I'm posting this from Tempe AZ. The people here suck. Maybe the ASU folks are OK, but there's a big culture change as soon as you get away from campus. This town is mostly a big, ugly ghetto.
I noticed this years ago when I graduated from college (in a small college town on the east coast), and got a job in that same town. Suddenly, living in a college town wasn't much fun. It was loads of fun when you don't have a job and you spend most of your time on campus or in one of the eateries right next to campus. But when you're working a normal job and not involved with anything or anyone on campus, it's really not a fun place at all.
He won't like it in Southern Europe, it's much too cold there. If he loves the weather in Arizona, then he's only going to be happy in someplace like Saudi Arabia, northern Africa, or maybe the desert of Australia.
BTW, I live in AZ too; it sucks here, and that includes the weather. 115 degrees (F) every day is not fun, and 2 months of nice weather in January/February doesn't make up for it. I'm ready to move north and put up with the cold.
(save one, who actually like the US better than France)
Maybe he ate at a McDonald's in Paris and decided the McD's in the US are better, since you don't have to worry so much about being physically attacked by the employees there.
Wrong. The civil war didn't "settle" anything. The civil war was successful for the Unionists because they had a strong manufacturing economy and were able to finance the war effort, plus they were able to conscript lots of people to send into battle against the rebels.
When the economy collapses in the US, there won't be any money to finance a war effort to hold the union together, and there probably won't be any political will to do so either. And where do you think you're going to find soldiers to fight that war? This breakup isn't going to be a whole bloc of states banding together and seceding at once, it's going to be a bunch of different places breaking off and doing their own thing, probably just ignoring the powerless federal government for a while before making any formal declarations of secession.
WTF? Yes, memory and storage are cheap. You can buy a whole laptop now for $260, with a 300GB hard drive. You can buy 1TB hard drives for $80 or so (which of course will only fit in a desktop chassis). This stuff isn't getting more expensive.
Are you sure? What are your credentials? How do you know that a solid iron asteroid isn't going to be split in half by a massive fictional bomb with the two pieces sent in opposite directions? Why should I believe some random asshole on Slashdot?
The 90% that's identical is also dirt cheap. Why bother sharing a cheap, low-power ARM CPU when you can just have multiple devices? I have a separate laptop, desktop, and phone now. Why would I want to combine these all into one device? The only problem with having multiple devices is syncing the data between them, but that's a software problem.
The way I see it, the US system was initially built to function that way, and it certainly can function that way (whether it ever actually has, I leave as an exercise for historians.
The US system worked extremely well under George Washington I think. After that, it started a slow downward slide.
That would only work if there were some way to independently verify that the sociopathic leader is in fact acting in the best interest of society, and not his own, and that he isn't somehow getting away with screwing over society to benefit himself. But if you have some people in place that can accurately make that determination, why not just put them in charge? Worst of all, who's going to make sure the board of directors (for lack of better term) is staffed with the right people (and not people who are also sociopaths, and who will be buddy-buddy with the sociopathic leader working together to enrich themselves at the expense of society, much like what happens with many large corporations), and that they're properly evaluating the leader? For that, you need an electorate that is able to do that effectively, but just about every democratically-elected government has proven that the electorate just isn't capable of making that determination.
It seems the best you're going to get is a system like China's, where you have an unelected cabal who has taken power, and has chosen from their party a leader who will work for the good of the country. Sometimes this works out well, as people truly interested in doing the best for the country get in power now and then. The problem is that, just like benevolent monarchs, it falls apart sooner or later as the good people get old and retire or die off, and new people replace them who aren't so good. So you get little "golden eras", in between periods of despotism.
As far as I can tell, the best system would be one where humans simply aren't involved, or at least don't have the ultimate power, and some sort of beneficial non-human overlord has the ultimate authority, whether it's some kind of Vulcan-like alien race or some very intelligent AIs.
Well of course; but the thing is, you'd think that most men would learn how to behave better as they get older and have more life experience. It's one thing to see a 20-year-old (or worse, teenager) do something stupid; the phrase "when I was young and stupid" is heard on occasion for a reason, but to see an elderly person do the same stupid stuff just shows that at least some people never learn.
You act like what your colleague said is somehow different and alien. Go back in time to colonial America, in the 16-1700s; they thought exactly the same way back then. They didn't usually cut off hands though; but they had some pretty nasty punishments like brandings, and of course execution for murder. For the lesser offenses, they just settled for public humiliation. Jails (gaols) were only used to keep people until their trials.
BTW, I'm not advocating a long prison term for this. A week might be a good first start.
A weekend in jail? I don't think that's sufficient for this kind of offense. Go ask your mother or wife what she thinks an appropriate punishment for this crime is. I didn't say years in prison was the answer, but you yourself advocate jail time, the question seems to be just how much; how about a month?
For comparison, what's the punishment when a doctor is found to be molesting female patients? How about a priest?
As for counseling, I don't see how that's going to help; these people are sick, and the only thing that'll stop them is either keeping them away from people altogether, or making it very clear they'll be harshly punished if they do it again, so they restrain themselves to avoid punishment. This works just fine with most other premeditated crimes (it's only crimes of passion or other situations where people don't have time to think through the consequences of their actions, and crimes where the perpetrators are the dregs of society that are too stupid to think through the consequences of their actions, where prison time isn't an effective deterrent. I would assume that anyone at a hacker's conference isn't quite that stupid.)
Yes, I never said FB was the be-and-and-end-all, and after that part you quoted I pointed out major problems with the implementation. Also, we already have yet another service that's 0.07% better as you were saying; it's called "Google+". The jury's still out on that one though. A lot of times, things like this have a first-mover factor, such as Ebay where no one bothers with the alternatives because the other people aren't on them; of course, that didn't save MySpace or AOL, so there's some kind of threshold where people abandon the player that has inertia.
For me, "here" is in AZ where I currently live. AZ certainly has its own reputation, but no, you won't escape prison if you shoot someone in the back as they're running away from you, or other such things. You really do have to be in danger here.
As for Zimmerman, it's not looking good for him so far; I'd be surprised to see him walk free.
Well considering how many people use FB, I guess in your mind most of the adult population is "feeble-minded". Arrogant much?
FB is a pretty smart idea; only a fool would say otherwise. However, that doesn't mean that FB is the greatest possible implementation of that idea. It has a lot of problems; the biggest problem is that of monetization. Sure, it's kinda cool to have some big online meeting place to find all your friends and post dumb pictures and links and chit-chat about it all, but someone's gotta pay the bills to keep it all running, and people posting silly comments about cat pictures and pictures of their kids isn't exactly a big money-maker, and people tend to get turned off by too much advertising, so while that can be used to bring in revenue, if you overdo it, it'll backfire, plus it's not hard for people to block ads with things like ABP, making advertising even less valuable.
The other problem I see is that FB just isn't that well done. For instance, suppose I want to look up someone I knew way back in high school to see what he or she is up to these days. If they have an uncommon name, no problem, just search for that name and they'll pop up if they have a FB account. But what if their name is John or Julie Smith? Good luck finding the person you're looking for there. Now, you'd think that you could just narrow it down with some keywords or something (e.g. school names they've attended, towns or states they've lived in, etc.); but no, the FB people aren't smart enough to implement that apparently.
I disagree. If you really want to get to the pot of gold, you have to start your own business. Working for someone else will never get you far. (Of course, starting your own company is also a giant gamble, as most companies fail, so there's no free lunch here either.)
Of course, there are those who supposedly work for someone else, but they really work for themselves, as they're independent contractors; they can also do quite well.
Don't be stupid. Someone grabbing your crotch is not threatening your life, and that's the only time you're allowed to shoot them in the head over here.
Yes, we can have guns over here, and we can even carry them around with us (here in Arizona, you don't even need a permit any more). But if you actually use it, you better have $20k to spend on a lawyer to defend you in court, unless it's absolutely blatantly obvious to the cops that you had no choice (e.g., some thugs with their own guns bust into your house at night, and you shoot them). In fact, shooting someone anywhere outside your home is generally a good way to get in trouble, as there's always a big he-said-she-said factor to it (like with the Travon Martin shooting in FL, another gun-friendly state).
Exactly. I've seen plenty of sexually harassment coming from older (50+) men, I've even seen it happen to my wife. There's a lot of disgusting old men out there who somehow forget how to behave like a gentlemen after their hair turns gray or falls out.
Any normal business setting is going to have women in it, even if they're in another part of the office doing HR or marketing work. An employee that goes around grabbing their coworkers' crotches, or just being creepy in general around the women there, is not going to be kept around for long.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm posting this from Tempe AZ. The people here suck. Maybe the ASU folks are OK, but there's a big culture change as soon as you get away from campus. This town is mostly a big, ugly ghetto.
I noticed this years ago when I graduated from college (in a small college town on the east coast), and got a job in that same town. Suddenly, living in a college town wasn't much fun. It was loads of fun when you don't have a job and you spend most of your time on campus or in one of the eateries right next to campus. But when you're working a normal job and not involved with anything or anyone on campus, it's really not a fun place at all.
He won't like it in Southern Europe, it's much too cold there. If he loves the weather in Arizona, then he's only going to be happy in someplace like Saudi Arabia, northern Africa, or maybe the desert of Australia.
BTW, I live in AZ too; it sucks here, and that includes the weather. 115 degrees (F) every day is not fun, and 2 months of nice weather in January/February doesn't make up for it. I'm ready to move north and put up with the cold.
(save one, who actually like the US better than France)
Maybe he ate at a McDonald's in Paris and decided the McD's in the US are better, since you don't have to worry so much about being physically attacked by the employees there.
Wrong. The civil war didn't "settle" anything. The civil war was successful for the Unionists because they had a strong manufacturing economy and were able to finance the war effort, plus they were able to conscript lots of people to send into battle against the rebels.
When the economy collapses in the US, there won't be any money to finance a war effort to hold the union together, and there probably won't be any political will to do so either. And where do you think you're going to find soldiers to fight that war? This breakup isn't going to be a whole bloc of states banding together and seceding at once, it's going to be a bunch of different places breaking off and doing their own thing, probably just ignoring the powerless federal government for a while before making any formal declarations of secession.
WTF? Yes, memory and storage are cheap. You can buy a whole laptop now for $260, with a 300GB hard drive. You can buy 1TB hard drives for $80 or so (which of course will only fit in a desktop chassis). This stuff isn't getting more expensive.
Maybe Natalie is Sue's girlfriend....
Are you sure? What are your credentials? How do you know that a solid iron asteroid isn't going to be split in half by a massive fictional bomb with the two pieces sent in opposite directions? Why should I believe some random asshole on Slashdot?
The 90% that's identical is also dirt cheap. Why bother sharing a cheap, low-power ARM CPU when you can just have multiple devices? I have a separate laptop, desktop, and phone now. Why would I want to combine these all into one device? The only problem with having multiple devices is syncing the data between them, but that's a software problem.
No, fucking Slashdot for not allowing you to edit a post after it's posted.
The way I see it, the US system was initially built to function that way, and it certainly can function that way (whether it ever actually has, I leave as an exercise for historians.
The US system worked extremely well under George Washington I think. After that, it started a slow downward slide.
That would only work if there were some way to independently verify that the sociopathic leader is in fact acting in the best interest of society, and not his own, and that he isn't somehow getting away with screwing over society to benefit himself. But if you have some people in place that can accurately make that determination, why not just put them in charge? Worst of all, who's going to make sure the board of directors (for lack of better term) is staffed with the right people (and not people who are also sociopaths, and who will be buddy-buddy with the sociopathic leader working together to enrich themselves at the expense of society, much like what happens with many large corporations), and that they're properly evaluating the leader? For that, you need an electorate that is able to do that effectively, but just about every democratically-elected government has proven that the electorate just isn't capable of making that determination.
It seems the best you're going to get is a system like China's, where you have an unelected cabal who has taken power, and has chosen from their party a leader who will work for the good of the country. Sometimes this works out well, as people truly interested in doing the best for the country get in power now and then. The problem is that, just like benevolent monarchs, it falls apart sooner or later as the good people get old and retire or die off, and new people replace them who aren't so good. So you get little "golden eras", in between periods of despotism.
As far as I can tell, the best system would be one where humans simply aren't involved, or at least don't have the ultimate power, and some sort of beneficial non-human overlord has the ultimate authority, whether it's some kind of Vulcan-like alien race or some very intelligent AIs.
Well of course; but the thing is, you'd think that most men would learn how to behave better as they get older and have more life experience. It's one thing to see a 20-year-old (or worse, teenager) do something stupid; the phrase "when I was young and stupid" is heard on occasion for a reason, but to see an elderly person do the same stupid stuff just shows that at least some people never learn.
If things are really that bad, why not just kill them and get it over with?
Because it's a violation of human rights? Because we don't want to be like China or Saudi Arabia?
true geeks might be socially awkward an silent but that does NOT mean every asshole who doesn't give a fuck is a geek.
That's what I used to think too, before I came to Slashdot. The comments here are telling.
Google's been doing pretty good, but those other companies are shit companies, I'll agree. Especially Groupon.
You act like what your colleague said is somehow different and alien. Go back in time to colonial America, in the 16-1700s; they thought exactly the same way back then. They didn't usually cut off hands though; but they had some pretty nasty punishments like brandings, and of course execution for murder. For the lesser offenses, they just settled for public humiliation. Jails (gaols) were only used to keep people until their trials.
BTW, I'm not advocating a long prison term for this. A week might be a good first start.
A weekend in jail? I don't think that's sufficient for this kind of offense. Go ask your mother or wife what she thinks an appropriate punishment for this crime is. I didn't say years in prison was the answer, but you yourself advocate jail time, the question seems to be just how much; how about a month?
For comparison, what's the punishment when a doctor is found to be molesting female patients? How about a priest?
As for counseling, I don't see how that's going to help; these people are sick, and the only thing that'll stop them is either keeping them away from people altogether, or making it very clear they'll be harshly punished if they do it again, so they restrain themselves to avoid punishment. This works just fine with most other premeditated crimes (it's only crimes of passion or other situations where people don't have time to think through the consequences of their actions, and crimes where the perpetrators are the dregs of society that are too stupid to think through the consequences of their actions, where prison time isn't an effective deterrent. I would assume that anyone at a hacker's conference isn't quite that stupid.)
Yes, I never said FB was the be-and-and-end-all, and after that part you quoted I pointed out major problems with the implementation. Also, we already have yet another service that's 0.07% better as you were saying; it's called "Google+". The jury's still out on that one though. A lot of times, things like this have a first-mover factor, such as Ebay where no one bothers with the alternatives because the other people aren't on them; of course, that didn't save MySpace or AOL, so there's some kind of threshold where people abandon the player that has inertia.
For me, "here" is in AZ where I currently live. AZ certainly has its own reputation, but no, you won't escape prison if you shoot someone in the back as they're running away from you, or other such things. You really do have to be in danger here.
As for Zimmerman, it's not looking good for him so far; I'd be surprised to see him walk free.
Texas does appear to be rather extreme.
Well considering how many people use FB, I guess in your mind most of the adult population is "feeble-minded". Arrogant much?
FB is a pretty smart idea; only a fool would say otherwise. However, that doesn't mean that FB is the greatest possible implementation of that idea. It has a lot of problems; the biggest problem is that of monetization. Sure, it's kinda cool to have some big online meeting place to find all your friends and post dumb pictures and links and chit-chat about it all, but someone's gotta pay the bills to keep it all running, and people posting silly comments about cat pictures and pictures of their kids isn't exactly a big money-maker, and people tend to get turned off by too much advertising, so while that can be used to bring in revenue, if you overdo it, it'll backfire, plus it's not hard for people to block ads with things like ABP, making advertising even less valuable.
The other problem I see is that FB just isn't that well done. For instance, suppose I want to look up someone I knew way back in high school to see what he or she is up to these days. If they have an uncommon name, no problem, just search for that name and they'll pop up if they have a FB account. But what if their name is John or Julie Smith? Good luck finding the person you're looking for there. Now, you'd think that you could just narrow it down with some keywords or something (e.g. school names they've attended, towns or states they've lived in, etc.); but no, the FB people aren't smart enough to implement that apparently.
I disagree. If you really want to get to the pot of gold, you have to start your own business. Working for someone else will never get you far. (Of course, starting your own company is also a giant gamble, as most companies fail, so there's no free lunch here either.)
Of course, there are those who supposedly work for someone else, but they really work for themselves, as they're independent contractors; they can also do quite well.
Just curious, do you know many examples of other such companies, which we would have heard of?
Don't be stupid. Someone grabbing your crotch is not threatening your life, and that's the only time you're allowed to shoot them in the head over here.
Yes, we can have guns over here, and we can even carry them around with us (here in Arizona, you don't even need a permit any more). But if you actually use it, you better have $20k to spend on a lawyer to defend you in court, unless it's absolutely blatantly obvious to the cops that you had no choice (e.g., some thugs with their own guns bust into your house at night, and you shoot them). In fact, shooting someone anywhere outside your home is generally a good way to get in trouble, as there's always a big he-said-she-said factor to it (like with the Travon Martin shooting in FL, another gun-friendly state).
Exactly. I've seen plenty of sexually harassment coming from older (50+) men, I've even seen it happen to my wife. There's a lot of disgusting old men out there who somehow forget how to behave like a gentlemen after their hair turns gray or falls out.
Any normal business setting is going to have women in it, even if they're in another part of the office doing HR or marketing work. An employee that goes around grabbing their coworkers' crotches, or just being creepy in general around the women there, is not going to be kept around for long.