You make a fair point, but there is--I think--a difference between the subjective affection we have for someone we love, which causes us to want to treat them well, and the objective value that ethics demands we extend to individuals.
It may be perfectly natural for me not to give anything to people in another country (because I don't care about them the way I care about my family), but that natural disparity in my affection for my fellow countrymen and for the foreigners doesn't mean that if we go to war I can commit war crimes against the people of that country.
The objective value imposed by ethics should be operative and overriding when making decisions about who lives and dies, because these choices are not just personal choices that primarily affect the person making the decision. If I ever desperately need medical attention and the doctor in triage has to choose who to treat and who to let die, I hope he has a more meaningful standard than whom he personally happens to like more.
And just to be clear, the criticism shouldn't be taken to say that I think it would have been wrong to perform the brain surgery even at risk to the child's life. It was simply the GGP's glib resolution of the question entirely in terms of the family members' affections (not even of the mother's!), as though those alone were were the only consideration and were of themselves sufficient to justify the conclusion.
I'd rather have the woman I'd known and loved for time, than a fetus I'd not met and hadn't even processed the atmosphere yetæ.now, he's stuck with a vegetable for a wife, and raising a kid on his own.
So the value of a human life is determined by your attachment the person? OR your enjoyment of the person? That seems like both an arbitrary and egotistical standard.
Why didn't they dump the kid and save her for God's sake???
. . .
Why was this such a hard choice to me? [sic] Seems a no brainer to me (no pun intended).
For one thing, the neurologists didn't seem to think such a tragedy was likely.
But more to the point, your comment (and GP's) seem to imply that the mother wasn't (or shouldn't have been) the one making the decision, but that she either was or ought to have been entirely passive in this process.
So going back to the first point, maybe she was willing to risk her health to make sure her child could grow up.
"once no one can tell it's a whole other ball game - at which time, yeah, a lot of people could hold a conversation and be browsing the web at the same time and no one would know it. Most humans are decent at jockeying a screen and a person simultaneously - think of driving, where one can easily hold a conversation with someone in the passenger seat but be mainly paying attention to the view in front of them and operating the vehicle."
I don't think this is true. Most people suck at it. Reading directly competes with listening. Most people just can't do both at once, without failing to grasp on one of the two.
There are lots of activities we can do quite well while talking (e.g., dribbling a basketball, or keeping our car between the lines on the road), but reading isn't one of them.
Some people might be quite good at selective listening (semi-consciously giving feedback at what seem like appropriate times, or listening for key inflections or keywords that indicate the conversation requires full attention). They might be good at judging when the coming few seconds of conversation are predictable, so they can glance away for a second to read a text message without interrupting the conversation. Or they might be good at mentally recording the sounds in a sort of audio buffer while they move their attention to something else for a couple seconds before returning to listen to the buffered audio and rejoin the conversation.
But tying to hold a conversation with someone who is trying to read (continuously, like in browsing the web) through the conversation is impossible.
I think the point was that this is a for-profit enterprise asking for donation. If they were organized as a non-profit seeking to provide the world with clean cheap energy, and planning to sell the final product at-cost, or even release the full schematics to the public domain, then it would be a lot easier to make a donation. (BTW, this doesn't mean people couldn't make good money in the process; employees at a non-profit can still draw substantial salaries.) But presumably (I could be wrong), if this works and they produce a shippable product, it will be sold at the highest price the market will bear and the people asking for donations will become fabulously rich in the process. It might be short-sighted, but there is still a real dissonance in giving money to a for-profit, even when that for-profit is doing something you consider worthwhile. Imagine a for-profit in any other line (education, medical treatment, medical R&D, feeding the poor etc.), would you be willing to donate to them? Do you donate to the University of Phoenix? Do you donate to Pfizer?
how? the spelling is horrific, the grammar atrocious, and the logic faulty. who doesn't like programming advice who can't program natural language.
You should cut them a little slack; most natural language interpreters will parse anything by aggressively guessing how to correct typos and syntax errors (unless they support the -W or --pedantic flags). It makes it damned hard to debug.
The compromised site is being used to host/inject the exploit.The vulnerability that is being exploited is in IE 9 &10, and allows code execution. It is being used to get the credentials for other--non-compromised--websites.
In fact their pricing and services are so similar I find it exceedingly difficult to believe that there isn't some form of collusion going on.
I'm not a fanboi of the telcos, but this just isn't fair. Of course their prices are comparable and move together; it would be utter incompetence if that weren't the case, and no, that is not an indication of collusion.
A basic part of being a viable business is tracking your direct competitors' prices to make sure your product is competitive. Do you accuse your local gas stations of collusion if their gas prices are always with 5 cents of each other?
How long would any business remain in business if it ignored that fact that its competitors were significantly undercutting them on a directly comparable product in the same market?
This reminds me of a story I heard once (maybe it was from a movie, or an XKCD, can't track it down right now), in which a pair of guys meet a random girl:
Guy 1: think of a card . . . Girl: okay Guy 1: your card is eight of hearts Girl: no it's 3 of diamonds \later Guy 2: Why did you think you knew her card? Guy 1: I didn't, but I figure I have about a 2% chance of guessing it, and if I do this to everyone I meet then when I do get it right the reaction will be worth all the times I got it wrong.
Look the word up in practically any modern dictionary... while your 1/10th definition will probably be there, it will probably have an (archaic) or (obsolete) qualifier on it.
OED lists 4 definition of the verb.
All four explicitly have to do with removing 1 in 10. Two of these four are marked "obs."
The last of the four has as second meaning (b) attached marked as "rhetorically or loosely"; only that is not explictly in reference to 1 in ten.
Yeah, I went through the list and noticed one or two things that were minor privacy bugs. But whoever let facts get in front of a sensational headline?
There are several aspects of the device and/or software that are absolutely stellar. Incomparably better than anything else I've seen. I hope that journalists and bloggers recognise those when they finally get their hands upon one. . . . Of course, there's one reason why I have the views and insights that I do
Could you just tell us what the subtly stellar aspects are?
And how precisely is the amount, in US dollars, of taxes that one owes calculated?
What I'm getting at is that there is no real declared value of the dollar. What has been declared is that the dollar can be used as currency. Even things like the minimum wage don't really set the value of the dollar since the minimum wage is supposed to be based on actual (market set) cost of living.
This is why the whole gold standard people are nuts. Yes, gold is worth a lot of money today because people value gold. If all the world paper economy really did crash tomorrow, gold would crash with it. It would crash because nobody would give a shit about shiny metal, everyone would be worried about food, water, guns, and ammunition.
I'm not out to make exact predictions on the value of gold, but I'm pretty sure we have several millenia of data from many cultures to support the claim that people consistently attach value to the shiny metal, even in time of major upheaval.
You basically have to be at the point of imminent death before gold becomes just another rock.
I know it is common knowledge among economists that deflation is bad, but I have always wondered whether this is true in a system where deflation is the expected behavior.
In an economy where everyone is banking on 2% inflation (so e.g., interest rates on loans have this factored in) suddenly experiencing deflation will certainly cause economic slow down as the market adjusts to the new reality and a lot of people will get screwed.
But in a market where deflation is anticipated, it seems like the economy would have adjusted to this and keep on moving: People have money to buy things, people will forego (some) future wealth in order to meet present needs and desires. Take a real world case of inflation: Technology. Everyone knows that in 2 years $x will buy more hardware than it will today. Traditional wisdom re: deflation would dictate that everyone would then stop buying technology, and wait indefinitely to get the most for their money, thereby destroying the tech sector. But in reality, people buy a lot of technology anyway, and overall the tech sector is growing fast. This is just because people don't want to wait their whole life and go without technology, so they can buy the most amazing smartphone in the world right before they die.
Seems to me an economy with relatively stable, constant deflation could work just the same. People will still buy food, housing, and other important or necessary stuff because they need it. And they will buy luxuries because they want to have them now and use them. The main differences would be that savers would benefit from saving, and you would have fewer bubbles caused from artificially low interest rates, and unnaturally low ROI leading to too aggressive investing (as inflation does).
Okay, first, yes updates do always bring the possibility of breakage. There is always the possibility of some weird configuration or corner case. (This is why stable generally demands relatively few updates, the more often you change things the more likely something is to break). So no, I'm not implying that a stable distro will never put out an update that breaks something for someone.
I am saying that if I'm using a distribution that sells itself as being for mass consumption and stable, then these broken updates should be rare and each one should affect relatively few users. Rare enough that the end user shouldn't have to research the updates before hitting 'okay'.
After all, if some patch is broken, and the typical user is able to find this out, that means the maintainers (who after all are supposed to keep up on this sort of thing) can find it out too and thus--this being a stable distribution for mass consuption--the update should have already been yanked by the maintainer or distribution.
But that falls on the user to ensure what is or isn't updated, which seems to be asking too much from many.
Am I reading this right?
If I'm running sid, then sure, I should watch out for broken updates. But if I'm running a distro that doesn't brand itself as pre-testing and unstable, it isn't my job as user to monitor the updates for potential breakage. Rather, it is the distro's job to test its updates before it pushes them out for general consumption. I think it is asinine to suggest that the users of a stable distribution shuold need to check the stability of updates that are pushed by the distribution.
Perhaps the standard of 'success' differs between for-profit corporations and non-profits.
Despite ubuntu's being the most popular distro, canonical is at the moment something of a failure, and insofar as ubuntu is canonical's flagship product, ubuntu too is at the moment a (commercial) failure.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously? Who TF is editing this?
You make a fair point, but there is--I think--a difference between the subjective affection we have for someone we love, which causes us to want to treat them well, and the objective value that ethics demands we extend to individuals.
It may be perfectly natural for me not to give anything to people in another country (because I don't care about them the way I care about my family), but that natural disparity in my affection for my fellow countrymen and for the foreigners doesn't mean that if we go to war I can commit war crimes against the people of that country.
The objective value imposed by ethics should be operative and overriding when making decisions about who lives and dies, because these choices are not just personal choices that primarily affect the person making the decision. If I ever desperately need medical attention and the doctor in triage has to choose who to treat and who to let die, I hope he has a more meaningful standard than whom he personally happens to like more.
And just to be clear, the criticism shouldn't be taken to say that I think it would have been wrong to perform the brain surgery even at risk to the child's life. It was simply the GGP's glib resolution of the question entirely in terms of the family members' affections (not even of the mother's!), as though those alone were were the only consideration and were of themselves sufficient to justify the conclusion.
I'd rather have the woman I'd known and loved for time, than a fetus I'd not met and hadn't even processed the atmosphere yetæ.now, he's stuck with a vegetable for a wife, and raising a kid on his own.
So the value of a human life is determined by your attachment the person? OR your enjoyment of the person? That seems like both an arbitrary and egotistical standard.
Why didn't they dump the kid and save her for God's sake??? . . . Why was this such a hard choice to me? [sic] Seems a no brainer to me (no pun intended).
For one thing, the neurologists didn't seem to think such a tragedy was likely.
But more to the point, your comment (and GP's) seem to imply that the mother wasn't (or shouldn't have been) the one making the decision, but that she either was or ought to have been entirely passive in this process.
So going back to the first point, maybe she was willing to risk her health to make sure her child could grow up.
"once no one can tell it's a whole other ball game - at which time, yeah, a lot of people could hold a conversation and be browsing the web at the same time and no one would know it. Most humans are decent at jockeying a screen and a person simultaneously - think of driving, where one can easily hold a conversation with someone in the passenger seat but be mainly paying attention to the view in front of them and operating the vehicle."
I don't think this is true. Most people suck at it. Reading directly competes with listening. Most people just can't do both at once, without failing to grasp on one of the two.
There are lots of activities we can do quite well while talking (e.g., dribbling a basketball, or keeping our car between the lines on the road), but reading isn't one of them.
Some people might be quite good at selective listening (semi-consciously giving feedback at what seem like appropriate times, or listening for key inflections or keywords that indicate the conversation requires full attention). They might be good at judging when the coming few seconds of conversation are predictable, so they can glance away for a second to read a text message without interrupting the conversation. Or they might be good at mentally recording the sounds in a sort of audio buffer while they move their attention to something else for a couple seconds before returning to listen to the buffered audio and rejoin the conversation.
But tying to hold a conversation with someone who is trying to read (continuously, like in browsing the web) through the conversation is impossible.
I think the point was that this is a for-profit enterprise asking for donation. If they were organized as a non-profit seeking to provide the world with clean cheap energy, and planning to sell the final product at-cost, or even release the full schematics to the public domain, then it would be a lot easier to make a donation. (BTW, this doesn't mean people couldn't make good money in the process; employees at a non-profit can still draw substantial salaries.)
But presumably (I could be wrong), if this works and they produce a shippable product, it will be sold at the highest price the market will bear and the people asking for donations will become fabulously rich in the process.
It might be short-sighted, but there is still a real dissonance in giving money to a for-profit, even when that for-profit is doing something you consider worthwhile. Imagine a for-profit in any other line (education, medical treatment, medical R&D, feeding the poor etc.), would you be willing to donate to them? Do you donate to the University of Phoenix? Do you donate to Pfizer?
how? the spelling is horrific, the grammar atrocious, and the logic faulty. who doesn't like programming advice who can't program natural language.
You should cut them a little slack; most natural language interpreters will parse anything by aggressively guessing how to correct typos and syntax errors (unless they support the -W or --pedantic flags). It makes it damned hard to debug.
I'm pretty sure that JS has a lot to do with writing games in HTML5.
The compromised site is being used to host/inject the exploit.The vulnerability that is being exploited is in IE 9 &10, and allows code execution. It is being used to get the credentials for other--non-compromised--websites.
In fact their pricing and services are so similar I find it exceedingly difficult to believe that there isn't some form of collusion going on.
I'm not a fanboi of the telcos, but this just isn't fair. Of course their prices are comparable and move together; it would be utter incompetence if that weren't the case, and no, that is not an indication of collusion. A basic part of being a viable business is tracking your direct competitors' prices to make sure your product is competitive. Do you accuse your local gas stations of collusion if their gas prices are always with 5 cents of each other? How long would any business remain in business if it ignored that fact that its competitors were significantly undercutting them on a directly comparable product in the same market?
This reminds me of a story I heard once (maybe it was from a movie, or an XKCD, can't track it down right now), in which a pair of guys meet a random girl:
Guy 1: think of a card . . .
Girl: okay
Guy 1: your card is eight of hearts
Girl: no it's 3 of diamonds
\later
Guy 2: Why did you think you knew her card?
Guy 1: I didn't, but I figure I have about a 2% chance of guessing it, and if I do this to everyone I meet then when I do get it right the reaction will be worth all the times I got it wrong.
Look the word up in practically any modern dictionary ... while your 1/10th definition will probably be there, it will probably have an (archaic) or (obsolete) qualifier on it.
OED lists 4 definition of the verb. All four explicitly have to do with removing 1 in 10. Two of these four are marked "obs."
The last of the four has as second meaning (b) attached marked as "rhetorically or loosely"; only that is not explictly in reference to 1 in ten.
It would be funny, if not so close to truth.
Yeah, I went through the list and noticed one or two things that were minor privacy bugs. But whoever let facts get in front of a sensational headline?
There are several aspects of the device and/or software that are absolutely stellar. Incomparably better than anything else I've seen. I hope that journalists and bloggers recognise those when they finally get their hands upon one. . . . Of course, there's one reason why I have the views and insights that I do
Could you just tell us what the subtly stellar aspects are?
And how precisely is the amount, in US dollars, of taxes that one owes calculated?
What I'm getting at is that there is no real declared value of the dollar.
What has been declared is that the dollar can be used as currency.
Even things like the minimum wage don't really set the value of the dollar since the minimum wage is supposed to be based on actual (market set) cost of living.
What is the declared value of a dollar? 1/36th of an oz of silver?
This is why the whole gold standard people are nuts. Yes, gold is worth a lot of money today because people value gold. If all the world paper economy really did crash tomorrow, gold would crash with it. It would crash because nobody would give a shit about shiny metal, everyone would be worried about food, water, guns, and ammunition.
I'm not out to make exact predictions on the value of gold, but I'm pretty sure we have several millenia of data from many cultures to support the claim that people consistently attach value to the shiny metal, even in time of major upheaval.
You basically have to be at the point of imminent death before gold becomes just another rock.
Wish I could mod this up.
I know it is common knowledge among economists that deflation is bad, but I have always wondered whether this is true in a system where deflation is the expected behavior.
In an economy where everyone is banking on 2% inflation (so e.g., interest rates on loans have this factored in) suddenly experiencing deflation will certainly cause economic slow down as the market adjusts to the new reality and a lot of people will get screwed.
But in a market where deflation is anticipated, it seems like the economy would have adjusted to this and keep on moving: People have money to buy things, people will forego (some) future wealth in order to meet present needs and desires. Take a real world case of inflation: Technology. Everyone knows that in 2 years $x will buy more hardware than it will today. Traditional wisdom re: deflation would dictate that everyone would then stop buying technology, and wait indefinitely to get the most for their money, thereby destroying the tech sector. But in reality, people buy a lot of technology anyway, and overall the tech sector is growing fast. This is just because people don't want to wait their whole life and go without technology, so they can buy the most amazing smartphone in the world right before they die.
Seems to me an economy with relatively stable, constant deflation could work just the same. People will still buy food, housing, and other important or necessary stuff because they need it. And they will buy luxuries because they want to have them now and use them.
The main differences would be that savers would benefit from saving, and you would have fewer bubbles caused from artificially low interest rates, and unnaturally low ROI leading to too aggressive investing (as inflation does).
That $100k FDIC should really be $1m to account for inflation in the last 30 years. Little people are really, really screwed.
First, it has been upped, originally it was $2,500 (1934)
Second, it is not $100k, but $250k (as of 2008).
Okay, first, yes updates do always bring the possibility of breakage. There is always the possibility of some weird configuration or corner case. (This is why stable generally demands relatively few updates, the more often you change things the more likely something is to break). So no, I'm not implying that a stable distro will never put out an update that breaks something for someone.
I am saying that if I'm using a distribution that sells itself as being for mass consumption and stable, then these broken updates should be rare and each one should affect relatively few users. Rare enough that the end user shouldn't have to research the updates before hitting 'okay'.
After all, if some patch is broken, and the typical user is able to find this out, that means the maintainers (who after all are supposed to keep up on this sort of thing) can find it out too and thus--this being a stable distribution for mass consuption--the update should have already been yanked by the maintainer or distribution.
yup. Something about a solution in search of a problem is coming to mind.
But that falls on the user to ensure what is or isn't updated, which seems to be asking too much from many.
Am I reading this right?
If I'm running sid, then sure, I should watch out for broken updates. But if I'm running a distro that doesn't brand itself as pre-testing and unstable, it isn't my job as user to monitor the updates for potential breakage. Rather, it is the distro's job to test its updates before it pushes them out for general consumption. I think it is asinine to suggest that the users of a stable distribution shuold need to check the stability of updates that are pushed by the distribution.
Perhaps the standard of 'success' differs between for-profit corporations and non-profits.
Despite ubuntu's being the most popular distro, canonical is at the moment something of a failure, and insofar as ubuntu is canonical's flagship product, ubuntu too is at the moment a (commercial) failure.
The revenues are sufficient enough . . .
You do realize that 'sufficient' means 'enough', yes?