If the less successful, and therefore cheaper, societies were able to do science work well, they wouldn't be less successful, would they?
What has science to do with economics? Countries like Russia, China, and India have had remarkable scientific achievements, but have been mired down by their inefficient socialist economies. What they truly need to become successful is training in clerical business jobs, they need to learn how to keep accounting books and inventories. Rocket science they already know.
The first step would be to understand why women have babies.
I'm not sure, but I'd be willing to bet that having ovaries and wombs has a lot to do with this.
1. To alert people of a real danger, in an effort to save lives. 2. To scare people into a panic by pretending there is a real danger when there is not. (for lulz).
Funny thing is, we keep seeing (2) as an exception to free speech.
However, let's reason this out. Is raising a false alarm illegal? Is it so wrong that it justifies an exception to the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution? Maybe.
But then, shouldn't this be applied to *ALL* false alarms?
No shouting FIRE!!! in theaters. No shouting KIDDIE PORN!!! in the internet. No shouting TERRORISM!!! everywhere.
Thank you for making my point for me. As I had originally posted in the gp,
Linux is and has been for several years *much* easier to use than MS-windows.
Compare the task of installing the Python interpreter plus a few additional Python libraries.
In Ubuntu, you click on the "Add/Remove programs" menu item. Select which packages you want by clicking on each. All packages will be downloaded from the Ubuntu repository, each is signed by a hash code, guaranteed to be free of malware.
Now do it the Microsoft way. Want five different Python libraries? Go to five different sites, find the download page for each, download the file, run it. Oops, some required.dll is missing? Fuck you, you are lazy/incompetent. How stupid can you be, you went to the python.org site instead of getting ActiveState Python. Nooo, you don't know WTF is mscvp70.dll? Just google "msvcp70.dll download site:microsoft.com". Hey, it's no big deal clicking through the 237 results to find the Microsoft download page that has mscvp70.dll, is it?
Now tell me, honestly, which system is easier to use?
You *could* just use an OS from this half of the decade
I guess I *could* do that -- *if* I didn't have something better to do with my money than buy a replacement for my old Compaq nx9005 notebook that came with XP installed.
I do know things like WinKey-E to open "Windows Explorer" for file management.
Rather than memorize stuff like that, I prefer to click an icon. It's much better to have a GUI available with user-friendly icons than to be forced to memorize key sequences, right?
a few things that I think are far harder on Linux (installing software with non-root is one of them; I have yet to see a package manager that actually deals with this well, so the only way I know how to do this most of the time is to go through 'configure && make && make install' after dealing with the dependency hell that make package managers such an essential part of Linux)
It's interesting that you mention software installation. In the Python training I mentioned in the GP, installing the packages in Ubuntu was entirely trivial.
Now, for the Microsoft systems, I had to go site by site downloading the necessary packages and running the respective installers. Luckily (or should I say *smartly*) all I had chosen was free software, which made things easier.
Then I ran into that dependency hell you mention. SOME, but not ALL the Microsoft systems complained about a missing "msvcp70.dll" file. WTF? Googling it I found a dll-files.com site that had a file named like that. Copy that to c:\windows\system32. Did I download malware? How the fsck do I know?
Funny thing is, there are people who say Microsoft systems have more vulnerabilities just because they are more widely used. Let's see: no central repository, any user can install stuff they get anywhere on the web, there are missing parts they must download somewhere else... Is it any wonder that Microsoft systems get infected?
Sharing someone else's copyrighted material is still not legal
Driving faster than the speed limit isn't legal either. Now, imagine a speed limit of 2 mph in the city and 4 mph in open country. Would you still drive in the legal limit? Fortunately speed limits are more reasonable today than they were in 1865.
But what about a copyright law under which no work has entered the public domain in the last 85 years? Is that reasonable? Under such a draconian law, it's perfectly ethical and fair to disobey the law. Better people than mehave disobeyed unfair laws.
If Linux was easier to use and free/cheap (as in beer), it wouldn't take long for it to be adopted.
You haven't actually used Linux, have you? Linux is and has been for several years *much* easier to use than MS-windows.
I just realized this when I had to give some lessons on Python programming to some people at work. I hadn't used a Windows desktop for several years, but since none of these people were Linux users I used XP for the course. I then realized how hard is XP for someone who's not used to it.
Starting with the "Start" menu, which is organized by software supplier, not category. Now where the fsck do I find a file manager? I just downloaded this file, where did it go? Where is my "home" directory, which in Linux has an icon intuitively shaped as a house? I want to copy a file, why did it create links for some, but not all copy operations? And so on. Windows is *extremely* hard to use for a beginner.
Here is a pre-1950 reference to the Moon. And you can easily check its veracity. The moon is close enough that a cannon shot can reach it. So, all you need to do to check if this is true or not is to tie yourself to a cannonball and shoot to the moon. Happy landing... er moonings.
The recorded music industry has been working hard to find proportionate and reasonable solutions to tackling online copyright infringement. In some countries, labels have taken legal action against users who have uploaded infringing music to the internet without permission for millions to download without payment. We believe section 92A is a better solution for everyone.
I, OTOH, am able to do simple math. Multiply the $0.99 price that's typically charged per on-line song by the 15 tracks one finds in a typical CD and you get the same $15 one pays for the CD. Add the hassle of burning and dealing with DRM.
If people don't want to buy CDs at $15, then why do they think people would be willing to pay the equivalent of $15 for a CD online?
Charge reasonable prices and the world will beat a path to your door.
I think if you want to survive, as a nation, the best thing to do in response to a nuclear attack by a terrorist organization would be to STFU and fucking NOT retaliate
Oh, great, you must belong to some religion that believes in reincarnation, right? All your suffering in this life will be repaid in the next?
Because giving bullies an assurance that they can do anything and you will not retaliate is the best way to handle such people. After all, look how well this policy has worked in the past
Whoah there cowboy! If I'm downloading films for *FREE*, how can that be financing anything? I mean, to "finance" something means getting money, right?
Welcome to the Brave New World
on
Why TV Lost
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· Score: 1, Interesting
Not TV, media companies lost. The future came and they weren't prepared.
I'd be willing to bet that in ten years we won't have phones or TV sets, just digital boxes with broadband internet. Small boxes to carry in your pocket, big boxes at home.
Game consoles, computers, phones, they will all merge. Perhaps we will have some boxes more specialized than others, but inside they will all be the same. A computer with a display and some form of input device, communicating over a wireless link to the internet.
I know this is obvious to most people but the "habitable zone" is awfully generous. It's hard to gauge the exact amount of heat given off by a star from as far away as we are. Plus, the atmosphere content is extremely important.
If you RTFA you'll see they are after statistics, not detailed data. They want to estimate the number of planets that have approximately the same characteristics as Earth.
The Kepler will keep monitoring the same 100000 stars during five years. The number of planets detected around those stars will give a rough idea on how likely it is to find earth-like planets.
Excellent graphs. I have been showing similar stuff to people who believe the media's assertion that the sky is falling down. It gets even better when one compensates for inflation, dividing the Dow Jones by the Consumer Price Index.
The reasonable conclusion is that we are at a fairly average economic recession, not the end of times.
Brazil is not 100% ethanol. The entire country is not converted. More like 50%.
You can travel through 100% of the country driving a car that runs on 100% ethanol. This has been true for the last 30 years.
Ethanol has caused the price of corn to double in South American countries from one cent to two cents causing riots and you can't burn a food crop that you have to use to feed people.
Brazilian ethanol is obtained from sugarcane. Sugarcane does not produce food. It can produce either sugar or brandy, when it's not used for fuel.
There are more hydrogen powered vehicles on the road today than say, electric vehicles.
How many cars total are actually running? There are a few million 100% ethanol cars in Brazil today and for the last 30 years.
There are over sixty stations in North America and hundreds more are in the planning stages.
Stepping voltage down is cheap and easy, you use a switching power supply. You can build one trivially for low voltage applications using one three-legged IC and two capacitors. For 5V, for example, use a 7805.
You probably know all this and just mixed up your wording, but a 7805 is not normally used as a switching regulator. OTOH, if you do use a switching regulator, then you can turn voltage up as easy as down. The word you're looking for is "flyback"
Even the sound of turning a page, or the satisfying crackle of the fabric binding on a brand new hard cover are fantastic
For me, the good thing in turning pages, at least in reference books, is how your "favorites" end being implanted into the book structure itself. All my reference books open automatically in the pages I need most frequently.
But what will really convert me to ebooks someday when the cost comes down is the volume of data. The conversion factor from digital books to bookshelf space is roughly two megabytes / centimeter. A 2GB SD card will hold ten meters of bookshelf, how's that, maybe a Library of Congress per gym bag?
The problem is the aluminum can't be used over and over again
[Citation Needed]. If you are thinking of the waste that appears when melting any metal, which is called "dross" in the industry, there are ways to handle it
hopefully continued research in hydrogen will replace the hype about plant based ethanol, which is not really a solution
On the contrary, ethanol as a fuel is not only a solution, it's a mature technology. My first 100% ethanol-burning car was a Brazilian 1983 Chevette, which I bought used in 1985. The last time gasoline was sold in Brazil without at least 10% of ethanol was in 1976
Hydrogen as a fuel is, at this moment, wishfull thinking. The stage of hydrogen research today is less advanced than ethanol as a fuel was in Brazil in 1974. And there's much more to research. Any gasoline engine will run, with reduced performance, on ethanol. Tuning a car to run on ethanol is a relatively simple task.
And, much more important, the delivery system is there. Any service station that sells gasoline or diesel has all it needs to sell ethanol. Trucks and pipelines are the same. To convert a whole country to ethanol, as was done in Brazil in the late 1970s, is simple.
Now try doing that with hydrogen. Build a new fleet of tanker trucks, a whole new network of pipelines covering the whole country. Develop and build the tanks to hold the fuel in each car. Do the safety checks. Develop, test, and certify the systems that will guarantee a car will still be safe, even after crashing.
To build a hydrogen-based society is not just finding some magical way to produce hydrogen.
somewhere there is a happy medium where an artist can get paid for their work and fans can use it the way want to without having to steal it.
Yes! I believe somewhere there is a business model that works like that. But calling your clients "thieves" will not help you find that ideal business model. Why can't artists sit down with their fans and try to solve those differences?
Try to find the 21st century way of doing business. Why must so many artists accept blindly what the *REAL THIEVES*, i.e. those MAFIAA scumbags say?
taking a picture of a car does not give you the same utility as owning the car, so its value is clearly nothing like the value of the car
What is meant as "theft" is not what I gain, but what I take away from you. If you teach me something, you are not forgetting what you taught me, are you? I gained something valuable, you lost nothing.
Or are you saying every student steals from his teacher?
When a product is stolen, there is value taken from the owner that can't be recovered.
In this sentence you stated exactly why unauthorized copying is not theft: nothing is taken from the owner. The right car analogy would be taking a picture of a car, not stealing it.
To think a teen who has a million dollars worth of media in his computer would have bought that with his $100/week allowance is dumb.
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What has science to do with economics? Countries like Russia, China, and India have had remarkable scientific achievements, but have been mired down by their inefficient socialist economies. What they truly need to become successful is training in clerical business jobs, they need to learn how to keep accounting books and inventories. Rocket science they already know.
I'm not sure, but I'd be willing to bet that having ovaries and wombs has a lot to do with this.
No, I'm not saying that. Try going back to the very start of the thread. The subject is "shouting FIRE in a theater". This is an anecdotal situation.
OF COURSE there is fire in theaters. OF COURSE there is child porn, terrorism, and copyright violations.
But NOT EVERY ONE of those anecdotal situations actually happen very often in real life.
CAPICE?????
Then what about the damage and injury for denouncing child porn and terrorism and copyright violations, etc, etc, where no such thing exists?
Funny thing is, we keep seeing (2) as an exception to free speech.
However, let's reason this out. Is raising a false alarm illegal? Is it so wrong that it justifies an exception to the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution? Maybe.
But then, shouldn't this be applied to *ALL* false alarms?
No shouting FIRE!!! in theaters. No shouting KIDDIE PORN!!! in the internet. No shouting TERRORISM!!! everywhere.
Thank you for making my point for me. As I had originally posted in the gp,
Compare the task of installing the Python interpreter plus a few additional Python libraries.
In Ubuntu, you click on the "Add/Remove programs" menu item. Select which packages you want by clicking on each. All packages will be downloaded from the Ubuntu repository, each is signed by a hash code, guaranteed to be free of malware.
Now do it the Microsoft way. Want five different Python libraries? Go to five different sites, find the download page for each, download the file, run it. Oops, some required .dll is missing? Fuck you, you are lazy/incompetent. How stupid can you be, you went to the python.org site instead of getting ActiveState Python. Nooo, you don't know WTF is mscvp70.dll? Just google "msvcp70.dll download site:microsoft.com". Hey, it's no big deal clicking through the 237 results to find the Microsoft download page that has mscvp70.dll, is it?
Now tell me, honestly, which system is easier to use?
I guess I *could* do that -- *if* I didn't have something better to do with my money than buy a replacement for my old Compaq nx9005 notebook that came with XP installed.
Rather than memorize stuff like that, I prefer to click an icon. It's much better to have a GUI available with user-friendly icons than to be forced to memorize key sequences, right?
It's interesting that you mention software installation. In the Python training I mentioned in the GP, installing the packages in Ubuntu was entirely trivial.
Now, for the Microsoft systems, I had to go site by site downloading the necessary packages and running the respective installers. Luckily (or should I say *smartly*) all I had chosen was free software, which made things easier.
Then I ran into that dependency hell you mention. SOME, but not ALL the Microsoft systems complained about a missing "msvcp70.dll" file. WTF? Googling it I found a dll-files.com site that had a file named like that. Copy that to c:\windows\system32. Did I download malware? How the fsck do I know?
Funny thing is, there are people who say Microsoft systems have more vulnerabilities just because they are more widely used. Let's see: no central repository, any user can install stuff they get anywhere on the web, there are missing parts they must download somewhere else... Is it any wonder that Microsoft systems get infected?
Driving faster than the speed limit isn't legal either. Now, imagine a speed limit of 2 mph in the city and 4 mph in open country. Would you still drive in the legal limit? Fortunately speed limits are more reasonable today than they were in 1865.
But what about a copyright law under which no work has entered the public domain in the last 85 years? Is that reasonable? Under such a draconian law, it's perfectly ethical and fair to disobey the law. Better people than me have disobeyed unfair laws.
You haven't actually used Linux, have you? Linux is and has been for several years *much* easier to use than MS-windows.
I just realized this when I had to give some lessons on Python programming to some people at work. I hadn't used a Windows desktop for several years, but since none of these people were Linux users I used XP for the course. I then realized how hard is XP for someone who's not used to it.
Starting with the "Start" menu, which is organized by software supplier, not category. Now where the fsck do I find a file manager? I just downloaded this file, where did it go? Where is my "home" directory, which in Linux has an icon intuitively shaped as a house? I want to copy a file, why did it create links for some, but not all copy operations? And so on. Windows is *extremely* hard to use for a beginner.
Here is a pre-1950 reference to the Moon. And you can easily check its veracity. The moon is close enough that a cannon shot can reach it. So, all you need to do to check if this is true or not is to tie yourself to a cannonball and shoot to the moon. Happy landing... er moonings.
I, OTOH, am able to do simple math. Multiply the $0.99 price that's typically charged per on-line song by the 15 tracks one finds in a typical CD and you get the same $15 one pays for the CD. Add the hassle of burning and dealing with DRM.
If people don't want to buy CDs at $15, then why do they think people would be willing to pay the equivalent of $15 for a CD online?
Charge reasonable prices and the world will beat a path to your door.
[Citation needed]: which middle-eastern cities have they nuked so far? Or do you have an alternative definition of the verb "to hesitate"?
Oh, great, you must belong to some religion that believes in reincarnation, right? All your suffering in this life will be repaid in the next?
Because giving bullies an assurance that they can do anything and you will not retaliate is the best way to handle such people. After all, look how well this policy has worked in the past
Whoah there cowboy! If I'm downloading films for *FREE*, how can that be financing anything? I mean, to "finance" something means getting money, right?
Not TV, media companies lost. The future came and they weren't prepared.
I'd be willing to bet that in ten years we won't have phones or TV sets, just digital boxes with broadband internet. Small boxes to carry in your pocket, big boxes at home.
Game consoles, computers, phones, they will all merge. Perhaps we will have some boxes more specialized than others, but inside they will all be the same. A computer with a display and some form of input device, communicating over a wireless link to the internet.
If you RTFA you'll see they are after statistics, not detailed data. They want to estimate the number of planets that have approximately the same characteristics as Earth.
The Kepler will keep monitoring the same 100000 stars during five years. The number of planets detected around those stars will give a rough idea on how likely it is to find earth-like planets.
Excellent graphs. I have been showing similar stuff to people who believe the media's assertion that the sky is falling down. It gets even better when one compensates for inflation, dividing the Dow Jones by the Consumer Price Index.
The reasonable conclusion is that we are at a fairly average economic recession, not the end of times.
First of all, I just recently bought a car that runs on 100% ethanol, a Brazilian 2009 Peugeot 207.
You can travel through 100% of the country driving a car that runs on 100% ethanol. This has been true for the last 30 years.
Brazilian ethanol is obtained from sugarcane. Sugarcane does not produce food. It can produce either sugar or brandy, when it's not used for fuel.
How many cars total are actually running? There are a few million 100% ethanol cars in Brazil today and for the last 30 years.
There are over 35000 ethanol stations in Brazil
ROTFL
You can make ethanol at home. But why bother, when there's all the infrastructure in place? Does anybody make gasoline at home?
Really? Which ones don't have ethanol cars?
I could go on, but this gets tiresome. Ethanol has been a reality for a generation, hydrogen is a pipe dream.
You probably know all this and just mixed up your wording, but a 7805 is not normally used as a switching regulator. OTOH, if you do use a switching regulator, then you can turn voltage up as easy as down. The word you're looking for is "flyback"
For me, the good thing in turning pages, at least in reference books, is how your "favorites" end being implanted into the book structure itself. All my reference books open automatically in the pages I need most frequently.
But what will really convert me to ebooks someday when the cost comes down is the volume of data. The conversion factor from digital books to bookshelf space is roughly two megabytes / centimeter. A 2GB SD card will hold ten meters of bookshelf, how's that, maybe a Library of Congress per gym bag?
[Citation Needed]. If you are thinking of the waste that appears when melting any metal, which is called "dross" in the industry, there are ways to handle it
On the contrary, ethanol as a fuel is not only a solution, it's a mature technology. My first 100% ethanol-burning car was a Brazilian 1983 Chevette, which I bought used in 1985. The last time gasoline was sold in Brazil without at least 10% of ethanol was in 1976
Hydrogen as a fuel is, at this moment, wishfull thinking. The stage of hydrogen research today is less advanced than ethanol as a fuel was in Brazil in 1974. And there's much more to research. Any gasoline engine will run, with reduced performance, on ethanol. Tuning a car to run on ethanol is a relatively simple task.
And, much more important, the delivery system is there. Any service station that sells gasoline or diesel has all it needs to sell ethanol. Trucks and pipelines are the same. To convert a whole country to ethanol, as was done in Brazil in the late 1970s, is simple.
Now try doing that with hydrogen. Build a new fleet of tanker trucks, a whole new network of pipelines covering the whole country. Develop and build the tanks to hold the fuel in each car. Do the safety checks. Develop, test, and certify the systems that will guarantee a car will still be safe, even after crashing.
To build a hydrogen-based society is not just finding some magical way to produce hydrogen.
Yes! I believe somewhere there is a business model that works like that. But calling your clients "thieves" will not help you find that ideal business model. Why can't artists sit down with their fans and try to solve those differences?
Try to find the 21st century way of doing business. Why must so many artists accept blindly what the *REAL THIEVES*, i.e. those MAFIAA scumbags say?
What is meant as "theft" is not what I gain, but what I take away from you. If you teach me something, you are not forgetting what you taught me, are you? I gained something valuable, you lost nothing.
Or are you saying every student steals from his teacher?
You think two weeks of work is nothing?
In this sentence you stated exactly why unauthorized copying is not theft: nothing is taken from the owner. The right car analogy would be taking a picture of a car, not stealing it.
To think a teen who has a million dollars worth of media in his computer would have bought that with his $100/week allowance is dumb.