If there is a provision that lets you claim your turtle as a dependent, that provision is there for a reason and you are a fool for not taking it. Even if that provision was not written for you but rather someone similar to you, it is your constitutional right to take that deduction (equal protection and all that).
Depends on your definition of evil. I personally consider my online privacy to be very important, and on that front Google out-evils the other two by a vast margin. Each of the three has their evil specialty, and there is plenty of evil to go around.
Since we are comparing two very different legal systems - US's being based in the common law tradition and Germany's being purely statutory law, I used the term 'illegal' in the broadest sense of 'in opposition to the law of the land' regardless of whether that law is civil or criminal.
This is actually very interesting if true. However, I am curious whether all freedom of opinion is actually protected in Germany. Specifically, I was under the impression that claiming facts about nazis was ok, as in holocaust museums etc., but claiming the opinion that nazis were awesome and should be emulated is what is not allowed.
Disclaimer, I hold the opinion that all nazis should go burn in a fire, and the 'nazis were awesome' comment is purely 100% just playing devil's advocate. Just to make sure we're clear.
You are correct in that the nature of free speech limitations can be different in the US vs. Germany. However, the limitations to free speech in the US are actually more broad rather than more specific. In the US, limitations are only based on broad categories such as libel, rather than making specific ideas illegal. For example, I can not legally publicly say that you enjoy frequent coitus with your mother. If false, it is libel/slander, and if true, a violation of your right to privacy (assuming you consider dissemination of such information damaging). But publicly proclaiming you to be a motherfscker is illegal not because statements regarding maternal copulation are explicitly outlawed, but because they fall under a restricted category.
OTOH, the topic of TFA is regarding a category, not a specific idea, specifically speech that violates ones right to privacy. As such, it is conceivable that a US court could make the same ruling that the German court did in this case.
Two weeks later, I come back and see that half of the comments are about whether or not I used 'begs the question' correctly rather than the actual points I made. Two week old slashdot articles probably aren't read very frequently, but just in case for the sake of future digital archaeologists who may stumble across this thread, I will set the story straight.
To my understanding, I used 'begging the question' correctly.
Begging the question means to use an unproven assumption as a basis for an argument. The author's argument was that advancing technology will make a hypothetical alien race not want to explore the galaxy and therefore never make contact with us. For that argument to be valid, three assumptions must be made that the author assumes are true and makes no attempt to prove. First, technology advancement causes a decrease in drive for exploration. Second, FTL won't be invented until technology has advanced to the point that our drive for exploration is completely wiped out. Third, this effect of technology is absolutely universal among all possible intelligent life in the universe. I then point out why these three assumptions are wrong, and therefore the author's argument is bullshit.
The article doesn't explain why there is rocky material close enough to the white dwarfs to be tidally ripped apart. It makes a brief comment about the extreme tidal stresses ripping apart anything orbiting it. But superdense objects don't exert stronger gravity for their mass than less dense objects. If the sun spontaneously magically became a white dwarf, or even a black hole, the earth would continue in its orbit unperturbed. The only thing that would cause a former planet of this white dwarf to be tidally ripped apart is if the star gained magical mass (which it wouldn't as a white dwarf has less mass than the star it used to be, as the rest is now in the planetary nebula), or if the planet survived the red giant stage and was somehow pulled in to a closer orbit in the white dwarf stage. I could imagine an earth like planet being enveloped in the hazy outer atmosphere of the expanding red giant, and the star's atmosphere causing enough drag to slow the planet down and fall to a lower orbit. But that requires a planet survive passing through a star's atmosphere without being incinerated right there and receiving just enough drag to fall to a lower orbit but not plunge into the heart of the star. That is all pretty amazing stuff if true, and the article mentions none of it - choosing rather to go down the bad science "it's denser so it must magically suck harder because that's how gravity really works" route.
Exactly. The 'you want it, you code it yourself' mentality is the number one reason that open source suffers, and there will never be a 'year of linux on the desktop' etc. FOSS proponents need to get over the idea that anyone can and should contribute to open source projects, and if they don't it's because they are just lazy. Not everyone can code. Not everyone SHOULD code! As a developer, I DO NOT WANT somebody for whom software development isn't a core strength coding on a project that I might either work on, use, or both. I deal with enough crappily coded software as it is. And that's assuming non-developers would want to or even know where to begin with coding the feature they might want.
The fact that journalism is several orders of magnitude older than the career of the journalist after whom the law was named doesn't make the meaning behind the law any less real. Do you have a better name for the law that would also be relevant to whatever you imagine the 'golden age' of journalism to be?
One, how can they presume our mental state would be significantly altered by unknown future technology. History would presume to suggest the opposite of what they suggest, actually. Our ingrained drive for exploring the unknown that we had in the days of sailing ships certainly wasn't quashed with the advent of steamships, or then again by airplanes, rocket ships, etc. and the drive for knowledge that we had in the days of stone tablets wasn't quashed by the invention of paper, the printing press, or the internet. If anything, these advances have only increased our drive to know what's out there.
Two, why would it necessarily take a time span long enough for our universal culture of inquisitiveness to fundamentally shift in order to develop FTL? There is no reason to say it absolutely won't happen before that arbitrary time. We already have theories such as Alcubierrie's suggesting that it isn't necessarily an impossibility, and even if it took 100 years for that theory to be put to practice it's presumptuous to say that drive in our psyche would definitely cease in that short a blip of our history.
Three, even if technological advancements did reduce our exploratory drive, what is to say that similar advancement would affect an alien mind in the same way? As the answer could be such advancements would affect us the same as us, the opposite of us, or something different entirely in equal probabilities, the question itself is therefore meaningless and all we can do is hope that they have the same drive for inquisitiveness as we do in the first place. Or not. Depending on the kind of Sci Fi you watch/read.
I have used Vectorworks before, and although it is not as popular as other CAD packages out there, I have found it much easier to use and just as capable.
That's rationalization. The whole "it's my device, I should be able to do what I want with it" concept should extend to having the choice of not seeing ads if I don't want to. Whether a second or two is an acceptable annoyance is purely subjective, and for some the threshold is zero as the whole concept of being unable to escape being shown ads everywhere is unacceptable to many.
Don't most tablets these days work with bluetooth keyboards? My wife purchased an iPad + BT keyboard to replace a dead laptop for the primary purpose of writing papers and taking notes in class. It works just fine for that purpose, and the dozens of others in her classes with iPads would tend to agree.
So it's a payment plan that comes bundled with a commitment to stay with the carrier you probably were going to stay with anyway. The contract is just a means of ensuring that you repay what is in effect a loan the carrier gave you to purchase your phone. People often see value in a payment plan that lets them pay less upfront even though they end up paying more in the long run. Do you know how much more you will pay on your mortgage than the purchase price of your house (assuming you're a homeowner)? But does that mean everybody should pay for their houses 100% upfront or not at all? Does that mean people who get mortgages are all suckers?
I have a theory about the Samsung bump to share feature. Android phones are marketed on the length of their bullet point list of features. A couple of years ago when NFC was invented, people were sure that NFC point of sale payments would take off worldwide like they did in Japan. So NFC was the next must-have bullet point. But technology that gets acceptance in Japan doesn't necessarily cut it in the rest of the world, and so NFC payments kind of flopped. But Samsung had invested so much in making NFC a thing, that they needed to come up with a reason for its existence. So they developed and marketed bump to share, despite a lack of logical use cases for it over existing file transfer methods.
What has the parent post here done to be a troll, other than being pro Apple? Everything stated is the truth. Woz is not the target market for iPhones, iPhones are designed for ease of use rather than bullet point lists of features, and it is an established fact that Samsung spends more to market the Galaxy line than Apple spends to market the iPhone line.
I really wish I had mod points to counteract the knee-jerk fandroid apple hate.
did you really just say that, in support of apple? apple is the epitome of fashion over function.
I honestly wonder if all of the Apple haters who denounce apple as 'just a marketing company' have actually seen an ad for an iDevice vs. and ad for an android device within the last year or so. Ads for iPhones and iPads show the device, and then demo a particular feature of it. Nothing more, nothing less. Ads for android devices are full of CGI robots and lightning bolts and 'injecting' people with fake 4g juice to 'upgrade' them and never actually show you what the phone can do in the real CGI-less world. The only exception is the Samsung commercials that demo the bump-to-share NFC feature, which to be honest is one feature I don't miss at all. 98% of the time I want to share a file with someone, I am not in the same room as them, let alone standing within fist-bump range of them. And sending files via iMessage (or god forbid an email attachment) works just fine for me.
How can Apple be dependent on marketing rather than on the features of their products, when their marketing consists solely of demoing their products' features?
And by breaking the conventional wisdom of touchscreens by using capacitive multitouch rather than the resistive singletouch that everyone of the day thought of when you said 'touchscreen', they were able to bring together those disparate technologies by making them better - the MP3 player by providing a view of all your music plus album artwork, the GPS by providing a high-rez scrollable map, and the phone by providing things like visual voicemail. Whereas I have yet to hear any argument for how the Surface or Win8 improves the experience of either a laptop or a tablet.
I wonder if it would be possible to make a 'light field' display, which rather than each pixel emitting light in all directions like in current 2d and faux 3d displays, it would be able to emit light in both the frequency and vector that was detected by the camera. This would be true autostereoscopic 3d, as the emitted light would have the same properties as the original light allowing the eye to naturally focus on it. I wonder if this would be possible by perfecting lenticular display technology, or if it would require something like an array of micro lasers with each pixel containing a set of lasers pointing in all directions.
And that is what makes Scientology so dangerous. It is as if RIAA claimed to be a religion in order to protect their litigiousness and greed behind a shield of anti-discrimination laws and tax exempt status.
Follow the money. Apple has no financial incentive to collect personally identifiable information on you, as the iPhone they'd sell you is identical in every way to the iPhone they would sell to anybody else, and they would make the same money either way. So it makes no sense for Apple to invest resources on gathering personal information as they have nothing to gain. On the other hand, Google's revenue comes solely from advertising, and what makes an ad of theirs valuable to advertisers is the ability to target that ad to the interests and lifestyle of the person looking at it. And the only way to do that is to build a database of personal information with which to match relevant ads.
I think it's product category rather than 'form factor' per se. There isn't a single product category that Apple makes that Apple 'invented'. However, they only enter a category if they think they can make significant changes to the status quo of that category. Sometimes that change involves a new form factor (like the iPhone), sometimes it doesn't. It could be argued that the original Mac wasn't a new form factor. The TRS-80 came as an all-in-one several years before the Mac. The Mac's innovation came in turning the GUI (notably also not 'invented' by Apple) from a science experiment into something that people would want to buy.
The form factor precedent for the 1st gen iMac was all previous all-in-one computers before it. I don't know if the colorful cases constitute a new form factor, or just an iteration on the idea based on Jony Ive's asthetic. The modern iMac is just an iteration on the same idea that came naturally with the state of technology migrating from CRTs to LCDs. The original iPod was a new form factor, but also an existing idea. Portable mp3 players had been around for years, as evidenced by the now famous slashdot post dismissing it as nothing new when it was first introduced.
It would be interesting to know exactly what that internal milestone is. Obviously, the ability to axe projects is core to Apple's business, as evidenced by the tiny number of SKUs they offer at any point in time compared to most electronics companies. And there have been rumors that Jobs could be particularly brutal when it came to shutting down projects that he didn't think were worthy.
The difference must be that while all companies axe projects, Apple makes cuts earlier than other companies and only lets the few chosen projects make any progress in the lifecycle. Whereas other companies take a 'throw everything at the wall and see what sticks' mentality, and only cut projects later when they aren't good enough. Sometimes they cut too late (e.g. MS Kin).
A sprocket is a toothed wheel designed to mesh with a chain, like on a bicycle. A gear is a toothed wheel designed to mesh with another gear. Hope that helps.
Slashdot Mirror
If there is a provision that lets you claim your turtle as a dependent, that provision is there for a reason and you are a fool for not taking it. Even if that provision was not written for you but rather someone similar to you, it is your constitutional right to take that deduction (equal protection and all that).
Depends on your definition of evil. I personally consider my online privacy to be very important, and on that front Google out-evils the other two by a vast margin. Each of the three has their evil specialty, and there is plenty of evil to go around.
Since we are comparing two very different legal systems - US's being based in the common law tradition and Germany's being purely statutory law, I used the term 'illegal' in the broadest sense of 'in opposition to the law of the land' regardless of whether that law is civil or criminal.
This is actually very interesting if true. However, I am curious whether all freedom of opinion is actually protected in Germany. Specifically, I was under the impression that claiming facts about nazis was ok, as in holocaust museums etc., but claiming the opinion that nazis were awesome and should be emulated is what is not allowed.
Disclaimer, I hold the opinion that all nazis should go burn in a fire, and the 'nazis were awesome' comment is purely 100% just playing devil's advocate. Just to make sure we're clear.
You are correct in that the nature of free speech limitations can be different in the US vs. Germany. However, the limitations to free speech in the US are actually more broad rather than more specific. In the US, limitations are only based on broad categories such as libel, rather than making specific ideas illegal. For example, I can not legally publicly say that you enjoy frequent coitus with your mother. If false, it is libel/slander, and if true, a violation of your right to privacy (assuming you consider dissemination of such information damaging). But publicly proclaiming you to be a motherfscker is illegal not because statements regarding maternal copulation are explicitly outlawed, but because they fall under a restricted category.
OTOH, the topic of TFA is regarding a category, not a specific idea, specifically speech that violates ones right to privacy. As such, it is conceivable that a US court could make the same ruling that the German court did in this case.
Two weeks later, I come back and see that half of the comments are about whether or not I used 'begs the question' correctly rather than the actual points I made. Two week old slashdot articles probably aren't read very frequently, but just in case for the sake of future digital archaeologists who may stumble across this thread, I will set the story straight.
To my understanding, I used 'begging the question' correctly.
Begging the question means to use an unproven assumption as a basis for an argument. The author's argument was that advancing technology will make a hypothetical alien race not want to explore the galaxy and therefore never make contact with us. For that argument to be valid, three assumptions must be made that the author assumes are true and makes no attempt to prove. First, technology advancement causes a decrease in drive for exploration. Second, FTL won't be invented until technology has advanced to the point that our drive for exploration is completely wiped out. Third, this effect of technology is absolutely universal among all possible intelligent life in the universe. I then point out why these three assumptions are wrong, and therefore the author's argument is bullshit.
The article doesn't explain why there is rocky material close enough to the white dwarfs to be tidally ripped apart. It makes a brief comment about the extreme tidal stresses ripping apart anything orbiting it. But superdense objects don't exert stronger gravity for their mass than less dense objects. If the sun spontaneously magically became a white dwarf, or even a black hole, the earth would continue in its orbit unperturbed. The only thing that would cause a former planet of this white dwarf to be tidally ripped apart is if the star gained magical mass (which it wouldn't as a white dwarf has less mass than the star it used to be, as the rest is now in the planetary nebula), or if the planet survived the red giant stage and was somehow pulled in to a closer orbit in the white dwarf stage. I could imagine an earth like planet being enveloped in the hazy outer atmosphere of the expanding red giant, and the star's atmosphere causing enough drag to slow the planet down and fall to a lower orbit. But that requires a planet survive passing through a star's atmosphere without being incinerated right there and receiving just enough drag to fall to a lower orbit but not plunge into the heart of the star. That is all pretty amazing stuff if true, and the article mentions none of it - choosing rather to go down the bad science "it's denser so it must magically suck harder because that's how gravity really works" route.
Exactly. The 'you want it, you code it yourself' mentality is the number one reason that open source suffers, and there will never be a 'year of linux on the desktop' etc. FOSS proponents need to get over the idea that anyone can and should contribute to open source projects, and if they don't it's because they are just lazy. Not everyone can code. Not everyone SHOULD code! As a developer, I DO NOT WANT somebody for whom software development isn't a core strength coding on a project that I might either work on, use, or both. I deal with enough crappily coded software as it is. And that's assuming non-developers would want to or even know where to begin with coding the feature they might want.
The fact that journalism is several orders of magnitude older than the career of the journalist after whom the law was named doesn't make the meaning behind the law any less real. Do you have a better name for the law that would also be relevant to whatever you imagine the 'golden age' of journalism to be?
The summary begs several questions, actually.
One, how can they presume our mental state would be significantly altered by unknown future technology. History would presume to suggest the opposite of what they suggest, actually. Our ingrained drive for exploring the unknown that we had in the days of sailing ships certainly wasn't quashed with the advent of steamships, or then again by airplanes, rocket ships, etc. and the drive for knowledge that we had in the days of stone tablets wasn't quashed by the invention of paper, the printing press, or the internet. If anything, these advances have only increased our drive to know what's out there.
Two, why would it necessarily take a time span long enough for our universal culture of inquisitiveness to fundamentally shift in order to develop FTL? There is no reason to say it absolutely won't happen before that arbitrary time. We already have theories such as Alcubierrie's suggesting that it isn't necessarily an impossibility, and even if it took 100 years for that theory to be put to practice it's presumptuous to say that drive in our psyche would definitely cease in that short a blip of our history.
Three, even if technological advancements did reduce our exploratory drive, what is to say that similar advancement would affect an alien mind in the same way? As the answer could be such advancements would affect us the same as us, the opposite of us, or something different entirely in equal probabilities, the question itself is therefore meaningless and all we can do is hope that they have the same drive for inquisitiveness as we do in the first place. Or not. Depending on the kind of Sci Fi you watch/read.
I have used Vectorworks before, and although it is not as popular as other CAD packages out there, I have found it much easier to use and just as capable.
That's rationalization. The whole "it's my device, I should be able to do what I want with it" concept should extend to having the choice of not seeing ads if I don't want to. Whether a second or two is an acceptable annoyance is purely subjective, and for some the threshold is zero as the whole concept of being unable to escape being shown ads everywhere is unacceptable to many.
Don't most tablets these days work with bluetooth keyboards? My wife purchased an iPad + BT keyboard to replace a dead laptop for the primary purpose of writing papers and taking notes in class. It works just fine for that purpose, and the dozens of others in her classes with iPads would tend to agree.
Thankfully, we are now a first-to-file system, so we don't have to bother with pesky details like prior art dating back to the dawn of civilization.
So it's a payment plan that comes bundled with a commitment to stay with the carrier you probably were going to stay with anyway. The contract is just a means of ensuring that you repay what is in effect a loan the carrier gave you to purchase your phone. People often see value in a payment plan that lets them pay less upfront even though they end up paying more in the long run. Do you know how much more you will pay on your mortgage than the purchase price of your house (assuming you're a homeowner)? But does that mean everybody should pay for their houses 100% upfront or not at all? Does that mean people who get mortgages are all suckers?
I have a theory about the Samsung bump to share feature. Android phones are marketed on the length of their bullet point list of features. A couple of years ago when NFC was invented, people were sure that NFC point of sale payments would take off worldwide like they did in Japan. So NFC was the next must-have bullet point. But technology that gets acceptance in Japan doesn't necessarily cut it in the rest of the world, and so NFC payments kind of flopped. But Samsung had invested so much in making NFC a thing, that they needed to come up with a reason for its existence. So they developed and marketed bump to share, despite a lack of logical use cases for it over existing file transfer methods.
What has the parent post here done to be a troll, other than being pro Apple? Everything stated is the truth. Woz is not the target market for iPhones, iPhones are designed for ease of use rather than bullet point lists of features, and it is an established fact that Samsung spends more to market the Galaxy line than Apple spends to market the iPhone line.
I really wish I had mod points to counteract the knee-jerk fandroid apple hate.
and folks who easily succumb to marketing
did you really just say that, in support of apple? apple is the epitome of fashion over function.
I honestly wonder if all of the Apple haters who denounce apple as 'just a marketing company' have actually seen an ad for an iDevice vs. and ad for an android device within the last year or so. Ads for iPhones and iPads show the device, and then demo a particular feature of it. Nothing more, nothing less. Ads for android devices are full of CGI robots and lightning bolts and 'injecting' people with fake 4g juice to 'upgrade' them and never actually show you what the phone can do in the real CGI-less world. The only exception is the Samsung commercials that demo the bump-to-share NFC feature, which to be honest is one feature I don't miss at all. 98% of the time I want to share a file with someone, I am not in the same room as them, let alone standing within fist-bump range of them. And sending files via iMessage (or god forbid an email attachment) works just fine for me.
How can Apple be dependent on marketing rather than on the features of their products, when their marketing consists solely of demoing their products' features?
And by breaking the conventional wisdom of touchscreens by using capacitive multitouch rather than the resistive singletouch that everyone of the day thought of when you said 'touchscreen', they were able to bring together those disparate technologies by making them better - the MP3 player by providing a view of all your music plus album artwork, the GPS by providing a high-rez scrollable map, and the phone by providing things like visual voicemail. Whereas I have yet to hear any argument for how the Surface or Win8 improves the experience of either a laptop or a tablet.
I wonder if it would be possible to make a 'light field' display, which rather than each pixel emitting light in all directions like in current 2d and faux 3d displays, it would be able to emit light in both the frequency and vector that was detected by the camera. This would be true autostereoscopic 3d, as the emitted light would have the same properties as the original light allowing the eye to naturally focus on it. I wonder if this would be possible by perfecting lenticular display technology, or if it would require something like an array of micro lasers with each pixel containing a set of lasers pointing in all directions.
And that is what makes Scientology so dangerous. It is as if RIAA claimed to be a religion in order to protect their litigiousness and greed behind a shield of anti-discrimination laws and tax exempt status.
Follow the money. Apple has no financial incentive to collect personally identifiable information on you, as the iPhone they'd sell you is identical in every way to the iPhone they would sell to anybody else, and they would make the same money either way. So it makes no sense for Apple to invest resources on gathering personal information as they have nothing to gain. On the other hand, Google's revenue comes solely from advertising, and what makes an ad of theirs valuable to advertisers is the ability to target that ad to the interests and lifestyle of the person looking at it. And the only way to do that is to build a database of personal information with which to match relevant ads.
I think it's product category rather than 'form factor' per se. There isn't a single product category that Apple makes that Apple 'invented'. However, they only enter a category if they think they can make significant changes to the status quo of that category. Sometimes that change involves a new form factor (like the iPhone), sometimes it doesn't. It could be argued that the original Mac wasn't a new form factor. The TRS-80 came as an all-in-one several years before the Mac. The Mac's innovation came in turning the GUI (notably also not 'invented' by Apple) from a science experiment into something that people would want to buy.
The form factor precedent for the 1st gen iMac was all previous all-in-one computers before it. I don't know if the colorful cases constitute a new form factor, or just an iteration on the idea based on Jony Ive's asthetic. The modern iMac is just an iteration on the same idea that came naturally with the state of technology migrating from CRTs to LCDs. The original iPod was a new form factor, but also an existing idea. Portable mp3 players had been around for years, as evidenced by the now famous slashdot post dismissing it as nothing new when it was first introduced.
It would be interesting to know exactly what that internal milestone is. Obviously, the ability to axe projects is core to Apple's business, as evidenced by the tiny number of SKUs they offer at any point in time compared to most electronics companies. And there have been rumors that Jobs could be particularly brutal when it came to shutting down projects that he didn't think were worthy.
The difference must be that while all companies axe projects, Apple makes cuts earlier than other companies and only lets the few chosen projects make any progress in the lifecycle. Whereas other companies take a 'throw everything at the wall and see what sticks' mentality, and only cut projects later when they aren't good enough. Sometimes they cut too late (e.g. MS Kin).
A sprocket is a toothed wheel designed to mesh with a chain, like on a bicycle. A gear is a toothed wheel designed to mesh with another gear. Hope that helps.