Because it is against human nature to be completely paranoid and skeptical of every email received, the only reliable way to fight this sort of thing is for everyone to digitally sign email messages through a reliable PKI hierarchy. Only when a federal regulatory body works with all the major email client producers (microsoft, google, etc.) would it be possible for such a thing to actually make it. Under "free market" forces, these companies do not have the incentive to cooperate.
the largest percentage (17 percent) paid less than $4
If you are arbitrarily defining the range paid, it is completely meaningless to say "the largest percentage."
For example, if I divide it in to two groups: those who paid less than $4 and those that paid more than $4, you could say that the largest percentage (83 percent) paid MORE than $4.
Yeah! How dare these IT professionals do anything other than study Materials Science! If only everyone were all-knowing, like his Royal Trollness, Futurepower.
I'm not French, I'm American. But when I visit friends in France, they always ask me to bring them electronic gifts, because a product that costs $200 in the USA costs $500 in France--same product same brand. I don't know why; it's all made in China. I assume it is some sort of insane socialist bullshit. In the USA, we have 0% federal sales tax and corporations pay no tax, either. My understanding is that France is the worst place in the West to own a business or to be a consumer. I was hoping England was more like the USA.
In 1990 when I first started playing games on a PC, a computer like the one in my living room now took a dedicated building and was called a "supercomputer", yet I can't play a new game on it. And the new game cost sixty bucks.
... In my day a nickelodeon only cost a five cents at the malt shop. And we respected our elders, too. Those kids these days! With their tattoos and their long hair and that rock-and-roll devilry... GET OFF MY LAWN!!!
Wow. You have the same problem as the submitter--taking way to long to say something simple. Allow me to rephrase.
Children have fewer legal rights than adults because children have not developed the judgment necessary to use some rights responsibly.
The reason age 18 is selected is pragmatic--it is not practical to psychologically evaluate every child every day to determine the exact instant each child obtains emotional maturity.
Is the submitter 16 and trying to argue his way out of high school detention, or something? Give it up, man.
If what you say is true, then who do the makers of NiCd batteries say instruct you to fully deplete batteries on the instructions that ship with the products? They don't know the properties of their own products?
if you don't know what a datacenter is, you're probably nowhere near interested in this entire field.
The fact that he is asking at all proves that he is interested in the field.
You must have very poor memory, nuzak, if you can't recall what it was like learning your trade.
When I was in high school, I knew I wanted to work in the computer field, yet I didn't know what a datacenter was. If I had met a pretentious jerk like you, I might not be managing a datacenter, today. Luckily, I met people who answered my questions instead of people like you. I also asked questions on slashdot, and learned quite a lot from this place.
And to answer the original question: A datacenter is a room full of computers with experts monitoring and maintaining them 24/7. It has special air conditioning, wiring, and security. Sometimes people rent servers or space there. Sometimes they contain only the computers of the company that owns the datacenter.
You can rationalize the costs after you find a cure,
You can rationalize the costs before the cure as long as you hire an outside consultant to come in and make up numbers for "probability of finding a cure due to this research." Consultants are great.
Wow, switch to decaf. Perhaps some low-budget filipino beans. You could spam slashdot with a sig about them for years, with no plans of ever actually finishing them. That's a good idea.
No society has ever existed where everyone has the right to pursue happiness. This particular right is just one of a hundred factors that must be weighed against each other when designing a social contract.
Mandatory experimentation would increase the net ability of a society to pursue happiness. Someone dying of plague doesn't have much ability to pursue happiness, does he?
This seems like a much easier trade-off to make than, say, powers of conscription or taxation.
if you were designing society's rules from a position where you had no idea which role you would be cast into, you would not create the role of "person to die in lab experiments for the greater good" because you yourself would not want to take on that role.
Wrong. I would MUCH MUCH MUCH prefer having a 0.00001% chance of being experimented on combined with a 10% chance of getting The Plague, than a 0.0% chance of being experimented on combined with a 30% chance of getting The Plague.
And that's not necessarily a contrived example. If, in the Dark Ages, someone actually had done controlled experiments on captives to see which of the items people were exposed to actually correlated with catching Plague, we could have found out that rats were the vector, then decimated the rat population, LONG before a third of Europe died.
Some of these moral guidelines are nothing more than convoluted justifications for reflexive animal emotional reactions--excuses for thinking with feelings instead of reason.
Why is it unethical? If you could save thousands of lives by curing a disease, but curing the disease required potentially deadly experiments on a few people, wouldn't it be unethical NOT to proceed with the research?
Video on demand EXIST TODAY. My home theater is a PC connected to a DLP projector. Both ABC and NBC have all their shows available to watch online in HD. Just click to watch LostT in full screen, high quality.
The fact that broadcast will have slightly higher video quality (at the expense of much higher bitrates) is insignificant compared to the fact that I can watch any episode of any show any time I want RIGHT NOW online.
It is an instinct to feel "creeped out" by a disfigured face. Disfigurement is often a sign of communicable disease, and evolution favors those who avoid disease. Common courtesy demands we try to repress such instincts, but we shouldn't feel guilty about the fact that they exist.
Also, it is perfectly reasonable to perform more thorough searches on passengers who wear clothes which provide more hiding places.
If searching this person took a very long time, it may have been due to her having an irrational fear of people looking at our touching her, or due to communication problems.
Did you know people who work in nuclear power plants live longer than the average for the US population? The evidence suggests that this nuclear "poison" is not as poisonous as you assume.
As for strip mining--life grows back at strip mine sites, too. If every mountain on earth were strip mined, only a tiny fraction of the earth would be affected. Once the mining is done, vegetation would return in a matter of years, followed by the same species of animals that lived there before.
I'm all for sustainable industry, but when you exaggerate and dramatize things that are harmless on a global scale, you hurt your cause.
By the way: one organism's poison is another organism's food. You really should study biology a bit more before you spout off nonsense.
Slashdot Mirror
What does LINUX stand for?
Because it is against human nature to be completely paranoid and skeptical of every email received, the only reliable way to fight this sort of thing is for everyone to digitally sign email messages through a reliable PKI hierarchy. Only when a federal regulatory body works with all the major email client producers (microsoft, google, etc.) would it be possible for such a thing to actually make it. Under "free market" forces, these companies do not have the incentive to cooperate.
It is still meaningless to say "the largest percentage."
For example, if I divide it in to two groups: those who paid less than $4 and those that paid more than $4, you could say that the largest percentage (83 percent) paid MORE than $4.
Lies, damn lies.... and terrible journalism.
Yeah! How dare these IT professionals do anything other than study Materials Science! If only everyone were all-knowing, like his Royal Trollness, Futurepower.
I'm not French, I'm American. But when I visit friends in France, they always ask me to bring them electronic gifts, because a product that costs $200 in the USA costs $500 in France--same product same brand. I don't know why; it's all made in China. I assume it is some sort of insane socialist bullshit. In the USA, we have 0% federal sales tax and corporations pay no tax, either. My understanding is that France is the worst place in the West to own a business or to be a consumer. I was hoping England was more like the USA.
Why? Do you guys have insane import/business taxes like France? You guys basically invented economics, so this is surprising.
Wow. You have the same problem as the submitter--taking way to long to say something simple. Allow me to rephrase.
Children have fewer legal rights than adults because children have not developed the judgment necessary to use some rights responsibly.
The reason age 18 is selected is pragmatic--it is not practical to psychologically evaluate every child every day to determine the exact instant each child obtains emotional maturity.
Is the submitter 16 and trying to argue his way out of high school detention, or something? Give it up, man.
If what you say is true, then who do the makers of NiCd batteries say instruct you to fully deplete batteries on the instructions that ship with the products? They don't know the properties of their own products?
You must have very poor memory, nuzak, if you can't recall what it was like learning your trade.
When I was in high school, I knew I wanted to work in the computer field, yet I didn't know what a datacenter was. If I had met a pretentious jerk like you, I might not be managing a datacenter, today. Luckily, I met people who answered my questions instead of people like you. I also asked questions on slashdot, and learned quite a lot from this place.
And to answer the original question: A datacenter is a room full of computers with experts monitoring and maintaining them 24/7. It has special air conditioning, wiring, and security. Sometimes people rent servers or space there. Sometimes they contain only the computers of the company that owns the datacenter.
Ah, Canada, where all the children are above average.
You can rationalize the costs before the cure as long as you hire an outside consultant to come in and make up numbers for "probability of finding a cure due to this research." Consultants are great.
Somehow, I don't think life-saving medical research had anything to do with that. Nice try, though.
Well, I guess we all know which company you work for.
Wow, switch to decaf. Perhaps some low-budget filipino beans. You could spam slashdot with a sig about them for years, with no plans of ever actually finishing them. That's a good idea.
No society has ever existed where everyone has the right to pursue happiness. This particular right is just one of a hundred factors that must be weighed against each other when designing a social contract.
Mandatory experimentation would increase the net ability of a society to pursue happiness. Someone dying of plague doesn't have much ability to pursue happiness, does he?
This seems like a much easier trade-off to make than, say, powers of conscription or taxation.
Wrong. I would MUCH MUCH MUCH prefer having a 0.00001% chance of being experimented on combined with a 10% chance of getting The Plague, than a 0.0% chance of being experimented on combined with a 30% chance of getting The Plague.
And that's not necessarily a contrived example. If, in the Dark Ages, someone actually had done controlled experiments on captives to see which of the items people were exposed to actually correlated with catching Plague, we could have found out that rats were the vector, then decimated the rat population, LONG before a third of Europe died.
Some of these moral guidelines are nothing more than convoluted justifications for reflexive animal emotional reactions--excuses for thinking with feelings instead of reason.
You completely fail at risk analysis.
Why is it unethical? If you could save thousands of lives by curing a disease, but curing the disease required potentially deadly experiments on a few people, wouldn't it be unethical NOT to proceed with the research?
Video on demand EXIST TODAY. My home theater is a PC connected to a DLP projector. Both ABC and NBC have all their shows available to watch online in HD. Just click to watch LostT in full screen, high quality.
The fact that broadcast will have slightly higher video quality (at the expense of much higher bitrates) is insignificant compared to the fact that I can watch any episode of any show any time I want RIGHT NOW online.
It is an instinct to feel "creeped out" by a disfigured face. Disfigurement is often a sign of communicable disease, and evolution favors those who avoid disease. Common courtesy demands we try to repress such instincts, but we shouldn't feel guilty about the fact that they exist.
Also, it is perfectly reasonable to perform more thorough searches on passengers who wear clothes which provide more hiding places.
If searching this person took a very long time, it may have been due to her having an irrational fear of people looking at our touching her, or due to communication problems.
You really should wash your underwear before you wear it for the first time.
Did you know people who work in nuclear power plants live longer than the average for the US population? The evidence suggests that this nuclear "poison" is not as poisonous as you assume.
As for strip mining--life grows back at strip mine sites, too. If every mountain on earth were strip mined, only a tiny fraction of the earth would be affected. Once the mining is done, vegetation would return in a matter of years, followed by the same species of animals that lived there before.
I'm all for sustainable industry, but when you exaggerate and dramatize things that are harmless on a global scale, you hurt your cause.
By the way: one organism's poison is another organism's food. You really should study biology a bit more before you spout off nonsense.