What did you have in your trunk by the way? Something you didn't want them to see, Or were you just being a pain in the ass for the sake of it?
People like you are the reason this world sucks so very badly and is only getting worse. Do you really believe that if he had, say, 20 pounds of heroin in his trunk he would have thought that just refusing the search would save him? Would he now be posting about it on slashdot? The problem with stupid people is not only that they don't know they are stupid, but that they assume everyone else is just the same as they are. It was obviously a matter of principle (look it up) to him. Duh squared.
The distributed technical support documentation didn't have the cache or RPM, but the representative was leaning towards the RPM being 7200.
Maybe the Seagate rep was right.
When was the last time a new drive was released with no press leaks , no review samples, no prior notice at all? Just boom. Here's the drive. It's up for sale (back order now) on our web site. It sets new records for areal density with 750 gig platters. Was their marketing department all fired recently or something? I guess they wanted to beat Western Digital to 3TB. I can't wait to see the first reviews from people cracking open their external cases and installing these inside their computers.
I looked for some software that could combine them to one drive letter (without destroying the data), something like if I have two files M:\movies\movie1.avi and n;\movies\movie2.avi, I could just open, say, Z:\movies and see both files even though they are on separate drives
It's only once everything of this sort has been ruled out that we face the prospect of actual, honest-to-goodness CPT violation.
Fair enough. But this has my heart beating a bit harder than usual. Just what exactly are the implications if this is in fact a genuine CPT violation? I've always wanted to be alive during a great scientific revolution. Although this would be very exciting I'm not sure any good would really come of it. It seems that it would just make things more confusing, at least until someone could clean up the mess. 21st century science has become so, well, complacent. No one really expects any more major changes to our theoretical framework in their lifetimes. It is also a good test of Thomas Kuhn's theories as presented in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Will contemporary scientists hold onto a theory in the face of contradictory evidence Will they try to explain away the evidence and keep the theory intact? Or will their be a 'paradigm shift'?
Even if SR fails, time dilation is still an experimentally verified fact.
Ah. Good point. Forgot about that. But that's exactly what I mean. Even if we can no longer trust the complete special theory, we can at least trust the parts that have been independently verified by experiment.
Here are three things I see to be a consistent form of trouble. First, obviously as we exist, there was not an equal amount of matter and anti-matter created at the big bang.
Well I can't speak for everyone, but I happen to know for an absolute fact that I don't exist.
A CPT violation has major implications for the special theory apparently due to what SciBrad said. Is Lorentz invariance similar to Lorentz Covariance? To get closer to why this is relevant to the special theory take a look at the wiki for Lorentz transformation.
The Lorentz transformation was originally the result of attempts by Lorentz and others to explain observed properties of light propagating in what was presumed to be the luminiferous aether; Albert Einstein later reinterpreted the transformation to be a statement about the nature of both space and time, and he independently re-derived the transformation from his postulates of special relativity.
Now, IANATP, but this seems core. We are getting back to the Michelson-Morley experiment for god's sake. I always figured the general theory would be the first to show cracks since it has a lot less solid experimental data behind it. But everyone is always going on about how the special theory is one of the most proven theories in all of science. So this could be big. Very big. Of course, it's a lot easier to just massage the data a little or start positing magical new forces to explain the discrepancy:
To save CPT and Einstein's theory -- assuming they need saving -- Ann Nelson of the University of Washington in Seattle favors the introduction of a new force. "It's a less radical idea" than throwing out Einstein's theory of special relativity, she notes. The force Nelson envisions would endow matter with a new kind of charge that would allow it to interact differently with neutrinos than antineutrinos.
It's a lot easier than tossing out your beloved theory or trying to build it up from scratch based on solid scientific evidence to support each individual tenet. I think the latter is what needs to be done, but it will take time. We need to re-figure out what we know absolutely. IOW, what aspects of special relativity are not contradicted by a CPT violation? If the Lorentz Transformation is called into question then so is science fiction's much beloved time dilation And what about the Twins Paradox? Yikes. This could be big. It is exciting when a major (and the special theory is about as major as it gets) scientific theory is contradicted, even in part because it means we could be on the verge of a major discovery. A real discovery based on experiment as opposed to flights of fancy, the angels dancing on pin heads inside the minds of theoretical physicists and then rationalized ex post facto quantitatively with systems of equations. Let us not forget the lesson of Ptolemy's cycles and epicycles. They predicted the motion of the planets better than Copernicus's theory, at least initially. But if Einstein is Ptolemy, who is Copernicus?
No good deed goes unpunished. That pretty much covers it. I don't know what is worse. The slimy, repellent actions of this Lamo guy in betraying a hero to The Man or you pseudo-patriotic nationalists who believe: 1) America and its soldiers is always right. 2) In case of doubt and even in the face of direct evidence that the American Military are behaving like Nazis in WWII with a complete utter disregard for innocent human lives, please see rule one. If it weren't for this Manning guy, we would never have known about the atrocities committed in our name and you guys want to see him executed. You people disgust me. Go ahead and twist your mind like a pretzel to try to avoid the fact that there was no sign of any guns or rpgs. Those were unarmed civilians and even children that they were trying to kill with military hardware. I have seen a lot of violent nasty shit go down in movies, but I have never seen anything quite like that video. To think that those were real people. I wonder if those soldiers can sleep at night. They are no better than the gestapo. Those soldiers are the ones who should be executed. A public hanging would be nice.
4) As for the car pulling up and getting shot. He said "Civilians run away from combat, not into it."
Full Metal Jacket to the rescue as always. IOW:
If they run, they're a VC. If they don't run they're well disciplined VC
These are great days we're living, bros! We are jolly green giants, walking the earth with guns. These people we wasted here today are the finest human beings we will ever know. After we rotate back to the world, we're gonna miss not having anyone around that's worth shooting.
Maybe back in the Vietnam days you could get away with blowing away women and children and other innocent civvies, but nowadays there is supposed to be more transparency. This Manning guy is one of those rare heros willing to stick his neck out to provide that transparency. The military wants to punish him to set an example and prevent future "betrayals". I've seen the video. There is no ambiguity there. No wiggle room. Those guys didn't think those people were enemy combatants. They were looking for an excuse to kill. Any excuse. And they found it. Manning is a total badass. He gave the US military a black eye. But now they are going to make him pay. Lamo is a lamo. Manning was stupid to trust him. That's true. Americans in general are far too trusting. But even Lamo realizes that what he did was wrong. Read the article. He was doing it because he thought it would save his ass. Not because he thought it was right. Just what the world needs. People to help nail whistle blowers.
Personally, I think this stuff about the other 250,000 "classified" documents that were leaked is bullshit made up by the military to distract people from the fact that they are nailing Manning for exposing their coverup of war crimes. It's also convenient that they can never show us the alleged documents because they are "classified". Hehe. Lucky for the US military that people in general are even more stupid than they are and will believe pretty much anything they say. After this coverup of heinous war crimes the US military has absolutely no credibility. They will clearly lie whenever they think they can get away with it. And they nearly always think they can get away with it. And they would have too if it hadn't been for Manning. But people like you want to see him nailed to a wall and executed. I guess it makes sense. No good deed goes unpunished.
So your whole post is all about justifying your lack of empathy for others. And the attitudes you post are quite typical. So basically you only feel empathy when you consider it justified. It is quite easy to argue that people are always at least partially responsible for their suffering. So in that ultra rare case where someone is suffering and they cannot possibly be even partially responsible you would feel empathy. Bravo.
Here's a test:
A 7 year old girl chases a ball into a busy street without looking and is squashed by a large truck. Which of these would most accurately reflect your response?:
a) It's her own fault. She deserved it. One less stupid person in the world. She should receive a mini Darwin award for being so stupid. If stupid people would stop breeding so much it would eliminate much unneeded suffering.
b) Her parents should be put in jail for letting her play near a busy street.
c) Who cares. She would have died eventually anyway and she was obviously a moron.
I wish you hadn't posted AC. I was trying to post something like this, but my browser lost focus and when I hit the backspace key it took me back to the slashdot main page. Grrr. I think that if this survey reflects the truth, the decline of religion is one of the most plausible causes. Religion creates a sort of blind pseudo-empathy in believers. They typically are not helping people because they genuinely care but because their god gives them no choice. They are just following orders. And the penalty for failing to be kind is eternal suffering in "hell". They are kind because the believe they have a gun to their head. Still, how many of us would question the motives of someone when they are kind to us. When I am in trouble and someone helps me I am deeply touched by that. It may be that they are only being kind because their god tells them to, but I can't help but think that they are better people than those who don't seem to care. Religion encourages a lack of critical thinking skills and irrationality, but it also discourages people from their natural selfishness. That's the price and maybe we are now paying it in terms of people who don't care about each other.
The article mentions the "self help" movement. I have personally noticed a change in child rearing attitudes. Teachers and parents encourage a high self regard in a child as an unqualified good. Regardless of the facts. The result I saw in my own nephew was a determined over-estimation of his abilities. He tended to have a natural belief that he was good at everything and could handle any situation despite the fact that he wasn't particularly good at most things. He would often fail at something he tried again and again even though he each time he strongly believed he would succeed and even that it was "easy". His believe in himself was unwavering. No amount of failure would result in even a little humility in the face of the challenges of the world. In his case that has finally changed somewhat. However, arrogance and over-estimation of ones abilities have become unqualified virtues in our society. Selfishness is more and more considered to be natural and good. It certainly is not considered bad in the way that it used to be.
Another possible source of blame could be the internet. People tend to lose any pretense at being nice when they post on the internet. I can't help but think that people are more cruel towards others on the internet than they are in real life. Perhaps this has started to bleed out of cyberspace into real life or maybe real life and cyberspace are just growing closer.
DRM sucks. I hate it. But unfortunately, I understand exactly why it exists.
Could you possibly explain it to me then? Because I don't understand it. Usually when something doesn't work I try something different. Is it out of spite or revenge? The crackers love a new challenge. Gives them a chance to be badass and have bragging rights. I can only assume that it is motivated by a secret desire to poke your paying customers in the eye and add value to the cracked version at the same time.
Regarding demos at this point in time I believe we have a bit of a vicious circle going on. Why bother with the effort of producing a crippled version of your software as a demo version when anyone with a broadband internet connection is going to just download the cracked version if they want a taste. At this point everyone (with the possible exception of the obscenely clueless publishers) realizes that every game will be cracked and made available for download within the first few days of release. So why waste even more money making a demo version? Including all the bandwidth for people to download the crippled version from your servers. It's sort of like all software nowadays is essentially shareware. You can always try the game first before you buy it. Of course, due to bizarrely restrictive DRM, publishers like EA are trying to just rent copies of their games instead of selling them. Not a very smart thing to do when your product is easily available for free. Frankly I think it's time that game developers starting asking for donations from fans. Or maybe trying a ransom method for releasing new titles. You can't crack something that hasn't been released yet.
And how does DRM help exactly? Name a single (commercial) game that wasn't cracked and uploaded to the intertubes in the first week (or maybe 2) of release? DRM has not yet been able to solve the problem. If it could then a lot of these arguments would have a lot more validity. I would support some version of completely non-intrusive DRM that was good enough that it couldn't be cracked. Of course, I probably would buy fewer games if none of them could be tried first. The misleading part about free downloads is that you don't have to give anything up to get them. 99.9% of the games I download I have never played and probably will never play. And 99% of the other 0.1% I don't like enough to play for more than 30 minutes. It's easy to please bored 12 year olds, but they don't typically have a lot of money. Creating a game that appeals to adult gamers is much harder and most developers aren't even trying anymore. Again, such download statistics or even server request statistics are utterly meaningless. Sure, there are people who play the cracked version, like the game, but don't bother to (or can't afford to) go out and buy a copy. But there are plenty of others who fall into quite a different category and they are very difficult to categorize. Every time I download a 700MB version of a film I could be counted among the free riders who just want to watch movies for free, and yet EVERY single movie that I like I buy on DVD or Blu-Ray. Not because of some moral issue, but because I want to own an actual physical copy of it. In the case of Blu-Ray it is also higher quality than anything available on the internet. Among internet "piracy" I think there really is a lot more of try-before-you-buy going on than people realize. All you really know for sure are your sales numbers. Everything else is nothing but speculation. Even some people who purchase the game will want to download a cracked version due to the intrusiveness of most DRM. The cracked version is usually a superior version. I think a lot of people would pay even more money for the cracked version than the DRM poisoned one.
This just proves they made a game a lot of people wanted to [try], and a lot of those people are [cautious about wasting money on a game they won't like during the second greatest worldwide recession in last 100 years.]
No. Libertarians are in favor of the least amount of regulation period. There are two subgroups: the limited government ones and the anarcho-libertarians who believe in (essentially) no government at all. Democracts and republicans would both also claim to believe in the least amount of regulation necessary to do the job. Where the political theory differs is in what exactly that job happens to be. BTW, "laissez-faire" is not the same as anarchy. It just refers to the government staying out of the economy.
and the judgment handed out in a Swedish court on Friday proves that's what it exists for.
All that proves is that you can get pretty much anyone in the world to do pretty much anything you want if you pay them enough money. Linking to copyrighted material was legal in Sweden. This verdict may change that, but all it shows is that Swedish judges are as human as anyone else. First the former prosecutor of the case and now a judge. Is the former prosecutor still working for the entertainment industry? Peter Sunde and the rest are heroes and maybe some will be martyrs. In a contest between a few lowly torrent tracker administrators and some of the largest, richest, most powerful corporations on the planet should anyone really be surprised by the verdict? It has nothing to do with justice.
Politics is about compromises as has been said a few times already.
.
No. I think that is corrupt politics that you are talking of. Do you really want to elect someone to run the whole country without any principles beyond "whatever gets me elected"? Yes. That is how things are. What it is not is how things ought to be.
Unfortunately Aristotle turned out to be wrong about most things most of the time. A few things he got right. That sort of optimism is CLEARLY wrong. As this story demonstrates.
But the Keynesians are the ones in charge. Yes. The Bush Dynasty was Keynesian. In fact I can't think of any administration in the past half century that wasn't essentially Keynesian (except maybe Reagan). And that is not only because the majority of Americans don't support laissez-faire capatalism. Most politicians don't really have any principles. They go by what their economic advisors tell them. And what "school" of economics most influences the majority of people with degrees in Economics? You guessed it. Keynesians. But even Reagan wasn't a "Randian" or Austrian. Fact: We haven't had a single Libertarian president at anytime in the 20th century and certainly not in this one. If you want to call Bush Jr. a "Randian" (rofl) then I should be able to call Obama a Socialist or Marxist (which he isn't). If there is one thing that you absolutely cannot blame the current mess on it is the free market. Yes. Corporations are evil. Yes. They can't be trusted. Yes they will happily screw you over if they can save a single penny. But that's just because that's how human beings are. Human beings are evil. There is no easy way around that. The State is certainly no better than the corporations. The State is made up of a huge number of worker drone wage slaves as well. Any of whom can be easily corrupted. So what's the "solution"?. Immediate Global Thermonuclear War maybe. I don't know. But I can tell you what is NOT part of the solution: rewarding the very people responsible with handouts paid out, taken from the very same poor people you are referring to.
But aside from that it seems obvious to me that our current system, which is based entirely on Keynesian theory, JUST DOESN'T WORK! It is particularly ironic that the only ones who are defending the idea of letting these evil capitalist Mega-Corps fail and die are the "pro-business" free market people. Everyone else seems in favor of millionaire welfare checks just to make absolutely certain that not a single millionaire has to part with a single megayacht or private jet in tough economic times. And why? Because of some irrational fear that the free market won't be able to fix itself. That supply and demand won't continue to do its thing. And blackmail of course. You are willing to be blackmailed by these Corps. Once they reach a certain size too many people will lose there jobs. But when does that end? You see that's the problem with blackmail. You never know when they are going to come back for more. And once these companies learn that they can rely on it, they don't mind taking risks as much. They do business differently from how they otherwise would. And very differently from the smaller companies that don't have that government protection.
People lose their jobs in these downturns, which if you believe the Austrian School, are actually caused by government intervention in the economy. There isn't any way to stop that. The alternative, which most people seem to support, is to prop up the badly run companies and leave the well run companies on their own. That is not exactly what I call fair. Fair would be letting these mega-corps go down as they deserve, just as any of us who had a small company would. They don't deserve billions of dollars for failure. If I were a competitor I would be tempted to act irresponsibly as well and take all kinds of extravagant risks since in the new world order failure IS success.
First. She's a girl. So. Duh. Of course she's not going to like science/math. Girls like that are one in a million, regardless of how they test. Obviously she's intelligent, but that isn't necessarily going to help her much in life. You need a goal first before you can use your brain to get you there. And some goals just don't require much brains. In a lot of fields following the orders of your supervisor without hesitancy or question and not getting too bored with drudgery, the tasks that the higher ups don't want to do, is a far more important qualification. The vast majority of jobs in the world are shit jobs, no matter how highly paid. And the sooner she accepts that fact the better off she'll be. Better to work as a prostitute at night to pay the bills and pursue her real interests, if she ever has any, in her spare time.
Maybe what she's really meant for is mathematically advanced fellatio techniques (you could help with that maybe) or cooking or dressmaking or interior design or acting. Girls are just not like us. They don't usually share our interests no matter how smart they are. At uni I knew a pretty physics major (I kid you not), but what she really wanted to do was make clothes. Only she didn't realize that until she made her first dress about 3/4 through her degree. Maybe because she was smart and no one pushed her in such a girly direction. I don't think it ever occurred to her that she would actually like that sort of thing. So she finished her degree and then went back to school to get a degree in fashion design. Then she started making clothes and stuck with that for the rest of her life.
Think of it this way. Little girls play with dolls. Little boys play with tech stuff: gadgets and guns and cars, and even robots if they're lucky. And that's what most of us end up doing as adults too. I can only envy that guy who works in that MIT Robotics lab. That was my dream as a kid and as I near 40 I still can't think of anything I'd rather be doing. Argue all you want about nature vs. nurture. In the end it just doesn't matter. Most girls end up with girly interests. She will too. So think of a profession that girls tend to actually like. Or she will never stick with it or if she does she will eventually grow to hate it. The fact is that, for a girl, being pretty is WAY, WAY, WAY more important than being smart. Actually it's true for guys too, but women tend to get more enjoyment from the social aspects of life. And looks matter more for that. Also girls tend to have these weird states called "emotions". Never could figure out what those were... But it tends to make them kind of unreliable and unpredictable and, well, moody.
Actually, having given this a bit more thought, I think the secret is to decide whether she is a girly girl or more of a tomboy. If she's an ultra-feminine girly girl forget about any male dominated field. She will HATE it. Utterly. And even if she is a tomboy and even if she initially likes [instert male dominated field] she will probably eventually grow to hate it as well. Only if she is truly indistinguishable from a male is she likely to be a good candidate for a tech profession. Otherwise that estrogen will eventually get the best of her. And she will go back to the pink frilly dresses and talking about her "feelings" and giggling while talking to her friends on her cell phone.
Slashdot Mirror
What did you have in your trunk by the way? Something you didn't want them to see, Or were you just being a pain in the ass for the sake of it?
People like you are the reason this world sucks so very badly and is only getting worse. Do you really believe that if he had, say, 20 pounds of heroin in his trunk he would have thought that just refusing the search would save him? Would he now be posting about it on slashdot? The problem with stupid people is not only that they don't know they are stupid, but that they assume everyone else is just the same as they are. It was obviously a matter of principle (look it up) to him. Duh squared.
I've never shot that much milk through my nose.
How is the job search going?
A new keyboard and another cup of coffee. It's not just what you say. It's how you say it.
The distributed technical support documentation didn't have the cache or RPM, but the representative was leaning towards the RPM being 7200.
Maybe the Seagate rep was right. When was the last time a new drive was released with no press leaks , no review samples, no prior notice at all? Just boom. Here's the drive. It's up for sale (back order now) on our web site. It sets new records for areal density with 750 gig platters. Was their marketing department all fired recently or something? I guess they wanted to beat Western Digital to 3TB. I can't wait to see the first reviews from people cracking open their external cases and installing these inside their computers.
I looked for some software that could combine them to one drive letter (without destroying the data), something like if I have two files M:\movies\movie1.avi and n;\movies\movie2.avi, I could just open, say, Z:\movies and see both files even though they are on separate drives
FlexRAID
It's only once everything of this sort has been ruled out that we face the prospect of actual, honest-to-goodness CPT violation.
Fair enough. But this has my heart beating a bit harder than usual. Just what exactly are the implications if this is in fact a genuine CPT violation? I've always wanted to be alive during a great scientific revolution. Although this would be very exciting I'm not sure any good would really come of it. It seems that it would just make things more confusing, at least until someone could clean up the mess. 21st century science has become so, well, complacent. No one really expects any more major changes to our theoretical framework in their lifetimes. It is also a good test of Thomas Kuhn's theories as presented in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Will contemporary scientists hold onto a theory in the face of contradictory evidence Will they try to explain away the evidence and keep the theory intact? Or will their be a 'paradigm shift'?
Even if SR fails, time dilation is still an experimentally verified fact.
Ah. Good point. Forgot about that. But that's exactly what I mean. Even if we can no longer trust the complete special theory, we can at least trust the parts that have been independently verified by experiment.
Here are three things I see to be a consistent form of trouble. First, obviously as we exist, there was not an equal amount of matter and anti-matter created at the big bang.
Well I can't speak for everyone, but I happen to know for an absolute fact that I don't exist.
A CPT violation has major implications for the special theory apparently due to what SciBrad said. Is Lorentz invariance similar to Lorentz Covariance? To get closer to why this is relevant to the special theory take a look at the wiki for Lorentz transformation.
Now, IANATP, but this seems core. We are getting back to the Michelson-Morley experiment for god's sake. I always figured the general theory would be the first to show cracks since it has a lot less solid experimental data behind it. But everyone is always going on about how the special theory is one of the most proven theories in all of science. So this could be big. Very big. Of course, it's a lot easier to just massage the data a little or start positing magical new forces to explain the discrepancy:
It's a lot easier than tossing out your beloved theory or trying to build it up from scratch based on solid scientific evidence to support each individual tenet. I think the latter is what needs to be done, but it will take time. We need to re-figure out what we know absolutely. IOW, what aspects of special relativity are not contradicted by a CPT violation? If the Lorentz Transformation is called into question then so is science fiction's much beloved time dilation And what about the Twins Paradox? Yikes. This could be big. It is exciting when a major (and the special theory is about as major as it gets) scientific theory is contradicted, even in part because it means we could be on the verge of a major discovery. A real discovery based on experiment as opposed to flights of fancy, the angels dancing on pin heads inside the minds of theoretical physicists and then rationalized ex post facto quantitatively with systems of equations. Let us not forget the lesson of Ptolemy's cycles and epicycles. They predicted the motion of the planets better than Copernicus's theory, at least initially. But if Einstein is Ptolemy, who is Copernicus?
No good deed goes unpunished. That pretty much covers it. I don't know what is worse. The slimy, repellent actions of this Lamo guy in betraying a hero to The Man or you pseudo-patriotic nationalists who believe: 1) America and its soldiers is always right. 2) In case of doubt and even in the face of direct evidence that the American Military are behaving like Nazis in WWII with a complete utter disregard for innocent human lives, please see rule one. If it weren't for this Manning guy, we would never have known about the atrocities committed in our name and you guys want to see him executed. You people disgust me. Go ahead and twist your mind like a pretzel to try to avoid the fact that there was no sign of any guns or rpgs. Those were unarmed civilians and even children that they were trying to kill with military hardware. I have seen a lot of violent nasty shit go down in movies, but I have never seen anything quite like that video. To think that those were real people. I wonder if those soldiers can sleep at night. They are no better than the gestapo. Those soldiers are the ones who should be executed. A public hanging would be nice.
4) As for the car pulling up and getting shot. He said "Civilians run away from combat, not into it."
Full Metal Jacket to the rescue as always. IOW:
If they run, they're a VC. If they don't run they're well disciplined VC
These are great days we're living, bros! We are jolly green giants, walking the earth with guns. These people we wasted here today are the finest human beings we will ever know. After we rotate back to the world, we're gonna miss not having anyone around that's worth shooting.
Maybe back in the Vietnam days you could get away with blowing away women and children and other innocent civvies, but nowadays there is supposed to be more transparency. This Manning guy is one of those rare heros willing to stick his neck out to provide that transparency. The military wants to punish him to set an example and prevent future "betrayals". I've seen the video. There is no ambiguity there. No wiggle room. Those guys didn't think those people were enemy combatants. They were looking for an excuse to kill. Any excuse. And they found it. Manning is a total badass. He gave the US military a black eye. But now they are going to make him pay. Lamo is a lamo. Manning was stupid to trust him. That's true. Americans in general are far too trusting. But even Lamo realizes that what he did was wrong. Read the article. He was doing it because he thought it would save his ass. Not because he thought it was right. Just what the world needs. People to help nail whistle blowers.
Personally, I think this stuff about the other 250,000 "classified" documents that were leaked is bullshit made up by the military to distract people from the fact that they are nailing Manning for exposing their coverup of war crimes. It's also convenient that they can never show us the alleged documents because they are "classified". Hehe. Lucky for the US military that people in general are even more stupid than they are and will believe pretty much anything they say. After this coverup of heinous war crimes the US military has absolutely no credibility. They will clearly lie whenever they think they can get away with it. And they nearly always think they can get away with it. And they would have too if it hadn't been for Manning. But people like you want to see him nailed to a wall and executed. I guess it makes sense. No good deed goes unpunished.
So your whole post is all about justifying your lack of empathy for others. And the attitudes you post are quite typical. So basically you only feel empathy when you consider it justified. It is quite easy to argue that people are always at least partially responsible for their suffering. So in that ultra rare case where someone is suffering and they cannot possibly be even partially responsible you would feel empathy. Bravo.
Here's a test:
A 7 year old girl chases a ball into a busy street without looking and is squashed by a large truck. Which of these would most accurately reflect your response?:
a) It's her own fault. She deserved it. One less stupid person in the world. She should receive a mini Darwin award for being so stupid. If stupid people would stop breeding so much it would eliminate much unneeded suffering.
b) Her parents should be put in jail for letting her play near a busy street.
c) Who cares. She would have died eventually anyway and she was obviously a moron.
d) Hahahahahahaha!
e) All of the above.
I wish you hadn't posted AC. I was trying to post something like this, but my browser lost focus and when I hit the backspace key it took me back to the slashdot main page. Grrr. I think that if this survey reflects the truth, the decline of religion is one of the most plausible causes. Religion creates a sort of blind pseudo-empathy in believers. They typically are not helping people because they genuinely care but because their god gives them no choice. They are just following orders. And the penalty for failing to be kind is eternal suffering in "hell". They are kind because the believe they have a gun to their head. Still, how many of us would question the motives of someone when they are kind to us. When I am in trouble and someone helps me I am deeply touched by that. It may be that they are only being kind because their god tells them to, but I can't help but think that they are better people than those who don't seem to care. Religion encourages a lack of critical thinking skills and irrationality, but it also discourages people from their natural selfishness. That's the price and maybe we are now paying it in terms of people who don't care about each other.
The article mentions the "self help" movement. I have personally noticed a change in child rearing attitudes. Teachers and parents encourage a high self regard in a child as an unqualified good. Regardless of the facts. The result I saw in my own nephew was a determined over-estimation of his abilities. He tended to have a natural belief that he was good at everything and could handle any situation despite the fact that he wasn't particularly good at most things. He would often fail at something he tried again and again even though he each time he strongly believed he would succeed and even that it was "easy". His believe in himself was unwavering. No amount of failure would result in even a little humility in the face of the challenges of the world. In his case that has finally changed somewhat. However, arrogance and over-estimation of ones abilities have become unqualified virtues in our society. Selfishness is more and more considered to be natural and good. It certainly is not considered bad in the way that it used to be.
Another possible source of blame could be the internet. People tend to lose any pretense at being nice when they post on the internet. I can't help but think that people are more cruel towards others on the internet than they are in real life. Perhaps this has started to bleed out of cyberspace into real life or maybe real life and cyberspace are just growing closer.
DRM sucks. I hate it. But unfortunately, I understand exactly why it exists.
Could you possibly explain it to me then? Because I don't understand it. Usually when something doesn't work I try something different. Is it out of spite or revenge? The crackers love a new challenge. Gives them a chance to be badass and have bragging rights. I can only assume that it is motivated by a secret desire to poke your paying customers in the eye and add value to the cracked version at the same time.
You seemed to be missing his point. Do you have an effective solution to the problem?
Regarding demos at this point in time I believe we have a bit of a vicious circle going on. Why bother with the effort of producing a crippled version of your software as a demo version when anyone with a broadband internet connection is going to just download the cracked version if they want a taste. At this point everyone (with the possible exception of the obscenely clueless publishers) realizes that every game will be cracked and made available for download within the first few days of release. So why waste even more money making a demo version? Including all the bandwidth for people to download the crippled version from your servers. It's sort of like all software nowadays is essentially shareware. You can always try the game first before you buy it. Of course, due to bizarrely restrictive DRM, publishers like EA are trying to just rent copies of their games instead of selling them. Not a very smart thing to do when your product is easily available for free. Frankly I think it's time that game developers starting asking for donations from fans. Or maybe trying a ransom method for releasing new titles. You can't crack something that hasn't been released yet.
And how does DRM help exactly? Name a single (commercial) game that wasn't cracked and uploaded to the intertubes in the first week (or maybe 2) of release? DRM has not yet been able to solve the problem. If it could then a lot of these arguments would have a lot more validity. I would support some version of completely non-intrusive DRM that was good enough that it couldn't be cracked. Of course, I probably would buy fewer games if none of them could be tried first. The misleading part about free downloads is that you don't have to give anything up to get them. 99.9% of the games I download I have never played and probably will never play. And 99% of the other 0.1% I don't like enough to play for more than 30 minutes. It's easy to please bored 12 year olds, but they don't typically have a lot of money. Creating a game that appeals to adult gamers is much harder and most developers aren't even trying anymore. Again, such download statistics or even server request statistics are utterly meaningless. Sure, there are people who play the cracked version, like the game, but don't bother to (or can't afford to) go out and buy a copy. But there are plenty of others who fall into quite a different category and they are very difficult to categorize. Every time I download a 700MB version of a film I could be counted among the free riders who just want to watch movies for free, and yet EVERY single movie that I like I buy on DVD or Blu-Ray. Not because of some moral issue, but because I want to own an actual physical copy of it. In the case of Blu-Ray it is also higher quality than anything available on the internet. Among internet "piracy" I think there really is a lot more of try-before-you-buy going on than people realize. All you really know for sure are your sales numbers. Everything else is nothing but speculation. Even some people who purchase the game will want to download a cracked version due to the intrusiveness of most DRM. The cracked version is usually a superior version. I think a lot of people would pay even more money for the cracked version than the DRM poisoned one.
This just proves they made a game a lot of people wanted to [try], and a lot of those people are [cautious about wasting money on a game they won't like during the second greatest worldwide recession in last 100 years.]
Fixed.
No. Libertarians are in favor of the least amount of regulation period. There are two subgroups: the limited government ones and the anarcho-libertarians who believe in (essentially) no government at all. Democracts and republicans would both also claim to believe in the least amount of regulation necessary to do the job. Where the political theory differs is in what exactly that job happens to be. BTW, "laissez-faire" is not the same as anarchy. It just refers to the government staying out of the economy.
and the judgment handed out in a Swedish court on Friday proves that's what it exists for.
All that proves is that you can get pretty much anyone in the world to do pretty much anything you want if you pay them enough money. Linking to copyrighted material was legal in Sweden. This verdict may change that, but all it shows is that Swedish judges are as human as anyone else. First the former prosecutor of the case and now a judge. Is the former prosecutor still working for the entertainment industry? Peter Sunde and the rest are heroes and maybe some will be martyrs. In a contest between a few lowly torrent tracker administrators and some of the largest, richest, most powerful corporations on the planet should anyone really be surprised by the verdict? It has nothing to do with justice.
Politics is about compromises as has been said a few times already.
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No. I think that is corrupt politics that you are talking of. Do you really want to elect someone to run the whole country without any principles beyond "whatever gets me elected"? Yes. That is how things are. What it is not is how things ought to be.
Unfortunately Aristotle turned out to be wrong about most things most of the time. A few things he got right. That sort of optimism is CLEARLY wrong. As this story demonstrates.
But the Keynesians are the ones in charge. Yes. The Bush Dynasty was Keynesian. In fact I can't think of any administration in the past half century that wasn't essentially Keynesian (except maybe Reagan). And that is not only because the majority of Americans don't support laissez-faire capatalism. Most politicians don't really have any principles. They go by what their economic advisors tell them. And what "school" of economics most influences the majority of people with degrees in Economics? You guessed it. Keynesians. But even Reagan wasn't a "Randian" or Austrian. Fact: We haven't had a single Libertarian president at anytime in the 20th century and certainly not in this one. If you want to call Bush Jr. a "Randian" (rofl) then I should be able to call Obama a Socialist or Marxist (which he isn't). If there is one thing that you absolutely cannot blame the current mess on it is the free market. Yes. Corporations are evil. Yes. They can't be trusted. Yes they will happily screw you over if they can save a single penny. But that's just because that's how human beings are. Human beings are evil. There is no easy way around that. The State is certainly no better than the corporations. The State is made up of a huge number of worker drone wage slaves as well. Any of whom can be easily corrupted. So what's the "solution"?. Immediate Global Thermonuclear War maybe. I don't know. But I can tell you what is NOT part of the solution: rewarding the very people responsible with handouts paid out, taken from the very same poor people you are referring to.
But aside from that it seems obvious to me that our current system, which is based entirely on Keynesian theory, JUST DOESN'T WORK! It is particularly ironic that the only ones who are defending the idea of letting these evil capitalist Mega-Corps fail and die are the "pro-business" free market people. Everyone else seems in favor of millionaire welfare checks just to make absolutely certain that not a single millionaire has to part with a single megayacht or private jet in tough economic times. And why? Because of some irrational fear that the free market won't be able to fix itself. That supply and demand won't continue to do its thing. And blackmail of course. You are willing to be blackmailed by these Corps. Once they reach a certain size too many people will lose there jobs. But when does that end? You see that's the problem with blackmail. You never know when they are going to come back for more. And once these companies learn that they can rely on it, they don't mind taking risks as much. They do business differently from how they otherwise would. And very differently from the smaller companies that don't have that government protection.
People lose their jobs in these downturns, which if you believe the Austrian School, are actually caused by government intervention in the economy. There isn't any way to stop that. The alternative, which most people seem to support, is to prop up the badly run companies and leave the well run companies on their own. That is not exactly what I call fair. Fair would be letting these mega-corps go down as they deserve, just as any of us who had a small company would. They don't deserve billions of dollars for failure. If I were a competitor I would be tempted to act irresponsibly as well and take all kinds of extravagant risks since in the new world order failure IS success.
First. She's a girl. So. Duh. Of course she's not going to like science/math. Girls like that are one in a million, regardless of how they test. Obviously she's intelligent, but that isn't necessarily going to help her much in life. You need a goal first before you can use your brain to get you there. And some goals just don't require much brains. In a lot of fields following the orders of your supervisor without hesitancy or question and not getting too bored with drudgery, the tasks that the higher ups don't want to do, is a far more important qualification. The vast majority of jobs in the world are shit jobs, no matter how highly paid. And the sooner she accepts that fact the better off she'll be. Better to work as a prostitute at night to pay the bills and pursue her real interests, if she ever has any, in her spare time.
Maybe what she's really meant for is mathematically advanced fellatio techniques (you could help with that maybe) or cooking or dressmaking or interior design or acting. Girls are just not like us. They don't usually share our interests no matter how smart they are. At uni I knew a pretty physics major (I kid you not), but what she really wanted to do was make clothes. Only she didn't realize that until she made her first dress about 3/4 through her degree. Maybe because she was smart and no one pushed her in such a girly direction. I don't think it ever occurred to her that she would actually like that sort of thing. So she finished her degree and then went back to school to get a degree in fashion design. Then she started making clothes and stuck with that for the rest of her life.
Think of it this way. Little girls play with dolls. Little boys play with tech stuff: gadgets and guns and cars, and even robots if they're lucky. And that's what most of us end up doing as adults too. I can only envy that guy who works in that MIT Robotics lab. That was my dream as a kid and as I near 40 I still can't think of anything I'd rather be doing. Argue all you want about nature vs. nurture. In the end it just doesn't matter. Most girls end up with girly interests. She will too. So think of a profession that girls tend to actually like. Or she will never stick with it or if she does she will eventually grow to hate it. The fact is that, for a girl, being pretty is WAY, WAY, WAY more important than being smart. Actually it's true for guys too, but women tend to get more enjoyment from the social aspects of life. And looks matter more for that. Also girls tend to have these weird states called "emotions". Never could figure out what those were... But it tends to make them kind of unreliable and unpredictable and, well, moody.
Actually, having given this a bit more thought, I think the secret is to decide whether she is a girly girl or more of a tomboy. If she's an ultra-feminine girly girl forget about any male dominated field. She will HATE it. Utterly. And even if she is a tomboy and even if she initially likes [instert male dominated field] she will probably eventually grow to hate it as well. Only if she is truly indistinguishable from a male is she likely to be a good candidate for a tech profession. Otherwise that estrogen will eventually get the best of her. And she will go back to the pink frilly dresses and talking about her "feelings" and giggling while talking to her friends on her cell phone.