Re:Sometimes I feel like a Luddite...
on
IronPython 1.0 is Born
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· Score: 1, Insightful
You are quite right. People (like the grandparent of this post) who are uncomfortable with Java are typically programmers who haven't had exposure to quite as many programming environments.
Python is a great scripting language, but to compare it to Java is really useless.
If you hired someone in your machine shop and they brought their trusty hammer and said "This is all I need", or "I don't like that big piece of equipment over there--it takes too long to drive in a nail, my hammer does it much quicker" you'd conclude that their experience, although possibly extensive in roofing, mining and fence repairs, may not apply to machining airplane wings or automobile repair.
I've got a good deal of experience in quite a few languages and can tell you that Python, VB, C, C#, Java, etc are all "the most appropriate solution" for one solution or another. To not acknowledge such is really only showing a lack of experience in some area of programming.
A new programmer trying to use Java to build a small desktop app is kind of silly, he should probably use VB (He won't be able to build a gui faster with any other tool). If it's going to be a web GUI requiring DB access, try Ruby on Rails.
A web programmer maintiaing some simple sites should probably be acquanted with Ruby, Perl, PHP, Javascript and a few document formats. He's not going to get anything from Java unless he needs custom controls for his Javascript pages.
However, if your task is implementing a large, distributed client/server app involving tens of thousands of classes coded by dozens of people, reliable object transfer/messaging, reliable easy access to various forms of communications (Sockets, etc), the ability to run on Unix, coordination of multiple groups in many locations, etc.. and you want to be able to maintin it for a few years, your only rational choice is Java. (Heck, even without the "Unix" clause I think Java is by far the best choice, although then C# is a competitor).
I would think they would watch traffic patterns and throttle based on usage and necessity. If one user has a constant stream of traffic and another user just has the occasional blip, Tap the QOS settings for the constant user down a peg or two. If there is a conflict, his traffic will always lose, and if his web browser is less responsive, he'll probably expect that given the ammount of traffic he's generating.
On the other hand, throttling bittorrent traffic when the pipes are all empty is just unnecessary.
I've noticed that when using bt my traffic spikes for a few seconds, then is throttled down by 25%, Understandable--but why all the time, even when I know there is no contention for the trunk.
Of course, after building apps to do stuff like this for 15 years, I admit it's a heck of a lot of work to get something deployed and reliable that can mass-configure a netowrk for this type of thing, espically for a smaller operator.
If the scorn comes directly from public knowledge of your actions, it makes this an interesting problem.
On one hand, it kind of makes sense--you did it so people finding out you did it is only passing along information...
On the other hand, it's EXTREMELY easy to abuse (Fake a picture or movie), and with the masses on the Internet, the scale of the response is likely to be much larger than deserved.
Are our private lives are supposed to be "Private"? Are we are supposed to be able to "Get Away" with doing things that are illegal, "immoral" or just tend to piss everyone off (spam)? If so, there are a few politicians and movie stars we should start apologizing to.
I'm not sure anyone would claim that a human brain could understand every aspect of the universe. There are too many details--it would overflow your memory capacity.
But, if you think that by inverting that logic you are successfully asserting that there is some tiny bizarro aspect of the universe that we could physically not understand even if given all the evidence, you are severely mistaken.
There is nothing we can't "Understand" if given the ability to gather the information and a small enough scope, and to state "We can't know everything" is one of those christian things that sounds good and seems to explain away huge chunks of science--but it's just a trick.
...I thought the SEC's role was to build investor confidence. What they're doing right now is destroying it
That seems like an odd POV. The more that you uncover and eliminate bad practices, the more confidence we'll have in the system.
It seems to me the same as saying that you can bolster peoples faith in government by ignoring corruption...
Someone should dig in, reveal and eliminate any trace of wrong-doing in business. Who are you suggesting should do this if not the SEC, and how do you suggest we enable (whoever you pick) to do this job?
Did you actually read my post? I do not believe it's testable.
I wasn't trying to convince anyone else that it's true, I was just stating that I know it's true and therefore there must be some reason it's not testable.
I'm sorry, I know how dumb that sounds, but it's the case. I'm not saying that I think people can tell the future or bend spoons, I really have no personal knowledge of that, I'm just saying that in my life, it would take more faith to believe that certain things are coincidences than to believe that there is a cause.
I'll give you my primary example, but this is only to show you why I speak as I do, not to convince you because you can't be convinced (you will, no matter how well you know me, always have some doubt as to my methods or truthfulness)
My wife and I had an event where we were together, she hit her head and I nearly passed out.
Now, that could be explained away a billion ways, but let me give you a little more detail...
We were shopping together. She was getting some stuff off a lower shelf, I walked over to auto parts (about half a store away, and fred meyer is a big store). She stood up about 30 seconds after I left and hit her head on a shelf. On the other side of the store, I had to grab onto a poll to stop myself from fainting.
The first check is maybe I knew somehow. That we communicated through facial gestures or something that she was going to hit her head in 30 seconds or that I heard her from half a (crowded) store away. This doesn't fit and would take a huge leap of faith to believe.
The second is that it was coidence. It was the only time in 40 years. My wife has had a times when she nearly fainted, but that was here most serious--what are the odds?
Now this is just one case. If it was just this case, I would say, absolutely, that it was coidence. We have had maybe a dozen cases like this--Physically separated but thinking about the same thing, or sitting together and suddenly I KNEW she was thinking the same thing I was, so I'd ask being careful to not give a hint what I was thinking about, and I'd be right.
I only started even testing like this after it had happened a bunch of times.
The thing is, it can never be enough to prove it to someone else. It's not reliable, I don't think I could cause it. My wife has had many other things happen of which I had no inkling. She got in a major car accident and I had no clue--this stuff is actually really rare and completely unpredictable.
I only tell you so that you can then try, as an experiment, to put yourself in my head. You have a knowledge (not belief) that some level of telepathy exists. It may not be much, just the occasional difficult to recognize or analyze feeling, but you have come to know it for fact. You guess that, like everything else in your experience it could probably improved with practice, but you have no idea how to do that--but someone probably could.
--Then you see that there is a $1,000,000 prize out there that hasn't been taken, and that Vegas exists and isn't being ripped off by telepaths every day.
I don't know why the prize hasn't been taken. Could be a law of physics (like the crazy cat is alive and dead until observed--this cannot be explaned by the existing laws of nature either--the cat is in an isolated box, how can someone observing it or not observing it through, say, a two-way mirror effect it in any way?)
I do understand a little about skeptics though...
When I was younger it was common knowledge around most of the people I knew that there was a program to create an "Invisible" plane--we never questioned it really, the government has plans that they contrieve to keep secret, they should, but stuff leaks. The leaks can't be proven, even if everyone knows it, the government will deny it flat to your face.
There were people who said it was IMPOSSIBLE, that if it existed, there would be proof, it would be known. These people were skeptics. They didn't believe in governme
Although I'm absolutely certain (from personal experience) that some level of psychic ability exists, I'm guessing that since it hasn't been "Proven" yet, it will not be proven now.
I don't know how it's possible that it hasn't been proven in thousands of years of humanity--or at least in the last few hundred where science could actually prove something--but my guess is that either there is a group that profits from telepathy being unproven or there is some law of nature that forbids it (I started thinking of that answer as a joke quite a while ago, but with some of the ramifications of String Theory and Quantum Physics, I really can't be sure it's absolutely impossible any more).
All I can say for sure is it exists and that it's existence isn't common knowledge--so something is going on.
What kind of a group do you work in? Sheesh! Perhaps what you need is some training and a little maturity. Shouldn't any kind of suggestion be considered an oppertunity to learn? And when two teammates argue, there should be a lead/architect/manager that can tell which approach is better, at which point the decision (if it was really that tough) should be documented and added to your groups' coding standards.
I'm not saying code reviews are the end-all be-all, but is static analysis really going to tell you about the most important part of coding, eliminating all redundant code (fully factoring your code)? If you've got your code factored well enough, you really can't screw up too bad since any fix is going to be limited in scope and probably pretty simple to fix--and this is what your code reviews really should be doing unless you have really really screwed up code to start with.
It's a patent filing. People do this all the time because they think someone will invent and implement it eventually and they'll get to steal the money from them.
Actually only a few hours of your work week goes to you. Most of the rest of your time is taken to support those who don't produce (Investors, Managers,...)
If everyone actually produced and stopped over-consuming and not working or just "working" by pushing money around, we'd all be able to work just a few hours a week.
Instead we have many people causing hundreds of us to work producing just for them maintaining their extravagant lifestyles.
Although you could call this "Creating jobs", since you are only producing for the sake of one individual (or, more generally for "Luxuries") you really aren't creating technology, food or clothing so a HUGE segment of society could just stop working and we'd still be producing enough of the basics for everyone.
The problem at this point becomes distributing it--Capitalism is not an appropriate solution for the case where people don't actually need to work because a society is overproducing. It does not work when there is only an hour of work a week for everyone but many people would choose to work more, it just falls apart--so instead we have a lot of "Made up" jobs that don't actually produce but just make some other non-producer's life even easier.
In theory I agree with you but in practice there is a HUGE difference based on what is being installed--for instance..
Yahoo toolbar is a menace to society. I stopped using anything related to Yahoo simply for fear of that monster being installed. It's a annoying, hard to get rid of and generally useless.
Google's toolbar, however, is one I actually choose to install. It lets you reconfigure it to hide whatever you don't want to see, many of the options are useful and certain things like the spell check are invaluable. I've never had it crash my system.
The fact is, installing bad software is an amazing annoyance, but installing easy to use, good, useful software is less annoying and for many types of users probably a benefit.
Personally I'd be much more upset if while trying to install Google Toolbar they bundled Adobe Ass-bat (they do put ass-bat on their "Google Updater" packing tool, but there you have to choose to install it.
And you can thank Google Toolbar for 5 less spelling errors/typos in this post.
I kinda agree. I think we're due for a depression followed by a revolution kind of like in the 30/40's if we're lucky, if not it'll be a violent one then I think the whole world may be in trouble.
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.--jfk
Does anyone think our "Democratic" system in the US could still be doing it's job, creating a peaceful revolution every 4-8 years?
When I started looking at consoles a couple years ago, I came to the exact same conclusion.
I used a new scientific method I call the "store test", which is basically if a store can't keep it on line, I don't really want it.
As I went through Target, Kmart, Bestbuy, Wal-mart and anywhere else with the "Three-console display" I took effort to note what was up and what was crashed.
XBox--rarely up, maybe 1/3 of the time (A very optomistic estimate, I think). Almost always had some kind of internal error--probably overheating in those display cases. Reset never helps.
PS/2--up about 1/2 the time. Now, that sounds great next to the xbox but we are talking about a system that should NEVER go down. Actually the newer displays stay up much more, I think they are using the new slim-line ps/2s. Reset sometimes helps.
GameCube--Never never never down. I have yet to see a gamecube down in a display case unless the entire case was down (probably due to the xbox catching fire inside there--dunno).
Anyway, if you want a worry-free livingroom device for the family, I doubt you can beat the gamecube. Wish it had more serious games, but whatever.
how is that news? If I file a suit suing slashdot for $30 million because some of the comments annoy me it's not illegal.
And the ability to sue for high amounts is very important--not in this case (Obviously), but in hundreds of cases across the state where the government wasn't doing it's job and someone had to find another way to challenge some companies horrendous practices.
What would be wrong would be to give a case like this a lot of publicity--or to let it win...
It's why we have a bigger system than just one person yanking laws out of their butt.
We have judges to review and disable laws that are overly broad, and we have enforcement that generally chooses not to enforce the stupidest of laws.
It sounds like a really dumb law, but then half of the crap coming out of the other washington is much worse these days. "Activist Judges" are exactly what's supposed to fix this problem.
What I said was that Republicans and fox have become very good at presenting these "Excuses" that tend to help conservatives believe what they want. Democrats don't do that very well. I didn't mention democrats because they don't do anything very well. This does not imply that Republicans are any worse than Democrats, as far as I'm concerned, you can call them both the conservative republocrat party and be done with it.
The only reason for the existance of the democrat party is to make our country appear to have a multi-party system, and to give people something to get angry about every 4 years.
They are both wholly owned subsidiaries of they wealthy and of corporate interests--and if you think this is an overstatement, try to find a leader of either party who is not a millionare.
That's a compare and contrast type of statement, and implies that republicans (conservative) are closed minded
Well, I did say that republicans tend to be a subset of conservatives (as do democrats) and that conservatives are close minded, so yes, that's implied. What I objected to was your saying republicans were somehow opposite democrats, or that democrats were somehow better--they are both for the most part conservative.
Here's a trivial definition or two of conservative from the web(type define:conservative into google)
- resistant to change - in politics, a loosely defined term indicating adherence to one or more of a family of attitudes, including respect for tradition and authority and resistance to wholesale or sudden changes. - people who generally like to uphold current conditions and oppose changes. Conservatives are often referred to as the right wing.
How is "Resisting Change" not close minded? To be Open Minded is to evaluate all the evidence and either resist change or promote change based on evidence and logic--AKA Liberal.
As for resisting change being good--disregarding evidence that you have taken may be very good for an individual. It helps them avoid thinking as well as "being wrong"--something that for some reason litterally TERRIFIES conservatives (which is why they became conservative in the first place.
It's rarely good for society as a whole though, and I consider it quite the evil myself but that's my opinion.
Now, if you are one of those republicans that thinks they should be libretarian, you're part of the way there. Just don't forget to constantly challenge every precept, every assumption. Whenever you get new data, REFUSE to throw it away until you've completely analyzed where it came from and how true it is.
I'm not saying you will come to the same conclusions as all liberals do because everyone has different core values and those values play into it as well, but if, throughout your life you always TRY--with your whole heart--to argue the side opposite from your held beliefs, you will find a lot more pieces of your life falling into place.
There are liberal republicans, but not usually for long.
Who ever said anything about Democrats or Republicans? Both are Conservative.
Conservatism is simply the desire not to challenge precepts but instead to spend quite a bit of effort to preserve them.
Democrats don't challenge their party's ideals, Republicans are even better at it. Both parties are conservative.
Who in this country is challenging existing ideals for logical reasons? Nader perhaps, some in the Green party. Some of the Libertarians (although many Libertarians are quite conservative as well).
Who is not? Bush, Clinton, Bush, Regan,... We haven't had a president who could think for himself since--probably Kennedy--and maybe Carter. Since a liberal is by definition going to piss a LOT of people off, they tend to be ineffective or die.
Just because people who blindly believe a certain point are in a party that tends to be towards the liberal side of conservatism, don't believe they are actually thinking like liberals, they are simply conservatives that are trying to conserve a slightly different set of views--to be a liberal is to try to constantly challenge ALL views.
The opposite of liberalism is as much "faith" as it is conservatism.
I never said stupid and smart. What I said equates pretty much to what you said--Conservatives are people who believe in what has been shown to work in the past.
Means the same thing, that Conservatives fall for this tactic much more than liberals do due to a belief in what they have learned as opposed to observation and analysis of what is in front of them.
Wow, that is the strangest moderation EVER. I actually was really impressed with the way that/. works and I get flamebait? Offtopic I could understand, but flamebait!?!?!
Maybe the moderator read it as sarcastic??? I can't imagine how, I was pretty clear.
I guess that's the exception that proves the rule.
It is not provable that we exist at all--we could live in a system like the Matrix and all the input to our "senses" could be faked.
All we can do is rely on the input and reasoning we have though, and try to use that to develop repeated, predictable patterns.
The scientific method is about ruling out things that cannot be based on information at hand and current theories. It works pretty damn well for coming up with a model that allows us to predict the future in many, many ways.
For instance, the theories that science has come up with predict that if I release an apple held in mid air, it will fall until something stops it. This is not "Provable", but if you want to start taking bets on which way it will go, I'll bet my house at 100:1 odds that it's going to hit the ground.
So it generally works. It might be wrong for periods of time, but usually if you look at the majority of scientists, they are pretty correct.
As non-scientists, many of us don't do the same thing. Many individuals pick and choose pieces of data that fit their mindset. It already takes an overwhelming amount of contrary data/evidence to change our mindset but many of us have the ability to pick and choose our evidence ignoring most contrary evidence--this makes convincing them of an untruth virtually impossible. The republicans have become very good at presenting "evidence" that anyone who already believes a point and wants to continue, can do so.
This is where comments like the parents' and the article itself come in. They get this little meme going around that "Most scientists" don't believe global warming. They don't have to convince ANYONE with this crap, they just have to throw it out so that people who already have a given mindset and don't WANT to be swayed by Gore's movie have an alternative, no matter how flimsy--they won't attempt to disprove it.
One of the interesting things about this pattern is that it only really works on conservatives. A good definition of Conservative/Liberal would be that Conservatives tend to cling to what they "Know" is right, Liberals however tend to be more ready to challenge their preconceived ideals, so aren't as open to fluff pieces aimed at allowing someone to retain a "Faith" in the face of significant evidence against it.
Religion has played on this "Excuse to believe" trick for years, but I never noticed it being so mainstream until the reign of Bush/Fox.
I have always loved the way slashdot rips stories like this apart. Throwing up some piece of BS onto meant to support your cause onto/. is akin to stabbing yourself in the back.
If an article makes sense, there will be an interesting, moderately in-depth discussion about it.
If it doesn't make sense, it's like a thousand little critters climbing into your little piece of rhetoric and tearing it to shreds.
A few will usually even follow the trail so far as to discredit ancillary actors in the story.
Then the moderation system starts to do it's job, evaluating which posts have substance and which don't, boiling the best to the top.
If you read at +2, threaded, highest rated first--you will always have fantastic additional input to complete the story behind the story within a few comments.
Never truer than on crap like this story. If all news outlets had the same type of system, it would be a much better world.
Yaaaay, RIAA Wins! Go fight the next battle against corner bars and small family owned restaurants playing radios! Look! Street performers dancing to a CD they bought so that they can afford food and a place to sleep tonight!
Slashdot Mirror
Well then, I stand corrected.
Best of luck.
You are quite right. People (like the grandparent of this post) who are uncomfortable with Java are typically programmers who haven't had exposure to quite as many programming environments.
Python is a great scripting language, but to compare it to Java is really useless.
If you hired someone in your machine shop and they brought their trusty hammer and said "This is all I need", or "I don't like that big piece of equipment over there--it takes too long to drive in a nail, my hammer does it much quicker" you'd conclude that their experience, although possibly extensive in roofing, mining and fence repairs, may not apply to machining airplane wings or automobile repair.
I've got a good deal of experience in quite a few languages and can tell you that Python, VB, C, C#, Java, etc are all "the most appropriate solution" for one solution or another. To not acknowledge such is really only showing a lack of experience in some area of programming.
A new programmer trying to use Java to build a small desktop app is kind of silly, he should probably use VB (He won't be able to build a gui faster with any other tool). If it's going to be a web GUI requiring DB access, try Ruby on Rails.
A web programmer maintiaing some simple sites should probably be acquanted with Ruby, Perl, PHP, Javascript and a few document formats. He's not going to get anything from Java unless he needs custom controls for his Javascript pages.
However, if your task is implementing a large, distributed client/server app involving tens of thousands of classes coded by dozens of people, reliable object transfer/messaging, reliable easy access to various forms of communications (Sockets, etc), the ability to run on Unix, coordination of multiple groups in many locations, etc.. and you want to be able to maintin it for a few years, your only rational choice is Java. (Heck, even without the "Unix" clause I think Java is by far the best choice, although then C# is a competitor).
I would think they would watch traffic patterns and throttle based on usage and necessity. If one user has a constant stream of traffic and another user just has the occasional blip, Tap the QOS settings for the constant user down a peg or two. If there is a conflict, his traffic will always lose, and if his web browser is less responsive, he'll probably expect that given the ammount of traffic he's generating.
On the other hand, throttling bittorrent traffic when the pipes are all empty is just unnecessary.
I've noticed that when using bt my traffic spikes for a few seconds, then is throttled down by 25%, Understandable--but why all the time, even when I know there is no contention for the trunk.
Of course, after building apps to do stuff like this for 15 years, I admit it's a heck of a lot of work to get something deployed and reliable that can mass-configure a netowrk for this type of thing, espically for a smaller operator.
If the scorn comes directly from public knowledge of your actions, it makes this an interesting problem.
On one hand, it kind of makes sense--you did it so people finding out you did it is only passing along information...
On the other hand, it's EXTREMELY easy to abuse (Fake a picture or movie), and with the masses on the Internet, the scale of the response is likely to be much larger than deserved.
Are our private lives are supposed to be "Private"? Are we are supposed to be able to "Get Away" with doing things that are illegal, "immoral" or just tend to piss everyone off (spam)? If so, there are a few politicians and movie stars we should start apologizing to.
I'm not sure anyone would claim that a human brain could understand every aspect of the universe. There are too many details--it would overflow your memory capacity.
But, if you think that by inverting that logic you are successfully asserting that there is some tiny bizarro aspect of the universe that we could physically not understand even if given all the evidence, you are severely mistaken.
There is nothing we can't "Understand" if given the ability to gather the information and a small enough scope, and to state "We can't know everything" is one of those christian things that sounds good and seems to explain away huge chunks of science--but it's just a trick.
That seems like an odd POV. The more that you uncover and eliminate bad practices, the more confidence we'll have in the system.
It seems to me the same as saying that you can bolster peoples faith in government by ignoring corruption...
Someone should dig in, reveal and eliminate any trace of wrong-doing in business. Who are you suggesting should do this if not the SEC, and how do you suggest we enable (whoever you pick) to do this job?
Did you actually read my post? I do not believe it's testable.
I wasn't trying to convince anyone else that it's true, I was just stating that I know it's true and therefore there must be some reason it's not testable.
I'm sorry, I know how dumb that sounds, but it's the case. I'm not saying that I think people can tell the future or bend spoons, I really have no personal knowledge of that, I'm just saying that in my life, it would take more faith to believe that certain things are coincidences than to believe that there is a cause.
I'll give you my primary example, but this is only to show you why I speak as I do, not to convince you because you can't be convinced (you will, no matter how well you know me, always have some doubt as to my methods or truthfulness)
My wife and I had an event where we were together, she hit her head and I nearly passed out.
Now, that could be explained away a billion ways, but let me give you a little more detail...
We were shopping together. She was getting some stuff off a lower shelf, I walked over to auto parts (about half a store away, and fred meyer is a big store). She stood up about 30 seconds after I left and hit her head on a shelf. On the other side of the store, I had to grab onto a poll to stop myself from fainting.
The first check is maybe I knew somehow. That we communicated through facial gestures or something that she was going to hit her head in 30 seconds or that I heard her from half a (crowded) store away. This doesn't fit and would take a huge leap of faith to believe.
The second is that it was coidence. It was the only time in 40 years. My wife has had a times when she nearly fainted, but that was here most serious--what are the odds?
Now this is just one case. If it was just this case, I would say, absolutely, that it was coidence. We have had maybe a dozen cases like this--Physically separated but thinking about the same thing, or sitting together and suddenly I KNEW she was thinking the same thing I was, so I'd ask being careful to not give a hint what I was thinking about, and I'd be right.
I only started even testing like this after it had happened a bunch of times.
The thing is, it can never be enough to prove it to someone else. It's not reliable, I don't think I could cause it. My wife has had many other things happen of which I had no inkling. She got in a major car accident and I had no clue--this stuff is actually really rare and completely unpredictable.
I only tell you so that you can then try, as an experiment, to put yourself in my head. You have a knowledge (not belief) that some level of telepathy exists. It may not be much, just the occasional difficult to recognize or analyze feeling, but you have come to know it for fact. You guess that, like everything else in your experience it could probably improved with practice, but you have no idea how to do that--but someone probably could.
--Then you see that there is a $1,000,000 prize out there that hasn't been taken, and that Vegas exists and isn't being ripped off by telepaths every day.
I don't know why the prize hasn't been taken. Could be a law of physics (like the crazy cat is alive and dead until observed--this cannot be explaned by the existing laws of nature either--the cat is in an isolated box, how can someone observing it or not observing it through, say, a two-way mirror effect it in any way?)
I do understand a little about skeptics though...
When I was younger it was common knowledge around most of the people I knew that there was a program to create an "Invisible" plane--we never questioned it really, the government has plans that they contrieve to keep secret, they should, but stuff leaks. The leaks can't be proven, even if everyone knows it, the government will deny it flat to your face.
There were people who said it was IMPOSSIBLE, that if it existed, there would be proof, it would be known. These people were skeptics. They didn't believe in governme
Although I'm absolutely certain (from personal experience) that some level of psychic ability exists, I'm guessing that since it hasn't been "Proven" yet, it will not be proven now.
I don't know how it's possible that it hasn't been proven in thousands of years of humanity--or at least in the last few hundred where science could actually prove something--but my guess is that either there is a group that profits from telepathy being unproven or there is some law of nature that forbids it (I started thinking of that answer as a joke quite a while ago, but with some of the ramifications of String Theory and Quantum Physics, I really can't be sure it's absolutely impossible any more).
All I can say for sure is it exists and that it's existence isn't common knowledge--so something is going on.
Yes, stairs...
go stand by the stairs.
I am the pusher robot. Do not trust the shover robot. I am here to protect you from the terrible secret of space.
What kind of a group do you work in? Sheesh! Perhaps what you need is some training and a little maturity. Shouldn't any kind of suggestion be considered an oppertunity to learn? And when two teammates argue, there should be a lead/architect/manager that can tell which approach is better, at which point the decision (if it was really that tough) should be documented and added to your groups' coding standards.
I'm not saying code reviews are the end-all be-all, but is static analysis really going to tell you about the most important part of coding, eliminating all redundant code (fully factoring your code)? If you've got your code factored well enough, you really can't screw up too bad since any fix is going to be limited in scope and probably pretty simple to fix--and this is what your code reviews really should be doing unless you have really really screwed up code to start with.
It's a patent filing. People do this all the time because they think someone will invent and implement it eventually and they'll get to steal the money from them.
Pretty stupid idea anyway.
Actually only a few hours of your work week goes to you. Most of the rest of your time is taken to support those who don't produce (Investors, Managers, ...)
If everyone actually produced and stopped over-consuming and not working or just "working" by pushing money around, we'd all be able to work just a few hours a week.
Instead we have many people causing hundreds of us to work producing just for them maintaining their extravagant lifestyles.
Although you could call this "Creating jobs", since you are only producing for the sake of one individual (or, more generally for "Luxuries") you really aren't creating technology, food or clothing so a HUGE segment of society could just stop working and we'd still be producing enough of the basics for everyone.
The problem at this point becomes distributing it--Capitalism is not an appropriate solution for the case where people don't actually need to work because a society is overproducing. It does not work when there is only an hour of work a week for everyone but many people would choose to work more, it just falls apart--so instead we have a lot of "Made up" jobs that don't actually produce but just make some other non-producer's life even easier.
In theory I agree with you but in practice there is a HUGE difference based on what is being installed--for instance..
Yahoo toolbar is a menace to society. I stopped using anything related to Yahoo simply for fear of that monster being installed. It's a annoying, hard to get rid of and generally useless.
Google's toolbar, however, is one I actually choose to install. It lets you reconfigure it to hide whatever you don't want to see, many of the options are useful and certain things like the spell check are invaluable. I've never had it crash my system.
The fact is, installing bad software is an amazing annoyance, but installing easy to use, good, useful software is less annoying and for many types of users probably a benefit.
Personally I'd be much more upset if while trying to install Google Toolbar they bundled Adobe Ass-bat (they do put ass-bat on their "Google Updater" packing tool, but there you have to choose to install it.
And you can thank Google Toolbar for 5 less spelling errors/typos in this post.
I kinda agree. I think we're due for a depression followed by a revolution kind of like in the 30/40's if we're lucky, if not it'll be a violent one then I think the whole world may be in trouble.
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.--jfk
Does anyone think our "Democratic" system in the US could still be doing it's job, creating a peaceful revolution every 4-8 years?
When I started looking at consoles a couple years ago, I came to the exact same conclusion.
I used a new scientific method I call the "store test", which is basically if a store can't keep it on line, I don't really want it.
As I went through Target, Kmart, Bestbuy, Wal-mart and anywhere else with the "Three-console display" I took effort to note what was up and what was crashed.
XBox--rarely up, maybe 1/3 of the time (A very optomistic estimate, I think). Almost always had some kind of internal error--probably overheating in those display cases. Reset never helps.
PS/2--up about 1/2 the time. Now, that sounds great next to the xbox but we are talking about a system that should NEVER go down. Actually the newer displays stay up much more, I think they are using the new slim-line ps/2s. Reset sometimes helps.
GameCube--Never never never down. I have yet to see a gamecube down in a display case unless the entire case was down (probably due to the xbox catching fire inside there--dunno).
Anyway, if you want a worry-free livingroom device for the family, I doubt you can beat the gamecube. Wish it had more serious games, but whatever.
how is that news? If I file a suit suing slashdot for $30 million because some of the comments annoy me it's not illegal.
And the ability to sue for high amounts is very important--not in this case (Obviously), but in hundreds of cases across the state where the government wasn't doing it's job and someone had to find another way to challenge some companies horrendous practices.
What would be wrong would be to give a case like this a lot of publicity--or to let it win...
It's why we have a bigger system than just one person yanking laws out of their butt.
We have judges to review and disable laws that are overly broad, and we have enforcement that generally chooses not to enforce the stupidest of laws.
It sounds like a really dumb law, but then half of the crap coming out of the other washington is much worse these days. "Activist Judges" are exactly what's supposed to fix this problem.
Now how do we fix the other washington?
What I said was that Republicans and fox have become very good at presenting these "Excuses" that tend to help conservatives believe what they want. Democrats don't do that very well. I didn't mention democrats because they don't do anything very well. This does not imply that Republicans are any worse than Democrats, as far as I'm concerned, you can call them both the conservative republocrat party and be done with it.
The only reason for the existance of the democrat party is to make our country appear to have a multi-party system, and to give people something to get angry about every 4 years.
They are both wholly owned subsidiaries of they wealthy and of corporate interests--and if you think this is an overstatement, try to find a leader of either party who is not a millionare.
That's a compare and contrast type of statement, and implies that republicans (conservative) are closed minded
Well, I did say that republicans tend to be a subset of conservatives (as do democrats) and that conservatives are close minded, so yes, that's implied. What I objected to was your saying republicans were somehow opposite democrats, or that democrats were somehow better--they are both for the most part conservative.
Here's a trivial definition or two of conservative from the web(type define:conservative into google)
- resistant to change
- in politics, a loosely defined term indicating adherence to one or more of a family of attitudes, including respect for tradition and authority and resistance to wholesale or sudden changes.
- people who generally like to uphold current conditions and oppose changes. Conservatives are often referred to as the right wing.
How is "Resisting Change" not close minded? To be Open Minded is to evaluate all the evidence and either resist change or promote change based on evidence and logic--AKA Liberal.
As for resisting change being good--disregarding evidence that you have taken may be very good for an individual. It helps them avoid thinking as well as "being wrong"--something that for some reason litterally TERRIFIES conservatives (which is why they became conservative in the first place.
It's rarely good for society as a whole though, and I consider it quite the evil myself but that's my opinion.
Now, if you are one of those republicans that thinks they should be libretarian, you're part of the way there. Just don't forget to constantly challenge every precept, every assumption. Whenever you get new data, REFUSE to throw it away until you've completely analyzed where it came from and how true it is.
I'm not saying you will come to the same conclusions as all liberals do because everyone has different core values and those values play into it as well, but if, throughout your life you always TRY--with your whole heart--to argue the side opposite from your held beliefs, you will find a lot more pieces of your life falling into place.
There are liberal republicans, but not usually for long.
Who ever said anything about Democrats or Republicans? Both are Conservative.
... We haven't had a president who could think for himself since--probably Kennedy--and maybe Carter. Since a liberal is by definition going to piss a LOT of people off, they tend to be ineffective or die.
Conservatism is simply the desire not to challenge precepts but instead to spend quite a bit of effort to preserve them.
Democrats don't challenge their party's ideals, Republicans are even better at it. Both parties are conservative.
Who in this country is challenging existing ideals for logical reasons? Nader perhaps, some in the Green party. Some of the Libertarians (although many Libertarians are quite conservative as well).
Who is not? Bush, Clinton, Bush, Regan,
Just because people who blindly believe a certain point are in a party that tends to be towards the liberal side of conservatism, don't believe they are actually thinking like liberals, they are simply conservatives that are trying to conserve a slightly different set of views--to be a liberal is to try to constantly challenge ALL views.
The opposite of liberalism is as much "faith" as it is conservatism.
I never said stupid and smart. What I said equates pretty much to what you said--Conservatives are people who believe in what has been shown to work in the past.
Means the same thing, that Conservatives fall for this tactic much more than liberals do due to a belief in what they have learned as opposed to observation and analysis of what is in front of them.
Wow, that is the strangest moderation EVER. I actually was really impressed with the way that /. works and I get flamebait? Offtopic I could understand, but flamebait!?!?!
Maybe the moderator read it as sarcastic??? I can't imagine how, I was pretty clear.
I guess that's the exception that proves the rule.
You are correct but EXTEMELY misleading.
It is not provable that we exist at all--we could live in a system like the Matrix and all the input to our "senses" could be faked.
All we can do is rely on the input and reasoning we have though, and try to use that to develop repeated, predictable patterns.
The scientific method is about ruling out things that cannot be based on information at hand and current theories. It works pretty damn well for coming up with a model that allows us to predict the future in many, many ways.
For instance, the theories that science has come up with predict that if I release an apple held in mid air, it will fall until something stops it. This is not "Provable", but if you want to start taking bets on which way it will go, I'll bet my house at 100:1 odds that it's going to hit the ground.
So it generally works. It might be wrong for periods of time, but usually if you look at the majority of scientists, they are pretty correct.
As non-scientists, many of us don't do the same thing. Many individuals pick and choose pieces of data that fit their mindset. It already takes an overwhelming amount of contrary data/evidence to change our mindset but many of us have the ability to pick and choose our evidence ignoring most contrary evidence--this makes convincing them of an untruth virtually impossible. The republicans have become very good at presenting "evidence" that anyone who already believes a point and wants to continue, can do so.
This is where comments like the parents' and the article itself come in. They get this little meme going around that "Most scientists" don't believe global warming. They don't have to convince ANYONE with this crap, they just have to throw it out so that people who already have a given mindset and don't WANT to be swayed by Gore's movie have an alternative, no matter how flimsy--they won't attempt to disprove it.
One of the interesting things about this pattern is that it only really works on conservatives. A good definition of Conservative/Liberal would be that Conservatives tend to cling to what they "Know" is right, Liberals however tend to be more ready to challenge their preconceived ideals, so aren't as open to fluff pieces aimed at allowing someone to retain a "Faith" in the face of significant evidence against it.
Religion has played on this "Excuse to believe" trick for years, but I never noticed it being so mainstream until the reign of Bush/Fox.
I have always loved the way slashdot rips stories like this apart. Throwing up some piece of BS onto meant to support your cause onto /. is akin to stabbing yourself in the back.
If an article makes sense, there will be an interesting, moderately in-depth discussion about it.
If it doesn't make sense, it's like a thousand little critters climbing into your little piece of rhetoric and tearing it to shreds.
A few will usually even follow the trail so far as to discredit ancillary actors in the story.
Then the moderation system starts to do it's job, evaluating which posts have substance and which don't, boiling the best to the top.
If you read at +2, threaded, highest rated first--you will always have fantastic additional input to complete the story behind the story within a few comments.
Never truer than on crap like this story. If all news outlets had the same type of system, it would be a much better world.
Thanks guys.
The universe isn't out to get us, but did you read the summary?
We are out to get ourselves. The chance of all those things are growing. In fact, global warming may be well beyond stopping.
My exact thought when I read the summary.
Yaaaay, RIAA Wins! Go fight the next battle against corner bars and small family owned restaurants playing radios! Look! Street performers dancing to a CD they bought so that they can afford food and a place to sleep tonight!
Don't let those evil wretches get away with that!