I would like to add only two things to your post, if I may:
In their first option, they can stand up to their philosophical beliefs --which is a VERY rare thing these days for any major company-- and keep up the fight.
Google isn't Chinese. Many would argue it's not their fight. It's a technological Vietnam War. Are they doing the right thing by not censoring their results? According to us, and our culture they may be, but not according to the host which has accepted them as a dinner guest. It's morally relative and looks a lot like a modern-day "The King and I".
someone (MS with Bing?) would jump in their place right away and it would be like nothing ever happened
Except it wouldn't be like nothing ever happened. Whoever jumps in their place gains an enormous market share, which would rattle the strength of Google at a shareholder level. Search engines are some of the shortest-lived giants our modern technology has bred. Google may be an unstoppable juggernaut today, but its family pedigree show us that adolescent heart attacks are the norm for its stock.
That's fine... until you visit a random forum to ask a random question and some idiot has an avatar.gif with an embedded trojan that has just now found its way into your harddrive's temp file. The only warning you get is when you see that Java is running in the system tray for a split second. Then kiss your afternoon's productivity goodbye.
I don't know if the oriented nature of gel-spun UHMWPE fibers is quite at the same level and provides the same thermal properties as ones made by drawing them out with an AFM cantilever, but they might be "good enough," considering that gel spinning is a scalable industrial production method while cantilever drawing is a "very careful scientist" sort of method.
Well, I have a solution for that. Swap out all the CAPTCHAs on major sites for a webcam peering into an electron microscope that allows a person to draw out the polymer molecules with the cantilever. A week or two, tops, and you'll have someone who's created a bot that can do it perfectly.
Another, similar way is to have Blizzard do the same thing, except using it as a substitute for a CAPTCHA, for every molecule they pull, they get 1 silver piece added to an account of their choice. You'll get the same results, except the bot will speak Chinese.
Could this explain why real butter and fake butter taste so much different to me? Growing up, I never noticed the difference. Then, for a few years, it tasted kind of like real butter has onions and garlic in it. It was to the point where I couldn't eat popcorn if the theater used real butter. I couldn't eat toast if it had real butter. It left a taste in my mouth similar to if I had gone out and licked a homeless person. It wasn't psychosomatic or texture-based. Up to that point, I would always pick real butter where it was available. During those years, however, I shamefacedly had to ask "Do you also offer a vegetable-spread or margarine?" Now, I've reverted back to where I can once again enjoy all butters (real or fake), but I can still determine whether it's real (dairy-based) or not by taste alone. It wasn't dairy aversion, because I always drink whole milk with any given breakfast.
2. So, Vivek, how much would a new Patent Administration cost? How long would it take? You wouldn't have your job long enough to see the project complete, successfully or otherwise
As long as he doesn't hire government workers to fix it, it would probably take a few months -- maybe a year. Savings could be seen within 2 years. (Before the next election)
3. How about that VA system huh? Let's stake your entire career on changing it. Ohhh now that YOUR skin is in the game, suddenly the status-quo looks pretty good.
What? Who WOULDN'T? If you wanted to pay me to fix the federal government's efficiency, there would not be a happier man in the entire United States. Every hundred-million-dollar slice I tear from the beast would help me rest easier at night. Every bureau I thin down to 10% its staff, while doubling its efficiency would make my next lunch taste that much sweeter. Put my career on the line? Then I have nothing they can bargain with if they want to continue inflating their bureaus to match their egos. I'd see to it that the VA administers more to the veterans of the country than to the staff of the VA.
And the fact they're all in a union would make it even easier to clean out the house!
Perhaps if we had a legal system that wasn't so convoluted with bylaws that the layman could be considered "competent" when defending himself in the eyes of a judge without spending 4 years in lawschool, then representation wouldn't be the requirement it is today. We have a system of laws written and practiced by lawyers to a point where it's not whether you did right or wrong, it's whether your lawyer can prove you did right or wrong. It's a flaw inhereted from the British system, and thoroughly perverted with each generation.
I understand that the bylaws cut down drastically on the amount of time and headaches it takes for a judge to review a case, but the fact that 299,990,000 Americans have to suffer for the sake of 10,000 judges -- and the fact that judges were created for the cases, not cases for the judges, the process has reversed itself from serving the people to treating a judge as royalty.
There are no easy answers, and we're at the point, or quickly getting there, where we've exhausted the pros of the path we've chosen with our legal system. If we destructured the legal system to its bare bones, the same people who manipulate it now will probably have an easier time manipulating it then. However, those who do not manipulate it now will find more ground on which to stand by themselves.
How do we do that? It would take a smarter man than I to know even where to begin. However, there are some symptoms that must be cleared up before we can call any revision as approaching successful: Prisons in the US need to be cleared out. Take non-dangerous, non-violent crimes and cut down on their prison time, but increase their community service time, or increase their fines. The theory of medical malpractice needs to be completely revamped. Too many people are going to the hospital to get their bank accounts fixed more than their health. Too many people have forgotten that death comes to us all, especially in hospitals. If the doctor did his best or performed reasonably competently (according to a jury of his randomly-sampled peers -- other doctors in the same field) then there is no malpractice case. A family can grieve without punishing the man who tried to save a life and failed. Medical malpractice is the new life insurance -- that everyone else ends up paying through healthcare costs.
Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision, dies and goes to Hell. The devil greets him when he arrives and says "Bobby, out of all the people up there, you remind me most of myself, so I'm going to let you choose your punishment for your first thousand years."
The two start at a short hallway labelled "First Timers" and stop at the first door. Inside is an old man, screaming, having his skin peeled off in 1 inch strips. The devil explains "At the beginning of the day, his flesh is renewed. By nightfall, he is nothing but a pile of organs hanging onto a skeleton. This is the only punishment where you get a few hours rest every night." Bobby feels a bit nervous about the long future ahead of him.
They walk to the next door. Inside is an even older man, screaming louder than the first man, and he's slowly being lowered into a vat of acid. The devil explains "This punishment lasts all day. It starts at the toes and works its way up. When you are completely burned away, it starts over. Some say that after the first 800 years, though, it feels more like a massage than a punishment. I suppose it's not so bad if you really enjoyed hot tubs when you were alive." Bobby starts sweating at the thought of his eternal reward.
They come up to the third, and last door of the hallway. Inside is an EXTREMELY old man, screaming at the top of his lungs. A gorgeous young woman, chained to him by the ankle, is giving him a passionate blowjob. The devil grins "This punishment may look like fun, but after the first few hours, you get tired, but you may never rest; not for a thousand years. This punishment is one of endurance. Now that you've seen your choices, which one will it be?" Bobby Kotick doesn't take long to decide which of the punishments he'll undergo. "I'll take the last one. The blowjob one."
The devil accepts Bobby's choice with a nodded bow, and opens the third door. He enters in, unlocks the chain on the woman's leg and whispers in her ear "Your replacement is here, you've been relieved."
I like to read, and unlike the rest of my classmates, I have some scientific background concerning the world in general. And thus, when I heard that BYU, founded on principles of racism, moral superiority, and hatred of atheists, I was surprised they had abandoned enough of their core principles to have a paleontology department that accurately dated fossils.
Apparently, you shouldn't believe everything that you read, or is just it a personal bias that makes you lash out so?
We just went through a massive consolidation like this, for about 3,000 servers. it was mostly smooth, and run under budget in terms of the project cost (and saved us tens of millions by going through it).
I'm having difficulty understanding how you can construe your mythology to say that your god of Biology created microorganisms first and then time second.
If a machine could write a Mozart sonata every bit as good as the originals, then what was so special about Mozart?
Mozart's greatest contribution to music wasn't neccessarily his symphonies. It was the algorithms he constructed, finding that pleasing music has mathematical undertones. I'm sure he would be emphatically proud of the machine, and would have, no doubt, used it in order to broaden his ability to compose. Imagine, using these machines to compose sibling symphonies, when played alone, sound pleasing, but when played together combine to form an entirely new harmony. Something that would take a human hundreds of years of trial and error, or some brutal headscratching to correctly compose... instead tweaked, played back, and suggested by an appliance.
These robots do no more harm to him and his legacy than Adobe Photoshop does to Pablo Picasso.
Whoever designs a website with a 10-part, ad-laden article which OPENS A NEW WINDOW EVERY TIME YOU CLICK ON THE " GO TO PART N+1" needs his head violently pressed against a cheese grater until he fixes it.
To their checkbooks it is equivalent to piracy. However, if they view legitimate (albeit free) competition as criminal, then they are admitting to their monopoly and/or price fixing. If their competition releases equivalent software for free, then their justifications to sell software licenses for $90+ are unsound and possibly illegal. If they want piracy to equal using open source solutions, then instead of going to an open source solution, I should have no moral qualms of pirating software. Thanks to them!
If you have a pair of sunglasses and a jacket, you should be good to go.
1: Get a $10-$25 cash card from your credit card company
2: Slide it through the card reader
3: Light up a cigarette
4: Spray gas all over the pump
5: Slowly walk away, flicking the smouldering cigarette behind you, onto the pump. Speak a one-liner about gas, pumps, explosions, fire, smoking, or credit card fraud. It is very important NOT to laugh at your own joke.
6: No matter how hot your back suddenly gets, keep walking slowly and DON'T turn around, (glass or shrapnel is going to hit you, it's better to take it in the back than in the face.)
7: Never worry about gas pump skimmers for the rest of your life.
I do not need to knock on my neighbor's door. In fact, going inside, opening his cabinets, and taking whatever I want is expected.
I get experience points for beating up stray dogs.
I find treasure chests, unlocked and unopened, hidden away in all sorts of bushes and alleyways around my city. Some even contain armor!
I don't work out, I level up!
I only carry up to 255 pieces of any item.
If I receive something that appears to be worthless (like a Rusty Sword) I must carry it with me wherever I go, in case I find someone who can restore it to its former glory.
When I buy a shirt at the store, I attempt to sell them the one on my back in order to cut costs.
Or they could follow the example of Blizzard and release only the stoneage for single player (while letting you play through all ages in multiplayer, minus 50% of the military units) and then next month, release classical age with another 25% of the units, and then modern age with the rest of the units.
Slashdot Mirror
In their first option, they can stand up to their philosophical beliefs --which is a VERY rare thing these days for any major company-- and keep up the fight.
Google isn't Chinese. Many would argue it's not their fight. It's a technological Vietnam War. Are they doing the right thing by not censoring their results? According to us, and our culture they may be, but not according to the host which has accepted them as a dinner guest. It's morally relative and looks a lot like a modern-day "The King and I".
someone (MS with Bing?) would jump in their place right away and it would be like nothing ever happened
Except it wouldn't be like nothing ever happened. Whoever jumps in their place gains an enormous market share, which would rattle the strength of Google at a shareholder level. Search engines are some of the shortest-lived giants our modern technology has bred. Google may be an unstoppable juggernaut today, but its family pedigree show us that adolescent heart attacks are the norm for its stock.
That's fine... until you visit a random forum to ask a random question and some idiot has an avatar.gif with an embedded trojan that has just now found its way into your harddrive's temp file. The only warning you get is when you see that Java is running in the system tray for a split second. Then kiss your afternoon's productivity goodbye.
I don't know if the oriented nature of gel-spun UHMWPE fibers is quite at the same level and provides the same thermal properties as ones made by drawing them out with an AFM cantilever, but they might be "good enough," considering that gel spinning is a scalable industrial production method while cantilever drawing is a "very careful scientist" sort of method.
Well, I have a solution for that. Swap out all the CAPTCHAs on major sites for a webcam peering into an electron microscope that allows a person to draw out the polymer molecules with the cantilever. A week or two, tops, and you'll have someone who's created a bot that can do it perfectly.
Another, similar way is to have Blizzard do the same thing, except using it as a substitute for a CAPTCHA, for every molecule they pull, they get 1 silver piece added to an account of their choice. You'll get the same results, except the bot will speak Chinese.
It was assault.
Salt killed his father.
Could this explain why real butter and fake butter taste so much different to me? Growing up, I never noticed the difference. Then, for a few years, it tasted kind of like real butter has onions and garlic in it. It was to the point where I couldn't eat popcorn if the theater used real butter. I couldn't eat toast if it had real butter. It left a taste in my mouth similar to if I had gone out and licked a homeless person. It wasn't psychosomatic or texture-based. Up to that point, I would always pick real butter where it was available. During those years, however, I shamefacedly had to ask "Do you also offer a vegetable-spread or margarine?" Now, I've reverted back to where I can once again enjoy all butters (real or fake), but I can still determine whether it's real (dairy-based) or not by taste alone. It wasn't dairy aversion, because I always drink whole milk with any given breakfast.
And then they swapped out the real packages for the fake ones!
:)
Srsly -- no need to be pedantic
You wouldn't remove it. You'd replace it with a nonmalevolent retrovirus.
$genome = str_replace($retroVirus, $superPower, $genome);
Just make sure you get the values in your variables correct, and that your body is upgraded to PHP v4.1 or later
2. So, Vivek, how much would a new Patent Administration cost? How long would it take? You wouldn't have your job long enough to see the project complete, successfully or otherwise
As long as he doesn't hire government workers to fix it, it would probably take a few months -- maybe a year. Savings could be seen within 2 years. (Before the next election)
3. How about that VA system huh? Let's stake your entire career on changing it. Ohhh now that YOUR skin is in the game, suddenly the status-quo looks pretty good.
What? Who WOULDN'T? If you wanted to pay me to fix the federal government's efficiency, there would not be a happier man in the entire United States. Every hundred-million-dollar slice I tear from the beast would help me rest easier at night. Every bureau I thin down to 10% its staff, while doubling its efficiency would make my next lunch taste that much sweeter. Put my career on the line? Then I have nothing they can bargain with if they want to continue inflating their bureaus to match their egos. I'd see to it that the VA administers more to the veterans of the country than to the staff of the VA.
And the fact they're all in a union would make it even easier to clean out the house!
Perhaps if we had a legal system that wasn't so convoluted with bylaws that the layman could be considered "competent" when defending himself in the eyes of a judge without spending 4 years in lawschool, then representation wouldn't be the requirement it is today. We have a system of laws written and practiced by lawyers to a point where it's not whether you did right or wrong, it's whether your lawyer can prove you did right or wrong. It's a flaw inhereted from the British system, and thoroughly perverted with each generation.
I understand that the bylaws cut down drastically on the amount of time and headaches it takes for a judge to review a case, but the fact that 299,990,000 Americans have to suffer for the sake of 10,000 judges -- and the fact that judges were created for the cases, not cases for the judges, the process has reversed itself from serving the people to treating a judge as royalty.
There are no easy answers, and we're at the point, or quickly getting there, where we've exhausted the pros of the path we've chosen with our legal system. If we destructured the legal system to its bare bones, the same people who manipulate it now will probably have an easier time manipulating it then. However, those who do not manipulate it now will find more ground on which to stand by themselves.
How do we do that? It would take a smarter man than I to know even where to begin. However, there are some symptoms that must be cleared up before we can call any revision as approaching successful: Prisons in the US need to be cleared out. Take non-dangerous, non-violent crimes and cut down on their prison time, but increase their community service time, or increase their fines. The theory of medical malpractice needs to be completely revamped. Too many people are going to the hospital to get their bank accounts fixed more than their health. Too many people have forgotten that death comes to us all, especially in hospitals. If the doctor did his best or performed reasonably competently (according to a jury of his randomly-sampled peers -- other doctors in the same field) then there is no malpractice case. A family can grieve without punishing the man who tried to save a life and failed. Medical malpractice is the new life insurance -- that everyone else ends up paying through healthcare costs.
Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision, dies and goes to Hell. The devil greets him when he arrives and says "Bobby, out of all the people up there, you remind me most of myself, so I'm going to let you choose your punishment for your first thousand years."
The two start at a short hallway labelled "First Timers" and stop at the first door. Inside is an old man, screaming, having his skin peeled off in 1 inch strips. The devil explains "At the beginning of the day, his flesh is renewed. By nightfall, he is nothing but a pile of organs hanging onto a skeleton. This is the only punishment where you get a few hours rest every night." Bobby feels a bit nervous about the long future ahead of him.
They walk to the next door. Inside is an even older man, screaming louder than the first man, and he's slowly being lowered into a vat of acid. The devil explains "This punishment lasts all day. It starts at the toes and works its way up. When you are completely burned away, it starts over. Some say that after the first 800 years, though, it feels more like a massage than a punishment. I suppose it's not so bad if you really enjoyed hot tubs when you were alive." Bobby starts sweating at the thought of his eternal reward.
They come up to the third, and last door of the hallway. Inside is an EXTREMELY old man, screaming at the top of his lungs. A gorgeous young woman, chained to him by the ankle, is giving him a passionate blowjob. The devil grins "This punishment may look like fun, but after the first few hours, you get tired, but you may never rest; not for a thousand years. This punishment is one of endurance. Now that you've seen your choices, which one will it be?" Bobby Kotick doesn't take long to decide which of the punishments he'll undergo.
"I'll take the last one. The blowjob one."
The devil accepts Bobby's choice with a nodded bow, and opens the third door. He enters in, unlocks the chain on the woman's leg and whispers in her ear "Your replacement is here, you've been relieved."
I like to read, and unlike the rest of my classmates, I have some scientific background concerning the world in general. And thus, when I heard that BYU, founded on principles of racism, moral superiority, and hatred of atheists, I was surprised they had abandoned enough of their core principles to have a paleontology department that accurately dated fossils.
Apparently, you shouldn't believe everything that you read, or is just it a personal bias that makes you lash out so?
BYU has one of the largest collection of Jurassic dino bones in the world.
Does that not fit into what your science teacher told you about people who aren't your science teacher?
We just went through a massive consolidation like this, for about 3,000 servers. it was mostly smooth, and run under budget in terms of the project cost (and saved us tens of millions by going through it).
Famous last words.
I'd say it is an "amazing creation of evolution"
I'm having difficulty understanding how you can construe your mythology to say that your god of Biology created microorganisms first and then time second.
Well, I'm glad to be paying someone's wages because they wanted to retire from an assembly job 15 years earlier than they should!
If a machine could write a Mozart sonata every bit as good as the originals, then what was so special about Mozart?
Mozart's greatest contribution to music wasn't neccessarily his symphonies. It was the algorithms he constructed, finding that pleasing music has mathematical undertones. I'm sure he would be emphatically proud of the machine, and would have, no doubt, used it in order to broaden his ability to compose. Imagine, using these machines to compose sibling symphonies, when played alone, sound pleasing, but when played together combine to form an entirely new harmony. Something that would take a human hundreds of years of trial and error, or some brutal headscratching to correctly compose... instead tweaked, played back, and suggested by an appliance.
These robots do no more harm to him and his legacy than Adobe Photoshop does to Pablo Picasso.
They only seem to market themselves by objectifying women.
You're not one of those people who think that "The Office" is an actual documentary, are you?
Whoever designs a website with a 10-part, ad-laden article which OPENS A NEW WINDOW EVERY TIME YOU CLICK ON THE " GO TO PART N+1" needs his head violently pressed against a cheese grater until he fixes it.
To their checkbooks it is equivalent to piracy. However, if they view legitimate (albeit free) competition as criminal, then they are admitting to their monopoly and/or price fixing. If their competition releases equivalent software for free, then their justifications to sell software licenses for $90+ are unsound and possibly illegal. If they want piracy to equal using open source solutions, then instead of going to an open source solution, I should have no moral qualms of pirating software. Thanks to them!
nODvD cr4cks and w4rez written by bored Russian teenagers
If you have a pair of sunglasses and a jacket, you should be good to go.
1: Get a $10-$25 cash card from your credit card company
2: Slide it through the card reader
3: Light up a cigarette
4: Spray gas all over the pump
5: Slowly walk away, flicking the smouldering cigarette behind you, onto the pump. Speak a one-liner about gas, pumps, explosions, fire, smoking, or credit card fraud. It is very important NOT to laugh at your own joke.
6: No matter how hot your back suddenly gets, keep walking slowly and DON'T turn around, (glass or shrapnel is going to hit you, it's better to take it in the back than in the face.)
7: Never worry about gas pump skimmers for the rest of your life.
What we have is a perfect recipe for greed!
I do not need to knock on my neighbor's door. In fact, going inside, opening his cabinets, and taking whatever I want is expected.
I get experience points for beating up stray dogs.
I find treasure chests, unlocked and unopened, hidden away in all sorts of bushes and alleyways around my city. Some even contain armor!
I don't work out, I level up!
I only carry up to 255 pieces of any item.
If I receive something that appears to be worthless (like a Rusty Sword) I must carry it with me wherever I go, in case I find someone who can restore it to its former glory.
When I buy a shirt at the store, I attempt to sell them the one on my back in order to cut costs.
Or they could follow the example of Blizzard and release only the stoneage for single player (while letting you play through all ages in multiplayer, minus 50% of the military units) and then next month, release classical age with another 25% of the units, and then modern age with the rest of the units.