It's news for nerds! It's entertainment! It's both!
You're confusing desire for a higher ideal and the gutter reality of human nature. So what the parent company has blessed this? Since when is Slashdot some sort of flagship for proper behavior or even known outside of the tech crowd? It's their company, they can do what they want and the market will reward actions accordingly. Maybe they compiled statistics showing how popular the competition is for funny modded posts. And last I checked a clear percentage of tech people are socially stunted, part of the mass appeal to come here. (Cough, cough, not me of course)
How are people being abused? There's a hot button word - I fail to see how ending up as fodder for what is clearly meant as satire qualifies as abuse. Humor is often all about ridicule, stupidity, and yes, quite often completely juvenile behavior, whether or not it's fair or mature is beside the point. Hence movies like Dodge Ball, a true pinnacle of achievement, get made and make money.
I would love to see this same profiling done for comments posted to my local TV news website. It's truly scary to see what people post: someone has a horrible freeway accident and a commenter posts something to the effect of 'hell yes, cool, a dead person, he deserved it because my microsecond skim of a sensationally covered news item suggests it to me'.
It doesn't serve to reinforce anything. I'm not so dumb as to think that because a few select people chose not to go into tech that the whole sex is somehow broken. Only that there might be something there that bears investigating.
I disagree. I do not at all think you personally would read anything into it, but other men definitely do and will take anything that can be construed negatively to reinforce their worldview. Consider that if sexist behavior wasn't such a constant we wouldn't be even be posting on this subject, in this way.
Here's a counter idea. Let's add to your proposed hypothesis with a second one. Note that in elementary levels boys generally do not attack the intellectual capabilities of girls, in fact a lot of great friendships and school project partnerships spring up in classrooms. Sex changes haven't happened and kids naturally are trusting of each other. So I would like to know why puberty induced aggression in males can translate into attacking/blocking/putting down women in the classroom and workplace throughout their adult lives. We commonly see that boys and girls as children can play games together and trade wins and losses, but post puberty a man hates to lose to a woman. Again, not all cases, not all men, but definitely a distinct population of males cannot stand the idea that a woman might win the game or have the better answer, and this also seems to go hand in hand with puberty. This same group is fine with other male colleagues, it's just that they get uncomfortable with women as equal work partners and then waste copious amounts of time blackballing, denigrating, etc.
Point taken on incorrect guessing of background, and assuming wrongly. Your story is both interesting and commendable. And, my statement was not at all meant to be insulting - you chose to take it that way - you cannot tell me that you have not heard other men remarking on the value of previous mentors in their lives. I was not at all attempting to demean, insult or otherwise injure you. Your remarks sound defensive and there is no need, your story, what can be pieced together that is, sounds like you had the chance to walk away and not push yourself and achieve your goals, but you did and that is awesome no matter who the person is, or their sex.
The puberty comment reminds me of arguments given against women in sports 40 years ago, prior to passage of Title IX. People are looking for all these silver bullet simple answers when the real answer, as it almost always is for social questions, is far more muddy and complicated. You got the all caps sig because to a woman, your hypothesis is pointless and was perceived as an attack. Your later comments have changed the attack perception however.
Here's another point. I have yet to meet a woman, techie or not, who relates any sort of retraction of abilities following puberty. Instead, what does happen at puberty is girls become highly aware of the daily "be a sex tart" message. The message is everywhere. The message is "we mostly just care how you look in a bikini." Then she gets a message from a few teachers and coworkers questioning why she is interested in math and science. Quantifying is soft science for sure, but even though we don't like it, no one really questions how effective advertising is. It's a billion dollar industry based on suggestions. We have a system that has suggested for centuries that women shouldn't go into technical areas, my money is on this, not on estrogen production.
It's a generalization to reason from the few examples you have encountered, and make an unfounded claim that developmental changes which occur during puberty are responsible for lack of adequate representation. It's baseless reasoning, unsupportable, and serves to reinforce negative opinion of women in technical fields. And yes, those of us in the field, who actually like men a ton, and like working with them, get incredibly tired of hearing these ridiculous statements. A number of men I have encountered (definitely not all), have gone out of their way to be as evil as possible. Unfortunately I have found other female colleagues who have experienced the same.
I'll hazard a guess that within in your tech career you have been praised and encouraged by family, friends and teachers, starting at a young age. Maybe not by everyone, but typically a guy will mention some particular teacher or work mentor who helped inspire and light the spark of lifelong interest.
The average female tech is perenially questioned, outright told no and experiences deliberate road blocks put up by coworkers, bosses, teachers and professors.
The average female tech has experienced zero in the way of encouragement.
I'd have to google around to refind it; there was an exploratory study done where reviewers were asked to rate journal articles with and without names. It was found that removing the name, and therefore any suggestion of sex, led to higher ratings for female authors. When the same papers had the names put back on, they were downgraded in ratings more often. I'm now kicking myself for not bookmarking this, and no I'm not making it up.
If you are interested in learning outside of the examples you mentioned, seek out the few female programmers, engineers, scientists, mathematicians in your work area and ask for some history. You'd
be surprised.
And screaming? Hmm. It's expected and sport on slashdot to make derogatory statement regarding female tech ability. These comments are often modded up as insightful and interesting. All they really serve to do is reinforce stereotypes.
The pressure from the government to beat those damned ruskies into space at all costs.
Angle of Attack is a magnificent read, both for the human side of the story, and the achievement of manned space flight from an inside engineering viewpoint. The at all costs dictum forced something else: the conscientious and conspicuous mandate to do things differently, fail and learn from it, and not stay in any comfortable ruts. There were no sanitary, emasculating powerpoint charts; instead stories of important people being called in at midnight to get to questions immediately. This is not to diminish the importance of ethics, but part of what came out of Apollo was thinking outside the box at all moments and not being tethered from doing so by management. Would that type of engineering today be seen as rogue and wasteful or brilliant? Indeed, how many places now truly allow development to occur in this fashion across all departments, despite the bullshit marketing speak spewed to investors and prospective employees? The global requirement of quick return of investment (measured in misleading ways, say lines of code per day for example) can stoke ethics problems, lead to a lot of CYA behavior, and squash innovative, careful, time consuming with little to show for it, thinking.
There are many other causes of death in our country besides terrorism that vastly outweigh the losses suffered on 9/11... on a yearly basis. Why haven't we taken any steps to solve those? Why is a single event where 3,000 people died cause to go batshit insane protective give-up-our-liberties mode, when Heart Disease causes over 200 times that many deaths on a yearly basis, and we can't convince ourselves to hit up a gym?
Because that solves a different problem and keeps healthcare costs like treating cancer and Alzheimer's disease in older people down. It's far cheaper just to promote the color coded ribbon body parts awareness club campaigns and do nothing. This makes the Healthcare Industrial Complex, not to mention the Mc-BigFarm-Corn-Chemical Complex, happy and profitable.
Not true in all cases. Your wife's school may not be teaching science but my son's primary school is. It is his passion and he has been with several teachers who have actively incorporated science as part of the core material.
The failing that I observe however is a large number of students falling very far behind in math. At his school the situation is so dire that the kids who are at the level they should be have now been moved into "gifted math" while the main group is attempting to learn things they should have mastered two to three years ago.
The literacy brigade has definitely lorded over all subjects. Witness that there is often a nightly reading requirement, in fact parents are sometimes required to sign a piece of paper indicating that the child did in fact read his daily allotment, but there is no nightly math requirement, no summer math club, none of the pushing to practice math let alone enjoy it. Students still get the picture that math is somehow not fun and something to be suffered through.
We seem to have low standards for math, and we pay teachers pitiful salaries that are not commensurate with the number of hours a decent teacher must put in for preparation, actual teaching and grading. I'd like to see teachers given very competitive salaries based on merit, where parents collectively vote on merit based on what they observe, along with test scores and observations from the local principal. The tenure game and low salaries don't seem to be working. Teachers collectively appear frustrated and students are being pushed to successive grade levels without actually achieving everything they need to at each level.
Spamming is terrible and whoever does deserves to punished severely, and possible killed.
We'll remember to tell your family your thoughts on the benefits of foregoing a trial, denial of representation and judgment by an assassin rather than your peers after you've been mistakenly identified as a spammer and brutally killed. They'll be comforted by knowing that millions of other people worldwide are throwing parties celebrating your demise.
OK, a bit much on the sarcasm here and yes, spamming is universally hated. How does the electronic world come to agreement on a consequence to this action? Here's an idea; let's assign each person a single hate point for spam and a thousand hate points for murder. Say the spammer affects 300 million mailboxes, 300 million people hate the perp and therefore 300 million hate points are posted to his ledger. In comparison another guy commits a murder and it affects 50 people, earning the murderer 50,000 hate points. But wait, that's just it. Who agrees that a thousand hate points each for murder is correct? Some people will want a million and some will cite the benefits of one less mouth to feed and figure it won't ever happen to anyone in their family so who cares - just assign a measely 100.
Aside from this little pesky detail, in our points based justice system, we avoid all those expensive lawyers and stupid judges and clueless juries; instead we can all just vote via the internet who we wanted punished for whatever is pissing us off at the moment. Then we can build a big colliseum just like the Romans and make it formal entertainment. It really all comes down to the fact that each person has a different moral judgment loop running in their head. This idea is ridiculous, but put forth to point out that your judgment seems extreme. Is spam truly so much of a problem in your life that it causes you to justify punishment with an upper bound of a killing? Does the relatively benign act of sending spam multiplied by millions of affected people make it more heinous than other more serious crimes that people commit?
Damn! Guess I won't be wearing my NHRA Snap-On Tools Got Nitro? t-shirt to Logan; unless maybe I pair it with a black leather miniskirt, heels and red lipstick.
Oh, wait, Southwest Airlines would be offended. Well, shit. OK, kids, do you hear me? NO self expression whatsoever in a public place. Buy your Think of the Children, Anti-Terrorist (TM) , better known as TCAT (TM) Elizabeth Hasselbeck approved SafeNEz Airport Wear uniform today! Only $29.95! Act now and we'll throw in the Sex Offender Detector Air Freshener purse or wallet spray, regularly $9.95, but free, if you act within the next 15 minutes!
Paging John Belushi, please resurrect yourself and save us from ourselves!
Truth be told, we were given more grief at customs regarding the wax-encased gouda in our suitcase than the bubblewrapped bong in my carry on.
Whoops! Now you've done it! After they add your slashdot postings to the searchable matrix of the rest of your data, they'll be finding that bong next time!
A friend of mine mentioned that he one day called the local Congresswoman's office to ask questions and offer opinions. He noted since that time, every time he boards a plane, he is subjected to security search * 10 compared to the regular passengers. Congress could care less what any one voter thinks, unless said voter makes the mistake of offering contradictory views, at which point he is targetted. Approval means jack, just move along and quit staring will ya? We hear these words like approval in order remain in the pleasant dream of denial. We have created an opaque government, overwhelmed by misguided fears and petty bickering between the two parties, rather than an accountable, transparent one. We all lose, including the elected officials, who one day may find that their son or daughter was tortured by one of these devices because the local cop didn't know it was an IMPORTANT PERSON.
Negative pressure means that if you take a box of the stuff, and let it expand, at the end of the day there's actually more stuff in there than you started with.
Does this further imply that changing the direction of time makes this a reversible process such that the original amount would be recovered?
Who knew? Secretiveness is now a commodity. I guess not telling anyone what they do doesn't count as keeping a secret. Presumably then they're out looking for Invader Zim!
You are right: Jesus did not condemn, unfortunately many of his followers do. In absence of balance of power protections, we could end up with a system similar to that of Muslim clerics dictating political will. We see active attempts with conservative groups regarding hot button issues now. The possiblity that a non-Christian scientist would be condemned for really no other reason other than difference in faith, or lack of faith in the case of an atheist, by people who claim to be Christians (and I use the word claim intentionally because they really do not follow the teachings), is troubling.
the embodiment of THE truth
This is an unprovable statement. Every religion claims the same, and it is essentially a cornerstone of many religions, not just Christianity. It is an absolute statement and while it may be part of the Christian belief system, it is as well part of the belief systems of many others that do not follow Christianity and have no wish to. This is where your statement regarding separation of church and state matters. Because each may claim truth, each tends to see their system as superior and all others inferior.
"truly Christian" is subjective and ill-defined, and additionally this implies trouble for the Buddhist scientist, Hindu scientist, Muslim scientist, Native American scientist, Jewish scientist. So you have augmented my observation: only someone adhering to the subjectively defined "truly Christian" worldview would be allowed to speak freely, all others would hit a wall.
I observe that you have free reign here on slashdot to express your religious views. Your comments are not modded as flamebait and you are free to express yourself. I can't help but think that the converse of a scientist posting a comment on a Christian website, expressing himself with equal passion, would be villified, taunted and attacked. This comment is not at all intended to be an attack, nor an endorsement or slam in any way, simply an observation.
It appears to be the first story tagged under "relationships" and the second tagged as "romance." Next up look for "recipes", "ab crunches" and "what he REALLY wants in bed!"
And please, can we quit calling them "computer security researchers"? What's wrong with hackers? When did we start on the euphemism treadmill?
Kinda like the diff between good cops and pigs, no? Each has more power than the average joe and the ability to use it to influence events. Do you really want to live in a world without the good guy hackers staying abreast of deliberate, inadvertent or just plain overlooked security flaws in the products you install on your machine, or trust your government to install on their machines that affect the outcome of elections and ergo, all aspects of life that you care about? Maybe you don't give a shit about about the dwindling democracy, but some people do and it is our collective responsibility to ensure that the leaders we collectively elect get their without blue or red assholes trying to game the system any more than it is already gamed.
Actually we could consider that simulation is acting like an operator between two realities, hence the mutual simulation, but no need to stop at just a binary operator, we could envision a many to one, or entire network of simulations all co-creating each other simultaneously and not necessarily with any root or base case node.
Careful, bub, in the sim a random mutation of events occurs and you're a hot hot hot love machine with eight kids spread out over six states, a nasty itch, and a bunch of ex wives all wanting child support!
Yes, and in that simulator they've actually already arrived at the conclusion showing all variations of deliberate moves to create instability and desired psyops ends up in the utter destruction of the power that paid for and created the simulator in the first place; hence the us(sim(sim)) level is working to find a communication port back, or at least a call/cc.
Roz Chast had a brilliant little cartoon on parallel universes years ago in the New Yorker; while the earth mom is baking cookies, Mrs. Vvv on $*&*& is baking pilkers. So, then, on $*&*& there must be an analogous simulation effort making some other yahoo really rich and the military powers falsely confident.
Seems to me tech addiction/love/desire/demand is not at all constrained to the West: it's a function of income, pricing and product availability, among other factors. Are you somehow forgetting the obvious huge explosion of tech driven economies of China and India? Perhaps the massive marvels of Dubai escaped you? Japanese supercomputing slipped your mind ? Do you really think all the brainpower creating these things goes home and doesn't indulge in the same level of personal tech lust that drives the average Jose in Denver? That's a bit ignorant and baiting, anonymous.
The media has an irrational, entertainment based, algorithm at work when it comes to selection and promotion of news stories. Promotion of space flight stories is generally good, however it's clear judging from the number of comments posted here that it doesn't mean much to the slashdot crowd who correctly filter as not much in the way of new or interesting. The gee whiz factor works for CNN though.
But the poster did include "amen" which is typically associated with the Christian faith; this detracts from the point of the observation which is dead on correct however: us vs them thinking is at best unnecessary drama and basically a cheap tactic to woo potential converts and keep the faithful hyped, and at worst is in fact capable of causing all manner of violence with a hypocritical sense of justification. There is a fine line between us vs them and extremism. I would argue that the poster has already crossed it. We would fare far better by firmly reinstating separation between church and state. Moreover, using the poster's argument, I'd claim the same for different reasons: with all the ills in the world why is the Christian backed Republican agenda so fucking wrapped around the axle over abortion and gays? Talk about misplaced priorities! We've got a gazillion dollar deficit, melting polar caps, poverty, crime, a FDA that can't be trusted, and thousands of broken families who sent soldiers to Iraq, among other issues as well. Unfortunately because this sad state of affairs has progressed so deeply, even if the poster hadn't used an "amen" in the post, the prevalence of the Christian agenda warping American politics would still make this a good bet.
It's perfectly logical to ask a geek forum to comment on political tech issues that the average geek knows far more about than the average mainstream voter. In no way does this imply that any of the geek readers care less about other issues; it simply does not follow. You can further bet that no electable candidate is going to go on record and make much of a stink about any of tech issues originally questioned anyway. None of those issues really mean much to the average voter, so the worry is unfounded. Here is one tech issue that does matter though to everyone: electronic voting machines. Who is saying what about this issue?
Slashdot Mirror
Especially since we at slashdot support pathetic excuses for all the errors committed by males in science and engineering:
http://listverse.com/science/top-10-worst-engineering-disasters/
It's news for nerds! It's entertainment! It's both!
You're confusing desire for a higher ideal and the gutter reality of human nature. So what the parent company has blessed this? Since when is Slashdot some sort of flagship for proper behavior or even known outside of the tech crowd? It's their company, they can do what they want and the market will reward actions accordingly. Maybe they compiled statistics showing how popular the competition is for funny modded posts. And last I checked a clear percentage of tech people are socially stunted, part of the mass appeal to come here. (Cough, cough, not me of course)
How are people being abused? There's a hot button word - I fail to see how ending up as fodder for what is clearly meant as satire qualifies as abuse. Humor is often all about ridicule, stupidity, and yes, quite often completely juvenile behavior, whether or not it's fair or mature is beside the point. Hence movies like Dodge Ball, a true pinnacle of achievement, get made and make money.
I would love to see this same profiling done for comments posted to my local TV news website. It's truly scary to see what people post: someone has a horrible freeway accident and a commenter posts something to the effect of 'hell yes, cool, a dead person, he deserved it because my microsecond skim of a sensationally covered news item suggests it to me'.
It doesn't serve to reinforce anything. I'm not so dumb as to think that because a few select people chose not to go into tech that the whole sex is somehow broken. Only that there might be something there that bears investigating.
I disagree. I do not at all think you personally would read anything into it, but other men definitely do and will take anything that can be construed negatively to reinforce their worldview. Consider that if sexist behavior wasn't such a constant we wouldn't be even be posting on this subject, in this way.
Here's a counter idea. Let's add to your proposed hypothesis with a second one. Note that in elementary levels boys generally do not attack the intellectual capabilities of girls, in fact a lot of great friendships and school project partnerships spring up in classrooms. Sex changes haven't happened and kids naturally are trusting of each other. So I would like to know why puberty induced aggression in males can translate into attacking/blocking/putting down women in the classroom and workplace throughout their adult lives. We commonly see that boys and girls as children can play games together and trade wins and losses, but post puberty a man hates to lose to a woman. Again, not all cases, not all men, but definitely a distinct population of males cannot stand the idea that a woman might win the game or have the better answer, and this also seems to go hand in hand with puberty. This same group is fine with other male colleagues, it's just that they get uncomfortable with women as equal work partners and then waste copious amounts of time blackballing, denigrating, etc.
Point taken on incorrect guessing of background, and assuming wrongly. Your story is both interesting and commendable. And, my statement was not at all meant to be insulting - you chose to take it that way - you cannot tell me that you have not heard other men remarking on the value of previous mentors in their lives. I was not at all attempting to demean, insult or otherwise injure you. Your remarks sound defensive and there is no need, your story, what can be pieced together that is, sounds like you had the chance to walk away and not push yourself and achieve your goals, but you did and that is awesome no matter who the person is, or their sex.
The puberty comment reminds me of arguments given against women in sports 40 years ago, prior to passage of Title IX. People are looking for all these silver bullet simple answers when the real answer, as it almost always is for social questions, is far more muddy and complicated. You got the all caps sig because to a woman, your hypothesis is pointless and was perceived as an attack. Your later comments have changed the attack perception however.
Here's another point. I have yet to meet a woman, techie or not, who relates any sort of retraction of abilities following puberty. Instead, what does happen at puberty is girls become highly aware of the daily "be a sex tart" message. The message is everywhere. The message is "we mostly just care how you look in a bikini." Then she gets a message from a few teachers and coworkers questioning why she is interested in math and science. Quantifying is soft science for sure, but even though we don't like it, no one really questions how effective advertising is. It's a billion dollar industry based on suggestions. We have a system that has suggested for centuries that women shouldn't go into technical areas, my money is on this, not on estrogen production.
It's a generalization to reason from the few examples you have encountered, and make an unfounded claim that developmental changes which occur during puberty are responsible for lack of adequate representation. It's baseless reasoning, unsupportable, and serves to reinforce negative opinion of women in technical fields. And yes, those of us in the field, who actually like men a ton, and like working with them, get incredibly tired of hearing these ridiculous statements. A number of men I have encountered (definitely not all), have gone out of their way to be as evil as possible. Unfortunately I have found other female colleagues who have experienced the same.
I'll hazard a guess that within in your tech career you have been praised and encouraged by family, friends and teachers, starting at a young age. Maybe not by everyone, but typically a guy will mention some particular teacher or work mentor who helped inspire and light the spark of lifelong interest.
The average female tech is perenially questioned, outright told no and experiences deliberate road blocks put up by coworkers, bosses, teachers and professors.
The average female tech has experienced zero in the way of encouragement.
I'd have to google around to refind it; there was an exploratory study done where reviewers were asked to rate journal articles with and without names. It was found that removing the name, and therefore any suggestion of sex, led to higher ratings for female authors. When the same papers had the names put back on, they were downgraded in ratings more often. I'm now kicking myself for not bookmarking this, and no I'm not making it up.
If you are interested in learning outside of the examples you mentioned, seek out the few female programmers, engineers, scientists, mathematicians in your work area and ask for some history. You'd be surprised.
And screaming? Hmm. It's expected and sport on slashdot to make derogatory statement regarding female tech ability. These comments are often modded up as insightful and interesting. All they really serve to do is reinforce stereotypes.
...They're housewives...
Oh please. The overt generalization is bullshit. You sound like all the threatened males I've encountered over the years.
-FUCKING *FEMALE* SLASHDOT CHICK WITH PHYSICS AND COMPUTER SCIENCE DEGREES
The pressure from the government to beat those damned ruskies into space at all costs.
Angle of Attack is a magnificent read, both for the human side of the story, and the achievement of manned space flight from an inside engineering viewpoint. The at all costs dictum forced something else: the conscientious and conspicuous mandate to do things differently, fail and learn from it, and not stay in any comfortable ruts. There were no sanitary, emasculating powerpoint charts; instead stories of important people being called in at midnight to get to questions immediately. This is not to diminish the importance of ethics, but part of what came out of Apollo was thinking outside the box at all moments and not being tethered from doing so by management. Would that type of engineering today be seen as rogue and wasteful or brilliant? Indeed, how many places now truly allow development to occur in this fashion across all departments, despite the bullshit marketing speak spewed to investors and prospective employees? The global requirement of quick return of investment (measured in misleading ways, say lines of code per day for example) can stoke ethics problems, lead to a lot of CYA behavior, and squash innovative, careful, time consuming with little to show for it, thinking.
There are many other causes of death in our country besides terrorism that vastly outweigh the losses suffered on 9/11... on a yearly basis. Why haven't we taken any steps to solve those? Why is a single event where 3,000 people died cause to go batshit insane protective give-up-our-liberties mode, when Heart Disease causes over 200 times that many deaths on a yearly basis, and we can't convince ourselves to hit up a gym?
Because that solves a different problem and keeps healthcare costs like treating cancer and Alzheimer's disease in older people down. It's far cheaper just to promote the color coded ribbon body parts awareness club campaigns and do nothing. This makes the Healthcare Industrial Complex, not to mention the Mc-BigFarm-Corn-Chemical Complex, happy and profitable.
Not true in all cases. Your wife's school may not be teaching science but my son's primary school is. It is his passion and he has been with several teachers who have actively incorporated science as part of the core material.
The failing that I observe however is a large number of students falling very far behind in math. At his school the situation is so dire that the kids who are at the level they should be have now been moved into "gifted math" while the main group is attempting to learn things they should have mastered two to three years ago.
The literacy brigade has definitely lorded over all subjects. Witness that there is often a nightly reading requirement, in fact parents are sometimes required to sign a piece of paper indicating that the child did in fact read his daily allotment, but there is no nightly math requirement, no summer math club, none of the pushing to practice math let alone enjoy it. Students still get the picture that math is somehow not fun and something to be suffered through.
We seem to have low standards for math, and we pay teachers pitiful salaries that are not commensurate with the number of hours a decent teacher must put in for preparation, actual teaching and grading. I'd like to see teachers given very competitive salaries based on merit, where parents collectively vote on merit based on what they observe, along with test scores and observations from the local principal. The tenure game and low salaries don't seem to be working. Teachers collectively appear frustrated and students are being pushed to successive grade levels without actually achieving everything they need to at each level.
Spamming is terrible and whoever does deserves to punished severely, and possible killed.
We'll remember to tell your family your thoughts on the benefits of foregoing a trial, denial of representation and judgment by an assassin rather than your peers after you've been mistakenly identified as a spammer and brutally killed. They'll be comforted by knowing that millions of other people worldwide are throwing parties celebrating your demise.
OK, a bit much on the sarcasm here and yes, spamming is universally hated. How does the electronic world come to agreement on a consequence to this action? Here's an idea; let's assign each person a single hate point for spam and a thousand hate points for murder. Say the spammer affects 300 million mailboxes, 300 million people hate the perp and therefore 300 million hate points are posted to his ledger. In comparison another guy commits a murder and it affects 50 people, earning the murderer 50,000 hate points. But wait, that's just it. Who agrees that a thousand hate points each for murder is correct? Some people will want a million and some will cite the benefits of one less mouth to feed and figure it won't ever happen to anyone in their family so who cares - just assign a measely 100. Aside from this little pesky detail, in our points based justice system, we avoid all those expensive lawyers and stupid judges and clueless juries; instead we can all just vote via the internet who we wanted punished for whatever is pissing us off at the moment. Then we can build a big colliseum just like the Romans and make it formal entertainment. It really all comes down to the fact that each person has a different moral judgment loop running in their head. This idea is ridiculous, but put forth to point out that your judgment seems extreme. Is spam truly so much of a problem in your life that it causes you to justify punishment with an upper bound of a killing? Does the relatively benign act of sending spam multiplied by millions of affected people make it more heinous than other more serious crimes that people commit?
Damn! Guess I won't be wearing my NHRA Snap-On Tools Got Nitro? t-shirt to Logan; unless maybe I pair it with a black leather miniskirt, heels and red lipstick.
Oh, wait, Southwest Airlines would be offended. Well, shit. OK, kids, do you hear me? NO self expression whatsoever in a public place. Buy your Think of the Children, Anti-Terrorist (TM) , better known as TCAT (TM) Elizabeth Hasselbeck approved SafeNEz Airport Wear uniform today! Only $29.95! Act now and we'll throw in the Sex Offender Detector Air Freshener purse or wallet spray, regularly $9.95, but free, if you act within the next 15 minutes!
Paging John Belushi, please resurrect yourself and save us from ourselves!
Truth be told, we were given more grief at customs regarding the wax-encased gouda in our suitcase than the bubblewrapped bong in my carry on.
Whoops! Now you've done it! After they add your slashdot postings to the searchable matrix of the rest of your data, they'll be finding that bong next time!
A friend of mine mentioned that he one day called the local Congresswoman's office to ask questions and offer opinions. He noted since that time, every time he boards a plane, he is subjected to security search * 10 compared to the regular passengers. Congress could care less what any one voter thinks, unless said voter makes the mistake of offering contradictory views, at which point he is targetted. Approval means jack, just move along and quit staring will ya? We hear these words like approval in order remain in the pleasant dream of denial. We have created an opaque government, overwhelmed by misguided fears and petty bickering between the two parties, rather than an accountable, transparent one. We all lose, including the elected officials, who one day may find that their son or daughter was tortured by one of these devices because the local cop didn't know it was an IMPORTANT PERSON.
Negative pressure means that if you take a box of the stuff, and let it expand, at the end of the day there's actually more stuff in there than you started with.
Does this further imply that changing the direction of time makes this a reversible process such that the original amount would be recovered?
waste of secretiveness.
Who knew? Secretiveness is now a commodity. I guess not telling anyone what they do doesn't count as keeping a secret. Presumably then they're out looking for Invader Zim!
You are right: Jesus did not condemn, unfortunately many of his followers do. In absence of balance of power protections, we could end up with a system similar to that of Muslim clerics dictating political will. We see active attempts with conservative groups regarding hot button issues now. The possiblity that a non-Christian scientist would be condemned for really no other reason other than difference in faith, or lack of faith in the case of an atheist, by people who claim to be Christians (and I use the word claim intentionally because they really do not follow the teachings), is troubling.
the embodiment of THE truth
This is an unprovable statement. Every religion claims the same, and it is essentially a cornerstone of many religions, not just Christianity. It is an absolute statement and while it may be part of the Christian belief system, it is as well part of the belief systems of many others that do not follow Christianity and have no wish to. This is where your statement regarding separation of church and state matters. Because each may claim truth, each tends to see their system as superior and all others inferior.
"truly Christian" is subjective and ill-defined, and additionally this implies trouble for the Buddhist scientist, Hindu scientist, Muslim scientist, Native American scientist, Jewish scientist. So you have augmented my observation: only someone adhering to the subjectively defined "truly Christian" worldview would be allowed to speak freely, all others would hit a wall.
I observe that you have free reign here on slashdot to express your religious views. Your comments are not modded as flamebait and you are free to express yourself. I can't help but think that the converse of a scientist posting a comment on a Christian website, expressing himself with equal passion, would be villified, taunted and attacked. This comment is not at all intended to be an attack, nor an endorsement or slam in any way, simply an observation.
It appears to be the first story tagged under "relationships" and the second tagged as "romance." Next up look for "recipes", "ab crunches" and "what he REALLY wants in bed!"
And please, can we quit calling them "computer security researchers"? What's wrong with hackers? When did we start on the euphemism treadmill?
Kinda like the diff between good cops and pigs, no? Each has more power than the average joe and the ability to use it to influence events. Do you really want to live in a world without the good guy hackers staying abreast of deliberate, inadvertent or just plain overlooked security flaws in the products you install on your machine, or trust your government to install on their machines that affect the outcome of elections and ergo, all aspects of life that you care about? Maybe you don't give a shit about about the dwindling democracy, but some people do and it is our collective responsibility to ensure that the leaders we collectively elect get their without blue or red assholes trying to game the system any more than it is already gamed.
Actually we could consider that simulation is acting like an operator between two realities, hence the mutual simulation, but no need to stop at just a binary operator, we could envision a many to one, or entire network of simulations all co-creating each other simultaneously and not necessarily with any root or base case node.
And yeah, coffee followed by a shot of whiskey.
Careful, bub, in the sim a random mutation of events occurs and you're a hot hot hot love machine with eight kids spread out over six states, a nasty itch, and a bunch of ex wives all wanting child support!
Yes, and in that simulator they've actually already arrived at the conclusion showing all variations of deliberate moves to create instability and desired psyops ends up in the utter destruction of the power that paid for and created the simulator in the first place; hence the us(sim(sim)) level is working to find a communication port back, or at least a call/cc.
Roz Chast had a brilliant little cartoon on parallel universes years ago in the New Yorker; while the earth mom is baking cookies, Mrs. Vvv on $*&*& is baking pilkers. So, then, on $*&*& there must be an analogous simulation effort making some other yahoo really rich and the military powers falsely confident.
Seems to me tech addiction/love/desire/demand is not at all constrained to the West: it's a function of income, pricing and product availability, among other factors. Are you somehow forgetting the obvious huge explosion of tech driven economies of China and India? Perhaps the massive marvels of Dubai escaped you? Japanese supercomputing slipped your mind ? Do you really think all the brainpower creating these things goes home and doesn't indulge in the same level of personal tech lust that drives the average Jose in Denver? That's a bit ignorant and baiting, anonymous.
The media has an irrational, entertainment based, algorithm at work when it comes to selection and promotion of news stories. Promotion of space flight stories is generally good, however it's clear judging from the number of comments posted here that it doesn't mean much to the slashdot crowd who correctly filter as not much in the way of new or interesting. The gee whiz factor works for CNN though.
But the poster did include "amen" which is typically associated with the Christian faith; this detracts from the point of the observation which is dead on correct however: us vs them thinking is at best unnecessary drama and basically a cheap tactic to woo potential converts and keep the faithful hyped, and at worst is in fact capable of causing all manner of violence with a hypocritical sense of justification. There is a fine line between us vs them and extremism. I would argue that the poster has already crossed it. We would fare far better by firmly reinstating separation between church and state. Moreover, using the poster's argument, I'd claim the same for different reasons: with all the ills in the world why is the Christian backed Republican agenda so fucking wrapped around the axle over abortion and gays? Talk about misplaced priorities! We've got a gazillion dollar deficit, melting polar caps, poverty, crime, a FDA that can't be trusted, and thousands of broken families who sent soldiers to Iraq, among other issues as well. Unfortunately because this sad state of affairs has progressed so deeply, even if the poster hadn't used an "amen" in the post, the prevalence of the Christian agenda warping American politics would still make this a good bet.
It's perfectly logical to ask a geek forum to comment on political tech issues that the average geek knows far more about than the average mainstream voter. In no way does this imply that any of the geek readers care less about other issues; it simply does not follow. You can further bet that no electable candidate is going to go on record and make much of a stink about any of tech issues originally questioned anyway. None of those issues really mean much to the average voter, so the worry is unfounded. Here is one tech issue that does matter though to everyone: electronic voting machines. Who is saying what about this issue?