This.
I stream Netflix vids on both XP and Vista boxes at different times of day, and I almost never see buffering. Maybe once a week if that. Either this guy cheesed off somebody at Netflix and they're picking on him, or there's something wrong with his connection or system config.
You're confusing the limits of human beings to create perfect systems with the existence of systems. Does communism not exist because attempts at it never live up to the ideal? Many ancient, medieval, and modern societies are in varying degrees meritocractic. (Just as there are varying degrees of freedom or democracy, or do those not exist too unless they are perfect, complete, and total?)
Your second sentence is the most woefully deficient syllogism I've ever seen effected. If meritocracy is derived from elitism, then being an elitist makes meritocracy unstable if it exists? And therefore what you want to be true is, and what I want to be true isn't? I wish I could summon the ghost of Demosthenes to slap the shit out of you for such terrible logic. Rather than deal with any rational progression of what your definition of terms are (I linked to a freakin' article) to how those concepts interact to produce a result, you just say, essentially, it is because ipse dixit.
What else, though, could I expect from somebody who says a socio-political structure has never existed simply because no structure has lived up to some abstract, perfect ideal. By that definition, nothing exists. Pure nonsense.
If somebody doesn't believe their opinion is better, they have self-esteem issues. (And in a social Darwinistic sense, if somebody believes their opinion isn't better, they're right.) Beware the argumentum ad temperantiam.
Elitism itself is rational, and leads to meritocracy, not by itself exclusively to tyranny nor racism, and certainly not genocide.
There are reasons to disarm an entire society. There are reasons not to. "Compelling" arguments are made for both sides, as both exist or existed somewhere.
I give more credence to the reasons not to do so. Such as tyranny (scroll down to Athenaion Politeia 14-15), racist oppression, and worst, out-right genocide, over and over.
While this issue is so entrenched that debating it is usually completely unproductive, you seem like a moderate which is encouraging.
However, there are some fundamental assumptions that need correction. Mass ownership of firearms doesn't make it 'easy to kill people'. Quite the opposite. Switzerland is full of households with state-issued assault rifles, and yet their per capita rate of murder is one of the lowest in the world. An armed-and-lawful society is the strongest possible social structure. Serious crimes become suicidal endeavors, which allows the armed-and-lawful individuals to lead peaceful lives.
In the US, those states which have higher rates per capita of concealed carrying of handguns have fewer violent crimes. Once again, this is because those who would perpetrate them are rightly afraid of being shot. The highest rates of violent crime in the US are invariably in cities that have the most 'gun control'. If somebody is going to commit murder, they aren't going to pay any attention to whether it's legal or not to have a certain weapon in a certain place. The only people who care about those laws are the very people a potential murderer is likely to kill.
The funny thing is, most of the state concealed carry laws have gone into effect in the last two decades. One after another the same tired argument gets trotted out: if more people carry guns, more people will get killed! And in every instance, after the laws pass, violent crime either goes down or remains the same. That's simply because the average guy isn't a murderer. Hardcore criminals will always be armed, regardless of laws, that's because they're criminals. Arming their potential victims is what changes the game.
Suggesting that armed resistance by the Jews would have led to a worse holocaust is kind of absurd. That's a poor gloss for the racism of gun control, both in Nazi Germany and in the US. The first gun control laws here were designed to disarm the black population so that they couldn't resist the KKK. You have to disarm people in order to control them, a lesson that goes all the way back to Pisistratus.
I myself carry a sidearm every day (an H&K USP.45 fullsize var. C), so I do walk the talk. I carried it now for four years (since I turned 21, the minimum age for my state), and I have never had to draw it. However, I do end up being essentially a bodyguard for everybody around me. I'm not a sworn officer, and I don't have to worry about moving violations or zoning laws or paperwork, but if somebody does get robbed, assaulted, or otherwise maliciously put in imminent danger of significant bodily harm, I will step in and do what seems most prudent to stop it. That's not to say that my first thought is 'shoot the guy'. That is a responsible person's last thought. Most of the time when a criminal is faced with a gun, they just stop (the whole 'not wanting to get shot' thing again) and/or run. Estimates are that in the US privately-held firearms are used to interdict 2.5 million crimes a year, and only in about 5% are shots fired (I recommend gunfacts.info if you're interested in a much more detailed breakdown with sources cited and graphs and so forth).
The Europeans have nobody to blame but themselves for the kind of people that the British are. Stronger connection with the continent? Heh, yeah, what like when the Romans invaded? The Danes? The Viking raids and invasion attempts? The Normans? The Spanish would have if they could have, same with the French both under their monarchy and Napoleon, and lastly the Germans under Hitler (we'll let the cold war Russian threat slide). I think I'd be a little schizophrenic about 'the continent' with that much 'history'.
It's funny that the EUropeans hold Britain's former colonies against her. All the major states of Europe had colonies, the only difference was that they all came to nothing. Mexico doesn't have a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, Algeria sure as hell didn't save Europe from the Germans (twice), Indonesia never managed to put men on the moon, etc. etc. Many of the British colonies were the only European colonies to achieve a 'European' level of rule of law and quality of life, and I think that makes the other European powers jealous. I think it bothers the French that no matter how many words they make up for new technology, it's still only English that's accepted as the universal language of air-traffic control (because English-speakers invented powered flight). I think it bothers the great Universities of Europe that no matter how good they are, they'll never carry the gravitas of Oxford and the Rhodes Scholarship simply because that's what Britain impressed on all her colonies and sphere of influence as the excelsior achievement. Anyway, the point is well enough made.
The transfer of global primacy from the British in the 19th century to the Americans in the 20th represents a very unique event in known history. Never has the center of the primary political and military power on earth shifted such a vast geographic distance without a similarly vast shift in language or culture. As a grand coincidence, those two English-speaking centuries oversaw the production, dissemination, and regulation (or lack thereof) of virtually every new technology that has changed human civilization, including the internet. This made the 'Anglosphere' into the primary progenitor of the coming modern monoculture. Any scion of the other major cultural powers who understands these things would be justifiably miffed, and I believe they are.
Who caves? I don't know, maybe I'm just a gourmand, but I have tastebuds too and I've never taken a woman to restaurant I didn't want to go to myself. (At least not until I was married.)
However I seriously doubt that odds of 'putting out' are increased by fast food. It is possible to be masculine and authoritative without being cheap.
lol seriously. That's base price around here (Seattle), and you can easily triple it at Canlis, quadruple it at Lampreia. However, I had better be taking Denise Milani to dinner for that.
Somebody mod parent up. It's so effin' true. There are still a lot of vestiges of the Victorian mindset, and all they do is create the negative feedback loops that keep psychotherapists in business. People need to be honest about what they want, both with others and themselves, and go about getting it in a responsible way. If nothing else, that's how I'm going to raise my daughter. At least I can break the cycle.
I would hate to have to be the person who thinks self expression is stupid. You must have a subconscious low opinion of yourself for some reason. Get therapy.
Liberty is never crap, regardless of where one seeks it.
The problem boils down to reconciling older paradigms and ethics with the ease of access and reference provided by the intertrons. Back in the Pre-Internet days somebody could subscribe to otherwise objectionable periodicals or be a member of politically marginalized groups and so long as they kept a low profile otherwise it would be entirely private. It's illegal to read others' snail mail and the only way to find out who was a member of what would be to hire somebody to follow them around, too expensive and time consuming.
However, now in the days of Google, it's easy and free to find out a lot of things about who subscribes to what, who is a member of this or that movement that somebody doesn't like, etc. etc.
Of course as it has been suggested by others on this topic, people can just use handles that they work hard at keeping separate from their 'real' lives. I myself am forced to do this by practical concerns. Ironically, it is the 'real' lives of people that ultimately become the least real. Just empty, fake polite drones, Stepford wives. No wonder 'anonymous' is becoming such a manic social force. People are becoming increasingly desperate to just be themselves without worrying about some retribution, not because they are terrible people but just because they're not the perfect, always friendly douche that every employer seems to cream themselves over.
I think its also a reflection of the generation gap. Generationally we're reaching the stage where middle management now knows just enough about technology to be dangerous and annoying, but they're still too old to have grown up 'in' the internet. When all the people who were born after 1980 make up a majority of hiring managers, I expect there to at least be more understanding.
A few meters? What are you smoking? I've seen HERF devices induce current on really small (inches) electronics. Whether that scales all the way down to nano I don't really know (probably depends on frequency and power), but it sure as hell isn't 'meters'.
Too bad humans aren't mice. (The subject of the study you alluded to.) Rather another study looked at the behaviors between different generations and genders within families with gay members. That study found that the mothers of gay men were more sexually active than the mothers of straight men. It has been hypothesized that homosexuality is not much more than a genetically inherited predisposition to sexually desire a gender in a 'more than normal' way. This is why it survives natural selection, because the women who might possess a gene that leans some of their male offspring toward homosexuality are so much more sexually active than other women that their genetic material is very likely to continue, perhaps recessively, in other offspring who themselves reproduce.
There has to be a significant amount of learned behavior/social pressure. I myself want to adopt at least one child (I have one biologically already) probably as much because my own adoption as any more practical reasoning about doing something good for that child.
And the only way to realize that is through further in-depth research and then the application of genetic modification. And if you're going to modify genes, the ones with negative effects are going to go. That sort of thing won't happen monolithicly overnight, so that will increase the chance that previously unrecognized positive and negative effects of changes will be recognized and applied back to the system. That's science.
Yeah, I'd totally want to have problems with major organs, be weak all my life and live half as long just so I could avoid a disease that virtually doesn't exist in the post-industrial environment I live in. Awesome. Oh, and the only way that the symptom non-presenting carrier state of the gene could be useful against malaria would be by, oh shit, very selective genetic screening or gene therapy! Hur hur.
Slashdot Mirror
heh, I watch Kojak too, almost every night at work between tech support calls.
But yeah, this BS 'article' needs to be updated with an apology for being so dumb.
This. I stream Netflix vids on both XP and Vista boxes at different times of day, and I almost never see buffering. Maybe once a week if that. Either this guy cheesed off somebody at Netflix and they're picking on him, or there's something wrong with his connection or system config.
You're confusing the limits of human beings to create perfect systems with the existence of systems. Does communism not exist because attempts at it never live up to the ideal? Many ancient, medieval, and modern societies are in varying degrees meritocractic. (Just as there are varying degrees of freedom or democracy, or do those not exist too unless they are perfect, complete, and total?)
Your second sentence is the most woefully deficient syllogism I've ever seen effected. If meritocracy is derived from elitism, then being an elitist makes meritocracy unstable if it exists? And therefore what you want to be true is, and what I want to be true isn't? I wish I could summon the ghost of Demosthenes to slap the shit out of you for such terrible logic. Rather than deal with any rational progression of what your definition of terms are (I linked to a freakin' article) to how those concepts interact to produce a result, you just say, essentially, it is because ipse dixit.
What else, though, could I expect from somebody who says a socio-political structure has never existed simply because no structure has lived up to some abstract, perfect ideal. By that definition, nothing exists. Pure nonsense.
If somebody doesn't believe their opinion is better, they have self-esteem issues. (And in a social Darwinistic sense, if somebody believes their opinion isn't better, they're right.) Beware the argumentum ad temperantiam.
Elitism itself is rational, and leads to meritocracy, not by itself exclusively to tyranny nor racism, and certainly not genocide.
There are reasons to disarm an entire society. There are reasons not to. "Compelling" arguments are made for both sides, as both exist or existed somewhere.
I give more credence to the reasons not to do so. Such as tyranny (scroll down to Athenaion Politeia 14-15), racist oppression, and worst, out-right genocide, over and over.
While this issue is so entrenched that debating it is usually completely unproductive, you seem like a moderate which is encouraging.
.45 fullsize var. C), so I do walk the talk. I carried it now for four years (since I turned 21, the minimum age for my state), and I have never had to draw it. However, I do end up being essentially a bodyguard for everybody around me. I'm not a sworn officer, and I don't have to worry about moving violations or zoning laws or paperwork, but if somebody does get robbed, assaulted, or otherwise maliciously put in imminent danger of significant bodily harm, I will step in and do what seems most prudent to stop it. That's not to say that my first thought is 'shoot the guy'. That is a responsible person's last thought. Most of the time when a criminal is faced with a gun, they just stop (the whole 'not wanting to get shot' thing again) and/or run. Estimates are that in the US privately-held firearms are used to interdict 2.5 million crimes a year, and only in about 5% are shots fired (I recommend gunfacts.info if you're interested in a much more detailed breakdown with sources cited and graphs and so forth).
However, there are some fundamental assumptions that need correction. Mass ownership of firearms doesn't make it 'easy to kill people'. Quite the opposite. Switzerland is full of households with state-issued assault rifles, and yet their per capita rate of murder is one of the lowest in the world. An armed-and-lawful society is the strongest possible social structure. Serious crimes become suicidal endeavors, which allows the armed-and-lawful individuals to lead peaceful lives.
In the US, those states which have higher rates per capita of concealed carrying of handguns have fewer violent crimes. Once again, this is because those who would perpetrate them are rightly afraid of being shot. The highest rates of violent crime in the US are invariably in cities that have the most 'gun control'. If somebody is going to commit murder, they aren't going to pay any attention to whether it's legal or not to have a certain weapon in a certain place. The only people who care about those laws are the very people a potential murderer is likely to kill.
The funny thing is, most of the state concealed carry laws have gone into effect in the last two decades. One after another the same tired argument gets trotted out: if more people carry guns, more people will get killed! And in every instance, after the laws pass, violent crime either goes down or remains the same. That's simply because the average guy isn't a murderer. Hardcore criminals will always be armed, regardless of laws, that's because they're criminals. Arming their potential victims is what changes the game.
Suggesting that armed resistance by the Jews would have led to a worse holocaust is kind of absurd. That's a poor gloss for the racism of gun control, both in Nazi Germany and in the US. The first gun control laws here were designed to disarm the black population so that they couldn't resist the KKK. You have to disarm people in order to control them, a lesson that goes all the way back to Pisistratus.
I myself carry a sidearm every day (an H&K USP
I posted this, I don't know how my Anonymous box got checked...
The Europeans have nobody to blame but themselves for the kind of people that the British are. Stronger connection with the continent? Heh, yeah, what like when the Romans invaded? The Danes? The Viking raids and invasion attempts? The Normans? The Spanish would have if they could have, same with the French both under their monarchy and Napoleon, and lastly the Germans under Hitler (we'll let the cold war Russian threat slide). I think I'd be a little schizophrenic about 'the continent' with that much 'history'.
It's funny that the EUropeans hold Britain's former colonies against her. All the major states of Europe had colonies, the only difference was that they all came to nothing. Mexico doesn't have a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, Algeria sure as hell didn't save Europe from the Germans (twice), Indonesia never managed to put men on the moon, etc. etc. Many of the British colonies were the only European colonies to achieve a 'European' level of rule of law and quality of life, and I think that makes the other European powers jealous. I think it bothers the French that no matter how many words they make up for new technology, it's still only English that's accepted as the universal language of air-traffic control (because English-speakers invented powered flight). I think it bothers the great Universities of Europe that no matter how good they are, they'll never carry the gravitas of Oxford and the Rhodes Scholarship simply because that's what Britain impressed on all her colonies and sphere of influence as the excelsior achievement. Anyway, the point is well enough made.
The transfer of global primacy from the British in the 19th century to the Americans in the 20th represents a very unique event in known history. Never has the center of the primary political and military power on earth shifted such a vast geographic distance without a similarly vast shift in language or culture. As a grand coincidence, those two English-speaking centuries oversaw the production, dissemination, and regulation (or lack thereof) of virtually every new technology that has changed human civilization, including the internet. This made the 'Anglosphere' into the primary progenitor of the coming modern monoculture. Any scion of the other major cultural powers who understands these things would be justifiably miffed, and I believe they are.
Who caves? I don't know, maybe I'm just a gourmand, but I have tastebuds too and I've never taken a woman to restaurant I didn't want to go to myself. (At least not until I was married.)
However I seriously doubt that odds of 'putting out' are increased by fast food. It is possible to be masculine and authoritative without being cheap.
These. Now crawl back into your cardboard box. 3 stars? Please, only if they're Michelin stars.
lol seriously. That's base price around here (Seattle), and you can easily triple it at Canlis, quadruple it at Lampreia. However, I had better be taking Denise Milani to dinner for that.
Somebody mod parent up. It's so effin' true. There are still a lot of vestiges of the Victorian mindset, and all they do is create the negative feedback loops that keep psychotherapists in business. People need to be honest about what they want, both with others and themselves, and go about getting it in a responsible way. If nothing else, that's how I'm going to raise my daughter. At least I can break the cycle.
The big guy with the baseball bat. Seriously, would you want to mess with the Yakuza? Don't you like your kneecaps?
I would hate to have to be the person who thinks self expression is stupid. You must have a subconscious low opinion of yourself for some reason. Get therapy.
The world needs more people like you.
Liberty is never crap, regardless of where one seeks it.
The problem boils down to reconciling older paradigms and ethics with the ease of access and reference provided by the intertrons. Back in the Pre-Internet days somebody could subscribe to otherwise objectionable periodicals or be a member of politically marginalized groups and so long as they kept a low profile otherwise it would be entirely private. It's illegal to read others' snail mail and the only way to find out who was a member of what would be to hire somebody to follow them around, too expensive and time consuming.
However, now in the days of Google, it's easy and free to find out a lot of things about who subscribes to what, who is a member of this or that movement that somebody doesn't like, etc. etc.
Of course as it has been suggested by others on this topic, people can just use handles that they work hard at keeping separate from their 'real' lives. I myself am forced to do this by practical concerns. Ironically, it is the 'real' lives of people that ultimately become the least real. Just empty, fake polite drones, Stepford wives. No wonder 'anonymous' is becoming such a manic social force. People are becoming increasingly desperate to just be themselves without worrying about some retribution, not because they are terrible people but just because they're not the perfect, always friendly douche that every employer seems to cream themselves over.
I think its also a reflection of the generation gap. Generationally we're reaching the stage where middle management now knows just enough about technology to be dangerous and annoying, but they're still too old to have grown up 'in' the internet. When all the people who were born after 1980 make up a majority of hiring managers, I expect there to at least be more understanding.
In any case, FUCK. THAT. SHIT. That is all.
http://www.xkcd.com/137/
A few meters? What are you smoking? I've seen HERF devices induce current on really small (inches) electronics. Whether that scales all the way down to nano I don't really know (probably depends on frequency and power), but it sure as hell isn't 'meters'.
Here it is I think.
Too bad humans aren't mice. (The subject of the study you alluded to.) Rather another study looked at the behaviors between different generations and genders within families with gay members. That study found that the mothers of gay men were more sexually active than the mothers of straight men. It has been hypothesized that homosexuality is not much more than a genetically inherited predisposition to sexually desire a gender in a 'more than normal' way. This is why it survives natural selection, because the women who might possess a gene that leans some of their male offspring toward homosexuality are so much more sexually active than other women that their genetic material is very likely to continue, perhaps recessively, in other offspring who themselves reproduce.
Mod parent up.
Furthermore, my primary USB flash drive is 8 GB.
There has to be a significant amount of learned behavior/social pressure. I myself want to adopt at least one child (I have one biologically already) probably as much because my own adoption as any more practical reasoning about doing something good for that child.
And the only way to realize that is through further in-depth research and then the application of genetic modification. And if you're going to modify genes, the ones with negative effects are going to go. That sort of thing won't happen monolithicly overnight, so that will increase the chance that previously unrecognized positive and negative effects of changes will be recognized and applied back to the system. That's science.
Yeah, I'd totally want to have problems with major organs, be weak all my life and live half as long just so I could avoid a disease that virtually doesn't exist in the post-industrial environment I live in. Awesome. Oh, and the only way that the symptom non-presenting carrier state of the gene could be useful against malaria would be by, oh shit, very selective genetic screening or gene therapy! Hur hur.