Hmm, I don't know. Judging from the "Occupy Wall Street" protests, I'd say that if Al Quaida were to come to the US and start a political party, they could be pretty successful. They sure have a much better track record for being tough on Wall Street and the Defense-Industrial Complex than any of our politicians have promised and never delivered on:-P
Plus it would be a better outlet for them than their traditional approach, as long as their platform wasn't based on doing more of the same. But then again, maybe it isn't something that can be fixed without destroying it and starting over...
Yep. I was pretty much in exactly the same situation as the OP. I'm still good friends with all of my old cohorts. In fact, maybe even better now that I don't have to talk shop and deliverables with them whenever we run into each other:-P
Your old company will get by. Maybe not as well as when you were there, but they'll manage to hold it together somehow. And they'll be stronger for it. They should not be reliant on one or even two key people (they really should try to keep their "truck number" higher than that, and devs need to share responsibility, understanding, and maintainability of their codebase with others).
If you're really that critical, they could pay you to consult part time until they get their new stars trained up to snuff. But that's pretty much the worst case scenario. Your friends will want you to succeed and go on and get other experience in life, and 7 years is more than enough to dedicate to one company these days.
Yep, that's why the article says it's not about money, but about culture control.
The RIAA was in the same position. You like the music and movies not because they're incredibly good, but because you see and hear them everywhere, they become a "sign of the times", and part of the culture of a generation. All they have to do is decide what they want to expose you to, make sure it doesn't suck too much, and just use their exclusive channels to bombard you with it. Then later maybe they can charge you for the privilege of reliving those times through those Disney/Barbie/SpiceGirls/whatever franchise whenever you're feeling nostalgic.
But if people have too much choice and the market fractures into too many segments, they can no longer get the big bucks off of the same tired old top 40 hits; they'd actually have to diversify their holdings, and wouldn't be able to make manufactured Joe Rapper X "popular" just by playing him on the radio incessantly.
Ah, OK, you're right... I guess I just got confused because MicroCenter moved into a couple of the old CompUSA storefronts in the DC metro area. Thanks for the catch!
I'm just immensely happy that people's priorities have changed so much. 10 years ago when I was a poor student (OK, maybe a bit more like 20) you'd be ridiculed for carrying around an electronic device with you everywhere. And a $200 graphing calculator would pretty much be your most prized possession.
Nowadays you can't pry just about anyone off their electronic devices, even if they're driving, dining, or in bed with someone. Nerdwin!!!1!
Essentially, most of the engineering groundwork was laid out during the previous administration, the senate had approved it 89-to-1 before going to Eisenhower (Louisiana sen. didn't want to raise the gas tax from 2c to 3c per gallon), Eisenhower was hospitalized under some kind of intestinal distress when he signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act, and he kinda thought he was enacting something that would build a system more similar to the autobahn in Germany than what we really got.
Not that I've tried this "new" helicopter view, but Google Earth had that kind of navigation track animation since the Keyhole days. I think the only news is that they've tied that feature into maps.google.com using a plugin.
Oh, I don't think "science" is all that necessary for politics. It's a good indicator of someone's education and critical thinking skills and general intelligence. But political leadership is more about motivating people to do something -- anything -- in a coordinated fashion, that results in something more than they could do individually.
Besides, science doesn't provide any moral imperative to do good or bad. It just tells you that, based on past observations and maybe some theoretical extrapolation, Y is likely to happen if you do X.
Environmentalism is sort of a moral imperative to give back as much as you take. There are some that want to convince you that they need to take more. It's in society's interest to keep those people in their box. The science only figures into how you give or take.
What politics does need is transparency and accountability. But politics is all about accumulating power, and those things kinda run counter to that.
It all depends on the hardware - I just got an old P4 for my kids to use, and the web suddenly seems surprisingly bloated and slow.
Pick up a CPU upgrade for it, I upgraded my old P4 laptop from 1.6Ghz to 2.8Ghz, and consolidated all of my P4-era laptop RAM into it for a total of 1.5GB or something. It's much faster and more responsive than any of my more recent netbooks.
The only thing it lacks is a decent 3D GPU. But for the kids, that's a good thing, I guess. Keeps them off teh Warcrack.
Running Chrome helps too.
I kinda wish it ran slower, though, so the kids would learn to close their background apps and not play multiple youtube vids at the same time:-P
How has this been modded insightful? Is it just the four-digit ID?
This would be the part where you exclaim that the top premier 1% of UIDS garner more than their fair share of the moderator point economy. But instead by going off on a tangent on something completely unrelated, you have only reaffirmed the awesome responsibility of the top 1% UID community in collecting and directing the tone and flavour of Slashdot commentary. To imply anything else would.be class warfare!
But the top 5% hoarding all of the resources is the most effective way to run a limited economy! They know the best use of those packets and can distribute them better than all those poor saps that use lower QoS queues. This unnatural regulation is going to strangle the health of the overall network and everyone is going to suffer SEVERELY! And it's all the current administration's fault!
The G-Tablet goes for around $250 nowadays and is among the better devices supported by VEGAn-TAB and CyanogenMOD.
The stock ROM bites, though, and the lack of GPS, magnometer, and limited LCD screen viewing angles might be an issue for some. But I'm pretty happy with mine.
I bought an XFX AGP GPU a few years ago... it was simply the current version of their nVidia 6800 chipset with a PCIe - AGP bridge thrown in. Good times.
Unfortunately, I finally sold that machine a year or two ago, since a bunch of games started requiring DX10:-/ Would have kept it around as a Linux server, but it was kinda power hungry and relatively noisy compared to my new box.
Religion is kinda like an operating system... it doesn't really matter which one you run.
My point is that it very much DOES matter what you believe.
Matters to whom? Other people? Who's going to decide which belief system is the "better" belief system that everyone else should use? Most religions already claim to be for "good". People ought to be free to decide whether they want to live in a conservative / traditional culture where people wear clothes, or live in some hedonistic hippie commune, and have all kinds of options available to them.
Now I'm not going to defend the ugly examples you bring out, but I'm pretty sure you can find something ugly about all religions and societies. The important thing is that you have some means of choice and escape if you're trapped in one you don't happen to agree with. That's where the diversity comes in.
Trying to get everyone to believe in the one "right" set of beliefs is pretty much exactly what's been happening all along, with all the religious wars and whatnot. So no, beliefs should not matter.
Actions matter. If you act against your society, they will react against you according to whatever their code is. And vice versa. There is no justice but social justice. Social justice is what gets enacted upon.
Yeah, maybe philosophy is a better word. But most people refer to religion as some kind of code (whether it's formally written down or not) that you apply to your inputs to determine what action you take.
I would consider atheism a form of religion, maybe even a religious movement. After all, what would a computer without an operating system do?
But I certainly understand why atheists would want to distance themselves from the "religions" by calling it something else.
Religion is simply your own personal reason that you do X.
Except when it lays down historical facts, and tells you that no, moral relativism DOESNT work and ISNT ok. Your statement may hold true for some religions, but certainly not for the big 3.
I cant speak to the Quran, but of the Jewish and Christian literature, about 80% of the pre-messianic scripture is regarding historical details, future predictions, wisdom literature, and prayers. Maybe 20% of it is "the reason that you do X" (and its pretty clear that its not a personal reason).
Meh, as a parent, I kinda see most religions as a bunch of stories you make up to get your kids to "listen to your parents", be "good", and do "good" work. Then the kids grow up and maybe rebel or become super-serious about it.
Religion is kinda like an operating system... it doesn't really matter which one you run.
No matter how you look at it, that statement cannot be true. If one of the religions is true, it absolutely matters-- it is in fact more important than anything else in your life. If they are all false (and if we exempt "atheism" from the category), then you are wasting your life ("If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.", 1 Corin 15:19). In fact, if they are all false, the "religion" of hedonism would very clearly be the best one to follow.
Well, everyone needs some reason to wake up in the morning. For hedonists, it's hunger, for others, maybe they want to strive to get closer to some sort of objective function or other. But just looking at people as a black box, the "religion" is just what goes on internally to determine what actions they take in response to a certain set of inputs. Everything that happens internally could be false, some of it could be true, but they're still going to take some sort of action.
I don't really want to get semantic about it, but I'd certainly consider atheism as a form of religion/philosophy. What does a computer without an operating system do?
The next time a woman is stoned to death for adultery, a child is driven to suicide for being gay, a man is murdered for "sorcery" or a family is destroyed for being apostates, I'll be sure to cheerfully remind every involved that it doesn't matter what you believe, and that we should value this diversity.
Um, diversity generally means that you ought to be able to choose something that, uh, doesn't involve any of the above things you mention. Lack of available alternatives is sort of what leads people to tolerate the status quo of their particular culture.
And even the "bad" stuff has a place in society / history. Otherwise you'd never have anything "good" by comparison. It's a yin/yang thang.
I'd say religion and science are pretty orthogonal.
Science kinda just tells you what is likely to happen when you do X. That's it.
Religion is simply your own personal reason that you do X. Maybe it's because everyone else is doing it. Or maybe you have some system of beliefs, founded in scientific observation or some other social aspect of your upbringing. But it doesn't really matter.
Religion is kinda like an operating system... it doesn't really matter which one you run. Some are more susceptible to viruses and botnets than others, some interoperate better other operating systems. But generally it's great that there's some diversity.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm, I don't know. Judging from the "Occupy Wall Street" protests, I'd say that if Al Quaida were to come to the US and start a political party, they could be pretty successful. They sure have a much better track record for being tough on Wall Street and the Defense-Industrial Complex than any of our politicians have promised and never delivered on :-P
Plus it would be a better outlet for them than their traditional approach, as long as their platform wasn't based on doing more of the same. But then again, maybe it isn't something that can be fixed without destroying it and starting over...
Yep. I was pretty much in exactly the same situation as the OP. I'm still good friends with all of my old cohorts. In fact, maybe even better now that I don't have to talk shop and deliverables with them whenever we run into each other :-P
Your old company will get by. Maybe not as well as when you were there, but they'll manage to hold it together somehow. And they'll be stronger for it. They should not be reliant on one or even two key people (they really should try to keep their "truck number" higher than that, and devs need to share responsibility, understanding, and maintainability of their codebase with others).
If you're really that critical, they could pay you to consult part time until they get their new stars trained up to snuff. But that's pretty much the worst case scenario. Your friends will want you to succeed and go on and get other experience in life, and 7 years is more than enough to dedicate to one company these days.
Yep, that's why the article says it's not about money, but about culture control.
The RIAA was in the same position. You like the music and movies not because they're incredibly good, but because you see and hear them everywhere, they become a "sign of the times", and part of the culture of a generation. All they have to do is decide what they want to expose you to, make sure it doesn't suck too much, and just use their exclusive channels to bombard you with it. Then later maybe they can charge you for the privilege of reliving those times through those Disney/Barbie/SpiceGirls/whatever franchise whenever you're feeling nostalgic.
But if people have too much choice and the market fractures into too many segments, they can no longer get the big bucks off of the same tired old top 40 hits; they'd actually have to diversify their holdings, and wouldn't be able to make manufactured Joe Rapper X "popular" just by playing him on the radio incessantly.
Ah, OK, you're right... I guess I just got confused because MicroCenter moved into a couple of the old CompUSA storefronts in the DC metro area. Thanks for the catch!
Whatever... all those people are plastered up on the walls at Microcenter. I'm sooo glad they bought out CompUSA.
I'm just immensely happy that people's priorities have changed so much. 10 years ago when I was a poor student (OK, maybe a bit more like 20) you'd be ridiculed for carrying around an electronic device with you everywhere. And a $200 graphing calculator would pretty much be your most prized possession.
Nowadays you can't pry just about anyone off their electronic devices, even if they're driving, dining, or in bed with someone. Nerdwin!!!1!
NPR did a pretty cool history of that event
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5522133
Essentially, most of the engineering groundwork was laid out during the previous administration, the senate had approved it 89-to-1 before going to Eisenhower (Louisiana sen. didn't want to raise the gas tax from 2c to 3c per gallon), Eisenhower was hospitalized under some kind of intestinal distress when he signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act, and he kinda thought he was enacting something that would build a system more similar to the autobahn in Germany than what we really got.
But cool beans nonetheless.
Oh well, maybe when China owns us, everything will be on the right track ;-D
http://www.quora.com/Why-do-Chinese-political-leaders-have-engineering-degrees-whereas-their-American-counterparts-have-law-degrees
Not that I've tried this "new" helicopter view, but Google Earth had that kind of navigation track animation since the Keyhole days. I think the only news is that they've tied that feature into maps.google.com using a plugin.
Oh, I don't think "science" is all that necessary for politics. It's a good indicator of someone's education and critical thinking skills and general intelligence. But political leadership is more about motivating people to do something -- anything -- in a coordinated fashion, that results in something more than they could do individually.
Besides, science doesn't provide any moral imperative to do good or bad. It just tells you that, based on past observations and maybe some theoretical extrapolation, Y is likely to happen if you do X.
Environmentalism is sort of a moral imperative to give back as much as you take. There are some that want to convince you that they need to take more. It's in society's interest to keep those people in their box. The science only figures into how you give or take.
What politics does need is transparency and accountability. But politics is all about accumulating power, and those things kinda run counter to that.
It all depends on the hardware - I just got an old P4 for my kids to use, and the web suddenly seems surprisingly bloated and slow.
Pick up a CPU upgrade for it, I upgraded my old P4 laptop from 1.6Ghz to 2.8Ghz, and consolidated all of my P4-era laptop RAM into it for a total of 1.5GB or something. It's much faster and more responsive than any of my more recent netbooks.
The only thing it lacks is a decent 3D GPU. But for the kids, that's a good thing, I guess. Keeps them off teh Warcrack.
Running Chrome helps too.
I kinda wish it ran slower, though, so the kids would learn to close their background apps and not play multiple youtube vids at the same time :-P
Heh, Prof. Miller should replace the poster with something from Nathan Fillion's work in Almost Porn.
Although the situation pretty much follows the quote dead-on. I mean, the girl had arms, I guess.
Funniest part was watching Fillion act like he doesn't know how to act. OK, maybe not the funniest.
How has this been modded insightful? Is it just the four-digit ID?
This would be the part where you exclaim that the top premier 1% of UIDS garner more than their fair share of the moderator point economy. But instead by going off on a tangent on something completely unrelated, you have only reaffirmed the awesome responsibility of the top 1% UID community in collecting and directing the tone and flavour of Slashdot commentary. To imply anything else would.be class warfare!
But the top 5% hoarding all of the resources is the most effective way to run a limited economy! They know the best use of those packets and can distribute them better than all those poor saps that use lower QoS queues. This unnatural regulation is going to strangle the health of the overall network and everyone is going to suffer SEVERELY! And it's all the current administration's fault!
The G-Tablet goes for around $250 nowadays and is among the better devices supported by VEGAn-TAB and CyanogenMOD.
The stock ROM bites, though, and the lack of GPS, magnometer, and limited LCD screen viewing angles might be an issue for some. But I'm pretty happy with mine.
aw, but the performance difference is only off by a factor of 10 or so ;-) Oh well, point taken :-D
I'd be more interested in seeing it in AGP myself.
LMGTFY.... ah, here we go: Zotac 5200 AGP
I bought an XFX AGP GPU a few years ago... it was simply the current version of their nVidia 6800 chipset with a PCIe - AGP bridge thrown in. Good times.
Unfortunately, I finally sold that machine a year or two ago, since a bunch of games started requiring DX10 :-/ Would have kept it around as a Linux server, but it was kinda power hungry and relatively noisy compared to my new box.
What a kitchen PC might have looked like "light years" ago:
http://hairball.mine.nu/~rwa2/pictures/Hairball_Incarnate/tn/20050601_070657.med.jpg
This is why Google shelved their version of this tech. The implications were too big.
I don't know... I fed my pr0n directory to Picasa's face recognition, and the results were pretty awesome.
Science is a set of observations; religion is a set of explanations.
Science cannot be good or evil. Religion is often good and evil.
Do you not remember making this statement?
Religion is kinda like an operating system... it doesn't really matter which one you run.
My point is that it very much DOES matter what you believe.
Matters to whom? Other people? Who's going to decide which belief system is the "better" belief system that everyone else should use? Most religions already claim to be for "good". People ought to be free to decide whether they want to live in a conservative / traditional culture where people wear clothes, or live in some hedonistic hippie commune, and have all kinds of options available to them.
Now I'm not going to defend the ugly examples you bring out, but I'm pretty sure you can find something ugly about all religions and societies. The important thing is that you have some means of choice and escape if you're trapped in one you don't happen to agree with. That's where the diversity comes in.
Trying to get everyone to believe in the one "right" set of beliefs is pretty much exactly what's been happening all along, with all the religious wars and whatnot. So no, beliefs should not matter.
Actions matter. If you act against your society, they will react against you according to whatever their code is. And vice versa. There is no justice but social justice. Social justice is what gets enacted upon.
Yeah, maybe philosophy is a better word. But most people refer to religion as some kind of code (whether it's formally written down or not) that you apply to your inputs to determine what action you take.
I would consider atheism a form of religion, maybe even a religious movement. After all, what would a computer without an operating system do?
But I certainly understand why atheists would want to distance themselves from the "religions" by calling it something else.
Religion is simply your own personal reason that you do X.
Except when it lays down historical facts, and tells you that no, moral relativism DOESNT work and ISNT ok. Your statement may hold true for some religions, but certainly not for the big 3.
I cant speak to the Quran, but of the Jewish and Christian literature, about 80% of the pre-messianic scripture is regarding historical details, future predictions, wisdom literature, and prayers. Maybe 20% of it is "the reason that you do X" (and its pretty clear that its not a personal reason).
Meh, as a parent, I kinda see most religions as a bunch of stories you make up to get your kids to "listen to your parents", be "good", and do "good" work. Then the kids grow up and maybe rebel or become super-serious about it.
Religion is kinda like an operating system... it doesn't really matter which one you run.
No matter how you look at it, that statement cannot be true. If one of the religions is true, it absolutely matters-- it is in fact more important than anything else in your life. If they are all false (and if we exempt "atheism" from the category), then you are wasting your life ("If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.", 1 Corin 15:19). In fact, if they are all false, the "religion" of hedonism would very clearly be the best one to follow.
Well, everyone needs some reason to wake up in the morning. For hedonists, it's hunger, for others, maybe they want to strive to get closer to some sort of objective function or other. But just looking at people as a black box, the "religion" is just what goes on internally to determine what actions they take in response to a certain set of inputs. Everything that happens internally could be false, some of it could be true, but they're still going to take some sort of action.
I don't really want to get semantic about it, but I'd certainly consider atheism as a form of religion/philosophy. What does a computer without an operating system do?
The next time a woman is stoned to death for adultery, a child is driven to suicide for being gay, a man is murdered for "sorcery" or a family is destroyed for being apostates, I'll be sure to cheerfully remind every involved that it doesn't matter what you believe, and that we should value this diversity.
Um, diversity generally means that you ought to be able to choose something that, uh, doesn't involve any of the above things you mention. Lack of available alternatives is sort of what leads people to tolerate the status quo of their particular culture.
And even the "bad" stuff has a place in society / history. Otherwise you'd never have anything "good" by comparison. It's a yin/yang thang.
I'd say religion and science are pretty orthogonal.
Science kinda just tells you what is likely to happen when you do X. That's it.
Religion is simply your own personal reason that you do X. Maybe it's because everyone else is doing it. Or maybe you have some system of beliefs, founded in scientific observation or some other social aspect of your upbringing. But it doesn't really matter.
Religion is kinda like an operating system... it doesn't really matter which one you run. Some are more susceptible to viruses and botnets than others, some interoperate better other operating systems. But generally it's great that there's some diversity.