Assuming that you're telling the truth and not trolling, Marx wasn't quite as anti-capitalist as you think. Capitalism is an incredibly efficient means of distributing resources--far better than any other method known to man. However, it's already founded on small socialist dictatorships we call "families."
A socialist/communist movement should not try and tear capitalism down; instead, it should try and raise the bar, to get to a level where anyone can cease wage-slave working and simply live out a simple, somewhat comfortable existance.
So if he has just smashed his head in with a baseball bat, that would be better?
Add in a "tried" before "smashed" and, quite simply, yes.
A man with just a little bit of marital-arts training--I mean, someone who's EVER blocked a punch of ANY kind--can mitigate the blow from a single baseball bat enough to not die.
The next morning, just insert the handy-dandy magetized needle, and lookie! Hangover-over!
Not quite.
Hangovers are caused by your body being dehydrated. To fix the worst of the effect, drink lots of water (preferably the night before) or, if you happen to be an EMT, stick some saline solution right into your blood.
there is always the "hmm MS Office is higher quality"
It is. MS Office has a cleaner UI, better integration with Windows and Mac, and requires less adaptation from what the workforce learned on. (Either Wordperfect, Word, or some other WP equally distant from MS or OOo)
Don't try and say "OOo is just as good for everything." Say "OOo is good enough for what we need; the benefits MS has over OOo aren't worth $200 a seat for licenses."
It's going to be pretty hard to rationalize punishing Hong Kong students for playing games in class after this revelation...
Depends on if there's an actual lesson going on, or just review.
I.e., if no one's teaching, what's the problem? But when someone IS teaching--or when someone is actually making a good point--it's time to put the game down and pay attention.
Yea, that sounds much better than everyone knowing my business and being flooded with junk mail...
What if you knew exactly who sent you the junk mail?
"Just bought a coffee pot" could be coupled with "refuses to buy from companies that junk mail you." Statistics be damned; when the comapny knows that about you, and continues to junk mail you, you should be able to bill them for wasting your time.
If everyone has access to your medical records, even if they can't change them, we could start getting to a Gattaca style world; where people are discriminated against based upon their genetic profle.
Not likely. We'd either find enough real-world data to know how many people don't go with their genetic indicators, or we'd find out that the "discrimination" actually just makes sense.
We could make laws that say having access to certain information can't affect your decisions, but that is easily circumvented by finding or creating other "reasons" to select a differen, "better" individual.
That'd be foolish. A better answer to too-much-information is too-much-information; if the company can know about me, then I can know about the company. If they discriminate against folk with long hair, or asthma, or bad genes, I can "vote with my dollars" and not go there--even if they would favor me.
If you tell me your phone number, and I tell someone else, I have invaded your privacy, but I certainly haven't infringed upon your rights--and there should be no consequnece to me.
The government, of course, is a special case--but so are spouses, doctors, lawyers, and priests--who DO have legal authority to mainatin your privacy.
. You don't want the world and his wife able to get at your bank account.
I don't want, and I shold be able to prevent, anyone from _effecting_ my bank account.
If everyone and their brother knows exactly how much is in my bank account, but cannot do anything more then send me an offer for a short-term loan or a "special cash rate" for a purchase, then all of my rights remain intact.
Privacy isn't a property - it is a privilege. This is evidenced by taking away certain levels of privacy from criminals...
You're so right, and then so wrong.
Privacy isn't a right per-se, but it certainly is more than a mere priviledge. Privacy is a presumption that is often necessary for a citizen to enjoy their most important right--that of quiet and safe enjoyment of their own life.
And criminals are a horrible example of "it's not like property." We violate oodes of a prisoner's rights--that's how we penalize folk who break the law.
It isn't privacy that is a property, it's the information that is a property.
False, I believe. Mere information should be public domain--if I want to find out, oh, what your telephone number is, there shouldn't be any penalty whatsoever if someone tells it to me.
This is simply evolution at its best because man has evolved to the point of being able to control evolution itself.
Control? Really. Wow. And here I thought we were just making a few specific alterations that we hoped would influenced organisms. Nope, we're controlling evolution now--so, when do we all become beautiful tolerate persons will full heads of hair and optimum body fat?
Many cannot deal with this thought for various reasons. Usually because their religion doesn't allow it. Religion vs. Science- nothing new here.
Bullocks.
Newton was tried as a heretic because he was--above and beyond saying that the sun is the center of the universe.
Furthermore, a very good case can be made that the Age of Reason was kindled and sparked by religion, not in spite of it.
On a more personal note: I have no theological objections whatsoever to man altering the DNA of any of God's creatures, or even man himself. We've been doing the same thing for generations anyway; this is just more direct and far-reaching.
That said, I do think that a bit of caution over the legal and biological consequences of genetic engineering is warranted. The last thing anyone wants is some freak bio-engineered corn or rice strain propogating and infecting the entire world's crop with a product that can't be sold without a "frankenfood" label and a royalty to a chem lab somewhere.
Snopes cites Vince Cerf saying "that as a Senator and now as Vice President, Gore has made it a point to be as well-informed as possible on technology and issues that surround it" but by 1999 (the copyright date on the Cerf page Snopes cites), Clinton/Gore had brought us the 1996 Telecommunications Act (which was a big step toward the media deregulation many groups across a wide political spectrum rail against today), the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act. So I come away thinking that Al Gore's legislative history deserves a more mixed review than Cerf (and Snopes) describe.
1: He was a vice president, whose only real power was casting the tie-breaking vote in the Senate (that, and leading the temporal action rangers)
2: After the 1996 "Contract with America", the Republicans had easily as much power as the Democrats. You might as well blame Newt Gingrich for the DMCA as Clinton/Gore.
3: It's politics, and politics is a game of compromises.
Never use a fifty-cent word when a nickel word will do.
Care to cite a passage of such? The biggest word I saw in the review was "prefabricated", and that's hardly a word that's cumbersome to the intended geeky audience.
Doesn't this add latency that could be very dangerous at high speed?
"latency" is a vauge term. There's "latency" in that information can only travel at c between two points; there's "latency" in that the car's controls aren't responsive. And, there's "latency" in that a human needs to see and react to what's around them.
Even a modest-speed LAN can have plenty of bandwidth to keep up with a car's latency issues--assuming, of course, that the darn thing is wired correctly.
An F-22, for example, is all fly-by-wire, and has several internetworked computers working to keep it aloft. And, as it's an unstable body, if the computers fry, the darn thing drops like a rock.
what about pdas? they have upwards of 400mhz, 32-128m ram, and boot in near-instant time.
No, they don't. They just have an excellent "suspend" mode.
My Palm only "boots" if I hard-reset it or it somehow becomes totally drained of battery power. And it takes "a few" minutes (never measured) for it to get to the digitizer sync display.
If you're going to talk per-capita, then you should compare states, not cities--and you should also chart average total population density and mean income.
Why do people use Palms anyhow, design constraints force developers to think creatively and keep interfaces consistent and simple.
That's part of it. Another is cost & battery life--or, rather, those WERE two major reasons.
But its not fast as a Ipaq, its far from feature ridden, its the perfect example of how the a bit of marketing and advertising can influence consumer decisions better than feature rich hardware additives and processing quality. Any Ipaq could outrun and emulate several palms (why aren't they?)..
My palm (Zire 71) can play MP3s & movies, has avaliable wireless internet, works with various office documents, has a camera, a backlit color screen, and is roughly equivalent to an iPaq in CPU/price.
The flagship palm, the Tungsten 3, has (AFAIK) the highest-resolution screen, a microsphone, no camrea, but a slew of others things that, apparantly, meet or beat every PocketPC on the market.
So, anyway, while PalmOS devices were indeed slower than PocketPCs two years ago, the new OS5 devices have largely eliminated the broad differences.
Eventually there will a palmtop pc that emulates everything
God, I hope not. If we must have code portability, I'd rather have a "reference platform" like Java or.Net before a slew of emulators.
technology supporting it will be vendor independent.. Like it is with telephone numbers for cellphones..
You're right here. In 100 years, I want every computer to have essentially the same OS.
And its the governments job to see they don't get it.
No, it isn't.
It's the government's job to ensure that monopolies don't unfairly use their market dominance, and that shared spaces use the same standards.
Free Market Capitalism is the best measure of which markets should be monopolized and which ones do best when not monopolized.
If you look at the current homogenized radio market you could argue that the FCC has encouraged filesharing by ruining radio.
A better argument would be that the FCC has allowed radio to be exploited by an oligarchy by failing to align a radio station's artists with the FCC's public policy goals.
A better model than the current model (where stations must pay for songs, and so play the songs that are subsidized through payola) would be one where radios were a legislated advertising device, and the only payment an artist gets from the radio is advertising.
And substantial parts of a spacecraft survive even an uncontrolled atmospheric entry; look at how much of Columbia came down, including large pieces of astronauts.
Columbia was a controlled reentry; it suffered a heat-shield failure, not a tradgectory failure.
You mean that a message from a wounded party asking the (possibly inadvertant) offender to stop the tort is unbelievable?
Bah.
The darn law doesn't mean that an e-mail is now legal service; it means that the RIAA won't have a "we'd get sued" excuse to not try and tell people "please stop that, we see what you're doing" before starting a lawsuit.
Slashdot Mirror
This is not meant as a joke.
Got a website?
Anyway...
Assuming that you're telling the truth and not trolling, Marx wasn't quite as anti-capitalist as you think. Capitalism is an incredibly efficient means of distributing resources--far better than any other method known to man. However, it's already founded on small socialist dictatorships we call "families."
A socialist/communist movement should not try and tear capitalism down; instead, it should try and raise the bar, to get to a level where anyone can cease wage-slave working and simply live out a simple, somewhat comfortable existance.
So if he has just smashed his head in with a baseball bat, that would be better?
Add in a "tried" before "smashed" and, quite simply, yes.
A man with just a little bit of marital-arts training--I mean, someone who's EVER blocked a punch of ANY kind--can mitigate the blow from a single baseball bat enough to not die.
There's no way to block a bullet.
The next morning, just insert the handy-dandy magetized needle, and lookie! Hangover-over!
Not quite.
Hangovers are caused by your body being dehydrated. To fix the worst of the effect, drink lots of water (preferably the night before) or, if you happen to be an EMT, stick some saline solution right into your blood.
there is always the "hmm MS Office is higher quality"
It is. MS Office has a cleaner UI, better integration with Windows and Mac, and requires less adaptation from what the workforce learned on. (Either Wordperfect, Word, or some other WP equally distant from MS or OOo)
Don't try and say "OOo is just as good for everything." Say "OOo is good enough for what we need; the benefits MS has over OOo aren't worth $200 a seat for licenses."
It's going to be pretty hard to rationalize punishing Hong Kong students for playing games in class after this revelation...
Depends on if there's an actual lesson going on, or just review.
I.e., if no one's teaching, what's the problem? But when someone IS teaching--or when someone is actually making a good point--it's time to put the game down and pay attention.
Yea, that sounds much better than everyone knowing my business and being flooded with junk mail...
What if you knew exactly who sent you the junk mail?
"Just bought a coffee pot" could be coupled with "refuses to buy from companies that junk mail you." Statistics be damned; when the comapny knows that about you, and continues to junk mail you, you should be able to bill them for wasting your time.
If everyone has access to your medical records, even if they can't change them, we could start getting to a Gattaca style world; where people are discriminated against based upon their genetic profle.
Not likely. We'd either find enough real-world data to know how many people don't go with their genetic indicators, or we'd find out that the "discrimination" actually just makes sense.
We could make laws that say having access to certain information can't affect your decisions, but that is easily circumvented by finding or creating other "reasons" to select a differen, "better" individual.
That'd be foolish. A better answer to too-much-information is too-much-information; if the company can know about me, then I can know about the company. If they discriminate against folk with long hair, or asthma, or bad genes, I can "vote with my dollars" and not go there--even if they would favor me.
It's not a privilege, it's an inalienable right.
Bullocks.
If you tell me your phone number, and I tell someone else, I have invaded your privacy, but I certainly haven't infringed upon your rights--and there should be no consequnece to me.
The government, of course, is a special case--but so are spouses, doctors, lawyers, and priests--who DO have legal authority to mainatin your privacy.
. You don't want the world and his wife able to get at your bank account.
I don't want, and I shold be able to prevent, anyone from _effecting_ my bank account.
If everyone and their brother knows exactly how much is in my bank account, but cannot do anything more then send me an offer for a short-term loan or a "special cash rate" for a purchase, then all of my rights remain intact.
Privacy isn't a property - it is a privilege. This is evidenced by taking away certain levels of privacy from criminals...
You're so right, and then so wrong.
Privacy isn't a right per-se, but it certainly is more than a mere priviledge. Privacy is a presumption that is often necessary for a citizen to enjoy their most important right--that of quiet and safe enjoyment of their own life.
And criminals are a horrible example of "it's not like property." We violate oodes of a prisoner's rights--that's how we penalize folk who break the law.
It isn't privacy that is a property, it's the information that is a property.
False, I believe. Mere information should be public domain--if I want to find out, oh, what your telephone number is, there shouldn't be any penalty whatsoever if someone tells it to me.
This is simply evolution at its best because man has evolved to the point of being able to control evolution itself.
Control? Really. Wow. And here I thought we were just making a few specific alterations that we hoped would influenced organisms. Nope, we're controlling evolution now--so, when do we all become beautiful tolerate persons will full heads of hair and optimum body fat?
Many cannot deal with this thought for various reasons. Usually because their religion doesn't allow it. Religion vs. Science- nothing new here.
Bullocks.
Newton was tried as a heretic because he was--above and beyond saying that the sun is the center of the universe.
Furthermore, a very good case can be made that the Age of Reason was kindled and sparked by religion, not in spite of it.
On a more personal note: I have no theological objections whatsoever to man altering the DNA of any of God's creatures, or even man himself. We've been doing the same thing for generations anyway; this is just more direct and far-reaching.
That said, I do think that a bit of caution over the legal and biological consequences of genetic engineering is warranted. The last thing anyone wants is some freak bio-engineered corn or rice strain propogating and infecting the entire world's crop with a product that can't be sold without a "frankenfood" label and a royalty to a chem lab somewhere.
Snopes cites Vince Cerf saying "that as a Senator and now as Vice President, Gore has made it a point to be as well-informed as possible on technology and issues that surround it" but by 1999 (the copyright date on the Cerf page Snopes cites), Clinton/Gore had brought us the 1996 Telecommunications Act (which was a big step toward the media deregulation many groups across a wide political spectrum rail against today), the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act. So I come away thinking that Al Gore's legislative history deserves a more mixed review than Cerf (and Snopes) describe.
1: He was a vice president, whose only real power was casting the tie-breaking vote in the Senate (that, and leading the temporal action rangers)
2: After the 1996 "Contract with America", the Republicans had easily as much power as the Democrats. You might as well blame Newt Gingrich for the DMCA as Clinton/Gore.
3: It's politics, and politics is a game of compromises.
I hereby nominate "640k ought to be enough for anybody" as most misquoted phrase ever.
Just in the arena of computers, he might have to get in line behind Al "I took the lead in creating the modern internet" Gore.
In general usage, I think one of the WWII generals gets the "most misquoted" phrase. That or Shakesphere.
Never use a fifty-cent word when a nickel word will do.
Care to cite a passage of such? The biggest word I saw in the review was "prefabricated", and that's hardly a word that's cumbersome to the intended geeky audience.
That includes forcing us to use a BIOS that will only "trust" their OS and thus render most hardware useless except for Windows.
Why?
I mean, honestly. It's not like Windows as a 90% share of all computers in the world. Plus they need dev-kits, anyway.
Palladium in the BIOS is like USB in the BIOS--it won't suddenly disable non-palladium systems, it just makes Palladium work.
Unless, of course, you happen to have a link to someone with real working knowledge of Palladium saying that it will keep you from running Linux...
Doesn't this add latency that could be very dangerous at high speed?
"latency" is a vauge term. There's "latency" in that information can only travel at c between two points; there's "latency" in that the car's controls aren't responsive. And, there's "latency" in that a human needs to see and react to what's around them.
Even a modest-speed LAN can have plenty of bandwidth to keep up with a car's latency issues--assuming, of course, that the darn thing is wired correctly.
An F-22, for example, is all fly-by-wire, and has several internetworked computers working to keep it aloft. And, as it's an unstable body, if the computers fry, the darn thing drops like a rock.
what about pdas? they have upwards of 400mhz, 32-128m ram, and boot in near-instant time.
No, they don't. They just have an excellent "suspend" mode.
My Palm only "boots" if I hard-reset it or it somehow becomes totally drained of battery power. And it takes "a few" minutes (never measured) for it to get to the digitizer sync display.
You can't compare states.
Sure you can. It's just innaccruate.
If we want to compare city-level, then we should do so with comparable population between cities.
And, last i knew, gun laws tended to be relativly consistent across entire states...
If you're going to talk per-capita, then you should compare states, not cities--and you should also chart average total population density and mean income.
But, in places like Vermont
Do you realize that the state of Vermont has possibly fewer people than Chicago? (I might be wrong, but the population density is still way down.)
A better comparison would be Dallas and Chicago.
Why do people use Palms anyhow, design constraints force developers to think creatively and keep interfaces consistent and simple.
.Net before a slew of emulators.
That's part of it. Another is cost & battery life--or, rather, those WERE two major reasons.
But its not fast as a Ipaq, its far from feature ridden, its the perfect example of how the a bit of marketing and advertising can influence consumer decisions better than feature rich hardware additives and processing quality. Any Ipaq could outrun and emulate several palms (why aren't they?)..
My palm (Zire 71) can play MP3s & movies, has avaliable wireless internet, works with various office documents, has a camera, a backlit color screen, and is roughly equivalent to an iPaq in CPU/price.
The flagship palm, the Tungsten 3, has (AFAIK) the highest-resolution screen, a microsphone, no camrea, but a slew of others things that, apparantly, meet or beat every PocketPC on the market.
So, anyway, while PalmOS devices were indeed slower than PocketPCs two years ago, the new OS5 devices have largely eliminated the broad differences.
Eventually there will a palmtop pc that emulates everything
God, I hope not. If we must have code portability, I'd rather have a "reference platform" like Java or
technology supporting it will be vendor independent.. Like it is with telephone numbers for cellphones..
You're right here. In 100 years, I want every computer to have essentially the same OS.
. In your car, is it any worse that your ECU fails than, say, a piston?
Depends on how it fails. A minor failure of either might be ignored--a major failure of either could cause instantaneous highway death.
Or a tire? Or the axel on your local Amish's wagon?
Hey, the Amish (who really aren't around here AFAIK) generally drive a slow-enough speeds that no one is in danger if one of their axels break.
Is it worse that your spinal cord breaks or your leg is severed?
Spinal cord. A severed leg can be replaced, and I've always got the other leg.
A broken spinal cord could mean no more sex!
(And yes, I do get some.)
And its the governments job to see they don't get it.
No, it isn't.
It's the government's job to ensure that monopolies don't unfairly use their market dominance, and that shared spaces use the same standards.
Free Market Capitalism is the best measure of which markets should be monopolized and which ones do best when not monopolized.
If you look at the current homogenized radio market you could argue that the FCC has encouraged filesharing by ruining radio.
A better argument would be that the FCC has allowed radio to be exploited by an oligarchy by failing to align a radio station's artists with the FCC's public policy goals.
A better model than the current model (where stations must pay for songs, and so play the songs that are subsidized through payola) would be one where radios were a legislated advertising device, and the only payment an artist gets from the radio is advertising.
And substantial parts of a spacecraft survive even an uncontrolled atmospheric entry; look at how much of Columbia came down, including large pieces of astronauts.
Columbia was a controlled reentry; it suffered a heat-shield failure, not a tradgectory failure.
Unbelievable.
You mean that a message from a wounded party asking the (possibly inadvertant) offender to stop the tort is unbelievable?
Bah.
The darn law doesn't mean that an e-mail is now legal service; it means that the RIAA won't have a "we'd get sued" excuse to not try and tell people "please stop that, we see what you're doing" before starting a lawsuit.