When faced with uncertainty, people do not become more courteous: they become upset. As in, "Will I be late by 20 minutes or 1:45 because of these other idiots on the roads that fail to realize they should all be driving exactly as I do?" A more uncertain driving environment will increase transit times and with that comes a bevy of negatives: more fuel consumed, more pollution, more stressed people sitting in traffic, larger chunks of peoples life lost behind a wheel (we already have little enough time for things other than working and driving to work).
Just the other day there was a blackout near my place of business and at the end of the day. The traffic was awful (all the signals were dead) and tempers were not much better.
Glider is bot software, but you cannot win a settlement against the creator of such software. It is the player that uses the software that is violating the Terms, and for doing that, they can be banned. If Blizzard could credibly argue that this single player is damaging their revenue in a noticeable way (very difficult, since the truth is that almost no other player is walking away from WoW because of this one player botting, and more likely, the botter would quit if forced to play without the bot, which implies the bot program actually increases WoW revenue), they have no case for a damage settlement.
It is Blizzard's failing in creating a game which is so repetitive as to be easily susceptible to automated play. Even if they can make some legal point on this issue, it is still pathetic that one person can write a little program, the game is so tiresome to enough people that he actually makes money selling it, and that this so worries Blizzard that they show up at his door and threaten legal action which is actually an act of intimidation rather than one of true litigious substance.
This is very simple. When you interview, you insist on clarity of job role, and then you turn them down if the title or compensation is misleading or inappropriate. There is no shortage of quality jobs, but you may have to be resolute about getting what you've earned. This has always been true; it is not something new.
The Hockey Stick graph used by global warming supporters ignores a warm Medieval period.
Tree rings do not always tell the whole story; therefore, the Sun does.
All important global warming scientists have forgotten the Stefan-Boltzmann law.
The deep ocean is not warming as global warming scientists have predicted.
I certainly do not think that an article in the Telegraph can effectively debunk the scientific work of hundreds of climatologists. "Oh, look at that article... Stefan-Boltzmann-well, shit. He's right, I totally forgot about those dudes. My past 20 years of work on this topic are out the window. I think I'll quit my job and go work for an oil company." There are some interesting points. 60% of the article centers around the Medieval warming period. "It was warm back then!" Yes, for several hundred years that did coincide with intense solar activity. On the other hand, many climatologists are looking at core samples of CO2 concentrations over a few hundred thousand years and saying, "It is very high and it is definitely rising."
Before man was making a global impact on the world, the Earth could respond to these changes with increase plant growth and favoring species that more efficiently consume CO2, but what we have now is a global impact of our industries on flora and fauna worldwide. We are effectively crippling the Earth's homeostatic systems by systematically destroying food chains, rain forests, and plant life in most of the arable regions (because we have so many people that we need more and more of it to feed them). Global warming science has never been precise. If it were, there would be no debate. But there is just no argument whatsoever about CO2 concentrations tripling since the beginning of the Industrial Age and those concentrations being the highest in over a hundred thousand years. No argument that CO2 traps heat (Venus), and no argument that this is having a significant impact on the Earth and us.
To be quite honest, if scientists doctored data to remove some data that would seem to provide a counterexample, I would think that it is targetted at the majority of people that will stick their head in the sand and not believe real effort is required on anything until it knocks down their door and starts running amok in front of their television. Ok, maybe that sounds awful, but people that have been studying this stuff for years are pretty terrified by the real dangers we are facing. They're terrified because no matter how much data they find and how compelling it is, the naysayers will do nothing until all the evidence is incontravertible and at that point it will be to late because the evidence will be something like, "500 million people will die of starvation in the next 2 years." Ok, maybe scientists hid a Medieval warming period in a graph presented for general consumption by the layman. One possibility is that this entirely refutes decades of research by the brightest minds in their field. But there are a great many other explanations that all involve our planet frying.
This is a typically idiotic thing. It never ceases to amaze me how we fight so stubbornly to continue doing the dumb thing because it is just "too hard" to stop pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. "Hey, look! We can start a whole industry for making these materials and pump more materials up into the atmosphere and beyond. That means more jobs. Two negatives make a positive!" And, what happens if some unanticipated side-effect arises as a result of this plan. Well, goodness. I guess we better have an industry to remove all this crap from orbit--what's that? We do not have a plan for that and we are now relying on the little bit of shelter this thing provides to prevent catastrophic global meltdown and tipping past a point where most of the coastal regions will be submerged, thus displacing hundreds of millions of people and leading to famine, disease, and economic upheaval?
Now don't you wish you had bit the bullet and solved the problem at the source (the CO2 and other pollutants that we continue to pump out)? I think 90% of us will be dead in 100 years because we're too stupid. Natural selection will get us in the end even if the Earth has to wipe and recovery to eliminate the disease. I think our growth is already too malignant (too irreversible) for anything else. "We can fix the atmosphere in time!" Yes, and meanwhile our boundless population growth will result in 10 billion of us stripping the Earth to a naked husk like so many locusts of old. Underneath all the issues we face today is that one issue: too many people, but no one wants to face that one. Politicians certainly won't. We have such an array of powerful organizations prepared to step in and clobber that one. Fucked.
What I find to be self evident is that the real issue is simply to many people, not enough planet.
Yes. The solution is so simple, but people are so unwilling I suppose because they cannot conquer their biological compulsion to screw. And we are getting screwed. All we really need to do is have global population constraints based on an analysis of the maximum sustainable population in a given area when using resources renewably. No fossil fuels. Local agriculture. Small communities. Strictly limited individual transportation. We have the technology to preserve many of the good aspects of modern life. Of course, everyone would scream bloody murder. The minute you say, "2 children per couple, no exception" people start screaming freedom, various religions start chanting, "Every sperm is sacred," and so on.
And if it is permitted, it will summarily fuck us all in the end. Because the ecosystem will be annihilated, global warming will destroy coast regions, the resulting economical upheaval will lead to profound discontent (like, a hundred million homeless and starving people), and that will lead to war. Everywhere. The writing is on the wall. People say, "Oh, that's nonsense. Every generation has its doomsayers." Sure. And many generations really do meet their doom. I know things are insanely out of whack for one simple reason: in election after election, I've never heard a single person advocating a position on population control in my country (US). Not one person. And yet, the size of population is the one fundamental form of control that preserves balance in every ecosystem since the beginning of life on the planet.
How can we forget something so utterly basic? My friends just had his third child, and he says, "When are you going to start having kids?" And I looked at him and I asked him why he has three and how many will be enough. He says, "The wife wanted a big family and I'm doing very well career wise so it is no problem." And I ask him, "Did you ask the Earth?" Every nation on this planet should have a population quota right now (based on what they can renewably support on the land), and should be working toward attaining that number. And every nation should actively be ensuring that they get there.
People may not agree with methods, but the important question is: "How many people is enough?" I mean, how many do we need? 5 billion? What is magical about 5 billion? Why not 2 billion? Is 10 billion preferable in some way? I just do not see it, and I know very few people are even thinking about it when they knock up their sweety or get all gushy about their girlfriends new baby. How many people is enough? Minus the technological advances, weren't there plenty of people before the industrial revolution? No? Why the Hell do we need so many more people? I realize it is a philosophical question. But we need to have a practical answer, and we need to act on it.
The U.S. Feral Government has been busy telling us
Gotcha! Poster plays a Druid in WoW! "Think of the Firefin Snappers!" he says. "Is there no love for the Oily Blackmouth?" he says. You're not fooling anyone. We know what you're really talking about!
These statistics are extremely misleading. The slow uptake of IE updates may well be due to the huge corporate install-base. Corporations are much slower to bring a new version in-house and usually wait until the new version is vetted by the general consumer. When they do bring the version in-house, it only takes one download and then it is distributed throughout the organization by deployment tools. From the other side, Firefox users are likely (at this point) to be more early-adopter oriented people, and if (as I suspect, but do not claim) the Firefox demographic has less corporate representation, these people are far more likely to download Firefox on a user by user basis.
I still think it is great to see such demand, but I don't think the statistics mentioned can conclusively show anything at all other than that there is good demand for Firefox. Comparisons to IE cannot be realistic without considering more factors.
Here's a different scenario. Over 90% of the adult population is addicted to work. Why? They do it every day. They have to do it every day. If they don't do it every day, it becomes a problem. Questions are asked, finances are in jeopardy, relationships are endangered.
Kinda fucked up, isn't it? Why isn't work an "addiction"? It keeps the bank account in the black and the population as a whole in a constrained environment with significantly limited freedoms (by narrowly defining what you can do and requiring you to invest most of your time and energy in it). But you just watch people come unglued if they unplug from work. Yep.
Is it unreasonable to expect that people will accept an occasional grammatical exception? Mistakes show their face when fingers exceed mental pace; they're hardly a proof of poor diction.
Sadly, I agree with every damn point in the parent post. Unmetered population growth is the most egregious crime against ourselves and the planet. We just don't need 10 billion people. We don't. 5 billion is plenty. Too much probably. Like a cancer that makes more of itself without bounds until it kills the host organism and itself...
And if 50% of your population is a twin? And you are all susceptible to . Oh, gee! I knew nature evolved sexual reproduction and has continued to use if for hundreds of millions of years for some reason.
Yes, let's just tell Mother Nature that she and her hundreds of millions of years of experience can go fuck Themselves. Why, oh why didn't asexual poultry evolve naturally? Or asexual everything for that matter. Just get it right the first darn time and go with what works! Yeah, that's the thing! Until it doesn't work. No problem! We'll just use biodiversity and genetic variance to produce...oh, snap!
All the people that do not see how screwed up and arrogant our approach is are idiots and the will make a wreck of our planet through apathy and ignorance despite anyone else's best most well-considered efforts. Sure we'll probably survive, but we'll suffer a Hell of a lot more than we had to. Just like a rebellious teenager that ignores the wisdom of their elders.
Won't Zune make use of an earpiece to deliver sound to your brain? Perhaps Apple has a "System and Method for Sending Music to Potential Girlfriend Through Earphone" patent and they intend to strenuously enforce patent violation by Zune users?
"People will buy iPods because they can let someone borrow their iPod to listen and that's faster than copy songs from Zune to Zune." WTF is Jobs on about?
Effective search just means the customer can buy more of what they want and less of what they don't. Of course, any major retailer that sells a fixed inventory of "acceptable" products is going to be unhappy, because people's interests, if they have the search abilities necessary to easily pursue them are widely varying and sometimes not "acceptable" according to the general definition of consumer.
If I'm interested in topic XYZ and can search and find the 2 retailers that sell that item, I'll buy it rather than a somewhat similar book on ZYW. Alternatively, if I'm interested in the very common topic A and I have access to search that helps my find the single best price for topic A in the world, I buy it at the best price. Therefore any company that relies on your limited knowledge to get more money out of you for topic A is going to be upset.
99% of all consumerism is about fucking over the guy that knows less than you. When relevant information is ubiquitously available to all interested parties, capitalism falls on its ass (or becomes militaristic to enforce information limitations on the general population--and what do you think is happening right now...). What this all means is that the livelihood of the majority of people depends on the relative ignorance of other people. For that reason, search, if it is allowed to be continually available to all for virtually no cost, will shake the foundations of the world's economy. And since those in power don't like that very much, it's likely that things will get bloody and strict controls will put be put in place on search. Just wait and see!
Those lessons are definitely important. Here are two approaches to situations where something goes wrong. In both cases you do what you do because you love the child.
1. Trust them a little less. Restrict their freedom for a period of time, and then give them freedom back after you believe they have learned the "lesson" that you wanted to teach.
2. Trust them a little more. Respect them and believe that they want to do what is right, but understand that they lack knowledge and experience that you have. Share that knowledge and experience with them, and ask them for their thoughts and feelings. Then don't take their freedom away. Offer them the responsibility to do what is right and watch them rise to it.
Both approaches can be effective. These approaches apply to every relationship we have. The most rewarding for me have been the ones where I took approach 2. The most painful and difficult came from 1.
I guess that works, if trust and love can be separated. I think a lot of times, a child will see that their parent does not trust them and equate that with their parent not loving them. I was talking with a friend of mine the other day. He is a teenager, and I know him fairly well. He's very responsible and mature for his age, but his father is very untrusting of his ability to make responsible choices. So his father takes things away from him.
"You can't do this. You won't do that. You're not going there."
But I know this kid well, and he really can handle himself. He even explains to me what his father is worried about. He knows what the dangers are that concern his father but he also knows how to handle the dangers and be careful and responsible in what he does. Pretty amazing kid. But he was talking to me and he says, "I tell my Dad all this, but he just won't listen, and I don't understand why." So, I suggested that it might just be that his Dad is afraid for him, and when we're afraid, we're not very rational.
He said he thinks that's true, but he goes along with what his Dad wants anyway because he loves him.
I was pretty amazed by that, so I asked him what his mother thought about these things. And he tells me, "My Mom thinks that I don't always make the right choices, but that I should be allowed to make the wrong choices and learn from them." That is when I understood the source of his unusual maturity. I know he will grow up to be a wonderful parent.
My reply wasn't really directed at you personally, but what I find interesting about your reply is that you brother remains as he is regardless of outside influences and attempts to "bring him around" and you developed into a mature and responsible person despite the absence of both a full-time father and mother figure. Not that they were entirely absent from your life--I wouldn't know, but the impression I get is that there was a big vacuum of parenting, and you saw that and stepped up to the responsibility needed to care for those around you and make right choices. And this is precisely what I mean. No one was around policing you and telling you how to be a good human being or forcing you to earn their trust according to their definition of "deserving". You did it of your own volition, because you wanted to do what was right. We can tell other people what is right until we are blue in the face, and we can even force them to do what is right repeatedly if we have power, but that will never make a person want to do what is right and they will never really learn what is right and why they should do it if we put them in a small box of approved behaviors.
If we make our children earn our trust and their own privacy, they will hate us. Because no child should have to earn the love of their parent, and trust is one of the pillars of that love. Love is the only gift that we can give them, and we had better give it freely no matter what because we brought them into this world and it is the one thing they need, no matter how imperfect they are or how unequipped they are to satisfy our definition of loveable. This isn't intended as a personal criticism. I had a pretty awful childhood in the ways that really mattered, and what I said here are some of the things that I decided about parenting. They're just opinions and they are not perfect.
One thing I hope we don't do is teach our kids that ever present surveillance is a desirable or natural thing. Raising children is about empowering them. Not controlling them. You want your kids to be gradually exposed to all aspects of life that they will contend with as adults. Our goal as parents is to nurture the critical thinking skills it takes to be independent. Morality, kindness, generousity, compassion: these things do not come by closing off all other paths to a child. They come from leading by example and empowering your child to think critically about those virtues and embrace them of their own volition.
Anything else leads down the path...frankly it leads down the path the the U.S. is currently going.
Slashdot Mirror
Just the other day there was a blackout near my place of business and at the end of the day. The traffic was awful (all the signals were dead) and tempers were not much better.
It is Blizzard's failing in creating a game which is so repetitive as to be easily susceptible to automated play. Even if they can make some legal point on this issue, it is still pathetic that one person can write a little program, the game is so tiresome to enough people that he actually makes money selling it, and that this so worries Blizzard that they show up at his door and threaten legal action which is actually an act of intimidation rather than one of true litigious substance.
I like peanut butter.
This is very simple. When you interview, you insist on clarity of job role, and then you turn them down if the title or compensation is misleading or inappropriate. There is no shortage of quality jobs, but you may have to be resolute about getting what you've earned. This has always been true; it is not something new.
- The Hockey Stick graph used by global warming supporters ignores a warm Medieval period.
- Tree rings do not always tell the whole story; therefore, the Sun does.
- All important global warming scientists have forgotten the Stefan-Boltzmann law.
- The deep ocean is not warming as global warming scientists have predicted.
I certainly do not think that an article in the Telegraph can effectively debunk the scientific work of hundreds of climatologists. "Oh, look at that article... Stefan-Boltzmann-well, shit. He's right, I totally forgot about those dudes. My past 20 years of work on this topic are out the window. I think I'll quit my job and go work for an oil company." There are some interesting points. 60% of the article centers around the Medieval warming period. "It was warm back then!" Yes, for several hundred years that did coincide with intense solar activity. On the other hand, many climatologists are looking at core samples of CO2 concentrations over a few hundred thousand years and saying, "It is very high and it is definitely rising."Before man was making a global impact on the world, the Earth could respond to these changes with increase plant growth and favoring species that more efficiently consume CO2, but what we have now is a global impact of our industries on flora and fauna worldwide. We are effectively crippling the Earth's homeostatic systems by systematically destroying food chains, rain forests, and plant life in most of the arable regions (because we have so many people that we need more and more of it to feed them). Global warming science has never been precise. If it were, there would be no debate. But there is just no argument whatsoever about CO2 concentrations tripling since the beginning of the Industrial Age and those concentrations being the highest in over a hundred thousand years. No argument that CO2 traps heat (Venus), and no argument that this is having a significant impact on the Earth and us.
To be quite honest, if scientists doctored data to remove some data that would seem to provide a counterexample, I would think that it is targetted at the majority of people that will stick their head in the sand and not believe real effort is required on anything until it knocks down their door and starts running amok in front of their television. Ok, maybe that sounds awful, but people that have been studying this stuff for years are pretty terrified by the real dangers we are facing. They're terrified because no matter how much data they find and how compelling it is, the naysayers will do nothing until all the evidence is incontravertible and at that point it will be to late because the evidence will be something like, "500 million people will die of starvation in the next 2 years." Ok, maybe scientists hid a Medieval warming period in a graph presented for general consumption by the layman. One possibility is that this entirely refutes decades of research by the brightest minds in their field. But there are a great many other explanations that all involve our planet frying.
Now don't you wish you had bit the bullet and solved the problem at the source (the CO2 and other pollutants that we continue to pump out)? I think 90% of us will be dead in 100 years because we're too stupid. Natural selection will get us in the end even if the Earth has to wipe and recovery to eliminate the disease. I think our growth is already too malignant (too irreversible) for anything else. "We can fix the atmosphere in time!" Yes, and meanwhile our boundless population growth will result in 10 billion of us stripping the Earth to a naked husk like so many locusts of old. Underneath all the issues we face today is that one issue: too many people, but no one wants to face that one. Politicians certainly won't. We have such an array of powerful organizations prepared to step in and clobber that one. Fucked.
And if it is permitted, it will summarily fuck us all in the end. Because the ecosystem will be annihilated, global warming will destroy coast regions, the resulting economical upheaval will lead to profound discontent (like, a hundred million homeless and starving people), and that will lead to war. Everywhere. The writing is on the wall. People say, "Oh, that's nonsense. Every generation has its doomsayers." Sure. And many generations really do meet their doom. I know things are insanely out of whack for one simple reason: in election after election, I've never heard a single person advocating a position on population control in my country (US). Not one person. And yet, the size of population is the one fundamental form of control that preserves balance in every ecosystem since the beginning of life on the planet.
How can we forget something so utterly basic? My friends just had his third child, and he says, "When are you going to start having kids?" And I looked at him and I asked him why he has three and how many will be enough. He says, "The wife wanted a big family and I'm doing very well career wise so it is no problem." And I ask him, "Did you ask the Earth?" Every nation on this planet should have a population quota right now (based on what they can renewably support on the land), and should be working toward attaining that number. And every nation should actively be ensuring that they get there.
People may not agree with methods, but the important question is: "How many people is enough?" I mean, how many do we need? 5 billion? What is magical about 5 billion? Why not 2 billion? Is 10 billion preferable in some way? I just do not see it, and I know very few people are even thinking about it when they knock up their sweety or get all gushy about their girlfriends new baby. How many people is enough? Minus the technological advances, weren't there plenty of people before the industrial revolution? No? Why the Hell do we need so many more people? I realize it is a philosophical question. But we need to have a practical answer, and we need to act on it.
It is a tribute to us all that this article was tagged "FUD".
I still think it is great to see such demand, but I don't think the statistics mentioned can conclusively show anything at all other than that there is good demand for Firefox. Comparisons to IE cannot be realistic without considering more factors.
How very Marie Antoinette of them. "Let them eat cake," indeed.
Here's a different scenario. Over 90% of the adult population is addicted to work. Why? They do it every day. They have to do it every day. If they don't do it every day, it becomes a problem. Questions are asked, finances are in jeopardy, relationships are endangered.
Kinda fucked up, isn't it? Why isn't work an "addiction"? It keeps the bank account in the black and the population as a whole in a constrained environment with significantly limited freedoms (by narrowly defining what you can do and requiring you to invest most of your time and energy in it). But you just watch people come unglued if they unplug from work. Yep.
There's your line.
Teach those kids to live in fear and except restricted freedom while their young and impressionable, yes sir!
So obvious and we do it to ourselves.
Oh, snap! WoW just came back up after weekly maintenance. Gotta go!
WoW email me soon, Nelfpwnjoo@Nefarian
Yes, let's just tell Mother Nature that she and her hundreds of millions of years of experience can go fuck Themselves. Why, oh why didn't asexual poultry evolve naturally? Or asexual everything for that matter. Just get it right the first darn time and go with what works! Yeah, that's the thing! Until it doesn't work. No problem! We'll just use biodiversity and genetic variance to produce...oh, snap!
All the people that do not see how screwed up and arrogant our approach is are idiots and the will make a wreck of our planet through apathy and ignorance despite anyone else's best most well-considered efforts. Sure we'll probably survive, but we'll suffer a Hell of a lot more than we had to. Just like a rebellious teenager that ignores the wisdom of their elders.
I seemed to have missed your funny bone.
"People will buy iPods because they can let someone borrow their iPod to listen and that's faster than copy songs from Zune to Zune." WTF is Jobs on about?
If I'm interested in topic XYZ and can search and find the 2 retailers that sell that item, I'll buy it rather than a somewhat similar book on ZYW. Alternatively, if I'm interested in the very common topic A and I have access to search that helps my find the single best price for topic A in the world, I buy it at the best price. Therefore any company that relies on your limited knowledge to get more money out of you for topic A is going to be upset.
99% of all consumerism is about fucking over the guy that knows less than you. When relevant information is ubiquitously available to all interested parties, capitalism falls on its ass (or becomes militaristic to enforce information limitations on the general population--and what do you think is happening right now...). What this all means is that the livelihood of the majority of people depends on the relative ignorance of other people. For that reason, search, if it is allowed to be continually available to all for virtually no cost, will shake the foundations of the world's economy. And since those in power don't like that very much, it's likely that things will get bloody and strict controls will put be put in place on search. Just wait and see!
1. Trust them a little less. Restrict their freedom for a period of time, and then give them freedom back after you believe they have learned the "lesson" that you wanted to teach.
2. Trust them a little more. Respect them and believe that they want to do what is right, but understand that they lack knowledge and experience that you have. Share that knowledge and experience with them, and ask them for their thoughts and feelings. Then don't take their freedom away. Offer them the responsibility to do what is right and watch them rise to it.
Both approaches can be effective. These approaches apply to every relationship we have. The most rewarding for me have been the ones where I took approach 2. The most painful and difficult came from 1.
"You can't do this. You won't do that. You're not going there."
But I know this kid well, and he really can handle himself. He even explains to me what his father is worried about. He knows what the dangers are that concern his father but he also knows how to handle the dangers and be careful and responsible in what he does. Pretty amazing kid. But he was talking to me and he says, "I tell my Dad all this, but he just won't listen, and I don't understand why." So, I suggested that it might just be that his Dad is afraid for him, and when we're afraid, we're not very rational.
He said he thinks that's true, but he goes along with what his Dad wants anyway because he loves him.
I was pretty amazed by that, so I asked him what his mother thought about these things. And he tells me, "My Mom thinks that I don't always make the right choices, but that I should be allowed to make the wrong choices and learn from them." That is when I understood the source of his unusual maturity. I know he will grow up to be a wonderful parent.
If we make our children earn our trust and their own privacy, they will hate us. Because no child should have to earn the love of their parent, and trust is one of the pillars of that love. Love is the only gift that we can give them, and we had better give it freely no matter what because we brought them into this world and it is the one thing they need, no matter how imperfect they are or how unequipped they are to satisfy our definition of loveable. This isn't intended as a personal criticism. I had a pretty awful childhood in the ways that really mattered, and what I said here are some of the things that I decided about parenting. They're just opinions and they are not perfect.
Anything else leads down the path...frankly it leads down the path the the U.S. is currently going.