I worry about A.I
The Hoyts theatre chain has an appalling website.
I'm hanging out for an Android phone
Telling people they deserve the laws they get for not paying attention to politicians is just short hand for saying only politicians have rights.
Apart from being annoyingly awkward, Bliuetooth has one particularly annoying facet....
The nonsense the media says
Markup and styling are inseparable in web technologies, so they ought interact appropriately
The pace of technical developement is ferocious, and the diffilculty in keeping up is especially troubling for computer Operating Systems.
Prescriptionists who insist 'man' is gender neutral as talking bollocks, not English
Is it economic competiton that drives quality down?
Bloody Ldap nonsense!
What sort of ignorant coward advises others not to go to Gallipoli because it scares them?
Eclipse sucks.
I just checked out Firefox 3.5's geolocation feature, expecting it to maybe get my city and it pinpointed my home address.
It's quite easy to compel standards compliance
A long time ago I took Economics 101 at university and dropped it as a load of bollocks.
Websites that rely on flash should be added to a black list so we can all go about blissfully ignorant of their existence
Pricks tugging on a knee jerk rope of patriotism annoy me again
Doesn't patronising parochialism get your goat?
Every computer language has flaws.
I chose Ruby over Python
I'm thinking people who bang the Law and Order drum do it to drown out the voice of dissent and liberty.
NATO's aid to a successful rebellion does not give it ownership of the success.
Would someone, please, pay a good designer to work on desktops for Linux.
Android has a bit of a problem in it's variety of hardware.
I've just been watching a program about the future of media consumption, and it made the same old mistake about TV/Computer convergence that people always make.
How many movies do we see that end satisfyingly?
Troops killing civilians, no matter what rules they follow, are murderers...
New Zealand has the worst government it's had since the nineteenth century.
The very concept of patents on software is ridiculous, even more so the preposterous idea that prior art means anything.
Fantasies about reality and authority may comfort some, but have no place in civil governance
What difference is there between my ethical position and anothers' religious practice?
Corporate entitlement has gotten ludicrous
The mainstream media keeps whining that the world needs them to keep a check on power.
Mother Earth can be a real Mutha
Companies that abuse openly available standards (even if proprietary) really get on my wick. For instance...
Remeber the Jetsons? A world where automation meant people only needed to work an hour or two a day to afford a comfortable life. Who ever thought economics could work that way?
The National Party of New Zealand wants to make NZ citizens bitches for wealthy people; peasants servile to their needs.
The single most important thing for civil society is the rule of law and repression of corruption.
I am not scared of the wider world attacking me, my government oppressing me is the more credible danger
What's the point of news snippets for the brain dead?
Why did Fox's attempts to emulate Jon Stewart fail?
People eager to constrain their identity within a recognisable national sterotype are pissing me off
I was just reading an article about some scientists theory that instruction given with religious authority can make people more aggresive.
These people used some admitted religious and not so religious people in an experiment where they were tested (using some games) to find how agressive each person was. Then they were read passages of what they were told were biblical, or for some simply historic, text. And some people were read passages that explicitly ended with divine commandments of violence (such as "go forth and smite the whatits commanded the lord").
Then the participants were tested again. and the result was that people who were read texts commanding divine violence, no matter how religious or aggressive the person, or the presumed source of the text, became more agressive.
This doesn't surprise me, but not because I think it says anything about peoples religion. I think I already know what religion is and this fits with my theories about people.
Let's talk about Milgram, he of the famous experiments into authority. Milgram's the guy who got people in lab coats to tell participants in experiments to keep turning up the current on shocks being given to people to see how far they would go. And plenty of people keep going up to apparently lethal levels as long as an authority figure told them to.
Milgram was trying to find out how previously assummed peaceful and civilized citizens of Germany could not only abide but actively participate in the crimes of the fascists. He wanted to understand how someone could undoubtably see evil we're sure they'd been taught to reject but still cooperate with it.
Turns out people can be unreasonably cooperative with authority. And I think it's obvious why.
Humans are gregarious creatures. We are hard wired to desire company and acceptance. Subordination to leadership looks and feels to our hind brains like valued membership in a tribe.
Priests try to define the tribe granting themselves a valueable ledge on its totem pole and they use millenia of well practiced threats and rewards to encourage people to settle into a given, lower, place on that pole.
They recognize that the suggestion of command by authority speaks directly to our ape brain and that people simply find it easy and rewarding to obey.
It's annoying but's it's just how we are. People aren't that complicated.