Comment Re:need a kill gesture (Score 1) 145
Great idea! It can come with a guaranteed stay in your local prison for obstruction of justice!
There is a reason Fox News regularly kills the other news networks viewership numbers combined.
This is because Fox News regularly throws journalistic integrity to the wind in pursuit of ratings.
No, Occam's Razor does not suggest that there is a powerful, sinister organization which is ruthlessly stamping out any leaders who even start to surface--that's your false dilemma talking.
At least two much more reasonable possibilities present themselves immediately. The survey may have been worded poorly (or suffered from some other methodological flaw) such that it grossly overstates the degree to which American and dissatisfied with their government; or, to address your particular claim, the problems which America face may be too intractable to be solved by any one leader, no matter how competent.
Sorry, but many slashdot posters have an IQ of 140+.
First of all, 'many' is not 'most', nor is it any other meaningfully quantifiable term (e.g., the average slashdoter has IQ of 140+; 20% of slashdotters have an IQ of 140+); so unless you have detailed statistics about the distribution of IQs within Slashdot's population you have not shown that the average slashdoter will be smarter than any other random person. See: Many Canadians have an IQ of 140+. That puts Canadians well into the top percentage of IQ across whatever reference group you care to name. Odds are thus pretty damn high that a random person a Canadian bumps into will be less intelligent than him or her.
Second, I don't know how you know the IQ of 'many' slashdoters, but if you're basing that on the self-reported IQ here in the comments, then you really need to shake off the groupthink.
As for my second paragraph, I was adding some thoughts about the problems with relying on statistical trends about a large population, even when those trends are true, which Derbyshire does in some of his more reasonable bullet points. It wasn't directed at you, and there's no need to get so angry about it.
Hmm. Many slashdot posters are almost certainly smarter than any random black person they're going to meet.
Almost certainly smarter than any random white, yellow, purple or green person too. That's an unfortunate downside of being intelligent.
If you actually believe this you need to stop reading so much Slashdot and shake off the group-think.
Furthermore, even if you accept Derbyshire's assertion that whites have statistically higher IQs than blacks, it's still racist to assume that you, or any other random white, is smarter most black people you'll meet. First, because such attitudes do real and lasting harm to society; and second, because in any actual interaction you'll have much more immediate and telling evidence about your black interlocutor's intelligence than some extremely broad statistical generalization. You ought to judge people based on specific facts pertaining to the individual--any thing less is lazy and, in some circumstances, racist.
In any case, what other, easy to use term would you use for a modern long gun.
Does 'long gun' not serve?
I rarely ever took notes. I'm sure I was the only one in lecture theatres of 180 people.
Given that this is at least the fifth such comment I've read, I'm reminded forcefully of XKCD Vol. 610. You're (presumably, given your use of the past tense) not an adolescent any more, so you have no excuse for thinking your situation is utterly unique in all the world. If even Stephen Hawking can dredge up a little humility, so can you.
A librarian with programming knowledge would be snapped up immediately (since most libraries are being forced to digitise their collections).
Someone who can speak arabic would be much better writing an english -> arabic translator than the vast majority of programmers.
If you're writing animation software, an animator who can program is much more valuable than a programmer who knows nothing about animation.
No, they would write unmaintainable, buggy crap. Ideally you'd have both a domain expert with programming knowledge and programmer with domain knowledge (if they're the same person, even better!), but if you can only have either a programmer with some domain knowledge, or a domain expert with some programming knowledge, you need the programmer.
Writing software that others depend on is hard.
You need to predict when it will be ready to use, you need to validate for strange inputs, and make sure it either works, or fails in such a way that the user knows it has failed. You need to write the code in such away that someone else can take over for you if you quit. You need to anticipate future changes, at least to the degree that you don't have to rewrite the thing every three months. You may have to discern what the program should do from the vague and contradictory statements of users who don't even know what's possible
There's so much more to software engineering / programming / application development / whatever-you-want-to-call-it than designing and implementing an algorithm, or writing a script to automate some frequent task.
Programmers are only a commodity for those who don't care about quality.
An astute observation! I suggest a revision:
-inanimate-noun- don't -animate-verb- people. People -animate-verb- people.
\Computational Linguist
No. Here is a definition of unthinkable:
Too unlikely or undesirable to be considered a possibility
Therefore the word doesn't necessarily say anything about how much thought has been put into a contingency. Next time you feel the urge to write a pedantic nit-pick post which adds nothing to the discussion you ought to get your facts straight first.
To avoid being found guilty of exactly what I just accused you of, both GP and GPP are wrong. X is a cliche excuse for Y is itself a cliche excuse for not confronting the truth that the world is a complicated place with few right answers and even fewer absolute truths.
"No matter where you go, there you are..." -- Buckaroo Banzai
