(On a side note, whats with those extremely long terms in prison? Anyone going in for 25 years will never be able to get back into society - I thought the point of prison was to punish and correct the guilty and get them back into working order. It used to be that. These days, the point of prison is to keep the prison system running, and wardens, politicians and a whole industry supporting it in business.
No, really. In many US states, the union of prison wardens is the strongest and most influential union.
I live in a market where phones often come "free" with contracts. And still, the iPhone came and conquered. The market for "phones" may be saturated, but have you seen mobile phones recently? Their user interfaces are designed by shizophrenic sadists. I know people who avoid entire companies because their UI is so horrible that they classify it as unusable. And these are people who want a phone for the basic functions, like calling someone and keeping an address book. Using the calculator is an advanced usage case for them.
The iPhone taps into that market in addition to the techies who want it for the geek factor, and the marketing dudes who want it for the cool factor, and the Mac-heads who want it for the integration. And the market for people who want a great phone that's easy to use is HUGE. If the rumours are true and Apple will allow subsidies, they could've trouble mass-producing iPhones fast enough.
That's only one part of a long list of US/EU changes we've been seeing recently.
Here's another one: For many years, the price of Apple products was the same in US$ and Euro. It stayed the same even when the Euro was already 1.2:1 over the US$. That changed last year.
we never really recovered from that until we began to receive and benefit from economic concessions from Germany and Japan following WWII.
This time it's hard to imagine where the money is going to come from. You've already said it: WW3. You justs elected the guy with the family experience a few years too early, and he was a dumbass who probably ruined his brother's chances.
I seriously do expect that the US will start a major war to beef up its economy. It definitely can't afford to go without a war at this time, I'm pretty certain it can't support a peace-economy anymore.
Of course, typical Americans; cleaning up after europe shits all over the place. Abolishing slavery, abolishing monarchies, reinstating civil rights and real courts, cleaning up the mess left in the Middle-East by the English (I'd love to applaud the people who drew those maps up, geniuses amongst men they must have been to mix kurds, sunnis, and shias), and defending Europe as much as they could from facists, from communists. You still getting through doors?
Driving out the fascists was about the only thing in the list that's correct. Especially your "cleaning up the mess" in the middle-east doesn't exactly work out too great, does it?
If I was BMW I'd love to settle back in Detroit; You are aware of the fact that "BMW" stands for "Bavarian Motor Works" and Bavaria is a part of Germany which happens to be a part of Europe? Just asking...
There is no correlation between a weak dollar and the strength or status of the U.S. in the world economy. Wrong, for two reasons.
One, lots and lots of countries have, over the past decades, hoarded US$ as reserve currency. They see investments of billions, in some cases trillions, of dollars rapidly deflate. Two, the world markets have changed. Point #1 is true because for a long time you could buy anything, anywhere in the world, with US$. That's changing. Thus your devalued currency is falling not only in purchasing power, but also in reach.
And this feeds back directly to the strength and status of the US because the US is a huge importing nation. Since there's little it exports, there's little you - as a foreign country with three times your GDP bound up in US$ - can do to get rid of your rapidly declining reserve. You can buy some high-tech, and that's essentially it. The US exports too little to spend your money, and other countries aren't really interested in taking it, because they're also trying to get rid of the crap.
The net effect of that is that the US becomes less and less important as a trading partner, because what they offer - US$ - is becoming worthless slips of fancy paper that you're desperately trying to get rid of, instead of getting even more of them.
That's a lot of loss of strength and status compared to a time where most of the world was trying hard to do business with you.
If there were no laws regulating kiddie porn and sex with minors, a lot more men would be sleeping with B-cup 14-year-old girls and filming the experience. Evidence for that claim?
That's exactly the kind of unsustantiated fear-mongering that I hate. You encounter it everywhere where people have an agenda. When they disallowed smoking in clubs and pubs over here at the start of the year, lots of tobacco-industry-paid (my impression) pundits yelled that the entire club scene would go bancrupt. Now that the figures are in, what we see is a small decline that fits well within the trend of the past years and may, once the year is done, sum up to a small or no effect at all.
Same with the whole "protect the chiiiildren" yelling. Almost always, it's made-up hogwash. 20 years ago we didn't have 100 laws making the wrong look at the wrong age group a death penalty crime. Speaking for everyone I know it didn't exactly make us hunted like prey when we were kids.
That depends on which version of justice you believe in.
If a law has no effect on the crime, then it fails on the "protection" aspect. There still is the "vengeance" aspect, which would be understandeable for murder or child abuse. But not for CGI porn.
I thought the purpose of child-porn laws were to ensure that no children were hurt (a fairly noble goal). Pfft.
The purpose of child-porn laws is to create fear in parents and then tell them your party will take care of their children and they needn't worry - if only the vote for you. In other words: The purpose of child-porn laws is to generate votes.
I've yet to see the slightest bit of evidence that any of these laws had any meaningful effect on actual child abuse at all. It's probably because the aim of those laws is the dangerous foreign stranger who abducts and abuses your child (a nightmare for all parents) instead of father/mother/uncle who abuses a kid (the by far most common case in real life).
I'm sure you have a surefire way of identifying an actual prophet, one that the other 200 factions of the abrahamic religion would agree on, instead of starting another holy war?
And one that'd convince people like me, who are of the opinion that "I am a prophet" is on par with "I am Napoleon" ?
You must be kidding. It's not just math, it's a general trend.
School has found itself in a bind. In addition to teaching knowledge, lots of parents have started to expect that their kids will receive education in school, instead of at home. So school has to do more in the same amount of time, with less pre-educated children.
In addition to that, the cultural climate has changed. For you, "no child left behind" might be a slogan, but for many schools it has turned into an order: Leave no child behind, no matter how dumb it is.
The solution for many elements in school was to make things easier, so the time available is enough and even the dumb kids can pass.
I wonder how the 5% was chosen? I mean how does one actually sample this in a meaningful way. Given that this is from McAffee, which kind of has a little of a business interest in making people afraid of the unseen dangers of that Intarweb thing, my guess is the sample was taken like this:
* Enter a random string into Google * Visit the first 20 websites that come up * Record that one looked kind of shady * 1 of 20 = 5% * Write press release using that figure
Prophets are a dime a dozen. The problem is they all contradict each other, at least in part.
I just think they're all bonkers annd should be locked up in an asylum. Besides, a god of love who'se so selective in his love that he insists on believing in him before he hands it out is an abomination anyways.
You, sir, need to figure out how to tell the difference between actions of people and doctrines of religious organizations. The two are not one and the same. And you, sir, have to realize that while actions and doctrines are not the same (trivial), there is a strong correlation between them. A society that thinks non-believers should be killed is very, very likely to have a higher rate of killings of non-believers than one that doesn't.
I said in that other post that Christians should probably NOT spend so much time touting the ten commandments because they are part of the Mosaic law - the law Christ was supposed to have fulfilled. Stoning and most of the stuff people point out as being cruel, etc. in the OT fall into the same category. Well, that exactly is my point. The key word is "most". You pick, you choose, you discard what you don't like and run with the rest. I refuse to accept that. By your own words, either your christ did fulfill something, then it's over and done with and I don't have to love my father and I can kill as I want because he didn't repeat that prohibition, or he didn't.
Your only way out of that would be if somewhere he told which parts continue to be valid. But, according to your own logic, humans are failable, they can be tempted and mislead, and therefore if such a choice were made by a human, it has to be suspect. Only the word of the infaliable deity itself could be trusted.
Let's cut this discussion short, because ten replies further down we'll end up at this conclusion anyways: Religion (any, not just yours) refuses to follow logic and isn't terribly bothered by internal inconsistence. It's an emotional thing if you want to label it with positive words, or a kind of insanity if you prefer my view. In any case, it's a view of the world that does not follow rational thought and thus can't be refuted, or falsified. So I'll stop trying because one of the strongest mantra of all religions is that the more your faith is disproved and demonstrated to be false, the more you should "trust in faith" and believe not anyways, but because it makes no sense.
Oh, and you may want to look into the murdering pro-adoption doctors thing. I am pretty sure I know what you meant, but that's a pretty awesome type-o. Errr... yes. I did mean abortion. Sorry.
That's exactly the point: You pick and choose the parts you like and discard everything else, while at the same time claiming that the whole work is the word of your god.
So, either you discard the old testament, or at least edit it (not like your ancestors didn't already do that several times) or you stick to it. Really, your choice. I just call hypocrite when you change your story to whatever suits you. When you call everything good "christian" and claim that everything bad that christians did in the name of their faith (witch burnings, crusades, murdering pro-adoption doctors, etc. etc.) has nothing to do with their religion.
As it stands, the "word of god" contains the phrase "though shalt not kill" as well as the phrase "though shalt not suffer a witch to live". There's no indication about how to solve the dilemma, or which part takes precedence. Oh, and the ten commandment parts is the older one.
And that is why I think christians make horrible politicians, and bad keynote speakers - they've learnt all their lives that it is ok to ignore facts and pick whatever truth fits you best at the moment.
Would you outlaw that religion? Actually, yes. Except that it would only make it more attractive to the extremists.
The US is - on paper - a secular state. As such, the religion of its office holders shouldn't matter. Those holding office should keep their religion private. But they don't and that's the problem. If he can't keep his religion out of his public office in a secular state - then he shouldn't be invited in that function to another non-religious event as obviously he's unable to draw that line.
One wonders whether a professed atheist, an Islamic mullah or Wiccan priest, instead of one of those dastardly Republicans, would get the same scrutiny or presumption of bias or other "odd" or "bizarre" feelings. Let's not forget that this is the US-of-A.
The professed atheist would be refused out of fear that the keynote would be overshadowed by protests of christian fundamentalists.
The Islamic mullah would be arrested as a terror suspect on his way to the conference.
The Wiccan priest would we welcomed with "Go to Hell, Satan!" signs at the airport, even though he's there for holiday and refused the honour because the wiccans keep a low profile for good reasons.
It also tells him to stone witches and adulterers to death, be a good subject to the king, and a whole lot of other stuff.
When you only pick out the nice parts, it's not a surprise the whole thing comes out as nice. It isn't. It's a mixed bag. Most importantly, it's got nothing to do with games and since he apparently can't keep it private but has to make it a part of everything he does, it would indeed seem better to have someone speaking about games at a games convention, instead of giving a speech about religion thinly veiled as a gaming speech.
While you're right in the main point, your numbers are off.
First, you can't compare cash reserves (i.e. fixed amount of money held at time x) with GDP (i.e. repeated income over time).
Two, MS did not win all the antitrust battles. Almost a billion of those cash reserves went to Europe to pay fines, and there is still more to come because they still don't play by the rules. They got lucky in the US where while they lost the case, the punishment was ridiculously low.
Three, the numbers you mentioned are not cash. They are "liquid assets", i.e. cash, short-term investments, and anything they can turn into cash quickly if they have to. That's a bit of a difference, because it means for most of the money there is no additional profit to be made by investing it, because it already is invested.
Bill Gates, when he first started MS, had passion for software and coding. And you take that knowledge from what source?
One of Bill's very first public appearance was his "open letter" where he showed a great passion for money and business, and very little for software and coding.
I *wish* I could program the stuff him and his buddies did way back then. Your probably can, if you are studying computer science. Even back then, it wasn't rocket science. A lot of people wrote similar stuff. But most of them didn't have the connections, rich parents, or greed to turn it into a successful business.
You've got this guy absolutely backwards.
someone that probably respects OSS programmers a lot more than he'd be able to admit before July 1st. He's considered them thieves for at least 20 years. I see no indication of him changing his mind. If you have, name your source.
is planning data centers on 'a scale that we haven't thought of before' Aka "on a scale our competitors have been successful with for a while now, so we decided we should start to copy them now".
Anyone else feel like the pooooor proprietary software companies are the equivalent of someone complaining about his birthday presents?
Hey, nobody forces you to use it, you know? You can write your own if you don't like the GPL. Different from patents, the GPL doesn't prevent you from coming up with the exact same thing, on your own time and expense.
Slashdot Mirror
No, really. In many US states, the union of prison wardens is the strongest and most influential union.
I live in a market where phones often come "free" with contracts. And still, the iPhone came and conquered. The market for "phones" may be saturated, but have you seen mobile phones recently? Their user interfaces are designed by shizophrenic sadists. I know people who avoid entire companies because their UI is so horrible that they classify it as unusable. And these are people who want a phone for the basic functions, like calling someone and keeping an address book. Using the calculator is an advanced usage case for them.
The iPhone taps into that market in addition to the techies who want it for the geek factor, and the marketing dudes who want it for the cool factor, and the Mac-heads who want it for the integration. And the market for people who want a great phone that's easy to use is HUGE. If the rumours are true and Apple will allow subsidies, they could've trouble mass-producing iPhones fast enough.
That's only one part of a long list of US/EU changes we've been seeing recently.
Here's another one: For many years, the price of Apple products was the same in US$ and Euro. It stayed the same even when the Euro was already 1.2:1 over the US$. That changed last year.
This time it's hard to imagine where the money is going to come from. You've already said it: WW3. You justs elected the guy with the family experience a few years too early, and he was a dumbass who probably ruined his brother's chances.
I seriously do expect that the US will start a major war to beef up its economy. It definitely can't afford to go without a war at this time, I'm pretty certain it can't support a peace-economy anymore.
Driving out the fascists was about the only thing in the list that's correct. Especially your "cleaning up the mess" in the middle-east doesn't exactly work out too great, does it? If I was BMW I'd love to settle back in Detroit; You are aware of the fact that "BMW" stands for "Bavarian Motor Works" and Bavaria is a part of Germany which happens to be a part of Europe? Just asking...
One, lots and lots of countries have, over the past decades, hoarded US$ as reserve currency. They see investments of billions, in some cases trillions, of dollars rapidly deflate.
Two, the world markets have changed. Point #1 is true because for a long time you could buy anything, anywhere in the world, with US$. That's changing. Thus your devalued currency is falling not only in purchasing power, but also in reach.
And this feeds back directly to the strength and status of the US because the US is a huge importing nation. Since there's little it exports, there's little you - as a foreign country with three times your GDP bound up in US$ - can do to get rid of your rapidly declining reserve. You can buy some high-tech, and that's essentially it. The US exports too little to spend your money, and other countries aren't really interested in taking it, because they're also trying to get rid of the crap.
The net effect of that is that the US becomes less and less important as a trading partner, because what they offer - US$ - is becoming worthless slips of fancy paper that you're desperately trying to get rid of, instead of getting even more of them.
That's a lot of loss of strength and status compared to a time where most of the world was trying hard to do business with you.
That's exactly the kind of unsustantiated fear-mongering that I hate. You encounter it everywhere where people have an agenda. When they disallowed smoking in clubs and pubs over here at the start of the year, lots of tobacco-industry-paid (my impression) pundits yelled that the entire club scene would go bancrupt. Now that the figures are in, what we see is a small decline that fits well within the trend of the past years and may, once the year is done, sum up to a small or no effect at all.
Same with the whole "protect the chiiiildren" yelling. Almost always, it's made-up hogwash. 20 years ago we didn't have 100 laws making the wrong look at the wrong age group a death penalty crime. Speaking for everyone I know it didn't exactly make us hunted like prey when we were kids.
That depends on which version of justice you believe in.
If a law has no effect on the crime, then it fails on the "protection" aspect. There still is the "vengeance" aspect, which would be understandeable for murder or child abuse. But not for CGI porn.
The purpose of child-porn laws is to create fear in parents and then tell them your party will take care of their children and they needn't worry - if only the vote for you. In other words: The purpose of child-porn laws is to generate votes.
I've yet to see the slightest bit of evidence that any of these laws had any meaningful effect on actual child abuse at all. It's probably because the aim of those laws is the dangerous foreign stranger who abducts and abuses your child (a nightmare for all parents) instead of father/mother/uncle who abuses a kid (the by far most common case in real life).
Ah, I see.
I'm sure you have a surefire way of identifying an actual prophet, one that the other 200 factions of the abrahamic religion would agree on, instead of starting another holy war?
And one that'd convince people like me, who are of the opinion that "I am a prophet" is on par with "I am Napoleon" ?
Look, OS X has just such a feature. :-)
The point is that parents have to take responsibility, and some actions. And they don't. On a massive scale, parents don't do any parenting anymore.
And that's the real problem.
It did work for microsoft, though. You only have to piss him off so much that he does something stupid.
You must be kidding. It's not just math, it's a general trend.
School has found itself in a bind. In addition to teaching knowledge, lots of parents have started to expect that their kids will receive education in school, instead of at home. So school has to do more in the same amount of time, with less pre-educated children.
In addition to that, the cultural climate has changed. For you, "no child left behind" might be a slogan, but for many schools it has turned into an order: Leave no child behind, no matter how dumb it is.
The solution for many elements in school was to make things easier, so the time available is enough and even the dumb kids can pass.
* Enter a random string into Google
* Visit the first 20 websites that come up
* Record that one looked kind of shady
* 1 of 20 = 5%
* Write press release using that figure
Prophets are a dime a dozen. The problem is they all contradict each other, at least in part.
I just think they're all bonkers annd should be locked up in an asylum. Besides, a god of love who'se so selective in his love that he insists on believing in him before he hands it out is an abomination anyways.
Your only way out of that would be if somewhere he told which parts continue to be valid. But, according to your own logic, humans are failable, they can be tempted and mislead, and therefore if such a choice were made by a human, it has to be suspect. Only the word of the infaliable deity itself could be trusted.
Let's cut this discussion short, because ten replies further down we'll end up at this conclusion anyways: Religion (any, not just yours) refuses to follow logic and isn't terribly bothered by internal inconsistence. It's an emotional thing if you want to label it with positive words, or a kind of insanity if you prefer my view. In any case, it's a view of the world that does not follow rational thought and thus can't be refuted, or falsified. So I'll stop trying because one of the strongest mantra of all religions is that the more your faith is disproved and demonstrated to be false, the more you should "trust in faith" and believe not anyways, but because it makes no sense. Oh, and you may want to look into the murdering pro-adoption doctors thing. I am pretty sure I know what you meant, but that's a pretty awesome type-o. Errr... yes. I did mean abortion. Sorry.
That's exactly the point: You pick and choose the parts you like and discard everything else, while at the same time claiming that the whole work is the word of your god.
So, either you discard the old testament, or at least edit it (not like your ancestors didn't already do that several times) or you stick to it. Really, your choice. I just call hypocrite when you change your story to whatever suits you. When you call everything good "christian" and claim that everything bad that christians did in the name of their faith (witch burnings, crusades, murdering pro-adoption doctors, etc. etc.) has nothing to do with their religion.
As it stands, the "word of god" contains the phrase "though shalt not kill" as well as the phrase "though shalt not suffer a witch to live". There's no indication about how to solve the dilemma, or which part takes precedence. Oh, and the ten commandment parts is the older one.
And that is why I think christians make horrible politicians, and bad keynote speakers - they've learnt all their lives that it is ok to ignore facts and pick whatever truth fits you best at the moment.
And science is all about the difference between "I think..." and "I've tested..."
If it behaves exactly as predicted, you can make another mark and continue. If not, you've found something potentially very important.
The US is - on paper - a secular state. As such, the religion of its office holders shouldn't matter. Those holding office should keep their religion private. But they don't and that's the problem. If he can't keep his religion out of his public office in a secular state - then he shouldn't be invited in that function to another non-religious event as obviously he's unable to draw that line.
The professed atheist would be refused out of fear that the keynote would be overshadowed by protests of christian fundamentalists.
The Islamic mullah would be arrested as a terror suspect on his way to the conference.
The Wiccan priest would we welcomed with "Go to Hell, Satan!" signs at the airport, even though he's there for holiday and refused the honour because the wiccans keep a low profile for good reasons.
It also tells him to stone witches and adulterers to death, be a good subject to the king, and a whole lot of other stuff.
When you only pick out the nice parts, it's not a surprise the whole thing comes out as nice. It isn't. It's a mixed bag. Most importantly, it's got nothing to do with games and since he apparently can't keep it private but has to make it a part of everything he does, it would indeed seem better to have someone speaking about games at a games convention, instead of giving a speech about religion thinly veiled as a gaming speech.
While you're right in the main point, your numbers are off.
First, you can't compare cash reserves (i.e. fixed amount of money held at time x) with GDP (i.e. repeated income over time).
Two, MS did not win all the antitrust battles. Almost a billion of those cash reserves went to Europe to pay fines, and there is still more to come because they still don't play by the rules. They got lucky in the US where while they lost the case, the punishment was ridiculously low.
Three, the numbers you mentioned are not cash. They are "liquid assets", i.e. cash, short-term investments, and anything they can turn into cash quickly if they have to. That's a bit of a difference, because it means for most of the money there is no additional profit to be made by investing it, because it already is invested.
One of Bill's very first public appearance was his "open letter" where he showed a great passion for money and business, and very little for software and coding. I *wish* I could program the stuff him and his buddies did way back then. Your probably can, if you are studying computer science. Even back then, it wasn't rocket science. A lot of people wrote similar stuff. But most of them didn't have the connections, rich parents, or greed to turn it into a successful business.
You've got this guy absolutely backwards. someone that probably respects OSS programmers a lot more than he'd be able to admit before July 1st. He's considered them thieves for at least 20 years. I see no indication of him changing his mind. If you have, name your source.
Anyone else feel like the pooooor proprietary software companies are the equivalent of someone complaining about his birthday presents?
Hey, nobody forces you to use it, you know? You can write your own if you don't like the GPL. Different from patents, the GPL doesn't prevent you from coming up with the exact same thing, on your own time and expense.