Man... I wish they'd just deposit in it a bank, and fund open source development off the interest. Even if it got just 0.1% compounded annually, that's $615,000 a year.
Nope. Hypocrisy is professing to believe in something in which you do not believe. Inconsistency is a necessary but not sufficient condition for hypocrisy.
As you can see, the cultures are of the Mediterranean sea are quite varied... you probably should be a little more specific.
Have you ever been there? The similarities between them are quite striking. Funny how similar climates, food sources, and geography can lead to similarities in culture.
Some people even think that geographic locations have a kind of "essence" which naturally leads to certain types of cultures in those areas. I won't go there, however.
What is your privacy worth to you? $0.30 off a 2 liter bottle of coke?
The privacy of my sexual habits is absolute. The privacy of whether I buy Coke? I don't give a shit, really.
My privacy is much more valuable to me, which is why I avoid the discount cards.
Some of us feel that things like, how often I buy strawberries, aren't the sort of info we mind other people knowing. Yes, there's the principle of privacy. As free persons, we are free to give up some of it in return for other things. Quit your bitching, and live your own life.
Besides, why a discount card with a unique ID?
This is so they can perform useful data mining, such as deciding which products to place next to each other on the shelves. There's no technical reason why this must be tied to your name. In fact, some cards are anonymous -- you can get an anonymous Albertson's card. They still track what is bought on that account, but they don't know who you are.
What was so wrong with coupons?
Obviously you've never been in the checkout line behind a nice old lady who is buying 300 items, each of which has an individual coupon. (I'm in no way disparaging nice old ladies, here.)
Why do they have to have a unique ID and log everything that you shop?
Again... This is how they figure out which item to put on which isle. They are trying to make shopping easier for everyone so that you don't need to run all over the store to get what you want. Do you actually think they are going to use this to create targetted ads aimed at you, personally? You're insane if you think a supermarket is going to print out a different offer for each individual customer. They cluster you into groups of buying habits. So what?
You can't have the discount unless you tell us your name, address, phone, SS# or drivers license? Bullshit.
Is there some line you sign, saying "I declare this info to be true on penalty of death?" Nope. And as I already mentioned, some places don't require the identifying information. This proves that their main concern is not targetted advertising, but simply the optimization of their item placement.
WHY CAN'T I HAVE MY DISCOUNT WITHOUT YOU KNOWING WHO I AM?
You've got it backward. The card gets you the real price. The people without the card pay a price hike. There is no "discount," they just phrase it that way to make you feel like you're getting a deal.
I definitely agree that illegally downloading music falls under the category of stealing, although some will play the semantics game.
For crying out loud, it is not a semantics game! When you steal something, the other person is deprived of it. When you infringe copyright, you have not deprived anyone of anything except a potential sale of that material. The "victim" in that case is neither the person taking the copyrighted material, nor the one giving it. It's the publisher.
Stealing and copyright infringement are covered under completely different sets of laws. They aren't the same, and we're not nitpicking on "semantics" here. If you can't see the extremely clear distinction then you're being purposefully stupid.
Having said that, I think copyright infringement is wrong, and I don't take part in it. But please quit this stupid, ignorant, head-in-sand interpretation of the meaning of copyright infringement. It ain't fucking stealing, it isn't prosecuted that way, it has different sentences, etc.
The server does not explode in a ball of fire taking (B/M)ILLIONS of dollars of equipment with it.
In our line of business, any sort of hitch would be catastrophic. The sorts of customers we deal with are 100% intolerant of any problem. If their Internet connection (something we have nothing to do with) is down, they blame us, and immediately start telling their colleagues to boycott us.
It's not a 50,000 miles away, requiring HUNDREDS of people and (B/M)ILLIONS of dollars just to get to it to replace a borked RAM chip.
This is why satellites are designed to depend as little as possible on integrated circuits. Are you aware that the CPUs on many of these satellites reboot themselves every 20 milliseconds? If it crashes, it's never for more than 20 milliseconds plus a few ms of startup time.
When the server fails you don't lose (B/M)ILLIONS of dollars of capital investment and 300,000+ man hours (30 ppl * 2000 hrs/yr * 5 yrs)
I addressed that above.
Your bug doesn't kill 7 of your best specialized programmers who have received MILLIONS of dollars worth of training and spent YEARS training to work on your server.
Satellites aren't manned, so this point is irrelevant.
Why can't we just experience the universe directly without the interference of sybols and concepts.
We do, when we meditate. A thing is what it is. Or, to be Zen about it, a thing is also what it is not. Because without what a thing is not, how can a thing be what it is?
That having been said, it's convenient to have symbols and concepts. Otherwise how would you have just posted that?
The founder of my company has told me something similar. He used to design spy satellites (who knows exactly what he worked on -- 30 years later he still isn't allowed to talk about it), and he says that the day-to-day IT management problems he encounters now are far more difficult to solve than designing spacecraft.
He blames it on the ten thousand different manufacturers you deal with in IT, ranging from motherboard suppliers, to RAM makers, to CPU makers, hard drives, UPSs, and of course, software. The pieces work, it's getting them to work together that's a bitch. With a satellite, you have maybe 20 or 30 people who, in combination, know everything about it and who can coordinate with each other.
Think about that. Keeping a mid-size server farm up and running smoothly (all the while undergoing constant upgrades, new feature additions, etc.) is more difficult than designing and launching a satellite. Straight from the horse's mouth.
Perhaps I'm wrong, but the way it all came about it looks like Gates is just giving away money to save face, not because he truly believes in or cares about any of the causes he gives to.
I'm pretty sure the people who have benefitted from his contributions don't care whether he cares. There's an alternate way of looking at this: Bill Gates donates to causes that he doesn't even care about. It sounds almost more philanthropic, put that way.
Personally, I'd prefer the big donors to be as minimally invested in any one ideology as possible. I don't want them to deeply care about causes. They should be concerned with helping people, in general.
I'm no fan of Microsoft, but Bill Gates' money has done more great things than I'll ever be able to accomplish.
Somebody mod this guy 'troll': He links to MSDN and calls it 'documentation.'
It's fairly obvious to anybody who has tried to learn anything remotely complicated from the MSDN documentation, that it is all purposefully misleading and confusing. In many cases the 'documentation' is outright wrong. Many examples simply do not work as presented.
This is deliberate, and the reasons are quite obvious. Windows has the vast majority of the market share for platforms. If you're a company writing software for multiple platforms, the most important platform to support is obviously Windows. By making the API documentation confusing, misleading, and subtly incorrect, Microsoft is able to bog you down in stupid details, forcing you to devote almost 100% of your development effort to supporting Windows. Failing to support the Windows market would be suicide. With no time left to support development on other platforms, eventually you end up dropping support altogether. This leads to the extinction of the competing platforms, due to no software support.
It should be noted that the only reason this strategy works for Microsoft is that they have a monopoly position. If they didn't benefit from this monopoly power, the software market would respond to this by shifting away from Windows.
This does not lead to censorship. It merely states that we are protecting 5 year olds from profanity.
Yeah. We all know the best way to stop children from doing something is to ban it and tell them it's naughty. This clearly worked for drugs, alcohol, and teenage sex.
I was at a skating rink the other weekend. They were playing your run of the mill pop songs. You know, the ones with lyrics about one night stands, taking cocaine in nightclub restrooms, having sex, orgies, etc. Nobody seemed to care that a bunch of 10 year olds were roller skating to this garbage. But hey, at least the word "fuck" wasn't uttered, right?
Our society must be truly fucked up, if we care that much about which words a person uses to say something, but not what they're actually saying.
I imagine even the minimum penalties would add up to life. So I would be very worried if I was them...
There's no way in hell what they did is deserving of life in prison, and no way in hell any judge is going to sentence them to that. Get a grip, man. Haven't you heard of the 8th Amendment? Proportionality?
Why not just let the market decide what the 'standard' is?
Look around. See anybody in the "market" deciding? The market is too scared to buy any DVD writer, precisely because there's no standard.
Having competing manufacturers in the marketplace is a good thing. Having competing "standards" in the marketplace is a bad thing. This isn't about excluding any group. It's about excluding all the superfluous technologies.
The problem is that gravity is a 'conservative force' which means that it doesn't on it's own change the speed of incoming asteroids
Sure it can. Energy is conserved, but some of it could be transferred to the massive object. How do you think gravitational "slingshotting" works? This is the same thing, except in reverse.
It would require a very specific set of conditions for an asteroid to be captured by a planet. It would have to approach the planet "from behind" (i.e., in the same direction as the planet is moving, overtaking the planet), coming close enough to be deflected around the planet. This "manuever" would result in some of the asteroid's momentum being transferred to the planet, decreasing the kinetic energy of the asteroid.
In order to actually enter orbit, it would be helpful to have other bodies nearby. The actual capture process would be a complicated interaction. But anyway, the basic point is that an asteroid can loop around a planet and emerge with more kinetic energy than it started with -- it just means that the kinetic energy of the planet has been reduced accordingly.
it has the best transportation and logistics system in use
What on Earth are you talking about? Anybody you ask who was actually fighting in Iraq, from privates up to generals, will tell you the logistics were almost a complete failure.
Superiority in other areas carried us through, but the supply chains were very flimsy and certainly wouldn't have withstood prolonged attacks by anyone as militarily competant as the EU nations.
You keep using this word, "de facto." I do not think it means what you think it means.
(Kidding aside, the term de facto means that something is widely used even though it is not officially standardized. In other words, it's pragmatic. Look up "de facto" and "pragmatic" in a dictionary and notice the similarity.)
Jeez, if they need money, they could just ask for frickin' donations... I'd give PG $50 in a heartbeat. It's been invaluable to me for years.
And using some Adobe format? Why? Even PDF isn't a good option, since it's controlled by Adobe. Open or not, it's a corporate format.
I still don't understand why people do not distribute documents in DVI format. This is the standard output format for TeX and LaTeX, and the 'xdvi' reader is already installed on your system with 99.99% likelihood. Converting to Postscript, if you really want to, is as simple as running 'dvips'.
Users are generally like people who leave their car unlocked and then complain that their radio is missing when they get back. Yes, they're stupid, but in the end the thief is the guilty one.
I fully agree with this. When I was in high school, I forgot to lock my (piece of shit) car one day in the school parking lot. I didn't see any real reason to lock it anyway, it had no radio, or anything else of value in it. However, somebody opened the door and took my school parking permit.
The school wanted to suspend me for A) Parking without a permit and B) "Facilitating" a crime on campus. Their argument was that if I had locked my doors, the crime would not have been committed, hence I was somehow responsible for it.
Since my mother is very adept at threatening lawsuits and making it sound very scary (she only does this when she's in "momma bear mode," she's not a litigious person), I got out of that one. But the point is, it sounds like a nice idea to hold stupid users responsible for virus and worm outbreaks, but your attitude will quickly change when you end up being one of the stupid users.
Don't misunderstand me: I'm not advocating the use of styrofoam. It's a wasteful substance, and it typifies the disgusting, wasteful habits of the average first-world citizen. However, targetting styrofoam is not going to help anything, and it actually distracts from the real, significant environmental problems on this planet.
It's a waste of fossil fuel
It's nowhere near as wasteful as each person in the U.S. owning their own car. Imagine the impact on fossil fuel usage if we all took buses or trains everywhere.
it's rarely recycled
This is a general problem with people's consciousness of environmental problems. It has nothing specifically to do with styrofoam.
It fills up landfills.
It's far better to have that carbon tied up in the form of styrofoam in some landfill somewhere, than to have it out in the atmosphere in the form of CO2 contributing to the greenhouse effect. If all the CO2 emissions from industry could somehow be converted into styrofoam, that would be an amazing environmental improvement. Then we could just bury the styrofoam and forget about it. That carbon was originally buried in the first place, in the form of fossil hydrocarbons. We'd be returning it to the state it was in originally, except it's chemically different. So what? It's inert. (This is for the sake of example. In reality, we'd use some other substance, not styrofoam, but the concept is identical.)
Sure, a lot of other stuff is even worse than a single styrofoam cup - but how many computers get thrown away every day?
A LOT. Apparently you've never seen an electronics recycling center. Go check one out. Then, imagine how many other computers are just being trashed instead of recycled.
Compared to the number of styrofoam cups thrown away?
The comparison doesn't matter. Styrofoam takes up space and looks ugly. Electronics materials are toxic.
Look, I care about the health of the planet as much as you do, if not more so. I simply see these feel-good, "Instant Green" (think "Instant Coffee," I mean it in that sense) solutions as doing more harm than good. People think they are doing "their share" in helping the environment by performing all sorts of weird, illogical actions that don't address the actual concerns. They think they've done their part, and go on about their lives without actually improving the situation.
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Man... I wish they'd just deposit in it a bank, and fund open source development off the interest. Even if it got just 0.1% compounded annually, that's $615,000 a year.
This isn't hypocrisy, it's just inconsistency.
Have you ever been there? The similarities between them are quite striking. Funny how similar climates, food sources, and geography can lead to similarities in culture.
Some people even think that geographic locations have a kind of "essence" which naturally leads to certain types of cultures in those areas. I won't go there, however.
The privacy of my sexual habits is absolute. The privacy of whether I buy Coke? I don't give a shit, really.
My privacy is much more valuable to me, which is why I avoid the discount cards.
Some of us feel that things like, how often I buy strawberries, aren't the sort of info we mind other people knowing. Yes, there's the principle of privacy. As free persons, we are free to give up some of it in return for other things. Quit your bitching, and live your own life.
Besides, why a discount card with a unique ID?
This is so they can perform useful data mining, such as deciding which products to place next to each other on the shelves. There's no technical reason why this must be tied to your name. In fact, some cards are anonymous -- you can get an anonymous Albertson's card. They still track what is bought on that account, but they don't know who you are.
What was so wrong with coupons?
Obviously you've never been in the checkout line behind a nice old lady who is buying 300 items, each of which has an individual coupon. (I'm in no way disparaging nice old ladies, here.)
Why do they have to have a unique ID and log everything that you shop?
Again... This is how they figure out which item to put on which isle. They are trying to make shopping easier for everyone so that you don't need to run all over the store to get what you want. Do you actually think they are going to use this to create targetted ads aimed at you, personally? You're insane if you think a supermarket is going to print out a different offer for each individual customer. They cluster you into groups of buying habits. So what?
You can't have the discount unless you tell us your name, address, phone, SS# or drivers license? Bullshit.
Is there some line you sign, saying "I declare this info to be true on penalty of death?" Nope. And as I already mentioned, some places don't require the identifying information. This proves that their main concern is not targetted advertising, but simply the optimization of their item placement.
WHY CAN'T I HAVE MY DISCOUNT WITHOUT YOU KNOWING WHO I AM?
You've got it backward. The card gets you the real price. The people without the card pay a price hike. There is no "discount," they just phrase it that way to make you feel like you're getting a deal.
For crying out loud, it is not a semantics game! When you steal something, the other person is deprived of it. When you infringe copyright, you have not deprived anyone of anything except a potential sale of that material. The "victim" in that case is neither the person taking the copyrighted material, nor the one giving it. It's the publisher.
Stealing and copyright infringement are covered under completely different sets of laws. They aren't the same, and we're not nitpicking on "semantics" here. If you can't see the extremely clear distinction then you're being purposefully stupid.
Having said that, I think copyright infringement is wrong, and I don't take part in it. But please quit this stupid, ignorant, head-in-sand interpretation of the meaning of copyright infringement. It ain't fucking stealing, it isn't prosecuted that way, it has different sentences, etc.
In our line of business, any sort of hitch would be catastrophic. The sorts of customers we deal with are 100% intolerant of any problem. If their Internet connection (something we have nothing to do with) is down, they blame us, and immediately start telling their colleagues to boycott us.
It's not a 50,000 miles away, requiring HUNDREDS of people and (B/M)ILLIONS of dollars just to get to it to replace a borked RAM chip.
This is why satellites are designed to depend as little as possible on integrated circuits. Are you aware that the CPUs on many of these satellites reboot themselves every 20 milliseconds? If it crashes, it's never for more than 20 milliseconds plus a few ms of startup time.
When the server fails you don't lose (B/M)ILLIONS of dollars of capital investment and 300,000+ man hours (30 ppl * 2000 hrs/yr * 5 yrs)
I addressed that above.
Your bug doesn't kill 7 of your best specialized programmers who have received MILLIONS of dollars worth of training and spent YEARS training to work on your server.
Satellites aren't manned, so this point is irrelevant.
We do, when we meditate. A thing is what it is. Or, to be Zen about it, a thing is also what it is not. Because without what a thing is not, how can a thing be what it is?
That having been said, it's convenient to have symbols and concepts. Otherwise how would you have just posted that?
You might be disqualifying Mercury from planethood, which would be odd, considering it's one of the original 5.
He blames it on the ten thousand different manufacturers you deal with in IT, ranging from motherboard suppliers, to RAM makers, to CPU makers, hard drives, UPSs, and of course, software. The pieces work, it's getting them to work together that's a bitch. With a satellite, you have maybe 20 or 30 people who, in combination, know everything about it and who can coordinate with each other.
Think about that. Keeping a mid-size server farm up and running smoothly (all the while undergoing constant upgrades, new feature additions, etc.) is more difficult than designing and launching a satellite. Straight from the horse's mouth.
1. Fine Microsoft $500 million.
2. Give $500 million to Open Source development foundations.
3. Who's laughing now, Billy Boy?
I'm pretty sure the people who have benefitted from his contributions don't care whether he cares. There's an alternate way of looking at this: Bill Gates donates to causes that he doesn't even care about. It sounds almost more philanthropic, put that way.
Personally, I'd prefer the big donors to be as minimally invested in any one ideology as possible. I don't want them to deeply care about causes. They should be concerned with helping people, in general.
I'm no fan of Microsoft, but Bill Gates' money has done more great things than I'll ever be able to accomplish.
It's fairly obvious to anybody who has tried to learn anything remotely complicated from the MSDN documentation, that it is all purposefully misleading and confusing. In many cases the 'documentation' is outright wrong. Many examples simply do not work as presented.
This is deliberate, and the reasons are quite obvious. Windows has the vast majority of the market share for platforms. If you're a company writing software for multiple platforms, the most important platform to support is obviously Windows. By making the API documentation confusing, misleading, and subtly incorrect, Microsoft is able to bog you down in stupid details, forcing you to devote almost 100% of your development effort to supporting Windows. Failing to support the Windows market would be suicide. With no time left to support development on other platforms, eventually you end up dropping support altogether. This leads to the extinction of the competing platforms, due to no software support.
It should be noted that the only reason this strategy works for Microsoft is that they have a monopoly position. If they didn't benefit from this monopoly power, the software market would respond to this by shifting away from Windows.
Yeah. We all know the best way to stop children from doing something is to ban it and tell them it's naughty. This clearly worked for drugs, alcohol, and teenage sex.
I was at a skating rink the other weekend. They were playing your run of the mill pop songs. You know, the ones with lyrics about one night stands, taking cocaine in nightclub restrooms, having sex, orgies, etc. Nobody seemed to care that a bunch of 10 year olds were roller skating to this garbage. But hey, at least the word "fuck" wasn't uttered, right?
Our society must be truly fucked up, if we care that much about which words a person uses to say something, but not what they're actually saying.
Ah, yes. If people like Rosa Parks and Gandhi had only followed this advice, the world would be much better right now.
Oh, wait...
There's no way in hell what they did is deserving of life in prison, and no way in hell any judge is going to sentence them to that. Get a grip, man. Haven't you heard of the 8th Amendment? Proportionality?
Look around. See anybody in the "market" deciding? The market is too scared to buy any DVD writer, precisely because there's no standard.
Having competing manufacturers in the marketplace is a good thing. Having competing "standards" in the marketplace is a bad thing. This isn't about excluding any group. It's about excluding all the superfluous technologies.
But here on Slashdot, we certainly pretend to be.
Sure it can. Energy is conserved, but some of it could be transferred to the massive object. How do you think gravitational "slingshotting" works? This is the same thing, except in reverse.
It would require a very specific set of conditions for an asteroid to be captured by a planet. It would have to approach the planet "from behind" (i.e., in the same direction as the planet is moving, overtaking the planet), coming close enough to be deflected around the planet. This "manuever" would result in some of the asteroid's momentum being transferred to the planet, decreasing the kinetic energy of the asteroid.
In order to actually enter orbit, it would be helpful to have other bodies nearby. The actual capture process would be a complicated interaction. But anyway, the basic point is that an asteroid can loop around a planet and emerge with more kinetic energy than it started with -- it just means that the kinetic energy of the planet has been reduced accordingly.
There is no material, rock or otherwise, which could support its own weight if it was six times as large as the sun.
The only reason the sun itself doesn't collapse is because of the radiation pressure from the nuclear reactions going on inside it.
Right. Companies like Real and Apple can out-lobby Microsoft in the EU. Sure. I'll write that one down on my "Delusions to Avoid" list.
What on Earth are you talking about? Anybody you ask who was actually fighting in Iraq, from privates up to generals, will tell you the logistics were almost a complete failure.
Superiority in other areas carried us through, but the supply chains were very flimsy and certainly wouldn't have withstood prolonged attacks by anyone as militarily competant as the EU nations.
(Kidding aside, the term de facto means that something is widely used even though it is not officially standardized. In other words, it's pragmatic. Look up "de facto" and "pragmatic" in a dictionary and notice the similarity.)
And using some Adobe format? Why? Even PDF isn't a good option, since it's controlled by Adobe. Open or not, it's a corporate format.
I still don't understand why people do not distribute documents in DVI format. This is the standard output format for TeX and LaTeX, and the 'xdvi' reader is already installed on your system with 99.99% likelihood. Converting to Postscript, if you really want to, is as simple as running 'dvips'.
I fully agree with this. When I was in high school, I forgot to lock my (piece of shit) car one day in the school parking lot. I didn't see any real reason to lock it anyway, it had no radio, or anything else of value in it. However, somebody opened the door and took my school parking permit.
The school wanted to suspend me for A) Parking without a permit and B) "Facilitating" a crime on campus. Their argument was that if I had locked my doors, the crime would not have been committed, hence I was somehow responsible for it.
Since my mother is very adept at threatening lawsuits and making it sound very scary (she only does this when she's in "momma bear mode," she's not a litigious person), I got out of that one. But the point is, it sounds like a nice idea to hold stupid users responsible for virus and worm outbreaks, but your attitude will quickly change when you end up being one of the stupid users.
It's a waste of fossil fuel
It's nowhere near as wasteful as each person in the U.S. owning their own car. Imagine the impact on fossil fuel usage if we all took buses or trains everywhere.
it's rarely recycled
This is a general problem with people's consciousness of environmental problems. It has nothing specifically to do with styrofoam.
It fills up landfills.
It's far better to have that carbon tied up in the form of styrofoam in some landfill somewhere, than to have it out in the atmosphere in the form of CO2 contributing to the greenhouse effect. If all the CO2 emissions from industry could somehow be converted into styrofoam, that would be an amazing environmental improvement. Then we could just bury the styrofoam and forget about it. That carbon was originally buried in the first place, in the form of fossil hydrocarbons. We'd be returning it to the state it was in originally, except it's chemically different. So what? It's inert. (This is for the sake of example. In reality, we'd use some other substance, not styrofoam, but the concept is identical.)
Sure, a lot of other stuff is even worse than a single styrofoam cup - but how many computers get thrown away every day?
A LOT. Apparently you've never seen an electronics recycling center. Go check one out. Then, imagine how many other computers are just being trashed instead of recycled.
Compared to the number of styrofoam cups thrown away?
The comparison doesn't matter. Styrofoam takes up space and looks ugly. Electronics materials are toxic.
Look, I care about the health of the planet as much as you do, if not more so. I simply see these feel-good, "Instant Green" (think "Instant Coffee," I mean it in that sense) solutions as doing more harm than good. People think they are doing "their share" in helping the environment by performing all sorts of weird, illogical actions that don't address the actual concerns. They think they've done their part, and go on about their lives without actually improving the situation.