Vicious Circle
Treat police like thugs, get treated like a criminal, wash, rinse, repeat.
If the majority of people didn't treat cops with such suspicion and distrust, and maybe acted like they were also members of society then we wouldn't have this problem. You go talk to a cop in a busy place, where 9/10 of the people he pulled over that day for driving like douchebags ranted and raved and threatened and yelled and argued. It has been my experience that being that 1/10 that he might encounter in a day that isn't a flaming asshole to him(or her even) goes a long way. I have been in simple positions of delegated authority and the people that just did what I relayed them to do were a blessing compared to the large number of idiot asshats that thought arguing with me about what I told them would change the fact that someone above me told me to tell them to do it. And that wasn't even a law enforcement situation where I have to worry about which assholes have knives and guns or might try to run me over...that was me just telling people they had something to do for our shared higher ups.
In high population areas it is harder because the risk to cops is increased greatly, and generally you are just another face in a sea of people. In smaller areas it is different.
1. How dare they stop us from taking photographs of public places! Censorship!
2. How dare they take pictures of us in public places! Privacy, Police State!
That would be the EULA. Honestly, I don't have a problem with Apple doing this because I know there are significant technical reasons for doing it.
The leading cause of Windows flakeyness is shitty device drivers. Period. Number one cause of crashes and other problems. So to solve this Apple (a hardware company mind you) says screw that, our hardware, our software, we own the QC process on the drivers and the hardware. This leads to a FAR smaller incidence of flakey behavior. This makes both their hardware and software look better.
If you went to a BMW dealer and all of their new BMWs came with smashed windows, scratched paint, and shit on the seats you would probably get a pretty poor impression of the controls at BMW. Even if you logically know that BMW the company isn't directly responsible. Every time you see a BMW you will have the memory of the bashed up shitstained BMW in your memory as a marker. That can be a deathblow to a company if it is a large enough problem.
The arguable difference here is that you didn't agree to only eat the peach as a condition of the purchase. In this case you agreed to the condition of only using Apple hardware as a condition of the purchase.
Now there is plenty of question as to how enforceable that really is, or if it is right of them to make that restriction, but as it stands now, they agreed to use only Apple hardware as part of the purchase. Personally I don't have a problem with them becoming a smoking crater for this just because of the approach. I am not a fan of EULAs, but how would you feel if someone you basically had a contract with decided to violate it and force you to take them to court to see how valid your agreement was.
My guess would be that not many Republican supporters watch that show or find it humerous as he is making a mockery of their recent stances on a variety of things. It isn't like he is representing any of their ideas that aren't completely moronic. (Both sides do have a few from time to time).
So it leaves what is probably a largely left leaning audience watching a Democrat "handle" the over the top Republican insanity in a humerous way.
The "one god" thing is taken very strangely and I can't begin to explain why that is. The Judaism based religions all have variations on a theme of being one and many at the same time, that whole omnipotent outside of human understanding thing. Personally my view is that it is so far outside human hunderstanding that to try and define "God" in such a specific way is goofy at best. I'm not fond of the gods created by humans thing because to me it takes the unbelievably arrogant stance that we are at the top of the chain. To me the assumtion that we are at the top of the chain because we observe ourselves to be at the top is even more laughable than the idea that there is something we can't understand higher up the chain than us. Though I will make no claim to understand what that something might be.
Your stated differences are true when confined to specific sciences/religions. There are a great many religions that don't box themselves in with dogmatic nonsense and consist of a continued exploration rather than "here is the answer, believe it or suffer eternally". Alternatively, science has quite frequently stomped its foot and said "this is the only way for this to happen" and challengers were laughed out of their labs only regaining status later (if even if in their own lifetimes) for discovering the truth. The behaviors of human arrogance is not restricted to science or religion and it isn't science or religion that causes it. Its the fact that on a whole we are a terribly arrogant and short sighted group of hairless talking monkeys that are constantly looking for new innovative methods to fling poo at each other.
People do insecure things. There is nothing wrong with the questions as they are now. I have a verification question somewhere that asks where my mother was born. I don't remember that crap and I'm not going to call her every time I have to get into that account. So...I lied and answered it with something I would remember. Hell, if your account is BankFoo you could just answer all of the questions "BankFoo" and not have to worry about someone getting the real information or you having to remember what you put.
No, but it is a fairly decent argument for saying that you can't use science to prove/disprove those fairies. To be honest I have never been impressed with the personification of God that came from the Judaeo-Christion mythology. This is where one of those scientific observation things messes up their religion. Almost every culture has personified things they didn't understand. On top of that, the whole son of kings, born poor, superhuman/son of god stuff is hardly new. Buddha was the son of royalty, lived poor, and is representative of about the closest thing Buddhism has to a "God". Jesus, same story. Herculese, once again. The trouble is that most people have a terrible time separating the concept of "God" from a specific mythology and personification. When you hold up most of the world religions and strip away the silly mythology stuff that has been shown to be natural cultural development stuff, most of them have a fairly similar view to the concept of "God" and "Soul" in the grand scheme of things.
Even outside of the nonsense of any particular religions story. The very nature of "God" takes it outside the scope of science. A higher power, a creator, something omnipotent, etc. All of the characteristics and actions of "God" would make it unobservable and indistinguishable from our natural world.
Science attempts to answer the question "How". Religion attempts to answer the question "Why". Unfortunately people get the two confused quite frequently. Science can't really answer "Why" any more than Religion can answer "How". But both sides try to twist the question to sound legitimate. "Why does a balloon pop when poked with a needle?" Is a bad scientific question. Science can only describe how it pops, on the grand scheme of things "why" it popped is because that is the way all of creation was designed to operate.
You sir have made me feel terribly young, I used to feel a bit old having worked on tractor feed dot matrix type jobs. I have never encountered a drum printer. It was with a parallel printer, so it makes sense that something tripped it up signal wise. If I remember correctly the printer did indeed continue to operate while "The printer is on fire!" message kept popping up in the logs. I bet it was a signaling/cable problem tripping the Error without Offline.
1. That created the world in 7 days stuff is probably more widely accepted by Christians as metaphore than it is literal. The problem is the literalists get much more attention for being such flaming morons and it makes it easy to attack all of Christianity. (Much the same as the all Muslims believe in suicide bombing). The literalist argument against this problem is that it was put there by either the Devil to mislead, or by God to weed out the unfaithful. You can't win that argument with them, and it will drive you batshit crazy to try.
2. Even if it is more "literal" being that it was "God" you can't exactly describe the specifics. Maybe he didn't change it, could be time compression or some such other fun science fictiony method. I personally don't know anyone who was around at the time so I treat all "absolute" claims on the how and when as suspect. (I am a great supporter of Science, but Science of any era tends to have the arrogance to claim that they are right. Each successive generation of scientists has done quite a bit to destroy the incorrect notions of previous generations. Scientific progress...amazing stuff.)
3. Regardless of any account that claims "God" made it all or how it would ultimatley stand to reason that "God" made all of the rules too. The notion that you can disprove "God" with science is stunningly ignorant of the nature of science and amounts to little more than militant athiesm, its own kind of "religious" fundamentalism. If "God" designed all of the intricate workings of existance then how could you possibly use those intricate workings to show he didn't create them. (Personally, I am not affiliated with any specific religion, but I like to believe any God is a bit more complex than making playdough snakes and people. MY version of God is quite capable of creating and maintaining an incredibly complex universe built on a vast structure of interacting behaviors that we discover and describe using scientific methods). The converse is true though, the idea that you can prove that "God" does exist is equally nonsensical and a bastardization of science.
It amuses me how much militant atheists and fundamentalists both use their ignorance of religion and literal interpretations to try and make their points. They also both try to warp science to meet their needs. Scientific proof that God does/doesn't exist is anti-intellectualism at its finest.
Given that MS error messages typically all say "Something bad happened, call an administrator" like an administrator is supposed to know what happened with no information included in the "something bad" section. The loads of nonsensical garbage (unless of course you can read memory addresses and the like) is not very useful to the vast majority of users anyways and they would probably have enjoyed a little frowny face X eyed guy.
My personal favorite actually came from a linux box. "The printer is on fire." I was actually very disappointed to learn that the printer was not actually on fire as the error message continued to state.
*whoosh* indeed apparently.
Given that was my original point I had assumed you were making a joke rather than making a redundant point. Hence I made the jokes about your examples of complex industry specific software.
1. Go look at all of the recalls and mass hysteria over "dangerous" toys. Precious few of them have been due to legitimate hidden dangers like lead based paint. Most of the major recalls have to do with parents not paying attention to their kids.
2. I didn't say watching out for each other is bad, just that our society has changed and brought the unintended consequence of stupidity being less terminal. The fact is the developments to provide the fastest help to the person having a stroke or heart attack also allows quick help to arrive for the dumbasses attempting "Jackass" stunts. (I love the show, the folks are aware of the risks, take at least some precautions, and encourage idiots to do the same dangerous things without said precautions).
3. In fact I do have children. This is how I know how much of a full time job it is keeping track of them as little ones and keeping them from getting hurt. The problem is the vast majority of people breeding would rather not actually raise their offspring. I'm not saying it is an easy job, but it is a job you need to be doing as a parent, or get yourself clipped before you become one for the benefit of all of us. This is also why the oldest child does not get toys that could hurt the youngest child until we are confident the oldest child is responsible enough to assist in the watching out for the youngest child. (I know...frightening thought...a parent teaching their kids to take care of each other and be held responsible...worked great for generations...not sure why it seems to have all but stopped)
4. If you have to beat your kid you are doing it wrong. Children should be terrified of disappointing you without the threat of physical violence and they should know that you would never hurt them. Giving a smack on the padded part of their ass isn't about how much pain and damage you can cause, it is about the shock factor and startling the crap out of them and rarely takes more than the force in your forearm/wrist to get their attention. Equally important is to not play their games. My son gets about 2 calm warnings before its a thunderclap shout of "get in the corner". My wife will argue back and forth with him when he is whining or acting up. As a result he is much more well behaved for me and I rarely have to do anything other than say his name when he is acting up.
5. You are right, the overprotective stuff is what I mean, but almost all of the toy recalls I have seen have not been about legitimately dangerous things when parent supervision was involved. When the easybake oven gets recalled because it can burn a kids hand we have a severe problem. At least two generations had that toy, in more dangerous forms, and now this generation is too stupid to be around a hot light bulb? The new skin glue for kids instead of stitches bothers me too. The whole process of getting stitches once taught me the lesson of not running in the house, going back to have them removed made sure I hadn't forgotten. My son did roughly the same thing, at just a little younger than when I did it. To this day reminding him of that serves as a wonderful deterent for whatever dangerous activity we are telling him not to do. That failing, when he does hurt himself doing something we told him not to we just shrug and let him scream (assuming no real damage).
Whether through disciplinary actions (holy crap, that stings without a diaper), or through their own trial and error (wow, they were right, that WILL burn me), it is a wonderful thing seeing that little lightbulb go off in their head as they put 2 and 2 together.
But so few fail in such a spectacular fashion. I have never seen a kernel panic delivered in anything other than terminal font on a black and white screen. The BSOD is called the BSOD because MS, in their infinite wisdom, opened themselves up to such a joke by deciding to deliver critical system messages with a "calming" blue background and white text. And then doing so very very frequently in the early days.
Honestly, they should just make it a black screen with some fireworks and a "Congratulations, You Crashed Windows Again!". You know, make it a more positive experience for the user.
There is a WIDE WIDE range of things that don't exist in the F/OSS world yet. The killer problem seems to be inherent in the way F/OSS works. Industry specific things frequently don't happen unless people from that industry also happen to be coders. Outside of the inherent difficulty in writing software for an industry you don't understand, most geeks don't bother to learn about other industries and instead assume that they should all operate the same way IT does.
Exactly. It is a tremendous pain in the ass to track all the stupid license keys and crap in use. Departments frequently need software specific to only their department and outside the scope of normal IT support stuff. Phone numbers, licenses, etc. God forbid any of those companies get purchased or go under, then you are stuck with expensive software that you cannot recover.
The call home variety is extremely infuriating. On top of whatever nonsense key/activation crap you have to go through, you have to put up with it trying to call home or deactivating itself. MS isn't the only guilty party in this, but those bastards certainly made the situation much worse.
I mostly agree. But the cold war taught the whole show of force as a deterent. If I can come out of nowhere and blow up your palace are you going to order missile strikes on your neighbor? (The problem of course is if I allow said neighbor to act aggressively towards you without consequence). At this point it becomes purely political wrangling and outside the scope of the military and its capabilities.
In a nutshell, I think morons voting are far more dangerous than any weapon in the military arsenal. (This is non-partisan, Dems and Reps both have a roughly equal number of morons, they just behave differently, and arguably anyone voting for Dem or Rep is a moron for not realizing how entrenched the 2 party system is and how meaningless each party really is.)
Until recently we had a wonderful system for allowing natural selection to take place. Our society has since removed that except in extreme cases. Stupidity should be terminal, and our legal, moral, and medical thoughts have largely removed that consequence. Once if you did something too stupid you died, if you didn't die you had to come up with a way to get help. Now, you just hope someone watching pounds 911 and hope that you survive the time it takes for the EMS to show up (Typically they have to stop recording on their cellphone camera to do this, so you may be out of luck).
I'm not saying our advances are entirely bad, but this is certainly a consequence of those changes. You remove the evolutionary pressure to not be a moron and the "moron gene" will start showing up again. I think you are wrong in saying there is a survival benefit to this, since in the cold hard world this behavior would likely get you killed before it it helped. The problem is that there is no hinderance of survival due to that gene because someone is always around to protect you. Look at all of the "OMG think of the children" crap. Toy recalls irritate me more than anything. Many of my generate played with lawndarts and survived, some didn't survive, that is natural selection.
Inability to learn from mistakes IS a disability. In the cases you cite that isn't an inability to learn from mistakes. In fact I suspect it is quite the opposite. Every time that person approaches another woman he probably uses things he learned from the last rejection to avoid rejection. The most smooth talking snakes I have known have been rejected 10x more than accepted. And I quote, "if you ask every woman you see eventually one of them will say yes". That seems alot like learning. Same with people who throw themselves against the odds, repeating the same mistake over and over is not inspiring. Science didn't get where it is by people trying the same thing that didn't work over and over, it got there by people learning to make adjustments with each attempt. You don't just load the rock in the catapult and fire 1000 times hoping to hit your target. You adjust slightly after each failure to bring yourself closer to target.
I mistated that in haste. Veterans make up a disproportionaly large number of the homeless. With 8-10% of the general population being veterans and 23-25% of the homeless population being veterans. When you figure in the veteran of foreign war piece the numbers are going to get quite a bit more dismal since only some veterans are veterans of foreign wars and a higher number of the homeless veterans are veterans of foriegn wars.
You mean the media outlets are putting up fake fireworks right after rearranging the opening announcements of the teams and so on? All over something as trivial as the Olympics?
It blows my mind that people aren't more concerned about this type of stuff in the real news. They have watched all manner of modern special effects and other kinds of impressive visual trickery in the movies. Hell, even the weather map thing is a greenscreen type trick. Yet, noone believes that this type of thing would happen on the news when so many people are watching events that could have economic impacts even as high as the trillion dollar range. Only that it happens during movies in the millions of dollar range.
You are correct, however, your very argument predominately deals with the economic issue. That was the main purpose of the federal government in the first place. To maintain interstate commerce to hold the union together. However, the original comment was in regards to culture. This is how we have the government involved in deciding to teach creationism in public schools, banning violent video games, censoring the airwaves, banning gay marriage, and so on. The laws dealing with things like murder and theft have economic issues deeply tied to them. The laws dealing with what two consenting adults do in their bedroom have precious little economic impact.
In fact, when government does get involved in these cultural issues it typically is a loss for everyone involved. We still have the wonderful world of organized crime from the prohibition days. I also think affirmative action is largely crap for a few reasons. One, it means successful members of minorities are going to have their success attributed to those kind of stupid handout programs. Two, it does economic damage in that it forces firms to not hire the most qualified, but to hire based on quotas. Economics was ending slavery before the government got involved, when it is cheaper to operate and maintain machines to do the same work it will be machines not slaves. Economics is also what would normally start to remove that discrimination crap as the firm that doesn't discriminate based on factors other than worker qualifications will eventually be hiring more qualified workers that other firms ignored and thus make them more successful. Thankfully we have our wonderful government to interfere on all of these things and generally fuck things up royally with the unintended consequences, the pandering, and other such nonsense.
I for one am amazed that the gay marriage crap was such a big deal. Why the fuck do people care whether gays get married or not? If they are so concerned with other peoples lives maybe they should examine why the majority of the nations homeless population are veterans of foreign wars. People can't be bothered with helping recover and reintegrate people that risked life and limb for them, but they sure as hell can make a fuss about some stupid trivial shit to "protect their culture".
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Vicious Circle
Treat police like thugs, get treated like a criminal, wash, rinse, repeat.
If the majority of people didn't treat cops with such suspicion and distrust, and maybe acted like they were also members of society then we wouldn't have this problem. You go talk to a cop in a busy place, where 9/10 of the people he pulled over that day for driving like douchebags ranted and raved and threatened and yelled and argued. It has been my experience that being that 1/10 that he might encounter in a day that isn't a flaming asshole to him(or her even) goes a long way. I have been in simple positions of delegated authority and the people that just did what I relayed them to do were a blessing compared to the large number of idiot asshats that thought arguing with me about what I told them would change the fact that someone above me told me to tell them to do it. And that wasn't even a law enforcement situation where I have to worry about which assholes have knives and guns or might try to run me over...that was me just telling people they had something to do for our shared higher ups.
In high population areas it is harder because the risk to cops is increased greatly, and generally you are just another face in a sea of people. In smaller areas it is different.
This type of thing is relatively amusing to me.
1. How dare they stop us from taking photographs of public places! Censorship!
2. How dare they take pictures of us in public places! Privacy, Police State!
Choose one.
That would be the EULA. Honestly, I don't have a problem with Apple doing this because I know there are significant technical reasons for doing it.
The leading cause of Windows flakeyness is shitty device drivers. Period. Number one cause of crashes and other problems. So to solve this Apple (a hardware company mind you) says screw that, our hardware, our software, we own the QC process on the drivers and the hardware. This leads to a FAR smaller incidence of flakey behavior. This makes both their hardware and software look better.
If you went to a BMW dealer and all of their new BMWs came with smashed windows, scratched paint, and shit on the seats you would probably get a pretty poor impression of the controls at BMW. Even if you logically know that BMW the company isn't directly responsible. Every time you see a BMW you will have the memory of the bashed up shitstained BMW in your memory as a marker. That can be a deathblow to a company if it is a large enough problem.
The arguable difference here is that you didn't agree to only eat the peach as a condition of the purchase. In this case you agreed to the condition of only using Apple hardware as a condition of the purchase.
Now there is plenty of question as to how enforceable that really is, or if it is right of them to make that restriction, but as it stands now, they agreed to use only Apple hardware as part of the purchase. Personally I don't have a problem with them becoming a smoking crater for this just because of the approach. I am not a fan of EULAs, but how would you feel if someone you basically had a contract with decided to violate it and force you to take them to court to see how valid your agreement was.
My guess would be that not many Republican supporters watch that show or find it humerous as he is making a mockery of their recent stances on a variety of things. It isn't like he is representing any of their ideas that aren't completely moronic. (Both sides do have a few from time to time).
So it leaves what is probably a largely left leaning audience watching a Democrat "handle" the over the top Republican insanity in a humerous way.
The "one god" thing is taken very strangely and I can't begin to explain why that is. The Judaism based religions all have variations on a theme of being one and many at the same time, that whole omnipotent outside of human understanding thing. Personally my view is that it is so far outside human hunderstanding that to try and define "God" in such a specific way is goofy at best. I'm not fond of the gods created by humans thing because to me it takes the unbelievably arrogant stance that we are at the top of the chain. To me the assumtion that we are at the top of the chain because we observe ourselves to be at the top is even more laughable than the idea that there is something we can't understand higher up the chain than us. Though I will make no claim to understand what that something might be.
Your stated differences are true when confined to specific sciences/religions. There are a great many religions that don't box themselves in with dogmatic nonsense and consist of a continued exploration rather than "here is the answer, believe it or suffer eternally". Alternatively, science has quite frequently stomped its foot and said "this is the only way for this to happen" and challengers were laughed out of their labs only regaining status later (if even if in their own lifetimes) for discovering the truth. The behaviors of human arrogance is not restricted to science or religion and it isn't science or religion that causes it. Its the fact that on a whole we are a terribly arrogant and short sighted group of hairless talking monkeys that are constantly looking for new innovative methods to fling poo at each other.
People do insecure things. There is nothing wrong with the questions as they are now. I have a verification question somewhere that asks where my mother was born. I don't remember that crap and I'm not going to call her every time I have to get into that account. So...I lied and answered it with something I would remember. Hell, if your account is BankFoo you could just answer all of the questions "BankFoo" and not have to worry about someone getting the real information or you having to remember what you put.
This seems fairly non story.
Clear evidence that the Air Force enlisted force is much smarter than the Army.
No, but it is a fairly decent argument for saying that you can't use science to prove/disprove those fairies. To be honest I have never been impressed with the personification of God that came from the Judaeo-Christion mythology. This is where one of those scientific observation things messes up their religion. Almost every culture has personified things they didn't understand. On top of that, the whole son of kings, born poor, superhuman/son of god stuff is hardly new. Buddha was the son of royalty, lived poor, and is representative of about the closest thing Buddhism has to a "God". Jesus, same story. Herculese, once again. The trouble is that most people have a terrible time separating the concept of "God" from a specific mythology and personification. When you hold up most of the world religions and strip away the silly mythology stuff that has been shown to be natural cultural development stuff, most of them have a fairly similar view to the concept of "God" and "Soul" in the grand scheme of things.
Even outside of the nonsense of any particular religions story. The very nature of "God" takes it outside the scope of science. A higher power, a creator, something omnipotent, etc. All of the characteristics and actions of "God" would make it unobservable and indistinguishable from our natural world.
Science attempts to answer the question "How". Religion attempts to answer the question "Why". Unfortunately people get the two confused quite frequently. Science can't really answer "Why" any more than Religion can answer "How". But both sides try to twist the question to sound legitimate. "Why does a balloon pop when poked with a needle?" Is a bad scientific question. Science can only describe how it pops, on the grand scheme of things "why" it popped is because that is the way all of creation was designed to operate.
Well duh, its because our solar system is only 6000 years old you heathen!
You sir have made me feel terribly young, I used to feel a bit old having worked on tractor feed dot matrix type jobs. I have never encountered a drum printer. It was with a parallel printer, so it makes sense that something tripped it up signal wise. If I remember correctly the printer did indeed continue to operate while "The printer is on fire!" message kept popping up in the logs. I bet it was a signaling/cable problem tripping the Error without Offline.
There are a few problems with your argument here.
1. That created the world in 7 days stuff is probably more widely accepted by Christians as metaphore than it is literal. The problem is the literalists get much more attention for being such flaming morons and it makes it easy to attack all of Christianity. (Much the same as the all Muslims believe in suicide bombing). The literalist argument against this problem is that it was put there by either the Devil to mislead, or by God to weed out the unfaithful. You can't win that argument with them, and it will drive you batshit crazy to try.
2. Even if it is more "literal" being that it was "God" you can't exactly describe the specifics. Maybe he didn't change it, could be time compression or some such other fun science fictiony method. I personally don't know anyone who was around at the time so I treat all "absolute" claims on the how and when as suspect. (I am a great supporter of Science, but Science of any era tends to have the arrogance to claim that they are right. Each successive generation of scientists has done quite a bit to destroy the incorrect notions of previous generations. Scientific progress...amazing stuff.)
3. Regardless of any account that claims "God" made it all or how it would ultimatley stand to reason that "God" made all of the rules too. The notion that you can disprove "God" with science is stunningly ignorant of the nature of science and amounts to little more than militant athiesm, its own kind of "religious" fundamentalism. If "God" designed all of the intricate workings of existance then how could you possibly use those intricate workings to show he didn't create them. (Personally, I am not affiliated with any specific religion, but I like to believe any God is a bit more complex than making playdough snakes and people. MY version of God is quite capable of creating and maintaining an incredibly complex universe built on a vast structure of interacting behaviors that we discover and describe using scientific methods). The converse is true though, the idea that you can prove that "God" does exist is equally nonsensical and a bastardization of science.
It amuses me how much militant atheists and fundamentalists both use their ignorance of religion and literal interpretations to try and make their points. They also both try to warp science to meet their needs. Scientific proof that God does/doesn't exist is anti-intellectualism at its finest.
Given that MS error messages typically all say "Something bad happened, call an administrator" like an administrator is supposed to know what happened with no information included in the "something bad" section. The loads of nonsensical garbage (unless of course you can read memory addresses and the like) is not very useful to the vast majority of users anyways and they would probably have enjoyed a little frowny face X eyed guy.
My personal favorite actually came from a linux box. "The printer is on fire." I was actually very disappointed to learn that the printer was not actually on fire as the error message continued to state.
*whoosh* indeed apparently. Given that was my original point I had assumed you were making a joke rather than making a redundant point. Hence I made the jokes about your examples of complex industry specific software.
1. Go look at all of the recalls and mass hysteria over "dangerous" toys. Precious few of them have been due to legitimate hidden dangers like lead based paint. Most of the major recalls have to do with parents not paying attention to their kids.
2. I didn't say watching out for each other is bad, just that our society has changed and brought the unintended consequence of stupidity being less terminal. The fact is the developments to provide the fastest help to the person having a stroke or heart attack also allows quick help to arrive for the dumbasses attempting "Jackass" stunts. (I love the show, the folks are aware of the risks, take at least some precautions, and encourage idiots to do the same dangerous things without said precautions).
3. In fact I do have children. This is how I know how much of a full time job it is keeping track of them as little ones and keeping them from getting hurt. The problem is the vast majority of people breeding would rather not actually raise their offspring. I'm not saying it is an easy job, but it is a job you need to be doing as a parent, or get yourself clipped before you become one for the benefit of all of us. This is also why the oldest child does not get toys that could hurt the youngest child until we are confident the oldest child is responsible enough to assist in the watching out for the youngest child. (I know...frightening thought...a parent teaching their kids to take care of each other and be held responsible...worked great for generations...not sure why it seems to have all but stopped)
4. If you have to beat your kid you are doing it wrong. Children should be terrified of disappointing you without the threat of physical violence and they should know that you would never hurt them. Giving a smack on the padded part of their ass isn't about how much pain and damage you can cause, it is about the shock factor and startling the crap out of them and rarely takes more than the force in your forearm/wrist to get their attention. Equally important is to not play their games. My son gets about 2 calm warnings before its a thunderclap shout of "get in the corner". My wife will argue back and forth with him when he is whining or acting up. As a result he is much more well behaved for me and I rarely have to do anything other than say his name when he is acting up.
5. You are right, the overprotective stuff is what I mean, but almost all of the toy recalls I have seen have not been about legitimately dangerous things when parent supervision was involved. When the easybake oven gets recalled because it can burn a kids hand we have a severe problem. At least two generations had that toy, in more dangerous forms, and now this generation is too stupid to be around a hot light bulb? The new skin glue for kids instead of stitches bothers me too. The whole process of getting stitches once taught me the lesson of not running in the house, going back to have them removed made sure I hadn't forgotten. My son did roughly the same thing, at just a little younger than when I did it. To this day reminding him of that serves as a wonderful deterent for whatever dangerous activity we are telling him not to do. That failing, when he does hurt himself doing something we told him not to we just shrug and let him scream (assuming no real damage).
Whether through disciplinary actions (holy crap, that stings without a diaper), or through their own trial and error (wow, they were right, that WILL burn me), it is a wonderful thing seeing that little lightbulb go off in their head as they put 2 and 2 together.
Come on now..."complex legal patent systems"? That is an awefully fancy way of saying "point of sale system".
Also, "vascular cleansing" is terribly easy, it is keeping the patient alive through the process that is the tricky part.
But so few fail in such a spectacular fashion. I have never seen a kernel panic delivered in anything other than terminal font on a black and white screen. The BSOD is called the BSOD because MS, in their infinite wisdom, opened themselves up to such a joke by deciding to deliver critical system messages with a "calming" blue background and white text. And then doing so very very frequently in the early days.
Honestly, they should just make it a black screen with some fireworks and a "Congratulations, You Crashed Windows Again!". You know, make it a more positive experience for the user.
There is a WIDE WIDE range of things that don't exist in the F/OSS world yet. The killer problem seems to be inherent in the way F/OSS works. Industry specific things frequently don't happen unless people from that industry also happen to be coders. Outside of the inherent difficulty in writing software for an industry you don't understand, most geeks don't bother to learn about other industries and instead assume that they should all operate the same way IT does.
Exactly. It is a tremendous pain in the ass to track all the stupid license keys and crap in use. Departments frequently need software specific to only their department and outside the scope of normal IT support stuff. Phone numbers, licenses, etc. God forbid any of those companies get purchased or go under, then you are stuck with expensive software that you cannot recover.
The call home variety is extremely infuriating. On top of whatever nonsense key/activation crap you have to go through, you have to put up with it trying to call home or deactivating itself. MS isn't the only guilty party in this, but those bastards certainly made the situation much worse.
I mostly agree. But the cold war taught the whole show of force as a deterent. If I can come out of nowhere and blow up your palace are you going to order missile strikes on your neighbor? (The problem of course is if I allow said neighbor to act aggressively towards you without consequence). At this point it becomes purely political wrangling and outside the scope of the military and its capabilities.
In a nutshell, I think morons voting are far more dangerous than any weapon in the military arsenal. (This is non-partisan, Dems and Reps both have a roughly equal number of morons, they just behave differently, and arguably anyone voting for Dem or Rep is a moron for not realizing how entrenched the 2 party system is and how meaningless each party really is.)
Until recently we had a wonderful system for allowing natural selection to take place. Our society has since removed that except in extreme cases. Stupidity should be terminal, and our legal, moral, and medical thoughts have largely removed that consequence. Once if you did something too stupid you died, if you didn't die you had to come up with a way to get help. Now, you just hope someone watching pounds 911 and hope that you survive the time it takes for the EMS to show up (Typically they have to stop recording on their cellphone camera to do this, so you may be out of luck).
I'm not saying our advances are entirely bad, but this is certainly a consequence of those changes. You remove the evolutionary pressure to not be a moron and the "moron gene" will start showing up again. I think you are wrong in saying there is a survival benefit to this, since in the cold hard world this behavior would likely get you killed before it it helped. The problem is that there is no hinderance of survival due to that gene because someone is always around to protect you. Look at all of the "OMG think of the children" crap. Toy recalls irritate me more than anything. Many of my generate played with lawndarts and survived, some didn't survive, that is natural selection.
Inability to learn from mistakes IS a disability. In the cases you cite that isn't an inability to learn from mistakes. In fact I suspect it is quite the opposite. Every time that person approaches another woman he probably uses things he learned from the last rejection to avoid rejection. The most smooth talking snakes I have known have been rejected 10x more than accepted. And I quote, "if you ask every woman you see eventually one of them will say yes". That seems alot like learning. Same with people who throw themselves against the odds, repeating the same mistake over and over is not inspiring. Science didn't get where it is by people trying the same thing that didn't work over and over, it got there by people learning to make adjustments with each attempt. You don't just load the rock in the catapult and fire 1000 times hoping to hit your target. You adjust slightly after each failure to bring yourself closer to target.
No, that right is clearly reserved for the government.
I mistated that in haste. Veterans make up a disproportionaly large number of the homeless. With 8-10% of the general population being veterans and 23-25% of the homeless population being veterans. When you figure in the veteran of foreign war piece the numbers are going to get quite a bit more dismal since only some veterans are veterans of foreign wars and a higher number of the homeless veterans are veterans of foriegn wars.
You mean the media outlets are putting up fake fireworks right after rearranging the opening announcements of the teams and so on? All over something as trivial as the Olympics?
It blows my mind that people aren't more concerned about this type of stuff in the real news. They have watched all manner of modern special effects and other kinds of impressive visual trickery in the movies. Hell, even the weather map thing is a greenscreen type trick. Yet, noone believes that this type of thing would happen on the news when so many people are watching events that could have economic impacts even as high as the trillion dollar range. Only that it happens during movies in the millions of dollar range.
You are correct, however, your very argument predominately deals with the economic issue. That was the main purpose of the federal government in the first place. To maintain interstate commerce to hold the union together. However, the original comment was in regards to culture. This is how we have the government involved in deciding to teach creationism in public schools, banning violent video games, censoring the airwaves, banning gay marriage, and so on. The laws dealing with things like murder and theft have economic issues deeply tied to them. The laws dealing with what two consenting adults do in their bedroom have precious little economic impact.
In fact, when government does get involved in these cultural issues it typically is a loss for everyone involved. We still have the wonderful world of organized crime from the prohibition days. I also think affirmative action is largely crap for a few reasons. One, it means successful members of minorities are going to have their success attributed to those kind of stupid handout programs. Two, it does economic damage in that it forces firms to not hire the most qualified, but to hire based on quotas. Economics was ending slavery before the government got involved, when it is cheaper to operate and maintain machines to do the same work it will be machines not slaves. Economics is also what would normally start to remove that discrimination crap as the firm that doesn't discriminate based on factors other than worker qualifications will eventually be hiring more qualified workers that other firms ignored and thus make them more successful. Thankfully we have our wonderful government to interfere on all of these things and generally fuck things up royally with the unintended consequences, the pandering, and other such nonsense.
I for one am amazed that the gay marriage crap was such a big deal. Why the fuck do people care whether gays get married or not? If they are so concerned with other peoples lives maybe they should examine why the majority of the nations homeless population are veterans of foreign wars. People can't be bothered with helping recover and reintegrate people that risked life and limb for them, but they sure as hell can make a fuss about some stupid trivial shit to "protect their culture".