Re:Typical cheesy psychobabble.
on
Hi-Tech Repo Man
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· Score: 1
There is no such thing as "outside the framework". If I say "everything", there is no thing that is possible of escaping it. Otherwise, you are just playing with semantics. Even if there is a spiritual realm, it is still part of everything, part of the framework. Whether there is a spiritual realm, or God, or Nirvana, is really not pertinent to this discussion.
It is interesting to hear about philosophies that ask you to give up an entire type of thinking, such as "do not cling to anything." What about the philosophy of not clinging to anything!? If he follows his advice, he should easily depart from his own philosophy, and start clinging to other things--a contradiction!
There is a reason why people "cling". It is because things have value to them. If you do not cling to something, it is because it has no value to you. A person who clings to nothing sounds much like an amoralist. To see a little girl drowning in the pond bothers them not. To see a cute little puppy bludgeoned to death bothers them not. For someone to forcibly enter their house and slaughter their wife and children bothers them not. I don't want to be that person, thank you very much. I want things to have value, I want to care what happens around me.
When I look at people who get concerned over the smallest things, I used to feel as you do, "What an overreaction. They are assigning much to much importance to this small little thing." But then I realized that for them to act otherwise would be foolish. Why? Because they have already taken care of the big things in life. It's just like Maslov's pyramid. A person is going to worry about breathing before they worry about eating, and they are going to worry about eating before they worry about combing their hair.
But what if someone just stopped caring after they already settled the basic needs: food, air, shelter? That would be a truly pathetic human. Even though they don't need anything more, to not try to achieve higher goals would be foolish. They would have nothing to do. They would just sit there until they were hungry again. What a truly marvelous existence you speak of!
I'm all for living within my means, and not sweating the small things. But to feel sufficed with no more than is required to keep a human vegetable alive, that is truly pathetic. If that is existence, then I might as well be the human vegetable. But I am not. I strive for higher things. And I strive for these things within the framework that I exist, because there is nothing else beyond me and this framework. What happens in the world (the framework) does matter to me, and I am not ashamed of this.
Muslim culture objectifies women worse than any other culture of its size. America still has some prejudices towards women, regarding them as frail, inept, and only good for mothering. Now take those prejudices and multiply them 100 times, and you get the culture of Islam. Here, a women who has sex out of wedlock is already dead. Such a women has disgraced their family so much, that, for the family to have any face restored in the eyes of their community, the women must be killed. Civilized indeed.
Now look at some of the most violent regions in the world: Africa, Balkans, Gaza Strip. I see a remarked absense of all video games in these regions. A person who plays many video games and watches many movies usually has a good idea of what is virtual and what is real. Such people tend to have more open philosophies, to encompass most of the perspectives that they have come across.
But for people in these wildly violent regions, there is only the real. They are told one story, and by God, that is the One True Way and every one must believe it, or they are so far out of the mental radar, that their life is unimportant. If you want to know what really causes death, that's it.
Shared cultural experiences give a shared perspective, and suddenly everyone knows what everyone else is talking about. They're all on the same wavelength. That's impossible in a media deprived or media controlled world.
I question the existence of the business model that depends on ownership of information. People are still going to need information gatherers, and inventors, regardless of copyright law. You do not shut down the economic system when you get rid of copyright.
But you have corporations who exist solely through copywrites that they buy and gaurd. For me, I would feel great if someone was giving away something I spent 6 months of my life developing. It's a matter a pride in my work. I am less interested in money than I am recognition. Even if I get no money off of what I develop, the popularity of the product makes the services that I can provide much more attractive. And people will always need informational services, such as programming custom solutions.
Taking information is not theft, as information is infinitely reproducible. Businesses such as the MPAA and RIAA should not even exist. To me, your argument is no more convincing than that of a slave-trader, who says that elimination of the slave trade will eliminate jobs for his white workers, and reduce the profits of cotton farms. There is a much greater moral imperative than the measley economic gain that is wrongly given to these amoral corporations.
Re:This is a Bad thing
on
NSA Inside?
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· Score: 1
The NSA has no motivation to release any technology that they cannot crack. It would be like the police departments handing out radar detectors.
The point made in the article about helping out national firms is bullshit. If they release this open source, then they are helping both US firms and firms abroad, as well as anyone who would want to try to circumvent these protections.
The most likely story is that this tool is something the NSA would like to use, but is not brought to the level of functionality to make it truly secure from the NSA itself.
I do agree that there is likely no backdoor. Clearly, they would not be so stupid to put in something like
mail(root_password, "password_harvester@nsa.gov");
in the code.
And imagine that they managed to put a backdoor into the code that was so subtle that it could not be seen in any localized portion of the system. Chances are, if it ever gets implemented in Linux, these subtle features will get changed enough in the process of code integration, that they will no longer be functional.
I totally agree. It's just a matter of perspective. There are several other factors influencing the perspective as well as the ones you list:
Once you learn X, other people seem dumber when they talk about X. It is much easier to see other people's flawed thinking when you know more about the subject.
As a graduate student, the classes you took most recently have much more intelligent students than the ones you are teaching. This is true at any level. To a 9th grader, a 5th grader's attempt at solving an algebra problem will look naive and stupid. As a teacher, you must learn to step in other people's shoes. Remember that you did not obtain the knowledge you have overnight.
As a good student, you probably hung out with other good students. When you are forced to interact with the class en'masse, you have to see the good and bad students.
Going with the parent poster's point. You probably never got too much info about how good other people's work was in classes you were taking. If you got too much detail, after all, it would be cheating. Without having this information, you probably assumed that you were of average ability. Of course, you were not.
If murder demands a certain penalty, it should demand that penalty regardless of the race, color, creed, or religion of either victim or assailant.
Agreed. But the penalty for murder should differ based on the intentionality of the assailant. If a little kid gets killed because he dashes out into the street before I can stop the car, then no one will argue that I am to blame. But if I mow through a crowd of pedestrians and scream, "I am the angel of death!" then the matter is different entirely. In each case, however, the victims are just as dead. No crime can occur without intention or negligence.
No one is arguing that it is the physical attributes of the assailant or victim that spell out the penalty of a crime. If John hates Jim because Jim's having sex with John's wife, then it doesn't matter what race John or Jim is, the intention is pretty clear. The set of people that John is likely to harm in the future is confined to those who have wronged him in some way.
But what if John killed Jim because he didn't like his race? Then the set of people that John is likely to harm in the future is very large. In this case, John is much more dangerous. So it is appropriate to punish him for his racist beliefs.
But I would agree with you to a certain degree. I don't think that making a special legal status for "hate crimes" is appropriate. Such considerations should be specific to the case at hand. For example, if John kills Jim just because he feels like killing someone, anyone, then he is more dangerous than either the racist or the jealous husband.
Hate crime legislation is too specific. Special crimes for hate crimes should be subsumed under current sentencing guidelines, and judges should have enough leeway to give appropriate punishments to all types of murderers. But do not forget that any type of murder is hate-based, and it is the hate responsible for the murder that is being punished.
If you tell someone a lie often enough and long enough, they will believe it. It might not be that you were wrong as a younger person. It might just be that you have accepted the attitudes of the older generation. You are not going to get anything accomplished in work if you say, "Well, if you had more experience, you would see why that doesn't work." It is very hard to believe something that does not have proper rationalization. And the "you just need more experience" argument can be applied to anything, so is not very rational indeed. You should explain to the person why they are wrong, without simply saying, "You are young, thus incapable of making a correct decision." Imagine if I said you were wrong simply because of your age. You would (justly) be angry. Many older people immediately think themselves wiser to the newer generation. If age indeed imparts wisdom, then they would not insultingly dismiss the younger generation. I was dismissed because of my age, and just left. I was the youngest person in the group, and the only one who knew what was going on. When I left, they were screwed. Willfully disrespecting me on nearly every issue, the manager really demonstrated the wisdom of his age there!
At my old job it was reverse. With age some people become more strong-headed, and more clueless. Just depends on the person. I was given no respect at the old job, and eventually left. Unfortunately for them, I was the only one who knew what was going on, and they were screwed when I left. You can talk "experience", and "political" wisdom all day long. But if you don't have the developer, none of it matters. You have to have the developer, but you don't have to have the management. People who forget this end up getting nothing done.
It is very important to learn how to apply, how to get results. But learning the conceptual fundamentals is also important.
During my senior year in college there were two classes in 3D computer graphics. One of the classes relied heavily on the OpenGL API, making calls to the various methods to give quick, cheap, pretty pictures. But I chose the other class, that taught graphics from the mathematical fundamentals. Why? I prefer to be a leader, not a follower. If I wanted to be the first person to code a 3D game on a PDA, just knowing the OpenGL API wouldn't help me. If I wanted to program a 3D Java applet before JDK 1.3, I wouldn't have been able to do it just knowing the OpenGL API.
There is a reason the term "script kiddie" is derided so often among computer users. Actually creating a hack/crack/exploit is so much more satisfying than using it, that once it is written, the author often feels no need to use it to cause damage.
Don't get me wrong, "applying" knowledge is just as important. No use in creating the ultimate widget if no one uses it.
And considered the right way, all knowledge is no more than application. Bertrand Russell derived the entire basis of mathematics from merely "applying" the laws of logic. But the real dichotomy is not
"application vs. creation", but "use vs. creation". It is in general much more interesting to create than it is to use. That is what makes programming so much fun.
It is a common idea that you cannot own information. This is not held by everyone, but it is a common idea in the slashdot crowd. It probably harks back on the idea that you cannot own something that is infinitely reproduceable, if this reproduction is not intrusive. The cheeseburger analogy gets close to this, so I would simply say that YES, it is ok for people to take your cheeseburgers without asking.
After an entire movie about comic books, it is revealed that Bruce's character is a comic book hero and Samuel L. is his nemesis.
Surprise! If you didn't see any of that coming, God help you.
If you saw it coming that Tyler Durden was actually Ed Norton, you are a truly gifted film viewer. Fight Club's ending made
me reevaluate the ENTIRE movie. It shook up the audience completely.
Actually, the plot twist in Fight Club really detracted from the movie. The movie gives a wonderful exposition of the virtues and vices of capitalism and anarchism on a societal scale, then suddenly zooms down to the scale of a human being to give a bullshit twist that confuses the entire message of the movie. Fight Club would have been a much better movie if the main character was one person throughout. But I guess the writers felt more was needed, so they had the main character be two people rather than one.
I thought Unbreakable was a great movie, but that was probably because everyone else thought it was shitty. People remember the experience of the Sixth Sense. They went in expecting standard ghost story fair, and were blown away by the quality of the movie. Then they expect to be blown away by Unbreakable, yet their expectations are already high to start. They expect to be overwhelmed despite high expectations. Of course they're going to be disappointed!
People are saying, "You call that a plot twist?!? How lame!" Why does the ending even have to be a twist? A good story both surprises and fulfills. The audience's expectations must be fulfilled, or else they will disbelieve what they see. And there is no reason to see what you've already seen, so there must be some surprises. I, for one, thought the movie played well against my expectations. Were I to see someone in the same situation as Bruce in real life, I would expect him to act as he did in the movie. This is the part where my expectations are fulfilled. But, being as I knew I was watching a movie, I half expected Bruce to tear off his shirt and start flying around. The surprise is in how real the directory kept the movie.
As for Jackson, we see the journey of a man who isn't sure what his life is about, but in the search, he finds out, and finds out that he's been living it all along. He needs Bruce, or there is no reason for him to exist. The great thing about movies is that you can change the world. But the people still have to be believable, even if they have spaceships or superpowers. The fact that the people were believable is what made me enjoy this movie.
Thanks man
Anyone wanna give up a sec and teach me how to do that? (html link)
Just put a space in it or something so Slashdot will not see it as an actual link.
Thanks
Dude, just right click on the web page and "view source". You can get a lot of info this way.
A truly safe distribution would be locked under 50 feet of cement and never turned on, lest it's data possibly be altered by evil crackers. But I actually want to use my computer, so I care very little about security on my machine. Even maintaining moderate security can take many hours I just don't have, or that I'd rather spend doing something useful, such as creating programs, rather than just protecting the one's I have. People too concerned about security remind me of people too concerned about diet. If you count every ounce you eat, and spend most of your time exercising, you'll be fit and healthy, but you'll only get about 2 hours a day to enjoy it. Me, I enjoy 4 hours a day (besides work) in sloth and laziness. I don't want to become wrapped up in diet so much that I lose sight of the end goal, enjoying life. I don't want to become so wrapped up in security that I lose sight of the end goal, using and enjoying my computer.
Many people never figure out how to use many advanced features on their computer until there is a GUI interface. I may be able to do less with the GUI configuration tool of GNOME than I was able to do with the configuration files of fvwm2, but I am much more likely to use the GUI configuration. Several years ago when I used fvwm2, it took enormous amounts of time to customize the window manager the way I wanted it. After a while, I just gave up and learned to live with the configuration that was dealt to me. There just wasn't time to customize everything I wanted to. With the GUI configuration tools that exist now, finding time to configure my interface is easy, because I don't have to hunt through configuration files and man pages. Today, there are less options that I can configure, but I change more of those options, because I can.
In the end, each person needs to find the balance that is right for them. To have more configurability, they need to invest more time to do the actual configuring. To be able to configure in less time, they need to give up some of their configurability. This is a wide scale ranging from the Macintosh interface to actually programming an X application yourself. Obviously, actually programming the thing is the ultimate in configuration, but it takes the most time. On the other hand, using the Macintosh interface is much like watching a movie, you just sit back and watch without being able to change anything.
It's mental training, not physical. As someone mentioned above, you could make the same argument about grand chessmasters--they just sit around on their fat ass analyzing the board. No physical conditioning whatsoever. Different activities practice different things, chess is deep contemplation, video games are mental quickness, and olympics are one dimensional physical performance (such as throwing a javelin).
At least in the more traditional interpretations of Christianity, Jesus and friends did perform miracles that simply would not be allowed in the current theories of science. If you say, for instance, that gravity holds, except for Jesus, this is somewhat opposed to what science says.
On the other hand, there does not have to be a schism. But without a schism, many concepts become watered down. The religious person may have trouble accepting that the universe is 15 billion (or so) years old. The scientist may have trouble accepting that the schizophrenic is experiencing a "divergent" reality that is just as valid as the one he accepts.
So, there are reasons that such a schism exists. Are they good reasons? Maybe. I, for one, fall more to the side of science. But I still recognize the problem of proving that what I experience is more "real" than what you experience.
This was before ICBMs. The thought of Russians orbiting over the US scared many people. They could simply drop the nukes without even having to fly them from anywhere. We didn't want the Russians having an ability to make war that we lacked, so we struggled to catch up.
Advances in the space industry help fuel advances in other fields, fields that eventually become useful in their own right. Example: Integrated circuits were not produced cheaply or in quantity until weight considerations forced the computer equipment to be light at any cost. Result: the beginning of the computer industry as we know it. I would hazard a guess that computers have been helpful overall to society.
Another benefit of space travel: satellites for communication. There are likely to be useful side effects of increasing space visitation, but who knows what they are now?
that everything goes well, or else the capitalization of the space program is screwed. If that dude doesn't make it back, then who is going to want to take the risk? No one. Back in the 60's, the space program kept going because it was a war, the Cold War. Getting into space was a matter of national security. But these individual citizens are doing for the thrill and excitement. No one is going to throw their life away just because it will be exciting if they live.
Don't you mean that they'll integrate the client with the next release of Windows?
No. I meant IE. It doesn't matter. Since IE is integrated into Windows, integrating MS-IM into IE will indirectly integrate it into Windows. But more importantly, even if the company is split, the Apps division will use its dominance of the browser market to dominate the IM market. Networking effects don't just apply to operating systems, they also apply to middleware (such as IE) and even applications (such as Office).
Slashdot Mirror
It is interesting to hear about philosophies that ask you to give up an entire type of thinking, such as "do not cling to anything." What about the philosophy of not clinging to anything!? If he follows his advice, he should easily depart from his own philosophy, and start clinging to other things--a contradiction!
There is a reason why people "cling". It is because things have value to them. If you do not cling to something, it is because it has no value to you. A person who clings to nothing sounds much like an amoralist. To see a little girl drowning in the pond bothers them not. To see a cute little puppy bludgeoned to death bothers them not. For someone to forcibly enter their house and slaughter their wife and children bothers them not. I don't want to be that person, thank you very much. I want things to have value, I want to care what happens around me.
But what if someone just stopped caring after they already settled the basic needs: food, air, shelter? That would be a truly pathetic human. Even though they don't need anything more, to not try to achieve higher goals would be foolish. They would have nothing to do. They would just sit there until they were hungry again. What a truly marvelous existence you speak of!
I'm all for living within my means, and not sweating the small things. But to feel sufficed with no more than is required to keep a human vegetable alive, that is truly pathetic. If that is existence, then I might as well be the human vegetable. But I am not. I strive for higher things. And I strive for these things within the framework that I exist, because there is nothing else beyond me and this framework. What happens in the world (the framework) does matter to me, and I am not ashamed of this.
Now look at some of the most violent regions in the world: Africa, Balkans, Gaza Strip. I see a remarked absense of all video games in these regions. A person who plays many video games and watches many movies usually has a good idea of what is virtual and what is real. Such people tend to have more open philosophies, to encompass most of the perspectives that they have come across.
But for people in these wildly violent regions, there is only the real. They are told one story, and by God, that is the One True Way and every one must believe it, or they are so far out of the mental radar, that their life is unimportant. If you want to know what really causes death, that's it.
Shared cultural experiences give a shared perspective, and suddenly everyone knows what everyone else is talking about. They're all on the same wavelength. That's impossible in a media deprived or media controlled world.
But you have corporations who exist solely through copywrites that they buy and gaurd. For me, I would feel great if someone was giving away something I spent 6 months of my life developing. It's a matter a pride in my work. I am less interested in money than I am recognition. Even if I get no money off of what I develop, the popularity of the product makes the services that I can provide much more attractive. And people will always need informational services, such as programming custom solutions.
Taking information is not theft, as information is infinitely reproducible. Businesses such as the MPAA and RIAA should not even exist. To me, your argument is no more convincing than that of a slave-trader, who says that elimination of the slave trade will eliminate jobs for his white workers, and reduce the profits of cotton farms. There is a much greater moral imperative than the measley economic gain that is wrongly given to these amoral corporations.
End of message.
The point made in the article about helping out national firms is bullshit. If they release this open source, then they are helping both US firms and firms abroad, as well as anyone who would want to try to circumvent these protections.
The most likely story is that this tool is something the NSA would like to use, but is not brought to the level of functionality to make it truly secure from the NSA itself.
I do agree that there is likely no backdoor. Clearly, they would not be so stupid to put in something like mail(root_password, "password_harvester@nsa.gov"); in the code.
And imagine that they managed to put a backdoor into the code that was so subtle that it could not be seen in any localized portion of the system. Chances are, if it ever gets implemented in Linux, these subtle features will get changed enough in the process of code integration, that they will no longer be functional.
- Once you learn X, other people seem dumber when they talk about X. It is much easier to see other people's flawed thinking when you know more about the subject.
- As a graduate student, the classes you took most recently have much more intelligent students than the ones you are teaching. This is true at any level. To a 9th grader, a 5th grader's attempt at solving an algebra problem will look naive and stupid. As a teacher, you must learn to step in other people's shoes. Remember that you did not obtain the knowledge you have overnight.
- As a good student, you probably hung out with other good students. When you are forced to interact with the class en'masse, you have to see the good and bad students.
- Going with the parent poster's point. You probably never got too much info about how good other people's work was in classes you were taking. If you got too much detail, after all, it would be cheating. Without having this information, you probably assumed that you were of average ability. Of course, you were not.
Cheers,Brandon.
No one is arguing that it is the physical attributes of the assailant or victim that spell out the penalty of a crime. If John hates Jim because Jim's having sex with John's wife, then it doesn't matter what race John or Jim is, the intention is pretty clear. The set of people that John is likely to harm in the future is confined to those who have wronged him in some way.
But what if John killed Jim because he didn't like his race? Then the set of people that John is likely to harm in the future is very large. In this case, John is much more dangerous. So it is appropriate to punish him for his racist beliefs.
But I would agree with you to a certain degree. I don't think that making a special legal status for "hate crimes" is appropriate. Such considerations should be specific to the case at hand. For example, if John kills Jim just because he feels like killing someone, anyone, then he is more dangerous than either the racist or the jealous husband.
Hate crime legislation is too specific. Special crimes for hate crimes should be subsumed under current sentencing guidelines, and judges should have enough leeway to give appropriate punishments to all types of murderers. But do not forget that any type of murder is hate-based, and it is the hate responsible for the murder that is being punished.
If you tell someone a lie often enough and long enough, they will believe it. It might not be that you were wrong as a younger person. It might just be that you have accepted the attitudes of the older generation. You are not going to get anything accomplished in work if you say, "Well, if you had more experience, you would see why that doesn't work." It is very hard to believe something that does not have proper rationalization. And the "you just need more experience" argument can be applied to anything, so is not very rational indeed. You should explain to the person why they are wrong, without simply saying, "You are young, thus incapable of making a correct decision." Imagine if I said you were wrong simply because of your age. You would (justly) be angry. Many older people immediately think themselves wiser to the newer generation. If age indeed imparts wisdom, then they would not insultingly dismiss the younger generation. I was dismissed because of my age, and just left. I was the youngest person in the group, and the only one who knew what was going on. When I left, they were screwed. Willfully disrespecting me on nearly every issue, the manager really demonstrated the wisdom of his age there!
At my old job it was reverse. With age some people become more strong-headed, and more clueless. Just depends on the person. I was given no respect at the old job, and eventually left. Unfortunately for them, I was the only one who knew what was going on, and they were screwed when I left. You can talk "experience", and "political" wisdom all day long. But if you don't have the developer, none of it matters. You have to have the developer, but you don't have to have the management. People who forget this end up getting nothing done.
It is very important to learn how to apply, how to get results. But learning the conceptual fundamentals is also important.
During my senior year in college there were two classes in 3D computer graphics. One of the classes relied heavily on the OpenGL API, making calls to the various methods to give quick, cheap, pretty pictures. But I chose the other class, that taught graphics from the mathematical fundamentals. Why? I prefer to be a leader, not a follower. If I wanted to be the first person to code a 3D game on a PDA, just knowing the OpenGL API wouldn't help me. If I wanted to program a 3D Java applet before JDK 1.3, I wouldn't have been able to do it just knowing the OpenGL API.
There is a reason the term "script kiddie" is derided so often among computer users. Actually creating a hack/crack/exploit is so much more satisfying than using it, that once it is written, the author often feels no need to use it to cause damage.
Don't get me wrong, "applying" knowledge is just as important. No use in creating the ultimate widget if no one uses it.
And considered the right way, all knowledge is no more than application. Bertrand Russell derived the entire basis of mathematics from merely "applying" the laws of logic. But the real dichotomy is not "application vs. creation", but "use vs. creation". It is in general much more interesting to create than it is to use. That is what makes programming so much fun.
It is a common idea that you cannot own information. This is not held by everyone, but it is a common idea in the slashdot crowd. It probably harks back on the idea that you cannot own something that is infinitely reproduceable, if this reproduction is not intrusive. The cheeseburger analogy gets close to this, so I would simply say that YES, it is ok for people to take your cheeseburgers without asking.
Take for instance boxofficereport.com. The images load correctly in mozilla, but they don't load at all in netscape 4.x.
You don't even need to log onto the web, it's that easy! Just follow these three easy steps:
It's really that easy. You don't even have to pay me for using it, 'cause I'm such a nice guy.
Actually, the plot twist in Fight Club really detracted from the movie. The movie gives a wonderful exposition of the virtues and vices of capitalism and anarchism on a societal scale, then suddenly zooms down to the scale of a human being to give a bullshit twist that confuses the entire message of the movie. Fight Club would have been a much better movie if the main character was one person throughout. But I guess the writers felt more was needed, so they had the main character be two people rather than one.
I thought Unbreakable was a great movie, but that was probably because everyone else thought it was shitty. People remember the experience of the Sixth Sense. They went in expecting standard ghost story fair, and were blown away by the quality of the movie. Then they expect to be blown away by Unbreakable, yet their expectations are already high to start. They expect to be overwhelmed despite high expectations. Of course they're going to be disappointed!
People are saying, "You call that a plot twist?!? How lame!" Why does the ending even have to be a twist? A good story both surprises and fulfills. The audience's expectations must be fulfilled, or else they will disbelieve what they see. And there is no reason to see what you've already seen, so there must be some surprises. I, for one, thought the movie played well against my expectations. Were I to see someone in the same situation as Bruce in real life, I would expect him to act as he did in the movie. This is the part where my expectations are fulfilled. But, being as I knew I was watching a movie, I half expected Bruce to tear off his shirt and start flying around. The surprise is in how real the directory kept the movie.
As for Jackson, we see the journey of a man who isn't sure what his life is about, but in the search, he finds out, and finds out that he's been living it all along. He needs Bruce, or there is no reason for him to exist. The great thing about movies is that you can change the world. But the people still have to be believable, even if they have spaceships or superpowers. The fact that the people were believable is what made me enjoy this movie.
Dude, just right click on the web page and "view source". You can get a lot of info this way.
A truly safe distribution would be locked under 50 feet of cement and never turned on, lest it's data possibly be altered by evil crackers. But I actually want to use my computer, so I care very little about security on my machine. Even maintaining moderate security can take many hours I just don't have, or that I'd rather spend doing something useful, such as creating programs, rather than just protecting the one's I have. People too concerned about security remind me of people too concerned about diet. If you count every ounce you eat, and spend most of your time exercising, you'll be fit and healthy, but you'll only get about 2 hours a day to enjoy it. Me, I enjoy 4 hours a day (besides work) in sloth and laziness. I don't want to become wrapped up in diet so much that I lose sight of the end goal, enjoying life. I don't want to become so wrapped up in security that I lose sight of the end goal, using and enjoying my computer.
In the end, each person needs to find the balance that is right for them. To have more configurability, they need to invest more time to do the actual configuring. To be able to configure in less time, they need to give up some of their configurability. This is a wide scale ranging from the Macintosh interface to actually programming an X application yourself. Obviously, actually programming the thing is the ultimate in configuration, but it takes the most time. On the other hand, using the Macintosh interface is much like watching a movie, you just sit back and watch without being able to change anything.
It's mental training, not physical. As someone mentioned above, you could make the same argument about grand chessmasters--they just sit around on their fat ass analyzing the board. No physical conditioning whatsoever. Different activities practice different things, chess is deep contemplation, video games are mental quickness, and olympics are one dimensional physical performance (such as throwing a javelin).
It's enlightening to see what your superior education does for your social skills.
On the other hand, there does not have to be a schism. But without a schism, many concepts become watered down. The religious person may have trouble accepting that the universe is 15 billion (or so) years old. The scientist may have trouble accepting that the schizophrenic is experiencing a "divergent" reality that is just as valid as the one he accepts.
So, there are reasons that such a schism exists. Are they good reasons? Maybe. I, for one, fall more to the side of science. But I still recognize the problem of proving that what I experience is more "real" than what you experience.
This was before ICBMs. The thought of Russians orbiting over the US scared many people. They could simply drop the nukes without even having to fly them from anywhere. We didn't want the Russians having an ability to make war that we lacked, so we struggled to catch up.
Another benefit of space travel: satellites for communication. There are likely to be useful side effects of increasing space visitation, but who knows what they are now?
that everything goes well, or else the capitalization of the space program is screwed. If that dude doesn't make it back, then who is going to want to take the risk? No one. Back in the 60's, the space program kept going because it was a war, the Cold War. Getting into space was a matter of national security. But these individual citizens are doing for the thrill and excitement. No one is going to throw their life away just because it will be exciting if they live.