Whenever I hear the "preserve our way of life" justification from pols, I parse it to mean *their* way of life. AFAIK, the only entities who can alter *my* way of life are the pols themselves.
There is real sociological research that overwhelmingly shows that this happens universally within two generations. Even the most stalwartly entrepreneurial immigrants who reproduce end up with grandchildren who want it all, want it now, and don't believe that they should have to work for it.
Unfortunately, I don't see any rigorous research on the topic at hand. The anecdotal evidence of mostly male CS (and math) students has statistics to back it up, but no cause and effect beyond the shared belief that guys like Math and girls like English.
I'm personally way more language-oriented, but when it came time to choose what to study, computers seemed obvious. I had to enforce discipline to stay on the math, but programming and systems studies were just plain fun.
I was, and still am, just very curious about it. I like knowing exactly what computers are doing, and I often reconfirm my knowledge because it's still miraculous to me. I can see the parallels in other systems, e.g., biological, social, etc., but it's computing that motivates me to continue to learn.
I don't know any women who feel this way, although I do know of a few. I think it's the way we're wired, starting with the prenatal testosterone bath that males get in our twenty-sixth week of development and reinforced by social mores.
I very much appreciate your "pipe dream" footnote.
Aside from the deterioration of the US military through reorganization whose design goals seem to focus on saving money, military service just isn't rewarding any more. Veteran's benefits have been wantonly slashed, despite the hard evidence that the WWII G.I. Bill produced a renaissance by providing a free college education to everyone who served. The pessimistic focus seems to mirror the canard of welfare cheats. I leave the irony of military recruiters targeting the poor as an exercise for the reader.
That being said, I found my own service experience useful in that it forced me to grow up and to recognize that I had been squandering my potential. If nothing else, the US military will teach you just how badly it sucks to take orders from someone less intelligent that you are. I count myself fortunate to have realized this before the age of twenty, and to have taken action by the time I reached twenty-two.
Not only did I get a college education on my own dime, I found that there were more than a few loopholes in the educational assistance program. I tired of fighting the bureaucracy and just did it on my own. In fairness, I did use the VA loan benefit ten years later.
I think that the problem is the mistaken belief that the common work-avoidance mentality of service{men,women} persists into the post-service, civilian experience. Some minority will game every system. That doesn't make it wise to turn it off.
I wonder whether any of us have approached our management with an analogous demand, e.g., "Justify why I should continue to work here. Your technology choices are rotting my skills, you don't compensate me at all for the extra time I put in, and you really have no idea what it is that I do for you."
Unfortunately, most management seems to [continue to] hew to the fantasy of a "run book" for their operations. It's as though they believe that anyone could do my job, that their operation is static, and that because I seem to be idle during normal working hours that they're somehow being ripped off. Conversely, they seem to think that my 24/7 availability is some magical free bonus, and that I enjoy explaining to my family that we have to postpone our vacation again because of my profession.
They really seem to believe that it's possible to completely document everything for quick and ready reference so that anyone with a modicum of technical knowledge can take care of any problem. This implies that they view me as an expensive and completely replaceable part.
I personally view IT in the same light as health care. It's a big risk to cut costs, and both industries have shifted away from the old "family doctor" model in favor of "managed care." The new model looks good on paper, but falls short in practice.
OTOH, it's difficult to find a good doctor or a good sysadmin, because you don't really know how talented/reliable either one is until you have a problem. And you must trust the professional to identify, explain, and remedy the problem. When the cost seems high, you're likely to push back, thereby reversing the decision to hire and trust the professional in the first place.
Ultimately, viewing the care of one's body or of a business' systems as an overhead cost that can be cut to save money is very risky.
I know what my doctor's response would be if I asked him to justify my paying him, and it wouldn't be deliverable documentation. I've had several positions that already occurred as poor work environments, such that the demand for me to justify my existence triggered a flight response. Of these, more than half dropped the demand when I told them I was leaving. In every case, I was left wondering who put the idea into their heads that IT support was somehow easily replaceable, even disposable.
That's not my advice to you. There exists a balance that keeps management aware of the value of your work and keeps you aware of how your efforts are perceived by those who account for it.
I say educate them in the way they're asking, and find a method that leaves you with more knowledge, too. The predictable response on your part is submissive and leaves you feeling powerless, possibly worrying about the canard called "job security." Whether they keep you or toss you--and whether you stay or leave--both should benefit from the effort.
My first reaction to your post was, you know, fuck you, you're wrong, that other guy is right, &c. I started forming an argument to show that war must include at least one other sovereign power with which to negotiate terms.
Then I got your point, and I agree. Call it what you like: War, Police Action, Military Intervention. The name is unimportant. The activities attached to the label "War" have morphed beyond any formal definition. The American Revolution itself was successful because it exploited weaknesses in what Britain thought War was.
I think a very apt metaphor is the difference between a software specification and the deliverable product:
In the beginning there was the Plan. And then came the Assumptions. And the Plan was without Substance. And darkness was upon the face of the Workers. And they spoke amongst themselves, saying, "This is a crock of shit and it stinketh!"
... and so on.
No matter how crappy the final product is, if enough people buy it--and keep buying it--it will not only survive, it will become the best-selling product in its market. In some cases, it will make its own market. I cite Microsoft Windows as a prime example.
Ah. I see that you prefer to lump your perceived opponents into easily dismissed groups. Apparently they're all of the same mind to you, e.g., no extremists on either tail of the bell curve. I'll grant that there are those who are derisive, and that their rantings haven't helped, and seem only to have stirred you and others like you to resist with insults and invalidation. In particular, your invectives ("some Leftie") are repellent, and do not serve to further your argument. To quote from your own post on another topic
Aye-aye-aye! Name-calling - how sad...
Thanks for clearing up that you've no formal religious education. I'm now curious what you refer to when you claim that you have "enough education". It leaves the impression that you feel that you've had all the education you need.
I wonder at your blanket dismissal of empirical data. The planet is on a distinct warming trend. This isn't merely well-grounded scientific theory. It's a fact. If you insist, I'll provide multiple sources for hard evidence.
You seem to be stuck on the argument that human activity is responsible for global warming. I personally don't care why the Earth's temperature is rising. I'm interested in whether this is a normal cyclical trend. Even if it is, I want to know how these rising temperatures will affect our species, directly and indirectly. It's futile to suggest that we have lived through earlier warming cycles. We must at least consider the present state of the world in comparison to what we know and can discern about the states during earlier warming cycles.
Getting back to the main topic of discussion, I view it as puerile to presume that the extinction--or even a drastic reduction--of any species warrants investigation. Why are they dying off? How will it affect us? Is it something we did, and if so, what is the impact of changing our behavior? If we're not responsible, then what is, and can we influence the outcome, or must we accept the change and compensate for it? More importantly, what is the impact of ignoring the problem?
To wit, if it's a matter of simple economics, I view it as folly to put off remediation simply because of the cost, especially if the main consideration is that some would lose money on the investments that they have already made. Suppose that you discovered mold growing in your home. Would you put off rectification simply because the cost might affect plans you already have for the money? It's not important to determine whose fault it is: The priority is your own health and the value of your home.
If you would take care of your private residence, then by extension you ought to be curious about what's going on with the planet it's parked on. If you'd just ignore the problem in your own home, then you are likely ignorant in other areas of your life as well.
You may wish to consider that responsibility and blame are not interchangeable.
Awesome. It is truly jaw-dropping to consider that your arguments constitute a plan to simply leave things the way they are. Staying the course may provide some sense of security. I claim that we as a culture demonstrate the assertion that doing what we've always done will produce the same result that we have always gotten. Perhaps your perspective is that we needn't change anything.
Your contribution to the discussion is reminiscent of attempts to derail it with straw man attacks designed to inspire doubt. You also execute the "change the subject" move with great verve and flair.
You may want to consider that winning isn't everything. The inherent problem with winning at all costs is that it carries the risk of having nothing and no one with which to celebrate after victory. See also Pyhrrus of Epirus.
I also recommend reflection on who it is that you're trying to impress, especially in this forum. I assert that you have, indeed, made an impression, and that it most likely is not the one you intended to make.
I find your final paragraph to be most telling. You seem to be acutely aware of the complexity of the problem, but your contribution appears to consist mostly, if not entirely of mockery and derision. Given your claim that you are a seminary graduate--I presume that this is a Christian institution--you may wish to review how bystanders treated Jesus, and compare their behavior to yours.
The problem is important, but doesn't yet seem to be urgent to enough of us to take action. It looks to me like a case of denial, in the same way that many individuals ignore signs of failing health. Most of us don't like to confront our own mortality. Such feelings don't change the facts.
In short, we seem to prefer to avoid issues that we regard as potentially painful to consider. To grant credence to the idea that our planet is in trouble gives rise to a very difficult problem. If, for example, US policy and behavior changes, many existing models require profound revision.
The most unproductive choice in the matter is to assign blame. I agree with the argument that extinction is natural. I assert that it is folly to deny responsibility for our habitat, and that there is no integrity (i.e., power and strength) in avoiding the possibility that we may need to change our behaviors in order to survive.
In short, following the path of least resistance works only at the atomic level. We are a complex species; it follows that even the most simple problems require elegant solutions. It is folly to presume that simple is the same as easy.
You're leaving out the civilian casualties. The ~3000 figure refers to what the US DoD has agreed to release.
Some estimates put the number of Iraqi citizens killed at over 100,000.
Then there are the injured. This conflict in particular has many, many more injured because of advanced "life saving" techniques, e.g., rapid airlift of wounded to hospital. These injuries include many which are debilitating, such as wounds to the head, the spine, lost limbs, &c.
Then there's the shameful lack of care for veterans which has been gutted over and over by the same politicians who claim to "support the troops" when they really mean "support the war."
I agree that Wiki markup is intuitive, but try formatting a large table, for example.
I'd personally like a wiki that would support automated entries, e.g., configuration management. I dreamt once that the wiki I was putting together at work could derive configurations and also cause configuration changes.
The state in which I live doesn't sell powerball tickets. Carpools form whenever the neighboring state's powerball reaches $40M or so.
Your point about $1/week as a lottery investment is well taken, but I refer to the tendency of some to regard a larger pot as worthy of a larger investment and the erroneous assumption of a higher probability to win.
That's why it's called puzzLOTTO. Ever notice how people will drive for hours and stand in line just to pay the moron tax when the PowerBall lotteries announce that the next payout is going to be tens of millions?
For sure someone will buy the app on day 29, planning to solve it in time to get the $30k.
The values of the stock markets have almost nothing to do with anything real.
Exactly. Even if eBay has made real efficiency improvements, few investors will comprehend the meaning of the claim in terms of "anything real," e.g., power consumption, productivity, seller satisfaction, etc.
They'll just think, "That's a good place to put my money."
You're confusing The Man with The Employees. The Man is far, far away from the keypad. He has hired thousands of people to insulate him from the keypad, in order to make his decisions in isolation.
Just because someone has the root password doesn't mean that they care, or have the authority to fix a security hole.
I say "has the root password" because that's how I think of the people between the front door of the airport and the jetway who can upgrade your ticket if they want to.
Add to that the TSA contractors who have full access to your luggage--and your time, if they choose to detain you.
I'm not saying "Don't raise Hell." I'm saying raise Hell with someone who can--and is likely to--do something about the thing that you think needs fixing. Complaining to someone who is powerless only reminds them that they're powerless--except when it comes to hassling you.
He was wrong for hearing the code. He was wrong for watching the employees type the code.
Surely you mean, "He was wrong in the eyes of the people to whom he reported the problem."
If you want to make a difference, report problems to someone who can make a difference. Someone has responded and referred to "the attendant at the gate" as "the authorities." That's the problem with this anecdote: None of the people involved were authorities. They had privileged access, but no authority to do anything about the exposed keypad. What did he expect, a big thank you and then legwork performed by the gate attendant and the TSA contractors in the vicinity?
I agree that whistleblowers are generally punished rather than respected, because they tend to uncover incompetency and/or malfeasance. That is, they're reporting problems to people who think they'll get in trouble if anyone finds out.
It seems that the man took offense at the fact that he managed to figure out the code to the keypad after only 15 minutes of observation. If he really did say, "No, I don't need the code to you locked door over there," he was inviting trouble, IMHO.
The responsible thing to do would have been to contact the airport's security officer and point out the security hole. I understand that this would take some effort, e.g., finding out who's in charge, how to contact him/her, waiting for him/her to call back, etc.
It's too bad that we can't simply point out errors as we find them, to the nearest and most convenient person. That still doesn't make it sensible to do so and then complain that no one listens. You might as well tell the guy behind the counter at the convenience store that the ATM in the back of the store has a security problem. At best, he'll ignore you--at worst, he'll call the cops because his limited understanding will lead him to believe that you just ripped off the ATM.
I remember clearly the latter half of September 2001. Of course there were the plastic flags flying from almost every motor vehicle, but what stands out for me is the memory of how I kept scanning the horizon for explosions when I was driving.
I didn't feel safe. Not that I'd ever been safe, but my perception had always been so.
The thing that still puzzles me, though, is how we in the US have tolerated such a rapid erosion of civil liberty. It's not that our documented rights and freedoms haven't been violated all along, but now there are legal provisions--and already some legal precedent--to protect and justify such violations.
Sure, sure, human psychology, thinking with the fear centers of our brains, even the Milgram Experiment--these and more describe how we react to a perceived threat. And fear is known to reduce the blood supply to the brain.
I find it sad to consider that this particular finding will have no effect on the encroachment on human rights in these United States. I suppose this man is just one "bad apple." Like the cases of the prosecuted torturers at Abu Ghraib (and other locations), the years-later finding that the illegal and shocking techniques were known and even encouraged by the entire organization will have no effect on the policies which shall remain in place.
This lands for me like most anti-other-culture polemic speech, particularly anti-other-religion. Religion in general has produced more hate than any other aspect of human culture. Even though war is all about money and power, it's religion that has supported war for those who don't stand to gain any money or power from the war, i.e., popular support.
It's the old "us and them" argument writ large. Every human being has experienced some version of this, but it tends to die off without ritual reinforcement.
I agree that clitoral "circumcision" (often the crude removal of the entire physical structure) is ridiculously cruel and occurs as unusual for anyone not steeped in that culture. There are examples of outrageous behaviour influenced and supported by every religion, though. It just so happens that this practice is one of, if not the most extreme instances.
It's the very paradigm of anti-female behavior in the name of a deity.
Compare and contrast the Hindus, who believe that more female orgasms imply a better world. Funny thing, this hasn't exempted them from turning to war; in fact, the very first chapter of the Bhagavad Gita is set on a battlefield.
That is, I find it genuinely tragic that young women are deprived of pleasure from sex, almost certainly before they've experienced it. By comparison, the wholesale slaughter of human beings regardless of sex in war is pathetic. The high irony is that war is couched in metaphors which suggest honor, glory, and other high morality.
I remember a chapter in a text for a health class in junior high school. The topic was "Quacks," and the direction was to "beware of them." I remember being interested in the first view of doctors I'd seen that didn't portray them as completely trustworthy and somehow authoritarian.
One section described a particularly heinous form of quackery that involved "gizmos purported to measure the electrical charge on the surface of the skin." This seemed outrageous to me. Electricity on the skin??? Obviously this was a big-time scam. These gizmos were obviously fakes; I could tell just by reading the damning text and staring at the weird black and white photos.
I thought about this from time to time as I grew up, especially when I learned about the vast array of electrical charges and how ubiquitous electricity is. I still held onto this strange form of pity for those who had fallen for the scams of these quacks and their bogus gizmos. Something about the tone of the textbook made the whole thing seem very dangerous, e.g., there were people spending all of their money on something that couldn't possibly work. And what if they had a serious ailment which was being ignored in favor of the, the... quackery !!!
Well, a few years ago, when the Scientology documents were exposed to the public, I perused them out of curiosity. Even though I knew about Xenu, I was still surprised to see it all there in print. Then I ran across the man's story of getting to some advanced Thetan level, and he described the self-auditing with the e-meter. Something in his narrative caused the neurons in my own brain to fire just so, and I realized that this was what was being described in the textbook.
I think it would be interesting to research how detectable electrical currents in the human body relate to physical, mental, even emotional processes. I believe it's dangerous to toss around half-baked notions of the same, in exchange for money and time, based on the ramblings of a science fiction author on alcohol and barbiturates.
I mean, the guy should have been on psilocybin, or mescaline. Alcohol and other depressants are cruel drugs.
Nor did IPU provide any evidence of having been in poverty. Further, the argument is moot, since the definition of poverty hasn't been defined.
But hey, we're in the fifth or sixth derivative discussion of the original topic. Like dozens of coats of paint, the original has become almost completely unrecognizable.
Slashdot Mirror
Whenever I hear the "preserve our way of life" justification from pols, I parse it to mean *their* way of life. AFAIK, the only entities who can alter *my* way of life are the pols themselves.
There is real sociological research that overwhelmingly shows that this happens universally within two generations. Even the most stalwartly entrepreneurial immigrants who reproduce end up with grandchildren who want it all, want it now, and don't believe that they should have to work for it.
Unfortunately, I don't see any rigorous research on the topic at hand. The anecdotal evidence of mostly male CS (and math) students has statistics to back it up, but no cause and effect beyond the shared belief that guys like Math and girls like English.
I'm personally way more language-oriented, but when it came time to choose what to study, computers seemed obvious. I had to enforce discipline to stay on the math, but programming and systems studies were just plain fun.
I was, and still am, just very curious about it. I like knowing exactly what computers are doing, and I often reconfirm my knowledge because it's still miraculous to me. I can see the parallels in other systems, e.g., biological, social, etc., but it's computing that motivates me to continue to learn.
I don't know any women who feel this way, although I do know of a few. I think it's the way we're wired, starting with the prenatal testosterone bath that males get in our twenty-sixth week of development and reinforced by social mores.
Heh, you beat me to it. The quote is often attributed to Yogi Berra, but it makes too much sense for him to have said, IMHO. The late Mr. Berra's Wikiquote page says This has also been attributed to computer scientist Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut and scientist Albert Einstein.
Ah don't keer who yew are, dat's funny right dere. ~Larry the Cable Guy
One man's Freedom Fighter is another corporation's Terrorist.
There, fixed that for you.
Clue #2:
I very much appreciate your "pipe dream" footnote.
Aside from the deterioration of the US military through reorganization whose design goals seem to focus on saving money, military service just isn't rewarding any more. Veteran's benefits have been wantonly slashed, despite the hard evidence that the WWII G.I. Bill produced a renaissance by providing a free college education to everyone who served. The pessimistic focus seems to mirror the canard of welfare cheats. I leave the irony of military recruiters targeting the poor as an exercise for the reader.
That being said, I found my own service experience useful in that it forced me to grow up and to recognize that I had been squandering my potential. If nothing else, the US military will teach you just how badly it sucks to take orders from someone less intelligent that you are. I count myself fortunate to have realized this before the age of twenty, and to have taken action by the time I reached twenty-two.
Not only did I get a college education on my own dime, I found that there were more than a few loopholes in the educational assistance program. I tired of fighting the bureaucracy and just did it on my own. In fairness, I did use the VA loan benefit ten years later.
I think that the problem is the mistaken belief that the common work-avoidance mentality of service{men,women} persists into the post-service, civilian experience. Some minority will game every system. That doesn't make it wise to turn it off.
I wonder whether any of us have approached our management with an analogous demand, e.g., "Justify why I should continue to work here. Your technology choices are rotting my skills, you don't compensate me at all for the extra time I put in, and you really have no idea what it is that I do for you."
Unfortunately, most management seems to [continue to] hew to the fantasy of a "run book" for their operations. It's as though they believe that anyone could do my job, that their operation is static, and that because I seem to be idle during normal working hours that they're somehow being ripped off. Conversely, they seem to think that my 24/7 availability is some magical free bonus, and that I enjoy explaining to my family that we have to postpone our vacation again because of my profession.
They really seem to believe that it's possible to completely document everything for quick and ready reference so that anyone with a modicum of technical knowledge can take care of any problem. This implies that they view me as an expensive and completely replaceable part.
I personally view IT in the same light as health care. It's a big risk to cut costs, and both industries have shifted away from the old "family doctor" model in favor of "managed care." The new model looks good on paper, but falls short in practice.
OTOH, it's difficult to find a good doctor or a good sysadmin, because you don't really know how talented/reliable either one is until you have a problem. And you must trust the professional to identify, explain, and remedy the problem. When the cost seems high, you're likely to push back, thereby reversing the decision to hire and trust the professional in the first place.
Ultimately, viewing the care of one's body or of a business' systems as an overhead cost that can be cut to save money is very risky.
I know what my doctor's response would be if I asked him to justify my paying him, and it wouldn't be deliverable documentation. I've had several positions that already occurred as poor work environments, such that the demand for me to justify my existence triggered a flight response. Of these, more than half dropped the demand when I told them I was leaving. In every case, I was left wondering who put the idea into their heads that IT support was somehow easily replaceable, even disposable.
That's not my advice to you. There exists a balance that keeps management aware of the value of your work and keeps you aware of how your efforts are perceived by those who account for it.
I say educate them in the way they're asking, and find a method that leaves you with more knowledge, too. The predictable response on your part is submissive and leaves you feeling powerless, possibly worrying about the canard called "job security." Whether they keep you or toss you--and whether you stay or leave--both should benefit from the effort.
It's one of the builtins that also has an analogous script/executable in /usr/bin, for when you're running /bin/sh or somesuch as root.
ObTrivia: Until a few years ago, Sun was still shipping basename(1) as a one-liner using expr(1). Then someone found a way to break it.
I'm struck by the stark contrast between TFA's ideas and the Hallowe'en Documents.
My first reaction to your post was, you know, fuck you, you're wrong, that other guy is right, &c. I started forming an argument to show that war must include at least one other sovereign power with which to negotiate terms.
Then I got your point, and I agree. Call it what you like: War, Police Action, Military Intervention. The name is unimportant. The activities attached to the label "War" have morphed beyond any formal definition. The American Revolution itself was successful because it exploited weaknesses in what Britain thought War was.
I think a very apt metaphor is the difference between a software specification and the deliverable product:
... and so on.
No matter how crappy the final product is, if enough people buy it--and keep buying it--it will not only survive, it will become the best-selling product in its market. In some cases, it will make its own market. I cite Microsoft Windows as a prime example.
Right. I saw that number, skipped the second paragraph, and presumed you meant the number of military casualties in Iraq.
Ironic, though, isn't it?
Ah. I see that you prefer to lump your perceived opponents into easily dismissed groups. Apparently they're all of the same mind to you, e.g., no extremists on either tail of the bell curve. I'll grant that there are those who are derisive, and that their rantings haven't helped, and seem only to have stirred you and others like you to resist with insults and invalidation. In particular, your invectives ("some Leftie") are repellent, and do not serve to further your argument. To quote from your own post on another topic
Thanks for clearing up that you've no formal religious education. I'm now curious what you refer to when you claim that you have "enough education". It leaves the impression that you feel that you've had all the education you need.
I wonder at your blanket dismissal of empirical data. The planet is on a distinct warming trend. This isn't merely well-grounded scientific theory. It's a fact. If you insist, I'll provide multiple sources for hard evidence.
You seem to be stuck on the argument that human activity is responsible for global warming. I personally don't care why the Earth's temperature is rising. I'm interested in whether this is a normal cyclical trend. Even if it is, I want to know how these rising temperatures will affect our species, directly and indirectly. It's futile to suggest that we have lived through earlier warming cycles. We must at least consider the present state of the world in comparison to what we know and can discern about the states during earlier warming cycles.
Getting back to the main topic of discussion, I view it as puerile to presume that the extinction--or even a drastic reduction--of any species warrants investigation. Why are they dying off? How will it affect us? Is it something we did, and if so, what is the impact of changing our behavior? If we're not responsible, then what is, and can we influence the outcome, or must we accept the change and compensate for it? More importantly, what is the impact of ignoring the problem?
To wit, if it's a matter of simple economics, I view it as folly to put off remediation simply because of the cost, especially if the main consideration is that some would lose money on the investments that they have already made. Suppose that you discovered mold growing in your home. Would you put off rectification simply because the cost might affect plans you already have for the money? It's not important to determine whose fault it is: The priority is your own health and the value of your home.
If you would take care of your private residence, then by extension you ought to be curious about what's going on with the planet it's parked on. If you'd just ignore the problem in your own home, then you are likely ignorant in other areas of your life as well.
You may wish to consider that responsibility and blame are not interchangeable.
Awesome. It is truly jaw-dropping to consider that your arguments constitute a plan to simply leave things the way they are. Staying the course may provide some sense of security. I claim that we as a culture demonstrate the assertion that doing what we've always done will produce the same result that we have always gotten. Perhaps your perspective is that we needn't change anything.
Your contribution to the discussion is reminiscent of attempts to derail it with straw man attacks designed to inspire doubt. You also execute the "change the subject" move with great verve and flair.
You may want to consider that winning isn't everything. The inherent problem with winning at all costs is that it carries the risk of having nothing and no one with which to celebrate after victory. See also Pyhrrus of Epirus.
I also recommend reflection on who it is that you're trying to impress, especially in this forum. I assert that you have, indeed, made an impression, and that it most likely is not the one you intended to make.
I find your final paragraph to be most telling. You seem to be acutely aware of the complexity of the problem, but your contribution appears to consist mostly, if not entirely of mockery and derision. Given your claim that you are a seminary graduate--I presume that this is a Christian institution--you may wish to review how bystanders treated Jesus, and compare their behavior to yours.
The problem is important, but doesn't yet seem to be urgent to enough of us to take action. It looks to me like a case of denial, in the same way that many individuals ignore signs of failing health. Most of us don't like to confront our own mortality. Such feelings don't change the facts.
In short, we seem to prefer to avoid issues that we regard as potentially painful to consider. To grant credence to the idea that our planet is in trouble gives rise to a very difficult problem. If, for example, US policy and behavior changes, many existing models require profound revision.
The most unproductive choice in the matter is to assign blame. I agree with the argument that extinction is natural. I assert that it is folly to deny responsibility for our habitat, and that there is no integrity (i.e., power and strength) in avoiding the possibility that we may need to change our behaviors in order to survive.
In short, following the path of least resistance works only at the atomic level. We are a complex species; it follows that even the most simple problems require elegant solutions. It is folly to presume that simple is the same as easy.
Surely you mean "no difference between the stated policy plans from both Obama and McCain."
Consider also the Iraqi government's rejection of the US plan for continued occupation and use of force.
You're leaving out the civilian casualties. The ~3000 figure refers to what the US DoD has agreed to release.
Some estimates put the number of Iraqi citizens killed at over 100,000.
Then there are the injured. This conflict in particular has many, many more injured because of advanced "life saving" techniques, e.g., rapid airlift of wounded to hospital. These injuries include many which are debilitating, such as wounds to the head, the spine, lost limbs, &c.
Then there's the shameful lack of care for veterans which has been gutted over and over by the same politicians who claim to "support the troops" when they really mean "support the war."
I agree that Wiki markup is intuitive, but try formatting a large table, for example.
I'd personally like a wiki that would support automated entries, e.g., configuration management. I dreamt once that the wiki I was putting together at work could derive configurations and also cause configuration changes.
Then I woke up.
The state in which I live doesn't sell powerball tickets. Carpools form whenever the neighboring state's powerball reaches $40M or so.
Your point about $1/week as a lottery investment is well taken, but I refer to the tendency of some to regard a larger pot as worthy of a larger investment and the erroneous assumption of a higher probability to win.
That's why it's called puzzLOTTO. Ever notice how people will drive for hours and stand in line just to pay the moron tax when the PowerBall lotteries announce that the next payout is going to be tens of millions?
For sure someone will buy the app on day 29, planning to solve it in time to get the $30k.
Exactly. Even if eBay has made real efficiency improvements, few investors will comprehend the meaning of the claim in terms of "anything real," e.g., power consumption, productivity, seller satisfaction, etc.
They'll just think, "That's a good place to put my money."
Right after that, they'll think, "Isn't it?"
You're confusing The Man with The Employees. The Man is far, far away from the keypad. He has hired thousands of people to insulate him from the keypad, in order to make his decisions in isolation.
Just because someone has the root password doesn't mean that they care, or have the authority to fix a security hole.
I say "has the root password" because that's how I think of the people between the front door of the airport and the jetway who can upgrade your ticket if they want to.
Add to that the TSA contractors who have full access to your luggage--and your time, if they choose to detain you.
I'm not saying "Don't raise Hell." I'm saying raise Hell with someone who can--and is likely to--do something about the thing that you think needs fixing. Complaining to someone who is powerless only reminds them that they're powerless--except when it comes to hassling you.
They probably hate the keypad, anyway.
Surely you mean, "He was wrong in the eyes of the people to whom he reported the problem."
If you want to make a difference, report problems to someone who can make a difference. Someone has responded and referred to "the attendant at the gate" as "the authorities." That's the problem with this anecdote: None of the people involved were authorities. They had privileged access, but no authority to do anything about the exposed keypad. What did he expect, a big thank you and then legwork performed by the gate attendant and the TSA contractors in the vicinity?
I agree that whistleblowers are generally punished rather than respected, because they tend to uncover incompetency and/or malfeasance. That is, they're reporting problems to people who think they'll get in trouble if anyone finds out.
It seems that the man took offense at the fact that he managed to figure out the code to the keypad after only 15 minutes of observation. If he really did say, "No, I don't need the code to you locked door over there," he was inviting trouble, IMHO.
The responsible thing to do would have been to contact the airport's security officer and point out the security hole. I understand that this would take some effort, e.g., finding out who's in charge, how to contact him/her, waiting for him/her to call back, etc.
It's too bad that we can't simply point out errors as we find them, to the nearest and most convenient person. That still doesn't make it sensible to do so and then complain that no one listens. You might as well tell the guy behind the counter at the convenience store that the ATM in the back of the store has a security problem. At best, he'll ignore you--at worst, he'll call the cops because his limited understanding will lead him to believe that you just ripped off the ATM.
I remember clearly the latter half of September 2001. Of course there were the plastic flags flying from almost every motor vehicle, but what stands out for me is the memory of how I kept scanning the horizon for explosions when I was driving.
I didn't feel safe. Not that I'd ever been safe, but my perception had always been so.
The thing that still puzzles me, though, is how we in the US have tolerated such a rapid erosion of civil liberty. It's not that our documented rights and freedoms haven't been violated all along, but now there are legal provisions--and already some legal precedent--to protect and justify such violations.
Sure, sure, human psychology, thinking with the fear centers of our brains, even the Milgram Experiment--these and more describe how we react to a perceived threat. And fear is known to reduce the blood supply to the brain.
I find it sad to consider that this particular finding will have no effect on the encroachment on human rights in these United States. I suppose this man is just one "bad apple." Like the cases of the prosecuted torturers at Abu Ghraib (and other locations), the years-later finding that the illegal and shocking techniques were known and even encouraged by the entire organization will have no effect on the policies which shall remain in place.
This lands for me like most anti-other-culture polemic speech, particularly anti-other-religion. Religion in general has produced more hate than any other aspect of human culture. Even though war is all about money and power, it's religion that has supported war for those who don't stand to gain any money or power from the war, i.e., popular support.
It's the old "us and them" argument writ large. Every human being has experienced some version of this, but it tends to die off without ritual reinforcement.
I agree that clitoral "circumcision" (often the crude removal of the entire physical structure) is ridiculously cruel and occurs as unusual for anyone not steeped in that culture. There are examples of outrageous behaviour influenced and supported by every religion, though. It just so happens that this practice is one of, if not the most extreme instances.
It's the very paradigm of anti-female behavior in the name of a deity.
Compare and contrast the Hindus, who believe that more female orgasms imply a better world. Funny thing, this hasn't exempted them from turning to war; in fact, the very first chapter of the Bhagavad Gita is set on a battlefield.
That is, I find it genuinely tragic that young women are deprived of pleasure from sex, almost certainly before they've experienced it. By comparison, the wholesale slaughter of human beings regardless of sex in war is pathetic. The high irony is that war is couched in metaphors which suggest honor, glory, and other high morality.
I remember a chapter in a text for a health class in junior high school. The topic was "Quacks," and the direction was to "beware of them." I remember being interested in the first view of doctors I'd seen that didn't portray them as completely trustworthy and somehow authoritarian.
One section described a particularly heinous form of quackery that involved "gizmos purported to measure the electrical charge on the surface of the skin." This seemed outrageous to me. Electricity on the skin??? Obviously this was a big-time scam. These gizmos were obviously fakes; I could tell just by reading the damning text and staring at the weird black and white photos.
I thought about this from time to time as I grew up, especially when I learned about the vast array of electrical charges and how ubiquitous electricity is. I still held onto this strange form of pity for those who had fallen for the scams of these quacks and their bogus gizmos. Something about the tone of the textbook made the whole thing seem very dangerous, e.g., there were people spending all of their money on something that couldn't possibly work. And what if they had a serious ailment which was being ignored in favor of the, the ... quackery !!!
Well, a few years ago, when the Scientology documents were exposed to the public, I perused them out of curiosity. Even though I knew about Xenu, I was still surprised to see it all there in print. Then I ran across the man's story of getting to some advanced Thetan level, and he described the self-auditing with the e-meter. Something in his narrative caused the neurons in my own brain to fire just so, and I realized that this was what was being described in the textbook.
I think it would be interesting to research how detectable electrical currents in the human body relate to physical, mental, even emotional processes. I believe it's dangerous to toss around half-baked notions of the same, in exchange for money and time, based on the ramblings of a science fiction author on alcohol and barbiturates.
I mean, the guy should have been on psilocybin, or mescaline. Alcohol and other depressants are cruel drugs.
Nor did IPU provide any evidence of having been in poverty. Further, the argument is moot, since the definition of poverty hasn't been defined.
But hey, we're in the fifth or sixth derivative discussion of the original topic. Like dozens of coats of paint, the original has become almost completely unrecognizable.