I'm surprised that nobody noticed it: Google is stopping all its future innovations, and concentrate on short-term revenues, which is a decision from their CEO, not by the cost of maintaining the current tools (it's a very small cost).
McNerney focused on using Six Sigma, and improving productivity. 3M, based on a culture of innovation since 100 years, had its internal culture almost destroyed in only 5 years.
The inventor of post-it said that it would have been impossible that the "post-it" concept would have been successful using the new method.
In my opinion, it's a very short-sighted decision, as you can see with Microsoft and IBM, which invest a lot of money in innovation. It's impossible to predict what will work in a few years, and I doubt that the current monopoly of Google on Internet ads will long very last.
Now, let me give a prediction: currently, Apple and Google are ranked 1st and 2nd as the most innovative companies. I bet that in 2 years, they won't be in the top 10 anymore.
Being celiac, I'm allergic to wheat or bread, but not to fat nor sugar. I also have to avoid dairy products and probably corn. As you can notice all these components are widely used in fast-food, and they have been engineered to be efficiently produced (I don't talk about GMO !).
And no, I don't believe that organic food is necessary (people complain about pesticides), since it's already expensive to eat without gluten !
According to Antisec, Stratfor was using the e-commerce suite Ubercart to handle customer information. The software has built-in encryption, but Stratfor apparently used custom modules that stored customer data in cleartext. Additionally, Stratfor appears to have stored the card security code of its customers, a practice generally prohibited by credit card companies.
Why the hell did Stratfor store credit card numbers in plain text ? They totally deserve what happens to them, I hope they'll have to pay all charges for the credit card changes. This is not the first time a company has this kind of problem, but we are now (almost) in 2012, so this problem should have disappeared a long time ago. Did they audit their security ? It's pretty sure, but they probably didn't show their custom modules, so it's totally their fault here.
Would you prefer that their server was hacked by some group other than Anonymous, so that nobody would ever know that there was a problem ? Security by obscurity is never good.
They can try to blame Anonymous, but it's Stratfor's entire fault !
First, I recommend to not provide the source code, and no documentation either, especially if you wrote the code on your own time. If your company is interested, propose to write some documentation during your working hours (see below).
Secondly, use your program to start personal branding. If what you did saved a lot of money, write a site explaining what your tool does, and propose to sell it for cheap without maintenance, but ask big money for improving it. Marketing is more important than coding, and you probably don't like to sell yourself. If you badly need money, you need to start selling. Try to read blogs and books about personal branding, marketing and SEO.
Thirdly, publicize in your company what you have done ! Don't hesitate to meet your CEO and tell him what you did. If he's interested in investing in your tool, ask for a new job title. If he's not, just tell him that you did that to help your service in the company, but you cannot provide the source nor documentation, since it's a personal project. Let them use the tool, but retain property. The main point is: make everybody aware of what you did. This way, the next raise will be for you, not for your manager who will take credit for your work.
I spent eight years operating and maintaining the reactor that I slept less than 100 feet away from.
If you want to make things personal what's your experience in this area?
And then ? I'm using a car since 30 years, and I'm no expert in cars. Operating and maintaining a reactor doesn't mean that you are an expert in radioactivity.
And now, I even more doubt your partiality in defending nuclear plants. You are the type of guys who refuse reality, just because it goes against their own interests.
BTW, Russia has always underestimated the human damages in Chernobyl. You should also know that Ukraine was USSR's granary. Chernobyl has poisoned the land for decades, and the food produced there will continue to be consumed in this region.
My wife got her thyroid removed, because of Chernobyl's radiations, so please, think about the future generations, not your current job !
What a short-sighted view ! How can you get modded insightful ?
Frankly, the problem is not the number of immediate deaths, it's the fact that the land is poisoned for a few millenia, and a lot of people will die in 100 years from this massive fuck-up (from eating contaminated food, and living in the neighbourhood).
It's easy to defend a rational point of view, when you are very FAR from the accident. Let's suppose that a nuclear plant melts near your home. Will you react as: no problem, I'm confident towards our engineers who have done their best, and there is nothing to worry.
Your emotions (you know, your human nature) will show that you are scared and you'll realize that if you want to have babies, they have 20% chances of being disabled (see Chernobyl), and that you have 80% of chances of dying from a cancer (from a long and painful way).
Ok, it's not your problem, so stop rationalizing here, it gives a false sense of security.
When you fix something, you introduce other undesirable effects. It's similar in software, when you fix bugs, you may introduce new ones.
You cannot predict what you are doing when modifying living organisms, and tests are much more expensive than in software, since it requires years to test a new food exhaustively, pretty much like in the pharmaceutical domain (check the list of undesirable effects of common drugs like aspirin, you'll be surprised).
Believing that food is automatically good for health is wishful thinking. Even some natural food is poisonous to humans (like mushrooms).
GMO producers want to have a fast return on investment, so they'd like to reduce the testing phase to the minimum, and they don't really care about health.
A french director filmed a documentary about Monsanto, and showed that the top management were all eating organic food, not their own food.
Wheat-free diet is not sufficient. You must avoid all gluten. I personally discovered that a few weeks ago, and it changed my life in one week.
In my case, I become ill 2 hours after absorbing gluten. Last time at a japanese restaurant, I ate rice with some meat, and I was ill afterwards, so it means that their food was gluten infected. I have the same symptoms as "irritable bowel syndrome".
Currently, it's very expensive to start a gluten free diet. I just hope that it will be more and more publicized, so that food becomes affordable. Luckily, I can eat rice, vegetables and meat, but no milk nor cereals.
Certain sorts of cereals are not contaminated with gluten, like quinoa or Spelt, because wheat has been naturally selected to have the biggest concentration of gluten. Gluten makes the flour easy to work for bakers, but the concentration is too massive. I even heard a story about a baker allergic to flour !
The problem is not a GMO's problem, but really a selection's problem. Currently, almost 2% of people are allergic to gluten, but only a few are diagnosed or realize that.
Being tested for celiac disease implies that you need to not have started a gluten-free diet, and there are biopsies, so it's not an option for me.
What is this bullshit ? How can you be modded up ?
I'm allergic to wheat, and all food containing gluten (this is called celiac disease, 2% of the population is concerned). It's incurable, and what happens when I eat gluten is that the gliadin destroys all my intestinal villus, and then my body cannot absorb nutrients from food anymore. I become very tired and irritable, and I have all the symptoms of "irritable bowel syndrome" (and no doctor ever suggested that the cause was gluten !).
The only way to solve the problem is to avoid any food containing gluten, and believe me: gluten is everywhere !
I live in France, and bread is a national food, and my body is trained with eating wheat since a lot of time, so training has nothing to do with that.
BTW, celiac disease also induces allergy to dairy products, so milk is banned too. Some people claim that gluten is linked to autism and ADHD, but I cannot confirm that, since I luckily don't have these problems.
Why am I allergic to gluten ? I have no idea, and I don't really care. It's difficult enough to check everything that I ingest. When I make a mistake, I'm ill in less than 2 hours (I become like a balloon, and a major dermatosis appears), and it takes 3 days for the symptoms to disappear. I'm a living gluten detector !
Why is wheat so allergenic ? Because it has been naturally selected to include more gluten. More gluten in the wheat means that it's easier to work (for bakers, and all transformed food, since wheat is inexpensive).
What do you suppose happen when the gluten destroyed all my internal villus ? Do you bet on cancer ? Frankly, I don't want to verify by myself.
And now, the one million dollars question: what can go wrong with GM ? Even if 1% of the population is allergic, it will be very difficult to prove, because nobody imagines that food can kill you. Of course, people will tell you that food will be even cheaper, and good for health.
1) Read the Theory of Constraints, and use it to organize your team 2) Read about Emotional Intelligence 3) Do not try to do everything, find what has value for your position, and concentrate on this 4) Do not micromanage. If you don't know agility, try to follow a Scrum certification, I know it's dumb, but the concepts are very important. The aim is to let people self-organize, and your role is to verify their throughput.
Your role as a manager is to be sure that the work is delivered, and help the team to do that. It means: - communicate to your team and to your hierarchy. Everything should be clear for everybody. If it's not clear, you aren't doing your job. - focus on your work. Stop trying to command people,. If they don't know what they have to do, it means that you didn't communicate clearly. - remove all possible impediments to the team (you need to protect them from your hierarchy) - be tough but fair with your team (do not let people abuse you)
Try to use the following values: - clarity (everybody must know what they have to do, not how to do it, also act transparently) - feedback (if something goes wrong, fix it as soon as possible. For example, detect bugs or specification inconstencies ASAP) - trust (trust your team, let them do as they prefer, but check that the work is done correctly and in the time they promised, do not force your planning on them, let your team decide how they want to be organized, help them if they don't know) - responsibility. Make people feel responsible about their work. If you take all the responsibility, your team won't care about your project. If you take no responsibility, the team will feel that you don't do anything for them.
The problem is not really about the fatal accidents, which are sad, but do not cost anything to society.
What is expensive is the fact that people are injured, or worse handicapped and still alive !
For example, land mines are designed to injure people so that they lose one foot or one leg, because it's much more expensive to keep injured soldiers alive.
His vision as a teen was probably confronted to reality.
In real-life, nothing is as perfect as in studies, and you have to deal with personalities, and very few people are nice.
As he seemed to have a high opinion of himself, he probably suffered when he started to fail. It's important to not view life as success and fail, but as a way to progress. If he saw life as something where you need to succeed, the first failures are very bad for the future, unless you accept to change.
I doubt he'll ever read this thread, since I doubt he knows your pseudo on Slashdot, and you never mentioned his name.
Switching contexts is computationally expensive for our brains, and is a lossy procedure. Any techie can tell you that constant interruptions cause bad code because you lose context and the "gestalt" of what you are doing.
In fact, it's a little more subtle than that. What is expensive is not switching contexts, as you can check by reading 2 web pages simultaneously, it's pretty easy.
But your performance degrades a lot when you try to multitask with your two cerebral hemispheres (for example computing and drawing at the same time).
Also, when you have similar tasks, you have an internal limit, and you can easily store tasks that fit within your limit. When a task is closed, you'll forget it immediately, to free space for an incoming task.
He probably simplified his life so that studies would occupy the central place. I think that this requires some special education from parents, who would help their children concentrate on what's important for them.
About the "no fear" attitude, I think that he was persuaded that he could understand everything that was shown to him. In my case, I put efforts to understand things only when I feel that I'm concerned, otherwise, I won't spend even a second on it. This way, I "store" only things that may be useful for me (I've a very impressive memory on a few subjects).
I hope your old friend is happy now, or all his efforts were useless.
- Always use a pessimistic point of view. Happiness doesn't drive audience. - Use cheap emotions whenever possible. No emotions except sadness or joy are allowed. - Hire fake audience to represent your audience in your poor shows, and make them laugh when you need (remember Pavlov ?). - Give random (poor) people access to the american dream, by giving them shiny objects. - Explain with lots of details terrible crimes. Morbid fascination everywhere. - Let people believe that possessing objects lead to happiness, and do that every minute, to be sure that they won't forget (ads). - Always paint the world in white and black (if possible black). Never use another color, it's too disturbing.
The real question is not how to eradicate mosquitoes, but how do we regulate human population on a world scale ?
Frankly, mosquitoes are small killers, and are a way to regulate population without too much damage, most notably where human's density is exploding. People reproduce themselves at an alarming rate, without bothering about resources, which is a short-sighted view.
I'm not a religious nut, but I'm pretty sure that if we kill mosquitoes, another bigger danger might appear, like a very dangerous virus, or more probably a massive famine. As resources will get scarce, their price will increase so much that only rich people will be able to eat normally, and when you have hunger, violence and war are not too far (I won't elaborate on human exploitation).
If you see earth as a giant living organism, you should realize that we are merely fleas, and we procreate at an unsustainable rate for the planet, doing a lot of damage. Somebody will have to pay the price, and it will be our grand-children.
In France, Thierry Breton is renowned for using a magnificent idea as management: Total Operational Performance, or TOP. This is Lean management applied to people. The idea is very simple: we manage people as resources, and if they are unused, they are reallocated elsewhere, or simply discarded. Result of this brilliant idea: around 15 suicides last year, and more than 60 suicides since he applied his idea.
TOP is so bad that it succeeded in instilling fear in all french companies, which don't want to listen about Lean ! Lean is very successful in automobile industries, too bad for Peugeot and Renault.
Replacing emails by Facebook ? Another brilliant idea ! It's obvious that they will save a lot of time. And directly speaking with people is so much more productive.
No, this is the traditional Christmas period. Prices are artificially inflated at that time of the year, probably to drive sales on SSD. It's similar on other products.
Speaking of art, I recommend that you download and unzip the best demos for PC on the USB key. You can download them here: http://www.pouet.net/
Explain them what a demo is: 1) a very small program (much smaller than a Youtube video) 2) a spectacle 3) a form of art 4) mathematics applied in realtime
Some people may feel so amazed by these technical pieces, that they'll learn how to program.
It may be related to this message: https://joindiaspora.com/posts/721055 where he announces that he just started an intimate relation, less than 2 weeks ago.
The relation has probably been broken, as his heart:-(
Slashdot Mirror
Totally agree, and it seems that their data is not cross-checked at all:
http://www.wordnik.com/words/internet
antonyms
Words with the opposite meaning:
World Wide Web
WTF ?
I'm surprised that nobody noticed it: Google is stopping all its future innovations, and concentrate on short-term revenues, which is a decision from their CEO, not by the cost of maintaining the current tools (it's a very small cost).
Something similar happened in 2000 with the 3M company, when James McNerney from GE became the new CEO.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_24/b4038406.htm
In 5 years, 3M, which was ranked as the most innovative company in the world, fell at the 7th place.
This year, 3M disappeared from the 50 most innovative companies, check here:
http://www.businessweek.com/interactive_reports/innovative_companies_2010.html
McNerney focused on using Six Sigma, and improving productivity.
3M, based on a culture of innovation since 100 years, had its internal culture almost destroyed in only 5 years.
The inventor of post-it said that it would have been impossible that the "post-it" concept would have been successful using the new method.
In my opinion, it's a very short-sighted decision, as you can see with Microsoft and IBM, which invest a lot of money in innovation.
It's impossible to predict what will work in a few years, and I doubt that the current monopoly of Google on Internet ads will long very last.
Now, let me give a prediction:
currently, Apple and Google are ranked 1st and 2nd as the most innovative companies.
I bet that in 2 years, they won't be in the top 10 anymore.
IT's the fat and sugars that are the problem.
Not exactly, you forgot gluten in your list.
Being celiac, I'm allergic to wheat or bread, but not to fat nor sugar.
I also have to avoid dairy products and probably corn.
As you can notice all these components are widely used in fast-food, and they have been engineered to be efficiently produced (I don't talk about GMO !).
And no, I don't believe that organic food is necessary (people complain about pesticides), since it's already expensive to eat without gluten !
From the ArsTechnica article:
According to Antisec, Stratfor was using the e-commerce suite Ubercart to handle customer information. The software has built-in encryption, but Stratfor apparently used custom modules that stored customer data in cleartext. Additionally, Stratfor appears to have stored the card security code of its customers, a practice generally prohibited by credit card companies.
Why the hell did Stratfor store credit card numbers in plain text ?
They totally deserve what happens to them, I hope they'll have to pay all charges for the credit card changes.
This is not the first time a company has this kind of problem, but we are now (almost) in 2012, so this problem should have disappeared a long time ago.
Did they audit their security ? It's pretty sure, but they probably didn't show their custom modules, so it's totally their fault here.
Would you prefer that their server was hacked by some group other than Anonymous, so that nobody would ever know that there was a problem ?
Security by obscurity is never good.
They can try to blame Anonymous, but it's Stratfor's entire fault !
Who will take the blame ?
First, I recommend to not provide the source code, and no documentation either, especially if you wrote the code on your own time.
If your company is interested, propose to write some documentation during your working hours (see below).
Secondly, use your program to start personal branding.
If what you did saved a lot of money, write a site explaining what your tool does, and propose to sell it for cheap without maintenance, but ask big money for improving it.
Marketing is more important than coding, and you probably don't like to sell yourself.
If you badly need money, you need to start selling. Try to read blogs and books about personal branding, marketing and SEO.
Thirdly, publicize in your company what you have done !
Don't hesitate to meet your CEO and tell him what you did.
If he's interested in investing in your tool, ask for a new job title.
If he's not, just tell him that you did that to help your service in the company, but you cannot provide the source nor documentation, since it's a personal project.
Let them use the tool, but retain property.
The main point is: make everybody aware of what you did. This way, the next raise will be for you, not for your manager who will take credit for your work.
I spent eight years operating and maintaining the reactor that I slept less than 100 feet away from.
If you want to make things personal what's your experience in this area?
And then ? I'm using a car since 30 years, and I'm no expert in cars.
Operating and maintaining a reactor doesn't mean that you are an expert in radioactivity.
And now, I even more doubt your partiality in defending nuclear plants.
You are the type of guys who refuse reality, just because it goes against their own interests.
BTW, Russia has always underestimated the human damages in Chernobyl.
You should also know that Ukraine was USSR's granary. Chernobyl has poisoned the land for decades, and the food produced there will continue to be consumed in this region.
My wife got her thyroid removed, because of Chernobyl's radiations, so please, think about the future generations, not your current job !
He would have probably created the first bug !
What a short-sighted view !
How can you get modded insightful ?
Frankly, the problem is not the number of immediate deaths, it's the fact that the land is poisoned for a few millenia, and a lot of people will die in 100 years from this massive fuck-up (from eating contaminated food, and living in the neighbourhood).
It's easy to defend a rational point of view, when you are very FAR from the accident.
Let's suppose that a nuclear plant melts near your home.
Will you react as: no problem, I'm confident towards our engineers who have done their best, and there is nothing to worry.
Your emotions (you know, your human nature) will show that you are scared and you'll realize that if you want to have babies, they have 20% chances of being disabled (see Chernobyl), and that you have 80% of chances of dying from a cancer (from a long and painful way).
Ok, it's not your problem, so stop rationalizing here, it gives a false sense of security.
When you fix something, you introduce other undesirable effects. It's similar in software, when you fix bugs, you may introduce new ones.
You cannot predict what you are doing when modifying living organisms, and tests are much more expensive than in software, since it requires years to test a new food exhaustively, pretty much like in the pharmaceutical domain (check the list of undesirable effects of common drugs like aspirin, you'll be surprised).
Believing that food is automatically good for health is wishful thinking. Even some natural food is poisonous to humans (like mushrooms).
GMO producers want to have a fast return on investment, so they'd like to reduce the testing phase to the minimum, and they don't really care about health.
A french director filmed a documentary about Monsanto, and showed that the top management were all eating organic food, not their own food.
Wheat-free diet is not sufficient.
You must avoid all gluten. I personally discovered that a few weeks ago, and it changed my life in one week.
In my case, I become ill 2 hours after absorbing gluten.
Last time at a japanese restaurant, I ate rice with some meat, and I was ill afterwards, so it means that their food was gluten infected.
I have the same symptoms as "irritable bowel syndrome".
Currently, it's very expensive to start a gluten free diet. I just hope that it will be more and more publicized, so that food becomes affordable.
Luckily, I can eat rice, vegetables and meat, but no milk nor cereals.
Certain sorts of cereals are not contaminated with gluten, like quinoa or Spelt, because wheat has been naturally selected to have the biggest concentration of gluten. Gluten makes the flour easy to work for bakers, but the concentration is too massive. I even heard a story about a baker allergic to flour !
The problem is not a GMO's problem, but really a selection's problem.
Currently, almost 2% of people are allergic to gluten, but only a few are diagnosed or realize that.
Being tested for celiac disease implies that you need to not have started a gluten-free diet, and there are biopsies, so it's not an option for me.
What is this bullshit ? How can you be modded up ?
I'm allergic to wheat, and all food containing gluten (this is called celiac disease, 2% of the population is concerned).
It's incurable, and what happens when I eat gluten is that the gliadin destroys all my intestinal villus, and then my body cannot absorb nutrients from food anymore. I become very tired and irritable, and I have all the symptoms of "irritable bowel syndrome" (and no doctor ever suggested that the cause was gluten !).
The only way to solve the problem is to avoid any food containing gluten, and believe me: gluten is everywhere !
I live in France, and bread is a national food, and my body is trained with eating wheat since a lot of time, so training has nothing to do with that.
BTW, celiac disease also induces allergy to dairy products, so milk is banned too.
Some people claim that gluten is linked to autism and ADHD, but I cannot confirm that, since I luckily don't have these problems.
Why am I allergic to gluten ?
I have no idea, and I don't really care. It's difficult enough to check everything that I ingest. When I make a mistake, I'm ill in less than 2 hours (I become like a balloon, and a major dermatosis appears), and it takes 3 days for the symptoms to disappear. I'm a living gluten detector !
Why is wheat so allergenic ?
Because it has been naturally selected to include more gluten. More gluten in the wheat means that it's easier to work (for bakers, and all transformed food, since wheat is inexpensive).
What do you suppose happen when the gluten destroyed all my internal villus ?
Do you bet on cancer ? Frankly, I don't want to verify by myself.
And now, the one million dollars question: what can go wrong with GM ?
Even if 1% of the population is allergic, it will be very difficult to prove, because nobody imagines that food can kill you.
Of course, people will tell you that food will be even cheaper, and good for health.
Here are some advice:
1) Read the Theory of Constraints, and use it to organize your team
2) Read about Emotional Intelligence
3) Do not try to do everything, find what has value for your position, and concentrate on this
4) Do not micromanage. If you don't know agility, try to follow a Scrum certification, I know it's dumb, but the concepts are very important. The aim is to let people self-organize, and your role is to verify their throughput.
Your role as a manager is to be sure that the work is delivered, and help the team to do that.
It means:
- communicate to your team and to your hierarchy. Everything should be clear for everybody. If it's not clear, you aren't doing your job.
- focus on your work. Stop trying to command people,. If they don't know what they have to do, it means that you didn't communicate clearly.
- remove all possible impediments to the team (you need to protect them from your hierarchy)
- be tough but fair with your team (do not let people abuse you)
Try to use the following values:
- clarity (everybody must know what they have to do, not how to do it, also act transparently)
- feedback (if something goes wrong, fix it as soon as possible. For example, detect bugs or specification inconstencies ASAP)
- trust (trust your team, let them do as they prefer, but check that the work is done correctly and in the time they promised, do not force your planning on them, let your team decide how they want to be organized, help them if they don't know)
- responsibility. Make people feel responsible about their work. If you take all the responsibility, your team won't care about your project. If you take no responsibility, the team will feel that you don't do anything for them.
So the fact that they were not able to provide a demonstration did not ring a few bells? LOUDLY?
I smell some "political" decision here.
Probably the guy who pushed for this solution is friend with the company that sold the application.
Here is a site with real photoshop disasters:
http://www.psdisasters.com/
It's more fun than "Spot the difference".
The problem is not really about the fatal accidents, which are sad, but do not cost anything to society.
What is expensive is the fact that people are injured, or worse handicapped and still alive !
For example, land mines are designed to injure people so that they lose one foot or one leg, because it's much more expensive to keep injured soldiers alive.
His vision as a teen was probably confronted to reality.
In real-life, nothing is as perfect as in studies, and you have to deal with personalities, and very few people are nice.
As he seemed to have a high opinion of himself, he probably suffered when he started to fail.
It's important to not view life as success and fail, but as a way to progress.
If he saw life as something where you need to succeed, the first failures are very bad for the future, unless you accept to change.
I doubt he'll ever read this thread, since I doubt he knows your pseudo on Slashdot, and you never mentioned his name.
Switching contexts is computationally expensive for our brains, and is a lossy procedure. Any techie can tell you that constant interruptions cause bad code because you lose context and the "gestalt" of what you are doing.
In fact, it's a little more subtle than that.
What is expensive is not switching contexts, as you can check by reading 2 web pages simultaneously, it's pretty easy.
But your performance degrades a lot when you try to multitask with your two cerebral hemispheres (for example computing and drawing at the same time).
Also, when you have similar tasks, you have an internal limit, and you can easily store tasks that fit within your limit.
When a task is closed, you'll forget it immediately, to free space for an incoming task.
My own limit is around 3.
This is called Zeigarnik effect:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspense#Zeigarnik_effect
You forgot to mention: dedication.
He probably simplified his life so that studies would occupy the central place.
I think that this requires some special education from parents, who would help their children concentrate on what's important for them.
About the "no fear" attitude, I think that he was persuaded that he could understand everything that was shown to him.
In my case, I put efforts to understand things only when I feel that I'm concerned, otherwise, I won't spend even a second on it. This way, I "store" only things that may be useful for me (I've a very impressive memory on a few subjects).
I hope your old friend is happy now, or all his efforts were useless.
You forgot:
- Always use a pessimistic point of view. Happiness doesn't drive audience.
- Use cheap emotions whenever possible. No emotions except sadness or joy are allowed.
- Hire fake audience to represent your audience in your poor shows, and make them laugh when you need (remember Pavlov ?).
- Give random (poor) people access to the american dream, by giving them shiny objects.
- Explain with lots of details terrible crimes. Morbid fascination everywhere.
- Let people believe that possessing objects lead to happiness, and do that every minute, to be sure that they won't forget (ads).
- Always paint the world in white and black (if possible black). Never use another color, it's too disturbing.
This article asks the correct question:
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html
The real question is not how to eradicate mosquitoes, but how do we regulate human population on a world scale ?
Frankly, mosquitoes are small killers, and are a way to regulate population without too much damage, most notably where human's density is exploding.
People reproduce themselves at an alarming rate, without bothering about resources, which is a short-sighted view.
I'm not a religious nut, but I'm pretty sure that if we kill mosquitoes, another bigger danger might appear, like a very dangerous virus, or more probably a massive famine.
As resources will get scarce, their price will increase so much that only rich people will be able to eat normally, and when you have hunger, violence and war are not too far (I won't elaborate on human exploitation).
If you see earth as a giant living organism, you should realize that we are merely fleas, and we procreate at an unsustainable rate for the planet, doing a lot of damage. Somebody will have to pay the price, and it will be our grand-children.
The worst enemy of humanity is humanity itself !
In France, Thierry Breton is renowned for using a magnificent idea as management: Total Operational Performance, or TOP.
This is Lean management applied to people.
The idea is very simple: we manage people as resources, and if they are unused, they are reallocated elsewhere, or simply discarded.
Result of this brilliant idea: around 15 suicides last year, and more than 60 suicides since he applied his idea.
TOP is so bad that it succeeded in instilling fear in all french companies, which don't want to listen about Lean !
Lean is very successful in automobile industries, too bad for Peugeot and Renault.
Now, he's trying to apply it in Atos:
http://www.rue89.com/2011/05/24/apres-france-telecom-thierry-breton-passe-atos-a-lessoreuse-204971
(in french)
and a lot of people of Atos are very afraid.
Replacing emails by Facebook ? Another brilliant idea !
It's obvious that they will save a lot of time.
And directly speaking with people is so much more productive.
No, this is the traditional Christmas period.
Prices are artificially inflated at that time of the year, probably to drive sales on SSD.
It's similar on other products.
Prices will decrease after Christmas.
Speaking of art, I recommend that you download and unzip the best demos for PC on the USB key.
You can download them here:
http://www.pouet.net/
Explain them what a demo is:
1) a very small program (much smaller than a Youtube video)
2) a spectacle
3) a form of art
4) mathematics applied in realtime
Some people may feel so amazed by these technical pieces, that they'll learn how to program.
It's librivox:
http://librivox.org/
It may be related to this message: https://joindiaspora.com/posts/721055
where he announces that he just started an intimate relation, less than 2 weeks ago.
The relation has probably been broken, as his heart :-(