Didn't you read "We need to be able to be fairly compensated for our content."? Translation: "Someone else is getting some profit off of our stuff. That means we aren't extracting all the value out of it we can. That can't be tolerated." Witness Rupert Murdoch and his battles with google. Losing two dollars to claim a dollar in someone else's pocket seems to be an all-too-common approach to the internet. It will take a while before people realize it's counterproductive to do shit like this. When they see profits going up, they'll attribute it to that, without realizing that it's due to other factors. When their profits go down, they'll use that to further justify this.
Indeed. The quote is scary independent of context. That it's someone with control over other people's lives is even worse. Big brother doesn't start looking over your shoulder for explicitly evil reasons. He looks over your shoulder for the children, or because terrorism, or because crime, or because lower taxes etc
Yeah, you probably *feel* as distracted when talking hands free, but when it comes down to a split-second evasive maneuver you'll find out why steering wheels are supposed to be used with two hands.
But again, that's not what's wrong with driving while holding a phone. The distraction is what is the issue.
Maybe banning hands-free sets would indeed be a good idea too, but reasoning that we may as well not care about handheld phones because everything's a distraction is just wrong and stupid.
That is indeed a wrong and stupid strawman argument, which is why I'm not making it. I'm only saying that hands-free is not an improvement, so carving out an exception for them while banning the other makes no sense.
Call me a cynic, but I'm pretty sure what makes something legal or "send you to prison illegal" is whether some wealthy corporation (and by extension, the government) dislikes you doing it or not.
If you're using zotero in a way someone dislikes enough, they'll find a way to bankrupt you at least for it.
That said, I can't think of how zotero would get you in that much hot water with any of our corporate overlords.
There are others, if that one isn't to your liking, and I have yet to come across one that suggests they DO improve safety. Furthermore, whenever I'm talking on a hands free set, I feel about as distracted as when I'm holding it up to my ears. The problem with cell phones isn't, after all, that you have one less hand you're using.
Traffic laws are there to balance convenience of travel against an acceptable level of death on the road.
If banning cell phones saves a reasonable number of lives, I think most people would agree that's a fair trade off. Banning other passengers in the car though would basically be banning driving, which is not really reasonable.
Your comparison is childish:it's reasonable to say no cell phone use in the car, but not reasonable to say no passengers.
The only solution I can see is a complete overhaul involving granting a lot less patents, but that's not going to happen without a complete overhaul of our society, because that challenges the mighty status quo.
You lost me at that last point. We need to "completely" overhaul society because we need to change one office?
I personally would be more pissed about having to go back to yahoo instead of gmail, but that's only because when I was using yahoo mail years ago, it sucked. Maybe they've improved since gmail set higher standards. I don't really care to find out.
Microsoft has a long history of understanding what proportion of their customers will accept what amount of abuse. And the people willing to spend the most money on consoles are, sadly, kids and parents who don't vote with their wallets.
In this specific case, it could end up bad for them, but it might not. After all, if a family doesn't have an internet connection, they probably aren't going to be the first kids on their block to get a new console, and they aren't going to be on twitter or facebook generating bad press about how their new christmas present won't work.
What I think they may be failing to do is a cost/benefit analysis. DRM in this case as always, won't hurt piracy or modded consoles. Most people don't mod their consoles to play pirate games, this might ensure that people will, and obviously piracy =/= lost sale. So why are they doing it? To satisfy developers' idiotic demands? From Sony's tweets, it sounds like the PS5 probably won't have always on DRM, so it's not like they need to match the competition. To force everyone who wants an xbox to get internet service? To prevent people from cheating at online games through modded consoles? From my experiences years ago, that was really rare.
Without the FDA, there would be a more medical treatments available to save lives. The FDA vastly increases the costs of researching new medical treatments and that kills more people than tainted drugs do.
The fact that you take this as a given fact suggests that you NEED to believe this strongly in order to rationalize your religious-like beliefs in an economic theory.
Citation needed. From my perspective, before the FDA, there was a lot of snake oil sold as medicine. Literal snake oil. And sometimes toxins. And not sold as "herbal remedies," they were outright lies. People have not gotten smarter since that time, we have herbal remedies which are completely ineffective, yet they're still big money. Consumers are not able to determine side effects or efficiency themselves, which is why they keep buying "Airborne" or crap like that. If you allowed unproven crap medicines to be sold alongside meds which were tested and effective, there's no way real pharmaceutical practices would be competitive. Real pharmaceutical testing would be halted in favor of marketing cheap snake oil.
The above is a hypothesis yes. So is your statement that ending the FDA would improve medicine. But I think yours is nonsense, and it's not worth testing these hypotheses and potentially ending up with my scenario.
I was going to make a joke involving the Hot Coffee incident, Natalie Portman as Padme, and hot grits, but I decided that was way too much nerdiness for one post.
So I'm simply going to say that I'd prefer vice versa, Star Wars set in a GTA universe.
No, seriously, they do (ducks again). EA has done some unforgivable things with DRM, that's what's despicable about them, not quality. Bioware and especially EA have made some hit and miss games, but this is true for almost every other company out there, except maybe for Valve. Their failures are only spectacular because of how much money they pumped into developing them. Sim City the recent one, Spore, they were huge games that were utter crap when delivered. But even their mediocre games are better than your average indie games.
Perhaps you don't like any games by either, but I'd suggest that you're TRYING not to like them. EA made Dead space, Mirror's edge, burnout, Timesplitters future perfect, rock band, Dragon age, walking dead, and Alice Madness Returns, all of which I enjoyed.
LucasArts had plenty of flops as well. Jedi power battles was atrocious. Plus, talk about milking franchises dry. People talk about how many call of duty games activision has put out, what about the number of star wars games LucasArts has put out? ANGRY BIRDS STAR WARS! THAT'S SHAMELESS!
Don't get me wrong, I liked lego star wars, but, come on, there's clearly double standards going on here if you're suggesting EA is bad and LucasArts was good.
If it makes you feel any better, eventually the official story will be that LucasArts shot at Disney first.
Re:also need to cut fluff and filler from Educatio
on
Let Them Eat Teslas
·
· Score: 1
also need to cut fluff and filler from Education.
Why? Seems to me like trust fund kids wasting seven years in pursuit of a communications degree generates a lot of income for the school.
Granted, that's probably wasted on new lockers for the football team rather than a scholarship for smart kids getting engineering degrees, but that would be true even if you cut down all the joke majors. The executive types would just take a pay increase.
I do think a lot of fluff and filler will be cut from education through online courses. I expect that universities will try to take bigger cuts of research grants and offer even less to researchers in return. So that's going to be awesome for everyone for a while.
It is safe to say there will be downsides to this technology though. Of course, such an observation is obvious: every single thing humans have ever invented have pros and cons. Nuclear weapons, the most destructive power we've got, they prevented wars.
Possible exception: vaccines. I can't see much downsides to them. Idiots being paranoid about their effects aren't worth mentioning, they'd find something to illogically worry about anyway.
And, reportedly, Mexico has lost 70,000 of its citizens since 2007 to drug war violence.
I'm pro-legalization for a wide variety of reasons, but I'm a little skeptical that mexican cartels would be shut down due to competition. I'm not sure the mafia during prohibition is necessarily a good parallel situation, that they'll die out quickly due to legal competition.
Don't get me wrong, I say lets test it, since clearly what we're doing now isn't working and we should have a right to do recreational drugs if we feel like it, but if any slashdotter can point to evidence that the cartels will be broken by legalization, I'd be interested to hear it.
Another problem with some Kids In The Hall sketches was that they would try to do two different jokes at the same time, the combination being worse than the individual jokes were.
Same thing here. "Encryption" is annoying enough. The Doctor Who joke is not funny. Both together? I'm actually going to WORK the rest of the day.
People spend all of this time bitching about all the things that are wrong in the world, and they only half-realize all the awesome things that go on such as this..
Well yeah, we bitch about THIS world. Awesome stuff may be happening on MARS, but here in this world, there's nothing but suckiness and things going wrong. Must be because there's nothing living on mars to fuck up shit. Dr. Manhattan had it right the first time.
Okay, that started out as a joke making fun of your word choice, but now I've gone from awestruck at the panorama to depressed...
In my experience, those two "problems" cancel each other out somewhat. I subscribed to RSS feeds from most of the journals relevant to my field, and every few days I'm flooded with relevant, hot-off-the-press papers to read. I find they're mostly believable research. I get ideas I wouldn't have thought of otherwise, ideas I apply to my own research and hypotheses. I think this may be what you are talking about with the serendipitous finds.
What do you mean "too much crappy research" anyway? The papers are basically republishing what's known already? You think the papers are mostly wrong? Or you just think the experiments could have been done better? The first two would be problems. The last one though is a far more common sentiment I hear from other scientists. I don't understand it. If you're convinced of the conclusions, but would demand that the experiment be done better, I don't think that's healthy skepticism, I think that's just arrogance. I also hear some scientists say things like "Well I just don't believe that." That again is not healthy skepticism, that's simply being closed minded.
Sorry for veering off topic there, I don't mean to suggest you're doing either of those errors.
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't you read "We need to be able to be fairly compensated for our content."? Translation: "Someone else is getting some profit off of our stuff. That means we aren't extracting all the value out of it we can. That can't be tolerated." Witness Rupert Murdoch and his battles with google. Losing two dollars to claim a dollar in someone else's pocket seems to be an all-too-common approach to the internet. It will take a while before people realize it's counterproductive to do shit like this. When they see profits going up, they'll attribute it to that, without realizing that it's due to other factors. When their profits go down, they'll use that to further justify this.
Indeed. The quote is scary independent of context. That it's someone with control over other people's lives is even worse. Big brother doesn't start looking over your shoulder for explicitly evil reasons. He looks over your shoulder for the children, or because terrorism, or because crime, or because lower taxes etc
Yeah, you probably *feel* as distracted when talking hands free, but when it comes down to a split-second evasive maneuver you'll find out why steering wheels are supposed to be used with two hands.
But again, that's not what's wrong with driving while holding a phone. The distraction is what is the issue.
Maybe banning hands-free sets would indeed be a good idea too, but reasoning that we may as well not care about handheld phones because everything's a distraction is just wrong and stupid.
That is indeed a wrong and stupid strawman argument, which is why I'm not making it. I'm only saying that hands-free is not an improvement, so carving out an exception for them while banning the other makes no sense.
Call me a cynic, but I'm pretty sure what makes something legal or "send you to prison illegal" is whether some wealthy corporation (and by extension, the government) dislikes you doing it or not.
If you're using zotero in a way someone dislikes enough, they'll find a way to bankrupt you at least for it.
That said, I can't think of how zotero would get you in that much hot water with any of our corporate overlords.
Listen buddy, were it not for us and our "aluminum," you'd be referring to it as "das aluminium" right about now.
I like this idea, provided that the extortion fees the users ended up paying to MS are what is refunded.
A journal is a book, as in ink on a dead, mashed up tree. Electronic beeps and shit on the telephone wires, that ain't no journal.
There are others, if that one isn't to your liking, and I have yet to come across one that suggests they DO improve safety. Furthermore, whenever I'm talking on a hands free set, I feel about as distracted as when I'm holding it up to my ears. The problem with cell phones isn't, after all, that you have one less hand you're using.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-he-cells30-2008jun30,0,2119996.story
http://ehstoday.com/safety/news/hands-free-phones-driving-5895
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/08/why-cell-phone-bans-dont-work.html
Wow... a libertarian who has actually extended his philosophy to abolishing traffic laws? I'm simultaneously impressed and scared.
Traffic laws are there to balance convenience of travel against an acceptable level of death on the road.
If banning cell phones saves a reasonable number of lives, I think most people would agree that's a fair trade off. Banning other passengers in the car though would basically be banning driving, which is not really reasonable.
Your comparison is childish:it's reasonable to say no cell phone use in the car, but not reasonable to say no passengers.
While you're at it, talking on a handsfree set hasn't proven any safer. so why are we specifically allowing it?
A bit like saying you can't consume any vodka before driving, but it's perfectly legal to be drunk off light beer while driving.
The only solution I can see is a complete overhaul involving granting a lot less patents, but that's not going to happen without a complete overhaul of our society, because that challenges the mighty status quo.
You lost me at that last point. We need to "completely" overhaul society because we need to change one office?
I personally would be more pissed about having to go back to yahoo instead of gmail, but that's only because when I was using yahoo mail years ago, it sucked. Maybe they've improved since gmail set higher standards. I don't really care to find out.
Microsoft has a long history of understanding what proportion of their customers will accept what amount of abuse. And the people willing to spend the most money on consoles are, sadly, kids and parents who don't vote with their wallets.
In this specific case, it could end up bad for them, but it might not. After all, if a family doesn't have an internet connection, they probably aren't going to be the first kids on their block to get a new console, and they aren't going to be on twitter or facebook generating bad press about how their new christmas present won't work.
What I think they may be failing to do is a cost/benefit analysis. DRM in this case as always, won't hurt piracy or modded consoles. Most people don't mod their consoles to play pirate games, this might ensure that people will, and obviously piracy =/= lost sale. So why are they doing it? To satisfy developers' idiotic demands? From Sony's tweets, it sounds like the PS5 probably won't have always on DRM, so it's not like they need to match the competition. To force everyone who wants an xbox to get internet service? To prevent people from cheating at online games through modded consoles? From my experiences years ago, that was really rare.
I simply can't figure it out.
Without the FDA, there would be a more medical treatments available to save lives. The FDA vastly increases the costs of researching new medical treatments and that kills more people than tainted drugs do.
The fact that you take this as a given fact suggests that you NEED to believe this strongly in order to rationalize your religious-like beliefs in an economic theory.
Citation needed. From my perspective, before the FDA, there was a lot of snake oil sold as medicine. Literal snake oil. And sometimes toxins. And not sold as "herbal remedies," they were outright lies. People have not gotten smarter since that time, we have herbal remedies which are completely ineffective, yet they're still big money. Consumers are not able to determine side effects or efficiency themselves, which is why they keep buying "Airborne" or crap like that. If you allowed unproven crap medicines to be sold alongside meds which were tested and effective, there's no way real pharmaceutical practices would be competitive. Real pharmaceutical testing would be halted in favor of marketing cheap snake oil.
The above is a hypothesis yes. So is your statement that ending the FDA would improve medicine. But I think yours is nonsense, and it's not worth testing these hypotheses and potentially ending up with my scenario.
GTA set in a Star Wars universe could be fun.
I was going to make a joke involving the Hot Coffee incident, Natalie Portman as Padme, and hot grits, but I decided that was way too much nerdiness for one post.
So I'm simply going to say that I'd prefer vice versa, Star Wars set in a GTA universe.
Bioware and EA both make good games
(ducks)
No, seriously, they do (ducks again). EA has done some unforgivable things with DRM, that's what's despicable about them, not quality. Bioware and especially EA have made some hit and miss games, but this is true for almost every other company out there, except maybe for Valve. Their failures are only spectacular because of how much money they pumped into developing them. Sim City the recent one, Spore, they were huge games that were utter crap when delivered. But even their mediocre games are better than your average indie games.
Perhaps you don't like any games by either, but I'd suggest that you're TRYING not to like them. EA made Dead space, Mirror's edge, burnout, Timesplitters future perfect, rock band, Dragon age, walking dead, and Alice Madness Returns, all of which I enjoyed.
LucasArts had plenty of flops as well. Jedi power battles was atrocious. Plus, talk about milking franchises dry. People talk about how many call of duty games activision has put out, what about the number of star wars games LucasArts has put out? ANGRY BIRDS STAR WARS! THAT'S SHAMELESS!
Don't get me wrong, I liked lego star wars, but, come on, there's clearly double standards going on here if you're suggesting EA is bad and LucasArts was good.
If it makes you feel any better, eventually the official story will be that LucasArts shot at Disney first.
also need to cut fluff and filler from Education.
Why? Seems to me like trust fund kids wasting seven years in pursuit of a communications degree generates a lot of income for the school.
Granted, that's probably wasted on new lockers for the football team rather than a scholarship for smart kids getting engineering degrees, but that would be true even if you cut down all the joke majors. The executive types would just take a pay increase.
I do think a lot of fluff and filler will be cut from education through online courses. I expect that universities will try to take bigger cuts of research grants and offer even less to researchers in return. So that's going to be awesome for everyone for a while.
It is safe to say there will be downsides to this technology though. Of course, such an observation is obvious: every single thing humans have ever invented have pros and cons. Nuclear weapons, the most destructive power we've got, they prevented wars.
Possible exception: vaccines. I can't see much downsides to them. Idiots being paranoid about their effects aren't worth mentioning, they'd find something to illogically worry about anyway.
And, reportedly, Mexico has lost 70,000 of its citizens since 2007 to drug war violence.
I'm pro-legalization for a wide variety of reasons, but I'm a little skeptical that mexican cartels would be shut down due to competition. I'm not sure the mafia during prohibition is necessarily a good parallel situation, that they'll die out quickly due to legal competition.
Don't get me wrong, I say lets test it, since clearly what we're doing now isn't working and we should have a right to do recreational drugs if we feel like it, but if any slashdotter can point to evidence that the cartels will be broken by legalization, I'd be interested to hear it.
Another problem with some Kids In The Hall sketches was that they would try to do two different jokes at the same time, the combination being worse than the individual jokes were.
Same thing here. "Encryption" is annoying enough. The Doctor Who joke is not funny. Both together? I'm actually going to WORK the rest of the day.
What would be much more interesting is data on *who* is registering and setting up all of these sites, rather than where.
I'd start with a list of Nigerian royalty.
People spend all of this time bitching about all the things that are wrong in the world, and they only half-realize all the awesome things that go on such as this..
Well yeah, we bitch about THIS world. Awesome stuff may be happening on MARS, but here in this world, there's nothing but suckiness and things going wrong. Must be because there's nothing living on mars to fuck up shit. Dr. Manhattan had it right the first time.
Okay, that started out as a joke making fun of your word choice, but now I've gone from awestruck at the panorama to depressed...
In my experience, those two "problems" cancel each other out somewhat. I subscribed to RSS feeds from most of the journals relevant to my field, and every few days I'm flooded with relevant, hot-off-the-press papers to read. I find they're mostly believable research. I get ideas I wouldn't have thought of otherwise, ideas I apply to my own research and hypotheses. I think this may be what you are talking about with the serendipitous finds.
What do you mean "too much crappy research" anyway? The papers are basically republishing what's known already? You think the papers are mostly wrong? Or you just think the experiments could have been done better? The first two would be problems. The last one though is a far more common sentiment I hear from other scientists. I don't understand it. If you're convinced of the conclusions, but would demand that the experiment be done better, I don't think that's healthy skepticism, I think that's just arrogance. I also hear some scientists say things like "Well I just don't believe that." That again is not healthy skepticism, that's simply being closed minded.
Sorry for veering off topic there, I don't mean to suggest you're doing either of those errors.