So yes, signaling your wealth IS a useful product function.
Er... no. No, it is not. Your second example, interspecies signaling, confuses me, so I'll skip that as I'm not sure what the relevance to humans is, but the other two are ridiculous. If you're giving to the poor to show how wealthy you are, that doesn't make signaling wealth useful, because people give to the poor for sheer altruism (and people use far less useful methods than charitable donations to signal their wealth). And if you find signaling wealth useful for picking a mate, I give you excellent odds on the bet that your chosen mate is a money-grubbing whore, with no real worth as a person.
Did you read my post? I never said working in a factory was at all pleasant, just that the work itself is easy to do from what I understand. I get that factory work is absolute shit.
Depends on the sense of "easy" you mean. From what I understand, the work involved in factory jobs is insanely easy, it's just hell to do the same thing over and over again in poor conditions. So, the job blows, but the actual task you do is easy.
I don't really understand the parent post being modded funny... $1337 (USD) per week would be a paycut for most IT professionals wouldn't it? I'm underpaid at the equivalent of $1546.40 a week.
Depends on where you live... I get paid pretty decently for my area, and I make $660 (gross) per week. And yes, I'm an IT professional.
Really, this lets the gov't track the millions of people who use passports easily but has no effect on criminals or those NOT from the USA. Personally I'd be more worried about the 20-something male muslum flying in to the US and then around from city to city than grandma taking a vacation to canada which now requires a passport. Yes, it's profiling. But when was the last time someone's mid-western 68 year old white grandmother went on a shooting/terror spree?
I dunno, personally, I don't want government-sanctioned racism. But that's just me.
a) Having an ability to do something doesn't mean you always successfully do so. I have the ability to bake a cake, but once in a while, my cakes come out terrible because I messed up. Similarly, sometimes I choose not to make a cake even though I want cake. In neither of those cases did I lack the ability to make a cake, though.
b) Not all species become extinct due to not adapting.
Er... how far up the dependency chain, exactly, do you want to go? Cause if we follow your idea to its conclusion, no one has ever been a hacker, unless they learned the language themselves through trial and error. Someone has to educate you on the material at some point... it's whether or not you have your hand held for you all the time that defines your hacker status, I'd argue.
Rubbish. Have you read any of the laws against theft lately? Let's see. California Penal Code section 484. up to about section 500 cover theft. They're not only far more precise (in that they more exactly define what situation they are to be applied toward), but there are exceptions defined, there are interpretative civil procedures codes that are relevant, and so on.
And all of that stuff is absolute. Are you even listening to what the hell I'm saying? The laws are absolute, but that does not mean they have no exceptions. It means that the exception must be codified into law before someone can utilize it.
Pure bullshit! I don't know who's been upmodding you, but they obviously know nothing about the law. The judicial process is all about arguing exceptions to it that don't exist before you argue them. That's how precedent is created. Of course you can argue exceptions that don't exist!
In the vast majority of cases, bullshit. The judiciary is merely ascertaining whether someone broke the law, not whether what they did should be illegal. In the cases where they are doing the latter, it's only because some meta-law (like the Constitution, say) gives them authority to do so.
Again, rubbish. People have known the Earth was round for millennia; as long as we've had civilization and codified rational thought.
Who the fuck cares if one person knows it? For a very, very long time, almost everyone except some men with radical crazy ideas was convinced the world was flat. That is my point. You're saying that the history of the judiciary proves your point, I'm saying that your evidence is irrelevant, as it is perfectly possible for large groups of people to be wrong over long periods of time.
I never said the constitution was not binding upon the government.
Bull! That is EXACTLY what you've been saying the ENTIRE time. The Constitution is just a guideline, and the government can break it whenever it feels it necessary.
Neither of those governments are any more tyrannical than the government of the United States, and some might say, in fact, that they are less so.
Considering the number of stories we see here about the UK turning into a 1984-like state, they're about the weakest example you could have picked.
Except such a law is not absolute. The fact that you believe it is does nothing more than showcase your own ignorance.
The laws against theft are every bit as absolute as the Constitution. What it says is absolute, unless amended. There can be exceptions, but they have to be made law to mean anything. I can't just steal from the local Wal-Mart, and get away with it by claiming (as you ludicrously claim about the Constitution) that it's merely a guideline, and because I found a situation where (in my view) it's reasonable to have an exception, I can just ignore the law. There may well be a need for an exception, but that exception needs to be written into the law before I can utilize it.
As I said, it's not just my word against yours that the constitution does not constitute valid law- it is the entire history of jurisprudence.
It is not impossible for a great many people to be wrong, even for a very long time. I remind you that, until a certain point in our world's history, one could have made the same exact defense for the doctrine that the world was flat.
What a shockingly ignorant grasp of political theory. The constitution does not grant the power to create law; in fact, it does exactly the opposite. It is a self-imposed limit on the exercise of sovereign power.
Sir, it is you who displays a shockingly ignorant grasp of political theory, not to mention the history of the formation of the United States. While I won't go so far as to say that you're malicious (Hanlon's razor applies here), your misinformation is precisely what we must guard against, because the malicious will use that kind of thinking against us. I only hope that more people in our nation don't subscribe to the same bullshit, because if they do, our nation is doomed to slide into tyranny. It may not be in our lifetime, or even near our lifetime, but it will happen if enough people have this false belief that the constitution of a government is not binding upon it. It's only a matter of time.
The Constitution, which I argue is not a valid law...
Ah, so we can do that now? Just say that laws aren't valid laws and then ignore them? Fuckin' cool, man! Why didn't anyone tell me this sooner? For starters, I'm gonna go ahead and say that the law prohibiting me from taking your (or anyone's for that matter) stuff is not a valid law--it's black and white, after all, and we don't live in a black and white world.
If the Consitution isn't a valid law, not one single law ever passed by our government is a valid law, since they were given the authority to pass said laws by the constitution. Your arguments that the Constitution can be ignored showcases your complete and total ignorance of the system of government that we have. Not that I'm gonna stop you--I mean, hey, go ahead and do what you gotta do, that's your right. But don't blame the rest of us when we sit around laughing at your sheer ignorance.
AoC has more technically proficient graphics, yes. But WoW's artists have more artistic talent in their little fingers than AoC's artists have in their entire bodies. Excellent rendering means nothing if your art is mediocre.
No, it actually has nothing to do with the FSM, as I recall the image. It's linked to by Wikipedia's FSM page, but the image itself doesn't mention the FSM, it's just about logical fallacy.
Ew. No. That was by far the worst part of Diablo before. Not being able to see a damn thing around me is not fun at all. At the very least, they need to make the "blackness" optional.
I have always failed to understand what people's problem with Diablo III's graphics. The important thing is the gothic feel here. You don't need a color palette made up of shades of brown, grey, and black to achieve that... there's nothing wrong with having a colorful world, since it doesn't necessarily change the look & feel of the world at all. Hell, I by far prefer the screen shots Blizzard has produced to the "improved" stuff the fans have put out. The people doing that work may be happy with a world full of dreary colors which is hard to see any detail in, but I for one am not.
People aren't propping up the system, they are playing by it.
Those two are one and the same. I understand why people do it, but they also need to accept their guilt in propping up the broken system if they want to try to work it.
It wouldn't be true if the people weren't complicit in propping up the system as it is. Things can be different, if people actually vote for who they want for, instead of voting against one of the two major candidates.
Your suggestion of creating our own PAC is laughable at best. The only REAL solution is to outlaw the practice; forcing our elected officials to actually communicate with the people that elected them i the first place. It is, after all, their fucking job in the first place. Despite it being their job, people somehow accept it is not. It's been suggested that fewer than 1% of our elected officials at the Federal level are not on the take in some form or fashion. This isn't surprising in the least considering it is almost impossible to get elected in the first place without some form of smudge on one's soul. Which is exactly why the system needs to be changed. All adults know the system is broken. The question is, which table will you be eating at tonight? The adults table or the children's table. The PAC suggestion is squarely at the later of the two.
What the fuck? After all your talk of recognizing the facts of the situation, you have the gall to say that creating a PAC representing our own interests is a childish solution? Look, it isn't a great solution. I don't like it. But, the reality is, it'll probably be significantly harder to fix the system, than to make the corrupt system work for us. That isn't childish, it's pragmatism.
Actually, you're wrong, it can be bigotry. Let's say you loathe Christianity and everything it stands for. Fair enough, that's your right. But, the instant you assume someone is (for example) an intolerant, unthinking asshole because he/she is a Christian, you've crossed the line into bigotry.
The problem is your definition of bigotry is off. Bigotry is judging someone, regardless of their individual merits, according to some group that they fit into, and it isn't limited to innate characteristics.
The point is, no matter how trustworthy the company has been in the past, you have absolutely no way of knowing for sure that they'll continue to be trustworthy in the future. All you have is their own word.
That's ALL you ever have, from ANYONE! Hell, if that's your reason for not trusting, I damn well hope you don't trust anyone at all. Anyone you know can only give you their own word that they will continue to be trustworthy in the future. That's what trust is!!
That's the whole point. With closed source, you can't get someone you trust to check it over for you. It's not an option. The only people who can "check it over for you" is the vendor, because they're the only ones who have access to the data.
No? Pretty sure this entire article is because some third party noticed a discrepancy in the results. Now, we can't know for sure why the discrepancy exists, but we can say that if it isn't fixed in the future, the company has almost certainly lied to us about why their results are off. If it is, they were probably honest. This is no different than when you accuse someone you know and trust of lying, and they say it was an error. You will NEVER know whether they really made an error, or were lying. All you will ever be able to do is decide the probability of this, based on their past actions, and how trustworthy they prove to be in the future.
It's not the fact that I disagree with you, it's the fact that you are wrong. It's not an opinion, it's a fact.
Nothing you or I has said in our arguments has been fact. Not ONE thing. This is a debate of opinions. There's nothing wrong with that, many things are. But if you don't recognize that now, you never will, so I don't know why I'm even trying to tell you.
since you claim to want someone to check it for you that is expressly NOT the company involved.
I claimed NOTHING of the sort. Learn to read? I said I wanted a trustworthy source to check it. That trustworthy source may, in fact, be the vendor. It also may not be. It depends on the situation.
This is why I know you're trolling, now. You agree, you just want to get a rise out of people by being an idiot.
Fuck you. You represent everything that's wrong with the internet, where you label someone as a troll just because you disagree (and YES, it is just because you disagree). I've challenged an opinion you hold strongly, and so I'm a troll. Well, have fun with your little sandboxes you try to create where everyone conforms to your expectations of how they should think. The rest of us live in the real world.
Slashdot Mirror
So yes, signaling your wealth IS a useful product function.
Er... no. No, it is not. Your second example, interspecies signaling, confuses me, so I'll skip that as I'm not sure what the relevance to humans is, but the other two are ridiculous. If you're giving to the poor to show how wealthy you are, that doesn't make signaling wealth useful, because people give to the poor for sheer altruism (and people use far less useful methods than charitable donations to signal their wealth). And if you find signaling wealth useful for picking a mate, I give you excellent odds on the bet that your chosen mate is a money-grubbing whore, with no real worth as a person.
Did you read my post? I never said working in a factory was at all pleasant, just that the work itself is easy to do from what I understand. I get that factory work is absolute shit.
Depends on the sense of "easy" you mean. From what I understand, the work involved in factory jobs is insanely easy, it's just hell to do the same thing over and over again in poor conditions. So, the job blows, but the actual task you do is easy.
I don't really understand the parent post being modded funny... $1337 (USD) per week would be a paycut for most IT professionals wouldn't it? I'm underpaid at the equivalent of $1546.40 a week.
Depends on where you live... I get paid pretty decently for my area, and I make $660 (gross) per week. And yes, I'm an IT professional.
Really, this lets the gov't track the millions of people who use passports easily but has no effect on criminals or those NOT from the USA. Personally I'd be more worried about the 20-something male muslum flying in to the US and then around from city to city than grandma taking a vacation to canada which now requires a passport. Yes, it's profiling. But when was the last time someone's mid-western 68 year old white grandmother went on a shooting/terror spree?
I dunno, personally, I don't want government-sanctioned racism. But that's just me.
a) Having an ability to do something doesn't mean you always successfully do so. I have the ability to bake a cake, but once in a while, my cakes come out terrible because I messed up. Similarly, sometimes I choose not to make a cake even though I want cake. In neither of those cases did I lack the ability to make a cake, though.
b) Not all species become extinct due to not adapting.
Er... how far up the dependency chain, exactly, do you want to go? Cause if we follow your idea to its conclusion, no one has ever been a hacker, unless they learned the language themselves through trial and error. Someone has to educate you on the material at some point... it's whether or not you have your hand held for you all the time that defines your hacker status, I'd argue.
Well, duh. That's why in Soviet Russia, you play Tetris.
Rubbish. Have you read any of the laws against theft lately? Let's see. California Penal Code section 484. up to about section 500 cover theft. They're not only far more precise (in that they more exactly define what situation they are to be applied toward), but there are exceptions defined, there are interpretative civil procedures codes that are relevant, and so on.
And all of that stuff is absolute. Are you even listening to what the hell I'm saying? The laws are absolute, but that does not mean they have no exceptions. It means that the exception must be codified into law before someone can utilize it.
Pure bullshit! I don't know who's been upmodding you, but they obviously know nothing about the law. The judicial process is all about arguing exceptions to it that don't exist before you argue them. That's how precedent is created. Of course you can argue exceptions that don't exist!
In the vast majority of cases, bullshit. The judiciary is merely ascertaining whether someone broke the law, not whether what they did should be illegal. In the cases where they are doing the latter, it's only because some meta-law (like the Constitution, say) gives them authority to do so.
Again, rubbish. People have known the Earth was round for millennia; as long as we've had civilization and codified rational thought.
Who the fuck cares if one person knows it? For a very, very long time, almost everyone except some men with radical crazy ideas was convinced the world was flat. That is my point. You're saying that the history of the judiciary proves your point, I'm saying that your evidence is irrelevant, as it is perfectly possible for large groups of people to be wrong over long periods of time.
I never said the constitution was not binding upon the government.
Bull! That is EXACTLY what you've been saying the ENTIRE time. The Constitution is just a guideline, and the government can break it whenever it feels it necessary.
Neither of those governments are any more tyrannical than the government of the United States, and some might say, in fact, that they are less so.
Considering the number of stories we see here about the UK turning into a 1984-like state, they're about the weakest example you could have picked.
The days of the $50 video game are OVER...
The prices of games at every store I go to disagree with you.
Except such a law is not absolute. The fact that you believe it is does nothing more than showcase your own ignorance.
The laws against theft are every bit as absolute as the Constitution. What it says is absolute, unless amended. There can be exceptions, but they have to be made law to mean anything. I can't just steal from the local Wal-Mart, and get away with it by claiming (as you ludicrously claim about the Constitution) that it's merely a guideline, and because I found a situation where (in my view) it's reasonable to have an exception, I can just ignore the law. There may well be a need for an exception, but that exception needs to be written into the law before I can utilize it.
As I said, it's not just my word against yours that the constitution does not constitute valid law- it is the entire history of jurisprudence.
It is not impossible for a great many people to be wrong, even for a very long time. I remind you that, until a certain point in our world's history, one could have made the same exact defense for the doctrine that the world was flat.
What a shockingly ignorant grasp of political theory. The constitution does not grant the power to create law; in fact, it does exactly the opposite. It is a self-imposed limit on the exercise of sovereign power.
Sir, it is you who displays a shockingly ignorant grasp of political theory, not to mention the history of the formation of the United States. While I won't go so far as to say that you're malicious (Hanlon's razor applies here), your misinformation is precisely what we must guard against, because the malicious will use that kind of thinking against us. I only hope that more people in our nation don't subscribe to the same bullshit, because if they do, our nation is doomed to slide into tyranny. It may not be in our lifetime, or even near our lifetime, but it will happen if enough people have this false belief that the constitution of a government is not binding upon it. It's only a matter of time.
The Constitution, which I argue is not a valid law...
Ah, so we can do that now? Just say that laws aren't valid laws and then ignore them? Fuckin' cool, man! Why didn't anyone tell me this sooner? For starters, I'm gonna go ahead and say that the law prohibiting me from taking your (or anyone's for that matter) stuff is not a valid law--it's black and white, after all, and we don't live in a black and white world.
If the Consitution isn't a valid law, not one single law ever passed by our government is a valid law, since they were given the authority to pass said laws by the constitution. Your arguments that the Constitution can be ignored showcases your complete and total ignorance of the system of government that we have. Not that I'm gonna stop you--I mean, hey, go ahead and do what you gotta do, that's your right. But don't blame the rest of us when we sit around laughing at your sheer ignorance.
AoC has more technically proficient graphics, yes. But WoW's artists have more artistic talent in their little fingers than AoC's artists have in their entire bodies. Excellent rendering means nothing if your art is mediocre.
You have an overly broad definition of "everything", methinks.
No, it actually has nothing to do with the FSM, as I recall the image. It's linked to by Wikipedia's FSM page, but the image itself doesn't mention the FSM, it's just about logical fallacy.
Well, I do love Bob Ross, so I'll take that as a compliment. :D
Ew. No. That was by far the worst part of Diablo before. Not being able to see a damn thing around me is not fun at all. At the very least, they need to make the "blackness" optional.
I have always failed to understand what people's problem with Diablo III's graphics. The important thing is the gothic feel here. You don't need a color palette made up of shades of brown, grey, and black to achieve that... there's nothing wrong with having a colorful world, since it doesn't necessarily change the look & feel of the world at all. Hell, I by far prefer the screen shots Blizzard has produced to the "improved" stuff the fans have put out. The people doing that work may be happy with a world full of dreary colors which is hard to see any detail in, but I for one am not.
No, they aren't, but bigotry is a subset of prejudice. Not all prejudice is bigotry, but I maintain that this instance of prejudice is also bigotry.
People aren't propping up the system, they are playing by it.
Those two are one and the same. I understand why people do it, but they also need to accept their guilt in propping up the broken system if they want to try to work it.
It wouldn't be true if the people weren't complicit in propping up the system as it is. Things can be different, if people actually vote for who they want for, instead of voting against one of the two major candidates.
Your suggestion of creating our own PAC is laughable at best. The only REAL solution is to outlaw the practice; forcing our elected officials to actually communicate with the people that elected them i the first place. It is, after all, their fucking job in the first place. Despite it being their job, people somehow accept it is not. It's been suggested that fewer than 1% of our elected officials at the Federal level are not on the take in some form or fashion. This isn't surprising in the least considering it is almost impossible to get elected in the first place without some form of smudge on one's soul. Which is exactly why the system needs to be changed. All adults know the system is broken. The question is, which table will you be eating at tonight? The adults table or the children's table. The PAC suggestion is squarely at the later of the two.
What the fuck? After all your talk of recognizing the facts of the situation, you have the gall to say that creating a PAC representing our own interests is a childish solution? Look, it isn't a great solution. I don't like it. But, the reality is, it'll probably be significantly harder to fix the system, than to make the corrupt system work for us. That isn't childish, it's pragmatism.
Actually, you're wrong, it can be bigotry. Let's say you loathe Christianity and everything it stands for. Fair enough, that's your right. But, the instant you assume someone is (for example) an intolerant, unthinking asshole because he/she is a Christian, you've crossed the line into bigotry.
The problem is your definition of bigotry is off. Bigotry is judging someone, regardless of their individual merits, according to some group that they fit into, and it isn't limited to innate characteristics.
The point is, no matter how trustworthy the company has been in the past, you have absolutely no way of knowing for sure that they'll continue to be trustworthy in the future. All you have is their own word.
That's ALL you ever have, from ANYONE! Hell, if that's your reason for not trusting, I damn well hope you don't trust anyone at all. Anyone you know can only give you their own word that they will continue to be trustworthy in the future. That's what trust is!!
That's the whole point. With closed source, you can't get someone you trust to check it over for you. It's not an option. The only people who can "check it over for you" is the vendor, because they're the only ones who have access to the data.
No? Pretty sure this entire article is because some third party noticed a discrepancy in the results. Now, we can't know for sure why the discrepancy exists, but we can say that if it isn't fixed in the future, the company has almost certainly lied to us about why their results are off. If it is, they were probably honest. This is no different than when you accuse someone you know and trust of lying, and they say it was an error. You will NEVER know whether they really made an error, or were lying. All you will ever be able to do is decide the probability of this, based on their past actions, and how trustworthy they prove to be in the future.
It's not the fact that I disagree with you, it's the fact that you are wrong. It's not an opinion, it's a fact.
Nothing you or I has said in our arguments has been fact. Not ONE thing. This is a debate of opinions. There's nothing wrong with that, many things are. But if you don't recognize that now, you never will, so I don't know why I'm even trying to tell you.
since you claim to want someone to check it for you that is expressly NOT the company involved.
I claimed NOTHING of the sort. Learn to read? I said I wanted a trustworthy source to check it. That trustworthy source may, in fact, be the vendor. It also may not be. It depends on the situation.
This is why I know you're trolling, now. You agree, you just want to get a rise out of people by being an idiot.
Fuck you. You represent everything that's wrong with the internet, where you label someone as a troll just because you disagree (and YES, it is just because you disagree). I've challenged an opinion you hold strongly, and so I'm a troll. Well, have fun with your little sandboxes you try to create where everyone conforms to your expectations of how they should think. The rest of us live in the real world.