Hi, I'm Australian. Can you give a couple of quick bullet points on how speech is freer in the US than here? Perhaps I'm missing something I don't know I'm missing.
I don't know.. people who troll basically just want some attention. It's attention-seeking behaviour, and there will be a reason behind it.
Sure, most people probably can't be bothered with it, especially when it's just some faceless dude on the net. But I'd argue that giving them a bit of positive brain time is good both for them and for the responder.
Think of it as good practice in dealing with an opposing point of view. A random sparring partner. Give it as much time as you want, even if it's 2 minutes, then drop it.
The result may be that the troll gets some attention - which is positive feedback - but then *loses* that attention when the responder disappears.
The troll may learn that the only way to keep someone's attention is to behave better. TFA doesn't say spend a week talking to them. One respectful response is enough - a taster of possible real conversation - real connection - if they stop behaving badly.
If that's not what they want, then it's only one response. Ignoring doesn't give anyone a chance, it's instant rejection. I think there's a better way, in the middle.
Uh, the parent poster is looking for a country with a more freedoms than America
Yes, perhaps s/he should be more specific about what "freedoms" are being lamented. Free to do what exactly? I think a human rights index is a pretty important measure of freedom in many ways that matter.
So what are the freedoms that you care about, that America is the best place for? The word "free" is bandied around rather freely, without much explanation of what it means to the person using it.
God forbid there's a "better county" out there than the US. Oh no, not possible. There can't possibly be over 30 countries with greater life expectancy than the US. Oh no. Nor can the US possibly be 12th in the quality of life index, or not top of the human development index or.. fuck it, pick your index, the only one the US is on top of is the Blind Arrogance Index. But hey you're free to do that too.
Just because Google is a huge organisation with resources to spare for strenuous recovery attempts, doesn't mean "the cloud" is reliable. The cloud is made up of lots of companies who might not be around in another year.
Go ahead and trust your information to them without being responsible for your own backups. Home storage & backup devices will soon be commonplace anyway, no longer restricted to the tech-savvy. I advise you use them.
I have POP set up in gmail, all email downloaded to Thunderbird and backed up. Not a single email of mine resides on Gmail servers which aren't either downloaded or spam.
They claim they are not a bank so as not to be regulated as a bank in the US, so they are allowed to screw customers by freezing funds at their discretion, not giving enough fraud protection etc.
Sorry, I think you're confusing the US with a country that gives a damn about regulation.
I think it's safe to resign ourselves to little more happening in our lives.
Thank god for that. Perhaps we can start to concentrate on fixing the problems on this (still unique) little world of ours. I'm all for scientific discovery, but can't help spotting the irony of searching for Earth-like worlds, while ours becomes a little less "Earth-like" every decade.
At least, once we've wiped out all life here, we can finally say our planet isn't unique any more.
The "Goldilocks Zone" is only one of a number of conditions which need to be met for intelligent life.
There's the issue of the Solar Wind blowing your atmosphere away, so you need a magnetic field to shield you, which means a spinning planet with an iron core - at least I that's the only way I've heard about. The Drake Equation doesn't account for that.
Then there's biology. We can see on Earth that any civilisation, in order to progress technologically, requires enough food in their immediate environment to get beyond subsistence living. Evidence - Australian Aborigines, Torres Strait Islanders, PNG.. no advances because they had to spend all their time looking for food.
So the gap between "planet in the right zone" and "civilisation with radio dishes" seems a pretty big one, whether they're a humanoid or a frogoid.
Its missing all ground textures and a lot of other textures, it doesn't run on any setting other than minimum, the screen constantly flickers when you play, you cant customize visuals, it crashes when you load a level for almost everyone, and the list goes on.
How does that differ from most games I play on my PC?
Being a good neighbour cuts both ways. I see new Wii games in the shop here (Oz) for $70 each. Who in their right minds thinks a video game is worth that much money, no matter how much sweat went into making it? It's just a video game. And then we hear that publishers don't like us having the freedom to sell them 2nd hand?
The outlook of many pirates, whether it's music or games, is, "if you're going to rip me off, I may as well rip you off too".
For the political pirates, it's very much like the music industry - buying an expensive game is not seen as supporting the creative talent and developers, as much as putting money in the pockets of publishers. Studios are valued, but when they're only getting 20% of revenue, something is very wrong.
So these industries have to take some blame for creating a mindset in the pirating public that the only damage being done is to greedy fat cats who are the ones to blame for games (and music) being double the price they should be.
Has nobody noticed that one can create *unlimited* throw-away addresses in Yahoo?
I've had a Yahoo account - unpaid - for years now, and have over 50 email aliases. I create a new one for every new need. It's awesome and nobody has matched it, ever. What's going on there?
Just create a yahoo.com.au account (Australian) and you can create aliases to your heart's content. A limit of 5, MS? Pathetic!
The experts who said Agent Orange and DDT were safe? The experts who put asbestos fibers in buildings for decades? Those experts?
Yeah, the experts who you have to thank for your comfortable life of beers in the fridge and (assumedly) freedom from things like slavery and preventable disease. How laughable to sit in your well-constructed house, on your computer, trying to say experts are getting it all wrong. I'd like to see you fix your car when it breaks down. My apologies if you're an expert mechanic.
I believe you are referring to the influence of money, not of expertise per se. Experts don't dictate what is done in the market with the result of their labours. Companies and governments do. In the past, religions did as well. Good luck looking to them for how to make the world a better place.
Expertise is the *only* thing standing between our culture of greed, selfishness and short-sightedness, and the virtual extinction of our species. Expertise isn't over-fishing and over-polluting. Expertise has to fight, all the time, against politics and money to get out the message of how to do things right and how to improve our lives.
And if they make the odd mistake, like the recent story about penguin trackers, it's not because they don't care. Experts are human and make honest mistakes - far more preferable to doing intentional harm to make a buck, isn't it?
If an expert says something is safe, they either: a) believe it is, or b) are corrupt, getting paid to say so, or c) the fall guy for corporations & government who don't want to take the blame. Very few are corrupt. An expert is, by definition, someone who cares a great deal about their subject and wants to get things right.
The reason people hated it was because people who like physics based sci-fi are not comfortable with meta-physics and fantasy sci-fi or at least don't like it when expecting one and get served the other.
You sure use the word "people" a lot. Who are these "people" of which you speak?
I do love people who generalise though. Makes me feel so unique and special if I disagree.:)
"Look", perhaps, but that's all. Personally I prefer being told a story, and using my imagination, than participate in this drive to spoon-feed the senses so it's all "experience" with no effort by the viewer. I hope it goes the way of smell-o-vision.
Personally I've never understood (and never cared enough, really) why TV magazines insist on telling the reader what is due to take place in their soap of choice over the coming week.
Particularly that practice, like in Battlestar Galactica, where "next week in Battlestar Galactica" was such a mash up of disparate scenes that watching it really gave you no idea what was going to happen anyway. Very weird.
I did make it up, yes.:) It's a story some (may be most) might like to be true, but it's hard to imagine happening even though China seems to be playing similar games. Capitalism is at fault here, since normally the west might stand up to them, but big companies want to trade and big companies buy policy.
Ironically, the US's biggest problem isn't communism, it's capitalism.:o
Meetup.com has 63 people, not all engineers, and they deal with a client base which uses their product in a much more demanding way than Facebook's users. I look at Meetup.com as more of a performance-critical application, at least in terms of their users. If Meetup gets a bug, it affects whole groups of people - a lot of them engaged in technical, educational, aid and political activities - trying to organise themselves. I'd like to say it again - *63 employees*.
Facebook, on it's face (so to speak), is not rocket science. Neither is Meetup. This indicates to me that there's a LOT going on behind the scenes and most of it has to do with implementing the API and other technology to support all the marketing, advertising, strategic partnerships, etc. Either that or the UI changes are deceptively complicated.
Yeah, I'd love to know what those 500 people are mostly coding. Perhaps this is an indication of the difference between an advertising-run business vs subscription. One of them allows you to get on with what matters to your users. If anything shows where Facebooks's primary focus is, this does.
I'm going to quote-mine the Facebook employee saying 'We absolutely do not believe "most engineers are capable of writing bug-free code"' when meeting with clients.:)
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Hi, I'm Australian. Can you give a couple of quick bullet points on how speech is freer in the US than here? Perhaps I'm missing something I don't know I'm missing.
I don't know.. people who troll basically just want some attention. It's attention-seeking behaviour, and there will be a reason behind it.
Sure, most people probably can't be bothered with it, especially when it's just some faceless dude on the net. But I'd argue that giving them a bit of positive brain time is good both for them and for the responder.
Think of it as good practice in dealing with an opposing point of view. A random sparring partner. Give it as much time as you want, even if it's 2 minutes, then drop it.
The result may be that the troll gets some attention - which is positive feedback - but then *loses* that attention when the responder disappears.
The troll may learn that the only way to keep someone's attention is to behave better. TFA doesn't say spend a week talking to them. One respectful response is enough - a taster of possible real conversation - real connection - if they stop behaving badly.
If that's not what they want, then it's only one response. Ignoring doesn't give anyone a chance, it's instant rejection. I think there's a better way, in the middle.
Uh, the parent poster is looking for a country with a more freedoms than America
Yes, perhaps s/he should be more specific about what "freedoms" are being lamented. Free to do what exactly? I think a human rights index is a pretty important measure of freedom in many ways that matter.
So what are the freedoms that you care about, that America is the best place for? The word "free" is bandied around rather freely, without much explanation of what it means to the person using it.
If there were a better country to move to
God forbid there's a "better county" out there than the US. Oh no, not possible. There can't possibly be over 30 countries with greater life expectancy than the US. Oh no. Nor can the US possibly be 12th in the quality of life index, or not top of the human development index or.. fuck it, pick your index, the only one the US is on top of is the Blind Arrogance Index. But hey you're free to do that too.
You offload IT work from non-skilled folks to skilled folks, with the downside of relying on connectivity
You're leaving out the downside of "the cloud" being mainly made up of start-ups who might not be around for another year. Then where's your data?
Not all cloud providers are Google, MS and SalesForce.
Because its safer then my hard drive.
Because you obviously don't do backups.
Just because Google is a huge organisation with resources to spare for strenuous recovery attempts, doesn't mean "the cloud" is reliable. The cloud is made up of lots of companies who might not be around in another year.
Go ahead and trust your information to them without being responsible for your own backups. Home storage & backup devices will soon be commonplace anyway, no longer restricted to the tech-savvy. I advise you use them.
Second this.
I have POP set up in gmail, all email downloaded to Thunderbird and backed up. Not a single email of mine resides on Gmail servers which aren't either downloaded or spam.
Keeping your life in cloud is for the birds. :)
They claim they are not a bank so as not to be regulated as a bank in the US, so they are allowed to screw customers by freezing funds at their discretion, not giving enough fraud protection etc.
Sorry, I think you're confusing the US with a country that gives a damn about regulation.
It bothers me how often I hear absolutes with regards to "regardless of XXX, life would most certainly still exist." :)
Taking it even further, you have to ask whether pornography is an emergent property of intelligent life.
I'm just wondering why Ron Jeremy is writing tech stories these days.
I think it's safe to resign ourselves to little more happening in our lives.
Thank god for that. Perhaps we can start to concentrate on fixing the problems on this (still unique) little world of ours. I'm all for scientific discovery, but can't help spotting the irony of searching for Earth-like worlds, while ours becomes a little less "Earth-like" every decade.
At least, once we've wiped out all life here, we can finally say our planet isn't unique any more.
The "Goldilocks Zone" is only one of a number of conditions which need to be met for intelligent life.
There's the issue of the Solar Wind blowing your atmosphere away, so you need a magnetic field to shield you, which means a spinning planet with an iron core - at least I that's the only way I've heard about. The Drake Equation doesn't account for that.
Then there's biology. We can see on Earth that any civilisation, in order to progress technologically, requires enough food in their immediate environment to get beyond subsistence living. Evidence - Australian Aborigines, Torres Strait Islanders, PNG.. no advances because they had to spend all their time looking for food.
So the gap between "planet in the right zone" and "civilisation with radio dishes" seems a pretty big one, whether they're a humanoid or a frogoid.
Its missing all ground textures and a lot of other textures, it doesn't run on any setting other than minimum, the screen constantly flickers when you play, you cant customize visuals, it crashes when you load a level for almost everyone, and the list goes on.
How does that differ from most games I play on my PC?
Being a good neighbour cuts both ways. I see new Wii games in the shop here (Oz) for $70 each. Who in their right minds thinks a video game is worth that much money, no matter how much sweat went into making it? It's just a video game. And then we hear that publishers don't like us having the freedom to sell them 2nd hand?
The outlook of many pirates, whether it's music or games, is, "if you're going to rip me off, I may as well rip you off too".
For the political pirates, it's very much like the music industry - buying an expensive game is not seen as supporting the creative talent and developers, as much as putting money in the pockets of publishers. Studios are valued, but when they're only getting 20% of revenue, something is very wrong.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_industry#Economics_2
So these industries have to take some blame for creating a mindset in the pirating public that the only damage being done is to greedy fat cats who are the ones to blame for games (and music) being double the price they should be.
...and almost fanatical devotion to the Pope.
Four! Our four key challenges....
On the contrary, I thought it was quite objective: it indicates that the total mass of the individuals arrested exceeds 1,000 kg.
On the contrary, you must be thinking of the metric ton, or tonne.
Has nobody noticed that one can create *unlimited* throw-away addresses in Yahoo?
I've had a Yahoo account - unpaid - for years now, and have over 50 email aliases. I create a new one for every new need. It's awesome and nobody has matched it, ever. What's going on there?
Just create a yahoo.com.au account (Australian) and you can create aliases to your heart's content. A limit of 5, MS? Pathetic!
The experts who said Agent Orange and DDT were safe? The experts who put asbestos fibers in buildings for decades? Those experts?
Yeah, the experts who you have to thank for your comfortable life of beers in the fridge and (assumedly) freedom from things like slavery and preventable disease. How laughable to sit in your well-constructed house, on your computer, trying to say experts are getting it all wrong. I'd like to see you fix your car when it breaks down. My apologies if you're an expert mechanic.
I believe you are referring to the influence of money, not of expertise per se. Experts don't dictate what is done in the market with the result of their labours. Companies and governments do. In the past, religions did as well. Good luck looking to them for how to make the world a better place.
Expertise is the *only* thing standing between our culture of greed, selfishness and short-sightedness, and the virtual extinction of our species. Expertise isn't over-fishing and over-polluting. Expertise has to fight, all the time, against politics and money to get out the message of how to do things right and how to improve our lives.
And if they make the odd mistake, like the recent story about penguin trackers, it's not because they don't care. Experts are human and make honest mistakes - far more preferable to doing intentional harm to make a buck, isn't it?
If an expert says something is safe, they either: a) believe it is, or b) are corrupt, getting paid to say so, or c) the fall guy for corporations & government who don't want to take the blame. Very few are corrupt. An expert is, by definition, someone who cares a great deal about their subject and wants to get things right.
The reason people hated it was because people who like physics based sci-fi are not comfortable with meta-physics and fantasy sci-fi or at least don't like it when expecting one and get served the other.
You sure use the word "people" a lot. Who are these "people" of which you speak?
I do love people who generalise though. Makes me feel so unique and special if I disagree. :)
These will be fantastic in 3D.
"Look", perhaps, but that's all. Personally I prefer being told a story, and using my imagination, than participate in this drive to spoon-feed the senses so it's all "experience" with no effort by the viewer. I hope it goes the way of smell-o-vision.
IMO 3D makes movies worse, not better.
Personally I've never understood (and never cared enough, really) why TV magazines insist on telling the reader what is due to take place in their soap of choice over the coming week.
Particularly that practice, like in Battlestar Galactica, where "next week in Battlestar Galactica" was such a mash up of disparate scenes that watching it really gave you no idea what was going to happen anyway. Very weird.
I did make it up, yes. :) It's a story some (may be most) might like to be true, but it's hard to imagine happening even though China seems to be playing similar games. Capitalism is at fault here, since normally the west might stand up to them, but big companies want to trade and big companies buy policy.
Ironically, the US's biggest problem isn't communism, it's capitalism. :o
Well, they got the "instant" part right, it's just the "pop" part which isn't such a great idea.
WTF is with Facebook and 500+ engineers?
Meetup.com has 63 people, not all engineers, and they deal with a client base which uses their product in a much more demanding way than Facebook's users. I look at Meetup.com as more of a performance-critical application, at least in terms of their users. If Meetup gets a bug, it affects whole groups of people - a lot of them engaged in technical, educational, aid and political activities - trying to organise themselves. I'd like to say it again - *63 employees*.
Facebook, on it's face (so to speak), is not rocket science. Neither is Meetup. This indicates to me that there's a LOT going on behind the scenes and most of it has to do with implementing the API and other technology to support all the marketing, advertising, strategic partnerships, etc. Either that or the UI changes are deceptively complicated.
Yeah, I'd love to know what those 500 people are mostly coding. Perhaps this is an indication of the difference between an advertising-run business vs subscription. One of them allows you to get on with what matters to your users. If anything shows where Facebooks's primary focus is, this does.
Thanks for that.
I'm going to quote-mine the Facebook employee saying 'We absolutely do not believe "most engineers are capable of writing bug-free code"' when meeting with clients. :)