I know what he meant and I suspect that most other/. readers do too. I'm all for correct use of language and such, but the definitions you've given are somewhat narrow and I think you know it. Now, before I post my next bit, I want to make it clear - my feelings on Bitcoin are irrelevant to this post. I am neither supporting nor bashing Bitcoin here.
Another definition taken from Wikipedia (the fountain of all human knowledge don't you know):
A pyramid scheme is a non-sustainable business model that involves promising participants payment, services or ideals, primarily for enrolling other people into the scheme or training them to take part, rather than supplying any real investment or sale of products or services to the public. Pyramid schemes are a form of fraud.
I suspect tthat this kind of definition was what the AC was going for. Probably the same for snake oil. Again the limited defintion you gave is at best outdated, at worst deliberately misleading given the popular usage of the phrase "snake oil".
If you want the full blown Microsoft Office or Photoshop, you have to get them from shady website, because the original are paying.
How about actually paying for them if you want to use them? Or finding FOSS alternatives like OpenOffice? You don't have to get them from a "shady website", that's a choice. A morally dubious choice as well in my opinion.
Would the accident rate have declined faster if distracting gadgets were removed from the equation?
Yes less people are dying on the road but that is in no way evidence against gadgets causing accidents. That may simply be safer cars with better brakes, better designed road systems, or any number of things.
Though in several cases, the car that was rear-ended was the one at fault. The light changed, the idiot texting her BFF didn't notice, and the car coming up from behind assumed that the stopped car would in fact eventually proceed through the now green light. It didn't.
No, no, no, no, no, a thousand times no. The idiot in the car that "assumed" is way more to blame for that than the moron sitting at a green light. Both are idiots. Both of them would get me swearing and questioning their parenthood/intelligence/fitness to exist but if you make an assumption about the actions of another driver you are setting yourself up for an accident.
Never assume that the guy in front of you doing 70mph with a clear road ahead will continue to do 70mph. If you follow so closely that his braking causes you to hit the back of him that's more your fault than his. Never assume the woman in front of you will pull out into traffic because YOU judged the gap to be large enough for her. She may feel differently. In the example you mentioned, at least in Britain, YOU are required to maintain enough distance to brake safely before you hit the back of that car. At no time should you ever get so close to someone that if they slam on the brakes you can't stop short of hitting them. If everyone followed this common sense approach we'd have way, way less car accidents worldwide, and if you believe the traffic analysts we'd actually all get to where we're going faster on average as there'd be less sharp braking, less accidents, more room to change lanes without having to cut in or slow down the people behind you etc.
Everyone got notified that they had to change their account info. No big deal.
I think that's just about the most idiotic and ill-thought out post I've ever seen on/.
No big deal you say. One wonders if you'd feel the same if you CC info and passwords for online banking were floating out there for anyone to use. Jesus. Such a selfish and short-sighted sentiment.
No, that's just given me even more to contemplate while staring at the ceiling. I'm surprised to hear FF8 is planned already....care to share any spoilers for what goodies I can expect in FF6 and 7 in the meantime? Actually never mind, I'll just wait till next week when they release both within 24 hours...
A little fun is fine. However, when real people start getting their personal details posted online it changes from "fun" to "harmful" behaviour. Now that they've rolled back to the script-kiddy tactics of DDoS attacks on random targets they've fallen further and are now officially just a bunch of fucking idiots with no appreciation for the harm they're doing to actual real people.
Your sole argument is that a word can only mean one thing at once, and since pirate still also means the peg-leg booty snatcher it can't mean anything in case there's confusion? I'd like to introduce you to the concept of homonyms.
I do hear this a lot from Americans, and while I can understand the argument I have to say that it's just a cultural thing. Europeans have no problem at all with temperatures being expressed in Celsius. You understand 60's and 70's (I think - obviously I'm not an expert) as being cold. We understand anything below zero up to about 5 degrees as being cold. You understand 90's as being warm. We understand anything above 25 (20 for us Brits but that's our microclimate for you) as being warm. If you'd grown up with it you'd understand, probably the same way I'd vehemently defend Farenheit if I'd been born and bred with that system. Either way, I can't see America abandoning Farenheit any time soon, nor as we likely to switch to that horribly convoluted and antiquated.........ahem........I mean delightful system. Vive la différence as they say.
Clearly you two have no place on the Internet. During a disagreement you've both used words like "respect" and "sorry" with wild abandon. You should be insulting each other in an illogical and globally offensive manner at this point.
UK isn't really on the metric either -- not 100%.... Temperature is measured in Celcius, and the younger generation don't have a "sense" for what numbers in Fahrenheit are.
Celsius is much more closely related to the SI for temperature (Kelvin) than Farenheit is. We don't understand Farenheit, nor do we need to. The only place that I've experienced using that system is America.
I encountered this, and while I admit it's a bit of a ballache and Valve really shoudl fix it, apparently it's only a handful of people/systems that experience it. I can work around it by turning off my wireless adapter (easily done on my laptop thankfully), implying that Steam is seeing a connection/adapter and struggling to comprehend that that doesn't necessarily mean that it can reach the Interwebs.
You can buy games that use Steam in brick and mortar stores. You can purchase physical copies of games that use Steam through Amazon and Play etc. The only thing you can't do is buy digital copies of games from other stores, and that's simply a business decision made by Valve. The crux of it is this: if you think Valve are charging too much for games through their store then don't buy them, and drop them an e-mail to let them know.
You haven't seen very many MMOs then. Have a look at RuneScape as one of many MMOs where paying users are offered absolutely massively more than free players, in terms of map areas (F2P get about 20% or less), items (similar proportion), skills etc. Not that there's anythign wrong with that, it's just not accurate to state that free players don't get a lot less than subscribers.
Never before have I read a post on/. that so closely matches my own opinion about popular media and alarmist reporting. You do have to consider though that without all the left wing, right wing, central (and whatever else people will subscribe to) media the citizens at large would have less to distract them from the actual problems in their lives, and with their government and the world. People in power like to keep the masses distracted with alarmist reporting and reality TV shows so they don't rise up and overthrow the corrupt powers that be.
Not this crap again. Pirate has very obviously become an accepted term for someone who infringes copyright. Why is this tired and meaningless argument that " a pirate has a boat and a wooden leg" trotted out again and again? It's language; fluid and changing. If we're going to bash copyright activist groups for being so stuck in their ways and unwilling to adapt, why can't everyone just accept that pirate now relates also to copyright infringers?
You think your cell phone was made from magic, unicorn farts and wishes? Research into materials, software, hardware and EM radiation. While I understand your sentiment to some degree I think perhaps you should go and find, for yourself, examples of how research translates into technologies you can use. I'm sure MIT's website will quickly get you into a publicity section that'll be happy to educate you about their knowledge transfer activities.
Petrol (gasoline for the Americans), diesel and engine oil are all highly dangerous and extremely harmful to the environment if spilled. We still manage to use them in unimaginable quantities every day without unmanageable problems. I think the toxicity of liquid-based batteries would easily be mitigated by safe storage designs and fool-proof extraction and refilling procedures. Yeah, yeah, I know nothing is fool proof but you can imagine a pair of tubes you have to screw onto your car and an automated retrieval and refilling procedure at fuel stations.
As a poster below mentioned, casual gamers are taking over. OnLive theoretically eliminates a huge proportion of cheaters, something that sounds pretty attractive to any sort of gamer, but probably even more so to someone who just wants to jump into a game and have a bit of a laugh after work.
Any gaming model that involves continually fleecing the player for whatever they can bear is amoral at best and if you stop to think about consequences of actions, clearly immoral.
I'm not sure it's quite as black and white as that. I have an "addictive personality" and often focus on one or two activities at the expense of others. In the past this was drinking, smoking and other destructive habits. Happily I've managed to fill some of the void left from quitting the nastier addictions with games (amongst other things), although I don't play MMOs nor do I feel compelled to subscribe to any of them. However, I am happy to spend £10-£30 on games and enjoy the entertainment I get from them.
If someone with similar motivations as me decides to spend their money instead on a WoW subscription, and gets some amount of enjoyment out of playing, or at the very least something to sate their need for repetitive actions, why is that inherently immoral? Now, in my eyes at least, there's a clear difference between the MMO gaming model and the bullshittery that we see from the CoD series, and others, that enjoy charging £15 for a fucking map pack and some hopelessly generic "new" weapons or abilities. MMOs may be driven by a need to hook people in and keep them playing, but in my book that's a world of difference from the blatantly cynical DLC offerings that are becoming increasingly common.
Wind or solar power fails due to changing weather conditions, and the charging of batteries for EVs is simply interrupted for a while.
And the lives of everyone using an EV are similarly disrupted in a non-predictable and highly disruptive fashion. How would the national economy be affected people not turning up for work, or being stranded in the city because their vehicles aren't charged?
So you're bashing the entire field of research because of problems with a SINGLE reactor that was experimental, and ceased operation over 20 years ago? What a sound and logical argument...
Can these problems be fixed? Might be. But why should we believe claims from an industry that is notorious mostly for not telling the truth?
The entire nuclear industry are liars? Wow, that's quite a claim. Hey, I heard that some politicians lie too, perhaps we should give up on centrally organised government...
I wish I had mod points to highlight your points. There's no sense of scale, risk-vs-reward or good old fashioned common sense in the arguments I see about nuclear power, and pretty much everything else in the news. It's all spin, manipulation of perceptions and, when it boils right down to it, far too much power being put into the hands of people with no fucking clue what the real issues are.
Public at large sees news reports of a nuclear reactor accident. Public at large decides nuclear power is bad and must be stopped. National government agree and give in, seemingly without any serious investigation into the actual facts. Is it very likely that in the time since the tsunami the German government properly investigated the long term costs and benefits of their nuclear program, or did they simply make a political decision based on the latest fashion trends in world news and the whim of the population?
Isn't it a matter of scale though? By the time I'd zoomed out enough to even see that the map was focused in Australia I'd long lost sight of the mine. And how much power did/does the material taken from that mine produce compared to mines for fossil fuels of comparable size?
Slashdot Mirror
Another definition taken from Wikipedia (the fountain of all human knowledge don't you know):
A pyramid scheme is a non-sustainable business model that involves promising participants payment, services or ideals, primarily for enrolling other people into the scheme or training them to take part, rather than supplying any real investment or sale of products or services to the public. Pyramid schemes are a form of fraud.
I suspect tthat this kind of definition was what the AC was going for. Probably the same for snake oil. Again the limited defintion you gave is at best outdated, at worst deliberately misleading given the popular usage of the phrase "snake oil".
If you want the full blown Microsoft Office or Photoshop, you have to get them from shady website, because the original are paying.
How about actually paying for them if you want to use them? Or finding FOSS alternatives like OpenOffice? You don't have to get them from a "shady website", that's a choice. A morally dubious choice as well in my opinion.
I see your challenge and raise you a question:
Would the accident rate have declined faster if distracting gadgets were removed from the equation?
Yes less people are dying on the road but that is in no way evidence against gadgets causing accidents. That may simply be safer cars with better brakes, better designed road systems, or any number of things.
Though in several cases, the car that was rear-ended was the one at fault. The light changed, the idiot texting her BFF didn't notice, and the car coming up from behind assumed that the stopped car would in fact eventually proceed through the now green light. It didn't.
No, no, no, no, no, a thousand times no. The idiot in the car that "assumed" is way more to blame for that than the moron sitting at a green light. Both are idiots. Both of them would get me swearing and questioning their parenthood/intelligence/fitness to exist but if you make an assumption about the actions of another driver you are setting yourself up for an accident.
Never assume that the guy in front of you doing 70mph with a clear road ahead will continue to do 70mph. If you follow so closely that his braking causes you to hit the back of him that's more your fault than his. Never assume the woman in front of you will pull out into traffic because YOU judged the gap to be large enough for her. She may feel differently. In the example you mentioned, at least in Britain, YOU are required to maintain enough distance to brake safely before you hit the back of that car. At no time should you ever get so close to someone that if they slam on the brakes you can't stop short of hitting them. If everyone followed this common sense approach we'd have way, way less car accidents worldwide, and if you believe the traffic analysts we'd actually all get to where we're going faster on average as there'd be less sharp braking, less accidents, more room to change lanes without having to cut in or slow down the people behind you etc.
OK, rant over.
Everyone got notified that they had to change their account info. No big deal.
I think that's just about the most idiotic and ill-thought out post I've ever seen on /.
No big deal you say. One wonders if you'd feel the same if you CC info and passwords for online banking were floating out there for anyone to use. Jesus. Such a selfish and short-sighted sentiment.
If it helps you sleep at night...
No, that's just given me even more to contemplate while staring at the ceiling. I'm surprised to hear FF8 is planned already....care to share any spoilers for what goodies I can expect in FF6 and 7 in the meantime? Actually never mind, I'll just wait till next week when they release both within 24 hours...
A little fun is fine. However, when real people start getting their personal details posted online it changes from "fun" to "harmful" behaviour. Now that they've rolled back to the script-kiddy tactics of DDoS attacks on random targets they've fallen further and are now officially just a bunch of fucking idiots with no appreciation for the harm they're doing to actual real people.
Your sole argument is that a word can only mean one thing at once, and since pirate still also means the peg-leg booty snatcher it can't mean anything in case there's confusion? I'd like to introduce you to the concept of homonyms.
I do hear this a lot from Americans, and while I can understand the argument I have to say that it's just a cultural thing. Europeans have no problem at all with temperatures being expressed in Celsius. You understand 60's and 70's (I think - obviously I'm not an expert) as being cold. We understand anything below zero up to about 5 degrees as being cold. You understand 90's as being warm. We understand anything above 25 (20 for us Brits but that's our microclimate for you) as being warm. If you'd grown up with it you'd understand, probably the same way I'd vehemently defend Farenheit if I'd been born and bred with that system. Either way, I can't see America abandoning Farenheit any time soon, nor as we likely to switch to that horribly convoluted and antiquated.........ahem........I mean delightful system. Vive la différence as they say.
Clearly you two have no place on the Internet. During a disagreement you've both used words like "respect" and "sorry" with wild abandon. You should be insulting each other in an illogical and globally offensive manner at this point.
UK isn't really on the metric either -- not 100%. ... Temperature is measured in Celcius, and the younger generation don't have a "sense" for what numbers in Fahrenheit are.
Celsius is much more closely related to the SI for temperature (Kelvin) than Farenheit is. We don't understand Farenheit, nor do we need to. The only place that I've experienced using that system is America.
I encountered this, and while I admit it's a bit of a ballache and Valve really shoudl fix it, apparently it's only a handful of people/systems that experience it. I can work around it by turning off my wireless adapter (easily done on my laptop thankfully), implying that Steam is seeing a connection/adapter and struggling to comprehend that that doesn't necessarily mean that it can reach the Interwebs.
You can buy games that use Steam in brick and mortar stores. You can purchase physical copies of games that use Steam through Amazon and Play etc. The only thing you can't do is buy digital copies of games from other stores, and that's simply a business decision made by Valve. The crux of it is this: if you think Valve are charging too much for games through their store then don't buy them, and drop them an e-mail to let them know.
You haven't seen very many MMOs then. Have a look at RuneScape as one of many MMOs where paying users are offered absolutely massively more than free players, in terms of map areas (F2P get about 20% or less), items (similar proportion), skills etc. Not that there's anythign wrong with that, it's just not accurate to state that free players don't get a lot less than subscribers.
There still is - see Frankie Boyle as one example.
Never before have I read a post on /. that so closely matches my own opinion about popular media and alarmist reporting. You do have to consider though that without all the left wing, right wing, central (and whatever else people will subscribe to) media the citizens at large would have less to distract them from the actual problems in their lives, and with their government and the world. People in power like to keep the masses distracted with alarmist reporting and reality TV shows so they don't rise up and overthrow the corrupt powers that be.
Not this crap again. Pirate has very obviously become an accepted term for someone who infringes copyright. Why is this tired and meaningless argument that " a pirate has a boat and a wooden leg" trotted out again and again? It's language; fluid and changing. If we're going to bash copyright activist groups for being so stuck in their ways and unwilling to adapt, why can't everyone just accept that pirate now relates also to copyright infringers?
You think your cell phone was made from magic, unicorn farts and wishes? Research into materials, software, hardware and EM radiation. While I understand your sentiment to some degree I think perhaps you should go and find, for yourself, examples of how research translates into technologies you can use. I'm sure MIT's website will quickly get you into a publicity section that'll be happy to educate you about their knowledge transfer activities.
Petrol (gasoline for the Americans), diesel and engine oil are all highly dangerous and extremely harmful to the environment if spilled. We still manage to use them in unimaginable quantities every day without unmanageable problems. I think the toxicity of liquid-based batteries would easily be mitigated by safe storage designs and fool-proof extraction and refilling procedures. Yeah, yeah, I know nothing is fool proof but you can imagine a pair of tubes you have to screw onto your car and an automated retrieval and refilling procedure at fuel stations.
As a poster below mentioned, casual gamers are taking over. OnLive theoretically eliminates a huge proportion of cheaters, something that sounds pretty attractive to any sort of gamer, but probably even more so to someone who just wants to jump into a game and have a bit of a laugh after work.
Any gaming model that involves continually fleecing the player for whatever they can bear is amoral at best and if you stop to think about consequences of actions, clearly immoral.
I'm not sure it's quite as black and white as that. I have an "addictive personality" and often focus on one or two activities at the expense of others. In the past this was drinking, smoking and other destructive habits. Happily I've managed to fill some of the void left from quitting the nastier addictions with games (amongst other things), although I don't play MMOs nor do I feel compelled to subscribe to any of them. However, I am happy to spend £10-£30 on games and enjoy the entertainment I get from them.
If someone with similar motivations as me decides to spend their money instead on a WoW subscription, and gets some amount of enjoyment out of playing, or at the very least something to sate their need for repetitive actions, why is that inherently immoral? Now, in my eyes at least, there's a clear difference between the MMO gaming model and the bullshittery that we see from the CoD series, and others, that enjoy charging £15 for a fucking map pack and some hopelessly generic "new" weapons or abilities. MMOs may be driven by a need to hook people in and keep them playing, but in my book that's a world of difference from the blatantly cynical DLC offerings that are becoming increasingly common.
Wind or solar power fails due to changing weather conditions, and the charging of batteries for EVs is simply interrupted for a while.
And the lives of everyone using an EV are similarly disrupted in a non-predictable and highly disruptive fashion. How would the national economy be affected people not turning up for work, or being stranded in the city because their vehicles aren't charged?
Can these problems be fixed? Might be. But why should we believe claims from an industry that is notorious mostly for not telling the truth?
The entire nuclear industry are liars? Wow, that's quite a claim. Hey, I heard that some politicians lie too, perhaps we should give up on centrally organised government...
I wish I had mod points to highlight your points. There's no sense of scale, risk-vs-reward or good old fashioned common sense in the arguments I see about nuclear power, and pretty much everything else in the news. It's all spin, manipulation of perceptions and, when it boils right down to it, far too much power being put into the hands of people with no fucking clue what the real issues are. Public at large sees news reports of a nuclear reactor accident. Public at large decides nuclear power is bad and must be stopped. National government agree and give in, seemingly without any serious investigation into the actual facts. Is it very likely that in the time since the tsunami the German government properly investigated the long term costs and benefits of their nuclear program, or did they simply make a political decision based on the latest fashion trends in world news and the whim of the population?
Isn't it a matter of scale though? By the time I'd zoomed out enough to even see that the map was focused in Australia I'd long lost sight of the mine. And how much power did/does the material taken from that mine produce compared to mines for fossil fuels of comparable size?