Name one place where sexual immorality was the only reason for God nuking an entire tribe in the Old Testament.
Right, because the Old Testament woo is the final authority on what is moral and what is not. I particularly like the bits about voices in the head of the chief woo-fanatic telling him to "kill all the men and boys and non-virgin women and then to take virgin girls for slaves...", I mean, that must be like morality squared or something!
Oh, and you should probably include Islam with your Jew & Christian bashing,
I did. All of the Judeo-Christian woo-woos, also called by some Abrahamic, are closely related. Islam just a variation on the theme, and a late comer to the party at that.
You should also have left Hinduism out from one of your lists about religions scared of sex.
Hinduism has its own screwy way of controlling sex, it is just less hypocritical about sex in general, as long as it is within the parameters of its particular woo. For example, sex between castes would quickly lead to serious trouble with the woo fanatics.
But don't let the truth get in the way of your trolling agenda.
Yea, because the woos of the world are so logical, consistent, scientific that any pointing out of their "flaws" (as in blatant idiocy) must surely be "trolling". And on that note, don't you have some prayer group to attend where you get to discuss the count of the angels on the tip of a needle?
Uhm, no. The Old Testament is full of "immorality pisses off God and he nukes the fornicating sinners, their children and their children's children, cousins, second-cousins, cats, dogs etc" type of stuff. As to modernity, why, one has to only take a look at what the Hasidic characters are up to....
Yeah and look how well those tribes have done in scaling up their societies in comparison.
The answer is that we will simply never know, as they were destroyed and overrun (usually violently) by the much more aggressive followers of the dominant militant woos. In the case of Europe, Africa and America that being the Judeo-Christian one and in most places in Far East, Buddhism, Hinduism and the like.
So this isn't the case of "scalability", rather a case of "inferior warmongering". Possibly their attitudes towards sex were somehow related with their general outlook on life, apparently not conductive to leading wide-spread bloody conquests of others.
Western culture is fine, the problem is that Mid-Western culture is increasingly spreading to the rest of the US.
This is actually an illusion. Most of the European societies which are now liberal in their attitude towards sex became only so, and very slowly, during the Enlightenment. The Calvinists come from the very places which you now list as having a healthy attitude.
So the "spread" of the more psychotic flavours of woo is not some new thing, but it is the return to the standard operating procedure for the Judeo-Christians, the recent relaxation being just a temporary defeat for it.
Why don't you just say "IP is not a physical object" instead? So your statement actually, you know, makes sense.
Because that is not what I am saying. What I am saying is that "law" as a set of rules to govern society, is itself subject to rules of logic and science, a fact which many, if not most legal "industry" members refuse to acknowledge, in effect pretending that "law" represents some sort of higher order of existence, not bound by mere physical universe. As the result you get statements like " the law does not have to make sense, its the law!" etc.
Also, saying that "IP is not a physical object" is an oversimplification in itself, as many "laws" dealing with "physical objects" also seem to try to defy reality.
Your problem is that you think all laws are just made up by some entitles with power.
Laws are made by "lawmakers", in US all of whom are presently pretty much for sale to the highest bidder. And that is in addition to the multi-multi-billion dollar "legal industry" which thrives on maintaining an arcane order of high-priests, priests, assistant-priests and various lesser acolytes dedicated to worship of the deity of "law" and "interpretation" of its musings, because the supposedly universal set of societal rules is by now so byzantine that no citizen can possibly understand even a fraction of them. Naturally, it is in the highest interest of that parasitic industry to keep things that way. Having illogical, convoluted, self-contradictory "laws" is very much akin to having the Book Of Nostardamus as your reference material: one can, given enough mental gymnastics, "read" anything one wants out of it.
In an ancient civilization, the rules help keep the order. Unwanted offspring create succession problems (which in those civilizations is often a political problem, too), lack of sexual restraint can lead to your wife or daughter getting raped, and then there's the question of what to do with the women and the unwanted offspring.
I have to disagree.
Your response is simply a demonstration of how deeply ingrained the Judeo-Christian woo has become in the world-view of people brought up under its ever-present influence. As I pointed out to another poster on this thread, your assumption about rules and sex is proven wrong by the fact that many societies existed before the Judeo-Christian woo took root and some long after, in isolation, which had a completely different approach to the problems of children and overpopulation. In many, children were thought to be a communal responsibility, looked after by women of the tribe together and sexual restraint was practised essentially by various means involving natural contraceptives. Also the concept of "marriage", which seems to be the base foundation of modern societies did not exist in the form that is considered unquestionable by most people today. So the current "method" or societal organization and dealing with children is not by any means the only one, even though you would never get this impression from watching the modern societies in action.
Sexual taboos might seem an idiocy to you, but there was a time when they were necessary and beneficial. They were intended to prevent the birth of unwanted children. Societies with a strict sexual culture were more efficient than those without them, because the survival rate of children was much higher.
That is just after-the-fact apologetics. There were many pre-Judeo-Cristian cultures, as well as some concurrent ones that escaped (for a while) the onslaught, in places like the Amazon Jungle. Their attitude towards sex was completely different from what is considered the "norm" in all the cultures overrun by Rome in one way or another. In such societies children were more of a communal responsibility and looked after by many women together. The concept of "marriage" was not so entrenched into the societal psyche to the point of being the unquestionable foundation of societal order. Also in the Far East, many societies had varying degrees of latitude in sexual affairs and many different approaches to the problem of preventing overpopulation. It is interesting to note that the Judeo-Christian woo made great inroads in places like Japan on the back of completely rabid consumerism that replaced most of what used to pass for "culture" in that place. China seems well poised to fall as the next victim of this "Baptism via Levi's and McDonalds".
So this is not so a clear-cut as some would like us to believe. I think the attitudes towards sex employed by the followers of Judeo-Christian woo varieties are directly influenced by their whole woo-induced world-view, centring around suffering, penance and "salvation".
1. Intellectual Property means legal ownership of patents, copyrights, etc. Clearly, you know this. You may not like it, but "IP" is the standard term in this discourse and, more importantly, in the law. So you're going to have to get used to it.
All of which are nonsense. True, they might be part of the "legal system" (presently itself a big steaming pile of nonsense, squared) but the fact that some "lawmaker" scribbled something down on paper and called it a "law" is not by itself a sufficient pre-condition to that scribble becoming a logically coherent concept. Which mistake (or more accurately, a religious dogma) is wilfully and universally practised by lawyers, and law worshippers, around the world. "It must be so because it is the law!!" is a cry of every petty, brainless, vindictive autocrat out there.
This has got to the point that I am convinced that many a lawyer would not blink at the idea that if the force of gravity were to be made "unlawful", we would all start floating 3 feet off the ground.
Which is pretty nearly the case with the so-called "Intellectual Property". Not only information itself lacks the required attributes to be "private property", but even the indirect methods of controlling it all lack the barest modicum of scientific backing, like for example a reliable, objective and scientific method of determining which combinations of bits were "derived" from what other combinations of bits, which is the basic pre-requisite to distinguishing uniqueness of information, as in for example in differentiating "patents" and works of art. And that is just exposing the very tip of the veritable mountains of illogic and out-right specious "reasoning" that is employed by various charlatans with vested interest in making "laws" to pad their pockets, logic or fairness be damned.
Psych problems with other people daring to have sex (and fun in general without permission from various control freaks) have been at the root of nearly all imbecilic religious woo-woos and the subsequent witch-hunts by the fanatics of the said woo-woos since times immemorial, but they have truly and completely gone full-tilt mental with the raise of the Judeo-Christian flavours of lunacy.
Thus it is no surprise that maiming and killing people is considered "moral" and "necessary in bringing Enlightenment, Freedom (to buy our products and make us rich) and Democracy (to elect friendly to our interests leaders)" while sex, particularly amongst younger people, is an "evil", "sin" and "immoral", to be punished, with prejudice and by extreme measures, for life (e.g. the "sexual offender lists"). Ripping a girl's hands and feet off by a 500lb bomb is a sad by-product of a "good deed", but seeing her enjoy sex is the very bottom of the pit of moral depravity.
But because sex sells, the Western culture is getting increasingly positively schizophrenic about it, on one hand trying to please the Mammon (into worship of which all of the Judeo-Christian flavours of woo have morphed) and at the same time trying to reconcile the woo-fanatics' psychotic attitudes towards the fact that they are all mammals, no matter how much they pretend that evolution did not occur.
And if you add to this the fact that other branches of Judeo-Christian idiocy, i.e. the Muslim-medieval kind, are even more rabidly insane, the majority of human societies on Earth are, to use a topic-relevant term: fucked up beyond description, with no relief in sight.
His point (which I agree with), is that all things being equal, the ribbon is a better interface than the file menu.
Proof? Scientific evidence? "Better" how? In what regard?
You've been practicing on that clunky "Word for Windows" file menu for 15 years.
Just so you know, that "clunky" menu is a direct derivative of CUA, the system developed as part of the IBM SAA initiative over many decades of actual scientific research.
I have no idea where you work, I assume you must be running IT for some Microsoft Gold-plated-Platinum Partner company, or some such. In all the places I had the misfortune to deploy Office 2007 (every time at the behest of some upper manager who himself or herself never bothers to actually use the computers, that's what "executive assistants" are for) it was a complete, unmitigated, fucking disaster.
The amount of complaints and confusion was just unbelievable. In all but one cases we ended up "downgrading" back to Office 2003. And that last case is not far away from that scenario, the idiot who pushed the change having his executive position threatened over this very thing, and is now hanging by his fingernails to his job, hopefully not for too long, so that we can get rid of that abomination in that last place too.
True, some users, particularly those who use Office on very rare occasions, do "accept" the thing, just like they "accept" everything else computer-related, simply as yet another black-magic voodoo that is just beyond them and they struggle to cope with it, baffled, just like they always did with all the other stuff on their computers. From those you rarely hear complaints, because they simply assume that it is they who are illiterate and so they suck it up, excepting an occasional guilty-looking (since they assume everything is their fault), sheepish request for help. Experienced users, with some very few exceptions, all revolted, to the point of causing disruptions in the corporate operations.
In other words, I have no fucking clue what you are on about. The experience you describe is diametrically opposed to what I have witnessed in the field.
Actually, scratch that, I did see a place where Office 2007 was deployed "successfully", if by "success" you mean ramming the thing down the throat of everyone by a dictatorial dictate, with all complaints directed straight to the trash can: the provincial government office. Apparently it was "in the contract" for some overpaid government-tit sucking "global" IT consultancy that they've "outsourced" their brains to.
Yes the rear wheel steering caused some trouble, but not actually that much.
The single rear wheel steering system hasn't been used by any manufacturer on any serious car (save $200 rickshaw bicycle/motorbike conversions somewhere in the Orient) during all of these decades with many millions of vehicles produced. I find it rather unlikely that a workable concept would be ignored by countless engineers world over for the last 60 years or so...
And there is still the problem of general dynamic stability, by definition more problematic with 3 wheels than with 4, not to mention the weird windshield and so on...
In short no one has tried to do this again simply because it was kooky to begin with, not because some world-spanning, anti-innovation, anti-Buckminster conspiracy as the tin-foil hats would have us believe.
Right on. People get so engrossed in the hero-worship of kooky "inventors" that they seem to check all and any critical abilities at the door.
As for this wacko of a "car", one could ask questions like: How do you install windshield wipers on a curved window composed of a bunch of panes? What is the dynamic stability of this three-wheeled wonder when turning at 120 km/h? Side wind, anyone? What is the traction one can get of a single rear mounted wheel transferring the entire output of the power-train on a slippery road covered with snow and ice? Etc etc etc.
The whole notion of a "stock market" or "investing" in things over which you have no control or knowledge about is, frankly, insane. This includes indirect forms of such gambling such as index trading or entities which engage in trading many shares in bulk at once, etc and so on.
If you engage in insane activities, you better be prepared to deal with the consequences.
So yes, it is far simpler that you are trying to make it appear.
Err, your point? Are you trying to suggest that crooks engaged in billion dollar briberies would be just completely terrified of committing fraud?! "Well we can bribe for industrial and state secrets, but no sireee, fraud, that is where we draw the line!".
outwardly innocent companies which are secretly breaking the law.
This is where the whole silly "free market" ideology falls apart. In the supposed "efficient free market" you are expected to have only "informed buyers" making rational purchases. So either you should have shareholders buying shares of companies of whose activities they are fully aware of (as in having thoroughly investigated them) or you have a "market" composed of con artists and marks. If you are incapable, or unwilling, to obtain a complete picture of what you are buying, then you are culpable for all of the results of your purchase, according to the ideologues.
Of course it is clearly impossible to be aware of all aspects of one's purchase with most modern products, shares of secretive companies in particular, and so any pretense of "free market" ever being possible is just idiot ideologues talking. And thus the whole particular idea of "shares" or "stock market" is horribly flawed in its inception, resulting in a glorified gambling casino where not only the value of "shares" of companies but also the real-world outcomes of the activities of those companies are utterly random. Which is the very reason for "ordinary people" not to "invest" in the crooked thing in the first place.
All those who participate are culpable by definition, for having chosen to actively support something over which they have no control.
but the shareholders themselves (retirement funds and the like) had nothing to do with the decision.
Bullshit. That is the copout that corporations have been using forever but there are two major and fatal problems with it: 1) shareholders choose to invest in companies and 2) they have (with any brains) the voting shares, and thus the ability to change the board of directors and with it the CEO.
So no dice. Whining that "We didn't know that our money invested in the 'White Phosphorus Bombs R Us' will actually hurt anyone! We just looked for the 200% return!" is scoring the unscrupulous assholes no points.
Also, the stock market is a gambling casino for those with more money then brains (now more so then ever before, where company earnings or dividends have no bearing whatsoever on share price). Retirement money does not belong there.
Still beats the hell out of a $25 gift-card, if you ask me... but then again neither the bribers or the bribees in these two-bit, amateur-hour shows were known for competence or ambition.
For some perspective, consider the Iraq invasion: $3 trillion (and that is just the latest estimate) in cash down the drain, all to private concerns, multiple billions of which are not only unaccounted for, but were actually delivered in form of mountains of $100, $50 and $20 bills on shipping pallets....
And then there is the "too big to fail" multi-hundred billion cash bailout for the destitute and starving Wall Street, the specifics of which are so sensitive as to constitute a "national security" concern...
In short, what is on display here is the difference between professionals and hobbyists.
"Would you betray your company/country for $1,000,000,000?" "Maybe" "ok, how do you plan on explaining how you suddenly got a billion dollars?"
From a purely scientific point of view, one can simply have the party in question organize an official "raffle" or "sales promotion lottery" or some such, ostensibly meant to promote their product or service and open to general public. And since they control the entire process, it would not be too difficult for you to end up with the "winning" raffle ticket.
We still don't know which one of those "absurd lying pieces of worthless trash" delayed his death this much
Delayed? Versus what? A "prognosis", which itself is based on a probability distribution, i.e. "82% of patients with this type of cancer do not live longer than x years"? Your dad could have simply been in that last few percent of cases. Or the doctor could have mis-estimated the size of the cancer or its state of advancement.
In other words you have absolutely no reference point to measure a "delay" of any kind. This, combined with all the other scientific evidence against the quacks mentioned leaves you in no position to call the GP "arrogant". In fact your attitude, i.e. your emotions shutting off your higher brain functions, is what makes these parasitic hucksters possible in the first place.
Desperate people with little or no means of evaluating scientific knowledge will do most idiotic things imaginable in order to try to save their loved ones. This is understandable, but it is no excuse for trying to pretend that anything these quacks offer is actually working or is in any way based on reality.
Hate Microsoft all you want, but they're giving people high paying jobs during a tough economy.
So did Al Capone. And so do all of these Colombian gentlemen in the "import-export" business...
You see, contrary to what some "free market" fetishists would have you believe, "giving people jobs" or "making piles of money" are by themselves insufficient criteria to evaluate worthiness of some individuals' activity.
If you don't like it, feel free to stop buying Microsoft and STFU.
This "advice" only works if the entity you are advising to "stop buying" from does not hold a de-facto monopoly in some area of the marketplace. Otherwise it is akin to advising some poor shmuck to "stop eating" if he "doesn't like buying stuff from the company store with his company scrip"
A small studio has to publish a hit every time, and this is becoming nearly impossible to do because of the expense involved in making a game with modern graphics.
This is a self-inflicted malaise as far as the independent studios are concerned. There is absolutely no requirement to use "modern graphics" (whatever that means, I assume you are talking about ridiculously detailed models with megazillions of polygons). That is because there is absolutely no direct relationship between game play and the graphics quality. Some of the most popular games have graphics reminiscent of the 1990s or even 1980s, while some of the greatest bombs sport fancy 3D engines with programmable shaders, deformable environments and what not.
In fact this whole obsession with graphics to the exclusion of everything else seems to me very much like a hardware vendor instigated mass psychosis, helped along by the likes of EA and others who wish to achieve a strangle-hold on the gaming industry by setting up massive, artificial, budgetary "barriers to entry" for competitors. Which also happens to be a pre-requisite to cartel-forming, creation of oligopolies and finally monopolies.
That is a way of putting it which brings warmth to my heart. I only wish that people with your insight were the majority, instead of a tiny fraction of a percentile of society... perhaps then reason, logic, empirical evidence and the scientific method would be a norm, instead of being treated as the red-headed bastard child of a chamber-maid at a feast of its arrogantly, pridefully ignorant, gleefully sociopathic, insanely greedy, diseased with delusional, self-serving "religions", violently aggressive and generally utterly irrational "betters".
Make a movie. Kiss a pair of tits and it's rated M. Chop 'em off and it's PG13.
Thats what you get when the whole Western "culture" is just a thin veneer of rationality covering up fucked in the head religious wackos and power-hungry authoritarian demagogues who are running the show in reality, just underneath the surface. Conditioning kids to kill on command because "we are the Good Guys!", "we are Righteous!" and ultimately "God is with us!" is a very useful tool for those who see the world as an everlasting, apocalyptic conflict between "Good" (defined as whatever the fucked-up authoritarians of "our side" come up with) and "Evil" (which is everything else, with a particular emphasis on the nearly identically fucked-up authoritarians of "the other guys", with a generous doze of contempt for everyone either neutral or having a functioning brain). And hypocritical, obsessive, hysterical and schizophrenic attitude toward sex of course is a direct link to the screwed-up religious bullshit all of these fucked-up authoritarians subscribe to in order to "justify" to themselves their greed for power and control over others.
It is no coincidence that nearly all the crazies which run around raping little girls, or kidnapping them and keeping them prisoners also happen to be far-out religious zealots, as it is also no coincidence that Judeo-Christian religions try to apply incoherent, illogical, irrational and usually very draconian rules to anything sex related. In this all the members of Al-Qaeda and the various screwed-up Western "think of the children!" authoritarians are of identical mind.
That is why there will never be sane policy on sex, drugs and many other things in the West. The fucked-up, religious wacko authoritarians will simply not allow it, whatever the cost.
They've put a single LED in a contact lens, so now we have Augmented Reality.
In unrelated news, the newly-founded Superluminal Space Travel Consortium announced plans for interstellar commercial travel in their new faster-than-light ships. The consortium's spokesman, one Slick McShifty, was quoted saying "We are well on our way to this stellar goal and we invite all potential investors to act swiftly as this is the most monumental of opportunities!", while demonstrating to the press the initial rivet of the first starship to be constructed.
In further unrelated news, the new expedition to the Center of The Earth got underway. Professor Meeh Nuts was quoted saying, "Onward Science! Come forth Discovery!", while throwing the first shovel-load of soil over his shoulder and posing for the cameras.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, because the Old Testament woo is the final authority on what is moral and what is not. I particularly like the bits about voices in the head of the chief woo-fanatic telling him to "kill all the men and boys and non-virgin women and then to take virgin girls for slaves...", I mean, that must be like morality squared or something!
I did. All of the Judeo-Christian woo-woos, also called by some Abrahamic, are closely related. Islam just a variation on the theme, and a late comer to the party at that.
Hinduism has its own screwy way of controlling sex, it is just less hypocritical about sex in general, as long as it is within the parameters of its particular woo. For example, sex between castes would quickly lead to serious trouble with the woo fanatics.
Yea, because the woos of the world are so logical, consistent, scientific that any pointing out of their "flaws" (as in blatant idiocy) must surely be "trolling". And on that note, don't you have some prayer group to attend where you get to discuss the count of the angels on the tip of a needle?
Uhm, no. The Old Testament is full of "immorality pisses off God and he nukes the fornicating sinners, their children and their children's children, cousins, second-cousins, cats, dogs etc" type of stuff. As to modernity, why, one has to only take a look at what the Hasidic characters are up to ....
The answer is that we will simply never know, as they were destroyed and overrun (usually violently) by the much more aggressive followers of the dominant militant woos. In the case of Europe, Africa and America that being the Judeo-Christian one and in most places in Far East, Buddhism, Hinduism and the like.
So this isn't the case of "scalability", rather a case of "inferior warmongering". Possibly their attitudes towards sex were somehow related with their general outlook on life, apparently not conductive to leading wide-spread bloody conquests of others.
This is actually an illusion. Most of the European societies which are now liberal in their attitude towards sex became only so, and very slowly, during the Enlightenment. The Calvinists come from the very places which you now list as having a healthy attitude.
So the "spread" of the more psychotic flavours of woo is not some new thing, but it is the return to the standard operating procedure for the Judeo-Christians, the recent relaxation being just a temporary defeat for it.
Because that is not what I am saying. What I am saying is that "law" as a set of rules to govern society, is itself subject to rules of logic and science, a fact which many, if not most legal "industry" members refuse to acknowledge, in effect pretending that "law" represents some sort of higher order of existence, not bound by mere physical universe. As the result you get statements like " the law does not have to make sense, its the law!" etc.
Also, saying that "IP is not a physical object" is an oversimplification in itself, as many "laws" dealing with "physical objects" also seem to try to defy reality.
Laws are made by "lawmakers", in US all of whom are presently pretty much for sale to the highest bidder. And that is in addition to the multi-multi-billion dollar "legal industry" which thrives on maintaining an arcane order of high-priests, priests, assistant-priests and various lesser acolytes dedicated to worship of the deity of "law" and "interpretation" of its musings, because the supposedly universal set of societal rules is by now so byzantine that no citizen can possibly understand even a fraction of them. Naturally, it is in the highest interest of that parasitic industry to keep things that way. Having illogical, convoluted, self-contradictory "laws" is very much akin to having the Book Of Nostardamus as your reference material: one can, given enough mental gymnastics, "read" anything one wants out of it.
I have to disagree.
Your response is simply a demonstration of how deeply ingrained the Judeo-Christian woo has become in the world-view of people brought up under its ever-present influence. As I pointed out to another poster on this thread, your assumption about rules and sex is proven wrong by the fact that many societies existed before the Judeo-Christian woo took root and some long after, in isolation, which had a completely different approach to the problems of children and overpopulation. In many, children were thought to be a communal responsibility, looked after by women of the tribe together and sexual restraint was practised essentially by various means involving natural contraceptives. Also the concept of "marriage", which seems to be the base foundation of modern societies did not exist in the form that is considered unquestionable by most people today. So the current "method" or societal organization and dealing with children is not by any means the only one, even though you would never get this impression from watching the modern societies in action.
That is just after-the-fact apologetics. There were many pre-Judeo-Cristian cultures, as well as some concurrent ones that escaped (for a while) the onslaught, in places like the Amazon Jungle. Their attitude towards sex was completely different from what is considered the "norm" in all the cultures overrun by Rome in one way or another. In such societies children were more of a communal responsibility and looked after by many women together. The concept of "marriage" was not so entrenched into the societal psyche to the point of being the unquestionable foundation of societal order. Also in the Far East, many societies had varying degrees of latitude in sexual affairs and many different approaches to the problem of preventing overpopulation. It is interesting to note that the Judeo-Christian woo made great inroads in places like Japan on the back of completely rabid consumerism that replaced most of what used to pass for "culture" in that place. China seems well poised to fall as the next victim of this "Baptism via Levi's and McDonalds".
So this is not so a clear-cut as some would like us to believe. I think the attitudes towards sex employed by the followers of Judeo-Christian woo varieties are directly influenced by their whole woo-induced world-view, centring around suffering, penance and "salvation".
All of which are nonsense. True, they might be part of the "legal system" (presently itself a big steaming pile of nonsense, squared) but the fact that some "lawmaker" scribbled something down on paper and called it a "law" is not by itself a sufficient pre-condition to that scribble becoming a logically coherent concept. Which mistake (or more accurately, a religious dogma) is wilfully and universally practised by lawyers, and law worshippers, around the world. "It must be so because it is the law!!" is a cry of every petty, brainless, vindictive autocrat out there.
This has got to the point that I am convinced that many a lawyer would not blink at the idea that if the force of gravity were to be made "unlawful", we would all start floating 3 feet off the ground.
Which is pretty nearly the case with the so-called "Intellectual Property". Not only information itself lacks the required attributes to be "private property", but even the indirect methods of controlling it all lack the barest modicum of scientific backing, like for example a reliable, objective and scientific method of determining which combinations of bits were "derived" from what other combinations of bits, which is the basic pre-requisite to distinguishing uniqueness of information, as in for example in differentiating "patents" and works of art. And that is just exposing the very tip of the veritable mountains of illogic and out-right specious "reasoning" that is employed by various charlatans with vested interest in making "laws" to pad their pockets, logic or fairness be damned.
Psych problems with other people daring to have sex (and fun in general without permission from various control freaks) have been at the root of nearly all imbecilic religious woo-woos and the subsequent witch-hunts by the fanatics of the said woo-woos since times immemorial, but they have truly and completely gone full-tilt mental with the raise of the Judeo-Christian flavours of lunacy.
Thus it is no surprise that maiming and killing people is considered "moral" and "necessary in bringing Enlightenment, Freedom (to buy our products and make us rich) and Democracy (to elect friendly to our interests leaders)" while sex, particularly amongst younger people, is an "evil", "sin" and "immoral", to be punished, with prejudice and by extreme measures, for life (e.g. the "sexual offender lists"). Ripping a girl's hands and feet off by a 500lb bomb is a sad by-product of a "good deed", but seeing her enjoy sex is the very bottom of the pit of moral depravity.
But because sex sells, the Western culture is getting increasingly positively schizophrenic about it, on one hand trying to please the Mammon (into worship of which all of the Judeo-Christian flavours of woo have morphed) and at the same time trying to reconcile the woo-fanatics' psychotic attitudes towards the fact that they are all mammals, no matter how much they pretend that evolution did not occur.
And if you add to this the fact that other branches of Judeo-Christian idiocy, i.e. the Muslim-medieval kind, are even more rabidly insane, the majority of human societies on Earth are, to use a topic-relevant term: fucked up beyond description, with no relief in sight.
Proof? Scientific evidence? "Better" how? In what regard?
Just so you know, that "clunky" menu is a direct derivative of CUA, the system developed as part of the IBM SAA initiative over many decades of actual scientific research.
I have no idea where you work, I assume you must be running IT for some Microsoft Gold-plated-Platinum Partner company, or some such. In all the places I had the misfortune to deploy Office 2007 (every time at the behest of some upper manager who himself or herself never bothers to actually use the computers, that's what "executive assistants" are for) it was a complete, unmitigated, fucking disaster.
The amount of complaints and confusion was just unbelievable. In all but one cases we ended up "downgrading" back to Office 2003. And that last case is not far away from that scenario, the idiot who pushed the change having his executive position threatened over this very thing, and is now hanging by his fingernails to his job, hopefully not for too long, so that we can get rid of that abomination in that last place too.
True, some users, particularly those who use Office on very rare occasions, do "accept" the thing, just like they "accept" everything else computer-related, simply as yet another black-magic voodoo that is just beyond them and they struggle to cope with it, baffled, just like they always did with all the other stuff on their computers. From those you rarely hear complaints, because they simply assume that it is they who are illiterate and so they suck it up, excepting an occasional guilty-looking (since they assume everything is their fault), sheepish request for help. Experienced users, with some very few exceptions, all revolted, to the point of causing disruptions in the corporate operations.
In other words, I have no fucking clue what you are on about. The experience you describe is diametrically opposed to what I have witnessed in the field.
Actually, scratch that, I did see a place where Office 2007 was deployed "successfully", if by "success" you mean ramming the thing down the throat of everyone by a dictatorial dictate, with all complaints directed straight to the trash can: the provincial government office. Apparently it was "in the contract" for some overpaid government-tit sucking "global" IT consultancy that they've "outsourced" their brains to.
The single rear wheel steering system hasn't been used by any manufacturer on any serious car (save $200 rickshaw bicycle/motorbike conversions somewhere in the Orient) during all of these decades with many millions of vehicles produced. I find it rather unlikely that a workable concept would be ignored by countless engineers world over for the last 60 years or so...
And there is still the problem of general dynamic stability, by definition more problematic with 3 wheels than with 4, not to mention the weird windshield and so on...
In short no one has tried to do this again simply because it was kooky to begin with, not because some world-spanning, anti-innovation, anti-Buckminster conspiracy as the tin-foil hats would have us believe.
Right on. People get so engrossed in the hero-worship of kooky "inventors" that they seem to check all and any critical abilities at the door.
As for this wacko of a "car", one could ask questions like: How do you install windshield wipers on a curved window composed of a bunch of panes? What is the dynamic stability of this three-wheeled wonder when turning at 120 km/h? Side wind, anyone? What is the traction one can get of a single rear mounted wheel transferring the entire output of the power-train on a slippery road covered with snow and ice? Etc etc etc.
The whole notion of a "stock market" or "investing" in things over which you have no control or knowledge about is, frankly, insane. This includes indirect forms of such gambling such as index trading or entities which engage in trading many shares in bulk at once, etc and so on.
If you engage in insane activities, you better be prepared to deal with the consequences.
So yes, it is far simpler that you are trying to make it appear.
Regards.
Err, your point? Are you trying to suggest that crooks engaged in billion dollar briberies would be just completely terrified of committing fraud?! "Well we can bribe for industrial and state secrets, but no sireee, fraud, that is where we draw the line!".
Really...
This is where the whole silly "free market" ideology falls apart. In the supposed "efficient free market" you are expected to have only "informed buyers" making rational purchases. So either you should have shareholders buying shares of companies of whose activities they are fully aware of (as in having thoroughly investigated them) or you have a "market" composed of con artists and marks. If you are incapable, or unwilling, to obtain a complete picture of what you are buying, then you are culpable for all of the results of your purchase, according to the ideologues.
Of course it is clearly impossible to be aware of all aspects of one's purchase with most modern products, shares of secretive companies in particular, and so any pretense of "free market" ever being possible is just idiot ideologues talking. And thus the whole particular idea of "shares" or "stock market" is horribly flawed in its inception, resulting in a glorified gambling casino where not only the value of "shares" of companies but also the real-world outcomes of the activities of those companies are utterly random. Which is the very reason for "ordinary people" not to "invest" in the crooked thing in the first place.
All those who participate are culpable by definition, for having chosen to actively support something over which they have no control.
Bullshit. That is the copout that corporations have been using forever but there are two major and fatal problems with it: 1) shareholders choose to invest in companies and 2) they have (with any brains) the voting shares, and thus the ability to change the board of directors and with it the CEO.
So no dice. Whining that "We didn't know that our money invested in the 'White Phosphorus Bombs R Us' will actually hurt anyone! We just looked for the 200% return!" is scoring the unscrupulous assholes no points.
Also, the stock market is a gambling casino for those with more money then brains (now more so then ever before, where company earnings or dividends have no bearing whatsoever on share price). Retirement money does not belong there.
Still beats the hell out of a $25 gift-card, if you ask me ... but then again neither the bribers or the bribees in these two-bit, amateur-hour shows were known for competence or ambition.
For some perspective, consider the Iraq invasion: $3 trillion (and that is just the latest estimate) in cash down the drain, all to private concerns, multiple billions of which are not only unaccounted for, but were actually delivered in form of mountains of $100, $50 and $20 bills on shipping pallets....
And then there is the "too big to fail" multi-hundred billion cash bailout for the destitute and starving Wall Street, the specifics of which are so sensitive as to constitute a "national security" concern ...
In short, what is on display here is the difference between professionals and hobbyists.
From a purely scientific point of view, one can simply have the party in question organize an official "raffle" or "sales promotion lottery" or some such, ostensibly meant to promote their product or service and open to general public. And since they control the entire process, it would not be too difficult for you to end up with the "winning" raffle ticket.
Purely academic, you understand.
Delayed? Versus what? A "prognosis", which itself is based on a probability distribution, i.e. "82% of patients with this type of cancer do not live longer than x years"? Your dad could have simply been in that last few percent of cases. Or the doctor could have mis-estimated the size of the cancer or its state of advancement.
In other words you have absolutely no reference point to measure a "delay" of any kind. This, combined with all the other scientific evidence against the quacks mentioned leaves you in no position to call the GP "arrogant". In fact your attitude, i.e. your emotions shutting off your higher brain functions, is what makes these parasitic hucksters possible in the first place.
Desperate people with little or no means of evaluating scientific knowledge will do most idiotic things imaginable in order to try to save their loved ones. This is understandable, but it is no excuse for trying to pretend that anything these quacks offer is actually working or is in any way based on reality.
So did Al Capone. And so do all of these Colombian gentlemen in the "import-export" business...
You see, contrary to what some "free market" fetishists would have you believe, "giving people jobs" or "making piles of money" are by themselves insufficient criteria to evaluate worthiness of some individuals' activity.
This "advice" only works if the entity you are advising to "stop buying" from does not hold a de-facto monopoly in some area of the marketplace. Otherwise it is akin to advising some poor shmuck to "stop eating" if he "doesn't like buying stuff from the company store with his company scrip"
This is a self-inflicted malaise as far as the independent studios are concerned. There is absolutely no requirement to use "modern graphics" (whatever that means, I assume you are talking about ridiculously detailed models with megazillions of polygons). That is because there is absolutely no direct relationship between game play and the graphics quality. Some of the most popular games have graphics reminiscent of the 1990s or even 1980s, while some of the greatest bombs sport fancy 3D engines with programmable shaders, deformable environments and what not.
In fact this whole obsession with graphics to the exclusion of everything else seems to me very much like a hardware vendor instigated mass psychosis, helped along by the likes of EA and others who wish to achieve a strangle-hold on the gaming industry by setting up massive, artificial, budgetary "barriers to entry" for competitors. Which also happens to be a pre-requisite to cartel-forming, creation of oligopolies and finally monopolies.
That is a way of putting it which brings warmth to my heart. I only wish that people with your insight were the majority, instead of a tiny fraction of a percentile of society... perhaps then reason, logic, empirical evidence and the scientific method would be a norm, instead of being treated as the red-headed bastard child of a chamber-maid at a feast of its arrogantly, pridefully ignorant, gleefully sociopathic, insanely greedy, diseased with delusional, self-serving "religions", violently aggressive and generally utterly irrational "betters".
Thats what you get when the whole Western "culture" is just a thin veneer of rationality covering up fucked in the head religious wackos and power-hungry authoritarian demagogues who are running the show in reality, just underneath the surface. Conditioning kids to kill on command because "we are the Good Guys!", "we are Righteous!" and ultimately "God is with us!" is a very useful tool for those who see the world as an everlasting, apocalyptic conflict between "Good" (defined as whatever the fucked-up authoritarians of "our side" come up with) and "Evil" (which is everything else, with a particular emphasis on the nearly identically fucked-up authoritarians of "the other guys", with a generous doze of contempt for everyone either neutral or having a functioning brain). And hypocritical, obsessive, hysterical and schizophrenic attitude toward sex of course is a direct link to the screwed-up religious bullshit all of these fucked-up authoritarians subscribe to in order to "justify" to themselves their greed for power and control over others.
It is no coincidence that nearly all the crazies which run around raping little girls, or kidnapping them and keeping them prisoners also happen to be far-out religious zealots, as it is also no coincidence that Judeo-Christian religions try to apply incoherent, illogical, irrational and usually very draconian rules to anything sex related. In this all the members of Al-Qaeda and the various screwed-up Western "think of the children!" authoritarians are of identical mind.
That is why there will never be sane policy on sex, drugs and many other things in the West. The fucked-up, religious wacko authoritarians will simply not allow it, whatever the cost.
In unrelated news, the newly-founded Superluminal Space Travel Consortium announced plans for interstellar commercial travel in their new faster-than-light ships. The consortium's spokesman, one Slick McShifty, was quoted saying "We are well on our way to this stellar goal and we invite all potential investors to act swiftly as this is the most monumental of opportunities!", while demonstrating to the press the initial rivet of the first starship to be constructed.
In further unrelated news, the new expedition to the Center of The Earth got underway. Professor Meeh Nuts was quoted saying, "Onward Science! Come forth Discovery!", while throwing the first shovel-load of soil over his shoulder and posing for the cameras.