Actually, Alan Carr states in his "stop smoking" books, especially the second thick one, that smart people tend to be harder to cure from smoking.
I think, a lot of well educated houses with deep religious roots hate smoking. Growing up in these families you are likely to marry in the same level of society, creating smart little kiddos finding smoking disgusting. In these families mostly the critical persons with more IQ tend to start smoking. So funny, that sentence alone would explain to myself those numbers.
I also want to point out, that Israel is a very exotic place in terms of society. If you ever were in the middle east, you know that they smoke a LOT and have very cheap cigs. In Israel however, you get a mix of middle east like'a'smokes, religious nonsmokers, and western liberal party people and tourists, so it is not the most representative place to conduct a study like this. Because growing up in a very clustered society with very harsh boundaries does not mix up the numbers enough. You would have to cluster the studies itself (well they did only test military, which rules out the arab population, still...)
Alan Carr was clearly not Uber IQd, however what he got right was to point out, that smoking is an addiction, therefore an illness, which you get tricked in by society, and you can't/hardly can really escape it by pure will power. Even worse, trying hard to stop smoking, even with all the arguments, horrible videos in the world, the lack of money, and so on, it only gets harder to give it up. Since pure willpower to stop something makes it even more precious in your mind, and the psychical addiction even works stronger then, your craving is immense. You feel as if giving up smoking is a sacrifice, like giving up sex.
So, if the society and friend circles you live in smoke, you are more in danger to start it. If you start it, having a high IQ might make stopping harder. Especially, because you KNOW it is stupid and you still do it, you develop ignorance or worse, self hatred.
Thinking about stopping to smoke is a battle in the head, which itself leads to smoking a cigarette - if your brain is faster, you will light it faster.
So, nice study, but I think it was made to make a valid claim to the government: smoking has nothing to do with social status. However, it does not have anything to do with intelligence, either.
They could conduct a study tho' that smokers at universities tend to talk more about stopping to smoke while smoking, or conduct a study, which counts all the oncologists and lungdoctors who smoke, because to me it always seems, the heaviest smokers in medical schools were always the ones who cured (well, mostly tried to) the diseases resulting from smoking (just like the highest suicide rate in medical personal is from psychiatry)
(...that was of course a joke, first 64 bit processors of course shipped way later, but project Trillian, an effort to port linux to the newly announced IA-64 platform (Itanium) was already underway in 1999 (released Feb. 2000), GCC however had 64 bit compatibility in the 20th century already. So, yeah, even if there was no 64 bit processor before 2001, linux supported it theoretically 1999.)
Of course, multimedia is an issue on the linux platform, and if you use a lot of multimedia like playing games and stuff, you might be better of with Windows anyway. Support from Vendors is not a problem of linux itself, it is a problem of the manufacturers.
Just to mention: Windows sometimes does not even ship network drivers on newly installed systems. The cause, why newly bought laptops can run all the nifty stuff from-the-box today, is more or less, because manufacturers include the drivers on the laptop preinstalled. I do use a lot of linux on installing windows network drivers on a new box, because linux ships most network drivers out of the box in the kernel even on newer hardware. So it really depends on what piece of hardware we are talking about. I know this, because the wonderful Windows Vista was one of the most requested uninstalls of all time, and replacing it with Windows XP was always a game of "oh, will it have network right away, or do I have to pre download the drivers..."
(If you were cynical, I am sorry, if not, I just fed you)
No, Miguel just loses an ambition in every release-cycle, now he has lost one, but you can still get it back by editing some textfiles in his home-lobe. Don't forget to delete his temporal lobe after that.
Until Feb 2010: "Nooo! Not the f.. Indexing! I wanted to..." *SLAM* -> primary feeling is anger.
From Feb 2010: "Nooo! Have mercy!" -> primary feeling is fear.
MS just healed one of the two major choleric computer users' psychological triggers, now they only have to replace the Don't send or send Error report popup with a virus, too.
Being transformed by fear to my new tyrant, I SHALL GUARD MY F1 BUTTON WITH MY MOUSE+1! YOU SHALL NOT PRESS!
> Just to finish up, consider what happened on OSX with pirated copies of iWorks.
well, if you go deeper into matter, it seems, it was a trial installer of iWorks, not a pirated full version. Since pirating is used in terms of downloading software you normally have to buy, I would not call it pirated.
There is a similar story about fraud, using an advertisement to download openoffice offering dialers or payed subscriptions for the download. Also that OpenOffice you download there is not really pirated, now is it? (worst thing: that fraud is even legal).
Of course I could be wrong, but http://blog.notahat.com/posts/28 tells me, its a trial installer.
I dont own an apple, so it could be that the trial installer is also the full version you have to enter a code into, and the "pirated" copy had a registration key or crack in bundle. But there are millions of sites offering downloads of whatever, like directX. It would be easy thing to extend it with a virus, which is kinda your point.
Was just the word "pirated" that somehow irritated me:)
if winning means, that some company creating netbooks will sell more of its netbooks, than apple will sell ipads: nope, netbooks won't win that.
in the end, what makes iStuff a winner is: ppl just buy it, even if they can't use it for all they dreamt about, because they don't dream - and all the money is not split amongst many manufacturers, it goes to apple alone.
And don't tell those ppl, you can do things on your netbook your iPad / iPhone / iWhatever can't do, because if I had an iPhone, I sure as hell would play around with it, too.
That's the only magic: they sell people stuff, which does that stuff pretty well, which it does, but can't do all the stuff they might could have done with a pro system. But since we are geeks and buy our gizmos because we WANT them to do stuff, we can't understand the big consumer base, which buy things because they want to see the stuff it does, nothing more. The whole "we attack the netbook market" is the same slogan as the iPhone attacked the mobile phone market, which it didn't really. mobile phones still do everything they are supposed to do, and smartphones still do more than the iphone, but the iphone is an iphone, you know.
I use a good old X41 for couchsurfing. I call it the iX41. I spent the money on that thing, which I would have spent on an iphone. no GSM of course, but it is not handy anyway to run around with a book sized electronic thingie pressed against my head.
We can even turn that around. Some people need to hold on to the thinking that trying to analyze the world through logic and acquiring information in our mind, believing to get a grasp of objective knowledge equals understanding truth; furthermore, concluding, that every thought about a God is impossible if you do that stuff, and therefore religion must be "just a more primitive conclusion" in their thought patterns.
And there it is born, the fight between (pseudo-)intellectuals in the religious faction and in the open minded technotheist faction, while it never was a real war at all, just a historical schizma.
The western way of thinking about religion and science as contrary, the arrogance of calling any conclusion of another being as "more primitive", it's just you being the playball of historical development.
there is always the option of keeping an open mind and still believe in an authority, but the truth is, especially bible based religions teach us, that the main authority of every human is he himself, which the bible calls the origin of sin. So maybe believing in a bigger authority means more not to believe in your own conclusions as absolutely right.
Being open minded does not mean, not to make any decisions at all, it just means, to know about there could have been another decision you could have taken.
Well we are all feeding a troll, just to mention;)
...plain old UO Shards with Iris2. There are a couple of them.
UO has in my eyes only one major drawback: the client. Since the protocol is fairly researched (see penultima online docs), and there are a lot of emulators very developped (runuo2, sphereserver, uox3, pol and the dead ones (nox, wolfpack, sunuo)), mostly even opensource, and there are a lot of freeshards with very different scriptpacks...
the ideas on freeshards are very cool, often copied by OSI into their own. but mostly every combat and magic system is trying to mimic the old UO, which is also fairly the fault of the emucode being hard to tamper with at that levels.
knowing the protocol, you can say that UO is pretty much like a webbrowser only reacting on what the server tells it to do, since every drag, every click is transmitted to the server. So basically in my opinion servers are still underdeveloped, a lot could be still implemented, and you can see that because some of them have developed completely unique gaming experience, custom maps, graphics, and everything.
But it leads to one big drawback, and that's the client. The UInterface is somewhat tricky to get into nowadays.
Luckily I think there is hope: iris2 The iris2 client is built upon ogre, is pretty much evolved, uses custom 3d terrain with 3d graphics from UO:TD. It has a 2d rendering engine built in, is scriptable via lua, and could have the base for much more creative mmo's. Especially if someone would develop the graphics / models themselves, they would have a complete free platform (client and servers) to build their ideas upon.
Some servers/freeshards already use iris2 (see list at http://iris2.de). But the scene needs developers. Especially on the server side. Ideas are there plenty. From the simple DOTA-like buildup for a freeshard, to more complex OSI like worlds, the engine could support pretty much everything.
I am concepting a freeshard 7 years now, coming into first development stages, and worked as scripter/devel in some freeshards also in my 10 years of UO fandom. Graphics is not everything, UO has taught us. But a good client engine also allows different gameplay, more action oriented, or more sophisticated for customization.
UO is like the HalfLife of MMO's, completely building upon it's massive freeshard movement, where the game is modded a lot. So if you searching your dream-mmo-server, maybe take on your gloves+1 and try to help some of those freeshards giving you your gaming experience you seek.
You asked: If I don't believe in Santa Claus, how does that make me religious?
I answered: It does only by how you take your "non-belief" - do you take it as a religious need to argue with believers or take your opinion higher up than theirs? I defined Children as the people which believe in Santa Claus. If you don't believe in Santa Claus, you might consider your faith to be more right, than theirs. If you follow your faith in the nonexistence of Santa Claus in a religious way, you might feel the need to bash children about their belief, which makes you a non-believing religious person. That would be of course a very stupid behaviour.
For me religiousness is an elitary behaviour, where your faith concentrates not in the essence of your religion, but in the religion itself. Every human being has a faith. Every faith leads to a basic personal religion (which can be sculptured by a preexisting religion of other people), which defines your rulesets of how you value things, and more importantly, which rules you have to follow for being true to your faith. And you want to be true to your faith, since you want to release yourself from your burden of fearing death in your subconciousness - and if you choose the wrong faith, it might lead to holding on to a wrong kind of salvation.
Not every child believes in Santa. And even if it does, it does not mean, he feels the need to lay cookies and milk in front of the chimney or defend the existence of Santa Claus. Same applies for "faiths" in terms of religious faiths (while Santa Claus is more like an opinion).
Maybe you get my point and understand, I was trying to answer your point from my point of view, if I didn't I would just thought to myself: "stupid analogy" and moved on - or worse.
Usefulness of statements also is a very personal question, I am sorry, you did not find my answer useful, if you still don't just leave it be. In essence, my answer was: believing in something or not has very little to do with being religious or not.
By the way, I don't believe in Santa Claus either.
I tried to help those iPhone guys, by sending them the contact of the SE guys, who implemented that feature even on my cheap little walkmanmobile,... but all they got was sms with garbage vcard code...
Most of these isps try to justify their actions with the excuse that they need to restrict pvp users so that other users consuming less bandwidth can enjoy decent surfing/transfer rates.
I really don't care much about those nasty PvP users, I am still for banning them from the net, looting me sad little pvm user last month...
it is more about how you can persuade your boss to accept the fact, that music can be very helpful for concentration.
it is definitely proved that music influences behaviour. well you don't even need a statistical study/prove for that, but you can even find those. statistically in medical studies it was found out, that e.g. classical music in certain tempi can shorten the gap between long term and short term memory - it can be an intensive learning help. other people use music in certain tempi (i would rather call it noise though) to help them reach a state of meditation or lucid dreaming (and i am not talking about religious meditation here only). you can even fall asleep while watching flashlights blinking 4 times a second or something, so other senses also influence brain patterns. one can dance to drum and base without drinking or doing other drugs and still go high just by closing ones' eyes (an experiment i found rather interesting, even if i dislike the music) - but not only rhytm does influence our brain, also there is emotional influence: everyone who felt the power and urge to act, while listening to hard music as metal, and watched crowds go crazy in concerts, can completely admit: music does influence us also emotionally - it can not only change our brainpatterns by rhytmic influence, but also change our feelings by emotional influence.
concentration needs a certain level of awareness. keeping yourself in a vivid rhytm with music, enjoying your work with it, is always a great help. so it would suggest, that not the listening itself can be the benefit or the problem, but the kind of music you play. i could never code with trance, except i need the music to calm me down, while starting to work in the morning with rammstein is mostly my preference. it depends on your character. sometimes you need to calm yourself down, or wake yourself up. if you perfectly know this, you can explain all this and even help others to see how music can help - or distract them.
but the matter here is a boss, who thinks he knows, what is good for everyone. confronting him in any way might be a bad idea, since every human starts to be somekind of stubborn if his beliefs and ideas are challenged. making him understand your standpoint, and to clarify, that music is not used to have fun at work without really being productive may need a lot of diplomatic finesse. maybe start with accepting your boss'es beliefs and try them out. try it without music first. and maybe try to connect to him personally, suggesting him, what you have found out by trying out his way of work. maybe you will find out productivity does increase sometimes. sometimes it may lead downwards. by becoming clear of why you have the urge to listen to music, where it might distract, and where it might be helpful, and by creating playlists for different emotional and wakeness-statusses can be a good step to understand music influence on yourself, and if you have the moment you might be in a position to present this to your boss.
one thing is clear: your boss is right about one thing, listening to music, without knowing how it affects you (even if intuitionally normally humans tend to pick music according to their state of mind) can be more distracting, or entertaining, than helping. where your boss is in error, that not listening to music will be benefitial in the long term. talking to each other can be much more distracting, distractions around you, too. you could even fall asleep because the copymachine next door makes exactly 4 copies a second.
for me, music can be a great help, but sometimes i turn it off, since there are times, where i just realize it distracts me more than it helps me.
I can tell, that an internship of mine started out as doing boring jobs, but only for two days. After asking too much questions about a highly theoretical work my co-worker did, I was put together with him as a team, and we had one of the companies top jobs at the time, creating a server software, which compared to the solutions you could buy was worth millions to them. It was an awesome experience and I still consider it cool
I had this job for 4 summers, and they even accepted my internship the following years, if I asked way too late if I could come work there. I never was payed more, but I got to know really cool people there, and was treated with respect as if I were a coworker.
They did pay me some bonuses later. I am also sure, I could have gotten a job there (but since I live 300km from the place, and still study around, I didn't).
So it is not always coffee stuff. But I also must say, I live in Europe, things here might be a little different.
I still consider UO the best thing for private servers, since the content in the client are completely changeable, and almost everything is server side, so you can modify your game experience heavily.
origin made a good job there. and even better, they tolerated private servers, looked at the most played ones, and took over ideas from them. smaller servers/freeshards with very custom rulesets are mostly used by RP playing people, while the very big servers mostly take britannia and put some custom content over it. that way it was even easy for the company to select servers to watch, since bigger servers mostly had ideas that fit into the original gameplay, while smaller servers had more fantastic ideas of how to modify the game (down to basic rules like how you obtain skillpoints or how fighting works).
it is no wonder, that the most sophisticated free mmog-server softwares are from the uo community (runuo in.net, sphereserver with custom scripting engine, polserver with pascal like scripting lang, wolfpack with c++/python, uox3 with c++/javascript,...). they are also a really good resource to learn from.
Slashdot Mirror
I pic Wbdlsl...
Maybe it is because of Flashs superior internal design or because of Flash's superior Garbage collection...
Actually, Alan Carr states in his "stop smoking" books, especially the second thick one, that smart people tend to be harder to cure from smoking.
I think, a lot of well educated houses with deep religious roots hate smoking. Growing up in these families you are likely to marry in the same level of society, creating smart little kiddos finding smoking disgusting. In these families mostly the critical persons with more IQ tend to start smoking. So funny, that sentence alone would explain to myself those numbers.
I also want to point out, that Israel is a very exotic place in terms of society. If you ever were in the middle east, you know that they smoke a LOT and have very cheap cigs. In Israel however, you get a mix of middle east like'a'smokes, religious nonsmokers, and western liberal party people and tourists, so it is not the most representative place to conduct a study like this. Because growing up in a very clustered society with very harsh boundaries does not mix up the numbers enough. You would have to cluster the studies itself (well they did only test military, which rules out the arab population, still...)
Alan Carr was clearly not Uber IQd, however what he got right was to point out, that smoking is an addiction, therefore an illness, which you get tricked in by society, and you can't/hardly can really escape it by pure will power. Even worse, trying hard to stop smoking, even with all the arguments, horrible videos in the world, the lack of money, and so on, it only gets harder to give it up. Since pure willpower to stop something makes it even more precious in your mind, and the psychical addiction even works stronger then, your craving is immense. You feel as if giving up smoking is a sacrifice, like giving up sex.
So, if the society and friend circles you live in smoke, you are more in danger to start it. If you start it, having a high IQ might make stopping harder. Especially, because you KNOW it is stupid and you still do it, you develop ignorance or worse, self hatred.
Thinking about stopping to smoke is a battle in the head, which itself leads to smoking a cigarette - if your brain is faster, you will light it faster.
So, nice study, but I think it was made to make a valid claim to the government: smoking has nothing to do with social status. However, it does not have anything to do with intelligence, either.
They could conduct a study tho' that smokers at universities tend to talk more about stopping to smoke while smoking, or conduct a study, which counts all the oncologists and lungdoctors who smoke, because to me it always seems, the heaviest smokers in medical schools were always the ones who cured (well, mostly tried to) the diseases resulting from smoking (just like the highest suicide rate in medical personal is from psychiatry)
I need a smoke.
I will stop. Soon.
I imagine a Beowulf on a cluster of these.
(...that was of course a joke, first 64 bit processors of course shipped way later, but project Trillian, an effort to port linux to the newly announced IA-64 platform (Itanium) was already underway in 1999 (released Feb. 2000), GCC however had 64 bit compatibility in the 20th century already. So, yeah, even if there was no 64 bit processor before 2001, linux supported it theoretically 1999.)
Of course, multimedia is an issue on the linux platform, and if you use a lot of multimedia like playing games and stuff, you might be better of with Windows anyway. Support from Vendors is not a problem of linux itself, it is a problem of the manufacturers.
Just to mention: Windows sometimes does not even ship network drivers on newly installed systems. The cause, why newly bought laptops can run all the nifty stuff from-the-box today, is more or less, because manufacturers include the drivers on the laptop preinstalled. I do use a lot of linux on installing windows network drivers on a new box, because linux ships most network drivers out of the box in the kernel even on newer hardware. So it really depends on what piece of hardware we are talking about. I know this, because the wonderful Windows Vista was one of the most requested uninstalls of all time, and replacing it with Windows XP was always a game of "oh, will it have network right away, or do I have to pre download the drivers..."
(If you were cynical, I am sorry, if not, I just fed you)
luckily, linux had 64bit support in the 20th century
No, Miguel just loses an ambition in every release-cycle, now he has lost one, but you can still get it back by editing some textfiles in his home-lobe. Don't forget to delete his temporal lobe after that.
image formats may not be defined, but browsers do implement only a certain amount
jpg, gif and png mostly.
i think the same will happen to video. over time.
Pressing F1 accidently
Until Feb 2010: "Nooo! Not the f.. Indexing! I wanted to..." *SLAM* -> primary feeling is anger.
From Feb 2010: "Nooo! Have mercy!" -> primary feeling is fear.
MS just healed one of the two major choleric computer users' psychological triggers, now they only have to replace the Don't send or send Error report popup with a virus, too.
Being transformed by fear to my new tyrant, I SHALL GUARD MY F1 BUTTON WITH MY MOUSE+1! YOU SHALL NOT PRESS!
> Just to finish up, consider what happened on OSX with pirated copies of iWorks.
:)
well, if you go deeper into matter, it seems, it was a trial installer of iWorks, not a pirated full version. Since pirating is used in terms of downloading software you normally have to buy, I would not call it pirated.
There is a similar story about fraud, using an advertisement to download openoffice offering dialers or payed subscriptions for the download. Also that OpenOffice you download there is not really pirated, now is it? (worst thing: that fraud is even legal).
Of course I could be wrong, but http://blog.notahat.com/posts/28 tells me, its a trial installer.
I dont own an apple, so it could be that the trial installer is also the full version you have to enter a code into, and the "pirated" copy had a registration key or crack in bundle.
But there are millions of sites offering downloads of whatever, like directX. It would be easy thing to extend it with a virus, which is kinda your point.
Was just the word "pirated" that somehow irritated me
if winning means, that some company creating netbooks will sell more of its netbooks, than apple will sell ipads: nope, netbooks won't win that.
in the end, what makes iStuff a winner is: ppl just buy it, even if they can't use it for all they dreamt about, because they don't dream - and all the money is not split amongst many manufacturers, it goes to apple alone.
And don't tell those ppl, you can do things on your netbook your iPad / iPhone / iWhatever can't do, because if I had an iPhone, I sure as hell would play around with it, too.
That's the only magic: they sell people stuff, which does that stuff pretty well, which it does, but can't do all the stuff they might could have done with a pro system. But since we are geeks and buy our gizmos because we WANT them to do stuff, we can't understand the big consumer base, which buy things because they want to see the stuff it does, nothing more.
The whole "we attack the netbook market" is the same slogan as the iPhone attacked the mobile phone market, which it didn't really. mobile phones still do everything they are supposed to do, and smartphones still do more than the iphone, but the iphone is an iphone, you know.
I use a good old X41 for couchsurfing. I call it the iX41. I spent the money on that thing, which I would have spent on an iphone. no GSM of course, but it is not handy anyway to run around with a book sized electronic thingie pressed against my head.
We can even turn that around. Some people need to hold on to the thinking that trying to analyze the world through logic and acquiring information in our mind, believing to get a grasp of objective knowledge equals understanding truth; furthermore, concluding, that every thought about a God is impossible if you do that stuff, and therefore religion must be "just a more primitive conclusion" in their thought patterns.
;)
And there it is born, the fight between (pseudo-)intellectuals in the religious faction and in the open minded technotheist faction, while it never was a real war at all, just a historical schizma.
The western way of thinking about religion and science as contrary, the arrogance of calling any conclusion of another being as "more primitive", it's just you being the playball of historical development.
there is always the option of keeping an open mind and still believe in an authority, but the truth is, especially bible based religions teach us, that the main authority of every human is he himself, which the bible calls the origin of sin. So maybe believing in a bigger authority means more not to believe in your own conclusions as absolutely right.
Being open minded does not mean, not to make any decisions at all, it just means, to know about there could have been another decision you could have taken.
Well we are all feeding a troll, just to mention
...plain old UO Shards with Iris2. There are a couple of them.
UO has in my eyes only one major drawback: the client. Since the protocol is fairly researched (see penultima online docs), and there are a lot of emulators very developped (runuo2, sphereserver, uox3, pol and the dead ones (nox, wolfpack, sunuo)), mostly even opensource, and there are a lot of freeshards with very different scriptpacks...
the ideas on freeshards are very cool, often copied by OSI into their own.
but mostly every combat and magic system is trying to mimic the old UO, which is also fairly the fault of the emucode being hard to tamper with at that levels.
knowing the protocol, you can say that UO is pretty much like a webbrowser only reacting on what the server tells it to do, since every drag, every click is transmitted to the server. So basically in my opinion servers are still underdeveloped, a lot could be still implemented, and you can see that because some of them have developed completely unique gaming experience, custom maps, graphics, and everything.
But it leads to one big drawback, and that's the client. The UInterface is somewhat tricky to get into nowadays.
Luckily I think there is hope: iris2
The iris2 client is built upon ogre, is pretty much evolved, uses custom 3d terrain with 3d graphics from UO:TD. It has a 2d rendering engine built in, is scriptable via lua, and could have the base for much more creative mmo's. Especially if someone would develop the graphics / models themselves, they would have a complete free platform (client and servers) to build their ideas upon.
Some servers/freeshards already use iris2 (see list at http://iris2.de). But the scene needs developers. Especially on the server side. Ideas are there plenty. From the simple DOTA-like buildup for a freeshard, to more complex OSI like worlds, the engine could support pretty much everything.
I am concepting a freeshard 7 years now, coming into first development stages, and worked as scripter/devel in some freeshards also in my 10 years of UO fandom. Graphics is not everything, UO has taught us. But a good client engine also allows different gameplay, more action oriented, or more sophisticated for customization.
UO is like the HalfLife of MMO's, completely building upon it's massive freeshard movement, where the game is modded a lot. So if you searching your dream-mmo-server, maybe take on your gloves+1 and try to help some of those freeshards giving you your gaming experience you seek.
CS is soooo 1999. Since Source, it is called CSS now.
* use your own source. buy Source on steam.
* don't do everything in HTML.
* cheat for IE.
* ???
* Stanford Degree.
You asked: If I don't believe in Santa Claus, how does that make me religious?
I answered: It does only by how you take your "non-belief" - do you take it as a religious need to argue with believers or take your opinion higher up than theirs?
I defined Children as the people which believe in Santa Claus. If you don't believe in Santa Claus, you might consider your faith to be more right, than theirs. If you follow your faith in the nonexistence of Santa Claus in a religious way, you might feel the need to bash children about their belief, which makes you a non-believing religious person. That would be of course a very stupid behaviour.
For me religiousness is an elitary behaviour, where your faith concentrates not in the essence of your religion, but in the religion itself. Every human being has a faith. Every faith leads to a basic personal religion (which can be sculptured by a preexisting religion of other people), which defines your rulesets of how you value things, and more importantly, which rules you have to follow for being true to your faith. And you want to be true to your faith, since you want to release yourself from your burden of fearing death in your subconciousness - and if you choose the wrong faith, it might lead to holding on to a wrong kind of salvation.
Not every child believes in Santa. And even if it does, it does not mean, he feels the need to lay cookies and milk in front of the chimney or defend the existence of Santa Claus. Same applies for "faiths" in terms of religious faiths (while Santa Claus is more like an opinion).
Maybe you get my point and understand, I was trying to answer your point from my point of view, if I didn't I would just thought to myself: "stupid analogy" and moved on - or worse.
Usefulness of statements also is a very personal question, I am sorry, you did not find my answer useful, if you still don't just leave it be. In essence, my answer was: believing in something or not has very little to do with being religious or not.
By the way, I don't believe in Santa Claus either.
By pointing out all the time how stupid kids are... religiously...
And by the way, being religious and believing are also two distinct things.
Here in Austria we now invented flowing water.
We also import chewing gum now.
Still, no Kangaroos here. Thats another desert.
I tried to help those iPhone guys, by sending them the contact of the SE guys, who implemented that feature even on my cheap little walkmanmobile, ... but all they got was sms with garbage vcard code...
I used GIF in my photographic apps to store all my pictures, and now this damn closed format censored my colors!
the hands, not the head.
Still, use the Preview Button.
It was written in XML valid HTML in a Texteditor, somewhere along the way, the head was displaced after optimizing the handwritten code for IE.
He should have used the Preview Button.
Most of these isps try to justify their actions with the excuse that they need to restrict pvp users so that other users consuming less bandwidth can enjoy decent surfing/transfer rates.
I really don't care much about those nasty PvP users, I am still for banning them from the net, looting me sad little pvm user last month...
it is more about how you can persuade your boss to accept the fact, that music can be very helpful for concentration.
it is definitely proved that music influences behaviour. well you don't even need a statistical study/prove for that, but you can even find those. statistically in medical studies it was found out, that e.g. classical music in certain tempi can shorten the gap between long term and short term memory - it can be an intensive learning help. other people use music in certain tempi (i would rather call it noise though) to help them reach a state of meditation or lucid dreaming (and i am not talking about religious meditation here only). you can even fall asleep while watching flashlights blinking 4 times a second or something, so other senses also influence brain patterns.
one can dance to drum and base without drinking or doing other drugs and still go high just by closing ones' eyes (an experiment i found rather interesting, even if i dislike the music) - but not only rhytm does influence our brain, also there is emotional influence:
everyone who felt the power and urge to act, while listening to hard music as metal, and watched crowds go crazy in concerts, can completely admit: music does influence us also emotionally - it can not only change our brainpatterns by rhytmic influence, but also change our feelings by emotional influence.
concentration needs a certain level of awareness. keeping yourself in a vivid rhytm with music, enjoying your work with it, is always a great help. so it would suggest, that not the listening itself can be the benefit or the problem, but the kind of music you play. i could never code with trance, except i need the music to calm me down, while starting to work in the morning with rammstein is mostly my preference. it depends on your character. sometimes you need to calm yourself down, or wake yourself up. if you perfectly know this, you can explain all this and even help others to see how music can help - or distract them.
but the matter here is a boss, who thinks he knows, what is good for everyone. confronting him in any way might be a bad idea, since every human starts to be somekind of stubborn if his beliefs and ideas are challenged. making him understand your standpoint, and to clarify, that music is not used to have fun at work without really being productive may need a lot of diplomatic finesse. maybe start with accepting your boss'es beliefs and try them out. try it without music first. and maybe try to connect to him personally, suggesting him, what you have found out by trying out his way of work. maybe you will find out productivity does increase sometimes. sometimes it may lead downwards.
by becoming clear of why you have the urge to listen to music, where it might distract, and where it might be helpful, and by creating playlists for different emotional and wakeness-statusses can be a good step to understand music influence on yourself, and if you have the moment you might be in a position to present this to your boss.
one thing is clear: your boss is right about one thing, listening to music, without knowing how it affects you (even if intuitionally normally humans tend to pick music according to their state of mind) can be more distracting, or entertaining, than helping. where your boss is in error, that not listening to music will be benefitial in the long term. talking to each other can be much more distracting, distractions around you, too. you could even fall asleep because the copymachine next door makes exactly 4 copies a second.
for me, music can be a great help, but sometimes i turn it off, since there are times, where i just realize it distracts me more than it helps me.
I can tell, that an internship of mine started out as doing boring jobs, but only for two days. After asking too much questions about a highly theoretical work my co-worker did, I was put together with him as a team, and we had one of the companies top jobs at the time, creating a server software, which compared to the solutions you could buy was worth millions to them. It was an awesome experience and I still consider it cool
I had this job for 4 summers, and they even accepted my internship the following years, if I asked way too late if I could come work there. I never was payed more, but I got to know really cool people there, and was treated with respect as if I were a coworker.
They did pay me some bonuses later. I am also sure, I could have gotten a job there (but since I live 300km from the place, and still study around, I didn't).
So it is not always coffee stuff. But I also must say, I live in Europe, things here might be a little different.
I still consider UO the best thing for private servers, since the content in the client are completely changeable, and almost everything is server side, so you can modify your game experience heavily.
.net, sphereserver with custom scripting engine, polserver with pascal like scripting lang, wolfpack with c++/python, uox3 with c++/javascript, ...). they are also a really good resource to learn from.
origin made a good job there. and even better, they tolerated private servers, looked at the most played ones, and took over ideas from them. smaller servers/freeshards with very custom rulesets are mostly used by RP playing people, while the very big servers mostly take britannia and put some custom content over it. that way it was even easy for the company to select servers to watch, since bigger servers mostly had ideas that fit into the original gameplay, while smaller servers had more fantastic ideas of how to modify the game (down to basic rules like how you obtain skillpoints or how fighting works).
it is no wonder, that the most sophisticated free mmog-server softwares are from the uo community (runuo in