Your examples refer only to the manufacturing of the devices, not to the overall environmental impact over the entire useful lifetime of the devices. And of course, as I said, life is solar powered, so at least there's a real historical precedent to the concept that things which are solar powered can have virtually zero negative impact on the environment as something that is at least doable.
this is not feasible and would in fact do a lot of damage to the environment....
Could you explain how, exactly, a 100% solar/renewable approach would do more damage to the environment than the non-renewables that it could otherwise replace?
...if we want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions quickly and effectively
Perhaps instead of looking for a quick and cheap solution, we should instead be looking for the most sustainable one. I'm not suggesting that your suggestion may not be an excellent stepping stone towards the long term goal of sustainability for as long as this planet remains habitable, but considering life itself is essentially solar powered and has been around in one form or another for over a billion years now, it seems pretty sustainable to me, so I'm genuinely at a loss as to how you'd think that a 100% solar-powered/renewable option could possibly be any worse for the environment in the long run than any alternative we've yet come up with.
I'm suggesting that feeling insulted, humiliated, ashamed, or harassed is not the same thing as being defamed, and any notion that one might have of similarity arises only from a misunderstanding of what defamation actually is, and their lawyer would probably set them straight long before it developed into a real lawsuit.
Feelings, by definition, cannot possibly be defamatory.... defamation requires statements about the defamed party that are presented as unequivocal truths, and must usually (although not always, under certain circumstances) be false. If person A is expressing, through an emoticon or otherwise, how they feel negatively about person B, then the statement being presented as an unequivocal truth is about person A themselves, not B... and thus cannot possibly be defamatory towards B.
You're talking in present tense.... were you doing this in 1982? Think for a moment about the tools that would have been available at the time.
And just how many years had you been doing it before you were able to make a picture that actually couldn't be easily distinguished as altered? Think about how old this kid was.
And just what kind of practice would you have needed, and how much would it have cost you to get there, to fake a picture in 1982 that looked indistinguishable from a polaroid pic?
I'm a parent as well... my kids are grown and all moved out now, but I was always willing to make personal sacrifices if it meant raising them to be decent and mature human beings. If that meant selling the TV or getting rid of cable, I'd do it. If that meant slower internet speeds, or even if it meant I'd have to go back to dialup*, I'd do that too.
But you can sure as hell bet I'd be bitching to the cable company for what I'd consider unfair treatment.
*We did that for a while at our house, when one of our kids was downloading shit he knew he wasn't supposed to. Ticked off his brothers, but they all survived it... and so did we. We got broadband back in our place after about a 5 year hiatus.
It's easy to manually edit photos, if you have your own photo lab and know how...
For values of "easy" that include unlimited time to spend on getting the result exactly right so that it can't be easy to tell that the photo was altered, not to mention having the money you might end up throwing away on wasted materials because of mistakes that end up showing in the final print.
Sure it's possible... but back then only by people who had more years of experience doing it than somebody who was still in high school would have realistically been likely to have.
While I wouldn't claim to be an expert, what I remember from photography class in school in the 1970's is that it is anything but trivial.
Doable, certainly... but from what I know, it would be at a considerable expense of time and effort, and often financial resources if the result is going to be genuinely any good (that is, it is not immediately obvious to even casual observers that it was a doctored photo).
In practice, I'd expect that it was just not viable back then to do convincingly without at least *SOME* commercial-scale opportunity for profit. to justify both the expense and effort that was spent simply making the photo. For something that offered no significant monetary incentive, such as holding a video game record, I think it's improbable to the extreme that anyone would doctor a physical photograph simply to prove something so mundane.
Think about when this was done... while trivial by today's standards, what you're describing may not necessarily have even been possible for someone who didn't have an entire game cartridge fabrication facility at his beck and call.
If a person is going to be paid to do something that will get them thrown in jail for an awful logng time if they should get caught, I'd think they'd expect to be paid enough to be assured of a nice little nest-egg when they got out.
... the person is *NOT* any kind of professional hitman, as the letter would suggest, unless he's somehow gotten displaced in time by about a hundred years or more.
Honestly, the letter would sound a whole lot more convincing if there were a few more zeroes in the figure... at least 2 more, and more likely 3.
I mean "ubiquitous" as in it is much more widely known, and you are less likely to have to supply all of your clients with training in the extension language than you would if you used Lua.
Lua is a fine embedded script language, but I sincerely think Javascript is preferable simply because it is more likely that the end user is going to have a passing familiarity with it even before they see your product, and will thus find the notion of developing such extensions, if they are inclined to do so, less intimidating.
Perhaps, but Javascript is far more ubiquitous than Lua, so for business-oriented software that has such end-user programmable extensions, you probably won't have to train any of your customers how to use it, while if you used Lua... you'd almost certainly have to supply language tutorials with your product just to get most people to square one... and as far as the end user is concerned, it would not be significantly different than if you had developed your own proprietary extension programming language that was not used anywhere but in your products (although it would take much less time to develop than using Lua, of course).
I like JavaScript, but hate using it inside of a browser. It is most useful, imo, embedded into a client program as a means of allowing a mechanism for user-added functionality that is simple for the end user to use while also being expressive enough to do anything, even beyond what the developers might imagine.
True... but that's what's kept an ongoing need for the poor. Once robots can do everything that rich people need them to do, poor people will be irrelevant, and just a drain on society.
Slashdot Mirror
Your examples refer only to the manufacturing of the devices, not to the overall environmental impact over the entire useful lifetime of the devices. And of course, as I said, life is solar powered, so at least there's a real historical precedent to the concept that things which are solar powered can have virtually zero negative impact on the environment as something that is at least doable.
Could you explain how, exactly, a 100% solar/renewable approach would do more damage to the environment than the non-renewables that it could otherwise replace?
Perhaps instead of looking for a quick and cheap solution, we should instead be looking for the most sustainable one. I'm not suggesting that your suggestion may not be an excellent stepping stone towards the long term goal of sustainability for as long as this planet remains habitable, but considering life itself is essentially solar powered and has been around in one form or another for over a billion years now, it seems pretty sustainable to me, so I'm genuinely at a loss as to how you'd think that a 100% solar-powered/renewable option could possibly be any worse for the environment in the long run than any alternative we've yet come up with.
Technically it's not an emoticon if used as a substitute for words... one is just then writing with pictures.
I'm suggesting that feeling insulted, humiliated, ashamed, or harassed is not the same thing as being defamed, and any notion that one might have of similarity arises only from a misunderstanding of what defamation actually is, and their lawyer would probably set them straight long before it developed into a real lawsuit.
Feelings, by definition, cannot possibly be defamatory.... defamation requires statements about the defamed party that are presented as unequivocal truths, and must usually (although not always, under certain circumstances) be false. If person A is expressing, through an emoticon or otherwise, how they feel negatively about person B, then the statement being presented as an unequivocal truth is about person A themselves, not B... and thus cannot possibly be defamatory towards B.
An emoticon is understood, by definition, to convey emotion.
I get how certain emoticons might feel offensive to some people in certain circumstances, but how can what someone *FEELS* be defamatory?
You're talking in present tense.... were you doing this in 1982? Think for a moment about the tools that would have been available at the time.
And just how many years had you been doing it before you were able to make a picture that actually couldn't be easily distinguished as altered? Think about how old this kid was.
And just what kind of practice would you have needed, and how much would it have cost you to get there, to fake a picture in 1982 that looked indistinguishable from a polaroid pic?
The matter of how a game screen was faked in 1982, given the resources available at the time, is the entire point of what I was asking.
I'm a parent as well... my kids are grown and all moved out now, but I was always willing to make personal sacrifices if it meant raising them to be decent and mature human beings. If that meant selling the TV or getting rid of cable, I'd do it. If that meant slower internet speeds, or even if it meant I'd have to go back to dialup*, I'd do that too.
But you can sure as hell bet I'd be bitching to the cable company for what I'd consider unfair treatment.
*We did that for a while at our house, when one of our kids was downloading shit he knew he wasn't supposed to. Ticked off his brothers, but they all survived it... and so did we. We got broadband back in our place after about a 5 year hiatus.
For values of "easy" that include unlimited time to spend on getting the result exactly right so that it can't be easy to tell that the photo was altered, not to mention having the money you might end up throwing away on wasted materials because of mistakes that end up showing in the final print.
Sure it's possible... but back then only by people who had more years of experience doing it than somebody who was still in high school would have realistically been likely to have.
While I wouldn't claim to be an expert, what I remember from photography class in school in the 1970's is that it is anything but trivial.
Doable, certainly... but from what I know, it would be at a considerable expense of time and effort, and often financial resources if the result is going to be genuinely any good (that is, it is not immediately obvious to even casual observers that it was a doctored photo).
In practice, I'd expect that it was just not viable back then to do convincingly without at least *SOME* commercial-scale opportunity for profit. to justify both the expense and effort that was spent simply making the photo. For something that offered no significant monetary incentive, such as holding a video game record, I think it's improbable to the extreme that anyone would doctor a physical photograph simply to prove something so mundane.
Possible, perhaps. But not likely.
At least, IMNSHO.
That would make the most sense, IMO, and may be a legitimate grounds to invalidate the score, but not accuse of him deliberately cheating.
Think about when this was done... while trivial by today's standards, what you're describing may not necessarily have even been possible for someone who didn't have an entire game cartridge fabrication facility at his beck and call.
So.... did anyone ever figure out how he might have created the photo?
Nobody said being a parent was supposed be fun, easy, or convenient.
If this is an issue at all, a parent is well advised to cancel their cable subscription entirely.
If an adult can't go on living without the television shows they want to watch, then why on earth should they expect their kids to?
If a person is going to be paid to do something that will get them thrown in jail for an awful logng time if they should get caught, I'd think they'd expect to be paid enough to be assured of a nice little nest-egg when they got out.
Honestly, the letter would sound a whole lot more convincing if there were a few more zeroes in the figure... at least 2 more, and more likely 3.
I mean "ubiquitous" as in it is much more widely known, and you are less likely to have to supply all of your clients with training in the extension language than you would if you used Lua.
Lua is a fine embedded script language, but I sincerely think Javascript is preferable simply because it is more likely that the end user is going to have a passing familiarity with it even before they see your product, and will thus find the notion of developing such extensions, if they are inclined to do so, less intimidating.
Perhaps, but Javascript is far more ubiquitous than Lua, so for business-oriented software that has such end-user programmable extensions, you probably won't have to train any of your customers how to use it, while if you used Lua... you'd almost certainly have to supply language tutorials with your product just to get most people to square one... and as far as the end user is concerned, it would not be significantly different than if you had developed your own proprietary extension programming language that was not used anywhere but in your products (although it would take much less time to develop than using Lua, of course).
I like JavaScript, but hate using it inside of a browser. It is most useful, imo, embedded into a client program as a means of allowing a mechanism for user-added functionality that is simple for the end user to use while also being expressive enough to do anything, even beyond what the developers might imagine.
I totally misread the headline and thought WTF?
I first read the headline as: Amateur astronomer discovered long dead by NASA satellite brought back to life.
It's nice that you think that... and truthfully, I hope you are right, but I really do think greed is going to win out.
True... but that's what's kept an ongoing need for the poor. Once robots can do everything that rich people need them to do, poor people will be irrelevant, and just a drain on society.
You grossly underestimate human greed.
5. People who have better things to do with their time than disclose every personal detail about their lives on facebook