...better irrigation, and stuff with the time they had to spare.
Then again, I thought the bottleneck encountered with food in Africa has been distribution. We need to fix that problem at the same time we build the big ration factories.
Oh and could we please make food conditional on the use of birth control? Please, please, pretty please.
"Down the wrong path". Care to expound on the meaning of that phrase?
That's what the Big Giant Brain is for. We won't need to waste our precious time defining silly things like that. We can just sit back by the pool with our little umbrella drinks and enjoy the Big Giant Brain approved entertainment.
Your case seems to be that many apparently "wrong path" kids turn out fine, while seemingly normal kids can end up doing worse damage. Duh! As if the Big Giant Brain didn't already know that!
Lession One: If you have or could possibly figure it out with your pithy, normal human brain, the Big Giant Brain knows it.
That is precisely why you shouldn't waste your time questioning the Big Giant Brain when it tells you that little Timmy, who seems like an ordinary four year old playing with legos to you, needs to be eliminated immediately for the good of all mankind. Just put Timmy in the disposal unit and get back to your drink by the pool.
The calendar page idea is a good one. A whole slashsite devoted to this kind of stuff would be good too. There could be sections for all of the various political inclinations.
"So it's not like funding will be transfered from a new Church of XYZ to some Jedi meditation chamber."
And if it did, wouldn't that be the will of the people. I mean, they put Jedi down. I'm sure they would appreciate the funds to help cultivate the faith.
The real issue is that asking someone's religion is so broad that they don't have the right to say someone can't be of some religion they make up from movies, comic books, slashdot, tea leaves, lights from the sky, or whatever. They are making a "wrong answer" via a penlty. There is no wrong answer.
Another letter describes how a competitor has redesigned a part so that it wouldn't infringe on Lemelson's patent. "Couldn't we file a reissue application," Lemelson asks, "to add a claim or two to cover this aspect?" (from the url mentioned in parent)
I (usa citizen) would also like to thank the Soviet Union for their quite essential help in the multinational effort to defeat Hitler. However, I hope the comment by RedGuard was not intended to mean that the USA was of no help to Britain, which would just be an outright lie.
Teleportation: tele + (trans)portation
Since the person does not move to another location, this is not the right word.
Telepresence would seem to be the right word.
In this scheme, the radio stations pay the RIAA to play music, and the consumer gets music for free.
Sorry, thanks for playing. Feel free to try again. See the new improved form of Payola that is the going thing these days. The recording industry pays people to pay the people that tell the radio stations what to play.
I sometimes wish I could get my hands on the weed people smoke when they decide that napster can afford to spend a billion dollars to the record industry over five years.
No weed involved, dude. Let's try some math. 60,000,000 Napster users. Guess that 15% stay with the subscription service, each pays 5$ a month. Meaning that Napster rakes in 540,000,000$/yr. At that rate, it looks quite likely that they could pay the record industry a billion over five yrs.
Sure, you can debate the fine points of how many people would stay, gross vs. net, and all that, but I don't see how you can say there is no reasonable case for Napster being worth quite a lot.
"The good Earth--we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy."K. Vonnegut
The poorest American lives better than the average European in a lot of countries.
I thought you were doing an o.k. job of putting forth one side of the issues until I came to this point. It seems like wild overexageration.
Maybe you could dissemble a bit on the "a lot of countries", but it would probably be better if you just retract the statement. We all get going on quick rants here on/. so we understand such overstating--something to do with the setup encourages quick banter instead of progressing debate--. Still, at best, the point in question is overly general and needlessly inflammatory.
And how can you say that "Europe has only lukewarmly embraced the concept of freedom", when several countries there are more tolorant about things like drugs, nudity, and other personal choices? You need to restrict what sorts of freedom you are talking about for your criticism to have a chance of being effective.
"The good Earth--we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy."K. Vonnegut
"In the year 2015, the public is stunned when AI scientists, forensic scientists, and legal experts reveal the Giant Judge-Brain. Able to comprehend all of the variables, weights, laws, and issues relating to a case, the GJB was able to arrive at truth in 99.99994% of the cases quickly and in a way that most people found 'pretty darn fair.' In the year 2025, after extensive self motification, the GJB successfully led a grassroots movement to add the GJB admendment to the Constitution. After serveing two terms as the President of the United States, the Griant Brain became Secretary-General of the UN. There it ruled, until the Giant Evil-Brain displaced it from power and subjubgaed the world." "The good Earth--we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy."K. Vonnegut
Right on. Why do people think that this question will be/can be solved for a while to come? Isn't it likely to take some time before we learn the answer to the "life elsewhere" question? Why go off trying to push the odds around in your pet way everytime some new study about molecules in space comes out?
Until they call us, come here, or we go there, can't we just put this one on hold? That seems like a good idea. Then we can pay attention to more important issues here on this planet, like [ reader to insert issue of inportance here].
"The good Earth--we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy."K. Vonnegut
"Gross weight limit" would seem to mean that it can carry that much minus the weight of the vehicle itself, not that it could carry that much in addition to itself. Is that interpretation right? If so the question becomes how much does your suv weigh (with average tank of gas)? Another question is how are the odds of rollover affected by straping my car on top of your suv?
I think I qualified my original post in such a way that your reply doesn't contradict it. I said be carefull with the suv's. Some are surely safer than some cars, but the "some"'s make that sentence pretty vacuous. My statement of caution is motivated by the statistics which show passengers of some suvs are more likely to die in certain types of accidents than passengers of some other smaller vehicles in the same type of accident. All I'm fighting against is the generalization "bigger = safer".
"The good Earth--we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy."K. Vonnegut
I have to agree with the dissenters. There simply must be a law of diminishing returns involved with audio equipment. Add to that, people do listen to music in cars and other not quite accoustically neutral environments, and I conclude that, to a very real extent, people don't much care about the quality as you would define it.
Exhibit b is how people will easily cut down the bitrate to carry more songs around.
Anyway, if people can only produce demo-quality stuff at home, or the local cheap recording place, so what... Music has become something of a commodity and in doing so it moved further from people's lives. I know I value the music that friends have made and given me far more than any of the commodity music I have.
I guess my point is, listening to music is not about sound quality. Only if it gets in the way, do most people ever notice.
"The good Earth--we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy."K. Vonnegut
Yeah as long as you don't go over the rather low weight limit, flip over and die. Many small cars have higher wight limits, and when they roll over the occupants are less likely to be killed. If you do have an attachment to your kids be careful with the suv. It is not the case that for all x, more x inplies more safe.
Oh, back to the topic. The Wheelman's lack of brakes is exerting major inhibitory influence on my urge to buy one.
"The good Earth--we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy."K. Vonnegut
If you don't like spam, I recommend sneakemail. I haven't given out my real address to sites or businesses in months. I've seen a reduction in my spam intake (except for some place that continues to think I'm a debt ridden home owner looking to start a business on the internet). YMMV, but I like this better than the filter war I was in--gives me the trump card.
Talk about unrelated things... nationalized health care? huh.... Just playing. On that topic I've heard a couple of good rumors about "friendly societies" of the past. But I haven't tried to follow up on them. And I have no idea how well the idea would scale, or even what the particulars of their setup were. Sounded like a more personable form of insurance. Letting communities handle it, instead of companies.
Back to the hard questions we've raised:
Personally, I'm a quite leary of justifing IP rights that block immediate good of people with the "future benefit" of continued progress. The question that comes to my mind is, "why did we labor to make the progress we have made to be able to help these people that need it now, if not to actually use that ability to help?" This might reveal more of my psychology than anything (but that can be said of most all of communication).
Seems to me that if research stalls while the system recovers from our playing the "greater immediate good of society" trump card, that would be acceptable. Might possibliy result in a boom/bust cycle between periods of [lots of research but very unequal distibution of benefits] and periods of [little research but equalization of benefits]. If that lead to less death/suffering on average, so much the better and fuck the unliving, abstractions of corporations. If they hand out checks for a while, help knowledge forward a bit, and then disolve... then in my mind they have served their purpose. It is ones that survive a long time that scare me anyway.
We might even learn to control the boom/bust cycle (in a few hundred years) like we sometimes seem to be getting closer to doing with economic markets. But if we don't play with the variables some (drop IP rights here, hold onto them on sheer principle there) we won't be able to learn the system. And when there are lives at stake, I guess I'm more easily convinced that we should be sure to err on the side that can be seen most clearly to save people. In my eyes, saving people here and now is more clear than gambling that we will need the abstract "progress" in the future.
Sorry to go off there down the perfect dreamworld path. I suppose we all have our pet abstractions.
Actually, I was weakening the argument in an attempt to find common ground, not repeating it. I'm sorry I didn't make that clear enough. You say that the distribution of monies in the company doesn't prove anything. I agree (in something of a qualified manner). However, just because statement A (when added to background premises) doesn't prove B, doesn't mean that A cannot imply that notB needs more firm grounding. Which is to say that the statement about how they distribute their money is a prima facie defeater of the claim that they must charge such high prices to continue finding new goodies.
And I don't remember the statement in question mentioning manufacturing cost. Only R&D, marketing, and administration. You are quite right to bring it up. As I said before, a better breakdown would be nice.
How about another line of reasoning? Say that the IP rights are suspended (which sounded perfectly legal in view of the emergency). Say research does suffer a bit in the future. Hell, say entire corporations fall apart, and the vaulted "progress" is stiffled for decades. How is that worse than people suffering and dieing? Corporations are not alive nor is the second derivitive of human understanding. Why value abstractions over one's genetic kin?
I understand the point that the statistic doesn't prove all that much. However, hiding behind lack of full proof while people suffer and die doesn't seem a very nice thing to do.
Further, the behavior of spending so much more on marketing and admin does not cohere well with saying that R&D will suffer if they are not allowed to make ample profits. Until the marketing and admin are running on a shoestring in a streamlined, super-efficient manner, then it would seem that any profits lost (in the effort to help entities that are actually alive, remember what is at stake when doing your cost-benefit calculus) can come out of the non-R&D section of the budget.
I have previously defended the big drug companies, even as I learned more of the unhappy situation that they have helped bring about in the realm of getting federal approval for new products. The cost of getting approval is far too high, which works against simple (read: non-super-profitable) lines of research from being pursued. However, now that I see the decoherence of their "we need the money" argument, and hear of their morally untenable actions to forestall efforts to help living, sentient creatures in poorer countries... well, they have lost my defence. Several of them, like some other companies, deserve to be striped of the rights we have granted them, that they have abused.
[ Before I get flamed to a crisp, I must point out that I enjoyed Bladerunner, but the "androids are people too" sentimentalism of the plot was pretty much a Scott creation]
The way the point is made in the movie is quite different than the way dick made it, but the bluring of the line and the questioning of what qualifies for 'human' was one of the big dick themes. Are those that set their emotional state with a dial more human than those that act on the basic drive to survive? If you spend your time wondering whether you are human, why change your opinion of someone/thing else when you learn it was engineered? Scott didn't have to add much, mostly he had to take away. Isn't caring about an android frog a bit sentimental?
I seem to recall reading that some people with plastic corneas have been sensitive to the UV part of the spectrum. But I can't think of where i read this or if it was trustworthy. Furthermore, a lazy search or two on google turned up nothing along this line. So I recommend a grain of salt with my fuzzy memory. But if anyone has heard something similar I'd love to know.
Slashdot Mirror
Then again, I thought the bottleneck encountered with food in Africa has been distribution. We need to fix that problem at the same time we build the big ration factories.
Oh and could we please make food conditional on the use of birth control? Please, please, pretty please.
That's what the Big Giant Brain is for. We won't need to waste our precious time defining silly things like that. We can just sit back by the pool with our little umbrella drinks and enjoy the Big Giant Brain approved entertainment.
Your case seems to be that many apparently "wrong path" kids turn out fine, while seemingly normal kids can end up doing worse damage. Duh! As if the Big Giant Brain didn't already know that!
Lession One: If you have or could possibly figure it out with your pithy, normal human brain, the Big Giant Brain knows it.
That is precisely why you shouldn't waste your time questioning the Big Giant Brain when it tells you that little Timmy, who seems like an ordinary four year old playing with legos to you, needs to be eliminated immediately for the good of all mankind. Just put Timmy in the disposal unit and get back to your drink by the pool.
And if it did, wouldn't that be the will of the people. I mean, they put Jedi down. I'm sure they would appreciate the funds to help cultivate the faith.
The real issue is that asking someone's religion is so broad that they don't have the right to say someone can't be of some religion they make up from movies, comic books, slashdot, tea leaves, lights from the sky, or whatever. They are making a "wrong answer" via a penlty. There is no wrong answer.
Remember folks, testing your theories about other people's stuff without permission is naughty.
Maybe you could offer a free "security assessment package".
This man was so truely evil. Get this:
Another letter describes how a competitor has redesigned a part so that it wouldn't infringe on Lemelson's patent. "Couldn't we file a reissue application," Lemelson asks, "to add a claim or two to cover this aspect?" (from the url mentioned in parent)
I don't know about the rest, but I think we can take care of this part...
Oh, and send us more p0rn, while you're at it.
I (usa citizen) would also like to thank the Soviet Union for their quite essential help in the multinational effort to defeat Hitler. However, I hope the comment by RedGuard was not intended to mean that the USA was of no help to Britain, which would just be an outright lie.
Teleportation: tele + (trans)portation
Since the person does not move to another location, this is not the right word.
Telepresence would seem to be the right word.
In this scheme, the radio stations pay the RIAA to play music, and the consumer gets music for free.
Sorry, thanks for playing. Feel free to try again. See the new improved form of Payola that is the going thing these days. The recording industry pays people to pay the people that tell the radio stations what to play.
Alas, a post that needs it, and me without any points.
I sometimes wish I could get my hands on the weed people smoke when they decide that napster can afford to spend a billion dollars to the record industry over five years.
No weed involved, dude. Let's try some math. 60,000,000 Napster users. Guess that 15% stay with the subscription service, each pays 5$ a month. Meaning that Napster rakes in 540,000,000$/yr. At that rate, it looks quite likely that they could pay the record industry a billion over five yrs.
Sure, you can debate the fine points of how many people would stay, gross vs. net, and all that, but I don't see how you can say there is no reasonable case for Napster being worth quite a lot.
"The good Earth--we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy."K. Vonnegut
The poorest American lives better than the average European in a lot of countries.
/. so we understand such overstating--something to do with the setup encourages quick banter instead of progressing debate--. Still, at best, the point in question is overly general and needlessly inflammatory.
I thought you were doing an o.k. job of putting forth one side of the issues until I came to this point. It seems like wild overexageration.
Maybe you could dissemble a bit on the "a lot of countries", but it would probably be better if you just retract the statement. We all get going on quick rants here on
And how can you say that "Europe has only lukewarmly embraced the concept of freedom", when several countries there are more tolorant about things like drugs, nudity, and other personal choices? You need to restrict what sorts of freedom you are talking about for your criticism to have a chance of being effective.
"The good Earth--we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy."K. Vonnegut
"In the year 2015, the public is stunned when AI scientists, forensic scientists, and legal experts reveal the Giant Judge-Brain. Able to comprehend all of the variables, weights, laws, and issues relating to a case, the GJB was able to arrive at truth in 99.99994% of the cases quickly and in a way that most people found 'pretty darn fair.' In the year 2025, after extensive self motification, the GJB successfully led a grassroots movement to add the GJB admendment to the Constitution. After serveing two terms as the President of the United States, the Griant Brain became Secretary-General of the UN. There it ruled, until the Giant Evil-Brain displaced it from power and subjubgaed the world."
"The good Earth--we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy."K. Vonnegut
Right on. Why do people think that this question will be/can be solved for a while to come? Isn't it likely to take some time before we learn the answer to the "life elsewhere" question? Why go off trying to push the odds around in your pet way everytime some new study about molecules in space comes out?
Until they call us, come here, or we go there, can't we just put this one on hold? That seems like a good idea. Then we can pay attention to more important issues here on this planet, like [ reader to insert issue of inportance here].
"The good Earth--we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy."K. Vonnegut
"Gross weight limit" would seem to mean that it can carry that much minus the weight of the vehicle itself, not that it could carry that much in addition to itself. Is that interpretation right? If so the question becomes how much does your suv weigh (with average tank of gas)? Another question is how are the odds of rollover affected by straping my car on top of your suv?
I think I qualified my original post in such a way that your reply doesn't contradict it. I said be carefull with the suv's. Some are surely safer than some cars, but the "some"'s make that sentence pretty vacuous. My statement of caution is motivated by the statistics which show passengers of some suvs are more likely to die in certain types of accidents than passengers of some other smaller vehicles in the same type of accident. All I'm fighting against is the generalization "bigger = safer".
"The good Earth--we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy."K. Vonnegut
I have to agree with the dissenters. There simply must be a law of diminishing returns involved with audio equipment. Add to that, people do listen to music in cars and other not quite accoustically neutral environments, and I conclude that, to a very real extent, people don't much care about the quality as you would define it.
Exhibit b is how people will easily cut down the bitrate to carry more songs around.
Anyway, if people can only produce demo-quality stuff at home, or the local cheap recording place, so what... Music has become something of a commodity and in doing so it moved further from people's lives. I know I value the music that friends have made and given me far more than any of the commodity music I have.
I guess my point is, listening to music is not about sound quality. Only if it gets in the way, do most people ever notice.
"The good Earth--we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy."K. Vonnegut
Yeah as long as you don't go over the rather low weight limit, flip over and die. Many small cars have higher wight limits, and when they roll over the occupants are less likely to be killed. If you do have an attachment to your kids be careful with the suv. It is not the case that for all x, more x inplies more safe.
Oh, back to the topic. The Wheelman's lack of brakes is exerting major inhibitory influence on my urge to buy one.
"The good Earth--we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy."K. Vonnegut
If you don't like spam, I recommend sneakemail. I haven't given out my real address to sites or businesses in months. I've seen a reduction in my spam intake (except for some place that continues to think I'm a debt ridden home owner looking to start a business on the internet). YMMV, but I like this better than the filter war I was in--gives me the trump card.
Back to the hard questions we've raised: Personally, I'm a quite leary of justifing IP rights that block immediate good of people with the "future benefit" of continued progress. The question that comes to my mind is, "why did we labor to make the progress we have made to be able to help these people that need it now, if not to actually use that ability to help?" This might reveal more of my psychology than anything (but that can be said of most all of communication).
Seems to me that if research stalls while the system recovers from our playing the "greater immediate good of society" trump card, that would be acceptable. Might possibliy result in a boom/bust cycle between periods of [lots of research but very unequal distibution of benefits] and periods of [little research but equalization of benefits]. If that lead to less death/suffering on average, so much the better and fuck the unliving, abstractions of corporations. If they hand out checks for a while, help knowledge forward a bit, and then disolve... then in my mind they have served their purpose. It is ones that survive a long time that scare me anyway.
We might even learn to control the boom/bust cycle (in a few hundred years) like we sometimes seem to be getting closer to doing with economic markets. But if we don't play with the variables some (drop IP rights here, hold onto them on sheer principle there) we won't be able to learn the system. And when there are lives at stake, I guess I'm more easily convinced that we should be sure to err on the side that can be seen most clearly to save people. In my eyes, saving people here and now is more clear than gambling that we will need the abstract "progress" in the future.
Sorry to go off there down the perfect dreamworld path. I suppose we all have our pet abstractions.
And I don't remember the statement in question mentioning manufacturing cost. Only R&D, marketing, and administration. You are quite right to bring it up. As I said before, a better breakdown would be nice.
How about another line of reasoning? Say that the IP rights are suspended (which sounded perfectly legal in view of the emergency). Say research does suffer a bit in the future. Hell, say entire corporations fall apart, and the vaulted "progress" is stiffled for decades. How is that worse than people suffering and dieing? Corporations are not alive nor is the second derivitive of human understanding. Why value abstractions over one's genetic kin?
Further, the behavior of spending so much more on marketing and admin does not cohere well with saying that R&D will suffer if they are not allowed to make ample profits. Until the marketing and admin are running on a shoestring in a streamlined, super-efficient manner, then it would seem that any profits lost (in the effort to help entities that are actually alive, remember what is at stake when doing your cost-benefit calculus) can come out of the non-R&D section of the budget.
I have previously defended the big drug companies, even as I learned more of the unhappy situation that they have helped bring about in the realm of getting federal approval for new products. The cost of getting approval is far too high, which works against simple (read: non-super-profitable) lines of research from being pursued. However, now that I see the decoherence of their "we need the money" argument, and hear of their morally untenable actions to forestall efforts to help living, sentient creatures in poorer countries... well, they have lost my defence. Several of them, like some other companies, deserve to be striped of the rights we have granted them, that they have abused.
[ Before I get flamed to a crisp, I must point out that I enjoyed Bladerunner, but the "androids are people too" sentimentalism of the plot was pretty much a Scott creation]
The way the point is made in the movie is quite different than the way dick made it, but the bluring of the line and the questioning of what qualifies for 'human' was one of the big dick themes.
Are those that set their emotional state with a dial more human than those that act on the basic drive to survive? If you spend your time wondering whether you are human, why change your opinion of someone/thing else when you learn it was engineered?
Scott didn't have to add much, mostly he had to take away. Isn't caring about an android frog a bit sentimental?
I seem to recall reading that some people with plastic corneas have been sensitive to the UV part of the spectrum. But I can't think of where i read this or if it was trustworthy. Furthermore, a lazy search or two on google turned up nothing along this line. So I recommend a grain of salt with my fuzzy memory. But if anyone has heard something similar I'd love to know.