insane != abstract

you don't get to redefine words as their opposite meaning and expect to sound logically coherent

"i'm going to redefine 'wet' as 'dry' and continue talking about climatology and expect people to still take me seriously..."

okay, crackpot

i'm not willing to entertain the mental gymnastics whereby moderation is defined as an extreme

you're nuts dude

i stopped reading there

how did that work with cuba? iran? north korea? china?

what you're asking for is massacred citizens

iran for example

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2...

no matter how many intelligent, forward thinking students you have agitating in the cities, the government just calls up busloads of basiji thugs from the countryside and cracks skulls until change seekers shut up in fear. or worse:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

slow stead engagement is what really works

reactionary inflexibility simply means no change at all

welcome to reality

this is you:

http://www.politico.com/story/...

pragmatism, flexibility, realism, compromise always wins

inflexible ideological dogmatism is how you lose and are ignored

well yeah, by definition a rock star is very rare

so if you want a rockstar working for you, you better be ready to shell out big money or provide truly extraordinary perks

you can't just expect or demand rock star status from average or even above average programmers. you can't mold people's personalities like their technical proficiency. i suppose there does exist stress mitigating strategies someone can consciously adapt. but from the rock star i met, it is a sort of chilly immunity to even the concept of stress that is quite awesome to behold

that's why i quoted eisenhower

because when i met such a person, i immediately thought of someone functioning under the stresses of extreme combat. i thought of this person on the eastern front in wwii. what it would take to survive *real* stress, because stress in programming, while real, taken in perspective to something like fields of combat, is a joke

i always wondered if this person had indeed been in such an extreme stressful environment, like war. a sort of "once i've seen that, none of this shit impresses me." because indeed, nothing seemed to impress him. you could scream in his face and he would react the same as if you were casually discussing gardening. nothing phased the dude

i have met a person with that stress proof personality, and above average talent. they exist. those are the rockstars

not sure if joking (look around here, there are some socially autistic morons on slashdot)

if you are joking, thanks for the laugh

if not, the middle way and compromise as an extreme is... stupid. not even logically coherent

ok, let's say you prevail. zuckerberg gives turkey the middle finger and doesn't censor images

ok, now facebook is kicked out turkey

what have you "won" exactly?

how has turkey changed in any way? you've given the authoritarians a win: they've successfully excised the evil western cancer of facebook from glorious turkey

and how will turkey change in the future?

so you're for not opening diplomatic relations with cuba? we should just never ever ever reconcile or talk with cuba? how has that strategy paid off to change cuba?

we don't talk to iran? what is iran's attitude going to be then?

you are a dogmatic rigid ideologue

you are exactly the same as what you don't like in turkey

and the fruits of your ignorant stubbornness is you HELP the people you don't like

pragmatism always wins

"i know you are but what am i" went out of style as rhetorically effective sometime around the second grade of elementary school. you don't even make any logical sense

people met on the street and in taverns and in private rooms, completely beyond the ability of anyone to eavesdrop

but enforcement against illegal activity proceeded by infiltrating groups and other methods

it seems the feds are complaining they might have to actually engage in hard work

do your damn job

if the positive influence outweighs the negative

the absence of facebook won't make those problems go away. how do you make those problems go away? with influence. like facebook. a bastardized influence, in order to exist, is still an influence, and better than no influence at all

this is called realism

it trumps ineffectual dogmatic idealism, which is just as authoritarian and extreme as what you are complaining about

compromise always wins

if you want to lose, hold fast to extreme adherence to difficult demands and never budge. there's no better way to make yourself marginalized, ineffectual, and ignored

they'll start blocking proxies

not possible?

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/...

yes, theoretically impossible to be watertight, but the whack-a-mole effort makes for a degraded dangerous existence for those seeking to use proxies

so you effectively banned facebook by forcing users to exert so much effort it's not worth it

culturally and politically, you've also antagonized turkey to go more silo

look at the constant "west is destroying us" ultranationalist bullshit in russia nowadays as an example of how turkey could go

so you let turkey have its way on the lightning rod topic of muhammad's face

then allow the more subtle influence to continue

time plus slow force can erode mountains

geologists should be in charge of topics like this

hard to tell if joking or not

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

if you're joking, thanks for the laugh

if not, well... you need help

you don't defeat authoritarianism or totalitarianism with the same sort of simplistic black-or-white ideological rigidity

it's not that simple

if he doesn't follow the laws turkey bans facebook. a facebook clone in turkey pops up instead. now all those connections to the outside world are greatly diminished. turkey becomes a social silo that stagnates

and so all the valuable positive subtle free speech influences that aren't live wire topics like muhammad's face are lost

by following turkey's authoritarian freedom crushing instructions that would otherwise get facebook banned, facebook remains influential in turkey in a positive way, in more subtle ways

you can't think of these nuanced complex issues in such blockheaded black-or-white "my way or the highway" rigid ways. that makes you something like turkey's authoritarianism actually

I tell this story to illustrate the truth of the statement I heard long ago in the Army: Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. There is a very great distinction because when you are planning for an emergency you must start with this one thing: the very definition of "emergency" is that it is unexpected, therefore it is not going to happen the way you are planning.

there's nothing like a real life emergency in programming but business culture is "get this done yesterday." no one can do that. but some programmers are very fragile and can only function according to one set of requirements/ work environment/ speed, and if you mess with that they get angry/ stressed/ tune out/ burnt out. while the "rock stars" can react to sudden and dramatic changes of requirement and need and crank out the changes relatively adroitly (not necessarily quickly). a sort of suppleness of mind and eerie lack of stress that's more about personality than training. and i say personality, and not training, because their code is a reflection of their personality: you can throw a curve ball at it from any direction and it can adapt without falling to pieces when "little" things (it's never little) change

your code is a reflection of how your mind works. which is your personality. and certain chilly stress proof people can generate flexible durable code that is almost like the redundancy and flexibility of logistics in war