Couple quick thoughts:
- Advanced carbon fiber manufacturing making wind power very close to an honest to goodness viable power source (I'm talking free market style...give it a few more years)
- Better batteries that enable a normal looking and driving car to go over 200 miles on a 1 hour charge
- Process improvements making 24" LCD screens viable for less than $200
- The whole semiconductor industry making tech so freaking cheap
- Probable observation of the Higgs Boson
- Possible observation of dark matter
- advanced stock trading algorithms allowing 1000 point market jumps and drops within milliseconds (I kid, I kid)
Yes, just like your laptop from 15 years ago that had a cable plugged into the wall. But removing that cable took the collective effort of a $trillion (probably) industry. Could your laptop scale one of its 9 different radios (2G/3G/4G/Bluetooth/Wifi/near field/AM/FM/GPS) up to 64-QAM on the fly based on geography while maintaining a connection for you to watch youtube in your car? How bout doing it for 6-7 hours without being plugged into the wall with a weight measured in grams? I mean, high speed bluetooth starts a packet using the bluetooth protocol and then mid-packet switches to wifi protocol to get higher throughput. That's pretty amazing to me because I've had to deal with stuff like protocol stacks.
The fact that all this crazy innovation works so seamlessly that people never need to care what happens behind the scenes is probably the most impressive demonstration of rapid progress I can think of. But just in case, check out all the progress made mapping genomes, robotics, space missions, etc. Anytime you want to be amazed, just take a quick peek below the surface of anything that goes on in your daily life.
I haven't read that book but in most nuclear supervillian stories I've read they generally ignore the logistics side of things. Sure there is a lot of shady money floating around but obtaining, maintaining and deploying a small advanced nuclear device would require resources of one of the world's top 10 GDP's. Think of how many people you'd have to hire/bribe/threaten/kill to get your plan to work. A big part of most of these plans is that they pop up out of nowhere. With all the world resources devoted to spying, not a single one of your henchmen will slip up? And if you own a car company -- because manufacturers import the cars, not dealerships -- you're already at the top of a $billion empire and you deal with hundreds of people a week. You're going to hide your scheme to destroy the world from all the other sharks trying to climb the ladder? Thats why Austin Powers was so funny (the first time). A supervillian holds up the world for $1million when his legitimate business pulled in $3billion last quarter. It just doesn't happen. The real supervillians run 3rd world countries and are too busy terrorizing their own people. (or in NK's case, too ridiculous to pull it off). 9/11 is the only major incident that works as a counter argument but the complacency that allowed it to happen no longer exists. If they tried using nukes they'd have been caught long before the planes took off.
Hopefully I don't get downmodded as a shill in a thread thats supposed to be bashing gopros but....FWIW, I also recently got a gopro and it works as advertised..that is great! It has a ton of capture options. Its simple enough to use considering it only has 2 buttons. I saw a bunch of complaints about the app, but again it works fine for me. Its a good substitute for not having a way to orient the camera since I can have a preview to help aim it. The app doesn't have playback but you can do that at home when you're not on the mountain, wave, track, reef, etc. Maybe the shot won't be perfect but so what, I'm not compiling a movie so its probably good enough for my personal viewing. I don't doubt that some people have defective units and what major consumer brand doesn't have terrible customer service these days? You could say I was lucky but you could also say my experience is typical and the other guy was UNlucky (since gopro has become as popular as they are). In short I'm happy with the camera, its price and capabilities. And yes, I looked around and didn't find anything comparable. But hey, if you need a tiny "action" camera and find a better one, buy that or don't buy camera at all. Reason for posting: I thought that other anecdote deserved a counter point.
Credited by who? Cypress Hill? The guy in the drum circle who always bogarts the bong? I hope your sig isn't an example of the introspection that got us here. (By here I mean the internet which is comprised of a mind boggling number of technical achievements). I kid, I kid...mainly because I've heard a fair number of potheads speak.
I am not egotistical enough to suppose that - in a hundred year - anyone will care how I looked, moved, and spoke. Anyone who thinks that their distant descendents will care about such a "life review" is, imho, pathetically full of themselves.
I know right? The market for this "virtual immortality" is HUGE! It can't miss....as long as the business plan involves collecting money from those who want to be preserved (content providers) rather than billing the eventual consumer.
If your point is energy market regulations are necessary and should not have been changed (because when restrictions were lifted things immediately went to shit due to greed) then I agree with you.
Those retail sellers were not allowed to raise their prices to users but generators were allowed to raise their prices to retail sellers.
And why would generators all of a sudden have to raise their price as soon as this deregulation occurred? I think your post is saying the CA gov is at fault because it opened the door for abuse of the system. But I feel like that's the same as saying: if Edison and Tesla never popularized electricity the CA crisis wouldn't have happened. Which is technically true provided no one else made electricity mainstream. The door may well been opened by the government (I'm guessing due to extensive lobbying by Enron and co) but I'm pretty sure the energy traders walked through that door on their own accord, orchestrating an unnecessary crisis for their own gain. Did you not hear the "Grandma Milly" phone recordings?
Years ago, during the California power crisis, BC Hydro made a killing
An important note: the power crisis was caused entirely by market manipulation with Enron at the front of the line. There was never a shortage of capacity. Traders would call up power plants and convince them to shut down unnecessarily thus driving up demand and price. Surprisingly a few people at the top actually went to jail for it. Good times. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis#Involvement_of_Enron
And it won't do anything like kill stuff -- it will increase plant cover as large land masses become better able to support plant life.
I'm inclined to agree with you. When coastal cities start flooding and crumbling, most of the killing won't be done by the ocean, but by humans. I'm sure storms will get a few but the majority will probably die in migrations of billions of people from the coasts to lands already claimed by billions of other people and maybe some wars over fresh water sources and general societal collapse.
Those "warmer periods in the past" can no doubt give us a preview of what we will end up with when the tundra thaws. But the real problem is the speed at which global warming is occurring. Its true we are coming out of a "cool" period in earths history. But in the past 100 years the global temperature has risen a little over 1F. The previous global rise of 1F took over 5000 years (or something close to that...heard it on the radio from some recent study). Do we know how society reacts to rapid change from the past?
Your cost of living is 9% to 12% higher because of Marketing.
What about marketing having got the word out on a product to a vast population allowing whatever business to expand and take advantage of economies of scale to the point where you can buy a 23" LED monitor for under $150? Wow, I can't believe I just tried to defend advertisers. I realize that when you pay for the name on something, you're paying for the marketing so yeah, costs are higher for that brand. But there is often a generic version of the same thing for half as much that wouldn't exist without the name brand sitting next to in the grocery store. I guess my point is, its not all bad (even in advertising).
humanity progresses technologically, certain other parts of it have failed to keep pace.
Tru dat. That's why I left in the caveat of the current rich people keeping control regardless of our technological state. No matter how far humanity progresses technologically, it will still be full of humans so it will never be perfect. But all of the crappy stuff humans do that makes you
not want to be on this planet
is most likely inseparable from all the awesome stuff humans do that you're currently too miserable to see. Lighten up man. There are big problems all around but dwelling on them full time just isn't productive or helpful. People "winding their way out of the system" are going to come up with grand solutions because every now and then an idea is just too good for everyone else to fuck it up. I think your post boils down to "gahh, kids these days"
If and when this takes effect, the only slaves will be robots. Technology is incredibly cheap already and its getting even cheaper with more automation. As fewer humans are involved with producing gadgets, robots, robots who service robots, food, transportation, healthcare, insurance claims, hell even stock trading there will be fewer humans to give money too. That is after all why stuff costs money right? You're not paying the minerals in the ground for oil, you pay the heavy equipment welder, driller, trucker, and most importantly, shareholder. When you get rid of all those people but maintain production, you don't have to give anyone an income because all the basic stuff is free! This will only hurt the shareholders/investors/job creators...who currently have the money/power so we'll have to wait and see if they will "let" humanity be free to do as it pleases or hold everyone down to make themselves feel important.
I was under the impression that china supports NK to avoid a flood of ~24 million refugees trying to evacuate if the regime were to crumble....which it would, almost instantly, without china's backing.
On the other hand, in an at-will environment, the company can fire you for no reason whenever they want to. And they will. The company has pretty much zero incentive to give warning
Lawsuit! If you are thinking layoffs, sure that happens all the time but in my experience it always includes some severance package or buyout (a weeks salary for every year, etc). Bigger companies with legal departments can have a very hard time firing people for fear of lawsuits. I'm sure we all have stories but I know this to be corporate policy for at least 3 corporations of 100k+ employees. I'd be shocked if the entire industry didn't have the same policies. So while they can fire you for no reason I can't imagine it happens too often because the incentive to warn you is non-zero.
I think the research passes the smell test. It makes sense that two groups of people that can look at the same topic and have wildly differing opinions probably have some structural difference in the organ that creates those opinions. If you look past the "conservatives are pussies, liberals are daredevils" flamebait, there are a lot of interesting questions like how do those structures form and change? Perhaps those questions can be answered by reading the article? Hopefully some other readers out there are also interested in the science. Unfortunately after a quick scan through the comments I didn't see any neuroscience or biology types chiming in. Just right vs left vs not left enough.
That's pretty generous. Wild speculation here but I bet if you compared most of the world's major cities' 1960's era night time satellite images (assuming they exist) with present day NK it would still look oddly dark. Perhaps rural-agrarian 1960's style living?
The latest Mars rover benefited from a lot of hype. Unwarranted hype at that. It's just a rover, it's not doing anything new, only something old and a little extra.
I don't think I'm supposed to respond to AC's but...what we got with the MSL is a small car sized (car analogy eh?) robot that can largely think for itself placed on another planet by the world's largest supersonic parachute, a set of rocket engines used to hover for several seconds, and a crane capable of gently lowering this giant robot from said rocket hover ship without damaging what is by far the most sensitive equipment ever to leave orbit. Oh yeah, all of that was operated by 70+ explosions that all worked exactly as intended. Streamed live for the whole world to see. The fact that jerks in basements can bemoan that as hype shows how many great engineers there are working today. If you spout out "it's not doing anything new, something old and a little extra"* to a feat of that magnitude, it means that there are so many engineers cranking out awesome shit everywhere that you're numb to the amazingness of human achievement. If you think that was easy, but a microcontroller dev kit, switches and motors for under $20 (a miracle in itself) and try and do a simple project like a garage door opener or anything interacting with the physical world and see how long it takes you. Is there a problem with bureaucracy? Sure but don't use that as excuse to spit on all of the greatness that is still currently being accomplished. You guys are as bad as hollywood when they brush off all of human invention as being given to us by aliens in whatever stupid scifi movie because thats easier to comprehend than "smart people exist".
*This deserves its own rant because its 100% bullshit. MSL is doing plenty of new things and the "a little extra" approach is ALL OF SCIENCE...see the development process from mecury to gemini to apollo. Cause really that was nothing new either. I mean the Chinese had "rockets" ~800 years ago.
Ok maybe market manipulation affects US elections even less than voter fraud (i.e. no effect at all) and this is just a solution in search of a problem. But the method in which he got his answers has some interesting possibilities. He notes that his paid idea contests have good results and wants to compare them against unpaid idea contests. If paid ideas turn out to be better (yeah I know, but who's judgement, etc...details details), that could introduce an entirely new and much better type of internet forum!
I'm sure most would agree that a large amount of internet commenting is inconsequential/flamebait/astroturf and generally worthless to anyone but the person who got to burn 5 min at work writing it (possibly speaking for myself here). I'm not saying I know how to make it work but perhaps a paid comment section could possibly add to a story or article constructively like they were originally intended to!
Out of curiosity, who in your opinion does have talent that deserves the prime sci fi? I'd be especially interested in any directors you like that have directed big budget movies and thus are beholden to hollywood and mass markets.
Yes. If you decode my post, the hidden message is that EMACS sucks. Seriously though, GP's post is different because I'm guessing VI/EMACS fans are both well represented here compared to football fans. And re-reading his post, there are several reasons to like football in there: hobby aspects of the kicking game, fewer fouls than in rugby, more frequent than the WC, better rules than the Canadian/Aussie version. I'll admit that sometimes even trolls inspire me to stop browsing the forum and take a deeper look at the subject at hand and I often learn something new. Making lemonade eh?
When it comes to (arguably) inconsequential topics such as sports on an internet message board, a non scientific personal preference is a fine reason to say something is great. Maybe you won't win any arguments or convert people but its good that GP was modded up if only to let/.ers know that other users have opinions that may differ from their own and to give said opinions a once over every now and then.
I can't figure out how that's supposed to invalidate or insult me (or if its even true) but thanks for modding me back down. Isn't the freedom we still have great?;) But seriously, you are correct. Living without a smartphone does not help make it legal to unlock a smart phone, it just avoids the problem...unless, it makes you more apt to write letters to your congresspeople. I remember reading letters have the biggest impact...however small that may be...since a letter counts for something like 50 phone calls and phone calls count for 100 emails...or something. Or you could donate the money you save on a dataplan to that congress person and really get their attention. Which kinda brings me back to my original gripe: there is so much sensationalism in posts here. America has it's shitty corporations that I hate as much as the next person but its not like China or Russia where political prisons are a huge problem or the middle east where women can't leave the house. Overall I think I have it pretty good here but I can't speak for you all. There are plenty of posts to the effect of "corporations own congress" (probably true) and when someone says "vote" they get a response of "your vote doesn't count, see above". So what to do aside from continue the circlejerk? Feel free to suggest something because all I can come up with is stop reading or...Rant of course! Thanks for the discourse./rant
Seriously. Most of the tyrannical aspects of america bemoaned on/. disappear if you chose to live your life in the same way as someone in say, the early 1990's. Which of course you are free to do. Yeah you still gotta deal with the TSA if you fly but if you don't use the internet or a cell phone, no corporation will be able to track you and you don't have to give up all your legal rights at every turn to do stuff. Its probably too much to give up for most of us at this point but it is still an option none-the-less.
Slashdot Mirror
Couple quick thoughts:
- Advanced carbon fiber manufacturing making wind power very close to an honest to goodness viable power source (I'm talking free market style...give it a few more years)
- Better batteries that enable a normal looking and driving car to go over 200 miles on a 1 hour charge
- Process improvements making 24" LCD screens viable for less than $200
- The whole semiconductor industry making tech so freaking cheap
- Probable observation of the Higgs Boson
- Possible observation of dark matter
- advanced stock trading algorithms allowing 1000 point market jumps and drops within milliseconds (I kid, I kid)
Yes, just like your laptop from 15 years ago that had a cable plugged into the wall. But removing that cable took the collective effort of a $trillion (probably) industry. Could your laptop scale one of its 9 different radios (2G/3G/4G/Bluetooth/Wifi/near field/AM/FM/GPS) up to 64-QAM on the fly based on geography while maintaining a connection for you to watch youtube in your car? How bout doing it for 6-7 hours without being plugged into the wall with a weight measured in grams? I mean, high speed bluetooth starts a packet using the bluetooth protocol and then mid-packet switches to wifi protocol to get higher throughput. That's pretty amazing to me because I've had to deal with stuff like protocol stacks.
The fact that all this crazy innovation works so seamlessly that people never need to care what happens behind the scenes is probably the most impressive demonstration of rapid progress I can think of. But just in case, check out all the progress made mapping genomes, robotics, space missions, etc. Anytime you want to be amazed, just take a quick peek below the surface of anything that goes on in your daily life.
I haven't read that book but in most nuclear supervillian stories I've read they generally ignore the logistics side of things. Sure there is a lot of shady money floating around but obtaining, maintaining and deploying a small advanced nuclear device would require resources of one of the world's top 10 GDP's. Think of how many people you'd have to hire/bribe/threaten/kill to get your plan to work. A big part of most of these plans is that they pop up out of nowhere. With all the world resources devoted to spying, not a single one of your henchmen will slip up? And if you own a car company -- because manufacturers import the cars, not dealerships -- you're already at the top of a $billion empire and you deal with hundreds of people a week. You're going to hide your scheme to destroy the world from all the other sharks trying to climb the ladder? Thats why Austin Powers was so funny (the first time). A supervillian holds up the world for $1million when his legitimate business pulled in $3billion last quarter. It just doesn't happen. The real supervillians run 3rd world countries and are too busy terrorizing their own people. (or in NK's case, too ridiculous to pull it off). 9/11 is the only major incident that works as a counter argument but the complacency that allowed it to happen no longer exists. If they tried using nukes they'd have been caught long before the planes took off.
Hopefully I don't get downmodded as a shill in a thread thats supposed to be bashing gopros but....FWIW, I also recently got a gopro and it works as advertised..that is great! It has a ton of capture options. Its simple enough to use considering it only has 2 buttons. I saw a bunch of complaints about the app, but again it works fine for me. Its a good substitute for not having a way to orient the camera since I can have a preview to help aim it. The app doesn't have playback but you can do that at home when you're not on the mountain, wave, track, reef, etc. Maybe the shot won't be perfect but so what, I'm not compiling a movie so its probably good enough for my personal viewing. I don't doubt that some people have defective units and what major consumer brand doesn't have terrible customer service these days? You could say I was lucky but you could also say my experience is typical and the other guy was UNlucky (since gopro has become as popular as they are). In short I'm happy with the camera, its price and capabilities. And yes, I looked around and didn't find anything comparable. But hey, if you need a tiny "action" camera and find a better one, buy that or don't buy camera at all. Reason for posting: I thought that other anecdote deserved a counter point.
What, This guy has a helmet cam? GoPro is so OVER /portlandiabikecourier
Credited by who? Cypress Hill? The guy in the drum circle who always bogarts the bong? I hope your sig isn't an example of the introspection that got us here. (By here I mean the internet which is comprised of a mind boggling number of technical achievements). I kid, I kid...mainly because I've heard a fair number of potheads speak.
I am not egotistical enough to suppose that - in a hundred year - anyone will care how I looked, moved, and spoke. Anyone who thinks that their distant descendents will care about such a "life review" is, imho, pathetically full of themselves.
I know right? The market for this "virtual immortality" is HUGE! It can't miss....as long as the business plan involves collecting money from those who want to be preserved (content providers) rather than billing the eventual consumer.
If your point is energy market regulations are necessary and should not have been changed (because when restrictions were lifted things immediately went to shit due to greed) then I agree with you.
Those retail sellers were not allowed to raise their prices to users but generators were allowed to raise their prices to retail sellers.
And why would generators all of a sudden have to raise their price as soon as this deregulation occurred? I think your post is saying the CA gov is at fault because it opened the door for abuse of the system. But I feel like that's the same as saying: if Edison and Tesla never popularized electricity the CA crisis wouldn't have happened. Which is technically true provided no one else made electricity mainstream. The door may well been opened by the government (I'm guessing due to extensive lobbying by Enron and co) but I'm pretty sure the energy traders walked through that door on their own accord, orchestrating an unnecessary crisis for their own gain. Did you not hear the "Grandma Milly" phone recordings?
Years ago, during the California power crisis, BC Hydro made a killing
An important note: the power crisis was caused entirely by market manipulation with Enron at the front of the line. There was never a shortage of capacity. Traders would call up power plants and convince them to shut down unnecessarily thus driving up demand and price. Surprisingly a few people at the top actually went to jail for it. Good times. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis#Involvement_of_Enron
And it won't do anything like kill stuff -- it will increase plant cover as large land masses become better able to support plant life.
I'm inclined to agree with you. When coastal cities start flooding and crumbling, most of the killing won't be done by the ocean, but by humans. I'm sure storms will get a few but the majority will probably die in migrations of billions of people from the coasts to lands already claimed by billions of other people and maybe some wars over fresh water sources and general societal collapse.
Those "warmer periods in the past" can no doubt give us a preview of what we will end up with when the tundra thaws. But the real problem is the speed at which global warming is occurring. Its true we are coming out of a "cool" period in earths history. But in the past 100 years the global temperature has risen a little over 1F. The previous global rise of 1F took over 5000 years (or something close to that...heard it on the radio from some recent study). Do we know how society reacts to rapid change from the past?
Your cost of living is 9% to 12% higher because of Marketing.
What about marketing having got the word out on a product to a vast population allowing whatever business to expand and take advantage of economies of scale to the point where you can buy a 23" LED monitor for under $150? Wow, I can't believe I just tried to defend advertisers. I realize that when you pay for the name on something, you're paying for the marketing so yeah, costs are higher for that brand. But there is often a generic version of the same thing for half as much that wouldn't exist without the name brand sitting next to in the grocery store. I guess my point is, its not all bad (even in advertising).
humanity progresses technologically, certain other parts of it have failed to keep pace.
Tru dat. That's why I left in the caveat of the current rich people keeping control regardless of our technological state. No matter how far humanity progresses technologically, it will still be full of humans so it will never be perfect. But all of the crappy stuff humans do that makes you
not want to be on this planet
is most likely inseparable from all the awesome stuff humans do that you're currently too miserable to see. Lighten up man. There are big problems all around but dwelling on them full time just isn't productive or helpful. People "winding their way out of the system" are going to come up with grand solutions because every now and then an idea is just too good for everyone else to fuck it up. I think your post boils down to "gahh, kids these days"
If and when this takes effect, the only slaves will be robots. Technology is incredibly cheap already and its getting even cheaper with more automation. As fewer humans are involved with producing gadgets, robots, robots who service robots, food, transportation, healthcare, insurance claims, hell even stock trading there will be fewer humans to give money too. That is after all why stuff costs money right? You're not paying the minerals in the ground for oil, you pay the heavy equipment welder, driller, trucker, and most importantly, shareholder. When you get rid of all those people but maintain production, you don't have to give anyone an income because all the basic stuff is free! This will only hurt the shareholders/investors/job creators...who currently have the money/power so we'll have to wait and see if they will "let" humanity be free to do as it pleases or hold everyone down to make themselves feel important.
I was under the impression that china supports NK to avoid a flood of ~24 million refugees trying to evacuate if the regime were to crumble....which it would, almost instantly, without china's backing.
On the other hand, in an at-will environment, the company can fire you for no reason whenever they want to. And they will. The company has pretty much zero incentive to give warning
Lawsuit! If you are thinking layoffs, sure that happens all the time but in my experience it always includes some severance package or buyout (a weeks salary for every year, etc). Bigger companies with legal departments can have a very hard time firing people for fear of lawsuits. I'm sure we all have stories but I know this to be corporate policy for at least 3 corporations of 100k+ employees. I'd be shocked if the entire industry didn't have the same policies. So while they can fire you for no reason I can't imagine it happens too often because the incentive to warn you is non-zero.
I think the research passes the smell test. It makes sense that two groups of people that can look at the same topic and have wildly differing opinions probably have some structural difference in the organ that creates those opinions. If you look past the "conservatives are pussies, liberals are daredevils" flamebait, there are a lot of interesting questions like how do those structures form and change? Perhaps those questions can be answered by reading the article? Hopefully some other readers out there are also interested in the science. Unfortunately after a quick scan through the comments I didn't see any neuroscience or biology types chiming in. Just right vs left vs not left enough.
1960s-style living
That's pretty generous. Wild speculation here but I bet if you compared most of the world's major cities' 1960's era night time satellite images (assuming they exist) with present day NK it would still look oddly dark. Perhaps rural-agrarian 1960's style living?
The latest Mars rover benefited from a lot of hype. Unwarranted hype at that. It's just a rover, it's not doing anything new, only something old and a little extra.
I don't think I'm supposed to respond to AC's but...what we got with the MSL is a small car sized (car analogy eh?) robot that can largely think for itself placed on another planet by the world's largest supersonic parachute, a set of rocket engines used to hover for several seconds, and a crane capable of gently lowering this giant robot from said rocket hover ship without damaging what is by far the most sensitive equipment ever to leave orbit. Oh yeah, all of that was operated by 70+ explosions that all worked exactly as intended. Streamed live for the whole world to see. The fact that jerks in basements can bemoan that as hype shows how many great engineers there are working today. If you spout out "it's not doing anything new, something old and a little extra"* to a feat of that magnitude, it means that there are so many engineers cranking out awesome shit everywhere that you're numb to the amazingness of human achievement. If you think that was easy, but a microcontroller dev kit, switches and motors for under $20 (a miracle in itself) and try and do a simple project like a garage door opener or anything interacting with the physical world and see how long it takes you. Is there a problem with bureaucracy? Sure but don't use that as excuse to spit on all of the greatness that is still currently being accomplished. You guys are as bad as hollywood when they brush off all of human invention as being given to us by aliens in whatever stupid scifi movie because thats easier to comprehend than "smart people exist".
*This deserves its own rant because its 100% bullshit. MSL is doing plenty of new things and the "a little extra" approach is ALL OF SCIENCE...see the development process from mecury to gemini to apollo. Cause really that was nothing new either. I mean the Chinese had "rockets" ~800 years ago.
Ok maybe market manipulation affects US elections even less than voter fraud (i.e. no effect at all) and this is just a solution in search of a problem. But the method in which he got his answers has some interesting possibilities. He notes that his paid idea contests have good results and wants to compare them against unpaid idea contests. If paid ideas turn out to be better (yeah I know, but who's judgement, etc...details details), that could introduce an entirely new and much better type of internet forum!
I'm sure most would agree that a large amount of internet commenting is inconsequential/flamebait/astroturf and generally worthless to anyone but the person who got to burn 5 min at work writing it (possibly speaking for myself here). I'm not saying I know how to make it work but perhaps a paid comment section could possibly add to a story or article constructively like they were originally intended to!
Out of curiosity, who in your opinion does have talent that deserves the prime sci fi? I'd be especially interested in any directors you like that have directed big budget movies and thus are beholden to hollywood and mass markets.
Yes. If you decode my post, the hidden message is that EMACS sucks. Seriously though, GP's post is different because I'm guessing VI/EMACS fans are both well represented here compared to football fans. And re-reading his post, there are several reasons to like football in there: hobby aspects of the kicking game, fewer fouls than in rugby, more frequent than the WC, better rules than the Canadian/Aussie version. I'll admit that sometimes even trolls inspire me to stop browsing the forum and take a deeper look at the subject at hand and I often learn something new. Making lemonade eh?
When it comes to (arguably) inconsequential topics such as sports on an internet message board, a non scientific personal preference is a fine reason to say something is great. Maybe you won't win any arguments or convert people but its good that GP was modded up if only to let /.ers know that other users have opinions that may differ from their own and to give said opinions a once over every now and then.
Your entire post is a tautology.
I can't figure out how that's supposed to invalidate or insult me (or if its even true) but thanks for modding me back down. Isn't the freedom we still have great? ;) But seriously, you are correct. Living without a smartphone does not help make it legal to unlock a smart phone, it just avoids the problem...unless, it makes you more apt to write letters to your congresspeople. I remember reading letters have the biggest impact...however small that may be...since a letter counts for something like 50 phone calls and phone calls count for 100 emails...or something. Or you could donate the money you save on a dataplan to that congress person and really get their attention. Which kinda brings me back to my original gripe: there is so much sensationalism in posts here. America has it's shitty corporations that I hate as much as the next person but its not like China or Russia where political prisons are a huge problem or the middle east where women can't leave the house. Overall I think I have it pretty good here but I can't speak for you all. There are plenty of posts to the effect of "corporations own congress" (probably true) and when someone says "vote" they get a response of "your vote doesn't count, see above". So what to do aside from continue the circlejerk? Feel free to suggest something because all I can come up with is stop reading or...Rant of course! Thanks for the discourse. /rant
Seriously. Most of the tyrannical aspects of america bemoaned on /. disappear if you chose to live your life in the same way as someone in say, the early 1990's. Which of course you are free to do. Yeah you still gotta deal with the TSA if you fly but if you don't use the internet or a cell phone, no corporation will be able to track you and you don't have to give up all your legal rights at every turn to do stuff. Its probably too much to give up for most of us at this point but it is still an option none-the-less.