But first of all, it is in fact the job of the police to act on suspicion, and suspicion is a subjective term. If a police officer feels you look or move in a way that arouse suspicion, then they have a valid reason - a duty, even - to look into it.
As for the suspicion part - an amazingly high proportion of drivers, and perhaps professional drivers in particular, are found to drive under the influence of something; that is enough to make it worht making these random checks. This is no different from stopping drivers to check their tyres or other things. Blowing in a breathalyzer is not an unreasonably onerous task, so you might say refusing to do so does look a bit suspicious.
The only thing I find out of line is taking DNA samples - it is still not a legal requirement, and I think it is doubtful that the police are authorise to store DNA data about people who have not been covicted of a crime.
I think we should stop screaming "Liberty" every time somebody says or does something we don't agree with. Freedom is too important to be treated with the disrespect the goes into prostituting it for every minor gripe. And the question of whether it i technically legal to print a plastic gun or not, is not about your right to speak your mind freely or live your life without undue interference.
Apart from that, it is beside the point. The purpose of banning things is not to "stop criminals doing whatever" - it is to make it prosecutable. The law - probably your constitution - says that you can not prosecute a person for something that is not explicitly defined as a crime in a law; this is an important, legal principle, that PROTECTS YOUR FUNDAMENTAL FREEDOM - got it? So, if they don't ban the production of firearms by hobbyists, it gets quite difficult to punish the guy who makes them and sells them to whoever is stupid enough to use them. And when they ban them, it is probably not because the authorities are afraid you might go on a rampage with a plastic gun, but because they tend to explode in your hands, especially if they are printed with poor quality plastics; and the authorities do have a duty of care, whether you like it or not.
If I may go off on a tangent here; companies beign bought for billions, even though they don't make a profit - isn't that what has been behind all bubbles in the market? I wonder if it wouldn't be better to simply round up all venture capitalists, confiscate their ill-gooten money and shoot them. They are more than a bit like a disease; they infect the market, suck out the value and then let the host die, and like all parasites, they don't understand or care that it is going to kill most of them in the end.
... which will allow developers and software engineers to program a wide variety of complex functions in a streamlined fashion, for pretty much every single type of hardware...
As a Dane, I can't help wonder who the hell this Thor guy is? The thundergod of Norse mythology is a stocky, hairy, red-headed, foul-tempered and slightly stupid sort of anti-hero, not a tall, waxed body builder with lanky, blond hair. And his hammer is famous for being unfinished, hence the handle is VERY SHORT; IOW it's not a bloody sledge-hammer.
Hmm, I can't figure out whether I agre with you or not, but here's my perspective: People have always used and will always use recreational drugs, and it does a certain amount of harm - although one may argue that it can also be beneficial to society, to some extent. It would be better in general, if there were some substances that gave people what they wanted, but with less harmful side-effects.
I have used a fair amount of drugs in my life, but I don't any more; not because of a great, moral insight or anything, but because when the novelty wears off, it is no longer as interesting, and it makes me less able to do the things I really enjoy in life. I think most people have had the same experience.
Drug addiction and -dependency is not the norm; if it were, then everybody who's been to hospital for major surgery would come out as heroin addicts; heroin is still widely used in hospitals, you see, as a safe and effective painkiller.
However, in Norway the population is, by and large, loyal to the government, believe it or not. In fact, that is how it is in most of Europe, AFAIK. Even if we don't agree with the government's policies, we still trust and respect them.
I remember a story from when I went to school in Denmark (too many years ago): The Czar of Russia came on a state visit to Denmark, and was shown some of the sights in Copenhagen, modest as they are. Among other things, they climbed up a famous church tower, "The Round Tower"; and the Czar, whose czarina was a Danish princess, wanted to impress his in-law with his immense power, so he called over one of his young officers and told him to throw himself from the tower. The officer dared not disobey, said his last prayers and started to climb over the railings - but the king stopped him and has the czar what this was about. The czar ansewred: "See, this is how powerful I am. Nobody can resist me". And the king looked at him and said - "My power if different - I can go out to even the poorest farm in my country, unarmed and alone, and ask for shelter; and the farmer will guard me with his life."
For my part, I don't really care; what I would like to have in Linux is something like Solaris' Service Management Facility (smf). After all, what is the advantage of running system initialisation in parallel? That it starts up faster? But surely you don't reboot Linux so often that it is a major concern whether it takes 1 minutes or 10?
On the other hand, a facility like smaf gives some real benefits, like better diagnostics, and if one is to believe the hype, "self-healing". Yeah, I don't quite believe that either, but you never know.
By eliminating all taxpayer funding of 'science'.... So long as politicians fund science with taxpayers' money, it will be politicized.
Nonsense. Firstly, it is wrong to say that "politicians fund science with tax-payers' money" - the state does, and in a modern democracy, that is an entity separate from the politicians; state is government, politicians are legislature - separation of powers and all that. If it doesn't work that way, it isn't because state funding is wrong, it is because you have a corrupt system. State funded research works in many countries, certainly in Europe, so it is possible to get it right.
The way to keep politics out of science is by improving the system and enforcing the rules. If you privatise all research, what you get is not better quality, but a free-for-all, where wealthy churces and organisations like Scientology can say "This is the truth", and nobody will know how to argue against them. In fact, a situation where science becomes impossible.
...does the onus fall on the developers, a government agency or the users themselves...
If by "the developer" you mean the company that sells the product, then the answer is clear: it is the developer that is responsible. The government can at best issue guidelines for how safe and fit for purpose a product should be, and it is not realistic to expect all users to understand the full ramifications of their choices, when it comes to things that are likely to be well outside their general competencies.
On the other hand, if by "the developer" you mean the engineer who designed and coded the app, then I would say not so much, but it depends on the circumstances. In general, software is not sold directly by the developers; there is a business organisation between, that decides what to produce and how to sell it. They are far more likely to be the real culprits.
I am not quite sure whether I am entirely against death penalty for certain crimes, but what I am against is dragging it out indefinitely and then finally doing it with so much meaningless, but complicated ritual. It you have made a decision like that, then you should just go and get it done.
As to the method, we know that electrocution, shooting, hanging, garroting, gas and lethal injection as it is usually carried out are all likely to cause an amount of suffering, and if you deliberately cause suffering in another living being, what are you? In my view not much better than the person that you are executing. There is however a simple and cheap way: asphyxiation with 100% nitrogen. You basically pass out feeling extremely euphoric, so no suffering.
Waaah waaah waaaah. YOU need to get to work, so the cyclist is supposed to get out of YOUR way?
Being a cyclist myself, I cringe when I hear/read this kind of unhelpful nonsense; you really need to grow up, I think. Traffic, and especially safe traffic, is a matter of cooperation. That means you give a little and you take a little; sometimes you make room for the others - even if they are in cars - and sometimes you are allowed to do thing you shouldn't really do, like driving on the pavement (sidewalk, for Americans). It is amazing how many rules you can get away with not following, PROVIDED THAT YOU SHOW DUE CARE AND ATTENTION TO OTHER ROAD USERS.
On the other hand, if you are the kind of twat that deliberately make yourself a nuissance to motorists just to prove that you are "better" than them, then you are nothing more than a bully - and a pathetic one, at that.
That Tom Cruise has any success as an actor is one of the great mysteries of this era; he is about as expressive as a block of wood. I don't know if the "MR interface" is a good idea or not, but the association with him has permanently tainted an otherwise good story.
I can sort of imagine situations where an interaction style sort of like might be meaningful, but to my mind it is just science fiction effects: the sort of things you put into a story to make it impressive, but which don't actually have any advantages. A bit like when you see Kirk speak to the Enterprise computer - it was very impressive at the time and stirred people's imagination, but when it comes to getting real work done, speech is far too imprecise and slow. Yes, most people can dictate a memo faster they can type it, but then you get all the "Ummm..." and "Oh, I didn't mean that,..." etc as well. And it is far faster to type "ls -l" than saying "give me a full directory listing, please".
It isn't just security either; I see lots of jobs advertised at the moment here in London. It is overwhelmingly what they call "DevOps" and Java development. I have been following the market for a long while, and I can see the same roles coming up again and again, so clearly the companies are having trouble finding people.
Having worked in IT for far too many years, I know how it goes: when you hire new employees, you know they aren't going to be up to speed for at least 3 - 6 months. However, these companies are mostly new start-ups, so they think it is like hiring a contractor, and they want their new staff to be up to speed immediately. It's just not going to happen, but until they see sense and learn to plan for the long term, the situation will be that way; lots of jobs that go unfilled, and lots of well qualified people the can't find jobs. And it's not about money, really; these web companies could afford to think ahead and invest in people with good potential - and one could argue that they can't really afford NOT to do so.
On top of that, they don't actually know what they are looking for. Take this new buzzword, "DevOps"; it comes from "development" and "operations", and it means somebody who sits in the middle, between a development department and system administration; ideally this is a person who can do everything a developer does and everything a system administrator does, and such person is probably a developer who has grown into system administration. In the old mainframe days you would call them System Programmers, and they would be your most sacred asset. But what the web companies really mean when they say "DevOps" is just a low ranking build engineer, who knows how to use Puppet, Chef or Jenkins and is doing the same, repetitive task over and over, provisioning into the cloud. And they all want somebody who has "at least 5 years experience with the cloud"; has "The Cloud" even existed that long?
Facebook doesn't post any beheading videos. It's users do.
Hmm, yes, and drug dealers don't ruin lives, people do it to themselves. And so on. If you own a facility - a house or a website - where you invite people in and allow them to commit crimes, then you are an accomplice, especially if you benefit finacially from the activities. The only question here is whether posting videos of beheadings is a crime; IMO it should be. It isn't about whether it is good taste or not - these videos are for a large part posted by terrorists as propaganda. Is aiding and abetting terrorists a crime?
I thought we were allowed to be irresponsible as long as it's legal?
True - but legal is not always right. Even casual glance at what a clever lawyer can get you off the hook for should tell that much. In my opinion the law should be "right" - when you read it you should go "Yeah, that sounds fairly reasonable".
The thing about the attitude you seem to put on display is that you'd probably also say things like "Rules are made for being broken" and that sort of crap. To me that sounds like you are morally corrupt - it's OK to piss other people up and down as long as it is barely legal, and anyway, you just make your own rules as you go along. Who should be ashamed here?
I'm not convinced that this has anything to do with free will. As far as I understand it, the Turing halting problem is about predictability, and not being able to predict an outcome only really tells us that our ability to make predictions is lacking. I think the question about free will is one that is likely to be covered by something similar to Godel's incompleteness theorem; ie. it is impossible to answer within the confines of logic (loosely speaking).
It is not just about the evil government trying to oppress the free, enterprising spirit of good, talented people. Any device that is likely to reach even a low orbit, will be heavy, especially if it is supposed to carry any payload - and why else sped time and money on doing it? It will have to carry a lot of highly explosive fuel, and it will probably produce a significant amount of pollutants as well. These factors are just some of the reasons why you are required to ask permission - it is actually not easy to steer a rocket, for one thing, and unless you are bloody clever, it will most likely fail, in which case you have a large, heavy object falling out of the sky, so whoever launches it has to be able to ensure that it doesn't fall on a populated area. And so on. I mean, if some fool decides to shave with a combine harvester, the damage is probably limited to himself, but if you lob tens of tons of exploding rocket onto a local school, "Oops, sorry" isn't going to cut it, I can tell you that.
A team working at Tampere University, Finland has discovered the virus that causes type 1 diabetes.
- which, of course, isn't true; they have at most discovered "...A virus that causes diabetes 1..." - there may well be many others out there.
Diabetes 1 is an autoimmune disease (ie. one where the body immune defence attacks the body's own cells), and it is entirely plausible that a virus could trigger an autoimmune reaction, and viruses could even be the most common trigger for every type of autoimmunity, like rheumatoid arthritis, lupus etc.
I am not sure that it is necessarily all that surprising. For one thing, if you are against something, you would have to learn something about it, so you can argue against whatever you disagree with.
And the thing is, being stupid often requires quite a lot of intelligence - you have to be able to gain some degree of insight, and then you have to be able to explain away the conclusions you don't like, which is actually hard work, intellectually. So, the people who are prominent in those fringe movements have to be very intelligent. Think "emperor's new clothes": the clever, experienced and insightful adults are the ones that are taken in, and the naive child accepts the obvious conclusion.
Lighten up - it was a joke. Think about it: if the moon suddenly started circling the other way, it would probably be something you'd feel. Just like if you observed an opposition between the Sun and Venus.
Just for the record, I've read one or two of his stories, and I thought they were OK - I was, admittedly, about 11 years old at the time. And I can't honestly say that he was anything as good as Heinlein, Asimov or any of the other genuinely big names. Not by a lightyear. No, he was OK, just run-of-the-mill.
As for creating a religion - have you any idea how easy it is? Just look back at Mormonism, Spiritualism, Christian Science, Tarot, Astrology, etc etc. All you have to do is speak loudly and sound like you mean it. This is not to bash religions or their followers at all, they often contain grains of truth; just take astrology - a retrograde moon is definitely not a good thing, for example.
Apart from that, I don't think Scientology can be called a religion at all; it is a scam, simply and plainly. With most religions, the leaders do in fact genuinely believe in their teachings, whereas all the evidence seems to suggest that the founders and leaders of Scientology coldly and cynically calculated a way to cheat and/or bully its victims out of money, freedom and dignity.
A simple idea underpins science: 'trust, but verify'.
Not true - the scientific method is what underpins science. What you state there is about convenience, not science. If you think your information comes from a reputable source or it feels right, you won't spend as much time and resources on verifying - that is an expression of human weakness, not of scientific principles, and one could argue that this is the kind of behaviour that is more commonly associated with religion.
It is a common misunderstanding that scientific method is about discovering the truth; it isn't - or it is only in an indirect sense. The scientific method can not prove anything, it can only disprove; it discovers the lies, and what it cannot disprove can be regarded as somewhat similar to the truth - or a truth, since we don't actually know that there is just one truth. A theory is just a model that seems to fit our observations and hasn't been falsified yet, and experience tells us that sooner or later new observations will prove it wrong in some place.
There is much truth in what you say - in my opinion the biggest, single factor in the spiraling health care costs is the pharmaceutical industry; and they are also in a perverse way on of the biggest hindrances to the development of real cures to some of the diseases that cost society so much.
To understand this, one just have to look at the fact that companies exist primarily to make money. If you find a way to cure, say, cancer, the company that produces the medicine can make money once per patient; but if you find a way to "manage" cancer, so the patient can live for years without being cured, then you can keep making money. This gives any pharmceutical company a strong incentive to NEVER come up with an outright cure. The obvious, pragmatic solution is to cut out the commercial aspect of pharmaceutical research, for example by moving it to state sponsored university hospitals.
Socialism, you say? Perhaps - who cares, to be honest? Should we, as rational, thinking and intelligent beings allow a silly word trick like that to scare us away from what is right?
The problem is they are too tied to the idea of tying everything to windows...
I'm not sure Windows as such is the problem - it is not a bad concept for a GUI desktop, in many ways. I think the real problem is this: they think like managers.
I have worked in the industry for 25 years, as developer on both MVS, DOS, Windows, OS/2, UNIX and Linux. There has always been this dicsonnect between what managers think motivates people, and what really motivates engineers. I don't know how many times I have been "awarded" with something that wouldn't want to own even as a gift - lumps of perspex, basically. They were probably quite expensive, some of them - like, a pair of cuff-links worth $300 or something - but just so utterly misplaced; I would have been happier with something useful - a bag of nails, a good quality hammer, of one of these:
- in short, something useful of good quality. Managers dno't understand this - in a way they refuse to understand, and that, I think is what Microsoft does on a grand scale: they produce a lump of perspex, and it has worked as a business model, because they sold to managers who love this kind of things. But in the real world, a lump of perspex is just a lump, and it invariably gets left behind at the bottom of a box.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you are blowing this out of proportion.
But first of all, it is in fact the job of the police to act on suspicion, and suspicion is a subjective term. If a police officer feels you look or move in a way that arouse suspicion, then they have a valid reason - a duty, even - to look into it.
As for the suspicion part - an amazingly high proportion of drivers, and perhaps professional drivers in particular, are found to drive under the influence of something; that is enough to make it worht making these random checks. This is no different from stopping drivers to check their tyres or other things. Blowing in a breathalyzer is not an unreasonably onerous task, so you might say refusing to do so does look a bit suspicious.
The only thing I find out of line is taking DNA samples - it is still not a legal requirement, and I think it is doubtful that the police are authorise to store DNA data about people who have not been covicted of a crime.
I think we should stop screaming "Liberty" every time somebody says or does something we don't agree with. Freedom is too important to be treated with the disrespect the goes into prostituting it for every minor gripe. And the question of whether it i technically legal to print a plastic gun or not, is not about your right to speak your mind freely or live your life without undue interference.
Apart from that, it is beside the point. The purpose of banning things is not to "stop criminals doing whatever" - it is to make it prosecutable. The law - probably your constitution - says that you can not prosecute a person for something that is not explicitly defined as a crime in a law; this is an important, legal principle, that PROTECTS YOUR FUNDAMENTAL FREEDOM - got it? So, if they don't ban the production of firearms by hobbyists, it gets quite difficult to punish the guy who makes them and sells them to whoever is stupid enough to use them. And when they ban them, it is probably not because the authorities are afraid you might go on a rampage with a plastic gun, but because they tend to explode in your hands, especially if they are printed with poor quality plastics; and the authorities do have a duty of care, whether you like it or not.
If I may go off on a tangent here; companies beign bought for billions, even though they don't make a profit - isn't that what has been behind all bubbles in the market? I wonder if it wouldn't be better to simply round up all venture capitalists, confiscate their ill-gooten money and shoot them. They are more than a bit like a disease; they infect the market, suck out the value and then let the host die, and like all parasites, they don't understand or care that it is going to kill most of them in the end.
Only joking, of course ...
... which will allow developers and software engineers to program a wide variety of complex functions in a streamlined fashion, for pretty much every single type of hardware ...
Isn't that what fortran does?
They have us by the balls.
Well, at least it is means your government is relevant to you.
As a Dane, I can't help wonder who the hell this Thor guy is? The thundergod of Norse mythology is a stocky, hairy, red-headed, foul-tempered and slightly stupid sort of anti-hero, not a tall, waxed body builder with lanky, blond hair. And his hammer is famous for being unfinished, hence the handle is VERY SHORT; IOW it's not a bloody sledge-hammer.
Hmm, I can't figure out whether I agre with you or not, but here's my perspective: People have always used and will always use recreational drugs, and it does a certain amount of harm - although one may argue that it can also be beneficial to society, to some extent. It would be better in general, if there were some substances that gave people what they wanted, but with less harmful side-effects.
I have used a fair amount of drugs in my life, but I don't any more; not because of a great, moral insight or anything, but because when the novelty wears off, it is no longer as interesting, and it makes me less able to do the things I really enjoy in life. I think most people have had the same experience.
Drug addiction and -dependency is not the norm; if it were, then everybody who's been to hospital for major surgery would come out as heroin addicts; heroin is still widely used in hospitals, you see, as a safe and effective painkiller.
The Government is outgunned by 16:1
However, in Norway the population is, by and large, loyal to the government, believe it or not. In fact, that is how it is in most of Europe, AFAIK. Even if we don't agree with the government's policies, we still trust and respect them.
I remember a story from when I went to school in Denmark (too many years ago): The Czar of Russia came on a state visit to Denmark, and was shown some of the sights in Copenhagen, modest as they are. Among other things, they climbed up a famous church tower, "The Round Tower"; and the Czar, whose czarina was a Danish princess, wanted to impress his in-law with his immense power, so he called over one of his young officers and told him to throw himself from the tower. The officer dared not disobey, said his last prayers and started to climb over the railings - but the king stopped him and has the czar what this was about. The czar ansewred: "See, this is how powerful I am. Nobody can resist me". And the king looked at him and said - "My power if different - I can go out to even the poorest farm in my country, unarmed and alone, and ask for shelter; and the farmer will guard me with his life."
The American way is not the only way.
For my part, I don't really care; what I would like to have in Linux is something like Solaris' Service Management Facility (smf). After all, what is the advantage of running system initialisation in parallel? That it starts up faster? But surely you don't reboot Linux so often that it is a major concern whether it takes 1 minutes or 10?
On the other hand, a facility like smaf gives some real benefits, like better diagnostics, and if one is to believe the hype, "self-healing". Yeah, I don't quite believe that either, but you never know.
By eliminating all taxpayer funding of 'science'. ...
So long as politicians fund science with taxpayers' money, it will be politicized.
Nonsense. Firstly, it is wrong to say that "politicians fund science with tax-payers' money" - the state does, and in a modern democracy, that is an entity separate from the politicians; state is government, politicians are legislature - separation of powers and all that. If it doesn't work that way, it isn't because state funding is wrong, it is because you have a corrupt system. State funded research works in many countries, certainly in Europe, so it is possible to get it right.
The way to keep politics out of science is by improving the system and enforcing the rules. If you privatise all research, what you get is not better quality, but a free-for-all, where wealthy churces and organisations like Scientology can say "This is the truth", and nobody will know how to argue against them. In fact, a situation where science becomes impossible.
...does the onus fall on the developers, a government agency or the users themselves...
If by "the developer" you mean the company that sells the product, then the answer is clear: it is the developer that is responsible. The government can at best issue guidelines for how safe and fit for purpose a product should be, and it is not realistic to expect all users to understand the full ramifications of their choices, when it comes to things that are likely to be well outside their general competencies.
On the other hand, if by "the developer" you mean the engineer who designed and coded the app, then I would say not so much, but it depends on the circumstances. In general, software is not sold directly by the developers; there is a business organisation between, that decides what to produce and how to sell it. They are far more likely to be the real culprits.
I am not quite sure whether I am entirely against death penalty for certain crimes, but what I am against is dragging it out indefinitely and then finally doing it with so much meaningless, but complicated ritual. It you have made a decision like that, then you should just go and get it done.
As to the method, we know that electrocution, shooting, hanging, garroting, gas and lethal injection as it is usually carried out are all likely to cause an amount of suffering, and if you deliberately cause suffering in another living being, what are you? In my view not much better than the person that you are executing. There is however a simple and cheap way: asphyxiation with 100% nitrogen. You basically pass out feeling extremely euphoric, so no suffering.
Waaah waaah waaaah. YOU need to get to work, so the cyclist is supposed to get out of YOUR way?
Being a cyclist myself, I cringe when I hear/read this kind of unhelpful nonsense; you really need to grow up, I think. Traffic, and especially safe traffic, is a matter of cooperation. That means you give a little and you take a little; sometimes you make room for the others - even if they are in cars - and sometimes you are allowed to do thing you shouldn't really do, like driving on the pavement (sidewalk, for Americans). It is amazing how many rules you can get away with not following, PROVIDED THAT YOU SHOW DUE CARE AND ATTENTION TO OTHER ROAD USERS.
On the other hand, if you are the kind of twat that deliberately make yourself a nuissance to motorists just to prove that you are "better" than them, then you are nothing more than a bully - and a pathetic one, at that.
That Tom Cruise has any success as an actor is one of the great mysteries of this era; he is about as expressive as a block of wood. I don't know if the "MR interface" is a good idea or not, but the association with him has permanently tainted an otherwise good story.
I can sort of imagine situations where an interaction style sort of like might be meaningful, but to my mind it is just science fiction effects: the sort of things you put into a story to make it impressive, but which don't actually have any advantages. A bit like when you see Kirk speak to the Enterprise computer - it was very impressive at the time and stirred people's imagination, but when it comes to getting real work done, speech is far too imprecise and slow. Yes, most people can dictate a memo faster they can type it, but then you get all the "Ummm..." and "Oh, I didn't mean that, ..." etc as well. And it is far faster to type "ls -l" than saying "give me a full directory listing, please".
It isn't just security either; I see lots of jobs advertised at the moment here in London. It is overwhelmingly what they call "DevOps" and Java development. I have been following the market for a long while, and I can see the same roles coming up again and again, so clearly the companies are having trouble finding people.
Having worked in IT for far too many years, I know how it goes: when you hire new employees, you know they aren't going to be up to speed for at least 3 - 6 months. However, these companies are mostly new start-ups, so they think it is like hiring a contractor, and they want their new staff to be up to speed immediately. It's just not going to happen, but until they see sense and learn to plan for the long term, the situation will be that way; lots of jobs that go unfilled, and lots of well qualified people the can't find jobs. And it's not about money, really; these web companies could afford to think ahead and invest in people with good potential - and one could argue that they can't really afford NOT to do so.
On top of that, they don't actually know what they are looking for. Take this new buzzword, "DevOps"; it comes from "development" and "operations", and it means somebody who sits in the middle, between a development department and system administration; ideally this is a person who can do everything a developer does and everything a system administrator does, and such person is probably a developer who has grown into system administration. In the old mainframe days you would call them System Programmers, and they would be your most sacred asset. But what the web companies really mean when they say "DevOps" is just a low ranking build engineer, who knows how to use Puppet, Chef or Jenkins and is doing the same, repetitive task over and over, provisioning into the cloud. And they all want somebody who has "at least 5 years experience with the cloud"; has "The Cloud" even existed that long?
Facebook doesn't post any beheading videos. It's users do.
Hmm, yes, and drug dealers don't ruin lives, people do it to themselves. And so on. If you own a facility - a house or a website - where you invite people in and allow them to commit crimes, then you are an accomplice, especially if you benefit finacially from the activities. The only question here is whether posting videos of beheadings is a crime; IMO it should be. It isn't about whether it is good taste or not - these videos are for a large part posted by terrorists as propaganda. Is aiding and abetting terrorists a crime?
I thought we were allowed to be irresponsible as long as it's legal?
True - but legal is not always right. Even casual glance at what a clever lawyer can get you off the hook for should tell that much. In my opinion the law should be "right" - when you read it you should go "Yeah, that sounds fairly reasonable".
The thing about the attitude you seem to put on display is that you'd probably also say things like "Rules are made for being broken" and that sort of crap. To me that sounds like you are morally corrupt - it's OK to piss other people up and down as long as it is barely legal, and anyway, you just make your own rules as you go along. Who should be ashamed here?
I'm not convinced that this has anything to do with free will. As far as I understand it, the Turing halting problem is about predictability, and not being able to predict an outcome only really tells us that our ability to make predictions is lacking. I think the question about free will is one that is likely to be covered by something similar to Godel's incompleteness theorem; ie. it is impossible to answer within the confines of logic (loosely speaking).
It is not just about the evil government trying to oppress the free, enterprising spirit of good, talented people. Any device that is likely to reach even a low orbit, will be heavy, especially if it is supposed to carry any payload - and why else sped time and money on doing it? It will have to carry a lot of highly explosive fuel, and it will probably produce a significant amount of pollutants as well. These factors are just some of the reasons why you are required to ask permission - it is actually not easy to steer a rocket, for one thing, and unless you are bloody clever, it will most likely fail, in which case you have a large, heavy object falling out of the sky, so whoever launches it has to be able to ensure that it doesn't fall on a populated area. And so on. I mean, if some fool decides to shave with a combine harvester, the damage is probably limited to himself, but if you lob tens of tons of exploding rocket onto a local school, "Oops, sorry" isn't going to cut it, I can tell you that.
The summary states:
A team working at Tampere University, Finland has discovered the virus that causes type 1 diabetes.
- which, of course, isn't true; they have at most discovered "...A virus that causes diabetes 1..." - there may well be many others out there.
Diabetes 1 is an autoimmune disease (ie. one where the body immune defence attacks the body's own cells), and it is entirely plausible that a virus could trigger an autoimmune reaction, and viruses could even be the most common trigger for every type of autoimmunity, like rheumatoid arthritis, lupus etc.
I am not sure that it is necessarily all that surprising. For one thing, if you are against something, you would have to learn something about it, so you can argue against whatever you disagree with.
And the thing is, being stupid often requires quite a lot of intelligence - you have to be able to gain some degree of insight, and then you have to be able to explain away the conclusions you don't like, which is actually hard work, intellectually. So, the people who are prominent in those fringe movements have to be very intelligent. Think "emperor's new clothes": the clever, experienced and insightful adults are the ones that are taken in, and the naive child accepts the obvious conclusion.
Lighten up - it was a joke. Think about it: if the moon suddenly started circling the other way, it would probably be something you'd feel. Just like if you observed an opposition between the Sun and Venus.
Just for the record, I've read one or two of his stories, and I thought they were OK - I was, admittedly, about 11 years old at the time. And I can't honestly say that he was anything as good as Heinlein, Asimov or any of the other genuinely big names. Not by a lightyear. No, he was OK, just run-of-the-mill.
As for creating a religion - have you any idea how easy it is? Just look back at Mormonism, Spiritualism, Christian Science, Tarot, Astrology, etc etc. All you have to do is speak loudly and sound like you mean it. This is not to bash religions or their followers at all, they often contain grains of truth; just take astrology - a retrograde moon is definitely not a good thing, for example.
Apart from that, I don't think Scientology can be called a religion at all; it is a scam, simply and plainly. With most religions, the leaders do in fact genuinely believe in their teachings, whereas all the evidence seems to suggest that the founders and leaders of Scientology coldly and cynically calculated a way to cheat and/or bully its victims out of money, freedom and dignity.
A simple idea underpins science: 'trust, but verify'.
Not true - the scientific method is what underpins science. What you state there is about convenience, not science. If you think your information comes from a reputable source or it feels right, you won't spend as much time and resources on verifying - that is an expression of human weakness, not of scientific principles, and one could argue that this is the kind of behaviour that is more commonly associated with religion.
It is a common misunderstanding that scientific method is about discovering the truth; it isn't - or it is only in an indirect sense. The scientific method can not prove anything, it can only disprove; it discovers the lies, and what it cannot disprove can be regarded as somewhat similar to the truth - or a truth, since we don't actually know that there is just one truth. A theory is just a model that seems to fit our observations and hasn't been falsified yet, and experience tells us that sooner or later new observations will prove it wrong in some place.
There is much truth in what you say - in my opinion the biggest, single factor in the spiraling health care costs is the pharmaceutical industry; and they are also in a perverse way on of the biggest hindrances to the development of real cures to some of the diseases that cost society so much.
To understand this, one just have to look at the fact that companies exist primarily to make money. If you find a way to cure, say, cancer, the company that produces the medicine can make money once per patient; but if you find a way to "manage" cancer, so the patient can live for years without being cured, then you can keep making money. This gives any pharmceutical company a strong incentive to NEVER come up with an outright cure. The obvious, pragmatic solution is to cut out the commercial aspect of pharmaceutical research, for example by moving it to state sponsored university hospitals.
Socialism, you say? Perhaps - who cares, to be honest? Should we, as rational, thinking and intelligent beings allow a silly word trick like that to scare us away from what is right?
The problem is they are too tied to the idea of tying everything to windows...
I'm not sure Windows as such is the problem - it is not a bad concept for a GUI desktop, in many ways. I think the real problem is this: they think like managers.
I have worked in the industry for 25 years, as developer on both MVS, DOS, Windows, OS/2, UNIX and Linux. There has always been this dicsonnect between what managers think motivates people, and what really motivates engineers. I don't know how many times I have been "awarded" with something that wouldn't want to own even as a gift - lumps of perspex, basically. They were probably quite expensive, some of them - like, a pair of cuff-links worth $300 or something - but just so utterly misplaced; I would have been happier with something useful - a bag of nails, a good quality hammer, of one of these:
http://www.keyboardco.com/keyboard_details.asp?PRODUCT=12
- in short, something useful of good quality. Managers dno't understand this - in a way they refuse to understand, and that, I think is what Microsoft does on a grand scale: they produce a lump of perspex, and it has worked as a business model, because they sold to managers who love this kind of things. But in the real world, a lump of perspex is just a lump, and it invariably gets left behind at the bottom of a box.