There are millions of people posting things, and they just get deleted wack-a-mole style if the content is not "harmonious".
What I don't understand is the mindset of the army of censors the government must employ. It would be extremely difficult to find enough Americans to do that job without creating a sizable group trying to disrupt the system from the inside. Granted, we are pretty hard-core about our free speech and free press liberties compared to most nations outside of Scandinavia, but I just don't grok the reasoning behind valuing "harmony" above that.
And this beside the fact that I live in place that is 99% white people and my own culture. Most of the racial bias seem to come from other people or established things, and babies can't have that.
You are confusing racism for racial bias. One is a social construct, the other is innate.
Racism doesn't really exist until the minority population has reached a certain threshold size. Below that, there is no tangible group by which to prejudge others, so they get treated as individuals instead of defined by their race. In a high school setting, that threshold is having enough to fill a cafeteria table or comprise the majority of an existing subgroup, such as a sports team.
This aspect is what you are not seeing, but the biases are certainly there.
It's not a joke. I can write a program to solve Go in about a dozen lines of code, without even trying to compress it. It's about as complex as tic-tac-toe.
Building the computer that can complete this program before the heat-death of the universe? That's merely a hardware issue.
But if I ask all my friends to send emails, and thousands of individuals all reply, I would think that is more like speech, a la "free speech". Nothing in TFA says the emails were threatening or trying to harm the judge
Free speech guarantees you the opportunity to say what you wish, but it does not let you force the audience to listen. The content of what you say is protected, but the manner in which you say it is not. If you are choosing your delivery method in a manner specifically to harass others, you are not eligible for free speech protections.
Your rights only go so far as they do not impinge on the rights of others...you cannot force people to listen to you.
I think this is related to the fact that in our culture we really don't like plagiarism.
The continued economic success of Disney makes me inclined to believe otherwise. The vast majority of their content is ripped directly from Aesop, Hans Christian Andersen, Brothers Grimm, and others. Occasionally, they even plagiarize more modern content, like Kimba, the White Lion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimba_the_White_Lion
Otherwise you can forget reforming copyright law. I am not sure of the best argument for this, maybe someone else can think of a convincing one.
"The Congress shall have Power... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"
Why didn't the drafters add in: "The Congress shall have Power... To promote Warmth and Welfare of the Populace, by securing for limited Times to Citizens and Free Peoples the exclusive Right to the Shirts on their Backs"
The second version sounds absolutely ridiculous, because, unlike ideas, we actually own our clothing. The founding fathers understood that publishing an idea is like pissing in the ocean. Once you decide to do that, you can't get it back...it's not your piss anymore; you don't own it.
TJ's thoughts on the matter: http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_8s12.html
Now imagine the impact of that weapon that set off it's high explosives, in mid-air, over a large metropolis
A mid-air impact?
Yeah, for some reason, the Air Force might decide to transport nuclear weapons over a large metropolis, have a release accident, and have the bomb strike another aircraft, which happens to somehow set off the conventional explosives.
Then again, there is a 50-year old nuclear reactor just down the road. 200,000 people live within one mile of it. I still sleep peacefully at night.
I implemented a software project for a police department. I did my homework, fully vetted the system. I had limited trials and corrected what needed to be corrected. Come deployment, not a single officer used it. After months of work, the project was canned because the offers had "tried it and it didn't work". Aside from my early adopters ( the ones who had used it while it beta so I could squash any last minute bugs ), not a single officer had logged in to the system.
You aren't the first person to make the "my product is superior, but my customers are dumb" mistake.
Somewhere along the line, either in product design, interface design, implementation, documentation, and/or training, you failed to deliver what the customer needed. Usually, it's documentation and training. Change is expensive. People are resistant to it because it takes time to get proficient with a new product. Sure, it might make them more efficient next month or next year, but they have work that needs doing today.
Remember the jocks on the football team? By and large, it's the same mentality...These aren't the kind of people I would base any decision on.
Insult your customers if it makes you feel better, but if you want to sell something, remember this incident. Realize that it was you that dropped the ball.
Couldn't Warden have sent requests to the EFF to provide lawyers so he could fight an evil corporation to use freely publicly available information?
Finding something on the web does not give you the legal authority to publish and redistribute it. Sure, he could have stuck the whole thing on a torrent somewhere, but if he actually wants to do real work and real research with these data, he's got to play by the rules of the real world...the one with the big blue ceiling and a concept called the rule of law.
If you don't like that reality, keep it in mind next time you vote.
While I in no way support or encourage tail-gating, I can tell you that it does get really irritating in FL with grandma driving in the fast lane of a 3 or 4 lane freeway at 55-60mph.
Perhaps granny should change lanes, perhaps not; it depends on the specifics of traffic density, visibility, weather, etc. For traffic safety purposes, it's not so critical an issue as your emotional reaction to the situation.
If you are getting irritated by this, then you are the danger to others on the road here, not granny. Sure, it's likely that granny should pull over a lane or two, but it's you that needs to pull off the road, find a diner, have a cup of tea, and calm the fuck down.
Save your irritation for when you are stuck behind the granny that won't stay to the right on the escalator. You can even yell and swear and act like an ass. We understand. It's annoying to be there. When you are driving a vehicle, it's your job to keep your emotions in check. If the tiny things are already irritating you, how are you going to react to a more serious incident? If you're going to get proportionally more emotional, get the fuck off the road.
There were nearly 6,420,000 auto accidents in the United States in 2005. The financial cost of these crashes is more than 230 Billion dollars. 2.9 million people were injured and 42,636 people killed. About 115 people die every day in vehicle crashes in the United States -- one death every 13 minutes.
Be very careful when you bring monetary arguments into traffic safety debates. Beyond 40-45 mph, the average medical costs for an accident starts to go back down. Not to be crass, but a funeral is cheaper than physical therapy.
There are legitimate reasons for analyzing costs of traffic management both on a financial basis and a humanitarian basis. It is important to not intermingle them because they have very different responses to traffic speed. Results like "Doubling the average highway traffic speeds will reduce the per-accident medical expenses by a factor of 10!" may be both absolutely true and completely useless.
All corporations are inherently sociopathic, lacking in empathy, remorse, guilt...
A corporation pays my salary, so they can't be all bad.
Assigning any type of pathos to a corporation is silly. They have no emotions. I could just as usefully wonder if my desklamp is bored.
Claiming that a company lacks empathy is like claiming that democracy lacks a rosemary-garlic flavor. Lacking the capacity for emotions doesn't make something inherently evil or bad, it's simply a trait shared by essentially everything that is not human.
Would a locomotive be evil for crushing anything that gets in its way? We have a tendency to think that way about powerful corporations, when instead, we should be concerned about where we place the tracks (the laws).
How on earth did the Japanese develop 15 minute charging? That's a LOT of energy to dump into a car.
To put this in perspective of what we are accustomed to:
1 gallon of gas =~ 120MJ Average gas pump =~ 5-10 gpm
120MJ * 7.5 gpm * (1min/60sec) = 15 Megawatts
To put 15 Megawatts in perspective, the Niagara Falls hydroelectric plant, one of the biggest plants feeding the Eastern Seaboard, pumps out 2.4GW...which is less than the combined power of the gas pumps within a 5-mile radius
Basically, we are used to "charging" our cars really, REALLY fast. Attempting to replicate this performance with electricity is an extremely difficult problem.
Gasoline has two huge advantages over batteries:
1) Safety: untrained users operate quick-connect, megawatt-range power couplers with nearly negligible accident rates. Gasoline is ludicrously safe to handle for its power density. 2) Weight: gasoline doesn't need a oxidizer tank. 1kg of gasoline uses ~3kg of oxidizer. Gas vehicles use air. EVs have to lug both reactants around. In current EVs, ~20-25% of the battery capacity is used solely for storing the energy needed to transport the batteries, compared to about 1-2% for gasoline.
unfortunately the rest of the world is willing to purchase products made with poor environmental, labor and safety levels:/
"But there were other mass murderers that got away with it! Stalin killed many millions, died in his bed, well done there; Pol Pot killed 1.7 million Cambodians, died under house arrest at age 72, well done indeed! And the reason we let them get away with it is because they killed their own people, and we're sort of fine with that. “Ah, help yourself,” you know? “We've been trying to kill you for ages!” So kill your own people, right on there!"
list of all the major complaints of Mass effect 1 and used it to design Mass effect 2.
That's fine for developing sequels, but that's not where the money comes from, because a string of lucrative sequels can't exist if you don't get the first game right.
In the class, we studied quite a few of the developer post-mortems from Gamasutra. A common theme in those articles are the gut-wrenching wild-ass-guesses that need to be made when breaking into a new genre. Fan feedback is pretty useless if you are not building on what your fans have experience with.
Since the article is about trying to break into an area littered with epic failures (educational gaming), he's not going to get much input from fans beyond a history lesson of what went wrong. That won't tell him how to do things right. By this point all the low-hanging fruit is gone; all of the obvious ideas have been tried. You aren't going to succeed here on the strength of one cool idea you came up with 5 minutes ago.
This is why some hardcore philosophical analysis of games is actually needed; educational gaming has run out of nifty ideas that can be thrown against the wall to see what sticks.
An academic discipline full of fanboys, I can't wait!
I took a game analysis class last fall at MIT/GAMBIT, and went in with a similar attitude.
Yeah...there was a ton more reading and discussing heavy philosophy than I was expecting.
Deconstructing "fun" may seem like wanking, but it's serious business to the folks analyzing whether to gamble $50M on the next title.
Video game buyers are pretty fickle, and their answer to "what is fun" is generally "I know it when I see it". Development budgets have gotten large enough that investors need a little more than warm fuzzies before opening their wallets.
It had my age and zodiac sign (seriously Spokeo?) correct
The combination of approximate age, astrological zodiac, and Chinese zodiac are a convenient way of giving your exact date of birth within 2 weeks. It just presents it in a much less "alarming" fashion.
It also gives identity thieves enough data to bluff their way through a date-of-birth authentication over the phone or in person.
Assuming you were born on the 21st of the month: Guesses of {1,2} are explained as single-digit omission errors Guesses of {11,20,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,31} are single-digit transcription errors A guess of 12 is a transposition error A guess of 21 is accurate.
If the thief makes an authoritative-sounding and accurate claim of your birth-month and birth-year, he's got a 50-50 chance of getting past the question without raising [I]any[/I] suspicions, because half of all the birth-day guesses will be attributed by the authenticator as a simple typo in his records. Add in the accent/language barrier of an out-sourced call center, and it's even easier.
Apparently, but I can't tell who they are trying to damage.
So they don't want their albums broken up and sold piecemeal, as that treads upon their "artistic integrity". That is a giant load of bullshit. That's not art, that's capitalism.
Do they want to force me to listen to the whole album for the one song I want to hear at the moment? If so, they can fuck off. Do they instead want to force me to buy the whole album for the one song I want to own? Again, they can fuck off.
When Microsoft argued that unbundling Internet Explorer from Windows, it would "violate the integrity of the user experience". That was widely accepted as a steaming pile of crap. s/Microsoft/Pink Floyd/, and the argument is still a steaming pile of crap.
If they had announced, "we don't want to unbundle our albums because we make more money selling them entire", I could absolutely respect that. It's their product; they don't have a monopoly to abuse; they can sell their stuff how and as they please.
Of course, you don't discover that until you get home, when it's too late.
It's never too late. If you got ripped off by a store, take that product back and bitch. It's not a court of law, you don't need to have proof that you are right. Just stand your ground, and they will cave. The more expensive the item, the longer they will argue with you, but you'll win in the end. It is simply not worth the money to argue with you.
However, don't make it personal. Don't blame anybody specifically. Don't piss anyone off. You want the manager to be able to walk away happy that he/she made a rational and correct cost-benefit decision (i.e. feeling like a winner)
My main point here is that I have seen WAAAAAAAAAYYYYY too many arrogant programmers talking from their bum about how much better THEIR code would be if only THEY had a chance to rewrite it.
The same is true for everyone from novelists to plumbers to aircraft designers. The second time through generally yields a better result; it's just frequently not an option. This doesn't make anyone arrogant, it's just life.
You are misunderstanding the concept of "proof". Once you throw the concept of a god into the mix, you throw the ability to prove or disprove concepts out the window.
Finding inconsistencies in the bible only shows that inconsistencies can be found in the bible. Doing so proves nothing about god in the same way that watching an apple fall proves nothing about the law of gravity. Any argument can be justified through the concept of god. It may be unreasonable and unconvincing, but the argument is still both sound and valid.
All you accomplish by attacking the bible is venerating it as a source worthy of examination. It isn't. Just accept that the concept of god is just a logical nuke that makes any reasoned debate moot. That is the real divine power, and trying to fight it is pointless.
Slashdot Mirror
Good lord, for the last time, it's "cue". "Cue", not "queue"
Is that you call a queue bawl?
"What shape is a pyramid?"
"Pyramid-shaped."
What shape is a kite?
"Kite-shaped"
What shape is an egg?
"Oval."
English has tons of tautological shapes.
There are millions of people posting things, and they just get deleted wack-a-mole style if the content is not "harmonious".
What I don't understand is the mindset of the army of censors the government must employ. It would be extremely difficult to find enough Americans to do that job without creating a sizable group trying to disrupt the system from the inside. Granted, we are pretty hard-core about our free speech and free press liberties compared to most nations outside of Scandinavia, but I just don't grok the reasoning behind valuing "harmony" above that.
And this beside the fact that I live in place that is 99% white people and my own culture. Most of the racial bias seem to come from other people or established things, and babies can't have that.
You are confusing racism for racial bias. One is a social construct, the other is innate.
Racism doesn't really exist until the minority population has reached a certain threshold size. Below that, there is no tangible group by which to prejudge others, so they get treated as individuals instead of defined by their race. In a high school setting, that threshold is having enough to fill a cafeteria table or comprise the majority of an existing subgroup, such as a sports team.
This aspect is what you are not seeing, but the biases are certainly there.
Go is simpler than checkers? Is that a joke?
It's not a joke. I can write a program to solve Go in about a dozen lines of code, without even trying to compress it. It's about as complex as tic-tac-toe.
Building the computer that can complete this program before the heat-death of the universe? That's merely a hardware issue.
But if I ask all my friends to send emails, and thousands of individuals all reply, I would think that is more like speech, a la "free speech". Nothing in TFA says the emails were threatening or trying to harm the judge
Free speech guarantees you the opportunity to say what you wish, but it does not let you force the audience to listen. The content of what you say is protected, but the manner in which you say it is not. If you are choosing your delivery method in a manner specifically to harass others, you are not eligible for free speech protections.
Your rights only go so far as they do not impinge on the rights of others...you cannot force people to listen to you.
I think this is related to the fact that in our culture we really don't like plagiarism.
The continued economic success of Disney makes me inclined to believe otherwise. The vast majority of their content is ripped directly from Aesop, Hans Christian Andersen, Brothers Grimm, and others. Occasionally, they even plagiarize more modern content, like Kimba, the White Lion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimba_the_White_Lion
Otherwise you can forget reforming copyright law. I am not sure of the best argument for this, maybe someone else can think of a convincing one.
"The Congress shall have Power ... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"
Why didn't the drafters add in: ... To promote Warmth and Welfare of the Populace, by securing for limited Times to Citizens and Free Peoples the exclusive Right to the Shirts on their Backs"
"The Congress shall have Power
The second version sounds absolutely ridiculous, because, unlike ideas, we actually own our clothing. The founding fathers understood that publishing an idea is like pissing in the ocean. Once you decide to do that, you can't get it back...it's not your piss anymore; you don't own it.
TJ's thoughts on the matter:
http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_8s12.html
In Soviet Russia the government decides how many atoms to make
In the United States, the many Adams decided how to make the government
Now imagine the impact of that weapon that set off it's high explosives, in mid-air, over a large metropolis
A mid-air impact?
Yeah, for some reason, the Air Force might decide to transport nuclear weapons over a large metropolis, have a release accident, and have the bomb strike another aircraft, which happens to somehow set off the conventional explosives.
Then again, there is a 50-year old nuclear reactor just down the road. 200,000 people live within one mile of it. I still sleep peacefully at night.
I implemented a software project for a police department. I did my homework, fully vetted the system. I had limited trials and corrected what needed to be corrected. Come deployment, not a single officer used it. After months of work, the project was canned because the offers had "tried it and it didn't work". Aside from my early adopters ( the ones who had used it while it beta so I could squash any last minute bugs ), not a single officer had logged in to the system.
You aren't the first person to make the "my product is superior, but my customers are dumb" mistake.
Somewhere along the line, either in product design, interface design, implementation, documentation, and/or training, you failed to deliver what the customer needed. Usually, it's documentation and training. Change is expensive. People are resistant to it because it takes time to get proficient with a new product. Sure, it might make them more efficient next month or next year, but they have work that needs doing today.
Remember the jocks on the football team? By and large, it's the same mentality...These aren't the kind of people I would base any decision on.
Insult your customers if it makes you feel better, but if you want to sell something, remember this incident. Realize that it was you that dropped the ball.
Couldn't Warden have sent requests to the EFF to provide lawyers so he could fight an evil corporation to use freely publicly available information?
Finding something on the web does not give you the legal authority to publish and redistribute it. Sure, he could have stuck the whole thing on a torrent somewhere, but if he actually wants to do real work and real research with these data, he's got to play by the rules of the real world...the one with the big blue ceiling and a concept called the rule of law.
If you don't like that reality, keep it in mind next time you vote.
Just lay off the Salsa Cookies and you'll be fine.
Oh yeah...Windmill Cookies too...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpAzvKt_8lk
While I in no way support or encourage tail-gating, I can tell you that it does get really irritating in FL with grandma driving in the fast lane of a 3 or 4 lane freeway at 55-60mph.
Perhaps granny should change lanes, perhaps not; it depends on the specifics of traffic density, visibility, weather, etc. For traffic safety purposes, it's not so critical an issue as your emotional reaction to the situation.
If you are getting irritated by this, then you are the danger to others on the road here, not granny. Sure, it's likely that granny should pull over a lane or two, but it's you that needs to pull off the road, find a diner, have a cup of tea, and calm the fuck down.
Save your irritation for when you are stuck behind the granny that won't stay to the right on the escalator. You can even yell and swear and act like an ass. We understand. It's annoying to be there. When you are driving a vehicle, it's your job to keep your emotions in check. If the tiny things are already irritating you, how are you going to react to a more serious incident? If you're going to get proportionally more emotional, get the fuck off the road.
There were nearly 6,420,000 auto accidents in the United States in 2005. The financial cost of these crashes is more than 230 Billion dollars. 2.9 million people were injured and 42,636 people killed. About 115 people die every day in vehicle crashes in the United States -- one death every 13 minutes.
Be very careful when you bring monetary arguments into traffic safety debates. Beyond 40-45 mph, the average medical costs for an accident starts to go back down. Not to be crass, but a funeral is cheaper than physical therapy.
There are legitimate reasons for analyzing costs of traffic management both on a financial basis and a humanitarian basis. It is important to not intermingle them because they have very different responses to traffic speed. Results like "Doubling the average highway traffic speeds will reduce the per-accident medical expenses by a factor of 10!" may be both absolutely true and completely useless.
All corporations are inherently sociopathic, lacking in empathy, remorse, guilt...
A corporation pays my salary, so they can't be all bad.
Assigning any type of pathos to a corporation is silly. They have no emotions. I could just as usefully wonder if my desklamp is bored.
Claiming that a company lacks empathy is like claiming that democracy lacks a rosemary-garlic flavor. Lacking the capacity for emotions doesn't make something inherently evil or bad, it's simply a trait shared by essentially everything that is not human.
Would a locomotive be evil for crushing anything that gets in its way? We have a tendency to think that way about powerful corporations, when instead, we should be concerned about where we place the tracks (the laws).
How on earth did the Japanese develop 15 minute charging? That's a LOT of energy to dump into a car.
To put this in perspective of what we are accustomed to:
1 gallon of gas =~ 120MJ
Average gas pump =~ 5-10 gpm
120MJ * 7.5 gpm * (1min/60sec) = 15 Megawatts
To put 15 Megawatts in perspective, the Niagara Falls hydroelectric plant, one of the biggest plants feeding the Eastern Seaboard, pumps out 2.4GW...which is less than the combined power of the gas pumps within a 5-mile radius
Basically, we are used to "charging" our cars really, REALLY fast. Attempting to replicate this performance with electricity is an extremely difficult problem.
Gasoline has two huge advantages over batteries:
1) Safety: untrained users operate quick-connect, megawatt-range power couplers with nearly negligible accident rates. Gasoline is ludicrously safe to handle for its power density.
2) Weight: gasoline doesn't need a oxidizer tank. 1kg of gasoline uses ~3kg of oxidizer. Gas vehicles use air. EVs have to lug both reactants around. In current EVs, ~20-25% of the battery capacity is used solely for storing the energy needed to transport the batteries, compared to about 1-2% for gasoline.
unfortunately the rest of the world is willing to purchase products made with poor environmental, labor and safety levels :/
"But there were other mass murderers that got away with it! Stalin killed many millions, died in his bed, well done there; Pol Pot killed 1.7 million Cambodians, died under house arrest at age 72, well done indeed! And the reason we let them get away with it is because they killed their own people, and we're sort of fine with that. “Ah, help yourself,” you know? “We've been trying to kill you for ages!” So kill your own people, right on there!"
--Eddie Izzard, Dressed to Kill
list of all the major complaints of Mass effect 1 and used it to design Mass effect 2.
That's fine for developing sequels, but that's not where the money comes from, because a string of lucrative sequels can't exist if you don't get the first game right.
In the class, we studied quite a few of the developer post-mortems from Gamasutra. A common theme in those articles are the gut-wrenching wild-ass-guesses that need to be made when breaking into a new genre. Fan feedback is pretty useless if you are not building on what your fans have experience with.
Since the article is about trying to break into an area littered with epic failures (educational gaming), he's not going to get much input from fans beyond a history lesson of what went wrong. That won't tell him how to do things right. By this point all the low-hanging fruit is gone; all of the obvious ideas have been tried. You aren't going to succeed here on the strength of one cool idea you came up with 5 minutes ago.
This is why some hardcore philosophical analysis of games is actually needed; educational gaming has run out of nifty ideas that can be thrown against the wall to see what sticks.
An academic discipline full of fanboys, I can't wait!
I took a game analysis class last fall at MIT/GAMBIT, and went in with a similar attitude.
Yeah...there was a ton more reading and discussing heavy philosophy than I was expecting.
Deconstructing "fun" may seem like wanking, but it's serious business to the folks analyzing whether to gamble $50M on the next title.
Video game buyers are pretty fickle, and their answer to "what is fun" is generally "I know it when I see it". Development budgets have gotten large enough that investors need a little more than warm fuzzies before opening their wallets.
It had my age and zodiac sign (seriously Spokeo?) correct
The combination of approximate age, astrological zodiac, and Chinese zodiac are a convenient way of giving your exact date of birth within 2 weeks. It just presents it in a much less "alarming" fashion.
It also gives identity thieves enough data to bluff their way through a date-of-birth authentication over the phone or in person.
Assuming you were born on the 21st of the month:
Guesses of {1,2} are explained as single-digit omission errors
Guesses of {11,20,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,31} are single-digit transcription errors
A guess of 12 is a transposition error
A guess of 21 is accurate.
If the thief makes an authoritative-sounding and accurate claim of your birth-month and birth-year, he's got a 50-50 chance of getting past the question without raising [I]any[/I] suspicions, because half of all the birth-day guesses will be attributed by the authenticator as a simple typo in his records. Add in the accent/language barrier of an out-sourced call center, and it's even easier.
There's a difference between being derivative and being an attempt at a 1:1 copy.
I disagree.
Cheers,
--e^x
Are the band seeking damages?
Apparently, but I can't tell who they are trying to damage.
So they don't want their albums broken up and sold piecemeal, as that treads upon their "artistic integrity". That is a giant load of bullshit. That's not art, that's capitalism.
Do they want to force me to listen to the whole album for the one song I want to hear at the moment? If so, they can fuck off.
Do they instead want to force me to buy the whole album for the one song I want to own? Again, they can fuck off.
When Microsoft argued that unbundling Internet Explorer from Windows, it would "violate the integrity of the user experience". That was widely accepted as a steaming pile of crap. s/Microsoft/Pink Floyd/, and the argument is still a steaming pile of crap.
If they had announced, "we don't want to unbundle our albums because we make more money selling them entire", I could absolutely respect that. It's their product; they don't have a monopoly to abuse; they can sell their stuff how and as they please.
Just don't tell me it's about "art"
Of course, you don't discover that until you get home, when it's too late.
It's never too late. If you got ripped off by a store, take that product back and bitch. It's not a court of law, you don't need to have proof that you are right. Just stand your ground, and they will cave. The more expensive the item, the longer they will argue with you, but you'll win in the end. It is simply not worth the money to argue with you.
However, don't make it personal. Don't blame anybody specifically. Don't piss anyone off. You want the manager to be able to walk away happy that he/she made a rational and correct cost-benefit decision (i.e. feeling like a winner)
My main point here is that I have seen WAAAAAAAAAYYYYY too many arrogant programmers talking from their bum about how much better THEIR code would be if only THEY had a chance to rewrite it.
The same is true for everyone from novelists to plumbers to aircraft designers. The second time through generally yields a better result; it's just frequently not an option. This doesn't make anyone arrogant, it's just life.
You are misunderstanding the concept of "proof". Once you throw the concept of a god into the mix, you throw the ability to prove or disprove concepts out the window.
Finding inconsistencies in the bible only shows that inconsistencies can be found in the bible. Doing so proves nothing about god in the same way that watching an apple fall proves nothing about the law of gravity. Any argument can be justified through the concept of god. It may be unreasonable and unconvincing, but the argument is still both sound and valid.
All you accomplish by attacking the bible is venerating it as a source worthy of examination. It isn't. Just accept that the concept of god is just a logical nuke that makes any reasoned debate moot. That is the real divine power, and trying to fight it is pointless.