Funny you should mention that. I think I've figured out why that is.
The greatest threat to democracy and the rule of the people is, and always has been, disparity of power. In the 18th century, when the American War of Independence happened (not actually a revolution, because revolutions are regime changes, and the same people who ran America in 1870 still ran it in 1880), the most powerful people in Europe were the kings and the aristocrats. They were the state (Louis of France said it literally: "I am the state!") As with Rome, where the democratic senate had been overpowered by the rule of the Emperors, the greatest threat in the 18th century was the aristocracy, who were, at that time, the state.
But the men who established the American system forgot the lessons of the first democracy. Athens was a democracy, and it was destroyed not by kings and nobles, but by the Oligarchs (Athens was where the word originated), and they were not aristocrats, but merchants who came to own everything. In fact, Greece's problems to this day are that it still has laws that recognize oligarchs, who pay almost no taxes. Onassis was an oligarch.
The totemic worship of the founding documents of the United States means that the American people no longer recognize them for what they were: living documents that were hotly debated and considered deeply flawed even by the men who approved them. And it also means that Americans seem to be incapable of recognizing that these men made what is now an anachronistic mistake. The ruling class today is no longer the lords and kings, but the oligarchs. These are the threats to democracy.
But freedom has become a worship word. Remember that Star Trek episode? American's adhere blindly to a 200+ year old doctrine only because they are old, without understand the context of the time, or why they might be wrong. And so, a new order of aristocrats have come to take your freedom, and you will hand it to them, because you believe that such a threat can only come from the state.
Stock price is maintained by buying back stock, not by performance. Salaries remain high, but the company is shrinking rapidly, so there is less stock, but less company. IBM is dying, but you wouldn't know it looking as the Nasdaq.
IBM is basically a software graveyard, much like Computer Associates was, but more upscale. The business model for a software graveyard is as follows: buy a second tier competitor in a business software field that has a large installation base (the first tier will be too expensive and not willing to sell.) Squeeze out all employees you consider to be redundant, keeping enough to provide a few new versions. You have a captured clientele, so do just enough to keep them interested. This will pay your original investment and then some.
When the captured clientele start leaving in droves as the software starts to give off a bad smell, sell the desiccated corpse to China or India. Get your employees to train their replacements, keep a small selection of that group that you consider worth salvaging (if they are willing to move).
Rinse and repeat. This is a policy of hemorrhage, but as long as you use profits to buy stock, the shareholders won't care. And because only shareholders matter now, eventually all American companies will cease to exist, except for the banks, who can change their base of operations in minutes.
The problem is that it's a political trap. Any attempt to roll back these laws will result in some political opponent charging them with being soft on drugs, crime, terrorism, etc. And America now has a legislature that can't get anything done anyway, because there are a large number of people in office who make their name by blocking everything, including initiatives originally designed by their own party.
So the war on drugs, a bipartisan effort that resulted from this kind of rhetoric, has now created the largest incarceration rate since Stalinist Russia, militarized police that look and act like an occupying army, and now, the right to take whatever you have without justification. Law enforcement is simply taking advantage of a paralyzed government to do whatever they like, because you can't bring them to task. Instead of getting the job done, elected representatives are spending all their time bickering about faux issues like Benghazi, Affordable Health Care, etc, while the real issues which should have libertarians and Tea Partiers screeching just get ignored.
Hmmm... it's almost as if they actually don't care after all...
There is also the fact that Kosminski's personality profile fits that of a serial killer, he had a deep hatred of women, and he was a butcher (and had a knife that matched the cuts). Being a Polish Jew, Kosminski was a likely match for the person who left the 'Jewes' graffiti. This being the case, and with the already prevalent anger against Jews and immigrants in the wake of the murder and the news of the graffiti, it seems likely that the police actually knew they had their man, but did not want to prosecute him publicly for fear of starting an anti-Jewish progrom in London. So they locked him away and made certain that he could never get out.
Shortly after the anniversary of the murders, there was a television special where several experts were asked to weigh in on who the killer was. The most qualified person on the panel, a woman who worked on investigations of serial murderers, said that Kosminski was the obvious suspect, but the audience went with the Queen's Doctor theory because of a TV special that offered that theory--despite the fact that at the time of the murders, said Doctor had already suffered a stroke, and had lost the use of one of his hands. Conspiracy theories always favor the most powerful agencies for events of broad prominence; this is why large government conspiracies are always favored over individual (Lee Harvey Oswald) or small group (Al Quaeda) actors.
There is something going on here that no one seems to be talking about: the collapse of markets.
Karl Marx made one chilling prediction: when the workers did not have the money to buy the goods they produced, markets would collapse and capitalism itself would collapse. Henry Ford beat Marx when he paid his workers an unheard of $5 a day, creating in a single stroke the blue collar middle class and a market for his own goods. And this made America an economic powerhouse, not just for it power to produce, but for its power to consume. Gaining entry into that market is sufficient to make other nations bend over backward. It is the main well of American soft power.
Until now.
With the growth of capital intensive, rather than labor intensive, manufacturing, the wealth from the manufacturing industry is concentrated in a few hands, and markets continue to shrink even as productive capacity grows. Marx has become relevant again. In the early 2000's, when I heard about the shenanigans in the banking industry, I pessimistically predicted that these idiots would make Marx relevant again. And they have. Now I'm afraid that our new aristocracy will make Lenin relevant again. And believe me, you don't want to make Lenin relevant.
So that means we are going to have to employ people, and pay them a decent wage. Yes, even those that are less than the best and brightest, because being less than bright, they will find stupid ways to make money, most of which will land them in jail. And we have a burgeoning prison industry that would love that, but the prison industry is bankrupting us. Where once we had employment for ditch diggers and farmhands, now those jobs are done by machines. So, yes, we need to find something that they can do, and pay them for it. And it would cost far less to employ the barely literate as street sweepers and park gardeners, with a decent wage, than to house them all in prisons.
If you think you are immune to this trend, please keep in mind that one of the main thrusts of high tech research now is AI. Medicine and law are already within the scope of work that can be partially automated by AI, but the goal is to produce systems that can produce code on demand. And then, we will all discover what the blue collar worker had been experiencing for decades.
But the one percent cannot support capitalism, certainly not when they're own markets are dying.
When I was with a startup during the dot com era, it seemed to me that the worker bees were on speed, while the executives were on coke. I could see what the worker bees were doing, but nothing else could explain the decisions made at the upper levels. The incentives were pretty obvious--long hours without sleep, and demand to be 'on' regardless of circumstance, and the arrogance that comes with mastering a small domain and thinking you've mastered everything (see Dunning-Kruger.)
Personally, when I was tired, what I craved was sleep. But that was frowned upon. You can see why so many did drugs.
Arrogance, though, is a major consideration. Notice the parent comment: If you take drugs and get addicted... but no one plans to get addicted. Oh, take drugs by all means, just don't get addicted. They take drugs to cope, and as they are masters of the universe, they could not possibly get addicted. Besides, it's just to meet this deadline... and the next... and the next...
The entire culture is a massive fuck-up. Tired people make mistakes, and mistakes cost money. In the 1850's they discovered that 40 hours a week was the sweet spot for productivity, and every generation since has had to discover the same thing the hard way. I cannot count the number of projects I have seen crash and burn because of this bullshit.
But fuck it. We're John Galt. We can do anything. Just another bump to get me through...
It's an odd thing, but I've worked in game development and business software, and game development has much simpler requirements. You know what looks and feels wrong, but business software is a matter of opinion--lots of opinions--and those opinions contradict each other. To give one client what they want, you may end up screwing all the others--and it becomes your fault that you cannot be all things to all people. At some point, you have to tell people that if they want X, it will be slow, limited, and DO YOU REALLY FUCKING NEED THIS, because often they don't.
We need to learn to say no. And not just to our clients, but to our salesmen, our managers, and our project managers. Because saying yes to one client might mean saying no to a dozen others.
Agreed. Where cops are required to wear surveillance gear, they are on their best behavior, because the video is available in court--this has already been demonstrated in the EU. And that's not up to the chief of police. Your lawyer can demand it. And Google glass feeds to the Google servers, not the police station. Ultimately, the cops don't own it, so they can't just delete or edit what they don't like, they can only modify their copy, which is not the master, which your lawyer can request. So they will be very careful to make sure that nothing incriminating appears in the feeds.
This is surveillance of the cops as well as citizens--souveillance, not just surveillance. Read Contrary Brin to find out what souveilance is. All the conspiracy theorist here need to take their tin foil hats off for a moment and try to understand what this really means.
The issue here is that the ideas have been picked apart long ago by the scientific community. But these journals are not meant to address the scientific community. They exist to provide industrial boilerplate as quote fodder for politicians and pundits. The real target is people who don't know any better. Even when the journal has been discredited, they will still quote it, because few people will know that it has been discredited.
A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth has its boots on. That is the whole point of efforts like these.
No, the point was not that they don't like religious people. The point was that they don't like religion, and the undue influence of religious leaders.
I have noticed that there are a thousand Richard Dawkins on the internet, and all but one of them are made of straw. You have just made that a thousand and one. Slate has an article by someone who claims that Christopher Hitchens was wrong when he thought that banning religion would fix the world. Except that Hitchens never called for a ban on religion, and he certainly never thought that eliminating religion would solve all the world's problems. The number of people misrepresenting Hitchens has skyrocketed, because no one would dare do it while he was alive. And that makes me suspect that they know they are lying.
If you are going to criticize someone, could you please exert the slightest rudimentary effort to understand what they did in fact say. I'm quite certain that 99.9% of the disputes on the internet would vanish if people could just learn to listen.
And before you say that we don't understand religious people, please be informed that most of the atheists I know were devoutly religious for most of their lives before becoming atheists, and we not only understand it, we were there, which is more than I can say for most of the people slinging this nonsense. The deepest theological conversations I have ever had took place in atheist meetups, between former believers who understood theology very well--in fact, it was theology that made them atheists. And yes, this includes Muslims.
I'd be interested to see what Grint could do with the role, and I wouldn't count him out for the future. And no, he's not 12 anymore (making a movie at 12 doesn't make you 12 forever.) The most exciting suggestion was Tilda Swinton; she would be magnificent! And yeah, the Catherine Tate thing could work too; the Doctor is dead--oh, wait, remember that there was a hybrid...
GMO does not mean Monsanto, unless you have a large anti-GMO movement. The anti-GMO movement is the best friend that Monsanto ever had. Thanks to you guys, Monsanto will rule the agricultural world.
Here's how it works. A small company engineers a new crop that can be grown in third world conditions and dramatically increase the food supply. But they need to obtain clearance, which, thanks to the anti-GMO movement, they can't get. For that they need lots of money and lawyers. So they go broke, Then Monsanto comes along, buys the IP for a fraction of what it took to produce, and they do have enough money and lawyers. And because there is actually nothing wrong with GMO foods, they win, because unlike anti-GMO activists, the court has to listen to the facts, and Monsanto brings it to market--probably modified to be a terminator crop (by the way, Monsanto did not invent this, and many of the seeds that you buy for you garden will not produce offspring.)
So keep up your good work. Monsanto thanks you. Without you, they could not do what they do.
You're talking about monoculture. This is the rule with crops bred the old fashioned way, not the exception--the orange crop is a monoculture, and that's why they're having this problem. Bananas are having the same problem. We've actually gone through three types of bananas. There is a blight that is wiping out the current monoculture, and after that, there will be no large sweet bananas unless we engineer something that can resist it. This has absolutely nothing to do with genetic modification.
And don't forget that there is a natural source of radiation--the Sun. And all of this happens with that too.
Oh, but it's natural. That makes it much better than GMO. Yeah. So is cyanide, mercury, cancer, and bubonic plague.
By the way, genetic modification is the one source of mutation where we know what effect it has, because we are actually trying for it. Random mutation can produce anything, including produce that is highly toxic.
Agreed. What they are predicting is not a population increase in Africa, but a devastating population collapse. What Africa is currently undergoing is the baby boom, when a scattershot reproductive strategy (have lots of kids, no birth control, and hope some live) meets modern medicine. But Africa does not have the food, resources, or social capital to support this, unlike the first world during their baby boom. Emigration is not an option either; the first world has already begun to face the limitations of cultural assimilation, realizing that a large population from a culture with low social capital cannot reasonably be expected to assimilate to the norms of a country with high social capital without massive disruption. The habits and traditions just aren't there. Tribal warfare--gang violence--and zero sum economics (you get rich only by taking from others; a common idea in Europe until only three or four centuries ago, and probably less) are still the norm in sub-Saharan Africa. They're like us, but a few centuries back.
Was there reason to suspect improper practices? We've been having a lot of problems in Canada with the Conservative Party (currently the party in power.) Is this a follow up on previous known practices?
Yeah, I'm a big fan of Eno--Music for Airports, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, or checkout Prophecy Theme from the Dune soundtrack. The rest of the Dune soundtrack, by the way, was done by Toto, who did a surprisingly good job.
Actually, don't give up on music quite yet. Music with lyrics will distract you--Tom Waits, Bob Dylan, or Lou Reed would take all of your attention. But a lot of techno can actually function as white noise (which is why a lot of coders in a busy office swear by it)--the beat gives you an adrenaline boost while the content vanishes. Bach and other forms of baroque music can also serve the same function; it fades into the background but has a calming effect, and many people consider it the sound of ordered thought.
Well spotted. Because it is obviously the role of the state to enforce obsolete business models. Especially when the ruling party is paid by the people who are dependent upon them. No bias at all there. Nothing to see here. Move along.
It sounds like most of the controls are wired controllers--that is, if the controller electronics or computer have become faulty, you no longer have a way to control the car. It's a bit like playing a game and having your controller stop responding while your character goes running into a room full of bosses, only in this case, you're the character. This is a lot more common in cars today that most of us are aware; there are many cars out there that have millions of lines of code designed to prevent you from making a catastrophic mistake, but who knows what can happen if this goes wrong. The steering seems to be the only thing that was still available in this case.
I suspect that the reason that Europe has a large Muslim population is the same as the reason that America has a large Mexican population: cheap labor. That and colonial ties to their countries of origin (this is certainly the case of France and Algeria, and the U.K. and Pakistan, India, and much of the Middle East) , as well as the fact that they are just much closer to the Middle East than we are.
Radical Islam in Europe seems to be the new punk for disaffected Muslim youth; their parents had enough of that crap back home, which is why they moved. What better way for a surly teenager to annoy his parents than to hang a bin Laden poster on his wall. Kind of like Che in the 60's (who was, by the way, every bit as batshit crazy as bin Laden, if not more so.) This will pass. Eventually, standing on the sidelines and watching life pass you by loses its charm.
If the European left seems crazy, a recent history of genocide will tend to push the needle into the red in any conversation about immigrants, outsiders, or other races and cultures. As for Muslims voting socialist, that doesn't seem likely, as socialists tend to be atheistic. Canada's recent turn to the right is largely attributed to an influx of immigrants who find the right's regard for religions more appealing. It's more likely that poor Muslim immigrants in Europe don't vote at all.
There seems to be a misconception that religion is separate from politics, and that the involvement of religion in politics is somehow an aberration. This is a belief that is based upon the very recent and historically brief period in which many Western countries have observed this separation. This period now seems to be coming to an end, by the way, with blasphemy laws making a major comeback, within and outside of the West.
But unless a religion specifically prohibits political involvement (and very few do), it is not only true to say that religion is political, but that religion is politics. Expressing disappointment that it is used by unscrupulous people as a tool of political and social control is a bit like being shocked and surprised that a handgun can be used to shoot someone. That is what it is for. All ideologies (and religions are ideologies) are morally neutral; they can be used for good or evil. They are simply tools. It hardly matters that the Soviet or Maoist regimes were not, strictly speaking, true Communist states. Communism is still vilified, and quite rightly so. It hardly matters whether the rulers are true believers or not. As always, religion is considered by the people to be true, by the wise to be false, and by the rulers to be useful--useful because it cuts through all debate with the claim "God says so!", and you can't refute this because God isn't taking his calls. It leaves the rulers free to do as they please, and what psychopath would not drool at such an opportunity? Don't worry about an atheist like Richard Dawkins. He's honest. Worry about an atheist like Karl Rove, who says in public that he is not fortunate enough to be a man of faith, calls believers "the crazies" in private, but can still deliver the evangelical right to any candidate for a price.
As for Constantine, he believed whatever was convenient, put the symbol of Apollo on his shield beside that of Christ to hedge his bets on who the people of Rome would support, and presided over the Council of Nicea to make damn sure that the religion would come out to his liking and benefit. He certainly had little use for its tenets, beyond killing anyone who disagreed with him, which was a practice he was already long accustomed to.
Agnosticism is orthogonal to belief or lack of belief. An agnostic simply says he doesn't know. Very few atheists claim to be certain that there is no God (and Richard Dawkins has never made that claim), and you may be surprised to learn that most believers don't claim to know either--that is why it's called faith.
Agnosticism is a weasel word used by atheists who want to avoid having arguments with believers, because as soon as you say atheist, they all line up to convert you. Do you believe in God? No? Then you are an atheist. Knowing has nothing to do with it.
Yeah, pretty much. As you get older, learning means knowing what to forget. You learn patterns, and forget the specifics. In the past 12 years, I've had to work on 6 gaming platforms, 7 languages, 4 development platforms, 8 API's, and on web, console, PC, and Java targets. This is the nature of the business. I would love the luxury of working on any one of these for more than 6 months, but that has never happened.
If you want a chance at anything to do with game development, graphics, visualization, AI, physics, etc., it's all math, all the time! So too with efficiency of algorithms, which will come up in an advanced job interview with any of the major companies (Google, IBM, Microsoft, Apple, etc.) I have never gotten rid of my university math textbooks, because I have to refer to them a lot. If you actually want to do anything creative (which is what you will have to do to go beyond standard business software) you will have to break those equations up and and understand how they work.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny you should mention that. I think I've figured out why that is.
The greatest threat to democracy and the rule of the people is, and always has been, disparity of power. In the 18th century, when the American War of Independence happened (not actually a revolution, because revolutions are regime changes, and the same people who ran America in 1870 still ran it in 1880), the most powerful people in Europe were the kings and the aristocrats. They were the state (Louis of France said it literally: "I am the state!") As with Rome, where the democratic senate had been overpowered by the rule of the Emperors, the greatest threat in the 18th century was the aristocracy, who were, at that time, the state.
But the men who established the American system forgot the lessons of the first democracy. Athens was a democracy, and it was destroyed not by kings and nobles, but by the Oligarchs (Athens was where the word originated), and they were not aristocrats, but merchants who came to own everything. In fact, Greece's problems to this day are that it still has laws that recognize oligarchs, who pay almost no taxes. Onassis was an oligarch.
The totemic worship of the founding documents of the United States means that the American people no longer recognize them for what they were: living documents that were hotly debated and considered deeply flawed even by the men who approved them. And it also means that Americans seem to be incapable of recognizing that these men made what is now an anachronistic mistake. The ruling class today is no longer the lords and kings, but the oligarchs. These are the threats to democracy.
But freedom has become a worship word. Remember that Star Trek episode? American's adhere blindly to a 200+ year old doctrine only because they are old, without understand the context of the time, or why they might be wrong. And so, a new order of aristocrats have come to take your freedom, and you will hand it to them, because you believe that such a threat can only come from the state.
Stock price is maintained by buying back stock, not by performance. Salaries remain high, but the company is shrinking rapidly, so there is less stock, but less company. IBM is dying, but you wouldn't know it looking as the Nasdaq.
IBM is basically a software graveyard, much like Computer Associates was, but more upscale. The business model for a software graveyard is as follows: buy a second tier competitor in a business software field that has a large installation base (the first tier will be too expensive and not willing to sell.) Squeeze out all employees you consider to be redundant, keeping enough to provide a few new versions. You have a captured clientele, so do just enough to keep them interested. This will pay your original investment and then some.
When the captured clientele start leaving in droves as the software starts to give off a bad smell, sell the desiccated corpse to China or India. Get your employees to train their replacements, keep a small selection of that group that you consider worth salvaging (if they are willing to move).
Rinse and repeat. This is a policy of hemorrhage, but as long as you use profits to buy stock, the shareholders won't care. And because only shareholders matter now, eventually all American companies will cease to exist, except for the banks, who can change their base of operations in minutes.
The problem is that it's a political trap. Any attempt to roll back these laws will result in some political opponent charging them with being soft on drugs, crime, terrorism, etc. And America now has a legislature that can't get anything done anyway, because there are a large number of people in office who make their name by blocking everything, including initiatives originally designed by their own party.
So the war on drugs, a bipartisan effort that resulted from this kind of rhetoric, has now created the largest incarceration rate since Stalinist Russia, militarized police that look and act like an occupying army, and now, the right to take whatever you have without justification. Law enforcement is simply taking advantage of a paralyzed government to do whatever they like, because you can't bring them to task. Instead of getting the job done, elected representatives are spending all their time bickering about faux issues like Benghazi, Affordable Health Care, etc, while the real issues which should have libertarians and Tea Partiers screeching just get ignored.
Hmmm... it's almost as if they actually don't care after all...
There is also the fact that Kosminski's personality profile fits that of a serial killer, he had a deep hatred of women, and he was a butcher (and had a knife that matched the cuts). Being a Polish Jew, Kosminski was a likely match for the person who left the 'Jewes' graffiti. This being the case, and with the already prevalent anger against Jews and immigrants in the wake of the murder and the news of the graffiti, it seems likely that the police actually knew they had their man, but did not want to prosecute him publicly for fear of starting an anti-Jewish progrom in London. So they locked him away and made certain that he could never get out.
Shortly after the anniversary of the murders, there was a television special where several experts were asked to weigh in on who the killer was. The most qualified person on the panel, a woman who worked on investigations of serial murderers, said that Kosminski was the obvious suspect, but the audience went with the Queen's Doctor theory because of a TV special that offered that theory--despite the fact that at the time of the murders, said Doctor had already suffered a stroke, and had lost the use of one of his hands. Conspiracy theories always favor the most powerful agencies for events of broad prominence; this is why large government conspiracies are always favored over individual (Lee Harvey Oswald) or small group (Al Quaeda) actors.
There is something going on here that no one seems to be talking about: the collapse of markets.
Karl Marx made one chilling prediction: when the workers did not have the money to buy the goods they produced, markets would collapse and capitalism itself would collapse. Henry Ford beat Marx when he paid his workers an unheard of $5 a day, creating in a single stroke the blue collar middle class and a market for his own goods. And this made America an economic powerhouse, not just for it power to produce, but for its power to consume. Gaining entry into that market is sufficient to make other nations bend over backward. It is the main well of American soft power.
Until now.
With the growth of capital intensive, rather than labor intensive, manufacturing, the wealth from the manufacturing industry is concentrated in a few hands, and markets continue to shrink even as productive capacity grows. Marx has become relevant again. In the early 2000's, when I heard about the shenanigans in the banking industry, I pessimistically predicted that these idiots would make Marx relevant again. And they have. Now I'm afraid that our new aristocracy will make Lenin relevant again. And believe me, you don't want to make Lenin relevant.
So that means we are going to have to employ people, and pay them a decent wage. Yes, even those that are less than the best and brightest, because being less than bright, they will find stupid ways to make money, most of which will land them in jail. And we have a burgeoning prison industry that would love that, but the prison industry is bankrupting us. Where once we had employment for ditch diggers and farmhands, now those jobs are done by machines. So, yes, we need to find something that they can do, and pay them for it. And it would cost far less to employ the barely literate as street sweepers and park gardeners, with a decent wage, than to house them all in prisons.
If you think you are immune to this trend, please keep in mind that one of the main thrusts of high tech research now is AI. Medicine and law are already within the scope of work that can be partially automated by AI, but the goal is to produce systems that can produce code on demand. And then, we will all discover what the blue collar worker had been experiencing for decades.
But the one percent cannot support capitalism, certainly not when they're own markets are dying.
We need to figure this out. And soon.
When I was with a startup during the dot com era, it seemed to me that the worker bees were on speed, while the executives were on coke. I could see what the worker bees were doing, but nothing else could explain the decisions made at the upper levels. The incentives were pretty obvious--long hours without sleep, and demand to be 'on' regardless of circumstance, and the arrogance that comes with mastering a small domain and thinking you've mastered everything (see Dunning-Kruger.)
Personally, when I was tired, what I craved was sleep. But that was frowned upon. You can see why so many did drugs.
Arrogance, though, is a major consideration. Notice the parent comment: If you take drugs and get addicted... but no one plans to get addicted. Oh, take drugs by all means, just don't get addicted. They take drugs to cope, and as they are masters of the universe, they could not possibly get addicted. Besides, it's just to meet this deadline... and the next... and the next...
The entire culture is a massive fuck-up. Tired people make mistakes, and mistakes cost money. In the 1850's they discovered that 40 hours a week was the sweet spot for productivity, and every generation since has had to discover the same thing the hard way. I cannot count the number of projects I have seen crash and burn because of this bullshit.
But fuck it. We're John Galt. We can do anything. Just another bump to get me through...
How's that working out?
It's an odd thing, but I've worked in game development and business software, and game development has much simpler requirements. You know what looks and feels wrong, but business software is a matter of opinion--lots of opinions--and those opinions contradict each other. To give one client what they want, you may end up screwing all the others--and it becomes your fault that you cannot be all things to all people. At some point, you have to tell people that if they want X, it will be slow, limited, and DO YOU REALLY FUCKING NEED THIS, because often they don't.
We need to learn to say no. And not just to our clients, but to our salesmen, our managers, and our project managers. Because saying yes to one client might mean saying no to a dozen others.
Agreed. Where cops are required to wear surveillance gear, they are on their best behavior, because the video is available in court--this has already been demonstrated in the EU. And that's not up to the chief of police. Your lawyer can demand it. And Google glass feeds to the Google servers, not the police station. Ultimately, the cops don't own it, so they can't just delete or edit what they don't like, they can only modify their copy, which is not the master, which your lawyer can request. So they will be very careful to make sure that nothing incriminating appears in the feeds.
This is surveillance of the cops as well as citizens--souveillance, not just surveillance. Read Contrary Brin to find out what souveilance is. All the conspiracy theorist here need to take their tin foil hats off for a moment and try to understand what this really means.
The issue here is that the ideas have been picked apart long ago by the scientific community. But these journals are not meant to address the scientific community. They exist to provide industrial boilerplate as quote fodder for politicians and pundits. The real target is people who don't know any better. Even when the journal has been discredited, they will still quote it, because few people will know that it has been discredited.
A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth has its boots on. That is the whole point of efforts like these.
No, the point was not that they don't like religious people. The point was that they don't like religion, and the undue influence of religious leaders.
I have noticed that there are a thousand Richard Dawkins on the internet, and all but one of them are made of straw. You have just made that a thousand and one. Slate has an article by someone who claims that Christopher Hitchens was wrong when he thought that banning religion would fix the world. Except that Hitchens never called for a ban on religion, and he certainly never thought that eliminating religion would solve all the world's problems. The number of people misrepresenting Hitchens has skyrocketed, because no one would dare do it while he was alive. And that makes me suspect that they know they are lying.
If you are going to criticize someone, could you please exert the slightest rudimentary effort to understand what they did in fact say. I'm quite certain that 99.9% of the disputes on the internet would vanish if people could just learn to listen.
And before you say that we don't understand religious people, please be informed that most of the atheists I know were devoutly religious for most of their lives before becoming atheists, and we not only understand it, we were there, which is more than I can say for most of the people slinging this nonsense. The deepest theological conversations I have ever had took place in atheist meetups, between former believers who understood theology very well--in fact, it was theology that made them atheists. And yes, this includes Muslims.
Please take the time to become likewise informed.
I'd be interested to see what Grint could do with the role, and I wouldn't count him out for the future. And no, he's not 12 anymore (making a movie at 12 doesn't make you 12 forever.) The most exciting suggestion was Tilda Swinton; she would be magnificent! And yeah, the Catherine Tate thing could work too; the Doctor is dead--oh, wait, remember that there was a hybrid...
GMO does not mean Monsanto, unless you have a large anti-GMO movement. The anti-GMO movement is the best friend that Monsanto ever had. Thanks to you guys, Monsanto will rule the agricultural world.
Here's how it works. A small company engineers a new crop that can be grown in third world conditions and dramatically increase the food supply. But they need to obtain clearance, which, thanks to the anti-GMO movement, they can't get. For that they need lots of money and lawyers. So they go broke, Then Monsanto comes along, buys the IP for a fraction of what it took to produce, and they do have enough money and lawyers. And because there is actually nothing wrong with GMO foods, they win, because unlike anti-GMO activists, the court has to listen to the facts, and Monsanto brings it to market--probably modified to be a terminator crop (by the way, Monsanto did not invent this, and many of the seeds that you buy for you garden will not produce offspring.)
So keep up your good work. Monsanto thanks you. Without you, they could not do what they do.
You're talking about monoculture. This is the rule with crops bred the old fashioned way, not the exception--the orange crop is a monoculture, and that's why they're having this problem. Bananas are having the same problem. We've actually gone through three types of bananas. There is a blight that is wiping out the current monoculture, and after that, there will be no large sweet bananas unless we engineer something that can resist it. This has absolutely nothing to do with genetic modification.
And don't forget that there is a natural source of radiation--the Sun. And all of this happens with that too.
Oh, but it's natural. That makes it much better than GMO. Yeah. So is cyanide, mercury, cancer, and bubonic plague.
By the way, genetic modification is the one source of mutation where we know what effect it has, because we are actually trying for it. Random mutation can produce anything, including produce that is highly toxic.
Agreed. What they are predicting is not a population increase in Africa, but a devastating population collapse. What Africa is currently undergoing is the baby boom, when a scattershot reproductive strategy (have lots of kids, no birth control, and hope some live) meets modern medicine. But Africa does not have the food, resources, or social capital to support this, unlike the first world during their baby boom. Emigration is not an option either; the first world has already begun to face the limitations of cultural assimilation, realizing that a large population from a culture with low social capital cannot reasonably be expected to assimilate to the norms of a country with high social capital without massive disruption. The habits and traditions just aren't there. Tribal warfare--gang violence--and zero sum economics (you get rich only by taking from others; a common idea in Europe until only three or four centuries ago, and probably less) are still the norm in sub-Saharan Africa. They're like us, but a few centuries back.
Was there reason to suspect improper practices? We've been having a lot of problems in Canada with the Conservative Party (currently the party in power.) Is this a follow up on previous known practices?
Yeah, I'm a big fan of Eno--Music for Airports, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, or checkout Prophecy Theme from the Dune soundtrack. The rest of the Dune soundtrack, by the way, was done by Toto, who did a surprisingly good job.
Actually, don't give up on music quite yet. Music with lyrics will distract you--Tom Waits, Bob Dylan, or Lou Reed would take all of your attention. But a lot of techno can actually function as white noise (which is why a lot of coders in a busy office swear by it)--the beat gives you an adrenaline boost while the content vanishes. Bach and other forms of baroque music can also serve the same function; it fades into the background but has a calming effect, and many people consider it the sound of ordered thought.
Well spotted. Because it is obviously the role of the state to enforce obsolete business models. Especially when the ruling party is paid by the people who are dependent upon them. No bias at all there. Nothing to see here. Move along.
It sounds like most of the controls are wired controllers--that is, if the controller electronics or computer have become faulty, you no longer have a way to control the car. It's a bit like playing a game and having your controller stop responding while your character goes running into a room full of bosses, only in this case, you're the character. This is a lot more common in cars today that most of us are aware; there are many cars out there that have millions of lines of code designed to prevent you from making a catastrophic mistake, but who knows what can happen if this goes wrong. The steering seems to be the only thing that was still available in this case.
I suspect that the reason that Europe has a large Muslim population is the same as the reason that America has a large Mexican population: cheap labor. That and colonial ties to their countries of origin (this is certainly the case of France and Algeria, and the U.K. and Pakistan, India, and much of the Middle East) , as well as the fact that they are just much closer to the Middle East than we are.
Radical Islam in Europe seems to be the new punk for disaffected Muslim youth; their parents had enough of that crap back home, which is why they moved. What better way for a surly teenager to annoy his parents than to hang a bin Laden poster on his wall. Kind of like Che in the 60's (who was, by the way, every bit as batshit crazy as bin Laden, if not more so.) This will pass. Eventually, standing on the sidelines and watching life pass you by loses its charm.
If the European left seems crazy, a recent history of genocide will tend to push the needle into the red in any conversation about immigrants, outsiders, or other races and cultures. As for Muslims voting socialist, that doesn't seem likely, as socialists tend to be atheistic. Canada's recent turn to the right is largely attributed to an influx of immigrants who find the right's regard for religions more appealing. It's more likely that poor Muslim immigrants in Europe don't vote at all.
There seems to be a misconception that religion is separate from politics, and that the involvement of religion in politics is somehow an aberration. This is a belief that is based upon the very recent and historically brief period in which many Western countries have observed this separation. This period now seems to be coming to an end, by the way, with blasphemy laws making a major comeback, within and outside of the West.
But unless a religion specifically prohibits political involvement (and very few do), it is not only true to say that religion is political, but that religion is politics. Expressing disappointment that it is used by unscrupulous people as a tool of political and social control is a bit like being shocked and surprised that a handgun can be used to shoot someone. That is what it is for. All ideologies (and religions are ideologies) are morally neutral; they can be used for good or evil. They are simply tools. It hardly matters that the Soviet or Maoist regimes were not, strictly speaking, true Communist states. Communism is still vilified, and quite rightly so. It hardly matters whether the rulers are true believers or not. As always, religion is considered by the people to be true, by the wise to be false, and by the rulers to be useful--useful because it cuts through all debate with the claim "God says so!", and you can't refute this because God isn't taking his calls. It leaves the rulers free to do as they please, and what psychopath would not drool at such an opportunity? Don't worry about an atheist like Richard Dawkins. He's honest. Worry about an atheist like Karl Rove, who says in public that he is not fortunate enough to be a man of faith, calls believers "the crazies" in private, but can still deliver the evangelical right to any candidate for a price.
As for Constantine, he believed whatever was convenient, put the symbol of Apollo on his shield beside that of Christ to hedge his bets on who the people of Rome would support, and presided over the Council of Nicea to make damn sure that the religion would come out to his liking and benefit. He certainly had little use for its tenets, beyond killing anyone who disagreed with him, which was a practice he was already long accustomed to.
Agnosticism is orthogonal to belief or lack of belief. An agnostic simply says he doesn't know. Very few atheists claim to be certain that there is no God (and Richard Dawkins has never made that claim), and you may be surprised to learn that most believers don't claim to know either--that is why it's called faith.
Agnosticism is a weasel word used by atheists who want to avoid having arguments with believers, because as soon as you say atheist, they all line up to convert you. Do you believe in God? No? Then you are an atheist. Knowing has nothing to do with it.
Yeah, pretty much. As you get older, learning means knowing what to forget. You learn patterns, and forget the specifics. In the past 12 years, I've had to work on 6 gaming platforms, 7 languages, 4 development platforms, 8 API's, and on web, console, PC, and Java targets. This is the nature of the business. I would love the luxury of working on any one of these for more than 6 months, but that has never happened.
And I'm 52.
If you want a chance at anything to do with game development, graphics, visualization, AI, physics, etc., it's all math, all the time! So too with efficiency of algorithms, which will come up in an advanced job interview with any of the major companies (Google, IBM, Microsoft, Apple, etc.) I have never gotten rid of my university math textbooks, because I have to refer to them a lot. If you actually want to do anything creative (which is what you will have to do to go beyond standard business software) you will have to break those equations up and and understand how they work.