
Beware the binary views - DanielRibeiro
http://swombat.com/2011/4/28/chris-dixon
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nevinera
>It simultaneously reminds me of both George Bush's classic "You're either
with us or against us", and of the old joke, "There are 10 kinds of people in
the world, those who understand binary and those who don't". All three are
superficially correct but utterly useless and needlessly divisive statements.

Not a very good comparison. "You're either with us or against us" was not a
'superficially true' statement, it's a _false dilemma_.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youre_either_with_us,_or_agains...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youre_either_with_us,_or_against_us)

~~~
Jach
One would also say that about understanding binary. Understanding is to me
clearly a scale with no hard limits; what does it mean to fully understand
binary? Knowing powers of 2 up to arbitrary n? Being able to make finite state
machines for sequence detection, gray code converters, etc.? Knowing binary
jokes when you see them?

~~~
rflrob
I don't think binary is really subtle enough to have a fine gradation of
shades of grey. I interpret "Understand binary" to mean something along the
lines of "be comfortable with the notion that the numbering system we use has
an arbitrary base (10), and that you can still have the same radix notation
with a base of 2." If you get the joke about 10 people, you probably
understand binary, and vice-versa.

And now, for a completely different binary joke: I've got 1100011 but a bit
ain't one.

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blahedo
I was confused because the apparent content is entirely overlaid with a full-
page ad for Chrome, whose close button was off the window to the left. I
nearly flagged this post as mislabelled content. :(

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jgershen
Also, binary views will bork your terminal.

