This article is about conservatives trying to brand themselves.
They want to find out what liberals support, and be the opposite. Since liberals seem to like science, and it seems to conflict with religion to some people(*), conservatives are rebelling against that.
What "science" actually is has nothing to do with the conservative view, or the liberal one(+).
The real problem that conservatives face here is that their strategy is silly. Defining yourself by what your enemies do will not work. It leaves you open to manipulation and getting backed into a corner. I think that's what is happening here.
----------
* - I don't think this is true at all. Religion is metaphysical poetry, science is its physical counterpart.
+ - I don't believe that "reality has a liberal bias." Reality has a reality bias. It's pointlessly combative to claim that all conservatives are detached from reality (or all liberals)
People need more choices in employers. The best way is less regulation so there are more businesses and it is easier to get hired. Better education helps as well.
If we can take this stinking mess and make energy from it, we should. This is literally free energy since we're all little poop factories by virtue of being biological. I'm not against solar or wind (hehe) power, but if we get free energy from feces, I'd at least like to recoup the savings and re-invest in some delicious food.
The contents of a three-minute video can generally be typed up into a half-page of text and read in thirty seconds.
The exceptions are walk-throughs that are difficult to describe in writing, or content that requires visual or audio.
For me, it's not a matter of being seen goofing off. I have headphones. But it's more a use of my time. If I'm going to goof off, I want to goof off *efficiently*.
Slashdot TV looks great and it looks like you'll do something good with it.
Here is my concern however. Eventually, all internet sites try to become Facebook or Myspace or whatever the "it" network is that week. The problem with this is that what makes Slashdot great is that it's not for general consumption. It's for a higher standard of technical knowledge or those with the desire to attain that.
If you try to make Slashdot into a cash cow that behaves just like Facebook, you will fail two ways. First, the people who are already using Facebook aren't going to come here. Second, you will drive away your faithful userbase.
You cannot be what they are. You are born different (apologies to Lady Gaga).
It's an interesting point. It seems to me however that the real problem is their lack of choice, and compelling them to work for abusive people is not the solution to that. They need more choices. I don't have a quick answer about how to provide that.
How can idiots rule this country if all of us can vote?
For idiots to rule in a democracy, that would have to mean that most voters are idiots. That contradicts "liberty, equality and fraternity" to say that.
These laws sound like the worst thing ever until someone posts your credit record online, a nude picture of your daughter, or your copyrighted code that you worked on for ten years and hoped to sell to finance your retirement.
Then, suddenly, they sound great.
The UK has a point about protecting privacy. If any point of failure can overcome the Streisand effect, it's the search engines. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
I end up defending the Great Satan (Microsoft) here, but they're right: Pirate Bay has more viruses, trojans and other drive-bay attacks in its ads than the average site, by a factor of at least ten.
I clean up a lot of PCs still, and the biggest vector of infection is still porn sites. The second biggest vector is The Pirate Bay.
Most job seekers see themselves as recipients and have a slave mentality of being grateful for any job at all. In my experience, this is like walking alone in a dark alley with RAPE ME written on your back in 1,024 point lipstick. You need to make your job choice a mutual decision, or they're going to treat you like a disposable employee.
Think about it this way. You don't receive a job, you agree to take one. You should be choosy. If you're broke and unemployed, take a job on a temporary basis. Don't stop looking. The people who hate their jobs perceive that they have no options. That perception probably started the minute they assumed that they had to take any job they were offered.
What this means related to employers probing your Facebook account is that you should reject any employer that does anything you find questionable. Be choosy and find a better employer. They will have you sign an NDA and an agreement about maintaining the company image outside the firm and leave it up to you to implement.
This is a public service announcement with some food for thought regarding Facebook and similar sites.
Do not post anything on these sites that you do not want the world to know!
1. User agreements. Almost all of these sites retain ownership to what you post. They can re-sell or re-publish the material later, like Twitter, and there is no guarantee that your privacy settings will be intact.
2. Follow the money. Search engine advertising is falling because it is not targeted, but social networks are easily targeted for advertising. Your data will be sold, and if it's anonymized, there's no guarantee that the anonymization will be done so completely that it won't be easy to correlate your anonymized data to your public profiles.
3. It's easy to get to your data. If your friends let in someone who's crazy, that data will be public.
4. Security is not guaranteed. These sites can get hacked and their data published, a la Wikileaks. Even if the data isn't public, it will be for sale to people including the security firms that your future employers will want.
5. People are stupid. They think it's funny, and they re-share your stunts and exploits, and then there's the picture of you naked beer bonging on your supervisor's desk.
Think defensively and don't trust large corporations like Google and Facebook with your data.
The study is inherently sexist in assuming that men and women are different. In my experience, however, there's some truth to this. Genders have different approaches to management.
My concern is that we assume "more democratic" is better. I think I'd prefer a strong fair leader. My co-workers are presumably less experienced than the boss, and I don't know if I want a vote by the less experienced to trump the better experience of the boss.
It seems like every side wants to make something illegal. I guess then it depends what you want to read about, extremist Islam or Western enlightenment values? It's not like they're banning Stephen King books.
Teach both creation and evolution as theory. That should satisfy everyone. Since we didn't see it happen, we don't need "for sure" either way. We don't need to. It's important to teach evolution but to give other views separate but equal air time.
I've now observed the computer industry for some decades, and I think this move by HP is a loser. Two wrongs don't make a right. If the PC division was not profitable on its own, combining it will only make it less efficient.
HP's PC business is in trouble because the Windows ecosystem is broken. The last HP PC I saw had 2 hrs worth of spyware removal, old drivers, no customization to make it easy for the user, 200 programs in the start menu, and annoying registration pop-ups. Although I will never trust Cupertino, if you buy a Mac you have none of this. Users want stuff to just work. HP's business model is based on selling cheaply made PCs to idiots and profiting from the advertising. That's not a real business model. They need to find a way to make fewer types of machines, and make more of them, so that they can use economies of scale to make good profit. They also need to cut out the spyware/spamware and configure these machines for your grandmother to use them to web-surf, email and word process. And for the love of whatever absent gods you believe in, install Chrome or Firefox but not IE!
HP's printer business is in trouble for the same reason. About 15 years ago they realized that the product was the ink, not the printers, and started selling really expensive ink in cheapie printers because they realized most people don't print much and don't think about it until they have to. The problem is that now the old rule, "You can trust any printer you buy from HP," is no longer true. Their brand is worth a lot less as a result and the new printer manufacturers are eating them alive. Again, they got fat and lazy on the easy money from the oblivious cows of the mid-American middle class consumer.
I'm convinced that any project, no matter how big can be done by 6 people.
HP suffers from too many cooks in the kitchen. As soon as the easy money rolled in, they got greedy and hired a lot of idiots to cover their tracks. Now they can't manufacture a PC at low cost, or act quickly, or do anything without 10,000 committee meetings. The human disease has taken over. It takes very little brainpower to make a great PC for $600 with $50 in profit to the maker. If you had the bulk purchasing power that HP does, you could make that same PC for $50. It's a mystery how they're losing money in this market, until you look at how big and bloated HP has become over the past 15 years.
I'm glad the NYT has found a way to get money for its content. Internet advertising is slowly being recognized as bunk because most of the people spending a lot of time on the internet are not going to buy anything. They're usually retired, young, or unemployed. As a result, the writers aren't going to get paid if the newspaper relies on advertising, and this means that there will be less quality writing for the rest of us. It's better to pay for something and have it be of a higher quality.
A commercial model works better for desktop software. That way, developers are paid to fix problems even if those problems aren't fun or interesting. Open source is great, but programmers often work on the fun and interesting problems, not the day-to-day stuff including boring little bug fixes, documentation, interface, etc.
Linux is great but the only software that really works is the server-oriented stuff like Apache. The desktop software is not up to par with the Windows and MacOS equivalents, and the developer community is generally hostile to those who point out its flaws. Shocking truth: users don't want to stop everything they're doing, learn to code and devote the next two years of their lives to fixing your bugs. The arrogance of the developer community is its greatest turn-off, especially when they're shouting "learn to code!" at architects, attorneys and doctors who want the software to just work right.
The Linux community also has to be more realistic about the state of its desktop software. We all want Open Office to be the equivalent of Microsoft Office, but it's not. KDE should be the equivalent of the Windows 7 GUI, but it's a far cry away. The Linux community has difficulty facing these difficult facts because someone can always say "That's just because Microsoft has gazillions of dollars, it's the only difference between our software and theirs," and lots of people want to hear that so they'll agree with that message. But it's not true.
I don't recommend Linux to the average user anymore. It's too expensive because you're going to spend a lot of time fiddling with the settings to get stuff to work right, where if you install Windows, it just works out of the box. There are far fewer glitches.
Instead, I tell the more advanced users that they should set up a server for home use. Use it to stream your audio/video, or to store important files, or to have a home webserver. Whatever.
The point is to get them involved with the "arts and crafts" mentality that Linux requires, which is that you think up a need and start playing around to get the software to do what you want. This is the only way to get people involved with programming or computer science. They want stuff to just work, unless it's a new frontier for them, and then they want to roll their own.
I think we should be wary of solutions which involve education as a substitute for the raw intelligence and common sense required to make complex decisions.
At every job I've worked, there have been over-educated people who could not (successfully) make basic decisions about how to regulate their own lives, budgets, technology and other day-to-day responsibilities. Not surprisingly, most of them were very enthusiastic about "it's so simple" political ideas that they wanted us all to adopt.
To my mind, while stupidity is a big challenge to democracy, an even bigger challenge is the trend of people to get caught up in whatever meme of the moment seems to deliver that "it's so simple" moment of feeling in control. We are herd animals and when we follow the herd we are usually wrong.
They're not looking for any one of these words. They're cross-indexing usage of multiple words. If a terrorist event is about to happen and they think it's near a bridge, finding "bridge" and "social network" and "ammonium nitrate" might be a good way to identify friends of the perp...
A private company is refusing to support incest porn with its payment system. Cry me a river; I don't care.
And yes I know your grade-school teacher taught you that if they censor anal sex incest cuckold porn today, tomorrow they'll be banning the dictionary and words themselves. Just like in 1984 which the guys in power must not have read.
You don't prove your dedication to free speech and privacy by finding the freakiest and most screwed up test cases to champion.
Slashdot Mirror
This article is about conservatives trying to brand themselves.
They want to find out what liberals support, and be the opposite. Since liberals seem to like science, and it seems to conflict with religion to some people(*), conservatives are rebelling against that.
What "science" actually is has nothing to do with the conservative view, or the liberal one(+).
The real problem that conservatives face here is that their strategy is silly. Defining yourself by what your enemies do will not work. It leaves you open to manipulation and getting backed into a corner. I think that's what is happening here.
----------
* - I don't think this is true at all. Religion is metaphysical poetry, science is its physical counterpart.
+ - I don't believe that "reality has a liberal bias." Reality has a reality bias. It's pointlessly combative to claim that all conservatives are detached from reality (or all liberals)
We need to make sure that no one is offended by parts of the big wide world out there that might be difficult.
First we can remove hurtful words, like "fat" or "stupid."
Then we can remove hurtful topics, like death and taxes.
Finally, we can ensure that nothing that anyone does can infringe on any of the 458,013 special interest groups that currently inhabit America.
After that, we can tell each other "Good day, how are you?" and "I'm well thanks" because that's all that will be left to say.
People need more choices in employers. The best way is less regulation so there are more businesses and it is easier to get hired. Better education helps as well.
If we can take this stinking mess and make energy from it, we should. This is literally free energy since we're all little poop factories by virtue of being biological. I'm not against solar or wind (hehe) power, but if we get free energy from feces, I'd at least like to recoup the savings and re-invest in some delicious food.
There's two ways to solve this:
1. Try to make abusive people less abusive through laws.
2. Try to give employees more options about where they work.
I am not sure the first will ever work because people always get around rules. The second works.
The contents of a three-minute video can generally be typed up into a half-page of text and read in thirty seconds.
The exceptions are walk-throughs that are difficult to describe in writing, or content that requires visual or audio.
For me, it's not a matter of being seen goofing off. I have headphones. But it's more a use of my time. If I'm going to goof off, I want to goof off *efficiently*.
Slashdot TV looks great and it looks like you'll do something good with it.
Here is my concern however. Eventually, all internet sites try to become Facebook or Myspace or whatever the "it" network is that week. The problem with this is that what makes Slashdot great is that it's not for general consumption. It's for a higher standard of technical knowledge or those with the desire to attain that.
If you try to make Slashdot into a cash cow that behaves just like Facebook, you will fail two ways. First, the people who are already using Facebook aren't going to come here. Second, you will drive away your faithful userbase.
You cannot be what they are. You are born different (apologies to Lady Gaga).
To take over the world, of course. Wouldn't you?
It's an interesting point. It seems to me however that the real problem is their lack of choice, and compelling them to work for abusive people is not the solution to that. They need more choices. I don't have a quick answer about how to provide that.
"Firefox can't find the server at www.godhatesfacebook.com."
How can idiots rule this country if all of us can vote?
For idiots to rule in a democracy, that would have to mean that most voters are idiots. That contradicts "liberty, equality and fraternity" to say that.
Are you opposed to democracy itself?
These laws sound like the worst thing ever until someone posts your credit record online, a nude picture of your daughter, or your copyrighted code that you worked on for ten years and hoped to sell to finance your retirement.
Then, suddenly, they sound great.
The UK has a point about protecting privacy. If any point of failure can overcome the Streisand effect, it's the search engines. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
I end up defending the Great Satan (Microsoft) here, but they're right: Pirate Bay has more viruses, trojans and other drive-bay attacks in its ads than the average site, by a factor of at least ten.
I clean up a lot of PCs still, and the biggest vector of infection is still porn sites. The second biggest vector is The Pirate Bay.
Most job seekers see themselves as recipients and have a slave mentality of being grateful for any job at all. In my experience, this is like walking alone in a dark alley with RAPE ME written on your back in 1,024 point lipstick. You need to make your job choice a mutual decision, or they're going to treat you like a disposable employee.
Think about it this way. You don't receive a job, you agree to take one. You should be choosy. If you're broke and unemployed, take a job on a temporary basis. Don't stop looking. The people who hate their jobs perceive that they have no options. That perception probably started the minute they assumed that they had to take any job they were offered.
What this means related to employers probing your Facebook account is that you should reject any employer that does anything you find questionable. Be choosy and find a better employer. They will have you sign an NDA and an agreement about maintaining the company image outside the firm and leave it up to you to implement.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4251968.stm
This is a public service announcement with some food for thought regarding Facebook and similar sites.
Do not post anything on these sites that you do not want the world to know!
1. User agreements. Almost all of these sites retain ownership to what you post. They can re-sell or re-publish the material later, like Twitter, and there is no guarantee that your privacy settings will be intact.
2. Follow the money. Search engine advertising is falling because it is not targeted, but social networks are easily targeted for advertising. Your data will be sold, and if it's anonymized, there's no guarantee that the anonymization will be done so completely that it won't be easy to correlate your anonymized data to your public profiles.
3. It's easy to get to your data. If your friends let in someone who's crazy, that data will be public.
4. Security is not guaranteed. These sites can get hacked and their data published, a la Wikileaks. Even if the data isn't public, it will be for sale to people including the security firms that your future employers will want.
5. People are stupid. They think it's funny, and they re-share your stunts and exploits, and then there's the picture of you naked beer bonging on your supervisor's desk.
Think defensively and don't trust large corporations like Google and Facebook with your data.
The study is inherently sexist in assuming that men and women are different. In my experience, however, there's some truth to this. Genders have different approaches to management.
My concern is that we assume "more democratic" is better. I think I'd prefer a strong fair leader. My co-workers are presumably less experienced than the boss, and I don't know if I want a vote by the less experienced to trump the better experience of the boss.
It seems like every side wants to make something illegal. I guess then it depends what you want to read about, extremist Islam or Western enlightenment values? It's not like they're banning Stephen King books.
Teach both creation and evolution as theory. That should satisfy everyone. Since we didn't see it happen, we don't need "for sure" either way. We don't need to. It's important to teach evolution but to give other views separate but equal air time.
I've now observed the computer industry for some decades, and I think this move by HP is a loser. Two wrongs don't make a right. If the PC division was not profitable on its own, combining it will only make it less efficient.
HP's PC business is in trouble because the Windows ecosystem is broken. The last HP PC I saw had 2 hrs worth of spyware removal, old drivers, no customization to make it easy for the user, 200 programs in the start menu, and annoying registration pop-ups. Although I will never trust Cupertino, if you buy a Mac you have none of this. Users want stuff to just work. HP's business model is based on selling cheaply made PCs to idiots and profiting from the advertising. That's not a real business model. They need to find a way to make fewer types of machines, and make more of them, so that they can use economies of scale to make good profit. They also need to cut out the spyware/spamware and configure these machines for your grandmother to use them to web-surf, email and word process. And for the love of whatever absent gods you believe in, install Chrome or Firefox but not IE!
HP's printer business is in trouble for the same reason. About 15 years ago they realized that the product was the ink, not the printers, and started selling really expensive ink in cheapie printers because they realized most people don't print much and don't think about it until they have to. The problem is that now the old rule, "You can trust any printer you buy from HP," is no longer true. Their brand is worth a lot less as a result and the new printer manufacturers are eating them alive. Again, they got fat and lazy on the easy money from the oblivious cows of the mid-American middle class consumer.
Someone else here on Slashdot said something that I've known to be true from my own experience:
HP suffers from too many cooks in the kitchen. As soon as the easy money rolled in, they got greedy and hired a lot of idiots to cover their tracks. Now they can't manufacture a PC at low cost, or act quickly, or do anything without 10,000 committee meetings. The human disease has taken over. It takes very little brainpower to make a great PC for $600 with $50 in profit to the maker. If you had the bulk purchasing power that HP does, you could make that same PC for $50. It's a mystery how they're losing money in this market, until you look at how big and bloated HP has become over the past 15 years.
I'm glad the NYT has found a way to get money for its content. Internet advertising is slowly being recognized as bunk because most of the people spending a lot of time on the internet are not going to buy anything. They're usually retired, young, or unemployed. As a result, the writers aren't going to get paid if the newspaper relies on advertising, and this means that there will be less quality writing for the rest of us. It's better to pay for something and have it be of a higher quality.
The real travesty is that they paid $40 million for that goofball paywall.
A commercial model works better for desktop software. That way, developers are paid to fix problems even if those problems aren't fun or interesting. Open source is great, but programmers often work on the fun and interesting problems, not the day-to-day stuff including boring little bug fixes, documentation, interface, etc.
Linux is great but the only software that really works is the server-oriented stuff like Apache. The desktop software is not up to par with the Windows and MacOS equivalents, and the developer community is generally hostile to those who point out its flaws. Shocking truth: users don't want to stop everything they're doing, learn to code and devote the next two years of their lives to fixing your bugs. The arrogance of the developer community is its greatest turn-off, especially when they're shouting "learn to code!" at architects, attorneys and doctors who want the software to just work right.
The Linux community also has to be more realistic about the state of its desktop software. We all want Open Office to be the equivalent of Microsoft Office, but it's not. KDE should be the equivalent of the Windows 7 GUI, but it's a far cry away. The Linux community has difficulty facing these difficult facts because someone can always say "That's just because Microsoft has gazillions of dollars, it's the only difference between our software and theirs," and lots of people want to hear that so they'll agree with that message. But it's not true.
I don't recommend Linux to the average user anymore. It's too expensive because you're going to spend a lot of time fiddling with the settings to get stuff to work right, where if you install Windows, it just works out of the box. There are far fewer glitches.
Instead, I tell the more advanced users that they should set up a server for home use. Use it to stream your audio/video, or to store important files, or to have a home webserver. Whatever.
The point is to get them involved with the "arts and crafts" mentality that Linux requires, which is that you think up a need and start playing around to get the software to do what you want. This is the only way to get people involved with programming or computer science. They want stuff to just work, unless it's a new frontier for them, and then they want to roll their own.
I think we should be wary of solutions which involve education as a substitute for the raw intelligence and common sense required to make complex decisions.
At every job I've worked, there have been over-educated people who could not (successfully) make basic decisions about how to regulate their own lives, budgets, technology and other day-to-day responsibilities. Not surprisingly, most of them were very enthusiastic about "it's so simple" political ideas that they wanted us all to adopt.
To my mind, while stupidity is a big challenge to democracy, an even bigger challenge is the trend of people to get caught up in whatever meme of the moment seems to deliver that "it's so simple" moment of feeling in control. We are herd animals and when we follow the herd we are usually wrong.
They're not looking for any one of these words. They're cross-indexing usage of multiple words. If a terrorist event is about to happen and they think it's near a bridge, finding "bridge" and "social network" and "ammonium nitrate" might be a good way to identify friends of the perp...
A private company is refusing to support incest porn with its payment system. Cry me a river; I don't care.
And yes I know your grade-school teacher taught you that if they censor anal sex incest cuckold porn today, tomorrow they'll be banning the dictionary and words themselves. Just like in 1984 which the guys in power must not have read.
You don't prove your dedication to free speech and privacy by finding the freakiest and most screwed up test cases to champion.