... and stop using all of your web-apps... sigh...
Yeah, and half the websites out there will stop rendering then. Sadly, the vast majority of them don't need javascript to do their job, but such is the epic lame that is the average web programmer.
Actually, I'm pretty sure those arrogant designers at NASA are quite confident that the International Space Station resists earthquakes.
And it would be just like them to focus on earthquakes, which can't happen in space, instead of say, solar flares.
the problem is to resist earthquakes in a cost effective manner, or alternatively stop people from doing stupid things.
Well, the second half of that is clearly impossible, so I'd suggest focusing on cost efficiency.
why do people knowingly locate in known flood areas behind dikes, in arid deserts, underneath volcanoes, or in known high-intensity earthquake areas
Curiously, the most fertile land, plentiful sources of water, and temperate climates, are located in those places. Except underneath volcanoes -- evil overlords live there, not joe average.
and not expect disasters to happen?
Oh, I think they do expect disasters to happen. And everyone else to pay for it thanks to this con game we call "insurance".
It's not an invisibility cloak. A nearby building could still fall on the cloaked one, with the usual result. Also, it's not a cloak, as in a piece of fabric. Last, anything can be made resistant to earthquakes, but to make it earthquake-proof is something only an arrogant designer or a project manager would say. Every design component can fail, and most catastrophic engineering failures are rooted in miscalculation or failing to test the model with a particular cascade of failures.
Anyone who thinks this is about anything other than a bunch of rich bastards exploiting a segment of the population is deluding themselves. They're simply upset that they got their hand caught in the cookie jar and now pay people smarter and more eloquent than them lots and lots of money to explain why the establishment owes them that cookie. Damn, I love America. Those few of us who are compelled from silence and apathy quickly settle on endless argumentation and debate, rather than activism. We weren't smarter about copyright law a hundred years ago... We were just less about words and more about actions back then. If the government screwed with the population a hundred years ago, the population screwed back. Nowadays, we all live in anonymous big cities and feel no attachment or trust with anyone else. And without trust, we can't even resist the most pathetic attempts at social control.
All these laws to "protect" employees taint the marketplace. If I want to hire somebody to haul live electrical cable around while I smoke cigarettes and blow smoke in their face and an albino midget yells racially crass jokes at them, then that's the job and if they want it we can come to an agreement on pay rates.
Fortunately, people with better business sense than you passed laws to prevent this, ostensibly because there's no business reason for you to be blowing smoke in someone's face while an albino midget yells racially crass jokes at them, and perhaps by avoiding these things the job of hauling live electrical cable around would be safer to both the employee and the public at large.
Also, surprisingly enough, business owners have discovered that treating their employees with dignity and respect tends to improve productivity to such a degree that they support anti-discrimination laws, if only because it makes the available labor pool better trained and easier to deal with. I, for one, would not want to enter a line of business where the labor poor was accustomed to having smoke blown in their face and being yelled at constantly. I rather suspect they would be poorly motivated.
Not at all. If women can make sexist jokes that a man couldn't, it's a double standard, which is what we're trying to avoid.
Do you exercise any care at all in what you read or are you in such a hurry that you stomp on other people in your efforts to attain the moral high ground? Go and read my post again and quote where in there I said I supported making sexist jokes at work, let alone double standards.
Of course there are admin costs, but dev fees and sales quite handily make up for that.
Citation needed.
The fact is, putting a limit on the number of indie games is an active act, requiring work.
Perhaps in order to keep the marketplace interface as uncluttered as possible, they limited the number of titles. Of course, Microsoft has never designed an interface that became too cluttered with only a limited number of items... See also: the Desktop. I'm just suggesting that Microsoft may be making decisions based on sound business practices rather than quack theory of "big evil corp versus small good guys". Remember that the interface needs to be intuitive and usable to a 12 year old.
We pander because those same groups have a habit of hiring lawyers and having laws passed to "protect" them.
The laws ARE deficient. Nobody should have to endure racist and sexist jokes and commentary at work. The message these groups want to send is simply: Go outside for that. That's where the first amendment is, not here.
Umm, guys? Indie titles get crapped on because they're small, not because of some conspiracy. Large businesses simply don't want to expend the resources and time to make things available for the "little guys", because the net return is so much lower. I mean, hey -- if I can corner 90% of the market by setting up my distribution platform to, say, seven businesses, why should I make that same effort fifty or a hundred times more just to get that extra 10%? I think, if I were in that position, I'd just move on to the next thing and save my money. And yes, it's all electronic. That doesn't make it zero-cost; There's administrative costs to everything and those costs don't go up in a linear fashion as you add more members.
So yeah, it's a big win for open source because it shows that you can make it to the S&P 500 by being an open source company.
The index, industry, and business world in general, doesn't give two sh--s whether something is open source or not. It may be an ideological victory of sorts, but calling it a "big win"? No. It's like graduating from fifth grade and moving on to middle school... It might be a big deal to the kids involved, but to the rest of the world? Not exactly bragging rights. All that said, I really wish I'd had the money to invest in Redhat when it sent me its IPO e-mail several years ago for being an open source contributor.:)
We have had this sickening pattern of pandering to groups who take the most offense to things. Women in the workplace and black people in the work place. Neither are typically "minorities" and if/when the tables are turned and a group was making "white" or "man" jokes, white men would likely not care at all.
Using women or blacks as an example and how they're allowed to make jokes that others aren't is a specious argument; Two wrongs don't make a right. The issue is that some people are failing to keep things professional. The expectation when you show up to work is that you work. Everything else is secondary to that, and if your color commentary is interfering with my (or anyone else's) work, it needs to stop. It's just that simple. You don't have a right to be offensive. That said, you're right insofar as some people overreact--just because someone else is a douche doesn't mean you have to sink to their level. A polite reminder or a memo is sufficient in 95% of all cases to correct the behavior. You don't even have to involve a manager most of the time. People are dumb, they make mistakes; Don't get worked up about it. For the remaining 5%, we have laws like this. On the clock, everything you do should be related to your job. But if you can't do that, at least have the decency to be mindful of the company you're keeping and making sure they are okay with your side conversation. It's just... being a decent human being.
That said, police work consists of piss poor pay, long hours, high stress, a decent risk of getting a bullet in your ass, and it's a thankless profession. Like EMTs, most emergency services personnel have a dry and/or odd sense of humor that others find morbid, offensive, or downright rude. A lot of them smoke or "self-medicate" to cope. I think it's only natural that they'd need an outlet to express their work frustrations outside of work. And once it leaves the workplace, it's fair game, first amendment and everything. What you do on your own time is your own business, even if it is offensive and derogatory towards your coworkers. As a woman, I expect men to make sexually crass comments when I'm not around. I also know some of them will go home and smoke pot, do drugs, eat hot dogs and hamburgers until their heart explodes... and you know what? I'm okay with that. Just keep it away from me.
People need to be mindful of the social spaces they occupy. I don't go to the bar dressed in a low-cut dress and then act outraged when some drunk creepy guy (or girl) hits on me. That's what bars are for. If the same person shows up drunk at the grocery store when I'm dressed in nothing more than jeans and a hoodie and does the same thing he's playing with fire. Likewise, showing up on an electronic forum for inner-city cops is likely to be full of racist, sexist, and every other kind of -ist and -ism out there, not because those people are somehow inherently evil, but because they deal with the worst examples of those groups on long shifts day after day.
Red Hat has made it onto the S&P 500, an important measure of the stock market.
First, the S&P members are selected by committee, not by merit alone. Companies are (usually) included because they have a high liquidity and are "representative" of their industry. Not that Red Hat being selected isn't good news, just understand they're not selecting it because of the "runaway success of Linux", but because Red Hat is representative of the overall health of this segment of the industry.
If Joss' involvement dooms a show, it's not because he lowers the quality. It's because the majority of the audience would rather be watching Friends reruns.
No, it's because as long as the show is under threat of cancellation, Joss tries. The moment the executives say it's not on the chopping block, he gets lazy ("creative" he'd say) and it goes to crap.
In just about every anime, cartoon series, and live-action where they've tried to swap one actor's voice for another, the series usually tanks not long after the switch is made. The only thing worse for a series is to get someone pregnant, involve a baby, or suddenly tack on a female lead or support role when one previously wasn't present. Or a consult with Joss Whedon.
CNN just had a front page article where they stated that around 25% of 18-25 year olds doubted the truth of the landing. That is utterly depressing, showing the current level of science education.
They must have done the survey south of the mason-dixon line, because up here in Minnesota, I have yet to meet anyone who believes that garbage. I still remember when Fox News aired their little "moon hoax" series what NASA's response was. It was, in my opinion, the best headline I will ever read in my life. It read, in giant lettering across its homepage;
Yes, We Did.
Don't think that just because we have slathering idiots in the streets that America as a whole has become uneducated. I assure you, idiots breed in larger numbers than smart people in every country.
The native Americans used to ask. To them, the land was so fundamentally free that to own a piece of it seemed a sacrilege (sp?) against nature.
I have friends who are Native. And I think they had a very good point -- we're destroying the planet with our notions of ownership, because ownership means "I can do whatever the hell I want with it, it's mine afterall." Ownership is the anti-thesis of community living.
Freedom isn't free, after all - as the saying goes. If you think the internet can't be owned, you've obviously never met a US legislator.
I'd have to reply by saying you've never met an enterprising hardware hacker with some pringles cans and an attitude problem. If we want freedom, we'll have it. It's just that people haven't woken up yet and realized that if they just say "no" the problem will go away.
Why is it that only our generation understands the truly public and universal nature of the internet? Nobody owns the internet, and nobody ever will. You can claim to own the wires, the equipment, the computers, the software, and every other component, but you still won't own the internet. The internet has given birth to an idea -- that we're all interconnected and nobody owns the spaces in between. This idea recurs generation after generation, only to die because society can't find a place for it.
Oh, but they'll try. They will cast their books down on our heads, scream a million epitaths of criminal, deviant, terrorists, and invent new terms to express their disgust. They'll arrest us, punish us, and wage massive campaigns of fear. But they'll never get the idea out of our heads that maybe, just maybe, we don't have to pay their tax to touch the life of another person.
True, but unfortunately a lot of things in society are set up to kill off those who fall more than 3 sigma outside the norm. We just keep looking for excuses to make ourselves feel good about the fact that we are doing it.
Which is strange, because if not for the people who are outside the norm, everything would suck. If only there was a way to ensure that only people outside the norm benefited from their work, this behavior might cease.
I understand that it takes significant testing to confirm that the machines are working correctly for each individual. I would bet that many individuals - such as psychopaths - could easily beat the machine if they refused to cooperate/pretened to cooperate with the 'set-up' phase.
Actually, you don't need to by a psychopath to beat it. Being a Mythbuster's host is sufficient.
I don't understand why the contributor of this story is so skeptical of it...it seems all we would need to do is hook the scientists up to an fMRI and we'd know for sure if they were lying about the study!
Yeah, except... people have been killed before on the mere suspicion that they were lying about certain things. Adding some scientific air of validity to it will only ensure the body count rises, irrespective of whether it works or not. Plus, we're making guesses about whether a person is really lying based on our miniscule knowledge of the brain -- in truth, we're just playing a statistics game, albeit with potentially fatal results for those who fall more than 3 sigma outside the norm.
Slashdot Mirror
Taps Cassini2 on the shoulder and points to the huge tornado "Is anywhere safe?"
Cassini: Ah, I'm sorry, but I'm over 746 million miles away right now. Try asking a satellite a bit closer.
... and stop using all of your web-apps... sigh...
Yeah, and half the websites out there will stop rendering then. Sadly, the vast majority of them don't need javascript to do their job, but such is the epic lame that is the average web programmer.
Actually, I'm pretty sure those arrogant designers at NASA are quite confident that the International Space Station resists earthquakes.
And it would be just like them to focus on earthquakes, which can't happen in space, instead of say, solar flares.
the problem is to resist earthquakes in a cost effective manner, or alternatively stop people from doing stupid things.
Well, the second half of that is clearly impossible, so I'd suggest focusing on cost efficiency.
why do people knowingly locate in known flood areas behind dikes, in arid deserts, underneath volcanoes, or in known high-intensity earthquake areas
Curiously, the most fertile land, plentiful sources of water, and temperate climates, are located in those places. Except underneath volcanoes -- evil overlords live there, not joe average.
and not expect disasters to happen?
Oh, I think they do expect disasters to happen. And everyone else to pay for it thanks to this con game we call "insurance".
It's not an invisibility cloak. A nearby building could still fall on the cloaked one, with the usual result. Also, it's not a cloak, as in a piece of fabric. Last, anything can be made resistant to earthquakes, but to make it earthquake-proof is something only an arrogant designer or a project manager would say. Every design component can fail, and most catastrophic engineering failures are rooted in miscalculation or failing to test the model with a particular cascade of failures.
That's a lot of words to say this: Go too far and the public will stop respecting the law(s).
Anyone who thinks this is about anything other than a bunch of rich bastards exploiting a segment of the population is deluding themselves. They're simply upset that they got their hand caught in the cookie jar and now pay people smarter and more eloquent than them lots and lots of money to explain why the establishment owes them that cookie. Damn, I love America. Those few of us who are compelled from silence and apathy quickly settle on endless argumentation and debate, rather than activism. We weren't smarter about copyright law a hundred years ago... We were just less about words and more about actions back then. If the government screwed with the population a hundred years ago, the population screwed back. Nowadays, we all live in anonymous big cities and feel no attachment or trust with anyone else. And without trust, we can't even resist the most pathetic attempts at social control.
All these laws to "protect" employees taint the marketplace. If I want to hire somebody to haul live electrical cable around while I smoke cigarettes and blow smoke in their face and an albino midget yells racially crass jokes at them, then that's the job and if they want it we can come to an agreement on pay rates.
Fortunately, people with better business sense than you passed laws to prevent this, ostensibly because there's no business reason for you to be blowing smoke in someone's face while an albino midget yells racially crass jokes at them, and perhaps by avoiding these things the job of hauling live electrical cable around would be safer to both the employee and the public at large.
Also, surprisingly enough, business owners have discovered that treating their employees with dignity and respect tends to improve productivity to such a degree that they support anti-discrimination laws, if only because it makes the available labor pool better trained and easier to deal with. I, for one, would not want to enter a line of business where the labor poor was accustomed to having smoke blown in their face and being yelled at constantly. I rather suspect they would be poorly motivated.
Not at all. If women can make sexist jokes that a man couldn't, it's a double standard, which is what we're trying to avoid.
Do you exercise any care at all in what you read or are you in such a hurry that you stomp on other people in your efforts to attain the moral high ground? Go and read my post again and quote where in there I said I supported making sexist jokes at work, let alone double standards.
Of course there are admin costs, but dev fees and sales quite handily make up for that.
Citation needed.
The fact is, putting a limit on the number of indie games is an active act, requiring work.
Perhaps in order to keep the marketplace interface as uncluttered as possible, they limited the number of titles. Of course, Microsoft has never designed an interface that became too cluttered with only a limited number of items... See also: the Desktop. I'm just suggesting that Microsoft may be making decisions based on sound business practices rather than quack theory of "big evil corp versus small good guys". Remember that the interface needs to be intuitive and usable to a 12 year old.
We pander because those same groups have a habit of hiring lawyers and having laws passed to "protect" them.
The laws ARE deficient. Nobody should have to endure racist and sexist jokes and commentary at work. The message these groups want to send is simply: Go outside for that. That's where the first amendment is, not here.
Umm, guys? Indie titles get crapped on because they're small, not because of some conspiracy. Large businesses simply don't want to expend the resources and time to make things available for the "little guys", because the net return is so much lower. I mean, hey -- if I can corner 90% of the market by setting up my distribution platform to, say, seven businesses, why should I make that same effort fifty or a hundred times more just to get that extra 10%? I think, if I were in that position, I'd just move on to the next thing and save my money. And yes, it's all electronic. That doesn't make it zero-cost; There's administrative costs to everything and those costs don't go up in a linear fashion as you add more members.
So yeah, it's a big win for open source because it shows that you can make it to the S&P 500 by being an open source company.
The index, industry, and business world in general, doesn't give two sh--s whether something is open source or not. It may be an ideological victory of sorts, but calling it a "big win"? No. It's like graduating from fifth grade and moving on to middle school... It might be a big deal to the kids involved, but to the rest of the world? Not exactly bragging rights. All that said, I really wish I'd had the money to invest in Redhat when it sent me its IPO e-mail several years ago for being an open source contributor. :)
We have had this sickening pattern of pandering to groups who take the most offense to things. Women in the workplace and black people in the work place. Neither are typically "minorities" and if/when the tables are turned and a group was making "white" or "man" jokes, white men would likely not care at all.
Using women or blacks as an example and how they're allowed to make jokes that others aren't is a specious argument; Two wrongs don't make a right. The issue is that some people are failing to keep things professional. The expectation when you show up to work is that you work. Everything else is secondary to that, and if your color commentary is interfering with my (or anyone else's) work, it needs to stop. It's just that simple. You don't have a right to be offensive. That said, you're right insofar as some people overreact--just because someone else is a douche doesn't mean you have to sink to their level. A polite reminder or a memo is sufficient in 95% of all cases to correct the behavior. You don't even have to involve a manager most of the time. People are dumb, they make mistakes; Don't get worked up about it. For the remaining 5%, we have laws like this. On the clock, everything you do should be related to your job. But if you can't do that, at least have the decency to be mindful of the company you're keeping and making sure they are okay with your side conversation. It's just... being a decent human being.
That said, police work consists of piss poor pay, long hours, high stress, a decent risk of getting a bullet in your ass, and it's a thankless profession. Like EMTs, most emergency services personnel have a dry and/or odd sense of humor that others find morbid, offensive, or downright rude. A lot of them smoke or "self-medicate" to cope. I think it's only natural that they'd need an outlet to express their work frustrations outside of work. And once it leaves the workplace, it's fair game, first amendment and everything. What you do on your own time is your own business, even if it is offensive and derogatory towards your coworkers. As a woman, I expect men to make sexually crass comments when I'm not around. I also know some of them will go home and smoke pot, do drugs, eat hot dogs and hamburgers until their heart explodes... and you know what? I'm okay with that. Just keep it away from me.
People need to be mindful of the social spaces they occupy. I don't go to the bar dressed in a low-cut dress and then act outraged when some drunk creepy guy (or girl) hits on me. That's what bars are for. If the same person shows up drunk at the grocery store when I'm dressed in nothing more than jeans and a hoodie and does the same thing he's playing with fire. Likewise, showing up on an electronic forum for inner-city cops is likely to be full of racist, sexist, and every other kind of -ist and -ism out there, not because those people are somehow inherently evil, but because they deal with the worst examples of those groups on long shifts day after day.
Red Hat has made it onto the S&P 500, an important measure of the stock market.
First, the S&P members are selected by committee, not by merit alone. Companies are (usually) included because they have a high liquidity and are "representative" of their industry. Not that Red Hat being selected isn't good news, just understand they're not selecting it because of the "runaway success of Linux", but because Red Hat is representative of the overall health of this segment of the industry.
If Joss' involvement dooms a show, it's not because he lowers the quality. It's because the majority of the audience would rather be watching Friends reruns.
No, it's because as long as the show is under threat of cancellation, Joss tries. The moment the executives say it's not on the chopping block, he gets lazy ("creative" he'd say) and it goes to crap.
Without the original cast, I won't be watching, simple as that.
That's what we said about Star Trek. And yet, we keep going...
In just about every anime, cartoon series, and live-action where they've tried to swap one actor's voice for another, the series usually tanks not long after the switch is made. The only thing worse for a series is to get someone pregnant, involve a baby, or suddenly tack on a female lead or support role when one previously wasn't present. Or a consult with Joss Whedon.
CNN just had a front page article where they stated that around 25% of 18-25 year olds doubted the truth of the landing. That is utterly depressing, showing the current level of science education.
They must have done the survey south of the mason-dixon line, because up here in Minnesota, I have yet to meet anyone who believes that garbage. I still remember when Fox News aired their little "moon hoax" series what NASA's response was. It was, in my opinion, the best headline I will ever read in my life. It read, in giant lettering across its homepage;
Yes, We Did.
Don't think that just because we have slathering idiots in the streets that America as a whole has become uneducated. I assure you, idiots breed in larger numbers than smart people in every country.
they disagree with you, and they are the ones with the guns, jails and judges to enforce what they believe.
We outnumber them ten thousand to one, maybe more. They're going to need a lot more guns, jails, and judges.
The native Americans used to ask. To them, the land was so fundamentally free that to own a piece of it seemed a sacrilege (sp?) against nature.
I have friends who are Native. And I think they had a very good point -- we're destroying the planet with our notions of ownership, because ownership means "I can do whatever the hell I want with it, it's mine afterall." Ownership is the anti-thesis of community living.
Freedom isn't free, after all - as the saying goes. If you think the internet can't be owned, you've obviously never met a US legislator.
I'd have to reply by saying you've never met an enterprising hardware hacker with some pringles cans and an attitude problem. If we want freedom, we'll have it. It's just that people haven't woken up yet and realized that if they just say "no" the problem will go away.
Why is it that only our generation understands the truly public and universal nature of the internet? Nobody owns the internet, and nobody ever will. You can claim to own the wires, the equipment, the computers, the software, and every other component, but you still won't own the internet. The internet has given birth to an idea -- that we're all interconnected and nobody owns the spaces in between. This idea recurs generation after generation, only to die because society can't find a place for it.
Oh, but they'll try. They will cast their books down on our heads, scream a million epitaths of criminal, deviant, terrorists, and invent new terms to express their disgust. They'll arrest us, punish us, and wage massive campaigns of fear. But they'll never get the idea out of our heads that maybe, just maybe, we don't have to pay their tax to touch the life of another person.
True, but unfortunately a lot of things in society are set up to kill off those who fall more than 3 sigma outside the norm. We just keep looking for excuses to make ourselves feel good about the fact that we are doing it.
Which is strange, because if not for the people who are outside the norm, everything would suck. If only there was a way to ensure that only people outside the norm benefited from their work, this behavior might cease.
I understand that it takes significant testing to confirm that the machines are working correctly for each individual. I would bet that many individuals - such as psychopaths - could easily beat the machine if they refused to cooperate/pretened to cooperate with the 'set-up' phase.
Actually, you don't need to by a psychopath to beat it. Being a Mythbuster's host is sufficient.
I don't understand why the contributor of this story is so skeptical of it...it seems all we would need to do is hook the scientists up to an fMRI and we'd know for sure if they were lying about the study!
Yeah, except... people have been killed before on the mere suspicion that they were lying about certain things. Adding some scientific air of validity to it will only ensure the body count rises, irrespective of whether it works or not. Plus, we're making guesses about whether a person is really lying based on our miniscule knowledge of the brain -- in truth, we're just playing a statistics game, albeit with potentially fatal results for those who fall more than 3 sigma outside the norm.
I wonder how well this method would work if tested on the researchers regarding the validity of their results...