Apparently these hoes are for sale, so what's left to be determined is the price.
They aren't for sale to you. Their (real) job is to maintain the system; they get paid a commission from their current corporate patron. They aren't interested in your money, you're a mere mortal.
Clothes don't make the man. Put an idiot in a $1000 suit and you have a well dressed idiot. Clothes make an impression on the viewer - and sometimes, they affect the behaviour of the wearer.
But people are not defined solely by their core attributes, but also by their social relationships. That well-dressed idiot might be attractive enough to make their approval socially valuable to a not-so-attractive genius, who's advice and support in turn boosts their performance above average. So in this way clothes do make the man by partially determining which paths are open for the man to choose.
Business casual doesn't even require suits. A shirt or even a polo shirt is fine. All it requires is basically that you don't look like a hobo.
Technically speaking, if you've ever moved for a job you are a hobo, so not looking like one would require you to wear an identity-concealing costume. In other words, a Batman costume both counts as and is required by this definition of "business casual".
And that's a brilliant strategy: a company staffed entirely by Batmen is going to kick ass in the marketplace. And what suicidal criminal would even dream of cracking their hardware? Yes, this is clearly the turning point of HP's fortunes: it's time to take Gotham - no, the World!
PC always had a "you're screwed if you don't toe the line" attitude.
It was never fine and cute. It has always been about social control.
So how is that different from every other aspect of employment? Do you obey your boss because they're a great person or because you'll be fired if you won't? Political Correctness is simply insisting you leave your Klan robe at the door, which is a perfectly reasonable demand.
But hey, all we have to do to make the issue go away is make employment optional, for example through unconditional basic income. If you no longer need to work for a living you can wear the Southern Flag as a toga all day long, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. But of course it also means other people are beyond your ability to control and "keep in their place", too.
Who fired a Nobel Prize laureate over a joke and why does he still have a job? Whoever fired him should be fired for damaging the company.
Humans, even Nobel Prize laureates, are mortal and will eventually leave, taking their talent with them. On the other hand, their influence will remain in the corporate culture, potentially forever. Apart from being less efficient overall - people are less likely to voice their good ideas or call out bad ones if they need to worry about being the next target - based on current trends it seems likely that it will also repulse future talent (and even current talent) as the world continues growing more inclusive. So cutting their losses seems like the rational thing to do.
Even special snowflakes are still just snowflakes.
Seriously, Political Correctness is fine and cute, but when it gets to getting shit done, it's time to stop the silly games and concentrate on what really matters.
So stop playing them. Stop wearing sexists shirts, stop telling racist jokes. Stop insisting other people endure you shoveling crap on them. But if you can't resist playing a power game, don't complain when other people - including your employer - refuse to let themselves be victimized.
Political Correctness is about focusing on the job, it's opponents are about forcing other people to eat their shit and pretend to like it. Stop being a gaping asshole and the whole issue won't have any effect on you, apart from making your environment less smelly.
Of course it hurts to give up a part of yourself, even if that part is composed of the leftover garbage from civilization's startup process. But the alternatives hurt even more. Sucks, but the prize is beating the odds and taking the stars.
Who is demanding zoomable magnification? The game uses icons.
Bitmap icons, which always end up looking like shit in a couple of years. How about turning all graphics into SVG? It would instantly make the game zoomable, ensure nice sharp visuals on every platform, benefit future OSS projects and give obsessive micro-optimizers something useful to do - or at least I've never seen a fast SVG implementation.
There's a little difference in the enterprise space, of course. But on the consumer side, people just don't care.
Unfortunately, the difference is that enterprises pretend to care about security but in reality every member wants exceptions for themselves based on their power and position, so the end result is insecure and inconvenient. Nor are they wrong to want those exceptions, since security tends to get in the way of getting anything done, so anyone who actually cares about it will be outcompeted by someone who doesn't.
Of course it doesn't help that most people hate their employers and will get satisfaction from every little act of rebellion, even if all they did was look the other way.
And, unfortunately, people who become deeply enmeshed in science are as apt to ignore morality as those who become too deeply enmeshed in finance or politics.
I don't think it's so much a matter of ignoring morality as losing perspective: you become so focused on a small portion of the world that you lose sight of anything beyond. And it happens to everyone to some extent, finance and politics just happen to be high-power positions which shield you from corrective feedback.
The opposite of "knowing" is not "not knowing". That can easily be remedied. If you do not know, you ask someone who does know, and then you know too.
Well, no. How do you know if the guy you asked actually knows anything about the matter but is simply making shit up as he goes or reciting some half-remembered factoid he heard from an unknown source? You can't. You can double-check, and quadruple-check, and so on, but ultimately every model of the world rests on unproven assumptions. After all, they're subject to the incompleteness theorems and as such can't be self-contained.
But then again none of this matters, since science vs. religion was never about knowledge but simply a case of two memetic complexes - or, if you prefer, "gods" - fighting for territory in the noosphere. Humans merely get sucked into the fight due to being the physical platform on which the noosphere rests.
The fact is that, as always, those who found it are basically screaming "sensational discovery, mystery XYZ is finally solved", while other scientist are more cautious. It's the old theme of "sensationalism versus business as usual", dangerously close to the stance of attention whores.
"Business as usual" is competition over limited funding, and that means marketing your accomplishments to show you can deliver results. Let's not look down on attention whores when We The People are the johns.
The force between free quarks increases with distance to about 10,000N, then remains constant (no, I have no idea how this makes any sense, but it's what I read).
According to Wikipedia it's because gluons, which mediate the Strong Force interaction between quarks, also feel said force themselves (that is, they carry color charge(. So rather than disperse with distance like, say, photons do, they tend to stick together and form "ropes".
So it's analogous to how a flashlight loses power faster than a laser.
I find your comment offensive and a micro-agression against me and my kind. This is hate speech.
No, it's not. Whether you are offended or not is irrelevant. What makes something hate speech is that it attacks a group, making them more of an acceptable target for future attacks. Hate speech is, in other words, the propaganda campaign that precedes every war and atrocity in human history. That makes hate speech not just speech but also an action, the first blow that starts chipping off the preceived humanity of the target that protects them from violence.
Is someone simply being a jerk? Then it's just speech, offensive or not. Is someone working themselves up into a rage in preparation for an attack? Then it's hate speech.
Probably, but by that time, you'll have to give control of your implants to your employer, and they will turn them on and off at will.
Which seems unlikely, since implants are a part of you, and the candidates for positions requiring high security tend to have other options. It's the McDonald's staff that needs to worry about such requirements.
IMO that is the reason why advertising is morally reprehensible. It's manipulative mass mind control.
Of course it is. And as people get more used to it and filter it out, it becomes harder to manipulate them in general - even by the politicians and special interest groups. So I guess it's a case of the Invisible Hand accidentally smacking the 1% on the face.
My first thought was that the entire point of the site was to BE a blackmail scheme.
Correct. From the article: "In a long manifesto posted alongside the stolen ALM data, The Impact Team said it decided to publish the information in response to alleged lies ALM told its customers about a service that allows members to completely erase their profile information for a $19 fee."
Now if you just add that the smart people end up hiring the stupid people to be armed and around them to protect them while decrying the evils of guns, you might have a solid theory on your hands.
Nope. People who believe violence will keep them safe will arm themselves, directly or indirectly. Intelligence doesn't enter into it, one way or another, any more than it does with any other basic instinct.
It seems like all the largest mouth pieces against guns sure have a lot of them around in the hands of hired help to protect them.
There's a running joke that the most vocal gay bashers are closet gays themselves. It's the same principle at work here. Internal contradictions tend to make people search for scapegoats.
Google is as good as a centralized search engine is likely to get. But any centralized entity has an inherent evolutionary disadvantage in the Age of Information: it can be censored.
The problem is that most of the time, voters are two dumb to actually understand the issues at stake or the consequences of their actions. Fix the dumbness, and you fix all sorts of other cultural mal-consequences (not just clumsy politics and gimme-dat laws).
Make people smarter and the issues and consequences will simply become more complex. They're not some external invariance, after all, but a function of those very same people's behaviour and mental make-up. So every organization must deal with the fact that its decision makers are going to be too dumb for the job. That's not something that can be avoided, and consequencetly the success or failure of the system can't be blamed on the intelligence of the participants. It is, instead, a function of the system itself.
For all their faults, democracies tend to be more effective than autocracies precisely because they make it easier for members to participate, which leads to greater collective intelligence: a greater pool of ideas and more chances to call out really dumb ones. If we need smarter societies still, we need to continue developing them further, not wish for some general population intelligence boost that wouldn't solve the issue even if it happened.
Sadly, a lot of societies seem to be going backwards towards the less efficient autocratic model right now. Natural selection will take care of that in due time, but combined with all the challences our species is currently facing, the process can get pretty unpleasant.
For example, I've heard flanges for molten salt reactors are a potential for failure, one leak and your radioactive fuel is everywhere.
No, it's a piece of rock salt on the floor. It's not liquid at room temperature, and will cool and solidify almost instatly if it leaks out of the reactor vessel.
If productivity enhancements means we don't need as many secretaries and factory workers, those expenditures will go towards marketing and sales.
No, they get paid out as management bonuses and dividends. Productivity enhancements have gone towards making the 1% richer at everyone else's expense. That's not sustainable, and will end up in either social reforms or outright revolution, just like it did the last time.
The idea that productivity enhancements will ever reduce the need for human labor was always laughable. Only people such as an ivory tower economist like Keynes could have ever thought this.
Then why do all developed economies struggle with unemployment?
Well I understand that it's science fiction, so I give them a pass, but in the real world there's obviously no way you can 'shield' against a freaking nuclear weapon. Unless you're willing to consider a solid metal shield with a thickness of a hundred meters. Wouldn't be much of a ship though.
We just don't have any need for such massive nukes so none ever got made. But they'd be very useful fighting against a multi-planetary enemy, if only as a show of force.
Super-nukes would be just as useless for fighting a multi-planet enemy than normal nukes were for fighting the Cold War. You can't use them without getting yourself killed too, so all they do is take up valuable resources that could be used for expansion, research, economic development, etc. And of course in the interstellar scheme this is all made worse by the fact that you're either surrounded by other empires eager to exploit your distraction, or empty space you could be colonizing.
What's even worse, justifying such useless cost to your own populace means a massive propaganda campaign; the mindset bred by said campaign will take a life of its own and limit your options, even after the conflict is over. When all you have is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail; when you have a military you went a trillion dollars into debt to build, you will damn well look into excuses to use it, which in turn will provide reasons to maintain and further develop it, ultimately destroying both your economy and society.
So I suppose the truly succesful interstellar empires will be the "unofficial" ones, which specialize in getting around - or perhaps even assimilating - occupying forces. So the grunts of future space wars will be smugglers like Han Solo rendering Empire's effective control near zero, not fighter pilots like Luke trying to fight it on its own terms.
We're already at the point where wars typically result in expensive failures, damaging both the economy, culture and prestige of the participants. Future belongs to whoever can solve the problem of having an organized society with zero reliance on coercive force. It's not an easy problem, but the prize is also tremendous: nigh-invincibility combined with the ability to devote all resources to productive activities.
You don't choose to watch a seizure-inducing flashing video unless it's either clearly labeled as such, or you have pyschic powers. Compare: you open your front door and out of nowhere a lion leaps at you. Did you "choose" to be eaten by a lion?
Of course, since the mechanism that generates seizures from flashing content is a pretty simple function of said content's pixel values, such labeling could easily be done automatically. And I'm sure at least Google would be more than happy to let you let them know you wish to not see such videos, or perhaps even offer a "de-seizured" edited version.
Slashdot Mirror
They aren't for sale to you. Their (real) job is to maintain the system; they get paid a commission from their current corporate patron. They aren't interested in your money, you're a mere mortal.
But people are not defined solely by their core attributes, but also by their social relationships. That well-dressed idiot might be attractive enough to make their approval socially valuable to a not-so-attractive genius, who's advice and support in turn boosts their performance above average. So in this way clothes do make the man by partially determining which paths are open for the man to choose.
Technically speaking, if you've ever moved for a job you are a hobo, so not looking like one would require you to wear an identity-concealing costume. In other words, a Batman costume both counts as and is required by this definition of "business casual".
And that's a brilliant strategy: a company staffed entirely by Batmen is going to kick ass in the marketplace. And what suicidal criminal would even dream of cracking their hardware? Yes, this is clearly the turning point of HP's fortunes: it's time to take Gotham - no, the World!
Nananananananananana HP! HP!
So how is that different from every other aspect of employment? Do you obey your boss because they're a great person or because you'll be fired if you won't? Political Correctness is simply insisting you leave your Klan robe at the door, which is a perfectly reasonable demand.
But hey, all we have to do to make the issue go away is make employment optional, for example through unconditional basic income. If you no longer need to work for a living you can wear the Southern Flag as a toga all day long, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. But of course it also means other people are beyond your ability to control and "keep in their place", too.
Humans, even Nobel Prize laureates, are mortal and will eventually leave, taking their talent with them. On the other hand, their influence will remain in the corporate culture, potentially forever. Apart from being less efficient overall - people are less likely to voice their good ideas or call out bad ones if they need to worry about being the next target - based on current trends it seems likely that it will also repulse future talent (and even current talent) as the world continues growing more inclusive. So cutting their losses seems like the rational thing to do.
Even special snowflakes are still just snowflakes.
So stop playing them. Stop wearing sexists shirts, stop telling racist jokes. Stop insisting other people endure you shoveling crap on them. But if you can't resist playing a power game, don't complain when other people - including your employer - refuse to let themselves be victimized.
Political Correctness is about focusing on the job, it's opponents are about forcing other people to eat their shit and pretend to like it. Stop being a gaping asshole and the whole issue won't have any effect on you, apart from making your environment less smelly.
Of course it hurts to give up a part of yourself, even if that part is composed of the leftover garbage from civilization's startup process. But the alternatives hurt even more. Sucks, but the prize is beating the odds and taking the stars.
Bitmap icons, which always end up looking like shit in a couple of years. How about turning all graphics into SVG? It would instantly make the game zoomable, ensure nice sharp visuals on every platform, benefit future OSS projects and give obsessive micro-optimizers something useful to do - or at least I've never seen a fast SVG implementation.
Unfortunately, the difference is that enterprises pretend to care about security but in reality every member wants exceptions for themselves based on their power and position, so the end result is insecure and inconvenient. Nor are they wrong to want those exceptions, since security tends to get in the way of getting anything done, so anyone who actually cares about it will be outcompeted by someone who doesn't.
Of course it doesn't help that most people hate their employers and will get satisfaction from every little act of rebellion, even if all they did was look the other way.
I don't think it's so much a matter of ignoring morality as losing perspective: you become so focused on a small portion of the world that you lose sight of anything beyond. And it happens to everyone to some extent, finance and politics just happen to be high-power positions which shield you from corrective feedback.
Well, no. How do you know if the guy you asked actually knows anything about the matter but is simply making shit up as he goes or reciting some half-remembered factoid he heard from an unknown source? You can't. You can double-check, and quadruple-check, and so on, but ultimately every model of the world rests on unproven assumptions. After all, they're subject to the incompleteness theorems and as such can't be self-contained.
But then again none of this matters, since science vs. religion was never about knowledge but simply a case of two memetic complexes - or, if you prefer, "gods" - fighting for territory in the noosphere. Humans merely get sucked into the fight due to being the physical platform on which the noosphere rests.
"Business as usual" is competition over limited funding, and that means marketing your accomplishments to show you can deliver results. Let's not look down on attention whores when We The People are the johns.
According to Wikipedia it's because gluons, which mediate the Strong Force interaction between quarks, also feel said force themselves (that is, they carry color charge(. So rather than disperse with distance like, say, photons do, they tend to stick together and form "ropes".
So it's analogous to how a flashlight loses power faster than a laser.
No, it's not. Whether you are offended or not is irrelevant. What makes something hate speech is that it attacks a group, making them more of an acceptable target for future attacks. Hate speech is, in other words, the propaganda campaign that precedes every war and atrocity in human history. That makes hate speech not just speech but also an action, the first blow that starts chipping off the preceived humanity of the target that protects them from violence.
Is someone simply being a jerk? Then it's just speech, offensive or not. Is someone working themselves up into a rage in preparation for an attack? Then it's hate speech.
Which seems unlikely, since implants are a part of you, and the candidates for positions requiring high security tend to have other options. It's the McDonald's staff that needs to worry about such requirements.
Mine has locks.
Of course it is. And as people get more used to it and filter it out, it becomes harder to manipulate them in general - even by the politicians and special interest groups. So I guess it's a case of the Invisible Hand accidentally smacking the 1% on the face.
Correct. From the article: "In a long manifesto posted alongside the stolen ALM data, The Impact Team said it decided to publish the information in response to alleged lies ALM told its customers about a service that allows members to completely erase their profile information for a $19 fee."
Nope. People who believe violence will keep them safe will arm themselves, directly or indirectly. Intelligence doesn't enter into it, one way or another, any more than it does with any other basic instinct.
There's a running joke that the most vocal gay bashers are closet gays themselves. It's the same principle at work here. Internal contradictions tend to make people search for scapegoats.
Google is as good as a centralized search engine is likely to get. But any centralized entity has an inherent evolutionary disadvantage in the Age of Information: it can be censored.
More to the point, it's proof that you have massive student debts so you're likely to put up with abuse to keep repaying them.
Make people smarter and the issues and consequences will simply become more complex. They're not some external invariance, after all, but a function of those very same people's behaviour and mental make-up. So every organization must deal with the fact that its decision makers are going to be too dumb for the job. That's not something that can be avoided, and consequencetly the success or failure of the system can't be blamed on the intelligence of the participants. It is, instead, a function of the system itself.
For all their faults, democracies tend to be more effective than autocracies precisely because they make it easier for members to participate, which leads to greater collective intelligence: a greater pool of ideas and more chances to call out really dumb ones. If we need smarter societies still, we need to continue developing them further, not wish for some general population intelligence boost that wouldn't solve the issue even if it happened.
Sadly, a lot of societies seem to be going backwards towards the less efficient autocratic model right now. Natural selection will take care of that in due time, but combined with all the challences our species is currently facing, the process can get pretty unpleasant.
No, it's a piece of rock salt on the floor. It's not liquid at room temperature, and will cool and solidify almost instatly if it leaks out of the reactor vessel.
No, they get paid out as management bonuses and dividends. Productivity enhancements have gone towards making the 1% richer at everyone else's expense. That's not sustainable, and will end up in either social reforms or outright revolution, just like it did the last time.
Then why do all developed economies struggle with unemployment?
Just turn your engines towards the explosion.
Super-nukes would be just as useless for fighting a multi-planet enemy than normal nukes were for fighting the Cold War. You can't use them without getting yourself killed too, so all they do is take up valuable resources that could be used for expansion, research, economic development, etc. And of course in the interstellar scheme this is all made worse by the fact that you're either surrounded by other empires eager to exploit your distraction, or empty space you could be colonizing.
What's even worse, justifying such useless cost to your own populace means a massive propaganda campaign; the mindset bred by said campaign will take a life of its own and limit your options, even after the conflict is over. When all you have is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail; when you have a military you went a trillion dollars into debt to build, you will damn well look into excuses to use it, which in turn will provide reasons to maintain and further develop it, ultimately destroying both your economy and society.
So I suppose the truly succesful interstellar empires will be the "unofficial" ones, which specialize in getting around - or perhaps even assimilating - occupying forces. So the grunts of future space wars will be smugglers like Han Solo rendering Empire's effective control near zero, not fighter pilots like Luke trying to fight it on its own terms.
We're already at the point where wars typically result in expensive failures, damaging both the economy, culture and prestige of the participants. Future belongs to whoever can solve the problem of having an organized society with zero reliance on coercive force. It's not an easy problem, but the prize is also tremendous: nigh-invincibility combined with the ability to devote all resources to productive activities.
You don't choose to watch a seizure-inducing flashing video unless it's either clearly labeled as such, or you have pyschic powers. Compare: you open your front door and out of nowhere a lion leaps at you. Did you "choose" to be eaten by a lion?
Of course, since the mechanism that generates seizures from flashing content is a pretty simple function of said content's pixel values, such labeling could easily be done automatically. And I'm sure at least Google would be more than happy to let you let them know you wish to not see such videos, or perhaps even offer a "de-seizured" edited version.