People don't want to spend 1 cent extra for something with long-term value (like scientific research), but they're perfectly happy to spend $2000 (no joke) on seats at a football game, or to waste their time and money watching a football game on pay-per-view TV. The huge demand for this brainless sports industry, and the consequential enormous amount of money flowing through it, is what allows them to pay athletes so much. So it's not like the athletes are taking it wrongfully; the individual citizens in our society are willingly forking it over. So again, this just shows that our citizens are idiots and don't spend their money wisely.
I'm not sure I agree with you here. Enjoying live sports has a lot of value to some people. I don't think that means that they are idiots, and that they don't spend their money wisely. People spending thousands of dollars on sports is similar to people who spend hundreds of dollars on good hiking boots. They could certainly get by (perhaps more painfully) with cheaper footware, but it's something that they really enjoy.
It seems that the real problem is that people don't see value in donating money to science - especially when the research is abstract, and there are no clear applications. I agree that there's no clear answer, but claiming that sports fans are idiots seems relatively short-sighted.
It looks like you're not being quite honest about the search results you said were returned.
First of all, when searching for "The Dark Knight" on bing, the string "Dark Knight Shoes" doesn't appear on the page. There is also nothing that says "Dark Knight Houston". If you search for "Dark Knight" then those terms do show up, but only in the "related searches" sidebar. The main search terms returned are all (every single one of them) related to the movie. There are 21 results, and they are categorized by type (unlike google and yahoo) including links containing the trailer, reviews, information on the cast, posters, the soundtrack, and video links. You can even hover over the video links for a video preview (which google doesn't do, and yahoo doesn't even embed video links). And, to top it off, there were no advertisements on the page.
I know that here on Slashdot any post that doesn't bash M$ is against our religion, but at least a cursory glance suggests that dismissing bing as a "shitty" search engine that people need to be tricked by advertising to use is false.
My word, I agree! It seems people I've run into on Slashdot promote their operating system with more zealotry than I've ever seen of people promoting their religion.
Then again, this is the internet. It's not like it's a place for rational debate anyways.
At this point, you're stretching to show that it's math. What about reading bits that are coming over the network, and putting them into a buffer. Surely math has no "network cord". Obviously, software is rooted heavily in math, but saying that it IS math is an oversimplification.
You can make a model in math, where you would pretend that matrixes are memory, and that no ops are statements like 1=1, but you could also make a model where spaghetti is memory, and adding tomato sauce is placing bits. Just because math can model it doesn't mean that it IS math.
What you're saying isn't completely true. It's not all mathematical instructions. The instruction to load a value from memory into some registers isn't math, and the order in which those values are loaded from memory can have a strong effect on the performance of the machine.
I'm not saying that I think software should be patentable, but I disagree that it can be completely reduced to math.
It's also the case that what is "riveting" is in the eye of the beholder. My brother thinks I have the most boring job in the world "sitting at a desk all day, typing away". He's a chef, and he absolutely loves it.
I can see how people would shuffle paper, lay bricks, or drive a truck and still call us mad for enjoying programming.
I have lived in a handful of major US cities, and from what I've experienced it is not possible to have a reasonable quality of life without a car unless you live in NYC or San Francisco. Other than those two cities public transit in the US is virtually nonexistent, so price those motorists off the roads and you are looking at one gigantic economic crisis. Seattle's public transit is actually pretty good as well. I've been using it for years despite having access to a car.
Slashdot Mirror
People don't want to spend 1 cent extra for something with long-term value (like scientific research), but they're perfectly happy to spend $2000 (no joke) on seats at a football game, or to waste their time and money watching a football game on pay-per-view TV. The huge demand for this brainless sports industry, and the consequential enormous amount of money flowing through it, is what allows them to pay athletes so much. So it's not like the athletes are taking it wrongfully; the individual citizens in our society are willingly forking it over. So again, this just shows that our citizens are idiots and don't spend their money wisely.
I'm not sure I agree with you here. Enjoying live sports has a lot of value to some people. I don't think that means that they are idiots, and that they don't spend their money wisely. People spending thousands of dollars on sports is similar to people who spend hundreds of dollars on good hiking boots. They could certainly get by (perhaps more painfully) with cheaper footware, but it's something that they really enjoy.
It seems that the real problem is that people don't see value in donating money to science - especially when the research is abstract, and there are no clear applications. I agree that there's no clear answer, but claiming that sports fans are idiots seems relatively short-sighted.
It looks like you're not being quite honest about the search results you said were returned.
First of all, when searching for "The Dark Knight" on bing, the string "Dark Knight Shoes" doesn't appear on the page. There is also nothing that says "Dark Knight Houston". If you search for "Dark Knight" then those terms do show up, but only in the "related searches" sidebar. The main search terms returned are all (every single one of them) related to the movie. There are 21 results, and they are categorized by type (unlike google and yahoo) including links containing the trailer, reviews, information on the cast, posters, the soundtrack, and video links. You can even hover over the video links for a video preview (which google doesn't do, and yahoo doesn't even embed video links). And, to top it off, there were no advertisements on the page.
I know that here on Slashdot any post that doesn't bash M$ is against our religion, but at least a cursory glance suggests that dismissing bing as a "shitty" search engine that people need to be tricked by advertising to use is false.
My word, I agree! It seems people I've run into on Slashdot promote their operating system with more zealotry than I've ever seen of people promoting their religion.
Then again, this is the internet. It's not like it's a place for rational debate anyways.
At this point, you're stretching to show that it's math. What about reading bits that are coming over the network, and putting them into a buffer. Surely math has no "network cord". Obviously, software is rooted heavily in math, but saying that it IS math is an oversimplification. You can make a model in math, where you would pretend that matrixes are memory, and that no ops are statements like 1=1, but you could also make a model where spaghetti is memory, and adding tomato sauce is placing bits. Just because math can model it doesn't mean that it IS math.
What you're saying isn't completely true. It's not all mathematical instructions. The instruction to load a value from memory into some registers isn't math, and the order in which those values are loaded from memory can have a strong effect on the performance of the machine.
I'm not saying that I think software should be patentable, but I disagree that it can be completely reduced to math.
It's also the case that what is "riveting" is in the eye of the beholder. My brother thinks I have the most boring job in the world "sitting at a desk all day, typing away". He's a chef, and he absolutely loves it.
I can see how people would shuffle paper, lay bricks, or drive a truck and still call us mad for enjoying programming.
Awesome! A CLUE reference!