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Comment: Re:Thanks, Obama. (Score 1) 172

by causality (#46476265) Attached to: Mars Rover Opportunity Faces New Threat: Budget Ax

BAD MOD: Not everyone will agree with this, but that doesn't mean it's flamebait.

Anyone who needed to have that explained to them is demonstrably resistant to facts and so-called "common sense" and is therefore a lost cause. Mass numbers of non-individuals agreeing with you bandwagon-style is the only thing they would find persuasive.

Comment: Re:Real World (Score 1) 91

by causality (#46470987) Attached to: Study: Happiness Improves Developers' Problem Solving Skills

Your tastes and preferences define your notion of importance. This is empirically verifiable.

I don't dispute that. What I contend is that, while doing so, one should recognize that it amounts to viewing the world through the lens of one's own interests. Any decisions made are tempered by that knowledge.

It's a self-awareness beyond standard ego consciousness. It tends to make you truly ashamed of and prepared to abandon any sort of self-centered, exploitative motive.

It's one of those things that anyone is capable of doing, provided they really want to.

Comment: Re:get'em laid (Score 1) 91

by causality (#46470643) Attached to: Study: Happiness Improves Developers' Problem Solving Skills



Comment: Re:Real World (Score 3, Insightful) 91

by causality (#46470631) Attached to: Study: Happiness Improves Developers' Problem Solving Skills


I would go so far as to say that you never truly reached adulthood until you can clearly and effortlessly distinguish objective, evidence-based reality from your own subjective feelings and opinions and wishes. Objectivity is when your own tastes and preferences do not influence your decision-making about anything important.

Until you can do that, life is a chaotic mess with no solutions except those that create more and more problems.

Comment: Re:Um, (Score 2) 91

by causality (#46470615) Attached to: Study: Happiness Improves Developers' Problem Solving Skills

Aren't happier people better at pretty much everything? Isn't that sort of the problem with depression?

It's also the problem with alienation and dehumanization, not merely depression. Go out sometime and see for yourself, how rarely people talk to one another like fellow human beings. Usually they would rather talk at someone, listen poorly and keep interrupting (because they have no patience) even when they are listening to an answer to their own question, and generally can't relax and slow down and "take in" much of anything. The irony is, this rushed and hurried approach to life is so error-prone that they accomplish fewer of their goals than they would otherwise.

Compared to that, depression is just a particular special case, an instance of a much more widespread problem with the way we live.

Comment: Re:Top gun manufacturers fail to protect users (Score 4, Insightful) 162

by causality (#46456883) Attached to: Top E-commerce Sites Fail To Protect Users From Stupid Passwords

From pointing the gun at their face.

Indeed. And "rules that require even more complexity in passwords" backfire because the notion of protecting people from themselves is fundamentally flawed. Note the way you practically never see this notion questioned in any headline or summary.

Comment: Re:They didn't "cheat". (Score 2) 288

by causality (#46418149) Attached to: How Ireland Got Apple's $9 Billion Australian Profit


It depends on whether the audience has the maturity to read about an event without automatically getting upset about it. Sadly, most Americans have been conditioned by repeated example to do the opposite. This is highly desirable from the standpoint of the media, because irritated emotions tend to shut down critical thinking.

Comment: Re:Remember Legal != Moral (Score 5, Insightful) 288

by causality (#46418131) Attached to: How Ireland Got Apple's $9 Billion Australian Profit

It's not cheating if the ones making the rules (The Aussie government) says it's perfectly legal.

It makes me wonder exactly when and how those rules got onto the law books, how they were sponsored, and what relationship the supporting politicians had with the major corporations of that time.

There are lots of ways to cheat that are legally legitimate.

Comment: Re:could and should and all that (Score 1) 131

by causality (#46396009) Attached to: Sulfur Polymers Could Enable Long-Lasting, High-Capacity Batteries

First, you have to prove that you deserve a flying car.

Then you have to prove that you can be trusted to dive/pilot a flying car.

Given how the vast majority of people drive, almost no one passes the second test.

I'm not claiming that I do either. I also know that I should not ride a motorcycle because I don't have the right kind of attention for it.

With a motorcycle your main problem is the other drivers.

What you would discover (or be reminded of) is that average people don't put any thought or attention energy into anything that isn't directly in their selfish interests. George Carlin called it stupidity and consumerism, Erich Fromm called it alienation, I call it spiritual infancy. Regardless, that's the deal. The SUV driver doesn't see your little motorcycle as a threat and isn't likely to spend much time looking out for you (meanwhile they can't move out of the way fast enough for a merging tractor-trailer - see how that works?). You have far more to lose in such a collision.

If you actually talk to motorcycle riders (at least in the US) you'll hear the same thing over and over.

Comment: Re:Abjectly false argument (Score 5, Informative) 235

You mean like illegally tapping telephones then giving obviously bogus justifications to the court?

Don't worry. No matter how many cases like this we know about, the next time you are in a courtroom and it's your word against the police officer's, you will lose. Every time.

So you see, they have everything under control.

Comment: Re:"suicide, which all religions frown upon" (Score 1) 363

by causality (#46388695) Attached to: UAE Clerics' Fatwa Forbids Muslims From Traveling To Mars

Let me put it this way: I can make infinite creatively worded claims, which can in no manner be disproved by you.

None of which would be falsifiable (c.f. Karl Poppler) by experiment, and therefore not scientific in nature. Hence the fallacy of demanding proof and referring to scientific methods in the middle of the discussion.

The irritation is that we have a casual conversation. At no point (and the point for this would be the very beginning) is it declared to be a scientific discussion. No one agreed to adhere to rigorous scientific methods. But then you say something that the other party happens not to like, and suddenly an outcry is heard for scientific proof.

Like I said, it's just a way to demand that the other guy substantiate his beliefs while feeling no obligation to return the favor. It's a desire to put the other person at a disadvantage while maintaining one's own air of legitimacy. It's that instant "hah I win, you lose" effortless slam-dunk victory everyone on this site seems so desperate to experience. Personally if I want to outsmart or out-debate someone I like to have worked for it, feel that I have earned it, and most importantly I make my intention known from the start. If I have to use cheap-shot tactics to avoid a level playing field, just to feel like I am right, then my own views must not be very sound.

I have speculated in the past that the constant reoccurrance of this phenomenon is likely because of personal insecurities on the part of many Slashdotters. It matches strongly the need for validation and a sense of superiority that insecure people tend to display.

Comment: Re:It's just a tool I guess (Score 1) 294

by causality (#46358589) Attached to: Doctors Say New Pain Pill Is "Genuinely Frightening"

That's the only reason why.

No it's not; you're forgetting Richard Nixon's white-hot hatred of hippies ;-)

One could also mention the blatantly racist methods used to promote prohibition of both cannabis and cocaine. But like Nixon's control-freak hatred, that was a means to an end. The lobbyists I mentioned wield the real power in Washington and decide what becomes or remains the law of the land.

Comment: Re:It's just a tool I guess (Score 4, Informative) 294

by causality (#46356957) Attached to: Doctors Say New Pain Pill Is "Genuinely Frightening"

Both heroin and cocaine were originally developed as medicine. Turns out that their potential for misuse far, far outweighs any medical benefit.

And yet they both are still used in medicine (http://www.medicinenet.com/cocaine_hydrochloride-topical/article.htm). While marijuana is classified by the US feds as having no medical use. Go figure.

The cannabis plant is too easy to cultivate and has too many non-drug uses that threaten several powerful industries with lots of lobbyists. That's why something with demonstrated medical use that is practically impossible to overdose on is listed as a Schedule I. That's the only reason why.


by causality (#46356913) Attached to: Doctors Say New Pain Pill Is "Genuinely Frightening"

I agree that "regulate the hell out of it" is a bad solution but "let's just keep it illegal so we don't have to regulate it" is an even worse solution because "illegal" is basically synonymous with "regulated out of existence".

If by "regulated out of existence" you mean "supplied by the black market" with all the problems that go along with that, then yes.


by causality (#46356899) Attached to: Doctors Say New Pain Pill Is "Genuinely Frightening"

I agree that the war on drugs is stupid and causes more harm than good. However, the counter argument that "people should be allowed to do things that only hurts themselves" is pretty poor in the case of most addictions (including but definitely not limited to drugs).

The question is whether jail is an environment that will make them better people and help them overcome these problems. A related question is whether armed police, not doctors/therapists, should be the ones we send to deal with people who have not used fraud or violence against another person.

Unfortunately, most people only think of the immediate physical effects (e.g. secondhand smoke) and don't think of the more long-term effects, especially those which are harder to quantify.

It's hard to think of a more damaging long-term effect than expanding the definition of "crime" to include "something other than using force/fraud to harm another human being", the subsequent mutilation of the Fourth Amendment, the asset forfeiture abuses that continue to happen, and the increasingly aggressive paramilitary police that even the law-abiding are afraid of. Ask an older person about what police used to be like sometime.

When you go out to buy, don't show your silver.