It is a strange thing that we - still - look at ourselves as something apart from "nature". It is a false world-view: the sphere of human activity and culture is not somehow separated from nature; our cities, our technology, our intellectual achievements, though impressive, are part of nature. We haven't escaped the forces of evolution any more than the force of gravity.
Evolution is not "something in nature kills you" - evolution is the interaction between the environment and the capabilities of each individual, and the fact that we have a huge influence on our environment doesn't change that. The fact that we are now capable of curing many diseases etc just means that we evolve in a direction where many, who would have died before, now survive - so we become more diverse as a species.
Furthermore, we are not the only species, or even the first, that has had a big impact on the environment; life has always shaped the local and even the global environment; just take the fact that the oxygen in our atmosphere is produced by photosynthesis.
I have often wondered why a thing like Apple is so successful - or indeed successful at all - and this only confirms my view.
I have tried using some of their products: the OSX, the iPhone, the iPad - and they constantly seem to work against what I try to achieve. This could be due to my immense stupidity, but then, how did I manage to become a very well paid SW engineer?
The only explanation I can think of (for Apple's success, that is) is that it works like X Factor: we all know it is utter crap, but for some reason people are attracted to it because it is 'cool'. Not much of an explanation, I know; hopefully somebody can offer a better one.
I see you don't answer my question, which doesn't do anything to reassure me of your intentions;-)
Playing at cloak and daggers may seem necessary to security personnel, but when they contact customers - whom I assume are their 'friend' in this game - they invariably end up looking like they are trying to pry out private and sensitive information, which I can't really imagine is fit for purpose.
And I do know about "Identity and access management", thank you very much, since I work for a company that deals in identification and data quality, among other things. Security by obscurity is an illusion, by the way, since you don't know what "the other side" knows about your secrets - other than it is likely to be much more than you hope.
So the issue is taken quiet seriously, you may not agree with some of the methodology, and that's fair enough, but to say banks don't take the issue seriously is misleading.
I'm not really trying to slag them off; but many of the measures seem to be half. You mention scrutinising the logs, which is good and necessary, but why don't they implement some of the simple and easy things that would help a lot - like an easy facility for checking the authenticity of a caller?
We don't stop to wonder: Is it 'natural'? Is it cultural?
'Cultural' is natural for us humans, so it is a daft question. A better question would be to ask whether this is something we are most likely to have learned through our early experience - and how. And I think the answer is likely to be that we learn the idea of "moreness" being a continuous thing from observing varying amounts of things - water in a glass etc, or the length of a piece of string; these concepts are clearly learned as and when you learn the words to describe them - ie. it is 'cultural'.
But many - maybe most - animals have the ability to gauge the relative size of things, and some, like the corvids - even seem able to count. Thus that would count as a 'natural' ability, I suppose.
The case with the Yupno seems to be that measurements aren't needed in their culture; one can muse over where that need arises from - it could be a result of trade, perhaps?
Lets just hope that it doesn't become European law. Actually I hope the judge loses a million
I'm not sure that I agree with that. Most phishing scams are rather obvious, and people really ought to look before they jump.
What feel is missing is that banks and other take it more serious and clean up their practises. Like, I have on a few occasions had my bank call me about something related to security (eg. an unusual transaction) - and bizarrely, the guy calling is reluctant or even refuses to give information about why he calls or which department he calls from - which makes it feel like yet another scam, even if it is genuine.
Ideally, they should give you a call, then let you call back on a security number posted prominently on their web-site (so that it is well-known). This ought to be basic routine.
Not sure about cholesterol, since I haven't followed it closely, but I have lost about 10kg and my blood pressure is around 115 - 125 when I measure it (i'm 54 this year).
As I said, I eat like this primarily because I find it much more satisfying; I do eat meat still, and many more kinds than before - silk worms, anyone?:-) - just not very much or very often. Somehow, when I eat meat, it quickly begins to taste foul, and it isn't about the quality either, because now that I eat it so rarely, I tend to buy more expensive and better quality meat.
You need less food (in volume) if you're eating meat than if you were eating a 'mixed' carb-heavy diet, too, which certainly helps. Judging from what I've seen vegans or even vegeterians deal with, it's certainly easier (in terms of food prep and quantity) and less costly
Eh? Less costly? Of course, I don't know what kind of vegan you have seen, but I assume they are the kind that live on this planet (as opposed to Vegans, if you know what I mean).
Personally, I have gone from eating loads of meat about 6 years ago to eating very little of it - I've just lost the appetite for meat, somehow. I can cook a very good bean curry, which will provide my lunch for about 3 or 4 days, for as little as 2 GBP. It takes longer to cook, but the actual work involved is about 10 minutes - can your meat diet beat this on price and effort?
I don't want my gov't doing deep packet inspection.
I don't want my ISP doing DNS filtering.
I don't want...
On the other hand, if one could censor out the real, immoral, harmful etc stuff - like the shite produced by the Murdoch Gang - that's IS bloody tempting.
We are always busy worrying about "muslim clerics" having too much influence in their own countries, but is American politics any better? Fundamentalist with an overtly anti-democratic, anti-human rights and anti-freedom agenda have a disproportionate amount of influence on American politics, to the extent that nobody running for office can get around pretending they are deeply religious - and we have the nerve to comment on the muslims?
So, it is somehow 'sad' that rumour-mongering and whipping up trouble is now illegal - in China, at least?
I am not necessarily convinced the best way to go about things is by going after the blogging services - I know too little about the subject. What I am convinced of is that you need to have a paricularly crooked mind to think that it is wrong to require truthfulness in reporting - all reporting. This is even more important in a democracy; the way American news media twist the trust or even outright lie does unfortunately have a huge influence on the way people choose to vote. If you believe in democracy and freedom, you must by logical necessity require that reporting is objective and truthful. It may not be practically possible to enforce, but I can't see that anybody can find fault with the logic of this.
The only people who have reason to be against this, are the ones who profit from spreading lies: the anti-democratic nut-jobs on the fringes and the religious fear-mongers, to whom truth and freedom are works of the Devil.
You may ask who is going to decide what is truthful? Well, haven't you learned anything from science? Science, or the scientific method, is the most democratic thing there is: you present your hypothesis, and everybody can check your data and accept or reject it based on their own insight. It doesn't require huge, intellectual resources, we are all able to do it, if we are allowed to.
As for China: they have the right to make their own choices, and our meddling is no more than bad manners, really. And what evidence do we in the West have to fear China's government? I mean, truthful and objective evidence - not the shite that you have gobbled up from the likes of Fox News. Of all the nations in the world, China seems to be the least aggressive and has been so for centuries. Even a pathetically small country like Denmark (my country) has been more aggressive to its neighbors.
Not a bad attempt, but I think what I'd really like to see is this sort of concept implemented to its full, logical extent, so you could start out by buying a small, low powered car, then change it bit by bit and end up with something with a big engine etc.
IOW, something where every part fits on a set of standard frames, so you could change your car according to your needs and your wallet, and could combine any parts of any make. That's what I want:-)
To paraphrase a nerd, if the cro-magnons who left cave paintings 30,000 years ago in France could've written something, they would've written something.
And to paraphrase an article I read only yesterday, those Cro-Magnons left something other than paintings: symbolic marks that look more like "writing" than anything else (sorry, can't find the link now, it may have been on http://anthropology.tamu.edu/news which seems to be down at the moment). To be fair, nobody suggests that this is writing like we understand it, more like "proto-writing", but we are damned close, IMO. These symbols see to have been used over a very large area, and considering that it takes time to develop both advanced painting techniques like the ones in the cave-paintings, and the abstract symbolism, we can be fairly confident that this ahs bee around for a long time before those painting were made. So, writing does seem to have deep roots.
The real "problem" is there is a shortage of cheap engineers
That may be part of it, but I think we have to look at a much wider picture. I work for an international SW company, with development both in the US, UK and India (among others), and what I see clearly is that in India, engineers get hired and then promoted fairly rapidly, like every two years or so, whereas in UK and America this doesn't happen: you are hired, and then you are dead in the water.
I think what is really lacking in the west is career plans/-paths for engineers. Our managers are simply not good enough at developing their staff and focus only on holding costs down - the only way you can get promioted or get a raise is by changing job, so our companies lose their good staff and find it really hard to replace them with what is left out there.
I don't think this is about the price of engineers - unless the companies are broke, they are all able and willing to pay for really good engineers, but once they're in the house, the managers have no clue about how to improve them.
A programming language that doesn't have any irritating flaws or omissions, that's all I want. Am I asking too much?
Yes. What you need, IMO, is not "a good language", but to learn to master one or a few. Likely candidates could be C, C++ or Java, which one doesn't really matter. Whining about "nothing is good enough" is just stupid.
Is no one even TRYING to get it right?
Are you? Change your attitude and contribute something.
Stephen Donaldson has some interesting ideas, but unfortunately I find his works close to unbearable with their stilted "Archaic American". The stories have the potential to be great, but the characters are too stylised to be believable.
It would be good for us all if people on both sides of the drugs debate would be less religious in their attitudes. What we need is a set of regulations based on scientific evidence, designed to give people some freedom of choice, but also limit the damages caused by use of recreational drugs.
All drugs can be harmful, especially when used to excess and without proper understanding of what you are doing. Instead of criminalising them, it would be better to legalise, tax and educate.
It is not as strange as one might think, and it doesn't necessarily mean that you can't trust those rich bastards.
It is a well know phenomenon that members of a group show great loyalty to each other, but have little regard for those outside; outsiders are "enemies", at least potentially. Rich people simply regard themselves as a group apart from the rest of society and therefore see the rules of society as irrelevant; this is, by the way, the origin of the word "privilege": "private law" - meaning that you have your own private laws apart from the common laws, which are meant for the rabble.
I know, I know, alarmist title and slightly OT contents, sorry about that. But,...
Shouldn't this tell us that democracy doesn't really work? I am not sure if it can work at all - I hope it can, but as far as I can see, it can only work if all participants are in complete agreement that not only the letter, but the spirit, of the rules has to be followed absolutely. If only there were a way to ensure that only people who had great personal integrity and were highly competent could run for office.
Rick Santorum -- he is simply a frothy black hole of stupidity.
It would be so nice to be able to simple declare that the man is unintelligent, but it obviously isn't the case.
However, stupid isn't the same thing; lack of intelligence is somethign you can't help, but stupidity is learned - you have to learn that particular discipline that protects you from gaining unwanted insight. This is something that requores quite a lot of intelligence and hard work. Stupidity is intelligence abused.
Not in my opinion, no. Not if you mean that they arise simply from "nature" in general. If you by "natural" mean "what is natural in human society", that is another matter - there are certain actions and traits that are beneficial to the group, like caring for the weak, being trustworthy etc. It is not surprising that laws often formalise these things; but one has to remember that this "group mentality" is only valid within the group - which is why we tend to not extend the same rights to the enemies of our group.
As for animal rights - when we as a society want to protect nature and the plants and animals, we in effect include them in our group, and it then becomes natural to extend the same rules to them. Ie. we give them "human rights" in the same way as your "natural right" which form the basis for the US legal system.
This is in my opinion a very good thing - we should care about our planet and all life on it. I'm not a Christian, but isn't that what the Bible says, right there at the beginning?
If you kill an animal and then eat it or sell the meat, then you hunt with a reasonable purpose; what I said above is that it is wrong to hunt with no other purpose than the "fun" of taking a life - killing for a trophy, or simply discarding the carcass. Culling, done professionally to manage a population, may be a very reasonable thing to do, and I am not against hunting for a reasonable purpose..
You're equating people who hunt for their own food with petty criminals? Do you find yourself offended by people who buy too much at the grocery store or drive too big of a car? Believe it or not, some people cut down trees to heat their homes. You sound like you might be excessively paranoid.
And you sound like you didn't actually read or comprehend what I wrote. Go on, read my words more carefully, and you will see.
Slashdot Mirror
It is a strange thing that we - still - look at ourselves as something apart from "nature". It is a false world-view: the sphere of human activity and culture is not somehow separated from nature; our cities, our technology, our intellectual achievements, though impressive, are part of nature. We haven't escaped the forces of evolution any more than the force of gravity.
Evolution is not "something in nature kills you" - evolution is the interaction between the environment and the capabilities of each individual, and the fact that we have a huge influence on our environment doesn't change that. The fact that we are now capable of curing many diseases etc just means that we evolve in a direction where many, who would have died before, now survive - so we become more diverse as a species.
Furthermore, we are not the only species, or even the first, that has had a big impact on the environment; life has always shaped the local and even the global environment; just take the fact that the oxygen in our atmosphere is produced by photosynthesis.
I have often wondered why a thing like Apple is so successful - or indeed successful at all - and this only confirms my view.
I have tried using some of their products: the OSX, the iPhone, the iPad - and they constantly seem to work against what I try to achieve. This could be due to my immense stupidity, but then, how did I manage to become a very well paid SW engineer?
The only explanation I can think of (for Apple's success, that is) is that it works like X Factor: we all know it is utter crap, but for some reason people are attracted to it because it is 'cool'. Not much of an explanation, I know; hopefully somebody can offer a better one.
I see you don't answer my question, which doesn't do anything to reassure me of your intentions ;-)
Playing at cloak and daggers may seem necessary to security personnel, but when they contact customers - whom I assume are their 'friend' in this game - they invariably end up looking like they are trying to pry out private and sensitive information, which I can't really imagine is fit for purpose.
And I do know about "Identity and access management", thank you very much, since I work for a company that deals in identification and data quality, among other things. Security by obscurity is an illusion, by the way, since you don't know what "the other side" knows about your secrets - other than it is likely to be much more than you hope.
So the issue is taken quiet seriously, you may not agree with some of the methodology, and that's fair enough, but to say banks don't take the issue seriously is misleading.
I'm not really trying to slag them off; but many of the measures seem to be half. You mention scrutinising the logs, which is good and necessary, but why don't they implement some of the simple and easy things that would help a lot - like an easy facility for checking the authenticity of a caller?
We don't stop to wonder: Is it 'natural'? Is it cultural?
'Cultural' is natural for us humans, so it is a daft question. A better question would be to ask whether this is something we are most likely to have learned through our early experience - and how. And I think the answer is likely to be that we learn the idea of "moreness" being a continuous thing from observing varying amounts of things - water in a glass etc, or the length of a piece of string; these concepts are clearly learned as and when you learn the words to describe them - ie. it is 'cultural'.
But many - maybe most - animals have the ability to gauge the relative size of things, and some, like the corvids - even seem able to count. Thus that would count as a 'natural' ability, I suppose.
The case with the Yupno seems to be that measurements aren't needed in their culture; one can muse over where that need arises from - it could be a result of trade, perhaps?
Lets just hope that it doesn't become European law. Actually I hope the judge loses a million
I'm not sure that I agree with that. Most phishing scams are rather obvious, and people really ought to look before they jump.
What feel is missing is that banks and other take it more serious and clean up their practises. Like, I have on a few occasions had my bank call me about something related to security (eg. an unusual transaction) - and bizarrely, the guy calling is reluctant or even refuses to give information about why he calls or which department he calls from - which makes it feel like yet another scam, even if it is genuine.
Ideally, they should give you a call, then let you call back on a security number posted prominently on their web-site (so that it is well-known). This ought to be basic routine.
Not sure about cholesterol, since I haven't followed it closely, but I have lost about 10kg and my blood pressure is around 115 - 125 when I measure it (i'm 54 this year).
As I said, I eat like this primarily because I find it much more satisfying; I do eat meat still, and many more kinds than before - silk worms, anyone? :-) - just not very much or very often. Somehow, when I eat meat, it quickly begins to taste foul, and it isn't about the quality either, because now that I eat it so rarely, I tend to buy more expensive and better quality meat.
You need less food (in volume) if you're eating meat than if you were eating a 'mixed' carb-heavy diet, too, which certainly helps. Judging from what I've seen vegans or even vegeterians deal with, it's certainly easier (in terms of food prep and quantity) and less costly
Eh? Less costly? Of course, I don't know what kind of vegan you have seen, but I assume they are the kind that live on this planet (as opposed to Vegans, if you know what I mean).
Personally, I have gone from eating loads of meat about 6 years ago to eating very little of it - I've just lost the appetite for meat, somehow. I can cook a very good bean curry, which will provide my lunch for about 3 or 4 days, for as little as 2 GBP. It takes longer to cook, but the actual work involved is about 10 minutes - can your meat diet beat this on price and effort?
I don't want my gov't doing deep packet inspection.
I don't want my ISP doing DNS filtering.
I don't want ...
On the other hand, if one could censor out the real, immoral, harmful etc stuff - like the shite produced by the Murdoch Gang - that's IS bloody tempting.
Most of the artifacts of the Forbidden City are in Taiwan, Republic of China (ROC), so they escaped the Cultural Revolution.
Stolen, in modern vernacular.
Here's the bit that scares me the most:
... after a weekend of 'prayer and thought,' ...
We are always busy worrying about "muslim clerics" having too much influence in their own countries, but is American politics any better? Fundamentalist with an overtly anti-democratic, anti-human rights and anti-freedom agenda have a disproportionate amount of influence on American politics, to the extent that nobody running for office can get around pretending they are deeply religious - and we have the nerve to comment on the muslims?
I think that is deeply scaring. And shameful.
So, it is somehow 'sad' that rumour-mongering and whipping up trouble is now illegal - in China, at least?
I am not necessarily convinced the best way to go about things is by going after the blogging services - I know too little about the subject. What I am convinced of is that you need to have a paricularly crooked mind to think that it is wrong to require truthfulness in reporting - all reporting. This is even more important in a democracy; the way American news media twist the trust or even outright lie does unfortunately have a huge influence on the way people choose to vote. If you believe in democracy and freedom, you must by logical necessity require that reporting is objective and truthful. It may not be practically possible to enforce, but I can't see that anybody can find fault with the logic of this.
The only people who have reason to be against this, are the ones who profit from spreading lies: the anti-democratic nut-jobs on the fringes and the religious fear-mongers, to whom truth and freedom are works of the Devil.
You may ask who is going to decide what is truthful? Well, haven't you learned anything from science? Science, or the scientific method, is the most democratic thing there is: you present your hypothesis, and everybody can check your data and accept or reject it based on their own insight. It doesn't require huge, intellectual resources, we are all able to do it, if we are allowed to.
As for China: they have the right to make their own choices, and our meddling is no more than bad manners, really. And what evidence do we in the West have to fear China's government? I mean, truthful and objective evidence - not the shite that you have gobbled up from the likes of Fox News. Of all the nations in the world, China seems to be the least aggressive and has been so for centuries. Even a pathetically small country like Denmark (my country) has been more aggressive to its neighbors.
Not a bad attempt, but I think what I'd really like to see is this sort of concept implemented to its full, logical extent, so you could start out by buying a small, low powered car, then change it bit by bit and end up with something with a big engine etc.
IOW, something where every part fits on a set of standard frames, so you could change your car according to your needs and your wallet, and could combine any parts of any make. That's what I want :-)
To paraphrase a nerd, if the cro-magnons who left cave paintings 30,000 years ago in France could've written something, they would've written something.
And to paraphrase an article I read only yesterday, those Cro-Magnons left something other than paintings: symbolic marks that look more like "writing" than anything else (sorry, can't find the link now, it may have been on http://anthropology.tamu.edu/news which seems to be down at the moment). To be fair, nobody suggests that this is writing like we understand it, more like "proto-writing", but we are damned close, IMO. These symbols see to have been used over a very large area, and considering that it takes time to develop both advanced painting techniques like the ones in the cave-paintings, and the abstract symbolism, we can be fairly confident that this ahs bee around for a long time before those painting were made. So, writing does seem to have deep roots.
The real "problem" is there is a shortage of cheap engineers
That may be part of it, but I think we have to look at a much wider picture. I work for an international SW company, with development both in the US, UK and India (among others), and what I see clearly is that in India, engineers get hired and then promoted fairly rapidly, like every two years or so, whereas in UK and America this doesn't happen: you are hired, and then you are dead in the water.
I think what is really lacking in the west is career plans/-paths for engineers. Our managers are simply not good enough at developing their staff and focus only on holding costs down - the only way you can get promioted or get a raise is by changing job, so our companies lose their good staff and find it really hard to replace them with what is left out there.
I don't think this is about the price of engineers - unless the companies are broke, they are all able and willing to pay for really good engineers, but once they're in the house, the managers have no clue about how to improve them.
A programming language that doesn't have any irritating flaws or omissions, that's all I want. Am I asking too much?
Yes. What you need, IMO, is not "a good language", but to learn to master one or a few. Likely candidates could be C, C++ or Java, which one doesn't really matter. Whining about "nothing is good enough" is just stupid.
Is no one even TRYING to get it right?
Are you? Change your attitude and contribute something.
Stephen Donaldson has some interesting ideas, but unfortunately I find his works close to unbearable with their stilted "Archaic American". The stories have the potential to be great, but the characters are too stylised to be believable.
It would be good for us all if people on both sides of the drugs debate would be less religious in their attitudes. What we need is a set of regulations based on scientific evidence, designed to give people some freedom of choice, but also limit the damages caused by use of recreational drugs.
All drugs can be harmful, especially when used to excess and without proper understanding of what you are doing. Instead of criminalising them, it would be better to legalise, tax and educate.
It is not as strange as one might think, and it doesn't necessarily mean that you can't trust those rich bastards.
It is a well know phenomenon that members of a group show great loyalty to each other, but have little regard for those outside; outsiders are "enemies", at least potentially. Rich people simply regard themselves as a group apart from the rest of society and therefore see the rules of society as irrelevant; this is, by the way, the origin of the word "privilege": "private law" - meaning that you have your own private laws apart from the common laws, which are meant for the rabble.
I know, I know, alarmist title and slightly OT contents, sorry about that. But, ...
Shouldn't this tell us that democracy doesn't really work? I am not sure if it can work at all - I hope it can, but as far as I can see, it can only work if all participants are in complete agreement that not only the letter, but the spirit, of the rules has to be followed absolutely. If only there were a way to ensure that only people who had great personal integrity and were highly competent could run for office.
Look, the eejit dussent even know how to spale cummon wirds.
Rick Santorum -- he is simply a frothy black hole of stupidity.
It would be so nice to be able to simple declare that the man is unintelligent, but it obviously isn't the case.
However, stupid isn't the same thing; lack of intelligence is somethign you can't help, but stupidity is learned - you have to learn that particular discipline that protects you from gaining unwanted insight. This is something that requores quite a lot of intelligence and hard work. Stupidity is intelligence abused.
So there are no "natural rights?"
Not in my opinion, no. Not if you mean that they arise simply from "nature" in general. If you by "natural" mean "what is natural in human society", that is another matter - there are certain actions and traits that are beneficial to the group, like caring for the weak, being trustworthy etc. It is not surprising that laws often formalise these things; but one has to remember that this "group mentality" is only valid within the group - which is why we tend to not extend the same rights to the enemies of our group.
As for animal rights - when we as a society want to protect nature and the plants and animals, we in effect include them in our group, and it then becomes natural to extend the same rules to them. Ie. we give them "human rights" in the same way as your "natural right" which form the basis for the US legal system.
This is in my opinion a very good thing - we should care about our planet and all life on it. I'm not a Christian, but isn't that what the Bible says, right there at the beginning?
If you kill an animal and then eat it or sell the meat, then you hunt with a reasonable purpose; what I said above is that it is wrong to hunt with no other purpose than the "fun" of taking a life - killing for a trophy, or simply discarding the carcass. Culling, done professionally to manage a population, may be a very reasonable thing to do, and I am not against hunting for a reasonable purpose..
You're equating people who hunt for their own food with petty criminals? Do you find yourself offended by people who buy too much at the grocery store or drive too big of a car? Believe it or not, some people cut down trees to heat their homes.
You sound like you might be excessively paranoid.
And you sound like you didn't actually read or comprehend what I wrote. Go on, read my words more carefully, and you will see.