in 150 years, china will be issuing diplomatic myspace invectives
Myspace not only still around, but an official channel in 150 years? Wow, and I thought Phillip K. Dick had some psychotically frightening future visions...
I agree that corporations do not have any "rights" that other groups don't have (in fact, less as they tend to be regulated). However,corporations DO limit the liability of the individuals in the organization. The original purpose behind this was to limit the financial liability of the individuals - if I am an owner of a corporation which fails, the only financial risk I personally assume is that which I put into the corporation. Debt collectors can not pierce the corporate shield to collect on corporate debts out of my personal funds. This is actually brilliant, and a vital part of a capitalistic economy.
However, and I think this is the thing that upsets people, it has become true that corporations also limit the legal liability of individuals. Certainly not entirely; there are recent instances of extreme corporate malfeasance being punished at the individual level. However, there are also cases of corporate malfeasance NOT being punished at the individual level. A good example that is near and dear to the/. heart is the Sony rootkit. At some point, individuals made the decisions, and individuals performed the actions that put rootkits on the Sony CDs. And yet, these individuals were not punished for this action entirely because they were operating as a corporation. Well, to be completely fair, because they were operating as an incredibly wealthy, powerful corporation. But the fundamental stupidity of governments creating, supporting, and failing to control their own most powerful competitors is a different discussion. The important thing here is that people look at corporate actions and think "If I did that, I'd be thrown in jail. They do that in the name of profit, they pay a fine smaller than the profit they made, and continue on. That's not fair."
So why assume that they are mentally the same? The physiology of the brain has been shown to have a tremendous influence over emotional and intellectual development.
if society influences what girls think and what they want, if you talk to girls who have been so influenced, they will in fact tell you what they think and want, i.e. how they have been socially influenced
This argument reminds me of string theory: it is internally consistent, but non-falsifiable. Unless you plan to have a control group raised by wolves, this is merely an assumption on your part, with no way to prove it. Maybe society has developed the gender roles it has b/c that is what the majority of women and men prefer, so society now reflects these preferences? My wife likes to clean because she derives satisfaction from exerting that control over her environment, having a task that she can see tangible results from, and just feels more at ease in a clean environment (for very strict definitions of clean). If you suggested she likes to clean because society has influenced her into thinking that is what a woman does, she would break your nose (she also enjoys kick-boxing).
No one has given a good reason why these fields should be so lopsided in terms of sex.
No one has given a good reason why these fields should NOT be so lopsided, either. Even if there is no physiological bias towards certain types of endeavor, but the bias comes entirely from society, so what? These are not positions of wealth and power; women are not inherently disenfranchised from society because of a lack of representation in engineering. As another poster said, where is the outrage that women are not more represented in trash collection?
In fact, far more offshoring went on during the 90's than the 2000's and nobody can say the US had fewer jobs afterwards.
I think it is a bit disingenuous to point to a period of time that saw the rise of an entirely new economic sector and pretend that b/c it was prosperous, business practices from that period must not have been negative. It's a bit like saying that murder doesn't have a negative impact on population growth, b/c a bunch of people were murdered last year, and yet we have more people this year!
Actually, even if the credit-card companies were manually sorting through the records (as dumb as that would appear to be), as long as they only shared the positive hits with the police, there still is no privacy issue. I would be shocked to learn that the credit-card companies do not have very wide powers when it comes to viewing, sorting, reporting against, etc. their own data. The privacy rights only kick in when it comes to your credit-card company sharing that data with someone else.
Ha! I just recently had one of our programmers submit a request for some back-end modifications to support some changes being made to our web-app. I shit you not, in her mock-up of how she thought the tables should look, she had a table named "tblTableName". It almost made sense in the context of the app, but I still got a pretty big laugh out of it.
I've noticed the same odd buying pattern during storms 'round these parts, as well. I've always wondered what the hell these people are making out of bread, milk, and eggs when the power goes out? French toast?
I think you meant never and I also think you are forgetting the Japanese internment camps we had during World War II.
"I think you meant the opposite of what you said, and based on that interpretation, here is an example proving you 'wrong'."
Finally, if you are a law abiding American citzen or law abiding resident then you should have nothing to worry about. However if you skirt the law, are a criminal, and in this country illegally then I say tough shit to you.
"Only the guilty need fear being hit with this large stick. And for your convenience, I have defined who the guilty are - the guilty are those who have done wrong."
Bravo. The only thing you left out is the part about knowing who has done wrong by hitting them with the stick and seeing who says "Ouch". Other than that, absolutely stellar!
I agree. I think Bush Jr. might be the first person to win the office of President of the U.S. who viewed the job as a sinecure. And then 9/11 happened, and he was suddenly made aware that people actually expected him to, you know, lead.
Just to give you my background, my mother is a teacher, my father was a teacher before going into computers back in the 80s, my sister is a teacher, my wife is a teacher, many of my friends are teachers. My entire life I have been surrounded by teachers. And I think you hit the nail exactly on the head. The one thing I would add is that there are mediocre teachers. They are the competent people that thought they would try teaching and are on the 5 year burn-out plan. They are hard to find, tho, b/c they are so fleeting. It takes a year or two for them to gain the experience to become decent, they might last a couple more years, and then are too burned out from the exact shit you mentioned to care anymore. Most then quit to do something else. If you look around, you will be amazed how many people have a few years teaching experience from early in their careers.
I work with this guy who is quite intelligent, but has unfortunately been brain damaged from working with Access pretty much since God invented dirt. We have MySQL 4x, SQL Server 2000 and Oracle 9i servers running on various machines, but he insists on using Access for a couple of tracking applications that manage some of his data, some of mine. Every time I need to update one of my tables, I have to get him to close his copy of the application, b/c Access of course "manages" synchronous users by locking the table to read only if you are the 2 person to touch it. Despite a year and a half of explanations (and demonstrations!), he still insists that is how ALL DBMS manage synchronous users, so migrating the applications to something else won't fix the issue. Since he is the senior DBA, we still use Access. Excuse me, I am going to go cry now...
The Real Problem is that the New York Times insists on publishing again and again secrets that ultimately end up damaging the U.S.
And the point is that there is a large difference between damaging the U.S., and politically damaging the current administration. If revealing to the public what the administration is doing (note, not what the military or CIA or FBI etc, but the White House administration) is somehow damaging to the US, then maybe the fault doesn't lie with the people that revealed the actions, but the actions themselves. There should be only a few specific areas that the public can not know what the government is doing in their name.
Discussion and arguments of policy is fine and it should be discussed in a fair, open, and rational way.
I submit that when the New York Times, or most other media outlets, publish information, the discussion they present is anything but fair and rational, and since they often give only token space to opposing viewpoints, it is not very open either.
And this provides a rationale for preventing them from presenting their view?
One thing these people need to understand is that their right to publish these things is guaranteed by the U.S Government. Not the U.N. not by the UE, or anyone else. When they publish information that causes harm to the U.S. in their zeal in pursing their partisan agenda, they are actually weakening the very institution that guarantees their rights.
Again, it is very debatable whether the NYT publishes information that harms the U.S., or whether it merely causes political harm to the current administration. There is not much question that when representatives of the US government seek to deny these rights "guaranteed by the U.S. government", they are actually weakening the very institution they swore to uphold. I definitely know which one I find more troubling.
No, I get the deterministic argument. I'm just saying that people don't necessarily appeal to religion in order to refute determinism. I think "gut feelings" play a larger role in most people's argument for free will than religion. "It feels like I have free will, so I must have free will." Which is certainly not a rigorous argument, but since logic can't actually prove either position, people tend to fall on the side they are emotionally more comfortable with.
The so-called problem with determinism is that it also refutes religion.
That is one of the objections to determinism, sure. But another, perhaps more common one is the simple fact that most people feel like they have free will. People perceive themselves as making choices all the time. So to come along and say that they in fact do not, the choices are not really a choice, conflicts with people's emotional experiences of their own thoughts and existence. If I don't have free will, why did I spend so damn long at the grocery store choosing which apples to buy?
Ok, all three of your arguments fall under "Sovereign states get to determine their own internal affairs. They don't have to do what any other state tells them if they don't want." Technically, true. Realistically, not so much. Sure, independent states can do what they want. But if you piss off the powers that be, you don't get to play in the global economy, import goods, export goods, etc., depending on how pissed they get. That's what Russia joining the WTO has to do with this: the WTO (which is pretty much an economic stick swung about by the wealthy nations) is likely to tell Russia they must crack down on "intellectual property infringement" if they want to play ball with the big boys. Russia wants to join the WTO, b/c then they get to be one of the big boys manipulating the world economy for their own advantage, rather than being one of the ones manipulated. I believe the term is realpolitik.
Yes, the blind are getting a better deal than immigrants. There are several reasons for this, some admirable, some not so much. A few are:
1) Immigrants can learn English in order to use your site. Blind people can not learn to see.
2) Related to #1, blindness invokes more sympathy than being an immigrant. More sympathy means more consideration.
3) The underlying assumption is that blind people are most likely citizens, immigrants are most likely not. All citizens must be assured equal access, regardless of status. However, if your status is "not citizen", protecting you becomes much less of a concern to the lawmakers. I'm not saying this is good or bad, or that immigrant == non citizen, just that this is an assumption many people make and the consequences of this assumption.
Have you ever tried to learn Chinese? Reading/writing is quite a bit harder than listening/speaking, at least in my experience, due to the fact that, to me, the written form has no inherent relationship to the spoken form. It is basically "memorize these 1000 pictures and what they mean". I am told that there ARE conventions used such that you can eventually translate a word you have never seen before, but that has proven WAY more difficult to pick up in the written form than the spoken form.
YMMV, IMHO, yadda yadda yadda
As for SG-I, at some point, too much realism becomes crappy TV. How come no one ever gets diarrhea, traveling to all these exotic planets and presumably eating all this exotic food?
No, no, he's right. The ultimate expression of being a woman is refusing to get a job b/c you have "traditional values", forcing your husband to work like a dog to stay ahead of the finance charges on the credit card you fraudulently took out against his bank account and refuse to give up. Then, when he catches you sleeping with the neighbor and threatens to divorce you, bring up allegations of abuse and get your mother to testify that she has known about the abuse for years now. You get to keep the house, which is conveniently close to the neighbor, receive alimony checks, AND slander your husband's name all over town. THAT is the ultimate expression of being a woman.
Me? I'm a very happily married man; why do you ask?
We can try to stick our heads in the sand as with climate change, but statistics show paedophilia charges and convictions are on the rise.
Do you have a better explanation than a weak-kneed permissive social attitude or a conditioning by media influences?
. There is no "moral question" -- it's so important it's a physically hardwired response to view such activities with disgust and contempt.
And this is exactly the reason we as a society need to think calmly and rationally about the issue. There is no moral question concerning abusing or hurting children. But what does that have to do with looking at computer generated images, again? Oh right, nothing. You just view it "with disgust and contempt", so you want to prevent anyone from doing it.
Slashdot Mirror
in 150 years, china will be issuing diplomatic myspace invectives
Myspace not only still around, but an official channel in 150 years? Wow, and I thought Phillip K. Dick had some psychotically frightening future visions...
I agree that corporations do not have any "rights" that other groups don't have (in fact, less as they tend to be regulated). However,corporations DO limit the liability of the individuals in the organization. The original purpose behind this was to limit the financial liability of the individuals - if I am an owner of a corporation which fails, the only financial risk I personally assume is that which I put into the corporation. Debt collectors can not pierce the corporate shield to collect on corporate debts out of my personal funds. This is actually brilliant, and a vital part of a capitalistic economy.
/. heart is the Sony rootkit. At some point, individuals made the decisions, and individuals performed the actions that put rootkits on the Sony CDs. And yet, these individuals were not punished for this action entirely because they were operating as a corporation. Well, to be completely fair, because they were operating as an incredibly wealthy, powerful corporation. But the fundamental stupidity of governments creating, supporting, and failing to control their own most powerful competitors is a different discussion. The important thing here is that people look at corporate actions and think "If I did that, I'd be thrown in jail. They do that in the name of profit, they pay a fine smaller than the profit they made, and continue on. That's not fair."
However, and I think this is the thing that upsets people, it has become true that corporations also limit the legal liability of individuals. Certainly not entirely; there are recent instances of extreme corporate malfeasance being punished at the individual level. However, there are also cases of corporate malfeasance NOT being punished at the individual level. A good example that is near and dear to the
Women and men are physiologically different
So why assume that they are mentally the same? The physiology of the brain has been shown to have a tremendous influence over emotional and intellectual development.
if society influences what girls think and what they want, if you talk to girls who have been so influenced, they will in fact tell you what they think and want, i.e. how they have been socially influenced
This argument reminds me of string theory: it is internally consistent, but non-falsifiable. Unless you plan to have a control group raised by wolves, this is merely an assumption on your part, with no way to prove it. Maybe society has developed the gender roles it has b/c that is what the majority of women and men prefer, so society now reflects these preferences? My wife likes to clean because she derives satisfaction from exerting that control over her environment, having a task that she can see tangible results from, and just feels more at ease in a clean environment (for very strict definitions of clean). If you suggested she likes to clean because society has influenced her into thinking that is what a woman does, she would break your nose (she also enjoys kick-boxing).
No one has given a good reason why these fields should be so lopsided in terms of sex.
No one has given a good reason why these fields should NOT be so lopsided, either. Even if there is no physiological bias towards certain types of endeavor, but the bias comes entirely from society, so what? These are not positions of wealth and power; women are not inherently disenfranchised from society because of a lack of representation in engineering. As another poster said, where is the outrage that women are not more represented in trash collection?
In fact, far more offshoring went on during the 90's than the 2000's and nobody can say the US had fewer jobs afterwards.
I think it is a bit disingenuous to point to a period of time that saw the rise of an entirely new economic sector and pretend that b/c it was prosperous, business practices from that period must not have been negative. It's a bit like saying that murder doesn't have a negative impact on population growth, b/c a bunch of people were murdered last year, and yet we have more people this year!
Maybe he is into hairy dudes.
Hey, at least you're providing feedback!
What, and risk destroying a future Bryan Adams or Celine Dion? We Americans aren't complete monsters!
Actually, even if the credit-card companies were manually sorting through the records (as dumb as that would appear to be), as long as they only shared the positive hits with the police, there still is no privacy issue. I would be shocked to learn that the credit-card companies do not have very wide powers when it comes to viewing, sorting, reporting against, etc. their own data. The privacy rights only kick in when it comes to your credit-card company sharing that data with someone else.
Man, if they have to search 22 million records to pull back a single transaction ID, that DBA should be shot! Indexes are your friend :)
Good point, tho. This is a non-issue as far as privacy is concerned.
Ha! I just recently had one of our programmers submit a request for some back-end modifications to support some changes being made to our web-app. I shit you not, in her mock-up of how she thought the tables should look, she had a table named "tblTableName". It almost made sense in the context of the app, but I still got a pretty big laugh out of it.
I've noticed the same odd buying pattern during storms 'round these parts, as well. I've always wondered what the hell these people are making out of bread, milk, and eggs when the power goes out? French toast?
I think you meant never and I also think you are forgetting the Japanese internment camps we had during World War II.
"I think you meant the opposite of what you said, and based on that interpretation, here is an example proving you 'wrong'."
Finally, if you are a law abiding American citzen or law abiding resident then you should have nothing to worry about. However if you skirt the law, are a criminal, and in this country illegally then I say tough shit to you.
"Only the guilty need fear being hit with this large stick. And for your convenience, I have defined who the guilty are - the guilty are those who have done wrong."
Bravo. The only thing you left out is the part about knowing who has done wrong by hitting them with the stick and seeing who says "Ouch". Other than that, absolutely stellar!
I agree. I think Bush Jr. might be the first person to win the office of President of the U.S. who viewed the job as a sinecure. And then 9/11 happened, and he was suddenly made aware that people actually expected him to, you know, lead.
Just to give you my background, my mother is a teacher, my father was a teacher before going into computers back in the 80s, my sister is a teacher, my wife is a teacher, many of my friends are teachers. My entire life I have been surrounded by teachers. And I think you hit the nail exactly on the head. The one thing I would add is that there are mediocre teachers. They are the competent people that thought they would try teaching and are on the 5 year burn-out plan. They are hard to find, tho, b/c they are so fleeting. It takes a year or two for them to gain the experience to become decent, they might last a couple more years, and then are too burned out from the exact shit you mentioned to care anymore. Most then quit to do something else. If you look around, you will be amazed how many people have a few years teaching experience from early in their careers.
I work with this guy who is quite intelligent, but has unfortunately been brain damaged from working with Access pretty much since God invented dirt. We have MySQL 4x, SQL Server 2000 and Oracle 9i servers running on various machines, but he insists on using Access for a couple of tracking applications that manage some of his data, some of mine. Every time I need to update one of my tables, I have to get him to close his copy of the application, b/c Access of course "manages" synchronous users by locking the table to read only if you are the 2 person to touch it. Despite a year and a half of explanations (and demonstrations!), he still insists that is how ALL DBMS manage synchronous users, so migrating the applications to something else won't fix the issue. Since he is the senior DBA, we still use Access. Excuse me, I am going to go cry now...
The Real Problem is that the New York Times insists on publishing again and again secrets that ultimately end up damaging the U.S.
And the point is that there is a large difference between damaging the U.S., and politically damaging the current administration. If revealing to the public what the administration is doing (note, not what the military or CIA or FBI etc, but the White House administration) is somehow damaging to the US, then maybe the fault doesn't lie with the people that revealed the actions, but the actions themselves. There should be only a few specific areas that the public can not know what the government is doing in their name.
Discussion and arguments of policy is fine and it should be discussed in a fair, open, and rational way.
I submit that when the New York Times, or most other media outlets, publish information, the discussion they present is anything but fair and rational, and since they often give only token space to opposing viewpoints, it is not very open either.
And this provides a rationale for preventing them from presenting their view?
One thing these people need to understand is that their right to publish these things is guaranteed by the U.S Government. Not the U.N. not by the UE, or anyone else. When they publish information that causes harm to the U.S. in their zeal in pursing their partisan agenda, they are actually weakening the very institution that guarantees their rights.
Again, it is very debatable whether the NYT publishes information that harms the U.S., or whether it merely causes political harm to the current administration. There is not much question that when representatives of the US government seek to deny these rights "guaranteed by the U.S. government", they are actually weakening the very institution they swore to uphold. I definitely know which one I find more troubling.
No, I get the deterministic argument. I'm just saying that people don't necessarily appeal to religion in order to refute determinism. I think "gut feelings" play a larger role in most people's argument for free will than religion. "It feels like I have free will, so I must have free will." Which is certainly not a rigorous argument, but since logic can't actually prove either position, people tend to fall on the side they are emotionally more comfortable with.
Wait, the naked woman has the face of Britney Spears, or the crocodile? I don't know whether to be offended or aroused...I'll call it offousal!
The so-called problem with determinism is that it also refutes religion.
That is one of the objections to determinism, sure. But another, perhaps more common one is the simple fact that most people feel like they have free will. People perceive themselves as making choices all the time. So to come along and say that they in fact do not, the choices are not really a choice, conflicts with people's emotional experiences of their own thoughts and existence. If I don't have free will, why did I spend so damn long at the grocery store choosing which apples to buy?
Ok, all three of your arguments fall under "Sovereign states get to determine their own internal affairs. They don't have to do what any other state tells them if they don't want." Technically, true. Realistically, not so much. Sure, independent states can do what they want. But if you piss off the powers that be, you don't get to play in the global economy, import goods, export goods, etc., depending on how pissed they get. That's what Russia joining the WTO has to do with this: the WTO (which is pretty much an economic stick swung about by the wealthy nations) is likely to tell Russia they must crack down on "intellectual property infringement" if they want to play ball with the big boys. Russia wants to join the WTO, b/c then they get to be one of the big boys manipulating the world economy for their own advantage, rather than being one of the ones manipulated. I believe the term is realpolitik.
However, the future is a very long time
That's what YOU think, human.
Yes, the blind are getting a better deal than immigrants. There are several reasons for this, some admirable, some not so much. A few are:
1) Immigrants can learn English in order to use your site. Blind people can not learn to see.
2) Related to #1, blindness invokes more sympathy than being an immigrant. More sympathy means more consideration.
3) The underlying assumption is that blind people are most likely citizens, immigrants are most likely not. All citizens must be assured equal access, regardless of status. However, if your status is "not citizen", protecting you becomes much less of a concern to the lawmakers. I'm not saying this is good or bad, or that immigrant == non citizen, just that this is an assumption many people make and the consequences of this assumption.
Have you ever tried to learn Chinese? Reading/writing is quite a bit harder than listening/speaking, at least in my experience, due to the fact that, to me, the written form has no inherent relationship to the spoken form. It is basically "memorize these 1000 pictures and what they mean". I am told that there ARE conventions used such that you can eventually translate a word you have never seen before, but that has proven WAY more difficult to pick up in the written form than the spoken form.
YMMV, IMHO, yadda yadda yadda
As for SG-I, at some point, too much realism becomes crappy TV. How come no one ever gets diarrhea, traveling to all these exotic planets and presumably eating all this exotic food?
No, no, he's right. The ultimate expression of being a woman is refusing to get a job b/c you have "traditional values", forcing your husband to work like a dog to stay ahead of the finance charges on the credit card you fraudulently took out against his bank account and refuse to give up. Then, when he catches you sleeping with the neighbor and threatens to divorce you, bring up allegations of abuse and get your mother to testify that she has known about the abuse for years now. You get to keep the house, which is conveniently close to the neighbor, receive alimony checks, AND slander your husband's name all over town. THAT is the ultimate expression of being a woman.
Me? I'm a very happily married man; why do you ask?
We can try to stick our heads in the sand as with climate change, but statistics show paedophilia charges and convictions are on the rise. Do you have a better explanation than a weak-kneed permissive social attitude or a conditioning by media influences?
How about knee-jerk reactions based on a puritanical social attitude conditioned by pervasive media witch hunts? OF COURSE pedophilia charges are going to go up when you start charging parents for taking pictures of their children.
. There is no "moral question" -- it's so important it's a physically hardwired response to view such activities with disgust and contempt.
And this is exactly the reason we as a society need to think calmly and rationally about the issue. There is no moral question concerning abusing or hurting children. But what does that have to do with looking at computer generated images, again? Oh right, nothing. You just view it "with disgust and contempt", so you want to prevent anyone from doing it.