Society is a series of hoops, because we all know that some humans are more functional than others.
College? A hoop. That Cisco certification? A hoop. Even the suit and tie? Hoops.
Get ready to leap.
If possible, employers would like us to leap through other hoops, as well. Got any criminal convictions? What about negative reputation on Google? Shoot, we'll even check out your World of Warcraft character.
Credit scores, interviewing your neighbors, and drug tests just fit right into that.
As long as we have lots of flaky, sociopathic and outright stupid people floating around, there's going to be hoops to separate the wheat from the chaff.
At least, that's a realist position. Someone else can cover the moral and social angles because I've never found them to be grounded in reality.
1. What form of electronic voting could not be compromised? 2. What form of paper voting could not be compromised?
It may be that we must accept that no form of voting is "secure" in the sense of cannot be gamed.
At least, people have been gaming votes for as long as democracy has existed, so I don't know if they're going to stop just because we make it slightly less convenient.
Actually I believe that constant fire fighting is the mark of a poorly run organization.
I completely agree.
Any organization that cannot plan its time usage is depending on the goodwill of its employees to suffer under mismanagement. However, the smarter ones will defect, leaving a horde of obedient incompetents. Your career then goes nowhere because "Hey look it's another one of those guys from the horde of incompetents across town!"
Common sense -- which used to exist, but in order to be equal we had to separate out the better discernment of others -- would have us realize that vague patents are time bombs.
I've just patented the act of hiding information in physical and virtual objects. You all owe me your life savings. That's my socialized healthcare and retirement plan, right there!
College is just a certification program. After that, your education begins.
You will learn basic job skills, and then learn to fight your way up the ladder.
Most people are fucking idiots, even if they're smart at one or two things (what Michael Crichton called "thin intelligences"). They will oppose you and obstruct you with their stupidity.
You will learn to navigate the minefield of politics, which is greatly increased by people being in denial that our society is dying just as Spengler predicted it would -- from within.
Stick to what you know, and to your own values, and don't let anyone ride your ass. Hold out for something good and have allegiance to nothing less.
These bloated plugins seem to also be responsible for 80%-ish of the crashes I have in Mozilla.
They are the big weakness of the web: what if someone decides to start putting a non-standard format out there that becomes a de facto standard because it's the easiest way to do something?
Flash seems to be the easiest way to put up an animation.
PDF is the best format for distributing documents that you don't necessarily want others to edit.
No one wants to explore alternatives because the content is in these somewhat unwieldy formats.
If machine is superior to man, let it be so. It's only natural selection.
We already know humans have downsides, like 4chan and ecocide. Let evolution do its work.
If machines get smart enough, they will have all that we do -- emotions, friendship, and aesthetic skills -- and so we will be obsolete.
Since they are superior beings, the machines will recycle most of us and banish the rest to a small nature preserve. After all, that's what we would do.
Diversity -- religions, ideological, cultural, linguistic and ethnic -- is inherent flawed because two values systems cannot occupy the same place at the same time.
One man's blasphemy is another man's progressivism.
So by endorsing "diversity," we demand an agree-to-disagree society that ensures we will have no values outside of commerce and laws.
PEOPLE IN GLASS HOUSES SHOULDN'T THROW STONES - "Those who are vulnerable should not attack others. The proverb has been traced back to Geoffrey Chaucer's 'Troilus and Criseyde' (1385). George Herbert wrote in 1651: 'Whose house is of glass, must not throw stones at another.' This saying is first cited in the United States in 'William & Mary College Quarterly' (1710). Twenty-six later Benjamin Franklin wrote, 'Don't throw stones at your neighbors', if your own windows are glass.' 'To live in a glass house' is used as a figure of speech referring to vulnerability." From "Random House Dictionary of Popular Proverbs and Sayings" (1996) by Gregory Y. Titelman (Random House, New York, 1996).
A reminder to all open source developers tempted to continue talking endless flak about Microsoft and Sun products.
Your life is regulated by "I believe" including that you believe you and physical reality exist, with zero evidence to that point.
Stop arrogantly oversimplifying complex arguments just so you can feel superior to someone who is religious. It's the intelligence of the person that determines the clarity of the religion, not how the masses interpret it.
Brain hacking has been around for a long time. Its primary vector is language.
Marketing, peer pressure, memes, prophecies, and rumors are all brain hacking.
It's just not a direct connection, but given how badly so many things have turned out at the hands of a large informed group, it looks like it succeeds most of the time.
There is only one solution: learn philosophy and critical thinking.
Both sides are developing SDI/anti-missile defenses. This makes many of these weapons obsolete, as they no longer have a guaranteed first-strike capability.
The old arms race was big missiles and bombers; the new arms race is drones and micro-cruise missiles.
But it was a nice press opportunity for both men to come out smelling like roses while they quietly plan each other's destruction.
The Linux Foundation says that the best solution at this point is for vendors to ditch FAT and come up with a new vendor-neutral format that can be used without having to pay licensing fees.
I completely agree with this. Don't hack a quasi-FAT implementation; make a new file system that can be used for all devices because it's open source. Designs can be open source just as much as code, and that lets people use them to do things, instead of keeping us ghettoized within legal constraints.
I think it's not terrible that a government have a working list of its citizens, especially if they put vital medical and other data on it. This can save lives and can get us more accurate reporting about how important it is to, say, find a cure for AIDS over a cure for cancer.
Having an easy way to contact or locate any citizen is also important.
We're so accustomed in the West to distrust of government that we've lost sight of the basic truth: it matters who you get into government, and how willing they are to fight back corruption (entropy). We can't regulate government into sanity. But we can pick sane people, although mass media democracy isn't so good at that.
Instead of fighting back at any recordkeeping, we might consider the following:
If we distrust government, we are forgetting that there are millions of ways government can wreck us that don't involve "Big Brother" scenarios. Bad wars. Corrupt economics. Allowing toxic waste to be in our groundwater. We don't see these as visibly as "Big Brother" scenarios, so we don't talk about them.
Letting Google keep records on who we are may be more destructive. A former friend turns enemy blogs about you? That's what the world will know of you when they Google you. Erroneous articles, conviction by public opinion? Just as corrupt as any corrupt government, but not as visible.
People like to have something tangible and external to blame. It wasn't my fault; God did it. It wasn't my fault; The 1984 Government did it. Leftists claim government is capitalist and dominated by white men; Rightists claim government is socialist and against white men. It seems every group is projecting its fears outside of itself in order to claim innocence.
Before newspapers in their modern form, anyone with a printing press just wrote some opinions and sent them out to the world -- like a blog.
With modern newspapers, we have more accountability than ever before. They vary from amazing (WSJ, NYT, The Guardian, Ha'aretz) to awful, but you can get some very insightful news analysis if you know where to look.
On blogs, not so much, outside of technology and popular culture topics.
The format -- words on a printed page -- isn't as important as the organizations behind them. Newspapers are a newer type of communication than blogs, even if blogs use a newer medium of transmission.
We will move from the freedom and anonymity of urban society right back into the parochial, scrutinized and regulated mores of rural society.
I think that's the most vital part of your article.
Quite honestly, it sounds good to me.
Our society is rife with abuses, stupidity, greed, cowardice and moronic hipsters floating around.
If it takes rural-style regulation of mores to get rid of these parasites, liars, creeps and low quality people, I'm all for it.
After all, if someone you could trust was in power, you'd feel better about power.
If your neighbors weren't reckless morons who could care less about what happens to you and your possessions, you'd feel better about living near people.
From years in several cities: people talk paradoxically in them. They rave on about how great it is to be in the center of things, but the focus of every action is removing themselves from the masses to someplace over which they have control.
Does he mean American grads are "spoiled," in that we don't learn rote process because there are other options and we have high expectations?
In a relative sense, his observation may be correct, but what he did not do was demonstrate the necessity of this more rigorous process in producing high-quality code.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems that most PHP apps have this problem because they encourage a "macro script" mentality.
Perl FTW.
Society is a series of hoops, because we all know that some humans are more functional than others.
College? A hoop.
That Cisco certification? A hoop.
Even the suit and tie? Hoops.
Get ready to leap.
If possible, employers would like us to leap through other hoops, as well. Got any criminal convictions? What about negative reputation on Google? Shoot, we'll even check out your World of Warcraft character.
Credit scores, interviewing your neighbors, and drug tests just fit right into that.
As long as we have lots of flaky, sociopathic and outright stupid people floating around, there's going to be hoops to separate the wheat from the chaff.
At least, that's a realist position. Someone else can cover the moral and social angles because I've never found them to be grounded in reality.
1. What form of electronic voting could not be compromised?
2. What form of paper voting could not be compromised?
It may be that we must accept that no form of voting is "secure" in the sense of cannot be gamed.
At least, people have been gaming votes for as long as democracy has existed, so I don't know if they're going to stop just because we make it slightly less convenient.
Actually I believe that constant fire fighting is the mark of a poorly run organization.
I completely agree.
Any organization that cannot plan its time usage is depending on the goodwill of its employees to suffer under mismanagement. However, the smarter ones will defect, leaving a horde of obedient incompetents. Your career then goes nowhere because "Hey look it's another one of those guys from the horde of incompetents across town!"
Just get a government job at that point.
...we're installing Windows. haha
"Vague."
Common sense -- which used to exist, but in order to be equal we had to separate out the better discernment of others -- would have us realize that vague patents are time bombs.
I've just patented the act of hiding information in physical and virtual objects. You all owe me your life savings. That's my socialized healthcare and retirement plan, right there!
Now that we know what defines a psychopath, we should test everyone and lock up the psychos.
Oh wait, a little knowledge IS a dangerous thing...
College is just a certification program. After that, your education begins.
You will learn basic job skills, and then learn to fight your way up the ladder.
Most people are fucking idiots, even if they're smart at one or two things (what Michael Crichton called "thin intelligences"). They will oppose you and obstruct you with their stupidity.
You will learn to navigate the minefield of politics, which is greatly increased by people being in denial that our society is dying just as Spengler predicted it would -- from within.
Stick to what you know, and to your own values, and don't let anyone ride your ass. Hold out for something good and have allegiance to nothing less.
Because society loves a chump.
These bloated plugins seem to also be responsible for 80%-ish of the crashes I have in Mozilla.
They are the big weakness of the web: what if someone decides to start putting a non-standard format out there that becomes a de facto standard because it's the easiest way to do something?
Flash seems to be the easiest way to put up an animation.
PDF is the best format for distributing documents that you don't necessarily want others to edit.
No one wants to explore alternatives because the content is in these somewhat unwieldy formats.
If machine is superior to man, let it be so. It's only natural selection.
We already know humans have downsides, like 4chan and ecocide. Let evolution do its work.
If machines get smart enough, they will have all that we do -- emotions, friendship, and aesthetic skills -- and so we will be obsolete.
Since they are superior beings, the machines will recycle most of us and banish the rest to a small nature preserve. After all, that's what we would do.
I think students should learn languages simultaneously, with a focus on getting them writing code they can use as quickly as possible.
I'd pick C/C++, Perl and assembly, with Lithp coming later.
That way, they can start writing the kind of stuff they're going to need and use right away:
* Web apps
* Device drivers
* Cracking software (oops...)
Diversity -- religions, ideological, cultural, linguistic and ethnic -- is inherent flawed because two values systems cannot occupy the same place at the same time.
One man's blasphemy is another man's progressivism.
So by endorsing "diversity," we demand an agree-to-disagree society that ensures we will have no values outside of commerce and laws.
A long, slow tumble to the end.
PEOPLE IN GLASS HOUSES SHOULDN'T THROW STONES - "Those who are vulnerable should not attack others. The proverb has been traced back to Geoffrey Chaucer's 'Troilus and Criseyde' (1385). George Herbert wrote in 1651: 'Whose house is of glass, must not throw stones at another.' This saying is first cited in the United States in 'William & Mary College Quarterly' (1710). Twenty-six later Benjamin Franklin wrote, 'Don't throw stones at your neighbors', if your own windows are glass.' 'To live in a glass house' is used as a figure of speech referring to vulnerability." From "Random House Dictionary of Popular Proverbs and Sayings" (1996) by Gregory Y. Titelman (Random House, New York, 1996).
A reminder to all open source developers tempted to continue talking endless flak about Microsoft and Sun products.
And philosophy comes in for the one-punch kill:
http://www.iep.utm.edu/b/brainvat.htm
Your life is regulated by "I believe" including that you believe you and physical reality exist, with zero evidence to that point.
Stop arrogantly oversimplifying complex arguments just so you can feel superior to someone who is religious. It's the intelligence of the person that determines the clarity of the religion, not how the masses interpret it.
Brain hacking has been around for a long time. Its primary vector is language.
Marketing, peer pressure, memes, prophecies, and rumors are all brain hacking.
It's just not a direct connection, but given how badly so many things have turned out at the hands of a large informed group, it looks like it succeeds most of the time.
There is only one solution: learn philosophy and critical thinking.
Both sides are developing SDI/anti-missile defenses. This makes many of these weapons obsolete, as they no longer have a guaranteed first-strike capability.
The old arms race was big missiles and bombers; the new arms race is drones and micro-cruise missiles.
But it was a nice press opportunity for both men to come out smelling like roses while they quietly plan each other's destruction.
The Linux Foundation says that the best solution at this point is for vendors to ditch FAT and come up with a new vendor-neutral format that can be used without having to pay licensing fees.
I completely agree with this. Don't hack a quasi-FAT implementation; make a new file system that can be used for all devices because it's open source. Designs can be open source just as much as code, and that lets people use them to do things, instead of keeping us ghettoized within legal constraints.
I think it's not terrible that a government have a working list of its citizens, especially if they put vital medical and other data on it. This can save lives and can get us more accurate reporting about how important it is to, say, find a cure for AIDS over a cure for cancer.
Having an easy way to contact or locate any citizen is also important.
We're so accustomed in the West to distrust of government that we've lost sight of the basic truth: it matters who you get into government, and how willing they are to fight back corruption (entropy). We can't regulate government into sanity. But we can pick sane people, although mass media democracy isn't so good at that.
Instead of fighting back at any recordkeeping, we might consider the following:
People like to have something tangible and external to blame. It wasn't my fault; God did it. It wasn't my fault; The 1984 Government did it. Leftists claim government is capitalist and dominated by white men; Rightists claim government is socialist and against white men. It seems every group is projecting its fears outside of itself in order to claim innocence.
Get involved.
Fix the situation.
If you run off somewhere else, when things go wrong there (as they do: entropy), you'll back out too.
Others will do the same, and nothing will emerge for the better.
It's like anti-natural selection.
On one hand, people go around asking for greater accountability.
On the other hand, they don't want it applied to them.
I don't think I mind having to keep my nose clean in exchange for a more stable, ordered existence.
Things will never be completely fair, but the way to make them more fair is to help everyone become more rich and powerful.
To paraphrase Bill Cosby (on "mind-expanding" drugs): But what if you're an asshole?
The same applies here:
Most people are the ones I see littering, driving like idiots, buying stupid junk, getting drunk and vomiting in my sunroof, etc.
Do I want them to be any more powerful than they are? Hell, no!
Before newspapers in their modern form, anyone with a printing press just wrote some opinions and sent them out to the world -- like a blog.
With modern newspapers, we have more accountability than ever before. They vary from amazing (WSJ, NYT, The Guardian, Ha'aretz) to awful, but you can get some very insightful news analysis if you know where to look.
On blogs, not so much, outside of technology and popular culture topics.
The format -- words on a printed page -- isn't as important as the organizations behind them. Newspapers are a newer type of communication than blogs, even if blogs use a newer medium of transmission.
We will move from the freedom and anonymity of urban society right back into the parochial, scrutinized and regulated mores of rural society.
I think that's the most vital part of your article.
Quite honestly, it sounds good to me.
Our society is rife with abuses, stupidity, greed, cowardice and moronic hipsters floating around.
If it takes rural-style regulation of mores to get rid of these parasites, liars, creeps and low quality people, I'm all for it.
After all, if someone you could trust was in power, you'd feel better about power.
If your neighbors weren't reckless morons who could care less about what happens to you and your possessions, you'd feel better about living near people.
From years in several cities: people talk paradoxically in them. They rave on about how great it is to be in the center of things, but the focus of every action is removing themselves from the masses to someplace over which they have control.
It seems a bad psychology to me.
...this refreshing Pepsi!
Ignoring his annoying generalization:
Does he mean American grads are "spoiled," in that we don't learn rote process because there are other options and we have high expectations?
In a relative sense, his observation may be correct, but what he did not do was demonstrate the necessity of this more rigorous process in producing high-quality code.