My best reason against the war in Iraq (since taking out dictators is generally such a good idea that you can hardly argue about it) is that with a fraction of the money spent ( http://costofwar.com/ ) we could have come A LOT closer to achieving the Millennium Development Goals and could have done so much more for so many more people.
Nobody cares about poor people now, why should they care about their future.
I mean how many people on Slashdot know what is going on in Africa right now? Like Chad, where fresh French troops were deployed this week to bolster the ranks of the French troops already there to stem off a rebellion. Anyone know who the rebels are or what they want? Anyone cares? Chad belongs to Sub-Saharan Africa, which is the poorest region in the world. How many could place Chad on a map?
Somalia got some attention back in the 90s. It still is a so called failed state. I dunno if many know what that term even means.
And I consider Slashdot to be an educated crowd. So much for the Western World.
Nobody gives a shit about poor people in other countries. Best example: http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/ Those goals were drawn up in 2000 and when 9/11 came up they were completely off the agenda. Though I don't know if 9/11 is to blame. Maybe they would have been taken off the agenda anyways.
So if you want to make people in Western countries care about climate change you should maybe mention the billions upon billions that natural disasters will cost. Money always gets attention.
What do you think would happen? There is a country that holds people without trial for as long as they like. Any other country than the US would be considered an enemy of the free world BY the US. What do you think the rest of the world thinks about G'Bay? Doh!
This, among the ABM shield are weapons directed at the next possible adversary. China. This is simply an oberservation. And though Bush has had his diplomatic blunders for some reason he was able to keep his mouth almost shut over this. Imagine "We build weapons to take the Chinese apart!" or something along those lines.
However, he did fundamentally and single handedly change the US policy on the Taiwan issue. It used to be "we will defend Taiwan, but for diplomatic reasons we won't say anything, since we play along with the One-China-Policy and the This-Is-An-Internal-Affair-Stand from Beijing" and changed to "of course we will defend Taiwan and say it out loud" by statement of the US President.
You actually do have a point. Japanese pop culture is after the latest gimmick. And Nintendo makes a lot of profit there.
But that's about it.
Please check sales and estimated R&D costs, you seem to have failed to. I won't check either, but I can tell you right now that the console market in North America at least a couple times larger than the Japanese. Same with Europe. So Nintendo has for over 20 years built for the North American market and the European market and will continue to do so.
But the biggest bs was covering the R&D costs in the first weeks. If you did read any story about consoles on Slashdot and followed up on the commentary you will notice that Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo actually loose money on the consoles in order to sell more and make money on the games. Nintendo pioneered that. So you think in the first weeks the Japanese will buy enough games to not only cover for the consoles that are sold at a loss but also for R&D?
There might be more bunk in your comment, but I stopped reading after the the second paragraph.
Mobile Handover is a bith, even if you stay in your own network. Some very clever guys managed to make it work for GSM, CDMA, UMTS and the likes. But GSM handover to WiFi and back? Maybe even on just any hotspot that happens to be around? Without dropping the call? Anyone on Slashdot that does this? Because I would love to hear how.
Negroponte just doesn't have a clue. That's all. Nothing to see here, move along.
RedHat is one of the sponsors. So the laptop will be shipped with some version of Fedora most likely. Maybe someone that doesn't have a clue either tried to install Fedora on a limited machine and noticed that it runs damn small. Or he checked for the recommended configuration on the Fedora web page. Either way, we all know that almost any distro (and certainly the kernel) can be configured to run on almost anything. Including X11. Maybe not with the latest KDE/Gnome or a default Fedora, which is what he meant.
Oracle didn't port their database to Linux for charity or because they love open source. They went in for the money. What a surprise. They wouldn't have known Linux existed if they wouldn't have been requested by customers, because with i386 you have been getting more bang for the buch for some time now. And Linux is THE i386 Unix. I am talking big corporate supported stuff, I know that BSD is cool and all. But Red Hat on Intel servers has been a very good deal in many cases. And if the customer doesn't spend as much on hardware they might be more willing to shell out the fortune that Oracle demands.
Well, Pushemail is not email in the traditional sense. Email was like mail. When you wanted to your mail you started your Pine, queried your pop3 server and got your mail (this changed a bit with imap and instant notification I must admit, but many non technical people still fire up their email app whenever they feel like it and don't use notification stuff on their desktop).
IM on the other hand is much different, because you get the message (if you have your IM turned on) the instant someone sends it. Like a telephone call.
Pushemail is the same. It is more like SMS than email. Many mobile devices also have email now in the traditional sense.
Even though PushEmail is different you still get emails that people send with the email state of urgency in mind. When I need something now I would use a telephone call or an SMS text message or IM. When I write longer messages with lower urgency I use email. I think many people use that the same way. That is why I certainly can see why pushemail could reduce productivity with people on the receiving end that just can't get their priorities straight (I think I would have a hard time keeping myself doing what I was doing when the Blackberry just went off, but I don't own one).
Maybe people should just turn off the push feature.
The system is flawed. The more these flaws get abused, the higher the chance that the system gets changed. Especially when small companies hold large companies like Microsoft hostage. Because these large companies are the ones that put the system in place and keep it there.
No evil here. Just some clever guys abusing the system and helping the greater good. We need more!
Please, let the patent cold war end. Let the hot war begin. I believe lawyers everywhere are very eager. They would earn a lot of money. I want to see Sun beat up Microsoft beat up IBM beat up...
But why no 12 or 18 month payment? Why does it have to be 6 month for a college student in the US (who had to pay a fortune for her education)? You are suggesting she should sell a kidney and you get modded up? Interesting on Slashdot.
To moderators: What have you shared today and how many kidneys do you have left?
My post is not that long! Where did I say she should not get punished?
I do believe in good and evil. But not in that black and white world that many American Christians seem to live in. For me there is good and evil in every one of us and we must strive to become better people every day. But to call a whole person (much less an entity like a company or even a country) evil is hard. There are many sides to every issue/person. A moderate Christian would rather bring out the good than condemn them as evil and fight them to the death.
To make someone drop out of college for something that is not even theft like in shoplifting is very hard. OTOH the US has a tendency to had out harsh punishments: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison#Prison_populat ion_statistics So maybe that is just the local culture.
Studies have shown that the way of punishment in a culture does not seem to infulence crime rates in a significant way. Some cultures just have harder some have weaker punishments. I heard that they don't even have "closed" prisions in Greenland, because that punishment is alien to Inuit. They used to just disabandon people for serious crimes I guess (which amounts to death, but maybe some found refuge with other groups).
I never used the term "evil" seriously before, because the concept of good and evil is pretty alien to me (I am a moderate Christian from Europe). But suggesting to drop out of college to pay a settlement for some p2p music stuff... (stealing would be if the company looses something, which is not the case with copying digital content).
I do think content producers (and software writers for that matter) need protection, but that?
Ask yourself, if you worked your butt off for some software and someone who is not willing to pay for it and would not use it if they had to but copied it and offered it for share, should they be made to drop out of college to pay for the settlement?
I now remember that I saw a tv documentary in which they did exactly that. They tried to train autistic teenagers to recognize basic emotions. Like extreme anger. The degree to which they can't relate varies, as far as I understood it. They had a successful example. Not hugely successful, but at least when the parent started to cry the teenager learned that this is a sign of stress and they should try to comfort them. The teenager still was bad at expressing emotions, but at least could respond to emotions in a basic way.
If you do not learn a foreign language, but just memorize a phrase that does not make sense to you at all but it gets you something. Quite hard to explain.
Wouldn't it be easier for the autistic person (given that they actually can engange and talk to people so much that those could become bored) to simply train how to recoginze different facial expressions? Don't flame me please, I know it ain't easy and maybe for some it can't be done. I simply think if an autistic person that is able to engage people on their own might want to try and learn facial expressions using different means. Like we don't naturally know how a dog feels. But if we learn that tail wagging means they are happy we can recognize it. IMHO with a little training many autistic people with the ability to engage people and use a device that vibrates might be as capable as a computer to recognize emotion such as boredom.
The Mask is one of my favourite movies. The acting and the plot may be poor (though I like the good/bad girl twist), but I thought it was very funny. I like funny movies. I didn't like the new Star Wars stuff at all. Maybe ILM is best at slapstick humour movies.
I am a big libertarian over here in Europe (which would translate to democrat in the US, yes, we are so far apart!), but there might be times when markets do seem to fail. The DVD was a large success. But the next generation? DRM is just one of the areas where the entertainment industry seems hopelss. Will the consumer "wait and see" for HD-DVD and Blue-Ray? I guess they will. Will they wait for DRM to actually work? Most likely! Will that translate into much sales? Hardly!
Same happened to the music industry and online distribution. They slept through it. They didn't even combat online piracy very good. They still don't. Maybe in part because Kazaa promotes the most popular and therefore acutally serves them. But iTunes came along pretty late in the game and still much earlier than the labels themselves.
Many people now have some sort of 5.1 or 6.1 Dolby Digital system at home. The music industry could sell all their stuff in sourround and reap similar profits to the movie industry with their old stuff on DVD selling like mad. Competing formats, no marketing, complete failure!!!
I still don't think the government should get involved in many of those cases, simply because markets sort it out eventually (see iTunes). But they would serve the industry much better if they would take lead in some sort of standard body. It might take longer with the government involved, but shorter and cheaper than the upcoming standards war.
Why is no one talking about developement tools for the Revolution, or for any of the other consoles for that matter? I heard that it was/is very difficult to develope for the PS2 for example. That (among licensing issues) forced out smaller developers. Maybe Revolution will have a very good, fast and easy developement platform and we will see many inovative titles from independent shops? Or they took a turn at Sony, or Microsoft ported Visual Basic?
Anyone got a clue? I clicked on comments to get some.
Reading what the heads of Google had to say about their stock (careful, careful, careful, our market is so competitive, we could loose to Yahoo or Microsoft any second) I suppose they themselves would not have included it.
Slashdot Mirror
My best reason against the war in Iraq (since taking out dictators is generally such a good idea that you can hardly argue about it) is that with a fraction of the money spent ( http://costofwar.com/ ) we could have come A LOT closer to achieving the Millennium Development Goals and could have done so much more for so many more people.
Nobody cares about poor people now, why should they care about their future.
I mean how many people on Slashdot know what is going on in Africa right now? Like Chad, where fresh French troops were deployed this week to bolster the ranks of the French troops already there to stem off a rebellion. Anyone know who the rebels are or what they want? Anyone cares? Chad belongs to Sub-Saharan Africa, which is the poorest region in the world. How many could place Chad on a map?
Somalia got some attention back in the 90s. It still is a so called failed state. I dunno if many know what that term even means.
And I consider Slashdot to be an educated crowd. So much for the Western World.
Nobody gives a shit about poor people in other countries. Best example: http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/
Those goals were drawn up in 2000 and when 9/11 came up they were completely off the agenda. Though I don't know if 9/11 is to blame. Maybe they would have been taken off the agenda anyways.
So if you want to make people in Western countries care about climate change you should maybe mention the billions upon billions that natural disasters will cost. Money always gets attention.
What do you think would happen? There is a country that holds people without trial for as long as they like. Any other country than the US would be considered an enemy of the free world BY the US. What do you think the rest of the world thinks about G'Bay? Doh!
Also, the Wall Street Journal opinion section is not exactly the place to go to find genuine scientific analysis.
I found the Wall Street Journal opinion section to be a very disturbing piece at times. For some reason or another they are very agenda driven.
This, among the ABM shield are weapons directed at the next possible adversary. China. This is simply an oberservation. And though Bush has had his diplomatic blunders for some reason he was able to keep his mouth almost shut over this. Imagine "We build weapons to take the Chinese apart!" or something along those lines.
However, he did fundamentally and single handedly change the US policy on the Taiwan issue. It used to be "we will defend Taiwan, but for diplomatic reasons we won't say anything, since we play along with the One-China-Policy and the This-Is-An-Internal-Affair-Stand from Beijing" and changed to "of course we will defend Taiwan and say it out loud" by statement of the US President.
You actually do have a point. Japanese pop culture is after the latest gimmick. And Nintendo makes a lot of profit there.
But that's about it.
Please check sales and estimated R&D costs, you seem to have failed to. I won't check either, but I can tell you right now that the console market in North America at least a couple times larger than the Japanese. Same with Europe. So Nintendo has for over 20 years built for the North American market and the European market and will continue to do so.
But the biggest bs was covering the R&D costs in the first weeks. If you did read any story about consoles on Slashdot and followed up on the commentary you will notice that Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo actually loose money on the consoles in order to sell more and make money on the games. Nintendo pioneered that. So you think in the first weeks the Japanese will buy enough games to not only cover for the consoles that are sold at a loss but also for R&D?
There might be more bunk in your comment, but I stopped reading after the the second paragraph.
Mobile Handover is a bith, even if you stay in your own network. Some very clever guys managed to make it work for GSM, CDMA, UMTS and the likes. But GSM handover to WiFi and back? Maybe even on just any hotspot that happens to be around? Without dropping the call? Anyone on Slashdot that does this? Because I would love to hear how.
Negroponte just doesn't have a clue. That's all. Nothing to see here, move along.
RedHat is one of the sponsors. So the laptop will be shipped with some version of Fedora most likely. Maybe someone that doesn't have a clue either tried to install Fedora on a limited machine and noticed that it runs damn small. Or he checked for the recommended configuration on the Fedora web page. Either way, we all know that almost any distro (and certainly the kernel) can be configured to run on almost anything. Including X11. Maybe not with the latest KDE/Gnome or a default Fedora, which is what he meant.
Oracle didn't port their database to Linux for charity or because they love open source. They went in for the money. What a surprise. They wouldn't have known Linux existed if they wouldn't have been requested by customers, because with i386 you have been getting more bang for the buch for some time now. And Linux is THE i386 Unix. I am talking big corporate supported stuff, I know that BSD is cool and all. But Red Hat on Intel servers has been a very good deal in many cases. And if the customer doesn't spend as much on hardware they might be more willing to shell out the fortune that Oracle demands.
And this is news???
Well, Pushemail is not email in the traditional sense. Email was like mail. When you wanted to your mail you started your Pine, queried your pop3 server and got your mail (this changed a bit with imap and instant notification I must admit, but many non technical people still fire up their email app whenever they feel like it and don't use notification stuff on their desktop).
IM on the other hand is much different, because you get the message (if you have your IM turned on) the instant someone sends it. Like a telephone call.
Pushemail is the same. It is more like SMS than email. Many mobile devices also have email now in the traditional sense.
Even though PushEmail is different you still get emails that people send with the email state of urgency in mind. When I need something now I would use a telephone call or an SMS text message or IM. When I write longer messages with lower urgency I use email. I think many people use that the same way. That is why I certainly can see why pushemail could reduce productivity with people on the receiving end that just can't get their priorities straight (I think I would have a hard time keeping myself doing what I was doing when the Blackberry just went off, but I don't own one).
Maybe people should just turn off the push feature.
But many states voted red. And they still would. The majority of Americans seem to favour less freedom and a more authorian government.
The system is flawed. The more these flaws get abused, the higher the chance that the system gets changed. Especially when small companies hold large companies like Microsoft hostage. Because these large companies are the ones that put the system in place and keep it there.
No evil here. Just some clever guys abusing the system and helping the greater good. We need more!
...typewriters reduce handwriting skills.
Please, let the patent cold war end. Let the hot war begin. I believe lawyers everywhere are very eager. They would earn a lot of money. I want to see Sun beat up Microsoft beat up IBM beat up ...
Where is my popcorn?
But why no 12 or 18 month payment? Why does it have to be 6 month for a college student in the US (who had to pay a fortune for her education)? You are suggesting she should sell a kidney and you get modded up? Interesting on Slashdot.
To moderators: What have you shared today and how many kidneys do you have left?
My post is not that long! Where did I say she should not get punished?
I do believe in good and evil. But not in that black and white world that many American Christians seem to live in. For me there is good and evil in every one of us and we must strive to become better people every day. But to call a whole person (much less an entity like a company or even a country) evil is hard. There are many sides to every issue/person. A moderate Christian would rather bring out the good than condemn them as evil and fight them to the death.
t ion_statistics
To make someone drop out of college for something that is not even theft like in shoplifting is very hard. OTOH the US has a tendency to had out harsh punishments:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison#Prison_popula
So maybe that is just the local culture.
Studies have shown that the way of punishment in a culture does not seem to infulence crime rates in a significant way. Some cultures just have harder some have weaker punishments. I heard that they don't even have "closed" prisions in Greenland, because that punishment is alien to Inuit. They used to just disabandon people for serious crimes I guess (which amounts to death, but maybe some found refuge with other groups).
I dunno, but I would prefer to see at least one backpack. Also at least two of the bags seemed to look like bags you get with your laptop.
I never used the term "evil" seriously before, because the concept of good and evil is pretty alien to me (I am a moderate Christian from Europe). But suggesting to drop out of college to pay a settlement for some p2p music stuff... (stealing would be if the company looses something, which is not the case with copying digital content).
I do think content producers (and software writers for that matter) need protection, but that?
Ask yourself, if you worked your butt off for some software and someone who is not willing to pay for it and would not use it if they had to but copied it and offered it for share, should they be made to drop out of college to pay for the settlement?
I now remember that I saw a tv documentary in which they did exactly that. They tried to train autistic teenagers to recognize basic emotions. Like extreme anger. The degree to which they can't relate varies, as far as I understood it. They had a successful example. Not hugely successful, but at least when the parent started to cry the teenager learned that this is a sign of stress and they should try to comfort them. The teenager still was bad at expressing emotions, but at least could respond to emotions in a basic way.
If you do not learn a foreign language, but just memorize a phrase that does not make sense to you at all but it gets you something. Quite hard to explain.
Wouldn't it be easier for the autistic person (given that they actually can engange and talk to people so much that those could become bored) to simply train how to recoginze different facial expressions? Don't flame me please, I know it ain't easy and maybe for some it can't be done. I simply think if an autistic person that is able to engage people on their own might want to try and learn facial expressions using different means. Like we don't naturally know how a dog feels. But if we learn that tail wagging means they are happy we can recognize it. IMHO with a little training many autistic people with the ability to engage people and use a device that vibrates might be as capable as a computer to recognize emotion such as boredom.
Heck, I could use a little training, too.
The Mask is one of my favourite movies. The acting and the plot may be poor (though I like the good/bad girl twist), but I thought it was very funny. I like funny movies. I didn't like the new Star Wars stuff at all. Maybe ILM is best at slapstick humour movies.
I am a big libertarian over here in Europe (which would translate to democrat in the US, yes, we are so far apart!), but there might be times when markets do seem to fail. The DVD was a large success. But the next generation? DRM is just one of the areas where the entertainment industry seems hopelss. Will the consumer "wait and see" for HD-DVD and Blue-Ray? I guess they will. Will they wait for DRM to actually work? Most likely! Will that translate into much sales? Hardly!
Same happened to the music industry and online distribution. They slept through it. They didn't even combat online piracy very good. They still don't. Maybe in part because Kazaa promotes the most popular and therefore acutally serves them. But iTunes came along pretty late in the game and still much earlier than the labels themselves.
Many people now have some sort of 5.1 or 6.1 Dolby Digital system at home. The music industry could sell all their stuff in sourround and reap similar profits to the movie industry with their old stuff on DVD selling like mad. Competing formats, no marketing, complete failure!!!
I still don't think the government should get involved in many of those cases, simply because markets sort it out eventually (see iTunes). But they would serve the industry much better if they would take lead in some sort of standard body. It might take longer with the government involved, but shorter and cheaper than the upcoming standards war.
Are we on Slashdot or what?
Why is no one talking about developement tools for the Revolution, or for any of the other consoles for that matter? I heard that it was/is very difficult to develope for the PS2 for example. That (among licensing issues) forced out smaller developers. Maybe Revolution will have a very good, fast and easy developement platform and we will see many inovative titles from independent shops? Or they took a turn at Sony, or Microsoft ported Visual Basic?
Anyone got a clue? I clicked on comments to get some.
Reading what the heads of Google had to say about their stock (careful, careful, careful, our market is so competitive, we could loose to Yahoo or Microsoft any second) I suppose they themselves would not have included it.
This is what you get when the big business lobby takes over the government. What did you expect?