FAQ incorrect?

R

Richard Heathfield

Default User said:
Richard said:
Rod Pemberton said:

[who cares]
You are easily amused.


Why feed the troll?

Unlike you, I am not yet convinced that Rod Pemberton is a troll. As I said
back in May:

'It is possible that "troll" is the wrong word for Mr Pemberton, but our
experience of him here in clc has not been a pleasant one. He has certainly
not endeared himself to the group. Many of the people you would probably
consider to be "good posters" have killfiled him. Even amongst those who
have not, I don't know of any who would be particularly keen to sing his
praises. If you want to understand why people here have a certain antipathy
to Mr Pemberton, you could do worse than to research his posting history in
this newsgroup. In my estimation, such research would explain to you why
people are labeling him "troll" (whether or not that label is, strictly
speaking, accurate - which in my view it probably is not).'

I've seen little or nothing since then to make me more, or less, convinced
that Rod Pemberton is trolling the group.
 
F

Frederick Gotham

Dann Corbit posted:
I also have a friend who has 500,000 lines of code perfectly memorized
in his head. He's at the other end of the spectrum.


I'd love to have mental abilities like that!

(I ask this respectfully:

People who have mental abilities like that; are they invariably people
who present some sort of (detrimental) psychological or mental condition?

Just curious. I've seen films like "Rain man" and so forth, but I've never
heard of anyone who had superior mental capabilities and who didn't present
with a condition such as autism.
 
R

Richard Heathfield

Frederick Gotham said:
Dann Corbit posted:



I'd love to have mental abilities like that!

(I ask this respectfully:

People who have mental abilities like that; are they invariably people
who present some sort of (detrimental) psychological or mental condition?

I'd have said that the ability to memorise half a million lines of code
indicates a /good/ mind, not a bad one.
Just curious. I've seen films like "Rain man" and so forth, but I've never
heard of anyone who had superior mental capabilities and who didn't
present with a condition such as autism.

I invite you to consider Einstein, Newton, Galileo, da Vinci, Avogadro,
Dalton, Boyle, von Neumann, Feynman, Boole, Shannon, Faraday, Gauss,
Franklin, Cantor, Hilbert, Fermat, Turing, Darwin, Snell, Tesla, Curie,
Davy, Euler, Abel, Lorentz, Feigenbaum, Oppenheimer, ...

Is it your contention that /all/ these people suffered from autism?
 
F

Frederick Gotham

Richard Heathfield posted:
I invite you to consider Einstein, Newton, Galileo, da Vinci, Avogadro,
Dalton, Boyle, von Neumann, Feynman, Boole, Shannon, Faraday, Gauss,
Franklin, Cantor, Hilbert, Fermat, Turing, Darwin, Snell, Tesla, Curie,
Davy, Euler, Abel, Lorentz, Feigenbaum, Oppenheimer, ...

Is it your contention that /all/ these people suffered from autism?


No. I expressed that I knew very little about people who had superior
mental capabilities, and then I inquired if such superior mental
capabilities are reserved only for those who have some sort of
mental/psychological condition. It was a genuine inquiry.

I was not referring to actual intelligence by the way, but rather
"superhuman" capabilities such as memorising half a million lines of code,
or calculating 478 to the power of 5 within a few seconds.

There are indeed some great minds among the people you listed above, but
how many of them had "superhuman" mental powers, such as memorising half a
million lines of code?
 
R

Richard Heathfield

Frederick Gotham said:

I was not referring to actual intelligence by the way, but rather
"superhuman" capabilities such as memorising half a million lines of code,
or calculating 478 to the power of 5 within a few seconds.

24953960486368 - what's so hard about that?
There are indeed some great minds among the people you listed above, but
how many of them had "superhuman" mental powers, such as memorising half a
million lines of code?

I think we have to take the "half a million lines" thing with a pinch of
salt. After all, imagine how long it would take to verify. You could do
some random sampling, of course, to give you some confidence in the
veracity of the claim, but until you'd tested him on the whole
half-million, would you really believe the claim entirely? And even if you
could verify it at a line a second, spending eight hours a day on it, it
would still take well over a fortnight to do.

I would be more inclined to accept the claim if we interpret it as "knows
the half-million-line code base so well that, asked about any given aspect
of the code, he can take you to the relevant function(s) very quickly".
 
K

Keith Thompson

Frederick Gotham said:
No. I expressed that I knew very little about people who had superior
mental capabilities, and then I inquired if such superior mental
capabilities are reserved only for those who have some sort of
mental/psychological condition. It was a genuine inquiry.

And I'm sure there are newsgroups where that question would be
topical.
 
M

Michael Wojcik

Richard said:
Default User said:
Richard Heathfield wrote:
Rod Pemberton said:

[who cares]

You are easily amused.
Why feed the troll?

Unlike you, I am not yet convinced that Rod Pemberton is a troll.

Wow.

I can see that some might want to distinguish between those who
primarily seek to disrupt the newsgroup - whom I would label "troll"
- and those who are merely arrogant, ignorant asses prone to vapid
arguments, such as Rod.

I imagine the real trolls, such as Kenny, are often hard-working folk
dedicated to producing content-free flame-bait posts, and they might
feel slighted by a comparison with others who are honestly, if
clumsily, trying to carry on a real argument. For that matter,
couldn't lumping the two groups together be considered much the sort
of gross generalization that Rod himself committed with his
entertainingly stupid "programmers in the US are failed physicists"
claim?

I imagine many of us[1] arrogant, somewhat-informed asses would not
want to be casually thrown in either of the previous two groups -
should we not show them the same courtesy?

Of course, that's not necessarily any reason to read Rod's postings.
I just offer it as a possible justification for the distinction
Richard is drawing.


[1] The inclusivity or exclusivity of this plural first-person
pronoun is left to the discretion of the reader.

--
Michael Wojcik (e-mail address removed)

The lecturer was detailing a proof on the blackboard. He started to say,
"From the above it is obvious that ...". Then he stepped back and thought
deeply for a while. Then he left the room. We waited. Five minutes
later he returned smiling and said, "Yes, it is obvious", and continued
to outline the proof. -- John O'Gorman
 
N

Nick Keighley

CBFalconer said:
It doesn't, in proper news readers that use the 'references' header
field correctly. Some stupid systems, such as Google, ignore that
field and depend on the subject header alone.

actually google fixed that some time ago
 
R

Rod Pemberton

Default User said:
Remember that Pemberton is a troll.

Mr. Rodenborn it appears you _still_ don't know the difference between a
troll (someone who intends to incite for the joy of a negative response) and
someone stating the facts of their experiences (which may be totally
different to yours or even radical or unacceptable from your narrow
perspective...).
You're better off killfiling or at least ignoring his rants.

Are you able to do so without comment? It appears not. From your Google
post history, the entire world is comprised of trolls, except one: you.


Rod Pemberton
 

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