Re:Ah. You tried to get into mensa....
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· Score: 1
I understand your point of view ; and I don't especialy share the Mensa objectives, scales of value or whatever. But I also understand why they're gathering as they do, and have a deep and personal understanding of the reasons why they chose a scale that de facto isolate them.
I said being a gifted child is a curse, and nearly all of those who were (and are) gifted can tell the same horror stories ; afterward, we find ways to cope with our history - for some, Mensa is a way, among others.
If you want to understand what it is to be gifted, imagine how you were at, say, 18 years old : politicaly aware, understanding of basic economy, computer literate, and a mature hobby. Now, forget the sex and the beer, view yourself physicaly at 8,and put your 18 yo self into your 8 yo body. That's it. Doesn't mean you're creative or entrepreneur by nature.
Now tell me, how do you fancy doll playing ? That's no more contempt against others than the look of an adult toward a child : the league is not the same, so there's no point in imagining that the gifted should interact normaly with his or her school mates of the same physical age. They may look alike, but inside they're completely different.
Re:Ah. You tried to get into mensa....
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MSN Sponsors Mensa
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Although I'm not member of the Mensa (but certainly would qualify), and don't plan to get in any time soon for most of the reasons given by others in this thread, I think this organisation doesn't deserve the contempt expressed by many here.
Being gifted is a terrible weight to carry for a child, because it shows and constantly expose you to jealous behaviours and sarcasms from other kids, their parents, not to speak of teachers. You spend years in schools trying to offer the smallest surface of yourself to the view of others - unsucessfuly, in general.
You think that it'll get better in college ? Nope, wrong. In adulthood ? Nope. Wherever you go, you are surrounded by the same poisoned atmosphere when people realise you think faster than they do. When you're that bright, yu soon understand what it was to be suspect of wichcraft.
Look at this thread : full of hatred against those folks, because they dare claim they're smart. Would they have claimed any other talent such as music or painting, there would be applauses of joy, but logical intelligence must be hidden.
So I understand those people like to gather, just to meet some of their kind. And I think there's a form of therapy in it. Bragging about it being part of the therapy, just like the AAs.
You'd be amazed at the speed of an original IBM AT firing up DOS + Word 5.5. You'd already have been typed one or two pages before XP splash vanish.
Of course, there would be no internet, no USB, no MP3, no nothing except what's really needed to work in most situations.
While windows evolution broadened the scope of use of computers, I compare the different versions to dinosaurs : ever more bigger, still severly lacking in the brain departement, and nearly collapsing under their own weight now.
I bet that history will repeat : time has come for smarter, smaller, devices, and the desktop computer as we know it will soon be a fading memory.
At once I felt trapped into a time warp ; I swear I read the same sentence when NT 4 was announced (plus or minus a few cosmetic details). Same old BS, at the time it was already a cold marketing ploy, nowdays, it's smelling like a rotten corpse.
That's not my point ; of course, given enough time and / or attention, any computer related question finds its answer.
My point was that although I actually like OS-operated floppy drives because they're more secure, especially in multi-users setups (and yes, back in the 80's, I've seen prolog-based accountancy packages actually backuping on floppies in multiuser environnements - chilling), the Apple's "trash to eject" shortcut is as dumb as can be. Any user in his right mind, save apple's worshipers, won't ever dare slipping the disk icon over the trash in the legitimate fear of wipping the disk clean. Not everybody, moreover given previous exposure to "Microsoft sense of ergonomical design", is eager to trust his computer to actually help him instead of pulling the trigger once the gun is aiming at his foot.
As others have pointed out, it's not because one can that one do ; moreover, there's no logical connection between "no floppy button" and "trash floppy icon to eject". On some hardware (Sun), floppy drives have no eject button either, and you trigger the ejection mecanism either with a "eject" command line (just to kid Mac's supporters a bit), or via menu attached to the icon. I suspect no die-hard Mac addict would admit it, but it's the silliest shortcut ever made in GUI history.
Qemu is damn fast, in my experience ; I wouldn't dare quantify it, but running win 98 under qemu on a 900 Mhz Athlon is perfectly OK, and it is impressive, quality-wise. Moreover, if host and target cpu are identical, there's a fast version of qemu to avoid unecessary emulations - didn't try that one, though, because it segfaulted on my FC2, and I was happy enough with the regular emulator so I didn't bother to investigate the issue any further (I did the build from CVS, so I expected glitches).
Perhaps Debian on sparc 32 is already showing signs of neglect in that the installer program crashes on a CD install on a sparcstation 10 or 20. I had to install on a 5 and move the disks across. SS10s/20s are now extremely cheap and 5s are only marginally more expensive - Ultras are just starting to get down to about £50.
I've always setup my sparc boxes via tftp / ftp, and it always worked smoothly. But I wonder on which planet you happen to live, as 10s and 20s are so much more powerfull and expandable than 5s I can't understand how they can get sold cheaper ?!
Hey, but if you're playing with sparcs then a BSD or (free as in beer!) Solaris may be more in your style.
Solaris is way too slow and bloated for what I use those boxes for (static web server, smtp), and - without feeding the troll - I favor GNU over BSD licence. Plus the fact that when I got those sparcs, no BSD could manage multiprocessors setups. As I first got a ss10 - 512, it was afterward more rational to keep Linux everywhere to reduce the maintenance burden.
Thank you for expressing better than I could the exact same feeling I have about this issue.
[No karma bonus, just wanted to acknowledge a good post and sadly missing mod points]
Bad news about that. It's more that it's latin based then that it's french based.
Bad news for you ; english used to be a germanic language, from which it got its grammar, but after Guillaume le Conquérant went there looking out for a week end cottage where he could rest away from his wife (she was a bore, always doing needle work...), things were never quite the same.
Those may be facts, but you're not following an historical method, therefore you're committing the worst crime against historical science : anachronism.
Just an example for you to chew on : the 100 years war. You depict it as being war between France and England, which is totaly wrong. It was a war between 2 princes BOTH claiming to be legitimate heirs to the throne of France ; one happened to be already king of England, but that doesn't really count. The winner happened to be crowned, but that doesn't make it a "french victory" per se.
Almost all your list shows the same void of historical knowledge, because before the XIXth century, Europe was divided into kingdoms, subdivided between lords who had very loose ties to their kings, and would even go as far as fighting between themselves, and against their own king eventually and easily swap alliances.
The very notion of country as you understand it (state - nation) is too modern.
The very idea that "french" as a whole are always beaten is therefore completely absurd, and would have seemed preposterous at the time. It would be strictly equivalent to conclude North americans always lose their battles because Confederates were beaten by the Yankees. oops.
That's for sure, but that's the task of the prosecutor to find him and bring up proofs of guilt.
As I understand the matter, the court is saying exactly that, within the limits of the case : personal copies are "fair use", now bring us the real culprit.
Well, perhaps it's not really double talk, but more "adaptative" talk : while pushing sw patents in the EU to secure the market there against EU companies, because US firms already have the lion's share of all the patents, I guess MS position is far less easy in the US. I would bet that patent wise, they're dwarfs compared to... say IBM. As things turn out, relationships between MS and IBM are as bad as can be, and the outcome of the SCO case could very well be an appetizer for IBM.
I think that MS is following the easy money path as usual. Do as we say, not as we do.
I think you're dead wrong on that issue ; capitalism is all about free market, where "market" means competition between many producers of comparable goods to cope with the demand of a large group of consummers. It's a system, not a political ideology. The political ideology built on top of capitalism is "liberalism" which basically states that the governement has no right to stop the game even if no balance can be found, leading to a de facto monopoly. Thus, in the information market, the game is biased from the very begining : goods are never scarce, because once a first sample is out, copies are dead cheap to produce. The better producer can lower its production cost at will until it wipes out competition, and the monopoly is at hand in no time. Thereafter, prices are not settled by the market, but the game does not end : that's liberalism, not capitalism. Recent history of computers shows that point : markets goes to near-monopoly for a time (think mainframes for IBM, Mini for DEC...), and they are only blown out and send to a niche market by a shift of the consummers to a NEW market. Monopolists eventualy goes bankrupt (DEC) because they fail to invest new markets fearing the loss of their captive mainstream income source.
On the other hand, communism awards a producer a state monopoly for no known reason, to satisfy the demand top down. But in the end, the result is exactly the same as liberalism : consummers are traped, because there is no such thing as an open market. But in communism case, there is not the luxury to open a new market.
The whole gpl thing is not about capitalism nor liberalism ; it's all in the question of the status of IP : are virtual productions goods suitable to market, or not. And GPL gives an answer that's not pleasant for either the USA nor Europe, and that answer is : NO. The production of IP as a stream of income is doomed, because the economical values stand in real products and tailored services, products you can touch. Once every bits of our goods are Chinese made, we'll have to bend to their will because we'll have nothing left in our hands. That does not necessarily means that the companies we all know and love will disappear in a glimpse, but they'll follow the real production, and become chinese if they see fit for the business. But what will be left of us ?
nor MSN Search are complying with the law IN THE SAME SEARCH CRITERIA...So, svp, explain why Vuitton isn't going after them.
I don't have the faintest idea, and I don't care. That's their very own problem ; perhaps they waited for the outcome of their first action ? Perhaps they wanted to make deal with them, allowing them to use their trademark for money ?
You stated that "plenty of search engines already complying with the laws" - culd you name a few ?
Last I looked, Lycos was compliant ; sponsored links refered to outlets for the brand, not competitors.
What would be the long-term damage to France's IT companies as they no longer have the most comprehensive searches available ?
That's the true beauty of being a lawyer : you absoluely don't care of that pesky little details. Perhaps this trial will lead our representatives to make a legal exception, perhaps the precedent will stand, but the only important thing in this was that there was a law, google broke it, they got slapped. Full stop. Everything else is juris-fiction.
Actually, all those convicted in that series of cases were pardoned by the governor of the state. So no one is still in jail.
Happy to know it, but I bet this pardon has no effect with regard to the alleged "guilt" of those involved. I mean that in front of the law, they're still considered guilty but don't need to serve their full jail time.
But this was only an example I chose to show that you don't have a better safety than we have, although our due process is completely different from yours.
You're being misleaded by translation ; when you see "the judge" in a law, actually it means you've got to refer to the Code of juridictions organisation to know the composition of the court. It can range from one individual to a popular jury of 12 + 3 professional judges. That's because we hate rewriting every text anytime a change occur. Court of one judge are extremely scarce, and can never put one's liberty in jeopardy alone. It's only grammar.
As of public trials, they are always public ; what's not public is only some testimonies (but both accusation and defense are present anytime). It's reserved to cases involving sexual assault against underage youths, to avoid details reaching the press. That's all of it. And yes, there are laws to know what is reserved. But the trial is still considered public because you know who is accused, by whom, what for, and the result of the trial. Every testimony is also recorded.
Oh, and yes, forgot it, but... as a matter of fact, professional judges are PAID by the governement, but they have such legal protection that they are in fact out of reach from anybody. We consider it more a protection of civil liberties that a drawback.
But, you know, i can understand your concerns if you were to face an uknown system. I, on the opposite, finds it rather chilling to travel the USA for exactly the opposite reasons. Remember that police officer who jailed nearly a 100 black persons in texas, for drug trafic, most of his testimonies having been proved perjury since ? Do you know that however many of the 'so-called' convicts were released, some still remain in jail because they pleaded guilty in the hope of having a lighter sentence, therefore their cases were not reopened ? Where was the 'security' of the jury, when those jurors where chosen exclusively white ?
right to confront the witnesses testifying in a trial - check
juries untainted by the need to preserve their own jobs - check
the notion that an individual is considered to not be liable until the converse is demonstrated - check.
So, we've got all of this, plus a big innovation : we can afford making mistakes, because the convict won't lose his head anymore since 1981.
On the other hand, while our systme, how less-than-perfect it is, is improving, I wouldn't count Guantanamo as a great leap toward better trial practice. Prove me wrong ?
In fact nearly ALL of this person's comments in this thread have reaked of it, so it was hardly a slip of the tongue.
Don't get me wrong : I like the USA, I've even been spending some holidays in Syracuse - NY, I sometimes eat at McDonald's, and read the Da Vinci Code in english. I appreciate american culture, and even managed to learn a bit of american law system.
Now, the more I learn about american culture, the more I understand there are deep differences between our ways of doing things, and yours. As far as you keep yours home, and don't mess with ours when we're home, I've got absolutely no objections whatsoever. When I pay you a visit, I respect your way of living, following the saying "When in Rome, do as the romans do".
So, what do we have here ? An american company who tried to get around our legislation, and a mass of supporters on/. who think our judges are expressing personal feelings (or obeying political orders) because they don't apply the US trademarks legislation ; well, sorry about it, but we've got our own, which basis is neither better nor worse than yours. It's just DIFFERENT, so please, understand and respect that difference, and everything will be fine.
If you really want to see Americans' draws drop, explain how European courts (both civil and criminal) work.
Temptating, but i'll refrain from it ; it's too bad Americans just hung Pothier & Domat's pictures over the heads of their congressmen (along with Blackstone's) but forgot to read them all alike.
What about those little coupon printers at the checkout lanes in supermarkets? If I buy a box of brand X dog food, it will probably print a coupon for brand Y dog food. They have software that scans what I have bought and prints coupons from advertisers who want to target people who buy specific items.
They're prohibited in France as well ; the only permitted way is pre-printed rolls where coupons are randomly set. So, coupons printing is not triggered by your buying habits.
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I said being a gifted child is a curse, and nearly all of those who were (and are) gifted can tell the same horror stories ; afterward, we find ways to cope with our history - for some, Mensa is a way, among others.
If you want to understand what it is to be gifted, imagine how you were at, say, 18 years old : politicaly aware, understanding of basic economy, computer literate, and a mature hobby. Now, forget the sex and the beer, view yourself physicaly at 8,and put your 18 yo self into your 8 yo body. That's it. Doesn't mean you're creative or entrepreneur by nature.
Now tell me, how do you fancy doll playing ? That's no more contempt against others than the look of an adult toward a child : the league is not the same, so there's no point in imagining that the gifted should interact normaly with his or her school mates of the same physical age. They may look alike, but inside they're completely different.
Being gifted is a terrible weight to carry for a child, because it shows and constantly expose you to jealous behaviours and sarcasms from other kids, their parents, not to speak of teachers. You spend years in schools trying to offer the smallest surface of yourself to the view of others - unsucessfuly, in general.
You think that it'll get better in college ? Nope, wrong. In adulthood ? Nope. Wherever you go, you are surrounded by the same poisoned atmosphere when people realise you think faster than they do. When you're that bright, yu soon understand what it was to be suspect of wichcraft.
Look at this thread : full of hatred against those folks, because they dare claim they're smart. Would they have claimed any other talent such as music or painting, there would be applauses of joy, but logical intelligence must be hidden.
So I understand those people like to gather, just to meet some of their kind. And I think there's a form of therapy in it. Bragging about it being part of the therapy, just like the AAs.
Being gifted is a curse most of the time.
Of course, there would be no internet, no USB, no MP3, no nothing except what's really needed to work in most situations.
While windows evolution broadened the scope of use of computers, I compare the different versions to dinosaurs : ever more bigger, still severly lacking in the brain departement, and nearly collapsing under their own weight now.
I bet that history will repeat : time has come for smarter, smaller, devices, and the desktop computer as we know it will soon be a fading memory.
At once I felt trapped into a time warp ; I swear I read the same sentence when NT 4 was announced (plus or minus a few cosmetic details). Same old BS, at the time it was already a cold marketing ploy, nowdays, it's smelling like a rotten corpse.
I think my english skills (lack of, that is to say), is badly showing. Sorry about my misunderstanding.
My point was that although I actually like OS-operated floppy drives because they're more secure, especially in multi-users setups (and yes, back in the 80's, I've seen prolog-based accountancy packages actually backuping on floppies in multiuser environnements - chilling), the Apple's "trash to eject" shortcut is as dumb as can be. Any user in his right mind, save apple's worshipers, won't ever dare slipping the disk icon over the trash in the legitimate fear of wipping the disk clean. Not everybody, moreover given previous exposure to "Microsoft sense of ergonomical design", is eager to trust his computer to actually help him instead of pulling the trigger once the gun is aiming at his foot.
As others have pointed out, it's not because one can that one do ; moreover, there's no logical connection between "no floppy button" and "trash floppy icon to eject". On some hardware (Sun), floppy drives have no eject button either, and you trigger the ejection mecanism either with a "eject" command line (just to kid Mac's supporters a bit), or via menu attached to the icon. I suspect no die-hard Mac addict would admit it, but it's the silliest shortcut ever made in GUI history.
Qemu is damn fast, in my experience ; I wouldn't dare quantify it, but running win 98 under qemu on a 900 Mhz Athlon is perfectly OK, and it is impressive, quality-wise. Moreover, if host and target cpu are identical, there's a fast version of qemu to avoid unecessary emulations - didn't try that one, though, because it segfaulted on my FC2, and I was happy enough with the regular emulator so I didn't bother to investigate the issue any further (I did the build from CVS, so I expected glitches).
I've always setup my sparc boxes via tftp / ftp, and it always worked smoothly. But I wonder on which planet you happen to live, as 10s and 20s are so much more powerfull and expandable than 5s I can't understand how they can get sold cheaper ?!
Hey, but if you're playing with sparcs then a BSD or (free as in beer!) Solaris may be more in your style.
Solaris is way too slow and bloated for what I use those boxes for (static web server, smtp), and - without feeding the troll - I favor GNU over BSD licence. Plus the fact that when I got those sparcs, no BSD could manage multiprocessors setups. As I first got a ss10 - 512, it was afterward more rational to keep Linux everywhere to reduce the maintenance burden.
Why use linux on sparc 32 in 3 letters : SMP.
Fine hardware, dead cheap, and NO bsd was up to it (until recently, if it happens to work now).
Debian back out in that area is a stab in the back for any user.
Thank you for expressing better than I could the exact same feeling I have about this issue. [No karma bonus, just wanted to acknowledge a good post and sadly missing mod points]
No more, no less than any other european nation. That's what all the UE is about : stop the madness.
Bad news for you ; english used to be a germanic language, from which it got its grammar, but after Guillaume le Conquérant went there looking out for a week end cottage where he could rest away from his wife (she was a bore, always doing needle work...), things were never quite the same.
Just an example for you to chew on : the 100 years war. You depict it as being war between France and England, which is totaly wrong. It was a war between 2 princes BOTH claiming to be legitimate heirs to the throne of France ; one happened to be already king of England, but that doesn't really count. The winner happened to be crowned, but that doesn't make it a "french victory" per se.
Almost all your list shows the same void of historical knowledge, because before the XIXth century, Europe was divided into kingdoms, subdivided between lords who had very loose ties to their kings, and would even go as far as fighting between themselves, and against their own king eventually and easily swap alliances.
The very notion of country as you understand it (state - nation) is too modern.
The very idea that "french" as a whole are always beaten is therefore completely absurd, and would have seemed preposterous at the time. It would be strictly equivalent to conclude North americans always lose their battles because Confederates were beaten by the Yankees. oops.
As I understand the matter, the court is saying exactly that, within the limits of the case : personal copies are "fair use", now bring us the real culprit.
I think that MS is following the easy money path as usual. Do as we say, not as we do.
I think you're dead wrong on that issue ; capitalism is all about free market, where "market" means competition between many producers of comparable goods to cope with the demand of a large group of consummers. It's a system, not a political ideology. The political ideology built on top of capitalism is "liberalism" which basically states that the governement has no right to stop the game even if no balance can be found, leading to a de facto monopoly. Thus, in the information market, the game is biased from the very begining : goods are never scarce, because once a first sample is out, copies are dead cheap to produce. The better producer can lower its production cost at will until it wipes out competition, and the monopoly is at hand in no time. Thereafter, prices are not settled by the market, but the game does not end : that's liberalism, not capitalism. Recent history of computers shows that point : markets goes to near-monopoly for a time (think mainframes for IBM, Mini for DEC...), and they are only blown out and send to a niche market by a shift of the consummers to a NEW market. Monopolists eventualy goes bankrupt (DEC) because they fail to invest new markets fearing the loss of their captive mainstream income source.
On the other hand, communism awards a producer a state monopoly for no known reason, to satisfy the demand top down. But in the end, the result is exactly the same as liberalism : consummers are traped, because there is no such thing as an open market. But in communism case, there is not the luxury to open a new market.
The whole gpl thing is not about capitalism nor liberalism ; it's all in the question of the status of IP : are virtual productions goods suitable to market, or not. And GPL gives an answer that's not pleasant for either the USA nor Europe, and that answer is : NO. The production of IP as a stream of income is doomed, because the economical values stand in real products and tailored services, products you can touch. Once every bits of our goods are Chinese made, we'll have to bend to their will because we'll have nothing left in our hands. That does not necessarily means that the companies we all know and love will disappear in a glimpse, but they'll follow the real production, and become chinese if they see fit for the business. But what will be left of us ?
I don't have the faintest idea, and I don't care. That's their very own problem ; perhaps they waited for the outcome of their first action ? Perhaps they wanted to make deal with them, allowing them to use their trademark for money ?
You stated that "plenty of search engines already complying with the laws" - culd you name a few ?
Last I looked, Lycos was compliant ; sponsored links refered to outlets for the brand, not competitors.
What would be the long-term damage to France's IT companies as they no longer have the most comprehensive searches available ?
That's the true beauty of being a lawyer : you absoluely don't care of that pesky little details. Perhaps this trial will lead our representatives to make a legal exception, perhaps the precedent will stand, but the only important thing in this was that there was a law, google broke it, they got slapped. Full stop. Everything else is juris-fiction.
Happy to know it, but I bet this pardon has no effect with regard to the alleged "guilt" of those involved. I mean that in front of the law, they're still considered guilty but don't need to serve their full jail time.
But this was only an example I chose to show that you don't have a better safety than we have, although our due process is completely different from yours.
Fine ; go sell some extasy on the street, then, because, after all, police should go after the buyer as long as you don't use it yourself.
Silly logic, no ?
As of public trials, they are always public ; what's not public is only some testimonies (but both accusation and defense are present anytime). It's reserved to cases involving sexual assault against underage youths, to avoid details reaching the press. That's all of it. And yes, there are laws to know what is reserved. But the trial is still considered public because you know who is accused, by whom, what for, and the result of the trial. Every testimony is also recorded.
Oh, and yes, forgot it, but... as a matter of fact, professional judges are PAID by the governement, but they have such legal protection that they are in fact out of reach from anybody. We consider it more a protection of civil liberties that a drawback.
But, you know, i can understand your concerns if you were to face an uknown system. I, on the opposite, finds it rather chilling to travel the USA for exactly the opposite reasons. Remember that police officer who jailed nearly a 100 black persons in texas, for drug trafic, most of his testimonies having been proved perjury since ? Do you know that however many of the 'so-called' convicts were released, some still remain in jail because they pleaded guilty in the hope of having a lighter sentence, therefore their cases were not reopened ? Where was the 'security' of the jury, when those jurors where chosen exclusively white ?
double jeopardy - Check
right to confront the witnesses testifying in a trial - check
juries untainted by the need to preserve their own jobs - check
the notion that an individual is considered to not be liable until the converse is demonstrated - check.
So, we've got all of this, plus a big innovation : we can afford making mistakes, because the convict won't lose his head anymore since 1981.
On the other hand, while our systme, how less-than-perfect it is, is improving, I wouldn't count Guantanamo as a great leap toward better trial practice. Prove me wrong ?
Don't get me wrong : I like the USA, I've even been spending some holidays in Syracuse - NY, I sometimes eat at McDonald's, and read the Da Vinci Code in english. I appreciate american culture, and even managed to learn a bit of american law system.
Now, the more I learn about american culture, the more I understand there are deep differences between our ways of doing things, and yours. As far as you keep yours home, and don't mess with ours when we're home, I've got absolutely no objections whatsoever. When I pay you a visit, I respect your way of living, following the saying "When in Rome, do as the romans do".
So, what do we have here ? An american company who tried to get around our legislation, and a mass of supporters on /. who think our judges are expressing personal feelings (or obeying political orders) because they don't apply the US trademarks legislation ; well, sorry about it, but we've got our own, which basis is neither better nor worse than yours. It's just DIFFERENT, so please, understand and respect that difference, and everything will be fine.
Temptating, but i'll refrain from it ; it's too bad Americans just hung Pothier & Domat's pictures over the heads of their congressmen (along with Blackstone's) but forgot to read them all alike.
They're prohibited in France as well ; the only permitted way is pre-printed rolls where coupons are randomly set. So, coupons printing is not triggered by your buying habits.