One of the ongoing issues people who want to discuss the nature of Islam or other cultures is that inevitably, someone will come on and accuse everyone else of being "racists". The goal of calling people racists is always the same -- to prevent a given topic from being discussed. I am not a racist. But I don't really care if people think I am. If someone wants to think I'm some sort of bigot because I'm not a fan of Islam then I'm perfectly okay with that. The reason being, I only...
Being the only child of a single parent with no extended family nearby gave me some pretty warped views on a lot of things. One of those things was the concept of love. Since the only relationship I had growing up was my mom, I came to believe that love was a finite thing. I.e. If I felt close to others, I would feel less-close to my mom. Of course, that went out the window the minute I fell in love. My first true love was a girl I met at the end of high school. We were togethe...
When I get into a political debate with friends or family that are liberal in their political views, at some point one of them will say "Well yea, you're conservative because you're one of the ones benefiting most from Bush's tax cuts." I'm 33. So for most of my life I wasn't well off. Yet for as long as I've even contemplated what the role of government should be in our lives as well as what people should do for themselves versus what the "community" should do for them I've had conservative ...
How do you define success? Different people define it different ways of course. But most of the time, people in conversation qualify the term success. They say things like "He is very successful in business" or "She has a successful marriage". So what does success mean in the generic sense? What does it mean when someone says John is successful? Here's my definition: A successful person is one who is able to achieve a level of material and emotional comfort in which their ...
Predictably, when someone talks about anti-Americanism the far left will begin distorting it to sound like that if you criticize your country then you are "UnAmerican". Pretty soon, the original point is turned into a charactiture of itself and the original author's points are ridiculed into oblivion. Criticizing the policies of your country does not make you unpatriotic. Not agreeing with the US President doesn't make you anti-American. The intellectually lazy may find it appeali...
One of the things that always bugs me is when people say things like "the truth is somewhere in the middle" between two parties. I hear that kind of moral equivalence argument all the time. But where the heck does it come from because while technically true, in spirit it is not. In my experience, when two parties disagree about some issue and have different versions of events, odds are that one of the parties accountings of events will be predominantly true and the other party's predomi...
Whether you’re talking to a right-wing nut or a left-wing zealot, they will insist that their opinions are in the mainstream. No one ever thinks that they are somehow out of touch with everyone. They’re not extreme. Everyone else is – particularly those who disagree with them. Who, exactly, is the arbiter of far left or far right? The answer is: Everyone else. By definition, you’re a right-wing or left-wing extremist if your positions on various issues are in conflict with the ...
For the past year I've been working from a terrific program called CityDesk. The way it works is that it has its own built in database and integrated editor. When you enter in a blog, it can generate HTML that you then upload to your site. Unfortunately, it's become more and more of a pain to access mapped network drives from remote and JoeUser.com is too busy to have it on a local machine. At the same time, blogging has become increasingly popular and I wanted to start putting together ...
One of the things I've been surprised about on forums, and I wrote a post about this recently, is just how poor at debating many younger debaters are. They seem interested in debating but it's as if they have no idea how to debate. Debating isn't just arguing. It is an exchange of ideas in which both sides try to make the case for their position. Lawyers in court, in theory, debate. They dont' just yell back and forth "Did so!" "Did not!" for hours until the judge flogs them. Highschools used...
One of the more frustrating aspects of the Internet is also one of its strengths - it is the great equalizer. People from all walks of life can get together and debate about anything. It is frustrating because often times you find yourself debating on some issue you're an "expert" on with some high school kid who has no idea what they're talking about. I will be debating a legal point or making a business argument only to find myself trading posts back and forth with some kid who is just plai...
One of the things I've come to realize over the years is that our company's management team is incomplete. Much of Stardock's success can be attributed to the incredible talent of our company's developers and management. But as we've grown, particularly in the past year, holes have appeared. For one thing, when you're small, having a management team full of specialists is good. I'm the only generalist in the management team. That works fine when you're a start-up. But as yo...
I've decided that I'm not an atheist. That doesn't mean I believe in "God" per se but being an atheist requires faith as well. We don't know how the universe got here. Oh, we have theories that go something like this: Around 14 billion years ago there was a gigantic explosion from a source that was theoretically smaller than an electron. As hard as it is to imagine, the universe isn't growing to fill up some "void" because there is no void. There is nothing else outside of our universe. One ...
The other day I was talking about just how precarious life on this planet is. Modern human civilization is a tremendous logistical achievement. The amount of uninterrupted energy and food production to sustain it is enormous. Even the slightest interruption can cause the deaths of thousands if not millions. This past summer, the American north east experienced a 24 hour black out. I don't know how many people died (if any) but it caused a massive economic hit. Imagine the results of som...
Most people don't really give how precarious human civilization really is. That's mainly because they have better things to do than to worry about that kind of thing. I, on the other hand, don't really have anything better to do sometimes than to think and read about this kind of thing. For example, while many people know that an asteroid nailed the earth 65 million years ago, wiping out the dinosaurs along with most other large animals in the ocean and on land, most people aren't aware of ...
Our company deals a lot with consumers. Which means, inevitably, there is a certain percentage of people who think we're a bunch of crooks. I take that really personally. I know I shouldn't, it's the nature of doing business on the Internet. But people just have no idea how dirty the business world is. It's the start of a new quarter which means Stardock is paying out its royalties to those developers who are paid in that manner. We've never missed a payment. Ever. Even in 1998 when ...