heresyforme

Shoot, I'd be willing to give it go and if I'm behind I'd be willing to take a pay cut for the 3-4 weeks it would take me to get up to speed.

It's a non-quantifiable scenario, whether kids or wife come first. Who do you love more? Does your wife get more Christmas presents more of your time? Does she get more of your time?

In a divorce, both relationships have failed. The base purpose of marriage is to procreate, not that it is necessary, but on some level we realize that this is truth in Western Civilization.

The father's email was hardly ferocious. When children are young, we express disappointment when they do something they should not do and express encouragement when they do something they should.

" People don’t behave badly because they lack information about their shortcomings. They behave badly because they’ve fallen into patterns of destructive behavior from which they’re unable to escape."

The behavior described by the father could hardly be genetic or environmental shortcomings. If lack of information is not the cause, then why do we say that problem youth need more and more education with superman-like teachers and fewer kids per class?

"Human behavior flows from hidden springs and calls for constant and crafty prodding more than blunt hectoring. The way to get someone out of a negative cascade is not with a ferocious e-mail trying to attack their bad behavior. It’s to go on offense and try to maximize some alternative good behavior. There’s a trove of research suggesting that it’s best to tackle negative behaviors obliquely, by redirecting attention toward different, positive ones."

Yes, hidden springs that mysterious yet totally doable thing that, if we did it right, then we'd know we were doing it, somehow.

"Still, it's worth noting that the population groups most at risk for major depression are women, members of minority groups and people unable to work or unemployed, and those without health insurance, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."

A strange thing to add as an addendum. Why are these particular groups singled out? And in particular they noted that "people unable to work or unemployed" are predisposed to depressive episodes after working long hours of overtime. How can they work overtime, if they are unemployed?

The study appears to have targeted men and women of middle-age, not particular sub-groups within those two groups. I'm not saying that it didn't need the addendum, but it certainly seems out of place here.

I did a quick search through the comments, but didn't see anyone mention crime and schools. Believe it or not, there are start-ups in the Southern states and they tend to be in the cities (New Orleans, Baton Rouge LA, Jackson MS) where crime is pretty bad. If you have children, the public schools are pretty bad, so you'll want to send them to private school which will run you 6-10K per child.

The only alternative is the suburbs. It's tricky, but I found a place about 20 minutes and 20 miles away, but we looked for over a year. The schools are relatively good and the private schools tend to be a bit cheaper.

People don't want big houses (please show me the evidence that they want big houses), but big houses tend to cost more, which means the neighbors you'll likely have are people who are educated, well-behaved, friendly and have a good credit score. "Big houses" is a polite way of saying I don't want to live by people who can't afford a big house.

...I should also mention. Yeah, bus rides - you don't want to do that.

The best programmer I met in college quit after 2 semesters because he already knew the concepts.

However, aren't we really talking about IQ? From what I can remember, companies really started using degrees when testing for IQ became illegal. If a possible employee has an IQ of 120, then you can be pretty certain he's going to pick most of the concepts you throw at him. The college degree filters (beginning with the SAT, ACT, and high school diploma) a lot of low IQ people out the process (at least, in theory) and if not, it at least filters out those individuals who don't work hard improving their mental capacity (for instance, cognitive abilities may be improved through the study of music).

What an employer really needs is the ability to quickly filter out bad candidates. In reality, it is HR that does the culling. They don't know how to filter technical candidates, so the first thing they use is the college degree.

I'm actually a little shocked by these numbers. Even movies seem to have a better return on investment. They would do better offering the game freely with 3-6 months of play for the price of a movie to bring in as many as first time players as possible.

I disagree with the idea that "the second and third functions are no longer relevant".

"The second function is to explain the phenomenon like the seasons and functioning of the cosmos. The third function is to ordain and maintain some kind of sociological order."

The second function is constantly being refined as we discover more and challenge existing ideas. The third function is the basis for any civilization. One might be tempted to mark the end of Western Civilization in the 20th century. Hence, the third function must, once again, function.

Nothing happens in a vacuum:

"But the most infamous event was when the captured men of Otranto were given the choice to convert to Islam or die; 800 of them held to their Christian faith and were beheaded en masse at a place now known as the Hill of the Martyrs. The Turkish fleet then went on to attack the cities of Vieste, Lecce, Taranto, and Brindisi, and destroyed the great library at the Monastero di San Nicholas di Casole, before returning to Ottoman territory in November."

"...it will surely surprise those who believe that millions of people died in the Spanish Inquisition to learn that throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, less than three people per year were sentenced to death by the Inquisition throughout the Spanish Empire, which ranged from Spain to Sicily and Peru. Secular historians given access to the Vatican’s archives in 1998 discovered that of the 44,674 individuals tried between 1540 and 1700, only 804 were recorded as being relictus culiae saeculari. The 763-page report indicates that only 1 percent of the 125,000 trials recorded over the entire inquisition ultimately resulted in execution by the secular authority, which means that throughout its infamous 345-year history, the dread Spanish Inquisition was less than one-fourteenth as deadly on an annual basis as children’s bicycles."

The Irrational Atheist, Vox Day

Is that really science? I could follow the same steps to balance my checkbook in order to determine spending periods.

If they'd created a small model of the Earth and applied what they know in order to determine the truth of their hypothesis, than yes, I would say they're doing science. Has the bar really dropped this low?

I really don't care how much it costs THEM. I care how much it costs ME.

I've been reading books from the Gutenburg Project on my PDA for a few years. Someone recently recommended a book to me that was released about 10 years ago. I go to buy it in electronic format and it's $24.99. I pass. I end up borrowing it from someone I know instead.

For me, I must provide the storage medium, electricity, and data connection. On top of that I must pay 10.00 - 30.00 for a small file that possibly contains some kind of DRM that would leave me unable to transfer the file to another device. What did I buy?

However, what if I was able to buy 50 ebooks for $25. Well, I would probably go for something like that. Right now, it's simply not worth the time, energy and money to buy what's on the market.

A corporation is a government construct, hence it is a socialist construct, not a capitalist one. It is a direct creation of and controlled by the government.

<a href="http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0411e.asp>; "We should recognize that state corporatism is a form of socialism, and it is nearly inevitable in a mixed economy that the introduction of more socialism will cartelize industry and consolidate wealth in the hands of the few." </a>

Therefore, describing it as capitalist is misleading.

Agreed. Patrick Warburton, though manly looking, isn't quite the alpha male that a football star type represents. Heck, Warburton was the Tick; a live action comedy character based on a cartoon character for children and Puddy on Seinfeld. Not exactly the guy known for playing an alpha male.

Apple is for betas, plain and simple. MS is missing an opportunity to reach the alphas.

MS is missing a huge opportunity. While Apple may be reaching the tech savvy and elite, MS needs to market to the "everyday average normal guy". Look at the Chevy "Like a friggin' rock" commercials. Is that guy going to buy some namby-pamby macbook if there's a real man's alternative somewhere?

Instead of two nerds making passive-aggressive beta-male comments to each other in the "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" commercials; imagine replacing the nerd with a Brett Farve type of guy. Not only is he an alpha male, but he's intelligent enough to be successful.

Watch what questions you ask about a persons personal life in an interview. Depending on how and what you ask, you could set yourself up for legal action.

New OS stagnation could be showing the trend away from the OS. A return to the terminal? Cloud computing could be the first new step of many. In many ways we may no longer need the local OS.