After that, they hit hard on designing good algorithms, and hired the mathematical talent to do
That's simply false, the PageRank idea and implementation came first, it was always there, and was developed by Page and Brin before they "hired the mathematical talent" to develop it and in fact even before Google was Google. It was the very starting point of it all. The single-biggest attraction point of Google was the relevancy of its search results. I know, I remember those days of sifting through pages and pages of arb e.g. AltaVista results, and what a difference it was when Google came along. From Wikipedia:
"PageRank was developed at Stanford University by Larry Page (hence the name Page-Rank[3]) and later Sergey Brin as part of a research project about a new kind of search engine. The project started in 1995 and led to a functional prototype, named Google, in 1998. Shortly after, Page and Brin founded Google Inc."
They are attempting to judge value when there simply is no objective measure for the kind of things they are trying to judge.
I think you're confusing "no objective measure" with "no known algorithms to computate those measures". Just because we don't know how to implement meaningful metrics with a computer or with some formulas, doesn't mean they don't exist. The proof of this is that other humans who are very good coders *are* actually, on the whole, pretty good (in fact, the *best* system out of them *all*) at judging the quality of other coders - MUCH better than any known computational metric - that doesn't mean what they're doing is terribly subjective, there are effectively objective but poorly understood processes in the brain that analyse quality (based on amongst others aspects that Tanuki64 already mentioned) (we just don't know how to 'duplicate' those quality-analysing 'algorithms', but they must exist, because our brains can do them). The book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance actually discusses this whole notion of 'quality' and the brain's analysis thereof.
In the "old days", instead of PHBs who like to think everything in business (including performance 'metrics') can be reduced to little formulas, we used to just promote to managerial positions the people who were just really good themselves, and *they* would usually judge who was good or bad, and that was the end of it. And there is nothing wrong with this, it *worked*, despite our contemporary egalitarian indoctrinations crying otherwise ("but, but, it could be unfair!", boo hoo cry me a river - the occasional incidences of poor evaluations would be more than compensated for by not only an overall improvement in analysing the quality of workers, AND consequently better *appreciation* of actual quality work done, which is important for motivation and morale) - plus, managers who actually understand what they are managing tend to be better. I'd like to see a return to that 'old' culture, but it sometimes almost seems like 'stupid' PHBs have managed to take over and now protect one another, keeping themselves enriched and in employ even as they destroy companies (but that's another topic). Those egalitarian notions where don't want to be *judged* (except by so-called "impartial", "fair" machines/formulas) also contribute to our own downfall.
Another approach might be to let the coders all evaluate and score one another via secret ballots; the aggregate scores could be (very very loosely) used as metrics - or rather, a 'rough guide' rather than absolute analysis - it's far from perfect, but it would still be much better than any automated metric, and better than letting a dumb PHB decide. It might suck for the 'overly arrogant and rude guy that nobody likes', but OTOH might make them be a bit nicer:)
Metrics like LOC make people motivated to add lots of pointless lines. Yay. Some of the the most quality commits I've ever done were deletes, and the most quality module rewrites I've ever done almost always allowed the system to do more with LESS lines of code. I constantly strive to streamline my code.
A few days ago my Vista updated the update system... so what this amounts to is, you're saying that a user first needs to update the update system in order to get an update that is needed to then get the update to SP1? Christ man, this thing is running amok. No wonder users are confused. (Who can get any work done anymore, we spend all day updating the updates for updating updating systems. Vista is eating itself; it seems the spaghetti mess has ballooned to unsustainable levels.)
The thing is, the EU is asking us to document API's we've previously declared as internal.
I noted you carefully said "APIs we declared as internal" instead of "APIs that *are* internal. Are they really 100% internal only? Does it or does it not affect the ability of others to interoperate with MS software?
There's a vast difference in the commenting you can rely on when you can and can't see the code. Not to mention that lots of these areas are old products, and aren't even necessarily in use anymore, and the developers have moved on to other product groups. It's tricky.
I don't understand, if some software is really not being used anymore, surely you can just delete it entirely? The only argument I can see not to delete, is if someone is in fact still using it. And if someone is in fact still using it, then sorry, it should be documented properly, heck, it should've been done from the start - how can anyone write and use software that isn't documented properly, are you telling me the biggest software company on the planet with massive revenues and billions in profits each quarter can't afford to even document their own software or isn't capable of documenting their own software? We're a tiny ISV and we document our software because we know it would be a disaster and cause our costs to balloon if we didn't.
Whether an API is internal or external, it's not useful without proper documentation (if you're lucky and have the source code then all you're left with is "source code *as* documentation" - if it's truly internal, fine, if it's not truly internal, it should be documented properly.)
I put forth that properly documenting your own software consistently for years would've SAVED the company a lot more money in the first place, than you're spending now to document it retroactively. In fact, that's not even my principle, that's a pretty standard thing in the industry. For each ten minutes you spend documenting immediately, you save hours down the line sometime in future. I suspect even Microsoft itself will benefit from this process, even if expensive now, because the investment pays off in the form of future development being more efficient. (No wonder Apple can produce new OS releases every 18 months but MS can no longer within 5 or 6 years.)
Sure, it sucks for you because you're documenting old stuff from other coders who in some cases have left, making it very difficult and painstaking and no doubt boring. But that doesn't change the fact that it's Microsoft's own fault, for either allowing a lazy coder initially, or not doing proper project planning leading the original coders to not have time to document in the first place.
Not documenting software properly WHEN IT IS WRITTEN doesn't save money, it just creates an externality in the future - you're basically pushing one of the costs of development into the future (and that future has arrived), and the future cost always balloons.
I always wondered why MS API documentation was so bad. Your commentary has given me at least a little additional insight into the matter, thanks.
If he was generally consistently well articulate, I might be inclined to believe that explanation, but he quite often (extremely often for someone of his standing) bumbles his words and says other kinds of way-out stuff, and often seems to struggle and have to kind of 'think' and work hard to get each next bit of a sentence out (it's a strange pattern, watching him speak, with these unusual pauses and so on) - against this backdrop it seems more likely he just got confused. I don't think he's stupid, but I genuinely (I don't mean this as an insult) think there is something slightly wrong with him somewhere in the brain (perhaps minor brain damage), particularly around the speech processing regions (maybe he got dropped on the head as a child or something). A person can still be intelligent but have quite specific defects from things like minor brain damage, but such a person might come across as stupider than they are as a result.
You can't seriously be expected to just be able to brush off someone threatening to spread horrible lies about you in the school setting, where you will spend the next several years sandwiched between social layers.
This is for me is the crux of one of the main 'wrong' acts perpetrated here - this is a bit like defamation. They were spreading public defamatory lies about her within her community that would be very hurtful to endure the results of. The adult equivalent of this must be close to, if someone at work didn't like you, copied some child porn onto your computer then called the cops and told everyone you'd a pedophile or something like that - even if you get proven innocent in the end, you are just fscked and it's going to harm you a lot. I know we adults tend to brush off high school almost as if it's a virtual world that doesn't really exist, but for a child, it *is* the world they live, and it's every bit as real as the world of adults - saying "just ignore it" is nearly as unhelpful as saying "just ignore the fake pedophile claims" to the hypothetical adult (apart from perhaps monetary damage claims if you lose a job, but everything else is basically as bad).
That's NOT what laws are for at all - it may seem that way, but that's the wrong way to look at it:
Laws are there to protect your *rights*.
That's all. Simple as that.
The fact that this is in practice usually happens to mean protecting the weaker from the stronger is almost incidental to that, and actually the notion of "protecting the weak" is FAR more broad than "protecting your rights" - dangerous even, for various reasons.
There are plenty of solid, real-world examples demonstrating why your reasoning is wrong that happen in many countries where otherwise well-meaning people want to "protect the weak" with laws. Take gambling - it is often argued that casinos are taking advantage of people who are 'too weak' to make sensible spending decisions for themselves - so in order to "protect the weak", gambling gets banned (or almost as bad, government "regulated"). This actually TAKES AWAY RIGHTS in order to "protect the weak" - see the difference? Another example is where people point to the sub-prime "failure" and argue that poorer people should be "protected" against taking out loans that they can't afford to service (i.e. against buying things they can't really afford) - you can only "protect" those "weak" people by removing some of everyone's rights, and that's wrong - government is there to protect your rights, not to protect the weak from their own poor decisions.
Another problem is that the notion of "protecting the weak" suggests that government should not focus on protecting the "strong", which is completely incorrect, EVERYONE has the same fundamental rights, whether they are "strong" or "weak" (vague terms, yes, but assuming whatever that means in any given context). The so-called "strong" can and are also often taken advantage of by the so-called "weak" (e.g. a poor person claims a rich celebrity molested their child in order to get a big cash settlement), and if your legal system is focusing on who appears to be "strong" vs. who appears to be "weak" you lose sight of the real issues - individual rights of *everyone*.
In a physical conflict "weak" and "strong" usually refer to physical strength or perhaps weapons advantage; outside of that, people usually take it to refer to "rich" vs "poor". If you think laws should be for "protecting the weak", then it often starts leading to other strange ideas that being poor means you're automatically being taken advantage of by rich people, or that rich people shouldn't have the same 'rights' as poor people because laws should protected the 'poor' from the 'rich'. I know it's popular to hate the rich but it's stupid, and rich people have the same rights as us poor minions. It's a dangerous viewpoint to start thinking otherwise, yet this well-intentioned line of reasoning has led many a country down very bad paths.
This case was horrible, and I agree the perpetrators should be punished (on the basis that they committed some kind of fraud and defamation at least - not for her suicide per se), but I can't stand this knee-jerk reaction to scream for new laws for every one-in-a-million tragic incident that occurs.
If this was something that we needed new laws for, it would be happening all the time. It's not. The fact that it was so unusual should tip you off that not only don't you need laws for it, laws are more likely to only make our lives worse than to help (I can't even begin to imagine how broad any law against "cyberbullying" could easily end up being, it could criminalise everyone and completely kill open discussion on the Internet - I mean, if I call someone on/. a retard or something, surely that is also "cyberbullying" on some level?)
Just another excuse for useless government officials to keep themselves in work and keep taxpayer money flowing their way, either fire their asses already and put them on the street or let them tackle actual problems.
There are aspects of cyberbullying though that could be sensibly tackled, but should be based on demonstrable harm, e.g. unreasonable defamation or ridicule.
More important, and people always forget to do this, is to factor in the extra time you need to baby a Windows system to keep it running OK, e.g. digging through website forums, going in circles trying to find and download the patches and driver updates that might hopefully fix the problem you're having, applying obscure registry edits (Vista especially, if you add it up I've had at a *minimum* two weeks fulltime downtime just trying to get basic things to work, from USB flash drives / USB mice to digital cameras to phones to bluetooth to wireless to graphics (OpenGL) etc. etc.... then you also need to factor in the extra time and money spent on antivirus software, as well as the fact that antivirus software must make your computer slower, so you actually, by definition, need a faster PC for Windows in order to get the *equivalent* performance of a Mac system - you can't even compare GHz for GHz etc.
To make a long story short by paraphrasing an old quote: A Windows PC is only (maybe) cheaper if your time has no value.
And apparently reading and comprehending anything at all in my post doesn't seem to matter to you. I've double-checked it all and I don't see anything amiss.
I just did a quick count of all the 'funny' modded posts above yours and there are over 50 at time of writing. Most the posts in this thread are humorous, what are you on about?
Actually, government laws are exactly one of the things being discussed EVEN IN THE ARTICLE: "... pressure from outside agencies like governments could be the only way to save us from an addiction epidemic".
Do people really need "information" to know that, say, reading slashdot all day long at work and/or at home is dysfunctional and unproductive behaviour that'll probably get them fired, probably drive them to ruin, and possibly destroy their relationships? I don't think so. That's common sense.
While getting rid of automobiles entirely is extreme, you are on to something there, many of the problems we're trying to solve in large part stem from out of control zoning laws that force society to be structured in unnatural ways.
if I decided I wanted 13 kids I'd probably be ostracised
Subtle correction, I think I'd probably be regarded as low-class trash, because having lots of babies "is what poor people do" (at least that's how it's seen), and the last thing I'd want is to be regarded as low-class - it's almost circular, i.e. it's become "by definition" that "poor people make babies", so the middle class then won't (or lose their status). Crazy, actually, if you think about it.
Oh... well, I believe the real numbers are closer to something like, smart guy from 1900 has 250 living descendants, and dumb guy from 1900 has 1000 living descendants. And I think the rates of change are worse now than in 1900, i.e. that this trend is distorting and deteriorating rapidly, so this century will see this trend becoming worse. (Up until around the 50s it was still acceptable for the educated minority to have lots of kids - my gran was one of 13 kids, this wasn't uncommon - nowadays it's almost become culturally an abomination to have lots of kids, if I decided I wanted 13 kids I'd probably be ostracised and I doubt I'd find a girl who'd go along with it either - this is only amongst the educated few, perhaps a few hundred million out of six billion on the planet).
I think one of the places where the results of all this (in general) is very obvious is Africa (where I am from) - Africa's population is exploding - nearly 1 billion now - and still growing exponentially. But this is almost entirely thanks to technology; the continent in 1900 just could not support this many people, now it can, thanks mainly to dams, vaccines (and other western medicine) and industrial agriculture (and to a lesser extent cars, roads, trains etc.). Dams and vaccines are probably the two biggest contributors. Of course the people who brought that technology are currently hated, and it's worth wondering if/how that ties in to the broader context of anti-intellectualism globally. Historically, everywhere except perhaps Europe, people tend to come to resent those who are more successful/intelligent/hardworking than them, this seems to be part of human nature, but I think there are other more base, instinctive reasons why people dislike intelligent people (or rather, those that tend to be physically weaker).
I don't think birth rate and IQ are necessarily inherently well-tied, I suspect it's mainly a *cultural* impetus. Most people try to do what most people around them do. If that's a big house and car with two kids, that's what most will aim at, and won't try stray too far from the norm. If "nobody you know" has 13 kids, and most people you know would think the idea ridiculous and horrible, then you'll probably avoid doing that. So nowadays instead of having more kids, we spend more of our money on quality of life expenditures like entertainment and big cars. (That's after the taxman has also taken a big cut to give to poor families for making babies and giving them healthcare so that they can survive and breed even more, at least where I live.)
the fuel used to drive to the store(burning 1 gallon of gasoline
A gallon to get to the store? Who drives that far, have US zoning laws gotten that out of hand? I use about 0.06 gallons (round trip) to my grocery store (about a mile from my house).
I do agree with you though that getting paranoid about plastic bags seems like silliness to me. On the other hand, people feel they want to do something (nothing wrong with that), and using fewer plastic bags is something most people DO have control over (unlike underground fires in China, not much I can do to stop that, and in general they're very hard to extinguish). 'Worrying about plastic bags' also is part of a general 'culture of awareness' - if you worry about plastic bags, you're like to also start asking, "where else can I be more efficient?"... and that's good for everyone, it even makes economic sense (e.g. if you happen to be a business owner, making your business more efficient can start making a real difference, and make your business more competitive). It's not just the environmental cost of energy, there is also a very literal cost to energy, e.g. building, running and maintaining power plants. If an economy can generate greater GDP off fewer power plants, or use excess power in new beneficial ways, THAT IS A GOOD THING regardless of environmental arguments.
From my near-libertarian perspective I don't care if people buy 'gas-guzzling' cars. I do think it's silly to do so though, especially when so much spending in the US is via consumer debt. It's really not that bad to drive a more modest car, and hell, if it means you can save money instead of going further into debt, you'll have a better quality of life when you retire, or be able to let your kids further their education.
Pacman etc. - still proves my point, doesn't matter.
Referring to 'Darwin' as having a 'job' is obviously just speaking metaphorically, I'm surprised you couldn't recognise that, as you seem intelligent - so you just ended up repeating what I already said, just in different words.
But what do you mean by "surviving in lower numbers over the long term"? Do you mean that it's not sustainable, and that eventually there will be a population crash and that, if so, the more intelligent will be more likely to survive that? If that's what you meant, then again you just repeated what I said, as I quote from my original post, "temporarily ceased to do its job". I obviously (duh) do not literally mean that natural selection has stopped - just that the environmental definition of 'fitness' has changed to be very different to (by far) the norm in nature - and that it's possible at some point we'll revert to those norms to some degree (i.e. I meant that nature "would usually" be killing off these masses - I guess I must write very badly if none of that came across, but it seems to be in plain sight to me).
I presume you're trolling, but Switzerland are actually in some areas leaders in medical research. So joke about chocolate and cuckoo clocks all you want, but when you get sick, there is a chance that some of the medicine that saves you will have been pioneered in Switzerland.
There is definitely a lot of truth to what you're saying, but I think there may also be a selection bias at work. In the early days of video games, when they were a niche, it tended to be only a small percentage of usually tech/engineer-oriented people who had computers and played games - so while you were playing educational games, it doesn't mean that 'the masses' were also (or e.g. reading), but rather probably the majority of people were doing something quite brainless like playing sport or watching A-Team etc.
What's happened now is that games have become mainstream, and are now aimed at the 'mass market', who just like before demand somewhat more brainless entertainment than the small educated minority. But there still exists a niche who e.g. play educational games (e.g. a friend of mine who has a 4-year old limits her game-playing to mainly educational titles, and there are a lot aimed at kids, no doubt many more than in the past - you just don't hear about them much).
I do get the feeling though that the percentage of society that regards intelligence virtuously is shrinking. This could be due to welfare-driven and other population skewing factors, i.e. the most educated have the lowest reproductive rates, and the least educated the highest reproductive rates. Darwin has temporarily ceased to do its job here thanks to the very technologies developed by the small, poorly-regarded and resented educated minority (from dams to modern medicine (vaccines/antibiotics etc.) to industrial agriculture to cars to computers, and so on).
Keep spreading that lie. Maybe it's because I actually like to, you know, use my machine, but I have 2GB RAM and Vista still runs like crap, this machine was much faster with XP. Or are you telling me I should feel good, because Vista would be running far worse even if I had only 1GB RAM?
Slashdot Mirror
After that, they hit hard on designing good algorithms, and hired the mathematical talent to do
That's simply false, the PageRank idea and implementation came first, it was always there, and was developed by Page and Brin before they "hired the mathematical talent" to develop it and in fact even before Google was Google. It was the very starting point of it all. The single-biggest attraction point of Google was the relevancy of its search results. I know, I remember those days of sifting through pages and pages of arb e.g. AltaVista results, and what a difference it was when Google came along. From Wikipedia:
"PageRank was developed at Stanford University by Larry Page (hence the name Page-Rank[3]) and later Sergey Brin as part of a research project about a new kind of search engine. The project started in 1995 and led to a functional prototype, named Google, in 1998. Shortly after, Page and Brin founded Google Inc."
They are attempting to judge value when there simply is no objective measure for the kind of things they are trying to judge.
I think you're confusing "no objective measure" with "no known algorithms to computate those measures". Just because we don't know how to implement meaningful metrics with a computer or with some formulas, doesn't mean they don't exist. The proof of this is that other humans who are very good coders *are* actually, on the whole, pretty good (in fact, the *best* system out of them *all*) at judging the quality of other coders - MUCH better than any known computational metric - that doesn't mean what they're doing is terribly subjective, there are effectively objective but poorly understood processes in the brain that analyse quality (based on amongst others aspects that Tanuki64 already mentioned) (we just don't know how to 'duplicate' those quality-analysing 'algorithms', but they must exist, because our brains can do them). The book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance actually discusses this whole notion of 'quality' and the brain's analysis thereof.
In the "old days", instead of PHBs who like to think everything in business (including performance 'metrics') can be reduced to little formulas, we used to just promote to managerial positions the people who were just really good themselves, and *they* would usually judge who was good or bad, and that was the end of it. And there is nothing wrong with this, it *worked*, despite our contemporary egalitarian indoctrinations crying otherwise ("but, but, it could be unfair!", boo hoo cry me a river - the occasional incidences of poor evaluations would be more than compensated for by not only an overall improvement in analysing the quality of workers, AND consequently better *appreciation* of actual quality work done, which is important for motivation and morale) - plus, managers who actually understand what they are managing tend to be better. I'd like to see a return to that 'old' culture, but it sometimes almost seems like 'stupid' PHBs have managed to take over and now protect one another, keeping themselves enriched and in employ even as they destroy companies (but that's another topic). Those egalitarian notions where don't want to be *judged* (except by so-called "impartial", "fair" machines/formulas) also contribute to our own downfall.
Another approach might be to let the coders all evaluate and score one another via secret ballots; the aggregate scores could be (very very loosely) used as metrics - or rather, a 'rough guide' rather than absolute analysis - it's far from perfect, but it would still be much better than any automated metric, and better than letting a dumb PHB decide. It might suck for the 'overly arrogant and rude guy that nobody likes', but OTOH might make them be a bit nicer :)
Metrics like LOC make people motivated to add lots of pointless lines. Yay. Some of the the most quality commits I've ever done were deletes, and the most quality module rewrites I've ever done almost always allowed the system to do more with LESS lines of code. I constantly strive to streamline my code.
This is why we have "standards". Are you saying that ALL Microsoft's problems are caused by non-standard hardware or drivers?
A few days ago my Vista updated the update system ... so what this amounts to is, you're saying that a user first needs to update the update system in order to get an update that is needed to then get the update to SP1? Christ man, this thing is running amok. No wonder users are confused. (Who can get any work done anymore, we spend all day updating the updates for updating updating systems. Vista is eating itself; it seems the spaghetti mess has ballooned to unsustainable levels.)
The thing is, the EU is asking us to document API's we've previously declared as internal.
I noted you carefully said "APIs we declared as internal" instead of "APIs that *are* internal. Are they really 100% internal only? Does it or does it not affect the ability of others to interoperate with MS software?
There's a vast difference in the commenting you can rely on when you can and can't see the code. Not to mention that lots of these areas are old products, and aren't even necessarily in use anymore, and the developers have moved on to other product groups. It's tricky.
I don't understand, if some software is really not being used anymore, surely you can just delete it entirely? The only argument I can see not to delete, is if someone is in fact still using it. And if someone is in fact still using it, then sorry, it should be documented properly, heck, it should've been done from the start - how can anyone write and use software that isn't documented properly, are you telling me the biggest software company on the planet with massive revenues and billions in profits each quarter can't afford to even document their own software or isn't capable of documenting their own software? We're a tiny ISV and we document our software because we know it would be a disaster and cause our costs to balloon if we didn't.
Whether an API is internal or external, it's not useful without proper documentation (if you're lucky and have the source code then all you're left with is "source code *as* documentation" - if it's truly internal, fine, if it's not truly internal, it should be documented properly.)
I put forth that properly documenting your own software consistently for years would've SAVED the company a lot more money in the first place, than you're spending now to document it retroactively. In fact, that's not even my principle, that's a pretty standard thing in the industry. For each ten minutes you spend documenting immediately, you save hours down the line sometime in future. I suspect even Microsoft itself will benefit from this process, even if expensive now, because the investment pays off in the form of future development being more efficient. (No wonder Apple can produce new OS releases every 18 months but MS can no longer within 5 or 6 years.)
Sure, it sucks for you because you're documenting old stuff from other coders who in some cases have left, making it very difficult and painstaking and no doubt boring. But that doesn't change the fact that it's Microsoft's own fault, for either allowing a lazy coder initially, or not doing proper project planning leading the original coders to not have time to document in the first place.
Not documenting software properly WHEN IT IS WRITTEN doesn't save money, it just creates an externality in the future - you're basically pushing one of the costs of development into the future (and that future has arrived), and the future cost always balloons.
I always wondered why MS API documentation was so bad. Your commentary has given me at least a little additional insight into the matter, thanks.
If he was generally consistently well articulate, I might be inclined to believe that explanation, but he quite often (extremely often for someone of his standing) bumbles his words and says other kinds of way-out stuff, and often seems to struggle and have to kind of 'think' and work hard to get each next bit of a sentence out (it's a strange pattern, watching him speak, with these unusual pauses and so on) - against this backdrop it seems more likely he just got confused. I don't think he's stupid, but I genuinely (I don't mean this as an insult) think there is something slightly wrong with him somewhere in the brain (perhaps minor brain damage), particularly around the speech processing regions (maybe he got dropped on the head as a child or something). A person can still be intelligent but have quite specific defects from things like minor brain damage, but such a person might come across as stupider than they are as a result.
You can't seriously be expected to just be able to brush off someone threatening to spread horrible lies about you in the school setting, where you will spend the next several years sandwiched between social layers.
This is for me is the crux of one of the main 'wrong' acts perpetrated here - this is a bit like defamation. They were spreading public defamatory lies about her within her community that would be very hurtful to endure the results of. The adult equivalent of this must be close to, if someone at work didn't like you, copied some child porn onto your computer then called the cops and told everyone you'd a pedophile or something like that - even if you get proven innocent in the end, you are just fscked and it's going to harm you a lot. I know we adults tend to brush off high school almost as if it's a virtual world that doesn't really exist, but for a child, it *is* the world they live, and it's every bit as real as the world of adults - saying "just ignore it" is nearly as unhelpful as saying "just ignore the fake pedophile claims" to the hypothetical adult (apart from perhaps monetary damage claims if you lose a job, but everything else is basically as bad).
That's NOT what laws are for at all - it may seem that way, but that's the wrong way to look at it:
Laws are there to protect your *rights*.
That's all. Simple as that.
The fact that this is in practice usually happens to mean protecting the weaker from the stronger is almost incidental to that, and actually the notion of "protecting the weak" is FAR more broad than "protecting your rights" - dangerous even, for various reasons.
There are plenty of solid, real-world examples demonstrating why your reasoning is wrong that happen in many countries where otherwise well-meaning people want to "protect the weak" with laws. Take gambling - it is often argued that casinos are taking advantage of people who are 'too weak' to make sensible spending decisions for themselves - so in order to "protect the weak", gambling gets banned (or almost as bad, government "regulated"). This actually TAKES AWAY RIGHTS in order to "protect the weak" - see the difference? Another example is where people point to the sub-prime "failure" and argue that poorer people should be "protected" against taking out loans that they can't afford to service (i.e. against buying things they can't really afford) - you can only "protect" those "weak" people by removing some of everyone's rights, and that's wrong - government is there to protect your rights, not to protect the weak from their own poor decisions.
Another problem is that the notion of "protecting the weak" suggests that government should not focus on protecting the "strong", which is completely incorrect, EVERYONE has the same fundamental rights, whether they are "strong" or "weak" (vague terms, yes, but assuming whatever that means in any given context). The so-called "strong" can and are also often taken advantage of by the so-called "weak" (e.g. a poor person claims a rich celebrity molested their child in order to get a big cash settlement), and if your legal system is focusing on who appears to be "strong" vs. who appears to be "weak" you lose sight of the real issues - individual rights of *everyone*.
In a physical conflict "weak" and "strong" usually refer to physical strength or perhaps weapons advantage; outside of that, people usually take it to refer to "rich" vs "poor". If you think laws should be for "protecting the weak", then it often starts leading to other strange ideas that being poor means you're automatically being taken advantage of by rich people, or that rich people shouldn't have the same 'rights' as poor people because laws should protected the 'poor' from the 'rich'. I know it's popular to hate the rich but it's stupid, and rich people have the same rights as us poor minions. It's a dangerous viewpoint to start thinking otherwise, yet this well-intentioned line of reasoning has led many a country down very bad paths.
This case was horrible, and I agree the perpetrators should be punished (on the basis that they committed some kind of fraud and defamation at least - not for her suicide per se), but I can't stand this knee-jerk reaction to scream for new laws for every one-in-a-million tragic incident that occurs.
/. a retard or something, surely that is also "cyberbullying" on some level?)
If this was something that we needed new laws for, it would be happening all the time. It's not. The fact that it was so unusual should tip you off that not only don't you need laws for it, laws are more likely to only make our lives worse than to help (I can't even begin to imagine how broad any law against "cyberbullying" could easily end up being, it could criminalise everyone and completely kill open discussion on the Internet - I mean, if I call someone on
Just another excuse for useless government officials to keep themselves in work and keep taxpayer money flowing their way, either fire their asses already and put them on the street or let them tackle actual problems.
There are aspects of cyberbullying though that could be sensibly tackled, but should be based on demonstrable harm, e.g. unreasonable defamation or ridicule.
More important, and people always forget to do this, is to factor in the extra time you need to baby a Windows system to keep it running OK, e.g. digging through website forums, going in circles trying to find and download the patches and driver updates that might hopefully fix the problem you're having, applying obscure registry edits (Vista especially, if you add it up I've had at a *minimum* two weeks fulltime downtime just trying to get basic things to work, from USB flash drives / USB mice to digital cameras to phones to bluetooth to wireless to graphics (OpenGL) etc. etc. ... then you also need to factor in the extra time and money spent on antivirus software, as well as the fact that antivirus software must make your computer slower, so you actually, by definition, need a faster PC for Windows in order to get the *equivalent* performance of a Mac system - you can't even compare GHz for GHz etc.
To make a long story short by paraphrasing an old quote: A Windows PC is only (maybe) cheaper if your time has no value.
I like how slashdot posts more Microsoft bashing news than Linux news
Why, is Microsoft exactly the same thing as Linux? Who are you anyway to tell somebody else what to post on their private site?
ts sad how this site has gone down the tubes.
Noone's forcing you to be here, DLTDHYITAOTWO *waves*.
And apparently reading and comprehending anything at all in my post doesn't seem to matter to you. I've double-checked it all and I don't see anything amiss.
I just did a quick count of all the 'funny' modded posts above yours and there are over 50 at time of writing. Most the posts in this thread are humorous, what are you on about?
Ouch!
... not even figurative senses of "hone" fit in this particular context.)
(I think they meant "home"
Actually, government laws are exactly one of the things being discussed EVEN IN THE ARTICLE: "... pressure from outside agencies like governments could be the only way to save us from an addiction epidemic".
Do people really need "information" to know that, say, reading slashdot all day long at work and/or at home is dysfunctional and unproductive behaviour that'll probably get them fired, probably drive them to ruin, and possibly destroy their relationships? I don't think so. That's common sense.
While getting rid of automobiles entirely is extreme, you are on to something there, many of the problems we're trying to solve in large part stem from out of control zoning laws that force society to be structured in unnatural ways.
if I decided I wanted 13 kids I'd probably be ostracised
Subtle correction, I think I'd probably be regarded as low-class trash, because having lots of babies "is what poor people do" (at least that's how it's seen), and the last thing I'd want is to be regarded as low-class - it's almost circular, i.e. it's become "by definition" that "poor people make babies", so the middle class then won't (or lose their status). Crazy, actually, if you think about it.
Oh... well, I believe the real numbers are closer to something like, smart guy from 1900 has 250 living descendants, and dumb guy from 1900 has 1000 living descendants. And I think the rates of change are worse now than in 1900, i.e. that this trend is distorting and deteriorating rapidly, so this century will see this trend becoming worse. (Up until around the 50s it was still acceptable for the educated minority to have lots of kids - my gran was one of 13 kids, this wasn't uncommon - nowadays it's almost become culturally an abomination to have lots of kids, if I decided I wanted 13 kids I'd probably be ostracised and I doubt I'd find a girl who'd go along with it either - this is only amongst the educated few, perhaps a few hundred million out of six billion on the planet).
I think one of the places where the results of all this (in general) is very obvious is Africa (where I am from) - Africa's population is exploding - nearly 1 billion now - and still growing exponentially. But this is almost entirely thanks to technology; the continent in 1900 just could not support this many people, now it can, thanks mainly to dams, vaccines (and other western medicine) and industrial agriculture (and to a lesser extent cars, roads, trains etc.). Dams and vaccines are probably the two biggest contributors. Of course the people who brought that technology are currently hated, and it's worth wondering if/how that ties in to the broader context of anti-intellectualism globally. Historically, everywhere except perhaps Europe, people tend to come to resent those who are more successful/intelligent/hardworking than them, this seems to be part of human nature, but I think there are other more base, instinctive reasons why people dislike intelligent people (or rather, those that tend to be physically weaker).
I don't think birth rate and IQ are necessarily inherently well-tied, I suspect it's mainly a *cultural* impetus. Most people try to do what most people around them do. If that's a big house and car with two kids, that's what most will aim at, and won't try stray too far from the norm. If "nobody you know" has 13 kids, and most people you know would think the idea ridiculous and horrible, then you'll probably avoid doing that. So nowadays instead of having more kids, we spend more of our money on quality of life expenditures like entertainment and big cars. (That's after the taxman has also taken a big cut to give to poor families for making babies and giving them healthcare so that they can survive and breed even more, at least where I live.)
the fuel used to drive to the store(burning 1 gallon of gasoline
A gallon to get to the store? Who drives that far, have US zoning laws gotten that out of hand? I use about 0.06 gallons (round trip) to my grocery store (about a mile from my house).
I do agree with you though that getting paranoid about plastic bags seems like silliness to me. On the other hand, people feel they want to do something (nothing wrong with that), and using fewer plastic bags is something most people DO have control over (unlike underground fires in China, not much I can do to stop that, and in general they're very hard to extinguish). 'Worrying about plastic bags' also is part of a general 'culture of awareness' - if you worry about plastic bags, you're like to also start asking, "where else can I be more efficient?" ... and that's good for everyone, it even makes economic sense (e.g. if you happen to be a business owner, making your business more efficient can start making a real difference, and make your business more competitive). It's not just the environmental cost of energy, there is also a very literal cost to energy, e.g. building, running and maintaining power plants. If an economy can generate greater GDP off fewer power plants, or use excess power in new beneficial ways, THAT IS A GOOD THING regardless of environmental arguments.
From my near-libertarian perspective I don't care if people buy 'gas-guzzling' cars. I do think it's silly to do so though, especially when so much spending in the US is via consumer debt. It's really not that bad to drive a more modest car, and hell, if it means you can save money instead of going further into debt, you'll have a better quality of life when you retire, or be able to let your kids further their education.
Pacman etc. - still proves my point, doesn't matter.
Referring to 'Darwin' as having a 'job' is obviously just speaking metaphorically, I'm surprised you couldn't recognise that, as you seem intelligent - so you just ended up repeating what I already said, just in different words.
But what do you mean by "surviving in lower numbers over the long term"? Do you mean that it's not sustainable, and that eventually there will be a population crash and that, if so, the more intelligent will be more likely to survive that? If that's what you meant, then again you just repeated what I said, as I quote from my original post, "temporarily ceased to do its job". I obviously (duh) do not literally mean that natural selection has stopped - just that the environmental definition of 'fitness' has changed to be very different to (by far) the norm in nature - and that it's possible at some point we'll revert to those norms to some degree (i.e. I meant that nature "would usually" be killing off these masses - I guess I must write very badly if none of that came across, but it seems to be in plain sight to me).
I presume you're trolling, but Switzerland are actually in some areas leaders in medical research. So joke about chocolate and cuckoo clocks all you want, but when you get sick, there is a chance that some of the medicine that saves you will have been pioneered in Switzerland.
There is definitely a lot of truth to what you're saying, but I think there may also be a selection bias at work. In the early days of video games, when they were a niche, it tended to be only a small percentage of usually tech/engineer-oriented people who had computers and played games - so while you were playing educational games, it doesn't mean that 'the masses' were also (or e.g. reading), but rather probably the majority of people were doing something quite brainless like playing sport or watching A-Team etc.
What's happened now is that games have become mainstream, and are now aimed at the 'mass market', who just like before demand somewhat more brainless entertainment than the small educated minority. But there still exists a niche who e.g. play educational games (e.g. a friend of mine who has a 4-year old limits her game-playing to mainly educational titles, and there are a lot aimed at kids, no doubt many more than in the past - you just don't hear about them much).
I do get the feeling though that the percentage of society that regards intelligence virtuously is shrinking. This could be due to welfare-driven and other population skewing factors, i.e. the most educated have the lowest reproductive rates, and the least educated the highest reproductive rates. Darwin has temporarily ceased to do its job here thanks to the very technologies developed by the small, poorly-regarded and resented educated minority (from dams to modern medicine (vaccines/antibiotics etc.) to industrial agriculture to cars to computers, and so on).
It's more of a marketing exercise than an intellectual exercise.
Huh? Re-read the thread, nobody was suggesting it was the ONLY indicator. I was responding to an implication that it was NOT A FACTOR AT ALL.
Keep spreading that lie. Maybe it's because I actually like to, you know, use my machine, but I have 2GB RAM and Vista still runs like crap, this machine was much faster with XP. Or are you telling me I should feel good, because Vista would be running far worse even if I had only 1GB RAM?