This was a guy who tried to deny his daughter's paternity, had an almost pathological hatred of charity (even ending all of Apple's charitable programs when he came back in the 90's), and routinely screwed over even friends and family for money.
And Henry Ford was an anti-semite, Walt Disney was at least accused of being one too. Edison was a bigger jerk. He even electrocuted an elephant in an effort to spread FUD about the competition. A public legacy often ignores some very glaring faults: society is fairly willing to forgive and forget the details. After all, we're not remembering those people so much as we are remembering what they did for us.
That said, the culture on the internet is more cynical than people are talking around the watercooler. If this discussion right here is any indication, Jobs may have come a little too late for his personal foibles to be similarly forgotten. In fact, thanks to The Oatmeal, there seems to be some going back and adding those negative details into Edison's legacy.
Informative/insightful/interesting are all used pretty redundantly, and have been for quite some time, but yeah, they should probably be combined.
Proof? That the MPAA has not decided to accept their fate? Have decided to stop pushing legislation to make every website out there liable to huge fines for users posting copyrighted material to them, severely limiting what we will be allowed to express online and likely making many valuable websites untenable? Are not involved in the worldwide conspiracy with ACTA to implement severe restrictions in order to prevent anyone from seeing a movie for free?
No, I don't have any specific proof. I think that they've earned the burden of the proof that they're -not- doing the things I described rather than vice versa.
Don't be a mouthpiece for the "lull people into a false sense of security" department of the MPAA, even in passing. SOPA and PIPA are merely letters for a conspiracy that hasn't for a moment stopped trying to kill freedom of speech online.
They're behind this law in the Philippines, and they're at this very moment buying politicians to get SOPA and PIPA passed again as different letters.
Don't even reference their lies in passing. They are out to screw us all over.
You'd call that paranoia? I'd call that "not being born yesterday."
OF COURSE they're preparing something identical behind the scenes. They haven't STOPPED being greedy, stupid, shortsighted, corrupt assholes. Chris Dodd and everyone else who would rather screw over the public domain for a very small theoretical increase in profits, THEY are not the ones who are dead and never coming back. It's a damn shame too that they don't all slowly and simultaneously die of hemorrhoids.
So that when a part on one breaks, you absolutely cannot find that part used or for sale somewhere else. Also so that when you're trying to print from a new printer, you absolutely must connect to the internet first to search for the relevant driver, which will not be found anyway.
It's part of the strategy that is obviously working out so well for HP and many other printer makers:
Step one: Make printers pointlessly difficult to use in all ways, frustrating users
Step two: The promised "paperless office" never happens
Step three:???
Step four: PROFIT!!!
I think you misunderstood ungrounded lightning's point: that the guy trying to make the plans to print a firearm online should be concerned about an overzealous law enforcement agency ruthlessly prosecuting him for something that is not actually illegal.
He was not suggesting that those AK websites were doing anything criminal, but he may be of the opinion that the ATF would prosecute them anyway, and from his tone, it's clear he wouldn't AGREE with the ATF about that.
I didn't endorse any charities, but I do think there are real ones out there without such partisan agendas. Like, maybe organizations which give more money to research or feeding starving people? If you're so jaded that you think all charities are primarily concerned with changing laws, then why not do away with tax deductions for charity altogther.
Not sure why I'm responding to someone accusing me of bigotry though...
How about calculated gross earnings of the students you have taught?
Of course that puts a value on teaching, which is something being discouraged for tenured faculty (which I obviously don't agree with).
That would also make it in new professors' best interests to not teach the intro level courses where much of the class will change majors and doesn't want to be there in the first place. They'll instead focus on the upper level courses where the weak links have been weeded out.
Guess which courses new faculty get stuck doing now? That would be rewarding the really weaselly ones who were able to skip the hard work.
Furthermore, the students don't care about quality teachers, or else they'd be going to smaller schools known more for teaching than for research grants. They're voting with their wallets for schools where research is valued more than instruction. So your solution is lacking a problem, at least according to the teachers and students of such schools.
Indeed. Giving money to the Mormon Church, which lobbies to make sure states don't respect the right to marry whoever one wants, is tax deductible. Giving money to the ACLU, which lobbies to make sure rights are upheld, is not. There's something wrong with that.
Feel free to call me a hypocrite, but I think there's a key difference in amount of money. I'm struggling to save up for a rainy day. Mitt Romney already has enough for him and his children to live comfortably on. I don't pay more in taxes than I'm required because I'm trying to make sure I'm not going to end up on more government services or borrowing money. Mitt Romney is not in danger of that.
I also think there's differences between "giving to charity" and "giving to the Mormon church and one's own charitable foundations." The latter is what Mitt appears to have done. I don't know what his charities do, maybe they're more deserving of money than the US government, but the Mormon church IN MY OPINION is not. Getting prop 8 passed, denying homosexuals their God-given right to marry who they choose, that's not a charitable diversion of tax dollars in my book, that's skipping taxes to take away people's rights.
For one thing, I think scientists are generally more honest than, say, politicians. Full disclosure: I AM a scientist, so I'm biased, but scientists don't go into science for the money. They don't go into it to lie to people. My experience has been that most scientists will admit when they're wrong and will not try to publish fraudulent research, if for no other reason than people are going to likely be repeating their experiments if they're of any importance.
For another, no one makes everything public in any profession. Why should scientists be held to such a high standard compared to law enforcement, lawyers, or politicians? Don't we provide a valuable enough service compared to politicians?
Cost is also a concern in some cases. In terms of time and in terms of storage. In my thesis work, I generated about two terabytes of raw data, most of which was useless even to me. I'm sure the costs to store it wouldn't be monumental, but for how little value anyone would get out of it, it doesn't seem worth it right now. Sorting through e-mails relevant to the work and scrubbing all my personal data out of my lab notebook would also be time that would be wasted.
Lastly, TFS touches on a good enough reason. "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." The loudest voices crying out for releasing everything are the global warming deniers and creationists, and they clearly want it not to pursue truth but to discredit legitimate science.
No, he probably means his tax returns from more than the last two years in which he was running for president and knew he would have to disclose. The tax returns he may not have realized anyone would ever see, so he may have felt entitled to cheap out on even more than he did with the tax returns he DID release.
I'm guessing this was done because the printer manufacturer is worried about the press that would hurt their buisiness, not because it's "illicit" or anything like that.
"Coming up on your shitty cable news program, TERRORIST PEDOPHILES can print out NEARLY ANY AUTOMATIC DEATH WEAPON AT HOME! Some experts (on making ridiculous statements) suggest they could print a NUCLEAR BOMB!!! Are YOUR children safe? NO THEY'RE FUCKING NOT BECAUSE WE DON'T HAVE ANY LAWS AGAINST IT AND PEOPLE ARE ALREADY PRINTING OFF GUNS (sorta)"
Which, they probably have legitimate reason to be concerned about that. Those stories will pop up, and people will write their congressmen who will suggest we need government regulation over what 3D things you can print off. And there are industries who have interests in people not being able to easily print off their own potentially copyright-infringing items. And it's too much to hope that such people won't be selfish and won't use such FUD to kill 3D printing before it gets off the ground.
Still, I'd prefer people to deal head on with stupid bullshit FUD when it comes up rather than punishing individual customers who are driving the field forward.
I don't know a single person that doesn't bike because they have to wear a helmet.
I was one. I lived in an otherwise bike-friendly city that could fine you for not wearing a helmet. I had a bike, not a helmet. Rather than going to the store and getting a helmet, I just rode the bus for most of the first year I was there, despite hating busses. Sometimes I risked the fine.
I then got a helmet and usually rode.
Anyway, you appear to be rejecting the conclusions of a valid study because they don't agree with your preconceived notions, AND using anecdotal evidence, or lackthereof, to do it.
I don't know, you seem to have sampled more species prepared as bacon than usual, I think most people have only tried pork bacon, not turkey and especially not lamb bacon. You suggest that NOTHING can compare to it. And you call me devoid of taste for suggesting otherwise. Why do you say you wouldn't call yourself a bacon purist?
I mean, aside from the fact "bacon purist" is a silly and ridiculous term I seem to have made up.
You'd give an unelected board of lifelong appointees the power to approve or reject all laws passed by congress? That sounds like a terrible idea. They wouldn't be restricted to dealing with it in a chronological order. They'd be able to fast-track laws they liked and bury laws they didn't.
At the current moment in history, I do think the supreme court justices are generally more worthy than your average congressman. Certainly more informed on what the constitution means. But if you give the position such powers, you raise the stakes, and I'm quite certain you'd see the supreme court being much more of a battleground than it is now. The pretense of striking down laws based not on opinion but on constitutionality would go right out the door.
Imagine if, for example, the tea party got one or two seats on such a supreme court. It would be bad as is, but consolidating even more control with the court both makes it more damaging and more likely.
Or, you know, turkey bacon. There's probably also some imitation bacon made for vegetarians. Purists will look down their nose at such options, but I look down my nose at people who would call themselves bacon purists. That is, I will when I'm not stuffing my face with crispy strips of cooked meat that taste the same to me and don't cost an arm and a belly.
Then you might be interested to know that turtles and some other reptiles can recover from spinal cord injuries, regrowing the neurons, and chickens can recover their hearing after hair cell loss, which we cannot do.
He doesn't need to be a criminal for AC to wish bad things upon him. Always struck me as strange how slashdotters are quick to forget that not everyone is a lawyer talking about laws.
the amount of actual science we do seem to keep falling.
From my perspective it seems the opposite. I'm a biologist, more powerful tools are coming out faster than I can keep up with them. When I started my PhD, the microscope we had was really nice. By the end, it was essentially obsolete. It was a laser scanning confocal, a spinning disc was installed next door that was much faster and a super-resolution microscope was on it's way. That was a few months ago.
There are potential budget cuts looming unless the tea party and republicans suddenly decide they'd rather cooperate with Obama and be rational. And that is annoying and stupid, but look at the funding for the national institute of health, which sponsors a lot of biology research. 1993-2009 and 2004 to 2012. It's up pretty significantly in the last decade.
Slashdot Mirror
This was a guy who tried to deny his daughter's paternity, had an almost pathological hatred of charity (even ending all of Apple's charitable programs when he came back in the 90's), and routinely screwed over even friends and family for money.
And Henry Ford was an anti-semite, Walt Disney was at least accused of being one too. Edison was a bigger jerk. He even electrocuted an elephant in an effort to spread FUD about the competition. A public legacy often ignores some very glaring faults: society is fairly willing to forgive and forget the details. After all, we're not remembering those people so much as we are remembering what they did for us.
That said, the culture on the internet is more cynical than people are talking around the watercooler. If this discussion right here is any indication, Jobs may have come a little too late for his personal foibles to be similarly forgotten. In fact, thanks to The Oatmeal, there seems to be some going back and adding those negative details into Edison's legacy.
Informative/insightful/interesting are all used pretty redundantly, and have been for quite some time, but yeah, they should probably be combined.
Proof? That the MPAA has not decided to accept their fate? Have decided to stop pushing legislation to make every website out there liable to huge fines for users posting copyrighted material to them, severely limiting what we will be allowed to express online and likely making many valuable websites untenable? Are not involved in the worldwide conspiracy with ACTA to implement severe restrictions in order to prevent anyone from seeing a movie for free?
No, I don't have any specific proof. I think that they've earned the burden of the proof that they're -not- doing the things I described rather than vice versa.
Don't be a mouthpiece for the "lull people into a false sense of security" department of the MPAA, even in passing. SOPA and PIPA are merely letters for a conspiracy that hasn't for a moment stopped trying to kill freedom of speech online.
They're behind this law in the Philippines, and they're at this very moment buying politicians to get SOPA and PIPA passed again as different letters.
Don't even reference their lies in passing. They are out to screw us all over.
Yes, we need to not be apathetic about our rights being eroded. Knowing is different than doing, sadly.
You'd call that paranoia? I'd call that "not being born yesterday."
OF COURSE they're preparing something identical behind the scenes. They haven't STOPPED being greedy, stupid, shortsighted, corrupt assholes. Chris Dodd and everyone else who would rather screw over the public domain for a very small theoretical increase in profits, THEY are not the ones who are dead and never coming back. It's a damn shame too that they don't all slowly and simultaneously die of hemorrhoids.
So that when a part on one breaks, you absolutely cannot find that part used or for sale somewhere else. Also so that when you're trying to print from a new printer, you absolutely must connect to the internet first to search for the relevant driver, which will not be found anyway.
It's part of the strategy that is obviously working out so well for HP and many other printer makers:
Step one: Make printers pointlessly difficult to use in all ways, frustrating users
Step two: The promised "paperless office" never happens
Step three:???
Step four: PROFIT!!!
I think you misunderstood ungrounded lightning's point: that the guy trying to make the plans to print a firearm online should be concerned about an overzealous law enforcement agency ruthlessly prosecuting him for something that is not actually illegal.
He was not suggesting that those AK websites were doing anything criminal, but he may be of the opinion that the ATF would prosecute them anyway, and from his tone, it's clear he wouldn't AGREE with the ATF about that.
Hence the "at least in theory."
Relevant oatmeal
I didn't endorse any charities, but I do think there are real ones out there without such partisan agendas. Like, maybe organizations which give more money to research or feeding starving people? If you're so jaded that you think all charities are primarily concerned with changing laws, then why not do away with tax deductions for charity altogther.
Not sure why I'm responding to someone accusing me of bigotry though...
How about calculated gross earnings of the students you have taught? Of course that puts a value on teaching, which is something being discouraged for tenured faculty (which I obviously don't agree with).
That would also make it in new professors' best interests to not teach the intro level courses where much of the class will change majors and doesn't want to be there in the first place. They'll instead focus on the upper level courses where the weak links have been weeded out.
Guess which courses new faculty get stuck doing now? That would be rewarding the really weaselly ones who were able to skip the hard work.
Furthermore, the students don't care about quality teachers, or else they'd be going to smaller schools known more for teaching than for research grants. They're voting with their wallets for schools where research is valued more than instruction. So your solution is lacking a problem, at least according to the teachers and students of such schools.
Indeed. Giving money to the Mormon Church, which lobbies to make sure states don't respect the right to marry whoever one wants, is tax deductible. Giving money to the ACLU, which lobbies to make sure rights are upheld, is not. There's something wrong with that.
Feel free to call me a hypocrite, but I think there's a key difference in amount of money. I'm struggling to save up for a rainy day. Mitt Romney already has enough for him and his children to live comfortably on. I don't pay more in taxes than I'm required because I'm trying to make sure I'm not going to end up on more government services or borrowing money. Mitt Romney is not in danger of that.
I also think there's differences between "giving to charity" and "giving to the Mormon church and one's own charitable foundations." The latter is what Mitt appears to have done. I don't know what his charities do, maybe they're more deserving of money than the US government, but the Mormon church IN MY OPINION is not. Getting prop 8 passed, denying homosexuals their God-given right to marry who they choose, that's not a charitable diversion of tax dollars in my book, that's skipping taxes to take away people's rights.
But the police are at least in theory impartial. The people who are paid to smear the climate change research, on the other hand, fuck their axe.
For one thing, I think scientists are generally more honest than, say, politicians. Full disclosure: I AM a scientist, so I'm biased, but scientists don't go into science for the money. They don't go into it to lie to people. My experience has been that most scientists will admit when they're wrong and will not try to publish fraudulent research, if for no other reason than people are going to likely be repeating their experiments if they're of any importance.
For another, no one makes everything public in any profession. Why should scientists be held to such a high standard compared to law enforcement, lawyers, or politicians? Don't we provide a valuable enough service compared to politicians?
Cost is also a concern in some cases. In terms of time and in terms of storage. In my thesis work, I generated about two terabytes of raw data, most of which was useless even to me. I'm sure the costs to store it wouldn't be monumental, but for how little value anyone would get out of it, it doesn't seem worth it right now. Sorting through e-mails relevant to the work and scrubbing all my personal data out of my lab notebook would also be time that would be wasted.
Lastly, TFS touches on a good enough reason. "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." The loudest voices crying out for releasing everything are the global warming deniers and creationists, and they clearly want it not to pursue truth but to discredit legitimate science.
No, he probably means his tax returns from more than the last two years in which he was running for president and knew he would have to disclose. The tax returns he may not have realized anyone would ever see, so he may have felt entitled to cheap out on even more than he did with the tax returns he DID release.
I'm guessing this was done because the printer manufacturer is worried about the press that would hurt their buisiness, not because it's "illicit" or anything like that.
"Coming up on your shitty cable news program, TERRORIST PEDOPHILES can print out NEARLY ANY AUTOMATIC DEATH WEAPON AT HOME! Some experts (on making ridiculous statements) suggest they could print a NUCLEAR BOMB!!! Are YOUR children safe? NO THEY'RE FUCKING NOT BECAUSE WE DON'T HAVE ANY LAWS AGAINST IT AND PEOPLE ARE ALREADY PRINTING OFF GUNS (sorta)"
Which, they probably have legitimate reason to be concerned about that. Those stories will pop up, and people will write their congressmen who will suggest we need government regulation over what 3D things you can print off. And there are industries who have interests in people not being able to easily print off their own potentially copyright-infringing items. And it's too much to hope that such people won't be selfish and won't use such FUD to kill 3D printing before it gets off the ground.
Still, I'd prefer people to deal head on with stupid bullshit FUD when it comes up rather than punishing individual customers who are driving the field forward.
I don't know a single person that doesn't bike because they have to wear a helmet.
I was one. I lived in an otherwise bike-friendly city that could fine you for not wearing a helmet. I had a bike, not a helmet. Rather than going to the store and getting a helmet, I just rode the bus for most of the first year I was there, despite hating busses. Sometimes I risked the fine.
I then got a helmet and usually rode.
Anyway, you appear to be rejecting the conclusions of a valid study because they don't agree with your preconceived notions, AND using anecdotal evidence, or lackthereof, to do it.
I don't know, you seem to have sampled more species prepared as bacon than usual, I think most people have only tried pork bacon, not turkey and especially not lamb bacon. You suggest that NOTHING can compare to it. And you call me devoid of taste for suggesting otherwise. Why do you say you wouldn't call yourself a bacon purist?
I mean, aside from the fact "bacon purist" is a silly and ridiculous term I seem to have made up.
You'd give an unelected board of lifelong appointees the power to approve or reject all laws passed by congress? That sounds like a terrible idea. They wouldn't be restricted to dealing with it in a chronological order. They'd be able to fast-track laws they liked and bury laws they didn't.
At the current moment in history, I do think the supreme court justices are generally more worthy than your average congressman. Certainly more informed on what the constitution means. But if you give the position such powers, you raise the stakes, and I'm quite certain you'd see the supreme court being much more of a battleground than it is now. The pretense of striking down laws based not on opinion but on constitutionality would go right out the door.
Imagine if, for example, the tea party got one or two seats on such a supreme court. It would be bad as is, but consolidating even more control with the court both makes it more damaging and more likely.
Or, you know, turkey bacon. There's probably also some imitation bacon made for vegetarians. Purists will look down their nose at such options, but I look down my nose at people who would call themselves bacon purists. That is, I will when I'm not stuffing my face with crispy strips of cooked meat that taste the same to me and don't cost an arm and a belly.
Then you might be interested to know that turtles and some other reptiles can recover from spinal cord injuries, regrowing the neurons, and chickens can recover their hearing after hair cell loss, which we cannot do.
Is not applicable to the current situation.
Clearly, he's a dirtbag
It is not illegal to be a dirtbag.
He doesn't need to be a criminal for AC to wish bad things upon him. Always struck me as strange how slashdotters are quick to forget that not everyone is a lawyer talking about laws.
the amount of actual science we do seem to keep falling.
From my perspective it seems the opposite. I'm a biologist, more powerful tools are coming out faster than I can keep up with them. When I started my PhD, the microscope we had was really nice. By the end, it was essentially obsolete. It was a laser scanning confocal, a spinning disc was installed next door that was much faster and a super-resolution microscope was on it's way. That was a few months ago.
There are potential budget cuts looming unless the tea party and republicans suddenly decide they'd rather cooperate with Obama and be rational. And that is annoying and stupid, but look at the funding for the national institute of health, which sponsors a lot of biology research. 1993-2009 and 2004 to 2012. It's up pretty significantly in the last decade.