One of the scariest parts about this article is that it assumes that this kind of software usually puts private information into "right" hands. In a world where your personal socializing habits are grounds for failing a background check, it really blurs the concept of "the wrong hands."
Mightn't the fact that we judge him to sound crazy have quite a bit to do with the total lack of evidence and fact?
You can certainly believe a person to have unreliable thinking patterns based on a broad range of unreliable claims. Unfortunately, you can't assume that all claims are falacious because most claims are falacious.
It is a classic falacy to attack the person giving the information, regardless of their reputation. You should always attack the information itself, otherwise you will eventually get stuck in a flame war (or mudslinging if you happen to be in politics).
This is especially true in this case, when there are plenty of ways to disprove what he has to say. It'd be costly to repeat his experiments with $1000 and a microwave, but a simple investigation with an exacto knife and a magnifying glass can be done to determine if there's an rfid behind Jackson's eye. They're tiny, but they're not invisible.
Regardless of your personal experience, it is Ford's habit to replace reliable vehicles with unreliable ones. The classical example of this is the Festiva. Those little things just went and went, got excellent reviews in Consumer Reports, and really upset a few Ford corporate executives.
They replaced the vehicle with the Aspire, which Ford dealership automechanics quicky nicknamed the "expire" due to their regular need for maintenance. They still sold quite a number of them due to the reputation of the previous vehicle.
Politically speaking, the government will do what they think will best benefit their supporters. Their supporters are the guys who pay to get them re-elected. This isn't about finding out what the public thinks, but it does help them in a few ways.
First, it builds public interest. When they come out and say "we've decided to do it this way," then the majority of people feel that they've had their say, and the government has listened to them, and what the government thinks is probably the best decision for some reason that completely escapes everyone's grasp, so they just go along with what the government decides. As if they had any say in it in the first place.
Second, it tells them how to spin what they're doing. What they're really doing is spending the public's money on something that isn't particularly accomplishable with our current technology. If they get our say-so, then they can hand billions over to our nation's "defense contractors" to try to figure it all out. Don't doubt for a minute that it'll be a long and expensive process.
Looking for public comment? Mr. Bush, I am unimpressed. How's that comment for you?
I'm a software engineer. I have very deep technical skills at what I do. But I also have a life outside of the computer screen, both social and otherwise, and unlike a "geek" I'm not socially inept. I love computers but they're not the most important thing in my life. I'm a technical expert. Call yourself a geek if you want, but you're not doing yourself any favours.
You entirely miss the point. I am also a well rounded, physically fit, socially active technical expert, but none of that is as important to me as my love of computers. I do my fourty hours plus a week with the computers, then go home to spend more time on computers. I make time for social activities and exercise because I enjoy them, too, but my first love is computers and technology.
I wear the term "geek" with pride because that's who I am, not what I do. Your technical ability is just a path to more social experiences - my social experiences are a path to better, more interesting technical projects. When working for a company, I'm not just working for a paycheck, I happily dig into the details of my job simply because I enjoy it.
Part of the reason I wear the title of "geek" with pride is because the paycheck players are so annoying. While I'm trying to get the big project in shape for a release, they're musing about the fine details of golf or wondering how they're doing in the latest football pool. Those aren't geeks, they're just nerds.
No, tech isn't the most important thing about my life. That would be my wife and children. But it does rate a close second. It's all a matter of priorities. My priorites identify me as a geek, and yours seem to identify you as a socialite who happens to work with computers. If you think that you are cooler because your activities fit your own priorites better, then you should go look up the word "egocentrism".
Email addresses belong in my email client. I occasionally back them up to a comma delimited file. I will copy them to my PDA, but only for relatives, close friends, or those that I might want to refer others to. Usually email addresses change too often to make it worthwhile anyway.
Phone numbers and addresses belong in my PDA and corresponding contact management software. This is a system that backs itself up every time I hotsync. This allows for triple redundancy because I also hotsync it at my work machine.
My cell phone just stores frequently used phone numbers. Getting numbers in and out of the device is often problematic, but I certainly wouldn't want to upload my entire PDA contact list to it - it would make it too time consuming to find a specific entry. I store numbers that I call frequently (or at least occasionally) in there because sifting through the rest of them would take more time than just looking them up in the PDA and typing the numbers.
I never JUST store a number in my cell phone. If I care about a number, I make a PDA entry. You may notice that any PDA/Cell phone combined device is still more expensive than the two separately.
Appropriate information in appropriate places. It's like your house. You don't try to pack everything you own into the room you're in most often, do you? Even if it would fit, it would make things difficult to find. Attempting to keep updated copies of everything everywhere is what a good programmer calls a "maintenance issue" - a very poor trade of bang for the buck.
At one point in my life, I purposely went out to purchase the geekiest watch I could find. That thing transferred phone numbers from my computer just by holding it up to the computer screen, and it was like wearing a hocky puck. I came to hate the thing, and have taken to purchasing the plainest watch I can find. One with actual hands, and a mechanical date function.
One of the things that I never understood about email clients was why they insisted on trying to store all of the contact information about a person. Who sends things to a snail mail address from an email client? Attempting to keep these things synched with your regular contact manager (like a PDA) is silly because I never try to send email from my PDA, and I have three times as many email addresses as I have real world address and phone number sets.
Inappropriately added functionality usually just makes a device more difficult to use, or at least distracts from its primary function. I have a PDA for my addresses; I don't need them on my cell phone. I don't want to have to whip out an entire PDA every time I make a call. The games are cute, but they just drain the batteries more quickly. The only unusual feature that I actually use on my cell phone is the Direct Connect, which I consider to be a logical extension. Everything else is a waste of electronics, a waste of my time, and a waste of the energy it takes to lug the thing around.
If you enjoy computers then play with them. You will lose your joy if you become a professional.
I SOOOOO have to disagree with this one. I'm an IT professional because I enjoy tech. I breathe and sleep tech. I consider software engineering an art form, and right now (believe me, you) I'm a starving artist. I do what I do because I enjoy it, and I'm glad that, at one point, it was extremely popular.
If you don't enjoy working in the tech industry, then don't. The money's gone, there's nothing left for you here. Let a real geek take your job.
I currently have numerous startup type projects going. The problem I've had is in finding decent partners. Why do we need parters, you ask? Because nobody I know knows how to write both the network connectivity protocols, the GUI front end, and can still draw well enough to create the graphics. Under the circumstances, you're left with the options of either taking partners or spending months learning new technologies and skills that you may never need again.
In once case, one of the partners decided to try to take my code and run off with it. After that got sorted out, we spent several months waiting for another of the partners to crank out his part of the project. Right now, we're scrambling for beta testers.
On another project, I've been the bad partner. The bulk of the coding is my responsibility, but I keep finding more things that the project needs. Mostly, they're waiting on my designs to settle out so they can work on their chunks.
And then there's the issue of how to split the ownerhsip of the company once you actually start the company. Most people get the bright idea that you should automatically split the company equally among all contributors. This means that the guy who designs and writes the bulk of the code winds up with the same percentage as the guy who designed a few icons for the web site. Deciding how much each person's contribution is worth is more than a little taxing on the business relationships.
To this date, I've been working on those startups for over a year, and am still waiting for them to pay off. Maybe they will, maybe they won't, but it isn't due to a lack in my effort.
I have no doubt that Bush has done a few things to help our country. Unfortunately, his motivations are entirely transparent, and have little to do with public interest. The documentation fills books ( see here and here and here ) and the facts are so heinous that they sound impossible when you try to summarize them in a space like this.
Nobody is all bad, but no amount of good could make up for things like this. The direction that our country is currently heading is more than enough to frighten the well informed.
Oh, I wasn't exempting Democrats from that listing, I was merely failing to exempt Republicans. To put another way, all Republicans buy into the Horatio Alger syndrome, and most Democrats do.
Hmm, that may be obscure too. Ok, try this. All Republicans hope that they'll be rich and powerful one day, and are willing to give more power to the rich and powerful as a means to feed this hope. Republican politicans are definitely among the worst about this.
Democrats, on the other hand, occasionally become politicans because they're concerned about how the people are being treated. They're kind of known for it. They may not stay that way once they get into office (there's a name for that syndrome, too, but I forget what it's called), but every now and again they start off that way.
Simple point: these Republicans had no business digging through anyone's files. Saying, "oh, by the way, we've got access to some stuff that you don't want us to see. Hope you fix your security breach soon, or we're liable to dig through your stuff again!" isn't much of an excuse.
Complete agreement on this. Think of it this way: let's say that your boss (for some unknown reason) has his C drive shared out, and you just happen to notice that there are salary listings and, with a little more digging, can identify all of the available corporate strategies, including next month's layoff plans. If you tell your boss about all of this, how likely are you to keep your job?
Not entirely true. Politicians are subject to a form of "group think", win one for the home team, WE are better than THEY, that kind of thing. That's why so many votes are made on partisan lines.
Our current administration is particularly bad because their "home team" isn't Republicans or Democrats, it's the fithy rich and powerful. They seem to be Republicans because anyone who's a Republican aspires to be one of them.
One of the most dangerous aspects of the Game of Betterthan is that once a group has established superiority, they feel they have the right to abuse those they are better than.
Force can come in many forms. Microsoft has the ability to revoke your ability to earn money, which is a form of force. They have used this ability to cripple the earning capability of many noted companies, and tried to use it against others. Slashdotters of all people should know this.
True free enterprise only exists when nobody controls the playing field. Since Microsoft has a near monopoly on desktop operating systems, they control the playing field for all applications that want to compete for the desktop marketplace.
Does anybody remember the jokes that were going around when they introduced quadrophonic sound systems? They tried to expand speaker number beyond what people thought was reasonable back then, and some comedian made jokes about the "googlophonic sound system", with a separate speaker for every wavelength, coming from every direction imaginable.
How long before someone comes out with a 9.1 sterio system?
"Truth" and "fact" are synonyms. Both - in everyday usage and m-w.com definition.
Their meanings are similar (see below), but in no way identical. Either you're being satyrical (hard to tell in type), or you've proved my point rather well.
I guess the word "belief" fell out of you vocabulary...
Nope, belief is a precursor to truth. If you can't prove it, you just have to believe. When you're looking for facts, belief is a stumbling block.
truth (as per dictionary.com)
Conformity to fact or actuality.
A statement proven to be or accepted as true.
Sincerity; integrity.
Fidelity to an original or standard.
fact (again, as per dictionary.com)
Knowledge or information based on real occurrences: an account based on fact; a blur of fact and fancy.
Something demonstrated to exist or known to have existed: Genetic engineering is now a fact. That Chaucer was a real person is an undisputed fact.
A real occurrence; an event: had to prove the facts of the case.
Something believed to be true or real: a document laced with mistaken facts.
A thing that has been done, especially a crime: an accessory before the fact.
Law.The aspect of a case at law comprising events determined by evidence: The jury made a finding of fact.
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of
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You're right in that it is flawed, simply because very few people are going to tell an agent of the U.S. Government that they use drugs. If you want to see a survey that avoids that issue, you can look at Monitoring the Future's parallel survey. ( http://monitoringthefuture.org/pubs/monographs/vol 1_2002.pdf )
No, they didn't knock on the people's doors, they contacted them in advance and set up appointments. The sampling of the population was statistically valid across all age groups, races, genders, and geographical locations. They've done this survey every year for over a decade.
If you actually want to know the correct information (as opposed to just needing to be right), you can examine the data and methodology yourself, and refute specific points. This would have much more impact on my that simply stating "you don't agree with me, therefore I don't believe your information could be accurate".
If you really want to get technical, the definition of truth starts with conformity to fact or actuality. If you pay attention to usage (the final arbiter of definitions), you realize that the things that are considered to be "truth" are those things which are not currently provable, and are therefore subjective. Examples of this are religion (check out truthforlife.com), and politics (we hold these Truths to be self-evident...).
One of the biggest abuses of this word is religion, where facts and evidence are non-existent. Even given the premise that these details about God's existence have a fixed and objective state, it is utterly, completely, and totally impossible to objectively demostrate the actual state of reality one way or the other. All arguements attempting to prove God's existence or qualities are either self referential (God exists because the Bible says so) or purely subjective (I have faith, therefore he is).
We very often use the word Truth when we want to convince the other side that our opinions are the only possible explaination, especially when our research is faulty, or when we don't want people to compare what we have to say against facts. A good example about this is the web page "Truth About Bowling (for Columbine)". While he does site a number of facts, the spin he puts on it is significantly different than the account given by Michael Moore himself. BOTH OF THESE ARE TRUTH. You get to pick which one you prefer, or build your own.
When it comes down to it, any time you see the word "truth" these days you have to assume that it means that someone wants you to swallow their version of things. To get something that better fits reality at large you have to pick the facts out of several accounts and build your own "truth".
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of
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You're welcome. It's a professional interest of mine.
www.perdl.com
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of
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On point number 2, roughly 12% of all drug users are black (National Household Survey on Drug Abuse). Slicing the data another way indicates that while 12.2% of all white people use drugs, only 10% of blacks use drugs.
To go even further with this, 35% of all people arrested on drug charges are black (US Department of Justice). Roughly 53% of all people tried for drug charges are black, and 70% of all time served for drug charges is served by blacks (US Department of Correctional Statistics).
Please check the facts before you try to push your truths on others.
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of
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Bravo. Well said on all points. Pitty the moderators didn't notice.
One of the things that causes this phenomenon is that most people can't tell the difference between truth and fact. Facts are information that is independently provable, whereas Truths are just what we accept as reality. Most people are absolutely insistent that their Truths are really Facts, and get really upset when you disagree with them.
Oddly enough, the less realistic a truth is, the more likely a person is to get upset at someone who is contradicting it. Look at anybody in history who has been burned, fired, hanged, or crucified for stating a truth, and you'll see what I mean.
While you're at it, you might notice that attempting to repeal laws which support certain popular truths is tantamount to breaking those laws in most people's eyes. Gives you something to chew on, eh?
I am a programmer with a handicap, in that my system is caffiene intollerant. That isn't to say that I can't do caffiene, but the value has to be worth the other discomforts. As a result, I often get myself hooked on caffiene and have to "clean myself out" afterwards.
I have tried most of the methods described above, and can tell you about their effectiveness. The problems with kicking caffiene are threefold. With caffiene you have to get used to not having the energy that you want. The second is that you get addicted to the flavor of coffee. The third are the actual withdrawl symptoms. It's kind of like smoking in that it isn't just the nicotine, it's the habit of doing something with your mouth. You have to deal with each of these issues.
For the lack of energy, I suggest starting by making sure you're getting enough sleep. It usually only takes an extra hour a day, and is much easier than spontaneously starting a regular regimen of exercise. Daily cardiovascular exercise (like 15-20 minutes on an exerbike) is next on the list - you wouldn't believe the extra energy that regular excercise will give you.
Dealing with the withdrawl symptoms is actually fairly easy. You can switch to green tea, you can drink a whole bunch of water, you can cut down on a schedule, you can switch to decaf. Cutting down on a schedule is the hardest on the list because you still have the stuff in front of you, and it's easy to convince yourself that a little more won't hurt. I don't suggest switching to soda because it has its own health issues.
The last thing to deal with (which is something that I never entirely get over) is the issue of just plain liking coffee. I think that the human pallatte would learn to enjoy battery acid if it had caffiene in it. Decaf isn't good enough, your pallette quickly figures out that it isn't getting what it wants and starts detesting it. Just drinking coffee on special occasions doesn't work either, because it reminds you how much you like it. The only answer I have to this one is that you need to have willpower while your getting yourself off of it, and once you're off, just drink decaf on special occasions, just to keep yourself from getting hooked again.
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One of the scariest parts about this article is that it assumes that this kind of software usually puts private information into "right" hands. In a world where your personal socializing habits are grounds for failing a background check, it really blurs the concept of "the wrong hands."
Mightn't the fact that we judge him to sound crazy have quite a bit to do with the total lack of evidence and fact?
You can certainly believe a person to have unreliable thinking patterns based on a broad range of unreliable claims. Unfortunately, you can't assume that all claims are falacious because most claims are falacious.
It is a classic falacy to attack the person giving the information, regardless of their reputation. You should always attack the information itself, otherwise you will eventually get stuck in a flame war (or mudslinging if you happen to be in politics).
This is especially true in this case, when there are plenty of ways to disprove what he has to say. It'd be costly to repeat his experiments with $1000 and a microwave, but a simple investigation with an exacto knife and a magnifying glass can be done to determine if there's an rfid behind Jackson's eye. They're tiny, but they're not invisible.
Regardless of your personal experience, it is Ford's habit to replace reliable vehicles with unreliable ones. The classical example of this is the Festiva. Those little things just went and went, got excellent reviews in Consumer Reports, and really upset a few Ford corporate executives.
They replaced the vehicle with the Aspire, which Ford dealership automechanics quicky nicknamed the "expire" due to their regular need for maintenance. They still sold quite a number of them due to the reputation of the previous vehicle.
Politically speaking, the government will do what they think will best benefit their supporters. Their supporters are the guys who pay to get them re-elected. This isn't about finding out what the public thinks, but it does help them in a few ways.
First, it builds public interest. When they come out and say "we've decided to do it this way," then the majority of people feel that they've had their say, and the government has listened to them, and what the government thinks is probably the best decision for some reason that completely escapes everyone's grasp, so they just go along with what the government decides. As if they had any say in it in the first place.
Second, it tells them how to spin what they're doing. What they're really doing is spending the public's money on something that isn't particularly accomplishable with our current technology. If they get our say-so, then they can hand billions over to our nation's "defense contractors" to try to figure it all out. Don't doubt for a minute that it'll be a long and expensive process.
Looking for public comment? Mr. Bush, I am unimpressed. How's that comment for you?
I quit the circus and started biting the heads off of computers for a living.
I'm a software engineer. I have very deep technical skills at what I do. But I also have a life outside of the computer screen, both social and otherwise, and unlike a "geek" I'm not socially inept. I love computers but they're not the most important thing in my life. I'm a technical expert. Call yourself a geek if you want, but you're not doing yourself any favours.
You entirely miss the point. I am also a well rounded, physically fit, socially active technical expert, but none of that is as important to me as my love of computers. I do my fourty hours plus a week with the computers, then go home to spend more time on computers. I make time for social activities and exercise because I enjoy them, too, but my first love is computers and technology.
I wear the term "geek" with pride because that's who I am, not what I do. Your technical ability is just a path to more social experiences - my social experiences are a path to better, more interesting technical projects. When working for a company, I'm not just working for a paycheck, I happily dig into the details of my job simply because I enjoy it.
Part of the reason I wear the title of "geek" with pride is because the paycheck players are so annoying. While I'm trying to get the big project in shape for a release, they're musing about the fine details of golf or wondering how they're doing in the latest football pool. Those aren't geeks, they're just nerds.
No, tech isn't the most important thing about my life. That would be my wife and children. But it does rate a close second. It's all a matter of priorities. My priorites identify me as a geek, and yours seem to identify you as a socialite who happens to work with computers. If you think that you are cooler because your activities fit your own priorites better, then you should go look up the word "egocentrism".
Email addresses belong in my email client. I occasionally back them up to a comma delimited file. I will copy them to my PDA, but only for relatives, close friends, or those that I might want to refer others to. Usually email addresses change too often to make it worthwhile anyway.
Phone numbers and addresses belong in my PDA and corresponding contact management software. This is a system that backs itself up every time I hotsync. This allows for triple redundancy because I also hotsync it at my work machine.
My cell phone just stores frequently used phone numbers. Getting numbers in and out of the device is often problematic, but I certainly wouldn't want to upload my entire PDA contact list to it - it would make it too time consuming to find a specific entry. I store numbers that I call frequently (or at least occasionally) in there because sifting through the rest of them would take more time than just looking them up in the PDA and typing the numbers.
I never JUST store a number in my cell phone. If I care about a number, I make a PDA entry. You may notice that any PDA/Cell phone combined device is still more expensive than the two separately.
Appropriate information in appropriate places. It's like your house. You don't try to pack everything you own into the room you're in most often, do you? Even if it would fit, it would make things difficult to find. Attempting to keep updated copies of everything everywhere is what a good programmer calls a "maintenance issue" - a very poor trade of bang for the buck.
At one point in my life, I purposely went out to purchase the geekiest watch I could find. That thing transferred phone numbers from my computer just by holding it up to the computer screen, and it was like wearing a hocky puck. I came to hate the thing, and have taken to purchasing the plainest watch I can find. One with actual hands, and a mechanical date function.
One of the things that I never understood about email clients was why they insisted on trying to store all of the contact information about a person. Who sends things to a snail mail address from an email client? Attempting to keep these things synched with your regular contact manager (like a PDA) is silly because I never try to send email from my PDA, and I have three times as many email addresses as I have real world address and phone number sets.
Inappropriately added functionality usually just makes a device more difficult to use, or at least distracts from its primary function. I have a PDA for my addresses; I don't need them on my cell phone. I don't want to have to whip out an entire PDA every time I make a call. The games are cute, but they just drain the batteries more quickly. The only unusual feature that I actually use on my cell phone is the Direct Connect, which I consider to be a logical extension. Everything else is a waste of electronics, a waste of my time, and a waste of the energy it takes to lug the thing around.
If you enjoy computers then play with them. You will lose your joy if you become a professional.
I SOOOOO have to disagree with this one. I'm an IT professional because I enjoy tech. I breathe and sleep tech. I consider software engineering an art form, and right now (believe me, you) I'm a starving artist. I do what I do because I enjoy it, and I'm glad that, at one point, it was extremely popular.
If you don't enjoy working in the tech industry, then don't. The money's gone, there's nothing left for you here. Let a real geek take your job.
Signed, a guy with Karma to burn.
I currently have numerous startup type projects going. The problem I've had is in finding decent partners. Why do we need parters, you ask? Because nobody I know knows how to write both the network connectivity protocols, the GUI front end, and can still draw well enough to create the graphics. Under the circumstances, you're left with the options of either taking partners or spending months learning new technologies and skills that you may never need again.
In once case, one of the partners decided to try to take my code and run off with it. After that got sorted out, we spent several months waiting for another of the partners to crank out his part of the project. Right now, we're scrambling for beta testers.
On another project, I've been the bad partner. The bulk of the coding is my responsibility, but I keep finding more things that the project needs. Mostly, they're waiting on my designs to settle out so they can work on their chunks.
And then there's the issue of how to split the ownerhsip of the company once you actually start the company. Most people get the bright idea that you should automatically split the company equally among all contributors. This means that the guy who designs and writes the bulk of the code winds up with the same percentage as the guy who designed a few icons for the web site. Deciding how much each person's contribution is worth is more than a little taxing on the business relationships.
To this date, I've been working on those startups for over a year, and am still waiting for them to pay off. Maybe they will, maybe they won't, but it isn't due to a lack in my effort.
I have no doubt that Bush has done a few things to help our country. Unfortunately, his motivations are entirely transparent, and have little to do with public interest. The documentation fills books ( see here and here and here ) and the facts are so heinous that they sound impossible when you try to summarize them in a space like this.
Nobody is all bad, but no amount of good could make up for things like this. The direction that our country is currently heading is more than enough to frighten the well informed.
Oh, I wasn't exempting Democrats from that listing, I was merely failing to exempt Republicans. To put another way, all Republicans buy into the Horatio Alger syndrome, and most Democrats do.
Hmm, that may be obscure too. Ok, try this. All Republicans hope that they'll be rich and powerful one day, and are willing to give more power to the rich and powerful as a means to feed this hope. Republican politicans are definitely among the worst about this.
Democrats, on the other hand, occasionally become politicans because they're concerned about how the people are being treated. They're kind of known for it. They may not stay that way once they get into office (there's a name for that syndrome, too, but I forget what it's called), but every now and again they start off that way.
What a world, what a world.
Simple point: these Republicans had no business digging through anyone's files. Saying, "oh, by the way, we've got access to some stuff that you don't want us to see. Hope you fix your security breach soon, or we're liable to dig through your stuff again!" isn't much of an excuse.
Complete agreement on this. Think of it this way: let's say that your boss (for some unknown reason) has his C drive shared out, and you just happen to notice that there are salary listings and, with a little more digging, can identify all of the available corporate strategies, including next month's layoff plans. If you tell your boss about all of this, how likely are you to keep your job?
Not entirely true. Politicians are subject to a form of "group think", win one for the home team, WE are better than THEY, that kind of thing. That's why so many votes are made on partisan lines.
Our current administration is particularly bad because their "home team" isn't Republicans or Democrats, it's the fithy rich and powerful. They seem to be Republicans because anyone who's a Republican aspires to be one of them.
One of the most dangerous aspects of the Game of Betterthan is that once a group has established superiority, they feel they have the right to abuse those they are better than.
Force can come in many forms. Microsoft has the ability to revoke your ability to earn money, which is a form of force. They have used this ability to cripple the earning capability of many noted companies, and tried to use it against others. Slashdotters of all people should know this.
True free enterprise only exists when nobody controls the playing field. Since Microsoft has a near monopoly on desktop operating systems, they control the playing field for all applications that want to compete for the desktop marketplace.
Does anybody remember the jokes that were going around when they introduced quadrophonic sound systems? They tried to expand speaker number beyond what people thought was reasonable back then, and some comedian made jokes about the "googlophonic sound system", with a separate speaker for every wavelength, coming from every direction imaginable.
How long before someone comes out with a 9.1 sterio system?
Their meanings are similar (see below), but in no way identical. Either you're being satyrical (hard to tell in type), or you've proved my point rather well.
I guess the word "belief" fell out of you vocabulary...
Nope, belief is a precursor to truth. If you can't prove it, you just have to believe. When you're looking for facts, belief is a stumbling block.
truth (as per dictionary.com)
fact (again, as per dictionary.com)
You're right in that it is flawed, simply because very few people are going to tell an agent of the U.S. Government that they use drugs. If you want to see a survey that avoids that issue, you can look at Monitoring the Future's parallel survey. ( http://monitoringthefuture.org/pubs/monographs/vol 1_2002.pdf )
No, they didn't knock on the people's doors, they contacted them in advance and set up appointments. The sampling of the population was statistically valid across all age groups, races, genders, and geographical locations. They've done this survey every year for over a decade.
If you actually want to know the correct information (as opposed to just needing to be right), you can examine the data and methodology yourself, and refute specific points. This would have much more impact on my that simply stating "you don't agree with me, therefore I don't believe your information could be accurate".
If you really want to get technical, the definition of truth starts with conformity to fact or actuality. If you pay attention to usage (the final arbiter of definitions), you realize that the things that are considered to be "truth" are those things which are not currently provable, and are therefore subjective. Examples of this are religion (check out truthforlife.com), and politics (we hold these Truths to be self-evident...).
One of the biggest abuses of this word is religion, where facts and evidence are non-existent. Even given the premise that these details about God's existence have a fixed and objective state, it is utterly, completely, and totally impossible to objectively demostrate the actual state of reality one way or the other. All arguements attempting to prove God's existence or qualities are either self referential (God exists because the Bible says so) or purely subjective (I have faith, therefore he is).
We very often use the word Truth when we want to convince the other side that our opinions are the only possible explaination, especially when our research is faulty, or when we don't want people to compare what we have to say against facts. A good example about this is the web page "Truth About Bowling (for Columbine)". While he does site a number of facts, the spin he puts on it is significantly different than the account given by Michael Moore himself. BOTH OF THESE ARE TRUTH. You get to pick which one you prefer, or build your own.
When it comes down to it, any time you see the word "truth" these days you have to assume that it means that someone wants you to swallow their version of things. To get something that better fits reality at large you have to pick the facts out of several accounts and build your own "truth".
You're welcome. It's a professional interest of mine.
www.perdl.com
On point number 2, roughly 12% of all drug users are black (National Household Survey on Drug Abuse). Slicing the data another way indicates that while 12.2% of all white people use drugs, only 10% of blacks use drugs.
To go even further with this, 35% of all people arrested on drug charges are black (US Department of Justice). Roughly 53% of all people tried for drug charges are black, and 70% of all time served for drug charges is served by blacks (US Department of Correctional Statistics).
Please check the facts before you try to push your truths on others.
Bravo. Well said on all points. Pitty the moderators didn't notice.
One of the things that causes this phenomenon is that most people can't tell the difference between truth and fact. Facts are information that is independently provable, whereas Truths are just what we accept as reality. Most people are absolutely insistent that their Truths are really Facts, and get really upset when you disagree with them.
Oddly enough, the less realistic a truth is, the more likely a person is to get upset at someone who is contradicting it. Look at anybody in history who has been burned, fired, hanged, or crucified for stating a truth, and you'll see what I mean.
While you're at it, you might notice that attempting to repeal laws which support certain popular truths is tantamount to breaking those laws in most people's eyes. Gives you something to chew on, eh?
It's all a matter of perspective. Feminism has most definitely changed America. For a lot of people, change is bad, therefore it has had a bad effect.
Regardless, the word "ruin" is far too strong a word top apply to America, since there are still a majority of our buildings standing.
I am a programmer with a handicap, in that my system is caffiene intollerant. That isn't to say that I can't do caffiene, but the value has to be worth the other discomforts. As a result, I often get myself hooked on caffiene and have to "clean myself out" afterwards.
I have tried most of the methods described above, and can tell you about their effectiveness. The problems with kicking caffiene are threefold. With caffiene you have to get used to not having the energy that you want. The second is that you get addicted to the flavor of coffee. The third are the actual withdrawl symptoms. It's kind of like smoking in that it isn't just the nicotine, it's the habit of doing something with your mouth. You have to deal with each of these issues.
For the lack of energy, I suggest starting by making sure you're getting enough sleep. It usually only takes an extra hour a day, and is much easier than spontaneously starting a regular regimen of exercise. Daily cardiovascular exercise (like 15-20 minutes on an exerbike) is next on the list - you wouldn't believe the extra energy that regular excercise will give you.
Dealing with the withdrawl symptoms is actually fairly easy. You can switch to green tea, you can drink a whole bunch of water, you can cut down on a schedule, you can switch to decaf. Cutting down on a schedule is the hardest on the list because you still have the stuff in front of you, and it's easy to convince yourself that a little more won't hurt. I don't suggest switching to soda because it has its own health issues.
The last thing to deal with (which is something that I never entirely get over) is the issue of just plain liking coffee. I think that the human pallatte would learn to enjoy battery acid if it had caffiene in it. Decaf isn't good enough, your pallette quickly figures out that it isn't getting what it wants and starts detesting it. Just drinking coffee on special occasions doesn't work either, because it reminds you how much you like it. The only answer I have to this one is that you need to have willpower while your getting yourself off of it, and once you're off, just drink decaf on special occasions, just to keep yourself from getting hooked again.
Best of luck.