Overselling representations of value, in the hope that they can make maximum use of the underutilized parts of the resources available. That transforms any regular customer use of those resources a "threat" to their viability as a business. So, at some point, like with a ponzi/pyramid scheme, demand drives the overselling on that resource to reach a point where the whole system starts to unravel. As this starts to happen, those running the system will turn to threats, excuses, and sudden changes in policy to try to make the process run that one last cycle, or try to sell the whole mess to someone else before the illusion is broken.
Here though, because the output is in terms of a constant stream of use, rather than monetary return, the provider can just kick out those who would complain about unfullfilled promises, freeing up resources to make more carefully worded promises they can't actually fulfill. All the blame goes away with the dropped customer, and benefit to those running the system.
That's the nature of selling everything as a 'service' when you have a relative monopoly - you can oversell as much as you want, then pick and choose who are the easiest customers to serve with limited resources.
Sure - it's a completely idiotic move, according to logic and ethics. But like watching a video of someone trying to badly imitate an episode of Jackass, there's just something odd about watching the single-minded drive towards something one knows is a stupid idea that oddly reinforces something about the human spirit.
Why? He knows he's marching towards a given horrible set of outcomes (damaging his own interests) - he knows he's mostly doing it to the entertainment of others - he even knows he's hurting those he works with (and seems to like that idea for some reason) - but through sheer will and bravado, he's picking up that damn skateboard, and he's going to jump all that freeway traffic, despite the fact that a little man just knocked his kneecap out of joint two minutes ago with a hammer.
Human drive can do so much - it can push us so far from reason that it can flip past tragedy back to comedy, even for 'successful' men like Darl. There's a twisted Catharsis in that - a fact about the human condition that we can use our focus towards any end, to just about any extent.
It reminds us why self-reflection, observing your own life from different perspectives occasionally can be so important too.
Suggestion to Asus: Lose the LCD on the end of the keyboard.
It defeats a lot of the purpose of such a device - this looks like something I'd chuck in a backpack, so when I got there, I'd just plug it into an LCD and go. Having an LCD built on the side could give some status information, but at the cost of messing up the center of gravity on the device (important for a lot of situations), and having a scratch hazard on an otherwise casual item. Losing the LCD would also make the unit fewer parts to power and go bad.
As another suggestion, try and make a wireless (perhaps bluetooth) DVI/VGA plug that will allow the device to run completely disconnected from the monitor. Add in an application for quickly setting up and managing external wireless storage and backup, and you've got a nice ultralight system.
A poster on yesterday's thread claiming to be the "director of digital communications at Time Warner Cable", stated that lost channels would be refunded to some degree on bills.
I take it that this latest agreement will also be, um, represented in the upcoming bills also?
It's the jobs of both companies to raise the shareholder value - and the best agreement in that scenario would be to agree to take more from customers.
The original suggestion of using the Internet to access programming is starting to look better and better. Any companies out there seriously considering a competitive delivery mechanism using only existing Internet channels for such content? I'm tired of being the customer with very little real voice in such agreements, when the amount of programming I'm actually interested in is rather small.
There's an important distinction here - this is not mind copying, it's just perspective swapping. Mind copying would be if you were able to copy the bits of one mind in one bit of hardware (example: brain) to another bit of hardware (example: computer disk), then be able to have the mind run somewhere else. What we have here is perceptive swapping, where you just overlay a new perspective in place of a brain's inputs/outputs, giving the limited sensory perception of acting in another place to that brain's mind.
It's cool that we're making new ways for people to get new perspectives, but this ain't mind swapping by a long shot.
Sure, the stock market's bad. Really bad. Oddly, that's what makes for very good timing here - because even though a lot of people have less money to invest, there's a lot of other folks who are looking to take their money from places they used to believe as 'safe', and put it where some of it will make money back to recover from recent failures. That includes mutual fund companies, and several other sources of megabucks.
There's also a lot of potential researchers who can spend a lot of time on these projects, at relatively competitive rates. And a lot of existing data to pull together from university projects that individually have been starved for resources. That, and there's a slight possibility some politicians may be able to make a sane infrastructure to provide at least some support in upcoming budgets.
Sounds like excellent timing to get a massively multiple-approach research project like this underway. It might even save a small part of our economy through the continuing troubles.
That was lightly addressed in my post, actually - anecdotally, the uninstalls aren't crediting back to the install limit of anyone commenting on the game so far, reinforcing the theory that the limit was mostly to kill the resell market for the game.
The kink in the idea of install limits is that the reason you tend to reinstall is because your computer went kaput. You don't tend to be able to uninstall when that happens. That's certainly not an atypical event in a gamer's computer usage, making it a double blow for a gamer recovering a system to have to lose access to a game they worked to buy in the first place. To get access to the game they purchased back, they have to contact EA and ask permission to play their copy of the game again... it just seems a punishment to regular users, and a large reinforcement to pirates.
All the messageboards commenting on the game are discussing the issue - and most everyone realizes that they tend to move games from machine to machine over the years, or at least are forced to reinstall windows enough that a 3 install limit is FAR too limited a deal. Oh, and uninstalling the software anecdotally does NOT appear to give you 'back' installs of the game so far.
I've worked making software protection schemes on occasion - from encrypted dongles with 'click counters' to sequentially mutating upgrade codes linked to custom hardware to send customers to extend licenses, all to make sure software was limited in terms of what users could do with it under license. This is one limit that really is too far for honorable customers.
The biggest suspicion is that all this was done to minimize the chance and value of the reselling the game. I can see that perspective... but if it's at the cost of actually selling the game in the first place, or of pissing off future customers, they've made a terrible mistake.
Ah, but they each have a different creation story, which is very frequently one that is incompatible with either creationism or intelligent design. Many have mankind springing or gods springing from food items, or being created by talking animals, or any number of ways that don't fit with an intentional creator, or with the creation story told in creationism.
Just because the word creation or intelligent design is used doesn't make it anything like most of the religions in the world. And that makes it an establishment of religion.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
---
Note the bolded part. The prime intention of the first amendment is to prevent an established state religion. To establish a religion, you just have to teach its precents at the exclusion of other religion. To teach only "creationism" in science class, which is exclusively the judeo-Christian god's creation story, just as "intelligent design" really is only the judeo-Christian story of design, you have in fact established an official religion in terms of which one is taught as fact in public education.
Also teaching evolution doesn't fix that - nor does placing it in science class make it science.
I'm a fan of divide and conquer techniques for a lot of things - but requiring the resources of a freaking fullscale army to do so kind of defeats the point. The whole technique is supposed to be used to accomplish bigger things with fewer resources intelligently, not to shuffle work around (divide) while ostensibly maintaining a product you intent to dominate the market (conquer).
Sounds like they used recursive subdivision of work into threads designed for more generic work.
I can understand that viewpoint. But I don't think de facto social darwinism, where the scammers teach people a lesson by bankrupting people, makes for a very productive society.
Everyone is dumb. We all lack some critical knowledge of something that can be used to extract critical resources from us. While we can't 'protect' everyone from the fault of their own ignorance, blaming every loss from ignorance on the victim is just as wrong. Not everyone has caring parents, and no one can escape from all scams. I've attended enough skeptics conventions to know that every skeptic can still be fooled - there's always a new trick, or use of an old one that will get you.
Indeed - and the war on drugs itself, I would define as a confidence scheme. Why? Because the only way people believe it's working and paying off is because of the words of those enforcing it. Meanwhile, those enforcing the war on drugs don't count the lost productivity of those jailed for minor drug charges, and can claim that every arrest saves countless productivity, and can claim, just by throwing an unlimited number of people in jail, that they're making society more productive without limit. It's a complete scam that's stealing a very large portion of America's resources mostly to feed and perpetuate its own existence, while not actually doing much to actually fight the more destructive aspects of drug use in our culture.
I'm saying this as a guy who, like Penn Gillete, has never used any illegal drugs, nor even drank anything more than a sip of an alchoholic beverage. I personally hate the idea of a substance changing the way my mind works, and love consciousness itself too much to want to mess with it - but I know a broken system when I see it, and see the "war on drugs" as a completely broken method of fixing our nation's problems with drug usage.
For as long as there's been culture, there's always been con men. It's always a sensitive balance for a society to decide how much fraud to allow to go on, and what to call fraud. From countless iterations of fortune tellers, to confidence schemes, to games of chance, to plain old commercial advertising, there have always been the grey areas where the clever can take from the gullible, but find ways to avoid the usual punishments for theft or fraud.
Most societies find ways to prevent too much subjective productivity from being lost to these schemes, but sometimes more than just public awareness is needed to counter the effects of such large scale con jobs. In the 1950's, there were bunco squads, or sections of the police force organized to find common fraud, such as fortune tellers, rigged games, confidence swindles, and the like. I think we could use more of those today - law enforcement devoted to tracking down leads on swindlers for the public interest. Skeptical communities and movements are nice - but very few people are really interested in learning how scams work before they're fooled by them, and it seems there's always a multiplying number of desperate swindlers looking to fool more folks out of money while hiding from consequences.
McCain does have a storied history of using and abandoning powerful, beautiful, but gullible women as stepping stones on his path to power.
Looks like the Maverick scores again.
Some problems though: This "babe" (as Rush Limbaugh calls her) wants to teach creationism as science in public schools, has an interesting set of scandals being investigated, and has some even more interesting friendly ties to Ted Stevens - which is rather impressive, given her very limited time frame for building up these problems.
Power supply units only supply so much energy, and before then cause interesting system instability.
Also, given the increasingly growing cost of energy, it might be worth buying a newer generation card just for the sake of saving the energy that would be used by multiple older generations of graphics cards. Not the newer cards use less energy in general - but multiple older cards being used to approximate a newer card would use more energy.
I guess power supplies are still the underlying limit.
As an additional aside, I'm still kind of surprised that there hasn't been any lego-style system component designs. Need more power supply? Add another lego that has a power input. Need another graphics card? Add another GPU lego. I imagine the same challenges that went into making this hydra GPU thing would be faced in making a generalist system layout like that.
And, of course, McBride is still harping about how misguided all the 'naysayers' are. Ah, corporate message control - so consistent, no matter the insanity of what is said.
I guess that's the point of freedom - for every choice that can be used to help build something greater, there is also choice to harm others. It's too bad that so much freedom ends up being used to crush the freedom of others for minimal short-term benefit, like those of SCO (which in turn was at least partly on behalf of Microsoft's FUD campaign).
<satire style="Stephen Colbert" > I mean, the nerve of those commoners - copying data without a whim of care towards the strict control of information. Taking good sales pounds from BMI and other sacred institutions. It's downright madness - thinking they could just download and copy what isn't rightfully theirs, and think they could get away with it.
I say, no more - they must be punished further - £500,000, no $5,000,000 per... bit of data copied. By god, they shall learn what it means to write data that isn't theirs.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to yell at squirrels for taking nuts from my trees - I do believe they now owe me twelve trillion fully grown oak trees - damn selfish squirrels, they will learn, oh yes, all of them will learn what it means to take my precious acorns - potential trees, all of them, stolen from me! </satire>
McCain - he's hip! (at least none broken yet) McCain - he's got the energy to fix this country! (who better than the Maverick who had a hand in breaking things, but I'm sure it was all under protest.) McCain - Experience to lead, experience where it matters! (He knows how to cover his mistakes, and where others have their sins buried) McCain - Because Obama would raise taxes on real Americans! (The super rich face such horrible burdens already - they're the realest Americans!) McCain - He won't compromise our national security! (It's not the damn president's job to negotiate peace with UnAmericans) McCain - He's earned our respect, he's the leader we deserve now! (Certainly the change we deserve - stay the course! Four more years!)
That presumes that a goal of modern conservatives in government is to reduce the debt incurred by government. I do not believe that is a goal - rather, when the goal is to destroy the effectiveness of government, the task is to maximize debt, and thereby paralyze what any government can do.
This is perfectly in line with modern conservative ideology. To create a debt, crush the ability of government to function, then dismantle the tools that can be used to fix it. Then win elections the next time through by promising to not only fix what was broken, but blame government itself for being the problem.
The rate the guy's firing people lately, you'd think they'd nickname him the 'terminator' or something.
Really though - this is a perfect example of modern conservatism: Destroy people's reliance on government by promising anything to be elected, then do absolutely everything you can to destroy everything that government does or provides. Soon, everyone sees politicians only as lying bastards (but still elects those who make the best promises), but no longer sees government as something that can actually help anyone do anything.
The end result is a society that distrusts everyone, and a private sector which can pick off opportunities from an enormous set of basic needs that are being unmet.
Government doesn't even need to be drown in the bathtub - indeed, it might be reborn in a different form if you did that. This way, you get to keep it in a permanant coma, feeding off of everyone's needs and desires and blaming generic government for everything you do.
Ryan Fenton
Why I do trust this survey, but see it as flawed..
on
IT Jobs To Drop In 2009
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Software development isn't something you do as a businessperson because you want to pay for people to work on computers - it's something you do because you want something made or done.
Businesses will still want things made, and they will still want things done, because they are still going to be responding to a changing market, and they still want to be able to make new stuff, or change the stuff they currently make.
Software may be expensive to develop and test, but it's still one of the cheapest things you can mass produce, and one of the cheapest ways you can modify an existing product line to expand your market.
The emphasis will certainly be on return on investment - and there will be very nice plans on exactly how to spend the least possible, but the moment the competition has a feature that looks to harm the product line, *gasp* - suddenly the design for the product will have to be retrofitted, testing will have to be expanded, or the product release cycle will have to be accelerated to get that new feature in!
I completely understand this survey though - while companies do care if they end up spending more than they initially estimated, they just need to estimate low costs now, thanks to economic pressures to show the illusion of fiscal improvement and concern for the shareholder's resources.
So to show productivity when all you have are plans, you plan to make better features, spend less, and beat the competition - then ask for more money when you have more to show, which would only go to waste if you stopped now.
What this illusion accomplishes is a bit backwards though - there simply won't be as much open planning of large software project, and more emergency dollars and small contracts. You end up spending much more - much like the shift towards low cost estimates, but then using contractors and emergency spending in the Iraq war. It's the way the game tends to be played in poorly planned business and government - and it's very alluring if you only care about a small set of things going into it.
I've been pricing packages for phone/television/internet lately, and have found that the local Verizon and BrightHouse offerings all happen to offer a minimal price of $100/month plus equipment rental and misc fees moving the realistic cost to $130/month, and a demand for long-term contracts with heavy penalties for ending the contract.
I was pricing these because we had work crews installing the FIOS lines around the neighborhood, and wanted to see how I could use that fact to negotiate a better price with either the cable company or the new Verizon FIOS. But I was surprised at how strictly each company matched eachother's offerings without offering any cheaper options for those interested in the cheapest option. I was interested in FIOS speeds a little, but I discovered that they would be cutting the independently-powered copper and replacing it with an 8-hour battery on the wall of the house. But... if they do that, and then a hurricane comes, then the landline is nothing more than a glorified cellphone with an 8-hour battery... most hurricane power outages last much longer than that, and there is a need to call city lines for messages on drinking water and the like that just aren't available from radio.
In any case, I don't understand the rationale of Verizon here - they're spending all this money rolling out the fiber for FIOS, but they aren't using the opportunity to compete other than offering faster, but still traffic-shaped internet. The end result is just two cables running to neighborhoods, each privately owned and vulnerable in the same ways, but not really distinguishing themselves.
I disagree - if something is supernatural, it has to be something that cannot be observed in a consistent way. If it cannot be observed using natural methods, then it cannot be rationally or critically considered, much less scientifically.
After all, how would you teach a "critical thinking" class to weigh the value of, for instance, prayer? Would you have them each pray as hard as they could towards a set of controlled situations, and show the objective influence of prayer? Or would you ask them to *feel* how their hearts had changed, and call that critical thinking? Would you put them into a native american sweat lodge, until they started seeing visions, and insist they must decide if these are effects of their brain overheating, or of a sign from the gods of nature?
I agree that critical thinking is a vastly undertaught skill, and is of primary importance to everyone on virtually all subjects - but I believe we disagree on what critical thinking means. You're correct that science should have no sacred cows - for it is simply the best of what we've been able to independently test and verify, and science IS an imperfect process. But by gathering one-sided doubt as a wedge to push religion as underappreciated brother to science, critical thinking is not served. Supernaturalism is supernaturalism because it is defined in ways that cannot be disproven - supernaturalism (including religion) is not the result of critical thought.
There is no valid way I can see to teach people that doubt opens the way to the supernatural having a valid connection to reality.
Slashdot Mirror
Overselling representations of value, in the hope that they can make maximum use of the underutilized parts of the resources available. That transforms any regular customer use of those resources a "threat" to their viability as a business. So, at some point, like with a ponzi/pyramid scheme, demand drives the overselling on that resource to reach a point where the whole system starts to unravel. As this starts to happen, those running the system will turn to threats, excuses, and sudden changes in policy to try to make the process run that one last cycle, or try to sell the whole mess to someone else before the illusion is broken.
Here though, because the output is in terms of a constant stream of use, rather than monetary return, the provider can just kick out those who would complain about unfullfilled promises, freeing up resources to make more carefully worded promises they can't actually fulfill. All the blame goes away with the dropped customer, and benefit to those running the system.
That's the nature of selling everything as a 'service' when you have a relative monopoly - you can oversell as much as you want, then pick and choose who are the easiest customers to serve with limited resources.
Ryan Fenton
Sure - it's a completely idiotic move, according to logic and ethics. But like watching a video of someone trying to badly imitate an episode of Jackass, there's just something odd about watching the single-minded drive towards something one knows is a stupid idea that oddly reinforces something about the human spirit.
Why? He knows he's marching towards a given horrible set of outcomes (damaging his own interests) - he knows he's mostly doing it to the entertainment of others - he even knows he's hurting those he works with (and seems to like that idea for some reason) - but through sheer will and bravado, he's picking up that damn skateboard, and he's going to jump all that freeway traffic, despite the fact that a little man just knocked his kneecap out of joint two minutes ago with a hammer.
Human drive can do so much - it can push us so far from reason that it can flip past tragedy back to comedy, even for 'successful' men like Darl. There's a twisted Catharsis in that - a fact about the human condition that we can use our focus towards any end, to just about any extent.
It reminds us why self-reflection, observing your own life from different perspectives occasionally can be so important too.
Ryan Fenton
Suggestion to Asus: Lose the LCD on the end of the keyboard.
It defeats a lot of the purpose of such a device - this looks like something I'd chuck in a backpack, so when I got there, I'd just plug it into an LCD and go. Having an LCD built on the side could give some status information, but at the cost of messing up the center of gravity on the device (important for a lot of situations), and having a scratch hazard on an otherwise casual item. Losing the LCD would also make the unit fewer parts to power and go bad.
As another suggestion, try and make a wireless (perhaps bluetooth) DVI/VGA plug that will allow the device to run completely disconnected from the monitor. Add in an application for quickly setting up and managing external wireless storage and backup, and you've got a nice ultralight system.
Ryan Fenton
A poster on yesterday's thread claiming to be the "director of digital communications at Time Warner Cable", stated that lost channels would be refunded to some degree on bills.
I take it that this latest agreement will also be, um, represented in the upcoming bills also?
It's the jobs of both companies to raise the shareholder value - and the best agreement in that scenario would be to agree to take more from customers.
The original suggestion of using the Internet to access programming is starting to look better and better. Any companies out there seriously considering a competitive delivery mechanism using only existing Internet channels for such content? I'm tired of being the customer with very little real voice in such agreements, when the amount of programming I'm actually interested in is rather small.
Ryan Fenton
There's an important distinction here - this is not mind copying, it's just perspective swapping. Mind copying would be if you were able to copy the bits of one mind in one bit of hardware (example: brain) to another bit of hardware (example: computer disk), then be able to have the mind run somewhere else. What we have here is perceptive swapping, where you just overlay a new perspective in place of a brain's inputs/outputs, giving the limited sensory perception of acting in another place to that brain's mind.
It's cool that we're making new ways for people to get new perspectives, but this ain't mind swapping by a long shot.
Ryan Fenton
Sure, the stock market's bad. Really bad. Oddly, that's what makes for very good timing here - because even though a lot of people have less money to invest, there's a lot of other folks who are looking to take their money from places they used to believe as 'safe', and put it where some of it will make money back to recover from recent failures. That includes mutual fund companies, and several other sources of megabucks.
There's also a lot of potential researchers who can spend a lot of time on these projects, at relatively competitive rates. And a lot of existing data to pull together from university projects that individually have been starved for resources. That, and there's a slight possibility some politicians may be able to make a sane infrastructure to provide at least some support in upcoming budgets.
Sounds like excellent timing to get a massively multiple-approach research project like this underway. It might even save a small part of our economy through the continuing troubles.
Ryan Fenton
That was lightly addressed in my post, actually - anecdotally, the uninstalls aren't crediting back to the install limit of anyone commenting on the game so far, reinforcing the theory that the limit was mostly to kill the resell market for the game.
The kink in the idea of install limits is that the reason you tend to reinstall is because your computer went kaput. You don't tend to be able to uninstall when that happens. That's certainly not an atypical event in a gamer's computer usage, making it a double blow for a gamer recovering a system to have to lose access to a game they worked to buy in the first place. To get access to the game they purchased back, they have to contact EA and ask permission to play their copy of the game again... it just seems a punishment to regular users, and a large reinforcement to pirates.
Ryan Fenton
All the messageboards commenting on the game are discussing the issue - and most everyone realizes that they tend to move games from machine to machine over the years, or at least are forced to reinstall windows enough that a 3 install limit is FAR too limited a deal. Oh, and uninstalling the software anecdotally does NOT appear to give you 'back' installs of the game so far.
I've worked making software protection schemes on occasion - from encrypted dongles with 'click counters' to sequentially mutating upgrade codes linked to custom hardware to send customers to extend licenses, all to make sure software was limited in terms of what users could do with it under license. This is one limit that really is too far for honorable customers.
The biggest suspicion is that all this was done to minimize the chance and value of the reselling the game. I can see that perspective... but if it's at the cost of actually selling the game in the first place, or of pissing off future customers, they've made a terrible mistake.
Ryan Fenton
Ah, but they each have a different creation story, which is very frequently one that is incompatible with either creationism or intelligent design. Many have mankind springing or gods springing from food items, or being created by talking animals, or any number of ways that don't fit with an intentional creator, or with the creation story told in creationism.
Just because the word creation or intelligent design is used doesn't make it anything like most of the religions in the world. And that makes it an establishment of religion.
Ryan Fenton
Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
---
Note the bolded part. The prime intention of the first amendment is to prevent an established state religion. To establish a religion, you just have to teach its precents at the exclusion of other religion. To teach only "creationism" in science class, which is exclusively the judeo-Christian god's creation story, just as "intelligent design" really is only the judeo-Christian story of design, you have in fact established an official religion in terms of which one is taught as fact in public education.
Also teaching evolution doesn't fix that - nor does placing it in science class make it science.
Ryan Fenton
I'm a fan of divide and conquer techniques for a lot of things - but requiring the resources of a freaking fullscale army to do so kind of defeats the point. The whole technique is supposed to be used to accomplish bigger things with fewer resources intelligently, not to shuffle work around (divide) while ostensibly maintaining a product you intent to dominate the market (conquer).
Sounds like they used recursive subdivision of work into threads designed for more generic work.
Ryan Fenton
I can understand that viewpoint. But I don't think de facto social darwinism, where the scammers teach people a lesson by bankrupting people, makes for a very productive society.
Everyone is dumb. We all lack some critical knowledge of something that can be used to extract critical resources from us. While we can't 'protect' everyone from the fault of their own ignorance, blaming every loss from ignorance on the victim is just as wrong. Not everyone has caring parents, and no one can escape from all scams. I've attended enough skeptics conventions to know that every skeptic can still be fooled - there's always a new trick, or use of an old one that will get you.
Ryan Fenton
Indeed - and the war on drugs itself, I would define as a confidence scheme. Why? Because the only way people believe it's working and paying off is because of the words of those enforcing it. Meanwhile, those enforcing the war on drugs don't count the lost productivity of those jailed for minor drug charges, and can claim that every arrest saves countless productivity, and can claim, just by throwing an unlimited number of people in jail, that they're making society more productive without limit. It's a complete scam that's stealing a very large portion of America's resources mostly to feed and perpetuate its own existence, while not actually doing much to actually fight the more destructive aspects of drug use in our culture.
I'm saying this as a guy who, like Penn Gillete, has never used any illegal drugs, nor even drank anything more than a sip of an alchoholic beverage. I personally hate the idea of a substance changing the way my mind works, and love consciousness itself too much to want to mess with it - but I know a broken system when I see it, and see the "war on drugs" as a completely broken method of fixing our nation's problems with drug usage.
Ryan Fenton
For as long as there's been culture, there's always been con men. It's always a sensitive balance for a society to decide how much fraud to allow to go on, and what to call fraud. From countless iterations of fortune tellers, to confidence schemes, to games of chance, to plain old commercial advertising, there have always been the grey areas where the clever can take from the gullible, but find ways to avoid the usual punishments for theft or fraud.
Most societies find ways to prevent too much subjective productivity from being lost to these schemes, but sometimes more than just public awareness is needed to counter the effects of such large scale con jobs. In the 1950's, there were bunco squads, or sections of the police force organized to find common fraud, such as fortune tellers, rigged games, confidence swindles, and the like. I think we could use more of those today - law enforcement devoted to tracking down leads on swindlers for the public interest. Skeptical communities and movements are nice - but very few people are really interested in learning how scams work before they're fooled by them, and it seems there's always a multiplying number of desperate swindlers looking to fool more folks out of money while hiding from consequences.
Ryan Fenton
McCain does have a storied history of using and abandoning powerful, beautiful, but gullible women as stepping stones on his path to power.
Looks like the Maverick scores again.
Some problems though: This "babe" (as Rush Limbaugh calls her) wants to teach creationism as science in public schools, has an interesting set of scandals being investigated, and has some even more interesting friendly ties to Ted Stevens - which is rather impressive, given her very limited time frame for building up these problems.
This should be an interesting election season.
Ryan Fenton
Power supply units only supply so much energy, and before then cause interesting system instability.
Also, given the increasingly growing cost of energy, it might be worth buying a newer generation card just for the sake of saving the energy that would be used by multiple older generations of graphics cards. Not the newer cards use less energy in general - but multiple older cards being used to approximate a newer card would use more energy.
I guess power supplies are still the underlying limit.
As an additional aside, I'm still kind of surprised that there hasn't been any lego-style system component designs. Need more power supply? Add another lego that has a power input. Need another graphics card? Add another GPU lego. I imagine the same challenges that went into making this hydra GPU thing would be faced in making a generalist system layout like that.
Ryan Fenton
Some folks are still willing to see SCO as the 'comeback kids' (Found from a Groklaw link from today
And, of course, McBride is still harping about how misguided all the 'naysayers' are. Ah, corporate message control - so consistent, no matter the insanity of what is said.
I guess that's the point of freedom - for every choice that can be used to help build something greater, there is also choice to harm others. It's too bad that so much freedom ends up being used to crush the freedom of others for minimal short-term benefit, like those of SCO (which in turn was at least partly on behalf of Microsoft's FUD campaign).
Ryan Fenton
Ryan Fenton
<satire style="Stephen Colbert" >
I mean, the nerve of those commoners - copying data without a whim of care towards the strict control of information. Taking good sales pounds from BMI and other sacred institutions. It's downright madness - thinking they could just download and copy what isn't rightfully theirs, and think they could get away with it.
I say, no more - they must be punished further - £500,000, no $5,000,000 per... bit of data copied. By god, they shall learn what it means to write data that isn't theirs.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to yell at squirrels for taking nuts from my trees - I do believe they now owe me twelve trillion fully grown oak trees - damn selfish squirrels, they will learn, oh yes, all of them will learn what it means to take my precious acorns - potential trees, all of them, stolen from me!
</satire>
It apparently adds the 'signed' tag to all articles on your website.
I was wondering how that happened.
Really - what's up with the newly-ubiquitous 'signed' tag?
Ryan Fenton
I could REALLY use one of those tire gauges!
Here goes (Stephen Colbert style):
McCain - he's hip! (at least none broken yet)
McCain - he's got the energy to fix this country! (who better than the Maverick who had a hand in breaking things, but I'm sure it was all under protest.)
McCain - Experience to lead, experience where it matters! (He knows how to cover his mistakes, and where others have their sins buried)
McCain - Because Obama would raise taxes on real Americans! (The super rich face such horrible burdens already - they're the realest Americans!)
McCain - He won't compromise our national security! (It's not the damn president's job to negotiate peace with UnAmericans)
McCain - He's earned our respect, he's the leader we deserve now! (Certainly the change we deserve - stay the course! Four more years!)
Ryan Fenton
That presumes that a goal of modern conservatives in government is to reduce the debt incurred by government. I do not believe that is a goal - rather, when the goal is to destroy the effectiveness of government, the task is to maximize debt, and thereby paralyze what any government can do.
This is perfectly in line with modern conservative ideology. To create a debt, crush the ability of government to function, then dismantle the tools that can be used to fix it. Then win elections the next time through by promising to not only fix what was broken, but blame government itself for being the problem.
Ryan Fenton
The rate the guy's firing people lately, you'd think they'd nickname him the 'terminator' or something.
Really though - this is a perfect example of modern conservatism: Destroy people's reliance on government by promising anything to be elected, then do absolutely everything you can to destroy everything that government does or provides. Soon, everyone sees politicians only as lying bastards (but still elects those who make the best promises), but no longer sees government as something that can actually help anyone do anything.
The end result is a society that distrusts everyone, and a private sector which can pick off opportunities from an enormous set of basic needs that are being unmet.
Government doesn't even need to be drown in the bathtub - indeed, it might be reborn in a different form if you did that. This way, you get to keep it in a permanant coma, feeding off of everyone's needs and desires and blaming generic government for everything you do.
Ryan Fenton
Software development isn't something you do as a businessperson because you want to pay for people to work on computers - it's something you do because you want something made or done.
Businesses will still want things made, and they will still want things done, because they are still going to be responding to a changing market, and they still want to be able to make new stuff, or change the stuff they currently make.
Software may be expensive to develop and test, but it's still one of the cheapest things you can mass produce, and one of the cheapest ways you can modify an existing product line to expand your market.
The emphasis will certainly be on return on investment - and there will be very nice plans on exactly how to spend the least possible, but the moment the competition has a feature that looks to harm the product line, *gasp* - suddenly the design for the product will have to be retrofitted, testing will have to be expanded, or the product release cycle will have to be accelerated to get that new feature in!
I completely understand this survey though - while companies do care if they end up spending more than they initially estimated, they just need to estimate low costs now, thanks to economic pressures to show the illusion of fiscal improvement and concern for the shareholder's resources.
So to show productivity when all you have are plans, you plan to make better features, spend less, and beat the competition - then ask for more money when you have more to show, which would only go to waste if you stopped now.
What this illusion accomplishes is a bit backwards though - there simply won't be as much open planning of large software project, and more emergency dollars and small contracts. You end up spending much more - much like the shift towards low cost estimates, but then using contractors and emergency spending in the Iraq war. It's the way the game tends to be played in poorly planned business and government - and it's very alluring if you only care about a small set of things going into it.
Ryan Fenton
I've been pricing packages for phone/television/internet lately, and have found that the local Verizon and BrightHouse offerings all happen to offer a minimal price of $100/month plus equipment rental and misc fees moving the realistic cost to $130/month, and a demand for long-term contracts with heavy penalties for ending the contract.
I was pricing these because we had work crews installing the FIOS lines around the neighborhood, and wanted to see how I could use that fact to negotiate a better price with either the cable company or the new Verizon FIOS. But I was surprised at how strictly each company matched eachother's offerings without offering any cheaper options for those interested in the cheapest option. I was interested in FIOS speeds a little, but I discovered that they would be cutting the independently-powered copper and replacing it with an 8-hour battery on the wall of the house. But... if they do that, and then a hurricane comes, then the landline is nothing more than a glorified cellphone with an 8-hour battery... most hurricane power outages last much longer than that, and there is a need to call city lines for messages on drinking water and the like that just aren't available from radio.
In any case, I don't understand the rationale of Verizon here - they're spending all this money rolling out the fiber for FIOS, but they aren't using the opportunity to compete other than offering faster, but still traffic-shaped internet. The end result is just two cables running to neighborhoods, each privately owned and vulnerable in the same ways, but not really distinguishing themselves.
Ryan Fenton
I disagree - if something is supernatural, it has to be something that cannot be observed in a consistent way. If it cannot be observed using natural methods, then it cannot be rationally or critically considered, much less scientifically.
After all, how would you teach a "critical thinking" class to weigh the value of, for instance, prayer? Would you have them each pray as hard as they could towards a set of controlled situations, and show the objective influence of prayer? Or would you ask them to *feel* how their hearts had changed, and call that critical thinking? Would you put them into a native american sweat lodge, until they started seeing visions, and insist they must decide if these are effects of their brain overheating, or of a sign from the gods of nature?
I agree that critical thinking is a vastly undertaught skill, and is of primary importance to everyone on virtually all subjects - but I believe we disagree on what critical thinking means. You're correct that science should have no sacred cows - for it is simply the best of what we've been able to independently test and verify, and science IS an imperfect process. But by gathering one-sided doubt as a wedge to push religion as underappreciated brother to science, critical thinking is not served. Supernaturalism is supernaturalism because it is defined in ways that cannot be disproven - supernaturalism (including religion) is not the result of critical thought.
There is no valid way I can see to teach people that doubt opens the way to the supernatural having a valid connection to reality.
Ryan Fenton