*Claire Wolfe*! likes Firefly!
POSTED BY: justme
UPDATED: Saturday, April 24, 2004 17:14
VIEWED: 8481
PAGE 3 of 4
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Originally posted by KernelM:
Her problem is exactly that Kaylee _didn't_ go to any reputable engineering college (or any kind of formal training about ships at all, as implied in OOG). Whether you believe someone can "intuit" the workings of a fairly complex ship is up to you, but she certainly wasn't implying anything about the ability of women to be engineers.
I see Ms. Wolfe's comment to be completely gender biased in it's supposition... not about Kaylee's education. She questions her ability to 'intuit' engineering because she is a girl. Her characterization regarding Kaylee's girliness and by saying "Bring Back Scottie!" and "real mechanics groaning" show that she has no concept of women as engineers.
Jaymes
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Quote:
Originally posted by Jared:Quote:
Originally posted by KernelM:
Her problem is exactly that Kaylee _didn't_ go to any reputable engineering college (or any kind of formal training about ships at all, as implied in OOG). Whether you believe someone can "intuit" the workings of a fairly complex ship is up to you, but she certainly wasn't implying anything about the ability of women to be engineers.
i cant talk for mechanics but dare to say that hardware and the workings of computers a halfway complex, too. and its sad to realize that you learned more in 10 years of just intensively using it and getting to know it than in 6 years of university. sure, you dont know all the fancy academic terms, but you develop a feeling for it. if my machine is acting strange im not digging out old and scripts (usually too abstract and theoretical to be of any use anyway) about operating systems or computers. you just feel where the problem probably is. so i have no problem believing that someone growing up around engines and mechanics also develops that kind of intuition.
at least i learned a lot by doing in my spare time and wasted tons of time with studies at university (but hey, now can i use fancy terminology to describe the complexity of an algorithm. instead of "forget it, do it that way and we will wait for the result til christmas" i can say "ohh.. but its np complete and has a complexity of O(n^10)".. guess what mal wouldnt want to hear ,-) )
This is going off-topic now, but you don't study computer science or engineering just to know how to program or fix computers. You can go to any number of technical schools and get a much more practical education about computer software and hardware. CS and CE is for people who want to actually really understand how computers work, and innovate on that. I remember scoffing at big-O notation in high school too, but I learned its importance in determining the relative efficiency of algorithms. The reason everything is abstract is that you should be able to apply that knowledge as the circumstances fit. Tie it down and it becomes obsolete.
I certainly can't think of too many basic programming constructs and concepts that came from people without a deep understanding of the theoretical underpinnings of computer science. Quicksort, OOP, structured programming, polymorphism, etc etc.
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Quote:
Originally posted by zoid:
Others fear that if we pull out, Germany, France and Russia in particular will rush in and snatch up all the oil in the region. Please see my stance on hydrogen fuel cell cars. How many millions of dollars per day are we spending on the war effort? Put that into weaning ourselves from petrochemicals for the next ten years
Lovely idea, Zoid. Unfortunately, we're in Iraq for two main reasons.
1. Oil. Halliburton wishes to control billions of dollars worth of oil and all the goodies that go with it.
2. Religious Fundamentalists. We have a bunch of Dominionists bent on creating their own "radical christian theocracy" pulling the strings of the smirky rat bastard liar in the White House who thinks he hears the voice of God singing in his morning bowl of rice krispies.
Their new domino theory involves the righteous army of the U.S. cleansing the Middle East or something equally horrific.
You think Reavers are scary ... watch out for Dominionists.
http://www.yuricareport.com/Dominionism/ConstitutionRestorationAct.htm
http://www.rapidnet.com/~jbeard/bdm/Psychology/cor/dominion.htm
http://www.betterworld.com/getreallist/article.php?story=2004022916161
044
http://reformed-theology.org/html/issue11/authority_compared.htm
http://www.piney.com/CultSigns.html
"Just keep walkin, preacher man."
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Zoid wrote:
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I wrote many parts of this in ironic fashion, in an attempt to point out that while many people vehemently disapprove of the war effort, those same people still want 'peacekeepers' dying there. Having served 14 years of active military duty, I believe the US military has no business being policemen(persons?). It is a misuse of military power; and an abuse of the citizens who volunteer to risks their lives for their country, who now must sit around with targets painted on them when there is no organized government left to defeat.
I agree Zoid. The same people that clamor for the U.S. to pull out, who call us "invaders", and who disfigure the corpse of American citizens, are the ones who cry the loudest for our aid when they need something. I guess circumstances dictate their willingness to suffer our presence.
I do think it is a misuse of the U.S. military to try to fit them into the role of police or peacekeepers, that is what the U.N. is supposed to be for in instances like this one.
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This job should be turned over to the UN immediately (if they want it or have the nerve for it), but we should be bringing our men and women home for good, in any case. I know some people want to brace up the area and provide stability, ya-da, ya-da; but the US is clearly too hated for that job, and the US soldier is wrong for any job other than killing enemies. It's a job they do better than anyone else in the world (and I couldn't be prouder of the fact). As policemen and 'peacekeepers', they are forced to stand in the open, in broken ranks, and not fire on suspected enemies until fired on first. We're sending them to the slaughter.
I agree, the U.N. should do this job, but so far they have not shown any interest in doing the job. It seems that organization can never come to a decision on what to do when a need arises. Too many conflicting agendas of its members if you ask my opinion, too many people putting the interest of their countries before the needs of the world. That is why the U.N. is not very effective.
I think it is wrong for U.S. soldiers to try to stabilize a country whose people want us to leave. If that is what they want, we should pull out. When unrest starts up, and it will, and the various power mongers try to jump in and carve out pieces for themselves, let's see if the U.N. steps up and settles things.
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Others fear that if we pull out, Germany, France and Russia in particular will rush in and snatch up all the oil in the region. Please see my stance on hydrogen fuel cell cars. How many millions of dollars per day are we spending on the war effort? Put that into weaning ourselves from petrochemicals for the next ten years, rather than having a standing army in the Middle East. Let the French, Germans and Russians -- or the entire UN for that matter -- try their hand stabilizing the area. I seriously doubt they'll have substantially more luck.
Personally I think our reliance on foreign oil has hobbled us for too long. We have the American automotive industry, and petroleum companies to thank for part of that weakness. The auto makers refuse to look at more economic alternatives to gas powered engines, and oil companies don't want us cutting oil imports as it will hit them square in the wallet. If they have a surplus because the U.S. is buying less, oil prices will drop all over the globe and the petroleum fat cats will be out some serious money.
In the long run it only makes sense to eliminate our need for foreign oil, and begin implementing plans for alternatives to gasoline engines. It will be better for the people, the enviroment, and the world.
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The Middle East has been crazy, if not downright murderous and evil, since at least the 1940's. I don't suspect it will get any better, and I always believe it's the best thing for everyone involved to distance yourself from crazy, destructive people and countries.
The Middle East has always been a hot bed. Religious extremists and in
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Coward:
'We Westerners' have scarcely been an alliance of equals since France closed its NATO bases back, when? The 60's? Since the Wall came down, Germany's been following suit, backing away somewhat more gracefully from NATO. The only alliance I see that lives up to its billing is the tacit Anglo-American alliance. We've got each other's backs. Everyone else are appeasers and influence-brokers. 'Patient like the UN' is only moral cowardice.
Allow me to amuse you with a parable. If your next door neighbor is beating his wife and kids, are you going to accept the council of your neighbors who say, "It's none of our business if he beats his wife and kids. We've asked him to stop, and told him if he doesn't we will call the police. That's all we feel we can do for now." You reply, "But that was thirteen years ago, and again every six months since then; and you've issued 4 more such warnings, each sterner than the one prior. He still hasn't stopped beating his wife and children, and I think one or more of them may soon die. In addition, he's started looking at my wife and children, like he may want to start beating them next. We must call the police now!" Your neighbors say, "Well, he's not looking at our wife and children yet, so we're not particularly worried about it. No, we absolutely forbid you to call the police. He must be given more time to come into voluntary compliance with our resolutions." (Besides which, they whisper in an aside, we have been selling him some fine whips and chains, which he purchased with money he was supposed to be spending on his family's food and medicine)
Are you suggesting that we should sit and wait until our neighbor's wife and children are dead? I'd hope that you would have called law enforcement right away, as soon as you knew he was abusing his people, er, family.
Bringing it back from analogy: Is it enough to know that Saddam was an international war criminal (by using nerve agents against civilian targets), starving his people to death and sponsoring terrorism (even if it was only training facilities and weapons)? What would it take to justify a unilateral reaction on our part, in your opinion?
In postwar Iraq, I stick with the 'help those who ask, leave when they resent it' statement. The old saying goes "No good deed goes unpunished." Some countries have longer memories of friendship extended them than others, I guess. We remember our debts, else we'd have told the French to eat merde a long time ago.
Respectfully,
zoid
_________________________________________________
"River and me was best friends, back then. I named my first-born daughter after her. 'Course, you can't swing a dead cat 'round here on I-Day without hittin' a River..."
- Kaywinnit Tam, wife and mother of 6, A Child Shall Lead Them: A History of the Second War of Independence Wilkins, Richard
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Quote:
Originally posted by BrownCoat1:
I believe the entire world should be working together to end the threat of terrorism.
And in the words of a certain friend of mine, "And if wishes were horses we'd all be eating stake!" What the entire world should do is not in our perview. We can't ensure that the entire world will do anything unless we're planning to rule it ourselves... Oh... wait... That is exactly the thinking that got us into this mess in Iraq.
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These cowards (no pun intended) have shown that no country is safe from their attacks, and that they do not discriminate between man or woman, adult or child, old or young. This is a threat the entire world should commit manpower and resources toward to hunt down and stamp out.
But different people in this world disagree about who is a terrorist and who is not. Why, just a short while ago Bin Lauden was one of our guys and not a terrorist at all. You end up making statements like our sitting President that those who do not agree with our definitions of terrorist will be treated as terrorists. Way to unify the world!
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We need to stand together to show terrorists we will not tolerate them or their dishonorable tactics.
But we can't even agree within the boarders of one country about what is dishonorable. I find Bush's sacrificing the lives of hundreds of this nations young people in the name of his racist war fantastically dishonorable.
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Who is to say why terrorists do what they do, be it for religious, political, or simple human greed. Whatever it is, these people need to learn that the world will not tolerate death and terror as a means to arguing a point.
Good Lord! "Death and terror" is exactly this administration's method of making its points! And Bush's reasons are exactly that: religious, plitical and simple human greed!
How can anyone really believe that this kind of "round 'em up and shoot 'em" mentality is gonna solve anything? You know what? All the terrorists who were alive a hundred years ago are dead, but there is arguably more terrorism today than ever. Dead terrorists does not mean the end of terrorism. Terrifying a world into submission doesn't sound like a winning strategy either.
HKCavalier
Hey, hey, hey, don't be mean. We don't have to be mean, because, remember, no matter where you go, there you are.
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Quote:
Originally posted by KernelM:
This is going off-topic now, but you don't study computer science or engineering just to know how to program or fix computers.
yet, thats what kaylee does. she's fixing the ship and keeps it running without needing to study it first.
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CS and CE is for people who want to actually really understand how computers work, and innovate on that.
the innovation part might work, but i see too many who cant make the step from their general "thats how operating systems should work" to installing a driver under a specific system. thats all good if you decide to stay in the theoretical field, but any employer hiring you for the diploma and expecting that someone with a diploma can handle primitive tasks like acutally using windows.. well, they might be disappointed. (reminds of a certain commercial "dont worry, its simple, every child could use it" "you dont understand, i was at university" "ohhhh, well THEN i have to explain it to you")
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I remember scoffing at big-O notation in high school too, but I learned its importance in determining the relative efficiency of algorithms.
there are hopefully better ones, yet its the only one we learned. and sorry, but assuming you can ignore factors might be nice in a theory, but break your neck when you notice "oh wait, we're not talking about huge n here and n^2 is a ton better than 100000*n".
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Quicksort, OOP, structured programming, polymorphism, etc etc.
i never bothered to find out who invented it and what his background was. but especially things like quicksort sound more like developed out of need more than for a nice intellectual challenge. and im not sure if polymorphism was really invented or just a workaround to get back some of the flexibility that was killed with introducing strictly typed languages.
but then, even after a couple of lectures i still see values in memory when using c++. maybe not during the planning phase, but its hard to ignore whats really going on and just seeing "objects". of course, some people nicknamed me performance junkie because i tend to aim for the most basic and efficient solution that does the job. so im definitely not the typical cs student, but like so many just do it because without a diploma its hard to get a decent job (es unfortunately most employers dont realize you can get one without having the slightest clue of how to actually work a computer).
mal hired someone who knows what she's doing, not someone who knows the fancy terms for what she SHOULD be doing if she had any idea of HOW to do it.
the original point was that for kaylees job (if it can be compared to computers) its even kind of pointless to study it. especially shown in her "that part is useless and just causing problems anyway" attitude.
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Zoid:
how's this for a parable:
Your neighbor really likes jewellery. Your other neighbor just so happens to be the second biggest collector of jewellery in the area. There are also rumours that said neighbour (Mister S) has been beating his wife for several years. However, no one has ever seen him beating his wife since he came out of prison ten years ago. Your other neighbour (Mister B) has since claimed that he has absolutely unquestionable evidence that Mister S is beating on his wife, but has never presented this evidence. Instead of going to the Police however, Mister B decides to take action himself and shoots Mister S.
Granted, this isn't a very good parable, but hey, it's your game we're playing here.
Everyone else wasn't being cowardly, they were just being careful, and the fact that there were no weapons on mass destruction or connections to Al-Quaida or a nuclear weapons program (exactly like all the rest of the world predicted beforehand) just proves that America did the morally wrong thing. And now you're going to quote Bush and claim that you removed an evil dictator, well yes you did. Now you can get on with removing all the other evil dictators in the world who don't happen to have a huge stack of oil.
Honestly Zoid, I don't get you. You claim the war was justified, yet you don't think the US should depend on oil and it should have an isolationist stance. You say they should withdraw in order to save American lives, well how do the 800 Americans that died in Iraq compare to the 10000s of Iraqis who died due to the war, or the estimated 500.000 People who died under the UN sanctions? If you aren't man enough to see the job through, you should have never started it in the first place.
Coward
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Coward:
Briefly, since it's 4:45AM and I gotta go to work momentarily :(
I don't think it's about oil. Maybe we did go to war over oil, from a big money/big business/big govt point of view. For me and many Americans though, it's about national security. I think it's about getting a crazy rat bastard out of the picture, because it makes my children safer. And yes, I think we should hunt down and kill all the rogue elements in the world who would gladly blow up my children's school bus to advance their ideological agenda. The same was true for McVeigh/Nichols, because they intentionally blew up children.
While I felt strongly about Beirut and Riyadh truck bombings that killed American soldiers in a cowardly way by attacking their barracks, at least those victims were soldiers. Those brave men and women knew they might die at the hands of an enemy, at least since basic training. I don't like sabotage/sneak attacks against human targets in general; but our heros knew they were risking everything when they signed on the dotted line. They did it anyway because they loved their country, and knew that the only way to protect our freedoms -- including our freedom to listen to wacky Hollywood types spout crap as though it'd been spoken to them from a burning bush -- was by risking something of themselves, instead of just shooting their mouths off and carrying placards with canned party political statements.
As far as the US being terrorists: them's fightin' words. I'll let you make that claim the very same day that US paramilitaries capture an Iraqi civilian transport and fly it into a civilian office building.
And to put your parable into proper perspective from a common man's viewpoint (mine), one that isn't clouded by the venomous spite of American left-wing demagoguery: it's not about the jewels, and your ex-con was only out on parole, not acquitted, and hadn't attended a single required meeting with his PO. He'd get arrested again. If he put up fight, barricading himself in his house, taking his family hostage, he'd likely get shot dead for his troubles... And there'd likely be some collateral damage to house and family, regardless how careful the SWAT guys were being.
Respectfully,
zoid
_________________________________________________
"River and me was best friends, back then. I named my first-born daughter after her. 'Course, you can't swing a dead cat 'round here on I-Day without hittin' a River..."
- Kaywinnit Tam, wife and mother of 6, A Child Shall Lead Them: A History of the Second War of Independence Wilkins, Richard
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Quote:
Originally posted by KernelM:
Her problem is exactly that Kaylee _didn't_ go to any reputable engineering college (or any kind of formal training about ships at all, as implied in OOG).
I don't know about you guys, but I never take my car to someone who speaks proper English all the time. Unless they grew up tinkering with engines in the garage, I'm not letting them near mine. I know a dozen redneck boys who never studied anything about cars in a classroom, and they can do amazing things with a vehicle. Engineering is a hands-on job. It's completely believable that Kaylee could learn by tinkering.
"Dear diary, today I was pompous and my sister was crazy."
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