I've been considering a move lately, and in considering the cost-of-living difference (i.e., the difference in average prices between 2 locations), I used this tool on salary.com. Pretty useful.:-)
Why not learn a C-like language first, seeing as C-like languages are pretty much the defacto style used in most application programming?
VB's syntax (at least as of VB6) was garbage, and the interpreter itself was garbage. One could not even write an unmanned application, since it's an event-driven language.
VB used to have the advantage of being super-easy to whip up a simple GUI app in; just point-n-click your way to a GUI. But that advantage was taken away with Visual Studio.NET: now you can point-n-click your way to a not-as-simple GUI app, coded in C# instead of VB.
At this point, since all.NET code compiles to the same MSIL regardless of the source language it's written in (C#, C++, VB, whatever), I just don't see a good reason to use VB and its craptacular syntax.
But that's my preference. I like C-like languages (C, C++, C#, Java, Perl); if you don't, well, I don't care either...
(Frankly, I think everybody should have to start out with a language that requires an understanding of pointers and memory allocation, e.g. C/C++. That said, the real-world uses for those languages are slowly becoming increasingly-limited...)
Fine. Then let's stop horseshitting everyone about how much we value education. Fair enough?
I genuinely believe that as a society, would be better-off if we stopped bullshitting people about how much we value education. Many of the jobs we have which request a certain amount of education do not actually need it.
Jobs are cheap.
That's also true.
Yep, that's about right. Education is worthless. Just say it. Don't need all the extra words.
I never said that, nor is that my opinion. Try thinking not only in black-and-white, but in shades of grey, and perhaps with a splash of color. Education is neither "always beneficial" nor is it "always worthless". Education's value depends entirely on how -- and whether -- it will actually be used.
For example, I have absolutely *zero* use for an education in underwater basket-weaving; nor do I have any use for theater, or political science (for practical, real-world purposes; as anybody with a modicum of understanding of statistics can determine, voting is pointless, and becomes more-so as the population expands). Yet at one point or another, I've had formal education in all of these except underwater basket-weaving... The time spent doing those things was a waste of my time. That is time that could've been allocated to some other, more-productive (or more fun) task.
In fact, I have no use for mainframe programming skills either -- and I spent years in college learning mainframe ASM, COBOL, and JCL... Literally not a *bit* of that applies to my current job. That is a clear example of worthless education. (And no, for the most part (> 90%), the very few concepts we learned don't carry over to my job.)
I learned a while ago that there ain't no fucking jobs in this fucking economy.
I'm not convinced. I know 20-something developers at who've been hired into stable jobs with big companies at an industry-average salary with just a BSCS and little job experience and a crap university GPA. And that's despite the outsourcing of developer jobs, despite our coming out of a mild recession (that could've been the worst recession since the Depression, had certain economic circumstances been different),
I didn't fucking ask anybody to care either.
Hint: when somebody says "who cares?", it's usually a rhetorical question.
Yep. Of course they could train people to do the job, but that only works for astronauts.
I've taken some on-the-job training classes, at no out-of-pocket expense to me.
I've been building it better and faster ever since the last lying rat fuck powdered-donut hairpiece chair-molded asscrack cheat fucked me out of a paycheck. I've never seen a grad school. I've done jobs faster and better than any ten of my former "co-workers." I don't spend my work day talking about golf next to the air conditioner.
And you gain more respect (among non-manager IT people) because of it...
Just say it. Education is worthless.
For some jobs -- punching buttons on the register at McD's, packing meat, digging ditches, shoveling shit in Louisiana, manning the front lines in the Army -- yes, education (at least beyond a middle-school or high school education) *is* largely worthless.
For engineering bridges, automobiles, and video cards, or for analyzing and drawing conclusions from statistical figures (though as stock and commodity market traders (who often have only a high school education) show, even here the need is sometimes questionable), or for understanding the nuances of the legal system -- yes, a serious education is an absolute requirement.
Is education necessary to a given job function? The answer, as usual, is "it depends" (not only *whether*
Just because person A has a higher education than person B does not make person A more valuable in the real world. Moreover, a graduate degree in no way *entitles* them to anything (anybody with an entitlement, "the world owes me a living" mentality is a loser in my book).
In IT, talk is cheap. You can have all the educational background in the world, but if you aren't up on the technology some company is using, you're worthless to them. So why should they hire you? Because you're smart? Who cares -- other people who are sufficiently-smart can do the job that you presently cannot. The manager thus picks them over you.
Step out of the grad school office and enter the real world sometime. Theory without practice is pointless; theory which does not match practical reality is *worse* than worthless (though typically, this is less of a problem in a math/science like CS than in the soft pseduo-sciences (i.e. social sciences)).
Ah, you're right... I did the estimates about 5 years ago, a few months after 9/11. As I think about it, IIRC I did actually come to a figure of 113 times as you note, not 13.3 times (figuring (40,000 people/year * 10 years) / (3,500 people/10 years).
A decimal point here and a decimal point there, and pretty soon you're talking about some error-prone math!:-)
Well, the first thing you have to realize is that your claimed fact (an assumption by Thomas Malthus, I might add) is wrong. The population is *not*, in fact, growing exponentially, as fertility rates in developed countries (and increasingly, in developing countries) is falling from the previous rates we have seen throughout human history.
And the second thing you have to ask yourself is: in an ever-expanding universe (or so physics has assured us), are the resources actually finite? Whatever happened to the idea of colonizing other planets? Whatever happened to renewable resources (e.g. agriculture (genetically-modified, if we want, to be even more-productive) for food; wind, solar, and ocean currents for electricity)?
You have to start thinking in terms of the gains in efficiency and discovery of resources due to technological progress. That is the reason Julian Simon won his 1980-1990 bet on commodities with Paul Ehrlich.
Why do overpopulation chicken-littles keep believing the economically-untrue argument that economics is a zero-sum game? It is not, and this becomes increasingly-apparent as time goes on...
What you are (apparently) unaware-of is that around the world, population growth is slowing -- even going into negative-growth territory, and not just in developed nations (I wouldn't call Russia a fully-developed nation). Malthus' observation may have been correct for his time, but it is quite clearly no longer true (again, if it ever was). The U.S. hasn't had a fertility rate above about 2.3 or so (the replacement rate -- the rate at which parents are replaced by their children -- is 2.1) in over 40 years.
This (along with increasing life expectancy) is the reason that in America, Social Security, Medicare, and various pension systems are at-risk: the old want the young to pay for them, but there are fewer young than the socialist-minded planners of their generation (and their parents') had expected. The same is true of similar govn't pyramid-schemes in Europe.
But yes, Malthusianism has *also* been thwarted by improving technology. If you haven't already, I suggest you look at the bet between Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich. Ehrlich bet on Malthus over a period of 10 years, and Ehrlich lost by a wide margin.
But what amazes me most:
We won't be able to sustain civilization by allowing supply and demand forces to shift us to accepting a lifestyle on little oil. Hopefully, the prices for oil will increase at a slow rate, slow enough that economies manage to struggle along while the high price on oil increases the economic profit of developing alternative energy sources.
Spoken like a true market-phobe who hasn't a lick of empirical evidence to support the statement.
Do you know what has happened in near-urban suburban America in the last year or two? Gasoline prices have risen at a fairly-linear rate. But they are getting high relative to what we are used to, and more people are starting to take mass-transit. This was very much the case back around the time of Hurricane Katrina, when gas prices shot up 20%, and then, what happened?
Those market forces that you claim we cannot trust brought the price level back down again, to where a linear-regression line would run through them plotted on a graph. See for yourself. (set the graph to 3 years, and select "USA Average". You'll get your stable-growth trend in gasoline prices, caused, I might add, by a stable growth in oil prices, due to rising global demand.)
No sir, the laws of supply and demand have not been repealed, and cannot be repealed any more than the laws of physics can be (indeed, the law of supply/demand exists *because* of the laws of physics)...
Do decent alternatives exist? (Maybe they do - I'm just asking)
A combination of hydrogen and battery power for individual vehicles; nuclear, wind, and hydroelectric power for homes and offices and electrically-powered mass-transit (at least in urban areas)...
At least, I would consider these to be reasonable alternatives (that said, widespread replacement energy sources in vehicles are still a ways-off. But they are certainly coming.).
If profits are at stake, and consumers demand alternative fuels -- as consumers certainly will as they realize their survival is threatened (assuming it is to begin with, which it is not: the human race survived for thousands of years prior to the advent of the combustion engine and discovery of the uses of crude oil) -- they will demand alternative fuel vehicles. And companies will produce those instead, because there exists a profit to do so.
Please try again after you've taken Econ101. And history too, while you're at it...
Long story short: if overpopulation were a real problem, prices of commodities would rise over time (rising demand on a constant supply). Instead, prices fell. Simon won the bet, and the Malthusians like Ehrlich went home crying to mommy and haven't been taken seriously since. Why did the bet go Simon's way?
My theory is that increasing efficiency in using those commodities allowed more and more people to have a usable slice of the same physically-fixed pie, and allowed us to find more previously-unknown reserves of those commodities in the Earth.
Both exploration and consumption efficiency improved such that demand, relative to known world supply, fell -- and thus, so did prices.
What's the person listening in going to think or care of me? Absolutely nothing, because he's never met me.
Oh really? There's no possibility that you would know anybody working in the govn'ts monitoring agency? Or that they would know you (e.g. from middle or high school, if nowhere else)?
How can you be *certain* the person listening doesn't know who you are?
Moreover, how do you know they are not a criminal who has not yet been caught? Suppose they are working in the monitoring agency by day, but go dumpster-diving by night, looking for credit card statements and such. They happen to find yours.
Now, not only do they have a history of your credit transactions, but they have intimate knowledge of your personal life. If you communicate with your son or daughter over the phone or in email, they know where your child will be -- and let's suppose again that the monitoring person is a child-molestor. Then what do you do? *They* know where your child is -- but you don't know that they know this.
At the very least man, if you're going to advocate a privacy-less society, then advocate a Transparent Society, where the watchers can be watched, along with every other citizen.
You cannot trust the lives of you or your family to *ANYBODY* you have not met. *EVER*. For *ANY* reason, regardless of their title or position or certifications. Yet, that is precisely what your position entails.
I maintain (and no less because of your post) that people who say "if you have nothing to hide, then what's wrong with being watched?" are idiots who haven't thought beyond step 1 and whose understanding of government and its historical abuses is severely-lacking. I have yet to find a person who is willing to map out the tree of possible causal paths that grows from a policy like this...
Pliskin : A virtual grunt of the digital age. That's just great.
Raiden : That's far more effective than live exercises.
Pliskin : You don't get injured in VR, do you? Every year, a few soldiers
die in field exercises.
Raiden : There's pain sensation in VR, and even a sense of reality and
urgency. The only difference is that it isn't actually happening.
Pliskin : That's the way they want you to think, to remove you from the
fear that goes with battle situations. War as a video game --
what better way to raise the ultimate soldier?
-- Solid Snake meeting Raiden, referring to that whiny metrosexual on his first mission with nothing but VR training under his belt.
This was simultaneously a very humorous and clever way of smacking the player into realizing that there is a vast difference between war in video games and real war; yet, that the wars of video games assist real-world warriors by desensitizing them to violence... The blunt irony of that conversation was probably lost on more people than it should have been, and I imagine a lot of impatient fools skipped over it as being "just another damn cutscene"...
It says right on the story that it is NOT required to stay employed. If you don't like the idea, don't do it.
Wrong. TFA specifically states:
In the past, employees accessed the room with an RFID tag which hung from their keychains, however under the new regulations an implantable, glass encapsulated RFID tag from VeriChip must be injected into the bicep to gain access, a release from spychips.com said on Thursday.
Although the company does not require the microchips be implanted to maintain employment, anyone without one will not be able to access the datacenter, according to a Register article.
Thus, *IF* you work in that datacenter, then you *MUST* get an RFID chip in the bicep. *IF* you refuse the chip, then you *CANNOT* enter the datacenter -- and thus, how do you do your job?
Perhaps the company will be able to re-position people who adamantly refuse to be chipped. However, my suspicion is that:
2) Every employee will go along with it anyway, like a bunch of goddamn cattle being taken to slaughter. *Especially* if the people working there are willingly working for what is a surveillance company...
That quote false attributed to president Bush has been disproven so many times the only people who still use it are either very stupid or doing so on purpose.
Logical fallacy committed: False dichotomy. (Typical for a Bush supporter though, who is inclined to agree that "you're either with us, or you're with the terrorists", as Bush said on national TV about 4 years ago.)
There is a third option: somebody who hasn't seen any sign of or heard about any of these alleged disproofs. I fall into this third category, and would be interested in seeing a respectable link to such a disproof.
Which is of course WHY you aren't likely to be trusted with political power so long as national security is a major issue.
You do realize that statistically, you are still about 13 times more likely to die in a car crash in a given year than you are to die in a terrorist attack over the 10 years up through 9/11 -- don't you? (It's a difference of around 3,500 people killed on U.S. soil by terrorists over the 10 years or so prior to and including 9/11, vs. 40,000/year killed in car accidents. And then there are deaths in ambulances, due to an ambulance's inability to arrive to the hospital in time: 250,000 people. Or smoking: 430,000 people. Or even just swimming in a backyard swimming pool: some 4,300 people/year die of this. And really, I am *totally* unconcerned about the possibility of dying in a swimming pool...)
Why people like you get worked-up over things that are less-likely to kill you than others, I have no idea, except that I understand that this behavior probably occurs out of an ignorance of social statistics (you're not alone; it's a common problem).
to be a traitor like Howard Dean, the ACLU, Sen. Kennedy
How are Dean and Kennedy and the ACLU traitors? Not that I'm a fan of the first two, but the only real traitors currently in government I know of are the ones in office: Bush and Gonzalez, in particular. To be a "traitor" requires that one commit an act of treason. An act of treason, according to the Constitution (as if that "goddamn piece of paper", as Bush called it, would matter to a Bush supporter), "shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court." To say that they are traitors thus requires a criminal court proceeding which has found them guilty of treason. Anything less, and they are not, by legal definition, "traitors", as you say. I hardly think they warrant such libel and defamation of character.
Bush & Co., OTOH, are as close to traitors as anybody who has run this country since Nixon or FDR. Bush doesn't give a damn about ensuring the existence of a free people or free market economics.
Welcome to the real world where soverign nation states play hard and play for keepsies.
And this is an argument for a blank check of executive power? Did you forget civics class, and why we have a system of checks-and-balances -- much as Bush and his cronies have deliberately ignored (I don't think they've forgotten; they just willfully disregard this point).
And just for the record let me state that if we don't start standing New York Times reporters against the nearest wall for disclosing classified information useful to our enemies in time of War we are going to lose.
If you believe the so-called "war on terror" (how can a "war" -- something that must be declared by Congress -- be declared on a concept which has no defined geographic boundaries?) can be "won" by anybody, terrorist or not, then you really *are* a moonbat.
I want the NSA to spy just as hard as they possibly can and stay legal. So yes, they can and should be tapping known Al Qaeda telephones abroad. Tap em here too, but get a warrant.
Well now that's the problem -- your "patriotic" friends in the White House don't believe they need a warrant. Are you contradicting your own party? Click your heels and goosestep the party line son! We can't prosecute the war on (terror|drugs|communism|blacks|Teletubbies) unless you shut up and think the same way as the rest of us! Stop that free-thinking nonsense and get back to spouting things like "unitary executive power"! (Which is as un-American an idea as one can get. We fought the Revolutionary War precisely *because* we didn't want a King! Yet that is the sort of power Justice Alito, Alberto Gonzalez, and Bush, all want for the White House.)
I'd be just as mad as you are if it were revealed he tapped a phone HERE without a warrant, but overseas it is spy hard time.
It is fact now that domestic phones have been tapped without a warrant. Are you angry yet? Or will you instead provide an excuse/apology for that illegally-obtained power?
(I do agree that tapping phones outside the U.S. is necessary, and agree that we should tap all we can, within the bounds of international stability.)
How can any educated person think this loss of privacy is "no big deal"?
Perhaps because computer scientists are trained to think about how to dig through more data, and not one whit of attention is paid towards privacy in 4 years of undergraduate education? Or if anything, CS students might write one very weak encryption/decryption program, which CS profs assure would be useful for "sensitive" transactions like financial or medical records. But rarely does the concept of *individual* privacy enter the discussion...
I speak as a recently-graduated BSCS myself, after all...
We don't learn about ethical issues. We don't learn the politics of privacy. We don't learn that liberal artsy-fartsy crap that everybody else in our college learns... We learn math and statistics theory. Data structures and algorithms. Specific technologies (which might be horribly outdated, if not at the time of teaching, then probably by the time we leave school).
Thoughts about society and culture are for those *other*, stupider people with non-technical minds (or so we CS students are told); for people who major in Political Science or the ever-worthless field of Sociology, or Gender Studies, or Non-White-Male-Studies, or English, or Theater, or Literature, etc... All the inane social studies and studies of things we learned in 1st grade (like English) that any alcohol-addled monkey can get a 4.0 in, if they bother to show up for the finals.
Admittedly, for as much of a privacy advocate as I usually am, there are times when I think a "Transparent Society" like David Brin's might be a better world. But I immediately recognize the idealism of that view, return to reality, and realize that Orwell's "1984" is far-more likely: a society in which the elite 20% get privacy, at least occasionally, whereas the the lower 80% of society (the proles, etc.) do not.
And really, in the long-run, I don't see privacy being protected. We are being dragged, kicking and screaming, towards a "1984" society, whether we like it or not. Technological progress ensures that it is technically-possible; political and business interests ensure it is psychologically and politically-possible. Scott McNeely was right when he said "privacy is dead" (I just haven't gotten over it, as he finished that sentence suggesting).
I'm frankly only mildly-surprised that this Stanford prof. thinks this sort of dataveillance is a good idea. Most CS profs, for as mathematically-brilliant as they are, can't see the ramifications of their work beyond their own nose. They are the "useful idiots" that more-strategic, less-technical, more-conceptual thinkers -- politicians, businessmen, etc. -- love to employ, because such gifted technical minds will do their bidding without considering the consequences of their work. Their innocence is their only cover for their incompetence at understanding the real world and dealing with people, and it is a poor cover, IMO.
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutely.
:-)
I've been considering a move lately, and in considering the cost-of-living difference (i.e., the difference in average prices between 2 locations), I used this tool on salary.com. Pretty useful.
Why not learn a C-like language first, seeing as C-like languages are pretty much the defacto style used in most application programming?
.NET: now you can point-n-click your way to a not-as-simple GUI app, coded in C# instead of VB.
.NET code compiles to the same MSIL regardless of the source language it's written in (C#, C++, VB, whatever), I just don't see a good reason to use VB and its craptacular syntax.
VB's syntax (at least as of VB6) was garbage, and the interpreter itself was garbage. One could not even write an unmanned application, since it's an event-driven language.
VB used to have the advantage of being super-easy to whip up a simple GUI app in; just point-n-click your way to a GUI. But that advantage was taken away with Visual Studio
At this point, since all
But that's my preference. I like C-like languages (C, C++, C#, Java, Perl); if you don't, well, I don't care either...
(Frankly, I think everybody should have to start out with a language that requires an understanding of pointers and memory allocation, e.g. C/C++. That said, the real-world uses for those languages are slowly becoming increasingly-limited...)
As long as it takes for MSFT to make it work in Windows.
I genuinely believe that as a society, would be better-off if we stopped bullshitting people about how much we value education. Many of the jobs we have which request a certain amount of education do not actually need it.
That's also true.
I never said that, nor is that my opinion. Try thinking not only in black-and-white, but in shades of grey, and perhaps with a splash of color. Education is neither "always beneficial" nor is it "always worthless". Education's value depends entirely on how -- and whether -- it will actually be used.
For example, I have absolutely *zero* use for an education in underwater basket-weaving; nor do I have any use for theater, or political science (for practical, real-world purposes; as anybody with a modicum of understanding of statistics can determine, voting is pointless, and becomes more-so as the population expands). Yet at one point or another, I've had formal education in all of these except underwater basket-weaving... The time spent doing those things was a waste of my time. That is time that could've been allocated to some other, more-productive (or more fun) task.
In fact, I have no use for mainframe programming skills either -- and I spent years in college learning mainframe ASM, COBOL, and JCL... Literally not a *bit* of that applies to my current job. That is a clear example of worthless education. (And no, for the most part (> 90%), the very few concepts we learned don't carry over to my job.)
I'm not convinced. I know 20-something developers at who've been hired into stable jobs with big companies at an industry-average salary with just a BSCS and little job experience and a crap university GPA. And that's despite the outsourcing of developer jobs, despite our coming out of a mild recession (that could've been the worst recession since the Depression, had certain economic circumstances been different),
Hint: when somebody says "who cares?", it's usually a rhetorical question.
I've taken some on-the-job training classes, at no out-of-pocket expense to me.
And you gain more respect (among non-manager IT people) because of it...
For some jobs -- punching buttons on the register at McD's, packing meat, digging ditches, shoveling shit in Louisiana, manning the front lines in the Army -- yes, education (at least beyond a middle-school or high school education) *is* largely worthless.
For engineering bridges, automobiles, and video cards, or for analyzing and drawing conclusions from statistical figures (though as stock and commodity market traders (who often have only a high school education) show, even here the need is sometimes questionable), or for understanding the nuances of the legal system -- yes, a serious education is an absolute requirement.
Is education necessary to a given job function? The answer, as usual, is "it depends" (not only *whether*
Just because person A has a higher education than person B does not make person A more valuable in the real world. Moreover, a graduate degree in no way *entitles* them to anything (anybody with an entitlement, "the world owes me a living" mentality is a loser in my book).
In IT, talk is cheap. You can have all the educational background in the world, but if you aren't up on the technology some company is using, you're worthless to them. So why should they hire you? Because you're smart? Who cares -- other people who are sufficiently-smart can do the job that you presently cannot. The manager thus picks them over you.
Step out of the grad school office and enter the real world sometime. Theory without practice is pointless; theory which does not match practical reality is *worse* than worthless (though typically, this is less of a problem in a math/science like CS than in the soft pseduo-sciences (i.e. social sciences)).
Yes, it's called private education. God you're retarded.
Ah, you're right... I did the estimates about 5 years ago, a few months after 9/11. As I think about it, IIRC I did actually come to a figure of 113 times as you note, not 13.3 times (figuring (40,000 people/year * 10 years) / (3,500 people/10 years).
:-)
A decimal point here and a decimal point there, and pretty soon you're talking about some error-prone math!
Seig Heil!
:P )
(do I get "-1, violates Godwin's Law" now?
Well, the first thing you have to realize is that your claimed fact (an assumption by Thomas Malthus, I might add) is wrong. The population is *not*, in fact, growing exponentially, as fertility rates in developed countries (and increasingly, in developing countries) is falling from the previous rates we have seen throughout human history.
And the second thing you have to ask yourself is: in an ever-expanding universe (or so physics has assured us), are the resources actually finite? Whatever happened to the idea of colonizing other planets? Whatever happened to renewable resources (e.g. agriculture (genetically-modified, if we want, to be even more-productive) for food; wind, solar, and ocean currents for electricity)?
You have to start thinking in terms of the gains in efficiency and discovery of resources due to technological progress. That is the reason Julian Simon won his 1980-1990 bet on commodities with Paul Ehrlich.
Why do overpopulation chicken-littles keep believing the economically-untrue argument that economics is a zero-sum game? It is not, and this becomes increasingly-apparent as time goes on...
This (along with increasing life expectancy) is the reason that in America, Social Security, Medicare, and various pension systems are at-risk: the old want the young to pay for them, but there are fewer young than the socialist-minded planners of their generation (and their parents') had expected. The same is true of similar govn't pyramid-schemes in Europe.
But yes, Malthusianism has *also* been thwarted by improving technology. If you haven't already, I suggest you look at the bet between Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich. Ehrlich bet on Malthus over a period of 10 years, and Ehrlich lost by a wide margin.
But what amazes me most:
Spoken like a true market-phobe who hasn't a lick of empirical evidence to support the statement.
Do you know what has happened in near-urban suburban America in the last year or two? Gasoline prices have risen at a fairly-linear rate. But they are getting high relative to what we are used to, and more people are starting to take mass-transit. This was very much the case back around the time of Hurricane Katrina, when gas prices shot up 20%, and then, what happened?
Those market forces that you claim we cannot trust brought the price level back down again, to where a linear-regression line would run through them plotted on a graph. See for yourself. (set the graph to 3 years, and select "USA Average". You'll get your stable-growth trend in gasoline prices, caused, I might add, by a stable growth in oil prices, due to rising global demand.)
Those same market forces are the ones that are causing the fuel-efficient Toyota Prius and other hybrids to sell-out last year on dealer lots while SUVs lose their sales luster.
So much for those untrustworthy markets... *grin*
No sir, the laws of supply and demand have not been repealed, and cannot be repealed any more than the laws of physics can be (indeed, the law of supply/demand exists *because* of the laws of physics)...
A combination of hydrogen and battery power for individual vehicles; nuclear, wind, and hydroelectric power for homes and offices and electrically-powered mass-transit (at least in urban areas)...
At least, I would consider these to be reasonable alternatives (that said, widespread replacement energy sources in vehicles are still a ways-off. But they are certainly coming.).
That's a hell of an assumption you make.
If profits are at stake, and consumers demand alternative fuels -- as consumers certainly will as they realize their survival is threatened (assuming it is to begin with, which it is not: the human race survived for thousands of years prior to the advent of the combustion engine and discovery of the uses of crude oil) -- they will demand alternative fuel vehicles. And companies will produce those instead, because there exists a profit to do so.
Please try again after you've taken Econ101. And history too, while you're at it...
Overpopulation?
You obviously don't understand economics and haven't heard about the famous 1980s bet between economist Julian Simon and biologist Paul Ehrlich.
Long story short: if overpopulation were a real problem, prices of commodities would rise over time (rising demand on a constant supply). Instead, prices fell. Simon won the bet, and the Malthusians like Ehrlich went home crying to mommy and haven't been taken seriously since. Why did the bet go Simon's way?
My theory is that increasing efficiency in using those commodities allowed more and more people to have a usable slice of the same physically-fixed pie, and allowed us to find more previously-unknown reserves of those commodities in the Earth.
Both exploration and consumption efficiency improved such that demand, relative to known world supply, fell -- and thus, so did prices.
Oh really? There's no possibility that you would know anybody working in the govn'ts monitoring agency? Or that they would know you (e.g. from middle or high school, if nowhere else)?
How can you be *certain* the person listening doesn't know who you are?
Moreover, how do you know they are not a criminal who has not yet been caught? Suppose they are working in the monitoring agency by day, but go dumpster-diving by night, looking for credit card statements and such. They happen to find yours.
Now, not only do they have a history of your credit transactions, but they have intimate knowledge of your personal life. If you communicate with your son or daughter over the phone or in email, they know where your child will be -- and let's suppose again that the monitoring person is a child-molestor. Then what do you do? *They* know where your child is -- but you don't know that they know this.
At the very least man, if you're going to advocate a privacy-less society, then advocate a Transparent Society, where the watchers can be watched, along with every other citizen.
You cannot trust the lives of you or your family to *ANYBODY* you have not met. *EVER*. For *ANY* reason, regardless of their title or position or certifications. Yet, that is precisely what your position entails.
I maintain (and no less because of your post) that people who say "if you have nothing to hide, then what's wrong with being watched?" are idiots who haven't thought beyond step 1 and whose understanding of government and its historical abuses is severely-lacking. I have yet to find a person who is willing to map out the tree of possible causal paths that grows from a policy like this...
The first time I read this, I read that to be "...would allow incineration without charge..."
You had me wondering if our U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez had moved down-under!
OK, the greatest *conversation* in that game... not the 2 greatest lines (though the 2 are in that quote, and both are uttered by Snake).
-- Solid Snake meeting Raiden, referring to that whiny metrosexual on his first mission with nothing but VR training under his belt.
This was simultaneously a very humorous and clever way of smacking the player into realizing that there is a vast difference between war in video games and real war; yet, that the wars of video games assist real-world warriors by desensitizing them to violence... The blunt irony of that conversation was probably lost on more people than it should have been, and I imagine a lot of impatient fools skipped over it as being "just another damn cutscene"...
Wrong. TFA specifically states:
Thus, *IF* you work in that datacenter, then you *MUST* get an RFID chip in the bicep. *IF* you refuse the chip, then you *CANNOT* enter the datacenter -- and thus, how do you do your job?
Perhaps the company will be able to re-position people who adamantly refuse to be chipped. However, my suspicion is that:
1) The company isn't big enough to have so many such possible positions available (just look at their "About Us" page -- doesn't this look rather low-grade and unprofessional?), and
2) Every employee will go along with it anyway, like a bunch of goddamn cattle being taken to slaughter. *Especially* if the people working there are willingly working for what is a surveillance company...
Because some people are idiots, and like any swimming pool, the gene pool needs its garbage skimmed-out from time to time?
(I'm kidding; I very much agree with the thrust of your arguments in this thread...)
Logical fallacy committed: False dichotomy. (Typical for a Bush supporter though, who is inclined to agree that "you're either with us, or you're with the terrorists", as Bush said on national TV about 4 years ago.)
There is a third option: somebody who hasn't seen any sign of or heard about any of these alleged disproofs. I fall into this third category, and would be interested in seeing a respectable link to such a disproof.
You do realize that statistically, you are still about 13 times more likely to die in a car crash in a given year than you are to die in a terrorist attack over the 10 years up through 9/11 -- don't you? (It's a difference of around 3,500 people killed on U.S. soil by terrorists over the 10 years or so prior to and including 9/11, vs. 40,000/year killed in car accidents. And then there are deaths in ambulances, due to an ambulance's inability to arrive to the hospital in time: 250,000 people. Or smoking: 430,000 people. Or even just swimming in a backyard swimming pool: some 4,300 people/year die of this. And really, I am *totally* unconcerned about the possibility of dying in a swimming pool...)
Why people like you get worked-up over things that are less-likely to kill you than others, I have no idea, except that I understand that this behavior probably occurs out of an ignorance of social statistics (you're not alone; it's a common problem).
How are Dean and Kennedy and the ACLU traitors? Not that I'm a fan of the first two, but the only real traitors currently in government I know of are the ones in office: Bush and Gonzalez, in particular. To be a "traitor" requires that one commit an act of treason. An act of treason, according to the Constitution (as if that "goddamn piece of paper", as Bush called it, would matter to a Bush supporter), "shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court." To say that they are traitors thus requires a criminal court proceeding which has found them guilty of treason. Anything less, and they are not, by legal definition, "traitors", as you say. I hardly think they warrant such libel and defamation of character.
Bush & Co., OTOH, are as close to traitors as anybody who has run this country since Nixon or FDR. Bush doesn't give a damn about ensuring the existence of a free people or free market economics.
And this is an argument for a blank check of executive power? Did you forget civics class, and why we have a system of checks-and-balances -- much as Bush and his cronies have deliberately ignored (I don't think they've forgotten; they just willfully disregard this point).
If you believe the so-called "war on terror" (how can a "war" -- something that must be declared by Congress -- be declared on a concept which has no defined geographic boundaries?) can be "won" by anybody, terrorist or not, then you really *are* a moonbat.
Well now that's the problem -- your "patriotic" friends in the White House don't believe they need a warrant. Are you contradicting your own party? Click your heels and goosestep the party line son! We can't prosecute the war on (terror|drugs|communism|blacks|Teletubbies) unless you shut up and think the same way as the rest of us! Stop that free-thinking nonsense and get back to spouting things like "unitary executive power"! (Which is as un-American an idea as one can get. We fought the Revolutionary War precisely *because* we didn't want a King! Yet that is the sort of power Justice Alito, Alberto Gonzalez, and Bush, all want for the White House.)
It is fact now that domestic phones have been tapped without a warrant. Are you angry yet? Or will you instead provide an excuse/apology for that illegally-obtained power?
(I do agree that tapping phones outside the U.S. is necessary, and agree that we should tap all we can, within the bounds of international stability.)
Couldn't agree more!
Perhaps because computer scientists are trained to think about how to dig through more data, and not one whit of attention is paid towards privacy in 4 years of undergraduate education? Or if anything, CS students might write one very weak encryption/decryption program, which CS profs assure would be useful for "sensitive" transactions like financial or medical records. But rarely does the concept of *individual* privacy enter the discussion...
I speak as a recently-graduated BSCS myself, after all...
We don't learn about ethical issues. We don't learn the politics of privacy. We don't learn that liberal artsy-fartsy crap that everybody else in our college learns... We learn math and statistics theory. Data structures and algorithms. Specific technologies (which might be horribly outdated, if not at the time of teaching, then probably by the time we leave school).
Thoughts about society and culture are for those *other*, stupider people with non-technical minds (or so we CS students are told); for people who major in Political Science or the ever-worthless field of Sociology, or Gender Studies, or Non-White-Male-Studies, or English, or Theater, or Literature, etc... All the inane social studies and studies of things we learned in 1st grade (like English) that any alcohol-addled monkey can get a 4.0 in, if they bother to show up for the finals.
Admittedly, for as much of a privacy advocate as I usually am, there are times when I think a "Transparent Society" like David Brin's might be a better world. But I immediately recognize the idealism of that view, return to reality, and realize that Orwell's "1984" is far-more likely: a society in which the elite 20% get privacy, at least occasionally, whereas the the lower 80% of society (the proles, etc.) do not.
And really, in the long-run, I don't see privacy being protected. We are being dragged, kicking and screaming, towards a "1984" society, whether we like it or not. Technological progress ensures that it is technically-possible; political and business interests ensure it is psychologically and politically-possible. Scott McNeely was right when he said "privacy is dead" (I just haven't gotten over it, as he finished that sentence suggesting).
I'm frankly only mildly-surprised that this Stanford prof. thinks this sort of dataveillance is a good idea. Most CS profs, for as mathematically-brilliant as they are, can't see the ramifications of their work beyond their own nose. They are the "useful idiots" that more-strategic, less-technical, more-conceptual thinkers -- politicians, businessmen, etc. -- love to employ, because such gifted technical minds will do their bidding without considering the consequences of their work. Their innocence is their only cover for their incompetence at understanding the real world and dealing with people, and it is a poor cover, IMO.
The government should throw in pr0n too. And prostitutes. After all, everybody needs love, right? :-)
Let's throw in a power boat too, for water skiing. And a billiards table. And cake, and ice cream, and punch and pie...
Jesus, I swear most people think the world owes them a living or something.
Greenspan is well-off, but he is no longer a banker. He stopped being a banker (the chief of all bankers, in fact) on Feb. 1. :-)