In general, it seems like the point of "package deals" is to screw the customer. If I buy X amount of bandwidth or cell phone minutes per month and don't use them all, I wasted money. If I use any more than that, they charge me a hefty premium.
On the other hand, consumers should see "unlimited" as a good thing only if they expect to use more than the average person, whose usage the price reflects. If I think I will eat $15 worth of food and the buffet costs $10, it's a good deal for me.
In short: "pay for what you use" is obviously fair. Package deals are an attempt to screw the customer; "unlimited" deals are an attempt to screw the provider. (Who, of course, has already calculated the average use and determined that the house will win.)
People have learned from experience that the professional news isn't trustworthy.
And even if it is, it often isn't relevant to our lives. Yes, everything affects everything else at some level, but the truth is that most of what you read in a newspaper doesn't is irrelevant to you, out of your realm of influence, or merely speculative. Pick up a year-old newspaper and see how compelling it is.
Psychologically, it's interesting to consider that while a major tragedy may happen to you or someone close to you just a handful of times in your life, a major tragedy is happening somewhere to somebody every hour. There was a time when we were blissfully unaware of that fact. Now we have a constant barrage of it. It is wearying, and to cope we have to tune a lot of it out.
I have also read (most of) Head First Javascript, and at the beginning of it, I fit the description of their ideal reader: knowledge of HTML and CSS, no programming experience.
I bought Headfirst JS at the same time as O'Reilly's "JavaScript: The Definitive Guide," which I've hardly cracked due to its dull style and assumption that the reader is already familiar with other languages. The difference between the two for a beginner is night and day - although of course they serve different purposes.
The way they explain things may seem childish at first, but it makes things memorable, and the times when I did the "busy work" of filling out crosswords of terms and penciling in missing code in examples were the times I learned the most.
For example, in explaining data types, they have you circle items in a drawing of a city street and tell what kind of data type would represent them: boolean for a car's blinker, string for the title of a shop, number for a 3-way traffic light. The concept of data types had not been clear to me in The Definitive Guide, so I appreciated HFJS's approach of representing real-life information as data types.
A few concepts seemed unclear at first - like the difference between writing a function and actually calling it - but overall this is a very helpful introduction to Javascript, and fairly painless to read. Once you get the basics, other books would be better for reference.
You are right that smart does not imply articulate but the converse is more often true or at least that has been my experience. How many articulate idiots do you know?
I don't know many articulate idiots. But I do know some articulate non-technical people. There is more than one way to be smart.
I'm not talking about "measurable truth vs. perception." I'm talking about being able to communicate what you know.
Scientists are often good at taking real-world things and describing them with formulas and theories. They are often bad at taking their findings and describing them in real-world terms.
To be unable to break your field's concepts down into simpler terms is a mental shortcoming, just like not being able to understand the concepts in the first place. Maybe it's no big deal if you only talk to other scientists. But the "film majors are morons" poster seemed to think smart=articulate, and that's just not the case.
And this is why liberal arts majors aren't so impressed by engineering students: because some of them are so dense that they can't write an English sentence about a cup of coffee without using mathematical variables.
Some geeks so absorbed in their symbolic descriptions of things that they can no longer talk about the things themselves. A cooling cup of coffee is reality; a formula is a way of describing it precisely, but it's useless unless you can always come back to the real-world thing you're describing and make that clear.
Many science majors look down on liberal arts majors for not understanding math and systems. But many liberal arts majors look down on science majors for not being able to understand why their words mean nothing to non-specialists. It makes it sound like all they've done is memorize and not internalize.
If you can't describe your field of work engagingly at a party, please, do us all a favor and don't write textbooks or become a professor.
The point where he snapped was where I suggested that the Maths/Science/Engineering students could make films (i.e. write papers about their favourite zombie flicks) many times better than his average student, if they were not busily, y'know, learning how to do hard stuff.
It's just about brain power.
That's just silly. Solving logical problems and telling stories are very different pursuits, and while some people are good at both, it's not simply a matter of "brainpower." Why else would geeks need "artsy" people to help with their GUIs?
Some people have an intuitive feel for drawing a figure, singing a melody, or telling a joke, and some people don't. Some people easily grasp complex systems, and some don't. It isn't "just about brain power," it's about specific talents, and maybe more importantly, about what gets you excited. If making films is a burning desire for you, that's a good sign; if it's just an assignment that you get when you'd rather be designing jet engines, guess whose film is going to suck?
I don't buy your premise (music good -> major label contract).
I don't buy that premise, either. However, labels have traditionally served as imperfect filters - screening out TONS of really bad music, and also screening out some good music. What they actually sell is selected based on perceived commercial viability, which may include a musician's appearance and stage presence and touring record as much as the quality of their songs - but musical quality IS a factor.
In many cases, big-label music is merely adequate in quality. But being an indie musician and having swapped CDs with a lot of other indies, I can tell you that there are ways of sucking, musically and lyrically, which do get effectively screened out by the labels.
Labels are dying, or at least shrinking. As that happens, more of the burden of listening to every wanna-be musician's stuff and screening out the crap, trying to find the diamond in the rough, falls on die-hard music fans. It's probably a better system, but if you're on the front lines of it, you'll quickly let go of the notion that "indie" = "better."
MrNaz is exactly right. Wherever you see petty violence, you may find an evil idiot. But when you see thwarted justice systems, insurance scams, terrorism, spambots, stock market fraud, genocide and other large-scale evil, you can be sure that the people behind it are both evil and smart. Their evil tendencies give them their goals, and their smarts help them deceive or outwit those who stand in their way.
Maybe nobody else in this discussion shares my enthusiasm for C.S. Lewis, but he said something very interesting on the subject of free will in people and angels or demons.
When we have understood about free will, we shall see how silly it is to ask, as somebody once asked me: 'Why did God make a creature of such rotten stuff that it went wrong?' The better stuff a creature is made of --the cleverer and stronger and freer it is--then the better it will be if it goes right, but also the worse it will be if it goes wrong. A cow cannot be very good or very bad; a dog can be both better and worse; a child better and worse still; an ordinary man, still more so; a man of genius, still more so; a superhuman spirit best--or worst--of all.
I disagree. Smart helps you decide "how should I accomplish what I want to do?" Ethical helps you decide "should I put my interests ahead of somebody else's?"
These two questions are not related. Being smart may lead you to be selfish in more subtle ways, but it doesn't automatically make you a nicer person.
The bottom line is that if you need technology to control what you're kids are watching -- you are doing something wrong.
I'm not a parent yet, so I can't speak from experience, but that seems overly broad. What about when your kids are old enough to be home alone for an evening? You can tell them what not to watch and what not to look at on the internet, but they may not listen.
Some of you will say, "well if the kids are old enough to be alone for a couple hours, they're old enough to watch whatever they want." But I strongly disagree, and they'll be my kids, not yours. I think there will be some value in having technological filters to back up what I tell them - just like a physical lock on an alcohol cabinet backs up an instruction to stay out of there. If kids could always be trusted, they wouldn't need parents.
Frankly I don't know how I'm going to handle this when the time comes. It will take a lot of thought.
I get out of a car that has 300 horsepower so I can sit on an animal that has one.
Why do we even use the term 'horsepower'? Is that to further humiliate horses?
The space-shuttle rockets have 20 million horsepower. Is there any point in still comparing it... to the horses?
Any chance of going back to using rockets with horses, trying to keep track of how many we're gonna need?
"Hey, horse. There's a rocket engine that broke down. Can you get 20 million friends together really fast?"
On my home PC, I don't require a password for either account; I'm the admin and the user, and I trust myself.:) I just read that logging in under the user account is more secure.
So if I do "run as" admin while logged in as user, it should just run, right?
I need to run as admin to update software, as I am regularly prompted to do. Switching over to admin is annoying, so mostly I just don't update software.
I wish I could specify that certain programs are allowed to update themselves without admin rights.
I *think* I understand what you mean, but you didn't say it. What you did imply was "consenting adults should be able to have sex any time, anywhere, under any conditions they like," since you said you wanted to get rid of all laws that govern that.
I was trying to humorously make the point that some such laws are a good idea, and that simply because two people are consenting adults doesn't mean their actions don't affect other people.
Of course I can't give an exhaustive explanation of why I believe in Christ here, and to be honest, my belief did not start with a philosophical examination - though I did come to that later on. However, I would say that since the most important claim of Christianity is the existence of a God who is infinitely intelligent and has His own goals, it is at least consistent with that belief that He will not submit himself to scientific tests unless He wants to. I believe that God is a Person, so you can't put him in a beaker and test Him unless He consents to that.
Astrology, on the other hand, purports to be a very predictable system of drawing correlation between two sets of observable events; human and astronomical. It's trivially easy to show that these predictions are false as often as true, or general enough to be meaningless.
Furthermore, and more importantly to me, astrology makes no conceptual sense. If human events are correlated with the stars (or more accurately, with earth's movement), then there must either be a physical mechanism for that which isn't apparent (cosmic mood-inducing rays or something), or there must be an intelligence behind it, pulling the strings - which, as far as I know, is not claimed.
I guess I would say that the concept of astrology seems to be too simple to stand up to critical thought. Reformed Christianity poses some difficult questions, but I think that it's internally consistent.
I think some people are way too casual about having incompatible worldviews with a significant other, but then again, I'm a person with very firm Christian beliefs. Maybe if you are agnostic, for example, you can tolerate someone who believes something which, by your view, could potentially be correct.
But if your mate believes something which you see as patently foolish - like the idea that everyone born between certain dates each year will have the same personality/fate, despite all evidence to the contrary, and despite a total lack of explanation as to how the position of stellar bodies relates to human events - I think this deep disagreement about how life works will lead to bitterness and problems. It's hard to conceal contempt.
And yes, I'm braced for the blind atheistic mockery of Slashdot.
The Design of Everyday Things is a great book, considered a classic. It covers basic things like doors and telephones more than GUIs, but it helps you think in the right direction.
One principle that stuck in my mind is that you should make things as obvious as you can - if you've got four heating elements on a stove, arranged in a square, then arrange the knobs that control them in a square and it's obvious how it maps. If you put the knobs in a straight line, you have to label them and the user has to stop to read the diagram.
A second principle is that you should make the penalty for screwing up as low as possible.
Imagine the worst possible user interface: it's easy to click the wrong button, and clicking the wrong button does something disastrous. Now strive for the opposite: it's obvious which button is right, and clicking the wrong one doesn't do anything that can't be easily undone.
Easier said than done, but just imagining the good design makes me feel less stressed.
Slashdot Mirror
In general, it seems like the point of "package deals" is to screw the customer. If I buy X amount of bandwidth or cell phone minutes per month and don't use them all, I wasted money. If I use any more than that, they charge me a hefty premium.
On the other hand, consumers should see "unlimited" as a good thing only if they expect to use more than the average person, whose usage the price reflects. If I think I will eat $15 worth of food and the buffet costs $10, it's a good deal for me.
In short: "pay for what you use" is obviously fair. Package deals are an attempt to screw the customer; "unlimited" deals are an attempt to screw the provider. (Who, of course, has already calculated the average use and determined that the house will win.)
And even if it is, it often isn't relevant to our lives. Yes, everything affects everything else at some level, but the truth is that most of what you read in a newspaper doesn't is irrelevant to you, out of your realm of influence, or merely speculative. Pick up a year-old newspaper and see how compelling it is.
Psychologically, it's interesting to consider that while a major tragedy may happen to you or someone close to you just a handful of times in your life, a major tragedy is happening somewhere to somebody every hour. There was a time when we were blissfully unaware of that fact. Now we have a constant barrage of it. It is wearying, and to cope we have to tune a lot of it out.
I have also read (most of) Head First Javascript, and at the beginning of it, I fit the description of their ideal reader: knowledge of HTML and CSS, no programming experience.
I bought Headfirst JS at the same time as O'Reilly's "JavaScript: The Definitive Guide," which I've hardly cracked due to its dull style and assumption that the reader is already familiar with other languages. The difference between the two for a beginner is night and day - although of course they serve different purposes.
The way they explain things may seem childish at first, but it makes things memorable, and the times when I did the "busy work" of filling out crosswords of terms and penciling in missing code in examples were the times I learned the most.
For example, in explaining data types, they have you circle items in a drawing of a city street and tell what kind of data type would represent them: boolean for a car's blinker, string for the title of a shop, number for a 3-way traffic light. The concept of data types had not been clear to me in The Definitive Guide, so I appreciated HFJS's approach of representing real-life information as data types.
A few concepts seemed unclear at first - like the difference between writing a function and actually calling it - but overall this is a very helpful introduction to Javascript, and fairly painless to read. Once you get the basics, other books would be better for reference.
I don't know many articulate idiots. But I do know some articulate non-technical people. There is more than one way to be smart.
I'm not talking about "measurable truth vs. perception." I'm talking about being able to communicate what you know.
Scientists are often good at taking real-world things and describing them with formulas and theories. They are often bad at taking their findings and describing them in real-world terms.
To be unable to break your field's concepts down into simpler terms is a mental shortcoming, just like not being able to understand the concepts in the first place. Maybe it's no big deal if you only talk to other scientists. But the "film majors are morons" poster seemed to think smart=articulate, and that's just not the case.
And this is why liberal arts majors aren't so impressed by engineering students: because some of them are so dense that they can't write an English sentence about a cup of coffee without using mathematical variables.
Some geeks so absorbed in their symbolic descriptions of things that they can no longer talk about the things themselves. A cooling cup of coffee is reality; a formula is a way of describing it precisely, but it's useless unless you can always come back to the real-world thing you're describing and make that clear.
Many science majors look down on liberal arts majors for not understanding math and systems. But many liberal arts majors look down on science majors for not being able to understand why their words mean nothing to non-specialists. It makes it sound like all they've done is memorize and not internalize.
If you can't describe your field of work engagingly at a party, please, do us all a favor and don't write textbooks or become a professor.
That's just silly. Solving logical problems and telling stories are very different pursuits, and while some people are good at both, it's not simply a matter of "brainpower." Why else would geeks need "artsy" people to help with their GUIs?
Some people have an intuitive feel for drawing a figure, singing a melody, or telling a joke, and some people don't. Some people easily grasp complex systems, and some don't. It isn't "just about brain power," it's about specific talents, and maybe more importantly, about what gets you excited. If making films is a burning desire for you, that's a good sign; if it's just an assignment that you get when you'd rather be designing jet engines, guess whose film is going to suck?
I don't buy that premise, either. However, labels have traditionally served as imperfect filters - screening out TONS of really bad music, and also screening out some good music. What they actually sell is selected based on perceived commercial viability, which may include a musician's appearance and stage presence and touring record as much as the quality of their songs - but musical quality IS a factor.
In many cases, big-label music is merely adequate in quality. But being an indie musician and having swapped CDs with a lot of other indies, I can tell you that there are ways of sucking, musically and lyrically, which do get effectively screened out by the labels.
Labels are dying, or at least shrinking. As that happens, more of the burden of listening to every wanna-be musician's stuff and screening out the crap, trying to find the diamond in the rough, falls on die-hard music fans. It's probably a better system, but if you're on the front lines of it, you'll quickly let go of the notion that "indie" = "better."
MrNaz is exactly right. Wherever you see petty violence, you may find an evil idiot. But when you see thwarted justice systems, insurance scams, terrorism, spambots, stock market fraud, genocide and other large-scale evil, you can be sure that the people behind it are both evil and smart. Their evil tendencies give them their goals, and their smarts help them deceive or outwit those who stand in their way.
Maybe nobody else in this discussion shares my enthusiasm for C.S. Lewis, but he said something very interesting on the subject of free will in people and angels or demons.
I disagree. Smart helps you decide "how should I accomplish what I want to do?" Ethical helps you decide "should I put my interests ahead of somebody else's?"
These two questions are not related. Being smart may lead you to be selfish in more subtle ways, but it doesn't automatically make you a nicer person.
Clippy: You seem to be delivering a veiled insult. Did you mean:
So the fact that someone is intelligent and systems-minded means that they are also moral and wise?
I cite chemical weapons, communist speech censorship tools, and since this is Slashdot, Microsoft Windows as counter-examples.
"Smart" != "trustworthy."
I'm not a parent yet, so I can't speak from experience, but that seems overly broad. What about when your kids are old enough to be home alone for an evening? You can tell them what not to watch and what not to look at on the internet, but they may not listen.
Some of you will say, "well if the kids are old enough to be alone for a couple hours, they're old enough to watch whatever they want." But I strongly disagree, and they'll be my kids, not yours. I think there will be some value in having technological filters to back up what I tell them - just like a physical lock on an alcohol cabinet backs up an instruction to stay out of there. If kids could always be trusted, they wouldn't need parents.
Frankly I don't know how I'm going to handle this when the time comes. It will take a lot of thought.
Clippy: I see you're trying to use apostrophes. You seem to be confused. Did you mean:
Reminds me of Seinfeld's take on the subject.
On my home PC, I don't require a password for either account; I'm the admin and the user, and I trust myself. :) I just read that logging in under the user account is more secure.
So if I do "run as" admin while logged in as user, it should just run, right?
To clarify, that means that "Admin" can set it so that when "User" runs Program X, that program will act as though it were being run by "Admin?"
If that's correct, where is that option? (And thanks for the tip!)
I need to run as admin to update software, as I am regularly prompted to do. Switching over to admin is annoying, so mostly I just don't update software.
I wish I could specify that certain programs are allowed to update themselves without admin rights.
...and then the photoshoppers will write evolutionary algorithms to modify their photographs until they pass evaluation by this tool.
I *think* I understand what you mean, but you didn't say it. What you did imply was "consenting adults should be able to have sex any time, anywhere, under any conditions they like," since you said you wanted to get rid of all laws that govern that.
I was trying to humorously make the point that some such laws are a good idea, and that simply because two people are consenting adults doesn't mean their actions don't affect other people.
"What's that you say? On a playground, during recess? Well, the law's the law!"
[Rolls eyes]
Thanks for the civil tone of your question. :)
Of course I can't give an exhaustive explanation of why I believe in Christ here, and to be honest, my belief did not start with a philosophical examination - though I did come to that later on. However, I would say that since the most important claim of Christianity is the existence of a God who is infinitely intelligent and has His own goals, it is at least consistent with that belief that He will not submit himself to scientific tests unless He wants to. I believe that God is a Person, so you can't put him in a beaker and test Him unless He consents to that.
Astrology, on the other hand, purports to be a very predictable system of drawing correlation between two sets of observable events; human and astronomical. It's trivially easy to show that these predictions are false as often as true, or general enough to be meaningless.
Furthermore, and more importantly to me, astrology makes no conceptual sense. If human events are correlated with the stars (or more accurately, with earth's movement), then there must either be a physical mechanism for that which isn't apparent (cosmic mood-inducing rays or something), or there must be an intelligence behind it, pulling the strings - which, as far as I know, is not claimed.
I guess I would say that the concept of astrology seems to be too simple to stand up to critical thought. Reformed Christianity poses some difficult questions, but I think that it's internally consistent.
Thank you. As to why - see the other replies. :)
I think some people are way too casual about having incompatible worldviews with a significant other, but then again, I'm a person with very firm Christian beliefs. Maybe if you are agnostic, for example, you can tolerate someone who believes something which, by your view, could potentially be correct.
But if your mate believes something which you see as patently foolish - like the idea that everyone born between certain dates each year will have the same personality/fate, despite all evidence to the contrary, and despite a total lack of explanation as to how the position of stellar bodies relates to human events - I think this deep disagreement about how life works will lead to bitterness and problems. It's hard to conceal contempt.
And yes, I'm braced for the blind atheistic mockery of Slashdot.
The Design of Everyday Things is a great book, considered a classic. It covers basic things like doors and telephones more than GUIs, but it helps you think in the right direction.
One principle that stuck in my mind is that you should make things as obvious as you can - if you've got four heating elements on a stove, arranged in a square, then arrange the knobs that control them in a square and it's obvious how it maps. If you put the knobs in a straight line, you have to label them and the user has to stop to read the diagram.
A second principle is that you should make the penalty for screwing up as low as possible.
Imagine the worst possible user interface: it's easy to click the wrong button, and clicking the wrong button does something disastrous. Now strive for the opposite: it's obvious which button is right, and clicking the wrong one doesn't do anything that can't be easily undone.
Easier said than done, but just imagining the good design makes me feel less stressed.