Oh, and "writing from scratch" is a sure way to insecure sites. As soon as you need user registration it is just not worth taking the risk of SQL injection or cross site scripting bugs. Which you will inevitably make.
Honestly, I cannot read that and not feel complete despair. You are either a programmer or you are not. If you cannot create one form on your own without creating security holes you should have your fingers glued together for your own good. Please choose another language to embarrass.
I can't help but to wonder where companies are finding all of the idiot web developers. In my experience working as a web developer and hiring/training them, there are two types of people who get into the field: wanna-be java programmers who didn't get the job they wanted and ended up in web, and designer types who think they can program. Futhermore, a lot of manager types also have no idea that web programming involves anything more than playing with images and colors.
Well, you might also mention that Islam had a large role in exterminating Greek civilization in Asia Minor and throughout the Mediterranean. The end of the (Greek) Eastern Roman Empire was almost entirely due to centuries of depredation by Islamic armies, and was finally defeated in the 15th century by the Turks.
Funny that you should mention Vernor Vinge. Read his story True Names (published years before), then read Neuromancer again. Neuromancer seems like a bit of a rip off.
"Yet, I get searched "randomly" quite often, I suspect because my last name looks slightly arabic."
I'm not sure what your exact situation is, but military personnel do occasionally try to sneak stuff like live rounds and the odd grenade onto aircraft (not to use them, but rather as souvenirs from a trip to the range or whatever) and perhaps that could be a factor. Personally, I couldn't imagine any officers that I ever knew doing that. Non-commissioned members are a different matter. Anytime I was at the range, it was standard to line us up at the end of the day and make us individually swear in great detail that we hadn't stolen any ammo.
I would prefer what you described over a system that does pointless stuff like searching old WASP ladies simply to placate some white guy's conscience.
Colleges are primarily technical/vocational schools.
If you want to become a firefighter, travel agent, surveyer, etc you would go to a college.
If you want to study english lit. or finance, you go from high school to university...except in Quebec (just to make it confusing), where everyone goes to college (called CEGEP) after high school, and then those who are in the pre-university stream go on to another three years of school in university. Pre-university people spend two years in CEGEP, whereas vocational people spend three years there.
One view is that universities are where the academic "elite" go. The other view is that colleges are where the people who want useful jobs and useful job training go.
What did the Byzantine Empire have to offer at the same time besides eye-gouging, hopelessly complex laws and a big friggin' wall?
Well, Justinian's revision of the roman legal system formed the basis of European jurisprudence. It had a professional, disciplined civil service. Really impressive art & architecture (although I've never been big on mosaics personally). It was a repository of Greek learning. Other stuff I probably can't think of.
One thing that Western Europe, the Byzantine Empire and the Arabs had in common though was that they were all some blood-thirsty, war-mongering sons of bitches.
Agreed. Plus, the eye-gouging stuff was not very nice.
The Arab world was the cornerstone of world civilization in the Middle Ages
The Arabs were certainly more civilized than most of Western Europe and came up with some advances on their own, but the cornerstone was actually the Byzantine Empire, i.e. the Roman Empire in the East, which lasted until the 15th century. That was the source of the renaissance when it was finally snuffed out by the Muslims and all of the scholars fled to the west.
I dunno, I can sympathize with that sentiment. Sometimes it's better to build on something you already know, rather than start over at the bottom learning what might seem to be yet another flavour of the month language.
Actually you're not too far off. The little ice age which wiped out the Greenlanders is thought to have been caused indirectly by the black plague. Many people died, including large numbers of farmers. Much of the land in that had been under cultivation went back to being forest, which pulled more CO2 out of the atmosphere. Europe, at least, became cooler.
According to the theory, the other two "little ice ages" in the last 2'000 years had the same sort of causes: the fall of the roman empire and a series of plagues in the third to the sixth centuries; and the reduction of the population of the Americas from 50 million to 5 million after the Europeans arrived.
Source: The Economist, dec 20th 2003.
One of the main reasons that approaches like social engineering work is because of the overwhelming emphasis a lot of companies put on "customer service".
I worked for several years in corporate security (good money/awful job), and it was the cardinal sin to piss someone off. On one occasion, a white guy showed up on a weekend with a pass card with a Vietnamese woman's name on it that wasn't cleared for access to the floor he wanted to get onto, which was the executive floor of a bank nonetheless.
The ten minutes it took to verify this guy's identity were the cause of a major spat between him (he turned out to be a VP of some sort) and my employer (the building management) that took days to blow over.
Some of my colleagues would simply give in if someone was pushy enough. No one wants to be the person who said "No" to the wrong person, no matter what the circumstances.
To make points short for this post, the US is the sole reason why the US is hated by many parts of the world. The UK is the sole reason why the Middle East is divided up as it currently is by religious and ethnic based borders.
I'm not sure that I can agree with you on this. It's hard to know exactly what the real opinions are in such a large, unstable and heterogeneous population which is the Middle East. I remember that when the US became involved in Somalia, Aidid was able to mobilize mass support and outrage against the US by claiming that the Americans were there to force muslim Somalis to become Christian. Ignorance isn't all one way.
The 'terrorist' groups are simply attacking the US and the UK because of the US and UK's military and economic support of Israel and other political and military involvement in the Middle East (i.e. US support of Iraq in the 1970's and early 1980's and the true political history and US involvement in Iran).
This may be true to a certain extent, but don't underestimate how unstable most middle-eastern countries are (due to a large degree by the demographics changes taking place there). It general, I would simply assume that any power that gets involved in the ME will be attacked at some time or another, because some splinter of a faction of a radical ideology will find a reason to do so.
The attacks on the World Trade Center buildings during both US presidential administrations, the attack on the USS Cole, and Pentagon were nothing more than symbolic. The US has not had one single attack on its soil since then because there is no general terrorism threat to the US and there never was one.
I'm sorry, but I find both of those statements simply unconscionable.
And although India and Pakistan have historically been back-and-forth over Kashmir, why haven't Al Qaeda attacked India like they did the US? Because Al Qaeda is not anti-democracy, but anti-US and anti-UK foreign policy.
I might have missed something further up the node, so I'm not sure if you are interested in addressing the motivations of Al Qaeda exclusively, or if attacks by other similar and probably related groups qualify, but India has been subject to constant provocation by Islamic terrorist groups, including a daylight attack on the Indian parliament in 2001. And, yes, I know that the radical Hindus can be jerks too.
Because Al Qaeda is not anti-democracy, but anti-US and anti-UK foreign policy.
I'm not sure that a lot of the AlQaeda guys are very deep thinkers who are pissed off that they don't have a spot on the McLaughlin Group, so much as angry Westerner-haters who want to kill a lot of people, but hey I could be wrong. But what is true is that a deep feeling of resentment of the success and power of the West is behind a lot of their motivation. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, just that it is something more visceral and racist than what I think you are describing.
If the Islamic people learned to stop fighting everyone including themselves, banded together and worked as a single homogeneous union, something akin to the EU the world would be a much different and possibly better place.
"If my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a wagon."
Pre-WW1 Turkey (which is what you are essentially describing) and Pan-Arab nationalism (in the '60's? '70's?) were failures for good reasons: the ME has simply become too unstable to make this kind of an approach work. If it worked would it make the world better off? Maybe. I'm not sure that bigger is always better in geo-politics. And there's no way that it would resemble the EU (for better or for worse).
Do you believe Al Qaeda will start attacking China? Unless China gets involved in the Middle East and Israel, then the answer is no.
China has had it's own internal struggle against Islamic terrorists, e.g. in the Uighur region, but it hasn't been well-publicized.
So, where are the links to those "many" discussions that you cited?
As for the rest of what you have written:
I am not an American, nor have I ever lived in the US. I have never worked for an American company. No, I don't own an SUV or a car. Not that any of this has any bearing on what I have previously said.
If you hate Americans because of some inferiority complex, I can't help you. If you can't see the good that the Americans have done in the world (and no, it has not *all* been good), I can't help you. If you are racist against white people and have a "hate on" for them, I can't help you.
But fuck off and get your own job.
There are plenty of discussions where the general theme is how backwards and close-minded and racist and homophobic etc. the rest of the population is, whereas Slashdotters are Gandhi reincarnated.
Okay, show me the links to those discussions, because I sure haven't seen them.
The only reason they had the opportunity to use that 'ingenuity' is because they were born in the right country.
Yes, that's right: they were born in the country that invested its tax dollars in R&D.
Which brings me back to my original point - which you never answered - Why should Americans be happy to see that investment foolishly given away to the third world, merely to enrich a very small elite in their own country?
It's amazing how people on this site, who are supposedly progressive and fair and open-minded, suddenly become greedy and nationalistic when their cosy existence is under threat.
1. I've never seen a claim anywhere that slashdotters are progressive, fair or open-minded.
2. Of course people get "greedy and nationalistic" when they see the elites in their country shipping off jobs to the third world with carefree abandon, esp. as many of those jobs were created through American ingenuity and American tax dollars. Are you new to the human race or something?
I used to buy into the "let's get people into space and great stuff will happen" point of view fuelled by a heavy addiction to sci-fi, but eventually I came to see manned space travel as pretty pointless. I really don't think that there is anything out there that is really worth the expense of finding , extracting and hauling it back to Earth (from a commercial point of view), and I don't think that there is any science that could not and should not eventually be done with robots.
Why robots? For one, manned space missions cost many times more than unmanned ones. Another reason is that I don't think that it's worth risking even one human life to find amoeba on Mars or any other place in the solar system.
I also don't think that we'll ever colonise space/other planets/etc. Earth is where humans evolved, and we'll never find a place as well suited for human life.
I figure that instead of spending huge sums of money creating white elephants like the Int'l Space Station where not much real science is done anyway, we should put the money into developing the technologies that do accomplish stuff: powerful freaking telescopes, smarter and more capable robots, and other things I can't think of right now.
I understand your feelings about rounding the horn of Africa, but remember that when early navigators did that stuff, it was because the knew that the markets of the Far East were out there.
In summary: A larger market. Cheaper consumer goods. More specialized labor. Better Economic Growth. There are detriments, namely the loss of jobs you mentioned. But the alternative is stagnation.
These are all great arguments, and I am familiar with the Economist's point of view on this topic, especially it's views on citizenship & labour (the Economist thinks mobile labour pools are more desirable than citizens - see it's article on the illegal migrants drowned in England from Feb 12th 2004), but the problem is that it is never a choice between one extreme and another.
The alternatives, I think, are not unconditionally free markets or stagnation, but usually a combination of open markets and reasonable government restrictions that prevent life from becoming hellish for non-rich citizens. That's what many would consider to be a responsible or good society. A too-unrestricted economy was where the US was headed at the end of the 19th century, until the US government under Teddy Roosevelt stepped in. I'm not sure how many people would like a return to the era of so-called "robber barons".
Economics is nice at attempting to describe how markets work (and it occasionally gets it right), but it provides no insight into what people really want out of life.
France, e.g. might have sucky growth compared to other countries, but guess what? People still prefer living there to living in, say, the U.S., because there are things that they value more than money. Or to be more precise, they are willing to "pay" a certain amount - in terms of lost growth - for things that have no dollar-amount attached to them but still provide value.
The Europeans seem to generally have the opinion that their governments are not there to create free markets full stop, or create some perfectly efficient world economy. Their governments are there to look out for them, and make the choices that are in their best interests, and a certain amount of market freedom is apart of that. But making the average European compete in a huge global labour pool with the average Indian or Chinese worker isn't.
btw, you say:
You advocate protectionism, which the long-term effects can be disastrous. Again, please take a look at the economic performance of Europe
In fact, most of the difference in performance between the US and Europe has to do with the fact that Americans simply work more hours, and not protectionism. Not everyone wants to work themselves to death for the sake of the doctrine of "efficient markets".
Look, while I agree that "this could never happen in the US or the UK" is an overstatement to be generous, but to get to the crux of the matter, there is no denying that India rates really rather high on corruption indexes (roughly on a par with Russia), and that western states rate very low.
The fact that "opportunities to commit fraud exist everywhere" is true; there is no place in the world where anyone can really guarantee that you won't get cheated/screwed over/defrauded. But if you think that your chances in Nigeria are the same as those in Finland, well, good luck.
Speaking of standards, you should avoid using the short open tags in php. You'll find that when you switch to XHTML that php will get confused between the xml markup and the php code.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, and "writing from scratch" is a sure way to insecure sites. As soon as you need user registration it is just not worth taking the risk of SQL injection or cross site scripting bugs. Which you will inevitably make.
Honestly, I cannot read that and not feel complete despair. You are either a programmer or you are not. If you cannot create one form on your own without creating security holes you should have your fingers glued together for your own good. Please choose another language to embarrass.
Why virtual servers? If you are going to run multiple services on one machine (and that's fine if it can handle the load) just do it.
PCI compliance would require it.
Don't you get a swollen head when you walk amongst dullards?
No. I just get tired.
Well, you might also mention that Islam had a large role in exterminating Greek civilization in Asia Minor and throughout the Mediterranean. The end of the (Greek) Eastern Roman Empire was almost entirely due to centuries of depredation by Islamic armies, and was finally defeated in the 15th century by the Turks.
Funny that you should mention Vernor Vinge. Read his story True Names (published years before), then read Neuromancer again. Neuromancer seems like a bit of a rip off.
20 years in management before you started programming? Well done, but how did that happen?
"Yet, I get searched "randomly" quite often, I suspect because my last name looks slightly arabic."
I'm not sure what your exact situation is, but military personnel do occasionally try to sneak stuff like live rounds and the odd grenade onto aircraft (not to use them, but rather as souvenirs from a trip to the range or whatever) and perhaps that could be a factor. Personally, I couldn't imagine any officers that I ever knew doing that. Non-commissioned members are a different matter. Anytime I was at the range, it was standard to line us up at the end of the day and make us individually swear in great detail that we hadn't stolen any ammo.
Let me know when 19 geriatric patients hijack a bunch of airplanes and kill thousands of people with them.
You say all this stuff like it's a bad thing.
I would prefer what you described over a system that does pointless stuff like searching old WASP ladies simply to placate some white guy's conscience.
Come on, the manual in Oracle is 584 Megs of pdfs. You could give him at least a little clue.
Like "start with the one titled 'Database Concepts'", e.g.
Colleges are primarily technical/vocational schools.
If you want to become a firefighter, travel agent, surveyer, etc you would go to a college.
If you want to study english lit. or finance, you go from high school to university...except in Quebec (just to make it confusing), where everyone goes to college (called CEGEP) after high school, and then those who are in the pre-university stream go on to another three years of school in university. Pre-university people spend two years in CEGEP, whereas vocational people spend three years there.
One view is that universities are where the academic "elite" go. The other view is that colleges are where the people who want useful jobs and useful job training go.
What did the Byzantine Empire have to offer at the same time besides eye-gouging, hopelessly complex laws and a big friggin' wall?
Well, Justinian's revision of the roman legal system formed the basis of European jurisprudence. It had a professional, disciplined civil service. Really impressive art & architecture (although I've never been big on mosaics personally). It was a repository of Greek learning. Other stuff I probably can't think of.
One thing that Western Europe, the Byzantine Empire and the Arabs had in common though was that they were all some blood-thirsty, war-mongering sons of bitches.
Agreed. Plus, the eye-gouging stuff was not very nice.
The Arab world was the cornerstone of world civilization in the Middle Ages
The Arabs were certainly more civilized than most of Western Europe and came up with some advances on their own, but the cornerstone was actually the Byzantine Empire, i.e. the Roman Empire in the East, which lasted until the 15th century. That was the source of the renaissance when it was finally snuffed out by the Muslims and all of the scholars fled to the west.
I dunno, I can sympathize with that sentiment. Sometimes it's better to build on something you already know, rather than start over at the bottom learning what might seem to be yet another flavour of the month language.
Actually you're not too far off. The little ice age which wiped out the Greenlanders is thought to have been caused indirectly by the black plague. Many people died, including large numbers of farmers. Much of the land in that had been under cultivation went back to being forest, which pulled more CO2 out of the atmosphere. Europe, at least, became cooler.
According to the theory, the other two "little ice ages" in the last 2'000 years had the same sort of causes: the fall of the roman empire and a series of plagues in the third to the sixth centuries; and the reduction of the population of the Americas from 50 million to 5 million after the Europeans arrived.
Source: The Economist, dec 20th 2003.
One of the main reasons that approaches like social engineering work is because of the overwhelming emphasis a lot of companies put on "customer service".
I worked for several years in corporate security (good money/awful job), and it was the cardinal sin to piss someone off. On one occasion, a white guy showed up on a weekend with a pass card with a Vietnamese woman's name on it that wasn't cleared for access to the floor he wanted to get onto, which was the executive floor of a bank nonetheless.
The ten minutes it took to verify this guy's identity were the cause of a major spat between him (he turned out to be a VP of some sort) and my employer (the building management) that took days to blow over.
Some of my colleagues would simply give in if someone was pushy enough. No one wants to be the person who said "No" to the wrong person, no matter what the circumstances.
To make points short for this post, the US is the sole reason why the US is hated by many parts of the world. The UK is the sole reason why the Middle East is divided up as it currently is by religious and ethnic based borders.
I'm not sure that I can agree with you on this. It's hard to know exactly what the real opinions are in such a large, unstable and heterogeneous population which is the Middle East. I remember that when the US became involved in Somalia, Aidid was able to mobilize mass support and outrage against the US by claiming that the Americans were there to force muslim Somalis to become Christian. Ignorance isn't all one way.
The 'terrorist' groups are simply attacking the US and the UK because of the US and UK's military and economic support of Israel and other political and military involvement in the Middle East (i.e. US support of Iraq in the 1970's and early 1980's and the true political history and US involvement in Iran).
This may be true to a certain extent, but don't underestimate how unstable most middle-eastern countries are (due to a large degree by the demographics changes taking place there). It general, I would simply assume that any power that gets involved in the ME will be attacked at some time or another, because some splinter of a faction of a radical ideology will find a reason to do so.
The attacks on the World Trade Center buildings during both US presidential administrations, the attack on the USS Cole, and Pentagon were nothing more than symbolic. The US has not had one single attack on its soil since then because there is no general terrorism threat to the US and there never was one.
I'm sorry, but I find both of those statements simply unconscionable.
And although India and Pakistan have historically been back-and-forth over Kashmir, why haven't Al Qaeda attacked India like they did the US? Because Al Qaeda is not anti-democracy, but anti-US and anti-UK foreign policy.
I might have missed something further up the node, so I'm not sure if you are interested in addressing the motivations of Al Qaeda exclusively, or if attacks by other similar and probably related groups qualify, but India has been subject to constant provocation by Islamic terrorist groups, including a daylight attack on the Indian parliament in 2001. And, yes, I know that the radical Hindus can be jerks too.
Because Al Qaeda is not anti-democracy, but anti-US and anti-UK foreign policy.
I'm not sure that a lot of the AlQaeda guys are very deep thinkers who are pissed off that they don't have a spot on the McLaughlin Group, so much as angry Westerner-haters who want to kill a lot of people, but hey I could be wrong. But what is true is that a deep feeling of resentment of the success and power of the West is behind a lot of their motivation. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, just that it is something more visceral and racist than what I think you are describing.
If the Islamic people learned to stop fighting everyone including themselves, banded together and worked as a single homogeneous union, something akin to the EU the world would be a much different and possibly better place.
"If my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a wagon." Pre-WW1 Turkey (which is what you are essentially describing) and Pan-Arab nationalism (in the '60's? '70's?) were failures for good reasons: the ME has simply become too unstable to make this kind of an approach work. If it worked would it make the world better off? Maybe. I'm not sure that bigger is always better in geo-politics. And there's no way that it would resemble the EU (for better or for worse).
Do you believe Al Qaeda will start attacking China? Unless China gets involved in the Middle East and Israel, then the answer is no.
China has had it's own internal struggle against Islamic terrorists, e.g. in the Uighur region, but it hasn't been well-publicized.
So, where are the links to those "many" discussions that you cited?
As for the rest of what you have written:
I am not an American, nor have I ever lived in the US. I have never worked for an American company. No, I don't own an SUV or a car. Not that any of this has any bearing on what I have previously said.
If you hate Americans because of some inferiority complex, I can't help you. If you can't see the good that the Americans have done in the world (and no, it has not *all* been good), I can't help you. If you are racist against white people and have a "hate on" for them, I can't help you.
But fuck off and get your own job.
There are plenty of discussions where the general theme is how backwards and close-minded and racist and homophobic etc. the rest of the population is, whereas Slashdotters are Gandhi reincarnated.
Okay, show me the links to those discussions, because I sure haven't seen them.
The only reason they had the opportunity to use that 'ingenuity' is because they were born in the right country.
Yes, that's right: they were born in the country that invested its tax dollars in R&D.
Which brings me back to my original point - which you never answered - Why should Americans be happy to see that investment foolishly given away to the third world, merely to enrich a very small elite in their own country?
It's amazing how people on this site, who are supposedly progressive and fair and open-minded, suddenly become greedy and nationalistic when their cosy existence is under threat.
1. I've never seen a claim anywhere that slashdotters are progressive, fair or open-minded.
2. Of course people get "greedy and nationalistic" when they see the elites in their country shipping off jobs to the third world with carefree abandon, esp. as many of those jobs were created through American ingenuity and American tax dollars. Are you new to the human race or something?
I used to buy into the "let's get people into space and great stuff will happen" point of view fuelled by a heavy addiction to sci-fi, but eventually I came to see manned space travel as pretty pointless. I really don't think that there is anything out there that is really worth the expense of finding , extracting and hauling it back to Earth (from a commercial point of view), and I don't think that there is any science that could not and should not eventually be done with robots.
Why robots? For one, manned space missions cost many times more than unmanned ones. Another reason is that I don't think that it's worth risking even one human life to find amoeba on Mars or any other place in the solar system.
I also don't think that we'll ever colonise space/other planets/etc. Earth is where humans evolved, and we'll never find a place as well suited for human life.
I figure that instead of spending huge sums of money creating white elephants like the Int'l Space Station where not much real science is done anyway, we should put the money into developing the technologies that do accomplish stuff: powerful freaking telescopes, smarter and more capable robots, and other things I can't think of right now.
I understand your feelings about rounding the horn of Africa, but remember that when early navigators did that stuff, it was because the knew that the markets of the Far East were out there.
In summary: A larger market. Cheaper consumer goods. More specialized labor. Better Economic Growth. There are detriments, namely the loss of jobs you mentioned. But the alternative is stagnation.
These are all great arguments, and I am familiar with the Economist's point of view on this topic, especially it's views on citizenship & labour (the Economist thinks mobile labour pools are more desirable than citizens - see it's article on the illegal migrants drowned in England from Feb 12th 2004), but the problem is that it is never a choice between one extreme and another.
The alternatives, I think, are not unconditionally free markets or stagnation, but usually a combination of open markets and reasonable government restrictions that prevent life from becoming hellish for non-rich citizens. That's what many would consider to be a responsible or good society. A too-unrestricted economy was where the US was headed at the end of the 19th century, until the US government under Teddy Roosevelt stepped in. I'm not sure how many people would like a return to the era of so-called "robber barons".
Economics is nice at attempting to describe how markets work (and it occasionally gets it right), but it provides no insight into what people really want out of life.
France, e.g. might have sucky growth compared to other countries, but guess what? People still prefer living there to living in, say, the U.S., because there are things that they value more than money. Or to be more precise, they are willing to "pay" a certain amount - in terms of lost growth - for things that have no dollar-amount attached to them but still provide value.
The Europeans seem to generally have the opinion that their governments are not there to create free markets full stop, or create some perfectly efficient world economy. Their governments are there to look out for them, and make the choices that are in their best interests, and a certain amount of market freedom is apart of that. But making the average European compete in a huge global labour pool with the average Indian or Chinese worker isn't.
btw, you say: You advocate protectionism, which the long-term effects can be disastrous. Again, please take a look at the economic performance of Europe
In fact, most of the difference in performance between the US and Europe has to do with the fact that Americans simply work more hours, and not protectionism. Not everyone wants to work themselves to death for the sake of the doctrine of "efficient markets".
Look, while I agree that "this could never happen in the US or the UK" is an overstatement to be generous, but to get to the crux of the matter, there is no denying that India rates really rather high on corruption indexes (roughly on a par with Russia), and that western states rate very low.
The fact that "opportunities to commit fraud exist everywhere" is true; there is no place in the world where anyone can really guarantee that you won't get cheated/screwed over/defrauded. But if you think that your chances in Nigeria are the same as those in Finland, well, good luck.
Speaking of standards, you should avoid using the short open tags in php. You'll find that when you switch to XHTML that php will get confused between the xml markup and the php code.