Feed one generation, and when the next one comes around, you'll have more mouths to feed. The GNP growth of the industrialized world is not sufficient to keep up with what would be the growth in their population over time.
Any effort directed at helping them help themselves is infinitely more useful than food in the long run. Not on an individual level, of course, but the question then becomes whether you're going to help individuals at the expense of a larger second generation dying in an even greater famine. What is the right thing to do, ethically, is an argument I don't want to get into; for me, they're numbers, which isn't fair, but it's all I can cope with, and that means I want to help the larger number of people.
I can dig up USD100, even on my limited income, and not end up losing my house. Do I spend it on feeding a handful of people for a little while, or do I spend it on giving them a tool with which they can at least try to get an education that they can hopefully use to save even more people, as well as building a fundament for sustainability?
I'd choose the latter. I'd even be willing to teach the kid/adult/whatever how to read and type, were I able to travel to where they are or vice versa. I could certainly sponsor one with a fair amount of online teaching, if there were to be provided an infrastructure for connectivity down there.
I'm happy to explain to them why it's a bad idea for them (or any of their peers) to have kids until they've educated their local community and gotten things to a stable situation. But I'm not paying them for food right now and then feeling guilty about *their* kids starving because they thought they could afford to have them.
Ok, sorry, I didn't catch that part. Most the people here have suggested taking the "proof" with them, which would be a different matter. It'd still be susceptible to photographs, but that'd be the case for just about anything, so not such a bad idea after all. My mistake.
All it really takes is a covert op... just have army guys buy a dozen cans of silly string each, wearing civvies... then ship it out to the troops in a covert manner. Sure, it costs a bit extra to avoid the negative press, but I'd think this would be trivial, next to stuff like crushing a middle-eastern nation, deposing democratic governments, or funding and training terrorist organizations.
How about just making a bunch of punch cards (hey, they're even reusable)?
Make them out of plastic, with a clearly defined weight tolerance (making it easy to do fairly accurate preliminary manual checks to see if the electronic vote was right). Print the candidate names on the cards. You put them in a slot, the machine reads the holes (we've had a few decades to get punch cards right, and they're pretty robust- no way to screw it up), ticks of the vote electronically, and deposits the card in the right box, which you should be able to see so you know it goes in the right box. Announce the results based on the electronic count, weigh the boxes to get an approximate verification (with a known distribution curve and defined tolerance, you can know just how precise this is). Any discrepancies cause a recount. Cards are reused between elections.
There's a million ways to do it, and most of them are better than what you have.
If this stuff works out, you people might one day be compulsory material for the history classes over there. I really hope it does. I'll certainly be posting the suggestion to the issues forum of the Norwegian Liberal party once it matures; they'd love it.
Use old-fashioned paper ballots (grab one for your party, stick it in an envelope, stick the envelope in a box). Spend the money on having a million chinese kids counting the votes by hand so you get the results just as quick.
Seriously, it'd be cheaper than getting e-voting right with the current process.
Because if you don't show me proof that you voted for "None of the above", I'll know to break your kids' kneecaps. That a good enough reason for you?
(PS: Obviously, I'm not going to do that. I don't even live in the US. But I trust I've made my point clear. There is a reason why anonymous voting is considered a prerequisite to democracy. That said, the current approach makes no sense either. Get the people who build rocket-launcher software to make an open implementation with a discrete 6502 that is inspected against a photograph on-site, or something; what do I care... The B5 analogy is at the end of a season here; guess which one.)
I guess you could take an unethical countermeasure to "fix" this problem... just record whatever machines they are already using in their bot nets, and install your own software there to do the distributed filtering work. You could even have standardized software that cooperates, so that any known bad host (that is, one that has actually spammed, not one that is simply compromised, although it would be hard to verify this, which accounts for about 50% of the unethical argument) will be prompty assimilated into a global countermeasures network that not only stops the spam at the source, but also uses the resources originally used by the spammers to give additional filtering.
Of course, this would in no way be legal in many jurisdictions, and the ethics are beyond questionable. I'm not sure it's a bad idea, though.
The way to do it, if you were to do so, is IMHO: * Bootstrap the infection from somewhere that lacks appropriate legislation. * Have it monitor some anonymous channel or otherwise get input in an untracable and unprovable manner. * Discreetly distribute the command signing keys to "trusted" operators. * Make sure there are several keys and each operator has only one (N-way distribution). * Implement a voting system based on these keys. * A majority vote can invalidate a compromised key, making it useless. * A majority vote can create a new key when there are too many operators per key. * Deactivate the spammers' bot or at least block its transmissions by checking if the user is the one actually originating an outgoing mail, or perhaps building up a profile to check what mail servers they are supposed to be using. * If possible, remove the spambot and/or plug the hole; distribute updates for this. * Remove yourself if infecting the system of a clued user, a bridging computer, a medical computer or anything else that seems more unethical to compromise than John Doe's pr0nbox. * Offer CPU power for filtering e-mail, via a legitimate protocol.
The last point bears further explanation, in that you'd want something like a SpamFilter@Home project, basically lots of computers offering their idle cycles to filter spam. It'd be potentially unethical to disclose the mail in this way, for which there are workarounds, but it's opt-in, and its main point is to provide a legitimate cover for the botnet.
Of course, this idea sucks, but so does the status quo. You could kill it once spam ceases to be a problem due to spammers losing the arms race. Their only advantage at the moment, is less moral issues. Although, personally, I think the antispam-crowd has abandoned the moral high ground ages ago; both parties decrease the usefulness and viability of e-mail. If you're gonna go that way, might as well go all the way, and do some good. Better than a global whitelist.
You have apparently missed the point entirely, but in so doing, have managed to come up with the perfect case-in-point.
The medieval farmer presumably led an exceedingly harsh life by modern standards, as did his wife (who would probably die during childbirth or from getting severely burned by a kitchen accident). They worked hard, lost a lot of kids, and rarely, if ever, saw any improvements in their overall situation.
I'll not linger on the point that they would not need to (or, in fact, even be encouraged to) use their brains a lot like we do today, nor that their situation would be exactly the same as that of their peers unlike a lot of burnouts, nor that there is a significant amount of folk medicine from that day intended to deal with depression (indicating that it happened).
However, they saw return on investment. In a much more direct way than we do today.
Every day, they would see *exactly* what their work amounted to, and every harvest, they would reap the fruits of their labour.
A similar case can be made for high-stress work today, like for example firefighters, where I'd be surprised if the burnout-rate, compared to the stress, is as high as elsewhere.
The conclusion? Pretty much the same as the original post: it doesn't really matter how hard it is, as long as you see that your efforts amount to something.
Oh, and please try not to come across as so condescending when you've never experienced something like this firsthand; until you've debated with your coworkers whether to drive back to work or into a concrete wall while doing 80mph, or considered what would be the least painful way for your loved ones to find your corpse after you decide to kill yourself (an accident prevented me; incidentally, a barbiturate-diamorphine overdose was my choice), you have no idea what it is like, and what it takes to live through it.
I'm not a Yougoslav, but my SO grew up with one. They preferred Tito. Everything wasn't all dandy and fine with him either, of course, but miles better than the alternative. Someplaces, peace just has to be forced, or you won't have any. Whether you prefer peace or holding occasional votes to distract yourself from the ongoing civil war, is up to you.
No. I said that *lack* of curiosity was a racial trait (that is, intrinsic to humans, at least when they reach maturity). I've only got my experience as an amateur student of human nature (by direct observation) to go by, though.
Actually, curiosity is an exceedingly rare trait in humans beyond their childhood years. It appears to be a racial trait, and even if it isn't, we raise them to curb their curiosity and school beats the rest out of them. "Curiosity killed the cat" sort of epitomizes the average human's point of view with regards to curiosity. Just like we, as a species, don't like change, learning or having to think for ourselves.
Fortunately, there are a few individuals for whom this is unacceptable, and they run ahead into the undiscovered, eyes wide open. And frequently we reward them by tearing them a new one for thinking and acting differently from the rest of us.
You have obviously not worked in a place where you felt compelled to work overtime for some reason or other (in my case it was to save the jobs of other people there). Once you've been pulling a fair bit of it, you start losing perspective and things get a bit crazy. It starts out with you trying to help out a bit by putting in some extra hours for free, and ends up in exploitation. And management should be held accountable when it crosses that line, because then they haven't been minding their jobs, and instead have just been floating along on their laurels because of someone else being generous/kind.
In the end, you make a decision not to put in any more unpaid hours ever again, hopefully before you burn out. Everyone loses out.
Holding someone accountable for their actions is usually the only way to make them do what they should be doing. In this case, management should have been putting an end to their excessive reliance on unpaid overtime a long time ago, which they didn't, so they are being held accountable. Fair enough.
Either way, reliance on unpaid overtime is a bad business decision. If you budget with their overtime, then when these workers put their heads together and decide to pull the plug on said overtime (which they're well within their rights to do), you lose big.
Of course, long term use of overtime doesn't work unless we're talking pure grunt work here; the loss in productivity per hour just isn't made up for in terms of net productivity. Especially since the productivity per hour doesn't recover immediately upon cutting the overtime.
Since when did God speak up against porn?
Did he talk to you personally? And, if so, did anyone else hear it? Did God instruct you to be the next prophet? Have you spoken to your therapist about this?
Because..
I can't really recall having seen anything in the Old Testament (closest you get is tearing down some phallic symbols, which comes down to Idol Worship, which has been put forth as a different sin: worshipping the material world).
The New Testament seems to be really quiet about it, too, despite recorded instances of porn from that era. Some of it far more creative (and, occasionally, outrageous) than most the stuff out there today. You do, however, get some pointers about "letting him who is without sin cast the first stone" and such, though, which does have some applicability here. Are you without sin, by your faith?
After the crucifixion, the next Roman emperor was Caligula, whose rein contained some of the most outrageous perversions seen so far, at least if you consider the scale. Rumors abound of his sister dying from brutal sodomy, as I recall. You'd think the people contributing to the formation of the church in this era would have written about almost nothing else if they were as preoccupied with people's sexual habits and preferences as you are.
About the only notable admonitions in the bible regarding sex, are to lay off the sheep (attributable to the notion that animals can't consent to being the recipient in sex), not to hump a man (attributable to communicable diseases; there are many other "rules" in the bible that clearly are aimed at disease control in an era which had precious little of it), fidelity (attributable to reducing violence in society), prostitution (again, communicable diseases, plus the modern objections to it) and crossdressing (not sure about that one, but I'm fairly sure you can put it down to something in the culture at the time).
Do not be so eager to deal out judgement.
Yes, the same standards should apply, but they don't.
Atheism, the belief that there is no deity in which to believe, is the new faith, and you'll have a hard time trying to seperate that from the state. Agnosticism, the absence of faith either way, is not quite as popular anymore.
As a believer who has tried very hard not to push my beliefs to others, and not ridicule their beliefs, I find it kind of amusing to see atheists go out of their way to ram their faith down other people's throats, and ridiculing anyone who believes differently than they do, just to, moments later, agonize over believers trying to push their faith.
It's often harder to spot your own flaws than those of others and, it would appear, a lot harder to tidy your own nest than to point out that someone else has dirtied theirs.
I'm tempted to say atheism is the fundamentalist version of science as a religion, except there's a large number of atheists out there that don't have the first clue about science. Oh, wait, that goes for most fundamentalists of any religion. Nevermind.:P
BTW. How can you go to hell if you don't believe in the Christian universe (and therefore Jesus). Is their an atheist's universe with a seperate hell?
Well, I don't necessarily subscribe to the idea that you will.
But I imagine it's something like the answer to "How can you go to jail if you don't believe in the validity of government as an institution (and therefore the laws, courts and police of your country)?".
I quite agree that there's been a lot of misguided efforts throughout humanity to ram personal beliefs down the throats of others, and that there's been a lot of bloodshed in the name of faiths that frequently don't even support these actions.
However, if you think religious people are unique in this regard, you're sadly mistaken. People are not naturally inclined towards tolerance and respect; it's a biological thing, I guess. Just look at kids in schools, for an example of what people are really like, inside. They pick on each other, and bully the other kids around. Sometimes just because they can, sometimes because the other kids look, act or think differently than they do. Belief is a subset of "think" in this regard.
Now, give these same people weapons, and an excuse to pick on someone, a reason, no matter how flimsy. And watch them go amok. Their inner children come out to play. Again. Like children, we are all intrinsically evil on some level. It's hardwired.
Just consider the fact that most depression and such comorbidities in autism, asperger and ADD arise from their interactions with society. Or that people that have been raped (bad enough in itself), but are successfully coping, get repeatedly hammered by society until they display the "appropriate" level of trauma, just because people can't accept that they don't react the way that they are "supposed to". I mean, the original abuse was bad enough, but people feel like they have to make it worse, because it wasn't bad enough for them? No wonder people start wondering if there's something wrong with them afterwards.
People just aren't very nice, and blaming that on religion gets us nowhere. Some religions at least make an attempt to curb these tendencies, although religious organizations often downplay that aspect of their faith.
For language to have meaning, people need to agree on the meanings of words, which has led to the argument that how people use a language defines that language. An argument that supports your position, but not that of the parent. However, this in turn leads to terms being muddled to the point where the sum of expressible concepts are folded into the number of words supported by the minds of the lowest common denominator (about 500-1000, I'd guess). Which lowers the net utility of the language, and leads to "hacker" becoming synonymous with "cracker", a pet peeve of many Slashdotters and carefully chosen to hopefully make someone care about this point. From this, we can again derive the argument that words do have defined meanings that shouldn't change so whimsically. Which supports the position of the parent.
Religion is a system of irrationality which praises blind faith over reason. It is designed to stay stagnant and never change no matter what we learn.
I believe you are confusing religions with religious organizations. Religions, by their very nature, do not make for good mass faith. People generally want stagnancy, to stick with their preconceptions, to not have to change, and not have to learn. Religious organizations capitalize on this, and build their power from pandering to this desire by simplifying the message.
Christianity was a mystery cult and food for thought, the religous part, bundled together with a lot of admonitions to the general public, the "masses" part. The religious part is, and has always been, a personal thing, and I doubt you'll ever see anyone succeed at bringing it to a mass audience. The churches build on the parts that are for the masses, mistaking the toppings for the cake itself, sometimes even in good faith. Then people seize on some of these toppings, and decide they're the only toppings anyone should have, and that they should die if they don't eat it, never mind allergies.
As for stagnancy, I'd like to make a point adressed on a Jewish page. The bible admonishes us to be kind to our slaves, etc.. However, the point that's really being made here, is that there is something wrong with slavery. It's just being wrapped up in a way that can do the most good at the time it is being said. If you went all out back then, and said people weren't supposed to have slaves at all, your message wouldn't get out, and you'd have done no good at all. However, if you say they should be nicer to their slaves, you'd start a change for the better, do a lot of good, and you hope they'll get the rest of that message on their own, given time. That's not stagnancy, that's an awareness of how people think and work, coupled with amazing foresight.
People, however, with their desire for stagnancy and strong laws writ in stone, their strong (I hope the Buddhists will for give me for this one) Sheep natures, hold on to what was once written for an older culture, and completely fail to grasp the deeper meaning. They try to practice the literal version, which by definition is stagnant as it has been taken out of the context of time, and discard the advances in the understanding of meaning that have happened since then. Then they disregard whatever is inconvenient to their incomplete understanding at the moment.
Religion demonstrably isn't for everyone, though an argument might be made that some of the messages sent by people who get religion are, if only as a seed to spark development in a certain direction.
Zen is not koans. Koans are a tool that some people can use to achieve Zen.
If I haven't gotten my point over by now, I will not get it over in a longer post, so I'll stop now.
Declaration of bias: I'm something along the lines of a personal Christian/Gnostic reincarnation guy, and make some sense of the crap in the world by assuming this is purgatory, and therefore only occupied by fucked-up souls that need a few more incarnations of purification before they "get" it; probably put here for touting their bibles in the educational facilities of some "higher" plane.;)
Reductio ad paedophilum..
Another interesting point is that if you *do* get ahold of the list, and it happens to have few false positives, you'll have the perfect "bookmarks" folder for someone looking for this stuff.
Actually, there are approximately six useful approaches to open source processors, which all mostly have to do with security:
* Make a tiny processor, or a fragmented small one, that can be implemented in FPGAs. This gives you a mostly open approach, although you still have to trust the FPGA. The gate count and clock rate would be fairly limited, but it's viable. Many people build their own RISC systems for this; an open source EPIC-like architecture might be nice here, too. * Make a small processor, or a fragmented medium one, and develop a semiconductor technology that home users can implement. This was discussed on the Cypherpunk lists at one point, and would probably either require the development of semiconductor ink that can be used in a printer, which could yield useful (yet still huge) feature sizes; or, printing projector transparencies and doing a home-version of the regular processes, presumably with Zink, Gallium and Germanium, which would presumably yield gargantuan feature sizes. On the positive side, anyone with a microscope can verify that they have got the right design. * Make a medium to large processor, and require the users to go for group buys, for example via MOSIS. This implies trusting MOSIS, but is quite doable, albeit at higher costs than a commercial processor. It also has been done, IIRC, with cores from the OpenCores project. This is the closest thing to something that is viable on grounds of utility and geek appeal, I guess. * Make a tiny to large processor that is implemented on PCBs with discrete transistors. You can buy reels and reels of N/P dual MOSFETs, and either hand-solder them (tiny processor, probably nothing fancier than a 286 at best) or have them machine mounted (up to large sizes, by stacking and otherwise interlinking several PCBs to get enough transistors). This would offer limited clock rates unless some ingenious engineering was done, and would probably consume a lot of power, but could be viable in terms of computing power. Inspection is also simple. It would be very expensive, though. * Make a tiny to large processor that is implemented on PCBs with logic gates (74-family). This is like the previous option, except it sacrifices some amount of inspection to gain a more compact footprint, higher clock rates and lower power consumption. This has been done with the Magic-1 Homebrew CPU, and is equivalent to what one once had to do in order to get a home "PC";)
The last approach, which would require a *ton* of funding, and sacrifices *hardware* inspection, but actually seems at least potentially viable, is to have lots and lots of geeks to pool their money to have the FSF/GNU/whatnot buy a prototyping fab or somesuch and have them crank these things out. The cheapest is a direct-write system, but I'm sure some second-hand fabs are available at a "reasonable" cost, although you'd not be getting entirely modern feature sizes for a reasonable price with anything but direct-write.
Commercially, these approaches all have limited value, I think. From a hacker's perspective, however, I find all of the above to have appeal. Is it reinventing the wheel? Sure. But doing it "just because I can", and to learn, experiment and play with it is IMHO worthwhile, if you have the resources to do so.
A class of CPU-engineers-in-training can complete a binary-compatible 486 DX in less than one year, according to someone I spoke to whose class had done just that (in a few months). MOSIS can fabricate it. This is, IIRC, how the RISC-1 was done, introducing the RISC concept to the world.
With sufficiently large-scale coordination and cash pooling, you could even conceivably buy a production run of a CPU with a modern feature size from one of the companies in that business.
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I couldn't really care less if they want food.
Feed one generation, and when the next one comes around, you'll have more mouths to feed. The GNP growth of the industrialized world is not sufficient to keep up with what would be the growth in their population over time.
Any effort directed at helping them help themselves is infinitely more useful than food in the long run. Not on an individual level, of course, but the question then becomes whether you're going to help individuals at the expense of a larger second generation dying in an even greater famine. What is the right thing to do, ethically, is an argument I don't want to get into; for me, they're numbers, which isn't fair, but it's all I can cope with, and that means I want to help the larger number of people.
I can dig up USD100, even on my limited income, and not end up losing my house. Do I spend it on feeding a handful of people for a little while, or do I spend it on giving them a tool with which they can at least try to get an education that they can hopefully use to save even more people, as well as building a fundament for sustainability?
I'd choose the latter. I'd even be willing to teach the kid/adult/whatever how to read and type, were I able to travel to where they are or vice versa. I could certainly sponsor one with a fair amount of online teaching, if there were to be provided an infrastructure for connectivity down there.
I'm happy to explain to them why it's a bad idea for them (or any of their peers) to have kids until they've educated their local community and gotten things to a stable situation. But I'm not paying them for food right now and then feeling guilty about *their* kids starving because they thought they could afford to have them.
Ok, sorry, I didn't catch that part. Most the people here have suggested taking the "proof" with them, which would be a different matter. It'd still be susceptible to photographs, but that'd be the case for just about anything, so not such a bad idea after all. My mistake.
All it really takes is a covert op... just have army guys buy a dozen cans of silly string each, wearing civvies... then ship it out to the troops in a covert manner. Sure, it costs a bit extra to avoid the negative press, but I'd think this would be trivial, next to stuff like crushing a middle-eastern nation, deposing democratic governments, or funding and training terrorist organizations.
How about just making a bunch of punch cards (hey, they're even reusable)?
Make them out of plastic, with a clearly defined weight tolerance (making it easy to do fairly accurate preliminary manual checks to see if the electronic vote was right). Print the candidate names on the cards. You put them in a slot, the machine reads the holes (we've had a few decades to get punch cards right, and they're pretty robust- no way to screw it up), ticks of the vote electronically, and deposits the card in the right box, which you should be able to see so you know it goes in the right box. Announce the results based on the electronic count, weigh the boxes to get an approximate verification (with a known distribution curve and defined tolerance, you can know just how precise this is). Any discrepancies cause a recount. Cards are reused between elections.
There's a million ways to do it, and most of them are better than what you have.
If this stuff works out, you people might one day be compulsory material for the history classes over there. I really hope it does. I'll certainly be posting the suggestion to the issues forum of the Norwegian Liberal party once it matures; they'd love it.
Why not go for the simpler solution?
Use old-fashioned paper ballots (grab one for your party, stick it in an envelope, stick the envelope in a box). Spend the money on having a million chinese kids counting the votes by hand so you get the results just as quick.
Seriously, it'd be cheaper than getting e-voting right with the current process.
Because if you don't show me proof that you voted for "None of the above", I'll know to break your kids' kneecaps. That a good enough reason for you?
(PS: Obviously, I'm not going to do that. I don't even live in the US. But I trust I've made my point clear. There is a reason why anonymous voting is considered a prerequisite to democracy. That said, the current approach makes no sense either. Get the people who build rocket-launcher software to make an open implementation with a discrete 6502 that is inspected against a photograph on-site, or something; what do I care... The B5 analogy is at the end of a season here; guess which one.)
I guess you could take an unethical countermeasure to "fix" this problem... just record whatever machines they are already using in their bot nets, and install your own software there to do the distributed filtering work. You could even have standardized software that cooperates, so that any known bad host (that is, one that has actually spammed, not one that is simply compromised, although it would be hard to verify this, which accounts for about 50% of the unethical argument) will be prompty assimilated into a global countermeasures network that not only stops the spam at the source, but also uses the resources originally used by the spammers to give additional filtering.
Of course, this would in no way be legal in many jurisdictions, and the ethics are beyond questionable. I'm not sure it's a bad idea, though.
The way to do it, if you were to do so, is IMHO:
* Bootstrap the infection from somewhere that lacks appropriate legislation.
* Have it monitor some anonymous channel or otherwise get input in an untracable and unprovable manner.
* Discreetly distribute the command signing keys to "trusted" operators.
* Make sure there are several keys and each operator has only one (N-way distribution).
* Implement a voting system based on these keys.
* A majority vote can invalidate a compromised key, making it useless.
* A majority vote can create a new key when there are too many operators per key.
* Deactivate the spammers' bot or at least block its transmissions by checking if the user is the one actually originating an outgoing mail, or perhaps building up a profile to check what mail servers they are supposed to be using.
* If possible, remove the spambot and/or plug the hole; distribute updates for this.
* Remove yourself if infecting the system of a clued user, a bridging computer, a medical computer or anything else that seems more unethical to compromise than John Doe's pr0nbox.
* Offer CPU power for filtering e-mail, via a legitimate protocol.
The last point bears further explanation, in that you'd want something like a SpamFilter@Home project, basically lots of computers offering their idle cycles to filter spam. It'd be potentially unethical to disclose the mail in this way, for which there are workarounds, but it's opt-in, and its main point is to provide a legitimate cover for the botnet.
Of course, this idea sucks, but so does the status quo. You could kill it once spam ceases to be a problem due to spammers losing the arms race. Their only advantage at the moment, is less moral issues. Although, personally, I think the antispam-crowd has abandoned the moral high ground ages ago; both parties decrease the usefulness and viability of e-mail. If you're gonna go that way, might as well go all the way, and do some good. Better than a global whitelist.
A 12GB pendrive will run you about USD 200-250 around here, and our VAT is exorbitant, so that goal is already within reach.
You have apparently missed the point entirely, but in so doing, have managed to come up with the perfect case-in-point.
The medieval farmer presumably led an exceedingly harsh life by modern standards, as did his wife (who would probably die during childbirth or from getting severely burned by a kitchen accident). They worked hard, lost a lot of kids, and rarely, if ever, saw any improvements in their overall situation.
I'll not linger on the point that they would not need to (or, in fact, even be encouraged to) use their brains a lot like we do today, nor that their situation would be exactly the same as that of their peers unlike a lot of burnouts, nor that there is a significant amount of folk medicine from that day intended to deal with depression (indicating that it happened).
However, they saw return on investment. In a much more direct way than we do today.
Every day, they would see *exactly* what their work amounted to, and every harvest, they would reap the fruits of their labour.
A similar case can be made for high-stress work today, like for example firefighters, where I'd be surprised if the burnout-rate, compared to the stress, is as high as elsewhere.
The conclusion? Pretty much the same as the original post: it doesn't really matter how hard it is, as long as you see that your efforts amount to something.
Oh, and please try not to come across as so condescending when you've never experienced something like this firsthand; until you've debated with your coworkers whether to drive back to work or into a concrete wall while doing 80mph, or considered what would be the least painful way for your loved ones to find your corpse after you decide to kill yourself (an accident prevented me; incidentally, a barbiturate-diamorphine overdose was my choice), you have no idea what it is like, and what it takes to live through it.
I'm not a Yougoslav, but my SO grew up with one. They preferred Tito. Everything wasn't all dandy and fine with him either, of course, but miles better than the alternative. Someplaces, peace just has to be forced, or you won't have any. Whether you prefer peace or holding occasional votes to distract yourself from the ongoing civil war, is up to you.
No. I said that *lack* of curiosity was a racial trait (that is, intrinsic to humans, at least when they reach maturity). I've only got my experience as an amateur student of human nature (by direct observation) to go by, though.
Actually, curiosity is an exceedingly rare trait in humans beyond their childhood years. It appears to be a racial trait, and even if it isn't, we raise them to curb their curiosity and school beats the rest out of them. "Curiosity killed the cat" sort of epitomizes the average human's point of view with regards to curiosity. Just like we, as a species, don't like change, learning or having to think for ourselves.
Fortunately, there are a few individuals for whom this is unacceptable, and they run ahead into the undiscovered, eyes wide open. And frequently we reward them by tearing them a new one for thinking and acting differently from the rest of us.
Don't unduly credit humanity.
You have obviously not worked in a place where you felt compelled to work overtime for some reason or other (in my case it was to save the jobs of other people there). Once you've been pulling a fair bit of it, you start losing perspective and things get a bit crazy. It starts out with you trying to help out a bit by putting in some extra hours for free, and ends up in exploitation. And management should be held accountable when it crosses that line, because then they haven't been minding their jobs, and instead have just been floating along on their laurels because of someone else being generous/kind.
In the end, you make a decision not to put in any more unpaid hours ever again, hopefully before you burn out. Everyone loses out.
Holding someone accountable for their actions is usually the only way to make them do what they should be doing. In this case, management should have been putting an end to their excessive reliance on unpaid overtime a long time ago, which they didn't, so they are being held accountable. Fair enough.
Either way, reliance on unpaid overtime is a bad business decision. If you budget with their overtime, then when these workers put their heads together and decide to pull the plug on said overtime (which they're well within their rights to do), you lose big.
Of course, long term use of overtime doesn't work unless we're talking pure grunt work here; the loss in productivity per hour just isn't made up for in terms of net productivity. Especially since the productivity per hour doesn't recover immediately upon cutting the overtime.
Since when did God speak up against porn? Did he talk to you personally? And, if so, did anyone else hear it? Did God instruct you to be the next prophet? Have you spoken to your therapist about this? Because.. I can't really recall having seen anything in the Old Testament (closest you get is tearing down some phallic symbols, which comes down to Idol Worship, which has been put forth as a different sin: worshipping the material world). The New Testament seems to be really quiet about it, too, despite recorded instances of porn from that era. Some of it far more creative (and, occasionally, outrageous) than most the stuff out there today. You do, however, get some pointers about "letting him who is without sin cast the first stone" and such, though, which does have some applicability here. Are you without sin, by your faith? After the crucifixion, the next Roman emperor was Caligula, whose rein contained some of the most outrageous perversions seen so far, at least if you consider the scale. Rumors abound of his sister dying from brutal sodomy, as I recall. You'd think the people contributing to the formation of the church in this era would have written about almost nothing else if they were as preoccupied with people's sexual habits and preferences as you are. About the only notable admonitions in the bible regarding sex, are to lay off the sheep (attributable to the notion that animals can't consent to being the recipient in sex), not to hump a man (attributable to communicable diseases; there are many other "rules" in the bible that clearly are aimed at disease control in an era which had precious little of it), fidelity (attributable to reducing violence in society), prostitution (again, communicable diseases, plus the modern objections to it) and crossdressing (not sure about that one, but I'm fairly sure you can put it down to something in the culture at the time). Do not be so eager to deal out judgement.
You mean like the orderings usually employed inside an OS, for example?
E.g. VM pages being linked along the LRU and Virtual Address axes?
Yes, the same standards should apply, but they don't.
Atheism, the belief that there is no deity in which to believe, is the new faith, and you'll have a hard time trying to seperate that from the state. Agnosticism, the absence of faith either way, is not quite as popular anymore.
As a believer who has tried very hard not to push my beliefs to others, and not ridicule their beliefs, I find it kind of amusing to see atheists go out of their way to ram their faith down other people's throats, and ridiculing anyone who believes differently than they do, just to, moments later, agonize over believers trying to push their faith.
It's often harder to spot your own flaws than those of others and, it would appear, a lot harder to tidy your own nest than to point out that someone else has dirtied theirs.
I'm tempted to say atheism is the fundamentalist version of science as a religion, except there's a large number of atheists out there that don't have the first clue about science. Oh, wait, that goes for most fundamentalists of any religion. Nevermind. :P
BTW. How can you go to hell if you don't believe in the Christian universe (and therefore Jesus). Is their an atheist's universe with a seperate hell?
Well, I don't necessarily subscribe to the idea that you will.
But I imagine it's something like the answer to "How can you go to jail if you don't believe in the validity of government as an institution (and therefore the laws, courts and police of your country)?".
I quite agree that there's been a lot of misguided efforts throughout humanity to ram personal beliefs down the throats of others, and that there's been a lot of bloodshed in the name of faiths that frequently don't even support these actions.
However, if you think religious people are unique in this regard, you're sadly mistaken. People are not naturally inclined towards tolerance and respect; it's a biological thing, I guess. Just look at kids in schools, for an example of what people are really like, inside. They pick on each other, and bully the other kids around. Sometimes just because they can, sometimes because the other kids look, act or think differently than they do. Belief is a subset of "think" in this regard.
Now, give these same people weapons, and an excuse to pick on someone, a reason, no matter how flimsy. And watch them go amok. Their inner children come out to play. Again. Like children, we are all intrinsically evil on some level. It's hardwired.
Just consider the fact that most depression and such comorbidities in autism, asperger and ADD arise from their interactions with society. Or that people that have been raped (bad enough in itself), but are successfully coping, get repeatedly hammered by society until they display the "appropriate" level of trauma, just because people can't accept that they don't react the way that they are "supposed to". I mean, the original abuse was bad enough, but people feel like they have to make it worse, because it wasn't bad enough for them? No wonder people start wondering if there's something wrong with them afterwards.
People just aren't very nice, and blaming that on religion gets us nowhere. Some religions at least make an attempt to curb these tendencies, although religious organizations often downplay that aspect of their faith.
Now that's a tricky bit, isn't it?
For language to have meaning, people need to agree on the meanings of words, which has led to the argument that how people use a language defines that language. An argument that supports your position, but not that of the parent. However, this in turn leads to terms being muddled to the point where the sum of expressible concepts are folded into the number of words supported by the minds of the lowest common denominator (about 500-1000, I'd guess). Which lowers the net utility of the language, and leads to "hacker" becoming synonymous with "cracker", a pet peeve of many Slashdotters and carefully chosen to hopefully make someone care about this point. From this, we can again derive the argument that words do have defined meanings that shouldn't change so whimsically. Which supports the position of the parent.
Religion is a system of irrationality which praises blind faith over reason. It is designed to stay stagnant and never change no matter what we learn.
I believe you are confusing religions with religious organizations. Religions, by their very nature, do not make for good mass faith. People generally want stagnancy, to stick with their preconceptions, to not have to change, and not have to learn. Religious organizations capitalize on this, and build their power from pandering to this desire by simplifying the message.
Christianity was a mystery cult and food for thought, the religous part, bundled together with a lot of admonitions to the general public, the "masses" part. The religious part is, and has always been, a personal thing, and I doubt you'll ever see anyone succeed at bringing it to a mass audience. The churches build on the parts that are for the masses, mistaking the toppings for the cake itself, sometimes even in good faith. Then people seize on some of these toppings, and decide they're the only toppings anyone should have, and that they should die if they don't eat it, never mind allergies.
As for stagnancy, I'd like to make a point adressed on a Jewish page. The bible admonishes us to be kind to our slaves, etc.. However, the point that's really being made here, is that there is something wrong with slavery. It's just being wrapped up in a way that can do the most good at the time it is being said. If you went all out back then, and said people weren't supposed to have slaves at all, your message wouldn't get out, and you'd have done no good at all. However, if you say they should be nicer to their slaves, you'd start a change for the better, do a lot of good, and you hope they'll get the rest of that message on their own, given time. That's not stagnancy, that's an awareness of how people think and work, coupled with amazing foresight.
People, however, with their desire for stagnancy and strong laws writ in stone, their strong (I hope the Buddhists will for give me for this one) Sheep natures, hold on to what was once written for an older culture, and completely fail to grasp the deeper meaning. They try to practice the literal version, which by definition is stagnant as it has been taken out of the context of time, and discard the advances in the understanding of meaning that have happened since then. Then they disregard whatever is inconvenient to their incomplete understanding at the moment.
Religion demonstrably isn't for everyone, though an argument might be made that some of the messages sent by people who get religion are, if only as a seed to spark development in a certain direction.
Zen is not koans. Koans are a tool that some people can use to achieve Zen.
If I haven't gotten my point over by now, I will not get it over in a longer post, so I'll stop now.
Declaration of bias: I'm something along the lines of a personal Christian/Gnostic reincarnation guy, and make some sense of the crap in the world by assuming this is purgatory, and therefore only occupied by fucked-up souls that need a few more incarnations of purification before they "get" it; probably put here for touting their bibles in the educational facilities of some "higher" plane. ;)
Did your meds just run out? That rant was, spelling/grammar aside, not very constructive.
Reductio ad paedophilum.. Another interesting point is that if you *do* get ahold of the list, and it happens to have few false positives, you'll have the perfect "bookmarks" folder for someone looking for this stuff.
Actually, there are approximately six useful approaches to open source processors, which all mostly have to do with security:
;)
* Make a tiny processor, or a fragmented small one, that can be implemented in FPGAs. This gives you a mostly open approach, although you still have to trust the FPGA. The gate count and clock rate would be fairly limited, but it's viable. Many people build their own RISC systems for this; an open source EPIC-like architecture might be nice here, too.
* Make a small processor, or a fragmented medium one, and develop a semiconductor technology that home users can implement. This was discussed on the Cypherpunk lists at one point, and would probably either require the development of semiconductor ink that can be used in a printer, which could yield useful (yet still huge) feature sizes; or, printing projector transparencies and doing a home-version of the regular processes, presumably with Zink, Gallium and Germanium, which would presumably yield gargantuan feature sizes. On the positive side, anyone with a microscope can verify that they have got the right design.
* Make a medium to large processor, and require the users to go for group buys, for example via MOSIS. This implies trusting MOSIS, but is quite doable, albeit at higher costs than a commercial processor. It also has been done, IIRC, with cores from the OpenCores project. This is the closest thing to something that is viable on grounds of utility and geek appeal, I guess.
* Make a tiny to large processor that is implemented on PCBs with discrete transistors. You can buy reels and reels of N/P dual MOSFETs, and either hand-solder them (tiny processor, probably nothing fancier than a 286 at best) or have them machine mounted (up to large sizes, by stacking and otherwise interlinking several PCBs to get enough transistors). This would offer limited clock rates unless some ingenious engineering was done, and would probably consume a lot of power, but could be viable in terms of computing power. Inspection is also simple. It would be very expensive, though.
* Make a tiny to large processor that is implemented on PCBs with logic gates (74-family). This is like the previous option, except it sacrifices some amount of inspection to gain a more compact footprint, higher clock rates and lower power consumption. This has been done with the Magic-1 Homebrew CPU, and is equivalent to what one once had to do in order to get a home "PC"
The last approach, which would require a *ton* of funding, and sacrifices *hardware* inspection, but actually seems at least potentially viable, is to have lots and lots of geeks to pool their money to have the FSF/GNU/whatnot buy a prototyping fab or somesuch and have them crank these things out. The cheapest is a direct-write system, but I'm sure some second-hand fabs are available at a "reasonable" cost, although you'd not be getting entirely modern feature sizes for a reasonable price with anything but direct-write.
Commercially, these approaches all have limited value, I think. From a hacker's perspective, however, I find all of the above to have appeal. Is it reinventing the wheel? Sure. But doing it "just because I can", and to learn, experiment and play with it is IMHO worthwhile, if you have the resources to do so.
A class of CPU-engineers-in-training can complete a binary-compatible 486 DX in less than one year, according to someone I spoke to whose class had done just that (in a few months). MOSIS can fabricate it. This is, IIRC, how the RISC-1 was done, introducing the RISC concept to the world.
With sufficiently large-scale coordination and cash pooling, you could even conceivably buy a production run of a CPU with a modern feature size from one of the companies in that business.