I know, it's so easy (and fun!) to slam the gov't when they mess up. Lately, they seem to be messing up an awful lot (which translates into an awful lot of fun for folks like me!).
Only a few agencies improved and those agencies aren't even as significantly correlated to security as the likes of DHS, etc.
It feels a lot like hypocrisy to me, when the gov't continuously appears to be able to fail and get away with it but we normal, everyday citizens cannot "officially" get away with much at all.
I wish there was some undiscovered land to be found because I feel the spirit of Christopher Columbus wanting to escape all this seemingly irreparable beaurocracy and start anew elsewhere.
I think that those who have posted here advocating that a 'social contract' is violated when users block online ads using such utilities as 'AdBlock' are somewhat misinformed about what, to me, constitutes a significant element in the idea of a social contract:
"Locke made the social contract the basis of his advocacy of popular sovereignty, the idea that the monarch or government
must reflect the will of the people."
To me, this suggests that unless "the will of the people" has spoken in favor of online ads, such ads are not "the will of the people" and, hence, no 'social contract' exists.
Instead, consider it a 'dictatorial contract', imposed from without upon those who [a] have not asked for it, and [b] are now criticized for wanting to control such unsolicited imposition.
Consider:
"
SOCIAL CONTRACT, agreement or covenant by which men are said to have abandoned the 'state of nature' to form the society in which they now live. The theory of such a contract, first formulated by the English philosophers Thomas Hobbes (in the Leviathan, 1651) and John Locke, assumes that men at first lived in a state of anarchy in which there was no society, no government, and no organized coercion of the individual by the group. Hobbes maintained that by the social contract men had surrendered their natural liberties in order to enjoy the order and safety of the organized state. Locke made the social contract the basis of his advocacy of popular sovereignty, the idea that the monarch or government must reflect the will of the people. Like Locke, the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, in Le Contrat social (1762), found the general will a means of establishing reciprocal rights and duties, privileges, and responsibilities as a basis of the state. Similar ideas were used as a justification for both the American and the French revolutions in the 18th cent. Thomas Jefferson held that the preservation of certain natural rights was an essential part of the social contract, and that 'consent of the governed' was fundamental to any exercise of governmental power. Although historically important, the theory as a basis of society and the state has generally been discarded by modern social and political scientists."
rebeka thomas (673264) wrote in post #12172861:
What tripe. What complete unadulterated tripe. Breeding a group of people who are convinced they're doing their thing for the world, yet who write anonymously behind the safety of a pseudonym or "Anonymous Coward" moniker?
Rebeka, you mentioned "the safety of a pseudonym" in your reply, above. Can you imagine any situation where you would feel justified appropriating such safety? I certainly can, and apparently a few other respondents can as well.
So if there are reasonable situations in which embracing anonymity seems appropriate to you, why does your post sound so harshly critical of others who may feel the same way?
Get some integrity people, and write with your real names. Stand up for what you believe in and put your name next to your thoughts.
Or are they not really thoughts worth standing up for?
I believe that thoughts stand or fall on their content alone, that the name, sex, age, ethnicity, etc., of the person expressing those thoughts conveys zero additional credibility to the legitimacy of said thoughts. To believe otherwise is to engage in one or more rhetorical fallacies such as discounting the relevance/truth of a position based on who it is that expresses that position, i.e., ad hominem.
Perhaps you place high value on knowing who is saying something because you unwittingly engage in this kind of erroneous evaluation: judging WHAT is said on the basis of WHO said it, rather than judging WHAT is said on the basis of WHAT IS SAID.
Perhaps you've been wronged/offended/hurt/embarrassed by an anonymous expression directed to or about you in the past; if so, I can empathize with your intensity on this matter. Nonetheless, projecting your own pain onto the rest of us because of something that happened to you personally seems a bit over-reactive and self-absorbed.
Stiletto/12066 wrote:
It's no wonder why people go the illegal route--it's much easier!
Well said! While I'm not one to blatantly disregard all law, I do think it is a fundamental duty of every human being to decide whether any particular law imposed upon them is appropriate.
No, I don't think everyone ought to be a law unto themselves. Conversely, I don't think everyone ought to line up and bleat like a mindless farm animals being slowly herded to the slaughterhouse.
As a practical matter, it's safer to avoid getting in line until you know exactly where that line is going. Perhaps more importantly, avoid lining up unless/until you are confidently persuaded that you may -- at your own discretion -- step out of the line without punishment, if that's what you decide to do after getting in line in the first place.
If it's easier to get in line, but harder or even impossible to get out, why don't more people sense the danger of such one-way decisions? Why don't more people find some way to get involved either by [1] making their thoughts/objections/concerns known to their representatives, [2] sharing their views with others so as to raise awareness of a possible danger. Or both!
I think one shows oneself a more responsible member of society when one errs on the side of conservatively guarding one's liberties/rights rather than erring on the side of too easily/quietly/quickly surrendering such freedoms under the guise of being a good, i.e., law-abiding, citizen.
As Ben Franklin so aptly put it:
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
With cell phones there is a small amount of radiation but....
Your outer skin is dead and acts as a great resistor. The signal does not get through your dead outer skin to the inner living skin to mutate it. Every cell phone goes through tests on this.
Are you certain about this? I mean, if that's true, then when I'm talking on the cell phone I ought to be able to put the phone on my lap and bend at the waist, completely surrounding the phone with my body.
By your statement, then, I ought to lose the call because the radiation couldn't get through my dead-skin layer to reach the cell-tower network.
I just tried this and I do NOT lose the call, ergo, your statement appears to be false.
Have I misunderstood you, or failed to correctly test your hypothesis?
I visited this puzzle-maker's site (quirkle.com) and discovered the super-high-power magnet set, called 'Quagnet', and bought two of them for holiday presents.
Okay, here's the deal: while the magnets are easily as powerful as described, they're too powerful for their own good! I'm serious. In about 5 minutes of playing with these things, two of the magnetic disks simply broke apart (one while I was trying to separate a magnet from the stack, the other during a playful pick-up from a distance of about 4-5 inches).
Anyone else buy these things as gifts? I mean, very cool in its own right but not so durable. Also, the d*mn things PINCH your fingers/skin whenever they snap together. A single pinch is just a minor annoyance but when it keeps happening over and over again (as it did with my set) it really starts to hurt.
I had bought these for a 12-year old girl and a 13-year old girl. Not gonna happen now. In fact, I did an on-the-sly inquiry of the 13-year old, telling her it was really a gift for her 10-year old brother and, by the way, what did she think?
Her response? "They're too powerful for him; he'll probably get hurt." So I asked her, ever so casually, "What about you? If I had bought these for you, do you think you'd enjoy them?" She answered, "No, they scare me."
I've been a software developer for 17 years. Majored in now-all-but-dead languages (Visual Foxpro, Foxpro before that, Foxbase, dBase III+, QuickBasic, GW-BASIC).
Am self-taught (i.e., no college degree) and considered well-educated and more-than-a-little intelligent by my friends and peers.
Despite my actual competence, intelligence and enthusiasm to re-tool into newer and more mainstream environments (Java, for example), I can't get interviewed despite the abundance of jobs in and around the Metro Washington, D.C. area.
I'm a little bitter that so much educational bias seems to screen me out before even talking to me. Want to go back to school at night but am looking at 5+ years of evening attendence before emerging with that sheepskin. This, to me, is of questionable reward: should I major in IT or something else?
Who knows. And I'm sorry for tangenting off the main topic but I feel like sharing so... there it is!:-)
Re:Disprovable?
on
God's Debris
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
A theory that can't be tested is useless.
As long as there is no more reliable, plausible theory to supplant it, an untestable theory is merely another possibility to consider along the way toward finding a reliable, plausible theory.
The sort of "either-or" thinking represented by your comment may be "safe" -- perhaps even required -- in a more strictly scientific setting but, in the practical experience of everyday life, very few of us live and think in the manner so strictly insisted upon in the context of online discusssion and debate.
While it may seem certain that a given proposition must be either-or: true/false, we must come to grips with the limitations of human intellect and our present scope of knowledge.
Perhaps a person doesn't know whether proposition p is true or false, and up to the present moment this person has no testable theory at hand. I suggest that it's quite rational to admit one's agnostic state-of-being with respect to the proposition being considered, and to entertain virtually any theory that one may imagine explains the proposition.
Notice I did not say that one may assert, as knowledge, the imagined theory. I said that they may entertain it, perhaps even choose to [gasp!] believe it (yes, even without compelling justification for doing so).
To believe in spite of evidence to the contrary is a hard position to defend, but to believe in the absence of any evidence whatsoever is quite human and, in the long run, perhaps even useful.
...python is filling my needs where perl5 and java are too cumbersome.
I'm very new to perl, have only a cursory exposure to java, and none at all to python. IOW, my question isn't at all meant to inspire a language war.
Would you (or anyone else 'in the know) be more specific about some of the cumbersome aspects of perl & java that you find python preferable for handling?
Again, I'm not trolling; I'm a neophyte looking to learn something potentially useful.
See, when you install new software on a Windows box, the new software almost always asks the user whether he wants documents with such and such extensions to open in this new application. Yes is the default and that's almost always what the user selects.
A little off the point here...
IF you agree to let the new software associate some file extension(s) to itself and then, later, you decide to uninstall said software, the file extensions do not (as far as I'm aware) revert to the default values.
At this point, the non-techie/non-power-user has effectively disabled this Windows "feature" of trying to be smart about knowing what to do with a file by virtue of its extension.
I've got a Microsoft Natural keyboard, too, and I've grown to love the layout. I'm a little confused about something, tho:
Everyone seems to be talking about Dvorak keyboards as if they're a physical thing!? I'm not sure about *nix (cuz I just installed SuSE 6.2 this past weekend), but M$ has various drivers to remap the physical keyboard's key layout.
So, unless you need to see the letters (I've learned to touch-type QWERTY, so I don't), there's no reason to seek out a physical Dvorak layout or to manually swap actual keys on your current keyboard.
As for "seeing" where the letters are, I installed the Dvorak remap, then I opened a text file and manually typed out the keyboard's layout (1 layout with the keys alone, 1 layout with each key while holding down the "shift" key).
As long as you've got the paper layout, you can "feel" your way through. The other benefit to this method is that you are, unwittingly, learning to "touch-type" the Dvorak layout, which is how you'll realize the most benefit.
As for what others may think, there will always be people that misunderstand or prejudge us on the basis of their stereotypes rather than on the facts. Personally, I'm not as concerned with other people's impressions of me as I am just being who I am. I'll be misunderstood by some of the people some of the time, no matter what keyboard layout I'm proficient with.
So personally, I let the cards (or keys!) fall where they may, and I recommend you all do the same.
Cheers and good day to all! |_ |_ QuadZero |_ Eat the elephant! One byte at a time... |_________________________________________
I'm just finishing chapter 1 and it's already so provoked me that my entire "hallucination" of the future has been radically altered.
Note to closed minded folks: don't bother to get this book, you won't believe it anyway (and, like the media's response to the authors' two previous books, you'll likely only have to 'fess up that you were wrong about their conclusions -- just like the media was wrong about their previous 2 books' conclusions 8-). |_ |_ QuadZero |_ Eat the elephant! One byte at a time... |_________________________________________
I find it ironic that you would write that the presence of the 10 commandments in school -implies- a religious influence, but that the main argument implies, conceptually, the opposite: that the violent content of the entertainment industry -doesn't imply- a violent influence.
If -any- exposure to a certain genre of content implies an influence upon those so exposed, then we ought to be consistent to apply this implication to material we may object to (religious) as well as material that we embrace (entertainment).
Don't you agree? |_ |_ QuadZero |_ Eat the elephant! One byte at a time... |_________________________________________
Slashdot Mirror
I know, it's so easy (and fun!) to slam the gov't when they mess up. Lately, they seem to be messing up an awful lot (which translates into an awful lot of fun for folks like me!).
Only a few agencies improved and those agencies aren't even as significantly correlated to security as the likes of DHS, etc.
It feels a lot like hypocrisy to me, when the gov't continuously appears to be able to fail and get away with it but we normal, everyday citizens cannot "officially" get away with much at all.
I wish there was some undiscovered land to be found because I feel the spirit of Christopher Columbus wanting to escape all this seemingly irreparable beaurocracy and start anew elsewhere.
Instead, consider it a 'dictatorial contract', imposed from without upon those who [a] have not asked for it, and [b] are now criticized for wanting to control such unsolicited imposition.
Consider:
So if there are reasonable situations in which embracing anonymity seems appropriate to you, why does your post sound so harshly critical of others who may feel the same way?
I believe that thoughts stand or fall on their content alone, that the name, sex, age, ethnicity, etc., of the person expressing those thoughts conveys zero additional credibility to the legitimacy of said thoughts. To believe otherwise is to engage in one or more rhetorical fallacies such as discounting the relevance/truth of a position based on who it is that expresses that position, i.e., ad hominem.Perhaps you place high value on knowing who is saying something because you unwittingly engage in this kind of erroneous evaluation: judging WHAT is said on the basis of WHO said it, rather than judging WHAT is said on the basis of WHAT IS SAID.
Perhaps you've been wronged/offended/hurt/embarrassed by an anonymous expression directed to or about you in the past; if so, I can empathize with your intensity on this matter. Nonetheless, projecting your own pain onto the rest of us because of something that happened to you personally seems a bit over-reactive and self-absorbed.
This news story offers additional information.
No, I don't think everyone ought to be a law unto themselves. Conversely, I don't think everyone ought to line up and bleat like a mindless farm animals being slowly herded to the slaughterhouse.
As a practical matter, it's safer to avoid getting in line until you know exactly where that line is going. Perhaps more importantly, avoid lining up unless/until you are confidently persuaded that you may -- at your own discretion -- step out of the line without punishment, if that's what you decide to do after getting in line in the first place.
If it's easier to get in line, but harder or even impossible to get out, why don't more people sense the danger of such one-way decisions? Why don't more people find some way to get involved either by [1] making their thoughts/objections/concerns known to their representatives, [2] sharing their views with others so as to raise awareness of a possible danger. Or both!
I think one shows oneself a more responsible member of society when one errs on the side of conservatively guarding one's liberties/rights rather than erring on the side of too easily/quietly/quickly surrendering such freedoms under the guise of being a good, i.e., law-abiding, citizen.
By your statement, then, I ought to lose the call because the radiation couldn't get through my dead-skin layer to reach the cell-tower network.
I just tried this and I do NOT lose the call, ergo, your statement appears to be false.
Have I misunderstood you, or failed to correctly test your hypothesis?
I visited this puzzle-maker's site (quirkle.com) and discovered the super-high-power magnet set, called 'Quagnet', and bought two of them for holiday presents.
:-)
Okay, here's the deal: while the magnets are easily as powerful as described, they're too powerful for their own good! I'm serious. In about 5 minutes of playing with these things, two of the magnetic disks simply broke apart (one while I was trying to separate a magnet from the stack, the other during a playful pick-up from a distance of about 4-5 inches).
Anyone else buy these things as gifts? I mean, very cool in its own right but not so durable. Also, the d*mn things PINCH your fingers/skin whenever they snap together. A single pinch is just a minor annoyance but when it keeps happening over and over again (as it did with my set) it really starts to hurt.
I had bought these for a 12-year old girl and a 13-year old girl. Not gonna happen now. In fact, I did an on-the-sly inquiry of the 13-year old, telling her it was really a gift for her 10-year old brother and, by the way, what did she think?
Her response? "They're too powerful for him; he'll probably get hurt." So I asked her, ever so casually, "What about you? If I had bought these for you, do you think you'd enjoy them?" She answered, "No, they scare me."
C'est la vie!
I've been a software developer for 17 years. Majored in now-all-but-dead languages (Visual Foxpro, Foxpro before that, Foxbase, dBase III+, QuickBasic, GW-BASIC). Am self-taught (i.e., no college degree) and considered well-educated and more-than-a-little intelligent by my friends and peers. Despite my actual competence, intelligence and enthusiasm to re-tool into newer and more mainstream environments (Java, for example), I can't get interviewed despite the abundance of jobs in and around the Metro Washington, D.C. area. I'm a little bitter that so much educational bias seems to screen me out before even talking to me. Want to go back to school at night but am looking at 5+ years of evening attendence before emerging with that sheepskin. This, to me, is of questionable reward: should I major in IT or something else? Who knows. And I'm sorry for tangenting off the main topic but I feel like sharing so... there it is! :-)
As long as there is no more reliable, plausible theory to supplant it, an untestable theory is merely another possibility to consider along the way toward finding a reliable, plausible theory.
The sort of "either-or" thinking represented by your comment may be "safe" -- perhaps even required -- in a more strictly scientific setting but, in the practical experience of everyday life, very few of us live and think in the manner so strictly insisted upon in the context of online discusssion and debate.
While it may seem certain that a given proposition must be either-or: true/false, we must come to grips with the limitations of human intellect and our present scope of knowledge.
Perhaps a person doesn't know whether proposition p is true or false, and up to the present moment this person has no testable theory at hand. I suggest that it's quite rational to admit one's agnostic state-of-being with respect to the proposition being considered, and to entertain virtually any theory that one may imagine explains the proposition.
Notice I did not say that one may assert, as knowledge, the imagined theory. I said that they may entertain it, perhaps even choose to [gasp!] believe it (yes, even without compelling justification for doing so).
To believe in spite of evidence to the contrary is a hard position to defend, but to believe in the absence of any evidence whatsoever is quite human and, in the long run, perhaps even useful.
I'm very new to perl, have only a cursory exposure to java, and none at all to python. IOW, my question isn't at all meant to inspire a language war.
Would you (or anyone else 'in the know) be more specific about some of the cumbersome aspects of perl & java that you find python preferable for handling?
Again, I'm not trolling; I'm a neophyte looking to learn something potentially useful.
Thanks in advance!
A little off the point here...
IF you agree to let the new software associate some file extension(s) to itself and then, later, you decide to uninstall said software, the file extensions do not (as far as I'm aware) revert to the default values.
At this point, the non-techie/non-power-user has effectively disabled this Windows "feature" of trying to be smart about knowing what to do with a file by virtue of its extension.
I've got a Microsoft Natural keyboard, too, and I've grown to love the layout. I'm a little confused about something, tho:
Everyone seems to be talking about Dvorak keyboards as if they're a physical thing!? I'm not sure about *nix (cuz I just installed SuSE 6.2 this past weekend), but M$ has various drivers to remap the physical keyboard's key layout.
So, unless you need to see the letters (I've learned to touch-type QWERTY, so I don't), there's no reason to seek out a physical Dvorak layout or to manually swap actual keys on your current keyboard.
As for "seeing" where the letters are, I installed the Dvorak remap, then I opened a text file and manually typed out the keyboard's layout (1 layout with the keys alone, 1 layout with each key while holding down the "shift" key).
As long as you've got the paper layout, you can "feel" your way through. The other benefit to this method is that you are, unwittingly, learning to "touch-type" the Dvorak layout, which is how you'll realize the most benefit.
As for what others may think, there will always be people that misunderstand or prejudge us on the basis of their stereotypes rather than on the facts. Personally, I'm not as concerned with other people's impressions of me as I am just being who I am. I'll be misunderstood by some of the people some of the time, no matter what keyboard layout I'm proficient with.
So personally, I let the cards (or keys!) fall where they may, and I recommend you all do the same.
Cheers and good day to all!
|_
|_ QuadZero
|_ Eat the elephant! One byte at a time...
|_________________________________________
I'm just finishing chapter 1 and it's already so provoked me that my entire "hallucination" of the future has been radically altered.
Note to closed minded folks: don't bother to get this book, you won't believe it anyway (and, like the media's response to the authors' two previous books, you'll likely only have to 'fess up that you were wrong about their conclusions -- just like the media was wrong about their previous 2 books' conclusions 8-).
|_
|_ QuadZero
|_ Eat the elephant! One byte at a time...
|_________________________________________
I find it ironic that you would write that the presence of the 10 commandments in school -implies- a religious influence, but that the main argument implies, conceptually, the opposite: that the violent content of the entertainment industry -doesn't imply- a violent influence.
If -any- exposure to a certain genre of content implies an influence upon those so exposed, then we ought to be consistent to apply this implication to material we may object to (religious) as well as material that we embrace (entertainment).
Don't you agree?
|_
|_ QuadZero
|_ Eat the elephant! One byte at a time...
|_________________________________________
The comments says this offer was good 'til 5pm CDT on 4 Aug., but unfortunately the message didn't hit my email-box until 9:28pm on 4 Aug.
:)
C'mon, folks -- let's get the mail out a little earlier, please