. It's bad enough that programmers now own mathematicians. Now you want farmers to own bio-scientists?
Hmm, now that you put it like that, yes. I want farmers to "own" bio-scientists in much the same way that programmers "own" mathematicians. I'm trying to think of a world where I have to pay a mathematician every time I implemented some algorthm, and I can only imagine a horrible, horrible place. I don't want farmers (particularly those in developing countries) to have to work under those conditions. I want algorithms and bio-science to be free. Feeding the world if far too important to leave at the whim of Monsanto. Fuck em'. If they go out of business, good riddence. Someone else will pick up the slack and find ways to improve crop yields without holding producers hostage. Even if it is good ol' fashioned government (or inter govertment) funded research. I'm sick of patents and I'm sick of Monsanto.
What are you talking about? What does Washington state have to do with anything?
In what way is Flock trying to control you? If you don't need to integrate with all those online services, DON'T USE IT. Jesus. It is like buying a 4-door sedan and then complaining that it is trying to control your driving habits because it was only designed to be driven on paved streets. If you want to go off-road, buy a different frieking car!
How can you not like the name? The program is called "Flock" and you tell it where to go (which websites). That makes *you* the shepherd. Isn't that exactly what you want?
At least Comcast offers services that people actually WANT. You may not like some of their policies, but they are what I would call a "positive" business. That is, as opposed to a negative business like e360 that acts more as a parasite offering "services" that consumers don't really want and quite often hate. They leech off the system.
He wasn't equating the two, he was making the distinction of heroin being safe while alcohol/tobacco are unsafe. I'd disagree and say that they are both relatively safe in low doses while toxic at higher doses.
You're conflating toxicicity and safety. Heroin is not toxic, even in high doses. That isn't to say that you can't OD, but opiates don't cause cell damage.
Which is fine if you are a cell, but as far as I'm aware you are not.
I happen to be built from billions, if not trillions of them, you insensitive clod!
You're most likely an organism with opioid receptors that feed into a central nervous system which shuts off when given enough morphine. Alcohol has a similar depressive effect, but while the LD50 for heroin is pretty high as far as drugs go, it's still nowhere near that of alcohol. A gram of heroin is a massive dose that would kill most people, I had twice that dose of alcohol today and then drove home.
No offense, but trying to compare two substances by weight of effective dose is kind of dumb. If you're worried about the potency of heroin compared to alcohol (by weight), just dilute the heroin. That's what I d... err, uh, I mean, toss me another brewski!
Highly addictive drugs are a danger to the public. If you can afford to supply your own habit, then more power to you. The problem is that drugs like heroin and crack aren't used solely by those who can afford them. So you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what happens when they run out of money. Sure the price would come down if it wasn't illegal, but until the price is zero there will always be people who can't afford it and are willing to go to any length in order to obtain it.
So what makes Heroin so special? There's plenty of other strong opiates out there that are given to people every day, legally. Many of these people are very much addicted, and their doctors know it. Such patients more or less have to accept the fact they'll probably be opiate addicts for the rest off their lives in exchange for pain management. But I don't hear many people complaining about that. Nobody crying "think of the children!" But any time heroin comes up, people freak out. They treat it like some special, evil, chemical.. something far more powerful and dangerous than, say, oxycontin. When, really, the only significant difference is the legal status. Though a connoisseur of fine opiates may wish argue the finer points.
I assert that once you take the stigma away from heroin, legalize it, and treat it like any other opiate, it wouldn't pose any more threat to the public than any other potent opiate already out there (and there are quite a few).
There's really not a whole lot you can do about people who'd prefer to spend every waking hour tweaking or nodding on some drug. Making the drugs illegal certainly doesn't stop them. I'd much rather see the focus put on the recovery and support side than on the law enforcement side of drugs. Not to mention that it would be nice to feel safe (from the law) to experiment with various chemicals if I so chose. Though those days are more or less behind me now and I never bothered with heroin specifically.
I like how you say that heroin in moderate amounts isn't damaging to the body, but then try to draw a comparison with alcohol, which is only dangerous when used in excess.
It is a fair comparison. Both are relatively safe, physiologically speaking.
Moderate alcohol use is even been found to be beneficial.
But it also toxic to cells. Where heroin is not. So it balances out, I think.
I've been on morphine and I can absolutely say that shit is extremely addictive.
If your friend had access to known concentrations of pharmaceutically clean opiates, instead of unknown quantities of whatever the hell black tar is he might be alive today.
Or maybe he just used the heroin as a convenient (and painless) method of suicide. WHo knows.
Drug abuse, by any definition of "abuse" has nothing to do with (informed) consent.
Maybe, maybe not.
Some might say it's perscription drug abuse if used other than as perscribed.
Sure, this would make sense since there is a clear definition for "use." But things get a little gray when you start talking about a substance or behavior that has no socially acceptable use case.
But generally speaking, drug use becomes abuse when there are negative health/social consequences.
No, that is better described as "addiction" depending on whether or not the person woudl have trouble discontinuing use or perhaps more simply, "a problem." If you say that any drug use that has negative health/social consequenses is "abuse," then we have to start talking about nicotine abuse, for example. And I can't imagine many people considering smokers to be drug abusers. They're USING nicotine. Not abusing it. Smoking cigarettes is the accepted and most common "use" for nicotine.
Under your idiotic definition, a fully informed heroin junkie isn't abusing drugs.
Since heroin has no accepted medical use that I'm aware of (though similar drugs are used as pain killers) and the common use for heroin is recreational, I would have to say that a heroin junkie is, in fact, not abusing heroin. Sure, he or she is most likely addicted and most likely will have social and health problems, but it isn't abuse any more than a cigarette smoker is abusing nicotine.
But you might be correct on the issue of informed consent. I don't think it really matters in most cases whether the (ab)user is fully informed or not. THough I wouldn't rule out the possibility of a good argument for such a consideration. I just can't think of one off hand.
I'm sorry, I have trouble whenever whenever an astronomer suggests that something they found "may be much more common than we thought." One observation does not mean way more common. It jumps the gap from "purely theoretical" to "proven possible", and in the data set of the known universe really isn't enough to make any type of assertion about commonality.
I suppose it depends on what one considers "common."
Lets put it this way. If you walked up to a haystack and looked down and quickly spotted a needle, wouldn't that suggest to you that needles might be pretty common in the haystack? I mean, what are the chances that you would just happen to observe the location of a single needle in a large haystack in a relatively short period of time? Certainly it is possible that you foudn the *only* one, but it is much more likely that there were many that you could have spotted first.
I would actually expect that in a technical field. High skilled and/or techinical people often have very specific requirements for software applications and tend to get entrenched in one particular route. Even if OpenOffice, for example, could technically do what they want, there's no real motivation to try since they already know what works. And they probably have the money to pay for it.
Remember, just because someone is "highly technical" doesn't mean they know (or care) that much about computers and software. I would think that the less technical with fewer specified requirements would be more likely to try alternatives... particularly if they are free.
I agree 100%. My mom, for example, downloaded OpenOffice (without any prompting from me) when her trial version of MS Office ran out. If Dell had included a "free" version of MS Works with the computer, she'd probably be using that right now.
I think Microsoft is forgetting how they came to be dominant in the first place: bundling, hiding the cost of the software in with the hardware purchase. Even if they end up paying about the same in the long run, customers are going to feel like they are paying more.
I dont think its about selling the add-ons for hundreds of dollars. I honestly think the basic Windows will eventually be free but by then it'll just be stripped down to the basic OS & browser. They wont sell the add-ons, they'll license them to people for a monthly fee.
I don't see how you can take away features that people have become accustomed to getting for "free." I say free because most users consider the OS to be "free" with the computer. They don't necessarily realize they they are paying a "microsoft tax" because it is never part of the bill. I think having to pay monthly fees for what they think should be free will not go over well. Especially when there's so much open source software out there. For example, when my mom's trial period for MS Office ran out and it came time to pay for it, she decided all on her own to download OpenOffice instead. Now, if the computer had just come with a full version of MS Works in the first place, she never would have been prompted to try an open source product.
Microsoft wants a continuous revenue stream from its users. They want you to keep giving them money whether you upgrade or not. They wont care if you insist on running your 4 years out of date OS as you'll still be paying your MS Rent.
They should care if people continue to run out of date versions of the OS because they not oonly have to continue supporting it, but it also limits somewhat the features of newer versions. Look at how many ugly hacks Microsoft had to add to Vista to keep backwards compatability with their OS from 2001. Applications will continue to target XP and rely on Vista's comptability. WHat Microsoft needs if for developers to target Vista and take advantage of new features. That is, if the want to keep the Windows line alive.
By giving away Core Windows with every new PC they get around the MS Tax on buying computers by charging you more later. Then you can upgrade as much as you wish...
I imagine vendors would end up shipping more than just the core as an "added bonus" to users if only to offset the annoyance of not getting for "free" what you expect to get for free.
I can really only see this plan of MS's working for NEW features. I seriously doubt they're going to take away what is considered to be base functionality such as "multimedia" and DirectX. And if they didn't include DirectX, I'm sure it would just ship with each game like it does now.
I don't think it is a slippery slope at all. It actually sound disturbingly realistic. I mean, a lot of software already is limited to the number of CPU's it will use. And there's versions of MSSQL that only support databases of certain size. It really isn't too much of a stretch to have to pay for these things in Windows 7.
Though I don't think it will go over well with customers. As if running a Windows computer wasn't already a hassle with having to think about virus protection, malware protection, now you'll have to constantly be bumping up against limitations of the OS and offered "upgrades."
It just seems like MS is going the wrong way with OSes. Instead of making them more transparent and simple, they just keep piling on complexity. I mean, complexity for the user. Obviously the complexity of the code is going to go up. That much is a given. But the way the user interacts with it doesn't have to be complex.
Nope. He based his 'argument' on his perception of Rob Weir.
He was simply pointing out a potential source of bias. I didn't even really see an argument either. Just an expressed opinion about how much the OP trust the author.
There are much better examples of ad hominem attacks. For example, if the OP had said "Rob Weir is an asshole and can't possibly be right". THAT would be a perfect example of ad hominem
Man, I'm really getting sick and tired of people abusing the "ad hominem" charge. Ad hom refers specifically to an attack on ones character which is used to discredit an argument. Simply questioning a persons motives and biases is not necessarily an ad hominem attack. It is important to make any potential biases clear. Though in this particular case, I'm not seeing it.
Also, attacks on ones character may not be considered "ad hominem" unless it is being use to refute an argument. This is probably the most common misuse of the term. For example, I can call someone an asshole and it wouldn't necessarily be an "ad hominem" attack. It might just mean I think the person is an asshole. It is a valid opinion. It just isn't relevant to any logical argument.
Just because there's no love between MS and IBM as corporations doesn't mean that an IBM employee can't do an unbiased assessment. Also, it isn't like IBM is trying to compete directly with OOXML or something. So what's the basis for this suggestion of bias?
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm, now that you put it like that, yes. I want farmers to "own" bio-scientists in much the same way that programmers "own" mathematicians. I'm trying to think of a world where I have to pay a mathematician every time I implemented some algorthm, and I can only imagine a horrible, horrible place. I don't want farmers (particularly those in developing countries) to have to work under those conditions. I want algorithms and bio-science to be free. Feeding the world if far too important to leave at the whim of Monsanto. Fuck em'. If they go out of business, good riddence. Someone else will pick up the slack and find ways to improve crop yields without holding producers hostage. Even if it is good ol' fashioned government (or inter govertment) funded research. I'm sick of patents and I'm sick of Monsanto.
What are you talking about? What does Washington state have to do with anything?
In what way is Flock trying to control you? If you don't need to integrate with all those online services, DON'T USE IT. Jesus. It is like buying a 4-door sedan and then complaining that it is trying to control your driving habits because it was only designed to be driven on paved streets. If you want to go off-road, buy a different frieking car!
How can you not like the name? The program is called "Flock" and you tell it where to go (which websites). That makes *you* the shepherd. Isn't that exactly what you want?
Irony?
At least Comcast offers services that people actually WANT. You may not like some of their policies, but they are what I would call a "positive" business. That is, as opposed to a negative business like e360 that acts more as a parasite offering "services" that consumers don't really want and quite often hate. They leech off the system.
I say, "Go Comcast!"
You're conflating toxicicity and safety. Heroin is not toxic, even in high doses. That isn't to say that you can't OD, but opiates don't cause cell damage.
I happen to be built from billions, if not trillions of them, you insensitive clod!
No offense, but trying to compare two substances by weight of effective dose is kind of dumb. If you're worried about the potency of heroin compared to alcohol (by weight), just dilute the heroin. That's what I d... err, uh, I mean, toss me another brewski!
So what makes Heroin so special? There's plenty of other strong opiates out there that are given to people every day, legally. Many of these people are very much addicted, and their doctors know it. Such patients more or less have to accept the fact they'll probably be opiate addicts for the rest off their lives in exchange for pain management. But I don't hear many people complaining about that. Nobody crying "think of the children!" But any time heroin comes up, people freak out. They treat it like some special, evil, chemical.. something far more powerful and dangerous than, say, oxycontin. When, really, the only significant difference is the legal status. Though a connoisseur of fine opiates may wish argue the finer points.
I assert that once you take the stigma away from heroin, legalize it, and treat it like any other opiate, it wouldn't pose any more threat to the public than any other potent opiate already out there (and there are quite a few).
There's really not a whole lot you can do about people who'd prefer to spend every waking hour tweaking or nodding on some drug. Making the drugs illegal certainly doesn't stop them. I'd much rather see the focus put on the recovery and support side than on the law enforcement side of drugs. Not to mention that it would be nice to feel safe (from the law) to experiment with various chemicals if I so chose. Though those days are more or less behind me now and I never bothered with heroin specifically.
-matthew
It is a fair comparison. Both are relatively safe, physiologically speaking.
But it also toxic to cells. Where heroin is not. So it balances out, I think.
So?
Or maybe he just used the heroin as a convenient (and painless) method of suicide. WHo knows.
Maybe, maybe not.
Sure, this would make sense since there is a clear definition for "use." But things get a little gray when you start talking about a substance or behavior that has no socially acceptable use case.
No, that is better described as "addiction" depending on whether or not the person woudl have trouble discontinuing use or perhaps more simply, "a problem." If you say that any drug use that has negative health/social consequenses is "abuse," then we have to start talking about nicotine abuse, for example. And I can't imagine many people considering smokers to be drug abusers. They're USING nicotine. Not abusing it. Smoking cigarettes is the accepted and most common "use" for nicotine.
Since heroin has no accepted medical use that I'm aware of (though similar drugs are used as pain killers) and the common use for heroin is recreational, I would have to say that a heroin junkie is, in fact, not abusing heroin. Sure, he or she is most likely addicted and most likely will have social and health problems, but it isn't abuse any more than a cigarette smoker is abusing nicotine.
But you might be correct on the issue of informed consent. I don't think it really matters in most cases whether the (ab)user is fully informed or not. THough I wouldn't rule out the possibility of a good argument for such a consideration. I just can't think of one off hand.
-matthew
I suppose it depends on what one considers "common."
Lets put it this way. If you walked up to a haystack and looked down and quickly spotted a needle, wouldn't that suggest to you that needles might be pretty common in the haystack? I mean, what are the chances that you would just happen to observe the location of a single needle in a large haystack in a relatively short period of time? Certainly it is possible that you foudn the *only* one, but it is much more likely that there were many that you could have spotted first.
Ha! Caught you! If you were really German, you would have capitalized the word German.
Then again, maybe you just took the English tendency to not capitalize nouns too far.
But isn't the problem there COBOL and not necessarily mainframes?
I would actually expect that in a technical field. High skilled and/or techinical people often have very specific requirements for software applications and tend to get entrenched in one particular route. Even if OpenOffice, for example, could technically do what they want, there's no real motivation to try since they already know what works. And they probably have the money to pay for it.
Remember, just because someone is "highly technical" doesn't mean they know (or care) that much about computers and software. I would think that the less technical with fewer specified requirements would be more likely to try alternatives... particularly if they are free.
I agree 100%. My mom, for example, downloaded OpenOffice (without any prompting from me) when her trial version of MS Office ran out. If Dell had included a "free" version of MS Works with the computer, she'd probably be using that right now.
I think Microsoft is forgetting how they came to be dominant in the first place: bundling, hiding the cost of the software in with the hardware purchase. Even if they end up paying about the same in the long run, customers are going to feel like they are paying more.
Are you a pedantic troll?
I don't see how you can take away features that people have become accustomed to getting for "free." I say free because most users consider the OS to be "free" with the computer. They don't necessarily realize they they are paying a "microsoft tax" because it is never part of the bill. I think having to pay monthly fees for what they think should be free will not go over well. Especially when there's so much open source software out there. For example, when my mom's trial period for MS Office ran out and it came time to pay for it, she decided all on her own to download OpenOffice instead. Now, if the computer had just come with a full version of MS Works in the first place, she never would have been prompted to try an open source product.
They should care if people continue to run out of date versions of the OS because they not oonly have to continue supporting it, but it also limits somewhat the features of newer versions. Look at how many ugly hacks Microsoft had to add to Vista to keep backwards compatability with their OS from 2001. Applications will continue to target XP and rely on Vista's comptability. WHat Microsoft needs if for developers to target Vista and take advantage of new features. That is, if the want to keep the Windows line alive.
I imagine vendors would end up shipping more than just the core as an "added bonus" to users if only to offset the annoyance of not getting for "free" what you expect to get for free.
I can really only see this plan of MS's working for NEW features. I seriously doubt they're going to take away what is considered to be base functionality such as "multimedia" and DirectX. And if they didn't include DirectX, I'm sure it would just ship with each game like it does now.
Really? I count 6 versions on this page: http://www.microsoft.com/sql/howtobuy/editionspricing.mspx
Flaimbait? How in the world is this considered flamebait? I'm sincerely asking how the XNU kernel is necessarily more modulular than other kernels.
I don't think it is a slippery slope at all. It actually sound disturbingly realistic. I mean, a lot of software already is limited to the number of CPU's it will use. And there's versions of MSSQL that only support databases of certain size. It really isn't too much of a stretch to have to pay for these things in Windows 7.
Though I don't think it will go over well with customers. As if running a Windows computer wasn't already a hassle with having to think about virus protection, malware protection, now you'll have to constantly be bumping up against limitations of the OS and offered "upgrades."
It just seems like MS is going the wrong way with OSes. Instead of making them more transparent and simple, they just keep piling on complexity. I mean, complexity for the user. Obviously the complexity of the code is going to go up. That much is a given. But the way the user interacts with it doesn't have to be complex.
In what way? How is it more modular that, say, the Linux kernel with as much as possible compiled as modules?
Does "higher electron mobility" necessarily mean more conductive in the "off" state? I thought it just meant faster switching.
He was simply pointing out a potential source of bias. I didn't even really see an argument either. Just an expressed opinion about how much the OP trust the author.
There are much better examples of ad hominem attacks. For example, if the OP had said "Rob Weir is an asshole and can't possibly be right". THAT would be a perfect example of ad hominem
-matthew
Man, I'm really getting sick and tired of people abusing the "ad hominem" charge. Ad hom refers specifically to an attack on ones character which is used to discredit an argument. Simply questioning a persons motives and biases is not necessarily an ad hominem attack. It is important to make any potential biases clear. Though in this particular case, I'm not seeing it.
Also, attacks on ones character may not be considered "ad hominem" unless it is being use to refute an argument. This is probably the most common misuse of the term. For example, I can call someone an asshole and it wouldn't necessarily be an "ad hominem" attack. It might just mean I think the person is an asshole. It is a valid opinion. It just isn't relevant to any logical argument.
-matthew
Just because there's no love between MS and IBM as corporations doesn't mean that an IBM employee can't do an unbiased assessment. Also, it isn't like IBM is trying to compete directly with OOXML or something. So what's the basis for this suggestion of bias?
I hear YouTube, Google, and EVE Online make heavy use of Python, and it is a dynamic language.