The idea was to show that religions are ridiculous, not to join the ranks of the bullshit peddlers.
Well, they should have thought about that before they went down this path. Now it is going to be taken deeply serious, and we are going to see the first schisms and religious wars in a few years.
Now, I'm beginning to look forward to the time when you can get married in online games.
Wow, i've never heard that one before. I make a statement the SJW's dont like and its because you think I'm in the closet. How novel! I suspect you are the gay one or british, same difference, lol.
We live and learn:-) Enlighten me, what is an SJW?
Still, I have trouble understanding why it is that some men are misogynists - so I try to make some wild guesses. Perhaps you have a better explanation? I am indeed British - not gay. I know, it's hard to tell the difference, but the slightly pained expression and awkward gait has another explanation: The Tory Government, who have a preference for, shall we say, approaching us from behind.
And because of that change, the planet is safe now!
I think you probably know better than that. The fact that we have actually been able to agree about a somewhat clear wording is remarkable, especially when you consider how far away everybody was from each other in Copenhagen. But of course, if it was only up to what the governmets' negotiators were able to do, then it would indeed be nothing - what makes this rather more hopeful is the fact that business has come on boards to agreat extent, and that there is optimism about a way forward, that may even mean new business opportunities. It isn't going to be easy - nobody imagines that, but we may have crossed a watershed now, and it just might be that we finally begin to move in the right direction.
OTOH - mistakes do happen. Negotiating a treaty between 100s of nations is not something where you can play silly games with words. Children do that; governments have to go back to their parliaments, congresses or maybe even populations where it will be scrutinised in great detail. A small, unfortunate wording would have been very embarrassing, of course, but nothing more than that.
If being gay is OK, then it's hardly a slander? But it is not uncommon for gays, who have yet to come out, to harbour rather cramped views on things like women, politics or being gay, to name but a few. And when you seem to be really quite misogynistic in your pronouncements, then it is not unreasonable to guess that you have reasons for favouring men - being gay is one such reason. But most gay men I know, don't feel hostile to women - it isn't a very wild guess to suspect that you don't feel good about yourself, since you seem to have a need to try to put half of the human population down. And if my chain of reasoning is correct, then the best way to get to feel better is to come out and be what is natural for you.
Farcebook for being a shit in general, racist people, or a country with a bug up its oh-so-righteous ass about expressing negative opinions/outlooks? All of the above? Everybody in the world?
Expressing negative opinions is all part of what makes democracy work - but there is a big difference between expressing opinions and being destructive. Vandalism, apart from harming somebody's property, is also a way to intimidate people, and intimidation has no place in any debate. At least not any debate that wants to achieve a fair and balanced compromise.
That said, graffiti isn't always bad; and it's hardly ever dangerous. Personally, I like graffiti, at least when it is well made; there are some very clever people out there, who express themselves that way.
Well, I'm worried about the fact that nobody can say for sure that solar panels don't cause cancer. What other things are they hiding from us? Like, nobody has assured us that solar panel aren't causing tsunamis or earthquakes, or price increases on beer.
An account repeatedly posting links to the same website, forbes.com. That website is full of ads, which are being shown to the audience that clicks through from Slashdot.
Happily, I use adblock, noscript, privacy badger,..., so I don't see the ads. But apart from that, I have learned to recognise the signs - the vaguely scientific stuff, 'on-a-grand-scale' non-news etc. It is always being trumpeted out as 'Finally We Understand...', and it invariably turns out to be big, glossy pictures, florid language and trivia about well-known phenomena.
The fact that this is happening again and again is no coincidence. There is clearly collusion and someone is getting paid.
It is called fabulous things like 'The New Economy', and yes, it is mostly bogus - very close to outright fraud, because it is all about selling advertising at as little cost as possible. It is Capitalism, Jim, but not as we know it. Oh, for the days when that was all about working hard, being clever, getting wealthier by being better at providing things of real value (if ever there was such a time).
Whatever - if Obama was to declare that Christmas falls in December, there would be a storm of protests from so-called freedom advocates. He could probably push through a complete ban on encryption by declaring that it is a human right to encrypt things.
The thing to keep in mind is that in China most drivers are still relatively new - they went from nearly no cars to jam packed in what seems like 20 years. On top of that, from my visits to China, I have got the impression that traffic rules are optional (although the Chinese will strongly deny this); this is slowly changing. And the final thing that makes Chinese traffic seem chaotic to visitors is the fact that many of the rules are slightly different in surprising ways - in Europe, for example, red light simply means STOP! - but in China, you are allowed to turn right at red lights. It is also acceptable, if not actually legal, to take some rather exotic left turns (when the light is green, that is) across the approching traffic in the opposite direction, if you are daring enough.
Coming from UK, I have had a hard time getting used to driving in Beijing - in London, for example, people will routinely help each other, especially in dense traffic: you let other drivers in front of you if they come in from a side road, just like you pull over to make room for emergency vehicles. Not so in Beijing; the number of times I have been shocked by the blatant attempts at cutting me off, when I felt it was clear that I would like to get into another lane (like when my lane is blocked). The trick seems to be that you use the horn to say "get out of the way", so perhaps it is just a question of me having to learn the right "body language".
I remember being horrified in one town at the number of intersections with no stop signs or traffic lights and drivers just pretty much doing whatever they felt like.
Interestingly, there have been experiments in some towns in Europe, I think, with removing traffic lights at road crossings - and it turns out that people usually start driving much more carefully, and the traffic isn't actually slowed down dramatically by it. At the end of the day, most of our impression of drivers in other countries being poor drivers is probably down to our expectations not matching what people in those countries find quite obvious. You can see it to some extent with American tourists in London; some have a really hard time with the fact that roads are not laid out in a grid and numbered. To me, that is the right way; you don't want to live on chess board.
Sometimes - but pure coincidence, or chance, is not likely to be persistent. It's like rolling dice: you may get a series of sexes, but if it goes on indefinitely, then the suspicion must be that there is something dodgy going on.
I am a developer, I have been a developer for a number of decades,...
Me too - and I agree. Well, mostly. I think these fads are really just about management trying (and failing) to catch up with what developers are. Agile is really just about trying to formalise what a sensible development team already does: talk to each other, make changes to designs when needed etc. The reason it fails is probably that in formalising the process, they try to introduce yet another one-size-fits-all concept, and developers are just not like that. A sales team perhaps, would like it - sales people often seem to enjoy the superficial ceremonial rah-rah, but engineers tend to think much deeper than that and reject it. Perhaps we shouldn't always, but there you are...
'Devops' is something different, I think. Ideally - or naively, perhaps - you would expect it to be something like sysadmins who know how to develop code (and do this as a large part of their jobs). In reality it seems that management thinks of this role as something like an automation process where you can let unskilled labourers push the buttons on machines that do what used to be done by highly skilled craftsmen. Whether it can really work in the long run remains to be seen; automation is certainly helpful in a cloud environment, where you may be handling 1000s of nearly identical systems, but somewhere in the process you really, really need to have people that are very insightful into the whole setup, and that is quite often missing.
By the same token, you don't get fat by eating too much - you eat too much because being fat makes you do it, right? It is correct that correlation is not proof of causation; but it narrows the choices down - correlation means things are connected, one way or the other. Either one causes the other, or they share a root cause. Which one you decide to go with is up to your own judgement - considering what we already know about things like the harmful effects of stress and the benefits of exercise, I would say it is more plausible that avoiding sitting down is better for your health, and that getting a good night's sleep is essential in avoiding stress - the reason for the latter being that if you feel tired due to lack of sleep, you are less able to cope with problems (which makes you feel stressed out) and you try to compensate by eating energy rich food (=too many calories, especially sugar) and drinking beverages with caffeine, which tend to ruin your sleep.
Could there be causation in the opposite direction? No doubt - but I think it mostly goes the other way.
I tried Whale when I was in Iceland. You know what? Its really yummy. You should try it!
Apparently, so is human. Do you volunteer? As science has progressed over the last few decades, things like different ways of scanning has allowed us to see what goes on in the brains of both humans and other animals, and the more we learn, the more we realise that most of the things we believed were uniquely human - feelings, intelligence, culture,.... - are in fact shared by many animals; certainly by a number of mammal and bird species. We used to think that all non-human animals were non-sentient - things - and we would refer to them as "it" rather than "he" or "she"; we now know that the distinction is far from as clear as that. So - we may well be killing what should rightly be regarded as "persons", not things. We may still decide that it is morally justified to do so, but we can't escape the moral considerations of what we are doing.
Heck even Terry Prachett made a joke about it in the discworld series: "The Kappamaki, a whaling research ship, was currently researching the question: How many whales can you catch in one week?"
It was 'Good Omens', not the Discworld, but a fabulous book. But yeah, you're right. What really pisses me off - and probably almost everybody else - is the fact that they have so little respect for the intelligence and decency of people, that they actually try to explain it away withh such a transparent lie. I would have felt less offended if they had simply stuck up a finger and said "We don't give a shit!". The expression "lying cowards" presents itself to the forefront of my mind, but let's keep it under control for now.
Third law: When one body exerts a force on a second body, the second body simultaneously exerts a force equal in magnitude and opposite in direction on the first body.
When we put pressure on any nation or group of people, they are going to push back. For a long time - since WWII or so - the US has been one of the main generators of hostile pressure on nations in the Middle East and elsewhere, in the pursuit of 'American Interests' (iow: the interests of big, American corporations; funny how the interests of the American people seem to have little significance). As I keep saying: We, in the West, have to stop producing the conditions in which terrorism flourishes.
If we are worried about freedom, civil rights etc, then introducing restrictions based on fear is probably not a good idea. The borders of any country are as open as a sieve, unless you introduce a truly draconian regime, so it is likely to be a lot of wasted effort. But of course, we can't just sit passive and hope for the best - we planted our foot firmly in the muck years ago, most recently with our stupid invasion of Iraq, but it has happened again and again for something like a century, if not longer. It is too late to change our mind now - we have to see it through to the bitter end - and no doubt it will be very bitter.
In the meantime we have to stop contributing so heavily to the causes of terrorism. And we have to stop being so bloody simplistic in our analysis of things - people don't become terrorists because they 'hate our freedom' or are 'envious' - and 'democracy' is not the only thing needed to fix things. It is even possible that democracy has no place in those countries for many years to come - after all, it took us in the West generations to learn to live with it. And, it is very likely that we in the West would help the peace best in the long term, if we were to leave the rebuilding to others, since we don't have too much of a good reputation in the Middle East.
Not sure about that - apparently the lethal injections ensures that the last moments of the condemned is likely to be absolute hell. But we DO treat animals better - at least if they are cute and cuddly and not destined for the abattoir.
Slashdot Mirror
So you can mod your own comments up!
The idea was to show that religions are ridiculous, not to join the ranks of the bullshit peddlers.
Well, they should have thought about that before they went down this path. Now it is going to be taken deeply serious, and we are going to see the first schisms and religious wars in a few years.
Now, I'm beginning to look forward to the time when you can get married in online games.
Wow, i've never heard that one before. I make a statement the SJW's dont like and its because you think I'm in the closet. How novel! I suspect you are the gay one or british, same difference, lol.
We live and learn :-) Enlighten me, what is an SJW?
Still, I have trouble understanding why it is that some men are misogynists - so I try to make some wild guesses. Perhaps you have a better explanation? I am indeed British - not gay. I know, it's hard to tell the difference, but the slightly pained expression and awkward gait has another explanation: The Tory Government, who have a preference for, shall we say, approaching us from behind.
And because of that change, the planet is safe now!
I think you probably know better than that. The fact that we have actually been able to agree about a somewhat clear wording is remarkable, especially when you consider how far away everybody was from each other in Copenhagen. But of course, if it was only up to what the governmets' negotiators were able to do, then it would indeed be nothing - what makes this rather more hopeful is the fact that business has come on boards to agreat extent, and that there is optimism about a way forward, that may even mean new business opportunities. It isn't going to be easy - nobody imagines that, but we may have crossed a watershed now, and it just might be that we finally begin to move in the right direction.
They tried to pull a fast one...
OTOH - mistakes do happen. Negotiating a treaty between 100s of nations is not something where you can play silly games with words. Children do that; governments have to go back to their parliaments, congresses or maybe even populations where it will be scrutinised in great detail. A small, unfortunate wording would have been very embarrassing, of course, but nothing more than that.
If being gay is OK, then it's hardly a slander? But it is not uncommon for gays, who have yet to come out, to harbour rather cramped views on things like women, politics or being gay, to name but a few. And when you seem to be really quite misogynistic in your pronouncements, then it is not unreasonable to guess that you have reasons for favouring men - being gay is one such reason. But most gay men I know, don't feel hostile to women - it isn't a very wild guess to suspect that you don't feel good about yourself, since you seem to have a need to try to put half of the human population down. And if my chain of reasoning is correct, then the best way to get to feel better is to come out and be what is natural for you.
Hey, just come out of the closet; there's no shame in being gay. And stop trying to make yourself look smarter by belittling women - it doesn't work.
Farcebook for being a shit in general, racist people, or a country with a bug up its oh-so-righteous ass about expressing negative opinions/outlooks? All of the above? Everybody in the world?
Expressing negative opinions is all part of what makes democracy work - but there is a big difference between expressing opinions and being destructive. Vandalism, apart from harming somebody's property, is also a way to intimidate people, and intimidation has no place in any debate. At least not any debate that wants to achieve a fair and balanced compromise.
That said, graffiti isn't always bad; and it's hardly ever dangerous. Personally, I like graffiti, at least when it is well made; there are some very clever people out there, who express themselves that way.
Well, I'm worried about the fact that nobody can say for sure that solar panels don't cause cancer. What other things are they hiding from us? Like, nobody has assured us that solar panel aren't causing tsunamis or earthquakes, or price increases on beer.
...John Wayne in Blazing Saddles, as Mel Brooks wanted.
Or, Brokeback Mountain?
An account repeatedly posting links to the same website, forbes.com. That website is full of ads, which are being shown to the audience that clicks through from Slashdot.
Happily, I use adblock, noscript, privacy badger, ..., so I don't see the ads. But apart from that, I have learned to recognise the signs - the vaguely scientific stuff, 'on-a-grand-scale' non-news etc. It is always being trumpeted out as 'Finally We Understand ...', and it invariably turns out to be big, glossy pictures, florid language and trivia about well-known phenomena.
The fact that this is happening again and again is no coincidence. There is clearly collusion and someone is getting paid.
It is called fabulous things like 'The New Economy', and yes, it is mostly bogus - very close to outright fraud, because it is all about selling advertising at as little cost as possible. It is Capitalism, Jim, but not as we know it. Oh, for the days when that was all about working hard, being clever, getting wealthier by being better at providing things of real value (if ever there was such a time).
Whatever - if Obama was to declare that Christmas falls in December, there would be a storm of protests from so-called freedom advocates. He could probably push through a complete ban on encryption by declaring that it is a human right to encrypt things.
The thing to keep in mind is that in China most drivers are still relatively new - they went from nearly no cars to jam packed in what seems like 20 years. On top of that, from my visits to China, I have got the impression that traffic rules are optional (although the Chinese will strongly deny this); this is slowly changing. And the final thing that makes Chinese traffic seem chaotic to visitors is the fact that many of the rules are slightly different in surprising ways - in Europe, for example, red light simply means STOP! - but in China, you are allowed to turn right at red lights. It is also acceptable, if not actually legal, to take some rather exotic left turns (when the light is green, that is) across the approching traffic in the opposite direction, if you are daring enough.
Coming from UK, I have had a hard time getting used to driving in Beijing - in London, for example, people will routinely help each other, especially in dense traffic: you let other drivers in front of you if they come in from a side road, just like you pull over to make room for emergency vehicles. Not so in Beijing; the number of times I have been shocked by the blatant attempts at cutting me off, when I felt it was clear that I would like to get into another lane (like when my lane is blocked). The trick seems to be that you use the horn to say "get out of the way", so perhaps it is just a question of me having to learn the right "body language".
I remember being horrified in one town at the number of intersections with no stop signs or traffic lights and drivers just pretty much doing whatever they felt like.
Interestingly, there have been experiments in some towns in Europe, I think, with removing traffic lights at road crossings - and it turns out that people usually start driving much more carefully, and the traffic isn't actually slowed down dramatically by it. At the end of the day, most of our impression of drivers in other countries being poor drivers is probably down to our expectations not matching what people in those countries find quite obvious. You can see it to some extent with American tourists in London; some have a really hard time with the fact that roads are not laid out in a grid and numbered. To me, that is the right way; you don't want to live on chess board.
Sometimes it's just down to coincidence
Sometimes - but pure coincidence, or chance, is not likely to be persistent. It's like rolling dice: you may get a series of sexes, but if it goes on indefinitely, then the suspicion must be that there is something dodgy going on.
Teenage Mutant Ninja .. err... Bacteria?
Hanged. You hanged yourself in a barn in 1272.
He hung himself - with acces to gene technology, that's what he did. Like a horse.
I am a developer, I have been a developer for a number of decades, ...
Me too - and I agree. Well, mostly. I think these fads are really just about management trying (and failing) to catch up with what developers are. Agile is really just about trying to formalise what a sensible development team already does: talk to each other, make changes to designs when needed etc. The reason it fails is probably that in formalising the process, they try to introduce yet another one-size-fits-all concept, and developers are just not like that. A sales team perhaps, would like it - sales people often seem to enjoy the superficial ceremonial rah-rah, but engineers tend to think much deeper than that and reject it. Perhaps we shouldn't always, but there you are ...
'Devops' is something different, I think. Ideally - or naively, perhaps - you would expect it to be something like sysadmins who know how to develop code (and do this as a large part of their jobs). In reality it seems that management thinks of this role as something like an automation process where you can let unskilled labourers push the buttons on machines that do what used to be done by highly skilled craftsmen. Whether it can really work in the long run remains to be seen; automation is certainly helpful in a cloud environment, where you may be handling 1000s of nearly identical systems, but somewhere in the process you really, really need to have people that are very insightful into the whole setup, and that is quite often missing.
By the same token, you don't get fat by eating too much - you eat too much because being fat makes you do it, right? It is correct that correlation is not proof of causation; but it narrows the choices down - correlation means things are connected, one way or the other. Either one causes the other, or they share a root cause. Which one you decide to go with is up to your own judgement - considering what we already know about things like the harmful effects of stress and the benefits of exercise, I would say it is more plausible that avoiding sitting down is better for your health, and that getting a good night's sleep is essential in avoiding stress - the reason for the latter being that if you feel tired due to lack of sleep, you are less able to cope with problems (which makes you feel stressed out) and you try to compensate by eating energy rich food (=too many calories, especially sugar) and drinking beverages with caffeine, which tend to ruin your sleep.
Could there be causation in the opposite direction? No doubt - but I think it mostly goes the other way.
...posted at 2:15 AM.
Timezones? When I look at this article, I see 7:15 as the timestamp.
We ought to have a "SPAM -1" tion in the moderation drop down list.
I tried Whale when I was in Iceland. You know what? Its really yummy. You should try it!
Apparently, so is human. Do you volunteer? As science has progressed over the last few decades, things like different ways of scanning has allowed us to see what goes on in the brains of both humans and other animals, and the more we learn, the more we realise that most of the things we believed were uniquely human - feelings, intelligence, culture, .... - are in fact shared by many animals; certainly by a number of mammal and bird species. We used to think that all non-human animals were non-sentient - things - and we would refer to them as "it" rather than "he" or "she"; we now know that the distinction is far from as clear as that. So - we may well be killing what should rightly be regarded as "persons", not things. We may still decide that it is morally justified to do so, but we can't escape the moral considerations of what we are doing.
Heck even Terry Prachett made a joke about it in the discworld series:
"The Kappamaki, a whaling research ship, was currently researching the question: How many whales can you catch in one week?"
It was 'Good Omens', not the Discworld, but a fabulous book. But yeah, you're right. What really pisses me off - and probably almost everybody else - is the fact that they have so little respect for the intelligence and decency of people, that they actually try to explain it away withh such a transparent lie. I would have felt less offended if they had simply stuck up a finger and said "We don't give a shit!". The expression "lying cowards" presents itself to the forefront of my mind, but let's keep it under control for now.
To quote Newton:
Third law: When one body exerts a force on a second body, the second body simultaneously exerts a force equal in magnitude and opposite in direction on the first body.
When we put pressure on any nation or group of people, they are going to push back. For a long time - since WWII or so - the US has been one of the main generators of hostile pressure on nations in the Middle East and elsewhere, in the pursuit of 'American Interests' (iow: the interests of big, American corporations; funny how the interests of the American people seem to have little significance). As I keep saying: We, in the West, have to stop producing the conditions in which terrorism flourishes.
You mean something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ?
If we are worried about freedom, civil rights etc, then introducing restrictions based on fear is probably not a good idea. The borders of any country are as open as a sieve, unless you introduce a truly draconian regime, so it is likely to be a lot of wasted effort. But of course, we can't just sit passive and hope for the best - we planted our foot firmly in the muck years ago, most recently with our stupid invasion of Iraq, but it has happened again and again for something like a century, if not longer. It is too late to change our mind now - we have to see it through to the bitter end - and no doubt it will be very bitter.
In the meantime we have to stop contributing so heavily to the causes of terrorism. And we have to stop being so bloody simplistic in our analysis of things - people don't become terrorists because they 'hate our freedom' or are 'envious' - and 'democracy' is not the only thing needed to fix things. It is even possible that democracy has no place in those countries for many years to come - after all, it took us in the West generations to learn to live with it. And, it is very likely that we in the West would help the peace best in the long term, if we were to leave the rebuilding to others, since we don't have too much of a good reputation in the Middle East.
Even our criminals are treated better
Not sure about that - apparently the lethal injections ensures that the last moments of the condemned is likely to be absolute hell. But we DO treat animals better - at least if they are cute and cuddly and not destined for the abattoir.