Re:Oh boy, where to start
on
What You Can't Say
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Funny, I thought everyone who wasn't a member of the Axis powers won WWII, and it was the combination of fighting multiple-front wars which effectively defeated Germany, Italy, and Japan.
Can't have a multiple-front war without multiple fronts. Last time I checked, the Russians weren't in Italy, France, or the Pacific, and the Americans/British/Canadians/ANZAC/Free French weren't in Poland or Siberia.
I'm American, so feel free to flame me on that basis (also, my pompous twat-hood). --------
Don't much care if people seem me as a pompous twat for that kind of thing.
It gets old seeing people repeat the same stuff over and over again like they invented it. Technical people seem to be particularly prone to this in non-technical fields -- the bias in that community that technical people are smarter than everyone else has a lot of self-reinforcing traction. ------
Got some statistics from a semi-neutral authority (not Rush, Bill, or Ann) to back up your self-proclaimed victim status?
I love it when people use words like "the most" and "these days" as if their sensitivity to anecdotal information and their own insecurity proves that the world is against them, so they don't really have to account for their own behavior.
And you know, you might actually be a racist, sexist homophobe. Some people are -- I've met lots of them. You might not be. I know I've been called racist and sexist (not so much homophobe) a lot because of some of my views, but I don't feel that I am somehow under attack. Get over yourself. ---------
Re:G. W. Bush should be tried for his war crimes..
on
What You Can't Say
·
· Score: 1
Technically, wouldn't gassing the Kurds and uprooting the Shia in the South of Iraq (both activities the US tolerated/condoned) have been a crime against humanity, or some such, since they were citizens of his own country? Gassing the Iranians would have been a war crime.
And I'm no expert in international law, but it seems to me that ordering an unprovoked attack on another country might be "an act of war" AND a "war crime", at least in the eyes of some. ----------
Congratulations. By dint of a lot of brainpower and work on your own, you've managed to reproduce a conversation that philosophers have been having for over a hundred years, anyway.
http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altruism
--------
Re:A few more modern taboos:
on
What You Can't Say
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Well, I know that Jews don't become powerful in every country they move to, and if you have a beef with this guy's assumptions, take it up with him, instead of coming after me for actually dealing with him directly.
However, in a more-or-less free society they (as does any other immigrant group with the right attitude) do seem to profit and find their way disproportionately (for their percentage in the population) into the professions in particular. The professions are profitable, money talks, and so on.
This is a stratagem to be emulated, not feared. -------
If you say "Jesse Ventura just killed someone in Nome, so let's go to Alaska and whack him", you better be able to prove that he killed someone in Nome. The burden is on YOU to prove that he killed someone, not to say after the fact "Well, there's no proof he DIDN'T kill someone in Nome."
It may not be an out and out lie for you, but it's pretty weaselly, and deliberately misleading (which, for me, makes it a lie). Not a good enough reason to go to Alaska and whack Jerry Ventura. -----------
Re:very strange stuff in the article about Churchi
on
What You Can't Say
·
· Score: 1
Well, the essence of a multi-party democracy (or anything other than an authoritarian state for that matter) is that people are allowed to have opinions other than the opinion of the party/person in power, and they're allowed to state those opinions, EVEN IN WARTIME.
Now, the people in power can also fight for their position with any words they like, and it turns out that the best tactic seems to be to label dissenters as unpatriotic, defeatist, fifth columners. Sometimes that's true, mostly it's not. --------
Re:A few more modern taboos:
on
What You Can't Say
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Here's a couple thoughts:
1) It's possible that there are some inherent differences between the races. The question is to what extent they're meaningful, and so worth study. I can think of some health issues which are much more likly to come up in specific races/ethnicities: sickle cell anemia in blacks, Tay-Sachs in Ashkenazi Jews. Those seem worth study, and they are studied. Other differences, probably not so meaningful.
2) Jews (and ethnic Chinese for that matter) become influential in diaspora because they have cultures which value hard work and study, so over the course of a couple generations, they eat the lunch of any "natives" who don't value that (like every antisemitic racist bubba still digging ditches in my hometown). Duh. It never ceases to amaze me that people think there's more to it than that.
3) You got me. I think the difference is that Stalin mostly killed his own people as part of a political consolidation of power, rather than identifying a particular ethnic group and trying to systematically exterminate ALL of them as part of a plan to wage an active war across the rest of the world. That's more a difference of politics than anything else.
4) You're clearly staying just this side of really nasty slurs. I can't wait for you to bring up the blood libel.
Hmmm... politically correct, meaning on the left or on the right? That catchphrase is typically used by the right to criticize the left, but the behavior (stifling particular kinds of expression/beliefs) it describes is politics-neutral. I've lived in both very conservative and very liberal environments. Both are pretty restrictive, and I found that I was at odds with the prevailing behavior/expectations in both.
Of course, maybe that means I'm just a contrarian git. ---------
Re:In defense of -ist and -ic
on
What You Can't Say
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I think what you're talking about is a two-fold tendency in most human discourse (at least most of the discourse I've seen):
1) The failure of speakers/writers to state in explicit terms exactly what they mean.
2) The failure of listeners/readers to think about the possible meanings of an even moderately vague statement.
There are all sorts of reasons for both of those tendencies, including intellectual laziness on both sides, a desire to inflame on both sides, the speaker's desire to be able to backtrack, the listener's desire to get ticked off, and so on.
I tend to agree with your analysis, but would add that -ism and -ist type words are too often used as the trump word to end a conversation -- once those kind of words have been used on you, you can't really continue. I've seen many conversations turn into a race to get to the trump word. ----------
Although it's worthwhile to examine and criticize the existing orthodoxies of your society/timeperiod/family, the question is whether one truly examines one's own deeply held beliefs (i.e., the ground from which you're throwing bombs at the "establishment"). I've spent a lot of time around people who have a staggering degree of certainty that they're in the minority and an astonishing level of belief in their own victimhood and the heretical nature of their opinions.
The fascinating thing about those folks is that most of them were highly-educated white men (as am I) who thought that the deck in the US was stacked against them. They took the academic intellectual critiques of the existing society to mean that they were personally under attack and could never get a fair break, so that their boorish behavior was actually "speaking truth to power."
I guess my point here is that just because one fancies oneself a heretic doesn't mean that one is. A lot of self-styled heretics are just rude people looking for someone to blame outside themselves.
and then the question is where one gets the materials to build the fuel cells and how one gets the hyrogen (i.e., do you derive it from hydrocarbons, or by running a current through water).
No matter what animals do to live, it pretty much means that another animal or plant has to die. That means that you SHOULD choose carefully, think carefully, and try to create a system which uses resources as efficiently and in as earthfriendly a way as possible.
Actually, if you look at who wants more registration and who wants to make Election Day a national holiday (or, hell, moving it to a weekend day), it's pretty clear that the left wants more participation and easier voting, and the right wants more restrictions on registration and harder voting.
The reasons are pretty straightforward -- people who are well off and have high-end salaried jobs are more likely to be able to get past registration barriers and to take time off from their weekday jobs (which are salaried, not hourly) to vote. By comparison, the less well-off are typically less educated and less likely to be able to take time to vote without a financial hit.
Now, the interesting thing about all of this analysis is that it's kind of backwards, because, IIRC, the more education and (to a point) income someone has, the less likely they are to vote conservative, and vice versa. There's a distinct lack of class consciousness in America, probably because the right has been really good at playing to the emotions and non-economic beliefs of the lower economic classes, while really pursuing agendas destructive of their actual economic interests. ----------------
and of course, why should anyone ever have to pay for software, or submit to any conditions on its use. after all, it was just written once a while ago by some programmer sitting in a cube/their basement.
i hope you're kidding. the RIAA is not good people, and the studio system screws musicians and puts out dreck, but musicians deserve to profit from the things they build. for example, every musician i've known to be interviewed says that they don't make ANY money on their albums no matter how many they sell -- the contracts and some creative accounting take care of that. instead, they make music when they tour and sometimes from radio play (which is ironically, sort of what you're proposing).
For those of you jumping on this particular point. Outsourcing just means moving the task out of the company to a contractor of some sort.
Doesn't make this guy any less screwed and it does sound like a serious pooch job for him. Of course, just like any management consulting review of services, nothing will be done which will (a) bother the people who hired the consulting or (b) avoid a chance for follow-on upsell of the services of the consulting company.
IIRC, all of the "men" had stubble or beards. all of the "hobbits" and "elves" stayed clean-shaven because according to the generally accepted mythology (and again, IIRC, Tolkien's appendices) those species don't grow facial hair below their eyebrows.
That probably has more to do with the network architecture than anything else.
DOCSIS is more or less an ethernet shared-bandwidth architecture among everyone connected to a given cable headend (Cable Modem Termination System, or CMTS) node, with fiber running from that headend back into the Cableco's high-speed network. That means that bandwidth hogs have a direct and immediate effect on other subscribers, because the CMTS shared bandwidth will typically be more limited than the fiber bandwidth is.
DSL, by way of comparison, is a direct connection from you to the head end, with the first shared medium being the fiber running from the dsl head end back into the telco network. That means that users would have to exceed fiber or router bandwidth to cause a problem, which (IIRC) is a much higher threshold than cable relative to the number of users on a node. -----
I spent some time looking at maximum bandwidth on a Ku-Band satellite at an old job. Satellite bandwidth is VERY limited compared to the subscriber footprint. See, one satellite covers pretty much the whole US (or equivalent geography), and it's almost impossible to increase bandwidth incrementally in amounts less than a transponder. IIRC, a standard Ku transponder costs something over $100K/month, and can support something between 20 and 40 Mb/s of bandwidth, depending on the age of the satellite and some other factors. That gets chewed up VERY fast when you've got a nationwide footprint of bandwidth hogs (that being a relative term). Also, there's not a lot that even the fanciest network management can do to ameliorate the problem when confronted with that kind of real-time demand for bits.
So, the provider weighs the cost of losing and re-acquiring a few subscribers (most of whom have NO POTS alternative other than satellite because they live in the boonies) vs. what it costs to jack up the available bandwidth to meet their needs.
If there's a satellite systems networking guy out there, please correct/supplement my figures. I no longer have the lab books in which I worked out the math. -----
because charging rents on the use of a patented invention is exactly the purpose of patents. they're very powerful, which is why they're limited in time and geography. they've also been pretty badly abused in the last few years, not in terms of charging license fees for legitimate patents, but in what one can ram through the pto.
you may also, if you like, challenge the whole concept of people having the exclusive rights to an invention, no matter how radical and new. people have. myself, i think it's a good idea when implemented properly. --------------------
Slashdot Mirror
Funny, I thought everyone who wasn't a member of the Axis powers won WWII, and it was the combination of fighting multiple-front wars which effectively defeated Germany, Italy, and Japan.
Can't have a multiple-front war without multiple fronts. Last time I checked, the Russians weren't in Italy, France, or the Pacific, and the Americans/British/Canadians/ANZAC/Free French weren't in Poland or Siberia.
I'm American, so feel free to flame me on that basis (also, my pompous twat-hood).
--------
[shrug]
Don't much care if people seem me as a pompous twat for that kind of thing.
It gets old seeing people repeat the same stuff over and over again like they invented it. Technical people seem to be particularly prone to this in non-technical fields -- the bias in that community that technical people are smarter than everyone else has a lot of self-reinforcing traction.
------
Got some statistics from a semi-neutral authority (not Rush, Bill, or Ann) to back up your self-proclaimed victim status?
I love it when people use words like "the most" and "these days" as if their sensitivity to anecdotal information and their own insecurity proves that the world is against them, so they don't really have to account for their own behavior.
And you know, you might actually be a racist, sexist homophobe. Some people are -- I've met lots of them. You might not be. I know I've been called racist and sexist (not so much homophobe) a lot because of some of my views, but I don't feel that I am somehow under attack. Get over yourself.
---------
Technically, wouldn't gassing the Kurds and uprooting the Shia in the South of Iraq (both activities the US tolerated/condoned) have been a crime against humanity, or some such, since they were citizens of his own country? Gassing the Iranians would have been a war crime.
And I'm no expert in international law, but it seems to me that ordering an unprovoked attack on another country might be "an act of war" AND a "war crime", at least in the eyes of some.
----------
Congratulations. By dint of a lot of brainpower and work on your own, you've managed to reproduce a conversation that philosophers have been having for over a hundred years, anyway. http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altruism --------
Well, I know that Jews don't become powerful in every country they move to, and if you have a beef with this guy's assumptions, take it up with him, instead of coming after me for actually dealing with him directly.
However, in a more-or-less free society they (as does any other immigrant group with the right attitude) do seem to profit and find their way disproportionately (for their percentage in the population) into the professions in particular. The professions are profitable, money talks, and so on.
This is a stratagem to be emulated, not feared.
-------
"The price of liberty is eternal dirt," which is my personal favorite.
--------
That's a very nice, neat evasion of the point.
If you say "Jesse Ventura just killed someone in Nome, so let's go to Alaska and whack him", you better be able to prove that he killed someone in Nome. The burden is on YOU to prove that he killed someone, not to say after the fact "Well, there's no proof he DIDN'T kill someone in Nome."
It may not be an out and out lie for you, but it's pretty weaselly, and deliberately misleading (which, for me, makes it a lie). Not a good enough reason to go to Alaska and whack Jerry Ventura.
-----------
Well, the essence of a multi-party democracy (or anything other than an authoritarian state for that matter) is that people are allowed to have opinions other than the opinion of the party/person in power, and they're allowed to state those opinions, EVEN IN WARTIME.
Now, the people in power can also fight for their position with any words they like, and it turns out that the best tactic seems to be to label dissenters as unpatriotic, defeatist, fifth columners. Sometimes that's true, mostly it's not.
--------
Here's a couple thoughts:
1) It's possible that there are some inherent differences between the races. The question is to what extent they're meaningful, and so worth study. I can think of some health issues which are much more likly to come up in specific races/ethnicities: sickle cell anemia in blacks, Tay-Sachs in Ashkenazi Jews. Those seem worth study, and they are studied. Other differences, probably not so meaningful.
2) Jews (and ethnic Chinese for that matter) become influential in diaspora because they have cultures which value hard work and study, so over the course of a couple generations, they eat the lunch of any "natives" who don't value that (like every antisemitic racist bubba still digging ditches in my hometown). Duh. It never ceases to amaze me that people think there's more to it than that.
3) You got me. I think the difference is that Stalin mostly killed his own people as part of a political consolidation of power, rather than identifying a particular ethnic group and trying to systematically exterminate ALL of them as part of a plan to wage an active war across the rest of the world. That's more a difference of politics than anything else.
4) You're clearly staying just this side of really nasty slurs. I can't wait for you to bring up the blood libel.
For the record, I'm not Jewish.
-------
These aren't heresies, they're just political positions from the Utah desert. They're silly, IMO, but hardly heretical.
You'll have to push a lot harder to actually be heretical, instead of just fanatical.
----------
Hmmm... politically correct, meaning on the left or on the right? That catchphrase is typically used by the right to criticize the left, but the behavior (stifling particular kinds of expression/beliefs) it describes is politics-neutral. I've lived in both very conservative and very liberal environments. Both are pretty restrictive, and I found that I was at odds with the prevailing behavior/expectations in both.
Of course, maybe that means I'm just a contrarian git.
---------
I think what you're talking about is a two-fold tendency in most human discourse (at least most of the discourse I've seen):
1) The failure of speakers/writers to state in explicit terms exactly what they mean.
2) The failure of listeners/readers to think about the possible meanings of an even moderately vague statement.
There are all sorts of reasons for both of those tendencies, including intellectual laziness on both sides, a desire to inflame on both sides, the speaker's desire to be able to backtrack, the listener's desire to get ticked off, and so on.
I tend to agree with your analysis, but would add that -ism and -ist type words are too often used as the trump word to end a conversation -- once those kind of words have been used on you, you can't really continue. I've seen many conversations turn into a race to get to the trump word.
----------
I think that the use of overhyped management buzzwords is a bad idea. Does that mean that I'm thinking outside the box?
Whoops, I seem to have caught myself in a recursive sarcasm loop. Darn.
-------------
Although it's worthwhile to examine and criticize the existing orthodoxies of your society/timeperiod/family, the question is whether one truly examines one's own deeply held beliefs (i.e., the ground from which you're throwing bombs at the "establishment"). I've spent a lot of time around people who have a staggering degree of certainty that they're in the minority and an astonishing level of belief in their own victimhood and the heretical nature of their opinions.
The fascinating thing about those folks is that most of them were highly-educated white men (as am I) who thought that the deck in the US was stacked against them. They took the academic intellectual critiques of the existing society to mean that they were personally under attack and could never get a fair break, so that their boorish behavior was actually "speaking truth to power."
I guess my point here is that just because one fancies oneself a heretic doesn't mean that one is. A lot of self-styled heretics are just rude people looking for someone to blame outside themselves.
and then the question is where one gets the materials to build the fuel cells and how one gets the hyrogen (i.e., do you derive it from hydrocarbons, or by running a current through water).
No matter what animals do to live, it pretty much means that another animal or plant has to die. That means that you SHOULD choose carefully, think carefully, and try to create a system which uses resources as efficiently and in as earthfriendly a way as possible.
do you KNOW that's what happened, or are you just stereotyping for fun and profit?
Actually, if you look at who wants more registration and who wants to make Election Day a national holiday (or, hell, moving it to a weekend day), it's pretty clear that the left wants more participation and easier voting, and the right wants more restrictions on registration and harder voting.
The reasons are pretty straightforward -- people who are well off and have high-end salaried jobs are more likely to be able to get past registration barriers and to take time off from their weekday jobs (which are salaried, not hourly) to vote. By comparison, the less well-off are typically less educated and less likely to be able to take time to vote without a financial hit.
Now, the interesting thing about all of this analysis is that it's kind of backwards, because, IIRC, the more education and (to a point) income someone has, the less likely they are to vote conservative, and vice versa. There's a distinct lack of class consciousness in America, probably because the right has been really good at playing to the emotions and non-economic beliefs of the lower economic classes, while really pursuing agendas destructive of their actual economic interests.
----------------
and of course, why should anyone ever have to pay for software, or submit to any conditions on its use. after all, it was just written once a while ago by some programmer sitting in a cube/their basement.
i hope you're kidding. the RIAA is not good people, and the studio system screws musicians and puts out dreck, but musicians deserve to profit from the things they build. for example, every musician i've known to be interviewed says that they don't make ANY money on their albums no matter how many they sell -- the contracts and some creative accounting take care of that. instead, they make music when they tour and sometimes from radio play (which is ironically, sort of what you're proposing).
For those of you jumping on this particular point. Outsourcing just means moving the task out of the company to a contractor of some sort.
Doesn't make this guy any less screwed and it does sound like a serious pooch job for him. Of course, just like any management consulting review of services, nothing will be done which will (a) bother the people who hired the consulting or (b) avoid a chance for follow-on upsell of the services of the consulting company.
IIRC, all of the "men" had stubble or beards. all of the "hobbits" and "elves" stayed clean-shaven because according to the generally accepted mythology (and again, IIRC, Tolkien's appendices) those species don't grow facial hair below their eyebrows.
it's just that simple, baby.
That probably has more to do with the network architecture than anything else.
DOCSIS is more or less an ethernet shared-bandwidth architecture among everyone connected to a given cable headend (Cable Modem Termination System, or CMTS) node, with fiber running from that headend back into the Cableco's high-speed network. That means that bandwidth hogs have a direct and immediate effect on other subscribers, because the CMTS shared bandwidth will typically be more limited than the fiber bandwidth is.
DSL, by way of comparison, is a direct connection from you to the head end, with the first shared medium being the fiber running from the dsl head end back into the telco network. That means that users would have to exceed fiber or router bandwidth to cause a problem, which (IIRC) is a much higher threshold than cable relative to the number of users on a node.
-----
I spent some time looking at maximum bandwidth on a Ku-Band satellite at an old job. Satellite bandwidth is VERY limited compared to the subscriber footprint. See, one satellite covers pretty much the whole US (or equivalent geography), and it's almost impossible to increase bandwidth incrementally in amounts less than a transponder. IIRC, a standard Ku transponder costs something over $100K/month, and can support something between 20 and 40 Mb/s of bandwidth, depending on the age of the satellite and some other factors. That gets chewed up VERY fast when you've got a nationwide footprint of bandwidth hogs (that being a relative term). Also, there's not a lot that even the fanciest network management can do to ameliorate the problem when confronted with that kind of real-time demand for bits.
So, the provider weighs the cost of losing and re-acquiring a few subscribers (most of whom have NO POTS alternative other than satellite because they live in the boonies) vs. what it costs to jack up the available bandwidth to meet their needs.
If there's a satellite systems networking guy out there, please correct/supplement my figures. I no longer have the lab books in which I worked out the math.
-----
because charging rents on the use of a patented invention is exactly the purpose of patents. they're very powerful, which is why they're limited in time and geography. they've also been pretty badly abused in the last few years, not in terms of charging license fees for legitimate patents, but in what one can ram through the pto.
you may also, if you like, challenge the whole concept of people having the exclusive rights to an invention, no matter how radical and new. people have. myself, i think it's a good idea when implemented properly.
--------------------
What, both of them?