Paintball is a game that mimics a gunfight, even though no actual weapons are involved (assuming we classify paintball guns as toys, and not projectile weapons).
Virtual shooters are all games that mimic a gunfight, even though no actual weapons are involved (assuming we classify desk chairs as furniture, and not projectile weapons).
They are already the same thing. The bloody FPS is a metaphor for a gunfight. The splattery paintball sport is a metaphor for a gunfight. So we make a metaphor for a metaphor for a gunfight, and somehow that makes it ok?
To micro-manage them is to underutilize them (and to frustrate them). Your job is to understand the business problems and communicate them as business problems, and let the team figure out the technical solutions...they should give you some alternatives, and let you pick the right ones. After that, your job is to ensure that nothing obstructs their development, and to take action whenever they tell you that they are blocked.
If you must be hard on deadlines, then you must be soft on requirements. Or vice versa. Being hard on both will always guarantee failure to deliver, and talent walking out the door. Usually being hard on deadlines is the choice of the day.....so being soft on requirements must be done, but *intelligently.* Some requirements are core to the usefulness of the app. Some are gold-plating. Move the gold-plating to the bottom of the priority heap. Each iteration will then represent the maximum possible business value that can be developed within the allotted time.
You also spend a lot less time trying to stick stuff end-to-end in making a project plan and having to spend more time changing it all around after things don't go as planned halfway through the project. Micro-managers tend to hate agile, despite the fact that it is a much more realistic addressing of the realities of software development than traditional, waterfall, winds up being.
from the article: Users could be infected with the Trojan either from a drive-by download, which can infect a PC by exploiting a vulnerability in a browser, or by being duped into downloading it, Canja said.
This is utterly unacceptable. They should give instructions to users on how to avoid downloading this.
They listed two ways in which systems get infected. One is "by being duped into downloading it." The instructions to avoid this are easily enough translated as your standard Internet hygien guidelines: "When websites offer browser-enhancements to you, say no," and "don't execute email attachments even if they come from trusted friends."
However, I want more detail about this "drive-by download" bit. There is a hole in my browser that will make it automatically download this addon, without prompting me? Give me a link. Give me the details. What versions have the hole? Has it been patched? Is there something I can do (other than "browse nothing") that will prevent this hole from being exploited? People need these details.
" prehistoric artifacts discovered in Africa and France, dated between 35,000 and 20,000 years old,[3] suggest early attempts to quantify time."
"There is evidence that women devised counting to keep track of their menstrual cycles; 28 to 30 scratches on bone or stone, followed by a distinctive marker."
"The earliest known mathematics in ancient India dates from 3000-2600 BC in the Indus Valley Civilization (Harappan civilization) of North India and Pakistan. This civilization developed a system of uniform weights and measures that used the decimal system"
I will stop quoting at this point, as the article is quite long. But an obvious takeaway is that societies used math to do things...facilitate commerce, build buildings, observe the rotation of stars, make calendars, and on and on. All of these things had value, which is why the systems of symbols they used became popular, and were continually refined to be even better at doing this sort of thing.
Remember, need is the mother of invention. We needed to do all kinds of things that required precise descriptions of various aspects of reality, so we invented math to do it. And we made it better over time. And the best versions of it survive to this day.
It's precisely the fact that the math isn't independent of the physics that is at issue here That's a very startling proposition
The word "math" refers to a huge collection of symbolic rule sets. These rule sets were not all invented at once by some magical mathematician in the past. They were produced over thousands of years of refinement.
One important point to note here is that many of these refinements were made specifically for the purpose of giving math a higher level of practical value. For example, the number zero, and subsequently the negative numbers, were added by most cultures only after they realized that they could derive a useful model of some aspect of reality by using these numbers.
I don't see why it would be surprising at all that a language which has been refined, over time, to describe reality would wind up describing reality.
I will further suggest that the truths of mathematics that seem intuitively obvious to us seem so only because our brains are structured such that these truths will seem intuitively obvious. What gave our brains this structure? Refinement-after-refinement due to the process of natural selection. So the reality which is being modeled by mathematics happens to be the same reality in which the inventors of mathematics (ie our brains) evolved. Who would have ever guessed that there would be some correspondence here?
I think the surprise only comes about when we forget the true origins of mathematics, and the true origins of the brains that understand mathematics and use it to represent reality.
Take the money they are requesting and instead use it to fund the foundation of a brand-new, American-based, car manufacturing company. This new company will not only be able to hire all (or at least most of) the workers that the current ones lay off, but it will also re-introduce some competition in the industry (which, incidentally, is the lifeblood of capitalism).
That should both ease the economic crisis and help reduce the negative economic impact of the current auto cartel, while not rewarding the current industry controllers for their demonstrated financial incompetence (thus keeping the taxpayers less pissed off).
On the one hand, the two words are more useful if they are not synonyms.
On the other hand, if the distinction between them is too complicated, subtle, or technical, then in most people's minds they are just synonyms. Being synonyms in popular use will make them become synonyms universally, which seems to be what happened.
On the third hand, if the distinction between them is actually a phantom distinction, then the two worlds *should* be used synonymously.
Interesting character judgment there...made on very little information. Sometimes people become snobs, pedants, or what-have-you for reasons other than insecurity. Also, some people come across that way for the mere act of trying to shed light on an issue of semantics.
you have to make up new words
The word "Graphic Novel" is not at all new. In fact, it has been around for years. I suspect it was initially devised as a marketing tool, used to differentiate one product from another based on a promised higher level in quality. Whether or not the promise was delivered is a separate issue, of course, but the poster did not make up the word "Graphic Novel," and the word is not new. In fact, you can read all about it here.
which look exactly the same.
In my experience, there is a difference in quality. They do not look exactly the same. Though the distinction between them is sometimes fuzzy and contains overlap.
You're reading comics.
And you are reading words. Grouping things together into a superset doesn't automatically make them the same thing. Abstraction is quite useful, but generalization is a logical fallacy.
Janella Spears doesn't think she's a sucker or an easy mark.
Many people like to believe that they are basically intelligent. They may readily admit that they don't know everything, but insist that they have a pretty good handle on most (if not all) of the really important things.
Far fewer people are actually willing to take the actions necessary to make such a belief true. Being "basically intelligent" requires that one make study and reflection part of one's lifestyle. Stopping with that once one graduates from school more-or-less guarantees that one is not, and will never be, "basically intelligent."
The real problem I have with this is that stupid people are not only a danger to themselves; they are a danger to those around them. Stupid people vote in favor of harmful/oppressive laws (or candidates), drive dangerously, harm the economy through poor money-management practices, harm their friends and family (sometimes emotionally, sometimes financially, sometimes physically) through stupid lifestyle practices, and so on.
In my opinion, it is every human's moral obligation to regularly invest a portion of their week to the business of improving their own cognitive abilities. And I don't just mean memorizing facts, but also engaging the mind's critical thinking capacities. One must be presented with genuine intellectual challenge in order to improve intelligence. One must, in other words, do things that are hard, since sticking with easy tasks will not produce the desired result.
And for God's sake, read Personal Finance for Dummies. If you haven't read it, stop trying to convince yourself you already know how money works. The book costs 15 bucks...just freaking READ IT!
The only difference between the Nigerian scam and the casino scam, is the government IS involved in the casino scam and gets to share your money.
There is another very important difference. When gambling, you know you are gambling. And, in the vast majority of cases, the odds of winning the game you are playing are published and widely known. The casino does not, for example, attempt to convince you that you are actually using your money to facilitate some sort of international transaction from which you will have earned a sizeable cut.
I think this difference prevents casinos from being lowered to the same moral level as scammers. Yes, they stack the odds against you...but they also publish those odds.
Any vegan I have seen looks to be just skin and bones.
To a large extent, the plants available in our grocery stores and/or restaurants have been grown in nutrient-depleted soil, as well as harvested too early and left to ripen on the truck (often with some chemical treatments made to replace the color).
The net effect is that our plants are less nutritious than our bodies expect. So, if someone completely rejects meat, it is hard to get the caloric content needed. True vegans must often eat *all the time* in order to get enough nutrition. It can make being a vegan very difficult.
As I understand, though, vegetarianism (by which I mean the inclusion of dairy products in the diet) is more popular than veganism, and solves that problem easily.
We need plants for minerals and meats for amino acids.
We get all the amino acids we need from plants. We don't actually 'need' meat at all. This belief is largely the product of successful marketing on the part of the meat and dairy industry.
That doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't eat meat though. We do plenty of things we don't need to do, and it is ok.
Well the bit about distributing the funds directly to the mortgage holders rather than buying the mortgages so the government now owns the toxic debts still makes sense.
According to this the population of America is just a hair over 300 million people.
The bailout is 700 billion
That is more than two million dollars per person!
Want to see some economic change? Want those debts to suddenly become good again? Want to see some solid upward velocity of wealth in our country? Why not just give that money to the citizens? Give it to the people who are getting screwed instead of the people who screwed us. It would only be a matter of time before most of that money would flow back up into the hands of the wealthy anyway...but things would be a helluva lot better for it.
More realistically speaking, a dump like that would do crazy things to inflation and to the economy....people across the nation would quit their dead-end jobs only to discover that they can't buy anything because everyone that would operate the register also quit their dead-end jobs...it would actually do more harm than good.
But what might have worked better would be to use that bailout money to set up a mortgage assistance fund with some kind of phase out....people with incomes within specific ranges could get a portion of their mortgage paid for by the government for the next five to ten years....something like that would make those toxic mortgages viable again and create positive cashflow for the banks, thus still bailing-out those who gave us the shaft...but it would also make life a lot easier on those who are really suffering and would have earned *huge* public approval for whoever supported the measure.
But, alas, we live in a world where those who already have money are entitled to receive more of it for free while those who don't have it must toil all their lives to earn tiny bits of it.
Is anybody else feeling really inadequate right now?
It is nothing but our own pride that insists that we are either the best in the world, or completely worthless.
There is a huge sliding grayscale of worthiness in the intellectual/industriousness domain.
The world needs a rich supply of people spread across that middle range.
In fact...the world needs the middlers more than it needs the geniuses. Given enough time the middlers can eventually get there on their own; the geniuses just accelerate the process a bit.
Once in a while a genius will do something that no number of middlers could ever have accomplished...which is nice...but once the genius has done it, the rest of us can follow suit. So, while we may need the occasional genius, we really don't need very many of them...whereas large numbers of middlers are the foundation of stable technological progress.
Drop the superego. Learn the value of who you already are, and be proud of it.
Why do people constantly use an argument meant to typify speech which leads to violence, injury and destruction, when attacking speech which does no such thing?
Because the Dicto simpliciter fallacy is effective at tripping up most people. The most popular fallacies are those that make irrational ideas sound rational to the largest number of people, after all.
Neither the democratic party nor the republican party actually represent the best interests of the majority of American citizens.
Both party agendas ultimately represent the best interests of an elite, wealthy, few.
They just use a lot of sophistry and marketing to convince the majority that they do, in fact, represent the best interests of the people, and that the political rivalry between the two parties is the most significant element of American progress.
In fact, it is political rivalry against both parties that does us some good...but so long as most people remain hypnotized by one or the other of these two parties, it will do no good.
But how do you get the sheeple to wake up and see how they are being duped?
"I bring you pain, the kind you can't suffer quietly. Fire up your brain, remind you inside your rioting society is slipping..."
Inasmuch as the scientific method is concerned, the presumption of a controlling intelligence eliminates the need for some categories of investigation, which ultimately inhibits progress.
For example, if you ask, "why does a person get sick?" and one answers "because God wills it, either as a punishment for sin or as a test of faith." You have eliminated the incentive to investigate into things like bacteria, the immune system, and so on.
By beginning with the premise that there is no controlling intelligence, and that there is some kind of underlying mechanism behind all observable phenomena, you preserve the incentive to formulate hypothesis and test them. Of course, many of the hypotheses will still be wrong, but the process of testing them is what yields the understanding we need to improve our lives.
So, scientifically speaking, atheism is the most useful assumption for maximizing our efforts at perusing knowledge.
On a more personal level, agnosticism is more logically "safe" than atheism. Though many consider that the assertion of the non-existence of an entity for which no demonstrative test can be devised is more well-founded than the assertion of the existence of said entity...logically this is still just a variant of the "ad ignorantium" fallacy. It is clear that where no test can be formulated *either way,* the only warranted conclusion is no conclusion at all. "I don't know if God exists, and I won't know until we can cook up some definitive tests" is the most logically sound response to questions of the ontological status of the divine.
Sometimes I think we really need a medieval style guild (NOT a union) that punishes companies that habitually abuse IT workers.
The problem is not limited to IT workers. Every business has a direct (and obvious) financial incentive to cut costs as much as possible. The skill with which they do that varies, but in general people tend to do what you incite them to do (NOT what you ask them nicely to do....nor what you threaten or attempt to force them to do).
You will not solve this problem by forming a club. The incentive will remain despite your punishment. If the club (union, guild, or what-have-you) gets powerful enough to disallow businesses from just working with non-club members, it will become a business unto itself which winds up having the same problems.
You also will not solve this problem by converting to communism or socialism. You will merely change the symptom of this problem.
I am convinced that humanity is as incapable of solving this problem as monkeys are incapable of building airplanes. It is simply beyond us. Maybe our evolutionary descendents will, with their superior intellectual capacities, figure out an effective and sustainable solution.
But we won't. All we can do is continue to react to the symptoms as they arise...continue the cyclic battle between the classes...more-or-less indefinitely.
Most forms of construction must adhere to a code. Why should software be any different?
It would be nice, IMO, if we could formulate a set of minimum requirements for any kind of personal-data-handling software (including codes for operating procedures). Things like "all passwords in the system must use strong encryption" and "backups of the data cannot be stored on personal laptops" and the like.
Then legally require businesses to higher some ratio of software developers who have passed a code certification and logged sufficient hours under the apprenticeship of a certified master, and cite them if any such developers blow the whistle on them.
It is not a perfect solution. It has problems with implementation. And of course M$ will do its darndest to ensure that codes require the use of its software. But it it is still better than the situation we have now.
In my ideal world, we shouldn't even call it "copyright," we should call it "sellright."
This guy should, IMO, get the book thrown at him. He was actively profiting from someone else's work, and keeping it all for himself.
I would like to see copyright law changed to this effect. A p2p network should be left alone...free duplication and distribution of digital works should be considered "fair use." The deliberate sale (or bundling) of such a work is what should be illegal, punishable, and enforced.
I would be more than happy with lengthy "sellright" terms if it means restoring sanity to our treatment of data. As it stands now, we get both the insanity and the ridiculously long terms. It's the worst of both worlds, really.
Slashdot Mirror
...that we are inching our way towards the metric system.
I think the paintball mode is equally silly.
Paintball is a game that mimics a gunfight, even though no actual weapons are involved (assuming we classify paintball guns as toys, and not projectile weapons).
Virtual shooters are all games that mimic a gunfight, even though no actual weapons are involved (assuming we classify desk chairs as furniture, and not projectile weapons).
They are already the same thing. The bloody FPS is a metaphor for a gunfight. The splattery paintball sport is a metaphor for a gunfight. So we make a metaphor for a metaphor for a gunfight, and somehow that makes it ok?
People are weird.
So you are saying that illegal-to-drive-while-baked is difficult to enforce.
That utterly fails to justify making it illegal to use when not driving.
You are merely punishing the law-abiding citizens because a *different law* is difficult to enforce (and will be broken by the criminals anyway).
That is irrational.
Those who do not actually understand the technology do think that this law will solve the problem.
...and use Agile. Here is the best book in the world: Agile estimation and planning
To micro-manage them is to underutilize them (and to frustrate them). Your job is to understand the business problems and communicate them as business problems, and let the team figure out the technical solutions...they should give you some alternatives, and let you pick the right ones. After that, your job is to ensure that nothing obstructs their development, and to take action whenever they tell you that they are blocked.
If you must be hard on deadlines, then you must be soft on requirements. Or vice versa. Being hard on both will always guarantee failure to deliver, and talent walking out the door. Usually being hard on deadlines is the choice of the day.....so being soft on requirements must be done, but *intelligently.* Some requirements are core to the usefulness of the app. Some are gold-plating. Move the gold-plating to the bottom of the priority heap. Each iteration will then represent the maximum possible business value that can be developed within the allotted time.
You also spend a lot less time trying to stick stuff end-to-end in making a project plan and having to spend more time changing it all around after things don't go as planned halfway through the project. Micro-managers tend to hate agile, despite the fact that it is a much more realistic addressing of the realities of software development than traditional, waterfall, winds up being.
from the article:
Users could be infected with the Trojan either from a drive-by download, which can infect a PC by exploiting a vulnerability in a browser, or by being duped into downloading it, Canja said.
This is utterly unacceptable. They should give instructions to users on how to avoid downloading this.
They listed two ways in which systems get infected. One is "by being duped into downloading it." The instructions to avoid this are easily enough translated as your standard Internet hygien guidelines: "When websites offer browser-enhancements to you, say no," and "don't execute email attachments even if they come from trusted friends."
However, I want more detail about this "drive-by download" bit. There is a hole in my browser that will make it automatically download this addon, without prompting me? Give me a link. Give me the details. What versions have the hole? Has it been patched? Is there something I can do (other than "browse nothing") that will prevent this hole from being exploited? People need these details.
Mathematics is not, in general, refined to describe reality
Oh Really?
Some highlights from the article:
" prehistoric artifacts discovered in Africa and France, dated between 35,000 and 20,000 years old,[3] suggest early attempts to quantify time."
"There is evidence that women devised counting to keep track of their menstrual cycles; 28 to 30 scratches on bone or stone, followed by a distinctive marker."
"The earliest known mathematics in ancient India dates from 3000-2600 BC in the Indus Valley Civilization (Harappan civilization) of North India and Pakistan. This civilization developed a system of uniform weights and measures that used the decimal system"
I will stop quoting at this point, as the article is quite long. But an obvious takeaway is that societies used math to do things...facilitate commerce, build buildings, observe the rotation of stars, make calendars, and on and on. All of these things had value, which is why the systems of symbols they used became popular, and were continually refined to be even better at doing this sort of thing.
Remember, need is the mother of invention. We needed to do all kinds of things that required precise descriptions of various aspects of reality, so we invented math to do it. And we made it better over time. And the best versions of it survive to this day.
It's precisely the fact that the math isn't independent of the physics that is at issue here That's a very startling proposition
The word "math" refers to a huge collection of symbolic rule sets. These rule sets were not all invented at once by some magical mathematician in the past. They were produced over thousands of years of refinement.
One important point to note here is that many of these refinements were made specifically for the purpose of giving math a higher level of practical value. For example, the number zero, and subsequently the negative numbers, were added by most cultures only after they realized that they could derive a useful model of some aspect of reality by using these numbers.
I don't see why it would be surprising at all that a language which has been refined, over time, to describe reality would wind up describing reality.
I will further suggest that the truths of mathematics that seem intuitively obvious to us seem so only because our brains are structured such that these truths will seem intuitively obvious. What gave our brains this structure? Refinement-after-refinement due to the process of natural selection. So the reality which is being modeled by mathematics happens to be the same reality in which the inventors of mathematics (ie our brains) evolved. Who would have ever guessed that there would be some correspondence here?
I think the surprise only comes about when we forget the true origins of mathematics, and the true origins of the brains that understand mathematics and use it to represent reality.
How about this:
Take the money they are requesting and instead use it to fund the foundation of a brand-new, American-based, car manufacturing company. This new company will not only be able to hire all (or at least most of) the workers that the current ones lay off, but it will also re-introduce some competition in the industry (which, incidentally, is the lifeblood of capitalism).
That should both ease the economic crisis and help reduce the negative economic impact of the current auto cartel, while not rewarding the current industry controllers for their demonstrated financial incompetence (thus keeping the taxpayers less pissed off).
Sounds like a win all around, eh?
On the one hand, the two words are more useful if they are not synonyms.
On the other hand, if the distinction between them is too complicated, subtle, or technical, then in most people's minds they are just synonyms. Being synonyms in popular use will make them become synonyms universally, which seems to be what happened.
On the third hand, if the distinction between them is actually a phantom distinction, then the two worlds *should* be used synonymously.
Maxima is released under the GPL.
you are so insecure about your interests
Interesting character judgment there...made on very little information. Sometimes people become snobs, pedants, or what-have-you for reasons other than insecurity. Also, some people come across that way for the mere act of trying to shed light on an issue of semantics.
you have to make up new words
The word "Graphic Novel" is not at all new. In fact, it has been around for years. I suspect it was initially devised as a marketing tool, used to differentiate one product from another based on a promised higher level in quality. Whether or not the promise was delivered is a separate issue, of course, but the poster did not make up the word "Graphic Novel," and the word is not new.
In fact, you can read all about it here.
which look exactly the same.
In my experience, there is a difference in quality. They do not look exactly the same. Though the distinction between them is sometimes fuzzy and contains overlap.
You're reading comics.
And you are reading words. Grouping things together into a superset doesn't automatically make them the same thing. Abstraction is quite useful, but generalization is a logical fallacy.
Seriously, get over yourself.
We teach best what we need to learn most.
Janella Spears doesn't think she's a sucker or an easy mark.
Many people like to believe that they are basically intelligent. They may readily admit that they don't know everything, but insist that they have a pretty good handle on most (if not all) of the really important things.
Far fewer people are actually willing to take the actions necessary to make such a belief true. Being "basically intelligent" requires that one make study and reflection part of one's lifestyle. Stopping with that once one graduates from school more-or-less guarantees that one is not, and will never be, "basically intelligent."
The real problem I have with this is that stupid people are not only a danger to themselves; they are a danger to those around them. Stupid people vote in favor of harmful/oppressive laws (or candidates), drive dangerously, harm the economy through poor money-management practices, harm their friends and family (sometimes emotionally, sometimes financially, sometimes physically) through stupid lifestyle practices, and so on.
In my opinion, it is every human's moral obligation to regularly invest a portion of their week to the business of improving their own cognitive abilities. And I don't just mean memorizing facts, but also engaging the mind's critical thinking capacities. One must be presented with genuine intellectual challenge in order to improve intelligence. One must, in other words, do things that are hard, since sticking with easy tasks will not produce the desired result.
And for God's sake, read Personal Finance for Dummies. If you haven't read it, stop trying to convince yourself you already know how money works. The book costs 15 bucks...just freaking READ IT!
The only difference between the Nigerian scam and the casino scam, is the government IS involved in the casino scam and gets to share your money.
There is another very important difference. When gambling, you know you are gambling. And, in the vast majority of cases, the odds of winning the game you are playing are published and widely known. The casino does not, for example, attempt to convince you that you are actually using your money to facilitate some sort of international transaction from which you will have earned a sizeable cut.
I think this difference prevents casinos from being lowered to the same moral level as scammers. Yes, they stack the odds against you...but they also publish those odds.
Any vegan I have seen looks to be just skin and bones.
To a large extent, the plants available in our grocery stores and/or restaurants have been grown in nutrient-depleted soil, as well as harvested too early and left to ripen on the truck (often with some chemical treatments made to replace the color).
The net effect is that our plants are less nutritious than our bodies expect. So, if someone completely rejects meat, it is hard to get the caloric content needed. True vegans must often eat *all the time* in order to get enough nutrition. It can make being a vegan very difficult.
As I understand, though, vegetarianism (by which I mean the inclusion of dairy products in the diet) is more popular than veganism, and solves that problem easily.
We need plants for minerals and meats for amino acids.
We get all the amino acids we need from plants. We don't actually 'need' meat at all. This belief is largely the product of successful marketing on the part of the meat and dairy industry.
That doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't eat meat though. We do plenty of things we don't need to do, and it is ok.
I was off by a couple orders of magnitude.
That's more like two thousand dollars per person.
So never mind.
Well the bit about distributing the funds directly to the mortgage holders rather than buying the mortgages so the government now owns the toxic debts still makes sense.
According to this the population of America is just a hair over 300 million people.
The bailout is 700 billion
That is more than two million dollars per person!
Want to see some economic change? Want those debts to suddenly become good again? Want to see some solid upward velocity of wealth in our country? Why not just give that money to the citizens? Give it to the people who are getting screwed instead of the people who screwed us. It would only be a matter of time before most of that money would flow back up into the hands of the wealthy anyway...but things would be a helluva lot better for it.
More realistically speaking, a dump like that would do crazy things to inflation and to the economy....people across the nation would quit their dead-end jobs only to discover that they can't buy anything because everyone that would operate the register also quit their dead-end jobs...it would actually do more harm than good.
But what might have worked better would be to use that bailout money to set up a mortgage assistance fund with some kind of phase out....people with incomes within specific ranges could get a portion of their mortgage paid for by the government for the next five to ten years....something like that would make those toxic mortgages viable again and create positive cashflow for the banks, thus still bailing-out those who gave us the shaft...but it would also make life a lot easier on those who are really suffering and would have earned *huge* public approval for whoever supported the measure.
But, alas, we live in a world where those who already have money are entitled to receive more of it for free while those who don't have it must toil all their lives to earn tiny bits of it.
And the majority seem to like it that way...
Is anybody else feeling really inadequate right now?
It is nothing but our own pride that insists that we are either the best in the world, or completely worthless.
There is a huge sliding grayscale of worthiness in the intellectual/industriousness domain.
The world needs a rich supply of people spread across that middle range.
In fact...the world needs the middlers more than it needs the geniuses. Given enough time the middlers can eventually get there on their own; the geniuses just accelerate the process a bit.
Once in a while a genius will do something that no number of middlers could ever have accomplished...which is nice...but once the genius has done it, the rest of us can follow suit. So, while we may need the occasional genius, we really don't need very many of them...whereas large numbers of middlers are the foundation of stable technological progress.
Drop the superego. Learn the value of who you already are, and be proud of it.
Why do people constantly use an argument meant to typify speech which leads to violence, injury and destruction, when attacking speech which does no such thing?
Because the Dicto simpliciter fallacy is effective at tripping up most people. The most popular fallacies are those that make irrational ideas sound rational to the largest number of people, after all.
Neither the democratic party nor the republican party actually represent the best interests of the majority of American citizens.
Both party agendas ultimately represent the best interests of an elite, wealthy, few.
They just use a lot of sophistry and marketing to convince the majority that they do, in fact, represent the best interests of the people, and that the political rivalry between the two parties is the most significant element of American progress.
In fact, it is political rivalry against both parties that does us some good...but so long as most people remain hypnotized by one or the other of these two parties, it will do no good.
But how do you get the sheeple to wake up and see how they are being duped?
"I bring you pain, the kind you can't suffer quietly.
Fire up your brain, remind you inside your rioting
society is slipping..."
--Dr Horrible
What's the rationale for atheism?
Inasmuch as the scientific method is concerned, the presumption of a controlling intelligence eliminates the need for some categories of investigation, which ultimately inhibits progress.
For example, if you ask, "why does a person get sick?" and one answers "because God wills it, either as a punishment for sin or as a test of faith." You have eliminated the incentive to investigate into things like bacteria, the immune system, and so on.
By beginning with the premise that there is no controlling intelligence, and that there is some kind of underlying mechanism behind all observable phenomena, you preserve the incentive to formulate hypothesis and test them. Of course, many of the hypotheses will still be wrong, but the process of testing them is what yields the understanding we need to improve our lives.
So, scientifically speaking, atheism is the most useful assumption for maximizing our efforts at perusing knowledge.
On a more personal level, agnosticism is more logically "safe" than atheism. Though many consider that the assertion of the non-existence of an entity for which no demonstrative test can be devised is more well-founded than the assertion of the existence of said entity...logically this is still just a variant of the "ad ignorantium" fallacy. It is clear that where no test can be formulated *either way,* the only warranted conclusion is no conclusion at all. "I don't know if God exists, and I won't know until we can cook up some definitive tests" is the most logically sound response to questions of the ontological status of the divine.
Sometimes I think we really need a medieval style guild (NOT a union) that punishes companies that habitually abuse IT workers.
The problem is not limited to IT workers. Every business has a direct (and obvious) financial incentive to cut costs as much as possible. The skill with which they do that varies, but in general people tend to do what you incite them to do (NOT what you ask them nicely to do....nor what you threaten or attempt to force them to do).
You will not solve this problem by forming a club. The incentive will remain despite your punishment. If the club (union, guild, or what-have-you) gets powerful enough to disallow businesses from just working with non-club members, it will become a business unto itself which winds up having the same problems.
You also will not solve this problem by converting to communism or socialism. You will merely change the symptom of this problem.
I am convinced that humanity is as incapable of solving this problem as monkeys are incapable of building airplanes. It is simply beyond us. Maybe our evolutionary descendents will, with their superior intellectual capacities, figure out an effective and sustainable solution.
But we won't. All we can do is continue to react to the symptoms as they arise...continue the cyclic battle between the classes...more-or-less indefinitely.
Most forms of construction must adhere to a code. Why should software be any different?
It would be nice, IMO, if we could formulate a set of minimum requirements for any kind of personal-data-handling software (including codes for operating procedures). Things like "all passwords in the system must use strong encryption" and "backups of the data cannot be stored on personal laptops" and the like.
Then legally require businesses to higher some ratio of software developers who have passed a code certification and logged sufficient hours under the apprenticeship of a certified master, and cite them if any such developers blow the whistle on them.
It is not a perfect solution. It has problems with implementation. And of course M$ will do its darndest to ensure that codes require the use of its software. But it it is still better than the situation we have now.
In my ideal world, we shouldn't even call it "copyright," we should call it "sellright."
This guy should, IMO, get the book thrown at him. He was actively profiting from someone else's work, and keeping it all for himself.
I would like to see copyright law changed to this effect. A p2p network should be left alone...free duplication and distribution of digital works should be considered "fair use." The deliberate sale (or bundling) of such a work is what should be illegal, punishable, and enforced.
I would be more than happy with lengthy "sellright" terms if it means restoring sanity to our treatment of data. As it stands now, we get both the insanity and the ridiculously long terms. It's the worst of both worlds, really.