"The understretch is also leaving American children ill-equipped to compete. They usually perform poorly in international educational tests, coming behind Asian countries that spend less on education but work their children harder." [Economist article cited above]
This hits the nail on the head... it is questionable to whine for more money [1] when we know that a large part of our education problems are simply a lack of student discipline.
Study after study shows that children who were lazy and naturally gifted do not do as well in college as average children who worked at learning. Asians aren't really smarter as much as they work harder (which ultimately means their adults are more capable). The bottom-line is that money isn't the biggest challenge.
To Obama's credit, hard work is something he is pushing as well.
[1] Ok in a perfect world we could spend more money, but how big is the deficit these days and how much are we already paying in taxes???
Exactly... this is called QinLaoZhiFu, which means "Industrious Wealth". It is a cultural phrase in China that many parents teach their children. They believe that working very hard is rewarded... and this is a national concept.
[responding to an earlier comment about China's inability to innovate] Interestingly, a Communist society where national values are promoted by the central party has a stronger work-ethic and sense of teamwork than this country walking around the world insisting that everyone must adopt democracy... or else. China has plenty of problems, but it is foolish to assume they cannot innovate simply because Confucianism (which isn't even the majority religion in China) doesn't encourage it.
Buy a plane ticket and visit... don't just ride tour buses and listen to guides... talk to real Chinese... eat lunch with them. They are a remarkable people.
You seem to be neglecting the power of compound interest over the next 40 years. If she can build a spectrograph, she can probably figure out what a safe investment vehicle is.
So, now, that we established that your original complaints are 100% untrue, you are trying to switch to change your complaint to indicate that having a choice of reply styles is absurd... When Notes comes up, you start spouting things that are totally untrue, and then use ad-hominem attacks to try to 'prove' your point
That is one possible conclusion. Perhaps you could come up with other conclusions that might explain how both statements about Notes inline quoting could be true.
Let's go back to what I said...
Notes is hated by many in IBM - You have not responded
You can't drag more than one email into a folder at a time. Yes I was wrong.
It has strange means for handling inline quoting - I have provided evidence that you are nitpicking the words of... and seem to use some sort of post-modern definition of ad-homenem.
Notes does have a positive in it's ability to interface with Google Desktop Enterprise. You have not responded.
So, after falsely complaining about an ad-hominem attack, you again keep using them.
So after exposing your inability to think outside of your narrow opinions, you say that your continued failure to understand something else means it's automatically qualified as ad-homenem. Whatever... it's irrelevevant to the argument anyway, and you are now attempting to leverage the "Tu-quoque" fallacy... and all good students of debate know that is a dead end.
I never said I knew everything.
More trivial nitpicking... it seems to be your favorite activity.
Again... I don't think you understand what the words you are using mean.
I really meant myopic when I said it... perhaps you can't imagine how that could apply to you. I apologize if I hurt your feelings. If it did, I'm sure it won't bother you for long; you're a very smart man and have many things to occupy your mind with.
You are lying, there for you are a liar. I then supported my statement of you lying with factual testable evidence.
Lotus Notes does not multiple-indent if the previous Notes respondents failed to use Lotus Notes' "internet-style quoting". Your example assumes that all respondents did. It's an absurd thing for Notes to do this, because it clearly knows where the boundaries of the previous messages were... they are shown right there on the screen before you select "Reply with Internet-Style History".
This is an actual ad-hominem attack. You are trying to imply that your point is correct by attacking me personally.
My point remains correct, regardless of your failure to comprehend the issues at hand. Oh, but you know everything, so I must be wrong if you miss the point.
clearly if this "technical consulting group" really does exist, and they are working with Notes on a regular bases, then my early statement concerning malice or incompetence is supported by the facts.
So far, your statements seem to be supported by a rather myopic view of the facts.
Yes, I would have to say then, that they have crappy administrators, and that the users you describe are either retarded or lairs. I drag and drop multiple emails into folders all the time. To get standard internet style indenting when replying to a message, all these supposed 'users' have to do is select "Reply with Internet-Style History" instead of "Reply with History". It's right there on the same menu just two items down. Of course, you can also use the 'strange' way, and get an exact copy as an object of the prior message. It is put in a nice collapsible section to simplify reading of large email chains.
So, which do you think it is that has caused you to spread this FUD? Are you lying?Are your co-workers lying? Are they simply incompetent? Or are they completely non-technical people working in a non-technical area of IBM, and have really crappy admins/trainers who just tell them that Notes can't do that because they don't realize that the users are their customers?
Your immediate jump into ad-hominem attacks speaks volumes about the futility of discussing this further. I will respond only to highlight the issues that you seem to have made so many assumptions about.
As for the part of IBM they work in, it is in the technical consulting group, and are bunch of system administrators.
"Reply with Internet-Style History" is a complete joke as it is implemented very poorly in Lotus Notes. Some of these folks use this scheme; however, it does not even bother to multiple-indent emails earlier in the thread. So how are you supposed to carry on a inline-response conversation with someone who uses the standard "Internet-style" indentation found in Outlook, Thunderbird, Eudora, mutt, et al???
To be honest, I dont care whether you think I am lying about these things or not. Acerbic responses will not get you very far in the world... maybe you don't care, but believe it or not, I do. You could be a much more effective agent of change in the world than you just demonstrated.
No, there is just a vocal group that hates Notes. This is tends to be the people that have/are really crappy administrators, and have/are really crappy developers.
Then I suppose IBM has "really crappy Notes admins"?? I work with IBM'ers all day long and it is notoriously hated even within IBM. Most would switch to Thunderbird or even Outlook in a heartbeat if they were not forced to use it.
Typical complaints are the bizarre user interface, which includes such gems like the inability to select more than one message when dragging into folders. Responding to email inline is a real joy as they have some strange way of handling inline quotes. The one saving grace appears to be the Google Desktop Enterprise search plugin...
Do you also think being a bartender, blackjack dealer, chocolatier, or barista is morally wrong? Those jobs also profit from activities that trigger addictions.
Nope, I'm personally fine with the above... remember, I said highly addictive. How much is too addictive? Obviously a judgment call, but hookers clearly cross the line for me and most other people.
What about the deep emotional center idea? Well, intense religious experiences have been shown to trigger some of the same centers as sex, chocolate, and roller coasters. Does that mean that pastors/ministers/priests are of a "lower social status"?
Pastors do not profit from the "intense religious experience"; they are paid by contributions, but I have been in church all my life and haven't met a single person who would consider church every remotely as fun as sex... myself as an example... I frequently skip church during NFL season for football.
So in your opinion, what percentage of the population experiences this kind of religious intensity to the point that it is comparable to sex? Where is your source material, and what evidence can you provide to prove this assertion? If religious experiences are so addictive, then why is the per-capita Christian & Catholic population declining in the US?
This discussion is bordering on absurd and is spinning off topic... if you really want to discuss it, my email address is in my slashdot profile
Why do we, as a society, look down on those who sell their bodies, but not those who sell other aspects of themselves? Actually, we don't look down on all those who sell their bodies. People who take part in drug trials, for example, sell their bodies far more than prostitutes (often for less money, and with bigger risks), and yet they are not regarded as social outcasts. People in the military sell their ethics (assuming they had some ethical objections to killing) and often their lives, but are not regarded with the same stigma as prostitutes.
Your argument seems to be that society should not look down on prostitutes more than we look down on those who participate in drug trials or in the active duty military.
You are presenting the evidence that some drug trial participants and some military members put their lives at greater risk than prostitutes. The implicit assumption seems to be that personal risk is the only reason for the lower social status of prostitutes.
I can't speak for the rest of society, but I consider prostitutes of lower social status because they attempt to profit from highly addictive behavior (and people who are vulnerable to this). Prostitutes are profiting from an activity that triggers much deeper in the brain's emotional center, which is the heart of many addictive behaviors. I believe that this is morally wrong, in the same way that selling highly addictive drugs is wrong.
I don't want to start an extended discussion about the morality of drugs and prostitution... this guy asked what might be a troll or an honest question... I'm not sure.
An easy example: On the english site, we can learn that the population of elephants has tripled in the last six months. On the chinese site, we can learn that the population of elephants has tripled in the last 12 solar terms.
I have friends in China that I IM frequently; and I occasionally have to use Babelfish to translate english to chinese from time to time... Babelfish.altavista.com used to routinely confuse moon / month which share the same chinese monosyllable (yue).... I wonder if someone pasted the english text into a chinese transator and got this result
To the main point of the article... This article makes a really bad asumption that does not appear to be true. I am sitting in a hotel room near the location of the 2008 Olympic games and I CANNOT access either en.wikipedia.org or zh.wikipedia.org from China... therefore I find it hard to attribute the differences in the sources to Chinese government activity.
The problem is that a large portion of the software the DoD uses is commercial off-the-shelf stuff...
I agree with your assessment of COTS software risks, but those risks are not unique to DoD... my comments in the context of custom software or specialized embedded systems that DoD uses... and particularly the case where they might contract with a US company who subcontracts elsewhere.
If the problem is that there aren't enough resources (including time) to do a sufficiently thorough audit of all the code, then it doesn't matter where the code was written, does it? Do we really suppose that a malicious actor would have that much harder a time getting a job for a DoD contractor in the US than overseas? Do we really suppose that it would be that much more difficult to suborn a programmer overseas than here?
Or, more accurately, is it enough more difficult in either case for us to be confident of code written inside the country as opposed to outside?
Yes, in fact we can be more confident of US code. When the US Goverment subcontracts to someone in the US, there are two dynamics in our favor...
1. The US does not have kind of economic forces that encourage the kind of high turnover that is typically seen in places like India (as an example). As a former employee of an embedded-systems company, I heard all about the rampant problems that our foreign outsourcing partners had... including competitors who would wave a few more rupees at them and they immediately flee (taking our proprietary knowledge with them).
So, how does this contribute to this discussion about hidden backdoors in Government software? The problem is that higher turnover means less incentive for the contracting company to do their due diligence on the next guy... knowing that at a significant portion of them will be gone within months. It also means an easier time for say an Iranian or Pakistani with a grudge to start working for the same company...
2. It is much easier to ensure you are getting good background checks in the US... the Feds can audit the contractors employees backgrounds... much harder to do on foreign soil.
In the world of debate, the above would be classified an ad hominem argument.
I'm not sure I see assertions about Crichton's expertise an ad-hominem attack. The statement was that you can't form a conclusion based solely on Crichton's book; that's not ad-hominem friend... accusing Crichton of bias because he is a melon-humping oil-hater is an example of ad-hominem.
I agree that ny evidence needs to be examined on it's merits... and _one_ of the criteria for evaluating the prescriptive recommendations from an "authority" (i.e. Crichton) is their qualifications as an authority.
Below is an outline from a common critical-thinking text (Asking the Right Questions)... Evaluating the quality of the evidence (question 7) is one of the key activities in critical thinking.
1. What are the issues & conclusions?
2. What are the reasons? (question # 7)
3. What words or phrases are ambiguous?
4. What are the value conflicts and assumptions?
5. What are the descriptive assumptions?
6. Are there any fallacies in the reasoning?
7. How good is the evidence?
8. Are there rival causes?
9. Are the statistics deceptive?
10. What significant information is omitted?
"All Cisco has to do is quit beating competitors over the head with patents and other anti-competitive practices and compete off of merrit and service instead."
Perhaps you would care to elaborate on your basis for this accusation...
From my experience, Cisco has one of the most generous patent-licensing policies in the industry... As an example, look at VRRP... covered by a Cisco patent, but Cisco has agreed to let the world implement the technology in a reasonable and non-discriminatory fashion [ ref http://www.ietf.org/ietf/IPR/VRRP-CISCO ]... far from the anti-competitive slant described.
Cisco-originated patent-infringement lawsuits are normally a last-resort after they have begged the offender to stop and the damage is quite serious... for instance, witness the Huawei debacle where they literally found Cisco copyright strings throughout the Huawei binaries... hard evidence that someone took significant portions of Cisco source-code and copied it line for line.
"I think Cisco Equiptment should have hardware signatures and checksums to keep fraudulent equiptment from being used."
Cisco has already started doing that...
No doubt this is wicked-cool stuff... Your points are quite valid when we are spending most of our time fighting highly organized armies... This idea was great when the soviets were a primary threat... but in the last two engagements, we wiped out entire enemy armor units at 45mph and didn't bother slowing down:-)...
Lately we've been losing a lot of guys to 155 mortars attached to a wire... I'm interested to see what DARPA has up their sleeve for this... with all the taxes we pay, it should be a problem to fund it all =)
Slashdot Mirror
"The understretch is also leaving American children ill-equipped to compete. They usually perform poorly in international educational tests, coming behind Asian countries that spend less on education but work their children harder." [Economist article cited above] This hits the nail on the head... it is questionable to whine for more money [1] when we know that a large part of our education problems are simply a lack of student discipline. Study after study shows that children who were lazy and naturally gifted do not do as well in college as average children who worked at learning. Asians aren't really smarter as much as they work harder (which ultimately means their adults are more capable). The bottom-line is that money isn't the biggest challenge. To Obama's credit, hard work is something he is pushing as well. [1] Ok in a perfect world we could spend more money, but how big is the deficit these days and how much are we already paying in taxes???
Exactly... this is called QinLaoZhiFu, which means "Industrious Wealth". It is a cultural phrase in China that many parents teach their children. They believe that working very hard is rewarded... and this is a national concept.
[responding to an earlier comment about China's inability to innovate] Interestingly, a Communist society where national values are promoted by the central party has a stronger work-ethic and sense of teamwork than this country walking around the world insisting that everyone must adopt democracy... or else. China has plenty of problems, but it is foolish to assume they cannot innovate simply because Confucianism (which isn't even the majority religion in China) doesn't encourage it.
Buy a plane ticket and visit... don't just ride tour buses and listen to guides... talk to real Chinese... eat lunch with them. They are a remarkable people.
You seem to be neglecting the power of compound interest over the next 40 years. If she can build a spectrograph, she can probably figure out what a safe investment vehicle is.
That is one possible conclusion. Perhaps you could come up with other conclusions that might explain how both statements about Notes inline quoting could be true.
Let's go back to what I said...
- Notes is hated by many in IBM - You have not responded
- You can't drag more than one email into a folder at a time. Yes I was wrong.
- It has strange means for handling inline quoting - I have provided evidence that you are nitpicking the words of... and seem to use some sort of post-modern definition of ad-homenem.
- Notes does have a positive in it's ability to interface with Google Desktop Enterprise. You have not responded.
So after exposing your inability to think outside of your narrow opinions, you say that your continued failure to understand something else means it's automatically qualified as ad-homenem. Whatever... it's irrelevevant to the argument anyway, and you are now attempting to leverage the "Tu-quoque" fallacy... and all good students of debate know that is a dead end.More trivial nitpicking... it seems to be your favorite activity.
I really meant myopic when I said it... perhaps you can't imagine how that could apply to you. I apologize if I hurt your feelings. If it did, I'm sure it won't bother you for long; you're a very smart man and have many things to occupy your mind with.
Lotus Notes does not multiple-indent if the previous Notes respondents failed to use Lotus Notes' "internet-style quoting". Your example assumes that all respondents did. It's an absurd thing for Notes to do this, because it clearly knows where the boundaries of the previous messages were... they are shown right there on the screen before you select "Reply with Internet-Style History".
My point remains correct, regardless of your failure to comprehend the issues at hand. Oh, but you know everything, so I must be wrong if you miss the point.
So far, your statements seem to be supported by a rather myopic view of the facts.
Your immediate jump into ad-hominem attacks speaks volumes about the futility of discussing this further. I will respond only to highlight the issues that you seem to have made so many assumptions about.
As for the part of IBM they work in, it is in the technical consulting group, and are bunch of system administrators.
"Reply with Internet-Style History" is a complete joke as it is implemented very poorly in Lotus Notes. Some of these folks use this scheme; however, it does not even bother to multiple-indent emails earlier in the thread. So how are you supposed to carry on a inline-response conversation with someone who uses the standard "Internet-style" indentation found in Outlook, Thunderbird, Eudora, mutt, et al???
To be honest, I dont care whether you think I am lying about these things or not. Acerbic responses will not get you very far in the world... maybe you don't care, but believe it or not, I do. You could be a much more effective agent of change in the world than you just demonstrated.
Then I suppose IBM has "really crappy Notes admins"?? I work with IBM'ers all day long and it is notoriously hated even within IBM. Most would switch to Thunderbird or even Outlook in a heartbeat if they were not forced to use it.
Typical complaints are the bizarre user interface, which includes such gems like the inability to select more than one message when dragging into folders. Responding to email inline is a real joy as they have some strange way of handling inline quotes. The one saving grace appears to be the Google Desktop Enterprise search plugin...
Pastors do not profit from the "intense religious experience"; they are paid by contributions, but I have been in church all my life and haven't met a single person who would consider church every remotely as fun as sex... myself as an example... I frequently skip church during NFL season for football.
So in your opinion, what percentage of the population experiences this kind of religious intensity to the point that it is comparable to sex? Where is your source material, and what evidence can you provide to prove this assertion? If religious experiences are so addictive, then why is the per-capita Christian & Catholic population declining in the US?
This discussion is bordering on absurd and is spinning off topic... if you really want to discuss it, my email address is in my slashdot profile
Your argument seems to be that society should not look down on prostitutes more than we look down on those who participate in drug trials or in the active duty military.
You are presenting the evidence that some drug trial participants and some military members put their lives at greater risk than prostitutes. The implicit assumption seems to be that personal risk is the only reason for the lower social status of prostitutes.
I can't speak for the rest of society, but I consider prostitutes of lower social status because they attempt to profit from highly addictive behavior (and people who are vulnerable to this). Prostitutes are profiting from an activity that triggers much deeper in the brain's emotional center, which is the heart of many addictive behaviors. I believe that this is morally wrong, in the same way that selling highly addictive drugs is wrong.
I don't want to start an extended discussion about the morality of drugs and prostitution... this guy asked what might be a troll or an honest question... I'm not sure.
I have friends in China that I IM frequently; and I occasionally have to use Babelfish to translate english to chinese from time to time... Babelfish.altavista.com used to routinely confuse moon / month which share the same chinese monosyllable (yue).... I wonder if someone pasted the english text into a chinese transator and got this result
To the main point of the article... This article makes a really bad asumption that does not appear to be true. I am sitting in a hotel room near the location of the 2008 Olympic games and I CANNOT access either en.wikipedia.org or zh.wikipedia.org from China... therefore I find it hard to attribute the differences in the sources to Chinese government activity.
I agree with your assessment of COTS software risks, but those risks are not unique to DoD... my comments in the context of custom software or specialized embedded systems that DoD uses... and particularly the case where they might contract with a US company who subcontracts elsewhere.
Yes, in fact we can be more confident of US code. When the US Goverment subcontracts to someone in the US, there are two dynamics in our favor...
1. The US does not have kind of economic forces that encourage the kind of high turnover that is typically seen in places like India (as an example). As a former employee of an embedded-systems company, I heard all about the rampant problems that our foreign outsourcing partners had... including competitors who would wave a few more rupees at them and they immediately flee (taking our proprietary knowledge with them).
So, how does this contribute to this discussion about hidden backdoors in Government software? The problem is that higher turnover means less incentive for the contracting company to do their due diligence on the next guy... knowing that at a significant portion of them will be gone within months. It also means an easier time for say an Iranian or Pakistani with a grudge to start working for the same company...
2. It is much easier to ensure you are getting good background checks in the US... the Feds can audit the contractors employees backgrounds... much harder to do on foreign soil.
In the world of debate, the above would be classified an ad hominem argument.
I'm not sure I see assertions about Crichton's expertise an ad-hominem attack. The statement was that you can't form a conclusion based solely on Crichton's book; that's not ad-hominem friend... accusing Crichton of bias because he is a melon-humping oil-hater is an example of ad-hominem.
I agree that ny evidence needs to be examined on it's merits... and _one_ of the criteria for evaluating the prescriptive recommendations from an "authority" (i.e. Crichton) is their qualifications as an authority.
Below is an outline from a common critical-thinking text (Asking the Right Questions)... Evaluating the quality of the evidence (question 7) is one of the key activities in critical thinking.
1. What are the issues & conclusions?
2. What are the reasons? (question # 7)
3. What words or phrases are ambiguous?
4. What are the value conflicts and assumptions?
5. What are the descriptive assumptions?
6. Are there any fallacies in the reasoning?
7. How good is the evidence?
8. Are there rival causes?
9. Are the statistics deceptive?
10. What significant information is omitted?
"All Cisco has to do is quit beating competitors over the head with patents and other anti-competitive practices and compete off of merrit and service instead."
Perhaps you would care to elaborate on your basis for this accusation...
From my experience, Cisco has one of the most generous patent-licensing policies in the industry... As an example, look at VRRP... covered by a Cisco patent, but Cisco has agreed to let the world implement the technology in a reasonable and non-discriminatory fashion [ ref http://www.ietf.org/ietf/IPR/VRRP-CISCO ]... far from the anti-competitive slant described.
Cisco-originated patent-infringement lawsuits are normally a last-resort after they have begged the offender to stop and the damage is quite serious... for instance, witness the Huawei debacle where they literally found Cisco copyright strings throughout the Huawei binaries... hard evidence that someone took significant portions of Cisco source-code and copied it line for line.
"I think Cisco Equiptment should have hardware signatures and checksums to keep fraudulent equiptment from being used." Cisco has already started doing that...
I was assuming you had a clue about the requirements for PC power
Congratulations, you've just described what is commonly known as the PC power supply :)
No doubt this is wicked-cool stuff... Your points are quite valid when we are spending most of our time fighting highly organized armies... This idea was great when the soviets were a primary threat... but in the last two engagements, we wiped out entire enemy armor units at 45mph and didn't bother slowing down :-)...
Lately we've been losing a lot of guys to 155 mortars attached to a wire... I'm interested to see what DARPA has up their sleeve for this... with all the taxes we pay, it should be a problem to fund it all =)