Well, I'm not too up on how this sort of thing works, however, couldn't the ISP conduct a "certificate in the middle" attack, analogous to man-in-the-middle? The ISP proxy makes the https connection for you, and receives the decrypted data. In turn, the data is re-encrypted for your HTTPS session. The certificates are handled in exactly the same way - the proxy just sends you *any* valid certificate (it's their own certificate), and interupts the request for a certificate from the signing authority.
Would you denigh that OOXML is about vendor locking? Politicking the ISO process to create a standard that vendor locks? Can't you see the irony there?
It seems like you've got a big blind spot - perhaps you should take a few more cynical pills. OOXML will just create more money for MS, and push a whole bunch of unnecessary work on the rest of the world - and possibly not solve the problem of a black whole in hour history because of outdated locked vendor formats.
Given that it may be possible to modify ODF (or use it as is) as a perfect fidelity format for Office documents - and the murky process through which OOXML has been shoved down developers throughts - can you come up with some coherent rational explination on how the world is a better place because MS decided to make everything just slightly incompatible unless you use their software? Speaking strictly from a $$$ point of view, the work to use ODF as a perfect MS-Office format is already well under way.
Think hard before you speak, because what we do in life matters.
if you actually reading my opinion on OOXML you have no girlfriend to make out with
Once you actually get a girlfriend, and get in the habit of regular sex, you find out that there's more to life than just getting laid. Think of a genuine highlight in your own life... was it associated with greed? anger? an orgasm? Hint: only a miserable person would answer yes.
(actually, many practicing Buddhists are too - although the Tibetans more tend to polytheism)
Buddhists are non-theistic, and that includes Tibetans. The buddhists "deities" are not considered gods, and are not worshipped. There are practises to connect with various energies - but there's nothing, absolutely, that is outside of oneself, that will "save" or "protect" you. In fact, Buddhist theorists say that everything that happens, happens in your mind. Have you ever experienced anything that wasn't in your mind? In Buddhism, you're on your own in the strictest sense.
A deficit implies that currency is moving in one direction much more than the other. In the old days, that meant less "money" in the economy. With floating exchange rates, it means the buying power of the currency is reduced. Thus, running large "deficits" puts downward pressure on the value of the US dollar, which in turn penalizes importing, and *generally* helps exports. If the currency deflats too much, then there will be inflationary problems (penalizing exporters), and there will be no realised economic growth... which puts you in the poor house.
In the long run, every import has to be paid for by an export. On a local scale, if an economy stops exporting as much as it imports, it ends up like Flint Michigan. That the US hasn't ended up like that already is testimony to the strong domestic economy.
I'm curious to know what your point is? That the US can't overspend? What's your rational? Did you just think that up, or repeat what someone else told you. If so, what's your source? What theory is it founded on? Deficits are real problems talked about by economists in government, financial and acedemic circles. Are all of these people trying to bamboozle the uninformed?
The sad reality is that most of life is boring -- and the sooner people recognize this, accept it, move on and learn the necessary material anyway, the better off we'll all be.
As a society we seem to struggle with the need to be constantly entertained - and thus experience unnecessary boredom. But maybe boredom could be a relief... nothing's happening, why do we have to become agitated by that.
A lack of boredom lays the ground for the ability to _enjoy_ oneself.
I once saw an old lady and a teenager waiting for a bus side-by-side. The old lady was just sitting there perfectly happy, taking in the day. The teenager looked like he was having his balls dragged across a cheese grater. Same day, same bus-stop, different mentality.
I would say that life doesn't have to be boring at all. When nothing entertaining is happening, we have to acknowledge that, and acknowledge that we can't live life being entertained like children constantly. When you get over the need to be entertained, you'll never experience boredom again -- and therefore experience much more contentment and genuine happiness.
If you can be ethical too, good for you, but ethical doesn't tend to work against an unethical opponent. Try winning a fair fight against a guy who is willing to kick you in the crotch and throw sand in your face some time.
There I have to disagree. When you throw ethics out, it becomes a race to the bottom, and creates extreme suffering. Ethics is about considering the consequences of your actions, which is sanity. If you find yourself squared off against a psychotic self-centred lunitic who's going to kick you in the crotch, and throw sand in your face... well, best to question how you came across that situation in the first place. If the situation was not your own doing, then best to let your confused friend sort himself out, instead of trying to "save the world" by "destroying him". Voilence begets voilenace, as they say, however, this can be extended in many ways. For example: ethics begets ethics. How do you think we arrived in the society we have today without ethics? It's not all bad... that would be some place like North Korea, which I'm sure is far better then some of the deptotisms of our history.
Your tools and techniques are probably bad, especially if you learned them in school.
I often wish that the people I worked with actually learnt something at school. They can do everything on your "uber"-list, however, the people on my project do not understand:
Any form on concurrency - threading or record locking
get confused by the notion of "encoding" - I tried to stop my team leader from pumping a binary file (in binary) into the CDATA section of an Xml document
have no understanding of data structures and algorithms - often storing data in delimited strings to pass to methods
do not know any design patterns - not even the singleton
do not learn new language features such as generics
do not understand how to manage resources or clean up after themselves
boiler-plate comment instead of using comments to actually describe the logic and reasoning of the code
writing complex code with unnecessary configuration options
Don't get me wrong - they're a great bunch of people, and very good at the things you listed - my grip is that they don't understand what I consider to be the "important-stuff" when it comes to actually writing computer programs.
The truth is that most of your "uber"-list can be learned by doing, however, writing concurrent programs requires *theory* and experience. Using data structures and algorithms correctly means understanding *theory*. Coming up with elegant and simple solutions means understanding how to make your language squeak, which means lots of practise experimenting with and learning different techniques - and understanding what you're doing.
In real life, doing architecture and writing stuff from scratch rarely happens...but that's all they teach you in school. In real life, you're working on some big pile of code that you're stuck with, can't change, and don't understand. You can fix #3, but usually #1 and #2 are immutable...until the magical day when they need a new feature (hey, we need to redo a whole chunk of that thing to get the new feature to work).
Working well with an existing code-base is one of two things that I feel wasn't properly taught at my university. (The other is some rudimentary design patterns.)
That being said - I work with people who cruised through university, and now they cruise through their job. Mediocrity is highly acceptable.
I don't think anyone likes advertising, but they accept it because they think it's necessary for their TV, newspaper, etc. If only people realised that we pay for the advertising _and_ the TV (newspaper, radio, etc). I saw a senior marketing researcher describe how they were studying how to make children more effective naggers, because they had already determined that that's the best way to get parents to buy stuff. She was asked:
"Do you think that's morale?"
"Morale? I don't know, however, if we sell more products then we've done our job."
If we had strictly regulated, non-intrusive advertising, then that would be a level field for companies to "get their message across", and lower the irritation level of society at large. Alas, nothing will ever happen while intrusive advertising is perceived as necessary.
First, it encourages people to create so that they'll be paid
Lol! These days most musicians make money by ticket sales at the door. Furthermore, a musician got paid more for a nights work 30 years ago. Yeah... royalties on other people playing your music doesn't really help put bread on the table of musician's families.
Second, it encourages people to create so that they don't have to pay other people.
That's disingenuous. Musicians learn how to play with other people's music. They also learn how to perform. Furthermore, some musicians are more skilled at performing than writing, and audiences appreciate it. For a vast many people, leaping straight into original material is not what the musician wants, the audience and it's often putting the card before the horse anyway.
Honestly, it seems win/win to me.
The only people who win are the bill collectors and the people who get paid to manage the red tape. And that's not the musicians nor the venue.
What's wrong with Joe Averge playing a cover at your bar? ... No one is trying to stop this.
Playing shows is extremely hard work as it is. Bury the musicians in red tape... it's better for them. What, musicians aren't pushing it? Funny that.
Its not hard to ask a performer for a list of songs they plan to play at your venue, its not hard to google those songs and make sure that your not infringing copyright by letting them play
You've got to be kidding. It is _hard_, and it takes _time_. And what about open-mic and other impromtu events?
And for what? What good would such regulations do? Does it "promote the arts"? What's wrong with Joe Averge playing a cover at your bar? There never was a problem before - and the musicians themselves usually like it when people cover their songs. It's part of the path of musicianship.
Copy-right is a limited monopoly granted by the people for the promotion of works. It is not a license to print money. There are more considerations than just business-dollars. For example, there are the artist, and receipiants of the art. Money is not an absolute measure of worth - it's an approximation. More money doesn't always mean more wealth. There are such things as "externalities" which don't come off your bottom line, and thus skew the "total worth" of your activities. This royality heavy mentality just hurts the source of the creation of art - and all for a few extra bucks this quarter.
because human belief is not about cold hard static facts, it is about your passion for how things SHOULD BE, not how THEY ARE. there are no facts to be had about how things should be.
When people have trouble reconciling cold-hard facts with their beliefs, they usually end up going with cold-hard facts most of the time. Those that don't move "back-to-reality" have a psychotic quality to them (think Scientology and ilk). But even people bound up in cults don't stay there forever.
There is a gray area, where the facts aren't obvious. This is where people can really get into all sorts of emotional arguments. Strong emotions create a blink spot in our logical thinking (they are different parts of the brain). It's interesting to note that people engaged in political discussions - if you examine their brain activity - have switched off their logic, and switched on their emotional centres. I think that explains a lot.
Essentially, for such a person to move "back-to-reality", they have to switch on their logic centres, and this can take some sort of shock - esp. if their thinking is entrenched. But this does happen when "reality comes crashing in", at which point, people almost always go with the facts of life.
At this point, our beliefs become based on cold hard facts. This is so common, that we have a word for it: we call it experience, and society places considerable value in it.
When cold hard facts match someone's beliefs, then we've come across a special trait, called wisdom. People tend to love this word even more than experience. The antonym is ignorance, which might accurately describe someone spewing emotional political rubbish.
I think that says sometime about basic intelligence. What I mean is - almost everyone thinks wisdom, experience and facts are good, and that ignorance, naivety and falsity are bad. Wisdom, experience and facts have value. Value implies scarcity. I think this implies that it would be naive to expect everyone to be wise and experienced... it's not easy to learn life's lessons. But is does happen eventually, so some extent.
There's no reason to be overly negative about people responding to passionate arguments that have little basis in facts. We aren't born with experience, we have to learn from our mistakes, and the end result is valuable.
Paying twice as much as other countries for medical care doesn't surprise me in the least, since we typically pay more than that for just about everything else.
A friend of mine, a doctor with experience in many health care systems including the US, told me that from a billing point of view, services in the US cost 11 times more than in Canada. That means, treating something like a broken arm or procedural surgery, on average, has 11 times the total cost.
I'm not confident that the free market could even fix it, since it's part of the problem. In Canada, there's $Xbillion per year, and the problem of providing "health-care". This directs a system towards providing services efficiently. A health-care "business" attempts to appropriate resources towards itself. Thus, all of the insurance, lawyering, paperwork and unnecessary procedures are encouraged because they are "economic growth".
I'd say the US health system has a major chronic disorder.
Combined with the massive consumption of sleeping medication, anti-depressants, and the epidemic of obesity, diabetes and cancer, I'd argue that the US population as a whole has a chronic health disorder, and their bloated health industry is a failure in comparison to most of the developed world.
The biggest drag for me is that IE 6 (still, and for the foreseeable future) is the mandated application development platform in the corporate environment because: + The vast corporate market is already locked into windows, using IE 6. + Coupled with the very conservative approach of administrators, nothing is going to change soon, because the financial risk is too much. Even moving from IE 6 to IE 7 is seriously considered as too risky: "what if something breaks?". + Part of the problem is that a lot of non-FOSS software tends to be riddled with crazy stuff. Built at minimal cost, and patched together like a bad science project, corporate applications are sometimes written by people with poor design and coding skills. Furthermore, support for anything else _but_ the client's technology is considered a complete waste. So everything is built to IE 6's craziness. + There is no _way_ that many people will be allowed to install Safari on their work computer. + Therefore there's no way major consulting firms will even bother targeting anything besides IE 6. Even talking about XAML and.Net3.0 is too wild. Forget any non M$ product - the customer already had licenses to M$ stuff, and have standardised on it.
IMHO the lock-in is both brilliant and bread-dead: smooth as clockwork. It's comical how no-one will change because no-one else will change. It's all about the bottom line, and for that reason, we don't have the money to build things to proper standards (therefore we can never cheaply migrate), or even talk about cost-saving technologies. Yes it's more expensive long-term, but system administrators are not in the business on placing bets on where the industry will be in 5 years - they're deciding to standardise on technology that has matured over the last 5 years.
There will be no change until competitors and start-ups show real savings, and those savings eclipse the cost of migrating to open standards. That means re-writing million dollar apps, so don't hold your breath. IE 6 will be around like old COBOL code.
The home market is chicken feed in comparison. The best apple can do is chip away at M$'s mind-share.
Something like 95% of the worlds people believe in some kind of higher power (source Contact, yeah, laugh-it-up). So let us assume that 95% of deranged people also believe in a higher power - seems likely. Well, now you have the source of all your problems with religion: people's confusion.
Religion is really about seeking truth in one's life. It goes beyond science in that it uses mysticism. While some might argue that mysticism isn't an improvement on science (it doesn't pretend to be), this argument is disingenuous: belief that science is "beyond" mysticism is, itself, mysticism.
Religion is responsible for the supression of my rights, the mutilation of my body and of millions of other people (males and females alike), the pyschological damaging of millions of people, the death of even more millions, the cause of untold wars, the supression of sceicen and progress.
While that is definitely true, that doesn't mean the scientifically minded people haven't done ignorant things. The sheer number of religious people (in comparison), just makes it more likely that ignorant activities are going to be executed by religious people. For example, it was the early beginnings of genetics that were used by the Nazi party to postulate that they were a master race. This reasoning was used as justification to murder disabled people.
Religion thinks it should force everyone to be compliant to it's wishes.
That is simply untrue. Some religious people think that, and some people think the world would be better off without religion... because of their mystical beliefs about the true nature of things
By now humanity should have had enough of this shit, but I'm continually depressed by how mindlessly guillable other humans are and they cede their intellectual sovereignty to religion.
By knowing something already, one will never connect with what's really going on, simply because they've already forsaken their senses and reason for a mental construct that they've previously created in their mind. This can take a lot of maintenance - because it can become very hard to shake loose of constructions that one has already assumed to be true. In short, by knowing-something-already, you cede your intellectual sovereignty.
By not-already-knowing something, you can open your mind to what is actually there. You open your mind to actually knowing something. You open your mind. Thereby, you inherit your birthright, which is your intellectual sovereignty. Religion doesn't need to enter the picture.
lol! I just want to know if some program wants to talk to my network. While it's true that free-as-in-beer programs don't have unwanted features in them, there are some things that aren't FOSS that I use. A lot of the stuff that's bundled with OS X for example I never trust non-FOSS software.
And I've used it in my work too. I had to install proprietry software on my computer, using a work license. I'm also intereseted in what's talking to the network anyway. I've used this feature a number of times, and I find it useful. Little Snitches is a neet tool and only a mild pain to use, and the interface seems quite good compared to other firewalls I've seen out in the wild.
Yeah, that's right, 2 of them, 1 hour ago. And you also reminded me that my OS X box is ridden with a copy of Nortons that I never figured out how to remove - you insensitive clod!
My girlfriend uses Windows, which I also use at work. I've got OS X 10.4 at home on an aging PPC mac mini. Frequently I'm asked "can I do that on my machine", and my response is... you have to buy a program. Everything on my mac, I got for free (except little snitch), and there's _lots_ of quality freeware and shareware out there. And then there's fink.
Indeed, it seems the preferred method for solving Mac computer problems is to buy your way out of it. Slow computer? Buy a new one. Want to convert a file? Buy a utility. Want to do simple tasks? Buy a commercial program. Peripherals don't work? Buy replacements.
"While the explanations claiming "energies" for Feng Shui may not be correct, the human psychology behind it is."
Yeah. There's a sucker born every minute.
The mind is affected by the relative world. Or perhaps you'd behave the same if you walked into a beautifully designed church as opposed to a toxic waste dump. AFAIK, the principles of Feng Shui are all about the relationship of the mind with the environment, and that that relationship exists is extremely obvious.
The problem is, I DO understand it.
Ha ha! Shouting at stupid people to make them understand.
btw, Feng Shui takes many years of discipline to understand. One must have a stable mind and a keen appreciation of subtleties and ascetics, and a deep understanding of the human mind and it's facets. Such people are generally kind and tactful, and generally don't presume to know things that they don't (that's called pride, which is related to earth), nor yell about them either (that's anger, related to water). I believe that understanding the nature of pride/anger and their relationship to the mind is part of understanding Feng Shui. Extraordinarly smart people spend decades trying to understand the nature of their own mind and emotions, and according to recent scientific research into the nature of happiness, they are easily the happiest people on this earth.
This is why I call it like I see it. Bullshit. First to last.
I live at a complex in the country that was designed by a Feng Shui expert, and it rocks. No really, it's beautiful, and people say so who visit. For us, hiring the Feng Shui consultant was an excellent investment.
First to last??? Perhaps you've never visited such a place???
More sex, more talking, more reading, more workouts, more movie-going, more hiking, more biking, more everything.
When you interact more with the person you have sex with, then the sex is amazing and therefore you have lots of it, and enjoy it lots. I was more addicted to surfing the internet (ha ha)... that was my way of avoiding the intensity of life.
In other words, let us exploit you, it's for your own good:-)>,
This encourages governments to be efficient, but also creates a race to the bottom on standards. "Exploitation" is more complex than good/bad. Wealth is more than money. A lot of the "wealth" from "exploitation" comes for hiding real costs. Creating huge negative externalities which aren't measured and thus removed from the bottom line.
incredibly expensive shows like 24 and Lost WON'T EXIST if they can't make money.
This is like saying that without the RIAA, there'd be no Michael Jackson or Madonna. Is that such a bad thing? Can't stop people making art, but the days of the $500gazillion blockbuster may be numbered, and perhaps that's not such a bad thing.
Wouldn't it be better if they remembered, suffered, and convinced people not to go to war in the future?
It wasn't until soldiers became literate that war all of a sudden became a tragedy (around WWI era). I guess when the guys doing the actual killing actually write about their experiences, the glory of war falls a little flat.
The NSA is (in theory at least) legally forbidden to spy on Americans.
I'm sure they can legally ask the Canadians to spy on 'suspects', and probably return the favour. The intelligence communicities of several countries are very tightly integrated, so I'm sure they have no problems getting around these little legal problems.
What POSSIBLE benefit can they see in shutting something down that has a primary use of helping people to identify and purchase their product? Really, it just seems like madness
Lyrics sites are invaluable for many musicians - I always thought that was their primary purpose. These guys have no feeling for music, and since that's their living, that means they have no soul.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I'm not too up on how this sort of thing works, however, couldn't the ISP conduct a "certificate in the middle" attack, analogous to man-in-the-middle? The ISP proxy makes the https connection for you, and receives the decrypted data. In turn, the data is re-encrypted for your HTTPS session. The certificates are handled in exactly the same way - the proxy just sends you *any* valid certificate (it's their own certificate), and interupts the request for a certificate from the signing authority.
Why wouldn't that work?
the concept of telepathy is pure fiction and could not work because no two people have the same native internal base dictionary
How do you know that telepathy relies on an internal base dictionary?
Would you denigh that OOXML is about vendor locking? Politicking the ISO process to create a standard that vendor locks? Can't you see the irony there?
It seems like you've got a big blind spot - perhaps you should take a few more cynical pills. OOXML will just create more money for MS, and push a whole bunch of unnecessary work on the rest of the world - and possibly not solve the problem of a black whole in hour history because of outdated locked vendor formats.
Given that it may be possible to modify ODF (or use it as is) as a perfect fidelity format for Office documents - and the murky process through which OOXML has been shoved down developers throughts - can you come up with some coherent rational explination on how the world is a better place because MS decided to make everything just slightly incompatible unless you use their software? Speaking strictly from a $$$ point of view, the work to use ODF as a perfect MS-Office format is already well under way.
Think hard before you speak, because what we do in life matters.
if you actually reading my opinion on OOXML you have no girlfriend to make out with
Once you actually get a girlfriend, and get in the habit of regular sex, you find out that there's more to life than just getting laid. Think of a genuine highlight in your own life... was it associated with greed? anger? an orgasm? Hint: only a miserable person would answer yes.
(actually, many practicing Buddhists are too - although the Tibetans more tend to polytheism)
Buddhists are non-theistic, and that includes Tibetans. The buddhists "deities" are not considered gods, and are not worshipped. There are practises to connect with various energies - but there's nothing, absolutely, that is outside of oneself, that will "save" or "protect" you. In fact, Buddhist theorists say that everything that happens, happens in your mind. Have you ever experienced anything that wasn't in your mind? In Buddhism, you're on your own in the strictest sense.
A deficit implies that currency is moving in one direction much more than the other. In the old days, that meant less "money" in the economy. With floating exchange rates, it means the buying power of the currency is reduced. Thus, running large "deficits" puts downward pressure on the value of the US dollar, which in turn penalizes importing, and *generally* helps exports. If the currency deflats too much, then there will be inflationary problems (penalizing exporters), and there will be no realised economic growth... which puts you in the poor house.
In the long run, every import has to be paid for by an export. On a local scale, if an economy stops exporting as much as it imports, it ends up like Flint Michigan. That the US hasn't ended up like that already is testimony to the strong domestic economy.
I'm curious to know what your point is? That the US can't overspend? What's your rational? Did you just think that up, or repeat what someone else told you. If so, what's your source? What theory is it founded on? Deficits are real problems talked about by economists in government, financial and acedemic circles. Are all of these people trying to bamboozle the uninformed?
The sad reality is that most of life is boring -- and the sooner people recognize this, accept it, move on and learn the necessary material anyway, the better off we'll all be.
As a society we seem to struggle with the need to be constantly entertained - and thus experience unnecessary boredom. But maybe boredom could be a relief... nothing's happening, why do we have to become agitated by that.
A lack of boredom lays the ground for the ability to _enjoy_ oneself.
I once saw an old lady and a teenager waiting for a bus side-by-side. The old lady was just sitting there perfectly happy, taking in the day. The teenager looked like he was having his balls dragged across a cheese grater. Same day, same bus-stop, different mentality.
I would say that life doesn't have to be boring at all. When nothing entertaining is happening, we have to acknowledge that, and acknowledge that we can't live life being entertained like children constantly. When you get over the need to be entertained, you'll never experience boredom again -- and therefore experience much more contentment and genuine happiness.
If you can be ethical too, good for you, but ethical doesn't tend to work against an unethical opponent. Try winning a fair fight against a guy who is willing to kick you in the crotch and throw sand in your face some time.
There I have to disagree. When you throw ethics out, it becomes a race to the bottom, and creates extreme suffering. Ethics is about considering the consequences of your actions, which is sanity. If you find yourself squared off against a psychotic self-centred lunitic who's going to kick you in the crotch, and throw sand in your face... well, best to question how you came across that situation in the first place. If the situation was not your own doing, then best to let your confused friend sort himself out, instead of trying to "save the world" by "destroying him". Voilence begets voilenace, as they say, however, this can be extended in many ways. For example: ethics begets ethics. How do you think we arrived in the society we have today without ethics? It's not all bad... that would be some place like North Korea, which I'm sure is far better then some of the deptotisms of our history.
Your tools and techniques are probably bad, especially if you learned them in school.
I often wish that the people I worked with actually learnt something at school. They can do everything on your "uber"-list, however, the people on my project do not understand:
Don't get me wrong - they're a great bunch of people, and very good at the things you listed - my grip is that they don't understand what I consider to be the "important-stuff" when it comes to actually writing computer programs.
The truth is that most of your "uber"-list can be learned by doing, however, writing concurrent programs requires *theory* and experience. Using data structures and algorithms correctly means understanding *theory*. Coming up with elegant and simple solutions means understanding how to make your language squeak, which means lots of practise experimenting with and learning different techniques - and understanding what you're doing.
In real life, doing architecture and writing stuff from scratch rarely happens...but that's all they teach you in school. In real life, you're working on some big pile of code that you're stuck with, can't change, and don't understand. You can fix #3, but usually #1 and #2 are immutable...until the magical day when they need a new feature (hey, we need to redo a whole chunk of that thing to get the new feature to work).
Working well with an existing code-base is one of two things that I feel wasn't properly taught at my university. (The other is some rudimentary design patterns.)
That being said - I work with people who cruised through university, and now they cruise through their job. Mediocrity is highly acceptable.
I don't think anyone likes advertising, but they accept it because they think it's necessary for their TV, newspaper, etc. If only people realised that we pay for the advertising _and_ the TV (newspaper, radio, etc). I saw a senior marketing researcher describe how they were studying how to make children more effective naggers, because they had already determined that that's the best way to get parents to buy stuff. She was asked:
"Do you think that's morale?"
"Morale? I don't know, however, if we sell more products then we've done our job."
If we had strictly regulated, non-intrusive advertising, then that would be a level field for companies to "get their message across", and lower the irritation level of society at large. Alas, nothing will ever happen while intrusive advertising is perceived as necessary.
First, it encourages people to create so that they'll be paid
...
Lol! These days most musicians make money by ticket sales at the door. Furthermore, a musician got paid more for a nights work 30 years ago. Yeah... royalties on other people playing your music doesn't really help put bread on the table of musician's families.
Second, it encourages people to create so that they don't have to pay other people.
That's disingenuous. Musicians learn how to play with other people's music. They also learn how to perform. Furthermore, some musicians are more skilled at performing than writing, and audiences appreciate it. For a vast many people, leaping straight into original material is not what the musician wants, the audience and it's often putting the card before the horse anyway.
Honestly, it seems win/win to me.
The only people who win are the bill collectors and the people who get paid to manage the red tape. And that's not the musicians nor the venue.
What's wrong with Joe Averge playing a cover at your bar?
No one is trying to stop this.
Playing shows is extremely hard work as it is. Bury the musicians in red tape... it's better for them. What, musicians aren't pushing it? Funny that.
Its not hard to ask a performer for a list of songs they plan to play at your venue, its not hard to google those songs and make sure that your not infringing copyright by letting them play
You've got to be kidding. It is _hard_, and it takes _time_. And what about open-mic and other impromtu events?
And for what? What good would such regulations do? Does it "promote the arts"? What's wrong with Joe Averge playing a cover at your bar? There never was a problem before - and the musicians themselves usually like it when people cover their songs. It's part of the path of musicianship.
Copy-right is a limited monopoly granted by the people for the promotion of works. It is not a license to print money. There are more considerations than just business-dollars. For example, there are the artist, and receipiants of the art. Money is not an absolute measure of worth - it's an approximation. More money doesn't always mean more wealth. There are such things as "externalities" which don't come off your bottom line, and thus skew the "total worth" of your activities. This royality heavy mentality just hurts the source of the creation of art - and all for a few extra bucks this quarter.
because human belief is not about cold hard static facts, it is about your passion for how things SHOULD BE, not how THEY ARE. there are no facts to be had about how things should be.
When people have trouble reconciling cold-hard facts with their beliefs, they usually end up going with cold-hard facts most of the time. Those that don't move "back-to-reality" have a psychotic quality to them (think Scientology and ilk). But even people bound up in cults don't stay there forever.
There is a gray area, where the facts aren't obvious. This is where people can really get into all sorts of emotional arguments. Strong emotions create a blink spot in our logical thinking (they are different parts of the brain). It's interesting to note that people engaged in political discussions - if you examine their brain activity - have switched off their logic, and switched on their emotional centres. I think that explains a lot.
Essentially, for such a person to move "back-to-reality", they have to switch on their logic centres, and this can take some sort of shock - esp. if their thinking is entrenched. But this does happen when "reality comes crashing in", at which point, people almost always go with the facts of life.
At this point, our beliefs become based on cold hard facts. This is so common, that we have a word for it: we call it experience, and society places considerable value in it.
When cold hard facts match someone's beliefs, then we've come across a special trait, called wisdom. People tend to love this word even more than experience. The antonym is ignorance, which might accurately describe someone spewing emotional political rubbish.
I think that says sometime about basic intelligence. What I mean is - almost everyone thinks wisdom, experience and facts are good, and that ignorance, naivety and falsity are bad. Wisdom, experience and facts have value. Value implies scarcity. I think this implies that it would be naive to expect everyone to be wise and experienced... it's not easy to learn life's lessons. But is does happen eventually, so some extent.
There's no reason to be overly negative about people responding to passionate arguments that have little basis in facts. We aren't born with experience, we have to learn from our mistakes, and the end result is valuable.
Paying twice as much as other countries for medical care doesn't surprise me in the least, since we typically pay more than that for just about everything else.
A friend of mine, a doctor with experience in many health care systems including the US, told me that from a billing point of view, services in the US cost 11 times more than in Canada. That means, treating something like a broken arm or procedural surgery, on average, has 11 times the total cost.
I'm not confident that the free market could even fix it, since it's part of the problem. In Canada, there's $Xbillion per year, and the problem of providing "health-care". This directs a system towards providing services efficiently. A health-care "business" attempts to appropriate resources towards itself. Thus, all of the insurance, lawyering, paperwork and unnecessary procedures are encouraged because they are "economic growth".
I'd say the US health system has a major chronic disorder.
Combined with the massive consumption of sleeping medication, anti-depressants, and the epidemic of obesity, diabetes and cancer, I'd argue that the US population as a whole has a chronic health disorder, and their bloated health industry is a failure in comparison to most of the developed world.
The biggest drag for me is that IE 6 (still, and for the foreseeable future) is the mandated application development platform in the corporate environment because: .Net3.0 is too wild. Forget any non M$ product - the customer already had licenses to M$ stuff, and have standardised on it.
+ The vast corporate market is already locked into windows, using IE 6.
+ Coupled with the very conservative approach of administrators, nothing is going to change soon, because the financial risk is too much. Even moving from IE 6 to IE 7 is seriously considered as too risky: "what if something breaks?".
+ Part of the problem is that a lot of non-FOSS software tends to be riddled with crazy stuff. Built at minimal cost, and patched together like a bad science project, corporate applications are sometimes written by people with poor design and coding skills. Furthermore, support for anything else _but_ the client's technology is considered a complete waste. So everything is built to IE 6's craziness.
+ There is no _way_ that many people will be allowed to install Safari on their work computer.
+ Therefore there's no way major consulting firms will even bother targeting anything besides IE 6. Even talking about XAML and
IMHO the lock-in is both brilliant and bread-dead: smooth as clockwork. It's comical how no-one will change because no-one else will change. It's all about the bottom line, and for that reason, we don't have the money to build things to proper standards (therefore we can never cheaply migrate), or even talk about cost-saving technologies. Yes it's more expensive long-term, but system administrators are not in the business on placing bets on where the industry will be in 5 years - they're deciding to standardise on technology that has matured over the last 5 years.
There will be no change until competitors and start-ups show real savings, and those savings eclipse the cost of migrating to open standards. That means re-writing million dollar apps, so don't hold your breath. IE 6 will be around like old COBOL code.
The home market is chicken feed in comparison. The best apple can do is chip away at M$'s mind-share.
Something like 95% of the worlds people believe in some kind of higher power (source Contact, yeah, laugh-it-up). So let us assume that 95% of deranged people also believe in a higher power - seems likely. Well, now you have the source of all your problems with religion: people's confusion.
Religion is really about seeking truth in one's life. It goes beyond science in that it uses mysticism. While some might argue that mysticism isn't an improvement on science (it doesn't pretend to be), this argument is disingenuous: belief that science is "beyond" mysticism is, itself, mysticism.
Religion is responsible for the supression of my rights, the mutilation of my body and of millions of other people (males and females alike), the pyschological damaging of millions of people, the death of even more millions, the cause of untold wars, the supression of sceicen and progress.
While that is definitely true, that doesn't mean the scientifically minded people haven't done ignorant things. The sheer number of religious people (in comparison), just makes it more likely that ignorant activities are going to be executed by religious people. For example, it was the early beginnings of genetics that were used by the Nazi party to postulate that they were a master race. This reasoning was used as justification to murder disabled people.
Religion thinks it should force everyone to be compliant to it's wishes.
That is simply untrue. Some religious people think that, and some people think the world would be better off without religion... because of their mystical beliefs about the true nature of things
By now humanity should have had enough of this shit, but I'm continually depressed by how mindlessly guillable other humans are and they cede their intellectual sovereignty to religion.
By knowing something already, one will never connect with what's really going on, simply because they've already forsaken their senses and reason for a mental construct that they've previously created in their mind. This can take a lot of maintenance - because it can become very hard to shake loose of constructions that one has already assumed to be true. In short, by knowing-something-already, you cede your intellectual sovereignty. By not-already-knowing something, you can open your mind to what is actually there. You open your mind to actually knowing something. You open your mind. Thereby, you inherit your birthright, which is your intellectual sovereignty. Religion doesn't need to enter the picture.
in the same sentence as little-snitch
lol! I just want to know if some program wants to talk to my network. While it's true that free-as-in-beer programs don't have unwanted features in them, there are some things that aren't FOSS that I use. A lot of the stuff that's bundled with OS X for example I never trust non-FOSS software.
And I've used it in my work too. I had to install proprietry software on my computer, using a work license. I'm also intereseted in what's talking to the network anyway. I've used this feature a number of times, and I find it useful. Little Snitches is a neet tool and only a mild pain to use, and the interface seems quite good compared to other firewalls I've seen out in the wild.
It's like pulling wisdom teeth!
Yeah, that's right, 2 of them, 1 hour ago. And you also reminded me that my OS X box is ridden with a copy of Nortons that I never figured out how to remove - you insensitive clod!
My girlfriend uses Windows, which I also use at work. I've got OS X 10.4 at home on an aging PPC mac mini. Frequently I'm asked "can I do that on my machine", and my response is... you have to buy a program. Everything on my mac, I got for free (except little snitch), and there's _lots_ of quality freeware and shareware out there. And then there's fink.
Indeed, it seems the preferred method for solving Mac computer problems is to buy your way out of it. Slow computer? Buy a new one. Want to convert a file? Buy a utility. Want to do simple tasks? Buy a commercial program. Peripherals don't work? Buy replacements.
I couldn't agree less.
"While the explanations claiming "energies" for Feng Shui may not be correct, the human psychology behind it is."
Yeah. There's a sucker born every minute.
The mind is affected by the relative world. Or perhaps you'd behave the same if you walked into a beautifully designed church as opposed to a toxic waste dump. AFAIK, the principles of Feng Shui are all about the relationship of the mind with the environment, and that that relationship exists is extremely obvious.
The problem is, I DO understand it.
Ha ha! Shouting at stupid people to make them understand.
btw, Feng Shui takes many years of discipline to understand. One must have a stable mind and a keen appreciation of subtleties and ascetics, and a deep understanding of the human mind and it's facets. Such people are generally kind and tactful, and generally don't presume to know things that they don't (that's called pride, which is related to earth), nor yell about them either (that's anger, related to water). I believe that understanding the nature of pride/anger and their relationship to the mind is part of understanding Feng Shui. Extraordinarly smart people spend decades trying to understand the nature of their own mind and emotions, and according to recent scientific research into the nature of happiness, they are easily the happiest people on this earth.
This is why I call it like I see it. Bullshit. First to last.
I live at a complex in the country that was designed by a Feng Shui expert, and it rocks. No really, it's beautiful, and people say so who visit. For us, hiring the Feng Shui consultant was an excellent investment.
First to last??? Perhaps you've never visited such a place???
More sex, more talking, more reading, more workouts, more movie-going, more hiking, more biking, more everything.
When you interact more with the person you have sex with, then the sex is amazing and therefore you have lots of it, and enjoy it lots. I was more addicted to surfing the internet (ha ha)... that was my way of avoiding the intensity of life.
In other words, let us exploit you, it's for your own good :-)>,
This encourages governments to be efficient, but also creates a race to the bottom on standards. "Exploitation" is more complex than good/bad. Wealth is more than money. A lot of the "wealth" from "exploitation" comes for hiding real costs. Creating huge negative externalities which aren't measured and thus removed from the bottom line.
incredibly expensive shows like 24 and Lost WON'T EXIST if they can't make money.
This is like saying that without the RIAA, there'd be no Michael Jackson or Madonna. Is that such a bad thing? Can't stop people making art, but the days of the $500gazillion blockbuster may be numbered, and perhaps that's not such a bad thing.
Wouldn't it be better if they remembered, suffered, and convinced people not to go to war in the future?
It wasn't until soldiers became literate that war all of a sudden became a tragedy (around WWI era). I guess when the guys doing the actual killing actually write about their experiences, the glory of war falls a little flat.
The NSA is (in theory at least) legally forbidden to spy on Americans.
I'm sure they can legally ask the Canadians to spy on 'suspects', and probably return the favour. The intelligence communicities of several countries are very tightly integrated, so I'm sure they have no problems getting around these little legal problems.
What POSSIBLE benefit can they see in shutting something down that has a primary use of helping people to identify and purchase their product? Really, it just seems like madness
Lyrics sites are invaluable for many musicians - I always thought that was their primary purpose. These guys have no feeling for music, and since that's their living, that means they have no soul.