Well, as someone who does... I use zazzle to make posters for my classroom, (nice) prints+frames for my relatives, customizable T-shirts for my classes. I make the stuff open to the world, but I'm not expecting to make money on it. Nonetheless I do get a small trickle of royalties, which is money I made without any extra effort.
Every time I tell someone about zazzle -- and I've been doing that for three years now -- they get excited about it, too. Sometimes these are cafepress users, but they generally switch over once they've tried zazzle. (The two services are more or less contemporaneous.)
These guys aren't going out on a limb. I don't think zazzle will become the Next Big Thing to Eat the Internet, but they've got a working model and a good userbase.
So, you know, in a couple months when they figure out that there isn't a very big market for this stuff
Well, I've been using zazzle for at least three years, having been part of the beta group. So I think they're safely past the "couple of months" stage. Maybe you can make money on this and maybe you can't -- but the VCs this time are getting into a business with a track record you can read and interpret. It's not just some vapor.
So you maybe will be able to build a "Praying Machine" that makes God telling you "Yes, I Am the Universal Faker"
Bzzzt. But thanks for playing. Your hypothetical machine is an experiment that can distinguish whether quarks exist -- indeed, you've even specified the experiment. And this contradicts the proposition that God fakes it in all experiments. An "experiment" doesn't have to be done in a linear collider, for pete's sake.
So what can be said? That quarks existing is consistent with every experiment that has been done to detect them. Could God pop out from behind the bush tomorrow and say "Gotcha!"? Sure. But in science all truths are contingent truths. The LHC could publish results tomorrow that overthrow QCD. It's an occupational hazard of doing science and one that scientists accept happily.
The fact they are two theories, not one, allows the expectation of finding tomorrow the refutative experiment that will make us prefer one over the other.
And that's my point: Way back the original question was, "What if God is faking the results of all the experiments?" And I very clearly said that if God fakes all experiments, then it's the same thing as quarks exist. Faking one experiment wouldn't be enough, but faking all of them would be.
By the way, I'd love to see a reference for an experiment that indicated ether existed. Ether was an example of what happens when you are forced to reason in advance of experiment.
I generally find that joke is found to be funny in direct proportion to the audience's scientific illiteracy.
Wow. I don't think you could be more wrong. At Stanford I worked among some of the top minds in physics in the world, and every one of them found it a funny joke. I can't say for sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if a physicist wrote the original joke in the first place. It's just self-deprecating humor.
And if you can't laught at yourself, you shouldn't be taken seriously.
If every experiment returns results that indicate quarks exist, then they exist. What meaning would there be in saying they don't? What would it mean for the quarks not to exist yet for all experiments to point that way?
Now, the experiments don't prove that God's Perverse Humor doesn't exist, as well. Indeed, the two are experimentally indistinguishable and therefore the same.
I propose that God is fucking around with your Large Hadron Collider, by deflecting particles as if quarks existed. This matches experiments exactly as if quarks actually do exist, so how can you say one theory is better than the other without Occam's Razor?
Well, this is why multiple experiments at multiple sites are done. Are you proposing that God fudges all experiments, so that no experiment can distinguish between quarks existing and God making it "look" like they exist?
In the latter guess, guess what? Quarks exist, because the ultimate arbiter of truth in sciene is the physical Universe. If every experiment "looks like" quarks exist, then in what way is it meaningful to say that they don't? If God had little angels whipping around arranging the proper collisions, and if those angels are not otherwise detectable and leave no other signature, then there's no distinction -- the quarks do exist, in the only meaningful (scientific) sense.
Source on that? Because I'm pretty sure you're wrong. In fact, a quick perusal of the Net indicates that Gen X would actually be (and was sometimes called) "Generation 13", dating from the colonial period.
Concentration of wealth is not in the public interest.
Heretic! Heretic! You're going against the policy of our society for at least the past thirty-fiveyears. The rising tide lifts all yachts, don't ya know?
I consider forum writing to be conversational, and I don't alway speak in perfect English, so my forum language matches my speaking language.
Except, in this case, you actually have the option to proofread and correct before you "speak" -- which should be a tremendous advantage to smooth communication. There's a difference between informal grammatical use and outright typos, misspellings, and bad vocabulary.
Fox purchases sci-fi series so it can shoot them in the foot
asserts causality. Rephrased, your statement could, "Because it wants to shoot them in the foot, Fox purchases sci fi series." And I question the causality implied there. I don't think that's the reason that they buy the shows.
It would be different if you had said
Fox purchases sci-fi series and it shoots them in the foot
which only sets up a timeline: Fox buys sci fi seies. Subsequently, they always shoot them in the foot.
Fox delibrately purchases sci-fi series so it can shoot them in the foot. Which it did to Firefly. It was delibrately destroyed, played in the wrong order, preempted by random shit, not promoted at all.
OK, I disdain Fox as much as the next sci fi fan, and they've honked me off too. But this makes no sense: Why would they spend the money just to ditch a show? Is Rupert Murdoch on some sort of anti-SF crusdae?
Firefly got canceled because they expected it to do, proportionally, what Buffy did for the WB -- but since Fox was already established and a much bigger network, that was impossible.
Not only do we have the usual insulting "equivalnce" between copyright infringement and violent pillaging on the open sea ("piracy"). We also find that casual copyright infringement is as bad as drunk driving:
The government has spent millions of pounds to change public awareness of drink-driving and smoking.
"As a society, we need to go through a similar process for creativity and intellectual property."
Yes, I'm sure this shrill overreaction will work in changing people's minds... 'cause getting that copy of Batman Begins is definitely the same as driving a car while drunk, endangering and possibly killing innocent bystanders.
The problem faced by the Content Cartel and their lackeys is this: Copyright infringement is in fact not as serious as these "sexier" crimes. People won't take it seriously because the harm is of an entirely different type.
Because it's copyright infrigement, it is not illegal to download copyrighted material. It's illegal to upload it.
Interesting distinction. A shame that it isn't true. In downloading the file, you perforce make a copy to store on your hard drive, CD, whatever. And that copy is itself infringing and so illegal.
Nixon was actually a decent president by a number of reasonably measures
... yeah, if you ignore all the, what do you call it? Direct assault on the rule of law in a democratic society.
Nixon is a truly tragic American President, because he did accomplish much (as you say) but nonetheless fell. The height of his heights makes the depth of his depths all that more poignant. But in the end, he really did attempt to overthrow the proper functioning of the American political system, turning executive power into imperial diktat. There is no redemption for that crime, no matter what you put on the other side of the balance.
Well, I see the splash screen each time and it isn't uncommon for Word to take 30+ seconds to open on my machine. I don't think the article is irrelevant, even if it doesn't match your experience.
I am loth to admit it but I like Outlook, too. I just wish I knew how to view multiple calendars in an overlay fashion. Right now my school maintains something like six different calendars, and I have to check each one for each date. Bleh.
The hilarity here is, you're both arguing the same thing. You think thw GPP is saying you should be able to do arithmetic in your head. If I'm reading correctly, the GPP is saying you won't be doing artithmetic at all.
I tell my HS physics students a thing that often shocks them, but I stand by it: Math is about numbers the way that literature is about letters. Math, unlike arithmetic, is about the behavior of numbers -- what they can tell us -- not about the manipulation per se.
Why I'm trying to get in so late in the thread, I'll never know, but...
You might as well say that "The fact he knew that what he was doing was wrong was supported by the fact that he didn't tell anyone about it." A right to privacy should be guaranteed. I shouldn't have to defend my use of tools which help ensure my privacy
Yeah, just like that amendment allows you to kill random people with your gun because you know, you have a right to your gun, and that right should be guaranteed, so anything you do with it is your right and thus cannot be questioned.
No, this case is more like, "You own a gun. That's evidence of your intent to shoot someone." You might want to shoot someone. You might like hunting. You might like going to a firing range.
However, it's much more like "You own a safe with a lock. You could be hiding child porn in it. Therefore you might be guilty of being a child pornography -- and the mere fact that you have the safe implicates you." Never mind that the safe has many many legitimate other uses. Never mind that it's perfectly legal to own a safe. Never mind that they haven't found child porn in your safe. Because you merely bought a thing that might hide child porn, you are suspect.
And don't cry me a river about "Well, they showed he was guilty with other evidence." If they used the PGP argument, it means the DA thinks it helps. If they could prove it without the PGP stuff, then society loses nothing by dropping the PGP stuff (because after all, they proved him guilty with the other things). And if it made a difference, then things are even worse -- because possession of a perfectly legal thing turns out to be enough to prove someone guilty.
What are we going to have to do to convince "ordinary users" to visit WindowsUpdate once in a while?
How about, have it not crash my machine so hard Explorer can't start once the mandatory reboot is completed?
People don't use Windows Update because they don't trust it. Not in the "oh, they might be spying on me" sense of distrust but in the "Oh, those idiots might really screw my machine" snese. It only has to happen once before a user decides he/she would rather risk the hypothetical infection than face the certain loss.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, as someone who does... I use zazzle to make posters for my classroom, (nice) prints+frames for my relatives, customizable T-shirts for my classes. I make the stuff open to the world, but I'm not expecting to make money on it. Nonetheless I do get a small trickle of royalties, which is money I made without any extra effort.
Every time I tell someone about zazzle -- and I've been doing that for three years now -- they get excited about it, too. Sometimes these are cafepress users, but they generally switch over once they've tried zazzle. (The two services are more or less contemporaneous.)
These guys aren't going out on a limb. I don't think zazzle will become the Next Big Thing to Eat the Internet, but they've got a working model and a good userbase.
Well, I've been using zazzle for at least three years, having been part of the beta group. So I think they're safely past the "couple of months" stage. Maybe you can make money on this and maybe you can't -- but the VCs this time are getting into a business with a track record you can read and interpret. It's not just some vapor.
You mean, you've managed to successfully remove it now?
Bzzzt. But thanks for playing. Your hypothetical machine is an experiment that can distinguish whether quarks exist -- indeed, you've even specified the experiment. And this contradicts the proposition that God fakes it in all experiments. An "experiment" doesn't have to be done in a linear collider, for pete's sake.
So what can be said? That quarks existing is consistent with every experiment that has been done to detect them. Could God pop out from behind the bush tomorrow and say "Gotcha!"? Sure. But in science all truths are contingent truths. The LHC could publish results tomorrow that overthrow QCD. It's an occupational hazard of doing science and one that scientists accept happily.
And that's my point: Way back the original question was, "What if God is faking the results of all the experiments?" And I very clearly said that if God fakes all experiments, then it's the same thing as quarks exist. Faking one experiment wouldn't be enough, but faking all of them would be.
By the way, I'd love to see a reference for an experiment that indicated ether existed. Ether was an example of what happens when you are forced to reason in advance of experiment.
Wow. I don't think you could be more wrong. At Stanford I worked among some of the top minds in physics in the world, and every one of them found it a funny joke. I can't say for sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if a physicist wrote the original joke in the first place. It's just self-deprecating humor.
And if you can't laught at yourself, you shouldn't be taken seriously.
If every experiment returns results that indicate quarks exist, then they exist. What meaning would there be in saying they don't? What would it mean for the quarks not to exist yet for all experiments to point that way?
Now, the experiments don't prove that God's Perverse Humor doesn't exist, as well. Indeed, the two are experimentally indistinguishable and therefore the same.
Well, this is why multiple experiments at multiple sites are done. Are you proposing that God fudges all experiments, so that no experiment can distinguish between quarks existing and God making it "look" like they exist?
In the latter guess, guess what? Quarks exist, because the ultimate arbiter of truth in sciene is the physical Universe. If every experiment "looks like" quarks exist, then in what way is it meaningful to say that they don't? If God had little angels whipping around arranging the proper collisions, and if those angels are not otherwise detectable and leave no other signature, then there's no distinction -- the quarks do exist, in the only meaningful (scientific) sense.
Source on that? Because I'm pretty sure you're wrong. In fact, a quick perusal of the Net indicates that Gen X would actually be (and was sometimes called) "Generation 13", dating from the colonial period.
m .
Check out http://ask.yahoo.com/ask/19990727.html; http://www.wordorigins.org/wordorg.htm {scroll down}; and http://users.metro2000.net/~stabbott/genxintro.ht
Was that pun intentional? Well played!
A sentiment that, if widely held and backed up by market forces, is the most damning indictment of the whole patent system yet.
Oh, I'm pretty sure they're already smartasses; they just get the opportunity to show it off...
Heretic! Heretic! You're going against the policy of our society for at least the past thirty-fiveyears. The rising tide lifts all yachts, don't ya know?
Except, in this case, you actually have the option to proofread and correct before you "speak" -- which should be a tremendous advantage to smooth communication. There's a difference between informal grammatical use and outright typos, misspellings, and bad vocabulary.
You forgot the apostrophe in "don't".
asserts causality. Rephrased, your statement could, "Because it wants to shoot them in the foot, Fox purchases sci fi series." And I question the causality implied there. I don't think that's the reason that they buy the shows.
It would be different if you had said
which only sets up a timeline: Fox buys sci fi seies. Subsequently, they always shoot them in the foot.
OK, I disdain Fox as much as the next sci fi fan, and they've honked me off too. But this makes no sense: Why would they spend the money just to ditch a show? Is Rupert Murdoch on some sort of anti-SF crusdae?
Firefly got canceled because they expected it to do, proportionally, what Buffy did for the WB -- but since Fox was already established and a much bigger network, that was impossible.
Yes, I'm sure this shrill overreaction will work in changing people's minds... 'cause getting that copy of Batman Begins is definitely the same as driving a car while drunk, endangering and possibly killing innocent bystanders.
The problem faced by the Content Cartel and their lackeys is this: Copyright infringement is in fact not as serious as these "sexier" crimes. People won't take it seriously because the harm is of an entirely different type.
Interesting distinction. A shame that it isn't true. In downloading the file, you perforce make a copy to store on your hard drive, CD, whatever. And that copy is itself infringing and so illegal.
Nixon is a truly tragic American President, because he did accomplish much (as you say) but nonetheless fell. The height of his heights makes the depth of his depths all that more poignant. But in the end, he really did attempt to overthrow the proper functioning of the American political system, turning executive power into imperial diktat. There is no redemption for that crime, no matter what you put on the other side of the balance.
Well, I see the splash screen each time and it isn't uncommon for Word to take 30+ seconds to open on my machine. I don't think the article is irrelevant, even if it doesn't match your experience.
I am loth to admit it but I like Outlook, too. I just wish I knew how to view multiple calendars in an overlay fashion. Right now my school maintains something like six different calendars, and I have to check each one for each date. Bleh.
The hilarity here is, you're both arguing the same thing. You think thw GPP is saying you should be able to do arithmetic in your head. If I'm reading correctly, the GPP is saying you won't be doing artithmetic at all.
I tell my HS physics students a thing that often shocks them, but I stand by it: Math is about numbers the way that literature is about letters. Math, unlike arithmetic, is about the behavior of numbers -- what they can tell us -- not about the manipulation per se.
No, this case is more like, "You own a gun. That's evidence of your intent to shoot someone." You might want to shoot someone. You might like hunting. You might like going to a firing range.
However, it's much more like "You own a safe with a lock. You could be hiding child porn in it. Therefore you might be guilty of being a child pornography -- and the mere fact that you have the safe implicates you." Never mind that the safe has many many legitimate other uses. Never mind that it's perfectly legal to own a safe. Never mind that they haven't found child porn in your safe. Because you merely bought a thing that might hide child porn, you are suspect.
And don't cry me a river about "Well, they showed he was guilty with other evidence." If they used the PGP argument, it means the DA thinks it helps. If they could prove it without the PGP stuff, then society loses nothing by dropping the PGP stuff (because after all, they proved him guilty with the other things). And if it made a difference, then things are even worse -- because possession of a perfectly legal thing turns out to be enough to prove someone guilty.
Anyone remember "guilty until proven innocent"?
How about, have it not crash my machine so hard Explorer can't start once the mandatory reboot is completed?
People don't use Windows Update because they don't trust it. Not in the "oh, they might be spying on me" sense of distrust but in the "Oh, those idiots might really screw my machine" snese. It only has to happen once before a user decides he/she would rather risk the hypothetical infection than face the certain loss.