It sounds like you work for Norton. Maybe your tin-foil hat is just a tad too tight and it's cutting off circulation.
1. A couple times a year I do some spring cleaning and make sure I'm not running anything I don't want to be. Usually this is just stuff I don't use anymore. Then there's cookies.
2. The last thing I'm worried about when I'm getting ready to go to bed is whether some piece of spam contains a trojan horse I'll never open. Actually, my spam folder is empty. I must be doing some(multiple)thing right. Setting up your browser correctly will do you more good than scanning your computer for viruses every night. Staying off Facebook and porn sights helps, too.
3. I don't owe shit to the rest of the world. I didn't tell those jackasses to go buy Windows and spend all their time on Facebook. Your FUD won't make me pity them.
What I don't understand about this software is how does it distinguish between content, structure, and grammar? It's one thing for software to grade structure, especially if it's a rigid 5- format. It gets tricky with grammar but is doable. But here you still run into little quirky problems: When, if ever, does the program allow a sentence to end with a preposition? When, if ever, will it allow a sentence to begin with 'but,' 'and,' or 'because?'
Content's the one I can't understand. For example, take an argumentative essay that tries to explain the cause for the Civil War and take a side. I can see software identifying whether the syllogisms composing the argument are valid or invalid, but a valid argument can still be unsound. That seems to be what this professor has done, he created an unsound essay utilizing valid structure.
I also blame the GOP for a lot of things, and in this case they do deserve some blame, but you also have to blame the university for their knee-jerk reaction to having their funds cut. They probably paid Will Muschamp that much or more for his 7-6 season last year, not to mention how much they paid their assistant coaches.
They also could have courted boosters, especially alumni with CS degrees.
It was irresponsible for the state legislature to cut funding for education, an unfortunate trend throughout the country that has escalated the cost of higher education throughout the last couple decades, but I don't believe for a second the university couldn't have made this a priority. If they needed to scrape up an extra $1.7 million a year for their football or basketball team, they would.
I also don't like the idea that we expect the government to fund higher education but at the same time 1) we still expect students to pay exorbitant amount of money to attend college with money mattering more than academic achievement 2) the government doesn't actually control the universities. Until the federal government takes control of our higher education system it will continue to function as a place for rich kids to spend most their time partying. Most kids don't enroll in higher education to learn because we provide them with far too many opportunities to go to college while side-stepping the learning process, provided that mommy and daddy can foot the bill. Schools like UofF are the worst offenders in this regard, so is it any surprise they don't prioritize education and run the university like it's a business, the P&L reports dictating what stays and what goes?
Why does something nefarious have to be going on? Because it's a corporation? I don't see what they have to gain from dishonesty. It's not like the average Twitter user could even define intellectual property, let alone care about it. It may seem strange, but sometimes people do things because they think it's right.
Also, 'amoral' means ethically neutral or ignorant. An act of manipulation is generally considered immoral, which means not moral.
I think that's the strange thing about this. The real disaster was the tsunami but a lot of people don't even acknowledge the tsunami and just see it as some nuclear disaster. I think there are a lot of people who are irrationally afraid of nuclear power. These people tend to have very limited scientific knowledge so what they've learned about nuclear technology throughout the years has nothing to do with physics and chemistry and everything to do with Chernobyl and Hiroshima. People think that nuclear fission is beyond our control because they don't understand it and they're only made aware of it when something goes wrong or it's used as a destructive force.
I'm sure, as you said, that a newer plant would have shrugged off the wave. And it probably wouldn't have anything to do with the reactor, but the architecture of the plant itself. Architecture in Japan has progressed since 1971 much more than nuclear reactors, with a specific focus on withstanding earthquakes and other natural disasters. A building that old in Japan is considered ancient and probably deemed unfit to handle any natural disaster.
The argument is a fallacious appeal from authority because he claims that one must be a parent to understand what it means to be a good parent. It reminds me of our current paradox of politicians. Everyone thinks politicians are rotten but no one wants to vote for someone with no experience in politics. Experience in politics seems to me to have nothing to do with how good one is as a politician just as experience in parenting has nothing to do with how good a parent is. Maybe, with the second child, Jessica Crackwhore knows some tricks that makes it easier on her. But she's still a bad parent when Child #2 doesn't graduate and ends up in prison at age 18.
The quoted sentence is also a non-sequitur because it is possible for something to work like you think it will even if you haven't done it.
Regarding your stance: Kids aren't furniture. My argument may be dumb if you remove the "starving and lonely" part but until some magician steps up and waves his magic wand that fills the bellies of orphans around the world and provides them with responsible and resourceful caretakers, "starving and lonely" remains an irrevocable truth. I think it's selfish that anyone could love one human more than another because they share the same genes.
This may come as a surprise to you, but it's not about my standards or your standards. Morality is objective. My moral standards may be incorrect but they're certainly not subjective. It's not up to me to determine how much you help but doesn't invalidate my opinion on the matter. Why it it so outrageous to tell someone, "If you really loved your kids you wouldn't blow cigarette smoke in their faces"? What's unfair about that? If you really love someone, you wouldn't purposefully harm them. I don't have to be a parent to arrive at that conclusion.
I'm sick of bad parents bitching about the difficulties of parenting as an excuse for what a poor job they're doing.
I'm not saying you're a bad parent - I don't know anything about you. But the fallacious excuse you just spewed is one that is far too often used by a parent to defend how they've raised their child who just got in trouble or just dropped out or became an embarrassment in some other way. It's one thing to believe that being a parent has given you some insights into raising kids, it's another to say that you're beyond reproach of any non-parent. I don't believe your claim that every single parent loves their children, but I would agree that most do. But love isn't much of a recompense for bringing a person into this world without being able to properly provide for them.
The fact of the matter is that people who consciously choose not to have children tend to be the ones who realize what it takes to be a parent. It's the hopeless, short-sighted, optimistic, "I can do better than my parents!" ones who end up with kids they can't handle. They end up with a responsibility they never understood the magnitude of until it's too late to get out of it and then they say with astonishment, "Parenting is really hard!" Well, no shit.
However, unlike the poster you're responding to I don't feel that having a child is irresponsible because of the public school system. I believe it's immoral because there are so many millions of orphans in the world, that if you want to raise a child selecting from that pool is the only moral option.
They should have asked "Will you replace your hybrid with another hybrid?" -- If you have a Prius, you may consider buying a truck as a supplementary vehicle to help move big stuff around. Hybrids aren't luxury cars, but since they're fairly new the owners are likely to be people who can afford more than one vehicle. Usually people who own more than one vehicle go for extremes -- the truck and the hybrid, the van and the Miata, etc.
Regardless, I can would never drive a hybrid. The battery is just too much of a liability. My car may be old but at least I can take care of the maintenance myself and parts are cheap. Then there's the resell value -- who wants to buy something that depends on a battery that's already undergone countless charges and drains? Maybe someday Tesla will produce something so amazing it even blows off Jeremy Clarkson's socks and my mind will be changed, but I'm not holding my breath.
Hopefully there really is a lot of dissatisfaction among hybrid owners (I'd be dissatisfied if my car couldn't beat a dirt bike in a half mile race) that will lead to more bivalent liquid hydrogen/gasoline engines.
So, if that guy in your anecdote was white, would you hate white people and stereotype them as violent thugs?
One with anecdotes such as yours shouldn't talk shit about cowardly pussies in their sig. Pot, meet kettle. It's so sad that you think your anecdote actually justifies negative stereotypes of blacks - way to rationalize racism.
How many housing projects are all black these days? America is more diverse than ever, but it's not because of black upward mobility, it's because of white downward mobility.
It's not about black or white - it's about class. Take a rich black kid dressed in middle class attire, who speaks perfect English and doesn't know slang and throw in a project. He won't last any longer than the middle class white kid. Poor people tend to hate rich people.
It's not like you have to be of a violent nature and trained in physical combat to survive the ghetto. Most aren't. But if you flaunt money - especially legally obtained money - then you make yourself a target. The way I see it, classism has overtaken racism in America. The guy who wrote the article that everyone's all up in arms about is just behind the times - if he knew what was what he'd tell his kids to avoid poor people, not black people.
Of course, instead of telling his kids to avoid black/poor people he could just enroll them in a public school in a diverse district so they can learn to how to deal with these people socially. The poor are culturally different from the middle class who are culturally different from the rich. If you understand the nuances between these cultures then you can interact with any of them without pissing anyone off.
You completely miss Dr. Spork's point. He's talking about the ability to put the plan into action, not the quality of the plan.
So being able to put any old bullshit plan into action is manly? That goes for a "point"? Meanwhile, I'm deemed a troll haha.. IOW correct ^^
This may have been a bad plan, especially in hindsight, but their ability to execute it with efficiency should be applauded.
I could not disagree more. But in the spirit of peace, I'm not gonna invoke the Nazis on this. Even though they're kinda screaming for it.
I give kudos where kudos are due - just because the you can compare something to the Nazis (I'm assuming you meant the efficient construction of large scale projects) doesn't mean that it's necessarily evil. Let's follow that logic: The Nazis ate food. The Nazis are evil. Therefore eating food is evil. The fallacy is obvious. Being able to invoke a Nazi comparison doesn't prove your point. If the Nazis Germany did something right there's no reason not to acknowledge it just because of its association with all the horrible things that happened during that time.
Accomplishment through hard work is manly. Whether I'm chopping wood, building a barn, or shooting a deer with an arrow. You can accomplish a bullshit plan with manliness, you can accomplish a great plan with manliness. Without manliness nothing is accomplished. Political correctness be damned.
In America there is a new name for God - it's The Market. We worship The Market, we are grateful for what The Market gives but do not demand any more, and we dare not try to control The Market for there is no greater blasphemy. Attempting to undercut the market with free products - whether it be software or a textbook or community service - that's the worship of the evil false idol: socialism.
Copyright is, by definition, government interference in the free market.
Who said anything about free? It's a meaningless qualifier to trick stupid people, like the 'Great' in Great Britain. 'Free' is the word that makes people believe in the market even though it's not an accurate description (let alone one anyone could ever agree on the meaning of).
But really, the way copyrights and patents have been utilized throughout the past century and the way that these laws have changed demonstrate the fierce independence of those with lots of power in the market. The government may interfere with the market, but only at the insistence of Mickey Mouse. Is the dog wagging the tail or is the tail wagging the dog?
They're probably better. Modern U.S. textbooks are terrible.
Look at modern math books, for example. They're ridiculously large and most the pages are filled exercises. Most of the exercises are painfully easy, then there are some difficult ones, and then a couple of real tough ones. Then other portions are dedicated to stupid little "Did You Know?" boxes that explain something that's pretty irrelevant to the subject at hand. Then you have several diagrams which all do a poor job of explaining the same concept in different ways.
Look at most European math books. A fraction of the size, an emphasis on formulae and theory, and fewer but more difficult exercises. I haven't seen any east Asian textbooks but I'd be willing to bet they follow a similar model.
Considering that these countries tend to do much better than the U.S. academically, especially in math and hard science, it would make sense to copy their methods. The only problem with that is the hundreds of pages of diagrams and fluff exercises cost more - they require more employees, more paper, more ink, and most importantly a higher price tag. More revenue, more profit.
In America there is a new name for God - it's The Market. We worship The Market, we are grateful for what The Market gives but do not demand any more, and we dare not try to control The Market for there is no greater blasphemy. Attempting to undercut the market with free products - whether it be software or a textbook or community service - that's the worship of the evil false idol: socialism.
You completely miss Dr. Spork's point. He's talking about the ability to put the plan into action, not the quality of the plan. This may have been a bad plan, especially in hindsight, but their ability to execute it with efficiency should be applauded. That was also the same generation that brought us the U.S. highway system and put a man on the moon.
Today we can't even build a train - even if funding were approved it would probably take decades to bring a modern transportation system to the U.S. because of all the red tape. It doesn't matter if we have the resources to do great things if we don't even try to do them, if we have a system which misdirects the resources, or if the vast majority, such as yourself, preaches apathy.
I'm sure there's some governing body for Native Americans - they should patent corn and sue Monsanto for all they're worth. It took them thousands of years to "invent" corn and Monsanto replicates and resells this invention without paying any compensation to the inventors.
In all seriousness, corn is probably the most impressively modified plant next to bananas. In its original form it was pretty much just a grain (corn, in fact, is a generic term for grain that's been part of the English language before any English speaker laid eyes on maize).
If any invention is going on here, it's the process by which the seeds are made. A process that's not too disimilar from the way the Native Americans made corn or how Mendal manipulated peas and flowers and whatnot. But what Monsanto is doing is closer to what Mendel did than the Natives. At least with maize its almost wholly different from the original plant. It's like the difference between a great dane and a chihuahua. I live in a rural area and I'm surrounded by things grown from Monsanto seeds. I recognize them as plants that have existed far before Monsanto. They would have to at least start producing something that struck me as a 'new' plant for me to even consider the possibility that it could be patentable, but then I'd still be wary since, as you said, no one builds seeds from scratch.
It's also an example of how this walled garden approach is bullshit.
It's not like this can't just be run on a server as a web app. The walled garden does have a gate - it's called Safari.
Personally, I hope this motivates the guy who made it to do just that. People need to realize that Facebook and Foursquare and G+ and whatever other social networks there are are creepy, the app is just an efficient way of exploiting this.
People keep forgetting this: only the members of the upper class were bugged and monitored. The plebes were left alone with their pointless little existences. Quote 1984 only if you have actually read and comprehend it.
So the fact that I know the plot details and such doesn't indicate that I've read and comprehended 1984, but if I copy and paste a quote from the book you'll believe me? What I'm not comprehending is your point.
Personally, I think everyone takes 1984 way too seriously. Do you distrust everyone named O'Brien?
I guess the terms of use can insight feelings of 1984 if you're pessimistic about it, and the lack of an indicator light is careless design, but the 1984 fears seem a bit hyperbolic to me. In 1984 the TVs were mandated and the government was plugged into each camera. There doesn't seem to be any malice here - I doubt Samsung has an interest in shaping the world in the form of an Orwellian nightmare. Rather, this just seems to be a cultural oversight - doing business in foreign lands leads to those and those in business love to tell anecdotes about them - Mexican Novas, Nothing Sucks Like Electrolux, etc. Whereas American engineers and marketing people would be quick to concern themselves about any parallels to Oceania because almost everyone reads 1984 in American schools and top-hat capitalists naively use it to defend their views, Korean engineers and marketing people probably didn't think about such concerns. This seems to be the way all TVs are going, and when Samsung realizes that models with indicator lights for the camera sell better they'll probably implement it (I'm sure there's no indicator light because that would have added a couple of pennies onto the cost of production or it never even crossed anyones mind as necessary, not because the evil people at Samsung want to spy on unsuspecting couch potatoes).
A much better literary analogy would be the TVs in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit-451. That's the goal of all TV and game console companies, and that's what this thing sounds like to me. Samsung doesn't want to spy on you. They just want you to sit your fat ass in front of their TV all day and buy services from them with it. Unless they have some secret contract with the NSA . . . *puts on tinfoil hat*
It makes sense for a tablet. I even like the way that Lion does it because it's just like an expanded maximize that's useful in certain situations - gesture controls on the trackpad are integral for the way OS X does it, though, and I don't know if that feature will ever appear on non-Apple computers.
But I think that Microsoft's Windows 8 strategy is a big mistake. For all the reasons the marketing people can come up with to make the tablet and desktop OS the same OS, there's a technical reason why the synergy people are wrong. The differences between the ARM and Intel versions are one example.
Hopefully, for my sake, Apple doesn't go overboard in their blending of iOS and OS X. Fortunately, I like what they did with Lion. I don't really use Mission Control, but I like the way they've done full screen apps (allowing you to jump in and out of full screen mode). It'd make me sad if the next big cat went the way of Metro (which it doesn't look like so far). I find it strange that Microsoft didn't see what happened with Unity and heed the warning.
It's an authority that was given to the NSA through the FISA Amendments Act signed into law by Bush and still supported today by Obama.
No law permits a violation of the Constitution. Any law that contradicts the Constitution is null and void. So they're right that they don't have the authority to spy domestically, regardless of what the FISA Amendments Act says. Whether this is applied in practice is the real mystery. Other organizations - I believe the DEA/FBI - were recently caught putting tracking devices on people's cars.
It seems to be a common attitude in law enforcement - from the local to federal level - that liberties are an obstacle to justice rather than the cornerstone of it. We all know about the extensive data mining of internet companies like Facebook. I can only imagine what type of scary shit the NSA is doing. Freedom on information laws aren't very effective considering anything the public needs to know can be classified.
Maybe you're new around here, but if you want people to take your comments seriously you may want to utilize logic and empirical evidence rather than your GUT. Perhaps no one made you aware that this is a website for nerds - you know, people into math and science, disciplines built upon logic and empirical evidence. My gut tells me Foxconn probably partakes in some unsavory labor practices but I would never accuse them of such without evidence lest I completely discredit myself like Mike Daisey did.
You should sound like the seasoned veteran in some cop show who doesn't understand the importance of a search warrant. "I've gotta hunch, dammit, I don't need no stinkin' warrant! I know a scumbag when I see one!"
I did some work for a Chinese manufacturer that was a native Chinese business (they designed, engineered, and manufactured their own products). When my boss, a marketing guy they hired to sell their stuff in the States, went over there to check out the factory he was extremely impressed. He said it was better than any American factory he's ever seen. It was clean, high tech, and there were quality services provided for the laborers.
China allows hell hole factories, and you're probably right in saying that most of them are hell holes, but the country has been developing at a rapid pace. Only a few decades ago China was considered a third world country. It still has areas where the quality of life is no better than third world, but the progress they've made is phenomenal. Many companies are looking to Africa and Latin America for future manufacturing because they're worried that China's becoming too wealthy of a country (basically, they're worried that the manufacturing costs in China will escalate as the country becomes more wealthy).
Slashdot Mirror
It sounds like you work for Norton. Maybe your tin-foil hat is just a tad too tight and it's cutting off circulation.
1. A couple times a year I do some spring cleaning and make sure I'm not running anything I don't want to be. Usually this is just stuff I don't use anymore. Then there's cookies.
2. The last thing I'm worried about when I'm getting ready to go to bed is whether some piece of spam contains a trojan horse I'll never open. Actually, my spam folder is empty. I must be doing some(multiple)thing right. Setting up your browser correctly will do you more good than scanning your computer for viruses every night. Staying off Facebook and porn sights helps, too.
3. I don't owe shit to the rest of the world. I didn't tell those jackasses to go buy Windows and spend all their time on Facebook. Your FUD won't make me pity them.
What I don't understand about this software is how does it distinguish between content, structure, and grammar? It's one thing for software to grade structure, especially if it's a rigid 5- format. It gets tricky with grammar but is doable. But here you still run into little quirky problems: When, if ever, does the program allow a sentence to end with a preposition? When, if ever, will it allow a sentence to begin with 'but,' 'and,' or 'because?'
Content's the one I can't understand. For example, take an argumentative essay that tries to explain the cause for the Civil War and take a side. I can see software identifying whether the syllogisms composing the argument are valid or invalid, but a valid argument can still be unsound. That seems to be what this professor has done, he created an unsound essay utilizing valid structure.
I also blame the GOP for a lot of things, and in this case they do deserve some blame, but you also have to blame the university for their knee-jerk reaction to having their funds cut. They probably paid Will Muschamp that much or more for his 7-6 season last year, not to mention how much they paid their assistant coaches.
They also could have courted boosters, especially alumni with CS degrees.
It was irresponsible for the state legislature to cut funding for education, an unfortunate trend throughout the country that has escalated the cost of higher education throughout the last couple decades, but I don't believe for a second the university couldn't have made this a priority. If they needed to scrape up an extra $1.7 million a year for their football or basketball team, they would.
I also don't like the idea that we expect the government to fund higher education but at the same time 1) we still expect students to pay exorbitant amount of money to attend college with money mattering more than academic achievement 2) the government doesn't actually control the universities. Until the federal government takes control of our higher education system it will continue to function as a place for rich kids to spend most their time partying. Most kids don't enroll in higher education to learn because we provide them with far too many opportunities to go to college while side-stepping the learning process, provided that mommy and daddy can foot the bill. Schools like UofF are the worst offenders in this regard, so is it any surprise they don't prioritize education and run the university like it's a business, the P&L reports dictating what stays and what goes?
Why does something nefarious have to be going on? Because it's a corporation? I don't see what they have to gain from dishonesty. It's not like the average Twitter user could even define intellectual property, let alone care about it. It may seem strange, but sometimes people do things because they think it's right.
Also, 'amoral' means ethically neutral or ignorant. An act of manipulation is generally considered immoral, which means not moral.
I think that's the strange thing about this. The real disaster was the tsunami but a lot of people don't even acknowledge the tsunami and just see it as some nuclear disaster. I think there are a lot of people who are irrationally afraid of nuclear power. These people tend to have very limited scientific knowledge so what they've learned about nuclear technology throughout the years has nothing to do with physics and chemistry and everything to do with Chernobyl and Hiroshima. People think that nuclear fission is beyond our control because they don't understand it and they're only made aware of it when something goes wrong or it's used as a destructive force.
I'm sure, as you said, that a newer plant would have shrugged off the wave. And it probably wouldn't have anything to do with the reactor, but the architecture of the plant itself. Architecture in Japan has progressed since 1971 much more than nuclear reactors, with a specific focus on withstanding earthquakes and other natural disasters. A building that old in Japan is considered ancient and probably deemed unfit to handle any natural disaster.
if you haven't actually DONE what you are preaching that others should, then it doesn't work like you think it will.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority#Fallacious_appeals_to_authority
The argument is a fallacious appeal from authority because he claims that one must be a parent to understand what it means to be a good parent. It reminds me of our current paradox of politicians. Everyone thinks politicians are rotten but no one wants to vote for someone with no experience in politics. Experience in politics seems to me to have nothing to do with how good one is as a politician just as experience in parenting has nothing to do with how good a parent is. Maybe, with the second child, Jessica Crackwhore knows some tricks that makes it easier on her. But she's still a bad parent when Child #2 doesn't graduate and ends up in prison at age 18.
The quoted sentence is also a non-sequitur because it is possible for something to work like you think it will even if you haven't done it.
Regarding your stance: Kids aren't furniture. My argument may be dumb if you remove the "starving and lonely" part but until some magician steps up and waves his magic wand that fills the bellies of orphans around the world and provides them with responsible and resourceful caretakers, "starving and lonely" remains an irrevocable truth. I think it's selfish that anyone could love one human more than another because they share the same genes.
This may come as a surprise to you, but it's not about my standards or your standards. Morality is objective. My moral standards may be incorrect but they're certainly not subjective. It's not up to me to determine how much you help but doesn't invalidate my opinion on the matter. Why it it so outrageous to tell someone, "If you really loved your kids you wouldn't blow cigarette smoke in their faces"? What's unfair about that? If you really love someone, you wouldn't purposefully harm them. I don't have to be a parent to arrive at that conclusion.
Basically, you didn't read the article.
I'm sick of bad parents bitching about the difficulties of parenting as an excuse for what a poor job they're doing.
I'm not saying you're a bad parent - I don't know anything about you. But the fallacious excuse you just spewed is one that is far too often used by a parent to defend how they've raised their child who just got in trouble or just dropped out or became an embarrassment in some other way. It's one thing to believe that being a parent has given you some insights into raising kids, it's another to say that you're beyond reproach of any non-parent. I don't believe your claim that every single parent loves their children, but I would agree that most do. But love isn't much of a recompense for bringing a person into this world without being able to properly provide for them.
The fact of the matter is that people who consciously choose not to have children tend to be the ones who realize what it takes to be a parent. It's the hopeless, short-sighted, optimistic, "I can do better than my parents!" ones who end up with kids they can't handle. They end up with a responsibility they never understood the magnitude of until it's too late to get out of it and then they say with astonishment, "Parenting is really hard!" Well, no shit.
However, unlike the poster you're responding to I don't feel that having a child is irresponsible because of the public school system. I believe it's immoral because there are so many millions of orphans in the world, that if you want to raise a child selecting from that pool is the only moral option.
They have a 90% share of the search market
No they don't.
They should have asked "Will you replace your hybrid with another hybrid?" -- If you have a Prius, you may consider buying a truck as a supplementary vehicle to help move big stuff around. Hybrids aren't luxury cars, but since they're fairly new the owners are likely to be people who can afford more than one vehicle. Usually people who own more than one vehicle go for extremes -- the truck and the hybrid, the van and the Miata, etc.
Regardless, I can would never drive a hybrid. The battery is just too much of a liability. My car may be old but at least I can take care of the maintenance myself and parts are cheap. Then there's the resell value -- who wants to buy something that depends on a battery that's already undergone countless charges and drains? Maybe someday Tesla will produce something so amazing it even blows off Jeremy Clarkson's socks and my mind will be changed, but I'm not holding my breath.
Hopefully there really is a lot of dissatisfaction among hybrid owners (I'd be dissatisfied if my car couldn't beat a dirt bike in a half mile race) that will lead to more bivalent liquid hydrogen/gasoline engines.
So, if that guy in your anecdote was white, would you hate white people and stereotype them as violent thugs?
One with anecdotes such as yours shouldn't talk shit about cowardly pussies in their sig. Pot, meet kettle. It's so sad that you think your anecdote actually justifies negative stereotypes of blacks - way to rationalize racism.
How many housing projects are all black these days? America is more diverse than ever, but it's not because of black upward mobility, it's because of white downward mobility.
It's not about black or white - it's about class. Take a rich black kid dressed in middle class attire, who speaks perfect English and doesn't know slang and throw in a project. He won't last any longer than the middle class white kid. Poor people tend to hate rich people.
It's not like you have to be of a violent nature and trained in physical combat to survive the ghetto. Most aren't. But if you flaunt money - especially legally obtained money - then you make yourself a target. The way I see it, classism has overtaken racism in America. The guy who wrote the article that everyone's all up in arms about is just behind the times - if he knew what was what he'd tell his kids to avoid poor people, not black people.
Of course, instead of telling his kids to avoid black/poor people he could just enroll them in a public school in a diverse district so they can learn to how to deal with these people socially. The poor are culturally different from the middle class who are culturally different from the rich. If you understand the nuances between these cultures then you can interact with any of them without pissing anyone off.
So being able to put any old bullshit plan into action is manly? That goes for a "point"? Meanwhile, I'm deemed a troll haha.. IOW correct ^^
I could not disagree more. But in the spirit of peace, I'm not gonna invoke the Nazis on this. Even though they're kinda screaming for it.
I give kudos where kudos are due - just because the you can compare something to the Nazis (I'm assuming you meant the efficient construction of large scale projects) doesn't mean that it's necessarily evil. Let's follow that logic: The Nazis ate food. The Nazis are evil. Therefore eating food is evil. The fallacy is obvious. Being able to invoke a Nazi comparison doesn't prove your point. If the Nazis Germany did something right there's no reason not to acknowledge it just because of its association with all the horrible things that happened during that time.
Accomplishment through hard work is manly. Whether I'm chopping wood, building a barn, or shooting a deer with an arrow. You can accomplish a bullshit plan with manliness, you can accomplish a great plan with manliness. Without manliness nothing is accomplished. Political correctness be damned.
In America there is a new name for God - it's The Market. We worship The Market, we are grateful for what The Market gives but do not demand any more, and we dare not try to control The Market for there is no greater blasphemy. Attempting to undercut the market with free products - whether it be software or a textbook or community service - that's the worship of the evil false idol: socialism.
Copyright is, by definition, government interference in the free market.
Who said anything about free? It's a meaningless qualifier to trick stupid people, like the 'Great' in Great Britain. 'Free' is the word that makes people believe in the market even though it's not an accurate description (let alone one anyone could ever agree on the meaning of).
But really, the way copyrights and patents have been utilized throughout the past century and the way that these laws have changed demonstrate the fierce independence of those with lots of power in the market. The government may interfere with the market, but only at the insistence of Mickey Mouse. Is the dog wagging the tail or is the tail wagging the dog?
They're probably better. Modern U.S. textbooks are terrible.
Look at modern math books, for example. They're ridiculously large and most the pages are filled exercises. Most of the exercises are painfully easy, then there are some difficult ones, and then a couple of real tough ones. Then other portions are dedicated to stupid little "Did You Know?" boxes that explain something that's pretty irrelevant to the subject at hand. Then you have several diagrams which all do a poor job of explaining the same concept in different ways.
Look at most European math books. A fraction of the size, an emphasis on formulae and theory, and fewer but more difficult exercises. I haven't seen any east Asian textbooks but I'd be willing to bet they follow a similar model.
Considering that these countries tend to do much better than the U.S. academically, especially in math and hard science, it would make sense to copy their methods. The only problem with that is the hundreds of pages of diagrams and fluff exercises cost more - they require more employees, more paper, more ink, and most importantly a higher price tag. More revenue, more profit.
In America there is a new name for God - it's The Market. We worship The Market, we are grateful for what The Market gives but do not demand any more, and we dare not try to control The Market for there is no greater blasphemy. Attempting to undercut the market with free products - whether it be software or a textbook or community service - that's the worship of the evil false idol: socialism.
You completely miss Dr. Spork's point. He's talking about the ability to put the plan into action, not the quality of the plan. This may have been a bad plan, especially in hindsight, but their ability to execute it with efficiency should be applauded. That was also the same generation that brought us the U.S. highway system and put a man on the moon.
Today we can't even build a train - even if funding were approved it would probably take decades to bring a modern transportation system to the U.S. because of all the red tape. It doesn't matter if we have the resources to do great things if we don't even try to do them, if we have a system which misdirects the resources, or if the vast majority, such as yourself, preaches apathy.
I forgot that it was illegal to be related to a criminal.
I'm sure there's some governing body for Native Americans - they should patent corn and sue Monsanto for all they're worth. It took them thousands of years to "invent" corn and Monsanto replicates and resells this invention without paying any compensation to the inventors.
In all seriousness, corn is probably the most impressively modified plant next to bananas. In its original form it was pretty much just a grain (corn, in fact, is a generic term for grain that's been part of the English language before any English speaker laid eyes on maize).
If any invention is going on here, it's the process by which the seeds are made. A process that's not too disimilar from the way the Native Americans made corn or how Mendal manipulated peas and flowers and whatnot. But what Monsanto is doing is closer to what Mendel did than the Natives. At least with maize its almost wholly different from the original plant. It's like the difference between a great dane and a chihuahua. I live in a rural area and I'm surrounded by things grown from Monsanto seeds. I recognize them as plants that have existed far before Monsanto. They would have to at least start producing something that struck me as a 'new' plant for me to even consider the possibility that it could be patentable, but then I'd still be wary since, as you said, no one builds seeds from scratch.
It's also an example of how this walled garden approach is bullshit.
It's not like this can't just be run on a server as a web app. The walled garden does have a gate - it's called Safari.
Personally, I hope this motivates the guy who made it to do just that. People need to realize that Facebook and Foursquare and G+ and whatever other social networks there are are creepy, the app is just an efficient way of exploiting this.
People keep forgetting this: only the members of the upper class were bugged and monitored. The plebes were left alone with their pointless little existences. Quote 1984 only if you have actually read and comprehend it.
So the fact that I know the plot details and such doesn't indicate that I've read and comprehended 1984, but if I copy and paste a quote from the book you'll believe me? What I'm not comprehending is your point.
Personally, I think everyone takes 1984 way too seriously. Do you distrust everyone named O'Brien?
I guess the terms of use can insight feelings of 1984 if you're pessimistic about it, and the lack of an indicator light is careless design, but the 1984 fears seem a bit hyperbolic to me. In 1984 the TVs were mandated and the government was plugged into each camera. There doesn't seem to be any malice here - I doubt Samsung has an interest in shaping the world in the form of an Orwellian nightmare. Rather, this just seems to be a cultural oversight - doing business in foreign lands leads to those and those in business love to tell anecdotes about them - Mexican Novas, Nothing Sucks Like Electrolux, etc. Whereas American engineers and marketing people would be quick to concern themselves about any parallels to Oceania because almost everyone reads 1984 in American schools and top-hat capitalists naively use it to defend their views, Korean engineers and marketing people probably didn't think about such concerns. This seems to be the way all TVs are going, and when Samsung realizes that models with indicator lights for the camera sell better they'll probably implement it (I'm sure there's no indicator light because that would have added a couple of pennies onto the cost of production or it never even crossed anyones mind as necessary, not because the evil people at Samsung want to spy on unsuspecting couch potatoes).
A much better literary analogy would be the TVs in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit-451. That's the goal of all TV and game console companies, and that's what this thing sounds like to me. Samsung doesn't want to spy on you. They just want you to sit your fat ass in front of their TV all day and buy services from them with it. Unless they have some secret contract with the NSA . . . *puts on tinfoil hat*
It makes sense for a tablet. I even like the way that Lion does it because it's just like an expanded maximize that's useful in certain situations - gesture controls on the trackpad are integral for the way OS X does it, though, and I don't know if that feature will ever appear on non-Apple computers.
But I think that Microsoft's Windows 8 strategy is a big mistake. For all the reasons the marketing people can come up with to make the tablet and desktop OS the same OS, there's a technical reason why the synergy people are wrong. The differences between the ARM and Intel versions are one example.
Hopefully, for my sake, Apple doesn't go overboard in their blending of iOS and OS X. Fortunately, I like what they did with Lion. I don't really use Mission Control, but I like the way they've done full screen apps (allowing you to jump in and out of full screen mode). It'd make me sad if the next big cat went the way of Metro (which it doesn't look like so far). I find it strange that Microsoft didn't see what happened with Unity and heed the warning.
It's an authority that was given to the NSA through the FISA Amendments Act signed into law by Bush and still supported today by Obama.
No law permits a violation of the Constitution. Any law that contradicts the Constitution is null and void. So they're right that they don't have the authority to spy domestically, regardless of what the FISA Amendments Act says. Whether this is applied in practice is the real mystery. Other organizations - I believe the DEA/FBI - were recently caught putting tracking devices on people's cars.
It seems to be a common attitude in law enforcement - from the local to federal level - that liberties are an obstacle to justice rather than the cornerstone of it. We all know about the extensive data mining of internet companies like Facebook. I can only imagine what type of scary shit the NSA is doing. Freedom on information laws aren't very effective considering anything the public needs to know can be classified.
Maybe you're new around here, but if you want people to take your comments seriously you may want to utilize logic and empirical evidence rather than your GUT. Perhaps no one made you aware that this is a website for nerds - you know, people into math and science, disciplines built upon logic and empirical evidence. My gut tells me Foxconn probably partakes in some unsavory labor practices but I would never accuse them of such without evidence lest I completely discredit myself like Mike Daisey did.
You should sound like the seasoned veteran in some cop show who doesn't understand the importance of a search warrant. "I've gotta hunch, dammit, I don't need no stinkin' warrant! I know a scumbag when I see one!"
I did some work for a Chinese manufacturer that was a native Chinese business (they designed, engineered, and manufactured their own products). When my boss, a marketing guy they hired to sell their stuff in the States, went over there to check out the factory he was extremely impressed. He said it was better than any American factory he's ever seen. It was clean, high tech, and there were quality services provided for the laborers.
China allows hell hole factories, and you're probably right in saying that most of them are hell holes, but the country has been developing at a rapid pace. Only a few decades ago China was considered a third world country. It still has areas where the quality of life is no better than third world, but the progress they've made is phenomenal. Many companies are looking to Africa and Latin America for future manufacturing because they're worried that China's becoming too wealthy of a country (basically, they're worried that the manufacturing costs in China will escalate as the country becomes more wealthy).