Many computer geeks lack the social skills to interact with anyone. I think the real problem is that girls are more encouraged to be social than men. (Although I don't know if this is cultural or genetic. Probably a combination.) Thus, women are more likely to be non-dweebs, and therefore be more likely to not want to hang out with a bunch of dweebs, therefore be more likely to not be willing to be Computer Science majors.
The Wikimedia Foundation would probably have a certain degree of resistance to being bought out and turned commercial. And furthermore everyone on Wikipedia would whine like hell.
Furthermore, buying Wikipedia is completely pointless. Wikipedia is, as has been pointed out, distrubatable under the GDPL. Google could just decide to copy all of Wikipedia's content and run their own wiki on their own servers. Buying Wikipedia would give them nothing extra except an excuse to write a fairly large check.
I've heard those criticisms before, but I'm perfectly happy with Wikipedia being a hapharzard collection of (mostly) true statements. If I have some question, I can usually find an answer to it pretty quickly by googling Wikipedia. And if I just want to browse random facts, the current format is quite conducive to that.
And frankly, I think "haphazard collections of true statements" is a perfectly sensible goal to set. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, which is a reference, not a textbook. Reference books, as a general thing, tend to be haphazard collections of true statements. That's what distinguishes them from other books. Nobody complains that a dictionary just throws a bunch of definitions at you and hopes you can handle it.
Also, I don't think looking at the "target audience" is neccesarily the best way to look at open-sourcy things like Wikipedia. When you're doing something commercially, then yeah, it's important to ask, "Who do we expect will buy this?" With Wikipedia, I don't see why people should feel a need to have a target audience any more than "people who like this kind of thing."
I fail to see why you need a target audience in order to determine quality. The goal of Wikipedia is to be an encyclopedia, thus its quality with by that metric is how well it serves as an encyclopedia: how much information it contains.
To be slightly pedantic, no. Accountability can only help ensure quality once you have it. If you have a room full of kindergarteners and ask them to write a Calculus textbook, they will produce a textbook of dubious quality even if you kill every kid who makes a mistake. Quality can only come from people who know what they're doing. Accountability is merely one way to seperate the competent ones out from the incompetent.
Personally, I suspect that Wikipedia's method is a somewhat viable way to shuffle out the stupids, as true statements will be less likely to be edited than untrue statements, so gradually over time Wikipedia will tend to be more and more likely to contain true statements. But eh, you might be right.
To be pedantic, XXX wasn't a real MPAA rating. It was a self-attributed thing which porn would sometimes call itself. X was the highest rating the MPAA could give out, but when porn companies wanted to show that their porn was really porny, they'd call themselves XXX. (See Wikipedia) But otherwise yes, the switch from X to NC-17 was because X was overly associated with pornography.
The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots. Thank you.
You know what dupes I'm sick of? Those silly recursive jokes where a person just repeats the same joke over and over.
Re:constructive and nonconstructive
on
Hooked On The Web
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· Score: 1
I agree with you that you shouldn't blanket all addictions to "things that are online" as an online addiction, but at the same time I can readily accept the concept that people can be addicted to socialization. There are tons of people who are very socially needy, who feel like they need to talk to people or they feel "lonely." To me, this really seems to resemble addiction. People get a high out of social interaction, and when they can't get this high, they feel withdrawal.
Of course, calling this an addiction might be a bit much because pretty much everyone has such feelings to some degree. But it also seems quite within the realm of possibility for someone to go too far, to spend all their time socializing to the point that it gets in the way of life.
I don't know if that's true. Good biased research is done by actually conducting serious research and then selecting the most skewed way to interpret the data. This requires a bit more skill than just pulling numbers out of your ass.
Not to be too pedantic, but I don't know if capitalism is quite the right word. Some of the most popular software for blocking ads (Firefox and its associated plugins) are completely and utterly free. Capitalism is more than just people satisfying demand, it also implies trade and profit and stuff. People giving stuff away for free is an important part of a free market, but I don't know if you can call it capitalism as such.
That said, the Google Toolbar would prboably be considered capitalist, because even though it wasn't sold, it was given away with the intent of making profit for Google.
Although I admit that it would be "insanely difficult" for logic to replace fear, fear is not neccesary to decide what is desirable. A fearless person would still have emotions, and would be able to say, "This emotion makes me happier than that emotion, thus this consequence is preferable to that consequence."
Furthermore, by saying that without fear people would not be able to determine whether a consequence is preferable to another implies that people always use fear to make their decisions. Although I agree with the posts which say that the human reasoning proccess is a complex thing where emotion makes its say before logic has been able to make up its mind, people are quite capable of saying, "I don't want to walk into traffic right now" even without actively feeling fear about the thing. I can think of walking into traffic, not be frightened by the idea, but still say to myself "Well, that probably wouldn't be a very good idea."
And I should again point out that I am not talking about the specific mechanisms that the human mind uses to think. Fear might be a crucial part of the human mind, but this does not imply that fear is neccesary for thought itself. Thought can be abstracted away from whatever implementation it happens to have.
Nonsense. Campaign finance laws regulate the exchange of money, not speech. It's also illegal to murder someone even if your murder is an expression of some deeply held belief.
I believe in free speech with all my heart. However, money is another matter entirely. Money is power, and the whole point of a Republic is making sure that power over government is kept just so. Checks and balances, elections, all sorts of things to make sure that nobody has too much power over the government. By letting people run in and say, "lol, i have money" the whole thing amounts to naught.
That said, I admit I have some discomfort with some of what I hear about the laws, and suspect they might cross the line into infringing free speech in some areas. (Although what doesn't these days?) But at the same time, I think the overall subject of campaign financing is a subject worth engaging in.
Wearing a t-shirt isn't disregard. You're not causing the person to suffer when you wear a t-shirt. If you refuse to bathe, or if you have gobs of cheese stuck to your clothes, then yes, you are showing disregard. People will feel uncomfortable around you, and that's not nice. But nobody feels uncomfortable when they see someone in a t-shirt. Fashionability goes a step further. It says, "Hey, I don't really wanna be wearing these clothes but I am because I want you to like me. PLEASE LIKE ME!"
I don't think so. Fear is not the source of all human behavior. Without fear, people could still say, "Well... I could jump off the roof, but then I'd probably break a few bones, and that would hurt, and I don't like being hurt." (After all, you are arguing right now that there is something inherently bad about being shot in the head, surely a fearless person might be able to see your argument.)
Fear is merely a mental shortcut. Instead of rationally arguing that doing something will lead to an unadvantageous situation, our brains merely automatically develop fears of the situation and we avoid it quasi-instinctually.
That said, if you were to completely remove fear without changing anything else, I do not doubt that shit would happen. Human beings are nowhere near as smart as they could be, and are probably not capable of thinking things out clearly enough. As it stands, we probably need mental crutches like fear until we are able to augment our intelligence.
But still, we should not imply that fear and desire are the only things capable of driving people. Fear is distinct from pain, desire is distinct from happiness.
Oh, you meant "explaining why." Well that's a different matter entirely. But at the same time, I strongly doubt that that's a knowable question. Things (presumably) exist, and we only have knowledge about these things through our senses, which are unreliable. Thus, when attempting to understand the nature of external reality, all we can do is look at it and construct models which seem to not contradict our perceptions.
I don't follow. I agree that (in Physics at least, other fields are less mathematical) scientific theories are merely mathematical models of collected data, but how does that not constitute an explanation of reality? Reality is where data comes from.
Hmm... I don't know. Speech is not an excuse for any action. For example, it's illegal to kill people, even if you're killing people as a form of expression. Thus, you need to look at both the speech and non-speech aspects of an action.
Campaign financing is not merely the expression of an idea, but also the giving of money, and that second part is very serious and perhaps even dangerous. First, that seems to make it commerce, thus putting it under the domain of the commerce clause. (And it seems to me that since national elections are an activity between the states, logically if money is exchanged during that proccess they become a form of "commerce between the states.")
But more generally, giving money can be considered to be giving power. Power is very integral to the nature of a politician, and by extension the nature of government. Thus from a philosophical perspective, regulating the powers of politicians seems like a perfectly sensible act of self-regulation.
(I suppose my exact phrasing would thus make it only possible to regulate the campaign contributions of people who eventually win, which might be an interesting distinction from the current system.)
I wouldn't call it erroneous, because it was a purely stylistic action. Nobody would assume "stasis-" was a prefix, because anyone who knows what a prefix is knows that they never go at the end of words. Thus, anyone smart enough to know what a prefix is would merely assume that it was some sort of weird way to signify that the 'stasis' was merely part of a word rather than a full word. I suppose it's a bit less-than-ideal, so I changed it, but it wasn't wrong as much as it was weird.
"You don't get to whine about things you choose to do."
"But that's absurd. Ultimately, everything is optional. Even life itself is optional, you can just kill yourself. Thus, your argument implies that you can't whine about anything."
The argument isn't neccesarily airtight, (ifwm was talking about actively choosing to do things, whereas the suicide argument refers to are "passive" actions, which philosophically might be considered distinct) but it seems like at least a "reasonable" argument.
I disagree. John Goodman plays "angry" better than Chris Farley did. Chris Farley could jump around yelling developers, but I think John Goodman would be far superior at the task of yelling "Fucking Eric Schmidt is a fucking pussy. I'm going to fucking bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to fucking kill Google."
Slashdot Mirror
Many computer geeks lack the social skills to interact with anyone. I think the real problem is that girls are more encouraged to be social than men. (Although I don't know if this is cultural or genetic. Probably a combination.) Thus, women are more likely to be non-dweebs, and therefore be more likely to not want to hang out with a bunch of dweebs, therefore be more likely to not be willing to be Computer Science majors.
The Wikimedia Foundation would probably have a certain degree of resistance to being bought out and turned commercial. And furthermore everyone on Wikipedia would whine like hell.
Furthermore, buying Wikipedia is completely pointless. Wikipedia is, as has been pointed out, distrubatable under the GDPL. Google could just decide to copy all of Wikipedia's content and run their own wiki on their own servers. Buying Wikipedia would give them nothing extra except an excuse to write a fairly large check.
I've heard those criticisms before, but I'm perfectly happy with Wikipedia being a hapharzard collection of (mostly) true statements. If I have some question, I can usually find an answer to it pretty quickly by googling Wikipedia. And if I just want to browse random facts, the current format is quite conducive to that.
And frankly, I think "haphazard collections of true statements" is a perfectly sensible goal to set. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, which is a reference, not a textbook. Reference books, as a general thing, tend to be haphazard collections of true statements. That's what distinguishes them from other books. Nobody complains that a dictionary just throws a bunch of definitions at you and hopes you can handle it.
Also, I don't think looking at the "target audience" is neccesarily the best way to look at open-sourcy things like Wikipedia. When you're doing something commercially, then yeah, it's important to ask, "Who do we expect will buy this?" With Wikipedia, I don't see why people should feel a need to have a target audience any more than "people who like this kind of thing."
I fail to see why you need a target audience in order to determine quality. The goal of Wikipedia is to be an encyclopedia, thus its quality with by that metric is how well it serves as an encyclopedia: how much information it contains.
To be slightly pedantic, no. Accountability can only help ensure quality once you have it. If you have a room full of kindergarteners and ask them to write a Calculus textbook, they will produce a textbook of dubious quality even if you kill every kid who makes a mistake. Quality can only come from people who know what they're doing. Accountability is merely one way to seperate the competent ones out from the incompetent.
Personally, I suspect that Wikipedia's method is a somewhat viable way to shuffle out the stupids, as true statements will be less likely to be edited than untrue statements, so gradually over time Wikipedia will tend to be more and more likely to contain true statements. But eh, you might be right.
To be pedantic, XXX wasn't a real MPAA rating. It was a self-attributed thing which porn would sometimes call itself. X was the highest rating the MPAA could give out, but when porn companies wanted to show that their porn was really porny, they'd call themselves XXX. (See Wikipedia) But otherwise yes, the switch from X to NC-17 was because X was overly associated with pornography.
The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots. Thank you.
You know what dupes I'm sick of? Those silly recursive jokes where a person just repeats the same joke over and over.
I agree with you that you shouldn't blanket all addictions to "things that are online" as an online addiction, but at the same time I can readily accept the concept that people can be addicted to socialization. There are tons of people who are very socially needy, who feel like they need to talk to people or they feel "lonely." To me, this really seems to resemble addiction. People get a high out of social interaction, and when they can't get this high, they feel withdrawal.
Of course, calling this an addiction might be a bit much because pretty much everyone has such feelings to some degree. But it also seems quite within the realm of possibility for someone to go too far, to spend all their time socializing to the point that it gets in the way of life.
Nobody cares how big your inseam is.
Writing funky code means that if you get hit by a bus, your company will do all it can to make sure you live. :)
I don't know if that's true. Good biased research is done by actually conducting serious research and then selecting the most skewed way to interpret the data. This requires a bit more skill than just pulling numbers out of your ass.
Not to be too pedantic, but I don't know if capitalism is quite the right word. Some of the most popular software for blocking ads (Firefox and its associated plugins) are completely and utterly free. Capitalism is more than just people satisfying demand, it also implies trade and profit and stuff. People giving stuff away for free is an important part of a free market, but I don't know if you can call it capitalism as such.
That said, the Google Toolbar would prboably be considered capitalist, because even though it wasn't sold, it was given away with the intent of making profit for Google.
Although I admit that it would be "insanely difficult" for logic to replace fear, fear is not neccesary to decide what is desirable. A fearless person would still have emotions, and would be able to say, "This emotion makes me happier than that emotion, thus this consequence is preferable to that consequence."
Furthermore, by saying that without fear people would not be able to determine whether a consequence is preferable to another implies that people always use fear to make their decisions. Although I agree with the posts which say that the human reasoning proccess is a complex thing where emotion makes its say before logic has been able to make up its mind, people are quite capable of saying, "I don't want to walk into traffic right now" even without actively feeling fear about the thing. I can think of walking into traffic, not be frightened by the idea, but still say to myself "Well, that probably wouldn't be a very good idea."
And I should again point out that I am not talking about the specific mechanisms that the human mind uses to think. Fear might be a crucial part of the human mind, but this does not imply that fear is neccesary for thought itself. Thought can be abstracted away from whatever implementation it happens to have.
I pronounce it Yuu-essian in my head, although I personally never use the phrase.
Nonsense. Campaign finance laws regulate the exchange of money, not speech. It's also illegal to murder someone even if your murder is an expression of some deeply held belief.
I believe in free speech with all my heart. However, money is another matter entirely. Money is power, and the whole point of a Republic is making sure that power over government is kept just so. Checks and balances, elections, all sorts of things to make sure that nobody has too much power over the government. By letting people run in and say, "lol, i have money" the whole thing amounts to naught.
That said, I admit I have some discomfort with some of what I hear about the laws, and suspect they might cross the line into infringing free speech in some areas. (Although what doesn't these days?) But at the same time, I think the overall subject of campaign financing is a subject worth engaging in.
Wearing a t-shirt isn't disregard. You're not causing the person to suffer when you wear a t-shirt. If you refuse to bathe, or if you have gobs of cheese stuck to your clothes, then yes, you are showing disregard. People will feel uncomfortable around you, and that's not nice. But nobody feels uncomfortable when they see someone in a t-shirt. Fashionability goes a step further. It says, "Hey, I don't really wanna be wearing these clothes but I am because I want you to like me. PLEASE LIKE ME!"
To me, this seems ruder than wearing a t-shirt.
I don't think so. Fear is not the source of all human behavior. Without fear, people could still say, "Well... I could jump off the roof, but then I'd probably break a few bones, and that would hurt, and I don't like being hurt." (After all, you are arguing right now that there is something inherently bad about being shot in the head, surely a fearless person might be able to see your argument.)
Fear is merely a mental shortcut. Instead of rationally arguing that doing something will lead to an unadvantageous situation, our brains merely automatically develop fears of the situation and we avoid it quasi-instinctually.
That said, if you were to completely remove fear without changing anything else, I do not doubt that shit would happen. Human beings are nowhere near as smart as they could be, and are probably not capable of thinking things out clearly enough. As it stands, we probably need mental crutches like fear until we are able to augment our intelligence.
But still, we should not imply that fear and desire are the only things capable of driving people. Fear is distinct from pain, desire is distinct from happiness.
You assume that politics and insanity are distinct. :)
Oh, you meant "explaining why." Well that's a different matter entirely. But at the same time, I strongly doubt that that's a knowable question. Things (presumably) exist, and we only have knowledge about these things through our senses, which are unreliable. Thus, when attempting to understand the nature of external reality, all we can do is look at it and construct models which seem to not contradict our perceptions.
I don't follow. I agree that (in Physics at least, other fields are less mathematical) scientific theories are merely mathematical models of collected data, but how does that not constitute an explanation of reality? Reality is where data comes from.
Hmm... I don't know. Speech is not an excuse for any action. For example, it's illegal to kill people, even if you're killing people as a form of expression. Thus, you need to look at both the speech and non-speech aspects of an action.
Campaign financing is not merely the expression of an idea, but also the giving of money, and that second part is very serious and perhaps even dangerous. First, that seems to make it commerce, thus putting it under the domain of the commerce clause. (And it seems to me that since national elections are an activity between the states, logically if money is exchanged during that proccess they become a form of "commerce between the states.")
But more generally, giving money can be considered to be giving power. Power is very integral to the nature of a politician, and by extension the nature of government. Thus from a philosophical perspective, regulating the powers of politicians seems like a perfectly sensible act of self-regulation.
(I suppose my exact phrasing would thus make it only possible to regulate the campaign contributions of people who eventually win, which might be an interesting distinction from the current system.)
I wouldn't call it erroneous, because it was a purely stylistic action. Nobody would assume "stasis-" was a prefix, because anyone who knows what a prefix is knows that they never go at the end of words. Thus, anyone smart enough to know what a prefix is would merely assume that it was some sort of weird way to signify that the 'stasis' was merely part of a word rather than a full word. I suppose it's a bit less-than-ideal, so I changed it, but it wasn't wrong as much as it was weird.
It seemed logical enough to me.
"You don't get to whine about things you choose to do."
"But that's absurd. Ultimately, everything is optional. Even life itself is optional, you can just kill yourself. Thus, your argument implies that you can't whine about anything."
The argument isn't neccesarily airtight, (ifwm was talking about actively choosing to do things, whereas the suicide argument refers to are "passive" actions, which philosophically might be considered distinct) but it seems like at least a "reasonable" argument.
As an addendum, I just found out that in "Pirates of Silicon Valley," Steve Ballmer was played by John DiMaggio, voice of Bender in Futurama.
I disagree. John Goodman plays "angry" better than Chris Farley did. Chris Farley could jump around yelling developers, but I think John Goodman would be far superior at the task of yelling "Fucking Eric Schmidt is a fucking pussy. I'm going to fucking bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to fucking kill Google."