I would really like to see some backing for your claims. From my experience the most convincing and most radical christians I have met have been people that were converted to christianity at a later stage in life rather than born in a "God-fearing household".
My experience has been just the opposite. However, if it were so easy for religion to be picked up by otherwise non-religious adults... why the focus on training children?
I also have known a number of people that have converted to Christianity later in life. However, they invariably came from another Christian sect, or from some other religion. I've yet to encounter a dyed-in-the-wool atheist who, as an adult, at some point found himself able to swallow a metric ton of inconsistency and contradiction. It's much easier when you are a child and have little or no critical-thinking capability and accept unquestioningly whatever worldview fed into your neural circuits. Granted, I've known many adults who had the critical-thinking skills of a small child, but that's another story.
Furthermore, as an unbeliever (and one who never has believed) I'm not limiting my comments to individuals who convert to Christianity or any other faith, as you seem to assume. Conversion is a matter of exchanging one set of religious protocols for another. It's not a basic shift in perception, as is required for an atheist acquire faith... or the faithful to lose it.
From my perspective, a person who was raised in the Jewish faith who decides to become a Christian is still someone who believes. They have the mental ability to accept faith, to believe in God... and that makes them fundamentally the same regardless of which particular brand of dogma they prefer. In my original comment, I was referring to people, like myself, who were not given any significant religious instruction as children, and were allowed to form their own belief system into adulthood. Those are the people who rarely find religion. Yes yes, it does happen and I can point to a couple of examples myself, but it's a rarity.
My point is that if you want your belief system to propagate from generation to generation, especially if it's, well, basically irrational and full of logical fallacies... focus on bringing your children up it. They're easy targets and odds are, they'll never escape.
I agree that management (or marketing for that matter) usually makes it's contributions to such disasters as well but you can't just absolve the coders, especially the senior techies that do the design work.
Yes, you can.
Sure, it's the senior design staff that is responsible for making poor design decisions... but it's management that made the decision to hire those particular individuals in the first place! It's management that didn't put into place the proper processes to assure success. Truth is, a well-thought-out design process won't allow major disasters to happen very often, but that costs money and time. Yes, mistakes sometimes slip by, but if you have proper review and testing procedures in place you really can't single out the engineers to take the heat. Everybody makes mistakes, everybody screws up sometime, and you simply have to accept that possibility and account for it in the way you run your projects. Look, any way you slice it, management is responsible because we know how to do it right. Whether it be an accounting program or a space-shuttle flight-control system, we know how to make big projects work. There's no mystery, it's not rocket science. It just takes the right stuff. A manager who fails to hire the right stuff (or a senior executive who fails to give said manager the resources to hire the right stuff) should find themselves on the unemployment line because it's their fault.
Furthermore, there's a reason execs get paid more than engineers: it's because they are the ones who ultimately have responsibility for failure. Granted, they often manage to weasel out of it, or place the blame on someone they hired who wasn't up to the job, but it's still an upper-level failure. A manager who selects the wrong person for the job is just as culpable (really, more so) than the engineer who picks the wrong solution.
I mean, who is more the fool? The fool... or the fool who hires him?
It's clear that Christianity (the best example for our nation) is intended only to benefit Christians -- if you aren't one, you can just go to hell.
More correctly, if you aren't one, you are going to Hell.
Realistically speaking, however, if you look at the root of all religions (going back to the pantheons of the ancient Greek, Roman and even earlier civilizations) you will note that they are attempts to explain that which was, at the time, unexplainable or simply unacceptable (i.e., death.) The problem is that we've advanced way, way beyond the need for such primitive descriptions of how the Universe works. To this day, far too many people are simply unwilling or, in many cases, constitutionally unable, to accept that and move on.
Where we have not succeeded is in eliminating the need for the social control that organized religion provides. By and large, people are animals when you get right down to it, and civilization doesn't function well (or at all) if everyone is just doing what's best for him or herself, no matter the cost to anyone else. Fear of God (or Zeus, or any other external deity) has kept millions of people more-or-less in line for centuries. Consequently, one can't say that everything organized religion has done is bad, but unfortunately we're at the point where their antiscience bent is causing a severe cultural rift, and is in fact causing a lot of damage.
The last thing they want is children thinking for themselves.
That applies to any self-perpetuating group. If you catch people when they're too young to make distinctions, you can implant your ideas down at the level of attitudes where they're very, very hard to get at later. Relatively few people who were raised in a non-religious environment ever acquire faith later in life: such an adult will perceive much of a typical religious belief system to be as corny, fictitious and unjustifiable as it really is.
Conversely, the bulk of people who were raised in religion die still believing it. As one of the aforementioned people who was not brought up in a God-fearing household, I often wonder how people who have strong religious beliefs manage to accommodate such cognitive dissonance. That is, how they rationalize the very evident inconsistencies between their programmed view of the Universe, and what actually is.
Skynet spreads onto almost every computer in the world (ie. there is no central core).
That was just the rubbish from the third movie, which film I'm personally trying to forget. It was also ridiculous: once Skynet nuked everyone and in the process shut down all power distribution and communications networks, all those millions of computers running some little bit of Skynet would be turned off and isolated anyway.Killings us would have been instant suicide for Skynet.
The original 80's vision of Skynet as a vast artificial intelligence living in a cavern somewhere running on its own power supply still makes a lot more sense.
I was under the impression revenue information was freely available at the end of every couple financial quarter through SEC regulations anyway - is that not the case?:|
Yes, but not for individual tracks, which is apparently what this Judge wants to see.
Well, I think you overestimate the conscience and social awareness of the Facebook generation that provides most of their profits. I'm almost fifty and I've been following the music industry's shenanigans since the late seventies: it's why I stopped buying music from the big four a long time ago. But that's me: I think you'll find that the bulk of people buying music couldn't give a damn where it comes from. We don't care, as a society, where any of the other products we buy come from... it's one of our failings, actually. I really can't see why people would evince sudden concern over yet another bunch of corporate thugs: all they care about is that they can buy their favorite artist's latest CD or iTunes track.
Personally, I believe that the reason they're so afraid of this info coming out is that, once it does and it's gone public, it will a. make a lot of their lawsuits harder to win and b. it will be damned hard for law enforcement to ignore them any longer. Right now, they're surviving on security through obscurity: it's common knowledge that they're crooks but nobody really knows the details. Once those are out, they may find themselves swimming in lawsuits, and you can bet your boots the artists they've been "protecting" so vigorously will be at the forefront. And yes, I agree with you that at that point, public opinion will be an issue because lawmakers and Federal law enforcement will have to be seen as "doing something". What they will do, and how effective it wil be, remains to be seen.
In a routine civil suit for damages, the jury never gets to hear testimony about the financial state of the plaintiff or defendant.
These are most definitely not routine suits. Furthermore, the judge is telling them to provide financial data on the specific songs that the RIAA has claimed were illegally distributed, to which they have made an outrageous claim of value and loss of revenue. They opened the door to this, not the defendant, so it sounds pretty reasonable to me, on the surface anyway. But then again, I'm not a copyright lawyer so I'll leave it at that.
Nowadays most games are either RTS and FPS. The most important factor is speed. Gamers simply don't have the time to admire any humor.
Depends. Now, you take some of the older 3D Realms FPS games like Duke Nuke, Shadow Warrior and Blood, and you'll see that speed and comedy are indeed compatible.
Webcasters, both large-and-small, found themselves faced with retroactive bills they would have to pay
So they change the law, and then go after people for committing a "crime" for behavior that wasn't illegal before the law was changed? Now, that sounds goddamn unConstitutional to me.
You, I'm sure. When you talk about China, I trust that you draw upon your vast amount of personal experience while shunning preconceived notions, stereotypes and heresay.
I see. So, in other words, you're claiming that China is not a totalitarian state?
I dumped Comcast a few months ago in favor of AT&T U-Verse. I'm on the supposedly 18 mbit/sec tier, and I've been getting 22 so I'm happy. It's not true DSL, of course... it's VDSL but so far it hasn't sucked. Problem is, once AT&T has milked enough customers from Comcast, they'll probably go back to being who they really are, SBC. Which will suck. But for the time being the service is great.
It doesn't rely on it, it uses it in addition to the same techniques used by other GPS units.
Well, I tend to agree with you there. I have a T-Mobile G1, and the original firmware would take a minute or two to acquire a GPS location. My laptop's external GPS is faster, and I still find that annoying slow. The latest release of the OS seems to capture a position in only a few seconds (less sometimes.) Is that because it's using the triangulated position to help the GPS figure out where it is?
Carrying a cellphone isn't displaying any expectation of privacy. By having it, you're explicitly granting permission for people to find you.
The government is supposed to operate to our expectations, not the other way around. And I disagree you about cell phone ownership automatically granting permission for everyone to find me, which is what you seem to be claiming. Matter of fact, the government agrees with me: they don't let telemarketers find you on your cellphone, for example. Furthermore, there's a huge difference between allowing other citizens and some corporations from finding you, and allowing law enforcement to find you without reasonable restrictions. I'm surprised you can't see that.
Put it this way. If We the People decide (as the Founders did, some two-hundred-odd years ago) that the government is required to seek judicial approval before violating our "papers or personal effects" (and a cell phone is certainly a personal effect) then that's the way it should be. You, actually, need to adjust your expectations to not make matters too easy for the Feds: make them fight for every new authority they assume, every civil liberty they take. Sometimes they are justified in what they want: most of the time they are not. Keep that in mind before you explicitly grant them anything whatsoever. Because, once you do, you'll probably never get it back. Law enforcement doesn't give up authority easily: generally only if lawmakers try to rein them in, but as we've seen with outfits like the TSA, even that doesn't always work.
How many colleges are using your book as their primary text? My guess is that you are doing it as a hobby, haven't ever been paid for it and if any students are using your text they are probably your own because you run a course and set the textbook to your own.
Slashdot Mirror
Any stereotype missing?
yes.
we British are all of the above.
What about the Irish?
I would really like to see some backing for your claims. From my experience the most convincing and most radical christians I have met have been people that were converted to christianity at a later stage in life rather than born in a "God-fearing household".
My experience has been just the opposite. However, if it were so easy for religion to be picked up by otherwise non-religious adults ... why the focus on training children?
... or the faithful to lose it.
... and that makes them fundamentally the same regardless of which particular brand of dogma they prefer. In my original comment, I was referring to people, like myself, who were not given any significant religious instruction as children, and were allowed to form their own belief system into adulthood. Those are the people who rarely find religion. Yes yes, it does happen and I can point to a couple of examples myself, but it's a rarity.
... focus on bringing your children up it. They're easy targets and odds are, they'll never escape.
I also have known a number of people that have converted to Christianity later in life. However, they invariably came from another Christian sect, or from some other religion. I've yet to encounter a dyed-in-the-wool atheist who, as an adult, at some point found himself able to swallow a metric ton of inconsistency and contradiction. It's much easier when you are a child and have little or no critical-thinking capability and accept unquestioningly whatever worldview fed into your neural circuits. Granted, I've known many adults who had the critical-thinking skills of a small child, but that's another story.
Furthermore, as an unbeliever (and one who never has believed) I'm not limiting my comments to individuals who convert to Christianity or any other faith, as you seem to assume. Conversion is a matter of exchanging one set of religious protocols for another. It's not a basic shift in perception, as is required for an atheist acquire faith
From my perspective, a person who was raised in the Jewish faith who decides to become a Christian is still someone who believes. They have the mental ability to accept faith, to believe in God
My point is that if you want your belief system to propagate from generation to generation, especially if it's, well, basically irrational and full of logical fallacies
I'm an engineer. This problem requires the skills of someone trained in Human Resources.
Bah. Human Resources is the last place I'd turn to solve a Human Resources problem. But yeah, I take your point!
I agree that management (or marketing for that matter) usually makes it's contributions to such disasters as well but you can't just absolve the coders, especially the senior techies that do the design work.
Yes, you can.
... but it's management that made the decision to hire those particular individuals in the first place! It's management that didn't put into place the proper processes to assure success. Truth is, a well-thought-out design process won't allow major disasters to happen very often, but that costs money and time. Yes, mistakes sometimes slip by, but if you have proper review and testing procedures in place you really can't single out the engineers to take the heat. Everybody makes mistakes, everybody screws up sometime, and you simply have to accept that possibility and account for it in the way you run your projects. Look, any way you slice it, management is responsible because we know how to do it right. Whether it be an accounting program or a space-shuttle flight-control system, we know how to make big projects work. There's no mystery, it's not rocket science. It just takes the right stuff. A manager who fails to hire the right stuff (or a senior executive who fails to give said manager the resources to hire the right stuff) should find themselves on the unemployment line because it's their fault.
... or the fool who hires him?
Sure, it's the senior design staff that is responsible for making poor design decisions
Furthermore, there's a reason execs get paid more than engineers: it's because they are the ones who ultimately have responsibility for failure. Granted, they often manage to weasel out of it, or place the blame on someone they hired who wasn't up to the job, but it's still an upper-level failure. A manager who selects the wrong person for the job is just as culpable (really, more so) than the engineer who picks the wrong solution.
I mean, who is more the fool? The fool
Here's a scientifically valid explanation using Occam's razor: Americans are getting dumber, including scientists. Import more Europeans. :)
As an American, let me say ... nah, you're not worth it.
It's clear that Christianity (the best example for our nation) is intended only to benefit Christians -- if you aren't one, you can just go to hell.
More correctly, if you aren't one, you are going to Hell.
Realistically speaking, however, if you look at the root of all religions (going back to the pantheons of the ancient Greek, Roman and even earlier civilizations) you will note that they are attempts to explain that which was, at the time, unexplainable or simply unacceptable (i.e., death.) The problem is that we've advanced way, way beyond the need for such primitive descriptions of how the Universe works. To this day, far too many people are simply unwilling or, in many cases, constitutionally unable, to accept that and move on.
Where we have not succeeded is in eliminating the need for the social control that organized religion provides. By and large, people are animals when you get right down to it, and civilization doesn't function well (or at all) if everyone is just doing what's best for him or herself, no matter the cost to anyone else. Fear of God (or Zeus, or any other external deity) has kept millions of people more-or-less in line for centuries. Consequently, one can't say that everything organized religion has done is bad, but unfortunately we're at the point where their antiscience bent is causing a severe cultural rift, and is in fact causing a lot of damage.
The last thing they want is children thinking for themselves.
That applies to any self-perpetuating group. If you catch people when they're too young to make distinctions, you can implant your ideas down at the level of attitudes where they're very, very hard to get at later. Relatively few people who were raised in a non-religious environment ever acquire faith later in life: such an adult will perceive much of a typical religious belief system to be as corny, fictitious and unjustifiable as it really is.
Conversely, the bulk of people who were raised in religion die still believing it. As one of the aforementioned people who was not brought up in a God-fearing household, I often wonder how people who have strong religious beliefs manage to accommodate such cognitive dissonance. That is, how they rationalize the very evident inconsistencies between their programmed view of the Universe, and what actually is.
Skynet spreads onto almost every computer in the world (ie. there is no central core).
That was just the rubbish from the third movie, which film I'm personally trying to forget. It was also ridiculous: once Skynet nuked everyone and in the process shut down all power distribution and communications networks, all those millions of computers running some little bit of Skynet would be turned off and isolated anyway.Killings us would have been instant suicide for Skynet.
The original 80's vision of Skynet as a vast artificial intelligence living in a cavern somewhere running on its own power supply still makes a lot more sense.
I was under the impression revenue information was freely available at the end of every couple financial quarter through SEC regulations anyway - is that not the case? :|
Yes, but not for individual tracks, which is apparently what this Judge wants to see.
Well, I think you overestimate the conscience and social awareness of the Facebook generation that provides most of their profits. I'm almost fifty and I've been following the music industry's shenanigans since the late seventies: it's why I stopped buying music from the big four a long time ago. But that's me: I think you'll find that the bulk of people buying music couldn't give a damn where it comes from. We don't care, as a society, where any of the other products we buy come from ... it's one of our failings, actually. I really can't see why people would evince sudden concern over yet another bunch of corporate thugs: all they care about is that they can buy their favorite artist's latest CD or iTunes track.
Personally, I believe that the reason they're so afraid of this info coming out is that, once it does and it's gone public, it will a. make a lot of their lawsuits harder to win and b. it will be damned hard for law enforcement to ignore them any longer. Right now, they're surviving on security through obscurity: it's common knowledge that they're crooks but nobody really knows the details. Once those are out, they may find themselves swimming in lawsuits, and you can bet your boots the artists they've been "protecting" so vigorously will be at the forefront. And yes, I agree with you that at that point, public opinion will be an issue because lawmakers and Federal law enforcement will have to be seen as "doing something". What they will do, and how effective it wil be, remains to be seen.
In a routine civil suit for damages, the jury never gets to hear testimony about the financial state of the plaintiff or defendant.
These are most definitely not routine suits. Furthermore, the judge is telling them to provide financial data on the specific songs that the RIAA has claimed were illegally distributed, to which they have made an outrageous claim of value and loss of revenue. They opened the door to this, not the defendant, so it sounds pretty reasonable to me, on the surface anyway. But then again, I'm not a copyright lawyer so I'll leave it at that.
lawyers can attempt to hide something that is shown as PROOF of damages behind the entire lawsuit, behind the 'private property' bullshit.
Our system of checks and balances is a little more complex than you're making it out to be. And their refusal will likely cost them.
Ahh, but now you've been labelled 'possible terrorist advisor'.
Oh shit, now I'm complicit too.
Yes, and that's what they call a "chain of evidence."
Nowadays most games are either RTS and FPS. The most important factor is speed. Gamers simply don't have the time to admire any humor.
Depends. Now, you take some of the older 3D Realms FPS games like Duke Nuke, Shadow Warrior and Blood, and you'll see that speed and comedy are indeed compatible.
Webcasters, both large-and-small, found themselves faced with retroactive bills they would have to pay
So they change the law, and then go after people for committing a "crime" for behavior that wasn't illegal before the law was changed? Now, that sounds goddamn unConstitutional to me.
You, I'm sure. When you talk about China, I trust that you draw upon your vast amount of personal experience while shunning preconceived notions, stereotypes and heresay.
I see. So, in other words, you're claiming that China is not a totalitarian state?
The real solution is for DSL to not suck.
I dumped Comcast a few months ago in favor of AT&T U-Verse. I'm on the supposedly 18 mbit/sec tier, and I've been getting 22 so I'm happy. It's not true DSL, of course ... it's VDSL but so far it hasn't sucked. Problem is, once AT&T has milked enough customers from Comcast, they'll probably go back to being who they really are, SBC. Which will suck. But for the time being the service is great.
You over-exploit the natural and human resources of the area where you operate, strip it bare, then move on to the next one?
The problem is that the "next area" is another planet, and we kinda lack the technology to get there for now...
We lack the technology .... but the Borg do.
It doesn't rely on it, it uses it in addition to the same techniques used by other GPS units.
Well, I tend to agree with you there. I have a T-Mobile G1, and the original firmware would take a minute or two to acquire a GPS location. My laptop's external GPS is faster, and I still find that annoying slow. The latest release of the OS seems to capture a position in only a few seconds (less sometimes.) Is that because it's using the triangulated position to help the GPS figure out where it is?
Carrying a cellphone isn't displaying any expectation of privacy. By having it, you're explicitly granting permission for people to find you.
The government is supposed to operate to our expectations, not the other way around. And I disagree you about cell phone ownership automatically granting permission for everyone to find me, which is what you seem to be claiming. Matter of fact, the government agrees with me: they don't let telemarketers find you on your cellphone, for example. Furthermore, there's a huge difference between allowing other citizens and some corporations from finding you, and allowing law enforcement to find you without reasonable restrictions. I'm surprised you can't see that.
Put it this way. If We the People decide (as the Founders did, some two-hundred-odd years ago) that the government is required to seek judicial approval before violating our "papers or personal effects" (and a cell phone is certainly a personal effect) then that's the way it should be. You, actually, need to adjust your expectations to not make matters too easy for the Feds: make them fight for every new authority they assume, every civil liberty they take. Sometimes they are justified in what they want: most of the time they are not. Keep that in mind before you explicitly grant them anything whatsoever. Because, once you do, you'll probably never get it back. Law enforcement doesn't give up authority easily: generally only if lawmakers try to rein them in, but as we've seen with outfits like the TSA, even that doesn't always work.
Ray, can you provide any insight into what Professor Nesson is trying to accomplish? On the face of it, he seems to be shooting himself in both feet.
Coming up next, RIAA applies for patent for human voice. All speech will be licensed, $0.99 a sentence.
If that happens, I'd say the vow of silence will come back into vogue very quickly.
Nobody (not even MS) tries to intervene.
But even so, Apple GOOD, Microsoft BAD.
Me, I bought a G1. Not as slick as an iPhone, but it does everything you mentioned (including needing a flash.)
57. Here is the list.
Apparently he guessed wrong.
The Kindle has something very similar in its ease with which you can purchase books and put them onto your Kindle.
True. So does my netbook.