Really? Fire someone who shows initiative, ability to manage others (managing external devs is often not trivial), and can potentially save the company lots of money?
Promote him is more like it, and see how he can improve productivity.
proved his own job could be outsourced better at a fraction of his salary
Not necessarily at all.
a) Security. The Chinese contractor probably had business-sensitive info that the employer would not have wanted given out. b) Management. External contractors need management, technical info and guidance, which was obviously provided by the employee. Is the employer able to provide management of foreign externals? Many think they can, then are shocked when they get a poor result.
The two overlapped a lot in the old days, but integrity of computer systems is a little more important now. It's very possible the government was trying to send a loud message that security hacking isn't acceptable but would have ended up dropping it after a suitable sweating period. But Swartz was still young - young people aren't the most emotionally stable, so I think it was wrong to be so harsh on someone that age when they're not even trying to hurt anyone. Young people do silly things all the time.
Please describe in what ways you do have control of your brain. For each item in the list, I bet I can list 5 ways in which you aren't.
I'll start. Autonomous breathing, release of oxytocin, seratonin and various other emotionally relevant chemicals. The sleep cycle. Your dreams. Pain response. Try staying awake continuously for 3 days and see what happens to your emotional state.
Most of the things going on in your brain you cannot control. The amount of it we have conscious control over (or at least the impression of control over) is very limited.
Who is productive? The country, certainly. But if you ask individual people if they are *productive to the benefit of their own personal lives*, I'd imagine the figures would be somewhat lower than GDP. You have to ask the question, "what are we doing all this for?" Are we working hard to benefit companies, shareholders and GDP?
Or is the point of society to be structured in a way that, as the ultimate goal, makes us feel secure, enabled, respected and inspired, so that we can raise families with the confidence that our kids will be better off than we are? Has anyone tested whether those outcomes in fact relate to GDP past a certain point?
I assume you mean "tall". Is it? Do you know what time of day the photo was taken and the inclination of the land? No? Then how do you judge how tall it is?
It almost looks like that might be a prison yard in the middle with a fence in the back?
What fence? I don't see a fence, I see a faint line. Why would a prison have one long fence and three walls? Where are the cells? It's a completely inefficient design as a place to service residents or equipment - you can't get from one side to the other without traversing the entire "U" shape. That's ludicrous.
This went up fast
How do you know that? Speculation about this crap is pointless.
Funny, though, that 90% of the supporting study references are from a single source - the Journal of Law and Economics, October 2001. I guess it must have been rather difficult finding supporting studies. Opposing studies, however, are found from Yale Law, Stanford Law, Georgetown University, University of Chicago and various journals.
If you want so good statistics, see the Kleck and Gertz study
Reading that article you refer to (which is on a pro-gun web site, as I'm sure you are aware), it seems Kleck disputes studies which show lower use of firearms in self-defence, while other people dispute Kleck's studies. What this proves remains unclear. There seems to be a lot of argument about how often guns are used to protect oneself.
"Criminal court judges who read the self-reported accounts of the purported self-defense gun use rated a majority as being illegal, even assuming that the respondent had a permit to own and to carry a gun, and that the respondent had described the event honestly from his own perspective."
"We found that guns in the home are used more often to frighten intimates than to thwart crime; other weapons are far more commonly used against intruders than are guns." Hear that? Guns in the home are used more often to frighten intimates than to thwart crime.
So "self defence" in studies like Kleck's gets in to very dodgy territory. It includes assholes who can't resolve an escalating argument without one of them pulling out a gun (or threatening to use one) to shut the other person down. This would tend to happen a lot when people have, for instance, been out drinking. I bet Kleck didn't determine how often alcohol was involved in these so-called "self-defence" situations.
'"But A.I.G. doesn't owe loyalty to the government," a person close to Mr. Greenberg said. "It owes loyalty to its shareholders."'
There, they finally said it. Corporations don't care about taxpayers, about citizens, about government, about society.
When will we, as a society, finally realise that corporate law is dysfunctional and unhealthy? We are trying to run a society by continuing to establish rules of self-interest and disregard for people. This worked fine when the world was young and there were opportunities and resources for everyone. But times are different now - we increasingly need to work together, to cooperate, but the systems in place don't encourage that kind of behaviour.
My mum has a fairly old printer, which has: a) several card slots for various memory cards (ie. built in card reader) b) the driver lets you use the card reader in Windows, so you can look at the pics on the screen as well c) a small, built-in colour screen on the printer d) buttons to select which photo you want to print e) a "print photo" button.
So all you do is, insert card straight from you camera, select the pic on the printer's screen and print it. You don't even need to turn on the PC, the printer does it all.
It wasn't an expensive printer either. Probably the only reason most printers don't do that is because manufacturers don't think that many people want to. And if such printers have around this long - at least 5 years - and they haven't become more common, well, the manufacturers are probably correct.
TL;DR You can buy cheap printers that are made to print photos without even using the PC. They're not hugely common, which means not many people want to do this.
distributed more or less randomly around the host galaxy
Surely this is a silly thing to say. Sure, the *amount of randomness* might have been assumed to be fairly high - which simply means the "difficulty in determining predictability". Or that nobody has bothered to think about it. So of course they're not "randomly" distributed. Nothing is "randomly" anything. The assumption should always be "we just haven't discovered a pattern yet."
So these researchers didn't have a "hunch it might not be random". They had a hunch that they could lower the level of unpredictability.
I wish these things were reported in a ways which didn't contribute to ignorance about how the world works.
Basically, 2 military officers briefly discussed the idea in letters. Noone knows if they actually went through with it. I am not aware of their particular religious views, but certainly this was discussed in the context of a military conflict.
Thanks for bringing that up. Not being American, I just assumed what I'd heard about that was true. Thought it wouldn't be surprising, considering what I do know about colonial behaviour towards indigenous people (I live in Australia).
If anything, fucking in front of others strengthens monogamous relationships, because you make your claim on the partner
If you think relationships are about making a claim on your partner, that's unfortunate.
The privacy of sex is something we do simply to keep it "special". We don't want to make sex humdrum and run-of-the-mill, because we still (some of us) do it as an expression of love and intimacy.
An act that is supposed to bring joy and fun is considered worse than an act that supposedly brings grief and pain?
Spread sexual imagery everywhere and you risk devaluing the act of lovemaking. I'm not being a wowser here, it is already being shown that many kids now think pubic hair is "gross" and boys want their first sexual experience to be like in porn movies.
I'm not against porn. But porn is what it is - it's actors playing up to fantasies of the paying customer. It's never been an accurate representation of what loving sex in a normal relationship is all about. Yes, you can do all those things with your partner, but not when you're a kid just because you see actors doing anal all the time in videos. That's not a good introduction to sharing the experience of sex with a girl. It's not a good message to send to girls that their pubic hair is somehow undesirable and they should expect sex to be all about what they can do physically for a guy.
BBS's are a bit different. You knew that most of the users on your BBS were local people. Not many people dialled from another zone for a BBS, unless it was really necessary, for obvious cost reasons. So everyone understood (except kids perhaps) the BBS was local and knew your phone number.
It's one thing being identified in your friendly local BBS, but quite another to have your identity known by some faceless company that wants to share everything can find out about you with other faceless companies all over the world. Completely different context.
Slashdot Mirror
fire the employee, keep the contractor.
Really? Fire someone who shows initiative, ability to manage others (managing external devs is often not trivial), and can potentially save the company lots of money?
Promote him is more like it, and see how he can improve productivity.
proved his own job could be outsourced better at a fraction of his salary
Not necessarily at all.
a) Security. The Chinese contractor probably had business-sensitive info that the employer would not have wanted given out.
b) Management. External contractors need management, technical info and guidance, which was obviously provided by the employee. Is the employer able to provide management of foreign externals? Many think they can, then are shocked when they get a poor result.
It used to be the home of the hacker culture.
I think you're doing what most people do, which is generalise the term "hacker".
There is the hacker subculture, which is different to security hacking.
The two overlapped a lot in the old days, but integrity of computer systems is a little more important now. It's very possible the government was trying to send a loud message that security hacking isn't acceptable but would have ended up dropping it after a suitable sweating period. But Swartz was still young - young people aren't the most emotionally stable, so I think it was wrong to be so harsh on someone that age when they're not even trying to hurt anyone. Young people do silly things all the time.
Please describe in what ways you do have control of your brain.
For each item in the list, I bet I can list 5 ways in which you aren't.
I'll start. Autonomous breathing, release of oxytocin, seratonin and various other emotionally relevant chemicals. The sleep cycle. Your dreams. Pain response. Try staying awake continuously for 3 days and see what happens to your emotional state.
Most of the things going on in your brain you cannot control. The amount of it we have conscious control over (or at least the impression of control over) is very limited.
It strikes me that, if the universe was *infinite* in all directions, it would look the same in all directions.
If the universe is finite in size, as it seems to be, surely there would be little chance it would, on average, look the same in all directions?
Yeah, but we're very productive
Who is productive? The country, certainly. But if you ask individual people if they are *productive to the benefit of their own personal lives*, I'd imagine the figures would be somewhat lower than GDP. You have to ask the question, "what are we doing all this for?" Are we working hard to benefit companies, shareholders and GDP?
Or is the point of society to be structured in a way that, as the ultimate goal, makes us feel secure, enabled, respected and inspired, so that we can raise families with the confidence that our kids will be better off than we are? Has anyone tested whether those outcomes in fact relate to GDP past a certain point?
Judging by the shadow, it's pretty high up
I assume you mean "tall". Is it? Do you know what time of day the photo was taken and the inclination of the land? No? Then how do you judge how tall it is?
It almost looks like that might be a prison yard in the middle with a fence in the back?
What fence? I don't see a fence, I see a faint line. Why would a prison have one long fence and three walls? Where are the cells? It's a completely inefficient design as a place to service residents or equipment - you can't get from one side to the other without traversing the entire "U" shape. That's ludicrous.
This went up fast
How do you know that? Speculation about this crap is pointless.
... I do not believe you can legitimately solve societal issues with technological mandates.
Nor with legislation.
So we shouldn't have bothered making rape, murder, etc. illegal then? Just, what, educate people on how naughty it is?
Also, read the book More Guns Less Crime, by Professor John Lott.
Why? There are as many studies rejecting his findings than there are supporting it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/More_Guns,_Less_Crime#Controversy
Funny, though, that 90% of the supporting study references are from a single source - the Journal of Law and Economics, October 2001. I guess it must have been rather difficult finding supporting studies. Opposing studies, however, are found from Yale Law, Stanford Law, Georgetown University, University of Chicago and various journals.
So it doesn't sound like a worthwhile read.
If you want so good statistics, see the Kleck and Gertz study
Reading that article you refer to (which is on a pro-gun web site, as I'm sure you are aware), it seems Kleck disputes studies which show lower use of firearms in self-defence, while other people dispute Kleck's studies. What this proves remains unclear. There seems to be a lot of argument about how often guns are used to protect oneself.
There are studies which dispute Kleck's claim that over a million people use guns in "self-defence" each year, such as:
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/gun-threats-and-self-defense-gun-use-2/
"Most purported self-defense gun uses are gun uses in escalating arguments and are both socially undesirable and illegal"
"Criminal court judges who read the self-reported accounts of the purported self-defense gun use rated a majority as being illegal, even assuming that the respondent had a permit to own and to carry a gun, and that the respondent had described the event honestly from his own perspective."
"We found that guns in the home are used more often to frighten intimates than to thwart crime; other weapons are far more commonly used against intruders than are guns." Hear that? Guns in the home are used more often to frighten intimates than to thwart crime.
So "self defence" in studies like Kleck's gets in to very dodgy territory. It includes assholes who can't resolve an escalating argument without one of them pulling out a gun (or threatening to use one) to shut the other person down. This would tend to happen a lot when people have, for instance, been out drinking. I bet Kleck didn't determine how often alcohol was involved in these so-called "self-defence" situations.
'"But A.I.G. doesn't owe loyalty to the government," a person close to Mr. Greenberg said. "It owes loyalty to its shareholders."'
There, they finally said it. Corporations don't care about taxpayers, about citizens, about government, about society.
When will we, as a society, finally realise that corporate law is dysfunctional and unhealthy? We are trying to run a society by continuing to establish rules of self-interest and disregard for people. This worked fine when the world was young and there were opportunities and resources for everyone. But times are different now - we increasingly need to work together, to cooperate, but the systems in place don't encourage that kind of behaviour.
the whole matter of the right to choose what I put in my body
Christianity [..] see the problem as being oneself-- that is, the responsibility is being shifted nowhere but inward
So Christians are pro-choice now?
I wonder where VB.NET sits, considering it's actually better than C#?
My mum has a fairly old printer, which has:
a) several card slots for various memory cards (ie. built in card reader)
b) the driver lets you use the card reader in Windows, so you can look at the pics on the screen as well
c) a small, built-in colour screen on the printer
d) buttons to select which photo you want to print
e) a "print photo" button.
So all you do is, insert card straight from you camera, select the pic on the printer's screen and print it. You don't even need to turn on the PC, the printer does it all.
It wasn't an expensive printer either. Probably the only reason most printers don't do that is because manufacturers don't think that many people want to. And if such printers have around this long - at least 5 years - and they haven't become more common, well, the manufacturers are probably correct.
TL;DR You can buy cheap printers that are made to print photos without even using the PC. They're not hugely common, which means not many people want to do this.
Seriously, if all phones had an alcohol breath tester built in, it would probably save a lot of lives and prevent a lot of conflict.
America - the only country where education is a liability.
America - the only country where you can have too much education.
distributed more or less randomly around the host galaxy
Surely this is a silly thing to say. Sure, the *amount of randomness* might have been assumed to be fairly high - which simply means the "difficulty in determining predictability". Or that nobody has bothered to think about it. So of course they're not "randomly" distributed. Nothing is "randomly" anything. The assumption should always be "we just haven't discovered a pattern yet."
So these researchers didn't have a "hunch it might not be random". They had a hunch that they could lower the level of unpredictability.
I wish these things were reported in a ways which didn't contribute to ignorance about how the world works.
Basically, 2 military officers briefly discussed the idea in letters. Noone knows if they actually went through with it. I am not aware of their particular religious views, but certainly this was discussed in the context of a military conflict.
Thanks for bringing that up. Not being American, I just assumed what I'd heard about that was true. Thought it wouldn't be surprising, considering what I do know about colonial behaviour towards indigenous people (I live in Australia).
I don't see irony, I just see proof of why a population of gun-mad wannabe vigilantes is a problem.
They bald-faced-ly give links to the youtube version on their facebook page
I didn't think Muslims did anything bald-facedly. Hijabs, after all, are just to hide the fact women don't have beards.
If anything, fucking in front of others strengthens monogamous relationships, because you make your claim on the partner
If you think relationships are about making a claim on your partner, that's unfortunate.
The privacy of sex is something we do simply to keep it "special". We don't want to make sex humdrum and run-of-the-mill, because we still (some of us) do it as an expression of love and intimacy.
An act that is supposed to bring joy and fun is considered worse than an act that supposedly brings grief and pain?
Spread sexual imagery everywhere and you risk devaluing the act of lovemaking. I'm not being a wowser here, it is already being shown that many kids now think pubic hair is "gross" and boys want their first sexual experience to be like in porn movies.
I'm not against porn. But porn is what it is - it's actors playing up to fantasies of the paying customer. It's never been an accurate representation of what loving sex in a normal relationship is all about. Yes, you can do all those things with your partner, but not when you're a kid just because you see actors doing anal all the time in videos. That's not a good introduction to sharing the experience of sex with a girl. It's not a good message to send to girls that their pubic hair is somehow undesirable and they should expect sex to be all about what they can do physically for a guy.
SlashCode moderation system
You're forgetting Reddit. That works pretty well also.
BBS's are a bit different. You knew that most of the users on your BBS were local people. Not many people dialled from another zone for a BBS, unless it was really necessary, for obvious cost reasons. So everyone understood (except kids perhaps) the BBS was local and knew your phone number.
It's one thing being identified in your friendly local BBS, but quite another to have your identity known by some faceless company that wants to share everything can find out about you with other faceless companies all over the world. Completely different context.