He's not saying any such thing. He's saying, simply, "This is a problem and we should talk about possible solutions," and there's no implication that any of the proposed solutions should include any of the absurd measures you came up with out of thin air.
s/JOf/Of and s/visial/visual/, of course. Grrr arrgh. With all the rounds of needless "improvements"/. has made to the interface recently, couldn't they find time to put in some kind of editing function -- say, posts would be editable until someone replies to or moderates them? Please?
JOf course phisical anthropology makes a distinction. Just watch Bones or read a paper: you can divide caucasian, asian, african. It's like red, green and blue: you have those 3, and infinite colors in the middle. And red is not "better" than violet or pink.
There is no problem with races, the problem arises when one race is arbitrarily defined as being "better" than others. Also, there are no strict bounds, just like you can't draw a line between red and pink.
Well, that's one problem. The other problem is the idea that those three groups are the "natural" divisions, the way red, green, and blue are the natural primary colors (for human eyes, anyway.) The primary colors are dictated by our visial anatomy; racial classifications have no such biological basis. In fact you can make both anatomical and genetic arguments for the existence of anywhere from two to several tens of racial groups, and none of these distinctions is any more valid than any other.
Or to put it more simply, the three-races idea can be neatly disposed of with one word: "India."
As a hatchet job, it was fairly well written. As a technical standpoint, its basically a bug report about a single missing MIME-type that somehow dragged on to a 6 screen wall of text.
As a hatchet job, your post is fairly well written. As a summary of, or even a reasonable response to, the article, it's basically a spew of straw men, unsupported assertions, and mockery that isn't nearly as clever as you think it is.
No doubt both Google and Samsung will rapidly improve the Chromebook. In a year it might be a pretty good machine.
That being said, it should never have gone out the door with some of the bugs TFA describes (.doc is an unknown file type? Really?) Google's "eternal beta" approach is okay for some things, like Gmail because, you know, it's an e-mail server. Also, free. For an entire not-cheap hardware/OS combination, it may not be such a great idea.
Perhaps we should go back to actually funding the USPTO mainly with tax revenue. I realize that there's a lot of people here that are opposed on principle, but sometimes taxpayers are the correct party to fund things.
Communist! Socialist! Pedophile! Pothead! Music pirate! Think of the children! If we violate the principles of God and the Founding Fathers by doing such a thing, the terrorists have won!
Good, the more ridiculous the patents get, the quicker something will be done to fix the mess. Personally, I'd like to see this patent granted, and dozens of companies ordered to pay lots of damages to the angelic company that is Kootol.....if only to see the backlash from a thousand juggernauts against the current patent system;)
Unfortunately, it's not likely to work out that way. Kootol will no doubt be crushed, but the giant companies they're suing will most likely pay off Congress to "reform" the patent system in a way that makes it more difficult for small patent trolls to operate while still allowing the giants to go after small developers (and not-so-small, as in Microsoft's ongoing war against Linux.) Don't ask me what the specific wording will be; I don't claim to know, but they've got armies of lawyers to write the language to achieve the desired result.
The fact that it's "recent" is revealing in and of itself; it's a clear attempt to draw moral equivalence between the founders of the US and the oppressive theocratic fanatics butchering people in the middle east.
Convenient: if the facts don't fit your biases, dismiss the people presenting the facts as biased and move on. It helps if you throw in some outrageous hyperbole, too. (In reality, show me anyone who is trying to draw the moral equivalence you suggest, and I'll show you someone who is regarded by any serious historian as a loon.) Meanwhile, back in the real world, the fact that many of the American Revolutionaries were, in fact, by modern standards, out-and-out terrorists is something that's been known for decades.
Which homes? How many? Why, in particular was each of those homes targeted? Was it a matter of policy, or an occasional slip?
These questions matter. If you're not asking them, you don't care about the truth; you're using the pretense of knowledge to cover your ideology.
Indeed they do; and if you actually care about the answers, you'll do some research. And if you do that, you'll quickly learn that GPP's point is entirely correct: no matter how noble their cause, every revolutionary group in history, including those of the years leading up to 1776, has done things that we'd label terrorism (IIRC, a word that came out of the French Revolution) by modern standards. So have the governments they were fighting, of course. Revolutions are ugly, ugly things, inevitably turning families and friends and neighbors against each other, and even of the best of them quickly descend into horror. This is something that those who casually call for revolution against the modern US government should keep in mind.
You don't actually remember how crappy batteries used to be, do you?
Battery tech is improving steadily, and a surprisingly large number of the big breakthroughs we hear about become standard equipment within a few years of their announcement. Batteries aren't flashy like processors or displays, so people tend not to notice, but in fact batteries have been following their own version of Moore's Law for quite some time now. Even cursory research will show you that batteries of all kinds are longer-lived, more powerful, more reliable, and less expensive for the performance delivered than they've ever been.
But I suppose it's just easier to make snarky remarks on/. than to spend five minutes Googling for the relevant information.
Indeed, and there are plenty of organizations which have that trust and maturity as part of their culture. Unfortunately, there are also a lot that don't. Personally, I've been extraordinarily lucky in my working life; the couple of times I've found myself working at places that pushed the "everyone has to be a superhero" mentality, or had such poor communication that it was nearly impossible to find out what people actually needed, have also been when the economy was doing well and there were better jobs available. In the current economic mess, people caught in that situation have a lot fewer options.
So you think overwork, burnout, and constant employee turnover are good things? You're either a sadist who enjoys treating other people like shit, or a masochist who enjoys being treated like shit; either way, don't expect rational people to buy into your sick ideology.
... it won't make any difference, I suspect. There are (at least) three big problems here:
Techie-macho. A lot of IT people have the idea that if you're not working at least twelve hours a day, six days a week, you're not really working. They don't just put up with sleep deprivation, irregular eating schedules, and the total lack of a social life when it's necessary to get the job done; they actively take pride in it. Vacation isn't even on their radar.
Management ignorance. IT is seen as a cost sink, so there's a reluctance to hire any more than the bare bones minimum staff to get the job done (and often, not even that.) When the inevitable problems occur as a result of this practice, it's seen as proof of IT's inefficiency and an excuse to cut their budget and resources even more.
(Often justified) paranoia. "If the boss knows the guy in the next cubicle over can take over for me when needed, I'll be the first one out the door in the next round of layoffs." This encourages "job security through obscurity," the creation of needlessly complex and poorly documented systems that only one person in the entire company can understand. It may not actually work, but people think it does, so they keep doing it.
And no, I don't know what the solution is. Just pointing out that it's a structural issue, and collecting anecdotes about how badly things tend to go wrong doesn't seem to be doing much to motivate anyone to try to fix the underlying problems.
There is simply no way to guarantee with 100% certainty that anyone is who they claim to be when using an electronic medium.
To be fair, you could drop the last five words from that sentence and it would still be true. At a certain point, we have to either assume that the various means we have to verify our identity, whether in person or not, are sufficient for the task at hand; or come up with better ways to accomplish that goal.
If you really, truly, genuinely believe that accepting the theory of relativity is equivalent to believing in the power of prayer, you are simply incapable of understanding or contributing to rational debate on this or any subject.
A rational response in a religious debate by an AC - this cannot be the Slashdot I know.
Hah! But it's only a "rational response" to the degree that trying to avoid answering hard questions is a rational goal -- that is, if you don't have a good answer and are trying to lead the debate off in another direction entirely. To recap, OP asked:
But when you really get down to it - is faith any different than believing in any other supernatural item?
and AC replied:
The debate of belief and disbelief in God is a key part of the Western philosophical tradition.
This is kind of like answering the question "Did you steal that money?" with "People like having money." It's a dodge, a retreat into generality. I find it hard to believe that AC (or you, or anyone else in the discussion) doesn't have a pretty specific opinion on the answer to OP's question.
Carefully trimmed stubble is "masculine" in the same way as pre-stressed jeans, clothing with a Harley-Davidson logo, or a Tap-Out sticker in the back window of a pickup truck. It's for chronologically adult little boys who think they can buy manhood instead of just, you know, being men.
Everything you say is true, but it won't make any difference to GPP or others like him. The Apple-haters, like all fanatics, are uninterested in trivial things like data and logic.
Yep. Other winners in this budget include the International Trade Administration, FBI, DEA, and the Bureau of Prisons. Other losers include NSF, NIST, NOAA, the Economic Development Administration, and programs to aid state and local law enforcement. You can draw your own conclusions about what set of priorities that reflects...
In your case, what you're missing is the point, by a mile. This isn't about NASA. It's about the overall value of research, without which we would all still be living in caves and scratching bare-handed in the dirt. If you don't accept that, that's your privilege, but you should have the courage to act on your beliefs, which means GTFO of the modern world.
Slashdot Mirror
He's not saying any such thing. He's saying, simply, "This is a problem and we should talk about possible solutions," and there's no implication that any of the proposed solutions should include any of the absurd measures you came up with out of thin air.
s/JOf/Of and s/visial/visual/, of course. Grrr arrgh. With all the rounds of needless "improvements" /. has made to the interface recently, couldn't they find time to put in some kind of editing function -- say, posts would be editable until someone replies to or moderates them? Please?
JOf course phisical anthropology makes a distinction. Just watch Bones or read a paper: you can divide caucasian, asian, african. It's like red, green and blue: you have those 3, and infinite colors in the middle. And red is not "better" than violet or pink.
There is no problem with races, the problem arises when one race is arbitrarily defined as being "better" than others. Also, there are no strict bounds, just like you can't draw a line between red and pink.
Well, that's one problem. The other problem is the idea that those three groups are the "natural" divisions, the way red, green, and blue are the natural primary colors (for human eyes, anyway.) The primary colors are dictated by our visial anatomy; racial classifications have no such biological basis. In fact you can make both anatomical and genetic arguments for the existence of anywhere from two to several tens of racial groups, and none of these distinctions is any more valid than any other.
Or to put it more simply, the three-races idea can be neatly disposed of with one word: "India."
As a hatchet job, it was fairly well written. As a technical standpoint, its basically a bug report about a single missing MIME-type that somehow dragged on to a 6 screen wall of text.
As a hatchet job, your post is fairly well written. As a summary of, or even a reasonable response to, the article, it's basically a spew of straw men, unsupported assertions, and mockery that isn't nearly as clever as you think it is.
No doubt both Google and Samsung will rapidly improve the Chromebook. In a year it might be a pretty good machine.
That being said, it should never have gone out the door with some of the bugs TFA describes (.doc is an unknown file type? Really?) Google's "eternal beta" approach is okay for some things, like Gmail because, you know, it's an e-mail server. Also, free. For an entire not-cheap hardware/OS combination, it may not be such a great idea.
Yep. And here's what the powers-that-be will hear:
Laundry list of distinguished security researchers: "Blah blah nerd stuff neep neep neep."
MPAA Flack: "We wear suits. And we have money. By the way, Senator, how's that third vacation home working out for you?"
Perhaps we should go back to actually funding the USPTO mainly with tax revenue. I realize that there's a lot of people here that are opposed on principle, but sometimes taxpayers are the correct party to fund things.
Communist! Socialist! Pedophile! Pothead! Music pirate! Think of the children! If we violate the principles of God and the Founding Fathers by doing such a thing, the terrorists have won!
There. Hope that clears things up for you.
Good, the more ridiculous the patents get, the quicker something will be done to fix the mess. Personally, I'd like to see this patent granted, and dozens of companies ordered to pay lots of damages to the angelic company that is Kootol. ....if only to see the backlash from a thousand juggernauts against the current patent system ;)
Unfortunately, it's not likely to work out that way. Kootol will no doubt be crushed, but the giant companies they're suing will most likely pay off Congress to "reform" the patent system in a way that makes it more difficult for small patent trolls to operate while still allowing the giants to go after small developers (and not-so-small, as in Microsoft's ongoing war against Linux.) Don't ask me what the specific wording will be; I don't claim to know, but they've got armies of lawyers to write the language to achieve the desired result.
The fact that it's "recent" is revealing in and of itself; it's a clear attempt to draw moral equivalence between the founders of the US and the oppressive theocratic fanatics butchering people in the middle east.
Convenient: if the facts don't fit your biases, dismiss the people presenting the facts as biased and move on. It helps if you throw in some outrageous hyperbole, too. (In reality, show me anyone who is trying to draw the moral equivalence you suggest, and I'll show you someone who is regarded by any serious historian as a loon.) Meanwhile, back in the real world, the fact that many of the American Revolutionaries were, in fact, by modern standards, out-and-out terrorists is something that's been known for decades.
Which homes? How many? Why, in particular was each of those homes targeted? Was it a matter of policy, or an occasional slip?
These questions matter. If you're not asking them, you don't care about the truth; you're using the pretense of knowledge to cover your ideology.
Indeed they do; and if you actually care about the answers, you'll do some research. And if you do that, you'll quickly learn that GPP's point is entirely correct: no matter how noble their cause, every revolutionary group in history, including those of the years leading up to 1776, has done things that we'd label terrorism (IIRC, a word that came out of the French Revolution) by modern standards. So have the governments they were fighting, of course. Revolutions are ugly, ugly things, inevitably turning families and friends and neighbors against each other, and even of the best of them quickly descend into horror. This is something that those who casually call for revolution against the modern US government should keep in mind.
You don't actually remember how crappy batteries used to be, do you?
Battery tech is improving steadily, and a surprisingly large number of the big breakthroughs we hear about become standard equipment within a few years of their announcement. Batteries aren't flashy like processors or displays, so people tend not to notice, but in fact batteries have been following their own version of Moore's Law for quite some time now. Even cursory research will show you that batteries of all kinds are longer-lived, more powerful, more reliable, and less expensive for the performance delivered than they've ever been.
But I suppose it's just easier to make snarky remarks on /. than to spend five minutes Googling for the relevant information.
You could literally confiscate every dime the wealthy earned last year, and still be nowhere near closing our yearly deficits.
You could easily repeat a stupid and easily debunked lie over and over, and find millions of suckers who believe it.
Indeed, and there are plenty of organizations which have that trust and maturity as part of their culture. Unfortunately, there are also a lot that don't. Personally, I've been extraordinarily lucky in my working life; the couple of times I've found myself working at places that pushed the "everyone has to be a superhero" mentality, or had such poor communication that it was nearly impossible to find out what people actually needed, have also been when the economy was doing well and there were better jobs available. In the current economic mess, people caught in that situation have a lot fewer options.
So you think overwork, burnout, and constant employee turnover are good things? You're either a sadist who enjoys treating other people like shit, or a masochist who enjoys being treated like shit; either way, don't expect rational people to buy into your sick ideology.
What is this "pager" you speak of?
... it won't make any difference, I suspect. There are (at least) three big problems here:
And no, I don't know what the solution is. Just pointing out that it's a structural issue, and collecting anecdotes about how badly things tend to go wrong doesn't seem to be doing much to motivate anyone to try to fix the underlying problems.
Actually, no, privacy and security are opposites. If you want total security, you need to live in a police state
Ask anyone who's ever lived in a police state how secure they felt doing so.
There is simply no way to guarantee with 100% certainty that anyone is who they claim to be when using an electronic medium.
To be fair, you could drop the last five words from that sentence and it would still be true. At a certain point, we have to either assume that the various means we have to verify our identity, whether in person or not, are sufficient for the task at hand; or come up with better ways to accomplish that goal.
If you really, truly, genuinely believe that accepting the theory of relativity is equivalent to believing in the power of prayer, you are simply incapable of understanding or contributing to rational debate on this or any subject.
A rational response in a religious debate by an AC - this cannot be the Slashdot I know.
Hah! But it's only a "rational response" to the degree that trying to avoid answering hard questions is a rational goal -- that is, if you don't have a good answer and are trying to lead the debate off in another direction entirely. To recap, OP asked:
But when you really get down to it - is faith any different than believing in any other supernatural item?
and AC replied:
The debate of belief and disbelief in God is a key part of the Western philosophical tradition.
This is kind of like answering the question "Did you steal that money?" with "People like having money." It's a dodge, a retreat into generality. I find it hard to believe that AC (or you, or anyone else in the discussion) doesn't have a pretty specific opinion on the answer to OP's question.
Exactly.
So what are you doing here?
Carefully trimmed stubble is "masculine" in the same way as pre-stressed jeans, clothing with a Harley-Davidson logo, or a Tap-Out sticker in the back window of a pickup truck. It's for chronologically adult little boys who think they can buy manhood instead of just, you know, being men.
Everything you say is true, but it won't make any difference to GPP or others like him. The Apple-haters, like all fanatics, are uninterested in trivial things like data and logic.
Yep. Other winners in this budget include the International Trade Administration, FBI, DEA, and the Bureau of Prisons. Other losers include NSF, NIST, NOAA, the Economic Development Administration, and programs to aid state and local law enforcement. You can draw your own conclusions about what set of priorities that reflects ...
Did we miss any?
In your case, what you're missing is the point, by a mile. This isn't about NASA. It's about the overall value of research, without which we would all still be living in caves and scratching bare-handed in the dirt. If you don't accept that, that's your privilege, but you should have the courage to act on your beliefs, which means GTFO of the modern world.