I had a similar thought when I read that part of the summary:
But the company said independent tests determined that the hack would require such a high skill level that there was a limited chance of it affecting many users.... The Trusted Computing Group, which sets standards on TPM chips, called the attack "exceedingly difficult to replicate in a real-world environment.
Two words: script kiddies. It may take an exceedingly high skill level to come up with an exploit. It may also take a high skill level to package that exploit so anyone can use it with little or no skill. After that, it will become as common as any Windows worm that originally required some skill to create.
There's just no substitute for relatively educated users who have some understanding of the devices they use and the security implications of their decisions and practices. The attempt to create some magical system that transfers all of that into software or a piece of silicon just creates a false sense of security. It makes a very attractive target for criminals to exploit. We really seem determined to refuse to learn this lesson.
I would say, genetically speaking, the desire to be part of something larger is advantageous. Being in a tight knit social group, one is much more likely to survive and breed than an isolated individual. I don't think there is anything metaphysical about this desire, necessarily. Even someone who felt naturally at one with the universe would still feel the common human desire to be a respected member of a group, to be part of something meaningful.
Most things like this have higher and lower forms of expression. The need for physical and biological survival and the realization that this comes much more easily when you work together with others who have similar interests (the family, clan, nation) is the lower form. The sense of union, the bliss of oneness with All That Is, and the beauty and vitality that come from this is the higher form. I view these as two sides of one coin.
Of course, it is all well and good to remember this while conversing with a like minded individual. It is much harder to remember when some asshole cuts you off in traffic.
That's when you get to put your beliefs into practice, which is a privilege. It's where you find out if this is an area in which you have more work to do. You can get annoyed at that asshole in traffic, which allows his negativity to get into you and tempt you to express it like he has done. You can also see that he is so inconsiderate of others because he suffers, because he has to bear the terrible burden of ignorance, because he is unable to unconditionally love.
When you realize how terrible that truly is, that it represents a waste of his mortal time on Earth and the beautiful gift of life, and see that you would not wish this on an enemy, you no longer want him to suffer. Then you have the power to feel compassion instead of anger, which is really just a minor form of hatred.
When you break a hologram, each piece does not contain all the information of the original. It contains the whole image, but blurrier and less detailed. Just saying...
To me that doesn't contradict it at all. It really only deepens the analogy. To me, that's like the way people generally feel incomplete and unfulfilled unless they feel deeply connected with something far greater than themselves. Those fragments of the hologram are blurrier and less detailed because they no longer experience themselves as the whole original.
I think this is about your fundamental connection with the Universe, with All That Is or however you care to say it. I believe this is a good and pure longing that often becomes perverted. Instead of that more natural connection, people lose sight of that but the "question" of it must have some kind of answer, as things like separateness and aloneness and pointlessness can be very painful. So they satisfy that pure longing in an impure way, by placing undue emphasis on institutions, corporations, governments, sports teams, trends, conformity, etc. It's all an attempt to feel like part of something bigger than yourself. What we get for dealing with it incorrectly, in that impure way, is mindlessness, groupthink, helpless dependency, and the struggle to determine who is in charge.
But this is all just interesting theory, some words on a screen. As the Tao Teh Ching says, the Tao we can talk about is not the true Tao.
Lao Tzu had that one right, but I think that's a failure of language, not expression. The language just reflects the average person's ability to use symbolic reference. Another way of saying the same thing is that there must be some consensus about the meaning of a word for it to have a definition. When you are talking about (it's horrible, but for lack of a better term I'll use it) "mystical" experiences that the average person neither seeks nor experiences, of course language will fall short because no such consensus has been built.
What you can do is have some understand of these things yourself. Then someone else who also has some understanding can refer to it, knowing very well that the words are inadequate. This won't be an obstacle for those who have seen it for themselves. It will, however, be useless for the purpose of instructing those who have not. The best you can do for them is to challenge them to find out for themselves what you mean.
So we're not really talking about the Tao, yet we can acknowledge a shared experience of it.
Your film analogy falls down because, in this way of looking at things, we are in the film, not watching it. Our consciousness is part of the film, another track on the film, like a sound track. As far as I can tell, there isn't anyone watching the film. But in each frame, the consciousness track has all kinds of echoes and reflections of previous frames. Those echoes and reflections are the things that make time appear to move.
That depends on your notion of consciousness and separateness. The way Bill Hicks put it, "we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively." There is only one united Universe, so we are both the observer and the observed. We're not in the film, we are the film, along with every star and planet and being and every thing that exists or ever existed. In this framework, the concept of ignorance is the perception of ourselves being split into "self" and "other", like a misunderstanding of the meaning of self-awareness (i.e. ego).
It mainly comes from the lack of appreciation for the fact that you could not exist as you are if not for a million other things that also exist as they are, that everything depends on everything else (cause-and-effect, i.e. my username "causality"). It's the interrelatedness of all things. So we have time in order to experience ourselves, not to observe some "thing" that we could be inside of or outside of.
An analogy I've heard involves holograms. It's similar to the notion of a fractal, self-similar Universe. Let's say you take a glass photographic plate and take a regular photograph with it. You then hit that plate with a mallet and break it into ten pieces. What you have is like a jigsaw puzzle of the original photograph, with each piece containing 1/10th of the information of the photo. Then you take another glass photographic plate and this time you take a hologram. You then hit that plate with a mallet and break that into ten pieces as well. What you get is completely different. You would get 10 complete holograms, with the only difference being that each is 1/10th the size. Each one has the full information and full 3D representation of the original unbroken hologram, because each part contains the whole. Our relationship with the Universe is like this though we often view the rest of the Universe as something outside ourselves.
Is time a basic measure of reality, or only an illusion? I mean, time only looks basic from inside. The actual moments that make up a timeline may form backwards, all at once, or randomly, yet from the inside we would still perceive them as happening in a linear fashion, because there are references to the past in each present moment.
You can really drive yourself nuts trying to figure this out. Personally, I tend toward the viewpoint of some non-theistic Eastern philosophies which state that there is only really the Eternal Present or the Here and Now. Memory or "past" is like a track record of how this Now has changed. Furthermore, much human stress and misery and worry is caused by living in your head's notion of the future or the past rather than the Now.
In an attempt to deter the more naive and shortsighted interpretations of this, it is not a rejection of preparedness or planning. If you are building a house, you have to draw up plans (i.e. blueprints), so in the Here and Now you are planning a house. But while you do so, you're fully present to experience planning a house. You're not caught up in past regrets or future worries so you can actually enjoy what you're doing.
Another interesting idea I have heard is that this is like a roll of film. The entire movie is contained there, all at once, in a single package. But it's not very useful in this form. You need the element of time, of one frame of the film after another, in order to watch the movie. The movie has a beginning and an end and it has events in-between, yet the entire movie has already been decided and is present in its whole form. Our consciousness could be something like the projector that animates the movie by introducing a framerate or time element.
What's this got to do with privacy?! Do you complain about privacy when you hire an accountant to do your taxes and you give him every piece of financial information about you in a given year? Do you complain about privacy when you hire a financial planner and he not only learns everything about your current finances, but also your future intentions?
The difference is that any information I give to an accountant, doctor, lawyer or a financial advisor is legally privileged information. It is protected by law. If they disclose this information to third parties without my consent, I can take them to court and successfully sue them. The knowledge that they were not authorized to share this information can cause them to lose important clients. It may even cause them to lose the license that allows them to do business. So, they have a pretty strong incentive to keep my information confidential. I see no such assurances with this proposed system.
Okay, I'm confused. Whenever privacy is discussed around here, we say "wouldn't it be great if we could retain personal control over our data, and could willingly decide whom to sell our data to?"
I think I can dissolve your confusion.
Real privacy would mean you get to decide whether this data is collected in the first place. If it's going to be gathered anyway and you might get a little discretion over how it is used once amassed, that's not real privacy. Sort of like the way that the ability to choose your master is not real freedom.
When Google does it, it's okay. Thats why Slashdot has the evil Borg for Bill Gates and the friendly Google logo for Google.
I don't really understand how either of them could patent this idea. Haven't companies discovered decades ago that the personal information (names, addresses, phone numbers) of their customers can be collected, "monetized", and sold to various advertisers advertisers (junk mailers, telemarketers) for a fee? This is starting to look like one of those "somehow completely different when a COMPUTER is involved" sort of patents.
The way to combat this is to kill the monetization component. The way to do that is to beat Bill to the punch and give all your data to everyone before he does, so they have to motivation to buy it.
Another way to combat this is to gather such information on Gates, other high-profile corporate figures, and politicians. Then publically post them onto highly visible Web sites. I mean after all, they think no privacy is such a great idea, right? Let them be the pioneers.
Like the notion that if the average Congressman knew that he had to depend on Social Security for his retirement, it would have been fixed (i.e. made sustainable) a long time ago.
Sorry but I suspect the endgame is presented in this http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/02/04/2809856.htm
quote:
Outside court, Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft executive director Neil Gane said he was disappointed with the decision.
He said the case was lodged to try to protect the livelihoods of the thousands of Australians who work in the television and film industries.
Mr Gane said he was confident that the Federal Government would now review the laws surrounding copyright infringement.
as the saying goes, who needs judges and courts when you can afford politicians.
Please mod this up. A good study of history will show you that people who live for power and control do not give up easily. They would not see this as a defeat; it is merely a setback that requires a change of tactics. They know very well that they need only one major victory and thereafter, the result they want will become enshrined in law and almost impossible to repeal. To give a seemingly unrelated example, the USA income tax was "temporary". It's temporary alright, in the sense that one day the sun will stop shining...
really? You know, most judges worldwide do tend to read into the decisions made by other countries and cite them, as there are many smart law folks. Whether they disagree or not sure, but simple jurisprudence does exist.
In a way, that bothers me. It's not the job of an ISP to censor content or to micromanage its users to appease a business interest (copyright) that is orthogonal to their own. That's the truth whether or not a judge in a foreign country thinks so. Sure, in this case the precedent set was a good and sane one, but next time it might not be.
Sure, because the parent I replied to had sound reasoning and solid argumentation when he said that most cyclists on the road are lawless jerks- and implied that they deserve what they get, or that drivers shouldn't be responsible for hitting them.
"The other guy did X, which was wrong, making it okay for me to do Y, which is also wrong." In an online discussion this is harmless but with more serious matters it is known as situational ethics. That term is little more than a euphemism for "hypocrisy" to tell you the truth. Besides, why allow the other guy to control what you do? That's what this sort of reactivity really is.
Let's assume for the sake of argument that the person to whom you replied also failed to use good argumentation. If you want to do something about that, you need to show him the correct way. You need to use better methods and show that they are more than capable of overcoming such shortcomings. That's if your goal is to offer constructive feedback. If you just want to rant, then of course this won't be a concern.
You know what? If reading that story and looking at that picture of that orphan makes a couple of Slashdotters a liiiiitle bit more careful driving (around cyclists or not), then it was worth every mod point.
I'm careful not to let my actions harm other people because that's the right thing to do, the right way to be. It gives me joy and purpose to live this way, to have compassion and to try to do the right thing. I don't need to be shocked by a vision of trauma or made to feel guilty. Those carrot-and-stick methods (in this case, the stick) are for people who haven't discovered this and are therefore ruled by consequence. I enjoy being more free than this.
It's like what Aristotle said: "I have gained this by philosophy, that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law." He was much more free than people who needed to be threatened with a negative consequence.
But yes, I see your point. Unfortunately, when you've been struck by cars twice (both breaking the law, when you were doing everything right), you tend to have a very shore fuse for the whole but-cyclists-are-lawless-idiots comment.
I'm not sure you do see my point. Listen to what you wrote there. You've been traumatized by something you could have accepted and let go of and now you have a sore spot. Now you have no choice but to take the ignorance of others personally, like an affront or attack.
You should be in charge of how you respond to something, but unfortunately this indicates that your emotional well-being is at the mercy of what others say and do. Whether you will be happy that day depends on whether or not someone makes a comment about cyclists. Most people are like that and they accept it as normal, probably because of a shortage of good counter-examples. There's no way this brings you joy. I want something better than that for you.
Every time cyclist safety comes up in conversation someone has to blurt this out. While I was still in my cast from the first time I was hit, an asshole coworker sat across from me and told the table that cyclists knew that it was dangerous and thus drivers shouldn't be liable. I nearly cracked him over the head with the cast.
It's easy to underestimate the power of graceful, unshakable calmness.
Let's say you did strike him with your cast. All that could possibly do is make him afraid to voice certain opinions. It does not remove those opinions and does not undermine their foundation of ignorance. You can be a bully, and feel justified, but you cannot intimidate people into doing the right thing. Genuinely doing the right thing must be powered with an energy other than fear.
If you want to put the lie to his opinion, you'd first have to bear it gracefully and let it have its full expression. That is real
As a bicyclist (and driver. Remember that- most of us who ride our bikes ALSO DRIVE), I find it very difficult to sympathize with your viewpoint.
When is the last time you read, "motorist killed by bicyclist"? Bicyclists always lose in car-vs-bicyclist.
Now, look at the face of cyclist road deaths: Kylie Bruehler, orphaned when both her parents were struck by a truck. Go on, LOOK, Mr. Self Righteous. Look at the face of a 7 year old girl as she buries her parents. Look at her grandfather walk down the line of hundreds of cyclists who showed up to honor them.
Do you know what usually happens when a motorist kills a cyclist? Absolutely nothing- and this case is not the exception but the rule. Time and time again the cyclist community fumes when another person is struck simply because the driver wasn't paying attention to where they were going, the police call it a "terrible accident", and the driver walks off without so much as a manslaughter charge.
I'm glad you used sound reasoning and solid argumentation and did not resort to baser things like guilt-trips and emotional appeals. Well done, sir.
Mod insightful, interesting, obvious genius, whatever. Do so with all your might. Countless hours wasted dealing with IE6. And just recently, too.
If it can be proven that IE's incompatibility with open standards is an intentional design decision on Microsoft's part (shouldn't be hard), then I'd love to see a legal precedent where every Web developer and/or their employers can send Microsoft a bill for the extra and otherwise unnecessary work. That'd be the way to end this practice.
You know what is the most terrifying?
I'm a foreigner in England and found that I know grammar and spelling better than most of my English friends. We're talking about people who passed through basic education system here, and at least half of them also through higher studies.
If you ask them about grammar, apostrophe rules or spelling they will just say they never studied this. Nobody ever though them this. Then you wonder why all this is in total shambles.
Problem is that all kids are prepared to pass those stupid tests and outside them they know jack shit. There are exceptions, but general population is similar to Idiocracy one.
That's the funny thing. Many of the dumber grammatical errors you see on Slashdot are made by people who are evidently native English speakers. They're things that should have been corrected in grade school, like problems with "your" and "you're", or "their", "there" and "they're". As they occur in trends like many other mindless activities, the latest one is "loose" vs. "lose".
The tests and their failure to guarantee competence when passed is a natural result of the exaggerated and undue emphasis that schools place on memorization by rote. If you had a perfect photographic memory, you would breeze through most any modern school curriculum. That doesn't mean you'd actually understand what you have memorized or be able to adapt that knowledge to different situations.
We have created something of a Catch-22 or self-fulfilling prophecy: the standardized test dictates what the students are taught, so according to that test the students have learned. Nowhere in this do you find a regard for whether they have any real mastery of that knowledge. They're just being taught to regurgitate information with no real understanding and I could teach a parrot to do that. Writing in particular is generally a creative process. It has mechanical elements but does not really lend itself to mechanized repetition; it's not like operating a machine. It's no surprise to me that this is where the incompetence is most evident.
I completely agree with the above post. People who want to force social activities upon their co-workers bug me. If people have common, social areas, they'll socialize. But don't push it down their throats. If you really want to draw people out without making it seem forced, see if you can get a golf/bowling/hockey team together. Maybe invite everyone in your department out for beer-n-wings the last Friday of the month and see who accepts.
Absolutely. The correct way to do this is to make it opt-in and entirely voluntary. If the object is to enjoy your time together and to have fun, I never saw the point of forcing people to go who don't want to be there. There's something incredibly superficial about that, a lack of regard for whether the surface appearance of physical proximity matches any notion of togetherness or solidarity.
In your so called social life, you never had a friend that was just unconditionally nice/friendly/talkative to everyone?
Sure. When it's genuine, that sort of person is truly kind to everyone. They really care about people and are not just playing politics or trying to get attention. I do have friends like this and I greatly value the time I spend with them. Unfortunately, the subject of my previous post is quite a bit less inspiring.
While your reasoning might be true for some people, it definitely misses the mark on some. There's really no consistency in social norms..
What I described in my previous post is the product of observation. I was not concerned with how that specific situation, as evidenced by observable behavior, might compare to other situations. How all of this fits into your view of social norms and their consistency or lack of consistency would be another discussion entirely. I simply reported what I plainly experienced at that particular workplace.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't go to work for "community". Don't get me wrong; I like what I do and we are all cordial at work and everything, but at the end of the day I don't really want to be your friend. Maybe this makes me "that guy", but that's fine with me; I just prefer to keep the professional and personal aspects of my life as separate as possible.
I felt that way when I worked in a large office for a major corporation. Mostly because the socialization was perfunctory and not genuine, and could be filed under "office politics" more than anything. I saw how people gossipped about the relationships and private lives of others, and it was not in a compassionate or positive light. I quickly ended up feeling the same way that you do. Simply put, those are not the sort of "friends" I care to have. Though unrelated to me, my real friends are more like family members and this provided quite a contrast against this sort of childish politicking and vying for advantage. I was very good at what I did and enjoyed the work. I really just wanted to come in, do my job, and go home but was required to humor those who wanted to turn work into a social club.
I was convinced that a lot of these folks had no social life whatsoever outside of work, and were trying to compensate for that by imposing on others by means of the corporate hierarchy. It really showed in the undue and greatly exaggerated importance that minor meetings and events had for these folks. It's like organizing little lunches and get-togethers was the only time they felt significant or important, which frankly was sad to see. I'm all for being on good friendly terms with co-workers, but I hope the inquirer of this Ask Slashdot doesn't take it too far and replicate this sort of maladaptive behavior.
This was a very rare thing to see prior to management's decision to hamstring meta-moderation. I'd still like to know who thought that was a good idea, who agreed with that person instead of laughing, and who has decided to keep meta-moderation useless even after the detrimental effects of this decision have been demonstrated.
O_o The moderation system on slashdot has always been controversial. Kuro5hin tried a new system where everybody was a moderator. It was a more accurate rating system, but it's failure was in giving the users the ability to approve or reject content. Part of why slashdot is successful (and Kuro5hin failed) is because the authorship of stories is controlled by only a few people who have a lot of experience. The moderation system could be a simple thumbs up/down, and metamoderation could be flushed down the toilet, and the quality wouldn't change. At its core, the moderation system is a popularity contest -- you only get mod points by being let into the clubhouse by the other popular kids, and only comments that represent the popular opinion are highly rated. In general, pro-microsoft stuff is moderated down, whereas pro-linux would be moderated up. But a particularily well-written pro-microsoft post could still be modded up provided the author acknowledges the prevailing opinion when submitting it. For example, "I'd be the first to say Microsoft is a blight upon the land, but in this case..." Or, more directly -- people can state unpopular opinions if they couch it in rhetoric, where-as popular opinions are scrutinized less. It's human nature, and the moderation system can't fix that. But -- it could be redesigned to be simpler and more true to its roots.
I must disagree here. I often say things that are not so popular, but I do it in a way that attempts to cause people to think differently about an issue. I typically have no problems with the moderators whenever I do this. The only sort of issues I have are people who enjoy deliberately distorting and quoting out of context, as it wastes my time to point out to them that actually reading my post would have negated whatever issue they believe they are raising. Still, I don't feel that mods target me because what I say is often not what folks like to hear. I try to be well-reasoned and lay a foundation for the arguments I construct, so that easy-way-out is not so easy.
I'd rather be spammed with location aware ads than something thats no where near me.
I frequently see variants of this notion and I still don't understand it.
I generally don't impulse-buy. I believe that the model of independently determining my wants and needs and then shopping for the best solution available soundly beats the model of listening to a company tell me why that company is good for me, buying items for needs I never even knew I had. As in, I don't just think that sounds good, I really believe that which means I practice it. So, unless it is free broadcast radio or free broadcast television, I don't want to see active ads of any kind. They're useless for me. They're also useless for the advertiser, as the sole effect they have on my purchasing decisions is that if one is particularly annoying, I make it a point to go with a competitor.
I'm fine with passive advertisements. They are more like opt-in/client-pull, whereas active advertisements are more like opt-out/server-push. Good examples are directories like the Yellow Pages and any online equivalents. When I want something your company sells, I know where to find you. Until then, I don't want to hear from you and it's in your business interests not to contact me against my will since I won't buy from people who are pushy. By nature, there's no reason for these to be location-aware.
I think this is more common than what would be immediately apparent. Even if it isn't, consider that lots of people who are influenced by ads will still go to some trouble to block them. So the point is not so much the motivation, it's that the goal of many is to avoid ads, at least when it comes to a service you are already paying for, such as cellphone service. In that case, why would I care about whether an ad is location-aware? I'm not going to respond to it favorably anyway. To me, saying "at least the ads were location-aware" is like being fatally stabbed with a spear and saying "at least it's been polished recently", as though a tarnished spear is less fatal than a shiny one. It's actually much worse because location-aware means that someone knows my location whether or not I wanted to disclose this information to them. As a customer, unwanted and unauthorized disclosure of my personal information is not something I care to pay for.
The idea is not to stop producing young workers. The idea is to limit how many you produce so they can be productive young workers. If you currently face a resource shortage, you need to either find a way to increase resources, or reduce the population, or a combination of both.
Active population reduction is generally politically unacceptable, and rationing the mechanism of saving lives to those who are most productive (for some definition of "productive" -- the old may not contribute labor, but they might contribute knowledge and wisdom), only a bit less so.
Still, providing the tools so that such a population can have more options in combating their misery is a good idea.
P
Nevertheless, it is not clear that providing tools that can exacerbate one aspect of their misery (keeping people alive so they can breed more), without also providing tools to counter this problem (abstinence education (like that ever worked), and contraceptive technology (which. surprisingly, encounters cultural resistance)), is all that great.
If overpopulation is an issue and you want to truly, effectively do something about it, that's simple. Come up with a version of "the pill" for men. End of population problem.
Of course, you will encounter resistance from what may seem like unlikely sources. Namely, an economic system based on debt and fiat currency cannot continue to expand and remain viable unless the population is increasing.
I will add one thing... the time necessary is really academic. Moderation is a simple, easy-to-handle matter and the way to do that job is to actually know something about the post that you are modding, usually by reading it, perhaps by cross-referencing it. I immediately knew your intent, but if I didn't, then I could go through a very slightly longer process of referencing the article, which would remove all doubt. So again this is just carelessness on the part of people who probably shouldn't have mod points in the first place.
This was a very rare thing to see prior to management's decision to hamstring meta-moderation. I'd still like to know who thought that was a good idea, who agreed with that person instead of laughing, and who has decided to keep meta-moderation useless even after the detrimental effects of this decision have been demonstrated.
Slashdot Mirror
Two words: script kiddies. It may take an exceedingly high skill level to come up with an exploit. It may also take a high skill level to package that exploit so anyone can use it with little or no skill. After that, it will become as common as any Windows worm that originally required some skill to create.
There's just no substitute for relatively educated users who have some understanding of the devices they use and the security implications of their decisions and practices. The attempt to create some magical system that transfers all of that into software or a piece of silicon just creates a false sense of security. It makes a very attractive target for criminals to exploit. We really seem determined to refuse to learn this lesson.
The glass is half-full ...
Personally, I like to resolve this by saying that the glass is at 50% capacity.
Most things like this have higher and lower forms of expression. The need for physical and biological survival and the realization that this comes much more easily when you work together with others who have similar interests (the family, clan, nation) is the lower form. The sense of union, the bliss of oneness with All That Is, and the beauty and vitality that come from this is the higher form. I view these as two sides of one coin.
That's when you get to put your beliefs into practice, which is a privilege. It's where you find out if this is an area in which you have more work to do. You can get annoyed at that asshole in traffic, which allows his negativity to get into you and tempt you to express it like he has done. You can also see that he is so inconsiderate of others because he suffers, because he has to bear the terrible burden of ignorance, because he is unable to unconditionally love.
When you realize how terrible that truly is, that it represents a waste of his mortal time on Earth and the beautiful gift of life, and see that you would not wish this on an enemy, you no longer want him to suffer. Then you have the power to feel compassion instead of anger, which is really just a minor form of hatred.
To me that doesn't contradict it at all. It really only deepens the analogy. To me, that's like the way people generally feel incomplete and unfulfilled unless they feel deeply connected with something far greater than themselves. Those fragments of the hologram are blurrier and less detailed because they no longer experience themselves as the whole original.
I think this is about your fundamental connection with the Universe, with All That Is or however you care to say it. I believe this is a good and pure longing that often becomes perverted. Instead of that more natural connection, people lose sight of that but the "question" of it must have some kind of answer, as things like separateness and aloneness and pointlessness can be very painful. So they satisfy that pure longing in an impure way, by placing undue emphasis on institutions, corporations, governments, sports teams, trends, conformity, etc. It's all an attempt to feel like part of something bigger than yourself. What we get for dealing with it incorrectly, in that impure way, is mindlessness, groupthink, helpless dependency, and the struggle to determine who is in charge.
Lao Tzu had that one right, but I think that's a failure of language, not expression. The language just reflects the average person's ability to use symbolic reference. Another way of saying the same thing is that there must be some consensus about the meaning of a word for it to have a definition. When you are talking about (it's horrible, but for lack of a better term I'll use it) "mystical" experiences that the average person neither seeks nor experiences, of course language will fall short because no such consensus has been built.
What you can do is have some understand of these things yourself. Then someone else who also has some understanding can refer to it, knowing very well that the words are inadequate. This won't be an obstacle for those who have seen it for themselves. It will, however, be useless for the purpose of instructing those who have not. The best you can do for them is to challenge them to find out for themselves what you mean.
So we're not really talking about the Tao, yet we can acknowledge a shared experience of it.
Your film analogy falls down because, in this way of looking at things, we are in the film, not watching it. Our consciousness is part of the film, another track on the film, like a sound track. As far as I can tell, there isn't anyone watching the film. But in each frame, the consciousness track has all kinds of echoes and reflections of previous frames. Those echoes and reflections are the things that make time appear to move.
That depends on your notion of consciousness and separateness. The way Bill Hicks put it, "we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively." There is only one united Universe, so we are both the observer and the observed. We're not in the film, we are the film, along with every star and planet and being and every thing that exists or ever existed. In this framework, the concept of ignorance is the perception of ourselves being split into "self" and "other", like a misunderstanding of the meaning of self-awareness (i.e. ego).
It mainly comes from the lack of appreciation for the fact that you could not exist as you are if not for a million other things that also exist as they are, that everything depends on everything else (cause-and-effect, i.e. my username "causality"). It's the interrelatedness of all things. So we have time in order to experience ourselves, not to observe some "thing" that we could be inside of or outside of.
An analogy I've heard involves holograms. It's similar to the notion of a fractal, self-similar Universe. Let's say you take a glass photographic plate and take a regular photograph with it. You then hit that plate with a mallet and break it into ten pieces. What you have is like a jigsaw puzzle of the original photograph, with each piece containing 1/10th of the information of the photo. Then you take another glass photographic plate and this time you take a hologram. You then hit that plate with a mallet and break that into ten pieces as well. What you get is completely different. You would get 10 complete holograms, with the only difference being that each is 1/10th the size. Each one has the full information and full 3D representation of the original unbroken hologram, because each part contains the whole. Our relationship with the Universe is like this though we often view the rest of the Universe as something outside ourselves.
Is time a basic measure of reality, or only an illusion? I mean, time only looks basic from inside. The actual moments that make up a timeline may form backwards, all at once, or randomly, yet from the inside we would still perceive them as happening in a linear fashion, because there are references to the past in each present moment.
You can really drive yourself nuts trying to figure this out. Personally, I tend toward the viewpoint of some non-theistic Eastern philosophies which state that there is only really the Eternal Present or the Here and Now. Memory or "past" is like a track record of how this Now has changed. Furthermore, much human stress and misery and worry is caused by living in your head's notion of the future or the past rather than the Now.
In an attempt to deter the more naive and shortsighted interpretations of this, it is not a rejection of preparedness or planning. If you are building a house, you have to draw up plans (i.e. blueprints), so in the Here and Now you are planning a house. But while you do so, you're fully present to experience planning a house. You're not caught up in past regrets or future worries so you can actually enjoy what you're doing.
Another interesting idea I have heard is that this is like a roll of film. The entire movie is contained there, all at once, in a single package. But it's not very useful in this form. You need the element of time, of one frame of the film after another, in order to watch the movie. The movie has a beginning and an end and it has events in-between, yet the entire movie has already been decided and is present in its whole form. Our consciousness could be something like the projector that animates the movie by introducing a framerate or time element.
Do you have any idea how many Slashdot articles could benefit from such an explanation?
The difference is that any information I give to an accountant, doctor, lawyer or a financial advisor is legally privileged information. It is protected by law. If they disclose this information to third parties without my consent, I can take them to court and successfully sue them. The knowledge that they were not authorized to share this information can cause them to lose important clients. It may even cause them to lose the license that allows them to do business. So, they have a pretty strong incentive to keep my information confidential. I see no such assurances with this proposed system.
I think I can dissolve your confusion.
Real privacy would mean you get to decide whether this data is collected in the first place. If it's going to be gathered anyway and you might get a little discretion over how it is used once amassed, that's not real privacy. Sort of like the way that the ability to choose your master is not real freedom.
When Google does it, it's okay. Thats why Slashdot has the evil Borg for Bill Gates and the friendly Google logo for Google.
I don't really understand how either of them could patent this idea. Haven't companies discovered decades ago that the personal information (names, addresses, phone numbers) of their customers can be collected, "monetized", and sold to various advertisers advertisers (junk mailers, telemarketers) for a fee? This is starting to look like one of those "somehow completely different when a COMPUTER is involved" sort of patents.
Not for everyone.
The way to combat this is to kill the monetization component. The way to do that is to beat Bill to the punch and give all your data to everyone before he does, so they have to motivation to buy it.
Another way to combat this is to gather such information on Gates, other high-profile corporate figures, and politicians. Then publically post them onto highly visible Web sites. I mean after all, they think no privacy is such a great idea, right? Let them be the pioneers.
Like the notion that if the average Congressman knew that he had to depend on Social Security for his retirement, it would have been fixed (i.e. made sustainable) a long time ago.
Sorry but I suspect the endgame is presented in this http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/02/04/2809856.htm quote: Outside court, Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft executive director Neil Gane said he was disappointed with the decision. He said the case was lodged to try to protect the livelihoods of the thousands of Australians who work in the television and film industries. Mr Gane said he was confident that the Federal Government would now review the laws surrounding copyright infringement. as the saying goes, who needs judges and courts when you can afford politicians.
Please mod this up. A good study of history will show you that people who live for power and control do not give up easily. They would not see this as a defeat; it is merely a setback that requires a change of tactics. They know very well that they need only one major victory and thereafter, the result they want will become enshrined in law and almost impossible to repeal. To give a seemingly unrelated example, the USA income tax was "temporary". It's temporary alright, in the sense that one day the sun will stop shining...
really? You know, most judges worldwide do tend to read into the decisions made by other countries and cite them, as there are many smart law folks. Whether they disagree or not sure, but simple jurisprudence does exist.
In a way, that bothers me. It's not the job of an ISP to censor content or to micromanage its users to appease a business interest (copyright) that is orthogonal to their own. That's the truth whether or not a judge in a foreign country thinks so. Sure, in this case the precedent set was a good and sane one, but next time it might not be.
"The other guy did X, which was wrong, making it okay for me to do Y, which is also wrong." In an online discussion this is harmless but with more serious matters it is known as situational ethics. That term is little more than a euphemism for "hypocrisy" to tell you the truth. Besides, why allow the other guy to control what you do? That's what this sort of reactivity really is.
Let's assume for the sake of argument that the person to whom you replied also failed to use good argumentation. If you want to do something about that, you need to show him the correct way. You need to use better methods and show that they are more than capable of overcoming such shortcomings. That's if your goal is to offer constructive feedback. If you just want to rant, then of course this won't be a concern.
I'm careful not to let my actions harm other people because that's the right thing to do, the right way to be. It gives me joy and purpose to live this way, to have compassion and to try to do the right thing. I don't need to be shocked by a vision of trauma or made to feel guilty. Those carrot-and-stick methods (in this case, the stick) are for people who haven't discovered this and are therefore ruled by consequence. I enjoy being more free than this.
It's like what Aristotle said: "I have gained this by philosophy, that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law." He was much more free than people who needed to be threatened with a negative consequence.
I'm not sure you do see my point. Listen to what you wrote there. You've been traumatized by something you could have accepted and let go of and now you have a sore spot. Now you have no choice but to take the ignorance of others personally, like an affront or attack.
You should be in charge of how you respond to something, but unfortunately this indicates that your emotional well-being is at the mercy of what others say and do. Whether you will be happy that day depends on whether or not someone makes a comment about cyclists. Most people are like that and they accept it as normal, probably because of a shortage of good counter-examples. There's no way this brings you joy. I want something better than that for you.
It's easy to underestimate the power of graceful, unshakable calmness.
Let's say you did strike him with your cast. All that could possibly do is make him afraid to voice certain opinions. It does not remove those opinions and does not undermine their foundation of ignorance. You can be a bully, and feel justified, but you cannot intimidate people into doing the right thing. Genuinely doing the right thing must be powered with an energy other than fear.
If you want to put the lie to his opinion, you'd first have to bear it gracefully and let it have its full expression. That is real
As a bicyclist (and driver. Remember that- most of us who ride our bikes ALSO DRIVE), I find it very difficult to sympathize with your viewpoint.
When is the last time you read, "motorist killed by bicyclist"? Bicyclists always lose in car-vs-bicyclist.
Now, look at the face of cyclist road deaths: Kylie Bruehler, orphaned when both her parents were struck by a truck. Go on, LOOK, Mr. Self Righteous. Look at the face of a 7 year old girl as she buries her parents. Look at her grandfather walk down the line of hundreds of cyclists who showed up to honor them.
Do you know what usually happens when a motorist kills a cyclist? Absolutely nothing- and this case is not the exception but the rule. Time and time again the cyclist community fumes when another person is struck simply because the driver wasn't paying attention to where they were going, the police call it a "terrible accident", and the driver walks off without so much as a manslaughter charge.
I'm glad you used sound reasoning and solid argumentation and did not resort to baser things like guilt-trips and emotional appeals. Well done, sir.
Mod insightful, interesting, obvious genius, whatever. Do so with all your might. Countless hours wasted dealing with IE6. And just recently, too.
If it can be proven that IE's incompatibility with open standards is an intentional design decision on Microsoft's part (shouldn't be hard), then I'd love to see a legal precedent where every Web developer and/or their employers can send Microsoft a bill for the extra and otherwise unnecessary work. That'd be the way to end this practice.
You know what is the most terrifying? I'm a foreigner in England and found that I know grammar and spelling better than most of my English friends. We're talking about people who passed through basic education system here, and at least half of them also through higher studies. If you ask them about grammar, apostrophe rules or spelling they will just say they never studied this. Nobody ever though them this. Then you wonder why all this is in total shambles.
Problem is that all kids are prepared to pass those stupid tests and outside them they know jack shit. There are exceptions, but general population is similar to Idiocracy one.
That's the funny thing. Many of the dumber grammatical errors you see on Slashdot are made by people who are evidently native English speakers. They're things that should have been corrected in grade school, like problems with "your" and "you're", or "their", "there" and "they're". As they occur in trends like many other mindless activities, the latest one is "loose" vs. "lose".
The tests and their failure to guarantee competence when passed is a natural result of the exaggerated and undue emphasis that schools place on memorization by rote. If you had a perfect photographic memory, you would breeze through most any modern school curriculum. That doesn't mean you'd actually understand what you have memorized or be able to adapt that knowledge to different situations.
We have created something of a Catch-22 or self-fulfilling prophecy: the standardized test dictates what the students are taught, so according to that test the students have learned. Nowhere in this do you find a regard for whether they have any real mastery of that knowledge. They're just being taught to regurgitate information with no real understanding and I could teach a parrot to do that. Writing in particular is generally a creative process. It has mechanical elements but does not really lend itself to mechanized repetition; it's not like operating a machine. It's no surprise to me that this is where the incompetence is most evident.
I completely agree with the above post. People who want to force social activities upon their co-workers bug me. If people have common, social areas, they'll socialize. But don't push it down their throats. If you really want to draw people out without making it seem forced, see if you can get a golf/bowling/hockey team together. Maybe invite everyone in your department out for beer-n-wings the last Friday of the month and see who accepts.
Absolutely. The correct way to do this is to make it opt-in and entirely voluntary. If the object is to enjoy your time together and to have fun, I never saw the point of forcing people to go who don't want to be there. There's something incredibly superficial about that, a lack of regard for whether the surface appearance of physical proximity matches any notion of togetherness or solidarity.
Sure. When it's genuine, that sort of person is truly kind to everyone. They really care about people and are not just playing politics or trying to get attention. I do have friends like this and I greatly value the time I spend with them. Unfortunately, the subject of my previous post is quite a bit less inspiring.
What I described in my previous post is the product of observation. I was not concerned with how that specific situation, as evidenced by observable behavior, might compare to other situations. How all of this fits into your view of social norms and their consistency or lack of consistency would be another discussion entirely. I simply reported what I plainly experienced at that particular workplace.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't go to work for "community". Don't get me wrong; I like what I do and we are all cordial at work and everything, but at the end of the day I don't really want to be your friend. Maybe this makes me "that guy", but that's fine with me; I just prefer to keep the professional and personal aspects of my life as separate as possible.
I felt that way when I worked in a large office for a major corporation. Mostly because the socialization was perfunctory and not genuine, and could be filed under "office politics" more than anything. I saw how people gossipped about the relationships and private lives of others, and it was not in a compassionate or positive light. I quickly ended up feeling the same way that you do. Simply put, those are not the sort of "friends" I care to have. Though unrelated to me, my real friends are more like family members and this provided quite a contrast against this sort of childish politicking and vying for advantage. I was very good at what I did and enjoyed the work. I really just wanted to come in, do my job, and go home but was required to humor those who wanted to turn work into a social club.
I was convinced that a lot of these folks had no social life whatsoever outside of work, and were trying to compensate for that by imposing on others by means of the corporate hierarchy. It really showed in the undue and greatly exaggerated importance that minor meetings and events had for these folks. It's like organizing little lunches and get-togethers was the only time they felt significant or important, which frankly was sad to see. I'm all for being on good friendly terms with co-workers, but I hope the inquirer of this Ask Slashdot doesn't take it too far and replicate this sort of maladaptive behavior.
This was a very rare thing to see prior to management's decision to hamstring meta-moderation. I'd still like to know who thought that was a good idea, who agreed with that person instead of laughing, and who has decided to keep meta-moderation useless even after the detrimental effects of this decision have been demonstrated.
O_o The moderation system on slashdot has always been controversial. Kuro5hin tried a new system where everybody was a moderator. It was a more accurate rating system, but it's failure was in giving the users the ability to approve or reject content. Part of why slashdot is successful (and Kuro5hin failed) is because the authorship of stories is controlled by only a few people who have a lot of experience. The moderation system could be a simple thumbs up/down, and metamoderation could be flushed down the toilet, and the quality wouldn't change. At its core, the moderation system is a popularity contest -- you only get mod points by being let into the clubhouse by the other popular kids, and only comments that represent the popular opinion are highly rated. In general, pro-microsoft stuff is moderated down, whereas pro-linux would be moderated up. But a particularily well-written pro-microsoft post could still be modded up provided the author acknowledges the prevailing opinion when submitting it. For example, "I'd be the first to say Microsoft is a blight upon the land, but in this case..." Or, more directly -- people can state unpopular opinions if they couch it in rhetoric, where-as popular opinions are scrutinized less. It's human nature, and the moderation system can't fix that. But -- it could be redesigned to be simpler and more true to its roots.
I must disagree here. I often say things that are not so popular, but I do it in a way that attempts to cause people to think differently about an issue. I typically have no problems with the moderators whenever I do this. The only sort of issues I have are people who enjoy deliberately distorting and quoting out of context, as it wastes my time to point out to them that actually reading my post would have negated whatever issue they believe they are raising. Still, I don't feel that mods target me because what I say is often not what folks like to hear. I try to be well-reasoned and lay a foundation for the arguments I construct, so that easy-way-out is not so easy.
I frequently see variants of this notion and I still don't understand it.
I generally don't impulse-buy. I believe that the model of independently determining my wants and needs and then shopping for the best solution available soundly beats the model of listening to a company tell me why that company is good for me, buying items for needs I never even knew I had. As in, I don't just think that sounds good, I really believe that which means I practice it. So, unless it is free broadcast radio or free broadcast television, I don't want to see active ads of any kind. They're useless for me. They're also useless for the advertiser, as the sole effect they have on my purchasing decisions is that if one is particularly annoying, I make it a point to go with a competitor.
I'm fine with passive advertisements. They are more like opt-in/client-pull, whereas active advertisements are more like opt-out/server-push. Good examples are directories like the Yellow Pages and any online equivalents. When I want something your company sells, I know where to find you. Until then, I don't want to hear from you and it's in your business interests not to contact me against my will since I won't buy from people who are pushy. By nature, there's no reason for these to be location-aware.
I think this is more common than what would be immediately apparent. Even if it isn't, consider that lots of people who are influenced by ads will still go to some trouble to block them. So the point is not so much the motivation, it's that the goal of many is to avoid ads, at least when it comes to a service you are already paying for, such as cellphone service. In that case, why would I care about whether an ad is location-aware? I'm not going to respond to it favorably anyway. To me, saying "at least the ads were location-aware" is like being fatally stabbed with a spear and saying "at least it's been polished recently", as though a tarnished spear is less fatal than a shiny one. It's actually much worse because location-aware means that someone knows my location whether or not I wanted to disclose this information to them. As a customer, unwanted and unauthorized disclosure of my personal information is not something I care to pay for.
The idea is not to stop producing young workers. The idea is to limit how many you produce so they can be productive young workers. If you currently face a resource shortage, you need to either find a way to increase resources, or reduce the population, or a combination of both.
Active population reduction is generally politically unacceptable, and rationing the mechanism of saving lives to those who are most productive (for some definition of "productive" -- the old may not contribute labor, but they might contribute knowledge and wisdom), only a bit less so.
Still, providing the tools so that such a population can have more options in combating their misery is a good idea. P Nevertheless, it is not clear that providing tools that can exacerbate one aspect of their misery (keeping people alive so they can breed more), without also providing tools to counter this problem (abstinence education (like that ever worked), and contraceptive technology (which. surprisingly, encounters cultural resistance)), is all that great.
If overpopulation is an issue and you want to truly, effectively do something about it, that's simple. Come up with a version of "the pill" for men. End of population problem.
Of course, you will encounter resistance from what may seem like unlikely sources. Namely, an economic system based on debt and fiat currency cannot continue to expand and remain viable unless the population is increasing.
I will add one thing... the time necessary is really academic. Moderation is a simple, easy-to-handle matter and the way to do that job is to actually know something about the post that you are modding, usually by reading it, perhaps by cross-referencing it. I immediately knew your intent, but if I didn't, then I could go through a very slightly longer process of referencing the article, which would remove all doubt. So again this is just carelessness on the part of people who probably shouldn't have mod points in the first place.
This was a very rare thing to see prior to management's decision to hamstring meta-moderation. I'd still like to know who thought that was a good idea, who agreed with that person instead of laughing, and who has decided to keep meta-moderation useless even after the detrimental effects of this decision have been demonstrated.