Amen!! I naively took a job where the boss told me in the interview he was easy going, and fed me almost that exact same line of, "Work late every now and again, and just take off when times are slow from time to time, no biggie."
Just know that it can be true, too. I've worked a place where yes, I was expected to take care of it if we were in a crunch, but my boss also took me aside and said "You're working more than 8 hours on average - don't. It's OK if you work less, but don't work more." and "Don't come into work if you're tired."
I've worked several places where the bosses threw people out and asked them to work less rather than more.
I agree with hedwards. There is already talk of a "levelling" and a saturation point. I think Google is smart in developing chrome. I am NOT a fan of "cloud computing" because most of what I do has to do with flop intensive activities (audio and video and image editing) and doing that in the aether is not a wise or efficient idea.
Well, the flops (floating point operations per second) isn't the problem - CPUs and power are likely cheaper in the datacenter than in your home to start with, and the CPUs get utilized more of the time. The problem is in getting your data to and from the CPUs.
I've lost count of the number of drugs in long term use that have turned out to be insanely expensive placebos and some even actively harmful.
There needs to be full accountability with people going to jail for any fraud at all and the companies of those people shut down.
Maybe this indicate that we need a new legal standard for scientific papers? So that when you declare "This is a scientific paper", you need to declare a number of things, e.g.
Conflicts of interest
Who are the real authors of the paper (what rough percentage / which involvement has each person has)
What's the real sources of funding
"We have not done any kind of conscious spin of the data" (Like "The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth")
And if you misrepresented any of these, you would take a legal penalty, similar to the penalty for perjury. The consequences of scientific misconduct has larger scope than most legal misconduct; so why should scientific misconduct have lesser penalties and legal safeguards?
It's not "fuck the investors over" - it is "ensure that the pressure is towards behaving ethically". With anything like decent risk management, you shouldn't have more than some low, single digit percentage in this anyway; investors often lose all their investment when a company goes bankrupt.
I'm also somewhat disturbed that you feel that what you should be thinking about after you find you've invested in murdering people is "What's going to happen to my money?"
From your comment "You lucky sod", it sounds like you're not in such a relationship.
I am in a relationship - with that kind of girl - and my experience is that it works better to have loaded my brain with a lot of information and then living by it than anything has worked before I loaded my brain with information about relationships.
Yes! The Chinese government has, stupid as they are, chosen to conservatively follow the lead of social psychology textbooks (e.g. David Myers "Social Psychology") about how we get influenced by video games, rather than random posters on Slashdot.
Now, it may be that the textbook in question is wrong (it's a major one in the field, but the only one I've read that cover this particular topic) - but if you're experimenting with a billion people, it is a relatively sane choice to say "We'll remove the freedom to experience violent/gangster glorifying videogames in order to give people the freedom of walking around without being violently assaulted."
Breaking this down, I think the following questions are the ones that's relevant. They're working under the assumption that there may be some correlation between playing violent/gangster glorifying video games, an assumption that as noted is shared by at least some major social psychologists. (I've included both positive and negative influence as separate points. Note that Freud's theory of catharsis / building up and releasing "emotional energy" is not considered scientific any more, and a hypothesis based on this giving positive results should at the very least be examined closely. As far as I know, substitute activities aren't well supported either.)
What is our best estimate at the cost of the extra criminal behavior by people that are influenced to be more violent
What is our best estimate at the benefit from the people that become less violent due to video games?
What's our best estimate at the value of the freedom to play violent video games - ie, how much does it improve the lives of the people that play them (and those around them) compared to not having them available?
What's our best estimate at the cost of enforcement for this law?
My personal guesses is that there is a significant number of people that are slightly influenced towards violence and acceptance of crime by these kinds of games, that there are few that are influenced to not be violent from them, that the value of playing this particular type of video games instead of other video games is quite low (assuming that your peers don't have the games either), and that the cost of enforcement for this kind of law is fairly low in a country that does heavy censorship already. Under these assumptions, the Chinese move makes sense and is rational, even though it goes against my personal feelings with regards to censorship (I hate when censorship is necessary/beneficial.)
Man I don't get how people are so polarized about this. Look dudes. It's against the law to infringe copyrighted material. It's against the law to aid somebody else breaking the law. File sharing therefor is Against The Law. It is the Proper Decision for these people to be convicted. Anything else would make me think the judges were asleep at the wheel.
If you dislike that so much, don't focus on whether somebody wins or loses these cases. It is Proper that they lose. It would be Wrong if the law bent so much to allow what is clearly outlawed. Instead, seek to CHANGE the law. Donate to lobbyists. Become lobbyists yourself. Civil disobedience is fine, but don't expect to get off the hook for doing it until you change the law.
Work to get rid of lobbyists.
My suggestion for how to level the playing field: Require that all lobbying be public. If somebody lobby for something, all their interactions with politicians have to be recorded and put up for download - for free. Sure, it would cost the lobbyists a bit - but not that much, and it is a reasonable extra cost of "doing business" as a lobbyists. If they have problems with the bandwidth bills, they could host a torrent.
Slashdot is an international website; while hosted in the US, there seems to be at least about the same amount non-US readers as US readers. (I believe there even was some statistics shown that indicated that there were more non-US readers, but I may be mixing up websites WRT those.)
However, you don't need to understand how to write a Tetris clone (an emergent phenomena) in order to be able to instruct a computer to make a copy of an existing one; and just the same way, you don't need to understand all emergent phenomena of the brain to copy it and get a functionally identical copy.
Yeah, yeah, I know, I'll be lynched for saying that Bill "I am Satan" Gates should be on par with RMS, ESR and Linus, but think about this for a second.
Bill founded what is now the largest software company in the world, and wether or not you agree with him, he has made a important contribution to the computing industry: Microsoft brought desktop computing to the home user.
Now, be honest. How many of us had our first computer experience with MS-DOS or Windows 3.1? Do you think that if computers still consisted on thin-client-server models based on huge VAX mainframes,
Stop right there.
Let's just add some years for release of successful GUIs here:
Macintosh, 1984. DesqView, 1984. GEM, 1984. X, 1984 (though X11 was only in 1987, and this is arguably not a full GUI, just a display and input driver.) Amiga, 1985. Atari ST, 1985. GEOS, 1986 (on C64. GEOS used to be the 3rd largest operating system in the world in terms of installed base, after MS-DOS and Macintosh).
And then we have Windows 3.0, the first successful Windows version: 1990.
That's a full 6 years after the mainstream pioneering efforts (in 1984).
It's over 31 years after The Mother of All Demos, when GUIs were first demonstrated in public.
that Joe and Jane Smith would be able to dial-in to AOL and connect to thousands of people around the world? Would the Internet have blossomed into the vast information network it is today without the aid of easy-to-use software from Microsoft? How about Grandma who wants to set up a webcam so she can chat with her grandchildren? She doesn't want to have to sit and hack kernels for hours.
Given that most of the things that preceded Windows made this *easier* than Windows - plug and play, drivers usually included on ROM on the hardware or using standardized protocols - yes, I believe that this would have worked fine.
She wants Plug-and-Play, baby.
Look, disagree all you like, but thanks to things like Windows, Office, and MSN, modern computing has been made easy and affordable to everyone, thanks to pioneers like Bill Gates.
"Pioneers" copying things *a whole human generation* after initial tech demos. "Pioneers" copying things 6 years after there were popular commercial products in the same space. "Pioneers" that's known to use monopolies and sleazy business tactics (per CPU licensing, anyone?) to keep competitors out of the market, and for buying and shutting down products that look like they could compete in the market.
Crediting Microsoft with the fact that the masses got relatively easy computing requires, at best, a fairly selective reading of history. The masses got easy computing because it was time; Microsoft just happened to fill the niche. They've certainly got a large number of technically skilled people - but their dominant position is intimately linked with abusive business practices, and it's not clear whether they would have actually had any significant position without unethical practices.
Thank you very much for teaching me that there's actually hats capable of storing two major countries (the UK and the US). I understand why this must be considered an absolute hat-full - in fact, I was very surprised that there existed a hat large enough to fit them at all.
Inbreeding strengthens the gene pool. It is the individuals it is bad for.
It is very simple: Inbreeding bring out recessives. If you have a negative recessive and a positive dominant allele on the two different chromosomes, and you inbreed this, you'll get one Recessive/Recessive (which will tend to die or not breed), two Recessive/Dominants, and one Dominant/Dominant. If we assume non-breeding of the double recessive (which is true for many genes), you'll end up with 2x Recessive and 4x Dominant in the pool (for 2/3s dominant - that is, good) instead of 1/2. A net improvement.
Inbreeding followed by outbreeding is a standard technique to improve an animal breed.
There are getting-laid-geeks. They mostly hang out at http://www.fastseduction.com/ (or used to, anyway - I've not been tracking that community for a few years.)
Eivind, living with his fiancee and getting married in September.
We agree that pharmaceutical research is the reason for those advances. We also agree that pharmaceutical research today happen partially in pharmaceutical companies, and that pharmaceutical companies make profits through patents. The question, to my mind, is how would pharmaceutical research happen without the present patent regime? According to data from 2006 (see [1]), most of the AIDS research is financed by government money . For the microbicides you are discussing, less than 5% of the money comes from the commercial sector. For vaccines, the investment from the commercial sector is about 10%.
Now, I won't say that 5% is nothing - but saying that "5% comes from patents" it is not the whole picture, either. While the patents *does* encourage those 5% of funding, it also adds a cost in patent licensing, research that is blocked due to patents, cost of performing techniques due to having to pay for use of patented techniques, research into licensing situation, and so on. I do not know if this cost adds up to 5% or not - and it may add up to more than 5%.
So, the net situation is that pharmaceutical companies *may* be net contributing to AIDS biocide research, they are clearly earning profits from blocking people's access to it - thereby making a lot of people die.
I won't try to define "greed" in this area; I find it too complicated. I just wanted to help show that crediting Big Pharma for this is giving them credit they haven't earned - the cost of HIV research is borne by all of us, not "Big Pharma".
I have dealt with this kind of issue by denying access, but being very explicit about trusting the person: "I trust you. Unfortunately, I don't fully trust my own judgment - I think I trust so many people that I'm going to be wrong somewhere, and so I feel I have to block even the ones I trust." This has worked well - nobody has been offended. (The above statement has been true everytime I used it, too.)
The people who demanded stem cells research be funded by the government (it was never banned, despite the rhetoric of the Left)
So, given the way that it was set up to ban any kind of cross-use of funding (including buying stuff that could potentially have been previously funded by the public) and blocking funding to different projects by the same companies, and given the large proportion of research funding in the US that is from the US government, let's agree that you'll use the term "effectively banned", to counter your bias against it being "banned", and I'll use the term "funding removed including funding of different projects by the same organization". That way we both counter our biases...
Eivind, who generally don't consider himself "on the left" but "on the side of reality", with others considering him all over the map.
Sounds like BS to me too. We often come across unexpected cables and you don't just cut them.
That varies. I know of at least one company that instituted the policy of "If you don't know it, cut it"; they'd had a problem of their network slowly getting undocumented over years, spent a lot of effort and money on getting it in order again, and had the "cut undocumented stuff" policy to make sure it didn't get undocumented again. It really would cut down on motivation for somebody to think "I'll document it later".
I've just never seen a good explanation of the difference of a cult and a religion that doesn't boil down purely to the difference in number of believers. I read the article in question and I'm still completely confused.
Hassan distinguishes between what he terms as destructive cults and benign cults. A destructive cult, according to Hassan, has a "pyramid-shaped authoritarian regime with a person or group of people that have dictatorial control." and "uses deception in recruiting new members." In contrast, benign cults are, according to Hassan, "any group of people who have a set of beliefs and rituals that are non-mainstream."
So benign cults are not a bad thing at all then? And "destructive" cult definition pretty much exactly matches Catholic church?
Benign cults are, in my opinion as an atheist, usually no more harmful than other random religious beliefs. The only problem with them is their fervor and the chance of leading to a destructive cult. As for the catholic church, while there is dictatorial leadership in terms of specific rules (abortion, divorce, preventives), this influence is public and known before people join. This would be different from a destructive cult, which tend to represent themselves as one thing and then gradually move members into something different.
Frankly, I would put/bin/bash as first on the list.
My toolchain (ranked by degree of my dependency on the tool) is: bash, vim, exuberant ctags, GNU make, GNU diff, GNU grep, GNU find, GCC, man, git, perl, gdb, objdump.
The chain covers about 95% of projects I do. (To GNU moniker: I'm no GNU nazi, but just to highlight the fact that - flame me all you want - I find the BSD variants of the tools mostly useless in everyday use.)
Curious - I suspect this must have more to do with background than I thought. I find GNU make a total pain, even though I've worked 5 years on maintaining projects with a GNU build system (and been the person that did the build system maintenance); and I find BSD make (as in FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD) nice, with similar amounts of experience on that. I thought people preferring GNU make did so due purely due to availability or having all their experience with that - but if I read you right, you say you actually have deep experience with both and still prefer the GNU variant?
For diff, GNU is the only game in town; it used to be for grep, too; I'm not sure of current status.
Sure; the only thing I really need is a paper saying what the rent is, where the property is, and when the rental starts.
I come from Norway. There is a default set of obligations in the law, outlining how a "default contract" will work. This is a fairly reasonable default.
Now, I might add something and it is common to do so - but it isn't really imperative that I do, and no matter what my contract says, it can't be too unreasonable - because the law contains a fair number of provisions that we're not allowed to diverge from even with an agreement.
It makes these things much simpler - and instead of everybody writing and understanding their own law, with lots of details (which you can think of a contract as), there is one basic law that is vetted by society as a whole.
It actually works out fairly well.
It is common to use (usually standard) contracts that have a little bit more - but they're quite short compared to common law countries (I've rented in both), and easier to deal with.
Thousands of years of tradition, common sense, law,
Actually, copyright is not thousands of years old - it's a couple of hundred. And law has things to say about monopoly practices - and about losing privileges when somebody or some corporation misuse monopolies.
observation of human responses to financial incentives,
You might benefit from reading "Understanding Motivation and Emotion" for some more complicated basis of motivation. Financial incentives will both increase and destroy motivation.
to name a few. What does?
Ultimately, the threat of violence controlled by the masses. The relatively recent tradition of copyright law is backed in the same thing: It is based on society's offer of using violence to artificially create a limited monopoly on distribution of things you've cooked together out of the things you've learned through being a member of society. And a large part of the moral basis for limiting the offer is that you're choosing to distribute it into society, which modifies society and blocks others ability to fill the same niche - which gives society a strong interest. If you want closer to unlimited protection there's always the option of not releasing it into society. Trade secret law gives you more rights.
Slashdot Mirror
Amen!! I naively took a job where the boss told me in the interview he was easy going, and fed me almost that exact same line of, "Work late every now and again, and just take off when times are slow from time to time, no biggie."
Just know that it can be true, too. I've worked a place where yes, I was expected to take care of it if we were in a crunch, but my boss also took me aside and said "You're working more than 8 hours on average - don't. It's OK if you work less, but don't work more." and "Don't come into work if you're tired." I've worked several places where the bosses threw people out and asked them to work less rather than more.
I agree with hedwards. There is already talk of a "levelling" and a saturation point. I think Google is smart in developing chrome. I am NOT a fan of "cloud computing" because most of what I do has to do with flop intensive activities (audio and video and image editing) and doing that in the aether is not a wise or efficient idea.
Well, the flops (floating point operations per second) isn't the problem - CPUs and power are likely cheaper in the datacenter than in your home to start with, and the CPUs get utilized more of the time. The problem is in getting your data to and from the CPUs.
I've lost count of the number of drugs in long term use that have turned out to be insanely expensive placebos and some even actively harmful.
There needs to be full accountability with people going to jail for any fraud at all and the companies of those people shut down.
Maybe this indicate that we need a new legal standard for scientific papers? So that when you declare "This is a scientific paper", you need to declare a number of things, e.g.
And if you misrepresented any of these, you would take a legal penalty, similar to the penalty for perjury. The consequences of scientific misconduct has larger scope than most legal misconduct; so why should scientific misconduct have lesser penalties and legal safeguards?
It's not "fuck the investors over" - it is "ensure that the pressure is towards behaving ethically". With anything like decent risk management, you shouldn't have more than some low, single digit percentage in this anyway; investors often lose all their investment when a company goes bankrupt.
I'm also somewhat disturbed that you feel that what you should be thinking about after you find you've invested in murdering people is "What's going to happen to my money?"
From your comment "You lucky sod", it sounds like you're not in such a relationship.
I am in a relationship - with that kind of girl - and my experience is that it works better to have loaded my brain with a lot of information and then living by it than anything has worked before I loaded my brain with information about relationships.
Eivind.
Yes! The Chinese government has, stupid as they are, chosen to conservatively follow the lead of social psychology textbooks (e.g. David Myers "Social Psychology") about how we get influenced by video games, rather than random posters on Slashdot.
Now, it may be that the textbook in question is wrong (it's a major one in the field, but the only one I've read that cover this particular topic) - but if you're experimenting with a billion people, it is a relatively sane choice to say "We'll remove the freedom to experience violent/gangster glorifying videogames in order to give people the freedom of walking around without being violently assaulted."
Breaking this down, I think the following questions are the ones that's relevant. They're working under the assumption that there may be some correlation between playing violent/gangster glorifying video games, an assumption that as noted is shared by at least some major social psychologists. (I've included both positive and negative influence as separate points. Note that Freud's theory of catharsis / building up and releasing "emotional energy" is not considered scientific any more, and a hypothesis based on this giving positive results should at the very least be examined closely. As far as I know, substitute activities aren't well supported either.)
What is our best estimate at the cost of the extra criminal behavior by people that are influenced to be more violent
What is our best estimate at the benefit from the people that become less violent due to video games?
What's our best estimate at the value of the freedom to play violent video games - ie, how much does it improve the lives of the people that play them (and those around them) compared to not having them available?
What's our best estimate at the cost of enforcement for this law?
My personal guesses is that there is a significant number of people that are slightly influenced towards violence and acceptance of crime by these kinds of games, that there are few that are influenced to not be violent from them, that the value of playing this particular type of video games instead of other video games is quite low (assuming that your peers don't have the games either), and that the cost of enforcement for this kind of law is fairly low in a country that does heavy censorship already. Under these assumptions, the Chinese move makes sense and is rational, even though it goes against my personal feelings with regards to censorship (I hate when censorship is necessary/beneficial.)
Man I don't get how people are so polarized about this. Look dudes. It's against the law to infringe copyrighted material. It's against the law to aid somebody else breaking the law. File sharing therefor is Against The Law. It is the Proper Decision for these people to be convicted. Anything else would make me think the judges were asleep at the wheel.
If you dislike that so much, don't focus on whether somebody wins or loses these cases. It is Proper that they lose. It would be Wrong if the law bent so much to allow what is clearly outlawed. Instead, seek to CHANGE the law. Donate to lobbyists. Become lobbyists yourself. Civil disobedience is fine, but don't expect to get off the hook for doing it until you change the law.
Work to get rid of lobbyists.
My suggestion for how to level the playing field: Require that all lobbying be public. If somebody lobby for something, all their interactions with politicians have to be recorded and put up for download - for free. Sure, it would cost the lobbyists a bit - but not that much, and it is a reasonable extra cost of "doing business" as a lobbyists. If they have problems with the bandwidth bills, they could host a torrent.
Eivind.
Slashdot is an international website; while hosted in the US, there seems to be at least about the same amount non-US readers as US readers. (I believe there even was some statistics shown that indicated that there were more non-US readers, but I may be mixing up websites WRT those.)
I understand where you're coming from.
However, you don't need to understand how to write a Tetris clone (an emergent phenomena) in order to be able to instruct a computer to make a copy of an existing one; and just the same way, you don't need to understand all emergent phenomena of the brain to copy it and get a functionally identical copy.
Eivind.
Yeah, yeah, I know, I'll be lynched for saying that Bill "I am Satan" Gates should be on par with RMS, ESR and Linus, but think about this for a second.
Bill founded what is now the largest software company in the world, and wether or not you agree with him, he has made a important contribution to the computing industry: Microsoft brought desktop computing to the home user.
Now, be honest. How many of us had our first computer experience with MS-DOS or Windows 3.1? Do you think that if computers still consisted on thin-client-server models based on huge VAX mainframes,
Stop right there.
Let's just add some years for release of successful GUIs here:
Macintosh, 1984.
DesqView, 1984.
GEM, 1984.
X, 1984 (though X11 was only in 1987, and this is arguably not a full GUI, just a display and input driver.)
Amiga, 1985.
Atari ST, 1985.
GEOS, 1986 (on C64. GEOS used to be the 3rd largest operating system in the world in terms of installed base, after MS-DOS and Macintosh).
And then we have Windows 3.0, the first successful Windows version: 1990.
That's a full 6 years after the mainstream pioneering efforts (in 1984).
It's over 31 years after The Mother of All Demos, when GUIs were first demonstrated in public.
that Joe and Jane Smith would be able to dial-in to AOL and connect to thousands of people around the world? Would the Internet have blossomed into the vast information network it is today without the aid of easy-to-use software from Microsoft? How about Grandma who wants to set up a webcam so she can chat with her grandchildren? She doesn't want to have to sit and hack kernels for hours.
Given that most of the things that preceded Windows made this *easier* than Windows - plug and play, drivers usually included on ROM on the hardware or using standardized protocols - yes, I believe that this would have worked fine.
She wants Plug-and-Play, baby.
Look, disagree all you like, but thanks to things like Windows, Office, and MSN, modern computing has been made easy and affordable to everyone, thanks to pioneers like Bill Gates.
"Pioneers" copying things *a whole human generation* after initial tech demos. "Pioneers" copying things 6 years after there were popular commercial products in the same space. "Pioneers" that's known to use monopolies and sleazy business tactics (per CPU licensing, anyone?) to keep competitors out of the market, and for buying and shutting down products that look like they could compete in the market.
Crediting Microsoft with the fact that the masses got relatively easy computing requires, at best, a fairly selective reading of history. The masses got easy computing because it was time; Microsoft just happened to fill the niche. They've certainly got a large number of technically skilled people - but their dominant position is intimately linked with abusive business practices, and it's not clear whether they would have actually had any significant position without unethical practices.
Eivind.
Thank you very much for teaching me that there's actually hats capable of storing two major countries (the UK and the US). I understand why this must be considered an absolute hat-full - in fact, I was very surprised that there existed a hat large enough to fit them at all.
You wouldn't happen to have pictures?
Offline. Or face-to-face. Or "outside of the net".
Eivind.
Inbreeding strengthens the gene pool. It is the individuals it is bad for.
It is very simple: Inbreeding bring out recessives. If you have a negative recessive and a positive dominant allele on the two different chromosomes, and you inbreed this, you'll get one Recessive/Recessive (which will tend to die or not breed), two Recessive/Dominants, and one Dominant/Dominant. If we assume non-breeding of the double recessive (which is true for many genes), you'll end up with 2x Recessive and 4x Dominant in the pool (for 2/3s dominant - that is, good) instead of 1/2. A net improvement.
Inbreeding followed by outbreeding is a standard technique to improve an animal breed.
Eivind.
There are getting-laid-geeks. They mostly hang out at http://www.fastseduction.com/ (or used to, anyway - I've not been tracking that community for a few years.)
Eivind, living with his fiancee and getting married in September.
Doesn't work for me.
We agree that pharmaceutical research is the reason for those advances. We also agree that pharmaceutical research today happen partially in pharmaceutical companies, and that pharmaceutical companies make profits through patents. The question, to my mind, is how would pharmaceutical research happen without the present patent regime? According to data from 2006 (see [1]), most of the AIDS research is financed by government money . For the microbicides you are discussing, less than 5% of the money comes from the commercial sector. For vaccines, the investment from the commercial sector is about 10%.
Now, I won't say that 5% is nothing - but saying that "5% comes from patents" it is not the whole picture, either. While the patents *does* encourage those 5% of funding, it also adds a cost in patent licensing, research that is blocked due to patents, cost of performing techniques due to having to pay for use of patented techniques, research into licensing situation, and so on. I do not know if this cost adds up to 5% or not - and it may add up to more than 5%.
So, the net situation is that pharmaceutical companies *may* be net contributing to AIDS biocide research, they are clearly earning profits from blocking people's access to it - thereby making a lot of people die.
I won't try to define "greed" in this area; I find it too complicated. I just wanted to help show that crediting Big Pharma for this is giving them credit they haven't earned - the cost of HIV research is borne by all of us, not "Big Pharma".
Eivind.
[1] Data from following the first relevant link from http://www.google.com/?q=aids+research+funding to http://www.unaids.org/en/KnowledgeCentre/Resources/FeatureStories/archive/2007/20070830_funding_estimates_R_and_D.asp, which again links to http://data.unaids.org/pub/FactSheet/2007/20070830_resource_tracking_for_randd_en.pdf
It does show meteor strikes going on.
I just tried your query, and didn't get any result similar to that. All results on the front page seemed to be genuine troubleshooting pages.
Eivind.
I have dealt with this kind of issue by denying access, but being very explicit about trusting the person: "I trust you. Unfortunately, I don't fully trust my own judgment - I think I trust so many people that I'm going to be wrong somewhere, and so I feel I have to block even the ones I trust." This has worked well - nobody has been offended. (The above statement has been true everytime I used it, too.)
Eivind.
...this is GOOD news for everyone, right?
The people who demanded stem cells research be funded by the government (it was never banned, despite the rhetoric of the Left)
So, given the way that it was set up to ban any kind of cross-use of funding (including buying stuff that could potentially have been previously funded by the public) and blocking funding to different projects by the same companies, and given the large proportion of research funding in the US that is from the US government, let's agree that you'll use the term "effectively banned", to counter your bias against it being "banned", and I'll use the term "funding removed including funding of different projects by the same organization". That way we both counter our biases...
Eivind, who generally don't consider himself "on the left" but "on the side of reality", with others considering him all over the map.
Sounds like BS to me too. We often come across unexpected cables and you don't just cut them.
That varies. I know of at least one company that instituted the policy of "If you don't know it, cut it"; they'd had a problem of their network slowly getting undocumented over years, spent a lot of effort and money on getting it in order again, and had the "cut undocumented stuff" policy to make sure it didn't get undocumented again. It really would cut down on motivation for somebody to think "I'll document it later".
Eivind.
I've just never seen a good explanation of the difference of a cult and a religion that doesn't boil down purely to the difference in number of believers. I read the article in question and I'm still completely confused. Hassan distinguishes between what he terms as destructive cults and benign cults. A destructive cult, according to Hassan, has a "pyramid-shaped authoritarian regime with a person or group of people that have dictatorial control." and "uses deception in recruiting new members." In contrast, benign cults are, according to Hassan, "any group of people who have a set of beliefs and rituals that are non-mainstream." So benign cults are not a bad thing at all then? And "destructive" cult definition pretty much exactly matches Catholic church?
Benign cults are, in my opinion as an atheist, usually no more harmful than other random religious beliefs. The only problem with them is their fervor and the chance of leading to a destructive cult. As for the catholic church, while there is dictatorial leadership in terms of specific rules (abortion, divorce, preventives), this influence is public and known before people join. This would be different from a destructive cult, which tend to represent themselves as one thing and then gradually move members into something different.
Eivind.
Frankly, I would put /bin/bash as first on the list.
My toolchain (ranked by degree of my dependency on the tool) is: bash, vim, exuberant ctags, GNU make, GNU diff, GNU grep, GNU find, GCC, man, git, perl, gdb, objdump.
The chain covers about 95% of projects I do. (To GNU moniker: I'm no GNU nazi, but just to highlight the fact that - flame me all you want - I find the BSD variants of the tools mostly useless in everyday use.)
Curious - I suspect this must have more to do with background than I thought. I find GNU make a total pain, even though I've worked 5 years on maintaining projects with a GNU build system (and been the person that did the build system maintenance); and I find BSD make (as in FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD) nice, with similar amounts of experience on that. I thought people preferring GNU make did so due purely due to availability or having all their experience with that - but if I read you right, you say you actually have deep experience with both and still prefer the GNU variant?
For diff, GNU is the only game in town; it used to be for grep, too; I'm not sure of current status.
Eivind.
I come from Norway. There is a default set of obligations in the law, outlining how a "default contract" will work. This is a fairly reasonable default.
Now, I might add something and it is common to do so - but it isn't really imperative that I do, and no matter what my contract says, it can't be too unreasonable - because the law contains a fair number of provisions that we're not allowed to diverge from even with an agreement.
It makes these things much simpler - and instead of everybody writing and understanding their own law, with lots of details (which you can think of a contract as), there is one basic law that is vetted by society as a whole.
It actually works out fairly well.
It is common to use (usually standard) contracts that have a little bit more - but they're quite short compared to common law countries (I've rented in both), and easier to deal with.
Eivind.
Thousands of years of tradition, common sense, law,
Actually, copyright is not thousands of years old - it's a couple of hundred. And law has things to say about monopoly practices - and about losing privileges when somebody or some corporation misuse monopolies.
observation of human responses to financial incentives,
You might benefit from reading "Understanding Motivation and Emotion" for some more complicated basis of motivation. Financial incentives will both increase and destroy motivation.
to name a few. What does?
Ultimately, the threat of violence controlled by the masses. The relatively recent tradition of copyright law is backed in the same thing: It is based on society's offer of using violence to artificially create a limited monopoly on distribution of things you've cooked together out of the things you've learned through being a member of society. And a large part of the moral basis for limiting the offer is that you're choosing to distribute it into society, which modifies society and blocks others ability to fill the same niche - which gives society a strong interest. If you want closer to unlimited protection there's always the option of not releasing it into society. Trade secret law gives you more rights.
Eivind.