I was kind of with you until you started making blanket statements about atheists. Many atheists I know (including myself) did not just wake up one day saying "geez, religion is blocks". Generally, the path to Atheism is a journey which begins with questioning some of the precepts of the given faith in which one is raised. For some, that's enough to completely shatter faith in any religious views. For others, its a process of questioning, and searching, and eventual trend from believer to questioning to agnosticism to outright atheism.
I'm not qualified to speak for all atheists or agnostics any more than you are, but for myself, I can say that the process of "losing my religion" was drawn out and painful. Think about this for a second: if you believe in a God, you probably believe that there's an afterlife of some sort - you probably believe that the universe makes some sort of sense - that something greater than yourself gives a flying fuck what happens to you. In your deepest, darkest, most troubling time, you've got someone/something to pray to. Now, imagine what it's like for those of us who do not believe... we are ultimately alone and insignificant in an uncaring universe. We only have such a very short time to live, love, and figure out what gives our lives meaning before we take a very long dirt-nap.
Tell me now, do you think for one second that I CHOSE that? Don't you think that I'd LOVE to believe - that I'd love to feel that some god in the sky was looking out for me or that I had some shot at life-after-death? That this isn't all that there is? I have stood at the precipice and have stared into the abyss, an deep down inside, it scares the crap out of me, but I keep looking anyway, and I'm a stronger person for it. YES, I've looked at various (but by no means all) belief systems / religions, and in the end, I just can't bring myself to believe in any of them. I'm pretty sure that many other atheists have similar experiences.
To use an analogy: I have stuck my hand on a hot stove and gotten burned. I have found that other hot things cause similar pain, so I do not now need to stick my hand in every single fire or hot thing to know what it is to be burned or to know the signs that I will be burned if I touch it.
UAC is "the boy who cried 'Wolf'", but it's only a symptom of the bigger underlying problem: Too many things that SHOULDN'T need admin level access DO need it in Windows.
My MacBook asks me for my admin password every now and then, but not nearly as often as a Windows Vista box pops up the UAC confirmation.
Rackspace is a HOSTING provider, not a carrier per-se. I know what you're trying to say, but I believe that hosting is a very different ball of wax from ISP.
You can always find another hosting provider as long as you have Internet access and as long as the hosting providers have Internet access. As long as the carriers are neutral, then you cant be silenced simply by a hosting company refusing to host your stuff - you can always find another regardless of your geographical location. If ISPs aren't neutral, then you may (due to geography) be screwed.
If your business is TRANSPORTING the bits, you're effectively not responsible for the content that passes through and you should have no right to inspect traffic past the level needed to transport it to where it needs to go. If you're HOSTING the bits, then there's a lot more wiggle room contract-wise about what you can do with the data.
This is what scares me so much about talks of "three strikes rules" with ISPs that some IP owners are pushing - you can ALWAYS find someone to host you, but if you can't get a net connection, then you're effectively silenced.
Science corrects itself after finding new facts, no news at 11.
...THIS
Science is about postulating a hypothesis, then testing to see if you can disprove or refine it... If science were about coming up with an idea, and deciding, "yeah, that's the likely answer" and never testing / refining/disproving anything, then we'd still be believing that the sun goes 'round the Earth, and we'd still have no clue about the cause of disease or how basic physics worked. We'd never advance knowledge.
Seems to me that an adjustment of the measurement doesn't mean "OOPS, sorry folks there is no Global Warming", it means "Hey, we've realized we made an error in our estimates, here is the new data". In my mind, things like this could also mean, "hey, maybe we DO have a little longer before we cross the point of no return... maybe even long enough to do something about it"/P
Good... tell you what NSA, you go ahead and when you've managed to actually track down the spammers and the phishers and we have some "extrordinary rendition" (I was thinking of rendition more in the soap sense), then I'll believe you're serious./It's fun to be an Internet Touch Chick//but I DO so wish they'd take me up on the challenge
Story reminds me of the joke where someone gets on the supermarket intercom and calls someone up to the front with a forklift 'cuz someone asked for $20 worth of Ramen.
I know, I know, not that kind./own the DVD of Tampopo - one of my favs.
I own a Macbook Pro, but I'm not a "Mac person"; I have to say that I was quite happy when they released Steam for it, and am even happier that Apple's found a way to improve the video performance... not that it was bad, but better is well, better.
I only wish I had taken more when my previous employer closed its doors. I wrote some really amazingly cool little shell scripts for various systems administration and code deployment tasks that I neglected to grab copies of. I had to re-invent a few wheels over the past four years due to that short-sightedness.
Samples of my own code - heck yeah, company secrets or customer data? no way!
Office stuff? Only the crap I brought in with me: my 24" monitor, a couple mice and keyboards and my hella sweet phone headset. (stuff I brought in myself cuz I couldn't justify them well enough to my boss, but I really felt my work life was better having.)
This is why when I take pictures in and around my home that are going to be uploaded to my Flickr or Facebook, I deliberately geocode them... with the coordinates of my hometown police department.
I figure it's close enough (less than a mile away) for the casual user, but would result in hilarity if thusly misused.
Sadly, we don't get to have MODERN reactors 'cuz there's far too much NIMBY going on.
When's the last time we brought a new nuclear power plant online in the US? Sometime in the 1970's. I'm sure that materials science and every other major branch of science & engineering have advanced enough that it would be like trying to compare a modern automobile to one from that time frame.
Sadly, I think you're right about how SEO is practiced, though I would think that REAL SEO (true Scottsman?) would mean ensuring that your site is showing up more for those folks for whom it IS relevant, and less for folks for whom it is not.
In other words if I have a niche site selling foo, then my site is very relevant to folks searching for foo. If there is some real correlation between folks who like foo and folks who also like bar, then my site may also be relevant to them. However, if baz is totally un-related, then maybe I'm better off not wasting my bandwidth and baz peoples' time trying to get eyeballs. It's foo and bar who are my audience.
However, it turns out that Internet success seems to be driven more by Big Numbers... statistics and trends and whatnot, rather than by highly targeting folks.
I remember the beginnings of all this demographic hoo-ha. I remember marketing folks at a newspaper I worked at being all excited about how they could mine the data and use the demographics to selectively target ads. They seemed (to me at the time) to be seriously over-playing that card. Years later, it turns out that most of that was kind of wasted effort. Seems that they've all just gone for the "He/She who spams the most annoying crap possible will get enough return from the DERPA DERP crowd to justify (to himself/herself) continued spamming of the most annoying thing possible at the largest number of eyeballs.
When I chew gum, I make it a point to throw it out in a proper trash bin when I'm done with it. When I used to smoke, I would crush out my butt and put it in my pocket until I found a proper place to dispose of it. It's not the gum, it's the sheer lack of common human consideration that's the problem.
Sadly, you're right: we've kept the notion of freedom while losing the idea of individual responsibility.
Which is kind of a fix in and of itself. If you have a problem, just do a search for it on the forum. Chances are, someone else will have run into it in the past. Barring that, you can submit a service request in-game, and I believe there are ways you can contact Blizzard through their support page on their main website, which is done via e-mail. There are options out there. Just gotta use your head.
... except of course, that the chilling effect real names will have may stop a lot of others from posting those useful questions/answers, thus making your suggested technique much less useful.
As an amateur photographer who happens to carry an AMOD GPS logging device with me everywhere I go (to geotag my photos), I'm thinking that maybe China wouldn't be the brightest idea for me visit-wise. (I guess in a way it's a good thing I probably can't afford such a trip anytime soon)
Basically, I'm guessing that if the Chinese government is that concerned about folks mapping things, they're probably going to take a very dim view of geotagged photos as well. I guess (if I screw up my world-view enough) I could sort of see why a totalitarian government could be very concerned about the "dangers" of such information. After all, if I have a photo showing some seriously poor village on the edge of survival, but tag it as being somewhere that the official propaganda says is an economic dynamo, it kind of exposes the lie. It's far easier to just step on my neck with their jack boots.
On the other hand, I would point out that gps loggers these days are very small and compact and don't actually require you to be walking around with big, obvious "HEY I'M IN UR BASE RECORDING UR COORDINATES" equipment... It seems to me that unless you tightly control where a tourist can go and what they can see (which I assume China does to some extent), the information WILL get out.
Truthfully, there isn't that much of a real national security issue anyway... Satellite imagery for ever square foot of the Earth is available... maybe not to super-high resolution in every corner yet, but it's getting there. An invading army doesn't need to know the name of the street to bomb it. This is purly "national security" from the viewpoint of a very paranoid totalitarian regime.
This is possibly the only way anyone could ever convince Mike Rowe that software engineering could be a dirty job. I suspect it will have much the same effect as durian fruit has on Andrew Zimern.
I was the web developer for a good sized metro daily back in 1999. Back then, we were owned by PRIVATELY_OWNED_MID-SIZE_NEWSPAPER_CONGLOMERATE, but we were pretty much allowed to do what we wanted (the web was young and our paper was pretty far ahead of our sister and parent organizations web-wise).
Then along came MAJOR_PUBLICLY_TRADED_PUBLISHING_CONGLOMERATE - bought our parent company. I saw the beginnings of what you're talking about and I jumped ship; found another job and gave my notice.
From what I heard from those who stayed behind, the red tape got more and more, the centralization came down from on high and threw out the baby with the bath water. Within a year, most of the web personnel had gone elsewhere, and the web site was just a cookie-cutter version of the corporate standard.
It's sad as the web department was full of some of the best and brightest people it's ever been my pleasure to work with.
What I mean to say is that I know where you're coming from.
Seems to me our math skills are good...
on
The Real Science Gap
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
It seems to me that this just proves that American math skills are good:
If student A spends over $100,000 on education, but finds there's no jobs that don't involve asking if they want whipped cream on their tall mocha late, how many years will they subsist on ramen while trying to pay off the debt with piss-poor tips?
If student B coasts out of high school and resigns themselves to the inevitability of their barista career, they'll be the manager in charge of deciding that Student A is way over qualified and might do better investigating the all the possibilities of frying something next door by the time Student A swallows their pride and applies.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd prefer the far more geeky "The avalanche has already started - it is too late for the pebbles to vote".
but I agree 100% with the sentiment.
I was kind of with you until you started making blanket statements about atheists. Many atheists I know (including myself) did not just wake up one day saying "geez, religion is blocks". Generally, the path to Atheism is a journey which begins with questioning some of the precepts of the given faith in which one is raised. For some, that's enough to completely shatter faith in any religious views. For others, its a process of questioning, and searching, and eventual trend from believer to questioning to agnosticism to outright atheism.
I'm not qualified to speak for all atheists or agnostics any more than you are, but for myself, I can say that the process of "losing my religion" was drawn out and painful. Think about this for a second: if you believe in a God, you probably believe that there's an afterlife of some sort - you probably believe that the universe makes some sort of sense - that something greater than yourself gives a flying fuck what happens to you. In your deepest, darkest, most troubling time, you've got someone/something to pray to. Now, imagine what it's like for those of us who do not believe... we are ultimately alone and insignificant in an uncaring universe. We only have such a very short time to live, love, and figure out what gives our lives meaning before we take a very long dirt-nap.
Tell me now, do you think for one second that I CHOSE that? Don't you think that I'd LOVE to believe - that I'd love to feel that some god in the sky was looking out for me or that I had some shot at life-after-death? That this isn't all that there is? I have stood at the precipice and have stared into the abyss, an deep down inside, it scares the crap out of me, but I keep looking anyway, and I'm a stronger person for it. YES, I've looked at various (but by no means all) belief systems / religions, and in the end, I just can't bring myself to believe in any of them. I'm pretty sure that many other atheists have similar experiences.
To use an analogy: I have stuck my hand on a hot stove and gotten burned. I have found that other hot things cause similar pain, so I do not now need to stick my hand in every single fire or hot thing to know what it is to be burned or to know the signs that I will be burned if I touch it.
Exactly!
UAC is "the boy who cried 'Wolf'", but it's only a symptom of the bigger underlying problem: Too many things that SHOULDN'T need admin level access DO need it in Windows.
My MacBook asks me for my admin password every now and then, but not nearly as often as a Windows Vista box pops up the UAC confirmation.
Rackspace is a HOSTING provider, not a carrier per-se. I know what you're trying to say, but I believe that hosting is a very different ball of wax from ISP.
You can always find another hosting provider as long as you have Internet access and as long as the hosting providers have Internet access. As long as the carriers are neutral, then you cant be silenced simply by a hosting company refusing to host your stuff - you can always find another regardless of your geographical location. If ISPs aren't neutral, then you may (due to geography) be screwed.
If your business is TRANSPORTING the bits, you're effectively not responsible for the content that passes through and you should have no right to inspect traffic past the level needed to transport it to where it needs to go. If you're HOSTING the bits, then there's a lot more wiggle room contract-wise about what you can do with the data.
This is what scares me so much about talks of "three strikes rules" with ISPs that some IP owners are pushing - you can ALWAYS find someone to host you, but if you can't get a net connection, then you're effectively silenced.
Science is about postulating a hypothesis, then testing to see if you can disprove or refine it... If science were about coming up with an idea, and deciding, "yeah, that's the likely answer" and never testing / refining /disproving anything, then we'd still be believing that the sun goes 'round the Earth, and we'd still have no clue about the cause of disease or how basic physics worked. We'd never advance knowledge.
Seems to me that an adjustment of the measurement doesn't mean "OOPS, sorry folks there is no Global Warming", it means "Hey, we've realized we made an error in our estimates, here is the new data". In my mind, things like this could also mean, "hey, maybe we DO have a little longer before we cross the point of no return... maybe even long enough to do something about it" /P
Good... tell you what NSA, you go ahead and when you've managed to actually track down the spammers and the phishers and we have some "extrordinary rendition" (I was thinking of rendition more in the soap sense), then I'll believe you're serious. /It's fun to be an Internet Touch Chick //but I DO so wish they'd take me up on the challenge
I've heard of Drunken Monkey, but this is a bit ridiculous.
Story reminds me of the joke where someone gets on the supermarket intercom and calls someone up to the front with a forklift 'cuz someone asked for $20 worth of Ramen.
I know, I know, not that kind. /own the DVD of Tampopo - one of my favs.
Maybe the report includes a dump of working memory?
Just a thought, thought that would make it kind of big.
That was a highly articulate outburst, and I approve (and couldn't agree more).
Straw man ain't welcome here. :)
I own a Macbook Pro, but I'm not a "Mac person"; I have to say that I was quite happy when they released Steam for it, and am even happier that Apple's found a way to improve the video performance... not that it was bad, but better is well, better.
I only wish I had taken more when my previous employer closed its doors. I wrote some really amazingly cool little shell scripts for various systems administration and code deployment tasks that I neglected to grab copies of. I had to re-invent a few wheels over the past four years due to that short-sightedness.
Samples of my own code - heck yeah, company secrets or customer data? no way!
Office stuff? Only the crap I brought in with me: my 24" monitor, a couple mice and keyboards and my hella sweet phone headset. (stuff I brought in myself cuz I couldn't justify them well enough to my boss, but I really felt my work life was better having.)
This is why when I take pictures in and around my home that are going to be uploaded to my Flickr or Facebook, I deliberately geocode them... with the coordinates of my hometown police department.
I figure it's close enough (less than a mile away) for the casual user, but would result in hilarity if thusly misused.
Sadly, we don't get to have MODERN reactors 'cuz there's far too much NIMBY going on.
When's the last time we brought a new nuclear power plant online in the US? Sometime in the 1970's. I'm sure that materials science and every other major branch of science & engineering have advanced enough that it would be like trying to compare a modern automobile to one from that time frame.
I don't like "Dwarf Planet" either... what's wrong with "Planetoid"?
Sadly, I think you're right about how SEO is practiced, though I would think that REAL SEO (true Scottsman?) would mean ensuring that your site is showing up more for those folks for whom it IS relevant, and less for folks for whom it is not.
In other words if I have a niche site selling foo, then my site is very relevant to folks searching for foo. If there is some real correlation between folks who like foo and folks who also like bar, then my site may also be relevant to them. However, if baz is totally un-related, then maybe I'm better off not wasting my bandwidth and baz peoples' time trying to get eyeballs. It's foo and bar who are my audience.
However, it turns out that Internet success seems to be driven more by Big Numbers... statistics and trends and whatnot, rather than by highly targeting folks.
I remember the beginnings of all this demographic hoo-ha. I remember marketing folks at a newspaper I worked at being all excited about how they could mine the data and use the demographics to selectively target ads. They seemed (to me at the time) to be seriously over-playing that card. Years later, it turns out that most of that was kind of wasted effort. Seems that they've all just gone for the "He/She who spams the most annoying crap possible will get enough return from the DERPA DERP crowd to justify (to himself/herself) continued spamming of the most annoying thing possible at the largest number of eyeballs.
I just don't get that...
When I chew gum, I make it a point to throw it out in a proper trash bin when I'm done with it. When I used to smoke, I would crush out my butt and put it in my pocket until I found a proper place to dispose of it. It's not the gum, it's the sheer lack of common human consideration that's the problem.
Sadly, you're right: we've kept the notion of freedom while losing the idea of individual responsibility.
As an amateur photographer who happens to carry an AMOD GPS logging device with me everywhere I go (to geotag my photos), I'm thinking that maybe China wouldn't be the brightest idea for me visit-wise. (I guess in a way it's a good thing I probably can't afford such a trip anytime soon)
Basically, I'm guessing that if the Chinese government is that concerned about folks mapping things, they're probably going to take a very dim view of geotagged photos as well. I guess (if I screw up my world-view enough) I could sort of see why a totalitarian government could be very concerned about the "dangers" of such information. After all, if I have a photo showing some seriously poor village on the edge of survival, but tag it as being somewhere that the official propaganda says is an economic dynamo, it kind of exposes the lie. It's far easier to just step on my neck with their jack boots.
On the other hand, I would point out that gps loggers these days are very small and compact and don't actually require you to be walking around with big, obvious "HEY I'M IN UR BASE RECORDING UR COORDINATES" equipment... It seems to me that unless you tightly control where a tourist can go and what they can see (which I assume China does to some extent), the information WILL get out.
Truthfully, there isn't that much of a real national security issue anyway... Satellite imagery for ever square foot of the Earth is available... maybe not to super-high resolution in every corner yet, but it's getting there. An invading army doesn't need to know the name of the street to bomb it. This is purly "national security" from the viewpoint of a very paranoid totalitarian regime.
THIS a thousand times THIS!
This is possibly the only way anyone could ever convince Mike Rowe that software engineering could be a dirty job. I suspect it will have much the same effect as durian fruit has on Andrew Zimern.
All I have to say is "DO NOT WANT!"
Yeah, I realized that after I posted... definite upgrade (though apparently, you still can't get to the HDD to replace it)
To be honest, I hadn't thought of that. I guess it makes sense when taken in that context.
I still ~want~ a Mini with an i5 or i7 though.
I don't know about you, but the internal power supply would make me really concerned that this thing would run hot.
Also, I had some high hopes when I read they were revving the mini - I was hoping it would have an i5 (and maybe even an i7 option).
Basically, I want an iMac, but I've got my own screens - just never gonna convince me to buy an all-in-one like that, but the Pros are overkill.
Better graphics: yay
Unibody (unopenable) case: BOO
Still Core2 instead of i5/i7: BOO
HDMI: MEH
I guess my MacBookPro will have to be an only Mac for a while longer.
I was the web developer for a good sized metro daily back in 1999. Back then, we were owned by PRIVATELY_OWNED_MID-SIZE_NEWSPAPER_CONGLOMERATE, but we were pretty much allowed to do what we wanted (the web was young and our paper was pretty far ahead of our sister and parent organizations web-wise).
Then along came MAJOR_PUBLICLY_TRADED_PUBLISHING_CONGLOMERATE - bought our parent company. I saw the beginnings of what you're talking about and I jumped ship; found another job and gave my notice.
From what I heard from those who stayed behind, the red tape got more and more, the centralization came down from on high and threw out the baby with the bath water. Within a year, most of the web personnel had gone elsewhere, and the web site was just a cookie-cutter version of the corporate standard.
It's sad as the web department was full of some of the best and brightest people it's ever been my pleasure to work with.
What I mean to say is that I know where you're coming from.
It seems to me that this just proves that American math skills are good:
If student A spends over $100,000 on education, but finds there's no jobs that don't involve asking if they want whipped cream on their tall mocha late, how many years will they subsist on ramen while trying to pay off the debt with piss-poor tips?
If student B coasts out of high school and resigns themselves to the inevitability of their barista career, they'll be the manager in charge of deciding that Student A is way over qualified and might do better investigating the all the possibilities of frying something next door by the time Student A swallows their pride and applies.
T hi s wi l l n oT eN d wEL l Welcome back to mid 90's-era "font-itis"