It's not only software. It's about every single thing. From an iPhone which costs aprox. 500EUR(!) to a pair of Nike Air shoes that you get for 80EUR average passing through gas for 1,5EUR per liter...
Now, can someone tell me why, exactly, can I get the same pair of shoes for 50USD in the US and have to pay more than 80EUR in the EU? Localization costs?! Bullshit.
NetDanzr is right, they charge higher prices because they can. At least with books I can give them the middle finger... Thank you Amazon.com! I just wish they'd ship a wider range of items to Europe...
Really? That's odd... It's gotta be the auto transmission then... Wouldn't imagine it would make such a difference...
Around here we don't really use cars with auto gearbox.. except the Smarts. So it never came to my attention..
You know, I can't wait to ditch my car... It's a cash siphon! Gas, taxes, inspection, insurances, accidents, mechanics....
I wanna move in to a city that has a decent public transportation system like Paris or something... You don't need a car with a Metro like that... Paradise...
Re:C# isn't a language...
on
Head First C#
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· Score: 1
Man, I'm probably missing something but, the first link brings little if nothing new to Java. While the second has a couple nice details but nothing more than that...
I'm just saying I can't really see where C# is more readable than Java... It's just like, a different accent (in terms of readability, of course).
But hey, languages are there to be used so, C# on man!
I'm getting into lighter flavors anyway, I figure that for most stuff I don't need the bulkiness of Java.. Python does the trick neatly.
Yeah, breaks my heart with sorrow... Poor media corporations... Losing money and all...
If the game is good, people buy it. Period.
See piracy as a mass advertising campaign that doesn't need ad agencies and specialists. But instead of paying millions in cash, you lose a few sales. It's much more effective and cheaper anyway.
Now, what I would like to know is how most games would turn popular without piracy...
Well I don't know about you, but for me, 1.50EUR a liter is pretty expensive no matter what MPG your car gets... I have a 1.4 liter, 4 cil. gas-powered vehicle and I get it to do 7L per 100Km.
That's more than 10 cents the kilometer... Not that cheap...
Man, do not underestimate me. I'm European. My country has its borders defined for 800 years. Believe me, if there are people who know about war, conflict and violence it's Europeans.
I don't need you to justify for the atomic bombs your country deployed. I think I know pretty well why.
Now, about terrorism, the West didn't create islamic terrorism? What exactly is islamic terrorism? What makes it different from irish, basque, or colombian terrorism? The motivation? Open your eyes. Terrorism is warfare. It's pretty much the warfare I would expect my enemy to practice if he had no money, weapons, organization, etc to form a "classical" army or guerrilla, but was determined to fight.
If the USA should give as much money to Palestine as it gives to Israel, maybe the palestinians wouldn't send only rocks and hand-made joke-rockets to Israeli tanks...
Re:C# isn't a language...
on
Head First C#
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
Huh, what features? If they're so nice it would sure be good to hear about them...
Terrorism works huh? No shit?
Everybody knows that. What's new is the fact that this new democratic-free-speech-politically-correct ruling mentality in the US and Europe that wants to convince us that it doesn't and that it's evil. Yet you look back in History and you see all kinds of terrorists being praised. Example: Menachem Begin, orchestrator of the bloodiest terrorist attack of the 20th century in King David Hotel in Jerusalem, with a death toll of around 90 people, men women and children both Jew and Muslim. Yet he became Prime-Minister and, here's the funny part, won the Nobel Prize for Peace. Hilarious.
Now, who are you and the rest of the blindfolded puppets that share your opinion trying to fool? Apart from yourselves of course...
how muslims fight : kidnapping kids, wives and old people and executing them en masse in hopes of demoralizing an enemy
Hiroshima/Nagasaki anyone?
the ancient egyptians (who still existed when the muslim caliph ordered the library of alexandria burnt down)
Yeah. That's what you say. Others say otherwise. Besides, the attack on science is not a muslim thing. It's a religious thing.
So you can crawl back to your hole again and stay there until you figure out how to properly make a point instead of swinging flawed biased pseudo-arguments around. Oh and while you're there, remove the blindfold and read a couple of things. History books are advisable though read more than one author. Books written in the last and before last centuries are also advisable (There were not any neocons back then, only imperialists).
I agree. Were it not for christianity, we could have stronger, Roman values, and could merely justify the extermination of our enemies because they were weaker. Just where exactly did you learn about those Roman values that justify the extermination of our enemies? It seems to me that you don't know much - perhaps nothing - about Romans. If there was ever a civilization that was fair with the people it conquered, it was Roma. In fact, I'd rather have my culture and nation exterminated by Romans a thousand times than a single one by Christians... I think you should take a look on a few History books that don't have "Holy Bible" written in the cover.
Huh, well..
You guys are pretty much talking about what you don't know. What you, and I, know is that we'll evolve phenotypes that will make correspondent genes last longer, i.e. get copied more often. That is what we can say for sure. Of course we can try to guess the general direction of our evolution but we would be probably wrong. Do not forget that we started to have fat and cholesterol problems relatively recently. For those factors to have a noticeable effect they would have to last for a long time. And considering the fast mutating rate of life and habits of Homo Sapiens Sapiens they probably won't. So I would say that even if we manage to guess a couple adaptations, the great majority wouldn't be guessable anyway because we can't even see the driving factors.. Besides we didn't even get ridden of the old useless ones yet... (e.g. the fifth toe) Anyway, we'll never know. Unfortunately.
it can't be denied that an intelligent designer could have come up with much better designs than the ones you see. Attributing evolutionary designs to an intelligent being is practically an insult when you look at some of the shoddy work evolution has come up with. Our testicles, for example, hang from our undersides dangerously exposed, just because some protein denatures at core body temperatures.
OK, it can't be denied that an intelligent designer "could" have come up with better designs. But the question is, would it? Anyone who has ever tampered with genetic algorithms knows that the power of random change associated with the mechanism of both natural and artificial selection is extremely powerful! In fact, I'm willing to bet that, given enough time, it can beat any intelligent design no matter the objective or purpose. I suggest you guys google on Karl Sims and his creatures for a glimpse of that power. And it can be applied to virtually anything, provided you can find a way to map a solution to a genotype and find a good heuristic to drive the process of selection. Then it's a matter of tuning the functions and probabilities and voila. You get your solution. Probably better than any you could ever design. Why? Well, for starters, there isn't any bias toward any particular kind of solution. Take symmetry. It's a bias that tends to show itself in human designs. And most of the times, it's not beneficial in any way. Basically, natural/artificial selection doesn't have any bias or prejudice against any kind of solution. It merely finds the best one.
About life, well, I believe the best definition of life so far, is the replicator definition. Basically, if it replicates, it is alive. Viruses (carbon based) would, under this definition, be living creatures. And, honestly, I don't see why wouldn't they... They seem pretty alive to me.. As for computer viruses I would put them in a zombie state. This is because, although they do replicate, they basically clone themselves which is not exactly the same thing at least for life as we know it. The problem resides in the fact that carbon viruses infect other phenotypes replicating machinery with their own genotype. Computer viruses don't. The analogous thing would be, I believe, for a computer virus to somehow inject it's source code into a victim compiler and make it compile it and execute it. I don't know if there is already something like this. I remember of code injection on forms and similar attacks secure-code guys are always worried about and I wonder if it possible...
Anyway I'm not a specialist, and everything I said here is from what I've learned in college and from reading... But for anyone interested I seriously recommend Richard Dawkins's books, especially The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker and The Extended Phenotype. They're written in fairly common language and, with a couple exceptions, can be easily understood by anyone minimally intelligent (I like to believe that that applies to everyone that reads/.). Well, if you're a creationist you'll probably not going to like them.. But then again, you're not minimally intelligent...
For CS guys well take a course on AI and your life will change... You'll start wondering what's the point of actually program something... Why not evolve the damn thing?..
Gentlemen,
the point I'm trying to make is that Iran has the right to have nuclear weapons. You talk about zealots and fanatics? Take the India-Pakistan conflict, for example, they're at war and they're both nuclear capable! Yet, no nukes used so far... And I believe nobody vouches for any of them as an example of rationality and moderation... North Korea is yet another example. A communist monarchy (eh eh) led by a, I believe we all agree, at least unscrupulous king, that is technically still at war with the U.S.! Obviously, if Iran becomes nuclear, nobody can expect to invade them as easily as Iraq. They will defend themselves with everything they have... By the way, even if someone - with their eyes open - had any doubts about WMD in Iraq before the invasion, it became perfectly clear that there were none because none were used against the invaders...
To make things clear, I'm not advocating nuclear weapons, although I do advocate nuclear powered energy, but I'm not ingenuous enough to actually believe that a nuclear Iran will be more dangerous than any other nuclear country in the world... And to be honest, I believe that a nuclear Iran would bring balance to the Middle East by putting Israel on check (which definitely needs to). I'm not happy about that solution, but if it's the only one that will stop infamous and shameful actions like the ones in Lebanon and Palestine then so be it.
P.S. - About the non-proliferation treaty, let's get serious... both Russia and the U.S. have more than enough nukes to blow the world even after decades of "non-proliferation", not to mention the anti-missile defense the U.S. is trying to implement in Europe and the recent push in tactical nukes also by the U.S. - who else?... Not much of an example, now is it?
Well, for starters, it's not clear that "Iran has vowed to annihilate Israel"... Perhaps you should investigate who does the translation from Farsi to English for almost all the main media companies in the U.S. and Europe. It wouldn't surprise a lot of people - it didn't surprised me - that a lot of translations are done by MEMRI - http://www.memri.org//. So what's MEMRI?
Yigal Carmon, MEMRI's founder, is a former advisor on terrorism to the Israeli Prime Ministers, Yitzhak Shamir and Yitzhak Rabin, so he actually worked for both Labor and Likud governments. Praise for MEMRI should be taken with a grain of salt since it is almost always motivated by politics, not the quantity or quality of MEMRI's work.
MEMRI has gained currency with most pro-Israel writers, as well as right-wing publications. For example, New York Times writer Thomas Friedman, a influential foreign affairs columnist, has used MEMRI translations a number of times in his columns. MEMRI is cited in several publications, such as The Times, The Washington Times, The Weekly Standard, The Jerusalem Post, The National Review, The Toronto Sun, Wall Street Journal, Libertad, FrontPageMagazine, Columbia Journalism Review, Associated Press, etc.
Bit of a bias heh? There's more:
According to the National Review, 250 donors--foundations and individuals--fund MEMRI's activities. Among these private donors is the right-wing Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation , which gave MEMRI $100,000 from 1999 to 2000. In 2001, the Randolph Foundation gave MEMRI $100,000, and in 2004 the John M. Olin Foundation gave $5,000, according to Media Transparency.
and also,
MEMRI was co-founded by Meyrav Wurmser and Colonel Yigal Carmon, formerly of Israeli military intelligence, "both of whom were early critics of the Oslo accords."
A little perl:
* Elie Wiesel - Professional Holocaust survivor (as Uri Avnery refers to him), member of the Irgun Zvei Leumi [32], and professional moralist.
"I hope you receive MEMRI's publications. I do. I find its material - translations and analyses of poisonous articles, hate-filled statements and slanderous accusations - vitally needed for the fight against antisemitism in the Arab world. Policy makers, legislators, teachers, and news commentators greatly benefit from its efforts to use truth in the service of peace."
- Elie Wiesel, May 22, 2003[33]
Read it all here: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Middle_East_Media_Research_Institute/
And even if Iran is developing nuclear weapons - and I believe they do - I really can't see why shouldn't they have the right to anyway... What? Are Iranians going to blow the world away? Ah ah... I don't think so... Besides, North Korea has nukes and I don't see any preemptive strikes... (I bet Japan would looove one of those..) Let's get serious gentlemen. Iran has the right to have a nuclear arsenal. Obviously, that would really upset the poor Israelis, since Iran would then be "preemptive-proof" and could openly support anti-israeli groups like Hezbollah and Hamas... But that's life... Besides, Israel has nukes too and I'm not so sure they are a model of rationality themselves... It's also ironic that the ONLY country that has ever used nuclear weapons was the U.S... Now isn't it?
and learning science became the "cool" thing to do.
Yep. And also teaching... Sagan, Penrose, Jastrow, Hawking... It spawned a golden age for popular science! Unfortunately, I believe we're going down medieval on science now...
Poor Carl would be disappointed.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not only software. It's about every single thing. From an iPhone which costs aprox. 500EUR(!) to a pair of Nike Air shoes that you get for 80EUR average passing through gas for 1,5EUR per liter...
Now, can someone tell me why, exactly, can I get the same pair of shoes for 50USD in the US and have to pay more than 80EUR in the EU? Localization costs?! Bullshit.
NetDanzr is right, they charge higher prices because they can. At least with books I can give them the middle finger... Thank you Amazon.com! I just wish they'd ship a wider range of items to Europe...
Perhaps you can enlighten us about some Brazilian inventions?
Because man, my country isn't worth shit, but you guys can't talk too loud can you, Cidade de Deus?
Which is great for democracy...
You know, I can't wait to ditch my car... It's a cash siphon! Gas, taxes, inspection, insurances, accidents, mechanics.... I wanna move in to a city that has a decent public transportation system like Paris or something... You don't need a car with a Metro like that... Paradise...
But hey, languages are there to be used so, C# on man!
I'm getting into lighter flavors anyway, I figure that for most stuff I don't need the bulkiness of Java.. Python does the trick neatly.
Yeah, breaks my heart with sorrow... Poor media corporations... Losing money and all... If the game is good, people buy it. Period. See piracy as a mass advertising campaign that doesn't need ad agencies and specialists. But instead of paying millions in cash, you lose a few sales. It's much more effective and cheaper anyway. Now, what I would like to know is how most games would turn popular without piracy...
Well I don't know about you, but for me, 1.50EUR a liter is pretty expensive no matter what MPG your car gets... I have a 1.4 liter, 4 cil. gas-powered vehicle and I get it to do 7L per 100Km. That's more than 10 cents the kilometer... Not that cheap...
Man, do not underestimate me. I'm European. My country has its borders defined for 800 years. Believe me, if there are people who know about war, conflict and violence it's Europeans. I don't need you to justify for the atomic bombs your country deployed. I think I know pretty well why. Now, about terrorism, the West didn't create islamic terrorism? What exactly is islamic terrorism? What makes it different from irish, basque, or colombian terrorism? The motivation? Open your eyes. Terrorism is warfare. It's pretty much the warfare I would expect my enemy to practice if he had no money, weapons, organization, etc to form a "classical" army or guerrilla, but was determined to fight. If the USA should give as much money to Palestine as it gives to Israel, maybe the palestinians wouldn't send only rocks and hand-made joke-rockets to Israeli tanks...
Huh, what features? If they're so nice it would sure be good to hear about them...
how muslims fight : kidnapping kids, wives and old people and executing them en masse in hopes of demoralizing an enemy
Hiroshima/Nagasaki anyone?
the ancient egyptians (who still existed when the muslim caliph ordered the library of alexandria burnt down)
Yeah. That's what you say. Others say otherwise. Besides, the attack on science is not a muslim thing. It's a religious thing.
So you can crawl back to your hole again and stay there until you figure out how to properly make a point instead of swinging flawed biased pseudo-arguments around. Oh and while you're there, remove the blindfold and read a couple of things. History books are advisable though read more than one author. Books written in the last and before last centuries are also advisable (There were not any neocons back then, only imperialists).
Huh, well.. You guys are pretty much talking about what you don't know. What you, and I, know is that we'll evolve phenotypes that will make correspondent genes last longer, i.e. get copied more often. That is what we can say for sure. Of course we can try to guess the general direction of our evolution but we would be probably wrong. Do not forget that we started to have fat and cholesterol problems relatively recently. For those factors to have a noticeable effect they would have to last for a long time. And considering the fast mutating rate of life and habits of Homo Sapiens Sapiens they probably won't. So I would say that even if we manage to guess a couple adaptations, the great majority wouldn't be guessable anyway because we can't even see the driving factors.. Besides we didn't even get ridden of the old useless ones yet... (e.g. the fifth toe) Anyway, we'll never know. Unfortunately.
About life, well, I believe the best definition of life so far, is the replicator definition. Basically, if it replicates, it is alive. Viruses (carbon based) would, under this definition, be living creatures. And, honestly, I don't see why wouldn't they... They seem pretty alive to me.. As for computer viruses I would put them in a zombie state. This is because, although they do replicate, they basically clone themselves which is not exactly the same thing at least for life as we know it. The problem resides in the fact that carbon viruses infect other phenotypes replicating machinery with their own genotype. Computer viruses don't. The analogous thing would be, I believe, for a computer virus to somehow inject it's source code into a victim compiler and make it compile it and execute it. I don't know if there is already something like this. I remember of code injection on forms and similar attacks secure-code guys are always worried about and I wonder if it possible... Anyway I'm not a specialist, and everything I said here is from what I've learned in college and from reading... But for anyone interested I seriously recommend Richard Dawkins's books, especially The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker and The Extended Phenotype. They're written in fairly common language and, with a couple exceptions, can be easily understood by anyone minimally intelligent (I like to believe that that applies to everyone that reads /.). Well, if you're a creationist you'll probably not going to like them.. But then again, you're not minimally intelligent...
For CS guys well take a course on AI and your life will change... You'll start wondering what's the point of actually program something... Why not evolve the damn thing?..
P.S. - About the non-proliferation treaty, let's get serious... both Russia and the U.S. have more than enough nukes to blow the world even after decades of "non-proliferation", not to mention the anti-missile defense the U.S. is trying to implement in Europe and the recent push in tactical nukes also by the U.S. - who else?... Not much of an example, now is it?