I don't agree with the article about the expectation of fairness in games vs real life. I think in both cases what we really want is to know the rules, so we have a chance of following them and making it through.
In games I simply want things to be moderately predictable - so that with experience I can become better. And then I want variation; it gets pretty tedious if it is always just the same few things you do, like just killing monsters.
This is leaving the keys in the lock - how can a lock with the keys in it stop anyone?
So if you go out and leave your door unlocked it is OK for me to go inside and have a look around? And read your letters and stuff?
Using somebody else's property without their permission is basically a form of theft (although perhaps the legal term is something else), whether it is taking their car for a drive, putting your rubbish in their bin or entering their property without permission - even if you don't take anything away. That is what all this privacy talk is all about: my space is mine, and I decide who I want to share it with.
Yes, you are of course right in all this, but the point is - a certain type of people, let's put it that way, a certain type of people stumble over a piece of research like this, completely ignore the context and start spouting silly nonsense by the gallon. This article is just one more case in point.
This kind of research cannot be taken out of context - as you say, one might have pounced on reading or video games instead, so why pick on tv? Well, unlike reading and playing computer games, tv really is something everybody in all age groups do; I suspect that everybody knows at least one or two people who don't read books or play computer games every day, but there really aren't many who don't sit down to watch tv every day, at least for something like an hour. So, if tv viewing is in some way bad for you, that is potentially a much bigger problem for society than, say, the hazards of sword swallowing.
It is when you add it all up that this kind of research gains weight - one study is not conclusive, but if we perform thousands of studies and they all point in the same direction, I think we can begin to draw conclusions. And as I said in my original posting, there are many reasons why we wouldn't be surprised to find a connection between tv viewing and asthma.
I think the thing that really riles me when I see this kind of reporting is that it is so disingenious; this is written by somebody who genuinely wants to find the truth, it is just somebody who doesn't want people - himself included - to face up to an inconvenient fact. We see this all the time - a couple of decades ago it was the tobacco industry paying people to ridicule the idea that smoking causes cancer and other diseases, in the recent past it has been things like the professional climate-sceptics and the Creationists. There is a number of people out there who for some reason have an interest in the public not understanding science and knowing the truth; they know that public don't know all that much about hard core scientific research, and that you can confuse them by obfuscating and fudging up genuine research in the news.
It is all about power - democracy can be a real pain if people are allowed to form their own opinion based on facts, because then they are harder to control; which is why certain people in power are anti-intellectual. And that is likely the reason why bumbling clowns like GWB have been allowed to be president - so people can see that "this is the way we should all be", you know "honest, plain and relying on gut instinct and faith".
everything about this study just screams "correlation is not causation".
I think what scream loudest in this case is that you are uncomfortable with the implications; perhaps there are things in your lifestyle you don't want to change?
Taken in isolation this kind of study does seem a little bizarre, and the way it is presented in the popular media doesn't help either, when it is reported as if it was a kind of joke. However, it is part of a growing trend that seems to indicate that a lot of illnesses are actually lifestyle diseases, and there is growing evidence that one common factor is inflammation - or the presence of certain indicators of inflammation, I should say. Inflammation seems to lie behind such things as atherosclerosis, insulin resistence, and of course it is known to a major symptom in asthma. The adipose tissues of obese people seem to be the seat of low-level inflammation too, or something very similar. Now, I don't know about you, but when I see all these things together, I don't think it is all that unlikely that sitting in front of the telly instead of getting up and about actually is a major causative factor in these lifestyle diseases, asthma included.
It is also well-known that exercise actually is a very effective way of lowering the levels of inflammation in places where you don't want it - perhaps because exercise actually causes low-level damage to muscles and connective tissue; this sort of draws the attention of the body's repair system away from the places where it is not actually supposed to be. Inflammation is an important part of the repair system, which is why muscles get sore from exercise.
I'm not sure I agree with the enforcement idea, at least in the sense it is implemented by Microsoft. I am in the happy position of being the UNIX manager for a R&D company, and the reason I am happy is that I am totally independent of the MS management team. Do get me wrong - they are not bad people, but every day I see the Windows users start their desktops up and hear them groan under the load of stuff pushed out by the domain servers. I mean, you can't tell me that is the right way to do things.
I think the basic philosophy for IT administration has to build on the principles of trust and the wish to serve. Too many administrators think that it is all about ruling a little empire; it isn't, it is about Serving the Community, making sure that everybody can get their job done. As for the trust part: why would a company employ people they don't trust? That doesn't make sense, to my mind.
The way I do it is, I give as much power to my UNIX users as possible. Example: we do a lot of database work - I think we have about 150 Oracle instances, different versions, different OSes etc; they all have the same administrator password, and all developers can start, stop and in principle destroy and create database instances. I am just the guy that keeps a tab on it all, I know where they all are, I regulate the use of resources, and in practise I am the person they turn to when they need something special. And it works well - people respect each other, they ask the others whether it is OK to do things etc.
Of course there are things I don't give away - only I know the root passwords to the servers, for example. But mutual trust really does work. So how do I adminstrate ~50 servers, ~150 Oracles, ~100 DB2s etc? The secret is called "ssh" - all administration in UNIX can be done from the commandline, and ssh can run scripts on remote machines. But there is another tool that I am looking into and will probably begin to use: STAF, which is really a SW test harness, but it can do so much more than that - go and look it up if you're interested.
If I were to administrate a network of desktop linuxes, I would probably produce some guidelines for what they can and can't do on their machines. They would themselves be responsible for the daily adminstration; I wouldn't hold the root password. When they screw up things, I would come and rescue their machines in a fairly basic way - more or less bring them back to the company baseline, really. I would put all the information about how to repair the system and the different non-standard configurations into a Wiki of some sort (TWiki is the one I prefer).
I am convinced it would work well; my experience so far on bigger systems is that people in general just want to do their job as well as possible. The ones that want to do more, who experiment and change their environment will enrich the company's knowledge base, but most people just want to know that their toolbox works.
Do games kill people? Of course not - but let's not be silly here, the subject is far too serious to be given the "Smoking can't be that bad for you, 'cause I knew somebody whose uncle lived till he was 90"-treatment.
A sedentary lifestyle does contribute to heart disease and obesity and so does junk food and instant meals. Most games and tv-watching encourage both a sedentary lifestyle and eating junk food. And of course you can play computer games for a hour a day without any harm - IF you get plenty of exercise every day. But a lot of people, especialy teenagers, spend many hours every day watching tv and playing computer games; those are the ones this campaing want to target. And it is unfortunately necessary to point out the dangers of that lifestyle, not just in general terms, but with specific examples. It is useless to say "Don't eat too much junk food" - because what is "too much"? You don't know when you are just 13 years old - and in fact most adults don't either. Instead you have to point out that "If you eat a Bic Mac Mega Meal with extra fries and a milkshake, you have already eaten more kalories than you need for the whole day".
However, the real cause for the obesity crisis is not that people can't control themselves or "can't get their squelchy arse off the sofa" - the real problem is the commercial interests that dictate that people should be enticed to eat and in general consume as much as possible. If supermarkets and burgerbars honestly wanted to promote a healthy lifestyle, then they wouldn't place the healthier versions of yoghurt just beside the creamy desserts, and they wouldn't sell the sensibly sized portions for almost the same price as the mega-version. As far as I can see this is something where the government will have to step in with clear and unambiguous regulations, because the producers are never going to.
Does your government sell information about your political activities etc to a cabal of semi-criminals? No? Well, there you have your answer, then.
Just because you have an ingrown bias that tells that "Everthing the government does is evil, and everything a private business does is sort of OK, even if it is criminal" doesn't mean that it makes sense. You would probably benefit from taking off your blinkers once in a while.
The article seems very vauge when it comes to what this z/VOS actually does, but since Microsoft haven't made any noises about a version of Windows that runs on z/Arhitecture, I can only assume this is a kind of emulated Intel environment. As a very rough rule of thumb I would say that a CPU emulation would run about 10 times slower than the actual CPU; and considering that the price for a mainframe is still up there in the tens of millions of USD, give or take, is this really something worth doing when you can get fairly hefty Dell server for a few thousand USD?
After all, the great strength of the mainframe is not so much that it is unbelievably powerful or fast (it isn't, actually), but that its HW is massively redundant, and that you can hot-swap just about every component up to, and including, the CPUs.
So, now they don't have to figure out where these soft targets are, they just go directly for the blurred areas on the map, right? Could it be that this hasn't been thought through?
I am a great fan of open games - like Crossfire or Mana World, but I find that I invariably get bored with a game after a relatively short while because it is too much of just one of two things. Perhaps the problem is that it is relatively easy to implement "killing" as the basic way to advance, whereas almost any other concept is difficult by comparison.
To be really long-term successful, I think an online game should cater for a wider variation of interests, like teaching, construction and exploration. I don't think graphics is all that important, as you can tell from my interests above; but a fantasy-universe where you can nurture several interests and styles of play would certainly catch my interest.
Employers are increasingly trolling the web for information about prospective employees
No they are not - "trolling" means "posting controversial, inflammatory, irrelevant or off-topic messages in an online community", which is a lot closer to what kdawson is doing with this.
By basing professional hiring decisions on candidates' personal lives and beliefs, employers are effectively legislating people's behavior, and they're creating an online environment where people can't express their true beliefs, state their unvarnished opinions, be themselves, and that runs contrary to the free, communal ethos of the Web
What a load of tosh. When you put things out in the public space, you have in effect decided that it isn't essential to keep it private; thinking otherwise is a bit like the joke where somebody says "Let's keep this our little secret" on air. The solution is not to make it "illegal" for employers to find what you have yourself made public, but for people to think once or twice before they go public.
Honestly, there's far too much of this "I want to have to fun, but I don't want to suffer the consequences" attitude around. Personally, I think if you are not prepared or able to think ahead in your private life, you shouldn't be given a job with too much responsibility.
Sound like a good investment of record company resources, anyone?
I think it is brilliant - the more they engage in this idiocy, the sooner they will collapse. I have, as you might guess, little sympathy for a recording industry that for decades has tried to monopolise our culture with bland muzak, boy/girl bands and all the other, vapid crap that's out there. The real musicians - the ones who don't just stand by the assemblyline, mechanically producing trivial variations over the same, tired old theme over and over - they are not going to suffer, because the fact of the matter is that is amazingly easy to produce good quality recordings now. And with the big monopolies gone, maybe we could see some real renewal of the music world.
The basis of socialism is the redistrubtion of wealth/resources "from each according to his ability, to each according to their need."
And a very appealing principle it is too; but it is no more than a principle - a guideline or ideal, if you will. As you will note, I did in fact argue that one can't implement pure socialism or communism; it is good to share, but we all need something we can call our own. No ideology or religion is more important than people; the goal of socialism - or indeed any ideology worth anything - is to make life good for as many people as possible. This obviously means that when we reach the point where we have to choose between our principles and what is good for people, it is the principles that should yield.
You seem to assume that socialism can't or mustn't change over time or adjust to reality; but of it can and should change as society develops. Marx, Engells and Lenin weren't the Holy Trinity and the Communist Manfesto isn't some holy scripture - it's just a statement of opinions about how society ought to be run, there's no need to get all religious about it.
I'll take the free market any day.
And you are welcome to it. Maybe when you one day are without any income and have no money to pay for hospital treatment for yourself or your wife and children etc, perhaps you will we it differently. Fortunately, you are allowed to change your mind if and when you are ready.
Most families are working models of communism - the family shares its possessions etc. It's true that many of the states that have called themselves "Communist" have failed, most notably the Soviet Union, but the question still remains whether this was because of communism or because of other factors - such as the permanent state of conflict with the Western world, the general incompetence of its leaders, the extreme paranoia of the same or whatever. I would say that it is impossible to have a stable society that is based on constant oppression of the majority, there is nothing inherent in socialism that requires oppression.
The argument one sees elsewhere, that oppression becomes necessary "because there will always be some that are too selfish", is only valid in the special case where the state insists on an extreme form of "perfect" socialism; but that is the same whether you insist on pure capitalism, theocracy or just about anything else. If deviation from the ideal is not tolerated, oppression becomes necessary.
There are many stable countries in the world that are predominantly socialist - Scandinavia springs to mind, but China is a good example; China is still a communist society and likely to remain so for the foreseable future, not despite its opening up to the international community, but because of it. The openness has taken away much of the oppression and people don't feel the need to revolt.
We are more governmentally encumbered and less capitalist than China in many ways!
Funny you should say that. To my mind this is the spirit of socialism at its best - the people at the bottom working together rather than each individual competing against each other. Open source is another prime example of what socialism and communism was really about before powerhungry egomaniacs like Stalin and Lenin took out a patent on the idea.
We can now look forward to a more community driven approach to oppression.
The sad thing is that so much oppression is actually community driven - perhaps far more than the case where the government oppresses the people. It's even got a name:
The Bush administration didn't do things because of idealism, they did them because of money and power
Well, to me that looks a lot like what certain aspects of American, political ideology is all about - money and power. Just because it isn't noble doesn't mean that it isn't idealism of sorts.
I'm still not sure if Bush was stupid or evil.
Oh, there is no doubt he was stupid, which isn't the same as being unintelligent. Stupidity, to my mind, is what you get when people have learned to avoid learning from new knowledge; and as always with learning, the more intelligent you are, the better you get, so it takes a very intelligent person to become very stupid.
Is he evil? Much of what he did was certainly evil, but no person is exclusively evil; I don' think it is possible.
... but don't make it out like they're just freeloading off everyone else.
I wasn't suggesting they were, I was only expressing my opinion, that it makes very little sense, whether in terms of basic fairness or economic reality, to give money to those who need it the least and then hope this will somehow makes the economy stronger and better. Trickle-down economics seems to be part of the Neo-Conservative faith, and according to my definition above a very stupid one, since experience has shown it to be false.
Should the rich pay a higher percent of their income than the not so rich? That's a good question - I think they should, but there is no absolute truth about this. To me it makes sense; a person can only meaningfully use a certain amount of money and other resources, whether that is the equivalent of $1M per year or whatever. Once you get over that limit, it no longer makes any sense that one person holds on to those resources, and it seems reasonable that they are shared to the benefit of the community in some way. It is quite possible that the state is not the best to decide how to share, but that is another matter.
As for the "gigantic tax-cuts" - when your personal income is an absurd several hundred millions per year, any tax-cut will be gigantic by any reasonable measure. A rich person gets a lot more mileage out of 1% than Joe Average. I wonder how much more the worst-off would have got if those whose income was over $1M p.a. hadn't got a tax-cut at all and the whole amount had been given to the poorest?
Stop playing stupid, and stop twisting words. If you want to comment on what I say, comment on the whole; the context is that when you pay your taxes it is voluntary - if you don't like paying taxes in America, you always have the option of going somewhere else or engaging in some of the legal tax-dodges. Once you have given the money away, it is no longer yours to spend. Shouldn't be too hard to grasp I would have thought.
I don't think they are interested in human rights but they understand the importance of uncorrupt institutions to prosperity.
I think you are probably wrong there. For one thing, Communism is, despite what we've all been told over and over, about the rights of common people; go and look it up if you care. They are not the same set of rights that people in the US subscribe to, but "The Universal Declaration of Human Rights" was, after all, something drawn up by the UN just after WWII - ie by the US, UK and France, mostly, and consequently it reflects values that are very Eurocentric and very Capitalistic.
Another thing is that people far too often assume that politicians in general are completely void of any sort of idealism and higher principles, which I think is manifestly untrue - even in America. Wasn't the problem with the Bush administration that they were too idealistic - that their belief in their ideology overruled their grasp of reality? A pragmatic leader would never have thrown the country into a war in Iraq or given gigantic tax cuts to the richest in the belief that this would somehow be good for everybody, in spite of what common sense and a hundred years of experience tells us.
In fact, I think politicians in general are more likely to be idealists than the average person. It's just that in the US, their ideology is very often some twisted version of fundamentalist Christianity or Ultra-Capitalism, whereas in China they are more likely to base their ideals on Communism - which is, when you think about it, a version of Humanism. To me, what makes the big difference is whether you believe your ideals are more important than people's lives and reality in general; and as far as I can see, the current Chinese leaders believe more in reality than in ideals. Which is good.
What's up with everybody using my money to make games these days.
If it was your money, it would be in your pocket and yours to spend, wouldn't it?
Tax is the contribution of the citizens towards the cost of running the state. The state in return provides certain services, roads, schools, military and a number of other things. Only a very minute part of your tax is spent on this sort of light entertainment - although I think this may be more in the category of edutainment, which is not a bad idea; too many people in America have no idea about astronomy and space technology, and a game like this might bring them a little bit closer to reality - and who knows, maybe even inspire some to learn more.
What makes me feel slightly uneasy about this is that these entangled photon are bound to be flitting around in nature all the time - and while there are, admittedly, some that I wouldn't mind getting entangled with, there are more that I would rather not be too intimate with.
In fact, the company's search engines are already known to be rigged - this is why the first results are always the sponsored ones. This in combination with their monopoly is a potential threat to such things as the free exchange of information; not unlike when a state has monopoly over the newsmedia. I'm sure you can see how easy it would be to use an information resource like that to shape public opinion.
Yes, give him a break. I mean, how long did it take before people stopped fawning over GWB and his shallow posturing? As I recall, about 6 or 7 years - until people realized how much crap he had landed us all in with his uninformed decisions and tunnel vision. And how long has Obama been in office? Just over a month. I mean, aren't you a little bit fast on the trigger? I can only conclude that you either expect him to possess god-like powers or that you don't want him to succeed, because common sense says that if you are new on the job, you need at least a couple of months to really settle in. So give him a break.
It is truly sad to see how judges and police in the States are willing - eager, even - to squash the lives of a young person who has done something stupid. There is definitely something wrong with the minds of people like that. But what really startled me was the phrase "commercially operated juvenile detention center"; to me that sounds like something out of a medieval horror movie - in effect, a company that on one hand receives public funding, and on the other hand has access to slave labour. I can't begin to express how deeply that disgusts me.
I would say, if you feel worried about this, it makes sense to think about what to do about it. I am not sure that employers would check people out as much as rumour has it, but they might, of course. I think if a company wants you, they are not going to check your internet profiles and then simply dismiss you out of hand because they see something they don't like, that might refer to you - they will at most confront you on the issue and hear what you have to say.
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I don't agree with the article about the expectation of fairness in games vs real life. I think in both cases what we really want is to know the rules, so we have a chance of following them and making it through.
In games I simply want things to be moderately predictable - so that with experience I can become better. And then I want variation; it gets pretty tedious if it is always just the same few things you do, like just killing monsters.
This is leaving the keys in the lock - how can a lock with the keys in it stop anyone?
So if you go out and leave your door unlocked it is OK for me to go inside and have a look around? And read your letters and stuff?
Using somebody else's property without their permission is basically a form of theft (although perhaps the legal term is something else), whether it is taking their car for a drive, putting your rubbish in their bin or entering their property without permission - even if you don't take anything away. That is what all this privacy talk is all about: my space is mine, and I decide who I want to share it with.
Yes, you are of course right in all this, but the point is - a certain type of people, let's put it that way, a certain type of people stumble over a piece of research like this, completely ignore the context and start spouting silly nonsense by the gallon. This article is just one more case in point.
This kind of research cannot be taken out of context - as you say, one might have pounced on reading or video games instead, so why pick on tv? Well, unlike reading and playing computer games, tv really is something everybody in all age groups do; I suspect that everybody knows at least one or two people who don't read books or play computer games every day, but there really aren't many who don't sit down to watch tv every day, at least for something like an hour. So, if tv viewing is in some way bad for you, that is potentially a much bigger problem for society than, say, the hazards of sword swallowing.
It is when you add it all up that this kind of research gains weight - one study is not conclusive, but if we perform thousands of studies and they all point in the same direction, I think we can begin to draw conclusions. And as I said in my original posting, there are many reasons why we wouldn't be surprised to find a connection between tv viewing and asthma.
I think the thing that really riles me when I see this kind of reporting is that it is so disingenious; this is written by somebody who genuinely wants to find the truth, it is just somebody who doesn't want people - himself included - to face up to an inconvenient fact. We see this all the time - a couple of decades ago it was the tobacco industry paying people to ridicule the idea that smoking causes cancer and other diseases, in the recent past it has been things like the professional climate-sceptics and the Creationists. There is a number of people out there who for some reason have an interest in the public not understanding science and knowing the truth; they know that public don't know all that much about hard core scientific research, and that you can confuse them by obfuscating and fudging up genuine research in the news.
It is all about power - democracy can be a real pain if people are allowed to form their own opinion based on facts, because then they are harder to control; which is why certain people in power are anti-intellectual. And that is likely the reason why bumbling clowns like GWB have been allowed to be president - so people can see that "this is the way we should all be", you know "honest, plain and relying on gut instinct and faith".
everything about this study just screams "correlation is not causation".
I think what scream loudest in this case is that you are uncomfortable with the implications; perhaps there are things in your lifestyle you don't want to change?
Taken in isolation this kind of study does seem a little bizarre, and the way it is presented in the popular media doesn't help either, when it is reported as if it was a kind of joke. However, it is part of a growing trend that seems to indicate that a lot of illnesses are actually lifestyle diseases, and there is growing evidence that one common factor is inflammation - or the presence of certain indicators of inflammation, I should say. Inflammation seems to lie behind such things as atherosclerosis, insulin resistence, and of course it is known to a major symptom in asthma. The adipose tissues of obese people seem to be the seat of low-level inflammation too, or something very similar. Now, I don't know about you, but when I see all these things together, I don't think it is all that unlikely that sitting in front of the telly instead of getting up and about actually is a major causative factor in these lifestyle diseases, asthma included.
It is also well-known that exercise actually is a very effective way of lowering the levels of inflammation in places where you don't want it - perhaps because exercise actually causes low-level damage to muscles and connective tissue; this sort of draws the attention of the body's repair system away from the places where it is not actually supposed to be. Inflammation is an important part of the repair system, which is why muscles get sore from exercise.
I'm not sure I agree with the enforcement idea, at least in the sense it is implemented by Microsoft. I am in the happy position of being the UNIX manager for a R&D company, and the reason I am happy is that I am totally independent of the MS management team. Do get me wrong - they are not bad people, but every day I see the Windows users start their desktops up and hear them groan under the load of stuff pushed out by the domain servers. I mean, you can't tell me that is the right way to do things.
I think the basic philosophy for IT administration has to build on the principles of trust and the wish to serve. Too many administrators think that it is all about ruling a little empire; it isn't, it is about Serving the Community, making sure that everybody can get their job done. As for the trust part: why would a company employ people they don't trust? That doesn't make sense, to my mind.
The way I do it is, I give as much power to my UNIX users as possible. Example: we do a lot of database work - I think we have about 150 Oracle instances, different versions, different OSes etc; they all have the same administrator password, and all developers can start, stop and in principle destroy and create database instances. I am just the guy that keeps a tab on it all, I know where they all are, I regulate the use of resources, and in practise I am the person they turn to when they need something special. And it works well - people respect each other, they ask the others whether it is OK to do things etc.
Of course there are things I don't give away - only I know the root passwords to the servers, for example. But mutual trust really does work. So how do I adminstrate ~50 servers, ~150 Oracles, ~100 DB2s etc? The secret is called "ssh" - all administration in UNIX can be done from the commandline, and ssh can run scripts on remote machines. But there is another tool that I am looking into and will probably begin to use: STAF, which is really a SW test harness, but it can do so much more than that - go and look it up if you're interested.
If I were to administrate a network of desktop linuxes, I would probably produce some guidelines for what they can and can't do on their machines. They would themselves be responsible for the daily adminstration; I wouldn't hold the root password. When they screw up things, I would come and rescue their machines in a fairly basic way - more or less bring them back to the company baseline, really. I would put all the information about how to repair the system and the different non-standard configurations into a Wiki of some sort (TWiki is the one I prefer).
I am convinced it would work well; my experience so far on bigger systems is that people in general just want to do their job as well as possible. The ones that want to do more, who experiment and change their environment will enrich the company's knowledge base, but most people just want to know that their toolbox works.
Do games kill people? Of course not - but let's not be silly here, the subject is far too serious to be given the "Smoking can't be that bad for you, 'cause I knew somebody whose uncle lived till he was 90"-treatment.
A sedentary lifestyle does contribute to heart disease and obesity and so does junk food and instant meals. Most games and tv-watching encourage both a sedentary lifestyle and eating junk food. And of course you can play computer games for a hour a day without any harm - IF you get plenty of exercise every day. But a lot of people, especialy teenagers, spend many hours every day watching tv and playing computer games; those are the ones this campaing want to target. And it is unfortunately necessary to point out the dangers of that lifestyle, not just in general terms, but with specific examples. It is useless to say "Don't eat too much junk food" - because what is "too much"? You don't know when you are just 13 years old - and in fact most adults don't either. Instead you have to point out that "If you eat a Bic Mac Mega Meal with extra fries and a milkshake, you have already eaten more kalories than you need for the whole day".
However, the real cause for the obesity crisis is not that people can't control themselves or "can't get their squelchy arse off the sofa" - the real problem is the commercial interests that dictate that people should be enticed to eat and in general consume as much as possible. If supermarkets and burgerbars honestly wanted to promote a healthy lifestyle, then they wouldn't place the healthier versions of yoghurt just beside the creamy desserts, and they wouldn't sell the sensibly sized portions for almost the same price as the mega-version. As far as I can see this is something where the government will have to step in with clear and unambiguous regulations, because the producers are never going to.
Does your government sell information about your political activities etc to a cabal of semi-criminals? No? Well, there you have your answer, then.
Just because you have an ingrown bias that tells that "Everthing the government does is evil, and everything a private business does is sort of OK, even if it is criminal" doesn't mean that it makes sense. You would probably benefit from taking off your blinkers once in a while.
The article seems very vauge when it comes to what this z/VOS actually does, but since Microsoft haven't made any noises about a version of Windows that runs on z/Arhitecture, I can only assume this is a kind of emulated Intel environment. As a very rough rule of thumb I would say that a CPU emulation would run about 10 times slower than the actual CPU; and considering that the price for a mainframe is still up there in the tens of millions of USD, give or take, is this really something worth doing when you can get fairly hefty Dell server for a few thousand USD?
After all, the great strength of the mainframe is not so much that it is unbelievably powerful or fast (it isn't, actually), but that its HW is massively redundant, and that you can hot-swap just about every component up to, and including, the CPUs.
So, now they don't have to figure out where these soft targets are, they just go directly for the blurred areas on the map, right? Could it be that this hasn't been thought through?
I am a great fan of open games - like Crossfire or Mana World, but I find that I invariably get bored with a game after a relatively short while because it is too much of just one of two things. Perhaps the problem is that it is relatively easy to implement "killing" as the basic way to advance, whereas almost any other concept is difficult by comparison.
To be really long-term successful, I think an online game should cater for a wider variation of interests, like teaching, construction and exploration. I don't think graphics is all that important, as you can tell from my interests above; but a fantasy-universe where you can nurture several interests and styles of play would certainly catch my interest.
Employers are increasingly trolling the web for information about prospective employees
No they are not - "trolling" means "posting controversial, inflammatory, irrelevant or off-topic messages in an online community", which is a lot closer to what kdawson is doing with this.
By basing professional hiring decisions on candidates' personal lives and beliefs, employers are effectively legislating people's behavior, and they're creating an online environment where people can't express their true beliefs, state their unvarnished opinions, be themselves, and that runs contrary to the free, communal ethos of the Web
What a load of tosh. When you put things out in the public space, you have in effect decided that it isn't essential to keep it private; thinking otherwise is a bit like the joke where somebody says "Let's keep this our little secret" on air. The solution is not to make it "illegal" for employers to find what you have yourself made public, but for people to think once or twice before they go public.
Honestly, there's far too much of this "I want to have to fun, but I don't want to suffer the consequences" attitude around. Personally, I think if you are not prepared or able to think ahead in your private life, you shouldn't be given a job with too much responsibility.
Sound like a good investment of record company resources, anyone?
I think it is brilliant - the more they engage in this idiocy, the sooner they will collapse. I have, as you might guess, little sympathy for a recording industry that for decades has tried to monopolise our culture with bland muzak, boy/girl bands and all the other, vapid crap that's out there. The real musicians - the ones who don't just stand by the assemblyline, mechanically producing trivial variations over the same, tired old theme over and over - they are not going to suffer, because the fact of the matter is that is amazingly easy to produce good quality recordings now. And with the big monopolies gone, maybe we could see some real renewal of the music world.
The basis of socialism is the redistrubtion of wealth/resources "from each according to his ability, to each according to their need."
And a very appealing principle it is too; but it is no more than a principle - a guideline or ideal, if you will. As you will note, I did in fact argue that one can't implement pure socialism or communism; it is good to share, but we all need something we can call our own. No ideology or religion is more important than people; the goal of socialism - or indeed any ideology worth anything - is to make life good for as many people as possible. This obviously means that when we reach the point where we have to choose between our principles and what is good for people, it is the principles that should yield.
You seem to assume that socialism can't or mustn't change over time or adjust to reality; but of it can and should change as society develops. Marx, Engells and Lenin weren't the Holy Trinity and the Communist Manfesto isn't some holy scripture - it's just a statement of opinions about how society ought to be run, there's no need to get all religious about it.
I'll take the free market any day.
And you are welcome to it. Maybe when you one day are without any income and have no money to pay for hospital treatment for yourself or your wife and children etc, perhaps you will we it differently. Fortunately, you are allowed to change your mind if and when you are ready.
communism hasn't worked anywhere
Most families are working models of communism - the family shares its possessions etc. It's true that many of the states that have called themselves "Communist" have failed, most notably the Soviet Union, but the question still remains whether this was because of communism or because of other factors - such as the permanent state of conflict with the Western world, the general incompetence of its leaders, the extreme paranoia of the same or whatever. I would say that it is impossible to have a stable society that is based on constant oppression of the majority, there is nothing inherent in socialism that requires oppression.
The argument one sees elsewhere, that oppression becomes necessary "because there will always be some that are too selfish", is only valid in the special case where the state insists on an extreme form of "perfect" socialism; but that is the same whether you insist on pure capitalism, theocracy or just about anything else. If deviation from the ideal is not tolerated, oppression becomes necessary.
There are many stable countries in the world that are predominantly socialist - Scandinavia springs to mind, but China is a good example; China is still a communist society and likely to remain so for the foreseable future, not despite its opening up to the international community, but because of it. The openness has taken away much of the oppression and people don't feel the need to revolt.
We are more governmentally encumbered and less capitalist than China in many ways!
Funny you should say that. To my mind this is the spirit of socialism at its best - the people at the bottom working together rather than each individual competing against each other. Open source is another prime example of what socialism and communism was really about before powerhungry egomaniacs like Stalin and Lenin took out a patent on the idea.
We can now look forward to a more community driven approach to oppression.
The sad thing is that so much oppression is actually community driven - perhaps far more than the case where the government oppresses the people. It's even got a name:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jante_law
The Bush administration didn't do things because of idealism, they did them because of money and power
Well, to me that looks a lot like what certain aspects of American, political ideology is all about - money and power. Just because it isn't noble doesn't mean that it isn't idealism of sorts.
I'm still not sure if Bush was stupid or evil.
Oh, there is no doubt he was stupid, which isn't the same as being unintelligent. Stupidity, to my mind, is what you get when people have learned to avoid learning from new knowledge; and as always with learning, the more intelligent you are, the better you get, so it takes a very intelligent person to become very stupid.
Is he evil? Much of what he did was certainly evil, but no person is exclusively evil; I don' think it is possible.
... but don't make it out like they're just freeloading off everyone else.
I wasn't suggesting they were, I was only expressing my opinion, that it makes very little sense, whether in terms of basic fairness or economic reality, to give money to those who need it the least and then hope this will somehow makes the economy stronger and better. Trickle-down economics seems to be part of the Neo-Conservative faith, and according to my definition above a very stupid one, since experience has shown it to be false.
Should the rich pay a higher percent of their income than the not so rich? That's a good question - I think they should, but there is no absolute truth about this. To me it makes sense; a person can only meaningfully use a certain amount of money and other resources, whether that is the equivalent of $1M per year or whatever. Once you get over that limit, it no longer makes any sense that one person holds on to those resources, and it seems reasonable that they are shared to the benefit of the community in some way. It is quite possible that the state is not the best to decide how to share, but that is another matter.
As for the "gigantic tax-cuts" - when your personal income is an absurd several hundred millions per year, any tax-cut will be gigantic by any reasonable measure. A rich person gets a lot more mileage out of 1% than Joe Average. I wonder how much more the worst-off would have got if those whose income was over $1M p.a. hadn't got a tax-cut at all and the whole amount had been given to the poorest?
Stop playing stupid, and stop twisting words. If you want to comment on what I say, comment on the whole; the context is that when you pay your taxes it is voluntary - if you don't like paying taxes in America, you always have the option of going somewhere else or engaging in some of the legal tax-dodges. Once you have given the money away, it is no longer yours to spend. Shouldn't be too hard to grasp I would have thought.
I don't think they are interested in human rights but they understand the importance of uncorrupt institutions to prosperity.
I think you are probably wrong there. For one thing, Communism is, despite what we've all been told over and over, about the rights of common people; go and look it up if you care. They are not the same set of rights that people in the US subscribe to, but "The Universal Declaration of Human Rights" was, after all, something drawn up by the UN just after WWII - ie by the US, UK and France, mostly, and consequently it reflects values that are very Eurocentric and very Capitalistic.
Another thing is that people far too often assume that politicians in general are completely void of any sort of idealism and higher principles, which I think is manifestly untrue - even in America. Wasn't the problem with the Bush administration that they were too idealistic - that their belief in their ideology overruled their grasp of reality? A pragmatic leader would never have thrown the country into a war in Iraq or given gigantic tax cuts to the richest in the belief that this would somehow be good for everybody, in spite of what common sense and a hundred years of experience tells us.
In fact, I think politicians in general are more likely to be idealists than the average person. It's just that in the US, their ideology is very often some twisted version of fundamentalist Christianity or Ultra-Capitalism, whereas in China they are more likely to base their ideals on Communism - which is, when you think about it, a version of Humanism. To me, what makes the big difference is whether you believe your ideals are more important than people's lives and reality in general; and as far as I can see, the current Chinese leaders believe more in reality than in ideals. Which is good.
What's up with everybody using my money to make games these days.
If it was your money, it would be in your pocket and yours to spend, wouldn't it?
Tax is the contribution of the citizens towards the cost of running the state. The state in return provides certain services, roads, schools, military and a number of other things. Only a very minute part of your tax is spent on this sort of light entertainment - although I think this may be more in the category of edutainment, which is not a bad idea; too many people in America have no idea about astronomy and space technology, and a game like this might bring them a little bit closer to reality - and who knows, maybe even inspire some to learn more.
What makes me feel slightly uneasy about this is that these entangled photon are bound to be flitting around in nature all the time - and while there are, admittedly, some that I wouldn't mind getting entangled with, there are more that I would rather not be too intimate with.
In fact, the company's search engines are already known to be rigged - this is why the first results are always the sponsored ones. This in combination with their monopoly is a potential threat to such things as the free exchange of information; not unlike when a state has monopoly over the newsmedia. I'm sure you can see how easy it would be to use an information resource like that to shape public opinion.
Yes, give him a break. I mean, how long did it take before people stopped fawning over GWB and his shallow posturing? As I recall, about 6 or 7 years - until people realized how much crap he had landed us all in with his uninformed decisions and tunnel vision. And how long has Obama been in office? Just over a month. I mean, aren't you a little bit fast on the trigger? I can only conclude that you either expect him to possess god-like powers or that you don't want him to succeed, because common sense says that if you are new on the job, you need at least a couple of months to really settle in. So give him a break.
commercially operated juvenile detention center
It is truly sad to see how judges and police in the States are willing - eager, even - to squash the lives of a young person who has done something stupid. There is definitely something wrong with the minds of people like that. But what really startled me was the phrase "commercially operated juvenile detention center"; to me that sounds like something out of a medieval horror movie - in effect, a company that on one hand receives public funding, and on the other hand has access to slave labour. I can't begin to express how deeply that disgusts me.
I would say, if you feel worried about this, it makes sense to think about what to do about it. I am not sure that employers would check people out as much as rumour has it, but they might, of course. I think if a company wants you, they are not going to check your internet profiles and then simply dismiss you out of hand because they see something they don't like, that might refer to you - they will at most confront you on the issue and hear what you have to say.