1) Without weapons, the weak have no recourse against the strong. Your idea of "democracy" really would come down to two wolves and a sheep making dinner plans.
All monopolies have powerful political friends, therefore they must exist with the aid of such friends.
Right, and in the example I cited (Microsoft), even the correlation didn't exist. Microsoft wanted almost nothing to do with governmental relationships, buddy-buddy or otherwise, until the antitrust case came up. They were simply left alone in what was probably the most-free market -- microcomputer software -- that this country has ever seen.
(I'm still waiting for the OP to come back and say, "b... b... but copyright!" Funny, I have a choice of novels to read, sci-fi movies to watch, magazines to browse, and textbooks to study. Those are all covered by copyright, too. Why don't I have a choice of operating systems?)
That is why every monopoly that ever existed in the world did so with the assistance of the state.
That's just insanity in the guise of an authoritative-sounding quote. How did the "state" give Microsoft its monopoly power to force PC vendors not to carry competitors' OS products?
Something many people don't understand is that the Nyquist criterion applies to the bandwidth of the recovered signal, not to its carrier frequency. So if you want to recover a 10-kHz wide signal at 800 MHz, you don't need to sample at 1600 MHz... you just need to sample at 20 kHz, using an ADC with lots of front-end bandwidth.
That's an oversimplification, but it may be what you were thinking of.
Perhaps time management isn't that important in the end, or perhaps the limited amount of time each of us may have makes it even more important.
Yeah, that's the question I had when I read through his PowerPoint slides yesterday morning, after the WSJ video came up in the course of my daily hour of mindless Fark surfing.
Pausch's methods are great for people who value a highly-regimented life, or who require the same to accomplish anything at all. There are people like that, and maybe he's one of them, but he overgeneralizes to a criminal extent, IMHO. Most of the worthwhile things I've accomplished can trace their beginnings to sitting around daydreaming and doing not much of anything, or looking for an excuse to put something else off. Hell, I wouldn't have seen his video and slides in the first place if I hadn't been killing time surfing the Web, right?
Ultimately, I spent half an hour watching the slides, and then went back to finish my daily list of unimportant links on Fark. I'll admit I was a little unsettled by one of the suggestions he raises ("Write your own eulogy. What do you want it to say?") because frankly, I don't know if people would find enough interesting things about me to even bother attending my funeral, and of course that bugs me. Everybody wants to leave a meaningful legacy, right? But ultimately, living by what you want your eulogist to say is just another way of living according to other people's standards. I finally managed to refute Pausch's dictums by imagining myself trying to persuade a Zen Buddhist practitioner to follow them.
You have to go your own way in life, and if you're lucky, you'll have the chance to determine how you die as well. If I were in Prof. Pausch's shoes, I'd like to think I'd wrap things up on my own terms, with a.38 Mannlicher and a one-way ticket to Washington, D.C. Consequently, my eulogy would depend entirely on how I behaved during the last five minutes of my life. Why should anyone be all that concerned about what people have to say about my Fark and Slashdot habits?
Old enough to know that your silly corporate conspiracy theories, are just that...
Then I'm sure you have a good explanation for their lack of action on the Sony rootkit. If you or I had done that, we still wouldn't have our computers back.
Geez, open your eyes, dumbass. There is one law for the people, and one law for corporations.
I know of specific ancestors who boarded ships with vague notions of their destination and slim possibilities for return. Many families have similar stories.
Don't forget just how much life absolutely sucked back then. Think about it... the homeless guy with the cardboard sign that you pass every day on the way to work has a better life in many respects than a wealthy nobleman did in the Age of Exploration. Your ancestor's choice was simple: his life could suck at home, or it could suck somewhere else. His reasoning was that he might as well take the long shot at fortune, because his life damned sure wasn't going anywhere otherwise.
As for me? I wouldn't even bother to grab a toothbrush first. But I can understand why many modern people would not agree to make the trip. We are too comfortable... and our modern opiates are stronger than religion ever was. (Hang out in a Chinese internet cafe full of WoW players if you want to see what I mean. You think any of those guys are willing to get on the boat to Mars?)
... to be a TV executive? Is there some kind of test you have to fail, or something?
Clue stick to head of NBC: Jobs knows what he's doing. Trust him. Give him your content, tell him to do whatever he wants with it, and go play golf or something.
Why don't NBC's stockholders revolt against the kind of mismanagement that throws away free money and turns content-distribution power over to pirates?
The contents of a power-cycled DRAM cell are highly correlated to whatever was stored in it before power was lost. Geez, think about how a DRAM works... it's a capacitor (aka an integrator)! That's the last place I'd ever look for randomness.
You think Amazon.com will give me any money out of their kind hearts for my invention? Does that sound fair to you
It isn't a question of what "sounds fair." It's a question of what the law says. The law says that only specific implementations, not vague concepts, can be patented. One-Click should never have been allowed as a patentable invention, because it is a concept, rather than an implementation.
But hey, if you think the value you add as a retailer has anything to do with the number of clicks needed to order stuff from your store, you're doomed anyway.
What effect would RF, even if only occasionally read, have from inside the human body?
None. You can either trust me on this, or go after the Nobel Prize that's waiting for anyone who can prove otherwise.
2) As far as I know, even if an object is inert, when injected inside of the human body, the human body works to reject foreign objects. At the very least, the human body has a tendency to form scar tissue around foreign bodies. Maybe in a small number of cases either the scar tissue, or human body's natural tendency to reject an object (with antibodies etc) or a combination of both results in cancer?
You should be able to patent business models and concepts that give you a competitive advantage.
Really? I've looked all through the Constitution, and I don't see anything about patenting concepts that give a competitive advantage. Some mumbo-jumbo about "promoting progress in the useful Arts and Sciences" is about as far as it goes.
If allowing corporations to own "concepts" promotes progress in anything except that particular corporation's stock price, I sure haven't seen evidence of it.
I'm not arguing for banning tobacco; while I hate smoking, I actively vote against smoking bans, in accordance with my basic l/Libertarian beliefs.
But it is kind of dumb to use "choice" as an argument for the freedom to use addictive drugs. It may be that the choice to renounce your ability to make choices is still a valid choice in itself, academically speaking, but let's not pretend that the addictive-drug/tobacco question is a matter of choice in any sense but an academic one.
It isn't about you being forced to do anything. It is about you wanting to do something and wanting to restrict someone else in the process. That isn't libertarianism. And if you think it is somehow, maybe we should rethink how many people are libertarian verses claiming to be.
The issue isn't quite that simple. You are talking about your supposed "right" to use an addictive drug that affects, or at least bothers, others around you.
What in the world is "libertarian" about being completely and utterly pwned by tobacco companies? How can you claim you have a choice to smoke, when the very nature of the product takes choice away from you at the biochemical level?
Interesting; I never realized Pournelle was such a dick.
"Apparently writers who want some control over who displays their works are despicable, but those who want their works displayed by pirate sites have a legitimate grievance."
Hello, dumbshit: it's not a "pirate site" to the extent that it's distributing works with permission. When you send takedown notices, you should be careful that the notices cover only properties to which you own the rights. Otherwise, guess what? You're the pirate.
Re:Shameless plug - chess board diagram composer
on
GWT in Action
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· Score: 1
The real question is, are you, I or anyone else actually benefiting from making this particular criticism?
Absolutely. By making fun of Christians, the reality-based community makes it harder for you to impose your superstitions on the rest of us.
The difference between me and you is that once I convince you to keep your fractured, pathological myths out of the voting booth and out of my child's classroom, I'll go away and leave you alone.
In the case of Islam, the believers are not mentally unstable
Sorry, but anyone who believes in any religion in the 21st century is mentally unstable.
Don't believe me? Try making up your own evangelical religion. Observe peoples' reaction when you tell them about it. Then ask them, "What's the difference between my irrational beliefs and the ones you already hold?"
Religion is something that all of us, not just radical Islamists, need to get over. We don't need it anymore. We have other explanations for natural phenomena.
No, there's no way we share a common ancestor with these guys. They certainly weren't created in the image of the same God as we were, right?... Right?
C'mon, guys, help me out here. My faith in Genesis is wearing kinda thin here.
Slashdot Mirror
... with an iPhone.
1) Without weapons, the weak have no recourse against the strong. Your idea of "democracy" really would come down to two wolves and a sheep making dinner plans.
2) Guns are fun, mmm'kay?
All monopolies have powerful political friends, therefore they must exist with the aid of such friends.
Right, and in the example I cited (Microsoft), even the correlation didn't exist. Microsoft wanted almost nothing to do with governmental relationships, buddy-buddy or otherwise, until the antitrust case came up. They were simply left alone in what was probably the most-free market -- microcomputer software -- that this country has ever seen.
(I'm still waiting for the OP to come back and say, "b... b... but copyright!" Funny, I have a choice of novels to read, sci-fi movies to watch, magazines to browse, and textbooks to study. Those are all covered by copyright, too. Why don't I have a choice of operating systems?)
... is exactly why you don't want to destroy the utility of the HF radio spectrum to sell it to broadband-over-power-line Internet providers.
You don't want to put all of your communication eggs in one government-controlled basket.
That is why every monopoly that ever existed in the world did so with the assistance of the state.
That's just insanity in the guise of an authoritative-sounding quote. How did the "state" give Microsoft its monopoly power to force PC vendors not to carry competitors' OS products?
Yeah, he's like that Gutenberg asshat. WTF has ol' Johann done for me lately?
Something many people don't understand is that the Nyquist criterion applies to the bandwidth of the recovered signal, not to its carrier frequency. So if you want to recover a 10-kHz wide signal at 800 MHz, you don't need to sample at 1600 MHz... you just need to sample at 20 kHz, using an ADC with lots of front-end bandwidth.
That's an oversimplification, but it may be what you were thinking of.
Perhaps time management isn't that important in the end, or perhaps the limited amount of time each of us may have makes it even more important.
.38 Mannlicher and a one-way ticket to Washington, D.C. Consequently, my eulogy would depend entirely on how I behaved during the last five minutes of my life. Why should anyone be all that concerned about what people have to say about my Fark and Slashdot habits?
Yeah, that's the question I had when I read through his PowerPoint slides yesterday morning, after the WSJ video came up in the course of my daily hour of mindless Fark surfing.
Pausch's methods are great for people who value a highly-regimented life, or who require the same to accomplish anything at all. There are people like that, and maybe he's one of them, but he overgeneralizes to a criminal extent, IMHO. Most of the worthwhile things I've accomplished can trace their beginnings to sitting around daydreaming and doing not much of anything, or looking for an excuse to put something else off. Hell, I wouldn't have seen his video and slides in the first place if I hadn't been killing time surfing the Web, right?
Ultimately, I spent half an hour watching the slides, and then went back to finish my daily list of unimportant links on Fark. I'll admit I was a little unsettled by one of the suggestions he raises ("Write your own eulogy. What do you want it to say?") because frankly, I don't know if people would find enough interesting things about me to even bother attending my funeral, and of course that bugs me. Everybody wants to leave a meaningful legacy, right? But ultimately, living by what you want your eulogist to say is just another way of living according to other people's standards. I finally managed to refute Pausch's dictums by imagining myself trying to persuade a Zen Buddhist practitioner to follow them.
You have to go your own way in life, and if you're lucky, you'll have the chance to determine how you die as well. If I were in Prof. Pausch's shoes, I'd like to think I'd wrap things up on my own terms, with a
Old enough to know that your silly corporate conspiracy theories, are just that...
Then I'm sure you have a good explanation for their lack of action on the Sony rootkit. If you or I had done that, we still wouldn't have our computers back.
Geez, open your eyes, dumbass. There is one law for the people, and one law for corporations.
I know of specific ancestors who boarded ships with vague notions of their destination and slim possibilities for return. Many families have similar stories.
Don't forget just how much life absolutely sucked back then. Think about it... the homeless guy with the cardboard sign that you pass every day on the way to work has a better life in many respects than a wealthy nobleman did in the Age of Exploration. Your ancestor's choice was simple: his life could suck at home, or it could suck somewhere else. His reasoning was that he might as well take the long shot at fortune, because his life damned sure wasn't going anywhere otherwise.
As for me? I wouldn't even bother to grab a toothbrush first. But I can understand why many modern people would not agree to make the trip. We are too comfortable... and our modern opiates are stronger than religion ever was. (Hang out in a Chinese internet cafe full of WoW players if you want to see what I mean. You think any of those guys are willing to get on the boat to Mars?)
... to be a TV executive? Is there some kind of test you have to fail, or something?
Clue stick to head of NBC: Jobs knows what he's doing. Trust him. Give him your content, tell him to do whatever he wants with it, and go play golf or something.
Why don't NBC's stockholders revolt against the kind of mismanagement that throws away free money and turns content-distribution power over to pirates?
The contents of a power-cycled DRAM cell are highly correlated to whatever was stored in it before power was lost. Geez, think about how a DRAM works... it's a capacitor (aka an integrator)! That's the last place I'd ever look for randomness.
Despite the fact that they do not own (or claim) copyright, they can certainly take civil action against you
In the absence of contract and consideration? Um, yeeeah. Good luck with that civil action. Maybe Jack Thompson will take the case.
You think Amazon.com will give me any money out of their kind hearts for my invention? Does that sound fair to you
It isn't a question of what "sounds fair." It's a question of what the law says. The law says that only specific implementations, not vague concepts, can be patented. One-Click should never have been allowed as a patentable invention, because it is a concept, rather than an implementation.
But hey, if you think the value you add as a retailer has anything to do with the number of clicks needed to order stuff from your store, you're doomed anyway.
What effect would RF, even if only occasionally read, have from inside the human body?
None. You can either trust me on this, or go after the Nobel Prize that's waiting for anyone who can prove otherwise.
2) As far as I know, even if an object is inert, when injected inside of the human body, the human body works to reject foreign objects. At the very least, the human body has a tendency to form scar tissue around foreign bodies. Maybe in a small number of cases either the scar tissue, or human body's natural tendency to reject an object (with antibodies etc) or a combination of both results in cancer?
Why don't earrings cause cancer, then?
You should be able to patent business models and concepts that give you a competitive advantage.
Really? I've looked all through the Constitution, and I don't see anything about patenting concepts that give a competitive advantage. Some mumbo-jumbo about "promoting progress in the useful Arts and Sciences" is about as far as it goes.
If allowing corporations to own "concepts" promotes progress in anything except that particular corporation's stock price, I sure haven't seen evidence of it.
I have no idea. He seems to have his own army of psycho net.kook stalker types...
I'm not arguing for banning tobacco; while I hate smoking, I actively vote against smoking bans, in accordance with my basic l/Libertarian beliefs.
But it is kind of dumb to use "choice" as an argument for the freedom to use addictive drugs. It may be that the choice to renounce your ability to make choices is still a valid choice in itself, academically speaking, but let's not pretend that the addictive-drug/tobacco question is a matter of choice in any sense but an academic one.
It isn't about you being forced to do anything. It is about you wanting to do something and wanting to restrict someone else in the process. That isn't libertarianism. And if you think it is somehow, maybe we should rethink how many people are libertarian verses claiming to be.
The issue isn't quite that simple. You are talking about your supposed "right" to use an addictive drug that affects, or at least bothers, others around you.
What in the world is "libertarian" about being completely and utterly pwned by tobacco companies? How can you claim you have a choice to smoke, when the very nature of the product takes choice away from you at the biochemical level?
Interesting; I never realized Pournelle was such a dick.
"Apparently writers who want some control over who displays their works are despicable, but those who want their works displayed by pirate sites have a legitimate grievance."
Hello, dumbshit: it's not a "pirate site" to the extent that it's distributing works with permission. When you send takedown notices, you should be careful that the notices cover only properties to which you own the rights. Otherwise, guess what? You're the pirate.
Nifty. Are you going to release the source?
I'll still go away and leave you alone. In fact, I'll do it now.
If only I could believe you.
The real question is, are you, I or anyone else actually benefiting from making this particular criticism?
Absolutely. By making fun of Christians, the reality-based community makes it harder for you to impose your superstitions on the rest of us.
The difference between me and you is that once I convince you to keep your fractured, pathological myths out of the voting booth and out of my child's classroom, I'll go away and leave you alone.
In the case of Islam, the believers are not mentally unstable
Sorry, but anyone who believes in any religion in the 21st century is mentally unstable.
Don't believe me? Try making up your own evangelical religion. Observe peoples' reaction when you tell them about it. Then ask them, "What's the difference between my irrational beliefs and the ones you already hold?"
Religion is something that all of us, not just radical Islamists, need to get over. We don't need it anymore. We have other explanations for natural phenomena.
No, there's no way we share a common ancestor with these guys. They certainly weren't created in the image of the same God as we were, right? ... Right?
C'mon, guys, help me out here. My faith in Genesis is wearing kinda thin here.