Look up the Southern Poverty Law Center. They have launched many law suits against the KKK for hate speech leading to violence. As a result, several branches of the KKK have lost their compounds, and all of their funds. With no place to assemble, and no money to pay for advertising, their influence diminishes. It is absolutely a cause-and-effect relationship.
Can you give an example? We don't let the KKK spout their hate so freely any more, and it has worked wonders in diminishing their presence. It sure as hell hasn't made them look like the good guys.
The people living there, if given the freedom to decide their own fate, will almost certainly call for more violence between Israelis and Muslims, leading to decades of war, in which tens of thousands of innocent people will die. Hence, they should be deprived of such rights, just as I would be, if I openly supported the murder of innocents.
You ought to learn a thing or two about that part of the world before saying that everyone should have the right to freedom of speech and expression. If the Egyptian government collapses, things between Israel and Gaza will get really bad, really fast. Sometimes it's more important to save the lives of thousands of people, rather than let thousands of other people yell hate speech.
In this case, the Egyptian government wants to bring peace to the Middle East, whereas the activists want more violence. The Egyptian government has long been instrumental in coordinating peace efforts between the Israelis and Palestinians. The majority of the activists coordinating through Facebook are doing so to express their hatred of Israel, and their desire for its destruction.
There was an interesting interview with a Hamas leader on Al Jazeera not long ago. Essentially, he said that the leaders know that violence won't lead anywhere. The reason the violence keeps going is because the common people on both sides keep calling for it, and leaders who don't acquiesce are thrown out. If the same thing starts happening in Egypt, then it will just lead to more war, and more death.
We, people from more peaceful parts of the world, generally assume that more democracy is always good. We fail to realize that at times, the majority is wrong. The majority wants to kill the other side, because they were harmed, and then the majority on the other side wants to kill the first. It's self-perpetuating, tit for tat. The only way to break out is with strong leaders on both sides who are willing to step up and refuse to fight. Giving the vengeful mob tools to undermine that is not a good thing.
There is no easy solution in the Middle East, but any solution would need to start with strong leaders in both Israel and Gaza who refuse to resort to violence, not with grassroots movements calling for each other's destruction. We need to recognize that, and stop applying our own values to their situation.
Microsoft in its response argued that giving litigants 'a free upgrade to Premium-ready PCs would provide a windfall to millions.
Whereas, of course, others would argue that the litigants provided a windfall of billions to Microsoft by purchasing Vista on a Vista Capable machine.
One could argue that, but one would be utterly wrong, since the vast majority of "Vista Capable" machines would have had XP had they not been so labeled.
Who decides which browsers get put on that list? If it's MS, then every little dev group on Earth can sue to have their listed, until the list is so large that the end user is left utterly lost as to which one they should pick.
Of course, a better way might be to include an interface through which you can search for browsers, look up details on them, and even read what others think of them. Hmm, now what would you call an interface like that....
He's the director of a research institute with over four thousand employees and a half billion dollar budget. I think he can handle the managerial stuff just fine.
Chu is a big name, so its hard to tell whether he was the driving force behind this research, or tossed on the list of authors to get funding. Muller is an Assistant Professor. Chiow is a post-doc.
Herrman, I can't find a position for via a quick google search, but it looks like he's been putting out papers under Muller for 5 years, which means he's been working under him even longer. The only way you'd work under one person for that long without having a larger internet presence is as a meek and lowly grad student.
Therefore, my guess is this - Muller or Chu comes up with idea. Chu gets funding. Muller does the over-arching theory behind the idea (probably with help from Chu). Chiow leads in actual lab work, while Herrman does the grunt work. But hey, at least its better than being an undergrad. Those poor saps probably got jobs like "write down the number on this display every ten minutes for the next four hours", and they don't even end up getting listed.
Similarly, a cloaking device can't afford to be lossy: if it lets just a little bit of light reflect off the object it's supposed to cloak, it's no longer effective.
Why would that be no longer effective? If the cloak reroutes 90% of the light, then you're left with 10% opacity, right? Sure, something that translucent would be very difficult to see, especially from a distance.
If Vista isn't a turkey then did Microsoft deem it necessary to produce Windows 7 ?
Because the popular consensus is that Vista is a turkey. The reality of the situation has absolutely nothing to do with it, once the masses have made up their minds. Vista could be the best OS in all of history (it's not, but it could be), and it wouldn't matter one bit if everyone already made up their minds that it sucked.
I have Win7 running on my five year old laptop, with 512 megs of RAM. It runs fine. I can use it for simple things like email/browsing, and can even watch TV and movies online. All on a system so old and crappy that I literally need to blow into the side air vents to kick-start the CPU fan.
But hey, don't let facts get in the way of your oh-so-fun MS-bashing:)
PlayOn let's you watch Hulu, along with Netflix, CBS, CNN, Youtube, and ESPN on your PS3, Xbox 360 or some set-top boxes. It doesn't support the Wii yet, though they are working on that. And it only costs a one-time charge of $30. I've saved a fortune by dropping cable and just using PlayOn+Hulu and Netflix.
If you release a demo for a good game, like Braid or Left4Dead, you get great sales. If you release a demo for a game that sucks, like Age of Conan, then you get bad sales. This shouldn't surprise anyone. In fact, it's rather disheartening to think that a company might think to themselves, "Hmm, our game isn't doing that great in the focus groups.... should we improve it? Nah! Let's just trick as many people into dropping fifty to sixty bucks on it as possible, before they realize its no good."
Going elsewhere isn't liable to do anything for you. The fact is, sometimes engineers mess up. But the fact that they mess up once doesn't mean that they're about to mess up again (heck, it's probably not even the same team working on the next drive). Likewise, the fact that a company has never messed up before doesn't mean that they aren't about to.
Intel had a well known erratum with their Pentiums back in the nineties, but if you were to have sworn off all Intel products over that, you would have missed out on a lot of great processors.
Basically, you can't judge a whole company by a single event. By all means, you ought to avoid the product that's known to be faulty, but "going elsewhere", is a waste of your time and money.
Can we require businesses that patent the ideas to have real, actual products to retain the patent?
No, because some times sitting on an idea to get another company to pay for it is a legitimate practice.
Let's say I create Startup Inc, and design a new type of lithography. I don't have the money to build a fab or anything, so I show the tech to Intel and offer to let them use it in exchange for royalties. Under your system they could say no, use it anyway, and I wouldn't be able to sue, because I don't have an actual product.
Patent trolls suck, and there should be a way to stop them through litigation, but we have to be sure that we don't kill off real innovators in the process.
What are you talking about? No one left the football sitting on a table somewhere... the aid carrying it got separated from the president. What do you think is going to happen? Obama accidentally leaves his blackberry with an aid.... who is then abducted so that the terrorists can read the president's chat logs?
And as for "President-Elect" being a recent term....
...all work 9/80. They all love it. During really busy weeks, you may be asked to work on your day off, leading to 50 hours work weeks. But let's face it, if you were working a "normal" schedule, you'd end up working 10 hours a day on weeks like that anyway.
My dad also telecommutes one of the remaining 9 days. So he never goes to work on Wednesdays, which means he never has to commute more than two days in a row. Words cannot describe how much happier he is since that change. If you have a long, nasty commute, look into this sort of schedule.
During college, I worked as IT support for an association of special education preschools. While I did get them to adopt OpenOffice, I immediately realized that I couldn't even recommend switching to Linux, because essential programs weren't supported.
One program that comes to mind is Boardmaker, by Mayer-Johnson. It's an extremely popular tool for helping autistic children, and not a complex program at all. It wouldn't be hard for open-source devs to replicate, but there is just no interest among developers. Unfortunately, without it, few special ed teachers will ever consider using Linux.
There is certainly demand for a free alternative as well - in part because of Boardmaker's $400/license price tag. Searching for "Boardmaker linux" or something of the sort reveals that people have asked for it, but gone unanswered. Perhaps the saddest request is this:
"My 11 year old son has autism and his a communication therapist has recommended Boardmaker by Nova logistics to help him communicate. He has had a great affinity for computers since he was 4 years old. He has a Pentium III 1Ghz powered Intel D815eea computer which I built for him.
Boardmaker sells for over $500 and we live on low, fixed income. I have been told that there may be an equivalent, Linux based program. If so, can you tell me what it is and where I can get it? Thanks for your help."
No offense, but that sounds like a defense industry thing. I, and several of my old college friends, are EEs, and we all work at least 45-50 hours a week, every week. One of my friends is currently in the middle of what will be a 76 hour week. However, I think the record is currently held by one of my coworkers, who worked 38 hours in two days.
The difference is, I enjoy the work. I find it interesting, even fun. The prevailing attitude among IT workers I've met is that their job is a chore, so when they have to spend more than 40 hours a week on it, it makes them miserable.
If the economic climate were better, I'd tell them to quit, and find work they enjoy. Unfortunately, that may not be an option presently.
Nonsense. People always over-glorify that one period of music. Do you really think that the only great musicians in all of human history were born in a span of a hundred years?
The modern youth you describe remember Frank Sinatra and the Beatles just as well as they do Mozart and Bach. Which is to say, vaguely. No music remains truly popular forever. Your definition of timeless as "lasting until the end of civilization" is overly strict. Nothing could meet such a standard, or, if something could, there would be no way for us to know it.
Music can be fairly described as timeless so long as some people in the modern day, who were not around when the music first became popular, still enjoy it. I think the Beatles can easily meet that criterion.
Demos often don't give you the full sense of a game, and you need the full version to get a feel for whether you really want the game or not.
You seriously believe what you just wrote? It looks like a flimsy rationalization for pirating.
I absolutely believe that. I downloaded the demo of Medieval: Total War back when that came out, and thought it was pretty lackluster. All it was was a single siege battle. You had no choice of troops, no broader strategic decisions, none of the things that made the actual game good. I didn't buy it.
A couple months later, I got a pirated version from a friend, played it, loved it, bought it, and have bought every title in the series to have been released since then.
Sure, that sort of scenario may be the exception more than the rule. But then, you could say the same of scenarios where someone would have pirated the game, but bought it due to DRM.
Read the whole thread that you're replying to. It started with: "you may be too young to realize it but most of the really useful technology we use today has come out of Space and Military research."
Usually the only times Asimovian robots could kill people were when they had "weakened" three laws - e.g. Nestor in "Little Lost Robot" who had only half the first law. It couldn't harm a human, but it could set them in a situation where they might die, knowing that it could save them, and then simply choose not to.
The only case I can think of where a robot with the full three laws could willingly kill someone was when they were unaware their victim was human. For example, a fully robotic, unmanned warship which assumes all other spaceships are also unmanned.
In any case, Asimov's robots were actual thinking creatures, capable of reason. Our robots are nothing like that. We couldn't make a "Three Law" robot if we tried. Maybe someday, but it would be silly to postpone making robots until we become capable of making an ideal robot.
I was led to believe that in the US system, the first digit of the unit code typically represents the year it is taken at.
Not in my experience, no. I was taking 6000-level courses by my 3rd year, and a quick look at MIT's OCW shows some 900-level courses advertised as being for undergrads (and some 200-level courses for grads only).
Additionally, given the other topics in Math 324, I'd expect the chain rule they mention to be in reference to tensor fields, not just just simple use you learn in high school calc.
Slashdot Mirror
Look up the Southern Poverty Law Center. They have launched many law suits against the KKK for hate speech leading to violence. As a result, several branches of the KKK have lost their compounds, and all of their funds. With no place to assemble, and no money to pay for advertising, their influence diminishes. It is absolutely a cause-and-effect relationship.
That'd be all well and good if the only casualties in a war were the people who called for it. Unfortunately, that is not the case.
Can you give an example? We don't let the KKK spout their hate so freely any more, and it has worked wonders in diminishing their presence. It sure as hell hasn't made them look like the good guys.
Better Translation:
The people living there, if given the freedom to decide their own fate, will almost certainly call for more violence between Israelis and Muslims, leading to decades of war, in which tens of thousands of innocent people will die. Hence, they should be deprived of such rights, just as I would be, if I openly supported the murder of innocents.
You ought to learn a thing or two about that part of the world before saying that everyone should have the right to freedom of speech and expression. If the Egyptian government collapses, things between Israel and Gaza will get really bad, really fast. Sometimes it's more important to save the lives of thousands of people, rather than let thousands of other people yell hate speech.
In this case, the Egyptian government wants to bring peace to the Middle East, whereas the activists want more violence. The Egyptian government has long been instrumental in coordinating peace efforts between the Israelis and Palestinians. The majority of the activists coordinating through Facebook are doing so to express their hatred of Israel, and their desire for its destruction.
There was an interesting interview with a Hamas leader on Al Jazeera not long ago. Essentially, he said that the leaders know that violence won't lead anywhere. The reason the violence keeps going is because the common people on both sides keep calling for it, and leaders who don't acquiesce are thrown out. If the same thing starts happening in Egypt, then it will just lead to more war, and more death.
We, people from more peaceful parts of the world, generally assume that more democracy is always good. We fail to realize that at times, the majority is wrong. The majority wants to kill the other side, because they were harmed, and then the majority on the other side wants to kill the first. It's self-perpetuating, tit for tat. The only way to break out is with strong leaders on both sides who are willing to step up and refuse to fight. Giving the vengeful mob tools to undermine that is not a good thing.
There is no easy solution in the Middle East, but any solution would need to start with strong leaders in both Israel and Gaza who refuse to resort to violence, not with grassroots movements calling for each other's destruction. We need to recognize that, and stop applying our own values to their situation.
Whereas, of course, others would argue that the litigants provided a windfall of billions to Microsoft by purchasing Vista on a Vista Capable machine.
One could argue that, but one would be utterly wrong, since the vast majority of "Vista Capable" machines would have had XP had they not been so labeled.
Who decides which browsers get put on that list? If it's MS, then every little dev group on Earth can sue to have their listed, until the list is so large that the end user is left utterly lost as to which one they should pick.
Of course, a better way might be to include an interface through which you can search for browsers, look up details on them, and even read what others think of them. Hmm, now what would you call an interface like that....
He's the director of a research institute with over four thousand employees and a half billion dollar budget. I think he can handle the managerial stuff just fine.
Chu is a big name, so its hard to tell whether he was the driving force behind this research, or tossed on the list of authors to get funding. Muller is an Assistant Professor. Chiow is a post-doc.
Herrman, I can't find a position for via a quick google search, but it looks like he's been putting out papers under Muller for 5 years, which means he's been working under him even longer. The only way you'd work under one person for that long without having a larger internet presence is as a meek and lowly grad student.
Therefore, my guess is this - Muller or Chu comes up with idea. Chu gets funding. Muller does the over-arching theory behind the idea (probably with help from Chu). Chiow leads in actual lab work, while Herrman does the grunt work. But hey, at least its better than being an undergrad. Those poor saps probably got jobs like "write down the number on this display every ten minutes for the next four hours", and they don't even end up getting listed.
Similarly, a cloaking device can't afford to be lossy: if it lets just a little bit of light reflect off the object it's supposed to cloak, it's no longer effective.
Why would that be no longer effective? If the cloak reroutes 90% of the light, then you're left with 10% opacity, right? Sure, something that translucent would be very difficult to see, especially from a distance.
If Vista isn't a turkey then did Microsoft deem it necessary to produce Windows 7 ?
Because the popular consensus is that Vista is a turkey. The reality of the situation has absolutely nothing to do with it, once the masses have made up their minds. Vista could be the best OS in all of history (it's not, but it could be), and it wouldn't matter one bit if everyone already made up their minds that it sucked.
Ram gobbler (2GB.. not enough)?
I have Win7 running on my five year old laptop, with 512 megs of RAM. It runs fine. I can use it for simple things like email/browsing, and can even watch TV and movies online. All on a system so old and crappy that I literally need to blow into the side air vents to kick-start the CPU fan.
But hey, don't let facts get in the way of your oh-so-fun MS-bashing :)
PlayOn let's you watch Hulu, along with Netflix, CBS, CNN, Youtube, and ESPN on your PS3, Xbox 360 or some set-top boxes. It doesn't support the Wii yet, though they are working on that. And it only costs a one-time charge of $30. I've saved a fortune by dropping cable and just using PlayOn+Hulu and Netflix.
If you release a demo for a good game, like Braid or Left4Dead, you get great sales. If you release a demo for a game that sucks, like Age of Conan, then you get bad sales. This shouldn't surprise anyone. In fact, it's rather disheartening to think that a company might think to themselves, "Hmm, our game isn't doing that great in the focus groups.... should we improve it? Nah! Let's just trick as many people into dropping fifty to sixty bucks on it as possible, before they realize its no good."
Going elsewhere isn't liable to do anything for you. The fact is, sometimes engineers mess up. But the fact that they mess up once doesn't mean that they're about to mess up again (heck, it's probably not even the same team working on the next drive). Likewise, the fact that a company has never messed up before doesn't mean that they aren't about to.
Intel had a well known erratum with their Pentiums back in the nineties, but if you were to have sworn off all Intel products over that, you would have missed out on a lot of great processors.
Basically, you can't judge a whole company by a single event. By all means, you ought to avoid the product that's known to be faulty, but "going elsewhere", is a waste of your time and money.
Can we require businesses that patent the ideas to have real, actual products to retain the patent?
No, because some times sitting on an idea to get another company to pay for it is a legitimate practice.
Let's say I create Startup Inc, and design a new type of lithography. I don't have the money to build a fab or anything, so I show the tech to Intel and offer to let them use it in exchange for royalties. Under your system they could say no, use it anyway, and I wouldn't be able to sue, because I don't have an actual product.
Patent trolls suck, and there should be a way to stop them through litigation, but we have to be sure that we don't kill off real innovators in the process.
What are you talking about? No one left the football sitting on a table somewhere... the aid carrying it got separated from the president. What do you think is going to happen? Obama accidentally leaves his blackberry with an aid.... who is then abducted so that the terrorists can read the president's chat logs? And as for "President-Elect" being a recent term....
...all work 9/80. They all love it. During really busy weeks, you may be asked to work on your day off, leading to 50 hours work weeks. But let's face it, if you were working a "normal" schedule, you'd end up working 10 hours a day on weeks like that anyway.
My dad also telecommutes one of the remaining 9 days. So he never goes to work on Wednesdays, which means he never has to commute more than two days in a row. Words cannot describe how much happier he is since that change. If you have a long, nasty commute, look into this sort of schedule.
During college, I worked as IT support for an association of special education preschools. While I did get them to adopt OpenOffice, I immediately realized that I couldn't even recommend switching to Linux, because essential programs weren't supported.
One program that comes to mind is Boardmaker, by Mayer-Johnson. It's an extremely popular tool for helping autistic children, and not a complex program at all. It wouldn't be hard for open-source devs to replicate, but there is just no interest among developers. Unfortunately, without it, few special ed teachers will ever consider using Linux.
There is certainly demand for a free alternative as well - in part because of Boardmaker's $400/license price tag. Searching for "Boardmaker linux" or something of the sort reveals that people have asked for it, but gone unanswered. Perhaps the saddest request is this:
"My 11 year old son has autism and his a communication therapist has recommended Boardmaker by Nova logistics to help him communicate. He has had a great affinity for computers since he was 4 years old. He has a Pentium III 1Ghz powered Intel D815eea computer which I built for him.
Boardmaker sells for over $500 and we live on low, fixed income. I have been told that there may be an equivalent, Linux based program. If so, can you tell me what it is and where I can get it? Thanks for your help."
There were no responses.
No offense, but that sounds like a defense industry thing. I, and several of my old college friends, are EEs, and we all work at least 45-50 hours a week, every week. One of my friends is currently in the middle of what will be a 76 hour week. However, I think the record is currently held by one of my coworkers, who worked 38 hours in two days.
The difference is, I enjoy the work. I find it interesting, even fun. The prevailing attitude among IT workers I've met is that their job is a chore, so when they have to spend more than 40 hours a week on it, it makes them miserable.
If the economic climate were better, I'd tell them to quit, and find work they enjoy. Unfortunately, that may not be an option presently.
Nonsense. People always over-glorify that one period of music. Do you really think that the only great musicians in all of human history were born in a span of a hundred years?
The modern youth you describe remember Frank Sinatra and the Beatles just as well as they do Mozart and Bach. Which is to say, vaguely. No music remains truly popular forever. Your definition of timeless as "lasting until the end of civilization" is overly strict. Nothing could meet such a standard, or, if something could, there would be no way for us to know it.
Music can be fairly described as timeless so long as some people in the modern day, who were not around when the music first became popular, still enjoy it. I think the Beatles can easily meet that criterion.
Demos often don't give you the full sense of a game, and you need the full version to get a feel for whether you really want the game or not.
You seriously believe what you just wrote? It looks like a flimsy rationalization for pirating.
I absolutely believe that. I downloaded the demo of Medieval: Total War back when that came out, and thought it was pretty lackluster. All it was was a single siege battle. You had no choice of troops, no broader strategic decisions, none of the things that made the actual game good. I didn't buy it.
A couple months later, I got a pirated version from a friend, played it, loved it, bought it, and have bought every title in the series to have been released since then.
Sure, that sort of scenario may be the exception more than the rule. But then, you could say the same of scenarios where someone would have pirated the game, but bought it due to DRM.
Read the whole thread that you're replying to. It started with: "you may be too young to realize it but most of the really useful technology we use today has come out of Space and Military research."
So yes, microwave ovens count.
Usually the only times Asimovian robots could kill people were when they had "weakened" three laws - e.g. Nestor in "Little Lost Robot" who had only half the first law. It couldn't harm a human, but it could set them in a situation where they might die, knowing that it could save them, and then simply choose not to.
The only case I can think of where a robot with the full three laws could willingly kill someone was when they were unaware their victim was human. For example, a fully robotic, unmanned warship which assumes all other spaceships are also unmanned.
In any case, Asimov's robots were actual thinking creatures, capable of reason. Our robots are nothing like that. We couldn't make a "Three Law" robot if we tried. Maybe someday, but it would be silly to postpone making robots until we become capable of making an ideal robot.
I was led to believe that in the US system, the first digit of the unit code typically represents the year it is taken at.
Not in my experience, no. I was taking 6000-level courses by my 3rd year, and a quick look at MIT's OCW shows some 900-level courses advertised as being for undergrads (and some 200-level courses for grads only).
Additionally, given the other topics in Math 324, I'd expect the chain rule they mention to be in reference to tensor fields, not just just simple use you learn in high school calc.