If one is productive, one can choose to work fewer hours and do the same amount of work, or work more hours and accomplish more. They are not mutually exclusive, and only a lazy person would choose to work fewer hours.
American workers stay longer in the office, at the factory or on the farm than their counterparts in Europe and most other rich nations, and they produce more per person over the year.
Both are true.
And the link between GDP and income is non-existent. No one has to to be paid more because they produce more. It would be nice in a morally controlled world, but that's not where Americans work.
I believe the study is just an example of random number crunching, where the people spending long hours in the office aren't necessarily the most productive, but create more wealth. An efficient factory line can make the 40-hour-and-under crowd very productive, enough to offset productivity loss over 55 hours.
I only read the article, which I suggest you do at the very least, and any assumptions made were due to not reading the actual report.
I actually fail to see what is really that new with this
Reading is one thing, comprehending is another. For the first time, we know what can get rid of this very bad bug in a mammal, without using the previously accepted (and not at all controversial) fecal transplant when other antibiotics fail.
Mouse or not, this gives a target to look for in humans. And assuming all of the ingredients are human-compatible, this should result in a good step towards curing a very painful and debilitating condition.
The principle has been known for a while, but the exact mix that works for this particular bug has not been known. Hopefully you see where the big deal is now. Previous treatments offered certain strains which only succeeded under certain circumstances, most likely when the patient had some of the missing flora.
I won't address the rant, it is a blend of ignorance, well-trodden fact, incomplete understanding, internal inconsistency, and a few others that can't be specified because they are wrapped around other fallacies. If you indeed can read, you should read less mainstream media, and certainly quit reading slashdot comments.
Rather than further mod you to oblivion, I chose to leave both your initial reply, where you admit to willfully remaining ignorant on something you dismiss, and the followup where you actually admit to learn something.
Especially after being hacked several times already. Standard response among large companies is to make new rules and clamp down everything. That should have happened two breaches ago.
On the other hand, I spent 45 minutes tonight trying to search for what the dial does on an HDTV antenna. Fine tuning knob they say. It allows you to fine-tune something so your something comes in better. Every hit was either a review or some shopping site.
I even removed some by adding "-purchase -buy -store" and the top 5 never changed. I don't want to buy it, I want to know what the fuck it does.
In the AltaVista days, I could find what I wanted in the first page. Northern lights, I could find it in the top 5. Before Google's IPO, I always told people I could find what they couldn't because I "knew how to program google". The search term(s) are the important part.
Today's google just doesn't have that edge. It tries to infer what you want, and it skews the result towards adverts. I have an advert running on OTA tv which says that Google reps will be in town. 80% of moms google something after being exposed to an ad. Grow your business, attend the whatever it is.
I'mma tell you, like Wu told me. Cash rules everything, around me.
I even resorted to Bing last week. To see which was better. Bing found some things Google didn't. And it pains me to say that, partly because Bing is a stupid name, and partly because Microsoft did something right. Outside of their developer tools, I can't compliment MS beyond being in the right place at the right time.
If I can't find out how something works because Google wants me to buy something with their referring, something is either wrong with Google, or wrong with the internet.
I'd say it was the internet, but given Google's local advertising, I'm leaning towards Google again.
Biologically speaking, it is straight people who keep producing gay offspring. If straight people really wanted to stop the gay, they would quit having gay kids.
Or alternatively, the insistence of a man marrying a woman and having children, and anything else being proof of queerness, is an imposition straight people make on the gays.
If we just let the gays go be gay and not pass on their gayness, they would either die off if it's genetic, or live happy lives without being persecuted.
So yeah, seems okay to be gay. If your lineage dies off that's what nature intended, or what your deity intended, or what destiny decided. It's an individual choice. If the individual is okay with that, it speaks for itself. If not, I guess they will try as hard as they can to infiltrate the other sex, or be infiltrated, to pass on the genes. And spread the gay further.
Did you use CTRL-X or CTRL-C? Or Edit/Copy vs. Edit/Cut?
I'm guessing it was copy. Copy and paste. Like Xerox, a copier. Not a cutter.
"Cut and paste job" refers to the older method of physically cutting apart something to make a new work. Like Thomas Jefferson's Bible. It is also pejorative, implying something that can be done by one with little brain.
You can say the piss poor editing is a "cut and paste" job, because it is. A user being too lazy to "copy and paste" is pejorative enough, going the extra mile is not just unnecessary but actually clouds your meaning.
Language evolves, and I have already lost this fight. But hopefully this helps people.
You can argue that society is wrong, and I think make some good arguments for that, but George Carlin's argument is, quite frankly, a bad argument.
Way to miss the point. Carlin was the court jester, the only one allowed to mock the King. He was a philosopher who made a living picking out absurdities and presenting them to an audience. He didn't have an "Act", he had a lecture.
He wasn't making an argument, and everyone here trying to pull apart an argument that doesn't exist are tilting at windmills which also do not exist.
He was not making an argument, he was simply pointing out something that, in a certain context, appears to be an absurdity. It is more word play than anything else.
If you watch his lecture, he specifically says he doesn't understand it, not that it should be legal. The closest he gets to an argument is
why is it illegal to sell something that is perfectly legal to give away?
Further, he compares military recognition for killing or maiming people, with going to jail for giving someone an orgasm. There's your argument, if you want to find one.
This whole "thing plus other thing" nonsense is a red herring, and everyone who participated is an idiot.
Not because of government conspiracy, but due to social constructs which favor male children. And I think there is just as much "people in power" conspiracy going on in places where prostitution is illegal. Which is to say, none. If there were, Nevada would be heavily pressured to conform, or at least disallow anyone from out of state to participate.
Your observation is not incorrect, but taking it to the next level and implying that it is intentionally being used for that purpose is quite a jump. Especially when more obvious explanations abound, such as the inherited so-called Puritanical views, and the incestuous cycle where it's seen as wrong, so it becomes a political issue, and then "everyone knows" that it should be outlawed. So the voter pandering continues.
Many of the people voting to keep it illegal, and enforcing the law, are very much for the idea personally, and they have to keep up the facade. If everyone just blurted out what they really thought, honestly, we would have a lot less opposition. We have to get past the social construct before we can talk about it being an oppressive position.
I was interested in finding people from school, which is a bit difficult when people have unlisted mobile numbers and have moved to different cities. Facebook made it simple to find all but the one person I really wanted to find. That's a pretty good percentage, and had I persisted I could have gone through the friends-of-friends route.
I caught up with where people are, talked to the ones I wanted to talk to, filtered out the ones who found me. Then torched my account and haven't been back.
They can't e-mail or call if they don't know your number, and they can't stop by if they don't know that you moved.
It is especially good for situations like people off to college in different cities or states, keeping in touch with people from high school. I was writing letters in 1993, since my younger friends didn't have e-mail. With something like Facebook I could have made fewer trips home, keep in touch with friends from time to time, and maintain contact at university.
There are numerous other scenarios in which something like Facebook is a good solution.
Farmville is not one. Friending people you don't really want to talk to is not one. Leaving details which let people piece together things you want kept secret is not one. Having all of your friends available so you can talk in person or on the phone in real-time is not one.
Some people work odd hours, and staying in touch by leaving status updates so the group knows what everyone else is doing, or planning, is quite convenient.
I plan to hop on every 5 years to see who is alive, dead, married, divorced, moved, or suddenly rich and/or partially famous. And then slowly burn the account so it doesn't even resemble me, and let it go dormant.
Try telling that to someone who lives in a country where being gay can still get you killed, such as present-day Iraq, Pakistan or Jamaica.
Surely you recognise the word "becoming", and the distinction between the younger generation, who do not control the laws, and the elders who do? GP post is dead-on:
Sexual orientation is becoming less important, especially to the younger generation.
That's not always practical if the "safe" distance is in another country.
If a defense is impossible, you have to fall back on the next best defense. That doesn't change the best defense. The best defense against your parents finding out about your sexual orientation from someone else will always be to tell them yourself, from whatever distance is safe.
Facebook is social networking, and people have to realize that their socializations will be revealed. Socializing in public will reveal these sorts of things unintentionally, online or in person. Facebook's position is the only sane one in this case, since people do need to be educated about this sort of thing. Facebook shirks that duty while acknowledging it, since their business model depends on you revealing this information, at least to FB if not to your friends.
And soon it won't matter. Not soon enough, but tolerance is growing in general.
Fuck me sideways. The one time I have JavaScript enabled I mis-moderate. I understand the reasoning behind not being able to edit a comment, but re-moderating within a minute or two, when moderation takes place instantly with no confirmation should be the minimum allowed.
The computer hacker collective Anonymous has distanced itself from WikiLeaks, claiming the whistleblowers' site has become too focused on the personal tribulations of its founder, Julian Assange.
To be fair, "claiming" could be a collective verb or not. So the bold was inappropriate.
Fuck you, JavaScript programmers. I do your job better and more sensibly every day. Some of you are okay, but the others should be screwed with a 2 by 4, sideways.
I was going to suggest many of those. My few additions:
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. No explanation, just go read it.
Milgram Obedience Studies - Groupthink. For obvious reasons.
The Fountainhead - individualism to a limited extent is a positive thing, but Atlas Shrugged just punches the idea into the ground repeatedly. Roark is still an inspiration in my programming. Bag the ideology and all the idiots who reply based on ideology. I stopped reading for a few years after that one.
Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates - Tom Robbins. I read a page at random from hundreds of books over several years. This one got me reading again. I'd say that was a significant impact.
Consciousness Explained - Daniel C. Dennett - it's a little out of date at this point, but pretty much relevant.
Rousseau - The social contact. Helps navigate the coworker waters.
Survival of the Sickest - Moalem. Interesting look at why we are the way we are.
Curiously, each of these has made me a better employed programmer. Each has its own construct of the universe. When certain issues or problems come up, these models help put ideas in context so they can be explained. A framework for all situations.
Don't forget to learn a foreign language, or refresh it if you took it a long time ago. Different languages have different ways of describing the same thing.French and Japanese for the niche, Spanish and Chinese for the mass market, German and/or something Nordic for the "origin of English" perspective, or if you want to change your way of life something truly obscure.
You don't need years, just minutes. Ptolemaic system already did it. In fact, there are working physical models which demonstrate the relative positions of planets given a geocentric alignment.
Good Fuck, did you not consider that someone else might have done this in the thousands of years since we have had enlightened beings on our planet? Ptolemy based his work on the Babylonians.
Somewhere around the discovery of the functions of the Antikythera Mechanism, slashdot had a link to a website where you could switch between a geo- vs helio- centric view of the solar system, an animation which displayed what was happening at that moment in time. I could not find it in time for apathy to set in, Bing it if you feel the need.
Here's a picture for you to start with, undoubtedly created from a model
"If it worked for our founding fathers..." is a terrible argument. Even when you're trying to say that things get old faster so they same time period is effectively longer.
I take the opinion that most of the copyright-based industries are actually false economies. They have built up a business model based on the scarcity of a tangible object (vinyl or paper), and expect to continue that via artificial scarcity. It doesn't make any sense.
The duration argument has already been made. Optimum length for a copyright for both the owner and society as a whole is 14-17 years, depending on who you ask. It has nothing to do with the circumstances long ago. We adjust as times change.
Allow me to elaborate on laurelraven's 3-letter pimp-slap. ADP (Automatic Data Processing) has a market cap of 28.83B. According to ADP's 10-k from 2009, ADP processed payroll for 570,000 companies, delivered 51 million year-end tax statements (W-2), delivered 39 million employer payroll tax returns and deposits.
That's a pretty large site. Judging by the ignorance of your response, I'd say this is your first experience in taking the piss. Remember, the dinosaurs were on top of the Darwinian survivalist chain until that unpleasantness quite a few million years ago now. I bet they felt just as smug.
Now why don't you and laurelraven make up, kiss, and figure out how to make Mozilla aware of this new development?
I'm pretty sure you will see your response as a knee-jerk response since someone stepped on a sensitive toe of yours.
IE has been unresectable from windows ever since, starting at 2.0/win 3.11 when they started the whole COM idiocy
IE was the original "killer app" to get OLE/COM to be a must-have development platform. It was integrated into Windows to the point that explorer.exe simply hosts the SHELL32 objects, and can host the web/ftp browsing objects just as easily.
IE was the COM host that allowed click-and-run directly from the web to work. No installation needed, no explicit download - just click a button or a website, COM gets downloaded and magically you're running a secure banking session, or a game, or whatever someone decided to build.
the whole COM idiocy was allowing untrusted applications, with no verification and little in the way of asking users if they would like an application to run, to do damned near anything they pleased on the user's computer. Simply by visiting a web page. Unprotected foreign binary code running on your machine, typically under a super-user account.
the whole COM idiocy was pimping their awesome new drive-by software which made it infinitely easier to infect computers, by integrating it so deeply into the operating system that it could not be disabled without taking down your file browser, and in some cases the whole shell.
The design of OLE/COM is irrelevant to the decision to make it the most obvious and least sealable security hole in recent memory.
The article is great for situations like this when you read the poorly crafted summary and then have questions.
found that early humans had occasionally successfully interbred with Neanderthals
... meaning it probably did not work most of the time. What changed is most likely the rare chance in which it succeeded. It's not like they went from compatible to not compatible overnight. At some point the interbreeding stopped working.
I think what you are wondering is what caused the change. Were the populations separated for long enough that they were no longer compatible? Or did the increasingly rare successes just tend towards zero? Given the number of alternate theories presented, the people behind this research also wonder the same thing.
You did not read the post before asking gottabeme to read yours. The post began with an illustration of assumptions being made, then listed your assumptions.
If I pray for something and it does not happen, that does not mean my prayers were not answered. Or if I think about something without praying and my non-prayer does not appear to be answered, that does not mean it wasn't. My prayer, combined with that of others, may result in a situation in which it is not obvious to me that my prayer, or non-prayer, was even considered.
A kid finds a lamp, rubs it to shine it up a bit, and out pops the Genie. The genie grants him one wish. The kid says "I want to be Batman." So the Genie kills the kid's parents.
Was his request granted, and does the kid see that his request was granted?
We don't have the first clue what an alien civilization might do. We may have found one which is desperately trying to communicate with us but we just don't know it. We have a thought experiment by Dyson which is attempting to solve the problem by extrapolating from a string of assumptions which statistically speaking are probably increasingly invalid. The same flaw you made in your post. We may never find aliens, because they may not want to be found, and we almost certainly will never find God because he requires faith, not proof.
You missed the point of prayer completely. You don't pray solely to ask for things. It is supposed to be a time of personal meditation if you wish to so define it, also known as personal time which you dedicate solely for your deity of choice.
Psalm 23 is frequently used as a group prayer. It is a simple affirmation which requests nothing, not even acknowledgement, of the Christian god. Instead of requesting goodness and mercy, it says Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.
Similar conditions apply to the prescribed Salah, in which Muslims recite parts of the Qur'an. It would be strange for such a ritual to contain personal requests which a deity could choose to fulfill or reject.
The power of prayer is a brief period of affirmation and meditation, which has proven benefits if you exclude requests for financial gain, and balance out the apparently miraculous restoration of health with the passing away despite continuous, devoted prayer for another's health.
It is founded in true faith in the sense that you don't know if your request will be fulfilled. You have faith that either you will get what you asked for, or that somehow in not getting it you are playing a part in the plan set out for you by your chosen deity.
Repeatedly praying for something and not getting it can actually increase a person's faith, as they hold out for that one prayer that gets through, in the same way playing the slot machines all night without much more than a pittance in winnings makes people believe that the machine is "about to pay out".
What if the same chemicals in different circumstances could produce different emotions? What if I said that the difference between love and fear is simply context?
That your awareness on a conscious level of your surroundings colors the chemical stimulation to feel like a different emotion, invalidating the entire concept of emotion and whittling it down to a slightly-less-than-conscious decision tree which makes you feel love, or fear, or anger, or any number of emotions?
What if emotion is simply a state machine which, given predictable inputs of chemical and situational nature, results in what we in our self-importance as humans refer to as the inexplicable and ethereal state called "love"?
This is the most clear explanation I could find on the subject given 2 minutes of searching, and you will find that the reported sensations in stage 2 (attraction) are the same as trepidation. There's even a picture of a roller coaster. The chemical basis of a sustained, devoted relationship are further explained.
Wait till you get to the experiment at the bottom, it should blow your mind.
And screw this Dyson Sphere nonsense - just hook your bed up to the grid and send energy nightly to your house or the creation of energy surplus. Don't use a bed? harvest the trapeze, back seat of the car, or repetitive one-armed motions. Energy problem solved. Now, everyone go screw.
I'm not sure if my reply to someone else applies, or if I should just ask you to either not steal what other people wrote or at least credit it.
Either way I am jeopardizing my karma in the hopes of improving online discussion one person at a time. Obviously I hope that means something to you, and at the same time it is just as obvious that I should check myself into some sort of institution for wasting such time as I have for it is clearly in the realm of utter madness.
Too bad I can't moderate you "-1 Condescending Bag of Arseholes".
You even admit to tossing out an oblique reference which people will most likely either recognize (and therefore it is redundant) or ignore (and therefore proves free of value).
I would not have even bothered to mouse-over the link had Genda not summarize the relevant bits. I assume there are 3 or 4 people who both had mod points available and also are familiar with that work, and also enjoy being coy with answers just to see how many people understand what is effectively an inside joke, a shared secret about which you can maintain your smugness.
Feel free to actually contribute next time, and find a circle of friends with whom you can play the game of who can find the most deceptively irrelevant comment.
For solving problems you need problem solving skills, abstraction and an ability to express that. This comes by experience.
Using your own words from comment 41563505 above, I don't see how you can make that argument. You can get by without any creativity and create functional programs. But problem solving often requires some creativity.
I take a look at the development of languages, from C where you can accomplish the same thing in hundreds of different ways due to the raw pointer and things like unions. Someone creates a new language trying to make the language match a particular domain problem, and it becomes all the rage.
OOP brought with it a huge playground in which you could work yourself into an inherited hole, or cleanly re-use code from a base class. Skipping straight to MVC, all of the good ideas around Rails and Spring were essentially "solved problems" which became formalized in the framework. Using C# under MVC implements those "solved problems" in ways which were not clear, or often not even possible, in.NET, without creative workarounds.
Here is the introduction to my programming style: Expressive Programming, which I define as "expressing your intentions so the code is clear." No obfuscation in clever re-use of generic code, unless it is clearly generic and can be clearly expressed. No hiding behind "magic" constructors or members that go off into the database. And the point is, choosing the right solution when a handful would meet the same requirement, requires creativity.
As I said, you can brute-force that by learning every design pattern and debating each one, and then through experience it becomes more clear which is the best path to take. It becomes intuitive, and eventually it just "feels right". If you decide that your domain has a single design pattern which fits the product, and slavishly follow that pattern even though it might not make sense, you are coding without creativity. And your code will most likely have an unmaintainable steaming pile which is inherently change-resistant.
Fixing a bug to adding a small feature inside an existing codebase can be free of creativity, which is why OP fears going the maintenance route. It's boring, and going through someone else's code which you may not even fully understand is not fun. It can also be very creative, where you find the most Goldbergian workaround to avoid changing critical infrastructure and reduce the amount of testing that needs done.
To find a proper balance is an art.
OP also talks about "training". Training is where you read a book or attend a lecture and do exactly what it says. Learning is when you take the same information and apply it judiciously. You can certainly implement a flowchart to decide when and how to break out of the mold. But a person who is a creative problem solver instead of an algorithmic one may come up with the novel approach which soon becomes a de-facto standard such as MVC, Or variations such as MVVM.
OP can be "trained" to do the same repetitive thing in things like circuit design or physics simulations, which is valid. Or OP could learn, generalize, and apply that information to new scenarios in the form of continuous training.
As much as we know about creativity, it could very well be defined as the nature of having been exposed to enough variations that a problem can be solved intuitively, without going through the intermediate steps of evaluation. But there is more evidence that creativity is simply a different way of thinking entirely. The fine line between creativity and insanity, where insanity can be very roughly approximated as "not thinking about things the way most people do."
I saw Red Sonja, and expected as much. One should watch Conan, Terminator, and Red Sonja before voting for a candidate. He may have a heart of gold, but he was a fierce warrior who seemed to have a somewhat tenuous hold on the concept of governance.
Ronald Regan, on the other hand, was a handsome and well-dressed non-barbarian. So clearly he was a better choice as governor. Clearly.
Slashdot Mirror
If one is productive, one can choose to work fewer hours and do the same amount of work, or work more hours and accomplish more. They are not mutually exclusive, and only a lazy person would choose to work fewer hours.
Both are true.
And the link between GDP and income is non-existent. No one has to to be paid more because they produce more. It would be nice in a morally controlled world, but that's not where Americans work.
I believe the study is just an example of random number crunching, where the people spending long hours in the office aren't necessarily the most productive, but create more wealth. An efficient factory line can make the 40-hour-and-under crowd very productive, enough to offset productivity loss over 55 hours.
I only read the article, which I suggest you do at the very least, and any assumptions made were due to not reading the actual report.
Reading is one thing, comprehending is another. For the first time, we know what can get rid of this very bad bug in a mammal, without using the previously accepted (and not at all controversial) fecal transplant when other antibiotics fail.
Mouse or not, this gives a target to look for in humans. And assuming all of the ingredients are human-compatible, this should result in a good step towards curing a very painful and debilitating condition.
The principle has been known for a while, but the exact mix that works for this particular bug has not been known. Hopefully you see where the big deal is now. Previous treatments offered certain strains which only succeeded under certain circumstances, most likely when the patient had some of the missing flora.
I won't address the rant, it is a blend of ignorance, well-trodden fact, incomplete understanding, internal inconsistency, and a few others that can't be specified because they are wrapped around other fallacies. If you indeed can read, you should read less mainstream media, and certainly quit reading slashdot comments.
Rather than further mod you to oblivion, I chose to leave both your initial reply, where you admit to willfully remaining ignorant on something you dismiss, and the followup where you actually admit to learn something.
I think I like it better this way.
Especially after being hacked several times already. Standard response among large companies is to make new rules and clamp down everything. That should have happened two breaches ago.
On the other hand, I spent 45 minutes tonight trying to search for what the dial does on an HDTV antenna. Fine tuning knob they say. It allows you to fine-tune something so your something comes in better. Every hit was either a review or some shopping site.
I even removed some by adding "-purchase -buy -store" and the top 5 never changed. I don't want to buy it, I want to know what the fuck it does.
In the AltaVista days, I could find what I wanted in the first page. Northern lights, I could find it in the top 5. Before Google's IPO, I always told people I could find what they couldn't because I "knew how to program google". The search term(s) are the important part.
Today's google just doesn't have that edge. It tries to infer what you want, and it skews the result towards adverts. I have an advert running on OTA tv which says that Google reps will be in town. 80% of moms google something after being exposed to an ad. Grow your business, attend the whatever it is.
I'mma tell you, like Wu told me. Cash rules everything, around me.
I even resorted to Bing last week. To see which was better. Bing found some things Google didn't. And it pains me to say that, partly because Bing is a stupid name, and partly because Microsoft did something right. Outside of their developer tools, I can't compliment MS beyond being in the right place at the right time.
If I can't find out how something works because Google wants me to buy something with their referring, something is either wrong with Google, or wrong with the internet.
I'd say it was the internet, but given Google's local advertising, I'm leaning towards Google again.
Biologically speaking, it is straight people who keep producing gay offspring. If straight people really wanted to stop the gay, they would quit having gay kids.
Or alternatively, the insistence of a man marrying a woman and having children, and anything else being proof of queerness, is an imposition straight people make on the gays.
If we just let the gays go be gay and not pass on their gayness, they would either die off if it's genetic, or live happy lives without being persecuted.
So yeah, seems okay to be gay. If your lineage dies off that's what nature intended, or what your deity intended, or what destiny decided. It's an individual choice. If the individual is okay with that, it speaks for itself. If not, I guess they will try as hard as they can to infiltrate the other sex, or be infiltrated, to pass on the genes. And spread the gay further.
I'm fine with that.
Did you use CTRL-X or CTRL-C? Or Edit/Copy vs. Edit/Cut?
I'm guessing it was copy. Copy and paste. Like Xerox, a copier. Not a cutter.
"Cut and paste job" refers to the older method of physically cutting apart something to make a new work. Like Thomas Jefferson's Bible. It is also pejorative, implying something that can be done by one with little brain.
You can say the piss poor editing is a "cut and paste" job, because it is. A user being too lazy to "copy and paste" is pejorative enough, going the extra mile is not just unnecessary but actually clouds your meaning.
Language evolves, and I have already lost this fight. But hopefully this helps people.
Way to miss the point. Carlin was the court jester, the only one allowed to mock the King. He was a philosopher who made a living picking out absurdities and presenting them to an audience. He didn't have an "Act", he had a lecture.
He wasn't making an argument, and everyone here trying to pull apart an argument that doesn't exist are tilting at windmills which also do not exist.
He was not making an argument, he was simply pointing out something that, in a certain context, appears to be an absurdity. It is more word play than anything else.
If you watch his lecture, he specifically says he doesn't understand it, not that it should be legal. The closest he gets to an argument is
Further, he compares military recognition for killing or maiming people, with going to jail for giving someone an orgasm. There's your argument, if you want to find one.
This whole "thing plus other thing" nonsense is a red herring, and everyone who participated is an idiot.
And China is going to become very interesting for that reason.
Not because of government conspiracy, but due to social constructs which favor male children. And I think there is just as much "people in power" conspiracy going on in places where prostitution is illegal. Which is to say, none. If there were, Nevada would be heavily pressured to conform, or at least disallow anyone from out of state to participate.
Your observation is not incorrect, but taking it to the next level and implying that it is intentionally being used for that purpose is quite a jump. Especially when more obvious explanations abound, such as the inherited so-called Puritanical views, and the incestuous cycle where it's seen as wrong, so it becomes a political issue, and then "everyone knows" that it should be outlawed. So the voter pandering continues.
Many of the people voting to keep it illegal, and enforcing the law, are very much for the idea personally, and they have to keep up the facade. If everyone just blurted out what they really thought, honestly, we would have a lot less opposition. We have to get past the social construct before we can talk about it being an oppressive position.
I was interested in finding people from school, which is a bit difficult when people have unlisted mobile numbers and have moved to different cities. Facebook made it simple to find all but the one person I really wanted to find. That's a pretty good percentage, and had I persisted I could have gone through the friends-of-friends route.
I caught up with where people are, talked to the ones I wanted to talk to, filtered out the ones who found me. Then torched my account and haven't been back.
They can't e-mail or call if they don't know your number, and they can't stop by if they don't know that you moved.
It is especially good for situations like people off to college in different cities or states, keeping in touch with people from high school. I was writing letters in 1993, since my younger friends didn't have e-mail. With something like Facebook I could have made fewer trips home, keep in touch with friends from time to time, and maintain contact at university.
There are numerous other scenarios in which something like Facebook is a good solution.
Farmville is not one. Friending people you don't really want to talk to is not one. Leaving details which let people piece together things you want kept secret is not one. Having all of your friends available so you can talk in person or on the phone in real-time is not one.
Some people work odd hours, and staying in touch by leaving status updates so the group knows what everyone else is doing, or planning, is quite convenient.
I plan to hop on every 5 years to see who is alive, dead, married, divorced, moved, or suddenly rich and/or partially famous. And then slowly burn the account so it doesn't even resemble me, and let it go dormant.
Surely you recognise the word "becoming", and the distinction between the younger generation, who do not control the laws, and the elders who do? GP post is dead-on:
Sexual orientation is becoming less important, especially to the younger generation.
If a defense is impossible, you have to fall back on the next best defense. That doesn't change the best defense. The best defense against your parents finding out about your sexual orientation from someone else will always be to tell them yourself, from whatever distance is safe.
Facebook is social networking, and people have to realize that their socializations will be revealed. Socializing in public will reveal these sorts of things unintentionally, online or in person. Facebook's position is the only sane one in this case, since people do need to be educated about this sort of thing. Facebook shirks that duty while acknowledging it, since their business model depends on you revealing this information, at least to FB if not to your friends.
And soon it won't matter. Not soon enough, but tolerance is growing in general.
Fuck me sideways. The one time I have JavaScript enabled I mis-moderate. I understand the reasoning behind not being able to edit a comment, but re-moderating within a minute or two, when moderation takes place instantly with no confirmation should be the minimum allowed.
To be fair, "claiming" could be a collective verb or not. So the bold was inappropriate.
Fuck you, JavaScript programmers. I do your job better and more sensibly every day. Some of you are okay, but the others should be screwed with a 2 by 4, sideways.
I was going to suggest many of those. My few additions:
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. No explanation, just go read it.
Milgram Obedience Studies - Groupthink. For obvious reasons.
The Fountainhead - individualism to a limited extent is a positive thing, but Atlas Shrugged just punches the idea into the ground repeatedly. Roark is still an inspiration in my programming. Bag the ideology and all the idiots who reply based on ideology. I stopped reading for a few years after that one.
Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates - Tom Robbins. I read a page at random from hundreds of books over several years. This one got me reading again. I'd say that was a significant impact.
Consciousness Explained - Daniel C. Dennett - it's a little out of date at this point, but pretty much relevant.
Rousseau - The social contact. Helps navigate the coworker waters.
Survival of the Sickest - Moalem. Interesting look at why we are the way we are.
Curiously, each of these has made me a better employed programmer. Each has its own construct of the universe. When certain issues or problems come up, these models help put ideas in context so they can be explained. A framework for all situations.
Don't forget to learn a foreign language, or refresh it if you took it a long time ago. Different languages have different ways of describing the same thing.French and Japanese for the niche, Spanish and Chinese for the mass market, German and/or something Nordic for the "origin of English" perspective, or if you want to change your way of life something truly obscure.
You don't need years, just minutes. Ptolemaic system already did it. In fact, there are working physical models which demonstrate the relative positions of planets given a geocentric alignment.
Good Fuck, did you not consider that someone else might have done this in the thousands of years since we have had enlightened beings on our planet? Ptolemy based his work on the Babylonians.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocentric_model
Somewhere around the discovery of the functions of the Antikythera Mechanism, slashdot had a link to a website where you could switch between a geo- vs helio- centric view of the solar system, an animation which displayed what was happening at that moment in time. I could not find it in time for apathy to set in, Bing it if you feel the need.
Here's a picture for you to start with, undoubtedly created from a model
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Geoz_wb_en.svg&page=1
"If it worked for our founding fathers..." is a terrible argument. Even when you're trying to say that things get old faster so they same time period is effectively longer.
I take the opinion that most of the copyright-based industries are actually false economies. They have built up a business model based on the scarcity of a tangible object (vinyl or paper), and expect to continue that via artificial scarcity. It doesn't make any sense.
The duration argument has already been made. Optimum length for a copyright for both the owner and society as a whole is 14-17 years, depending on who you ask. It has nothing to do with the circumstances long ago. We adjust as times change.
http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2007/07/research-optimal-copyright-term-is-14-years/
Allow me to elaborate on laurelraven's 3-letter pimp-slap. ADP (Automatic Data Processing) has a market cap of 28.83B. According to ADP's 10-k from 2009, ADP processed payroll for 570,000 companies, delivered 51 million year-end tax statements (W-2), delivered 39 million employer payroll tax returns and deposits.
That's a pretty large site. Judging by the ignorance of your response, I'd say this is your first experience in taking the piss. Remember, the dinosaurs were on top of the Darwinian survivalist chain until that unpleasantness quite a few million years ago now. I bet they felt just as smug.
Now why don't you and laurelraven make up, kiss, and figure out how to make Mozilla aware of this new development?
I'm pretty sure you will see your response as a knee-jerk response since someone stepped on a sensitive toe of yours.
The article is great for situations like this when you read the poorly crafted summary and then have questions.
I think what you are wondering is what caused the change. Were the populations separated for long enough that they were no longer compatible? Or did the increasingly rare successes just tend towards zero? Given the number of alternate theories presented, the people behind this research also wonder the same thing.
You did not read the post before asking gottabeme to read yours. The post began with an illustration of assumptions being made, then listed your assumptions.
If I pray for something and it does not happen, that does not mean my prayers were not answered. Or if I think about something without praying and my non-prayer does not appear to be answered, that does not mean it wasn't. My prayer, combined with that of others, may result in a situation in which it is not obvious to me that my prayer, or non-prayer, was even considered.
A kid finds a lamp, rubs it to shine it up a bit, and out pops the Genie.
The genie grants him one wish.
The kid says "I want to be Batman." So the Genie kills the kid's parents.
Was his request granted, and does the kid see that his request was granted?
We don't have the first clue what an alien civilization might do. We may have found one which is desperately trying to communicate with us but we just don't know it. We have a thought experiment by Dyson which is attempting to solve the problem by extrapolating from a string of assumptions which statistically speaking are probably increasingly invalid. The same flaw you made in your post. We may never find aliens, because they may not want to be found, and we almost certainly will never find God because he requires faith, not proof.
You missed the point of prayer completely. You don't pray solely to ask for things. It is supposed to be a time of personal meditation if you wish to so define it, also known as personal time which you dedicate solely for your deity of choice.
Psalm 23 is frequently used as a group prayer. It is a simple affirmation which requests nothing, not even acknowledgement, of the Christian god. Instead of requesting goodness and mercy, it says Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.
Similar conditions apply to the prescribed Salah, in which Muslims recite parts of the Qur'an. It would be strange for such a ritual to contain personal requests which a deity could choose to fulfill or reject.
The power of prayer is a brief period of affirmation and meditation, which has proven benefits if you exclude requests for financial gain, and balance out the apparently miraculous restoration of health with the passing away despite continuous, devoted prayer for another's health.
It is founded in true faith in the sense that you don't know if your request will be fulfilled. You have faith that either you will get what you asked for, or that somehow in not getting it you are playing a part in the plan set out for you by your chosen deity.
Repeatedly praying for something and not getting it can actually increase a person's faith, as they hold out for that one prayer that gets through, in the same way playing the slot machines all night without much more than a pittance in winnings makes people believe that the machine is "about to pay out".
What if the same chemicals in different circumstances could produce different emotions? What if I said that the difference between love and fear is simply context?
That your awareness on a conscious level of your surroundings colors the chemical stimulation to feel like a different emotion, invalidating the entire concept of emotion and whittling it down to a slightly-less-than-conscious decision tree which makes you feel love, or fear, or anger, or any number of emotions?
What if emotion is simply a state machine which, given predictable inputs of chemical and situational nature, results in what we in our self-importance as humans refer to as the inexplicable and ethereal state called "love"?
This is the most clear explanation I could find on the subject given 2 minutes of searching, and you will find that the reported sensations in stage 2 (attraction) are the same as trepidation. There's even a picture of a roller coaster. The chemical basis of a sustained, devoted relationship are further explained.
Wait till you get to the experiment at the bottom, it should blow your mind.
"The science of love"
http://www.youramazingbrain.org/lovesex/sciencelove.htm
And screw this Dyson Sphere nonsense - just hook your bed up to the grid and send energy nightly to your house or the creation of energy surplus. Don't use a bed? harvest the trapeze, back seat of the car, or repetitive one-armed motions. Energy problem solved. Now, everyone go screw.
I'm not sure if my reply to someone else applies, or if I should just ask you to either not steal what other people wrote or at least credit it.
Either way I am jeopardizing my karma in the hopes of improving online discussion one person at a time. Obviously I hope that means something to you, and at the same time it is just as obvious that I should check myself into some sort of institution for wasting such time as I have for it is clearly in the realm of utter madness.
Too bad I can't moderate you "-1 Condescending Bag of Arseholes".
You even admit to tossing out an oblique reference which people will most likely either recognize (and therefore it is redundant) or ignore (and therefore proves free of value).
I would not have even bothered to mouse-over the link had Genda not summarize the relevant bits. I assume there are 3 or 4 people who both had mod points available and also are familiar with that work, and also enjoy being coy with answers just to see how many people understand what is effectively an inside joke, a shared secret about which you can maintain your smugness.
Feel free to actually contribute next time, and find a circle of friends with whom you can play the game of who can find the most deceptively irrelevant comment.
Using your own words from comment 41563505 above, I don't see how you can make that argument. You can get by without any creativity and create functional programs. But problem solving often requires some creativity.
I take a look at the development of languages, from C where you can accomplish the same thing in hundreds of different ways due to the raw pointer and things like unions. Someone creates a new language trying to make the language match a particular domain problem, and it becomes all the rage.
OOP brought with it a huge playground in which you could work yourself into an inherited hole, or cleanly re-use code from a base class. Skipping straight to MVC, all of the good ideas around Rails and Spring were essentially "solved problems" which became formalized in the framework. Using C# under MVC implements those "solved problems" in ways which were not clear, or often not even possible, in .NET, without creative workarounds.
Here is the introduction to my programming style: Expressive Programming, which I define as "expressing your intentions so the code is clear." No obfuscation in clever re-use of generic code, unless it is clearly generic and can be clearly expressed. No hiding behind "magic" constructors or members that go off into the database. And the point is, choosing the right solution when a handful would meet the same requirement, requires creativity.
As I said, you can brute-force that by learning every design pattern and debating each one, and then through experience it becomes more clear which is the best path to take. It becomes intuitive, and eventually it just "feels right". If you decide that your domain has a single design pattern which fits the product, and slavishly follow that pattern even though it might not make sense, you are coding without creativity. And your code will most likely have an unmaintainable steaming pile which is inherently change-resistant.
Fixing a bug to adding a small feature inside an existing codebase can be free of creativity, which is why OP fears going the maintenance route. It's boring, and going through someone else's code which you may not even fully understand is not fun. It can also be very creative, where you find the most Goldbergian workaround to avoid changing critical infrastructure and reduce the amount of testing that needs done.
To find a proper balance is an art.
OP also talks about "training". Training is where you read a book or attend a lecture and do exactly what it says. Learning is when you take the same information and apply it judiciously. You can certainly implement a flowchart to decide when and how to break out of the mold. But a person who is a creative problem solver instead of an algorithmic one may come up with the novel approach which soon becomes a de-facto standard such as MVC, Or variations such as MVVM.
OP can be "trained" to do the same repetitive thing in things like circuit design or physics simulations, which is valid. Or OP could learn, generalize, and apply that information to new scenarios in the form of continuous training.
As much as we know about creativity, it could very well be defined as the nature of having been exposed to enough variations that a problem can be solved intuitively, without going through the intermediate steps of evaluation. But there is more evidence that creativity is simply a different way of thinking entirely. The fine line between creativity and insanity, where insanity can be very roughly approximated as "not thinking about things the way most people do."
I saw Red Sonja, and expected as much. One should watch Conan, Terminator, and Red Sonja before voting for a candidate. He may have a heart of gold, but he was a fierce warrior who seemed to have a somewhat tenuous hold on the concept of governance.
Ronald Regan, on the other hand, was a handsome and well-dressed non-barbarian. So clearly he was a better choice as governor. Clearly.