when one laments the politicizing of, and decline in trust in, "science", as it were, one should be sure and mention one of the primary actors...
namely, those "scientists" who have an aim first, and their theories, papers, and so on are simply the means.
Said differently - there wouldn't be a decline of and mistrust in "science" at large if some "scientists" weren't so interested in pushing their own agenda.
When there is consensus on what theory best fits the data, you get no argument from the president, the religious right, etc. When you have _data_, but no theory that explains it to the satisfaction of everyone, you get discourse.
In a way, it is nice that people _care_ about the origins of life, the biodiversity of the planet, and so on. The world would be in much worse shape if nobody cared to argue, and no one had the fire to continue to try and discover.
even if you _hate_ the the ID proponents, and beleive they are flatly wrong and that macroevolution is the endpoint of human understanding of lifes origins, you still need to be able to competantly address their arguments.... steel sharpens steel, if you like.
The quality of a US education varies greatly depending on
- student - parents - school environment - teachers
in that order.
I'm not sure what constitutes college Math to you, but i left highschool with 3 semesters of calculus (including multi-variable). My experience is pretty uncommon, from what i gather. It is usually the case that to complete highschool in the US you need only go as far as 1 year of algebra.
I took woodshop in middle school. Apart from the problems with some students behavior, i really liked the class. Woodworking is both practical mechanically and expressive artistically.
Ironically enough, years and years later the stool i built in woodshop class was what my wife fell off of and broke her arm, the weekend before our first anniversary. Our first anniversary pictures all feature her wearing an arm sling:)
Regarding household, i beleive you're referring to "home economics". In my opinion, this is a class that needs to get taught more, not less. In the US you no longer have any sort of reasonable family environment; kids grow up in 1 or 0 parent households, and as such get no concepts of how to manage a home, do basic clothing repairs, or cook for themselves. All of these are fundamental life skills and appeal to the intrinsic sense of self-sufficiency most americans have.
Some in the US choose to not involve their children in public/traditional education at all, since it is so poor at providing advanced math education _and_ traditional practical life skills at the same time.
The reality of the situation is - i have double majors in mathematics and computer science. Unfortuneately, i haven't used any of my mathematics since doing the assignments/tests in college. It's hard to argue that that was effort well spent, or that i need more advanced math education. I've spent much more time learning auto mechanic skills to work on my cars, or home remodelling skills to work on my own home. These are skills which most americans feel powerless to obtain, and are continually paying exhorbetant fees to professionals to have their services.
Here, franklin calculates the money and pounds of wax required to burn candles into the evening, while sleeping through the perfectly good hours of daylight in the early morning.
The lifestyle and architecture of modern man very rarely makes efficient use of natural light, to our peril: financially, healthwise [mental and physical], and societally.
That said, i really cant do anything to get to work much before 9:30. The earlier i get up, the longer i sit around the house.
I was hired 5 years ago into the developer tools division. At that time, we were getting beat up in the press w.r.t. security, linux, open source, relibility, etc. IIS was losing to apache, people were threatening to drop windows for linux, etc.
People were scrambling. There'd be discussions about every press release or "analyst" report. I think the windows server marketing group were the first people to try and lookg objectively and analytically at what was happening in the MS vs. F/OSS space.. and back then anybody that had come from that world was someone they wanted to talk to. I had chimed in on a few of the internal mailing lists that were discussing some of what was out there in the press (or on slashdot, for that matter), filling in details or giving examples of my pre-Microsoft life (solaris, irix, linux, etc).
I actually looked at interviewing for a full time position doing linux competitive analysis, but that never panned out. The position would be tasked with things like "person x is saying that linux's kernel has this advantage over windows - do a technical analysis for us and cook up some tests to see what the real story is".
Another thing i participated in was a planning meeting for Windows kernel auditing.. they were basically saying "lets make sure we're not egregiously behind what other people are doing in this space" so i gave a short overview of the Solaris C2 (bsm) package and showed them a bit about how it worked.
I went to perhaps 5-10 of these "we're comparing what we're doing with what unix is doing" type meetings.
I'd say 2-3 years ago, they really started getting good people in the right places to think about this stuff full time, and to really become experts at it. Each passing year of my employment was time away from the daily grind of living in the unix world (though i had my old unix machines at home still running, even my SGI was my main workstation at home for a few more years after i was hired..)
There are people that came from unix scattered all over the company, and there always have been. What we've got now are people who _only_ think about linux/unix/f/oss issues as their full time job. They can get into the guts of any of the relevant f/oss products, they can see what does and doesn't work, they can see where we do or don't interop well..and i suspect they can feed the marketing people with _real_ data on what windows does well and what it doesn't do well, w.r..t linux. I used to review marketing/sales documents in an informal capacity a few years back..
this may sound nefarious but ultimately the more technical people reviewing that literature, the better everyone will be. I made some suggestions that some of the claims were either useless, would be shot down by anybody familiar with the tech, or were perhaps overly zealous.... and afaik these made it into the final documents.
Microsoft is learning to deal with the growing interest, acceptance, and quality of f/oss. A few years ago, we were (imo) floundering pretty badly in "panic mode". At least now we've got good people dedicating lots of time and brainpower to understanding the space.
Hopefully you'll see less stuff like "gpl is cancer"*** and more stuff like SFU, ADS->NIS interop, and people like Bill getting into the press.
Finally, i think everyone will agree that the microsoft of today, product wise, is quite a lot better than the microsoft of Windows 98. Solid competition (even if its just mindshare, and linux getting lots more press adoption than real adoption), pushes us to work that much harder and hopefully make software that is that much "less awful" (i dont say "better" very often about software;)
***[although technically, i agree with this.. the viral nature of GPL is hugely scary for a company that thinks its source code is its IP.. and the stated goal of GPL/RMS is to _Destroy_ intellectual property]
Um, 50% of the population is of below average intelligence? I'm sorry but if half the population is below a certain level, then the average gets lower.
Well, i'm presupposing that intelligence of the populace is described by the standard distribution. If that's accurate, then what I said is accurate - nearly 50% are below average, and nearly 50% are necessarily above. Depending on how one chooses to measure intelligence [i.e. the domain of the intelligence function], there could be 0, 1, or many persons of precisely "average" intelligence, but everyone not in that set is either above or below, and i feel comfortable in my assessment that roughly half of the populace are on either side of this hypothetical "average".
based on your response I have a guess about which half you fall into, at least as far as parsing mathematical conjecture goes:)
Other people have taken this as an opportunity to bash the president (hint: he attended a more prestigious university than you do/did)
Other's have said that Creationism/ID is anti-intellectual. Certainly i have a hard time seeing eye to eye with people that beleive the earth is 6000 years old.
No, what is anti-intellectual is the wholesale writeoff of religious thought, and the complete lack of philosophical and scientific scrutiny of the origin of life. It seems like you can't, with the same mouth, say that ID is "junk" because its not falsifialbe, and then suggest that evolution factally contradicts the tenets of christianity and therefore the latter is junk.
Yet some people do just that.
Personally, i don't think i'm anti-intellectual - i had a math minor before leaving highschool, and got dual degrees in math and CS, and have managed to hold down a job with the same company since finishing school over 5 years ago (in the software industry, no less). I've taught myself how to do home wiring, pipe work, and structural repairs, and I perform all the maintenance on the vehicles in our home, and am comfortable troubleshooting fuel injection or replacing suspension components. According do most methods I'm aware of that claim to measure intelligence, i'm at least not outright stupid.
That said, i do dislike the crop of people that seem to be playing the "intellectual elitist" card. I don't like people that think they know whats right for everyone, and i dislike people that talk down to/at others. I especially dislike these traits in politicians. I'd say a good portion of Americans feel the same way, and if that constitutes anti-intellectualism, so be it.
IMO, the people that go on and on about how dumb Bush is or about how Christians are stupid, or how they themselves are such brilliant hot stuff are going to continue to be marginalized at election time. Nobody wants to hear how great you are and how dumb "we" are.
My amusing "statistical" argument is that, for better or for worse, roughly 50% of the population is of below average intelligence:) Furthermore, assuming this below-average block was smart enough to all think alike, they'd still not have a majority during elections (it seems reasonable to assume the smarter half of the population understands the mutual need for smart-solidarity to prevail during elections, assuming above/below average intelligence splits along party lines, as some like to suggest).
So here's my advice for you "brilliant" people out there - learn to deal with us dummies. We're not difficult to convince - we buy shit off of TV after all, and we're in credit card debt just like you [although i personally suffer from neither of these two conditions], so we'll beleive pretty much whatever. But if you cant convince even us curmudgeons that you're right, you probably aren't. It's not like you aren't adept at lying through your teeth, so if you'd just stop insulting us all the time, you might gain a little support.
Maybe I am anti-intellectual. Not because I'm stupid, but because I'm sick of hotshots with meaningless lives telling me how I'm wrong and they aren't.
Nearly everytime there's an election where you've got a farmer running against a lawayer, I'll vote for the farmer. Both people are in the shit creation business, but one of them manages to produce food out of the deal.
As a matter of reality, it is near-impossible to home school in some jurisdictions (state demands control over curriculum, etc). Most administrations/teachers/government officials don't "get" homeschooling and are very, very critical of it. While thankfully it is not impossible, or even difficult in _some_ areas, the government has entirely too much say in bringing up children, and creating barriers to home/alternative schooling is cheif amongst their means.
I do not _want_ equal time for creationism - far from it. I don't want it discussed in school. I'm merely expressing that this is backlash - a pendulum swing - to counteract the continued belittlement of religious (primarily christian) viewpoints by the public school system. In biology class (this topic) by activist teachers, by trying to restrict student freedom of assembly (prayer meetings), etc.
Do i personally feel persecuted by this ? No. I'm no longer in school, and when i was i'm sure i was ready to make fun of those dumb fundies along with the teacher and everyone else.
I don't know where you live - but i dont hear of muslims, or any other "group" in mass graves in this country at all.
The public school system, arguably, is one of the _worst_ things going on in poor neighborhoods. Question - if public education for the poor is working so great, where are the people that "break out" of the poor neighborhoods they grow up in? It's possible, and it happens, but it's not common. If my public school experience was typical, there were a few kids from a disadvantaged part of town that tried hard. They got a hard time from the rest of the kids from their demographic. School for most of these guys was daytime daycare for teenagers. Nothing learned, no value added to society.
When people don't want to be at school, why force them to be there? Why should you and I be paying to put someone in a building where they'll only slow down the rest of the students, at least some of which are there to learn ?
The public school system is fundamentally busted. Everyone should support school choice, with as little government involvement as possible, including a hands-off home-schooling program. Nobody that decides to homeschool is going to do so and then not give a damn about their kids educational quality - its a lot of work, so why all of the government oversight and hurdles for homeschooling families ?
1) I am not equipped to give a lecture in apologetics, and you don't seem interested. I therefore won't attempt to address your list of apparent biblical contradictions/inaccuracies.
2) I don't advocate the slaughter of teachers - but i welcome a climate where they aren't government employees, and i have complete freedom of education for my children, and i am not paying tax money to have children indoctrinated with viewpoints i find objectionable.
2a) teachers "happen" to have a brain? Teachers in public schools are hit and miss, but there is definitely not an intelligence pre-requisite to hold a teaching position. There are some very good ones also, but i hope you're not insinuating that all teachers are brilliant or something.
3) I don't think darwin's work makes my religion obsolete. My problem is with teachers jumping to that conclusion and then it being de-facto accepted in K12 education, and passing that on to students. This is where the controversy comes from - preferable, the apparent contradiction (for some, especially students) betweeen religion and science ought to be handled respectfully and without condescension or judgement.
4) As near as I can tell, Jesus certainly "gave a damn" about the old testament - he was Jewish after all, he referred to the old testament frequently (it was the common language of all the people, if nothing else)..
Your medical records indicate that you are $[incredibly bad contagious disease] positive.
If it would be beneficial to society at large to be aware of your disease, so that they could choose to not associate with you and to exclude you from certain events, places, activities, and so on. For the good of society at large, of course.
Let's keep the Government's representatives' religious beliefs and traditions out of our personal lives please.
Yes, lets.
Unfortuneately, a bunch of government employees (teachers) got the idea that darwinism and christianity/biblical account were mutually exclusive, started telling kids that the bible was incorrect/whatever, and parents weren't thrilled about it.
As a near-christian fundamentalist, i anxiously look forward to a united states with few if any professional teachers in the sense we currently have them.
What a great day it will be when the laughable public education system we have vanishes completely, and i dont have to worry about what kind of indoctrination some wacko teacher is going to try and pump into the minds of my (unborn) children. I wont have to listen to the nonsense of the NEA or the teachers union, and there won't be any time spent at home undoing all of the damage done at school.
Christians wouldn't care about this at all if it weren't for the work of some misguided teachers saying something to the effect of "Look, christianity and the bible were shown to be anachronisms and blatantly false when darwin distributed his work".
You should be more concerned that for the overwhelming majority of people in the US, what they hear in school is exactly what the government wants them to hear. That that can be violently anti-christian (as it sometimes has been) or swing to be moderately pro-christian should worry you a lot more than the possibility of someone in public school hearing a non-critical-of-christianity viewpoint.
You can't be for government intervention in curriculum but against theological teachings intruding into school. The majority of citizens in this country beleive in $DEITY, and any localized submajority is sufficient to affect schooling, one way or another. Atheism and criticism of one particular religion (i.e. christianity) is not a protected scientific position - it is a religious one, and one that has gotten plenty of "time" under the current system.
America broke off from Europe 200 some odd years ago. You need to accept that europe was so _awful_ back then that it was worth starting a new country and fighting a few wars, just to get away from you clowns.
You shouldn't exactly be surprised if Americans could care less what european news agencies think about them from time to time.
You go ahead and be concerned. We'll keep working long hours.
The reason i got out of administrative type work is that it's ultimately a dead end.
1) it is an expense. Few companies are in the business of administering computers. IT is a cost.. an expense.. a sector to be minimized and continually examined for its benefits and its ROI. If you're in the shoe selling business, running a webserver is not your problem.
2) People are by far the biggest cost in IT spending
3) People in IT are only there because the industry is so immature, and the software is so poor.
Some day, computers filling functional roles will effectively self manage, or be managable by part timers who spend the rest of their time adding business value.. and the Guild of Machine Babysitters (administrators) will be doing other things, or unemployed.
it sounds like you take them too seriously. The lyrics i've read are hillarious, not to mention the songs themselves. This stuff cracks me up. I wouldn't say these guys are socially depressed - i mean, what original music of _yours_ are people all over the internet listening to and enjoying?
No, what worries me are "gangsta" rappers taking themselves seriously. I appreciate that these kids are doing amusing crap like this in college instead of focusing solely on date rape (the more popular collegiate male past-time)
A figure that gets thrown around is that for each MSRC bulletin (i.e., MS 05-35 or something), MS spends at least 1 million dollars on taking care of it.
Now, add to that the unquantified cost to the company's image (be that what it may), the hassle to all of its own employees/IT org etc for deploying, and the HUGE hassle to all of the MS customers (the same customers which keep MS in business in the first place) and you can see that MS would have to collect a _lot_ of revenue from every single bulletin before it could possibly make sense to issue security bulletins to get additional license compliance revenue.
It seems to me that hte WGA program primarily focuses on identifying avenues by which mom and pop users end up getting computers with non-legit MS software on them.. when those users thought they were paying for the real deal. Going after the misbehaving OEMs is the goal i suspect.
how is linux light years ahead in viruses and/or spyware ? Are you saying that because there doesn't seem to be a spyware/virus epedemic on linux?
Well, CP/M doesn't currently have a virus/spyware epedemic, and neither does MVS/TSO. Neither does the AppleSoft 3.3 Environment. Is your claim that all of those are "superior" to windows ?:)
Windows suffers from the need to let people run as root because of a variety of applications need that. I'll admit, the last time i used dosemu was a long time ago, but wasn't it suid ?
Once upon a time, you needed euid=0 to run openGL games, to run svgalib apps, etc.
So at least historically, to get the same sorts of features as windows (ability to play games, run legacy software), linux has to let you run with euid=0. Which puts you exactly in the boat a windows xp home user is in - running as admin.
There is _nothing_ technically different about the concept of separation of priviledge between windows and linux. If anything, windows has the more flexible model.
There is no "basic design flaw". if you can explain to me which parts of the windows architecture are flawed and how those flaws dont exist in linux, w.r.t. virii, spyware, security patches, and so on, please let me know. I'm modestly familiar with the architectures of both systems and frankly they're not all that different on the points you're trying to raise.
In any case, I'm excited to see the linux community develop better software. So far i haven't seen it. I've seen the good things about real UNIX cloned, and in the app space, i've seen a lot of the microsoft products cloned. Where's the better software in the vast sea of clones ?
Seriously, the amount of b.s. in this game really spoiled the series for me. By the end of the game i was just like "for the love of pete, STFU with your proseletyzing already"
Microsoft will start to put products on linux when enough people are willing to buy them that it makes business sense to do so.
The following things, at minimum, need to happen first
1) linux users need to be willing to pay for software.
2) linux users need to accept that they will not get everything as source code, and that necessarily means that the overwhelming majority of platforms, distributions, and versions will not be supported.
Btw, Microsoft had the worlds fastest jvm when they were actively working on it.
Because to "admin" Oracle or DB2, you apparently have to go to training classes.
Whereas just about anyone can install, configure, maintain, and tune SQL server. Without expensive, pompous training.
SQL Server has TPC-C scores higher than the # of annual transactions on the NYSE. _You_ do not have a problem so big that SQL server couldn't handle it (but oracle or DB2 could).
Compared to Oracle (and i think DB2, but i dont have as much experience), SQL server is easier to install, worlds easier to administer, easier to develop for, easier to automate maintenance tasks, has way better tools, and costs less. I beleive that for certain work loads, it's also faster.
Given what Oracle costs, and given what the fluffers that are members of the professional oracle babysitting guild expect to be paid, i can't beleive anybody is still even using Oracle.
I've played guitar as a hobby since 8th grade.. and i'm something of a metal/shred fan.
This thing addresses the wrong end of the problem.
I can _play_ reasonably proficiently. I mean, anything most people would listen to i can play without much trouble - technical profiency at guitar _playing_ is not really making anybody money right now. I mean, to a lot of people, metallica is like the end-all-be-all of fast guitar licks and "wild" guitar solos and yet i could play the overwhelming majority of that stuff after a few years of playing while i was in highschoool. There are much much better guitarists out there, who's work i cannot emulate, but honestly, there are very few guys out there where some other guy can't play his stuff perfectly.
The issue then, is not about the ability to "play", but the ability to create.
I can play just about any metallica song.. solos and all.
But i definitely can't write anything like they could. It shames me to admit that i can't even put together an original song as good as a crap band like weezer or radiohead or any of the other stuff that's passed as music in the last 15 years.
Composition is the real gem here, not technical playing ability. If you want to hear a trillion notes per second, check out the artists on the Shrapnel Records label.. nothing but guitar/keyboard maniacs (which i happen to love, but i admit it gets tiring at times... i think a few less notes might do a better job now and then)
One other thing to consider - i haven't seen/heard the thing play, but something you'll hear from older guitarists is that "95% of your tone is in your finger tips, not your equipment". How effective is the robot at things like bends ? If you listen to a player like marty friedman, he really makes effective emotional use of bends that just _sound_ better than what i can do. How does a robot compare ?
Slashdot Mirror
when one laments the politicizing of, and decline in trust in, "science", as it were, one should be sure and mention one of the primary actors...
namely, those "scientists" who have an aim first, and their theories, papers, and so on are simply the means.
Said differently - there wouldn't be a decline of and mistrust in "science" at large if some "scientists" weren't so interested in pushing their own agenda.
When there is consensus on what theory best fits the data, you get no argument from the president, the religious right, etc. When you have _data_, but no theory that explains it to the satisfaction of everyone, you get discourse.
In a way, it is nice that people _care_ about the origins of life, the biodiversity of the planet, and so on. The world would be in much worse shape if nobody cared to argue, and no one had the fire to continue to try and discover.
even if you _hate_ the the ID proponents, and beleive they are flatly wrong and that macroevolution is the endpoint of human understanding of lifes origins, you still need to be able to competantly address their arguments.... steel sharpens steel, if you like.
The quality of a US education varies greatly depending on
:)
- student
- parents
- school environment
- teachers
in that order.
I'm not sure what constitutes college Math to you, but i left highschool with 3 semesters of calculus (including multi-variable). My experience is pretty uncommon, from what i gather. It is usually the case that to complete highschool in the US you need only go as far as 1 year of algebra.
I took woodshop in middle school. Apart from the problems with some students behavior, i really liked the class. Woodworking is both practical mechanically and expressive artistically.
Ironically enough, years and years later the stool i built in woodshop class was what my wife fell off of and broke her arm, the weekend before our first anniversary. Our first anniversary pictures all feature her wearing an arm sling
Regarding household, i beleive you're referring to "home economics". In my opinion, this is a class that needs to get taught more, not less. In the US you no longer have any sort of reasonable family environment; kids grow up in 1 or 0 parent households, and as such get no concepts of how to manage a home, do basic clothing repairs, or cook for themselves. All of these are fundamental life skills and appeal to the intrinsic sense of self-sufficiency most americans have.
Some in the US choose to not involve their children in public/traditional education at all, since it is so poor at providing advanced math education _and_ traditional practical life skills at the same time.
The reality of the situation is - i have double majors in mathematics and computer science. Unfortuneately, i haven't used any of my mathematics since doing the assignments/tests in college. It's hard to argue that that was effort well spent, or that i need more advanced math education. I've spent much more time learning auto mechanic skills to work on my cars, or home remodelling skills to work on my own home. These are skills which most americans feel powerless to obtain, and are continually paying exhorbetant fees to professionals to have their services.
In Japan, contract law is enforced by sleve-tatoo covered guys that do meat-origami with your internal organs.
Your only recourse is to find a peasant kung fu master from rural china to fight on your behalf.
http://webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/franklin.htm l
Here, franklin calculates the money and pounds of wax required to burn candles into the evening, while sleeping through the perfectly good hours of daylight in the early morning.
The lifestyle and architecture of modern man very rarely makes efficient use of natural light, to our peril: financially, healthwise [mental and physical], and societally.
That said, i really cant do anything to get to work much before 9:30. The earlier i get up, the longer i sit around the house.
This is an evolving situation at microsoft.
;)
I was hired 5 years ago into the developer tools division. At that time, we were getting beat up in the press w.r.t. security, linux, open source, relibility, etc. IIS was losing to apache, people were threatening to drop windows for linux, etc.
People were scrambling. There'd be discussions about every press release or "analyst" report. I think the windows server marketing group were the first people to try and lookg objectively and analytically at what was happening in the MS vs. F/OSS space.. and back then anybody that had come from that world was someone they wanted to talk to. I had chimed in on a few of the internal mailing lists that were discussing some of what was out there in the press (or on slashdot, for that matter), filling in details or giving examples of my pre-Microsoft life (solaris, irix, linux, etc).
I actually looked at interviewing for a full time position doing linux competitive analysis, but that never panned out. The position would be tasked with things like "person x is saying that linux's kernel has this advantage over windows - do a technical analysis for us and cook up some tests to see what the real story is".
Another thing i participated in was a planning meeting for Windows kernel auditing.. they were basically saying "lets make sure we're not egregiously behind what other people are doing in this space" so i gave a short overview of the Solaris C2 (bsm) package and showed them a bit about how it worked.
I went to perhaps 5-10 of these "we're comparing what we're doing with what unix is doing" type meetings.
I'd say 2-3 years ago, they really started getting good people in the right places to think about this stuff full time, and to really become experts at it. Each passing year of my employment was time away from the daily grind of living in the unix world (though i had my old unix machines at home still running, even my SGI was my main workstation at home for a few more years after i was hired..)
There are people that came from unix scattered all over the company, and there always have been. What we've got now are people who _only_ think about linux/unix/f/oss issues as their full time job. They can get into the guts of any of the relevant f/oss products, they can see what does and doesn't work, they can see where we do or don't interop well..and i suspect they can feed the marketing people with _real_ data on what windows does well and what it doesn't do well, w.r..t linux. I used to review marketing/sales documents in an informal capacity a few years back..
this may sound nefarious but ultimately the more technical people reviewing that literature, the better everyone will be. I made some suggestions that some of the claims were either useless, would be shot down by anybody familiar with the tech, or were perhaps overly zealous.... and afaik these made it into the final documents.
Microsoft is learning to deal with the growing interest, acceptance, and quality of f/oss. A few years ago, we were (imo) floundering pretty badly in "panic mode". At least now we've got good people dedicating lots of time and brainpower to understanding the space.
Hopefully you'll see less stuff like "gpl is cancer"*** and more stuff like SFU, ADS->NIS interop, and people like Bill getting into the press.
Finally, i think everyone will agree that the microsoft of today, product wise, is quite a lot better than the microsoft of Windows 98. Solid competition (even if its just mindshare, and linux getting lots more press adoption than real adoption), pushes us to work that much harder and hopefully make software that is that much "less awful" (i dont say "better" very often about software
***[although technically, i agree with this.. the viral nature of GPL is hugely scary for a company that thinks its source code is its IP.. and the stated goal of GPL/RMS is to _Destroy_ intellectual property]
Well, i'm presupposing that intelligence of the populace is described by the standard distribution. If that's accurate, then what I said is accurate - nearly 50% are below average, and nearly 50% are necessarily above. Depending on how one chooses to measure intelligence [i.e. the domain of the intelligence function], there could be 0, 1, or many persons of precisely "average" intelligence, but everyone not in that set is either above or below, and i feel comfortable in my assessment that roughly half of the populace are on either side of this hypothetical "average".
based on your response I have a guess about which half you fall into, at least as far as parsing mathematical conjecture goes
does the anti-intellectualism come from ?
:) Furthermore, assuming this below-average block was smart enough to all think alike, they'd still not have a majority during elections (it seems reasonable to assume the smarter half of the population understands the mutual need for smart-solidarity to prevail during elections, assuming above/below average intelligence splits along party lines, as some like to suggest).
And what does that mean, exactly ?
Other people have taken this as an opportunity to bash the president (hint: he attended a more prestigious university than you do/did)
Other's have said that Creationism/ID is anti-intellectual. Certainly i have a hard time seeing eye to eye with people that beleive the earth is 6000 years old.
No, what is anti-intellectual is the wholesale writeoff of religious thought, and the complete lack of philosophical and scientific scrutiny of the origin of life. It seems like you can't, with the same mouth, say that ID is "junk" because its not falsifialbe, and then suggest that evolution factally contradicts the tenets of christianity and therefore the latter is junk.
Yet some people do just that.
Personally, i don't think i'm anti-intellectual - i had a math minor before leaving highschool, and got dual degrees in math and CS, and have managed to hold down a job with the same company since finishing school over 5 years ago (in the software industry, no less). I've taught myself how to do home wiring, pipe work, and structural repairs, and I perform all the maintenance on the vehicles in our home, and am comfortable troubleshooting fuel injection or replacing suspension components. According do most methods I'm aware of that claim to measure intelligence, i'm at least not outright stupid.
That said, i do dislike the crop of people that seem to be playing the "intellectual elitist" card. I don't like people that think they know whats right for everyone, and i dislike people that talk down to/at others. I especially dislike these traits in politicians. I'd say a good portion of Americans feel the same way, and if that constitutes anti-intellectualism, so be it.
IMO, the people that go on and on about how dumb Bush is or about how Christians are stupid, or how they themselves are such brilliant hot stuff are going to continue to be marginalized at election time. Nobody wants to hear how great you are and how dumb "we" are.
My amusing "statistical" argument is that, for better or for worse, roughly 50% of the population is of below average intelligence
So here's my advice for you "brilliant" people out there - learn to deal with us dummies. We're not difficult to convince - we buy shit off of TV after all, and we're in credit card debt just like you [although i personally suffer from neither of these two conditions], so we'll beleive pretty much whatever. But if you cant convince even us curmudgeons that you're right, you probably aren't. It's not like you aren't adept at lying through your teeth, so if you'd just stop insulting us all the time, you might gain a little support.
Maybe I am anti-intellectual. Not because I'm stupid, but because I'm sick of hotshots with meaningless lives telling me how I'm wrong and they aren't.
Nearly everytime there's an election where you've got a farmer running against a lawayer, I'll vote for the farmer. Both people are in the shit creation business, but one of them manages to produce food out of the deal.
As a matter of reality, it is near-impossible to home school in some jurisdictions (state demands control over curriculum, etc). Most administrations/teachers/government officials don't "get" homeschooling and are very, very critical of it. While thankfully it is not impossible, or even difficult in _some_ areas, the government has entirely too much say in bringing up children, and creating barriers to home/alternative schooling is cheif amongst their means.
I do not _want_ equal time for creationism - far from it. I don't want it discussed in school. I'm merely expressing that this is backlash - a pendulum swing - to counteract the continued belittlement of religious (primarily christian) viewpoints by the public school system. In biology class (this topic) by activist teachers, by trying to restrict student freedom of assembly (prayer meetings), etc.
Do i personally feel persecuted by this ? No. I'm no longer in school, and when i was i'm sure i was ready to make fun of those dumb fundies along with the teacher and everyone else.
I don't know where you live - but i dont hear of muslims, or any other "group" in mass graves in this country at all.
The public school system, arguably, is one of the _worst_ things going on in poor neighborhoods. Question - if public education for the poor is working so great, where are the people that "break out" of the poor neighborhoods they grow up in? It's possible, and it happens, but it's not common. If my public school experience was typical, there were a few kids from a disadvantaged part of town that tried hard. They got a hard time from the rest of the kids from their demographic. School for most of these guys was daytime daycare for teenagers. Nothing learned, no value added to society.
When people don't want to be at school, why force them to be there? Why should you and I be paying to put someone in a building where they'll only slow down the rest of the students, at least some of which are there to learn ?
The public school system is fundamentally busted. Everyone should support school choice, with as little government involvement as possible, including a hands-off home-schooling program. Nobody that decides to homeschool is going to do so and then not give a damn about their kids educational quality - its a lot of work, so why all of the government oversight and hurdles for homeschooling families ?
1) I am not equipped to give a lecture in apologetics, and you don't seem interested. I therefore won't attempt to address your list of apparent biblical contradictions/inaccuracies.
2) I don't advocate the slaughter of teachers - but i welcome a climate where they aren't government employees, and i have complete freedom of education for my children, and i am not paying tax money to have children indoctrinated with viewpoints i find objectionable.
2a) teachers "happen" to have a brain? Teachers in public schools are hit and miss, but there is definitely not an intelligence pre-requisite to hold a teaching position. There are some very good ones also, but i hope you're not insinuating that all teachers are brilliant or something.
3) I don't think darwin's work makes my religion obsolete. My problem is with teachers jumping to that conclusion and then it being de-facto accepted in K12 education, and passing that on to students. This is where the controversy comes from - preferable, the apparent contradiction (for some, especially students) betweeen religion and science ought to be handled respectfully and without condescension or judgement.
4) As near as I can tell, Jesus certainly "gave a damn" about the old testament - he was Jewish after all, he referred to the old testament frequently (it was the common language of all the people, if nothing else)..
You seem awfully antagonistic about this. Why?
Your medical records indicate that you are $[incredibly bad contagious disease] positive.
If it would be beneficial to society at large to be aware of your disease, so that they could choose to not associate with you and to exclude you from certain events, places, activities, and so on. For the good of society at large, of course.
Is your medical information public or private ?
i was wondering who'd bring that up. :)
Yes, lets.
Unfortuneately, a bunch of government employees (teachers) got the idea that darwinism and christianity/biblical account were mutually exclusive, started telling kids that the bible was incorrect/whatever, and parents weren't thrilled about it.
Welcome to today's problem.
As a near-christian fundamentalist, i anxiously look forward to a united states with few if any professional teachers in the sense we currently have them.
What a great day it will be when the laughable public education system we have vanishes completely, and i dont have to worry about what kind of indoctrination some wacko teacher is going to try and pump into the minds of my (unborn) children. I wont have to listen to the nonsense of the NEA or the teachers union, and there won't be any time spent at home undoing all of the damage done at school.
Christians wouldn't care about this at all if it weren't for the work of some misguided teachers saying something to the effect of "Look, christianity and the bible were shown to be anachronisms and blatantly false when darwin distributed his work".
You should be more concerned that for the overwhelming majority of people in the US, what they hear in school is exactly what the government wants them to hear. That that can be violently anti-christian (as it sometimes has been) or swing to be moderately pro-christian should worry you a lot more than the possibility of someone in public school hearing a non-critical-of-christianity viewpoint.
You can't be for government intervention in curriculum but against theological teachings intruding into school. The majority of citizens in this country beleive in $DEITY, and any localized submajority is sufficient to affect schooling, one way or another. Atheism and criticism of one particular religion (i.e. christianity) is not a protected scientific position - it is a religious one, and one that has gotten plenty of "time" under the current system.
America broke off from Europe 200 some odd years ago. You need to accept that europe was so _awful_ back then that it was worth starting a new country and fighting a few wars, just to get away from you clowns.
You shouldn't exactly be surprised if Americans could care less what european news agencies think about them from time to time.
You go ahead and be concerned. We'll keep working long hours.
Maybe.. but it's an academic question
I can show, via tautology, that blowing up terrorists is fine
Theory 1: Nobody is really innocent.
Corrolary: Nobody is really guilty.
Conclusion: We can bomb the snot out of whomever with impunity.
Theory 2: Radical Muslim Extremists are bad
Conclusion: We can bomb the snot out of Radical Muslime Extremists with impunity.
In the future, the US (and the West, in general) should to less meddling with other peoples and other governments.
Right now, there's a big mess out there, and it needs cleaning up.
The reason i got out of administrative type work is that it's ultimately a dead end.
1) it is an expense. Few companies are in the business of administering computers. IT is a cost.. an expense.. a sector to be minimized and continually examined for its benefits and its ROI. If you're in the shoe selling business, running a webserver is not your problem.
2) People are by far the biggest cost in IT spending
3) People in IT are only there because the industry is so immature, and the software is so poor.
Some day, computers filling functional roles will effectively self manage, or be managable by part timers who spend the rest of their time adding business value.. and the Guild of Machine Babysitters (administrators) will be doing other things, or unemployed.
it sounds like you take them too seriously. The lyrics i've read are hillarious, not to mention the songs themselves. This stuff cracks me up. I wouldn't say these guys are socially depressed - i mean, what original music of _yours_ are people all over the internet listening to and enjoying?
No, what worries me are "gangsta" rappers taking themselves seriously. I appreciate that these kids are doing amusing crap like this in college instead of focusing solely on date rape (the more popular collegiate male past-time)
Interesting thought, but I doubt it.
A figure that gets thrown around is that for each MSRC bulletin (i.e., MS 05-35 or something), MS spends at least 1 million dollars on taking care of it.
Now, add to that the unquantified cost to the company's image (be that what it may), the hassle to all of its own employees/IT org etc for deploying, and the HUGE hassle to all of the MS customers (the same customers which keep MS in business in the first place) and you can see that MS would have to collect a _lot_ of revenue from every single bulletin before it could possibly make sense to issue security bulletins to get additional license compliance revenue.
It seems to me that hte WGA program primarily focuses on identifying avenues by which mom and pop users end up getting computers with non-legit MS software on them.. when those users thought they were paying for the real deal. Going after the misbehaving OEMs is the goal i suspect.
Do you have examples ?
In any case, what is the UN qualified to have oversight on?
how is linux light years ahead in viruses and/or spyware ? Are you saying that because there doesn't seem to be a spyware/virus epedemic on linux?
:)
Well, CP/M doesn't currently have a virus/spyware epedemic, and neither does MVS/TSO. Neither does the AppleSoft 3.3 Environment. Is your claim that all of those are "superior" to windows ?
Windows suffers from the need to let people run as root because of a variety of applications need that. I'll admit, the last time i used dosemu was a long time ago, but wasn't it suid ?
Once upon a time, you needed euid=0 to run openGL games, to run svgalib apps, etc.
So at least historically, to get the same sorts of features as windows (ability to play games, run legacy software), linux has to let you run with euid=0. Which puts you exactly in the boat a windows xp home user is in - running as admin.
There is _nothing_ technically different about the concept of separation of priviledge between windows and linux. If anything, windows has the more flexible model.
There is no "basic design flaw". if you can explain to me which parts of the windows architecture are flawed and how those flaws dont exist in linux, w.r.t. virii, spyware, security patches, and so on, please let me know. I'm modestly familiar with the architectures of both systems and frankly they're not all that different on the points you're trying to raise.
In any case, I'm excited to see the linux community develop better software. So far i haven't seen it. I've seen the good things about real UNIX cloned, and in the app space, i've seen a lot of the microsoft products cloned. Where's the better software in the vast sea of clones ?
Seriously, the amount of b.s. in this game really spoiled the series for me. By the end of the game i was just like "for the love of pete, STFU with your proseletyzing already"
- 30&res=l
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php?date=2001-11
Microsoft will start to put products on linux when enough people are willing to buy them that it makes business sense to do so.
The following things, at minimum, need to happen first
1) linux users need to be willing to pay for software.
2) linux users need to accept that they will not get everything as source code, and that necessarily means that the overwhelming majority of platforms, distributions, and versions will not be supported.
Btw, Microsoft had the worlds fastest jvm when they were actively working on it.
And that's why SQL Server wins.
Because to "admin" Oracle or DB2, you apparently have to go to training classes.
Whereas just about anyone can install, configure, maintain, and tune SQL server. Without expensive, pompous training.
SQL Server has TPC-C scores higher than the # of annual transactions on the NYSE. _You_ do not have a problem so big that SQL server couldn't handle it (but oracle or DB2 could).
Compared to Oracle (and i think DB2, but i dont have as much experience), SQL server is easier to install, worlds easier to administer, easier to develop for, easier to automate maintenance tasks, has way better tools, and costs less. I beleive that for certain work loads, it's also faster.
Given what Oracle costs, and given what the fluffers that are members of the professional oracle babysitting guild expect to be paid, i can't beleive anybody is still even using Oracle.
his 2nd solo disc is really, really good. everyone i play it for likes it. even women, the kind that hate metal / guitar music.
I've played guitar as a hobby since 8th grade.. and i'm something of a metal/shred fan.
... i think a few less notes might do a better job now and then)
This thing addresses the wrong end of the problem.
I can _play_ reasonably proficiently. I mean, anything most people would listen to i can play without much trouble - technical profiency at guitar _playing_ is not really making anybody money right now. I mean, to a lot of people, metallica is like the end-all-be-all of fast guitar licks and "wild" guitar solos and yet i could play the overwhelming majority of that stuff after a few years of playing while i was in highschoool. There are much much better guitarists out there, who's work i cannot emulate, but honestly, there are very few guys out there where some other guy can't play his stuff perfectly.
The issue then, is not about the ability to "play", but the ability to create.
I can play just about any metallica song.. solos and all.
But i definitely can't write anything like they could. It shames me to admit that i can't even put together an original song as good as a crap band like weezer or radiohead or any of the other stuff that's passed as music in the last 15 years.
Composition is the real gem here, not technical playing ability. If you want to hear a trillion notes per second, check out the artists on the Shrapnel Records label.. nothing but guitar/keyboard maniacs (which i happen to love, but i admit it gets tiring at times
One other thing to consider - i haven't seen/heard the thing play, but something you'll hear from older guitarists is that "95% of your tone is in your finger tips, not your equipment". How effective is the robot at things like bends ? If you listen to a player like marty friedman, he really makes effective emotional use of bends that just _sound_ better than what i can do. How does a robot compare ?