The Creator created both space and time, thus inevitably placing not only the initial disposition of figures on the chessboard, but also every single move of the players in the mittel- and endspiel.
So much for free will and ethical responsibility. So you're saying that God condemns people to hell at the very outset? Your God is an evil prick. And do note that it's your God--you made him up all by yourself, or maybe with some unscrupulous help.
Believers believe in miracles. We believe in God's capability to break every single superficial cause-effect law humans discovered during their existence plus every other physical law that we yet have to discover if he needs to.
So much for truth. If cause-and-effect and the other rules of logic do not apply, there is no way to establish any type of truth, even from scripture. Goodbye science, legal jurisprudence, and ethical responsibility. You are advocating an abyss of utter epistemological and moral relativism, anarchy, and ignorance.
Do you really think that we are going to give a penny for all the scientific discoveries to come? As one of the posters wisely noted, scientific knowledge is ever changing. Guess what, the religious knowledge stays as a rock. Do you really think that believers will exchange the rock for a sand?
In other words, religious believers never learn anything. Learning changes what you know. Insisting that you know everything to start with is called pride. It's rather frowned upon. Fortunately, religious knowledge does change. The Bible never says anything against slavery, but Christian believers eventually realized that it was wrong--after being pestered for centuries about it. The Bible doesn't condemn torture, but they eventually admitted that that was wrong too. This is called learning. The scriptures were written by primitive peoples in the bronze age. If we haven't learned more than that by now, we would be pathetic.
But maybe that's not for you. Ever word of your post drips with haughty pride. You know it all. You have no deficiencies, as you put it. My, God must be very grateful to have someone like you to look up to and protect him. Are you beginning to see the problem here?
I notice that what you wrote here is very similar to the beliefs preached amongst extremist Muslims and is almost identical to those held by the Al Quaeda terrorists, particularly your hatred of the world and emphasis on the afterlife. I suspect you may be in danger, largely from yourself. I'm not kidding, this is textbook suicide cult material; you have surrendered all methods and standards of practical and moral judgement. Whatever group you are in, get out of it as soon as you can.
Uh, no, what he said is that they have evolved into different species which can breed within the species but not with members of the other species. This is how we tell two species apart--they are no longer genetically compatible, and cannot interbreed.
Richard Dawkins mentions the Herring Gull and the Lesser Black-backed Gull, which cannot interbreed and are therefore seperate species. Both exist in Europe. But if you follow the population of Herring Gulls westward around the north pole, to North America, Alaska, Siberia, and back to Europe, you encounter all the intermediate stages leading to the Black-backed Gull. In each area around this ring, the gulls in that area can interbreed with their neighbours. Only when you get to Europe do you have two seperate species.
As for a lot of people being against evolution, the ID people created a petition of all the scientists who disagree with it. They have about 400 signatures so far, almost none of whom have any expertise in an area relevant to the subject. So the scientific community came up with the Steve list. Basically, you can sign it if your support evolution and your name is some variation of Steve. They have over 700 signatures so far. Since the number of scientists named Steve or something like it makes up about 1% of the scientific community, this represents about 70,000 scientists. They did it as a joke (ID is a joke, after all) but you get the point. Or at least, most people would.
Your arguments are referred to as "God in the Gaps", only the gaps here are not in science, but in your own knowledge of it. Even Behe and Dembski don't try the missing link argument anymore, because it's a joke. The reason you don't see a snail evolve into a human is that it takes millions of years, and we haven't been around that long. But we still have the DNA from our earliest pregenitors, and our proximity with other animals along the evolutionary tree can be traced by establishing how much DNA we share. We share 98% of our DNA with chimpanzees. So, if God made us just the way we are, how come he built us out of spare chimp parts?
Unreasonably high prices and artificial scarcities create black markets. Draconian measures to thwart those black markets create criminal organizations who profit on those markets, by a process of natural selection which eliminates all but the most ruthless. International criminal organizations haven't found the business model to turn all this to their advantage yet, but give them time--they're working on it. When they figure it out, the RIAA won't be facing a bereaved family, but a wily group of thugs who do this professionally, with plenty of cash on hand for their own lawyers--if the RIAA can get to them at all. This, of course, assumes that the artists don't find an alternative first and cut the RIAA and the people they represent out of the loop. It's a race between the artists and the gangsters, but either way the RIAA will lose.
I would like to offer an alternative of what they should be doing--put the following notice in each of their CD's and DVD's:
This disk has no copy protection whatsoever. You can transfer, copy, rip, and burn it to your heart's content. You can even hand out these copies to other people, with one proviso: insist that if they like it, they should go out and buy their own copy.
Every dollar you spend is a vote. Paying for this is a way of telling the artists you like it and want more. If you like this music, paying for it means that you will get more; more from this artist, and more from similar artists--and maybe even music from artists you will want to hear who are quite different, but otherwise wouldn't have enough support to get started. You may think that recording artists make a lot of money and don't need your support. In fact, there are a lot of expenses that they incur just to make and promote this album, and it takes a lot of sales just to break even. And hey, if they do get filthy rich, it may take a lot of money to persuade them to get back into the studio. Either way, you get more of what you want.
If you don't pay for this, and a lot of people who like it copy it for free, the artists will have to get a day job. They will stop making albums, and probably won't play anywhere more than a day's journey from home. Sucks to be you. The music that you like won't be made anymore. And every time you turn on the radio, you will hear music made by people whose fans are just too damned stupid to know how to copy it.
So, do what you want. But if everything on the radio and at the music store is infantile crap, don't blame us. We warned you.
That's what they should be doing. Of course, they're not. Wall Street has a saying: "A bear can make money, a bull can make money. A pig always gets slaughtered." The RIAA is a pig. They're going to get slaughtered.
Apparently you missed the photo of the billboard in Tehran, with Nesrallah's face on it and the quote for Ahmadinejad, translated into English by the Iranians themselves. Yes, it says "Israel must be wiped off the map." That's what he said, and that's what he meant. Nesrallah told a reporter that it would be better if all the Jews came to Israel, so that he could kill them all there.
This is what they say, and this is what they mean. Take them at their word.
I won't install WGA either. I have a legit copy of Windows, but I'm running a pirate copy because of their stupid protection scheme--five hardware changes and you have to re-register. A lot of people I know won't install a legit copy of Windows for the same reason. I can do five hardware changes in five minutes if I'm testing hardware. I'll be damned if I'm going to contact Microsoft at 2:00 in the morning to ask them for permission to use MY computer--that's just stupid. Fortunately I'm heavily firewalled, but what's going to happen when millions of machines which don't have the patch become repeater bots for the Russian mafia?
Is there a way around the copy protection scheme or WGA, other than taking the crack pipe from Ballmer and trying to pull him in for a landing?
What I said is based on industry reports on game and console sales and subscriptions in Asia, as well as weekly reports on XBox 360 sales vs projected sales, and what co-workers who vacation in Japan have been told by their friends over there.
Lineage went to the top of the MMORPG market based on the Asian market alone; WoW went from 3 millian to 6 million subscribers in 3 weeks on entering the Asian market. People in South Korea regularly play these games until they literally drop dead; this has happened often enough that the government is drafting a law to try to limit this. These are subscription based products--no piracy possible. Wizardry, long since a memory here, is still updated and reissued in Japan--it was the only thing that kept Sirtech afloat in the latter days. We get about half of the gadgets on the market here that are available in Japan. The demand there far surpasses the demand here.
So this isn't anecdotal evidence, based on a couple guys I met. This is a long established pattern going back 30 years.
All of this stuff about the PS3 being dead is pure media hype originating from Microsoft. No one who is actually in the game industry believes a word of it. We watched the sales of the XBox 360 and could already see the writing on the wall. All hype to the contrary, it tanked. Within a couple months of release, Microsoft was already making the "We'll get 'em next time" speech. Piles of them collected dust in the Asian market, and they are still collecting dust.
The PS3 will own the Asian market. That's a given--the brand loyalty over there is very strong, and $600 is nothing for a console over there; game afficionadoes in Japan, Korea, Singapore, and the richer parts of china have a stack of consoles, a drawer full of handhelds, and a state of the art PC. They'll spend $600 on their graphics card--every year. They love their gadgets, and they always want the latest. In Japan, you can walk down the street on garbage day and pick up year-old big screen TV's that have been left out of the curb just because they're a year old. You can furnish your apartment in grand style by garbage picking--I know people who've done just that. Those for whom it is a lot of money are already saving up for their PS3. The PS3 will make more sales in Japan alone than the 360 has made worldwide.
Sales in the North America and Europe may start off slow, but they will continue to be steady throughout the PS3's lifespan, as prices and production costs drop. The PS2 continue to sell more units than any form of XBox. And to get to the basic configuration of the PS3, you have to spend almost as much on a 360.
Nobody in the industry would even consider writing off the PS3. To see posts about the alleged failure of the PS3 on Slashdot of all places, the most anti-Microsoft site pushing Microsoft FUD, is mind boggling. I'm sure the people at Microsoft's PR department are all high-fiving each other, even as the bean counters look at the numbers and glumly acknowledge the awful truth.
I just bought a Linksys, replacing a Netgear, and so far it's great. Loved the features on the Netgear, hated the instability. Damn thing took up to an hour to boot; it kept crashing over and over again. Netgear is sucking badly these days. The Linksys boots in seconds, and has all the features I want anyway.
You will note that I said that he doesn't believe it is possible. This is not the same as saying that he believes it is impossible, only that he has not seen any evidence to support the belief that some people can read other's minds. If he did believe that psi were possible, then that would be a positive claim, and he would have to prove that, wouldn't he? The onus of proof is on him only if he provides an alternative explanation for a positive result, as the CSICOP quote says, and this is the point he keeps trying to make, and people like you keep missing--there are no positive results. Please reread your own post, carefully this time.
And since Randi isn't even involved in the tests, as I have already mentioned, I fail to see how your claim is relevant, even if it were true.
An open mind should be open at both ends--it should excrete as well as consume. Theories which have a history of empirical failure are not on an equal footing with other theories. If it's wrong every time over a thousand trials, it's probably going to be wrong forever. After a certain number of negative results, we consider them false. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. This is why creationists encouraging schools to "teach the controversy" are lying. This is also why people arguing that we should keep an open mind towards telepathy are 99.99% likely to be wasting our time.
Randi doesn't have to get perfect results in telepathy, since he doesn't believe it is possible. That's his whole point. Randi can, however, confound ordinary scientists using ordinary conjuring methods. They don't know how to spot them.
Randi doesn't attend the tests, but does send someone trained in conjuring along to identify obvious conjuring tricks. Scientists are not trained in recognizing these. Between the scientists and conjurer examiners, no one has ever made it past even the screening phase.
No proper scientific study of telepathy has ever produced significant results. Those that claim to produce significant results have major holes in them; controlling for these gives you a negative result. Scientific results must be repeatable; no positive result on telepathy has ever been repeated.
The sheer willingness to accept the belief in telepathy and other magical powers would make a significant result ring out like a nuclear blast through the scientific community, and would make the headlines of every newspaper in the world. It's guaranteed Nobel prize material; proving it would put you in the ranks of Einstein and Newton, your name would be immortalized for the rest of human history. Furthermore, you would become absurdly rich. And yet, no one has done it. But this willingness also makes most laymen hopelessly gullible on the subject. The money that has been pissed away on this bullshit runs in the billions. In the hands of legitimate researchers, we might now have a cure for cancer by now instead of an endless stream of pseudo-scientific, pseudo-religious tripe, so treasured by those who couldn't tell a significant result from a fairy tale if their life depended on it.
Other posters mentioned remote viewing and Khun. As for remote viewing, the Soviet Union was the worldwide distributor of woo-woo pseudo-science, and there were plenty of muscle heads in the military and intelligence community who were all too willing to lap up this delusional vodka-fuelled piss. So they threw money at it, and more money, and more money, because the soviets, as is the custom of religious fanatics, swore up and down that the glory of communism had given their people miraculous powers. This is not something to be quoted and celebrated, but something to be ignored and feel embarrassed about.
Thomas Khun has become the darling of postmodernists, and conspiracy nuts who think that SCIENTISTS ARE A CABAL WHO ARE SUPPRESSING THE TRUTH (they always speak in caps, a trait they share with schizophrenics.) He has become a great ally to fundamentalists of all stripes, who would like to claim that all beliefs are equal (but, of course, theirs are equaller than others.) So you have Hindu computers and Christian reactors.. oh, that's right, you don't. No religion has ever made a single contribution to science and technology. How about that? Apparently, despite all claims, they haven't a clue about how the world really works.
The belief in telepathy has never contributed anything to science either. Stop wasting our time.
If option (2) is true, it means that the scientists in question will be metaphorically shot by the scientific community for daring to question the great reletivity laws, and remove bad scientists from the community.
No, they won't be shot. Stephen Hawking has challenged Einstein's theories and been wrong about nearly everything he's ever proposed, and he's still considered a good physicist. It's okay to challenge the dominant theory, just as long as you have good evidence to back it up, and your theory explains something that nothing else does. Bad science is done with poor or no evidence, explains even less than the current theory, and is usually presented to the general public without peer review. When confronted with evidence that proves their theory false, good scientists concede, while bad scientists wail on about scientific orthodoxy and appeal to popular opinion.
I think the tip-off about these people is the part that says education was a "well heeled, publicly funded lobby . . . devoted to abolishing creators' rights on the Internet." He's talking about students and public libraries here; not exactly my idea of well heeled.
The subtleties of maturity beat the thrills of immaturity anytime. The world is a complex place, and I love the complexity of it. The best taste in life is bittersweet, with only enough sweetness to prevent the bitter from being bland. It's no surprise that diabetes is on the rise. People have lost the palate for strong tastes. Even fibre comes in a pill, as if eating raw oats and bran is some sort of trial too harsh for people to bear. The world is divided into simple primary colors and basic binaries: red and blue, left and right, liberal vs conservative. Only the caricatures that pass as media personalities fit into these categories. The world is just not that simple.
It is revealing to contrast the tone of public discourse 50 years ago to what it is today. Ronald Reagan abandoned formal rhetoric for folksy chat, and now we're stuck with it. G W Bush got elected by appearing to be just a regular guy--at some point, people forgot that you don't want just a regular guy as your leader, you want the best and brightest. Distrust of intellectuals is at an all time high, because it takes work to understand what they're saying. But democracy takes work, every single day.
I've always suspected that the main point of "family values" and all of these exhortations to "think of the children" are just scare tactics to turn the world into the largest nursery in history, where you cannot even have an adult conversation, and where kids aren't even allowed to play unsupervised. Can you imagine a childhood where you have to make "play dates," where it is no longer possible to just walk anywhere? Thanks to media scaremongering, parents see the world as a frightening place with a child molestor or Satanic cult member lurking in every playground. The fact is, your kids are about a hundred times as likely to get killed by a car as they are to be kidnapped. But that doesn't sell soap.
Even God has been turned into the cosmic wetnurse, who will rapture us up, clean our nappies, and dry our tears. ID promises us the fantasy of every child; that we are the center of the universe, that it's really all for us. Since you're saved by faith alone, you don't have to do jack, just show up at the mega-church for the show and listen to a postmodernist drivel which is equal parts fairy tale and new-age glurge. You gotta hand it to them, they know their market. Why stop at frying your pancreas with candy, when you can get diabetes of the soul too?
Which would be great if American companies like Haliburton didn't maintain shell subsidiaries in places like the Caiman Islands. These subsidiaries are apparently not bound by American law, even though they amount to a post office box whose contents are forwarded to the States. This is how Haliburton got away with dealing with Iran while it was illegal to do so, even selling them centrifuges used in their nuclear project.
In any case, the cozy relationship between the Saudi Royal family and American business and government amounts to bribe of a different type--information and contacts. George Bush Sr. worked for the Saudis while still receiving intelligence briefings, a right that all former presidents have but which has always been waived. Bush Sr. was the first former president to insist on getting them. You can bet that Bush Jr. will be getting them too--the President who walked hand in hand with Prince Bandar. And now those intelligence reports will include the banking information of competing companies. The money to be made here makes simple bribes miniscule by comparison. Not even Airbus is in the position to offer the kind of money that can be made by investing a billion dollars in a small company that is about to win a massive government contract.
Which means that even after Bush is out of office, he will still have his hand in the federal pie, and will be able to sell a piece of that pie to the highest bidder. Not bad for a spoiled dilletante with no talent for business. We're stuck with the bastard till the day he dies.
That's why you make it a requirement that Paladin's must gain reputation points to advance, and those reputation points require that they spend time helping others. The point here is to frustrate power gamers, who are usually snotty little twinks that everyone hates.
Agreed. After trying many MMORPG's (including WoW) I've gone back to City of Heroes/City of Villains. Fifteen minute missions, casual grouping, genuine strategic strengths and weaknesses that make a major difference between a good player and a poor player. I can get some good gaming in as little as half an hour, squeezing in a mission or two before dinner or before bed.
What the article is about is not work, but what I call trial-by-boredom, a term I came up with during my years of tabletop playing. You know those DM's who insisted that you describe exactly what you were doing every step of the way to detect traps, looks for monsters, etc, etc, until the group lapsed into a coma and then he sprang his dastardly trap. Yeah, that crap. When I ran it, every room had something of interest, and I described it from the point of view of experienced adventurers ("That table looks a little to thick to be made of just solid wood--you probably want to take a closer look at it.") When running a game, you have to take into account that the player, who is isolated by the interface or by your description, has a much lower bandwidth of information than his character, who is right there on the scene. This is my ongoing problem with Neverwinter Nights campaigns. The DM, having designed the dungeon, thinks that everyone knows what he does. He drops an oblique hint, then kills the entire party in frustration because they didn't pick up on his casual clue.
In MMORPG's, trial-by-boredom consists of all crafting, and rare-spawn rare-drop hunting. Most crafting should by done offline by the character after you log intentions for what you are doing till you next log in; you get to work to select a range of difficulty versus money earned--the more you earn, the less you learn, and to learn a lot, you have to pay for materials wasted and the craft master's time. The best items should always be player made. As for the rare-spawn, rare-drop syndrome, all rare components should be obtainable by pyramid style quests: you get X from A by doing his quest, turn in X's to B to get Y's, then turn in some Y's to C to get what you want. Rare boss monsters should be ransomed, not killed. You fight through the guards and the elite champions, till you get to the king, who lets you choose the ransom you want. This is the way it worked historically. You get to choose what drops, and instead of the one dragon scale that you auction to the 50 people in the raid, you get a dragon scale for everyone in the raid, guaranteed (you just beat the dragon to a standstill till he submits, after which he gives you part of his last moult.) Of course, you might also get a dragon scale from a dragon for bringing him a few pounds of his favourite berries, which happen to grow in hostile territory...
Also underplayed in MMORPG's is the social aspect, which is where you may interest more women. Find and deliver a cure for a rare disease for the nephew of the King of an enemy race, and you may gain right of passage into an enemy city, under the proviso that you keep your sword sheathed. Bring a bottle of good brandy to a notoriously tough guard, and he may wink at you and let you pass unmolested from then on. Make the Paladin the toughest character in the game--but require him to have a high reputation to advance, which can be gained only by helping other players. Become a merchant who trades in rare goods across enemy lines, and secure safe passage in areas no one is allowed to go, allowing you to act as ambassador.
Make each server retain it's own history, with each significant advance (a newly discovered formula, area, technique, or treaty) bear the name of the original character who initiated it (such discoveries are subject to chance, so few characters will have more than one or two.) Allow the actions and choice of allegiance of characters to change the world, so that those servers dominated by evil characters become fly-blown wastelands where even food is expensive, and those dominated by good players become lush gardens (use algorithmic tex
Why does this smell like a Microsoft FUD plant? We've already seen what the PS3 can do--it blows the 360 away. And why would anyone go into the technical details of memory and bus speed without going all the way and actually understanding what that memory is used for and why the Cell doesn't have to access it at all! It's bad enough that someone wrote this piece of FUD--it's worse that Slashdot gave it a headline.
Every aspect of every conspiracy theory about 9/11 has been systematically debunked somewhere or another. Since the WTC was structurally unique, comparisons to other buildings really don't have much bearing in the matter, and while they anticipated the impact of a 707, they did not take into account the combined effect of impact and a full load of fuel; all of this, of course, assumes that the designers were correct when saying that the building could withstand a 707. Timelines show that jets were scrambled in a timely manner when the situation was understood (within minutes of realizing the planes were hijacked and pinpointing their locations.) The dissenting expert opinions are not unusual in science; all scientific fields have their share of wing nuts, but these are fringe opinions usually based upon a single, simplistic, and inconclusive study. There were also people who speculated openly in the early days, and have since come to regret it. In the course of normal science these come out in the wash, but conspiracy theorists cherry pick these and run with them--in some cases, long after the original proponent has disowned and attempted to kill the theory attributed to him. There are pseudo-scientific theories that persist decades after they have been debunked.
The most frustrating thing about conspiracy theories is not the individual factoids that comprise them, but the profound ignorance of human nature, and the obessively magical thinking, that underlie them. As Ben Franklin said, three may keep a secret if two of them are dead. 9/11 conspiracy theories require thousands of conspirators--think of just what would be required to run drone planes into buildings, dispose of all the passengers, rig the buildings, fake everything so that the airlines wouldn't notice, and on, and on, and on. Even the mafia can't keep a secret when the boss tells one guy to whack another, and that's a conspiracy of two, protected by the Omerta!
Only a true fanatic can keep secrets like these, and then, only for a short time, provided he is kept relatively isolated. The Al Queda plan was remarkeably low tech with few moving parts and carried out by a small group of fanatics, most of whom did not arrive in America until a couple days beforehand. Even so, it almost got discovered beforehand. In the aftermath, there is almost no detail of how it was done that we don't know. Compare this with conspiracy theories, which remain isolated pinpoints of data organized by a unifying myth. The Al Queda plan left a big footprint. A government conspiracy would have left an even bigger one.
Conspiracy theories are the new secular religion, supported by the same cognitive errors which support religion, and serving the same purpose. To the conspiracy theorist, the dark cabals which run the world are both stupid and supernaturally brilliant, fools who are somehow capable of godlike prescience, omiscience, and control. The conspiracy theorist himself is a figure on the same mythical scale: he has pierced the veil of the illuminati, seen what few have seen--he is the great challenger to this omnipotent cabal. By following his warnings, we shall overcome the evil presence which has corrupted our world from within, and restore all to goodness and innocence. It's all good, because the solution is so simple.
You'll never convince him otherwise, because his entire conception of self is wound up in the idea that he is the rare visionary, the one who cannot be fooled. To admit that he is wrong would require him to admit that he is profoundly wrong, not just gulled, but gullible. This would be a fall of luciferian proportion, from grand visier to court fool. Conspiracy theorists tend to be marginal and disenfranchised. The fall from mythic heights to the harsh reality of their lives is very hard indeed.
The reality, of course, is that there may actually be no one in control, that both the leaders and the conspiracy theorists can't tell their assholes from a gopher hole, and that this has been the situation for nearly all of hum
No, that's Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday morning. A lot of companies begin their work week on Sundays. Two allnighters, two days with very little sleep, and by 10 o'clock on Thursday morning, you have 100 hours. That's when they finally told me to go home.
I have to agree with the other respondents. I work in the games industry, and I discovered early that perpetual crunch mode does not work. The first company I worked in enforced 60 hour minimum weeks, with 80+ at peak. I clocked over 100 hours one week--by Thursday morning. It took me a month to fix the damage I did that week. I soon discovered that the work habits of everyone in the company had deteriorated to the point that it took 60 hours to get 35 hours work out of people, and if they went did work 40 hours, you barely got 20 out of them. This is called burnout. I remember one guy who was considered a crunch time hero, who wandered in at 11:00, didn't start asking code related questions till 4:00, and left at 8:00 most days. This means he barely put in 4 hours a day.
Labour did not invent the 40 hour work week--in fact, they opposed it because they were paid by the hour. For 150 years companies have been doing research into the optimum work week, and they keep coming up with the magic number 40. When you go over this number, errors due to fatigue cancel out any productivity gained. You can exceed this for short durations, but the gains decline rapidly. It seems that every generation insists on learning this again the hard way. Companies get around it by literally cycling through employees; they get a lot of kids who aren't burnt out, but most of them have don't stick around long enough to gain much experience.
Of course, there are the other costs as well. The other team at the first company I worked at had six married members when the project they were working on started. By the time it was done, all of them were divorced. I worked long hours on a project for a dot com back in 2000. The guy I worked with, a good friend of mine, died last year of congestive heart failure, caused by chronic stress. If you're working 60 hours a week or more on a regular basis, your boss is an incompetent boob. Your job isn't worth giving up your life for, figuratively or literally.
Multiple forms of ID mean multiple databases, many of which duplicate sensitive data. Having it all in a central database does permit it to be searched from one source, but that does not mean that you are any more exposed. In fact, the duplication across multiple databases means that your information exists in many places, some of which may not be secure. This means that not only can the government access it, but even less scupulous parties can get to it.
Also, don't forget that innacurate information may prove as damaging to you as accurate information. If some cop suspects you of a crime that you had nothing to do with, and enters this in some criminal database, your "deviance quotient" increases (yes, I heard this phrase used by a cop; someone I know was once denied a security clearance based upon actions of members of their family, which, when described, turned out to be mostly innuendo.) In the absence of accurate information, the authorities are free to spin tales about you that still may have some effect on your life. They don't have to explain why they denied you a security clearance. Do you actually think that the Nazis arrested all those people based on accurate information? It's not what they know about you, but what they claim to know.
Furthermore, your bank knows more about you than you'll ever tell the government, and the government doesn't even need to a subpeona to get a hold of it. Credit information has been available to financial institutions for decades. Do you have an Air-Miles card? This is a data mining tool which tracks everything you buy and everywhere you go, and that information is for sale.
At least a central database might have some requirements for accuracy, and some minimum security standards, unlike the bulk of the information that is floating around out there about you right now. They might even keep records on who requested access, unlike most of these data sources. A good private investigator can collect a ton of information on you quickly and easily; so can an accomplished thief or an experienced intelligence agent. Your life history is out there, right now, for sale to anyone who wants it.
Artist, in this case, includes the song writers, who make more money than the recording artist (who may not even get a percentage, but only scale.) But even song-writers who perform their own material, and produce it in their own studios, the take is usually well short of a dollar per CD. Only about five years ago Paul MacCartney became the first artist in history to break the dollar barrier--and he handed the record company a finished product. All they had to do was burn it and ship it, and I never heard a peep of advertising for that album. So, the record company got about 4 dollars for maybe 20 cents worth of production.
It would be nice if sound engineers and cover artists made a good living, but they don't. That's not where the money goes--if all the rest of the artistic talent that goes into packaging and selling make even 20 cents per album, I'd be very surprised. Cover artists make peanuts. Even Andy Warhol couldn't get paid for cover art. Talent scouts used to actually know something about music, but now they're just marketers who try to guess what they can sell. As for marketing agents studying a craft, you obviously haven't met many of them. They are the most singularly inept, idiotic, and misinformed bunch I have ever met. Trust me, the vast majority of them have never studied anything, and seem to consider aggressive ignorance a great virtue. They, however, like the lawyers and the managers, probably take the bulk of the money.
No, open source game engines would mean that instead of paying a huge load of cash for an engine, that huge load of cash would be available to pay programmers to modify the engine. Instead of slave driving coders to build yet another throw away engine, they could concentrate on working on gameplay. And instead of needing a million dollars up front just to think about making a game, smaller developing houses might be able to compete, rather than see the industry whittled down to a handful of giant corporations who run sweatshops.
If we're having trouble making a living, it's because we always have to go out and reinvent the wheel. Eventually people get sick of paying again and again for the same damn thing.
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The Creator created both space and time, thus inevitably placing not only the initial disposition of figures on the chessboard, but also every single move of the players in the mittel- and endspiel.
So much for free will and ethical responsibility. So you're saying that God condemns people to hell at the very outset? Your God is an evil prick. And do note that it's your God--you made him up all by yourself, or maybe with some unscrupulous help.
Believers believe in miracles. We believe in God's capability to break every single superficial cause-effect law humans discovered during their existence plus every other physical law that we yet have to discover if he needs to.
So much for truth. If cause-and-effect and the other rules of logic do not apply, there is no way to establish any type of truth, even from scripture. Goodbye science, legal jurisprudence, and ethical responsibility. You are advocating an abyss of utter epistemological and moral relativism, anarchy, and ignorance.
Do you really think that we are going to give a penny for all the scientific discoveries to come? As one of the posters wisely noted, scientific knowledge is ever changing. Guess what, the religious knowledge stays as a rock. Do you really think that believers will exchange the rock for a sand?
In other words, religious believers never learn anything. Learning changes what you know. Insisting that you know everything to start with is called pride. It's rather frowned upon. Fortunately, religious knowledge does change. The Bible never says anything against slavery, but Christian believers eventually realized that it was wrong--after being pestered for centuries about it. The Bible doesn't condemn torture, but they eventually admitted that that was wrong too. This is called learning. The scriptures were written by primitive peoples in the bronze age. If we haven't learned more than that by now, we would be pathetic.
But maybe that's not for you. Ever word of your post drips with haughty pride. You know it all. You have no deficiencies, as you put it. My, God must be very grateful to have someone like you to look up to and protect him. Are you beginning to see the problem here?
I notice that what you wrote here is very similar to the beliefs preached amongst extremist Muslims and is almost identical to those held by the Al Quaeda terrorists, particularly your hatred of the world and emphasis on the afterlife. I suspect you may be in danger, largely from yourself. I'm not kidding, this is textbook suicide cult material; you have surrendered all methods and standards of practical and moral judgement. Whatever group you are in, get out of it as soon as you can.
Uh, no, what he said is that they have evolved into different species which can breed within the species but not with members of the other species. This is how we tell two species apart--they are no longer genetically compatible, and cannot interbreed.
Richard Dawkins mentions the Herring Gull and the Lesser Black-backed Gull, which cannot interbreed and are therefore seperate species. Both exist in Europe. But if you follow the population of Herring Gulls westward around the north pole, to North America, Alaska, Siberia, and back to Europe, you encounter all the intermediate stages leading to the Black-backed Gull. In each area around this ring, the gulls in that area can interbreed with their neighbours. Only when you get to Europe do you have two seperate species.
As for a lot of people being against evolution, the ID people created a petition of all the scientists who disagree with it. They have about 400 signatures so far, almost none of whom have any expertise in an area relevant to the subject. So the scientific community came up with the Steve list. Basically, you can sign it if your support evolution and your name is some variation of Steve. They have over 700 signatures so far. Since the number of scientists named Steve or something like it makes up about 1% of the scientific community, this represents about 70,000 scientists. They did it as a joke (ID is a joke, after all) but you get the point. Or at least, most people would.
Your arguments are referred to as "God in the Gaps", only the gaps here are not in science, but in your own knowledge of it. Even Behe and Dembski don't try the missing link argument anymore, because it's a joke. The reason you don't see a snail evolve into a human is that it takes millions of years, and we haven't been around that long. But we still have the DNA from our earliest pregenitors, and our proximity with other animals along the evolutionary tree can be traced by establishing how much DNA we share. We share 98% of our DNA with chimpanzees. So, if God made us just the way we are, how come he built us out of spare chimp parts?
Unreasonably high prices and artificial scarcities create black markets. Draconian measures to thwart those black markets create criminal organizations who profit on those markets, by a process of natural selection which eliminates all but the most ruthless. International criminal organizations haven't found the business model to turn all this to their advantage yet, but give them time--they're working on it. When they figure it out, the RIAA won't be facing a bereaved family, but a wily group of thugs who do this professionally, with plenty of cash on hand for their own lawyers--if the RIAA can get to them at all. This, of course, assumes that the artists don't find an alternative first and cut the RIAA and the people they represent out of the loop. It's a race between the artists and the gangsters, but either way the RIAA will lose.
I would like to offer an alternative of what they should be doing--put the following notice in each of their CD's and DVD's:
This disk has no copy protection whatsoever. You can transfer, copy, rip, and burn it to your heart's content. You can even hand out these copies to other people, with one proviso: insist that if they like it, they should go out and buy their own copy.
Every dollar you spend is a vote. Paying for this is a way of telling the artists you like it and want more. If you like this music, paying for it means that you will get more; more from this artist, and more from similar artists--and maybe even music from artists you will want to hear who are quite different, but otherwise wouldn't have enough support to get started. You may think that recording artists make a lot of money and don't need your support. In fact, there are a lot of expenses that they incur just to make and promote this album, and it takes a lot of sales just to break even. And hey, if they do get filthy rich, it may take a lot of money to persuade them to get back into the studio. Either way, you get more of what you want.
If you don't pay for this, and a lot of people who like it copy it for free, the artists will have to get a day job. They will stop making albums, and probably won't play anywhere more than a day's journey from home. Sucks to be you. The music that you like won't be made anymore. And every time you turn on the radio, you will hear music made by people whose fans are just too damned stupid to know how to copy it.
So, do what you want. But if everything on the radio and at the music store is infantile crap, don't blame us. We warned you.
That's what they should be doing. Of course, they're not. Wall Street has a saying: "A bear can make money, a bull can make money. A pig always gets slaughtered." The RIAA is a pig. They're going to get slaughtered.
Apparently you missed the photo of the billboard in Tehran, with Nesrallah's face on it and the quote for Ahmadinejad, translated into English by the Iranians themselves. Yes, it says "Israel must be wiped off the map." That's what he said, and that's what he meant. Nesrallah told a reporter that it would be better if all the Jews came to Israel, so that he could kill them all there.
This is what they say, and this is what they mean. Take them at their word.
I won't install WGA either. I have a legit copy of Windows, but I'm running a pirate copy because of their stupid protection scheme--five hardware changes and you have to re-register. A lot of people I know won't install a legit copy of Windows for the same reason. I can do five hardware changes in five minutes if I'm testing hardware. I'll be damned if I'm going to contact Microsoft at 2:00 in the morning to ask them for permission to use MY computer--that's just stupid. Fortunately I'm heavily firewalled, but what's going to happen when millions of machines which don't have the patch become repeater bots for the Russian mafia?
Is there a way around the copy protection scheme or WGA, other than taking the crack pipe from Ballmer and trying to pull him in for a landing?
What I said is based on industry reports on game and console sales and subscriptions in Asia, as well as weekly reports on XBox 360 sales vs projected sales, and what co-workers who vacation in Japan have been told by their friends over there.
Lineage went to the top of the MMORPG market based on the Asian market alone; WoW went from 3 millian to 6 million subscribers in 3 weeks on entering the Asian market. People in South Korea regularly play these games until they literally drop dead; this has happened often enough that the government is drafting a law to try to limit this. These are subscription based products--no piracy possible. Wizardry, long since a memory here, is still updated and reissued in Japan--it was the only thing that kept Sirtech afloat in the latter days. We get about half of the gadgets on the market here that are available in Japan. The demand there far surpasses the demand here.
So this isn't anecdotal evidence, based on a couple guys I met. This is a long established pattern going back 30 years.
All of this stuff about the PS3 being dead is pure media hype originating from Microsoft. No one who is actually in the game industry believes a word of it. We watched the sales of the XBox 360 and could already see the writing on the wall. All hype to the contrary, it tanked. Within a couple months of release, Microsoft was already making the "We'll get 'em next time" speech. Piles of them collected dust in the Asian market, and they are still collecting dust.
The PS3 will own the Asian market. That's a given--the brand loyalty over there is very strong, and $600 is nothing for a console over there; game afficionadoes in Japan, Korea, Singapore, and the richer parts of china have a stack of consoles, a drawer full of handhelds, and a state of the art PC. They'll spend $600 on their graphics card--every year. They love their gadgets, and they always want the latest. In Japan, you can walk down the street on garbage day and pick up year-old big screen TV's that have been left out of the curb just because they're a year old. You can furnish your apartment in grand style by garbage picking--I know people who've done just that. Those for whom it is a lot of money are already saving up for their PS3. The PS3 will make more sales in Japan alone than the 360 has made worldwide.
Sales in the North America and Europe may start off slow, but they will continue to be steady throughout the PS3's lifespan, as prices and production costs drop. The PS2 continue to sell more units than any form of XBox. And to get to the basic configuration of the PS3, you have to spend almost as much on a 360.
Nobody in the industry would even consider writing off the PS3. To see posts about the alleged failure of the PS3 on Slashdot of all places, the most anti-Microsoft site pushing Microsoft FUD, is mind boggling. I'm sure the people at Microsoft's PR department are all high-fiving each other, even as the bean counters look at the numbers and glumly acknowledge the awful truth.
I just bought a Linksys, replacing a Netgear, and so far it's great. Loved the features on the Netgear, hated the instability. Damn thing took up to an hour to boot; it kept crashing over and over again. Netgear is sucking badly these days. The Linksys boots in seconds, and has all the features I want anyway.
You will note that I said that he doesn't believe it is possible. This is not the same as saying that he believes it is impossible, only that he has not seen any evidence to support the belief that some people can read other's minds. If he did believe that psi were possible, then that would be a positive claim, and he would have to prove that, wouldn't he? The onus of proof is on him only if he provides an alternative explanation for a positive result, as the CSICOP quote says, and this is the point he keeps trying to make, and people like you keep missing--there are no positive results. Please reread your own post, carefully this time.
And since Randi isn't even involved in the tests, as I have already mentioned, I fail to see how your claim is relevant, even if it were true.
An open mind should be open at both ends--it should excrete as well as consume. Theories which have a history of empirical failure are not on an equal footing with other theories. If it's wrong every time over a thousand trials, it's probably going to be wrong forever. After a certain number of negative results, we consider them false. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. This is why creationists encouraging schools to "teach the controversy" are lying. This is also why people arguing that we should keep an open mind towards telepathy are 99.99% likely to be wasting our time.
Randi doesn't have to get perfect results in telepathy, since he doesn't believe it is possible. That's his whole point. Randi can, however, confound ordinary scientists using ordinary conjuring methods. They don't know how to spot them.
Randi doesn't attend the tests, but does send someone trained in conjuring along to identify obvious conjuring tricks. Scientists are not trained in recognizing these. Between the scientists and conjurer examiners, no one has ever made it past even the screening phase.
No proper scientific study of telepathy has ever produced significant results. Those that claim to produce significant results have major holes in them; controlling for these gives you a negative result. Scientific results must be repeatable; no positive result on telepathy has ever been repeated.
The sheer willingness to accept the belief in telepathy and other magical powers would make a significant result ring out like a nuclear blast through the scientific community, and would make the headlines of every newspaper in the world. It's guaranteed Nobel prize material; proving it would put you in the ranks of Einstein and Newton, your name would be immortalized for the rest of human history. Furthermore, you would become absurdly rich. And yet, no one has done it. But this willingness also makes most laymen hopelessly gullible on the subject. The money that has been pissed away on this bullshit runs in the billions. In the hands of legitimate researchers, we might now have a cure for cancer by now instead of an endless stream of pseudo-scientific, pseudo-religious tripe, so treasured by those who couldn't tell a significant result from a fairy tale if their life depended on it.
Other posters mentioned remote viewing and Khun. As for remote viewing, the Soviet Union was the worldwide distributor of woo-woo pseudo-science, and there were plenty of muscle heads in the military and intelligence community who were all too willing to lap up this delusional vodka-fuelled piss. So they threw money at it, and more money, and more money, because the soviets, as is the custom of religious fanatics, swore up and down that the glory of communism had given their people miraculous powers. This is not something to be quoted and celebrated, but something to be ignored and feel embarrassed about.
Thomas Khun has become the darling of postmodernists, and conspiracy nuts who think that SCIENTISTS ARE A CABAL WHO ARE SUPPRESSING THE TRUTH (they always speak in caps, a trait they share with schizophrenics.) He has become a great ally to fundamentalists of all stripes, who would like to claim that all beliefs are equal (but, of course, theirs are equaller than others.) So you have Hindu computers and Christian reactors.. oh, that's right, you don't. No religion has ever made a single contribution to science and technology. How about that? Apparently, despite all claims, they haven't a clue about how the world really works.
The belief in telepathy has never contributed anything to science either. Stop wasting our time.
If option (2) is true, it means that the scientists in question will be metaphorically shot by the scientific community for daring to question the great reletivity laws, and remove bad scientists from the community.
No, they won't be shot. Stephen Hawking has challenged Einstein's theories and been wrong about nearly everything he's ever proposed, and he's still considered a good physicist. It's okay to challenge the dominant theory, just as long as you have good evidence to back it up, and your theory explains something that nothing else does. Bad science is done with poor or no evidence, explains even less than the current theory, and is usually presented to the general public without peer review. When confronted with evidence that proves their theory false, good scientists concede, while bad scientists wail on about scientific orthodoxy and appeal to popular opinion.
I think the tip-off about these people is the part that says education was a "well heeled, publicly funded lobby . . . devoted to abolishing creators' rights on the Internet." He's talking about students and public libraries here; not exactly my idea of well heeled.
When I hear spin like this, I smell bullshit.
Excellent post!
The subtleties of maturity beat the thrills of immaturity anytime. The world is a complex place, and I love the complexity of it. The best taste in life is bittersweet, with only enough sweetness to prevent the bitter from being bland. It's no surprise that diabetes is on the rise. People have lost the palate for strong tastes. Even fibre comes in a pill, as if eating raw oats and bran is some sort of trial too harsh for people to bear. The world is divided into simple primary colors and basic binaries: red and blue, left and right, liberal vs conservative. Only the caricatures that pass as media personalities fit into these categories. The world is just not that simple.
It is revealing to contrast the tone of public discourse 50 years ago to what it is today. Ronald Reagan abandoned formal rhetoric for folksy chat, and now we're stuck with it. G W Bush got elected by appearing to be just a regular guy--at some point, people forgot that you don't want just a regular guy as your leader, you want the best and brightest. Distrust of intellectuals is at an all time high, because it takes work to understand what they're saying. But democracy takes work, every single day.
I've always suspected that the main point of "family values" and all of these exhortations to "think of the children" are just scare tactics to turn the world into the largest nursery in history, where you cannot even have an adult conversation, and where kids aren't even allowed to play unsupervised. Can you imagine a childhood where you have to make "play dates," where it is no longer possible to just walk anywhere? Thanks to media scaremongering, parents see the world as a frightening place with a child molestor or Satanic cult member lurking in every playground. The fact is, your kids are about a hundred times as likely to get killed by a car as they are to be kidnapped. But that doesn't sell soap.
Even God has been turned into the cosmic wetnurse, who will rapture us up, clean our nappies, and dry our tears. ID promises us the fantasy of every child; that we are the center of the universe, that it's really all for us. Since you're saved by faith alone, you don't have to do jack, just show up at the mega-church for the show and listen to a postmodernist drivel which is equal parts fairy tale and new-age glurge. You gotta hand it to them, they know their market. Why stop at frying your pancreas with candy, when you can get diabetes of the soul too?
Which would be great if American companies like Haliburton didn't maintain shell subsidiaries in places like the Caiman Islands. These subsidiaries are apparently not bound by American law, even though they amount to a post office box whose contents are forwarded to the States. This is how Haliburton got away with dealing with Iran while it was illegal to do so, even selling them centrifuges used in their nuclear project.
In any case, the cozy relationship between the Saudi Royal family and American business and government amounts to bribe of a different type--information and contacts. George Bush Sr. worked for the Saudis while still receiving intelligence briefings, a right that all former presidents have but which has always been waived. Bush Sr. was the first former president to insist on getting them. You can bet that Bush Jr. will be getting them too--the President who walked hand in hand with Prince Bandar. And now those intelligence reports will include the banking information of competing companies. The money to be made here makes simple bribes miniscule by comparison. Not even Airbus is in the position to offer the kind of money that can be made by investing a billion dollars in a small company that is about to win a massive government contract.
Which means that even after Bush is out of office, he will still have his hand in the federal pie, and will be able to sell a piece of that pie to the highest bidder. Not bad for a spoiled dilletante with no talent for business. We're stuck with the bastard till the day he dies.
Nah, just Wind. Or, Doh!
That's why you make it a requirement that Paladin's must gain reputation points to advance, and those reputation points require that they spend time helping others. The point here is to frustrate power gamers, who are usually snotty little twinks that everyone hates.
Agreed. After trying many MMORPG's (including WoW) I've gone back to City of Heroes/City of Villains. Fifteen minute missions, casual grouping, genuine strategic strengths and weaknesses that make a major difference between a good player and a poor player. I can get some good gaming in as little as half an hour, squeezing in a mission or two before dinner or before bed.
What the article is about is not work, but what I call trial-by-boredom, a term I came up with during my years of tabletop playing. You know those DM's who insisted that you describe exactly what you were doing every step of the way to detect traps, looks for monsters, etc, etc, until the group lapsed into a coma and then he sprang his dastardly trap. Yeah, that crap. When I ran it, every room had something of interest, and I described it from the point of view of experienced adventurers ("That table looks a little to thick to be made of just solid wood--you probably want to take a closer look at it.") When running a game, you have to take into account that the player, who is isolated by the interface or by your description, has a much lower bandwidth of information than his character, who is right there on the scene. This is my ongoing problem with Neverwinter Nights campaigns. The DM, having designed the dungeon, thinks that everyone knows what he does. He drops an oblique hint, then kills the entire party in frustration because they didn't pick up on his casual clue.
In MMORPG's, trial-by-boredom consists of all crafting, and rare-spawn rare-drop hunting. Most crafting should by done offline by the character after you log intentions for what you are doing till you next log in; you get to work to select a range of difficulty versus money earned--the more you earn, the less you learn, and to learn a lot, you have to pay for materials wasted and the craft master's time. The best items should always be player made. As for the rare-spawn, rare-drop syndrome, all rare components should be obtainable by pyramid style quests: you get X from A by doing his quest, turn in X's to B to get Y's, then turn in some Y's to C to get what you want. Rare boss monsters should be ransomed, not killed. You fight through the guards and the elite champions, till you get to the king, who lets you choose the ransom you want. This is the way it worked historically. You get to choose what drops, and instead of the one dragon scale that you auction to the 50 people in the raid, you get a dragon scale for everyone in the raid, guaranteed (you just beat the dragon to a standstill till he submits, after which he gives you part of his last moult.) Of course, you might also get a dragon scale from a dragon for bringing him a few pounds of his favourite berries, which happen to grow in hostile territory...
Also underplayed in MMORPG's is the social aspect, which is where you may interest more women. Find and deliver a cure for a rare disease for the nephew of the King of an enemy race, and you may gain right of passage into an enemy city, under the proviso that you keep your sword sheathed. Bring a bottle of good brandy to a notoriously tough guard, and he may wink at you and let you pass unmolested from then on. Make the Paladin the toughest character in the game--but require him to have a high reputation to advance, which can be gained only by helping other players. Become a merchant who trades in rare goods across enemy lines, and secure safe passage in areas no one is allowed to go, allowing you to act as ambassador.
Make each server retain it's own history, with each significant advance (a newly discovered formula, area, technique, or treaty) bear the name of the original character who initiated it (such discoveries are subject to chance, so few characters will have more than one or two.) Allow the actions and choice of allegiance of characters to change the world, so that those servers dominated by evil characters become fly-blown wastelands where even food is expensive, and those dominated by good players become lush gardens (use algorithmic tex
Why does this smell like a Microsoft FUD plant? We've already seen what the PS3 can do--it blows the 360 away. And why would anyone go into the technical details of memory and bus speed without going all the way and actually understanding what that memory is used for and why the Cell doesn't have to access it at all! It's bad enough that someone wrote this piece of FUD--it's worse that Slashdot gave it a headline.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
Every aspect of every conspiracy theory about 9/11 has been systematically debunked somewhere or another. Since the WTC was structurally unique, comparisons to other buildings really don't have much bearing in the matter, and while they anticipated the impact of a 707, they did not take into account the combined effect of impact and a full load of fuel; all of this, of course, assumes that the designers were correct when saying that the building could withstand a 707. Timelines show that jets were scrambled in a timely manner when the situation was understood (within minutes of realizing the planes were hijacked and pinpointing their locations.) The dissenting expert opinions are not unusual in science; all scientific fields have their share of wing nuts, but these are fringe opinions usually based upon a single, simplistic, and inconclusive study. There were also people who speculated openly in the early days, and have since come to regret it. In the course of normal science these come out in the wash, but conspiracy theorists cherry pick these and run with them--in some cases, long after the original proponent has disowned and attempted to kill the theory attributed to him. There are pseudo-scientific theories that persist decades after they have been debunked.
The most frustrating thing about conspiracy theories is not the individual factoids that comprise them, but the profound ignorance of human nature, and the obessively magical thinking, that underlie them. As Ben Franklin said, three may keep a secret if two of them are dead. 9/11 conspiracy theories require thousands of conspirators--think of just what would be required to run drone planes into buildings, dispose of all the passengers, rig the buildings, fake everything so that the airlines wouldn't notice, and on, and on, and on. Even the mafia can't keep a secret when the boss tells one guy to whack another, and that's a conspiracy of two, protected by the Omerta!
Only a true fanatic can keep secrets like these, and then, only for a short time, provided he is kept relatively isolated. The Al Queda plan was remarkeably low tech with few moving parts and carried out by a small group of fanatics, most of whom did not arrive in America until a couple days beforehand. Even so, it almost got discovered beforehand. In the aftermath, there is almost no detail of how it was done that we don't know. Compare this with conspiracy theories, which remain isolated pinpoints of data organized by a unifying myth. The Al Queda plan left a big footprint. A government conspiracy would have left an even bigger one.
Conspiracy theories are the new secular religion, supported by the same cognitive errors which support religion, and serving the same purpose. To the conspiracy theorist, the dark cabals which run the world are both stupid and supernaturally brilliant, fools who are somehow capable of godlike prescience, omiscience, and control. The conspiracy theorist himself is a figure on the same mythical scale: he has pierced the veil of the illuminati, seen what few have seen--he is the great challenger to this omnipotent cabal. By following his warnings, we shall overcome the evil presence which has corrupted our world from within, and restore all to goodness and innocence. It's all good, because the solution is so simple.
You'll never convince him otherwise, because his entire conception of self is wound up in the idea that he is the rare visionary, the one who cannot be fooled. To admit that he is wrong would require him to admit that he is profoundly wrong, not just gulled, but gullible. This would be a fall of luciferian proportion, from grand visier to court fool. Conspiracy theorists tend to be marginal and disenfranchised. The fall from mythic heights to the harsh reality of their lives is very hard indeed.
The reality, of course, is that there may actually be no one in control, that both the leaders and the conspiracy theorists can't tell their assholes from a gopher hole, and that this has been the situation for nearly all of hum
Yeah, 1 seems the best. Has the same amount of information, but a very light touch.
No, that's Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday morning. A lot of companies begin their work week on Sundays. Two allnighters, two days with very little sleep, and by 10 o'clock on Thursday morning, you have 100 hours. That's when they finally told me to go home.
I have to agree with the other respondents. I work in the games industry, and I discovered early that perpetual crunch mode does not work. The first company I worked in enforced 60 hour minimum weeks, with 80+ at peak. I clocked over 100 hours one week--by Thursday morning. It took me a month to fix the damage I did that week. I soon discovered that the work habits of everyone in the company had deteriorated to the point that it took 60 hours to get 35 hours work out of people, and if they went did work 40 hours, you barely got 20 out of them. This is called burnout. I remember one guy who was considered a crunch time hero, who wandered in at 11:00, didn't start asking code related questions till 4:00, and left at 8:00 most days. This means he barely put in 4 hours a day.
Labour did not invent the 40 hour work week--in fact, they opposed it because they were paid by the hour. For 150 years companies have been doing research into the optimum work week, and they keep coming up with the magic number 40. When you go over this number, errors due to fatigue cancel out any productivity gained. You can exceed this for short durations, but the gains decline rapidly. It seems that every generation insists on learning this again the hard way. Companies get around it by literally cycling through employees; they get a lot of kids who aren't burnt out, but most of them have don't stick around long enough to gain much experience.
Of course, there are the other costs as well. The other team at the first company I worked at had six married members when the project they were working on started. By the time it was done, all of them were divorced. I worked long hours on a project for a dot com back in 2000. The guy I worked with, a good friend of mine, died last year of congestive heart failure, caused by chronic stress. If you're working 60 hours a week or more on a regular basis, your boss is an incompetent boob. Your job isn't worth giving up your life for, figuratively or literally.
Multiple forms of ID mean multiple databases, many of which duplicate sensitive data. Having it all in a central database does permit it to be searched from one source, but that does not mean that you are any more exposed. In fact, the duplication across multiple databases means that your information exists in many places, some of which may not be secure. This means that not only can the government access it, but even less scupulous parties can get to it.
Also, don't forget that innacurate information may prove as damaging to you as accurate information. If some cop suspects you of a crime that you had nothing to do with, and enters this in some criminal database, your "deviance quotient" increases (yes, I heard this phrase used by a cop; someone I know was once denied a security clearance based upon actions of members of their family, which, when described, turned out to be mostly innuendo.) In the absence of accurate information, the authorities are free to spin tales about you that still may have some effect on your life. They don't have to explain why they denied you a security clearance. Do you actually think that the Nazis arrested all those people based on accurate information? It's not what they know about you, but what they claim to know.
Furthermore, your bank knows more about you than you'll ever tell the government, and the government doesn't even need to a subpeona to get a hold of it. Credit information has been available to financial institutions for decades. Do you have an Air-Miles card? This is a data mining tool which tracks everything you buy and everywhere you go, and that information is for sale.
At least a central database might have some requirements for accuracy, and some minimum security standards, unlike the bulk of the information that is floating around out there about you right now. They might even keep records on who requested access, unlike most of these data sources. A good private investigator can collect a ton of information on you quickly and easily; so can an accomplished thief or an experienced intelligence agent. Your life history is out there, right now, for sale to anyone who wants it.
Artist, in this case, includes the song writers, who make more money than the recording artist (who may not even get a percentage, but only scale.) But even song-writers who perform their own material, and produce it in their own studios, the take is usually well short of a dollar per CD. Only about five years ago Paul MacCartney became the first artist in history to break the dollar barrier--and he handed the record company a finished product. All they had to do was burn it and ship it, and I never heard a peep of advertising for that album. So, the record company got about 4 dollars for maybe 20 cents worth of production.
It would be nice if sound engineers and cover artists made a good living, but they don't. That's not where the money goes--if all the rest of the artistic talent that goes into packaging and selling make even 20 cents per album, I'd be very surprised. Cover artists make peanuts. Even Andy Warhol couldn't get paid for cover art. Talent scouts used to actually know something about music, but now they're just marketers who try to guess what they can sell. As for marketing agents studying a craft, you obviously haven't met many of them. They are the most singularly inept, idiotic, and misinformed bunch I have ever met. Trust me, the vast majority of them have never studied anything, and seem to consider aggressive ignorance a great virtue. They, however, like the lawyers and the managers, probably take the bulk of the money.
No, open source game engines would mean that instead of paying a huge load of cash for an engine, that huge load of cash would be available to pay programmers to modify the engine. Instead of slave driving coders to build yet another throw away engine, they could concentrate on working on gameplay. And instead of needing a million dollars up front just to think about making a game, smaller developing houses might be able to compete, rather than see the industry whittled down to a handful of giant corporations who run sweatshops.
If we're having trouble making a living, it's because we always have to go out and reinvent the wheel. Eventually people get sick of paying again and again for the same damn thing.