I like them, too. When other people are wearing them. It allows me to more easily indulge in the fantasy of choking the living shit out of them - when they are being assholes, which is often - if they have a convenient bit of attire to focus my imagination on;)
(It may or may not be statistically relevant that of the people I have met in life who wear ties - or finery of that sort - on a daily basis, a much higher proportion have been assholes who deserve to be throttled than not. I would suspect that this is mainly due to my own personal bias if I had not encountered many other people who think in similar ways...;) )
Most (well, many) adults can express themselves quite effectively with their words, and don't need costumes.
At the most basic level of definition, uniforms are essentially costumes: unique garments worn for a particular social occasion.
That said, personally I have no problem with wearing a branded shirt or other attire, as long as the company that wishes me to do so both provides them and provides for maintenance for said attire. If you want me to wear this to promote the company, fine, glad to, but *you* pay for it*. Passing the cost on to an employee just indicates to me that the company isn't doing it for promotional purposes (think advertising) but because some higher-up thinks it's a swell idea because everyone else does it. That defeats the purpose.
Hmm. Perhaps the brain matures somewhere in that time - I still have my doubts about that - but "mental maturity"? I know people my age who still haven't matured mentally...;)
In case anyone wonders when it was I last made love, it was about half an hour ago, and the above was posted mostly from her comments about the silly hypocrisy of society's, particularly religious society's, ideas about kids looking at naked bodies, whether directly or thru pictures. As she says "we aren't test tube babies, let's drop the stupid bullshit and get on with the business of making kids who think for themselves." She is much more eloquent than I.
Middle age does sometimes confer some wisdom. Not all the time, but sometimes. The hard part is finding a partner who shares it; but if you do, it makes something greater than the sum of the two parts...
Most human beings reach sexual maturity - that is, the age where their hormones are in full swing - somewhere between the ages of 8 and 14 as measured by earth's orbit around the sun.
At that point they are capable of producing offspring. At that point, their bodies have entered into the physical stages where producing offspring is a *physical imperative* - ie, the hormones that produce the desire to mate are in full swing.
Now this seems to have worked for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years. After all, we are still around as a species. This is all very well established scientific biological, and realistic, fact.
So... this whole concept of offspring not being able to view other members of their species sans clothing, or in sexual congress, or to engage in said sexual congress themselves, surely must be a societal influence. Am I correct so far?
If so, then if one takes the view of many of those who feel that those members of society younger than a certain age (it differs in various societies, but let's take 18 orbits of the earth about it's star as the number here, because it's what's being bandied about) aren't "ready" to procreate, aren't "ready" to raise those offspring to be productive members of said society, where does the fault lie? Does it lie with the offspring having offspring, or a failure of the society to teach those humans how to raise their own offspring before and during the time when they become physically capable, indeed even when their bodies demand, that they produce offspring?
Put more simply, maybe instead of telling kids they can't have sex, maybe we as a society should be teaching them *before* puberty what it all means, that they will experience it, and when they do, to guide them thru the process, rather than telling them "Sorry, no, you can't do that. Because we say so."
Now, wait a minute. One of the driving beliefs amongst many of those in many societies which restrict the ages at which young human beings can procreate is a belief in a supernatural deity who, in the words of their own creed, once said "be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the earth". Yet the same holders of that belief also tend to be in the forefront of those who tell young human beings that they cannot procreate, until they have reached some arbitrarily decided "age of reason"; which with some of them seems to be any age younger than they are, regardless of the age they have reached.
Not only that, but many members of that society seem to have reached the conclusion that viewing an unclothed member of their own species seems to fall within some concept called "evil" - which is apparently bad - and which makes one wonder how those members of the species seem to reproduce themselves in such great numbers. Perhaps they do it in the dark....
Does anyone else ever wonder whether or not human society is becoming more and more irrational? Nevermind, redundant question;)
The Politically Correct teach us to be "differently abled".
Dead on the nail.
The problem isn't the people, the problem is society's expectations.
I've watched this change over more than twenty years. I'm no expert in any social or psychological field, but what I've seen is society "evolving" (it's the only word I think applies) to categorize people who can't keep up with the changes as being "disabled" in some way - there are many definitions.
Historically this is a common view - you don't fit in, you are therefore crippled in some way.
More and more, I think it's society that is becoming crippled - by putting people in pigeonholes, by labeling them, by putting an onus on them for their fellows.
Or, to be more impolitically incorrect (yet using their terminology), it's the people in power demanding that the rest of us follow their particular paradigm.
The blinders are on, the sheep... only some of them, look up.
Even a lot of slashdot readers seem to be following this road, judging from the moderations I see.
Independent thinking has no place, here, so many say.
We are not sheep. Even the most jaded control freaks in society nowadays espouse "independent thinking" - they don't know of what they speak, but they still spout it.
Maybe I'm not the most eloquent of posters, but what I see is classic historical blinders - sheep, following along with the herd, because that's what makes them safe, because some other person told them it was the best thing to do, because others have said the same thing before, and that makes one somehow immune to criticism. Or because it gets them mod points, or kudos from other members of society.
That's pretty pathetic.
I'm done. I can't speak for anyone else, but I've done my best to live outside all the bullshit for more than two decades, lived frugal and inside my means and listen to wisdom when it comes, and I've come to the conclusion that it is no longer worth trying to talk about that "ephemeral" thing some of us define as thinking for ourselves. It doesn't make a damned bit of difference if one does.
In the next few years we are going to see ignorance and idiocy and greed rear it's ugly head on a scale the world has never seen before - the economy of the richest nation ever, blowing itself into oblivion, selling each other vacuous, value-less commodities. The richest, most heavily armed nation on this planet, ever, wrecking itself over greedy bullshit.
The cost of all this is going to be higher than anyone can imagine.
I suspect that many of our ancestors will curse these generations for our misuse of resources and our willingness to let con artists run our economy.
Human beings are, for the most part, just plain greedy, stupid and ignorant, and seem determined to spread those qualities as far as we can. The whole point the founders of this country had in mind was to forestall that. Unfortunately they couldn't foresee the future.
We should be mining asteroids by now, fer chrissakes. It's the logical progression of our technology, to provide more resources for a hugely growing population.
The most I can hope for is that I am completely wrong. "If I live to see sixty years old..."
Fuck slashdot karma, it's not worth anything. If what I say reaches just one damned person out there, that's of infinite worth...
Screensavers shouldn't need direct file access to anything more than their binary files and libraries (read only!), their data files in/home/user, and the X window screensaver system via system calls. I'm not a heavy duty programmer, but I fail to see why screensavers can't be effectively sandboxed, at least in linux.
Take any X number of people in a random sample, show them a visual scene, or play an audio sequence for them, printed word, whatever, and the amount of data they actually "consume" (ie, actively or passively notice and/or act upon) will vary widely between the subjects.
As just one example of this, look at automobiles and drivers and the witnesses to accidents.
Information is useless if it isn't actually noticed by the processes in the brain, and I doubt there's any way to find out just how much is actually utilized even as an average. It's simply too complicated.
So while one can say, as you do, that representation of information has a basic fundamental metric, the actual USE of such information varies so widely as not be something we can estimate. The use of information is what is being discussed here, not information itself (and even there one can go lots further - one could say that an article in a piece of newsprint contains information that can be represented on the atomic, subatomic or quantum levels in addition to what's directly usable by the human brain, although for the most part that's also meaningless when it comes general understanding of it - and physicists and chemists may argue that point:)
Not to mention that the word "consumption" hardly applies to information in most of it's forms, except perhaps material items such as newsprint and books. To "consume" means to use up, ie, we consume food. Nobody in their right mind says that we consume a radio broadcast, or a tv show, or a piece of music. Infinitely replicable data such as TV broadcasts, radio, internet, etc, cannot be considered to be limited in supply (unless you listen to the RIAA).
So yeah, basically, this article is meaningless bullshit meant to sell useless, bogus information to ignorant consumers. Hah:)
Personally, I find the whole concept of statistics as applied to human behavior and mental states a silly endeavor. It makes some of those people a lot of money, tho.
When one considers the fact that nearly all if not all american currency has some traces of drugs on it, then anyone who has a dollar bill in his or her pocket can be busted, if the authority on the spot needs an excuse.
We have the sheer arrogant gall to call ourselves a "civilized" society. Oh, please; we are at the least generations away from being so. Just because we think we're better than most of what has come before us does not make us the end to all. Many societies in history have thought the same way.
Humanity in general has a long goddamned ways to go before it gets past the petulant teenager stage. Assuming we're that far, I'm not so sure.
I hate to say it, but it seems to me - having lived before and after - that the greatest advance in information dissemination in human history has made us collectively stupider. But then it wasn't the technology that did so, it was the exposure of common idiocy.
Let's see how long the United States of America survives it. Not long, in my estimation. But time, and history, move on.
Have you read Skunkworks (http://www.amazon.com/Skunk-Works-Personal-Memoir-Lockheed/dp/0316743003)?
If not, I'd highly recommend it. The book points out just how badly screwed up the military procurement process for new technology can get. It's a bit dated now - a decade or so, really - but still very much worth reading.
I consider this one of the most informative books I've ever read in my life, not just because of the military tech aspect, but because of the perspective on effective management of bringing an idea from the first notes to working prototypes. It should certainly be required reading for anyone in the engineering fields.
To test the hardware in a potentially hostile environment before using it in a *really* hostile environment.
Political considerations aside, these R&D programs aren't cheap. Best to know how it performs in every situation before it's used in one that's mission critical.
New Constitution? They'd debate it for four or five presidential administrations and then finally pass a two hundred thousand page incomprehensible document with more riders than a fleet of 747s, and not release it to the public until it was "finished", aka, everyone had polished their deals. The media would eat it up, there'd be blogs and commentary on every side for decades, and Nothing Would Ever Change.
Run them out of town? We ought to shoot the whole lot of them, disbar their families for four or five generations from holding public office - let's see how long they keep their riches - and immediate sycophants from ever taking part in politics, imprison all their lobbyists, and fine all their corporate "advisors" sufficient to prevent them from ever holding a job higher than burger cooker. Hunter Thompson was right, most of these people aren't competent to hold any job higher than that. But that will never happen. The vast majority of the American Public can no longer see what's happening impartially.
Cynical, me? Others can use flowery language if they wish, but I won't. My point of view is hardly an original one.
Slashdot still badly needs a sarcasm mod option. I'd suggest not giving it a + or -, just tag it sarcasm. That way they avoid all the (potentially legally actionable) negative commentary/sarcasm
My experiences. I used to think that unions were great - until I lived thru the Hormel strike in Austin MN in 1986.
Both sides were so fucked up it was unbelievable. I had friends and family on both sides. I watched as people who I thought of as good, rational and well meaning were swallowed by the rhetoric coming from the people who controlled their incomes. It was not pretty. I "opted out" after someone I thought I knew burned someone else's car for "breaking the line" and another friend on the other side burned his house down. Idiots. No amount of money is worth that. They were best friends before it, I used to drink with them in one of the local bars.
That's a large part of my non-partisan outlook. Unions can be good, but they can also - especially local chapters - be controlled by people who are just as venal, greedy and controlling as the people who run the companies that they are opposing.
Anyone who thinks that any organized group of people, no matter how pure it's motives, can't be corrupted by human greed and venality on a local or larger scale is either too young to have had any real experience with the world, or a fool living in a fantasy reality. Human history is FULL of experiences like this. Pretty sad, ain't it?
To paraphrase George Carlin "I was a believer until I reached the age of reason."
First off, what sort of pressure is she under to conform to the demands of her department? What sort of pressure is she under from congress, etc?
If she made that decision because she had a personal agenda, sure, he should fire her ass, I agree. Or, if the situation demands, have a "severe talk" with her?
Who should he nominate in her place? Who will be agreed upon by the court of "public" (read: congressional) opinion? How long will that take? Another two or three years of hearings?
"is not a bureaucrat - she's a political appointee."
You are either a troll or an idiot.
Just to make it clear in this discussion right now, in over twenty years of being a voting citizen, I have never been a member of any party nor voted that way neither do I debate that way? K?
But one thing that has become clear to me over the decades, is that putting responsibility on any one president for the idiocy in his administration appointees is lunacy.
For you republicans, in that respect, I put forth the Reagan administration. And, that George Bush Sr actually had some damned sense in his appointees, in my opinion.
For the Democracts, Clinton.
I don't do the fractured mentality arguments. Done with those, years ago. The only side I care about is the human race.
We are the richest goddamn country in the world - and we get a lot of our wealth from elsewhere (of course we've leeched a lot of it to elsewhere lately in our quest to balance our insanely overdrawn budget and in the name of corporate "efficiency") - but we still have resources nobody else has. For a little while. About five or ten years, then we're done.
We are spending those resources like a petulant teenager taking payday loans during out of work times, hoping that our ship will come in. It won't.
As a social entity, we are past contempt. We do great things, but they pale besides what we could do - not just for our benefit, but as an example to the people struggling for freedom. Mostly we dictate and push our means of living on everyone else. I find that reprehensible.
This is not the country I swore an oath to, twenty four years ago.
It's not even a pale shade. But even then, I knew what was coming. Back then, I'd read my history, I knew the signs. So I'm not shocked - maybe a bit surprised that it took this long for things to fall apart, given the extravagances of the Reagan era.
As a financial entity, we are, in geek rhet, Owned. Loaned out, by people who have no care to anyone but themselves.
Farewell to the greatest experiment in democracy. Hopefully something better will take it's place. Maybe the belief that intelligence is the most precious thing?
Pardon my bitterness. I've watched the ideals I grew up with being reduced to items on a spreadsheet over three decades. I can hardly be counted on to not care.
I was saying that no president can ultimately be held accountable for the actions of all the people below him, no more than any corporate CEO can be, or any parent can be.
Some chains of accountability are a bit shorter - the parent/child chain is much shorter, being only one level of "don't do that, dammit" and without many of the potential points of broken communication that bureaucracy has.
And I'm being nice, there. But the first sentence of your second paragraph says in one sentence just what I was saying in many.
Anyone who thinks that accountability starts and ends at the "CEO" is a damned fool. "I was only following orders" has it's limits at the people who were doing things they know were wrong but got them better stock options and that third vacation house and swiss bank accounts.
Bitter? Hell, yeah. I've watched the country I love get screwed by short talking and quick sales over three decades.
Then what is it, and how do we know we that information isn't transmitted?
I'm not trolling, it's a sincere question driven by years of curiosity. If quantum entanglement is real - and it's been demonstrated that it is real, to the best of our understanding - then there has to be *some* information transmitted - even if it's a simple 0/1 bit - either the particle on one end changed state, or it didn't. One can't say that no info was transmitted at all, from our view of the results.
We may not be able to transmit *data* as we understand it - sequences of bits - but there still has to be information transmitted, the state of the other particle is obviously communicated FTL by some means or another. That counts as information - maybe not to us, but certainly to the two particles involved. How else does the other particle know which state to be in when it's observed?
I suspect that we simply don't understand what is going on, not yet. As you no doubt know well that has always been the one simple driving factor in our quest to figure out how the universe works:) - so stating that "something" causes it to happen is kind of premature...
(No, I'm not a professional physicist, but I have learned enough about the field to understand just how woefully ignorant we really are about the underlying structure of the universe; this is illustrated by the current debates and how much the field has changed since I majored in physics a couple decades ago. It is by far the most fascinating field of science there is, because it has the most unanswered questions - possibly only matched by the study of consciousness.) For me, concepts are easy - mathematics is where I met my doom, somewhere in advanced linear equations;)
Isn't there an old maxim somewhere to the effect that no entity living within a system can have a complete understanding of the system they live within, without moving outside it? It may be merely human philosophy, but it certainly seems to apply to humans with mental illnesses - my ex-girlfriend worked in that field and we had endless discussions;)
So how does that apply to the physics structures we're talking about? We are not separate from the processes within which we live and think.
I'd like to point out that all the great discoveries we've had - all the "intuitions" about the way the world works - have all started as what one could term as a simple bit flip - a eureka moment, a change in perspective - in one person's mind (sometimes somewhat simultaneously in more than one mind, working from the same data and theories); and that we don't understand how or why that happens, either.
Isn't reality wonderful? I have a gut feeling that thousands of years from now we'll still be struggling to answer a lot of deep questions whose existence we're not even aware of yet... and that there is no end to those questions, no ultimate knowledge.
Makes one wish one could live forever, just to keep learning. What else could there be that is so much fun?
But I digress. What's that "something" you speak of? If you don't know what it is, or how it operates, you can hardly speak to it's properties, yes?
So what you are saying is that one person - even the president - should be able to not only keep track of everything all his subordinates are doing, but neutralize it immediately? (Or even have the power to do so without creating more "scandal" ala dissension within his admin? which his opponents would seize on to create more of the same headlines...)
Apparently you have no understanding whatsoever just how large and entrenched the federal bureaucracy is.
I'm not defending Obama, I'm just saying that there is no way in hell anybody, no matter who they are or how much power they hold, can keep track of or alter all the stupid shit done by some of the hundreds of thousands of people who work in the system itself.
Your sig is somewhat applicable, by the way: put yourself in the position of someone in overall control of a national entity that has that technology, and see if you can find ways to prevent all the people who have access to it from misusing it. You can't.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I like ties.
I like them, too. When other people are wearing them. It allows me to more easily indulge in the fantasy of choking the living shit out of them - when they are being assholes, which is often - if they have a convenient bit of attire to focus my imagination on ;)
(It may or may not be statistically relevant that of the people I have met in life who wear ties - or finery of that sort - on a daily basis, a much higher proportion have been assholes who deserve to be throttled than not. I would suspect that this is mainly due to my own personal bias if I had not encountered many other people who think in similar ways... ;) )
SB
Most (well, many) adults can express themselves quite effectively with their words, and don't need costumes.
At the most basic level of definition, uniforms are essentially costumes: unique garments worn for a particular social occasion.
That said, personally I have no problem with wearing a branded shirt or other attire, as long as the company that wishes me to do so both provides them and provides for maintenance for said attire. If you want me to wear this to promote the company, fine, glad to, but *you* pay for it*. Passing the cost on to an employee just indicates to me that the company isn't doing it for promotional purposes (think advertising) but because some higher-up thinks it's a swell idea because everyone else does it. That defeats the purpose.
* (Most every place I've ever worked has done so)
SB
Well said.
SB
Hmm. Perhaps the brain matures somewhere in that time - I still have my doubts about that - but "mental maturity"? I know people my age who still haven't matured mentally... ;)
SB
Only when there aren't others who agree with you ;)
SB
In case anyone wonders when it was I last made love, it was about half an hour ago, and the above was posted mostly from her comments about the silly hypocrisy of society's, particularly religious society's, ideas about kids looking at naked bodies, whether directly or thru pictures. As she says "we aren't test tube babies, let's drop the stupid bullshit and get on with the business of making kids who think for themselves." She is much more eloquent than I.
Middle age does sometimes confer some wisdom. Not all the time, but sometimes. The hard part is finding a partner who shares it; but if you do, it makes something greater than the sum of the two parts...
SB
When does this shit stop?
Most human beings reach sexual maturity - that is, the age where their hormones are in full swing - somewhere between the ages of 8 and 14 as measured by earth's orbit around the sun.
At that point they are capable of producing offspring. At that point, their bodies have entered into the physical stages where producing offspring is a *physical imperative* - ie, the hormones that produce the desire to mate are in full swing.
Now this seems to have worked for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years. After all, we are still around as a species. This is all very well established scientific biological, and realistic, fact.
So... this whole concept of offspring not being able to view other members of their species sans clothing, or in sexual congress, or to engage in said sexual congress themselves, surely must be a societal influence. Am I correct so far?
If so, then if one takes the view of many of those who feel that those members of society younger than a certain age (it differs in various societies, but let's take 18 orbits of the earth about it's star as the number here, because it's what's being bandied about) aren't "ready" to procreate, aren't "ready" to raise those offspring to be productive members of said society, where does the fault lie? Does it lie with the offspring having offspring, or a failure of the society to teach those humans how to raise their own offspring before and during the time when they become physically capable, indeed even when their bodies demand, that they produce offspring?
Put more simply, maybe instead of telling kids they can't have sex, maybe we as a society should be teaching them *before* puberty what it all means, that they will experience it, and when they do, to guide them thru the process, rather than telling them "Sorry, no, you can't do that. Because we say so."
Now, wait a minute. One of the driving beliefs amongst many of those in many societies which restrict the ages at which young human beings can procreate is a belief in a supernatural deity who, in the words of their own creed, once said "be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the earth". Yet the same holders of that belief also tend to be in the forefront of those who tell young human beings that they cannot procreate, until they have reached some arbitrarily decided "age of reason"; which with some of them seems to be any age younger than they are, regardless of the age they have reached.
Not only that, but many members of that society seem to have reached the conclusion that viewing an unclothed member of their own species seems to fall within some concept called "evil" - which is apparently bad - and which makes one wonder how those members of the species seem to reproduce themselves in such great numbers. Perhaps they do it in the dark. ...
Does anyone else ever wonder whether or not human society is becoming more and more irrational? Nevermind, redundant question ;)
SB
They do now.
SB
The Politically Correct teach us to be "differently abled".
Dead on the nail.
The problem isn't the people, the problem is society's expectations.
I've watched this change over more than twenty years. I'm no expert in any social or psychological field, but what I've seen is society "evolving" (it's the only word I think applies) to categorize people who can't keep up with the changes as being "disabled" in some way - there are many definitions.
Historically this is a common view - you don't fit in, you are therefore crippled in some way.
More and more, I think it's society that is becoming crippled - by putting people in pigeonholes, by labeling them, by putting an onus on them for their fellows.
Or, to be more impolitically incorrect (yet using their terminology), it's the people in power demanding that the rest of us follow their particular paradigm.
The blinders are on, the sheep... only some of them, look up.
Even a lot of slashdot readers seem to be following this road, judging from the moderations I see.
Independent thinking has no place, here, so many say.
We are not sheep. Even the most jaded control freaks in society nowadays espouse "independent thinking" - they don't know of what they speak, but they still spout it.
Maybe I'm not the most eloquent of posters, but what I see is classic historical blinders - sheep, following along with the herd, because that's what makes them safe, because some other person told them it was the best thing to do, because others have said the same thing before, and that makes one somehow immune to criticism. Or because it gets them mod points, or kudos from other members of society.
That's pretty pathetic.
I'm done. I can't speak for anyone else, but I've done my best to live outside all the bullshit for more than two decades, lived frugal and inside my means and listen to wisdom when it comes, and I've come to the conclusion that it is no longer worth trying to talk about that "ephemeral" thing some of us define as thinking for ourselves. It doesn't make a damned bit of difference if one does.
In the next few years we are going to see ignorance and idiocy and greed rear it's ugly head on a scale the world has never seen before - the economy of the richest nation ever, blowing itself into oblivion, selling each other vacuous, value-less commodities. The richest, most heavily armed nation on this planet, ever, wrecking itself over greedy bullshit.
The cost of all this is going to be higher than anyone can imagine.
I suspect that many of our ancestors will curse these generations for our misuse of resources and our willingness to let con artists run our economy.
Human beings are, for the most part, just plain greedy, stupid and ignorant, and seem determined to spread those qualities as far as we can. The whole point the founders of this country had in mind was to forestall that. Unfortunately they couldn't foresee the future.
We should be mining asteroids by now, fer chrissakes. It's the logical progression of our technology, to provide more resources for a hugely growing population.
The most I can hope for is that I am completely wrong. "If I live to see sixty years old..."
Fuck slashdot karma, it's not worth anything. If what I say reaches just one damned person out there, that's of infinite worth...
SB
Isn't it a lot easier to detect and remove userspace malware than rootkit style malware?
SB
Screensavers shouldn't need direct file access to anything more than their binary files and libraries (read only!), their data files in /home/user, and the X window screensaver system via system calls. I'm not a heavy duty programmer, but I fail to see why screensavers can't be effectively sandboxed, at least in linux.
Anyone care to enlighten me?
SB
Take any X number of people in a random sample, show them a visual scene, or play an audio sequence for them, printed word, whatever, and the amount of data they actually "consume" (ie, actively or passively notice and/or act upon) will vary widely between the subjects.
As just one example of this, look at automobiles and drivers and the witnesses to accidents.
Information is useless if it isn't actually noticed by the processes in the brain, and I doubt there's any way to find out just how much is actually utilized even as an average. It's simply too complicated.
So while one can say, as you do, that representation of information has a basic fundamental metric, the actual USE of such information varies so widely as not be something we can estimate. The use of information is what is being discussed here, not information itself (and even there one can go lots further - one could say that an article in a piece of newsprint contains information that can be represented on the atomic, subatomic or quantum levels in addition to what's directly usable by the human brain, although for the most part that's also meaningless when it comes general understanding of it - and physicists and chemists may argue that point :)
Not to mention that the word "consumption" hardly applies to information in most of it's forms, except perhaps material items such as newsprint and books. To "consume" means to use up, ie, we consume food. Nobody in their right mind says that we consume a radio broadcast, or a tv show, or a piece of music. Infinitely replicable data such as TV broadcasts, radio, internet, etc, cannot be considered to be limited in supply (unless you listen to the RIAA).
So yeah, basically, this article is meaningless bullshit meant to sell useless, bogus information to ignorant consumers. Hah :)
Personally, I find the whole concept of statistics as applied to human behavior and mental states a silly endeavor. It makes some of those people a lot of money, tho.
SB
"All this has happened before, and will happen again."
SB
When one considers the fact that nearly all if not all american currency has some traces of drugs on it, then anyone who has a dollar bill in his or her pocket can be busted, if the authority on the spot needs an excuse.
We have the sheer arrogant gall to call ourselves a "civilized" society. Oh, please; we are at the least generations away from being so. Just because we think we're better than most of what has come before us does not make us the end to all. Many societies in history have thought the same way.
Humanity in general has a long goddamned ways to go before it gets past the petulant teenager stage. Assuming we're that far, I'm not so sure.
I hate to say it, but it seems to me - having lived before and after - that the greatest advance in information dissemination in human history has made us collectively stupider. But then it wasn't the technology that did so, it was the exposure of common idiocy.
Let's see how long the United States of America survives it. Not long, in my estimation. But time, and history, move on.
SB
Pardon me, it was from Apollo 13.
Here's the linkie for anyone who finds that nostalgic:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhoOuxN8cyw
SB
"Savage Baggage Masters" commercial from The Right Stuff would be lawyer fodder, nowadays.
SB
Have you read Skunkworks (http://www.amazon.com/Skunk-Works-Personal-Memoir-Lockheed/dp/0316743003)?
If not, I'd highly recommend it. The book points out just how badly screwed up the military procurement process for new technology can get. It's a bit dated now - a decade or so, really - but still very much worth reading.
I consider this one of the most informative books I've ever read in my life, not just because of the military tech aspect, but because of the perspective on effective management of bringing an idea from the first notes to working prototypes. It should certainly be required reading for anyone in the engineering fields.
SB
To test the hardware in a potentially hostile environment before using it in a *really* hostile environment.
Political considerations aside, these R&D programs aren't cheap. Best to know how it performs in every situation before it's used in one that's mission critical.
SB
New Constitution? They'd debate it for four or five presidential administrations and then finally pass a two hundred thousand page incomprehensible document with more riders than a fleet of 747s, and not release it to the public until it was "finished", aka, everyone had polished their deals. The media would eat it up, there'd be blogs and commentary on every side for decades, and Nothing Would Ever Change.
Run them out of town? We ought to shoot the whole lot of them, disbar their families for four or five generations from holding public office - let's see how long they keep their riches - and immediate sycophants from ever taking part in politics, imprison all their lobbyists, and fine all their corporate "advisors" sufficient to prevent them from ever holding a job higher than burger cooker. Hunter Thompson was right, most of these people aren't competent to hold any job higher than that. But that will never happen. The vast majority of the American Public can no longer see what's happening impartially.
Cynical, me? Others can use flowery language if they wish, but I won't. My point of view is hardly an original one.
Slashdot still badly needs a sarcasm mod option. I'd suggest not giving it a + or -, just tag it sarcasm. That way they avoid all the (potentially legally actionable) negative commentary /sarcasm
SB
My experiences. I used to think that unions were great - until I lived thru the Hormel strike in Austin MN in 1986.
Both sides were so fucked up it was unbelievable. I had friends and family on both sides. I watched as people who I thought of as good, rational and well meaning were swallowed by the rhetoric coming from the people who controlled their incomes. It was not pretty. I "opted out" after someone I thought I knew burned someone else's car for "breaking the line" and another friend on the other side burned his house down. Idiots. No amount of money is worth that. They were best friends before it, I used to drink with them in one of the local bars.
That's a large part of my non-partisan outlook. Unions can be good, but they can also - especially local chapters - be controlled by people who are just as venal, greedy and controlling as the people who run the companies that they are opposing.
Anyone who thinks that any organized group of people, no matter how pure it's motives, can't be corrupted by human greed and venality on a local or larger scale is either too young to have had any real experience with the world, or a fool living in a fantasy reality. Human history is FULL of experiences like this. Pretty sad, ain't it?
To paraphrase George Carlin "I was a believer until I reached the age of reason."
SB
First off, what sort of pressure is she under to conform to the demands of her department? What sort of pressure is she under from congress, etc?
If she made that decision because she had a personal agenda, sure, he should fire her ass, I agree. Or, if the situation demands, have a "severe talk" with her?
Who should he nominate in her place? Who will be agreed upon by the court of "public" (read: congressional) opinion? How long will that take? Another two or three years of hearings?
"is not a bureaucrat - she's a political appointee."
You are either a troll or an idiot.
Just to make it clear in this discussion right now, in over twenty years of being a voting citizen, I have never been a member of any party nor voted that way neither do I debate that way? K?
But one thing that has become clear to me over the decades, is that putting responsibility on any one president for the idiocy in his administration appointees is lunacy.
For you republicans, in that respect, I put forth the Reagan administration. And, that George Bush Sr actually had some damned sense in his appointees, in my opinion.
For the Democracts, Clinton.
I don't do the fractured mentality arguments. Done with those, years ago. The only side I care about is the human race.
We are the richest goddamn country in the world - and we get a lot of our wealth from elsewhere (of course we've leeched a lot of it to elsewhere lately in our quest to balance our insanely overdrawn budget and in the name of corporate "efficiency") - but we still have resources nobody else has. For a little while. About five or ten years, then we're done.
We are spending those resources like a petulant teenager taking payday loans during out of work times, hoping that our ship will come in. It won't.
As a social entity, we are past contempt. We do great things, but they pale besides what we could do - not just for our benefit, but as an example to the people struggling for freedom. Mostly we dictate and push our means of living on everyone else. I find that reprehensible.
This is not the country I swore an oath to, twenty four years ago.
It's not even a pale shade. But even then, I knew what was coming. Back then, I'd read my history, I knew the signs. So I'm not shocked - maybe a bit surprised that it took this long for things to fall apart, given the extravagances of the Reagan era.
As a financial entity, we are, in geek rhet, Owned. Loaned out, by people who have no care to anyone but themselves.
Farewell to the greatest experiment in democracy. Hopefully something better will take it's place. Maybe the belief that intelligence is the most precious thing?
Pardon my bitterness. I've watched the ideals I grew up with being reduced to items on a spreadsheet over three decades. I can hardly be counted on to not care.
SB
Oh, I agree. Truman was the last of the ones who didn't play politics any more than he had to. He just did what the hell he thought necessary.
But I wasn't talking about fifty years ago, I was talking about now. If you want an argument, then get current, asshole ;)
SB
I wasn't talking about Bush, specifically.
I was saying that no president can ultimately be held accountable for the actions of all the people below him, no more than any corporate CEO can be, or any parent can be.
Some chains of accountability are a bit shorter - the parent/child chain is much shorter, being only one level of "don't do that, dammit" and without many of the potential points of broken communication that bureaucracy has.
And I'm being nice, there. But the first sentence of your second paragraph says in one sentence just what I was saying in many.
Anyone who thinks that accountability starts and ends at the "CEO" is a damned fool. "I was only following orders" has it's limits at the people who were doing things they know were wrong but got them better stock options and that third vacation house and swiss bank accounts.
Bitter? Hell, yeah. I've watched the country I love get screwed by short talking and quick sales over three decades.
You?
SB
Then what is it, and how do we know we that information isn't transmitted?
I'm not trolling, it's a sincere question driven by years of curiosity. If quantum entanglement is real - and it's been demonstrated that it is real, to the best of our understanding - then there has to be *some* information transmitted - even if it's a simple 0/1 bit - either the particle on one end changed state, or it didn't. One can't say that no info was transmitted at all, from our view of the results.
We may not be able to transmit *data* as we understand it - sequences of bits - but there still has to be information transmitted, the state of the other particle is obviously communicated FTL by some means or another. That counts as information - maybe not to us, but certainly to the two particles involved. How else does the other particle know which state to be in when it's observed?
I suspect that we simply don't understand what is going on, not yet. As you no doubt know well that has always been the one simple driving factor in our quest to figure out how the universe works :) - so stating that "something" causes it to happen is kind of premature...
(No, I'm not a professional physicist, but I have learned enough about the field to understand just how woefully ignorant we really are about the underlying structure of the universe; this is illustrated by the current debates and how much the field has changed since I majored in physics a couple decades ago. It is by far the most fascinating field of science there is, because it has the most unanswered questions - possibly only matched by the study of consciousness.) For me, concepts are easy - mathematics is where I met my doom, somewhere in advanced linear equations ;)
Isn't there an old maxim somewhere to the effect that no entity living within a system can have a complete understanding of the system they live within, without moving outside it? It may be merely human philosophy, but it certainly seems to apply to humans with mental illnesses - my ex-girlfriend worked in that field and we had endless discussions ;)
So how does that apply to the physics structures we're talking about? We are not separate from the processes within which we live and think.
I'd like to point out that all the great discoveries we've had - all the "intuitions" about the way the world works - have all started as what one could term as a simple bit flip - a eureka moment, a change in perspective - in one person's mind (sometimes somewhat simultaneously in more than one mind, working from the same data and theories); and that we don't understand how or why that happens, either.
Isn't reality wonderful? I have a gut feeling that thousands of years from now we'll still be struggling to answer a lot of deep questions whose existence we're not even aware of yet ... and that there is no end to those questions, no ultimate knowledge.
Makes one wish one could live forever, just to keep learning. What else could there be that is so much fun?
But I digress. What's that "something" you speak of? If you don't know what it is, or how it operates, you can hardly speak to it's properties, yes?
SB
So what you are saying is that one person - even the president - should be able to not only keep track of everything all his subordinates are doing, but neutralize it immediately? (Or even have the power to do so without creating more "scandal" ala dissension within his admin? which his opponents would seize on to create more of the same headlines...)
Apparently you have no understanding whatsoever just how large and entrenched the federal bureaucracy is.
I'm not defending Obama, I'm just saying that there is no way in hell anybody, no matter who they are or how much power they hold, can keep track of or alter all the stupid shit done by some of the hundreds of thousands of people who work in the system itself.
Your sig is somewhat applicable, by the way: put yourself in the position of someone in overall control of a national entity that has that technology, and see if you can find ways to prevent all the people who have access to it from misusing it. You can't.
SB