You seem obsessed. I made a mistake. Most people would just move on.
You're making a mistake, in addition to the original. You're not moving on.
At this point, you're just an object lesson for other slashdot readers.
With that, you saw what I was trying to bring out into the open. You saw it for yourself.
How then do you explain those who can deal with the pace of modern life, including those who love and work frequently with technology and information, yet retain the ability to concentrate and focus and pay attention at will?
It's an illusion that you can do those things as well as you think you can.
"People who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their memory or switch from one job to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time, a group of Stanford researchers has found."
I wasn't talking about multitasking or "several streams". I was talking about being able to focus and concentrate on a single thing indefinitely, i.e. until you are actually done with it. That's something the ADD crowd cannot do. Many of them wouldn't last one minute.
The next time you watch a news program, pay close attention to how often they change (flash) scenes. They suddenly switch scenes and put something else on the screen several times a minute, usually as frequently as every 10-20 seconds. They do this to accommodate the ADD types. It makes them feel comfortable and engaged. This has been the case for some time now.
Darwinism doesn't apply when the penalty for stupidity (i.e. lack of fitness) is less than death or at least, sterilization.
When a couple only produce one child and this child only has one child in coupling with another only child, the relative amount of their DNA in the gene pool diminishes. Compared this to their neighbour, who produces three offspring every generation. It's simple enough to create a proof by induction that you have either not understood what I wrote, or, that you have no idea what you are talking about... please refrain from posting rubbish.
To suggest that this is due to "nature running its course", based on competition, with the end of making the objectively fittest thrive as implied by Darwinism and any notion of natural selection, and not at all influenced or if you will, perverted, by the flaws in those artificial constructs we call societies, is simply absurd.
Thus the notion of who breeds more eventually becomes who makes poorer decisions. You wind up with situations where the smart, careful, responsible, prudent people who take the time to attain an education, establish a career, form a healthy marriage, own a home, and then have only the children they can financially and emotionally afford to properly raise are disadvantaged. Instead of quality, it becomes a race for quantity. So those who recklessly have sex without birth control when they are absolutely not ready to have a baby multiply much more than those who do not.
Unless you're a big subscriber to that most puerile of justifications, known as "might makes right", you have to notice something there is not as it would naturally be, if there were a struggle for survival as Darwinism assumes. That means we are talking about something other than Darwinism. Having established that, let's recognize it and move on to something that might work. No need to play word games with what "Darwinism" means, like some lawyer, to force the square peg into a round hole because it means you get your way.
The hinge of this whole turn you've decided was best for the thread is the notion of "fitness" and what that means. You've decided to twist it to mean "whatever happens to be common" with no sign of an appreciation of how and why it became common. Then you offer this "breeding contest" type of response to my comment which was about personal decision-making and willingness to assume responsibility, something that is "nurture" and not "nature" if you insist on dividing the two.
So alright, tell me I don't understand what you did there. If you think I'm personally insulting you by asking you not to post about what you do not understand, then okay, repeat my own format to mock me, only substitute "rubbish" for "things you clearly don't understand" like a variable in a formula. You really want to prove my point for me about shallow responses to things, don't you?
How then do you explain those who can deal with the pace of modern life, including those who love and work frequently with technology and information, yet retain the ability to concentrate and focus and pay attention at will?
Sufficient genetic deviation in the population should allow such people to exist. If these people are successful breeders relative to the ADD folks, then, Darwins law of evolution shall explain the rest for you.
Darwinism doesn't apply when the penalty for stupidity (i.e. lack of fitness) is less than death or at least, sterilization.
Darwinism in that classic sense hasn't applied to human beings for a very long time because of technologically improved production capabilities, social safety nets, and modern medicine. Please don't offer explanations based on things you clearly don't understand.
It's particularly shallow to offer a genetic explanation in a one-size-fits-all manner in response to my post about nurture and voluntary decision-making.
Nonsense.
There's a fair bit of evidence to show that ADD is heritable. There's some that suggests that it has been around a lot longer than just the modern period, but that in the past there was a greater variety of work that allowed people who aren't comfortable with a 9-5 office routine to still be useful and productive.
Decrease access to certain types of work and increase the number of children who don't get to grow up with adult males who can teach and show them ways of using AD in useful ways (it's Y linked) and you are going to see more people who are 'disordered'. The 'attention deficit' part contains a large chunk of people who are just not suited to focusing on a single task for eight hours at a time and/or who aren't primarily audio/visual learners and thinkers.
Perhaps calling your argument 'nonsense' is going too far - social change has resulted in more people exhibiting 'symptoms', but it's not some kind of adaption or reaction to the rate of change.
Here's the nonsense part. It's one thing to not be "primarily" an audio-visual learner. It's quite another to be so completely stuck in one and only one form of learning that you are completely dysfunctional in any other. It's a choice one makes and it's really that simple.
It's also another thing to say, "hmm, I have a definite weakness in this area and my very best possible move is to never, ever work on this weakness until, with time and patience, I become at least proficient at it even if I never become the best at it. Damn, that's far too dynamic and active and I really want my mind to be rigid and passive. No, now that I'm aware of this weakness, I'll just avoid it entirely and call it my disability. Then everyone can accommodate me or they're insensitive."
That so few have the guts, the sense, and the personal responsibility to understand this is precisely why we're gradually embracing fascism. Think about it.
ADD is the logical consequence of doing everything ever faster. It is not caused by TV as such, but rather by the way the world has changed.
We used to have the middle ages, where everything significant done was thought over probaby 50 years at the very least.
Then we went from "water + green sparkly stone heats up" to nuclear power plants (with a detour to the bomb) in about 15 years.
Then things accelerated and technology advanced, so cost decreased to the point where 10 year planning was enough to travel to the moon.
We went from 1 baud to ~150 Tb/sec with roughly the same amount of minds behind it, in about 40 years, rising exponentially year-over-year.
Now things are accelerated to the point that we plan for a few hours, a few weeks, maybe a few months for the really, really big projects.
And "strangely" this results in a short attention span... how is this a surprise ? How exactly do you think our brains would adapt ? It is physically impossible (in non-geological timespans) to get any smarter, so what was the brain to do ? The acceleration above happened in 500 years. The last 4 in less than 100 years. The last 2 in 30 years. ADD is only the beginning, it'll expand to the point that large amounts of people do not have sufficient attention span to get anything done at all, to the point where it can rightly be called a disease.
ADD is simply a result of how we've "chosen" to run the world (perhaps more accurately : how the dollar has chosen to run the world). It will get much worse than it is today. The shortening of attention spans and the lack of depth of thought is running along an exponential curve.
How then do you explain those who can deal with the pace of modern life, including those who love and work frequently with technology and information, yet retain the ability to concentrate and focus and pay attention at will?
I have an entirely different theory. It's not a matter of something new that has recently appeared. It's a matter of something old that is no longer valued as it once was. The heightened pace of modern life merely increases the contrast, makes the nature of the problem more evident and observable. Without that, you'd have to look for it much harder before you would see it.
It's simply a matter of discipline mixed with expectation and most people grossly sell themselves short on both counts. The lack of depth is absolutely caused by the decline of personal introspection and self-evaluation, things which naturally lead to an internal embracing of the good and rewarding kind of discipline. This isn't the kind of discipline externally imposed by some authority. It is a desire to appreciate and to invest in things that are valuable and significant.
If you buy a car, you take good care of it and learn a little bit about how it works so you know how to do that. If you buy a computer, you pay attention to experienced users, you learn from your mistakes, and you do a little reading here and there so you can get the most out of it. All of that has now been shoved into the exclusive domain of experts. All of that is "too hard", which is code for "requires a small investment of effort that repeatedly pays off forever afterwards".
All of that is not passive enough, not comfortable enough for those who want to be served more than they want to help themselves. That kind of creative, relaxing "me time" would also mean you don't judge your social standing by how hectic and burn-out your schedule is, you make time for things you value more than you say "I just don't have the time". In short, that would make you a nobody, because if you were really somebody, you'd be drowning in appointments instead of bothering with things like working on your character and learning new things.
The only real change has been to what you might call a value system. The pace at which a given value system is applied is completely irrelevant.
You're not being forced. You're certainly allowed to not consume content on any website that chooses to add facebook/twitter/google tracking... If you dislike it that much, contact the content provider and let them know. Websites add these since people sharing links on fb, etc.. can be a major source of incoming traffic. If they thought that the links might be a net loss in traffic, they'd be gone in a second. It just takes enough people to complain.
Never depend on the dumb masses to do the right thing, especially not when it would cause them even the slightest inconvenience. It will fail. It's like expecting water to flow uphill by itself. Marketers and charismatic leaders view them as little more than playthings for good reason: that is what they have chosen to be. The path of self-education and self-awareness was long ago deemed "too hard" by them. It makes them malleable addicts to any promise of convenience.
You should find an individual action you can take instead, like refusing to participate. Masses of people want some pointless shiny and are willing to cede information, and thus power, over their lives to have it? Okay. We tried to warn them. They didn't want to listen. Let them do it. I'm not their leader or their dictator, no matter how Faustian their bargain is. It seems most people want to learn things the hard way. At some point you have to respect their decision, however foolish. But I won't be joining them.
Driven by hunger, a fox tried to reach some grapes hanging high on the vine but was unable to, although he leaped with all his strength. As he went away, the fox remarked, 'Oh, you aren't even ripe yet! I don't need any sour grapes.' People who speak disparagingly of things that they cannot attain would do well to apply this story to themselves.
Any grapes the fox cannot reach must be sour. Any Internet forum in which you can't get your shit together must be populated by angry people.
That's your mistake. For catching it, you're very welcome.
the surgery to have the rod removed from your rectum is both affordable and covered under most insurance plans.
That's very mature of you. Nutria had it right.
You were merely ignorant before. Having received a correction and proving you are unable to handle that like an adult, you are now embracing willful stupidity.
It is blatantly obvious that saving face is more important to you than getting it right. The really amusing thing is, by being such a crybaby about it you are actually losing face much more than you otherwise would have.
You want to talk about levity? You're providing me with a lot of laughter right now. In fact, I'd wager you're the only one who doesn't find some humor in your desperate race to avoid admitting fault. Now wouldn't that be something, if the only one who takes this so seriously and wants so badly to bicker about it is the one who keeps demanding that everyone else lighten up. There are professional writers who struggle to so greatly portray irony.
I can tell the difference between when I need to be an asshole at work vs choosing to be an asshole to everyone I meet.
You're not having a discussion at work, no project depends on this, and one guy using the wrong word doesn't hurt anyone. Try and lighten up.
Replace the word patent with copyright and re-read the comment. does it still make sense? then absorb it and move on. Does it not make sense? then it isn't worth getting into.
http://lolpie.com/images/archive/content/1/3/lol-why-u-mad-tho-U9bbc.jpg
Correcting your mistake is not an asshole thing to do. You made a mistake. That's just a fact. It's not a matter of levity or gravity.
Being too proud to admit you should have gotten this right is an asshole thing to do. Just think for a second about why you're encountering so much resistance in this thread. Your lil' ego was bruised and apparently you don't handle that gracefully. You seem to be the only one who doesn't see that.
If "lightening up" is what you want so badly, start with yourself. "Lightening up" would mean you saying, from the very start, "hey thanks for catching my mistake" instead of crying about what a big meanie head everyone is. By demanding everyone else do what you failed to do, you're just a garden-variety hypocrite.
Or you can decide we're all just assholes and we're all conspiring to give you a hard time, that way you don't have to admit any flaw within yourself. You can protect your precious ego that way, at the cost of deluding yourself.
the fact that you turned this into a mac vs pc argument allows me to immediately dismiss this. I can only assume you knew how ridiculous this was, and thats why you posted AC
No, what's ridiculous is when the AC makes an analogy and you decide to fixate on the analogy itself in order to miss the point being made by it.
You must be desperate indeed to dismiss it if your rationale for doing so is that flimsy.
do you always act like you program? do you go around at parties, telling people they're walking around in a misty clouded universe that only you can see through? Does the effort of holding the stick in your rectum cause you to be this annoying all the time?
its people like you that need to lighten up.
You can't tell the difference between a party and a discussion about intellectual property law? Oh wait, you can but that would be inconvenient for you.
It's not a matter of "always acting like you program". It's a matter of having the slightest bit of discipline to handle the most basic things correctly. If you want a party analogy, it's like making sure you show up at the right address. What you're doing is showing up at the wrong address, knocking on the door, having it answered by a 90-year-old grandma, and handwaving away her objections that there is no party in her home and acting butthurt when she asks you to leave.
All of this is easier than just taking a correction and thanking the person for setting you straight?
It's not semantics, it's two completely different areas of law. It's as different as condemning Mac desktops as being insecure virus magnets when you actually meant Windows desktops, and then when someone calls you out on it, pleading "oh, semantics police!" as a valid defence.
Intellectual laziness always tries to assert its own validity.
It leads to strange behaviors. For example, the afflicted will usually prefer to make themselves look stupid by trying to convince you that an obvious glaring error is somehow not an error, rather than admit they made a mistake like human beings tend to do from time to time. I guess they think they're fooling anyone.
The sentiment seems to be, "how dare you expect me to know the most basic things about a subject prior to taking a position on it?! I mean really, who do you think you are?" In a way, it's amusing. In another way, it's really pathetic.
It takes time to accumulate 50-100 pounds of excess body fat. It is not something that can suddenly sneak up on you.
I have this sudden vision of a ball of adipose floating around trying to sneak it's way up on Victoria Beckham, hiding behind street lights every time she looks around, ducking into doorwarys, lurking behind parked cars, inching closer and closer.
Hah. That might be enough for me to believe "it's not my fault!" etc. Or I'd just say she needs better situational awareness.
1) Morbidly obese
2) Insanely religious
3) Loud and arrogant
4) Ignorant and barely literate
Man, you nailed it with those four. These are never discussed very openly but by repeated example they are promoted as virtues. The message is, you must really be something special if you can afford to be like this. I.e. "you'd be loud and arrogant too, if only you had the confidence", as though you could not be confident and assertive without needlessly imposing on others. I think a whole generation of never allowing kids to feel real defeat and always telling them how special they are to give them false self-esteem has made them a bunch of insecure idiots who constantly feel a need to compensate with a lot of false bravado.
The obesity one is especially noticable. Personally, I hardly view it as a physical issue. I see it as a mental disease. A healthy, sound mind would do something about it during its early stages and would never even make the transition from "overweight" to "obese", let alone from "obese" to "morbidly obese". It takes time to accumulate 50-100 pounds of excess body fat. It is not something that can suddenly sneak up on you.
It's so basic, there are only two things to understand: 1) if you eat more calories than you burn you will gain weight and 2) only an insane person practices the same habits over and over and expects a different result. If what you're doing now makes you gain weight, you can expect to continue gaining weight if you don't change. How much simpler could it get? If the suggestion that you as an adult person should be able to comprehend and practice simple things offends you, I am sure you can find a nice big emotional bucket of comfort food to use like a drug to get your few minutes' relief.
The other items you gave better describe the US government. Most of the regular folk aren't this way. They've just had the wool pulled over their eyes for entire generations and have come to believe it is merely the way of things.
I'm not saying that abuses of power, especially within the police force, don't happen in other countries, but you're clearly looking at this through USA-tinted glasses, no?
Not all police the world over are as nervous and trigger-happy as panicked, adversarial American cops. Most police force's in Europe, and most of the police men and women that work within them are generally "good eggs", who (quite ironically) uphold the American police's "to protect and serve" philosophy far better than the vast majority of their American counterparts.
American cops weren't always so trigger-happy and didn't always view the citizens as opportunities to increase their arrest counts. It took some time for them to become this way. It took a lot of complacency for them to become this way.
If you don't want to learn from those who live in a country where it started out well and became as you describe, who understand how and why it became that way, so be it. You can just plug up your ears and repeat in a loud voice "IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE EVER".
But they also have, or at least had, a police that could be trusted.
There is no such thing. Good, honest police won't stay that way if you become complacent. Far less power than what they have is enough to bring out the worst in people. Then there's the way that police tend to cover for each other, making otherwise honest cops part of the problem when they look the other way at their collegues' abuses of authority. It is sometimes called the "blue wall of silence". The citizens have a duty to call attention to all abuses and demand that they be remedied. No one else is going to do that. No one else has a stronger interest in seeing that this is done.
Have you ever heard of an employer that never audits the quality of employees' work in some way? Do they ever say "well you've always been a good employee so we'll stop caring about the work you do now"? The stakes are much, much higher when you are dealing with a branch of government which has a legal monopoly on the use of force.
I'm tired of all the glorification of cops and their jobs and authority backed by force, in general. There's nothing glamorous or admirable about it. The only reason we even have governments and police is because it's slightly better than not having them. They are both necessary evils.
or to quote the CEO mark zuckerberg, it makes them "dumb fucks"
Wow. That's the closest thing to a useful, relevant contribution I have ever seen you make. I shall refer to you as "Number 412" to distinguish you from all the other sockpuppet accounts, at least until such time as they follow your example and post something that isn't completely worthless.
Number 412, you earned it. Yes, you are but one insignificant clone sockpuppet account of many insignificant clone sockpuppet accounts, but you stand out above all the others. You give slight credibility to the idea that the owner of these clone sockpuppet accounts may yet achieve a semblance of mental health.
Yes yes, why do you cower, you're a worthless feeb, etc etc. Just take a damned compliment.
Well, djbdns is dead, so what else is left of any worth?
I've been really happy with Unbound. Prior to that, I used MaraDNS until I found that Unbound was snappier from the perspective of my Web browser not having to wait as long for hostname resolution.
My own needs are rather modest. It is possible there is some killer feature you absolutely must have that neither of those supports. If not, I think you'd like them.
Just stop. It's a Slashdot comment, not a term paper, and edited accordingly.
You waste my time.
The message? "You should value your own independent, individual, personal thoughts and opinions that you share voluntarily much, much less than the things you are forced by authority to write in order to jump through some hoops to earn some credential."
Yeah, that's sane and you'd be a fool to question it. Nothing is worth any effort, it is never worthwhile to take an extra second to get it right, you should never show anything this kind of respect (particularly not yourself and your own works), and everything should be as sloppy as permissible. Some authority figure like a professor holding some kind of gun to your head like denial of a degree is the only good reason to ever go the extra mile for anything. Oh, and it's normal to feel empty and unfulfilled because nothing has any intrinsic value; everything is just a means to an end including the ends themselves.
If anyone disagrees with this, you should advocate sloppiness instead of simply telling him that his message would be more effective if he were less of a jerk. It's all-or-nothing, baby, and you're either with us or against us.
Obviously not. I try to avoid Firefox, and I don't need the functionality of NoScript in my browser of choice because most of it is built-in.
Fair enough, but can you see why that wouldn't put you in a good position to form opinions about it?
Since plugin blocking was added after the initial release, the initial intention (and name) was in fact blocking Javascript. From the changelog, it appears that plugin blocking was added in 1.1.
The initial release of Microsoft Windows was a graphical shell that ran on top of DOS. So that means Windows 7 is still based on 16-bit code, right? Because we all know, nothing ever grows or expands or evolves beyond its initial origins.
I wouldn't know, I'm not a lawyer, I just appreciate the work of some of them.
See there I did make an assumption and you rightly called me on it. I don't mind. Goose, gander, and all of that. Of course I could try to weasel out of that and say something like "could you appreciate the way they construct and deconstruct lines of reasoning too?" but that'd be less honest.
NoInternet blocks everything except those from local storage.
Expecting novice users to understand and use NoScript is not tenable.
To expect them to automatically understand it "out of the box" as though their spirit guide slipped the knowledge into their minds while they slept, no that is not tenable. The expectation is that there will be a short period of adjustment that any literate adult of below-average or higher intelligence should be able to handle.
What's REALLY not tenable and is accumulating untold amounts of cost and damage, is this un-negotiated, unwritten, often unspoken default assumption that "novice" should be a permanent state and not one that is soon outgrown with acquired experience. Naturally the implication is that someone who was paying attention, who maybe read a FAQ or a manual once in a while, should bear both his own burdens and those of a permanent novice. How nice to be so entitled to another's efforts, to scream and cry whenever same is denied. Heaven forbid the novice ever be told to do anything different. That would make you a big meanie.
I suppose the "right" to never be challenged by anything is taking its place next to the "right" to never be offended by anyone.
Slashdot is a perfect example, it's simply not usable with javascript enabled.
So how do you explain all of the people, like myself, who use Slashdot with Javascript enabled? Your credibility is starting to ring a bit hollow. A lack of Javascript is not a security panacea, not by a long shot. Plugins are the problem, not scripting. Scripting only matters if you're defending against a script injection attack. It doesn't do squat if the server was hacked and the page has an iframe pointing to a PDF, Java applet, or Flash movie, and it does even less against a site that is simply malicious.
Did you know: NoScript blocks plugins, movies, and applets too? You would have known that, if you were actually in a good position to form an opinion about it. There's a reason it is "NoScript" not "NoJavaScript". Basically NoScript means you get just the basic page layout with nothing "active" like movies or scripts unless you explicitly choose to enable them on a case-by-case basis. To reiterate, you should really understand the most basic functions of NoScript if you're going to comment on it.
Also, I don't recall anyone saying anything was a panacea. Since no one made this claim, what purpose does it serve to refute it? There is no security panacea anywhere. Therefore, to say "X is not a security panacea" is a statement of the obvious. There are no 90-foot purple newts either, by the way. Just like your parroting someone else who used the phrase "ring hollow", apparently as a sort of mockery, this is a sign of a content-free post based on emotion.
They do still teach lawyers how to construct an argument, right?
Slashdot Mirror
You seem obsessed. I made a mistake. Most people would just move on. You're making a mistake, in addition to the original. You're not moving on. At this point, you're just an object lesson for other slashdot readers.
With that, you saw what I was trying to bring out into the open. You saw it for yourself.
How then do you explain those who can deal with the pace of modern life, including those who love and work frequently with technology and information, yet retain the ability to concentrate and focus and pay attention at will?
It's an illusion that you can do those things as well as you think you can.
http://www.physorg.com/news170349575.html
"People who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their memory or switch from one job to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time, a group of Stanford researchers has found."
I wasn't talking about multitasking or "several streams". I was talking about being able to focus and concentrate on a single thing indefinitely, i.e. until you are actually done with it. That's something the ADD crowd cannot do. Many of them wouldn't last one minute.
The next time you watch a news program, pay close attention to how often they change (flash) scenes. They suddenly switch scenes and put something else on the screen several times a minute, usually as frequently as every 10-20 seconds. They do this to accommodate the ADD types. It makes them feel comfortable and engaged. This has been the case for some time now.
When a couple only produce one child and this child only has one child in coupling with another only child, the relative amount of their DNA in the gene pool diminishes. Compared this to their neighbour, who produces three offspring every generation. It's simple enough to create a proof by induction that you have either not understood what I wrote, or, that you have no idea what you are talking about... please refrain from posting rubbish.
To suggest that this is due to "nature running its course", based on competition, with the end of making the objectively fittest thrive as implied by Darwinism and any notion of natural selection, and not at all influenced or if you will, perverted, by the flaws in those artificial constructs we call societies, is simply absurd.
Thus the notion of who breeds more eventually becomes who makes poorer decisions. You wind up with situations where the smart, careful, responsible, prudent people who take the time to attain an education, establish a career, form a healthy marriage, own a home, and then have only the children they can financially and emotionally afford to properly raise are disadvantaged. Instead of quality, it becomes a race for quantity. So those who recklessly have sex without birth control when they are absolutely not ready to have a baby multiply much more than those who do not.
Unless you're a big subscriber to that most puerile of justifications, known as "might makes right", you have to notice something there is not as it would naturally be, if there were a struggle for survival as Darwinism assumes. That means we are talking about something other than Darwinism. Having established that, let's recognize it and move on to something that might work. No need to play word games with what "Darwinism" means, like some lawyer, to force the square peg into a round hole because it means you get your way.
The hinge of this whole turn you've decided was best for the thread is the notion of "fitness" and what that means. You've decided to twist it to mean "whatever happens to be common" with no sign of an appreciation of how and why it became common. Then you offer this "breeding contest" type of response to my comment which was about personal decision-making and willingness to assume responsibility, something that is "nurture" and not "nature" if you insist on dividing the two.
So alright, tell me I don't understand what you did there. If you think I'm personally insulting you by asking you not to post about what you do not understand, then okay, repeat my own format to mock me, only substitute "rubbish" for "things you clearly don't understand" like a variable in a formula. You really want to prove my point for me about shallow responses to things, don't you?
Sufficient genetic deviation in the population should allow such people to exist. If these people are successful breeders relative to the ADD folks, then, Darwins law of evolution shall explain the rest for you.
Darwinism doesn't apply when the penalty for stupidity (i.e. lack of fitness) is less than death or at least, sterilization.
Darwinism in that classic sense hasn't applied to human beings for a very long time because of technologically improved production capabilities, social safety nets, and modern medicine. Please don't offer explanations based on things you clearly don't understand.
It's particularly shallow to offer a genetic explanation in a one-size-fits-all manner in response to my post about nurture and voluntary decision-making.
Nonsense. There's a fair bit of evidence to show that ADD is heritable. There's some that suggests that it has been around a lot longer than just the modern period, but that in the past there was a greater variety of work that allowed people who aren't comfortable with a 9-5 office routine to still be useful and productive. Decrease access to certain types of work and increase the number of children who don't get to grow up with adult males who can teach and show them ways of using AD in useful ways (it's Y linked) and you are going to see more people who are 'disordered'. The 'attention deficit' part contains a large chunk of people who are just not suited to focusing on a single task for eight hours at a time and/or who aren't primarily audio/visual learners and thinkers. Perhaps calling your argument 'nonsense' is going too far - social change has resulted in more people exhibiting 'symptoms', but it's not some kind of adaption or reaction to the rate of change.
Here's the nonsense part. It's one thing to not be "primarily" an audio-visual learner. It's quite another to be so completely stuck in one and only one form of learning that you are completely dysfunctional in any other. It's a choice one makes and it's really that simple.
It's also another thing to say, "hmm, I have a definite weakness in this area and my very best possible move is to never, ever work on this weakness until, with time and patience, I become at least proficient at it even if I never become the best at it. Damn, that's far too dynamic and active and I really want my mind to be rigid and passive. No, now that I'm aware of this weakness, I'll just avoid it entirely and call it my disability. Then everyone can accommodate me or they're insensitive."
That so few have the guts, the sense, and the personal responsibility to understand this is precisely why we're gradually embracing fascism. Think about it.
ADD is the logical consequence of doing everything ever faster. It is not caused by TV as such, but rather by the way the world has changed.
We used to have the middle ages, where everything significant done was thought over probaby 50 years at the very least. Then we went from "water + green sparkly stone heats up" to nuclear power plants (with a detour to the bomb) in about 15 years. Then things accelerated and technology advanced, so cost decreased to the point where 10 year planning was enough to travel to the moon. We went from 1 baud to ~150 Tb/sec with roughly the same amount of minds behind it, in about 40 years, rising exponentially year-over-year. Now things are accelerated to the point that we plan for a few hours, a few weeks, maybe a few months for the really, really big projects.
And "strangely" this results in a short attention span ... how is this a surprise ? How exactly do you think our brains would adapt ? It is physically impossible (in non-geological timespans) to get any smarter, so what was the brain to do ? The acceleration above happened in 500 years. The last 4 in less than 100 years. The last 2 in 30 years. ADD is only the beginning, it'll expand to the point that large amounts of people do not have sufficient attention span to get anything done at all, to the point where it can rightly be called a disease.
ADD is simply a result of how we've "chosen" to run the world (perhaps more accurately : how the dollar has chosen to run the world). It will get much worse than it is today. The shortening of attention spans and the lack of depth of thought is running along an exponential curve.
How then do you explain those who can deal with the pace of modern life, including those who love and work frequently with technology and information, yet retain the ability to concentrate and focus and pay attention at will?
I have an entirely different theory. It's not a matter of something new that has recently appeared. It's a matter of something old that is no longer valued as it once was. The heightened pace of modern life merely increases the contrast, makes the nature of the problem more evident and observable. Without that, you'd have to look for it much harder before you would see it.
It's simply a matter of discipline mixed with expectation and most people grossly sell themselves short on both counts. The lack of depth is absolutely caused by the decline of personal introspection and self-evaluation, things which naturally lead to an internal embracing of the good and rewarding kind of discipline. This isn't the kind of discipline externally imposed by some authority. It is a desire to appreciate and to invest in things that are valuable and significant.
If you buy a car, you take good care of it and learn a little bit about how it works so you know how to do that. If you buy a computer, you pay attention to experienced users, you learn from your mistakes, and you do a little reading here and there so you can get the most out of it. All of that has now been shoved into the exclusive domain of experts. All of that is "too hard", which is code for "requires a small investment of effort that repeatedly pays off forever afterwards".
All of that is not passive enough, not comfortable enough for those who want to be served more than they want to help themselves. That kind of creative, relaxing "me time" would also mean you don't judge your social standing by how hectic and burn-out your schedule is, you make time for things you value more than you say "I just don't have the time". In short, that would make you a nobody, because if you were really somebody, you'd be drowning in appointments instead of bothering with things like working on your character and learning new things.
The only real change has been to what you might call a value system. The pace at which a given value system is applied is completely irrelevant.
You're not being forced. You're certainly allowed to not consume content on any website that chooses to add facebook/twitter/google tracking... If you dislike it that much, contact the content provider and let them know. Websites add these since people sharing links on fb, etc.. can be a major source of incoming traffic. If they thought that the links might be a net loss in traffic, they'd be gone in a second. It just takes enough people to complain.
Never depend on the dumb masses to do the right thing, especially not when it would cause them even the slightest inconvenience. It will fail. It's like expecting water to flow uphill by itself. Marketers and charismatic leaders view them as little more than playthings for good reason: that is what they have chosen to be. The path of self-education and self-awareness was long ago deemed "too hard" by them. It makes them malleable addicts to any promise of convenience.
You should find an individual action you can take instead, like refusing to participate. Masses of people want some pointless shiny and are willing to cede information, and thus power, over their lives to have it? Okay. We tried to warn them. They didn't want to listen. Let them do it. I'm not their leader or their dictator, no matter how Faustian their bargain is. It seems most people want to learn things the hard way. At some point you have to respect their decision, however foolish. But I won't be joining them.
Driven by hunger, a fox tried to reach some grapes hanging high on the vine but was unable to, although he leaped with all his strength. As he went away, the fox remarked, 'Oh, you aren't even ripe yet! I don't need any sour grapes.' People who speak disparagingly of things that they cannot attain would do well to apply this story to themselves.
Any grapes the fox cannot reach must be sour. Any Internet forum in which you can't get your shit together must be populated by angry people.
That's your mistake. For catching it, you're very welcome.
Just a quick question out of ignorance, how does the stardate communicate relative time frames?
Very carefully.
the surgery to have the rod removed from your rectum is both affordable and covered under most insurance plans.
That's very mature of you. Nutria had it right.
You were merely ignorant before. Having received a correction and proving you are unable to handle that like an adult, you are now embracing willful stupidity.
It is blatantly obvious that saving face is more important to you than getting it right. The really amusing thing is, by being such a crybaby about it you are actually losing face much more than you otherwise would have.
You want to talk about levity? You're providing me with a lot of laughter right now. In fact, I'd wager you're the only one who doesn't find some humor in your desperate race to avoid admitting fault. Now wouldn't that be something, if the only one who takes this so seriously and wants so badly to bicker about it is the one who keeps demanding that everyone else lighten up. There are professional writers who struggle to so greatly portray irony.
I can tell the difference between when I need to be an asshole at work vs choosing to be an asshole to everyone I meet. You're not having a discussion at work, no project depends on this, and one guy using the wrong word doesn't hurt anyone. Try and lighten up. Replace the word patent with copyright and re-read the comment. does it still make sense? then absorb it and move on. Does it not make sense? then it isn't worth getting into. http://lolpie.com/images/archive/content/1/3/lol-why-u-mad-tho-U9bbc.jpg
Correcting your mistake is not an asshole thing to do. You made a mistake. That's just a fact. It's not a matter of levity or gravity.
Being too proud to admit you should have gotten this right is an asshole thing to do. Just think for a second about why you're encountering so much resistance in this thread. Your lil' ego was bruised and apparently you don't handle that gracefully. You seem to be the only one who doesn't see that.
If "lightening up" is what you want so badly, start with yourself. "Lightening up" would mean you saying, from the very start, "hey thanks for catching my mistake" instead of crying about what a big meanie head everyone is. By demanding everyone else do what you failed to do, you're just a garden-variety hypocrite.
Or you can decide we're all just assholes and we're all conspiring to give you a hard time, that way you don't have to admit any flaw within yourself. You can protect your precious ego that way, at the cost of deluding yourself.
the fact that you turned this into a mac vs pc argument allows me to immediately dismiss this. I can only assume you knew how ridiculous this was, and thats why you posted AC
No, what's ridiculous is when the AC makes an analogy and you decide to fixate on the analogy itself in order to miss the point being made by it.
You must be desperate indeed to dismiss it if your rationale for doing so is that flimsy.
do you always act like you program? do you go around at parties, telling people they're walking around in a misty clouded universe that only you can see through? Does the effort of holding the stick in your rectum cause you to be this annoying all the time? its people like you that need to lighten up.
You can't tell the difference between a party and a discussion about intellectual property law? Oh wait, you can but that would be inconvenient for you.
It's not a matter of "always acting like you program". It's a matter of having the slightest bit of discipline to handle the most basic things correctly. If you want a party analogy, it's like making sure you show up at the right address. What you're doing is showing up at the wrong address, knocking on the door, having it answered by a 90-year-old grandma, and handwaving away her objections that there is no party in her home and acting butthurt when she asks you to leave.
All of this is easier than just taking a correction and thanking the person for setting you straight?
It's not semantics, it's two completely different areas of law. It's as different as condemning Mac desktops as being insecure virus magnets when you actually meant Windows desktops, and then when someone calls you out on it, pleading "oh, semantics police!" as a valid defence.
Intellectual laziness always tries to assert its own validity.
It leads to strange behaviors. For example, the afflicted will usually prefer to make themselves look stupid by trying to convince you that an obvious glaring error is somehow not an error, rather than admit they made a mistake like human beings tend to do from time to time. I guess they think they're fooling anyone.
The sentiment seems to be, "how dare you expect me to know the most basic things about a subject prior to taking a position on it?! I mean really, who do you think you are?" In a way, it's amusing. In another way, it's really pathetic.
I have this sudden vision of a ball of adipose floating around trying to sneak it's way up on Victoria Beckham, hiding behind street lights every time she looks around, ducking into doorwarys, lurking behind parked cars, inching closer and closer.
Hah. That might be enough for me to believe "it's not my fault!" etc. Or I'd just say she needs better situational awareness.
1) Morbidly obese
2) Insanely religious
3) Loud and arrogant
4) Ignorant and barely literate
Man, you nailed it with those four. These are never discussed very openly but by repeated example they are promoted as virtues. The message is, you must really be something special if you can afford to be like this. I.e. "you'd be loud and arrogant too, if only you had the confidence", as though you could not be confident and assertive without needlessly imposing on others. I think a whole generation of never allowing kids to feel real defeat and always telling them how special they are to give them false self-esteem has made them a bunch of insecure idiots who constantly feel a need to compensate with a lot of false bravado.
The obesity one is especially noticable. Personally, I hardly view it as a physical issue. I see it as a mental disease. A healthy, sound mind would do something about it during its early stages and would never even make the transition from "overweight" to "obese", let alone from "obese" to "morbidly obese". It takes time to accumulate 50-100 pounds of excess body fat. It is not something that can suddenly sneak up on you.
It's so basic, there are only two things to understand: 1) if you eat more calories than you burn you will gain weight and 2) only an insane person practices the same habits over and over and expects a different result. If what you're doing now makes you gain weight, you can expect to continue gaining weight if you don't change. How much simpler could it get? If the suggestion that you as an adult person should be able to comprehend and practice simple things offends you, I am sure you can find a nice big emotional bucket of comfort food to use like a drug to get your few minutes' relief.
The other items you gave better describe the US government. Most of the regular folk aren't this way. They've just had the wool pulled over their eyes for entire generations and have come to believe it is merely the way of things.
I'm not saying that abuses of power, especially within the police force, don't happen in other countries, but you're clearly looking at this through USA-tinted glasses, no? Not all police the world over are as nervous and trigger-happy as panicked, adversarial American cops. Most police force's in Europe, and most of the police men and women that work within them are generally "good eggs", who (quite ironically) uphold the American police's "to protect and serve" philosophy far better than the vast majority of their American counterparts.
American cops weren't always so trigger-happy and didn't always view the citizens as opportunities to increase their arrest counts. It took some time for them to become this way. It took a lot of complacency for them to become this way.
If you don't want to learn from those who live in a country where it started out well and became as you describe, who understand how and why it became that way, so be it. You can just plug up your ears and repeat in a loud voice "IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE EVER".
There is no such thing. Good, honest police won't stay that way if you become complacent. Far less power than what they have is enough to bring out the worst in people. Then there's the way that police tend to cover for each other, making otherwise honest cops part of the problem when they look the other way at their collegues' abuses of authority. It is sometimes called the "blue wall of silence". The citizens have a duty to call attention to all abuses and demand that they be remedied. No one else is going to do that. No one else has a stronger interest in seeing that this is done.
Have you ever heard of an employer that never audits the quality of employees' work in some way? Do they ever say "well you've always been a good employee so we'll stop caring about the work you do now"? The stakes are much, much higher when you are dealing with a branch of government which has a legal monopoly on the use of force.
I'm tired of all the glorification of cops and their jobs and authority backed by force, in general. There's nothing glamorous or admirable about it. The only reason we even have governments and police is because it's slightly better than not having them. They are both necessary evils.
or to quote the CEO mark zuckerberg, it makes them "dumb fucks"
Wow. That's the closest thing to a useful, relevant contribution I have ever seen you make. I shall refer to you as "Number 412" to distinguish you from all the other sockpuppet accounts, at least until such time as they follow your example and post something that isn't completely worthless.
Number 412, you earned it. Yes, you are but one insignificant clone sockpuppet account of many insignificant clone sockpuppet accounts, but you stand out above all the others. You give slight credibility to the idea that the owner of these clone sockpuppet accounts may yet achieve a semblance of mental health.
Yes yes, why do you cower, you're a worthless feeb, etc etc. Just take a damned compliment.
Thank you for putting my thoughts into words.
They were worthy of expression. It seemed right for someone to articulate the difference between nit-picking and a genuine love of excellence.
Well, djbdns is dead, so what else is left of any worth?
I've been really happy with Unbound. Prior to that, I used MaraDNS until I found that Unbound was snappier from the perspective of my Web browser not having to wait as long for hostname resolution.
My own needs are rather modest. It is possible there is some killer feature you absolutely must have that neither of those supports. If not, I think you'd like them.
Just stop. It's a Slashdot comment, not a term paper, and edited accordingly.
You waste my time.
The message? "You should value your own independent, individual, personal thoughts and opinions that you share voluntarily much, much less than the things you are forced by authority to write in order to jump through some hoops to earn some credential."
Yeah, that's sane and you'd be a fool to question it. Nothing is worth any effort, it is never worthwhile to take an extra second to get it right, you should never show anything this kind of respect (particularly not yourself and your own works), and everything should be as sloppy as permissible. Some authority figure like a professor holding some kind of gun to your head like denial of a degree is the only good reason to ever go the extra mile for anything. Oh, and it's normal to feel empty and unfulfilled because nothing has any intrinsic value; everything is just a means to an end including the ends themselves.
If anyone disagrees with this, you should advocate sloppiness instead of simply telling him that his message would be more effective if he were less of a jerk. It's all-or-nothing, baby, and you're either with us or against us.
Obviously not. I try to avoid Firefox, and I don't need the functionality of NoScript in my browser of choice because most of it is built-in.
Fair enough, but can you see why that wouldn't put you in a good position to form opinions about it?
Since plugin blocking was added after the initial release, the initial intention (and name) was in fact blocking Javascript. From the changelog, it appears that plugin blocking was added in 1.1.
The initial release of Microsoft Windows was a graphical shell that ran on top of DOS. So that means Windows 7 is still based on 16-bit code, right? Because we all know, nothing ever grows or expands or evolves beyond its initial origins.
I wouldn't know, I'm not a lawyer, I just appreciate the work of some of them.
See there I did make an assumption and you rightly called me on it. I don't mind. Goose, gander, and all of that. Of course I could try to weasel out of that and say something like "could you appreciate the way they construct and deconstruct lines of reasoning too?" but that'd be less honest.
NoInternet blocks everything except those from local storage.
Expecting novice users to understand and use NoScript is not tenable.
To expect them to automatically understand it "out of the box" as though their spirit guide slipped the knowledge into their minds while they slept, no that is not tenable. The expectation is that there will be a short period of adjustment that any literate adult of below-average or higher intelligence should be able to handle.
What's REALLY not tenable and is accumulating untold amounts of cost and damage, is this un-negotiated, unwritten, often unspoken default assumption that "novice" should be a permanent state and not one that is soon outgrown with acquired experience. Naturally the implication is that someone who was paying attention, who maybe read a FAQ or a manual once in a while, should bear both his own burdens and those of a permanent novice. How nice to be so entitled to another's efforts, to scream and cry whenever same is denied. Heaven forbid the novice ever be told to do anything different. That would make you a big meanie.
I suppose the "right" to never be challenged by anything is taking its place next to the "right" to never be offended by anyone.
Slashdot is a perfect example, it's simply not usable with javascript enabled.
So how do you explain all of the people, like myself, who use Slashdot with Javascript enabled? Your credibility is starting to ring a bit hollow. A lack of Javascript is not a security panacea, not by a long shot. Plugins are the problem, not scripting. Scripting only matters if you're defending against a script injection attack. It doesn't do squat if the server was hacked and the page has an iframe pointing to a PDF, Java applet, or Flash movie, and it does even less against a site that is simply malicious.
Did you know: NoScript blocks plugins, movies, and applets too? You would have known that, if you were actually in a good position to form an opinion about it. There's a reason it is "NoScript" not "NoJavaScript". Basically NoScript means you get just the basic page layout with nothing "active" like movies or scripts unless you explicitly choose to enable them on a case-by-case basis. To reiterate, you should really understand the most basic functions of NoScript if you're going to comment on it.
Also, I don't recall anyone saying anything was a panacea. Since no one made this claim, what purpose does it serve to refute it? There is no security panacea anywhere. Therefore, to say "X is not a security panacea" is a statement of the obvious. There are no 90-foot purple newts either, by the way. Just like your parroting someone else who used the phrase "ring hollow", apparently as a sort of mockery, this is a sign of a content-free post based on emotion.
They do still teach lawyers how to construct an argument, right?