What on earth are you talking about? "Clean code" and "optimized code" are opposing forces!
"Premature optimization is the root of all evil."
The cleanest code will also be some of the most inefficient. (Note it does not work the other way around, of course, so read that sentence carefully before criticizing it!) The most efficient code will be pug-fugly, incredibly difficult to read without intimate knowlege of the whole system code, and will be very difficult to correctly change to boot.
Done much programming when efficiency was a concern? Doesn't sound like it.
The freedom from the need to worry so much about efficiency is one of the best things that has ever happened to any engineering discipline. It can be taken too far but the answer is better balance, not to fly off in the opposite direction.
Good grief, I never thought I'd see someone work the poor quality of video games into The Conspiracy.
Is there anything that isn't the direct result of whoever it is with the 260 IQ (because it would take nothing less to run The Conspiracy) running The Conspiracy?
No, wait, this post must be part of The Conspiracy, too, trying to throw you off the track! Keep digging and you'll find the truth! (Or is this a double-cross attempt by The Conspiracy? All I can tell you is no matter what you decide, The Conspiracy will render your body down for the oil it contains as soon as it gets around to you.)
Me too, but I seem to have gotten a slightly different revision.
In mine, Voyager travels back in time and after exactly one hour (including commercials), it turns out the suit never happens. The reset button is pushed and everybody lives happily ever after.
This project, therefore, is entirely moot, at least in regards to the SCO lawsuit...
I think you understand the most literal level, but I think you're missing the logic. I think you're right, this doesn't have anything to do with the lawsuit. I think this is punitive. I think this is a side-project, to punish SCO for violating community standards, no matter what happens to the lawsuit.
As such the rest of your concerns are irrelevant, since as you yourself say this has nothing to do with the lawsuit.
This is a long-term project, to establish the danger of messing with the UNIX community, to make anybody else in the future who thinks they can milk money from the community, or that a lawyer-spasm is preferable to simply going out of business, think twice because they can expect the community to lash out not just in rhetoric, but with legal manuevers of their own. Textbook deterrence.
I'm not ESR and I don't know. But that's how I read this, and I think it's a great idea. May not go anywhere but if it works it's very poetic and appropriate payback.
I read that as "For an average website, only 30% of it will be read."
Consider the vast number of archives online, mostly unread. For instance, I have my weblog posts going back to 2000. I probably use them more then anybody else (due to the nature of the weblog and a project I'm doing) and I still don't use that much.
If you're talking about read reasonably "often", then the vast majority of jerf.org is unread.
However, it was all read at some point, so it depends on the exact definition. If you're talking ever it's close to 100%.
Also, I was disappointed to see the "We're post-scarcity" canard. It's not true; information is too scarce. The whole problem with info glut in the first place is that the vast majority of it isn't information we want, it just is, while meanwhile information we want is either obscured or not actually available. Mere quantity does nothing to guarentee that what exists corresponds to what we want. (Another example of the "infinite (or very large) sets must contain all possibilities" fallacy.)
Make sure they actually give you permission to re-mix the tunes. Otherwise they could slap the winner... or perhaps just the losers >;-)... in jail for copyright violation!
"Don't collect for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal. But collect for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves don't break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. "The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eye is generous, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is stingy, your whole body will be full of darkness. So if the light within you is darkness--how deep is that darkness! "No one can be a slave of two masters, since either he will hate one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot be slaves of God and of money.
"This is why I tell you: Don't worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Isn't life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the sky: they don't sow or reap or gather into barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Aren't you worth more than they? Can any of you add a single cubit to his height by worrying? And why do you worry about clothes? Learn how the wildflowers of the field grow: they don't labor or spin thread.Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was adorned like one of these! If that's how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and thrown into the furnace tomorrow, won't He do much more for you--you of little faith? So don't worry, saying, 'What will we eat?' or 'What will we drink?' or 'What will we wear?' For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be provided for you. Therefore don't worry about tomorrow, because tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.
There's not enough detail in the article to know whether this is a problem, but it looks like there's at least potential for a serious "correlation implies causation" error. Does Buddhism make people happy, or do people who are already happy become Buddhists?
I'm also not sure how "calm" got transformed into "happy" in the article. My personal definition of "happy" doesn't really have much to do with "hard to scare".
The study is interesting to some degree but drawing conclusion from it is unwarrented, until more data is collected from more sources.
Re:Maybe the title should be changed
on
Hijacking .NET
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
If the alternative to writing a quick ACL changer is multiple days of intense hacking, vs. a couple hours with the right pokes at private members, it will take a lot of internal interface changes before the amount of time spent tracking the internal API exceeds the time it would have taken to do it right the first time. Since the capability doesn't officially exist, your (a) point is meaningless (even this platform doesn't officially support it) if you can assert that everybody will use the same platform, and given we're talking.Net the odds that a an awful lot of.Net programs will run only on Microsoft's implementation anyhow is pretty high, and odds are (b) doesn't bother you because it may never happen (changing the internals like that also implies work for that developer, so it's not a bad bet they won't be in a hurry to change the internals for their own sake), and even if it doesn your probably still ahead.
Encapsulation is not an absolute law, it's a risk that must be analysed like any other risk, and treating it like an absolute law will sometimes cause you to do sub-optimal things. I can't be 100% certain with the given information, but odds are that the choice to use internal private methods and data to do ACL manipulation are a good bet. Yes, you may lose, but implementing ACL manipulations yourself may lose too: If the ACL system changes, you have to track it yourself, while the odds are decent that the internal private members will automatically track the changes!
Violating encapsulation is almost always bad, but that's a long way from "always bad".
Other countries have gotten to the bottom and we still refuse to learn from them.
The USSR. China (at least, I don't think it's doing well.) Iraq. North Korea. In fact you're hard pressed to come up with a state at "the bottom" that didn't get there because of excessive authority given to the government.
That's why TIA is so important to fight... because the people pushing for it are too stupid and too shortsighted to realize that it's bad, even for them. (On a number of levels... even just practically they'll never be able to handle that much information, because they're already overloaded. The solution to their problems don't lie in more information!) Morons incapable of taking a simple look around them and seeing how well similar systems have turned out. Unfortunately, if we don't stop them, they'll take us down with them.
Congress can't just wave away the need for judicial oversight, and that includes signing treaties. Congress does not have the power to wave away judicial oversight, and thus technically is not able to sign such treaties in good faith, even when they wrote them.
This is one of the things that tends to annoy Europeans, which is that with the way our Constitution is written, they can't merely propose a treaty, slip an anti-capital punishment or gun banning clause in there, and whammo, "educate" us nasty, dirty Americans in the ways of psuedo-civilization. Our Supreme Court can still strike down any attempts to enforce such provisions.
Note that the EU increasingly depends on the ability to override its member countries, indeed that was a lot of the point, and I think over the next 10 years you'll see the wisdom of not granting Congress, or anybody the power to so trivially override the Constitution.
(Another lawsuit-waiting-to-happen on a similar topic are those PATRIOT act provisions for the secret courts; Congress doesn't have the power to declare the existence of new courts not under the Supreme Court. Someday they'll annoy somebody powerful enough to sue on that issue and the Supreme Court will wipe out the whole secret court system.)
Unfortunatly, I somewhat doubt these will be available to the public w/o editing.
Unfortunately? Sure would violate the privacy of anybody pulled over, esp. anybody who wasn't actually guilty. The police officer should be accountable, but the detainees, who may be completely innocent, should be protected too.
You don't say. Do you really think everybody else is stupid?
Stupid? No. But the number of people who seem to think they are lawyers is very large, and not just on Slashdot either. I can't count the number of times in my real life I've discussed intellectual property issues and not only has the other person been very, very wrong, but I was not even able to get them to listen to me.
I'm not a lawyer, but I've taken a close interest in that sort of thing and I know the basics very well.
As a Slashdot example, basically, if someone is insisting that they have a "fair use" right to something, unless they are jusitifying it with reference to the four criteria used to determine if something is fair use, they're wrong.
People seem to need periodic reminding that they aren't lawyers, and other non-lawyers aren't lawyers.
For computer examples, how many times have you heard someone around you give an incredibly wrong reason for a crash... and stick by it, even after you fix it, because of course they're right?
Discussion of issues is one thing. Talking about something that could make or break a career, that's a time for a real lawyer, not hundreds of people who think they are lawyers.
WTF does market capitalization have to do with the health of a company?!
45 million dollars in my pocket would set me up for life.
45 million dollars for a multi-billion dollar company is operating expenses for a day or two.
The bigger you are, the more you need to keep you alive. And like an animal, a company can only "cut back" so much before it becomes untenable and simply dies. Unlike animals, portions of it can live on, but the point is that while the service may seem impressive, and it is, it should be considered in the context of a very large company that is facing serious challenges in the medium term, not an Internet startup that made 45 million in a little over two weeks.
Note, this is just perspective. I'm not really trying to draw conclusions. Might want to consider stuff like this, for instance. I'm not foolhardy enough to predict the death of Apple... but I'm not in a hurry to invest my money in them either.
Barring continued unlikely exponential growth, this won't "save" the company (to the extent it might need "saving". However, I suspect that it is certainly a profitable aspect of the company, probably already profitable (though hard to tell), so even should The Worst happen, this will probably be spun off successfully; too lucrative to disappear into thin air.
We have the technology to automate the production of food. Meaning if we put the thought, time and resources behind it we could give everyone the food they need to live without asking for money in return.
Which we do. But if you want to eat food of a higher quality then the baseline food shipped to homeless shelters or overseas to countries where the government steals the food but some makes it through, you're going to have to pay. Rice is free, if you're willing to go down to the shelters to eat it. Lobsters are not.
Work is now a means of obtaining and doing other things, such as better then the baseline shelter you can also obtain for free in this country. For instance, why did you bother posting? Some people work for the same reason. There are lazy slobs who wouldn't work even if you put a gun to their heads, but there are also people who would do their work even if you didn't pay them. Part of the key of a robust economy is making sure the latter group is allowed to do so as well as possible, especially the engineer types who love to build things.
(To the extent possible, we try to make food and shelter free or easily accessible in other countries, too, but it's not always possible due to the government of the other country.)
Before I'd be inclined to pay much attention to your criticisms of society, and the many other times I've read virtually identical posts, I'd have to see more evidence that you actually understand society, instead of subscribing to a trite and trendy among angsty teenagers view of society.
The complex matrix of propoganda certainly exists, but it is far from the whole story and it's not as successful as many would like to think; witness the failure of the overwhelming "matrix" of propoganda pushing the viewpoint that the war in Iraq was morally wrong to convince the American public, vs. the much smaller and quieter justification for it. Damn near the entire media, both TV and newspaper, the entire entertainment industry, and the entire rest of the world were trying to convince us how wrong it was, vs. basically just the President and a few odd-man-out commentators trying to convince us it was a good idea. Extremely lopsided, but majority propoganda lost, and is still losing. Regardless of how you feel about that issue, that's a great example of when "the matrix of propoganda" almost completely broke down, and demonstrated that to truly understand society you need a much deeper comprehension then blaming everything on "propoganda". As a model of reality, it is extremely inaccurate.
Probably not the best example. Summarizing the Reformation as people claiming "You can't reinterpret the Bible as you choose and call it Christianity" (slight word change) is a reasonably accurate, though detail-free, overview.
Something I've wondered for a while... what's up with the points coming off the stars? I've always accepted it when I see it with my own eyes because I don't expect my own eyes to be optically perfect, so I always thought it was distortion, but looking at the full image I see that the brightest stars once again have points coming off of them in four directions. Typically they are directly up, down, left, and right, but in that image, they appear to be about five to ten degrees off that.
The biggest example I see is about 3/4s of the way to the right and about 1/5 of the way down on the image, where there is a huge-looking star.
Why four points? Why do we see them even when the star itself is not in the picture (look on the top border for examples, like the one almost directly in the middle)? I guess I would expect that if the light source is too bright the spread would be in a circular formation and simply blur the star, not blur it in just those four directions so much stronger then the rest.
Is it just QM at play? If so, why it is almost always directly up, down, left, and right, instead of random and perhaps even changing over time directions (which probably would get right back to simply looking blurred)? Detector flaws?
The whole problem here is that people are looking at these things the wrong way, from the get go. The point is not the machines, the point is the impact on people. Try to define things in terms of the technology and you are inevitably and irrevocably drawn into exactly the problems you describe, and there is no way out of them.
Machines don't matter. Technology doesn't matter. Only people do.
The "fun" thing about today is no one listens anymore.
Nobody ever listens. Listening is a hard skill that must be painstakingly cultivated. Not only are we not born with it, if anything, we're born with the opposite, a desire to talk, talk, talk and have everybody else listen to us. (Even shy people who don't have the courage to talk are generally wishing they could.)
The only reason you might think people listened in the past is that it is only the listeners whom history has recorded; it is hard to do great things like writing great novels without learning to listen to the world first.
Slashdot is perfectly normal, considered both today and as part of history; most people are too busy talking and showing off to be bothered to listen in the first place. When all the posts on a site are considered and come from a carefully acquired understanding of the subject, that's abnormal.
Slashdot Mirror
"Pervert" implies that there is some "pure" version of the process that exists. "Oppose" again implies the existance of a goal. Nature has neither.
(NB: I'm not claiming that we are therefore free to do as we please. But it's a serious mistake to anthropomorphize Nature.)
Obviously it's time to stop talking about it becuase all you're doing is advertising their name for free.
There is a such thing as bad publicity, especially for publically traded companies.
or perhaps more accurately, in opposition to.
It is impossible to be "in opposition to" nature. Nature has no goals.
What on earth are you talking about? "Clean code" and "optimized code" are opposing forces!
"Premature optimization is the root of all evil."
The cleanest code will also be some of the most inefficient. (Note it does not work the other way around, of course, so read that sentence carefully before criticizing it!) The most efficient code will be pug-fugly, incredibly difficult to read without intimate knowlege of the whole system code, and will be very difficult to correctly change to boot.
Done much programming when efficiency was a concern? Doesn't sound like it.
The freedom from the need to worry so much about efficiency is one of the best things that has ever happened to any engineering discipline. It can be taken too far but the answer is better balance, not to fly off in the opposite direction.
Good grief, I never thought I'd see someone work the poor quality of video games into The Conspiracy.
Is there anything that isn't the direct result of whoever it is with the 260 IQ (because it would take nothing less to run The Conspiracy) running The Conspiracy?
No, wait, this post must be part of The Conspiracy, too, trying to throw you off the track! Keep digging and you'll find the truth! (Or is this a double-cross attempt by The Conspiracy? All I can tell you is no matter what you decide, The Conspiracy will render your body down for the oil it contains as soon as it gets around to you.)
Yeah, but I read a leaked copy of the script.
Me too, but I seem to have gotten a slightly different revision.
In mine, Voyager travels back in time and after exactly one hour (including commercials), it turns out the suit never happens. The reset button is pushed and everybody lives happily ever after.
Live it up folks, this time line is toast.
This project, therefore, is entirely moot, at least in regards to the SCO lawsuit...
I think you understand the most literal level, but I think you're missing the logic. I think you're right, this doesn't have anything to do with the lawsuit. I think this is punitive . I think this is a side-project, to punish SCO for violating community standards, no matter what happens to the lawsuit.
As such the rest of your concerns are irrelevant, since as you yourself say this has nothing to do with the lawsuit.
This is a long-term project, to establish the danger of messing with the UNIX community, to make anybody else in the future who thinks they can milk money from the community, or that a lawyer-spasm is preferable to simply going out of business, think twice because they can expect the community to lash out not just in rhetoric, but with legal manuevers of their own. Textbook deterrence.
I'm not ESR and I don't know. But that's how I read this, and I think it's a great idea. May not go anywhere but if it works it's very poetic and appropriate payback.
I read that as "For an average website, only 30% of it will be read."
Consider the vast number of archives online, mostly unread. For instance, I have my weblog posts going back to 2000. I probably use them more then anybody else (due to the nature of the weblog and a project I'm doing) and I still don't use that much.
If you're talking about read reasonably "often", then the vast majority of jerf.org is unread.
However, it was all read at some point, so it depends on the exact definition. If you're talking ever it's close to 100%.
Also, I was disappointed to see the "We're post-scarcity" canard. It's not true; information is too scarce. The whole problem with info glut in the first place is that the vast majority of it isn't information we want, it just is, while meanwhile information we want is either obscured or not actually available. Mere quantity does nothing to guarentee that what exists corresponds to what we want. (Another example of the "infinite (or very large) sets must contain all possibilities" fallacy.)
you can remix Street Fighter tunes
... in jail for copyright violation!
Make sure they actually give you permission to re-mix the tunes. Otherwise they could slap the winner... or perhaps just the losers >;-)
There's not enough detail in the article to know whether this is a problem, but it looks like there's at least potential for a serious "correlation implies causation" error. Does Buddhism make people happy, or do people who are already happy become Buddhists?
I'm also not sure how "calm" got transformed into "happy" in the article. My personal definition of "happy" doesn't really have much to do with "hard to scare".
The study is interesting to some degree but drawing conclusion from it is unwarrented, until more data is collected from more sources.
If the alternative to writing a quick ACL changer is multiple days of intense hacking, vs. a couple hours with the right pokes at private members, it will take a lot of internal interface changes before the amount of time spent tracking the internal API exceeds the time it would have taken to do it right the first time. Since the capability doesn't officially exist, your (a) point is meaningless (even this platform doesn't officially support it) if you can assert that everybody will use the same platform, and given we're talking .Net the odds that a an awful lot of .Net programs will run only on Microsoft's implementation anyhow is pretty high, and odds are (b) doesn't bother you because it may never happen (changing the internals like that also implies work for that developer, so it's not a bad bet they won't be in a hurry to change the internals for their own sake), and even if it doesn your probably still ahead.
Encapsulation is not an absolute law, it's a risk that must be analysed like any other risk, and treating it like an absolute law will sometimes cause you to do sub-optimal things. I can't be 100% certain with the given information, but odds are that the choice to use internal private methods and data to do ACL manipulation are a good bet. Yes, you may lose, but implementing ACL manipulations yourself may lose too: If the ACL system changes, you have to track it yourself, while the odds are decent that the internal private members will automatically track the changes!
Violating encapsulation is almost always bad, but that's a long way from "always bad".
Other countries have gotten to the bottom and we still refuse to learn from them.
The USSR. China (at least, I don't think it's doing well.) Iraq. North Korea. In fact you're hard pressed to come up with a state at "the bottom" that didn't get there because of excessive authority given to the government.
That's why TIA is so important to fight... because the people pushing for it are too stupid and too shortsighted to realize that it's bad, even for them. (On a number of levels... even just practically they'll never be able to handle that much information, because they're already overloaded. The solution to their problems don't lie in more information!) Morons incapable of taking a simple look around them and seeing how well similar systems have turned out. Unfortunately, if we don't stop them, they'll take us down with them.
Congress can't just wave away the need for judicial oversight, and that includes signing treaties. Congress does not have the power to wave away judicial oversight, and thus technically is not able to sign such treaties in good faith, even when they wrote them.
This is one of the things that tends to annoy Europeans, which is that with the way our Constitution is written, they can't merely propose a treaty, slip an anti-capital punishment or gun banning clause in there, and whammo, "educate" us nasty, dirty Americans in the ways of psuedo-civilization. Our Supreme Court can still strike down any attempts to enforce such provisions.
Note that the EU increasingly depends on the ability to override its member countries, indeed that was a lot of the point, and I think over the next 10 years you'll see the wisdom of not granting Congress, or anybody the power to so trivially override the Constitution.
(Another lawsuit-waiting-to-happen on a similar topic are those PATRIOT act provisions for the secret courts; Congress doesn't have the power to declare the existence of new courts not under the Supreme Court. Someday they'll annoy somebody powerful enough to sue on that issue and the Supreme Court will wipe out the whole secret court system.)
Unfortunatly, I somewhat doubt these will be available to the public w/o editing.
Unfortunately? Sure would violate the privacy of anybody pulled over, esp. anybody who wasn't actually guilty. The police officer should be accountable, but the detainees, who may be completely innocent, should be protected too.
You don't say. Do you really think everybody else is stupid?
Stupid? No. But the number of people who seem to think they are lawyers is very large, and not just on Slashdot either. I can't count the number of times in my real life I've discussed intellectual property issues and not only has the other person been very, very wrong, but I was not even able to get them to listen to me.
I'm not a lawyer, but I've taken a close interest in that sort of thing and I know the basics very well.
As a Slashdot example, basically, if someone is insisting that they have a "fair use" right to something, unless they are jusitifying it with reference to the four criteria used to determine if something is fair use, they're wrong.
People seem to need periodic reminding that they aren't lawyers, and other non-lawyers aren't lawyers.
For computer examples, how many times have you heard someone around you give an incredibly wrong reason for a crash... and stick by it, even after you fix it, because of course they're right?
Discussion of issues is one thing. Talking about something that could make or break a career, that's a time for a real lawyer, not hundreds of people who think they are lawyers.
Please read Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments. I don't know if that's risen to "classic paper" status but as far as I'm concerned it has.
Don't worry, the increased solar radiation from global warming should stuff it all back in.
WTF does market capitalization have to do with the health of a company?!
45 million dollars in my pocket would set me up for life.
45 million dollars for a multi-billion dollar company is operating expenses for a day or two.
The bigger you are, the more you need to keep you alive. And like an animal, a company can only "cut back" so much before it becomes untenable and simply dies. Unlike animals, portions of it can live on, but the point is that while the service may seem impressive, and it is, it should be considered in the context of a very large company that is facing serious challenges in the medium term, not an Internet startup that made 45 million in a little over two weeks.
Note, this is just perspective. I'm not really trying to draw conclusions. Might want to consider stuff like this, for instance. I'm not foolhardy enough to predict the death of Apple... but I'm not in a hurry to invest my money in them either.
At two million in 16 days, that's a $125,000 per day. That's 45.625 million per year.
Apple's current market capatalization is 6.781 billion, as of this writing.
Barring continued unlikely exponential growth, this won't "save" the company (to the extent it might need "saving". However, I suspect that it is certainly a profitable aspect of the company, probably already profitable (though hard to tell), so even should The Worst happen, this will probably be spun off successfully; too lucrative to disappear into thin air.
We have the technology to automate the production of food. Meaning if we put the thought, time and resources behind it we could give everyone the food they need to live without asking for money in return.
Which we do. But if you want to eat food of a higher quality then the baseline food shipped to homeless shelters or overseas to countries where the government steals the food but some makes it through, you're going to have to pay. Rice is free, if you're willing to go down to the shelters to eat it. Lobsters are not.
Work is now a means of obtaining and doing other things, such as better then the baseline shelter you can also obtain for free in this country. For instance, why did you bother posting? Some people work for the same reason. There are lazy slobs who wouldn't work even if you put a gun to their heads, but there are also people who would do their work even if you didn't pay them. Part of the key of a robust economy is making sure the latter group is allowed to do so as well as possible, especially the engineer types who love to build things.
(To the extent possible, we try to make food and shelter free or easily accessible in other countries, too, but it's not always possible due to the government of the other country.)
Before I'd be inclined to pay much attention to your criticisms of society, and the many other times I've read virtually identical posts, I'd have to see more evidence that you actually understand society, instead of subscribing to a trite and trendy among angsty teenagers view of society.
The complex matrix of propoganda certainly exists, but it is far from the whole story and it's not as successful as many would like to think; witness the failure of the overwhelming "matrix" of propoganda pushing the viewpoint that the war in Iraq was morally wrong to convince the American public, vs. the much smaller and quieter justification for it. Damn near the entire media, both TV and newspaper, the entire entertainment industry, and the entire rest of the world were trying to convince us how wrong it was, vs. basically just the President and a few odd-man-out commentators trying to convince us it was a good idea. Extremely lopsided, but majority propoganda lost, and is still losing. Regardless of how you feel about that issue, that's a great example of when "the matrix of propoganda" almost completely broke down, and demonstrated that to truly understand society you need a much deeper comprehension then blaming everything on "propoganda". As a model of reality, it is extremely inaccurate.
Tell that to Martin Luther.
Probably not the best example. Summarizing the Reformation as people claiming "You can't reinterpret the Bible as you choose and call it Christianity" (slight word change) is a reasonably accurate, though detail-free, overview.
Yeah, well, my single firing neuron... no, wait, maybe I don't want to go there.
Something I've wondered for a while... what's up with the points coming off the stars? I've always accepted it when I see it with my own eyes because I don't expect my own eyes to be optically perfect, so I always thought it was distortion, but looking at the full image I see that the brightest stars once again have points coming off of them in four directions. Typically they are directly up, down, left, and right, but in that image, they appear to be about five to ten degrees off that.
The biggest example I see is about 3/4s of the way to the right and about 1/5 of the way down on the image, where there is a huge-looking star.
Why four points? Why do we see them even when the star itself is not in the picture (look on the top border for examples, like the one almost directly in the middle)? I guess I would expect that if the light source is too bright the spread would be in a circular formation and simply blur the star, not blur it in just those four directions so much stronger then the rest.
Is it just QM at play? If so, why it is almost always directly up, down, left, and right, instead of random and perhaps even changing over time directions (which probably would get right back to simply looking blurred)? Detector flaws?
The whole problem here is that people are looking at these things the wrong way, from the get go. The point is not the machines, the point is the impact on people. Try to define things in terms of the technology and you are inevitably and irrevocably drawn into exactly the problems you describe, and there is no way out of them.
Machines don't matter. Technology doesn't matter. Only people do.
The "fun" thing about today is no one listens anymore.
Nobody ever listens. Listening is a hard skill that must be painstakingly cultivated. Not only are we not born with it, if anything, we're born with the opposite, a desire to talk, talk, talk and have everybody else listen to us. (Even shy people who don't have the courage to talk are generally wishing they could.)
The only reason you might think people listened in the past is that it is only the listeners whom history has recorded; it is hard to do great things like writing great novels without learning to listen to the world first.
Slashdot is perfectly normal, considered both today and as part of history; most people are too busy talking and showing off to be bothered to listen in the first place. When all the posts on a site are considered and come from a carefully acquired understanding of the subject, that's abnormal.