The media is controlled, the voting machines are controlled, and the lawmakers are controlled.
The media has a lot less control than before. It's just that the people haven't really gotten any smarter.
There is nothing any reasonable person can do to change it, unless you have a miracle plan that you'd care to share.
You want change? Go into education, into teaching. It'll probably take two or three generations before things turn around, but if you want meaningful change that lasts longer than a president's term, that's what it's going to take.
There are no miracles. Just lots of hard work and personal sacrifice.
To put it plainly, this line of thought can only arrive at the conclusion that a group of people with a particular set of characteristics are more valuable than others.
It makes sense why people constantly appeal to this idea of hate crime. Some people really do want to feel that they are more valuable than others. They want that validation. They want to someone to tell them that their existence is superior to the existence of people unlike them. There are many reasons why they'd want to feel this way, reasons which are largely unimportant. What is important is that this mentality has no place in a society founded on the principles of equality.
There are actions that are correctly categorized as hate crimes. They usually victimize an entire group of people, as opposed to an individual who just so happens to be a member of some (regionally) deviant social group.
Actually, it's an attempt to force incoming students to be social. It's a way to get people to meet completely different people with whom they normally wouldn't voluntarily make contact, and hopefully be a better person afterwards.
It doesn't always work out that way, but it rarely turns out quite this badly.
Both are just wrong, but the first one is more so because it carries social prejudice along with it.
No, it's not. The social prejudice is unrelated to the wrongness of secretly filming someone. The existence of the social prejudice may be wrong, but it is not any individual's fault that it exists. And by extension, individuals shouldn't be punished for society's ills.
And like all other acceptable pieces of legislation, has been distorted to be what law enforcement/the prosecution wants it to mean at any particular time.
This was clearly not a hate crime. The target was an individual firstly. And the offence would be no different an offence if the guest had been an older man, an older woman, or some young woman in the same school (though the ultimate result may have differed). That Clementi committed suicide is unfortunate, but hardly Ravi's fault.
That people, especially the prosecution, was expecting a jail term of years just shows how ridiculous society has become. It's the justice system, not the revenge system.
The porn industry is younger, more willing to innovate and take chances, more "liberal".
There are so many places I could go with that...
The porn "industry" is like this because there are no barriers to entry. Quite literally, anyone can set up shop in a basement or garage, and shoot a porno. Anyone can set up their own webcam and people will pay them to jerk off. This means three things:
First, there is no scarcity, artificial or otherwise, controlling the consumption of the product. There are no entrenched interests. There are no gatekeepers. There's no rating organization, no union, no one that decides whether something should be made and released or not. There are no theaters with limited screens and limited time that production companies need to fight over to get their film shown.
Second, competition is fierce and constant. The only thing that's important in a porno are genitals, and everyone has those (in fact, some fetishes don't even involve genitals). There's not much natural differenciation (except maybe size, but that can be augmented), so innovation in delivery is used instead to create that differenciation. If someone does not quickly innovate or catch up to the leaders of the industry, some up and coming person will eat their lunch.
Third, both risk and reward are fairly low. Producing a porno is cheap. At the same time, pornography isn't going to be pulling a billion dollars a film. Innovation generally involves very low risk, both in money spent, and revenue lost. Change happens easily, quickly, and painlessly. Failure is only possible by not innovating.
The movie and TV industry are the opposite of this. The production cost of a movie or TV show is hundreds to hundred-thousands of times the cost of a porno. Distribution is severely restricted and controlled. Demand is much smaller (viewers are pickier). All of the companies have been around for a long time, and there is very lower turnover, making everyone subject to contracts and agreements accumulated over time. This makes innovation risky. Change does not happen lightly or casually.
In many ways, the movie and TV industry look to the porn industry to see what works and what doesn't. The necessary criteria for consuming porn is not all that different from the criteria necessary for watching a movie or TV show. If an innovation is successful, then the industry adopts it for a more general audience. If it isn't, they move on. It's slower, but reduces the chance of failure.
It's much the same with the whole X amount of billionaires don't pay any taxes on their income. The news media doesn't report that's because they give 90% of the money to charitable causes, or what not.
Yeah, the more money they retain, the more Meals on Wheels trucks they can fund.
What you're not getting is that at the same time, the more money they make, the more we, the everyday average person, is going to need that Meals on Wheels truck to come by.
I'd rather that money be in my pocket, and if not in my pocket, then the next best thing: in the government's pocket. I'd really rather that money not be in the hands of some other individual or private entity. I'd really rather not be beholden to their generosity and whims.
If the government is corrupt, you can elect uncorrupt officials. If some philanthropist decides to withhold their charity to you for whatever reason, you have no say in the matter.
A few things on this: 1) Use shortcut keys, and memorize the key sequences necessary to compose and send a text message. 2) Use a plain 12-button phone to minimize the number of keys to press and the distance the thumb needs to travel. 3) Memorize the T9 suggestion order.
It's really only feasible for sending (and only sending) text messages in stop-and-go traffic, or local driving, when the pauses allow the driver to glance away briefly. Note, I'm not advocating texting while driving at all. Just pointing out that there are better and worse ways to do it.
Even on local roads, it's about as safe as constantly playing with the GPS or climate control. The very fact that texting (even without looking at the phone) is already a distraction already significantly reduces the ability to drive. To do this during any type of highway driving, irrespective of road conditions, traffic conditions, etc. is courting death.
And this doesn't even apply to holding a conversation by text message. To have to look away from the road, especially for the amount of time necessary to read text, makes it all the more impossible to do safely.
Re:Bad CEO replaced by bad CEO replaced by bad CEO
on
HP To Cut 30,000 Jobs
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Sounds like a board issue. They're not picking the right people for the job (I would've said person, but this has happened twice within as many decades).
Yes, but in most other places, they're not particularly proud of that quality. Most of those people seek to better themselves by become better educated, more spiritual, etc. (not say the net outcome is necessarily positive).
Here, people like to assert their own superiority even when there is none. They feel that somehow, because they are themselves, it automatically means they are superior to everyone else. It's not just that mentality though. As a consequence of this thinking, it automatically implies that everyone else should be more like them.
You are confusing Jewish the people, and Jewish the religion. They often appear together, so it's not uncommon to make this mistake. But they are two separate things. Judiasm is a belief system. But you don't have to believe in Judiasm to be Jewish. Being Jewish is also an identity separate from the religion. There are plenty of Jewish people who are secular, agnostic, or even atheist, as well as believers in Judiasm who are not Jewish (converted).
Einstein may have identified with the people, but he did not identify with the religion.
Hardly. Einstein did not believe in the same "god" that people capitalize the "G" for. His god is nature, the natural world and order. His god was not some white man with a beard in the sky causing floods of biblical proportions and causing miracles.
Sure, creation stories are a part of philosophy, anthropology, history, and other studies of the human condition. But that's creation stories taken as a whole. No specific story deserves any more focus or credence than the others in any serious field of study. This is because it is the human condition that is worthy of study, not the story itself. Creation stories, like all stories is merely an expression of the condition.
What are you, a shill? Have you forgotten PlaysForSure? What about Windows Mobile?
Microsoft still dicks their partners over. They still pretend like it's their way or the highway. Why do you think Windows Mobile flopped and nobody's excited about Windows Phone? Because every developer learned their lesson developing for 5.5 (and consequently went to develop for Android instead). Why is nobody interested in Silverlight? Why did the Zune fail? That's all of Microsoft's usual business practices coming back to bite them in the ass. Nokia's sudden drop of MeeGo, QT, and even Symbian is Microsoft-esque in tactics. You don't need to know Elop and Ballmer were once in bed together to realize that Nokia has become Microsoft's phone division.
As a developer, you should be the most disgusted with them. They've constantly dicked over developers (their partners in particular), and for no better reason than some PHB's whim (sometimes Ballmer's). Developers avoid Microsoft at every opportunity (there are times when you just can't), because they know that developing for Microsoft is a risky endeavor at best.
As a user, they're not terrible. As a consumer, they're pretty good. But at this point, no serious developer trusts them.
Office was always their cash cow. Microsoft holds a monopoly in operating systems almost solely to sell copies of Office. Everything revolves around Office. They practically built AD just so they could keep people locked into using Outlook and thus Word and Excel.
And I'm not talking about home and personal use. Microsoft knows their playing field is the enterprise. It is the copy of Office that comes bundled with every office computer. It is the semi-related Office products (Project, Visio, etc.) that managers shell out big bucks for.
The only thing they really failed on is enterprise database software. Foxpro never really took off, and Access is weak. SQL Server requires a Windows Server to install on, which never was the serious contender in the server OS market versus POSIX. The only reason people shell out money for Windows Server is because of AD, and more recently.NET. Nobody purchases a Windows Server just to run SQL Server. If SQL Server could run on a POSIX platform, its adoption rate would be much, much higher. Unfortunately, that's not how Microsoft works.
But even.NET is just (like almost everything else) a diversion for Microsoft. If web technologies were actually that important, they would have phased out VBA in favor of.NET in Office. They have done no such thing because it's unnecessary, and won't drive the sales of Office any further.
And now, it's too late. Between the threats of patent and anti-trust lawsuits, Microsoft practically cannot enter new markets, nor innovate by integrating newer products and ideas into their established product lines. What really gets me is that they'd prefer to hold the entire industry back by supporting software patents (by not speaking/lobbying against them, by settling with patent trolls insead of going to court, and more recently, using them offensively) over being forced to innovate by an ever-changing market and ever-improving competitors.
But as I stated earlier, Microsoft is great at doing business, but not so good at producing products.
The guy who headed the XBox division, as well as led the development on Courier, more or less got the boot from Microsoft. Courier is dead.
Which is a crying shame really. But that probably just reinforces the point that Ballmer is terrible. Instead of retaining top talent, he lets them go in favor of PHBs.
Or their orbit could just be unstable. They could be spiraling into their sun with each revolution, but we'd never know, since it'd take too long to actually cause our measurements to change.
But based on these recent observations, the fact that Jupiter hasn't swallowed up all of the inner rock planets in the past 4.5 billion years is fairly unusual..It very well could be that if the asteroid belt had coalesced into a planet (there's certainly enough material to do so), perhaps Jupiter's orbit would be destabilized by the gravity of this intermediate object, and would have eventually started wandering inwards as well.
Math classes can certainly teach more interesting topics now that calculators have obviated the need to memorize logarithm tables.
Eh, no. Memorizing log tables is not relevant to math. It isn't even a part of math. You can leave your answers in log form without losing points. Math is more abstract than the final number at the end. If you've ever done algorithm analysis, (big O notation), that's closer to what's math than figuring out the log, sin, cos of some non-trivial number.
And because of this, calculators don't help. They do the exact opposite. I mentioned in an earlier post how by using a GPS, you lose the need to exercise a certain thought pattern. Calculators are the same. By constantly using it, you're actually losing a certain ability. Instead of "freeing up" room, you actually cease to be able to put 1 and 1 together without some external device giving you the answer. If you consider your brain to be a muscle (which is the most apt analogy for the brain as I've ever encountered), the calculator would be an exoskeleton. You won't and can't gain muscle by using an exoskeleton. You'll in fact start to lose muscle if that's all you use. You can only gain more muscle by exercising. And that means not using a calculator.
Anyways, real mathematics doesn't require you to get to the numerical answer. Perhaps in engineering, or physics, or other fields that apply math heavily, but not actual mathematics do you need to actually come up with a numerical answer. Leaving pi, or e, or i as a symbol is perfectly ok in math.
Slashdot Mirror
You forgot:
4) Profit!
But not for you.
The media is controlled, the voting machines are controlled, and the lawmakers are controlled.
The media has a lot less control than before. It's just that the people haven't really gotten any smarter.
There is nothing any reasonable person can do to change it, unless you have a miracle plan that you'd care to share.
You want change? Go into education, into teaching. It'll probably take two or three generations before things turn around, but if you want meaningful change that lasts longer than a president's term, that's what it's going to take.
There are no miracles. Just lots of hard work and personal sacrifice.
To put it plainly, this line of thought can only arrive at the conclusion that a group of people with a particular set of characteristics are more valuable than others.
It makes sense why people constantly appeal to this idea of hate crime. Some people really do want to feel that they are more valuable than others. They want that validation. They want to someone to tell them that their existence is superior to the existence of people unlike them. There are many reasons why they'd want to feel this way, reasons which are largely unimportant. What is important is that this mentality has no place in a society founded on the principles of equality.
There are actions that are correctly categorized as hate crimes. They usually victimize an entire group of people, as opposed to an individual who just so happens to be a member of some (regionally) deviant social group.
Actually, it's an attempt to force incoming students to be social. It's a way to get people to meet completely different people with whom they normally wouldn't voluntarily make contact, and hopefully be a better person afterwards.
It doesn't always work out that way, but it rarely turns out quite this badly.
Both are just wrong, but the first one is more so because it carries social prejudice along with it.
No, it's not. The social prejudice is unrelated to the wrongness of secretly filming someone. The existence of the social prejudice may be wrong, but it is not any individual's fault that it exists. And by extension, individuals shouldn't be punished for society's ills.
And like all other acceptable pieces of legislation, has been distorted to be what law enforcement/the prosecution wants it to mean at any particular time.
This was clearly not a hate crime. The target was an individual firstly. And the offence would be no different an offence if the guest had been an older man, an older woman, or some young woman in the same school (though the ultimate result may have differed). That Clementi committed suicide is unfortunate, but hardly Ravi's fault.
That people, especially the prosecution, was expecting a jail term of years just shows how ridiculous society has become. It's the justice system, not the revenge system.
The porn industry is younger, more willing to innovate and take chances, more "liberal".
There are so many places I could go with that...
The porn "industry" is like this because there are no barriers to entry. Quite literally, anyone can set up shop in a basement or garage, and shoot a porno. Anyone can set up their own webcam and people will pay them to jerk off. This means three things:
First, there is no scarcity, artificial or otherwise, controlling the consumption of the product. There are no entrenched interests. There are no gatekeepers. There's no rating organization, no union, no one that decides whether something should be made and released or not. There are no theaters with limited screens and limited time that production companies need to fight over to get their film shown.
Second, competition is fierce and constant. The only thing that's important in a porno are genitals, and everyone has those (in fact, some fetishes don't even involve genitals). There's not much natural differenciation (except maybe size, but that can be augmented), so innovation in delivery is used instead to create that differenciation. If someone does not quickly innovate or catch up to the leaders of the industry, some up and coming person will eat their lunch.
Third, both risk and reward are fairly low. Producing a porno is cheap. At the same time, pornography isn't going to be pulling a billion dollars a film. Innovation generally involves very low risk, both in money spent, and revenue lost. Change happens easily, quickly, and painlessly. Failure is only possible by not innovating.
The movie and TV industry are the opposite of this. The production cost of a movie or TV show is hundreds to hundred-thousands of times the cost of a porno. Distribution is severely restricted and controlled. Demand is much smaller (viewers are pickier). All of the companies have been around for a long time, and there is very lower turnover, making everyone subject to contracts and agreements accumulated over time. This makes innovation risky. Change does not happen lightly or casually.
In many ways, the movie and TV industry look to the porn industry to see what works and what doesn't. The necessary criteria for consuming porn is not all that different from the criteria necessary for watching a movie or TV show. If an innovation is successful, then the industry adopts it for a more general audience. If it isn't, they move on. It's slower, but reduces the chance of failure.
They start doing this, and their userbase will disappear. They know this. This is why they haven't played this card yet.
It's much the same with the whole X amount of billionaires don't pay any taxes on their income. The news media doesn't report that's because they give 90% of the money to charitable causes, or what not.
Yeah, the more money they retain, the more Meals on Wheels trucks they can fund.
What you're not getting is that at the same time, the more money they make, the more we, the everyday average person, is going to need that Meals on Wheels truck to come by.
I'd rather that money be in my pocket, and if not in my pocket, then the next best thing: in the government's pocket. I'd really rather that money not be in the hands of some other individual or private entity. I'd really rather not be beholden to their generosity and whims.
If the government is corrupt, you can elect uncorrupt officials. If some philanthropist decides to withhold their charity to you for whatever reason, you have no say in the matter.
A few things on this:
1) Use shortcut keys, and memorize the key sequences necessary to compose and send a text message.
2) Use a plain 12-button phone to minimize the number of keys to press and the distance the thumb needs to travel.
3) Memorize the T9 suggestion order.
It's really only feasible for sending (and only sending) text messages in stop-and-go traffic, or local driving, when the pauses allow the driver to glance away briefly. Note, I'm not advocating texting while driving at all. Just pointing out that there are better and worse ways to do it.
Even on local roads, it's about as safe as constantly playing with the GPS or climate control. The very fact that texting (even without looking at the phone) is already a distraction already significantly reduces the ability to drive. To do this during any type of highway driving, irrespective of road conditions, traffic conditions, etc. is courting death.
And this doesn't even apply to holding a conversation by text message. To have to look away from the road, especially for the amount of time necessary to read text, makes it all the more impossible to do safely.
Sounds like a board issue. They're not picking the right people for the job (I would've said person, but this has happened twice within as many decades).
Did you really expect a politician to actually know the law? What are they, lawyers now?
It's also unconstitutional. Article 1, section 9.
Yes, but in most other places, they're not particularly proud of that quality. Most of those people seek to better themselves by become better educated, more spiritual, etc. (not say the net outcome is necessarily positive).
Here, people like to assert their own superiority even when there is none. They feel that somehow, because they are themselves, it automatically means they are superior to everyone else. It's not just that mentality though. As a consequence of this thinking, it automatically implies that everyone else should be more like them.
tl;dr: Wolfram Alpha sucks.
The point is moot. They changed the link order completely, probably in response to this thread.
You are confusing Jewish the people, and Jewish the religion. They often appear together, so it's not uncommon to make this mistake. But they are two separate things. Judiasm is a belief system. But you don't have to believe in Judiasm to be Jewish. Being Jewish is also an identity separate from the religion. There are plenty of Jewish people who are secular, agnostic, or even atheist, as well as believers in Judiasm who are not Jewish (converted).
Einstein may have identified with the people, but he did not identify with the religion.
Hardly. Einstein did not believe in the same "god" that people capitalize the "G" for. His god is nature, the natural world and order. His god was not some white man with a beard in the sky causing floods of biblical proportions and causing miracles.
Sure, creation stories are a part of philosophy, anthropology, history, and other studies of the human condition. But that's creation stories taken as a whole. No specific story deserves any more focus or credence than the others in any serious field of study. This is because it is the human condition that is worthy of study, not the story itself. Creation stories, like all stories is merely an expression of the condition.
Because of all the howling we've been hearing, it sounds like the democratic system worked as designed.
FTFY
What are you, a shill? Have you forgotten PlaysForSure? What about Windows Mobile?
Microsoft still dicks their partners over. They still pretend like it's their way or the highway. Why do you think Windows Mobile flopped and nobody's excited about Windows Phone? Because every developer learned their lesson developing for 5.5 (and consequently went to develop for Android instead). Why is nobody interested in Silverlight? Why did the Zune fail? That's all of Microsoft's usual business practices coming back to bite them in the ass. Nokia's sudden drop of MeeGo, QT, and even Symbian is Microsoft-esque in tactics. You don't need to know Elop and Ballmer were once in bed together to realize that Nokia has become Microsoft's phone division.
As a developer, you should be the most disgusted with them. They've constantly dicked over developers (their partners in particular), and for no better reason than some PHB's whim (sometimes Ballmer's). Developers avoid Microsoft at every opportunity (there are times when you just can't), because they know that developing for Microsoft is a risky endeavor at best.
As a user, they're not terrible. As a consumer, they're pretty good. But at this point, no serious developer trusts them.
Office was always their cash cow. Microsoft holds a monopoly in operating systems almost solely to sell copies of Office. Everything revolves around Office. They practically built AD just so they could keep people locked into using Outlook and thus Word and Excel.
And I'm not talking about home and personal use. Microsoft knows their playing field is the enterprise. It is the copy of Office that comes bundled with every office computer. It is the semi-related Office products (Project, Visio, etc.) that managers shell out big bucks for.
The only thing they really failed on is enterprise database software. Foxpro never really took off, and Access is weak. SQL Server requires a Windows Server to install on, which never was the serious contender in the server OS market versus POSIX. The only reason people shell out money for Windows Server is because of AD, and more recently .NET. Nobody purchases a Windows Server just to run SQL Server. If SQL Server could run on a POSIX platform, its adoption rate would be much, much higher. Unfortunately, that's not how Microsoft works.
But even .NET is just (like almost everything else) a diversion for Microsoft. If web technologies were actually that important, they would have phased out VBA in favor of .NET in Office. They have done no such thing because it's unnecessary, and won't drive the sales of Office any further.
And now, it's too late. Between the threats of patent and anti-trust lawsuits, Microsoft practically cannot enter new markets, nor innovate by integrating newer products and ideas into their established product lines. What really gets me is that they'd prefer to hold the entire industry back by supporting software patents (by not speaking/lobbying against them, by settling with patent trolls insead of going to court, and more recently, using them offensively) over being forced to innovate by an ever-changing market and ever-improving competitors.
But as I stated earlier, Microsoft is great at doing business, but not so good at producing products.
The guy who headed the XBox division, as well as led the development on Courier, more or less got the boot from Microsoft. Courier is dead.
Which is a crying shame really. But that probably just reinforces the point that Ballmer is terrible. Instead of retaining top talent, he lets them go in favor of PHBs.
Pluto is Greek.
Or their orbit could just be unstable. They could be spiraling into their sun with each revolution, but we'd never know, since it'd take too long to actually cause our measurements to change.
But based on these recent observations, the fact that Jupiter hasn't swallowed up all of the inner rock planets in the past 4.5 billion years is fairly unusual..It very well could be that if the asteroid belt had coalesced into a planet (there's certainly enough material to do so), perhaps Jupiter's orbit would be destabilized by the gravity of this intermediate object, and would have eventually started wandering inwards as well.
Math classes can certainly teach more interesting topics now that calculators have obviated the need to memorize logarithm tables.
Eh, no. Memorizing log tables is not relevant to math. It isn't even a part of math. You can leave your answers in log form without losing points. Math is more abstract than the final number at the end. If you've ever done algorithm analysis, (big O notation), that's closer to what's math than figuring out the log, sin, cos of some non-trivial number.
And because of this, calculators don't help. They do the exact opposite. I mentioned in an earlier post how by using a GPS, you lose the need to exercise a certain thought pattern. Calculators are the same. By constantly using it, you're actually losing a certain ability. Instead of "freeing up" room, you actually cease to be able to put 1 and 1 together without some external device giving you the answer. If you consider your brain to be a muscle (which is the most apt analogy for the brain as I've ever encountered), the calculator would be an exoskeleton. You won't and can't gain muscle by using an exoskeleton. You'll in fact start to lose muscle if that's all you use. You can only gain more muscle by exercising. And that means not using a calculator.
Anyways, real mathematics doesn't require you to get to the numerical answer. Perhaps in engineering, or physics, or other fields that apply math heavily, but not actual mathematics do you need to actually come up with a numerical answer. Leaving pi, or e, or i as a symbol is perfectly ok in math.