We also had 4 heart attacks and 3 cancers. I saw young people walking around with black eyes from lack of sleep. Programming without constraints is horrible and will kill you. Humans are not meant to consistently work 70-80 hours per week for months.
We evolved for a life expectancy of about 35 years, at constant risk of starvation and disease, under constant threat of violence, and with a constant need to fight a hostile environment. Many human beings on this planet still live close to those conditions. Many people even in Europe and the US regularly and voluntarily work 80h/week with no ill effect.
As for the rest, you are arguing against points I never made.
Oh yes just because I can pay for cheaper consumer crap things are ok. I am going to ask how old are you? For life also includes health care, education, etc. These costs have become prohibitive for the poor. Sure they are given loans and then get jobs where they can barely pay back these things. But hey as long as I can get get cheap consumer crap all is ok, right?
How old are you to spout such nonsense? Health care today is nothing like health care decades ago, it is much more valuable. Education today is nothing like education decades ago, again it is much more valuable.
Again you don't know what you are talking about. Cheaper consumer crap yes. Cheaper food? NO, but I guess you don't buy food do you?
Again, you don't know what you are talking about. Here's the data:
Note that, not only are people spending less, they are getting much better food for that amount of money.
The poor are poorer than the average poor of say 40 years ago. When economists measure poverty and such they don't measure it in absolute values like how much currency you have. The measure it in terms of what you can afford for the monies you make.
Every income quintile has improved, in constant dollars, since the 1960's:
I'm sorry, but you have turned a discussion about work hours for French programmers into some ridiculous debate about 19th century workplace practices and put up a silly strawman of no regulation vs California/European-style regulation, as if those were the only two options.
I ask you a simple question why on earth are kids still working today in other countries?
What stopped child labor is the revolutions in agriculture, industry, and the economy, which meant that everybody could survive on a fraction of the amount of work they previously needed. Until it was economically and socially possible, you couldn't have passed any such laws.
And trust me it ain't pretty. They work ungodly number of hours and behave like monkeys (lack of sleep) when the boss comes by.
Trust me, it's still prettier than not having a job at all. And unless people like you screw up their economies with their naive ivory tower views, they'll go through the same evolution as our society: they'll become richer and their kids won't have to work anymore.
Again not seeing the reality are we? The GP has made a legite point and all you do is fire back the theory.
No, you are firing back irrelevant theory. We're talking about ridiculous over-regulation of software developers in France, and you talk about stuff that is completely irrelevant.
People talk about a manual tranny being real driving, but I say it's degenerate ever since they added synchromesh.
Manual transmissions are cheap, safe, low maintenance, and efficient; that's what makes them good.
Thinking about whether it constitutes "real driving" is stupid. But for most people, it's just as stupid to put an automatic transmission in your car, which has few advantages and costs more.
No, you need to stop conflating the conditions at the dawn of the industrial revolution with today's conditions, and you need to stop giving false credit. What stopped 12 year olds working 72 hours a week was not just that the labor movement demanded it, but that the industrial revolution made it possible; the same 12 year olds used to work 72 hours a week (and more) before the industrial revolution, but people didn't stop that because economic conditions made it impossible.
Today, programming is not dangerous industrial work. The idea that programmers need to be protected from predatory employers by applying workplace standards developed for dangerous manual labor is ludicrous. Most people these days should be free to contract for work in whatever way they like. And they want to, as you can see from the declining union memberships.
So the real problem here is that the public has assumed a risk and the contractor doesn't have to bear that risk anymore. If the contractor were actually liable to the tune of, say $20m per killed employee (cost of human life plus some penalty), he would shore up the side of the trenches. Of course, if the employees were rational, they would refuse to even work for a contractor who doesn't provide safety equipment. In effect, that's what strikes and unions do. The problem is that, instead of dealing with the problem in a market way, namely by getting individual contractors to change their conduct, they have forced the state to assume the contractor's risk, resulting exactly in the problem you describe.
In effect, we're piling one bad regulation on top of another: public assumption of workplace risk, freeing corporate officers from liability, ineffective and costly OSHA inspections, etc. In the end, every special interest group, whether it's workers in dangerous professions, their employers, corporate officers, etc. is trying to get rich and lazy by saying "I don't want to have to worry about this, let the tax payer pay for it". That's not a "race to the bottom" (in terms of working conditions) at all, it's a completely different kind of failure.
The rational thing to do is wait until computer technology is fast enough that doing this kind of project is cheap. Spending billions of dollars on it right now is a waste of money, and may not even get us there any faster. After all, Markram has no control over when CPUs, switches, and storage devices actually are fast enough.
When science doesn't support your prejudices and bigotry, you resort to fabrications trying to resolve the differences. Don't strain yourself too much, your anterior cingulate gyrus is already abnormally large.
The paper you cite shows a correlation between size of the right amygdala and self-reported political attitudes, with "conservatives" having a larger amygdala.
What correlates with the size of the amygdala? Social network size and artistic creativity.
A small amygdala correlates with anxiety disorders and social problems. Also, the anterior cingulate gyrus enlarges if people experience more conflict between their beliefs and reality, as liberals apparently do.
So if you insist on interpreting these results in the way you do, they suggest that liberals tend towards fearful, non-artistic loners who can't make sense of the world, while conservatives tend towards social, artistic types who understand how the world works.
That's like saying you can't find any evidence that police hand out parking tickets in Boston. It's such a common occurrence that it doesn't require more sourcing or evidence on a German site.
Far more worrisome is that politicians, clergy, churches, and their critics threaten each other based on these kinds of laws. This is also a regular occurrence, sometimes even resulting in prison sentences or book banning. Churches and right wing politicians are particularly fond of shielding themselves from criticism that way:
You said the "1st Amendment". Is that that law that says whoever has the most money is the one that gets to pick who is elected by virtue of more advertising money?
As opposed to other nations where whoever runs the media and the schools gets to pick who is elected by virtue of manipulating people from childhood onward? Where the people and parties in power get to rewrite history and spread their propaganda to keep themselves in power? Systems that have brought fascists and communists to power?
Even if in the US, the most advertising money would win elections, that would still be preferable to any of those other systems. Of course, in the real world, election outcomes are largely independent of how much money people spend.
And it's no wonder that you're so anti-American: you're apparently a product of one of those systems, and the people who raised you and shaped you fear nothing more than a free press and free elections.
Lol, you're deluded if you can't see how your "power to influence other people in how they vote" makes your vote more valuable than theirs.
How does influencing other people change the value of my vote?
You seem to think that freedom means a right to influence other people to vote as you. That is not democracy
Yes, the right to influence other people via speech, publication, and political activity and organizing is a fundamental part of freedom and democracy, and it has been in every democracy since Greek democracy.
And also, freedom does NOT include you being able to exercise control over me with what you call "power to influence".
Talking to you or publishing things is not "exercising control" or "coercion" in any way. I have a right to talk and publish as I like, and you have the right to ignore me. You do not have the right to prevent me from speaking to other people, but that is what you're trying to do with restrictions on campaign contributions and political advertising.
I'm not sure where exactly you come from, but your understanding of democracy, its history, and its meaning, is obviously severely deficient.
The reason not much is happening is because, despite all these problems, the majority is actually still getting a better future. Wasting money on the military, on bailouts, or on disability-as-early-retirement may be wasteful, but it isn't so bad as to seriously affect most people's standard of living seriously.
Corporations are only one of many special interests enriching themselves at the expense of others. And as with all these special interests, it's only a subset of corporations that are enriching themselves, while many contribute positively. Same with most of the other groups. As long as people like you believe propaganda about this or that supposed enemy, you're part of the mass of people responsible for this.
That's good until Windows starts sending you uninteresting events constantly for the heck of it. That's probably what's happening here.
iTunes is not a mouse driver, and adding a small amount of latency in some of its event loops may be a reasonable thing to do, in particular since there actually is a problem that needs to be fixed and Apple seems incapable of fixing it any other way.
Just make (keep?) it legal to use any drone over public land or your private property for target practice, and the problem will quickly take care of itself.
Conservatives brains work differently. Their genetics make them concentrate on fear responses.
Yet "progressives" and "liberals" are afraid of free market competition, of climate change, of getting sick and not having health care, of other people with guns, of not having all sorts of insurance provided for them, of cancer and toxins, of falling through the social safety net, etc.
Of course it does. Go to a shooting range and take a poll and you're going to come up 99% Republican or Libertarian. At an NRA meeting, 99.9%.
Bullshit. Gun ownership rates are about 30% for Democrats and 50% for Republicans, but much of that difference is explained simply by where people live.
This wording excludes libel and slander right from the start (which aren't protected speech in the US either if I remember right)
Libel and slander are civil matters in the US; in Germany, they are criminal matters and potentially carry jail terms. Germany also has jail terms (up to three years) for insulting religions.
Standards are pretty low. Calling an airline pilot a "bus driver", calling a store a "fraud" in a review (even if you obviously don't mean it literally), flipping someone off, or using someone's first name if you haven't been introduced are all criminal offenses with prison sentences of up to 1-2 years. True statements can also be criminal offenses.
Flipping someone off behind the wheel generally costs upward of $4000 in penalties, a milder gesture around $1000. Just about anything negative you say to a policeman will get you charged and convicted in Germany.
Slashdot Mirror
We evolved for a life expectancy of about 35 years, at constant risk of starvation and disease, under constant threat of violence, and with a constant need to fight a hostile environment. Many human beings on this planet still live close to those conditions. Many people even in Europe and the US regularly and voluntarily work 80h/week with no ill effect.
As for the rest, you are arguing against points I never made.
I said that and it's true.
How old are you to spout such nonsense? Health care today is nothing like health care decades ago, it is much more valuable. Education today is nothing like education decades ago, again it is much more valuable.
Again, you don't know what you are talking about. Here's the data:
http://theintrinsicvalue.com/images/2011/03/US-Income-Percentage-spend-on-food-History.png
Note that, not only are people spending less, they are getting much better food for that amount of money.
Every income quintile has improved, in constant dollars, since the 1960's:
http://angrybearblog.com/2012/09/what-is-economic-middle-class.html
One can debate whether incomes have grown fast enough, but to claim that "the poor are poorer than 40 years ago" is utter nonsense.
I'm sorry, but you have turned a discussion about work hours for French programmers into some ridiculous debate about 19th century workplace practices and put up a silly strawman of no regulation vs California/European-style regulation, as if those were the only two options.
What stopped child labor is the revolutions in agriculture, industry, and the economy, which meant that everybody could survive on a fraction of the amount of work they previously needed. Until it was economically and socially possible, you couldn't have passed any such laws.
Trust me, it's still prettier than not having a job at all. And unless people like you screw up their economies with their naive ivory tower views, they'll go through the same evolution as our society: they'll become richer and their kids won't have to work anymore.
No, you are firing back irrelevant theory. We're talking about ridiculous over-regulation of software developers in France, and you talk about stuff that is completely irrelevant.
Manual transmissions are cheap, safe, low maintenance, and efficient; that's what makes them good.
Thinking about whether it constitutes "real driving" is stupid. But for most people, it's just as stupid to put an automatic transmission in your car, which has few advantages and costs more.
No, you need to stop conflating the conditions at the dawn of the industrial revolution with today's conditions, and you need to stop giving false credit. What stopped 12 year olds working 72 hours a week was not just that the labor movement demanded it, but that the industrial revolution made it possible; the same 12 year olds used to work 72 hours a week (and more) before the industrial revolution, but people didn't stop that because economic conditions made it impossible.
Today, programming is not dangerous industrial work. The idea that programmers need to be protected from predatory employers by applying workplace standards developed for dangerous manual labor is ludicrous. Most people these days should be free to contract for work in whatever way they like. And they want to, as you can see from the declining union memberships.
So the real problem here is that the public has assumed a risk and the contractor doesn't have to bear that risk anymore. If the contractor were actually liable to the tune of, say $20m per killed employee (cost of human life plus some penalty), he would shore up the side of the trenches. Of course, if the employees were rational, they would refuse to even work for a contractor who doesn't provide safety equipment. In effect, that's what strikes and unions do. The problem is that, instead of dealing with the problem in a market way, namely by getting individual contractors to change their conduct, they have forced the state to assume the contractor's risk, resulting exactly in the problem you describe.
In effect, we're piling one bad regulation on top of another: public assumption of workplace risk, freeing corporate officers from liability, ineffective and costly OSHA inspections, etc. In the end, every special interest group, whether it's workers in dangerous professions, their employers, corporate officers, etc. is trying to get rich and lazy by saying "I don't want to have to worry about this, let the tax payer pay for it". That's not a "race to the bottom" (in terms of working conditions) at all, it's a completely different kind of failure.
Yes. It's called "competition". It's what keeps markets efficient and prices low. It's what makes people better off over time.
The rational thing to do is wait until computer technology is fast enough that doing this kind of project is cheap. Spending billions of dollars on it right now is a waste of money, and may not even get us there any faster. After all, Markram has no control over when CPUs, switches, and storage devices actually are fast enough.
When science doesn't support your prejudices and bigotry, you resort to fabrications trying to resolve the differences. Don't strain yourself too much, your anterior cingulate gyrus is already abnormally large.
The paper you cite shows a correlation between size of the right amygdala and self-reported political attitudes, with "conservatives" having a larger amygdala.
What correlates with the size of the amygdala? Social network size and artistic creativity.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3079404/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18922517
A small amygdala correlates with anxiety disorders and social problems. Also, the anterior cingulate gyrus enlarges if people experience more conflict between their beliefs and reality, as liberals apparently do.
So if you insist on interpreting these results in the way you do, they suggest that liberals tend towards fearful, non-artistic loners who can't make sense of the world, while conservatives tend towards social, artistic types who understand how the world works.
(As for "fairness", grow up.)
That's like saying you can't find any evidence that police hand out parking tickets in Boston. It's such a common occurrence that it doesn't require more sourcing or evidence on a German site.
http://web.de/magazine/auto/verkehr-service/8888722-kostet-stinkefinger.html
Far more worrisome is that politicians, clergy, churches, and their critics threaten each other based on these kinds of laws. This is also a regular occurrence, sometimes even resulting in prison sentences or book banning. Churches and right wing politicians are particularly fond of shielding themselves from criticism that way:
http://winfuture.de/news,66580.html
http://www.rp-online.de/politik/deutschland/bundespraesident/wulff-klagt-wegen-beleidigung-bei-facebook-1.2655558
http://www.berliner-zeitung.de/archiv/ein-mann-druckte-koranverse-auf-toilettenpapier-und-schickte-die-blaetter-an-moscheen--das-gericht-verurteilte-ihn-und-verwies-dabei-auch-auf-die-weltpolitische-lage-geeignet--einen-orkan-zu-entfachen,10810590,10365520.html
As opposed to other nations where whoever runs the media and the schools gets to pick who is elected by virtue of manipulating people from childhood onward? Where the people and parties in power get to rewrite history and spread their propaganda to keep themselves in power? Systems that have brought fascists and communists to power?
Even if in the US, the most advertising money would win elections, that would still be preferable to any of those other systems. Of course, in the real world, election outcomes are largely independent of how much money people spend.
And it's no wonder that you're so anti-American: you're apparently a product of one of those systems, and the people who raised you and shaped you fear nothing more than a free press and free elections.
How does influencing other people change the value of my vote?
Yes, the right to influence other people via speech, publication, and political activity and organizing is a fundamental part of freedom and democracy, and it has been in every democracy since Greek democracy.
Talking to you or publishing things is not "exercising control" or "coercion" in any way. I have a right to talk and publish as I like, and you have the right to ignore me. You do not have the right to prevent me from speaking to other people, but that is what you're trying to do with restrictions on campaign contributions and political advertising.
I'm not sure where exactly you come from, but your understanding of democracy, its history, and its meaning, is obviously severely deficient.
The reason not much is happening is because, despite all these problems, the majority is actually still getting a better future. Wasting money on the military, on bailouts, or on disability-as-early-retirement may be wasteful, but it isn't so bad as to seriously affect most people's standard of living seriously.
Corporations are only one of many special interests enriching themselves at the expense of others. And as with all these special interests, it's only a subset of corporations that are enriching themselves, while many contribute positively. Same with most of the other groups. As long as people like you believe propaganda about this or that supposed enemy, you're part of the mass of people responsible for this.
That's good until Windows starts sending you uninteresting events constantly for the heck of it. That's probably what's happening here.
iTunes is not a mouse driver, and adding a small amount of latency in some of its event loops may be a reasonable thing to do, in particular since there actually is a problem that needs to be fixed and Apple seems incapable of fixing it any other way.
There are replacement applications, for example on Linux, and they work. What they can't do is deal with Apple's store and DRM media.
Just make (keep?) it legal to use any drone over public land or your private property for target practice, and the problem will quickly take care of itself.
Yet "progressives" and "liberals" are afraid of free market competition, of climate change, of getting sick and not having health care, of other people with guns, of not having all sorts of insurance provided for them, of cancer and toxins, of falling through the social safety net, etc.
Bullshit. Gun ownership rates are about 30% for Democrats and 50% for Republicans, but much of that difference is explained simply by where people live.
Libel and slander are civil matters in the US; in Germany, they are criminal matters and potentially carry jail terms. Germany also has jail terms (up to three years) for insulting religions.
Standards are pretty low. Calling an airline pilot a "bus driver", calling a store a "fraud" in a review (even if you obviously don't mean it literally), flipping someone off, or using someone's first name if you haven't been introduced are all criminal offenses with prison sentences of up to 1-2 years. True statements can also be criminal offenses.
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beleidigung_(Deutschland)
Flipping someone off behind the wheel generally costs upward of $4000 in penalties, a milder gesture around $1000. Just about anything negative you say to a policeman will get you charged and convicted in Germany.
Yeah, that's the oversimplification of a complex scientific subject for political purposes, complete with knee-jerk emotional appeals.
Just THINK OF THE (GRAND-)CHILDREN!