I did know about "pass left, keep right" in the states. It was driving in Europe that gave me the sense of how well it works if EVERYONE follows it to the extreme (and speed limits are either very high, ignored, or non-existent).
Prior to my exposure to European driving, I was usually rightfully in the left lane here in the States - this was back when we had the 55 MPH speed limit and, on the open road, I certainly wasn't going to go below 75 MPH - so since even at 75 MPH I had to keep 50% of my attention devoted to looking for airplanes, CHP on on-ramps, CHP making U-Turns on Highway 5 behind me and the like - I usually drove at least 90 - 95 MPH in good weather in daylight hours (it also kept me alert - checking every car behind you who seems to not be falling behind your, every car on every on-ramp, every car going the other way for a shotgun sticking up kept me on my toes [warning: the "shotgun sticking up" thing no longer works in California - in many cases they seem to have hidden them]). However, I was always very polite and wouldn't harass someone who was driving at 65 MPH in the left lane but would instead carefully pass them on the right when the safe opportunity presented itself - sometimes ten minutes later. After we finally dropped the stupid 55 MPH limit, I also dropped my speed substantially (if I can go 75 MPH w/o fear of tickets, why spend all the extra energy on "ticket avoidance" just to get 15 or 20 MPH more?).
Since we (still) have low speed limits in the US, I am fairly willing to "keep left" when driving at 85 MPH on Hwy 5 in California even though some guy wants to drive at 100 MPH or 110 MPH. In this case, I actually am glad to move right if the gap between trucks is sufficient that I can never downshift or hit my brakes while letting the 100MPH guy continue past me and return to the left lane. Actually, I'm really glad to do this - I call these guys "CHP Squeegees" and love them.
It seems (almost?) all local building codes accept stick built homes using usual pine/fir 2x4s for most framing members. Other (even steel studs) materials seem less universally accepted. Is my perception correct and is this an issue for Habitat?
(Personally, if I ever build myself a home in a place with termites - there will be no wood framing in it if I can avoid it! Munch, munch, munch...)
Where are these Jobs? And can I get one without a masters degree or higher (no degree actually). No one assembles any more (ok very few). I personally hate the idea that I have to hope a compiler knows what it's doing.
Hmm... True, there's not much assembly being used nowadays. The only place I can think of that might still do a LOT of assembly are mass produced consumer devices where they can save 15 cents per unit if all the code can fit in a 16k (which strikes me as a pretty boring job - but each to their own).
However, in every "server class" (database servers mostly) development shop I've worked, there are a few of us around who are comfortable digging through at the assembly level (to varying degrees on different machines of course - I know IA-32 best, and PPC, Sparc, IA-64 less well). This is usually useful when a debugger can't figure out a stack, or the the compiler generated bad (or surprising code), when hardware doesn't work correctly (rare - usually because of a documented errata by the chip vendor but where the OS didn't implement a workaround), or due to an OS bug (more frequent than one would guess), or when one needs to do something like implement a latch (usually about 10 instructions at most) because the vendor has not provided a sufficiently performant one (I don't think any real OSs fail to provide the necessary primitives now so this probably isn't needed anymore).
As far as how to get a job in this type of environment - I have no idea, aren't all jobs in this environment?
Seriously, it seems to be something developers get into very early in their career and continuously migrate towards because they are intrigued enough by solving nasty problems that they keep driving down until they find the problem - at 3 in the morning (with luck, the first morning after the afternoon they hit the problem!). It's probably really hard to shift into such a job area w/o experience in it (and, to a lesser degree, without a BSc or better) - of course one way to get experience is to work deep in the Linux kernel - and if you can get something accepted into the code base, that would give a lot of credentials on the resume!
Processors are still made up of logica gates and I don't recall there being an ADD logic gate (but I'm not an EE)
I don't recall much about the 4004 anymore, but I'm pretty sure it was not microcoded and that it almost certainly had a hardware adder (it was only a 4 bit adder, so it doesn't take all that many gates to implement) but I have no idea what type (maybe some sort of ripple adder???) and have forgotten most of my logic design course.
Ouch, I thought I was just a "geezer", but I guess I'm an "old geezer":) (Although, I must admit, every so often I catch myself allocating a memory buffer for some trivial little thing and realize it's substantially bigger than the entire physical memory on the first multi-user server class system I worked on the development of - maybe that qualifies me for the "old" tag).
I see where you're coming from. However, I compare today's rank and file Java programmer with the 70's rank and file COBOL programmer - both are/were pretty clueless about what happens inside the beast yet technology continued to progress after 1975 (much more slowly than I expected though).
Really, not everyone needs to know about memory coherence on SMPs, register renaming, what all the bits in IEEE FP formats are for and and what that implies, yada, yada, yada. The good news is that some geeks will continue to learn this stuff and get to work only on the "hard" (aka, "interesting") problems and get paid well for it. The need for this knowledge is now less widespread than it once was (as debuggers got better and languages more abstract) so it's more of a speciality now.
When I mention that microprocessors only do three things (incriment,decriment and compare)
A bit too narrow - surely you would consider the 4004 to be a microprocesser (it certainly is in common usage) and even it could add/subtract IIRC.
(What amazes me is how few "kids" today - those under 30 - have a clue how their cars work and could even identify the main components of their car engine if someone handed them all the disassembled parts in a box! That knowledge seemed to be something most everyone I know learned somewhere during grade school/junior high school and now seems to be a mystery to most -- but I'm not too worried about engine technology growth stopping.)
price supports for certain food products with certain additives (milk with hormones added, high fructose corn syrrup, etc.) ADM basically makes a bunch of food additives that aren't good for you and are mostly put into products because of government regulations and price supports
WRT the food products, the government doesn't force you to eat any of these - there are readily available alternatives in all cases. I do disagree with government subsidies however (just as I object to all direct or indirect confiscation of citizens' resources [a.k.a. taxation] by the Federal government to perform tasks not assigned or allowed to them by the Constitution - including education, medicare, social security...).
But I also think the government could easily end meth use if they really wanted to. I think they allow it to exist because someone makes money off of it. Same with a lot of other kinds of crime (auto theft, illegal immigration, burgalary, etc.)
Do you have any support for this allegation of intent?
If you think the government (local? state? Federal?) could "easily" end meth (I assume you meant the use of meth since it would presumably be hard to eliminate atoms, or even the molecules, that are necessary to make meth), can you provide some hints on how? Obviously (as we saw earlier in this thread), attempting to constrain the supply of an easily available critical component of meth results in someone screaming about how his/her "constitutional rights" are being violated.
It's a fact of life - regardless of if someone likes it or not.
When a project development effort gets behind schedule or an important customer has serious problems, the developer who continues to work 5 days a week, 9 hours a day due to outside obligations just isn't as valuable as a similarly skilled and experienced one who puts in the extra time to address the customer problem and/or help deliver the release (with the essential functions intact and working properly) on time.
As a manager, I try to be as flexible as possible to accommodate developers' outside obligations. But, if a developer is routinely unable to respond to a customer crisis or figure out a way to adjust their personal schedule so they can work with other team members to resolve critical path problems in development, obviously at review time (and off-shoring time, and cost reduction time) this developer is remembered as one that I can't rely on as much.
In my experience, this is really rarely a problem since the best developers truly enjoy what they do and are engaged and want to do the best job they can and figure out how to juggle their personal and professional lives.
One needs to think both short and long term. The only ways I know of to meet all schedules every time without extra work is to either sandbag schedules or to refuse to commit to a schedule until a substantial percentage of the project's development budget has been expended on detailed design. Neither is efficient or practical.
Some jobs of course don't require additional effort beyond 5/8 - but the one time I worked at such a place (a major aerospace firm over 25 years ago when I was still in school), I was bored stiff and left for a more interesting job in a more dynamic environment - YMMV.
Do you guys really keep prints from people who have been cleared
Actually, now that you mention it, I'm not sure that we do. Somehow I thought we did, but I can't identify a source. After searching the web, it appears that the prints are supposed to be purged from the FBI database when a suspect is cleared. However, there seem to be some cases (such as a suspected gang member) where these prints will linger for 5 years past becoming "inactive".
Number of surgeries is not a qualifier in of itself.
No, but it can be one of several very important factors. Probably if one doctor has performed a particular surgical procedure 100 times this year while another has performed it 200 times on patients in similar circumstances and with similar support staff & equipment, the difference doesn't matter much. But, if one has performed the procedure only five times in the past year while the other has performed it 100 times, the difference is significant. Obviously this applies only if both the doctors are of similar intellectual capacity and both care about what they are doing.
I find that age and length of career has no correlation to the quality of work coming from techies.
My experience is quite different than yours (albeit, I've spent most of my life at startup companies where we could usually pick and choose developers carefully, so we may have very different experiences).
If you are comparing the best-of-the-best from both the "more experienced" and the "less experienced" techie groups, it's been my experience that the "experienced" developers are much more effective at some things - such as tracking down very difficult to diagnose concurrency problems, complex architecture, designing for RAS issues, and prioritizing customer needs against development principles. On the other hand, I find the less experienced developers are more inclined to learn the details of the latest language, tool, interface, or whatever (the more experienced developers seem to be a little less interested in learning every detail of YAD [Yet Another Debugger] unless there is something really unique about it). Also, as techies gain more experienced (aka "older"), they sometimes pick up more family obligations which result in them being less willing/able to work the seventh day of the week or the 15th hour of the day - to the extent that their experience doesn't compensate for this tendency, the more experienced developers lose out.
Well, no, I don't trust the government with DNA of non-convicted people - any more than I trust them with a lot of stuff (like what firearms, if any, that I own)! I just wish people worried about this stuff more before we had slid so far down the slippery slope. I believe both the DNA and the data extracted from the DNA collected from a suspect should be kept only until the suspect is cleared (admittedly, if the police believe the suspect to be guilty but can't find enough evidence, the suspect might never really be cleared because the case remains open for a very long time). Even if the suspect is not cleared (but not convicted either), the data should probably be purged from any central databases after some fixed time (perhaps a couple of years) except under an explicit court order for each individual case.
You are correct that DNA can tell vastly more about a person than a fingerprint can. However, don't the criminal DNA databases record VERY little of this (less than 20 core loci? but I really don't know nothing about this part of it)? Such limited data seems likely to be of little use to insurance companies or anyone else except for matching two samples with a fairly high degree of reliability. Of course, the police will probably keep the original sample somewhere (and, presumably, preserve it) so the government could go back in the future and extract the additional information without having to re-apprehend the person - but we could prohibit extracting and recording of data beyond what is useful to law enforcement to associate or disassociate an individual from a sample found at a crime scene.
Actually, it is the ease of planting DNA and even the ease of it being transported unwittingly that I suspect may eventually make DNA less acceptable to jurors. It's much harder to plant a fingerprint than to plant a few hairs from someone.
(I can only imagine what NRA types would have said if this had happened under Clinton!)
Actually, I suspect that a lot of "NRA types" (since you use the term "types" rather than "members", it's impossible to identify what group you speak of) are very much against this - regardless of who is POTUS. In my unscientific sample group, there is something of a libertarian bent among many active NRA members - esp. those who are not also from a law enforcement background.
So, which is it? A harmless but essential means to defend America against the terrorist hordes, or the beginning of the black helicopter putsch to introduce a Liberal secret police rounding up meat eaters and shooting in the streets anyone who goes to church?
Neither. But it is a continuing trend of incursion on the freedoms of residents of the United States and it's likely to be accepted since we've been sliding (apparently quite willingly in most people's eyes) down the slippery slope of more central control for years - sometimes because "it's for the children" or because "it takes a village".
From a logical standpoint, this DNA initiative is really no different than keeping the fingerprints of those who are detained but not convicted and I've heard little outcry about this. Back in the dark ages, the local police would keep the prints of those they ran across but there was limited coordination across local police departments - this seemed fine to many (after all, if your fingerprints were on file in Oakland California and you were picked up in Dallas Texas, the odds of your Oakland prints being accessed by the police in Dallas would have been very close to 0%). Then, there was increased consolidation of prints and records at State and Federal levels - this seemed fine to many (after all, only in the most extraordinary cases, such as perhaps the assassination of a POTUS, would anyone actually dig through all those prints to match the ones found at a crime scene). Then, the prints got scanned and a program was developed to electronically match prints - this seemed fine to many (after all, "pre deployment" use of this program identified the Night Stalker [Richard Rameriz] in California back in 1985 and led to his conviction and that was the best of all possible worlds).
Frogs, welcome to our warm water spa... [yes, I know the frog/boiling water thing is a myth].
They might say "Ah, but we still have a democratic means to express our opposition to this measure", but (a) anyone can see there's no such thing, and (b) Bush IS a Republican, ferchrisakes!
I don't understand the claim we don't have a democratic means to express our opposition to this measure. Call, fax, and write your congresscritters. In 2006 and 2008 and 2010 vote a straight Libertarian ticket. That's how the process works - hopefully enough of the frogs notice the spa is getting a bit too hot before they find themselves terminally overheated.
The primary goal of a rewrite of a major product should normally be to make the product more extensible (i.e., reduce the cost of adding features and increase the reliability of those features) in the future - not necessarily to substantially improve the product in the first "rewrite" release. The benefits come in the next decade worth of releases.
Unfortunately, it seems most rewrite attempts fail. By their nature, rewrites of major products are very expensive. This makes them difficult to sell to senior executive management (as it should) because the see a high risk, high duration, high cost project with a seemingly long ROI period -- while customers are screaming that they need this or that new widget in the existing product ASAP.
The response to this need to sell the product is often to pile on every new "gee whiz" feature to make the rewrite sexier. Unfortunately, this of course increases cost, risk, and duration - and a vicious cycle begins. At best, the project is funded, but most of the best "in the trenches" engineers end up working on the next release of the "old" product -- either because they are cynical about the success of the rewrite or because they are essential to the features already promised to the customers in the "old" product line. Usually, the project (now bloated to the point if it were pig, it could "fly" in much the same way a balloon can fly if you poke a hole in it) is never funded beyond the investigative stage.
When such a rewrite project actually gets funded, too often it is initially staffed by a team of mostly idealistic engineers (or worse, pseudo-academics) either drawn from internal ranks or hired from outside. These people usually don't really understand what it takes to take care production systems in the field. They also are usually mostly unaware of rationale behind seemingly obscene hacks that have been made in the existing product due to very specific customer requirements over the years.
It seems major product rewrites are most likely to work if everyone understands that the project is a success if it pretty much replicates existing functionality (or equivalent functionality where the current product's functionality is, itself, a hack) and only adds features that have been on the "we know how to do that but it's SO hard to do in the existing system" list for several years -- leave out all the "oh, did you read that neat paper on zzz, I wonder how we could use that" features. Also, the project team should include the best architects and engineers from the existing product AND a sufficient mix of new blood from outside (either from outside the company or from other product lines within the company) to challenge the team and to bring in fresh perspectives.
1) A weapon used is a useless weapon. If you have to use a weapon, it obvously is not a strong enough deterrent to a war.
If your enemy is eliminated by the weapon, the enemy is no longer a threat -- a weapon that accomplishes that in the small or the large is certainly not "useless".
While a terrorist group isn't a major strategic threat outside of their home environment, there are still rogue nations, most of which are within grasp of the power to knock out our GPS satellites one way or another.
Once you knock out our eyes, then conventional warfare makes us no better suited than the 1950s (simple jammable radio-based communication).
The key to being a super-power is a credible threat. A death-star, or a ready-to-string special forces that can take out any town over night.
We still have nukes (if nothing else, delivered by subs and planes) that can pretty much eliminate any adversary if we're willing to cause a lot of "collateral" damage. This seems pretty much like a death star.
I think even rouge nations understand that it would be stupid to eliminate our ability to use our precisely guided weapons as it would likely force us to use our bigger hammers.
Also, I HOPE that the military has a plan for insuring that the loss of GPS does not drive us to the big guns. Remember, the first gulf war seemed to use mostly laser guided stuff rather than GPS and it worked pretty well - sure, it required visual acquisition and the crew had to individually target each weapon rather than just drop them in the general area with a "Deliver to" address on them - but I'd guess that the hard part in a real all-out war is identifying targets to be targeted - not actually hitting them.
Yes, but why does it matter if it happens a billion years or 100,000 years (or even 10,000 years) in the future?
I can't really come up with a good reason for caring very much (I am of course quite concerned about it happening tomorrow because I already paid my car insurance for the next year and could have instead spent that money on some hedonistic pleasure today).
In all cases, the last few generations will likely suffer as they are unable to adapt to whatever is killing man off (although, if the demise is far in the future, perhaps more generations will suffer since the demise might be more gradual).
If I were religious, wouldn't I likely believe that our physical life and presence on Earth is fairly insignificant (and, it seems, some religions anticipate and prepare for a cataclysmic "mankind ending" event in the fairly near future).
If I weren't religious, wouldn't I assume there were hundreds, thousands, millions, or maybe billions of chunks of matter in the universe that contain something meeting our definition of sentient life and, given no additional information, that many are more advanced than us and many are less advanced than us. In this case, again, man's existence seems rather insignificant.
(Come to think of it, that danged bug I've been trying to figure out seems rather insignificant - hope the customer sees it the same way...)
When a project is in that much in trouble, the root problem is nearly always a management problem (at a minimum, management should have long ago fixed technical issues w/staffing and/or direction).
Thus, just "working harder" or "working smarter" isn't a very effective way to solve the problem (management should have long ago dismissed or reeducated anyone was not working as hard or as smart as they could before).
Clearly a festering problem like this requires massive management changes. Even if existing upper managers were smart enough to solve the problem, clearly they were not smart enough to figure out it should be solved. Unfortunately, this reorg looks way too much like shuffling the deck chairs. Me thinks it's time for the board to look very closely at Monkeyboy.
When I said Democrat, I meant just that - the party. Your list seems to mostly reflect what Progressives stand for.
In 2004, John Kerry didn't stand tall for very many (if any) of the things in your list and the Democrats put him on the ballot anyway. Unfortunately for the Democrats, Kerry really didn't stand tall on any position except "Bush is bad" - instead, he mouthed mushy positions on most everything in an attempt to court the moderates and seemed weak and indecisive as a result. This suggests that progressives haven't even convinced mainstream Democrats yet. While I can understand the general Democrat population bashing Bush, why are progressives wasting time bashing Bush? I would think the progressive wing of the Democratic party would instead be devoting their energy to swaying the other members of their own party by building detailed plans, developing economic models reflecting those plans, building cogent arguments for these plans, and documenting examples of where similar policies have been implemented (for example, France and Germany have much more "progressive" polices than the US and are very close to matching your list), and trumpeting the end result of these policies (fortunately, your list does not include free speech so France and Germany remain fairly good models except for your religion bullet point).
With respect to the "Wars fought in defense only, and ONLY as a last resort" point, President Clinton engaged the US military in Kosovo in an action that clearly didn't have ANYTHING to do with defense of the United States (nor was the response the last resort) - yet Kerry appears to have supported that action. Indeed, I've heard little outcry from Democrats about this. Again, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party should probably be devoting energy to changing the mind of other Democratic Party members rather than wasting time Bush bashing.
"An end to exhorbitant [sic] tax cuts for the already-insanely rich" is really a tax increase and it should be called that. A desire to increase taxes is a perfectly acceptable political stance - but to try to hide it behind "rolling back Bush's tax cuts" as the Democrats did in the last election is, at best, a mushy message. Why not "roll back Kennedy's tax cuts" instead? To demand rollback of just Bush's tax cuts suggests that somehow on January 20, 2000 we had just the right tax structure and it's the ideal structure to return to even in 2004 or 2006 or 2008 in spite of a very different economy. In reality, this ploy is a double failure - trying to bash Bush and be mushy about an important keystone of the entire progressive platform all in one phrase is ineffective.
I don't recall Kerry calling for universal health care but instead for something like a vaguely stated goal of improving health care for those who couldn't afford it. Again, Kerry seemed to be unwilling to take a crisp stand on this issue (perhaps, because he knew it would cost him the election). [Unfortunately, the computer I stored Kerry's campaign position papers on is powered off and a few hundred miles from me at the moment (and I can't find them on JohnKerry.org anymore) so I'm working from possibly imperfect recollection here].
There was a hot current topic WRT "separation of church and government interests" during the 2004 election, yet I never saw Kerry take the opportunity to call for the removal of "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance. Again, maybe I missed it, but I think I would have heard of it had he chosen to stand tall for separation.
You speak of compromise as being something that is necessarily good and give (faint) praise for Democrats being willing to do so. Yes, of course, the Democrats are willing to compromise now since they have no power in Washington - but they avoid it if they can (look at Supreme Court nominees and compare how Republicans voted on Ginsburg's confirmation to how Democrats vote on the next two SCOTUS candidates - I predict that even Roberts, who everyone ag
I'm referring to RED LIGHT cameras in the US (it appears you are referring to speed monitoring cameras?). These are at intersections. Here, they take a picture of both the FRONT and the BACK so the flash is directly in the eyes of motorists and the flash is quite intense at night (it is, of course, short). It is true that people are usually moving slowly (starting/stopping) when they go off (although, once or twice I have seen them fire when there was no reason for it - presumably some sort of malfunction - so people were driving at a fairly high speed when it went off).
Anyway, if a "tiny" accident involves a truck and a toddler on foot who gets loose from its parent while waiting for a light, "tiny" doesn't mean "inconsequential".
In the US, all it takes is a wayward jury - look at the recent Vioxx case where the patient died of a type of heart problem that is not associated with Vioxx and where on member of the jury said something like "we couldn't understand all that scientific stuff". The award may be reduced, but odds are that a substantial award will be upheld.
In the UK wouldn't that be "keep left, pass right"? Having never driven in the UK I don't recall (I'm too busy trying remembering to look the other way before crossing the street on foot!).
But yes - if people in the US would learn to follow the rules, it would help so much. Maybe every US driver should have to drive in Italy or Germany for at least one week in order to renew their license in the US after their first one expires. Once you see "keep right, pass left" in action, you see how well it works.
The first time I drove in Europe (Italy) many years ago, it was quite a shock to see the headlights of a big Mercedes getting bigger really, really quickly until I could only see the tops of them over my trunk. My second thought (I won't share my first thought) was "I'm going over 90 mph [sorry, wasn't thinking in km], the right lane has big trucks trundling along at 50 mph - why shouldn't I drive in the left lane even if this guy in the Mercedes wants to go 110 mph?". However, since I figured the court proceedings would probably be in Italian which was somewhere beyond my tourist grasp, I pulled over. Then I watched and realized how it really worked. Most notable, it seemed to be acceptable to pull over to PASS even if it meant some high speed driver might have to slow down a little (as long as he had plenty of room to do so) but you'd better get your slow butt over in the right ASAP. I figured "When in Rome..." and had no more problems carefully following the rule - although, admittedly, it probably doesn't work as well on congested highways of more than two lanes.
Now, if Italians would have only obeyed stop signs outside of the major cities...
Off topic, but I'm waiting for the first lawsuit where the flash of a speed camera distracted a law abiding driver momentarily which results in a fatal accident. Somehow, I think the general public's dislike for the cameras might not make the city attorney's defense job any easier when the jury retires to deliberate.
But perhaps many of the evolutionary reasons for uglies not breeding are gone.
Before medical science had advanced, one had to make a judgement about the capability of their breeding partners (do they have leprosy, are they defective, etc) and a simple way to do this was to wire our brains (along with some cultural conditioning) with an "ideal" look - and making any deviation from this undesirable (even if the deviation didn't affect the odds of healthy offspring) decreased the odds of breeding with a damaged mate.
Now, we are better able to determine if an individual is a medically suitable partner. We should care more about brains since a smart unattractive person will probably do better in life than an attractive dumb one.
Of course, none of this matters because the firmware in our brains is hard to flash...
(Actually, breeding uglies are probably much less dangerous to our gene pool than all the people we "save" with medical care - but I doubt that most people will refuse medical care in order to improve the gene pool, so why shouldn't uglies breed?)
The fact is that a self respecting population would have Bush so far behind in popularity that a win by him would immediately be declared bogus.
Slashdot might not like this but the only thing Bush had in his favor was a clear anti gay position. Most Americans have similar views but are afraid to express them publicly.
Huh? The problem was not Bush, it was that for some reason the Democratic party couldn't field a viable candidate (any moderate who seemed to have leadership qualities -- such as being able to make up their mind -- probably would have worked). This is amazing given what an easy win the election should have been for the Democrats. Hopefully the Democrats learned something from the humiliating loss in 2004. Sadly, I'm afraid they didn't because the main agenda of many Democratic party members still seems to be "Bush bashing" (even to the extent of wasting time Photoshopping childish cartoons and caricatures) rather than formulating constructive concrete proposals.
My personal opinion is that ex-governors are more compelling presidential candidates than Senators because governors actually have experience with taking responsibility for making decisions - Senators just take 1% of the responsibility.
I would be willing to bet out of a thousand people on the street if they were asked to provide 10 guesses how to exit emacs, and they had never used it before, NONE of the 10 guesses from the thousand people would be CTL-X CTL-C.
True - but none of these people would have guessed how to start it either so it's not a problem.
Seriously, I have the same problem with vi (which I only use when forced to because emacs isn't installed) and I can't remember how to get into command mode and then save a file. My answer is usually to ask someone who knows vi to do the editing. Of course, then I get frustrated when I ask them to do simple things like chop out a rectangular section and they stare at me blankly - I assume there's a way to do this but just that most vi users don't know how.
Also, FF is much more likely to be used by technically savvy people whereas IE is also used by vast numbers of people who are not technically oriented.
Technically savvy people are more likely to update their software (although with SP2, automatic Windows Update seems pretty hard for the naive user to avoid, so this may in fact turn around as untrusting geeks turn it off and trusting J.Q.Public accepts the default) with recent security updates. Technically savvy people are more likely to understand what is "safe" and what is "unsafe" and hence are self-protecting.
Given these factors, a browser deployed disproportionally to geeks will have less observed problems than those deployed disproportionally to J.Q.Public even if the "geek's" browser actually has as many or more security problems as the others.
My point is not that we can or should prevent climate change; my point is that we should do our best to make sure we are not the cause of the climate change.
This principle seems to have a couple of implications.
First... Suppose the climate was naturally changing in a way (such as towards a deep and extended ice age) that would drive many species (say, all mammalian species) into extinction. Even if we we knew how to reverse the change and "save" (at least for the moment) all of these species (including ours), your principle would disallow this. Note that this principle doesn't co-exist well with any argument that the reason not to cause climate change is to protect current species - since, by definition, this principle places a lower value on the survival of the current species than on "thou shalt not change the climate".
Second... It is impossible for man (or tigers, or elephants, or volcanoes, or ants, or termites) not to change the climate in some way (assuming, of course, that greenhouse gases are one source of climate change). How do we resolve this? I suppose we could kill off all the tigers, elephants, ants, and termites - but frankly I'm not too sure what to do with the volcanoes - I don't think we can plug them all with some "super concrete". If mankind intentionally killed themselves off (perhaps via Kool-Aid from Jonestown?), that would eliminate additional impact by man on the climate -- but if man had never evolved to the point of being able to make tools, harness energy sources and the like, he would have still had some impact on the climate so eliminating modern man (rather than reverting them back to some prior state that is sufficiently primitive to accept) would also remove that effect.
I think the absolute principle that we do our best to not affect the climate is not a very useful position (since, we know exactly how to do that - kill ourselves and I've not heard a groundswell of support for this - although, perhaps, if those who believe in this absolute principle should lead the way and maybe the rest will realize what a good idea it is and follow suit.)
Rather, the discussion seems better directed to determining the extent to which particular actions we take affect the climate and the extent of discomfort, cost, risk, or lack of advancement we are willing to accept to reduce climate change to some limit. For example, under their interstate commerce powers, the Feds could presumably effectively eliminate most global warming arising from power generation in the U.S. by banning power transmission across state lines unless that power was generated by climate-friendly methods (such as nuclear, wind, solar) and ban power imports or exports to/from any state which allowed any limits or prohibitions on building and operating nuclear power plants as long as these plants met Federal regulations (i.e., no NIMY rules at the state or local levels - if someone owns a plot of land, they can build a nuclear plant on it).
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Prior to my exposure to European driving, I was usually rightfully in the left lane here in the States - this was back when we had the 55 MPH speed limit and, on the open road, I certainly wasn't going to go below 75 MPH - so since even at 75 MPH I had to keep 50% of my attention devoted to looking for airplanes, CHP on on-ramps, CHP making U-Turns on Highway 5 behind me and the like - I usually drove at least 90 - 95 MPH in good weather in daylight hours (it also kept me alert - checking every car behind you who seems to not be falling behind your, every car on every on-ramp, every car going the other way for a shotgun sticking up kept me on my toes [warning: the "shotgun sticking up" thing no longer works in California - in many cases they seem to have hidden them]). However, I was always very polite and wouldn't harass someone who was driving at 65 MPH in the left lane but would instead carefully pass them on the right when the safe opportunity presented itself - sometimes ten minutes later. After we finally dropped the stupid 55 MPH limit, I also dropped my speed substantially (if I can go 75 MPH w/o fear of tickets, why spend all the extra energy on "ticket avoidance" just to get 15 or 20 MPH more?).
Since we (still) have low speed limits in the US, I am fairly willing to "keep left" when driving at 85 MPH on Hwy 5 in California even though some guy wants to drive at 100 MPH or 110 MPH. In this case, I actually am glad to move right if the gap between trucks is sufficient that I can never downshift or hit my brakes while letting the 100MPH guy continue past me and return to the left lane. Actually, I'm really glad to do this - I call these guys "CHP Squeegees" and love them.
It seems (almost?) all local building codes accept stick built homes using usual pine/fir 2x4s for most framing members. Other (even steel studs) materials seem less universally accepted. Is my perception correct and is this an issue for Habitat?
(Personally, if I ever build myself a home in a place with termites - there will be no wood framing in it if I can avoid it! Munch, munch, munch...)
Hmm... True, there's not much assembly being used nowadays. The only place I can think of that might still do a LOT of assembly are mass produced consumer devices where they can save 15 cents per unit if all the code can fit in a 16k (which strikes me as a pretty boring job - but each to their own).
However, in every "server class" (database servers mostly) development shop I've worked, there are a few of us around who are comfortable digging through at the assembly level (to varying degrees on different machines of course - I know IA-32 best, and PPC, Sparc, IA-64 less well). This is usually useful when a debugger can't figure out a stack, or the the compiler generated bad (or surprising code), when hardware doesn't work correctly (rare - usually because of a documented errata by the chip vendor but where the OS didn't implement a workaround), or due to an OS bug (more frequent than one would guess), or when one needs to do something like implement a latch (usually about 10 instructions at most) because the vendor has not provided a sufficiently performant one (I don't think any real OSs fail to provide the necessary primitives now so this probably isn't needed anymore).
As far as how to get a job in this type of environment - I have no idea, aren't all jobs in this environment?
Seriously, it seems to be something developers get into very early in their career and continuously migrate towards because they are intrigued enough by solving nasty problems that they keep driving down until they find the problem - at 3 in the morning (with luck, the first morning after the afternoon they hit the problem!). It's probably really hard to shift into such a job area w/o experience in it (and, to a lesser degree, without a BSc or better) - of course one way to get experience is to work deep in the Linux kernel - and if you can get something accepted into the code base, that would give a lot of credentials on the resume!
Processors are still made up of logica gates and I don't recall there being an ADD logic gate (but I'm not an EE)
I don't recall much about the 4004 anymore, but I'm pretty sure it was not microcoded and that it almost certainly had a hardware adder (it was only a 4 bit adder, so it doesn't take all that many gates to implement) but I have no idea what type (maybe some sort of ripple adder???) and have forgotten most of my logic design course.
I see where you're coming from. However, I compare today's rank and file Java programmer with the 70's rank and file COBOL programmer - both are/were pretty clueless about what happens inside the beast yet technology continued to progress after 1975 (much more slowly than I expected though).
Really, not everyone needs to know about memory coherence on SMPs, register renaming, what all the bits in IEEE FP formats are for and and what that implies, yada, yada, yada. The good news is that some geeks will continue to learn this stuff and get to work only on the "hard" (aka, "interesting") problems and get paid well for it. The need for this knowledge is now less widespread than it once was (as debuggers got better and languages more abstract) so it's more of a speciality now.
When I mention that microprocessors only do three things (incriment,decriment and compare)
A bit too narrow - surely you would consider the 4004 to be a microprocesser (it certainly is in common usage) and even it could add/subtract IIRC.
(What amazes me is how few "kids" today - those under 30 - have a clue how their cars work and could even identify the main components of their car engine if someone handed them all the disassembled parts in a box! That knowledge seemed to be something most everyone I know learned somewhere during grade school/junior high school and now seems to be a mystery to most -- but I'm not too worried about engine technology growth stopping.)
When I began programing on commodore machines many years ago
Hmm... So you were programming before you were born - or was a commodore out of someone's attic was all you could afford? :)
Sounds like we need a common definition of:
WRT the food products, the government doesn't force you to eat any of these - there are readily available alternatives in all cases. I do disagree with government subsidies however (just as I object to all direct or indirect confiscation of citizens' resources [a.k.a. taxation] by the Federal government to perform tasks not assigned or allowed to them by the Constitution - including education, medicare, social security...).
But I also think the government could easily end meth use if they really wanted to. I think they allow it to exist because someone makes money off of it. Same with a lot of other kinds of crime (auto theft, illegal immigration, burgalary, etc.)
Do you have any support for this allegation of intent?
If you think the government (local? state? Federal?) could "easily" end meth (I assume you meant the use of meth since it would presumably be hard to eliminate atoms, or even the molecules, that are necessary to make meth), can you provide some hints on how? Obviously (as we saw earlier in this thread), attempting to constrain the supply of an easily available critical component of meth results in someone screaming about how his/her "constitutional rights" are being violated.
When a project development effort gets behind schedule or an important customer has serious problems, the developer who continues to work 5 days a week, 9 hours a day due to outside obligations just isn't as valuable as a similarly skilled and experienced one who puts in the extra time to address the customer problem and/or help deliver the release (with the essential functions intact and working properly) on time.
As a manager, I try to be as flexible as possible to accommodate developers' outside obligations. But, if a developer is routinely unable to respond to a customer crisis or figure out a way to adjust their personal schedule so they can work with other team members to resolve critical path problems in development, obviously at review time (and off-shoring time, and cost reduction time) this developer is remembered as one that I can't rely on as much.
In my experience, this is really rarely a problem since the best developers truly enjoy what they do and are engaged and want to do the best job they can and figure out how to juggle their personal and professional lives.
One needs to think both short and long term. The only ways I know of to meet all schedules every time without extra work is to either sandbag schedules or to refuse to commit to a schedule until a substantial percentage of the project's development budget has been expended on detailed design. Neither is efficient or practical.
Some jobs of course don't require additional effort beyond 5/8 - but the one time I worked at such a place (a major aerospace firm over 25 years ago when I was still in school), I was bored stiff and left for a more interesting job in a more dynamic environment - YMMV.
Actually, now that you mention it, I'm not sure that we do. Somehow I thought we did, but I can't identify a source. After searching the web, it appears that the prints are supposed to be purged from the FBI database when a suspect is cleared. However, there seem to be some cases (such as a suspected gang member) where these prints will linger for 5 years past becoming "inactive".
No, but it can be one of several very important factors. Probably if one doctor has performed a particular surgical procedure 100 times this year while another has performed it 200 times on patients in similar circumstances and with similar support staff & equipment, the difference doesn't matter much. But, if one has performed the procedure only five times in the past year while the other has performed it 100 times, the difference is significant. Obviously this applies only if both the doctors are of similar intellectual capacity and both care about what they are doing.
I find that age and length of career has no correlation to the quality of work coming from techies.
My experience is quite different than yours (albeit, I've spent most of my life at startup companies where we could usually pick and choose developers carefully, so we may have very different experiences).
If you are comparing the best-of-the-best from both the "more experienced" and the "less experienced" techie groups, it's been my experience that the "experienced" developers are much more effective at some things - such as tracking down very difficult to diagnose concurrency problems, complex architecture, designing for RAS issues, and prioritizing customer needs against development principles. On the other hand, I find the less experienced developers are more inclined to learn the details of the latest language, tool, interface, or whatever (the more experienced developers seem to be a little less interested in learning every detail of YAD [Yet Another Debugger] unless there is something really unique about it). Also, as techies gain more experienced (aka "older"), they sometimes pick up more family obligations which result in them being less willing/able to work the seventh day of the week or the 15th hour of the day - to the extent that their experience doesn't compensate for this tendency, the more experienced developers lose out.
You are correct that DNA can tell vastly more about a person than a fingerprint can. However, don't the criminal DNA databases record VERY little of this (less than 20 core loci? but I really don't know nothing about this part of it)? Such limited data seems likely to be of little use to insurance companies or anyone else except for matching two samples with a fairly high degree of reliability. Of course, the police will probably keep the original sample somewhere (and, presumably, preserve it) so the government could go back in the future and extract the additional information without having to re-apprehend the person - but we could prohibit extracting and recording of data beyond what is useful to law enforcement to associate or disassociate an individual from a sample found at a crime scene.
Actually, it is the ease of planting DNA and even the ease of it being transported unwittingly that I suspect may eventually make DNA less acceptable to jurors. It's much harder to plant a fingerprint than to plant a few hairs from someone.
Actually, I suspect that a lot of "NRA types" (since you use the term "types" rather than "members", it's impossible to identify what group you speak of) are very much against this - regardless of who is POTUS. In my unscientific sample group, there is something of a libertarian bent among many active NRA members - esp. those who are not also from a law enforcement background.
So, which is it? A harmless but essential means to defend America against the terrorist hordes, or the beginning of the black helicopter putsch to introduce a Liberal secret police rounding up meat eaters and shooting in the streets anyone who goes to church?
Neither. But it is a continuing trend of incursion on the freedoms of residents of the United States and it's likely to be accepted since we've been sliding (apparently quite willingly in most people's eyes) down the slippery slope of more central control for years - sometimes because "it's for the children" or because "it takes a village".
From a logical standpoint, this DNA initiative is really no different than keeping the fingerprints of those who are detained but not convicted and I've heard little outcry about this. Back in the dark ages, the local police would keep the prints of those they ran across but there was limited coordination across local police departments - this seemed fine to many (after all, if your fingerprints were on file in Oakland California and you were picked up in Dallas Texas, the odds of your Oakland prints being accessed by the police in Dallas would have been very close to 0%). Then, there was increased consolidation of prints and records at State and Federal levels - this seemed fine to many (after all, only in the most extraordinary cases, such as perhaps the assassination of a POTUS, would anyone actually dig through all those prints to match the ones found at a crime scene). Then, the prints got scanned and a program was developed to electronically match prints - this seemed fine to many (after all, "pre deployment" use of this program identified the Night Stalker [Richard Rameriz] in California back in 1985 and led to his conviction and that was the best of all possible worlds).
Frogs, welcome to our warm water spa... [yes, I know the frog/boiling water thing is a myth].
They might say "Ah, but we still have a democratic means to express our opposition to this measure", but (a) anyone can see there's no such thing, and (b) Bush IS a Republican, ferchrisakes!
I don't understand the claim we don't have a democratic means to express our opposition to this measure. Call, fax, and write your congresscritters. In 2006 and 2008 and 2010 vote a straight Libertarian ticket. That's how the process works - hopefully enough of the frogs notice the spa is getting a bit too hot before they find themselves terminally overheated.
Unfortunately, it seems most rewrite attempts fail. By their nature, rewrites of major products are very expensive. This makes them difficult to sell to senior executive management (as it should) because the see a high risk, high duration, high cost project with a seemingly long ROI period -- while customers are screaming that they need this or that new widget in the existing product ASAP.
The response to this need to sell the product is often to pile on every new "gee whiz" feature to make the rewrite sexier. Unfortunately, this of course increases cost, risk, and duration - and a vicious cycle begins. At best, the project is funded, but most of the best "in the trenches" engineers end up working on the next release of the "old" product -- either because they are cynical about the success of the rewrite or because they are essential to the features already promised to the customers in the "old" product line. Usually, the project (now bloated to the point if it were pig, it could "fly" in much the same way a balloon can fly if you poke a hole in it) is never funded beyond the investigative stage.
When such a rewrite project actually gets funded, too often it is initially staffed by a team of mostly idealistic engineers (or worse, pseudo-academics) either drawn from internal ranks or hired from outside. These people usually don't really understand what it takes to take care production systems in the field. They also are usually mostly unaware of rationale behind seemingly obscene hacks that have been made in the existing product due to very specific customer requirements over the years.
It seems major product rewrites are most likely to work if everyone understands that the project is a success if it pretty much replicates existing functionality (or equivalent functionality where the current product's functionality is, itself, a hack) and only adds features that have been on the "we know how to do that but it's SO hard to do in the existing system" list for several years -- leave out all the "oh, did you read that neat paper on zzz, I wonder how we could use that" features. Also, the project team should include the best architects and engineers from the existing product AND a sufficient mix of new blood from outside (either from outside the company or from other product lines within the company) to challenge the team and to bring in fresh perspectives.
Umm... didn't you miss a merger? Wouldn't Pacific Bell be SBC now? See, now there's real competition, SBC vs. Pacific Bell.. oh, wait... Never Mind.
If your enemy is eliminated by the weapon, the enemy is no longer a threat -- a weapon that accomplishes that in the small or the large is certainly not "useless".
While a terrorist group isn't a major strategic threat outside of their home environment, there are still rogue nations, most of which are within grasp of the power to knock out our GPS satellites one way or another.
Once you knock out our eyes, then conventional warfare makes us no better suited than the 1950s (simple jammable radio-based communication).
The key to being a super-power is a credible threat. A death-star, or a ready-to-string special forces that can take out any town over night.
We still have nukes (if nothing else, delivered by subs and planes) that can pretty much eliminate any adversary if we're willing to cause a lot of "collateral" damage. This seems pretty much like a death star.
I think even rouge nations understand that it would be stupid to eliminate our ability to use our precisely guided weapons as it would likely force us to use our bigger hammers.
Also, I HOPE that the military has a plan for insuring that the loss of GPS does not drive us to the big guns. Remember, the first gulf war seemed to use mostly laser guided stuff rather than GPS and it worked pretty well - sure, it required visual acquisition and the crew had to individually target each weapon rather than just drop them in the general area with a "Deliver to" address on them - but I'd guess that the hard part in a real all-out war is identifying targets to be targeted - not actually hitting them.
I can't really come up with a good reason for caring very much (I am of course quite concerned about it happening tomorrow because I already paid my car insurance for the next year and could have instead spent that money on some hedonistic pleasure today).
In all cases, the last few generations will likely suffer as they are unable to adapt to whatever is killing man off (although, if the demise is far in the future, perhaps more generations will suffer since the demise might be more gradual).
If I were religious, wouldn't I likely believe that our physical life and presence on Earth is fairly insignificant (and, it seems, some religions anticipate and prepare for a cataclysmic "mankind ending" event in the fairly near future).
If I weren't religious, wouldn't I assume there were hundreds, thousands, millions, or maybe billions of chunks of matter in the universe that contain something meeting our definition of sentient life and, given no additional information, that many are more advanced than us and many are less advanced than us. In this case, again, man's existence seems rather insignificant.
(Come to think of it, that danged bug I've been trying to figure out seems rather insignificant - hope the customer sees it the same way...)
Clearly a festering problem like this requires massive management changes. Even if existing upper managers were smart enough to solve the problem, clearly they were not smart enough to figure out it should be solved. Unfortunately, this reorg looks way too much like shuffling the deck chairs. Me thinks it's time for the board to look very closely at Monkeyboy.
In 2004, John Kerry didn't stand tall for very many (if any) of the things in your list and the Democrats put him on the ballot anyway. Unfortunately for the Democrats, Kerry really didn't stand tall on any position except "Bush is bad" - instead, he mouthed mushy positions on most everything in an attempt to court the moderates and seemed weak and indecisive as a result. This suggests that progressives haven't even convinced mainstream Democrats yet. While I can understand the general Democrat population bashing Bush, why are progressives wasting time bashing Bush? I would think the progressive wing of the Democratic party would instead be devoting their energy to swaying the other members of their own party by building detailed plans, developing economic models reflecting those plans, building cogent arguments for these plans, and documenting examples of where similar policies have been implemented (for example, France and Germany have much more "progressive" polices than the US and are very close to matching your list), and trumpeting the end result of these policies (fortunately, your list does not include free speech so France and Germany remain fairly good models except for your religion bullet point).
With respect to the "Wars fought in defense only, and ONLY as a last resort" point, President Clinton engaged the US military in Kosovo in an action that clearly didn't have ANYTHING to do with defense of the United States (nor was the response the last resort) - yet Kerry appears to have supported that action. Indeed, I've heard little outcry from Democrats about this. Again, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party should probably be devoting energy to changing the mind of other Democratic Party members rather than wasting time Bush bashing.
"An end to exhorbitant [sic] tax cuts for the already-insanely rich" is really a tax increase and it should be called that. A desire to increase taxes is a perfectly acceptable political stance - but to try to hide it behind "rolling back Bush's tax cuts" as the Democrats did in the last election is, at best, a mushy message. Why not "roll back Kennedy's tax cuts" instead? To demand rollback of just Bush's tax cuts suggests that somehow on January 20, 2000 we had just the right tax structure and it's the ideal structure to return to even in 2004 or 2006 or 2008 in spite of a very different economy. In reality, this ploy is a double failure - trying to bash Bush and be mushy about an important keystone of the entire progressive platform all in one phrase is ineffective.
I don't recall Kerry calling for universal health care but instead for something like a vaguely stated goal of improving health care for those who couldn't afford it. Again, Kerry seemed to be unwilling to take a crisp stand on this issue (perhaps, because he knew it would cost him the election). [Unfortunately, the computer I stored Kerry's campaign position papers on is powered off and a few hundred miles from me at the moment (and I can't find them on JohnKerry.org anymore) so I'm working from possibly imperfect recollection here].
There was a hot current topic WRT "separation of church and government interests" during the 2004 election, yet I never saw Kerry take the opportunity to call for the removal of "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance. Again, maybe I missed it, but I think I would have heard of it had he chosen to stand tall for separation.
You speak of compromise as being something that is necessarily good and give (faint) praise for Democrats being willing to do so. Yes, of course, the Democrats are willing to compromise now since they have no power in Washington - but they avoid it if they can (look at Supreme Court nominees and compare how Republicans voted on Ginsburg's confirmation to how Democrats vote on the next two SCOTUS candidates - I predict that even Roberts, who everyone ag
Anyway, if a "tiny" accident involves a truck and a toddler on foot who gets loose from its parent while waiting for a light, "tiny" doesn't mean "inconsequential".
In the US, all it takes is a wayward jury - look at the recent Vioxx case where the patient died of a type of heart problem that is not associated with Vioxx and where on member of the jury said something like "we couldn't understand all that scientific stuff". The award may be reduced, but odds are that a substantial award will be upheld.
But yes - if people in the US would learn to follow the rules, it would help so much. Maybe every US driver should have to drive in Italy or Germany for at least one week in order to renew their license in the US after their first one expires. Once you see "keep right, pass left" in action, you see how well it works.
The first time I drove in Europe (Italy) many years ago, it was quite a shock to see the headlights of a big Mercedes getting bigger really, really quickly until I could only see the tops of them over my trunk. My second thought (I won't share my first thought) was "I'm going over 90 mph [sorry, wasn't thinking in km], the right lane has big trucks trundling along at 50 mph - why shouldn't I drive in the left lane even if this guy in the Mercedes wants to go 110 mph?". However, since I figured the court proceedings would probably be in Italian which was somewhere beyond my tourist grasp, I pulled over. Then I watched and realized how it really worked. Most notable, it seemed to be acceptable to pull over to PASS even if it meant some high speed driver might have to slow down a little (as long as he had plenty of room to do so) but you'd better get your slow butt over in the right ASAP. I figured "When in Rome..." and had no more problems carefully following the rule - although, admittedly, it probably doesn't work as well on congested highways of more than two lanes.
Now, if Italians would have only obeyed stop signs outside of the major cities...
Off topic, but I'm waiting for the first lawsuit where the flash of a speed camera distracted a law abiding driver momentarily which results in a fatal accident. Somehow, I think the general public's dislike for the cameras might not make the city attorney's defense job any easier when the jury retires to deliberate.
Before medical science had advanced, one had to make a judgement about the capability of their breeding partners (do they have leprosy, are they defective, etc) and a simple way to do this was to wire our brains (along with some cultural conditioning) with an "ideal" look - and making any deviation from this undesirable (even if the deviation didn't affect the odds of healthy offspring) decreased the odds of breeding with a damaged mate.
Now, we are better able to determine if an individual is a medically suitable partner. We should care more about brains since a smart unattractive person will probably do better in life than an attractive dumb one.
Of course, none of this matters because the firmware in our brains is hard to flash...
(Actually, breeding uglies are probably much less dangerous to our gene pool than all the people we "save" with medical care - but I doubt that most people will refuse medical care in order to improve the gene pool, so why shouldn't uglies breed?)
Slashdot might not like this but the only thing Bush had in his favor was a clear anti gay position. Most Americans have similar views but are afraid to express them publicly.
Huh? The problem was not Bush, it was that for some reason the Democratic party couldn't field a viable candidate (any moderate who seemed to have leadership qualities -- such as being able to make up their mind -- probably would have worked). This is amazing given what an easy win the election should have been for the Democrats. Hopefully the Democrats learned something from the humiliating loss in 2004. Sadly, I'm afraid they didn't because the main agenda of many Democratic party members still seems to be "Bush bashing" (even to the extent of wasting time Photoshopping childish cartoons and caricatures) rather than formulating constructive concrete proposals.
My personal opinion is that ex-governors are more compelling presidential candidates than Senators because governors actually have experience with taking responsibility for making decisions - Senators just take 1% of the responsibility.
True - but none of these people would have guessed how to start it either so it's not a problem.
Seriously, I have the same problem with vi (which I only use when forced to because emacs isn't installed) and I can't remember how to get into command mode and then save a file. My answer is usually to ask someone who knows vi to do the editing. Of course, then I get frustrated when I ask them to do simple things like chop out a rectangular section and they stare at me blankly - I assume there's a way to do this but just that most vi users don't know how.
Technically savvy people are more likely to update their software (although with SP2, automatic Windows Update seems pretty hard for the naive user to avoid, so this may in fact turn around as untrusting geeks turn it off and trusting J.Q.Public accepts the default) with recent security updates. Technically savvy people are more likely to understand what is "safe" and what is "unsafe" and hence are self-protecting.
Given these factors, a browser deployed disproportionally to geeks will have less observed problems than those deployed disproportionally to J.Q.Public even if the "geek's" browser actually has as many or more security problems as the others.
This principle seems to have a couple of implications.
First... Suppose the climate was naturally changing in a way (such as towards a deep and extended ice age) that would drive many species (say, all mammalian species) into extinction. Even if we we knew how to reverse the change and "save" (at least for the moment) all of these species (including ours), your principle would disallow this. Note that this principle doesn't co-exist well with any argument that the reason not to cause climate change is to protect current species - since, by definition, this principle places a lower value on the survival of the current species than on "thou shalt not change the climate".
Second... It is impossible for man (or tigers, or elephants, or volcanoes, or ants, or termites) not to change the climate in some way (assuming, of course, that greenhouse gases are one source of climate change). How do we resolve this? I suppose we could kill off all the tigers, elephants, ants, and termites - but frankly I'm not too sure what to do with the volcanoes - I don't think we can plug them all with some "super concrete". If mankind intentionally killed themselves off (perhaps via Kool-Aid from Jonestown?), that would eliminate additional impact by man on the climate -- but if man had never evolved to the point of being able to make tools, harness energy sources and the like, he would have still had some impact on the climate so eliminating modern man (rather than reverting them back to some prior state that is sufficiently primitive to accept) would also remove that effect.
I think the absolute principle that we do our best to not affect the climate is not a very useful position (since, we know exactly how to do that - kill ourselves and I've not heard a groundswell of support for this - although, perhaps, if those who believe in this absolute principle should lead the way and maybe the rest will realize what a good idea it is and follow suit.)
Rather, the discussion seems better directed to determining the extent to which particular actions we take affect the climate and the extent of discomfort, cost, risk, or lack of advancement we are willing to accept to reduce climate change to some limit. For example, under their interstate commerce powers, the Feds could presumably effectively eliminate most global warming arising from power generation in the U.S. by banning power transmission across state lines unless that power was generated by climate-friendly methods (such as nuclear, wind, solar) and ban power imports or exports to/from any state which allowed any limits or prohibitions on building and operating nuclear power plants as long as these plants met Federal regulations (i.e., no NIMY rules at the state or local levels - if someone owns a plot of land, they can build a nuclear plant on it).