You realize the "prime directive" was a bass-ackwards attempt to explain why alien races didn't hassle with the Earth...
Ignoring that it was a human idea, yes.
, rather than any sound philosophical concept, right?
Bzzt. Wrong. There are primitive tribes right here on Earth that the general population is not allowed to trade with. Right here in the United States are the dim echoes of the Native Americans, who suffered both from European incursion and their own adaptation of the cheapest elements of European Culture.
"Let them evolve on their own, or they're become part of us" is a pretty good philosophical concept. It's just one step removed from "Free Will."
ISOHunt et al are essentially moonshiners. There's no will in the US to change the law to make it legal to trade someone else's work without their permission. (If you think I'm wrong, go ahead and start a Constitutional Amendment. It worked for Prohibition.)
What's interesting is that RIAA/MPAA are "getting it", and are starting to focus on promoting and working with major players. It's only a matter of time until the hardship of finding a "free hit" is greater than the "hardship" of going to the market leader.
what fields that aren't science or engineering require intelligent, technical people?
Wow. Off the top of my head, in order of "how could you forget these":
1: Doctors 2: Lawyers 3: Academia 4: Public Policy 5: Police Work
(If you doubt #2, you've never seen geeks argue over the GPL. And that's on the simple end. If you doubt #5, you've never seen the inside of a modern police cruiser.)
Modern linguistics holds that ultimately there are no significant differences between languages. Since all languages are just expressions of the same deep structure, it is impossible for one to be healthier than another.
PC science aside, it's not "impossible" for one language to form significantly different brain paths in its speakers than another. Just like there are clear genetic differences between Caucasians, Africans, Asians, and between Men and Women.
The first thing I'd wonder if the study missed isn't language-healthiness, but if they controlled for the prevalence of monolingualism. It's a heck of a lot easier to be a prosperous, successful, and fully-realized person in America as a monolinguist than it is in France.
the world is ALWAYS about to blow up in a nuclear war, so it quickly loses its impact.
It is. It takes considerably less time than fifteen minutes for any military capable of building an maintaining an ICBM to point it at today's foe and fire. If, say, Osama Bin Laden has set up a broadcast tower in Kabul and, alongside the Taliban, took full responsibility for 9/11 as it happened, he might have been atomized before the broadcast was over.
according to many critics, not worthy to be grouped under the umbrella term "intellectual property".
They are not deeds to land (real property), nor are they tangible or tradeable items (personal property), but rather artificial monopolies granted upon otherwise entirely reproducible things. Grouping them together makes exactly as much sense as grouping the right to pump oil from the ground with an installed air-conditioner (real property) or a certificate of stock with a turkey sandwich (personal property).
GNU doth protest too much. It's a perfectly valid term, and wasting time protesting common sense instead of explaining the differences between copyrights et al just makes you (or GNU) seem unhinged.
Oh please. I agree with the rest of your post, but you can't argue that imperial vs metric is about diversity vs uniformity. It's quite clearly being argued because of the difficulties in conversion, not some assault on the brave USA, willing to stand alone from the metric crowd of sheep.
Psst. Just because Europe thinks that we should all use their arbitrary system "For the sake of uniformity" doesn't mean that it's not also an "assault on the brave USA."
Most of the world's great conflicts are rooted in a misundersatnding of what the other side wants.
The current model Treos, apparently. Only they actually have a thumb-pad, so you don't need that "I can't even get it right in the demo" virtual keyboard.
I have not seen one person speculate on the sales of the iphone that had anything negative to say. far from being the general sentiment.
Hi. I'm a consumer. I likely could afford a $500 PDA/phone come summer. I can think of about a dozen better uses for said $500 than the "iPhone." I think Apple'll be well off to get 1% of the smartphone market, let alone the general "I just want a phone" crowd.
This gets stated and restated on Slashdot all the time, usually by the same handful of people - but does anyone have any actual proof from anywhere that doesn't cater to a 15- to 25-year-old audience?
The 15 to 25 year old demographic drive technology; they're the ones where the guys smart enough to know what's what haven't gotten to the point where they stop supporting friends & family for the sheer fun of it.
Sure there is. It just doesn't mean what you think it means.
"Happening in a time span lower than the response rate of the observer." If I move my mouse, the cursor moves "instantaneously", even though there's a delay significantly higher than c's round trip through mouse, cable, USB bus, CPU, AGP, GPU, VGA cable, monitor control, eyes.
I could understand if you were literally going to be on the phone all day, but assuming you'd have a more normal usage pattern, why is it so difficult to drop a phone into a dock (which they mentioned the iPhone will have) or plug in a charger when you get home at the end of the day?
If this were just a phone, it'd be fine. But it's not. It' a web browser / video player / music player. It's entirely possible that the typical user will want it to last for longer than just one day's causal use: they'll want to be able to use it, forget to plug it in, and then use it again the next day.
I'm fairly sure that most of the people that "don't take Linux seriously" are people who don't even know what it is.
On the desktop?
I wager that everyone who says "Linux isn't ready" knows full well what Linux is, and can name at least one reason why they don't recommend it to their clients/boss/relatives.
If Linux were ready, well, a free OS that's just as good as that new $300 MS thing is going to make a bigger dent than Linux has.
Religion is a barrier to progress and an excuse for evil.
You're right. No anti-religious government has ever become an evil empire that hampers progress and rules by fear and terror... I mean, except for the Soviet Union. And the American Eugenics program.
(Oh, and the Christian Church, which you seem to be slurring, didn't have the power to so much as pull people into pews until the reign of Constantine the Great's Edict of Milan in 313. And few significant branches of Christianity never had even that much power.)
Evil men do evil things using whatever excuse they can find. Naked power, religion, science, and even the "good of the people" have all been used as excuses to do terribly evil things.
The LA Times (and others) want this to change so that the investments support or at a minimum, do not detract from, the Foundation's goals.
Why not? The Foundation is a Federally Recognized NFP charity, which gives it some tax benefits on the belief that it will do good with its money. A foundation can do FAR more good by moral investing than outright giving.
If Gates & Co. wanted to ruthlessly make money via investment, they should have set up a holding company and pledged a dollar amount to the foundation.
No, not necessarily. Web Developers are advised to test against all browsers with more than a 3% market share for their site. If your site has 3% share of IE 5, 6, and 7, then you've got your work cut out for you. Most others don't have that problem.
Just because some academics came up with a "standard" doesn't mean there's a law that says that everyone needs to follow it. They should be called "suggestions".
The wonderful thing about standards, when done correctly, is that everyone can support the standard and get essentially the same result.
In all honestly, if your website can't function fine with the minor variations between browsers, then you've got a bad design. (And let's not even get into how bad your site will look in mobile devices, or without images, or for the blind.)
Illegal immigration sucks money from the economy and stresses our entire infrastructure
No, Illegal immigration stresses our law enforcement and emergency services infrastructures, and undermines the rule of law. Since only bonna-fide citizens get direct fiscal aid, there is almost no financial impact upon non-emergency infrasructure.
The answer, of course, is to make an unlimited-quantity "guest worker" program that carries a modest fee. It just has to be easier to use for the worker than being illegal, and all of a sudden what was a drain on our infrastructure becomes an important part of our economy.
(Of course, The Answer won't be implemented, because the very lobby that's most against it will be hurt when legal immigrants are able to use the US Courts against them.)
If her life could be devastated simply by the revelation of her secrets--that is, without anyone doing anything unethical with those secrets once they're known--then the fault is squarely on her own shoulders. She should not have set her life up around a lie, and if she was not willing to face the simple consequences to her relationships of the revelation, then she shouldn't have done what she did in the first place.
Show me how this is different it she were a porn star who never told her parents until the new neighbor made the connection, and then you'll have a leg to stand on. Until then, the paper was entirely within its ethical rights (and possibly even its ethical obligations) to investigate her identity and publish their findings.
Remember, the infamous McDonald's coffee cup had a warning label!
Yep. And now the label's bigger, and prominent enough. Of course, the label SHOULD say "this coffee is 40 degrees hotter than what you get at home" or "This liquid is hot enough to cause severe burns".
(I browsed your "infamous" link, and I must say -- a lot of crap. If nothing else, Starbucks gets its big bucks because it has a far better coffee array than McDonald's did fifteen years ago, and they sell their coffee hot because most of the time they add something significantly colder (like frothed milk) to the coffee.)
(Did you know that juries only get on Oprah if they find for the plaintiff?)
Did you know that cases only go to juries if there's a question of fact?
Did you know that we have a perfectly good way to correct judicial cases we don't like, by having our legislatures amend the law accordingly?
Did you ever ponder why, in the last six years of Republican Congressional Control, we haven't seen a proposed Constitutional Amendment reserving full and explicitly authority to the states to resolve Abortion law?
Re:Aliens, ghosts, and gods never leave evidence .
on
UFOs In the News
·
· Score: -1, Flamebait
"God" in the biblical form requires an immense level of magic to explain.
Slashdot Mirror
You realize the "prime directive" was a bass-ackwards attempt to explain why alien races didn't hassle with the Earth...
Ignoring that it was a human idea, yes.
, rather than any sound philosophical concept, right?
Bzzt. Wrong. There are primitive tribes right here on Earth that the general population is not allowed to trade with. Right here in the United States are the dim echoes of the Native Americans, who suffered both from European incursion and their own adaptation of the cheapest elements of European Culture.
"Let them evolve on their own, or they're become part of us" is a pretty good philosophical concept. It's just one step removed from "Free Will."
It's just kind of the nature of politics.
It's kind of the nature of law.
ISOHunt et al are essentially moonshiners. There's no will in the US to change the law to make it legal to trade someone else's work without their permission. (If you think I'm wrong, go ahead and start a Constitutional Amendment. It worked for Prohibition.)
What's interesting is that RIAA/MPAA are "getting it", and are starting to focus on promoting and working with major players. It's only a matter of time until the hardship of finding a "free hit" is greater than the "hardship" of going to the market leader.
Did anyone RTFA? MySpace has 140 million+ users on SQL Server servers? No comments from Slashdot on the implausibility of this?
Nope. Because the margin between folk who blink at that and folk who realize the possible hacks to get it work are pretty small.
Remember, it's not "140 million+ accounts working perfectly", it's "140million+ working with nasty bugs."
what fields that aren't science or engineering require intelligent, technical people?
Wow. Off the top of my head, in order of "how could you forget these":
1: Doctors
2: Lawyers
3: Academia
4: Public Policy
5: Police Work
(If you doubt #2, you've never seen geeks argue over the GPL. And that's on the simple end. If you doubt #5, you've never seen the inside of a modern police cruiser.)
Modern linguistics holds that ultimately there are no significant differences between languages. Since all languages are just expressions of the same deep structure, it is impossible for one to be healthier than another.
PC science aside, it's not "impossible" for one language to form significantly different brain paths in its speakers than another. Just like there are clear genetic differences between Caucasians, Africans, Asians, and between Men and Women.
The first thing I'd wonder if the study missed isn't language-healthiness, but if they controlled for the prevalence of monolingualism. It's a heck of a lot easier to be a prosperous, successful, and fully-realized person in America as a monolinguist than it is in France.
O2007 isn't all that different, aside from some GUI changes. And I'll bet they can be disabled back to a 'classic' view, just like Vista can.
.NET and XML to describe one via code.
Nope. And the only way to get a custom ribbon is to learn the combination of
Still, I think the good outweighs the bad. Even if there's no easy way for me to apply my styles by typing the name anymore.
*ahem*
You can download a 60-day trial of Office 2007 right now, and one of those versions is the "$150 for three PCs" Student & Home edition.
Hmm...
0: Pop.
1: Metal.
2: Alternative
3: "Movie Classical"
4: Country
5: Disco
6: Rap.
There's six for you. "Hip-Hop" is just a bastard child of rap and pop. (Rap would be a higher on that list if i ranked on "size of influence.")
the world is ALWAYS about to blow up in a nuclear war, so it quickly loses its impact.
It is. It takes considerably less time than fifteen minutes for any military capable of building an maintaining an ICBM to point it at today's foe and fire. If, say, Osama Bin Laden has set up a broadcast tower in Kabul and, alongside the Taliban, took full responsibility for 9/11 as it happened, he might have been atomized before the broadcast was over.
according to many critics, not worthy to be grouped under the umbrella term "intellectual property".
They are not deeds to land (real property), nor are they tangible or tradeable items (personal property), but rather artificial monopolies granted upon otherwise entirely reproducible things. Grouping them together makes exactly as much sense as grouping the right to pump oil from the ground with an installed air-conditioner (real property) or a certificate of stock with a turkey sandwich (personal property).
GNU doth protest too much. It's a perfectly valid term, and wasting time protesting common sense instead of explaining the differences between copyrights et al just makes you (or GNU) seem unhinged.
Funny you should mention that one, as it was eventually proven to be incorrect. That's was Einstein's claim to fame.
No, Newton's totally correct. He just didn't consider that the universe was non-constant.
Oh please. I agree with the rest of your post, but you can't argue that imperial vs metric is about diversity vs uniformity. It's quite clearly being argued because of the difficulties in conversion, not some assault on the brave USA, willing to stand alone from the metric crowd of sheep.
Psst. Just because Europe thinks that we should all use their arbitrary system "For the sake of uniformity" doesn't mean that it's not also an "assault on the brave USA."
Most of the world's great conflicts are rooted in a misundersatnding of what the other side wants.
The current model Treos, apparently. Only they actually have a thumb-pad, so you don't need that "I can't even get it right in the demo" virtual keyboard.
I have not seen one person speculate on the sales of the iphone that had anything negative to say. far from being the general sentiment.
Hi. I'm a consumer. I likely could afford a $500 PDA/phone come summer. I can think of about a dozen better uses for said $500 than the "iPhone." I think Apple'll be well off to get 1% of the smartphone market, let alone the general "I just want a phone" crowd.
This gets stated and restated on Slashdot all the time, usually by the same handful of people - but does anyone have any actual proof from anywhere that doesn't cater to a 15- to 25-year-old audience?
The 15 to 25 year old demographic drive technology; they're the ones where the guys smart enough to know what's what haven't gotten to the point where they stop supporting friends & family for the sheer fun of it.
There is no such thing as "instantaneously".
Sure there is. It just doesn't mean what you think it means.
"Happening in a time span lower than the response rate of the observer." If I move my mouse, the cursor moves "instantaneously", even though there's a delay significantly higher than c's round trip through mouse, cable, USB bus, CPU, AGP, GPU, VGA cable, monitor control, eyes.
I could understand if you were literally going to be on the phone all day, but assuming you'd have a more normal usage pattern, why is it so difficult to drop a phone into a dock (which they mentioned the iPhone will have) or plug in a charger when you get home at the end of the day?
If this were just a phone, it'd be fine. But it's not. It' a web browser / video player / music player. It's entirely possible that the typical user will want it to last for longer than just one day's causal use: they'll want to be able to use it, forget to plug it in, and then use it again the next day.
I'm fairly sure that most of the people that "don't take Linux seriously" are people who don't even know what it is.
On the desktop?
I wager that everyone who says "Linux isn't ready" knows full well what Linux is, and can name at least one reason why they don't recommend it to their clients/boss/relatives.
If Linux were ready, well, a free OS that's just as good as that new $300 MS thing is going to make a bigger dent than Linux has.
Religion is a barrier to progress and an excuse for evil.
You're right. No anti-religious government has ever become an evil empire that hampers progress and rules by fear and terror... I mean, except for the Soviet Union. And the American Eugenics program.
(Oh, and the Christian Church, which you seem to be slurring, didn't have the power to so much as pull people into pews until the reign of Constantine the Great's Edict of Milan in 313. And few significant branches of Christianity never had even that much power.)
Evil men do evil things using whatever excuse they can find. Naked power, religion, science, and even the "good of the people" have all been used as excuses to do terribly evil things.
The LA Times (and others) want this to change so that the investments support or at a minimum, do not detract from, the Foundation's goals.
Why not? The Foundation is a Federally Recognized NFP charity, which gives it some tax benefits on the belief that it will do good with its money. A foundation can do FAR more good by moral investing than outright giving.
If Gates & Co. wanted to ruthlessly make money via investment, they should have set up a holding company and pledged a dollar amount to the foundation.
Developers now have to support IE5, 6 and 7.
No, not necessarily. Web Developers are advised to test against all browsers with more than a 3% market share for their site. If your site has 3% share of IE 5, 6, and 7, then you've got your work cut out for you. Most others don't have that problem.
Just because some academics came up with a "standard" doesn't mean there's a law that says that everyone needs to follow it. They should be called "suggestions".
The wonderful thing about standards, when done correctly, is that everyone can support the standard and get essentially the same result.
In all honestly, if your website can't function fine with the minor variations between browsers, then you've got a bad design. (And let's not even get into how bad your site will look in mobile devices, or without images, or for the blind.)
Illegal immigration sucks money from the economy and stresses our entire infrastructure
No, Illegal immigration stresses our law enforcement and emergency services infrastructures, and undermines the rule of law. Since only bonna-fide citizens get direct fiscal aid, there is almost no financial impact upon non-emergency infrasructure.
The answer, of course, is to make an unlimited-quantity "guest worker" program that carries a modest fee. It just has to be easier to use for the worker than being illegal, and all of a sudden what was a drain on our infrastructure becomes an important part of our economy.
(Of course, The Answer won't be implemented, because the very lobby that's most against it will be hurt when legal immigrants are able to use the US Courts against them.)
Her life was absolutely and totally devestated.
And for what?
Truth.
If her life could be devastated simply by the revelation of her secrets--that is, without anyone doing anything unethical with those secrets once they're known--then the fault is squarely on her own shoulders. She should not have set her life up around a lie, and if she was not willing to face the simple consequences to her relationships of the revelation, then she shouldn't have done what she did in the first place.
Show me how this is different it she were a porn star who never told her parents until the new neighbor made the connection, and then you'll have a leg to stand on. Until then, the paper was entirely within its ethical rights (and possibly even its ethical obligations) to investigate her identity and publish their findings.
Remember, the infamous McDonald's coffee cup had a warning label!
Yep. And now the label's bigger, and prominent enough. Of course, the label SHOULD say "this coffee is 40 degrees hotter than what you get at home" or "This liquid is hot enough to cause severe burns".
(I browsed your "infamous" link, and I must say -- a lot of crap. If nothing else, Starbucks gets its big bucks because it has a far better coffee array than McDonald's did fifteen years ago, and they sell their coffee hot because most of the time they add something significantly colder (like frothed milk) to the coffee.)
(Did you know that juries only get on Oprah if they find for the plaintiff?)
Did you know that cases only go to juries if there's a question of fact?
Did you know that we have a perfectly good way to correct judicial cases we don't like, by having our legislatures amend the law accordingly?
Did you ever ponder why, in the last six years of Republican Congressional Control, we haven't seen a proposed Constitutional Amendment reserving full and explicitly authority to the states to resolve Abortion law?
"God" in the biblical form requires an immense level of magic to explain.
Dude? So does aliens actually visiting us.