"Even if you're a frequent ocean swimmer, you're much more likely to die in a car accident than from a shark attack" is meaningless. How "frequent"? How far do you drive?
Like playing Russian Roulette is safer than going to bed. Far more people die in bed.
As far as Japan and the end of WWII is concerned, we should have forgone the nukes, invaded and if it caused hundreds of thousands of deaths on either side, then so be it.
There was no need either to nuke Japan or invade it. Japan was no longer capable of fighting, and had/has practically no indigenous resources with which to re-arm and resume the war. Strange this third alternative is rarely mentioned
There are always a few vocal slashdotters who say they'd like to go back to the era when all sites were labors of love running on stolen time on university hardware. I suppose if that's what you really want, good for you.
Some serious bollocks there, AC. People used stolen time and university hardware in those days because it was very expensive. These days it is as cheap as chips. No-one will ever be going back to those days.
Anyway, figure out what's most important to you. What content do you want, and how do you want to pay for it? Cash, have your eyeballs assaulted with untargeted ads, or have a few, relevant targeted ads? Or no content. Those are your choices. Choose well........And note that "Block all the ads!" doesn't work in the long run. If everyone does it, then sites will either paywall or die.
I do pay - I pay for my interent access and I also pay for hosting four websites. But my websites are free, have no adverts on them, and they cost me peanuts. They will still be there, as will millions of others. It will be the likes of YouTube and Twitter that will go, but even those will be replaced by something equivalent as long as people have an urge to upload their cat videos.
Most people here seem of the view, and it's also the point of TFA, is that low key adverts are OK. Paper magazines did fine on non-animated non-pop-up adverts. Targeted adverts - yes, just like I get from ebay for a car washer for months after I have actually bought a car washer through them - I'm sure the world will keep on turning without them.
I've been on the internet since the time of 28.8 modems and I don't remember ads being more obnoxious than today.
Luxury! I was on a 14.4 modem. There were hardly any adverts then, and those that were were - had to be - low key. Anything elaborate would have slowed things to a glacier pace and you would have hung up, redialed, and gone elsewhere.
Perhaps it is different in the US, but in the UK it is illegal for an advert to give false information, and it is quite common for advertisers to be taken to court over it. Court cases are usually by individuals though, so there is not much clout.
Perhaps because of this legal threat, mainstream adverts tend, rather than lie, to give no information at all. An advert for beer, say, will show some brainless idiot falling off a ladder and landing on a mattress that someone happens to be carrying past at that moment, and doing a string of such antics while keeping up a cheesy smile, and finally opening a can of the beer in question. Nothing is said about how good or otherwise the beer is, only (in my eyes anyway) that it is drunk by cheesy idiots.
Of couse I am drawing a line between mainstream adverts (on TV and website pop-ups, whose purpose is only to associate a brand with a lifestyle) and low-key adverts of the type you need to look for on their own web sites; like if I am thinking of buying a camera I will go and browse the websites of Canon, Pentax etc for info. The latter type of website is less likely to lie as in the UK at least they would be open to prosecution if they told plain lies.
In the West.. a significant proportion of women have rejected men entirely, possible after one fling and a child.
Citation needed..... I would be curious to see some hard stats to back this up.
Quoting John Davies "A History of Wales", a authoritative work, [ISBN 978-0-140-28475-1] for example, "a large number [of babies in Wales] were born to single mothers, who generally lived in poverty and isolation" He bases this statement on the UK 2001 census and further figures from 2003. Consult the census figures directly if you like.
I'm assuming that you do not need a citation for males and females being born in similar numbers. Then clearly the Jocks who got those girls into trouble and dumped them will be back in the dating game the very next day (or do you need a citation for that?), whereas the girls withdraw from society, being too poor to afford baby-sitting, as Davies says. There are also the career women who never, or only briefly, have anything to do with men - have you never encountered any? Add the preponderance of males among immigrants to this. Then with the remaining nubile women outnumbered by seeking men, the more who pair up with eachother in marriage or partnership, the worse the ratio becomes among the remainder.
Maybe you confuse 'all men' with 'me'? You seem biter.
I have re-read my post and although you put all men in quotes, I do not see it anywhere. I am not even sure what your point is. Whether or not I am bitter (maybe you meant that) is irrelevant, I am discussing facts. It is another fact that I am married to a significantly more attractive woman than most, but that does not alter what I see around me, either way.
To make your post even more wrong, this *is* actually a problem in cultures where one man can have many wives
Why does that make my post wrong? I heartily agree with you there. I had a Muslim girlfriend once who wanted to get away from that culture.
And to make it even more wrong, there is a large shortage of women in china... because lots of girls were aborted or worse due to the one-child policy combined with a patriarchal society.
Why does that make me even more wrong? I heartily agree with you again, except you should have said "are aborted", not "were aborted". And you should add the fact that some of those far eastern countries (especially Thailand and the Phillipines, but China too) have made things even worse by exporting the flower of their womanhood to the rest of the world, the West in particular, as mail-order brides or prostitutes - the demand being due to the shortfall in Western women that I discussed above.
human empathy that can only be developed by an experience of mutual relationship
So what does she have to offer or suggest to those people (men particularly) who have no opportunity to develop such an experience? In the West at least, a significant proportion of women have rejected men entirely, possible after one fling and a child. Equal wages and opportunities for women, as well as social attitudes, mean that it is no longer "essential" for a woman to find a husband as it was as recently as two generations ago. There are too many men seeking for the number of women available.
Not just lawyers. I print on average every day. In the last few days:- printing an update of my camping packing list, printing a sales offer from the Web to give to a non-tech neighbour, printing a 10%-off voucher sent to me by a local restaurant to use there (they need it on paper for their accounts, I gather, and I am not going to take the risk of not having it on paper anyway).
Most important, I bought a new set of tyres (sorry, tires) last week and took the precaution of printing the details off the tyre shop's web page and taking it with me. When they came to the price, they quoted 10 GBP per tyre more than their web site had said. I whipped out my printed page and saved myself 40 GBP.
Maybe I could have done that with a phone too (although I don't have, don't want, a smartphone). However fiddling with a phone during dealing puts you on the back foot, gives them time to think - it is far more effective to be able to slap a sheet of paper down on their desk.
Yesterday I was doing a job under my car, wiring up towbar electrics. I printed out the wiring diagram of the car rear lights area on paper to take it under the car with me.
No, I don't want to drag my tablet under the car. It would end up broken. I do a lot of "blue collar" jobs like this as an amateur.
The only way to truly punish (and really, deter) those who are above our ability to punish financially, is to confine them.
No, that's not the only way.
Right. There is the death sentence too, and just flogging them.
Trouble with most other methods is that crooks and lawbreakers find ways round them. Fining? Crooks are masters of spiriting their gains out of sight and reach. Probation and supervision (like having to attend rehabilitation ) is that it takes massive public expense and manpower, and certain types of crook are able to charm their way out of it anyway. Probation officers are only human and susceptible to bribes, threats and charm. Jail is much simpler and "binary".
The worst outcome is burning wood. Of course, forest fires have their advantages but burning wood for heat puts everything back in the air.
For goodness sake don't tell the greenies or wood-burning-stove-merchants that. They are contantly (here in the UK anyway) trumpetting that burning wood is ecologically sustainable. In fact that would only be true if trees were planted and grew as rapidly as they were burned, which they are not.
Around 1000 AD lowland Britain was largely covered by forest. By 350 years later (time of the Black Death) most of it had gone. In fact there was a looming crisis in that the population was becoming unsustainable in terms of food and fuel, which the Black Death solved for a time. What forest remained after that only did so because it was largely "preserved" (by lords wanting forests to hunt in) - a similar situation to today but without the hunting. That depletion of the forests occurred with quite a small population, using it for heating and construction (but most would have been for heating). What little forest remains in Britain today would vanish probably in the first Winter if everyone used it for heating.
How in the world will "mobile" go away?.... people are not going to return to physical keyboards anytime soon
Yes they are, or they have never abandoned them. Typing (as opposed to just looking and reading) is just awful on a touchscreen. Also, the fad for smallness is going away already. The marketing droids will represent keyboards to the next generation as a "new idea", as they did analog watches.
I've never understood people who complain about working a lot of hours....... I work a lot of hours, and I am paid well to do it......... I'd wager I am paid considerably more than than people in Europe who take months of vacation time.
But what is the point if you do not have the time to "enjoy" that money?
Despite living in the UK I actually have quite a lot of money earned from a middling profession career, and I would find it hard to spend it all. I already live where I want to live. I have a 10 year old car that I prefer to more recent models. I do all my own car and house maintenance because I enjoy doing it, like a hobby (one reason why I now have quite a lot of money). This PC has bits up to 15 years old and works fine. I don't give a shit about designer clothing, watches, iStuff, whatever. My ideal day out is walking in the countryside, which costs nothing.
Billionaire plutocrats might have the best set of golf clubs that money can buy, but no time to play golf; and the biggest yachts in the Mediterranean - that sit in marinas almost unused. I calculate that Bill Gates, for example, could buy a new car on average every 15 seconds for the rest of his life - not enough time to get in and out again, what's the point?
The fact is that for some people work is their hobby and their life (sounds like yours); but it isn't mine.
Here are you only referring to advertising placed in and around content, or all advertising, for example a company's own website, or some point-of-sale display?
I took it as read that he meant advertising around other content. If I want to buy a camera I go and look at the "advertising" websites of Canon, Pentax etc to see what they have on offer. Of course I look at review sites as well. Adverts that are put in my face annoy me to hell; they have an entirely negative effect on me and I am suprised that the vast majority of people do not react the same.
The benefit of freight is that there's far less danger and far lower insurance liability. Hyperloop could pull trucks off the roads.... Think of the greenhouse gases we'll save.
Then they need to build it big enough to take standard freight containers.
Most freight does not need to be moved at high speed. Conventional rail can already do that with far less greehouse gas than road transport.
With the hyperloop, any breach of the pipe, will let air into the tube, which increases the atmospheric pressure and forces the pod to slow down. It's a nice passive safety system
Understatement of the day. The air rushing into the broken pipe will hit any 1000kph train within it like a gigantic sledge hammer. It will still hit the train like a sledgehammer if the train has already been stopped because of an advance warning.
There are plenty of ways of stopping all conventional trains (and Hyperloop trains for that matter, but refer to my first paragraph) if an earthquake is detected anywhere along the line. Japan has such systems. Of course, if the track/pipe is broken at a place when the train is passing through, neither is safe.
Even if the most conservative costs of freighting for the hyperloop were to double....... it'd still be faster and cheaper than all the current means of transportation of goods.
So a railway plus a 4m diameter vacuum tube on pylons will be cheaper than a railway without a 4m diameter vacuum tube on pylons?
If a false defamation of character is involved, and Sagehorn seems to be admitting it was false, there would a case for civil legal action against him. Some, possibly including Sagehorn, might not see it as a defamation of character, but others (most importantly the teacher) would; but that would be for a court to decide. For example if a woman already had a reputation for sleeping around it would not be a defamation of character, but that does not sound like the case here. Getting expelled from the school instead of a legal case therefore might be seen as Sagehorn getting off lightly.
Laws should be no different "because it was on a computer", a point often made here in other contexts.
I don't think that they will find Indian workers as malleable, conformist and submissive as Chinese - the ostensible reason* why so much manufacturing was moved to China in the first place.
* Along with low wages - a related characteristc anyway.
Around here, there's expansion joints, cracks, frost heaves, roots...
Looks like he is on a campus, university or commercial. Those are usually well kept. Perhaps public streets in Japan are just as good, but not where I Iive.
Slashdot Mirror
"Even if you're a frequent ocean swimmer, you're much more likely to die in a car accident than from a shark attack" is meaningless. How "frequent"? How far do you drive?
Like playing Russian Roulette is safer than going to bed. Far more people die in bed.
As far as Japan and the end of WWII is concerned, we should have forgone the nukes, invaded and if it caused hundreds of thousands of deaths on either side, then so be it.
There was no need either to nuke Japan or invade it. Japan was no longer capable of fighting, and had/has practically no indigenous resources with which to re-arm and resume the war. Strange this third alternative is rarely mentioned
There are always a few vocal slashdotters who say they'd like to go back to the era when all sites were labors of love running on stolen time on university hardware. I suppose if that's what you really want, good for you.
Some serious bollocks there, AC. People used stolen time and university hardware in those days because it was very expensive. These days it is as cheap as chips. No-one will ever be going back to those days.
Anyway, figure out what's most important to you. What content do you want, and how do you want to pay for it? Cash, have your eyeballs assaulted with untargeted ads, or have a few, relevant targeted ads? Or no content. Those are your choices. Choose well. .......And note that "Block all the ads!" doesn't work in the long run. If everyone does it, then sites will either paywall or die.
I do pay - I pay for my interent access and I also pay for hosting four websites. But my websites are free, have no adverts on them, and they cost me peanuts. They will still be there, as will millions of others. It will be the likes of YouTube and Twitter that will go, but even those will be replaced by something equivalent as long as people have an urge to upload their cat videos.
Most people here seem of the view, and it's also the point of TFA, is that low key adverts are OK. Paper magazines did fine on non-animated non-pop-up adverts. Targeted adverts - yes, just like I get from ebay for a car washer for months after I have actually bought a car washer through them - I'm sure the world will keep on turning without them.
I've been on the internet since the time of 28.8 modems and I don't remember ads being more obnoxious than today.
Luxury! I was on a 14.4 modem. There were hardly any adverts then, and those that were were - had to be - low key. Anything elaborate would have slowed things to a glacier pace and you would have hung up, redialed, and gone elsewhere.
Ads are always a lie
Perhaps it is different in the US, but in the UK it is illegal for an advert to give false information, and it is quite common for advertisers to be taken to court over it. Court cases are usually by individuals though, so there is not much clout. Perhaps because of this legal threat, mainstream adverts tend, rather than lie, to give no information at all. An advert for beer, say, will show some brainless idiot falling off a ladder and landing on a mattress that someone happens to be carrying past at that moment, and doing a string of such antics while keeping up a cheesy smile, and finally opening a can of the beer in question. Nothing is said about how good or otherwise the beer is, only (in my eyes anyway) that it is drunk by cheesy idiots.
Of couse I am drawing a line between mainstream adverts (on TV and website pop-ups, whose purpose is only to associate a brand with a lifestyle) and low-key adverts of the type you need to look for on their own web sites; like if I am thinking of buying a camera I will go and browse the websites of Canon, Pentax etc for info. The latter type of website is less likely to lie as in the UK at least they would be open to prosecution if they told plain lies.
You should see the film "Westworld". The robots get what we now would call a computer virus that makes them too intelligent.
Women oppose prostitution and sex bots because they effectively break the cartel's monopoly.
I thought prostitution was part of the cartel. Do you think prostitutes are free? Maybe they are a different cartel.
In the West .. a significant proportion of women have rejected men entirely, possible after one fling and a child.
Citation needed. .... I would be curious to see some hard stats to back this up.
Quoting John Davies "A History of Wales", a authoritative work, [ISBN 978-0-140-28475-1] for example, "a large number [of babies in Wales] were born to single mothers, who generally lived in poverty and isolation" He bases this statement on the UK 2001 census and further figures from 2003. Consult the census figures directly if you like.
I'm assuming that you do not need a citation for males and females being born in similar numbers. Then clearly the Jocks who got those girls into trouble and dumped them will be back in the dating game the very next day (or do you need a citation for that?), whereas the girls withdraw from society, being too poor to afford baby-sitting, as Davies says. There are also the career women who never, or only briefly, have anything to do with men - have you never encountered any? Add the preponderance of males among immigrants to this. Then with the remaining nubile women outnumbered by seeking men, the more who pair up with eachother in marriage or partnership, the worse the ratio becomes among the remainder.
Maybe you confuse 'all men' with 'me'? You seem biter.
I have re-read my post and although you put all men in quotes, I do not see it anywhere. I am not even sure what your point is. Whether or not I am bitter (maybe you meant that) is irrelevant, I am discussing facts. It is another fact that I am married to a significantly more attractive woman than most, but that does not alter what I see around me, either way.
To make your post even more wrong, this *is* actually a problem in cultures where one man can have many wives
Why does that make my post wrong? I heartily agree with you there. I had a Muslim girlfriend once who wanted to get away from that culture.
And to make it even more wrong, there is a large shortage of women in china... because lots of girls were aborted or worse due to the one-child policy combined with a patriarchal society.
Why does that make me even more wrong? I heartily agree with you again, except you should have said "are aborted", not "were aborted". And you should add the fact that some of those far eastern countries (especially Thailand and the Phillipines, but China too) have made things even worse by exporting the flower of their womanhood to the rest of the world, the West in particular, as mail-order brides or prostitutes - the demand being due to the shortfall in Western women that I discussed above.
human empathy that can only be developed by an experience of mutual relationship
So what does she have to offer or suggest to those people (men particularly) who have no opportunity to develop such an experience? In the West at least, a significant proportion of women have rejected men entirely, possible after one fling and a child. Equal wages and opportunities for women, as well as social attitudes, mean that it is no longer "essential" for a woman to find a husband as it was as recently as two generations ago. There are too many men seeking for the number of women available.
Not just lawyers. I print on average every day. In the last few days:- printing an update of my camping packing list, printing a sales offer from the Web to give to a non-tech neighbour, printing a 10%-off voucher sent to me by a local restaurant to use there (they need it on paper for their accounts, I gather, and I am not going to take the risk of not having it on paper anyway).
Most important, I bought a new set of tyres (sorry, tires) last week and took the precaution of printing the details off the tyre shop's web page and taking it with me. When they came to the price, they quoted 10 GBP per tyre more than their web site had said. I whipped out my printed page and saved myself 40 GBP.
Maybe I could have done that with a phone too (although I don't have, don't want, a smartphone). However fiddling with a phone during dealing puts you on the back foot, gives them time to think - it is far more effective to be able to slap a sheet of paper down on their desk.
Yesterday I was doing a job under my car, wiring up towbar electrics. I printed out the wiring diagram of the car rear lights area on paper to take it under the car with me.
No, I don't want to drag my tablet under the car. It would end up broken. I do a lot of "blue collar" jobs like this as an amateur.
The only way to truly punish (and really, deter) those who are above our ability to punish financially, is to confine them.
No, that's not the only way.
Right. There is the death sentence too, and just flogging them.
Trouble with most other methods is that crooks and lawbreakers find ways round them. Fining? Crooks are masters of spiriting their gains out of sight and reach. Probation and supervision (like having to attend rehabilitation ) is that it takes massive public expense and manpower, and certain types of crook are able to charm their way out of it anyway. Probation officers are only human and susceptible to bribes, threats and charm. Jail is much simpler and "binary".
You have no imagination as to how many ways crooks can make their gains "disappear" into thin air, yet live the life of Riley
The worst outcome is burning wood. Of course, forest fires have their advantages but burning wood for heat puts everything back in the air.
For goodness sake don't tell the greenies or wood-burning-stove-merchants that. They are contantly (here in the UK anyway) trumpetting that burning wood is ecologically sustainable. In fact that would only be true if trees were planted and grew as rapidly as they were burned, which they are not.
Around 1000 AD lowland Britain was largely covered by forest. By 350 years later (time of the Black Death) most of it had gone. In fact there was a looming crisis in that the population was becoming unsustainable in terms of food and fuel, which the Black Death solved for a time. What forest remained after that only did so because it was largely "preserved" (by lords wanting forests to hunt in) - a similar situation to today but without the hunting. That depletion of the forests occurred with quite a small population, using it for heating and construction (but most would have been for heating). What little forest remains in Britain today would vanish probably in the first Winter if everyone used it for heating.
How in the world will "mobile" go away? .... people are not going to return to physical keyboards anytime soon
Yes they are, or they have never abandoned them. Typing (as opposed to just looking and reading) is just awful on a touchscreen. Also, the fad for smallness is going away already. The marketing droids will represent keyboards to the next generation as a "new idea", as they did analog watches.
I've never understood people who complain about working a lot of hours. ...... I work a lot of hours, and I am paid well to do it. ........ I'd wager I am paid considerably more than than people in Europe who take months of vacation time.
But what is the point if you do not have the time to "enjoy" that money?
Despite living in the UK I actually have quite a lot of money earned from a middling profession career, and I would find it hard to spend it all. I already live where I want to live. I have a 10 year old car that I prefer to more recent models. I do all my own car and house maintenance because I enjoy doing it, like a hobby (one reason why I now have quite a lot of money). This PC has bits up to 15 years old and works fine. I don't give a shit about designer clothing, watches, iStuff, whatever. My ideal day out is walking in the countryside, which costs nothing.
Billionaire plutocrats might have the best set of golf clubs that money can buy, but no time to play golf; and the biggest yachts in the Mediterranean - that sit in marinas almost unused. I calculate that Bill Gates, for example, could buy a new car on average every 15 seconds for the rest of his life - not enough time to get in and out again, what's the point?
The fact is that for some people work is their hobby and their life (sounds like yours); but it isn't mine.
so be ready to pay for the sites you like
I have several hobby-type websites with no adverts. It costs me only a very small amount to run them. But then perhaps you would not like them.
Advertising is a plague
Here are you only referring to advertising placed in and around content, or all advertising, for example a company's own website, or some point-of-sale display?
I took it as read that he meant advertising around other content. If I want to buy a camera I go and look at the "advertising" websites of Canon, Pentax etc to see what they have on offer. Of course I look at review sites as well. Adverts that are put in my face annoy me to hell; they have an entirely negative effect on me and I am suprised that the vast majority of people do not react the same.
The benefit of freight is that there's far less danger and far lower insurance liability. Hyperloop could pull trucks off the roads .... Think of the greenhouse gases we'll save.
Then they need to build it big enough to take standard freight containers.
Most freight does not need to be moved at high speed. Conventional rail can already do that with far less greehouse gas than road transport.
With the hyperloop, any breach of the pipe, will let air into the tube, which increases the atmospheric pressure and forces the pod to slow down. It's a nice passive safety system
Understatement of the day. The air rushing into the broken pipe will hit any 1000kph train within it like a gigantic sledge hammer. It will still hit the train like a sledgehammer if the train has already been stopped because of an advance warning.
There are plenty of ways of stopping all conventional trains (and Hyperloop trains for that matter, but refer to my first paragraph) if an earthquake is detected anywhere along the line. Japan has such systems. Of course, if the track/pipe is broken at a place when the train is passing through, neither is safe.
Even if the most conservative costs of freighting for the hyperloop were to double ....... it'd still be faster and cheaper than all the current means of transportation of goods.
So a railway plus a 4m diameter vacuum tube on pylons will be cheaper than a railway without a 4m diameter vacuum tube on pylons?
If a false defamation of character is involved, and Sagehorn seems to be admitting it was false, there would a case for civil legal action against him. Some, possibly including Sagehorn, might not see it as a defamation of character, but others (most importantly the teacher) would; but that would be for a court to decide. For example if a woman already had a reputation for sleeping around it would not be a defamation of character, but that does not sound like the case here. Getting expelled from the school instead of a legal case therefore might be seen as Sagehorn getting off lightly.
Laws should be no different "because it was on a computer", a point often made here in other contexts.
Anybody is malleable, conformist and submissive when [it's] the best hope of eating and keeping a roof over your i.. family
Only until they smell the potential for more money.
I don't think that they will find Indian workers as malleable, conformist and submissive as Chinese - the ostensible reason* why so much manufacturing was moved to China in the first place.
* Along with low wages - a related characteristc anyway.
Around here, there's expansion joints, cracks, frost heaves, roots...
Looks like he is on a campus, university or commercial. Those are usually well kept. Perhaps public streets in Japan are just as good, but not where I Iive.