Yes! This!

It's frequently all too obvious that people critical of ideas that originated (or were perpetuated by) that woman have absolutely no understanding of the ideas and frequently haven't even read the books.

Love that phrasing, btw: "I'd like to work on mine and it would be nice if you would get out of the way".

You either have extremely poor reading comprehension skills or are just an idiot. Either way I'll take the bait.

Socialism does not fail because it "has made most of society's lives better". It failed because it DID NOT do that, and worse, always seems to result in an oppressive regime with the only goal of keeping itself in power.
That is a failure. Don't you get frustrated when you can't do anything to fix whatever lousy situation you happen to be in? Now imagine it were legislated specifically so that you were unable to.

Next time try reading what I wrote, instead of twisting it to fit your bigoted, uneducated, and perhaps brainwashed view about opponents of socialism.

To be fair, there could be an example of an amazingly successful government (perhaps beaten into the ground by the evil freedom lovers somewhere in the world) that I'm unaware of, so please give me an example of a thriving socialist paradise where everyone is happy living out their lives for everyone else's benefit, since they're unable to influence their own lives through their own effort.

I'm waiting.

Not at all. But civilization doesn't have to always be the bureaucratic mess it is today, as perpetuated by the established "liberal" and "conservative" (that is, entirely anti-freedom and advancement of society on both sides) incumbents.

Socialism in particular fails because the only motivation inherent in the system is to improve the lives of others. The cool thing about making a society more democratic and less restrictive (that is, moving toward the libertarian sense of what a government should be) is that it makes it really obvious how you can benefit from the self-improvements of others, and how they can benefit from your own self-improvement at no cost to yourself.

Why does everyone always think that a libertarian ideal is completely geared around making money? It doesn't have to be. My ideal would be as much humanist as libertarian, and I expect that's more of what is being talked about with the "seasteading" project as well, since it seems to come from the Randian vision of how to define a model person.

So... you had a kid recently then?

Some of us try our best to live up to the standards set by the society we live in without being forced to, because it's in our own best interest.
And sometimes that means you collect your own trash.

Socialism has been tried in the "modern era" and it failed-- why are so many people against trying the opposite? (To my knowledge it's never actually been tried in modern times, especially with only people who give a damn.)

Irrelevant.

I am back in school (at age 30) in no small part because of the excitement and interest that the Lewin physics lectures instilled in me. His alleged misconduct in any other arena is irrelevant. It's not even as if the content of the lectures could be perceived in some "bad" manner-- it's totally unrelated!

For those that haven't seen those lectures, I cannot recommend them highly enough.

This is a terrible move for MIT. They should be embarrassed.

Since when has Slashdot of all places become accepting of general mediocrity over personal excellence?

" Perhaps the advice-giver wants to sound smart, or simply wants to avoid the possiblity of having to admit they were wrong (if you make your advice hard to follow, that reduces the chance of somebody actually climbing that mountain and then pointing out to you if your suggestion didn't work). So it's not just that the advice-giver is being unhelpful, it's that they're being a dick."

Well, I'm glad the author cares about the overall performance of his advice across 'everyone'. Personally, when receiving advice, I prefer searching out and researching all reasonable options and choosing the best one for me rather than taking generic advice applicable to a wide range of people. And when I give advice I try to do it in such a way that leaves the advice-taker able to evaluate the options and take the best option for them, rather than giving them advice that may help "anyone" a little bit but won't help them in particular a whole lot. If the advice-seeker doesn't have the interest to look at the options and make a choice that's their problem.

+1 UI madness.
For me the problem with git is the extreme un-usability of the standard command-line client.

There are countless ways of doing the same operations, all of which are confusing. Unless I use a specific command on a daily basis I end up having to look it up and sift through results with varying ways of doing the same thing. It is extremely frustrating. Some of the other dvcs solutions are far superior in this regard.

Architecturally, git is fantastic. It seems to me it shouldn't be that difficult to make the standard client app easier to use on the command line. Too bad this article is a joke, I would actually love to see it happen.

Yeah, this is great and all...

But wouldn't it be more useful to have a course that emphasizes critical thinking about all types of problems rather than focusing on one specific application of critical thinking? People usually seem to overlook that the important thing about working with computers is the ability to think critically about what you're doing, not the specifics of what you're doing.

Traditional science classes kind of broach the surface of critical thinking, but I suspect that it could be covered in much greater depth over a wide variety of problems, to much better effect.

This is retarded. I submit a story for the first time and it just disappears from the submissions list. No way to determine what happened.

The "firehose" apparently is just gone, even though the site FAQ still refers to it. There isn't even a redirect from the /firehose page.
There is no way to control what "colors" of submissions I can see on the submissions page, and even clicking on a particular color (which it says will filter to just that color) does absolutely nothing.

One would think that there would at least be a way to see that my submission has presumably been scored "black" or below. But no... there is in fact no way to determine that.

This place has really gone downhill in recent years.

Actually, it kind of does.

ET == [EST or EDT, depending on the time of year]
So, if you look at your timezone as "ET", then yeah, it's one timezone.
However, if you look at your timezone as EST or EDT, it's two.

Personally, I look at it both ways, depending on the context of what I'm doing.