I guess it's possible that the miles of cars I see stacking up to gawk at car accidents is really caused by a few folks, but I doubt it. I believe most people are fascinated by death on some level.
There's a reason behind the meme, "It was like a train wreck; I couldn't help but watch it."
Most people can't help it.
People like to see the twisted and bent metal, they like imagining how far a car had to get off the ground to get to a certain position, or just how many train cars derailed. It's a lot of power, and people are curious about that. They think that's morbid (thus the train wreck meme) because they know people must have been hurt, but they still abstract the actual people away from the scene.
I'll grant you that even if there's people involved, it's sometimes fun. The fact that America's Funniest Home Videos exist is proof of that. People like seeing others getting hit in the crotch. In addition there are tons of movies with people getting thrown through windows and what's not. That's fun. However, all of that stops the moment people see the actual gore and blood of someone truly badly hurt. People don't generally stick around to see that, they run away, they often vomit. Even most R-Rated movies avoid truly horrific gore, except for those horror films that go so far beyond reality that people can once again abstract it, because it's cartoonish.
Personally, while I definitely feel for the individuals and families involved in accident photos or other gruesome scenes, that does not diminish my objective curiosity.
Well, like I said, go ahead. I didn't mean to offend in any way people who do have that curiosity. I objected when the original poster said that "everyone is fascinated with images of mortality." No, not everyone is, and it's been my experience that most aren't.
If people were not able to deal with such sights in a detached and medically curious way, who would perform surgeries? Who would be the EMTs or other first responders? The visceral reaction that one experiences when faced with these types of scenes varies in intensity across people (and can certainly be diminished with enough exposure).
Again, you don't have an argument from me there. And the fact that people's viceral reactions can be diminished with exposure, as you've put it, has been an argument for censorship of violent pictures for a long time (you don't want to desensitize an individual to violence unless it's necessary to his profession, and then only if his profession is desirable in society). I don't personally believe we should do that, because it becomes up to somebody to determine what level of violence is acceptable, and what professions are desirable and require desensitization. That's not a power anyone, or any committee, should have.
On the other hand, my opinion that most people are not morbidly curious by nature is reinforced by your claim that people can be desensitized. Most people in the medical profession go through a rough period acclimating themselves to what they have to deal with.
Although this case is purely sensational in nature, in does not vary materially from the basic subject matter that many within the law enforcement and medical communities must deal with on a daily basis.
As I've said, I don't believe in censorship, and I don't think there's anything wrong with you or anybody else viewing the pictures that are available. I do think there's something wrong with the police officers who leaked the picture, and I think there's something insanely wrong with the people who sent the pictures to the family.
you can see for yourself. It's plain old curiosity.
I could, but I most certainly won't. There are things I'm just not curious about. I know such accidents exist, I know people are fragile, I know people die. I don't need to see it in detail.
Everyone is fascinated with images of mortality.
That some people are fascinated with those pictures is fairly self-evident. However, most of us are grossed out and feel the pain of empathy for the victims and their families. These are not pleasant feelings, and we try not to seek them out.
That said, I don't believe in censorship, and as long as all you're doing is viewing those photos, go ahead I guess. Just don't send it to the rest of us, please. Also, the people who leaked the photos should be sued. The people who sent the photos to the family via e-mail should be prosecuted for harassment.
With more users, and more software available (both free and commercial) comes more people interested in investing time and money to make the OS run great and become more usable.
If usability is all that is important for you, then Mac OS X is probably a good choice. Windows is actually not horrible anymore these days. People still talk of BSOD's as if everyone still ran Windows Me, but Windows XP is a good OS, Vista improved on the usability for non-admin users, and Windows 7 looks like it fixed the major problems with Vista.
What I want for Linux is for it to be a usable, but open, OS. The open part is important to me. I think we're making strides, and I think ubuntu is fantastic and only getting better. However, I really don't want a world where even Linux users are sending me Word files instead of OpenOffice. I'd like for there to be no need for proprietary software.
Don't interpret from my previous post that I don't want more users in the Linux world. I just don't want them if the price is to remove options (consolidating on a single windows manager for example: some people like gnome, others like kde, and others go with fluxbox...and everyone should be able to use what they like best). I also don't want them if the cost is less openness, due to high popularity of proprietary software. The benefits are just not worth the price, and again, if you don't care about openness, there are options in other operating systems. There's nothing wrong with that.
I like Linux, and I don't need/want Quickbooks, but what similar software is better than Quickbooks and available for Linux?
I personally use GnuCash which is enough for my needs. I looked online to see if there was something more small business oriented, and came across LedgerSMB.
I don't really use QuickBooks, so I can't vouch for whether or not those programs contain every feature you might need. However, even if there are features lacking in the open source versions, it's my beliefs that not having QuickBooks available at all in Linux is just going to further motivate developers to work on those features in the available open source programs (both because they need the features, and because they will receive more pressure from end-users, who have no alternative programs).
Maybe some people would use Linux if Quickbooks were available on it.
Well, part of my point was that I don't really care if more people use Linux. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to be an elitist prick saying that "I don't want windows Lusers" in the Linux world, or something equally stupid. I welcome everyone to try it, and I love Ubuntu for making this easier for the average person. I also think everyone should use the best tool for the job. If QuickBooks is what you need, and you can't find an alternative, then use Windows. I keep a Windows partition around myself, mostly for a game here and there. Macs are also pretty good in that they have the unix goodness and lots of well designed software.
The problem is that the whole point of using Linux is an essential belief in the open source philosophy. Once everyone starts releasing proprietary software for Linux, I envision the bigger companies dominating the market, one popular closed source package being dependent on another, until eventually Linux will be like the Mac environment. Sure, Darwin is open source, but just about everything running on top of it is proprietary. I'd hate to see the day when the kernel is the only thing free in my distribution.
Perhaps if came out in 1998, we'd be seeing Quickbooks for Linux on Walmart shelves by now.
I don't get that sentiment, I honestly don't. Seeing proprietary software being sold for Linux in the same scale as they are for Windows and Macs is the very last thing I ever want to see.
Then again, I never understood the idea that we need to have a bigger market share than microsoft. I think we enough people to maintain a healthy developer base. Anything else doesn't make Linux more useful. "Quickbooks for Linux on Walmart shelves" is a downgrade, not an upgrade.
Don't. They didn't, and it's a horrible movie. Yes, Data "dies" but not before transferring his memories into another Android that was a prototype to Soong's other androids. They did this specifically because they wanted to be able to resurrect him in another movie (but then Nemesis bombed, and that was it for TNG movies), so I'm pretty sure they didn't kill him because of his appearance.
1) Considering how many planets we have looked at and that we can't find life on any of them this makes Earth very extraordinary.
We've looked at one Earth-like planet. That's Earth. You need larger samples of earth-like planets (rocky, about the same size, in the habitable zone) with no life before you can say Earth is special at all.
And before you say that not finding any other Earth-like planets already makes Earth special, you need to remember that we don't have the technology to find them. They could be at single every star we've looked at, and we still wouldn't have seen them. Technology is improving though, and we're becoming able to find smaller planets.
2) Not ever be able to communicate with distant places? You don't know what we will invent in the future. It may come out tomorrow, or it may come out in 300 years - but to say "never".
Relativity made the entire concept very hard. I think it's more realistic to assume we'll never find a way around relativity than to assume that technology and knowledge will one day give us some magic. Sure, we might develop something and that'd be great, but we shouldn't count our chickens before our eggs are hatched. Hell in this case, we don't even have the eggs yet, there's no evidence of any phenomenon that bypasses the whole speed-of-light limit, time-dilation difficulties that can actually be used to transmit information.
3) Speculation about other life is not pointless
We agree completely there.
Finding organic material will be hard short of landing on the surface.
That's not true at all. Spectroscopy has been able to find organic material in several distant places, without having to land anything there. Just yesterday there was a story on slashdot about ethyl formate around Sagittarius B2
Whoever did your cabling was unqualified to do the work he was hired to do. (Usually the the fault of whoever hired them.)
I don't follow... When I get a quote from somebody who claims to be capably trained for certain task how is it my fault when he screws up?
I don't think that's what he meant. If you call Company A to do the work, and the guy Company A sent is incompetent, it's the fault of whoever is in charge of hiring people over at Company A. It doesn't mean that everyone in the same class as Company A are incompetent for that job (ie, all electricians). Sometimes, it doesn't even mean everyone at Company A is incompetent.
I did some work as an undergrad rendering complex molecules for the physics department at my school, had it exported to vrml, and placed on the website of the research project.
I'm not sure if that's "useful." Visualizing the molecules was, but that can be done in other software. Placing it on the web, well at the time they thought it was going to be useful, but it's no longer on their website, so they probably decided it wasn't:)
The problem with the mainstream model for ISPs is that in an unlimited use plan, the less aggressive users subsidize the consumption of the aggressive users. Most slashdot readers may not have a problem with that, but I think that a lot of people would rather pay a reasonable, and cheaper rate, for bandwidth they use than pay more for a theoretically uncapped amount that they won't use.
That doesn't make sense. The internet is not like water running through pipes (or a series of tubes). When you pay for your water, you get charged for the amount of water you use, because the water itself is the limited resource. The bits you are downloading aren't the limited resource. The rate at which they can be delivered to you is.
The problem they claim to have is that heavy downloaders are bogging down traffic to the point where every customer suffers. In the water analogy, that doesn't mean we don't have water to deliver. It means the pipes aren't large enough to deliver the throughput of water the neighborhood needs, so when you open up the faucet, all you get are a few drips. You can't solve that by telling people to use less water, because even if everyone cuts their water usage by half, when you get to the certain times in the day (like in the morning when everyone is showering to go to work), the pipes are still going to be too small, and nobody is going to get the water.
Basically, even if every single person limits their monthly usage to 1 Gb, if they all start downloading things when most people get back from work (6-7pm), there's still going to be major congestion. They used to get away with selling you 3Mbps connections, because they didn't have enough clients on youtube, hulu, and xbox live, so they weren't using a lot of bandwidth (not in terms of total usage: most users were not using their bandwidth consistently during peak hours because they weren't watching videos and all that jazz, they were loading web pages and downloading e-mail). Now that's no longer the case.
No longer having unlimited use won't help the ISP's, that's just their excuse to charge more. Solving their problems means either upgrading their network or, if that's not possible while maintaining a profit, tier actual bandwidth, not usage. Cap their lowest cost plan at 720k, lower their highest cost plan from 6Mbps to 1.5Mbps-3Mpbs if they have to. Their "boost" algorithm also works well, where you get a higher bandwidth for the first few seconds of a download, then you get back to a lower rate. That actually helps.
[1] To be really pedantic, bandwidth is measured in Hz. The term you are thinking of is 'throughput'.
Analog bandwidth is measured in Hz. Digital bandwidth is not measured in Hz, and is equal to maximum throughput, not just throughput. Throughput is a measure of the successful data rate. So if you're sending packets, but only 50% of them are getting to their destination, your throughput is only half your bandwidth.
This is because the rate of bits you can squeeze through a medium with a certain analog bandwidth is known (hartley's law), so if you're going to talk about bandwidth in a digital medium, you might as well use the value that is most useful to you (in bits/s) rather than Hz.
Mod that post -1 incorrect (they really need that option). The rules say that the random selection occurs when the order is indeterminate, but they are looking for the billionth one.
They do want people looking at, they just want to be paid for their work.
Then maybe they shouldn't put it up for free? Maybe they should try some type of subscription model.
Otherwise they can go out of business, and then where will you get your information?
The answer to that question is the same reason newspapers are NOT using some type of subscription model: "just about anywhere." There's no shortage of information online, and people who try to charge for the content suddenly find out that their clients are still finding the content they want elsewhere.
What happens in the highly unrealistic scenario if they all go out of business and you can't find the news anywhere online? The market will be ripe for new companies putting information up under a subscription model, now that they no longer have the free competition.
Ah, they want to be paid through ads? That's fine too. It's a really stupid idea to do and simultaneously make demands of the search engines bringing people to your website, much less sue them. I don't understand why google doesn't just quit linking to any newspaper that complains of the news aggregation, and then wait for THEM to offer to pay google a percentage of their profits if they'll just start listing and aggregating their news again.
Health Insurance should work like other insurance policies
No, that's stupid. Instead, we should stop calling it "health insurance," stop treating it as if it were insurance, and start calling it "health plan" which is actually what it is (and what everyone needs).
I do not mind universal catastrophic health care, I do mind the idea of paying for every kook who thinks his tummy ache is an emergency.
I hear this argument a lot, but it's actually a very poor one. It would be much, much cheaper if everyone went to their doctors anytime they got the first sign of an unusual symptom (by unusual = something they haven't felt before, or worse than what they've felt before), regardless of how benign that is. If it turns out to be nothing, as it will in most cases, you've wasted a small amount of cash (that adds up, I'll grant you that). However, if it turns out to be something dangerous in its first stages then you've very probably saved enough money to compensate for all the other cases when people didn't actually need the doctor. Simply because the treatment for dangerous conditions in later stages are typically much more complex, and much more expensive than dealing with the problem early on.
No, it really doesn't. The story says 9 patients made 2,700 ER visits for the past 6 years, it says nothing as to whether they actually NEEDED to go to the ER that often. In fact, 8 of the 9 were drug abusers, so chances are that they were all near-death from overdosing that many times, and the ER was justified.
Yes, the ER is expensive. Do you want less money to be wasted? The first time a junkie shows up in the ER, he needs to get the emergency treatment, followed by a court-mandated detox as well as paid-for shrinks to help him kick the habit. Then he won't have the following emergencies, and by paying more early on, you've again saved money in the long term.
A local hospital in Atlanta (actually more than one) reports many cases of people calling 911 to get a ride downtown where by law they are required to be given a "ticket" to get home. So what happens? Many abuse the system only to waste our money and the valuable time of doctors and nurses just so they can come downtown and see friends or do shopping.
That would be real abuse, and that one didn't come with a link (I was disappointed, I thought your msnbc link was going to talk about that story). First, I don't believe it, because I've been to the ER. If you've reported symptoms and told the paramedics to take you to the hospital, you're going to spend HOURS in the hospital while they test you for the symptoms you reported that were apparently severe enough to warrant an ambulance. There's no way that pain is worth the ride and (bus?) ticket.
I suppose once you got to the hospital you could refuse treatment, but I think the solution to that abuse is simple. If you call 911 and refuse tests, you get charged for all expenditures. If you have a history of calling 911 and tests consistently review that you have nothing, you get either charged with fraud (evidence that you just wanted a ride downtown--wtf?) or you get a court-mandated shrink appointment to manage your hypochondria (which is likely to account for a significant amount of repeat ER visitors).
What's tired and boring are people with no lives like you who don't want to be here and yet come along to post. And the idiot mods who modded you up for that.
It's fine that you think it's dumb. That's your prerogative. So you can't quit slashdot for A DAY?
I enjoyed this years' stories. I thought some of them were quite funny, as are the posts (except for people like you). You may think that makes me an idiot, and again, you're entitled to your opinion. But do you go around to every website on the internet that you think is stupid to post how stupid you think it is?
On second thought, you should do that. The internet is a big place, and if that task keeps you busy and away from here, we both win.
hey have to tell us that "it's pants", which somehow we non-Brits will all magically know.
I would like to tell you to turn in your card or something, but nobody else seems to remember how the "ispants" slashdot meme started. First there was this story which introduced the crowd to the term. Then people (I bet mostly Americans, since it never happened before) started tagging idle stories as "idleispants."
Basically, the person you replied to might not even be British. He might be one of us Americans, who is using a meme that he expects the slashdot crowd to be familiar with.
For those of you who... I congratulate you, as you are clearly an intelligent audience.
This reads like a really sleazy sales pitch, along the lines of "Did you know that top billionaires take my supplement to boost their brain power?"
Not only that, but I actually went to Rands' blog and read the latest post just to see what could be so amazing about it. In there, I found more stupid marketing / management terminology:
In a good bridge, I see the defiant end result of how some of my favorite engineering stories begin:
âoeIâ(TM)m sure you can arrange an impressive line of people who say itâ(TM)s impossible. I take personal joy in ignoring those who say no.â
âoeYes, halfway through this project weâ(TM)ll discover the impossible, but we know how to build through the impossible. Impossible is when we do our best work.â
Nobody "discovers the impossible" but "knows how to build through the impossible." That's not what impossible means. But it sure as hell sounds impressive, and it excites people!
The ability to deal with obstacles, even very difficult obstacles is a very marketable skill. However, when you start talking about overcoming challenges as "doing the impossible" you stop sounding like someone who is actually capable of dealing with problems and starts sounding like a moron salesman. Especially when you later say something stupid like, "Impossible is when we do our best work." It might sound great when your favorite Hollywood hero says that he "laughs in the face of danger," but in real life, when you're managing people, if you dismiss a current challenge by saying, "that's when we do our best work" you'll piss your employees off. They know it's bullshit, they know they'd do better if it was easy and they had more time. You can tell them that you have confidence they can handle the problem, but don't dismiss the problem with levity.
Hell, even in his own example of the Brooklyn Bridge, he says that when they hit the challenges during the building process, the manager got the bends, two employees died, and they decided to let one of the towers rest on compacted sand instead of bedrock. Then he says how amazing it is that it was a good decision, because it "hasn't moved" since. Might have been a good decision, but "the best" outcome obviously would have been no injuries, no deaths, and a foundation that was built exactly according to plan. Clearly, they don't do their best work under "impossible" conditions.
You want some tips on managing programmers and engineers? I don't have all the answers, but I do have one for certain: that type of marketing pitch might work when you're meeting to sell the product, but programmers and engineers aren't like most people in that regard. Exaggerations like that are just likely to piss us off, not impress or motivate us. So you post a summary like that on slashdot, and you get a bunch of angry geeks; you try to manage people like that, and you get a bunch of employees labeling you as a PHB.
No, they're not. They "merely" apply science to specific well-known problems.
I take offense to that. Although a lot of engineering involves solving well-known problems, there's a good deal of "never-before-done, at the conceptual stage, we're not sure if it's even possible" problems. Yes, we still use well known physics in the design process, but calling us "not scientists" is a little bit like saying modern mathematicians are not mathematicians because all they're doing is applying well-known math to solve their new problems.
Good engineers apply the scientific method in their design process. When creating something nobody has done before, they examine previous work, they construct a "hypothesis" of how to best solve the problem, they perform tests and simulations to make sure their assumptions are correct, and then they analyze the data, draw a conclusion (create a plan), and build the thing.
if we went by your standard of evidence it's doubtful that our collective scientific knowledge would actually have gotten far enough
I agree with you in principle. You can't take anything for granted, common sense is often wrong. And that applies in engineering a LOT.
If we went by your standard of evidence, we would consider there to be a mountain of evidence that the Sun goes around the Earth. Nowadays it's easy to see that it's the other way round
However, you picked the worst example ever to make your point, because you just used a "common-sense, everyone thinks this is right, but technically it's not" example. It's not necessarily "wrong" to say the Sun goes around the Earth. It's inconvenient for calculations because the center of mass of the earth-sun system lies inside the Sun. It doesn't mean that you can't come up with an elaborate mathematical model with the Earth as the reference center of the solar system (and it has been done), it just means that you'll be doing too much damn work.
There's no absolute reference points in the universe. Picking the Sun as the center of the solar system is the equivalent of using the cylindrical coordinate system instead of the cartesian one for problems that make sense. Things get a whole lot easier, and the math is way simpler and more elegant.
I think you're confusing consciousness with reasoning. Consciousness is needed to 'feel' anything. But consciousness doesn't imply intelligence.
Consciousness in the sense of being aware and responsive to the environment is necessary to pain and is something that crabs obviously have. Consciousness in the philosophical sense of being self-aware isn't necessary for pain. There's a big difference between the feeling of pain and the ability to realize, "this is me feeling pain. I don't like it." Even human babies aren't capable of having that thought (self-awareness develops a while after you're born), but that doesn't mean they can't feel pain.
The question is does their form of pain "hurt"? We'll never know that. After all, we don't even know why pain hurts for us humans; all we know is that it does indeed hurt and is not something we like to experience (unless you're masochistic).
You asked the question, and then you answered it. Evolutionarily speaking, if the signals that indicate you're being injured are unpleasant to you, you're more likely to avoid the same injury in the future, because you remember the unpleasantness. That gives you an advantage over anyone who doesn't think the injury signals are unpleasant, and it's why masochists (who actually finds those signals pleasurable) make up a minority.
Everyone trying to attribute conscious intellectuality to pain isn't thinking it through. Consciousness just means you'll be better able to avoid the unpleasant feeling, because it allows you to analyze exactly what brought it on and extrapolate to similar situations. What matters isn't consciousness, but memory: If you can't remember (at least on some very small level) whether a certain action was pleasant or unpleasant, then it's not going to help you in the future. So there's no evolutionary benefit to actually feeling an unpleasant sensation associated with the injury signal.
Think of it in this way. If you accidentally put your hand on a stove, the injury signal travels through your nervous system to your brain. Before it gets to your brain, your spinal cord will send the necessary signal to cause you to move your hand back (because this is really important and wasting time would lead to more damage, and put you in an evolutionary disadvantage). As a result you move your hand away, and the pain doesn't come for another second. If you don't have any capability for memory, the job has been done, and the feeling of pain that comes later doesn't help at all. You won't remember and you'll do it again. If, on the other hand, you do remember the incident, the feeling of pain later on is what prevents you from putting your hand in the stove again. You want to avoid the unpleasantness.
What it comes down to is basically this: It doesn't matter if crabs thrash around when they're in boiling water...that doesn't mean pain, it could mean the reflex of taking your hand off the stove. However, if they can show that crabs avoid situations where they were injured before, that means memory, and it means pain. In which case, the boiling them on hot water before killing them swiftly can be argued to be really unethical.
...the first 1831 lines (!) of the page are blank...Attention Globe and Mail web designers: When your idiot print newspaper editor tells you to make liberal use of whitespace, this is not what he had in mind!
Believe it or not, someone had it in mind. This is most likely a really, really stupid attempt at security by obscurity.
PHB:My kid was showing me something on our website, and then he just clicked some buttons and the entire source code was available for him to look at. You need to do something about that. WebGuy:You mean the html code? Well, that actually does need to get transferred. You see, the browser does the display transformation on the client's computer... PHB:The source code is out intellectual property! WebGuy:Fine. We'll handle it.::whispering to WebGuy #2:: Just add a bunch of empty lines. When the boss looks at it, he won't think to scroll down much before he gives up. PHB:Ah, I see that when I try to look at the source it now shows up blank! Good work!
Slashdot Mirror
I guess it's possible that the miles of cars I see stacking up to gawk at car accidents is really caused by a few folks, but I doubt it. I believe most people are fascinated by death on some level.
There's a reason behind the meme, "It was like a train wreck; I couldn't help but watch it."
Most people can't help it.
People like to see the twisted and bent metal, they like imagining how far a car had to get off the ground to get to a certain position, or just how many train cars derailed. It's a lot of power, and people are curious about that. They think that's morbid (thus the train wreck meme) because they know people must have been hurt, but they still abstract the actual people away from the scene.
I'll grant you that even if there's people involved, it's sometimes fun. The fact that America's Funniest Home Videos exist is proof of that. People like seeing others getting hit in the crotch. In addition there are tons of movies with people getting thrown through windows and what's not. That's fun. However, all of that stops the moment people see the actual gore and blood of someone truly badly hurt. People don't generally stick around to see that, they run away, they often vomit. Even most R-Rated movies avoid truly horrific gore, except for those horror films that go so far beyond reality that people can once again abstract it, because it's cartoonish.
Personally, while I definitely feel for the individuals and families involved in accident photos or other gruesome scenes, that does not diminish my objective curiosity.
Well, like I said, go ahead. I didn't mean to offend in any way people who do have that curiosity. I objected when the original poster said that "everyone is fascinated with images of mortality." No, not everyone is, and it's been my experience that most aren't.
If people were not able to deal with such sights in a detached and medically curious way, who would perform surgeries? Who would be the EMTs or other first responders? The visceral reaction that one experiences when faced with these types of scenes varies in intensity across people (and can certainly be diminished with enough exposure).
Again, you don't have an argument from me there. And the fact that people's viceral reactions can be diminished with exposure, as you've put it, has been an argument for censorship of violent pictures for a long time (you don't want to desensitize an individual to violence unless it's necessary to his profession, and then only if his profession is desirable in society). I don't personally believe we should do that, because it becomes up to somebody to determine what level of violence is acceptable, and what professions are desirable and require desensitization. That's not a power anyone, or any committee, should have.
On the other hand, my opinion that most people are not morbidly curious by nature is reinforced by your claim that people can be desensitized. Most people in the medical profession go through a rough period acclimating themselves to what they have to deal with.
Although this case is purely sensational in nature, in does not vary materially from the basic subject matter that many within the law enforcement and medical communities must deal with on a daily basis.
As I've said, I don't believe in censorship, and I don't think there's anything wrong with you or anybody else viewing the pictures that are available. I do think there's something wrong with the police officers who leaked the picture, and I think there's something insanely wrong with the people who sent the pictures to the family.
you can see for yourself. It's plain old curiosity.
I could, but I most certainly won't. There are things I'm just not curious about. I know such accidents exist, I know people are fragile, I know people die. I don't need to see it in detail.
Everyone is fascinated with images of mortality.
That some people are fascinated with those pictures is fairly self-evident. However, most of us are grossed out and feel the pain of empathy for the victims and their families. These are not pleasant feelings, and we try not to seek them out.
That said, I don't believe in censorship, and as long as all you're doing is viewing those photos, go ahead I guess. Just don't send it to the rest of us, please. Also, the people who leaked the photos should be sued. The people who sent the photos to the family via e-mail should be prosecuted for harassment.
I own four, why?
With more users, and more software available (both free and commercial) comes more people interested in investing time and money to make the OS run great and become more usable.
If usability is all that is important for you, then Mac OS X is probably a good choice. Windows is actually not horrible anymore these days. People still talk of BSOD's as if everyone still ran Windows Me, but Windows XP is a good OS, Vista improved on the usability for non-admin users, and Windows 7 looks like it fixed the major problems with Vista.
What I want for Linux is for it to be a usable, but open, OS. The open part is important to me. I think we're making strides, and I think ubuntu is fantastic and only getting better. However, I really don't want a world where even Linux users are sending me Word files instead of OpenOffice. I'd like for there to be no need for proprietary software.
Don't interpret from my previous post that I don't want more users in the Linux world. I just don't want them if the price is to remove options (consolidating on a single windows manager for example: some people like gnome, others like kde, and others go with fluxbox...and everyone should be able to use what they like best). I also don't want them if the cost is less openness, due to high popularity of proprietary software. The benefits are just not worth the price, and again, if you don't care about openness, there are options in other operating systems. There's nothing wrong with that.
I like Linux, and I don't need/want Quickbooks, but what similar software is better than Quickbooks and available for Linux?
I personally use GnuCash which is enough for my needs. I looked online to see if there was something more small business oriented, and came across LedgerSMB.
I don't really use QuickBooks, so I can't vouch for whether or not those programs contain every feature you might need. However, even if there are features lacking in the open source versions, it's my beliefs that not having QuickBooks available at all in Linux is just going to further motivate developers to work on those features in the available open source programs (both because they need the features, and because they will receive more pressure from end-users, who have no alternative programs).
Maybe some people would use Linux if Quickbooks were available on it.
Well, part of my point was that I don't really care if more people use Linux. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to be an elitist prick saying that "I don't want windows Lusers" in the Linux world, or something equally stupid. I welcome everyone to try it, and I love Ubuntu for making this easier for the average person. I also think everyone should use the best tool for the job. If QuickBooks is what you need, and you can't find an alternative, then use Windows. I keep a Windows partition around myself, mostly for a game here and there. Macs are also pretty good in that they have the unix goodness and lots of well designed software.
The problem is that the whole point of using Linux is an essential belief in the open source philosophy. Once everyone starts releasing proprietary software for Linux, I envision the bigger companies dominating the market, one popular closed source package being dependent on another, until eventually Linux will be like the Mac environment. Sure, Darwin is open source, but just about everything running on top of it is proprietary. I'd hate to see the day when the kernel is the only thing free in my distribution.
Perhaps if came out in 1998, we'd be seeing Quickbooks for Linux on Walmart shelves by now.
I don't get that sentiment, I honestly don't. Seeing proprietary software being sold for Linux in the same scale as they are for Windows and Macs is the very last thing I ever want to see.
Then again, I never understood the idea that we need to have a bigger market share than microsoft. I think we enough people to maintain a healthy developer base. Anything else doesn't make Linux more useful. "Quickbooks for Linux on Walmart shelves" is a downgrade, not an upgrade.
They killed Data? huh. Maybe now I'll watch it.
Don't. They didn't, and it's a horrible movie. Yes, Data "dies" but not before transferring his memories into another Android that was a prototype to Soong's other androids. They did this specifically because they wanted to be able to resurrect him in another movie (but then Nemesis bombed, and that was it for TNG movies), so I'm pretty sure they didn't kill him because of his appearance.
1) Considering how many planets we have looked at and that we can't find life on any of them this makes Earth very extraordinary.
We've looked at one Earth-like planet. That's Earth. You need larger samples of earth-like planets (rocky, about the same size, in the habitable zone) with no life before you can say Earth is special at all.
And before you say that not finding any other Earth-like planets already makes Earth special, you need to remember that we don't have the technology to find them. They could be at single every star we've looked at, and we still wouldn't have seen them. Technology is improving though, and we're becoming able to find smaller planets.
2) Not ever be able to communicate with distant places? You don't know what we will invent in the future. It may come out tomorrow, or it may come out in 300 years - but to say "never".
Relativity made the entire concept very hard. I think it's more realistic to assume we'll never find a way around relativity than to assume that technology and knowledge will one day give us some magic. Sure, we might develop something and that'd be great, but we shouldn't count our chickens before our eggs are hatched. Hell in this case, we don't even have the eggs yet, there's no evidence of any phenomenon that bypasses the whole speed-of-light limit, time-dilation difficulties that can actually be used to transmit information.
3) Speculation about other life is not pointless
We agree completely there.
Finding organic material will be hard short of landing on the surface.
That's not true at all. Spectroscopy has been able to find organic material in several distant places, without having to land anything there. Just yesterday there was a story on slashdot about ethyl formate around Sagittarius B2
Whoever did your cabling was unqualified to do the work he was hired to do. (Usually the the fault of whoever hired them.)
I don't follow... When I get a quote from somebody who claims to be capably trained for certain task how is it my fault when he screws up?
I don't think that's what he meant. If you call Company A to do the work, and the guy Company A sent is incompetent, it's the fault of whoever is in charge of hiring people over at Company A. It doesn't mean that everyone in the same class as Company A are incompetent for that job (ie, all electricians). Sometimes, it doesn't even mean everyone at Company A is incompetent.
I did some work as an undergrad rendering complex molecules for the physics department at my school, had it exported to vrml, and placed on the website of the research project.
I'm not sure if that's "useful." Visualizing the molecules was, but that can be done in other software. Placing it on the web, well at the time they thought it was going to be useful, but it's no longer on their website, so they probably decided it wasn't :)
The problem with the mainstream model for ISPs is that in an unlimited use plan, the less aggressive users subsidize the consumption of the aggressive users. Most slashdot readers may not have a problem with that, but I think that a lot of people would rather pay a reasonable, and cheaper rate, for bandwidth they use than pay more for a theoretically uncapped amount that they won't use.
That doesn't make sense. The internet is not like water running through pipes (or a series of tubes). When you pay for your water, you get charged for the amount of water you use, because the water itself is the limited resource. The bits you are downloading aren't the limited resource. The rate at which they can be delivered to you is.
The problem they claim to have is that heavy downloaders are bogging down traffic to the point where every customer suffers. In the water analogy, that doesn't mean we don't have water to deliver. It means the pipes aren't large enough to deliver the throughput of water the neighborhood needs, so when you open up the faucet, all you get are a few drips. You can't solve that by telling people to use less water, because even if everyone cuts their water usage by half, when you get to the certain times in the day (like in the morning when everyone is showering to go to work), the pipes are still going to be too small, and nobody is going to get the water.
Basically, even if every single person limits their monthly usage to 1 Gb, if they all start downloading things when most people get back from work (6-7pm), there's still going to be major congestion. They used to get away with selling you 3Mbps connections, because they didn't have enough clients on youtube, hulu, and xbox live, so they weren't using a lot of bandwidth (not in terms of total usage: most users were not using their bandwidth consistently during peak hours because they weren't watching videos and all that jazz, they were loading web pages and downloading e-mail). Now that's no longer the case.
No longer having unlimited use won't help the ISP's, that's just their excuse to charge more. Solving their problems means either upgrading their network or, if that's not possible while maintaining a profit, tier actual bandwidth, not usage. Cap their lowest cost plan at 720k, lower their highest cost plan from 6Mbps to 1.5Mbps-3Mpbs if they have to. Their "boost" algorithm also works well, where you get a higher bandwidth for the first few seconds of a download, then you get back to a lower rate. That actually helps.
[1] To be really pedantic, bandwidth is measured in Hz. The term you are thinking of is 'throughput'.
Analog bandwidth is measured in Hz. Digital bandwidth is not measured in Hz, and is equal to maximum throughput, not just throughput. Throughput is a measure of the successful data rate. So if you're sending packets, but only 50% of them are getting to their destination, your throughput is only half your bandwidth.
This is because the rate of bits you can squeeze through a medium with a certain analog bandwidth is known (hartley's law), so if you're going to talk about bandwidth in a digital medium, you might as well use the value that is most useful to you (in bits/s) rather than Hz.
Mod that post -1 incorrect (they really need that option). The rules say that the random selection occurs when the order is indeterminate, but they are looking for the billionth one.
Anyone who downloads an app today gets entered into a lottery with the chance to win. You can also submit a form to enter without purchasing anything.
They do want people looking at, they just want to be paid for their work.
Then maybe they shouldn't put it up for free? Maybe they should try some type of subscription model.
Otherwise they can go out of business, and then where will you get your information?
The answer to that question is the same reason newspapers are NOT using some type of subscription model: "just about anywhere." There's no shortage of information online, and people who try to charge for the content suddenly find out that their clients are still finding the content they want elsewhere.
What happens in the highly unrealistic scenario if they all go out of business and you can't find the news anywhere online? The market will be ripe for new companies putting information up under a subscription model, now that they no longer have the free competition.
Ah, they want to be paid through ads? That's fine too. It's a really stupid idea to do and simultaneously make demands of the search engines bringing people to your website, much less sue them. I don't understand why google doesn't just quit linking to any newspaper that complains of the news aggregation, and then wait for THEM to offer to pay google a percentage of their profits if they'll just start listing and aggregating their news again.
Health Insurance should work like other insurance policies
No, that's stupid. Instead, we should stop calling it "health insurance," stop treating it as if it were insurance, and start calling it "health plan" which is actually what it is (and what everyone needs).
I do not mind universal catastrophic health care, I do mind the idea of paying for every kook who thinks his tummy ache is an emergency.
I hear this argument a lot, but it's actually a very poor one. It would be much, much cheaper if everyone went to their doctors anytime they got the first sign of an unusual symptom (by unusual = something they haven't felt before, or worse than what they've felt before), regardless of how benign that is. If it turns out to be nothing, as it will in most cases, you've wasted a small amount of cash (that adds up, I'll grant you that). However, if it turns out to be something dangerous in its first stages then you've very probably saved enough money to compensate for all the other cases when people didn't actually need the doctor. Simply because the treatment for dangerous conditions in later stages are typically much more complex, and much more expensive than dealing with the problem early on.
This recent story explains why it can be so out of control, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29998460/ [msn.com]
No, it really doesn't. The story says 9 patients made 2,700 ER visits for the past 6 years, it says nothing as to whether they actually NEEDED to go to the ER that often. In fact, 8 of the 9 were drug abusers, so chances are that they were all near-death from overdosing that many times, and the ER was justified.
Yes, the ER is expensive. Do you want less money to be wasted? The first time a junkie shows up in the ER, he needs to get the emergency treatment, followed by a court-mandated detox as well as paid-for shrinks to help him kick the habit. Then he won't have the following emergencies, and by paying more early on, you've again saved money in the long term.
A local hospital in Atlanta (actually more than one) reports many cases of people calling 911 to get a ride downtown where by law they are required to be given a "ticket" to get home. So what happens? Many abuse the system only to waste our money and the valuable time of doctors and nurses just so they can come downtown and see friends or do shopping.
That would be real abuse, and that one didn't come with a link (I was disappointed, I thought your msnbc link was going to talk about that story). First, I don't believe it, because I've been to the ER. If you've reported symptoms and told the paramedics to take you to the hospital, you're going to spend HOURS in the hospital while they test you for the symptoms you reported that were apparently severe enough to warrant an ambulance. There's no way that pain is worth the ride and (bus?) ticket.
I suppose once you got to the hospital you could refuse treatment, but I think the solution to that abuse is simple. If you call 911 and refuse tests, you get charged for all expenditures. If you have a history of calling 911 and tests consistently review that you have nothing, you get either charged with fraud (evidence that you just wanted a ride downtown--wtf?) or you get a court-mandated shrink appointment to manage your hypochondria (which is likely to account for a significant amount of repeat ER visitors).
IT'S NOT TIRED AND BORING AT ALL.
What's tired and boring are people with no lives like you who don't want to be here and yet come along to post. And the idiot mods who modded you up for that.
It's fine that you think it's dumb. That's your prerogative. So you can't quit slashdot for A DAY?
I enjoyed this years' stories. I thought some of them were quite funny, as are the posts (except for people like you). You may think that makes me an idiot, and again, you're entitled to your opinion. But do you go around to every website on the internet that you think is stupid to post how stupid you think it is?
On second thought, you should do that. The internet is a big place, and if that task keeps you busy and away from here, we both win.
hey have to tell us that "it's pants", which somehow we non-Brits will all magically know.
I would like to tell you to turn in your card or something, but nobody else seems to remember how the "ispants" slashdot meme started. First there was this story which introduced the crowd to the term. Then people (I bet mostly Americans, since it never happened before) started tagging idle stories as "idleispants."
Basically, the person you replied to might not even be British. He might be one of us Americans, who is using a meme that he expects the slashdot crowd to be familiar with.
For those of you who ... I congratulate you, as you are clearly an intelligent audience.
This reads like a really sleazy sales pitch, along the lines of "Did you know that top billionaires take my supplement to boost their brain power?"
Not only that, but I actually went to Rands' blog and read the latest post just to see what could be so amazing about it. In there, I found more stupid marketing / management terminology:
In a good bridge, I see the defiant end result of how some of my favorite engineering stories begin:
Nobody "discovers the impossible" but "knows how to build through the impossible." That's not what impossible means. But it sure as hell sounds impressive, and it excites people!
The ability to deal with obstacles, even very difficult obstacles is a very marketable skill. However, when you start talking about overcoming challenges as "doing the impossible" you stop sounding like someone who is actually capable of dealing with problems and starts sounding like a moron salesman. Especially when you later say something stupid like, "Impossible is when we do our best work." It might sound great when your favorite Hollywood hero says that he "laughs in the face of danger," but in real life, when you're managing people, if you dismiss a current challenge by saying, "that's when we do our best work" you'll piss your employees off. They know it's bullshit, they know they'd do better if it was easy and they had more time. You can tell them that you have confidence they can handle the problem, but don't dismiss the problem with levity.
Hell, even in his own example of the Brooklyn Bridge, he says that when they hit the challenges during the building process, the manager got the bends, two employees died, and they decided to let one of the towers rest on compacted sand instead of bedrock. Then he says how amazing it is that it was a good decision, because it "hasn't moved" since. Might have been a good decision, but "the best" outcome obviously would have been no injuries, no deaths, and a foundation that was built exactly according to plan. Clearly, they don't do their best work under "impossible" conditions.
You want some tips on managing programmers and engineers? I don't have all the answers, but I do have one for certain: that type of marketing pitch might work when you're meeting to sell the product, but programmers and engineers aren't like most people in that regard. Exaggerations like that are just likely to piss us off, not impress or motivate us. So you post a summary like that on slashdot, and you get a bunch of angry geeks; you try to manage people like that, and you get a bunch of employees labeling you as a PHB.
To hold a child's hand so tightly that they cannot squirm away will only cause them pain
Dude, when your kid is squirming to get away from you so much that you think you need to hold so tight as to hurt them...you pick them up
There's no need for a leash. There's no need to hurt them. There's no need to let them go running away to where you can't protect them.
No, they're not. They "merely" apply science to specific well-known problems.
I take offense to that. Although a lot of engineering involves solving well-known problems, there's a good deal of "never-before-done, at the conceptual stage, we're not sure if it's even possible" problems. Yes, we still use well known physics in the design process, but calling us "not scientists" is a little bit like saying modern mathematicians are not mathematicians because all they're doing is applying well-known math to solve their new problems.
Good engineers apply the scientific method in their design process. When creating something nobody has done before, they examine previous work, they construct a "hypothesis" of how to best solve the problem, they perform tests and simulations to make sure their assumptions are correct, and then they analyze the data, draw a conclusion (create a plan), and build the thing.
if we went by your standard of evidence it's doubtful that our collective scientific knowledge would actually have gotten far enough
I agree with you in principle. You can't take anything for granted, common sense is often wrong. And that applies in engineering a LOT.
If we went by your standard of evidence, we would consider there to be a mountain of evidence that the Sun goes around the Earth. Nowadays it's easy to see that it's the other way round
However, you picked the worst example ever to make your point, because you just used a "common-sense, everyone thinks this is right, but technically it's not" example. It's not necessarily "wrong" to say the Sun goes around the Earth. It's inconvenient for calculations because the center of mass of the earth-sun system lies inside the Sun. It doesn't mean that you can't come up with an elaborate mathematical model with the Earth as the reference center of the solar system (and it has been done), it just means that you'll be doing too much damn work.
There's no absolute reference points in the universe. Picking the Sun as the center of the solar system is the equivalent of using the cylindrical coordinate system instead of the cartesian one for problems that make sense. Things get a whole lot easier, and the math is way simpler and more elegant.
I think you're confusing consciousness with reasoning. Consciousness is needed to 'feel' anything. But consciousness doesn't imply intelligence.
Consciousness in the sense of being aware and responsive to the environment is necessary to pain and is something that crabs obviously have. Consciousness in the philosophical sense of being self-aware isn't necessary for pain. There's a big difference between the feeling of pain and the ability to realize, "this is me feeling pain. I don't like it." Even human babies aren't capable of having that thought (self-awareness develops a while after you're born), but that doesn't mean they can't feel pain.
The question is does their form of pain "hurt"? We'll never know that. After all, we don't even know why pain hurts for us humans; all we know is that it does indeed hurt and is not something we like to experience (unless you're masochistic).
You asked the question, and then you answered it. Evolutionarily speaking, if the signals that indicate you're being injured are unpleasant to you, you're more likely to avoid the same injury in the future, because you remember the unpleasantness. That gives you an advantage over anyone who doesn't think the injury signals are unpleasant, and it's why masochists (who actually finds those signals pleasurable) make up a minority.
Everyone trying to attribute conscious intellectuality to pain isn't thinking it through. Consciousness just means you'll be better able to avoid the unpleasant feeling, because it allows you to analyze exactly what brought it on and extrapolate to similar situations. What matters isn't consciousness, but memory: If you can't remember (at least on some very small level) whether a certain action was pleasant or unpleasant, then it's not going to help you in the future. So there's no evolutionary benefit to actually feeling an unpleasant sensation associated with the injury signal.
Think of it in this way. If you accidentally put your hand on a stove, the injury signal travels through your nervous system to your brain. Before it gets to your brain, your spinal cord will send the necessary signal to cause you to move your hand back (because this is really important and wasting time would lead to more damage, and put you in an evolutionary disadvantage). As a result you move your hand away, and the pain doesn't come for another second. If you don't have any capability for memory, the job has been done, and the feeling of pain that comes later doesn't help at all. You won't remember and you'll do it again. If, on the other hand, you do remember the incident, the feeling of pain later on is what prevents you from putting your hand in the stove again. You want to avoid the unpleasantness.
What it comes down to is basically this: It doesn't matter if crabs thrash around when they're in boiling water...that doesn't mean pain, it could mean the reflex of taking your hand off the stove. However, if they can show that crabs avoid situations where they were injured before, that means memory, and it means pain. In which case, the boiling them on hot water before killing them swiftly can be argued to be really unethical.
...the first 1831 lines (!) of the page are blank...Attention Globe and Mail web designers: When your idiot print newspaper editor tells you to make liberal use of whitespace, this is not what he had in mind!
Believe it or not, someone had it in mind. This is most likely a really, really stupid attempt at security by obscurity.
PHB:My kid was showing me something on our website, and then he just clicked some buttons and the entire source code was available for him to look at. You need to do something about that. ::whispering to WebGuy #2:: Just add a bunch of empty lines. When the boss looks at it, he won't think to scroll down much before he gives up.
WebGuy:You mean the html code? Well, that actually does need to get transferred. You see, the browser does the display transformation on the client's computer...
PHB:The source code is out intellectual property!
WebGuy:Fine. We'll handle it.
PHB:Ah, I see that when I try to look at the source it now shows up blank! Good work!