Nice kneejerk reaction, but the real reason to do this is if you have a legitimate copy of Windows, but don't want Microsoft's phone-home crap on your PC.
The usage you describe is just a dilution of the original usage. If you've never heard it used that way, and you live in the U.S., it may be because you already had a preconception about what it meant. In the tech context, for another definition aside from the Wikipedia one someone pointed to, see the Jargon File.
The Jonestown incident is the whole point: drinking the Kool-Aid is an act of unquestioning blind allegiance, with no critical thought involved. The reason it's such a popular expression is that you see so many people behaving this way, towards all sorts of things not worthy of such behavior, like companies, politicians, cars, you name it. As Mulder might put it, they want to believe... in something, anything.
You smell that? Do you smell that? Viral marketing, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of viral marketing in the morning. Smells like - market share.
The price is the only real thing hindering it, but if you consider long term energy savings, its awesome.
There are a couple of other problems. Note that the page says "These bulbs are generally not intended as a complete replacement for incandescents - these bulbs are lower output but more focused". One issue is that LEDs emit light in a very narrow spectrum, nothing like the broad spectrums of either incandescent or compact fluorescent. This tends to make LED lamp light appear harsh. Of course, manufacturers try to compensate for this, but I'm not aware of any that come close to providing the kind of broad spectrum distribution of the other bulb types.
Also, from a cost perspective, compact fluorescents are a cheaper upfront cost, even if LEDs are cheaper in the long run.
Wrong. All it takes is for people to agree with them.
That's not dictating. The problem is that the PR and press reports have tended to buy into this "official" crap.
You remember that next time they bring out the 2007 dictionaries - I'll expect to hear you complaining about the changes.
Funnily enough, I couldn't care less about whether they decide to downgrade Pluto to a dwaf planet, a comet, or a snowball. What just bugs me is all the bogus propaganda being spewed on the subject, and most of it is coming from the IAU and the press.
You're still arguing my point. The point is that an astronomical committee can't dictate the meaning of the English word "Pluto". The mutual agreement that caused the term to end up in the dictionary is as close to "official" as it gets.
Who defines "official"? All you have to do is go look it up in a dictionary:
a. Also called major planet. any of the nine large heavenly bodies revolving about the sun and shining by reflected light: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, or Pluto in the order of their proximity to the sun.
b. a similar body revolving about a star other than the sun.
And that's where this astronomical committee runs into trouble. They're redefining a word which has an English definition that will now be distinct from their technical definition. Anyone who speaks English can go on calling Pluto a planet, without qualification - there's nothing to unlearn, unless you plan to have a discussion with an excessively anal astronomer who believes that classifications like this somehow constitute science. Puh-leeze.
We stopped believing that the Earth is flat because better observations and measurements of the Earth contradicted the definition of "flat". However, what they're doing with Pluto is changing the definition of "planet". This is an entirely arbitrary process, and the definition they've come up with is entirely arbitrary. It has much less to do with science than with human psychology.
The people who want to stick with Pluto as a planet are at least as rational and justified in their belief as the people who want to change it.
Um, you do realize you have to pay for the CPU time you use, right? I estimate that every cent of RSA factoring prize money will cost you about $50 spent on Amazon Compute Cloud services. But with the capacity of EC2, I bet you could make up for it in volume!
You may have hit on something here -- if all the world's megacorps decided they needed jurisdiction-free headquarters in space, the problem of humanity being stuck on planet Earth would be solved! Before this decade is out, we could have a space-based population consisting of hundreds of thousands of CxOs, lawyers, accountants, and their support staff.
Perhaps we've been looking in all the wrong places for the Right Stuff? The future of space is... cubicles!
I'd say this only proves the point - this information wanted to be free badly enough to escape from AOL, leaving a trail of career destruction in its wake!
You were quite happy to accuse scientists of having lost the plot, but it seems you're not so ready to accept that your own criticism in fact applied to you.
The wonderful thing about science is that it allows us to make good predictions about many things without necessarily wasting the money to visit a place. (Although in this case, they have visited, and the information on which this latest theory is based comes largely from a satellite in Mars orbit.)
We already know that Mars has CO2 ice, and we can calculate quite exactly what temperature that ice melts at, and we know that when it melts, it becomes gaseous (hence the name "dry ice"). We have photos taken from orbit of the process which takes place in the Martian spring. All that remains is to confirm the model that's been proposed for the polar jets. However, the model makes a great deal of intuitive sense, matches the evidence, and explains quite well a phenomenon that's been known for years. This is a good example of how science makes progress. You should be glad of it, because without this sort of thing, you'd still be living in a cave.
At a certain point, we have to trust that the experts (that would be the FDA and other organizations) are, in fact, experts.
We trust that they're experts dealing with stuff that they've seen every day, and having learned from their mistakes. But when they do something new on a large scale, their expertise could very well count for little as factors outside their control affect things in unanticipated ways. Of course, any illness or death that results will help them to be better experts in future. But for those of us out in guinea-pig land, exercising some caution is not irrational. The interests and risk tradeoffs of the experts are not exactly the same as those for any individual consumer of virus-sprayed meat.
How about this, your food is inspected and is maintained within the strict standards set by those in charge of your health. That is a good label that can go on all your food.
Faith in government - are you sure you're on the right web site?
The point is that governments screw up, and the other point is that spraying food with viruses is something new which hasn't previously been tested on food consumed by millions of people. The meat industry is also not the first industry I'd trust to be introducing such technology. You might be willing to be a gamma tester for the latest mass-scale experiment in biotechnology, but not everyone is quite as blindly trusting as you. Federal agencies, viruses, the meat industry, and a can't-pass-up opportunity to deploy shiny new biotechnology sound like a recipe for a few good movie plots, and if you think none of those plots could possibly come true, you don't pay attention to the news (FEMA? Iraq? Vioxx?)
Further, you talk about evolving, well guess what: our cautious nature is a big part of what has kept us as a species alive. You can maintain your faith in "those in charge of your health", but I'm in charge of my own health, thank you very much.
There's not much mystery about that kind of thing. First of all, any computer that reboots because you drop a cup on its case is probably flaky in the first place - either a poorly homebuilt machine, or a very cheap commercial one. The impact probably caused something to flex, which shorted something out and caused the reboots. Secondly, since the machine didn't properly shut down, it's not unusual to get disk corruption as a result of that.
Slashdot Mirror
Nice kneejerk reaction, but the real reason to do this is if you have a legitimate copy of Windows, but don't want Microsoft's phone-home crap on your PC.
I agree, those are the origins of the phrase, but it took on a different meaning after Jonestown.
The usage you describe is just a dilution of the original usage. If you've never heard it used that way, and you live in the U.S., it may be because you already had a preconception about what it meant. In the tech context, for another definition aside from the Wikipedia one someone pointed to, see the Jargon File.
The Jonestown incident is the whole point: drinking the Kool-Aid is an act of unquestioning blind allegiance, with no critical thought involved. The reason it's such a popular expression is that you see so many people behaving this way, towards all sorts of things not worthy of such behavior, like companies, politicians, cars, you name it. As Mulder might put it, they want to believe... in something, anything.
Shhh, you'll spook the moderators!
You smell that? Do you smell that? Viral marketing, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of viral marketing in the morning. Smells like - market share.
Thos special getting high powers mentioned in your sig are really working for you!
Ladies? How could you tell? Did they wear bonnets and carry parasols?
What happened to your previous declaration "as a Jaffa"? Couldn't resist the Ori-worshipper mod points, huh??
There are a couple of other problems. Note that the page says "These bulbs are generally not intended as a complete replacement for incandescents - these bulbs are lower output but more focused". One issue is that LEDs emit light in a very narrow spectrum, nothing like the broad spectrums of either incandescent or compact fluorescent. This tends to make LED lamp light appear harsh. Of course, manufacturers try to compensate for this, but I'm not aware of any that come close to providing the kind of broad spectrum distribution of the other bulb types.
Also, from a cost perspective, compact fluorescents are a cheaper upfront cost, even if LEDs are cheaper in the long run.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
Frankly, these particular cops sound like incompetent Gestapo. I wouldn't be so proud if I were you.
You're still arguing my point. The point is that an astronomical committee can't dictate the meaning of the English word "Pluto". The mutual agreement that caused the term to end up in the dictionary is as close to "official" as it gets.
The point is, there's an accepted definition. That the definition is based in historical usage doesn't change the fact that a definition exists.
Who defines "official"? All you have to do is go look it up in a dictionary:
And that's where this astronomical committee runs into trouble. They're redefining a word which has an English definition that will now be distinct from their technical definition. Anyone who speaks English can go on calling Pluto a planet, without qualification - there's nothing to unlearn, unless you plan to have a discussion with an excessively anal astronomer who believes that classifications like this somehow constitute science. Puh-leeze.
Murdering Steve Ballmer would be a start...
We stopped believing that the Earth is flat because better observations and measurements of the Earth contradicted the definition of "flat". However, what they're doing with Pluto is changing the definition of "planet". This is an entirely arbitrary process, and the definition they've come up with is entirely arbitrary. It has much less to do with science than with human psychology.
The people who want to stick with Pluto as a planet are at least as rational and justified in their belief as the people who want to change it.
Um, you do realize you have to pay for the CPU time you use, right? I estimate that every cent of RSA factoring prize money will cost you about $50 spent on Amazon Compute Cloud services. But with the capacity of EC2, I bet you could make up for it in volume!
You may have hit on something here -- if all the world's megacorps decided they needed jurisdiction-free headquarters in space, the problem of humanity being stuck on planet Earth would be solved! Before this decade is out, we could have a space-based population consisting of hundreds of thousands of CxOs, lawyers, accountants, and their support staff.
Perhaps we've been looking in all the wrong places for the Right Stuff? The future of space is... cubicles!
I'd say this only proves the point - this information wanted to be free badly enough to escape from AOL, leaving a trail of career destruction in its wake!
You were quite happy to accuse scientists of having lost the plot, but it seems you're not so ready to accept that your own criticism in fact applied to you.
The wonderful thing about science is that it allows us to make good predictions about many things without necessarily wasting the money to visit a place. (Although in this case, they have visited, and the information on which this latest theory is based comes largely from a satellite in Mars orbit.)
We already know that Mars has CO2 ice, and we can calculate quite exactly what temperature that ice melts at, and we know that when it melts, it becomes gaseous (hence the name "dry ice"). We have photos taken from orbit of the process which takes place in the Martian spring. All that remains is to confirm the model that's been proposed for the polar jets. However, the model makes a great deal of intuitive sense, matches the evidence, and explains quite well a phenomenon that's been known for years. This is a good example of how science makes progress. You should be glad of it, because without this sort of thing, you'd still be living in a cave.
Faith in government - are you sure you're on the right web site?
The point is that governments screw up, and the other point is that spraying food with viruses is something new which hasn't previously been tested on food consumed by millions of people. The meat industry is also not the first industry I'd trust to be introducing such technology. You might be willing to be a gamma tester for the latest mass-scale experiment in biotechnology, but not everyone is quite as blindly trusting as you. Federal agencies, viruses, the meat industry, and a can't-pass-up opportunity to deploy shiny new biotechnology sound like a recipe for a few good movie plots, and if you think none of those plots could possibly come true, you don't pay attention to the news (FEMA? Iraq? Vioxx?)
Further, you talk about evolving, well guess what: our cautious nature is a big part of what has kept us as a species alive. You can maintain your faith in "those in charge of your health", but I'm in charge of my own health, thank you very much.
There's not much mystery about that kind of thing. First of all, any computer that reboots because you drop a cup on its case is probably flaky in the first place - either a poorly homebuilt machine, or a very cheap commercial one. The impact probably caused something to flex, which shorted something out and caused the reboots. Secondly, since the machine didn't properly shut down, it's not unusual to get disk corruption as a result of that.