The claims that people don't want to talk to scientists because they are "smarter" may reflect another problem - simple arrogance.
It's extraordinarily difficult to be interested in something, to in fact devote your life to something, that is completely outside the realm of what most people are interested in or find relevant. It's difficult to make small talk when your mind is full of astrophysics or whatnot. It's even more difficult when people consider your pursuits to be lacking in merit or pretentious. Oftentimes this leads to a lonely life full of resentment, and this arrogant attitude you mention.
Given the choice between self-perception as superior and self-perception as a failure, most everybody will choose the former, especially when the only reason they would be deemed the latter is because they chose to be interested in something most people don't, or more often than not can't, understand. The talents valued most in this society are not individual pursuits, they're society-generated traits like popularity, wealth, confidence and the like.
"One chooses dialectics only when one has no other means... it can only be self-defense for those who no longer have other weapons." -- Nietzsche
This isn't debate club. Pointing out the spite in my argument doesn't obscure the truth about your murdering crook friends in DC. The only people worse than them are the people who stick up for them, who do so even though they're being screwed over just like all the rest of us. You're a fool.
Ah, but you neglect the distinction between who is going to pay for it and who was supposed to profit from it.
Exactly right. Hussein overthrown, friendly government installed, Haliburton cleans up mess, US military keeps the peace, total cost to US taxpayers astronomical.
Once the dust clears, friendly government sells drilling rights to US oil companies (you think the Bushes have a piece of one?), who patiently wait for the dust to clear to jump in and make astronomical profits.
For that kind of money I might consider creating fantastic tales of weapons of "mass destruction", "mushroom clouds," secret Nigerian uranium and the like. These guys belong in jail, all of them. Mothers are losing children so these bastards can get rich.
My impression is that the Bush family is the most corrupt family every to have political power in the United States. These are people who believe that they are more than 100% right, and that other people don't matter.
I think you overestimate the influence of morality. The interest of this family (and their party) has little to do with right and wrong. Despite our president's delusions that the voices in his head are Jesus Christ telling him what to do, that's really not the point.
At some point (hint RR), the federal government shifted from being a organization serving the needs of its citizens into being a multitrillion dollar business. The people running things, both Rep and Dem, are very wealthy and in many instances, particularly in the White House, are ex-CEOs. They are making national decisions based on profit margin, not for us, but for themselves.
For example, it's much cheaper to drill Iraqi oil fields than it is to drill offshore in the Gulf of Mexico. The oil reserves in this country are going to be depleted sometime in the near future and the Bushes, and all their cronies, understand full well they will be out of the oil business if they don't position themselves within the Middle East, which is where we'll squeeze the last drop of crude out of this rock we live on.
This administration has made certain individuals in this country extraordinarily wealthy. There is no way in hell that the people making so much money at taxpayer expense would give that up to something as fickle as a general election. Thankfully, someone's got an eye on them.
Careful with stereotype. They can be turned right around and shoved down your piehole as your are revealed to be an ignorant ideologue.
NINEDENINE: Ah, good. New acquisitions. You are a protocol droid, are you not?
THREEPIO: I am See-Threepio, human-cy...
NINEDENINE: Yes or no will do.
THREEPIO: Oh. Well, yes.
NINEDENINE: How many languages do you speak?
THREEPIO: I am fluent in over six million forms of communication, and can readily...
Excellent, can you translate what that guy just said? You'd think commenting on a literacy topic would encourage people to check their spelling and grammar, but no.
Reading and writing are no longer considered core competencies. Math, too. And of course, science. Being smart is no longer considered important and it's never been cool. What is important to our nation's youth?
What I get out of it: don't outsource IT to a firm that doesn't lock out former employees
Especially a disgruntled former admin in charge of security who you just put on the unemployment line. However, this guy had pocketed an admin account SecurID card so you can't fault them entirely.
There are seemingly few companies out there who have termination procedures as thorough as new hire procedures. There are even fewer who can lock out someone who had root. Moral of the story... if you're going to dump your IT staff and outsource, you'd better provide some compensation to your departed admin(s).
Half the time you have to disable outgoing email scanning or you just cannot send email, period.
You remind me of a nightmare situation... I installed a SMTP server at the corp's perimeter without issue, only to find certain users (including the CEO of course) were getting "relay denied" errors. It took me weeks to figure out that it was one of these crappy AV programs working as a transparent proxy on the client side, one that was unable to speak SSL/TLS.
The major problem was that the software confused the mail client, which would report "relay denied". The AV program wouldn't cop to being encryption-illiterate. It just quietly failed. On the server side, I could see their clients initiate the connection, then close it without sending the envelope. The only way to make it stop was to kill the AV process completely. Like you said, someone who just forked down bills for mail protection isn't too pleased.
As I point out, on a day to day basis most people don't need a federally accepted ID card. It's cheaper for the states to tell people who need a federal ID card to just get a passport (which about 25% of Americans already have.)
Passports should be the most commonly-used ID anyway. They are national and are more difficult to forge. However, I actually was told at a bank once that a passport wasn't suitable as ID and I suspect many people don't even know what one looks like, probably because many people don't bother to leave the country.
This Real ID thing would be great if it included some new numeric means of identification that wasn't a social security number. It would be nice if one existede that you couldn't fish out of someone's trash can, get from a hall of records, or pay some web swine $39.95 to go find for you.
Re:spam is dead, long live spam
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Frankly, cocaine isn't even really that bad. In some ways it is like marijuana. Many, many, people consume it casually and infrequently and you would never know it. I'm not saying it is a good idea to use cocaine, but the idea that cocaine has some megical ability to ruin lives just by its mere pesence is a myth.
Well, it almost killed me. It did kill two people I know off the top of my head. And countless others I've spent time with are doing serious jail time, like the kind with "life" at the end of it. So watch what you say.
Cocaine affects different people differently, like most drugs, both illicit and otherwise. Some people don't even feel it. But more importantly, the craving reaction; while you may have the occasional thought from time to time it might be fun to do, I feel about cocaine the way I feel when my head's stuck under water and I need some air. People like you have fun. People like me go insane, go to jail or die a miserable death. Such is life.
The difference between individuals' reaction apparently has something to do with the brain's inborn ability to regulate neurotransmitters, particularly glutamine and dopamine. I found this paper on the net about six months ago: http://www.nature.com/npp/journal/v30/n1/abs/13006 00a.html when my life was going, shall we say, very poorly. Apparently this drug corrects the imbalance that creates the cravings. They went away and I haven't touched it since.
Addiction is an experience that can't be communicated properly. If you don't go through it, you can't understand it, not really. Trust me when I say to you it's not pleasant.
If you define "Windows" as the kernel, then you have to include drivers as being part of "Windows." Anything that facilitates the use of hardware should be considered part of the operating system.
If you define "Windows" as being the kernel and only those drivers written by Microsoft then what you said makes some sense, but even then the reason third party drivers crash may very well be buggy Microsoft libraries.
You do get a tangible security benefit, in addition to doing switch port authentication, and VPN quarantines.
Switch port authentication? You don't need a certificate to authenticate someone plugging into your switch port. Just look at the dude and see you recognize him.
Although I guess we could pin our public keys on our shirts like nametags and walk around that way.
Why do we humans keep trying to predict our technological future?
Funding.
Re:spam is dead, long live spam
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How much farm land in Columbia is destroyed and people poisoned because the US dumps herbicides all over the place to kill coca crops? Lots.
How many people have their lives and the lives of their loved ones destroyed as a result of cocaine? More. Many, many more. Ridding the world of the coca plant would be a good thing. It's ravaged our species. It's created the most power criminal organizations on the planet, strong enough to influence governments across the world. If the Powers That Be (TM) would commit to wholesale eradication, I don't care who is inconvenienced. However, they seem to target the crops of certain cartels. Hmmm.
Paul Saffo at Silicon Valley's Institute for the Future says that "Google is a religion posing as a company."
I'm not exactly sure where a guy from a place called the "Institute for the Future" gets the nuts to call any organization pious, but he raises a point.
It's impossible to create a cathedral from a bazaar and still have it be a bazarr. You cannot suck all the resources out of the community and then declare yourself the community, which may or may not be Google's intent, but it certainly is starting to feel that way. They are chasing after every talented person around and positioning themselves in every market. Doing it better in some cases, not so much in others.
It's arguable, but innovation and competition seem to go hand in hand. We seem to produce better results when talent is spread around and several companies are chasing results, rather than one company gobbling everything up and amassing a vast fortune. I don't think Google is evil, but they may be too powerful for their own good. These massive projects they're taking on could have long-lasting effects in our community; I'd rather they were created in a consortium than in a star chamber.
Same here when I installed 5.10. Going into "network settings" and clicking Enable was too complex for ya, huh?
That doesn't always work. I have a Linksys USB Wireless adapter and I needed to use iwconfig from the commandline to turn up the interface, after which it appears in network settings.
Ubuntu is as close to Windows simplicity as I've seen in a Linux distro, but it doesn't cover everything. It doesn't support MP3 or video out of the box. Some packages are old and force you to go outside their application installer. And some hardware doesn't work without some fingering, like I mentioned. None of those are show stoppers if you know what you're doing, but Windows covers all the bases. That's the advantage of being closed and that's why they own the desktop market.
Redmond doesn't have to worry about hardware compatibility, because manufacturers work within parameters that they've set. They don't have to sweat the RIAA because they have a relationship with them. They don't need to worry about software they don't write because if anyone has issues with it, they'll go to the people who wrote it.
None of the above issues are going away. There's no central authority to represent Linux nor should there ever be. Too, Linux wasn't designed to generate profits for software and hardware companies. It was designed to be a platform for applications with Unix structure and conventions. To do so, it had to compromise in areas that make it easily accessible for people who aren't savvy.
Are you saying that someone that does this is something other than an idiot? Allowing social pressures to drag them down into the spread of a deadly disease? That's what I would call an idiot.
Given the choice between admitting that he's had sex with another man and quietly hoping a) no one will find out and b) he didn't contract a deadly disease doing it, a heterosexual man will generally choose the latter. That may not be reasonable, but it's human nature. We tend to be irrationally hopeful and motivated by pride. If you believe reason always trumps human nature, that if we don't conform to our inner Spock we're somehow lesser beings, then you're an idiot.
I'd say idiots are both the primary cause of AIDS transmission, and are also the disease's primary victims. That's pretty uncontroversial when you look at the evidence.
As usual, the evidence of the ignorant falls somewhat short of being accurate.
You can contract AIDS not just from sharing needles, but from using another junkies' spoon. Too, used needles are all that's available sometimes. Street dealers sell them for convenience sake. They have to... you can't buy needles in a store. Because that would encourage drug use and frighten churchgoers. There are needle exchanges in major US cities, but they only operate a few hours a week in various locations. Not to mention, many junkies fear they'll be marked by undercover narcs if they pick their rigs up there. It's not that junkies wouldn't use fresh needles if they were available, in fact they're preferable (sharper). They're not, though.
The relatively high percentage of AIDS in the black community is correlated to the relatively high percentage of black men who are incarcerated. One of the great unspokens within the black community is that many men have sex with one another in prison. Before the GNAA chimes in, you should understand many heterosexual men have sex with other men in prison. It's a different world no one can judge unless they've been there. It doesn't help condoms aren't distributed in prison. Homophobia, you understand. Don't want to look gay or anything. Same reason guys don't admit to it, same reason guys don't get tested, same reason guys give it to their girlfriends when they get out. Shame.
As for having unprotected sex being idiotic, if that were true we're all idiots. Well, probably not you. I'll let you in on a little secret, though -- condomless feels better. In the moment, it's pretty easy to convince yourself that you can beat the odds.
Slashdot Mirror
It's extraordinarily difficult to be interested in something, to in fact devote your life to something, that is completely outside the realm of what most people are interested in or find relevant. It's difficult to make small talk when your mind is full of astrophysics or whatnot. It's even more difficult when people consider your pursuits to be lacking in merit or pretentious. Oftentimes this leads to a lonely life full of resentment, and this arrogant attitude you mention.
Given the choice between self-perception as superior and self-perception as a failure, most everybody will choose the former, especially when the only reason they would be deemed the latter is because they chose to be interested in something most people don't, or more often than not can't, understand. The talents valued most in this society are not individual pursuits, they're society-generated traits like popularity, wealth, confidence and the like.
This isn't debate club. Pointing out the spite in my argument doesn't obscure the truth about your murdering crook friends in DC. The only people worse than them are the people who stick up for them, who do so even though they're being screwed over just like all the rest of us. You're a fool.
Exactly right. Hussein overthrown, friendly government installed, Haliburton cleans up mess, US military keeps the peace, total cost to US taxpayers astronomical.
Once the dust clears, friendly government sells drilling rights to US oil companies (you think the Bushes have a piece of one?), who patiently wait for the dust to clear to jump in and make astronomical profits.
For that kind of money I might consider creating fantastic tales of weapons of "mass destruction", "mushroom clouds," secret Nigerian uranium and the like. These guys belong in jail, all of them. Mothers are losing children so these bastards can get rich.
I think you overestimate the influence of morality. The interest of this family (and their party) has little to do with right and wrong. Despite our president's delusions that the voices in his head are Jesus Christ telling him what to do, that's really not the point.
At some point (hint RR), the federal government shifted from being a organization serving the needs of its citizens into being a multitrillion dollar business. The people running things, both Rep and Dem, are very wealthy and in many instances, particularly in the White House, are ex-CEOs. They are making national decisions based on profit margin, not for us, but for themselves.
For example, it's much cheaper to drill Iraqi oil fields than it is to drill offshore in the Gulf of Mexico. The oil reserves in this country are going to be depleted sometime in the near future and the Bushes, and all their cronies, understand full well they will be out of the oil business if they don't position themselves within the Middle East, which is where we'll squeeze the last drop of crude out of this rock we live on.
This administration has made certain individuals in this country extraordinarily wealthy. There is no way in hell that the people making so much money at taxpayer expense would give that up to something as fickle as a general election. Thankfully, someone's got an eye on them.
NINEDENINE: Ah, good. New acquisitions. You are a protocol droid, are you not? ...
THREEPIO: I am See-Threepio, human-cy...
NINEDENINE: Yes or no will do.
THREEPIO: Oh. Well, yes.
NINEDENINE: How many languages do you speak?
THREEPIO: I am fluent in over six million forms of communication, and can readily
Excellent, can you translate what that guy just said? You'd think commenting on a literacy topic would encourage people to check their spelling and grammar, but no.
God Bless America, you dillhole.
Reading and writing are no longer considered core competencies. Math, too. And of course, science. Being smart is no longer considered important and it's never been cool. What is important to our nation's youth?
Why, being fuckable of course.
Yes, but stupid Americans make fantastic Republicans.
"He wave flag, he say Jesus, me like Bush. Where my beer? Where my pikup truk?"
Especially a disgruntled former admin in charge of security who you just put on the unemployment line. However, this guy had pocketed an admin account SecurID card so you can't fault them entirely.
There are seemingly few companies out there who have termination procedures as thorough as new hire procedures. There are even fewer who can lock out someone who had root. Moral of the story ... if you're going to dump your IT staff and outsource, you'd better provide some compensation to your departed admin(s).
You remind me of a nightmare situation ... I installed a SMTP server at the corp's perimeter without issue, only to find certain users (including the CEO of course) were getting "relay denied" errors. It took me weeks to figure out that it was one of these crappy AV programs working as a transparent proxy on the client side, one that was unable to speak SSL/TLS.
The major problem was that the software confused the mail client, which would report "relay denied". The AV program wouldn't cop to being encryption-illiterate. It just quietly failed. On the server side, I could see their clients initiate the connection, then close it without sending the envelope. The only way to make it stop was to kill the AV process completely. Like you said, someone who just forked down bills for mail protection isn't too pleased.
Ugh, I need a drink.
They were destroyed during the Taft administration's seldom-mentioned War on Birds.
There are some nifty bits of nastiness that can be delivered when a machine is privy to having its clock changed from afar.
Passports should be the most commonly-used ID anyway. They are national and are more difficult to forge. However, I actually was told at a bank once that a passport wasn't suitable as ID and I suspect many people don't even know what one looks like, probably because many people don't bother to leave the country.
This Real ID thing would be great if it included some new numeric means of identification that wasn't a social security number. It would be nice if one existede that you couldn't fish out of someone's trash can, get from a hall of records, or pay some web swine $39.95 to go find for you.
Well, it almost killed me. It did kill two people I know off the top of my head. And countless others I've spent time with are doing serious jail time, like the kind with "life" at the end of it. So watch what you say.
Cocaine affects different people differently, like most drugs, both illicit and otherwise. Some people don't even feel it. But more importantly, the craving reaction; while you may have the occasional thought from time to time it might be fun to do, I feel about cocaine the way I feel when my head's stuck under water and I need some air. People like you have fun. People like me go insane, go to jail or die a miserable death. Such is life.
The difference between individuals' reaction apparently has something to do with the brain's inborn ability to regulate neurotransmitters, particularly glutamine and dopamine. I found this paper on the net about six months ago: http://www.nature.com/npp/journal/v30/n1/abs/13006 00a.html when my life was going, shall we say, very poorly. Apparently this drug corrects the imbalance that creates the cravings. They went away and I haven't touched it since.
Addiction is an experience that can't be communicated properly. If you don't go through it, you can't understand it, not really. Trust me when I say to you it's not pleasant.
Clue up so you don't have to do enduser support.
If you define "Windows" as the kernel, then you have to include drivers as being part of "Windows." Anything that facilitates the use of hardware should be considered part of the operating system.
If you define "Windows" as being the kernel and only those drivers written by Microsoft then what you said makes some sense, but even then the reason third party drivers crash may very well be buggy Microsoft libraries.
Switch port authentication? You don't need a certificate to authenticate someone plugging into your switch port. Just look at the dude and see you recognize him.
Although I guess we could pin our public keys on our shirts like nametags and walk around that way.
Funding.
How many people have their lives and the lives of their loved ones destroyed as a result of cocaine? More. Many, many more. Ridding the world of the coca plant would be a good thing. It's ravaged our species. It's created the most power criminal organizations on the planet, strong enough to influence governments across the world. If the Powers That Be (TM) would commit to wholesale eradication, I don't care who is inconvenienced. However, they seem to target the crops of certain cartels. Hmmm.
I'm not exactly sure where a guy from a place called the "Institute for the Future" gets the nuts to call any organization pious, but he raises a point.
It's impossible to create a cathedral from a bazaar and still have it be a bazarr. You cannot suck all the resources out of the community and then declare yourself the community, which may or may not be Google's intent, but it certainly is starting to feel that way. They are chasing after every talented person around and positioning themselves in every market. Doing it better in some cases, not so much in others.
It's arguable, but innovation and competition seem to go hand in hand. We seem to produce better results when talent is spread around and several companies are chasing results, rather than one company gobbling everything up and amassing a vast fortune. I don't think Google is evil, but they may be too powerful for their own good. These massive projects they're taking on could have long-lasting effects in our community; I'd rather they were created in a consortium than in a star chamber.
If money fixed bugs, Windows would be rock solid, no?
Pouring funding into Open Source sounds like the road to migration away from Redmond's licensing fees.
Damn, I guess I can't download my favorite episodes of CSI:Pawtucket.
Perhaps you make a good argument but to be honest you lost all credibility with that "you're."
You should consult Strunk and White before you argue a point, particularly when your argument is questioning the intelligence of someone's statement.
That doesn't always work. I have a Linksys USB Wireless adapter and I needed to use iwconfig from the commandline to turn up the interface, after which it appears in network settings.
Ubuntu is as close to Windows simplicity as I've seen in a Linux distro, but it doesn't cover everything. It doesn't support MP3 or video out of the box. Some packages are old and force you to go outside their application installer. And some hardware doesn't work without some fingering, like I mentioned. None of those are show stoppers if you know what you're doing, but Windows covers all the bases. That's the advantage of being closed and that's why they own the desktop market.
Redmond doesn't have to worry about hardware compatibility, because manufacturers work within parameters that they've set. They don't have to sweat the RIAA because they have a relationship with them. They don't need to worry about software they don't write because if anyone has issues with it, they'll go to the people who wrote it.
None of the above issues are going away. There's no central authority to represent Linux nor should there ever be. Too, Linux wasn't designed to generate profits for software and hardware companies. It was designed to be a platform for applications with Unix structure and conventions. To do so, it had to compromise in areas that make it easily accessible for people who aren't savvy.
Given the choice between admitting that he's had sex with another man and quietly hoping a) no one will find out and b) he didn't contract a deadly disease doing it, a heterosexual man will generally choose the latter. That may not be reasonable, but it's human nature. We tend to be irrationally hopeful and motivated by pride. If you believe reason always trumps human nature, that if we don't conform to our inner Spock we're somehow lesser beings, then you're an idiot.
As usual, the evidence of the ignorant falls somewhat short of being accurate.
You can contract AIDS not just from sharing needles, but from using another junkies' spoon. Too, used needles are all that's available sometimes. Street dealers sell them for convenience sake. They have to ... you can't buy needles in a store. Because that would encourage drug use and frighten churchgoers. There are needle exchanges in major US cities, but they only operate a few hours a week in various locations. Not to mention, many junkies fear they'll be marked by undercover narcs if they pick their rigs up there. It's not that junkies wouldn't use fresh needles if they were available, in fact they're preferable (sharper). They're not, though.
The relatively high percentage of AIDS in the black community is correlated to the relatively high percentage of black men who are incarcerated. One of the great unspokens within the black community is that many men have sex with one another in prison. Before the GNAA chimes in, you should understand many heterosexual men have sex with other men in prison. It's a different world no one can judge unless they've been there. It doesn't help condoms aren't distributed in prison. Homophobia, you understand. Don't want to look gay or anything. Same reason guys don't admit to it, same reason guys don't get tested, same reason guys give it to their girlfriends when they get out. Shame.
As for having unprotected sex being idiotic, if that were true we're all idiots. Well, probably not you. I'll let you in on a little secret, though -- condomless feels better. In the moment, it's pretty easy to convince yourself that you can beat the odds.