Your response avoids every point I made. Let's start with the beginning.
No, he is suggesting that if you have a contract, you honor it. And if you don't like the terms of the contract for hire, you leave.
Why should an employer be faced to pay someone more money than what their contract calls for?
Because they're perfectly willing to award contracts that reward performance when executives are hired, but not when any other position is hired. And who makes the contacts? The executives. You're using a particularly insidious method of blurring the lines - in Japan, his contract, by law, calls for this kind of reward, and suing for money is a valid option legally (and ethically, or so I argued). My post then jumped from that to an statement that researchers in the US should be awarded similiarly. Note the use of the word should in the first sentence. The original post had a dangerous implication, so I tried to flesh it out. Contracts don't even apply to my argument (even if they did, legally, I win the argument. Note I didn't say anything about suing in the US). In fact, my entire post implies that contracts are entirely acceptable as long as all positions in a company are treated fairly and consistently with regard to the difficulty of the work and rewarding outstanding performance. Reading means you read all the words. Next sentence:
I said: I thought that in capitalism, we reward those with harder jobs who perform well because otherwise "no one would do them."
You:
Then you don't understand capitalism. Honestly, does the guy who cleans the shit out of toilets make or deserve more money than someone who doesn't? Well, in your warped view of Capitalism, they should, right? Who wants to clean turds up?
However, that job requires no formal education, no planning, and really, no thinking.
Capitalism rewards those that put forth ingenuity, time, hard work, skill, and/or luck.
The entire discussion is specifically about research, a difficult job, which is considered in every Econ 101 class as a basic argument for capitalism. The logic goes that research takes years of learning and dedication, serious work and effort that is easily put off or interrupted, and hence researchers should be rewarded. I argued that we should reward researchers based on their worth to a company, which everyone but you would take as an argument that intellectual and skilled labor that takes years of effort should be rewarded. My entire post is about jobs that require ingenuity, time, hard work, and skill. The only way you could even argue against my main point - namely, that researchers should be rewarded based on achievement - without renouncing capitalism is by taking the sentence entirely out of context: everything in my post, the article, or the entire fucking discussion implies we were talking about skilled labor. If you'd thought about what I wrote, you'd realize that I was talking about rewarding excellence. Unless you want to argue making blue LEDs is easy.
We don't. They run the companies. If the companies they run sucked badly enough, they'd lose employees and profits and they'd cease to be a company, and the CEO would not make a penny.
They are people. People choose all of this. People run every company ever made. If people had different VALUES, they would set the salaries differently. You're kind of rambling, but I want to make sure you understand that companies are groups of people who make decisions at least partly based on cultural values of what they feel should be rewarded.
So what your saying is, some entity, maybe the government, should decide what everyone gets paid, based on how "worthy" of the money you think they are?
Are you trolling? I didn't think you were because most trolls write extremely well, but maybe you are. If so, you're a disgrace. I was saying that companies should reward researchers based ON HOW MUCH MONEY THEIR INVENTIONS GR
The problem here is that he has set the precedent that your salary is if you do nothing; if you invent something cool, you sue the company to get MORE.
So are you honestly suggesting that the salaried employees that bring in millions of dollars with their inventions or solve particularly difficult problems should be paid the same as those who aren't profitable at all or stick to the routine? What about the executives who are paid millions based on the performance of the company? We compensate executives of big corporations based on how the company performs, and we vary their pay wildly, to the tune of several million dollars, depending on how they do. Why are people so willing to accept that hard work and results should only be grossly rewarded when performed by executives? People keep saying that the company provides the capital for the R and D and takes the risks to bring it to market. How did they get this capital? Osmosis? It was either through the investments of venture capitalists or through previous products developed by the same people we're talking about. And if it was from venture capitalists, the company is likely relatively new, and breakthrough inventions that earn a profit should be rewarded, as they're a big reason why the company will see another year. Does anyone here honestly think that executive ability is the only ability worthy of millions of dollars?
Please keep in mind I DO work for a large company who owns my inventions, I DO have patents in my name but assigned to my employer, and I WON'T sue my company even if they make millions from it and I don't see a dime... they compensated me for that time and effort - that's what my salary is.
They taught you that nonsense about salary and compensation so the executives could keep your cut. I read another post that said the CEO gave a press conference saying that real researchers do their jobs for the joy of technical achievement. Do executives do their jobs for the joy of fiscal discipline? Does it bother you that your time and effort, no matter how productive or brilliant, is worth shit unless you're an executive? And does it surprise you that the people paid the most are the ones who manage the money?
I thought that in capitalism, we reward those with harder jobs who perform well because otherwise "no one would do them." Why are we rewarding one type of hard work and not the other? Why is it that culturally, we reward people who run companies or appear on our newly invented hi-def TV screens screens, but we don't reward the people who make any of this technology possible? I'd like to thank you, though. I now know that if I end up in a corporate job, I should only surrender my mundane ideas to those greedy fucks.
To you my fellow youngings: stick to the university life. The university of Iowa just changed their patent and staff invention compensation plan because it was percieved as being unfair among the professors. They changed it so that the inventor recieves all of the first $100,000 of profit (or something like that). Here's how horrible it was (they also mention that change):
Adding to the benefits for researchers is the chance for profit. The university splits licensing revenue four ways - 25 percent to inventors, 25 percent to their departments, 25 percent to a fund advancing university research, and 25 percent to UI Research Foundation - but a new plan the UI Staff Council passed on Thursday would allocate them an additional $100,000.
So... let's say that I want to patronize his obviously grossly illegal service. How do you consummate a transaction like this? Cash in a Fedex envelope? Sent to whom? A P.O. box?
Who performs first? Are there criminal escrow services?
This page, linked in the posted article, has some explanation about how they traded:
"The 4,000 Shadowcrew members were participants in an underground economy capable of providing a dizzying array of illicit products and services. The most active commodities were "dumps" of credit card account data, fake physical cards to go with the dumps ($50 blank, $70 embossed, in bulk), and expertly forged identification to help pass the plastic at the local consumer electronics store. Credit reports, hacked online bank accounts, and names, birthdates and social security numbers of potential identity theft targets were also for sale in bulk.
Each product had its own specialists, and every vendor had to be reviewed by a trusted site member before they were allowed to sell. Disputes were handled judiciously, "rippers" selling bunk products quickly exposed and banned from the site. In one case a vendor who owed another member money was allowed to continue selling only on the condition that his future illicit earnings would be garnished until his debt was repaid..
Members of the community even traded in tangible items like ATM skimmers, prescription drugs, and cocaine, and services like DDoS for hire and malware customization. One well-reviewed vendor offered a test-taking service that promised to get customers technical certifications within days. He was permitted to vend after earning the reviewer a Microsoft MCP certification under an alias."
And how stupid do you have to be to take out an ad online, in a known criminal hangout, announcing your secret power, and providing contact info?
Um, dude, have you ever hung out on undernet? All sorts of shady shit happens there. I've known friends who knew people from online chatrooms who hijacked business conference call lines and made them available to entire chatrooms as a group conference voicechat line. Warring chatrooms would even appear and try to make the line unusable. I thought it was moronic (they even called from their home and work phones for God's sake!), but I think people aren't used to the internet's topology. The lack of a physical police presence makes people pretty confident and reckless - you're not there, so they can't just arrest you on the spot, which eliminates most of the anxiety in any crime (smoke weed in a public park and your house and compare your reactions). Even worse, because of the nature of the internet, the police don't need a physical presence to monitor any of it, so criminals can't just look over and notice that shady van across the street. The lack of these real-world reminders makes for bad heuristic judgments. You'd think hackers would be the first to notice that their lack of fear is due to this sort of fallacy, but from the article, it's clear that some don't.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that it's easy to catch people committing crimes online. It's extremely difficult. GHB kits thrived online, and I'm sure if you still looked you could find products ostensibly marketed for other reasons that are just clandestine GHB kits on google (that's the only example you get, but you'd all be fucking shocked if you knew just how many drugs are sold online with Visa and paypal). If you take only the most obvious precautions, it's many times harder. Something as simple as using a proxy and encryption from a "borrowed" wireless connection can make criminals almost undetectable. Many of us use one of the three reguarly. How hard is it to combine them?
The police can't monitor everything. Even if they devoted the resources to looking for this sort of thing, how many people know the magic combinations of words and searching techniques that let them
I have no idea how you got the +5 insightful, but it's enough to make me want to retch. Being an asshole about a single spelling mistake on the internet is about as low as you can get. As it is, he writes better than 99% of posters on the internet in both his low frequency of spelling errors and the presence of correct punctuation and capitalization. You're just being an asshole with that comment, and there's no excuse for it.
The best part is the fact that he isn't the journalist you're thinking of. Do you just assume everyone on the internet with the same name is the same person? Are you fucking retarded? Does it make you feel like an asshole? I'd feel like an asshole if I threw out an attack based on a 3rd grade assumption and inadvertently hurt some uninvolved person's reputation. Maybe a fucking apology to both Rolands is in order.
I know I sound like an ass, but this guy sure fucking worked for it.
Ack! Heh, that was horrible wording. It can easily be modified to say that each thought is also a physical activity, and arises from the structure, organization, and interworkings of the cells in the brain, namely neurons and glial cells. Thought is tied to a physical process and does not exist independently of that process. That is the point I wanted to make.
At the end of your post, you're using thought in a different sense than I am. You're thinking of content of the thought, and how someone can think of the same thing on two different days. I'm thinking of a thought as the physical process that occurs in our brain as we think. I was using the point to reenforce the idea that nothing exists independently of the physical world, not even our experience. It's clearly true in that sense.
Then you better explain that "science" is only a pragmatic, physical explanation of observed results -- it can make no claim to being "truth".
If someone can define truth as something other than the agreement between our statements and states of affairs of objects in the world, I'd like to hear it. Everyone else in history who's tried has failed. Also, describing an explanation as only physical doesn't make it less valid. In fact, since no one has ever demonstrated that anything but the physical world exists, it'd seem that a presence in the physical world would be a qualification for anything and everything we sense and the only reality that anyone has experienced up until this point. Science may have too small a scope to understand the nature of realiy, but based on every bit of evidence any of us have every recieved (that is, our collected sensory impressions), it doesn't.
For an exercise, try thinking of a word that doesn't involve states of affairs in the world, or our intrepretations of the states of our bodies. Everything corresponds to the physical world. Your speech is vibrations in the air. Your thoughts are neurons in your brain (disagree? Overdose on DXM and then try making metaphors). Nothing anyone has ever presented has contridicted this.
Truth is a word philosophers made up before they got their act together. The only sensible definition of the word refers to the agreement of a statement with certain states of affairs in the world*. Please read more so you know what baggage words carry before you use them. These linguistic errors are the cause of 99% of misunderstandings.
*The pragmatic definition of truth as verifiability does make sense and is a worthwhile concept, but since no one ever means this when they use the word truth but pragmatists, we should make it another word.
This is the 2nd time that I'm aware of Apple using a Firmware fix to keep competition down. The first happened when the G4s had just been released. It so happened that they had released a firmware update for the G3 a few weeks prior and, without telling anyone who used the firmware update, snuck in a patch to block G4 upgrades. It was only a couple weeks before the chip upgrade companies had broken the protection, but I was still pissed about paying hundreds of dollars more for an equivalent speed machine out of brand loyalty and them screwing me all the same.
People on slashdot conviently forget everything that Apple does that doesn't fit inside their small, incredibly inconsistent world view. I want people to take this story, mentally replace all occurances of Apple to MS, then tell me if this is even remotely consistent with slashdot posts. There are comments rated 5 saying that Apple has the right to do this. Hey guys and moderaters giving these posts points: where were you in the discussions about the dangers of a proprietary.doc format?
Did anyone else find it funny that no one talks about MSs "right" to bust cross-program functionality with.doc files? Note that word does work well with standard text, RTF, and HTML formats that are in wide use. That's the same thing as the ipod playing mp3s, right?
The truth is that if MS did this with Word to mess up Staroffice, you'd all be up in arms for weeks complaining. And I wouldn't blame you at all - it would be a stupid, petty move from a company that is abusing its captive market. But when it comes from Apple, the wonderful word right appears, and you've saved yourselves from cognitive dissonance (as if having a right to do something made it desirable in any way, or somehow an acceptable path of action). Sure they can do this: are they assholes for doing so? Would you feel the same if another company did this? Apple has a history of acting like a business, which it is. Don't trick yourself into thinking that they're on your side against the big, bad, proprietary, stupid, plain, and evil PC orthodoxy. They're there to sell you computers.
I'd kill to see more posts where products were graded on one critera only: functionality as a computer. If you'd ask the people here, you'd think Windows 2000 or XP still crashed frequently (my brother and I leave our cpus on for months) and was prone to driver and software conflicts with nearly everything. Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux are all tools. Do you use a hammer when you need a screwdriver? No. Do you screws all the time, cursing those nails which are so damned hard to remove? No. You use them when you need them and the price is acceptable for the use. Computers are no different. Let's stop treating these products like absolutes and get more of those shades of grey back that are required for rational discussion.
I go to a big ten school that has a massive campus wide agreement with Microsoft that gives us Windows XP and all other major Microsoft apps (office, frontpage) for 8 dollars each, except for Visual Studio.net, which costs 11. You can also download office XP from ITS (norton too, thank god). Don't get me wrong, they have more than just MS stuff - Mac OS X costs 14 or so, and Red Hat Enterprise costs around 10. I already filled up a binder of hundreds of dollars of software (I buy every version released) after 2 and a half years here. This agreement is campus wide - the CS department uses mainly linux labs, although it does have some connection with Microsoft.
Last semester, they started to teach intro computing classes in C#, and I'll bet they get some money for that. Oddly enough, I'm glad, as the course introduced me to Visual Studio, the crack of GUI windows programming (the labs used citrix to run it). They've successfully hooked myself and another of my friends to it. They're smarter than people realize, and go to great lengths to ensure that graduates in as many fields as possible rely on their software (Excel is almost universally used at my school). They also seem to understand that getting programmers using their tools is essential for them to keep their market dominance.
This goes double for overclockers. I only bought one motherboard before I realized that reviews didn't hold up as well as the collective experiences of techies (this is especially important for overclocking results). Forum posts are direct links to specific experience and knowledge gleaned from those experiences, like how you shouldn't ever expect a Tiger Direct rebate. Reviews never stress the products to my liking - you need clumsy people and morons to do that for ya. Sometimes they can also tell you the step in the (dis)assembly that was missing from the manual. I guess that black heatsink gunk on the standard Intel HS can get really stuck to the processor. Stuck enough to rip the processor out of the socket with the pins still in the socket. Yeah, don't use intel thermal gunk. If you must, apply heat to remove. See? You learned something on a forum.
It does matter how the outcome is achieved. The ends do not justify the means, not even when it's a university professor trying to extort money from Microsoft. One reason we have the (few, and eroding all the time, but still meaningful) civil liberties we do in America is because the whole foundation of our legal system is the idea that there must be a fair process, not just a fair result.
What I was getting at in my post is that the fairest process is one equally applied. To let Microsoft game the industry and then have Eolas not get their due according to the rules of the industry isn't right either. We should be happy that if something unfair goes around, it comes around, unless you'd rather we shrug off the only sense of justice we'll likely have in IP law for years (besides the impending implosion of SCO). If we're opposed to it all we're opposed to it all, but remember, I said nothing about the fairness of the claim within the system. I only mentioned the fundamental fairness of the system, which most people here are opposed to. You seem to have confused the two.
This is how the patent system works (check slashdot anyday for examples). We shouldn't bitch if a company that is known for manuiplating the system finally becomes the victim. You seem to have overreacted to the suggestion that we should be happy when immoral procedures finally punish those whom they usually benefit. Excessive idealization and abstraction of morals does that to people. Now, sit back and enjoy the fireworks!
As far as I heard (here in a previous post of the story), it was some professor who holds the patents, and I'd imagine both he and the university share the money. He's doing this as retribution towards Microsoft, and since he's a professor, he's not pressing the OSS alternatives. Shouldn't you like that someone who actually created something get money from Microsoft, whether or not it was done in a fair system? Are we going to be stupid enough to let people like MS manuiplate patent law and bitch when someone little gets his?
Those are the kind of comments I figured this article would end. If you read the article, it mentions the strong correllation* between increasing amounts of methane and C02 and periods of warming on the earth. Usually, some dumbass comes on and starts talking about how the dataset isn't big enough to form conclusions, forgetting that the form and details of physical structures often betray their development (not so much in this case, all I see is someone recklessly assuming that scientists assume). The earth left us clues, and that's what these scientists are looking at. Never mind that their descriptions of the natural world are overwhelmingly accurate; never mind that your life would crumble apart if the collected claims of scientists, which all of us base our lives around, turned out to be false. Scientists don't get wild ass ideas about why something's happening and then try to fit the world to their view, unlike certain other denominational groups that seem to be guiding much of this narrow-thinking inside the US. If you want to believe some wild bullshit dogma apart from the evidence, go ahead, but quit saying that everybody else's methods stink like your own.
I dislike reading slashdot and other filter site articles on global warming because of the large number of people who would rail on ONE OR TWO specific conclusions scientists make. I've never had a chance to directly speak with such a person, but I would draw them out like this.
Contrarian: The data-set is too small! We can't know!
Me: The earth betrays its history. Dinosaur bones, man.
Contrarian: But the earth goes through periods of warming all the time!
Me: Yes. Scientists told you that. And now they're telling you that fossil fuels do it too.
Contrarian: I don't see how they could make a conclusion on so little data!
Me (this part depends entirely on the contrarian not being a climatologist by trade, as is always the case): Well, you should review the data!
Contrarian: I should! And then I'll have the best ideas and arguments about the marxist fiction of global warming! I'll reason through the process, eliminate bias, and use a process of inductive observation...
Me: Right! And then other people can ask you for your educated opinion! And you'd be....a scientist.
That's what scientists are. They're the professionals. They're the ones who've READ THE FUCKING BOOKS. I like to point this out, because most of us here are arguing about shit we have no interest or training in. YOUR SHREWD POINT IS NOT A COUNTEREXAMPLE TO YEARS AND LIVES DEVOTED TO RESEARCH. SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT IT. You don't know about all the reasons why global warming exists BECAUSE YOU HAVE NOT READ ENOUGH TO UNDERSTAND THEM OR EVEN HAVE HEARD OF THEM. Scientists can be wrong, but you have to explain why; you can't do this unless you understand the field. So, please, enlighten us!
*I understand that correllation is not causation, but evidence like this, coupled with the melting of the glaciers and increased output of fossil fuel, and the concensus of the scientific community, the burden of proof is now on the naysayers. Most scientific results depend upon correllation, as cause and effect is a sticky relationship to (feasbly) pin down.
This isn't the case at many other universities. Chem (and hopefully other science) teachers at the U of Iowa are smart enough to ban graphing calculators from tests, and I haven't had a math class yet that allowed me to use any sort of calculator at all on exams. You should have seen some of the problems I had to do on my first calc III exam. My brother (who, granted, is in one of the best public high schools in the nation) was just complaining yesterday about not being able to use a calculator on a problem with Newton's Method for an exam that ended up with something like 2370 in the denominator and an even nastier group of stuff on top. A lot of my teachers are foreign, but this holds for all the Americans, too.
It's mainly a question of motivation. I'd say that of any randomly selected population grouped on a shared trait, the people who come to sites like slashdot rank pretty highly on math aptitude. But how many people here have studied beyond intro calc or linear algebra?
That's one of the best ideas I've ever heard. One of my friends in high school was a grammer nazi, and his complaining about my grammer eventually got so annyoing that I started punctuating. After about 2 years of typing correctly I stopped making most grammatical errors. If I ever have kids, I'm going to make a program that does that for their IM programs, and give them the condition that if they want their own computer they have to use the modified client. My dad tricked me into developing an interest in learning by buying me a computer, and I think it was the best parental decision he ever made.
I can't figure out why so many Bush supporters earnestly defend the president for speaking clumisly, saying that we shouldn't judge him for it, and then vow to never forgive this one (mis)quoted sentence of Al Gore's that, while technically true and true in some sense of his meaning, is a little too broad. Not to suggest the Democrats aren't guilty of the same: most of politics revolves around these gaffes. This leads me to a bigger point. In these stupid squabbling matches (which human error gives us the chance to enjoy several times yearly), does anyone here just say it's all stupid? Is anyone here absolutely consistent in their opinion? The only time people seem unable to forgive these errors is when a politician in the party they don't belong to makes them. Can anyone here admit that sometimes people phrase things wrong? Does anyone here have the balls to say, yes, I sometimes fuck up my sentences? Because this is slashdot, and while I now study math and the sciences, the classes from my former writing major tell me that you folks shouldn't be critizing these people for speaking inaccurately. This is doubly true for the people who don't have the internet, as we've at least practiced our reading and writing skills online rather than rot in front of the TV.
I honestly think this lack of perspective signifies the worst about our culture. Stupid petty squabbling about wording or taking sentences to mean the most implausable things they can is not political discussion. Holding others to standards that we'd easily excuse for ourselves and those we care about is how the feeble minded make their points (this is particularly insidious if you don't know your friends are gay or smoke drugs). No one talks about ideas anymore because we can't read or think, and hence we can't speak or seperate this sort of political bullshit from the issues that matter. While in an ideal world this sort of nonsense would occur equally between both parties, the presence of dogmatic thinking absolutely requires these shallow rebuttals when the world-view encompassing dogma is questioned, lest it be contradicted. Democrats can be and often are petty, but when the significance of a person's religion and life thus far - complete with the promise of eternal happiness - are swept away in practical arguments or considerations, these sorts of rebuttals necessarily crop up. See Rush Limbaugh and his 3 divorces + drug use, then compare it to the inability to marry for gay couples and the 50% of the drug population in jail being African-American, mainly incarcarated for using crack, which is punished at 100X the severity of cocaine (they're the same drug, but cocaine is preferred by whites and not in freebase form). If there's a guide book to the battles in America we're facing right now, it's Bertrand Russel's "Why I Am Not a Christian."* I suggest you all read it.
*For those of you who are Christians, most of the book deals with the dogmatic christianity that was still lingering around the turn of the 20th century. While he does take Christianity to task for the shit smears it has stomped into the tapestry of human history, your modern faith will hardly be examined, unless he points out that the reason you find it so palatable is because of the attacks on the Church made by it's enemies across the centuries.
Addiction is a reification, and that's where the problem comes in. We've blurred the use of addiction in society until the abstract definition of addiction - the need to perform some behavior compulsively - determines the connotation of the word. The only meaning of the word addiction that applies to physical reality is that version that arises from biological adaptation to the ingestion of substances, which some people (alcoholics, for one) are much more prone to. Continued use develops continued need, and soon, their bodies (literally) depend on the substances for normal functioning, as they have stopped producing sufficient amounts of affected neurotransmitters on their own.
The other connotation of addiction is the one we refer to in common speech - when a person repeats behaviors, regardless of the consequences or his/her own inclination to do so. So we speak of those addicted to shopping, grooming, sex, or any other behavior a person focuses on for what others would deem an unhealthy period of time (this behavior is almost always a vice, or capable of becoming one in excess). This is where our definitions overlap and the problem first appears. Any thought or behavior is necessarily biological. What's more, for all of human history, people have tried to resist pleasure, such as eating or sex, that is innately tied with both biological reward and negative consequences. And in this way, the reward and the strong drive to perform the behaviors that bring about this reward are abstracted on the basis of their biological similarity (the same brain rewards both behaviors) and the strikingly similar behaviors of those deemed addicted (when you want to do something, you do it). But when we do this, we overstep the bounds of the word addiction, and soon we start regulating all human behavior associated with pleasure, negative consequences, and an obsessive quality into the category of addiction. Now, if you think that a reasonable definition of addiction is one that can apply to any pleasure-deriving activity, including every vice, that's your opinion. It just happens to be a very wrong one.
It's hard not to do the things we like. They make us feel the same (happy) as heroin makes heroin addicts feel (happy). And for all of human history, we've been trying to figure out how to suppress the human tendencies toward pleasure that can hurt and destroy us. But when we speak like this, we replace a deeper understanding of human action with the shallow descriptions of behavior we read in magazines. I used to smoke cigarettes, and I occasionally smoke pot. When I quit smoking, I felt nuts, like I was losing something that my body depended upon. When you're a smoker, you can't remember what it was like to be a non-smoker - to go a day without thinking of a cigarette. It was the hardest thing I've ever done, and if you non-smokers could imagine that suffering, you'd know what we mean we when talk about addiction. When I stop smoking pot, I feel upset that I'm not doing what I like to do, and I want to smoke. But I when I stopped smoking cigarettes, I couldn't think, my head felt like it was being smashed, and I wasn't able to register anything other than my shaking and desire for a cigarette.
There is a biological reality to real addiction. The rest is human behavior and the same attraction to vice that we've lived with for years. While this is necessarily biology, it arises naturally from human behavior, and is not caused by physical adaption to external agents and chemicals that act upon the body. This is a critical distinction, and not one easily understood by half-rate thinkers, people who read magazines, and those who've never wanted a cigarette.
This shit gets so old. First comes convincing people that others aren't in control of their actions. That's the only way a person can say "stop doing this action, even though it doesn't affect me, because I don't like it" without getting laughed at. Listen to this quote from the article:
"Pornography really does, unlike other addictions, biolog
I remember watching a documentary or two about autism and something that was repeatedly found was that as an autistic individual tried to remedy their problems with autism (usually getting better with age) their savant like knowledge began to deteriorate. I have always thought that there is almost a finite amount of brain capacity any one individual is able to have. Meaning, while a savant is able to have incredible knowledge of some things, their brain is so devoted to that knowledge that things, like knowing where the silverwear drawer is, get sacrificed.
The capacity of the brain is functionally unlimited. Look up one of the various amazing people who memorized large amounts of trivial facts as an example. If there is a limit to human knowledge, no person has ever reached it, and that includes Euler. So that's not very plausable.
I've read the same facts about the loss of savant abilities, but depending on the context, you may not have learned that the specifics related to the loss of autistic powers generally concerns young people who lose one or more amazing feats as they learn to function socially (functioning socially or learning language almost always is associated with the loss of savant abilities: see google.) Since the gain of one skill and the loss of another are so closely related, this seems to suggest a finite processing power in the brain and maybe some plasticity in its parts, not a finite capacity of knowledge.
Even more specifically, a savant's inability to find the silverware drawer or dress himself likely relates to his cerebellum, which differs from most of ours. My favorite intiutive concept for the cerebellum is "rhythmic autopilot." As we learn procedural tasks and are conditioned to react in various ways, this automatic processing is largely taken up by the cerebellum. It's the conditioning/feedback loop center of the brain and hence governs movement, speaking with others, automated responses to stimuli, and all procedural knowledge. They can't find the silverware because their brains don't click into autopilot when performing these activities. So what seems trivial to us, like getting dressed, is essentially a new task for them every day. Could you imagine having to navigate your world through facts, unable to learn the rhythms of automated procedures we take for granted hundreds of times a day? And, as we'd expect, the autistic also often have differences in their cerebellums: click here for more. Here's a quote from a page of the functioning of the cerebellum, which has an excellent section describing its function (it uses a computer metaphor, so you guys might wanna check it out). Quote:
The skills involved in human communication, for example, require both motor and mental activity: the motor activity of speech or gesture, and the mental activity that formulates what is to be said. In the course of learning these skills, an individual's performance can be improved incrementally through practice so that the skills eventually can be performed without conscious attention to detail. For example, in recalling words stored in the memory, the activity can be performed without conscious attention to the details of how the words are selected by the brain during the retrieval process.
In social interaction, we take for granted automatic signals like voice tone, body language, or even the specific words we're using (I've never met anyone who thought over every word every time they spoke). My guess is that the plasticity of the brain allows the unused sections in autistics that are normally used for activities like social interaction to adapt for other uses, hence generating the autistic ability. When these brains are rightfully claimed by their social or lingusitic origins, the computing power is lost and the sa
Clinton won because of Perot. He did well running for reelection because of Dick Morris, who was a damn skilled man (he was in a bad position for quite a while after his healthcare plan failed). And he's literally the exception, not the rule. It takes people like Nixon to make the democrats win one election before losing for 12 more years.
Let's do an experiment. We all sign this petition to get Howard Dean as head of the DNC, and we'll see if this really works.
Before Dean ran, no one thought the Democrats could possibly win (or even raise more money than the president). When he started campaigning, he was the only one landing blows on Bush at all. Shifting the party right is useless (see the past 3 decades). If we sign this, we might keep losing elections, but we'll be losing them for a party we want to vote for and respect. I'm sick of this GOP lite shit. As far as I'm concerned, if the Democrats don't nominate Dean, they have one chance left to earn my loyalty before I'm through. And I'm only 20 =/
-Oobob
Really now, besides being an old and tired joke, doesn't this apply to all thin and flat objects similar to paper? Isn't it precisely these jumps in abstract and basic understanding of our world that lead the way for good things, whether it's advancement of basic knowledge (some of which may be applied later) or a novel application of that knowledge? Curious investigation of our world is a necessary precursor to science, and it's absurd to suggest that these sorts of inquiries aren't valuable when the existence of science depends on them.
By this logic, anyone who speaks out against a war is a traitor. This is even more dangerous when we consider the silence of people like Robert Mcnamara, who understood our dim prospects for victory but still refused to speak out against the war. Tortured POWs are (generally) angry at antiwar activists. But what about those men who didn't die in Vietnam because of people like Kerry? Who betrayed or forgot these men? Were those people who pushed for continued engagement in Vietnam the real traitors, betraying the youth of our nation by sending them to die in an unwinnable war? Kerry's statements were 30 years ago. If his testimony hurt you, get fucking over it. Thousands more would be dead if people like him were too afraid to speak.
Besides, weren't atrocities committed in Vietnam? Yeah, they were. I guess that makes your comment pure dogshit. You're just a moron and/or troll (and shame on the moderators who gave you points).
"slippery slope" is only a fallacy if you say beacuse of something something else WILL happen. It is not a fallacy if you say because of something something else COULD (or is very likely even) happen. I find that people that scream about the "slippery slope fallacy" are usually doing so because they have no other arguments to back up their position.\
This is the stupidest thing I've ever read on Slashdot. The point of the slippery slope is that there isn't a strict cause and effect relationship between the antecedents and consequent of a conditional statement, and hence a proposition representing this "slipperly slope," (A -> B ->... -> I), is invalid. To show this, we demonstrate that the consequent need not follow from the antecedent, and hence demonstrate the lack of a strict casual link between the elements A, B,..., I.
Given that, tell me, in a proposition composed of invalid slippery slope consequentials (A -> B ->...-> I), does the truth of A make it any more possible (or even very likely) for I to happen? Or is the possibility of I independent of A? Let's recall that a slippery slope occurs precisely when a casual link does not exist between the elements of the conditional. If a casual link did exist, the conditional would be satisified, and (A -> B ->...-> I) would be a valid statement. But since the elements aren't related, the truth of the statement A has no affect on the possibility of I being the case. That's the point of a slippery slope - no casual relationship exists and hence the deduction is invalid. If A doesn't have a casual relationship with an I, then why would you claim that making A the case would make I any more likely to be the case? Cause necessarily precedes effect. Logic reflects this.
Slashdot postings usually worry me, but the insightful modifier on this one is particularly distressing. I'm shocked that someone didn't catch this.
And that's where the problem comes in. We've blurred the use of addiction in society until the abstract definition of addiction - the need to perform some behavior compulsively - determines the connotation of the word. The only meaning of the word addiction that applies to physical reality is that version that arises from biological adaptation to the ingestion of substances, which some people (alcoholics, for one) are much more prone to. Continued use develops continued need, and soon, their bodies (literally) depend on the substances for normal functioning, as they have stopped producing sufficent amounts of affected neurotransmitters on their own.
The other connotation of addiction is the one we refer to in common speech - when a person repeats behaviors, regardless of the consequences or his/her own inclination to do so. So we speak of those addicted to shopping, grooming, sex, or any other behavior a person focuses on for what others would deem an unhealthy period of time (this behavior is almost always a vice, or capable of becoming one in excess). This is where our definitions overlap and the problem first appears. Any thought or behavior is necessarily biological. What's more, for all of human history, people have tried to resist pleasure, such as eating or sex, that is innately tied with both biological reward and negative consequences. And in this way, the reward and the strong drive to perform the behaviors that bring about this reward are abstracted on the basis of their biological similarity (the same brain rewards both behaviors) and the strikingly similar behaviors of those deemed addicted (when you want to do something, you do it). But when we do this, we overstep the bounds of the word addiction, and soon we start regulating all human behavior associated with pleasure, negative consequences, and an obsessive quality (games, sex, etcetc) into the category of addiction. Now, if you think that a reasonable definition of addiction is one that can apply to any pleasure-deriving activity, including every vice, that's your opinion. It just happens to be a very wrong one.
Listen, it's hard not to do the things we like. They make us feel the same (happy) as heroin makes heroin addicts feel (happy). And for all of human history, we've been trying to figure out how to supress the human tendencies towards pleasure that can hurt and destroy us. But when we talk like this, we cheapen the real meaning of addiction and blur the only real use of the word, and we replace deeper understand of human action with trivial and shallow definitions we read in magazines. I used to smoke cigarettes, I occasionally smoke pot, and I love math. When I quit smoking, I felt nuts, like I was losing something that my body depended upon. When you're a smoker, you can't remember what it was like to be a non-smoker - to go a day without thinking of a cigarette. It was the hardest thing I've ever done, and if you non-smokers could imagine that suffering, you'd know what we mean we when talk about addiction (and why we get angry when this pop psychology bullshit shits on our plight). But when I stop smoking pot, I feel upset that I'm not doing what I like to do, I feel urges to smoke, and very often, I will smoke once or twice again before starting my real month off. But I don't feel like I can't think, that my head is being smashed, or that I can't register anything other than my shaking and desire for a cigarette. There is a biological reality to real addiction. The rest is human behavior and the same old virture and vice discussions we've lived with for years. While this is necessarily biology, it comes naturally from human behavior, and is not caused by physical adaption to external agents and chemicals that act upon the biology of the body. This is a critical distinction, and not one easily understood by half-rate scientists, people who read magazines, and those who've never wanted a cigarette.
That's the great thing about the internet. All I need to make music are some instruments, a way to hook up the audio out to my computer, and a piece of software to record and edit that sound. I could then distribute that to the entire world. This is the key point that gets missed in these little flamewars. Piracy and the trampling of our rights are side effects of an underlying issue (and while it is important and neccesary to fight for them, property rights are sacred and unassailable territory in America, never mind that these morons around us have never fucking read anything about any philosophy that might suggest reasonable limitations on these rights).
The real reason they're scared is because the internet makes them obsolete. The only problem is that they won't become so until everyone ignores them. Listen to techno (good techno, big difference) with labels like WARP and other indy music with reasonable digital music policies. Movies? I'd hope that you'd be smart enough for that trash to bore you. Books and the Internet are quickly becoming the last sanctuaries of complex human thought and art (along with interconnected ideas, themes and subtlety, all abandoned in the world outside of the University and Internet. Proof? Read the paper or watch the TV.). Remember, the $$AAs only exist as long as they can persuade others that they still have a purpose - to distribute and record cultural content. And they do it 20 times less efficiently than the Internet.
Sure, stupid people with poor taste will keep giving them money, but for the first time in history, the Internet has given us options. We can make our own culture. But most people can't hope to understand the profound implications this raises for institution and tradition. Any of the pioneers of human thought would be amazed at the possibilities that a truly peer-to-peer system such as the Internet makes possible. By creating and sharing our culture through it, we've made obsolete the old institutions and abolished the physical limitations imposed on us by analog distribution (watch as they clamor for a piece of the new pie). It's a testament to human adaptation that we treat it as routine.
Slashdot Mirror
Your response avoids every point I made. Let's start with the beginning.
No, he is suggesting that if you have a contract, you honor it. And if you don't like the terms of the contract for hire, you leave. Why should an employer be faced to pay someone more money than what their contract calls for?
Because they're perfectly willing to award contracts that reward performance when executives are hired, but not when any other position is hired. And who makes the contacts? The executives. You're using a particularly insidious method of blurring the lines - in Japan, his contract, by law, calls for this kind of reward, and suing for money is a valid option legally (and ethically, or so I argued). My post then jumped from that to an statement that researchers in the US should be awarded similiarly. Note the use of the word should in the first sentence. The original post had a dangerous implication, so I tried to flesh it out. Contracts don't even apply to my argument (even if they did, legally, I win the argument. Note I didn't say anything about suing in the US). In fact, my entire post implies that contracts are entirely acceptable as long as all positions in a company are treated fairly and consistently with regard to the difficulty of the work and rewarding outstanding performance. Reading means you read all the words. Next sentence:
I said: I thought that in capitalism, we reward those with harder jobs who perform well because otherwise "no one would do them."
You: Then you don't understand capitalism. Honestly, does the guy who cleans the shit out of toilets make or deserve more money than someone who doesn't? Well, in your warped view of Capitalism, they should, right? Who wants to clean turds up?
However, that job requires no formal education, no planning, and really, no thinking.
Capitalism rewards those that put forth ingenuity, time, hard work, skill, and/or luck.
The entire discussion is specifically about research, a difficult job, which is considered in every Econ 101 class as a basic argument for capitalism. The logic goes that research takes years of learning and dedication, serious work and effort that is easily put off or interrupted, and hence researchers should be rewarded. I argued that we should reward researchers based on their worth to a company, which everyone but you would take as an argument that intellectual and skilled labor that takes years of effort should be rewarded. My entire post is about jobs that require ingenuity, time, hard work, and skill. The only way you could even argue against my main point - namely, that researchers should be rewarded based on achievement - without renouncing capitalism is by taking the sentence entirely out of context: everything in my post, the article, or the entire fucking discussion implies we were talking about skilled labor. If you'd thought about what I wrote, you'd realize that I was talking about rewarding excellence. Unless you want to argue making blue LEDs is easy.
We don't. They run the companies. If the companies they run sucked badly enough, they'd lose employees and profits and they'd cease to be a company, and the CEO would not make a penny.
They are people. People choose all of this. People run every company ever made. If people had different VALUES, they would set the salaries differently. You're kind of rambling, but I want to make sure you understand that companies are groups of people who make decisions at least partly based on cultural values of what they feel should be rewarded.
So what your saying is, some entity, maybe the government, should decide what everyone gets paid, based on how "worthy" of the money you think they are?
Are you trolling? I didn't think you were because most trolls write extremely well, but maybe you are. If so, you're a disgrace. I was saying that companies should reward researchers based ON HOW MUCH MONEY THEIR INVENTIONS GR
The problem here is that he has set the precedent that your salary is if you do nothing; if you invent something cool, you sue the company to get MORE.
So are you honestly suggesting that the salaried employees that bring in millions of dollars with their inventions or solve particularly difficult problems should be paid the same as those who aren't profitable at all or stick to the routine? What about the executives who are paid millions based on the performance of the company? We compensate executives of big corporations based on how the company performs, and we vary their pay wildly, to the tune of several million dollars, depending on how they do. Why are people so willing to accept that hard work and results should only be grossly rewarded when performed by executives? People keep saying that the company provides the capital for the R and D and takes the risks to bring it to market. How did they get this capital? Osmosis? It was either through the investments of venture capitalists or through previous products developed by the same people we're talking about. And if it was from venture capitalists, the company is likely relatively new, and breakthrough inventions that earn a profit should be rewarded, as they're a big reason why the company will see another year. Does anyone here honestly think that executive ability is the only ability worthy of millions of dollars?
Please keep in mind I DO work for a large company who owns my inventions, I DO have patents in my name but assigned to my employer, and I WON'T sue my company even if they make millions from it and I don't see a dime... they compensated me for that time and effort - that's what my salary is.
They taught you that nonsense about salary and compensation so the executives could keep your cut. I read another post that said the CEO gave a press conference saying that real researchers do their jobs for the joy of technical achievement. Do executives do their jobs for the joy of fiscal discipline? Does it bother you that your time and effort, no matter how productive or brilliant, is worth shit unless you're an executive? And does it surprise you that the people paid the most are the ones who manage the money?
I thought that in capitalism, we reward those with harder jobs who perform well because otherwise "no one would do them." Why are we rewarding one type of hard work and not the other? Why is it that culturally, we reward people who run companies or appear on our newly invented hi-def TV screens screens, but we don't reward the people who make any of this technology possible? I'd like to thank you, though. I now know that if I end up in a corporate job, I should only surrender my mundane ideas to those greedy fucks.
To you my fellow youngings: stick to the university life. The university of Iowa just changed their patent and staff invention compensation plan because it was percieved as being unfair among the professors. They changed it so that the inventor recieves all of the first $100,000 of profit (or something like that). Here's how horrible it was (they also mention that change):
Adding to the benefits for researchers is the chance for profit. The university splits licensing revenue four ways - 25 percent to inventors, 25 percent to their departments, 25 percent to a fund advancing university research, and 25 percent to UI Research Foundation - but a new plan the UI Staff Council passed on Thursday would allocate them an additional $100,000.
That's worth the extra school.
Why yes, that's exactly my reasoning. Such a sagacious insight from such a clever man.
So... let's say that I want to patronize his obviously grossly illegal service. How do you consummate a transaction like this? Cash in a Fedex envelope? Sent to whom? A P.O. box?
Who performs first? Are there criminal escrow services?
This page, linked in the posted article, has some explanation about how they traded:
"The 4,000 Shadowcrew members were participants in an underground economy capable of providing a dizzying array of illicit products and services. The most active commodities were "dumps" of credit card account data, fake physical cards to go with the dumps ($50 blank, $70 embossed, in bulk), and expertly forged identification to help pass the plastic at the local consumer electronics store. Credit reports, hacked online bank accounts, and names, birthdates and social security numbers of potential identity theft targets were also for sale in bulk.
Each product had its own specialists, and every vendor had to be reviewed by a trusted site member before they were allowed to sell. Disputes were handled judiciously, "rippers" selling bunk products quickly exposed and banned from the site. In one case a vendor who owed another member money was allowed to continue selling only on the condition that his future illicit earnings would be garnished until his debt was repaid..
Members of the community even traded in tangible items like ATM skimmers, prescription drugs, and cocaine, and services like DDoS for hire and malware customization. One well-reviewed vendor offered a test-taking service that promised to get customers technical certifications within days. He was permitted to vend after earning the reviewer a Microsoft MCP certification under an alias."
And how stupid do you have to be to take out an ad online, in a known criminal hangout, announcing your secret power, and providing contact info?
Um, dude, have you ever hung out on undernet? All sorts of shady shit happens there. I've known friends who knew people from online chatrooms who hijacked business conference call lines and made them available to entire chatrooms as a group conference voicechat line. Warring chatrooms would even appear and try to make the line unusable. I thought it was moronic (they even called from their home and work phones for God's sake!), but I think people aren't used to the internet's topology. The lack of a physical police presence makes people pretty confident and reckless - you're not there, so they can't just arrest you on the spot, which eliminates most of the anxiety in any crime (smoke weed in a public park and your house and compare your reactions). Even worse, because of the nature of the internet, the police don't need a physical presence to monitor any of it, so criminals can't just look over and notice that shady van across the street. The lack of these real-world reminders makes for bad heuristic judgments. You'd think hackers would be the first to notice that their lack of fear is due to this sort of fallacy, but from the article, it's clear that some don't.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that it's easy to catch people committing crimes online. It's extremely difficult. GHB kits thrived online, and I'm sure if you still looked you could find products ostensibly marketed for other reasons that are just clandestine GHB kits on google (that's the only example you get, but you'd all be fucking shocked if you knew just how many drugs are sold online with Visa and paypal). If you take only the most obvious precautions, it's many times harder. Something as simple as using a proxy and encryption from a "borrowed" wireless connection can make criminals almost undetectable. Many of us use one of the three reguarly. How hard is it to combine them?
The police can't monitor everything. Even if they devoted the resources to looking for this sort of thing, how many people know the magic combinations of words and searching techniques that let them
I have no idea how you got the +5 insightful, but it's enough to make me want to retch. Being an asshole about a single spelling mistake on the internet is about as low as you can get. As it is, he writes better than 99% of posters on the internet in both his low frequency of spelling errors and the presence of correct punctuation and capitalization. You're just being an asshole with that comment, and there's no excuse for it.
The best part is the fact that he isn't the journalist you're thinking of. Do you just assume everyone on the internet with the same name is the same person? Are you fucking retarded? Does it make you feel like an asshole? I'd feel like an asshole if I threw out an attack based on a 3rd grade assumption and inadvertently hurt some uninvolved person's reputation. Maybe a fucking apology to both Rolands is in order.
I know I sound like an ass, but this guy sure fucking worked for it.
Your thoughts are neurons in your brain
Ack! Heh, that was horrible wording. It can easily be modified to say that each thought is also a physical activity, and arises from the structure, organization, and interworkings of the cells in the brain, namely neurons and glial cells. Thought is tied to a physical process and does not exist independently of that process. That is the point I wanted to make.
At the end of your post, you're using thought in a different sense than I am. You're thinking of content of the thought, and how someone can think of the same thing on two different days. I'm thinking of a thought as the physical process that occurs in our brain as we think. I was using the point to reenforce the idea that nothing exists independently of the physical world, not even our experience. It's clearly true in that sense.
Then you better explain that "science" is only a pragmatic, physical explanation of observed results -- it can make no claim to being "truth".
If someone can define truth as something other than the agreement between our statements and states of affairs of objects in the world, I'd like to hear it. Everyone else in history who's tried has failed. Also, describing an explanation as only physical doesn't make it less valid. In fact, since no one has ever demonstrated that anything but the physical world exists, it'd seem that a presence in the physical world would be a qualification for anything and everything we sense and the only reality that anyone has experienced up until this point. Science may have too small a scope to understand the nature of realiy, but based on every bit of evidence any of us have every recieved (that is, our collected sensory impressions), it doesn't.
For an exercise, try thinking of a word that doesn't involve states of affairs in the world, or our intrepretations of the states of our bodies. Everything corresponds to the physical world. Your speech is vibrations in the air. Your thoughts are neurons in your brain (disagree? Overdose on DXM and then try making metaphors). Nothing anyone has ever presented has contridicted this.
Truth is a word philosophers made up before they got their act together. The only sensible definition of the word refers to the agreement of a statement with certain states of affairs in the world*. Please read more so you know what baggage words carry before you use them. These linguistic errors are the cause of 99% of misunderstandings.
*The pragmatic definition of truth as verifiability does make sense and is a worthwhile concept, but since no one ever means this when they use the word truth but pragmatists, we should make it another word.
This is the 2nd time that I'm aware of Apple using a Firmware fix to keep competition down. The first happened when the G4s had just been released. It so happened that they had released a firmware update for the G3 a few weeks prior and, without telling anyone who used the firmware update, snuck in a patch to block G4 upgrades. It was only a couple weeks before the chip upgrade companies had broken the protection, but I was still pissed about paying hundreds of dollars more for an equivalent speed machine out of brand loyalty and them screwing me all the same.
.doc format?
Did anyone else find it funny that no one talks about MSs "right" to bust cross-program functionality with .doc files? Note that word does work well with standard text, RTF, and HTML formats that are in wide use. That's the same thing as the ipod playing mp3s, right?
People on slashdot conviently forget everything that Apple does that doesn't fit inside their small, incredibly inconsistent world view. I want people to take this story, mentally replace all occurances of Apple to MS, then tell me if this is even remotely consistent with slashdot posts. There are comments rated 5 saying that Apple has the right to do this. Hey guys and moderaters giving these posts points: where were you in the discussions about the dangers of a proprietary
The truth is that if MS did this with Word to mess up Staroffice, you'd all be up in arms for weeks complaining. And I wouldn't blame you at all - it would be a stupid, petty move from a company that is abusing its captive market. But when it comes from Apple, the wonderful word right appears, and you've saved yourselves from cognitive dissonance (as if having a right to do something made it desirable in any way, or somehow an acceptable path of action). Sure they can do this: are they assholes for doing so? Would you feel the same if another company did this? Apple has a history of acting like a business, which it is. Don't trick yourself into thinking that they're on your side against the big, bad, proprietary, stupid, plain, and evil PC orthodoxy. They're there to sell you computers.
I'd kill to see more posts where products were graded on one critera only: functionality as a computer. If you'd ask the people here, you'd think Windows 2000 or XP still crashed frequently (my brother and I leave our cpus on for months) and was prone to driver and software conflicts with nearly everything. Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux are all tools. Do you use a hammer when you need a screwdriver? No. Do you screws all the time, cursing those nails which are so damned hard to remove? No. You use them when you need them and the price is acceptable for the use. Computers are no different. Let's stop treating these products like absolutes and get more of those shades of grey back that are required for rational discussion.
I go to a big ten school that has a massive campus wide agreement with Microsoft that gives us Windows XP and all other major Microsoft apps (office, frontpage) for 8 dollars each, except for Visual Studio.net, which costs 11. You can also download office XP from ITS (norton too, thank god). Don't get me wrong, they have more than just MS stuff - Mac OS X costs 14 or so, and Red Hat Enterprise costs around 10. I already filled up a binder of hundreds of dollars of software (I buy every version released) after 2 and a half years here. This agreement is campus wide - the CS department uses mainly linux labs, although it does have some connection with Microsoft.
Last semester, they started to teach intro computing classes in C#, and I'll bet they get some money for that. Oddly enough, I'm glad, as the course introduced me to Visual Studio, the crack of GUI windows programming (the labs used citrix to run it). They've successfully hooked myself and another of my friends to it. They're smarter than people realize, and go to great lengths to ensure that graduates in as many fields as possible rely on their software (Excel is almost universally used at my school). They also seem to understand that getting programmers using their tools is essential for them to keep their market dominance.
This goes double for overclockers. I only bought one motherboard before I realized that reviews didn't hold up as well as the collective experiences of techies (this is especially important for overclocking results). Forum posts are direct links to specific experience and knowledge gleaned from those experiences, like how you shouldn't ever expect a Tiger Direct rebate. Reviews never stress the products to my liking - you need clumsy people and morons to do that for ya. Sometimes they can also tell you the step in the (dis)assembly that was missing from the manual. I guess that black heatsink gunk on the standard Intel HS can get really stuck to the processor. Stuck enough to rip the processor out of the socket with the pins still in the socket. Yeah, don't use intel thermal gunk. If you must, apply heat to remove. See? You learned something on a forum.
It does matter how the outcome is achieved. The ends do not justify the means, not even when it's a university professor trying to extort money from Microsoft. One reason we have the (few, and eroding all the time, but still meaningful) civil liberties we do in America is because the whole foundation of our legal system is the idea that there must be a fair process, not just a fair result.
What I was getting at in my post is that the fairest process is one equally applied. To let Microsoft game the industry and then have Eolas not get their due according to the rules of the industry isn't right either. We should be happy that if something unfair goes around, it comes around, unless you'd rather we shrug off the only sense of justice we'll likely have in IP law for years (besides the impending implosion of SCO). If we're opposed to it all we're opposed to it all, but remember, I said nothing about the fairness of the claim within the system. I only mentioned the fundamental fairness of the system, which most people here are opposed to. You seem to have confused the two.
This is how the patent system works (check slashdot anyday for examples). We shouldn't bitch if a company that is known for manuiplating the system finally becomes the victim. You seem to have overreacted to the suggestion that we should be happy when immoral procedures finally punish those whom they usually benefit. Excessive idealization and abstraction of morals does that to people. Now, sit back and enjoy the fireworks!
As far as I heard (here in a previous post of the story), it was some professor who holds the patents, and I'd imagine both he and the university share the money. He's doing this as retribution towards Microsoft, and since he's a professor, he's not pressing the OSS alternatives. Shouldn't you like that someone who actually created something get money from Microsoft, whether or not it was done in a fair system? Are we going to be stupid enough to let people like MS manuiplate patent law and bitch when someone little gets his?
Those are the kind of comments I figured this article would end. If you read the article, it mentions the strong correllation* between increasing amounts of methane and C02 and periods of warming on the earth. Usually, some dumbass comes on and starts talking about how the dataset isn't big enough to form conclusions, forgetting that the form and details of physical structures often betray their development (not so much in this case, all I see is someone recklessly assuming that scientists assume). The earth left us clues, and that's what these scientists are looking at. Never mind that their descriptions of the natural world are overwhelmingly accurate; never mind that your life would crumble apart if the collected claims of scientists, which all of us base our lives around, turned out to be false. Scientists don't get wild ass ideas about why something's happening and then try to fit the world to their view, unlike certain other denominational groups that seem to be guiding much of this narrow-thinking inside the US. If you want to believe some wild bullshit dogma apart from the evidence, go ahead, but quit saying that everybody else's methods stink like your own.
I dislike reading slashdot and other filter site articles on global warming because of the large number of people who would rail on ONE OR TWO specific conclusions scientists make. I've never had a chance to directly speak with such a person, but I would draw them out like this.
Contrarian: The data-set is too small! We can't know!
Me: The earth betrays its history. Dinosaur bones, man.
Contrarian: But the earth goes through periods of warming all the time!
Me: Yes. Scientists told you that. And now they're telling you that fossil fuels do it too.
Contrarian: I don't see how they could make a conclusion on so little data!
Me (this part depends entirely on the contrarian not being a climatologist by trade, as is always the case): Well, you should review the data!
Contrarian: I should! And then I'll have the best ideas and arguments about the marxist fiction of global warming! I'll reason through the process, eliminate bias, and use a process of inductive observation...
Me: Right! And then other people can ask you for your educated opinion! And you'd be....a scientist.
That's what scientists are. They're the professionals. They're the ones who've READ THE FUCKING BOOKS. I like to point this out, because most of us here are arguing about shit we have no interest or training in. YOUR SHREWD POINT IS NOT A COUNTEREXAMPLE TO YEARS AND LIVES DEVOTED TO RESEARCH. SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT IT. You don't know about all the reasons why global warming exists BECAUSE YOU HAVE NOT READ ENOUGH TO UNDERSTAND THEM OR EVEN HAVE HEARD OF THEM. Scientists can be wrong, but you have to explain why; you can't do this unless you understand the field. So, please, enlighten us!
*I understand that correllation is not causation, but evidence like this, coupled with the melting of the glaciers and increased output of fossil fuel, and the concensus of the scientific community, the burden of proof is now on the naysayers. Most scientific results depend upon correllation, as cause and effect is a sticky relationship to (feasbly) pin down.
This isn't the case at many other universities. Chem (and hopefully other science) teachers at the U of Iowa are smart enough to ban graphing calculators from tests, and I haven't had a math class yet that allowed me to use any sort of calculator at all on exams. You should have seen some of the problems I had to do on my first calc III exam. My brother (who, granted, is in one of the best public high schools in the nation) was just complaining yesterday about not being able to use a calculator on a problem with Newton's Method for an exam that ended up with something like 2370 in the denominator and an even nastier group of stuff on top. A lot of my teachers are foreign, but this holds for all the Americans, too.
It's mainly a question of motivation. I'd say that of any randomly selected population grouped on a shared trait, the people who come to sites like slashdot rank pretty highly on math aptitude. But how many people here have studied beyond intro calc or linear algebra?
That's one of the best ideas I've ever heard. One of my friends in high school was a grammer nazi, and his complaining about my grammer eventually got so annyoing that I started punctuating. After about 2 years of typing correctly I stopped making most grammatical errors. If I ever have kids, I'm going to make a program that does that for their IM programs, and give them the condition that if they want their own computer they have to use the modified client. My dad tricked me into developing an interest in learning by buying me a computer, and I think it was the best parental decision he ever made.
I can't figure out why so many Bush supporters earnestly defend the president for speaking clumisly, saying that we shouldn't judge him for it, and then vow to never forgive this one (mis)quoted sentence of Al Gore's that, while technically true and true in some sense of his meaning, is a little too broad. Not to suggest the Democrats aren't guilty of the same: most of politics revolves around these gaffes. This leads me to a bigger point. In these stupid squabbling matches (which human error gives us the chance to enjoy several times yearly), does anyone here just say it's all stupid? Is anyone here absolutely consistent in their opinion? The only time people seem unable to forgive these errors is when a politician in the party they don't belong to makes them. Can anyone here admit that sometimes people phrase things wrong? Does anyone here have the balls to say, yes, I sometimes fuck up my sentences? Because this is slashdot, and while I now study math and the sciences, the classes from my former writing major tell me that you folks shouldn't be critizing these people for speaking inaccurately. This is doubly true for the people who don't have the internet, as we've at least practiced our reading and writing skills online rather than rot in front of the TV.
I honestly think this lack of perspective signifies the worst about our culture. Stupid petty squabbling about wording or taking sentences to mean the most implausable things they can is not political discussion. Holding others to standards that we'd easily excuse for ourselves and those we care about is how the feeble minded make their points (this is particularly insidious if you don't know your friends are gay or smoke drugs). No one talks about ideas anymore because we can't read or think, and hence we can't speak or seperate this sort of political bullshit from the issues that matter. While in an ideal world this sort of nonsense would occur equally between both parties, the presence of dogmatic thinking absolutely requires these shallow rebuttals when the world-view encompassing dogma is questioned, lest it be contradicted. Democrats can be and often are petty, but when the significance of a person's religion and life thus far - complete with the promise of eternal happiness - are swept away in practical arguments or considerations, these sorts of rebuttals necessarily crop up. See Rush Limbaugh and his 3 divorces + drug use, then compare it to the inability to marry for gay couples and the 50% of the drug population in jail being African-American, mainly incarcarated for using crack, which is punished at 100X the severity of cocaine (they're the same drug, but cocaine is preferred by whites and not in freebase form). If there's a guide book to the battles in America we're facing right now, it's Bertrand Russel's "Why I Am Not a Christian."* I suggest you all read it.
*For those of you who are Christians, most of the book deals with the dogmatic christianity that was still lingering around the turn of the 20th century. While he does take Christianity to task for the shit smears it has stomped into the tapestry of human history, your modern faith will hardly be examined, unless he points out that the reason you find it so palatable is because of the attacks on the Church made by it's enemies across the centuries.
Addiction is a reification, and that's where the problem comes in. We've blurred the use of addiction in society until the abstract definition of addiction - the need to perform some behavior compulsively - determines the connotation of the word. The only meaning of the word addiction that applies to physical reality is that version that arises from biological adaptation to the ingestion of substances, which some people (alcoholics, for one) are much more prone to. Continued use develops continued need, and soon, their bodies (literally) depend on the substances for normal functioning, as they have stopped producing sufficient amounts of affected neurotransmitters on their own.
The other connotation of addiction is the one we refer to in common speech - when a person repeats behaviors, regardless of the consequences or his/her own inclination to do so. So we speak of those addicted to shopping, grooming, sex, or any other behavior a person focuses on for what others would deem an unhealthy period of time (this behavior is almost always a vice, or capable of becoming one in excess). This is where our definitions overlap and the problem first appears. Any thought or behavior is necessarily biological. What's more, for all of human history, people have tried to resist pleasure, such as eating or sex, that is innately tied with both biological reward and negative consequences. And in this way, the reward and the strong drive to perform the behaviors that bring about this reward are abstracted on the basis of their biological similarity (the same brain rewards both behaviors) and the strikingly similar behaviors of those deemed addicted (when you want to do something, you do it). But when we do this, we overstep the bounds of the word addiction, and soon we start regulating all human behavior associated with pleasure, negative consequences, and an obsessive quality into the category of addiction. Now, if you think that a reasonable definition of addiction is one that can apply to any pleasure-deriving activity, including every vice, that's your opinion. It just happens to be a very wrong one.
It's hard not to do the things we like. They make us feel the same (happy) as heroin makes heroin addicts feel (happy). And for all of human history, we've been trying to figure out how to suppress the human tendencies toward pleasure that can hurt and destroy us. But when we speak like this, we replace a deeper understanding of human action with the shallow descriptions of behavior we read in magazines. I used to smoke cigarettes, and I occasionally smoke pot. When I quit smoking, I felt nuts, like I was losing something that my body depended upon. When you're a smoker, you can't remember what it was like to be a non-smoker - to go a day without thinking of a cigarette. It was the hardest thing I've ever done, and if you non-smokers could imagine that suffering, you'd know what we mean we when talk about addiction. When I stop smoking pot, I feel upset that I'm not doing what I like to do, and I want to smoke. But I when I stopped smoking cigarettes, I couldn't think, my head felt like it was being smashed, and I wasn't able to register anything other than my shaking and desire for a cigarette.
There is a biological reality to real addiction. The rest is human behavior and the same attraction to vice that we've lived with for years. While this is necessarily biology, it arises naturally from human behavior, and is not caused by physical adaption to external agents and chemicals that act upon the body. This is a critical distinction, and not one easily understood by half-rate thinkers, people who read magazines, and those who've never wanted a cigarette.
This shit gets so old. First comes convincing people that others aren't in control of their actions. That's the only way a person can say "stop doing this action, even though it doesn't affect me, because I don't like it" without getting laughed at. Listen to this quote from the article: "Pornography really does, unlike other addictions, biolog
I remember watching a documentary or two about autism and something that was repeatedly found was that as an autistic individual tried to remedy their problems with autism (usually getting better with age) their savant like knowledge began to deteriorate. I have always thought that there is almost a finite amount of brain capacity any one individual is able to have. Meaning, while a savant is able to have incredible knowledge of some things, their brain is so devoted to that knowledge that things, like knowing where the silverwear drawer is, get sacrificed.
The capacity of the brain is functionally unlimited. Look up one of the various amazing people who memorized large amounts of trivial facts as an example. If there is a limit to human knowledge, no person has ever reached it, and that includes Euler. So that's not very plausable.
I've read the same facts about the loss of savant abilities, but depending on the context, you may not have learned that the specifics related to the loss of autistic powers generally concerns young people who lose one or more amazing feats as they learn to function socially (functioning socially or learning language almost always is associated with the loss of savant abilities: see google.) Since the gain of one skill and the loss of another are so closely related, this seems to suggest a finite processing power in the brain and maybe some plasticity in its parts, not a finite capacity of knowledge.
Even more specifically, a savant's inability to find the silverware drawer or dress himself likely relates to his cerebellum, which differs from most of ours. My favorite intiutive concept for the cerebellum is "rhythmic autopilot." As we learn procedural tasks and are conditioned to react in various ways, this automatic processing is largely taken up by the cerebellum. It's the conditioning/feedback loop center of the brain and hence governs movement, speaking with others, automated responses to stimuli, and all procedural knowledge. They can't find the silverware because their brains don't click into autopilot when performing these activities. So what seems trivial to us, like getting dressed, is essentially a new task for them every day. Could you imagine having to navigate your world through facts, unable to learn the rhythms of automated procedures we take for granted hundreds of times a day? And, as we'd expect, the autistic also often have differences in their cerebellums: click here for more. Here's a quote from a page of the functioning of the cerebellum, which has an excellent section describing its function (it uses a computer metaphor, so you guys might wanna check it out). Quote:
The skills involved in human communication, for example, require both motor and mental activity: the motor activity of speech or gesture, and the mental activity that formulates what is to be said. In the course of learning these skills, an individual's performance can be improved incrementally through practice so that the skills eventually can be performed without conscious attention to detail. For example, in recalling words stored in the memory, the activity can be performed without conscious attention to the details of how the words are selected by the brain during the retrieval process.
In social interaction, we take for granted automatic signals like voice tone, body language, or even the specific words we're using (I've never met anyone who thought over every word every time they spoke). My guess is that the plasticity of the brain allows the unused sections in autistics that are normally used for activities like social interaction to adapt for other uses, hence generating the autistic ability. When these brains are rightfully claimed by their social or lingusitic origins, the computing power is lost and the sa
Clinton won because of Perot. He did well running for reelection because of Dick Morris, who was a damn skilled man (he was in a bad position for quite a while after his healthcare plan failed). And he's literally the exception, not the rule. It takes people like Nixon to make the democrats win one election before losing for 12 more years.
Let's do an experiment. We all sign this petition to get Howard Dean as head of the DNC, and we'll see if this really works.
Before Dean ran, no one thought the Democrats could possibly win (or even raise more money than the president). When he started campaigning, he was the only one landing blows on Bush at all. Shifting the party right is useless (see the past 3 decades). If we sign this, we might keep losing elections, but we'll be losing them for a party we want to vote for and respect. I'm sick of this GOP lite shit. As far as I'm concerned, if the Democrats don't nominate Dean, they have one chance left to earn my loyalty before I'm through. And I'm only 20 =/
-Oobob
Really now, besides being an old and tired joke, doesn't this apply to all thin and flat objects similar to paper? Isn't it precisely these jumps in abstract and basic understanding of our world that lead the way for good things, whether it's advancement of basic knowledge (some of which may be applied later) or a novel application of that knowledge? Curious investigation of our world is a necessary precursor to science, and it's absurd to suggest that these sorts of inquiries aren't valuable when the existence of science depends on them.
-Oobob
By this logic, anyone who speaks out against a war is a traitor. This is even more dangerous when we consider the silence of people like Robert Mcnamara, who understood our dim prospects for victory but still refused to speak out against the war. Tortured POWs are (generally) angry at antiwar activists. But what about those men who didn't die in Vietnam because of people like Kerry? Who betrayed or forgot these men? Were those people who pushed for continued engagement in Vietnam the real traitors, betraying the youth of our nation by sending them to die in an unwinnable war? Kerry's statements were 30 years ago. If his testimony hurt you, get fucking over it. Thousands more would be dead if people like him were too afraid to speak.
Besides, weren't atrocities committed in Vietnam? Yeah, they were. I guess that makes your comment pure dogshit. You're just a moron and/or troll (and shame on the moderators who gave you points).
-Oobob
"slippery slope" is only a fallacy if you say beacuse of something something else WILL happen. It is not a fallacy if you say because of something something else COULD (or is very likely even) happen. I find that people that scream about the "slippery slope fallacy" are usually doing so because they have no other arguments to back up their position.\
This is the stupidest thing I've ever read on Slashdot. The point of the slippery slope is that there isn't a strict cause and effect relationship between the antecedents and consequent of a conditional statement, and hence a proposition representing this "slipperly slope," (A -> B ->
Given that, tell me, in a proposition composed of invalid slippery slope consequentials (A -> B ->...-> I), does the truth of A make it any more possible (or even very likely) for I to happen? Or is the possibility of I independent of A? Let's recall that a slippery slope occurs precisely when a casual link does not exist between the elements of the conditional. If a casual link did exist, the conditional would be satisified, and (A -> B ->...-> I) would be a valid statement. But since the elements aren't related, the truth of the statement A has no affect on the possibility of I being the case. That's the point of a slippery slope - no casual relationship exists and hence the deduction is invalid. If A doesn't have a casual relationship with an I, then why would you claim that making A the case would make I any more likely to be the case? Cause necessarily precedes effect. Logic reflects this.
Slashdot postings usually worry me, but the insightful modifier on this one is particularly distressing. I'm shocked that someone didn't catch this.
Read here for more:
http://www.drury.edu/ess/Logic/Informal/Slipper
-Oobob
And that's where the problem comes in. We've blurred the use of addiction in society until the abstract definition of addiction - the need to perform some behavior compulsively - determines the connotation of the word. The only meaning of the word addiction that applies to physical reality is that version that arises from biological adaptation to the ingestion of substances, which some people (alcoholics, for one) are much more prone to. Continued use develops continued need, and soon, their bodies (literally) depend on the substances for normal functioning, as they have stopped producing sufficent amounts of affected neurotransmitters on their own.
The other connotation of addiction is the one we refer to in common speech - when a person repeats behaviors, regardless of the consequences or his/her own inclination to do so. So we speak of those addicted to shopping, grooming, sex, or any other behavior a person focuses on for what others would deem an unhealthy period of time (this behavior is almost always a vice, or capable of becoming one in excess). This is where our definitions overlap and the problem first appears. Any thought or behavior is necessarily biological. What's more, for all of human history, people have tried to resist pleasure, such as eating or sex, that is innately tied with both biological reward and negative consequences. And in this way, the reward and the strong drive to perform the behaviors that bring about this reward are abstracted on the basis of their biological similarity (the same brain rewards both behaviors) and the strikingly similar behaviors of those deemed addicted (when you want to do something, you do it). But when we do this, we overstep the bounds of the word addiction, and soon we start regulating all human behavior associated with pleasure, negative consequences, and an obsessive quality (games, sex, etcetc) into the category of addiction. Now, if you think that a reasonable definition of addiction is one that can apply to any pleasure-deriving activity, including every vice, that's your opinion. It just happens to be a very wrong one.
Listen, it's hard not to do the things we like. They make us feel the same (happy) as heroin makes heroin addicts feel (happy). And for all of human history, we've been trying to figure out how to supress the human tendencies towards pleasure that can hurt and destroy us. But when we talk like this, we cheapen the real meaning of addiction and blur the only real use of the word, and we replace deeper understand of human action with trivial and shallow definitions we read in magazines. I used to smoke cigarettes, I occasionally smoke pot, and I love math. When I quit smoking, I felt nuts, like I was losing something that my body depended upon. When you're a smoker, you can't remember what it was like to be a non-smoker - to go a day without thinking of a cigarette. It was the hardest thing I've ever done, and if you non-smokers could imagine that suffering, you'd know what we mean we when talk about addiction (and why we get angry when this pop psychology bullshit shits on our plight). But when I stop smoking pot, I feel upset that I'm not doing what I like to do, I feel urges to smoke, and very often, I will smoke once or twice again before starting my real month off. But I don't feel like I can't think, that my head is being smashed, or that I can't register anything other than my shaking and desire for a cigarette. There is a biological reality to real addiction. The rest is human behavior and the same old virture and vice discussions we've lived with for years. While this is necessarily biology, it comes naturally from human behavior, and is not caused by physical adaption to external agents and chemicals that act upon the biology of the body. This is a critical distinction, and not one easily understood by half-rate scientists, people who read magazines, and those who've never wanted a cigarette.
That's the great thing about the internet. All I need to make music are some instruments, a way to hook up the audio out to my computer, and a piece of software to record and edit that sound. I could then distribute that to the entire world. This is the key point that gets missed in these little flamewars. Piracy and the trampling of our rights are side effects of an underlying issue (and while it is important and neccesary to fight for them, property rights are sacred and unassailable territory in America, never mind that these morons around us have never fucking read anything about any philosophy that might suggest reasonable limitations on these rights).
The real reason they're scared is because the internet makes them obsolete. The only problem is that they won't become so until everyone ignores them. Listen to techno (good techno, big difference) with labels like WARP and other indy music with reasonable digital music policies. Movies? I'd hope that you'd be smart enough for that trash to bore you. Books and the Internet are quickly becoming the last sanctuaries of complex human thought and art (along with interconnected ideas, themes and subtlety, all abandoned in the world outside of the University and Internet. Proof? Read the paper or watch the TV.). Remember, the $$AAs only exist as long as they can persuade others that they still have a purpose - to distribute and record cultural content. And they do it 20 times less efficiently than the Internet.
Sure, stupid people with poor taste will keep giving them money, but for the first time in history, the Internet has given us options. We can make our own culture. But most people can't hope to understand the profound implications this raises for institution and tradition. Any of the pioneers of human thought would be amazed at the possibilities that a truly peer-to-peer system such as the Internet makes possible. By creating and sharing our culture through it, we've made obsolete the old institutions and abolished the physical limitations imposed on us by analog distribution (watch as they clamor for a piece of the new pie). It's a testament to human adaptation that we treat it as routine.