The Market! The Market! The Market will save us and cure all our Ills!! So it is written by Adam's Himself!!!
Seriously, there are people who call on the supposed omnipresent "Market" like some ancient pagan deity. Like any religion, their belief is more than a little irrational and unsubstantiated. Adam Smith has been elevated to the status of a prophet, and all he did was write a book or two. The Church of the Market has unfortunately become the state religion in many countries. Whither now separation of church and state?
The "Market" cannot solve everything. Some things it will not even attempt to solve or rectify, subtitling programs among them, as pointed out by other posters. Better example include public services, healthcare, water and electricity production and distribution, education, etc, etc. Any attempt to leave such matters entirely in the hands of "Market" forces has resulted in the wider stagnation of society. Yes, Government can be big and inefficient, but at least it gets the job done. Private companies won't even do that unless there's money in it for them.
Wrong. It is currently cheaper in the short to medium term to continue to use humans instead of investing in research to create a machine to do the job.
A better example than motherboards is clothing. Take T-shirts for example. The textiles industry was historically the first to become industrialized, yet here we are 250+ years later, and there are still people in sweatshops making the simplest items of clothing. Why? Because it's technically too difficult to automate clothing manufacture? Whatever.
The reality is that no motherboard, clothing, or any other company is willing to actually spend money and innovate. Find ways of making basic items by the millions, quickly, reliably, cheaply. And the reason they're not willing to do it is because they can still find cheaper and cheaper sources of labour. On China, they're current strategy when wages on the east coast get too expensive, is just to move 100km inland, rinse and repeat.
There is lack of innovation in the manufacturing sector. It's caused an oversupply of cheap labour. Simply put, there is no pressure on factory owners to continue the industrial revolution, and human progress. Instead there's an incentive to use quasi, and what the hell, full blown slave labour.
I harp on China, but it's happening all over. It's happening a lot closer to home than you think. Our society is back-peddling, and it's down to the fact that rabid (no so)free market capitalism has become the dominant ethos of our politics and media, where it is assumed that no matter what the issue problem or injustice is, the omnipresent "market" will find a solution to all our ills.
I'm not some fanatical anti-globalisation, anti-capitalism protester. I just think that too much power, not money, power, is being concentrated into the hands of private companies. I don't like big government either, but I still think that corporations should be reigned in. If we don't, your children or grandchildren could find themselves like those Chinese brickworkers, force to work at the barrel of a privately owned gun.
P.S. I believe in a free and fair market. Why should workers here have to compete against countries with lower standards?
Amen. Feynman was right. There's little difference between ancient witch doctors and the modern the mental health profession. The major one being that modern psychoanalysts are a greater danger to free society.
Their criteria for declaring something a medial disorder is based on 1) rhetoric and 2) political correctness. Why did the AMA delist homosexuality as a medical disorder? Better yet, why was it classified as a disorder in the first place? In both cases the answer is that the AMA bowed to social and political pressure. More direct examples of this sort of thing can be seen when psychiatrists are called in by politicians and companies to label opponents or employees as insane. When the definition of a "disorder" is based solely and completely on a wordy, obscure, and vaguely written paper by a "prominent" author, you can basically tag anyone as being insane.
It's a pity. There's some good work done in the sphere of mental health. People helping trauma victims based on studies of objective data being the best example. But most of the field is weighed down by extremely abstract humanities doctorates posing as scientists. The situation isn't helped by the neuroscience community waving about brain scans with no concrete idea of anything that's going on, and devouring the first scrap tossed to them by the entrenched ideas of psychoanalysis.
Bottom line, we need to stop treating psychiatrists and psychologist as scientists. They're not. At best they are practitioners, like doctors, or humanities researchers, like historians, though frankly that's a disparagement to both those groups. In the main the mental health community consists of amateurs posing as professionals. Their opinions should hold no weight in a court of law. The fact that the do is undermining our system of justice.
Have you ever wondered why the "targets" in Palestine are always surrounded by their cousins, nephews and nieces, assorted random children from the street, etc?
IPv6 won't be around on anywhere near the scale needed for worldwide deployment in the next five years. Reason being that it will take ~20 more years for all the current patents on IPv6 to expire. No private company is going to run the risk of litigation before then.
I think it was less Adobe's licencing of the product than simply their tacit approval of its widespread warezing that lead to the rise of Photoshop. Despite it's obscene price, Adobe have never seemed interested in curbing the rampant pirating of this particular product.
The reason is obvious of course. Better for Johnny the budding graphics designer to get familiar with "'Shopping" than take the legal route and become familiar with the like of the Gimp, etc. Personally, I think Adobe themselves upload the lastest hacked copies of Photoshop to the usual places.
You're saying that if you don't see that stop sign and cause me ten million dollars of medical bills that since it's an honest mistake you (or rather your insurance company; the same company that insures doctors) shouldn't have to pay?
When we drive cars, cross the road, ride an elevator, eat a meal, we all accept a certain level of risk. These are the risks that somehow, through no deliberate fault of anyone, something will go wrong. There will be an oil slick on the road, you will trip on a stone, a sensor will fail, there will be a chicken head in your nuggets.
It's one thing if someone deliberately avoids their responsibility and in so doing cause an accident. It's quite another when an accident occurs through no real fault of a diligent and responsible person. In the first case, their actions escalated the danger of the situation beyond the level of risk most people would be willing to accept. In the second, the accident that occurred was one that any honest person would accept was a reasonable possibility, and furthermore, one which people so accept as a possibility every single day.
Accidents happen. They are erratic events which we cannot predict, but nonetheless accept the possibility of. Of course, deliberate misfortunes also occur, which were indeed quite foreseeable and avoidable. It is the latter event that people should be held to account over.
Actually, only octopuses is the correct plural. The other's are I believe greek and latin root extensions, or something.
I could hijack a potentially popular first post to get my own unrelated comment higher up on the page than it would normally get, but instead I'll use the opportunity to open discussion on this recently encroaching phenomenon.... oh wait.
It wasn't our generation, or our great great great great great grandparent's generation.
Actually, it was more like your grandparent's generation. And people are still suffering from discrimination even today. Your hands aren't washed clean just yet.
Well look around you, not everyone who has the ability to talk, should.
Hang on, for emphasis, let me quote you again.
Well look around you, not everyone who has the ability to talk, should.
Well, in a general sense, I suppose many would be better off if they thought a bit before they spoke, or didn't just blurt out any old thing, but that's not really your point is it? Your point is that we shouldn't really have freedom of speech, should we? Our declarations should be subject to approval by appropriate persons, yes?
Its not the dark ages anymore, not only wise\learned people have the ability to reach others in print, or other media. Any fool with access to a computer can touch thousands of other minds. We all as (hopefully) sane humans need to police the internet, consider it neighborhood watch if you like. Report abuse of other humans, in any situation.
So you're saying that only "wise and learned" people should have the ability to preach to the masses? That our fragile minds are too weak to resist "corruption" by unscrupulous fools with internet access? That we should all become police informants against people who don't tow the line?
Of course, I imagine you'll deny my observation's of your post. Say that I'm putting words in your mouth, etc, etc. You won't even have the integrity to come right out and say what you really believe in. I would not agree with you, but I could at least respect that you have an opinion and aren't afraid to say it.
People like you are the greatest threat to our society. You are the cancer within that gnaws at the foundations that previous generations worked so hard to build. The sad fact is you don't like our free society very much, or at least, while you may enjoy your own freedoms and luxuries, you feel uncomfortable about extending those freedoms to everyone, regardless of class, race, creed or colour.
I think the people in the world we loosely classify as "right wing" could be better described as those who believe in and desire a caste system for our society, where the "right" kind of people enjoy freedom, democracy, prosperity, etc, and where the "wrong" kind of people are "protected" or "supervised" or whatever other euphemisms for serfdom and slavery are in vogue at the moment. There's probably some kind of evolutionary psychology explanation for this. It would be interesting to explore why such a mentality exists.
You need to accept that you are such a person. You need to have the integrity to voice your opinions openly instead of hiding them behind insidious and equivocal language. That at least an honest person could respect. Sure your opinions might be unpopular, but at least they'll be your honest opinions, and not a false facade. You'll be better off in the long run, and so will society.
"Normal" is a well defined statistical term. Specifically in most circumstances, "normal" refers to the statistical mean of some value among individuals in a population.
What most people don't understand is that the normal, in and of itself, is not really very representative of the population. In fact, in almost all cases, there are no individuals in the entire population who's value agrees with the normal or mean. Best example, families have on average 1.69 children, but there is no one family with 1 and 69 hundredths children. Normal height could be, say, 6ft, but if you went around measuring people's height with a laser, you would likely never find someone who was precisely 6ft. They'd be ~5.999ft or ~6.0001ft.
The probability of finding an individual conforming to the mean, or indeed any value, is statistically zero. (Specifically, the normal is a point on a probability distribution of Lebesgue measure zero, but I digress.)
A better statistical measure of a population is it's variance, in conjunction with its normal or mean. With both of these values, you can give accurate estimations of the probability that someone's height will be between 5.5ft and 6ft, or whether they will have 1 or two children. Variance is almost never quoted, but it is as vital a statistic as the mean itself. Without it, the mean is a relatively useless statistic.
The mean of a randomly selected number between 4 and 8 is 6, the same as the mean of height in most populations. Height is not random, and has a different variance, but most modern junk news reports essentially do not distinguish between a random variable and a normally distributed one.
Effectively, when most people hear a statistic about the normal, average or mean, they probably implicitly assume that the variance is close to zero, in other words that the vast majority of the population hugs very close to the mean. In the age of mass production, it's easy to see why people who see row upon row of identical goods would think that human beings are essentially all equivalent with only exceptionally minor difference and the occasional "dud" here and there.
But humanity is much more diverse than most people are willing to admit. Yes we mostly have two hands and two eyes, etc, but the variation in our habits, temperaments, preferences, heights, weights, talents and skills. I'm not a eugenicist who only sees a one dimensional bell curve of humanity. I see a distribution with thousands if not millions of axes, and I think that the variation and diversity in humanity is a benefit to everyone, and that everyone can potentially put their individual talents to good use. Most people don't agree with this. They think we should try to shift the mean to "improve" the whole population. Instead what we should really be trying to do is increase the variance, on all the axes.
The internet is helping to increase the variance in our populations. People are better able to find things they enjoy and are good at rather than be corralled into the bottom end of a bureaucrat's bell curve. The internet enables people. Some people don't like this. They want "normality". They want a smaller variance. They want to feel secure. They'll use examples like incest, pedophiles, terrorists, etc, etc to frighten others away from the potential of the internet. They say they want to make "the children" etc, safer, but what they really want is the entire population to have a smaller variance, to be like those rows and rows of perfectly identical widgets. They don't do this because they are evil, they do it because they are afraid.
All across the world the internet is being censored, reduced and reigned in by both governments and by companies like Livejournal. They are getting away with it because people have put their trust these entities, and by and large, support their actions. Most people don't want that higher variance. Most people you speak to will support Livejournal here. It's a depressing statement but the fact is that the majority of the population will never see the connection between the hysteria over "deviant" groups online and the slow loss of their own rights in that sphere. A great number of them simply will not care.
Having recently fled from the barren dependency hell of Fedora, (to Feisty), I am perplexed as to why anyone wanting to install a user friendly Linux distro of any kind would choose Fedora as their base distro. Hardware detection was... OK, but there were innumerable problems with package management, configurations and yes, software availability. I mean, will the box play mp3 files? DVDs? Fedora is not a distro known for these capabilities.
Have you had that verified by scientists in a double blind study? I believe you're just imagining it every time you're around electronic equipment, and only believe you're hearing such noises because you're seeing the equipment.
I hear cathode ray tube TVs every time they're turned on and am continually amazed when other people don't. It's not just from seeing the TV. If a fairly big CRT is on in the next room, I can hear it pretty easily if the room is only somewhat quiet. It's a light, but high pitched, constant whine. Very distinctive. LCD's don't emit it. Just CRTs.
I live in europe so all our video games run in 50Hz by default, but in recent years have offered a 60Hz option. Often I'll choose the 50Hz option because at 60Hz the CRT's whine becomes noticeably louder. After a while you sometimes get used to it, but not often at 60Hz.
Other people have given me funny looks when I ask them to the game back to 50Hz, or to turn off a TV on static or on mute. I'm not convinced that they can't hear the sound, but instead have simply mentally filtered it out. Sometimes I test them and the occasional one finally realizes that there is a sound, but not often.
If I had to make a wild, unsubstantiated guess, I'd say that most people, in the country where I live, have mentally tuned out the constant background 50Hz hum from each and every electronic device that surrounds them every day of their lives, and which is powered by the national electricity grid supplying AC power at 50Hz.
Or maybe my inner ears are just deformed. Who knows.
But it is still as intangible and unattainable as deities from other religions.
Unattainable? Tell you what, why don't you try and get, say, Rupert Murdoch or King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia to realise what a false and unobtainable idol they are coveting. I mean, anyone can just waltz right up to them on the street and snap a picture.
It's not like they have hired goons squads and political connections and secretive schedules which outright confound your ability to snoop into their lives is it? I mean, privacy is a fantasy right? There's no way the rich and powerful could have something the rest of us don't if that something simply just doesn't exist right?
Privacy is very, very real. In todays market centric humanisms, one could almost describe privacy as an obtainable asset which people are willing to pay money for, and one which, because of it's decreasing availability, is becoming ever more expensive to obtain by simple laws of supply and demand. I await an astute poster's follow up comment discussing the rise of a "privacy industry" in response to decreasing supply of this so called "intangible" notion.
Drugs do not make people do the things you mention. "Addiction" to drugs do not make people do the things you mention.
People choose to do the things you mention. Saying that somehow that a substance or product or hobby "made" them do it is an argument with as much weight as its direct predecessor, namely that a devil or evil spirit possessed their bodies and "made" them do it.
Millions, no billions, of people drink alcohol and live their lives without major incident. Some people become alcoholics and neglect their children etc, etc. What needs to be realised is that alcohol or any other drug does not somehow possess or control these people. They choose their actions. To be sure, they can be influenced by a drug, or a hobby, or an ideology, but ultimately people are responsible for their own actions.
"Addiction" is a boegyman that the nanny state uses to frighten us into submission. Yes, people can be strongly influenced and dependent on a drug or habit or religion. But they still have the ability to reason and know right from wrong. To argue that something has taken these abilities from them is to argue that such people are no longer fully human.
Also, blacks have a lot more than other races, and Orientals much less... as is obviously apparent in their respective physiologies.
You mean their larger average body mass. Because, yes, I would expect that groups with on average larger body masses would produce on average more.... bodily fluids.
Legolas: A lament for Gandalf. Merry: What do they say about him? Legolas: I cannot tell you. To do so would be a violation of their copyright to the song.
Slashdot Mirror
The Market! The Market! The Market will save us and cure all our Ills!! So it is written by Adam's Himself!!!
Seriously, there are people who call on the supposed omnipresent "Market" like some ancient pagan deity. Like any religion, their belief is more than a little irrational and unsubstantiated. Adam Smith has been elevated to the status of a prophet, and all he did was write a book or two. The Church of the Market has unfortunately become the state religion in many countries. Whither now separation of church and state?
The "Market" cannot solve everything. Some things it will not even attempt to solve or rectify, subtitling programs among them, as pointed out by other posters. Better example include public services, healthcare, water and electricity production and distribution, education, etc, etc. Any attempt to leave such matters entirely in the hands of "Market" forces has resulted in the wider stagnation of society. Yes, Government can be big and inefficient, but at least it gets the job done. Private companies won't even do that unless there's money in it for them.
Wrong. It is currently cheaper in the short to medium term to continue to use humans instead of investing in research to create a machine to do the job.
A better example than motherboards is clothing. Take T-shirts for example. The textiles industry was historically the first to become industrialized, yet here we are 250+ years later, and there are still people in sweatshops making the simplest items of clothing. Why? Because it's technically too difficult to automate clothing manufacture? Whatever.
The reality is that no motherboard, clothing, or any other company is willing to actually spend money and innovate. Find ways of making basic items by the millions, quickly, reliably, cheaply. And the reason they're not willing to do it is because they can still find cheaper and cheaper sources of labour. On China, they're current strategy when wages on the east coast get too expensive, is just to move 100km inland, rinse and repeat.
There is lack of innovation in the manufacturing sector. It's caused an oversupply of cheap labour. Simply put, there is no pressure on factory owners to continue the industrial revolution, and human progress. Instead there's an incentive to use quasi, and what the hell, full blown slave labour.
I harp on China, but it's happening all over. It's happening a lot closer to home than you think. Our society is back-peddling, and it's down to the fact that rabid (no so)free market capitalism has become the dominant ethos of our politics and media, where it is assumed that no matter what the issue problem or injustice is, the omnipresent "market" will find a solution to all our ills.
I'm not some fanatical anti-globalisation, anti-capitalism protester. I just think that too much power, not money, power, is being concentrated into the hands of private companies. I don't like big government either, but I still think that corporations should be reigned in. If we don't, your children or grandchildren could find themselves like those Chinese brickworkers, force to work at the barrel of a privately owned gun.
P.S.
I believe in a free and fair market. Why should workers here have to compete against countries with lower standards?
Amen. Feynman was right. There's little difference between ancient witch doctors and the modern the mental health profession. The major one being that modern psychoanalysts are a greater danger to free society.
Their criteria for declaring something a medial disorder is based on 1) rhetoric and 2) political correctness. Why did the AMA delist homosexuality as a medical disorder? Better yet, why was it classified as a disorder in the first place? In both cases the answer is that the AMA bowed to social and political pressure. More direct examples of this sort of thing can be seen when psychiatrists are called in by politicians and companies to label opponents or employees as insane. When the definition of a "disorder" is based solely and completely on a wordy, obscure, and vaguely written paper by a "prominent" author, you can basically tag anyone as being insane.
It's a pity. There's some good work done in the sphere of mental health. People helping trauma victims based on studies of objective data being the best example. But most of the field is weighed down by extremely abstract humanities doctorates posing as scientists. The situation isn't helped by the neuroscience community waving about brain scans with no concrete idea of anything that's going on, and devouring the first scrap tossed to them by the entrenched ideas of psychoanalysis.
Bottom line, we need to stop treating psychiatrists and psychologist as scientists. They're not. At best they are practitioners, like doctors, or humanities researchers, like historians, though frankly that's a disparagement to both those groups. In the main the mental health community consists of amateurs posing as professionals. Their opinions should hold no weight in a court of law. The fact that the do is undermining our system of justice.
Yes, they're like feral beasts.
He did not build the time machine to win at the stock market. He built the time machine to travel through time!
Because.... they live in cities?
....the US, Great Britain, Australia, Ireland, etc, etc...
The net is being reined in by those who don't like it. There's little anyone who cares can do to stop it.
IPv6 won't be around on anywhere near the scale needed for worldwide deployment in the next five years. Reason being that it will take ~20 more years for all the current patents on IPv6 to expire. No private company is going to run the risk of litigation before then.
The USPTO, will truly, break the network.
....Computer says nooo .
I think it was less Adobe's licencing of the product than simply their tacit approval of its widespread warezing that lead to the rise of Photoshop. Despite it's obscene price, Adobe have never seemed interested in curbing the rampant pirating of this particular product.
The reason is obvious of course. Better for Johnny the budding graphics designer to get familiar with "'Shopping" than take the legal route and become familiar with the like of the Gimp, etc. Personally, I think Adobe themselves upload the lastest hacked copies of Photoshop to the usual places.
But he should.
When we drive cars, cross the road, ride an elevator, eat a meal, we all accept a certain level of risk. These are the risks that somehow, through no deliberate fault of anyone, something will go wrong. There will be an oil slick on the road, you will trip on a stone, a sensor will fail, there will be a chicken head in your nuggets.
It's one thing if someone deliberately avoids their responsibility and in so doing cause an accident. It's quite another when an accident occurs through no real fault of a diligent and responsible person. In the first case, their actions escalated the danger of the situation beyond the level of risk most people would be willing to accept. In the second, the accident that occurred was one that any honest person would accept was a reasonable possibility, and furthermore, one which people so accept as a possibility every single day.
Accidents happen. They are erratic events which we cannot predict, but nonetheless accept the possibility of. Of course, deliberate misfortunes also occur, which were indeed quite foreseeable and avoidable. It is the latter event that people should be held to account over.
Actually, only octopuses is the correct plural. The other's are I believe greek and latin root extensions, or something.
I could hijack a potentially popular first post to get my own unrelated comment higher up on the page than it would normally get, but instead I'll use the opportunity to open discussion on this recently encroaching phenomenon.... oh wait.
Actually, it was more like your grandparent's generation. And people are still suffering from discrimination even today. Your hands aren't washed clean just yet.
Hang on, for emphasis, let me quote you again.
Well, in a general sense, I suppose many would be better off if they thought a bit before they spoke, or didn't just blurt out any old thing, but that's not really your point is it? Your point is that we shouldn't really have freedom of speech, should we? Our declarations should be subject to approval by appropriate persons, yes?
So you're saying that only "wise and learned" people should have the ability to preach to the masses? That our fragile minds are too weak to resist "corruption" by unscrupulous fools with internet access? That we should all become police informants against people who don't tow the line?
Of course, I imagine you'll deny my observation's of your post. Say that I'm putting words in your mouth, etc, etc. You won't even have the integrity to come right out and say what you really believe in. I would not agree with you, but I could at least respect that you have an opinion and aren't afraid to say it.
People like you are the greatest threat to our society. You are the cancer within that gnaws at the foundations that previous generations worked so hard to build. The sad fact is you don't like our free society very much, or at least, while you may enjoy your own freedoms and luxuries, you feel uncomfortable about extending those freedoms to everyone, regardless of class, race, creed or colour.
I think the people in the world we loosely classify as "right wing" could be better described as those who believe in and desire a caste system for our society, where the "right" kind of people enjoy freedom, democracy, prosperity, etc, and where the "wrong" kind of people are "protected" or "supervised" or whatever other euphemisms for serfdom and slavery are in vogue at the moment. There's probably some kind of evolutionary psychology explanation for this. It would be interesting to explore why such a mentality exists.
You need to accept that you are such a person. You need to have the integrity to voice your opinions openly instead of hiding them behind insidious and equivocal language. That at least an honest person could respect. Sure your opinions might be unpopular, but at least they'll be your honest opinions, and not a false facade. You'll be better off in the long run, and so will society.
"Normal" is a well defined statistical term. Specifically in most circumstances, "normal" refers to the statistical mean of some value among individuals in a population.
What most people don't understand is that the normal, in and of itself, is not really very representative of the population. In fact, in almost all cases, there are no individuals in the entire population who's value agrees with the normal or mean. Best example, families have on average 1.69 children, but there is no one family with 1 and 69 hundredths children. Normal height could be, say, 6ft, but if you went around measuring people's height with a laser, you would likely never find someone who was precisely 6ft. They'd be ~5.999ft or ~6.0001ft.
The probability of finding an individual conforming to the mean, or indeed any value, is statistically zero. (Specifically, the normal is a point on a probability distribution of Lebesgue measure zero, but I digress.)
A better statistical measure of a population is it's variance, in conjunction with its normal or mean. With both of these values, you can give accurate estimations of the probability that someone's height will be between 5.5ft and 6ft, or whether they will have 1 or two children. Variance is almost never quoted, but it is as vital a statistic as the mean itself. Without it, the mean is a relatively useless statistic.
The mean of a randomly selected number between 4 and 8 is 6, the same as the mean of height in most populations. Height is not random, and has a different variance, but most modern junk news reports essentially do not distinguish between a random variable and a normally distributed one.
Effectively, when most people hear a statistic about the normal, average or mean, they probably implicitly assume that the variance is close to zero, in other words that the vast majority of the population hugs very close to the mean. In the age of mass production, it's easy to see why people who see row upon row of identical goods would think that human beings are essentially all equivalent with only exceptionally minor difference and the occasional "dud" here and there.
But humanity is much more diverse than most people are willing to admit. Yes we mostly have two hands and two eyes, etc, but the variation in our habits, temperaments, preferences, heights, weights, talents and skills. I'm not a eugenicist who only sees a one dimensional bell curve of humanity. I see a distribution with thousands if not millions of axes, and I think that the variation and diversity in humanity is a benefit to everyone, and that everyone can potentially put their individual talents to good use. Most people don't agree with this. They think we should try to shift the mean to "improve" the whole population. Instead what we should really be trying to do is increase the variance, on all the axes.
The internet is helping to increase the variance in our populations. People are better able to find things they enjoy and are good at rather than be corralled into the bottom end of a bureaucrat's bell curve. The internet enables people. Some people don't like this. They want "normality". They want a smaller variance. They want to feel secure. They'll use examples like incest, pedophiles, terrorists, etc, etc to frighten others away from the potential of the internet. They say they want to make "the children" etc, safer, but what they really want is the entire population to have a smaller variance, to be like those rows and rows of perfectly identical widgets. They don't do this because they are evil, they do it because they are afraid.
All across the world the internet is being censored, reduced and reigned in by both governments and by companies like Livejournal. They are getting away with it because people have put their trust these entities, and by and large, support their actions. Most people don't want that higher variance. Most people you speak to will support Livejournal here. It's a depressing statement but the fact is that the majority of the population will never see the connection between the hysteria over "deviant" groups online and the slow loss of their own rights in that sphere. A great number of them simply will not care.
Having recently fled from the barren dependency hell of Fedora, (to Feisty), I am perplexed as to why anyone wanting to install a user friendly Linux distro of any kind would choose Fedora as their base distro. Hardware detection was... OK, but there were innumerable problems with package management, configurations and yes, software availability. I mean, will the box play mp3 files? DVDs? Fedora is not a distro known for these capabilities.
Oh I'm sure that real journalism is quite hard. There's just not very many real journalists.
I hear cathode ray tube TVs every time they're turned on and am continually amazed when other people don't. It's not just from seeing the TV. If a fairly big CRT is on in the next room, I can hear it pretty easily if the room is only somewhat quiet. It's a light, but high pitched, constant whine. Very distinctive. LCD's don't emit it. Just CRTs.
I live in europe so all our video games run in 50Hz by default, but in recent years have offered a 60Hz option. Often I'll choose the 50Hz option because at 60Hz the CRT's whine becomes noticeably louder. After a while you sometimes get used to it, but not often at 60Hz.
Other people have given me funny looks when I ask them to the game back to 50Hz, or to turn off a TV on static or on mute. I'm not convinced that they can't hear the sound, but instead have simply mentally filtered it out. Sometimes I test them and the occasional one finally realizes that there is a sound, but not often.
If I had to make a wild, unsubstantiated guess, I'd say that most people, in the country where I live, have mentally tuned out the constant background 50Hz hum from each and every electronic device that surrounds them every day of their lives, and which is powered by the national electricity grid supplying AC power at 50Hz.
Or maybe my inner ears are just deformed. Who knows.
Unattainable? Tell you what, why don't you try and get, say, Rupert Murdoch or King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia to realise what a false and unobtainable idol they are coveting. I mean, anyone can just waltz right up to them on the street and snap a picture.
It's not like they have hired goons squads and political connections and secretive schedules which outright confound your ability to snoop into their lives is it? I mean, privacy is a fantasy right? There's no way the rich and powerful could have something the rest of us don't if that something simply just doesn't exist right?
Privacy is very, very real. In todays market centric humanisms, one could almost describe privacy as an obtainable asset which people are willing to pay money for, and one which, because of it's decreasing availability, is becoming ever more expensive to obtain by simple laws of supply and demand. I await an astute poster's follow up comment discussing the rise of a "privacy industry" in response to decreasing supply of this so called "intangible" notion.
Drugs do not make people do the things you mention. "Addiction" to drugs do not make people do the things you mention.
People choose to do the things you mention. Saying that somehow that a substance or product or hobby "made" them do it is an argument with as much weight as its direct predecessor, namely that a devil or evil spirit possessed their bodies and "made" them do it.
Millions, no billions, of people drink alcohol and live their lives without major incident. Some people become alcoholics and neglect their children etc, etc. What needs to be realised is that alcohol or any other drug does not somehow possess or control these people. They choose their actions. To be sure, they can be influenced by a drug, or a hobby, or an ideology, but ultimately people are responsible for their own actions.
"Addiction" is a boegyman that the nanny state uses to frighten us into submission. Yes, people can be strongly influenced and dependent on a drug or habit or religion. But they still have the ability to reason and know right from wrong. To argue that something has taken these abilities from them is to argue that such people are no longer fully human.
7) RMS
8) Officer Barbrady
9) Leeroy Jenkins
10) ???
11) Profit!
12) I'll die in the future you insensitive clod!
You mean their larger average body mass. Because, yes, I would expect that groups with on average larger body masses would produce on average more
Legolas: A lament for Gandalf.
Merry: What do they say about him?
Legolas: I cannot tell you. To do so would be a violation of their copyright to the song.