Organizations are collectively responsible for their joint actions, even if every single member didn't sign off on the specific action. Suppose Prism persuades the administration of a University that they have to stop their faculty from "stealing IP." If the university seriously want to change its people's behavior, it implements new policies and make it very clear to the faculty that they have to follow them.
In general, that's how organizations respond when they decide they shouldn't be doing something: they tell their people not to do it, and sanction them if they don't listen.
So Prism is going around telling other organizations to implement a policy while failing to implement it themselves. Sounds like hypocrisy to me.
Solar's big advantage is that it supplies the most electricity midday, when demand peaks.
Solar's big advantages are that it is essentially pollution free, doesn't up CO2, reduces petroleum requirements which means more lubricants, plastics and so on at reasonable prices, reduction of political leverage of oil rich countries, increase in ability to operate independently at every level from national to individual, and over the long term, it costs less.
Dude, don't quote out of context. (It helps if you don't read out of context.) TFA doesn't say that the peaking thing is the main advantage of solar. It's the main advantage of solar over other renewable energy sources (wind, geothermal, tidal). And all renewable energy sources have the advantages you mention.
Well, except for the cost part. Unless by "over the long term" you refer to stuff like the cost of fighting a war every 10-20 years to keep the oil flowing. Which makes sense from a social planning point of view, but not something you can tell to someone who's considering spending $100K on a solar power setup.
And you're dreaming if you think solar power is "essentially pollution free". Sure, it's a lot less polluting than the tech we're using now. But anything humans do has an environmental impact. Building giant solar-powered steam plants (probably the least polluting approach) has huge environmental impacts. To say nothing of paving every roof with solar-electric cells. Those cells are semiconductors, and manufacturing semiconductors produces a lot of pollution.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for solar power. But let's not be all starry-eyed about it. You don't help a cause by underestimating its difficulties. You just give ammunition to kneejerk opponents.
Yes, people who advocate solar power tend to be a little blind to its drawbacks. In that respect, they're exactly the same as advocates for any other technology. Or any other thing, come to that.
I'm a little tired of all the right-wing bozos who claim that anybody who disagrees with them is "irrational." Reducing all arguments to a personal attack and making simplistic generalizations about others are both signs of poor thinking skills.
It's a given that people say stupid stuff. "Greenies" are not immune, and you are really not immune. If you want to correct other people's bullshit, that's fine. But don't pretend that your side has a patent on logic. That's super bullshit.
Apples and oranges. Aggressively prosecuting minor crimes like this is certainly a bad allocation of government resources. But that's a lot different from a massive invasion of privacy, affecting citizens who aren't even suspected of a crime.
Anyway, don't get bent out of shape. We've got surveillance cameras in this country too, and people are just as up in arms about them as we are about yours. More so: nobody here honestly cares whether the UK goes fascist.
Mute buttons (or, even better, the skip forward 30 seconds button on your VCR or DVR) are for people who are actually focused on the TV set. The parent poster is probably one of those people (who, I suspect, form a majority of viewers) who just leave the TV on while they do other stuff, and only seriously watch when something catches their attention. So when you're playing cards or cooking or cuddling your significant other, and the TV suddenly starts shouting at you about McNuggets or erectile dysfunction, it can be pretty irritating.
But you might be right. After all, Google made its fortune serving up advertisements that were easy to ignore. And I often suspect that most advertising dollars spent on traditional media (print, broadcasting) are wasted, since they don't really have a reliable way of measuring their effect.
On the other hand, there's a school of thought that says that obnoxious ads are more effective. The whole point of advertising is to plant a product meme in your head. Long after you've forgotten which advertisers you're pissed of at, you'll have their trademarks floating in your subconscious. That's why folks don't go out for a burger any more (they go to McDonalds), don't by markers (they buy Sharpies), etc.
Not an issue as long as they don't use material from Return to Oz. Which they certainly won't, since their stated aim is to adapt all 15 books — and Return to Oz totally departs from the books.
Well, that would be a good reason reason for acquiring the rights to the movie. But in fact, Warner already has the rights, and got them pretty much by accident. It wouldn't surprise me if this new adaption followed the book rather than the movie. Which, incidentally, had silver slippers, not crystal. Wicked takes its own liberties with the story.
The weirdest part was the Tin Woodsman's head. In the first book, he tells Dorothy how he became a tin person: an evil wizard enchanted his axe so he started losing body parts. Since nobody can die in Oz, all he had to do was replace the missing body part with a replacement provided by a friendly tinsmith. Eventually he was made entirely of tin.
In a later book, he encounters his old flesh head, sitting on a shelf in a shop. It's still alive, and the two of them have a conversation. I dimly recall that they get into an argument about identity.
Which is all very clever and imaginative. But the fact is, nothing in the Oz stories is any weirder than stuff in traditional fairy tales. And I can't forgive the Oz books for taking all the emotional depth out of the genre. That was Baum's stated aim: to remove all the nastiness from fairy tales and make nice wholesome stories that always work out well for the good guys and bad for the bad guys. And no death — not even ordinary death from illness or old age.
What this ignores is the reason children like nasty stories: it helps them work through their many fears. (Remember how fucking scary it was to be a kid?) It also pushes forward the cultural trend towards stories with an unrealistic presumption of good triumphing over evil.
I seem to recall Tip being pretty upset at having to change. But that might have been a sop to people who found the gender bending idea repulsive. I suspect that transgendered people often fantasize about being magically changed into the opposite sex, just like in the book. And really, isn't that pretty much what they try to do with gender reassignment surgery?
It's yet another sloppy summary of TFA, which mentions two distinct facts:
Warner plans to adapt all 15 books.
Warner bought the rights to the 1939 movie from Ted Turner. (Actually, they bought Ted Turner's whole media operation, which happened to include his film library, which happened to include this movie. This happened over 10 years ago; it's connection with this announcement isn't clear.)
The writer of the TFA was a little sloppy, and the submitter was very sloppy, so of course the facts got a bit jumbled. Welcome to Slashdot.
oh wait, there wasn't actually a business model unless selling to some bigger company counts
That's a pretty common business model. (Remember broadcast.com?) Though in this case I'd amend that to "Selling to Google." Nobody else has both ultra-deep pockets and a lust for products whose main virtue is their technological coolness. After all, YouTube is the first streaming video site to have a really elegant user experience and do it with a scalable infrastructure. There was no way Google could resist. (And no way anybody else could even consider it.) They probably told each other, "We just can't pass this up. We can afford it. We'll worry about a revenue model later."
Except now they seem to be feeling the pinch of all that bandwidth cost (1.9 billion video minutes a month). Plus all those lawsuits. So maybe Google has to operate in the real world for once.
It is stupid to waste time creating laws which cover the sale of things no one will be able to afford anyway.
If you have the money, you can buy anything. Not many folks can afford their own tank, but it's a long way from "nobody". Hey, it's even within reach of ordinary working folks if they get a few friends to chip in.
If someone is determined enough, the legality of ownership does not matter.
If someone is determined enough, legality doesn't matter. Should we do away with all laws?
But like I said, you got me wrong. I'm tired of the government telling me what to do. No laws, and a private army on every block! No more boring weekends! Paradise!
As a current student struggling with something akin to $50k yearly tuition...
I don't think anybody's planning to cover your full freight at a top private school. $10K (non-resident tuition at a good state school) is more likely. And you're on your own forroom and board.
TPP didn't say anything about selective schools being better. But since you raise the issue: you're full of shit. "Better" students have a lot more choices about where they go to school. And they tend to be smart. (Dunno why, but it's true.) If a school is able to attract and keep them, that would seem to he a good measure of a school's success.
Besides, a school has no hope of being really good without a good student body. Learning is a social activity.
You certainly shouldn't judge a school just by how many applicants it turns away. But you can't ignore it either.
Nothing, I hope. Even if you ignore the threats to personal liberty such a database entails, it makes no sense at all for DoD to be managing it. It's just another brainless project from Paul Wolfowitz, the most reality-impaired of the Bushies.
That's great but my Pentium 1 - 133Mhz CPU could play MP3s.... You expect me to believe that a modern computer is having CPU contention issues over the processing power to play a MP3?
Of course there are no contention issues playing an MP3. But Vista pretends to me a multimedia powerhouse, which means not just audio but video as well. And video decoding often has trouble getting all the cycles it needs, especially for HD formats.
It seems likely that the MS tweaked the scheduler to give priority to all multimedia apps, obviously thinking of the use case where you're watching a Blu-Ray disc or a high-definition video stream and ignoring the use case where you just want a little background music while you work on your database application. Or maybe they didn't just ignore the second use case: it's pretty hard to distinguish between a multimedia app that needs as many CPU cycles as you can give it, and one that doesn't.
Well, I care, but only because I think "Blu-Ray" is a lot cooler a name than "HD-DVD", and I'm sorry it seems to be losing.
But yeah, most consumers don't care about this format war, or about about the whole high-definition boondoggle in general. Except to complain about the problems of converting to ATSC when NTSC goes dark. Which is going to be a pain: you can either get digital cable/satellite (too expensive), put up a rooftop antenna (not an option for many of us), or buy the best indoor antenna you can find (which won't get most NTSC stations where I live, never mind ATSC).
This whole shift to high definition is a disaster, mainly hurting to people it was supposed to help. Blu-Ray development has turned out to be a total waste, HD-DVD will take forever to recover its R&D costs, and broadcasters have spent a fortune retooling for a format that very few people will watch, at least until the price of HD monitors comes down. If the first-responders didn't need some of the frequencies that NTSC is using now, I'd say "Forget the whole thing."
Oh well, I guess I don't really care. I've got a five year backlog in my Netflix queue. It's not like I'll be starved for entertainment.
Slashdot Mirror
It isn't your disagreeing with me that makes you a right wing bozo. It's the way you reduce all arguments to personal attacks.
Organizations are collectively responsible for their joint actions, even if every single member didn't sign off on the specific action. Suppose Prism persuades the administration of a University that they have to stop their faculty from "stealing IP." If the university seriously want to change its people's behavior, it implements new policies and make it very clear to the faculty that they have to follow them.
In general, that's how organizations respond when they decide they shouldn't be doing something: they tell their people not to do it, and sanction them if they don't listen.
So Prism is going around telling other organizations to implement a policy while failing to implement it themselves. Sounds like hypocrisy to me.
Yeah, that worked out great for YouTube.
Dude, don't quote out of context. (It helps if you don't read out of context.) TFA doesn't say that the peaking thing is the main advantage of solar. It's the main advantage of solar over other renewable energy sources (wind, geothermal, tidal). And all renewable energy sources have the advantages you mention.
Well, except for the cost part. Unless by "over the long term" you refer to stuff like the cost of fighting a war every 10-20 years to keep the oil flowing. Which makes sense from a social planning point of view, but not something you can tell to someone who's considering spending $100K on a solar power setup.
And you're dreaming if you think solar power is "essentially pollution free". Sure, it's a lot less polluting than the tech we're using now. But anything humans do has an environmental impact. Building giant solar-powered steam plants (probably the least polluting approach) has huge environmental impacts. To say nothing of paving every roof with solar-electric cells. Those cells are semiconductors, and manufacturing semiconductors produces a lot of pollution.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for solar power. But let's not be all starry-eyed about it. You don't help a cause by underestimating its difficulties. You just give ammunition to kneejerk opponents.
Yes, people who advocate solar power tend to be a little blind to its drawbacks. In that respect, they're exactly the same as advocates for any other technology. Or any other thing, come to that.
I'm a little tired of all the right-wing bozos who claim that anybody who disagrees with them is "irrational." Reducing all arguments to a personal attack and making simplistic generalizations about others are both signs of poor thinking skills.
It's a given that people say stupid stuff. "Greenies" are not immune, and you are really not immune. If you want to correct other people's bullshit, that's fine. But don't pretend that your side has a patent on logic. That's super bullshit.
Everybody in this thread with a law degree, raise their hand. Anyone? No? Then go argue about something relatively simple, like quantum mechanics.
You're an evil person! I'll bet your whois record doesn't even have your correct email and phone number!
Apples and oranges. Aggressively prosecuting minor crimes like this is certainly a bad allocation of government resources. But that's a lot different from a massive invasion of privacy, affecting citizens who aren't even suspected of a crime.
Anyway, don't get bent out of shape. We've got surveillance cameras in this country too, and people are just as up in arms about them as we are about yours. More so: nobody here honestly cares whether the UK goes fascist.
Mute buttons (or, even better, the skip forward 30 seconds button on your VCR or DVR) are for people who are actually focused on the TV set. The parent poster is probably one of those people (who, I suspect, form a majority of viewers) who just leave the TV on while they do other stuff, and only seriously watch when something catches their attention. So when you're playing cards or cooking or cuddling your significant other, and the TV suddenly starts shouting at you about McNuggets or erectile dysfunction, it can be pretty irritating.
But you might be right. After all, Google made its fortune serving up advertisements that were easy to ignore. And I often suspect that most advertising dollars spent on traditional media (print, broadcasting) are wasted, since they don't really have a reliable way of measuring their effect.
On the other hand, there's a school of thought that says that obnoxious ads are more effective. The whole point of advertising is to plant a product meme in your head. Long after you've forgotten which advertisers you're pissed of at, you'll have their trademarks floating in your subconscious. That's why folks don't go out for a burger any more (they go to McDonalds), don't by markers (they buy Sharpies), etc.
Given the industry's obsession with branding, the logo and the name is everything.
Not an issue as long as they don't use material from Return to Oz. Which they certainly won't, since their stated aim is to adapt all 15 books — and Return to Oz totally departs from the books.
Well, that would be a good reason reason for acquiring the rights to the movie. But in fact, Warner already has the rights, and got them pretty much by accident. It wouldn't surprise me if this new adaption followed the book rather than the movie. Which, incidentally, had silver slippers, not crystal. Wicked takes its own liberties with the story.
The weirdest part was the Tin Woodsman's head. In the first book, he tells Dorothy how he became a tin person: an evil wizard enchanted his axe so he started losing body parts. Since nobody can die in Oz, all he had to do was replace the missing body part with a replacement provided by a friendly tinsmith. Eventually he was made entirely of tin.
In a later book, he encounters his old flesh head, sitting on a shelf in a shop. It's still alive, and the two of them have a conversation. I dimly recall that they get into an argument about identity.
Which is all very clever and imaginative. But the fact is, nothing in the Oz stories is any weirder than stuff in traditional fairy tales. And I can't forgive the Oz books for taking all the emotional depth out of the genre. That was Baum's stated aim: to remove all the nastiness from fairy tales and make nice wholesome stories that always work out well for the good guys and bad for the bad guys. And no death — not even ordinary death from illness or old age.
What this ignores is the reason children like nasty stories: it helps them work through their many fears. (Remember how fucking scary it was to be a kid?) It also pushes forward the cultural trend towards stories with an unrealistic presumption of good triumphing over evil.
I seem to recall Tip being pretty upset at having to change. But that might have been a sop to people who found the gender bending idea repulsive. I suspect that transgendered people often fantasize about being magically changed into the opposite sex, just like in the book. And really, isn't that pretty much what they try to do with gender reassignment surgery?
The writer of the TFA was a little sloppy, and the submitter was very sloppy, so of course the facts got a bit jumbled. Welcome to Slashdot.
I try not to.
Except now they seem to be feeling the pinch of all that bandwidth cost (1.9 billion video minutes a month). Plus all those lawsuits. So maybe Google has to operate in the real world for once.
But like I said, you got me wrong. I'm tired of the government telling me what to do. No laws, and a private army on every block! No more boring weekends! Paradise!
Ooh, somebody didn't get in.
TPP didn't say anything about selective schools being better. But since you raise the issue: you're full of shit. "Better" students have a lot more choices about where they go to school. And they tend to be smart. (Dunno why, but it's true.) If a school is able to attract and keep them, that would seem to he a good measure of a school's success.
Besides, a school has no hope of being really good without a good student body. Learning is a social activity.
You certainly shouldn't judge a school just by how many applicants it turns away. But you can't ignore it either.
Nothing, I hope. Even if you ignore the threats to personal liberty such a database entails, it makes no sense at all for DoD to be managing it. It's just another brainless project from Paul Wolfowitz, the most reality-impaired of the Bushies.
It seems likely that the MS tweaked the scheduler to give priority to all multimedia apps, obviously thinking of the use case where you're watching a Blu-Ray disc or a high-definition video stream and ignoring the use case where you just want a little background music while you work on your database application. Or maybe they didn't just ignore the second use case: it's pretty hard to distinguish between a multimedia app that needs as many CPU cycles as you can give it, and one that doesn't.
Well, I care, but only because I think "Blu-Ray" is a lot cooler a name than "HD-DVD", and I'm sorry it seems to be losing.
But yeah, most consumers don't care about this format war, or about about the whole high-definition boondoggle in general. Except to complain about the problems of converting to ATSC when NTSC goes dark. Which is going to be a pain: you can either get digital cable/satellite (too expensive), put up a rooftop antenna (not an option for many of us), or buy the best indoor antenna you can find (which won't get most NTSC stations where I live, never mind ATSC).
This whole shift to high definition is a disaster, mainly hurting to people it was supposed to help. Blu-Ray development has turned out to be a total waste, HD-DVD will take forever to recover its R&D costs, and broadcasters have spent a fortune retooling for a format that very few people will watch, at least until the price of HD monitors comes down. If the first-responders didn't need some of the frequencies that NTSC is using now, I'd say "Forget the whole thing."
Oh well, I guess I don't really care. I've got a five year backlog in my Netflix queue. It's not like I'll be starved for entertainment.