Question the methods if you will, but I think people have figured out that organizing is the only way to get companies to listen.
There's a series of natural parallels here. Capitalists accumulate; workers unionize; consumers boycott. Sometimes I wonder if management hostility toward unions is partly motivated by the fact that management was countered by their own method: the accumulation of social resources. It makes sense that it would work for consumers as well.
It takes less than ten minutes a month to pay all your bills online manually. (Once you've done the initial setup, of course, which you have to do no matter which method you use to pay.) I pay essentials like electric and phone online, and ten minutes is a gross over-estimate of the time I spend doing it.
Let's say I automated all of that. I would still have to spend five to ten minutes a month just checking my accounts to make sure the payments had been made, posted in the correct amounts to my checking account, et cetera. Automatic payments would be a wash at best, unless you're the kind of person who doesn't do that sort of cross-checking and verifying... in which case, when I see you in front of the 7-11, no, you can't have any change.
The companies that want you to auto-pay want you to do so because their cash reserves are collecting interest somewhere, so every day they have your money and you don't is very profitable for them. I might consider auto-pay if I got that interest instead, but then the companies who want you to auto-pay probably wouldn't want it anymore.
Why in blazes should people who don't have kids, or who responsibly make arrangements for them to be cared for... have to pay in the form of a lower salary for yours?
You think you don't benefit from civilization? From law, order, a structured society? From the strong caring for the weak? Compassion, sympathy, friendship, co-operation? An educational system? Hospitals, doctors, nurses? The elimination of smallpox? The defeat of people who were gassing Jews? Protection from discrimination against your idiosyncrasies? The remission of the Law of the Jungle? The spare time to do something other than digging dirt for mere subsistence? The technology and luxury for you to post to Slashdot instead of being out hunting and gathering tonight's meal?
Society is a complex web of interdependent relationships and compromises from which you too benefit.
1: It may make your work faster and more efficient. 2: It may require less maintenance than your old computer. 3: It won't, but that's not necessary; it's like asking a workman whether a new hammer would make his job any more profitable. That doesn't mean it's not an investment anyway.
Welcome to Slashdot! Let me help you by translating into the local idiom:
1: It may make your work faster and more efficient. 2: ??? 3:... profit...
I mean, the obvious issue that comes to most people's minds was the shuttle explosion, apparently caused by poor engineering decisions, and subsequent cover-ups of them.
Not poor engineering decisions, poor management decisions. In both cases, engineers warned of the problems, and were cockblocked by management, mostly due to funding issues. NASA is our most important program, and one of our worst funded.
The sad thing is, if the bloated life-sucking tick that is DoD were cut down to size, we'd have plenty of money for both education and Constellation. As I say in my sig, Five percent of one year's DoD budget puts us on Mars. Even at padded government rates, we could put a team of four scientists and infrastructure for settlement on Mars for about 30 billion dollars. (Zubrin has suggested a private firm could do it for only seven billion.) Space geeks who haven't read The Case For Mars should make it a priority. All of the info is online at the link above; the paperback is almost always on the shelf at my local B&N; and it's only $11 at Amazon.
Zubrin has outlined a straightforward plan to settle an entire other planet at relatively low cost. What the hell is the hold-up? How is it this is not the most obvious project in the solar system?
But [it's] been so lopsided towards the creators these days.
Not the creators, the copyright holders. Those are not always the same people. Courtney Love does the math is still a good place to start.
This is important to me personally because I feel that our genuine intellectual lifeblood, the creators, are frequently screwed over by lawyers and businessmen who legally own the copyrights. As a Nietzschean, of course I feel that businessmen are supposed to be at the bottom of the social pyramid, and the creators, our genuine artists, at the top. The legal types are supposed to be a support mechanism for our creators. Instead, the artists are treated as a commodity to generate cash-flow for the suits.
Somehow these briefcase-wielding cocksuckers have flipped the whole damn world upside down.
People are assholes. Anonymity just lets them get away with it.
(To get geekier, I'd reference Frank Herbert's idea that perhaps not all people are human and ask if it is only civilization's arbitrary training mechanisms that create the quality of humanity in people.)
-Julius Caesar burned it down in 48BCE (Olympian, by way of Rome) -Emperor Aurelian destroyed the remains in 274 CE (Olympian, by way of Rome) -Emperor Theophilus ordered it destroyed in 391 CE (Christian) -Amr ibn al 'Aas burned what was left of it in 642 CE (Muslim)
Have we reached a time where all of our tool-sets are now made moot by vast clouds of information and strictly applied maths? I think there's a Star Trek analogy here.
When Gene Roddenberry was putting together TNG, his theme for the series was "Prometheus Unbound". Roddenberry wanted to explore a world of ideas, to explore what happens when scarcity is not a factor. When you have so much energy and so much technology that the only limitation is your imagination, what do you do then? What decisions do you still have to make? What conflicts must you still resolve? (I think this can be a difficult sell because few of us can relate to a scarcity-free world. If you look at the luxurious 1701-D and then compare it to, say, Babylon 5 with downbelow and lurkers, it's clear which one is more like our world, and thus, which one is more about our personal stories.)
So now imagine a world so Googleized that finding the facts is never a problem. What we do then is decide what to do. What kind of world do we build? What kind of society do we want?
We can abandon representative democracy because referenda have no cost -- Google knows how people will vote. Do we still want representative democracy because there are social benefits that come only with that structure? What about communism or capitalism? Who cares! Google has correlated all information everywhere and knows what goods to ship where... if we can agree on what our beliefs and priorities are. A more Googly world also gets us closer to the idealized Adam Smith "perfect information flow" discussed in Economics 101. Is the end result of this a win for libertarians? Or will perfect information flow have different consequences than we believe it will?
When Google's clusters tell us the facts, our role will be to be the deciders of things. We will have to choose those things that are beyond facts. Personally, I feel this gets us closer to our ideal selves. We'll get closer to choosing what we really want rather than choosing from the subset of what we can have.
"In the Bullshit Department, a businessman can't hold a candle to a clergyman. 'Cause I gotta tell you the truth, folks. When it comes to bullshit, big-time, major league bullshit, you have to stand in awe of the all-time champion of false promises and exaggerated claims: religion. No contest. No contest. Religion. Religion easily has the greatest bullshit story ever told." -- George Carlin
How does Google make money at anything? They'll sell your eyeballs to advertisers. As long as they sell my eyeballs off to the side with no blinking or animation, that's fine by me.
What was the last good version? Norton Utilities for DOS 6.01? Finding good Norton is easy. Norton rocked when there was a picture of the man himself, wearing a tie and a dress shirt with his sleeves rolled up, on all of his products.
Face it, it was just a movie. People aren't going to invest any more meaning in it than in any other bit of summer blockbuster popcorn entertainment. "What's in there?" "Only what you take with you."
Please do not look to "The Matrix" for spiritual guidance. You won't find anything worth a damn there. I respectfully disagree. The Matrix asks a lot of important questions about creation, existence, and perception that every individual absolutely must deal with if they are going to choose their place in the world around them, if they are genuinely going to decide to even be an individual. The Matrix is our generation's telling of Allegory of the Cave, which is the root of all Western European thought about both will and epistemology.
Absolutely seconded, Cosmos is just brilliant. Even without the science, even just as some visual tone poem, it would be a fascinating show. I remember a "thought spaceship" -- it might not have been that exact name -- where Sagan introduced the idea that we might picture in our minds what could exist literally "billions" of light years away. Cosmos also was my introduction to the composer Shostakovich and his 11th symphony.
But with the science? Cosmos is of profound educational and inspirational value. It's been something like 30 years since it came out -- I tend to think of Cosmos in one mental breath with the specials about relativity that came out in 1979 for the centennial of Einstein's birth -- but I remember feeling like this was something special. Sagan was a guy who really had a sense of just how damn cool the universe is.
Add the following in Preferences window: [X] Allow resizing of chat input area Sadly, some devs know the "Any feature that can't be disabled is a bug." principle and just disagree with it. Then you're just screwed. Or forked.;-) (Look at http://senseis.xmp.net/?KGSWishlist%2FGeneralUI and search for "I can't disagree more strongly" for just one example. CGoban is a rich, detailed, and widely-used app; wms clearly is not deficient in skills. He just doesn't care about options, and he's the dev, so too bad.)
There are people in the linked thread saying things like "But in practice, IM messages are usually one line.". This is so unbelievably not true in so many contexts that it's like they're trying to stir up trouble. (I'm trying to avoid saying "pissing contest".) In my office, we use IM to send a lot of "ok", "thx", et cetera, but we also frequently IM the entire text of an email for review before sending, or send 15 or 20 lines of data from a report so someone in a branch office can check job progress, et cetera. I don't think we're the only ones doing this.
All those people who cut corners had to rush to fix all of their pages.... So lots of the dumb people from the previous example didn't learn their lesson, and skipped the semicolon.... Yep, that's right, Netscape 4 came out and broke all their pages again. Moderation +2: Cluestick of Justice!!!
Open source, he said, creates a license 'so that nobody can ever improve the software,' he claimed, bemoaning the squandered opportunity for jobs and business.
"Spike's working for Adam? After all we've done-- nah, I can't even act surprised."
However, if people knew and accepted this they might actually behave more humane, because they'd realize that no deity or karmic force is going to do shit for them.
If you haven't watched Angel, today is as good a time as any to start:
Angel: "Well, I guess I kinda - worked it out. If there is no great glorious end to all this, if - nothing we do matters, - then all that matters is what we do. 'cause that's all there is. What we do, now, today. - I fought for so long. For redemption, for a reward - finally just to beat the other guy, but... I never got it." Kate: "And now you do?" Angel: "Not all of it. All I wanna do is help. I wanna help because - I don't think people should suffer, as they do. Because, if there is no bigger meaning, then the smallest act of kindness - is the greatest thing in the world."
Evolution is really good at explaining how butterflies change color overtime, it does not explain how you get from paramecium to human... Why do you say that?
I once asked a religious person who was busting my chops about evolution if she believed that children were identical to their parents. She said she did not. I asked her if she believed that some people live longer and others die sooner based on their individual characteristics. She said she did.
I said then that she did believe in evolution, because at its heart, that's more or less what evolution is: natural selection resulting in change over long periods of time. She then said, "Yes, but you can't become a gorilla."
So why these arbitrary lines? Why can't a paramecium evolve into a human? Why can't humans devolve into a more ape-like form? Why can't anything evolve into anything? Given that we see changes in life all the time, why would we believe there are some very specific points at which that change stops?
Slashdot Mirror
Question the methods if you will, but I think people have figured out that organizing is the only way to get companies to listen.
There's a series of natural parallels here. Capitalists accumulate; workers unionize; consumers boycott. Sometimes I wonder if management hostility toward unions is partly motivated by the fact that management was countered by their own method: the accumulation of social resources. It makes sense that it would work for consumers as well.
Why automate any of it?
It takes less than ten minutes a month to pay all your bills online manually. (Once you've done the initial setup, of course, which you have to do no matter which method you use to pay.) I pay essentials like electric and phone online, and ten minutes is a gross over-estimate of the time I spend doing it.
Let's say I automated all of that. I would still have to spend five to ten minutes a month just checking my accounts to make sure the payments had been made, posted in the correct amounts to my checking account, et cetera. Automatic payments would be a wash at best, unless you're the kind of person who doesn't do that sort of cross-checking and verifying... in which case, when I see you in front of the 7-11, no, you can't have any change.
The companies that want you to auto-pay want you to do so because their cash reserves are collecting interest somewhere, so every day they have your money and you don't is very profitable for them. I might consider auto-pay if I got that interest instead, but then the companies who want you to auto-pay probably wouldn't want it anymore.
Why in blazes should people who don't have kids, or who responsibly make arrangements for them to be cared for... have to pay in the form of a lower salary for yours?
You think you don't benefit from civilization? From law, order, a structured society? From the strong caring for the weak? Compassion, sympathy, friendship, co-operation? An educational system? Hospitals, doctors, nurses? The elimination of smallpox? The defeat of people who were gassing Jews? Protection from discrimination against your idiosyncrasies? The remission of the Law of the Jungle? The spare time to do something other than digging dirt for mere subsistence? The technology and luxury for you to post to Slashdot instead of being out hunting and gathering tonight's meal?
Society is a complex web of interdependent relationships and compromises from which you too benefit.
That's why.
1: It may make your work faster and more efficient.
2: It may require less maintenance than your old computer.
3: It won't, but that's not necessary; it's like asking a workman whether a new hammer would make his job any more profitable. That doesn't mean it's not an investment anyway.
Welcome to Slashdot! Let me help you by translating into the local idiom:
1: It may make your work faster and more efficient. ... profit...
2: ???
3:
I mean, the obvious issue that comes to most people's minds was the shuttle explosion, apparently caused by poor engineering decisions, and subsequent cover-ups of them.
Not poor engineering decisions, poor management decisions. In both cases, engineers warned of the problems, and were cockblocked by management, mostly due to funding issues. NASA is our most important program, and one of our worst funded.
The sad thing is, if the bloated life-sucking tick that is DoD were cut down to size, we'd have plenty of money for both education and Constellation. As I say in my sig, Five percent of one year's DoD budget puts us on Mars. Even at padded government rates, we could put a team of four scientists and infrastructure for settlement on Mars for about 30 billion dollars. (Zubrin has suggested a private firm could do it for only seven billion.) Space geeks who haven't read The Case For Mars should make it a priority. All of the info is online at the link above; the paperback is almost always on the shelf at my local B&N; and it's only $11 at Amazon.
Zubrin has outlined a straightforward plan to settle an entire other planet at relatively low cost. What the hell is the hold-up? How is it this is not the most obvious project in the solar system?
Can we get a mars.slashdot.org subdomain?
I think people would be quicker to fix the economy if the problem were called "economic constipation".
But [it's] been so lopsided towards the creators these days.
Not the creators, the copyright holders. Those are not always the same people. Courtney Love does the math is still a good place to start.
This is important to me personally because I feel that our genuine intellectual lifeblood, the creators, are frequently screwed over by lawyers and businessmen who legally own the copyrights. As a Nietzschean, of course I feel that businessmen are supposed to be at the bottom of the social pyramid, and the creators, our genuine artists, at the top. The legal types are supposed to be a support mechanism for our creators. Instead, the artists are treated as a commodity to generate cash-flow for the suits.
Somehow these briefcase-wielding cocksuckers have flipped the whole damn world upside down.
... the dehumanizing effect of anonymity.
People are assholes. Anonymity just lets them get away with it.
(To get geekier, I'd reference Frank Herbert's idea that perhaps not all people are human and ask if it is only civilization's arbitrary training mechanisms that create the quality of humanity in people.)
Burma Shave.
By the gods, I wish you could get +10.
-Julius Caesar burned it down in 48BCE (Olympian, by way of Rome)
-Emperor Aurelian destroyed the remains in 274 CE (Olympian, by way of Rome)
-Emperor Theophilus ordered it destroyed in 391 CE (Christian)
-Amr ibn al 'Aas burned what was left of it in 642 CE (Muslim)
Fixed. AKA, please don't patronize others' religion, thanks.
Why do I have to <p> on my paragraphs when I've selected "plain old text"??
So other Slashdotters won't try to mack on your hotties.When Gene Roddenberry was putting together TNG, his theme for the series was "Prometheus Unbound". Roddenberry wanted to explore a world of ideas, to explore what happens when scarcity is not a factor. When you have so much energy and so much technology that the only limitation is your imagination, what do you do then? What decisions do you still have to make? What conflicts must you still resolve? (I think this can be a difficult sell because few of us can relate to a scarcity-free world. If you look at the luxurious 1701-D and then compare it to, say, Babylon 5 with downbelow and lurkers, it's clear which one is more like our world, and thus, which one is more about our personal stories.)
So now imagine a world so Googleized that finding the facts is never a problem. What we do then is decide what to do. What kind of world do we build? What kind of society do we want?
We can abandon representative democracy because referenda have no cost -- Google knows how people will vote. Do we still want representative democracy because there are social benefits that come only with that structure? What about communism or capitalism? Who cares! Google has correlated all information everywhere and knows what goods to ship where... if we can agree on what our beliefs and priorities are. A more Googly world also gets us closer to the idealized Adam Smith "perfect information flow" discussed in Economics 101. Is the end result of this a win for libertarians? Or will perfect information flow have different consequences than we believe it will?
When Google's clusters tell us the facts, our role will be to be the deciders of things. We will have to choose those things that are beyond facts. Personally, I feel this gets us closer to our ideal selves. We'll get closer to choosing what we really want rather than choosing from the subset of what we can have.
Sadly, the answer is a few webpages down the way, in a recent Slashdot post:
"In the Bullshit Department, a businessman can't hold a candle to a clergyman. 'Cause I gotta tell you the truth, folks. When it comes to bullshit, big-time, major league bullshit, you have to stand in awe of the all-time champion of false promises and exaggerated claims: religion. No contest. No contest. Religion. Religion easily has the greatest bullshit story ever told." -- George Carlin
"Only what you take with you."
That's worth a big damn.
Absolutely seconded, Cosmos is just brilliant. Even without the science, even just as some visual tone poem, it would be a fascinating show. I remember a "thought spaceship" -- it might not have been that exact name -- where Sagan introduced the idea that we might picture in our minds what could exist literally "billions" of light years away. Cosmos also was my introduction to the composer Shostakovich and his 11th symphony.
But with the science? Cosmos is of profound educational and inspirational value. It's been something like 30 years since it came out -- I tend to think of Cosmos in one mental breath with the specials about relativity that came out in 1979 for the centennial of Einstein's birth -- but I remember feeling like this was something special. Sagan was a guy who really had a sense of just how damn cool the universe is.
There are people in the linked thread saying things like "But in practice, IM messages are usually one line.". This is so unbelievably not true in so many contexts that it's like they're trying to stir up trouble. (I'm trying to avoid saying "pissing contest".) In my office, we use IM to send a lot of "ok", "thx", et cetera, but we also frequently IM the entire text of an email for review before sending, or send 15 or 20 lines of data from a report so someone in a branch office can check job progress, et cetera. I don't think we're the only ones doing this.
Genoism they call it.
Dammit! Now I'm going to have to rename my new religion!
Open source, he said, creates a license 'so that nobody can ever improve the software,' he claimed, bemoaning the squandered opportunity for jobs and business.
"Spike's working for Adam? After all we've done-- nah, I can't even act surprised."
If you haven't watched Angel, today is as good a time as any to start: Angel: "Well, I guess I kinda - worked it out. If there is no great glorious end to all this, if - nothing we do matters, - then all that matters is what we do. 'cause that's all there is. What we do, now, today. - I fought for so long. For redemption, for a reward - finally just to beat the other guy, but... I never got it."
Kate: "And now you do?"
Angel: "Not all of it. All I wanna do is help. I wanna help because - I don't think people should suffer, as they do. Because, if there is no bigger meaning, then the smallest act of kindness - is the greatest thing in the world."
I once asked a religious person who was busting my chops about evolution if she believed that children were identical to their parents. She said she did not. I asked her if she believed that some people live longer and others die sooner based on their individual characteristics. She said she did.
I said then that she did believe in evolution, because at its heart, that's more or less what evolution is: natural selection resulting in change over long periods of time. She then said, "Yes, but you can't become a gorilla."
So why these arbitrary lines? Why can't a paramecium evolve into a human? Why can't humans devolve into a more ape-like form? Why can't anything evolve into anything? Given that we see changes in life all the time, why would we believe there are some very specific points at which that change stops?