81 according to the article, that's how old he is.
Most of you youngsters in here maybe don't get it, but as I have now blown through my teens, my twenties, and now most of my thirties I have definitely begun to acquire more and more of a distaste for that which I do to make money.
If I make it to 81 and I still give two craps about technology in general, much less have enough enthusiasm left to try and contribute, then I'll consider myself an extremely lucky man.
Kudos to this guy for working in tech SINCE THE FIFTIES and not burning out.
Tolerance of other faiths is not persecution. By extension, tolerance of people who happen to disagree with you is likewise, not an attack on your own beliefs to which they disagree.
By your logic, would it also be persecution to Muslims, were your town to decide to decline to recognize Ramadan with decorations on main street?
We have a *secular* government in the United States (for good reason). The fact that our secular government may choose not to endorse Christian holidays is NOT PERSECUTION.
The US Constitution is a "christ-based" document, I guess in as much as the people who wrote it were steeped in a culture that generally revered Christianity. By that token, though you could also claim the phone book is "Christ centered" were it also written in such a culture.
You know, this'll probably get modded "troll" along with the last guy, but honestly it needs to be said again. I, myself am a Christian, and I do not see this "persecution" of which you speak, "finding me", at least not in America.
Honestly, I've got no doubt that some people of all faiths all over the world find themselves persecuted, but in America this is the farthest thing from real that you can possibly get. There is no religious persecution in America, except possibly towards Islam as it is *consistently* demonized in popular culture.
Honestly, here in America it's like some people have fetishized the idea of fighting against persecution, to the point where they are seeking it out. Where they basically go around being anti-social dicks about something vaguely religious, then scream persecution when someone points out how dickish they're being.
For instance, if proselytizing is not allowed at your work or school, reacting to this by holding impromptu prayer meetings in the hall is dickish behavior. It's clearly not allowed, but you're doing it anyhow to provoke a confrontation, and most definitely would NOT be doing it if it wasn't explicitly disallowed. When someone shuts you down, that's not persecution, that's you being an ass and getting shut down.
If you are a Christian in America, you are in *no way* disenfranchised, or persecuted against based on your faith.
Oh dude, you're not kidding about Reglan. I was recently hospitalized for major surgery, and they put me on that drug when I went home to help "wake up" my bowels after all of the narcotics administered in the hospital.
I straight up lost my fucking mind, "fear and loathing" style. My living room was "bat country" for like three days, until we figured out (on our own, -- thanks google --) that the Reglan might causing it.
What the FUCK? No... seriously... WHAT. THE. FUCK?
Look man... I recently spent a week in the hospital... with a TV that would get TBS, and FOX News... also every waiting area in the hospital blasted Fox News. There was no escaping it.
There is ZERO straight news on Fox. None whatsoever, period. At all. None of it.
Either that, or it was some amazing coincidence, that every single time I encountered a television with Fox news, there was either a pundit doing his thing, or an anchor snarkily commenting on "straight" news. Except it isn't straight news when you do it like that... any more than Jon Stewart's Daily Show is "straight news". It's just the "what this dude thinks you should think about the news show".
Clearly, Fox's political leanings irritate me. I can't deny that. But what irritates me even more is that this BULLSHIT that they're doing PASSES FOR JOURNALISM amongst the vast majority of the public.
I'd really have the same issue with it, if Colbert and the Daily Show had a 24 hour news channel and everyone was lapping their schtick up as real journalism too.
Why? Because you don't have to think about it too hard, and the message panders to you. They're CONSISTENTLY reinforcing this message "those crazy people who disagree with you are stupid. You're SMART for LISTENING TO US.". And... incredibly... a large number of people swallow this, and buy into it.
Think about that. That's INCREDIBLE... and it's why I couldn't escape Fox news while I was in the hospital... because most people don't notice that, and if they do, it doesn't bother them.
That's Fucked up... with a capital F, people.
As far as American media goes... the PBS NewsHour is about the closest thing to straight news I've seen lately. They are slightly left biased in political commentary... but, then again, when that happens, it's CLEARLY delineated as editorial commentary.
Damn straight there's a difference. I too grew up in paper company territory. You could always tell when you'd wandered into a replanted "forrest"... the trees are planted on a grid. It's quite eerie at first, before you realize how it happened that all the trees line up.
Even if every American stopped driving RIGHT NOW, and FOREVER... there would STILL be a a huge profit margin for these companies. Oil is a GLOBAL commodity market.
Which is why the "drill baby drill" crowd and the "Boycot BP" crowd curiously suffer from the same logic problem.
Is 9 suicides / year out of the average for Chinese tech manufacturing facilities? If it is, it might not necessarily be the lack of workers rights and grueling work hours.
There might be some chemical contamination in that factory affecting the worker's state of mind. That's not at all an unreasonable idea. I wonder if anyone's looked at that angle.
It's not that your family doctor is useless, it's that the medical system doesn't have your best interests as a primary goal. The primary goal of the U.S. health system is to maximize the amount that any given practitioner can bill your insurance company.
This is why, 3 years ago I went to my family doctor and said "my stomach hurts and I shit a whole lot". He referred me to a GI, who almost sight unseen went "crohn's disease!".
Two years into that, none of the (extraordinarily expensive) treatments were working, and I had to hit google. There were a lot of things that didn't add up, and I didn't necessarily jump to my own diagnosis, but I knew one thing: for damn sure this wasn't Crohn's disease.
Eventually I had to *demand* to be referred to a research university, where presumably there were still some inquiring minds in the medical field (thank God I was right about that).
It turned out I had cancer (and the treatment has gone amazingly well). That would NEVER have been discovered in my hometown, if I'd chosen to just blindly trust the word of my local doctors.
Locally they would have simply continued to pump me full of very expensive chemicals that did not work.
Everyone gets their payday, the patient continues to need treatment, and the system hums along like perfection... except the patient doesn't necessarily get any better. Everyone is taken care of except YOU.
In this day and age you have to take responsibility for your own care, and if you have generalized diagnostic logic skills (as many of us techies do), then they are absolutely invaluable, and google can save your life.
So if the price of having this tool at our disposal is that *some people* freak out and hassle their doctors too much... well so be it.
It was a low budget mac os that you could run on your C-64, man... there was absolutely nothing like it *at all* at the time, and it remains, in my mind, an incredible feat of software engineering.
What the hell has this to do with debunking wave, or "one integrated interface for everything", I do not know. I guess GEOS had a paint program... and a word processing program, and some other programs, and they all used the same GUI toolkit... if that's what you mean. But then so just about everything these days.
All taxes punish success. You can't get around that fact.
You know, I hear this one all the time, and it just doesn't ring true to me. By most standards, I'm one of the people who has found success (starting reasonably low on the totem, even). I don't feel particularly "punished".
It's true I'm taxed vastly more now, than I was when I was making minimum wage. This isn't "punishment", it's paying my dues.
I'm taxed proportionately based on the benefits I've extracted from the system. Without community college, public health care & other social safety net systems I'd have never made it this far. Now I'm paying back into the system.
The idea that progressive income taxes are a disincentive for success is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. If that was true, people would stop playing the lottery, no?
Why bother getting rich if you're just gonna be "punished". Oh right. Having more money is always better than having less money.
Stop bitching people. It's patriotic to pay your taxes, unless they are unjust... and they aren't.
Well, I know this'll be consigned to the Briney depths of Score: 1, but what the hell, I'm feeling futile today, I guess.
We don't need money. We need code. Create a new agency in charge of adapting and extending open source packages for use across the entire federal government.
This saves lots of money spent on vendor packages. In return we get high-quality professionally developed patches released back to the community.
I'd actually like to watch my "tax dollars at work" in this way.
... so there should be plenty of competition in late 2010/early 2011.
No, probably there won't be. It's like this
10 gas is expensive, yo! 20 people get pissed off 30 start getting serious about alternative fuel 40 oil cartel drops prices 50 everything goes back to normal 60 while (people not pissed off) { 70 oil_price ++; 80 } 90 GOTO 10
We are on line 30.
The fuckin' electric car is always "a few years off", it has been since I was in high school.
So the only two you can actually buy right now are:
A) a ridiculously expensive sports car that goes fast but not for long
B) a ridiculous jetsons car that goes reasonable speeds for a decent period of time but in a form factor that's mostly unusable, and certainly not mass marketable.
HEAVEN FORBID, we make an electric car with the features of B in a form factor that people would you know... actually buy. I doubt they're gaining THAT much efficiency from the shape.
G. Walker Bush, final impressions: "competence? in MY government? It's more likely than you'd think!"
Seriously, the election's over now... can all you fearmongering nitwits please finally stop highlighting the man's middle name? Yes OOOOH his middle name is the same as the last name of a dude who was a bad guy.
What is your point, exactly? That we should be afraid of him, because of his middle name? What? REALLY? That's the best you've got?
That, and the cost of his privately funded shin-dig could fund the war in Iraq for like 5 minutes?
I don't know what to be more frightened of, Bush's right-wing, conservative, religion wackos or the mass of people that Obama has mobilized into believing that something will be vastly different with him in charge.
I think it will all go just fine. Listen to the man's words. He hasn't mobilized the masses with promises of free lunches. He's mobilized them with words encouragement to take on challenges themselves, not to give up hope and to believe in the worth of their own efforts.
Obviously some will choose to ignore these words, and be pissed when they don't get their mythical free lunch. But I have to believe the number of such people is simply dwarfed by the number of people paying attention.
Inspired, even... by paying attention.
That alone is such a sea change. I can't remember a time before today, when I paid attention to a politician's words and came away thinking: "that sounds reasonable, RIGHT even, whoa!"
Homeboy, WE SHOULD subsidize marriage (gay OR straight), because it is primarily an institution designed to enable a stable environment for raising children.
Children who will become the doctor that cures your cancer when you're in your 60's, mister eternal bachelor.
There is a LOT of social value in raising and providing for the next generation. After all, someone did it for you.
What is killing perl (at least at my job) is it's lack of a proper, modern, standards compliant webservices toolkit.
SOAP::Lite is a sorry mess. It's *simply amazing* that it works *at all*. I've tried to scratch that itch to fix it so many times, but the internals of SOAP::Lite are so *incredibly* convoluted, that it's damn near impossible.
Perl needs a completely new SOAP toolkit, with real WSDL support for all the different document modes.
That ONE thing will keep perl entrenched deep in the guts of the corporate world, in the end... providing all of us perl hackers with job security for years to come.
So... I've got a pretty steady day job, and no time at night. I already make 6 figgures, and I have a reasonable expectation of employment beyond 1 year.
Surely, there is one of us perlheads out there who is in a position to give a year up to really iron this out in perl. I'd donate even. Like I said, this would be the gift that keeps on giving to the perl community.
Maybe if we could stop being a nation of self-absorbed horny retards with lots of guns and the attention span of a crack addled butterfly... sucking up 60% of the world's oil supply, while our sleazy CEOs rape labor in India, China, The Philippines and Thailand to make crappy plastic toys to go in the happy meals we feed to our morbidly obese children, whose future we've torpedoed with the massive debt we've accumulated borrowing money for our two simultaneous wars that are utterly laying waste to the countries of the people that "hate us".
Homeboy, these people hate us for some very valid reasons.
42 Nukes ain't near enough. We need a fucking moonshot... "100% nuclear power in the next 10 years"... so we can stop fucking with these people that "hate us", and begin to get our own affairs in order.
Slashdot Mirror
81 according to the article, that's how old he is.
Most of you youngsters in here maybe don't get it, but as I have now blown through my teens, my twenties, and now most of my thirties I have definitely begun to acquire more and more of a distaste for that which I do to make money.
If I make it to 81 and I still give two craps about technology in general, much less have enough enthusiasm left to try and contribute, then I'll consider myself an extremely lucky man.
Kudos to this guy for working in tech SINCE THE FIFTIES and not burning out.
How many of us will be able to say the same?
Uuh dude, what?
Tolerance of other faiths is not persecution. By extension, tolerance of people who happen to disagree with you is likewise, not an attack on your own beliefs to which they disagree.
By your logic, would it also be persecution to Muslims, were your town to decide to decline to recognize Ramadan with decorations on main street?
We have a *secular* government in the United States (for good reason). The fact that our secular government may choose not to endorse Christian holidays is NOT PERSECUTION.
The US Constitution is a "christ-based" document, I guess in as much as the people who wrote it were steeped in a culture that generally revered Christianity. By that token, though you could also claim the phone book is "Christ centered" were it also written in such a culture.
You know, this'll probably get modded "troll" along with the last guy, but honestly it needs to be said again.
I, myself am a Christian, and I do not see this "persecution" of which you speak, "finding me", at least not in America.
Honestly, I've got no doubt that some people of all faiths all over the world find themselves persecuted, but in America this is the farthest thing from real that you can possibly get. There is no religious persecution in America, except possibly towards Islam as it is *consistently* demonized in popular culture.
Honestly, here in America it's like some people have fetishized the idea of fighting against persecution, to the point where they are seeking it out. Where they basically go around being anti-social dicks about something vaguely religious, then scream persecution when someone points out how dickish they're being.
For instance, if proselytizing is not allowed at your work or school, reacting to this by holding impromptu prayer meetings in the hall is dickish behavior. It's clearly not allowed, but you're doing it anyhow to provoke a confrontation, and most definitely would NOT be doing it if it wasn't explicitly disallowed. When someone shuts you down, that's not persecution, that's you being an ass and getting shut down.
If you are a Christian in America, you are in *no way* disenfranchised, or persecuted against based on your faith.
Oh dude, you're not kidding about Reglan.
I was recently hospitalized for major surgery, and they put me on that drug when I went home to help "wake up" my bowels after all of the narcotics administered in the hospital.
I straight up lost my fucking mind, "fear and loathing" style. My living room was "bat country" for like three days, until we figured out (on our own, -- thanks google --) that the Reglan might causing it.
Scariest three days of my life, dude.
What the FUCK? ... seriously ... WHAT. THE. FUCK?
No
Look man ... I recently spent a week in the hospital ... with a TV that would get TBS, and FOX News ... also every waiting area in the hospital blasted Fox News. There was no escaping it.
There is ZERO straight news on Fox. None whatsoever, period. At all. None of it.
Either that, or it was some amazing coincidence, that every single time I encountered a television with Fox news, there was either a pundit doing his thing, or an anchor snarkily commenting on "straight" news. Except it isn't straight news when you do it like that ... any more than Jon Stewart's Daily Show is "straight news". It's just the "what this dude thinks you should think about the news show".
Clearly, Fox's political leanings irritate me. I can't deny that. But what irritates me even more is that this BULLSHIT that they're doing PASSES FOR JOURNALISM amongst the vast majority of the public.
I'd really have the same issue with it, if Colbert and the Daily Show had a 24 hour news channel and everyone was lapping their schtick up as real journalism too.
Why? Because you don't have to think about it too hard, and the message panders to you. They're CONSISTENTLY reinforcing this message "those crazy people who disagree with you are stupid. You're SMART for LISTENING TO US.". And ... incredibly ... a large number of people swallow this, and buy into it.
Think about that. That's INCREDIBLE ... and it's why I couldn't escape Fox news while I was in the hospital ... because most people don't notice that, and if they do, it doesn't bother them.
That's Fucked up ... with a capital F, people.
As far as American media goes ... the PBS NewsHour is about the closest thing to straight news I've seen lately. They are slightly left biased in political commentary ... but, then again, when that happens, it's CLEARLY delineated as editorial commentary.
Damn straight there's a difference. ... the trees are planted on a grid. It's quite eerie at first, before you realize how it happened that all the trees line up.
I too grew up in paper company territory. You could always tell when you'd wandered into a replanted "forrest"
China.
Even if every American stopped driving RIGHT NOW, and FOREVER ... there would STILL be a a huge profit margin for these companies.
Oil is a GLOBAL commodity market.
Which is why the "drill baby drill" crowd and the "Boycot BP" crowd curiously suffer from the same logic problem.
Is 9 suicides / year out of the average for Chinese tech manufacturing facilities?
If it is, it might not necessarily be the lack of workers rights and grueling work hours.
There might be some chemical contamination in that factory affecting the worker's state of mind.
That's not at all an unreasonable idea.
I wonder if anyone's looked at that angle.
at least they learn from their mistakes and correct them in a timely manner. ... well almost every other mega-corporation.
unlike
even when apple screws up, they do it right.
LOL.
damn. guess I'm a fanboy now.
Damn straight.
It's not that your family doctor is useless, it's that the medical system doesn't have your best interests as a primary goal. The primary goal of the U.S. health system is to maximize the amount that any given practitioner can bill your insurance company.
This is why, 3 years ago I went to my family doctor and said "my stomach hurts and I shit a whole lot". He referred me to a GI, who almost sight unseen went "crohn's disease!".
Two years into that, none of the (extraordinarily expensive) treatments were working, and I had to hit google. There were a lot of things that didn't add up, and I didn't necessarily jump to my own diagnosis, but I knew one thing: for damn sure this wasn't Crohn's disease.
Eventually I had to *demand* to be referred to a research university, where presumably there were still some inquiring minds in the medical field (thank God I was right about that).
It turned out I had cancer (and the treatment has gone amazingly well). That would NEVER have been discovered in my hometown, if I'd chosen to just blindly trust the word of my local doctors.
Locally they would have simply continued to pump me full of very expensive chemicals that did not work.
Everyone gets their payday, the patient continues to need treatment, and the system hums along like perfection ... except the patient doesn't necessarily get any better. Everyone is taken care of except YOU.
In this day and age you have to take responsibility for your own care, and if you have generalized diagnostic logic skills (as many of us techies do), then they are absolutely invaluable, and google can save your life.
So if the price of having this tool at our disposal is that *some people* freak out and hassle their doctors too much ... well so be it.
Goddamn right I remember GEOS!
It was a low budget mac os that you could run on your C-64, man ... there was absolutely nothing like it *at all* at the time, and it remains, in my mind, an incredible feat of software engineering.
What the hell has this to do with debunking wave, or "one integrated interface for everything", I do not know. I guess GEOS had a paint program ... and a word processing program, and some other programs, and they all used the same GUI toolkit ... if that's what you mean. But then so just about everything these days.
slashdot: not used for pr0n or juarez.
yes yes, but we use http for that all the time :-)
countdown to this being used for warez and porn ... 3 ... 2 ... 1
All taxes punish success. You can't get around that fact.
You know, I hear this one all the time, and it just doesn't ring true to me. By most standards, I'm one of the people who has found success (starting reasonably low on the totem, even). I don't feel particularly "punished".
It's true I'm taxed vastly more now, than I was when I was making minimum wage. This isn't "punishment", it's paying my dues.
I'm taxed proportionately based on the benefits I've extracted from the system. Without community college, public health care & other social safety net systems I'd have never made it this far. Now I'm paying back into the system.
The idea that progressive income taxes are a disincentive for success is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. If that was true, people would stop playing the lottery, no?
Why bother getting rich if you're just gonna be "punished". Oh right. Having more money is always better than having less money.
Stop bitching people. It's patriotic to pay your taxes, unless they are unjust ... and they aren't.
Well, I know this'll be consigned to the Briney depths of Score: 1, but what the hell, I'm feeling futile today, I guess.
We don't need money. We need code.
Create a new agency in charge of adapting and extending open source packages for use across the entire federal government.
This saves lots of money spent on vendor packages. In return we get high-quality professionally developed patches released back to the community.
I'd actually like to watch my "tax dollars at work" in this way.
... so there should be plenty of competition in late 2010/early 2011.
No, probably there won't be. It's like this
10 gas is expensive, yo!
20 people get pissed off
30 start getting serious about alternative fuel
40 oil cartel drops prices
50 everything goes back to normal
60 while (people not pissed off) {
70 oil_price ++;
80 }
90 GOTO 10
We are on line 30.
The fuckin' electric car is always "a few years off", it has been since I was in high school.
So the only two you can actually buy right now are:
A) a ridiculously expensive sports car that goes fast but not for long
B) a ridiculous jetsons car that goes reasonable speeds for a decent period of time but in a form factor that's mostly unusable, and certainly not mass marketable.
HEAVEN FORBID, we make an electric car with the features of B in a form factor that people would you know ... actually buy. I doubt they're gaining THAT much efficiency from the shape.
Waaaahhaaaahoooow man!
That is hands down the nerdiest thing I've ever seen. And you got your wife to play a long.
this must have been a different era entirely.
kudos, many many kudos.
wow.
G. Walker Bush, final impressions: "competence? in MY government? It's more likely than you'd think!"
Seriously, the election's over now ... can all you fearmongering nitwits please finally stop highlighting the man's middle name? Yes OOOOH his middle name is the same as the last name of a dude who was a bad guy.
What is your point, exactly?
That we should be afraid of him, because of his middle name? What? REALLY? That's the best you've got?
That, and the cost of his privately funded shin-dig could fund the war in Iraq for like 5 minutes?
weak sauce, dude.
please point to ONE thing he has done, not said.
Became your president.
I don't know what to be more frightened of, Bush's right-wing, conservative, religion wackos or the mass of people that Obama has mobilized into believing that something will be vastly different with him in charge.
I think it will all go just fine. Listen to the man's words. He hasn't mobilized the masses with promises of free lunches. He's mobilized them with words encouragement to take on challenges themselves, not to give up hope and to believe in the worth of their own efforts.
Obviously some will choose to ignore these words, and be pissed when they don't get their mythical free lunch. But I have to believe the number of such people is simply dwarfed by the number of people paying attention.
Inspired, even ... by paying attention.
That alone is such a sea change. I can't remember a time before today, when I paid attention to a politician's words and came away thinking: "that sounds reasonable, RIGHT even, whoa!"
We'll see if it lasts. By God, I hope it does.
Radio Shack
You Have Questions
We have great cell phone plans available
Homeboy, WE SHOULD subsidize marriage (gay OR straight), because it is primarily an institution designed to enable a stable environment for raising children.
Children who will become the doctor that cures your cancer when you're in your 60's, mister eternal bachelor.
There is a LOT of social value in raising and providing for the next generation. After all, someone did it for you.
Indeed. If I had the time and resources.
Unfortunately, time is something I don't have these days.
Which is why I bothered posting this. I hope someone who does have the time will pick it up and run with it.
What is killing perl (at least at my job) is it's lack of a proper, modern, standards compliant webservices toolkit.
SOAP::Lite is a sorry mess. It's *simply amazing* that it works *at all*. I've tried to scratch that itch to fix it so many times, but the internals of SOAP::Lite are so *incredibly* convoluted, that it's damn near impossible.
Perl needs a completely new SOAP toolkit, with real WSDL support for all the different document modes.
That ONE thing will keep perl entrenched deep in the guts of the corporate world, in the end ... providing all of us perl hackers with job security for years to come.
So ... I've got a pretty steady day job, and no time at night. I already make 6 figgures, and I have a reasonable expectation of employment beyond 1 year.
Surely, there is one of us perlheads out there who is in a position to give a year up to really iron this out in perl. I'd donate even. Like I said, this would be the gift that keeps on giving to the perl community.
Maybe if we could stop being a nation of self-absorbed horny retards with lots of guns and the attention span of a crack addled butterfly ... sucking up 60% of the world's oil supply, while our sleazy CEOs rape labor in India, China, The Philippines and Thailand to make crappy plastic toys to go in the happy meals we feed to our morbidly obese children, whose future we've torpedoed with the massive debt we've accumulated borrowing money for our two simultaneous wars that are utterly laying waste to the countries of the people that "hate us".
... "100% nuclear power in the next 10 years" ... so we can stop fucking with these people that "hate us", and begin to get our own affairs in order.
Homeboy, these people hate us for some very valid reasons.
42 Nukes ain't near enough. We need a fucking moonshot