So, with enough money and enough (brought) representatives, can I give rights to a gun to shoot people, but not the person that wields it? That is inane.
As seems to be repeatedly being demonstrated, with enough money and enough bought representatives, you can do pretty damn near anything. There's a huge number of absolutely disgusting laws being churned out from various sources, because the Golden Rule works so very well at the moment (Golden Rule = Whoever's got the Gold, makes the rules)
I don't know, AMD have some quite nice ideas for scalable multiprocessor based designs. I can see a lot of milage with IBM looking to cut 'back in' to the desktop business, and AMD would benefit a lot from some of the PPC based coolness IBM can do these days.
I'd disagree. I don't think you have to define duress, theft and property. Most people know what these things mean quite well. Or at least have enough of a consensus that any disputes can be settled by a neutral third party. The legal definition of 'theft' is pretty convoluted, but whilst most people don't know it verbatim, most also know when 'theft' has occured.
Our mistake as 'civilised beings' is to legislate into absurdity, such that personal responsiblity for the internal functioning of society is left by the wayside.
I don't consider science at odds with religion. Or at least, it shouldn't be. There's some aspects of dogma that cause 'conflicts', but... well, the existance (or not) of a God doesn't actually change anything - that's kind of the point of the scientific method.
Develop a hypothesis, predict, decide on a test methodology, conclude based on observations.
Whether the inspiration came from God, or the random firing of your brain as you watch water flowing down the plug'ole doesn't actually matter all that much.
STDs are one of the more direct forms of evolutionary pressure, as are contraceptives. Both have significant effects on your reproductive cycle. Less breeding, means your contribution to the gene pool will be diminished.
There's plenty of traits that don't significantly alter survivability of a species either. Take the appendix for example - there's some evidence what it is/was used for - other species have one, and use it for processing grass.
The human appendix is pretty much unusable. But... well, if we _did_ have common evolutionary roots with other mammals, used to eat grass, and thus an appendix was important. Since stopping eating grass, it stopped being important. But, and here's the key thing, an appendix has very little impact on my chance of reproduction. There's appendicitis, and maybe the 'wasted effort', but general, it's a very minor effect. This is why you see variance in colours, facial shapes, that kind of thing.
Of course, I suspect I might see an Intelligent Design advocate pointing out that the appendix was put there deliberately, and us not using it is going against Gods Will or something. However I'll happily let them graze my lawn, and everyone's happy.
Every day 'mutuation' happens. It's pretty slow on a human scale, since each generation is 'about' 20 years, but it's still happening. Thing is, on the kind of scales we're talking about, 20 years is no time at all. But even then, well, mutation of cells happens quite frequently - every time a cell is hit by ionising radiation there's a chance it'll 'change'. Now, ok, the odds of the change affecting a cell critical to the reproductive cycle are pretty low. And the odds of that change being something other than either 'null' or 'negative' are also pretty low. But we're talking really really long periods of time here, and we're talking really really large numbers of generations of cells. The kind of mind bogglingly huge numbers of generations that... well, if you play the lottery trillions of times, then you start to see winning numbers show up.
It's always interested me, the whole evolutionary pressure thing. I'm fine with the argument that mutation happens naturally, and over long periods of time, there's an awful lot more 'failures' than there are 'successes'. The evolutionary failures tend to branch into extinction as they're out-competed for resources.
The thing that's intriguing me at the moment though, is the question of at what level the human race is circumventing the 'selection' part of the evolutionary process. There's quite literally very high odds that 'almost any' specimens of humanity will end up able to reproduce. So you have tendancies like poor sight, diabetes, mental disorders that breed true, since we can compensate for them.
Worse is when we consider the 'skew' on child rates - in the modern world, it's inhumane to not support parents who don't want to work for a living, and would much rather have lots of sex without any forms of birth control. And of course, give 'support' to the families in question too, so if you work the system right, you quite literally get a better house and more income the more sprogs you drop.
Where you have the more traditional 'professionals' waiting later and later in life to have children, with gradually diminishing success rates, and probably not many children, leading to a net negative growth within the particular social strata.
I can't help but wonder if that's going to really hurt us as a species if we don't correct the trend.
The whole concept of religious dogma (Althought I still contend the underlying concepts as 'open for debate') is that, as you say, it's population control. Feed the lower clases their myth, so that they will work hard in the hopes of a just reward.
You might say it's one of the biggest incidences of myth-management...
I'd cope if they limited it to just one distro 'supported' and the driver stuff open sourced. And given it's Novell, I'd imagine that we'll be seeing Dell laptops with SUSE preconfigured, and that's just fine by me.
Ah, so it's a punishment thing? Well, I know a few people who pay for that kind of service, so this all start s to make sense. Windows is actually some kind of BSDM game, with no safewords.
If I recall correctly, the raptor is a pretty expensive fighter. But that's not really all that significant compared to the 'value' of a pilot. I mean, even assuming the value of human life is neglected, there's still a significant amount of training and 'lead times' to getting a pilot into service.
You need a balanced approach. I'd be inclined to agree though, that loyalty to a company is a good way to get abused - I know several people who've 'overdone it' working for a company, and now... well are paying the price in a big way. So no, you don't really owe them anything. But at the same time, how many companies are going to want to invest in an employee if they're liable to leave in the next couple of months? Training is expensive, between the days you're not in the office, and the actual cost of a day of training, it adds up fast. An employer is entirely reasonable in looking for how long you'll last, if they're going to be 'investing' 5-10k on training for you.
Treat myspace and your blog as an extension of your CV, and you will probably do OK. I know for a fact that I've had interviewers/recruiters reading my blog. I don't see this as a problem, but... well you definitely need to remain aware that it's liable to happen.
And of course, bear in mind what it shows up if they type your name into google.
"It's like trying to be a Microsoft network administrator with a staff that downloads viruses and porn to their computers daily and expect you to fix it."
What, you mean it's not supposed to be this way?
Sadly true. I have a parent who's 'in teaching' who's seen a lot of changes over 25 years of it. To the point where they have children biting and kicking them in class, and there's really not a lot they can do about it. Their parents are the only ones able to discipline the children, and all too often they're unwilling to.
There's a lot of parents who aren't prepared to take responsibilty for their children, which leads to what is essentially feral behaviour. At which point, there's really not a lot of options open to the teachers, short of expulsion or legal action.
We're actively building a 'split culture' where we have a 'middle class' who are working hard and not having many children, and a subclass who don't care, and are breeding because more kids = more benefits. Their children, whilst there are exceptions, don't have the kind of start in life that's really needed to actually achieve much.
The answer? Well, lets start with holding parents responsible for children's behaviour whilst they're under the age of majority. Lets also add in some kind of parenting test. You can't drive a car without a license, and that's far less complicated than bringing up a child. And hey, if you run someone over and mess their life up, then there's consequences to be faced.
You could use a citrix delivered application, but I suppose that would't get you all that much. I suppose that's a reasonable comparison. Citrix + MS Office, vs. Google Apps. There's a lot of people who do the former, so I can see why there'd be a lot of people who'd opt for the latter.
Are there any plans to integrate certain EVE services with out of game? From my point of view, it would be vastly preferable to have POP access to my EVEMail, so I can use a 'useful' mail client (sorry, the in game one's not all that great, and positively horrible when you're faced with 50 evemails a day) and IRC Access to public in game channels. Of course, I'd also like SAP support for my corp management, but that might be a little harder to accomplish. Although I daresay you _might_ be able to persuade SAP to do it as a publicity stunt. Think of all the PR as all the EVE gamers get used to SAP and use that to promote it in their workplace.
Not all games suit all players. I like EVE for a lot of reasons, but I also accept that the reasons I like it, could as easily be the reasons that others dislike it.
Recently, there's been a lot of fighting between LV and GoonSwarm in Tenerifis. How do you feel about how the whole campaign, and the reflections it's cast on large scale warfare in EVE?
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No one ever said the law had to make sense.
But hey, that's democracy at work. Isn't it?
Just as well the UK doesn't support software patents then, isn't it?
Truth in company naming? How excellent.
I don't know, AMD have some quite nice ideas for scalable multiprocessor based designs. I can see a lot of milage with IBM looking to cut 'back in' to the desktop business, and AMD would benefit a lot from some of the PPC based coolness IBM can do these days.
Our mistake as 'civilised beings' is to legislate into absurdity, such that personal responsiblity for the internal functioning of society is left by the wayside.
Develop a hypothesis, predict, decide on a test methodology, conclude based on observations.
Whether the inspiration came from God, or the random firing of your brain as you watch water flowing down the plug'ole doesn't actually matter all that much.
STDs are one of the more direct forms of evolutionary pressure, as are contraceptives. Both have significant effects on your reproductive cycle. Less breeding, means your contribution to the gene pool will be diminished.
The human appendix is pretty much unusable. But... well, if we _did_ have common evolutionary roots with other mammals, used to eat grass, and thus an appendix was important. Since stopping eating grass, it stopped being important. But, and here's the key thing, an appendix has very little impact on my chance of reproduction. There's appendicitis, and maybe the 'wasted effort', but general, it's a very minor effect. This is why you see variance in colours, facial shapes, that kind of thing.
Of course, I suspect I might see an Intelligent Design advocate pointing out that the appendix was put there deliberately, and us not using it is going against Gods Will or something. However I'll happily let them graze my lawn, and everyone's happy.
Every day 'mutuation' happens. It's pretty slow on a human scale, since each generation is 'about' 20 years, but it's still happening. Thing is, on the kind of scales we're talking about, 20 years is no time at all. But even then, well, mutation of cells happens quite frequently - every time a cell is hit by ionising radiation there's a chance it'll 'change'. Now, ok, the odds of the change affecting a cell critical to the reproductive cycle are pretty low. And the odds of that change being something other than either 'null' or 'negative' are also pretty low. But we're talking really really long periods of time here, and we're talking really really large numbers of generations of cells. The kind of mind bogglingly huge numbers of generations that ... well, if you play the lottery trillions of times, then you start to see winning numbers show up.
The thing that's intriguing me at the moment though, is the question of at what level the human race is circumventing the 'selection' part of the evolutionary process. There's quite literally very high odds that 'almost any' specimens of humanity will end up able to reproduce. So you have tendancies like poor sight, diabetes, mental disorders that breed true, since we can compensate for them.
Worse is when we consider the 'skew' on child rates - in the modern world, it's inhumane to not support parents who don't want to work for a living, and would much rather have lots of sex without any forms of birth control. And of course, give 'support' to the families in question too, so if you work the system right, you quite literally get a better house and more income the more sprogs you drop.
Where you have the more traditional 'professionals' waiting later and later in life to have children, with gradually diminishing success rates, and probably not many children, leading to a net negative growth within the particular social strata.
I can't help but wonder if that's going to really hurt us as a species if we don't correct the trend.
You might say it's one of the biggest incidences of myth-management...
I'd cope if they limited it to just one distro 'supported' and the driver stuff open sourced. And given it's Novell, I'd imagine that we'll be seeing Dell laptops with SUSE preconfigured, and that's just fine by me.
Ah, so it's a punishment thing? Well, I know a few people who pay for that kind of service, so this all start s to make sense. Windows is actually some kind of BSDM game, with no safewords.
If I recall correctly, the raptor is a pretty expensive fighter. But that's not really all that significant compared to the 'value' of a pilot. I mean, even assuming the value of human life is neglected, there's still a significant amount of training and 'lead times' to getting a pilot into service.
And of course, bear in mind what it shows up if they type your name into google.
No no, clearly it's an ironic commentary on the prevailing social culture.
"It's like trying to be a Microsoft network administrator with a staff that downloads viruses and porn to their computers daily and expect you to fix it." What, you mean it's not supposed to be this way?
There's a lot of parents who aren't prepared to take responsibilty for their children, which leads to what is essentially feral behaviour. At which point, there's really not a lot of options open to the teachers, short of expulsion or legal action.
We're actively building a 'split culture' where we have a 'middle class' who are working hard and not having many children, and a subclass who don't care, and are breeding because more kids = more benefits. Their children, whilst there are exceptions, don't have the kind of start in life that's really needed to actually achieve much.
The answer? Well, lets start with holding parents responsible for children's behaviour whilst they're under the age of majority. Lets also add in some kind of parenting test. You can't drive a car without a license, and that's far less complicated than bringing up a child. And hey, if you run someone over and mess their life up, then there's consequences to be faced.
I'm fairly sure 'bullying' is also covered already too. But that doesn't stop it happening, or even make action particularly likely.
You could use a citrix delivered application, but I suppose that would't get you all that much. I suppose that's a reasonable comparison. Citrix + MS Office, vs. Google Apps. There's a lot of people who do the former, so I can see why there'd be a lot of people who'd opt for the latter.
Are there any plans to integrate certain EVE services with out of game? From my point of view, it would be vastly preferable to have POP access to my EVEMail, so I can use a 'useful' mail client (sorry, the in game one's not all that great, and positively horrible when you're faced with 50 evemails a day) and IRC Access to public in game channels. Of course, I'd also like SAP support for my corp management, but that might be a little harder to accomplish. Although I daresay you _might_ be able to persuade SAP to do it as a publicity stunt. Think of all the PR as all the EVE gamers get used to SAP and use that to promote it in their workplace.
Not all games suit all players. I like EVE for a lot of reasons, but I also accept that the reasons I like it, could as easily be the reasons that others dislike it.
Recently, there's been a lot of fighting between LV and GoonSwarm in Tenerifis. How do you feel about how the whole campaign, and the reflections it's cast on large scale warfare in EVE?