My company sells digital microscopy systems -- microscope, camera, Mac or PC workstation, capture and image processing software, and assorted other goodies -- which typically run between $75,000 and $250,000. Now, I don't know if our customers would like to be described as "ordinary scientists" <g> but we do sell plenty of systems. Academic customers usually pay with grant money, of course; corporate (mostly pharmaceutical) customers just write a check... In any case, there are plenty of scientists who have access to that level of funding.
Probably because it's not an outright grant, but a contest which (theoretically) anyone can enter. And there are a fair number of/.ers who might be interested. I'd enter myself, but my chances of winning as a grad student are probably somewhere between 0 and NULL.
Bullshit. Health care in Canada is as good as it is in the US, except more people (as a percentage of the population) have access to it. If you want to bitch about Canadian taxes (which are higher than in the US, certainly) go for it, but don't repeat stupid propaganda.
I've been a Mac user for a looong time now, and although the (relative) safety from malware is one of many things I like about using a Mac, I still think that in this situation, the user is at least as much to blame as the person who created the malicious file. There is no excuse for anyone who uses a computer, of any kind, in this day and age, not being aware of the danger of double-clicking on files from an untrusted source. (Cue snarky remarks about how even if it came from microsoft.com, the source would still be untrustworthy...) Blame is not a fixed quantity -- in any crime, we blame the perpetrator, but sometimes there's some extra blame for the victim as well.
I believe that truth is a defense against a charge of slander, but not of libel. I could very well be wrong, of course... Anyway, Googling for "product defamation lawsuit" produces an alarming number of hits; from a quick scan, it looks like most of the suits that actually go to court fail, but that the threat of such suits is often used (successfully) to initimidate people into keeping their mouths shut about products that fail to work as advertised.
Earth(tm)(R)(c) is owned, trademarked, copyrighted, and patented by EarthCo(tm)(R)(c), a wholly owned subsidiary of the RIAA, Microsoft, and SCO. You will immediately cease and desist using Earth(tm)(R)(c) unless you can pay EarthCo(tm)(R)(c) $500,000 royalties every time you take a step on Earth(tm)(R)(c), breathe Earth(tm)(R)(c) air, or eat something grown in the dirt found on Earth(tm)(R)(c).
What's that? You claim prior art? Meet our army of EarthCo(tm)(R)(c) lawyers...
Yes. De Tocqueville described a young America built on freedom, innovation, and opportunity -- the same ideas that underly F/OSS. For this bunch of reactionaries to call themselves the "Alexis de Tocqueville Institution" is like starting an anti-semitic group and calling it the "Simon Wiesenthal Institution," or a group dedicated to the restoration of the monarchy and calling it the "Thomas Jefferson Institution," or... oh, hell, you get the idea.
You need a dictator who is working himself out of a job. The US got something of that effect with Washington who refused a third term. After the war, he could easily have made himself King George I of the United States of America.
Yep, we were lucky. A more recent example, and one perhaps more relevant to Communist countries: Gorbachev, the man who ended the Cold War.
IIRC, there actually have been successful "product defamation" lawsuits. Yeah, it's stupid, but it's also an unavoidable consequence of the absurd legal idea that corporations are people; therefore, if you criticize their products, it's libel. Other, similar anti-free-speech attempts on the part of corporations include EULA's saying you can't write a review of the product without the corporation's permission, and sending pre-release copies to reviewers on the condition that they not write a negative review.
Here and here are a couple of polls with well-documented methodology. Neither covers the "face on Mars" or alien abductions, unfortunately, but they do discuss plenty of equally silly beliefs. Skeptical Inquirer reports on these beliefs fairly often, and discusses the methodology of the polls as well as their results.
No, a hell of a lot of people believe in the "face on Mars" and all this other pseudoscientific claptrap. Polls consistently show remarkably high levels of absolute belief in alien abduction, psychics, astrology, the literal truth of ancient collections of oral folktales, faked lunar landings, etc. If you haven't been taken in by all this, good for you, but you can't pretend that it's a small minority of people who have.
The problem is that F/OSS has to be better that Microsoft when it comes to things like file format conversion, not just as good. Like it or not, people have a double standard: if they try to open a Word document in Open Office and it doesn't work, they'll say that OO (and by extension, F/OSS in general) is no good; but if one version of Word refuses to open correctly a document created in another version, they'll shrug and say, "That's the way it is with computers, what can you do?" Microsoft is like the weather to a lot of people -- they bitch about it, but they don't seriously think they can do anything about it, and they think of it as an unavoidable part of their environment.
What are the mods smoking? How is my parent post a troll, or flamebait?
I was wondering that myself. My best guess is that they read the first sentence and assumed it was anti-European trash-talking -- you know, the stereotypical (and unfortunately, all too common) Ugly American "Europe can't do anything right U5 0wNz0Rz j00 if it wasn't for us you'd all be speaking German" crap that any/. story about any technological advance outside the US always seems to bring out -- and didn't bother to read the rest of the post carefully.
The fact that the US Shuttle is obsolete doesn't mean that the concept of a reentry vehicle that lands like an airplane is obsolete. Hopefully the EADS engineers will learn from both the successes (contrary to popular myth, the Shuttle does do some things right) and failures of the Shuttle and Buran programs, and produce such a vehicle that lives up to the promise of the idea.
I hate to see news suppressed, but I am forced to admit that when the public gets involved objectivity goes out the window. People are often willing at the height of these incidences to cry for blood without regard for anyone who might be innocent of wrong doing but caught in the middle.
The public should be crying for blood.
I was a medic in Desert Storm. I took care of more wounded Iraqis than all American, British, Saudi, and other allied wounded put together. In many cases, the Iraqis I was taking care of has been trying to kill me a few hours before. Now, I'm not saying that no American soldier ever abused an Iraqi prisoner in that war -- but I will say, quite confidently, that there was nothing like the endemic, long-term, systematic abuse that is clearly going on now. Speaking as a veteran, as an American, and as a human being, I am saying that the people who committed this abuse, be they soldiers, civilian intelligence personnel, or civilian contractors, should be put up against a wall and shot.
And if it hadn't been for the release of those pictures, the chance of justice ever being done (except maybe for a few junior enlisted folks who would have been sacrificed while those who gave the orders got away with everything) would have been roughly zero.
If GE invents superior cabling, then only GE and its licensees get to use it, and they pass the cost on to you, the consumer. If NASA invents superior cabling, then everybody (including GE) can use it to deliver better products (including suspension bridges) at a lower price.
Government expenditure on science is an investment by the people of the US (or whatever country is doing the spending) -- and one which (especially in the case of NASA) has quite often had a rate of return on investment which few if any private R&D operations can match.
And they would have insisted that the missions of the other space probes -- the ones that actually did go places and discover things -- weren't as important as B&C sitting around at NASA, all shiny and clean and safe, pretending to be heroic explorers.
Most math classes aren't directly concerned with algorithmic efficiency, no, but I'd argue it's pretty much impossible to understand a good algorithms or numerics class without a solid math background. Maybe I'm wrong, and there's another route to this understanding, but I've never seen it.
Slashdot Mirror
My company sells digital microscopy systems -- microscope, camera, Mac or PC workstation, capture and image processing software, and assorted other goodies -- which typically run between $75,000 and $250,000. Now, I don't know if our customers would like to be described as "ordinary scientists" <g> but we do sell plenty of systems. Academic customers usually pay with grant money, of course; corporate (mostly pharmaceutical) customers just write a check ... In any case, there are plenty of scientists who have access to that level of funding.
Probably because it's not an outright grant, but a contest which (theoretically) anyone can enter. And there are a fair number of /.ers who might be interested. I'd enter myself, but my chances of winning as a grad student are probably somewhere between 0 and NULL.
Microsoft is a monopoly. Apple is not.
Is that so fucking hard to understand?
:) Thanks.
<takes a bow>
Thats why so many Canadians come to the US for anything more serious than the flu right? Because health care in Canada is so great...
Cf. "stupid propaganda," above. The "hordes of Canadian health shoppers" meme is an urban legend on a par with Satanic ritual child abuse.
If you really think capitalism was born in the US, you might want to familiarize yourself with this fascinating resource called a "history book."
Moron.
Bullshit. Health care in Canada is as good as it is in the US, except more people (as a percentage of the population) have access to it. If you want to bitch about Canadian taxes (which are higher than in the US, certainly) go for it, but don't repeat stupid propaganda.
I've been a Mac user for a looong time now, and although the (relative) safety from malware is one of many things I like about using a Mac, I still think that in this situation, the user is at least as much to blame as the person who created the malicious file. There is no excuse for anyone who uses a computer, of any kind, in this day and age, not being aware of the danger of double-clicking on files from an untrusted source. (Cue snarky remarks about how even if it came from microsoft.com, the source would still be untrustworthy ...) Blame is not a fixed quantity -- in any crime, we blame the perpetrator, but sometimes there's some extra blame for the victim as well.
I believe that truth is a defense against a charge of slander, but not of libel. I could very well be wrong, of course ... Anyway, Googling for "product defamation lawsuit" produces an alarming number of hits; from a quick scan, it looks like most of the suits that actually go to court fail, but that the threat of such suits is often used (successfully) to initimidate people into keeping their mouths shut about products that fail to work as advertised.
Earth(tm)(R)(c) is owned, trademarked, copyrighted, and patented by EarthCo(tm)(R)(c), a wholly owned subsidiary of the RIAA, Microsoft, and SCO. You will immediately cease and desist using Earth(tm)(R)(c) unless you can pay EarthCo(tm)(R)(c) $500,000 royalties every time you take a step on Earth(tm)(R)(c), breathe Earth(tm)(R)(c) air, or eat something grown in the dirt found on Earth(tm)(R)(c).
...
What's that? You claim prior art? Meet our army of EarthCo(tm)(R)(c) lawyers
Yes. De Tocqueville described a young America built on freedom, innovation, and opportunity -- the same ideas that underly F/OSS. For this bunch of reactionaries to call themselves the "Alexis de Tocqueville Institution" is like starting an anti-semitic group and calling it the "Simon Wiesenthal Institution," or a group dedicated to the restoration of the monarchy and calling it the "Thomas Jefferson Institution," or ... oh, hell, you get the idea.
You need a dictator who is working himself out of a job.
The US got something of that effect with Washington who refused a third term. After the war, he could easily have made himself King George I of the United States of America.
Yep, we were lucky. A more recent example, and one perhaps more relevant to Communist countries: Gorbachev, the man who ended the Cold War.
IIRC, there actually have been successful "product defamation" lawsuits. Yeah, it's stupid, but it's also an unavoidable consequence of the absurd legal idea that corporations are people; therefore, if you criticize their products, it's libel. Other, similar anti-free-speech attempts on the part of corporations include EULA's saying you can't write a review of the product without the corporation's permission, and sending pre-release copies to reviewers on the condition that they not write a negative review.
Indeed it could -- read my list of silly beliefs carefully. ;)
Here and here are a couple of polls with well-documented methodology. Neither covers the "face on Mars" or alien abductions, unfortunately, but they do discuss plenty of equally silly beliefs. Skeptical Inquirer reports on these beliefs fairly often, and discusses the methodology of the polls as well as their results.
No, a hell of a lot of people believe in the "face on Mars" and all this other pseudoscientific claptrap. Polls consistently show remarkably high levels of absolute belief in alien abduction, psychics, astrology, the literal truth of ancient collections of oral folktales, faked lunar landings, etc. If you haven't been taken in by all this, good for you, but you can't pretend that it's a small minority of people who have.
The problem is that F/OSS has to be better that Microsoft when it comes to things like file format conversion, not just as good. Like it or not, people have a double standard: if they try to open a Word document in Open Office and it doesn't work, they'll say that OO (and by extension, F/OSS in general) is no good; but if one version of Word refuses to open correctly a document created in another version, they'll shrug and say, "That's the way it is with computers, what can you do?" Microsoft is like the weather to a lot of people -- they bitch about it, but they don't seriously think they can do anything about it, and they think of it as an unavoidable part of their environment.
In certain occupations, though, it's the lingua franca.
Didn't some comedian say that the two major successes of the metric system in the US were the 9mm bullet and the kilo of coke?
What are the mods smoking? How is my parent post a troll, or flamebait?
/. story about any technological advance outside the US always seems to bring out -- and didn't bother to read the rest of the post carefully.
;)
I was wondering that myself. My best guess is that they read the first sentence and assumed it was anti-European trash-talking -- you know, the stereotypical (and unfortunately, all too common) Ugly American "Europe can't do anything right U5 0wNz0Rz j00 if it wasn't for us you'd all be speaking German" crap that any
Next time I have mod points I'll mod you up.
The fact that the US Shuttle is obsolete doesn't mean that the concept of a reentry vehicle that lands like an airplane is obsolete. Hopefully the EADS engineers will learn from both the successes (contrary to popular myth, the Shuttle does do some things right) and failures of the Shuttle and Buran programs, and produce such a vehicle that lives up to the promise of the idea.
I hate to see news suppressed, but I am forced to admit that when the public gets involved objectivity goes out the window. People are often willing at the height of these incidences to cry for blood without regard for anyone who might be innocent of wrong doing but caught in the middle.
The public should be crying for blood.
I was a medic in Desert Storm. I took care of more wounded Iraqis than all American, British, Saudi, and other allied wounded put together. In many cases, the Iraqis I was taking care of has been trying to kill me a few hours before. Now, I'm not saying that no American soldier ever abused an Iraqi prisoner in that war -- but I will say, quite confidently, that there was nothing like the endemic, long-term, systematic abuse that is clearly going on now. Speaking as a veteran, as an American, and as a human being, I am saying that the people who committed this abuse, be they soldiers, civilian intelligence personnel, or civilian contractors, should be put up against a wall and shot.
And if it hadn't been for the release of those pictures, the chance of justice ever being done (except maybe for a few junior enlisted folks who would have been sacrificed while those who gave the orders got away with everything) would have been roughly zero.
If GE invents superior cabling, then only GE and its licensees get to use it, and they pass the cost on to you, the consumer. If NASA invents superior cabling, then everybody (including GE) can use it to deliver better products (including suspension bridges) at a lower price.
Government expenditure on science is an investment by the people of the US (or whatever country is doing the spending) -- and one which (especially in the case of NASA) has quite often had a rate of return on investment which few if any private R&D operations can match.
And they would have insisted that the missions of the other space probes -- the ones that actually did go places and discover things -- weren't as important as B&C sitting around at NASA, all shiny and clean and safe, pretending to be heroic explorers.
Most math classes aren't directly concerned with algorithmic efficiency, no, but I'd argue it's pretty much impossible to understand a good algorithms or numerics class without a solid math background. Maybe I'm wrong, and there's another route to this understanding, but I've never seen it.
Yes, it can, and yes, I am. ;)