Words are nothing, they have no inherent meaning. They are but mental placeholders for ideas. There is nothing universal that causes me to fill a placeholder with the same idea as you. When I fill the placeholder, "evil", I imagine various things. You may or may not imagine those same various things.
Now, that I think you understand. But not to the fullest extent; all of what I have typed is but placeholders, and--for every single one--you may or may not share the same ideas as I. Chances are, 99% of these words we agree on in meaning. But we can't be certain of it.
"That being said, I also have to point out that, while everything is relative on one level, there is always another level on which things are not relative at all."
I think you're making an assumption. Like I said, words are but placeholders. If it were possible to know with absolute certainty we agree with one another on the meaning of the words involved, you would be right--we could discuss a given notion on the same level, we'd be on the same page. But you can't use a device to measure itself and know for certain the results will be accurate. You can't use language to verify that we're talking about the same thing.
Now, that's all philosophy, mind you. If I truly believed it in practice, I wouldn't even bother typing this because I would not know if you would be able to understand the meaning behind these words. But don't let it fool you; we're making an assumption when we think we know what one another interprets as "evil".
Government can hardly deliver my mail intact (USPS), competently educate my children (public schools), take care of my grandparent's health (Medicare), or ensure my retirement (the ridiculous failure that is Social Security).
Maybe I'm missing the big picture, but what's the problem with preventing minors from buying games specifically market for adults?
Besides the fact that, well, it's the complete opposite of what freedom is all about?
Besides the fact that age has absolutely nothing to do with the capacity to enjoy a good bloodbath video game and not re-enact it in real life, or not be traumatized from it?
Besides the fact that parents reserve the right to raise their kids how they see fit?
Besides the fact the government is here to protect us from people who try to aggress against us, not to protect us essentially from ourselves?
Okay, here's one: today they can restrict unacceptable material from minors under the pretense of Nanny-State(r) protectionism. Tomorrow they can restrict the same material from intelligent adults like myself under those same pretenses. You don't think authoritarianism happens overnight do you?
Glad someone finally said it. Every day I make about a 25 mile commute on a major national freeway, and if you don't run 80mph you will be run over, regardless of the posted 65mph speed limit. Car manufacturers respond to consumer demands, and there are a lot of people that demand they don't get run over while driving to work.
Musicians have already ended voter apathy You've got to be kidding, right? Voter apathy still very much exists, and it's because voters don't have any good viable choices. Every four years it's the same: either Tweedle Dee or Tweedle Dum.
And then you congratulate the musicians when they throw a teen-oriented campaign to get the youth to vote for Dum or Dee? Christ... no wonder we've got Bush as president two terms in a row.
Example: if Comcast struck a deal with Yahoo, Yahoo would become the default search engine, and Google would be moved into a "premium" tier, meaning that I'd have to pay extra in order to access Google. I don't have to do this today because of Net Neutrality. Let's imagine Comcast enters into an agreement with Yahoo, and begins charging their customers higher rates for visiting Google. I think we can all agree that would suck. In fact, it would suck so much that competing ISPs would take notice at Comcast's irate customer base, and would offer Internet service at fixed, flat rates.
Bottom line is if the customers don't want to be charged based on *what* they access instead of *how much* they access, then there will always be an eager business ready to make a buck off of providing that kind of service. We don't need a law; we just need to let the market work its magic. Yes, there will be bad ISP's, but if the local government allows a free market in the area of Internet service, customers will always have an alternative.
The real danger lies, not in the absence of Net Neutrality, but in areas like my own, where the local government has given a particular ISP a monopoly on cable Internet access. If I want highspeed Internet access, I'm forced to go with the only cable provider here (or go with DSL, but that's not really an option given my proximity to the central office).
remember that when you're sitting there starving because your imported grain is suddenly cut off because of some crisis or turmoil external to your country.
Yeah, because we know if UPS suddenly increases their prices or goes out of business we're starving for our overnight parcels, right? Give me a break; freemarket competition would cause alternative grain suppliers to pop up faster than the zits on your dick.
i grew up on a family farm. i helped my dad through college until he retired. all the small/medium farmers work their ass off at great risk (you live or die by the weather.. try basing your livelihood on that as a variable) and you get little in return to keep you moving forward.
Did the taxpayers force you to work on that farm? No? Okay, then you don't have the right to take our money just to keep your ass afloat.
many farmers do not like subsidies themselves but a) have little choice due to increasing operating costs and decreasing return on product at market* & b) it's kinda hard to NOT enter some programs when the government is basically waving money in your face to not produce as much.
Ask yourself why those operating costs are so high. Sure, it has to do with competing with other farms who do accept subsidies, but the bulk of the matter is the fact that technology is improving; we can grow more now than we could in the past because we've gotten so damned efficient at it. Simple economics dictates there's more supply of farm products than there are demand, and this is a good thing for everyone overall. Think of all the typewriter manufacturers that went out of business due to the introduction of the PC; are we all not better off for this, including those very same typewriter manufacturers? Of course we are; it's called economic progress, and it won't happen if government subsidizes those businesses that cannot stand on their own two feet.
*compare the market prices of corn/soybeans now to 1980, 1970, 1960, etc.. now compare the costs of equipment, fertilizers, taxes, etc.. for those same years. the only variables in the farmer's favor is the yield (bushels/acre) increase.. but put it all together it's a very razor-thin margin.
Ask yourself why that margin is so thin; again, it comes down to the demand not being as high as the supply. If those farms that couldn't stand on their own two feet without government subsidies finally gave in the towel, the supply would go down and would match the demand; food would cost less because we would no longer have to subsidize its production (which would benefit everyone), and those that lost their jobs to the more efficient farmers could put their other skills to use in the economy.
Here's a good example...
My dad is in the business of structural steel detailing--a draftsman. He started out doing it with pencil and paper on a drafting desk, and life was good. But then came along the PC and CAD software; he had a choice: he could a) keep doing it with pencil and paper (and probably go out of business) or b) learn the new technology. He chose option B, and learned how to use a PC and the CAD software. Other detailers he knew were not so lucky; they stuck to the old method, and could not compete with the more efficient CAD detailers. Luckily, however, those same detailers found new jobs doing something else, and because its now faster to draft something, it's also cheaper to build those things which need to be drafted. And this benefits everyone. Some people lost their jobs initially, yes, but they eventually found work elsewhere and the economy as a whole was that much more efficient and productive.
Imagine if the government stepped in to subsidize those draftsmen that kept doing it with pencil and paper; there would be no real incentive for people like my dad to use a PC and CAD to do the same work. The cost of detailing a structure, for instance, would cost more money and take longer to produce. Because there would be less demand for PCs and CAD software, the
It's pretty hard to say for any of us to say what that experience might be like
Take enough Psilocybe mushrooms and you'll experience eternity. Like you so very well put, it's pretty hard to say what the experience might be like. But to presume that there exists not a state of human consciousness that cannot comprehend the concept of "infinite"--indeed, that this supposed state is not and has not already been available--is, I think, an exercise of logical haste.
Problem is that "knowledge", even that which is "proved", is only but a perception had in one specific state of consciousness, "while all about there exists multitudes more states of consciousness undiscovered" (to badly paraphrase the great American psychologist William James). The question is: which one is "correct", if any. How can we know if they aren't all correct (or all incorrect)? The answer that philosophy has given us over the coarse of human history sums it up: we can't; we must take reality, and all that it encompasses--such as so-called "truth"--at face value... including our species' greatest minds' theories. In the end, it all comes down to perception.
I try to avoid showing off to potential interests when I have absolutely nothing to show. Nothing to show? Haiku is almost out of alpha, that is, it's almost feature complete. It runs R5 binary software. It's reimplemented most of the BeAPI. It's reimplemented the Be File System. It's come out with a neat icon format that allows vector graphics without degrading disk performance due to extraneous seeks. Really, the big thing left to do is finish the network stack and knock out bugs.
Don't worry if you didn't get anything out of the presentation: you're not a low-level engineer and probably wouldn't care about things like how the VM manager works, or why fitting a vector icon in a disk inode is pretty neat. But you weren't the TECHNICAL talk's target audience either; the ex-Be engineers and the Google engineers were the target audience, and the purpose was to stimulate interest and hopefully pick up some volunteers.
> The importance of HVI (which isn't strictly a form of SVG, but of vector graphics) is that an icon that would normally take several kilobytes in disk space consumes less than the size that's free on a typical BFS inode, allowing gorgeous graphics with no extra disk seeks required; it's quite a feat that other UIs should take note of.
Yeah, because if you're not cautious all those pesky icons will fill up your 300 GB harddisk very quickly. Talk about ignorance.
Disk seeks have nothing to do with disk space. Because the HVI icon fits within a standard inode, you're going to see great performance because your hard drive won't have to go fetch more data just to retreive a given file's icon. BeOS did this, but they were using bitmap graphics; Haiku was able to pull it off using vector graphics.
It's alpha software, meaning it's not feature complete (almost but not quite) and has loads of bugs. As someone who checks out the regular builds on a daily basis, the stability varies considerably from one revision to the next simply because of the rapid changes and development going on.
There's been days when it was more stable than Linux or Windows. Others when DOS seemed more useful. I'm guessing this just happened to be the performance of a lesser build.
The importance of HVI (which isn't strictly a form of SVG, but of vector graphics) is that an icon that would normally take several kilobytes in disk space consumes less than the size that's free on a typical BFS inode, allowing gorgeous graphics with no extra disk seeks required; it's quite a feat that other UIs should take note of.
All in all, it's very impressive what a handful of developers have managed to do in the last five years from scratch. It's going to be very exciting what happens in the next couple of years after R1 comes out.
Yep, this is what drives the free market: people acting in their own self-interest. Novartis probably doesn't expect or intend to benefit others with this move (it's PR like you said), but undoubtedly their self-interest will end up benefiting others.
That's actually a good point and potentially worthwhile, but could this be achieved by other means because I REALLY don't want a tracking device in my car! I'm completely with you on that; I don't want a tracking device on my vehicle either, whether it's the government doing the tracking or AAA. But the great thing about the free market is what's great about open source; you've got thousands of minds working, and even a blind squirrel finds a nut now and again.
What you or I or a hundred other Slashdotters here can think of as a solution (e.g. tracking device for billing) is only a drop in the bucket compared to what the free market could come up with if left to its own devices. After all, we're just here shooting the shit, but someone wanting to make a living off of providing mediums of transportation that customers would want en masse--that is, something that didn't involve tracking our every move--is going to come up with even greater ideas: they're driven by profit, while we're just driven by throwing "what if"s around.
Anytime you see America or Australia compared to fascism you should take the author as a joke. Anytime you have someone telling you what to do in a certain situation, you should ignore them and think for yourself.
Yeah, it is pretty stupid. Of course, the solution is pretty simple: don't ban stem cell research, but don't use other people's money to finance it either.
Sure, there's a plethora of governmental bodies, and maybe more than needed, but without them, where do streets and street repairs come from? Street lights? Police officers? Schools? Each one of those are paid for with your local taxes.
That $100 paid for someones back breaking labor (heh) on our streets, to ensure our tires don't get beat up by potholes. No, it didn't. Local streets are paid for by local taxes. Highways are paid for by an excise tax on gasoline.
Oh, when ANYTHING in the country goes wrong, who do we turn to to shell out the big bucks to get it fixed/done? The government. I don't, but you're right; most people do. But that's only because government has all the resources, and it has all the resources only because it's sucked the private sector dry through taxes in the first place.
Unless your American, then, sorry. Damn, I thought I had one! Oh well, I'll just pretend you were talking about US taxes and post anyway.:)
Look at all the tax breaks given to big business. What we have here in the good ol' USA is socialism for the rich. Show me a single drug company that hasn't benefited from federal research grants. That's socialism.
"Fascism is the marriage of corporate power and the state." -- Mussolini
If you really think government isn't immune to corruption, you're being hopelessly naive. Read: If you really think government is immune to corruption, you're being hopelessly naive.
I'm no fan of bureaucracy, but the FDA isn't your average government agency. It's completely independent. And the idea that a "private industry" could constrain time and cost and still produce "better" results is amusing to me. I have a feeling that it's amusing to you because you don't understand economics.
Let's take the USPS for instance; the private industry (of FedEx, UPS, and DHL) has systematically decreased the price of shipping packages, increased the reliability of shipping packages, and increased the quality of shipping packages. Everyone knows how well the USPS does it... it says, "We'll try and get it there overnight, but don't hold your breath." The only thing keeping that bureaucracy afloat is its government-given monopoly on $1.00 or less parcel; if that was taken away, FedEx, UPS, and DHL would would be able to mail a letter overnight for half the cost of mailing a letter through non-overnight snail mail.
Here's how private industry does it more efficiently while still keeping (and usually increasing) the quality of the service or product at hand: it has to survive. Government agencies on the other hand, no matter how God awful poorly they do, keep getting their funding.
What, exactly, would you expect to be different? The drug companies run the trials. It's always been that way. All the FDA does is provide oversight, review and approval. I would expect to see several FDA-type companies that perform testing on products, similar to what Consumer Reports and Underwriter's Laboratories do. People who want an untested-could-kill-you drug could have it, while those wanting approval could wait for it to be tested by reputable testing companies. Hell, keep the FDA around... just remove the restrictions on using untested drugs: the prudent people, myself included, would wait for a new drug to be approved by the FDA, but those more ballsy (or stupid?) could have them right away.
A private enterprise has only one constituency: its shareholders. Sometimes the best interests of shareholders and the public at large align, but not always, and I wouldn't feel comfortable even saying "often." I don't care if your liberal or conservative, there are some things that a government just does better. And this is one. A private enterprise has to SURVIVE, while a government agency simply has to show up for work. A private enterprise has to please its consumers or lose them to its competition. Government has no competition and therefore has no reason to be more efficient or do what's better for its constituents. If you really think government isn't immune to corruption, you're being hopelessly naive.
Those that believe in the magical powers of the free-market to regulate itself need only look at all of human history prior to the last 75 years. Those that believe in the magical powers of government to regulate itself and protect its constituents need only look at all of government history for the last 2000 years. Governments screw its people up their arse under the pretense of protecting them, and they've been doing this since the dawn of organized government.
You, sir, need to engage your brain before you type your links with such arrogance.
Tobacco is not a medicine and is not sold under the auspices of making you better. It's sold to make you feel good, or rather to not make you feel bad from withdrawal.
On the other hand, a business--which sells a good intended to make you better--is not going to sell goods that they know will kill their customer.
Even the tobacco industry, who doesn't claim their products make you better, is understanding that if they kill their customers they're out of business. This is precisely why they're pushing the non-tobacco nicotine products.
You kind of missed my point here.
The maximum extension of your logic is to legalize any substance that has shown any promise in saving lives without any testing at all. Wrong. The maximum extension of my logic is stop preventing people from putting what they want into their own body; you seem to think you know what's best for everyone else. I seem to think people know what's better for themselves than do government agencies with a one-size-fits-all approach.
People--especially those with a proverbial gun to their head in the form of an illness--simply do not have enough information to make a decision about what non-regulated chemical to take. And without testing and regulation, doctors don't have enough information either. What you consider enough information may not be what I consider enough information; let people decide for themself if the risks of taking an untested drug is worth the potential advantages. If I have AIDS, and there's a new drug out which initial studies suggest could help me get over my affliction, you do not have the right to tell me I cannot try this drug out. It's my body and my illness; not yours. You don't seem to comprehend that.
Second, how many people would be "killed" if they couldn't trust the drugs that are prescribed for them? I call fallacy; you're assuming if it's got the FDA seal of approval on it, then it can be trusted. Need I list the drugs that have been approved by the FDA which have turned out to be quite unsafe for many people? Need I point out that safe and proven medicines, such as aspirin, wouldn't be able to get the FDA's approval if they were introduced today?
After all, in an unregulated market just because a drug says it's Vicodin or Valium or Vioxx, it doesn't mean that it actually is. First, selling a substance as something else would fall under fraud and would be illegal. Second, if you don't restrict the availability of a given drug, people won't have to go to a black market to get access to that drug. Why would reputable businesses conduct fraud when they could just as easily sell the real deal, legally?
How would you possibly know what the "total sum" of "deaths from snake oil" are compared to the deaths that *MAY* have been prevented if a drug was approved quicker? Do I have to spell this out for you? We have history. We know of the tragedies of elixir sulfanilamide, which killed only 107 people. On the other hand, beta blockers SAVE ten thousand lives a year; this is from the FDA itself. For each year people didn't have access to beta blockers due to FDA's mandatory testing, ten thousand people died. If the FDA's process only took five years, then 50,000 people less would have died. If the process only took a week, almost 100,000 would have been saved. Yes, this all assumes those who died would have given the beta blockers a shot, but considering Europe had access to them while the US did not, US doctors were well aware of the benefits being realized in Europe while their own patients waited dying for the drug to be approved.
Fifth, the idea that regulation "kills" people by not giving them a treatment fast enough is akin to saying that a paramedic kills the gunshot victim because he couldn't get him to the hospital in time. Physics prevents the driver from getting there on time; public policy perpetrated by people like you prevent life-saving drugs from getting there on time. Big difference.
And really, comparing marijuana, which is literally ripped out of the ground with no further processing, to todays prescription drugs is a little overboard. The pharmacology and pharmacodynamics of the average drug are insanely complex. Look up (for yourself, I already know the answer) how many psychoactive chemicals--yes, that's right: DRUGS--are in marijuana. Marijuana is not ONE drug, but an organic substance comprised of HUNDREDS of drugs.
"At least snake oil, though useless, didn't kill people."
You do realize that 'snake oil' isn't actually a real thing? To say that whatever concoction being peddled on any given day wasn't lethal is a pure guess on your part. Simple logic tells me that it probably was, at least some of the time. Snake oil did kill people, no doubt. But regulation isn't the answer. Never was, and never will be.
It costs about a billion dollars and ten years of mandatory testing before a promising drug can make its way to the store shelf. This mandatory testing obviously increases the prices of new drugs, but it does something even more sinister that they never tell you about: it kills people.
When beta blockers first came out, Europe had access to them while across the pond in the US people were still waiting on the mandatory FDA approval process. When the FDA finally did approve beta blockers, they heralded them and proclaimed that they'd save ten thousand lives a year. (God bless the FDA for giving us this new drug that will save ten thousand lives every year!)
But... didn't that mean that for every year BEFORE beta blockers were approved, ten thousand people DIED as a result of not having access to them? It took about ten years to approve them in the US, so that means 10 years X 10,000 lives = 100,000 lives the FDA did away with by not giving them the medication they needed in time. That's just one example.
There's currently a fat substitute in the works that tastes just as good but won't clog your arteries. While every year the FDA prevents us from using this new substitute, cardiovascular diseases kill nearly a million people! So why are we preventing people from using the substitute? Because it *might* kill *some* people? I'm betting it won't kill a million every year.
My point is that so many more people die because they don't have access to these life-saving innovations than the total sum of the deaths from snake oil. The solution: let people and their doctors decide whether they should try a cutting-edge new drug, or whether they should wait for the proper testing to be done.
So many of you are for legalizing pot, but you think people should be prevented from taking other medications they and their doctors decide on if those medications aren't approved by the FDA. Let people decide what they want to put into their bodies. Keep the FDA, but don't prevent people from using untested new drugs that could save their lives.
Slashdot Mirror
Words are nothing, they have no inherent meaning. They are but mental placeholders for ideas. There is nothing universal that causes me to fill a placeholder with the same idea as you. When I fill the placeholder, "evil", I imagine various things. You may or may not imagine those same various things.
:)
Now, that I think you understand. But not to the fullest extent; all of what I have typed is but placeholders, and--for every single one--you may or may not share the same ideas as I. Chances are, 99% of these words we agree on in meaning. But we can't be certain of it.
"That being said, I also have to point out that, while everything is relative on one level, there is always another level on which things are not relative at all."
I think you're making an assumption. Like I said, words are but placeholders. If it were possible to know with absolute certainty we agree with one another on the meaning of the words involved, you would be right--we could discuss a given notion on the same level, we'd be on the same page. But you can't use a device to measure itself and know for certain the results will be accurate. You can't use language to verify that we're talking about the same thing.
Now, that's all philosophy, mind you. If I truly believed it in practice, I wouldn't even bother typing this because I would not know if you would be able to understand the meaning behind these words. But don't let it fool you; we're making an assumption when we think we know what one another interprets as "evil".
The joy of semantics.
I could give a rat's ass about having permission to freely edit the presidential debates unless the debates themselves were opened.
Government can hardly deliver my mail intact (USPS), competently educate my children (public schools), take care of my grandparent's health (Medicare), or ensure my retirement (the ridiculous failure that is Social Security).
Okay, here's one: today they can restrict unacceptable material from minors under the pretense of Nanny-State(r) protectionism. Tomorrow they can restrict the same material from intelligent adults like myself under those same pretenses. You don't think authoritarianism happens overnight do you?
Glad someone finally said it. Every day I make about a 25 mile commute on a major national freeway, and if you don't run 80mph you will be run over, regardless of the posted 65mph speed limit. Car manufacturers respond to consumer demands, and there are a lot of people that demand they don't get run over while driving to work.
When a nation's main media outlets don't cover something as newsworthy as two presidential candidates being arrested for trying to get into the debates, I think voter apathy makes a lot of sense.
And then you congratulate the musicians when they throw a teen-oriented campaign to get the youth to vote for Dum or Dee? Christ... no wonder we've got Bush as president two terms in a row.
Bottom line is if the customers don't want to be charged based on *what* they access instead of *how much* they access, then there will always be an eager business ready to make a buck off of providing that kind of service. We don't need a law; we just need to let the market work its magic. Yes, there will be bad ISP's, but if the local government allows a free market in the area of Internet service, customers will always have an alternative.
The real danger lies, not in the absence of Net Neutrality, but in areas like my own, where the local government has given a particular ISP a monopoly on cable Internet access. If I want highspeed Internet access, I'm forced to go with the only cable provider here (or go with DSL, but that's not really an option given my proximity to the central office).
remember that when you're sitting there starving because your imported grain is suddenly cut off because of some crisis or turmoil external to your country.
Yeah, because we know if UPS suddenly increases their prices or goes out of business we're starving for our overnight parcels, right? Give me a break; freemarket competition would cause alternative grain suppliers to pop up faster than the zits on your dick.
i grew up on a family farm. i helped my dad through college until he retired. all the small/medium farmers work their ass off at great risk (you live or die by the weather.. try basing your livelihood on that as a variable) and you get little in return to keep you moving forward.
Did the taxpayers force you to work on that farm? No? Okay, then you don't have the right to take our money just to keep your ass afloat.
many farmers do not like subsidies themselves but a) have little choice due to increasing operating costs and decreasing return on product at market* & b) it's kinda hard to NOT enter some programs when the government is basically waving money in your face to not produce as much.
Ask yourself why those operating costs are so high. Sure, it has to do with competing with other farms who do accept subsidies, but the bulk of the matter is the fact that technology is improving; we can grow more now than we could in the past because we've gotten so damned efficient at it. Simple economics dictates there's more supply of farm products than there are demand, and this is a good thing for everyone overall. Think of all the typewriter manufacturers that went out of business due to the introduction of the PC; are we all not better off for this, including those very same typewriter manufacturers? Of course we are; it's called economic progress, and it won't happen if government subsidizes those businesses that cannot stand on their own two feet.
*compare the market prices of corn/soybeans now to 1980, 1970, 1960, etc.. now compare the costs of equipment, fertilizers, taxes, etc.. for those same years. the only variables in the farmer's favor is the yield (bushels/acre) increase.. but put it all together it's a very razor-thin margin.
Ask yourself why that margin is so thin; again, it comes down to the demand not being as high as the supply. If those farms that couldn't stand on their own two feet without government subsidies finally gave in the towel, the supply would go down and would match the demand; food would cost less because we would no longer have to subsidize its production (which would benefit everyone), and those that lost their jobs to the more efficient farmers could put their other skills to use in the economy.
Here's a good example...
My dad is in the business of structural steel detailing--a draftsman. He started out doing it with pencil and paper on a drafting desk, and life was good. But then came along the PC and CAD software; he had a choice: he could a) keep doing it with pencil and paper (and probably go out of business) or b) learn the new technology. He chose option B, and learned how to use a PC and the CAD software. Other detailers he knew were not so lucky; they stuck to the old method, and could not compete with the more efficient CAD detailers. Luckily, however, those same detailers found new jobs doing something else, and because its now faster to draft something, it's also cheaper to build those things which need to be drafted. And this benefits everyone. Some people lost their jobs initially, yes, but they eventually found work elsewhere and the economy as a whole was that much more efficient and productive.
Imagine if the government stepped in to subsidize those draftsmen that kept doing it with pencil and paper; there would be no real incentive for people like my dad to use a PC and CAD to do the same work. The cost of detailing a structure, for instance, would cost more money and take longer to produce. Because there would be less demand for PCs and CAD software, the
It's pretty hard to say for any of us to say what that experience might be like
Take enough Psilocybe mushrooms and you'll experience eternity. Like you so very well put, it's pretty hard to say what the experience might be like. But to presume that there exists not a state of human consciousness that cannot comprehend the concept of "infinite"--indeed, that this supposed state is not and has not already been available--is, I think, an exercise of logical haste.
Problem is that "knowledge", even that which is "proved", is only but a perception had in one specific state of consciousness, "while all about there exists multitudes more states of consciousness undiscovered" (to badly paraphrase the great American psychologist William James). The question is: which one is "correct", if any. How can we know if they aren't all correct (or all incorrect)? The answer that philosophy has given us over the coarse of human history sums it up: we can't; we must take reality, and all that it encompasses--such as so-called "truth"--at face value... including our species' greatest minds' theories. In the end, it all comes down to perception.
Don't worry if you didn't get anything out of the presentation: you're not a low-level engineer and probably wouldn't care about things like how the VM manager works, or why fitting a vector icon in a disk inode is pretty neat. But you weren't the TECHNICAL talk's target audience either; the ex-Be engineers and the Google engineers were the target audience, and the purpose was to stimulate interest and hopefully pick up some volunteers.
Yeah, because if you're not cautious all those pesky icons will fill up your 300 GB harddisk very quickly. Talk about ignorance.
Disk seeks have nothing to do with disk space. Because the HVI icon fits within a standard inode, you're going to see great performance because your hard drive won't have to go fetch more data just to retreive a given file's icon. BeOS did this, but they were using bitmap graphics; Haiku was able to pull it off using vector graphics.
Anything else you'd like to try and piss on?
It's alpha software, meaning it's not feature complete (almost but not quite) and has loads of bugs. As someone who checks out the regular builds on a daily basis, the stability varies considerably from one revision to the next simply because of the rapid changes and development going on.
There's been days when it was more stable than Linux or Windows. Others when DOS seemed more useful. I'm guessing this just happened to be the performance of a lesser build.
The importance of HVI (which isn't strictly a form of SVG, but of vector graphics) is that an icon that would normally take several kilobytes in disk space consumes less than the size that's free on a typical BFS inode, allowing gorgeous graphics with no extra disk seeks required; it's quite a feat that other UIs should take note of.
All in all, it's very impressive what a handful of developers have managed to do in the last five years from scratch. It's going to be very exciting what happens in the next couple of years after R1 comes out.
Yep, this is what drives the free market: people acting in their own self-interest. Novartis probably doesn't expect or intend to benefit others with this move (it's PR like you said), but undoubtedly their self-interest will end up benefiting others.
What you or I or a hundred other Slashdotters here can think of as a solution (e.g. tracking device for billing) is only a drop in the bucket compared to what the free market could come up with if left to its own devices. After all, we're just here shooting the shit, but someone wanting to make a living off of providing mediums of transportation that customers would want en masse--that is, something that didn't involve tracking our every move--is going to come up with even greater ideas: they're driven by profit, while we're just driven by throwing "what if"s around.
Yeah, it is pretty stupid. Of course, the solution is pretty simple: don't ban stem cell research, but don't use other people's money to finance it either.
I always have better aim when I've smoked a couple joints beforehand.
Look at all the tax breaks given to big business. What we have here in the good ol' USA is socialism for the rich. Show me a single drug company that hasn't benefited from federal research grants. That's socialism.
"Fascism is the marriage of corporate power and the state." -- Mussolini
Let's take the USPS for instance; the private industry (of FedEx, UPS, and DHL) has systematically decreased the price of shipping packages, increased the reliability of shipping packages, and increased the quality of shipping packages. Everyone knows how well the USPS does it... it says, "We'll try and get it there overnight, but don't hold your breath." The only thing keeping that bureaucracy afloat is its government-given monopoly on $1.00 or less parcel; if that was taken away, FedEx, UPS, and DHL would would be able to mail a letter overnight for half the cost of mailing a letter through non-overnight snail mail.
Here's how private industry does it more efficiently while still keeping (and usually increasing) the quality of the service or product at hand: it has to survive. Government agencies on the other hand, no matter how God awful poorly they do, keep getting their funding. What, exactly, would you expect to be different? The drug companies run the trials. It's always been that way. All the FDA does is provide oversight, review and approval. I would expect to see several FDA-type companies that perform testing on products, similar to what Consumer Reports and Underwriter's Laboratories do. People who want an untested-could-kill-you drug could have it, while those wanting approval could wait for it to be tested by reputable testing companies. Hell, keep the FDA around... just remove the restrictions on using untested drugs: the prudent people, myself included, would wait for a new drug to be approved by the FDA, but those more ballsy (or stupid?) could have them right away. A private enterprise has only one constituency: its shareholders. Sometimes the best interests of shareholders and the public at large align, but not always, and I wouldn't feel comfortable even saying "often." I don't care if your liberal or conservative, there are some things that a government just does better. And this is one. A private enterprise has to SURVIVE, while a government agency simply has to show up for work. A private enterprise has to please its consumers or lose them to its competition. Government has no competition and therefore has no reason to be more efficient or do what's better for its constituents. If you really think government isn't immune to corruption, you're being hopelessly naive. Those that believe in the magical powers of the free-market to regulate itself need only look at all of human history prior to the last 75 years. Those that believe in the magical powers of government to regulate itself and protect its constituents need only look at all of government history for the last 2000 years. Governments screw its people up their arse under the pretense of protecting them, and they've been doing this since the dawn of organized government.
You, sir, need to engage your brain before you type your links with such arrogance.
Tobacco is not a medicine and is not sold under the auspices of making you better. It's sold to make you feel good, or rather to not make you feel bad from withdrawal.
On the other hand, a business--which sells a good intended to make you better--is not going to sell goods that they know will kill their customer.
Even the tobacco industry, who doesn't claim their products make you better, is understanding that if they kill their customers they're out of business. This is precisely why they're pushing the non-tobacco nicotine products.
Anymore links for me?
Exactly. It's in a company's own best interest to not kill their customer. Before the FDA, most drug manufacturers did their own testing.
Next.
You do realize that 'snake oil' isn't actually a real thing? To say that whatever concoction being peddled on any given day wasn't lethal is a pure guess on your part. Simple logic tells me that it probably was, at least some of the time. Snake oil did kill people, no doubt. But regulation isn't the answer. Never was, and never will be.
It costs about a billion dollars and ten years of mandatory testing before a promising drug can make its way to the store shelf. This mandatory testing obviously increases the prices of new drugs, but it does something even more sinister that they never tell you about: it kills people.
When beta blockers first came out, Europe had access to them while across the pond in the US people were still waiting on the mandatory FDA approval process. When the FDA finally did approve beta blockers, they heralded them and proclaimed that they'd save ten thousand lives a year. (God bless the FDA for giving us this new drug that will save ten thousand lives every year!)
But... didn't that mean that for every year BEFORE beta blockers were approved, ten thousand people DIED as a result of not having access to them? It took about ten years to approve them in the US, so that means 10 years X 10,000 lives = 100,000 lives the FDA did away with by not giving them the medication they needed in time. That's just one example.
There's currently a fat substitute in the works that tastes just as good but won't clog your arteries. While every year the FDA prevents us from using this new substitute, cardiovascular diseases kill nearly a million people! So why are we preventing people from using the substitute? Because it *might* kill *some* people? I'm betting it won't kill a million every year.
My point is that so many more people die because they don't have access to these life-saving innovations than the total sum of the deaths from snake oil. The solution: let people and their doctors decide whether they should try a cutting-edge new drug, or whether they should wait for the proper testing to be done.
So many of you are for legalizing pot, but you think people should be prevented from taking other medications they and their doctors decide on if those medications aren't approved by the FDA. Let people decide what they want to put into their bodies. Keep the FDA, but don't prevent people from using untested new drugs that could save their lives.