No one. It was a classic straw man. The logically-impaired love to use them. I'd say you shouldn't be surprised at that sort of thing from an Anonymous Coward, but sadly many users with accounts have the same problem.
What is up with Slashdotters these days? I hate to break it to you, but people in the social sciences are not as dumb as you think — believe it or not, elementary (and even advanced) statistics is required for most of the social sciences. While your average frat boy may not have mastered the skill (or much of anything, for that matter) the people who go on to get PhDs in psychology and sociology definitely do. These aren't beer chugging ex-jocks trying to get through their undergraduate years by doing as little work as possible — these are people who, just like physics and chemistry graduate students, spend most of their time doing research, reading journals, and working with their advisors designing experiments.
Descriptive sciences and nomothetic sciences are philosophically somewhat different; the former are quite limited in how many variables they can isolate in an experimental setting but nonetheless have made a number of startling advances and discoveries thanks to the scientific method.
The fact that correlation does not imply causation in a general sense does not mean that it never does; in particular, because the converse is true — causation does imply correlation — we know that in many cases correlation does in fact hint to a causal relationship. While having correlation is not sufficient to deductively (in the sense of abstract mathematics) prove that a causal relationship exists, in an inductive, empirical setting it can be a good starting point in the formulation of a hypothesis.
A hypothesis — in the social sciences as well as in the hard sciences — is a guess at what's going on that seems to fit the data. Researchers in both fields know that these guesses are not necessarily right, and even in a nomothetic setting have often turned out to be wrong: but falsifiability is part of what makes science science, and no one who understands the process is going to be convinced by someone criticizing it on those counts.
Outside of the nomothetic ideal, we often need to examine the data, the various correlations that exist, and use what we already know (in this case, about human behavior, psychology, and social effects) to draw a logical conclusion. It may not be correct. Everyone understands that. But what is your proposed alternative? Draw no conclusions? How does one establish causality rigorously in an empirical setting? The answer: one doesn't. There is no rigor in science. That is best left to mathematicians.
In true Slashdot tradition, I have not read the article, but your arrogant dismissal of social sciences is irksome. Assuming these people are real researchers and not just media-whores, they have probably spent most of the last several years doing this research and before that, years becoming experts in their respective fields. You, on the other hand, know next to nothing about what they do, and yet feel qualified to imply that they (and not just them, but everyone in the social sciences) have based all their work on a logical fallacy someone with an eighth grade education could be taught to understand and avoid.
I'm not going to even get into your second ridiculous assertion — that social sciences "fail to recognize culturally specific results" — as our entire awareness of these effects stems from advances in sociology, which, as you may have noticed, is the canonical example of a social science.
There's more to life than programming. Go to the library.
CEOs, middle-level managers, and supervisors are all employees of their respective companies. You may want to check your dictionary's definition of the term employee — you seem to be confusing it with laborer. Board members, admittedly, are not (necessarily) employees.
You say ick to something, and then go on to code C? Jesus man, you need more exposure. For the love of god, learn haskell, and see just how much you're missing.
I suppose I should be glad that you didn't say C++ or Java... that, at least, is something.
Sure, you could. Hey, you could also write your own copy program! Or, you could boot into Linux and do it from there!
Seriously though, why are we making excuses? Copying files is a pretty basic file system operation, and just because there's some other way to do what you're trying to do doesn't mean that it's ok that the system runs out of memory.
The average user is probably not going to make an image, or boot up into Linux, or write his own copy program. He is going to assume — and rightfully so — that he can back up his hard drive (or whatever) by dragging and dropping in Explorer. When Vista wigs out, and leaves his system in an inconsistent state, he is going to be very upset — again rightfully so — and telling him "You should have followed nomessages' advice and made an image instead" is not going to make him feel any better.
I agree (I would never purchase a uid). But it is worth noting that while having a low uid implies that you're an old timer, being an old-timer does not necessarily imply that you have a low uid. Lots of folks on Slashdot have claimed (no doubt some minority of them honestly) that they've been around for a long time and simply refused to register back in the day, for example.
So who cares, right? The problem I suppose is that much of Slashdot seems to think that having a low uid and being an old timer are equivalent (ie, they affirm the consequent), and so those people who are old timers and don't have a low uid feel like they aren't accorded the respect they deserve. Both the mistake and the reaction are silly, in my opinion. But there you have it.
I would suspect that some people who really were around ten years ago but who didn't register might value having a lower id.
I personally don't see the point. I have a user with a much lower id (still 6 digits, however) that I used when I first started reading Slashdot, but at the time I wasn't privacy-conscious and used my real name as a handle — something I avoid doing these days (and not just on Slashdot). I could still log in and post with my old user, I guess, and have a uid 7 times smaller, but really, who gives a shit? Unless you're CmdrTaco, there will always be some schmuck with a uid lower than yours, and since Slashdot was around for quite a while before user name registration began, there's no guarantee that uid 45 is really older than uid 450, anyway. It just means the guy with uid 45 happened to be reading Slashdot right around the time user registration was announced. Hell, it might even have been his first time reading Slashdot, for all we know.
Having said that, everyone should donate to the EFF. I would suggest doing it directly, because that way you can get tax breaks.
In this case, it should be "If I was able to see further." Use of the subjunctive mood in English (If I were) indicates that the statement is contrary to hypothesis. For example, "If I were a dog, I would lick myself" implies that I am not, in fact, a dog, and am only speaking hypothetically. Whereas: "If I was a dog, it was only because I was selfish at heart" implies that you were a dog (in this case, the meaning is figurative, obviously).
Here, your sig does not introduce any information that is contrary to hypothesis. When you say "If I was able to see further, it is because..." you are actually giving an explanation for why you were able to see further. Saying "If I were able to see further" implies that you were not, in fact, able to see further, which is not what you meant.
Apparently we live in different USs. I lived in the developing world for nearly 5 years, and the US I live in is nothing like the third world. The corruption we complain about is laughably small and inconsequential compared to the third world. The poorest among us have a better lifestyle than many of the most wealthy there, there are no shanty towns, no open sewers, and 25% of the population is not dying of HIV. Painful but easily treatable conditions (assuming access to modern medicine) like cleft palate do not affect anything resembling a substantial percentage of our population. Even if the tap water in some places in the US doesn't taste wonderful, it is always potable and so clean drinking water is accessible to everyone. And by developed nation standards, we aren't even anywhere near the healthiest.
The US's tertiary education system is still by far and away the best in the world: everyone comes to our universities to be educated — you don't see anyone moving to Vientiane or Ouagadougou to get their engineering degrees.
You say you've been to the third world, but privately I doubt it. No one who has seen the misery and poverty that I've seen could claim with a straight face that the US is anything remotely resembling the third world. If you're unhappy with the direction this country is headed, then by all means, be critical — we grow through criticism. But hyperbole that makes light of the very real squalor that most of the world lives in not only makes you — and by extension your criticisms, which might otherwise have merit — look stupid, it also makes you look small and mean-spirited.
Thomas Hobbes wrote in 1651 that "the life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." This still describes the lives of most of the people on this planet. You really should get out more.
Ron Paul is a pro-life neo-America-firster who favors the abolishment of the Fed and a speedy return to the gold standard. Despite his stupidly isolationist policies, his lack of belief in a woman's right to choose, and his apparent inability to grasp basic economics, he favors lowering taxes and curbing government spending, which as far as I can tell is why Slashdotters like him.
I can get behind less government spending but single-issue voting is pretty braindamaged in my opinion.
Your jaded cynicism betrays a lack of experience with the people you deride. I've worked in engineering, computer science, and finance — I studied math in university — and in every one of those fields the concentration of intelligent people has been overwhelming.
The stark difference, though, is one of respect. I work in finance now, but I spent almost 10 years programming professionally. My current coworkers, who are no less dumb than my previous coworkers — often smarter, in fact — never talk about how dumb CS people are. In fact, they greatly respect my background, because a lot of what we do is algorithmic in nature. But when I worked in IT, I constantly heard self-important blowhard programmers bemoan the stupidity of anyone who wears a suit.
The funny thing about all this — or maybe the sad thing, depending on your perspective — is that really, programming is not that complex. Engineers are perhaps better deserving of their arrogance, but let's face it, doing software development doesn't require a whole lot of smarts for 90% of projects. Despite this, nearly every programmer thinks he is the smartest person on the whole entire planet. He has somehow deluded himself into thinking that management doesn't do "real" work, that it's all golfing and rides in private jets.
The reality of course is that managing people is very difficult, and that most people do not do it well. And when you work at a software company — even one that sells software as its core competency — writing the code is only a small part of what needs to be done to make the company run. How exactly programmers justify their self-important attitudes is beyond me. Perhaps it's because they've never tried their hand at accounting, for example, and seen how difficult it is? Or capital budgeting? Or marketing, for that matter? A great product isn't going to make you any money if you can't convince people to buy it. What about sales, since we're on the subject? How many of you have worked in sales? It's bust-ass work, and it requires a great deal of talent (talent that I know from experience I do not have).
Sitting in your cubicle reading Slashdot and thinking about how much smarter math and science types are than anyone else is all well and good until you actually go out into the world and meet some people from other fields. America is filled with smart people, and many of them opt to go into other careers. But that doesn't make them any less smart, it just means they don't know the same things you know.
At my job every day I interact with people from tier-1 universities, many of them with advanced degrees in mathematical finance, economics, business, and management. 90% of my coworkers are ivy-league and graduated at or near the top of their class. They are smart as hell and we rely on their smarts to beat the market and generate returns for our clients. We rely on the people in marketing to make sure our instruments get into the right funds, because not every portfolio is right for what we sell. Our marketing people use advanced calculus and statistics in their day-to-day work. When was the last time the average programmer used calculus for anything?
I never hear them say "CS people are nerdy, stupid, cubicle-drones who can't get dates." Maybe that's because they're smart enough to know a stereotype when they see one. But I constantly hear techies who, let's face it, do most of their coding in PHP or VB and went to DeVry for their education talk about how stupid suits are.
This has historically been the case. Unfortunately, Americans these days seem to have largely forgotten that we are a country of immigrants, and are constantly worrying about "foreigners" coming in a stealing "our jobs". Hell, if you're in California you know they even worry about Mexican field workers — as if anyone in Orange County or SF desperately needs a job picking fruit.
I used to live in China, and for the Chinese, "brain drain" is a huge problem. Historically, their best and brightest have moved elsewhere, often the US, to pursue better prospects. The government has been complaining loudly about how unfair this is for some time. They've accused the Chinese who move to the US or Europe as having no national pride, of being completely motivated by money without recognizing that as a developing economy China simply cannot afford to pay the same salaries and afford them the same standard of living as the US — effectively asking them to "take one for the team." They used to have propaganda segments on TV about brilliant students who graduated at the top of their class at Qinghua University and who, after their 5 year PhD programs at Harvard or MIT, promptly came back to China because "life in the US just couldn't compare to life in the PRC."
What's more likely is that they couldn't get a visa, because we Americans have apparently forgotten how valuable these sorts of people are.
You're misunderstanding. Go to the Debian volatile page to understand the whole picture. In a nutshell, though, when the OP said "keep them functional" (which was a direct quote from the provided link) he did not mean "prevent them from crashing or spamming you with errors or whatever". He meant that there are some packages (like spam filters, for example) that are volatile in the sense that they are constantly changing and by definition incapable of being useful if the version you're running is from 3 years ago. Running a spam filter from 2003 isn't going to be very useful because spammers have shifted tactics. It's not that you can't run that program, or that it's broken — just that it's not functional.
People on Slashdot who always want the latest and the greatest on their desktop often don't understand the impetus behind Debian stable, and lampoon its slow upgrade cycle. But as anyone who has done real admin work will tell you, once you get a working system running, you really want to touch it as little as possible, because updates and upgrades often break things. So most admins stick to security updates and that's that. The truth is, the version of GNU ls from 1994 lists directory contents just as well as the bleeding edge CVS version — there's no good reason to risk screwing up your setup for something so trivial.
But, as people have often noted, other than security issues, there are some packages that simply need updates more frequently than the Debian stable release cycle can accommodate, and so the volatile repository was born. Previously, the Debian devs had to prioritize certain updates (like say, a New Zealand DST time zone update that affects only people on a little island in the south pacific) and push them out as security updates. This was bad because they aren't security updates — no matter how you think about it, a vulnerability in Apache and an update to your spam filter or to the New Zealand timezone data are not in the same league, and serious system administrators appreciate being able to get updates for the former while foregoing the latter.
Debian volatile was expressly designed to deal with exactly this sort of package. The people complaining apparently did not realize that, well, these days, only security updates go into security, and other pressing changes affecting packages in stable go into volatile.
In other words, they didn't understand how Debian works, expected them to do it one way, and were surprised when they didn't — even though if you think about it for two seconds you'll realize that Debian's way is the right way and their's was the god-cursed-stupid way.
Keep your spam filter and timezone updates out of my security updates. I don't want production level systems to get an update unless they need it for security reasons. I know I can trust Debian not to mess with me and that's why they're the only serious Linux distribution out there, in my opinion.
I don't actually have anything more to add, because that's exactly how I feel in a nutshell, but I thought I'd reply anyway so you knew I'd read what you wrote. Have a good one!
I think the old "reading Playboy for the articles" line made more sense prior to the 1970s, when pornography as such was still fairly risqué, difficult to come by, and carried with it strong social taboos. During the 70s, though, pornography became more mainstream and more available, and Playboy — previously seen as tasteless because it featured a few pictures of topless women — came to be seen as relatively tame.
The internet, of course, ushered in a whole new era of easily accessibly hardcore porn. But even before that, the idea that one would read Playboy for anything other than the articles had already become a confusing one. Sure, if you were 13 and hadn't been exposed to anything else, then Playboy was a godsend — but hell, when I was 11 years old I used to wack it to the Macy's underwear catalog... suffice to say, my standards weren't very high.
I think it's a interesting sociolinguistic phenomenon, though, this whole "I bet you read Playboy for the articles" thing. Playboy is at best a wholly unexciting magazine from a pornographic perspective. For a while it had the down-home girl-next-door thing going, but as you rightly pointed out it's mostly airbrushed Barbie dolls these days. The articles, however — they're consistently of high caliber, and always have been. Shel Silverstein got his start writing for Playboy, and Frank Herbert's Dune was first published in the magazine — to name just two. In a very real way, it's like the New Yorker with boob-shots.
It's been quite a few years since I purchased any jerk-off mags — the internet has changed the whole industry — but when I did, I certainly didn't buy Playboy. I bought a whole slew of dirty, sleazy, fetish magazines that the saltiest editor of Playboy would have blanched at, and I know I wasn't alone.
In the fifties, saying you read Playboy for the articles was like saying you didn't inhale. Now, it's just god's honest truth. I wack off to more decadent filth. In a way, it's like we've lost our innocence as a society — I wonder what the constant availability of hardcore porn will do to us. It can't all be positive. I've noticed, for example, that virtually every girl I have a fling with these days has a shaved hoo-ha. I used to enjoy a bald taco as much as the next guy — but I find nowadays that I like something more au naturel, and woefully single girls not sporting a brazillian wax job are quite difficult to come by. Likewise, laser vaginoplasty is on the rise, and my current girlfriend has told me that she was self-conscious about the fact that her inner labia were larger than her outer ones — I can't imagine these sorts of insecurities gaining traction in a world where we aren't bombarded with highly idealized, shaved poontang on such a regular basis.
Not that I yearn for the simpler days of the 1950s, mind you — I didn't live through that decade but what's left of the media it produced convinces me that it wasn't such a great time to be around.
But these days I find myself abstaining a bit more from porn — what if I get so jaded that I just can't get off unless she puts a pineapple in my ass and sucks off a horse?
Some lines are best not pushed...
At any rate, I read Playboy for the articles, if I read it at all. So I second the parent.
I've heard Coke VPs from back in the day admit that that's how it worked out, and that they were glad of it, but that they unfortunately weren't smart enough to have come up with that strategy themselves -- it just worked out that way. The impetus for New Coke, apparently, was that blind taste tests at the time had a statistically significant margin of subjects preferring Pepsi to Coke, and New Coke was an attempt to "taste more like Pepsi".
The outpouring of nostalgia was unexpected and they jumped on it. Coke in many countries does not have any corn syrup (for example, coke in Mexico and in China), and yet is still marketed as Coke classic.
I personally prefer sugar Coke to corn syrup Coke and am always happy to be in a country where HFCS is not the sweetener of choice. But I don't think they did it on purpose.
Slashdot Mirror
No one. It was a classic straw man. The logically-impaired love to use them. I'd say you shouldn't be surprised at that sort of thing from an Anonymous Coward, but sadly many users with accounts have the same problem.
On the other hand, they do swear.
What is up with Slashdotters these days? I hate to break it to you, but people in the social sciences are not as dumb as you think — believe it or not, elementary (and even advanced) statistics is required for most of the social sciences. While your average frat boy may not have mastered the skill (or much of anything, for that matter) the people who go on to get PhDs in psychology and sociology definitely do. These aren't beer chugging ex-jocks trying to get through their undergraduate years by doing as little work as possible — these are people who, just like physics and chemistry graduate students, spend most of their time doing research, reading journals, and working with their advisors designing experiments.
Descriptive sciences and nomothetic sciences are philosophically somewhat different; the former are quite limited in how many variables they can isolate in an experimental setting but nonetheless have made a number of startling advances and discoveries thanks to the scientific method.
The fact that correlation does not imply causation in a general sense does not mean that it never does; in particular, because the converse is true — causation does imply correlation — we know that in many cases correlation does in fact hint to a causal relationship. While having correlation is not sufficient to deductively (in the sense of abstract mathematics) prove that a causal relationship exists, in an inductive, empirical setting it can be a good starting point in the formulation of a hypothesis.
A hypothesis — in the social sciences as well as in the hard sciences — is a guess at what's going on that seems to fit the data. Researchers in both fields know that these guesses are not necessarily right, and even in a nomothetic setting have often turned out to be wrong: but falsifiability is part of what makes science science, and no one who understands the process is going to be convinced by someone criticizing it on those counts.
Outside of the nomothetic ideal, we often need to examine the data, the various correlations that exist, and use what we already know (in this case, about human behavior, psychology, and social effects) to draw a logical conclusion. It may not be correct. Everyone understands that. But what is your proposed alternative? Draw no conclusions? How does one establish causality rigorously in an empirical setting? The answer: one doesn't. There is no rigor in science. That is best left to mathematicians.
In true Slashdot tradition, I have not read the article, but your arrogant dismissal of social sciences is irksome. Assuming these people are real researchers and not just media-whores, they have probably spent most of the last several years doing this research and before that, years becoming experts in their respective fields. You, on the other hand, know next to nothing about what they do, and yet feel qualified to imply that they (and not just them, but everyone in the social sciences) have based all their work on a logical fallacy someone with an eighth grade education could be taught to understand and avoid.
I'm not going to even get into your second ridiculous assertion — that social sciences "fail to recognize culturally specific results" — as our entire awareness of these effects stems from advances in sociology, which, as you may have noticed, is the canonical example of a social science.
There's more to life than programming. Go to the library.
CEOs, middle-level managers, and supervisors are all employees of their respective companies. You may want to check your dictionary's definition of the term employee — you seem to be confusing it with laborer. Board members, admittedly, are not (necessarily) employees.
You say ick to something, and then go on to code C? Jesus man, you need more exposure. For the love of god, learn haskell, and see just how much you're missing.
I suppose I should be glad that you didn't say C++ or Java... that, at least, is something.
Sure, you could. Hey, you could also write your own copy program! Or, you could boot into Linux and do it from there!
Seriously though, why are we making excuses? Copying files is a pretty basic file system operation, and just because there's some other way to do what you're trying to do doesn't mean that it's ok that the system runs out of memory.
The average user is probably not going to make an image, or boot up into Linux, or write his own copy program. He is going to assume — and rightfully so — that he can back up his hard drive (or whatever) by dragging and dropping in Explorer. When Vista wigs out, and leaves his system in an inconsistent state, he is going to be very upset — again rightfully so — and telling him "You should have followed nomessages' advice and made an image instead" is not going to make him feel any better.
Wow, do you guys live in China?
Maybe you're backing up to an external hard drive?
I agree (I would never purchase a uid). But it is worth noting that while having a low uid implies that you're an old timer, being an old-timer does not necessarily imply that you have a low uid. Lots of folks on Slashdot have claimed (no doubt some minority of them honestly) that they've been around for a long time and simply refused to register back in the day, for example.
So who cares, right? The problem I suppose is that much of Slashdot seems to think that having a low uid and being an old timer are equivalent (ie, they affirm the consequent), and so those people who are old timers and don't have a low uid feel like they aren't accorded the respect they deserve. Both the mistake and the reaction are silly, in my opinion. But there you have it.
I would suspect that some people who really were around ten years ago but who didn't register might value having a lower id.
I personally don't see the point. I have a user with a much lower id (still 6 digits, however) that I used when I first started reading Slashdot, but at the time I wasn't privacy-conscious and used my real name as a handle — something I avoid doing these days (and not just on Slashdot). I could still log in and post with my old user, I guess, and have a uid 7 times smaller, but really, who gives a shit? Unless you're CmdrTaco, there will always be some schmuck with a uid lower than yours, and since Slashdot was around for quite a while before user name registration began, there's no guarantee that uid 45 is really older than uid 450, anyway. It just means the guy with uid 45 happened to be reading Slashdot right around the time user registration was announced. Hell, it might even have been his first time reading Slashdot, for all we know.
Having said that, everyone should donate to the EFF. I would suggest doing it directly, because that way you can get tax breaks.
In this case, it should be "If I was able to see further." Use of the subjunctive mood in English (If I were) indicates that the statement is contrary to hypothesis. For example, "If I were a dog, I would lick myself" implies that I am not, in fact, a dog, and am only speaking hypothetically. Whereas: "If I was a dog, it was only because I was selfish at heart" implies that you were a dog (in this case, the meaning is figurative, obviously).
Here, your sig does not introduce any information that is contrary to hypothesis. When you say "If I was able to see further, it is because..." you are actually giving an explanation for why you were able to see further. Saying "If I were able to see further" implies that you were not, in fact, able to see further, which is not what you meant.
Hope this helps.
Mods, come on! This should be informative! I never knew about the prehistory of Slashdot.
There were no "modded up" comments, as there was no mod system back then.
You make this correction as if it substantially alters my perceptions of you or of the ridiculousness of your analogy.
Apparently we live in different USs. I lived in the developing world for nearly 5 years, and the US I live in is nothing like the third world. The corruption we complain about is laughably small and inconsequential compared to the third world. The poorest among us have a better lifestyle than many of the most wealthy there, there are no shanty towns, no open sewers, and 25% of the population is not dying of HIV. Painful but easily treatable conditions (assuming access to modern medicine) like cleft palate do not affect anything resembling a substantial percentage of our population. Even if the tap water in some places in the US doesn't taste wonderful, it is always potable and so clean drinking water is accessible to everyone. And by developed nation standards, we aren't even anywhere near the healthiest.
The US's tertiary education system is still by far and away the best in the world: everyone comes to our universities to be educated — you don't see anyone moving to Vientiane or Ouagadougou to get their engineering degrees.
You say you've been to the third world, but privately I doubt it. No one who has seen the misery and poverty that I've seen could claim with a straight face that the US is anything remotely resembling the third world. If you're unhappy with the direction this country is headed, then by all means, be critical — we grow through criticism. But hyperbole that makes light of the very real squalor that most of the world lives in not only makes you — and by extension your criticisms, which might otherwise have merit — look stupid, it also makes you look small and mean-spirited.
Thomas Hobbes wrote in 1651 that "the life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." This still describes the lives of most of the people on this planet. You really should get out more.
Ron Paul is a pro-life neo-America-firster who favors the abolishment of the Fed and a speedy return to the gold standard. Despite his stupidly isolationist policies, his lack of belief in a woman's right to choose, and his apparent inability to grasp basic economics, he favors lowering taxes and curbing government spending, which as far as I can tell is why Slashdotters like him.
I can get behind less government spending but single-issue voting is pretty braindamaged in my opinion.
You poor, poor man.
Never been to the third world, have you? What a stupid thing to say.
Engineers and programmers tend both to be liberterians, and as all libertarians know, unions are evil.
Nothing like taking one for the market, eh?
Your jaded cynicism betrays a lack of experience with the people you deride. I've worked in engineering, computer science, and finance — I studied math in university — and in every one of those fields the concentration of intelligent people has been overwhelming.
The stark difference, though, is one of respect. I work in finance now, but I spent almost 10 years programming professionally. My current coworkers, who are no less dumb than my previous coworkers — often smarter, in fact — never talk about how dumb CS people are. In fact, they greatly respect my background, because a lot of what we do is algorithmic in nature. But when I worked in IT, I constantly heard self-important blowhard programmers bemoan the stupidity of anyone who wears a suit.
The funny thing about all this — or maybe the sad thing, depending on your perspective — is that really, programming is not that complex. Engineers are perhaps better deserving of their arrogance, but let's face it, doing software development doesn't require a whole lot of smarts for 90% of projects. Despite this, nearly every programmer thinks he is the smartest person on the whole entire planet. He has somehow deluded himself into thinking that management doesn't do "real" work, that it's all golfing and rides in private jets.
The reality of course is that managing people is very difficult, and that most people do not do it well. And when you work at a software company — even one that sells software as its core competency — writing the code is only a small part of what needs to be done to make the company run. How exactly programmers justify their self-important attitudes is beyond me. Perhaps it's because they've never tried their hand at accounting, for example, and seen how difficult it is? Or capital budgeting? Or marketing, for that matter? A great product isn't going to make you any money if you can't convince people to buy it. What about sales, since we're on the subject? How many of you have worked in sales? It's bust-ass work, and it requires a great deal of talent (talent that I know from experience I do not have).
Sitting in your cubicle reading Slashdot and thinking about how much smarter math and science types are than anyone else is all well and good until you actually go out into the world and meet some people from other fields. America is filled with smart people, and many of them opt to go into other careers. But that doesn't make them any less smart, it just means they don't know the same things you know.
At my job every day I interact with people from tier-1 universities, many of them with advanced degrees in mathematical finance, economics, business, and management. 90% of my coworkers are ivy-league and graduated at or near the top of their class. They are smart as hell and we rely on their smarts to beat the market and generate returns for our clients. We rely on the people in marketing to make sure our instruments get into the right funds, because not every portfolio is right for what we sell. Our marketing people use advanced calculus and statistics in their day-to-day work. When was the last time the average programmer used calculus for anything?
I never hear them say "CS people are nerdy, stupid, cubicle-drones who can't get dates." Maybe that's because they're smart enough to know a stereotype when they see one. But I constantly hear techies who, let's face it, do most of their coding in PHP or VB and went to DeVry for their education talk about how stupid suits are.
It's pathetic, really.
This may come as a surprise to you, but many Asians are in fact American. Yes, even the ones with accents.
This has historically been the case. Unfortunately, Americans these days seem to have largely forgotten that we are a country of immigrants, and are constantly worrying about "foreigners" coming in a stealing "our jobs". Hell, if you're in California you know they even worry about Mexican field workers — as if anyone in Orange County or SF desperately needs a job picking fruit.
I used to live in China, and for the Chinese, "brain drain" is a huge problem. Historically, their best and brightest have moved elsewhere, often the US, to pursue better prospects. The government has been complaining loudly about how unfair this is for some time. They've accused the Chinese who move to the US or Europe as having no national pride, of being completely motivated by money without recognizing that as a developing economy China simply cannot afford to pay the same salaries and afford them the same standard of living as the US — effectively asking them to "take one for the team." They used to have propaganda segments on TV about brilliant students who graduated at the top of their class at Qinghua University and who, after their 5 year PhD programs at Harvard or MIT, promptly came back to China because "life in the US just couldn't compare to life in the PRC."
What's more likely is that they couldn't get a visa, because we Americans have apparently forgotten how valuable these sorts of people are.
You're misunderstanding. Go to the Debian volatile page to understand the whole picture. In a nutshell, though, when the OP said "keep them functional" (which was a direct quote from the provided link) he did not mean "prevent them from crashing or spamming you with errors or whatever". He meant that there are some packages (like spam filters, for example) that are volatile in the sense that they are constantly changing and by definition incapable of being useful if the version you're running is from 3 years ago. Running a spam filter from 2003 isn't going to be very useful because spammers have shifted tactics. It's not that you can't run that program, or that it's broken — just that it's not functional.
People on Slashdot who always want the latest and the greatest on their desktop often don't understand the impetus behind Debian stable, and lampoon its slow upgrade cycle. But as anyone who has done real admin work will tell you, once you get a working system running, you really want to touch it as little as possible, because updates and upgrades often break things. So most admins stick to security updates and that's that. The truth is, the version of GNU ls from 1994 lists directory contents just as well as the bleeding edge CVS version — there's no good reason to risk screwing up your setup for something so trivial.
But, as people have often noted, other than security issues, there are some packages that simply need updates more frequently than the Debian stable release cycle can accommodate, and so the volatile repository was born. Previously, the Debian devs had to prioritize certain updates (like say, a New Zealand DST time zone update that affects only people on a little island in the south pacific) and push them out as security updates. This was bad because they aren't security updates — no matter how you think about it, a vulnerability in Apache and an update to your spam filter or to the New Zealand timezone data are not in the same league, and serious system administrators appreciate being able to get updates for the former while foregoing the latter.
Debian volatile was expressly designed to deal with exactly this sort of package. The people complaining apparently did not realize that, well, these days, only security updates go into security, and other pressing changes affecting packages in stable go into volatile.
In other words, they didn't understand how Debian works, expected them to do it one way, and were surprised when they didn't — even though if you think about it for two seconds you'll realize that Debian's way is the right way and their's was the god-cursed-stupid way.
Keep your spam filter and timezone updates out of my security updates. I don't want production level systems to get an update unless they need it for security reasons. I know I can trust Debian not to mess with me and that's why they're the only serious Linux distribution out there, in my opinion.
I don't actually have anything more to add, because that's exactly how I feel in a nutshell, but I thought I'd reply anyway so you knew I'd read what you wrote. Have a good one!
I think the old "reading Playboy for the articles" line made more sense prior to the 1970s, when pornography as such was still fairly risqué, difficult to come by, and carried with it strong social taboos. During the 70s, though, pornography became more mainstream and more available, and Playboy — previously seen as tasteless because it featured a few pictures of topless women — came to be seen as relatively tame.
The internet, of course, ushered in a whole new era of easily accessibly hardcore porn. But even before that, the idea that one would read Playboy for anything other than the articles had already become a confusing one. Sure, if you were 13 and hadn't been exposed to anything else, then Playboy was a godsend — but hell, when I was 11 years old I used to wack it to the Macy's underwear catalog... suffice to say, my standards weren't very high.
I think it's a interesting sociolinguistic phenomenon, though, this whole "I bet you read Playboy for the articles" thing. Playboy is at best a wholly unexciting magazine from a pornographic perspective. For a while it had the down-home girl-next-door thing going, but as you rightly pointed out it's mostly airbrushed Barbie dolls these days. The articles, however — they're consistently of high caliber, and always have been. Shel Silverstein got his start writing for Playboy, and Frank Herbert's Dune was first published in the magazine — to name just two. In a very real way, it's like the New Yorker with boob-shots.
It's been quite a few years since I purchased any jerk-off mags — the internet has changed the whole industry — but when I did, I certainly didn't buy Playboy. I bought a whole slew of dirty, sleazy, fetish magazines that the saltiest editor of Playboy would have blanched at, and I know I wasn't alone.
In the fifties, saying you read Playboy for the articles was like saying you didn't inhale. Now, it's just god's honest truth. I wack off to more decadent filth. In a way, it's like we've lost our innocence as a society — I wonder what the constant availability of hardcore porn will do to us. It can't all be positive. I've noticed, for example, that virtually every girl I have a fling with these days has a shaved hoo-ha. I used to enjoy a bald taco as much as the next guy — but I find nowadays that I like something more au naturel, and woefully single girls not sporting a brazillian wax job are quite difficult to come by. Likewise, laser vaginoplasty is on the rise, and my current girlfriend has told me that she was self-conscious about the fact that her inner labia were larger than her outer ones — I can't imagine these sorts of insecurities gaining traction in a world where we aren't bombarded with highly idealized, shaved poontang on such a regular basis.
Not that I yearn for the simpler days of the 1950s, mind you — I didn't live through that decade but what's left of the media it produced convinces me that it wasn't such a great time to be around.
But these days I find myself abstaining a bit more from porn — what if I get so jaded that I just can't get off unless she puts a pineapple in my ass and sucks off a horse?
Some lines are best not pushed...
At any rate, I read Playboy for the articles, if I read it at all. So I second the parent.
I've heard Coke VPs from back in the day admit that that's how it worked out, and that they were glad of it, but that they unfortunately weren't smart enough to have come up with that strategy themselves -- it just worked out that way. The impetus for New Coke, apparently, was that blind taste tests at the time had a statistically significant margin of subjects preferring Pepsi to Coke, and New Coke was an attempt to "taste more like Pepsi".
The outpouring of nostalgia was unexpected and they jumped on it. Coke in many countries does not have any corn syrup (for example, coke in Mexico and in China), and yet is still marketed as Coke classic.
I personally prefer sugar Coke to corn syrup Coke and am always happy to be in a country where HFCS is not the sweetener of choice. But I don't think they did it on purpose.