Gee, it seems to me that the banks already give your account information to reporting agencies who will sell it to anyone with the money to buy it. So, despite my desire to keep the information secret, the governemt has already decided that we do not deserve this privacy.
The problem with government secrecy is that rather than concentrating their efforts on information that is vital to keep secret, they mark almost everything as secret with very little justification. The more pieces of information you claim are secret, the more likely that some of that information will leak through the cracks. Meanwhile the attempt to keep many secrets removes focus from the truly vital pieces which makes any given secret more likely to slip out from divided attention.
Couple this with the technology and recent government directives and we end up collecting even more public and private information, networking the information together for easy retrieval, and not focusing on the most important secrets which leads to a total mess.
I've never taken a job at a company that requires a second or third interview. If I have to make more than one trip to your campus I'll take another job before you get a chance to make an offer.
Likewise, if you have any testing that requires more than a trivial amount of time on my part, I'll pass on the "opportunity" to waste my time at your company for free. If you want me to spend my time you'd better be paying me for it.
Seriously, has anyone here ever written to their representatives and had it work properly? Usually, I send a clear letter stating my position and get a form letter saying something to the effect of "thank you for your support and we agree with you that's why" then they continue to list the very opposite of what my letter said. Not only does your representative not read the letter, their office flunkies miscount you letter as a letter of support rather than dissent.
It seems to me that the voter matters less and less every year. I guess once they get computerized voting machines in place, with their lack of recountable ballots, the voters will be removed from the loop entirely.
You may as well have written:
"God made the fundamental forces."
The point of science and religion isn't to say "something is", it's to explain why.
And herein lies the fundamental problem with religious believers. The statement "because God..." does not explain anything. It is the very antithesis of science. If the actions of God were an adequate explanation then there would be absolutely no technological advancement of society as a whole because everyone would know that everything is exactly as God wanted it to be.
Now, I realize that the above statement immediately upsets the sensitivities of many religious folks reading this and they want to attack me for saying it. This is generally where any discussion of religion gets derailed and the religious believers begin to attack the person who made the argument. Let's not do this and try to stay on topic.
In my experience, religious believers and scientific thinkers have a fundamentally different way of coming to conclusions. Religious believers are comforted by knowing what is right in their heart and no fact will ever overcome this. In fact, to suggest that a mere fact could make them doubt their religion is deeply offensive to them. Whereas, those following the scientific method try never to believe anything without the facts to support that belief. These people are ready to completely toss out any belief once verified facts prove the belief is wrong. These are mutually exclusive concepts and both sides have a hard time understanding the other. It's amazing how many of these types of arguments have degenerate into practitioners of the scientific method spouting facts at the religious while they try to frame the argument as a matter of "faith." These arguments never resolve, for obvious reasons.
Now, back to the point of this post which I've bolded above. I've bolded it for one reason, I don't want anyone replying to this post to get lost about what the main thesis is. We are debating whether God is an adequate explanation for the world around us. This and only this. Don't get sidetracked arguing any other statements in this post as they are tangental to the primary argument and will only lead us all astray. So, is God an adequate explanation of the following?
Why did my mother get sick and die? "It was God's will."
Scientists did not accept this as an adequate explanation and created the entirety of medical science. Of course, there is still much to discover and figure out and some of the models we're currently practicing will undoubtedly be proven wrong at some point but we have come a very long way throughout human history in the treatment of disease and other medical ailments. Today, even religious people are willing to go to a doctor for treatment because they don't consider "God wants you to be sick" an adequate explanation and know that medical techniques will save them. Most religious people think it's cultish to refuse treatment to the sick because you have faith that God will heal them. Though there was a time when the concept of germs and medical research was blasphemous, today we save countless lives because scientists sought better explanations.
Why didn't the crops grow this year? "It was God's will."
Throughout the ages countless animals and even people, were sacrificed to appease a vengeful God in an attempt to get the crops to provide food for His followers. Scientists however sought to find out exactly why plants grew and failed to grow. Agricultural researchers have made leaps and bounds in their understanding of food crops. It's a good thing, too, because with over six billion people on this planet, starvation would run rampant if not for their efforts.
Why do the stars in the heavens move? "It is God's will."
As it turns out, the stars don't move. Even the most devout religious believers know this now but the followers of Copernicus were condemned by the church for believing this apparent
Well, if the headline were referring to any particular White House photographer or their position I would expect it to say "White House photographer" not "Obama photographer". The primary reason for having "Obama photographer" in the headline rather than simply "photographer" is that the news story is only relevant because a well-known, iconic poster was made from the reference photo. If this were a lesser known photo with an equally unknown derivative work it would simply not be newsworthy. Having "Obama photographer" in the headline provides the most useful information about the story's newsworthiness. If this story wasn't about "the Obama photo" no one would bother to read it. The summary exists to clarify any information that couldn't be clearly condensed into the headline and the story exists to provide further information. Though on Slashdot YMMV.
Gee, my methods were different than most: I married a Ukrainian woman. Having a wife who knows several languages, each with different 8-bit encodings, using computers in your house on a daily basis makes you appreciate Unicode in a hurry.
Oh, I'm sorry, I thought your own examples would suffice once you recognized there was a difference between marketing and advertising. For example, Bill Gates convincing IBM to allow them to write the DOS for them is pure marketing whereby Bill Gates created his entire software empire by creating a market out of software sales that would have been developed in-house and given away by IBM if he had not done so. In the case of Netscape and Wordperfect, Microsoft made it easy for users of MS alternatives to read competitors' files while only creating content in their own standards which many here call "embrace, extend and extinguish." This is a pure marketing ploy to make your product the only one in the market which reads everything while making it difficult for your competitors to read your output. This makes using MS products the path of least resistance for those reading documents while forcing everyone else to also buy MS products to read the documents produced. This was not an engineering decision but a carefully considered marketing decision.
But these are just your examples. Microsoft has exhibited marketing excellence throughout its existence from choosing to offer discounts to computer manufacturers who do not sell systems with alternative OSes to MCSEs and Microsoft Solution providers who are provided with primarily marketing resources rather than technical resources. Apparently, much of what you think is just "business" is the particular subset of business known as marketing.
You're confusing marketing with advertising. There's much more to marketing than advertising and Microsoft is exceedingly good at the former despite being poor at the latter.
Let me see if I've got this straight. The government is concerned that people are being scammed out of their money by online poker playing so they take the player's money instead. How's this better? And, wouldn't the fact that the money they are seizing is actually payouts from the poker companies prove that at least people are actually winning at least $33 million?
There's nothing wrong with more discrete searches but I've found that the vast majority of users are not nearly as good at defining a discrete search as I am. The point is, if you search for "sex discrimination" with a location of India you get blocked because the term "sex" is blocked and the GGP stated that if a user used the term "sex" in their search they were only seeking sexually explicit results.
However, if 10,000 people each give you a $1 gift you won't owe taxes. This seems to be more analogous to peer-to-peer file-sharing. In fact, most gifts from the users are less than a full file since you would get only small pieces of files from each person.
The problem is that there s no such thing as the "best" standard. Different circumstances and applications favor one standard over another. What companies like Apple and Microsoft do when they set their standards is definitively choose one standard over another despite the fact that it will not perform in well in some circumstances. But open source developers want to have the best for any given set of circumstances and hence create multiple competing standards. This multiplicity of standards makes the development environment all the more fragmented and make a less unified whole for the user. This is a serious problem with open source development. Even individual applications often get bogged down with let's-add-another-button-itis until the user interface is a cacophony of controls and difficult for users to learn. In a company like Apple, for instance, great battles are fought over almost every pixel of the display. The interface people fight with the developers and in the end pare down the feature set and the number of options in the interface. Since Apple pays everyone's paycheck, there is an incentive for them to reach some fort of resolution and Apple can set the priorities within these disputes.
Sadly, I don't see this improving in the open source community. For there to be a consistent Linux desktop interface, the developers would need to bow to a body of interface specialists and comply with the interface standards set by them. Every developer who's written a difficult bit of code is proud of their accomplishment and would like a button to run it in the middle of the interface. If someone were to suggest that the button does not belong or, indeed, that the entire functionality (and its configuration) should never be seen by the user then the developer and others who think like him will fork the code and add yet another confusing option to the mix. This is compounded by the fact that most open source developers think of interfaces as "pretty printing" and believe that it is far beneath their talents and that those who concern themselves with the interface are inferior programmers. So it's unlikely that this situation will improve.
Slashdot Mirror
Gee, it seems to me that the banks already give your account information to reporting agencies who will sell it to anyone with the money to buy it. So, despite my desire to keep the information secret, the governemt has already decided that we do not deserve this privacy.
The problem with government secrecy is that rather than concentrating their efforts on information that is vital to keep secret, they mark almost everything as secret with very little justification. The more pieces of information you claim are secret, the more likely that some of that information will leak through the cracks. Meanwhile the attempt to keep many secrets removes focus from the truly vital pieces which makes any given secret more likely to slip out from divided attention.
Couple this with the technology and recent government directives and we end up collecting even more public and private information, networking the information together for easy retrieval, and not focusing on the most important secrets which leads to a total mess.
Down? I don't think any amount of money can make him living again.
And employers who will abuse their developers time.
I've never taken a job at a company that requires a second or third interview. If I have to make more than one trip to your campus I'll take another job before you get a chance to make an offer. Likewise, if you have any testing that requires more than a trivial amount of time on my part, I'll pass on the "opportunity" to waste my time at your company for free. If you want me to spend my time you'd better be paying me for it.
You seem to be built wrong, my python is in the front.
Well, America also copied all the existing case law from England when the United States was formed, too.
I forget, how many virgins does one get for an exploding iPod?
Seriously, has anyone here ever written to their representatives and had it work properly? Usually, I send a clear letter stating my position and get a form letter saying something to the effect of "thank you for your support and we agree with you that's why" then they continue to list the very opposite of what my letter said. Not only does your representative not read the letter, their office flunkies miscount you letter as a letter of support rather than dissent.
It seems to me that the voter matters less and less every year. I guess once they get computerized voting machines in place, with their lack of recountable ballots, the voters will be removed from the loop entirely.
You may as well have written: "God made the fundamental forces." The point of science and religion isn't to say "something is", it's to explain why.
And herein lies the fundamental problem with religious believers. The statement "because God ..." does not explain anything. It is the very antithesis of science. If the actions of God were an adequate explanation then there would be absolutely no technological advancement of society as a whole because everyone would know that everything is exactly as God wanted it to be.
Now, I realize that the above statement immediately upsets the sensitivities of many religious folks reading this and they want to attack me for saying it. This is generally where any discussion of religion gets derailed and the religious believers begin to attack the person who made the argument. Let's not do this and try to stay on topic.
In my experience, religious believers and scientific thinkers have a fundamentally different way of coming to conclusions. Religious believers are comforted by knowing what is right in their heart and no fact will ever overcome this. In fact, to suggest that a mere fact could make them doubt their religion is deeply offensive to them. Whereas, those following the scientific method try never to believe anything without the facts to support that belief. These people are ready to completely toss out any belief once verified facts prove the belief is wrong. These are mutually exclusive concepts and both sides have a hard time understanding the other. It's amazing how many of these types of arguments have degenerate into practitioners of the scientific method spouting facts at the religious while they try to frame the argument as a matter of "faith." These arguments never resolve, for obvious reasons.
Now, back to the point of this post which I've bolded above. I've bolded it for one reason, I don't want anyone replying to this post to get lost about what the main thesis is. We are debating whether God is an adequate explanation for the world around us. This and only this. Don't get sidetracked arguing any other statements in this post as they are tangental to the primary argument and will only lead us all astray. So, is God an adequate explanation of the following?
Why did my mother get sick and die? "It was God's will."
Scientists did not accept this as an adequate explanation and created the entirety of medical science. Of course, there is still much to discover and figure out and some of the models we're currently practicing will undoubtedly be proven wrong at some point but we have come a very long way throughout human history in the treatment of disease and other medical ailments. Today, even religious people are willing to go to a doctor for treatment because they don't consider "God wants you to be sick" an adequate explanation and know that medical techniques will save them. Most religious people think it's cultish to refuse treatment to the sick because you have faith that God will heal them. Though there was a time when the concept of germs and medical research was blasphemous, today we save countless lives because scientists sought better explanations.
Why didn't the crops grow this year? "It was God's will."
Throughout the ages countless animals and even people, were sacrificed to appease a vengeful God in an attempt to get the crops to provide food for His followers. Scientists however sought to find out exactly why plants grew and failed to grow. Agricultural researchers have made leaps and bounds in their understanding of food crops. It's a good thing, too, because with over six billion people on this planet, starvation would run rampant if not for their efforts.
Why do the stars in the heavens move? "It is God's will."
As it turns out, the stars don't move. Even the most devout religious believers know this now but the followers of Copernicus were condemned by the church for believing this apparent
Well, if the headline were referring to any particular White House photographer or their position I would expect it to say "White House photographer" not "Obama photographer". The primary reason for having "Obama photographer" in the headline rather than simply "photographer" is that the news story is only relevant because a well-known, iconic poster was made from the reference photo. If this were a lesser known photo with an equally unknown derivative work it would simply not be newsworthy. Having "Obama photographer" in the headline provides the most useful information about the story's newsworthiness. If this story wasn't about "the Obama photo" no one would bother to read it. The summary exists to clarify any information that couldn't be clearly condensed into the headline and the story exists to provide further information. Though on Slashdot YMMV.
Personally, I would prefer the headline "Obama Photographer Says AP and Fairey Are Both Wrong" for the same number of characters.
And that's clearly what makes Bill Gates evil. :)
Gee, my methods were different than most: I married a Ukrainian woman. Having a wife who knows several languages, each with different 8-bit encodings, using computers in your house on a daily basis makes you appreciate Unicode in a hurry.
Oh, I'm sorry, I thought your own examples would suffice once you recognized there was a difference between marketing and advertising. For example, Bill Gates convincing IBM to allow them to write the DOS for them is pure marketing whereby Bill Gates created his entire software empire by creating a market out of software sales that would have been developed in-house and given away by IBM if he had not done so. In the case of Netscape and Wordperfect, Microsoft made it easy for users of MS alternatives to read competitors' files while only creating content in their own standards which many here call "embrace, extend and extinguish." This is a pure marketing ploy to make your product the only one in the market which reads everything while making it difficult for your competitors to read your output. This makes using MS products the path of least resistance for those reading documents while forcing everyone else to also buy MS products to read the documents produced. This was not an engineering decision but a carefully considered marketing decision.
But these are just your examples. Microsoft has exhibited marketing excellence throughout its existence from choosing to offer discounts to computer manufacturers who do not sell systems with alternative OSes to MCSEs and Microsoft Solution providers who are provided with primarily marketing resources rather than technical resources. Apparently, much of what you think is just "business" is the particular subset of business known as marketing.
You're confusing marketing with advertising. There's much more to marketing than advertising and Microsoft is exceedingly good at the former despite being poor at the latter.
You can't tell what sites I've been to if it's Slashdotted!
Let me see if I've got this straight. The government is concerned that people are being scammed out of their money by online poker playing so they take the player's money instead. How's this better? And, wouldn't the fact that the money they are seizing is actually payouts from the poker companies prove that at least people are actually winning at least $33 million?
And, WOW, aren't those beads shiny! Let me have them.
There's nothing wrong with more discrete searches but I've found that the vast majority of users are not nearly as good at defining a discrete search as I am. The point is, if you search for "sex discrimination" with a location of India you get blocked because the term "sex" is blocked and the GGP stated that if a user used the term "sex" in their search they were only seeking sexually explicit results.
Sure, it's impossible that someone might be trying to read laws about sex discrimination or how to determine the sex of a snake or something.
I know. I hope they crack down on all these pirates so we can have a successful automobile industry again.
It seems to me that the RIAA is just doing a lot of "make busy" work to make the case as expensive as possible for her pro bono counsel.
However, if 10,000 people each give you a $1 gift you won't owe taxes. This seems to be more analogous to peer-to-peer file-sharing. In fact, most gifts from the users are less than a full file since you would get only small pieces of files from each person.
The problem is that there s no such thing as the "best" standard. Different circumstances and applications favor one standard over another. What companies like Apple and Microsoft do when they set their standards is definitively choose one standard over another despite the fact that it will not perform in well in some circumstances. But open source developers want to have the best for any given set of circumstances and hence create multiple competing standards. This multiplicity of standards makes the development environment all the more fragmented and make a less unified whole for the user. This is a serious problem with open source development. Even individual applications often get bogged down with let's-add-another-button-itis until the user interface is a cacophony of controls and difficult for users to learn. In a company like Apple, for instance, great battles are fought over almost every pixel of the display. The interface people fight with the developers and in the end pare down the feature set and the number of options in the interface. Since Apple pays everyone's paycheck, there is an incentive for them to reach some fort of resolution and Apple can set the priorities within these disputes.
Sadly, I don't see this improving in the open source community. For there to be a consistent Linux desktop interface, the developers would need to bow to a body of interface specialists and comply with the interface standards set by them. Every developer who's written a difficult bit of code is proud of their accomplishment and would like a button to run it in the middle of the interface. If someone were to suggest that the button does not belong or, indeed, that the entire functionality (and its configuration) should never be seen by the user then the developer and others who think like him will fork the code and add yet another confusing option to the mix. This is compounded by the fact that most open source developers think of interfaces as "pretty printing" and believe that it is far beneath their talents and that those who concern themselves with the interface are inferior programmers. So it's unlikely that this situation will improve.
Basically, they're launching a retail store on Monday and don't know what configurations and prices will be for offer.