"An upper caste member might not be able to get into a school with a 90% score on the entrance exams, but a lower caste member may be assured admission with a 70% score."
This is a very common practice in America and Europe. Despite some grumblings from the privledged classes, it IS working here in the United States. Ethnic groups who were once excluded from universities are more successful then they were 50 years ago. We have African American governers, Latino American mayors, Asian American CEOs, Native American senators, etc. We still have a long way to go, but the leadership of this country is finally starting to reflect the ethnic makeup of this country.
Something you miss about this is that in the US and Europe the targets of affirmative action are minorities. But in India the low castes are the majority of the population. With guaranteed seats in parliament and university they vastly reduce the opportunity for the minority high caste members. So it's not just that you are letting more people in with low scores, it is that they are guaranteeing that the majority of university students will have low scores and kicking the high-scoring students to the curb, literally.
On what, exactly, are you calling bullshit? He didn't lie. He just said something you disagree with. Ergo, there is no reason you should 'call bullshit.'
I long for the day we can leave this 'calling bullshit' bullshit behind.
Bullshit is not just a lie. Bullshit is related to lies, but spouting bullshit does not require an intent to lie, it requires either an intent to lie or a belief that the bullshit is truth.
The idea that everyone can simply boycott the RIAA is bullshit. That is what the poster was talking about. They then proceeded to explain why this is a bullshit idea. (In case you did not read their post, but will somehow read mine, they said that most people have a favorite band on an RIAA label, among other things.)
Now, I have pretty much stopped buying cds and downloading RIAA music. But I realize that I do listen to it on the radio. That's not really boycotting the RIAA. The problem here is that the RIAA is holding the music industry, and our beloved artists, hostage.
Is it so big that you can't just call out or walk for 10-15 seconds to talk to somebody? I've used IM clients to have a silent conversation in a crowded room before but not for regular communication at home.
I had no idea what fucking luddites you slashdotters are. Do you have any idea what technology is for at all? The point is if I am working upstairs it is damned inefficient to walk all the way downstairs, stop waht I am doing, interrupt someone else, and stop what they are doing, just so I can ask them a one sentence question. It is stupid and unnecessary thanks to technology.
We are not talking about ending family communication. That happened decades ago. We are talking about making it possible again. Families are busy, dispersed, and engaged in all sorts of distracting tasks. There are few chances for familial communication especially with the death first of nightly gatherings for reading and prayer and second with the death of the family dinner.
I am not saying an effort to revive such practices is misguided, but what if you could talk to your family while doing other things? That is what instant messaging was invented for. It is there so you can talk to multiple people at once while coding, posting to slashdot, writing the great american novel, doing your homework, balancing the budget, or whatever it is you are doing on your computer. It means you can talk to the rest of the family and ask simple questions and make decisions together.
Now that the rest of the family have computers, pdas, cell phones and such it is especially spiffy because you can text message and talk to your kids and family members to keep tabs on what they are doing and coordinate that family dinner that died so long ago for lack of coordination and communication.
Also, the internet and instant messaging are great for people who do not live with their families. I communicate with the wired members of my family much more often simply because they are available to me. If you are back in the 19th century sending paper letters through snail mail you get much less communication.
Inside a bar is generally considered "in public" and a "public place" since its a place of business that just about anyone can go into.
Yes, but the pictures were probably shot after hours, when no one else could go in there. Didn't you notice that there were no other people in this very famous and popular lincoln bar?
Good post. I hate to do this but... "It may indeed be a better system, but there is still the problem that cvs is ubiquitous, well-known, and widely supported."
Replace cvs with windows and you can see what's happening on the desktop.
Believe me, not only am I painfully aware of that, but I was thinking of it when I wrote what I did. If you want Linux on the desktop you have to solve the same problems Microsoft did when they were working on taking over. You have to design your interface such that users of your competition can easily and naturally use the interface, and you must allow them to quickly and easily access their legacy data. That is the law fo software no matter what software we are talking about. Fail to do this and you fail to take the market every time.
Did you bother to check the links? Besides your assurances, can you point to studies that support your claims - and something a little more methodologically sound than what your mother is up to? If access is near a hundred percent, you think there would be a news story that would have told the rest of us about it. Find one - preferably from a reputable source.
Mighty skeptical aren't we? I don't think there is much I can do to prove to you that libraries exist. Perhaps you should try and visit one? For starters, google for "public library locations" and include the name of your favorite town.
It is simply a fact that there is a correlation between income and Internet use. It is also a fact that income level is correlated with race and gender. You may not like it, but it is true. Now, do some research before you start ranting about things so you have an informed opinion about them.
No, it is simply a canard that income has anything to do with internet access. Last time I checked they did not ask for a slip from my bank account to attend a public school, enter the grounds of a public library or of a university. Your continued assertions that minorities are somehow incapable of figuring this out or of earning a living do a disservice to them as well. Perhaps you should get out more and take a look around you.
Better yet, ask a librarian about how Internet access works in a library. Ever tried it? Sign up times and time limits make for a decidedly different experience than surfing at home - and surely if you were accessing it via the library you'd want to spend your limited time on the 'net answering some pollster's questions. Right?
I have indeed done a fair bit of travelling in the US as well as conversing with people on the internet and doing a lot of research. The studies you point to are inflammatory reactionary bullshit. They rely solely on a gross manipulation of the facts at hand in order to arrive at the same conclusion every "liberal" study does, which is that minorities are somehow inferior and need to be husbanded carefully into democratic voting booths. It is this very philosophy that represents the most dangerous racist agenda we currently face.
Of course there are less people using the internet at home than there should be. Of course not everyone wants or has a computer. But I would submit that since even people on welfare can and do own computers and do access the internet, this has a lot to do with choice.
Regardless, again, there are the public libraries. I have not found a single town in the US that did not have one, nor have I found a library that did not have internet access. I have done more than ask the librarian how the system works, I have availed myself of their services. Further, even homeless people have been able to maintain internet access in this and like manner. The access has always been more than adequate to pursue not only necessary information, but idle pursuits as well. The libraries are always full of people mudding, working on their websites, chtting, and sending email. Usually access is given in increments of one hour, but so long as one is unchallenged one might be in there all day on the net. Nevertheless, a simple poll can be answered in seconds. It could be announced on television and access could even be organized through the aforementioned places just as voting is. When Newsweek was poo pooing Perot's electronic town halls, they did not realize that they had already been built. They were there then, are here now, and here to stay.
The necessary hardware to access the internet is likewise freely available. Even a 486 can get on the internet, and people throw those away. It is a simple matter of how badly you want on and whether you do at all. Internet access is available for free or for nominal fees through dialup access providers and sometimes through communities themselves. I am reminded of the rural Kentucky town that wired its entire
If you really want to get polling information about political stuff, use the internet....Now, of course the results will be skewed because only people who are informed and interested in the issue at hand will vote.
More likely, the data will be skewed due to the fact that only 2 in 5 households have internet access and most of that is concentrated in higher-income, white and Asian households. If you want go with more current estimates of around 149 million of the 291 million people that live in the U.S. - 51 percent of the population - have Internet access. According to a fairly recent Pew Study as much as 24% of the U.S. population is completely disconnected from the Internet - and this research suggests that's the way they want it.
You are exactly the kind of guy I was talking about in my rant about "liberals." I knew someone would pull out that old racist saw that only white people use the internet, and claim that there are actually large portions of the population without access. Both are completely and totally false.
The rate of internet access in the united states is very near 100% if it is not exactly that number. The reason is that every community has a public library and public schools, and those are on the internet. 7-11's, restaurants, coffee shops, truck stops, washaterias, hotels, apartment complexes and all manner of other public places have publicly available internet access that can be had for free or for the price of a cup of coffee. This is not just in urban areas.
For instance my mother lives in a small town of probably a few hundred not very far from the border. People there are simple, dirt poor, and many of them are indeed old. Most do not have a lot to do with the internet. Internet is available, but not everyone wants it or has a computer. But the schools and library do have internet access. And most people have a friend or relative that does as well and who shares it with them. Shared access like this means that for the purposes of voting online or using a poll, EVERYONE has the ability to get online.
Also this business of constantly claiming that evrything useful and requiring a mein for education is harmful to minorities is blatantly false, racist, and in itself harmful to these very people. Are you expecting us to believe that minorities have some basic inbred inability to grok the net? Because it is bullocks. People of all ethnicities and economic levels get on the net, from the homeless guy to the single mother on welfare to the rich guy in the mansion sending out spam. It is true that not everyone likes it or wants to get on there, or use it 24/7 like most of us here, but if they need something and it is there you can be damn sure they will go there.
Technophobes use computers in the library and the unemployment office to find jobs, get maps, and help with their homework. If you build a voting system on the net, or create polls on the net, they will come.
No, this "liberal" will whine that (deleted by the anti-flamebait filter). Internet polls are entirely, absurdly, voluntary/opt-in (as opposed to a phone poll where only certain people can take part) and therefore tend to poll the people with the strongest opinions rather than represent a cross-section of the voting public.
BUt that is exactly my point. If I am a politician and I want to get elected, I only care about people who actually care enough about a given issue to show up and vote based on that issue. If you don't feel strongly about it, I don't care about you because you will not affect my tenure in office, at least not over that issue.
So this is where one of the inherent flaws in internet polls actually comes to the rescue, because we are polling the people whose opinions are going t o affect the outcome.
Most CNN Website Polls on controvertial subjects, for example, tend to get linked to by sites like Free Republic and Democratic Underground, neither of which are exactly representative of the general public. With most votes coming from these kinds of readerships, what's the likelihood that the polls are accurate?
Actually the likelihood excluding vote manipulation is very high that the accuracy will approach 100%. This is because those kinds of people are exactly who we want to poll. They are politically active. They are almost guaranteed to show up on election day. The random person you call is almost guaranteed NOT to show up on election day. Something like 6-10% of the registered voters, if that, turn out for congressional elections. Only about 50% show up for presidential elections. That means if the issue in question is on the same ballot as the presidential election I am tossing a coin every time I call you as to whether you are actually going to be involved in the decision making process. If it is not, I am 90% certain that you are not going to be voting about it. This is worse if I do not restrict my calls to registered voters. I am asking your opinion why again?
No, it is important to the process that I go to the people who will truly be involved, and show up on election day. That is why web polls would be better. There are ways of dealing with the problem of identifying individuals and they will have to be weighed based both on their varying potential for preventing multiple votes and the cost to privacy rights. But that aside, it seems to me that polls of people who feel strongly about the issue are exactly what a politician is going to want.
Is the monitor you are using set to a refresh rate higher than 120 Hz? If so, there is a very real limit to how many 100's of frames per second the human eye can see. The extra frames aren't being displayed. While I do agree with you about motion blur being important, and FSAA improving things, etc, we certainly have a long way to go; IF THE FUCKING IMAGE NEVER GETS DISPLAYED, IT DOESN'T MAKE THINGS ANY SMMOOTHER. Sorry, don't mean to be specifically rude with you, but I talk to lots of gamerz that don't seem to have any idea how the games work, don't care how they work, and are beligerently ignorant if you try and explain to them how things work.
Yes, I am an animator and OpenGL coder, so I'm reasonably qualified to comment.:quote:
I wish people would quit spouting out the crap about "above human eye limits". There is no such thing. We don't know what the maximum frame rate that the eye can see is. Don't go talking about movies or TV -- they're not the same. All video capture methods (be it film or digital) capture motion blur, which our brains happily interpret when shown at a somewhat adequate frame rate. But that doesn't help a bit for somethings -- like fast pans (move the camera horizontally). Throw in some vertical definition (like, oh say, a white picket fence) and you'll wind up with a headache because what comes out on video does not look good. It's doubtful that it even looks like a white picket fence.:endquote:
Even so there is something you are all missing here. So what if the game displays 120FPS at optimum conditions! When you are actually playing the game you will quickly approach suboptimum conditions. The more crap starts appearing on the screen in conjunction with having to deal with the various issues of multiplayer the less FPS you are going to get. So fine if 60-85FPS is enough for you to see the image. That may mean you need a card that benchmarks at 240FPS. Which is the REAL reason to shell out kiznash for higher level cards.
Not only that, very often you get these bleeding high framerates at the cost of quality. Start turing on curves, lights, shading, and depth and the framerate drops like a rock. So again you wnat as high a framerate as possible on the benchmarjs because it means you might possibly be able to turn on the features you have paid for on your precious and expensive video card which are used by your precious and expensive video game and aqctually still play the game with said eyecandy turned on.
Everyone bitches about "Man! you can see movies at 15FPS and that should be enough for anybody!" without considering that if you are at 15FPS with 640x480x256 with no shading or anything, you are going to be unable to go to 1024x768 or even get any lighting or shading features in. Whereas you might get the monster 200+FPS card and by the time you actually use the real features of the card under real gaming conditions you might be lucky to see that 15FPS that you thought was good enough.
From my perspective, you have missed the whole fiddling with the parts, literally, while reading this essay. Honestly, do you need two-speed power windows on your car? I cannot find any refference to what you propose.
Yes, actually. Yes, I do. Being able to choose between quickly bringing the window all the way down or gracefully lowering or raising it to an acceptable level has all kinds of benefits. Like you, I once poo pooed such features because I did not have them and think I needed them. But if you get the chance to use them, you will realize how useful they really are. Granted, you can use manual rollers if you wnat, but there are all kinds of situations where bringing the windows up or down quickly might even save your life (like disposing of something dangerous like a grenade or a wasp, or stopping a carjacker).
Likewise, I wish that my vehicle had power mirrors. Power mirrors aren't just something for lazy people. They make your car safer to drive. You can set the mirrors without assistance from someone else outside the vehicle, and set them from the spot from which you will be viewing them. That is a MAJOR improvement over the method I currently use, which is to reach over and fiddle with the passenger mirror, adjust the driver mirror, and eventually give up when I can basically see what is behind me. Then I have to do it again when my mirrors move (which they do even if people aren't brushing up against them in the parking lot). If you have power mirrors, you can trivially eliminate all blind spots so you always see vehicles which are behind you. This is a Good Thing.
Computer tech is the same way. I used to say "who cares about new kit. 640x460x256 shoudl be enough for anybody." Then I saw what you can do with a 21" monitor at high resolutions. You get more work done, is what. And using the computer is a vastly different experience in that environment. It is easier to Get Things Done. Same deal with broadband over dialup, or multiGhz CPU with MultiGB DDR RAM vs your old PII. These are not useless geegaws. They change the experience and therefore make the overall use of the technology better. That is why billions are invested in R&D to develop this stuff. It is not just to get consumers to waste money or for slashdotters to geek out.
The point is, you cannot dismiss the popularity of Windows as a product of consumer ignorance. All of these people I helped knew that there were alternatives to Windows, they just wanted nothing to do with them.
That is because the daemon you know is never so scary as the daemon you don't. Face it. No one likes windows. Only MCSE types claim it is worth a shit, and that is because they are praying to keep their jobs because they don't really understand computers. But people (including the MCSE types) are also afraid of change. Deathly afraid. It was scary enough for them to try a computer, and they have been having nightmares about it ever since. It is no wonder they aren't so keen to repeat the experience, except this time without the benefit of following the herd and having massive corporate support.
If you're running a distro that requires you to recompile your kernel to gain hardware support, you've got the wrong distro.
Get a swiss army knife kernel like Mandrake and others use..they create ALL possible modules for you and they're just a modprobe away. That's why hardware support is so much better on the 'easy' distros. Remember, easy doesn't mean 'not good'.
You remind me of the Windows admin in the commercials who said he liked Win2k because it automagically detected all of his hardware. I wanted to slap that fucker, because every fool knows that you can only autodetect hardware you have drivers for. In other words, it has to have been developed before your OS CD was made, and there have to have been drivers in time for that release.
You are referring to the fact that Mandrake and friends compile all the modules included with the Linux kernel, and yes that is probably super spiffy for you. However, what happens when you go get new hardware that was not supported by the kernel that you have? Better yet (and more on the mopney in this case) what happens when the hardware is not supported at all in the vanilla kernel? That's right, you get to do the dance explained above. This is the same for every Linux distro, and anyone with a very basic understanding of how drivers and operating systems work knows why.
Newsflash, the Arch developers say that Arch is the best product!
Can you provide any third party reviews? Books?
No because no one is using it except perhaps the Arch developers. Hell, even the Hurd people have not gotten in on this kool-aid.
It may indeed be a better system, but there is still the problem that cvs is ubiquitous, well-known, and widely supported. Also hwo do you convert your cvs trees to arch and maintain history? Can you integrate arch and cvs so that you can easily migrate?
The problem we will always have with software is that legacy data needs to be accessable. IF the new program cannot read the old stuff, it won't work.
Re:Voting with your dollars works both ways.
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Of course they aren't serious, but covering such topics and WHY THEY DO NOT WORK is very important, especially to people who could potentially get conned out of $$$.
Yes that is an important point as well. Recently there was a Dharma and Greg episode in which Dharma's dad buys a conspiracy book store. Greg deals with this by studying the books, and announces that he has discovered a conspiracy to sell conspiracy books by sensationalizing or faking results. That was fiction and a comedy. But the funny thing is that it does happen.
There was also a special on the Bermuda triangle on one of the documentary channels (discovery or something) in which they talked about a serious researcher who decided to look into the bermuda triangle mythos. Now as a young lad I had read quite a bit about the Bermuda triangle and I had thought that it was interesting and odd, and I am sure many people have wondered what the hell is going on there. This scientist and his colleagues found that the only oddity was the bermuda triangle mythos. IN other words, that most of the stories told about the bermuda triangle actual are either complete BS or are sensationalized accounts of perfectly normal events.
One of the common threads was a series of accounts of ships which vanished mysteriously, which is common bermuda triangle fare. That they were found later, that they were stolen, or any other normal event which easily explained what had happened was simply left out, so that you think that there is some great mystery. Another point was a statistical analysis which was done of the bermuda triangle. It was found that the number of vessels lost in that area was not in any way unusual compared to similar expanses of ocean. In fact other triangles could be drawn virtually anywhere which had the same amount or more disappearances.
So what happened? Well what was happening here was that the bermuda triangle was only being written about by kooks and sheisters, because serious scientists would not touch the subject for fear of their reputations and careers (or because they themselves did not think the subject was serious or worth their time). So teh only story we hear of teh bermuda triangle is the continuing tale of this mysterious body of water. You don't hear the voices of the debunkers because they are not there to be heard.
It would be nice if more stories like this were debunked publicly. Even if something like this were true, it must withstand the scrutiny of the scientific method like all facts we are expected to believe. Unfortunately the dynamics are currently against it.
"Why can't the wireless companies set up a way to allow the caller to pay the charges?"
Technically, it's easy. Cell phones in most of the world work that way already.
In the US, cell phone companies could give people personal 900 numbers, and/or adopt generic "caller pays" 900 call-in numbers (you call the 900 number, then you dial the cell phone number).
OTOH, I really don't want pollsters to call me on my cell phone. I don't want them to call me at all.
Actually, in the US the caller does pay when they call your cell phone if it is long distance, but of course you are paying as well. So the telephone company gets twice the fees; much more if the caller puts you outside of your plan! The telephone companies would never dream of changing this. And anyone who tries to make them do so will be expelled as a god-damned communist!:)
" in my experience telephone polls aren't used as conclusive findings... but as rough indicators and estimates of the current state of whatever issue is being polled."
Yes, but politicians routinely rely on polls for forming policy. Maybe they shouldn't, but they do.
When the issue at hand is something like, "Should cell phone usage be permitted while driving?", only polling land-line customers may give a tremendously skewed view of the public's opinion on this issue.
Personally, I think that phone polls are stupid, intrusive and almost completely spurious. If you really want to get polling information about political stuff, use the internet.
Now, of course the results will be skewed because only people who are informed and interested in the issue at hand will vote. BUt that is exactly the point. IN this case those are the only people who matter, becasue they may vote. If you can't even click on a web poll, you probably won't vote so who cares what you think? The telephone poll would have called someone and woke them from their slumber or interrupted their dinner, in which case an angered respondant might give either whatever answer they think will get rid of the pollster quicker or the exact opposite of what they think the pollster wants (in oorder to get revenge on the pollster).
Now some "liberal" will probably whine that internet polls are unfair to the poor and especially harmful to the elderly, women and minorities (to say nothing of the damage to the children!) like everything else under the sun. Personally, I don't believe a word of it. There are homeless people in this country who were on the internet sooner and more often than I and I am a pretty wired guy. There are various access points for getting online. IF you care, you will go there. If you don't care enough to go there, you will likely not care enough to show up at the ballot box and vote me out of office for voting differently than you might have liked on that issue.
"companies that decide to go with EFI will be able to use it any way they like, by picking and choosing different features"
Couldn't find docs or linkies to support, but I seem to remember that those were the claims of ACPI, and that played hell on many a 'nix laptop for a full one-dot kernel version, i.e., hardware not working because there was no good software IRQ handler, sleep-mode problems, kernel lockups, etc...any takers?
ACPI is still a problem on all platforms, but especially the open source ones where many of the features still do not work at all and acpi causes myriad problems.
...it HAS to be bad, and an attempt to kill Linux.
That pretty much sums up the rest of the posts on this. Thanks, let's move on to the next story.
Well, considering that Microsoft has promised to develop a DRM bios that does not allow LInux to bot, and this bios replacement is developed by Intel and Microsoft who vehemently opposed Open Firmware (because it makes it easier to boot other or multiple OS's) it is likely the case that there is something afoot here. Besides, at minimum it will displace the last two bios manufacturers (Phoenix and AMI) therefore utterly destroying an entire market. Typical Microsoft behavior. (And they won't care, either. IN a recent interview, Bill Gates said "Phoenix is still around?" as though he thought they should be long gone by now.
As for argricultural pollution: run the farm equipment and make any required fertilizers from the products you're making from the plants. Pesticides would be very minimal, since insect damage would not be as much a concern -- the crops aren't being used for food so more damage is acceptable.
Do you have any idea how many birds and small mammals are killed by farm equipment every year? It absolutely dwarfs the number killed by these turbines. You are trading something more dangerous in the name of safety here.
All viable ways to "grow" sources of energy......and maybe if we give the farmers something useful to grow (Energy crops), we won't have to pay them to not grow anything (ween them off subsidies - Nearly $75 billion spent last year in the US alone to keep farmers employed because there isn't a market for the stuff they grow). May as well earn their money growing sometihng useful!
Not like the market for energy is going to be going anywhere anytime soon, and this might just put the US back-in-black in terms of energy production vs. usage. With the USA's crop production capacity we might even be able to generate a surplus and export it... =Smidge=
All of which create air pollution. In some cases the pollution created by these fuels is worse than the pollution created by gasoline. Most proponents point to decreased carbon monoxide emmissions, which are certainly a plus, but fail to mention all the other nasty chemicals put into the air by these fules that are not put into the air by conventional gasoline.
Burning these fuels would kill birds as well. Birds die in smokestacks all the time. They sit on them and then fall in, the emmissions poison them, etc etc.
Turbines do not produce pollution. Apparently some birds are foolishly flyinginto the turbines, but it is less than are killed by all sorts of other methods, such as cats, poachers, and conventional power plants. Perhaps the dumb ones will die off and leave us with a population of birds that do NOT fly into windmills. That would be natural selection in actiuon, whnich is good for the birds.
Yeah, I (the original guy who made that comment, but posting as an AC to avoid burning karma) kinda agree with you -- some farms are nice - a farm in Santa Cruz where you can see the birds wander around (wings not clipped, hanging around for the food) -- others, even free range ones, suck, and they clip the wings and let the birds roam "free" just for the marketing gimmic.
What's so bad about clipping their flight feathers? It does not hurt the chickens and actually prevents them hurting themselves. I have raised chickens and, well, they just don't fly all that well. They are likely to get hurt trying to fly over fences and such. So clipping their flight feathers is actually humane.
I don't like the idea that factory farm chickens get their beaks clipped. It probably does hurt the chickens. BUt the rationale is that clipping their beaks prevents them from pecking each other to death, which they certainly will do if allowed to do so. They are especially bad about pecking wounded chickens, so it is one of those things that escalates.
Personally I prefer the free-range method, but even if we allow factory farms there are some very basic modifications that could be made to make them more humane. I don't like to think that the drumstuck I am eating was once permanently fused to the bottom of a cage at the foot because the foot, mired in the feces of the chicken it was attached to and hundred s of chickens above it, naturally had the wires of the cage gradually cut into it over time and then tried to heal back but for lack of room included the wire in the foot. I don't like to think about all those wounded chickens that have to be fed overdoses of antibiotics to keep said feet from just rotting off. I also don't like to think about the tons of chickenshit allowed into our drinking water.
But all of that boils down to simple neglect and the factory farms not giving a shit, literally. If a few basic laws were passed, the farms would be able to continue to operate with minor modifications and the chickens would have a better life. They would still be bred in a cage for slaughter, but it would be a nicer cage.
I don't know if you can breed as many chickens in a free range farm. If you can then they should switch to that method as it is better all around. But in closing, clipping their wings is not so horrible as the normal lot of chickens.
So: I decide that I've had enough of the Bay Area and move to Texas; MontaVista decides they don't need the management overhead of an additional remote employee and lets me go. When trying to find new work (halfway across the country in a city where I had no contacts), the refusal to give out references hurt. A lot.
It's actually standard practice for big corporations to direct all calls on past employees to the HR department where they only answer such questions as "when was this person employed there" and "what was their job title." That is pretty close to all they are supposed to say about you, and all they are supposed to be asked. Clearly, most peopel hiring you want to hear some glowing recommendations.
What helped me is not burning any bridges and making friends with as many people at work, including management, as possible. I then compiled a list of references and asked them beforehand if I could use them for reference. So whereas officially the hiring company could only inquire about work history via HR, unofficially they could call my friends/old bosses who would crow about how great I was;).
Good luck in your new job, and welcome to Austin it's a great place to live.
Taking this one step further like the author suggests, I can envision some wacky japanese game where you get to play a sexual predator.
Actually, such games exist in Japan, and while controversial, they are legal. There are Japanese superhero comics glorifying sexual predators as well.
Probably the more you try to repress sex in a society the more people will be driven to seek outlets for that sexual desire. It is better that they do it through video games and pornography IMHO than that they do something which harms living beings.
Slashdot Mirror
"An upper caste member might not be able to get into a school with a 90% score on the entrance exams, but a lower caste member may be assured admission with a 70% score."
This is a very common practice in America and Europe. Despite some grumblings from the privledged classes, it IS working here in the United States. Ethnic groups who were once excluded from universities are more successful then they were 50 years ago. We have African American governers, Latino American mayors, Asian American CEOs, Native American senators, etc. We still have a long way to go, but the leadership of this country is finally starting to reflect the ethnic makeup of this country.
Something you miss about this is that in the US and Europe the targets of affirmative action are minorities. But in India the low castes are the majority of the population. With guaranteed seats in parliament and university they vastly reduce the opportunity for the minority high caste members. So it's not just that you are letting more people in with low scores, it is that they are guaranteeing that the majority of university students will have low scores and kicking the high-scoring students to the curb, literally.
On what, exactly, are you calling bullshit? He didn't lie. He just said something you disagree with. Ergo, there is no reason you should 'call bullshit.'
I long for the day we can leave this 'calling bullshit' bullshit behind.
Bullshit is not just a lie. Bullshit is related to lies, but spouting bullshit does not require an intent to lie, it requires either an intent to lie or a belief that the bullshit is truth.
The idea that everyone can simply boycott the RIAA is bullshit. That is what the poster was talking about. They then proceeded to explain why this is a bullshit idea. (In case you did not read their post, but will somehow read mine, they said that most people have a favorite band on an RIAA label, among other things.)
Now, I have pretty much stopped buying cds and downloading RIAA music. But I realize that I do listen to it on the radio. That's not really boycotting the RIAA. The problem here is that the RIAA is holding the music industry, and our beloved artists, hostage.
Is it so big that you can't just call out or walk for 10-15 seconds to talk to somebody? I've used IM clients to have a silent conversation in a crowded room before but not for regular communication at home.
I had no idea what fucking luddites you slashdotters are. Do you have any idea what technology is for at all? The point is if I am working upstairs it is damned inefficient to walk all the way downstairs, stop waht I am doing, interrupt someone else, and stop what they are doing, just so I can ask them a one sentence question. It is stupid and unnecessary thanks to technology.
We are not talking about ending family communication. That happened decades ago. We are talking about making it possible again. Families are busy, dispersed, and engaged in all sorts of distracting tasks. There are few chances for familial communication especially with the death first of nightly gatherings for reading and prayer and second with the death of the family dinner.
I am not saying an effort to revive such practices is misguided, but what if you could talk to your family while doing other things? That is what instant messaging was invented for. It is there so you can talk to multiple people at once while coding, posting to slashdot, writing the great american novel, doing your homework, balancing the budget, or whatever it is you are doing on your computer. It means you can talk to the rest of the family and ask simple questions and make decisions together.
Now that the rest of the family have computers, pdas, cell phones and such it is especially spiffy because you can text message and talk to your kids and family members to keep tabs on what they are doing and coordinate that family dinner that died so long ago for lack of coordination and communication.
Also, the internet and instant messaging are great for people who do not live with their families. I communicate with the wired members of my family much more often simply because they are available to me. If you are back in the 19th century sending paper letters through snail mail you get much less communication.
Combine that with voice recognition software and you coud be talking to her
Why bother? most im clients have voice chat built in, so there is no reason to translate speech into text :P
Inside a bar is generally considered "in public" and a "public place" since its a place of business that just about anyone can go into.
Yes, but the pictures were probably shot after hours, when no one else could go in there. Didn't you notice that there were no other people in this very famous and popular lincoln bar?
Good post. I hate to do this but...
"It may indeed be a better system, but there is still the problem that cvs is ubiquitous, well-known, and widely supported."
Replace cvs with windows and you can see what's happening on the desktop.
Believe me, not only am I painfully aware of that, but I was thinking of it when I wrote what I did. If you want Linux on the desktop you have to solve the same problems Microsoft did when they were working on taking over. You have to design your interface such that users of your competition can easily and naturally use the interface, and you must allow them to quickly and easily access their legacy data. That is the law fo software no matter what software we are talking about. Fail to do this and you fail to take the market every time.
Did you bother to check the links? Besides your assurances, can you point to studies that support your claims - and something a little more methodologically sound than what your mother is up to? If access is near a hundred percent, you think there would be a news story that would have told the rest of us about it. Find one - preferably from a reputable source.
Mighty skeptical aren't we? I don't think there is much I can do to prove to you that libraries exist. Perhaps you should try and visit one? For starters, google for "public library locations" and include the name of your favorite town.
It is simply a fact that there is a correlation between income and Internet use. It is also a fact that income level is correlated with race and gender. You may not like it, but it is true. Now, do some research before you start ranting about things so you have an informed opinion about them.
No, it is simply a canard that income has anything to do with internet access. Last time I checked they did not ask for a slip from my bank account to attend a public school, enter the grounds of a public library or of a university. Your continued assertions that minorities are somehow incapable of figuring this out or of earning a living do a disservice to them as well. Perhaps you should get out more and take a look around you.
Better yet, ask a librarian about how Internet access works in a library. Ever tried it? Sign up times and time limits make for a decidedly different experience than surfing at home - and surely if you were accessing it via the library you'd want to spend your limited time on the 'net answering some pollster's questions. Right?
I have indeed done a fair bit of travelling in the US as well as conversing with people on the internet and doing a lot of research. The studies you point to are inflammatory reactionary bullshit. They rely solely on a gross manipulation of the facts at hand in order to arrive at the same conclusion every "liberal" study does, which is that minorities are somehow inferior and need to be husbanded carefully into democratic voting booths. It is this very philosophy that represents the most dangerous racist agenda we currently face.
Of course there are less people using the internet at home than there should be. Of course not everyone wants or has a computer. But I would submit that since even people on welfare can and do own computers and do access the internet, this has a lot to do with choice.
Regardless, again, there are the public libraries. I have not found a single town in the US that did not have one, nor have I found a library that did not have internet access. I have done more than ask the librarian how the system works, I have availed myself of their services. Further, even homeless people have been able to maintain internet access in this and like manner. The access has always been more than adequate to pursue not only necessary information, but idle pursuits as well. The libraries are always full of people mudding, working on their websites, chtting, and sending email. Usually access is given in increments of one hour, but so long as one is unchallenged one might be in there all day on the net. Nevertheless, a simple poll can be answered in seconds. It could be announced on television and access could even be organized through the aforementioned places just as voting is. When Newsweek was poo pooing Perot's electronic town halls, they did not realize that they had already been built. They were there then, are here now, and here to stay.
The necessary hardware to access the internet is likewise freely available. Even a 486 can get on the internet, and people throw those away. It is a simple matter of how badly you want on and whether you do at all. Internet access is available for free or for nominal fees through dialup access providers and sometimes through communities themselves. I am reminded of the rural Kentucky town that wired its entire
If you really want to get polling information about political stuff, use the internet....Now, of course the results will be skewed because only people who are informed and interested in the issue at hand will vote.
More likely, the data will be skewed due to the fact that only 2 in 5 households have internet access and most of that is concentrated in higher-income, white and Asian households. If you want go with more current estimates of around 149 million of the 291 million people that live in the U.S. - 51 percent of the population - have Internet access. According to a fairly recent Pew Study as much as 24% of the U.S. population is completely disconnected from the Internet - and this research suggests that's the way they want it.
You are exactly the kind of guy I was talking about in my rant about "liberals." I knew someone would pull out that old racist saw that only white people use the internet, and claim that there are actually large portions of the population without access. Both are completely and totally false.
The rate of internet access in the united states is very near 100% if it is not exactly that number. The reason is that every community has a public library and public schools, and those are on the internet. 7-11's, restaurants, coffee shops, truck stops, washaterias, hotels, apartment complexes and all manner of other public places have publicly available internet access that can be had for free or for the price of a cup of coffee. This is not just in urban areas.
For instance my mother lives in a small town of probably a few hundred not very far from the border. People there are simple, dirt poor, and many of them are indeed old. Most do not have a lot to do with the internet. Internet is available, but not everyone wants it or has a computer. But the schools and library do have internet access. And most people have a friend or relative that does as well and who shares it with them. Shared access like this means that for the purposes of voting online or using a poll, EVERYONE has the ability to get online.
Also this business of constantly claiming that evrything useful and requiring a mein for education is harmful to minorities is blatantly false, racist, and in itself harmful to these very people. Are you expecting us to believe that minorities have some basic inbred inability to grok the net? Because it is bullocks. People of all ethnicities and economic levels get on the net, from the homeless guy to the single mother on welfare to the rich guy in the mansion sending out spam. It is true that not everyone likes it or wants to get on there, or use it 24/7 like most of us here, but if they need something and it is there you can be damn sure they will go there.
Technophobes use computers in the library and the unemployment office to find jobs, get maps, and help with their homework. If you build a voting system on the net, or create polls on the net, they will come.
No, this "liberal" will whine that (deleted by the anti-flamebait filter). Internet polls are entirely, absurdly, voluntary/opt-in (as opposed to a phone poll where only certain people can take part) and therefore tend to poll the people with the strongest opinions rather than represent a cross-section of the voting public.
BUt that is exactly my point. If I am a politician and I want to get elected, I only care about people who actually care enough about a given issue to show up and vote based on that issue. If you don't feel strongly about it, I don't care about you because you will not affect my tenure in office, at least not over that issue.
So this is where one of the inherent flaws in internet polls actually comes to the rescue, because we are polling the people whose opinions are going t o affect the outcome.
Most CNN Website Polls on controvertial subjects, for example, tend to get linked to by sites like Free Republic and Democratic Underground, neither of which are exactly representative of the general public. With most votes coming from these kinds of readerships, what's the likelihood that the polls are accurate?
Actually the likelihood excluding vote manipulation is very high that the accuracy will approach 100%. This is because those kinds of people are exactly who we want to poll. They are politically active. They are almost guaranteed to show up on election day. The random person you call is almost guaranteed NOT to show up on election day. Something like 6-10% of the registered voters, if that, turn out for congressional elections. Only about 50% show up for presidential elections. That means if the issue in question is on the same ballot as the presidential election I am tossing a coin every time I call you as to whether you are actually going to be involved in the decision making process. If it is not, I am 90% certain that you are not going to be voting about it. This is worse if I do not restrict my calls to registered voters. I am asking your opinion why again?
No, it is important to the process that I go to the people who will truly be involved, and show up on election day. That is why web polls would be better. There are ways of dealing with the problem of identifying individuals and they will have to be weighed based both on their varying potential for preventing multiple votes and the cost to privacy rights. But that aside, it seems to me that polls of people who feel strongly about the issue are exactly what a politician is going to want.
Is the monitor you are using set to a refresh rate higher than 120 Hz? If so, there is a very real limit to how many 100's of frames per second the human eye can see. The extra frames aren't being displayed. While I do agree with you about motion blur being important, and FSAA improving things, etc, we certainly have a long way to go; IF THE FUCKING IMAGE NEVER GETS DISPLAYED, IT DOESN'T MAKE THINGS ANY SMMOOTHER. Sorry, don't mean to be specifically rude with you, but I talk to lots of gamerz that don't seem to have any idea how the games work, don't care how they work, and are beligerently ignorant if you try and explain to them how things work.
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Yes, I am an animator and OpenGL coder, so I'm reasonably qualified to comment.
I wish people would quit spouting out the crap about "above human eye limits". There is no such thing. We don't know what the maximum frame rate that the eye can see is. Don't go talking about movies or TV -- they're not the same. All video capture methods (be it film or digital) capture motion blur, which our brains happily interpret when shown at a somewhat adequate frame rate. But that doesn't help a bit for somethings -- like fast pans (move the camera horizontally). Throw in some vertical definition (like, oh say, a white picket fence) and you'll wind up with a headache because what comes out on video does not look good. It's doubtful that it even looks like a white picket fence.
Even so there is something you are all missing here. So what if the game displays 120FPS at optimum conditions! When you are actually playing the game you will quickly approach suboptimum conditions. The more crap starts appearing on the screen in conjunction with having to deal with the various issues of multiplayer the less FPS you are going to get. So fine if 60-85FPS is enough for you to see the image. That may mean you need a card that benchmarks at 240FPS. Which is the REAL reason to shell out kiznash for higher level cards.
Not only that, very often you get these bleeding high framerates at the cost of quality. Start turing on curves, lights, shading, and depth and the framerate drops like a rock. So again you wnat as high a framerate as possible on the benchmarjs because it means you might possibly be able to turn on the features you have paid for on your precious and expensive video card which are used by your precious and expensive video game and aqctually still play the game with said eyecandy turned on.
Everyone bitches about "Man! you can see movies at 15FPS and that should be enough for anybody!" without considering that if you are at 15FPS with 640x480x256 with no shading or anything, you are going to be unable to go to 1024x768 or even get any lighting or shading features in. Whereas you might get the monster 200+FPS card and by the time you actually use the real features of the card under real gaming conditions you might be lucky to see that 15FPS that you thought was good enough.
From my perspective, you have missed the whole fiddling with the parts, literally, while reading this essay. Honestly, do you need two-speed power windows on your car? I cannot find any refference to what you propose.
Yes, actually. Yes, I do. Being able to choose between quickly bringing the window all the way down or gracefully lowering or raising it to an acceptable level has all kinds of benefits. Like you, I once poo pooed such features because I did not have them and think I needed them. But if you get the chance to use them, you will realize how useful they really are. Granted, you can use manual rollers if you wnat, but there are all kinds of situations where bringing the windows up or down quickly might even save your life (like disposing of something dangerous like a grenade or a wasp, or stopping a carjacker).
Likewise, I wish that my vehicle had power mirrors. Power mirrors aren't just something for lazy people. They make your car safer to drive. You can set the mirrors without assistance from someone else outside the vehicle, and set them from the spot from which you will be viewing them. That is a MAJOR improvement over the method I currently use, which is to reach over and fiddle with the passenger mirror, adjust the driver mirror, and eventually give up when I can basically see what is behind me. Then I have to do it again when my mirrors move (which they do even if people aren't brushing up against them in the parking lot). If you have power mirrors, you can trivially eliminate all blind spots so you always see vehicles which are behind you. This is a Good Thing.
Computer tech is the same way. I used to say "who cares about new kit. 640x460x256 shoudl be enough for anybody." Then I saw what you can do with a 21" monitor at high resolutions. You get more work done, is what. And using the computer is a vastly different experience in that environment. It is easier to Get Things Done. Same deal with broadband over dialup, or multiGhz CPU with MultiGB DDR RAM vs your old PII. These are not useless geegaws. They change the experience and therefore make the overall use of the technology better. That is why billions are invested in R&D to develop this stuff. It is not just to get consumers to waste money or for slashdotters to geek out.
The point is, you cannot dismiss the popularity of Windows as a product of consumer ignorance. All of these people I helped knew that there were alternatives to Windows, they just wanted nothing to do with them.
That is because the daemon you know is never so scary as the daemon you don't. Face it. No one likes windows. Only MCSE types claim it is worth a shit, and that is because they are praying to keep their jobs because they don't really understand computers. But people (including the MCSE types) are also afraid of change. Deathly afraid. It was scary enough for them to try a computer, and they have been having nightmares about it ever since. It is no wonder they aren't so keen to repeat the experience, except this time without the benefit of following the herd and having massive corporate support.
If you're running a distro that requires you to recompile your kernel to gain hardware support, you've got the wrong distro.
Get a swiss army knife kernel like Mandrake and others use..they create ALL possible modules for you and they're just a modprobe away. That's why hardware support is so much better on the 'easy' distros. Remember, easy doesn't mean 'not good'.
You remind me of the Windows admin in the commercials who said he liked Win2k because it automagically detected all of his hardware. I wanted to slap that fucker, because every fool knows that you can only autodetect hardware you have drivers for. In other words, it has to have been developed before your OS CD was made, and there have to have been drivers in time for that release.
You are referring to the fact that Mandrake and friends compile all the modules included with the Linux kernel, and yes that is probably super spiffy for you. However, what happens when you go get new hardware that was not supported by the kernel that you have? Better yet (and more on the mopney in this case) what happens when the hardware is not supported at all in the vanilla kernel? That's right, you get to do the dance explained above. This is the same for every Linux distro, and anyone with a very basic understanding of how drivers and operating systems work knows why.
Newsflash, the Arch developers say that Arch is the best product!
Can you provide any third party reviews? Books?
No because no one is using it except perhaps the Arch developers. Hell, even the Hurd people have not gotten in on this kool-aid.
It may indeed be a better system, but there is still the problem that cvs is ubiquitous, well-known, and widely supported. Also hwo do you convert your cvs trees to arch and maintain history? Can you integrate arch and cvs so that you can easily migrate?
The problem we will always have with software is that legacy data needs to be accessable. IF the new program cannot read the old stuff, it won't work.
Of course they aren't serious, but covering such topics and WHY THEY DO NOT WORK is very important, especially to people who could potentially get conned out of $$$.
Yes that is an important point as well. Recently there was a Dharma and Greg episode in which Dharma's dad buys a conspiracy book store. Greg deals with this by studying the books, and announces that he has discovered a conspiracy to sell conspiracy books by sensationalizing or faking results. That was fiction and a comedy. But the funny thing is that it does happen.
There was also a special on the Bermuda triangle on one of the documentary channels (discovery or something) in which they talked about a serious researcher who decided to look into the bermuda triangle mythos. Now as a young lad I had read quite a bit about the Bermuda triangle and I had thought that it was interesting and odd, and I am sure many people have wondered what the hell is going on there. This scientist and his colleagues found that the only oddity was the bermuda triangle mythos. IN other words, that most of the stories told about the bermuda triangle actual are either complete BS or are sensationalized accounts of perfectly normal events.
One of the common threads was a series of accounts of ships which vanished mysteriously, which is common bermuda triangle fare. That they were found later, that they were stolen, or any other normal event which easily explained what had happened was simply left out, so that you think that there is some great mystery. Another point was a statistical analysis which was done of the bermuda triangle. It was found that the number of vessels lost in that area was not in any way unusual compared to similar expanses of ocean. In fact other triangles could be drawn virtually anywhere which had the same amount or more disappearances.
So what happened? Well what was happening here was that the bermuda triangle was only being written about by kooks and sheisters, because serious scientists would not touch the subject for fear of their reputations and careers (or because they themselves did not think the subject was serious or worth their time). So teh only story we hear of teh bermuda triangle is the continuing tale of this mysterious body of water. You don't hear the voices of the debunkers because they are not there to be heard.
It would be nice if more stories like this were debunked publicly. Even if something like this were true, it must withstand the scrutiny of the scientific method like all facts we are expected to believe. Unfortunately the dynamics are currently against it.
"Why can't the wireless companies set up a way to allow the caller to pay the charges?"
Technically, it's easy. Cell phones in most of the world work that way already.
In the US, cell phone companies could give people personal 900 numbers, and/or adopt generic "caller pays" 900 call-in numbers (you call the 900 number, then you dial the cell phone number).
OTOH, I really don't want pollsters to call me on my cell phone. I don't want them to call me at all.
Actually, in the US the caller does pay when they call your cell phone if it is long distance, but of course you are paying as well. So the telephone company gets twice the fees; much more if the caller puts you outside of your plan! The telephone companies would never dream of changing this. And anyone who tries to make them do so will be expelled as a god-damned communist! :)
" in my experience telephone polls aren't used as conclusive findings ... but as rough indicators and estimates of the current state of whatever issue is being polled."
Yes, but politicians routinely rely on polls for forming policy. Maybe they shouldn't, but they do.
When the issue at hand is something like, "Should cell phone usage be permitted while driving?", only polling land-line customers may give a tremendously skewed view of the public's opinion on this issue.
Personally, I think that phone polls are stupid, intrusive and almost completely spurious. If you really want to get polling information about political stuff, use the internet.
Now, of course the results will be skewed because only people who are informed and interested in the issue at hand will vote. BUt that is exactly the point. IN this case those are the only people who matter, becasue they may vote. If you can't even click on a web poll, you probably won't vote so who cares what you think? The telephone poll would have called someone and woke them from their slumber or interrupted their dinner, in which case an angered respondant might give either whatever answer they think will get rid of the pollster quicker or the exact opposite of what they think the pollster wants (in oorder to get revenge on the pollster).
Now some "liberal" will probably whine that internet polls are unfair to the poor and especially harmful to the elderly, women and minorities (to say nothing of the damage to the children!) like everything else under the sun. Personally, I don't believe a word of it. There are homeless people in this country who were on the internet sooner and more often than I and I am a pretty wired guy. There are various access points for getting online. IF you care, you will go there. If you don't care enough to go there, you will likely not care enough to show up at the ballot box and vote me out of office for voting differently than you might have liked on that issue.
"companies that decide to go with EFI will be able to use it any way they like, by picking and choosing different features"
Couldn't find docs or linkies to support, but I seem to remember that those were the claims of ACPI, and that played hell on many a 'nix laptop for a full one-dot kernel version, i.e., hardware not working because there was no good software IRQ handler, sleep-mode problems, kernel lockups, etc...any takers?
ACPI is still a problem on all platforms, but especially the open source ones where many of the features still do not work at all and acpi causes myriad problems.
That pretty much sums up the rest of the posts on this. Thanks, let's move on to the next story.
Well, considering that Microsoft has promised to develop a DRM bios that does not allow LInux to bot, and this bios replacement is developed by Intel and Microsoft who vehemently opposed Open Firmware (because it makes it easier to boot other or multiple OS's) it is likely the case that there is something afoot here. Besides, at minimum it will displace the last two bios manufacturers (Phoenix and AMI) therefore utterly destroying an entire market. Typical Microsoft behavior. (And they won't care, either. IN a recent interview, Bill Gates said "Phoenix is still around?" as though he thought they should be long gone by now.
As for argricultural pollution: run the farm equipment and make any required fertilizers from the products you're making from the plants. Pesticides would be very minimal, since insect damage would not be as much a concern -- the crops aren't being used for food so more damage is acceptable.
Do you have any idea how many birds and small mammals are killed by farm equipment every year? It absolutely dwarfs the number killed by these turbines. You are trading something more dangerous in the name of safety here.
Can you please provide a link to something explaining the connection between solar energy and toxins?
I wasn't aware that such a problem existed.
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Building solar cells requires the use of toxic chemicals and the production of toxic chemical waste. Just like your computer.
Biodiesel
Alcohol fuels
Biomass
Thermal Depolymerization
All viable ways to "grow" sources of energy...
Not like the market for energy is going to be going anywhere anytime soon, and this might just put the US back-in-black in terms of energy production vs. usage. With the USA's crop production capacity we might even be able to generate a surplus and export it...
=Smidge=
All of which create air pollution. In some cases the pollution created by these fuels is worse than the pollution created by gasoline. Most proponents point to decreased carbon monoxide emmissions, which are certainly a plus, but fail to mention all the other nasty chemicals put into the air by these fules that are not put into the air by conventional gasoline.
Burning these fuels would kill birds as well. Birds die in smokestacks all the time. They sit on them and then fall in, the emmissions poison them, etc etc.
Turbines do not produce pollution. Apparently some birds are foolishly flyinginto the turbines, but it is less than are killed by all sorts of other methods, such as cats, poachers, and conventional power plants. Perhaps the dumb ones will die off and leave us with a population of birds that do NOT fly into windmills. That would be natural selection in actiuon, whnich is good for the birds.
Yeah, I (the original guy who made that comment, but posting as an AC to avoid burning karma) kinda agree with you -- some farms are nice - a farm in Santa Cruz where you can see the birds wander around (wings not clipped, hanging around for the food) -- others, even free range ones, suck, and they clip the wings and let the birds roam "free" just for the marketing gimmic.
What's so bad about clipping their flight feathers? It does not hurt the chickens and actually prevents them hurting themselves. I have raised chickens and, well, they just don't fly all that well. They are likely to get hurt trying to fly over fences and such. So clipping their flight feathers is actually humane.
I don't like the idea that factory farm chickens get their beaks clipped. It probably does hurt the chickens. BUt the rationale is that clipping their beaks prevents them from pecking each other to death, which they certainly will do if allowed to do so. They are especially bad about pecking wounded chickens, so it is one of those things that escalates.
Personally I prefer the free-range method, but even if we allow factory farms there are some very basic modifications that could be made to make them more humane. I don't like to think that the drumstuck I am eating was once permanently fused to the bottom of a cage at the foot because the foot, mired in the feces of the chicken it was attached to and hundred s of chickens above it, naturally had the wires of the cage gradually cut into it over time and then tried to heal back but for lack of room included the wire in the foot. I don't like to think about all those wounded chickens that have to be fed overdoses of antibiotics to keep said feet from just rotting off. I also don't like to think about the tons of chickenshit allowed into our drinking water.
But all of that boils down to simple neglect and the factory farms not giving a shit, literally. If a few basic laws were passed, the farms would be able to continue to operate with minor modifications and the chickens would have a better life. They would still be bred in a cage for slaughter, but it would be a nicer cage.
I don't know if you can breed as many chickens in a free range farm. If you can then they should switch to that method as it is better all around. But in closing, clipping their wings is not so horrible as the normal lot of chickens.
So: I decide that I've had enough of the Bay Area and move to Texas; MontaVista decides they don't need the management overhead of an additional remote employee and lets me go. When trying to find new work (halfway across the country in a city where I had no contacts), the refusal to give out references hurt. A lot.
It's actually standard practice for big corporations to direct all calls on past employees to the HR department where they only answer such questions as "when was this person employed there" and "what was their job title." That is pretty close to all they are supposed to say about you, and all they are supposed to be asked. Clearly, most peopel hiring you want to hear some glowing recommendations.
What helped me is not burning any bridges and making friends with as many people at work, including management, as possible. I then compiled a list of references and asked them beforehand if I could use them for reference. So whereas officially the hiring company could only inquire about work history via HR, unofficially they could call my friends/old bosses who would crow about how great I was ;).
Good luck in your new job, and welcome to Austin it's a great place to live.
Taking this one step further like the author suggests, I can envision some wacky japanese game where you get to play a sexual predator.
Actually, such games exist in Japan, and while controversial, they are legal. There are Japanese superhero comics glorifying sexual predators as well.
Probably the more you try to repress sex in a society the more people will be driven to seek outlets for that sexual desire. It is better that they do it through video games and pornography IMHO than that they do something which harms living beings.