I believe that the phrase "The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions" has always been applicable.
Or Thomas Moore's (apocryphal) dialogue from A Man For All Seasons: "Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil? William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that! Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!"
Google too tough for you? http://nypost.com/2011/04/17/h... "US Attorney General Eric Holder and his brother failed to pay the property taxes on their childhood home in Queens, which they inherited last August after their mother died, The Post has learned. And because their ailing mom, Miriam, was already behind on two quarterly tax bills when she succumbed to illness on Aug. 13, the charges went unpaid for more than a year â" growing to $4,146. It wasnâ(TM)t until The Post confronted Holder last week about the delinquency that he and younger brother William Holder finally paid up Friday..."
And as for Geithner, one might expect the man appointed TREASURY SECRETARY to be fairly careful about his taxes? Don't we kinda hope those guys are obsessive about numbers and details?
The media doesn't bat an eye when the president's treasury secretary or attorney general are found guilty of tax evasion. Why would we expect that they conform to any other standard for other members of the administration?
Jesse Jackson: "I desperately need a new cause to trumpet, or I'm no longer going to be able to afford my lifestyle. Therefore, I shall identify a desperate need for my community, for which I shall naturally be named the spokesman. By this method I shall articulate a set of vague, impossible goals such that we can once again identify an entire culture as 'victims' of the nebulous (but nevertheless nefarious) forces that keep us "down". I shall continue attach myself to this I-hope-ever-growing-movement, in order to be able to pay for my cars, mistresses, and if I'm lucky, even the lawyers needed to keep my son out of prison. Perhaps I have finally found the cause celebre that will even allow me to ride into media sinecure, like that dirty sellout bastard Al Sharpton."
Well, that's what I heard, anyway.
I'd call his plan for IT diversity the Nationwide IT General Graduate Effectiveness Resource System. Come up with your own acronym as required.
The real question, for the IT community is, of course, does his plan ensure enough vaginas in IT departments? If not, then his victim train will have to wait until that one leaves the station.
Personally, I use Chrome not because I have a hardon for Google, but because: a) it's generally been the fastest smoothest browser out there. Sure, this or that may just nudge ahead of Chrome now and again, but I'd rather take "1st or 2nd fastest every time" over "was first once, then was never heard of for 7 months, then was first again". b) I don't honestly care about "privacy" in the FUD context it's generally bandied about. Frankly, if the great "them" collecting data on me want to know that I'm a 46 year old hetero white male and serve me ads of stuff that I want (preferably draped in scantily clad, easily-objectifiable women) I'm al lfor it.
I use adblock not for privacy purposes, but as a filter against the obnoxious, aggressive, in-your-face ubiquitous advertising that gets in the way of my browsing. In fact, I watch carefully the number of blocked cookies, etc. For sites I've visited for a while and seen they're moderately low and not too obtrusive, I disable adblock because I want them to get the revenue for my visits, as small as it is. TANSTAAFL.
I mean, what else do you call it when a director and studio execs repeatedly ass-hump JRR Tolkien's corpse until it's a tattered, torn remnant, not even recognizable as related to it's original form?
I'm not kidding. This isn't The Hobbit...this is "fantasy action movie ver#3, including characters from The Hobbit".
And everyone knew it was coming. Do you know of a single person, anywhere who (when told The Hobbit would be 3 movies) didn't do a double take and say WTF?
I really loved the LOTR movies. I largely agreed with the editorial choices to remove parts that were non-germane to the plot. But this?
This is appalling. The trailer looks appalling, and the first two movies were appalling. Not only were they not The Hobbit, they weren't even GOOD 'generic fantasy movies'.
Fuck you, Peter Jackson, you weird, barefoot shitbird, for the future people your abortion will drive away from what's really a canon of fantasy literature. May your memory as a director rot in hell right next to Ralph Bakshi.
For those disappointed folks who haven't already seen them, CinemaSins has done an amusing job of reviewing the ample superficial flaws in the first two. Watch these, they're more entertaining than these films themselves: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... (the first movie) https://www.youtube.com/watch?... (the second)
Who the hell is this guy sleeping with, that Slashdot has become his personal blog-pimp site? (Rhetorical question, it's clearly timothy, soulskill, and samzenpus....do you guys know about each other?)
Seriously? If his points were insightful, it might just BARELY be acceptable (but still, not really - did we want this to become the 21st century's Chaos Manor column?)...but I have to say, they aren't. I was going just refute as an example a few of his issues, but they're so fucking obvious, what's the point?
Bennett, I'm not going to educate you basic premises of business, marketing, anecdotal evidence, etc. Seriously, talking about the goddamn WEATHER?
"...illegal drug use (including abuse of prescription painkillers) among technology workers and executives in high-pay, high-stress Silicon Valley...."
I know a shit-ton of people whose lives/work is JUST as stressful working their 3 jobs to make ends meet, but since it's not "high pay" that would probably mean they're not worth talking about, right? Certainly, we're less interesting in the 'why' of their drug abuse issues, because they can only afford cheap mood-altering chemistry like booze and cigs.
Personally, I'd say the fact that Silicon Valley folks make stupid-large amounts of money means they have even LESS of an excuse to complain.
Lots of people have more stress for much less self-inflicted reasons than pursuing of giant piles of cash.
You might want to revise your facts. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu... Mice gengineered to be germ free were fed drinking water from public sources. Within the life span of the mice, they developed GI tract bacteria that were ENTIRELY DIFFERENT SPECIES.
Hell, Galapagos Finches evolved different heritable beak differences in http://www.plosgenetics.org/ar... http://rspb.royalsocietypublis...
1) I could point to thousands of species that have, and are growing, adapting, and doing quite well thank you. Bacteria, virii, insects, lots of plants, fungus, etc. I'm sorry that they aren't the adorable big/furry mammals that excite your sympathy gland. 2) Even with the most sophisticated weapons and tools, have we exterminated every species of whale? Nope. Heck, even with the determined effort of CENTURIES, have we (or are we even close to) exterminated the common mosquito? Nope. 3) I wasn't really blaming them for anything. I was saying that no species cares about its environment, in that, humans are EXACTLY like the other animals...we're going to reproduce and poison our environment until it kills us. That's just the natural way of things.
You ENTIRELY missed the point of my comment, by the way. Righteous indignation makes it hard to read, I get it.
Or perhaps the entire idea of 'peacefully coexisting with nature' is completely, utterly wrong and a romantic, emotionalized intellectualism first dreamed up by Thoreau and lately enfranchised by Greens because it thrums sympathetic heartstrings of the same naive urbanites that think you can hand-feed wild animals or coexist with bears (Grizzlyman!) because they're cute?
NO species "peacefully coexists with nature". Zero. Nature is a cold-hearted bitch, and to "win" against it, species have evolved their own ruthless strategies. Every species from the single-celled protozoa to grey whales eats and reproduces heedless of the consequences to the environment. Ultimately, one of three things happen: 1) the species cannot reproduce fast enough to outrace environmental pressures and is wiped out (either slowly over time, or just a result of shitty luck like an asteroid strike - 'scale' is always the tricky question where environment is concerned). 2) the species comes to an equilibrium, where reproduction/expansion are roughly balanced against the environmental pressures, and a sort of stasis results (until the next environmental variation that exceeds the flexibility of the population to sustain) 3) the species overwhelms environmental pressures, expanding until they exhaust resources and are confronted with #1 again, or is able to move to another environment and "restart" the calculation.
That's it. Every species, ever. Three (really 2) possible results. But no matter how you decorate it, #2 isn't some delightful rainbows and unicorns happy time either - both 'sides' are voraciously, impersonally, automatically fighting both directions. Think of it as a bloody tug of war....just because the flag in the center isn't moving much, doesn't in ANY way imply that both sides aren't struggling mightily every single second, and wouldn't cheerfully win if given the opportunity.
Hell, even plants are selfish, arrogant assholes when you come right down to it and see how they fuck each other over. They just do it really slowly.
(To be clear, I'm not anthropomorphizing it either, it's simply useful for the point here to suggest the forces are 'contending'. In reality, they're both entirely insensate....which is kind of my point.)
I know it's futile, since it's such a pretty delusion (and so politically useful for so many...) but can we ever dispense with the bullshit notion that anything, ever, "peacefully coexists with nature"?
That's an unfair assertion, and completely not supported by facts.
Don Rumsfeld has NOT been proven to be an alien, nor have I seen any evidence that he prefers Mexicans over any other nationality, much less the exclusivity implied by the wiki entry.
"Most people wouldn't even be able to flush their toilet because urban water supplies largely rely on electric pumps. "
Um, no. First, the normal flush pressure comes from the water tank on the back...so EVERYONE would be able to flush at least once. (Actually, in a disaster, that tank isn't a bad source of freshwater, at least for a while.)
Most communities have water tanks above their population, either on a nearby height, or in water towers. This makes the system - at least in the short term, until that tank is drained - impervious to power outage. Even NYC has tens of thousands of rooftop tanks with the same function, but on a per-building level. GRAVITY, not electricity, produces water pressure that refills that local toilet tank. So until the community tank is emptied, and electric pumps are required to fill that large tank, everyone would be able to flush just fine.
To suggest that critiquing a stupid unit of measure is somehow trivializing the problem is itself a strawman.
If I said that I'm 1,930,400,000,000 picometers tall, people SHOULD mock me for using a stupid unit of measure. When people are primed to overreact to an event like Fukushima and then confronted by a number in public reporting that uses just such an inappropriate unit of measure, one can either mock the report for being foolish, or condemn it for being deliberately inflammatory. Which would you prefer?
I have minor strabismus, one eye points about 10-15 degrees offline. I'm told it's barely noticeable with glasses on, but very evident when I have them off. Plus, I've lived all my life with glasses and I'm 46....so nah, not worth the bother/risk. If I was 20 and didn't have this vanity thing? I'd do it in a heartbeat.
Am I the only one that finds the "Internet of Things" a catastrophically, pointlessly stupid idea?
I don't WANT my refrigerator, stove, blender, toaster, home climate control, garage door opener, office fan, or toilet connected to the internet. I cannot see how adding additional potential points of failure to everything makes them better, just so I can see when (and/or what) little Jimmy flushed this morning, or I can log in to my toaster's web page and change the settings remotely (why?).
I've been an 'early adopter' of lots of things - computers, the internet, dvds, digital tvs, etc - but perhaps at 46 I'm simply too old to "get" the IoT (like twitter or instagram, I don't really "get" those either).
...if it is, it's more a symptom than cause. I believe it's societies in which the economically optimal behavior is cheating.
In Socialist East Germany as many have posted here anecdotally, the system was so broken that cheating - going outside the formal rules of the system - was the only way to get many basic and preferred needs met.
This is endemic to CORRUPT societies, not just socialist ones.
For cheating to be optimal, you have to have two elements: - a system that gives people motivation to break the rules AND (importantly) - an alternative - a black market, corrupt officials, etc - that is workable.
I'd argue that *any* overbureaucratic society will eventually reach this point. Capitalism - insofar as it mitigates the issue - allows people to DIRECTLY follow their self-interest, without having to 'cheat' around the system. I'd argue that the conflicted desire of the US populace for ever-greater safety-nets and protection by the government (and thus control) will likewise ever-more incentivize cheating in precisely the same way.
Slashdot Mirror
It's "secret" in the same sense that Zimmerman was a "white man" ...because race-baiting is a surefire way to gin up an audience.
To hell with the facts. And consequences. Nobody pays us to pay attention to those.
I believe that the phrase "The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions" has always been applicable.
Or Thomas Moore's (apocryphal) dialogue from A Man For All Seasons:
"Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!"
Google too tough for you?
http://nypost.com/2011/04/17/h...
"US Attorney General Eric Holder and his brother failed to pay the property taxes on their childhood home in Queens, which they inherited last August after their mother died, The Post has learned.
And because their ailing mom, Miriam, was already behind on two quarterly tax bills when she succumbed to illness on Aug. 13, the charges went unpaid for more than a year â" growing to $4,146.
It wasnâ(TM)t until The Post confronted Holder last week about the delinquency that he and younger brother William Holder finally paid up Friday..."
And as for Geithner, one might expect the man appointed TREASURY SECRETARY to be fairly careful about his taxes? Don't we kinda hope those guys are obsessive about numbers and details?
1963 called, wondered where the imminent apocalypse was?
The media doesn't bat an eye when the president's treasury secretary or attorney general are found guilty of tax evasion. Why would we expect that they conform to any other standard for other members of the administration?
Tell me that this doesn't scream for implementation with porn?
Jesse Jackson: "I desperately need a new cause to trumpet, or I'm no longer going to be able to afford my lifestyle. Therefore, I shall identify a desperate need for my community, for which I shall naturally be named the spokesman. By this method I shall articulate a set of vague, impossible goals such that we can once again identify an entire culture as 'victims' of the nebulous (but nevertheless nefarious) forces that keep us "down". I shall continue attach myself to this I-hope-ever-growing-movement, in order to be able to pay for my cars, mistresses, and if I'm lucky, even the lawyers needed to keep my son out of prison. Perhaps I have finally found the cause celebre that will even allow me to ride into media sinecure, like that dirty sellout bastard Al Sharpton."
Well, that's what I heard, anyway.
I'd call his plan for IT diversity the Nationwide IT General Graduate Effectiveness Resource System. Come up with your own acronym as required.
The real question, for the IT community is, of course, does his plan ensure enough vaginas in IT departments? If not, then his victim train will have to wait until that one leaves the station.
Privacy != blocking ads.
Personally, I use Chrome not because I have a hardon for Google, but because:
a) it's generally been the fastest smoothest browser out there. Sure, this or that may just nudge ahead of Chrome now and again, but I'd rather take "1st or 2nd fastest every time" over "was first once, then was never heard of for 7 months, then was first again".
b) I don't honestly care about "privacy" in the FUD context it's generally bandied about. Frankly, if the great "them" collecting data on me want to know that I'm a 46 year old hetero white male and serve me ads of stuff that I want (preferably draped in scantily clad, easily-objectifiable women) I'm al lfor it.
I use adblock not for privacy purposes, but as a filter against the obnoxious, aggressive, in-your-face ubiquitous advertising that gets in the way of my browsing. In fact, I watch carefully the number of blocked cookies, etc. For sites I've visited for a while and seen they're moderately low and not too obtrusive, I disable adblock because I want them to get the revenue for my visits, as small as it is. TANSTAAFL.
I mean, what else do you call it when a director and studio execs repeatedly ass-hump JRR Tolkien's corpse until it's a tattered, torn remnant, not even recognizable as related to it's original form?
I'm not kidding.
This isn't The Hobbit...this is "fantasy action movie ver#3, including characters from The Hobbit".
And everyone knew it was coming. Do you know of a single person, anywhere who (when told The Hobbit would be 3 movies) didn't do a double take and say WTF?
I really loved the LOTR movies. I largely agreed with the editorial choices to remove parts that were non-germane to the plot. But this?
This is appalling. The trailer looks appalling, and the first two movies were appalling. Not only were they not The Hobbit, they weren't even GOOD 'generic fantasy movies'.
Fuck you, Peter Jackson, you weird, barefoot shitbird, for the future people your abortion will drive away from what's really a canon of fantasy literature. May your memory as a director rot in hell right next to Ralph Bakshi.
For those disappointed folks who haven't already seen them, CinemaSins has done an amusing job of reviewing the ample superficial flaws in the first two. Watch these, they're more entertaining than these films themselves:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... (the first movie)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... (the second)
In the immortal words of Judge Smayles: Well, the world needs ditch-diggers, too.
Who the hell is this guy sleeping with, that Slashdot has become his personal blog-pimp site? (Rhetorical question, it's clearly timothy, soulskill, and samzenpus....do you guys know about each other?)
Seriously? If his points were insightful, it might just BARELY be acceptable (but still, not really - did we want this to become the 21st century's Chaos Manor column?)...but I have to say, they aren't. I was going just refute as an example a few of his issues, but they're so fucking obvious, what's the point?
Bennett, I'm not going to educate you basic premises of business, marketing, anecdotal evidence, etc. Seriously, talking about the goddamn WEATHER?
What.
The.
Fuck,
Slashdot?
"...illegal drug use (including abuse of prescription painkillers) among technology workers and executives in high-pay, high-stress Silicon Valley. ..."
I know a shit-ton of people whose lives/work is JUST as stressful working their 3 jobs to make ends meet, but since it's not "high pay" that would probably mean they're not worth talking about, right? Certainly, we're less interesting in the 'why' of their drug abuse issues, because they can only afford cheap mood-altering chemistry like booze and cigs.
Personally, I'd say the fact that Silicon Valley folks make stupid-large amounts of money means they have even LESS of an excuse to complain.
Lots of people have more stress for much less self-inflicted reasons than pursuing of giant piles of cash.
You might want to revise your facts.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
Mice gengineered to be germ free were fed drinking water from public sources. Within the life span of the mice, they developed GI tract bacteria that were ENTIRELY DIFFERENT SPECIES.
Hell, Galapagos Finches evolved different heritable beak differences in http://www.plosgenetics.org/ar...
http://rspb.royalsocietypublis...
To answer your points in order:
1) I could point to thousands of species that have, and are growing, adapting, and doing quite well thank you. Bacteria, virii, insects, lots of plants, fungus, etc. I'm sorry that they aren't the adorable big/furry mammals that excite your sympathy gland.
2) Even with the most sophisticated weapons and tools, have we exterminated every species of whale? Nope. Heck, even with the determined effort of CENTURIES, have we (or are we even close to) exterminated the common mosquito? Nope.
3) I wasn't really blaming them for anything. I was saying that no species cares about its environment, in that, humans are EXACTLY like the other animals...we're going to reproduce and poison our environment until it kills us. That's just the natural way of things.
You ENTIRELY missed the point of my comment, by the way. Righteous indignation makes it hard to read, I get it.
Or perhaps the entire idea of 'peacefully coexisting with nature' is completely, utterly wrong and a romantic, emotionalized intellectualism first dreamed up by Thoreau and lately enfranchised by Greens because it thrums sympathetic heartstrings of the same naive urbanites that think you can hand-feed wild animals or coexist with bears (Grizzlyman!) because they're cute?
NO species "peacefully coexists with nature". Zero. Nature is a cold-hearted bitch, and to "win" against it, species have evolved their own ruthless strategies.
Every species from the single-celled protozoa to grey whales eats and reproduces heedless of the consequences to the environment. Ultimately, one of three things happen:
1) the species cannot reproduce fast enough to outrace environmental pressures and is wiped out (either slowly over time, or just a result of shitty luck like an asteroid strike - 'scale' is always the tricky question where environment is concerned).
2) the species comes to an equilibrium, where reproduction/expansion are roughly balanced against the environmental pressures, and a sort of stasis results (until the next environmental variation that exceeds the flexibility of the population to sustain)
3) the species overwhelms environmental pressures, expanding until they exhaust resources and are confronted with #1 again, or is able to move to another environment and "restart" the calculation.
That's it. Every species, ever. Three (really 2) possible results. But no matter how you decorate it, #2 isn't some delightful rainbows and unicorns happy time either - both 'sides' are voraciously, impersonally, automatically fighting both directions. Think of it as a bloody tug of war....just because the flag in the center isn't moving much, doesn't in ANY way imply that both sides aren't struggling mightily every single second, and wouldn't cheerfully win if given the opportunity.
Hell, even plants are selfish, arrogant assholes when you come right down to it and see how they fuck each other over. They just do it really slowly.
(To be clear, I'm not anthropomorphizing it either, it's simply useful for the point here to suggest the forces are 'contending'. In reality, they're both entirely insensate....which is kind of my point.)
I know it's futile, since it's such a pretty delusion (and so politically useful for so many...) but can we ever dispense with the bullshit notion that anything, ever, "peacefully coexists with nature"?
That's an unfair assertion, and completely not supported by facts.
Don Rumsfeld has NOT been proven to be an alien, nor have I seen any evidence that he prefers Mexicans over any other nationality, much less the exclusivity implied by the wiki entry.
Glad they fixed it.
"Most people wouldn't even be able to flush their toilet because urban water supplies largely rely on electric pumps. "
Um, no.
First, the normal flush pressure comes from the water tank on the back...so EVERYONE would be able to flush at least once. (Actually, in a disaster, that tank isn't a bad source of freshwater, at least for a while.)
Most communities have water tanks above their population, either on a nearby height, or in water towers. This makes the system - at least in the short term, until that tank is drained - impervious to power outage. Even NYC has tens of thousands of rooftop tanks with the same function, but on a per-building level.
GRAVITY, not electricity, produces water pressure that refills that local toilet tank. So until the community tank is emptied, and electric pumps are required to fill that large tank, everyone would be able to flush just fine.
http://www.howstuffworks.com/w...
FUD, now in "patronizing" flavor.
To suggest that critiquing a stupid unit of measure is somehow trivializing the problem is itself a strawman.
If I said that I'm 1,930,400,000,000 picometers tall, people SHOULD mock me for using a stupid unit of measure. When people are primed to overreact to an event like Fukushima and then confronted by a number in public reporting that uses just such an inappropriate unit of measure, one can either mock the report for being foolish, or condemn it for being deliberately inflammatory. Which would you prefer?
I mean, what is the advantage of a complex vacuum system and the flexible (ie fail-able) skin?
Just put dimples on the cars. In a single generation, it would go from "looking weird" to normal.
I have minor strabismus, one eye points about 10-15 degrees offline.
I'm told it's barely noticeable with glasses on, but very evident when I have them off. Plus, I've lived all my life with glasses and I'm 46....so nah, not worth the bother/risk.
If I was 20 and didn't have this vanity thing? I'd do it in a heartbeat.
Didn't an animal study in 2009 or so show that fMRI was fundamentally flawed, as it showed brain activity in DEAD salmon?
Ah, here it is:
http://blogs.scientificamerica...
Am I the only one that finds the "Internet of Things" a catastrophically, pointlessly stupid idea?
I don't WANT my refrigerator, stove, blender, toaster, home climate control, garage door opener, office fan, or toilet connected to the internet. I cannot see how adding additional potential points of failure to everything makes them better, just so I can see when (and/or what) little Jimmy flushed this morning, or I can log in to my toaster's web page and change the settings remotely (why?).
I've been an 'early adopter' of lots of things - computers, the internet, dvds, digital tvs, etc - but perhaps at 46 I'm simply too old to "get" the IoT (like twitter or instagram, I don't really "get" those either).
...if it is, it's more a symptom than cause.
I believe it's societies in which the economically optimal behavior is cheating.
In Socialist East Germany as many have posted here anecdotally, the system was so broken that cheating - going outside the formal rules of the system - was the only way to get many basic and preferred needs met.
This is endemic to CORRUPT societies, not just socialist ones.
For cheating to be optimal, you have to have two elements:
- a system that gives people motivation to break the rules AND (importantly)
- an alternative - a black market, corrupt officials, etc - that is workable.
I'd argue that *any* overbureaucratic society will eventually reach this point.
Capitalism - insofar as it mitigates the issue - allows people to DIRECTLY follow their self-interest, without having to 'cheat' around the system.
I'd argue that the conflicted desire of the US populace for ever-greater safety-nets and protection by the government (and thus control) will likewise ever-more incentivize cheating in precisely the same way.
Let's check America in about 5-10 years (give it time to settle in), and then we can confirm that it's independent of socialism.
He probably booted you from the project when you failed to spell his name right.