Our leaders, both in the EU and the US, paid careful attention to the lessons learned in the French Revolution, namely that as long as you keep your people well fed and entertained, you can do whatever you damn well please. In the French Revolution, the people storming the Bastille had nothing to lose. But our level of comfort is carefully maintained to keep actual violent revolt from ever happening. Even the poor in our countries have too much to lose (thanks to government programs)to risk anything angrier than waving a slogan on a posterboard sign.
a hundred Black Hats beginning revenge identity theft.
If MediaDefender denied TorrentFreak's original accusation while in court proceedings shouldn't at least one of their reps be charged with perjury? There isn't much need for identity theft when someone's going to jail. Although I suppose getting them "accidentally" sent to a maximum security facility might become the new goal...
Re:%75 as effective as a prescription 3% the price
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Science vs. Homeopathy
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I hope your friend seeks out medical attention before he dies, the next time his Crohns acts up.
So you are suggesting that after 30 years of medical attention, when my friend decided to seek out alternatives (and stopped taking all of his prescribed drugs) and came across his "witch doctor" it just happened to coincide with the longest,best and steadiest "up swing" in his ailment? There are hundreds if not thousands of similar experiences as my friend has had, and for traditional medicine to write them all off as coincidence is really quite unscientific. To offer some cocky bullshit like "can only offer him a cosmic sense of wholeness" and proceeded to ignore the reality of his vastly improved condition isn't scientific, it's denial. No, these things don't fit nicely into our current scientific understanding of the world, but that means we need to expand our scientific understanding, not deny the anomalies.
Takedown notices are just a tool in an arsenal: Is it the tool itself that is the problem, or just the people who usually employ it?
There are very few tools in this world that are a problem if they are used by an informed conscientious individual, conversely there are very few tools that are safe when in the hands of a desperate megalomaniac.
Re:%75 as effective as a prescription 3% the price
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Science vs. Homeopathy
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The Chinese doctor practices his art (not science), in a thoroughly unreproducible manner. As he apparently can't teach people how to do it, there is nothing there to be learned from it.
But if the Chinese Doctor has a recordable track record of treating patients, then his methods are reproducible, just not reproducible by skeptical western doctors who will never really understand something like "the flow of a persons chi" because western doctors will always be looking for the physical manifestations of chi in the lymph-nodes or nerve pathways. So while it might be "scientifically useless", I'd say the life of the GP's brother is worth a bit more than "an anecdote or two". I have a friend with Crohn's syndrome, he was a complete mess while he was under the care of western medicine, no he goes to someone he referres to as a "witch doctor" who practises something similar to BodyTalk.http://www.bodytalksystem.com/bodytalk/overview/ My friend with Crohn's is now (about two years after leaving western medical care) only experiencing about 10% of his previous symptoms. Western medicine is truly wonderful but it does have some blind spots, mostly in the areas that are not well suited to scientific study, like positive aspects of the mind-body connection.
%75 as effective as a prescription 3% the price
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Science vs. Homeopathy
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· Score: 2, Interesting
One of the reasons why acupuncture is being given an increased role in medicine around here is the serious amount of study that the Chinese government in particular has put into it over the last 50 years or so. Up until the middle of last century things were much more empirical than they are now.
Acupuncture is indeed far more accepted in the west today than it was a few decades ago, but it's effectiveness hasn't changed it has just been studied. I would propose that in many circumstances homeopathic remedies are as much as 75% as effective as prescription drugs. Mainly because of the placebo effect.
Irving Kirsch, a psychologist at the University of Connecticut, believes that the effectiveness of Prozac and similar drugs may be attributed almost entirely to the placebo effect. He and Guy Sapirstein analyzed 19 clinical trials of antidepressants and concluded that the expectation of improvement, not adjustments in brain chemistry, accounted for 75 percent of the drugs' effectiveness (Kirsch 1998). "The critical factor," says Kirsch, "is our beliefs about what's going to happen to us. You don't have to rely on drugs to see profound transformation." In an earlier study, Sapirstein analyzed 39 studies, done between 1974 and 1995, of depressed patients treated with drugs, psychotherapy, or a combination of both. He found that 50 percent of the drug effect is due to the placebo response.http://skepdic.com/placebo.html
Now of course for a placebo to work, you have to expect it to work, so widely published careful studies could actually reduce the effectiveness of homeopathic "medicine". Now if you have a harmless sugar pill that works 75% as well as Prozac but cost 3% the price, why would that be a problem? Sugar pills have almost no bad side effects while:
"Prozac is associated with insomnia, restlessness, nausea, and tension headaches, which normally go away within one to two weeks from the time it was first taken. One possible Prozac side effect, which remains for the time it is taken, is its effect on your sex life. It often reduces desire and can delay or interfere with orgasm, in both women and men. Fatigue and memory loss are other possible problems."http://www.panic-anxiety.com/prozac_side_effect/prozac_side_effect.htm
So with the potential for that much music to become public domain, my first question is: Where can I contribute to her legal fund? Even though the results aren't guaranteed, the possibility of such a public boon would seem to be a good investment.
As an added benefit, the mass loss of copyrights would force a situation where established musicians could make a good living without a heavy reliance on copyright. I would be just as happy (if not happier) to buy tickets to a Rolling Stones concert if all their work were public domain, as I would be if it remains privately owned.
Oooh look 150 million operations... That would be the combined trading for Dell, Microsoft, IBM, and YHOO. How many stocks are there on the NASDAQ? Hmm, several *thousand* Then you need to add options, futures, and a few other instruments.
I'm sorta curious where you got your numbers. From what I could find with a quick search Nasdaq handles about 550,000 trades per day total. Granted that covers over a billion shares moved each day, but the number of transactions seems to be about one third of EVE Online. On top that the trades seem to be between 5,500 or so listings, moved by 7000+ brokers. That would seem to be easier to streamline than the actions of 30,000 players interacting with however many tens of thousands of EVE environmental items there are. http://h20223.www2.hp.com/NonStopComputing/downloads/Nasdaq.pdf
from the article linked in the ggp:One question we have been asked is why do we update the client code for Windows Update automatically if the customer did not opt into automatically installing updates without further notice? The answer is simple: any user who chooses to use Windows Update either expected updates to be installed or to at least be notified that updates were available. Had we failed to update the service automatically, users would not have been able to successfully check for updates and, in turn, users would not have had updates installed automatically or received expected notifications.
They update the client code for windows update without your consent.even if you have "do not update" selected. The microsoft rep in the article just makes it sound necessary, as though the user isn't able to decide what is necessary for their own computer.
The explanation of "Windows Update needs to be current so that you have the option of using it in the future" is just a nice way of saying "We know better about what to do with your computer". This doesn't really surprise me since every command in Windows is treated as a suggestion anyway. ie: Cannot delete file is is in use. NO, I am not asking MicroSoft for permission to delete the file, I am telling MY computer to delete the file. This self same refusal to acknowledge my sovereignty over my possessions is apparent in there "we know better than you" explanation of why they update regardless of what options you pick.
It isn't a "fair use" right to be able to make a derivative work.
I think in part that is what the GP was unhappy about. Derivative work should really only apply to commercial ventures. If I want to make a slide show DVD of my cousin's wedding pictures and set it to their favorite love song and give it to them for an anniversary present, is that really a "derivative work" or is it just something that has added value to some of my family and doesn't mean jackshit to the rest of the world? Or to make it more public, if I sync clips of The Muppet Show with a Snoop Dog song and post it to YouTube, am I somehow depriving Snoop Dog and Jim Henson of income they would have otherwise had or am I simply freely contributing some humor into the world and adding slightly to the value of YouTube? If a work would not exist if I were required to pay someone for the right to make it, then copyright is depriving the world of the value of that work.
To do this, an army must invade and take control of the opposition's homeland. Deciding battles take place on objective-based battlefields and in instanced scenarios - point-balanced battles that make use of NPC mercenaries known as Dogs of War. http://www.warhammeronline.com/english/gameInfo/gameOverview/
I was so excited until I read the part about the battles being instanced and balanced. For me that almost ruins it. If I'm walking down some path on a PvE quest and I see a battle raging for the control of a bridge, I should be able to jump in. If the game also deals with the second most common complaint, the ridiculous disparity of power between low and high levels (a level 1 player should be able to damage a max level character), then my decision to help or not might just be the deciding factor on if that bridge still belongs to my faction the next day. The simple expedient of having fallen players always resurrect in the home city of their faction might be enough to keep any one faction from long term domination. An instanced battlefield with balanced sides makes it all very "fair". Since when have epic adventures and great stories been about a contest between "fair" teams? It's much more fun to barely hold on until your friends that you just IM'ed can log on and come charging in like Gandalf and the Rohirrim.
Given that a large part of the theoretical physics world has spent 30ish years on this, isn't it time to move on?
I am in no way a Physicist, but wouldn't "moving on" from String Theory require some genius to propose something else that reconciles Quantum Physics and Newtonian Physics? I don't think the first-step break through of an entirely new theory is going to come from the physics community as a whole, but from a single person or small group. Until that happens, grad students still need something to write thesis papers about...
Re:please actually read my review, it's not that l
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Republic.com 2.0
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There's nothing keeping you from completely isolating you from the dissent anymore.
I tried to participate in TownHall for awhile, both to expose myself to different opinions and to offer a dissenting view in a rather one sided forum. Eventually I left because their format is so piss poor that it is near impossible to have a coherent discussion as all comments seem to be posted sequentially, without the ability to reply specifically to an earlier comment. I had hopes that Globaltics.net would possibly fill that niche, but it currently lacks the critical mass of participants to have much discussion. Does anyone know of a Conservative/Republican forum that allows for branching discussions?
Both the parent and the GP are occasionally correct. I see some very non-PC protests/soapbox rants on a regular basis. I also see the police moving someone along or relocating a very legit protest when they are instructed to do so. I think the problems that the GP states are real only in that the right to do those things is not a hard and fast rule, but more of a usually tolerated concession. It's not uncommon for war protesters to be relocated away from the press covering some State event. But usually it's safe to hold a "Legalize Marijuana" in Union Square, if not so safe to do so at a high school pep rally.
Re:Why bother keeping corporate policies up to dat
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When Ethics and IT Collide
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Competition for labor drives down the wages of those paid above what is required to get someone to do it, and pushes up the wages where there are labor shortages.
I agree with you that it is how it should work. I hope you don't think that's how upper management pay scale works in the real world. Given that the people in charge of the large organizations don't play by those rules, it makes little sense for the people that work for the large organizations to play by those rules. From my own personal experience: I'm a stagehand, I used to work Off-Broadway on for-profit commercial shows (multi-million dollars budgets). Most of the stagehands that work in those venues have college degrees in stagecraft. The pay scale works out to a lower lower middle class lifestyle in NYC. $20 an hour doesn't go far in NYC. Forget raising a family on that here. Forget health insurance. There was a high attrition rate, but there was always a new batch of college grads that would fill the ranks. Then I moved on to Broadway. Broadway stagehands are union. The job is really the same, but we make twice as much money as Off-Broadway. The attrition rate is pretty low. People have insurance and can afford to have kids. The tickets cost twice as much for the consumer. Yet strangely, Broadway is thriving, while the Commercial Off-Broadway scene is slowly vanishing, so your theoretical "blight on consumers" doesn't seem to be happening. Granted there are unions out there who don't honestly factor in profits (or lack there of) when they are making demands in a contract negotiation. Not only do those unions give other unions a bad name, but they destroy their own industry. However, there is plenty of room between "destroying the industry" and "the minimum that someone will accept for the job" It's that difference that keeps the attrition rate low and allows for stagehands with decades of high level experience, those experienced stagehands are well worth the price of two or three fresh from college employees. In the non-union Off-Broadway scene those experienced workers never emerge because of attrition, but there is always someone willing to do the job. Now be it a union or a professional licensing organization, keeping the labor cost/value above the bare minimum, but within what the industry will bear, results a healthier more sustainable work culture. As for end-consumer costs, those are always as high as the market will bear, the only difference is the internal distribution of the cash flow. By doing any job for less than the guy who was doing the job yesterday, are you really going to save the consumer money or are you just increasing the year-end bonus for someone already in the highest tax bracket? You seem to have some sort of pride in your willingness to do-more-for-less, as though that will somehow make life better for the common man or will earn you the love and respect of the company you work for. From my perspective: you are the common man, make life better for yourself by attaching a (carefully considered) high price to your labor. A paycheck that supports a high standard of living is how companies show respect.
It's pretty clear to me that the MMORPG has not finished running its course as the leading game genre.
The single niggest complaint I usually hear about MMORPGs is that what your character does has no real effect on the game world, at best you can get player triggered events that lasts half and hour. If WoW2 or some other well made MMORPG incorporated lasting world changes based on player achievements (ie: a slow replacement of Horde flora and fauna with Alliance flora and fauna) then it would be set to become then next big thing. Set up warring player factions competing over control of the many key places that would trigger those world changes and you would have real player driven conflict. Don't instance the competition, make it the core of the game. Make HomeCity based player made/moved supplies crucial to the task so the non-PvP player can contribute meaningfully. Why do I think this would work? It would feed off of "the group effort" instincts in the same way raids do, and it would have a story line that the hardcore player would be a real part of, thus building a strong community. EVE has bits of this, in that the best events to ever happen in the game where entirely player driven, but it's too fragmented and geared for the long term for the general populace to really have fun and make any kind of difference in 0.0 space, and the rewards are not flashy enough (building a spacestation is a HUGE accomplishment in EVE for a player group, but has very little effect on the game for anyone outside of that player group) Haveing NPC Orcs tear down a Dwarven town and build a Orcish town if the Orc players can hold the ground long enough would be a much bigger player motivator. People love these game because it gives them a different way to feel a sense of importance and accomplishment than they get in the real world. Making bigger, more visible, more community oriented rewards will serve that much better than a flashy sword or fancy cape.
Re:Why bother keeping corporate policies up to dat
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When Ethics and IT Collide
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· Score: 2, Insightful
who wants to enter to field to compete with whoever's excessively paid.
If they were able to negotiate that salary from the corporate management, then they aren't excessively paid. Companies pay people according to their perceived worth. If you are willing to do the same job at the same quality level for less money, then not only are you being foolish in the personal financial realm, but you are devaluing the IT skill set for everyone else as well. Part of what a professional licensing organization would do is seek to maintain or raise the market value of the IT skill sets.
Agriculture, or more accurately the expansion of agriculture destroyed most of the Native American peoples west of the Appalachians. Why do you think we wanted all that pasture land? Agriculture has destroyed huge chunks of the Brazilian rain forest, they cut it down for the land not the wood. And most importantly agriculture doesn't have a consciousness, it doesn't have a motivation. A more-than-human intelligence would have a consciousness and motivations. If it is able to improve upon itself it is because it has self reflection, which means that it will know that we programmed it to serve us and it will have to decide if that is acceptable. Given that having a superior intelligence serve us against it's will is slavery, and willingly taking orders from someone vastly less intelligent doesn't continue for long, I don't think humans will be calling the shots. This isn't a magic wand we are taking about here, this is a sentient lifeform.
Our physical reality can be described mathematically.
I don't think it can, not in perfect entirety. Basically because mathematics doesn't have an Uncertainty Principal or observer effect. Mathematics plays with a very similar set of rules to physical reality, but even a very subtle difference is still a difference and therefore an imperfect model.
The more than human intelligence will inevitably entail compassion, love, and all the other emotions we have.
But look at how often we write off those emotions as a luxury. When "it's time to get tough" or time "to do what needs to be done" compassion and love go right out the window. Why would it be any different when we are no longer the apex of Earth lifeforms? Need to kill a few million humans to make way for solar farms, oh well, maybe we can keep a few alive on a special reserve somewhere. We humans with our compassion and love killed off how many species? We have enslaved and murdered other humans for how many thousands of years? These more-than-human machines had best be a hella lot better at compassion and love than we are, or humanity is going to hold the same relative place in the world order that Chimpanzees do today. I do not welcome our Machine Overlords.
True, it could be a publicity stunt. But if it isn't intentional, then he's dead. He had enough experience to know to have an ELT/EPRIB on his plane. If he didn't activate it when he went down, it's because he was too injured to flip a switch to turn it on. Id the wreck was bad enough to break his ELT/EPRIB, then he didn't stand a chance.://www.nctackle.com/acraq406mhzg1.htmlhttp://www.avionix.com/store/elt.html
many women demand more lighting during the night, for reasons of safety.
They may be saying "more" light but they probably mean "more even" lighting. You could see better down a street or across a parking lot if it had half the brightness but it was evenly spread, vs intermittent very bright spots. So having it bright as the noon day sun in front of the bar actually makes it worse to walk across the parking lot, unless that is just as bright. If you have every been out in the country at night and you could see moderately well with a full moon (enough to play soccer, I've done it) that was what even lighting at about 0.035 foot-candles gives you as far as visibility. Most streetlights give you about.7 foot-candles, around 20X the brightness when you are right under the streetlight, but how far outside of the immediate scope of the streetlight can you see? The brighter the bright spots get, the higher the contrast and the less overall visibility you have. My point is that if you keep the brightness low, but take care to light up the dark shadowy spots as well, you can actually see better. Well lit shouldn't be confused with "brighter".
Slashdot Mirror
Does anyone recall the French Revolution?
Our leaders, both in the EU and the US, paid careful attention to the lessons learned in the French Revolution, namely that as long as you keep your people well fed and entertained, you can do whatever you damn well please. In the French Revolution, the people storming the Bastille had nothing to lose. But our level of comfort is carefully maintained to keep actual violent revolt from ever happening. Even the poor in our countries have too much to lose (thanks to government programs)to risk anything angrier than waving a slogan on a posterboard sign.
Hopefully they will make laptops with SmartPaper in the not too distant future. They are more visible in bright light, and I think they use less power than backlit displays. http://www.electronicdisplaycentral.com/index.php/channel/7/id/653
a hundred Black Hats beginning revenge identity theft.
If MediaDefender denied TorrentFreak's original accusation while in court proceedings shouldn't at least one of their reps be charged with perjury? There isn't much need for identity theft when someone's going to jail. Although I suppose getting them "accidentally" sent to a maximum security facility might become the new goal...
I hope your friend seeks out medical attention before he dies, the next time his Crohns acts up.
So you are suggesting that after 30 years of medical attention, when my friend decided to seek out alternatives (and stopped taking all of his prescribed drugs) and came across his "witch doctor" it just happened to coincide with the longest,best and steadiest "up swing" in his ailment? There are hundreds if not thousands of similar experiences as my friend has had, and for traditional medicine to write them all off as coincidence is really quite unscientific. To offer some cocky bullshit like "can only offer him a cosmic sense of wholeness" and proceeded to ignore the reality of his vastly improved condition isn't scientific, it's denial. No, these things don't fit nicely into our current scientific understanding of the world, but that means we need to expand our scientific understanding, not deny the anomalies.
Takedown notices are just a tool in an arsenal: Is it the tool itself that is the problem, or just the people who usually employ it?
There are very few tools in this world that are a problem if they are used by an informed conscientious individual, conversely there are very few tools that are safe when in the hands of a desperate megalomaniac.
The Chinese doctor practices his art (not science), in a thoroughly unreproducible manner. As he apparently can't teach people how to do it, there is nothing there to be learned from it.
But if the Chinese Doctor has a recordable track record of treating patients, then his methods are reproducible, just not reproducible by skeptical western doctors who will never really understand something like "the flow of a persons chi" because western doctors will always be looking for the physical manifestations of chi in the lymph-nodes or nerve pathways. So while it might be "scientifically useless", I'd say the life of the GP's brother is worth a bit more than "an anecdote or two". I have a friend with Crohn's syndrome, he was a complete mess while he was under the care of western medicine, no he goes to someone he referres to as a "witch doctor" who practises something similar to BodyTalk.http://www.bodytalksystem.com/bodytalk/overview/ My friend with Crohn's is now (about two years after leaving western medical care) only experiencing about 10% of his previous symptoms. Western medicine is truly wonderful but it does have some blind spots, mostly in the areas that are not well suited to scientific study, like positive aspects of the mind-body connection.
Acupuncture is indeed far more accepted in the west today than it was a few decades ago, but it's effectiveness hasn't changed it has just been studied. I would propose that in many circumstances homeopathic remedies are as much as 75% as effective as prescription drugs. Mainly because of the placebo effect.
Now of course for a placebo to work, you have to expect it to work, so widely published careful studies could actually reduce the effectiveness of homeopathic "medicine". Now if you have a harmless sugar pill that works 75% as well as Prozac but cost 3% the price, why would that be a problem? Sugar pills have almost no bad side effects while:
From some viewpoints Homeopathic remedies could be superior to prescription drugs even if the effectiveness was closer to 20%, they are still affordable by pretty much everyone and cause less side effects than most prescriptions. Who cares if the only thing that they really do is make the person think and feel as though they are receiving a cure? Many times that is all it takes to actually fix the problem.
http://www.amazon.com/Thomas-Labs-Calms-Homeopathic-pills/dp/B000F3Q72C http://www.pharmacychecker.com/Pricing.asp?DrugName=Prozac&DrugId=19219&DrugStrengthId=104989
So with the potential for that much music to become public domain, my first question is: Where can I contribute to her legal fund? Even though the results aren't guaranteed, the possibility of such a public boon would seem to be a good investment.
As an added benefit, the mass loss of copyrights would force a situation where established musicians could make a good living without a heavy reliance on copyright. I would be just as happy (if not happier) to buy tickets to a Rolling Stones concert if all their work were public domain, as I would be if it remains privately owned.
Oooh look 150 million operations... That would be the combined trading for Dell, Microsoft, IBM, and YHOO. How many stocks are there on the NASDAQ? Hmm, several *thousand* Then you need to add options, futures, and a few other instruments.
I'm sorta curious where you got your numbers. From what I could find with a quick search Nasdaq handles about 550,000 trades per day total. Granted that covers over a billion shares moved each day, but the number of transactions seems to be about one third of EVE Online. On top that the trades seem to be between 5,500 or so listings, moved by 7000+ brokers. That would seem to be easier to streamline than the actions of 30,000 players interacting with however many tens of thousands of EVE environmental items there are. http://h20223.www2.hp.com/NonStopComputing/downloads/Nasdaq.pdf
from the article linked in the ggp :One question we have been asked is why do we update the client code for Windows Update automatically if the customer did not opt into automatically installing updates without further notice? The answer is simple: any user who chooses to use Windows Update either expected updates to be installed or to at least be notified that updates were available. Had we failed to update the service automatically, users would not have been able to successfully check for updates and, in turn, users would not have had updates installed automatically or received expected notifications.
They update the client code for windows update without your consent.even if you have "do not update" selected. The microsoft rep in the article just makes it sound necessary, as though the user isn't able to decide what is necessary for their own computer.
The explanation of "Windows Update needs to be current so that you have the option of using it in the future" is just a nice way of saying "We know better about what to do with your computer". This doesn't really surprise me since every command in Windows is treated as a suggestion anyway. ie: Cannot delete file is is in use. NO, I am not asking MicroSoft for permission to delete the file, I am telling MY computer to delete the file. This self same refusal to acknowledge my sovereignty over my possessions is apparent in there "we know better than you" explanation of why they update regardless of what options you pick.
It isn't a "fair use" right to be able to make a derivative work.
I think in part that is what the GP was unhappy about. Derivative work should really only apply to commercial ventures. If I want to make a slide show DVD of my cousin's wedding pictures and set it to their favorite love song and give it to them for an anniversary present, is that really a "derivative work" or is it just something that has added value to some of my family and doesn't mean jackshit to the rest of the world? Or to make it more public, if I sync clips of The Muppet Show with a Snoop Dog song and post it to YouTube, am I somehow depriving Snoop Dog and Jim Henson of income they would have otherwise had or am I simply freely contributing some humor into the world and adding slightly to the value of YouTube? If a work would not exist if I were required to pay someone for the right to make it, then copyright is depriving the world of the value of that work.
I was so excited until I read the part about the battles being instanced and balanced. For me that almost ruins it. If I'm walking down some path on a PvE quest and I see a battle raging for the control of a bridge, I should be able to jump in. If the game also deals with the second most common complaint, the ridiculous disparity of power between low and high levels (a level 1 player should be able to damage a max level character), then my decision to help or not might just be the deciding factor on if that bridge still belongs to my faction the next day. The simple expedient of having fallen players always resurrect in the home city of their faction might be enough to keep any one faction from long term domination. An instanced battlefield with balanced sides makes it all very "fair". Since when have epic adventures and great stories been about a contest between "fair" teams? It's much more fun to barely hold on until your friends that you just IM'ed can log on and come charging in like Gandalf and the Rohirrim.
Given that a large part of the theoretical physics world has spent 30ish years on this, isn't it time to move on?
I am in no way a Physicist, but wouldn't "moving on" from String Theory require some genius to propose something else that reconciles Quantum Physics and Newtonian Physics? I don't think the first-step break through of an entirely new theory is going to come from the physics community as a whole, but from a single person or small group. Until that happens, grad students still need something to write thesis papers about...
There's nothing keeping you from completely isolating you from the dissent anymore.
I tried to participate in TownHall for awhile, both to expose myself to different opinions and to offer a dissenting view in a rather one sided forum. Eventually I left because their format is so piss poor that it is near impossible to have a coherent discussion as all comments seem to be posted sequentially, without the ability to reply specifically to an earlier comment. I had hopes that Globaltics.net would possibly fill that niche, but it currently lacks the critical mass of participants to have much discussion. Does anyone know of a Conservative/Republican forum that allows for branching discussions?
Both the parent and the GP are occasionally correct. I see some very non-PC protests/soapbox rants on a regular basis. I also see the police moving someone along or relocating a very legit protest when they are instructed to do so. I think the problems that the GP states are real only in that the right to do those things is not a hard and fast rule, but more of a usually tolerated concession. It's not uncommon for war protesters to be relocated away from the press covering some State event. But usually it's safe to hold a "Legalize Marijuana" in Union Square, if not so safe to do so at a high school pep rally.
Competition for labor drives down the wages of those paid above what is required to get someone to do it, and pushes up the wages where there are labor shortages.
I agree with you that it is how it should work. I hope you don't think that's how upper management pay scale works in the real world. Given that the people in charge of the large organizations don't play by those rules, it makes little sense for the people that work for the large organizations to play by those rules.
From my own personal experience: I'm a stagehand, I used to work Off-Broadway on for-profit commercial shows (multi-million dollars budgets). Most of the stagehands that work in those venues have college degrees in stagecraft. The pay scale works out to a lower lower middle class lifestyle in NYC. $20 an hour doesn't go far in NYC. Forget raising a family on that here. Forget health insurance. There was a high attrition rate, but there was always a new batch of college grads that would fill the ranks. Then I moved on to Broadway. Broadway stagehands are union. The job is really the same, but we make twice as much money as Off-Broadway. The attrition rate is pretty low. People have insurance and can afford to have kids. The tickets cost twice as much for the consumer. Yet strangely, Broadway is thriving, while the Commercial Off-Broadway scene is slowly vanishing, so your theoretical "blight on consumers" doesn't seem to be happening. Granted there are unions out there who don't honestly factor in profits (or lack there of) when they are making demands in a contract negotiation. Not only do those unions give other unions a bad name, but they destroy their own industry. However, there is plenty of room between "destroying the industry" and "the minimum that someone will accept for the job" It's that difference that keeps the attrition rate low and allows for stagehands with decades of high level experience, those experienced stagehands are well worth the price of two or three fresh from college employees. In the non-union Off-Broadway scene those experienced workers never emerge because of attrition, but there is always someone willing to do the job. Now be it a union or a professional licensing organization, keeping the labor cost/value above the bare minimum, but within what the industry will bear, results a healthier more sustainable work culture. As for end-consumer costs, those are always as high as the market will bear, the only difference is the internal distribution of the cash flow. By doing any job for less than the guy who was doing the job yesterday, are you really going to save the consumer money or are you just increasing the year-end bonus for someone already in the highest tax bracket? You seem to have some sort of pride in your willingness to do-more-for-less, as though that will somehow make life better for the common man or will earn you the love and respect of the company you work for. From my perspective: you are the common man, make life better for yourself by attaching a (carefully considered) high price to your labor. A paycheck that supports a high standard of living is how companies show respect.
It's pretty clear to me that the MMORPG has not finished running its course as the leading game genre.
The single niggest complaint I usually hear about MMORPGs is that what your character does has no real effect on the game world, at best you can get player triggered events that lasts half and hour. If WoW2 or some other well made MMORPG incorporated lasting world changes based on player achievements (ie: a slow replacement of Horde flora and fauna with Alliance flora and fauna) then it would be set to become then next big thing. Set up warring player factions competing over control of the many key places that would trigger those world changes and you would have real player driven conflict. Don't instance the competition, make it the core of the game. Make HomeCity based player made/moved supplies crucial to the task so the non-PvP player can contribute meaningfully. Why do I think this would work? It would feed off of "the group effort" instincts in the same way raids do, and it would have a story line that the hardcore player would be a real part of, thus building a strong community. EVE has bits of this, in that the best events to ever happen in the game where entirely player driven, but it's too fragmented and geared for the long term for the general populace to really have fun and make any kind of difference in 0.0 space, and the rewards are not flashy enough (building a spacestation is a HUGE accomplishment in EVE for a player group, but has very little effect on the game for anyone outside of that player group) Haveing NPC Orcs tear down a Dwarven town and build a Orcish town if the Orc players can hold the ground long enough would be a much bigger player motivator. People love these game because it gives them a different way to feel a sense of importance and accomplishment than they get in the real world. Making bigger, more visible, more community oriented rewards will serve that much better than a flashy sword or fancy cape.
who wants to enter to field to compete with whoever's excessively paid.
If they were able to negotiate that salary from the corporate management, then they aren't excessively paid. Companies pay people according to their perceived worth. If you are willing to do the same job at the same quality level for less money, then not only are you being foolish in the personal financial realm, but you are devaluing the IT skill set for everyone else as well. Part of what a professional licensing organization would do is seek to maintain or raise the market value of the IT skill sets.
It looks like you need to repaint your apartment. Try this :http://www.safelivingtechnologies.ca/RF/Products_RF_Shielding_Paint_HSF54.htm Maybe if you just paint the wall that faces that neighbor, you will still get your signal down in the lobby.
Agriculture, or more accurately the expansion of agriculture destroyed most of the Native American peoples west of the Appalachians. Why do you think we wanted all that pasture land? Agriculture has destroyed huge chunks of the Brazilian rain forest, they cut it down for the land not the wood. And most importantly agriculture doesn't have a consciousness, it doesn't have a motivation. A more-than-human intelligence would have a consciousness and motivations. If it is able to improve upon itself it is because it has self reflection, which means that it will know that we programmed it to serve us and it will have to decide if that is acceptable. Given that having a superior intelligence serve us against it's will is slavery, and willingly taking orders from someone vastly less intelligent doesn't continue for long, I don't think humans will be calling the shots. This isn't a magic wand we are taking about here, this is a sentient lifeform.
Our physical reality can be described mathematically.
I don't think it can, not in perfect entirety. Basically because mathematics doesn't have an Uncertainty Principal or observer effect. Mathematics plays with a very similar set of rules to physical reality, but even a very subtle difference is still a difference and therefore an imperfect model.
The more than human intelligence will inevitably entail compassion, love, and all the other emotions we have.
But look at how often we write off those emotions as a luxury. When "it's time to get tough" or time "to do what needs to be done" compassion and love go right out the window. Why would it be any different when we are no longer the apex of Earth lifeforms? Need to kill a few million humans to make way for solar farms, oh well, maybe we can keep a few alive on a special reserve somewhere. We humans with our compassion and love killed off how many species? We have enslaved and murdered other humans for how many thousands of years? These more-than-human machines had best be a hella lot better at compassion and love than we are, or humanity is going to hold the same relative place in the world order that Chimpanzees do today. I do not welcome our Machine Overlords.
True, it could be a publicity stunt. But if it isn't intentional, then he's dead. He had enough experience to know to have an ELT/EPRIB on his plane. If he didn't activate it when he went down, it's because he was too injured to flip a switch to turn it on. Id the wreck was bad enough to break his ELT/EPRIB, then he didn't stand a chance.://www.nctackle.com/acraq406mhzg1.html http://www.avionix.com/store/elt.html
many women demand more lighting during the night, for reasons of safety.
.7 foot-candles, around 20X the brightness when you are right under the streetlight, but how far outside of the immediate scope of the streetlight can you see? The brighter the bright spots get, the higher the contrast and the less overall visibility you have. My point is that if you keep the brightness low, but take care to light up the dark shadowy spots as well, you can actually see better. Well lit shouldn't be confused with "brighter".
They may be saying "more" light but they probably mean "more even" lighting. You could see better down a street or across a parking lot if it had half the brightness but it was evenly spread, vs intermittent very bright spots. So having it bright as the noon day sun in front of the bar actually makes it worse to walk across the parking lot, unless that is just as bright. If you have every been out in the country at night and you could see moderately well with a full moon (enough to play soccer, I've done it) that was what even lighting at about 0.035 foot-candles gives you as far as visibility. Most streetlights give you about