As a doctoral student, I very much resent the implication that PhD equals tool. The decision to pursue a post-baccalaureate degree is quite personal; equally so, the decision of which degree to pursue. Might I add that in my particular department, all doctoral students receive university support in the form of a fellowship which pays for tuition and (barely) living expenses. I can tell you as a fact that most of us do not come from anything remotely approximating a political or economic elite, and that none of us have any kind of vested interest in maintaining a scarcity of resources.
I can not claim to speak for every graduate student in every department in the country, but that has been my experience.
I would appreciate it if you would refrain from making nasty generalizations about post-secondary education. You refer to more people than you can possible hope to characterize with such broad strokes. Many of us have worked very hard, and with very good motives, in pursuit of our goals.
And conversely, when users of an application make polite and constructive remarks to a developer, the developer will ideally understand that, aside from concerns over his or her workload and responsibilities, criticism does not necessarily mean that anybody is implying that the application (or that the developer) sucks.
Much of that, I think, comes down to poor communication skills. Saying 'this and this sucks' is almost never useful, and from your perspective must be very annoying; you are, as you say, essentially a volunteer! Criticism should be polite and constructive. Users who find that something irritates them should, at the very least, suggest an alternative (e.g. 'I would find this application even more useful if I could configure which icons appear in the toolbar').
I don't know if it says more about me or about Slashdot that I took your comment seriously (and got seriously angry) until you stated explicitly that you were being sarcastic.
The current U.S. "national" drinking age is de facto only. Any state brazen enough to challenge this would be met, in theory, with a revocation of federal funding for interstate highways. I'll decline moral equivocation, but for this you have mostly to thank Mothers Against Drunk Driving.
Archaeology is/literally/ a subfield of anthropology. This isn't something that you can argue, this is the history of the discipline.
Historical Archaeology, which is what you are referring to, is a different field entirely, focusing on literate historical populations and employing different methods, publishing in different journals, etc.
FYI, archaeology is a subfield of anthropology. And text analysis, the sort of which would be necessary to sort through masses of Wikipedia entries (across languages or not), is nothing new (nor is it confined to anthropology -- not remotely). Slapping a new label on something doesn't make it novel, it makes it jargon, and jargon doesn't help anybody.
Also, FTA:
But in the anthropological sense, another name for a "simple collection of disconnected trivia" is "culture."
Is a load of crap. I'm not going to claim that there's a strong concensus on what precisely culture is --beyond, of course, that it's a term we have constructed to represent some odd human behavioral patterns-- but I don't know a single anthropologist who would agree with that statement. And I know a lot of anthropologists.
I think it's a pain when you see some cool feature or eyecandy or whatever appearing in the desktop environment you aren't using... but it isn't enough to make you totally switch your current desktop. And just when you do go and switch, your old environment will come out with some sweet feature and you're back to square one.
Let's say for argument's sake that Gnome and KDE are the only GUI choices for Linux and that they are (magically) totally merged tomorrow. Of course, by definition, the problem you outlined above is never going to occur -- there is only one environment. But that doesn't remotely imply that you're going to get twice as many cool features and eye candy. It doesn't even imply that you wouldn't get, overall, 1/16 the amount of cool features and eye candy. I don't have data to back this argument up, but it seems to me that the existence of competing (but fairly compatible) standards is one of the major forces driving innovation in Linux GUIs. How much have Gnome and KDE changed in the last few years? How about the Windows GUI? Just something to consider.
This may be the first time (myself included) that users will see the two OS's, side by side.
Not that LILO and GRUB have (easily) facilitated that for a while.
I don't know which possibility I find more disturbing: that Amazon would choose to enforce this idiocy, or that the move was made in the interest of preventing somebody else from doing so.
Slashdot Mirror
As a doctoral student, I very much resent the implication that PhD equals tool. The decision to pursue a post-baccalaureate degree is quite personal; equally so, the decision of which degree to pursue. Might I add that in my particular department, all doctoral students receive university support in the form of a fellowship which pays for tuition and (barely) living expenses. I can tell you as a fact that most of us do not come from anything remotely approximating a political or economic elite, and that none of us have any kind of vested interest in maintaining a scarcity of resources.
I can not claim to speak for every graduate student in every department in the country, but that has been my experience. I would appreciate it if you would refrain from making nasty generalizations about post-secondary education. You refer to more people than you can possible hope to characterize with such broad strokes. Many of us have worked very hard, and with very good motives, in pursuit of our goals.
And conversely, when users of an application make polite and constructive remarks to a developer, the developer will ideally understand that, aside from concerns over his or her workload and responsibilities, criticism does not necessarily mean that anybody is implying that the application (or that the developer) sucks.
Much of that, I think, comes down to poor communication skills. Saying 'this and this sucks' is almost never useful, and from your perspective must be very annoying; you are, as you say, essentially a volunteer! Criticism should be polite and constructive. Users who find that something irritates them should, at the very least, suggest an alternative (e.g. 'I would find this application even more useful if I could configure which icons appear in the toolbar').
I don't know if it says more about me or about Slashdot that I took your comment seriously (and got seriously angry) until you stated explicitly that you were being sarcastic.
Far from sources of pollution and far from pollution are not equivalent statements.
And no matter how mathematically or computationally complex, much boils down to the quality of data and set of assumptions employed in the model.
Yes. I believe that the correct term here would be 'race'.
Or by trying out another of the many excellent, freely-available distros.
Actually, that would be Senegalese chimps in Iran.
Howard Stern /and/ Oprah?
I fucking quit.
The current U.S. "national" drinking age is de facto only. Any state brazen enough to challenge this would be met, in theory, with a revocation of federal funding for interstate highways. I'll decline moral equivocation, but for this you have mostly to thank Mothers Against Drunk Driving.
Archaeology is /literally/ a subfield of anthropology. This isn't something that you can argue, this is the history of the discipline.
Historical Archaeology, which is what you are referring to, is a different field entirely, focusing on literate historical populations and employing different methods, publishing in different journals, etc.
FYI, archaeology is a subfield of anthropology. And text analysis, the sort of which would be necessary to sort through masses of Wikipedia entries (across languages or not), is nothing new (nor is it confined to anthropology -- not remotely). Slapping a new label on something doesn't make it novel, it makes it jargon, and jargon doesn't help anybody.
Also, FTA:
Is a load of crap. I'm not going to claim that there's a strong concensus on what precisely culture is --beyond, of course, that it's a term we have constructed to represent some odd human behavioral patterns-- but I don't know a single anthropologist who would agree with that statement. And I know a lot of anthropologists.
http://www.prangstgrup.com/startupsound/
This may be the first time (myself included) that users will see the two OS's, side by side. Not that LILO and GRUB have (easily) facilitated that for a while.
VVii. Viiv. iivv...
I'm very good at doing nothing. May I please have my paycheck now?
Society for Creative Obfuscation, anyone?
I wonder when they'll getting around to fixing that pesky security flaw in users which causes them compulsively to click on things.
I don't know which possibility I find more disturbing: that Amazon would choose to enforce this idiocy, or that the move was made in the interest of preventing somebody else from doing so.
It's Moya.