In all honesty though, I use Firefox all the time on all the computers, PC and Mac, and I use gmail, and I've never seen my memory use go above 200M (usually around 150M). And even if I can get the memory usage to go up by opening 20 tabs full of pages with huge images, together with gmail, I don't get a CPU spike.
In fact, I've never gotten a CPU spike. None of the friends I have that use FF got a CPU spike, ever.
So, I hope you can see the problem here. Many people use FF and never experience what you're talking about. In fact, every time I read it, I think it's just trolls bullshitting. I hope someone can post a video of a computer with FF3 suffering from that bug so we can have proof that the bug exists. I don't think it's a real bug.
But let's say it is real. This bug, since it occurs in corner cases, is going to be hard to fix. It will be hard to find. It probably has to do with multi-threaded code and data sharing between threads, or it has to do with garbage collector. Either way, it's not easy.
Let's talk about other browsers now. I won't bother with IE. Let's take Opera. I use Opera Mini 4 all the time. That piece of shit has bugs and breaks all the time for me. The only reason I use it is because it's better than the built-in browser, which works better than Opera, but gives me a bookmark list that's controlled by my phone carrier, which I don't want. So because I want to control my own bookmarks, I have to use Opera on my blackberry. Clearly Opera is no angel. I am a very unsatisfied Opera user. And how hard is it to fix a bug in an app that's only 130kb long? EH?? Should be cake, right? Opera Mini does crappy rendering on many pages and the most annoying thing is that sometimes it loses my feeds or breaks them so that I have to reinstall them. And there are usability issues, such as when I want to search Google, I have to click way too many times for comfort (why can't I use the enter key, once? Why do I have to click to start typing, then type, then click to open a menu and select "OK", then scroll down to search button and again click on it... why ????? WTF OPERA??).
I think Mozilla does a fine, fine job. That they can't please a certain vocal minority is understandable. And the constant "angel" example of Opera is pure bullshit.
the PS3 has moved from absolutely pathetic to just plain luke-warm, and the Xbox 360 has completely failed in Japan From where I stand, PS3 has moved from like-warm to boiling hot. I've had xbox360 (actually 2, since I didn't bother replacing the first one that failed) for about a year now. I'm sad to report there is a grand-total of one, count-em, JUST ONE GAME, that I have honest-to-god enjoyed: Rainbow Six Vegas 1. And then there were were a few OK games, like Halo (ho-hum), The Darkness (decent), Mass Effect (underwhelming, but still entertaining), and Oblivion IV (great game ruined by the shitty console, as I experience hangs in it, frame rate drops, and so on, but love the concept of the game). And then there is hyped crap like Gears of War -- I could only stomach 30 mins of that mindless grinding -- the worst FPS ever, no plot, crap weapons, horrible characters (too fat looking, horrible voices), with the only good thing being a decent, but not the best, control scheme (the best FPS control is Rainbow Six Vegas, by far).
Now compare this to PS3. No hangs, no RROD issues, it runs very very cool (compared to scorching hot xbox360), power supply is inside the box compared to a fugly humangous power supply brick that comes with xbox360, plays blu-ray movies.
And now games -- I got these together with PS3:
MGS 4 GTA 4 Ratchet and Clank (Future...) COD 4 Rainbow Six Vegas 2 Ninja Gaiden Sigma
Now, many of these are available on xbox360 too, but PS3 is superior hardware, it runs cool and doesn't crash as much, why in the heck would I want to run any of these games on an xbox? MGS 4 is exclusive to PS3 and unlike xbox exclusives, it's a great game. I still want to by Dynasty Warriors 6 and a few other games. I'm looking forward to FF 13 and I loved FF 23 on PS2, while Lost Story is merely OH-KEY on xbox360, and what turn-based strategy games are there on xbox360? Slim to none is the answer. On PS3 also not so many, but there is a huge amount of them on PS2, and I am willing to bet they are going to be coming to PS3 and not to xbox360 and not to wii either.
Wii has 2 games I want to play -- Zelda and No More Heroes. I dislike the mario games and Pokemon can be played on DS, which I do have. Etc.
So PS3 is looking great from my point of view, and xbox360 was a huge disappointment in terms of its game library and hardware. xbox360 had plenty of time to get good games and it failed to do so. Also almost every game on xbox360 is available on PS3 too, and PS3 hardware is supreme. PS3 exclusives are way better than xbox360 exclusives for my taste.
There you go. I think PS3 is going to rock.
Re:Your car is too fat. Uncle Sam needs to trim it
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The SUV Is Dethroned
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The problem was caused by government, government, and then government. Demonstrating the common affliction of irrational faith in government, your solution is now more government! When someone is responsible for a problem, less of that someone is not the solution. The solution is to demand increased accountability and to exhort responsibility.
Simply getting rid of the irresponsible party is not the solution.
Now let's look at the phenomenon of governance. First, you have to recognize that humans, as long as they form societies, will experience the phenomenon of governance. There can be relatively less and more of it, but what's more important is, is there a democratic control over this governance, or is it done by private parties?
Governance is any kind of decision that affects multitudes in significant ways. If you look at it this way, you can see that many corporations and the banking system are all engages in various forms of governance already, and they are not democratic institutions. So the government was conceived as a counterbalance to this type of private power.
So if you propose to throw away our central government, essentially you are proposing to shift governance into private hands. That will result in more ad-hoc, more nonsensical decisions being made, more tyranny, more despotism and so on. All you have to do is to look back to the history when most of the power was undemocratic and concentrated in the few private hands. Sure, there was free market back then too, you know? Even back in the days of czars and kings there was free market, but people were not happy. Go figure.
because i have to pay the mortgage. Well, that excuse is starting to wear thin. Is survival and even just maintenance of a domicile that critical in your value system? Think about it. Because if something like that is critical, that means you're going to sacrifice a lot of freedom, and you'd be OK with torturing your neighbors, and all kinds of things like that, just so you could keep persisting in your lifestyle.
People of this generation have no notion of freedom and of sacrifice. They cling to their lives and to their families not realizing that clinging to your own life and clinging to the lives of your loved ones is precisely what endangers those lives. It's that clinging that allows others to grab you by your balls and tell you to do as told.
I like that we are a peaceful people. I think that's wonderful! But peaceful people should still have warrior qualities such as the ability to sacrifice one's own life and a degree of non-attachment to life's pleasures and assurances. (Gandhi comes to mind...)
People have died to give us this freedom, but we are losing our freedom because we have to pay mortgage. It's kind of strange that to gain freedom, we have to die, but to lose it, all we need to do is to put our mortgage first on the list of priorities.
I am not calling for any extreme and/or thoughtless actions. I just hope this can be food for thought.
"The buttons don't work the way you'd expect, but once you get used to it, it's really intuitive." Actually this is right. Intuition is a conditioned phenomenon. What is or is not considered intuitive depends on your prior experience and training.
I've used 3D application since the late 80's What you are saying is that you should never have to retrain your intuition.
You shouldn't have to learn. You've learned everything you want to learn back in the 80's and you want to stay that way. That's what you are saying.
> Everything should be a means to an end with the goal being to protect and support your family.
Family is very important.
But why is family important? Let's investigate this philosophically as a contemplative would.
You are also someone's child. Did that someone give you a free life? If not, not being in possession of freedom, how can you empower your child's freedom? Do slaves make their kids more free by working harder? Where does freedom come from? Does child's freedom come from one's parents?
On the other hand, if that someone gave you a free life and you turn yourself into a slave in order to pass it onto your kid, does that mean you piss away the gift that's been given to you? After all, someone thought you were the most important thing on Earth and gave you that gift, and here you are giving it away... And if that's the situation then what will happen if your "free" child grows up and discovers that he/she too has to give up their freedom for their child and so on -- where does it all stop? And does it stop? Is anyone ever free?
Now, I am not saying that sacrifice has no meaning and no purpose. What I am saying is that the issues of freedom are not trivial. Freedom is not something that can be purchased by just working harder or even smarter.
I am not supposed to tell you what freedom is. You are supposed to discover it on your own. But I'll break the rules anyway and tell you what it is. I doubt you'll get it. But my hope it what I say will sink in and at some point in the future you'll remember what I said and it will then make sense later. So, here it is:
Freedom is an innate quality of all beings. Freedom is not something you have to earn or work for. Freedom is what you start with. However, why then don't people feel free? The reason for this is two-fold:
1. People do not recognize their innate freedom. This is similar to a person who is using a huge brick of gold as their pillow and doesn't realize its value. Not knowing its true value all he/she gets out of it is a shitty and uncomfortable pillow.
2. People do not want to deal with the consequences of freedom. Freedom means responsibility. Responsibility is not the same as duties or honor. Responsibility means you cannot shift the entirety of any difficulty on someone else. It means you are at least partly, and in some cases -- fully -- responsible for what happens to you. By the way, if you try to take full responsibility for everything, no matter what, then you are being irresponsible, because in that case you fail to acknowledge your limitations as a person (but you being a person is not your ultimate identity -- it is a valid provisional identity, like being a coach when you are a coach, for example). Just remember though, you are at least partly responsible for everything. When you are responsible, it means you have to bear a certain degree of suffering in silence or in contemplation. Not everyone has the stamina to do that. The stamina can be developed if the person wishes to develop it. But the person will only wish to develop it if they see how it makes sense to develop it and why it is of benefit. It's not obvious why forbearance is of benefit.
I am not saying that a responsible person experiences only suffering. It's just that sometimes a responsible person meets with suffering and doesn't run away, but stays right there and continues to pay attention without mentally/spiritually jerking away from it.
So a person who recognizes their innate freedom and who is able to deal with its consequences is what we call "a free person". But all people are innately free, even those whom we call "slaves." This is why it is possible to emancipate slaves and this is why it is possible to redeem anyone whatsoever. If people did not have innate freedom, there could never be any way to transmit or impart that freedom onto them.
So, if you want your kids to grow up happy and free, the best you can do is to gently clue them into what I am sayi
if Microsoft ponies up a few buckazoids and delivers some value to OLPC such that it helps OLPC meets its goals, then, how is that bad for the kids getting the computers, all Windows cracks aside? If someone gives a person some food and a dwelling, what does it matter what kind of person it is?
Well it turns out, it does matter.
The relationship between the two people exchanging value is important. If I sustain a slave via some food and a dwelling place, that is not as valuable as when I sustain a free person via some food and a dwelling place. Microsoft promotes informational slavery, as has been recorded in history time and time again on many occasions. That's why when Microsoft appears to give "gifts", Microsoft's actions appear very suspicious. This is why people discuss the Microsoft lock-in effect. The lock-in effect is relevant to education.
So a gift is just as important as the conditions that are attached to that gift. You have vastly more freedoms with Linux than you do with Windows. There is no Linux lock-in. In the Linux ecosystem everything that matters is open in the biggest sense of the word "open" (unlike say "shared source" which is really neither open source nor free, as in freedom, software).
If a gift puts you in a condition of servitude to a giver, it is no gift at all.
I know a lot of programmers and one artist and I believe all of them make vastly more than indicated on that chart. I think the chart is a bullshit propaganda piece to get people to believe that programmers and other roles make less money than they really do.
I have especially grave doubts in the low and high ends. I wouldn't count intern and 12 year old kids' ("a friend of a CTO's kid who wanted to work here") salaries as low end. And I will never believe than no programmer makes over 70k in game development. Game dev is technically one of the most challenging things you could be doing as a programmer and it must pay a lot more than what's indicated by the article.
The post Jherek Carnelian (831679) is replying to is a complete pro-IP propaganda hit piece without any real analysis of the situations in which various real and unreal, so-called "intellectual" properties find themselves in.
There are huge and irreconcilable difference between physical properties and ideas.
If the moderation remains as it is, I will conclude that Slashdot is keeping it artificially in place. This is complete against the historical trend of the opinions and analysis that have appeared on Slashdot throughout the times.
In a world driven by money and commerce, the injection of money into artistic works is NOT artifical. It's the natural product of the way the world works.
You don't understand the word "artifical" correctly in this case. Artificial here does not mean unnatural, but it means having a pretentious reason. So for example, if I don't care about sculpture, but I have heard that you can make lots of money making sculptures, and I train myself to be a mediocre sculptor and thus make lots of money, my reason for sculpting is artificial in a sense that normally people expert and consider love of the art to be inherent in the art, and yet when they view my sculptures they are seeing greed and artifice but not love. So I am pretending to love sculpting (by my actions, if not by words), but at heart I don't love it at all, but I just love money. This is the artifice that we talk about.
Unfortunately at this time this kind of pretense is so common that it is natural without being something other than pretense. So it is natural and artificial at the same time and there is no contradiction because the words "natural" and "artifical" are used in two different senses here. By "natural" I mean "not violating the laws of nature" and by "artificial" I mean pretentious and/or disingenuous.
It's not an economic fact. Money is not the goal. Profit is not the goal. The reason people trade is to improve the quality of life and not just to get lots of profits. If profit comes at the expense of the quality of life, then the trade that resulted in it has the opposite of intended effect.
Probably meant as a joke, but this is very profoundly insightful from a spiritual point of view. This is in essence what spiritual adepts in many spiritual paths will do. The "physical" lock-in is happening in your own mind at a very deep level. It is non-trivial to overcome it.
There is a lot of truth in what you say. If you work slavishly then people think you are powerless and do it out of desperation, in the manner of begging. For example, if you work 12 hours it is because you believe your 8 hours is not good enough, so you have to compensate for your shit skills by working more along the lines of "well I am not that productive per hour, so let me work more hours in desperate hopes that my employer will notice me and at least refrain from firing me, or at least put me in the back of the line when firing." It's a fear-based, victim, loser mentality. And funny enough, if you stop doing it, people value you more. If you kill yourself for the company, you get fired with the rest of the workaholic office flotsam.
It's the exact same dynamic that exists between men and women. Men who are desperate for women and who bend over backward to please women are despised by women. Women hate the "nice guy". And the corps hate the "nice employee" too for the same reason.
I know this from experience. When I was "nice", I got zero respect and my only reward was an ever-increasing workload and responsibility with the ever decreasing decision making power. So if something ever went wrong it was my fault, even though I had no decision making power to do it better or even just plain differently. I was a nervous wreck on hastening to take my place 6ft under with no other motivation besides fear. When I realized how pathetic that was, for me and for others around me (even for the corp itself), I changed and never looked back. I'd rather die free than be a slave.
Actually, free market means exactly that. You are free to organize, boycott, and simply not buy the product. But if you get the government involved and pass laws to restrict trade then the market is, by definition, no longer "free". Mince words all you want, but that is how it works.
Wrong. As long as it the market was not adjusted by a dictator's hand, it is still a free market. If the majority of population supports meat regulation so that it's a crime to sell rotten meat, it is still a free market (even though you are not free to sell rotten meat, even if you use CO2 packaging to make your rotten meat look fresh).
Hell, compare it to energy, education, healthcare, food, and in some cases housing and it seems like a downright bargain(or it could be the Fed is incredibly out of touch when it comes up with those low inflation numbers)
Just don't compare it to salaries, or the illusion of "bargain" will vanish very quickly.
If you don't like this business model, then you do not support free market in principle (not preaching whether that is good or bad, just stating the fact).
That's pure nonsense. So if I support a free market I give up my right to have opinions and preferences with regard to various business models? Sounds like a raw deal!
It's like saying that if you support free speech you cannot criticize anyone, since everyone is protected by the free speech. Newsflash -- criticism is also protected!
Free market means if we don't like Apple's business model, we can say so, we can organize, boycott, we can take action at the government level, and so on. Free market is not some kind of protection from likes and dislikes of the populace. Just because people like the idea of a free market does not mean ethics do not play into it at all.
The question was whether or not "Ivy League" is a relevant bit of information (and even obviously so). I think it's not only not obvious, but it is false. There is nothing special/specific about Ivy League lectures that makes them better candidates for a notebook note taking.
The purpose of running a business is to make money.
Sorry. I disagree with your basic premise. I'm sick of people saying it over and over, as if saying it many times will make it true.
It is simply not true and is easy to prove.
The purpose of business is to satisfy the desires of businesspeople by satisfying the desires of customers. It is not about money. You can run a business without relying on a monetary economy. So the purpose is not to make money.
And why is this important? Because if the purpose was to accumulate something abstract, like paper symbols, that kind of purpose would be amoral. On the other hand, desires and their satisfaction can only happen within a system of morality. Stupid people like you shift attention away from the moral nature of desires toward the amoral nature of abstract symbols in order to promote greed.
The problem is... it doesn't work, because it can only fool some people some of the time. The rest see what is happening for what it is.
IF I made a fortune gobbling up prime real estate, nobody would care. why is this different? What do you mean "nobody would care"? Of course people care! Gobbling up real estate is immoral.
That always bothered me about the game industry. I don't see why Microsoft shouldn't be sued. Instead I think game companies should be sued for deceptive advertising. Gamers, as a group, are more tolerant than general computer users. Most gamers read forums and do research, etc... Not so with all other computer users.
What game companies do when advertising games running on maxed out hardware and then posting absurdly low minimum requirements on their games is just wrong.
Right now they are setting a minimum price, so you can at least stop stocking that item. Soon Congress might make a law that requires certain types of shops to stock certain types of good if they want to stay in business. Then what will you do?
As your freedoms are eroded, you can say in your whiny voice "fine..fine...but then I won't do it". But there is only so much you can tolerate. Instead of saying "fine it doesn't matter" you should maybe pay attention. It matters.
We have so many laws that look bad, that right now being an outlaw is not necessarily being a bad person. And that's very unfortunate.
At every company I have ever worked for, the hourlies rarely took any initiative to change anything. There were always plenty of complaints from this group, but rarely were there any potential solutions offered.
Was this a side effect of being an hourly worker?
Well I can tell you that where I work, I am salaried, but there is pretty much 0% chance for me to influence anything of any importance at my company (a worldwide leader in our industry).
In fact, more than one of my coworkers with higher (and sometimes significantly higher) job titles have tried to discuss some changes, and basically were blown off at best, or at worst, told straight to their face that "they're not smart enough to be talking about such things", only not in exactly those words. And I'm talking about changes that we're absolutely qualified to suggest because they fall completely (100%) within our domain of expertise (but we had to ask because they do require some, even if minimal, buy in/commitment from the upper layers of management).
So, my anecdotal evidence is that being salaried does not whatsoever improve your stake in the business. Salaried employees can be, and I believe, mostly are just as disenfranchised as hourly employees.
Seriously, this website serves absolutely no purpose,
The purpose is to communicate.
and has no weight in the industry.
It has the same weight as any other communication -- no more, no less. When you participate in a group discussion, you are probably going to respect some people and not others. Those that you respect will influence you and that influence will carry through to your day job.
It's a place for geeks to verbally masturbate.
Communication venues are what you make of them. Since you say that, I have to surmise that you are verbally masturbating right now. As they say -- don't cut the branch you're sitting on.
Nobody goes to their boss with a proposal or idea that begins with "I read on slashdot..."
Nobody goes to their boss with a proposal or idea that begins with "I was thinking in the shower..." or "While I was taking a massive dump..." or "I dreamt about..." and yet our thinking process from dreams, bathrooms, and so on, does influence us on our day job. Of course due to social conventions you are not likely to disclose that to your boss. That doesn't mean it has no weight!
Slashdot Mirror
In all honesty though, I use Firefox all the time on all the computers, PC and Mac, and I use gmail, and I've never seen my memory use go above 200M (usually around 150M). And even if I can get the memory usage to go up by opening 20 tabs full of pages with huge images, together with gmail, I don't get a CPU spike.
In fact, I've never gotten a CPU spike. None of the friends I have that use FF got a CPU spike, ever.
So, I hope you can see the problem here. Many people use FF and never experience what you're talking about. In fact, every time I read it, I think it's just trolls bullshitting. I hope someone can post a video of a computer with FF3 suffering from that bug so we can have proof that the bug exists. I don't think it's a real bug.
But let's say it is real. This bug, since it occurs in corner cases, is going to be hard to fix. It will be hard to find. It probably has to do with multi-threaded code and data sharing between threads, or it has to do with garbage collector. Either way, it's not easy.
Let's talk about other browsers now. I won't bother with IE. Let's take Opera. I use Opera Mini 4 all the time. That piece of shit has bugs and breaks all the time for me. The only reason I use it is because it's better than the built-in browser, which works better than Opera, but gives me a bookmark list that's controlled by my phone carrier, which I don't want. So because I want to control my own bookmarks, I have to use Opera on my blackberry. Clearly Opera is no angel. I am a very unsatisfied Opera user. And how hard is it to fix a bug in an app that's only 130kb long? EH?? Should be cake, right? Opera Mini does crappy rendering on many pages and the most annoying thing is that sometimes it loses my feeds or breaks them so that I have to reinstall them. And there are usability issues, such as when I want to search Google, I have to click way too many times for comfort (why can't I use the enter key, once? Why do I have to click to start typing, then type, then click to open a menu and select "OK", then scroll down to search button and again click on it... why ????? WTF OPERA??).
I think Mozilla does a fine, fine job. That they can't please a certain vocal minority is understandable. And the constant "angel" example of Opera is pure bullshit.
Now compare this to PS3. No hangs, no RROD issues, it runs very very cool (compared to scorching hot xbox360), power supply is inside the box compared to a fugly humangous power supply brick that comes with xbox360, plays blu-ray movies.
And now games -- I got these together with PS3:
MGS 4
GTA 4
Ratchet and Clank (Future...)
COD 4
Rainbow Six Vegas 2
Ninja Gaiden Sigma
Now, many of these are available on xbox360 too, but PS3 is superior hardware, it runs cool and doesn't crash as much, why in the heck would I want to run any of these games on an xbox? MGS 4 is exclusive to PS3 and unlike xbox exclusives, it's a great game. I still want to by Dynasty Warriors 6 and a few other games. I'm looking forward to FF 13 and I loved FF 23 on PS2, while Lost Story is merely OH-KEY on xbox360, and what turn-based strategy games are there on xbox360? Slim to none is the answer. On PS3 also not so many, but there is a huge amount of them on PS2, and I am willing to bet they are going to be coming to PS3 and not to xbox360 and not to wii either.
Wii has 2 games I want to play -- Zelda and No More Heroes. I dislike the mario games and Pokemon can be played on DS, which I do have. Etc.
So PS3 is looking great from my point of view, and xbox360 was a huge disappointment in terms of its game library and hardware. xbox360 had plenty of time to get good games and it failed to do so. Also almost every game on xbox360 is available on PS3 too, and PS3 hardware is supreme. PS3 exclusives are way better than xbox360 exclusives for my taste.
There you go. I think PS3 is going to rock.
Simply getting rid of the irresponsible party is not the solution.
Now let's look at the phenomenon of governance. First, you have to recognize that humans, as long as they form societies, will experience the phenomenon of governance. There can be relatively less and more of it, but what's more important is, is there a democratic control over this governance, or is it done by private parties?
Governance is any kind of decision that affects multitudes in significant ways. If you look at it this way, you can see that many corporations and the banking system are all engages in various forms of governance already, and they are not democratic institutions. So the government was conceived as a counterbalance to this type of private power.
So if you propose to throw away our central government, essentially you are proposing to shift governance into private hands. That will result in more ad-hoc, more nonsensical decisions being made, more tyranny, more despotism and so on. All you have to do is to look back to the history when most of the power was undemocratic and concentrated in the few private hands. Sure, there was free market back then too, you know? Even back in the days of czars and kings there was free market, but people were not happy. Go figure.
People of this generation have no notion of freedom and of sacrifice. They cling to their lives and to their families not realizing that clinging to your own life and clinging to the lives of your loved ones is precisely what endangers those lives. It's that clinging that allows others to grab you by your balls and tell you to do as told.
I like that we are a peaceful people. I think that's wonderful! But peaceful people should still have warrior qualities such as the ability to sacrifice one's own life and a degree of non-attachment to life's pleasures and assurances. (Gandhi comes to mind...)
People have died to give us this freedom, but we are losing our freedom because we have to pay mortgage. It's kind of strange that to gain freedom, we have to die, but to lose it, all we need to do is to put our mortgage first on the list of priorities.
I am not calling for any extreme and/or thoughtless actions. I just hope this can be food for thought.
You shouldn't have to learn. You've learned everything you want to learn back in the 80's and you want to stay that way. That's what you are saying.
> Everything should be a means to an end with the goal being to protect and support your family.
Family is very important.
But why is family important? Let's investigate this philosophically as a contemplative would.
You are also someone's child. Did that someone give you a free life? If not, not being in possession of freedom, how can you empower your child's freedom? Do slaves make their kids more free by working harder? Where does freedom come from? Does child's freedom come from one's parents?
On the other hand, if that someone gave you a free life and you turn yourself into a slave in order to pass it onto your kid, does that mean you piss away the gift that's been given to you? After all, someone thought you were the most important thing on Earth and gave you that gift, and here you are giving it away... And if that's the situation then what will happen if your "free" child grows up and discovers that he/she too has to give up their freedom for their child and so on -- where does it all stop? And does it stop? Is anyone ever free?
Now, I am not saying that sacrifice has no meaning and no purpose. What I am saying is that the issues of freedom are not trivial. Freedom is not something that can be purchased by just working harder or even smarter.
I am not supposed to tell you what freedom is. You are supposed to discover it on your own. But I'll break the rules anyway and tell you what it is. I doubt you'll get it. But my hope it what I say will sink in and at some point in the future you'll remember what I said and it will then make sense later. So, here it is:
Freedom is an innate quality of all beings. Freedom is not something you have to earn or work for. Freedom is what you start with. However, why then don't people feel free? The reason for this is two-fold:
1. People do not recognize their innate freedom. This is similar to a person who is using a huge brick of gold as their pillow and doesn't realize its value. Not knowing its true value all he/she gets out of it is a shitty and uncomfortable pillow.
2. People do not want to deal with the consequences of freedom. Freedom means responsibility. Responsibility is not the same as duties or honor. Responsibility means you cannot shift the entirety of any difficulty on someone else. It means you are at least partly, and in some cases -- fully -- responsible for what happens to you. By the way, if you try to take full responsibility for everything, no matter what, then you are being irresponsible, because in that case you fail to acknowledge your limitations as a person (but you being a person is not your ultimate identity -- it is a valid provisional identity, like being a coach when you are a coach, for example). Just remember though, you are at least partly responsible for everything. When you are responsible, it means you have to bear a certain degree of suffering in silence or in contemplation. Not everyone has the stamina to do that. The stamina can be developed if the person wishes to develop it. But the person will only wish to develop it if they see how it makes sense to develop it and why it is of benefit. It's not obvious why forbearance is of benefit.
I am not saying that a responsible person experiences only suffering. It's just that sometimes a responsible person meets with suffering and doesn't run away, but stays right there and continues to pay attention without mentally/spiritually jerking away from it.
So a person who recognizes their innate freedom and who is able to deal with its consequences is what we call "a free person". But all people are innately free, even those whom we call "slaves." This is why it is possible to emancipate slaves and this is why it is possible to redeem anyone whatsoever. If people did not have innate freedom, there could never be any way to transmit or impart that freedom onto them.
So, if you want your kids to grow up happy and free, the best you can do is to gently clue them into what I am sayi
Well it turns out, it does matter.
The relationship between the two people exchanging value is important. If I sustain a slave via some food and a dwelling place, that is not as valuable as when I sustain a free person via some food and a dwelling place. Microsoft promotes informational slavery, as has been recorded in history time and time again on many occasions. That's why when Microsoft appears to give "gifts", Microsoft's actions appear very suspicious. This is why people discuss the Microsoft lock-in effect. The lock-in effect is relevant to education.
So a gift is just as important as the conditions that are attached to that gift. You have vastly more freedoms with Linux than you do with Windows. There is no Linux lock-in. In the Linux ecosystem everything that matters is open in the biggest sense of the word "open" (unlike say "shared source" which is really neither open source nor free, as in freedom, software).
If a gift puts you in a condition of servitude to a giver, it is no gift at all.
I know a lot of programmers and one artist and I believe all of them make vastly more than indicated on that chart. I think the chart is a bullshit propaganda piece to get people to believe that programmers and other roles make less money than they really do.
I have especially grave doubts in the low and high ends. I wouldn't count intern and 12 year old kids' ("a friend of a CTO's kid who wanted to work here") salaries as low end. And I will never believe than no programmer makes over 70k in game development. Game dev is technically one of the most challenging things you could be doing as a programmer and it must pay a lot more than what's indicated by the article.
Why is this not modded to +5 insightful?
The post Jherek Carnelian (831679) is replying to is a complete pro-IP propaganda hit piece without any real analysis of the situations in which various real and unreal, so-called "intellectual" properties find themselves in.
There are huge and irreconcilable difference between physical properties and ideas.
If the moderation remains as it is, I will conclude that Slashdot is keeping it artificially in place. This is complete against the historical trend of the opinions and analysis that have appeared on Slashdot throughout the times.
You don't understand the word "artifical" correctly in this case. Artificial here does not mean unnatural, but it means having a pretentious reason. So for example, if I don't care about sculpture, but I have heard that you can make lots of money making sculptures, and I train myself to be a mediocre sculptor and thus make lots of money, my reason for sculpting is artificial in a sense that normally people expert and consider love of the art to be inherent in the art, and yet when they view my sculptures they are seeing greed and artifice but not love. So I am pretending to love sculpting (by my actions, if not by words), but at heart I don't love it at all, but I just love money. This is the artifice that we talk about.
Unfortunately at this time this kind of pretense is so common that it is natural without being something other than pretense. So it is natural and artificial at the same time and there is no contradiction because the words "natural" and "artifical" are used in two different senses here. By "natural" I mean "not violating the laws of nature" and by "artificial" I mean pretentious and/or disingenuous.
It's not an economic fact. Money is not the goal. Profit is not the goal. The reason people trade is to improve the quality of life and not just to get lots of profits. If profit comes at the expense of the quality of life, then the trade that resulted in it has the opposite of intended effect.
Money is not god, not even in economics.
> A search engine's job is to make profit for their shareholders.
No, that's not its job. There are things in life higher than profits for shareholders.
FUCK YOU AND THOSE LIKE YOU.
Stop spreading this retarded meme.
Probably meant as a joke, but this is very profoundly insightful from a spiritual point of view. This is in essence what spiritual adepts in many spiritual paths will do. The "physical" lock-in is happening in your own mind at a very deep level. It is non-trivial to overcome it.
There is a lot of truth in what you say. If you work slavishly then people think you are powerless and do it out of desperation, in the manner of begging. For example, if you work 12 hours it is because you believe your 8 hours is not good enough, so you have to compensate for your shit skills by working more along the lines of "well I am not that productive per hour, so let me work more hours in desperate hopes that my employer will notice me and at least refrain from firing me, or at least put me in the back of the line when firing." It's a fear-based, victim, loser mentality. And funny enough, if you stop doing it, people value you more. If you kill yourself for the company, you get fired with the rest of the workaholic office flotsam.
It's the exact same dynamic that exists between men and women. Men who are desperate for women and who bend over backward to please women are despised by women. Women hate the "nice guy". And the corps hate the "nice employee" too for the same reason.
I know this from experience. When I was "nice", I got zero respect and my only reward was an ever-increasing workload and responsibility with the ever decreasing decision making power. So if something ever went wrong it was my fault, even though I had no decision making power to do it better or even just plain differently. I was a nervous wreck on hastening to take my place 6ft under with no other motivation besides fear. When I realized how pathetic that was, for me and for others around me (even for the corp itself), I changed and never looked back. I'd rather die free than be a slave.
Wrong. As long as it the market was not adjusted by a dictator's hand, it is still a free market. If the majority of population supports meat regulation so that it's a crime to sell rotten meat, it is still a free market (even though you are not free to sell rotten meat, even if you use CO2 packaging to make your rotten meat look fresh).
Sorry to rain on your anti-government parade.
Just don't compare it to salaries, or the illusion of "bargain" will vanish very quickly.
That's pure nonsense. So if I support a free market I give up my right to have opinions and preferences with regard to various business models? Sounds like a raw deal!
It's like saying that if you support free speech you cannot criticize anyone, since everyone is protected by the free speech. Newsflash -- criticism is also protected!
Free market means if we don't like Apple's business model, we can say so, we can organize, boycott, we can take action at the government level, and so on. Free market is not some kind of protection from likes and dislikes of the populace. Just because people like the idea of a free market does not mean ethics do not play into it at all.
LOL
Please tell me my sarcasm detector is still operational.
The question was whether or not "Ivy League" is a relevant bit of information (and even obviously so). I think it's not only not obvious, but it is false. There is nothing special/specific about Ivy League lectures that makes them better candidates for a notebook note taking.
Sorry. I disagree with your basic premise. I'm sick of people saying it over and over, as if saying it many times will make it true.
It is simply not true and is easy to prove.
The purpose of business is to satisfy the desires of businesspeople by satisfying the desires of customers. It is not about money. You can run a business without relying on a monetary economy. So the purpose is not to make money.
And why is this important? Because if the purpose was to accumulate something abstract, like paper symbols, that kind of purpose would be amoral. On the other hand, desires and their satisfaction can only happen within a system of morality. Stupid people like you shift attention away from the moral nature of desires toward the amoral nature of abstract symbols in order to promote greed.
The problem is... it doesn't work, because it can only fool some people some of the time. The rest see what is happening for what it is.
That always bothered me about the game industry. I don't see why Microsoft shouldn't be sued. Instead I think game companies should be sued for deceptive advertising. Gamers, as a group, are more tolerant than general computer users. Most gamers read forums and do research, etc... Not so with all other computer users.
What game companies do when advertising games running on maxed out hardware and then posting absurdly low minimum requirements on their games is just wrong.
Right now they are setting a minimum price, so you can at least stop stocking that item. Soon Congress might make a law that requires certain types of shops to stock certain types of good if they want to stay in business. Then what will you do?
As your freedoms are eroded, you can say in your whiny voice "fine..fine...but then I won't do it". But there is only so much you can tolerate. Instead of saying "fine it doesn't matter" you should maybe pay attention. It matters.
We have so many laws that look bad, that right now being an outlaw is not necessarily being a bad person. And that's very unfortunate.
In fact, more than one of my coworkers with higher (and sometimes significantly higher) job titles have tried to discuss some changes, and basically were blown off at best, or at worst, told straight to their face that "they're not smart enough to be talking about such things", only not in exactly those words. And I'm talking about changes that we're absolutely qualified to suggest because they fall completely (100%) within our domain of expertise (but we had to ask because they do require some, even if minimal, buy in/commitment from the upper layers of management).
So, my anecdotal evidence is that being salaried does not whatsoever improve your stake in the business. Salaried employees can be, and I believe, mostly are just as disenfranchised as hourly employees.