Yes, when they say "competent", they're talking about competence in a particular area. So people who are bad navigators are not very effective at judging who is a good navigator; people who are truly socially incompetent are not good at identifying social competence.
They (or at least some of them) were also opposed to political parties in general, and specifically wanted to avoid the rise of a two-party system. They also feared corporations and the consolidation of power they they represented. The general strategy of the founders of the US was to break up power into the smallest possible chunks so that no one person or group could make things happen without getting numerous other groups to agree and cooperate.
A better question is, why does anybody think Santorum or Obama, let alone a 3rd world dictator, is any smarter than anybody else?
Well you're really setting up for an uncomfortable flame-war here. Comparing Santorum to Obama to 3rd world dictators is bound to put someone's nose out of joint. But anyway, whether they're "smart" or "smarter than anybody else" are rather abstract terms. I'm sure, speaking loosely, that they're "smarter than anybody else". If they're not smarter than anybody else, i.e. they're not smarter than a single other person, then that would be shocking. That aside, what we're talking about is not abstract "smartness", but whether they are capable and competent in particular situations. Asking whether Santorum is "smart" isn't really the question. The question is, how well do people generally do when evaluating whether Santorum would make a good president.
Most people manage most of the rest of their lives just fine, why should politics be any different?
Are they really? I haven't met most people, but I have met a lot of people who are not managing their own lives in a happy and productive way.
Reiligion was invented to try and keep people honest.
I don't believe things are quite that clear. Certainly some religious parables are formulated in order to teach a moral lesson, and some religious laws were written to encourage good behavior. However, we don't have clear historic records of the formulations of early religions, and the things that I've read that attempt to analyze why religions were founded thousands of years ago (or longer) don't really support the idea that they were rational attempts to keep people honest.
This is definitely worth considering. Although self-control and discipline are practiced skills, research has indicated that we each have limits on our self-control. The people who are very good at it are actually good at avoiding situations where they are being frequently tempted.
My experience is personal and anecdotal, but here goes:
I bought an iPad when the first model was released, with the intention of using it to read ebooks. I'm a very digital-oriented person, and I have loads of books but I don't especially like clutter. After a few months, I had gotten rid of my iPad because I didn't like it for reading. There were a myriad of reasons.
For one, as the summary says, I kept getting tempted to do other things. I had games on my iPad, a web browser, and music. I had email beeping at me on a regular basis. I would find myself watching Netflix when I had intended to sit down and read. I found the experience unpleasant and tense, which is generally the opposite of my experience reading.
Just recently, someone gave me an iPad 2, and I had been carrying around a big thick book, so I decided to give it another try. I didn't sync my music library to the device, and I turned off email notifications. I changed the theme to the "sepia" colors instead of the default bright-white theme, and set iBook to "full screen', which turns off the fake-book skin. For some reason, for me, those visual changes made it much more pleasant to read. Also, the iPad 2 is significantly faster and more responsive than my original iPad was. I now use the iPad almost exclusively for reading books and news articles, and I'm getting used to it.
So manly the advantages at this point is that I don't have to carry around books (the iPad is actually lighter than many books that I read), and I can readily buy and download books without going to the store. Also, importantly, I can get public domain books for free. Given my commute and my desire to avoid clutter in my apartment, these are significant advantages. It's also nice to have a web browser that I can take with me without bringing a full computer.
On the other hand, I do miss books. I like the smell of them and the tactile experience. The big problem that I have is that I will miss the ability to lend or gift books to people. Still, overall, I'm getting used to it. I agree to some extent with the idea that e-ink displays are better for reading, but the ability to have a real full-color web browser on the same device makes it worth the sacrifice. Still, my biggest complaint is theoretical-- the inability to lend/share books, and the fear that if I build a nice digital library, I may one day be denied access to that library because of DRM.
Well I don't entirely agree with you. I think you're on the right track to point out that people do have tendencies toward order and honesty, but I think that dishonesty and misdirection is a part of our nature as well. Human nature is not all self-interest and viciousness, but it's not all selflessness and virtue either. We do, at times, put others before ourselves. We do appreciate an orderly and predictable society. However, there will always be people who are seeking their own advantage and are willing to mislead others to achieve it. None of us are free from these impulses.
Yes, and I also don't mean "debate" in the sense of "went in front of a crowd and tried to sell their point of view". I mean that they sat in a room and argued with each other, published philosophical arguments one way or the other, and eventually reached a compromise that many of them didn't entirely agree with.
Well research is sometimes about verifying things that we all believe, and sometimes the attempt at verification reveals that we were all wrong. Aside from that, research sometimes is aimed at providing specific details or answering questions about something that we already know.
So incompetent people can't judge the competence of others, but how bad of a job do they do? What factors throw off their judgment? What might be done to allow them to do a better job at assessing competence? These are all places where research might provide better answers than guesses.
A few thousand years ago, philosophers were already indicating that the inherent problem with Democracy was that the majority of people were never going to be smart/wise/informed enough to make appropriate decisions. The founders of the United States also identified this as a problem, and had many debates about how to mitigate the dangers.
The simplest/shortest answer to this question is: Befriend your IT support people and find out what they'll let you get away with. There's no need to be too secretive about it. If they don't want you to use your laptop for the personal usage you'd like, find out if they object to using a LiveCD/LiveUSB. They may even be willing to hook you up with something. As an IT person, I've even bent the rules here and there for people who were nice enough to ask politely.
If they absolutely do not want to permit your intended usage under any circumstances, then don't try to subvert their security. Too many IT disasters happen when people try to subvert IT policies, even innocently. Sometimes there are important business or technical implications of those policies that you don't know about.
Which compatibility layer are you talking about? Vavle has been developing/compiling games for the Mac natively. There is WINE, but it's still far from perfect.
My only concern for this is that Steam (one of the major forces in PC gaming) moving this direction will discourage Desktop PC game development.
That doesn't seem like a sensible concern to me. These rumors indicate that the Steam Box will essentially be a normal Windows desktop PC, so it's more likely to encourage development for desktop PCs. Now, if this plan is successful, it may discourage developers from optimizing their games for bleeding-edge systems, and instead target the Steam Box specs. The rumors indicate they expect an upgrade cycle of 4 years or so, which isn't far outside of what most game developers do anyway. Also, the way this is structured, it shouldn't be hard to set new specs (since its all based on commodity hardware), so there's no reason why new specs should be delayed. What I mean is, with the XBox and Playstation, they need to develop the whole hardware/software platform. With the Steam Box, Valve can just choose an appropriate model from Dell or HP (or whomever) and make that the new reference model.
So instead of trivially adapting your existing PC for display on a Big-screen, you feel compelled to shell out extra dollars for a piece of hardware, which is essentially another redundant PC, that you don't even need?
Well no, if you already have a good gaming rig, then you don't need to buy a new one. I don't think Valve is asking you to, either. There are hints, at least, that this will be more a set of standardized specs than a particular hardware console. As I said, I think what Valve is really doing is setting a standard set of requirements for gaming PCs. So in this scheme, you can buy a gaming PC that's "Steambox certified" (or whatever), and then in the Steam store, you'll be able to see that games are designed to run on all "Steambox certified" hardware.
It won't prevent you from running the same games on another computer, but it will make it so developers have a consistent hardware platform to target, and so gamers basically won't need to think about system requirements for each game. If games are developed/optimized for a 2012 Steambox and you have a 2012 model Steambox, then you know that it'll play well.
My understanding of the story is that essentially this will be a Windows computer with Steam installed. There are two major developments that this signals:
First, that Valve plans to start issuing a sort of standard system requirement for game developers to target, which is one of the benefits of consoles right now. Developers know what platform they're developing for when they develop a PS3 game, and when I buy a PS3 game I know it'll play on my PS3. If all Steam Boxes have the same system requirements, then you get the same benefit.
The other implication is that Valve must be developing Steam software suitable for use on a big screen tv. This is going to mean menu systems with large fonts that can be navigated with a remote, as well have controller/remote hardware to use with it.
I'm pretty optimistic about this. I've been ranting for years now about how Valve should develop a console.
I'm pretty sure it was to deflect high-energy particles from colliding with the ship. As in, space isn't empty, and you're traveling at immense speeds, so you're bound to collide with something that will kill you unless you deflect everything.
Also, as hard as it may be to believe if you don't remember the time, most people didn't have computers back then. Not only were computers slow, but computers were not particularly easy to use. The introduction of the Macintosh was still a year away. So not only did people not have a computer to access the Internet on, but people didn't understand computers at all, didn't know how to use them at all, and were extremely uncomfortable in dealing with anything computer-related.
Unfortunately, you're too late to do this properly. The best practices for leaving an IT position are practices that should have started when you took the position. At a high level, these should have included:
Documenting your setup as you set it up.
Documenting changes as you made them.
Documenting common problems that you run across and how to fix them.
Setting things up in the most common/default way unless you have a real reason for changing them
Avoiding making too many tweaks (unless you have a big support staff, minor performance gains from tweaks aren't worth having a non-standard setup)
If you've done a good job in your job, another decent IT person should be able to pick up your job at any time, without you having time to prepare. Because what if you get sick, or hit by a car, or fired, or whatever? Admittedly, I can't claim that I've always done that good of a job.
I think we should find out all the words that they're monitoring, and organize a movement to have everyone slip them all into their facebook/twitter posts.
Hey everyone! I just dropped a dirty bomb in the toilet. So stinky!
or
I'm going to really attack the gym today, do some exercise drills. It'll be an explosion of activity!
or
Molly, I really loved seeing you tonight. Happy Birthday! Chemical weapons.
Ultimately it's just a method for AT&T to hide the fact that they're charging their customers by having someone else charge them instead. Because you know how this will work, right? AT&T will charge Netflix, and that will cause Netflix to increase their prices. You'll pay the price either way.
Yes, well one thing that happens when you're feeling confident and empowered is that you stop thinking critically about certain things. It may not be that you become "evil", but more that you become careless and fail to analyze the consequences of your actions.
Maybe it's not that the amoral get rich (though who can doubt that happens), but that the rich become amoral. You try spending your life getting everyone you want and having everyone kiss your ass, nobody ever saying "no" to you. Let me know how that affects your behavior and yur worldview.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, when they say "competent", they're talking about competence in a particular area. So people who are bad navigators are not very effective at judging who is a good navigator; people who are truly socially incompetent are not good at identifying social competence.
They (or at least some of them) were also opposed to political parties in general, and specifically wanted to avoid the rise of a two-party system. They also feared corporations and the consolidation of power they they represented. The general strategy of the founders of the US was to break up power into the smallest possible chunks so that no one person or group could make things happen without getting numerous other groups to agree and cooperate.
A better question is, why does anybody think Santorum or Obama, let alone a 3rd world dictator, is any smarter than anybody else?
Well you're really setting up for an uncomfortable flame-war here. Comparing Santorum to Obama to 3rd world dictators is bound to put someone's nose out of joint. But anyway, whether they're "smart" or "smarter than anybody else" are rather abstract terms. I'm sure, speaking loosely, that they're "smarter than anybody else". If they're not smarter than anybody else, i.e. they're not smarter than a single other person, then that would be shocking. That aside, what we're talking about is not abstract "smartness", but whether they are capable and competent in particular situations. Asking whether Santorum is "smart" isn't really the question. The question is, how well do people generally do when evaluating whether Santorum would make a good president.
Most people manage most of the rest of their lives just fine, why should politics be any different?
Are they really? I haven't met most people, but I have met a lot of people who are not managing their own lives in a happy and productive way.
Reiligion was invented to try and keep people honest.
I don't believe things are quite that clear. Certainly some religious parables are formulated in order to teach a moral lesson, and some religious laws were written to encourage good behavior. However, we don't have clear historic records of the formulations of early religions, and the things that I've read that attempt to analyze why religions were founded thousands of years ago (or longer) don't really support the idea that they were rational attempts to keep people honest.
This is definitely worth considering. Although self-control and discipline are practiced skills, research has indicated that we each have limits on our self-control. The people who are very good at it are actually good at avoiding situations where they are being frequently tempted.
My experience is personal and anecdotal, but here goes:
I bought an iPad when the first model was released, with the intention of using it to read ebooks. I'm a very digital-oriented person, and I have loads of books but I don't especially like clutter. After a few months, I had gotten rid of my iPad because I didn't like it for reading. There were a myriad of reasons.
For one, as the summary says, I kept getting tempted to do other things. I had games on my iPad, a web browser, and music. I had email beeping at me on a regular basis. I would find myself watching Netflix when I had intended to sit down and read. I found the experience unpleasant and tense, which is generally the opposite of my experience reading.
Just recently, someone gave me an iPad 2, and I had been carrying around a big thick book, so I decided to give it another try. I didn't sync my music library to the device, and I turned off email notifications. I changed the theme to the "sepia" colors instead of the default bright-white theme, and set iBook to "full screen', which turns off the fake-book skin. For some reason, for me, those visual changes made it much more pleasant to read. Also, the iPad 2 is significantly faster and more responsive than my original iPad was. I now use the iPad almost exclusively for reading books and news articles, and I'm getting used to it.
So manly the advantages at this point is that I don't have to carry around books (the iPad is actually lighter than many books that I read), and I can readily buy and download books without going to the store. Also, importantly, I can get public domain books for free. Given my commute and my desire to avoid clutter in my apartment, these are significant advantages. It's also nice to have a web browser that I can take with me without bringing a full computer.
On the other hand, I do miss books. I like the smell of them and the tactile experience. The big problem that I have is that I will miss the ability to lend or gift books to people. Still, overall, I'm getting used to it. I agree to some extent with the idea that e-ink displays are better for reading, but the ability to have a real full-color web browser on the same device makes it worth the sacrifice. Still, my biggest complaint is theoretical-- the inability to lend/share books, and the fear that if I build a nice digital library, I may one day be denied access to that library because of DRM.
Well I don't entirely agree with you. I think you're on the right track to point out that people do have tendencies toward order and honesty, but I think that dishonesty and misdirection is a part of our nature as well. Human nature is not all self-interest and viciousness, but it's not all selflessness and virtue either. We do, at times, put others before ourselves. We do appreciate an orderly and predictable society. However, there will always be people who are seeking their own advantage and are willing to mislead others to achieve it. None of us are free from these impulses.
Yes, and I also don't mean "debate" in the sense of "went in front of a crowd and tried to sell their point of view". I mean that they sat in a room and argued with each other, published philosophical arguments one way or the other, and eventually reached a compromise that many of them didn't entirely agree with.
Well research is sometimes about verifying things that we all believe, and sometimes the attempt at verification reveals that we were all wrong. Aside from that, research sometimes is aimed at providing specific details or answering questions about something that we already know.
So incompetent people can't judge the competence of others, but how bad of a job do they do? What factors throw off their judgment? What might be done to allow them to do a better job at assessing competence? These are all places where research might provide better answers than guesses.
A few thousand years ago, philosophers were already indicating that the inherent problem with Democracy was that the majority of people were never going to be smart/wise/informed enough to make appropriate decisions. The founders of the United States also identified this as a problem, and had many debates about how to mitigate the dangers.
The simplest/shortest answer to this question is: Befriend your IT support people and find out what they'll let you get away with. There's no need to be too secretive about it. If they don't want you to use your laptop for the personal usage you'd like, find out if they object to using a LiveCD/LiveUSB. They may even be willing to hook you up with something. As an IT person, I've even bent the rules here and there for people who were nice enough to ask politely.
If they absolutely do not want to permit your intended usage under any circumstances, then don't try to subvert their security. Too many IT disasters happen when people try to subvert IT policies, even innocently. Sometimes there are important business or technical implications of those policies that you don't know about.
Which compatibility layer are you talking about? Vavle has been developing/compiling games for the Mac natively. There is WINE, but it's still far from perfect.
My only concern for this is that Steam (one of the major forces in PC gaming) moving this direction will discourage Desktop PC game development.
That doesn't seem like a sensible concern to me. These rumors indicate that the Steam Box will essentially be a normal Windows desktop PC, so it's more likely to encourage development for desktop PCs. Now, if this plan is successful, it may discourage developers from optimizing their games for bleeding-edge systems, and instead target the Steam Box specs. The rumors indicate they expect an upgrade cycle of 4 years or so, which isn't far outside of what most game developers do anyway. Also, the way this is structured, it shouldn't be hard to set new specs (since its all based on commodity hardware), so there's no reason why new specs should be delayed. What I mean is, with the XBox and Playstation, they need to develop the whole hardware/software platform. With the Steam Box, Valve can just choose an appropriate model from Dell or HP (or whomever) and make that the new reference model.
So instead of trivially adapting your existing PC for display on a Big-screen, you feel compelled to shell out extra dollars for a piece of hardware, which is essentially another redundant PC, that you don't even need?
Well no, if you already have a good gaming rig, then you don't need to buy a new one. I don't think Valve is asking you to, either. There are hints, at least, that this will be more a set of standardized specs than a particular hardware console. As I said, I think what Valve is really doing is setting a standard set of requirements for gaming PCs. So in this scheme, you can buy a gaming PC that's "Steambox certified" (or whatever), and then in the Steam store, you'll be able to see that games are designed to run on all "Steambox certified" hardware.
It won't prevent you from running the same games on another computer, but it will make it so developers have a consistent hardware platform to target, and so gamers basically won't need to think about system requirements for each game. If games are developed/optimized for a 2012 Steambox and you have a 2012 model Steambox, then you know that it'll play well.
My understanding of the story is that essentially this will be a Windows computer with Steam installed. There are two major developments that this signals:
First, that Valve plans to start issuing a sort of standard system requirement for game developers to target, which is one of the benefits of consoles right now. Developers know what platform they're developing for when they develop a PS3 game, and when I buy a PS3 game I know it'll play on my PS3. If all Steam Boxes have the same system requirements, then you get the same benefit.
The other implication is that Valve must be developing Steam software suitable for use on a big screen tv. This is going to mean menu systems with large fonts that can be navigated with a remote, as well have controller/remote hardware to use with it.
I'm pretty optimistic about this. I've been ranting for years now about how Valve should develop a console.
I'm pretty sure it was to deflect high-energy particles from colliding with the ship. As in, space isn't empty, and you're traveling at immense speeds, so you're bound to collide with something that will kill you unless you deflect everything.
Also, as hard as it may be to believe if you don't remember the time, most people didn't have computers back then. Not only were computers slow, but computers were not particularly easy to use. The introduction of the Macintosh was still a year away. So not only did people not have a computer to access the Internet on, but people didn't understand computers at all, didn't know how to use them at all, and were extremely uncomfortable in dealing with anything computer-related.
And very importantly, even low-quality porn take a long time to download at 300 baud.
Exactly my point. It's a way for AT&T to charge you extra at the expense of Netflix's PR.
Unfortunately, you're too late to do this properly. The best practices for leaving an IT position are practices that should have started when you took the position. At a high level, these should have included:
Documenting your setup as you set it up.
Documenting changes as you made them.
Documenting common problems that you run across and how to fix them.
Setting things up in the most common/default way unless you have a real reason for changing them
Avoiding making too many tweaks (unless you have a big support staff, minor performance gains from tweaks aren't worth having a non-standard setup)
If you've done a good job in your job, another decent IT person should be able to pick up your job at any time, without you having time to prepare. Because what if you get sick, or hit by a car, or fired, or whatever? Admittedly, I can't claim that I've always done that good of a job.
I think we should find out all the words that they're monitoring, and organize a movement to have everyone slip them all into their facebook/twitter posts.
Hey everyone! I just dropped a dirty bomb in the toilet. So stinky!
or
I'm going to really attack the gym today, do some exercise drills. It'll be an explosion of activity!
or
Molly, I really loved seeing you tonight. Happy Birthday! Chemical weapons.
Ultimately it's just a method for AT&T to hide the fact that they're charging their customers by having someone else charge them instead. Because you know how this will work, right? AT&T will charge Netflix, and that will cause Netflix to increase their prices. You'll pay the price either way.
Ok, then where did the "standard AAC" come from? Because it it comes from iTunes, then maybe it was already mastered for iTunes.
Yes, well one thing that happens when you're feeling confident and empowered is that you stop thinking critically about certain things. It may not be that you become "evil", but more that you become careless and fail to analyze the consequences of your actions.
Maybe it's not that the amoral get rich (though who can doubt that happens), but that the rich become amoral. You try spending your life getting everyone you want and having everyone kiss your ass, nobody ever saying "no" to you. Let me know how that affects your behavior and yur worldview.