Well then by your definition my Linux system contains spyware since it also checks for updates.
There are a few differences:
You can choose to prevent any software in your Linux system from updating, either individually or collectively.
You can choose to prevent any software in your Linux system from "calling home" and/or sending data about you.
The updates you received are Open Source programs, and have been reviewed by a community of experts and users before being deployed.
Using Linux -or any other general use OS- lets you choose what programs to install or use. You can install paid-for software, open source software, or even create your own software, without being a prisoner in a walled garden where competition doesn't exist. If you are in the garden, everything is pretty, but you end up paying more and getting worse software, and your data and apps are used as hostages and can be remotely erased or blocked from you, at the whim of a private company.
If solar panels were the norm then they might become half as expensive, but batteries, charging systems, and installation won't be.
Economy of scale would affect not only the panels, but the rest of the components as well. Even installation will get less expensive, as the installation procedure gets streamlined and the components better designed, both for efficiency, inter-operability and ease of installation. If I had to place a bet, it would be that the rest of the components would drop prices even more than the panels.
I must disagree.
While washing your hands wouldn't probably do shit in preventing the spread of the Plague, other factors surely would.
Frequently washing clothes would reduce greatly the amount of fleas and flea eggs, hence lowering the infection rates. Ditto for taking frequent baths. A sewer system wouldn't make rats disappear but it would keep them away from most humans. In the middle ages there was plenty of food in the streets for rats -garbage, dung, animal corpses...- which made it impossible to isolate rats from the population. And, lastly, the plague could also be transmitted by air, in droplets of body fluids in the victim's breath. Those funny face masks that were so fashionable during the Swine Flu outbreak would have helped a lot in this context.
"Getting on the no-fly list might very well be the best way to ensure that your employer will arrange less humiliating travel options when they need you to be somewhere...."
Either that or your employer will give you the pink slip and hire another guy. Hmmm... What would most employers do?
patenting or copyrighting them is not really that different from patenting or copyrighting integers.
And copyrighting integers is not different from trademarking common words like Apple or Windows. "Whoever has the gold, makes the rules".
I hope none of THEM reads your post, or we'll start running short of integers any time soon.;)
Note: My browser had some hiccup while editing and sent my other, half finished post of his own volition, I promise! I'll leave now and discreetly perform seppukku.
Try selling a Ferrari for $5000 and see what happens.
Everybody knows that a Ferrari can't cost $5000, but no fucking body knows what the price of some stocks should be. It's just too much data from a gazillion sources, and it's extremely chaotic. A company could see a huge 'proper' increase in their stock value due to some local war in Africa or the untimely death of a pop star. Now we have programs specialized in finding those trends and profitable stock-and purchasing it automatically, and we have programs specialized in deceiving them.
I think those kind of programs should be both forbidden by law. Automatic buyers are extremely dangerous, and the only way to decrease the risk they pose is by putting a human being in the chain of command, with the responsibility of giving approval before placing the orders. The difficult part is that it should be a human being with some common sense.
Having the bad guys placing their orders manually would cripple to a great extent their ability to manipulate markets. Of course one of these guys could make a program simulating human behavior, but then they wouldn't be able to place thousands of orders per hour.
There is lots of this kind of manipulation going on in WoW's Auction House. Whenever someone sells goods at 800% their market price, someone is trying to pump up the said price. This way whoever visits the AH with an Auctioneer robot will be tricked into thinking that purchasing those goods is a worthy business.
It reminds me of those sorry pathetic bastards that offer publicly to purchase some useless trinket for 1000 gold, through the commerce channel. By pure chance there is one of these items being auctioned at 600 gold. When the happy entrepreneur tries to contact the sorry pathetic etc. to collect his earnings he usually finds out that other did it first, or that the prospective purchaser has temporarily left the game, or just ignores him . ^_^
WoW is only a game, but I shudder when I consider the things that may be lurking in the Real World's markets.
How does this beat the use of magnetic tethers, also proposed for this task some time ago? Wouldn't the balloon's draft reduce the speed enough for the satellite to survive reentry and fall to earth in a single piece? Or are they planning to free the balloon before entering the first layers of atmosphere?
I mostly agree. Except for the fact that Dell, a company based in a country with strong customer privacy laws and the ability to enforce them, is sending their customer's data to third counties that either lack these laws, or lack the ability to enforce the above said laws. That should be totally forbidden, but sadly it is not. Making Dell -or any other company doing the same thing- legally responsible for these kind of privacy breaches makes perfect sense.
If an IT department needs to be calling Dell/HP/IBM/anybody's tech support, they're understaffed/under trained.
So, instead of making a call to the support center and wasting an hour or two to discover the cause of those strange glitches in a new model of computer your company purchased by the dozens, your ideal IT department would start by investigating the issue from scratch and wasting 10s of man hours to discover the cause of the issue , eh? Makes perfect sense. Not.
in such a case, why do you even have an internal tech department?
Because quite often the support center doesn't have a clue. Perhaps the relevant information is somewhere in their technical dept, but no mater what you do, you can't contact 'the right guy' who knows the answers. Perhaps it's that your computers are the only ones that suffer the issue, due to your company using non-standard software or hardware. Perhaps the issue is extremely difficult to pinpoint, or extremely difficult to explain. In those cases the two or three hours the IT dept spends calling support are not lost, they're just part of the time needed to investigate and fix the problem.
... the resistance to Round-Up does not have trade offs that significantly impact the plant.
In order to attain said resistance to Round-Up, the plant's cells have to produce several proteins, which has a cost in terms of energy, that in non-GMO varieties would be used for improving the survival and reproductive abilities of the plants. Thus, this Round-Up gene would eventually disappear, but it could take thousands of years.
You can observe this same phenomenon in antibiotic resistant bacterias, though in very short timescales, as a bacterial generation can last less than an hour, while each generation of a crop usually lasts one year.
I have a little technical problem related to this. In the IForOneWelcomeOur form, the field [NameOfOverlords] isn't big enough to hold this string. Writing "I for one welcome our new ZOMBIE VAMP overlords sounds totally gay.
On the other hand, the form InSovietRussia" seems to work alright.
Will we have robots like those that Isaac Asimov described with laws drummed into them not to harm people?
Hopefully never, since each and every Asimov's robot story is about how these laws fail miserably. A rigid adherence to a set of rules is simply not sufficient ethical framework for an intelligent creature.
I always understood that Asimov's Three Laws were boundaries inside which the robots could act, but the decisions themselves were subject to limitations due to lack of information and lack of processing power -Does It sound familiar?. Thus, more intelligent robots could make better decisions, up to the point that they could create by themselves a new law, -i.e. Daneel R. creating the 0th Law.
Or the guys that created the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
In one of his books, Asimov wrote that any man who followed perfectly the Three Laws would be considered a saint, or words to that effect.
Disclaimer: I don't know whether the "Three Laws" can ever be "programmed" or not.
"And it'd be an awful shock for those kids if they went from their safe school environment back to the real world where people don't have infinite patience"
Following the same logic:
"And it'd be an awful shock for those kids if they went from their safe school environment back to the real world where people won't teach them anything"
"And it'd be an awful shock for those kids if they went from their safe school environment back to the real world where performance and productivity can be a matter of life or death"
"And it'd be an awful shock for those kids if they went from their safe school environment back to the real world where people may harm them"
...
So kids should never leave the school -alive, that is. At the same time, we also fixed the unemployment problem.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Well then by your definition my Linux system contains spyware since it also checks for updates.
There are a few differences:
You can choose to prevent any software in your Linux system from updating, either individually or collectively. You can choose to prevent any software in your Linux system from "calling home" and/or sending data about you.
The updates you received are Open Source programs, and have been reviewed by a community of experts and users before being deployed.
Using Linux -or any other general use OS- lets you choose what programs to install or use. You can install paid-for software, open source software, or even create your own software, without being a prisoner in a walled garden where competition doesn't exist. If you are in the garden, everything is pretty, but you end up paying more and getting worse software, and your data and apps are used as hostages and can be remotely erased or blocked from you, at the whim of a private company.
Was there a leather-bound scroll I missed somewhere?
If you believe in everything written in scrolls, you need professional help asap. ;-)
If solar panels were the norm then they might become half as expensive, but batteries, charging systems, and installation won't be.
Economy of scale would affect not only the panels, but the rest of the components as well. Even installation will get less expensive, as the installation procedure gets streamlined and the components better designed, both for efficiency, inter-operability and ease of installation. If I had to place a bet, it would be that the rest of the components would drop prices even more than the panels.
I must disagree. While washing your hands wouldn't probably do shit in preventing the spread of the Plague, other factors surely would. Frequently washing clothes would reduce greatly the amount of fleas and flea eggs, hence lowering the infection rates. Ditto for taking frequent baths. A sewer system wouldn't make rats disappear but it would keep them away from most humans. In the middle ages there was plenty of food in the streets for rats -garbage, dung, animal corpses...- which made it impossible to isolate rats from the population. And, lastly, the plague could also be transmitted by air, in droplets of body fluids in the victim's breath. Those funny face masks that were so fashionable during the Swine Flu outbreak would have helped a lot in this context.
.. please tell me you were being sarcastic!
This thing has the right size and lift capability for deploying "rods from God". Scary, isn't it?
"Getting on the no-fly list might very well be the best way to ensure that your employer will arrange less humiliating travel options when they need you to be somewhere...."
Either that or your employer will give you the pink slip and hire another guy. Hmmm... What would most employers do?
I wonder if you can do the same thing with water.
Water? Instead of slivovitza? You must be joking! :D
"...2 a : an agreement among conspirators b : a group of conspirators
synonyms see PLOT"
'Group' is a synonym of 'set' - " 21 : a collection of elements and especially mathematical ones..."- and sets can have a single element.
Perhaps it's stretching it a bit too much, but I think that you can "conspire with yourself" the same way you can "plot by yourself".
Of course, the legal meaning of 'conspiracy' is a different matter.
patenting or copyrighting them is not really that different from patenting or copyrighting integers.
And copyrighting integers is not different from trademarking common words like Apple or Windows. "Whoever has the gold, makes the rules".
I hope none of THEM reads your post, or we'll start running short of integers any time soon. ;)
Note: My browser had some hiccup while editing and sent my other, half finished post of his own volition, I promise! I'll leave now and discreetly perform seppukku.
...patenting or copyrighting them is not really that different from patenting or copyrighting integers.
Hum, the previous market price ,then . And it doesn't count as 'true' market price if the purchaser is one of your friends acting in your behalf.
Try selling a Ferrari for $5000 and see what happens.
Everybody knows that a Ferrari can't cost $5000, but no fucking body knows what the price of some stocks should be. It's just too much data from a gazillion sources, and it's extremely chaotic. A company could see a huge 'proper' increase in their stock value due to some local war in Africa or the untimely death of a pop star. Now we have programs specialized in finding those trends and profitable stock-and purchasing it automatically, and we have programs specialized in deceiving them.
I think those kind of programs should be both forbidden by law. Automatic buyers are extremely dangerous, and the only way to decrease the risk they pose is by putting a human being in the chain of command, with the responsibility of giving approval before placing the orders. The difficult part is that it should be a human being with some common sense.
Having the bad guys placing their orders manually would cripple to a great extent their ability to manipulate markets. Of course one of these guys could make a program simulating human behavior, but then they wouldn't be able to place thousands of orders per hour.
My 0,02 €
It reminds me of those sorry pathetic bastards that offer publicly to purchase some useless trinket for 1000 gold, through the commerce channel. By pure chance there is one of these items being auctioned at 600 gold. When the happy entrepreneur tries to contact the sorry pathetic etc. to collect his earnings he usually finds out that other did it first, or that the prospective purchaser has temporarily left the game, or just ignores him . ^_^
WoW is only a game, but I shudder when I consider the things that may be lurking in the Real World's markets.
Just curious.*
*:Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna read TFA. :)
My 0.02 €
If an IT department needs to be calling Dell/HP/IBM/anybody's tech support, they're understaffed/under trained.
So, instead of making a call to the support center and wasting an hour or two to discover the cause of those strange glitches in a new model of computer your company purchased by the dozens, your ideal IT department would start by investigating the issue from scratch and wasting 10s of man hours to discover the cause of the issue , eh? Makes perfect sense. Not.
in such a case, why do you even have an internal tech department?
Because quite often the support center doesn't have a clue. Perhaps the relevant information is somewhere in their technical dept, but no mater what you do, you can't contact 'the right guy' who knows the answers. Perhaps it's that your computers are the only ones that suffer the issue, due to your company using non-standard software or hardware. Perhaps the issue is extremely difficult to pinpoint, or extremely difficult to explain. In those cases the two or three hours the IT dept spends calling support are not lost, they're just part of the time needed to investigate and fix the problem.
*I think I just made that word up. I love english, you can form new words and people will still understand your message.
Well, I guess that's more common than you think
The word 'defaultly', I meant. :D
A famous line of gholas.
... the resistance to Round-Up does not have trade offs that significantly impact the plant.
In order to attain said resistance to Round-Up, the plant's cells have to produce several proteins, which has a cost in terms of energy, that in non-GMO varieties would be used for improving the survival and reproductive abilities of the plants. Thus, this Round-Up gene would eventually disappear, but it could take thousands of years. You can observe this same phenomenon in antibiotic resistant bacterias, though in very short timescales, as a bacterial generation can last less than an hour, while each generation of a crop usually lasts one year.
I have a little technical problem related to this. In the IForOneWelcomeOur form, the field [NameOfOverlords] isn't big enough to hold this string. Writing "I for one welcome our new ZOMBIE VAMP overlords sounds totally gay.
On the other hand, the form InSovietRussia" seems to work alright.
^_^
I always understood that Asimov's Three Laws were boundaries inside which the robots could act, but the decisions themselves were subject to limitations due to lack of information and lack of processing power -Does It sound familiar?. Thus, more intelligent robots could make better decisions, up to the point that they could create by themselves a new law, -i.e. Daneel R. creating the 0th Law.
Or the guys that created the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
In one of his books, Asimov wrote that any man who followed perfectly the Three Laws would be considered a saint, or words to that effect.
Disclaimer: I don't know whether the "Three Laws" can ever be "programmed" or not.
Following the same logic:
"And it'd be an awful shock for those kids if they went from their safe school environment back to the real world where people won't teach them anything"
"And it'd be an awful shock for those kids if they went from their safe school environment back to the real world where performance and productivity can be a matter of life or death"
"And it'd be an awful shock for those kids if they went from their safe school environment back to the real world where people may harm them"
So kids should never leave the school -alive, that is. At the same time, we also fixed the unemployment problem. :)
I'm most terrified. Where are the Butlerian jihhadists when you need them? :)
FYI, three lawyers can obfuscate anything!