The bullet is not pushing against the back of the gun; it's pushing against the rapidly expanding gas from the cartridge, which is distributing the rest of its energy in all directions, which means that a lot of energy is lost in places other than momentum of the gun itself (such as chemical energy, heat energy, or places where the gas itself escapes and transfers momentum that way).
That probably isn't a big factor, admittedly. More of note, kinetic energy is a function of the square of the velocity, so if the stock of the gun stock doesn't get up to speed, it doesn't have high kinetic energy, and the fleshy shoulder behind it doesn't have to dissipate that energy on the same timescale as the recipient of the bullet.
The FORCE imparted to your shoulder by the stock is not the same as the force of the bullet when it HITS--it's the same as the energy the bullet receives as it gets up to speed. You could get a city bus up to speed (say 5-10 mph) by pushing it with weak fleshy human hands, but if it hits a brick wall, chances are metal and/or brick will break, while your hands did not sustain any injury at all.
I'm not saying you wouldn't sustain injury if the stock of your rifle was the size and shape of a bullet, but I'd bet 50 bucks it wouldn't get half the penetration of the bullet in flight.
The force of a bullet hitting a person is the same as that of the stock hitting the shoulder of the shooter. I'd rather be on the shooter's end.
While I appreciate the analogy, I'm pretty sure that's wrong. Force is time-dependent; the bullet keeps getting energy imparted the entire time it's going down the shaft, during which time it accelerates up to speed. It has enormous impact because it's trying to shed all that energy into the material it's hitting all at once, and most materials (like flesh) don't have enough strength to hold up against firepower of that magnitude. However, the butt of the rifle (assuming it's kept against the shoulder) doesn't have the same room to accelerate, and the energy doesn't build up. This, plus accuracy, are why you hold the rifle like that in the first place.
And no, the energy isn't the same as the outgoing energy of the bullet either; it's dissipated in a lot of ways very quickly, which is why gun barrels are designed the way they are--in order to capture as much energy as possible before it's all lost to entropy.
But maybe I'm mistaken about at least part of it. Seems like it'd be interesting for the mythbusters to sink their teeth into.
"This is where it takes you" is an apt way to put it. I don't think capitalism was ever meant to be a final solution; it was meant to be a steppingstone, and it was far in advance of pre-capitalist systems in terms of the social change it's allowed.
Capitalist means the capital--means of production--are privately held and can be used for private profit. The alternative is capital being held by the state, which is amazingly good at keeping the status quo or responding to clear challenges (invasions, keeping up with the Jones, space race, energy race, etc) but is not nearly nimble enough to drive innovation by random, untested entrepreneurs. There's frankly no way that such people could have driven innovation unless they could could convince The Authority Figure with The Money to give it to them. Now, at worst, they have to convince An Authority figure with Money, but it could be one of hundreds (or maybe thousands or millions, depending on the startup costs).
But it ain't right, because in the end, what do you do when you've beaten the game (to put it in such terms)? If you've ever played a game like Civilization or even one more directly about Just Making Money, you know that eventually you've achieved every achievement and the game just ends. But if that game were your life, what do you do when you no longer have profit to make? Game over don't happen 'til you die.
If you ask me, the people who are doing this shit are (to extend the metaphor unduly) people who've completed the game and are going after every last achievement, even the ones the designers put in there just to be dicks. "Become the leading producers of entertainment worldwide--check. Pass legislation worldwide so that every poor sod worldwide is under your thumb--working on it. Wait... become a tyrant that's destroying the happiness of billions... why do I have this achievement?"
Seriously, they've lost their focus and their minds, and they ought to either be shot or stripped of all money and forbidden from ever engaging in capitalist endeavors again.
The problem is not that someone is ignorant, it's that people who are ignorant and unqualified to make any decisions, make those decisions based entirely on ideology, and present their ideologically-inspired beliefs as "truth".
I would call that "Impersonating a qualified expert for the purposes of testimony" and wish to god it was illegal everywhere important decisions are made.
Agreed. In the end, the appearance of vigilantes is a symptom of something else; I won't go so far as to say it's inevitable, but if it takes vigilantes before things come to light, your country got problems.
What about virus checking on mobiles and laptops? If you had antivirus on a chip, especially with an updateable firmware on a high-speed flash, it could go a long way towards securing any device that is both mobile (wattage-sensitive) and has a large disk.
Typically antivirus does scanning on read or write, which means doing a small shitload of tests on EVERY disk I/O. You almost have to have those tests already loaded into ram, though, because disk reads are abhorrently slow compared to all other processor speeds; alternately, if antivirus-on-chip were feasible, it would yank them from very close, very fast flash one (or a set) at a time, without robbing CPU cycles or taking up space in RAM; and anytime that no disk reads/writes are done, it's simply turned off altogether.
The problem is (if I understand the orbital mechanics right; IANARS) that the launch window for getting to mars, or back, is rather small and occurs but rarely. If you send a rocket TO mars, it won't immediately come back, because the window to START travelling is shorter than the time it takes to get there.
Additionally, the fuel needed in transit is actually much less than the fuel needed to get into and out of those kind of orbits--because space has no force opposing inertia. Getting a load from the surface of mars up to the speed of an incoming orbital rocket (in order to match orbits and dock) is pretty much the same fuel it would take to send it home on its own, and if you decelerate the incoming rocket, you not only have to accelerate the load from the surface, but now the rest of the rocket again too.
Now, if you were talking about sending people back and forth, getting a few people up to orbital speed is different from getting those people plus food, water, and living quarters, but again, that rocket would have to sit in orbit until the next window anyway, so it'd be better to send both rockets at the same time rather than have it arrive and sit uselessly in orbit, or possibly to just make one large rocket, which is the primary model as-is.
I keep thinking that the DM and windowing metaphors really need an overhaul not to something new, but to a logical extension of what they already are.
For instance, to my knowledge, there's no way in Windows, *nix, or anything else to add a touchscreen to a desktop (convenient example) and use it only as a place to store widgets, such that it doesn't interact with the rest of the desktop--unless you use some sort of proprietary software that hides the display from the OS entirely. For all that widgets are fast becoming first-class citizens on the desktop (or in some cases already are), I've never heard anyone suggest they be differentiated, even though they operate differently.
As of right now I use Win 7 widgets, plus the start menu which is a widget in its own right, although I've also tried google desktop widgets and a couple others. I've used the previously linked product to cordon them off before, but critically, as long as there are multiple monitors shifting focus away from a fullscreen app (for example) will interrupt it, even if the processes are logically separate. A differentiated widget screen (especially a touchscreen that needn't capture the mouse) could easily be interacted with without stealing focus from apps.
I can understand it not being a priority but I think it'd be a killer feature, personally.
No, you're not living on through your children, you're beginning the process of iterating; you will die and someone else will take your place. Iterative design is all about fixing mistakes in the previous version (you) and trying to find a way to create adult humans who are capable of dealing with any problem that crosses their path (your child).
If you're trying to create adult humans that are the same as you instead of capable in general, you probably believe one or more of: * That you're perfect (in which case you're wrong, especially if you're doing creepy things to your children) * That you're not perfect, but they're not going to come across any problems you didn't (in which case you're 99% likely to be wrong, unless you're a fifth-generation coal miner or something) * That something you needed to do is left undone (which is a shitty thing to leave your kids burdened with, especially without their consent or approval, and by the way you're not even dead yet) * That life doesn't allow people to make any progress anyway so we should all just be shitty people like you * Your children don't really have feelings anyway and as long as you play the game of parenting right you can make them into whatever you want * That your way of life gives you a unique way of dealing with things that is far superior to all others (a view shared by both too-rich people and scam artists)
As far as I know, all of those are legitimately unhealthy psychologically.
Piracy of games literally is not stealing, it's the fencing of goods (for free) in a way that the license for the product forbids ("You shall not make unauthorized copies of this software."). If the license for the game didn't explicitly forbid copying, you'd be within your rights to do so, up to the point where you fall afoul of some other law, such as copyright. Violating any other license's explicit terms, including those of the GPL, is actually 100% equivalent.
Gross exaggeration and strawman do not support one's point of view.
No, really.
Sexual harassment, blackmail, and rape are all forms of abuse propagated because of a person believes in and/or creates one-way power relationships. They may be the most serious of such abuse, but they are not the only kinds. Bosses who are petty, backbiting, and in other ways torturous simply because they can get away with it are doing the same thing, even if it's not on the same scale.
"I should be able to fire them, for whatever reason I choose" means different things for a halfway decent person as it does for a one-way power tripper. A normal human being sees it as, "If they've done something wrong or they're not helping my business, I shouldn't be hindered in removing them." A criminal mind says, "If I fire someone, nobody has any right to ask why." They do have the right to ask why, especially if there are allegations of abuse. What the NLRB is (or should be, not having RTFA) saying is, "You cannot blackmail your employees into silence, or we'll look into the situation to make sure you aren't doing something illegal or abusive" or more realistically, "you cannot force them into silence one way or another, you'll just have to continue your abusiveness aboveboard."
Freeing the people......if the people just happen to be dumb-shits or irrational? Well that's the bed you've made for yourself, why are you disappointed or put out?
As soon as there's a place in this world I can emigrate to where I can escape from the consequences of stupid people, stupid laws, and long-standing mistakes, I'll be as happy as your sardonic statement suggests.
I'm not dumb enough to advocate trying to change giant freaking monolithic governments, where even getting elected, much less petitioning as a normal citizen, leaves you in many ways powerless to affect important things. I just wish there was a place on this earth (or beyond it--space colonies or whatever) where people could go to leave behind the absolute crap that some places shove on us. A place where experiments in government can be tried and debugged without having to overcome institutional inertia, where science can be done upon it until all the issues we have with government are fixed. A pipe dream in the current world, I think, but it's no more a pipe dream in the long run than a perfect OS is.
But there ain't no such place and there ain't gonna be anytime soon.
I think that the GP's outrage is more that this is coming as a response to people who display existing evidence (that vaccines is harmless), by people who ignore all that data and instead make speculative claims without themselves having sufficient medical background, and/or without any data to back it up.
Yes, the tradition in science is that things need to be proven, and that we should acknowledge what is not yet proven, and even that we should take any credible evidence opposing existing theories and attempt to find the truth. However, the question is, is their pop-culture "science" founded on credible evidence, and does it itself acknowledge data in opposition to its views?
Or in short, they're taking advantage of scientist's willingness to be proven false in the face of data, while not showing the same courtesy.
Well, all I can really say is, if you're actually trying to convince or convey anything, you either have a very odd way of doing it, or we're simply talking way past each other. You're a bit well-written to be a troll, but as far as I can tell, we're really not talking about the same thing.
Something is left explicitly unstated when it is not brought to the table at all when discussing something where its relevance is not only obvious but paramount. The economics of starting an offshore business are "How much will it cost us?" which contains both the cost of the setup and the ongoing cost of the facility--in other words, the wages of the employees. Of principle concern to how much will be paid in wages is the relationship between how much you pay an employee and the resultant customer satisfaction, given that the IT help desk office is going to produce absolutely no other output.
Now maybe I've slipped into an alternate reality where IT help desks--foreign or domestic--have a substantially greater reputation than I've ever heard of, but if not, I'm fairly certain diminishing returns are going to set in awfully quickly, even with the best possible employer. However, a company that is hiring IT pros to "set up" IT help desks doesn't strike me as a company that has a vested interest in quality, which leads me to believe that the wage bar will likely be set at a 'conservative estimate' (meaning low) of where they believe that diminishing returns point to be. Considering that at the ideal point of diminishing returns, an appropriately educated worker wouldn't feel shafted taking the job, anything lower than that is probably unfair to whomever DOES take it--and, if the help desk setup company is, as I suspect, not entirely concerned with quality, the working environment could easily be hostile as well, which just screws with the people who DO take the job.
Now, admittedly, the discussion of how much the employees would be paid was left out of a second- or third-hand report, so it's not necessarily the case that it's not something the company itself cares about; maybe they're good samaritans, or hell, good businessmen with some integrity. Somehow I suspect it isn't the case. That suspicion, admittedly, is only preliminary, and I'll happily yield it given facts that suggest otherwise.
("Gasp!") Leaving the fact-vacuum to rejoin the oxygenated world, the question was in regard to the ethics of helping to take away jobs from co-workers to "give them jobs to furriners with funny accents."
You know, manufacturing quotes out of thin air is not "leaving the fact vacuum". (Oh look, mixed metaphors. Meh.) If that "furriners with funny accents" comment was supposed to be in reply to anyone, I haven't seen it, so it comes to nothing more than a strawman, and an irrelevant one at that, considering that my argument is pro-worker, not pro-local.
The problem with your analysis is that offshoring is done as a cost-saving measure. This means two pertinent things: that the quality of the help desk could easily go down, and that it is explicitly unstated whether the workers at the offshore IT help desk would be paid appropriate wages. If nothing else, when setting up such a facility in your own country, you have a reasonable understanding of the buying power of your own currency, relevant work laws, etc. If you don't speak the language in that foreign country, will you be able to do more than trust the local translator who tells you there's no problem? If you do speak the language, do you know enough about the country to know if the people will be taken advantage of?
That's a different part of the argument, admittedly. Does the company have a right to make mistakes that could potentially screw over its consumers, by outsourcing the help desk? Yes, they have a right to make mistakes. Is it unethical to take part in that if you disagree with their motives and means? Yes, I'd say that's unethical. Is the question of ethics really dependent on who gets the job when all is said and done? No, not really; if there were a slum in your own nation where it were legal to pay ridiculously little for questionable labor, or whatever the similar situation is, then the ethics question would stay the same regardless of which nation gets the money.
No, this is not what they're saying. Google employees installed the Bing toolbar and enabled the feature to send click-data to Bing. Then they fed that data to Bing.
If they didn't know what the keyword used in the Google search was, and if they didn't explicitly integrate that into their engine, they wouldn't have gotten results for that same search on their engine. I'm afraid I don't see how that's different from sending "a mapping of the search keywords to results Google considers relevant" as I argued in my post.
To your other point, I don't think we usually cheer on piracy here, at least if we're talking about approving of it; what I see approved of most often is circumventing DRM, or in other words, sticking it to people who get in the way of you enjoying what you legitimately bought. Not that there aren't such nutjobs, but I see more people cheering the latter.
In my thermodynamics class back in college, one problem we were given was to calculate how much energy it would take to melt all the snow across the campus.
One of the things that always boggles me about winter is that there is no addition of cold in any meaningful way, negative thermal energy not really existing; the world (well, hemisphere) gets substantially colder because it continues losing heat at the same rate it does in summer, but now it's not being replaced by the sun. All of those huge waves of warm and cold air that we live or die by are inefficiencies in heat getting from the ground (or anywhere else it's absorbed) to space.
Makes the world, and humanity, seem so much more fragile when you look at it that way.
What Microsoft is tantamount to admitting is that "customer data" includes searches on a rival engine, and the relevant results. In other words, "When our competitor successfully finds a result for you, we want to know what it is." Clearly, Microsoft never asked Google if this was okay, or there would be no shock and no argument. Instead, they're using users of their opt-in program (henceforth known as mules) in a distributed effort to get a mapping of search queries to useful results. However, those useful results were generated thanks to Google's long-standing competence in the field, and not by ANY process Bing has a hand in. Therefore it is still to be argued that Bing is appropriating, without due request or apology, a mapping of google's results weighted by the relevance to users of google's site. So tell me--how is that not copying results?
Further, the mules in this attack are legitimate Google users who are acting on good faith. And indeed, perhaps the weighting on the algorithm is such that until or unless the weighting changes, this mapping does so little to Bing's results as to be utterly innocent. However, if Bing gained dominance (at the expense of Google) because of this mapping, or if for any other reason this caused Google's service to falter or become unprofitable, those users of Google's service will have unwittingly caused its downfall, and they caused that downfall by being satisfied with Google as a product.
I'm probably overstating it, but it still leaves a nasty taste in the mouth as far as I'm concerned. There's a difference in Bing's policy versus whether or not they're successful at it. If they consider it good policy to sit on the threshold of stealing someone else's results, but then simply not weighting those results highly enough to cause trouble, then I take issue with them. It remains their prerogative to explain themselves if they want to reverse that opinion.
You know, people complain that Chrome--built on Chromium, an open source browser, could be sending who knows what to Google about your browsing habits. However, Chrome is entirely optional and user-installed, whereas IE comes standard with windows--to the point where they got in huge-ass trouble previously for stifling competition with it. But while Google lays its cards out for everyone to see (except for the places where Chrome isn't Chromium, admittedly), in order to forestall objections that they might be doing something like this, Microsoft flat-out does it, behind your back.
Now, some people have said it's a Bing Toolbar thing, and I dunno, not having RTFA; but even so, how often is that going to be shovelware that preys on unwitting users, like every OTHER friggin' IE toolbar? So not only is it preying on Google's algorithm, not only is it stealing user data, it's also coercing unwitting users to be their mule in this attack.
There's nothing you can say that makes this taste even marginally better. It's shit, and the Bing team should be ashamed, if not prosecuted.
I was walking on the sidewalk by his house, and he shouted out the window that he just farted. I took out a notepad and wrote down that the guy just farted. Then he sued me for invasion of privacy. ---> Guy gets laughed out of court.
I know this "shouting" example gets thrown around a lot with question, but it's much more that he had private data (passwords, email, etc) on a big screen TV, which you can see clearly from the street. He could have done any number of things to secure it (turn the TV, close the blinds), and realistically he has no expectation of privacy, but in the end, it's a setup that he fails to understand the consequences of, rather than an action he takes over and over (vis a vis shouting).
Also, if you're routinely writing down things people yell out their window (or especially one person's house), that's exceptionally creepy behavior. I have no idea if it's illegal or not, but jeeeeeez.
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The bullet is not pushing against the back of the gun; it's pushing against the rapidly expanding gas from the cartridge, which is distributing the rest of its energy in all directions, which means that a lot of energy is lost in places other than momentum of the gun itself (such as chemical energy, heat energy, or places where the gas itself escapes and transfers momentum that way).
That probably isn't a big factor, admittedly. More of note, kinetic energy is a function of the square of the velocity, so if the stock of the gun stock doesn't get up to speed, it doesn't have high kinetic energy, and the fleshy shoulder behind it doesn't have to dissipate that energy on the same timescale as the recipient of the bullet.
The FORCE imparted to your shoulder by the stock is not the same as the force of the bullet when it HITS--it's the same as the energy the bullet receives as it gets up to speed. You could get a city bus up to speed (say 5-10 mph) by pushing it with weak fleshy human hands, but if it hits a brick wall, chances are metal and/or brick will break, while your hands did not sustain any injury at all.
I'm not saying you wouldn't sustain injury if the stock of your rifle was the size and shape of a bullet, but I'd bet 50 bucks it wouldn't get half the penetration of the bullet in flight.
The force of a bullet hitting a person is the same as that of the stock hitting the shoulder of the shooter. I'd rather be on the shooter's end.
While I appreciate the analogy, I'm pretty sure that's wrong. Force is time-dependent; the bullet keeps getting energy imparted the entire time it's going down the shaft, during which time it accelerates up to speed. It has enormous impact because it's trying to shed all that energy into the material it's hitting all at once, and most materials (like flesh) don't have enough strength to hold up against firepower of that magnitude. However, the butt of the rifle (assuming it's kept against the shoulder) doesn't have the same room to accelerate, and the energy doesn't build up. This, plus accuracy, are why you hold the rifle like that in the first place.
And no, the energy isn't the same as the outgoing energy of the bullet either; it's dissipated in a lot of ways very quickly, which is why gun barrels are designed the way they are--in order to capture as much energy as possible before it's all lost to entropy.
But maybe I'm mistaken about at least part of it. Seems like it'd be interesting for the mythbusters to sink their teeth into.
"This is where it takes you" is an apt way to put it. I don't think capitalism was ever meant to be a final solution; it was meant to be a steppingstone, and it was far in advance of pre-capitalist systems in terms of the social change it's allowed.
Capitalist means the capital--means of production--are privately held and can be used for private profit. The alternative is capital being held by the state, which is amazingly good at keeping the status quo or responding to clear challenges (invasions, keeping up with the Jones, space race, energy race, etc) but is not nearly nimble enough to drive innovation by random, untested entrepreneurs. There's frankly no way that such people could have driven innovation unless they could could convince The Authority Figure with The Money to give it to them. Now, at worst, they have to convince An Authority figure with Money, but it could be one of hundreds (or maybe thousands or millions, depending on the startup costs).
But it ain't right, because in the end, what do you do when you've beaten the game (to put it in such terms)? If you've ever played a game like Civilization or even one more directly about Just Making Money, you know that eventually you've achieved every achievement and the game just ends. But if that game were your life, what do you do when you no longer have profit to make? Game over don't happen 'til you die.
If you ask me, the people who are doing this shit are (to extend the metaphor unduly) people who've completed the game and are going after every last achievement, even the ones the designers put in there just to be dicks. "Become the leading producers of entertainment worldwide--check. Pass legislation worldwide so that every poor sod worldwide is under your thumb--working on it. Wait... become a tyrant that's destroying the happiness of billions... why do I have this achievement?"
Seriously, they've lost their focus and their minds, and they ought to either be shot or stripped of all money and forbidden from ever engaging in capitalist endeavors again.
The problem is not that someone is ignorant, it's that people who are ignorant and unqualified to make any decisions, make those decisions based entirely on ideology, and present their ideologically-inspired beliefs as "truth".
I would call that "Impersonating a qualified expert for the purposes of testimony" and wish to god it was illegal everywhere important decisions are made.
Agreed. In the end, the appearance of vigilantes is a symptom of something else; I won't go so far as to say it's inevitable, but if it takes vigilantes before things come to light, your country got problems.
What about virus checking on mobiles and laptops? If you had antivirus on a chip, especially with an updateable firmware on a high-speed flash, it could go a long way towards securing any device that is both mobile (wattage-sensitive) and has a large disk.
Typically antivirus does scanning on read or write, which means doing a small shitload of tests on EVERY disk I/O. You almost have to have those tests already loaded into ram, though, because disk reads are abhorrently slow compared to all other processor speeds; alternately, if antivirus-on-chip were feasible, it would yank them from very close, very fast flash one (or a set) at a time, without robbing CPU cycles or taking up space in RAM; and anytime that no disk reads/writes are done, it's simply turned off altogether.
The problem is (if I understand the orbital mechanics right; IANARS) that the launch window for getting to mars, or back, is rather small and occurs but rarely. If you send a rocket TO mars, it won't immediately come back, because the window to START travelling is shorter than the time it takes to get there.
Additionally, the fuel needed in transit is actually much less than the fuel needed to get into and out of those kind of orbits--because space has no force opposing inertia. Getting a load from the surface of mars up to the speed of an incoming orbital rocket (in order to match orbits and dock) is pretty much the same fuel it would take to send it home on its own, and if you decelerate the incoming rocket, you not only have to accelerate the load from the surface, but now the rest of the rocket again too.
Now, if you were talking about sending people back and forth, getting a few people up to orbital speed is different from getting those people plus food, water, and living quarters, but again, that rocket would have to sit in orbit until the next window anyway, so it'd be better to send both rockets at the same time rather than have it arrive and sit uselessly in orbit, or possibly to just make one large rocket, which is the primary model as-is.
I keep thinking that the DM and windowing metaphors really need an overhaul not to something new, but to a logical extension of what they already are.
For instance, to my knowledge, there's no way in Windows, *nix, or anything else to add a touchscreen to a desktop (convenient example) and use it only as a place to store widgets, such that it doesn't interact with the rest of the desktop--unless you use some sort of proprietary software that hides the display from the OS entirely. For all that widgets are fast becoming first-class citizens on the desktop (or in some cases already are), I've never heard anyone suggest they be differentiated, even though they operate differently.
As of right now I use Win 7 widgets, plus the start menu which is a widget in its own right, although I've also tried google desktop widgets and a couple others. I've used the previously linked product to cordon them off before, but critically, as long as there are multiple monitors shifting focus away from a fullscreen app (for example) will interrupt it, even if the processes are logically separate. A differentiated widget screen (especially a touchscreen that needn't capture the mouse) could easily be interacted with without stealing focus from apps.
I can understand it not being a priority but I think it'd be a killer feature, personally.
Xoom, Flash, all these 'fast' names
I wasn't aware "Exhume" was a fast word. If you ask me, they're more dirty than fast.
Yet another product name that didn't pass the teenager giggle test before it was decided on.
No, you're not living on through your children, you're beginning the process of iterating; you will die and someone else will take your place. Iterative design is all about fixing mistakes in the previous version (you) and trying to find a way to create adult humans who are capable of dealing with any problem that crosses their path (your child).
If you're trying to create adult humans that are the same as you instead of capable in general, you probably believe one or more of:
* That you're perfect (in which case you're wrong, especially if you're doing creepy things to your children)
* That you're not perfect, but they're not going to come across any problems you didn't (in which case you're 99% likely to be wrong, unless you're a fifth-generation coal miner or something)
* That something you needed to do is left undone (which is a shitty thing to leave your kids burdened with, especially without their consent or approval, and by the way you're not even dead yet)
* That life doesn't allow people to make any progress anyway so we should all just be shitty people like you
* Your children don't really have feelings anyway and as long as you play the game of parenting right you can make them into whatever you want
* That your way of life gives you a unique way of dealing with things that is far superior to all others (a view shared by both too-rich people and scam artists)
As far as I know, all of those are legitimately unhealthy psychologically.
Violating the GPL != stealing.
Piracy of games literally is not stealing, it's the fencing of goods (for free) in a way that the license for the product forbids ("You shall not make unauthorized copies of this software."). If the license for the game didn't explicitly forbid copying, you'd be within your rights to do so, up to the point where you fall afoul of some other law, such as copyright. Violating any other license's explicit terms, including those of the GPL, is actually 100% equivalent.
In my understanding, that is. IANAL.
"one-way power relationships"?
You do know that you have the right to seek employment at another place of business, or to even create your own business?
You also have the right to date, get married to and in most cases divorced from, anyone you please. That fact has not prevented spousal abuse.
A one way power relationship is not only created from a physical limitation. Psychological abuse and control are absolutely terrifying things.
Gross exaggeration and strawman do not support one's point of view.
No, really.
Sexual harassment, blackmail, and rape are all forms of abuse propagated because of a person believes in and/or creates one-way power relationships. They may be the most serious of such abuse, but they are not the only kinds. Bosses who are petty, backbiting, and in other ways torturous simply because they can get away with it are doing the same thing, even if it's not on the same scale.
"I should be able to fire them, for whatever reason I choose" means different things for a halfway decent person as it does for a one-way power tripper. A normal human being sees it as, "If they've done something wrong or they're not helping my business, I shouldn't be hindered in removing them." A criminal mind says, "If I fire someone, nobody has any right to ask why." They do have the right to ask why, especially if there are allegations of abuse. What the NLRB is (or should be, not having RTFA) saying is, "You cannot blackmail your employees into silence, or we'll look into the situation to make sure you aren't doing something illegal or abusive" or more realistically, "you cannot force them into silence one way or another, you'll just have to continue your abusiveness aboveboard."
Freeing the people... ...if the people just happen to be dumb-shits or irrational? Well that's the bed you've made for yourself, why are you disappointed or put out?
As soon as there's a place in this world I can emigrate to where I can escape from the consequences of stupid people, stupid laws, and long-standing mistakes, I'll be as happy as your sardonic statement suggests.
I'm not dumb enough to advocate trying to change giant freaking monolithic governments, where even getting elected, much less petitioning as a normal citizen, leaves you in many ways powerless to affect important things. I just wish there was a place on this earth (or beyond it--space colonies or whatever) where people could go to leave behind the absolute crap that some places shove on us. A place where experiments in government can be tried and debugged without having to overcome institutional inertia, where science can be done upon it until all the issues we have with government are fixed. A pipe dream in the current world, I think, but it's no more a pipe dream in the long run than a perfect OS is.
But there ain't no such place and there ain't gonna be anytime soon.
I think that the GP's outrage is more that this is coming as a response to people who display existing evidence (that vaccines is harmless), by people who ignore all that data and instead make speculative claims without themselves having sufficient medical background, and/or without any data to back it up.
Yes, the tradition in science is that things need to be proven, and that we should acknowledge what is not yet proven, and even that we should take any credible evidence opposing existing theories and attempt to find the truth. However, the question is, is their pop-culture "science" founded on credible evidence, and does it itself acknowledge data in opposition to its views?
Or in short, they're taking advantage of scientist's willingness to be proven false in the face of data, while not showing the same courtesy.
Harumphh!
Well, all I can really say is, if you're actually trying to convince or convey anything, you either have a very odd way of doing it, or we're simply talking way past each other. You're a bit well-written to be a troll, but as far as I can tell, we're really not talking about the same thing.
Something is left explicitly unstated when it is not brought to the table at all when discussing something where its relevance is not only obvious but paramount. The economics of starting an offshore business are "How much will it cost us?" which contains both the cost of the setup and the ongoing cost of the facility--in other words, the wages of the employees. Of principle concern to how much will be paid in wages is the relationship between how much you pay an employee and the resultant customer satisfaction, given that the IT help desk office is going to produce absolutely no other output.
Now maybe I've slipped into an alternate reality where IT help desks--foreign or domestic--have a substantially greater reputation than I've ever heard of, but if not, I'm fairly certain diminishing returns are going to set in awfully quickly, even with the best possible employer. However, a company that is hiring IT pros to "set up" IT help desks doesn't strike me as a company that has a vested interest in quality, which leads me to believe that the wage bar will likely be set at a 'conservative estimate' (meaning low) of where they believe that diminishing returns point to be. Considering that at the ideal point of diminishing returns, an appropriately educated worker wouldn't feel shafted taking the job, anything lower than that is probably unfair to whomever DOES take it--and, if the help desk setup company is, as I suspect, not entirely concerned with quality, the working environment could easily be hostile as well, which just screws with the people who DO take the job.
Now, admittedly, the discussion of how much the employees would be paid was left out of a second- or third-hand report, so it's not necessarily the case that it's not something the company itself cares about; maybe they're good samaritans, or hell, good businessmen with some integrity. Somehow I suspect it isn't the case. That suspicion, admittedly, is only preliminary, and I'll happily yield it given facts that suggest otherwise.
("Gasp!") Leaving the fact-vacuum to rejoin the oxygenated world, the question was in regard to the ethics of helping to take away jobs from co-workers to "give them jobs to furriners with funny accents."
You know, manufacturing quotes out of thin air is not "leaving the fact vacuum". (Oh look, mixed metaphors. Meh.) If that "furriners with funny accents" comment was supposed to be in reply to anyone, I haven't seen it, so it comes to nothing more than a strawman, and an irrelevant one at that, considering that my argument is pro-worker, not pro-local.
The problem with your analysis is that offshoring is done as a cost-saving measure. This means two pertinent things: that the quality of the help desk could easily go down, and that it is explicitly unstated whether the workers at the offshore IT help desk would be paid appropriate wages. If nothing else, when setting up such a facility in your own country, you have a reasonable understanding of the buying power of your own currency, relevant work laws, etc. If you don't speak the language in that foreign country, will you be able to do more than trust the local translator who tells you there's no problem? If you do speak the language, do you know enough about the country to know if the people will be taken advantage of?
That's a different part of the argument, admittedly. Does the company have a right to make mistakes that could potentially screw over its consumers, by outsourcing the help desk? Yes, they have a right to make mistakes. Is it unethical to take part in that if you disagree with their motives and means? Yes, I'd say that's unethical. Is the question of ethics really dependent on who gets the job when all is said and done? No, not really; if there were a slum in your own nation where it were legal to pay ridiculously little for questionable labor, or whatever the similar situation is, then the ethics question would stay the same regardless of which nation gets the money.
Where has it been illustrated he has any at all?
No, this is not what they're saying. Google employees installed the Bing toolbar and enabled the feature to send click-data to Bing. Then they fed that data to Bing.
If they didn't know what the keyword used in the Google search was, and if they didn't explicitly integrate that into their engine, they wouldn't have gotten results for that same search on their engine. I'm afraid I don't see how that's different from sending "a mapping of the search keywords to results Google considers relevant" as I argued in my post.
To your other point, I don't think we usually cheer on piracy here, at least if we're talking about approving of it; what I see approved of most often is circumventing DRM, or in other words, sticking it to people who get in the way of you enjoying what you legitimately bought. Not that there aren't such nutjobs, but I see more people cheering the latter.
In my thermodynamics class back in college, one problem we were given was to calculate how much energy it would take to melt all the snow across the campus.
One of the things that always boggles me about winter is that there is no addition of cold in any meaningful way, negative thermal energy not really existing; the world (well, hemisphere) gets substantially colder because it continues losing heat at the same rate it does in summer, but now it's not being replaced by the sun. All of those huge waves of warm and cold air that we live or die by are inefficiencies in heat getting from the ground (or anywhere else it's absorbed) to space.
Makes the world, and humanity, seem so much more fragile when you look at it that way.
Well, you'll have to make a distinction for me.
What Microsoft is tantamount to admitting is that "customer data" includes searches on a rival engine, and the relevant results. In other words, "When our competitor successfully finds a result for you, we want to know what it is." Clearly, Microsoft never asked Google if this was okay, or there would be no shock and no argument. Instead, they're using users of their opt-in program (henceforth known as mules) in a distributed effort to get a mapping of search queries to useful results. However, those useful results were generated thanks to Google's long-standing competence in the field, and not by ANY process Bing has a hand in. Therefore it is still to be argued that Bing is appropriating, without due request or apology, a mapping of google's results weighted by the relevance to users of google's site. So tell me--how is that not copying results?
Further, the mules in this attack are legitimate Google users who are acting on good faith. And indeed, perhaps the weighting on the algorithm is such that until or unless the weighting changes, this mapping does so little to Bing's results as to be utterly innocent. However, if Bing gained dominance (at the expense of Google) because of this mapping, or if for any other reason this caused Google's service to falter or become unprofitable, those users of Google's service will have unwittingly caused its downfall, and they caused that downfall by being satisfied with Google as a product.
I'm probably overstating it, but it still leaves a nasty taste in the mouth as far as I'm concerned. There's a difference in Bing's policy versus whether or not they're successful at it. If they consider it good policy to sit on the threshold of stealing someone else's results, but then simply not weighting those results highly enough to cause trouble, then I take issue with them. It remains their prerogative to explain themselves if they want to reverse that opinion.
You know, people complain that Chrome--built on Chromium, an open source browser, could be sending who knows what to Google about your browsing habits. However, Chrome is entirely optional and user-installed, whereas IE comes standard with windows--to the point where they got in huge-ass trouble previously for stifling competition with it. But while Google lays its cards out for everyone to see (except for the places where Chrome isn't Chromium, admittedly), in order to forestall objections that they might be doing something like this, Microsoft flat-out does it, behind your back.
Now, some people have said it's a Bing Toolbar thing, and I dunno, not having RTFA; but even so, how often is that going to be shovelware that preys on unwitting users, like every OTHER friggin' IE toolbar? So not only is it preying on Google's algorithm, not only is it stealing user data, it's also coercing unwitting users to be their mule in this attack.
There's nothing you can say that makes this taste even marginally better. It's shit, and the Bing team should be ashamed, if not prosecuted.
I was walking on the sidewalk by his house, and he shouted out the window that he just farted. I took out a notepad and wrote down that the guy just farted. Then he sued me for invasion of privacy.
---> Guy gets laughed out of court.
I know this "shouting" example gets thrown around a lot with question, but it's much more that he had private data (passwords, email, etc) on a big screen TV, which you can see clearly from the street. He could have done any number of things to secure it (turn the TV, close the blinds), and realistically he has no expectation of privacy, but in the end, it's a setup that he fails to understand the consequences of, rather than an action he takes over and over (vis a vis shouting).
Also, if you're routinely writing down things people yell out their window (or especially one person's house), that's exceptionally creepy behavior. I have no idea if it's illegal or not, but jeeeeeez.