I don't have that mindset actually, but I do post here a lot, and I've seen a few accounts that are very clearly shills. Some of them have even said outright that they work in marketing. This guy was one of them. I'm not sure if he's the same guy as North Korea/CmdrPony (and a few other accounts that I can't remember the name of, but they all use the same manner of speech and keep suggesting that people travel around Asia like he did/does). That guy at first I wasn't sure if he just had limited experience with any non-MS software (he keeps saying how Visual Studio is the best development tool, full stop, and he said in a discussion about servers that Linux sucks because you can't log in remotely, wtf?). Sometimes he doesn't even mention anything pro-MS or anti-Google and just likes to join in the chatting. But often he does his shilling thing. So they're getting better, but next time you see someone defending MS in the face of all logic, chances are that their UID is brand new and they are in fact just a shill account rather than a genuine poster.
I should probably keep a log of all the posts that give them away just to show to guys like you. There's even a post in here somewhere that links to the website of a company that does all this stuff. I can't remember if it's the same name as was in the journal I saw a few months ago where someone had found out the name of a company and several accounts used by that company.. it's all rather sad, but it's true. There are people being paid to try and mislead those who don't actually have any knowledge of the history of MS. You may say it's all ancient history, but Ballmer is still in charge. MS' business tactics are rotten. The only reason they haven't been able to get away with so much in the 00s was the anti-trust oversight, but that's over now.
I would think noise cancelling headphones would cancel out a lot more noise - though your system could do noise cancellation too of course, but headphones already help to block a noise out simply by being in or over your ears, so I think they'd be an easier starting point.
I actually thought maybe one the reasons you'd prefer a cable behind the ear rather than headphones was to leave your normal hearing at full capacity while you also listen to your music or whatever. Maybe I was imagining your idea wrong.
When. i think of trawling I think of fisnhng, or trawling a lake for dead bodies for example. You have to start off indiscriminately checking/catching every post (every bit of garbage at the bottom of the lake, or a bunch of dolphins as well as your fish) and then keep the ones that match your search, throwing the rest away.
I know what "troll" means, and in this case they meant "trawl". I was wondering if I was wrong reading your definitions, but on further research I'm still correct. Trolling is fishing with a dragline (never heard of that before), while trawling is using a dragnet - which is what you figuratively do if you're searching through data.
In the case of saying how Facebook could troll, that was what I like to call a joke. Guess I should have used one of these:p
I know there's a difference. The fact that you think of it as a personality change pretty much is admitting that it's all bunk, hecuase the bible refers to god as "unchanging"? Usually people put more efforting into trying to reconcile the personality change to not be a personality change at all.. interesting. Do you just accept stuff like that without even questioning it?
There are more than just passages about idols, there are passages about the Isralites mingling with foreigners and adopting their customs/festivals etc. God didn't like that either. Adopting "Easter" bunnies and "Christmas" trees seems like a really good way to piss off the OT god, and to have the NT god or Jesus give you a right good telling off before forgiving you and saying shucks, you're forgiven, just don't be naughty again, mmkay?
I've been thinking to myself that it'd be neat to have some sort of a small plug behind your ear into which you can plug in a small audio cable, and then have the audio transmitted directly to your inner ear through cranial resonance
If you have to plug in a cable anyway, why not just use headphones? They're a lot less traumatic. Okay so operations aren't that traumatic, I've had ops on both my ears under local anaesthetic, but still I wouldn't go in for such an operation unless it was going to make a big difference to my life.
I'd only get aural implants if they were wireless. I'd probably be happy to go for direct cabling if it linked directly to the nervous system though. That could be hella fun, if you didn't die in the process of installation..
If you post a lot or a little you don't get mod points. If you're in the middle range then you get plenty. I either saw someone say that or it's in the FAQ somewhere, but it does match my experience.
Unlucky. See the post above yours. I thought there were summaries calling it the "God Particle" a year or two though. Don't know where else I would have heard the phrase from.
Its a LOT more plausible than that some christians decided to ignore all the zillions of condemnations for idolatrous trees in the OT.
You do realise that most Christians back when this tradition was started couldn't even read, and wouldn't be able to see these passages? It was illegal for anyone but priests to read scriptures for a while too, wasn't it? And by now everyone is too used to the way they think Christmas "should" be to want to change the tree etc.
I've never heard of this paradise tree thing in my life. It's only plausible to you because that's what you want it to be the case, not because you're thinking about things in a historically accurate fashion. My family always put up a Christmas tree despite being in a pretty serious protestant denomination btw. People just don't even notice this kind of thing until someone points it out. I didn't even think about it until I saw that cartoon.
Nope, I didn't miss the New Testament, but are you saying that you should completely ignore the Old?
It doesn't matter if the adults are doing it, how is it any different getting their kids to write letters to imaginary beings? Why do you think this is any different to pagan gods? I have no hostility towards people putting up a tree and having a party, I just think it's hypocritical of Christians to be using symbols from pagan celebrations in their own when their bible forbids it.
The bible doesn't actually say that you should celebrate Christmas either. And the party isn't for your god, it's for the people.
a website is a part of the Internet, no matter where it is hosted.
"A country is part of the world, no matter where it is situated". By your logic, different nations shouldn't exist. It's a nice idea of course, but reality kind of gets in the way.
If anything the fact that sites are not located in the US should be what makes it impossible for them to do anything - apart from create something akin to China's "Great Firewall". If they want to stop people using US owned domains then fine, but they'd better not try to start taking down.ru sites etc.
Note that I don't even agree with Copyright infringment, but neither do I agree with these clowns.
IT isn't all about shifting paradigms, a lot of the thinking you need to do IT support and build/manage infrastructure simply required the right mindset of considering various possible problems or solutions. I've always been "good with computers" simply because I'm curious, I try things out, and the things I learn from that tend to help me with future things.
I stopped finding IT support interesting within a couple of years though, and have managed to shift my job role in the company to being a lot more programming oriented the last few years. So I guess I'm one of the "gurus" that the article talks about. Unfortunately the department that makes the most use of my software projects has just been sold to another company, and they haven't decided if they want to keep using that software or switch to some general solution yet. I don't really mind either way, management seem to like the idea of me continuing in some kind of programming role for them otherwise they'd have made me part of the deal..
Mod parent up.. already he's been modded down by astroturfer accounts. Depressing that people actually get paid to troll the one place that I actually still enjoy reading and posting.
And you're one of the astroturfers that tries to protect MS even when those things are true. People don't need to make up bad things about MS, because they simply have done and still do bad things.
"Insight in 140 bytes" as in "I'm a marketing droid who loves astroturfing on Twitter/social media". Anyone who visits Slashdot regularly will recognise that the vast majority of the newest UIDs are astroturfers. I'm a bit shocked by the scale of it all as mentioned in the summary, but I already knew about the industry thanks to you and your buddies.
I predict the next study will show that their mothers are fatter than average, and ugly
Well, stupid kids are likely to have come from stupid parents, and stupid people are too stupid to stop eating so much when they get fat. And getting fatter almost always makes you uglier. So I wouldn't be surprised by that outcome.
Well as I tried to say before about the poker hands, there are many, many more possible orientations of matter that result in lifelessness than there are that result in life (despite both sets being effectively infinite I suppose). That's what I mean when I talk about the probability of life coming from lifelessness being more likely than life being already assembled.
I understand your point of view as it's similar to mine for a large portion of my life, except that I took it seriously from quite early on, and had a lot of questioning that started in my mid teens.
God isn't really an explanation, because you haven't explained God. It's just shifting things so that you don't have to think about it any more. How do you then explain God's intelligence? Why do you think such an almighty and intelligent being as the Christian God can exist without outside influence, but can't accept that you can exist without it?
I get what you're saying about consciousness too - it's easy to accept that a being could appear conscious from the outside, but when you're experiencing it yourself it feels like more. It seems impossible that the experience could just start out of nothing. But it seems equally impossible that "something" has always existed too, so there you go.
At the higher level things are not random at all. On average, things work as you expect them to work. You don't expect a computer to act randomly, so why expect that your brain is doing so? We don't need souls to explain experience. Sticking electrodes into your brain can influence what you see, hear and do. As can taking drugs.
I'm not going to claim anything about good or bad. I don't really believe in the concepts as absolute things that we have to live up to, though I do obviously believe in things that I think are good or bad on a personal level. I don't think that people can be perfect if you define perfect as doing the best for those around them. Our genes tend to put our self interest above other things unless we are looking after a family.
I used to think the bible meshed quite well with reality too. But it's easy to make statements that don't go against the truth of reality just by saying obvious things but leaving ambiguity. Obvious things like "people do bad things". Now that I'm free of some of the cognitive dissonance holding me back and moulding my thoughts, I can see a few places where the bible doesn't mesh with reality though - starting even from the very basics. People build so much crap on top of the basics that they refuse to even consider them. Things like why God would even want to create other beings if he's already perfect, and why would be want to create beings to worship him? Is he really that much of an arrogant prick? etc.
I have no doubt that many people have died for their faith in many religions, but being willing to die for your faith doesn't make it true. Look at suicide bombing terrorists or the Jonestown massacre. People do a lot of crazy things for nonsense ideology.
Well, I wasn't analysing it in depth. I didn't like most of the themes personally, but that's the case with any OS I've used, and I assume that all the ones that made it in must be liked by at least a few people. There are 2 or 3 themes that I really liked, like the default MintX, and the dark grey one with medium blue title bars. The themes and the default desktop backgrounds do have a very "minty fresh" bold quality to them IMO - I think their whole Mint concept works quite well.
I'm going to keep using it until something pisses me off. Hopefully these guys won't be quite so arrogant though. Not everything needs to be turned into a tablet interface.
Acting like there is a 50/50 chance of a deity seems a bit much to me. I'm thinking more from a human point of view as in "can we explain why these people made up all this shit without actually requiring a god to be there?" type of thing. Clearly they can't all be right. And again I think it quite likely that all of them are wrong. Our data comes from knowing people and seeing groupthink from religion, sports, even Slashdot memes.
As an ide: I would like to believe there is some kind of spiritual realm, it would certainly make death less scary and the world slightly more magical in a way, but at the same time, knowing that we evolved from bacteria etc.. I find it hard to believe that there would be any notion of a soul for a single bacteria.. and if there is, then souls are not intelligent. Intelligence is a result of our brain, not a soul, etc.. it all just seems like wishful thinking. I can see why people came to believe things and want to believe them, and religious thinking does help some people for things like overcoming addiction a that kind of thing. But it also damages a lot of lives by screwing with people's personal development (mine included), and even gives people yet another excuse to kill each other.
So I think you might as well flip a coin for whether the moon is made of marshmallows, or sleep being a government control mechanism, or any other crazy shit that pops into your head, because that's how religion starts and that's why I say all this stuff is unlikely to contain ultimate truth. They might make good stories and some factual or wise information, but people who take these books too seriously.. meh..
I don't give a crap about religious symbols other than wishing that the concept of religion didn't even exist. In context though, the Christian god is a supremely "jealous" one. If he were real, he wouldn't be happy with people making a big deal about decorating shiny fertility symbols in their home and all the surrounding materialism and prayers/letters to Santa when they're meant to be celebrating his son's birth:p Some Christians of course don't go in for all that, but most clearly do.
Well, I personally switched from Ubuntu to Mint a few weeks after they made Unity the default. At that time it was claimed to be the second most popular distro which is why I went with it - because I thought it would still have decent support and updates. I don't care if it becomes "number 1" or anything like that, but it's certainly my favourite OS so far. They've put effort into making it feel polishedl the themes are classy, and I like little details like getting a fortune cookie every time you open a new terminal. The quotes from that Husse guy are very amusing, whoever he is.. seems like one of their developers.
*Googles* Shit. Husse died last year apparently. That makes me feel rather sad. He sounded like a lot of fun and obviously was committed to helping people out when he could..
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I don't have that mindset actually, but I do post here a lot, and I've seen a few accounts that are very clearly shills. Some of them have even said outright that they work in marketing. This guy was one of them. I'm not sure if he's the same guy as North Korea/CmdrPony (and a few other accounts that I can't remember the name of, but they all use the same manner of speech and keep suggesting that people travel around Asia like he did/does). That guy at first I wasn't sure if he just had limited experience with any non-MS software (he keeps saying how Visual Studio is the best development tool, full stop, and he said in a discussion about servers that Linux sucks because you can't log in remotely, wtf?). Sometimes he doesn't even mention anything pro-MS or anti-Google and just likes to join in the chatting. But often he does his shilling thing. So they're getting better, but next time you see someone defending MS in the face of all logic, chances are that their UID is brand new and they are in fact just a shill account rather than a genuine poster.
I should probably keep a log of all the posts that give them away just to show to guys like you. There's even a post in here somewhere that links to the website of a company that does all this stuff. I can't remember if it's the same name as was in the journal I saw a few months ago where someone had found out the name of a company and several accounts used by that company.. it's all rather sad, but it's true. There are people being paid to try and mislead those who don't actually have any knowledge of the history of MS. You may say it's all ancient history, but Ballmer is still in charge. MS' business tactics are rotten. The only reason they haven't been able to get away with so much in the 00s was the anti-trust oversight, but that's over now.
I would think noise cancelling headphones would cancel out a lot more noise - though your system could do noise cancellation too of course, but headphones already help to block a noise out simply by being in or over your ears, so I think they'd be an easier starting point.
I actually thought maybe one the reasons you'd prefer a cable behind the ear rather than headphones was to leave your normal hearing at full capacity while you also listen to your music or whatever. Maybe I was imagining your idea wrong.
When. i think of trawling I think of fisnhng, or trawling a lake for dead bodies for example. You have to start off indiscriminately checking/catching every post (every bit of garbage at the bottom of the lake, or a bunch of dolphins as well as your fish) and then keep the ones that match your search, throwing the rest away.
I know what "troll" means, and in this case they meant "trawl". I was wondering if I was wrong reading your definitions, but on further research I'm still correct. Trolling is fishing with a dragline (never heard of that before), while trawling is using a dragnet - which is what you figuratively do if you're searching through data.
In the case of saying how Facebook could troll, that was what I like to call a joke. Guess I should have used one of these :p
I know there's a difference. The fact that you think of it as a personality change pretty much is admitting that it's all bunk, hecuase the bible refers to god as "unchanging"? Usually people put more efforting into trying to reconcile the personality change to not be a personality change at all.. interesting. Do you just accept stuff like that without even questioning it?
There are more than just passages about idols, there are passages about the Isralites mingling with foreigners and adopting their customs/festivals etc. God didn't like that either. Adopting "Easter" bunnies and "Christmas" trees seems like a really good way to piss off the OT god, and to have the NT god or Jesus give you a right good telling off before forgiving you and saying shucks, you're forgiven, just don't be naughty again, mmkay?
Indeed. The summary meant "trawled" of course. Trolling the users would imply Facebook posting fake messages from friends telling them to do it.
I've been thinking to myself that it'd be neat to have some sort of a small plug behind your ear into which you can plug in a small audio cable, and then have the audio transmitted directly to your inner ear through cranial resonance
If you have to plug in a cable anyway, why not just use headphones? They're a lot less traumatic. Okay so operations aren't that traumatic, I've had ops on both my ears under local anaesthetic, but still I wouldn't go in for such an operation unless it was going to make a big difference to my life.
I'd only get aural implants if they were wireless. I'd probably be happy to go for direct cabling if it linked directly to the nervous system though. That could be hella fun, if you didn't die in the process of installation..
If you post a lot or a little you don't get mod points. If you're in the middle range then you get plenty. I either saw someone say that or it's in the FAQ somewhere, but it does match my experience.
1. Then under this act they can presumably only block the non-US IPs.
2. Doesn't matter whatsoever.
3. They could revoke this.
Unlucky. See the post above yours. I thought there were summaries calling it the "God Particle" a year or two though. Don't know where else I would have heard the phrase from.
It was pretty much just banks in general with their dodgy loan policies wasn't it?
Its a LOT more plausible than that some christians decided to ignore all the zillions of condemnations for idolatrous trees in the OT.
You do realise that most Christians back when this tradition was started couldn't even read, and wouldn't be able to see these passages? It was illegal for anyone but priests to read scriptures for a while too, wasn't it? And by now everyone is too used to the way they think Christmas "should" be to want to change the tree etc.
I've never heard of this paradise tree thing in my life. It's only plausible to you because that's what you want it to be the case, not because you're thinking about things in a historically accurate fashion. My family always put up a Christmas tree despite being in a pretty serious protestant denomination btw. People just don't even notice this kind of thing until someone points it out. I didn't even think about it until I saw that cartoon.
Nope, I didn't miss the New Testament, but are you saying that you should completely ignore the Old?
It doesn't matter if the adults are doing it, how is it any different getting their kids to write letters to imaginary beings? Why do you think this is any different to pagan gods? I have no hostility towards people putting up a tree and having a party, I just think it's hypocritical of Christians to be using symbols from pagan celebrations in their own when their bible forbids it.
The bible doesn't actually say that you should celebrate Christmas either. And the party isn't for your god, it's for the people.
a website is a part of the Internet, no matter where it is hosted.
"A country is part of the world, no matter where it is situated". By your logic, different nations shouldn't exist. It's a nice idea of course, but reality kind of gets in the way.
If anything the fact that sites are not located in the US should be what makes it impossible for them to do anything - apart from create something akin to China's "Great Firewall". If they want to stop people using US owned domains then fine, but they'd better not try to start taking down .ru sites etc.
Note that I don't even agree with Copyright infringment, but neither do I agree with these clowns.
IT isn't all about shifting paradigms, a lot of the thinking you need to do IT support and build/manage infrastructure simply required the right mindset of considering various possible problems or solutions. I've always been "good with computers" simply because I'm curious, I try things out, and the things I learn from that tend to help me with future things.
I stopped finding IT support interesting within a couple of years though, and have managed to shift my job role in the company to being a lot more programming oriented the last few years. So I guess I'm one of the "gurus" that the article talks about. Unfortunately the department that makes the most use of my software projects has just been sold to another company, and they haven't decided if they want to keep using that software or switch to some general solution yet. I don't really mind either way, management seem to like the idea of me continuing in some kind of programming role for them otherwise they'd have made me part of the deal..
Mod parent up.. already he's been modded down by astroturfer accounts. Depressing that people actually get paid to troll the one place that I actually still enjoy reading and posting.
And you're one of the astroturfers that tries to protect MS even when those things are true. People don't need to make up bad things about MS, because they simply have done and still do bad things.
"Insight in 140 bytes" as in "I'm a marketing droid who loves astroturfing on Twitter/social media". Anyone who visits Slashdot regularly will recognise that the vast majority of the newest UIDs are astroturfers. I'm a bit shocked by the scale of it all as mentioned in the summary, but I already knew about the industry thanks to you and your buddies.
I predict the next study will show that their mothers are fatter than average, and ugly
Well, stupid kids are likely to have come from stupid parents, and stupid people are too stupid to stop eating so much when they get fat. And getting fatter almost always makes you uglier. So I wouldn't be surprised by that outcome.
Oh dear. Are you lost, little one? How did you get in here?
They would never do that, because then they stop getting cheap stuff.
Well as I tried to say before about the poker hands, there are many, many more possible orientations of matter that result in lifelessness than there are that result in life (despite both sets being effectively infinite I suppose). That's what I mean when I talk about the probability of life coming from lifelessness being more likely than life being already assembled.
I understand your point of view as it's similar to mine for a large portion of my life, except that I took it seriously from quite early on, and had a lot of questioning that started in my mid teens.
God isn't really an explanation, because you haven't explained God. It's just shifting things so that you don't have to think about it any more. How do you then explain God's intelligence? Why do you think such an almighty and intelligent being as the Christian God can exist without outside influence, but can't accept that you can exist without it?
I get what you're saying about consciousness too - it's easy to accept that a being could appear conscious from the outside, but when you're experiencing it yourself it feels like more. It seems impossible that the experience could just start out of nothing. But it seems equally impossible that "something" has always existed too, so there you go.
At the higher level things are not random at all. On average, things work as you expect them to work. You don't expect a computer to act randomly, so why expect that your brain is doing so? We don't need souls to explain experience. Sticking electrodes into your brain can influence what you see, hear and do. As can taking drugs.
I'm not going to claim anything about good or bad. I don't really believe in the concepts as absolute things that we have to live up to, though I do obviously believe in things that I think are good or bad on a personal level. I don't think that people can be perfect if you define perfect as doing the best for those around them. Our genes tend to put our self interest above other things unless we are looking after a family.
I used to think the bible meshed quite well with reality too. But it's easy to make statements that don't go against the truth of reality just by saying obvious things but leaving ambiguity. Obvious things like "people do bad things". Now that I'm free of some of the cognitive dissonance holding me back and moulding my thoughts, I can see a few places where the bible doesn't mesh with reality though - starting even from the very basics. People build so much crap on top of the basics that they refuse to even consider them. Things like why God would even want to create other beings if he's already perfect, and why would be want to create beings to worship him? Is he really that much of an arrogant prick? etc.
I have no doubt that many people have died for their faith in many religions, but being willing to die for your faith doesn't make it true. Look at suicide bombing terrorists or the Jonestown massacre. People do a lot of crazy things for nonsense ideology.
Well, I wasn't analysing it in depth. I didn't like most of the themes personally, but that's the case with any OS I've used, and I assume that all the ones that made it in must be liked by at least a few people. There are 2 or 3 themes that I really liked, like the default MintX, and the dark grey one with medium blue title bars. The themes and the default desktop backgrounds do have a very "minty fresh" bold quality to them IMO - I think their whole Mint concept works quite well.
I'm going to keep using it until something pisses me off. Hopefully these guys won't be quite so arrogant though. Not everything needs to be turned into a tablet interface.
Acting like there is a 50/50 chance of a deity seems a bit much to me. I'm thinking more from a human point of view as in "can we explain why these people made up all this shit without actually requiring a god to be there?" type of thing. Clearly they can't all be right. And again I think it quite likely that all of them are wrong. Our data comes from knowing people and seeing groupthink from religion, sports, even Slashdot memes.
As an ide: I would like to believe there is some kind of spiritual realm, it would certainly make death less scary and the world slightly more magical in a way, but at the same time, knowing that we evolved from bacteria etc.. I find it hard to believe that there would be any notion of a soul for a single bacteria.. and if there is, then souls are not intelligent. Intelligence is a result of our brain, not a soul, etc.. it all just seems like wishful thinking. I can see why people came to believe things and want to believe them, and religious thinking does help some people for things like overcoming addiction a that kind of thing. But it also damages a lot of lives by screwing with people's personal development (mine included), and even gives people yet another excuse to kill each other.
So I think you might as well flip a coin for whether the moon is made of marshmallows, or sleep being a government control mechanism, or any other crazy shit that pops into your head, because that's how religion starts and that's why I say all this stuff is unlikely to contain ultimate truth. They might make good stories and some factual or wise information, but people who take these books too seriously.. meh..
I don't give a crap about religious symbols other than wishing that the concept of religion didn't even exist. In context though, the Christian god is a supremely "jealous" one. If he were real, he wouldn't be happy with people making a big deal about decorating shiny fertility symbols in their home and all the surrounding materialism and prayers/letters to Santa when they're meant to be celebrating his son's birth :p Some Christians of course don't go in for all that, but most clearly do.
Well, I personally switched from Ubuntu to Mint a few weeks after they made Unity the default. At that time it was claimed to be the second most popular distro which is why I went with it - because I thought it would still have decent support and updates. I don't care if it becomes "number 1" or anything like that, but it's certainly my favourite OS so far. They've put effort into making it feel polishedl the themes are classy, and I like little details like getting a fortune cookie every time you open a new terminal. The quotes from that Husse guy are very amusing, whoever he is.. seems like one of their developers.
*Googles* Shit. Husse died last year apparently. That makes me feel rather sad. He sounded like a lot of fun and obviously was committed to helping people out when he could..