Yah there are corrupt churches and there was the middle-ages with the Catholic church, but most of the money that goes to tithing goes to serve the various missions of that church which include helping out the poor which is a fundamental responsibility of every Christian regardless of whether you are Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, or whatever.
Your money that you pay to Blizzard goes directly to the Vivendi corporate bottom line to fill the pockets of some effite Frenchman living the good life while the poor of his country riot in desperation.
are owned. I guess if you are a Boy Scout, then the Boy Scouts of America own you for the rest of your life. Or if you are a Rotarian, or a Mason, or belong to any social club that involves volunteering your time and money.
And as a Catholic I concur with some of your sentiment about mega-churches, however, I think the whole media fascination with mega-churches and televangelists is way overblown and people like yourself are like any other human only scared of what you don't understand.
How many people do you personally know who belong to a mega-church (which is just a fancy term for modern evangelical churches)? Do you honestly believe they all think the same and might as well just be clones of each other.
Plus, most Christian institutions in the United States do far more good for people than bad (which is all you ever hear about in the media, not because the media hates Christianity, but because bad news is usually more sensational). Playing WoW 40 hours a week is a purely selfish activity, and judging by the behaviour a lot of people display in online gaming communities like Battle.net, I would say it is not just a selfish activity, but an anti-social activity as well.
outside my office. I put money in, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, but for some dumb reason I keep chucking money in the machine until it actually works.
It Is Nothing More Than A Pork Barrell Project
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HAARP Amping It Up
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· Score: 1
from Senator Ted Stephens, just as the proposed Alaskan "Bridge To Nowhere" happens to be for connecting a small sparsely populated island to the mainland of Alaska that happens to cost many millions of dollars.
I would be more worried about how much this expensive science project costs our federal budget than its potential capabilities militarily (which probably is nil anyways).
is that drugs, largely because of their illegal nature, are generally expensive habits. Gaming is relatively cheap. If I were to take the 40 bucks I spent on Starcraft and Brood War and then divide that amount by how many hours total I spent on that game, well then I am basically getting a really good bang for my buck, whereas with many illegal drugs, they can bankrupt millionaires practically overnight.
Even for MMORPG's which are on average around 10 bucks a month, the average gamer is still getting quite a good fix for the amount of hours they put into the game.
That is the benefit and the danger of gaming. Just like with masturbation, gaming is for all intents and purposes a free addictive activity, which means there is no reality check that you have a problem until you are evicted, homeless, and hungry. However, with masturbation you can do it so many times in a day before things start to bleed and then you know you definitely have a problem.
In the past, just like pretty much most guys involved in the computer related professions have done our fair share of gaming over the years and it is pretty much part of the culture. In fact, it is hard to socialize with fellow programmers unless you have some street credibility in Doom, Starcraft, etc. With computer use becoming as ubiquitous among the younger generation as it has always been with the "geek profession" crowd, I think that gaming addictions will continue to be a bigger and bigger problem in society.
I myself used to play an insane amount of Starcraft and Warcraft III. Do I regret all the time I spent playing those games? Sometimes yes, but hey those were fun games isn't life about having a good time so long as it is not at the expense of someone else? Then again, I am sure doing crack cocaine is fun the first few times for those who have tried it (just speculating since I have never done crack cocaine personally). Just like with any other addictable drug, gaming can consume your life and nothing else in life seems fun anymore. Before you know it you are depressed and the only thing you look forward to is gaming, but those darn dopamine receptors just won't get fired up like they used to due to the LAW OF DIMINISHING RETURNS: The greater the thrill, the harder and edgier the thrill will have to be the next time around to seem as exciting.
Now, I love playing sports, especially soccer, but you can only run around having fun kicking a ball so long before you physically get tired and the pain of sore legs outweighs the pleasure you have dribbling and passing the ball down the field and your brain tells you to stop. Unfortunately, with computer gaming the only thing telling you to stop is a parent, spouse, or your heart as it gives out playing your choice MMORPG several days straight nonstop.
But what if "gaming addiction" becomes a big enough problem to society that it causes other social problems just like many illegal drugs do when people get hooked on them. Just look at online Poker which was once a simple card game, and now has been bastardized into an internet phenomenon of largely anonymous competition. People play Poker not because they think they will get rich, but because people are addicted to the thrill of besting their neighbor. Simply put, competitive people like myself are addicted to competition and that can manifest itself in both positive and negative ways (I don't gamble BTW, because I feel gambling is a stupidity tax and I don't like being taxed in the first place).
So what should be done about gaming addiction, especially since it is not easy to just throw out your computer and function in the modern world? I know plenty of people who have thrown out their TV, but the computer? Seriously, get real. One idea is something that worked reasonably well with the arcade games when they were popular when you didn't have the Playstation 2 or the XBOX is a pay per play system. As you play more and more, the quarters you pop into the machine start to become painful after a while as you notice your wallet getting thinner and thinner. Once you are broke, you are forced to go work to get more money to play more games. Also, if you want to play games you have to make a conscious decision to spend money, whereas if you had a monthly rate of unlimited gaming (such as a Wow subscription), then you would probably overindulge in gaming just as fat people generally overindulge at all you can eat buffets.
So, one easy thing that can be done for any form of online gaming whether it be WoW or Poker or the RTS games I love is to force vendors to charge by the minute and tax that income so as to provide revenue for programs dealing with the social pollution generated from "addictive gaming". Kind of like how we tax many other vices or how we fine companies that pollute the environment under the premise that companies should be held accountable for the negative side effects their business has on society at large.
I know I will get flamed for suggesting this, but as an ardent gamer myself, I know it does not bode well for society if everyone is spending their time searching for loot in some MMORPG, rather than actually getting a good night's sleep so they can be productive at making loot in their real life.
It is the administration of the patent system that is bad.
The U.S. Patent Office is underfunded, understaffed, and underqualified. Much of this is intentional on the part of big business and "patent companies" who profit off of a dysfunctional U.S. Patent Office not being able to do its job. The reasons things are so bad are purely intentional. Also, if a patent examiner rejects a patent, then a few phone calls are made and the patent examiner (who is more than likely some kid straight out of college) is in hot shit by his superior. So, since the patent examiners just want to get paid like everyone else, they rarely blow the whistle on companies which have a lot of lobbying influence in Washington.
Without the patent system, you would basically have a wild west business climate where the only way to protect your inventions is to hire your own thugs to deal with people who infringe on your monopoly. Of course, someone else could hire their own thugs and just steal your invention (provided they had the expertise to manage it) as well. Neither situation is good for business or a climate friendly to inventors, so that is why we have patents.
I could go on and on about why patents are necessary as well as talk about my real world experience with the system, but I think any sane person would agree patents are a necessary evil to scientific progress in business and industry. Nevertheless, the current patent system is so poorly run and so politicized that it might as well be more of a roadblock to inventors than a safeguard right now.
If you want a functioning patent system for the future, maybe you might want to write to your congressmen about how you think it would be wise to reduce social entitlement payouts to retiring old farts in the forms of medicare and social security, and put the money to better use in the U.S. Patent Office where right it is perfectly OK for a patent examiner to work a couple years for the government and then work for a "patent company" or law firm specializing in patents right after that.
Well while I do agree with you on parental responsibility, when you have a bunch of spoiled, incorrigible kids running around as violent criminals it does become my problem whether I like it or not because:
(A) The messed up parents are not going to be held liable for their criminal demonspawn, so if they victimize me, I really have no recourse for any pain and suffering I endure from the senseless criminal acts of children not raised well.
(B) These kids even if caught for their criminal behaviour will go to jail. Jail costs a lot of taxpayer money and that means I have to pay for their room and board as if they were my own child. The only other realistic option for getting rid of this financial problem is to kill the kids, but that is considered to be inhumane by some people taxpayers just pay to build more prisons.
(C) These thugs will breed more thugs as being responsible with birth control is not one of the hallmarks of thuggery. They will just continue to breed incessantly until taxpayers can no longer support the growing incarcerated population and the people who maintain order in those populations.
So, really you have to at some point say enough is enough and start dealing with getting rid of the social conditions that promote thuggery or else any semblance of freedom you enjoy now will be forever lost as your community becomes more and more of a police state as its primary goal is to deal with the thuggery and criminal behaviour that is pervasive and glorified by the underculture.
If parents are not willing to give the tough love to their children, then somebody has to or else you in the end, all your are really doing is whining and moaning about "parents not raising their children", and nothing really changes.
Oh yeah and not all parents are yuppies with BMW's or Lexuses. I know quite a few parents from pretty much all ladders of the socioeconomic ladder and the one thing in common with all of them is that they are self-absorbed and weak and the main reason they are that way is because our culture says that it is OK to be an ultra-individual while a wimp at the same time. In a time, long, long ago this was known as vanity and was definitely not something to be proud of.
The only thing you need to worry about is infrasound which can travel long distances and can disrupt the communication signals of many marine animals (after all how do you think whales communicate with each other).
As for the higher range of frequencies (ultrasound) which have shorter range because the energy of the waves is absorbed faster can perhaps theoretically be effective against targeted projectiles. One of the main problems with acoustic weapons is aiming, but with this system the idea is to basically have an array of boom boxes around the ship shooting out sound in all directions.
Also, sound travels faster in water because it dissipates slower than in air so that is why this technology could have some potential underwater, while a weapon above ground would not exactly be a counter to an ICBM nuclear missile attack.
Of course, vampires who live forever make sure their numbers are small so they don't overpopulate themselves and deplete their entire food supply (humans). Also, vampires control their numbers often by killing other vampires.
The same thing could be said of human beings in the future when it comes to the concept of immortality.
Fortunately for humanity there seems to be a problem of rebuilding a dying brain, so at least people won't be living 1000 years or something ridiculous like that.
But don't think there does not exist an elite class of people in the world who would kill off 99% of the rest of the world, just so they would be able to live forever with all the resources they would ever need to live an eternal life of decadence and hedonism.
Well what you say about humor has scientific theories to back it up, however, the problem is that few if any of these jokes on Slashdot are even remotely funny.
Quality humor involves tact and timing and frankly many of these jokes have neither.
Simply put, people who make anonymous jokes about people who would not even possibly laugh at the jokes themselves are really just cowards looking for attention.
If they had any balls at all in thinking that their jokes are actually funny, they would tell their jokes in a public square where they could be stoned to death if by some chance people don't find jokes about innocent, suffering, and helpless people to be funny at all.
People laugh at jokes about people who actually deserve to be laughed at (e.g. Michael Jackson), but trying to find jokes about victims from a once in a 500 year disaster that everyone can laugh at is a pretty hard thing to do.
So far, maybe one joke in this thread was even halfway decent, and the rest are just from trolls who couldn't be funny if their life depended on it.
While I agree with the premise that it is a good idea to get pop culture to embrace science and technology as something cool, I think giving a bunch of people with no proven record of artistic creativity (the scientists who are more than likely geeks anyways), will just make people even more anti-intellectual in the long run, since crappy entertainment (in the entertaining sense of the word), tends to have a negative effect on people.
Also, this is a top-to-bottom approach in trying to force a cultural change on society. It would make much more sense for people interested in science to hang up their lab coats for a few hours a day and get people interested in science at the grass roots level where most real trends tend to develop.
I mean, Rap's popularity today didn't exactly develop as a spinoff to corporate rock in the 80's, even though modern rap shares a lot of the same similiarities with corporate rock.
Unfortunately, getting so-called geeks, many of whom have disproportionately been picked on all their life, and who are now afraid of their own shadow, to go out into the country (the red states) and the inner city where intellectualism is not exactly embraced is going to be a hard sell.
It would make much more sense for people involved in science and technology who worry about future generations being technically illiterate to stop trying to make science and technology seem cool, but to actually make it cool. I know a lot of people will have a problem parsing that last sentence, but if understand what I am saying, then you have probably wasted your time reading all of this because you already know what needs to be done to change the cultural attitudes of Americans towards the fiefdom of geekdom.
Corporate power is anathema to small business formation as the overaccumulation of capital in the hands of a small group of people who are more likely to hoard assets than invest them, makes it really hard for anyone who is not born with a silver spoon in their mouth to create a new business.
Right now only five software companies create 75% of the revenues in the software industry here in the United States, and people wonder why the tech-job market is exploding in India and China, while laws like Sarbanes-Oxley which are ironically intended to curb corporate corruption, only enhance its power at the expense of small and medium sized businesses.
I mean, at this rate the entire telecommunications industry will just be a monopoly in the very near future, or at the very least, a colluding duopoly like Visa and Mastercard which is arguably just as bad since it gives the false impression to the public that there is competition in the marketplace.
And why does our government allow these kind of mergers to take place without even thinking twice about the long-term consequences? Oh yah, it is the mistaken premise by the leaders of both political parties that corporations need to get fatter in order to compete in the "World Economy" with largely state owned businesses in China and India as well as the oligarchy oriented super-massive corporations of old Europe and Japan.
Until the United States (and the rest of the world for that matter) has a graduated corporate tax on revenues (not profits but revenues), things are going to get worse and worse for the worker as they will be stuck in a state of inertia slaving away in some cubicle at a super-massive corporation with no option of finding another job because no new jobs will be created due to small businesses getting the shaft by their own theoretically democratic government which constantly creates unnecessary laws which add relatively major costs of compliance to small businesses, while leaving large corporations relatively unscathed.
How are small businesses so supposed to compete against large corporations if all their capital is being drained by their government while large corporations can use their political influence to get tax breaks and sweet heart deals to add to their bottom line.
I mean seriously, when will the American public get the drift that corporate mergers are not some special unification to be joyous about as if corporate mergers should be treated as some kind of state wedding.
Pretty soon science will give us the ability to reprogram specific areas of the human brain and not to much farther down the road you could potentially remap an entire human brain onto a clone "6th Day" style.
But why would you want to even stop there? Why not just create a new host for your consciousness in the form of reprogrammable replicating nanocells that are adverse to many of the inherent problems with cellular life and its fragile DNA?
Even better than that, with this new artificial host created by nanocells, your consciousness could instruct your nanocells to create new limbs or extend your special member to any desired length or girth with just a thought "Spawn" style. You could in effect become anything you wanted to, provided there are safeguards for not corrupting your own neural net accidentally.
Of course these prospects might sound cool now, but even the typical amoral geekified anti-god slashdotter has to wonder if there is such a thing as science going too far when you can reprogram and remote control other organisms (including humans) in such a way that you might as well be playing god yourself.
at least when you go see his movies, you are almost guaranteed to see a bunch of things blowing up, which usually is worth the price of admission for me (yah, yah, yah I have a strong bias towards B quality action movies like Delta Force).
For this particular movie, I cannot think of a better director for the job, but I guess we will all wait and see. The guy who I would pick second to Bay to direct this movie would be Roland Emmerich who did Independence Day, Godzilla, the Day After Tomorrow.
If not for the fact that they lasted so long. Hey, if Microsoft did not patent the internet, then some other company which exists solely for the purpose of extorting money out of other companies with patent lawsuit threats would have done it.
I myself have been personally involved in the patent process for reasons I can't mention here, but I have learned through it all that more times than not companies such as Microsoft file or acquire patents for defensive reasons much more often than for the purposes of bullying the small guy with threats of litigation.
I mean, what if Microsoft or Amazon.com didn't file some of these ridiculous patents and somebody else did, then sued Microsoft or Amazon.com or [INSERT GIANT MULTINATIONAL SOFTWARE COMPANY HERE], and this company was able to extort millions, perhaps billions of dollars from these big companies by abusing the patent system. I mean, if you are a patent-squatter what is the point of wasting your time suing a small fry when you can go for the Big Kahuna.
But the worst thing about all of this is that unless you defend your patent in court, you lose it. So, whether Microsoft or Amazon.com wants to defend their patents or not against a company which may have technology that is related to their patent, they are forced to sue those companies anyways.
In addition to health care costs for businesses, high corporate taxes, weak anti-trust laws as well as poor enforcement of them, I would say our ass-backwards patent system is one of the major poisons of starting a technology business in the United States these days.
I am no fan of oursourcing myself, but as a business owner of a software company myself, you sometimes have to ask yourself how the hell are you supposed to compete in the world marketplace when the laws and regulations in your own country AND THE ENFORCEMENT OF THOSE LAWS AND REGULATIONS is rigged entirely in favor of multinational corporations which really don't even have any national loyalty to any particular nation, yet due to the weakness of democratic republics around the world where votes can easily be bought and sold, small business owners in the technology industry either have to play by the rigged rules of the big companies or not play at all.
Technology patents may seem like a huge problem when it comes to stifling innovation in the United States and around the world, but unfortunately they are just a small problem in a giant sea of problems that exist due to well-intentioned ideas such as patents being corrupted by giant amoral companies and the soulless people who run them.
If you read the article a little deeper, the general idea is that the software system described is used to guess the purchasing habits of friends and family based on stereotypes derived from information gathered from these messages.
This is no different than someone assuming that if you are some random black guy who happens to like rap music that if you send a message to another friend with the keyword "rap" that it assumes that the recipient of that message must also like rap music.
When marketroids are allowed to segment human beings into every imaginable stereotypical group they can think of, it may be useful for making those advertising dollars a little more efficient, but the cost to society is huge in that people stop sharing similarities as they are encouraged to go retreat to their own little islands of likeminded thinkers.
It is almost like politics in America right now, where pollsters and political pundits have managed to reprogram much of the American electorate into foolishly believing that they are part of some narrowly defined group like the "religious right", or "extreme left" or that they are a "Reagan Republican" or a "NASCAR Dad".
So, instead of society being encouraged to try to create art, ideas, products, services, government programs, etc. which try to serve the public good in a general way, the only thing you see nowadays is ridiculous levels of customization in everything around us that divide people rather than unite them.
It is like people can now go to whatever news outlet they want whether it be the Communist Broadcasting Service or Fox News not to get an objective view on what goes on around the world, but rather to hear news with a distinct political spin to make themselves feel better about "being right" when it comes to their position on any given issue.
This is just another step in the corporatization of America where people voluntarily give up their freedom and rational minds by being fooled into believing that allowing corporations to create a virtual caste system through modern marketing methods is actually a good thing.
A network's usefulness reaches a limit
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Metcalfe's Law Refuted
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· Score: 2, Interesting
once you get enough nodes on the network that any given node on the network can only make so much use of all of the other nodes based on one constant Metcalf's law seems to ignore and that is time.
Furthermore, as you increase noise on the network (i.e. spam, popup ads wasting your time from what you intend to use the network for, random people bugging you about things unimportant to you, but nevertheless important to them for whatever reason), the network becomes less and less useful and the difficulty in sorting out useful nodes on the network from useless nodes becomes harder. So once this limit is reached, the more nodes you add, the more useless the network becomes.
For example, look at the web in 1990 versus what we have today. Back then, you could do a search on Lycos or Yahoo and most of the time you could find what you were looking for, but nowadays search engines are glorified phone books where the way documents/web sites get to the top of a search list has little to do with the usefulness of the content, but rather how much money they pay to web site portals to have their site ranked above others for any given topic. Furthermore, due to keyword stuffing from porn sites, blogs, and other irrelevant content web crawlers scan for web page indexing, sites like google are becoming less and less useful over time.
In the internet/cell phone/ANYONE CAN ANNOY ANYONE ELSE THEY FRIGGING WANT AT ANY GIVEN TIME culture we now live in, sometimes it is damned near impossible to get any real work done, or more importantly just be able to relax at the end of the day when a bunch of people who are addicted to communicating with others for no good reason feel the need to bother you just because they can.
I think Donald Knuth's solution of just pulling the plug on all communication devices is about the only option some of us have because like most things in science, if you give the average person a little bit of scientific rope, they will surely find a way to hang themselves.
And yah, yah, yah you can say you can just tell people who may be friends, family members, business associates, or whatever not to bug you for certain activities during certain hours (i.e. don't bug me at work about personal stuff and at home don't bug me about work, just because you know how to reach me on my cell phone or computer 24/7), but that is easier said than done without pissing a lot of people off you don't want to piss off for other reasons.
And when it comes to a network, the more nodes you add the more potential there is for people to waste your time and therefore less gets done and the network becomes useless.
Metcalf's law is good in theory, but in practice people sometimes don't realize how much of their life they waste getting interrupted by people who think that just because cell phone minutes are cheap nowadays, that it means your line is always intended to be open for any random topic of discussion as opposed to the good purpose of leaving it open for emergencies and truly important business.
In the old days, when someone wanted to discuss something with another person they physically had to make the effort to get off their lazy arse and meet that person somewhere. Nowadays, you just have to hit a number on speed dial or double click on someone in your buddy list to be able to "reach out and annoy someone".
If time is money, then the abuses many common folk make with the internet is costing the world trillions of dollars in lost productivity.
If you have a low tolerance to stress, then being stuck in a crappy job will have a negative impact on your mental as well as your physical health. If you are good with stress and nothing really fazes you, then it doesn't really matter what the job is so long as it pays well.
If you cannot function in a high stress environment (such as a job as a bill collector), then you will probably be a pretty shitty bill collector. If you can function in that environment, then you may make a whole lot of money.
Generally, people are more creative and do better in jobs that they like regardless of the stress level. As a software developer like many people on this forum, there are often times where my job involves a lot of stress, but the sense of accomplishment I get from finally getting something to work you have been working on for the last couple of weeks, months, or even years makes it all worth while. Plus, this profession generally pays pretty well relative to other professional jobs, so it sure beats starving and living in a gang infested neighborhood where you have to literally worry about getting mugged or even killed every time you walk out of your house. And well, if you are poor, the odds are you will live in a much less safe community than if you are well off.
If you are someone who knows what it is like to be desperate for money and then know the difference between that situation and a situation where you just don't happen to like the work you are doing at the moment even though it pays well, then you will realize that the worst thing you can do is quit a job without having any good options to back you up.
It is one thing to quit a job because you have realistic non-pipe dream options you could potentially exploit, and it is another thing to just quit a job because you are pissed off at your boss, company, or the kind of work you are currently working on. Always keep your skills updated and never get lazy and complacent in your existing position of employment or else you might find yourself downsized and obsolete before you know it.
Finally, never let your boss or prospective boss (if you are interviewing for a job) know that you are desperate for your job. If they realize they have a lot of power over you, 9 times out of 10 you can expect them to exploit it in ways that are not beneficial to you. Just remember, there is a huge difference between someone thinking you are desperate and someone thinking you are disloyal as they really are mutually exclusive impressions and the impression you want to give out at work is that you could leave your company for greener pastures at any moment, but that you won't if the company obeys its side of the social contract in being loyal to you.
Actually I have been a professional software developer for close to 10 years now and like any decent developer I know a wide variety of programming languages, however, PHP is not one of them (-:
There are many styles to writing code, but I think that if you are verbose with the naming of your variables, as opposed to naming your variables with unintelligible abbreviations, then that goes a long way to long term code maintenance.
Well written code should read like a book and only need commenting for blocks of code which are not completely obvious as to what their intent happens to be (for example some hack you write up to get around a bug in a library you are using at the time).
One of the most annoying things is the fact I choose not to use an IDE, so developer documentation inserted into the code to describe a function or class or whatever just clutters up the reading of the actual code.
Furthermore, most of the developer documentation of your typical programmer is such that all it describes is the arguments a function takes and what is supposed to be returned, while doing nothing to explain the purpose of the function and why it might be used. In other words, most of the time documentation is useless and just gets in the way because it doesn't relate to anything which makes sense (for humans to understand something new, usually you need to relate it to something they already understand).
So as a general rule of thumb, if you can read the code out loud (or in your head) and you don't constantly have to stop to analyze the code to see what the context of some variable happens to be at any given time, then you are doing a good job. If on the other hand your code cannot be read out loud (because of inaudible variable names), then the odds are some other programmer is going to have to review every other line of your code just to try and make sense of it all.
An ex-employee of mine who I didn't audit very well, spent a ton of time documenting his code in some of the most anally-retentive ways. However, his code just never had any flow. To date, I have had to scrap much of what he worked on because his code was not maintainable.
So in essence, if you have poorly written code, then all the documentation in the world won't do much because poorly written code makes your design inflexible and hard to work with, while well-written code that you can read like a book usually is simple enough that you can mold it into something more useful later on.
So I agree that the code is the design and the design is the code. You can come up with the most elaborate UML diagram known to man, but if the code has no flow to it, and a whole lot of hacks are needed to implement a rigid design structure, then the design overall in the end is going to suck.
If you are going to do documentation, keep your modules small and do it once you are pretty certain the modules won't be changing much from that point on. If you are uncertain, then it is probably best to just ignore the documentation process until things are more set in stone.
Slashdot Mirror
Yah there are corrupt churches and there was the middle-ages with the Catholic church, but most of the money that goes to tithing goes to serve the various missions of that church which include helping out the poor which is a fundamental responsibility of every Christian regardless of whether you are Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, or whatever.
Your money that you pay to Blizzard goes directly to the Vivendi corporate bottom line to fill the pockets of some effite Frenchman living the good life while the poor of his country riot in desperation.
are owned. I guess if you are a Boy Scout, then the Boy Scouts of America own you for the rest of your life. Or if you are a Rotarian, or a Mason, or belong to any social club that involves volunteering your time and money.
And as a Catholic I concur with some of your sentiment about mega-churches, however, I think the whole media fascination with mega-churches and televangelists is way overblown and people like yourself are like any other human only scared of what you don't understand.
How many people do you personally know who belong to a mega-church (which is just a fancy term for modern evangelical churches)? Do you honestly believe they all think the same and might as well just be clones of each other.
Plus, most Christian institutions in the United States do far more good for people than bad (which is all you ever hear about in the media, not because the media hates Christianity, but because bad news is usually more sensational). Playing WoW 40 hours a week is a purely selfish activity, and judging by the behaviour a lot of people display in online gaming communities like Battle.net, I would say it is not just a selfish activity, but an anti-social activity as well.
outside my office. I put money in, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, but for some dumb reason I keep chucking money in the machine until it actually works.
from Senator Ted Stephens, just as the proposed Alaskan "Bridge To Nowhere" happens to be for connecting a small sparsely populated island to the mainland of Alaska that happens to cost many millions of dollars.
I would be more worried about how much this expensive science project costs our federal budget than its potential capabilities militarily (which probably is nil anyways).
is that drugs, largely because of their illegal nature, are generally expensive habits. Gaming is relatively cheap. If I were to take the 40 bucks I spent on Starcraft and Brood War and then divide that amount by how many hours total I spent on that game, well then I am basically getting a really good bang for my buck, whereas with many illegal drugs, they can bankrupt millionaires practically overnight.
Even for MMORPG's which are on average around 10 bucks a month, the average gamer is still getting quite a good fix for the amount of hours they put into the game.
That is the benefit and the danger of gaming. Just like with masturbation, gaming is for all intents and purposes a free addictive activity, which means there is no reality check that you have a problem until you are evicted, homeless, and hungry. However, with masturbation you can do it so many times in a day before things start to bleed and then you know you definitely have a problem.
In the past, just like pretty much most guys involved in the computer related professions have done our fair share of gaming over the years and it is pretty much part of the culture. In fact, it is hard to socialize with fellow programmers unless you have some street credibility in Doom, Starcraft, etc. With computer use becoming as ubiquitous among the younger generation as it has always been with the "geek profession" crowd, I think that gaming addictions will continue to be a bigger and bigger problem in society.
I myself used to play an insane amount of Starcraft and Warcraft III. Do I regret all the time I spent playing those games? Sometimes yes, but hey those were fun games isn't life about having a good time so long as it is not at the expense of someone else? Then again, I am sure doing crack cocaine is fun the first few times for those who have tried it (just speculating since I have never done crack cocaine personally). Just like with any other addictable drug, gaming can consume your life and nothing else in life seems fun anymore. Before you know it you are depressed and the only thing you look forward to is gaming, but those darn dopamine receptors just won't get fired up like they used to due to the LAW OF DIMINISHING RETURNS: The greater the thrill, the harder and edgier the thrill will have to be the next time around to seem as exciting.
Now, I love playing sports, especially soccer, but you can only run around having fun kicking a ball so long before you physically get tired and the pain of sore legs outweighs the pleasure you have dribbling and passing the ball down the field and your brain tells you to stop. Unfortunately, with computer gaming the only thing telling you to stop is a parent, spouse, or your heart as it gives out playing your choice MMORPG several days straight nonstop.
But what if "gaming addiction" becomes a big enough problem to society that it causes other social problems just like many illegal drugs do when people get hooked on them. Just look at online Poker which was once a simple card game, and now has been bastardized into an internet phenomenon of largely anonymous competition. People play Poker not because they think they will get rich, but because people are addicted to the thrill of besting their neighbor. Simply put, competitive people like myself are addicted to competition and that can manifest itself in both positive and negative ways (I don't gamble BTW, because I feel gambling is a stupidity tax and I don't like being taxed in the first place).
So what should be done about gaming addiction, especially since it is not easy to just throw out your computer and function in the modern world? I know plenty of people who have thrown out their TV, but the computer? Seriously, get real. One idea is something that worked reasonably well with the arcade games when they were popular when you didn't have the Playstation 2 or the XBOX is a pay per play system. As you play more and more, the quarters you pop into the machine start to become painful after a while as you notice your wallet getting thinner and thinner. Once you are broke, you are forced to go work to get more money to play more games. Also, if you want to play games you have to make a conscious decision to spend money, whereas if you had a monthly rate of unlimited gaming (such as a Wow subscription), then you would probably overindulge in gaming just as fat people generally overindulge at all you can eat buffets.
So, one easy thing that can be done for any form of online gaming whether it be WoW or Poker or the RTS games I love is to force vendors to charge by the minute and tax that income so as to provide revenue for programs dealing with the social pollution generated from "addictive gaming". Kind of like how we tax many other vices or how we fine companies that pollute the environment under the premise that companies should be held accountable for the negative side effects their business has on society at large.
I know I will get flamed for suggesting this, but as an ardent gamer myself, I know it does not bode well for society if everyone is spending their time searching for loot in some MMORPG, rather than actually getting a good night's sleep so they can be productive at making loot in their real life.
It is the administration of the patent system that is bad.
The U.S. Patent Office is underfunded, understaffed, and underqualified. Much of this is intentional on the part of big business and "patent companies" who profit off of a dysfunctional U.S. Patent Office not being able to do its job. The reasons things are so bad are purely intentional. Also, if a patent examiner rejects a patent, then a few phone calls are made and the patent examiner (who is more than likely some kid straight out of college) is in hot shit by his superior. So, since the patent examiners just want to get paid like everyone else, they rarely blow the whistle on companies which have a lot of lobbying influence in Washington.
Without the patent system, you would basically have a wild west business climate where the only way to protect your inventions is to hire your own thugs to deal with people who infringe on your monopoly. Of course, someone else could hire their own thugs and just steal your invention (provided they had the expertise to manage it) as well. Neither situation is good for business or a climate friendly to inventors, so that is why we have patents.
I could go on and on about why patents are necessary as well as talk about my real world experience with the system, but I think any sane person would agree patents are a necessary evil to scientific progress in business and industry. Nevertheless, the current patent system is so poorly run and so politicized that it might as well be more of a roadblock to inventors than a safeguard right now.
If you want a functioning patent system for the future, maybe you might want to write to your congressmen about how you think it would be wise to reduce social entitlement payouts to retiring old farts in the forms of medicare and social security, and put the money to better use in the U.S. Patent Office where right it is perfectly OK for a patent examiner to work a couple years for the government and then work for a "patent company" or law firm specializing in patents right after that.
Until then you get what you pay for.
Just what I was thinking (-:
Well while I do agree with you on parental responsibility, when you have a bunch of spoiled, incorrigible kids running around as violent criminals it does become my problem whether I like it or not because:
(A) The messed up parents are not going to be held liable for their criminal demonspawn, so if they victimize me, I really have no recourse for any pain and suffering I endure from the senseless criminal acts of children not raised well.
(B) These kids even if caught for their criminal behaviour will go to jail. Jail costs a lot of taxpayer money and that means I have to pay for their room and board as if they were my own child. The only other realistic option for getting rid of this financial problem is to kill the kids, but that is considered to be inhumane by some people taxpayers just pay to build more prisons.
(C) These thugs will breed more thugs as being responsible with birth control is not one of the hallmarks of thuggery. They will just continue to breed incessantly until taxpayers can no longer support the growing incarcerated population and the people who maintain order in those populations.
So, really you have to at some point say enough is enough and start dealing with getting rid of the social conditions that promote thuggery or else any semblance of freedom you enjoy now will be forever lost as your community becomes more and more of a police state as its primary goal is to deal with the thuggery and criminal behaviour that is pervasive and glorified by the underculture.
If parents are not willing to give the tough love to their children, then somebody has to or else you in the end, all your are really doing is whining and moaning about "parents not raising their children", and nothing really changes.
Oh yeah and not all parents are yuppies with BMW's or Lexuses. I know quite a few parents from pretty much all ladders of the socioeconomic ladder and the one thing in common with all of them is that they are self-absorbed and weak and the main reason they are that way is because our culture says that it is OK to be an ultra-individual while a wimp at the same time. In a time, long, long ago this was known as vanity and was definitely not something to be proud of.
The only thing you need to worry about is infrasound which can travel long distances and can disrupt the communication signals of many marine animals (after all how do you think whales communicate with each other).
As for the higher range of frequencies (ultrasound) which have shorter range because the energy of the waves is absorbed faster can perhaps theoretically be effective against targeted projectiles. One of the main problems with acoustic weapons is aiming, but with this system the idea is to basically have an array of boom boxes around the ship shooting out sound in all directions.
Also, sound travels faster in water because it dissipates slower than in air so that is why this technology could have some potential underwater, while a weapon above ground would not exactly be a counter to an ICBM nuclear missile attack.
Did anyone stop to consider the mere possibility that the human brain's understanding of evolution is evolving?
Of course, vampires who live forever make sure their numbers are small so they don't overpopulate themselves and deplete their entire food supply (humans). Also, vampires control their numbers often by killing other vampires. The same thing could be said of human beings in the future when it comes to the concept of immortality. Fortunately for humanity there seems to be a problem of rebuilding a dying brain, so at least people won't be living 1000 years or something ridiculous like that. But don't think there does not exist an elite class of people in the world who would kill off 99% of the rest of the world, just so they would be able to live forever with all the resources they would ever need to live an eternal life of decadence and hedonism.
Well what you say about humor has scientific theories to back it up, however, the problem is that few if any of these jokes on Slashdot are even remotely funny.
Quality humor involves tact and timing and frankly many of these jokes have neither.
Simply put, people who make anonymous jokes about people who would not even possibly laugh at the jokes themselves are really just cowards looking for attention.
If they had any balls at all in thinking that their jokes are actually funny, they would tell their jokes in a public square where they could be stoned to death if by some chance people don't find jokes about innocent, suffering, and helpless people to be funny at all.
People laugh at jokes about people who actually deserve to be laughed at (e.g. Michael Jackson), but trying to find jokes about victims from a once in a 500 year disaster that everyone can laugh at is a pretty hard thing to do.
So far, maybe one joke in this thread was even halfway decent, and the rest are just from trolls who couldn't be funny if their life depended on it.
But this is a horrible, horrible idea.
While I agree with the premise that it is a good idea to get pop culture to embrace science and technology as something cool, I think giving a bunch of people with no proven record of artistic creativity (the scientists who are more than likely geeks anyways), will just make people even more anti-intellectual in the long run, since crappy entertainment (in the entertaining sense of the word), tends to have a negative effect on people.
Also, this is a top-to-bottom approach in trying to force a cultural change on society. It would make much more sense for people interested in science to hang up their lab coats for a few hours a day and get people interested in science at the grass roots level where most real trends tend to develop.
I mean, Rap's popularity today didn't exactly develop as a spinoff to corporate rock in the 80's, even though modern rap shares a lot of the same similiarities with corporate rock.
Unfortunately, getting so-called geeks, many of whom have disproportionately been picked on all their life, and who are now afraid of their own shadow, to go out into the country (the red states) and the inner city where intellectualism is not exactly embraced is going to be a hard sell.
It would make much more sense for people involved in science and technology who worry about future generations being technically illiterate to stop trying to make science and technology seem cool, but to actually make it cool. I know a lot of people will have a problem parsing that last sentence, but if understand what I am saying, then you have probably wasted your time reading all of this because you already know what needs to be done to change the cultural attitudes of Americans towards the fiefdom of geekdom.
Corporate power is anathema to small business formation as the overaccumulation of capital in the hands of a small group of people who are more likely to hoard assets than invest them, makes it really hard for anyone who is not born with a silver spoon in their mouth to create a new business.
Right now only five software companies create 75% of the revenues in the software industry here in the United States, and people wonder why the tech-job market is exploding in India and China, while laws like Sarbanes-Oxley which are ironically intended to curb corporate corruption, only enhance its power at the expense of small and medium sized businesses.
I mean, at this rate the entire telecommunications industry will just be a monopoly in the very near future, or at the very least, a colluding duopoly like Visa and Mastercard which is arguably just as bad since it gives the false impression to the public that there is competition in the marketplace.
And why does our government allow these kind of mergers to take place without even thinking twice about the long-term consequences? Oh yah, it is the mistaken premise by the leaders of both political parties that corporations need to get fatter in order to compete in the "World Economy" with largely state owned businesses in China and India as well as the oligarchy oriented super-massive corporations of old Europe and Japan.
Until the United States (and the rest of the world for that matter) has a graduated corporate tax on revenues (not profits but revenues), things are going to get worse and worse for the worker as they will be stuck in a state of inertia slaving away in some cubicle at a super-massive corporation with no option of finding another job because no new jobs will be created due to small businesses getting the shaft by their own theoretically democratic government which constantly creates unnecessary laws which add relatively major costs of compliance to small businesses, while leaving large corporations relatively unscathed.
How are small businesses so supposed to compete against large corporations if all their capital is being drained by their government while large corporations can use their political influence to get tax breaks and sweet heart deals to add to their bottom line.
I mean seriously, when will the American public get the drift that corporate mergers are not some special unification to be joyous about as if corporate mergers should be treated as some kind of state wedding.
And start buying Dole stock!
Pretty soon science will give us the ability to reprogram specific areas of the human brain and not to much farther down the road you could potentially remap an entire human brain onto a clone "6th Day" style.
But why would you want to even stop there? Why not just create a new host for your consciousness in the form of reprogrammable replicating nanocells that are adverse to many of the inherent problems with cellular life and its fragile DNA?
Even better than that, with this new artificial host created by nanocells, your consciousness could instruct your nanocells to create new limbs or extend your special member to any desired length or girth with just a thought "Spawn" style. You could in effect become anything you wanted to, provided there are safeguards for not corrupting your own neural net accidentally.
Of course these prospects might sound cool now, but even the typical amoral geekified anti-god slashdotter has to wonder if there is such a thing as science going too far when you can reprogram and remote control other organisms (including humans) in such a way that you might as well be playing god yourself.
at least when you go see his movies, you are almost guaranteed to see a bunch of things blowing up, which usually is worth the price of admission for me (yah, yah, yah I have a strong bias towards B quality action movies like Delta Force). For this particular movie, I cannot think of a better director for the job, but I guess we will all wait and see. The guy who I would pick second to Bay to direct this movie would be Roland Emmerich who did Independence Day, Godzilla, the Day After Tomorrow.
If not for the fact that they lasted so long. Hey, if Microsoft did not patent the internet, then some other company which exists solely for the purpose of extorting money out of other companies with patent lawsuit threats would have done it.
I myself have been personally involved in the patent process for reasons I can't mention here, but I have learned through it all that more times than not companies such as Microsoft file or acquire patents for defensive reasons much more often than for the purposes of bullying the small guy with threats of litigation.
I mean, what if Microsoft or Amazon.com didn't file some of these ridiculous patents and somebody else did, then sued Microsoft or Amazon.com or [INSERT GIANT MULTINATIONAL SOFTWARE COMPANY HERE], and this company was able to extort millions, perhaps billions of dollars from these big companies by abusing the patent system. I mean, if you are a patent-squatter what is the point of wasting your time suing a small fry when you can go for the Big Kahuna.
But the worst thing about all of this is that unless you defend your patent in court, you lose it. So, whether Microsoft or Amazon.com wants to defend their patents or not against a company which may have technology that is related to their patent, they are forced to sue those companies anyways.
In addition to health care costs for businesses, high corporate taxes, weak anti-trust laws as well as poor enforcement of them, I would say our ass-backwards patent system is one of the major poisons of starting a technology business in the United States these days.
I am no fan of oursourcing myself, but as a business owner of a software company myself, you sometimes have to ask yourself how the hell are you supposed to compete in the world marketplace when the laws and regulations in your own country AND THE ENFORCEMENT OF THOSE LAWS AND REGULATIONS is rigged entirely in favor of multinational corporations which really don't even have any national loyalty to any particular nation, yet due to the weakness of democratic republics around the world where votes can easily be bought and sold, small business owners in the technology industry either have to play by the rigged rules of the big companies or not play at all.
Technology patents may seem like a huge problem when it comes to stifling innovation in the United States and around the world, but unfortunately they are just a small problem in a giant sea of problems that exist due to well-intentioned ideas such as patents being corrupted by giant amoral companies and the soulless people who run them.
If you read the article a little deeper, the general idea is that the software system described is used to guess the purchasing habits of friends and family based on stereotypes derived from information gathered from these messages.
This is no different than someone assuming that if you are some random black guy who happens to like rap music that if you send a message to another friend with the keyword "rap" that it assumes that the recipient of that message must also like rap music.
When marketroids are allowed to segment human beings into every imaginable stereotypical group they can think of, it may be useful for making those advertising dollars a little more efficient, but the cost to society is huge in that people stop sharing similarities as they are encouraged to go retreat to their own little islands of likeminded thinkers.
It is almost like politics in America right now, where pollsters and political pundits have managed to reprogram much of the American electorate into foolishly believing that they are part of some narrowly defined group like the "religious right", or "extreme left" or that they are a "Reagan Republican" or a "NASCAR Dad".
So, instead of society being encouraged to try to create art, ideas, products, services, government programs, etc. which try to serve the public good in a general way, the only thing you see nowadays is ridiculous levels of customization in everything around us that divide people rather than unite them.
It is like people can now go to whatever news outlet they want whether it be the Communist Broadcasting Service or Fox News not to get an objective view on what goes on around the world, but rather to hear news with a distinct political spin to make themselves feel better about "being right" when it comes to their position on any given issue.
This is just another step in the corporatization of America where people voluntarily give up their freedom and rational minds by being fooled into believing that allowing corporations to create a virtual caste system through modern marketing methods is actually a good thing.
once you get enough nodes on the network that any given node on the network can only make so much use of all of the other nodes based on one constant Metcalf's law seems to ignore and that is time.
Furthermore, as you increase noise on the network (i.e. spam, popup ads wasting your time from what you intend to use the network for, random people bugging you about things unimportant to you, but nevertheless important to them for whatever reason), the network becomes less and less useful and the difficulty in sorting out useful nodes on the network from useless nodes becomes harder. So once this limit is reached, the more nodes you add, the more useless the network becomes.
For example, look at the web in 1990 versus what we have today. Back then, you could do a search on Lycos or Yahoo and most of the time you could find what you were looking for, but nowadays search engines are glorified phone books where the way documents/web sites get to the top of a search list has little to do with the usefulness of the content, but rather how much money they pay to web site portals to have their site ranked above others for any given topic. Furthermore, due to keyword stuffing from porn sites, blogs, and other irrelevant content web crawlers scan for web page indexing, sites like google are becoming less and less useful over time.
In the internet/cell phone/ANYONE CAN ANNOY ANYONE ELSE THEY FRIGGING WANT AT ANY GIVEN TIME culture we now live in, sometimes it is damned near impossible to get any real work done, or more importantly just be able to relax at the end of the day when a bunch of people who are addicted to communicating with others for no good reason feel the need to bother you just because they can.
I think Donald Knuth's solution of just pulling the plug on all communication devices is about the only option some of us have because like most things in science, if you give the average person a little bit of scientific rope, they will surely find a way to hang themselves.
And yah, yah, yah you can say you can just tell people who may be friends, family members, business associates, or whatever not to bug you for certain activities during certain hours (i.e. don't bug me at work about personal stuff and at home don't bug me about work, just because you know how to reach me on my cell phone or computer 24/7), but that is easier said than done without pissing a lot of people off you don't want to piss off for other reasons.
And when it comes to a network, the more nodes you add the more potential there is for people to waste your time and therefore less gets done and the network becomes useless.
Metcalf's law is good in theory, but in practice people sometimes don't realize how much of their life they waste getting interrupted by people who think that just because cell phone minutes are cheap nowadays, that it means your line is always intended to be open for any random topic of discussion as opposed to the good purpose of leaving it open for emergencies and truly important business.
In the old days, when someone wanted to discuss something with another person they physically had to make the effort to get off their lazy arse and meet that person somewhere. Nowadays, you just have to hit a number on speed dial or double click on someone in your buddy list to be able to "reach out and annoy someone".
If time is money, then the abuses many common folk make with the internet is costing the world trillions of dollars in lost productivity.
If you have a low tolerance to stress, then being stuck in a crappy job will have a negative impact on your mental as well as your physical health. If you are good with stress and nothing really fazes you, then it doesn't really matter what the job is so long as it pays well. If you cannot function in a high stress environment (such as a job as a bill collector), then you will probably be a pretty shitty bill collector. If you can function in that environment, then you may make a whole lot of money. Generally, people are more creative and do better in jobs that they like regardless of the stress level. As a software developer like many people on this forum, there are often times where my job involves a lot of stress, but the sense of accomplishment I get from finally getting something to work you have been working on for the last couple of weeks, months, or even years makes it all worth while. Plus, this profession generally pays pretty well relative to other professional jobs, so it sure beats starving and living in a gang infested neighborhood where you have to literally worry about getting mugged or even killed every time you walk out of your house. And well, if you are poor, the odds are you will live in a much less safe community than if you are well off. If you are someone who knows what it is like to be desperate for money and then know the difference between that situation and a situation where you just don't happen to like the work you are doing at the moment even though it pays well, then you will realize that the worst thing you can do is quit a job without having any good options to back you up. It is one thing to quit a job because you have realistic non-pipe dream options you could potentially exploit, and it is another thing to just quit a job because you are pissed off at your boss, company, or the kind of work you are currently working on. Always keep your skills updated and never get lazy and complacent in your existing position of employment or else you might find yourself downsized and obsolete before you know it. Finally, never let your boss or prospective boss (if you are interviewing for a job) know that you are desperate for your job. If they realize they have a lot of power over you, 9 times out of 10 you can expect them to exploit it in ways that are not beneficial to you. Just remember, there is a huge difference between someone thinking you are desperate and someone thinking you are disloyal as they really are mutually exclusive impressions and the impression you want to give out at work is that you could leave your company for greener pastures at any moment, but that you won't if the company obeys its side of the social contract in being loyal to you.
Actually I have been a professional software developer for close to 10 years now and like any decent developer I know a wide variety of programming languages, however, PHP is not one of them (-:
There are many styles to writing code, but I think that if you are verbose with the naming of your variables, as opposed to naming your variables with unintelligible abbreviations, then that goes a long way to long term code maintenance.
Well written code should read like a book and only need commenting for blocks of code which are not completely obvious as to what their intent happens to be (for example some hack you write up to get around a bug in a library you are using at the time).
One of the most annoying things is the fact I choose not to use an IDE, so developer documentation inserted into the code to describe a function or class or whatever just clutters up the reading of the actual code.
Furthermore, most of the developer documentation of your typical programmer is such that all it describes is the arguments a function takes and what is supposed to be returned, while doing nothing to explain the purpose of the function and why it might be used. In other words, most of the time documentation is useless and just gets in the way because it doesn't relate to anything which makes sense (for humans to understand something new, usually you need to relate it to something they already understand).
So as a general rule of thumb, if you can read the code out loud (or in your head) and you don't constantly have to stop to analyze the code to see what the context of some variable happens to be at any given time, then you are doing a good job. If on the other hand your code cannot be read out loud (because of inaudible variable names), then the odds are some other programmer is going to have to review every other line of your code just to try and make sense of it all.
An ex-employee of mine who I didn't audit very well, spent a ton of time documenting his code in some of the most anally-retentive ways. However, his code just never had any flow. To date, I have had to scrap much of what he worked on because his code was not maintainable.
So in essence, if you have poorly written code, then all the documentation in the world won't do much because poorly written code makes your design inflexible and hard to work with, while well-written code that you can read like a book usually is simple enough that you can mold it into something more useful later on.
So I agree that the code is the design and the design is the code. You can come up with the most elaborate UML diagram known to man, but if the code has no flow to it, and a whole lot of hacks are needed to implement a rigid design structure, then the design overall in the end is going to suck.
If you are going to do documentation, keep your modules small and do it once you are pretty certain the modules won't be changing much from that point on. If you are uncertain, then it is probably best to just ignore the documentation process until things are more set in stone.