It's curiosity that brings us science, and wonder that brings us religion, if that's not cutting semantics too fine.
Science and logic are wonderful, as it were in casual speak, yet religious marvel is not about 'what kind of magic' so much as about marveling at being as such.
I think 'What kind of magic is this' remains a kind of utilitarian / instrumental thinking - often posing in religious garb while actually still the domain of science to answer with these and those theories and measurements and attributes. A lot of what passes for religion wanders that way and promptly (tragically really - being doomed to fail) trips up into competing with science.
Religious awe is about reality being sublime/ineffable essentially, the part of reality which is trans-rational and inaccessible to measurement.
On a tangent, faith, for me, is not some laughable doctrine or particular sentences, but a perspective (a metanoia), of being somewhat perpetually in mild astonishment, a little bit of constant background amazement about the time-being in array, the interpenetration of form and emptiness in all things, the way language is a charming necessity always falling short of capturing the being and non-finite nature of objects. Though maybe I'm digressing here...
Noting your remark, I, too, facepalm all the time at the superstitious. It's not-even-wrong, as the physics phrase would go. It's actually kind of useful though in it's way - if superstition is involved, it's easy to discern as bad theology and move on.
Nice chitchatting with you guys, btw. It's been too long since I was browsing/participating in Slashdot threads. I miss the quality of these forums. You guys are great company.
How about publishing a competing copy, with more niggers and slaves tossed in. And let's toss in some colorful extra profanity here and there. We'll have a new order of publishing, where a consumer can select the style of copy and prose that appeals to his tastes, and put in custom orders for certain disliked words to by substituted with synoymns.
Annoyed that some uppity author uses nitid instead of brilliant, or that some popular hack ludicrously has someone hiss with pleasure in a romance scene? Order it with a few synonym substitution made...
I find it droll, but honestly, I sincerely expect exactly that aspect of customized publishing to, eventually, inevitably arrive. Hence aspects of this debate about more or less nigger seems somewhat moot.
You left out that the Romans would have almost certainly done all of the above while also managing to have 2 or 3 civil wars within the Roman empire.
Honestly, who didn't come to a bad end in ancient Rome? Cicero had to stick his head out of his carriage having been chased down by political assassins, in order to assist his relatively inexperienced murder at somewhat ineptly hacking off his head.
Oh, ancient Rome - such a model for politics and governance...
Actually it is wonder that brings us religion. Self-delusion is generally a disappointment with the realization that one has been tangled up in projections and wish fulfillment fantasies, which is helpful when it brings useful change. Whereas the underlying wonder / marvel as wonder / marvel, which is a key basis of religious impulse, is not the cause or target of that self-delusive drive or the aftermath of grappling with it.
Best of luck with your continued unfolding, whichever path of atheism / agnosticism / religious inclination you take.
The necktie literally evolved out of the dinner napkin. Don't get too carried away. Ludicrous shoes meant to display that you can't be bothered to walk more than 50 feet to resolve a problem are easily a better definitive litmus test of religious quality.
Do they eliminate the buzzing in to claim the answer and have all players answer all questions? Because it would seem that the computer could always instantaneously buzz in and use the next few seconds to conjure up the answer, just as many humans do, save that 3-4 seconds of computational time can effect a pretty massive search / advantage. I would certainly run metrics on my program and figure out the optimal lead time to have it buzz prior to finding the answer. As has been noted, this is 75 percent marketing, and does not work well with the game format designed for humans.
I work in finance, the hypothesis of the article is ludicrous. No one enters m or b in any system among dozens that I have ever seen. No one even enters all the 000s, as the layperson typically initially assumes. You enter 100 for a 100 million order. Virtually all the control reports for middle and back offices also output that way. And lets not even talk about most products/systems trading screens generally having dual static and the four-eyes principle and deal review of trades from done to verified states by the middle office (traders are front office) and so forth. The whole premise of the billion vs million typo is a pretty dubious posit from unfamiliarity. It doesn't defy the rules of physics, but just...unlikely...
The clearest fix, imho, is that most products / banks / trading house have modules for traders limits. Which do what you'd think - a trader simply cannot trade a billion, it auto-rejects. Not every system has this setup, primarily as the product vendor's often charge semi-ludicrous ad-hoc fees for every last module to their product, including the trading limits modules, but really, it's becoming more and more pervasively standard.
If you want to be concerned generally? Be concerned or activist about things like hedge funds over-leveraging under the current lack of regulation and counterparty/exposure visibility, where a political battle is long overdue to unfold to more transparently regulate hedge funds (via clearinghouses and regulatory disclosures, for instance). Or be worried that no one understands very well how to predict where the trillion dollar range massive amounts of overall global liquidity flow and behave under irrationality, overwhelming the tools at central bank's disposal in a way not seen in prior decades.
If you want to be concerned personally? Diversify your stock holdings outside the US market. Honestly, it's silly to hold your own country's stock too heavily. Probably illustrated best by people in small European countries having a portfolio made up of 80-90 percent of businesses based in their tiny country. Versus considering the world economy, and making your country perhaps weighted, but more accurately reflect it's percentage slice of the global economy.
This article is just silly headlines pandering. Though it beats the Slashdot article today on how many keys to carry in your pocket. Jesus. Non-judgment day must be growing near.
It's incidental that hungry people get feed by the ad views on the page while I guess words, I just like guessing the words. At best it gives me an excuse to rationalize playing. The game format is what feeds the academic / humanitarian purpose, not the other way around.
Guessing words for ad views for buying rice is trivial, but makes obvious at a glance the bare essentials of the article posters' argument, and that it scales up.
Academic games are fun if you yourself like the academic subject qua itself, (bare-bones finite state machine coding 'games' are an example of this), but that audience is almost always just too narrow.
Once you have cheap, easy engineering of microbial life, then all it takes is exactly ONE maniac to design a transmittable disease that will wipe out everyone. Once you have cheap, easy engineering of microbial life, you also have thousands of people competent to work on cures, genetic enhancements, immune system upgrades, rapid turn-around vaccines, and so forth. Computers and programming languages didn't just produce script kiddies, they produces all the other benefits of computers and programming languages, from security researches to flash games to robotic assembly lines to the pending promise of hand-held real-time universal translation widgets.
Genetic engineering brings extension of lifespan, curing of disease, creation of new life forms, preservation of extinct species, etc. Not that bio-bricks silver bullet such stuff, anymore than the first room-sized ENIAC instantly snapped universal translation into existence. Just that your alarmism sees a narrow range.
If you can't keep the technology contained, one of the most rational things to do is make a large pool of benevolent people competent in the technology, to counteract the impact of the nutty minority who will attempt to misuse it.
Designing a disease like this would be almost pathetically simple with the right tools. Design it to be extremely infectious, but with an incubation period of 10 years before it starts killing. The bio-bricks will make it easy to test that it works on humans, incubating for 10 years, eh? Or will you be testing it in a petri dish and presuming you can mod it defect-free to both work in humans and incubate for 10 years, setting aside the hilarity of how difficult such an incubation effect would be. Not even influenza or ebola kills 99 percent of people, incidentally, but don't let that stop your alarmist hyperbole.
10 years from now, I definately expect your genome will be decodable on the cheap inside a day, and we'll be well along in decoding a whole host of symbiotic gut bacteria and bloodstream chemicals and so forth. Most probably we'll be busy working on tech to monitor your blood chemistry real-time, and thinking about regularly, say, decoding the state and composition of your internal fauna on routine doctor visits.
Remaining undetected 10 years from now seems to be more challenging than you breezily think it will be. A majority of script kiddies attacks from 10 years ago are negligible now, security layers and techniques advanced.
If any technology should be tightly controlled, this is it. Technologies should be appropriately regulated with a judicious rational eye, as we do with dozens of technologies already. There's a delicious irony in yourself or someone you like dying from some variant flavor of disease years hence, because you were too alarmist to let me study the proteans and genetics of those cells as an intellectual hobby and contribute something worthwild, and I programmed flash games instead.
If anything ought to be more tightly regulated, incidentally, it's parenting.
I could do with less nutty people in the world to misuse technology in the first place.
-evoke
Although I wouldn't call 33k exactly high, it's above the 20k average for the 48 contiguous states for a family of four, (per the Federal Register, Vol. 71, No. 15, January 24, 2006, pp. 3848-3849), though I would take some ethical issue with how reasonable federal guidelines are in establishing thresholds. I don't see how anyone on 33k can afford to own their own home in quite a number of areas of the country, for instance, and I find that disturbing.
I did a bit of web research in light of your comment, and agree that you look to be right about the modern American military's composition generally matching the demographics of the general population, (example: http://www.heritage.org/Research/NationalSecurity/ cda05-08.cfm), hence I thank you for clarifying that. I appreciate you taking the time to post an entry to correct my understanding.
Rounding out the comment exchange, I chuckled at your movie stars remark. I happen to have read People's History, the Pentagon Papers, etc. quite some time ago and happen to think that currently democrats are incoherent and Marxism laughably self-contradictory and intellectually dishonest (we're going to end all class conflict in history by self-contradictorily appealing to class unity of the working class in the same breath...? Riiiiight...) That said, I don't think you have to go Chomsky-esque leftist to think there's something disturbed about the way America wages wars or the hypocrisy of our alleged American values.
The inevitable cost of cutting off foreign oil will be yet another crisis-mode reactive response, as we as a species lurch to addressing a serious problem only when it becomes a 3-alarm fire. I'm not a fan of fascism, but this freedom to be greedy and ignorant thing is an utter failure of democracy to achieve it's stated ideals. Any two idiots outvoting the informed is a lousy system of government, acknowledging we seem to agree that the alternatives (marxism, fascism, libertarianism) seem even poorer.
I think you got that quote wrong. (Shame on you for not being familiar with American history. O for shame!) The correct version is:
"Ask not what the empire can do for you, ask what you can do for the empire."
Why is it that you can get 400,000 people to give their lives for their country, but god forbid you ask them to use less energy.
By the way, to answer your semi-rhetorical question, while you can get several respectable thousands of people to die for patriotism and honor, you can get 400,000 people to give their lives for their country because they're poor. The poor have disportionately died in the wars of the American privleged classes for as far back as our history goes, from our founding days through the various Civil and Spanish-American wars, up to the World Wars and the War on Terror. Detroit recruits a hell of a lot better than Princeton. Note that whether you consider that a positive or negative item as far as 2006 politics and historical realpolitik efficacy goes, as a neutral fact of American history it's eminently researchable and well-documented, if not often candidly discussed in polite privleged classes company. Howard Zinn's People's history of the United States is a convenient text for a general overview of various pertinent gems of the historical data, and a classic recommendation in that area, if you have a non-rhetorical interest.
People generalized to the basic character structure of modern human nature aren't going to resist french fries and cheaply priced cheese, much less abstractions about using too much energy. Hence asking people to use less energy is never going to work in the aggregate. They'll stop when their behavoir is sufficiently incentivized to produce that response, period, preferrably by innovations appealing unmistakably to their economic interest, rather than catastrophic disaster appealing unmistakably to their survival interests. Electric meters rolling backwards for people with solar panals installed has that tangible and economic combo effect; that's why it's a hit. Ideology needs that to find traction and evangelicize well, or it fails to influence most people.
Thousands of people are suffering and dying vainly and unjustly at every moment, and this does not affect us; it's full reality is shrouded, our minds dealing with localized range and a limited span of people. Hence to the latter half of your semi-rhetorical question...God has forbid we ask them to use less energy - they need to see it in tangible terms in daily living, not as a abstract argument. The wise can be good but the many cannot be wise, they must have their french fries and unmistakable incentives.
Only when the worldwide proletariat is engaged in efforts to secure human rights will true progress be achieved.
That seems to me like saying that if everybody wanted peace instead of a color TV, there would be peace.
It isn't untrue, but it's unrealistic to the known facts of human nature and history. I donate to the EFF not because I desire them to tackle global human rights, but because I hope that they will prove an effective check against governmental abuse of the technological expression of my rights.
The EFF should do more to call people's attention to the international struggle for human freedom.
I don't want the vague desire to be a millionaire next week, it gets me nowhere - I want a sensible budget and automatic paycheck deduction to savings, because that actually helps me genuinely achieve wealth. The EFF's scope is fine, leave the global humanitarianism, worthy though it may be, out of this.
When the day comes that people's revolution has overthrown the existing order...
A fine day. However, you overlook that one of the problems is not the global ruling class, but privileged classes in general, and more notably privilege rather than class. i.e. When poor people become rich, they do not behave like the virtuous poor you imagine them to be, but promptly pick up the habits of rich, ruling, privileged class which you rail against. In other words, I admire your intent, but suspect that your direction is essentially tragic, seeking satisfaction by means which by their very nature cannot lead to satisfaction.
The sticky detail of privileged classes being emergent and inevitable is profound, as it implies that a simple revolution leading directly to utopia is misguided, and that more systemic proximal improvements to human social institutions are more useful. The gradual improvement of human history may be seen as such a slow sea change progress.
The enemy is not just a few misguided Bush administration functionaries, but is in fact the whole of the global ruling class.
A people has no enemies, though I appreciate your general intent. Marxism's proletariat was at it's best, perhaps, in it's invitation to join it, rather than in it's promise to sieze things, kill people and allegedly overthrow dystopia for paradise.
Tangentially, when fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross, not via a few misguided functionaries, nor even the ruling class. It will sweep up the general populace in it's flow and frenzy. They will participate.
Whether or not the EFF is defending 'bourgeois privilege', they appear to be checking fascism as a trend. Therefore they get my dollars. It's not that you weren't insightful or without worthy intent, it's just 'seizing the means of production' is an unworkable solution.
When the day comes that humanity throws off it's chains, it will discover that chasing freedom is itself unfree. In the meanwhile, could you set the global proletariat down and help with local matters at hand ?
Any better ideas other then beating the users with a stick or JB Weld in any unused ports on a computer.
I work at a Fortune 500 company, that actually hands out USB keys with laptop provisionings. Not only might we one day find hackers attempting to place USB keys outside, we already occassionally find misplaced usb keys inside the building. Plugging one in to find out whom to return it to is both obvious and a common practice upon finding one misplaced.
However - we have a 'test lab' box on the floor - where we test software downloads, open source libraries, etc., for wholesome behavoir before submitting them for approval for production use, hence it's straightforward to pop the usb key in over there, a brief stroll away, on a safe box not hooked up to email or the general network. It's a fairly easy habit to acquire, although same-floor convenience is probably key.
Being curious is one thing. Being curious and setting loose a virus when a test lab box was trivially nearby is arguably another thing; it's generally understood you'd catch extra hell for being lazy in that scenario and deserve it.
People are lazy in addition to being curious, of course. But it is a suggestion. Most companies large enough to have too many employees to rigorous train on security, are also generally large enough to provide test lab boxes, (and virtual server sofware, vpn work arrangements from home, etc.)
Clearly you're paid to develop software.
I'm paid to develop software AND develop the next generation of people to develop software.
that I'm paid to develop software that accomplishes a purpose that betters the world. If I make mistakes, or allow too many novices on board, or allow a novice on board that do not happen to have a sufficient desire to learn or to perform due diligence...someone literally suffers. Somewhere someone will recieve a poor medical outcome, or fail to get a home loan, or watch their startup fail for lack of a quality tool, or labor unneccessarily in the absence of a timely product, etc.
I'm not willing to develop the next generation of people to develop software at the expense of my end user's or the company's customers. I'm not against the obvious neccessity of novices learning, I just don't think it's appropriate on serious projects. They should cut their teeth elsewhere.
You may indeed be richer, regardless of wealth. I am not so full of hubris not to notice the validity of your critiques. As regards wealth, I can say that it is not the money that obliges me to perform, it is the obligation and the responsibility that accepting the money entails. We, as experts, are being paid exceedingly well to deliver, not to engage in pleasant social interaction. And we have an addition obligation not merely to the company that pays us, but to the users of our products and to society.
I question whether the training of novices comes at the expense of other people, and I find the likelihood that it often may, rather tragic, with due respect to the possibility that you may be in an honorable and beneficial situation. I am not persuaded your circumstance is not an outlier of good luck, nor, particularly, whether it is biased towards overlooking instances and costs of failed apprenticeships.
There are quite a bit of things that you can do in this situation, and most of it depends on the skill differential and the type of project. If your partner is not a very good programmer, expect to be their teacher.
If your partner is not a very good programmer and you are an expert, you should delegate the instruction of the novice to a journeyman. Experts should teach journeymen, journeyman should teach novices.
Depending on your personal preferences, obviously some experts may enjoying teaching novices. But many will not. If the skill gap is too wide, it can be akward, and it is unjust to put the onus on the expert.
What better way than to round out a new / young programmer's
knowledge than to work with a more experienced colleague?
How about the young programmer read source code from a variety of projects. Why should I bother to teach someone who can't be bothered to make that effort, or who remains fundamentally ignorant about not what to learn, but how to learn ?
How about the novice actually crack open some difficult textbooks and sandbox programming environments and really study the fundamentals. Why on earth should I teach any basic concepts broadly available in the standard literature ?
How about the novice actually study up on the domain of the work, in addition to the vanilla comp sci topics. Why should I have to cover and compensate for his lack of motivation and lack of desire to engage in domain subject matter ?
Before we advocate the merits of apprenticeship with great enthusiasm, how about we also concurrently and ruthlessly consider trading, firing, or safely sandboxing the less competant elsewhere, and replace them with sufficiently competant staff.
I'm not out to troll you, I seriously think most novices are problematic. For every ideal novice and situation you can posterchild, there are a dozen that are dysfunctional, unpleasant for the expert, or simply inefficient.
Most expert developers I've known at a variety of companies and settings have little interest in training novices. Linear to our degree of expertise, we want to execute with high competance and attention to detail on complex domain models and enterprise warehouses and highly scalable services and so forth. Novices are not welcome.
Journeymen not yet up to speed on certain project specifics or domain specifics are fine. I would submit they are usually journeymen because they actually do the things I listed above, which your novices ought to do bother bothering people. e.g. reading source code widely, exploring and practicing difficult spaces in the compsci literature, branching out to studying a non-compsci domain, signficantly contributing to an open source project, etc.
There are places for being a novice, but they include school, your own time, hobbyist open source projects, official company-sponsered training courses or free days, professional conferences, and so forth. They do not include expensive, complex, or mission critical work projects, which are, candidly, a sizable majority of work project, else they wouldn't be professional work.
I am myself a novice in new domain areas or technologies, as is any expert, but I don't inflict myself on my work collegues in those areas, or ask them to train me when I have wide resources to train myself. At minimum, I come for clarification or a quick tip at the journeyman to advanced journeyman level, and have a variety of worthwild knowledge to exchange.
Or to spin your quote another way:
What better way for the young programmer to round out his knowledge. But what a painful-to-watch, project-delaying, time-consuming, novice-code-rewriting, overtime-causing chore for the unlucky competant collegue.
I'm particularly interested in historical data about the levels to which common instruments were normed in prior decades.
For actual tables of data from specific historical studies, refer to the copious amount of literature on the intersection of testing and education, which is arguably it's own subgenre of educational literature. You should have no difficulty finding materials.
My IQ was rated at about 190 when I was 12 but I never had the opportunity to just exclusively go to school and not work.
Flamebait or troll or not, I accuse you of flagrant exaggeration, if not outright lying. Your use of language, vocabulary, and compositional structure is self-evidently sharply below that level. As is the vocabulary and compositional quality of your other recent posts, eight of the last ten of which scored 1. Your expository and vocabulary also jarringly conflicts with your assertion of "a nearly insatiable desire to read whatever I could get my hands on."
The point of which is, don't lie on this forum. Making a knowing transgression of risking off-topic for this reply or not, I dislike letting that by, and it taints the rest of your post, the meta-moderation of which I would suggest ought consider whether the moderation points were deserved.
As an aside, also, the vast majority of IQ tests, including upper range IQ tests, are not designed to accurately test above approximately 170. Test calibration above that level is very challenging. Try and remember such tangential details the next time you fib, for better general congruence and background.
I am a significant deviation from the norm
Sigh. In inferiority complex, perhaps.
In the future, try posting without repeatedly referencing how smart you are, and how your brilliance is oppressed by vast forces opposing you. Your posts will implicitly convey deviation from the norm, if they can in fact exhibit such, without needing attempts at neon signage.
Accent can be a problem, but I don't think that this is in any way racist. (italics added)
It is not, it is cultural bias. Such bias, while not as bad as overt racism, can wreck more havoc than you might expect. I agree with the strict form of your assertion that accent in pure isolation as such is neglibile, but disagree with the implicit direction of overlooked cultural bias your carefree wording perhaps suggests. 'in any way' walks a very fine line.
Also, to wit, comprehension "may be a problem", however accents being a problem, as a phrasing, is rather suggestive of bias, without meaning to overly deconstruct what may have been quickly authored language. There is a delicious irony in your warning of age bias while displaying possible cultural bias, of course.
If you find yourself consistantly giving better reviews for initiative and teaming to American collegues, of whatever color, and are yourself also American, it would serve you well to pause for a moment and consider if the people you are negatively reviewing or having work friction with are consistantly asian, indian, latin american, etcetera. i.e. grew up in foreign cultures.
For the record, I myself am American, white, and male. I speak to you from the acquired benefit of unpleasant experience. Cultural bias is painful, both in ignorance and in the retrospect of wisdom. It is neither liberal or conservative to relate to people wisely, it is quintessentially human.
You may find that it appears to you that your indian collegues do not suitably debate when a team lead is in the room, or your asian collegues do not seem to independantly pick up tasks spontaneously and run away crisply executing them. Is this not as much your invisible American bias, as it is a deficiency of your collegues? It bears your thinking for a while about whether they are intelligent and creative, particularly if others assert they are, yet still seem to have friction with you. (One can easily ask disinterested nuetral parties to spotcheck this.) The constant in your dissatasfying relationships with people with accents may not be the accents.
You may not be properly communicating and listening and collaborating with people from foreign cultures, and may be offending them with your classically American traits, and so forth. This is not using people effectively; you are literally disadvantaging yourself. If this resonates as true, and reveals bias, it makes your negative reviews unfair, and the work friction tragically unneccessary. It is also, fortunately, very much in your power to repair.
If this tangent seems unwarrented or inapplicable to you, please take no offense. I thought it valuable, even if an overreaction to an offhand comment, as a contribution to the overall thread, illuminating the distinction between racism and cultural bias. (And for that reason, am willing to walk the fine line between insight and flamebait.)
One could, for example, be American and share age, gender, and caucasian skintone ranges with a caucasian or near caucasian South African or Russian or Peruvian, and yet run amok of sharp cultural conflict or subtle resentment...
Could one not provide the Slashdot editors with pushbutton-simple or fully automated tools, that check for both broken links, and, more saliently, for overt paragraph copying from linked material as submission text ?
It seems to me, with respect, that one could easily code some straightforward editor admin features up to pull the link's pages and regex for obvious pattern matches, in a rather short development time and pushbutton manner, displaying the results of the checks. Or in an automatic manner, auto-invoked for each candidate submission and displaying a couple visual bits of information for the article selector beside eligible candidate entries / submission entries.
(I am presuming the submission pool looks like some form of html listing of entries to editors.)
Would it be possible, in rejecting articles, to checkbox from a list of rejection labels, providing feedback to the submitters as to why the submission was rejected.
By way of analogy, as many coders and IT personnel know, much improvement in coding comes as much from getting feedback from colleagues and experiencing the results of design choices, as from more instantaneous errors, such as compiler messages. Slashdot lacks a feedback element to article submission.
Could you clarify why Slashdot does not allow a selected group of trusted users or spelling trolls to correct article misspellings ? Has this been considered, I am unclear why you would reject it, and felt in some way the above meta-article was lacking in not mentioning this topic.
Surely the innovation and skill of the Slashdot team is up to the task, being quite familiar with it's origins in trusting a small pool of users (i.e. editors, and the trusted moderation pool of the early days.)
I have read much this year online and in print vivisecting newspapers' failures to establish good websites, with much remedial analysis suggesting a large potential in allowing readership to correct spelling, grammar, and incorrect journalistic details. I do not propose journalistic details or major grammar be editable on Slashdot posts, nor that article summaries turn Wiki-esque, but surely there are some safe ways to improve spelling and minor grammar, via allowing a small trusted pool of spellers corrective ability, perhaps with various strict constraints on character counts, non-link text only, and so forth. So many articles misspellings only require one or two characters of editing, or an apostrophe!
Have you considered any systems by which correction of spelling, grammar, broken links, summary plagiarism, egregious quasi-advertisement entries, factual oversights, or tracking down of original source material behind the linked material, might lead to awarding the correcting user with moderation points, or with (one-time ?) heightened statistical chance for moderator selection ?
(Or, perhaps, rather than on the fist accepted correction, on every Xth accepted correction, establishing consistency of corrector merit, possibly excluding grammar (i.e. grammer trolling) from the above (partial) suggested list.)
Users careful enough to consistently catch errors would arguably make better-than-average moderators, parsing article comments with similar care, and this would, in classic Slashdot fashion, leverage the community for community-based submission review. Obviously, there are some counterarguments here, I offer it in part for it's possible inspirational aspect. I very much like the leveraging of community virtue portion of the idea.
Also... Thank you!
I have read Slashdot for many years - you are a primary news source to me.
I have much enjoyed the article selection over the years.
I am currently using Eclipse and it took a long time to get the environment set up.
Respectfully, in addition to asking which IDE to use, you should be asking yourself why this is. Particularly if you do not work in soloist isolation, collaborating with a colleague is in your best interests - you should have asked a college with expertise to assist you. If you are not fortunate enough to be in a master-apprentice relationship with a more experienced colleague, you ought at least shift your automatic frame of mind towards the collaboration of a working group. You could later repay with collaborative expertise in a particular subset of specialty you possess. Even in open source projects, such instincts for teaming and efficiency will serve you well. Your question has been good, but it's basis is suggestive an compartmentalized perspective or environment that may be at least as important to ponder as the finer points of IDE efficiencies.
Has anybody here migrated from Eclipse to IDEA?
I work with both simultaneously. Both are adequate workspace environments, relatively easy to migrate and setup(*). However, I find it more interesting to redirect to asking if have considered using both IDEs for their strengths, if costs permit. After migrating, I found no need to actually choose between them, and would ask you if your post hides a false framing question, implying a binary choice when other options exist. You need not fully setup a project in an IDE to reap many of the benefits of it's use. You may load a single source file and still perform a fairly broad number of powerful actions. (As other will no doubt point out, the mix of refactorings offered between them varies, it can be pleasing to utilize both for a combined pool of available IDE refactorings.)
With Murphy as my witness, I currently have Eclipse, Visual SlickEdit, NetBeans, and IntelliJ installed. I use Eclipse for a subset of some of it's refactorings, SlickEdit as needed for things such as horizontal column cuts and power-editing macro recording/replay (the other IDEs simply don't provide these features suitably), and IntelliJ for most development. NetBeans I confess to not much using; I've tried JDeveloper on a colleagues box. Such evaluations are useful - an IDE with even one or two favorable unique features easily run on singleton files repays the exploratory time.
That you may not wish the setup costs is a valid point, as is ability level at maintaining familiarity with multiple IDEs, however the counterpoint here about maximizing efficiency by selection and mix of the right tools, and about continual learning, are, I think, valid. In both regards to increased colleague collaboration and avoiding binary choices to build a robust mix of tools, please consider keeping an active mind.
(*) There are some occasional stray bits of migration errata in either direction, but nothing severe. For instance, Eclipse awkwardly roadblocking on, say, encountering a mixed case windows directory vs an all lowercase Java import. That was bad coding by a third party developer, but an awkward case to workaround in Eclipse that IntelliJ handled smoothly. Both are good IDEs, IntelliJ is perhaps a bit smoother and more robust.
Slashdot Mirror
It's curiosity that brings us science, and wonder that brings us religion, if that's not cutting semantics too fine.
Science and logic are wonderful, as it were in casual speak, yet religious marvel is not about 'what kind of magic' so much as about marveling at being as such.
I think 'What kind of magic is this' remains a kind of utilitarian / instrumental thinking - often posing in religious garb while actually still the domain of science to answer with these and those theories and measurements and attributes. A lot of what passes for religion wanders that way and promptly (tragically really - being doomed to fail) trips up into competing with science.
Religious awe is about reality being sublime/ineffable essentially, the part of reality which is trans-rational and inaccessible to measurement.
On a tangent, faith, for me, is not some laughable doctrine or particular sentences, but a perspective (a metanoia), of being somewhat perpetually in mild astonishment, a little bit of constant background amazement about the time-being in array, the interpenetration of form and emptiness in all things, the way language is a charming necessity always falling short of capturing the being and non-finite nature of objects. Though maybe I'm digressing here...
Noting your remark, I, too, facepalm all the time at the superstitious. It's not-even-wrong, as the physics phrase would go. It's actually kind of useful though in it's way - if superstition is involved, it's easy to discern as bad theology and move on.
Nice chitchatting with you guys, btw. It's been too long since I was browsing/participating in Slashdot threads. I miss the quality of these forums. You guys are great company.
How about publishing a competing copy, with more niggers and slaves tossed in. And let's toss in some colorful extra profanity here and there. We'll have a new order of publishing, where a consumer can select the style of copy and prose that appeals to his tastes, and put in custom orders for certain disliked words to by substituted with synoymns.
Annoyed that some uppity author uses nitid instead of brilliant, or that some popular hack ludicrously has someone hiss with pleasure in a romance scene? Order it with a few synonym substitution made...
I find it droll, but honestly, I sincerely expect exactly that aspect of customized publishing to, eventually, inevitably arrive. Hence aspects of this debate about more or less nigger seems somewhat moot.
You left out that the Romans would have almost certainly done all of the above while also managing to have 2 or 3 civil wars within the Roman empire. Honestly, who didn't come to a bad end in ancient Rome? Cicero had to stick his head out of his carriage having been chased down by political assassins, in order to assist his relatively inexperienced murder at somewhat ineptly hacking off his head. Oh, ancient Rome - such a model for politics and governance...
Actually it is wonder that brings us religion. Self-delusion is generally a disappointment with the realization that one has been tangled up in projections and wish fulfillment fantasies, which is helpful when it brings useful change. Whereas the underlying wonder / marvel as wonder / marvel, which is a key basis of religious impulse, is not the cause or target of that self-delusive drive or the aftermath of grappling with it. Best of luck with your continued unfolding, whichever path of atheism / agnosticism / religious inclination you take.
The necktie literally evolved out of the dinner napkin. Don't get too carried away. Ludicrous shoes meant to display that you can't be bothered to walk more than 50 feet to resolve a problem are easily a better definitive litmus test of religious quality.
Do they eliminate the buzzing in to claim the answer and have all players answer all questions? Because it would seem that the computer could always instantaneously buzz in and use the next few seconds to conjure up the answer, just as many humans do, save that 3-4 seconds of computational time can effect a pretty massive search / advantage. I would certainly run metrics on my program and figure out the optimal lead time to have it buzz prior to finding the answer. As has been noted, this is 75 percent marketing, and does not work well with the game format designed for humans.
I work in finance, the hypothesis of the article is ludicrous. No one enters m or b in any system among dozens that I have ever seen. No one even enters all the 000s, as the layperson typically initially assumes. You enter 100 for a 100 million order. Virtually all the control reports for middle and back offices also output that way. And lets not even talk about most products/systems trading screens generally having dual static and the four-eyes principle and deal review of trades from done to verified states by the middle office (traders are front office) and so forth. The whole premise of the billion vs million typo is a pretty dubious posit from unfamiliarity. It doesn't defy the rules of physics, but just...unlikely...
The clearest fix, imho, is that most products / banks / trading house have modules for traders limits. Which do what you'd think - a trader simply cannot trade a billion, it auto-rejects. Not every system has this setup, primarily as the product vendor's often charge semi-ludicrous ad-hoc fees for every last module to their product, including the trading limits modules, but really, it's becoming more and more pervasively standard.
If you want to be concerned generally? Be concerned or activist about things like hedge funds over-leveraging under the current lack of regulation and counterparty/exposure visibility, where a political battle is long overdue to unfold to more transparently regulate hedge funds (via clearinghouses and regulatory disclosures, for instance). Or be worried that no one understands very well how to predict where the trillion dollar range massive amounts of overall global liquidity flow and behave under irrationality, overwhelming the tools at central bank's disposal in a way not seen in prior decades.
If you want to be concerned personally? Diversify your stock holdings outside the US market. Honestly, it's silly to hold your own country's stock too heavily. Probably illustrated best by people in small European countries having a portfolio made up of 80-90 percent of businesses based in their tiny country. Versus considering the world economy, and making your country perhaps weighted, but more accurately reflect it's percentage slice of the global economy.
This article is just silly headlines pandering. Though it beats the Slashdot article today on how many keys to carry in your pocket. Jesus. Non-judgment day must be growing near.
Take http://www.freerice.com/ as a simple illustrative example.
It's incidental that hungry people get feed by the ad views on the page while I guess words, I just like guessing the words. At best it gives me an excuse to rationalize playing. The game format is what feeds the academic / humanitarian purpose, not the other way around.
Guessing words for ad views for buying rice is trivial, but makes obvious at a glance the bare essentials of the article posters' argument, and that it scales up.
Academic games are fun if you yourself like the academic subject qua itself, (bare-bones finite state machine coding 'games' are an example of this), but that audience is almost always just too narrow.
That's ridiculous. The glass is merely twice as large as it needs to be.
Fair enough.
Although I wouldn't call 33k exactly high, it's above the 20k average for the 48 contiguous states for a family of four, (per the Federal Register, Vol. 71, No. 15, January 24, 2006, pp. 3848-3849), though I would take some ethical issue with how reasonable federal guidelines are in establishing thresholds. I don't see how anyone on 33k can afford to own their own home in quite a number of areas of the country, for instance, and I find that disturbing.
I did a bit of web research in light of your comment, and agree that you look to be right about the modern American military's composition generally matching the demographics of the general population, (example: http://www.heritage.org/Research/NationalSecurity/ cda05-08.cfm), hence I thank you for clarifying that. I appreciate you taking the time to post an entry to correct my understanding.
Rounding out the comment exchange, I chuckled at your movie stars remark. I happen to have read People's History, the Pentagon Papers, etc. quite some time ago and happen to think that currently democrats are incoherent and Marxism laughably self-contradictory and intellectually dishonest (we're going to end all class conflict in history by self-contradictorily appealing to class unity of the working class in the same breath...? Riiiiight...) That said, I don't think you have to go Chomsky-esque leftist to think there's something disturbed about the way America wages wars or the hypocrisy of our alleged American values.
The inevitable cost of cutting off foreign oil will be yet another crisis-mode reactive response, as we as a species lurch to addressing a serious problem only when it becomes a 3-alarm fire. I'm not a fan of fascism, but this freedom to be greedy and ignorant thing is an utter failure of democracy to achieve it's stated ideals. Any two idiots outvoting the informed is a lousy system of government, acknowledging we seem to agree that the alternatives (marxism, fascism, libertarianism) seem even poorer.
Thanks again for the debunk.
I think you got that quote wrong. (Shame on you for not being familiar with American history. O for shame!) The correct version is:
"Ask not what the empire can do for you, ask what you can do for the empire."
By the way, to answer your semi-rhetorical question, while you can get several respectable thousands of people to die for patriotism and honor, you can get 400,000 people to give their lives for their country because they're poor. The poor have disportionately died in the wars of the American privleged classes for as far back as our history goes, from our founding days through the various Civil and Spanish-American wars, up to the World Wars and the War on Terror. Detroit recruits a hell of a lot better than Princeton. Note that whether you consider that a positive or negative item as far as 2006 politics and historical realpolitik efficacy goes, as a neutral fact of American history it's eminently researchable and well-documented, if not often candidly discussed in polite privleged classes company. Howard Zinn's People's history of the United States is a convenient text for a general overview of various pertinent gems of the historical data, and a classic recommendation in that area, if you have a non-rhetorical interest.
People generalized to the basic character structure of modern human nature aren't going to resist french fries and cheaply priced cheese, much less abstractions about using too much energy. Hence asking people to use less energy is never going to work in the aggregate. They'll stop when their behavoir is sufficiently incentivized to produce that response, period, preferrably by innovations appealing unmistakably to their economic interest, rather than catastrophic disaster appealing unmistakably to their survival interests. Electric meters rolling backwards for people with solar panals installed has that tangible and economic combo effect; that's why it's a hit. Ideology needs that to find traction and evangelicize well, or it fails to influence most people.
Thousands of people are suffering and dying vainly and unjustly at every moment, and this does not affect us; it's full reality is shrouded, our minds dealing with localized range and a limited span of people. Hence to the latter half of your semi-rhetorical question...God has forbid we ask them to use less energy - they need to see it in tangible terms in daily living, not as a abstract argument. The wise can be good but the many cannot be wise, they must have their french fries and unmistakable incentives.
That seems to me like saying that if everybody wanted peace instead of a color TV, there would be peace.
It isn't untrue, but it's unrealistic to the known facts of human nature and history. I donate to the EFF not because I desire them to tackle global human rights, but because I hope that they will prove an effective check against governmental abuse of the technological expression of my rights.
I don't want the vague desire to be a millionaire next week, it gets me nowhere - I want a sensible budget and automatic paycheck deduction to savings, because that actually helps me genuinely achieve wealth. The EFF's scope is fine, leave the global humanitarianism, worthy though it may be, out of this.
A fine day. However, you overlook that one of the problems is not the global ruling class, but privileged classes in general, and more notably privilege rather than class. i.e. When poor people become rich, they do not behave like the virtuous poor you imagine them to be, but promptly pick up the habits of rich, ruling, privileged class which you rail against. In other words, I admire your intent, but suspect that your direction is essentially tragic, seeking satisfaction by means which by their very nature cannot lead to satisfaction.
The sticky detail of privileged classes being emergent and inevitable is profound, as it implies that a simple revolution leading directly to utopia is misguided, and that more systemic proximal improvements to human social institutions are more useful. The gradual improvement of human history may be seen as such a slow sea change progress.
A people has no enemies, though I appreciate your general intent. Marxism's proletariat was at it's best, perhaps, in it's invitation to join it, rather than in it's promise to sieze things, kill people and allegedly overthrow dystopia for paradise.
Tangentially, when fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross, not via a few misguided functionaries, nor even the ruling class. It will sweep up the general populace in it's flow and frenzy. They will participate.
Whether or not the EFF is defending 'bourgeois privilege', they appear to be checking fascism as a trend. Therefore they get my dollars. It's not that you weren't insightful or without worthy intent, it's just 'seizing the means of production' is an unworkable solution.
When the day comes that humanity throws off it's chains, it will discover that chasing freedom is itself unfree. In the meanwhile, could you set the global proletariat down and help with local matters at hand ?
I work at a Fortune 500 company, that actually hands out USB keys with laptop provisionings. Not only might we one day find hackers attempting to place USB keys outside, we already occassionally find misplaced usb keys inside the building. Plugging one in to find out whom to return it to is both obvious and a common practice upon finding one misplaced.
However - we have a 'test lab' box on the floor - where we test software downloads, open source libraries, etc., for wholesome behavoir before submitting them for approval for production use, hence it's straightforward to pop the usb key in over there, a brief stroll away, on a safe box not hooked up to email or the general network. It's a fairly easy habit to acquire, although same-floor convenience is probably key.
Being curious is one thing. Being curious and setting loose a virus when a test lab box was trivially nearby is arguably another thing; it's generally understood you'd catch extra hell for being lazy in that scenario and deserve it.
People are lazy in addition to being curious, of course. But it is a suggestion. Most companies large enough to have too many employees to rigorous train on security, are also generally large enough to provide test lab boxes, (and virtual server sofware, vpn work arrangements from home, etc.)
that I'm paid to develop software that accomplishes a purpose that betters the world. If I make mistakes, or allow too many novices on board, or allow a novice on board that do not happen to have a sufficient desire to learn or to perform due diligence...someone literally suffers. Somewhere someone will recieve a poor medical outcome, or fail to get a home loan, or watch their startup fail for lack of a quality tool, or labor unneccessarily in the absence of a timely product, etc.
I'm not willing to develop the next generation of people to develop software at the expense of my end user's or the company's customers. I'm not against the obvious neccessity of novices learning, I just don't think it's appropriate on serious projects. They should cut their teeth elsewhere.
You may indeed be richer, regardless of wealth. I am not so full of hubris not to notice the validity of your critiques. As regards wealth, I can say that it is not the money that obliges me to perform, it is the obligation and the responsibility that accepting the money entails. We, as experts, are being paid exceedingly well to deliver, not to engage in pleasant social interaction. And we have an addition obligation not merely to the company that pays us, but to the users of our products and to society.
I question whether the training of novices comes at the expense of other people, and I find the likelihood that it often may, rather tragic, with due respect to the possibility that you may be in an honorable and beneficial situation. I am not persuaded your circumstance is not an outlier of good luck, nor, particularly, whether it is biased towards overlooking instances and costs of failed apprenticeships.
If your partner is not a very good programmer and you are an expert, you should delegate the instruction of the novice to a journeyman. Experts should teach journeymen, journeyman should teach novices.
Depending on your personal preferences, obviously some experts may enjoying teaching novices. But many will not. If the skill gap is too wide, it can be akward, and it is unjust to put the onus on the expert.
How about the young programmer read source code from a variety of projects. Why should I bother to teach someone who can't be bothered to make that effort, or who remains fundamentally ignorant about not what to learn, but how to learn ?
How about the novice actually crack open some difficult textbooks and sandbox programming environments and really study the fundamentals. Why on earth should I teach any basic concepts broadly available in the standard literature ?
How about the novice actually study up on the domain of the work, in addition to the vanilla comp sci topics. Why should I have to cover and compensate for his lack of motivation and lack of desire to engage in domain subject matter ?
Before we advocate the merits of apprenticeship with great enthusiasm, how about we also concurrently and ruthlessly consider trading, firing, or safely sandboxing the less competant elsewhere, and replace them with sufficiently competant staff.
I'm not out to troll you, I seriously think most novices are problematic. For every ideal novice and situation you can posterchild, there are a dozen that are dysfunctional, unpleasant for the expert, or simply inefficient.
Most expert developers I've known at a variety of companies and settings have little interest in training novices. Linear to our degree of expertise, we want to execute with high competance and attention to detail on complex domain models and enterprise warehouses and highly scalable services and so forth. Novices are not welcome.
Journeymen not yet up to speed on certain project specifics or domain specifics are fine. I would submit they are usually journeymen because they actually do the things I listed above, which your novices ought to do bother bothering people. e.g. reading source code widely, exploring and practicing difficult spaces in the compsci literature, branching out to studying a non-compsci domain, signficantly contributing to an open source project, etc.
There are places for being a novice, but they include school, your own time, hobbyist open source projects, official company-sponsered training courses or free days, professional conferences, and so forth. They do not include expensive, complex, or mission critical work projects, which are, candidly, a sizable majority of work project, else they wouldn't be professional work.
I am myself a novice in new domain areas or technologies, as is any expert, but I don't inflict myself on my work collegues in those areas, or ask them to train me when I have wide resources to train myself. At minimum, I come for clarification or a quick tip at the journeyman to advanced journeyman level, and have a variety of worthwild knowledge to exchange.
Or to spin your quote another way:
What better way for the young programmer to round out his knowledge. But what a painful-to-watch, project-delaying, time-consuming, novice-code-rewriting, overtime-causing chore for the unlucky competant collegue.
I'm paid to develop software, not to teach.
With apologies for straying off-topic to answer...
Try http://paulcooijmans.lunarpages.com/p/essay/gold.The notorious but well-written and methodically researched 'The Bell Curve' http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0684824299/002-21 85531-9075203?v=glance&n=283155 also springs to mind, if your interested in the intersection of race and racism with intelligence testing.
For a casual historical introduction Wikipedia covers the basic history and common instruments, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient , as well as the specific topic of race and intelligence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence .
For actual tables of data from specific historical studies, refer to the copious amount of literature on the intersection of testing and education, which is arguably it's own subgenre of educational literature. You should have no difficulty finding materials.Flamebait or troll or not, I accuse you of flagrant exaggeration, if not outright lying. Your use of language, vocabulary, and compositional structure is self-evidently sharply below that level. As is the vocabulary and compositional quality of your other recent posts, eight of the last ten of which scored 1. Your expository and vocabulary also jarringly conflicts with your assertion of "a nearly insatiable desire to read whatever I could get my hands on."
The point of which is, don't lie on this forum. Making a knowing transgression of risking off-topic for this reply or not, I dislike letting that by, and it taints the rest of your post, the meta-moderation of which I would suggest ought consider whether the moderation points were deserved.
As an aside, also, the vast majority of IQ tests, including upper range IQ tests, are not designed to accurately test above approximately 170. Test calibration above that level is very challenging. Try and remember such tangential details the next time you fib, for better general congruence and background.
Sigh.
In inferiority complex, perhaps.
In the future, try posting without repeatedly referencing how smart you are, and how your brilliance is oppressed by vast forces opposing you. Your posts will implicitly convey deviation from the norm, if they can in fact exhibit such, without needing attempts at neon signage.
It is not, it is cultural bias. Such bias, while not as bad as overt racism, can wreck more havoc than you might expect. I agree with the strict form of your assertion that accent in pure isolation as such is neglibile, but disagree with the implicit direction of overlooked cultural bias your carefree wording perhaps suggests. 'in any way' walks a very fine line.
Also, to wit, comprehension "may be a problem", however accents being a problem, as a phrasing, is rather suggestive of bias, without meaning to overly deconstruct what may have been quickly authored language. There is a delicious irony in your warning of age bias while displaying possible cultural bias, of course.
If you find yourself consistantly giving better reviews for initiative and teaming to American collegues, of whatever color, and are yourself also American, it would serve you well to pause for a moment and consider if the people you are negatively reviewing or having work friction with are consistantly asian, indian, latin american, etcetera. i.e. grew up in foreign cultures.
For the record, I myself am American, white, and male. I speak to you from the acquired benefit of unpleasant experience. Cultural bias is painful, both in ignorance and in the retrospect of wisdom. It is neither liberal or conservative to relate to people wisely, it is quintessentially human.
You may find that it appears to you that your indian collegues do not suitably debate when a team lead is in the room, or your asian collegues do not seem to independantly pick up tasks spontaneously and run away crisply executing them. Is this not as much your invisible American bias, as it is a deficiency of your collegues? It bears your thinking for a while about whether they are intelligent and creative, particularly if others assert they are, yet still seem to have friction with you. (One can easily ask disinterested nuetral parties to spotcheck this.) The constant in your dissatasfying relationships with people with accents may not be the accents.
You may not be properly communicating and listening and collaborating with people from foreign cultures, and may be offending them with your classically American traits, and so forth. This is not using people effectively; you are literally disadvantaging yourself. If this resonates as true, and reveals bias, it makes your negative reviews unfair, and the work friction tragically unneccessary. It is also, fortunately, very much in your power to repair.
If this tangent seems unwarrented or inapplicable to you, please take no offense. I thought it valuable, even if an overreaction to an offhand comment, as a contribution to the overall thread, illuminating the distinction between racism and cultural bias. (And for that reason, am willing to walk the fine line between insight and flamebait.)
One could, for example, be American and share age, gender, and caucasian skintone ranges with a caucasian or near caucasian South African or Russian or Peruvian, and yet run amok of sharp cultural conflict or subtle resentment...
Some constructive suggestions:
Could one not provide the Slashdot editors with pushbutton-simple or fully automated tools, that check for both broken links, and, more saliently, for overt paragraph copying from linked material as submission text ?
It seems to me, with respect, that one could easily code some straightforward editor admin features up to pull the link's pages and regex for obvious pattern matches, in a rather short development time and pushbutton manner, displaying the results of the checks. Or in an automatic manner, auto-invoked for each candidate submission and displaying a couple visual bits of information for the article selector beside eligible candidate entries / submission entries.
(I am presuming the submission pool looks like some form of html listing of entries to editors.)
Would it be possible, in rejecting articles, to checkbox from a list of rejection labels, providing feedback to the submitters as to why the submission was rejected.
By way of analogy, as many coders and IT personnel know, much improvement in coding comes as much from getting feedback from colleagues and experiencing the results of design choices, as from more instantaneous errors, such as compiler messages. Slashdot lacks a feedback element to article submission.
Could you clarify why Slashdot does not allow a selected group of trusted users or spelling trolls to correct article misspellings ? Has this been considered, I am unclear why you would reject it, and felt in some way the above meta-article was lacking in not mentioning this topic.
Surely the innovation and skill of the Slashdot team is up to the task, being quite familiar with it's origins in trusting a small pool of users (i.e. editors, and the trusted moderation pool of the early days.)
I have read much this year online and in print vivisecting newspapers' failures to establish good websites, with much remedial analysis suggesting a large potential in allowing readership to correct spelling, grammar, and incorrect journalistic details. I do not propose journalistic details or major grammar be editable on Slashdot posts, nor that article summaries turn Wiki-esque, but surely there are some safe ways to improve spelling and minor grammar, via allowing a small trusted pool of spellers corrective ability, perhaps with various strict constraints on character counts, non-link text only, and so forth. So many articles misspellings only require one or two characters of editing, or an apostrophe!
Have you considered any systems by which correction of spelling, grammar, broken links, summary plagiarism, egregious quasi-advertisement entries, factual oversights, or tracking down of original source material behind the linked material, might lead to awarding the correcting user with moderation points, or with (one-time ?) heightened statistical chance for moderator selection ?
(Or, perhaps, rather than on the fist accepted correction, on every Xth accepted correction, establishing consistency of corrector merit, possibly excluding grammar (i.e. grammer trolling) from the above (partial) suggested list.)
Users careful enough to consistently catch errors would arguably make better-than-average moderators, parsing article comments with similar care, and this would, in classic Slashdot fashion, leverage the community for community-based submission review. Obviously, there are some counterarguments here, I offer it in part for it's possible inspirational aspect. I very much like the leveraging of community virtue portion of the idea.
Also... Thank you!
I have read Slashdot for many years - you are a primary news source to me. I have much enjoyed the article selection over the years.
Respectfully, in addition to asking which IDE to use, you should be asking yourself why this is. Particularly if you do not work in soloist isolation, collaborating with a colleague is in your best interests - you should have asked a college with expertise to assist you. If you are not fortunate enough to be in a master-apprentice relationship with a more experienced colleague, you ought at least shift your automatic frame of mind towards the collaboration of a working group. You could later repay with collaborative expertise in a particular subset of specialty you possess. Even in open source projects, such instincts for teaming and efficiency will serve you well. Your question has been good, but it's basis is suggestive an compartmentalized perspective or environment that may be at least as important to ponder as the finer points of IDE efficiencies.
I work with both simultaneously. Both are adequate workspace environments, relatively easy to migrate and setup(*). However, I find it more interesting to redirect to asking if have considered using both IDEs for their strengths, if costs permit. After migrating, I found no need to actually choose between them, and would ask you if your post hides a false framing question, implying a binary choice when other options exist. You need not fully setup a project in an IDE to reap many of the benefits of it's use. You may load a single source file and still perform a fairly broad number of powerful actions. (As other will no doubt point out, the mix of refactorings offered between them varies, it can be pleasing to utilize both for a combined pool of available IDE refactorings.)
With Murphy as my witness, I currently have Eclipse, Visual SlickEdit, NetBeans, and IntelliJ installed. I use Eclipse for a subset of some of it's refactorings, SlickEdit as needed for things such as horizontal column cuts and power-editing macro recording/replay (the other IDEs simply don't provide these features suitably), and IntelliJ for most development. NetBeans I confess to not much using; I've tried JDeveloper on a colleagues box. Such evaluations are useful - an IDE with even one or two favorable unique features easily run on singleton files repays the exploratory time.
That you may not wish the setup costs is a valid point, as is ability level at maintaining familiarity with multiple IDEs, however the counterpoint here about maximizing efficiency by selection and mix of the right tools, and about continual learning, are, I think, valid. In both regards to increased colleague collaboration and avoiding binary choices to build a robust mix of tools, please consider keeping an active mind.
(*) There are some occasional stray bits of migration errata in either direction, but nothing severe. For instance, Eclipse awkwardly roadblocking on, say, encountering a mixed case windows directory vs an all lowercase Java import. That was bad coding by a third party developer, but an awkward case to workaround in Eclipse that IntelliJ handled smoothly. Both are good IDEs, IntelliJ is perhaps a bit smoother and more robust.