Fox later admitted that he purposely skips his medication before public events like this so people will see his worst case symptoms.
Skipping medication is *not* the same as play acting. Popping pills isn't always as straight-forward as asprin, or as dreamy as acid. If people never see warts and all, then they're living in a world of tranqualizers.
Matryros is 100% right about drawing down on resources, and that affecting the sustainable "income" of the future. There are two things at play here, and they've co-existed for as long as the world has existed with human society on it: + The economic system, based on growth + The matter-energy relationship humans have with the environment.
So far the world has been big enough for perpetual growth to continue to this point, and a little beyond. However, it is *inevitable* that perpetual exponential growth with reach a choke point with the 2nd relationship. Many left-wing economics believe that the economy based on natural resources will be replaced with an information economy. That the economy can fundamentally do without natural resources. I believe this thinking is flawed. As a society, our information economy will resemble a sky-scraper with an eroding foundation. When people need heat, food and shelter, then the information economy will be meaningless.
Thus one should consider the big picture: at what point will our current economic system become untenable. This is a serious question with horrific consequences. The only sane thing to do is plan for the future, but it remains to be seen if humanity can actually do that en masse.
Personally I believe that the energy crisis will become the choke point that corrects perpetual growth. Rising energy costs will drive huge inflation, and every larger recessions that eventually never seem to end. At some point, investors will realise that there is no value in investing in a economy that fundamentally won't grow. Without investment money, an entirely new system will have to come about, and a scramble for economic reorganisation that should really be planned over lifetimes.
If energy really is the choke point, then this will come about sometime in the next 50 years maximum. If we successfully transition away from an energy based economy, or alternatively, solve our energy problems, then a different choke point will present itself at some time, unless humanity becomes a space faring species.
Over time, our growth-based economic system cannot fundamentally co-exist with our matter-energy relationship with the world.
Shouldn't that be the benchmark for personal "success"?
Yes it should. Except it would be impossible to set out to be more kind/genuine/wise/selfless with a goal of "personal" success. It's very paradoxical. The truth can't be pinned down so easily. The "truth" as you think it, is a mental formation - that's almost certianly entangled with your heart-fealt sense of self. Perhaps in this discussion you feel that you're right about something. Perfectly natural. Perhaps there's also a background pervasive feeling that something isn't quite right. Also perfectly natural. Both are aspects of you heart-felt sense of self.
In fact if you can do this without help from a belief in a false god then aren't you better off?
Why yes you would. But if you did succeed, then belief/nonbelief in god would be incidental. Whatever works for you. Belief in god is so pervasive because we need to believe in something bigger than ourselves to move past our mental entaglement with the heart-felt sense of self.
Consider the following aspiration: To relase myself from harm, and to free all others from suffering, let me give myself away and love others as I love myself.
A person with absolutely no doubt in themselves could do that. 99.999% of us need to believe in something first, and the benefit of that belief is that it will direct us in a practical sense.
Perhaps it's obvious to you that god doesn't exist. Perhaps you believe therefore, that you don't need belief in god. Great. Now, how are you going to achieve this personal success? I wonder if you'll just brush that practical aspect off, but still fail to commit to the personal/spiritual growth that would bring "glad to be alive" into every moment of your life. Perhaps you've already achieved "success" without belief in god (as Buddha did).
I'm not saying that there is only one way. There are as many ways as there are people on the planet. But I would say that everybody needs to pay close attention to their life - really connect with it honestly - and move beyong anything untrue or harmful. That is the path quality of spirituality, and for those who find their way without belief in god, then great.
What is left is a meaningless question mark in the dark, something so completely orthogonal to any human hope, expectation, or understanding, so utterly alien, that it is colder than the void of space. This is not the God that any religion believes in.
Personally I think this is spot on, but the religious types (which includes myself) would remain completely unconvinced that you've said anything useful. Well, I think you have, so there must be a bridge somewhere.
Perhaps the problem is that too many people are concerned with what God is or isn't. The question should be not what God is, but what is the function of belief in God. Instead of asking "why", it seems more useful to investigate "what" and "how". What am I part of? What am I? How does "this-all" work? Answers to those questions are more reachable.
That brings me to the point - people are interested in religion, fundamentally, because they are seeking some sort of truth in their life. The irony is not lost on me. But at the same time, it most cases it works, and in some cases it makes a tremendously positive difference in peoples lives.
The benchmark for religious "success" could be: kindness, wisdom, open mindedness, trust in oneself, genuineness and selflessness. These qualities embody the divine within, but if you don't like that term, then think of it as basic human nature. Our nature when we're not confused, frightened or bewildered.
So paradoxically, people seek truth in some sort of delusion. We are all already deluded to some degree. It's subconscious, ingrained and almost impossible to "see". Perhaps the only real spiritual path is stepping out of delusion. How someone does that is believe in an entirely fictitious sacred world which might act as a cure for the fictitious world that they currently believe in.
I think that's the core of it. It's not a question of what is God, but how does a belief in this mental formation function in helping someone see past themselves and find some sort of happiness and equanimity in life. If you can do that without belief in God, then good for you. And write a book too, because other no-believers need to know.
Tasters are economic parasites, pure and simple. Just like the biological kind, they exist because they can, and we can't really do much about it. Perhaps ICANN could, but it doesn't seem to be a top priority for them. I don't know why that is, but I assume its a mixture of greed and incompetence. I'm sure ICANN is either threatened legally, or are on the take themselves, or are simply clueless and think they have better things to do.
In short, just because something is obviously wrong with domain tasting doesn't mean that the world will change direction. It spins of its own accord.
If you're at stage 2-4, then it can be extremely frustring to run into someone at stage 1, because usually
such people are like a cup that's completely full. No room for anything.
Do you really think a prof (probably at stage 2-4) is afraid that they'll be made redundent by google, or is
more like they're annoyed by idiots at stage 1 who think they've got everything worked out already.
The point is that the world does not need religion, it is evil and serves no purpose but to
perpetuate its self and get in the way of rational, proper thinking.
Evil and with no purpose? In essence, it's purist form, religion is there
to provide a spiritual path such that one can solve their problems. It is an act of utter
sanity and proper thinking to attempt to solve ones problems and give away anything that
causes hardship. That is the purpose and rationality of religion.
It's natural to object to the dogmatic and prescriptive aspects. Thats fine. Some people need that,
some don't. We're all different in that regard. There *are* religious congregations that are not
dogmatic *at all*. And their are dogmatic and prescriptive "rationalists" as well. The point is
that dogma is not religion.
However much you or anyone else think you believe in some sort of god doesn't change the fact that
there is no god and that you have simply been deluded either by yourself or by your parents or elders
into believing that nonsense.
Really? I'd say it's impossible to prove either way, although I'm leaning towards the idea that there is
no god, I couldn't say for sure. If somebody finds a belief useful in getting through that day, and it
causes them to act with more kindness and genuiness, then I'm all for it. If a belief in god or otherwise
does not have this effect, then I'd privately question the sanity - but alas, there is no way to help
such a person, but try to support them in finding happiness for themselves.
Imagine a family of dole bludging crack addicts, assuming any children survived they would be convinced
that leeching of the state and undertaking petty crime to pay for their crack is perfectly normal behaviour and
something to be applauded. The fact is no matter how much they might believe in that it still doesn't make it
right and society has a duty to get involved when things go wrong like this and put an end to the problem.
I think this "bite" highlights a difference in how we think. Deep down we are all aware of when something is
unhealthy and when something is not. Belief won't change that. It's basic intelligence, and works at the
level of "hand on stove equals burnt hand". Thus, it would be impossible for these crack addicts to be
happy. Deep down, they'd be painfully aware of what they are creating. The easy road is denial.
The hard road is dealing with the whole problem.
Societies traditional way of dealing with "the whole problem" is spirituality. Sure it's confused, sure lots
of bad stuff happens, but that's because spirituality is practised by human beings. If human beings weren't
confused, then they wouldn't need spirituality in the first place. So pat yourself on the back if you
think that you're perfectly wise, sane, and live life with absolutely no regret and never cause harm to
yourself or anybody else. You'd be the one in a trillion who would derive no benefit from genuine spirituality.
Unfortunately it doesn't matter that most peoples actual belief is more or less half hearted and innocuous
in order to target the real criminals, priests, nuns, monks and evangalists etc they must be brought to understand
that supporting religious activity is no longer an acceptable behaviour. Without their 'flock' the real work can
begin; taking down the organisation and infrastructure of relgion. There is no real need to imprison any but the
most hardline extremists ( who will undoubtedly turn to terrorism to maintain a grasp on their power ) it will be
enough to make sure that no religious nonsense can ever be taught to children and no religious organisation can be
allowed to operate, eventually with a lack of support and aggressive teaching about the fallacy of religion it will
wither and die a natural, but long overdue death.
While I respect that you truely believe that, I find it difficult to think that any but a very small portion of
religious leaders would resort to terrorism. Those that woul
If your only incentive is to make money, then I guess you've defined what is not art. It might look like art to the casual observer, but it has no substance, and is only an echo of the real thing. So lets find a business model that works please.
In my experience the figure is pretty low - more like 10-20% of the people I know. I believe that file-sharing has a particular demographic, and outside of that, people can't be bothered with that computer thingy.
I agree that you need to have a rough idea about how the whole stack works. But we no longer expect all computer science students to be able to wire up NAND gates from discrete valves or transistors.
I agree a little more with the parent of your post because, I find that it's really important to be able to reason about what your code is *doing*. To reason code, one must understand what high-level language X is doing with it. A lot of mistakes that I see are made because people don't understand how their code is executing.
It doesn't take too much to learn. A bit of assembler, write some basic stuff, so that one can get the idea of it. Write a bit of C for a microcontroller, throw in a few pointers, so that one has a working understanding of stack/heap memory, function pointers and such. Only then will you be able to understand how the CLR works, how it tries to save you from resource leaks, and how you can still screw it all up.
Ignorance is not bliss when it comes to working in higher level abstractions. One needs to have some basic idea of what the abstraction is doing.
When you do that, you basically destroy any chance of a tech industry emerging in Africa, because, there's not going to be any indigenous computer manufacturing. It's always fun to look at free trade and say, geez, look at what the third world is doing to the USA, but, sometimes, you have to look the other way around.
The cost-benefit analyse is obviously in favour of having the OLPC. An educated society is much more valuable than the potential of developing a computer-component manufacturing sector.
Education is the most precious thing in society. Even in wealthy countries, those who are uneducated are effectively sentenced to a life of poverty, hardship and bad health. The wealth and benefits of our modern society can, to a large extent, be attributed to mass education.
Studies have shown that viewing violence has a certain affect on the brain. I'm sure porn does to. My personal belief is that violence is far worse than porn, but that neither are that bad. The fact that an individual can become addicted to porn, and that that affects their ability to have a real relationship with someone, and ultimatly their happiness, is proof that porn *can* be problematic.
Like all things, one can only trust in ones own ability to discern what is healthy. Compulsion and other problems can be cured by never forgetting what you want, and the support of family, friends and professionals.
I'm saying that the debate is wrong. We should me more concerned with how we can find individual happiness by living our one-shot lives better, than worrying about other people seeing violence or porn on the internet.
Perhaps we should be more concerned about teaching our children to live in the *real* world, and live well. We can only teach children that by living well ourselves.
Honestly... it's crap like that that makes me want to just download instead of purchasing.
The fact that media companies think they can control what I consume by shoving ads/branding/corporate-ethics-of-the-day just ensures that I'll look elsewhere. I'm not sure if media companies understand how obvious that is - or perhaps they believe they're entitled to piss me off, and therefore it's a "moral" issue not grounded in the reality of what people actually do.
To sumerise the argument: corporate greed is right and consumer greed is wrong. Ignore that you can get something better elsewhere. But isn't giving consumers what they want the very core of a market economy?
If the media companies bit the bullet and actually provided a wonderfully easy to use, indexed service where you could download your latest shows/movies/songs for a reasonable price (say 99c for an episode of TV - watermark it if you want). Well, why would I bother with all the hassle of illegal downloading when I can get what I want much more conveniently?
I once saw a senior market researcher explaining how she was researching ways to make children better naggers. She said that irritation might be a certain attitude that parents have, but if they ship toys they win. I think that sentiment sums up the ethics of the people who force you and your children to sit though commercials and other branding on your legitimately bought DVDs.
I think it's a moral choice to download, because in the end, a market economy is about the consumer. If/when the media companies play ball, then the consumer will buy from them. If TV/music/movies must be produced on smaller budgets, and prices have to come down - well then, the consumer has spoken, and that will make everyone happy.
can anyone give a reason why ALL people convicted of ANYTHING aren't in a database?
AFIAK, arrest, trail and imprisonment are all public acts and therefore you should be able to work it out if you really want to. Not completely sure about that, but I am sure that fundamentally, its the wrong direction.
More and more, as a society, we're concerned about securing ourselves by putting up barriers between ourselves and others. This is fundamentally ignorant. It is destroying society. Isolation is precisely the catalyst to deviant social behavior, and depression.
The process of branding someone is always flawed, and tends to create the opposite of what you want. For example, if you get angry, it's because of the circumstance you're in right? Wrong. Other people will look at you in that moment, and see you as an intrinsically angry person... just as you brand all former criminals as intrinsically criminal, with life-long convictions.
When you brand these "bad" people (who see their problems as circumstantial, and not intrinsic as you do)... what do you think they'll do? Smile at you with deep understanding that you hate them because you don't understand their struggle with life? If you hate them, then they will hate you back. That's because, if everybody looks at you like you're a freak, you *will* hate them in turn. If you isolate someone, then who knows what dark place they will visit - maybe stealing your car to buy drugs (so they can feel good), or attacking someone, or vandalize your property.
Isn't public safety more important than the "privacy" of criminals?
Public safety can be best served by bringing people back into whatever fragile community we have left. Into jobs, church, family gatherings, community gatherings, 12-step programs, whatever.
You're version of public safety leads to a progressively more depressing and lawless situation. Branded, envious and hopeless people are permanently convicted. Where will they turn? Perhaps it'd be better to put them out of their misery - or dump them on some pacific island somewhere. On the other hand, upright citizens like yourself have to move to progressively safer neighbourhoods with higher fences and bigger locks. Alas for the sad irony of blank-n-white morality.
Nowdays everybody can have an offspring no matter what diseases, diets or social changes he is subjected to.
I'm ready to mate with any female who'll have me. Unfortunatly none have got past my obnoxious/. personality and I have to waste good sperm on my lesbian pr0n collection. Friends - are you being selected against too?
I wish TFA had properly indicated that as the reason why we won't ever have a chernobyl, along with our compliance with basic safety regulations.
Mistakes happen. fatigue kills. I'll feel safer when it's mandated that such workers have a minimum of 9 hours sleep, and are audited by some sort of cognative test.
The popular vision of bumbling PHB buffoons everywhere is just another stupid slashdot stereotype, fostered by insecure
social retards who have to foist their apparent superiority over everyone by scoffing at everything.
Now hang on there a moment. I appreciate your candor; however I'd like to point out that while the PHB in
Dilbert comics really is a bumbling buffoon, the PHBs that I've met are completely different. They are
street-wise, people-smart, conflate confidence with accomplishment, and have entirely different concerns to programmers.
And by programmers, I mean, people who actually care about and want to write software.
PHBs are very concerned that
the documentation has a smart looking layout, and lots of diagrams - hopefully nice and thick. They like glossy shrink-wrap
and smart looking logos and designs. Software should "look" good, and that will meet client's expectations. The contents
could be crap, but that's just a little secret. But if you place a beautiful brochade on a piece of crap - the essence of
what's there is still crap.
A good example is the recent/. article about canadian passport website - where changing the query string allowed
access to other peoples application details.
Such a thing happens, not because of a single programmer, but because of organisational issues. The programmer knows at some
level that the boss doesn't "get-it", and has no incentive or *environment* where they can actually learn how to do things
properly. The poor guy who wrote the website, he probably was never shown how to work the security. Maybe he attended a 2-day corporate course, but he was never *shown* how to do it. For this reason, I see, and continue to see, horrendously poor quality work that just slips and slides through the
system. I see band-aid solutions routinely applied, and a fight fire-with-fire attitude. Be very afraid of proprietary software
Sure, they exist, but long-term successful tech companies generally have -- get ready for it -- smart people working for them.
Yes, yes. But are they oriented correctly? Are they actually used for their skills? Do they work under a regime that
considers it more important to cultivate the "business" knowledge of their programmers? Are they mentored? Are their skills
cultivated? Does the boss care if the software guts are actually written well - more than meeting a deadline that is arbitrarily
moved back to "motivate" the staff.
I work for one of the most successful companies in the world, and most of the people I work with aren't really interested in
programming, but they all have great people skills. When I was hired, I introduced a few concepts to the senior programmer:
+ Hashtables (yes, their software was running painfully slow, because no-one paid attention to algorithms and data-structures. The
people running the place had been out of school for so long, that they had forgotten what they were)
+ The concept of encoding (for example, UTF-8 is a binary representation of text. & is an XML representation of the ampersand)
+ The singleton design pattern
I stopped there, because there's no point. Forget thread synchronization, design patterns, the works. While they struggle
with the.net soap wizard, I'll quietly try to find myself on projects that don't involve working with large volumes of
hacked up garbage - and study on my own what I really want to study: how to write software well.
So if you know of an organization that is pragmatically involved with cultivating the skills of their developers,
then please, send me the contact details.
But why would the anti-spam software companies want that? If they succeed in actually eliminating spam, they'd also go out of business. It may be profitable for the spammers, but I suspect it's even more profitable for the anti-spam companies.
"Hold on Joe, we can't implement that algorithm, we'll lose our jobs." Probably _not_ something any flies on the wall will have heard in the anti-spam industry. The "boss" probably doesn't know what a hashtable is, and finds his lead programmer's attitude annoyingly expensive. After-all you can hire vb programmers out of school for less than half as much, and it's just software after all. What's the big deal with these code reviews.
My point is, the "powers" that be, in the particular case, are likely incompetent - incapable of successfully pulling off such a conspiracy. The CEO probably blows his load whenever he thinks of outselling his economic rivals. If they could make their product an order of magnitude better, and *own* the market, then they could be the next M$ of their industry. If companies produce poor software, it's probably because they're more interested in the business side of things, than any real care about producing good software.
Don't hold your breath for spam killer software - not because the anti-spam industry isn't trying, but because the problem is genuinely hard, and the PHB qualities of management in the software industry.
Too much fruit and nuts for you
on
Google Goes Green
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Keep this in mind when you contrast this with the fact that more oil is currently known to exist than any other time in human history and its widely believed huge undiscovered reserves have yet to be located.
fyi, nobody is investing in new oil refineries, because noone in their right mind would invest $$$ when they won't get a return on capitol. The market has spoken - the market says there isn't money to be made from more refineries. That's probably because you'd have to run it for 10 years to break-even, and in 10 years time, our refining capacity may outstrip supply. Either that, or there's a massive organised world-wide conspiricy, to keep gold cookies out away from intelligent negative people.
Long story short, there is actually zero factual information to suggest we are anywhere near peak
Ignore the factual information. There's *lots* of oil. Jedi waves hand.
If the oil companies are conspiring to do anything, it's that they want to sell you *more* oil and *now*. That's because it's good for their bottom line. So go to the gas station and fill up, dump in the river and fill up again! Don't worry about future scarcity! We want your money NOW! and if we make money it's good for the economy, so it _must_ be good for you too!
There's an apt saying: "Never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity". As I see it, the oil companies aren't capable of the type of conspiricy you suggest. It's too easy to shine light on their FUD. For example, the chamber of echos that exxon has created to suggest that there's *lots* of scientists who don't believe in the human impact on climate change. Some are fooled, anyone who cares to look it not.
And on the bright side - if you're right - and the oil companies are delibertly trying *not* to sell more oil (falls down laughing), then they're doing humanity a service on so many different levels:
Increased price restricts demand - pushes back peak. Just like the 70s crisis screwed up Huberts original projection for world peak in the 90s
Increased public awareness on the oil issue (it hits the wallet), means policy changes and *research* into alternatives
Alternatives become more attractive - the energy economy is diversified
Who knows - maybe the decrease in oil sales will translate into total less greenhouse gasses this year
Energy prices have been too low for too long. If an energy crunch happens, it will mean severe economic adjustment (and hardship) that could have been mitigated by a more frugle policy to energy usage. Such policies could help the economy slowly make the necessary structural changes. Such policies fly can only exist when the future becomes more important than satisfying immediate wants. I'm not holding my breath - too many people with a sense of entitlement - that they should have what they want, and have it now. Humanities current flirtation with greed has nothing to do with malice, and everything to do with stupidty.
A russian friend told me that Russia will never go that far under the existing regime. He said the TV is very positive about the government, and most people just believe it. I also noticed some unusual behaviour from him, like not trusting banks and other institutions. Spending time with him made me realize how russia is really in a lot of pain.
A simple fact: if Putin was so wonderful, he wouldn't condone thuggery on anyone, let alone an old man.
There are far poorer nations in the world where people are happier, like Bhutan, where the police chief asked the monks to purify the police-force for the conflict they created by doing their job. People trusting each other is worth more than money. If I didn't believe that, then I'd join the mafia.
Oh, I get it, Putin *is* the mafia, and you're their for the gold bricks right?
And the USA and EU can't stop doing that so long as there's ever a threat of war. What does war have to do with it?? Well, it's very simple. If war breaks out, you have to have food to eat. That's a good enough reason to subsides agriculture, and keep the production within your borders.
Not that I think dumping on the market is a good thing. It's a complex issue.
The theory is that as a democracy, legislative matters ultimately rest in the hands of voters. Well, we're a dysfunctional bunch if we make laws that criminalize wide-spread behaviour. Perhaps something is truly broken with the system. (Gasp!)
Lets face it: the genie is out of the bottle.
The cost of distribution of digital material is almost negligible. The only real way that a business can make a buck at distribution is by making the *accuracy* and *convenience* of their system better than p2p networks. That's possible, and the price they can charge is really only what that convenience and accuracy is worth - not the "hotness" of the content.
I believe that that will have next to zero impact on artists creating new works. In fact, I predict that musicians, writers, software engineers and painters will *all* created *more* art. Some with independent produces of other media. These days most musicians make money from people coming to their shows and buying merchandise - so nothing really changes for them...
What *will* change is the extravagant megabucks all-show-and-no-backbone facade that passes for art. The masses will probably not be too depressed by missing Michael Jackson, Brittany Spears, Madonna, and other such hyped acts. These artists probably would have had their own smaller scale success anyway. So what *exactly* is lost by not having their egos rammed down our thought by expensive advertising systems. Is it bad enough that we should have laws that make the average person a criminal? Doesn't bad law breed contempt for the law system? Isn't the law system struggling enough without all of this added extra noise?
One thing that might not come out in the wash are the super-duper-expensive movies that people are making theses days. The popcorn blockbuster made for $200 million. But I have to ask... do you really see a threat such that the TV and Movie industry disbands? TV is heading for a big shake-up, and home theatres are eating into the box-office. Well, maybe hollywood will have to scale back a *little*, like to the comparative budgets of the 70s, and maybe no more $2million dollar episodes of favourite space-soap. Is that the end of the world?
Hypocrisy has a corrosive effect on society.
Yeah... if we just wake up a little bit, we'd scale back copyright to help promote new art. Oh that's right, we can't stop businesses making money right?
Greed has a corrosive effect on society. Hypocrisy is the rim of wisdom.
Slashdot Mirror
Fox later admitted that he purposely skips his medication before public events like this so people will see his worst case symptoms.
Skipping medication is *not* the same as play acting. Popping pills isn't always as straight-forward as asprin, or as dreamy as acid. If people never see warts and all, then they're living in a world of tranqualizers.
Matryros is 100% right about drawing down on resources, and that affecting the sustainable "income" of the future. There are two things at play here, and they've co-existed for as long as the world has existed with human society on it:
+ The economic system, based on growth
+ The matter-energy relationship humans have with the environment.
So far the world has been big enough for perpetual growth to continue to this point, and a little beyond. However, it is *inevitable* that perpetual exponential growth with reach a choke point with the 2nd relationship. Many left-wing economics believe that the economy based on natural resources will be replaced with an information economy. That the economy can fundamentally do without natural resources. I believe this thinking is flawed. As a society, our information economy will resemble a sky-scraper with an eroding foundation. When people need heat, food and shelter, then the information economy will be meaningless.
Thus one should consider the big picture: at what point will our current economic system become untenable. This is a serious question with horrific consequences. The only sane thing to do is plan for the future, but it remains to be seen if humanity can actually do that en masse.
Personally I believe that the energy crisis will become the choke point that corrects perpetual growth. Rising energy costs will drive huge inflation, and every larger recessions that eventually never seem to end. At some point, investors will realise that there is no value in investing in a economy that fundamentally won't grow. Without investment money, an entirely new system will have to come about, and a scramble for economic reorganisation that should really be planned over lifetimes.
If energy really is the choke point, then this will come about sometime in the next 50 years maximum. If we successfully transition away from an energy based economy, or alternatively, solve our energy problems, then a different choke point will present itself at some time, unless humanity becomes a space faring species.
Over time, our growth-based economic system cannot fundamentally co-exist with our matter-energy relationship with the world.
Shouldn't that be the benchmark for personal "success"?
Yes it should. Except it would be impossible to set out to be more kind/genuine/wise/selfless with a goal of "personal" success. It's very paradoxical. The truth can't be pinned down so easily. The "truth" as you think it, is a mental formation - that's almost certianly entangled with your heart-fealt sense of self. Perhaps in this discussion you feel that you're right about something. Perfectly natural. Perhaps there's also a background pervasive feeling that something isn't quite right. Also perfectly natural. Both are aspects of you heart-felt sense of self.
In fact if you can do this without help from a belief in a false god then aren't you better off?
Why yes you would. But if you did succeed, then belief/nonbelief in god would be incidental. Whatever works for you. Belief in god is so pervasive because we need to believe in something bigger than ourselves to move past our mental entaglement with the heart-felt sense of self.
Consider the following aspiration:
To relase myself from harm, and to free all others from suffering, let me give myself away and love others as I love myself.
A person with absolutely no doubt in themselves could do that. 99.999% of us need to believe in something first, and the benefit of that belief is that it will direct us in a practical sense.
Perhaps it's obvious to you that god doesn't exist. Perhaps you believe therefore, that you don't need belief in god. Great. Now, how are you going to achieve this personal success? I wonder if you'll just brush that practical aspect off, but still fail to commit to the personal/spiritual growth that would bring "glad to be alive" into every moment of your life. Perhaps you've already achieved "success" without belief in god (as Buddha did).
I'm not saying that there is only one way. There are as many ways as there are people on the planet. But I would say that everybody needs to pay close attention to their life - really connect with it honestly - and move beyong anything untrue or harmful. That is the path quality of spirituality, and for those who find their way without belief in god, then great.
What is left is a meaningless question mark in the dark, something so completely orthogonal to any human hope, expectation, or understanding, so utterly alien, that it is colder than the void of space. This is not the God that any religion believes in.
Personally I think this is spot on, but the religious types (which includes myself) would remain completely unconvinced that you've said anything useful. Well, I think you have, so there must be a bridge somewhere.
Perhaps the problem is that too many people are concerned with what God is or isn't. The question should be not what God is, but what is the function of belief in God. Instead of asking "why", it seems more useful to investigate "what" and "how". What am I part of? What am I? How does "this-all" work? Answers to those questions are more reachable.
That brings me to the point - people are interested in religion, fundamentally, because they are seeking some sort of truth in their life. The irony is not lost on me. But at the same time, it most cases it works, and in some cases it makes a tremendously positive difference in peoples lives.
The benchmark for religious "success" could be: kindness, wisdom, open mindedness, trust in oneself, genuineness and selflessness. These qualities embody the divine within, but if you don't like that term, then think of it as basic human nature. Our nature when we're not confused, frightened or bewildered.
So paradoxically, people seek truth in some sort of delusion. We are all already deluded to some degree. It's subconscious, ingrained and almost impossible to "see". Perhaps the only real spiritual path is stepping out of delusion. How someone does that is believe in an entirely fictitious sacred world which might act as a cure for the fictitious world that they currently believe in.
I think that's the core of it. It's not a question of what is God, but how does a belief in this mental formation function in helping someone see past themselves and find some sort of happiness and equanimity in life. If you can do that without belief in God, then good for you. And write a book too, because other no-believers need to know.
Everybody who cares to look already knows that ODF is about IBM's business AND the pubic good.
Tasters are economic parasites, pure and simple. Just like the biological kind, they exist because they can, and we can't really do much about it. Perhaps ICANN could, but it doesn't seem to be a top priority for them. I don't know why that is, but I assume its a mixture of greed and incompetence. I'm sure ICANN is either threatened legally, or are on the take themselves, or are simply clueless and think they have better things to do.
In short, just because something is obviously wrong with domain tasting doesn't mean that the world will change direction. It spins of its own accord.
There are 4 stages to understanding something:
If you're at stage 2-4, then it can be extremely frustring to run into someone at stage 1, because usually such people are like a cup that's completely full. No room for anything.
Do you really think a prof (probably at stage 2-4) is afraid that they'll be made redundent by google, or is more like they're annoyed by idiots at stage 1 who think they've got everything worked out already.
The point is that the world does not need religion, it is evil and serves no purpose but to perpetuate its self and get in the way of rational, proper thinking.
Evil and with no purpose? In essence, it's purist form, religion is there to provide a spiritual path such that one can solve their problems. It is an act of utter sanity and proper thinking to attempt to solve ones problems and give away anything that causes hardship. That is the purpose and rationality of religion.
It's natural to object to the dogmatic and prescriptive aspects. Thats fine. Some people need that, some don't. We're all different in that regard. There *are* religious congregations that are not dogmatic *at all*. And their are dogmatic and prescriptive "rationalists" as well. The point is that dogma is not religion.
However much you or anyone else think you believe in some sort of god doesn't change the fact that there is no god and that you have simply been deluded either by yourself or by your parents or elders into believing that nonsense.
Really? I'd say it's impossible to prove either way, although I'm leaning towards the idea that there is no god, I couldn't say for sure. If somebody finds a belief useful in getting through that day, and it causes them to act with more kindness and genuiness, then I'm all for it. If a belief in god or otherwise does not have this effect, then I'd privately question the sanity - but alas, there is no way to help such a person, but try to support them in finding happiness for themselves.
Imagine a family of dole bludging crack addicts, assuming any children survived they would be convinced that leeching of the state and undertaking petty crime to pay for their crack is perfectly normal behaviour and something to be applauded. The fact is no matter how much they might believe in that it still doesn't make it right and society has a duty to get involved when things go wrong like this and put an end to the problem.
I think this "bite" highlights a difference in how we think. Deep down we are all aware of when something is unhealthy and when something is not. Belief won't change that. It's basic intelligence, and works at the level of "hand on stove equals burnt hand". Thus, it would be impossible for these crack addicts to be happy. Deep down, they'd be painfully aware of what they are creating. The easy road is denial. The hard road is dealing with the whole problem.
Societies traditional way of dealing with "the whole problem" is spirituality. Sure it's confused, sure lots of bad stuff happens, but that's because spirituality is practised by human beings. If human beings weren't confused, then they wouldn't need spirituality in the first place. So pat yourself on the back if you think that you're perfectly wise, sane, and live life with absolutely no regret and never cause harm to yourself or anybody else. You'd be the one in a trillion who would derive no benefit from genuine spirituality.
Unfortunately it doesn't matter that most peoples actual belief is more or less half hearted and innocuous in order to target the real criminals, priests, nuns, monks and evangalists etc they must be brought to understand that supporting religious activity is no longer an acceptable behaviour. Without their 'flock' the real work can begin; taking down the organisation and infrastructure of relgion. There is no real need to imprison any but the most hardline extremists ( who will undoubtedly turn to terrorism to maintain a grasp on their power ) it will be enough to make sure that no religious nonsense can ever be taught to children and no religious organisation can be allowed to operate, eventually with a lack of support and aggressive teaching about the fallacy of religion it will wither and die a natural, but long overdue death.
While I respect that you truely believe that, I find it difficult to think that any but a very small portion of religious leaders would resort to terrorism. Those that woul
We Canadians are going to form a nation with Cuba and Mexico and SURROUND you.
Mwahahahahahaha.
Then we're going to write you a stern letter about many things really.
and I'm free to cease producing works.
If your only incentive is to make money, then I guess you've defined what is not art. It might look like art to the casual observer, but it has no substance, and is only an echo of the real thing. So lets find a business model that works please.
In my experience the figure is pretty low - more like 10-20% of the people I know. I believe that file-sharing has a particular demographic, and outside of that, people can't be bothered with that computer thingy.
I highly doubt that the 1800 staff know anything that will be useful - and even if they did, they won't be able to tell you.
Damn I love this world.
I agree that you need to have a rough idea about how the whole stack works. But we no longer expect all computer science students to be able to wire up NAND gates from discrete valves or transistors.
I agree a little more with the parent of your post because, I find that it's really important to be able to reason about what your code is *doing*. To reason code, one must understand what high-level language X is doing with it. A lot of mistakes that I see are made because people don't understand how their code is executing.
It doesn't take too much to learn. A bit of assembler, write some basic stuff, so that one can get the idea of it. Write a bit of C for a microcontroller, throw in a few pointers, so that one has a working understanding of stack/heap memory, function pointers and such. Only then will you be able to understand how the CLR works, how it tries to save you from resource leaks, and how you can still screw it all up.
Ignorance is not bliss when it comes to working in higher level abstractions. One needs to have some basic idea of what the abstraction is doing.
When you do that, you basically destroy any chance of a tech industry emerging in Africa, because, there's not going to be any indigenous computer manufacturing. It's always fun to look at free trade and say, geez, look at what the third world is doing to the USA, but, sometimes, you have to look the other way around.
The cost-benefit analyse is obviously in favour of having the OLPC. An educated society is much more valuable than the potential of developing a computer-component manufacturing sector.
Education is the most precious thing in society. Even in wealthy countries, those who are uneducated are effectively sentenced to a life of poverty, hardship and bad health. The wealth and benefits of our modern society can, to a large extent, be attributed to mass education.
Studies have shown that viewing violence has a certain affect on the brain. I'm sure porn does to. My personal belief is that violence is far worse than porn, but that neither are that bad. The fact that an individual can become addicted to porn, and that that affects their ability to have a real relationship with someone, and ultimatly their happiness, is proof that porn *can* be problematic.
Like all things, one can only trust in ones own ability to discern what is healthy. Compulsion and other problems can be cured by never forgetting what you want, and the support of family, friends and professionals.
I'm saying that the debate is wrong. We should me more concerned with how we can find individual happiness by living our one-shot lives better, than worrying about other people seeing violence or porn on the internet.
Perhaps we should be more concerned about teaching our children to live in the *real* world, and live well. We can only teach children that by living well ourselves.
Honestly... it's crap like that that makes me want to just download instead of purchasing.
The fact that media companies think they can control what I consume by shoving ads/branding/corporate-ethics-of-the-day just ensures that I'll look elsewhere. I'm not sure if media companies understand how obvious that is - or perhaps they believe they're entitled to piss me off, and therefore it's a "moral" issue not grounded in the reality of what people actually do.
To sumerise the argument: corporate greed is right and consumer greed is wrong. Ignore that you can get something better elsewhere. But isn't giving consumers what they want the very core of a market economy?
If the media companies bit the bullet and actually provided a wonderfully easy to use, indexed service where you could download your latest shows/movies/songs for a reasonable price (say 99c for an episode of TV - watermark it if you want). Well, why would I bother with all the hassle of illegal downloading when I can get what I want much more conveniently?
I once saw a senior market researcher explaining how she was researching ways to make children better naggers. She said that irritation might be a certain attitude that parents have, but if they ship toys they win. I think that sentiment sums up the ethics of the people who force you and your children to sit though commercials and other branding on your legitimately bought DVDs.
I think it's a moral choice to download, because in the end, a market economy is about the consumer. If/when the media companies play ball, then the consumer will buy from them. If TV/music/movies must be produced on smaller budgets, and prices have to come down - well then, the consumer has spoken, and that will make everyone happy.
can anyone give a reason why ALL people convicted of ANYTHING aren't in a database?
AFIAK, arrest, trail and imprisonment are all public acts and therefore you should be able to work it out if you really want to. Not completely sure about that, but I am sure that fundamentally, its the wrong direction.
More and more, as a society, we're concerned about securing ourselves by putting up barriers between ourselves and others. This is fundamentally ignorant. It is destroying society. Isolation is precisely the catalyst to deviant social behavior, and depression.
The process of branding someone is always flawed, and tends to create the opposite of what you want. For example, if you get angry, it's because of the circumstance you're in right? Wrong. Other people will look at you in that moment, and see you as an intrinsically angry person... just as you brand all former criminals as intrinsically criminal, with life-long convictions.
When you brand these "bad" people (who see their problems as circumstantial, and not intrinsic as you do)... what do you think they'll do? Smile at you with deep understanding that you hate them because you don't understand their struggle with life? If you hate them, then they will hate you back. That's because, if everybody looks at you like you're a freak, you *will* hate them in turn. If you isolate someone, then who knows what dark place they will visit - maybe stealing your car to buy drugs (so they can feel good), or attacking someone, or vandalize your property.
Isn't public safety more important than the "privacy" of criminals?
Public safety can be best served by bringing people back into whatever fragile community we have left. Into jobs, church, family gatherings, community gatherings, 12-step programs, whatever.
You're version of public safety leads to a progressively more depressing and lawless situation. Branded, envious and hopeless people are permanently convicted. Where will they turn? Perhaps it'd be better to put them out of their misery - or dump them on some pacific island somewhere. On the other hand, upright citizens like yourself have to move to progressively safer neighbourhoods with higher fences and bigger locks. Alas for the sad irony of blank-n-white morality.
Nowdays everybody can have an offspring no matter what diseases, diets or social changes he is subjected to.
/. personality and I have to waste good sperm on my lesbian pr0n collection. Friends - are you being selected against too?
I'm ready to mate with any female who'll have me. Unfortunatly none have got past my obnoxious
We are a dying breed.
I wish TFA had properly indicated that as the reason why we won't ever have a chernobyl, along with our compliance with basic safety regulations.
Mistakes happen. fatigue kills. I'll feel safer when it's mandated that such workers have a minimum of 9 hours sleep, and are audited by some sort of cognative test.
The popular vision of bumbling PHB buffoons everywhere is just another stupid slashdot stereotype, fostered by insecure social retards who have to foist their apparent superiority over everyone by scoffing at everything.
/. article about canadian passport website - where changing the query string allowed
access to other peoples application details.
.net soap wizard, I'll quietly try to find myself on projects that don't involve working with large volumes of
hacked up garbage - and study on my own what I really want to study: how to write software well.
Now hang on there a moment. I appreciate your candor; however I'd like to point out that while the PHB in Dilbert comics really is a bumbling buffoon, the PHBs that I've met are completely different. They are street-wise, people-smart, conflate confidence with accomplishment, and have entirely different concerns to programmers. And by programmers, I mean, people who actually care about and want to write software.
PHBs are very concerned that the documentation has a smart looking layout, and lots of diagrams - hopefully nice and thick. They like glossy shrink-wrap and smart looking logos and designs. Software should "look" good, and that will meet client's expectations. The contents could be crap, but that's just a little secret. But if you place a beautiful brochade on a piece of crap - the essence of what's there is still crap.
A good example is the recent
Such a thing happens, not because of a single programmer, but because of organisational issues. The programmer knows at some level that the boss doesn't "get-it", and has no incentive or *environment* where they can actually learn how to do things properly. The poor guy who wrote the website, he probably was never shown how to work the security. Maybe he attended a 2-day corporate course, but he was never *shown* how to do it. For this reason, I see, and continue to see, horrendously poor quality work that just slips and slides through the system. I see band-aid solutions routinely applied, and a fight fire-with-fire attitude. Be very afraid of proprietary software
Sure, they exist, but long-term successful tech companies generally have -- get ready for it -- smart people working for them.
Yes, yes. But are they oriented correctly? Are they actually used for their skills? Do they work under a regime that considers it more important to cultivate the "business" knowledge of their programmers? Are they mentored? Are their skills cultivated? Does the boss care if the software guts are actually written well - more than meeting a deadline that is arbitrarily moved back to "motivate" the staff.
I work for one of the most successful companies in the world, and most of the people I work with aren't really interested in programming, but they all have great people skills. When I was hired, I introduced a few concepts to the senior programmer:
+ Hashtables (yes, their software was running painfully slow, because no-one paid attention to algorithms and data-structures. The people running the place had been out of school for so long, that they had forgotten what they were)
+ The concept of encoding (for example, UTF-8 is a binary representation of text. & is an XML representation of the ampersand)
+ The singleton design pattern
I stopped there, because there's no point. Forget thread synchronization, design patterns, the works. While they struggle with the
So if you know of an organization that is pragmatically involved with cultivating the skills of their developers, then please, send me the contact details.
But why would the anti-spam software companies want that? If they succeed in actually eliminating spam, they'd also go out of business. It may be profitable for the spammers, but I suspect it's even more profitable for the anti-spam companies.
"Hold on Joe, we can't implement that algorithm, we'll lose our jobs." Probably _not_ something any flies on the wall will have heard in the anti-spam industry. The "boss" probably doesn't know what a hashtable is, and finds his lead programmer's attitude annoyingly expensive. After-all you can hire vb programmers out of school for less than half as much, and it's just software after all. What's the big deal with these code reviews.
My point is, the "powers" that be, in the particular case, are likely incompetent - incapable of successfully pulling off such a conspiracy. The CEO probably blows his load whenever he thinks of outselling his economic rivals. If they could make their product an order of magnitude better, and *own* the market, then they could be the next M$ of their industry. If companies produce poor software, it's probably because they're more interested in the business side of things, than any real care about producing good software.
Don't hold your breath for spam killer software - not because the anti-spam industry isn't trying, but because the problem is genuinely hard, and the PHB qualities of management in the software industry.
fyi, nobody is investing in new oil refineries, because noone in their right mind would invest $$$ when they won't get a return on capitol. The market has spoken - the market says there isn't money to be made from more refineries. That's probably because you'd have to run it for 10 years to break-even, and in 10 years time, our refining capacity may outstrip supply. Either that, or there's a massive organised world-wide conspiricy, to keep gold cookies out away from intelligent negative people.
Long story short, there is actually zero factual information to suggest we are anywhere near peak
Ignore the factual information. There's *lots* of oil. Jedi waves hand.
If the oil companies are conspiring to do anything, it's that they want to sell you *more* oil and *now*. That's because it's good for their bottom line. So go to the gas station and fill up, dump in the river and fill up again! Don't worry about future scarcity! We want your money NOW! and if we make money it's good for the economy, so it _must_ be good for you too!
There's an apt saying: "Never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity". As I see it, the oil companies aren't capable of the type of conspiricy you suggest. It's too easy to shine light on their FUD. For example, the chamber of echos that exxon has created to suggest that there's *lots* of scientists who don't believe in the human impact on climate change. Some are fooled, anyone who cares to look it not.
And on the bright side - if you're right - and the oil companies are delibertly trying *not* to sell more oil (falls down laughing), then they're doing humanity a service on so many different levels:
Energy prices have been too low for too long. If an energy crunch happens, it will mean severe economic adjustment (and hardship) that could have been mitigated by a more frugle policy to energy usage. Such policies could help the economy slowly make the necessary structural changes. Such policies fly can only exist when the future becomes more important than satisfying immediate wants. I'm not holding my breath - too many people with a sense of entitlement - that they should have what they want, and have it now. Humanities current flirtation with greed has nothing to do with malice, and everything to do with stupidty.
A russian friend told me that Russia will never go that far under the existing regime. He said the TV is very positive about the government, and most people just believe it. I also noticed some unusual behaviour from him, like not trusting banks and other institutions. Spending time with him made me realize how russia is really in a lot of pain. A simple fact: if Putin was so wonderful, he wouldn't condone thuggery on anyone, let alone an old man. There are far poorer nations in the world where people are happier, like Bhutan, where the police chief asked the monks to purify the police-force for the conflict they created by doing their job. People trusting each other is worth more than money. If I didn't believe that, then I'd join the mafia. Oh, I get it, Putin *is* the mafia, and you're their for the gold bricks right?
And the USA and EU can't stop doing that so long as there's ever a threat of war. What does war have to do with it?? Well, it's very simple. If war breaks out, you have to have food to eat. That's a good enough reason to subsides agriculture, and keep the production within your borders.
Not that I think dumping on the market is a good thing. It's a complex issue.
The theory is that as a democracy, legislative matters ultimately rest in the hands of voters. Well, we're a dysfunctional bunch if we make laws that criminalize wide-spread behaviour. Perhaps something is truly broken with the system. (Gasp!)
Lets face it: the genie is out of the bottle.
The cost of distribution of digital material is almost negligible. The only real way that a business can make a buck at distribution is by making the *accuracy* and *convenience* of their system better than p2p networks. That's possible, and the price they can charge is really only what that convenience and accuracy is worth - not the "hotness" of the content.
I believe that that will have next to zero impact on artists creating new works. In fact, I predict that musicians, writers, software engineers and painters will *all* created *more* art. Some with independent produces of other media. These days most musicians make money from people coming to their shows and buying merchandise - so nothing really changes for them...
What *will* change is the extravagant megabucks all-show-and-no-backbone facade that passes for art. The masses will probably not be too depressed by missing Michael Jackson, Brittany Spears, Madonna, and other such hyped acts. These artists probably would have had their own smaller scale success anyway. So what *exactly* is lost by not having their egos rammed down our thought by expensive advertising systems. Is it bad enough that we should have laws that make the average person a criminal? Doesn't bad law breed contempt for the law system? Isn't the law system struggling enough without all of this added extra noise?
One thing that might not come out in the wash are the super-duper-expensive movies that people are making theses days. The popcorn blockbuster made for $200 million. But I have to ask... do you really see a threat such that the TV and Movie industry disbands? TV is heading for a big shake-up, and home theatres are eating into the box-office. Well, maybe hollywood will have to scale back a *little*, like to the comparative budgets of the 70s, and maybe no more $2million dollar episodes of favourite space-soap. Is that the end of the world?
Hypocrisy has a corrosive effect on society.
Yeah... if we just wake up a little bit, we'd scale back copyright to help promote new art. Oh that's right, we can't stop businesses making money right?
Greed has a corrosive effect on society. Hypocrisy is the rim of wisdom.