25 karma · joined March 9, 2015
an epic science book which attempts to grapple with some of these questions.
from the Wikipedia page:
"Taylor asserts that the techniques used by cults to influence others are similar to those used by other social groups, and compares similar totalitarian aspects of cults and communist societies. These techniques include isolating the individual and controlling their access to information, challenging their belief structure and creating doubt, and repeating messages in a pressurized environment."
It's my view that ^ is generally what is at play with regard to the lower and middle classes in the United States.
The studies on humans that are often cited are typically unscientific because they're inclusive of individuals who also use other substances that are known to be neurotoxic such as alcohol or even methamphetamine. Also more importantly these recreational users are not given a supply of pure MDMA so it's safe to assume that some percentage of them are actually ingesting a cocktail of MDMA adulterated with other substances.
With all of this said, the verdict is still out on whether or not this is neurotoxic in human at normal doses.. there definitely is a long term tolerance that builds up to the effect of the drug but this alone does not prove anything about neurotoxicity.
Wouldn't you then be stuck in the awkward position of engaging mysterious potentencies which impact your life but who's fundamental operations seem utterly mysterious to you ?
To me, philosophically speaking, that sounds like a recipe for disaster. The analogy that spring to mind is a tourist onboard a nuclear submarine who is jabbing his finger wildly at the controls without knowing what any of the buttons and levers do. I mean it sounds like good fun if thrill seeking is your cup of tea, and I can see how it might be possible to convince yourself there's "something there", but yet it's an inherently risky proposition is it not ?
Instead, the Buddha explains the perceived continuity of the human personality by describing it as composed of five attributes (skandhas) none of which contain a permanent entity.
This ensures that nobody ever needs to go hungry, it puts money in people's pockets because now they don't have to spend as much of their income on food, and it accomplishes this all without prying into the private details of anyone's life.
The goal in my opinion should not be to "give everyone an income" but rather to give everyone a safety net on top of which they can attempt to build a life for themselves. It trains people to be used to sharing and giving the things that we need to sustain ourselves, which is healthy and nurtures a cooperative spirit among men.
^ if that's included then it some kind of a scam IMHO. Why would an team want to program in a legally onerous environment as opposed to say, a mall food court ?
Could this also be rephrased as "separation is illusion" ?
In addition to making the web more centralized, forcing everyone into HTTPS actually makes it much easier to effect broad scale traffic analysis. On top of that many info-sec experts suspect that the actual cipher in play here may eventually be proven to have significant weaknesses at some future date. AND HTTPS is more expensive to support in terms of bandwidth, CPU, and increased latency. It could result it more coal being burned each year to push all of those extra bytes around.
Seaweed an even more potent source of iodine, and the Japanese eat a lot of it. The concentration of iodine in these marine plants ranges from 0.5-8.0 mg/g. Terrestrial plants, in contrast, contain only trace amounts of iodine, 0.001 mg/g.
In 1964, the Nutrition Section of Japan's Bureau of Public Health found that people in Japan consumed a daily average of 4.5 g of seaweed with measured iodine content of 3.1 mg/g, or 13.8 mg of iodine. Saltwater fish and shellfish contain iodine, but one would have to eat 15-25 pounds of fish to get 13 mg of iodine.
[Nutrition Section, Bureau of Public Health. Nutrition in Japan, 1964. Tokyo, Japan: Ministry of Health and Welfare; 1965. ]
I look at things like projected read/write throughput, latency characteristics, total data volume, concurrency, and whether or not the problem domain actually requires highly relational queries.
I think that a lot of shops don't put enough thinking into figuring out what kind of data access patterns they'll need to support throughout the life-cycle of the business. This is no big deal if the product doesn't experience growth. But in terms of rich web applications which begin to experience growth the team inevitably ends up with a massive scaling problem unless their system architecture was designed to support these access patterns from the ground up.
It seems that this "growing pains" scaling nightmare has become almost a right of passage for successful tech startups. Founders are generally led to believe that it's a good thing for them to need to sell equity to outside investors in order to "scale out" a much larger team to build out the infrastructure required to perform in-flight rocket surgery on the application before it either explodes or becomes increasing cost inefficient.
While this whole process greatly benefits VCs, the high end tech engineering job market, and recruiters, it's absolutely terrible the founding team because it means they inevitably get massively diluted as a consequence of experiencing success. I'm not saying it's a conspiracy, but I am saying there is massive financial incentive to keep this kind of technical knowledge about best practices an open secret within the highly paid IT consultancy world.
TLDR: It's my supposition that small teams can build scalable, composable, systems by thinking about web scale data access patterns from the beginning.
The candidate would choose a data-store for the problem domain, write a multi-threaded web crawler to ingest the data, implement some stream-processing components (parsers, filters, etc), and create a simple HTML5 chart view of the (real-time) statistics around the data.
The tools he chooses would clue us in to his/her overall knowledge of distributed systems, graph theory, data-science, networking, real-time systems theory, etc The requirement to create a small statistics visualization web app to display the data will encourage the candidate to demonstrate a requisite knowledge of web standards XHMTL/CSS/Javascript.
The overall terseness, neatness, and quality of the code is what matters rather than the "coolness" of the tools. Many candidates will lose focus on the actual data-analysis problem itself as they get bogged down in the details around building a platform to solve it. The ability to remain focused on the actual problem while writing terse production quality code is what you're looking for in the interview, and the candidate should be informed of that ahead of time.
p.s. the above problem is not meant to serve as a 'bar to reach' in terms of whether or not to hire someone, but rather it's a problem designed to measure a candidate's overall "full stackness" by forcing him/her to struggle towards solving a honest to goodness "full-stack" problem
The big change we're seeing in the IT job market is that now these same sorts of expectations which are standard in more mature job markets are now often times being applied to IT knowledge workers. The new trend is that it's reasonable to expect for employees to have completed significant projects which demonstrate their knowledge and competency in a non-trivial way, which is akin to a doctrinal thesis or post graduate work.
In my opinion what this means in practical terms is that after you finish your 4 year degree, or acquire the equivalent CS knowledge on your own, it behooves you to plan for yourself a period of time, perhaps 6 months or a year to work on actually creating something which demonstrates the knowledge that you have acquired. You will own the IP for this "field work", so you can use it to qualify yourself to future employers.
What I suspect is that in the future this field work will be more important than the actual 4 year degree if it's not already. Personally I have no experience with hiring, but since it's part of my planning I think about it frequently. I suspect that already it's the case that startup hiring teams get more out of examining a well built implementation of a non-trivial concept than they do out of examining a college diploma.
TLDR: It's unreasonable to consider yourself to be a qualified anthropologist or an archeologist without having first done field work and documented in a thesis paper. This is coming to IT.
For me.. cyberpunk was cool because of Neil Stephenson, William Gibson, and uhh ShadowRun.. Somehow this meshed with the rave scene and I guess also 'industrial' music which was slowly becoming cool.. but for a while.. it wasn't quite there yet and being a hacker had negative coolness connotations kind of like being into MTG or D&D.
I never thought about the release of the movie "the Matrix" as being the pivot moment after which the consensus view of hackerdom coolness shifted (at least in highschools across america), but you're probably right.
When I first started going to these tons of people there were BBS sysops, others were HAM radio enthusiasts who were learning about microwave packet radio, others were hardware hackers, telephony phreaks, ascii artists, and a few were pro infosec geeks.
Nobody was there because of the idea of "launching a startup" everybody was there because they wanted to learn about the Internet and the emerging technologies associated with it. When I first started going to these meetings in my teens most normal people hadn't even heard of the Internet (aside from AOL), so there definitely wasn't the idea that you're going to get rich just by hacking.
We had a blast just helping each other learn things like BSD sockets, networking, or hardware hacking for the sheer joy of it. Hacking was a FUN HOBBY but not one that would get you chicks or gobs of cash.. it was kind of like ANSI ART, demo scene, or HAM Radio which a lot of us were also interested in. There was absolutely zero pressure to achieve anything other than to have fun by learning.
There was a certain hacker ethos that existed back then which seems to be gone now as geek becomes sheek. You can still get a feel for what it used to be by reading some of the literature.
Here's a couple of books off my shelf from that time period which I highly recommend:
http://www.amazon.com/Masters-Deception-Gang-Ruled-Cyberspac...
http://www.amazon.com/Cryptonomicon-Neal-Stephenson/dp/00605...
What if the woman knows that her rural grandparents or great aunt would probably look after the kids while the mom was looking for a job (perhaps living in her car part of the time) ? In that case then what you're talking about is not a threat of violence, what you're talking about is a threat of having to leave the so called middle class lifestyle and fall into a diminished or poverty-stricken lifestyle.
It's a horrible thing to have to contemplate because and the lower you fall in the socio-economic todem pole the more physical dangers you're exposed to during the course of everyday living, but that doesn't mean her situation is the same as rape
The word or concept has nothing to do with jurisprudence or the idea of jurisdiction which is what many people here keep referencing. A word still holds it's proper definition in the minds of men and it is prudent to defend them as such irregardless of what goes on within government.
It sounds like the young lady experienced sexual harassment and decided that it was worth it to willingfuly have sex with a coworker in order to continue to prop up a financial relationship so that she wouldn't have to deal with the burden of needing to take on some debt, or move in with a relative while she goes out to find another job.
You are assuming that she can somehow show evidence that she believed that it was nearly impossible for her to get another job, and in addition that she believed that losing her income stream would have caused her or her children to actually starve to death. Maybe if she lived in a POW camp where prisoners are assigned strict food rations and a guard was threatening her with losing her only way to get a meal then it would make sense to call it rape rather than sexual harassment. In America though you can go work at McDonalds if you don't have a prior felony record or even go to a homeless shelter.
She could have just sued the bastard to recoup those losses anyways right ? (in theory) Especially if she has that legal background.
I'm not trying to defend the criminal who sexually harassed her but I am trying to point out that falsely accusing someone of rape is a serious crime unto itself.