Yeah you're probably right. What I read didn't have any sources cited.
Short of kidnapping people, owning a spaceship and a radio telescope, and flying them all 6001 light years away to look back on the Earth, - assuming we didn't hit a massive ceiling mural of the galaxy - I probably couldn't prove to them that the Earth is older than that.
Waste of time is a waste. But it doesn't matter, in 6000 years we won't exist anymore because these people will have forgotten the actual year the Earth was supposed to have been created, and they will still be citing that factoid of theirs.
I find evil as defined by certain camps of Christianity fascinating. It enables an annoying self-righteous attitude... yet the same people are supposedly born damned because of something an ancestor did, and the same people who needed someone innocent to die for them just to have a chance at avoiding Hell.
I don't know for sure, but I think the rules that govern the religious world you live in are evil - not all the other people.
Yeah, come to think of it I might be mistaken. It's exactly 5999.9 years old. Damn, you got me.
On a serious note, Hinduism claims to be 111.5 trillion years old, and that the Earth is even older than that at 155 trillion. Seems we have a disagreement brewing on the origin and the age of this rock. Rather than have our greatest scientific minds look into it, lets just pull everyone together from various religions for a friendly debate and exchange of information.
I know you're joking, but it occurs to me that there are currently practiced religions thousands of years older than that. Hinduism is the first one to come to mind, starting 11,000 years ago. Anyone who actually believes the earth is younger than Hinduism, probably believes their God did that (condemned a billion souls to damnation), specifically to challenge our personal belief here in God's country, (formerly the land of Native American nature spirits.)
Yes, let the people have their say in the vetting of science. This is a democracy! So long as brother John down the road is unconvinced, and so long as local channel 8 (sponsored in part by Exxon Mobile) gives him a mic to debate these important issues, it's unsettled and there's no cause for alarm. Keep doing what you're doing. No one has to adjust. Nothing is wrong. Everything is fine.
Everyone is different. Living the dream at work is not typical. A dream job for you may just be a paycheck for someone else. Most jobs are compromises that we accept because our dreams are either unrealistic or unlikely, and finding work is more important.
If you can use your talents at work great. But I think the most an employer should expect from an employee is competency. Anything more is a gift.
I tend to think of opportunity as the result of being in the right place with the right skills and the right background. The job I ended up with is not what I had in mind, though at least it opened the door to a middle-class income and let me stay somewhat in line with my interest in computer graphics. At the same time though, the work I did want to do is flooded with way too many people thanks to game/film school diploma mills. I went to a local university, majored in computer science, and worked in a VR lab on campus. There I did some work for a local building contractor, which directly lead to my current doing building information modeling. I know what could have happened had I followed my dreams, but I'm not without regret either. I'm split on how I feel about it.
I can say though that what people will do best in may not be known to them until they experience it. The thing they wanted may turn out to be something they'll hate, and the thing they ended up with that they initially regretted may actually turn out to be a good deal.
I'm really safe in this job. I provide what's expected of my job title and quite a bit more due to my interests. I can be replaced, but they'll have a hard time doing it. The people out there like me but living their dreams often wouldn't settle for my job, even if their job is objectively awful, pays less, and they're abused by companies that don't consider them valuable.
I don't doubt it. It's where the laws come from, how they're used, and who they hurt that bothers me. Republicans are supposed to be about liberty, but they're about as freedom loving as North Korea is democratic.
I'm a liberal, but even I'm tired of the job creation talk. "I work not because of you, but in spite of you." Is my internal narrative towards these people. They want so much credit for not screwing up as bad as the last clown. F-that, this was my own doing. I made this.
It's only like that now because this particular brand of politician (guess!) don't completely control the Federal government yet. Once they have that, everyone under them could simply be prevented from writing their own laws on whatever issues an industry pays to have ignored, be they states, counties, cities, towns, Native American Nations, whatever.
It's the same story with LGBT civil protection laws. In Republican states, cities can't write their own, and the state complains about and campaigns against any Federal laws. This is just another situation where that kind of lawmaking has taken effect. Once they have total control on the federal level, they'll stop complaining and everyone else will just be a radical insurgent. I know it's flippant to do so but I want to say it'll be illegal to complain after that. I wouldn't put it past them.
They already sell it. You have to buy it if you build a new machine - you can't even transfer a free upgrade from an old computer, and there's still a Microsoft tax on new PCs.
Free upgrades might be periodically available for big OS updates (no more releases or service packs, so they say). But I bet this kind of push is a one off, and the further back you are, the less likely you'll be bothered. Vista users aren't pestered with Windows 10 upgrades because the OS is considered too old and 10 year old hardware may not even run it. Windows 7 is next to be left alone. Then 8, 8.1, etc. Meanwhile the desktop will be neglected by Microsoft and everything developed for it will run on older OSes for a while.
So the trick may be to stick with OSes old enough to skip the free upgrade push, but not so old they miss out on security patches.
That said, there's going to be some people running Windows 10 now who will gradually find their PC is less able to run the system with the latest patches. Ten years down the line, their 2016 box may be too heavily encumbered... Users will have to find unsupported (or soon to be) copies of Windows (that may not have adequate driver support for the new hardware), buy a new computer just to stay productive, or switch to Linux.
Same story for the rest of us. We can't run Windows 8.1 forever...
I tend to think that one reason we still have an internet is because commercial businesses found a way to monetize it. If they had barriers to doing so, there would be a lot less of a reason to develop it, and more push back against it. (Much like the push back against the torrent aggregators or the piracy focused file sharing websites).
Bitcoin is still legal here because businesses found a use for it and they don't care about the drugs or money laundering. But if they couldn't use it, those other issues would be highlighted by their lobbyists to get it blocked and every Republican under the sun would be talking about it.
So long as it works for them, they're fine letting us have it too.
Also, I have a demonstration video on Youtube of a plugin that I sell. It's the main way people find out about my work, and there's a lot of people like me out there who advertise on YouTube and elsewhere. We're little guys, and there's no way you were talking about us, but a law banning all advertising online can have some wide reaching consequences, not to mention 1st amendment free speech issues. Even if you changed the wording to allow my advertising but forbid Comcast's, I'd be against it on principal... and I hate Comcast.
You can have your FOSS internet, and we can have our commercial internet, and we can live in peace without trying to ban each other's behavior.
US Government: "We will fine you until you comply with the order giving us access to the servers."
Microsoft:"Those aren't our servers. We don't have access."
Government: "Comply or be fined a million dollars a day."
Microsoft files bankruptcy in AD 3276.
Thus begins the first Year of Linux on the Desktop.
Amen. I wouldn't say I love my job, but it's a branch of the kind of work I like to do (3d modeling and programming). I work the hardest when I work a full 8 hour day, then go home and instead of watching TV, work on my own projects. It is in these days I feel the most fulfilled. The days where I just work 8 hours and then veg out watching cartoons are the days I feel the least fulfilled.
Sometimes I'm needed to work on a crunch time schedule. I hate those, but I'm almost never alone in this and we're always happy at the end. It's like defeating a dragon. It didn't eat us alive, we're proud of ourselves, and now our boss's are really happy with us too.
Hard work in life is normal. What isn't is when you're too far removed from the fruits of your labor and are unable to take pride in it (like fast food or low-end retail). When you have pride in your work, and you can take credit for your part in it, it feels good.
To add to my previous post - one thing a manager can do to mitigate overworking employees is to hire more employees. A lot of people refuse to do this, especially during a recession, yet expect the same level of work, or have people over them expecting it. That's when your manager is supposed to stand up for you and the team and say, "We only have so many people. We need more if you want that much done in X amount of time. Please give me more time, or give me authorization to look for more people."
I'm near or at the bottom. I can't tell anyone what to do. I manage nothing, even the use of my own skills or time without talking first with my supervisor (who to his credit is likely to accept any ideas I might have - up to and including small software projects if it'll improve the workflow.)
This is normal, I'm not complaining.
My supervisor manages me and a few others in our department. His job is really stressful, in part because a lot of the time the people asking him to make stuff happen don't fully appreciate the amount of work involved, nor the time necessary to complete the task. That gets delegated to us to some degree, though he has a lot of similar work to handle as well. He manages us, but is also one of us.
He's not my ruler, but he is my boss.
His boss is also my boss, but not all of his bosses are also my boss - the one I answer to often speaks directly to me, and the ones my supervisor has to deal with often involve tasks that don't involve me. This is kind of a relief, because my boss's boss is a cool guy and we get along fine. He's probably rich, but he doesn't flaunt it and he's not at the top or anywhere near it - not that I care about that sort of thing.
HIS boss - my boss's, boss's, boss, I rarely speak to and does work I don't fully understand. I think he communicates with the people we do business with - the property owners we work for. These owners are what I consider the real bosses. Donald Trump "builds" his buildings the same way these guys do - with people like us. We never see them, not at my level anyway. We just make their desired thing happen - but I'm okay with that. These guys aren't the ones responsible for time management.
If your gripe is that all your time is spent working, it's probably a middle manager's fault (or yours). Not some distant "ruler", and definitely not an actual one (unless you live in North Korea). Though admittedly I work in a relatively flat organizational structure and a small one at that. I can and do see where the real time constraints occur - when other people make promises of performance on your behalf. If they do it poorly, you're just as f-ked as if you were the one to make that promise.
The privacy controls - I don't know how well they work (reports are - "not well"), I may want to block some addresses with the router to keep it from sending packets of audio and video to the central servers "telescreen style", and some settings are in strange places. In 8 they're all together and are about 5 or 6 toggle switches, in 10, there's many more, and things like WifiSense are kind of hidden away and separate.
The forced upgrades / nagware on older OSes - It makes me not want to upgrade out of spite. I did it anyway for my Surface Pro (gen 1), because I'm still curious, but I'll never do it for my other computers. I retain a copy of the 8.1 key and software in case I want to go back after the first 30 days.
I turned off Cortana, so the only benefits left to upgrading is the sort-of-returned Start Menu, and the ability to run Universal Apps in a window - both features are kind of pointless on a tablet (turned off in tablet mode). So I guess the remaining benefit is that I'm keeping up with the app store... that I don't use... and Edge, which I also don't use... nevermind.
The final issue is that the license is not transferable. I plan to build a new machine soon. If I upgrade my license on the desktop I still have to buy Windows 10 for the new box. If the old box is going to keep any OS, it might as well stick to the one released during its era (the box before the box is being used as a security camera DVR, and retains Windows 7 even though I could have upgraded it to Windows 8, 8.1, or 10).
I will need to install GWX Control Panel on these machines to avoid any surprises. Upgrades tend to mess with software licenses - things like Zbrush, Unity Pro, and Max will absolutely break after an upgrade, and you'll have to re-activate, contact support, or both. They also mess with drivers - I still use an Intuos 2 Wacom tablet, and while I did confirm it works with Windows 10, the new OS is considered the "last", and will then be subjected to continuous, mandatory, gradual, and major updates that are for sure to break something that old eventually.
I practically shilled for MS when they released the Surface Pro (which I'm using for this post), but man, when MS wants to f-up badly, they know just how to do it. I hope they see the light soon. Any more of this and businesses will absolutely abandon Windows. I'm already hearing about PCs being upgraded at work. Its insanity.
Occasionally I'll do long division by hand. Sometimes I don't trust the calculator, or rather... my fingers punching the numbers. This happens when I'm doing more than one thing and I want to be careful. I find the scrap of paper handy for keeping up with where I've been, more so than a calculator's record scroll. Sometimes I cheat and do both to check my work.
I see it, multiplication, fractions and percentages, and basic algerbra, as essential skills.
I know a guy who can't calculate 20% tips without a calculator. When I tried to teach him, he just shuts down and asked me to stop. He can't do simple math, this is a real problem that's really common. The guy is really smart, but schools failed him big time and he'll never learn how to tip without a calculator, let alone balance a budget (even with a computer... tried to teach him Excel with predictable results).
Kids are in school to learn to learn. That's why a lot of it seems pointless at first, but appreciated later. People do math in day to day life to figure something out. Like the ability to read, it's a tool to learn something.
You're the program in the machine, where as before you were the program and the actuator. Now the car does the steering and braking for you - at your command through a mechanical/digital interface.
If you try being a passenger in one without a driver, you're going to break yourself. Don't do that. Let the self driving cars do that for you when they gain sapience.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah you're probably right. What I read didn't have any sources cited.
Short of kidnapping people, owning a spaceship and a radio telescope, and flying them all 6001 light years away to look back on the Earth, - assuming we didn't hit a massive ceiling mural of the galaxy - I probably couldn't prove to them that the Earth is older than that.
Waste of time is a waste. But it doesn't matter, in 6000 years we won't exist anymore because these people will have forgotten the actual year the Earth was supposed to have been created, and they will still be citing that factoid of theirs.
I find evil as defined by certain camps of Christianity fascinating. It enables an annoying self-righteous attitude... yet the same people are supposedly born damned because of something an ancestor did, and the same people who needed someone innocent to die for them just to have a chance at avoiding Hell.
I don't know for sure, but I think the rules that govern the religious world you live in are evil - not all the other people.
Yeah, come to think of it I might be mistaken. It's exactly 5999.9 years old. Damn, you got me.
On a serious note, Hinduism claims to be 111.5 trillion years old, and that the Earth is even older than that at 155 trillion. Seems we have a disagreement brewing on the origin and the age of this rock. Rather than have our greatest scientific minds look into it, lets just pull everyone together from various religions for a friendly debate and exchange of information.
I know you're joking, but it occurs to me that there are currently practiced religions thousands of years older than that. Hinduism is the first one to come to mind, starting 11,000 years ago. Anyone who actually believes the earth is younger than Hinduism, probably believes their God did that (condemned a billion souls to damnation), specifically to challenge our personal belief here in God's country, (formerly the land of Native American nature spirits.)
Yes, let the people have their say in the vetting of science. This is a democracy! So long as brother John down the road is unconvinced, and so long as local channel 8 (sponsored in part by Exxon Mobile) gives him a mic to debate these important issues, it's unsettled and there's no cause for alarm. Keep doing what you're doing. No one has to adjust. Nothing is wrong. Everything is fine.
We can only accept one apocalypse at a time, and the Christians got us first. Now if you'll excuse me, I'll be waiting on my lawn chair for Jesus.
Everyone is different. Living the dream at work is not typical. A dream job for you may just be a paycheck for someone else. Most jobs are compromises that we accept because our dreams are either unrealistic or unlikely, and finding work is more important.
If you can use your talents at work great. But I think the most an employer should expect from an employee is competency. Anything more is a gift.
I tend to think of opportunity as the result of being in the right place with the right skills and the right background. The job I ended up with is not what I had in mind, though at least it opened the door to a middle-class income and let me stay somewhat in line with my interest in computer graphics. At the same time though, the work I did want to do is flooded with way too many people thanks to game/film school diploma mills. I went to a local university, majored in computer science, and worked in a VR lab on campus. There I did some work for a local building contractor, which directly lead to my current doing building information modeling. I know what could have happened had I followed my dreams, but I'm not without regret either. I'm split on how I feel about it.
I can say though that what people will do best in may not be known to them until they experience it. The thing they wanted may turn out to be something they'll hate, and the thing they ended up with that they initially regretted may actually turn out to be a good deal.
I'm really safe in this job. I provide what's expected of my job title and quite a bit more due to my interests. I can be replaced, but they'll have a hard time doing it. The people out there like me but living their dreams often wouldn't settle for my job, even if their job is objectively awful, pays less, and they're abused by companies that don't consider them valuable.
I don't doubt it. It's where the laws come from, how they're used, and who they hurt that bothers me. Republicans are supposed to be about liberty, but they're about as freedom loving as North Korea is democratic.
But then no one will get to hear me complain impotently about this horrible website nobody forces me to use!
I'm a liberal, but even I'm tired of the job creation talk. "I work not because of you, but in spite of you." Is my internal narrative towards these people. They want so much credit for not screwing up as bad as the last clown. F-that, this was my own doing. I made this.
It's only like that now because this particular brand of politician (guess!) don't completely control the Federal government yet. Once they have that, everyone under them could simply be prevented from writing their own laws on whatever issues an industry pays to have ignored, be they states, counties, cities, towns, Native American Nations, whatever.
It's the same story with LGBT civil protection laws. In Republican states, cities can't write their own, and the state complains about and campaigns against any Federal laws. This is just another situation where that kind of lawmaking has taken effect. Once they have total control on the federal level, they'll stop complaining and everyone else will just be a radical insurgent. I know it's flippant to do so but I want to say it'll be illegal to complain after that. I wouldn't put it past them.
They already sell it. You have to buy it if you build a new machine - you can't even transfer a free upgrade from an old computer, and there's still a Microsoft tax on new PCs.
Free upgrades might be periodically available for big OS updates (no more releases or service packs, so they say). But I bet this kind of push is a one off, and the further back you are, the less likely you'll be bothered. Vista users aren't pestered with Windows 10 upgrades because the OS is considered too old and 10 year old hardware may not even run it. Windows 7 is next to be left alone. Then 8, 8.1, etc. Meanwhile the desktop will be neglected by Microsoft and everything developed for it will run on older OSes for a while.
So the trick may be to stick with OSes old enough to skip the free upgrade push, but not so old they miss out on security patches.
That said, there's going to be some people running Windows 10 now who will gradually find their PC is less able to run the system with the latest patches. Ten years down the line, their 2016 box may be too heavily encumbered... Users will have to find unsupported (or soon to be) copies of Windows (that may not have adequate driver support for the new hardware), buy a new computer just to stay productive, or switch to Linux.
Same story for the rest of us. We can't run Windows 8.1 forever...
I tend to think that one reason we still have an internet is because commercial businesses found a way to monetize it. If they had barriers to doing so, there would be a lot less of a reason to develop it, and more push back against it. (Much like the push back against the torrent aggregators or the piracy focused file sharing websites).
Bitcoin is still legal here because businesses found a use for it and they don't care about the drugs or money laundering. But if they couldn't use it, those other issues would be highlighted by their lobbyists to get it blocked and every Republican under the sun would be talking about it.
So long as it works for them, they're fine letting us have it too.
Also, I have a demonstration video on Youtube of a plugin that I sell. It's the main way people find out about my work, and there's a lot of people like me out there who advertise on YouTube and elsewhere. We're little guys, and there's no way you were talking about us, but a law banning all advertising online can have some wide reaching consequences, not to mention 1st amendment free speech issues. Even if you changed the wording to allow my advertising but forbid Comcast's, I'd be against it on principal... and I hate Comcast.
You can have your FOSS internet, and we can have our commercial internet, and we can live in peace without trying to ban each other's behavior.
Thankfully this will be over in late July when the free upgrade offer ends.
US Government: "We will fine you until you comply with the order giving us access to the servers."
Microsoft:"Those aren't our servers. We don't have access."
Government: "Comply or be fined a million dollars a day."
Microsoft files bankruptcy in AD 3276.
Thus begins the first Year of Linux on the Desktop.
Amen. I wouldn't say I love my job, but it's a branch of the kind of work I like to do (3d modeling and programming). I work the hardest when I work a full 8 hour day, then go home and instead of watching TV, work on my own projects. It is in these days I feel the most fulfilled. The days where I just work 8 hours and then veg out watching cartoons are the days I feel the least fulfilled.
Sometimes I'm needed to work on a crunch time schedule. I hate those, but I'm almost never alone in this and we're always happy at the end. It's like defeating a dragon. It didn't eat us alive, we're proud of ourselves, and now our boss's are really happy with us too.
Hard work in life is normal. What isn't is when you're too far removed from the fruits of your labor and are unable to take pride in it (like fast food or low-end retail). When you have pride in your work, and you can take credit for your part in it, it feels good.
To add to my previous post - one thing a manager can do to mitigate overworking employees is to hire more employees. A lot of people refuse to do this, especially during a recession, yet expect the same level of work, or have people over them expecting it. That's when your manager is supposed to stand up for you and the team and say, "We only have so many people. We need more if you want that much done in X amount of time. Please give me more time, or give me authorization to look for more people."
Yeah, things are way more complicated than that.
I'm near or at the bottom. I can't tell anyone what to do. I manage nothing, even the use of my own skills or time without talking first with my supervisor (who to his credit is likely to accept any ideas I might have - up to and including small software projects if it'll improve the workflow.)
This is normal, I'm not complaining.
My supervisor manages me and a few others in our department. His job is really stressful, in part because a lot of the time the people asking him to make stuff happen don't fully appreciate the amount of work involved, nor the time necessary to complete the task. That gets delegated to us to some degree, though he has a lot of similar work to handle as well. He manages us, but is also one of us.
He's not my ruler, but he is my boss.
His boss is also my boss, but not all of his bosses are also my boss - the one I answer to often speaks directly to me, and the ones my supervisor has to deal with often involve tasks that don't involve me. This is kind of a relief, because my boss's boss is a cool guy and we get along fine. He's probably rich, but he doesn't flaunt it and he's not at the top or anywhere near it - not that I care about that sort of thing.
HIS boss - my boss's, boss's, boss, I rarely speak to and does work I don't fully understand. I think he communicates with the people we do business with - the property owners we work for. These owners are what I consider the real bosses. Donald Trump "builds" his buildings the same way these guys do - with people like us. We never see them, not at my level anyway. We just make their desired thing happen - but I'm okay with that. These guys aren't the ones responsible for time management.
If your gripe is that all your time is spent working, it's probably a middle manager's fault (or yours). Not some distant "ruler", and definitely not an actual one (unless you live in North Korea). Though admittedly I work in a relatively flat organizational structure and a small one at that. I can and do see where the real time constraints occur - when other people make promises of performance on your behalf. If they do it poorly, you're just as f-ked as if you were the one to make that promise.
Here are my problems with Windows 10:
The privacy controls - I don't know how well they work (reports are - "not well"), I may want to block some addresses with the router to keep it from sending packets of audio and video to the central servers "telescreen style", and some settings are in strange places. In 8 they're all together and are about 5 or 6 toggle switches, in 10, there's many more, and things like WifiSense are kind of hidden away and separate.
The forced upgrades / nagware on older OSes - It makes me not want to upgrade out of spite. I did it anyway for my Surface Pro (gen 1), because I'm still curious, but I'll never do it for my other computers. I retain a copy of the 8.1 key and software in case I want to go back after the first 30 days.
I turned off Cortana, so the only benefits left to upgrading is the sort-of-returned Start Menu, and the ability to run Universal Apps in a window - both features are kind of pointless on a tablet (turned off in tablet mode). So I guess the remaining benefit is that I'm keeping up with the app store... that I don't use... and Edge, which I also don't use... nevermind.
The final issue is that the license is not transferable. I plan to build a new machine soon. If I upgrade my license on the desktop I still have to buy Windows 10 for the new box. If the old box is going to keep any OS, it might as well stick to the one released during its era (the box before the box is being used as a security camera DVR, and retains Windows 7 even though I could have upgraded it to Windows 8, 8.1, or 10).
I will need to install GWX Control Panel on these machines to avoid any surprises. Upgrades tend to mess with software licenses - things like Zbrush, Unity Pro, and Max will absolutely break after an upgrade, and you'll have to re-activate, contact support, or both. They also mess with drivers - I still use an Intuos 2 Wacom tablet, and while I did confirm it works with Windows 10, the new OS is considered the "last", and will then be subjected to continuous, mandatory, gradual, and major updates that are for sure to break something that old eventually.
I practically shilled for MS when they released the Surface Pro (which I'm using for this post), but man, when MS wants to f-up badly, they know just how to do it. I hope they see the light soon. Any more of this and businesses will absolutely abandon Windows. I'm already hearing about PCs being upgraded at work. Its insanity.
Thankfully this all ends in July. I'm sure we'll get lots of cheerful statistics from Microsoft, but it'll be over and they'll leave us alone.
Occasionally I'll do long division by hand. Sometimes I don't trust the calculator, or rather... my fingers punching the numbers. This happens when I'm doing more than one thing and I want to be careful. I find the scrap of paper handy for keeping up with where I've been, more so than a calculator's record scroll. Sometimes I cheat and do both to check my work.
I see it, multiplication, fractions and percentages, and basic algerbra, as essential skills.
I know a guy who can't calculate 20% tips without a calculator. When I tried to teach him, he just shuts down and asked me to stop. He can't do simple math, this is a real problem that's really common. The guy is really smart, but schools failed him big time and he'll never learn how to tip without a calculator, let alone balance a budget (even with a computer... tried to teach him Excel with predictable results).
Kids are in school to learn to learn. That's why a lot of it seems pointless at first, but appreciated later. People do math in day to day life to figure something out. Like the ability to read, it's a tool to learn something.
And we know just how secure government computers are...
You're the program in the machine, where as before you were the program and the actuator. Now the car does the steering and braking for you - at your command through a mechanical/digital interface.
If you try being a passenger in one without a driver, you're going to break yourself. Don't do that. Let the self driving cars do that for you when they gain sapience.
Nothing so convoluted. He's just talking about playing Eve Online.