Pre-industrial revolution there were about 500 million people on the planet. If we went back to subsistence, we'd be back there pretty quickly...If we were lucky we'd be able to maintain around that level.
Yeah, but it'd be worth it to avoid raising the temperature of the planet a few degrees, or forcing coastal dwellers to move inland. Wouldn't it???
Culture is also worth protecting, since it highlights the diversity of mankind as a whole.
What is the real value of the "highlights of diversity" of culture? As long as we have diversity of genes we'll be fine whether or not we listen to the same music, celebrate the same holidays, or live in houses with the same or different styles.
I have nothing against cultural diversity, but I'm not particularly in favor of going to great lengths to perpetuate it just for the sake of perpetuating it. Inasmuch as some dying culture is interesting, go ahead and document it for posterity and then let it die.
How do you relocates a culture? History?
There is no place similar to relocate these people and some of them won't be able to function in a city.
Species have been adapting to change for billions of years. We're supposed to believe the Eskimos can't? If so, I say let Darwin have his way with them.
I'm 20 minutes from California border, and can get a fifth of Rum for about $9 from a grocery store down there, but have to pay about $16 for the same bottle in Oregon.
At the risk of going even further off-topic, this kind of government efficiency is one of the most obvious reasons so many of us conservatives shudder at the thought of government-run health care. Uninsured citizens is a problem, but it pales in comparison to the problems we'll have if the government gets in the business.
Anyone who does not intend to respect other's human rights (and muslims don't, declaration of Cairo on human rights in islam, stating that there can be no freedom of religion and that religious discrimination is mandatory, and adds to that that sexual discrimination is also mandatory) cannot call upon the human rights laws to defend him/herself. (article 29 of convention of Geneva, clause c, and article 30 of UNHR)
That may be true from a moral and logical standpoint, but it doesn't seem to be supported by the articles of either document you mentioned. At least not in the clauses you mentioned.
I don't think the US was hit that hard by 911, 2k deaths is a lot, but cannot be compared to 1M iraqi deaths.
I assume you mean the millions that died under Saddam, right? Because 1M haven't died in the violence since Saddam was removed from power. As I mentioned above, that number is not credible. You only weaken your own arguments when you use such fictitious numbers.
Any more than that, and I'd start donating the extra to charity
That's very noble and I applaud that. I think that's what we should do as a society instead of over-taxation by government to force people to give their money away to others. But would you give every single cent you earn beyond a certain point? I wouldn't, and I don't think anyone should. Wealth generates more wealth which allows a larger total amount of donation in the future. By a financial successful person giving away all his extra wealth to people who aren't financially successful, it is less likely that that money will allow further generation of wealth and future charity since it's being given to people that have demonstrated they aren't productive with the wealth they have.
Now that's not to say that I don't think charity is a good idea. It absolutely is. But I don't think it's a good idea to say "I need no more than $80,000/year and every cent that I earn beyond that is going to be given away." If you've more than met your personal needs, it's clear you are able to put money to good use. So if you earn $100k and you only need $80k, perhaps give $10k away and invest the other $10k so that in a few yeas you've turned that $10k into $30k, invest $15k of that again to keep the ball rolling... but now you're able to donate $15k rather than the $10k you would've originally. You've improved your own financial situation and are giving away more wealth than you would have if you'd given it all away in the beginning.
Further, your continued good financial planning and savings (that you retain instead of giving all away) means that when the economy goes through rough times and you might not be able to generate as much for yourself, you have a buffer for your family an may even still be able to give away to charity--and those are often the times that people (thus charities) most need money: When most people don't have it. And you won't have it if you've given it all away in the past. Heck, you might even find yourself needing charity.
The point is, income limitation (whether it is personally imposed or imposed by the government) is not a good idea for the individual or society in the long run. All of society is better off when people are continually bettering their own financial position and, at the same time, setting aside a reasonable amount of their own income voluntarily to charity.
...he obviously does not give a shit about 1M Iraqis, almost all of them civilians, dieing due to war
That number is not generally considered credible except by extreme leftists where the number benefits their agenda. Calculating deaths by polling is rather absurd.
but US is not powerful enough to do that with conventional weapons,
Actually, we probably are powerful enough to level the main population centers indiscriminately with conventional weapons. I'm glad we haven't done so, though.
nor does it have enough clout to get away with it.
I would hope no-one has enough clout to get away with genocide.
People do not like to admit it about genocide, but if you do it thoroughly, then it actually works,
Just because it might work doesn't mean the ends justify the means.
Develop a defensive military strategy, which should work just fine, as you are on your own frigging continent?
Because we had a defensive military strategy and we were still hit hard on 9/11, even though we're on our own friggin' continent.
If only there was a "-1 Stupid Political Stereotype" mod
That'd be neat, but most posts at Slashdot (mine not included) would be subject to it, rendering it immediately useless.
Seriously, my comment was most definitely not as silly as some might think. There's a heck of a lot of truth to it. More than I thought. I recently talked to my sister (heavy Democrat) about politics and I was shocked at just what she admitted to believing as a Democrat.
'If governments or other people with millions of dollars can listen to your conversations right now, why shouldn't your next-door neighbor?' Muller says."
What a stupid comment. In other words, if some people are going to break the law, let's make sure everyone can. Good idea.
In the Democratic playbook, a person is only allowed to reach a certain level of success. Even more success is undesirable, bad, and makes that person a Republican automatically.
That way it looks like Valentine left because the product was ready rather than leaving because the project was going down the drain.
Why does Valentine's departure have to have anything to do with Vista? Whether it was on the right track or heading for the dumpster, if I had that kind of deal with Amazon, I'd quit, too! I've left more than one company that was successful and had a successful product--not because I didn't believe in the company or the product but simply because some other company believed more in me. And had the money to back it up.
Since the possibility of an uncontrolled re-entry was never foreseen...
That's a pretty iffy assumption. To suggest that anyone that lobs something into space doesn't even consider what would happen if it comes back is quite a stretch.
How much of the cool stuff you enjoy using today would even exist if it had to be coded in assembly?
And how much of the cool stuff you enjoy wouldn't exist if it had to be coded in anything other than assembly language? A lot of the processors that run the motor of your car, probably most fixed phones, garage door openers, your sprinkler system, very possibly your refrigerator, washing machine, dryer, networked smoke detectors, voltmeters, traditional non-geek calculators, a lot of electronic musical instruments, your heater/air conditioner thermostat, networked smoke detectors in your home, the little speed/odometer on your bicycle, the same type of controls on home/gym exercise equipment, the code that's inside your external mouse or keyboard...
You think all that stuff is written in 'C' or Java? Maybe a few... but as I said elsewhere: At any given time on earth, I can almost guarantee that there are more programs running end-user applications that were written in assembly language than there are programs written in other languages.
So many people forget that the "programming universe" is far, far larger than just Windows and Linux.
Indeed assembly language is only "obsolete" in certain circles. It might be obsolete to some random VB programmer but it's definitely not obsolete to a host of other industries, including true embedded programming. There are still applications that need to be written to fit in 2k of ROM. Those programs might not be common on end-user PCs any more, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. I believe it's fair to say that most programs that are running at any given time in the world are not running on PCs or Macs. And those that aren't are usually still subject to efficiency and optimization requirements that many PC-world programmers have long since forgotten.
Assembly language (and related experience) can be the difference between an "embedded programmer" grunt that makes $50/hour and a senior embedded programmer that makes $125+/hr.
I use Thunderbird but have been frustrated from the beginning. Am I the only one that has problems with the Thunderbird editor mangling the formatting?
If I reply to someone, I can no longer effectively quote/reply in-line because it either inserts too many blank lines to separate the quoted text, or not enough blank lines and my reply is stuck right to the reply text with no blank line between them.
And sometimes even if I'm just composing an email from scratch with no quoted message at all, it sometimes just mysteriously takes blank lines out of my message so it looks like I can't even format my paragraphs correctly.
Am I really the only one that has this problem? If I can't fix it I'm so close to switching email programs... I just don't know what I should use instead.
Knight: "If you think that by threatening me you can get me to be your slave... Well, that's where you're right. But - and I am only saying this because I care - there's a lot of decaffeinated brands on the market that are just as tasty as the real thing."
Hathaway: "I'm not kidding, Chris."
Knight: "Neither am I, Jerry."
And, of course, one of the most classic lines: "Would you consider that a launch problem or a design problem?"
Given how many films were released before I was born, how many are released each year, and how many of those are likely to be of interest to me, I'm actually pretty comfortable about ignoring a mediocre 80s teen flick starring Val Kilmer.
You're obviously an idiot. I mean it's not that it's that important, but you are clearly a movie buff. You are probably a geek (since you're here). But to have a movie-buff geek say that Real Genious is a "mediocre 80s teen flick" is just laughable. You obviously haven't seen and don't know what you're talking about and, as such, should refrain from commenting on it until you do.
As others have said, turn in your geek card until you've seen it.
Real public transit. In the majority of the USA, public transit is so bad your really have no choice except to drive if you want to get to work in a reasonable time.
Won't happen. Our sprawl won't allow efficient public transit except in concentrated downtown areas. And malign sprawl as much as you'd like, but I lived in another country where there wasn't as much sprawl. No thank you. I'll take the sprawl any day of the week. Not everyone wants to live in a crowded city.
For what it's worth, I'm self-employed and work from my home 99% of the time so my contribution to the "problem" is less than that of most tree-huggers, including those that take the bus or train.
hydrogen cars are just a distraction to allow car manufacturers to keep kicking the ball down the road on producing a truly fuel-efficient car, one far more modest than the one you're presently driving. Get used to it people;
Guess what? I don't want a car far more modest than the one I'm driving. I don't have a massive SUV but you damn well better believe I don't want a Smart. You get used to it.
when peak oil rolls through, that moped that was "fun to ride until your friends saw you" (much like a fat chick) is going to look like Fonzie cool.
Peak oil? Sigh... It's a non-issue. If peak oil happens, oil will not dry up overnight. Supplies will get tighter and tighter driving prices of gasoline higher and higher. This will lead to incentives to find alternative energies. The market will do this all by itself, with no government action, as soon as it makes sense to do so. Meanwhile, trying to force something that the market doesn't want and the technology isn't ready for isn't going to help anyone.
My friggin' laptop can only last a couple hours and all it's doing is lighting up a screen and driving a hard drive. And you expect me to believe some killed the electric car? The technology isn't ready yet! It will become mature as the market demands it all by itself as gas prices go up.
I misspoke. The study did try to address whether or not there was a correlation between brand awareness and clicking but found that there was not a strong correlation between the two. Which means that a lack of clicking does not necessarily mean your advertisement has failed if your goal was brand awareness. And that's exactly what my original post was responding. Except for a small subset of banner ads, click-throughs is not a valid metric to determine the success of the campaign.
The only kind of banner ads that can be evaluated on a click-through basis are those that are really depending on an instantaneous impulse sale. Those will continue to live and die by the click-through rate. For most advertisers, though, the lack of click-throughs is not a good metric. That means sites that cater to higher-end customers (like Slashdot and other focused sites) who previously might have had their advertising rates depressed by the fact that not too many people clicked on them may find that they may be able to get higher rates despite a low click-through rate.
Getting your advertisement seen by hundreds of thousands of high-earning geeks is potentially far more valuable than a hundred poor people that have a limited budget clicking on your advertisement out of curiosity.
Of course, that does not take into account ad-blocking software. But that's no different than DVRs. The issue remains that online advertising is going to tend to move back towards a per-impression rather than a per-click pricing. If you can get some clicks out of it too, great.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but it'd be worth it to avoid raising the temperature of the planet a few degrees, or forcing coastal dwellers to move inland. Wouldn't it???
What is the real value of the "highlights of diversity" of culture? As long as we have diversity of genes we'll be fine whether or not we listen to the same music, celebrate the same holidays, or live in houses with the same or different styles.
I have nothing against cultural diversity, but I'm not particularly in favor of going to great lengths to perpetuate it just for the sake of perpetuating it. Inasmuch as some dying culture is interesting, go ahead and document it for posterity and then let it die.
Species have been adapting to change for billions of years. We're supposed to believe the Eskimos can't? If so, I say let Darwin have his way with them.
Gore has produced more hot air than all the oil-burning cars in the world. This is true whether or not Gore flies.
At the risk of going even further off-topic, this kind of government efficiency is one of the most obvious reasons so many of us conservatives shudder at the thought of government-run health care. Uninsured citizens is a problem, but it pales in comparison to the problems we'll have if the government gets in the business.
That may be true from a moral and logical standpoint, but it doesn't seem to be supported by the articles of either document you mentioned. At least not in the clauses you mentioned.
I assume you mean the millions that died under Saddam, right? Because 1M haven't died in the violence since Saddam was removed from power. As I mentioned above, that number is not credible. You only weaken your own arguments when you use such fictitious numbers.
That's very noble and I applaud that. I think that's what we should do as a society instead of over-taxation by government to force people to give their money away to others. But would you give every single cent you earn beyond a certain point? I wouldn't, and I don't think anyone should. Wealth generates more wealth which allows a larger total amount of donation in the future. By a financial successful person giving away all his extra wealth to people who aren't financially successful, it is less likely that that money will allow further generation of wealth and future charity since it's being given to people that have demonstrated they aren't productive with the wealth they have.
Now that's not to say that I don't think charity is a good idea. It absolutely is. But I don't think it's a good idea to say "I need no more than $80,000/year and every cent that I earn beyond that is going to be given away." If you've more than met your personal needs, it's clear you are able to put money to good use. So if you earn $100k and you only need $80k, perhaps give $10k away and invest the other $10k so that in a few yeas you've turned that $10k into $30k, invest $15k of that again to keep the ball rolling... but now you're able to donate $15k rather than the $10k you would've originally. You've improved your own financial situation and are giving away more wealth than you would have if you'd given it all away in the beginning.
Further, your continued good financial planning and savings (that you retain instead of giving all away) means that when the economy goes through rough times and you might not be able to generate as much for yourself, you have a buffer for your family an may even still be able to give away to charity--and those are often the times that people (thus charities) most need money: When most people don't have it. And you won't have it if you've given it all away in the past. Heck, you might even find yourself needing charity.
The point is, income limitation (whether it is personally imposed or imposed by the government) is not a good idea for the individual or society in the long run. All of society is better off when people are continually bettering their own financial position and, at the same time, setting aside a reasonable amount of their own income voluntarily to charity.
That number is not generally considered credible except by extreme leftists where the number benefits their agenda. Calculating deaths by polling is rather absurd.
Actually, we probably are powerful enough to level the main population centers indiscriminately with conventional weapons. I'm glad we haven't done so, though.
I would hope no-one has enough clout to get away with genocide.
Just because it might work doesn't mean the ends justify the means.
Because we had a defensive military strategy and we were still hit hard on 9/11, even though we're on our own friggin' continent.
That'd be neat, but most posts at Slashdot (mine not included) would be subject to it, rendering it immediately useless.
Seriously, my comment was most definitely not as silly as some might think. There's a heck of a lot of truth to it. More than I thought. I recently talked to my sister (heavy Democrat) about politics and I was shocked at just what she admitted to believing as a Democrat.
What a stupid comment. In other words, if some people are going to break the law, let's make sure everyone can. Good idea.
In the Democratic playbook, a person is only allowed to reach a certain level of success. Even more success is undesirable, bad, and makes that person a Republican automatically.
You're an idiot. Truly. And probably a Democrat.
Why does Valentine's departure have to have anything to do with Vista? Whether it was on the right track or heading for the dumpster, if I had that kind of deal with Amazon, I'd quit, too! I've left more than one company that was successful and had a successful product--not because I didn't believe in the company or the product but simply because some other company believed more in me. And had the money to back it up.
That's a pretty iffy assumption. To suggest that anyone that lobs something into space doesn't even consider what would happen if it comes back is quite a stretch.
And how much of the cool stuff you enjoy wouldn't exist if it had to be coded in anything other than assembly language? A lot of the processors that run the motor of your car, probably most fixed phones, garage door openers, your sprinkler system, very possibly your refrigerator, washing machine, dryer, networked smoke detectors, voltmeters, traditional non-geek calculators, a lot of electronic musical instruments, your heater/air conditioner thermostat, networked smoke detectors in your home, the little speed/odometer on your bicycle, the same type of controls on home/gym exercise equipment, the code that's inside your external mouse or keyboard...
You think all that stuff is written in 'C' or Java? Maybe a few... but as I said elsewhere: At any given time on earth, I can almost guarantee that there are more programs running end-user applications that were written in assembly language than there are programs written in other languages.
So many people forget that the "programming universe" is far, far larger than just Windows and Linux.
Indeed assembly language is only "obsolete" in certain circles. It might be obsolete to some random VB programmer but it's definitely not obsolete to a host of other industries, including true embedded programming. There are still applications that need to be written to fit in 2k of ROM. Those programs might not be common on end-user PCs any more, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. I believe it's fair to say that most programs that are running at any given time in the world are not running on PCs or Macs. And those that aren't are usually still subject to efficiency and optimization requirements that many PC-world programmers have long since forgotten.
Assembly language (and related experience) can be the difference between an "embedded programmer" grunt that makes $50/hour and a senior embedded programmer that makes $125+/hr.
I use Thunderbird but have been frustrated from the beginning. Am I the only one that has problems with the Thunderbird editor mangling the formatting?
If I reply to someone, I can no longer effectively quote/reply in-line because it either inserts too many blank lines to separate the quoted text, or not enough blank lines and my reply is stuck right to the reply text with no blank line between them.
And sometimes even if I'm just composing an email from scratch with no quoted message at all, it sometimes just mysteriously takes blank lines out of my message so it looks like I can't even format my paragraphs correctly.
Am I really the only one that has this problem? If I can't fix it I'm so close to switching email programs... I just don't know what I should use instead.
Knight: "If you think that by threatening me you can get me to be your slave... Well, that's where you're right. But - and I am only saying this because I care - there's a lot of decaffeinated brands on the market that are just as tasty as the real thing."
Hathaway: "I'm not kidding, Chris."
Knight: "Neither am I, Jerry."
And, of course, one of the most classic lines: "Would you consider that a launch problem or a design problem?"Because it's a funny movie. But it's even more funny to geeks like us that can appreciate certain humor and attitudes in the movie.
If you have a sense of humor and you're anything approaching a geek, you'll enjoy the movie. Unless you've made up your mind not to.
You're obviously an idiot. I mean it's not that it's that important, but you are clearly a movie buff. You are probably a geek (since you're here). But to have a movie-buff geek say that Real Genious is a "mediocre 80s teen flick" is just laughable. You obviously haven't seen and don't know what you're talking about and, as such, should refrain from commenting on it until you do.
As others have said, turn in your geek card until you've seen it.
Won't happen. Our sprawl won't allow efficient public transit except in concentrated downtown areas. And malign sprawl as much as you'd like, but I lived in another country where there wasn't as much sprawl. No thank you. I'll take the sprawl any day of the week. Not everyone wants to live in a crowded city.
For what it's worth, I'm self-employed and work from my home 99% of the time so my contribution to the "problem" is less than that of most tree-huggers, including those that take the bus or train.
Did the conversation just change to global warming?
Guess what? I don't want a car far more modest than the one I'm driving. I don't have a massive SUV but you damn well better believe I don't want a Smart. You get used to it.
Peak oil? Sigh... It's a non-issue. If peak oil happens, oil will not dry up overnight. Supplies will get tighter and tighter driving prices of gasoline higher and higher. This will lead to incentives to find alternative energies. The market will do this all by itself, with no government action, as soon as it makes sense to do so. Meanwhile, trying to force something that the market doesn't want and the technology isn't ready for isn't going to help anyone.
My friggin' laptop can only last a couple hours and all it's doing is lighting up a screen and driving a hard drive. And you expect me to believe some killed the electric car? The technology isn't ready yet! It will become mature as the market demands it all by itself as gas prices go up.
I misspoke. The study did try to address whether or not there was a correlation between brand awareness and clicking but found that there was not a strong correlation between the two. Which means that a lack of clicking does not necessarily mean your advertisement has failed if your goal was brand awareness. And that's exactly what my original post was responding. Except for a small subset of banner ads, click-throughs is not a valid metric to determine the success of the campaign.
The only kind of banner ads that can be evaluated on a click-through basis are those that are really depending on an instantaneous impulse sale. Those will continue to live and die by the click-through rate. For most advertisers, though, the lack of click-throughs is not a good metric. That means sites that cater to higher-end customers (like Slashdot and other focused sites) who previously might have had their advertising rates depressed by the fact that not too many people clicked on them may find that they may be able to get higher rates despite a low click-through rate.
Getting your advertisement seen by hundreds of thousands of high-earning geeks is potentially far more valuable than a hundred poor people that have a limited budget clicking on your advertisement out of curiosity.
Of course, that does not take into account ad-blocking software. But that's no different than DVRs. The issue remains that online advertising is going to tend to move back towards a per-impression rather than a per-click pricing. If you can get some clicks out of it too, great.