On a number of occasions I have hired people who actively participate in OSS projects. Here's why:
It lets me look at their code,
It (usually) lets me see something about how they work with others,
Most of the people who do it are very community- or team-minded,
It lets me know that they really like programming, and aren't just clock-punchers, and
It gives them experience with the full product development and release cycle.
And they get bonus points if they have done the work in some area that relates to the work I'm paying them to do, even if we don't use their package. Why? Because it means they've been thinking very hard about the problem.
There is nothing to observe that lead to the hypothesis.
No, it clearly explains how people know what to say. They get it from the unicorns.
I guess my point is that we should not hinder people from exploring every possibility.
I'd agree. You are welcome to take all the resources at your command and explore anything you like.
It's only when you want to start impinging on other's explorations by consuming their time, attention, or money that we have to start being choosy.
Science is rightly a competitive business. The ideas that succeed are the ones that are so solid, so compelling, so useful that people can't knock them down or ignore them. And they get that way because of years of dedicated work by passionate individuals.
If you think some theory is worth pursuing, then you should pursue it.
Why couldn't the idea that we exist in a simulation not be scientifically explored? Why can't we hypothesize the existence of multiple realms of existence and then try to test its viability? How are these things not science?
I have a hypothesis that invisible pink unicorns follow everybody around, saying exactly what their matching people say, but 10 seconds before they say it. Is that science?
My answer: no. It's just a notion. Science is focused on finding testable hypotheses and then beating the shit out of them. Unless I can find ways to test my hypotheses, they're just talk.
We sometimes make an exception for things that are right at the edge. If a hypothesis has more explanatory power than current theories, is consistent with known science, and is just hard to test, then we chew on it for a while. I understand string theory to be there now.
My understanding is that the quantum-forking notions and the universe-as-simulation stuff are too far out there to be testable yet. People jaw about them now and then, but I think it's more science fiction than science.
The self-appointed priests of science should do the same.
Please. Those scientists give prizes every year to the people who stir up the most trouble, break the most dogma. They're called Nobel prizes. Maybe you've heard of them?
For example, doctors thought for decades ulcers were caused by stress. It was obvious. Everybody knew it. At least until Dr. Barry Marshall proved otherwise, earning himself the Nobel Prize in 2005. Young medical researchers everywhere will look to him as an example to emulate. That's the exact opposite of what an actual priesthood would do.
For centuries, you Christians burned heretics. Scientists give their best heretics money and fame. Notice a difference?
Far too many police departments protect bad cops. I say, kudos to Palin for cleaning house.
Cleaning house is awesome. And elected official using the power of their office for personal reasons? Not quite so swell. Good results can happen in bad ways.
It also appears that Hillary voters are moving to Palin in a big way, according to some of their blogs.
Well, if you're right, this should be pretty easy to demonstrate. Find a few named bloggers who donated to both Bill and Hillary and who have just come out in favor of McCain/Palin over Obama/Biden based on Palin. The donation history is all in the public records, after all.
My guess is your "big way" will turn out to be pretty hard to pin down.
Ethical scandal? Really? She pushed for the firing of some cop who tazer'd his own nephew, and then threatened the life of his soon-to-be-ex father in law? Seems like a fireable offense to me. Regardless of how she's related to the family.
The "tasered his own nephew" is a bad summary. From what I've read, the kid wanted to try it out, and the cop had already tried it on himself. If my uncle had had a Taser, I'd have been tempted to try it out, too; I've sure had a lot of fun playing hot potato with charged capacitors. And we're talking about Alaska here, where I'm not even sure they cook meat before eating it.
Seems like a fireable offense to me.
Ethics aren't just about the right thing eventually happening; they're about how it happens. If she had pushed to fire every misbehaving cop, that's one thing. But pushing to fire one guy who she had something against when his superiors had already investigated him and decided not to fire him is something else altogether.
We elect people to exercise power on behalf of the people, not themselves.
You don't remember that?? Because, at least in my neck of the woods, there are still many who wish it had gone the other way. Many who would rather give the woman thing a go first...
I'm presuming you mean the "in the woods" thing literally. Because anybody who would switch their vote from a pro-choice Democratic presidential candidate named Clinton to a gun-toting, pro-life right-wing hockey mom vice-presidential candidate is not exactly what I'd call a political sophisticate.
The Republicans have rightly grumbled for years about the left's tendencies to identity politics. But this strikes me as a cheap indulgence of it. Nobody can say with a straight face that the Republicans would have picked a male with such a light resume.
Obama didn't even have the courtesy to vet Hillary Clinton as a possible vice-president, ouch.
My understanding is that she asked not to be vetted unless she was on the short list. And that she would have been, except nobody believed Bill Clinton could sit still and stay quiet for 8 years in the cheap seats.
There's no evidence that Obama's got an ounce of misogyny in him. So as far as I can tell, you're just trolling here.
Being in it for themselves and being in it for the bucks are not the same thing. Those who are in it for good feelings are still in it for themselves. Everyone is in it for themselves, which is not to say that they are against others.
It's tautologically true that all motivation of people is at some stage personal motivation. But that's different than being in it for themselves, where the purposes of actions involve direct personal benefit without regards to that of other actors. Your statements confuse the two.
Further, you're missing the actual point of my statement and the context into which it fits. OeLeWaPpErKe is claiming that they are indeed heedless of others. Try to keep up.
You're arguing to prove a point, rather than trying to understand anything I'm saying. I don't see any value in carrying this further.
For the record, I disagree with pretty much every interpretation you have made of what I've said. You've also dragged in a host of things that I haven't said and don't agree with, apparently because they sound vaguely similar to you. I decline to accept responsibility for dealing with the bag of nonsense that you've chosen to carry around with you.
Further, I continue to find your core theses uncompelling. If your goal is to put Christianity in a good light, I'd encourage you to find a different approach. If I didn't have a number of thoughtful Christians as friends, you'd mainly have persuaded me that Christians are confused, parochial, and ignorant. From the replies you're getting, it looks like I'm not the only one you're alienating.
I agree with you, but in fairness, the reason the atheist prison population is so low is probably because it is mostly accepted by philosophically minded, middle to upper class, well educated people (based on anecdotal evidence).
That seems reasonable to me. It could indeed be that people inclined to be good are more likely to become atheists.
It could also be that becoming atheists makes them more likely to behave well. Or there could be some third factor that drives them both.
Regardless, the crime numbers undermine his theory that atheism is destructive of moral orders in general, just because it wrecks the one he's pushing. He may behave well because only some sky daddy is watching his every move, but that's not true even for my Christian friends.
You go on to admit that atheism is in fact in disagreement with you
No. No, I don't.
What I'm "admitting" is that your (erroneous) expectations don't match my actual views. Dreaming your dreams of a Santa Claus in the sky, the impermanence of the physical world scares you.
It does not scare me. That nothing lasts takes none of the fun out of making something good. If anything, it makes it more poignant, more beautiful. If you don't believe me, go experience some of the art of people like Andy Goldsworthy, who make some works intentionally impermanent.
Again we will see less moral incentive determining their actions. The cracks will be wider.
This is a fine argument from theory, with no actual data. You, some random guy, on the Internet, "guarantee" your argument. So?
History shows that you are wrong. Buddhism started out as a godless venture, accepting the eternal flux we live in, and the Zen Buddhists carry that atheism through today. Have they turned evil? Go meet some and let me know what you think, but I'd say they're doing fine.
Science also suggests you are wrong. At least some and probably much of the human moral sense is provably an innate biological function. For readable introductions, see "Good Natured" by Franz de Waal or "Demonic Males" by Richard Wrangham. And in the decade since those books came out, there's been a heap of good experimental and fMRI observational work, reinforcing the biological basis of community-oriented behavior. And let's not forget "The Forest People," showing that non-Christan societies can develop strong community-oriented behavior.
Your theory that the only source of morality is Christian memes is provably false. And the data about crime and atheism proves the opposite of your notion as well. Atheists are circa 10% of America's population, are circa 0.2% of the prison population. Japan, the least Christian country in the G8, has the lowest violent crime rate. America, the most Christian country, has the highest.
You're really just repeating and embroidering the kind of ignorant statements that Christians make about atheists all the time.
why exactly is it that CS students think they're the smartest? What is it about knowing how to use a computer that makes for elitism?
You've got it backwards. Difficulty with noticing or dealing with the real world makes computers a fine domain to study.
For what it's worth, I don't mean that in a particularly negative way. I spent a lot of middle and high school in my parents' basement hacking away, and I don't regret it a bit. But in the years since, I've come to appreciate how big and rich the world is. There are a lot of ways to understand the world, and my the uber-analytical way of me and my fellow dorks is just one of them.
If those people choose what economists call "Nash efficiency" as an ideology (what atheists do), improving themselves without conscious regard to others
That's embarrassingly wrong. Do you know any actual atheists?
Let's take the classic ur-atheist, the physical scientist. You're suggesting all of those people are in it for themselves? Because the ones I know could do a lot better than a post-doc's wage. The ones I've asked do it because they want to be involved in an enterprise for the ages. They want to learn and contribute that learning to human understanding. They want to teach, sharing knowledge with young minds. They are atheists, but they are not so much in it for the bucks.
Personally, I'm an atheist and very community-minded. Why? Well really, that's who I am. But if you want me to rationalize it, I'm glad to say that I value life and hope and love, and I want to maximize those things not just for myself, but for everybody, and for the ages. Yes, it's all dust eventually, but so what? Every extra moment of beauty, of joy, of wonder that we make is that much better a universe.
Assume that none of the 1500 languages used still exist 2,000 years from now. It's a fairly safe bet that if there's still humans, there's still going to be religion. And as annoying as it is to admit for some people, Christianity is likely to be one of those religions that survives. That'll give them a translation key for 1,500 languages, which can in turn be used to translate the rest of the information contained on the plates.
A few years back I saw the brilliant scholar of religions Huston Smith speak. This being California, one person asked him what he thought of the notion of being "spiritual" but not religious. One of his answers was that religion gives spirituality historical traction. That there were probably quite a number of people a thousand years ago with important insights that have been lost because they weren't preserved by religious traditions.
That seems entirely different than your original "YouTube never needed Flash and still doesn't." Now you're saying they did need it and still do, but that they could start the process of switching if they wanted.
Now, of course, you just need to find a reason why they'd want to do that.
That's worse in a bunch of ways. First, its browser support is weak. Second, you're dependent on the vagaries and codecs of whatever video player they happen to have installed, which is a support and UI consistency nightmare. Third, it's only for video; the YouTube player includes ads and dynamic UI elements, too. Fourth,it DID NOT EXIST when YouTube was starting.
Sure, they could switch now if they wanted to make their users jump through hoops, give a worse user experience, cut off a revenue stream, and do a lot of work for no benefit to them at all. Somehow I think that's not on high on their priority list.
No, thanks to embedded video, which existed long before Flash, and is finally being done in a standard way with the HTML5 video tag. YouTube never needed Flash, and still doesn't.
Would you care to point me to an alternative implementation that has most of YouTube's features? And preferably something that was available, effective, and stable in 2005 when they were starting? I haven't seen anything that's a tenth as controllable as Flash for client-side interface.
All the embedded video I remember before the rise of the Flash player was pretty sucky.
You've proven the case for multimedia on the Web. Not Flash.
He doesn't have to prove the case for Flash. The person wishing to make a change has to make a case for the getting everybody to go to the trouble of changing. What was your proposal again?
Think of the level of citizen journalism, all the articles and ideas, that Microsoft Word has enabled. Therefore, we should all store and distribute.doc files instead of an open standard.
Is your proposal that we should discuss things in the future through confused, misleading analogies? Or that we should have an open replacement for Flash?
Assuming the latter, I look forward to seeing the standard you're writing, and to using your beta. When do you plan to have it out?
I never had any serious, regular problem, in the last year and a half, with Debian Etch or Any Ubuntu release since 6.10 (when i first used it) with flash.
For me, using Fedora, Flash works mostly fine on 32-bit kernels, but crashes like an epileptic cymbal player on 64-bit kernels.
I wonder why, given the huge increase in the performance of computers over the last ten years and more, why it sill takes some games one to five minutes to load.
The goal of almost any commercial product isn't to be 100% awesome in every possible way. It's to be adequate on most measures and awesome in the few that buyers care most about.
Game buyers care about volume and quality of content a lot more than load time. So even if some engineer figured out a way to cut load time in half, somebody would just add more content and bump up bit rates and quality levels until it was back to a tolerable load time.
But if the security guard is NOT being an asshole about it, maybe you should take it up with the people setting the policy, not the guard. Do you absolutely have to take that picture?
The security guard has accepted the job of being the public face for those policies. If he doesn't want to deal with that, he should find a new job, one better suited to his tastes.
That doesn't mean one shouldn't also take it up with the people who write the policies, but the security guard doesn't suddenly lose his responsibility for his behavior because he's getting paid.
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On a number of occasions I have hired people who actively participate in OSS projects. Here's why:
And they get bonus points if they have done the work in some area that relates to the work I'm paying them to do, even if we don't use their package. Why? Because it means they've been thinking very hard about the problem.
There is nothing to observe that lead to the hypothesis.
No, it clearly explains how people know what to say. They get it from the unicorns.
I guess my point is that we should not hinder people from exploring every possibility.
I'd agree. You are welcome to take all the resources at your command and explore anything you like.
It's only when you want to start impinging on other's explorations by consuming their time, attention, or money that we have to start being choosy.
Science is rightly a competitive business. The ideas that succeed are the ones that are so solid, so compelling, so useful that people can't knock them down or ignore them. And they get that way because of years of dedicated work by passionate individuals.
If you think some theory is worth pursuing, then you should pursue it.
Why couldn't the idea that we exist in a simulation not be scientifically explored? Why can't we hypothesize the existence of multiple realms of existence and then try to test its viability? How are these things not science?
I have a hypothesis that invisible pink unicorns follow everybody around, saying exactly what their matching people say, but 10 seconds before they say it. Is that science?
My answer: no. It's just a notion. Science is focused on finding testable hypotheses and then beating the shit out of them. Unless I can find ways to test my hypotheses, they're just talk.
We sometimes make an exception for things that are right at the edge. If a hypothesis has more explanatory power than current theories, is consistent with known science, and is just hard to test, then we chew on it for a while. I understand string theory to be there now.
My understanding is that the quantum-forking notions and the universe-as-simulation stuff are too far out there to be testable yet. People jaw about them now and then, but I think it's more science fiction than science.
The self-appointed priests of science should do the same.
Please. Those scientists give prizes every year to the people who stir up the most trouble, break the most dogma. They're called Nobel prizes. Maybe you've heard of them?
For example, doctors thought for decades ulcers were caused by stress. It was obvious. Everybody knew it. At least until Dr. Barry Marshall proved otherwise, earning himself the Nobel Prize in 2005. Young medical researchers everywhere will look to him as an example to emulate. That's the exact opposite of what an actual priesthood would do.
For centuries, you Christians burned heretics. Scientists give their best heretics money and fame. Notice a difference?
Far too many police departments protect bad cops. I say, kudos to Palin for cleaning house.
Cleaning house is awesome. And elected official using the power of their office for personal reasons? Not quite so swell. Good results can happen in bad ways.
It also appears that Hillary voters are moving to Palin in a big way, according to some of their blogs.
Well, if you're right, this should be pretty easy to demonstrate. Find a few named bloggers who donated to both Bill and Hillary and who have just come out in favor of McCain/Palin over Obama/Biden based on Palin. The donation history is all in the public records, after all.
My guess is your "big way" will turn out to be pretty hard to pin down.
Ethical scandal? Really? She pushed for the firing of some cop who tazer'd his own nephew, and then threatened the life of his soon-to-be-ex father in law? Seems like a fireable offense to me. Regardless of how she's related to the family.
The "tasered his own nephew" is a bad summary. From what I've read, the kid wanted to try it out, and the cop had already tried it on himself. If my uncle had had a Taser, I'd have been tempted to try it out, too; I've sure had a lot of fun playing hot potato with charged capacitors. And we're talking about Alaska here, where I'm not even sure they cook meat before eating it.
Seems like a fireable offense to me.
Ethics aren't just about the right thing eventually happening; they're about how it happens. If she had pushed to fire every misbehaving cop, that's one thing. But pushing to fire one guy who she had something against when his superiors had already investigated him and decided not to fire him is something else altogether.
We elect people to exercise power on behalf of the people, not themselves.
You don't remember that?? Because, at least in my neck of the woods, there are still many who wish it had gone the other way. Many who would rather give the woman thing a go first...
I'm presuming you mean the "in the woods" thing literally. Because anybody who would switch their vote from a pro-choice Democratic presidential candidate named Clinton to a gun-toting, pro-life right-wing hockey mom vice-presidential candidate is not exactly what I'd call a political sophisticate.
The Republicans have rightly grumbled for years about the left's tendencies to identity politics. But this strikes me as a cheap indulgence of it. Nobody can say with a straight face that the Republicans would have picked a male with such a light resume.
Obama didn't even have the courtesy to vet Hillary Clinton as a possible vice-president, ouch.
My understanding is that she asked not to be vetted unless she was on the short list. And that she would have been, except nobody believed Bill Clinton could sit still and stay quiet for 8 years in the cheap seats.
There's no evidence that Obama's got an ounce of misogyny in him. So as far as I can tell, you're just trolling here.
Being in it for themselves and being in it for the bucks are not the same thing. Those who are in it for good feelings are still in it for themselves. Everyone is in it for themselves, which is not to say that they are against others.
It's tautologically true that all motivation of people is at some stage personal motivation. But that's different than being in it for themselves, where the purposes of actions involve direct personal benefit without regards to that of other actors. Your statements confuse the two.
Further, you're missing the actual point of my statement and the context into which it fits. OeLeWaPpErKe is claiming that they are indeed heedless of others. Try to keep up.
Sigh.
You're arguing to prove a point, rather than trying to understand anything I'm saying. I don't see any value in carrying this further.
For the record, I disagree with pretty much every interpretation you have made of what I've said. You've also dragged in a host of things that I haven't said and don't agree with, apparently because they sound vaguely similar to you. I decline to accept responsibility for dealing with the bag of nonsense that you've chosen to carry around with you.
Further, I continue to find your core theses uncompelling. If your goal is to put Christianity in a good light, I'd encourage you to find a different approach. If I didn't have a number of thoughtful Christians as friends, you'd mainly have persuaded me that Christians are confused, parochial, and ignorant. From the replies you're getting, it looks like I'm not the only one you're alienating.
I agree with you, but in fairness, the reason the atheist prison population is so low is probably because it is mostly accepted by philosophically minded, middle to upper class, well educated people (based on anecdotal evidence).
That seems reasonable to me. It could indeed be that people inclined to be good are more likely to become atheists.
It could also be that becoming atheists makes them more likely to behave well. Or there could be some third factor that drives them both.
Regardless, the crime numbers undermine his theory that atheism is destructive of moral orders in general, just because it wrecks the one he's pushing. He may behave well because only some sky daddy is watching his every move, but that's not true even for my Christian friends.
You go on to admit that atheism is in fact in disagreement with you
No. No, I don't.
What I'm "admitting" is that your (erroneous) expectations don't match my actual views. Dreaming your dreams of a Santa Claus in the sky, the impermanence of the physical world scares you.
It does not scare me. That nothing lasts takes none of the fun out of making something good. If anything, it makes it more poignant, more beautiful. If you don't believe me, go experience some of the art of people like Andy Goldsworthy, who make some works intentionally impermanent.
Again we will see less moral incentive determining their actions. The cracks will be wider.
This is a fine argument from theory, with no actual data. You, some random guy, on the Internet, "guarantee" your argument. So?
History shows that you are wrong. Buddhism started out as a godless venture, accepting the eternal flux we live in, and the Zen Buddhists carry that atheism through today. Have they turned evil? Go meet some and let me know what you think, but I'd say they're doing fine.
Science also suggests you are wrong. At least some and probably much of the human moral sense is provably an innate biological function. For readable introductions, see "Good Natured" by Franz de Waal or "Demonic Males" by Richard Wrangham. And in the decade since those books came out, there's been a heap of good experimental and fMRI observational work, reinforcing the biological basis of community-oriented behavior. And let's not forget "The Forest People," showing that non-Christan societies can develop strong community-oriented behavior.
Your theory that the only source of morality is Christian memes is provably false. And the data about crime and atheism proves the opposite of your notion as well. Atheists are circa 10% of America's population, are circa 0.2% of the prison population. Japan, the least Christian country in the G8, has the lowest violent crime rate. America, the most Christian country, has the highest.
You're really just repeating and embroidering the kind of ignorant statements that Christians make about atheists all the time.
why exactly is it that CS students think they're the smartest? What is it about knowing how to use a computer that makes for elitism?
You've got it backwards. Difficulty with noticing or dealing with the real world makes computers a fine domain to study.
For what it's worth, I don't mean that in a particularly negative way. I spent a lot of middle and high school in my parents' basement hacking away, and I don't regret it a bit. But in the years since, I've come to appreciate how big and rich the world is. There are a lot of ways to understand the world, and my the uber-analytical way of me and my fellow dorks is just one of them.
An early version of this is already on the Rosetta space probe.
Just because we agnostic or atheist geeks think that such things are embarrassing doesn't make it any less representative of the world we live in.
Yep. I'm a flaming atheist, and I'm fine with them having used Genesis. I'd bet it's the single most translated text in the world.
If I'm going to build a bridge that I want to last 500 years, I'm going to take a hard look at all the bridges that have lasted that long already.
If those people choose what economists call "Nash efficiency" as an ideology (what atheists do), improving themselves without conscious regard to others
That's embarrassingly wrong. Do you know any actual atheists?
Let's take the classic ur-atheist, the physical scientist. You're suggesting all of those people are in it for themselves? Because the ones I know could do a lot better than a post-doc's wage. The ones I've asked do it because they want to be involved in an enterprise for the ages. They want to learn and contribute that learning to human understanding. They want to teach, sharing knowledge with young minds. They are atheists, but they are not so much in it for the bucks.
Personally, I'm an atheist and very community-minded. Why? Well really, that's who I am. But if you want me to rationalize it, I'm glad to say that I value life and hope and love, and I want to maximize those things not just for myself, but for everybody, and for the ages. Yes, it's all dust eventually, but so what? Every extra moment of beauty, of joy, of wonder that we make is that much better a universe.
Assume that none of the 1500 languages used still exist 2,000 years from now. It's a fairly safe bet that if there's still humans, there's still going to be religion. And as annoying as it is to admit for some people, Christianity is likely to be one of those religions that survives. That'll give them a translation key for 1,500 languages, which can in turn be used to translate the rest of the information contained on the plates.
A few years back I saw the brilliant scholar of religions Huston Smith speak. This being California, one person asked him what he thought of the notion of being "spiritual" but not religious. One of his answers was that religion gives spirituality historical traction. That there were probably quite a number of people a thousand years ago with important insights that have been lost because they weren't preserved by religious traditions.
That seems entirely different than your original "YouTube never needed Flash and still doesn't." Now you're saying they did need it and still do, but that they could start the process of switching if they wanted.
Now, of course, you just need to find a reason why they'd want to do that.
That's worse in a bunch of ways. First, its browser support is weak. Second, you're dependent on the vagaries and codecs of whatever video player they happen to have installed, which is a support and UI consistency nightmare. Third, it's only for video; the YouTube player includes ads and dynamic UI elements, too. Fourth,it DID NOT EXIST when YouTube was starting.
Sure, they could switch now if they wanted to make their users jump through hoops, give a worse user experience, cut off a revenue stream, and do a lot of work for no benefit to them at all. Somehow I think that's not on high on their priority list.
No, thanks to embedded video, which existed long before Flash, and is finally being done in a standard way with the HTML5 video tag. YouTube never needed Flash, and still doesn't.
Would you care to point me to an alternative implementation that has most of YouTube's features? And preferably something that was available, effective, and stable in 2005 when they were starting? I haven't seen anything that's a tenth as controllable as Flash for client-side interface.
All the embedded video I remember before the rise of the Flash player was pretty sucky.
You've proven the case for multimedia on the Web. Not Flash.
He doesn't have to prove the case for Flash. The person wishing to make a change has to make a case for the getting everybody to go to the trouble of changing. What was your proposal again?
Think of the level of citizen journalism, all the articles and ideas, that Microsoft Word has enabled. Therefore, we should all store and distribute .doc files instead of an open standard.
Is your proposal that we should discuss things in the future through confused, misleading analogies? Or that we should have an open replacement for Flash?
Assuming the latter, I look forward to seeing the standard you're writing, and to using your beta. When do you plan to have it out?
I never had any serious, regular problem, in the last year and a half, with Debian Etch or Any Ubuntu release since 6.10 (when i first used it) with flash.
For me, using Fedora, Flash works mostly fine on 32-bit kernels, but crashes like an epileptic cymbal player on 64-bit kernels.
I wonder why, given the huge increase in the performance of computers over the last ten years and more, why it sill takes some games one to five minutes to load.
The goal of almost any commercial product isn't to be 100% awesome in every possible way. It's to be adequate on most measures and awesome in the few that buyers care most about.
Game buyers care about volume and quality of content a lot more than load time. So even if some engineer figured out a way to cut load time in half, somebody would just add more content and bump up bit rates and quality levels until it was back to a tolerable load time.
But if the security guard is NOT being an asshole about it, maybe you should take it up with the people setting the policy, not the guard. Do you absolutely have to take that picture?
The security guard has accepted the job of being the public face for those policies. If he doesn't want to deal with that, he should find a new job, one better suited to his tastes.
That doesn't mean one shouldn't also take it up with the people who write the policies, but the security guard doesn't suddenly lose his responsibility for his behavior because he's getting paid.