That doesn't mean people should go out of their way to persecute such folks, but it does mean they should be kept away from positions of authority. They lack a material connection to the future, and their motives are suspect. They lack the biological mechanisms that prevent toxic decadence in a human culture.
Regardless of how they are reared, those children ARE the human race, and they ARE the social fabric. Those who tend them are better attuned to the future than you are. Life is brutal sometimes.
Though typically, they argue the case very passionately, usually people with such views have another and deeply more sinister agenda that is tied to the laws laid out in bronze age texts, that were in turn passed along by word of mouth from a pack of bare arse savages. It is no more than a strongly vocalised opinion that sadly benefits from staggering political backing in many nations. Personally I believe that the real threat to mankind is these very religions and those who prioritise the agenda of their imaginary, magical, scolding father figures over that of the betterment of humanity and they should most certainly be kept away from positions of authority. Certainly these delusional influences have a far more serious detrimental effect on intellectual judgement compared to what gender someone enjoys as sexual partners.
If it's a legitimate argument for people who download music and movies, then it's a legitimate argument in this case. Or else it's inaccurate in both cases. You can't have it both ways.
Many people in this case may have lost their original files which is rather different from having someone copy them. Piracy != theft. Sure most people here wouldn't steal a car, but if they could download one from the internet I'm sure a lot more people would.
I don't usually reply to my own comments, but I realized I got distracted and forgot to present my argument. Here it is:
The extradition arrangement is not reciprocal.
It's worse even than you may suspect. As shown in the case of the Enron three, the prosecutors even get to cherry pick which state to extradite to for more favourable local laws and chances of prosecution, longer jail terms for specific crimes etc. They can even jail you for things that aren't even recognised as a crime in the UK (in the Enron 3's example it they were charged with wire fraud from the UK against a UK bank.)
Roll on Scottish independence and away from these crazy treaties and the farce of an unelected government the UK is currently suffering through.
If Indian instructors are nearly as hard to understand at the tech phone supports I've had from "Bob" lately....well, it will surely degrade the already failing US education system. Hard to learn if you can't understand a damned thing the instructor is trying to say...
I'm going to have to strongly disagree with the stereotyping going on all over this topic, having recently experienced the reverse of this phenomenon. In my computer science degree we covered advanced AI + Intelligent systems in the second and final years and I found the local based lecturer difficult to understand. Not his accent I hasten to add, he spoke very clearly but he taught in an overly complicated manner. In the end I was saved from panic/ruin and ultimately failing the course when I found a massive set of free lectures on YouTube by some Indian professor who explained it really clearly in spite of his strong Indian accent.
I guess the Einstein quote rings true in my experience, "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough."
Interestingly the lecturer is part of some government funded Indian University that do free e-courses on a wide range of science + Engineering topics (all in English it seems) with all the lectures online and handouts / coursework up for free digital download. Not looked through the site in depth but seems to be genuinely free beer learning on degree level e-courses. Again I stress that I've not looked through the site in detail yet, but it seems like they take some of the strongest lecturers from Indian universities and basically record their lectures and upload all their hand outs etc.
Please don't perpetuate stereotypes, yes sometimes they do hold some truth but that's no reason to write off so many other really cool things out there.
If the Iranian government were so concerned over the deaths of their poor due to economic sanctions, then they would accede to their international obligations of forsaking Hezbollah and abandoning their nuclear weapon aspirations.
Perhaps if you could provide some direct evidence of their nuclear weapons aspiration. Perhaps I'm being a cynic but we heard the whole WMD line with Iraq and it was (at least in the UK) proven to be a complete fabrication. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/middle_east/02/uk_dossier_on_iraq/html/full_dossier.stm) So when that line failed they tried to focus on the human rights abuses. Unfortunately we replaced one set of human rights abuses with another. We did no good there, just killed an awful lot of people.
Considering our constant threats of violent action for political and ecenomic purposes.
(Cambridge online dictionary) terrorism noun/ter..r.zm//-.-/ [U] Definition (threats of) violent action for political purposes
"Tensions Over Hormuz Raise Ugly Possibilities For War"
It's no wonder the Iranians are deeply upset by the sanctions. Surely some people do realise that economic sanctions will likely kill an awful lot of the poorest people in Iran and the sanctions are in themselves, a declaration of war. Theses sanctions worked so very well in Iraq with estimations of up to 1.7 million civilian deaths as a direct result of these sanctions by 1995. http://www.mediamonitors.net/mosaddeq17.html. Like with Iraq, there is no direct evidence of a reason for war and we have already seen the political posturing and powers that be, who already have Iraqi blood on their hands are still lying to us with articles such as this http://www.adl.org/main_International_Affairs/ahmadinejad_words.htm.
For people who don't see how sanctions can kill so many people (taken from UNICEF report 1995 (sorry original link to the report is no longer working ) “Sanctions are inhibiting the importation of spare parts, chemicals, reagents, and the means of transportation required to provide water and sanitation services to the civilian population of Iraq... What has become increasingly clear is that no significant movement towards food security can be achieved so long as the embargo remains in place. All vital contributors to food availability - agricultural production, importation of foodstuffs, economic stability and income generation, are dependent on Iraq’s ability to purchase and import those items vital to the survival of the civilian population.”
a senior sysadmin should expect to write some in-house tools, yes.
Perhaps the wages or treatment of staff is particularly poor, though he (or she) does say he developed it in his own time. Perhaps two pertinent questions are if he enjoyed doing this little side project like a hobby and also if this releases the work burden on some of his colleagues, could this lead to some of them being laid off as a result?
Delist every high-fashion apparel producer from Google Search, that will put a big dent in it.
I used to live in an extremely bad area in Glasgow / Scotland where drugs and prostitution were everywhere. Over the road from me was a homeless hostel and round the back of my apartment block was a methadone clinic and prostitutes stood on street corners for blocks in every direction. I've seen dealers injecting heroin into girls who looked around 12 years old before sending these kids out into the streets to pay for it while the police turned a blind eye (they had some kind of experimental tolerance policy in place between 9 pm till 3 am). Trust me, there are many worse things these children can be forced to do rather than making trainers or iPads for a living. Apparently human trafficking can be just as horrific as drug addict child prostitution and if Google pledges to charities that can actually help prevent some of this stuff then I say good for them.
Also, this option really doesn't change anything what Facebook knows about you. It presents you an option to discuss with professionals if you need help.
Can't help but feel that people who are having genuine thoughts about suicide would be rather unlikely to care about updating their facebook status to reflect this. Given the way FB has consistently treated its userbase with greed and contempt, it's hard not to see this as a PR stunt wrapped around another data gold mining opportunity.
If the US wanted to, they could have nuked the entire Muslim world after 9/11, given the popular mood in the country.
Not without facing enforced disarmament and decades of sanctions from the rest of the developed world. This is a very bad American stereotype you are bandying around here. 'We can do what we want because we got the bomb and people should be grateful we don't just nuke them into the stone age..' There is a whole world out there and America becoming a rogue nuclear state would not go down well with the rest of it.
Re:Almost as if someone had designed it....
on
Is the Earth Special?
·
· Score: 4, Funny
I can already hear the "intelligent design" folks jumping on this topic as proof that we aren't here through random chance but were assembled by some creator.
To be fair, sometimes I think planetary scientists can be extremely narrow minded, especially given the focus of their study has a sample size of 1.
Britney Spears got mentioned on/. because of her voice?
Only because of her voice coaching. They make it sound almost like she came up with the technique, next they will have us believe this performing monkey actually programmes the synths and writes her own music.
A counter-argument is that it's not altruism so much as monkeys finding expressions of distress unpleasant, meaning they avoid pulling a cord that results in unpleasant sounds: a selfish behavior, because the real goal is to avoid hearing sounds they don't like.
There are many forms of altruism in animals such as bats regurgitating blood for hungry cave mates or birds that give a warning cry of predators that reveals the location of the caller to said predators. However altruism is an arguable word in its definition, as typically these gestures of altruism come with increased interest from the opposite sex, a gesture of superiority so to speak which arguably is exactly the same in humans. It could also be said that true altruism does not exist, in humans or animals.
Ban this game: Its a sick, violent and racist game that cannot be played without a high body count. The whites versus the blacks in this war against race, but the people who make the game decided that whites are superior and must start with an advantage. There is a strong caste social system in the game and players are encouraged to happily send the poor people out to die so that the more wealthy characters are more likely to survive. The sick bastards who play this game never feel remorse with the violence. I tell you, speaking as a mother, this game is making our children into sociopaths. We must ban chess now!
You mean Mathematical models like the theory of gravity? Yup, sounds pretty reasonable.
There are other more complicated but also more plausible and elegant solutions that exist without needing to introduce dark matter. The problem dark matter attempts to solve are curves witnessed in galaxy rotation that are inconsistent with our understanding of gravity and mass. The key hypothesis is that dark matter is a dipolar fluid composed from gravitational dipoles (in analogy with electric dipole, a gravitational dipole is defined as a system composed of two particles, one with positive and one with negative gravitational charge). the galaxy rotation curves can be considered as result of the gravitational polarization of the dipolar fluid by the gravitational field of baryonic matter.
This paper: http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1106/1106.0847.pdf by D S Hajdukovic at CERN proposes that dark matter does not exist but its measured effect is merely an illusion created by the polarization of the quantum vacuum by the gravitational field of the baryonic matter.
That's right, people are actually trumpeting the use of a browser made by a company with a financial interest in snooping your data and delivering web ads. Slashdot has gone 180 degrees.
You can assume evil intent, or you can just accept that most people consider Chrome to be a superior browser (that doesn't default to Bing).
A religious rant, condemning other theories as inadequate, antiquated, and conforming to orthodoxy. On the internet too. Wow, who would have anticipated that?
To be fair, using mathematical models on stuff we can see and measure seems a reasonable idea as opposed to inventing an invisible, incorporeal, magical material that we have no direct evidence even exists in order to compensate for our lack of understanding in how the Universe moves.
Plot being the key word here. A lot of CGI seems built to look great for the trailers rather than actually furthering the plot. I don't see why the film 'C' cannot make full use of models but then enhance it with CGI. Without fail, every character or rendering in CGI looks depressingly fake, especially 6 months to a year after release, but there are many films where the CGI enhancements look fantastic and do not age anywhere near as fast.
When you see a terrible, unrealistic special effect, it snaps you out of that "zone." I'd rather not see it at all than see it badly.
I would agree with this, but to me CGI has turned horror movies and sci-fi into versions of Who Frame Roger Rabbit only slightly less scary. There is no more zone.
If they keep this up I might join you. The USA will probably make facebook accounts mandatory so the NSA can track us better.
Yes despite all the terrible press the EU gets especially in the UK, there are some nice things coming out of it like forcing mobile phone companies to all use mini-usb chargers. Sometimes I wish England would stop dicking about in EU and actually commit to something bigger than themselves for reasons other than personal greed.
Slashdot Mirror
That doesn't mean people should go out of their way to persecute such folks, but it does mean they should be kept away from positions of authority. They lack a material connection to the future, and their motives are suspect. They lack the biological mechanisms that prevent toxic decadence in a human culture.
Regardless of how they are reared, those children ARE the human race, and they ARE the social fabric. Those who tend them are better attuned to the future than you are. Life is brutal sometimes.
Though typically, they argue the case very passionately, usually people with such views have another and deeply more sinister agenda that is tied to the laws laid out in bronze age texts, that were in turn passed along by word of mouth from a pack of bare arse savages. It is no more than a strongly vocalised opinion that sadly benefits from staggering political backing in many nations. Personally I believe that the real threat to mankind is these very religions and those who prioritise the agenda of their imaginary, magical, scolding father figures over that of the betterment of humanity and they should most certainly be kept away from positions of authority. Certainly these delusional influences have a far more serious detrimental effect on intellectual judgement compared to what gender someone enjoys as sexual partners.
For those interested in this treaty, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extradition_Act_2003 It makes for some outrageous reading.
Isn't this already debunked? Apparently temperatures haven't risen for 8 years?
Citation needed.
If it's a legitimate argument for people who download music and movies, then it's a legitimate argument in this case. Or else it's inaccurate in both cases. You can't have it both ways.
Many people in this case may have lost their original files which is rather different from having someone copy them. Piracy != theft. Sure most people here wouldn't steal a car, but if they could download one from the internet I'm sure a lot more people would.
I don't usually reply to my own comments, but I realized I got distracted and forgot to present my argument. Here it is: The extradition arrangement is not reciprocal.
It's worse even than you may suspect. As shown in the case of the Enron three, the prosecutors even get to cherry pick which state to extradite to for more favourable local laws and chances of prosecution, longer jail terms for specific crimes etc. They can even jail you for things that aren't even recognised as a crime in the UK (in the Enron 3's example it they were charged with wire fraud from the UK against a UK bank.)
Roll on Scottish independence and away from these crazy treaties and the farce of an unelected government the UK is currently suffering through.
More research into expanding the food supply might be a better use of resources.
More food = more people
What we need is better education and family planning services in poorer countries.
If Indian instructors are nearly as hard to understand at the tech phone supports I've had from "Bob" lately....well, it will surely degrade the already failing US education system. Hard to learn if you can't understand a damned thing the instructor is trying to say...
I'm going to have to strongly disagree with the stereotyping going on all over this topic, having recently experienced the reverse of this phenomenon. In my computer science degree we covered advanced AI + Intelligent systems in the second and final years and I found the local based lecturer difficult to understand. Not his accent I hasten to add, he spoke very clearly but he taught in an overly complicated manner. In the end I was saved from panic/ruin and ultimately failing the course when I found a massive set of free lectures on YouTube by some Indian professor who explained it really clearly in spite of his strong Indian accent.
I guess the Einstein quote rings true in my experience, "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough."
Interestingly the lecturer is part of some government funded Indian University that do free e-courses on a wide range of science + Engineering topics (all in English it seems) with all the lectures online and handouts / coursework up for free digital download. Not looked through the site in depth but seems to be genuinely free beer learning on degree level e-courses. Again I stress that I've not looked through the site in detail yet, but it seems like they take some of the strongest lecturers from Indian universities and basically record their lectures and upload all their hand outs etc.
Here's the address if anyone is interested: http://nptel.iitm.ac.in/
Please don't perpetuate stereotypes, yes sometimes they do hold some truth but that's no reason to write off so many other really cool things out there.
If the Iranian government were so concerned over the deaths of their poor due to economic sanctions, then they would accede to their international obligations of forsaking Hezbollah and abandoning their nuclear weapon aspirations.
Perhaps if you could provide some direct evidence of their nuclear weapons aspiration. Perhaps I'm being a cynic but we heard the whole WMD line with Iraq and it was (at least in the UK) proven to be a complete fabrication. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/middle_east/02/uk_dossier_on_iraq/html/full_dossier.stm) So when that line failed they tried to focus on the human rights abuses. Unfortunately we replaced one set of human rights abuses with another. We did no good there, just killed an awful lot of people.
Considering our constant threats of violent action for political and ecenomic purposes. /ter..r.zm//-.-/ [U] Definition (threats of) violent action for political purposes
(Cambridge online dictionary) terrorism noun
"Tensions Over Hormuz Raise Ugly Possibilities For War"
It's no wonder the Iranians are deeply upset by the sanctions. Surely some people do realise that economic sanctions will likely kill an awful lot of the poorest people in Iran and the sanctions are in themselves, a declaration of war. Theses sanctions worked so very well in Iraq with estimations of up to 1.7 million civilian deaths as a direct result of these sanctions by 1995. http://www.mediamonitors.net/mosaddeq17.html.
Like with Iraq, there is no direct evidence of a reason for war and we have already seen the political posturing and powers that be, who already have Iraqi blood on their hands are still lying to us with articles such as this http://www.adl.org/main_International_Affairs/ahmadinejad_words.htm.
For people who don't see how sanctions can kill so many people (taken from UNICEF report 1995 (sorry original link to the report is no longer working ) “Sanctions are inhibiting the importation of spare parts, chemicals, reagents, and the means of transportation required to provide water and sanitation services to the civilian population of Iraq... What has become increasingly clear is that no significant movement towards food security can be achieved so long as the embargo remains in place. All vital contributors to food availability - agricultural production, importation of foodstuffs, economic stability and income generation, are dependent on Iraq’s ability to purchase and import those items vital to the survival of the civilian population.”
a senior sysadmin should expect to write some in-house tools, yes.
Perhaps the wages or treatment of staff is particularly poor, though he (or she) does say he developed it in his own time. Perhaps two pertinent questions are if he enjoyed doing this little side project like a hobby and also if this releases the work burden on some of his colleagues, could this lead to some of them being laid off as a result?
Delist every high-fashion apparel producer from Google Search, that will put a big dent in it.
I used to live in an extremely bad area in Glasgow / Scotland where drugs and prostitution were everywhere. Over the road from me was a homeless hostel and round the back of my apartment block was a methadone clinic and prostitutes stood on street corners for blocks in every direction. I've seen dealers injecting heroin into girls who looked around 12 years old before sending these kids out into the streets to pay for it while the police turned a blind eye (they had some kind of experimental tolerance policy in place between 9 pm till 3 am). Trust me, there are many worse things these children can be forced to do rather than making trainers or iPads for a living. Apparently human trafficking can be just as horrific as drug addict child prostitution and if Google pledges to charities that can actually help prevent some of this stuff then I say good for them.
Although I am pretty sure this goes against a Geneva convention this is healthier for you than high speed lead.
Though to be fair I would rather go blind the natural way 'as God intended'. Shaking the meat! Choking the bishop... etc
Also, this option really doesn't change anything what Facebook knows about you. It presents you an option to discuss with professionals if you need help.
Can't help but feel that people who are having genuine thoughts about suicide would be rather unlikely to care about updating their facebook status to reflect this. Given the way FB has consistently treated its userbase with greed and contempt, it's hard not to see this as a PR stunt wrapped around another data gold mining opportunity.
If the US wanted to, they could have nuked the entire Muslim world after 9/11, given the popular mood in the country.
Not without facing enforced disarmament and decades of sanctions from the rest of the developed world. This is a very bad American stereotype you are bandying around here. 'We can do what we want because we got the bomb and people should be grateful we don't just nuke them into the stone age..' There is a whole world out there and America becoming a rogue nuclear state would not go down well with the rest of it.
I can already hear the "intelligent design" folks jumping on this topic as proof that we aren't here through random chance but were assembled by some creator.
To be fair, sometimes I think planetary scientists can be extremely narrow minded, especially given the focus of their study has a sample size of 1.
Britney Spears got mentioned on /. because of her voice?
Only because of her voice coaching. They make it sound almost like she came up with the technique, next they will have us believe this performing monkey actually programmes the synths and writes her own music.
A counter-argument is that it's not altruism so much as monkeys finding expressions of distress unpleasant, meaning they avoid pulling a cord that results in unpleasant sounds: a selfish behavior, because the real goal is to avoid hearing sounds they don't like.
There are many forms of altruism in animals such as bats regurgitating blood for hungry cave mates or birds that give a warning cry of predators that reveals the location of the caller to said predators. However altruism is an arguable word in its definition, as typically these gestures of altruism come with increased interest from the opposite sex, a gesture of superiority so to speak which arguably is exactly the same in humans. It could also be said that true altruism does not exist, in humans or animals.
Ban this game: Its a sick, violent and racist game that cannot be played without a high body count. The whites versus the blacks in this war against race, but the people who make the game decided that whites are superior and must start with an advantage. There is a strong caste social system in the game and players are encouraged to happily send the poor people out to die so that the more wealthy characters are more likely to survive. The sick bastards who play this game never feel remorse with the violence. I tell you, speaking as a mother, this game is making our children into sociopaths. We must ban chess now!
You mean Mathematical models like the theory of gravity? Yup, sounds pretty reasonable.
There are other more complicated but also more plausible and elegant solutions that exist without needing to introduce dark matter. The problem dark matter attempts to solve are curves witnessed in galaxy rotation that are inconsistent with our understanding of gravity and mass. The key hypothesis is that dark matter is a dipolar fluid composed from gravitational dipoles (in analogy with electric dipole, a gravitational dipole is defined as a system composed of two particles, one with positive and one with negative gravitational charge). the galaxy rotation curves can be considered as result of the gravitational polarization of the dipolar fluid by the gravitational field of baryonic matter.
This paper: http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1106/1106.0847.pdf by D S Hajdukovic at CERN proposes that dark matter does not exist but its measured effect is merely an illusion created by the polarization of the quantum vacuum by the gravitational field of the baryonic matter.
That's right, people are actually trumpeting the use of a browser made by a company with a financial interest in snooping your data and delivering web ads. Slashdot has gone 180 degrees.
You can assume evil intent, or you can just accept that most people consider Chrome to be a superior browser (that doesn't default to Bing).
A religious rant, condemning other theories as inadequate, antiquated, and conforming to orthodoxy. On the internet too. Wow, who would have anticipated that?
To be fair, using mathematical models on stuff we can see and measure seems a reasonable idea as opposed to inventing an invisible, incorporeal, magical material that we have no direct evidence even exists in order to compensate for our lack of understanding in how the Universe moves.
Turbolifts always moved at the speed of plot.
Plot being the key word here. A lot of CGI seems built to look great for the trailers rather than actually furthering the plot. I don't see why the film 'C' cannot make full use of models but then enhance it with CGI. Without fail, every character or rendering in CGI looks depressingly fake, especially 6 months to a year after release, but there are many films where the CGI enhancements look fantastic and do not age anywhere near as fast.
When you see a terrible, unrealistic special effect, it snaps you out of that "zone." I'd rather not see it at all than see it badly.
I would agree with this, but to me CGI has turned horror movies and sci-fi into versions of Who Frame Roger Rabbit only slightly less scary. There is no more zone.
If they keep this up I might join you. The USA will probably make facebook accounts mandatory so the NSA can track us better.
Yes despite all the terrible press the EU gets especially in the UK, there are some nice things coming out of it like forcing mobile phone companies to all use mini-usb chargers. Sometimes I wish England would stop dicking about in EU and actually commit to something bigger than themselves for reasons other than personal greed.
The Phillipines employ more people in call centers than India.
Yet India earns 10 times as much in outsourcing.
How can that be?
From the headline you never read, never mind TFA, "This year, call centers in the Philippines employed 50,000 more people than those in India."