I think that the future of mankind is autism, since autists are highly specialized, and have poor communication skills. Humanity is becoming more individual than collective, and we need to process larger amounts of data as time goes on.
Our current brain is not designed for that, because our brain is multi-purpose. If you make it highly specialized, for example by reducing the interactions skills, you improve its efficiency in other parts, like data/facts processing or knowledge retention. I don't think that autists' brains are buggy, they have evolved to remove all useless functionalities.
However, I think that the current selection by grades is a really bad thing. It encourages people following arbitrary rules and punish people not following them. People following rules blindly tend to become moralists and highly corrupted. They tend to classify everything in categories (and most of the time in only 2 categories, black and white, good or evil).
What worries me is the rigidity of the mind that it encourages, as if we were born to store information and never question it. For me, freedom is not a physical concept, but a concept of the mind: what are my preconceptions ? Can I fix them ? Is my mind free ? Do I know my emotions ?
Relying on the mind is foolish at best and dangerous at worst.
Thinking and experimenting are two disjoint processes. Analytical thinking reduces the experiential feedback, as you can see in schizophrenic personalities. If you start meditating without object (that means concentrating your attention on the present and letting your thoughts pass), you'll increase your awareness of your surroundings and decrease the flow of thoughts. You'll experience and enjoy the reality more (even when the reality is tough) and spend less time thinking.
Analytical thinking is not correlated to intelligence, and believing is not correlated to dumbness.
Real belief is not taught, it's lived. If it cannot be experienced, it's useless.
Perhaps 100% of the unvaccinated 8% got ill, but only 10% of the vaccinated 81% got the whooping cough.
And there is another thing: when you get ill, you build antibodies, so you won't become ill for at least 10 years. With vaccine, you need to vaccinate after a few years.
I don't think that whooping cough is deadly, so not vaccinating against it is not unwise. But if the illness has a letal risk (like measles), it's just stupid to avoid vaccines. Between autism and death, I choose autism.
However, it's the management of such facilities that's a problem - in the goal to extract greater and larger profits (bigger bonus!), they start cutting
No, you are wrong. In fact, nuclear power is cheap because of the lack of security, not about bonus. Building a nuclear plant is costly, and it takes a lot of years to make a profit, so any kind of economy saves a few years. Using the correct level of security would increase the delay.
And there is another bigger problem: dismantlement of the old nuclear plants. In France, the cost of a dismantlement was underrated by a factor 20 (expected: 24 millions of euros, reality: 482 millions for Brennilis).
On the other hand, our society is depending more and more on electricity, so we need to find ways to produce cheap electricity. Nuclear is not the solution to this contradiction.
So just because someone is afraid of something we should accept their position?
What can you do ? You first need to accept their idea to change their point of view, at least to understand why they believe that.
Suppose that you come to me with your ideas, and I bluntly reject them, does it change your point of view or does it reinforce it ?
It's a well known manipulation technique used in sects, for example with Jehovah's witnesses. The adepts have to defend the point of view of their sect, and even if they have doubts about it, since everybody rejects them, it reinforces their belief, since they are sure they are right, because everybody is against their ideas !!!! (and they do that in pairs, so that it reduces their doubts, it's a nasty technique).
If the fears are irrational then by definition they go against reality. We have to judge based on reality, not irrational fear.
Sure, I guess that you are not influenced by advertisements, and all the things you buy are rationally chosen. Believe me, everybody has irrational fears, and some of them are very hidden.
I think that your reasoning is wrong. You try to reason logically, when belief and irrational fears are involved.
Claiming that people are unreasonable simply because you don't have their fear is a bit tough. I think that you don't understand what happens here. Let's suppose that you fear serpents. If I don't fear serpents and I show you one, it would be stupid from me to say that you are unreasonable, it won't cure your fear.
Changing people's beliefs is a difficult task, and using reason simply doesn't work. Instead, you use emotional manipulation, like the fear of losing your children, it's a better motivator than logic here.
BTW, I have tons of beliefs, although I'm a rational guy. One of my beliefs is that autism is linked to gluten, and I experienced that gluten is bad for me. You may say: hey, there is no correlation between gluten and autism, and you may be right, but you may also be wrong.
In any case, the chances that vaccines and autism are linked are close to 0%.
In fact, this search started with human efforts, so it was already heavily crowd-sourced since a least 3 centuries. The culmination of the manual effort came in 1903, when Frank Nelson Cole showed that: 193,707,721 × 761,838,257,287 = 2^67 - 1 It took 3 years of Sundays to discover. http://www.rutherfordjournal.org/article030105.html
Just use a sheet, draw a treasure map on it, and let it fly.
In a lot of movies, a simple sheet of paper is able to fly long distances, even when there is no wind, as long as it contains something important for the hero.
I programmed a few games on the C64 and on the PC before 1987 (in assembler). The C64 hardware was a lot better than the IBM PC's one. For example, there were hardware scrolling and sprites, and you could even trump the video card in removing the borders and surpassing the limits of the hardware (check a few demos without border). It was very dedicated towards console games.
In comparison, the IBM's video card was the same as the Amstrad CPC's one. It barely allowed scrolling (I'm not even sure it was able to scroll pixel by pixel), and when you wanted to display something, you had to draw the objects pixel by pixel, and video memory was slower to access too ! I remember I wrote a medical curve displayer in assembler on the very first PCs and CGA was terrible. When VGA appeared, it was a lot easier to write games, but the video memory was still slower than the rest of the memory, and scrolling was impossible. Then VESA cards appeared, but it was in the 90s.
Of course, a few years after, the first 3D cards appeared, but the C64 was already dead at that time.
1) Use 2 computers: one for work, and one for leisure. Do not mix leisure and work, try work in a dedicated room if possible.
2) Define what you want to do today at the beginning of your day. It's important to keep the motivation, and will help you concentrate your effort on what you have to deliver every day.
3) If you are a programmer, try agile. Pair-programming is much more efficient this way.
4) Try to commute once every week, just to keep contact with your coworkers. If you work with agile, select the day they hold retrospectives. Dedicate this day to communicate with the team, not to program.
First, train yourself ! Speaking publicly is not easy, you need to learn the basics. 1) Since most of the communication is not verbal, you need to master your appearance and your gestures. Face your public, open your arms, smile. 2) Look your audience from left to right then right to left. 3) Master your voice. We tend to have a pitched voice. Try to breathe deeply.
About the content: 1) Try to search what your audience wants to learn or hear 2) Prepare thoroughly your presentation (1 hour of presentation needs at least 10 hours of preparation). Your content should not be in your powerpoint. 3) Interact with your audience (survey, questions,...) 4) People like to hear stories, so tell your story as if you lived it yesterday, and what lessons were to be learnt 5) Surprise your audience (people get bored after 10 minutes)
What is important is not what you'll tell, but what you want to convey.
Credit card fraud is a huge illegal industry. It finances drug gangs and cartels, terrorists, small organized crime, major organized crime (mafia), and occasionally the rogue individual hacker.
Citation needed ! I doubt drug gangs, cartels, terrorists or any large organized crime use credit card fraud, since they have tons of money in other ways (drug and prostitution for example). Credit card fraud is too random to be seriously useful for large groups.
But I'm also sure that small organized crime or individuals use it, since they just need to find mules.
In fact, it's pretty easy to improve the system. You just need to copy the Web 2.0 concept: encourage collaboration, instead of promoting competition !
Grades encourage competition, since you try to classify people. Grades encourage cheating. Grades only show how a teacher is good or not. Grades encourage competition.
Encourage collaboration between people, so that everybody shares knowledge.
Instead of focusing on the results (grades), focus on the process (how to learn). Students should love learning, not hate it. When you love doing something, it's easy to be good. If somebody is not interested into learning, find what he likes to do, and orient him in this direction. In France, the goverment tries to keep students in schools as long as possible, it's just a waste of time and energy. If somebody hates learning, just let him work.
Let's find ways to improve intrinsic motivation (enjoying learning), instead of extrinsic motivation (grades).
Oh, and stop this dumb idea about using technology to improve learning ! If technology was so efficient, why don't everybody use television to learn ?
You are completely wrong. If you put some bonus and encourage competition, you'll create even more people who will reject education.
Instead, you should encourage people to enjoy learning.
As long as you use grades as the measure to learning, you are encouraging cheating. Cheating will be done by students, and with a bonus system, teachers will cheat as well (to get their bonus).
Grades only show the ability of the teacher to teach. Grades should measure motivation of the students, not their results. If you have people motivated to learn and to teach, everything is solved in school.
In France, the government keeps students as long as possible in school, even though they are not motivated. It's a better idea to find what motivate them, and orient them in these directions.
This latest crack just makes it a little more obvious that it's a question of motivation more than anything else - and money is a powerful motivator, probably more so than notoriety (in sufficient quantities, anyway).
No, it just proves that when you put enough money, professional crackers are attracted.
On the contrary, I think that money attracts professionals, and discourages all other people, who may have interesting hacks but know that they cannot compete against professionals. In short, it encourages people who came to win, and discourages people who came to participate.
One of the comments on the page already said that.
I remember I disassembled Forth a lot of years ago. It comes in 2 flavours: interpreted and compiled. It relies on RPN heavily. It's a very compact language, both in source and in compiled form. You extend the language by using "words", and it's like OOP.
It took me a lot of efforts to find my wife. I don't want to invest more energy into finding another one;-)
For me, meditation is just a way to not be prisoner of my thoughts. I mean, when you try to focus your attention on an object, you realize that your mind wanders everywhere, because it cannot stand to be still. Once you focus all your attention on a given neutral object, you start to concentrate on your whole body, and you notice how the mind and the body are linked, and you feel that everything in you is in conflict. I inspired myself from the zen meditation, except that I do this exercise when commuting, during 30 minutes every day. It's improving my focus, and helping me to notice all my internal and external conflicts (and there are a lot), and an effortless wisdom appeared spontaneously in me.
As you, I'm able to laugh about my own limitations publicly, and I hope to help people challenge themselves.
But I think that you are still missing a long-term goal, since it's important to have future goals, even though they might change. My current future goal is to find a job that will correspond more to my current state of mind (in my job, I have to handle a lot of conflicts, it's just tiring), and to share my past to other people as an example about what not to do;-)
15 years ago, I was unbearably unhappy and I didn't have a lot of solutions to stop the situation: change or die ! So I started working on myself, as if I was working on my programs. I did a psychoanalysis and started meditation. I mourned my father who died 10 years before, and started to forgive my family. After a while, I found my wife, and stopped working on videogames, it was a tough decision. Finding my wife gave me my first experiences of happiness, but I was still unsatisfied.
4 years ago, I had a major internal change, I became extrovert and started presenting conferences (it was totally unexpected). Every day, I discover a new part of myself, and I enjoy reality as it is. Reality is hard to enjoy, because my tough past is always very present in my life, and my future is completely uncertain, and the Now is so difficult to perceive.
I insist on success and failure, because I still sense that I've not yet found the place I'm looking for. My evolution these last years has been perceived by a lot of people, because I'm the opposite of what I was back then (internally and externally), but my job is still about the same old things since a lot of years, and I don't enjoy them anymore. It's difficult to stop doing the things that I'm doing since 25 years and start something anew.
So every day, I prepare myself for my future, and I'm becoming happier as time progresses (my happiness does not depend on external factors), being less in conflict with reality. And I'm not into religions or beliefs.
Slashdot Mirror
Another suggestion: eat slowly !
We eat tons of food without even realizing.
The satiety comes after a few moments eating, and it differs from people to another one.
Eating in the shortest amount of time doesn't allow the satiety mechanisms do their job.
I forgot to mention that it was done by Joss Whedon !
It has been done for Serenity, 7 years ago.
The first 20 minutes were viewable.
I partly agree with you.
I think that the future of mankind is autism, since autists are highly specialized, and have poor communication skills.
Humanity is becoming more individual than collective, and we need to process larger amounts of data as time goes on.
Our current brain is not designed for that, because our brain is multi-purpose.
If you make it highly specialized, for example by reducing the interactions skills, you improve its efficiency in other parts, like data/facts processing or knowledge retention.
I don't think that autists' brains are buggy, they have evolved to remove all useless functionalities.
However, I think that the current selection by grades is a really bad thing.
It encourages people following arbitrary rules and punish people not following them.
People following rules blindly tend to become moralists and highly corrupted.
They tend to classify everything in categories (and most of the time in only 2 categories, black and white, good or evil).
What worries me is the rigidity of the mind that it encourages, as if we were born to store information and never question it.
For me, freedom is not a physical concept, but a concept of the mind: what are my preconceptions ? Can I fix them ? Is my mind free ? Do I know my emotions ?
Relying on the mind is foolish at best and dangerous at worst.
Thinking and experimenting are two disjoint processes.
Analytical thinking reduces the experiential feedback, as you can see in schizophrenic personalities.
If you start meditating without object (that means concentrating your attention on the present and letting your thoughts pass), you'll increase your awareness of your surroundings and decrease the flow of thoughts. You'll experience and enjoy the reality more (even when the reality is tough) and spend less time thinking.
Analytical thinking is not correlated to intelligence, and believing is not correlated to dumbness.
Real belief is not taught, it's lived. If it cannot be experienced, it's useless.
No, you should count everybody (ill and not ill).
Perhaps 100% of the unvaccinated 8% got ill, but only 10% of the vaccinated 81% got the whooping cough.
And there is another thing: when you get ill, you build antibodies, so you won't become ill for at least 10 years.
With vaccine, you need to vaccinate after a few years.
I don't think that whooping cough is deadly, so not vaccinating against it is not unwise.
But if the illness has a letal risk (like measles), it's just stupid to avoid vaccines.
Between autism and death, I choose autism.
However, it's the management of such facilities that's a problem - in the goal to extract greater and larger profits (bigger bonus!), they start cutting
No, you are wrong. In fact, nuclear power is cheap because of the lack of security, not about bonus.
Building a nuclear plant is costly, and it takes a lot of years to make a profit, so any kind of economy saves a few years.
Using the correct level of security would increase the delay.
And there is another bigger problem: dismantlement of the old nuclear plants.
In France, the cost of a dismantlement was underrated by a factor 20 (expected: 24 millions of euros, reality: 482 millions for Brennilis).
On the other hand, our society is depending more and more on electricity, so we need to find ways to produce cheap electricity.
Nuclear is not the solution to this contradiction.
Rules are useless against beliefs.
People will falsify certificates to avoid vaccines.
You need to create a stronger belief of safety.
So just because someone is afraid of something we should accept their position?
What can you do ? You first need to accept their idea to change their point of view, at least to understand why they believe that.
Suppose that you come to me with your ideas, and I bluntly reject them, does it change your point of view or does it reinforce it ?
It's a well known manipulation technique used in sects, for example with Jehovah's witnesses.
The adepts have to defend the point of view of their sect, and even if they have doubts about it, since everybody rejects them, it reinforces their belief, since they are sure they are right, because everybody is against their ideas !!!! (and they do that in pairs, so that it reduces their doubts, it's a nasty technique).
If the fears are irrational then by definition they go against reality. We have to judge based on reality, not irrational fear.
Sure, I guess that you are not influenced by advertisements, and all the things you buy are rationally chosen.
Believe me, everybody has irrational fears, and some of them are very hidden.
I think that your reasoning is wrong. You try to reason logically, when belief and irrational fears are involved.
Claiming that people are unreasonable simply because you don't have their fear is a bit tough.
I think that you don't understand what happens here.
Let's suppose that you fear serpents. If I don't fear serpents and I show you one, it would be stupid from me to say that you are unreasonable, it won't cure your fear.
Changing people's beliefs is a difficult task, and using reason simply doesn't work.
Instead, you use emotional manipulation, like the fear of losing your children, it's a better motivator than logic here.
BTW, I have tons of beliefs, although I'm a rational guy. One of my beliefs is that autism is linked to gluten, and I experienced that gluten is bad for me.
You may say: hey, there is no correlation between gluten and autism, and you may be right, but you may also be wrong.
In any case, the chances that vaccines and autism are linked are close to 0%.
More like 3 centuries ago. See my other comment about that.
No, the first large distributed project is the Cunnigham project:
http://books.google.com/books?id=udr3tHHwBl0C&lpg=PA375&ots=s4GNA3LkQo&pg=PA375
that started in 1949 on the ENIAC !
And this project is still ongoing.
In fact, this search started with human efforts, so it was already heavily crowd-sourced since a least 3 centuries.
The culmination of the manual effort came in 1903, when Frank Nelson Cole showed that:
193,707,721 × 761,838,257,287 = 2^67 - 1
It took 3 years of Sundays to discover.
http://www.rutherfordjournal.org/article030105.html
Just use a sheet, draw a treasure map on it, and let it fly.
In a lot of movies, a simple sheet of paper is able to fly long distances, even when there is no wind, as long as it contains something important for the hero.
No, the GP is right.
I programmed a few games on the C64 and on the PC before 1987 (in assembler).
The C64 hardware was a lot better than the IBM PC's one.
For example, there were hardware scrolling and sprites, and you could even trump the video card in removing the borders and surpassing the limits of the hardware (check a few demos without border).
It was very dedicated towards console games.
In comparison, the IBM's video card was the same as the Amstrad CPC's one. It barely allowed scrolling (I'm not even sure it was able to scroll pixel by pixel), and when you wanted to display something, you had to draw the objects pixel by pixel, and video memory was slower to access too !
I remember I wrote a medical curve displayer in assembler on the very first PCs and CGA was terrible.
When VGA appeared, it was a lot easier to write games, but the video memory was still slower than the rest of the memory, and scrolling was impossible.
Then VESA cards appeared, but it was in the 90s.
Of course, a few years after, the first 3D cards appeared, but the C64 was already dead at that time.
I follow the 10 and 2 suggestions:
Left hand on the 2 and right hand on the 10.
It's just a little bit tiring.
1) Use 2 computers: one for work, and one for leisure.
Do not mix leisure and work, try work in a dedicated room if possible.
2) Define what you want to do today at the beginning of your day.
It's important to keep the motivation, and will help you concentrate your effort on what you have to deliver every day.
3) If you are a programmer, try agile. Pair-programming is much more efficient this way.
4) Try to commute once every week, just to keep contact with your coworkers.
If you work with agile, select the day they hold retrospectives.
Dedicate this day to communicate with the team, not to program.
Wow, so many useful suggestions.
Here are a few other ones.
First, train yourself !
Speaking publicly is not easy, you need to learn the basics.
1) Since most of the communication is not verbal, you need to master your appearance and your gestures. Face your public, open your arms, smile.
2) Look your audience from left to right then right to left.
3) Master your voice. We tend to have a pitched voice. Try to breathe deeply.
About the content: ...)
1) Try to search what your audience wants to learn or hear
2) Prepare thoroughly your presentation (1 hour of presentation needs at least 10 hours of preparation). Your content should not be in your powerpoint.
3) Interact with your audience (survey, questions,
4) People like to hear stories, so tell your story as if you lived it yesterday, and what lessons were to be learnt
5) Surprise your audience (people get bored after 10 minutes)
What is important is not what you'll tell, but what you want to convey.
Here is the real one:
http://115.com/file/be27pff7
Directly from the author's blog:
http://aluigi.altervista.org/adv/ms12-020_leak.txt
Credit card fraud is a huge illegal industry. It finances drug gangs and cartels, terrorists, small organized crime, major organized crime (mafia), and occasionally the rogue individual hacker.
Citation needed !
I doubt drug gangs, cartels, terrorists or any large organized crime use credit card fraud, since they have tons of money in other ways (drug and prostitution for example).
Credit card fraud is too random to be seriously useful for large groups.
But I'm also sure that small organized crime or individuals use it, since they just need to find mules.
In fact, it's pretty easy to improve the system.
You just need to copy the Web 2.0 concept: encourage collaboration, instead of promoting competition !
Grades encourage competition, since you try to classify people. Grades encourage cheating.
Grades only show how a teacher is good or not.
Grades encourage competition.
Encourage collaboration between people, so that everybody shares knowledge.
Instead of focusing on the results (grades), focus on the process (how to learn).
Students should love learning, not hate it.
When you love doing something, it's easy to be good.
If somebody is not interested into learning, find what he likes to do, and orient him in this direction.
In France, the goverment tries to keep students in schools as long as possible, it's just a waste of time and energy.
If somebody hates learning, just let him work.
Let's find ways to improve intrinsic motivation (enjoying learning), instead of extrinsic motivation (grades).
Oh, and stop this dumb idea about using technology to improve learning !
If technology was so efficient, why don't everybody use television to learn ?
Teachers need an incentivized bonus program
You are completely wrong.
If you put some bonus and encourage competition, you'll create even more people who will reject education.
Instead, you should encourage people to enjoy learning.
As long as you use grades as the measure to learning, you are encouraging cheating.
Cheating will be done by students, and with a bonus system, teachers will cheat as well (to get their bonus).
Grades only show the ability of the teacher to teach.
Grades should measure motivation of the students, not their results.
If you have people motivated to learn and to teach, everything is solved in school.
In France, the government keeps students as long as possible in school, even though they are not motivated.
It's a better idea to find what motivate them, and orient them in these directions.
This latest crack just makes it a little more obvious that it's a question of motivation more than anything else - and money is a powerful motivator, probably more so than notoriety (in sufficient quantities, anyway).
No, it just proves that when you put enough money, professional crackers are attracted.
There is an article where Charlie Miller (winner of past contests) explains why he won't compete:
https://www.zdnet.com/blog/security/charlie-miller-skipping-pwn2own-as-new-rules-change-hacking-game/10554
On the contrary, I think that money attracts professionals, and discourages all other people, who may have interesting hacks but know that they cannot compete against professionals.
In short, it encourages people who came to win, and discourages people who came to participate.
One of the comments on the page already said that.
I remember I disassembled Forth a lot of years ago.
It comes in 2 flavours: interpreted and compiled.
It relies on RPN heavily.
It's a very compact language, both in source and in compiled form.
You extend the language by using "words", and it's like OOP.
It's one of the weirdest language I ever used.
It took me a lot of efforts to find my wife. I don't want to invest more energy into finding another one ;-)
For me, meditation is just a way to not be prisoner of my thoughts. I mean, when you try to focus your attention on an object, you realize that your mind wanders everywhere, because it cannot stand to be still. Once you focus all your attention on a given neutral object, you start to concentrate on your whole body, and you notice how the mind and the body are linked, and you feel that everything in you is in conflict.
I inspired myself from the zen meditation, except that I do this exercise when commuting, during 30 minutes every day.
It's improving my focus, and helping me to notice all my internal and external conflicts (and there are a lot), and an effortless wisdom appeared spontaneously in me.
As you, I'm able to laugh about my own limitations publicly, and I hope to help people challenge themselves.
But I think that you are still missing a long-term goal, since it's important to have future goals, even though they might change. ;-)
My current future goal is to find a job that will correspond more to my current state of mind (in my job, I have to handle a lot of conflicts, it's just tiring), and to share my past to other people as an example about what not to do
I guess we are on the same journey.
15 years ago, I was unbearably unhappy and I didn't have a lot of solutions to stop the situation: change or die !
So I started working on myself, as if I was working on my programs. I did a psychoanalysis and started meditation.
I mourned my father who died 10 years before, and started to forgive my family.
After a while, I found my wife, and stopped working on videogames, it was a tough decision.
Finding my wife gave me my first experiences of happiness, but I was still unsatisfied.
4 years ago, I had a major internal change, I became extrovert and started presenting conferences (it was totally unexpected).
Every day, I discover a new part of myself, and I enjoy reality as it is.
Reality is hard to enjoy, because my tough past is always very present in my life, and my future is completely uncertain, and the Now is so difficult to perceive.
I insist on success and failure, because I still sense that I've not yet found the place I'm looking for.
My evolution these last years has been perceived by a lot of people, because I'm the opposite of what I was back then (internally and externally), but my job is still about the same old things since a lot of years, and I don't enjoy them anymore. It's difficult to stop doing the things that I'm doing since 25 years and start something anew.
So every day, I prepare myself for my future, and I'm becoming happier as time progresses (my happiness does not depend on external factors), being less in conflict with reality.
And I'm not into religions or beliefs.