They're very much not exceptions my friend. Obviously, there are a ton of crappy DJs out there just like any other kind of performers. I posted some a couple posts up in this thread, but I mean I can even remember more now besides those: Kid Koala, Kut Master Kurt, Afrika Bambaataa, DJ Spooky, The X-Ecutioners, Nightmares on Wax, The BPA. Man if I had my iTunes with me I could probably type a whole screen of sick shit.
Stop hatin'! (It is verifiably bad for your health to harbor strong emotions based on nothing but some desire to protect a fragile ego.) Being a DJ is far more than playing music for people (although it is also very much playing music for people). It is moving people and entertaining them throughout an evening and keeping them dancing and psyched out about hearing all the bagin' beats and their favorites and new tracks. It's about hyping new artists and producing beats for them so that more people can hear music they like. It is about remixing and producing tracks featuring a variety of vocalists and instrumentalists. It is about evoking emotion on and off the dance floor and showing people another perspective on a beat or vocal hook they thought they knew inside and out. It's fine if you don't like the music, but to call something you know nothing about uncreative is just, well, hubris!
If services want to switch to verified accounts, I am (mostly) all for it. Then we can basically have the (more) trustworthy web and the anonymous web. We can keep email and 4chan and Facebook and Slashdot on different tiers, you know? I'd love to have verifiable accounts, in business settings for instance. No reason site owner's can't keep anonymous access. Now, if someone legislated certain services or all services do that, I'll be reaching for my gu... guaranteed right to vote;-)
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you totally, but "one size fits most" > "one size fits a few" > "one size fits none" if you can't get any closer to "one size fits all."
In other words, the one size gets better as it approaches the limit of how many it fits; don't let the good be the enemy of the perfect!
Oh man you must be really sheltered:-( Giving coffee to a child is not child abuse. That's sad that you would think it was. It's part of a bigger problem of people in general wanting others to fix their own problems. Please reconsider your mentality.
I hear sandwiches are pretty easy to make;-) Seriously though, if you do some research on cooking, you will find 15-20 minute recipes for lunchtime. Of course, if you don't know how to cook, it might take you a while to get up to speed. Some of my recomendations though are: energy bars, left over spaghetti w/ sauce, imported ramen (actually has some nutritional value sometimes), hard boiled eggs, veges w/ dip, chips, juice boxes/soda cans, hummus, leftover meat left in a marinade overnight. You can get a slow cooker and have rice/beans ready for you in the morning to take to work. If you want to be a little more creative you could take a look over at Just Bento for recipes. If you enjoy food, investing time in learning to prepare what you like can be massively rewarding!
You're trying to use tool choice to solve a social problem. It isn't going to work.
Frankly, it will work, and I think it's funny you aren't open to that possibility. Plus, in many ways it is not a social problem, but a technical one. Putting locks on your doors keeps people from just walking in off the street. Email is basically an unlocked door with a big sign that says "come on in!" Anyway, who had a verified email accounts in the 90's??! Email was way more open then. The funny thing is we've tightened it up and it's still a problem.
Before you can say "drop email in favor of X, Y, and Z", you need X, Y, and Z to be a suitable replacement for email.
You didn't read my post that closely did you. That's OK, it is Slashdot after all;-) If you'll go back to my first post, I'm not saying that we need to switch today. I'm saying we need to switch. To something better. Email sucks. And there are alternatives for many of the things email does for us. Anyway, you're right with the SMS stuff - you can send from IM etc. Facebook is a better example. It's hard to imagine Facebook becoming 95% spam since in most cases you could file legal action against the spammers or take their accounts away.
Besides, what we have today is: some channels without (or actually, with little) spam. Do away with email and you will accelerate the pace at which those channels start getting more spam. It's as simple as that.
It's really not that simple. Do you know how email works? It's basically completely open to spammers. There are many many things that could be done better with email. A lot of that is implemented in some of the social networking sites. There are certainly ways to reduce spam before it is sent. When we have to filter 95% of email traffic after it is sent, you don't stop and think something's wrong??
While there's always some unwanted communications in any media, none of the media you list have 95% of their traffic going toward spam. Email is broken for that reason alone (and more).
Come one people. Think about this. There are a lot of possibilities for fighting spam, if we switch protocols. That idea does not warrant a -1 overrated.
With no forging, anyone who sends spam can be immediately barred from the service, and any relevant legal actions could be brought against that person. Anybody can still contact you on say, Facebook, they just have to sign up for an account using a verifiable identity. That's really not a big deal. Also, spam filters don't eliminate spam, they sweep it under the proverbial rug. It's still there, taking up bandwidth, we just don't see it in our inboxes. We don't need something completely impenetrable to spam, anything less than 95% is an improvement over email.
1. Some channels without spam is better than no channels. 2. You get SMS spam, but spam is not 95% of SMS traffic, plus you need a verified phone account (in most cases) to use SMS. It's a lot easier to shut someone down when you know who they are by the account details. Come one people. Think about this. There are a lot of possibilities for fighting spam, if we switch protocols. That idea does not warrant a -1 overrated.
You know, if spam is that high, let's just ditch email. It kinda sucks anyway. There're plenty of alternative services suchas SMS, Twitter, IM, Facebook, etc. Maybe someone knows why that wouldn't be a good idea, but I can see some disadvantages to spammers compared to email. I mean, seriously, we either need an "email 2.0" protocol that deals with spam effectively, or we need to gradually stop using email in favor of protocols/services that address email's shortcomings.
Game'll melt in your mouth too. You just gotta slow cook it... Bake it on a low temp. or, dare I say, put it in the crock! (Be sure to brown it somehow first though, whether you pan sear it or broil it a bit.)
For real. I take it so far as to defend my piracy of programs I would never buy - the maker hasn't lost any money from my infringement, and so I have not hurt them or done anything wrong. On the other hand, this defense seems totally asinine. It's obvious that downloading a copyrighted work over BitTorrent is piracy. Just because you get parts of it from different seeders/peers doesn't mean you haven't pirated that movie, app, or whatever.
the more fairy tales people believe in the greater the chance of it leading to harm
Yes, you said that before. It's not particularly true. Not everyone is even going to have the aptitude, let alone the need, to look at things logically beyond day-to-day concerns. Why should they? It has little bearing on the basic things that are important in day-to-day life. In other words, not everyone is a mathematician, engineer, or theorist, and we tech-minded people shouldn't try to force our methods and processes of life and perception on them, just as they should not force their methods and processes on us!
Humanity will always have leaders. Leaders have always exploited those they lead. It is no different with science. It can just as easily be bent towards corrupt goals as religion can, or for that matter sports, wealth, comfort, etc. Most religious people could give a shit about how old the Earth is. It's when their leaders have stake in that claim for political reasons that it becomes an issue. Especially when the followers of reason tell them they are stupid for having faith. I am convinced that what needs to be made clear to religious people is that, like you say, science comes up with the best explanation given the facts at hand and by testing observations. We should be making it clear to religious people that to simply brush these observations away at a whim is intellectually dishonest. We need to make it clear to them that we believe in their freedom of religion - and we truly should believe that. We need to make it clear to them that censoring science is an insult to their faith. If there faith is so weak it cannot stand to reason, it is no faith at all (in the sense that if the Earth were 6000 years old, their higher power could make millions of years of geological processes happen in 6 days by speeding up time or something, higher powers are supposed to be all powerful right?).
Check out the rules of things you aren't allowed to do on their sabbath. Including driving to worship--you better be walking to Temple.
And yet, Judaism has enriched many peoples' lives and still does. I do take your point however, with Texas and the like. In fact, it is a good example of religious people demonizing science. What we need less of is demonization - that's my point. Humanity has a lot of problems. Worries about people believing in "fairy tales" or about the "moral baselessness" of science are both counterproductive and divisive.
Your pastor tells you that God will cure you and this is a test of faith.
See, you are over generalizing. Most religious people do not belong to cults that don't believe in medicine. Most religious people are not fundamentalists, extremists, or zealots.
only one of those will use psychological guilt trips and family to pressure you into thinking you don't have a choice
While that, I imagine, would happen more often in a religious setting, at least now a days, it is just untrue to say that guilt trips or worse have never been applied to people for disagreeing with their doctors - in fact, psych wards until recently have been known as frightening places - that one can't leave of one's own free will - imprisoning people and subjecting them to electro-shock, experimental drugs, and other abuses simply because it was considered "abnormal/insane" to use drugs other than alcohol or to be homosexual or to be a radical, etc., etc., etc. Hell, they used to prescribe amphetamine as a diet pill. It almost seems like you consider medicine/psychiatry infallible, which it is certainly and very obviously not. Going to the hospital is the third leading cause of death in America!
Furthermore, there's nothing wrong with your family being concerned for you; if they believe it will harm you to leave their church, why wouldn't they try to persuade you to stay? People do what they feel is Right, and that's only a problem when they start forcing that view on other people.
Reality always wins in the end.
So why not enjoy it and create Good in the world, instead of worrying about the ways other people try to enjoy life and create Good in the world:-) There is this very popular false dichotomy between science and religion, reason and faith, which just isn't there when you look at the way people live their lives and the actual roles of science and religion in society.
Anything that gives you happiness by providing you with fairy tales is harmful in large doses
You can say that, but it doesn't make it true;-) Why exactly? How is it harmful? If you are happy, and, say volunteering and giving to charity, what is wrong with your life? Sounds to me like you would be a pretty good person. It's not the only way to be a good person or a happy person; being good and/or happy really doesn't correlate with one's understanding of abstract scientific principles...
If you think anti-depressants are over-prescribed just think how much religion is over-prescribed.
Luckily for most everyone in the developed world, we do not have to listen to our doctors or pastors, and many choose not to. The only real problem comes from being forced to believe something you don't or being forced to take psychoactive medicines.
Well, you may be right in some cases, although here I have been "let down" by both religion and Prozac. Basically my point is that changing the way one thinks about one's life is a much better cure in most cases than are the common anti-depressants (which it is hard to argue aren't over-prescribed). I'm glad the medications are there for the people that need them, but I know in my case a good, swift kick in the ass would have helped me more than the Prozac my psychiatrist prescribed me. (I knew something was off when I decided that it was better for my life to skip class and sit on a park bench for hours a day - sure it made me happier, but it couldn't have lasted - I wouldn't even have been able to afford the medications if I took that path!)
We all deal in different ways; most religious people are not extremists or fundamentalists - they are able to draw strength from the ritual and community that their church provides. I truly believe it something that needs to be discussed without resorting to the facile argument of "religion bad, science good." Any thoughts? Seriously, I enjoy these discussions:-)
Slashdot Mirror
They're very much not exceptions my friend. Obviously, there are a ton of crappy DJs out there just like any other kind of performers. I posted some a couple posts up in this thread, but I mean I can even remember more now besides those: Kid Koala, Kut Master Kurt, Afrika Bambaataa, DJ Spooky, The X-Ecutioners, Nightmares on Wax, The BPA. Man if I had my iTunes with me I could probably type a whole screen of sick shit.
Just because you don't get it doesn't mean that it isn't creative. You don't even understand what you are talking about. You've obviously never listened to many DJs, or you would know shit like that is so creative: Mick Boogie, Kruder & Dorfmeister, DJ Benzi, Amplive, DJ Jazzy Jeff, Crookers, Diplo, DJ Danger Mouse, Wax Tailor, N.A.S.A., etc., etc., etc. And that's just off the toppa my head.
Stop hatin'! (It is verifiably bad for your health to harbor strong emotions based on nothing but some desire to protect a fragile ego.) Being a DJ is far more than playing music for people (although it is also very much playing music for people). It is moving people and entertaining them throughout an evening and keeping them dancing and psyched out about hearing all the bagin' beats and their favorites and new tracks. It's about hyping new artists and producing beats for them so that more people can hear music they like. It is about remixing and producing tracks featuring a variety of vocalists and instrumentalists. It is about evoking emotion on and off the dance floor and showing people another perspective on a beat or vocal hook they thought they knew inside and out. It's fine if you don't like the music, but to call something you know nothing about uncreative is just, well, hubris!
If services want to switch to verified accounts, I am (mostly) all for it. Then we can basically have the (more) trustworthy web and the anonymous web. We can keep email and 4chan and Facebook and Slashdot on different tiers, you know? I'd love to have verifiable accounts, in business settings for instance. No reason site owner's can't keep anonymous access. Now, if someone legislated certain services or all services do that, I'll be reaching for my gu... guaranteed right to vote ;-)
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you totally, but "one size fits most" > "one size fits a few" > "one size fits none" if you can't get any closer to "one size fits all."
In other words, the one size gets better as it approaches the limit of how many it fits; don't let the good be the enemy of the perfect!
Well. That sucks. Hey at least they're prolly on a torrent somewhere! Too bad you now won't be able to give WotC your money for it though...
Oh man you must be really sheltered :-( Giving coffee to a child is not child abuse. That's sad that you would think it was. It's part of a bigger problem of people in general wanting others to fix their own problems. Please reconsider your mentality.
OK, to everyone saying they are "addicted" to caffeine:
;-)
Addiction Scene from Half Baked
It's funny because it's true. You ever sucked dick for caffeine? No? Then shut the fuck up and grow a pair
I hear sandwiches are pretty easy to make ;-) Seriously though, if you do some research on cooking, you will find 15-20 minute recipes for lunchtime. Of course, if you don't know how to cook, it might take you a while to get up to speed. Some of my recomendations though are: energy bars, left over spaghetti w/ sauce, imported ramen (actually has some nutritional value sometimes), hard boiled eggs, veges w/ dip, chips, juice boxes/soda cans, hummus, leftover meat left in a marinade overnight. You can get a slow cooker and have rice/beans ready for you in the morning to take to work. If you want to be a little more creative you could take a look over at Just Bento for recipes. If you enjoy food, investing time in learning to prepare what you like can be massively rewarding!
Especially as most *nix users are also windows users.
So then it's true. Most people really are idiots ;-)
You're trying to use tool choice to solve a social problem. It isn't going to work.
Frankly, it will work, and I think it's funny you aren't open to that possibility. Plus, in many ways it is not a social problem, but a technical one. Putting locks on your doors keeps people from just walking in off the street. Email is basically an unlocked door with a big sign that says "come on in!" Anyway, who had a verified email accounts in the 90's??! Email was way more open then. The funny thing is we've tightened it up and it's still a problem.
Before you can say "drop email in favor of X, Y, and Z", you need X, Y, and Z to be a suitable replacement for email.
You didn't read my post that closely did you. That's OK, it is Slashdot after all ;-) If you'll go back to my first post, I'm not saying that we need to switch today. I'm saying we need to switch. To something better. Email sucks. And there are alternatives for many of the things email does for us. Anyway, you're right with the SMS stuff - you can send from IM etc. Facebook is a better example. It's hard to imagine Facebook becoming 95% spam since in most cases you could file legal action against the spammers or take their accounts away.
Besides, what we have today is: some channels without (or actually, with little) spam. Do away with email and you will accelerate the pace at which those channels start getting more spam. It's as simple as that.
It's really not that simple. Do you know how email works? It's basically completely open to spammers. There are many many things that could be done better with email. A lot of that is implemented in some of the social networking sites. There are certainly ways to reduce spam before it is sent. When we have to filter 95% of email traffic after it is sent, you don't stop and think something's wrong??
While there's always some unwanted communications in any media, none of the media you list have 95% of their traffic going toward spam. Email is broken for that reason alone (and more).
Come one people. Think about this. There are a lot of possibilities for fighting spam, if we switch protocols. That idea does not warrant a -1 overrated.
With no forging, anyone who sends spam can be immediately barred from the service, and any relevant legal actions could be brought against that person. Anybody can still contact you on say, Facebook, they just have to sign up for an account using a verifiable identity. That's really not a big deal. Also, spam filters don't eliminate spam, they sweep it under the proverbial rug. It's still there, taking up bandwidth, we just don't see it in our inboxes. We don't need something completely impenetrable to spam, anything less than 95% is an improvement over email.
1. Some channels without spam is better than no channels. 2. You get SMS spam, but spam is not 95% of SMS traffic, plus you need a verified phone account (in most cases) to use SMS. It's a lot easier to shut someone down when you know who they are by the account details. Come one people. Think about this. There are a lot of possibilities for fighting spam, if we switch protocols. That idea does not warrant a -1 overrated.
You know, if spam is that high, let's just ditch email. It kinda sucks anyway. There're plenty of alternative services suchas SMS, Twitter, IM, Facebook, etc. Maybe someone knows why that wouldn't be a good idea, but I can see some disadvantages to spammers compared to email. I mean, seriously, we either need an "email 2.0" protocol that deals with spam effectively, or we need to gradually stop using email in favor of protocols/services that address email's shortcomings.
Game'll melt in your mouth too. You just gotta slow cook it... Bake it on a low temp. or, dare I say, put it in the crock! (Be sure to brown it somehow first though, whether you pan sear it or broil it a bit.)
'Tis a plague of Slashdot, but is that not what -1 Overrated is? A somewhat pointless conversation, I will give you that ;-)
For real. I take it so far as to defend my piracy of programs I would never buy - the maker hasn't lost any money from my infringement, and so I have not hurt them or done anything wrong. On the other hand, this defense seems totally asinine. It's obvious that downloading a copyrighted work over BitTorrent is piracy. Just because you get parts of it from different seeders/peers doesn't mean you haven't pirated that movie, app, or whatever.
1'11 74|3 7#47 1/\/70 (0/\/51|)3r4710/\/ ;-)
the more fairy tales people believe in the greater the chance of it leading to harm
Yes, you said that before. It's not particularly true. Not everyone is even going to have the aptitude, let alone the need, to look at things logically beyond day-to-day concerns. Why should they? It has little bearing on the basic things that are important in day-to-day life. In other words, not everyone is a mathematician, engineer, or theorist, and we tech-minded people shouldn't try to force our methods and processes of life and perception on them, just as they should not force their methods and processes on us!
Humanity will always have leaders. Leaders have always exploited those they lead. It is no different with science. It can just as easily be bent towards corrupt goals as religion can, or for that matter sports, wealth, comfort, etc. Most religious people could give a shit about how old the Earth is. It's when their leaders have stake in that claim for political reasons that it becomes an issue. Especially when the followers of reason tell them they are stupid for having faith. I am convinced that what needs to be made clear to religious people is that, like you say, science comes up with the best explanation given the facts at hand and by testing observations. We should be making it clear to religious people that to simply brush these observations away at a whim is intellectually dishonest. We need to make it clear to them that we believe in their freedom of religion - and we truly should believe that. We need to make it clear to them that censoring science is an insult to their faith. If there faith is so weak it cannot stand to reason, it is no faith at all (in the sense that if the Earth were 6000 years old, their higher power could make millions of years of geological processes happen in 6 days by speeding up time or something, higher powers are supposed to be all powerful right?).
Check out the rules of things you aren't allowed to do on their sabbath. Including driving to worship--you better be walking to Temple.
And yet, Judaism has enriched many peoples' lives and still does. I do take your point however, with Texas and the like. In fact, it is a good example of religious people demonizing science. What we need less of is demonization - that's my point. Humanity has a lot of problems. Worries about people believing in "fairy tales" or about the "moral baselessness" of science are both counterproductive and divisive.
Your pastor tells you that God will cure you and this is a test of faith.
See, you are over generalizing. Most religious people do not belong to cults that don't believe in medicine. Most religious people are not fundamentalists, extremists, or zealots.
only one of those will use psychological guilt trips and family to pressure you into thinking you don't have a choice
While that, I imagine, would happen more often in a religious setting, at least now a days, it is just untrue to say that guilt trips or worse have never been applied to people for disagreeing with their doctors - in fact, psych wards until recently have been known as frightening places - that one can't leave of one's own free will - imprisoning people and subjecting them to electro-shock, experimental drugs, and other abuses simply because it was considered "abnormal/insane" to use drugs other than alcohol or to be homosexual or to be a radical, etc., etc., etc. Hell, they used to prescribe amphetamine as a diet pill. It almost seems like you consider medicine/psychiatry infallible, which it is certainly and very obviously not. Going to the hospital is the third leading cause of death in America!
Furthermore, there's nothing wrong with your family being concerned for you; if they believe it will harm you to leave their church, why wouldn't they try to persuade you to stay? People do what they feel is Right, and that's only a problem when they start forcing that view on other people.
Reality always wins in the end.
So why not enjoy it and create Good in the world, instead of worrying about the ways other people try to enjoy life and create Good in the world :-) There is this very popular false dichotomy between science and religion, reason and faith, which just isn't there when you look at the way people live their lives and the actual roles of science and religion in society.
Anything that gives you happiness by providing you with fairy tales is harmful in large doses
You can say that, but it doesn't make it true ;-) Why exactly? How is it harmful? If you are happy, and, say volunteering and giving to charity, what is wrong with your life? Sounds to me like you would be a pretty good person. It's not the only way to be a good person or a happy person; being good and/or happy really doesn't correlate with one's understanding of abstract scientific principles...
If you think anti-depressants are over-prescribed just think how much religion is over-prescribed.
Luckily for most everyone in the developed world, we do not have to listen to our doctors or pastors, and many choose not to. The only real problem comes from being forced to believe something you don't or being forced to take psychoactive medicines.
What's wrong with game, anyway? Dark meat's good for a body.
Well, you may be right in some cases, although here I have been "let down" by both religion and Prozac. Basically my point is that changing the way one thinks about one's life is a much better cure in most cases than are the common anti-depressants (which it is hard to argue aren't over-prescribed). I'm glad the medications are there for the people that need them, but I know in my case a good, swift kick in the ass would have helped me more than the Prozac my psychiatrist prescribed me. (I knew something was off when I decided that it was better for my life to skip class and sit on a park bench for hours a day - sure it made me happier, but it couldn't have lasted - I wouldn't even have been able to afford the medications if I took that path!)
:-)
We all deal in different ways; most religious people are not extremists or fundamentalists - they are able to draw strength from the ritual and community that their church provides. I truly believe it something that needs to be discussed without resorting to the facile argument of "religion bad, science good." Any thoughts? Seriously, I enjoy these discussions
I wish there was a choice that said "Factually Wrong -1" when I mod.
Psst... that's what discussion is used for.
101. 7#47'5 pR06461y 4 g00d 1d34 ;-) 631/3v3 /\/\3, u 5#0u1d 63 g14D 5145#d07 d035/\/'7 4110\/\/ un/c0d3 c#4R5 0r 7#15 c0u1d g37 pr377y kR4zY, Y0u k/\/0\/\/?
Man, I guess the editors/contributors just caught up on the last few days of Hack-A-Day too ;-)