"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world;
the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
-- George Bernard Shaw
> Political correctness is about avoiding potentially inoffensive things because that tends to be bad politically.
Agreed. That is why I call it Political Censorship. Censoring words because of some negative connotation which would basically screw the politician out of votes due to backlash.
> Not only that, but he acts like "free" software wasn't just hit with some of the most massive security holes
You seem to be under the delusion that the philosophy used to write the software undermagically makes it immune to bugs; no one is claiming that.
How many bugs in Windows, worms, viruses, trojans are closed / non-free source??
The WHOLE point of open / free source is that you and everyone else CAN contribute to make it better; in contradistinction you don't have that freedom with non-free closed source. Over time, in the long run, free/open source software is better for society instead of worrying about hidden back doors in closed non-free propriety source code and/or binaries.
> However to say that you react before -any- info reaches the brain smacks of a physical impossibility
Incorrect. You have outdated information.
There have been studies shown that the heart is able to react pre-stimulus; THEN the brain reacts. The heart contains 40,000+ neurons is part of the reason.
the amygdala makes instantaneous decisions about the threat level of incoming sensory information, and due to its extensive connections to the hypothalamus and other autonomic nervous system centers, is able to "hijack" the neural pathways activating the autonomic nervous system and emotional response before the higher brain centers receive the sensory information.
(Emphasis added)
Our left brain is apparently operating at 15kb / second while our right brain is apparently operating at 20million kb / second. We don't know how fast our heart brain is operating at but we do know that the electromagnetic field around our heart is 4000 times greater than the field of our brain.
> Let's say if a big bank (i.e. HSBC, or Santander) got caught, certainly hundreds of people would go to jail, right?
./sarcasm Yes; Oh wait...
In October 2001, Birkenfeld began working at UBS in Geneva, Switzerland, handling private banking, primarily for clients located in the United States. In 2005, he learned that UBS's secret dealings with American customers violated an agreement the bank had reached with the IRS.
He resigned from UBS in October 2005 and provided written whistleblower complaints to Peter Kurer, Head Counsel for UBS, and other UBS senior executives regarding the illegal practices of U.S. cross-border business.
He is the first person to expose what has become a multi-billion dollar international tax fraud scandal over Swiss private banking Despite his unprecedented, extensive and voluntary cooperation, and registering as an IRS whistleblower, Birkenfeld is the only U.S. citizen to be sentenced to jail as a result of the scandal in March 2012.
... As a result of the financial recoveries facilitated by his whistleblowing, Birkenfeld received a $104 million award from the IRS Whistleblower Office in September 2012.
The ironic thing is that we were warned exactly about this situation:
"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered... I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies... The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs." -- Thomas Jefferson
> So why does someone leave and create a startup like that anyway? Oh yeah, to get more money.
That is an incomplete picture.
Gee, didn't we just have a story about older people joining a startup because they want to be freed of corporate bureaucracy, and want work to be fun again??
Man that sucks. Sounds like the standard pump-n-dump get-rich scheme.:-/
And companies wonder why they can't hire good coders -- maybe because we've seen all the bullshit before, while the young coders have delusions of grandeur of being the "next hot thing" being "naive".
You seem to be think that if people don't live up your "idealism" then you can simply toss the baby out with the bathwater??
Was Jefferson perfect? No one is claiming that he was. However, in his area of expertise, he advocated what worked and what didn't. Jefferson was pragmatic.
The greatest problem with the US today is complete apathy, and greed. Most people don't give a damn -- "Not my problem!" Which is exactly why the US will collapse from within, before being rebuilt.
Before shooting the messenger how about paying attention to the message:
Jefferson was not alone in his concerns about the future of the US:
I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs."
Dr. James McHenry asked "Well Doctor what have we got, a republic or a monarchy." Ben Franklin replied, "A republic . . . if you can keep it."
John Adams wrote:
"There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide,"
James Madison wrote in Federalist 10 that
"Democracies have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths."
The founding fathers were well aware of the problem of sustainability.
Only an idiot ignores the message simply because they don't like messenger.
I don't listen to a lot of music -- growing up or as an adult. As a result I'm not familiar with a lot of popular bands (from any era.) As a teenager I was too busy programming, tearing apart how games worked in assembly language, learning graphics; As an adult these days I spend most time on game dev, game design, and still gaming. I have very little time to listen to (popular) music -- I prefer music without vocals.
> You are basically advocating violent overthrown of the government, a.k.a. treason -
You do realize that Jefferson said this right?
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
Which was interpreted to mean a revolution every generation:
"God forbid we should ever be 20. years without such a rebellion"
Here is the full context:
"I do not know whether it is to yourself or Mr. Adams I am to give my thanks for the copy of the new constitution. I beg leave through you to place them where due. It will be yet three weeks before I shall receive them from America. There are very good articles in it: and very bad. I do not know which preponderate. What we have lately read in the history of Holland, in the chapter on the Stadtholder, would have sufficed to set me against a Chief magistrate eligible for a long duration, if I had ever been disposed towards one: and what we have always read of the elections of Polish kings should have forever excluded the idea of one continuable for life. Wonderful is the effect of impudent and persevering lying. The British ministry have so long hired their gazetteers to repeat and model into every form lies about our being in anarchy, that the world has at length believed them, the English nation has believed them, the ministers themselves have come to believe them, and what is more wonderful, we have believed them ourselves. Yet where does this anarchy exist? Where did it ever exist, except in the single instance of Massachusets? And can history produce an instance of a rebellion so honourably conducted? I say nothing of it's motives. They were founded in ignorance, not wickedness. God forbid we should ever be 20. years without such a rebellion.[1] The people can not be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. We have had 13. states independant 11. years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century and a half for each state. What country ever existed a century and a half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve it's liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it's natural manure. Our Convention has been too much impressed by the insurrection of Massachusets: and in the spur of the moment they are setting up a kite to keep the hen yard in order. I hope in god this article will be rectified before the new constitution is accepted."
[1] This sentence has possibly been misquoted as "every generation needs a new revolution."
Thank-you for exposing me to new music. Just bought CCR 20 Greatest hits off iTunes. Great to find classic rock when it still had soul before selling out.
Slashdot Mirror
> I still won't use Emacs though! :-)
Bloody right chap. I see you came to your senses; Vim it is! ;-) /half-sarcasm-half-serious
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world;
the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.
Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
-- George Bernard Shaw
> Political correctness is about avoiding potentially inoffensive things because that tends to be bad politically.
Agreed. That is why I call it Political Censorship. Censoring words because of some negative connotation which would basically screw the politician out of votes due to backlash.
> Not only that, but he acts like "free" software wasn't just hit with some of the most massive security holes
You seem to be under the delusion that the philosophy used to write the software under magically makes it immune to bugs; no one is claiming that.
How many bugs in Windows, worms, viruses, trojans are closed / non-free source??
The WHOLE point of open / free source is that you and everyone else CAN contribute to make it better; in contradistinction you don't have that freedom with non-free closed source. Over time, in the long run, free/open source software is better for society instead of worrying about hidden back doors in closed non-free propriety source code and/or binaries.
You are making a mountain out of a mole hill.
> However to say that you react before -any- info reaches the brain smacks of a physical impossibility
Incorrect. You have outdated information.
There have been studies shown that the heart is able to react pre-stimulus; THEN the brain reacts. The heart contains 40,000+ neurons is part of the reason.
(Emphasis added)
Our left brain is apparently operating at 15kb / second while our right brain is apparently operating at 20million kb / second. We don't know how fast our heart brain is operating at but we do know that the electromagnetic field around our heart is 4000 times greater than the field of our brain.
* http://www.heartmath.org/resea...
* http://www.heartmath.org/free-...
* http://www.livingtransformatio...
./ sarcasm Shhhh, we have to declare the next inanimate object the next evil incarnate.
> I was flabbergasted by the difference in adoption between last year and this year. Everyone had 4K gear.
The hardware guys are always hocking the latest fads.
i.e.
2012 = 3D
2013 = 4K
Yup, that's always a good laugh when a company is so big it ends up suing itself !
* Sony vs. Sony
. /sarcasm What?! Treat the customer with some respect? Heresy! What are you? Some kind of weird User Experience developer? :-)
What, you don't like the mandatory weekly BitCoin "news" ? :-)
> Let's say if a big bank (i.e. HSBC, or Santander) got caught, certainly hundreds of people would go to jail, right?
. /sarcasm Yes; Oh wait ...
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
Eventually justice is rendered
HSBC had to (eventually) pay:
* http://www.salon.com/2012/12/1...
Greed knows no bounds ...
* http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...
The ironic thing is that we were warned exactly about this situation:
The arrogance of Sony won't allow them to do that. They have a fetish for proprietary failed formats
Failed Sony Formats...
* Betamax http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
* MiniDisc http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
* HiFD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
* SSDS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
* BroadBand eBook http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
* Memory Stick http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... (almost dead)
* HDV http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H... dying
* Super Audio CD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
* Universal Media Disc http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U... (dying)
Successful Sony Formats...
+ CD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
+ Blu-ray http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
> And do we really need to care about single-threaded performance that much these days?
Not every task is parallelizable.
Second, are you going to pay for an engineer to make their code multi-threaded that shows X% run-time performance?
Yeah, I weep too because the US gets what she deserves. :-((((
The problem and solution is in the mirror: The cause of apathy.
> So why does someone leave and create a startup like that anyway? Oh yeah, to get more money.
That is an incomplete picture.
Gee, didn't we just have a story about older people joining a startup because they want to be freed of corporate bureaucracy, and want work to be fun again??
Ask Slashdot: Joining a Startup As an Older Programmer?
Yeah. Companies want to be able to fire your ass at any second but if you leave they expect you to stay 2 weeks.
Mutual respect for employees is not a common trait for the legal "psychopath", er, corporation.
Man that sucks. Sounds like the standard pump-n-dump get-rich scheme. :-/
And companies wonder why they can't hire good coders -- maybe because we've seen all the bullshit before, while the young coders have delusions of grandeur of being the "next hot thing" being "naive".
> The stash/shelve feature is sorely missing from SVN.
Am I missing something here? I'm not understanding why you couldn't just make a new branch?
So you solution is to run away??
And go where exactly again?? Canada? Australia? Europe? Asia?
Almost every single country (aside from 6) is run by financial idiots.
* List of countries by External Debt
* List of countries by Public Debt
You seem to be think that if people don't live up your "idealism" then you can simply toss the baby out with the bathwater??
Was Jefferson perfect? No one is claiming that he was. However, in his area of expertise, he advocated what worked and what didn't. Jefferson was pragmatic.
The greatest problem with the US today is complete apathy, and greed. Most people don't give a damn -- "Not my problem!" Which is exactly why the US will collapse from within, before being rebuilt.
Before shooting the messenger how about paying attention to the message:
Jefferson was not alone in his concerns about the future of the US:
John Adams wrote:
James Madison wrote in Federalist 10 that
The founding fathers were well aware of the problem of sustainability.
Only an idiot ignores the message simply because they don't like messenger.
I don't listen to a lot of music -- growing up or as an adult. As a result I'm not familiar with a lot of popular bands (from any era.) As a teenager I was too busy programming, tearing apart how games worked in assembly language, learning graphics; As an adult these days I spend most time on game dev, game design, and still gaming. I have very little time to listen to (popular) music -- I prefer music without vocals.
> You are basically advocating violent overthrown of the government, a.k.a. treason -
You do realize that Jefferson said this right?
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
Which was interpreted to mean a revolution every generation:
"God forbid we should ever be 20. years without such a rebellion"
Here is the full context:
[1] This sentence has possibly been misquoted as "every generation needs a new revolution."
* http://wiki.monticello.org/med...
Agreed that Dobson did more to popularize astronomy.
Guess we leave this one up to the history "experts" to argue over to the end of time.
Sorry, don't get the reference. Looks like Bo Selecta is a British sketch show. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo'_Selecta!)
Which are the "essential" skits to watch?
Wow! Interesting back story!
Thank-you for exposing me to new music. Just bought CCR 20 Greatest hits off iTunes. Great to find classic rock when it still had soul before selling out.