You have to accept the fact that, in America, the Republican party has been in large part co-opted by ultra-religious interests
I'm a liberal and I disagree with this statement.
The Republican party is a combination of two major groups. The first are the ultra-religious. These are the foot soldiers. They use churches as organizing elements for the disseminating (dis)information and getting large numbers of people to the polls to vote for Republicans. The second group are corporate leaders who provide the money to get people elected in exchange for kickbacks and earmarks.
These groups tend not to have anything in common. It doesn't matter to a casino or defense contractor whether women can get abortions or gays can marry or atheists are stoned to death. However, occasionally these groups are put at odds. For example, the leader of some southern christian group was recently ousted because he wanted to change the focus from gays and abortion to social welfare and environmentalism. The other leaders told him that wasn't happening.
I don't think this is because they really hate gays that much, (hell, some of the are closeted gays themselves) but because they realized that social welfare and environmentalism were bad for business, and the gravy train they'd been riding since the early 1980s would have stopped.
So, you see, the fundamentalist Christians in this country are being duped all the time by preachers who lust for power and money and who get it by working with big business to get Republicans elected who send kickbacks.
And if Republicans have a problem with this, then I suggest you take your party back, because that's what it has become.
I'd argue that when those metaphors and allegories cause misunderstandings that lead to the slaughter of millions of people that it's just as bad as lying.
Your assumption ignores the fact that, if I were God, I'd be omnipotent and omniscient. I'd be able to see the grief that's going to be caused by me originating this creation myth.
You're also ignoring the fact that cultures around the globe have differing creation myths, some so drastically different that there's no real way they could be interpreted from same original idea.
If I were God in this position, I'd teach people about the scientific method. I'd teach them skepticism and the other skills necessary to know the universe the way I know it. And then I'd tell them to use these to explore and know the universe and, by doing so, understand me more fully, as well as answer any other questions they might have.
And if those Bronze Age idiots couldn't understand, I'd ignore them for the rest of eternity. One species on an unimpressive mudball in a boring suburb of an ordinary galaxy isn't worth that much grief.
I don't agree that "logic is valid" is an unproven assumption. It's actually proven every day. We arrive at conclusions in a logical manner and when those conclusions are verified, our logic is shown to be valid.
For example, if I were to drop a hammer and were to see it hit my foot, I can logically assume, because cellular destruction causes pain, and a hammer dropping on my foot would cause cellular destruction, that my foot is going to hurt in a moment. It's a classic A -> B, B -> C, therefore A -> C reasoning. A moment later, my "faith" in logic's validity is proven yet again.
However, faith in an unproven thing, like heaven, salvation, or even God, is irrational. There is no experiment that provides evidence of God or heaven or hell or ghosts or goblins or angels or psychic friends. All of these things are, currently anyway, supernatural. As such, the only thing they have going for them is the fact that millions or billions of people around the globe believe they exist and can intervene. And some of those people will defer to an unproven God over proven science when it comes to matters of life and death.
Faith in things that cannot be or have not been proven is destructive at worst and counter-productive at best.
I argue the opposite. Faith is a weakness. Faith leads people to accept their conditions and pray that it will get better rather than act. Faith leads people to accept conditions that are unacceptable.
Faith keeps women from leaving abusive husbands because the hope they'll see the light. Faith keeps people from speaking out against the government because they hope their God will intervene. Faith keeps people from enjoying the only life they know they have because they hope that the words in a particular book are true.
Our best quality isn't our ability to blindly accept conditions as they are because they might change, but to recognize the flaws in our condition right now through research and figure out a way to change the stuff we can. In fact, the ability to drastically modify our environment is what makes us a technological species.
Perhaps you're using a different definition of "faith" than I am.
I have a life. I'm married and I do contract work and I help friends move and participate in charities. I don't have time to sit around killing wolves on a screen or even working through the levels of most FPS games.
This sort of monotony is the primary reason I don't play most games and I'm not interested in practicing to get good at one. I may have an hour or so a week to kill. This isn't enough time to really learn anything. All I want is some good gameplay that's not too hard to get.
And that's why I'm getting a Wii. The gameplay is intuitive and compelling, and I don't have to learn how to do stuff or look up cheats online to keep having fun when I get to a certain point.
Either way its the perfect market. If bandwidth started truly running in short supply a little thing called supply and demand would kick in QUICKLY. ISPs getting complaints from users would implement higher caps or simply start charging more per speed rating. People would then either cut back or they would pay more. That extra payment then could be used to expand the network or the telcos could pocket it. The telcos that just pocket it would then start to lose customers. And the whole thing just goes in circles.. So whats the question again?????
It's not a perfect market. I have a choice of two bad broadband providers in my area. Thanks to my state government, they've got a monopoly, and running new lines is expensive with an unpredictable ROI.
So they'll pocket it, and there will be an outcry, and the public will slowly get used to paying $50/month for 256kbps connections, and things will continue to deteriorate.
We're all about competition. Comcast isn't. Comcast and Verizon donate heavily to Pennsylvania lawmakers to create beneficial laws, such as cable monopolies and limiting rights-of-way to other companies.
I'm totally with you on the back-of-the-napkin type apps that technically work as illustrations of functionality. I do them all the time. However, my beef with my boss was that he was trying to sell these things as actual applications. And the unsuspecting clients didn't know what they were getting into.
This was the same boss who didn't understand why we shouldn't be hosting development applications on our production server, or that a testing suite does not consist of one guy trying to break an application in the wee hours of the morning, or that a root password of the company name with an @ in place of the a was perfectly secure.
Trust me, this guy was not competent. His solution to a possible SQL injection attack by using quotes in a text field was "Well, there's no reason for a user to enter quotes in that field anyway." The MapQuest "hack" was on a production site that was live at the time he showed it to me.
The point I was trying to make is that there are real amateurs out there making web apps these days, which leads me to the conclusion that way more than 70% are hackable.
If we don't have an antiquated system, why does every doctors office and hospital still have shelves and shelves of medical records? Why has every doctor, dentist, and optometrist I've ever been to record everything on paper? Why does my wife, who works in the mental health industry, have to submit weekly paperwork that's only authenticated using her signature? Why does my health insurance company still insist on faxing my medical information back and forth rather than using public-private key encryption? Why is it that every hospital show still has people doing paperwork and signing things and carrying around clipboards with case histories on it?
And this doesn't just go for the medical administration. When I was getting my mortgage a year ago I had to fax pay stubs. I asked if I could scan and email them, and they declined. I asked if I could encrypt them and call them with the password for the encryption and they still declined. "We need a paper copy" they said, completely ignorant that the fax is probably digitized by the fax machine on their end, or by the phone company in between, but it's far from the security you can achieve through 256-bit encryption, which is freely available and cross-compatible.
Spending more money unnecessarily on broadband means less disposable income, meaning that the economy is slowing down because we're not paying what the fair market price is and/or we're not getting acceptable service for the prices we're paying.
So there, Mr. Freemarket, is your incentive for wanting cheap, universal broadband access.
I completely agree.
Only in the US would you have a law, like the one passed last year in PA, that explicitly forbids any government from rolling their own municipal broadband when they're underserved by Verizon and Comcast.
And only in the US would a company be given monopoly rule over its central office and lines that's enforced by the government.
Personally, I like Utahs Utopia system where the city runs the fiber and then leases it to ISPs. That would encourage competition
And where are those homes? I can tell because I've seen them. They're in affluent suburbs. They're not running this stuff to middle class homes or rural areas or even upscale urban neighborhoods.
I can't get it where I live, even though my house costs as much as one in a neighborhood where it is available, and even though there are 100 residences per mile in my area, compared to 25-30 in these suburbs, meaning each mile of fiber is even more profitable.
I live in Lancaster, PA. Yeah, I'm surrounded by Amish country, but I'm on a main thoroughfare between Harrisburg and Philadelphia, and I live in the city where the population density is near 10,000 people per square mile. I know for a fact that there's dark fiber under my block because I talked to a guy who was trying to sell it to my former employer.
I also know that most people on my block are young professionals who would snap up really great broadband for about $50/month. But is there an option for this? Heck no. Verizon and Comcast would have a conniption and the Public Utility Commission, a wholly owned subsidiary of Comcast and Verizon, would kill any startup in a heartbeat Is there any way for my city to tell Verizon and Comcast where to put their "broadband" and roll its own? Of course not. Ed Rendell saw to that, and now municipal broadband won't ever happen in Pennsylvania.
So here I am, stuck paying Comcast $80/month for 3.0M/384kbps broadband and basic cable. Why? Because the government, a wholly owned subsidiary of Comcast, keeps competitors out of the market. And my other choice is to switch to Verizon and have all incoming ports blocked and have even slower access (1.5M/384kpbs). Or blackmail Comcast into lowering the price for six months by threatening to switch.
Secondly, the options in NYC don't compare favorably to the options in Seoul or Tokyo or Stockholm. They can get 100Mbps symmetrical access with a static IP for half of what I'm paying. That's an impossibility in any city of the US, even though the population density is the same.
So, you see, it's not about land area or population density. It's about the greed and laziness of the service providers and the idea that people don't have any way of forcing the issue.
I don't really have a problem with a permanent identification system. It would solve a lot of problems, mostly with our rediculously antiquated medical administration system. I cannot see why, in 2007, we are so reliant on dead trees to store our medical information and trust to verify a person's identity. Not to mention the problems that could be avoided if emergency room doctors could see an unknown person's medical history and allergies.
My problem with RFID is that it's permanent and easily read illicitly. Can you remove or revoke a chip if it gets copied? Probably, but it'll be hard. And if someone can read your chip, they'll be able to spoof your identity. Maybe a better system would be to put a hash on the chip of a person's fingerprint. Then the chip can be quickly verified, probably in the same reader, and would be more secure than relying only on the chip's information.
I agree totally. That's why they're my EX-employer. I was sick of getting told that I didn't have enough time to do things the right way. And I was also afraid that if the site did get hacked, they'd pass the blame on to me.
One of the developers I worked with never tested in Firefox. He said "Since IE is predominant, testing in Firefox isn't important." He also said some of his best work was in MS Access and that MySQL wasn't a "real database." Also, he "hacked" Mapquest by posting a for to the same place as the form on Mapquest's site.
I asked whether he used the API and he said "What's an API?"
Thankfully, I'm not surrounded by tech school grads anymore.
A good followup to that commercial would be for a "hacker" to come along and, since he's so used to saying "allow", the PC gets his wallet stolen because the security doesn't stop something after he says "allow."
My I used to work as a web developer for a small company that did a lot of other small company's web sites. The amount of corners we cut in order to get the sites out in the time that the salesman stated was scary.
Passwords were often stored in the database in plain text. Credit cards, too. Data was taken directly from $_POST and put into SQL queries and curl calls to payment systems.
And if, in the future, we found these vulnerabilities and wanted to fix them, we had to escalate them to the CEO (did I mention the CEO is also the sales guy) before we could do any work on them.
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My favorite part of that story is that they ate of the tree of knowledge and then God said "You know stuff, I don't like you anymore."
Personally, given the choice between knowledge and living in perfection, I'd take the knowledge.
I'm a liberal and I disagree with this statement.
The Republican party is a combination of two major groups. The first are the ultra-religious. These are the foot soldiers. They use churches as organizing elements for the disseminating (dis)information and getting large numbers of people to the polls to vote for Republicans. The second group are corporate leaders who provide the money to get people elected in exchange for kickbacks and earmarks.
These groups tend not to have anything in common. It doesn't matter to a casino or defense contractor whether women can get abortions or gays can marry or atheists are stoned to death. However, occasionally these groups are put at odds. For example, the leader of some southern christian group was recently ousted because he wanted to change the focus from gays and abortion to social welfare and environmentalism. The other leaders told him that wasn't happening.
I don't think this is because they really hate gays that much, (hell, some of the are closeted gays themselves) but because they realized that social welfare and environmentalism were bad for business, and the gravy train they'd been riding since the early 1980s would have stopped.
So, you see, the fundamentalist Christians in this country are being duped all the time by preachers who lust for power and money and who get it by working with big business to get Republicans elected who send kickbacks.
And if Republicans have a problem with this, then I suggest you take your party back, because that's what it has become.
I'd argue that when those metaphors and allegories cause misunderstandings that lead to the slaughter of millions of people that it's just as bad as lying.
Your assumption ignores the fact that, if I were God, I'd be omnipotent and omniscient. I'd be able to see the grief that's going to be caused by me originating this creation myth.
You're also ignoring the fact that cultures around the globe have differing creation myths, some so drastically different that there's no real way they could be interpreted from same original idea.
If I were God in this position, I'd teach people about the scientific method. I'd teach them skepticism and the other skills necessary to know the universe the way I know it. And then I'd tell them to use these to explore and know the universe and, by doing so, understand me more fully, as well as answer any other questions they might have.
And if those Bronze Age idiots couldn't understand, I'd ignore them for the rest of eternity. One species on an unimpressive mudball in a boring suburb of an ordinary galaxy isn't worth that much grief.
I don't agree that "logic is valid" is an unproven assumption. It's actually proven every day. We arrive at conclusions in a logical manner and when those conclusions are verified, our logic is shown to be valid.
For example, if I were to drop a hammer and were to see it hit my foot, I can logically assume, because cellular destruction causes pain, and a hammer dropping on my foot would cause cellular destruction, that my foot is going to hurt in a moment. It's a classic A -> B, B -> C, therefore A -> C reasoning. A moment later, my "faith" in logic's validity is proven yet again.
However, faith in an unproven thing, like heaven, salvation, or even God, is irrational. There is no experiment that provides evidence of God or heaven or hell or ghosts or goblins or angels or psychic friends. All of these things are, currently anyway, supernatural. As such, the only thing they have going for them is the fact that millions or billions of people around the globe believe they exist and can intervene. And some of those people will defer to an unproven God over proven science when it comes to matters of life and death.
Faith in things that cannot be or have not been proven is destructive at worst and counter-productive at best.
Someone needs to read Deutoronomy 23:1
Where's the disagreement? There's a big difference between knowing you can change and wanting to change.
I argue the opposite. Faith is a weakness. Faith leads people to accept their conditions and pray that it will get better rather than act. Faith leads people to accept conditions that are unacceptable.
Faith keeps women from leaving abusive husbands because the hope they'll see the light. Faith keeps people from speaking out against the government because they hope their God will intervene. Faith keeps people from enjoying the only life they know they have because they hope that the words in a particular book are true.
Our best quality isn't our ability to blindly accept conditions as they are because they might change, but to recognize the flaws in our condition right now through research and figure out a way to change the stuff we can. In fact, the ability to drastically modify our environment is what makes us a technological species.
Perhaps you're using a different definition of "faith" than I am.
I have a life. I'm married and I do contract work and I help friends move and participate in charities. I don't have time to sit around killing wolves on a screen or even working through the levels of most FPS games.
This sort of monotony is the primary reason I don't play most games and I'm not interested in practicing to get good at one. I may have an hour or so a week to kill. This isn't enough time to really learn anything. All I want is some good gameplay that's not too hard to get.
And that's why I'm getting a Wii. The gameplay is intuitive and compelling, and I don't have to learn how to do stuff or look up cheats online to keep having fun when I get to a certain point.
It's not a perfect market. I have a choice of two bad broadband providers in my area. Thanks to my state government, they've got a monopoly, and running new lines is expensive with an unpredictable ROI.
So they'll pocket it, and there will be an outcry, and the public will slowly get used to paying $50/month for 256kbps connections, and things will continue to deteriorate.
Just as long as I got overtime for it.
Yet another example of why we need an IT union. Someone's sig says "IT workers are the teamsters of the 21st century."
6. Use twisted logic to intimate that people who hate SUVs simply can't afford them.
We're all about competition. Comcast isn't. Comcast and Verizon donate heavily to Pennsylvania lawmakers to create beneficial laws, such as cable monopolies and limiting rights-of-way to other companies.
I'm totally with you on the back-of-the-napkin type apps that technically work as illustrations of functionality. I do them all the time. However, my beef with my boss was that he was trying to sell these things as actual applications. And the unsuspecting clients didn't know what they were getting into.
This was the same boss who didn't understand why we shouldn't be hosting development applications on our production server, or that a testing suite does not consist of one guy trying to break an application in the wee hours of the morning, or that a root password of the company name with an @ in place of the a was perfectly secure.
Trust me, this guy was not competent. His solution to a possible SQL injection attack by using quotes in a text field was "Well, there's no reason for a user to enter quotes in that field anyway." The MapQuest "hack" was on a production site that was live at the time he showed it to me.
The point I was trying to make is that there are real amateurs out there making web apps these days, which leads me to the conclusion that way more than 70% are hackable.
If we don't have an antiquated system, why does every doctors office and hospital still have shelves and shelves of medical records? Why has every doctor, dentist, and optometrist I've ever been to record everything on paper? Why does my wife, who works in the mental health industry, have to submit weekly paperwork that's only authenticated using her signature? Why does my health insurance company still insist on faxing my medical information back and forth rather than using public-private key encryption? Why is it that every hospital show still has people doing paperwork and signing things and carrying around clipboards with case histories on it?
And this doesn't just go for the medical administration. When I was getting my mortgage a year ago I had to fax pay stubs. I asked if I could scan and email them, and they declined. I asked if I could encrypt them and call them with the password for the encryption and they still declined. "We need a paper copy" they said, completely ignorant that the fax is probably digitized by the fax machine on their end, or by the phone company in between, but it's far from the security you can achieve through 256-bit encryption, which is freely available and cross-compatible.
Spending more money unnecessarily on broadband means less disposable income, meaning that the economy is slowing down because we're not paying what the fair market price is and/or we're not getting acceptable service for the prices we're paying.
So there, Mr. Freemarket, is your incentive for wanting cheap, universal broadband access.
Me? Well, I'm seething with jealousy.
I completely agree. Only in the US would you have a law, like the one passed last year in PA, that explicitly forbids any government from rolling their own municipal broadband when they're underserved by Verizon and Comcast. And only in the US would a company be given monopoly rule over its central office and lines that's enforced by the government. Personally, I like Utahs Utopia system where the city runs the fiber and then leases it to ISPs. That would encourage competition
And where are those homes? I can tell because I've seen them. They're in affluent suburbs. They're not running this stuff to middle class homes or rural areas or even upscale urban neighborhoods.
I can't get it where I live, even though my house costs as much as one in a neighborhood where it is available, and even though there are 100 residences per mile in my area, compared to 25-30 in these suburbs, meaning each mile of fiber is even more profitable.
I live in Lancaster, PA. Yeah, I'm surrounded by Amish country, but I'm on a main thoroughfare between Harrisburg and Philadelphia, and I live in the city where the population density is near 10,000 people per square mile. I know for a fact that there's dark fiber under my block because I talked to a guy who was trying to sell it to my former employer.
I also know that most people on my block are young professionals who would snap up really great broadband for about $50/month. But is there an option for this? Heck no. Verizon and Comcast would have a conniption and the Public Utility Commission, a wholly owned subsidiary of Comcast and Verizon, would kill any startup in a heartbeat Is there any way for my city to tell Verizon and Comcast where to put their "broadband" and roll its own? Of course not. Ed Rendell saw to that, and now municipal broadband won't ever happen in Pennsylvania.
So here I am, stuck paying Comcast $80/month for 3.0M/384kbps broadband and basic cable. Why? Because the government, a wholly owned subsidiary of Comcast, keeps competitors out of the market. And my other choice is to switch to Verizon and have all incoming ports blocked and have even slower access (1.5M/384kpbs). Or blackmail Comcast into lowering the price for six months by threatening to switch.
Secondly, the options in NYC don't compare favorably to the options in Seoul or Tokyo or Stockholm. They can get 100Mbps symmetrical access with a static IP for half of what I'm paying. That's an impossibility in any city of the US, even though the population density is the same.
So, you see, it's not about land area or population density. It's about the greed and laziness of the service providers and the idea that people don't have any way of forcing the issue.
An open source search engine would be a good idea, except that the index would have to be hosted somewhere and indexed somehow.
I'd gladly donate some spare processor cycles, hard drive space, and bandwidth to an open source search engine like a BOINC project.
I don't really have a problem with a permanent identification system. It would solve a lot of problems, mostly with our rediculously antiquated medical administration system. I cannot see why, in 2007, we are so reliant on dead trees to store our medical information and trust to verify a person's identity. Not to mention the problems that could be avoided if emergency room doctors could see an unknown person's medical history and allergies.
My problem with RFID is that it's permanent and easily read illicitly. Can you remove or revoke a chip if it gets copied? Probably, but it'll be hard. And if someone can read your chip, they'll be able to spoof your identity. Maybe a better system would be to put a hash on the chip of a person's fingerprint. Then the chip can be quickly verified, probably in the same reader, and would be more secure than relying only on the chip's information.
I agree totally. That's why they're my EX-employer. I was sick of getting told that I didn't have enough time to do things the right way. And I was also afraid that if the site did get hacked, they'd pass the blame on to me.
One of the developers I worked with never tested in Firefox. He said "Since IE is predominant, testing in Firefox isn't important." He also said some of his best work was in MS Access and that MySQL wasn't a "real database." Also, he "hacked" Mapquest by posting a for to the same place as the form on Mapquest's site.
I asked whether he used the API and he said "What's an API?"
Thankfully, I'm not surrounded by tech school grads anymore.
A good followup to that commercial would be for a "hacker" to come along and, since he's so used to saying "allow", the PC gets his wallet stolen because the security doesn't stop something after he says "allow."
My I used to work as a web developer for a small company that did a lot of other small company's web sites. The amount of corners we cut in order to get the sites out in the time that the salesman stated was scary.
Passwords were often stored in the database in plain text. Credit cards, too. Data was taken directly from $_POST and put into SQL queries and curl calls to payment systems.
And if, in the future, we found these vulnerabilities and wanted to fix them, we had to escalate them to the CEO (did I mention the CEO is also the sales guy) before we could do any work on them.
If anything, 70% is low.