I'm not arguing that the parents shouldn't be doing their damn jobs, just that trying to make up for it by allowing a greater range of power for people who are not parents is a poor solution.
Not only is it not their job, it's also not their responsibility.
Well, to nitpick, they really only obey what I'd consider to be the important commandments...Kill, Steal, Lie, Covet, Honor yer Parents, and Adultery (in the sense of not cheating on your spouse but not in the sense of extramarital hanky panky)...They skip sabbath, idols, blasphemy, and one god only.
Personally, I think that a society who follows those tenets because they believe them to be right, rather than because that's what their god supposedly wants, is a more enlightened society.
In a nutshell, I think that a society that is purely physicalist in its view of living things is...problematical. By those standards stomping on an alarm clock, a flower, and a puppy are all pretty much the same thing, because living things are no different from non-living things.
Now Star Trek is an interesting case (despite what others seem to think) because they embrace some of what I would think of as "the divinity of man"...They have very strong beliefs about not only the intrinsic value of life, but also the value of things like art, literature, science, and the uplifting of the human condition, as well as a sophisticated value system dealing with the sort of things that are ethically "desirable" in an individual.
So, when I say, "Spirituality" I'm definitely not talking about anything supernatural per se, but more about an appreciation of the value of things beyond the actual physical substance of the world. Religion is a form of spiritualism, though not one that appeals to me personally because I feel it often misses the point, and because it tends toward anti-intellectualism.
Sure, In Loco Parentis..."In place of parents" means they can do whatever your parents can do to you...On school property.
The real issue here is whether or not they have the right to go after you for things that you're doing off school property. In my mind, that's a definite no; their power relationship is governed by their location. At school, sure. Out of school? What's the theory behind that, and where does it end?
You're moving into a serious nanny state if you allow your educators to effectively assert control over your kids outside of a school environment. I understand why they feel the need...Lot of parents aren't holding up their end, so the schools feel like, in order to get something done, they have to do it themselves. I appreciate the frustration. However, it's a hugely bad precedent.
Not really what I would consider "Graphic Design" which is more what this discussion is about. Anyway, they're talking about Adobe in particular, and as far as I know, Adobe doesn't actually make that sort of program, unless you include Studio for Flash animation.
They may very well have understood them...You have to remember, the Dark Ages for us was the Enlightenment for them. They were doing a lot of interesting math, and building architecturally advanced structures embodying complex mathematical concepts when we were wallowing around in superstitious ignorance.
Just because things have swung back the other way today, doesn't mean they won't swing back again tomorrow...That's the real lesson to learn from all the fundamentalist chrsitian movements...A society that doesn't appreciate some form of spirituality is pretty empty, but a society to embraces spirituality above all other things is hardly removed from barbarism.
Heh. I'm trying to imagine graphics professionals that aren't using Mac's already, and I'm failing.
We have maybe 50 Photoshop licenses where I work, and about the same number of Quark licenses. Bunch of different versions of Acrobat. I think, out of those three pieces of software, we have maybe 4 Windows software licenses, and the photoshop install media has been sitting in my desk drawer for more than a year without anyone asking for it.
If I copied everything about the Ferrari except the actual emblem, that would be okay, because it's legal to reverse engineer engines and shocks and transmissions...Just not software. and if I copied the emblem, it still wouldn't be a copyright issue. It'd be a trademark violation.
Downloading music isn't theft. It's not a trademark violation. It's not a patent infringement. It's copyright violation. Very simple.
Yea, it's amazing how, when you treat people like they're your slaves, they take pleasure in telling you where to stuff it.
If sales seemed genuinely interested in getting things done in the most efficient possible manner, they'd probably get more help. In my experience, however, they flip-flop constantly, with unnecessary staff moves, and constant cosmetic reporting changes which makes tons of work for IT, while providing no real benefit.
It's always the sales guys. I actually saw a group of them complain so hard that they succeeded in getting access to streaming media sites, at a time when our bandwidth was just about at capacity. It started to affect the rest of the building, so we throttled their subnet.
You've never heard so much screaming and whining. Goes all the way up to the top. CEO gets involved, wants to know the problem. We explain the problem, which was reasonably unsolvable at that point (no money for bigger pipe).
Then we provided the logs. We were pretty pissed off, so we provided all the logs.
Result? 3 people fired for what we'd consider "real" violations, and 11 people given warnings about the proper use of work equipment.
To this day, we have the most viruses, the most spyware, and the most user-caused problems from that department. The people who work there are not tech savvy, they are not problem solvers. But each and every one of them believes that their position is by far the most important position in the company, above and beyond the people who actually produce the product.
Now I understand that you want a certain type of person for sales, and I understand that by and large, the kind of person who works in sales needs to have certain character traits to be a good salesperson, and that that sort of person isn't usually over-supplied with introspection.
But take this to heart: IT is there to keep things working. IT is there to introduce, after a period of testing, new software. IT is there to protect company data from malicious outsiders...and malicious insiders, and to maintain critical systems, and to fix technical problems.
The purpose of IT is not to do whatever you want them to do; they have to take care of the whole organization, and the needs of the organization as a whole come first. It's not to bend the security guidelines for every program that one person thinks he needs. It's sure as hell not to mindlessly support every whim of every middle manager who is desperate for his department to have something to blame for his failure to meet sales goals.
Some users we trust with elevated permissions. Some users we allow to install their own software. It may even be as high as 8 or 9 percent of our user base. Percentage in finance, for example, is like 60%. The percentage in the advertising department? Maybe 1 in 100. They are non-technical users who have a poor appreciation of security risks, and are incapable of not clicking on a pop-up if one pops up in front of them.
Shrug. That could be changed by changing the write patterns.
How big is your cache file? A gig? Let it use all unused space on the drive, and overwrite the oldest parts of the cache when necessary. That would reduce the number of writes substantially, and since flash doesn't have the same performance limitations as standard drives, there is no loss of efficiency with the cache not being located on the "edge" of the drive.
A highly efficient, low power, impact resistant hard drive that would reliably last a few years in a laptop would definitely be something worth having, as long as the price was acceptable.
Shrug. Saying that I believe that there is other advanced intelligence out there doesn't mean that they automatically must be obsessed with colonizing the universe...That's his assumption and there is no fact to back it up, seeing as the one semi-advanced culture we know of (our own) hasn't done anything remotely like that, and we have a achieved spaceflight.
I don't think there is any way to know how many advanced civilizations there are (if any), without making a concerted exploration effort. All I'm saying is, it's probable that we're not alone.
"We are a people of different faiths, but we are one. Which faith conquers the other is not the question; rather, the question is whether Christianity stands or falls.... We tolerate no one in our ranks who attacks the ideas of Christianity... in fact our movement is Christian. We are filled with a desire for Catholics and Protestants to discover one another in the deep distress of our own people."
-Adolf Hitler, in a speech in Passau, 27 October 1928
And sure, Secularism killed a lot of people last century, but what is that but a blip in the bloody history of religion? The religiously fueled carnage in the middle east right now is thousands of years old. What secular hate can even compare?
Decades worth of spare parts, everything you're going to need at the other end...
Out of curiosity, I checked up on Cruise Ships...The Freedom of the Seas which is the largest ship whose stats are on Wikipedia, cost about a billion dollars (947,000,000) and holds about 5700 people, which would suggest that we'd be talking around 2,000,000,000 dollars (minimum) to build a ship for 10,000 people on Earth, assuming that it's just as easy to build a ship twice as big as it is to build it standard size.
Any ship that we're planning to send out on an extra solar expedition would pretty much have to be built in orbit, so imagine the cost factor there! In order to even think about something like this we'd have to have some ridiculous space infrastructure...Boosting all that gear off the planet would be a complete waste of resources.
I think we definitely need to be working on space, but when we haven't even begun there it's impossible to know what it would cost to send out a successful extra solar colony ship.
Meh. I want new music, and I don't want to have to lurk on the music nerd forums to find it. Admittedly I'm not terribly satisfied, but I'm not unsatisfied enough to kick the service...the ideal for any company. =P
Sure, but moving ten-thousand people an interstellar distance is probably going to cost substantially more than ten billion dollars...Hell, at today's prices it'd cost two billion just to send them on one of Richard Branson's LEO tours.
It's a common philosophical argument that God is "simple" which is to say "Not composed of parts" because things that are composed of parts are the sum of their parts and things that are the sum of their parts are not complete in and of themselves, and this has implications on Omnipotence and all that crap.
And we have a lot of examples in nature of complexity arising from simplicity, but that would be God-As-Evolution, and you're right, that's not a tenable position to the hard core fundie.
I don't see how that follows. Improbable things happen all the time, what's one more? And the actual probability over time is pretty high...I mean, life exists practically everywhere on this planet...The most barren, desolate spots imaginable, they all have life. As far as we know, life is quite common in the universe...Intelligent life, maybe not.
Extrapolate from that to the whole universe, and say that it's probable that nowhere else in the whole universe has another species done what we have done?
I'm sure it irks the hell out of people who are wedded to the idea that they're little unique snowflakes that just happen to be genetically identical (+/-.001%) to nearly every other unique snowflake in the fricking world to think that we might not be utterly special in the cosmos. But how often in nature do you see one of something?
Frankly, if you're a hard Creationist, you are intellectually backwards. You believe that the Earth and everything in it was created in 7 days by a supernatural force. This is contradicted by Geology, Biology, Chemistry, and Physics. Philosophically, it is also pretty shaky.
End of story.
If you want to say, "Well, I believe that there may have been a supernatural force present at the dawn of the universe." Fine. But that's not strong Creationism.
Yes, there are a lot of illogical hard core fundamentalists out there. What's your point? That fundamentalist religion is perfectly fine? That's it's okay to go apeshit whenever you perceive someone to be slighting your precious beliefs, to discard scientific evidence whenever it's convenient, to be just generally unbearable?
Maybe. The only way I could see it is if individuals could fund their own expeditions...Then self-interest could fuel the expansion...But that would require space travel becoming extremely cheap.
How about: "In all energy exchanges, if no energy enters or leaves the system, the potential energy of the state will always be less than that of the initial state."
Good old Second law. Either more energy is being fed into our universe, or eventually it will collapse. That's just entropy.
The reason I say you'd have to buy into Creationism, is because in Creationism, God created man, and no other species. That would be the only explanation for how an intelligent species could exist without there being the possibility for other intelligent species.
It's not that Creationists lack common sense. It's that they are so rabid about anything that might possibly in some world conceivably be a challenge to their beliefs, that they refuse to accept anything outside their little book. If they were open-minded at all, they wouldn't be pure Creationists. Just that simple.
Sure, but they could also have colonized the whole galaxy, then devolved and died off in the same period. Or they could just have skipped us because they like metal-rich planets in the liquid water zone with an atmosphere that's primarily methane, or any number of possible scenarios.
The point is, unless they set up an "Alien Burger" on the moon with a sign forty miles on a side, we'd never know they were around. Omni-directional radio of terrestrial origin has very little chance of ever being received in another solar system.
There is also the whole "What are the odds of intelligent live evolving at all?" question. It may be that, despite the age of the universe, the conditions for intelligent life took a long time to come together. Or that the process of evolution tends to take a while to produce a space faring civilization.
There are way too many variables to just automatically say, "If it were going to happen, it would already have happened."
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not arguing that the parents shouldn't be doing their damn jobs, just that trying to make up for it by allowing a greater range of power for people who are not parents is a poor solution.
Not only is it not their job, it's also not their responsibility.
Well, to nitpick, they really only obey what I'd consider to be the important commandments...Kill, Steal, Lie, Covet, Honor yer Parents, and Adultery (in the sense of not cheating on your spouse but not in the sense of extramarital hanky panky)...They skip sabbath, idols, blasphemy, and one god only.
Personally, I think that a society who follows those tenets because they believe them to be right, rather than because that's what their god supposedly wants, is a more enlightened society.
In a nutshell, I think that a society that is purely physicalist in its view of living things is...problematical. By those standards stomping on an alarm clock, a flower, and a puppy are all pretty much the same thing, because living things are no different from non-living things.
Now Star Trek is an interesting case (despite what others seem to think) because they embrace some of what I would think of as "the divinity of man"...They have very strong beliefs about not only the intrinsic value of life, but also the value of things like art, literature, science, and the uplifting of the human condition, as well as a sophisticated value system dealing with the sort of things that are ethically "desirable" in an individual.
So, when I say, "Spirituality" I'm definitely not talking about anything supernatural per se, but more about an appreciation of the value of things beyond the actual physical substance of the world. Religion is a form of spiritualism, though not one that appeals to me personally because I feel it often misses the point, and because it tends toward anti-intellectualism.
Sure, In Loco Parentis..."In place of parents" means they can do whatever your parents can do to you...On school property.
The real issue here is whether or not they have the right to go after you for things that you're doing off school property. In my mind, that's a definite no; their power relationship is governed by their location. At school, sure. Out of school? What's the theory behind that, and where does it end?
You're moving into a serious nanny state if you allow your educators to effectively assert control over your kids outside of a school environment. I understand why they feel the need...Lot of parents aren't holding up their end, so the schools feel like, in order to get something done, they have to do it themselves. I appreciate the frustration. However, it's a hugely bad precedent.
Not really what I would consider "Graphic Design" which is more what this discussion is about. Anyway, they're talking about Adobe in particular, and as far as I know, Adobe doesn't actually make that sort of program, unless you include Studio for Flash animation.
They may very well have understood them...You have to remember, the Dark Ages for us was the Enlightenment for them. They were doing a lot of interesting math, and building architecturally advanced structures embodying complex mathematical concepts when we were wallowing around in superstitious ignorance.
Just because things have swung back the other way today, doesn't mean they won't swing back again tomorrow...That's the real lesson to learn from all the fundamentalist chrsitian movements...A society that doesn't appreciate some form of spirituality is pretty empty, but a society to embraces spirituality above all other things is hardly removed from barbarism.
Heh. I'm trying to imagine graphics professionals that aren't using Mac's already, and I'm failing.
We have maybe 50 Photoshop licenses where I work, and about the same number of Quark licenses. Bunch of different versions of Acrobat. I think, out of those three pieces of software, we have maybe 4 Windows software licenses, and the photoshop install media has been sitting in my desk drawer for more than a year without anyone asking for it.
I assume you mean, "Even more strained analogy"
If I copied everything about the Ferrari except the actual emblem, that would be okay, because it's legal to reverse engineer engines and shocks and transmissions...Just not software. and if I copied the emblem, it still wouldn't be a copyright issue. It'd be a trademark violation.
Downloading music isn't theft. It's not a trademark violation. It's not a patent infringement. It's copyright violation. Very simple.
Yea, it's amazing how, when you treat people like they're your slaves, they take pleasure in telling you where to stuff it.
If sales seemed genuinely interested in getting things done in the most efficient possible manner, they'd probably get more help. In my experience, however, they flip-flop constantly, with unnecessary staff moves, and constant cosmetic reporting changes which makes tons of work for IT, while providing no real benefit.
It's always the sales guys. I actually saw a group of them complain so hard that they succeeded in getting access to streaming media sites, at a time when our bandwidth was just about at capacity. It started to affect the rest of the building, so we throttled their subnet.
You've never heard so much screaming and whining. Goes all the way up to the top. CEO gets involved, wants to know the problem. We explain the problem, which was reasonably unsolvable at that point (no money for bigger pipe).
Then we provided the logs. We were pretty pissed off, so we provided all the logs.
Result? 3 people fired for what we'd consider "real" violations, and 11 people given warnings about the proper use of work equipment.
To this day, we have the most viruses, the most spyware, and the most user-caused problems from that department. The people who work there are not tech savvy, they are not problem solvers. But each and every one of them believes that their position is by far the most important position in the company, above and beyond the people who actually produce the product.
Now I understand that you want a certain type of person for sales, and I understand that by and large, the kind of person who works in sales needs to have certain character traits to be a good salesperson, and that that sort of person isn't usually over-supplied with introspection.
But take this to heart: IT is there to keep things working. IT is there to introduce, after a period of testing, new software. IT is there to protect company data from malicious outsiders...and malicious insiders, and to maintain critical systems, and to fix technical problems.
The purpose of IT is not to do whatever you want them to do; they have to take care of the whole organization, and the needs of the organization as a whole come first. It's not to bend the security guidelines for every program that one person thinks he needs. It's sure as hell not to mindlessly support every whim of every middle manager who is desperate for his department to have something to blame for his failure to meet sales goals.
Some users we trust with elevated permissions. Some users we allow to install their own software. It may even be as high as 8 or 9 percent of our user base. Percentage in finance, for example, is like 60%. The percentage in the advertising department? Maybe 1 in 100. They are non-technical users who have a poor appreciation of security risks, and are incapable of not clicking on a pop-up if one pops up in front of them.
Shrug. That could be changed by changing the write patterns.
How big is your cache file? A gig? Let it use all unused space on the drive, and overwrite the oldest parts of the cache when necessary. That would reduce the number of writes substantially, and since flash doesn't have the same performance limitations as standard drives, there is no loss of efficiency with the cache not being located on the "edge" of the drive.
A highly efficient, low power, impact resistant hard drive that would reliably last a few years in a laptop would definitely be something worth having, as long as the price was acceptable.
Shrug. Saying that I believe that there is other advanced intelligence out there doesn't mean that they automatically must be obsessed with colonizing the universe...That's his assumption and there is no fact to back it up, seeing as the one semi-advanced culture we know of (our own) hasn't done anything remotely like that, and we have a achieved spaceflight.
I don't think there is any way to know how many advanced civilizations there are (if any), without making a concerted exploration effort. All I'm saying is, it's probable that we're not alone.
The Nazi's were hardly secular.
"We are a people of different faiths, but we are one. Which faith conquers the other is not the question; rather, the question is whether Christianity stands or falls.... We tolerate no one in our ranks who attacks the ideas of Christianity... in fact our movement is Christian. We are filled with a desire for Catholics and Protestants to discover one another in the deep distress of our own people."
-Adolf Hitler, in a speech in Passau, 27 October 1928
And sure, Secularism killed a lot of people last century, but what is that but a blip in the bloody history of religion? The religiously fueled carnage in the middle east right now is thousands of years old. What secular hate can even compare?
Decades worth of spare parts, everything you're going to need at the other end...
Out of curiosity, I checked up on Cruise Ships...The Freedom of the Seas which is the largest ship whose stats are on Wikipedia, cost about a billion dollars (947,000,000) and holds about 5700 people, which would suggest that we'd be talking around 2,000,000,000 dollars (minimum) to build a ship for 10,000 people on Earth, assuming that it's just as easy to build a ship twice as big as it is to build it standard size.
Any ship that we're planning to send out on an extra solar expedition would pretty much have to be built in orbit, so imagine the cost factor there! In order to even think about something like this we'd have to have some ridiculous space infrastructure...Boosting all that gear off the planet would be a complete waste of resources.
I think we definitely need to be working on space, but when we haven't even begun there it's impossible to know what it would cost to send out a successful extra solar colony ship.
Meh. I want new music, and I don't want to have to lurk on the music nerd forums to find it. Admittedly I'm not terribly satisfied, but I'm not unsatisfied enough to kick the service...the ideal for any company. =P
XM definitely does commercials on some stations. Usually pretty lame ones...Highly amusing what they seem to think their demographic is.
Sure, but moving ten-thousand people an interstellar distance is probably going to cost substantially more than ten billion dollars...Hell, at today's prices it'd cost two billion just to send them on one of Richard Branson's LEO tours.
It's a common philosophical argument that God is "simple" which is to say "Not composed of parts" because things that are composed of parts are the sum of their parts and things that are the sum of their parts are not complete in and of themselves, and this has implications on Omnipotence and all that crap.
And we have a lot of examples in nature of complexity arising from simplicity, but that would be God-As-Evolution, and you're right, that's not a tenable position to the hard core fundie.
I don't see how that follows. Improbable things happen all the time, what's one more? And the actual probability over time is pretty high...I mean, life exists practically everywhere on this planet...The most barren, desolate spots imaginable, they all have life. As far as we know, life is quite common in the universe...Intelligent life, maybe not.
.001%) to nearly every other unique snowflake in the fricking world to think that we might not be utterly special in the cosmos. But how often in nature do you see one of something?
Extrapolate from that to the whole universe, and say that it's probable that nowhere else in the whole universe has another species done what we have done?
I'm sure it irks the hell out of people who are wedded to the idea that they're little unique snowflakes that just happen to be genetically identical (+/-
Frankly, if you're a hard Creationist, you are intellectually backwards. You believe that the Earth and everything in it was created in 7 days by a supernatural force. This is contradicted by Geology, Biology, Chemistry, and Physics. Philosophically, it is also pretty shaky.
End of story.
If you want to say, "Well, I believe that there may have been a supernatural force present at the dawn of the universe." Fine. But that's not strong Creationism.
Yes, there are a lot of illogical hard core fundamentalists out there. What's your point? That fundamentalist religion is perfectly fine? That's it's okay to go apeshit whenever you perceive someone to be slighting your precious beliefs, to discard scientific evidence whenever it's convenient, to be just generally unbearable?
Don't be that guy.
Coincidentally, there is a congressman in Texas who is arguing against the Copernican Solar System on religious grounds.
I used to defend religion, but I'm frankly tired of it and I'm not going to shrug and smile when someone spouts off some ridiculous crap.
Maybe. The only way I could see it is if individuals could fund their own expeditions...Then self-interest could fuel the expansion...But that would require space travel becoming extremely cheap.
How about: "In all energy exchanges, if no energy enters or leaves the system, the potential energy of the state will always be less than that of the initial state."
Good old Second law. Either more energy is being fed into our universe, or eventually it will collapse. That's just entropy.
Hit a nerve, I see.
The reason I say you'd have to buy into Creationism, is because in Creationism, God created man, and no other species. That would be the only explanation for how an intelligent species could exist without there being the possibility for other intelligent species.
It's not that Creationists lack common sense. It's that they are so rabid about anything that might possibly in some world conceivably be a challenge to their beliefs, that they refuse to accept anything outside their little book. If they were open-minded at all, they wouldn't be pure Creationists. Just that simple.
Sure, but they could also have colonized the whole galaxy, then devolved and died off in the same period. Or they could just have skipped us because they like metal-rich planets in the liquid water zone with an atmosphere that's primarily methane, or any number of possible scenarios.
The point is, unless they set up an "Alien Burger" on the moon with a sign forty miles on a side, we'd never know they were around. Omni-directional radio of terrestrial origin has very little chance of ever being received in another solar system.
There is also the whole "What are the odds of intelligent live evolving at all?" question. It may be that, despite the age of the universe, the conditions for intelligent life took a long time to come together. Or that the process of evolution tends to take a while to produce a space faring civilization.
There are way too many variables to just automatically say, "If it were going to happen, it would already have happened."