This is not, I think, an accurate recollection of events, or at least not a complete one.
The actual sequence of events seems relatively accurate, however I think the more important fact here is that studies after the fact showed that a full statewide recount would've been decided in Gore's favor (there was an issue about the overvotes that never got counted, all the disputes dealt with undervotes ). So what it looks like really happened is that the Gore team made tactical errors in cherry-picking their recount requests (there was some reason for it that I forget at the moment, I think having something to do with filing requirements).
Now, this is all an unpleasant trip down memory lane that none of us wants to really revisit, but I walk away with the clear impression, between the butterfly ballots, the staged Dade County riot (remember that one? ) disenfranchised non-felon felons, etc, etc that the majority of people in Florida went to the polls in 2000 intending to vote for Gore. I believe this was sustained by subsequent studies. I suppose the relevance in the context of the current slashdot article is that there's lots of ways to steal an election, as with many other things, technology just makes it more efficient (e.g. the career of L.B.J)
This could of course be a longer post, I don't think anyone's got the appetite for that. There's a fair amount of evidence, BTW, that e-voting threw Ohio to Bush in '04 for example, here
Personally the day the Supreme Court decision came down in 2000 was the day I stopped believing that I live in a democracy. I know this might strike some as tinfoil hat country, I think I'm a reasonable guy and there's a fair amount of evidence to support this conclusion.
Read through the article, sounds like a nice tool. I agree with the author's assertion about the lack of architecture in most development efforts.
That being said...
I've seen a fair number of high-power tools offerred that do everything from soup to nuts, UML, Code generation, integrated testing, etc, etc, etc. It's been my sense that to fully leverage these tools you kind of have to buy in all the way, you can use their architect tools, but you need to put a fair amount of effort into learning the tool, and then you're not developing in C# or whatever, but in the tool. You're then also locked into the constraints imposed by the tool.
Every sophisticated tool I mess with these days seems like it has this issue, and I guess it's structural- you have a simple core surrounded by proprietary extensions that in theory offer a lot of power and in practice require a huge buy in of time to leverage the extensions. For example, most java application servers have all kinds of built-in goodies (e.g. Jboss) but whenever I've worked with them I've seen almost no use of the proprietary stuff. Same for web frameworks, most projects I've seen don't leverage the frameworks nearly as well as they could. This indicates to me that the learning curve is too high and that in practice it's not realistic to expect that people can master and fully utilize proprietary tools in addition to languages, patterns, and other necassary knowledge.
To be fair, I don't work in the Microsoft universe, and it may be a bit more realistic to expect tool buy-in in a world where there's one major tool vendor.
These are all great suggestions. I've worked for a pretty wide variety of places over the last few years, and often even the most basic stuff is left hanging (I once walked into a project with 10 developers and no version control). In an environment like that, even instituting VC is a real victory.
Brain Book- I love your idea of a "brain book". I've never seen such a thing, always wanted one. In just about every place I've worked this is knowledge one accumulates through attrition and then lives forever on crumpled sticky notes and "that email from last month I know is here from Fred".
Code review-great, only seen in one place.
I'd add one extra idea to this- At a small shop I worked in we began a series of weekly self-education meetings - each week a rotating member of the group would pick some development subject (any subject of their choosing) and talk about it for about 30 minutes. This gave everyone a bit of a way to stay on top of things but also got people to buy into the idea of continuous improvement for themselves.
It may be my bad luck in the last few years, but a fair majority of the folks I've worked with have been terrible coders. And from others I've talked to, it seems, at least anecdotally, that incompetance is common, that many shops operate without basic standards or even basic source code control, that it's rare for people writing code to have a full understanding of the systems they're working on or the ramifications of the systems they build.
Really, I don't consider myself great at this, but I've worked with so many who really have little knowledge beyond syntax and how to accomplish basic tasks. The most lacking is usually any sense of structure. Maybe there just aren't enough people around who are good at this.
I think we can even talk about this without questions of ego. There's just such a higher demand for this sort of work than there was 20 years ago, and I think most people would agree that almost anyone can do it (sort of) and that it takes an aptitude (an aptitude that at the very least is not universal) to do it well. Under those circumstances there's just bound to be lots of stuff that doesn't quite work.
I'd like to see a slashdot poll- "Of your co-workers in the last few years, what percentage would you consider competent?". Follow up poll could be "How competent do you think you are?"
I've also used both, and agree with you with a few caveats.
-I haven't had crash issues, everything's pretty much worked as advertised.
-I'd read that the biggest issues) for me with MySQL, the limitations in using subqueries, were in the process of being fixed. That'd make the 2 basically equivalent for me, at least in functional terms (coming from a developer's perspective here, not a DBA)
I'd like to see benchmarks, but other than that both systems are fabulous, I really appreciate the work that's gone into them. And they're much easier to work with than oracle (where you often get the impression that they intentionally obfuscate things to justify the cost).
I've just finished a (small) project, part of which involved some services deployed on jBoss. Part of the development involved figuring out whether to use the built-in jboss MBean and Interceptor architecture. Initially I wanted to use as much of the built-in stuff as possibly, partly because it's silly to write things twice and partly becuase I wanted to learn more about JBoss.
My personal experience, FWIW, is that taking advantage of the JBoss-specific architecture has its downsides:
-you lock yourself into jboss (not a horrible thing, really, how often do you want to change the appserver of a running application, but annoying)
-some of the implementations appear to be version dependant, e.g. your jboss-specific components might break when you upgrade
-there's are undocumented hurdles-e.g. I spent hours trying to figure out why my mbeans were refusing to load, eventually googled a mail message to learn that it relies on an (undocumented, as far as I can tell) naming convention.
In the end we just did POJO with MBean access to some basic parameters. But there's definately an (unfriendly) learning curve.
At it's best, absoloutely, in the sense that it can exercise your creativity and imagination to the utmost. Anyone who's really put in the time can attest to the joy of those deep aha moments. This is no different than the "art" in abstract math or other purely intellectual disciplines, although the future use (or lack thereof ) of your beautiful creation is often a letdown.
I had a (physics) professor once who was trying to give me advice when I was, in college, moving from physics to music, who told me that he'd faced a similar choice and the only difference he saw was that "he didn't have to play scales every day".
I think that those of us who toil in the corporate software fields also know that there's a wide gulf between those who are interested in their craft for its own sake (an interest which I would argue leads to excercising the craft as an art) and those who, basically, are menatlly working in a sauasage factory and couldn't give a crap. There are valid arguments to be made as to whether or not the art of it is for the sake of the client(s) or the programmer's vanity. In the end I think if I'm going to spend 8 hours a day doing something I'd much prefer to be creating something worth appreciating.
Not sure what your question is. If you're doing a stage 3 install (that's the mostly-binary-prebuilt one, right?) then, yes, you can build the thing pretty quickly, as it's the compiling that takes forever and you're skipping that.Production system also might not need most of the big GUI apps that take forever to compile (KDE, Word processor, mozilla, xorg).
AMD64 3200+ is faster than what I've used, although I'd be pretty surprised if it compiled X in 5 minutes-to get a complete desktop system to compile in 3 hours would be an order of magnitude better than I get.
1. Your language and attitude need fixing.
2. I was not referring to the parties of the specific judges, merely noting that Mr. Bush has profited handsomely from similar transactions. I did not claim that this would lead him to appoint judges likely to approve of such scams in the future-It seems unlikely that he could/would do the same thing again, and I doubt he can think that far ahead, or even is aware of the ramifications of the deal he got. Probably would think he deserved it if he ever thought about it (again, unlikely).
3. If you disapprove of this deal you should also disapprove of Mr. Bush's conduct in this case.
4. You fucking idiot.
Of course this is how George made his money in Texas. The short story: before he was governor of Texas he was brought in as part owner of the Texas Rangers for a $600,000 investment. The Rangers then convinced the city of Arlington to seize 13 acres by eminent domain and build a stadium at taxpayer expense. Bush cashed out a few years later for 16 million, a millionaire by government handout if ever there was one.
There have been surveys that show that most people believe they aren't influenced by ads, and yet ads are still bought, and directly correlate with peoples perceptions and purchases. Advertising is bought because it works. Ask yourself if you're that much savvier than your fellow citizens, most of whom believe they are savvier than you. We all know it's bull, but it still works.
Ask yourself, for example, when you go to buy that car, what your internal image is of, and what you think of, when you see the words:
FORD
CHEVY
MERCEDES
ASTON-MARTIN
Objectively, I'll claim, you probably don't have enough real personal direct knowledge to truly know the difference in quality, performance, etc, etc between, say, audi and chevy. Maybe you've read trade articles, the writers who themselves are filtering their perception. The very fact that those brand names triggered a flood of connections in your brain (quality, expensive, classy, cheap, populist, hard-working,...) I'd argue that way, way in the back of your brain you've got concepts and feelings attached to those brand names, along with preconceptions on everything from pepsi to victoria's secret. When you go to buy your car, that little storehouse of unexamined beliefs in the back of your brain will be consulted. And that is what advertising buys.
It's always funny to look at old advertisements from, say, 100 , 50, or even 25 years ago, they look so hopelessly naive. It's a constant arms race between the cynical lies of advertisers and our increasing cynicism about their cynical lies.
I've been using Gentoo for about a year or so, maybe more, and have built it on 3 systems.
Building a system in 3 hours sounds really unlikely, in that the compile for some of the larger things (X, KDE, a word processor, firefox) will take significantly longer than that. It is possible to get it up and running in about 3 hours by installing some of the larger packages as binaries. It's also possible to get the thing basically set up in about an hour or so, run emerge to get everything you want, and come back in a day or two. If you're doing the compiling, it seems pretty unlikely to me that you'd be done in three hours, in the sense that you'd have the system you want and be done.
Months is also pretty unlikely, although it is the sort of thing you can continually mess with to get is just right, making Gentoo an excellent procrastination tool.
In practice, at least for me, the install's not much of an issue, I"m not doing lots of machines as I'm not doing this for a production environment, the initial install is fairly quick.
To get a few things out of the way first-
I'm not a historian, my knowledge of the Scopes trial is limited to the movies and a few debunking articles ( I think Stephen J. Gould wrote one, can't remember the others). I've also read some of Mencken's original reporting.
Your reply looked like it had a bit of research behind it, so I looked around a bit, not exhaustively of course.
Here's 2 references that seem to dispute your statements: The first is an account by scopes, quite interesting in that it gives a hint of his character: http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/s copes/scopesreflections.html Of the many references, (in a hurry, only looked at the first few) I found things that seems to confirm what I'd seen in the past, e.g.(From a review of Summer of the Gods at
http://www.facingthechallenge.org/scopes1.htm
When the Tennessee law was enacted, the ACLU saw it as a chance for a legal victory for freedom of speech. The leaders sent out a press release offering to challenge the law, and calling for any Tennessee teacher to volunteer as a test case. They would provide the legal defence and cover all costs, and were sure that the teacher concerned need not lose his or her job...
In a small town in East Tennessee, a few young professionals gathered at the local drug store to discuss the offer from the ACLU. It seems they were struck with the possibilities of free publicity for their town. One of the group invited a close friend of his, 24-year-old John T. Scopes, to join them in one of their drug store get-togethers. He was asked if he would be willing to let his name be used for a test case. Although he was not actually a biology teacher, he had filled in for the regular teacher during an illness using the state-approved biology text, which had a section on human evolution. It was enough for the trial.
Of course, this is not "real" historical research, I'm going by google and I don't really know the authenticity of what I'm reading, yadda yadda... But Mostly I'm troubled by the references to propaganda, and the idea that this conflict was somehow perpetuated by people with a sinister agenda of some sort. Exactly what is it that is being propagated through propaganda? Evolution?
What I've seen in my last few gigs is a different problem, and the analogy illuminates it pretty well.
Two issues:
1.I keep running into systems that have been built with next to no architectural ideas. I'm not discussing standards here, but plans. In traditional building you'd never see a contractor claming to be an architect because he'd been doing it long enough, while in the development world, an architect is often a fancy title with amorphous responsibilities.
Not that I think it's clear where the line between a developer and an architect is, and what makes an architect, but I keep finding myself working on immense systems that are put together with horrible or nonexistant architectures. These tend to be due either to a reasonably good developer with no sense for larger issues, or the dreaded "Big ball of mud" pattern you get on systems that have been in constant developement for years with a rotating set of developers.
In software you can often pretty much get away with bad architecture, at least in the short run. Which brings me to
2. In bad software the pain doesn't get inflicted until a year later, when someone has to edit/change the system. A bad house gets noticed at once.
Not to get into the whole "pick your entertaining, I-get-to-look-down-on-you-redneck-elite-cracker-ea stern-hollywood-whitewine-beer-quiche
redstate-bluestate" business, which seems sort of gratuitous and pointless in the current context,(and I agree with your objections to it, BTW)
but I was wondering what you meant by this: It was no accident that Darrow and Scopes were both hired by a mine manager to break the local religion, which supported the unions and provided a place where workers could meet to organize with little fear of attack by the companies' mercenary thugs. The remains of this propaganda campaign still hang over in the culture of US eastern cities and thus in the US media.
I assume you're talking about the scopes trial, and this throws up heavy, heavy paranoid-misinformation alerts for me. Scopes was a local High School teacher, and apparently he was pushed into challenging the law as a stunt by the local Chamber of Commerce to get the town on the map. That is the Scopes we're talking about, right?
>Few adults, even, question what's authoritatively told them in High School, much less elementary school.
I can speak from the experience of myself and that of friends and acquaintances and say that this is a generalization that does not always hold; "few" is an ambiguous term that needs to be quantified and more specifically defined before it can have force. Personally, many of my current beliefs challenge if not flatly contradict what I was taught as a child. However, I've seen plenty who support your argument - is teaching a rational view to those who refuse to be critically reflective to begin with going to help? Certainly it will make more people agree with you, but is not the goal of a rational society to promote criticism and challenge of popular belief in search of something better, more accurate? Thus, if your argument about few people challenging what they are told holds, society is a lost cause because, while we may have a decent start on a scientific answer now, it will never go any further because no one will question it...except for the minority that I mentioned who are willing to criticize foundational beliefs, whether they are brought up with them or not. This minority have always been the ones to promote positive change in science to begin with, and it won't matter what they're taught.
This, I think, is our base disagreement. How do you educate to get people who think for themselves? Putting aside the inconvenient thousands of books I'd imagine have been written on this, I have 2 points to make re: evolution vs. ID/creationism.
1) Teaching people to think critically is at best a difficult undertaking. In our current political climate it is even more an uphill battle. The very forces pushing creationism push uncritical acceptance. In a sense, teaching evolution is a bit of a statment that only knowledge that has passed the test of critical examination is worthy of being taught as science.
2) It doesn't help to just "give up". If you teach creationism alongside evolution not only do you validate sloppy thinking, and not only do you create scientifically illiterate kids, but you abandon one of the very things that has a chance of creating a critically-thinking adult, the exposure to a real idea.
See, I think that most pre-college education is predigested and oversimplified, certainly much of what I remember. An encounter with a real idea in all its complexity and depth can be a life changing experience, one that is notably absent from textbook-style volumes. Here's what I mean-
Someone, a few years back wrote (I think it was actually Leo Buscaglia, of all people) that if you read one poem, really read just one, then you're lost. What he meant (recalling from context) was that you could go one absorbing things on autopilot forever, but once you've really seen what there is to see in one poem, or one novel, or... etc etc. you see the depth of what exists in art, science, knowledge. To teach ID is to deny this experience in the interest of pleasing a vocal political minority.
I'd also like to mention that your high school computer analogy is amusing but, I feel, inapplicable, since you threw together a wide mixture of information rather than different ideas on the same topic.
Yeah, it was a bit weak, hopefully you get what I was shooting for, sort of in the sense of what I've just written above.
I have to say that I'm enjoying this discussion
Me too, though the time it's taking me to write these posts reminds me why I don't do this too often....
That's testing the progression of life, not the origin.
To distinguish the origin of life in this case from the progression is a nice point, but it seems to me that talking about the origin of life on this level would be a philosophical argument (because it seems to me that this only makes sense if you're talking about the origin of conciousness? ).
The scientific is our shared consensual belief.
That doesn't sit entirely well with me;
Yeah, OK, I have to acknowledge that this was "reaching" a bit; even so, I think it's appropriate for a rationality-based worldview (which is what a scientific worldview boils down to) is an appropriate baseline for public policy, certainly for the teaching of science.
Teaching alternative ideas to children, adults, whomever does not equate to forcing them to accept them. The problem you mentioned is exactly the problem I see in this debate at large - people are trying to lessen their own discomfort by lambasting those who don't agree with them - their reactions make them seem frightened of an idea they consider childish, and it doesn't make sense. If they are confident that evolution is, in fact, the most rational choice available, what do they have to fear from it being taught side by side with ID, alien cross-fertilization, or anything else anyone can come up with?
Here's where I think you're just plain wrong. Any educator, or a person with young children in particular could tell you that children are not capable of making value-neutral distinctions in this way.
If you teach it in the classroom, you give it status as "accepted". Few adults, even, question what's authoritatively told them in High School, much less elementary school. Indeed, there are entire political groups that are based pretty much on the violent emotional resistance to facts that contradict what people have been taught in High School.
If you teach evolution, creationism, and alien cross-fertilization, you 1) have less time to teach evolution and 2) teach that all of these are equally likely. If you teach evolution you teach a powerful scientific idea. If you teach a bit of a lot of things, you teach... a bit of a lot of things, it's a disconnected mess, and is unlikely to be retained or worth anything to the student.
Contrast these:
1) We have a week to teach HS students about computers. (this is highly idealized, but bear with me). The teacher begins to talk about basic binary signals and progresses up to simple nand/nor, circuits, opcodes, etc (I've seen books that do this, a fair understanding of what a computer "is".
2) We have a week to teach HS students about computers. We spend a day on a walkthrough of Microsoft Windows, talk about the abacus, and make sure to spend time on religious ideas about knowledge. Or something.
In (1) the students will have a real understanding of a domain of human knowledge. This is real education. In (2) they'd have a hodgepodge of crap. If you ever read a HS textbook on anything (a very instructive excercise, BTW) you'll see that it's full of watered-down nonsense that any self-respecting kid will feel honor-bound to forget right after the exam. My main point is that in the interest of being "fair" we're turning an exciting and illuminating idea into uninteresting mush.
I was speaking of the aspect of both evolution and ID as the origin of human life. Looked at in that way, evolution will never be proven nor disproven by verification (barring the invention of a time machine).
I disagree. While it's true that we'll never actually witness the origin of human life, we can verify those pieces of it that we can figure out how to test, for example some aspects of the process of natural selection. We can also trace some elements of the progression of evolution through the fossil record.
It's possible that one day we'll find out that fossils are a huge practical joke perpetuated by aliens with too much spare time and a strange sense of humor. This is a dumb sounding example, but note-
a)the same argument has literatlly been made by creationists, albeit in better sounding form (God put fossils in the earth as a "test", or so that his existance would remain an open question).
b)You really have to venture this far afield to figure out a scenario where evolution turns out to be flat out wrong.
In any case, there's an enormous gap between "our best guess, which may, in ways we can't see right now, be wrong" and "since it's only a theory, then anything I come up with is equally possible".
If you hold "trans-rational" beliefs because you feel rationality to come up short in the full and accurate description of life, why should your properly rational beliefs, though admittedly insufficient, hold an inherently higher status than trans-rational beliefs?
A good question, and one that occurred to me as I was typing my too-quick response. "Trans-rational" is a pretty crappy term, and confuses more than it helps. What I really meant was something like:
I hold personal beliefs that are not covered by logic and for which logic is insufficient. Logic, for example, does not tell me that killing is a bad thing. Science is in itself insufficient for morality. It is insufficient in itself to help me decide on those things in my life that I value.Above and beyond this, beliefs about the workings of the universe that cannot be scientifically derived (e.g. Supreme Being) are inherently personal. I do not have the reight to impose these on others, to force others to teach their children these beliefs, etc.
The scientific is our shared consensual belief. To refuse to share these beliefs, as many do today, is in my view to refuse to participate in the modern world. You're welcome to do that, just don't come into my life and impose it on me.
The people who do that are not intereseted in consensus, they're interested only in forcing others to agree with them to lessen their own cognitive dissonance and make them feel better about their own beliefs (my view, of course). This is (again, in my view) intolerant, ignorant, and just plain wrong.
No one will ever be able to prove religion. No one will ever be able to prove evolution.
There's a difference here, and it goes to the root of what science "is".
Evolution, as a framework for understanding the world in a scientific and rational way, is always subject to proof or disproof by verification. ID is by definition above and beyond proof or disproof,as arguments about actions of a supreme being. By definition this supreme being can do things we can't, so we can't verify or disprove any assertions about his/her/its actions, because, partially, the whole point of dragging the supreme being into this argument is in response to, or an expression of our admission that we don't understand it.
Science is by definition about things we can prove or disprove. A statement about which we can do neither is, again by definition, outside of the province of science.
In otherwords, it's religion.
It's one thing to say, and reasonable as well, that you have beliefs that are outside of the framework of pure and strict rationality. Pure ratinoality is in itself a pretty weak philosophy to life your life by, at least to me. It's quite another thing to argue that your desire for trans-ratinal beliefs should be afforded the same status as rational ones.
I agree absolutely with this. Hey intelligent Americans - TAKE BACK YOUR FUCKING COUNTRY! We are sick of this shit and many of us are tiring of NOT lumping you all in the same bunch. You are burning serious karma.
Sorry, I was watching "Desperate Housewives". What was that again?
Well, as an American, I'm not terribly happy about the America-bashing. Let's just say that statistically the people who have the beliefs you're describing are about 1/3 of the country, maximally, they've pretty much taken over our gov't, along with a fair number of sociopaths who are willing to use these people for their own aims (cough, cough,...Delay... Frist... cough).
Current issue of Harpers (not in the online vers, unfortunately, but one of the best things I've ever read on the subject, highly, highly recommended) provides a very good description of this, BTW.
Bush was apparently right about one thing. He said at some point that fundamentalist regimes were going to be the new problem for the 21st century (or did one of his familiars say it? Hard to remember).
There's a difference, I'd argue, between open-mindedness and "blind" open-mindedness. It's important to be open-minded, of course, but open-mindedness in the face of overwhelming contradictory evidence is just the sort of perverse, bending-over-backwards-to-be-fair behavior that's often derided, and justly so, as political correctness in other contexts.
The problem is not what other people believe, it's that a fairly large chunk of our society is willing to believe things that directly and clearly contradict physical evidence and to alter our political process and how we educate our childred to remove any references that might be upsetting to their view of the world.
This is an old argument, but for the most part I think we'd agree that when you finish boiling down the evidence ID is simply religion (specifically, some Christian beliefs (that not all christians agree with, not trying for flamebait here, just noting the source)) in camoflouge.
How can you live in a modern, technological society and ignore the evidence of your own experience? To give one example, If you go get an MRI or an X-ray you're benefitting from some of the same technology and body of knowledge that allows us to date fossils. How can a person stand up and denounce evolution in one minute, and in the next go get a chest X-ray? People who are unable to filter out this sort of obvious mental nonsense are driving our politics and our policies, and it's a scary thing.
Many people have noted here already that there are legal implications, and perhaps practical reasons why one might want to monitor.
I think there's another dimension to this entirely. Putting aside entirely the question of whether or not an employer has the legal right to monitor your email (and given that legal rights can often be purchased by large enough economic players, e.g. Credit card companies & the recent bankruptcy law changes, so I don't take them as a usefull guideline to what is or is not moral behavior) or the question of whether or not it might be useful for your employer to do so (that is, whether it's a reasonable conclusion that they might get something out of montioring you) there's this horrible sense I get that more and more the people we work for treat us as property. To me this sounds an awful lot like people who work in walmart having their bathroom breaks monitored. Isn't there something just,.. just wrong with our becoming accustomed to this idea that the organization we work for is justified in doing anything to us that's not strictly illegal?
I don't know about you, but it's important to me to be treated as a professional. There are expectations on me that are strictly and entirely limited to my job. The rest of it, as far as I'm concerned, is none of anyone's damn business.
On top of this, it's also been my experience that wasting time and resources on monitoring your empoyees email is the kind of low-rent activity that "managers" engage in when they can't actually think of anything usefull or productive to do. Maybe they teach this in Business school, instead of that elective in ethics that no one has time for anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
The actual sequence of events seems relatively accurate, however I think the more important fact here is that studies after the fact showed that a full statewide recount would've been decided in Gore's favor (there was an issue about the overvotes that never got counted, all the disputes dealt with undervotes ). So what it looks like really happened is that the Gore team made tactical errors in cherry-picking their recount requests (there was some reason for it that I forget at the moment, I think having something to do with filing requirements).
Now, this is all an unpleasant trip down memory lane that none of us wants to really revisit, but I walk away with the clear impression, between the butterfly ballots, the staged Dade County riot (remember that one? ) disenfranchised non-felon felons, etc, etc that the majority of people in Florida went to the polls in 2000 intending to vote for Gore. I believe this was sustained by subsequent studies. I suppose the relevance in the context of the current slashdot article is that there's lots of ways to steal an election, as with many other things, technology just makes it more efficient (e.g. the career of L.B.J)
This could of course be a longer post, I don't think anyone's got the appetite for that. There's a fair amount of evidence, BTW, that e-voting threw Ohio to Bush in '04 for example, here
Personally the day the Supreme Court decision came down in 2000 was the day I stopped believing that I live in a democracy. I know this might strike some as tinfoil hat country, I think I'm a reasonable guy and there's a fair amount of evidence to support this conclusion.
That being said...
I've seen a fair number of high-power tools offerred that do everything from soup to nuts, UML, Code generation, integrated testing, etc, etc, etc. It's been my sense that to fully leverage these tools you kind of have to buy in all the way, you can use their architect tools, but you need to put a fair amount of effort into learning the tool, and then you're not developing in C# or whatever, but in the tool. You're then also locked into the constraints imposed by the tool.
Every sophisticated tool I mess with these days seems like it has this issue, and I guess it's structural- you have a simple core surrounded by proprietary extensions that in theory offer a lot of power and in practice require a huge buy in of time to leverage the extensions. For example, most java application servers have all kinds of built-in goodies (e.g. Jboss) but whenever I've worked with them I've seen almost no use of the proprietary stuff. Same for web frameworks, most projects I've seen don't leverage the frameworks nearly as well as they could. This indicates to me that the learning curve is too high and that in practice it's not realistic to expect that people can master and fully utilize proprietary tools in addition to languages, patterns, and other necassary knowledge.
To be fair, I don't work in the Microsoft universe, and it may be a bit more realistic to expect tool buy-in in a world where there's one major tool vendor.
These are all great suggestions. I've worked for a pretty wide variety of places over the last few years, and often even the most basic stuff is left hanging (I once walked into a project with 10 developers and no version control). In an environment like that, even instituting VC is a real victory.
Brain Book- I love your idea of a "brain book". I've never seen such a thing, always wanted one. In just about every place I've worked this is knowledge one accumulates through attrition and then lives forever on crumpled sticky notes and "that email from last month I know is here from Fred".
Code review-great, only seen in one place.
I'd add one extra idea to this- At a small shop I worked in we began a series of weekly self-education meetings - each week a rotating member of the group would pick some development subject (any subject of their choosing) and talk about it for about 30 minutes. This gave everyone a bit of a way to stay on top of things but also got people to buy into the idea of continuous improvement for themselves.
It may be my bad luck in the last few years, but a fair majority of the folks I've worked with have been terrible coders. And from others I've talked to, it seems, at least anecdotally, that incompetance is common, that many shops operate without basic standards or even basic source code control, that it's rare for people writing code to have a full understanding of the systems they're working on or the ramifications of the systems they build.
Really, I don't consider myself great at this, but I've worked with so many who really have little knowledge beyond syntax and how to accomplish basic tasks. The most lacking is usually any sense of structure. Maybe there just aren't enough people around who are good at this.
I think we can even talk about this without questions of ego. There's just such a higher demand for this sort of work than there was 20 years ago, and I think most people would agree that almost anyone can do it (sort of) and that it takes an aptitude (an aptitude that at the very least is not universal) to do it well. Under those circumstances there's just bound to be lots of stuff that doesn't quite work.
I'd like to see a slashdot poll- "Of your co-workers in the last few years, what percentage would you consider competent?". Follow up poll could be "How competent do you think you are?"
-I haven't had crash issues, everything's pretty much worked as advertised.
-I'd read that the biggest issues) for me with MySQL, the limitations in using subqueries, were in the process of being fixed. That'd make the 2 basically equivalent for me, at least in functional terms (coming from a developer's perspective here, not a DBA)
I'd like to see benchmarks, but other than that both systems are fabulous, I really appreciate the work that's gone into them. And they're much easier to work with than oracle (where you often get the impression that they intentionally obfuscate things to justify the cost).
My personal experience, FWIW, is that taking advantage of the JBoss-specific architecture has its downsides:
-you lock yourself into jboss (not a horrible thing, really, how often do you want to change the appserver of a running application, but annoying)
-some of the implementations appear to be version dependant, e.g. your jboss-specific components might break when you upgrade
-there's are undocumented hurdles-e.g. I spent hours trying to figure out why my mbeans were refusing to load, eventually googled a mail message to learn that it relies on an (undocumented, as far as I can tell) naming convention.
In the end we just did POJO with MBean access to some basic parameters. But there's definately an (unfriendly) learning curve.
I had a (physics) professor once who was trying to give me advice when I was, in college, moving from physics to music, who told me that he'd faced a similar choice and the only difference he saw was that "he didn't have to play scales every day".
I think that those of us who toil in the corporate software fields also know that there's a wide gulf between those who are interested in their craft for its own sake (an interest which I would argue leads to excercising the craft as an art) and those who, basically, are menatlly working in a sauasage factory and couldn't give a crap. There are valid arguments to be made as to whether or not the art of it is for the sake of the client(s) or the programmer's vanity. In the end I think if I'm going to spend 8 hours a day doing something I'd much prefer to be creating something worth appreciating.
Is it an art? Only if you want it to be.
AMD64 3200+ is faster than what I've used, although I'd be pretty surprised if it compiled X in 5 minutes-to get a complete desktop system to compile in 3 hours would be an order of magnitude better than I get.
1. Your language and attitude need fixing.
2. I was not referring to the parties of the specific judges, merely noting that Mr. Bush has profited handsomely from similar transactions. I did not claim that this would lead him to appoint judges likely to approve of such scams in the future-It seems unlikely that he could/would do the same thing again, and I doubt he can think that far ahead, or even is aware of the ramifications of the deal he got. Probably would think he deserved it if he ever thought about it (again, unlikely).
3. If you disapprove of this deal you should also disapprove of Mr. Bush's conduct in this case.
4. You fucking idiot.
Here's a few links on this, but I pretty much pulled them at random, just google "Bush Arlington Eminent Domain":. html e s3/bush_and_eminent_domain.htm
http://www.bushfiles.com/bushfiles/SweetheartDeal
http://www.propertyrightsresearch.org/2004/articl
It's a good thing you're not a cynic.
Ask yourself, for example, when you go to buy that car, what your internal image is of, and what you think of, when you see the words: ...)
FORD
CHEVY
MERCEDES
ASTON-MARTIN
Objectively, I'll claim, you probably don't have enough real personal direct knowledge to truly know the difference in quality, performance, etc, etc between, say, audi and chevy. Maybe you've read trade articles, the writers who themselves are filtering their perception. The very fact that those brand names triggered a flood of connections in your brain (quality, expensive, classy, cheap, populist, hard-working,
I'd argue that way, way in the back of your brain you've got concepts and feelings attached to those brand names, along with preconceptions on everything from pepsi to victoria's secret. When you go to buy your car, that little storehouse of unexamined beliefs in the back of your brain will be consulted. And that is what advertising buys.
It's always funny to look at old advertisements from, say, 100 , 50, or even 25 years ago, they look so hopelessly naive. It's a constant arms race between the cynical lies of advertisers and our increasing cynicism about their cynical lies.
Building a system in 3 hours sounds really unlikely, in that the compile for some of the larger things (X, KDE, a word processor, firefox) will take significantly longer than that. It is possible to get it up and running in about 3 hours by installing some of the larger packages as binaries. It's also possible to get the thing basically set up in about an hour or so, run emerge to get everything you want, and come back in a day or two. If you're doing the compiling, it seems pretty unlikely to me that you'd be done in three hours, in the sense that you'd have the system you want and be done.
Months is also pretty unlikely, although it is the sort of thing you can continually mess with to get is just right, making Gentoo an excellent procrastination tool.
In practice, at least for me, the install's not much of an issue, I"m not doing lots of machines as I'm not doing this for a production environment, the initial install is fairly quick.
I'm not a historian, my knowledge of the Scopes trial is limited to the movies and a few debunking articles ( I think Stephen J. Gould wrote one, can't remember the others). I've also read some of Mencken's original reporting.
Your reply looked like it had a bit of research behind it, so I looked around a bit, not exhaustively of course.
Here's 2 references that seem to dispute your statements:s copes/scopesreflections.html
The first is an account by scopes, quite interesting in that it gives a hint of his character:
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/
Of the many references, (in a hurry, only looked at the first few) I found things that seems to confirm what I'd seen in the past, e.g.(From a review of Summer of the Gods at http://www.facingthechallenge.org/scopes1.htm
When the Tennessee law was enacted, the ACLU saw it as a chance for a legal victory for freedom of speech. The leaders sent out a press release offering to challenge the law, and calling for any Tennessee teacher to volunteer as a test case. They would provide the legal defence and cover all costs, and were sure that the teacher concerned need not lose his or her job...
In a small town in East Tennessee, a few young professionals gathered at the local drug store to discuss the offer from the ACLU. It seems they were struck with the possibilities of free publicity for their town. One of the group invited a close friend of his, 24-year-old John T. Scopes, to join them in one of their drug store get-togethers. He was asked if he would be willing to let his name be used for a test case. Although he was not actually a biology teacher, he had filled in for the regular teacher during an illness using the state-approved biology text, which had a section on human evolution. It was enough for the trial.
Of course, this is not "real" historical research, I'm going by google and I don't really know the authenticity of what I'm reading, yadda yadda...
But Mostly I'm troubled by the references to propaganda, and the idea that this conflict was somehow perpetuated by people with a sinister agenda of some sort. Exactly what is it that is being propagated through propaganda? Evolution?
Two issues:
1.I keep running into systems that have been built with next to no architectural ideas. I'm not discussing standards here, but plans.
In traditional building you'd never see a contractor claming to be an architect because he'd been doing it long enough, while in the development world, an architect is often a fancy title with amorphous responsibilities.
Not that I think it's clear where the line between a developer and an architect is, and what makes an architect, but I keep finding myself working on immense systems that are put together with horrible or nonexistant architectures. These tend to be due either to a reasonably good developer with no sense for larger issues, or the dreaded "Big ball of mud" pattern you get on systems that have been in constant developement for years with a rotating set of developers.
In software you can often pretty much get away with bad architecture, at least in the short run. Which brings me to
2. In bad software the pain doesn't get inflicted until a year later, when someone has to edit/change the system. A bad house gets noticed at once.
but I was wondering what you meant by this:
It was no accident that Darrow and Scopes were both hired by a mine manager to break the local religion, which supported the unions and provided a place where workers could meet to organize with little fear of attack by the companies' mercenary thugs. The remains of this propaganda campaign still hang over in the culture of US eastern cities and thus in the US media.
I assume you're talking about the scopes trial, and this throws up heavy, heavy paranoid-misinformation alerts for me. Scopes was a local High School teacher, and apparently he was pushed into challenging the law as a stunt by the local Chamber of Commerce to get the town on the map. That is the Scopes we're talking about, right?
Somebody's been listening to Rush Limbaugh again.
I can speak from the experience of myself and that of friends and acquaintances and say that this is a generalization that does not always hold; "few" is an ambiguous term that needs to be quantified and more specifically defined before it can have force. Personally, many of my current beliefs challenge if not flatly contradict what I was taught as a child. However, I've seen plenty who support your argument - is teaching a rational view to those who refuse to be critically reflective to begin with going to help? Certainly it will make more people agree with you, but is not the goal of a rational society to promote criticism and challenge of popular belief in search of something better, more accurate? Thus, if your argument about few people challenging what they are told holds, society is a lost cause because, while we may have a decent start on a scientific answer now, it will never go any further because no one will question it...except for the minority that I mentioned who are willing to criticize foundational beliefs, whether they are brought up with them or not. This minority have always been the ones to promote positive change in science to begin with, and it won't matter what they're taught.
This, I think, is our base disagreement. How do you educate to get people who think for themselves? Putting aside the inconvenient thousands of books I'd imagine have been written on this, I have 2 points to make re: evolution vs. ID/creationism.
1) Teaching people to think critically is at best a difficult undertaking. In our current political climate it is even more an uphill battle. The very forces pushing creationism push uncritical acceptance. In a sense, teaching evolution is a bit of a statment that only knowledge that has passed the test of critical examination is worthy of being taught as science.
2) It doesn't help to just "give up". If you teach creationism alongside evolution not only do you validate sloppy thinking, and not only do you create scientifically illiterate kids, but you abandon one of the very things that has a chance of creating a critically-thinking adult, the exposure to a real idea.
See, I think that most pre-college education is predigested and oversimplified, certainly much of what I remember. An encounter with a real idea in all its complexity and depth can be a life changing experience, one that is notably absent from textbook-style volumes. Here's what I mean- ... etc etc. you see the depth of what exists in art, science, knowledge. To teach ID is to deny this experience in the interest of pleasing a vocal political minority.
Someone, a few years back wrote (I think it was actually Leo Buscaglia, of all people) that if you read one poem, really read just one, then you're lost. What he meant (recalling from context) was that you could go one absorbing things on autopilot forever, but once you've really seen what there is to see in one poem, or one novel, or
I'd also like to mention that your high school computer analogy is amusing but, I feel, inapplicable, since you threw together a wide mixture of information rather than different ideas on the same topic.
Yeah, it was a bit weak, hopefully you get what I was shooting for, sort of in the sense of what I've just written above.
I have to say that I'm enjoying this discussion
Me too, though the time it's taking me to write these posts reminds me why I don't do this too often....
That's testing the progression of life, not the origin.
To distinguish the origin of life in this case from the progression is a nice point, but it seems to me that talking about the origin of life on this level would be a philosophical argument (because it seems to me that this only makes sense if you're talking about the origin of conciousness? ).
The scientific is our shared consensual belief.
That doesn't sit entirely well with me;
Yeah, OK, I have to acknowledge that this was "reaching" a bit; even so, I think it's appropriate for a rationality-based worldview (which is what a scientific worldview boils down to) is an appropriate baseline for public policy, certainly for the teaching of science.
Teaching alternative ideas to children, adults, whomever does not equate to forcing them to accept them. The problem you mentioned is exactly the problem I see in this debate at large - people are trying to lessen their own discomfort by lambasting those who don't agree with them - their reactions make them seem frightened of an idea they consider childish, and it doesn't make sense. If they are confident that evolution is, in fact, the most rational choice available, what do they have to fear from it being taught side by side with ID, alien cross-fertilization, or anything else anyone can come up with?
Here's where I think you're just plain wrong. Any educator, or a person with young children in particular could tell you that children are not capable of making value-neutral distinctions in this way. If you teach it in the classroom, you give it status as "accepted". Few adults, even, question what's authoritatively told them in High School, much less elementary school. Indeed, there are entire political groups that are based pretty much on the violent emotional resistance to facts that contradict what people have been taught in High School. ... a bit of a lot of things, it's a disconnected mess, and is unlikely to be retained or worth anything to the student.
If you teach evolution, creationism, and alien cross-fertilization, you 1) have less time to teach evolution and 2) teach that all of these are equally likely. If you teach evolution you teach a powerful scientific idea. If you teach a bit of a lot of things, you teach
Contrast these:
1) We have a week to teach HS students about computers. (this is highly idealized, but bear with me). The teacher begins to talk about basic binary signals and progresses up to simple nand/nor, circuits, opcodes, etc (I've seen books that do this, a fair understanding of what a computer "is".
2) We have a week to teach HS students about computers. We spend a day on a walkthrough of Microsoft Windows, talk about the abacus, and make sure to spend time on religious ideas about knowledge. Or something.
In (1) the students will have a real understanding of a domain of human knowledge. This is real education. In (2) they'd have a hodgepodge of crap. If you ever read a HS textbook on anything (a very instructive excercise, BTW) you'll see that it's full of watered-down nonsense that any self-respecting kid will feel honor-bound to forget right after the exam. My main point is that in the interest of being "fair" we're turning an exciting and illuminating idea into uninteresting mush.
I disagree. While it's true that we'll never actually witness the origin of human life, we can verify those pieces of it that we can figure out how to test, for example some aspects of the process of natural selection. We can also trace some elements of the progression of evolution through the fossil record.
It's possible that one day we'll find out that fossils are a huge practical joke perpetuated by aliens with too much spare time and a strange sense of humor. This is a dumb sounding example, but note-
a)the same argument has literatlly been made by creationists, albeit in better sounding form (God put fossils in the earth as a "test", or so that his existance would remain an open question).
b)You really have to venture this far afield to figure out a scenario where evolution turns out to be flat out wrong.
In any case, there's an enormous gap between "our best guess, which may, in ways we can't see right now, be wrong" and "since it's only a theory, then anything I come up with is equally possible".
If you hold "trans-rational" beliefs because you feel rationality to come up short in the full and accurate description of life, why should your properly rational beliefs, though admittedly insufficient, hold an inherently higher status than trans-rational beliefs?
A good question, and one that occurred to me as I was typing my too-quick response. "Trans-rational" is a pretty crappy term, and confuses more than it helps. What I really meant was something like:
I hold personal beliefs that are not covered by logic and for which logic is insufficient. Logic, for example, does not tell me that killing is a bad thing. Science is in itself insufficient for morality. It is insufficient in itself to help me decide on those things in my life that I value.Above and beyond this, beliefs about the workings of the universe that cannot be scientifically derived (e.g. Supreme Being) are inherently personal. I do not have the reight to impose these on others, to force others to teach their children these beliefs, etc.
The scientific is our shared consensual belief. To refuse to share these beliefs, as many do today, is in my view to refuse to participate in the modern world. You're welcome to do that, just don't come into my life and impose it on me. The people who do that are not intereseted in consensus, they're interested only in forcing others to agree with them to lessen their own cognitive dissonance and make them feel better about their own beliefs (my view, of course). This is (again, in my view) intolerant, ignorant, and just plain wrong.
There's a difference here, and it goes to the root of what science "is".
Evolution, as a framework for understanding the world in a scientific and rational way, is always subject to proof or disproof by verification. ID is by definition above and beyond proof or disproof,as arguments about actions of a supreme being. By definition this supreme being can do things we can't, so we can't verify or disprove any assertions about his/her/its actions, because, partially, the whole point of dragging the supreme being into this argument is in response to, or an expression of our admission that we don't understand it.
Science is by definition about things we can prove or disprove. A statement about which we can do neither is, again by definition, outside of the province of science.
In otherwords, it's religion.
It's one thing to say, and reasonable as well, that you have beliefs that are outside of the framework of pure and strict rationality. Pure ratinoality is in itself a pretty weak philosophy to life your life by, at least to me. It's quite another thing to argue that your desire for trans-ratinal beliefs should be afforded the same status as rational ones.
Sorry, I was watching "Desperate Housewives". What was that again?
Current issue of Harpers (not in the online vers, unfortunately, but one of the best things I've ever read on the subject, highly, highly recommended) provides a very good description of this, BTW.
Bush was apparently right about one thing. He said at some point that fundamentalist regimes were going to be the new problem for the 21st century (or did one of his familiars say it? Hard to remember).
Guess we just didn't think it would be us.
The problem is not what other people believe, it's that a fairly large chunk of our society is willing to believe things that directly and clearly contradict physical evidence and to alter our political process and how we educate our childred to remove any references that might be upsetting to their view of the world.
This is an old argument, but for the most part I think we'd agree that when you finish boiling down the evidence ID is simply religion (specifically, some Christian beliefs (that not all christians agree with, not trying for flamebait here, just noting the source)) in camoflouge.
How can you live in a modern, technological society and ignore the evidence of your own experience? To give one example, If you go get an MRI or an X-ray you're benefitting from some of the same technology and body of knowledge that allows us to date fossils. How can a person stand up and denounce evolution in one minute, and in the next go get a chest X-ray? People who are unable to filter out this sort of obvious mental nonsense are driving our politics and our policies, and it's a scary thing.
I don't know about you, but it's important to me to be treated as a professional. There are expectations on me that are strictly and entirely limited to my job. The rest of it, as far as I'm concerned, is none of anyone's damn business.
On top of this, it's also been my experience that wasting time and resources on monitoring your empoyees email is the kind of low-rent activity that "managers" engage in when they can't actually think of anything usefull or productive to do. Maybe they teach this in Business school, instead of that elective in ethics that no one has time for anymore.