Can someone please cite me a DOD software project that doesn't suck? Please?
Because I was an air force comm officer for 4 years, and now I'm a Systems Engineering contractor, and I shudder if fear every time I find out I'm going to have to work with a GOTS product.
Seriously...these morons couldn't figure out how to update the mouse driver include in GDSS2, saying that it was going to cost them half a million and two spirals to make mouse scroll work on their windows client.
Toyota matrix, baby.
I get 32 mpg in town, and I can and have hauled everything from a 10 foot extension ladder to a a single mattress in that thing.
Best. Car. Evah.
Jeffro, are you completely ignorant of the history of christianity? You spent the first 400 years killing each other over whether christ as "like god" or "of god", then you got united by a politician to consolidate his own power (united, by the way, by the central church of rome, aka THE FUCKING ROMAN ARMY, killing anyone who disagreed.) You then killed hundreds of thousands of people all over europe to make sure that paganism wasn't a viable alternative to catholocism, not to mention every time anyone had any idea about how their religion worked than the church, they were killed in massive orgies of blood (ever heard of the cathars?) In between killing each other, you occasionally banded together to run down to the middle east to slaughter as many muslims as you could get your hands on. You spawned the inquisition, which tortured hundreds of thousands of people to death. It wasn't until you finally spawned a couple of sub-sects (a THOUSAND YEARS) later and the balance of power meant both sides were getting killed rather than one side of the theological debate getting eradicated that you took enough of a breather to let some folks start developing the thoughts and practices that gave us science. This was known as "The Enlightenment". After the elightenment started showing people the idiocy of believing the bible as a totally true word of god, folks started recognizing that maybe burning people to death over the course of 4 hours because they thought they should all get together and pray on saturday instead of sunday maybe wasn't really all that and a bag of chips. It was the enlightenment teaching people how to observe the world without the moron filters on that gave us our free wheeling, open culture where we don't stone people.
As for the rest of your screed, you clearly haven't ever read or observed shit without taking off your moron filters. If you'd been born a muslim, you'd still be a muslim, if you were born in a hot-spot and were a muslim, you'd probably be involved in killing people, and if you were born to scientologist parents you'd probably be getting your negative emotions measured for a coupla thou.
One thing I will agree to: you "learning" the bible will give you peace, because any time you put your brain in the "off" position, it's kinda peaceful. Most folks call it meditation, but hey, call it whatever you want.
Speaking as a recently volunteer-separated comm officer, I can tell you that while the benefits are nice (they're great if you're an o), they air force doesn't have a freakin' clue about how to do IT, period. Maybe this command will be different, but they'll have to make a new career field, because the CDC's (tests for knowledge/advancement) for the comm enlisted guys blow, the officer corps is made up of all the rejects and humanities majors from the "cool" career fields, and there is a culture of willful ignorance among the officers O3 and above.
I had to get out because I was going to kill someone the next time I heard a lt col say "I don't know anything about this 20 million dollar, 5 year decision I just made, but I know my people."
I spent most of my time in the air force trying to explain basic concepts to people who should've known better. Like the colonel who couldn't get it through this thick skull that when you've got a system with hundreds of distributed nodes worldwide, and some of those nodes are connected through unreliable links that YOU DON'T CONTROL, they're going to be unreachable sometimes. It took me six months to get that one to sink in.
Lord is talking a surprisingly good game, but cyber command would basically have to hire all new officers and mostly new enlisted to make this one work. And I seriously doubt the air force culture could handle having a majcom that didn't accept the bullshit from the rest of the air force.
Basically, the pilots have convinced themselves that IT (all of it) is a blue collar, non-thinking job. They think they can sit a kid in front of a computer, give him a checklist without any real knowledge of what he's doing, and it'll work fine.
I once had a lt col ask where the checklist was for troubleshooting windows. I asked her how she thought microsoft was still in business if it's that easy.
And I haven't even mentioned the all-too-cozy relationship between the colonels (who, I may have mentioned, don't know shit but control the money), and big name vendors (like microsoft).
The vendors don't have to convince anyone who knows what they're doing. They just have to convince a colonel. Which just takes some pretty pictures and a free lunch or two. Point in case: the air force (or at least one majcom) licensed sharepoint about 5 years ago in a huge mulimillion dollar boondoggle. It took them 3 years to make people start using it, since no one actually wanted it, and then within a year they've decided that sharepoint isn't that great for real-time collaboration and documentation and are ditching the project. But wait, they can't actually get rid of it yet because of politics, so they'll continue to train people on it for awhile until it safe to tell everyone they're ditching it.
(Side note: I think sharepoint is OK for the creation of static documentation (i.e, policy). It blows for living documentation (wiki's are much better, and why use a wiki you have to pay for when there are so many good F/OS ones out there?)/rant
For a rebuttal of your tired and patently ridiculous argument regarding atheism and stalin/hitler, please see here
In it, it is noticed that what atheists really have a problem with is dogmatic belief in propositions without evidence, and both Stalin and Hitler's regimes were steeped in dogma.
I dunno, I happen to think that a preacher being able to convince the FCC to institute indecency rules because christians apparently aren't able to change the channel counts...
'course, there's always the possibility that's because of
1) Schmucks telling them, repeatedly, that we're one nation under GOD, not allah or
2) A (not necessarily misplaced) belief that such a rally would only lead to the crazy christian contingent starting something or
3) Why bother? You have significant and loud proportions of americans repeatedly and falsely telling everyone that we're a christian nation, so why should they band together and show support for a country actively excluding them?
And why, I ask you, are the christian nuts locked up? Because our countries and laws were set up by secularists, deists, and atheists. Freethinking people who knew that the end result of letting your book o' myths dictate your laws was a sure way to end up with people getting burned, stoned, beheaded, drowned, tortured, generally abused for no good reason. It is ONLY the secular, rational influence of the scientific enlightenment that prevents our society from acting exactly as muslim societies do now.
The real difference is that there aren't as many true believers among christians as there are among muslims (thank goodness). If christians believed as strongly as muslims do, then we would've had a crusade that would've killed hundreds of millions of people by now.
Yeah, linking wikipedia wasn't the wisest thing to do there, because if there's one thing you theists can agree on, it's not to agree on anything.
(nearly) EVERY religion related article on wikipedia has all those marks. It's because theists of one brand or another can't bear to hear an outsider's description of their superstitions, and since wikipedia allows anyone to mark it up, then there is plenty of back and forth.
Meanwhile, atheists, freethinkers, and skeptics can only sit back and shake our heads in disgust.
Man, coward is absolutely the right title for your sad ass. Don't leave your house tomorrow...a terrorist might kill you in your driveway. Come to think of it, maybe you shouldn't sleep again, ever. Someone could kill you in your sleep. Maybe you could fort up with a couple of dozen guns and kill anyone darker than a swedish albino that comes too near you, just in case?
I know I'm not supposed to feed the trolls, but I have a feeling this guy believes what he's saying. Yikes.
I get this from the guys I work with all the time. They bitch and whine about how they could STILL wire up their peg-boards to get their "computers" working, because they had to memorize them. The fact that the complexity of the field as a whole has increased about a hundred fold escapes their notice.
I can see why they could use VB, although, I agree blech. Anything modern should probably do a combo of bash/perl/python for the *nix side and powershell/.net/vb for the windows side.
Of course, if they really want to go where the future lies, they can just skip the windows side;-)
Question: Was it any more difficult for the foreign students to make it to an American university in the first place? By which I mean, might some of the weeding been done ahead of time for the foreign students?
Wait - are you suggesting that anyone taking an MBA actually think beyond this quarters profits, which can be driven up by cutting every long term project the company has?
That's craziness!
Those doing MBAs.. please consider the benefits of graduate staff.
I'd like to amend this: Those doing MBAs, please consider getting a real degree and picking up the "management" stuff later. Trust me. The whole country and/or world will be better for it.
Well, I think you kinda need a bit on both sides. Obviously, you don't want to overmanage it, but I'd say making it accessible for people to get degrees that advance society rather than fuck with it (i.e science and tech vs business), and then you need to invest in things that will employ those people. Doing one or the other is a bit like wanking...
I concur. The US can only benefit by getting as many smart people to come here as possible. It also helps to drive out the chaff (and by chaff, I mean flat-earth society theists and their ilk).
We need more than just the tech people, though. We also need to invest in our tech infrastructure, internally, so we make it possible to open up labs for science and tech work anywhere in the country easily without having to be co-located. That'd help solve the whole "silicon valley" housing bubble. Healthcare is a nearly completely different issue that does need to be addressed, but addressed for everyone and it is not location specific.
To sum up: science and technology are, to a large degree, self-propagating. The more we have, the more we get. The ancillary downsides of having a lot of this stuff in a small area can be addressed without wreaking the whole system.
Which of course raises the question about whether or not the government should invest in the country's future by offering lots of grants specifically targeted to useful majors and pasttimes in college...you know, like everything except business and communications majors.
Government involvement only stifles innovation when the people in control of the government have a bad habit of covering up the science that directly contradicts their personal fantasies. This is not the normal case. It is only the case when you're dumb enough to elect people who think government doesn't work to run your government. (It doesn't help when they're theists to boot.)
Flip side of that is, there are endless amounts of good things(tm) that have come from government research. internet comes to the top of my mind, and velcro, but those were both applied. Refer back to an earlier post for some of the stuff grounded in un-applied science.
Also, "government only innovates when it has to" is irrelevant here. The government isn't innovating here. They are providing funding for other people to imagine and and advance pure science.
Long story short, I got no problem with doing some money on the back side to spur innovation on specific desired products.
I think the first responder covers your bs about "goals".
That just means you need to fix IP (I kinda like the new "intellectual privilege" idea that someone just tossed out there) law so that it actually matches the constitution (to promote the sciences and useful arts) rather than lining peoples pocketbooks.
Both actually investing progress and science and fixing the rules so that they encourage innovation again both would require some serious political will.
Really? There have been no demonstrable benefits to open source and open standards? I think anyone that uses the internet may wish to disagree with you, since it was built on both.
To say that anyone has "no place in public reporting" is idiocy. My only point is that when any side comes to the table, they need to provide reasons. This doesn't exclude opinion. Opinion is still the meet of most policy discussions. But, as I stated, all opinions are not created equal.
On what basis do you claim that the FSF's agenda is a matter of "faith and philosophy"? What specific aspect of their agenda are you claiming that there is no evidence for?
If an advocate is unpaid, than there is basically no way for them to hide their bias. Without any sort of compensation for saying that Rold Gold Preztals are great, than all you are doing is presenting your opinion to the world. How would you even go about hiding that? What good do you do for you cause if you're trying to advocate for it without doing it openly? I'm really confused by that one.
Slashdot Mirror
Can someone please cite me a DOD software project that doesn't suck? Please? Because I was an air force comm officer for 4 years, and now I'm a Systems Engineering contractor, and I shudder if fear every time I find out I'm going to have to work with a GOTS product. Seriously...these morons couldn't figure out how to update the mouse driver include in GDSS2, saying that it was going to cost them half a million and two spirals to make mouse scroll work on their windows client.
Toyota matrix, baby. I get 32 mpg in town, and I can and have hauled everything from a 10 foot extension ladder to a a single mattress in that thing. Best. Car. Evah.
Can someone please post a mirror that isn't blocked by DOD? They block the stupidest shit around here...
Jeffro, are you completely ignorant of the history of christianity? You spent the first 400 years killing each other over whether christ as "like god" or "of god", then you got united by a politician to consolidate his own power (united, by the way, by the central church of rome, aka THE FUCKING ROMAN ARMY, killing anyone who disagreed.) You then killed hundreds of thousands of people all over europe to make sure that paganism wasn't a viable alternative to catholocism, not to mention every time anyone had any idea about how their religion worked than the church, they were killed in massive orgies of blood (ever heard of the cathars?) In between killing each other, you occasionally banded together to run down to the middle east to slaughter as many muslims as you could get your hands on. You spawned the inquisition, which tortured hundreds of thousands of people to death. It wasn't until you finally spawned a couple of sub-sects (a THOUSAND YEARS) later and the balance of power meant both sides were getting killed rather than one side of the theological debate getting eradicated that you took enough of a breather to let some folks start developing the thoughts and practices that gave us science. This was known as "The Enlightenment". After the elightenment started showing people the idiocy of believing the bible as a totally true word of god, folks started recognizing that maybe burning people to death over the course of 4 hours because they thought they should all get together and pray on saturday instead of sunday maybe wasn't really all that and a bag of chips. It was the enlightenment teaching people how to observe the world without the moron filters on that gave us our free wheeling, open culture where we don't stone people.
As for the rest of your screed, you clearly haven't ever read or observed shit without taking off your moron filters. If you'd been born a muslim, you'd still be a muslim, if you were born in a hot-spot and were a muslim, you'd probably be involved in killing people, and if you were born to scientologist parents you'd probably be getting your negative emotions measured for a coupla thou.
One thing I will agree to: you "learning" the bible will give you peace, because any time you put your brain in the "off" position, it's kinda peaceful. Most folks call it meditation, but hey, call it whatever you want.
Speaking as a recently volunteer-separated comm officer, I can tell you that while the benefits are nice (they're great if you're an o), they air force doesn't have a freakin' clue about how to do IT, period. Maybe this command will be different, but they'll have to make a new career field, because the CDC's (tests for knowledge/advancement) for the comm enlisted guys blow, the officer corps is made up of all the rejects and humanities majors from the "cool" career fields, and there is a culture of willful ignorance among the officers O3 and above.
/rant
I had to get out because I was going to kill someone the next time I heard a lt col say "I don't know anything about this 20 million dollar, 5 year decision I just made, but I know my people."
I spent most of my time in the air force trying to explain basic concepts to people who should've known better. Like the colonel who couldn't get it through this thick skull that when you've got a system with hundreds of distributed nodes worldwide, and some of those nodes are connected through unreliable links that YOU DON'T CONTROL, they're going to be unreachable sometimes. It took me six months to get that one to sink in.
Lord is talking a surprisingly good game, but cyber command would basically have to hire all new officers and mostly new enlisted to make this one work. And I seriously doubt the air force culture could handle having a majcom that didn't accept the bullshit from the rest of the air force.
Basically, the pilots have convinced themselves that IT (all of it) is a blue collar, non-thinking job. They think they can sit a kid in front of a computer, give him a checklist without any real knowledge of what he's doing, and it'll work fine.
I once had a lt col ask where the checklist was for troubleshooting windows. I asked her how she thought microsoft was still in business if it's that easy.
And I haven't even mentioned the all-too-cozy relationship between the colonels (who, I may have mentioned, don't know shit but control the money), and big name vendors (like microsoft).
The vendors don't have to convince anyone who knows what they're doing. They just have to convince a colonel. Which just takes some pretty pictures and a free lunch or two. Point in case: the air force (or at least one majcom) licensed sharepoint about 5 years ago in a huge mulimillion dollar boondoggle. It took them 3 years to make people start using it, since no one actually wanted it, and then within a year they've decided that sharepoint isn't that great for real-time collaboration and documentation and are ditching the project. But wait, they can't actually get rid of it yet because of politics, so they'll continue to train people on it for awhile until it safe to tell everyone they're ditching it.
(Side note: I think sharepoint is OK for the creation of static documentation (i.e, policy). It blows for living documentation (wiki's are much better, and why use a wiki you have to pay for when there are so many good F/OS ones out there?)
If we could just get people to stop respecting religions, we might be able to avoid you having to fight.
I'm just sayin'...
so...what you're saying is that this particular class of muslims should just learn to use greasemonkey and STFU?
I like it.
Actually, as was pointed out earlier, they dont' really do that much making fun of jebus. He is, after all, part of their mythology as well.
If you want to make this argument, just replace all your whiny-ass christian references with "holocaust", and then carry on.
In it, it is noticed that what atheists really have a problem with is dogmatic belief in propositions without evidence, and both Stalin and Hitler's regimes were steeped in dogma.
Long story short, you're being stupid.
Yeah, they should just stick to conservapedia
I dunno, I happen to think that a preacher being able to convince the FCC to institute indecency rules because christians apparently aren't able to change the channel counts...
'course, there's always the possibility that's because of
1) Schmucks telling them, repeatedly, that we're one nation under GOD, not allah or
2) A (not necessarily misplaced) belief that such a rally would only lead to the crazy christian contingent starting something or
3) Why bother? You have significant and loud proportions of americans repeatedly and falsely telling everyone that we're a christian nation, so why should they band together and show support for a country actively excluding them?
And why, I ask you, are the christian nuts locked up? Because our countries and laws were set up by secularists, deists, and atheists. Freethinking people who knew that the end result of letting your book o' myths dictate your laws was a sure way to end up with people getting burned, stoned, beheaded, drowned, tortured, generally abused for no good reason. It is ONLY the secular, rational influence of the scientific enlightenment that prevents our society from acting exactly as muslim societies do now.
The real difference is that there aren't as many true believers among christians as there are among muslims (thank goodness). If christians believed as strongly as muslims do, then we would've had a crusade that would've killed hundreds of millions of people by now.
Yeah, linking wikipedia wasn't the wisest thing to do there, because if there's one thing you theists can agree on, it's not to agree on anything.
(nearly) EVERY religion related article on wikipedia has all those marks. It's because theists of one brand or another can't bear to hear an outsider's description of their superstitions, and since wikipedia allows anyone to mark it up, then there is plenty of back and forth.
Meanwhile, atheists, freethinkers, and skeptics can only sit back and shake our heads in disgust.
Man, coward is absolutely the right title for your sad ass. Don't leave your house tomorrow...a terrorist might kill you in your driveway. Come to think of it, maybe you shouldn't sleep again, ever. Someone could kill you in your sleep. Maybe you could fort up with a couple of dozen guns and kill anyone darker than a swedish albino that comes too near you, just in case? I know I'm not supposed to feed the trolls, but I have a feeling this guy believes what he's saying. Yikes.
Someone please mod this up.
I get this from the guys I work with all the time. They bitch and whine about how they could STILL wire up their peg-boards to get their "computers" working, because they had to memorize them. The fact that the complexity of the field as a whole has increased about a hundred fold escapes their notice.
I can see why they could use VB, although, I agree blech. Anything modern should probably do a combo of bash/perl/python for the *nix side and powershell/.net/vb for the windows side.
;-)
Of course, if they really want to go where the future lies, they can just skip the windows side
Question: Was it any more difficult for the foreign students to make it to an American university in the first place? By which I mean, might some of the weeding been done ahead of time for the foreign students?
That's craziness!
I'd like to amend this: Those doing MBAs, please consider getting a real degree and picking up the "management" stuff later. Trust me. The whole country and/or world will be better for it.Well, I think you kinda need a bit on both sides. Obviously, you don't want to overmanage it, but I'd say making it accessible for people to get degrees that advance society rather than fuck with it (i.e science and tech vs business), and then you need to invest in things that will employ those people. Doing one or the other is a bit like wanking...
I concur. The US can only benefit by getting as many smart people to come here as possible. It also helps to drive out the chaff (and by chaff, I mean flat-earth society theists and their ilk).
We need more than just the tech people, though. We also need to invest in our tech infrastructure, internally, so we make it possible to open up labs for science and tech work anywhere in the country easily without having to be co-located. That'd help solve the whole "silicon valley" housing bubble. Healthcare is a nearly completely different issue that does need to be addressed, but addressed for everyone and it is not location specific.
To sum up: science and technology are, to a large degree, self-propagating. The more we have, the more we get. The ancillary downsides of having a lot of this stuff in a small area can be addressed without wreaking the whole system.
Which of course raises the question about whether or not the government should invest in the country's future by offering lots of grants specifically targeted to useful majors and pasttimes in college...you know, like everything except business and communications majors.
Government involvement only stifles innovation when the people in control of the government have a bad habit of covering up the science that directly contradicts their personal fantasies. This is not the normal case. It is only the case when you're dumb enough to elect people who think government doesn't work to run your government. (It doesn't help when they're theists to boot.) Flip side of that is, there are endless amounts of good things(tm) that have come from government research. internet comes to the top of my mind, and velcro, but those were both applied. Refer back to an earlier post for some of the stuff grounded in un-applied science. Also, "government only innovates when it has to" is irrelevant here. The government isn't innovating here. They are providing funding for other people to imagine and and advance pure science. Long story short, I got no problem with doing some money on the back side to spur innovation on specific desired products. I think the first responder covers your bs about "goals".
That just means you need to fix IP (I kinda like the new "intellectual privilege" idea that someone just tossed out there) law so that it actually matches the constitution (to promote the sciences and useful arts) rather than lining peoples pocketbooks.
Both actually investing progress and science and fixing the rules so that they encourage innovation again both would require some serious political will.
But it absolutely should be done.
Really? There have been no demonstrable benefits to open source and open standards? I think anyone that uses the internet may wish to disagree with you, since it was built on both.
To say that anyone has "no place in public reporting" is idiocy. My only point is that when any side comes to the table, they need to provide reasons. This doesn't exclude opinion. Opinion is still the meet of most policy discussions. But, as I stated, all opinions are not created equal.
On what basis do you claim that the FSF's agenda is a matter of "faith and philosophy"? What specific aspect of their agenda are you claiming that there is no evidence for?
If an advocate is unpaid, than there is basically no way for them to hide their bias. Without any sort of compensation for saying that Rold Gold Preztals are great, than all you are doing is presenting your opinion to the world. How would you even go about hiding that? What good do you do for you cause if you're trying to advocate for it without doing it openly? I'm really confused by that one.