Thanks for the correction. I also spent some time chatting with some Buddhist monks in my younger years, and I definitely appreciate that viewpoint, but somehow missed the no-soul thing. My point was simply that all religious systems have their irrational aspects of them, and that's why you have to judge religious groups more by what they do than what they say they believe in.
Really? Let me present some popular religious beliefs, you tell me which is most rational: 1. an alien overlord abused a bunch of other aliens, and the victim's souls affect us today 2. an omnipotent omniscient benevolent invisible man 3. reincarnation of all people's souls, forever 4. reincarnation of all people's souls, unless they do some sort of meditation thing that allows them to escape the cycle into a state of pure bliss 5. sacrificing a chicken will make your sister's baby healthier 6. a bunch of immortal beings who aren't omnipotent but like to control things with a few well-placed thunderbolts or monsters or bits of advice
Well, how else are you going to convince people that they should be spending huge sums of taxpayer money to help private industry do the computer security work they should have already done at their own expense?
But yes, it cheapens the meaning of the real 9/11 when you use it to scare people into responding to non-lethal threats. Apparently, banks and utilities have already been hit, and nobody outside of those organizations even noticed. That tells you how much of a non-threat it is.
I'm not a Scientologist. I've encountered a few (to the best of my knowledge, fairly low ranking), and they on average seemed no better or worse than most anyone else. And as far as their belief system goes, I'm not sure it's any crazier than any other religious belief system.
A friend of a friend, though, came up with an excellent evaluation rubric to determine how dangerous it was to belong to any organization, regardless of their beliefs. This has been used by law enforcement as well as cult survivor organizations. The tool is the ABCDEF, short for Advanced Bonewits (the inventor's name) Cult Danger Evaluation Framework.
The idea here is that you don't rate the groups beliefs at all. Instead, you rate their behavior. Groups that score low on the ABCDEF are those that are open about what they believe and stand for, have rights and reasonable expectations of members, and make it easy to leave. Which means that if they or their leadership start getting really crazy, normal people can see that and leave.
So a reasonable position might be that Scientology is a belief system like any other, but the Church of Scientology is dangerous.
Importing people who will be automatically put into a process of exporting if they lose their job always seemed more than a bit cruel to me.
The rule that H1B visa holders lose their right to be in the country if they lose their job is one of the attractions of H1B holders for bad employers. Imagine, if you will, an abusive boss or company that's making you put in lots of 80+ hour work weeks for $45K a year (It was supposed to be closer to $75K when you took the job, but for some reason the deal changed after you moved to take the job). Now, you have 2 basic options: You can quit, or you can put up with it.
As a US citizen, if you quit, you might be unemployed for a while, which will suck, but you have a decent chance of finding new work sooner or later and have access to social safety net programs if you need them. As an H1B Visa holder, if you quit, you have to leave the country basically immediately and your best bet is going to work in your home country for $30K a year for a different abusive boss / company. Which means that the US citizen is more likely to quit when abused than an H1B holder is.
And I don't blame the H1B holders for coming to the US to work - they're doing this because it's the best they can do. But I will absolutely be angry at the employers who want to cut costs by making it difficult to quit and then abusing their employees.
4. There is active discrimination against people who have been unemployed for any significant length of time. 5. Age discrimination means that old techies often aren't getting hired.
HR and C-level execs are all chasing after programmers aged 25-30 who aren't junior enough that they'll make rookie mistakes but aren't senior enough that they'll want a fair day's pay for a fair day's work.
I for one would be overjoyed to have on my team a decent 58-year-old programmer who's been unemployed since 2009: He's probably good because he's experienced enough to know all the tricks of the trade, and he's probably cheap because he's starting to get desperate. I'd much rather have him than somebody who's billed as a "rock star" 21-year-old developer.
What about "Mirror, Mirror", where a few members of the main cast are explicitly interacting with their evil counterparts? Or if you want to deal with TNG, what about "Skin of Evil" (killing off Tasha Yar for the fun of it), or "Chain of Command" (torturing Picard for the fun of it)?
If you allow for actions that most people would generally see as "evil", you'd also have to include Deputy Fuhrer Melakon from the Nazi planet episode, Khan Noonien Singh, Lore (on a bad day), the Borg, and quite a few others.
A reasonable candidate: Futurama - Roswell That Ends Well
Now, granted, the context was comedy, but they used time travel not as a deus ex machina but as a setup for events that had occurred in previous and later episodes. Again, except for the causal loop, which they very clearly make intentional.
Seriously, when has "outreach" or "awareness" ever solved anything?
Actually, it may be in the process of at least reducing a serious problem, namely human trafficking: Because of the 'awareness' efforts, lots of states in the US have been passing laws to stop it, and because of the 'outreach' efforts there are groups helping people escape from their post-trafficking slavery.
Your instincts are right, though: Outreach and awareness programs are often about preserving the organization who's doing the outreach and awareness, not about solving the problem.
Point being, there's no way for the Iranians (or some other Evil Empire) to pull off that kind of attack from the safety of a computer console halfway around the world.
I can pretty much guarantee you that this is not about spectrum or improving service. What the bigwigs actually care about when they plan big purchases like this is a larger customer base. Well, that and their personal bonuses.
Just as an example, how many people depend on life support systems that require energy in hospitals?
That's why pretty much all hospitals have generators. They know how to deal with power outages and water issues.
The reason a "cyber Pearl Harbor" isn't imminent
on
The One Sided Cyber War
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
In the real Pearl Harbor, people died. Unless and until the people talking about "cyberwar" demonstrate that they're defending us against the same kind of lethal threats, there isn't a legitimate comparison.
At worst, there may be property damage. But the simple fact is that the threats presented by enemies of the United States today are not even close to being the same level of threat presented by the Germans and Japanese and Russians of the past, where if we screwed up it was quite possible that the United States wouldn't exist anymore.
So why do they continue to invoke this stuff? To scare people into putting their organization on the US DoD gravy train.
But the issue of Poaching or Employees going to a competitor is a problem.
It is only a problem if you haven't made it so that your employees really *want* to work for you. You can do that a lot of ways: high salary, really really nice offices, free lunches for everyone, a 40- or even 36-hour work week, really cool code, etc.
I'm sure it will be as eye-bleedingly high as the fines levied against HSBC for laundering staggering amounts of drug money. Which is to say it will be a mere fraction of the profit from breaking the law. After all, in this case it was only thousands of tech workers losing potential salary, it's not like anyone important (from the point of view of Washington or Wall St) was harmed.
Don't get me wrong: I view this tendency more as a sad fact of life, not a moral evil.
Now, what is in my view a moral evil is that while Africa has all sorts of valuable natural resources, very few of those resources are owned by Africans. The effect of that is significant: In, say, a South African gold mine, for $1000 worth of gold ore, the miners might get $1, his bosses gets $3, the government of South Africa gets $1, and investors in New York and London get $995. Now, getting that $5 into the South African economy improves the economy of South Africa, but it also sucks out $995 worth of natural resources that can't be replaced. It's one of the remnants of European colonialism that is not likely to go away anytime soon.
No it doesn't: Mali is 400 miles away from Cameroon, in West Africa. The reason France got involved in Mali was because Mali was a former French colony and sort-of client state, and the Mali government asked for help after one of their major cities was threatened.
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That's why his Emacs wiki never took off: His Lisp syntax was bad!
Thanks for the correction. I also spent some time chatting with some Buddhist monks in my younger years, and I definitely appreciate that viewpoint, but somehow missed the no-soul thing. My point was simply that all religious systems have their irrational aspects of them, and that's why you have to judge religious groups more by what they do than what they say they believe in.
Really? Let me present some popular religious beliefs, you tell me which is most rational:
1. an alien overlord abused a bunch of other aliens, and the victim's souls affect us today
2. an omnipotent omniscient benevolent invisible man
3. reincarnation of all people's souls, forever
4. reincarnation of all people's souls, unless they do some sort of meditation thing that allows them to escape the cycle into a state of pure bliss
5. sacrificing a chicken will make your sister's baby healthier
6. a bunch of immortal beings who aren't omnipotent but like to control things with a few well-placed thunderbolts or monsters or bits of advice
Answer? None of the above!
Well, how else are you going to convince people that they should be spending huge sums of taxpayer money to help private industry do the computer security work they should have already done at their own expense?
But yes, it cheapens the meaning of the real 9/11 when you use it to scare people into responding to non-lethal threats. Apparently, banks and utilities have already been hit, and nobody outside of those organizations even noticed. That tells you how much of a non-threat it is.
I'm not a Scientologist. I've encountered a few (to the best of my knowledge, fairly low ranking), and they on average seemed no better or worse than most anyone else. And as far as their belief system goes, I'm not sure it's any crazier than any other religious belief system.
A friend of a friend, though, came up with an excellent evaluation rubric to determine how dangerous it was to belong to any organization, regardless of their beliefs. This has been used by law enforcement as well as cult survivor organizations. The tool is the ABCDEF, short for Advanced Bonewits (the inventor's name) Cult Danger Evaluation Framework.
The idea here is that you don't rate the groups beliefs at all. Instead, you rate their behavior. Groups that score low on the ABCDEF are those that are open about what they believe and stand for, have rights and reasonable expectations of members, and make it easy to leave. Which means that if they or their leadership start getting really crazy, normal people can see that and leave.
So a reasonable position might be that Scientology is a belief system like any other, but the Church of Scientology is dangerous.
Importing people who will be automatically put into a process of exporting if they lose their job always seemed more than a bit cruel to me.
The rule that H1B visa holders lose their right to be in the country if they lose their job is one of the attractions of H1B holders for bad employers. Imagine, if you will, an abusive boss or company that's making you put in lots of 80+ hour work weeks for $45K a year (It was supposed to be closer to $75K when you took the job, but for some reason the deal changed after you moved to take the job). Now, you have 2 basic options: You can quit, or you can put up with it.
As a US citizen, if you quit, you might be unemployed for a while, which will suck, but you have a decent chance of finding new work sooner or later and have access to social safety net programs if you need them. As an H1B Visa holder, if you quit, you have to leave the country basically immediately and your best bet is going to work in your home country for $30K a year for a different abusive boss / company. Which means that the US citizen is more likely to quit when abused than an H1B holder is.
And I don't blame the H1B holders for coming to the US to work - they're doing this because it's the best they can do. But I will absolutely be angry at the employers who want to cut costs by making it difficult to quit and then abusing their employees.
4. There is active discrimination against people who have been unemployed for any significant length of time.
5. Age discrimination means that old techies often aren't getting hired.
HR and C-level execs are all chasing after programmers aged 25-30 who aren't junior enough that they'll make rookie mistakes but aren't senior enough that they'll want a fair day's pay for a fair day's work.
I for one would be overjoyed to have on my team a decent 58-year-old programmer who's been unemployed since 2009: He's probably good because he's experienced enough to know all the tricks of the trade, and he's probably cheap because he's starting to get desperate. I'd much rather have him than somebody who's billed as a "rock star" 21-year-old developer.
There is no 'evil' in the Star Trek universe
What about "Mirror, Mirror", where a few members of the main cast are explicitly interacting with their evil counterparts? Or if you want to deal with TNG, what about "Skin of Evil" (killing off Tasha Yar for the fun of it), or "Chain of Command" (torturing Picard for the fun of it)?
If you allow for actions that most people would generally see as "evil", you'd also have to include Deputy Fuhrer Melakon from the Nazi planet episode, Khan Noonien Singh, Lore (on a bad day), the Borg, and quite a few others.
Red Green standing by.
What did time travel right?
A reasonable candidate: Futurama - Roswell That Ends Well
Now, granted, the context was comedy, but they used time travel not as a deus ex machina but as a setup for events that had occurred in previous and later episodes. Again, except for the causal loop, which they very clearly make intentional.
has every advantage of gas (liquid can be pumped, etc)
... unless you live in Minnesota or some other cold climate.
And in some cases it can be as simple as turning on a flourescent light [wikipedia.org] or taking a cheap over-the-counter vitamin.
I have an even more radical solution: Go outside and/or be near a window during the day.
Seriously, when has "outreach" or "awareness" ever solved anything?
Actually, it may be in the process of at least reducing a serious problem, namely human trafficking: Because of the 'awareness' efforts, lots of states in the US have been passing laws to stop it, and because of the 'outreach' efforts there are groups helping people escape from their post-trafficking slavery.
Your instincts are right, though: Outreach and awareness programs are often about preserving the organization who's doing the outreach and awareness, not about solving the problem.
Iran hasn't attacked anyone for hundreds of years.
Yes they have. Now, granted, their attack was a counterattack against the Iraqis.
It'll be really bad for business.
Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #34: War is good for business.
Point being, there's no way for the Iranians (or some other Evil Empire) to pull off that kind of attack from the safety of a computer console halfway around the world.
And here I was thinking the next probe was going to be named "Hawaiian Punch".
I can pretty much guarantee you that this is not about spectrum or improving service. What the bigwigs actually care about when they plan big purchases like this is a larger customer base. Well, that and their personal bonuses.
Just as an example, how many people depend on life support systems that require energy in hospitals?
That's why pretty much all hospitals have generators. They know how to deal with power outages and water issues.
In the real Pearl Harbor, people died. Unless and until the people talking about "cyberwar" demonstrate that they're defending us against the same kind of lethal threats, there isn't a legitimate comparison.
At worst, there may be property damage. But the simple fact is that the threats presented by enemies of the United States today are not even close to being the same level of threat presented by the Germans and Japanese and Russians of the past, where if we screwed up it was quite possible that the United States wouldn't exist anymore.
So why do they continue to invoke this stuff? To scare people into putting their organization on the US DoD gravy train.
But the issue of Poaching or Employees going to a competitor is a problem.
It is only a problem if you haven't made it so that your employees really *want* to work for you. You can do that a lot of ways: high salary, really really nice offices, free lunches for everyone, a 40- or even 36-hour work week, really cool code, etc.
I'm sure it will be as eye-bleedingly high as the fines levied against HSBC for laundering staggering amounts of drug money. Which is to say it will be a mere fraction of the profit from breaking the law. After all, in this case it was only thousands of tech workers losing potential salary, it's not like anyone important (from the point of view of Washington or Wall St) was harmed.
Here's where the "legendary" part comes in (data from the World Health Organization):
Life expectancy in the US - 77.7 years
Life expectancy in Cuba - 77.4 years
US annual health care cost per capita - $7,164
Cuba annual health care cost per capita - $495
That's the reason people are paying attention to the Cuban model - they're getting good results on a shoestring budget.
Don't get me wrong: I view this tendency more as a sad fact of life, not a moral evil.
Now, what is in my view a moral evil is that while Africa has all sorts of valuable natural resources, very few of those resources are owned by Africans. The effect of that is significant: In, say, a South African gold mine, for $1000 worth of gold ore, the miners might get $1, his bosses gets $3, the government of South Africa gets $1, and investors in New York and London get $995. Now, getting that $5 into the South African economy improves the economy of South Africa, but it also sucks out $995 worth of natural resources that can't be replaced. It's one of the remnants of European colonialism that is not likely to go away anytime soon.
No it doesn't: Mali is 400 miles away from Cameroon, in West Africa. The reason France got involved in Mali was because Mali was a former French colony and sort-of client state, and the Mali government asked for help after one of their major cities was threatened.