'Free speech' has become a mantra for bullying the people whose opinion is that there are things they don't like and don't want to see; but that in itself becomes a kind of censorship. Not by the government, but by other groups - and it is extremely easy to bombard websites with updates that drown out opinions that you as a person or group don't like.
Ideally, if all people were honest and genuinely played by the rules of good citizenship etc, free speech would be truly free, but it only takes a small minority of bullies to take that away. Governments in democratic countries don't actually want to limit people's freedom of speech, because when people feel they can let off steam, they are less likely to want to upset things too much. It is the different bullying groups, the extremists, religious or otherwise, who talk the loudest about "freedom" and constitutional right, and they are also the ones who are working the hardest to take that away from the general public.
No one is being "constantly affronted by the depravities of deranged fools." What we have is one political faction trying to silence another by declaring it "offensive" and attacking its source of funding by going after advertisers. Now the censors at Google can go wild banning their political opponents under the guise of fiscal responsibility.
Oh dear, you really are taking this hard, aren't you? You have the freedom of speech, even if many would sometimes wish you would stop using it; but you don't have a right to be heard, and you don't have the right to use resources that belong to a private business unless they give you that right. If YouTube's customers (the advertisers) or their goods (the users) complain and start walking away, then it is common sense for them to try to do something about it, and they have every right to do so.
Well, strictly speaking, there was a sharp spike in temperatures some 10 million years after the dinosaurs wen't extinct, if I remember correctly, but what is unprecedented, is that it is changing so fast - about 10 times as fast as that spike, and that should be cause for deep concern. We simply don't know that the world's ecosystems will be able to adapt fast enough. Human lifespan is too short for us to really see how fast the changes are - but it does actually come to something when these changes are so rapid that it has changed appreciably within living memory. I remember that we used to have snow every winter that lay on the ground for at least a couple of weeks; now I see the first spring flowers around Christmas. If that was just me and my anecdotes, then it wouldn't matter, but when it is confirmed by everything science can throw at it, then it becomes significant. Especially when we know that these transitions follow something like an exponential curve for the first half of the transition; so when we are seeing temperatures somewhat now, it may be the changes in the future will be much, much faster, at least for a while. We don't really know without doing more science.
They can either honor the ethos that brought all the eyes to the videos or they can die slowly trying to suck the cock of Wall Street while losing viewers to other video channels. That whole market forces thing is a bitch.
So it is. Just to clarify, the market in this case is the advertisers, not the people who come to YouTube; they are the livestock that they are trying to sell. So, the market is now deciding that they don't want this sort of cattle; they want people that would potentially be interested in becoming customers of the companies they are advertising for. And the thing is - idiots that keep posting extreme materials online constitute only a tiny minority, but they drive away the huge majority, who don't want to be in an environment where they are constantly affronted by the depravities of deranged fools. YouTube's owners are no angels, but they do know where the money comes from.
Easy, if you don't have a social media account, your visa is denied. No skin off our asses.
Ah, yet another 'easy solution'. Yes, I suppose you can be an idiot about if you like, but the thing is, if you consistently behave like an idiot, you will end up being considered an idiot. I can sort of follow the thinking behind this sort of rule, but it is just so heart-breakingly naive. What will happen is that good, honest, well-intentioned people will, as always, be the ones that lose out; the ones that genuinely don't use social media will be under suspicion, whereas if you are an extremist with a busy life on social media, you will just extend the double-life you are probably already living, and have a social media persona that is all about "America is the greatest, Amen, I love democracy, ain't Trump just great?" which they and their pals can laugh themselves silly about, while they continue their real activities under an assumed name. No sweat. And on top of this, the good, patriotic people that make up the majority of the security establishments in the US will loathe being made to act like stupid bullies, so after some time they will probably want to leave - and then all you'll have is the leftovers, the ones that enjoy bullying. How is that good for America?
It is easy to lose sight of what the actual goal is here: to reduce the number of accidents. Fines or other punishment can have an effect, but only if it motivates drivers to drive more considerately. Something that is used in UK is the idea of adding penalty points to people's license - when you reach 12 points, you generally lose your license, and it does seem to work to some degree, altough there are those who don't care. For them there is the option of banning them from driving, after which you may go to jail, if you are caught driving.
I'm not convinced that using only penalties is the best way - it would be better if there was a carrot to go with the stick, although I can't think of how that would work. There have been experiments with turning off all traffic signals at junctions, and it seems to make drivers much more careful about how they drive, but my suspicion is that it also makes traffic much slower and thus congested.
You may have to go fast enough to red-shift the wavelength of the reflected light below infra-red. If your car is that fast, I think you will have more pressing matters to attend to, like staying on the planet.
I'm not sure whether you are criticising the way DRM is defined at the moment to only favour the big entertainment producers, or you are against DRM in any form. Given the massive, commercial interests that drive much of the internet, I think it is unrealistic to expect that we can get rid of DRM completely, but I agree that it needs to be rebalanced, probably in a quite radical way. However, I think DRM is only a corner of a much wider problem, namely the problem of what information it should be possible to own in general, how and by whom. Scientific research results should, IMO be assumed to be in the public domain as a starting point, unless a good case can be made for ownership, since they are potentially of importance for society as a whole and are often produced with some form of public support, whether it is visible in the form of direct funding or not. On the other hand, what can be broadly called 'entertainment' - ie. books, movies, computer games, paintings etc - are not fundamentally important for society as a whole, but how these should be owned and by whom is open to debate, and I think it is wrong to leave the public - the potential customers - out of that discussion.
I also saw somewhere years ago a proof something along the lines that quantum systems mathematically couldn't be built on top of non-quantum systems. I wish I could find that again. Though its possibly-to-likely that it wasn't as solid as it sounded at the time or it (and similar proofs) would be pasted all over the internet.
Well, I suppose it depends on what kind of proof. One of the things about QM is that it is such a horribly complicated mess, mathematically - GR, relatively speaking, is simple: it's just differential geometry, give or take a few bits (not that it isn't hard enough, though). QM is so full of things that have the look and feel of rules-of-thumb or patches to repair holes in the theory, and the maths is still running to catch up. If it is something that interests you (a lot), there are three lecture series on youtube that you might enjoy:
They are all given by Dr Frederic Schuller, who is a phenomenally good lecturer. What I find refreshing is that he teaches the maths behind modern physics as the primary subject, rather than as something you unfortunately have to deal with to solve the equations. I think it is essential to understand the maths to understand the physics.
I feel the same way about string theory, though one thing string theory has produced is some pretty useful mathematical tools
Well, string theory at least starts out along the same lines as Einstein's work with Kaluza and Klein, which I think gives it some credibility, although it is still largely speculative. The thing I object to with theories like the holographic and other, similar speculations, is that they take the quantum mechanical view as dogma and assume without argument, that general relativity must somehow be derived from that - that gravity must be "quantised". The reality is that we already, somewhere, know that both theories are of limited scope - that they are essentially 'wrong' - and that both must be modified. The theory that unites the two will no doubt turn out to not only solve the problems with singularities in GR, but also derive QM's funny bits (like Heisenberg's indeterminacy and the whole business of the collapse of the wave function etc) from deeper structure. My bet is that it will come from some really surprising, but fundamentally continuous geometry of space-time.
...spider's venom... harmless chemical...shuts down an ion channel... risk of causing hemorrhages.
I think it is irresponsible to talk about things like this in such a cavalier way. A compund that comes from the venom of a funnel-web spider, shuts down ion channels and may cause haemorrhages in the brain is hardly "harmless". Water is harmless, in moderation, just for comparison. Slashdot still tries to sell itself as "news for nerds", so please try to at least not dumbing down science and technology. Your readers are interested in these subjects and are at least trrying to understand, so try to respect that instead of treating us all like idiots.
We'd lose a conventional war with China, and going nuclear is too much, even for Donald Trump.
For now; with a president as thin-skinned and paranoid as Trump, who knows what will happen? Just look at the nonsense about Obama "spying" on him; and he has barely started in this job.
As for winning a war - when has the US been involved on the winning side in any war since WWII? Maybe I'm being unfair, but I think you haven't won a war, if you still have an enemy afterwards. WWII was well and truly won, for the most part, but since then, it has at best been an exercise in producing enemies. As for nuclear war - nobody wins a nuclear war, but perhaps China still has a minor advantage, since they have many more people; the chance that there may be stray survivors is higher.
The reason is not that they are out of ideas, the reason is that they are lazy and just re-use what did work one more time.
It's because of "corporate thinking": big businesses always talk about 'innovation' and that sort of thing, but they are too timid to actually go for anything truly innovative. Lazy is perhaps not the word - they are mostly bean counters, and even if they get the odd, wild idea, they are too anal-retentive to let it grow, and by the same token, they reject any really creative idea from others. With a bit of luck, we will see somebody else take over from Hollywood; China perhaps?
Chinese films aren't quite there yet, though; but they have made quite a few that are worthwhile, and they are very different from the run-of -the-mill Hollywood stuff. Chinese sci-fi books are also beginning to get translated into English; ATM I'm reading 'Three body problem' by Cixin Liu. It keeps surprising me - sometimes it feels a bit like a manga, with apparently shallow characters and exaggerated emotions, but then you are hit with a surprising depth of insight. It's definitely not Western sci-fi; the science initially feels very mundane, almost trivial, but little by little I think you get the feeling that there is a lot of real insight just under the surface. Any way - that was a bit of a side-track.
Unless they are beating up Trump supporters or "punching a Nazi". Then the clearly unbiased media will simply excuse or laud you. Not unlike how Obama went to a very racist church for ages yet got a pass.
If you mean attacking other people without provocation, then of course the same rules apply, whether the victim is of one kind or another. The question will always be whether the attack was unprovoked. As for unbiased media - I have seen BBC cover attacks on rightwing groups in the same way as attacks on leftwing groups; they always tend to concentrate on the facts of the events.
As for Obama and his church - personally, I think you have to be a bit weakminded to be religious, but apparently you can't hold public office in the US without pretending. When I heard about that pasto, I though Obama should have denounced him on the spot, but then I would find that easy anyway, since religion doesn't matter to me.
After all, the quickest way to defeat "We are the 99%" is to fragment them into many smaller groups...
There was never a united 99% - not as a political unit with a clear purpose, or any purpose at all. You let the American Dream slip out of your hands, because you fell for the corporate liars, the McCarthies and their comsumerism.
Not all of it - Tom Cruise is such an appallingly poor actor, so I never finished watching it. It's a good story, though, if a bit dated by now, just a shame about him.
However, you are exaggerating wildly, if you compare that story line to what is common in contemporary, criminal law. I imagine one could argue that we could decide all criminal cases from first principles; so that it wouldn't be criminal to drive under the influence or shooting your gun in a crowd, it would only be a crime if somebody was objectively hurt by it. But don't you think that there are cases where it is obvious that certain behaviours will, quite objectively lead to certain undesirable outcomes? And should we,as a society, not strive to avoid things like unnecessary deaths?
I think the whole point of Minority Report is something else: firstly, that calculating the behaviour of complex systems is chaotic, and secondly, that even if it were possible, the major weakness of such a system will always be the temptation to hide the unfavourable results in order to make more profit. IOW, it is a criticism of capitalism.
I fully agree that all speech should be legal, and thankfully in the US we have a Constitutional protection (for now) on free speech.
Sure - but with all freedom comes responsibility. If you lie for profit, it is fraud, and you should be punished accordingly. If you stir up hatred, you incite to violence, and should face consequences. This is not about thought policing, it is about observable consequences: if some white supremacist tells his followers that he thinks they should go out and beat up blacks, and they then go and do it, then the consequence is real. If a Muslim or Christian preacher stirs up their followers, who then go and commit crimes - like attacking abortion clinics - then we are talking about real consequences. The people who are inciting these things are hate preachers, and it is right that they are brought to justice. I don't think there can be any question about this - the only question is whether we should wait until after the fact - when somebody has been murdered for example - or whether we should go after these people, when it is clear what they are doing and what the consequences are likely to be.
Are you saying that we should give staff busywork so that they'll be around if we need them for something important later?
I think you already have enough data to answer your own question. What I am saying is that management should try to think a bit further ahead than to their next bonues payment. As an engineer, I have seen over and over how management jump on the latest money saving fad, and then struggle to keep up quality and production as a direct consequence. Just take the outsourcing idiocy: Managers go "Oh look, we can hire SW engineers in India and China for 10% of the cost, let's fire our seasoned, local people and hire some cheap ones instead" - and it always results in months or years of chaos. This is not because Chinese or Indian engineers are worse than American or European ones, but developing software is not like digging trenches or laying bricks. The ability to write code is only a very small part of it - there is a whole world of soft skills needed, centered around things like communication within the team, expectations that team members have of each others and of management; managers somehow rarely seem able to understand this.
If the management of an apparently well-run business are not able to find new, useful things for their engineers to do, then that is a symptom of management failure. An engineer with long experience represents a significant value, but in terms of investment by the company and in potential, future earnings for the company. Who, in their right mind, would throw out something valuable just like that?
I could replace 4-5 full time engineers with Jenkins and some continuous integration scripts...
You may be able to do so, but it may not be wise, necessarily. For each, highly skilled engineer you get rid of, you also give up an amount of expertise, that will be expensive to replace, should you need it later. For example if the company needs to expand its business, change its product line or whatever; efficiency savings (just like outsourcing) often look better on paper than when you get to implementing them.
If you want to introduce new methods and technologies, you have to sell the idea - not only to management, but also to the engineers. And it is better to introduce improvements gradually, for every step involving the engineers in the process. Nobody likes to have changes imposed - especially engineers - so you have to work with them and get them on your side. If you are not able to do that, then you still have something to learn.
Never heard the phrase "run it up the flagpole" but if you find the question "how will this scale?" annoying, you may want to choose a new line of business.
Couldn't you catch this kind of thing with the obscenity filter?
- oops, shouldn't reply to myself, but one more thing: I'm not saying that blockchain or anonymous, electronic money isn't possible, or that it isn't possible to avoid middlemen, only that I think some sort of centralised backer is necessary, in my view.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's an interesting article: http://www.freepresshouston.co...
'Free speech' has become a mantra for bullying the people whose opinion is that there are things they don't like and don't want to see; but that in itself becomes a kind of censorship. Not by the government, but by other groups - and it is extremely easy to bombard websites with updates that drown out opinions that you as a person or group don't like.
Ideally, if all people were honest and genuinely played by the rules of good citizenship etc, free speech would be truly free, but it only takes a small minority of bullies to take that away. Governments in democratic countries don't actually want to limit people's freedom of speech, because when people feel they can let off steam, they are less likely to want to upset things too much. It is the different bullying groups, the extremists, religious or otherwise, who talk the loudest about "freedom" and constitutional right, and they are also the ones who are working the hardest to take that away from the general public.
No one is being "constantly affronted by the depravities of deranged fools." What we have is one political faction trying to silence another by declaring it "offensive" and attacking its source of funding by going after advertisers. Now the censors at Google can go wild banning their political opponents under the guise of fiscal responsibility.
Oh dear, you really are taking this hard, aren't you? You have the freedom of speech, even if many would sometimes wish you would stop using it; but you don't have a right to be heard, and you don't have the right to use resources that belong to a private business unless they give you that right. If YouTube's customers (the advertisers) or their goods (the users) complain and start walking away, then it is common sense for them to try to do something about it, and they have every right to do so.
Nope, nothing like this has ever happened before.
Well, strictly speaking, there was a sharp spike in temperatures some 10 million years after the dinosaurs wen't extinct, if I remember correctly, but what is unprecedented, is that it is changing so fast - about 10 times as fast as that spike, and that should be cause for deep concern. We simply don't know that the world's ecosystems will be able to adapt fast enough. Human lifespan is too short for us to really see how fast the changes are - but it does actually come to something when these changes are so rapid that it has changed appreciably within living memory. I remember that we used to have snow every winter that lay on the ground for at least a couple of weeks; now I see the first spring flowers around Christmas. If that was just me and my anecdotes, then it wouldn't matter, but when it is confirmed by everything science can throw at it, then it becomes significant. Especially when we know that these transitions follow something like an exponential curve for the first half of the transition; so when we are seeing temperatures somewhat now, it may be the changes in the future will be much, much faster, at least for a while. We don't really know without doing more science.
They can either honor the ethos that brought all the eyes to the videos or they can die slowly trying to suck the cock of Wall Street while losing viewers to other video channels. That whole market forces thing is a bitch.
So it is. Just to clarify, the market in this case is the advertisers, not the people who come to YouTube; they are the livestock that they are trying to sell. So, the market is now deciding that they don't want this sort of cattle; they want people that would potentially be interested in becoming customers of the companies they are advertising for. And the thing is - idiots that keep posting extreme materials online constitute only a tiny minority, but they drive away the huge majority, who don't want to be in an environment where they are constantly affronted by the depravities of deranged fools. YouTube's owners are no angels, but they do know where the money comes from.
I mean breastfeeding... FFS... it is a normal part of life, completely non sexual, and in no way affects anyone other than mother and child.
How can you say such a thing; if God had meant women to breast-feed, he would have created them with,... er, never mind.
Easy, if you don't have a social media account, your visa is denied. No skin off our asses.
Ah, yet another 'easy solution'. Yes, I suppose you can be an idiot about if you like, but the thing is, if you consistently behave like an idiot, you will end up being considered an idiot. I can sort of follow the thinking behind this sort of rule, but it is just so heart-breakingly naive. What will happen is that good, honest, well-intentioned people will, as always, be the ones that lose out; the ones that genuinely don't use social media will be under suspicion, whereas if you are an extremist with a busy life on social media, you will just extend the double-life you are probably already living, and have a social media persona that is all about "America is the greatest, Amen, I love democracy, ain't Trump just great?" which they and their pals can laugh themselves silly about, while they continue their real activities under an assumed name. No sweat. And on top of this, the good, patriotic people that make up the majority of the security establishments in the US will loathe being made to act like stupid bullies, so after some time they will probably want to leave - and then all you'll have is the leftovers, the ones that enjoy bullying. How is that good for America?
It is easy to lose sight of what the actual goal is here: to reduce the number of accidents. Fines or other punishment can have an effect, but only if it motivates drivers to drive more considerately. Something that is used in UK is the idea of adding penalty points to people's license - when you reach 12 points, you generally lose your license, and it does seem to work to some degree, altough there are those who don't care. For them there is the option of banning them from driving, after which you may go to jail, if you are caught driving.
I'm not convinced that using only penalties is the best way - it would be better if there was a carrot to go with the stick, although I can't think of how that would work. There have been experiments with turning off all traffic signals at junctions, and it seems to make drivers much more careful about how they drive, but my suspicion is that it also makes traffic much slower and thus congested.
You may have to go fast enough to red-shift the wavelength of the reflected light below infra-red. If your car is that fast, I think you will have more pressing matters to attend to, like staying on the planet.
I'm not sure whether you are criticising the way DRM is defined at the moment to only favour the big entertainment producers, or you are against DRM in any form. Given the massive, commercial interests that drive much of the internet, I think it is unrealistic to expect that we can get rid of DRM completely, but I agree that it needs to be rebalanced, probably in a quite radical way. However, I think DRM is only a corner of a much wider problem, namely the problem of what information it should be possible to own in general, how and by whom. Scientific research results should, IMO be assumed to be in the public domain as a starting point, unless a good case can be made for ownership, since they are potentially of importance for society as a whole and are often produced with some form of public support, whether it is visible in the form of direct funding or not. On the other hand, what can be broadly called 'entertainment' - ie. books, movies, computer games, paintings etc - are not fundamentally important for society as a whole, but how these should be owned and by whom is open to debate, and I think it is wrong to leave the public - the potential customers - out of that discussion.
I also saw somewhere years ago a proof something along the lines that quantum systems mathematically couldn't be built on top of non-quantum systems. I wish I could find that again. Though its possibly-to-likely that it wasn't as solid as it sounded at the time or it (and similar proofs) would be pasted all over the internet.
Well, I suppose it depends on what kind of proof. One of the things about QM is that it is such a horribly complicated mess, mathematically - GR, relatively speaking, is simple: it's just differential geometry, give or take a few bits (not that it isn't hard enough, though). QM is so full of things that have the look and feel of rules-of-thumb or patches to repair holes in the theory, and the maths is still running to catch up. If it is something that interests you (a lot), there are three lecture series on youtube that you might enjoy:
The WE-Heraeus International Winter School on Gravity and Light: https://www.youtube.com/channe...
Lectures on Geometrical Anatomy of Theoretical Physics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Lectures on Quantum Theory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
They are all given by Dr Frederic Schuller, who is a phenomenally good lecturer. What I find refreshing is that he teaches the maths behind modern physics as the primary subject, rather than as something you unfortunately have to deal with to solve the equations. I think it is essential to understand the maths to understand the physics.
I feel the same way about string theory, though one thing string theory has produced is some pretty useful mathematical tools
Well, string theory at least starts out along the same lines as Einstein's work with Kaluza and Klein, which I think gives it some credibility, although it is still largely speculative. The thing I object to with theories like the holographic and other, similar speculations, is that they take the quantum mechanical view as dogma and assume without argument, that general relativity must somehow be derived from that - that gravity must be "quantised". The reality is that we already, somewhere, know that both theories are of limited scope - that they are essentially 'wrong' - and that both must be modified. The theory that unites the two will no doubt turn out to not only solve the problems with singularities in GR, but also derive QM's funny bits (like Heisenberg's indeterminacy and the whole business of the collapse of the wave function etc) from deeper structure. My bet is that it will come from some really surprising, but fundamentally continuous geometry of space-time.
Consider the folowing, quoted from the summary:
...spider's venom... harmless chemical ...shuts down an ion channel... risk of causing hemorrhages.
I think it is irresponsible to talk about things like this in such a cavalier way. A compund that comes from the venom of a funnel-web spider, shuts down ion channels and may cause haemorrhages in the brain is hardly "harmless". Water is harmless, in moderation, just for comparison. Slashdot still tries to sell itself as "news for nerds", so please try to at least not dumbing down science and technology. Your readers are interested in these subjects and are at least trrying to understand, so try to respect that instead of treating us all like idiots.
Not to mention the many tunnels on the canal network in UK (which dates back to the 1700s), but I think that is perhaps stretching the point.
300 meters != 384 feet
Depends on who you are - I saw this guy in circus once; I don't think it would take more than one of his feet to make up 1 meter.
Define "too old" to work in tech?
Too old to work in tech: aka Dead
We'd lose a conventional war with China, and going nuclear is too much, even for Donald Trump.
For now; with a president as thin-skinned and paranoid as Trump, who knows what will happen? Just look at the nonsense about Obama "spying" on him; and he has barely started in this job.
As for winning a war - when has the US been involved on the winning side in any war since WWII? Maybe I'm being unfair, but I think you haven't won a war, if you still have an enemy afterwards. WWII was well and truly won, for the most part, but since then, it has at best been an exercise in producing enemies. As for nuclear war - nobody wins a nuclear war, but perhaps China still has a minor advantage, since they have many more people; the chance that there may be stray survivors is higher.
The reason is not that they are out of ideas, the reason is that they are lazy and just re-use what did work one more time.
It's because of "corporate thinking": big businesses always talk about 'innovation' and that sort of thing, but they are too timid to actually go for anything truly innovative. Lazy is perhaps not the word - they are mostly bean counters, and even if they get the odd, wild idea, they are too anal-retentive to let it grow, and by the same token, they reject any really creative idea from others. With a bit of luck, we will see somebody else take over from Hollywood; China perhaps?
Chinese films aren't quite there yet, though; but they have made quite a few that are worthwhile, and they are very different from the run-of -the-mill Hollywood stuff. Chinese sci-fi books are also beginning to get translated into English; ATM I'm reading 'Three body problem' by Cixin Liu. It keeps surprising me - sometimes it feels a bit like a manga, with apparently shallow characters and exaggerated emotions, but then you are hit with a surprising depth of insight. It's definitely not Western sci-fi; the science initially feels very mundane, almost trivial, but little by little I think you get the feeling that there is a lot of real insight just under the surface. Any way - that was a bit of a side-track.
I'm Linux user too, but I think it's great news. Linux needs competition to keep us on our toeas, so we don't get smug and lazy.
Unless they are beating up Trump supporters or "punching a Nazi". Then the clearly unbiased media will simply excuse or laud you. Not unlike how Obama went to a very racist church for ages yet got a pass.
If you mean attacking other people without provocation, then of course the same rules apply, whether the victim is of one kind or another. The question will always be whether the attack was unprovoked. As for unbiased media - I have seen BBC cover attacks on rightwing groups in the same way as attacks on leftwing groups; they always tend to concentrate on the facts of the events.
As for Obama and his church - personally, I think you have to be a bit weakminded to be religious, but apparently you can't hold public office in the US without pretending. When I heard about that pasto, I though Obama should have denounced him on the spot, but then I would find that easy anyway, since religion doesn't matter to me.
After all, the quickest way to defeat "We are the 99%" is to fragment them into many smaller groups...
There was never a united 99% - not as a political unit with a clear purpose, or any purpose at all. You let the American Dream slip out of your hands, because you fell for the corporate liars, the McCarthies and their comsumerism.
Not all of it - Tom Cruise is such an appallingly poor actor, so I never finished watching it. It's a good story, though, if a bit dated by now, just a shame about him.
However, you are exaggerating wildly, if you compare that story line to what is common in contemporary, criminal law. I imagine one could argue that we could decide all criminal cases from first principles; so that it wouldn't be criminal to drive under the influence or shooting your gun in a crowd, it would only be a crime if somebody was objectively hurt by it. But don't you think that there are cases where it is obvious that certain behaviours will, quite objectively lead to certain undesirable outcomes? And should we ,as a society, not strive to avoid things like unnecessary deaths?
I think the whole point of Minority Report is something else: firstly, that calculating the behaviour of complex systems is chaotic, and secondly, that even if it were possible, the major weakness of such a system will always be the temptation to hide the unfavourable results in order to make more profit. IOW, it is a criticism of capitalism.
I fully agree that all speech should be legal, and thankfully in the US we have a Constitutional protection (for now) on free speech.
Sure - but with all freedom comes responsibility. If you lie for profit, it is fraud, and you should be punished accordingly. If you stir up hatred, you incite to violence, and should face consequences. This is not about thought policing, it is about observable consequences: if some white supremacist tells his followers that he thinks they should go out and beat up blacks, and they then go and do it, then the consequence is real. If a Muslim or Christian preacher stirs up their followers, who then go and commit crimes - like attacking abortion clinics - then we are talking about real consequences. The people who are inciting these things are hate preachers, and it is right that they are brought to justice. I don't think there can be any question about this - the only question is whether we should wait until after the fact - when somebody has been murdered for example - or whether we should go after these people, when it is clear what they are doing and what the consequences are likely to be.
Are you saying that we should give staff busywork so that they'll be around if we need them for something important later?
I think you already have enough data to answer your own question. What I am saying is that management should try to think a bit further ahead than to their next bonues payment. As an engineer, I have seen over and over how management jump on the latest money saving fad, and then struggle to keep up quality and production as a direct consequence. Just take the outsourcing idiocy: Managers go "Oh look, we can hire SW engineers in India and China for 10% of the cost, let's fire our seasoned, local people and hire some cheap ones instead" - and it always results in months or years of chaos. This is not because Chinese or Indian engineers are worse than American or European ones, but developing software is not like digging trenches or laying bricks. The ability to write code is only a very small part of it - there is a whole world of soft skills needed, centered around things like communication within the team, expectations that team members have of each others and of management; managers somehow rarely seem able to understand this.
If the management of an apparently well-run business are not able to find new, useful things for their engineers to do, then that is a symptom of management failure. An engineer with long experience represents a significant value, but in terms of investment by the company and in potential, future earnings for the company. Who, in their right mind, would throw out something valuable just like that?
I could replace 4-5 full time engineers with Jenkins and some continuous integration scripts...
You may be able to do so, but it may not be wise, necessarily. For each, highly skilled engineer you get rid of, you also give up an amount of expertise, that will be expensive to replace, should you need it later. For example if the company needs to expand its business, change its product line or whatever; efficiency savings (just like outsourcing) often look better on paper than when you get to implementing them.
If you want to introduce new methods and technologies, you have to sell the idea - not only to management, but also to the engineers. And it is better to introduce improvements gradually, for every step involving the engineers in the process. Nobody likes to have changes imposed - especially engineers - so you have to work with them and get them on your side. If you are not able to do that, then you still have something to learn.
Never heard the phrase "run it up the flagpole" but if you find the question "how will this scale?" annoying, you may want to choose a new line of business.
Couldn't you catch this kind of thing with the obscenity filter?
- oops, shouldn't reply to myself, but one more thing: I'm not saying that blockchain or anonymous, electronic money isn't possible, or that it isn't possible to avoid middlemen, only that I think some sort of centralised backer is necessary, in my view.