We're at an impasse, then. A significant fraction of the Catholic population in the U.S. uses birth control, despite the fact that the Church officially condemns such practices. Domestic abuse is common everywhere, and it's especially common within religious groups that teach the subjugation of women. The statements are impolite, and it would be unfair to say Catholics are particularly wicked in those regards. But "politically incorrect" and "inaccurate" aren't the same thing.
I didn't say the professor has carte blanche to bash Catholics, just because he was one. However, my experience is that too many religious people dismiss even valid, well-considered criticism of their beliefs as ignorant bigotry. If it comes from people who were never "one of them," then it's because they "don't really understand". If it comes from people who were once "one of them," then the critic is just bitter and disillusioned. The only way to get an objective view of the faith is by getting all your information from firm believers.
Former believers are often viciously attacked and vilified by their old faith. If religious people were wiser, they would be more eager to try and learn from the experiences of the departed. Instead, they shoot the messengers, and I'm not surprised that such mistreatment engenders even more hostility.
I think your post nicely illustrates how you needn't have facts before forming an opinion. A few choice quotes from a private e-mail is not enough to conclude that a teacher is disliked by his students, or that his classes are especially unprofessional. I've seen plenty of cases where a teacher got caught up in one of these absurd controversies, and their students became their most outspoken defenders.
While he may have been insensitive and overzealous, I see nothing wrong with a professor of religious studies having opinions about religious matters, so "ignorant" doesn't seem like an appropriate description. Whatever he said about Catholicism and Catholics, the fact that he was raised as one indicates to me that his opinions on those matters should carry some weight.
In part, it's because the scientists are used to dealing with people who understand and accept the scientific method. If they stick to purely scientific arguments, only the minority who can recognize valid scientific reasoning will listen. If they're blurting out idiotic nonsense, it's because for the first time in their sheltered academic lives they're facing an enemy which does nothing else.
The supporters of ID clearly want people to draw the conclusion that they cannot explicitly state in the classroom: God is the "Intelligent Designer". But once you've accepted arguments for some manner of supernatural intervention into the evolutionary process, anything that has the power to make such interventions is a viable possibility. God, Flying Spaghetti Monsters, space aliens, superintelligent hamsters with tiny guitars. It's all the same.
Since The Flying Spaghetti Monster is omnipotent, any evidence for the Judeo-Christian concept of God (the Bible, the ubiquity of belief in God, etc.) must have been created by the FSM in order to test our faith in His Noodly Presence.
If FSM is a straw man, it's a straw man that the God Hypothesis is strapped inside. Because any blow you can land that would discredit the Flying Spaghetti Monster can be turned against any other supernatural agent.
Disagree? Feel free to demonstrate to me, a humble believer, that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is not the creator of our Universe.
I think the point the other guy is trying to make--and is getting lost among his rhetoric--is that even if a journalist is giving people the information they want, a journalist doesn't serve his readers when he fails to disclose the source of information, and knowing that source could strongly impact how the reader would understand that information.
Now if I were publishing a press release, and a journalist copied it verbatim into a story, I'd be happy. If I were a journalist, and I knew I could send my editor the press release and knock off for the day, I'd be happy. But if I were a reader, and I found out the story I'd read was actually a slightly modified press release, I would feel a mite screwed.
I'm not going to touch the argument about whether or not it falls under which definitioms of "journalism" or "plagarism." I'm just saying that it's bad practice. If somebody has an agenda for propagating information, and the journalist takes pains to hide that agenda, then people stop trusting journalism.
The lesson that they were trying to get across is valid, though: You're relying on the people around you to do their jobs, and when they screw up, you feel the consequences. One guy forgets to order ammo? Everybody suffers. Somebody in bloodbanking mislabels the blood used by the hospital? Somebody else dies.
So I see what they were trying to accomplish.
The military didn't brainwash me, though. Growing up Mormon, I'd already had the obedience to authority thing drilled into me. The military fit me like a glove for the first eight or nine months. Then I finally got it through my head that "those in authority" didn't always have the best of intentions, and that realization changed my view of all manner of authoritarian systems.
In short, the military gave me a virulent anti-authoritarian streak. I'm sure I'm unusual, but not unique in that regard.
Between friendly fire and the fragging of overly-brave officers, humans haven't shown exceptional abilities in this department. I mean, I'd worry about being the soldier assigned to fight next to the beta release. But I think your bias is much the same as the one that makes people fear flying. Even though flying is actually a good deal safer than most forms of transportation, people hate the feeling that they're putting their safety entirely in the hands of a "system" that they don't understand and cannot control.
With people, we convince ourselves that we understand why they do what they do. If Spc. Bob just fragged the el-tee, we can make up a story that--to us--explains why he did it, and give us a feeling of control over any similar future events. If the A.I. frags Spc. Bob, because its imaging software got confused, how do you control that?
Given a perfect network and telepresence, you could make a hell of a living as a chauffeur. You could turn on your VR gear, immediately hop into the driver's seat of a car in Milwaulkee, drive the person to his destination, then immediately pick up a second customer in Atlanta. No waiting around between fares. Just drive, drive, drive.
Of course five seconds of bad lag could get somebody killed, I don't think it will become a reality.
They say the intention of the author is irrelevant, that the work should be judged entirely without reference to what the artist might have been trying to say.
Personally, I think the whole thing is an attempt to wrest control of art away from the artists. "I don't care what you meant to say, I'm here to tell you what your work actually communicates." That sort of thing.
I really, really, really don't think Roger Ebert was trying to claim that video games aren't successful, marketable products. I also don't think he was claiming that all movies were art. The points you're trying to make should already be obvious to everyone, and are kind of irrelevant to the discussion.
I'm tentatively siding with Ebert on this subject. You can have exceptional graphics that immerse you completely in the world being presented, an intricate plot with compelling characters, and a string of cut scenes that move your very soul. It might still not be art.
I think the recent Metal Gears are good examples. You enter an area, and get rewarded with a cut scene where your next opponent is introduced. The cut scene illuminates this character's background, motivations, and maybe shows you a glimpse of the humanity behind the person you're about to kill. You may feel some sort of connection to the person, some regret about having to kill them.
Then you take control of the game, and twitch and mash buttons until one of you wins. It's heart-pounding and exhilarating, but I've only ever felt a tentative connection between the cut scenes and fight. It's all adrenaline and big explosions.
I think, if you're going to call it art, there has to be some emotional unity and continuity between the parts you control and the parts you don't. Otherwise, they may as well have redone the between-scene activities as their own cut-scenes, and called it an artistic machinima film.
The drive is almost always to make games long enough to justify the $40 bucks you're being asked to pay for it. The easiest way to do that is to add lots of similar, repetitive tasks to the game. You know, the sort of thing computers are good at. But I think that in order to keep control of the player's emotions throughout the experience, the game has to be extremely short (on the order of a couple of hours). Get in, tell the story you want, generate the experience you want, and then get out. It shouldn't take more than two or three hours.
But if that's your goal, I don't see how to give the user much control over the experience. Alternate endings just turn it into a "Choose Your Own Adventure", and no control turns it into a movie.
I'm not saying it's impossible for a game to be art. But I'm not familiar with any examples that fulfill my criteria, and I think fulfilling them would be tricky.
But regardless of the pursuit, it should be considered a vice to pursue it excessively, to the detriment of your well-being or that of those around you.
You like looking at naked women. No problem. You like looking at them for eight to twelve hours a day, and spend your rent money on X-rated DVDs? Big problem. Same goes for gambling. As long as the time and money you put into it are amounts you can afford to lose, do as you like.
Most things are harmless in moderation. Some things are harmful because they're so difficult to self-moderate.
That's positively tragic. I hope things get better for her.
As technology advances, artificial realities are only going to get more intricate and more immersive. Stories like hers will only become more common.
If only real life were more rewarding.
In an earlier post, I was speculating about building a system that could limit a user's computer usage. It seems like this would be a thousand times easier for an MMORPG to implement. If I was running one, I'd put a hard limit of 8 hours a day and 40 hours a week, with an option of allowing the user to restrict himself further. It seems like the socially responsible thing to do.
I'm sure somebody objects. I'm not really sympathetic to the view that more time spent is beneficial, or to the view that "I can do whatever I want with my time". But I'm willing to listen to objections.
Re:These are different activites
on
Hooked On The Web
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
You've nailed it.
We've always had information junkies. Before they went online in huge numbers, they would be subscribed to every magazine about their favorite subjects, own lots of books, maybe have a stock ticker and a hotline to their investment manager, if that was their thing.
We've always had social junkies. Before they went online in huge numbers, they would spend hours a day on the phone, or hanging out with friends.
We've always had porn junkies. We've always had diary junkies. We've always had shopping junkies.
These days, just about every facet of life can be performed online. I think the "Internet addiction" thing is something of an artifact. To those who don't understand the Internet, it masks a wide variety of behaviors whose only commonality is the fact that the same tool is used to accomplish each of them.
Personally, I think it should be called the "Fun Things Are More Fun Than Boring Things Disorder" (FTAMFTBTD).
Having said that, sometimes it's difficult for people to control their behavior, and it hurts their long-term interests. Lots of people need somebody or something else to keep them on track. My thinking is that there would be a decent market for a service where someone comes in and installs a monitoring program. The installer would ask them which applications and websites they find most "addictive", and set the monitoring program to control overall time spent on the computer, time spent on games, time spent surfing the web, time spent surfing specific sites, etc. An emergency override could force the computer to work again, but it would be a loan against future usage (and it would send a polite e-mail to your spouse).
No, It's not draconian if it's voluntary.
Other people might simply need to recognize how much time they actually spend on these activities. The same program might run in a less intrusive mode, where it just keeps track of activities, and occasionally confronts the user about them. "Clippy: You've spent four hours instant messaging today. Does that seem a bit excessive to you?"
Anyhow, those are my thoughts. We are all a bit dumber for having read them.
The fact that it's an online survey means that the participants are self-selected. That alone means that the study is "flawed" insofar as its results do not generalize beyond the group that actually took the survey. For example, if you put up a survey about tapioca pudding, only people with strong opinions about tapioca pudding would participate. People who don't care about a subject don't participate in polls about that subject.
The worst thing you can do is create a self-selected survey, and use the results to generalize about the population at large. If you put up a survey about pet ownership, people who own pets are more likely to participate. So if 75% of respondents say, "I own a German Shepherd", it's very likely the survey got posted to alt.dogs.i-love-my-german-shepherd, and that the results have no bearing on actual pet ownership patterns.
This survey might be good for getting some ideas about ways to improve Linux's usability, which is good. But there may be classes of people with classes of problems that the survey didn't reach, so those problems aren't going to show up in the results. So it may not reflect the most important issues.
From the study:
Survey questions were developed by the OSDL Desktop Linux Working Group. The survey URL was distributed via email and was picked up by a number of newsgroups and news outlets. 3,374 individuals responded to the survey.
A useful exercise? Maybe. But not the hallmark of good science.
I'm afraid I was already persuaded before I even ran across this. Most of these Ayn Rand knockoffs seem to think that in the dog-eat-dog world they seem to want, they'll somehow end up right where their inherent superiority dictates they belong: at the top. And as long as they can believe that others bring suffering upon themselves by their inherently self-destructive attitudes, they don't have to feel sorry for anyone who doesn't thrive.
But I think you're wrong to ascribe evil to their motives. I think in some fundamental way, they just see "fairness" in a different way than you and I do. To them, society--excluding government intervention--is inherently a fair place where hard work is rewarded, that most people earn their riches honestly and should be allowed to use them in whatever way benefits them, and anyone can make it if they're willing to put in the effort. If all these things were true, I'd probably think much the same way they do.
I don't know how I would have handled your opponent; he seems to be an unapologetic nutjob. I can't blame you for fighting dirty, and I don't know if trying to fight clean would have persuaded anybody. But I think that half the people in this country think that everyone on the opposite end of the political spectrum is evil, and we should therefore use any means necessary to keep those people away from power. This attitude of mutual abhorrence cannot help but end badly.
If you're using Gnome, and happen to know Emacs well, try opening up gconf-editor, drill down into Desktop -> Gnome -> Interface, and change the gtk_key_theme from "Default" to "Emacs". When you do that, anytime you're editing text under gnome, the following commands apply:
Ctrl-P : previous line Ctrl-N : next line Ctrl-F : forward a space Ctrl-B : back a space Ctrl-D : Deletes the character immediately in front of the cursor. Ctrl-U : Kills the entire line your cursor is on. Ctrl-K : Kills all text to the right of your cursor. Ctrl-A : Move cursor to beginning of current line. Ctrl-E : Move cursor to end of current line.
Text editing has a very emacsy feel when you do this. I tend to overextrapolate sometimes. For examples, accidentally trying to use Ctrl-x-o to move between fields on web forms, or Ctrl-x Ctrl-s to "submit", or expecting the text that I just Ctrl-k'ed to come back when I hit Ctrl-y. Also, when I sit down in front of a box where these things don't happen, I might end up with four or five print dialogs in front of me before I realize what happened. Despite the occasional gaffe, it's a huge, huge timesaver for me.
Note that these bindings work as advertised when the GUI's focus is on a text section (like a web form or the location bar in your browser), but when focus is elsewhere, the old keybindings work fine (Ctrl-P to print, Ctrl-D to bookmark, etc.)
And how long does it take you to save a 12MB file? Even if you were allowed to use hexadecimal notation, I don't think you could write fast enough to do it inside a month. OpenOffice is a huge timesaver.
From what I've been able to find, the XBox360 CPU is a modified PPC chip. But I would assume that a lot of its performance comes from specialized graphics chipsets (like any good gaming rig). While it's possible to do general purpose computations on graphics cards, I don't think it's trivial.
So for high performance computing, I don't see how networking a bunch of XBoxen together is going to deliver anything that couldn't be achieved by networking a bunch of beige boxes. With a custom-built solution, you aren't buying controllers, or the DVD-ROM, or the graphics chipsets that don't really do anything for you. Finally, you have better control over the hardware specifications.
The upsides: Well, they'll look much cooler mounted on the rack. And perhaps in a few months you can get used ones at very competitive prices. But overall, I think beige will always be king.
Slashdot Mirror
We're at an impasse, then. A significant fraction of the Catholic population in the U.S. uses birth control, despite the fact that the Church officially condemns such practices. Domestic abuse is common everywhere, and it's especially common within religious groups that teach the subjugation of women. The statements are impolite, and it would be unfair to say Catholics are particularly wicked in those regards. But "politically incorrect" and "inaccurate" aren't the same thing.
I didn't say the professor has carte blanche to bash Catholics, just because he was one. However, my experience is that too many religious people dismiss even valid, well-considered criticism of their beliefs as ignorant bigotry. If it comes from people who were never "one of them," then it's because they "don't really understand". If it comes from people who were once "one of them," then the critic is just bitter and disillusioned. The only way to get an objective view of the faith is by getting all your information from firm believers.
Former believers are often viciously attacked and vilified by their old faith. If religious people were wiser, they would be more eager to try and learn from the experiences of the departed. Instead, they shoot the messengers, and I'm not surprised that such mistreatment engenders even more hostility.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for helping perpetuate the "hamsters with guitars" meme.
I think your post nicely illustrates how you needn't have facts before forming an opinion. A few choice quotes from a private e-mail is not enough to conclude that a teacher is disliked by his students, or that his classes are especially unprofessional. I've seen plenty of cases where a teacher got caught up in one of these absurd controversies, and their students became their most outspoken defenders.
While he may have been insensitive and overzealous, I see nothing wrong with a professor of religious studies having opinions about religious matters, so "ignorant" doesn't seem like an appropriate description. Whatever he said about Catholicism and Catholics, the fact that he was raised as one indicates to me that his opinions on those matters should carry some weight.
In part, it's because the scientists are used to dealing with people who understand and accept the scientific method. If they stick to purely scientific arguments, only the minority who can recognize valid scientific reasoning will listen. If they're blurting out idiotic nonsense, it's because for the first time in their sheltered academic lives they're facing an enemy which does nothing else.
What makes FSM a straw man?
The supporters of ID clearly want people to draw the conclusion that they cannot explicitly state in the classroom: God is the "Intelligent Designer". But once you've accepted arguments for some manner of supernatural intervention into the evolutionary process, anything that has the power to make such interventions is a viable possibility. God, Flying Spaghetti Monsters, space aliens, superintelligent hamsters with tiny guitars. It's all the same.
Since The Flying Spaghetti Monster is omnipotent, any evidence for the Judeo-Christian concept of God (the Bible, the ubiquity of belief in God, etc.) must have been created by the FSM in order to test our faith in His Noodly Presence.
If FSM is a straw man, it's a straw man that the God Hypothesis is strapped inside. Because any blow you can land that would discredit the Flying Spaghetti Monster can be turned against any other supernatural agent.
Disagree? Feel free to demonstrate to me, a humble believer, that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is not the creator of our Universe.
I think the point the other guy is trying to make--and is getting lost among his rhetoric--is that even if a journalist is giving people the information they want, a journalist doesn't serve his readers when he fails to disclose the source of information, and knowing that source could strongly impact how the reader would understand that information.
Now if I were publishing a press release, and a journalist copied it verbatim into a story, I'd be happy. If I were a journalist, and I knew I could send my editor the press release and knock off for the day, I'd be happy. But if I were a reader, and I found out the story I'd read was actually a slightly modified press release, I would feel a mite screwed.
I'm not going to touch the argument about whether or not it falls under which definitioms of "journalism" or "plagarism." I'm just saying that it's bad practice. If somebody has an agenda for propagating information, and the journalist takes pains to hide that agenda, then people stop trusting journalism.
The lesson that they were trying to get across is valid, though: You're relying on the people around you to do their jobs, and when they screw up, you feel the consequences. One guy forgets to order ammo? Everybody suffers. Somebody in bloodbanking mislabels the blood used by the hospital? Somebody else dies.
So I see what they were trying to accomplish.
The military didn't brainwash me, though. Growing up Mormon, I'd already had the obedience to authority thing drilled into me. The military fit me like a glove for the first eight or nine months. Then I finally got it through my head that "those in authority" didn't always have the best of intentions, and that realization changed my view of all manner of authoritarian systems.
In short, the military gave me a virulent anti-authoritarian streak. I'm sure I'm unusual, but not unique in that regard.
Between friendly fire and the fragging of overly-brave officers, humans haven't shown exceptional abilities in this department. I mean, I'd worry about being the soldier assigned to fight next to the beta release. But I think your bias is much the same as the one that makes people fear flying. Even though flying is actually a good deal safer than most forms of transportation, people hate the feeling that they're putting their safety entirely in the hands of a "system" that they don't understand and cannot control.
With people, we convince ourselves that we understand why they do what they do. If Spc. Bob just fragged the el-tee, we can make up a story that--to us--explains why he did it, and give us a feeling of control over any similar future events. If the A.I. frags Spc. Bob, because its imaging software got confused, how do you control that?
I'm desperately trying to think of how my life would have benefitted from learning of this story three or four days earlier.
Then I remembered I'd just dropped $5000 on camera gear at PriceRitePhoto.com.
Stupid friggin' Slashdot.
Given a perfect network and telepresence, you could make a hell of a living as a chauffeur. You could turn on your VR gear, immediately hop into the driver's seat of a car in Milwaulkee, drive the person to his destination, then immediately pick up a second customer in Atlanta. No waiting around between fares. Just drive, drive, drive.
Of course five seconds of bad lag could get somebody killed, I don't think it will become a reality.
Obviously you're not a post-modernist snob.
They say the intention of the author is irrelevant, that the work should be judged entirely without reference to what the artist might have been trying to say.
Personally, I think the whole thing is an attempt to wrest control of art away from the artists. "I don't care what you meant to say, I'm here to tell you what your work actually communicates." That sort of thing.
I really, really, really don't think Roger Ebert was trying to claim that video games aren't successful, marketable products. I also don't think he was claiming that all movies were art. The points you're trying to make should already be obvious to everyone, and are kind of irrelevant to the discussion.
I'm tentatively siding with Ebert on this subject. You can have exceptional graphics that immerse you completely in the world being presented, an intricate plot with compelling characters, and a string of cut scenes that move your very soul. It might still not be art.
I think the recent Metal Gears are good examples. You enter an area, and get rewarded with a cut scene where your next opponent is introduced. The cut scene illuminates this character's background, motivations, and maybe shows you a glimpse of the humanity behind the person you're about to kill. You may feel some sort of connection to the person, some regret about having to kill them.
Then you take control of the game, and twitch and mash buttons until one of you wins. It's heart-pounding and exhilarating, but I've only ever felt a tentative connection between the cut scenes and fight. It's all adrenaline and big explosions.
I think, if you're going to call it art, there has to be some emotional unity and continuity between the parts you control and the parts you don't. Otherwise, they may as well have redone the between-scene activities as their own cut-scenes, and called it an artistic machinima film.
The drive is almost always to make games long enough to justify the $40 bucks you're being asked to pay for it. The easiest way to do that is to add lots of similar, repetitive tasks to the game. You know, the sort of thing computers are good at. But I think that in order to keep control of the player's emotions throughout the experience, the game has to be extremely short (on the order of a couple of hours). Get in, tell the story you want, generate the experience you want, and then get out. It shouldn't take more than two or three hours.
But if that's your goal, I don't see how to give the user much control over the experience. Alternate endings just turn it into a "Choose Your Own Adventure", and no control turns it into a movie.
I'm not saying it's impossible for a game to be art. But I'm not familiar with any examples that fulfill my criteria, and I think fulfilling them would be tricky.
Okay.
But regardless of the pursuit, it should be considered a vice to pursue it excessively, to the detriment of your well-being or that of those around you.
You like looking at naked women. No problem. You like looking at them for eight to twelve hours a day, and spend your rent money on X-rated DVDs? Big problem. Same goes for gambling. As long as the time and money you put into it are amounts you can afford to lose, do as you like.
Most things are harmless in moderation. Some things are harmful because they're so difficult to self-moderate.
That's positively tragic. I hope things get better for her.
As technology advances, artificial realities are only going to get more intricate and more immersive. Stories like hers will only become more common.
If only real life were more rewarding.
In an earlier post, I was speculating about building a system that could limit a user's computer usage. It seems like this would be a thousand times easier for an MMORPG to implement. If I was running one, I'd put a hard limit of 8 hours a day and 40 hours a week, with an option of allowing the user to restrict himself further. It seems like the socially responsible thing to do.
I'm sure somebody objects. I'm not really sympathetic to the view that more time spent is beneficial, or to the view that "I can do whatever I want with my time". But I'm willing to listen to objections.
You've nailed it.
We've always had information junkies. Before they went online in huge numbers, they would be subscribed to every magazine about their favorite subjects, own lots of books, maybe have a stock ticker and a hotline to their investment manager, if that was their thing.
We've always had social junkies. Before they went online in huge numbers, they would spend hours a day on the phone, or hanging out with friends.
We've always had porn junkies. We've always had diary junkies. We've always had shopping junkies.
These days, just about every facet of life can be performed online. I think the "Internet addiction" thing is something of an artifact. To those who don't understand the Internet, it masks a wide variety of behaviors whose only commonality is the fact that the same tool is used to accomplish each of them.
Personally, I think it should be called the "Fun Things Are More Fun Than Boring Things Disorder" (FTAMFTBTD).
Having said that, sometimes it's difficult for people to control their behavior, and it hurts their long-term interests. Lots of people need somebody or something else to keep them on track. My thinking is that there would be a decent market for a service where someone comes in and installs a monitoring program. The installer would ask them which applications and websites they find most "addictive", and set the monitoring program to control overall time spent on the computer, time spent on games, time spent surfing the web, time spent surfing specific sites, etc. An emergency override could force the computer to work again, but it would be a loan against future usage (and it would send a polite e-mail to your spouse).
No, It's not draconian if it's voluntary.
Other people might simply need to recognize how much time they actually spend on these activities. The same program might run in a less intrusive mode, where it just keeps track of activities, and occasionally confronts the user about them. "Clippy: You've spent four hours instant messaging today. Does that seem a bit excessive to you?"
Anyhow, those are my thoughts. We are all a bit dumber for having read them.
link plz thx!
The worst thing you can do is create a self-selected survey, and use the results to generalize about the population at large. If you put up a survey about pet ownership, people who own pets are more likely to participate. So if 75% of respondents say, "I own a German Shepherd", it's very likely the survey got posted to alt.dogs.i-love-my-german-shepherd, and that the results have no bearing on actual pet ownership patterns.
This survey might be good for getting some ideas about ways to improve Linux's usability, which is good. But there may be classes of people with classes of problems that the survey didn't reach, so those problems aren't going to show up in the results. So it may not reflect the most important issues.
From the study:
A useful exercise? Maybe. But not the hallmark of good science.
I'm afraid I was already persuaded before I even ran across this. Most of these Ayn Rand knockoffs seem to think that in the dog-eat-dog world they seem to want, they'll somehow end up right where their inherent superiority dictates they belong: at the top. And as long as they can believe that others bring suffering upon themselves by their inherently self-destructive attitudes, they don't have to feel sorry for anyone who doesn't thrive.
But I think you're wrong to ascribe evil to their motives. I think in some fundamental way, they just see "fairness" in a different way than you and I do. To them, society--excluding government intervention--is inherently a fair place where hard work is rewarded, that most people earn their riches honestly and should be allowed to use them in whatever way benefits them, and anyone can make it if they're willing to put in the effort. If all these things were true, I'd probably think much the same way they do.
I don't know how I would have handled your opponent; he seems to be an unapologetic nutjob. I can't blame you for fighting dirty, and I don't know if trying to fight clean would have persuaded anybody. But I think that half the people in this country think that everyone on the opposite end of the political spectrum is evil, and we should therefore use any means necessary to keep those people away from power. This attitude of mutual abhorrence cannot help but end badly.
My complaint was that you seemed to be taking your girlfriend for granted. This response does nothing to change my opinion.
I got an Apple sticker with a recent iPod acquisition, and I'm trying to decide if I should slap it on the back of an old Toshiba laptop.
This is far and away the most precious flame war I've seen in years.
Thank you. Thank you both! I'm certainly bookmarking this exchange.
Ah, a Gnome man, I see.
If you're using Gnome, and happen to know Emacs well, try opening up gconf-editor, drill down into Desktop -> Gnome -> Interface, and change the gtk_key_theme from "Default" to "Emacs". When you do that, anytime you're editing text under gnome, the following commands apply:
Ctrl-P : previous line
Ctrl-N : next line
Ctrl-F : forward a space
Ctrl-B : back a space
Ctrl-D : Deletes the character immediately in front of the cursor.
Ctrl-U : Kills the entire line your cursor is on.
Ctrl-K : Kills all text to the right of your cursor.
Ctrl-A : Move cursor to beginning of current line.
Ctrl-E : Move cursor to end of current line.
Text editing has a very emacsy feel when you do this. I tend to overextrapolate sometimes. For examples, accidentally trying to use Ctrl-x-o to move between fields on web forms, or Ctrl-x Ctrl-s to "submit", or expecting the text that I just Ctrl-k'ed to come back when I hit Ctrl-y. Also, when I sit down in front of a box where these things don't happen, I might end up with four or five print dialogs in front of me before I realize what happened. Despite the occasional gaffe, it's a huge, huge timesaver for me.
Note that these bindings work as advertised when the GUI's focus is on a text section (like a web form or the location bar in your browser), but when focus is elsewhere, the old keybindings work fine (Ctrl-P to print, Ctrl-D to bookmark, etc.)
And how long does it take you to save a 12MB file? Even if you were allowed to use hexadecimal notation, I don't think you could write fast enough to do it inside a month. OpenOffice is a huge timesaver.
From what I've been able to find, the XBox360 CPU is a modified PPC chip. But I would assume that a lot of its performance comes from specialized graphics chipsets (like any good gaming rig). While it's possible to do general purpose computations on graphics cards, I don't think it's trivial.
So for high performance computing, I don't see how networking a bunch of XBoxen together is going to deliver anything that couldn't be achieved by networking a bunch of beige boxes. With a custom-built solution, you aren't buying controllers, or the DVD-ROM, or the graphics chipsets that don't really do anything for you. Finally, you have better control over the hardware specifications.
The upsides: Well, they'll look much cooler mounted on the rack. And perhaps in a few months you can get used ones at very competitive prices. But overall, I think beige will always be king.