At a previous job, my employer required all employees to have a page on Facebook and we were all supposed to "friend" the company's corporate page. I told them "Fire me if you like, I refuse to join Facebook." Worked there for quite a while, and never got called out on it. I did, however, have to list any on-line communities I was part of in my "Disclosure and Background Check Release" to get my security clearances. They told me I had to stop posting in the sci-fi discussion group I was a member of. While that was a small price to pay for an amazing paycheck doing something I enjoyed, I thought it was a little draconian. With their complete dropping of the Facebook requirement, I wonder if I'd have called their bluff if they would have done anything.
I find it funny that the so-called "rational, intelligent people", atheists, have to resort to straw man fallacies and hurtful words.
If you re-read my post you'll see that I say creationism SHOULD NOT be taught in school. That Evolution should be taught in school. And furthermore, if I want to teach my children something else, I'll do so in the privacy of my own home.
Because I identified myself as a Christian, you, and most everyone else that replied, had to do so in a hurtful and antagonistic tone.
And here I thought it was the Christians that did the persecuting and witch-hunting, and that the rational, intelligent atheists would make for a "live and let live" kind of world.....hypocrite much?
As far as government contractors are concerned EVERYTHING you do EVER is private. Never worked at one of these places, have you? These people are paranoid - constantly. The policy is: Keep your mouth shut, your nose clean, and the curtains drawn, no video, no pictures and never ever write anything down. In other words, don't do shit that would ever cast a shadow of doubt on you, EVER. They are betting literally Billions of dollars on you, along with the livelihood of all your cow-orkers, and are not about to take any chances of you screwing it up while drunk at a party, dancing with a lampshade on your head. Wanna drink? Get loaded at your own home all you want, just don't be late for work, and make sure you can pass a piss test in the morning.
There are plenty of people out there like this, and if you don't fit the bill, someone else will. As long as you're not after that job, it won't matter to you, though.
This is a very bad idea - and that's coming from a self-described Christian. I don't want some goof-ball teacher going over something like this with my kid. They can barely get math right. You focus on math/science/history/reading, I'll handle teaching my kid religion and philosophy at home.
And as always, evolution and creation are not at odds. Evolution answers "How?" and creation answers"Why?"
I don't expect my views to be accepted by devout atheists, OR devout Catholics, so let's leave the creationism at home and not have a big fucking fight for no reason.
A company would seriously be fooling itself if it thinks it preserved some kind of integrity by not hiring someone who occasionally unwinds with friends at a party. They already have employees who do that, they just ignore the fact that they don't actively know about it. The fact that they can't distinguish between the two is a problem.
Consider a company that does top secret contracts for the government. If you can't keep your private life private, why should they trust you with their top secret data? One set of loose lips could possibly cost them BILLIONS. So, anything that even looks a little fishy, they want to (and for arguably good reasons) drop it like it's hot.
Even more worrying is the possibility of people deliberately destroying another's reputation. There's no shortage of people in this world with a grudge against someone else. It's quite easy to imagine an example where someone fails to get a job because of something someone has posted about them. It needn't even be true; a prospective employer isn't going to take time to give you the benefit of the doubt when there's plenty of other candidates.
This is 4chan^H^H^H^HEbaum's World's bread and butter my friend. Watch any Good Morning America lately?
I know it's supposed to be funny, but I can't say that I agree at all. I'd say the average person only knows a little bit about a handful of things, and much of that is incorrect or incomplete. "Skilled" people tend to have a lot of very narrow knowledge, often much of it simple rote memorization. Specialists tend to be the ones who know the why as well as the how, or they at least understand the importance of learning the "why".
Spoken like a true specialist!
As an IT professional myself, I've seen the myopic views of many a specialist totally ruin a business. I've been the one to mop-up afterwards on several occasions.
Specialists that couldn't see the big picture because all they were good at was programming.... They couldn't see that what they were doing wasn't clear to the accountants that had to use their obtuse and obfuscated databse GUIs.... it made no sense to the clients. What they needed was someone to work on their system that actually UNDERSTOOD what they were doing.
if you know everthing there is to know about how to make fast SQL querries, how's that going to help you make an application for a group of accountants? Sure, they can do the work fast....if they can understand the app you make for them. However if you understand, at least a little, of what they are doing - you will be able to tailor your work to match their needs.
Of course, the perfect solution is to be a specialist in EVERYTHING! but that doesn't work out all that often.;)
nope, comp/sci. I think that particular conversation was during a hardware class where we were making ISA cards. I completely ignored his lecture on the memory decode circuit because I had a better way to do it - or so I thought.... Oops.
We've been known to go over to the prof's house, bang on the door till he answers and tell him (direct quote here, I shit you not) "Hey fucker! What the shit is up with this homework!" His response was "Dammit, bitches, pay attention and stop downloading pr0n during my lectures."
Of course, it doesn't help that after the lecture, he comes back to my workstation and wants to watch the pr0n I've downloaded.
It was a result of outdated technology and a ballot that was confusing to read.
Like the Postal2 dude said: What fuckin' moron designed this? "Damn! I don't even know who that'll count for!" "Shit! Didn't go all the way through!" "Oh! Looks like the chad's still hanging on that one....but they'll know what my intentions are..."
First, let me start off by saying I own a small, independent video store in rural Kentucky, USA.... So with that knowledge, comes this:
Lots of the poorer people in America don't even have a DVD player YET!
Quite a few movies are either no longer released on VHS, or the public release date for the VHS is a month or more later than the release date for the DVD. I can order movies on VHS from my distributor, but they are insanely expensive. Take the wretched "Bad Boys 2" for example. From my distributor, the DVD would be here on street date, ready to rent, for a measly $24.99 If I wanted the same movie on VHS on the same day as the DVD, it was $89.99. If I wanted to wait six weeks, until the VHS tapes were shipped to Target and Wal-Mart, then the VHS would be $21.99.
The VAST majority of America doesn't give a flying crap about things like "HDTV" or "digital blahblahblah"....The vast majority of America thinks "Widescreen" cuts off the top and bottom of the movie (I know, I know, I explain this to at least three moron rednecks a day). Most movie outlets were saying this spring that DVD accounts for about 80% of their sales, with VHS making up the rest. And numbers in rural areas - especially "The South" being somewhere closer to 65% DVD, 35% VHS. Blu-Ray is going to be a long time in coming. I know the vast majority of my customers only got a DVD player this past christmas. After doing some accounting, I saw that the best way for me to compete with the big chains up the highway was for me to actually buy DVD players from Wal-Mart (the cheap APEX model) and give them away as a store promotion rather than plunk down $90 on a VHS tape that will take a year to pay for itself. So, my store gave away five DVD players last year at christmas to VHS-only customers. This year, I'm probably going to do the same.
DVD has only just recently unseated VHS as the video format of choice. TPTB had better understand this, and not go switching formats again too soon, or....
Well, or nothing. People will be pissed about it, but they'll either buy a BDR machine, or they'll not watch new movies.
Speaking from a movie standpoint, hollywood has only just recently taken advantage of the cool technological advancements that DVD offers over VHS - such as New Line Cinema's 'Infinifilm' line, and all the cool extras added to the extended versions of the Lord of the Rings movies. For a geek like me, that kind of stuff has a really high "cool factor", but for most people all that extra stuff might as well not even exist. Sure, a few of them might watch the deleted scenes on a DVD if they really liked the movie, but that's it.
And as for the whole disk v. tape debate in the durability department: tapes rule. Sorry....but it's true. The plastic housing on a VHS tape protects it from harm. Sure, the tape stretches over time, but that's not an issue here. If the tape stretches and snaps on the 300th use, that means I've rented the tape 300 times before it dies. A dvd will last indefinitely - if it is cared for. However, dipshits will rent a DVD and hand it to their kid to put it in the player. the kid has...I dunno...ice cream or snot on their hands, and grabs the disk by the data side. When the movie doesn't play, the dipshit adult take it out, sees the goop on it, and rubs it vigorously on their shirt - RiGhT On ToP of their freaking buttons - to clean it. Then they pop in the disk and it still doesn't play (because they dug huge furrows in the plastic while trying to "clean" it). Then they bring it back in and say to me "Hey bubba, this thing don't play none!" I open it and see a snot-encrusted, scratched disk and sigh heavily.
DVDs should have been in a plastic caddy.
I pray that BD-ROM will be. I know it won't, but I still pray for it.
For comic book fans, it's got what you want. For film fans, it's got what you want. For action movie fans, it's got what you want.
Granted, there were moments when I wanted to scream "but that doesn't make sense!" ( {spoiler} like when the fusion generator was sucking in everything....except things like people and important props {/spoiler}) But in general it was a well done film.
There are only two criticisms I could possibly give this movie: Kirsten Dunst's acting (*cough* wooden *cough*) and it being a wee bit too angsty.
In it's defense, it was SUPPOSED to be a wee bit angsty. Spider-man in the early days was like that - a confused young man that didn't understand his place in the world. In other words - a teenager.
{spoiler} Another possible problem is the Batman situation. In the first batman, they killed the Joker. In the second, they killed the penguin. In the first Spider-man they killed the Green Goblin (which was okay - if a little fast. He was supposed to die eventually. But now - if Doc Ock is dead, well that causes continuity problems....and comic book geeks hate that. {/spoiler}
As a side thing - here's a comic book geek drinking game you can play with Spider-Man 2. Every time a writer or artist or editor that worked on the Spider-Man comic books at Marvel is shown on screen, take a shot. You are guaranteed to be half dead by the end of the movie if you catch them all.
Just give up on the mouse/touchpad idea and go with an integrated trackball. I just love trackballs. After destroying my right shoulder in a work injury, I can no longer use a mouse - causes my shoulder to swell and ache like a mofo. I fell in love with trackballs. a google search for: keyboard "integrated trackball" bluetooth returned about a bazillion hits.
That's one company maintaining ONE database. That's great! They're supposed to do that. What I don't want them to do is openly share that database with law enforcement. They should do that on a per-customer/permission basis.
Have you ever done one of those "logic puzzles" you see in game/wordsearch/crossword magazines. You are told a story something like this. Bob, Mary and Jane went to the store. Each bought an item. One of them brought $.47 to spend, one brought $1.50 and one brought $.35. Bob didn't buy the popsicle. Jane didn't buy the bubble gum. Bob had less than $.50 to spend. The nachos one of them bought cost $1.29. Then you are given a chart that has each person's name on it, along with a list of the items and a list of the amounts of money brought to the store. Then you have to figure out who bought what, and how much money they started with. You aren't given enough information to answer straight away - you have to figure it out. Bringing all this information together (consider banking records, credit records, information gleaned through co-operative business (remember that supermarket "discount" card you signed up for?) forwarding addresses given to the post office, college records, income tax information - the list goes on) a decent computer app to display it all in a meaningful way, and a smart analyst to look at it, and they can figure out most anything about anyone.
Big Brother never had it so good!
And you say "bah - it's all public knowledge anyway. They can already find it out." and my response is this: Before, it was work. Before this, it cost money. Before this they had to have a reason to look at someone so closely. Now you go tickety-tickety-tick on the keyboard and blammo - you see that Mr. Johnson is apparantly feeling ill from the sushi he ate last night (from his credit report) because he bought some pepto bismol and OTC tagament from the supermarket (from the supermarket's customer tracking database - gotta love that discount card). But what's this? He took $300 out of the atm at 6pm, spent fifty at the grocery store, then took out another $300 at 9pm. This automated traffic camera places him in the seedy side of town at 11pm. What was he doing over there in the middle of the night with $550 in cash? Looks like we need to pay closer attention to Mr. Johnson.
And yes - the terms and conditions papers from my bank when I opened my checking account said that "since 9/11 any large transactions (over $200) will be reported immediately to the department of homeland security".
This is why the thought of a cashless society scares me.
Now where's my typewriter and my compound in montana? I thought those things were standard to us luddite freaks...?
Is this really a smart thing to start replacing the human workforce with machines when our economy is so bad? The coolness factor with innovations like this is quite high, I grant you - but should it be done? no. Next you're going to say "It's just the way the world works - if you can't adapt, you don't survive." or more cruelly: "Carpenters are all unskilled labor anyway - it's not like we're putting smart people out of work."
Well - wrong and wrong. Firstly, society has supplanted natural selection with social selection. In eras past, a person born with a birth defect wouldn't be able to survive, because they would get eaten by sabertooth tigers or some such - but now, we call them "differently abled" and help them out. We've realized that being human is more important than any so called "natural process".
Secondly, carpenters are highly skilled workers - they have to be engineers, machinists, mathmaticians - and they have to be somewhat physically fit to perform their duties.
Every time I see something like this in the news, I get a little more angry. All this means is that the rich man that owns the robots and rents them out to build houses gets richer, and the carpenter that used to build those houses now can no longer afford to feed himself or his family.
The idea of robots taking the toil out of life and turning the earth into a paradise is utter bullshit. Until the day comes when someone invents a "replicator" (like the ones on Star Trek's Enterprise) and makes all physical objects free of charge, robots replacing people will simply errode the world's middle class, polarizing the world into the very poor and the very wealthy.
Many very smart economists have said that the best yard stick for any society is measuring the population of it's middle class. Too many poor people, and you've got kenya or bangledesh. Too many rich people and inflation skyrockets, and suddenly money is worthless.
There's been piles upon piles of speculative fiction about this very topic. Everything from The Matrix to the backstory from Frank Herbert's Dune, the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica to Skynet from The Terminator. Granted, all those examples are more than a little melodramatic - that's not the way it will really work. I'm thinking more of an economic wasteland similar to what was portrayed in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.
A little note to anyone who still wants to argue - how will you feel when someone successfully creates a computer program than can successfully turn a plain English decription of a task into a working computer application that can do that task? How will you feel when someone replaces programmers and sysadmins with a robot?
Not entirely true- you're just not thinking right. Don't try and fly for an airline - look into flying for the shipping companies. FedEx, UPS and Airborne are almost always hiring pilots. AND screw flight school. You don't need to pay for that shit... Bite the bullet and go sign up for the airforce. With a computer geek IQ, background and college degree, you'll get to be a pilot. THEN, ask to fly a KC-135 skytanker, or a C5 cargo plane - stay away from flying fighters or bombers. Do your tour in the USAF, then start applying. You'll get your education for "free" (if you call being Uncle Sam's bitch for six years "free") and you'll have hours upon hours of practical experience. Of course, if you're like me, and pushing your early 30s pretty hard, you might have trouble getting in - And you might have to either do some serious dieting or bulking up, depending on your build...
I did just this. I worked as a contract employee in the IT field, and hated it. I was salary, and voluntarily put in 16 hour days, plus 8 on sunday....Then the manager got angry with me because I wouldn't come in on saturday (only day I get to spend wth my son - stupid visitation). "This is your job we're talking about. Family can wait," She said. She's in the process of getting a divorce right now, I hear.... That and the job wasn't satisfying at all. The project I was working on had already eaten six teams of developers, none of them really and truly solving the problem. The conditions were horrible - I worked in a storage room that contained a huge pile of financial records that all smelled of mildew. I had accountants running in and out all day. And the ballast in the fluorescent light overhead was bad so the light flickered. So when they said they weren't going to renew my contract a slow smile crept over my face, and it was all I could do to keep from running from the office in complete glee. Sure I miss the money. But I damn sure don't miss the ulcer, the worry, the migraines, the lack of sleep and the problems.
Now I own a video store. And y'know - Second Hand Lions was a damn good movie. If you're looking for something the whole family can enjoy, that's a good pick. And for an extra dollar, you can keep it another day. And I don't even miss the "1337N355" of it all, because I'm right here, on my "development platform" whipping up a new software suite to handle the business of renting videos. And now I don't have someone dangling a "permanent position" over my head.
It's only an "autopsy" if the subject died before it was examined. If radical exploratory surgery is performed on a ___Living___ subject with little regard to the subject's well being, it's called: Vivisection
Had the subject survived the experience, it is called "research". If the subject dies during the quest for knowledge, it's called an "atrocity" and you get charged with neat little things like "Crimes Against Humanity" and the guys at..oh...Say, Nuremberg decide to hang you....
Just wanted to clear that up. Y'know - as Samuel Clemens warned us in his critique of Fenimore Cooper - "Use the right word, not it's second cousin!"
The only email address of mine that gets spammed anymore is the email function of my cellphone (an ancient nokia 3360). So when I get these types of spam all I see, due to the insanely low size limit on incoming messages, is the anti-anti-spam technology. Yesterday, I got one that began:
noneuclidian insane poet mastermind....
It fooled me for a second, I thought I was really reading something kinda cool, then I realized it was just anti-spam-filter jibberish. I was disappointed, I wanted to know more about this noneuclidian insane poet mastermind! It sounded like a cool opening for a novel.
It's even worse than that - Ferarris and Volkswagens are both designed to do the same job (though one is faster and the other more reliable). Take two different landers and it would be like trying to use submarine parts to fix a fighter plane. Each lander has a specific mission and limited payload. These robots we're sending up aren't Star Trek's "Data" - hell, they aren't even Star Wars' R2D2. Think more like a remote control car that can scoop up dirt in a can and do a few minor analysis on the dirt.
nay sayers are missing the point
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Life is persistant. Life is vindictive.
I don't mean this like the saying "life sucks" - I mean this like "Living things are like Rocky Balboa - you can knock them down, but they'll get back up. You might win the first fight, but they'll train, they'll get better, and they'll challenge you to a rematch."
Sure - plenty of the places in the universe - hell, MOST of the universe by a HUGE margin - are very poor places for a human to exist...and not just a human, but all the life that's evolved on this little planet.
but what about the life that could have evolved THERE?
We see places in the universe where the radiation and poisonous elements would kill and sicken us in mere moments - but what about living things that evolved to that environment? Things we would barely recognize as being "alive"? silicon based life that uses mercury as a "skin pigment" to protect it from the radiation of it's sun; iron in place of calcium for it's support structure...etc. etc. etc.
There are wild enough looking and behaving organisms here on this earth using our model of life (take the deep ocean volcanic bacteria for example).
nay sayers in these replies I've read keep saying "but the conditions here on earth are rare!" and to that I say: FUCK earth! We are one example. Maybe there are other examples of life out there that follows the rules of it's environment, not the rules of ours.
As far as intelligence goes - we can't even define that in HUMANS very well, let alone other animals here on earth.
Is smart being able to do math? No - that would mean computers are smart (smarter than quite a few people, I think...)
Is smart being able to read? No, but it helps.
Is smart being able to do well on a test? no - some smart people have test anxiety and don't test well.
Smart, like pornography, is something that's hard to define, but you know it when you see it. Or do you?
Robert T. Bakker came to my university for a lecture a few years back, and I was there, with my son, in the fifth row. Part of his lecture was on a theory he called "The Line of Equal Smarts" where he showed different animals plotted on a graph where y=brain mass and x=body mass. He showed that all the "smartest" animals tended to be towards the center of the graph, along a diagnal line. On this line were animals like humans, apes, chimps, dolphins, squid and parrots. Near to the line were dogs, pigs, rats and horses. far from the line were animals like cats, giraffes, and pandas. dead center on the line was the "Utah Raptor". His point
was that "smart" can show up in unlikely places.
(he did go on to explain that to finish the theory, he'd have to more in depth than just plotting "brain mass" on a graph, because some brain mass is more important that others - for example, most of a dog's brain is designed to decode smell sensory data, not engage in abstract thought)
Some scientists are re-evaluating whether apes or parrots are "smarter" - parrots have recently shown to actually
understand the noises they make (meaning when it says "polly want a cracker" he really means he wants a fucking cracker, knows what a cracker is, and knows you are the one to get it for him!)
the scarriest ramification of the whole Robert Bakker talk was the fact that squid were on that line... Their ratio of brain mass to body mass was almost the same as humans, meaning they could potentially be as "smart" as dolphins, chimps, parrots and apes....
Sweet JEEEEEEZUZ! Ia Ia! Cthulhu F'taghn!
Thou shalt not create a machine in the image of the mind of man. First Commandment, Orange Catholic Bible, Dune, by Frank Herbert
Or, maybe you like a more recent refrence:
"I say 'Your' society because, you see, when we started thinking for you, it really became OUR society." Agent Smith, conversation with a sedated Morpheus, The Matrix, by the Wachowski brothers Or maybe a little more panic-inducing. "They say it got smart. A new order of intelligence. Then it saw all people as a threat not just the ones on the other side. Decided our fate in a millisecond: extermination." Reese, talking to Sarah Connor, The Terminator, by James Cameron & Harlan Ellison
Or how about: "It can only be attributable to human error." H.A.L. 9000, regarding a piece of information it had falsified, 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Or maybe a little more plausible?
"Would you like to play a game?" Joshua, Wargames
But then again, I'm a sick weirdo that thinks technology is one of the main reasons there are so many people who are depressed and overweight. Technology BAAAD! Now just give me a type-writer and a cabin in the mountains....
Sure - we are not "owed" all the luxuries Americans get, I'll agree with that. However, you are missing something: Neither is the corporate CEO. When a company like sun gets rid of American workers that they actually have to pay and hires H1Bs they can get "half-off", where do you think all that extra money goes? Does it go to help starving babies in africa? no. Does it go to help starving babies in china? no. Does it go to help starving babies in the US? no. Or even: Does it go to Sun's R&D dept? no.
The money goes into the wallet of the rich men who did it in the first place.
We have hired the government to "promote the general welfare" is how it is worded in the preamble to the constitution. For this service, we pay taxes. The government is supposed to defend the common man from the powerful and greedy. That includes greedy corporate executives willing to remove the big screen tv from your living room and put it in his own.
If you think losing your job to a foreigner with an H1B is nothing to get upset over - try doing it yourself sometime.
Most people in this thread are missing the point. It's not about racism. It's not about losing our jobs to the "damn foreigners". It's about protecting private citizens from corporate greed. That's one of our government's jobs, and they're sucking at it.
Slashdot Mirror
At a previous job, my employer required all employees to have a page on Facebook and we were all supposed to "friend" the company's corporate page. I told them "Fire me if you like, I refuse to join Facebook." Worked there for quite a while, and never got called out on it. I did, however, have to list any on-line communities I was part of in my "Disclosure and Background Check Release" to get my security clearances. They told me I had to stop posting in the sci-fi discussion group I was a member of. While that was a small price to pay for an amazing paycheck doing something I enjoyed, I thought it was a little draconian.
With their complete dropping of the Facebook requirement, I wonder if I'd have called their bluff if they would have done anything.
I find it funny that the so-called "rational, intelligent people", atheists, have to resort to straw man fallacies and hurtful words.
If you re-read my post you'll see that I say creationism SHOULD NOT be taught in school. That Evolution should be taught in school. And furthermore, if I want to teach my children something else, I'll do so in the privacy of my own home.
Because I identified myself as a Christian, you, and most everyone else that replied, had to do so in a hurtful and antagonistic tone.
And here I thought it was the Christians that did the persecuting and witch-hunting, and that the rational, intelligent atheists would make for a "live and let live" kind of world. ....hypocrite much?
As far as government contractors are concerned EVERYTHING you do EVER is private. Never worked at one of these places, have you? These people are paranoid - constantly. The policy is: Keep your mouth shut, your nose clean, and the curtains drawn, no video, no pictures and never ever write anything down.
In other words, don't do shit that would ever cast a shadow of doubt on you, EVER. They are betting literally Billions of dollars on you, along with the livelihood of all your cow-orkers, and are not about to take any chances of you screwing it up while drunk at a party, dancing with a lampshade on your head.
Wanna drink? Get loaded at your own home all you want, just don't be late for work, and make sure you can pass a piss test in the morning.
There are plenty of people out there like this, and if you don't fit the bill, someone else will. As long as you're not after that job, it won't matter to you, though.
This is a very bad idea - and that's coming from a self-described Christian. I don't want some goof-ball teacher going over something like this with my kid. They can barely get math right. You focus on math/science/history/reading, I'll handle teaching my kid religion and philosophy at home.
And as always, evolution and creation are not at odds. Evolution answers "How?" and creation answers"Why?"
I don't expect my views to be accepted by devout atheists, OR devout Catholics, so let's leave the creationism at home and not have a big fucking fight for no reason.
A company would seriously be fooling itself if it thinks it preserved some kind of integrity by not hiring someone who occasionally unwinds with friends at a party. They already have employees who do that, they just ignore the fact that they don't actively know about it. The fact that they can't distinguish between the two is a problem.
Consider a company that does top secret contracts for the government. If you can't keep your private life private, why should they trust you with their top secret data? One set of loose lips could possibly cost them BILLIONS. So, anything that even looks a little fishy, they want to (and for arguably good reasons) drop it like it's hot.
Even more worrying is the possibility of people deliberately destroying another's reputation. There's no shortage of people in this world with a grudge against someone else. It's quite easy to imagine an example where someone fails to get a job because of something someone has posted about them. It needn't even be true; a prospective employer isn't going to take time to give you the benefit of the doubt when there's plenty of other candidates.
This is 4chan^H^H^H^HEbaum's World's bread and butter my friend. Watch any Good Morning America lately?
Spoken like a true specialist!
As an IT professional myself, I've seen the myopic views of many a specialist totally ruin a business. I've been the one to mop-up afterwards on several occasions.
Specialists that couldn't see the big picture because all they were good at was programming.... They couldn't see that what they were doing wasn't clear to the accountants that had to use their obtuse and obfuscated databse GUIs.... it made no sense to the clients. What they needed was someone to work on their system that actually UNDERSTOOD what they were doing.
if you know everthing there is to know about how to make fast SQL querries, how's that going to help you make an application for a group of accountants? Sure, they can do the work fast....if they can understand the app you make for them. However if you understand, at least a little, of what they are doing - you will be able to tailor your work to match their needs.
Of course, the perfect solution is to be a specialist in EVERYTHING! but that doesn't work out all that often.
nope, comp/sci. I think that particular conversation was during a hardware class where we were making ISA cards. I completely ignored his lecture on the memory decode circuit because I had a better way to do it - or so I thought.... Oops.
We've been known to go over to the prof's house, bang on the door till he answers and tell him (direct quote here, I shit you not) "Hey fucker! What the shit is up with this homework!"
His response was "Dammit, bitches, pay attention and stop downloading pr0n during my lectures."
Of course, it doesn't help that after the lecture, he comes back to my workstation and wants to watch the pr0n I've downloaded.
Like the Postal2 dude said:
What fuckin' moron designed this?
"Damn! I don't even know who that'll count for!"
"Shit! Didn't go all the way through!"
"Oh! Looks like the chad's still hanging on that one....but they'll know what my intentions are..."
First, let me start off by saying I own a small, independent video store in rural Kentucky, USA....
So with that knowledge, comes this:
Lots of the poorer people in America don't even have a DVD player YET!
Quite a few movies are either no longer released on VHS, or the public release date for the VHS is a month or more later than the release date for the DVD.
I can order movies on VHS from my distributor, but they are insanely expensive.
Take the wretched "Bad Boys 2" for example. From my distributor, the DVD would be here on street date, ready to rent, for a measly $24.99
If I wanted the same movie on VHS on the same day as the DVD, it was $89.99.
If I wanted to wait six weeks, until the VHS tapes were shipped to Target and Wal-Mart, then the VHS would be $21.99.
The VAST majority of America doesn't give a flying crap about things like "HDTV" or "digital blahblahblah"....The vast majority of America thinks "Widescreen" cuts off the top and bottom of the movie (I know, I know, I explain this to at least three moron rednecks a day).
Most movie outlets were saying this spring that DVD accounts for about 80% of their sales, with VHS making up the rest. And numbers in rural areas - especially "The South" being somewhere closer to 65% DVD, 35% VHS.
Blu-Ray is going to be a long time in coming. I know the vast majority of my customers only got a DVD player this past christmas. After doing some accounting, I saw that the best way for me to compete with the big chains up the highway was for me to actually buy DVD players from Wal-Mart (the cheap APEX model) and give them away as a store promotion rather than plunk down $90 on a VHS tape that will take a year to pay for itself. So, my store gave away five DVD players last year at christmas to VHS-only customers. This year, I'm probably going to do the same.
DVD has only just recently unseated VHS as the video format of choice. TPTB had better understand this, and not go switching formats again too soon, or....
Well, or nothing. People will be pissed about it, but they'll either buy a BDR machine, or they'll not watch new movies.
Speaking from a movie standpoint, hollywood has only just recently taken advantage of the cool technological advancements that DVD offers over VHS - such as New Line Cinema's 'Infinifilm' line, and all the cool extras added to the extended versions of the Lord of the Rings movies. For a geek like me, that kind of stuff has a really high "cool factor", but for most people all that extra stuff might as well not even exist. Sure, a few of them might watch the deleted scenes on a DVD if they really liked the movie, but that's it.
And as for the whole disk v. tape debate in the durability department:
tapes rule. Sorry....but it's true. The plastic housing on a VHS tape protects it from harm. Sure, the tape stretches over time, but that's not an issue here.
If the tape stretches and snaps on the 300th use, that means I've rented the tape 300 times before it dies.
A dvd will last indefinitely - if it is cared for. However, dipshits will rent a DVD and hand it to their kid to put it in the player. the kid has...I dunno...ice cream or snot on their hands, and grabs the disk by the data side. When the movie doesn't play, the dipshit adult take it out, sees the goop on it, and rubs it vigorously on their shirt - RiGhT On ToP of their freaking buttons - to clean it. Then they pop in the disk and it still doesn't play (because they dug huge furrows in the plastic while trying to "clean" it). Then they bring it back in and say to me "Hey bubba, this thing don't play none!" I open it and see a snot-encrusted, scratched disk and sigh heavily.
DVDs should have been in a plastic caddy.
I pray that BD-ROM will be. I know it won't, but I still pray for it.
And well....it was great.
Not just a little bit.
For comic book fans, it's got what you want. For film fans, it's got what you want. For action movie fans, it's got what you want.
Granted, there were moments when I wanted to scream "but that doesn't make sense!" ( {spoiler} like when the fusion generator was sucking in everything....except things like people and important props {/spoiler}) But in general it was a well done film.
There are only two criticisms I could possibly give this movie: Kirsten Dunst's acting (*cough* wooden *cough*) and it being a wee bit too angsty.
In it's defense, it was SUPPOSED to be a wee bit angsty. Spider-man in the early days was like that - a confused young man that didn't understand his place in the world. In other words - a teenager.
{spoiler}
Another possible problem is the Batman situation. In the first batman, they killed the Joker. In the second, they killed the penguin. In the first Spider-man they killed the Green Goblin (which was okay - if a little fast. He was supposed to die eventually. But now - if Doc Ock is dead, well that causes continuity problems....and comic book geeks hate that.
{/spoiler}
As a side thing - here's a comic book geek drinking game you can play with Spider-Man 2. Every time a writer or artist or editor that worked on the Spider-Man comic books at Marvel is shown on screen, take a shot. You are guaranteed to be half dead by the end of the movie if you catch them all.
Just give up on the mouse/touchpad idea and go with an integrated trackball. I just love trackballs. After destroying my right shoulder in a work injury, I can no longer use a mouse - causes my shoulder to swell and ache like a mofo. I fell in love with trackballs.
a google search for:
keyboard "integrated trackball" bluetooth
returned about a bazillion hits.
That's one company maintaining ONE database. That's great! They're supposed to do that. What I don't want them to do is openly share that database with law enforcement. They should do that on a per-customer/permission basis.
Have you ever done one of those "logic puzzles" you see in game/wordsearch/crossword magazines. You are told a story something like this.
Bob, Mary and Jane went to the store. Each bought an item. One of them brought $.47 to spend, one brought $1.50 and one brought $.35. Bob didn't buy the popsicle. Jane didn't buy the bubble gum. Bob had less than $.50 to spend. The nachos one of them bought cost $1.29.
Then you are given a chart that has each person's name on it, along with a list of the items and a list of the amounts of money brought to the store. Then you have to figure out who bought what, and how much money they started with. You aren't given enough information to answer straight away - you have to figure it out.
Bringing all this information together (consider banking records, credit records, information gleaned through co-operative business (remember that supermarket "discount" card you signed up for?) forwarding addresses given to the post office, college records, income tax information - the list goes on) a decent computer app to display it all in a meaningful way, and a smart analyst to look at it, and they can figure out most anything about anyone.
Big Brother never had it so good!
And you say "bah - it's all public knowledge anyway. They can already find it out."
and my response is this: Before, it was work. Before this, it cost money. Before this they had to have a reason to look at someone so closely. Now you go tickety-tickety-tick on the keyboard and blammo - you see that Mr. Johnson is apparantly feeling ill from the sushi he ate last night (from his credit report) because he bought some pepto bismol and OTC tagament from the supermarket (from the supermarket's customer tracking database - gotta love that discount card). But what's this? He took $300 out of the atm at 6pm, spent fifty at the grocery store, then took out another $300 at 9pm. This automated traffic camera places him in the seedy side of town at 11pm. What was he doing over there in the middle of the night with $550 in cash? Looks like we need to pay closer attention to Mr. Johnson.
And yes - the terms and conditions papers from my bank when I opened my checking account said that "since 9/11 any large transactions (over $200) will be reported immediately to the department of homeland security".
This is why the thought of a cashless society scares me.
Now where's my typewriter and my compound in montana? I thought those things were standard to us luddite freaks...?
Is this really a smart thing to start replacing the human workforce with machines when our economy is so bad?
The coolness factor with innovations like this is quite high, I grant you - but should it be done? no.
Next you're going to say "It's just the way the world works - if you can't adapt, you don't survive." or more cruelly: "Carpenters are all unskilled labor anyway - it's not like we're putting smart people out of work."
Well - wrong and wrong.
Firstly, society has supplanted natural selection with social selection. In eras past, a person born with a birth defect wouldn't be able to survive, because they would get eaten by sabertooth tigers or some such - but now, we call them "differently abled" and help them out. We've realized that being human is more important than any so called "natural process".
Secondly, carpenters are highly skilled workers - they have to be engineers, machinists, mathmaticians - and they have to be somewhat physically fit to perform their duties.
Every time I see something like this in the news, I get a little more angry. All this means is that the rich man that owns the robots and rents them out to build houses gets richer, and the carpenter that used to build those houses now can no longer afford to feed himself or his family.
The idea of robots taking the toil out of life and turning the earth into a paradise is utter bullshit. Until the day comes when someone invents a "replicator" (like the ones on Star Trek's Enterprise) and makes all physical objects free of charge, robots replacing people will simply errode the world's middle class, polarizing the world into the very poor and the very wealthy.
Many very smart economists have said that the best yard stick for any society is measuring the population of it's middle class. Too many poor people, and you've got kenya or bangledesh. Too many rich people and inflation skyrockets, and suddenly money is worthless.
There's been piles upon piles of speculative fiction about this very topic. Everything from The Matrix to the backstory from Frank Herbert's Dune, the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica to Skynet from The Terminator.
Granted, all those examples are more than a little melodramatic - that's not the way it will really work. I'm thinking more of an economic wasteland similar to what was portrayed in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.
A little note to anyone who still wants to argue - how will you feel when someone successfully creates a computer program than can successfully turn a plain English decription of a task into a working computer application that can do that task? How will you feel when someone replaces programmers and sysadmins with a robot?
Not entirely true- you're just not thinking right.
Don't try and fly for an airline - look into flying for the shipping companies. FedEx, UPS and Airborne are almost always hiring pilots.
AND screw flight school. You don't need to pay for that shit...
Bite the bullet and go sign up for the airforce. With a computer geek IQ, background and college degree, you'll get to be a pilot. THEN, ask to fly a KC-135 skytanker, or a C5 cargo plane - stay away from flying fighters or bombers. Do your tour in the USAF, then start applying. You'll get your education for "free" (if you call being Uncle Sam's bitch for six years "free") and you'll have hours upon hours of practical experience. Of course, if you're like me, and pushing your early 30s pretty hard, you might have trouble getting in - And you might have to either do some serious dieting or bulking up, depending on your build...
I did just this. I worked as a contract employee in the IT field, and hated it. I was salary, and voluntarily put in 16 hour days, plus 8 on sunday....Then the manager got angry with me because I wouldn't come in on saturday (only day I get to spend wth my son - stupid visitation). "This is your job we're talking about. Family can wait," She said. She's in the process of getting a divorce right now, I hear....
That and the job wasn't satisfying at all. The project I was working on had already eaten six teams of developers, none of them really and truly solving the problem.
The conditions were horrible - I worked in a storage room that contained a huge pile of financial records that all smelled of mildew. I had accountants running in and out all day. And the ballast in the fluorescent light overhead was bad so the light flickered.
So when they said they weren't going to renew my contract a slow smile crept over my face, and it was all I could do to keep from running from the office in complete glee.
Sure I miss the money. But I damn sure don't miss the ulcer, the worry, the migraines, the lack of sleep and the problems.
Now I own a video store. And y'know - Second Hand Lions was a damn good movie. If you're looking for something the whole family can enjoy, that's a good pick. And for an extra dollar, you can keep it another day.
And I don't even miss the "1337N355" of it all, because I'm right here, on my "development platform" whipping up a new software suite to handle the business of renting videos.
And now I don't have someone dangling a "permanent position" over my head.
It's only an "autopsy" if the subject died before it was examined. If radical exploratory surgery is performed on a ___Living___ subject with little regard to the subject's well being, it's called:
..oh...Say, Nuremberg decide to hang you....
Vivisection
Had the subject survived the experience, it is called "research". If the subject dies during the quest for knowledge, it's called an "atrocity" and you get charged with neat little things like "Crimes Against Humanity" and the guys at
Just wanted to clear that up. Y'know - as Samuel Clemens warned us in his critique of Fenimore Cooper - "Use the right word, not it's second cousin!"
The only email address of mine that gets spammed anymore is the email function of my cellphone (an ancient nokia 3360). So when I get these types of spam all I see, due to the insanely low size limit on incoming messages, is the anti-anti-spam technology. Yesterday, I got one that began:
noneuclidian insane poet mastermind....
It fooled me for a second, I thought I was really reading something kinda cool, then I realized it was just anti-spam-filter jibberish.
I was disappointed, I wanted to know more about this noneuclidian insane poet mastermind! It sounded like a cool opening for a novel.
It's even worse than that - Ferarris and Volkswagens are both designed to do the same job (though one is faster and the other more reliable). Take two different landers and it would be like trying to use submarine parts to fix a fighter plane. Each lander has a specific mission and limited payload. These robots we're sending up aren't Star Trek's "Data" - hell, they aren't even Star Wars' R2D2. Think more like a remote control car that can scoop up dirt in a can and do a few minor analysis on the dirt.
Life is persistant. Life is vindictive.
I don't mean this like the saying "life sucks" - I mean this like "Living things are like Rocky Balboa - you can knock them down, but they'll get back up. You might win the first fight, but they'll train, they'll get better, and they'll challenge you to a rematch."
Sure - plenty of the places in the universe - hell, MOST of the universe by a HUGE margin - are very poor places for a human to exist...and not just a human, but all the life that's evolved on this little planet.
but what about the life that could have evolved THERE?
We see places in the universe where the radiation and poisonous elements would kill and sicken us in mere moments - but what about living things that evolved to that environment? Things we would barely recognize as being "alive"? silicon based life that uses mercury as a "skin pigment" to protect it from the radiation of it's sun; iron in place of calcium for it's support structure...etc. etc. etc.
There are wild enough looking and behaving organisms here on this earth using our model of life (take the deep ocean volcanic bacteria for example).
nay sayers in these replies I've read keep saying "but the conditions here on earth are rare!" and to that I say: FUCK earth! We are one example. Maybe there are other examples of life out there that follows the rules of it's environment, not the rules of ours.
As far as intelligence goes - we can't even define that in HUMANS very well, let alone other animals here on earth.
Is smart being able to do math? No - that would mean computers are smart (smarter than quite a few people, I think...)
Is smart being able to read? No, but it helps.
Is smart being able to do well on a test? no - some smart people have test anxiety and don't test well.
Smart, like pornography, is something that's hard to define, but you know it when you see it. Or do you?
Robert T. Bakker came to my university for a lecture a few years back, and I was there, with my son, in the fifth row. Part of his lecture was on a theory he called "The Line of Equal Smarts" where he showed different animals plotted on a graph where y=brain mass and x=body mass. He showed that all the "smartest" animals tended to be towards the center of the graph, along a diagnal line. On this line were animals like humans, apes, chimps, dolphins, squid and parrots. Near to the line were dogs, pigs, rats and horses. far from the line were animals like cats, giraffes, and pandas. dead center on the line was the "Utah Raptor". His point was that "smart" can show up in unlikely places. (he did go on to explain that to finish the theory, he'd have to more in depth than just plotting "brain mass" on a graph, because some brain mass is more important that others - for example, most of a dog's brain is designed to decode smell sensory data, not engage in abstract thought)
Some scientists are re-evaluating whether apes or parrots are "smarter" - parrots have recently shown to actually understand the noises they make (meaning when it says "polly want a cracker" he really means he wants a fucking cracker, knows what a cracker is, and knows you are the one to get it for him!)
the scarriest ramification of the whole Robert Bakker talk was the fact that squid were on that line... Their ratio of brain mass to body mass was almost the same as humans, meaning they could potentially be as "smart" as dolphins, chimps, parrots and apes....
Sweet JEEEEEEZUZ! Ia Ia! Cthulhu F'taghn!
Thou shalt not create a machine in the image of the mind of man.
First Commandment, Orange Catholic Bible, Dune, by Frank Herbert
Or, maybe you like a more recent refrence:
"I say 'Your' society because, you see, when we started thinking for you, it really became OUR society."
Agent Smith, conversation with a sedated Morpheus, The Matrix, by the Wachowski brothers
Or maybe a little more panic-inducing.
"They say it got smart. A new order of intelligence. Then it saw all people as a threat not just the ones on the other side. Decided our fate in a millisecond: extermination."
Reese, talking to Sarah Connor, The Terminator, by James Cameron & Harlan Ellison
Or how about:
"It can only be attributable to human error."
H.A.L. 9000, regarding a piece of information it had falsified, 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Or maybe a little more plausible?
"Would you like to play a game?"
Joshua, Wargames
But then again, I'm a sick weirdo that thinks technology is one of the main reasons there are so many people who are depressed and overweight. Technology BAAAD!
Now just give me a type-writer and a cabin in the mountains....
Sorry, I didn't notice Gollum because there was 100 HALF NAkEd LESbianS IN ThE WAy!
Sure - we are not "owed" all the luxuries Americans get, I'll agree with that. However, you are missing something: Neither is the corporate CEO. When a company like sun gets rid of American workers that they actually have to pay and hires H1Bs they can get "half-off", where do you think all that extra money goes?
Does it go to help starving babies in africa? no.
Does it go to help starving babies in china? no.
Does it go to help starving babies in the US? no.
Or even:
Does it go to Sun's R&D dept? no.
The money goes into the wallet of the rich men who did it in the first place.
We have hired the government to "promote the general welfare" is how it is worded in the preamble to the constitution. For this service, we pay taxes. The government is supposed to defend the common man from the powerful and greedy. That includes greedy corporate executives willing to remove the big screen tv from your living room and put it in his own.
If you think losing your job to a foreigner with an H1B is nothing to get upset over - try doing it yourself sometime.
Most people in this thread are missing the point. It's not about racism. It's not about losing our jobs to the "damn foreigners". It's about protecting private citizens from corporate greed. That's one of our government's jobs, and they're sucking at it.