Have you actually read that Wikipedia article? All it says is that the fear of losing $100 has more impact on people's thinking than the hope of gaining $100. I suppose that's true for most people (it's certainly true for me); but what about compulsive gamblers? "Loss aversion" is just an empirical observation about how people deal with economic risk. It may be useful for building economic models, but it's hardly proof that people are "wired that way".
And even if they were, that has nothing to do one's capacity for doing without minor luxuries. If people complain that cable TV costs too much, but pay for it anyway, they're not exactly minimizing their economic losses, are they?
Oh right, anything you can get on cable you can get on broadcast TV.
The legal alternative to cable/satellite is to do without. Pass on the cable-only sports events. Wait for your favorite cable-only TV shows to come out on DVD. You can even go out and do stuff instead of spending all your leisure time in front of the box.
But Americans don't like to do without. So they pay huge cables fees. They may bitch and moan, but they will pay.
In other words, you're absolutely convinced, beyond any doubt, that humans have no significant impact on global climate. I envy you your sense of certainty.
Actually, there's a lot of evidence (ice core samples and such) that the arctic hasn't been warm enough for a passage to form for at least 100,000 years.
The scary thing is that losing the polar ice cap has effects way beyond creating a new shipping route. All that ice reflects a lot of heat back into space. It's one of many effects (methane outgassing from melting Siberian tundra; carbon released when drought causes forests to burn) that create a positive feedback look in the global warming trend. In theory, these feedback loops could get so severe they won't stop until the oceans boil. OK, that's pretty unlikely. But it wouldn't have to be nearly so severe an effect to do something relatively minor, but quite nasty. Like wipe out our food supply.
In other words, it's a mistake to phrase the global warming debate in terms of compelling evidence. We can't know for sure — and that should make us more scared, not less. To quote Dirty Harry: You have to ask yourself if you're feeling lucky. Well, do you, punk?
IANAL and your recommendation of consulting one would be a much better idea than my and others' of hacking up a notice we found on the 'net. I'm just saying it's not insane. But probably is a little silly.
In a legal fight (or any fight) it's probably better if your opponents think you're insane than if they think you're silly. If they think you're insane, they'll still take you seriously — possibly more seriously than if they thought you were behaving rationally. If they think you're silly, they'll write you off as a loser that they can outbully or outstubborn.
0h, right. They're going to shut down a profitable website because of threats from someone with no resources because there's a dim possibility that that a lawyer might be involved at a later date.
on Slashdot, phrases like, "most popular", "no known bugs", and "interoperates seamlessly" always have the implicit qualification "me and my friend consider it...".
Let me get this straight: you want to enforce the legal requirements of the content license, but you don't want to use the legal system to do it. Sorry. If you want to enforce an agreement, you have to stand in front of a judge and show that the agreement is applicable and enforceable. (Retaining a lawyer is not mandatory, but is highly advisable.) There's no magical way to guarantee that everybody respects your rights as you see them.
You make some good points. I think there are two main reasons for the issues you describe. First, there's the obvious problem that we're just beginning to outgrow: the attitude that our own technology is so superior, we don't really need to interoperate. (Of course, Microsoft has the same problem, but it's easier for them to get away with it.) Hence Sun's past half-assed support for everything that wasn't pure Solaris-on-SPARC. Fortunately, management now realizes how dumb that it.
Second, there's the simple fact that people who are experts on Solaris tend not to be experts on Windows. That's one of the issues the new Sun-Microsoft joint development team is presumably meant to address. No doubt your "native" authentication is high on their agenda. Unfortunately, this work can't happen overnight. Undoing many years of bad decisions is going to take time.
No. If there had been no Microsoft, someone else would have done that.
Somebody else did do it: IBM. (And even IBM was just joining a trend that started elsewhere.) Microsoft just provided the OS. And they almost didn't even do that.
If he HAD been looking at kiddie porn, if he HAD been a sexual predator, being a father how could I stand back and not try to do something?
You assume that anybody who is sexually aroused by children is going to actually abuse children. That's nonsense.
Yes, kiddie porn need to be banned, but only because producing it is an evil abuse of the children who appear in it. There's no real evidence that looking at porn that depicts evil behavior causes that behavior. If it did, there's be a rash of torture killings every time another Hostel sequel came out.
Lots of people have sexual fantasies that would have them thrown in prison or even lynched if they tried to act on them in real life. (Actually, I suspect all people do.) They don't act on them because they're wired to grasp that hurting people is wrong, or because they're not adept at the moral rationalization you need to be a criminal. People who aren't this way are criminals and possibly sociopaths, and you identify them by how they behave towards others, not by their taste in porn.
This attitude toward pedophilia has got to change. Yes, people who abuse children, sexually or otherwise, need to be punished. But this notion that we need to come down on everybody who even smells of pedophilia is stupid, cruel, and really just makes matters worse.
As I write this, California parole agents are going around telling hundreds of sexual offenders that they have to move, because they live too close to parks, schools, or other places that children congregate. Many of these offenders actually have no history of child abuse. All of them will have trouble finding new housing that complies with the rules. Those that don't will either have to go back to prison (at extreme expense to the taxpayers), start living on the street, or go underground. Yeah, that's an effective way to keep track of predators!
The logic seems to be something like this: Google needed lots of home and office computers to succeed, and most of those computers ran Microsoft software. But that doesn't mean that those computers wouldn't exist without Microsoft. If history had gone differently, they might well be running an OS derived from CP/M instead of from MS-DOS (which was Bill Gates's original recommendation to IBM). Or they might all be running a Unix-like OS (something Microsoft itself once assumed was inevitable). Or IBM might have stayed out of the desktop computer market (which they almost did) and there'd still be no de-facto standard for desktop computers. Or one of the other players might have created the commodity system, and we'd be running something derived from the Amiga or the Atari ST. That last scenario was always unlikely, but personally I'm very sorry it didn't happen that way.
So of course, this claim is hilarious. But we shouldn't laugh too hard. This isn't the first time I've heard technogeeks congratulate themselves for "changing the world" when all they did was surf the waves of technological progress. Even Brin and Page, who deserve a lot of credit for their technological savvy and also for correctly anticipating how search engine technology had to evolve, are just surfers, not the equivalent of Lord Neptune who gets to decides where the waves go.
This entire story (which has appeared on a lot of general news sites, but no science news sites) is probably just a case of a reporter misunderstanding something a scientist said. According to the UK NPL site, fluctuations in the physical objects used to define fundamental metric units has always been a problem. Back when they were created, the ideal material for them seemed to be a hard, dense iridium-platinum alloy. This turned out to be a nasty mistake: the alloy is slightly radioactive, which means that some of its mass flies off into space all the time. No mystery there.
This is why most fundamental units are now based on natural constants. For example, the meter used to be the distance between two notches on a platinum-iridium stick. (Before that, it was defined as 1 ten-millionth of a line that goes from the equator to the north pole; except they miscalculated the length of the line!) Now it's based on how far light travels in some tiny amount of time. But there's no consensus as to the best way to get rid of the physical kilogram.
In other words, all we have here is a clueless reporter trying to fill up a slow news day.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you actually read that Wikipedia article? All it says is that the fear of losing $100 has more impact on people's thinking than the hope of gaining $100. I suppose that's true for most people (it's certainly true for me); but what about compulsive gamblers? "Loss aversion" is just an empirical observation about how people deal with economic risk. It may be useful for building economic models, but it's hardly proof that people are "wired that way".
And even if they were, that has nothing to do one's capacity for doing without minor luxuries. If people complain that cable TV costs too much, but pay for it anyway, they're not exactly minimizing their economic losses, are they?
...he really needs to get a life!
Oh right, anything you can get on cable you can get on broadcast TV.
The legal alternative to cable/satellite is to do without. Pass on the cable-only sports events. Wait for your favorite cable-only TV shows to come out on DVD. You can even go out and do stuff instead of spending all your leisure time in front of the box.
But Americans don't like to do without. So they pay huge cables fees. They may bitch and moan, but they will pay.
In other words, you're absolutely convinced, beyond any doubt, that humans have no significant impact on global climate. I envy you your sense of certainty.
Actually, there's a lot of evidence (ice core samples and such) that the arctic hasn't been warm enough for a passage to form for at least 100,000 years.
The scary thing is that losing the polar ice cap has effects way beyond creating a new shipping route. All that ice reflects a lot of heat back into space. It's one of many effects (methane outgassing from melting Siberian tundra; carbon released when drought causes forests to burn) that create a positive feedback look in the global warming trend. In theory, these feedback loops could get so severe they won't stop until the oceans boil. OK, that's pretty unlikely. But it wouldn't have to be nearly so severe an effect to do something relatively minor, but quite nasty. Like wipe out our food supply.
In other words, it's a mistake to phrase the global warming debate in terms of compelling evidence. We can't know for sure — and that should make us more scared, not less. To quote Dirty Harry: You have to ask yourself if you're feeling lucky. Well, do you, punk?
I'm sure you're right. But that's all the more reason to talk to a lawyer before you start issuing "legal" notices.
0h, right. They're going to shut down a profitable website because of threats from someone with no resources because there's a dim possibility that that a lawyer might be involved at a later date.
on Slashdot, phrases like, "most popular", "no known bugs", and "interoperates seamlessly" always have the implicit qualification "me and my friend consider it...".
And why should Wikia pay any attention to a takedown notice signed by somebody who isn't a lawyer and obviously lacks the resources to hire one?
Let me get this straight: you want to enforce the legal requirements of the content license, but you don't want to use the legal system to do it. Sorry. If you want to enforce an agreement, you have to stand in front of a judge and show that the agreement is applicable and enforceable. (Retaining a lawyer is not mandatory, but is highly advisable.) There's no magical way to guarantee that everybody respects your rights as you see them.
I'm sure it does all kind of cool shit. Fact remains, it isn't more newbie-friendly then the boot-from-CD method.
You make some good points. I think there are two main reasons for the issues you describe. First, there's the obvious problem that we're just beginning to outgrow: the attitude that our own technology is so superior, we don't really need to interoperate. (Of course, Microsoft has the same problem, but it's easier for them to get away with it.) Hence Sun's past half-assed support for everything that wasn't pure Solaris-on-SPARC. Fortunately, management now realizes how dumb that it.
Second, there's the simple fact that people who are experts on Solaris tend not to be experts on Windows. That's one of the issues the new Sun-Microsoft joint development team is presumably meant to address. No doubt your "native" authentication is high on their agenda. Unfortunately, this work can't happen overnight. Undoing many years of bad decisions is going to take time.
Yes, kiddie porn need to be banned, but only because producing it is an evil abuse of the children who appear in it. There's no real evidence that looking at porn that depicts evil behavior causes that behavior. If it did, there's be a rash of torture killings every time another Hostel sequel came out.
Lots of people have sexual fantasies that would have them thrown in prison or even lynched if they tried to act on them in real life. (Actually, I suspect all people do.) They don't act on them because they're wired to grasp that hurting people is wrong, or because they're not adept at the moral rationalization you need to be a criminal. People who aren't this way are criminals and possibly sociopaths, and you identify them by how they behave towards others, not by their taste in porn.
This attitude toward pedophilia has got to change. Yes, people who abuse children, sexually or otherwise, need to be punished. But this notion that we need to come down on everybody who even smells of pedophilia is stupid, cruel, and really just makes matters worse.
As I write this, California parole agents are going around telling hundreds of sexual offenders that they have to move, because they live too close to parks, schools, or other places that children congregate. Many of these offenders actually have no history of child abuse. All of them will have trouble finding new housing that complies with the rules. Those that don't will either have to go back to prison (at extreme expense to the taxpayers), start living on the street, or go underground. Yeah, that's an effective way to keep track of predators!
Jeez, all he had to do was change his name!
"Poetical"? It was just a silly metaphor. I suck at poetry.
The logic seems to be something like this: Google needed lots of home and office computers to succeed, and most of those computers ran Microsoft software. But that doesn't mean that those computers wouldn't exist without Microsoft. If history had gone differently, they might well be running an OS derived from CP/M instead of from MS-DOS (which was Bill Gates's original recommendation to IBM). Or they might all be running a Unix-like OS (something Microsoft itself once assumed was inevitable). Or IBM might have stayed out of the desktop computer market (which they almost did) and there'd still be no de-facto standard for desktop computers. Or one of the other players might have created the commodity system, and we'd be running something derived from the Amiga or the Atari ST. That last scenario was always unlikely, but personally I'm very sorry it didn't happen that way.
So of course, this claim is hilarious. But we shouldn't laugh too hard. This isn't the first time I've heard technogeeks congratulate themselves for "changing the world" when all they did was surf the waves of technological progress. Even Brin and Page, who deserve a lot of credit for their technological savvy and also for correctly anticipating how search engine technology had to evolve, are just surfers, not the equivalent of Lord Neptune who gets to decides where the waves go.
Will you please stop pretending to he all these different people? It's very tiresome.
My insults are never gratuitous. For example: you're an idiot because your "correction" of what I said says the same thing I said.
Don't ask me, I have trouble measuring coffee.
That's the original definition of a kilogram. It's been abandoned. Apparently it's hard to guarantee that water has consistent density.
Don't need a hint. Just came back from Mass. Boy, was it heavy.
This entire story (which has appeared on a lot of general news sites, but no science news sites) is probably just a case of a reporter misunderstanding something a scientist said. According to the UK NPL site, fluctuations in the physical objects used to define fundamental metric units has always been a problem. Back when they were created, the ideal material for them seemed to be a hard, dense iridium-platinum alloy. This turned out to be a nasty mistake: the alloy is slightly radioactive, which means that some of its mass flies off into space all the time. No mystery there.
This is why most fundamental units are now based on natural constants. For example, the meter used to be the distance between two notches on a platinum-iridium stick. (Before that, it was defined as 1 ten-millionth of a line that goes from the equator to the north pole; except they miscalculated the length of the line!) Now it's based on how far light travels in some tiny amount of time. But there's no consensus as to the best way to get rid of the physical kilogram.
In other words, all we have here is a clueless reporter trying to fill up a slow news day.