Absolutely right! But Obama is smart (or at least clever) and knows that you buy more votes by proposing welfare for the middle class than with space programs.
That fact that you think a book that insults the intelligence of girls by assuming they can't handle math unless it's made "cute" enough is "solidly progressive" is pretty sad, but pretty much in line with most of what passes for "progressive" thought these days. The main achievement of modern feminism has been to solidify the notion that women are inferior by the constant institutional repetition of the idea that women need special help. I would hate to be a woman today, as the social constraints on what women are expected to do have only become more constraining, and yet also made worse by the fact that we now expect women to live the same meaningless workaday lives on which men have historically wasted their existence. Most women I know are miserable in their careers, and feel unfulfilled by them. Their barely conceiled resentment of their friends who have children is telling. True, some women are truly happy in the roles the feminists have insisted upon them, but shouldn't the point be that women are free to choose, without somebody always second guessing them, and assuming that their reasons for not being a mathematician are well founded, and not simply because somebody failed to jangle keys in front of their faces while cooing about how fun fractions can be? I guess I'm just not progressive enough to see it...
I didn't mean to be offensive or patronizing. I didn't mean to imply that they are especially in need of forgiveness (my experience is that it's remarkably quite the opposite), just that I'd cut anyone virtually any amount of slack after they experience combat for the good of their country. How anybody can be one minute patrolling a city while under constant threat of death, occasionally having to kill people in split second decisions, and then come back to America and stand patiently in line at the Home Depot is beyond me. At the very least, it just seems tough to go from a situation where you count on everybody, and everything matters so much, to the penny ante bullshit of everyday "civilized" life. So I can totally see how an ex marine would want to strangle the fat lazy guy on the other end of the phone line who can't be bothered to make an effort to fix his own modem problems. From my perspective, the lazy guy can't really be blamed, but from the perspective of a guy who would've died had his buddies been so half-assed, it must be damned annoying. Not to mention the fact that he put his ass on the line for these morons!
Actually, I'm an engineer. I wasn't complaining for myself: I've never had a problem with a telco, partly because when I get DSL, I throw out the stupid installation disk and set up my router myself.
I was complaining on behalf of people who have no technical knowledge of routers or the internal billing proceedures of a telco, and shouldn't be expected to. That's just empathy, not complaining, and I'm guessing it's grounds for dismissal for telco employees.
Anyway, if by "Corps" you're referring to the Marine Corps, then you should've led with that. I'll forgive virtually anything from a vet. I don't blame you for having a chip on your shoulder about lazy customers, and it sucks that after coming back from serving us, you had to have such a frustrating job. After going through what I imagine you went through, I would probably have been fired my first day on the job for going ballistic the first second a call didn't go smoothly. Honestly, an ex-Marine is probably not the person you want dealing with customer service, and I say that as a compliment to Marines. You're used to dealing with people who have a much more highly evolved sense of self-reliance than one can expect to find on the other end of a customer service line at a telephone company.
Your attitude is exactly why customer service sucks so much in technology. People in technology have no sense of proportion when it comes to customer expectations. If you can't provide internet service to somebody without having the customer read you an arcane 32 bit number in hexadecimal, perhaps there something you as a company could be doing better. Why have such high standards for the customer's knowledge? YOU'RE the one providing a technical service, perhaps the onus should be on you to do everything technically possible to make it easy. If they knew how to work this shit, you'd be hiring them. If your system is so easy to break that a customer can screw you up by leaving off their fricking apartment number, then perhaps your company should've taken a look at itself instead of blaming customers for being stupid.
I'm guessing the miserable company you worked for never missed billing a customer for a dime, did they? When it comes to billing, you'll cross reference credit report address databases and employ all the cleverness one can wring out of an MBA to figure out exactly how to never miss a receivable. But when it comes to doing your job with a deliverable, you just can't figure out how to do it without the customer reading the bloody hardware ID of the router? That's chicken shit, and the fact that you don't know it and write a rant about "this stupid customer" is very telling. In the old days you would've sent somebody out there fix his problem instead of relying on him to do your field work for you.
Whatever. Computers have been around for almost half a century. By the time aviation had been around for half a century, we went from the Wright brothers to jet aircraft. Maybe software engineering isn't really engineering. My feeling is that it's kind of the ironic reverse of what you say: computers are such predicable environments that it's feasible to even try the ad hoc seat of our pants approach that is programming, and thus software engineering has never had to mature. Windows crashing may be a pain, but it doesn't kill people or waste all that much money in the grand scheme. However, there is no reason software design can't be approached like other areas of engineering, just that nobody has the patience to do so and nobody wants to see progress slowed in the short term to pay for better progress in the long term.
Water projects are productive, cleaning up from hurricane after hurricane is a dead weight. It was a cute little argument you made, but you might as well have said "why should my tax dollars go to build roads for people who are too stupid to live somewhere other than a salt flat." Providing infrastructure is vastly different from providing disaster relief for predictable disasters, though apparently too few people remain smart enough to grasp that these days.
yeah, it's amazing the debate around alternative fuels isn't more levelheaded and scientifically based. i know all the corn-belt politicians and hippies hyping ethanol have advanced degrees in chemistry, so they certainly know better. it's almost like politics and political agendas are getting in the way of this important issue. we should check into this, because if so, al gore will certainly want to hear about it.
It was the "completely" part of it that I was stressing. Perhaps I should've used bold face... Before, it would at least *sometimes* protect small companies, in that the government would prevent larger ones from patenting the technology of the smaller company. At this point there's nothing stopping said large company from just patenting the whole portfolio of a smaller competitor, regardless of how bogus, and then litigating them to death. In America, it doesn't matter if you're right or wrong, just how much money you have to spend dragging out a legal battle of attrition. Seriouslly, I think it's time to start killing all the lawyers...
At this point, the patent process has become completely trivial, with the only hurdles and scrutiny occurring during litigation. So, this is essentially a huge gift to large corporations with deep pockets. The patent system will now completely become a game of intimidation and a dead weight on the economy. Amazing how the good parts of central government tend wither away with corruption until they become useless, whereas the bad parts of central government grow and grow.
Or it could be that it's not a real scientific competition, but one primarily designed to increase awareness and appreciation of science in young people. That also might explain why a girl won after making a $300 spectrograph with little actual innovation (people have been selling cheap spectrographs that cost hundreds of dollars for a long time based on the same principles) even though the rest of the field included folks doing fucking algebraic topology and solving open problems in math. In fact, her project was probably one of the few that the judges could even understand, though I suspect in the end her winning had more to do with the fact that "women in science" is the latest politically correct fad. That's not to say she's not brilliant and a remarkable scientist, far better than any of us. It's just that the intent of the contest is NOT to find the best young scientist. That should be obvious, and it's probably even the right way to handle it. All these kids will go to great schools and soon find that $100k is nothing. This contest is about inspiring the kids that aren't up there doing group theory in grade school. On the other hand, it probably just inspires normal kids to go into business school...
There's no way the Navy would allow active sonar all over the place. That would give away the positions of all of our subs, I would think. All an enemy sub would have to do is sit in the shadow of the sonar and listen for spurious reflections. How nice to have active sonar that doesn't give away your position! Of course, you can argue it goes both ways, but submarine warfare isn't about a fair fight. I'm sure the US is happy enough with its subs to be willing to take its chances without active sonar all over the place.
you do realize that for that to work, you'd have to be located within the small field of view of his scope, also known as "the short list of things about to get shot?"
Ok, I can see the cynical view of the Marshal plan and the space program, and I'm sure there's a great deal of truth there. But you at least have to give them credit for looking at our best interests in a creative, constructive way. Preemptive war with the USSR is probably what we would've done these days, or at least CIA funding of East German militants. And with the space race, I agree that nukes were a huge reason for it, but that only explains the booster research.
Not really on topic, but wanted to correct you on something: Germany was full of stuff we'd love to have had. We chose not to for reasons our current generations are probably unable to fathom. What the US did after WWII was historically unprecedented. We rebuilt the very countries that tried to destroy us. We paid to defend ourselves from their aggression, and then we paid again to help them repair themselves after we won.
I am aware of no such science. You may be talking about some type of politics.
Have you ever heard of the anthropic principle? Even if life is so improbable that millions of universes have come and gone without it, it only had to happen once for us to exist and question it. We, of course, would not have been there for the millions where it failed to happen, so naturally we think of ourselves as inevitable or special, depending on your beliefs. While both may lead to different conclusions, both are based on false logic. You can't make conclusions about an experiment you're only around to see because the experiment came out a certain way. So, cut the guy a break. He may well be right.
The best thing to happen to the linux community would be the linux community forgetting the idea that eventually the consumer OSes will become so bad that people will be driven to linux, and starting to work to make linux so good that people are drawn to it. And by "so good" I do NOT mean "a very good implementation of Windows circa 1998" but something actually novel and compelling.
Terrible logic, though an incredibly common lapse. As the number of people you're considering goes up, so does the amount of total time they spend doing other stuff. If the logic doesn't apply to a single person, it doesn't apply to n people, either. The fraction of your life you spend waiting for computers isn't worth thinking a second about. You spend far more time waiting in traffic, waiting for hot water to heat, etc.
The bottom line is that the fraction of wasted time stays the same no matter how many people you consider. I hate it when people try to prove a point not worth proving by considering a large population. (That's not what you were doing, it's what Steve was doing. I'm criticizing his and other's logic, not your post.) It's usually an argument used by alarmists to try to get something shutdown (ironically enough). For example, did you know that every year HUNDREDS of lives would be saved if we outlawed backyard pools? How can you let hundreds of people die?!? Well, if a hundred people die in America from something, I consider that an incredibly safe activity. Anyway, to bring it back to topic, I rather enjoy the down time I spend waiting for my PC to boot. It's like a free few minutes where nobody expects anything from you.
Overfuckingrated? Maybe it wasn't the worlds most incisive post, but come on. This moderation thing isn't supposed to be used to just take down things you disagree with.
Well, goodbye/. that was the moronic moderation that broke the camel's back. Maybe moderation shouldn't be anonymous...
You need to RTFA with a more critical eye. There's no proof that the artist was paid. My guess is that the scammer promised to pay the artist when he got his money. I agree with the original poster; this anti-scammer guy (I've actually been following him for a while) is going way too far, to the point where he's probably causing harm to people not otherwise involved. The saddest anti-scam he did was getting a scammer to get a bunch of local artists to draw beautiful copies of a map (incredibly labor intensive). I'm quite certain that some poor guy in Nigeria who wasn't scamming anyone probably put a lot of work into nothing in the hope of eventually getting paid. True, perhaps the ultimate blame is on the 419er, but this "Shiver" guy is definitely a man with an obsession and no sense of proportion.
I agree with 3. But I'm still not with you on the first two. It seems like you're saying anything they do to place ads is just an extension of their business, and not a new market. I don't think that makes sense. The ads are just a type of transaction from their perspective. Would you feel differently if they charged a set fee per search? Well, it wouldn't make much difference to them if they could get away with it. It's just a transaction to them, and whether it's an ad shown or a search paid for by the user, the important thing that makes the search market separate from the online mail market is the competitive landscape is different in each.
What are you saying? You might as well say "there's NO market for broadcast television." Of course there is a market for search. It's just that search is paid for by ads.
You're just making a petty semantic argument. When people say market, they just mean an area of competition. Just because the money comes in through ads (in common with other markets) is absolutely meaningless. Focusing on the mechanics of compensation over the facets of competition makes no sense. The bottom line is people need a search engine, and they either choose Google or Yahoo or MSN. That's a market.
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Absolutely right! But Obama is smart (or at least clever) and knows that you buy more votes by proposing welfare for the middle class than with space programs.
That fact that you think a book that insults the intelligence of girls by assuming they can't handle math unless it's made "cute" enough is "solidly progressive" is pretty sad, but pretty much in line with most of what passes for "progressive" thought these days. The main achievement of modern feminism has been to solidify the notion that women are inferior by the constant institutional repetition of the idea that women need special help. I would hate to be a woman today, as the social constraints on what women are expected to do have only become more constraining, and yet also made worse by the fact that we now expect women to live the same meaningless workaday lives on which men have historically wasted their existence. Most women I know are miserable in their careers, and feel unfulfilled by them. Their barely conceiled resentment of their friends who have children is telling. True, some women are truly happy in the roles the feminists have insisted upon them, but shouldn't the point be that women are free to choose, without somebody always second guessing them, and assuming that their reasons for not being a mathematician are well founded, and not simply because somebody failed to jangle keys in front of their faces while cooing about how fun fractions can be? I guess I'm just not progressive enough to see it...
I didn't mean to be offensive or patronizing. I didn't mean to imply that they are especially in need of forgiveness (my experience is that it's remarkably quite the opposite), just that I'd cut anyone virtually any amount of slack after they experience combat for the good of their country. How anybody can be one minute patrolling a city while under constant threat of death, occasionally having to kill people in split second decisions, and then come back to America and stand patiently in line at the Home Depot is beyond me. At the very least, it just seems tough to go from a situation where you count on everybody, and everything matters so much, to the penny ante bullshit of everyday "civilized" life. So I can totally see how an ex marine would want to strangle the fat lazy guy on the other end of the phone line who can't be bothered to make an effort to fix his own modem problems. From my perspective, the lazy guy can't really be blamed, but from the perspective of a guy who would've died had his buddies been so half-assed, it must be damned annoying. Not to mention the fact that he put his ass on the line for these morons!
Actually, I'm an engineer. I wasn't complaining for myself: I've never had a problem with a telco, partly because when I get DSL, I throw out the stupid installation disk and set up my router myself.
I was complaining on behalf of people who have no technical knowledge of routers or the internal billing proceedures of a telco, and shouldn't be expected to. That's just empathy, not complaining, and I'm guessing it's grounds for dismissal for telco employees.
Anyway, if by "Corps" you're referring to the Marine Corps, then you should've led with that. I'll forgive virtually anything from a vet. I don't blame you for having a chip on your shoulder about lazy customers, and it sucks that after coming back from serving us, you had to have such a frustrating job. After going through what I imagine you went through, I would probably have been fired my first day on the job for going ballistic the first second a call didn't go smoothly. Honestly, an ex-Marine is probably not the person you want dealing with customer service, and I say that as a compliment to Marines. You're used to dealing with people who have a much more highly evolved sense of self-reliance than one can expect to find on the other end of a customer service line at a telephone company.
Your attitude is exactly why customer service sucks so much in technology. People in technology have no sense of proportion when it comes to customer expectations. If you can't provide internet service to somebody without having the customer read you an arcane 32 bit number in hexadecimal, perhaps there something you as a company could be doing better. Why have such high standards for the customer's knowledge? YOU'RE the one providing a technical service, perhaps the onus should be on you to do everything technically possible to make it easy. If they knew how to work this shit, you'd be hiring them. If your system is so easy to break that a customer can screw you up by leaving off their fricking apartment number, then perhaps your company should've taken a look at itself instead of blaming customers for being stupid.
I'm guessing the miserable company you worked for never missed billing a customer for a dime, did they? When it comes to billing, you'll cross reference credit report address databases and employ all the cleverness one can wring out of an MBA to figure out exactly how to never miss a receivable. But when it comes to doing your job with a deliverable, you just can't figure out how to do it without the customer reading the bloody hardware ID of the router? That's chicken shit, and the fact that you don't know it and write a rant about "this stupid customer" is very telling. In the old days you would've sent somebody out there fix his problem instead of relying on him to do your field work for you.
Whatever. Computers have been around for almost half a century. By the time aviation had been around for half a century, we went from the Wright brothers to jet aircraft. Maybe software engineering isn't really engineering. My feeling is that it's kind of the ironic reverse of what you say: computers are such predicable environments that it's feasible to even try the ad hoc seat of our pants approach that is programming, and thus software engineering has never had to mature. Windows crashing may be a pain, but it doesn't kill people or waste all that much money in the grand scheme. However, there is no reason software design can't be approached like other areas of engineering, just that nobody has the patience to do so and nobody wants to see progress slowed in the short term to pay for better progress in the long term.
Water projects are productive, cleaning up from hurricane after hurricane is a dead weight. It was a cute little argument you made, but you might as well have said "why should my tax dollars go to build roads for people who are too stupid to live somewhere other than a salt flat." Providing infrastructure is vastly different from providing disaster relief for predictable disasters, though apparently too few people remain smart enough to grasp that these days.
yeah, it's amazing the debate around alternative fuels isn't more levelheaded and scientifically based. i know all the corn-belt politicians and hippies hyping ethanol have advanced degrees in chemistry, so they certainly know better. it's almost like politics and political agendas are getting in the way of this important issue. we should check into this, because if so, al gore will certainly want to hear about it.
It was the "completely" part of it that I was stressing. Perhaps I should've used bold face... Before, it would at least *sometimes* protect small companies, in that the government would prevent larger ones from patenting the technology of the smaller company. At this point there's nothing stopping said large company from just patenting the whole portfolio of a smaller competitor, regardless of how bogus, and then litigating them to death. In America, it doesn't matter if you're right or wrong, just how much money you have to spend dragging out a legal battle of attrition. Seriouslly, I think it's time to start killing all the lawyers...
At this point, the patent process has become completely trivial, with the only hurdles and scrutiny occurring during litigation. So, this is essentially a huge gift to large corporations with deep pockets. The patent system will now completely become a game of intimidation and a dead weight on the economy. Amazing how the good parts of central government tend wither away with corruption until they become useless, whereas the bad parts of central government grow and grow.
If they go ahead with this, perhaps GM can make the cup holders.
Or it could be that it's not a real scientific competition, but one primarily designed to increase awareness and appreciation of science in young people. That also might explain why a girl won after making a $300 spectrograph with little actual innovation (people have been selling cheap spectrographs that cost hundreds of dollars for a long time based on the same principles) even though the rest of the field included folks doing fucking algebraic topology and solving open problems in math. In fact, her project was probably one of the few that the judges could even understand, though I suspect in the end her winning had more to do with the fact that "women in science" is the latest politically correct fad. That's not to say she's not brilliant and a remarkable scientist, far better than any of us. It's just that the intent of the contest is NOT to find the best young scientist. That should be obvious, and it's probably even the right way to handle it. All these kids will go to great schools and soon find that $100k is nothing. This contest is about inspiring the kids that aren't up there doing group theory in grade school. On the other hand, it probably just inspires normal kids to go into business school...
There's no way the Navy would allow active sonar all over the place. That would give away the positions of all of our subs, I would think. All an enemy sub would have to do is sit in the shadow of the sonar and listen for spurious reflections. How nice to have active sonar that doesn't give away your position! Of course, you can argue it goes both ways, but submarine warfare isn't about a fair fight. I'm sure the US is happy enough with its subs to be willing to take its chances without active sonar all over the place.
you do realize that for that to work, you'd have to be located within the small field of view of his scope, also known as "the short list of things about to get shot?"
Ok, I can see the cynical view of the Marshal plan and the space program, and I'm sure there's a great deal of truth there. But you at least have to give them credit for looking at our best interests in a creative, constructive way. Preemptive war with the USSR is probably what we would've done these days, or at least CIA funding of East German militants. And with the space race, I agree that nukes were a huge reason for it, but that only explains the booster research.
Not really on topic, but wanted to correct you on something: Germany was full of stuff we'd love to have had. We chose not to for reasons our current generations are probably unable to fathom. What the US did after WWII was historically unprecedented. We rebuilt the very countries that tried to destroy us. We paid to defend ourselves from their aggression, and then we paid again to help them repair themselves after we won.
Have you ever heard of the anthropic principle? Even if life is so improbable that millions of universes have come and gone without it, it only had to happen once for us to exist and question it. We, of course, would not have been there for the millions where it failed to happen, so naturally we think of ourselves as inevitable or special, depending on your beliefs. While both may lead to different conclusions, both are based on false logic. You can't make conclusions about an experiment you're only around to see because the experiment came out a certain way. So, cut the guy a break. He may well be right.
The best thing to happen to the linux community would be the linux community forgetting the idea that eventually the consumer OSes will become so bad that people will be driven to linux, and starting to work to make linux so good that people are drawn to it. And by "so good" I do NOT mean "a very good implementation of Windows circa 1998" but something actually novel and compelling.
What makes you think it was a man asking a woman for a sandwich? Ok, yeah, we all know it was.
Well, at least my post said SOMETHING. Could you inform me of exactly why saving a second of my life once every few days is worth jack?
The bottom line is that the fraction of wasted time stays the same no matter how many people you consider. I hate it when people try to prove a point not worth proving by considering a large population. (That's not what you were doing, it's what Steve was doing. I'm criticizing his and other's logic, not your post.) It's usually an argument used by alarmists to try to get something shutdown (ironically enough). For example, did you know that every year HUNDREDS of lives would be saved if we outlawed backyard pools? How can you let hundreds of people die?!? Well, if a hundred people die in America from something, I consider that an incredibly safe activity. Anyway, to bring it back to topic, I rather enjoy the down time I spend waiting for my PC to boot. It's like a free few minutes where nobody expects anything from you.
Well, goodbye /. that was the moronic moderation that broke the camel's back. Maybe moderation shouldn't be anonymous...
You need to RTFA with a more critical eye. There's no proof that the artist was paid. My guess is that the scammer promised to pay the artist when he got his money. I agree with the original poster; this anti-scammer guy (I've actually been following him for a while) is going way too far, to the point where he's probably causing harm to people not otherwise involved. The saddest anti-scam he did was getting a scammer to get a bunch of local artists to draw beautiful copies of a map (incredibly labor intensive). I'm quite certain that some poor guy in Nigeria who wasn't scamming anyone probably put a lot of work into nothing in the hope of eventually getting paid. True, perhaps the ultimate blame is on the 419er, but this "Shiver" guy is definitely a man with an obsession and no sense of proportion.
I agree with 3. But I'm still not with you on the first two. It seems like you're saying anything they do to place ads is just an extension of their business, and not a new market. I don't think that makes sense. The ads are just a type of transaction from their perspective. Would you feel differently if they charged a set fee per search? Well, it wouldn't make much difference to them if they could get away with it. It's just a transaction to them, and whether it's an ad shown or a search paid for by the user, the important thing that makes the search market separate from the online mail market is the competitive landscape is different in each.
You're just making a petty semantic argument. When people say market, they just mean an area of competition. Just because the money comes in through ads (in common with other markets) is absolutely meaningless. Focusing on the mechanics of compensation over the facets of competition makes no sense. The bottom line is people need a search engine, and they either choose Google or Yahoo or MSN. That's a market.