Relativism, the belief that these sorts of things are relative to the person and don't exist independently of that person's thoughts, gets you no where, except suicide of the insane asylum. Clear enough?
Yes. And you're right, for what it's worth. However, I choose to go only one level into the loop, and avoid the recursion that renders it useless.
Besides until you can tell me you've read the Analects, as well as the various other works of classical Chinese scholasticism, I don't believe you're in ANY position to claim an understanding of Chinese ways. Period. ~a - b.a. History, focus: China.
Okay, now where did I claim to have any understanding of Chinese ways? I didn't even mention China.
Oh... I get it. This way you can bring up workds like scholasticism and appear "lurn-ed". Well, good job then.
I challenge you to make an argument in which a government that censors its people is in the right. Convince me that my personal beliefs valuing freedom of expression and speech should not apply in China or anywhere else.
I can't, because you clearly believe in the idea that a social construct such as freedom of speech has some fundamental, inherent "rightness", and I do not.
There is no possible agreement between us on the topic.
So... you feel that freedom of speech isn't a inherent right for the Chinese?
That's correct. I don't believe that freedom of speech is an inherent right. Neither do western governments. If you don't believe me, try reading pedophile poetry in a kindergarten class. Or try spreading state secrets if you come across one.
More to the point, I think freedom of speech might work at one time and in one place, and not at all in other times and places. I'm very much a believer in moral subjectivity.
What I DON'T agree with is trying to impress your own beliefs on another society just because you think yours are better than theirs.
It's a chance to read a whole bunch of responses by contributors who are absolutely convinced that the values and beliefs they hold are the ones that should be universally observed.
Even being a spectator in the finals - being able to watch the top competitors attack some hard problems in real-time - was an exciting experience.
Wow. If you think watching coders think is exciting, just wait until you discover organized sports.
Football, hockey, baseball... well, scratch baseball (most overrated game in the entire history of games)... hell, I'd watch seniors curling before I'd watch a programming competition.
I'm a coder (although not a world-class one by any stretch of the imagination), and I've had people shadow my work during career week. I can't imagine how bored they must have been. I wish I could apologize to them for turning them off of the career.
It's so typical of western society to believe that their values are the ones that should be universally held.
I sincerely hope that the software is immediately used by employees to get around corporate content firewalls, allowing them to surf child porn and hate literature undetected.
When we begin life, we begin with a brain that has been built by DNA. But from the moment the first sensations begin to trickle into that tiny organ, the brain begins to change. At first, the sensations are simple. The beat of the mothers heart, the warmth of the womb, the sense of enclosure coming through touch... these are the first of many things that will mold a child. After birth, the brain is completely saturated with new sensations. For the rest of its life, that brain will take in, categorize, and learn from a continual barrage of input.
From early on the lessons being learned are extremely complex. Cause and effect. Rules. Social behaviours. Orders. Persuasion. Manipulation. These are the lessons of early childhood. The incredible range of sensation made available to every brain is so varied that each one develops differently. Even identical twins raised together and treated roughly the same can end up with dramatic differences in their personalities. After all, they start out with the same brain, thanks to common DNA... so even small differences in environment can clearly make huge differences in people.
At every stage of growth, a person faces a multitude of choices. Each choice made carries with it the weight of countless past choices, and the knowledge of the results. The brain grows even more intricate... and the person learns. But... I look at my life, and I wonder. Looking back at every decision I have ever made... was it possible for me to have decided any other way than I eventually did? I'm bad with money. When I was 18 and I got my first credit card, I might have made smarter choices with it. But I didn't. Could I have? I just don't know.
I inhabit my mind. It feels like I'm making decisions as I go... but am I just carrying out the only possible courses of action, ones dictated by the combination of new input and old patterns? It could be. Perhaps it was utterly impossible to make different decisions in my past. Perhaps my future is not in my hands. This new input, the choice made, and the results will become a part of the old patterns, ready to affect my next choice.
In the deterministic universe there is no such thing as chance. If you knew all of the variables you could compute the state of the universe from beginning to end. There is no free will in a universe that winds down like a perfectly ordered clock. But in the quantum universe, the probabilistic one, it isn't possible to predict individual events. You can only treat large numbers of them statistically.
If free will is real, then the basis of it must be found within the randomness built into the underlying rules that govern the realm of the very small. It can't simply reside in the cells, ganglia and structures found in the brain. These are tinkertoys, part of the macroscopic world. And as such, they are predictable like clocks.
Free will bucks the universe. It implies that we are capable of guiding our destiny, regardless of what reality dictates. But are we really?
Even if I think I do not have free well, I will still act as if I do. I have no choice. If I am running a preordained treadmill of actions, I'll never know it, because part of that chain involves me reacting to the world around me as if I did have a choice.
It's complicated. Sometimes it's frustrating. I could just stop thinking about it and do something else...
Is It Free Will, or Just a Reasonable Facsimile?
Filed under: Science And Technology -- Cranky @ Edit This
When we begin life, we begin with a brain that has been built by DNA. But from the moment the first sensations begin to trickle into that tiny organ, the brain begins to change. At first, the sensations are simple. The beat of the mothers heart, the warmth of the womb, the sense of enclosure coming through touch... these are the first of many things that will mold a child. After birth, the brain is completely saturated with new sensations. For the rest of its life, that brain will take in, categorize, and learn from a continual barrage of input.
From early on the lessons being learned are extremely complex. Cause and effect. Rules. Social behaviours. Orders. Persuasion. Manipulation. These are the lessons of early childhood. The incredible range of sensation made available to every brain is so varied that each one develops differently. Even identical twins raised together and treated roughly the same can end up with dramatic differences in their personalities. After all, they start out with the same brain, thanks to common DNA... so even small differences in environment can clearly make huge differences in people.
At every stage of growth, a person faces a multitude of choices. Each choice made carries with it the weight of countless past choices, and the knowledge of the results. The brain grows even more intricate... and the person learns. But... I look at my life, and I wonder. Looking back at every decision I have ever made... was it possible for me to have decided any other way than I eventually did? I'm bad with money. When I was 18 and I got my first credit card, I might have made smarter choices with it. But I didn't. Could I have? I just don't know.
I inhabit my mind. It feels like I'm making decisions as I go... but am I just carrying out the only possible courses of action, ones dictated by the combination of new input and old patterns? It could be. Perhaps it was utterly impossible to make different decisions in my past. Perhaps my future is not in my hands. This new input, the choice made, and the results will become a part of the old patterns, ready to affect my next choice.
In the deterministic universe there is no such thing as chance. If you knew all of the variables you could compute the state of the universe from beginning to end. There is no free will in a universe that winds down like a perfectly ordered clock. But in the quantum universe, the probabilistic one, it isn't possible to predict individual events. You can only treat large numbers of them statistically.
If free will is real, then the basis of it must be found within the randomness built into the underlying rules that govern the realm of the very, very, very small. It can't simply reside in the cells, ganglia and structures found in the brain. These are tinkertoys, part of the macroscopic world. And as such, they are predictable like clocks.
Free will bucks the universe. It implies that we are capable of guiding our destiny, regardless of what reality dictates. But are we really?
Even if I think I do not have free well, I will still act as if I do. I have no choice. If I am running a preordained treadmill of actions, I'll never know it, because part of that chain involves me reacting to the world around me as if I did have a choice.
It's complicated. Sometimes it's frustrating. I could just stop thinking about it and do something else...
Or could I?
(Written September 28, 2005)
This is how the record industry, wait, music industry should be. The digital music is the advert to get you to go to the live gigs Where they make their money.
An extremely substantial percentage of people who listen to music do NOT go to live venues. I'm going to go way out on a limb and throw a completely fictitious guess out. I'll bet that less than 10 percent of the people who listen to music regularly will attend a concert or see a live band this year.
Most bands will never make it as a profitable venture. I'd like to know exactly how all of this digital music advertising is going to get the bands enough scratch to pay the bills generated by the rental of larger venues.
Really, the only way most bands will ever play a stadium or concert hall is by having financial backing from some wealthy third party. And if all you ever do is play bars, well... the life and scope of your band is limited.
I hate to say it, but the media companies do serve some good. For all their draconian actions, their structure allows bands with potential to try big and fail, funded by financially successful acts. Most music never makes a profit.
Most bands can't even afford the cost of professional recording. And despite what some guys with a $500 card and Cubase would have you believe, you need really good equipment and a talented recording engineer to make a really good demo. I've got $2500 in microphones in my little home studio.
I don't want to see music become free, unless the artists who made it choose it to be.
Ran into this when they opened a new Best Buy near us, and I thought I might pick up a little extra money as a computer tech (mostly back-room work, minimal customer contact). They asked a few (very few) questions to establish tech skills, 90% of this on-line application was this behavioral crap, which I answered more or less honestly. I could see where the thing was aiming, though, looked like they wanted everyone in the store to be "Cheerful Charlies" to fit in.
I ran a technical support / repair centre for a large store for about 5 years. During that time I came to realize the following:
1. I can turn almost anybody of average intelligence into a good, serviceable technician.
2. Poor personal skills take far, far longer to retrain than do technical skills. A prick is a prick, and so shall he remain. Ditto for Negative Nancy's.
My team was at its best right before I moved on. The positive people became proficient technicians, and everything ran as smooth as silk. So personality became weighted heavier than technical skills.
I had to fire the most technically gifted person I ever had on my team. He just couldn't understand the dollar value of a good customer relationship.
There are lots of people looking for tech work. It's no longer necessary to hire some introverted jerk just because they're available.
I don't see Male Porn Star anywhere on the list...
Oh sure, it looks glamorous when everything is slightly blurry. Wait until the first high definition porn titles become available and you can see all of the pimply, warty details. Suddenly being a "sanitation worker" isn't so bad.
"Redhat.com has a banner and press release that states that it will be Red Hat that will buy JBoss and not Oracle as previously thought."'John will go out with Jane not Jake'
These aren't the same, or even close.
The important sentence fragment says "It will be Red Hat that will buy JBoss and not Oracle as previously thought". A similar sentence would be "It will be John who will go out with Jane, and not Jake." There is no ambiguity there.
My grammar-nazi post above should be modded out of visibility. An anonymous coward above made an excellent point. I don't know why I thought there were grammar problems with the original - it's fine. It might seem a little unclear, but there's nothing wrong with it.
I don't usually stoop to picking on grammar and/or spelling. You have my apology.
Okay, I know I'm going to have to rebuild some karma here, but it's got to be said.
""Redhat.com has a banner and press release that states that it will be Red Hat that will buy JBoss and not Oracle as previously thought.
I agree when people say that basic problems with grammar and spelling are not a big deal on a place like slashdot. But when faulty grammar leads to a complete misinterpretation of the situation, you have to fix it.
This line says that somebody thought Red Hat was going to buy Oracle.
When your grammar becomes an impediment to understanding, it's time to work on it.
"Are you joking? This kid TAPED himself acting like an idiot, then left the tape in a PUBLIC PLACE! Yeah, he looks like an idiot in the video. Well, sorry. He does. He should get $350k because he was embarrased? BS."
I fail to see how this absolves the other guys from being pricks. I said I'm glad to see them pay because they're pricks. I don't really care about whether or not the kid really deserves the money.
"I like how I can look at the Postgres source code, so I don't have to call anyone to solve my problem - or I can choose who I call."
In discussions like this, availability of source code always comes up.
I want to know who has a job where they have so much extra time on their hands that they can debug the source code of their database product.
No, seriously. I REALLY want to know. I can't imagine things operating at a pace where this kind of thing is even an option.
The only conclusion is that people who actually do this are either (a) the top.001% of the elite programmers who can do this on the fly, (b) ex-developers from the PostgreSQL team, or (c) nerds in their basement with no time constraints because all they're doing is running their Star Trek fansites with it.
"Science Daily is reporting that children with 'superior' IQ's tend to have a slow start in the development of their cortex."
"Slow Starters Have Higher IQ?"
Now I would expect that a person submitting a story to a relatively technical place like slashdot would have just a hint of logical thinking ability.
Don't tell me that slow starters have higher IQ's - that doesn't follow. It's just flat out wrong here.
Tell me that a small number of people who are slow starters go on to have higher IQ's. The vast majority of slow starters simply remain slow, and their IQ never rises to brainy heights.
The summary was defective in the first place, as lots people have noted above, but it was defective within its own assumptions after that.
According to my copy of "Subtle is the Lord", Einstein failed his college entrance exam simply because he didn't study for it. He did, in fact, do very well on the science and math portions of that exam. Also, at 16 he was several years younger than the normal applicant.
While he did attend a "normal" school in adolescence he was top of his class. Grades provided by the family bear this out. There's no truth to the myth that he was a substandard student.
He graduated from the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich with his diploma as a teacher in physics and mathematics. Being confrontational and hotheaded, it's not surprising he had trouble finding work, eventually taking a job at the patent office.
From nobelprize.org:
"During his stay at the Patent Office, and in his spare time, he produced much of his remarkable work and in 1908 he was appointed Privatdozent in Berne. In 1909 he became Professor Extraordinary at Zurich, in 1911 Professor of Theoretical Physics at Prague, returning to Zurich in the following year to fill a similar post. In 1914 he was appointed Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Physical Institute and Professor in the University of Berlin.
People believe some very amusing things about Einstein. I think it's a knee-jerk reaction to brilliance - cut him down a bit, lest we feel insignificant. You can point to a thousand sites that think he was dyslexic... and yet the Cambridge biography of the man found nothing on that subject, and the family has denied it.
No, no, no. "A Beowolf Cluster of these" reference might be obligatory. Or perhaps the fact that all our base are belong to these new chips might also apply.
A Spaceballs reference on slashdot, though? Naw... not obligatory.
Actually, it's a reference to something outside of the usual targets on Slashdot, which makes it an oddity anyway. You should be proud. Prefixing something with "Obligatory" usually means you've put up a roadside sign saying, "There is no originality beyond this point! Nothing funny to see here"
Are they sure that they've established true causality? Are they sure it's the cocaine?
I volunteer to snort some cocaine (I'll need more than a molecule) and touch a gold surface they've provided if the urge strike me. And I volunteer to keep doing it at 30 minute intervals until all of the cocaine is gone.
"Seems like the Good Ship Redmond is adrift. They are preoccupied by too many projects going on..."
Sometimes when a business wishes to tackle more than one thing at a time, they expand by hiring additional "employees". Then, if the projects are of sufficient size, they hire "managers" to "manage" the employees. As complexity increases, they add "departments", and "department heads".
Using these basic building blocks it's possible for a single company to simultaneously address many projects and products.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm curious. Are school districts bound by the first amendment in the United States?
Agreed! We should universally support that there is no universal belief that everyone should support.
Awesome. I'll draw up a charter, and you can ignore it.
Relativism, the belief that these sorts of things are relative to the person and don't exist independently of that person's thoughts, gets you no where, except suicide of the insane asylum. Clear enough?
Yes. And you're right, for what it's worth. However, I choose to go only one level into the loop, and avoid the recursion that renders it useless.
Besides until you can tell me you've read the Analects, as well as the various other works of classical Chinese scholasticism, I don't believe you're in ANY position to claim an understanding of Chinese ways. Period. ~a - b.a. History, focus: China.
Okay, now where did I claim to have any understanding of Chinese ways? I didn't even mention China.
Oh... I get it. This way you can bring up workds like scholasticism and appear "lurn-ed". Well, good job then.
I challenge you to make an argument in which a government that censors its people is in the right. Convince me that my personal beliefs valuing freedom of expression and speech should not apply in China or anywhere else.
I can't, because you clearly believe in the idea that a social construct such as freedom of speech has some fundamental, inherent "rightness", and I do not.
There is no possible agreement between us on the topic.
So ... you feel that freedom of speech isn't a inherent right for the Chinese?
That's correct. I don't believe that freedom of speech is an inherent right. Neither do western governments. If you don't believe me, try reading pedophile poetry in a kindergarten class. Or try spreading state secrets if you come across one.
More to the point, I think freedom of speech might work at one time and in one place, and not at all in other times and places. I'm very much a believer in moral subjectivity.
What I DON'T agree with is trying to impress your own beliefs on another society just because you think yours are better than theirs.
It's a chance to read a whole bunch of responses by contributors who are absolutely convinced that the values and beliefs they hold are the ones that should be universally observed.
Even being a spectator in the finals - being able to watch the top competitors attack some hard problems in real-time - was an exciting experience.
Wow. If you think watching coders think is exciting, just wait until you discover organized sports.
Football, hockey, baseball... well, scratch baseball (most overrated game in the entire history of games)... hell, I'd watch seniors curling before I'd watch a programming competition.
I'm a coder (although not a world-class one by any stretch of the imagination), and I've had people shadow my work during career week. I can't imagine how bored they must have been. I wish I could apologize to them for turning them off of the career.
It's so typical of western society to believe that their values are the ones that should be universally held.
I sincerely hope that the software is immediately used by employees to get around corporate content firewalls, allowing them to surf child porn and hate literature undetected.
When we begin life, we begin with a brain that has been built by DNA. But from the moment the first sensations begin to trickle into that tiny organ, the brain begins to change. At first, the sensations are simple. The beat of the mothers heart, the warmth of the womb, the sense of enclosure coming through touch... these are the first of many things that will mold a child. After birth, the brain is completely saturated with new sensations. For the rest of its life, that brain will take in, categorize, and learn from a continual barrage of input.
From early on the lessons being learned are extremely complex. Cause and effect. Rules. Social behaviours. Orders. Persuasion. Manipulation. These are the lessons of early childhood. The incredible range of sensation made available to every brain is so varied that each one develops differently. Even identical twins raised together and treated roughly the same can end up with dramatic differences in their personalities. After all, they start out with the same brain, thanks to common DNA... so even small differences in environment can clearly make huge differences in people.
At every stage of growth, a person faces a multitude of choices. Each choice made carries with it the weight of countless past choices, and the knowledge of the results. The brain grows even more intricate... and the person learns. But... I look at my life, and I wonder. Looking back at every decision I have ever made... was it possible for me to have decided any other way than I eventually did? I'm bad with money. When I was 18 and I got my first credit card, I might have made smarter choices with it. But I didn't. Could I have? I just don't know.
I inhabit my mind. It feels like I'm making decisions as I go... but am I just carrying out the only possible courses of action, ones dictated by the combination of new input and old patterns? It could be. Perhaps it was utterly impossible to make different decisions in my past. Perhaps my future is not in my hands. This new input, the choice made, and the results will become a part of the old patterns, ready to affect my next choice.
In the deterministic universe there is no such thing as chance. If you knew all of the variables you could compute the state of the universe from beginning to end. There is no free will in a universe that winds down like a perfectly ordered clock. But in the quantum universe, the probabilistic one, it isn't possible to predict individual events. You can only treat large numbers of them statistically.
If free will is real, then the basis of it must be found within the randomness built into the underlying rules that govern the realm of the very small. It can't simply reside in the cells, ganglia and structures found in the brain. These are tinkertoys, part of the macroscopic world. And as such, they are predictable like clocks.
Free will bucks the universe. It implies that we are capable of guiding our destiny, regardless of what reality dictates. But are we really?
Even if I think I do not have free well, I will still act as if I do. I have no choice. If I am running a preordained treadmill of actions, I'll never know it, because part of that chain involves me reacting to the world around me as if I did have a choice.
It's complicated. Sometimes it's frustrating. I could just stop thinking about it and do something else...
Or could I?
(Written September 28, 2005)
Is It Free Will, or Just a Reasonable Facsimile? Filed under: Science And Technology -- Cranky @ Edit This When we begin life, we begin with a brain that has been built by DNA. But from the moment the first sensations begin to trickle into that tiny organ, the brain begins to change. At first, the sensations are simple. The beat of the mothers heart, the warmth of the womb, the sense of enclosure coming through touch... these are the first of many things that will mold a child. After birth, the brain is completely saturated with new sensations. For the rest of its life, that brain will take in, categorize, and learn from a continual barrage of input. From early on the lessons being learned are extremely complex. Cause and effect. Rules. Social behaviours. Orders. Persuasion. Manipulation. These are the lessons of early childhood. The incredible range of sensation made available to every brain is so varied that each one develops differently. Even identical twins raised together and treated roughly the same can end up with dramatic differences in their personalities. After all, they start out with the same brain, thanks to common DNA... so even small differences in environment can clearly make huge differences in people. At every stage of growth, a person faces a multitude of choices. Each choice made carries with it the weight of countless past choices, and the knowledge of the results. The brain grows even more intricate... and the person learns. But... I look at my life, and I wonder. Looking back at every decision I have ever made... was it possible for me to have decided any other way than I eventually did? I'm bad with money. When I was 18 and I got my first credit card, I might have made smarter choices with it. But I didn't. Could I have? I just don't know. I inhabit my mind. It feels like I'm making decisions as I go... but am I just carrying out the only possible courses of action, ones dictated by the combination of new input and old patterns? It could be. Perhaps it was utterly impossible to make different decisions in my past. Perhaps my future is not in my hands. This new input, the choice made, and the results will become a part of the old patterns, ready to affect my next choice. In the deterministic universe there is no such thing as chance. If you knew all of the variables you could compute the state of the universe from beginning to end. There is no free will in a universe that winds down like a perfectly ordered clock. But in the quantum universe, the probabilistic one, it isn't possible to predict individual events. You can only treat large numbers of them statistically. If free will is real, then the basis of it must be found within the randomness built into the underlying rules that govern the realm of the very, very, very small. It can't simply reside in the cells, ganglia and structures found in the brain. These are tinkertoys, part of the macroscopic world. And as such, they are predictable like clocks. Free will bucks the universe. It implies that we are capable of guiding our destiny, regardless of what reality dictates. But are we really? Even if I think I do not have free well, I will still act as if I do. I have no choice. If I am running a preordained treadmill of actions, I'll never know it, because part of that chain involves me reacting to the world around me as if I did have a choice. It's complicated. Sometimes it's frustrating. I could just stop thinking about it and do something else... Or could I? (Written September 28, 2005)
This is how the record industry, wait, music industry should be. The digital music is the advert to get you to go to the live gigs Where they make their money.
An extremely substantial percentage of people who listen to music do NOT go to live venues. I'm going to go way out on a limb and throw a completely fictitious guess out. I'll bet that less than 10 percent of the people who listen to music regularly will attend a concert or see a live band this year.
Most bands will never make it as a profitable venture. I'd like to know exactly how all of this digital music advertising is going to get the bands enough scratch to pay the bills generated by the rental of larger venues.
Really, the only way most bands will ever play a stadium or concert hall is by having financial backing from some wealthy third party. And if all you ever do is play bars, well... the life and scope of your band is limited.
I hate to say it, but the media companies do serve some good. For all their draconian actions, their structure allows bands with potential to try big and fail, funded by financially successful acts. Most music never makes a profit.
Most bands can't even afford the cost of professional recording. And despite what some guys with a $500 card and Cubase would have you believe, you need really good equipment and a talented recording engineer to make a really good demo. I've got $2500 in microphones in my little home studio.
I don't want to see music become free, unless the artists who made it choose it to be.
Ran into this when they opened a new Best Buy near us, and I thought I might pick up a little extra money as a computer tech (mostly back-room work, minimal customer contact). They asked a few (very few) questions to establish tech skills, 90% of this on-line application was this behavioral crap, which I answered more or less honestly. I could see where the thing was aiming, though, looked like they wanted everyone in the store to be "Cheerful Charlies" to fit in.
I ran a technical support / repair centre for a large store for about 5 years. During that time I came to realize the following:
1. I can turn almost anybody of average intelligence into a good, serviceable technician.
2. Poor personal skills take far, far longer to retrain than do technical skills. A prick is a prick, and so shall he remain. Ditto for Negative Nancy's.
My team was at its best right before I moved on. The positive people became proficient technicians, and everything ran as smooth as silk. So personality became weighted heavier than technical skills.
I had to fire the most technically gifted person I ever had on my team. He just couldn't understand the dollar value of a good customer relationship.
There are lots of people looking for tech work. It's no longer necessary to hire some introverted jerk just because they're available.
I don't see Male Porn Star anywhere on the list...
Oh sure, it looks glamorous when everything is slightly blurry. Wait until the first high definition porn titles become available and you can see all of the pimply, warty details. Suddenly being a "sanitation worker" isn't so bad.
Actually, the original line is:
"Redhat.com has a banner and press release that states that it will be Red Hat that will buy JBoss and not Oracle as previously thought." 'John will go out with Jane not Jake' These aren't the same, or even close. The important sentence fragment says "It will be Red Hat that will buy JBoss and not Oracle as previously thought". A similar sentence would be "It will be John who will go out with Jane, and not Jake." There is no ambiguity there.
My grammar-nazi post above should be modded out of visibility. An anonymous coward above made an excellent point. I don't know why I thought there were grammar problems with the original - it's fine. It might seem a little unclear, but there's nothing wrong with it.
I don't usually stoop to picking on grammar and/or spelling. You have my apology.
Okay, I know I'm going to have to rebuild some karma here, but it's got to be said.
""Redhat.com has a banner and press release that states that it will be Red Hat that will buy JBoss and not Oracle as previously thought.
I agree when people say that basic problems with grammar and spelling are not a big deal on a place like slashdot. But when faulty grammar leads to a complete misinterpretation of the situation, you have to fix it.
This line says that somebody thought Red Hat was going to buy Oracle.
When your grammar becomes an impediment to understanding, it's time to work on it.
"Are you joking? This kid TAPED himself acting like an idiot, then left the tape in a PUBLIC PLACE! Yeah, he looks like an idiot in the video. Well, sorry. He does. He should get $350k because he was embarrased? BS."
I fail to see how this absolves the other guys from being pricks. I said I'm glad to see them pay because they're pricks. I don't really care about whether or not the kid really deserves the money.
I hope he got most of that cash. and I don't give a damn about whose "rights" were upheld.
Setting aside all of the legal questions, sometimes you just want people to pay for being pricks. And these guys were pricks.
"I like how I can look at the Postgres source code, so I don't have to call anyone to solve my problem - or I can choose who I call."
.001% of the elite programmers who can do this on the fly, (b) ex-developers from the PostgreSQL team, or (c) nerds in their basement with no time constraints because all they're doing is running their Star Trek fansites with it.
In discussions like this, availability of source code always comes up.
I want to know who has a job where they have so much extra time on their hands that they can debug the source code of their database product.
No, seriously. I REALLY want to know. I can't imagine things operating at a pace where this kind of thing is even an option.
The only conclusion is that people who actually do this are either (a) the top
"Science Daily is reporting that children with 'superior' IQ's tend to have a slow start in the development of their cortex."
"Slow Starters Have Higher IQ?"
Now I would expect that a person submitting a story to a relatively technical place like slashdot would have just a hint of logical thinking ability.
Don't tell me that slow starters have higher IQ's - that doesn't follow. It's just flat out wrong here.
Tell me that a small number of people who are slow starters go on to have higher IQ's. The vast majority of slow starters simply remain slow, and their IQ never rises to brainy heights.
The summary was defective in the first place, as lots people have noted above, but it was defective within its own assumptions after that.
According to my copy of "Subtle is the Lord", Einstein failed his college entrance exam simply because he didn't study for it. He did, in fact, do very well on the science and math portions of that exam. Also, at 16 he was several years younger than the normal applicant.
While he did attend a "normal" school in adolescence he was top of his class. Grades provided by the family bear this out. There's no truth to the myth that he was a substandard student. He graduated from the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich with his diploma as a teacher in physics and mathematics. Being confrontational and hotheaded, it's not surprising he had trouble finding work, eventually taking a job at the patent office.
From nobelprize.org:
"During his stay at the Patent Office, and in his spare time, he produced much of his remarkable work and in 1908 he was appointed Privatdozent in Berne. In 1909 he became Professor Extraordinary at Zurich, in 1911 Professor of Theoretical Physics at Prague, returning to Zurich in the following year to fill a similar post. In 1914 he was appointed Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Physical Institute and Professor in the University of Berlin.
nobelprize.org
People believe some very amusing things about Einstein. I think it's a knee-jerk reaction to brilliance - cut him down a bit, lest we feel insignificant. You can point to a thousand sites that think he was dyslexic... and yet the Cambridge biography of the man found nothing on that subject, and the family has denied it.
No, no, no. "A Beowolf Cluster of these" reference might be obligatory. Or perhaps the fact that all our base are belong to these new chips might also apply.
A Spaceballs reference on slashdot, though? Naw... not obligatory.
Actually, it's a reference to something outside of the usual targets on Slashdot, which makes it an oddity anyway. You should be proud. Prefixing something with "Obligatory" usually means you've put up a roadside sign saying, "There is no originality beyond this point! Nothing funny to see here"
Are they sure that they've established true causality? Are they sure it's the cocaine?
I volunteer to snort some cocaine (I'll need more than a molecule) and touch a gold surface they've provided if the urge strike me. And I volunteer to keep doing it at 30 minute intervals until all of the cocaine is gone.
All in the interests of science, of course.
"Seems like the Good Ship Redmond is adrift. They are preoccupied by too many projects going on..."
Sometimes when a business wishes to tackle more than one thing at a time, they expand by hiring additional "employees". Then, if the projects are of sufficient size, they hire "managers" to "manage" the employees. As complexity increases, they add "departments", and "department heads".
Using these basic building blocks it's possible for a single company to simultaneously address many projects and products.