Definitely with you on the Guild Wars choice; I think it's one of the thing that manages to satisfy most of the people most of the time.. There's the story mode (which is the bit that has me awaiting the next release; graphics be damned, it's fun going through those stories!), which is like reading a book.. Then there's the jump in with everything already there for the PvP aspect.. You can group for the social aspect, or use 'heroes' and henchmen to solo (which I do a lot of the time), or a mix thereof.. It's not 'perfect' by any means.. But it lets you mix and match for what you want at the time. Sociable or antisocial.. Follow the plot, or just jump in and hack and slash.. It doesn't force you to be anything, you just choose what you want from it at the time.
Excellent for writing a game. Hope you do well with it. However, putting loads of DRM on it (above and beyond what the XBox normally has) will cost you a lot of money, and explain to prospective customers that you don't think they're very trustworthy. You'd certainly lose a sale to me if you start playing around with my system (there are a lot of very good PC games that I look wistfully at and say to myself "If they hadn't put that crap DRM on there that plays silly buggers with my system, such that I don't trust my own PC anymore..". I don't buy them). Yes, everyone wants a perfect system. Wouldn't it be nice if servers never broke, cars never broke down, trains were never late, you didn't occasionally put your wallet down on a cafe table and walk off, realising the next day you've not got it, but never remember where you left it. The world is not a perfect system. We're only a few steps removed from being feral animals (and a few days starvation will remove those steps pretty quickly). By all means, dislike the people that manage to obtain your game for free. Perhaps (and statistically very probably) if the game is good, that exposure will lead to more sales from friends of friends; most people are basically honest, with the odd lapse into being a little 'naughty' now and then, but try to 'do the right thing'. Doing the right thing means paying for what you use. Now and then you find ones that take everything, but pay for nothing. They're the ones that burn through their mates by never paying for a round, or showing largesse. It's noted, and Karma catches up. In fact, it's one of the things build into humanity, that it's a status symbol to be able to pay for things and have the 'originals'. If you tie things down too tight, you'll find that you miss out on a lot of the exposure to the younger gamer (the most frequent copiers, as they can't afford things, but many of their mates have it, so they cut corners and burn a copy; no lost sale, but it's exposure).. And that first lost sale to the young gamer may lead to many more when they stop being so young and are able to afford to purchase.. Again, you're free to dislike them for doing that, and within your rights to prosecute them if you find them. However, you'll not end up looking like the 'good guy' if you do. However, tracking down and busting a ring that's commercially ripping your stuff and selling it as bootlegs, get them, and everyone will cheer for you; you'll be a hero. If you choose to be in a society and generally liked and supported, there are tradeoffs to make. If you don't care, and really think you don't need to care.. Then by all means, be as blunt, brutal and stern as you wish. Just remember that has it's own price, that's not (immediately anyway) measured in monetary terms.
This is basically where people who are prone to depression have markedly less influence by illusiory conditions. They view the world as it is, without the rose tinted spectacles of the non-depressed. This gives a general predisposition towards problem solving and accurate assessment of situations, allowing the excision of the personal investment in problems, treating the problem as a more logical construct, which overall leads to better problem solving (which has been researched since the late 70s and 80s).
However, depression being what it is, it doesn't make life around a depressed person any easier, and isn't that great for the depressed person themselves (I speak as one that's prone to that state of mind and have to be a little careful from time to time; it does make things in my favourite field of IT Business Continuity seem somewhat easier than it does for most though, with me jokingly being accused of having enough paranoia for the whole hospital). The trouble with "Depressive Realism" is that it's not entirely evident whether it's the realistic state of mind that brings about depression (having trouble with the normal chit chat that greases the social wheels, yet goes nowhere, is a real drag and will definitely get you down), or whether it's the depressive state of mind that leaves you more objective.
Actually, it does. A web site is a collection of HTML markup, images or other digital media referenced by a URL or ip/port and path mapping. Anything you publish via HTTP is using the 'web' service. Anything with a resource address is a 'site'. What you happen to put on that site is up to you, but it is, by definition, a web site.
Well, because science has established a very strong relationship between the rise in CO2 levels (and methane, and a variety of other 'greenhouse gasses), and a rise in the general temperature of the planet. This is happening at a very accelerated rate, compared to swings that have happened before in ice records and various other sources that show a swing in temperature.
The knock on effect of this warming is that Australia is facing the worst droughts in its history, coral reefs are dying (as they can only survive in a narrow temperature band), and a host of other untowards effects are happening.
Now, we have a couple of choices really. When this is flagged up (even with a proviso "we can't 100% prove this, but we've got a strong correlation, which may not be causation, but it's a good candidate") we can either:
1) Say "You can't prove it 100%. This is therefore bunk, and I'm not doing it.". If you guess right, you save a lot of money, and the world carries on as normal. If you guess wrong, the global ecosystem will be screwed up, affecting the food chain and who knows what else. Rainfall patterns will change (some places becoming swamps, others becoming deserts). Sea levels will rise (putting some coastal cities and towns underwater).
OR
2) You can say "Sounds bad. Lets take reasonable action and put some money into making sure we're not screwing around with this unnecessarily. Like lead piping, what we don't know CAN harm us. Lets shell out what we can to circumvent as much of the problem as possible, without going completely insanely over the top". If you guess right, you spend a lot of money (though create quite a few jobs in the process), the world carries on pretty well avoiding as much of the problems as possible with our technology, while creating quite a few new technologies along the way. If you guess wrong, well, you've just wasted money (though understand a lot more about the ecological systems of the world, which is a scientific boon).
No, people need to get some etiquette. It's there to try and make sure that in general, you don't accidentally upset someone you didn't know was actually a psychotic lunatic and would take your head off for no reason. Suggesting that people "need to get a thick skin" because being rude and obnoxious is fast becoming the norm isn't a solution (hey, there's a hole in the roof. Lets invest in better buckets). Now if people actually grew a backbone and realised that there's no earthly reason to hide behind semi anonymity and yell insults without fear of reprisal, then the world would actually become a more pleasant, easier place to live in. Instead, you seem to be proposing that you can be as obnoxious as you want, and it's everyone else's problem to deal with.
So, correct in that not everyone's going to like you, or be nice to you.. But there sure should be a very good reason to be nasty to someone (rather than "just because I felt like it", which is a fast race to the dregs of the barrel).
Make absolutely sure you count the time it'll take guaranteed to have the network admin professional on site from the second you place the call, otherwise you end up with:
"Hello, network support? Yes, our network's down and doesn't work. What do you mean, they'll connect up remotely? The NETWORK is down. What do you mean you'll send a technician who fixes PCs? The whole network is dead. You don't have a roaming Network Admin spare? Next week?".
When your network dies, everyone stops any work based on servers, or relying on the internet.. Or anything else that needs communication. For all that time, you're still paying wages, and not producing what your company needs, so you sum up the money lost in salary over the time, and get an estimate of the loss of productivity in your company (as that time should be at a profit to the company). If you end up with a figure that you don't like, then you can't afford to outsource your net admin. This applies to servers too when their remote services go awry (nothing beats console login for reliability of link). When you have someone on site, they jump the second something goes wrong, and start fixing. Knowing the systems well, they have a good chance of fixing it quickly. From an outsource, you usually have "4 hour response", which is essentially "We'll send round a junior technician to see if they can diagnose, then we'll escalate that to the people who know a little more, and hope. Otherwise it'll be a few days of escalation before we pull out the big guns to take a look".
Check the figures. It's not the corners you can cut (unless the company is dead in the water without it), it's what you can't afford not to have. If you run a network, I always advise having a local network admin, not necessarily for all the reasons you can think of, but for the ones you can't if you're not an expert.
No. They simply put you on the various databases that 'accidentally' label you as a child abuser or some such, prevent you from doing any work (CRB, and various 'trust' database entries) and hound you 'till you commit suicide. They can't tell anyone to kill you (well, unless it's on national security grounds, and then quietly), but they can make the choice to stay alive a very difficult one. Yes, there have been cases.
Cost. I operate in several fields in IT as a technical manager. Getting a cert in each of those will cost about £2k per cert. This will be prime for about 2-3 years before the next one is out. Say, getting cert in 4 main strands (£8-10k) will cost approximately £2.5k-3k per year. This strategy works if you have no experience in the first place, or no sound grounding in the theory as a "quick entry" into the workplace, in areas that don't have the skillsets in place to filter you out at interview. If you've got the demonstrable experience, and can back it up with tech knowledge, organisational skills, and general personality goodness, you blow people away at interview. Far more so than spending the few grand on certifications on specific versions of things. They can be useful as a 'training exercise', but as validators of a person's ability? Not a chance. I'm interviewing for developers at the moment, and out of about 20 I've seen so far, only one has come close. And he had no certification. Several did, and couldn't code their way out of a paper bag (as proved on both test and in interview on theory).
From the phrasing of that post, I'll have a stab and say you're quite left wing, and happily buy into the Labour spin.
First off, there are sites saying how bad the news is on any given source (including things like the BBC and so on). This does not mean the site that decries the news sources is any more reliable themselves.
Secondly, throwing in the word "racist" and expecting any argument to be over just doesn't work so much these days. Quite a few studies have shown that everybody discriminates (on just about every factor you can think of). Including the papers you read (which presumably you think are ok, because they say what you want to hear, and you don't feel like hunting down a site which says how bad the news quality is in it).
Finally, and most importantly, show me the disputation that proves this isn't actually happening. You'll be hard pressed, because it is actually in place at the moment, merely being expanded upon.
Classic spin tactics on your part. Really must applaud. However, wrong.
Oddly, however, I've known families like the ones being watched. They're the kind that'll send their kids round to burn out your car because you told their dog off for savaging your baby. Playing the club music at full volume until 4am every night and generally making the neighbourhood a really bad place to be in (because, of course, it's a free country and they can do anything they want any time they want, nobody's allowed to tell them any different, otherwise they don't have any 'respeck', and thus deserve a knife in the gut). I'm stuck in the conundrum of absolutely hating surveillance with a vengeance, and thinking what the hell is anybody meant to do with people who act like that? You just know that as soon as any measure is put in place, it'll widen in scope to creep up to the point it encompasses everyone, and then what do you do?
Much as my 'knee jerk' reaction is to say that this is awful, being surveilance, it's one that leaves me feeling edgy, but it's worth looking at. And keeping an eye on very closely to watch its creep.
Like fixing anything badly broken in a system, sometimes you have to use extraordinary measure to fix a dire problem. Monsters we are, lest monsters we become.
The big point is that documentation doesn't say who you you are.. It says who you purport to be. For the law abiding majority, this will be the same. If, however, you're into serious criminal activity and want to have a nice document that'll say "this is not the person you're looking for", what better than an ID card that they trust implicitly (though wrongly so).
ID cards are not a security measure that means anything.
Really, I think there's a lot that can be done in the Aliens universe. Just because there are Aliens around, there's nothing to stop lengthy stories of intrigue (as to why the corporation is trying to gather aliens, splinter groups trying to stop it etc). Half life did a pretty good job of putting a reasonable story on 'Humans meet aliens. Aliens kill humans.'.
You're under 30, and never really lived under a conservative government.. The current one loves to spin, lie, and rely on knee jerk fear to shape the populace.. All the restrictions on liberty you mention are proposed by the current government and actually opposed by the one you're afraid of? What's that logic? There is a government that will likely give back some freedom, but you don't want them because they're tre bogeyman because labour tell you so?
Laudable idea, except what you're essentially doing is creating a license for something that by law should be unencumbered. If that's required, the public domain is indeed dead..
The big problem is that's exactly the repository the CopyFraud groups use to obtain the Public Domain material to slap their Copyright on, and "own" the material through Google etc. until someone puts up a legal suit to remove it as copyright material. There's no incentive NOT to falsely claim copyright of public domain material. That's the issue from the articles.
Simple. The one thing that lets society expand, and the thing that most wars have been fought over. Resources. If you're on a big ball of random things, you can mine said ball for what you need to build more things. If you're on a space station, you're forever dependent on recycling, and having extra resources brought up by some mechanism. In other words, you're still tethered to a gravity well in some form or another. The optimum strategy is to colonise a gravity well, set up industry, and perhaps have later 'safe' quarters in orbit as staging posts, allowing you to have bulk loads of volatiles lifted at intervals, and anything else that's needed from the planetary base, giving you a resupply base for any craft that needs refuel/resupply. Everything is about resources.
Essentially, what that argument boils down to is that we're all prejudiced. Everyone. Which comes back to my original argument that the current cries will damp down as it's proven that we all suffer the same flaw.
If we know we all suffer the same flaw, do we beat each other up about it and each dig to get what we can from it (or use it to make ourselves seem superior), or do we get on with life and make the most of ourselves?
All comes back to Etiquette.
If we keep chasing what biases we exhibit in any decision (and that's the way the psyche arguments you put forth head), then you end up with the frame problem, which is exactly the same one that killed symbollic AI.
In working out what you need to consider to make a decision (i.e. what your true biases are), you spend so long evaluating things that you don't actually make the decision.
The usage of the phrase 'Racism', I do think is bound for the scrapheap at some point. There may always be bias built into humanity. But that applies to all. It's the great leveller. In the end, I think Etiquette will need to win out, otherwise there's likely to be a huge backlash against the general concept, which will swing back to the bad old days before coming to more neutral ground (and etiquette kicks in again, and the whole thing becomes a 'non issue').
The joy of psychological research is it tells us we're all fundamentally broken. Yes, we know that. What your research doesn't tell anybody is what to actually do about it. Nobody does. Apart from yell, and do the political equivalent of stoning a particular demographic. And trust me, that is no solution. If anything, it'll only make matters worse, as I believe I mentioned in my original post.
I thoroughly enjoy a good debate, and appreciate that you took the time to make a well researched, and thorough reply, but I believe you made the mistake of not answering the question (or maybe you did, and are just employing the time honoured tactic of not answering the real question, but one that sounds like it but has the opportunity to elicit a greater subjective response, thus derailing the thrust of the original point). I mentioned that the word will fall out of fashion not that bias will be extinguished. Bias will probably always be there, but I think in a generation, people will be more sensible about it. Etiquette is designed to allow proper functioning of a system where bias and tension exists. Having accusations thrown around ends up in a brawl, especially when all sides are guilty. So, the choices are, accept it, live with it, and make the most of yourself (hey, the major power on this planet is actually run by a guy from an ethnic minority; what does that say about the balance of the power structure at the moment?). Or, you can throw rhetoric around, villify people who you think you can get one over by accusing (and to those that bring up history, I'd say read all the story, not the chosen sound bites), and generally stir things up.
Personally, I'm mainly an unashamed elitist. If you're good, prove it. Go out and do. If someone's good, I'll hire 'em. If they're not.. Then I won't. Simple. I accept my flaws, and make the best of myself in their limitations. I expect others to do the same.
Anyhow, this is getting a little off the original topic; I originally got on this track as I was incensed that anytime a hard scientific fact is stated that has any bearing on genetic differentiation between branches of humanity, some bright spark always yells that it's bigoted. It's not. It's a fact. And this one was actually quite interesting from a purely scientific perspective, and rather reassuring in the 'diversity breeds resilience' way.
Throwing money at a problem with sod all in the way of technical review doesn't help. That's exactly what the government in the UK did with their NPfIT project (National Project for Information Technology), which is the system whereby all medical records are supposed to be digital and available nationally.
The specifications were a joke, with each of the "commercial partners" building it differently, with different understandings of the data to the extent that I have the strong suspicion that they wouldn't actually be fully compatible with each other.
Also, the decision on the system was taken by a quick look at it in ONE hospital, where it worked perfectly, and then it was decided that would be the core for everything, without working out if it would really scale properly. Then there was the whole set of "revisions" where the initial would mean you couldn't do things you historically could, and you'd be stuck in a backwater for a decade.
Whole rafts of products were promised which still aren't available and working for it, making it pretty rubbish for day to day usage (in many cases, extra people have had to be hired to perform the 'work arounds' to cope with the increased workload of having to follow a seriously strict method of entering data, such that followup appointments take about 15 mins to book, where they used to take a few seconds with a receptionist).
The chap who headed the whole thing up in the early days was one Richard Granger, whose large claim to fame was that he initially failed his degree, and it took his mother writing to Princess Anne to lean on Bristol University to let him do a retake of the exam (which normally isn't allowed).
The core Cerner product at the heart of it is actually pretty good as a one off. But scaling up isn't what it was designed to do. As every slashdot story needs a crap analogy, I have one for it that I mention to people to describe my take on it:
To deliver newspapers to the door, you'll find it hard to get better than a kid on a bike doing a paper round. The whole NPfIT project makes the assumption that because that's a good mechanism for delivery, it's got rid of the fleets of heavy trucks, and does the entire delivery from the printing works by hiring tens of thousands of kids on bikes instead.
The future of 'racism' is that word will fall out of fashion and pretty much cease to exist in a generation or so. It's hideously divisive in a modern context. At the start, where there was a serious belief in the western world that being non-caucasian meant you were sub-human, then the laws necessary to stop that were a boon. Now, anything gets shoved under the context of 'racism' that's meant to cause a knee jerk reaction. Say something about someone who was born in Ireland? Racist (their parents may have come from just down the road from you, but hey, 'racist')! Nobody from an 'ethnic group' turns up for interviews for jobs at your company for particular roles? Hey, you're not hiring enough of them, so you're racist. The worst thing about the modern "positive discrimination" isn't that it's actually the most prevalent form of racism at the moment, it's that it actually intimates that someone from an ethnic background isn't capable of performing well enough to compete against anyone else, and "allowances" have to be made for them. Filtering back into schools, there's a whole sector of kids that know they'll get jobs allocated to them under this, so don't consider it worth pushing themselves as hard to compete (some of my family work in the school system, and this drives them nuts!).
Face it, people are people, and some people don't like others for a variety of reasons. Mannerisms, attitude, so on, so forth. The way this used to be dealt with was a little thing called Etiquette, which for some reason seems to be considered horribly old fashioned and outdated these days. The basic principle was that you knew other people were flawed, in the same way you knew yourself to be flawed. Yet everyone needed to keep on going without killing each other. So you looked for the best in people, and given the chance chose to accept something as complimentary rather than derogatory (or at least did so at face), and you exchanged pleasantries, no matter how the barb ran underneath that.
Now, taking offense is an industry. If you can find a way to take offense to something someone says, there's a quick bit of cash to be had through a Lawyer somewhere who specialises in that. Taking offense on behalf of someone else (who frequently isn't offended at all anyway) is the way to obtain a false sense of self worth. Sure, it makes you feel good (after all, you're looking after "the children"/"some group that can't look after themselves"/"some other group that you're better, and more able than"). It puts you subjectively above them, even if that's not what you think you're doing.
When science comes up with these figures, it is NOT a method of saying "hey look, food for bigots". It is stating an observable fact. Anything beyond the figures is conjecture. There are three main branches of humanity that have been successful in evolutionary terms. That's possible failsafes in case there's a flaw in one or more branches of the genetic structure that some pathogen can take advantage of. It's a good thing.
If you instantly think of 'racism' over released figures, I think you're part of a longer, more insidious issue than ever these figures could be.
I took up Scuba and Rock Climbing again (activities I enjoyed back in my Uni days, may years past).. There's a whole bunch of people you meet, and then the social activities kick in.. Makes things much easier. Plus, there's enough gadgetry to keep the technical side of you occupied..
I always thought as society more like an elastic band than a pendulum (as it the backlash is faster and more fierce the more you stretch it past the 'neutral' point). Still, it's not usually the equilibrium that's reached, certainly in today's polarised political times. When something gives and 'snaps back', like your pendulum, there's usually a good degree of overshoot in the other direction as people have been pushed past their tolerance for being entirely rational about a subject, and they push en masse for a sweeping change to salve their ire.
Culturally British these days is saying there's no such thing as British Culture; it's all multicultural, and if there's anything displayed to state a liking of classical British Culture then the meta-game is to see how quickly you can take offense and claim damages against someone with deep pockets (yes I was one of the people who got yelled at for having an English flag for St. George's day a few years ago because it was 'insensitive' to other cultures. They were, however, strangely quiet when I asked how they felt about the mass of cars going by with Jamaican flags; that never bothered me, but one rule for all please).
As for the ruling by force, that goes back to the dawn of history and before. Every culture has it on some scale (in Tribal setups, you'll have one tribe raiding the next). And if food is in the area it will be hunted to the limits required; palaentology has records of species going extinct well before humanity was able to hunt them to extinction. We're learning that one, and starting tentative steps to try not to, but it's not a British cultural thing. Collapsing stable democracies? Pfft.. All the wars involving Greece had that taken care of long ago. What about destabilising stable other governments? Again, not a classic Brit thing. Been going on for along, long time.
There's really a whole glut of culture in the UK, like Arthurian legends, and stories up through WW2. After that, it all goes a bit quiet.
There are also quite a few whistleblower laws, and methods of keeping sources anonymous. There's a notable case of a local newspaper (the Bristol Evening Post) that used to have a column where the author was known only as "Barry Beelzebub", where he published a lot of hard talking, and definitely not politically correct topics. His name was very much kept away from public knowledge, yet his column was spectacularly popular. There are many cases where journalists use pseudonyms, and keep their true identity well away from general knowledge. One of these days, I hope journalists become celebreties, so we can all poke and probe into their personal lives, and haul them over the coals too.. I've been on the business end of them a few times in various roles I've had. After the first time, I learned just how nasty they can be (a journalist I had an interview managed to collapse a fair portion of a charity event by misquoting, and sensationalising various small parts of the whole event). The journalist's credo is to publish sensational in headlines, and later apologise in the small print. These days, I think most of them actually get in the way of discovering the real news.
Well, that sure beats the UK Prime Minister's approach, which is to tell the world several months in advance that he's going to sell of a fair portion of the UK gold reserves.. Then when he's successfully crashed the market price, sells at a ridiculously low price.. Now everybody wants it, so adding to the UK reserves will cost a hefty sum!
Slashdot Mirror
Definitely with you on the Guild Wars choice; I think it's one of the thing that manages to satisfy most of the people most of the time.. There's the story mode (which is the bit that has me awaiting the next release; graphics be damned, it's fun going through those stories!), which is like reading a book.. Then there's the jump in with everything already there for the PvP aspect.. You can group for the social aspect, or use 'heroes' and henchmen to solo (which I do a lot of the time), or a mix thereof..
It's not 'perfect' by any means.. But it lets you mix and match for what you want at the time. Sociable or antisocial.. Follow the plot, or just jump in and hack and slash.. It doesn't force you to be anything, you just choose what you want from it at the time.
Excellent for writing a game. Hope you do well with it.
However, putting loads of DRM on it (above and beyond what the XBox normally has) will cost you a lot of money, and explain to prospective customers that you don't think they're very trustworthy.
You'd certainly lose a sale to me if you start playing around with my system (there are a lot of very good PC games that I look wistfully at and say to myself "If they hadn't put that crap DRM on there that plays silly buggers with my system, such that I don't trust my own PC anymore..". I don't buy them).
Yes, everyone wants a perfect system. Wouldn't it be nice if servers never broke, cars never broke down, trains were never late, you didn't occasionally put your wallet down on a cafe table and walk off, realising the next day you've not got it, but never remember where you left it.
The world is not a perfect system. We're only a few steps removed from being feral animals (and a few days starvation will remove those steps pretty quickly).
By all means, dislike the people that manage to obtain your game for free. Perhaps (and statistically very probably) if the game is good, that exposure will lead to more sales from friends of friends; most people are basically honest, with the odd lapse into being a little 'naughty' now and then, but try to 'do the right thing'.
Doing the right thing means paying for what you use. Now and then you find ones that take everything, but pay for nothing. They're the ones that burn through their mates by never paying for a round, or showing largesse. It's noted, and Karma catches up. In fact, it's one of the things build into humanity, that it's a status symbol to be able to pay for things and have the 'originals'.
If you tie things down too tight, you'll find that you miss out on a lot of the exposure to the younger gamer (the most frequent copiers, as they can't afford things, but many of their mates have it, so they cut corners and burn a copy; no lost sale, but it's exposure).. And that first lost sale to the young gamer may lead to many more when they stop being so young and are able to afford to purchase..
Again, you're free to dislike them for doing that, and within your rights to prosecute them if you find them. However, you'll not end up looking like the 'good guy' if you do. However, tracking down and busting a ring that's commercially ripping your stuff and selling it as bootlegs, get them, and everyone will cheer for you; you'll be a hero.
If you choose to be in a society and generally liked and supported, there are tradeoffs to make. If you don't care, and really think you don't need to care.. Then by all means, be as blunt, brutal and stern as you wish. Just remember that has it's own price, that's not (immediately anyway) measured in monetary terms.
Weird you got rated as 'Funny'.. That's more of less a distillation of a goodly many academic texts on theology.
This is basically where people who are prone to depression have markedly less influence by illusiory conditions. They view the world as it is, without the rose tinted spectacles of the non-depressed.
This gives a general predisposition towards problem solving and accurate assessment of situations, allowing the excision of the personal investment in problems, treating the problem as a more logical construct, which overall leads to better problem solving (which has been researched since the late 70s and 80s).
However, depression being what it is, it doesn't make life around a depressed person any easier, and isn't that great for the depressed person themselves (I speak as one that's prone to that state of mind and have to be a little careful from time to time; it does make things in my favourite field of IT Business Continuity seem somewhat easier than it does for most though, with me jokingly being accused of having enough paranoia for the whole hospital).
The trouble with "Depressive Realism" is that it's not entirely evident whether it's the realistic state of mind that brings about depression (having trouble with the normal chit chat that greases the social wheels, yet goes nowhere, is a real drag and will definitely get you down), or whether it's the depressive state of mind that leaves you more objective.
Actually, it does.
A web site is a collection of HTML markup, images or other digital media referenced by a URL or ip/port and path mapping.
Anything you publish via HTTP is using the 'web' service. Anything with a resource address is a 'site'.
What you happen to put on that site is up to you, but it is, by definition, a web site.
Well, because science has established a very strong relationship between the rise in CO2 levels (and methane, and a variety of other 'greenhouse gasses), and a rise in the general temperature of the planet. This is happening at a very accelerated rate, compared to swings that have happened before in ice records and various other sources that show a swing in temperature.
The knock on effect of this warming is that Australia is facing the worst droughts in its history, coral reefs are dying (as they can only survive in a narrow temperature band), and a host of other untowards effects are happening.
Now, we have a couple of choices really. When this is flagged up (even with a proviso "we can't 100% prove this, but we've got a strong correlation, which may not be causation, but it's a good candidate") we can either:
1) Say "You can't prove it 100%. This is therefore bunk, and I'm not doing it.". If you guess right, you save a lot of money, and the world carries on as normal. If you guess wrong, the global ecosystem will be screwed up, affecting the food chain and who knows what else. Rainfall patterns will change (some places becoming swamps, others becoming deserts). Sea levels will rise (putting some coastal cities and towns underwater).
OR
2) You can say "Sounds bad. Lets take reasonable action and put some money into making sure we're not screwing around with this unnecessarily. Like lead piping, what we don't know CAN harm us. Lets shell out what we can to circumvent as much of the problem as possible, without going completely insanely over the top".
If you guess right, you spend a lot of money (though create quite a few jobs in the process), the world carries on pretty well avoiding as much of the problems as possible with our technology, while creating quite a few new technologies along the way. If you guess wrong, well, you've just wasted money (though understand a lot more about the ecological systems of the world, which is a scientific boon).
Which, to you, is the sane bet to take?
No, people need to get some etiquette. It's there to try and make sure that in general, you don't accidentally upset someone you didn't know was actually a psychotic lunatic and would take your head off for no reason.
Suggesting that people "need to get a thick skin" because being rude and obnoxious is fast becoming the norm isn't a solution (hey, there's a hole in the roof. Lets invest in better buckets).
Now if people actually grew a backbone and realised that there's no earthly reason to hide behind semi anonymity and yell insults without fear of reprisal, then the world would actually become a more pleasant, easier place to live in.
Instead, you seem to be proposing that you can be as obnoxious as you want, and it's everyone else's problem to deal with.
So, correct in that not everyone's going to like you, or be nice to you.. But there sure should be a very good reason to be nasty to someone (rather than "just because I felt like it", which is a fast race to the dregs of the barrel).
Make absolutely sure you count the time it'll take guaranteed to have the network admin professional on site from the second you place the call, otherwise you end up with:
"Hello, network support? Yes, our network's down and doesn't work. What do you mean, they'll connect up remotely? The NETWORK is down. What do you mean you'll send a technician who fixes PCs? The whole network is dead. You don't have a roaming Network Admin spare? Next week?".
When your network dies, everyone stops any work based on servers, or relying on the internet.. Or anything else that needs communication. For all that time, you're still paying wages, and not producing what your company needs, so you sum up the money lost in salary over the time, and get an estimate of the loss of productivity in your company (as that time should be at a profit to the company). If you end up with a figure that you don't like, then you can't afford to outsource your net admin. This applies to servers too when their remote services go awry (nothing beats console login for reliability of link).
When you have someone on site, they jump the second something goes wrong, and start fixing. Knowing the systems well, they have a good chance of fixing it quickly. From an outsource, you usually have "4 hour response", which is essentially "We'll send round a junior technician to see if they can diagnose, then we'll escalate that to the people who know a little more, and hope. Otherwise it'll be a few days of escalation before we pull out the big guns to take a look".
Check the figures. It's not the corners you can cut (unless the company is dead in the water without it), it's what you can't afford not to have. If you run a network, I always advise having a local network admin, not necessarily for all the reasons you can think of, but for the ones you can't if you're not an expert.
No. They simply put you on the various databases that 'accidentally' label you as a child abuser or some such, prevent you from doing any work (CRB, and various 'trust' database entries) and hound you 'till you commit suicide. They can't tell anyone to kill you (well, unless it's on national security grounds, and then quietly), but they can make the choice to stay alive a very difficult one.
Yes, there have been cases.
Cost. I operate in several fields in IT as a technical manager. Getting a cert in each of those will cost about £2k per cert. This will be prime for about 2-3 years before the next one is out.
Say, getting cert in 4 main strands (£8-10k) will cost approximately £2.5k-3k per year.
This strategy works if you have no experience in the first place, or no sound grounding in the theory as a "quick entry" into the workplace, in areas that don't have the skillsets in place to filter you out at interview.
If you've got the demonstrable experience, and can back it up with tech knowledge, organisational skills, and general personality goodness, you blow people away at interview. Far more so than spending the few grand on certifications on specific versions of things.
They can be useful as a 'training exercise', but as validators of a person's ability? Not a chance.
I'm interviewing for developers at the moment, and out of about 20 I've seen so far, only one has come close. And he had no certification. Several did, and couldn't code their way out of a paper bag (as proved on both test and in interview on theory).
From the phrasing of that post, I'll have a stab and say you're quite left wing, and happily buy into the Labour spin.
First off, there are sites saying how bad the news is on any given source (including things like the BBC and so on). This does not mean the site that decries the news sources is any more reliable themselves.
Secondly, throwing in the word "racist" and expecting any argument to be over just doesn't work so much these days. Quite a few studies have shown that everybody discriminates (on just about every factor you can think of). Including the papers you read (which presumably you think are ok, because they say what you want to hear, and you don't feel like hunting down a site which says how bad the news quality is in it).
Finally, and most importantly, show me the disputation that proves this isn't actually happening. You'll be hard pressed, because it is actually in place at the moment, merely being expanded upon.
Classic spin tactics on your part. Really must applaud. However, wrong.
Oddly, however, I've known families like the ones being watched. They're the kind that'll send their kids round to burn out your car because you told their dog off for savaging your baby. Playing the club music at full volume until 4am every night and generally making the neighbourhood a really bad place to be in (because, of course, it's a free country and they can do anything they want any time they want, nobody's allowed to tell them any different, otherwise they don't have any 'respeck', and thus deserve a knife in the gut).
I'm stuck in the conundrum of absolutely hating surveillance with a vengeance, and thinking what the hell is anybody meant to do with people who act like that?
You just know that as soon as any measure is put in place, it'll widen in scope to creep up to the point it encompasses everyone, and then what do you do?
Much as my 'knee jerk' reaction is to say that this is awful, being surveilance, it's one that leaves me feeling edgy, but it's worth looking at. And keeping an eye on very closely to watch its creep.
Like fixing anything badly broken in a system, sometimes you have to use extraordinary measure to fix a dire problem. Monsters we are, lest monsters we become.
The big point is that documentation doesn't say who you you are.. It says who you purport to be. For the law abiding majority, this will be the same. If, however, you're into serious criminal activity and want to have a nice document that'll say "this is not the person you're looking for", what better than an ID card that they trust implicitly (though wrongly so).
ID cards are not a security measure that means anything.
Really, I think there's a lot that can be done in the Aliens universe. Just because there are Aliens around, there's nothing to stop lengthy stories of intrigue (as to why the corporation is trying to gather aliens, splinter groups trying to stop it etc). Half life did a pretty good job of putting a reasonable story on 'Humans meet aliens. Aliens kill humans.'.
You're under 30, and never really lived under a conservative government.. The current one loves to spin, lie, and rely on knee jerk fear to shape the populace.. All the restrictions on liberty you mention are proposed by the current government and actually opposed by the one you're afraid of? What's that logic? There is a government that will likely give back some freedom, but you don't want them because they're tre bogeyman because labour tell you so?
Laudable idea, except what you're essentially doing is creating a license for something that by law should be unencumbered. If that's required, the public domain is indeed dead..
The big problem is that's exactly the repository the CopyFraud groups use to obtain the Public Domain material to slap their Copyright on, and "own" the material through Google etc. until someone puts up a legal suit to remove it as copyright material. There's no incentive NOT to falsely claim copyright of public domain material. That's the issue from the articles.
Simple. The one thing that lets society expand, and the thing that most wars have been fought over. Resources.
If you're on a big ball of random things, you can mine said ball for what you need to build more things.
If you're on a space station, you're forever dependent on recycling, and having extra resources brought up by some mechanism. In other words, you're still tethered to a gravity well in some form or another.
The optimum strategy is to colonise a gravity well, set up industry, and perhaps have later 'safe' quarters in orbit as staging posts, allowing you to have bulk loads of volatiles lifted at intervals, and anything else that's needed from the planetary base, giving you a resupply base for any craft that needs refuel/resupply.
Everything is about resources.
Essentially, what that argument boils down to is that we're all prejudiced. Everyone. Which comes back to my original argument that the current cries will damp down as it's proven that we all suffer the same flaw. If we know we all suffer the same flaw, do we beat each other up about it and each dig to get what we can from it (or use it to make ourselves seem superior), or do we get on with life and make the most of ourselves? All comes back to Etiquette.
If we keep chasing what biases we exhibit in any decision (and that's the way the psyche arguments you put forth head), then you end up with the frame problem, which is exactly the same one that killed symbollic AI. In working out what you need to consider to make a decision (i.e. what your true biases are), you spend so long evaluating things that you don't actually make the decision.
The usage of the phrase 'Racism', I do think is bound for the scrapheap at some point. There may always be bias built into humanity. But that applies to all. It's the great leveller. In the end, I think Etiquette will need to win out, otherwise there's likely to be a huge backlash against the general concept, which will swing back to the bad old days before coming to more neutral ground (and etiquette kicks in again, and the whole thing becomes a 'non issue').
The joy of psychological research is it tells us we're all fundamentally broken. Yes, we know that. What your research doesn't tell anybody is what to actually do about it. Nobody does. Apart from yell, and do the political equivalent of stoning a particular demographic. And trust me, that is no solution. If anything, it'll only make matters worse, as I believe I mentioned in my original post.
I thoroughly enjoy a good debate, and appreciate that you took the time to make a well researched, and thorough reply, but I believe you made the mistake of not answering the question (or maybe you did, and are just employing the time honoured tactic of not answering the real question, but one that sounds like it but has the opportunity to elicit a greater subjective response, thus derailing the thrust of the original point). I mentioned that the word will fall out of fashion not that bias will be extinguished. Bias will probably always be there, but I think in a generation, people will be more sensible about it. Etiquette is designed to allow proper functioning of a system where bias and tension exists. Having accusations thrown around ends up in a brawl, especially when all sides are guilty. So, the choices are, accept it, live with it, and make the most of yourself (hey, the major power on this planet is actually run by a guy from an ethnic minority; what does that say about the balance of the power structure at the moment?). Or, you can throw rhetoric around, villify people who you think you can get one over by accusing (and to those that bring up history, I'd say read all the story, not the chosen sound bites), and generally stir things up.
Personally, I'm mainly an unashamed elitist. If you're good, prove it. Go out and do. If someone's good, I'll hire 'em. If they're not.. Then I won't. Simple. I accept my flaws, and make the best of myself in their limitations. I expect others to do the same.
Anyhow, this is getting a little off the original topic; I originally got on this track as I was incensed that anytime a hard scientific fact is stated that has any bearing on genetic differentiation between branches of humanity, some bright spark always yells that it's bigoted. It's not. It's a fact. And this one was actually quite interesting from a purely scientific perspective, and rather reassuring in the 'diversity breeds resilience' way.
Throwing money at a problem with sod all in the way of technical review doesn't help. That's exactly what the government in the UK did with their NPfIT project (National Project for Information Technology), which is the system whereby all medical records are supposed to be digital and available nationally.
The specifications were a joke, with each of the "commercial partners" building it differently, with different understandings of the data to the extent that I have the strong suspicion that they wouldn't actually be fully compatible with each other.
Also, the decision on the system was taken by a quick look at it in ONE hospital, where it worked perfectly, and then it was decided that would be the core for everything, without working out if it would really scale properly. Then there was the whole set of "revisions" where the initial would mean you couldn't do things you historically could, and you'd be stuck in a backwater for a decade.
Whole rafts of products were promised which still aren't available and working for it, making it pretty rubbish for day to day usage (in many cases, extra people have had to be hired to perform the 'work arounds' to cope with the increased workload of having to follow a seriously strict method of entering data, such that followup appointments take about 15 mins to book, where they used to take a few seconds with a receptionist).
The chap who headed the whole thing up in the early days was one Richard Granger, whose large claim to fame was that he initially failed his degree, and it took his mother writing to Princess Anne to lean on Bristol University to let him do a retake of the exam (which normally isn't allowed).
The core Cerner product at the heart of it is actually pretty good as a one off. But scaling up isn't what it was designed to do. As every slashdot story needs a crap analogy, I have one for it that I mention to people to describe my take on it:
To deliver newspapers to the door, you'll find it hard to get better than a kid on a bike doing a paper round. The whole NPfIT project makes the assumption that because that's a good mechanism for delivery, it's got rid of the fleets of heavy trucks, and does the entire delivery from the printing works by hiring tens of thousands of kids on bikes instead.
The future of 'racism' is that word will fall out of fashion and pretty much cease to exist in a generation or so. It's hideously divisive in a modern context.
At the start, where there was a serious belief in the western world that being non-caucasian meant you were sub-human, then the laws necessary to stop that were a boon.
Now, anything gets shoved under the context of 'racism' that's meant to cause a knee jerk reaction.
Say something about someone who was born in Ireland? Racist (their parents may have come from just down the road from you, but hey, 'racist')! Nobody from an 'ethnic group' turns up for interviews for jobs at your company for particular roles? Hey, you're not hiring enough of them, so you're racist.
The worst thing about the modern "positive discrimination" isn't that it's actually the most prevalent form of racism at the moment, it's that it actually intimates that someone from an ethnic background isn't capable of performing well enough to compete against anyone else, and "allowances" have to be made for them. Filtering back into schools, there's a whole sector of kids that know they'll get jobs allocated to them under this, so don't consider it worth pushing themselves as hard to compete (some of my family work in the school system, and this drives them nuts!).
Face it, people are people, and some people don't like others for a variety of reasons. Mannerisms, attitude, so on, so forth. The way this used to be dealt with was a little thing called Etiquette, which for some reason seems to be considered horribly old fashioned and outdated these days. The basic principle was that you knew other people were flawed, in the same way you knew yourself to be flawed. Yet everyone needed to keep on going without killing each other. So you looked for the best in people, and given the chance chose to accept something as complimentary rather than derogatory (or at least did so at face), and you exchanged pleasantries, no matter how the barb ran underneath that.
Now, taking offense is an industry. If you can find a way to take offense to something someone says, there's a quick bit of cash to be had through a Lawyer somewhere who specialises in that. Taking offense on behalf of someone else (who frequently isn't offended at all anyway) is the way to obtain a false sense of self worth. Sure, it makes you feel good (after all, you're looking after "the children"/"some group that can't look after themselves"/"some other group that you're better, and more able than"). It puts you subjectively above them, even if that's not what you think you're doing.
When science comes up with these figures, it is NOT a method of saying "hey look, food for bigots". It is stating an observable fact. Anything beyond the figures is conjecture. There are three main branches of humanity that have been successful in evolutionary terms. That's possible failsafes in case there's a flaw in one or more branches of the genetic structure that some pathogen can take advantage of. It's a good thing.
If you instantly think of 'racism' over released figures, I think you're part of a longer, more insidious issue than ever these figures could be.
I took up Scuba and Rock Climbing again (activities I enjoyed back in my Uni days, may years past).. There's a whole bunch of people you meet, and then the social activities kick in.. Makes things much easier.
Plus, there's enough gadgetry to keep the technical side of you occupied..
I always thought as society more like an elastic band than a pendulum (as it the backlash is faster and more fierce the more you stretch it past the 'neutral' point). Still, it's not usually the equilibrium that's reached, certainly in today's polarised political times. When something gives and 'snaps back', like your pendulum, there's usually a good degree of overshoot in the other direction as people have been pushed past their tolerance for being entirely rational about a subject, and they push en masse for a sweeping change to salve their ire.
Culturally British these days is saying there's no such thing as British Culture; it's all multicultural, and if there's anything displayed to state a liking of classical British Culture then the meta-game is to see how quickly you can take offense and claim damages against someone with deep pockets (yes I was one of the people who got yelled at for having an English flag for St. George's day a few years ago because it was 'insensitive' to other cultures. They were, however, strangely quiet when I asked how they felt about the mass of cars going by with Jamaican flags; that never bothered me, but one rule for all please).
As for the ruling by force, that goes back to the dawn of history and before. Every culture has it on some scale (in Tribal setups, you'll have one tribe raiding the next). And if food is in the area it will be hunted to the limits required; palaentology has records of species going extinct well before humanity was able to hunt them to extinction. We're learning that one, and starting tentative steps to try not to, but it's not a British cultural thing.
Collapsing stable democracies? Pfft.. All the wars involving Greece had that taken care of long ago. What about destabilising stable other governments? Again, not a classic Brit thing. Been going on for along, long time.
There's really a whole glut of culture in the UK, like Arthurian legends, and stories up through WW2. After that, it all goes a bit quiet.
There are also quite a few whistleblower laws, and methods of keeping sources anonymous.
There's a notable case of a local newspaper (the Bristol Evening Post) that used to have a column where the author was known only as "Barry Beelzebub", where he published a lot of hard talking, and definitely not politically correct topics. His name was very much kept away from public knowledge, yet his column was spectacularly popular.
There are many cases where journalists use pseudonyms, and keep their true identity well away from general knowledge.
One of these days, I hope journalists become celebreties, so we can all poke and probe into their personal lives, and haul them over the coals too.. I've been on the business end of them a few times in various roles I've had. After the first time, I learned just how nasty they can be (a journalist I had an interview managed to collapse a fair portion of a charity event by misquoting, and sensationalising various small parts of the whole event).
The journalist's credo is to publish sensational in headlines, and later apologise in the small print. These days, I think most of them actually get in the way of discovering the real news.
Well, that sure beats the UK Prime Minister's approach, which is to tell the world several months in advance that he's going to sell of a fair portion of the UK gold reserves.. Then when he's successfully crashed the market price, sells at a ridiculously low price.. Now everybody wants it, so adding to the UK reserves will cost a hefty sum!