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Comment: Let's become a giant shopping mall (Score 2, Informative) 151

by hessian (#44161247) Attached to: FWD.us Remixes the Statue of Liberty Greeting

We'll invite everyone in.

Culture? We have none. We are all citizens of the television.

Heritage? None. We are arbitrary, gray and without origins. We need government, television and shopping to feel a sense of place.

Values? We have nothing in common except that we like money, we like sex, and we like to shop.

It's the path to Idiocracy + Brave New World.

Why does Zuckerberg support it? Cheap labor. People who permanent vote for no majority rule. And more customers who haven't yet gotten jaded about the decay.

Comment: Scientists know nothing of politics or military (Score 0) 193

by hessian (#44161231) Attached to: A Case For Unilateral US Nuclear Warhead Reductions

We got through the Cold War by reminding them that if they stepped out of line, we'd kill every last one of them.

That works.

Being a peace-oriented wuss encourages them to attack.

Don't send mixed signals.

Do bad, you die. (clear signal)

We want peace, bad is what? (mixed signal)

+ - For China, hacking may be all about Sun Tzu and World War III->

Submitted by hessian
hessian writes "As I've had more time to study the behavior of the PRC, I've come to believe that China isn't necessarily gearing up to start World War III, but they are planning for how they might win it, should our two nations find ourselves in a shooting war.

Sun Tzu was a Chinese military strategist thought to have lived around 500 years before the modern era, and widely credited with authoring one of the foundational texts on warfare, The Art of War."
Link to Original Source

Comment: The whole idea is to "displace American engineers" (Score 1) 270

by hessian (#44138025) Attached to: Immigration Bill Passes the Senate, Includes More H-1B Visas

Think about it.

If American engineers are good enough, why import anyone?

If they're not good enough, what are they saying -- foreign engineers are better? For what reason?

The point is that other nations have less developed economies and so it's cheaper to import these people and then drop them when they hit 40.

Either way however, an American job is displaced and you're worth less as a result.

Comment: An epitaph for software (Score 2) 238

by hessian (#43968069) Attached to: HP Discontinue OpenVMS

development moved to India in 2009

That's how they always kill it: they outsource to the perceived cheaper labor, which lets them claim that the product got discriminated against by the market, when the market is reacting to the fact that the project got farmed out, thus is unlikely to have frequent updates, thus is a dead-end project because users won't get the support they need or a competitive product. RIP

+ - Why so many people–including scientists–suddenly believe in an after->

Submitted by hessian
hessian writes "Recent polls across the developed world are starting to tell an intriguing tale. In the U.S., religion central for the West, belief in heaven has held steady, even ticking upwards on occasion, over the past two decades. Belief in hell is also high, but even Americans show a gap between the two articles of faith—81 per cent believed in the former in 2011, as opposed to 71 per cent accepting the latter. Elsewhere in the Western world the gap between heaven and hell believers is more of a gulf—a 2010 Canadian poll found more than half of us think there is a heaven, while fewer than a third acknowledge hell. What’s more, monotheism’s two destinations are no longer all that are on offer. In December a survey of the 1970 British Cohort group—9,000 people, currently 42 years old—found half believed in an afterlife, while only 31 per cent believed in God. No one has yet delved deeply into beliefs about the new afterlife—the cohort surveyors didn’t ask for details—but reincarnation, in an newly multicultural West, is one suggested factor. So too is belief in what one academic called “an unreligious afterlife,” the natural continuation of human consciousness after physical death.

While most of the current bestselling accounts of afterlife experiences are recognizably Christian—at least in outline—signs of changing beliefs can be found in them too. Nor are the new travellers—who include a four-year-old boy and a middle-aged neurosurgeon—what religious skeptics would think of as the usual suspects. Colton Burpo, now 13, “died” 10 years ago from a ruptured appendix, and spent three minutes of earthly time in heaven—some of it in Jesus’s lap, some of it speaking with a miscarried sister whose existence he had never been told about—before being pulled back to Earth by his surgical team. Since 2010, when his father, Todd, a Nebraska minister, published his account of what Colton told him, Heaven is for Real has sold more than 7.5 million copies. If Colton’s story sounds like a contemporary take on an ancient Christian motif—“unless you become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3)—the same can’t be said about Eben Alexander’s post-religious cosmic experience."
Link to Original Source

+ - Jeff Hanneman, Guitarist, Dies at 49->

Submitted by hessian
hessian writes "Jeff Hanneman, a guitarist for the influential metal band Slayer, who helped shape the group’s sonic assault and wrote some of its most popular — and controversial — songs, died on Thursday at a hospital near his home east of Los Angeles. He was 49.

(I know a lot of people in tech listen to a lot of Slayer. Please consider this article as on-topic in that light.)"
Link to Original Source

+ - Game Preferences Among Atheistic and Religious Individuals->

Submitted by hessian
hessian writes "Burris and Petrican (2011) recently showed that atheists are less capable of internally simulating vivid, emotionally evocative experiences relative to those who identify with religion. Consequently, relative to religious individuals, atheists were expected to find the engaging, multisensory experience offered by virtual gaming environments to be an especially appealing form of play. This hypothesis was supported. Indeed, atheists did not rate narrative-oriented tabletop games more appealing than did religious individuals, and rated them as less appealing compared to agnostic/no religion individuals. The disparity in atheists' game preferences was further polarized by individual differences in psychological absorption. Atheists' preference for “what you see is what you get” video game environments over tabletop games that require greater imaginative effort for less immersive benefits may reflect a broad orientation that provides an experiential basis for disbelief in the unseen."
Link to Original Source

+ - Can you break this code from Boards of Canada?->

Submitted by hessian
hessian writes "This is probably another dumb marketing scheme, but it looks like viral inseminators have been sneaking around this URL for a Boards of Canada promotion. Unlike most of these, however, it involves some actual hackery content

Any ideas? I know nothing about this ‘Boards of Canada’ band (except the soundtracks from Until the Light Takes Us) but I have to admit a quickening of the pulse at an OpenVMS prompt."
Link to Original Source

Do you suffer painful recrimination? -- Nancy Boxer, "Structured Programming with Come-froms"

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