If you make a habit of reading polls on a a variety of political and social issues, you'll learn a lot about Americans and specifically you might come to the conclusion that about 25-35% of Americans are basically so disconnected from scientific and social reality they're functionally insane and their opinion should ALWAYS and AUTOMATICALLY be classified as "non-truth related".
For instance, and famously, about 46% of Americans don't believe in evolution
And on and on and on. Watching polls what you'll discover is about 10% of Americans are just outright fascists who wouldn't hesitate to do whatever any right wing authority told them to do, and think it should have been started yesterday. This is also the finding of Bob Altemeyer in his seminal work on authoritarianism :
About 25-30% believe that events on Earth are assiduously overseen by an all knowing God who "sees them when they're sleeping / and knows if they're awake / and knows if they've been bad of good..." and what happens in everything from their personal life to world events is really of no consequence except to the extent that it is a reflection of an eternal, ongoing battle between good and evil being fought on an unseen cosmic plane. This is something they have this is common with every Muslim extremist who ever strapped a suicide bomb onto himself.
Americans have a deficit of rationality, a deep and persistent belief that something other than outcome based, welfare of humans is the proper measure of human morality, are scientifically illiterate and constitutionally incapable of perceiving in their thinking just the kinds of bugs that the referenced article details.
There's not enough time to reform the American character before we have to take radical and decisive action on global warming. The fact is, democracy stops where science begins. This isn't going to lead to anything good.
The least divisive, least disrupting course of action is for the government to internally and secretly set up an Executive Action team within one the intelligence agencies whose purpose is to discredit, attack and dismantle and neutralize the leaders of the denier terrorist movement. We all know who they are. These *thought leaders* need to be attacked the same way we'd attack any group of terrorists building a bomb named which would have the same long term destructive power as global warming. Denialism is a bomb with the capacity to permanently destroy civilization and the people assembling that bomb are not working in secret. They need to be neutralized and their sources of funding and societal legitimacy attacked through and and all means necessary. They have forfeited their civil rights and constitutional protections. We simply need to deal with them like the world destroying terrorists they are.
You can come to this conclusion now when there's still time to do something about global warming or you can come to this conclusion later, when there's no possibility of doing anything about it and the starvation, the concomitant societal breakdown and mass, uncontrolled immigration, the tidal wave of anti-Western (Big Oil / Big Coal ) terrorism and collapsing centralized governments take not just the denier's civil liberties and Con
I was denied employment b/c I wouldn't t tell them how much I made in my previous job. I didn't want them to think I wouldn't work for them since their offer was much lower. I didn't care, I just wanted a stable long term job. Turns out they took that as an act of insubordination or something. If I wanted my IRS returns to be public, they'd be on FB. I am not telling you because I want that information private. I am applying for this job because I have determined the salary offered meets my salary demands.
GTFU. Just because you have a job to offer doesn't mean every application filer has to dump their panty drawer at your feet so you can get yourself off by sniffing its contents. Be glad a high quality candidate took an interest in your job.
Single merchandiser (Amazon) == market control. Don't sell digital goods on Amazon and don't buy or make DRM. Amazon Google and Apple lose their power to unilaterally make up law and Reality when we stop giving them that power.
Whatever the facts are,and I am sure the Russian software provider is using dirty business tactics to suppress competition, Comrade,the reality is you can't permit a gateway to turn into a gatekeeper who keeps you out of your market place. We should have learned that from the Apple store fiascoes . We give them the power to be arbitrary dictators by building business model which rely for their success of failure on them taking a shine to us or not. That's crazy. Don't let Google in that position or Apple or Amazon or anyone. A lot of word of mouth, a little SEO and the web is your distribution channel. If a market segment can't find your app that way or can't use it b/c they live in a walled garden, then don't include success with those users as a critical part of your business plan. Business plans with single, gigantic holes in them fail.
I have to say I'm a bit surprised that my city is voluntarily shedding potentially $9.8M in revenue after objectively evaluating a program
Yes the idea of a government for by and of the people is completely alien to a large number of slashdotters who have drunk the Ayn Rand / John Galt / Libertarian Kool-Aid.
Fuck you it's not a moral issue you fucking moron. It's called a nation and for people to be satisfied in their nation they have to have some means of being gainfully employed. It has nothing to do with "deserving" ; it has to do with nationhood. Fucking asswipe.
If Google was built around FOSS then their analytic engine would be open source. instead of secret sauce. That's what Google using FOSS to make money would look like. There's a difference between USING FOSS and making money WITH FOSS. We don't say Goggle makes money off the roads the employees use to drive to work because that's just something they use on the way to making money. Google uses a lot of free / freely shared/ open source things on the way to doing business - the question is do they make money ON FOSS and the answer is no, or only very very indirectly, as indirectly as making money off roads. They make money on their analytic engine, which is a trade secret.
Look, it's an article of FAITH to believe that there's a good-for-people relationship between jobs, progress and the economy. There is nothing stopping the event of an tech enabling a small group of people to supply a very large group of people with everything they want to spend money on. Then what? Economists act like it's an impossible event. It's not. I only want to do the same things over and over- program, read, listen to create music, get out in nature with my family, help people in some way. There's enough there to make me happy for the the entirety of my life. It's entirely possible that the things I need to do those other things can be made by a very few people and machines. Ditto everyone else.
You have to accept that the economy is not a natural thing, it's a human made game whose outcome HAS TO BE beneficial to humans by definition. All the laws and regulations and trade agreements and monetary policy and all these complex things will either serve the general welfare of humans of *get thrown the fuck out* and replaced by something that does.
IF you want to see what a "natural" economy looks like, head over to Somolia or Rwanda or Congo. Pack your pretty wife or girl friend too and stay a few weeks "free of goomint regulation" in your perfect Ayn Randian "free market" with all those supermen who have gained positions of power thanks to being free from that damn 'goobmint and tell us how it goes for you.
The economy is not a natural thing. It's a game; an agreed upon lie that can and should be replaced when it starts to fail with something that works. . Maybe that something is just a little bit of socialism where we all work some hours and get what a lot of of what we want in return. The reality that is technological progress could take us there and if it does,who the fuck cares ? When we can grow houses
The DA is there to represent The People in seeking justice and only secondarily as the prosecutor for that justice against the defense. The first job of the DA is to impartially and with discretion decide whether the case is worth pursuing at all and if so what charges to bring. This is not a power given to the defense and the DA is expected to impartially play the role of a juror applying reasonable doubt here.
So it's not the more than mildly brain-dead "blue-team / red-team let's get it on! " scenario you learned from watching Law and Order re-runs. IN fact the whole "deep voiced voiceover" that precedes each Law and Order episode deliberately and malignantly mis-presents and distorts the adversarial structure of the the judicial system by identifying
In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups -- the police who investigate crime, and the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories.
When in reality the "two equally important" sides are the prosecution and the defense, which have decidedly UNequal powers.
The prosecution and the state has practically unlimited funds to pursue cases- defendants are often indigent.
Prosecution has the power to decide charges,; defendants can suck it up.
the prosecutor has a repeating, ongoing relationship with both the police and the judges who in turn decide cases and issue \subpoenas \ decide on admissability \ decide on each objection and motion. Defendants are generally poor strangers around these here parts who likely won't be seen again.
DAs party with, socialize with, marry into, have kids with, and generally travel in the same social circles with judges , the police and other lawyers, including defense lawyers . Defendants are strangers around these parts who likely wont' be seen again.
Maybe if you got your ideas about how the system is supposed to work from civics class instead of Fred Thompson TV shows, you'd understand why people are upset over the state of criminal justice in this nation.
It's a material fact about our criminal justice system that prosecutors put people they know to be innocent away for life. Check out the Innocence Project for the grotesque details.
The reason I bring that up is because it dramatically illustrates the power and fearlessness of ever being called to account that all DAs have. The immunity from any fear of prosecution of their own crimes basically puts them above the law- a fact that doesn't go unnoticed by them. They can literally do anything they want no matter how unbalanced or depraved so long as they can dress it up as prosecutorial "zeal".. They know that the general population doesn't track on the details of cases and ALL families of accused say their prosecution is unjust , so that doesn't matter either. They can do whatever they want, however they want for any reason they want. They suppress exculpatory evidence as a matter of course- basically they play the role of good ole' Buford T Justice where they decide who's guilty and create through whatever means necessary the evidence to prove it.
Try being a minority caught in the clutches of our system. Why do you think so many poor African Americans are so totally checked out, fatalistic, knowing and cynical when it comes to matters of criminal justice? Because they know no one cares if they see anything like justice or not and that there is no real justice or just cause , there's "just us" and "just cuz" for them.
So Aaron got caught in THAT system and the video of him attempting to hide his face with a bike helmet enraged and incensed one of these DAs who had the full cooperation of the sociopaths in the upper administration of MIT.
It's a good reason to never convict / indict anyone for anything that might lead to jail. Jail is basically sado-hell where society throws people it's mad at without a shred or a care about what happens to them in there or when they get out either.
The only people you should ever indict or convict are very violent people who just cannot control themselves and will surely re-offend the first chance they get. Everyone else should walk.
As a side note, it's a fact also that they won't put scientists or programmers on juries because they are too good at thinking up potentially exculpatory alternative hypothesis and more immune to DAs wide-eyed narratives of moral outrage strung together with circumstantial doo-dads and character assassination. Juries are largely composed of retirees and gung ho Law and Order fans.
Just the threat of jail surely turned Aaron around a long time ago. Did that DA give a shit? Oh fuck no- he's bucking for bigger office, a better job, maybe political office. Anyone who puts a bike helmet over his face knows he (age what??? 24?) is doing something naughty , and now, as Lessig said, "we get to nuke you. "
No indictments. No convictions. Not until things change in this fucking country. Fuck you Conn. Fuck you asshole DAs. Too bad you need us to rubber stamp your dirty work before you can kill again. Denied. Denied denied denied denied. Fuck you.
You're interpreting my post too literally. When I say C# is a great language, I am implicitly including the runtime. Ditto for java- I am implicitly including the jvm since in both cases the statements become nonsensical without including the associated VMs they run on .
Also you're interpreting "great" too literally also. Great is of course always relative. They're as good programming languages as any. They're fine They're great. You should use them.
Just by coincidence , today in ARS comes this story which includes an "infallible" backdoor placed on machines via Adobe PDFs and Word documents that's part of a worldwide highly targeted espionage network. Homeland Security is not recommending that Word and PDF Reader be universally removed from all machines and they weren't recommending that for Java either. The advice is always the same- don't open / run shit from people you don't know or entities you don't trust.
People have to keep in mind that programming languages are seen as are prime economic turf that players will fight over for a wide variety of reasons That includes waging proxy wars on slashdot, exaggerating distorting the actual meaning of news events etc etc. The place where yo9u might have seen this happening over the years is Intel vs AMD. I would love to know the amount of money spent / number of people employed by Intel in astro-turf campaigns and reviews. If court records are to be believed, Intel is one of the dirtiest players in all of Silicon Valley and will do anything conceivable legal or illegal to gain an advantage. What it *looks like* is what the language wars *look like* either strong unequivocal bashing of the opponents platform by someone with apparently infinite time to respond to posts with enormous technical detail that distorts reality but is difficult for the average person to counter or damning with faint praise in reviews etc.
These things go on at every level everywhere. Java and it's VM is an enormously successful language / platform that is installed on perhaps a billion machines and is no more insecure than any other equivalently power technology. The same is true of C# and all the other platforms.
Get real. People running Java based apps on their computers are in no danger of anything. What is being talked about is Applets, where arbitrary code is injected and run in the browser-hosted sandbox. So you surf to some website We-R-Malware and it asks you to let it run their applet (written in Java) in your browser and you say "sure, great idea".
This is like opening an email attachment form the same domain name; don't do that because somehow that PDF file, Excel file, Word document or whatever is harboring some evil code.
But does any of that mean you should remove Excel or PDF readers or Word or Libre Office or anything else from your own machine? Of course not. Java apps are totally safe on your machine and removing Java from your machine makes exactly zero sense.
The only people (mis) representing this situation are people who have an economic stake in "competing " languages and runtimes and language warriors , so that would include M$, consultants who want to be able to bill to rewrite Java apps (for no reason) , authors and evangelists from competing languages etc etc etc . You should all be ashamed of yourselves. C# is a great language , Java is a great language , Perl is a great language , C is a great language, Scala is a great language, Lisp is a great language.. so just GTFU.
In the US you can be fired for no reason whatsoever; only a few classes of reason are forbidden- race gender age (supposedly) etc.
The effect is that everything eventually becomes 100% political. Managers maintain a hit list of people they want to get rid of and as soon as they have the opportunity, they execute on that hit list. It effectively creates a "Survivor" type dynamic inside every workplace where who you know and who you've sucked up to carries nearly all the weight and the quality of your work product carries none.
Regarding that last past , very simply put, American employers are not going to tolerate you trying to quality-work your way to job security. They know all about this "tactic", have nothing but contempt for it and view it as nothing more than an attempt to "top from the bottom".
Letting you control your fire-ability through the quality of your work would put YOU in the driver's seat and there's no way that's ever going to fly around here. Having themselves come up in the same system of exploitation, abuse, kangaroo courts in the guise of "employee evaluations ", favoritism and cronyism they consider it their right and earned privilege to do whatever they want within the confines of their fiefdom and for whatever reason they see fit. Full stop.
This is also the mentality of all the managers beneath them, who know to kowtow to the king.
This is where the rancor towards Obamacare comes from, aside from Obamacare's attenuation of one of the chief implicit existential threats that keep employees in their place- the threat of dying or being bankrupted because you have no health care. It's the government telling people who think of themselves as rulers of their own nation what to do in their nation.
Essentially it's what England had under Henry VIII, say, where power is total and despotic, anyone can be executed at any time for any reason and the lords and earls and noblemen jockey for power positions amongst themselves , while sucking up to the King unless and until the opportunity to overthrow him presents itself.
I've been fired many times and never once because of the quality of my work product, my productivity or economic conditions. The majority of my friends would tell you the same thing.
Let me get this straight. The top 1% beggar the rest of us so badly that we don't make enough to even pay federal income taxes any longer and then THAT fact is then used against us as a talking point?
Yeah you're reacting to actions that are going on 50 years old now done by people whose world views were formed 80 years ago now who were born going on 100 years ago now. Your attitude is how never-ending wars are perpetuated. Every generation recites the offenses for yonder days . IN the uS it' susually accompanied (poorly) with the quote "those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.". You know what? Those who cling to history's real and perceived offenses are doomed to repeat it that same history. Figure it out.
Exactly. The FBI and Homeland Security have a duty to to look into lawlessness and guess what, plenty of OWS people were all for the kinds of "direct action" which, however you feel about their goals (I supported and do support them given my admiration of the European socialist democracies) basically represent lawlessness. The EXACT SAME type of investigation and procedures were and are used against Wall Street in connection with the events inspiring OWS. Law enforcement has to build up knowledge about the world and the people in it. How ELSE do you expect them to do their jobs? This is not J Edgar Hoover's FBI fabricating crimes against political opponents.. The left in the US has the bad habit of always fighting the last war, of looking for the keys where the light is shining, of framing things in terms they are comfortable with, well worn tropes, rather then framing things in terms of how they actually are. The problem with that is it's a form of reality denial. Every time you deny or distort reality you lose credibility not only with your enemies, but with people who would have otherwise taken you seriously.
"People are selfish by nature " is not a quantifiable statement of causality; it's cop out when people want to short circuit investigating why people act as they do.
People can be either very or somewhat or not very much at all selfish. All these states are "by nature" since nothing we do is outside of nature.
But the known facts are that people are more or less altruistic / selfish / egalitarian / violent depending on the environment they find themselves in that either rewards or prepares them for one set of responses or another, and by environment I include everything from in utereo onwards since we have lots of evidence that events starting then and at all time points forward can have a critical effect on which genes get expressed and how.
If you read the excellent The Selfish Gene, you'll see what a full exposition of the idea that "people are selfish by nature" actually amounts to, and it's NOT genetics is destiny for any given personality or behavior, excepting very extreme birth defects. Neither does it mean there's just no way to raise people who are not generally selfish tending towards criminality or still-legal but clearly anti-social behavior.
Yes people are selfish, and from this necessarily follows little with respect to the kind of very specific behaviour and actions that are the source of trouble for society.
We have to become responsible for the environment we raise people in and to do that we need knowledge and then we need to act on that knowledge.. To paraphrase Neo in the Matrix- knowledge. we needs lots of knowledge.
They know they're lying and when you lie about something that kills millions, that's manslaughter if not murder.
The Koch brothers THINK they'll going to die of old age before anyone tries them and puts a noose around their necks. Ditto Limbaugh and Monckton and Singer and Murdoch. Don't be too sure. All it takes is one serious dislocation with mass death and panic due to say crop failures or rising sea levels or the oceans dying or things appearing to have entered into a positive feedback loop for them to be facing the same kind of mass rage that Mussolini faced. Ask Saddam what kind of kangaroo court the US can trot out when the need arises and people just cease to care about legalistic niceties.
As far as their "legacy", the only "legacy" they're leaving behind is to be known as some of history's worst psychopaths. That's a done deal. The best they can hope for now is to destroy human civilization once and for all so there won't be anyone around to talk about them at all.
Yeah what's the attraction with the Saw movies? Does anyone over the age of 14 or 15 have any interest in these things? Prior to those ages, one supposes, the whole concept and graphic gore are probably novel.. "Hey ! What if some, like, total SICKO chained you in a room with only a SAW and one other person then watched everything you did on a closed circuit TV and... and...
blah blah blah
fuckin' blah blah blah
fuckin' blah
fuckin' blah
fuckin' blah blah blah....
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz....
OK kids that's a glimpse into how an adult mind processes gory movies. Wake me up when this REALLY STUPID thing is o-vah....
Adults only object to them because they're so fucking inane, unimaginative, unoriginal, stupid and boring that we're worried you'll devolve to the depths your great grandparents "achieved" :
Term limits are the WORST idea for someone with your beliefs.
Here's what you THINK you're doing :
Stopping people from having to be corporations bitches so they can get money to be elected again.
and here's what you're REALLY doing:
Ensuring that whoever runs for office will be a literal employee of corporations both immediately before and immediately after; someone whose career in government amounts to a sabbatical to Congress or the Senate to do the bidding of the corporations who sent him on that sabbatical.
Here's what you THINK you're doing:
Keeping "career" politicians our of Washington and giving "regular people" a chance to have that Senate seat.
and here's what you're REALLY doing:
Keeping people who are motivated by a strong desire to be effective in getting government to work from ever even considering running for office since only corporate employees get those jobs and anyway even if you get you can't do any good in your single term.
The way to good governance is through a Constitutional Amendment overturning Citizen's United.
This is why we have governments. They are able and have the mandate to do things that corporations are incapable of doing or don't have the motivation to do or as in this case, both. This is how we got the national highway system ion the first place. I would say that private business and the nation as a whole has benefited from having a highway system and that the money spent has been paid back many many many many many times over since it was created.
"'We've got the lobsters feeding back on themselves just because they're so abundant,' said Richard Wahle, a marine sciences professor at the University of Maine, who is supervising the research. 'It's never been observed just out in the open like this,' he said." Abundance caused by populations of their predators collapsing.
owing to the increased temperature in the oceans... owing to global warming.
This is what happens when you inadvertently screw with the predator-prey relationships which have worked themselves out over millions of years.
Just wait 30 years and the FTFY will be:
"'We've got the people feeding back on themselves just because there's so little food' "It's never been observed just out in the open like this,' " We have overpopulation relative to collapsing food supply caused in turn by the collapse of the ecosystem, starting 30 years ago in the oceans..."
Slashdot Mirror
If you make a habit of reading polls on a a variety of political and social issues, you'll learn a lot about Americans and specifically you might come to the conclusion that about 25-35% of Americans are basically so disconnected from scientific and social reality they're functionally insane and their opinion should ALWAYS and AUTOMATICALLY be classified as "non-truth related".
For instance, and famously, about 46% of Americans don't believe in evolution
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/05/americans-believe-in-creationism_n_1571127.html
But also 10% think that prosecutors who send innocent people to jail should not be prosecuted:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-texas-exoneree-testifies-20130204,0,3950542.story?page=2
25% think Obama is not an American citizen:
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20056061-503544.html
30%^ think God decides the outcome of sporting events: http://rt.com/usa/news/super-bowl-result-god-337/
And on and on and on. Watching polls what you'll discover is about 10% of Americans are just outright fascists who wouldn't hesitate to do whatever any right wing authority told them to do, and think it should have been started yesterday. This is also the finding of Bob Altemeyer in his seminal work on authoritarianism :
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/.
right.
About 25-30% believe that events on Earth are assiduously overseen by an all knowing God who "sees them when they're sleeping / and knows if they're awake / and knows if they've been bad of good..." and what happens in everything from their personal life to world events is really of no consequence except to the extent that it is a reflection of an eternal, ongoing battle between good and evil being fought on an unseen cosmic plane. This is something they have this is common with every Muslim extremist who ever strapped a suicide bomb onto himself.
Americans have a deficit of rationality, a deep and persistent belief that something other than outcome based, welfare of humans is the proper measure of human morality, are scientifically illiterate and constitutionally incapable of perceiving in their thinking just the kinds of bugs that the referenced article details.
There's not enough time to reform the American character before we have to take radical and decisive action on global warming. The fact is, democracy stops where science begins. This isn't going to lead to anything good.
The least divisive, least disrupting course of action is for the government to internally and secretly set up an Executive Action team within one the intelligence agencies whose purpose is to discredit, attack and dismantle and neutralize the leaders of the denier terrorist movement. We all know who they are. These *thought leaders* need to be attacked the same way we'd attack any group of terrorists building a bomb named which would have the same long term destructive power as global warming. Denialism is a bomb with the capacity to permanently destroy civilization and the people assembling that bomb are not working in secret. They need to be neutralized and their sources of funding and societal legitimacy attacked through and and all means necessary. They have forfeited their civil rights and constitutional protections. We simply need to deal with them like the world destroying terrorists they are.
You can come to this conclusion now when there's still time to do something about global warming or you can come to this conclusion later, when there's no possibility of doing anything about it and the starvation, the concomitant societal breakdown and mass, uncontrolled immigration, the tidal wave of anti-Western (Big Oil / Big Coal ) terrorism and collapsing centralized governments take not just the denier's civil liberties and Con
I was denied employment b/c I wouldn't t tell them how much I made in my previous job. I didn't want them to think I wouldn't work for them since their offer was much lower. I didn't care, I just wanted a stable long term job. Turns out they took that as an act of insubordination or something. If I wanted my IRS returns to be public, they'd be on FB. I am not telling you because I want that information private. I am applying for this job because I have determined the salary offered meets my salary demands.
GTFU. Just because you have a job to offer doesn't mean every application filer has to dump their panty drawer at your feet so you can get yourself off by sniffing its contents. Be glad a high quality candidate took an interest in your job.
Single merchandiser (Amazon) == market control. Don't sell digital goods on Amazon and don't buy or make DRM. Amazon Google and Apple lose their power to unilaterally make up law and Reality when we stop giving them that power.
Whatever the facts are,and I am sure the Russian software provider is using dirty business tactics to suppress competition, Comrade,the reality is you can't permit a gateway to turn into a gatekeeper who keeps you out of your market place. We should have learned that from the Apple store fiascoes . We give them the power to be arbitrary dictators by building business model which rely for their success of failure on them taking a shine to us or not. That's crazy. Don't let Google in that position or Apple or Amazon or anyone. A lot of word of mouth, a little SEO and the web is your distribution channel. If a market segment can't find your app that way or can't use it b/c they live in a walled garden, then don't include success with those users as a critical part of your business plan. Business plans with single, gigantic holes in them fail.
I have to say I'm a bit surprised that my city is voluntarily shedding potentially $9.8M in revenue after objectively evaluating a program
Yes the idea of a government for by and of the people is completely alien to a large number of slashdotters who have drunk the Ayn Rand / John Galt / Libertarian Kool-Aid.
Fuck you it's not a moral issue you fucking moron. It's called a nation and for people to be satisfied in their nation they have to have some means of being gainfully employed. It has nothing to do with "deserving" ; it has to do with nationhood. Fucking asswipe.
If Google was built around FOSS then their analytic engine would be open source. instead of secret sauce. That's what Google using FOSS to make money would look like. There's a difference between USING FOSS and making money WITH FOSS. We don't say Goggle makes money off the roads the employees use to drive to work because that's just something they use on the way to making money. Google uses a lot of free / freely shared/ open source things on the way to doing business - the question is do they make money ON FOSS and the answer is no, or only very very indirectly, as indirectly as making money off roads. They make money on their analytic engine, which is a trade secret.
You have to accept that the economy is not a natural thing, it's a human made game whose outcome HAS TO BE beneficial to humans by definition. All the laws and regulations and trade agreements and monetary policy and all these complex things will either serve the general welfare of humans of *get thrown the fuck out* and replaced by something that does.
IF you want to see what a "natural" economy looks like, head over to Somolia or Rwanda or Congo. Pack your pretty wife or girl friend too and stay a few weeks "free of goomint regulation" in your perfect Ayn Randian "free market" with all those supermen who have gained positions of power thanks to being free from that damn 'goobmint and tell us how it goes for you.
The economy is not a natural thing. It's a game; an agreed upon lie that can and should be replaced when it starts to fail with something that works. . Maybe that something is just a little bit of socialism where we all work some hours and get what a lot of of what we want in return. The reality that is technological progress could take us there and if it does,who the fuck cares ? When we can grow houses
http://www.popsci.com/arbona/article/2006-11/grow-your-second-home
and clothes and high quality protein meat is created in test tubes ,
http://www.helium.com/items/2162168-meat-grown-in-test-tubes-only-a-few-years-away
that is when food clothing and shelter are too cheap to meter , then what? Something new. Something we haven't thought of, that's all.
Sure tech is ruining the economy. Is it really that surprising? The economics of scarcity is the ultimate buggy whip.
Wrong.
The DA is there to represent The People in seeking justice and only secondarily as the prosecutor for that justice against the defense. The first job of the DA is to impartially and with discretion decide whether the case is worth pursuing at all and if so what charges to bring. This is not a power given to the defense and the DA is expected to impartially play the role of a juror applying reasonable doubt here.
So it's not the more than mildly brain-dead "blue-team / red-team let's get it on! " scenario you learned from watching Law and Order re-runs. IN fact the whole "deep voiced voiceover" that precedes each Law and Order episode deliberately and malignantly mis-presents and distorts the adversarial structure of the the judicial system by identifying
In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups -- the police who investigate crime, and the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories.
When in reality the "two equally important" sides are the prosecution and the defense, which have decidedly UNequal powers.
The prosecution and the state has practically unlimited funds to pursue cases- defendants are often indigent.
Prosecution has the power to decide charges,; defendants can suck it up.
the prosecutor has a repeating, ongoing relationship with both the police and the judges who in turn decide cases and issue \subpoenas \ decide on admissability \ decide on each objection and motion. Defendants are generally poor strangers around these here parts who likely won't be seen again.
DAs party with, socialize with, marry into, have kids with, and generally travel in the same social circles with judges , the police and other lawyers, including defense lawyers . Defendants are strangers around these parts who likely wont' be seen again.
Maybe if you got your ideas about how the system is supposed to work from civics class instead of Fred Thompson TV shows, you'd understand why people are upset over the state of criminal justice in this nation.
It's a material fact about our criminal justice system that prosecutors put people they know to be innocent away for life. Check out the Innocence Project for the grotesque details.
The reason I bring that up is because it dramatically illustrates the power and fearlessness of ever being called to account that all DAs have. The immunity from any fear of prosecution of their own crimes basically puts them above the law- a fact that doesn't go unnoticed by them. They can literally do anything they want no matter how unbalanced or depraved so long as they can dress it up as prosecutorial "zeal".. They know that the general population doesn't track on the details of cases and ALL families of accused say their prosecution is unjust , so that doesn't matter either. They can do whatever they want, however they want for any reason they want. They suppress exculpatory evidence as a matter of course- basically they play the role of good ole' Buford T Justice where they decide who's guilty and create through whatever means necessary the evidence to prove it.
Try being a minority caught in the clutches of our system. Why do you think so many poor African Americans are so totally checked out, fatalistic, knowing and cynical when it comes to matters of criminal justice? Because they know no one cares if they see anything like justice or not and that there is no real justice or just cause , there's "just us" and "just cuz" for them.
So Aaron got caught in THAT system and the video of him attempting to hide his face with a bike helmet enraged and incensed one of these DAs who had the full cooperation of the sociopaths in the upper administration of MIT.
It's a good reason to never convict / indict anyone for anything that might lead to jail. Jail is basically sado-hell where society throws people it's mad at without a shred or a care about what happens to them in there or when they get out either.
The only people you should ever indict or convict are very violent people who just cannot control themselves and will surely re-offend the first chance they get. Everyone else should walk.
As a side note, it's a fact also that they won't put scientists or programmers on juries because they are too good at thinking up potentially exculpatory alternative hypothesis and more immune to DAs wide-eyed narratives of moral outrage strung together with circumstantial doo-dads and character assassination. Juries are largely composed of retirees and gung ho Law and Order fans.
Just the threat of jail surely turned Aaron around a long time ago. Did that DA give a shit? Oh fuck no- he's bucking for bigger office, a better job, maybe political office. Anyone who puts a bike helmet over his face knows he (age what??? 24?) is doing something naughty , and now, as Lessig said, "we get to nuke you. "
No indictments. No convictions. Not until things change in this fucking country. Fuck you Conn. Fuck you asshole DAs. Too bad you need us to rubber stamp your dirty work before you can kill again. Denied. Denied denied denied denied. Fuck you.
You're interpreting my post too literally. When I say C# is a great language, I am implicitly including the runtime. Ditto for java- I am implicitly including the jvm since in both cases the statements become nonsensical without including the associated VMs they run on .
Also you're interpreting "great" too literally also. Great is of course always relative. They're as good programming languages as any. They're fine They're great. You should use them.
Just by coincidence , today in ARS comes this story which includes an "infallible" backdoor placed on machines via Adobe PDFs and Word documents that's part of a worldwide highly targeted espionage network. Homeland Security is not recommending that Word and PDF Reader be universally removed from all machines and they weren't recommending that for Java either. The advice is always the same- don't open / run shit from people you don't know or entities you don't trust.
People have to keep in mind that programming languages are seen as are prime economic turf that players will fight over for a wide variety of reasons That includes waging proxy wars on slashdot, exaggerating distorting the actual meaning of news events etc etc. The place where yo9u might have seen this happening over the years is Intel vs AMD. I would love to know the amount of money spent / number of people employed by Intel in astro-turf campaigns and reviews. If court records are to be believed, Intel is one of the dirtiest players in all of Silicon Valley and will do anything conceivable legal or illegal to gain an advantage. What it *looks like* is what the language wars *look like* either strong unequivocal bashing of the opponents platform by someone with apparently infinite time to respond to posts with enormous technical detail that distorts reality but is difficult for the average person to counter or damning with faint praise in reviews etc.
These things go on at every level everywhere. Java and it's VM is an enormously successful language / platform that is installed on perhaps a billion machines and is no more insecure than any other equivalently power technology. The same is true of C# and all the other platforms.
This is like opening an email attachment form the same domain name; don't do that because somehow that PDF file, Excel file, Word document or whatever is harboring some evil code.
But does any of that mean you should remove Excel or PDF readers or Word or Libre Office or anything else from your own machine? Of course not. Java apps are totally safe on your machine and removing Java from your machine makes exactly zero sense.
The only people (mis) representing this situation are people who have an economic stake in "competing " languages and runtimes and language warriors , so that would include M$, consultants who want to be able to bill to rewrite Java apps (for no reason) , authors and evangelists from competing languages etc etc etc . You should all be ashamed of yourselves. C# is a great language , Java is a great language , Perl is a great language , C is a great language, Scala is a great language, Lisp is a great language.. so just GTFU.
In the US you can be fired for no reason whatsoever; only a few classes of reason are forbidden- race gender age (supposedly) etc. The effect is that everything eventually becomes 100% political. Managers maintain a hit list of people they want to get rid of and as soon as they have the opportunity, they execute on that hit list. It effectively creates a "Survivor" type dynamic inside every workplace where who you know and who you've sucked up to carries nearly all the weight and the quality of your work product carries none. Regarding that last past , very simply put, American employers are not going to tolerate you trying to quality-work your way to job security. They know all about this "tactic", have nothing but contempt for it and view it as nothing more than an attempt to "top from the bottom". Letting you control your fire-ability through the quality of your work would put YOU in the driver's seat and there's no way that's ever going to fly around here. Having themselves come up in the same system of exploitation, abuse, kangaroo courts in the guise of "employee evaluations ", favoritism and cronyism they consider it their right and earned privilege to do whatever they want within the confines of their fiefdom and for whatever reason they see fit. Full stop. This is also the mentality of all the managers beneath them, who know to kowtow to the king. This is where the rancor towards Obamacare comes from, aside from Obamacare's attenuation of one of the chief implicit existential threats that keep employees in their place- the threat of dying or being bankrupted because you have no health care. It's the government telling people who think of themselves as rulers of their own nation what to do in their nation. Essentially it's what England had under Henry VIII, say, where power is total and despotic, anyone can be executed at any time for any reason and the lords and earls and noblemen jockey for power positions amongst themselves , while sucking up to the King unless and until the opportunity to overthrow him presents itself. I've been fired many times and never once because of the quality of my work product, my productivity or economic conditions. The majority of my friends would tell you the same thing.
Let me get this straight. The top 1% beggar the rest of us so badly that we don't make enough to even pay federal income taxes any longer and then THAT fact is then used against us as a talking point?
You sir, are infinitely gullible.
Yeah you're reacting to actions that are going on 50 years old now done by people whose world views were formed 80 years ago now who were born going on 100 years ago now. Your attitude is how never-ending wars are perpetuated. Every generation recites the offenses for yonder days . IN the uS it' susually accompanied (poorly) with the quote "those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.". You know what? Those who cling to history's real and perceived offenses are doomed to repeat it that same history. Figure it out.
Exactly. The FBI and Homeland Security have a duty to to look into lawlessness and guess what, plenty of OWS people were all for the kinds of "direct action" which, however you feel about their goals (I supported and do support them given my admiration of the European socialist democracies) basically represent lawlessness. The EXACT SAME type of investigation and procedures were and are used against Wall Street in connection with the events inspiring OWS. Law enforcement has to build up knowledge about the world and the people in it. How ELSE do you expect them to do their jobs? This is not J Edgar Hoover's FBI fabricating crimes against political opponents.. The left in the US has the bad habit of always fighting the last war, of looking for the keys where the light is shining, of framing things in terms they are comfortable with, well worn tropes, rather then framing things in terms of how they actually are. The problem with that is it's a form of reality denial. Every time you deny or distort reality you lose credibility not only with your enemies, but with people who would have otherwise taken you seriously.
"People are selfish by nature " is not a quantifiable statement of causality; it's cop out when people want to short circuit investigating why people act as they do.
People can be either very or somewhat or not very much at all selfish. All these states are "by nature" since nothing we do is outside of nature.
But the known facts are that people are more or less altruistic / selfish / egalitarian / violent depending on the environment they find themselves in that either rewards or prepares them for one set of responses or another, and by environment I include everything from in utereo onwards since we have lots of evidence that events starting then and at all time points forward can have a critical effect on which genes get expressed and how.
If you read the excellent The Selfish Gene, you'll see what a full exposition of the idea that "people are selfish by nature" actually amounts to, and it's NOT genetics is destiny for any given personality or behavior, excepting very extreme birth defects. Neither does it mean there's just no way to raise people who are not generally selfish tending towards criminality or still-legal but clearly anti-social behavior.
Yes people are selfish, and from this necessarily follows little with respect to the kind of very specific behaviour and actions that are the source of trouble for society.
We have to become responsible for the environment we raise people in and to do that we need knowledge and then we need to act on that knowledge.. To paraphrase Neo in the Matrix- knowledge. we needs lots of knowledge.
The Koch brothers THINK they'll going to die of old age before anyone tries them and puts a noose around their necks. Ditto Limbaugh and Monckton and Singer and Murdoch. Don't be too sure. All it takes is one serious dislocation with mass death and panic due to say crop failures or rising sea levels or the oceans dying or things appearing to have entered into a positive feedback loop for them to be facing the same kind of mass rage that Mussolini faced. Ask Saddam what kind of kangaroo court the US can trot out when the need arises and people just cease to care about legalistic niceties.
As far as their "legacy", the only "legacy" they're leaving behind is to be known as some of history's worst psychopaths. That's a done deal. The best they can hope for now is to destroy human civilization once and for all so there won't be anyone around to talk about them at all.
Yeah what's the attraction with the Saw movies? Does anyone over the age of 14 or 15 have any interest in these things? Prior to those ages, one supposes, the whole concept and graphic gore are probably novel.. "Hey ! What if some, like, total SICKO chained you in a room with only a SAW and one other person then watched everything you did on a closed circuit TV and... and... blah blah blah fuckin' blah blah blah fuckin' blah fuckin' blah fuckin' blah blah blah....
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz....
OK kids that's a glimpse into how an adult mind processes gory movies. Wake me up when this REALLY STUPID thing is o-vah....
Adults only object to them because they're so fucking inane, unimaginative, unoriginal, stupid and boring that we're worried you'll devolve to the depths your great grandparents "achieved" :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Johann_Schwarzer_movies_about_1906.jpg
Term limits are the WORST idea for someone with your beliefs.
Here's what you THINK you're doing :
Stopping people from having to be corporations bitches so they can get money to be elected again.
and here's what you're REALLY doing:
Ensuring that whoever runs for office will be a literal employee of corporations both immediately before and immediately after; someone whose career in government amounts to a sabbatical to Congress or the Senate to do the bidding of the corporations who sent him on that sabbatical.
Here's what you THINK you're doing:
Keeping "career" politicians our of Washington and giving "regular people" a chance to have that Senate seat.
and here's what you're REALLY doing:
Keeping people who are motivated by a strong desire to be effective in getting government to work from ever even considering running for office since only corporate employees get those jobs and anyway even if you get you can't do any good in your single term.
The way to good governance is through a Constitutional Amendment overturning Citizen's United.
Thank you !! You need to keep opening your mouth in these kinds of discussions. My country needs you.
This is why we have governments. They are able and have the mandate to do things that corporations are incapable of doing or don't have the motivation to do or as in this case, both. This is how we got the national highway system ion the first place. I would say that private business and the nation as a whole has benefited from having a highway system and that the money spent has been paid back many many many many many times over since it was created.
This is happening because the oceans are warming:
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/science/121203/lobster-cannibals-caused-warm-seasons
"'We've got the lobsters feeding back on themselves just because they're so abundant,' said Richard Wahle, a marine sciences professor at the University of Maine, who is supervising the research. 'It's never been observed just out in the open like this,' he said." Abundance caused by populations of their predators collapsing.
owing to the increased temperature in the oceans... owing to global warming.
This is what happens when you inadvertently screw with the predator-prey relationships which have worked themselves out over millions of years.
Just wait 30 years and the FTFY will be :
"'We've got the people feeding back on themselves just because there's so little food' "It's never been observed just out in the open like this,' " We have overpopulation relative to collapsing food supply caused in turn by the collapse of the ecosystem, starting 30 years ago in the oceans..."
The "natural" selection process begins next year...
The NATURAL selection process starts next year.