It may remind you of that, but it's not a very good comparison. You think that living in a city and taking public transportation is akin to suffering with a disease?
I'm someone who would argue, to some extent, that you shouldn't live in single family dwellings and you should take public transportation, but my argument is in no way, "You should be satisfied with those things." Or rather, I don't really care whether you're personally satisfied with those things as much as, I think we should allow people the opportunity to be satisfied with those thing, e.g. you can drive if you want, but we should have public transportation so that those who don't want to drive (or can't drive) don't have to drive.
I don't want to get into a whole discussion since it's very off-topic, but I think of people who live in the suburbs and drive their own car more like a person who eats McDonald's hamburgers every day. On an individual level, I don't care very much what you do, but it seems unhealthy and stupid. You're welcome to it, but I wouldn't want to live that way if you paid me to. But then, on a large scale, you're helping to prop up up an inefficient and inhumane system that may well ruin us, so it is frustrating to watch people dedicate themselves to living that lifestyle.
Just because something is unsafe, doesn't mean I want to stop doing it.
I don't quite agree, at least not in the simple form you've posted here. If something is unsafe, that is a very good reason to stop doing it. I think (or at least hope) you would acknowledge that very often, we shouldn't want to do unsafe things. I wouldn't play Russian Roulette because it is unsafe. I wouldn't support making it legal for children to drink and then drive cars because it would be unsafe. As a principle, lack of safety is one of the best reasons not to do something.
I think what you're really looking for is not a principled stance, but a practical stance. What you wrote makes it sound like you think it's a good principle, i.e. "One should not avoid doing something because it is unsafe." I believe you mean the more practical idea that, "Though we should on principle avoid unsafe things, there are times when we should do something which is not completely safe."
I think you would agree, for example, that NASA should try to make space travel as safe as they practically can.
Sorry, but it was an appropriate correction. When you say, "in light of", it's implied to be something akin to "because of". Even your own definition of "in consideration of" has the same implication.
So what you said implies that you would like to do even more space exploration because of all of the astronauts that have been killed, as though murdering astronauts is a good reason to continue. I'm guessing that's not what you intend. Changing it to "in spite of" instead implies that, although astronauts are sometimes killed and you don't favor killing astronauts, you would still like to pursue space exploration.
In my mind, the "cure" mentality is linked up with a general problem with science journalism. I think there may be scientists who contribute to the problem in some way or another, and once silly ideas or bad information is out there, everyday people will spread it around, but it's primarily about journalism.
And the problem with journalism, as far as I understand, breaks down into two general causes. One cause of the problem is oversimplification-- either the journalist doesn't understand the science, or they don't expect that their audience will understand, so their explanation of the science cuts out a lot of the complications and gives a simplified explanation. That is not a problem in itself, but when you simplify, you run the risk of oversimplifying and ending up with an explanation that's actually misleading.
The other big cause of problems seems to be sensationalism. Journalists want people to read their stories and get excited about their stories. More people will be excited about a story about a "cure for cancer" than "a treatment for cancer that will meaningfully extend life in select cases." More people will be excited about a story about how "drinking coffee will kill you," than one about how "a single study indicates some adverse effects of coffee consumption, but more study is needed." More people want to read about "A new breakthrough that will make time travel possible" than how "A single scientist who's a little on the fringes is trying to develop a new variant of string theory, which if it turns out to be true, might possibly mean that time travel is theoretically possible but practically impossible and/or well beyond any technology we have. Or it might still mean that time travel is impossible. We don't know yet because the theory isn't complete."
The result is a lot of misinformation, and a lot of focus on the wrong things. One example might be a focus on "cures" when "treatments" may be more realistic. Another problem is an expectation of impending wild technological advancement. We read about someone developing a new technology for manufacturing processors or displays that will be give us super-gadgets in the next 3 years, when even if those advances materialize, they're 20 years out. Another problem is fad diets, since every study relating to diets is suddenly reported as a miracle that will allow everyone to shed all of their unwanted weight and become super healthy. Another problem is scifi concepts being reported as "just around the corner". In the next couple of years, we'll all be immortal, living with AI, time traveling, traveling faster than light, with unlimited perpetual motion machines generating all of the energy we'd like. It's always just a couple of years out, but never materializing.
Arguable the most damaging problem is that all of the other problems makes science appear to be complete bullshit. With the kind of ideas being pushed as "scientific", I almost have a hard time blaming people who disbelieve that pollution is bad, people who believe that homeopathy works, or people who are afraid of vaccinations are harmful. We're flooded with constant promises that are unfulfilled, and conflicting reports about things being "scientifically proven". One year, eggs will kill you, and the next they're a miracle cure for everything. A few years ago, we were all being told to replace fatty foods with sugar-filled substitutes, and now we're being told the opposite. If you see enough of those stories, I can understand not knowing who to trust.
It was a pretty common response at the time Episode I was released. I can understand how you might not notice, but it was something that struck a lot of people, and not just people who were looking for racism.
I don't think it's intentional, or that anyone at the time thought it was intentional. It's just sort of weird. I remember watching it for the same time, and being like, "WTF? How did Lucas accidentally create something so seemingly racist, and nobody noticed or called him out on it?" In my mind, it really stood out as weirdly racist. You have an alien with big lips and an broad, flat nose speaking in a Jamaican accent, acting like a lazy bumbling fool similar to old racist comedies.
Again, it doesn't seem like there's a particular racist intent, but it's just odd. Like imagine Lucas had made a point of having Yoda voiced in such a way as to make him sound like an inner-city black guy, and then have him absolutely love fried chicken and watermelon. Even if you want to argue that it's not that offensive, it'd just be a really odd choice.
Well we don't know what our climate is going to do, ultimately. We do know, however, that we're dumping CO2 into our atmosphere, enough to screw up our environment in various ways, including creating a greenhouse effect in our atmosphere and add to the acidification of our oceans. That's in addition to a crap ton of other stupid things we're doing, e.g. overfishing, dumping toxins into our water supply, deforestation.
So do we know if we're going to get a mini ice age soon due to natural causes? No, we really don't know. Do we know that we're damaging our own ecosystem, metaphorically poisoning our own well? Yes, we know that with a large degree of certainty.
Don't apologize for a nerdy post. You're responding to a message on Slashdot where someone's talking about Star Trek. It's a little off topic, but who cares? I started it.
I didn't know all of that, since I just watched the series and have not read the books. Mainly, what struck me was an idea that I only mentioned for a second, which was the idea of giving a poison pill to the Borg. That's essentially what they did when they taught individuality to Hugh, which was successful in disrupting the Borg. However, I imagined a scenario for a Star Trek story that presents the following dilemma: The Borg is destroying the Federation and taking over the galaxy, and the only way to stop it is to feed an empathic pacifist civilization to the Borg and hope that their influence becomes significant.
I guess basically it'd be the same concept as Hugh, but on a large genocidal scale. And I suppose you could muddy the waters a bit by saying, "They're in the Borg's path anyway, and all we need to do is just not try to save them."
Anyway, that's what popped into my head, and I thought, "That's fucked up. But I feel like it could make for a good DS9 episode."
I never thought about it quite like that before, but it makes me wonder: If the Borg operate by using biological brains as processing units, does the nature of the brains have any impact on the outcome of the processing? Like if the Borg assimilated a race with very different brains, might their presence in the collective affect the decisions made by the collective? Could you flood the collective with so many pacifists that the Borg become peaceful?
I guess it applies in real life, to this rat experiment. On either a quantitative or qualitative level, how do the individual rat brains influence the results?
Well maybe they could also put our brains into a kind of simulation, so that we didn't know that they were using us in this way. Like we could be sitting in little pods, wired up to drive their computing power, while we think we're walking around in the world, living our lives. In that case, we wouldn't feel anything about it.
That is, we wouldn't feel anything about it until Keanu Reeves liberates us using magic kung fu.
Facebook and Twitter - the escalators of the internet.
It's not quite the same thing. If someone shuts down those sites, it shouldn't hinder you much, but those sites will actually be offline. But shutting down escalators, as Mitch Hedberg observed, just turn into stairs. Sorry for the convenience.
Stupid is not what you call people making centi-millions off the rest of us.
Depends on what you mean by "stupid". The whole point is that they have the game rigged so that even when they make absurd mistakes and still come out on top. The fact that they occasionally make those mistakes displays a sort of stupidity. The fact that they've rigged the game is the biggest sign of intelligence.
I tend to agree with you less when it comes to laptops, and more in terms of phones. Often enough, when I use my laptop, I'm seated someplace close enough to a power outlet. My laptop has something like an 11 hour battery life, so effectively I pretty much never run out of battery life unless I've just been totally careless. I'd generally rather have lighter weight so I can save my back from some pain. My phone, however, is always in operation and usually in my pocket. Charging isn't terribly convenient, and if I don't charge it every night, I'll probably end up stuck someplace without a working phone.
However, in the case of this laptop, I completely agree. The reviewer says that the battery lasted around 5 hours with light web browsing, which is too short in my opinion.
Kinda unfair to people who looked after themselves.
Do we have evidence that "looking after yourself" is the only factor, or even the biggest factor, in "aging rate" that they're talking about? As you point out, if it's related to taking certain jobs, it seems like it might be more fair to make sure that people who take those jobs get to retire earlier. But what if it's genetic, or some other set of factors that people can't really control?
Maybe it is time to shut down the CIA, NSA and FBI completely and start new agencies that are required to follow much stricter and very public oversight.
That sounds like a bad idea to me. Sort of like saying, "I feel like my operating system has become bloated, so let's build a new one from scratch." Sure it sounds great, and you might solve some of your problems, but you're going to have to re-solve a lot of the same old problems, and you'll also introduce more new problems.
So you have $1000 in fines as well as $150 a week times 104 weeks for the counseling which all flows back to the county's bank account. This type of thing is happening commonly in our legal system.
Didn't they just recently have to alter their data collection policies, because Congress wasn't able to pass the law to extend the current practices? Yes, they're still collecting data, and you might not feel the changes are sufficient, but there have been changes in policy.
My recollection is that now they're not allowed to collect all of our data and then get a warrant to officially use it. Instead, they have to get a warrant to gather the data from phone companies in the first place. Or something along those lines. Maybe someone else could clarify?
Who would buy a lock from a company that made a master key that was good in all of their locks?
It's probably not the best example. I would hire a locksmith knowing full well that they could pick the lock that they're installing. That doesn't bother me. However, that's because I'm resigned to the idea that locks only keep out casual thieves, and that any lock I'm likely to put on my door can be picked. I'm not inclined to say the same sort of thing about my encryption.
The team said the next step was to discover what was affecting the pace of ageing.
So common wisdom might tell you that this is all caused by smoking, drinking, lack of sleep, lack of exercise, etc., but scientifically we don't know. We might study this and discover that the effect of some of those things in minor when compared to... I don't know what. Genetics? Childhood trauma? Stress? Sitting too much?
I disagree. I mean, I agree that not everyone should be a programmer, but I think everyone should have a general idea of how programming works, if possible, since it drastically improves a person's understanding of how computers work, and what computers can (or can't) do.
I know a bit of programming. Not enough to consider myself a programmer, but enough to write little bash/ruby/powersheel/php/javascript when I need to. I find it tremendously useful, and I don't like the idea that I shouldn't have learned as much as I have because I didn't learn "comprehensively". I don't like the process enough to want to do it full time for my job, but it's nice when I can do something by spending 20 minutes writing a script instead of 6 hours doing it by hand.
And back on topic, I do think that if you're a manager or "idea person", it's not necessary to know all the nitty-gritty details, but you'll be more successful if you have a general understanding of how things work. I've managed people who were better at their particular job than I would be. Network techs that know more about the internal structure of packets, and who can set up all the Cisco equipment with the command line without looking anything up. Web developers who remember off the top of their head which CSS quirks are in which browser, and who are simply better designers than I am. I've even managed programmers. I'm not a programmer, but when I was having trouble describing exactly what I wanted something to do, it was helpful to write up some pseudocode and say, "Can you make this real?"
Managers don't need to be able to do everything their employees can do as well as their employees can do it. That's a mistake a lot of people make-- for example, to think that the best programmer in a group is inherently the best person to manage a group of programmers. It's definitely important that the person know enough about programming to be able to speak intelligently about it, and to avoid giving stupid direction (or at least to be able to understand and consider when someone tells you that your directions are stupid), but management honestly is a different set of skills.
I think the bar you're setting for "outside the box" might be too high. It reminds me of when people talk about "originality" in art, and dismiss everything as "unoriginal" because it was inspired by something or other. Set a standard so high it can't be reached.
I do a lot of what people consider "outside the box" thinking, but in my mind, it's really just "taking a step back". Are we asking the right questions? Are we trying to accomplish the right goal? To give a simple/obvious example, a client says that they want Microsoft Office, but don't have the money to pay for it. If everyone else is scrambling around looking for sales and discounts, then it might be "outside the box" thinking just to say, maybe we should download a copy of LibreOffice, let them test it, and see if it does everything they need. The box you were in was "buying a cheap copy of MS Office", and you thought outside of the box.
Well DNS isn't really secured, so if you're worried about the CIA intercepting your DNS traffic, I don't think which DNS server you use is going to be extremely important there.
But yeah, any DNS server could gather and store records about every query, and which IP address the query came from. Many people don't consider that amount of data to be invasive enough to worry about. For most people, the worst information it would leak is that, just like almost everyone else, you're visiting porn sites.
Someone may correct me if there's more to it, but I think it's just that some people are uncomfortable with Google having so much access to information about us. Any DNS server you access will have the potential to keep records of which IP addresses made which queries, which potentially gives Google even more tracking data. As far as I know, there's no real sign that they're using that data, but to some extent, they're a company that makes money from collecting data about their users, so...
The majority: people who were convinced that working a regular, full-time job was some sort of scam. They were just too smart to fall for that scam, you see, to be tricked into working long hour for shit pay.
I grew up in a fairly diverse but dominently upper-middle class area. This was the majority opinion among people there, too. Lots of people with get-rich-quick schemes, and people who thought that working long, hard hours at minimum wage pay was for suckers, and they were too good for that sort of thing. Work at McDonalds, or work as a janitor? Fuck no. That kind of work is for losers and idiots.
I have a cousin who spent his teenage years and early twenties as a layabout, smoking pot and hanging around his parents house. He got caught with a little marijuana when he was... I think 18, 19.... the police let him go. Then when he was around 26, he decided to get his life together. His parents sent him to community college and bought him a suit. He ended up with a decent enough (not spectacular, but with a salary far above minimum wage) IT job.
Hell, I know a few kids who spent all their whole high school and college years getting drunk, only to get a job at their daddy's firm, and they make more money than I do.
Slashdot Mirror
It may remind you of that, but it's not a very good comparison. You think that living in a city and taking public transportation is akin to suffering with a disease?
I'm someone who would argue, to some extent, that you shouldn't live in single family dwellings and you should take public transportation, but my argument is in no way, "You should be satisfied with those things." Or rather, I don't really care whether you're personally satisfied with those things as much as, I think we should allow people the opportunity to be satisfied with those thing, e.g. you can drive if you want, but we should have public transportation so that those who don't want to drive (or can't drive) don't have to drive.
I don't want to get into a whole discussion since it's very off-topic, but I think of people who live in the suburbs and drive their own car more like a person who eats McDonald's hamburgers every day. On an individual level, I don't care very much what you do, but it seems unhealthy and stupid. You're welcome to it, but I wouldn't want to live that way if you paid me to. But then, on a large scale, you're helping to prop up up an inefficient and inhumane system that may well ruin us, so it is frustrating to watch people dedicate themselves to living that lifestyle.
Just because something is unsafe, doesn't mean I want to stop doing it.
I don't quite agree, at least not in the simple form you've posted here. If something is unsafe, that is a very good reason to stop doing it. I think (or at least hope) you would acknowledge that very often, we shouldn't want to do unsafe things. I wouldn't play Russian Roulette because it is unsafe. I wouldn't support making it legal for children to drink and then drive cars because it would be unsafe. As a principle, lack of safety is one of the best reasons not to do something.
I think what you're really looking for is not a principled stance, but a practical stance. What you wrote makes it sound like you think it's a good principle, i.e. "One should not avoid doing something because it is unsafe." I believe you mean the more practical idea that, "Though we should on principle avoid unsafe things, there are times when we should do something which is not completely safe."
I think you would agree, for example, that NASA should try to make space travel as safe as they practically can.
Sorry, but it was an appropriate correction. When you say, "in light of", it's implied to be something akin to "because of". Even your own definition of "in consideration of" has the same implication.
So what you said implies that you would like to do even more space exploration because of all of the astronauts that have been killed, as though murdering astronauts is a good reason to continue. I'm guessing that's not what you intend. Changing it to "in spite of" instead implies that, although astronauts are sometimes killed and you don't favor killing astronauts, you would still like to pursue space exploration.
In my mind, the "cure" mentality is linked up with a general problem with science journalism. I think there may be scientists who contribute to the problem in some way or another, and once silly ideas or bad information is out there, everyday people will spread it around, but it's primarily about journalism.
And the problem with journalism, as far as I understand, breaks down into two general causes. One cause of the problem is oversimplification-- either the journalist doesn't understand the science, or they don't expect that their audience will understand, so their explanation of the science cuts out a lot of the complications and gives a simplified explanation. That is not a problem in itself, but when you simplify, you run the risk of oversimplifying and ending up with an explanation that's actually misleading.
The other big cause of problems seems to be sensationalism. Journalists want people to read their stories and get excited about their stories. More people will be excited about a story about a "cure for cancer" than "a treatment for cancer that will meaningfully extend life in select cases." More people will be excited about a story about how "drinking coffee will kill you," than one about how "a single study indicates some adverse effects of coffee consumption, but more study is needed." More people want to read about "A new breakthrough that will make time travel possible" than how "A single scientist who's a little on the fringes is trying to develop a new variant of string theory, which if it turns out to be true, might possibly mean that time travel is theoretically possible but practically impossible and/or well beyond any technology we have. Or it might still mean that time travel is impossible. We don't know yet because the theory isn't complete."
The result is a lot of misinformation, and a lot of focus on the wrong things. One example might be a focus on "cures" when "treatments" may be more realistic. Another problem is an expectation of impending wild technological advancement. We read about someone developing a new technology for manufacturing processors or displays that will be give us super-gadgets in the next 3 years, when even if those advances materialize, they're 20 years out. Another problem is fad diets, since every study relating to diets is suddenly reported as a miracle that will allow everyone to shed all of their unwanted weight and become super healthy. Another problem is scifi concepts being reported as "just around the corner". In the next couple of years, we'll all be immortal, living with AI, time traveling, traveling faster than light, with unlimited perpetual motion machines generating all of the energy we'd like. It's always just a couple of years out, but never materializing.
Arguable the most damaging problem is that all of the other problems makes science appear to be complete bullshit. With the kind of ideas being pushed as "scientific", I almost have a hard time blaming people who disbelieve that pollution is bad, people who believe that homeopathy works, or people who are afraid of vaccinations are harmful. We're flooded with constant promises that are unfulfilled, and conflicting reports about things being "scientifically proven". One year, eggs will kill you, and the next they're a miracle cure for everything. A few years ago, we were all being told to replace fatty foods with sugar-filled substitutes, and now we're being told the opposite. If you see enough of those stories, I can understand not knowing who to trust.
It was a pretty common response at the time Episode I was released. I can understand how you might not notice, but it was something that struck a lot of people, and not just people who were looking for racism.
I don't think it's intentional, or that anyone at the time thought it was intentional. It's just sort of weird. I remember watching it for the same time, and being like, "WTF? How did Lucas accidentally create something so seemingly racist, and nobody noticed or called him out on it?" In my mind, it really stood out as weirdly racist. You have an alien with big lips and an broad, flat nose speaking in a Jamaican accent, acting like a lazy bumbling fool similar to old racist comedies.
Again, it doesn't seem like there's a particular racist intent, but it's just odd. Like imagine Lucas had made a point of having Yoda voiced in such a way as to make him sound like an inner-city black guy, and then have him absolutely love fried chicken and watermelon. Even if you want to argue that it's not that offensive, it'd just be a really odd choice.
Well we don't know what our climate is going to do, ultimately. We do know, however, that we're dumping CO2 into our atmosphere, enough to screw up our environment in various ways, including creating a greenhouse effect in our atmosphere and add to the acidification of our oceans. That's in addition to a crap ton of other stupid things we're doing, e.g. overfishing, dumping toxins into our water supply, deforestation.
So do we know if we're going to get a mini ice age soon due to natural causes? No, we really don't know. Do we know that we're damaging our own ecosystem, metaphorically poisoning our own well? Yes, we know that with a large degree of certainty.
Don't apologize for a nerdy post. You're responding to a message on Slashdot where someone's talking about Star Trek. It's a little off topic, but who cares? I started it.
I didn't know all of that, since I just watched the series and have not read the books. Mainly, what struck me was an idea that I only mentioned for a second, which was the idea of giving a poison pill to the Borg. That's essentially what they did when they taught individuality to Hugh, which was successful in disrupting the Borg. However, I imagined a scenario for a Star Trek story that presents the following dilemma: The Borg is destroying the Federation and taking over the galaxy, and the only way to stop it is to feed an empathic pacifist civilization to the Borg and hope that their influence becomes significant.
I guess basically it'd be the same concept as Hugh, but on a large genocidal scale. And I suppose you could muddy the waters a bit by saying, "They're in the Borg's path anyway, and all we need to do is just not try to save them."
Anyway, that's what popped into my head, and I thought, "That's fucked up. But I feel like it could make for a good DS9 episode."
I never thought about it quite like that before, but it makes me wonder: If the Borg operate by using biological brains as processing units, does the nature of the brains have any impact on the outcome of the processing? Like if the Borg assimilated a race with very different brains, might their presence in the collective affect the decisions made by the collective? Could you flood the collective with so many pacifists that the Borg become peaceful?
I guess it applies in real life, to this rat experiment. On either a quantitative or qualitative level, how do the individual rat brains influence the results?
Well maybe they could also put our brains into a kind of simulation, so that we didn't know that they were using us in this way. Like we could be sitting in little pods, wired up to drive their computing power, while we think we're walking around in the world, living our lives. In that case, we wouldn't feel anything about it.
That is, we wouldn't feel anything about it until Keanu Reeves liberates us using magic kung fu.
Facebook and Twitter - the escalators of the internet.
It's not quite the same thing. If someone shuts down those sites, it shouldn't hinder you much, but those sites will actually be offline. But shutting down escalators, as Mitch Hedberg observed, just turn into stairs. Sorry for the convenience.
Stupid is not what you call people making centi-millions off the rest of us.
Depends on what you mean by "stupid". The whole point is that they have the game rigged so that even when they make absurd mistakes and still come out on top. The fact that they occasionally make those mistakes displays a sort of stupidity. The fact that they've rigged the game is the biggest sign of intelligence.
I don't have a vault. You have a vault?
I tend to agree with you less when it comes to laptops, and more in terms of phones. Often enough, when I use my laptop, I'm seated someplace close enough to a power outlet. My laptop has something like an 11 hour battery life, so effectively I pretty much never run out of battery life unless I've just been totally careless. I'd generally rather have lighter weight so I can save my back from some pain. My phone, however, is always in operation and usually in my pocket. Charging isn't terribly convenient, and if I don't charge it every night, I'll probably end up stuck someplace without a working phone.
However, in the case of this laptop, I completely agree. The reviewer says that the battery lasted around 5 hours with light web browsing, which is too short in my opinion.
Kinda unfair to people who looked after themselves.
Do we have evidence that "looking after yourself" is the only factor, or even the biggest factor, in "aging rate" that they're talking about? As you point out, if it's related to taking certain jobs, it seems like it might be more fair to make sure that people who take those jobs get to retire earlier. But what if it's genetic, or some other set of factors that people can't really control?
Maybe it is time to shut down the CIA, NSA and FBI completely and start new agencies that are required to follow much stricter and very public oversight.
That sounds like a bad idea to me. Sort of like saying, "I feel like my operating system has become bloated, so let's build a new one from scratch." Sure it sounds great, and you might solve some of your problems, but you're going to have to re-solve a lot of the same old problems, and you'll also introduce more new problems.
So you have $1000 in fines as well as $150 a week times 104 weeks for the counseling which all flows back to the county's bank account. This type of thing is happening commonly in our legal system.
I agree that this is a huge problem.
Didn't they just recently have to alter their data collection policies, because Congress wasn't able to pass the law to extend the current practices? Yes, they're still collecting data, and you might not feel the changes are sufficient, but there have been changes in policy.
My recollection is that now they're not allowed to collect all of our data and then get a warrant to officially use it. Instead, they have to get a warrant to gather the data from phone companies in the first place. Or something along those lines. Maybe someone else could clarify?
Who would buy a lock from a company that made a master key that was good in all of their locks?
It's probably not the best example. I would hire a locksmith knowing full well that they could pick the lock that they're installing. That doesn't bother me. However, that's because I'm resigned to the idea that locks only keep out casual thieves, and that any lock I'm likely to put on my door can be picked. I'm not inclined to say the same sort of thing about my encryption.
From the article:
The team said the next step was to discover what was affecting the pace of ageing.
So common wisdom might tell you that this is all caused by smoking, drinking, lack of sleep, lack of exercise, etc., but scientifically we don't know. We might study this and discover that the effect of some of those things in minor when compared to... I don't know what. Genetics? Childhood trauma? Stress? Sitting too much?
I disagree. I mean, I agree that not everyone should be a programmer, but I think everyone should have a general idea of how programming works, if possible, since it drastically improves a person's understanding of how computers work, and what computers can (or can't) do.
I know a bit of programming. Not enough to consider myself a programmer, but enough to write little bash/ruby/powersheel/php/javascript when I need to. I find it tremendously useful, and I don't like the idea that I shouldn't have learned as much as I have because I didn't learn "comprehensively". I don't like the process enough to want to do it full time for my job, but it's nice when I can do something by spending 20 minutes writing a script instead of 6 hours doing it by hand.
And back on topic, I do think that if you're a manager or "idea person", it's not necessary to know all the nitty-gritty details, but you'll be more successful if you have a general understanding of how things work. I've managed people who were better at their particular job than I would be. Network techs that know more about the internal structure of packets, and who can set up all the Cisco equipment with the command line without looking anything up. Web developers who remember off the top of their head which CSS quirks are in which browser, and who are simply better designers than I am. I've even managed programmers. I'm not a programmer, but when I was having trouble describing exactly what I wanted something to do, it was helpful to write up some pseudocode and say, "Can you make this real?"
Managers don't need to be able to do everything their employees can do as well as their employees can do it. That's a mistake a lot of people make-- for example, to think that the best programmer in a group is inherently the best person to manage a group of programmers. It's definitely important that the person know enough about programming to be able to speak intelligently about it, and to avoid giving stupid direction (or at least to be able to understand and consider when someone tells you that your directions are stupid), but management honestly is a different set of skills.
I think the bar you're setting for "outside the box" might be too high. It reminds me of when people talk about "originality" in art, and dismiss everything as "unoriginal" because it was inspired by something or other. Set a standard so high it can't be reached.
I do a lot of what people consider "outside the box" thinking, but in my mind, it's really just "taking a step back". Are we asking the right questions? Are we trying to accomplish the right goal? To give a simple/obvious example, a client says that they want Microsoft Office, but don't have the money to pay for it. If everyone else is scrambling around looking for sales and discounts, then it might be "outside the box" thinking just to say, maybe we should download a copy of LibreOffice, let them test it, and see if it does everything they need. The box you were in was "buying a cheap copy of MS Office", and you thought outside of the box.
Do you know what those "legitimate questions during Jesse Jackson's AMA" were? I'm honestly asking. I was curious why she was fired.
I'm also not too worried about DNS privacy, but I don't see the problem with Slashdot being the sort of place where nerds talk about network security.
Well DNS isn't really secured, so if you're worried about the CIA intercepting your DNS traffic, I don't think which DNS server you use is going to be extremely important there.
But yeah, any DNS server could gather and store records about every query, and which IP address the query came from. Many people don't consider that amount of data to be invasive enough to worry about. For most people, the worst information it would leak is that, just like almost everyone else, you're visiting porn sites.
Someone may correct me if there's more to it, but I think it's just that some people are uncomfortable with Google having so much access to information about us. Any DNS server you access will have the potential to keep records of which IP addresses made which queries, which potentially gives Google even more tracking data. As far as I know, there's no real sign that they're using that data, but to some extent, they're a company that makes money from collecting data about their users, so...
The majority: people who were convinced that working a regular, full-time job was some sort of scam. They were just too smart to fall for that scam, you see, to be tricked into working long hour for shit pay.
I grew up in a fairly diverse but dominently upper-middle class area. This was the majority opinion among people there, too. Lots of people with get-rich-quick schemes, and people who thought that working long, hard hours at minimum wage pay was for suckers, and they were too good for that sort of thing. Work at McDonalds, or work as a janitor? Fuck no. That kind of work is for losers and idiots.
I have a cousin who spent his teenage years and early twenties as a layabout, smoking pot and hanging around his parents house. He got caught with a little marijuana when he was... I think 18, 19.... the police let him go. Then when he was around 26, he decided to get his life together. His parents sent him to community college and bought him a suit. He ended up with a decent enough (not spectacular, but with a salary far above minimum wage) IT job.
Hell, I know a few kids who spent all their whole high school and college years getting drunk, only to get a job at their daddy's firm, and they make more money than I do.