Here's the tl;dr version of that bug report: Techies should no longer suggest Firefox to their friends and relatives and should start installing Chrome, Opera, or Safari instead. The Mozilla devs have completely gone off the deep end, in case that wasn't already apparent to anyone for the last year or two.
That sounds like total bullshit. If you somehow MADE $3 million on your investment in the past year alone, I'd say now is the perfect time to get out. Not because it's a rainy day, but because that's enough money to retire and do whatever the hell expensive things you want for the rest of your life.
I'm 28, have smoked pot maybe 5 times in my life, and have never been drunk. Yet I fully support legalizing, at the least, any drug that is safer than alcohol, which is a good portion of them. Does that make me a "drug addled looser"?
Another problem is that this leads to the same problems as racial profiling. That is, once you start devoting more resources to specific areas, of course you're going to start finding more criminals there, until it gets to the point that those are pretty much the only areas you ever even find crime, because you don't bother to look anywhere else.
That's a good point, and partially what led to my quitting. One of my few remaining friends who played on my server started spending more and more time on another server until it eventually became his main character. In order for me to play there with him, I could either spend 100+ hours grinding a new character and gear, or spend $55 to transfer one of my existing characters there and change faction. $55 is the cost of buying the game again, just for them to have an automated script move a few bits around from one server to another.
See, I tried Rift but everything about it screamed "WoW clone" and the whole point of me trying it was trying to escape WoW. If you compare the Rift classes to WoW talent specs, you'll see they all match up almost exactly. The gameplay and UI are basically the same, but without the ability to customize your interface with addons (at least back when I tried it).
So instead of switching to Rift, I just quit WoW, and now I have far more free time to enjoy doing things that are actually fun, and even productive.
Most people have not cared as much about massive quantities of cash throughout history.
Money has always been a motivating factor certainly, but without the American get-rich-quick, your-life-is-meaningless-if-you're-poor culture, there were a lot more people who did things "just because", regardless of profitability.
In addition to that, I find it harder to blame people for just trying to improve their lives by purchasing a home than bankers who knew exactly what they were doing and what would happen.
I think you're both right, and are mostly arguing a theoretical point of philosophy. This is what he was replying to:
If you're really fancy you do 2 in the chest and 1 in the head. When you fire your weapon you should mean it. Don't shoot to injure or incapacitate. Shoot to kill.
To me, and probably him, that sounded more like macho chest-thumping "shoot until they stop breathing" than your rational explanation of "shoot to kill".
On the other hand, if we ever got to the mythical "human drivers are banned and all cars are networked and computer-controlled", it would still be a hundred times safer to drive at 130mph than a human driving is right now.
In your original post you said "nice to know that the robot car people have, basically, no ethics whatsoever, considering that automobile-travel systems have killed more people than terrorism." which I assumed you meant referred to ALL automated control systems.
Here, you're basically saying that you only meant the fully robotic controlled cars.
Can you point out even one single death from one of these cars?
It's a moot point anyway, since it doesn't use normal HIV, but I don't really understand what you mean.
"Honey, I'm going to get HIV and live a relatively normal life for the next 20 years or so. We'll have to start using condoms though." vs. "Honey, I'm going to die over the next year or so in agonizing torture. What? Sex? I haven't felt like doing that since chemo started and in a few more months I'll barely have the energy to piss myself."
No, I'm sorry, I disagree. Have you met the average person on the street? They can often be very nice, friendly, hardworking people, but most of them are so ignorant or stupid that I'm amazed when they are capable of forming sentences. Just being here debating an issue with coherent thoughts, even thinking about an issue for oneself beyond what a friend or pastor said to think, puts one leaps and bounds above "Mr or Mrs John Q Voter".
To the article: the difference is that a fingerprint doesn't really tell you anything about a person. I suspect it can be used to predict gender, and maybe age and race with some fancy algorithms. It's not a very big violation of privacy (in most people's opinion, not everyone obviously) because all it can really do is identify. With DNA, depending on how in-depth the data collected is, you almost know more about a person than they do. Admittedly, the DNA testing that modern police use isn't usually good enough to tell you much, and in fact are often not adequate even for identification.
But with vaguely written laws, it's usually not specified what the testing and data retention is restricted to. In the future, a full genome could be sequenced while someone is being booked at the station. It tells you hair color, eye color, predisposition to diseases, allergies. It suggests likely height, left- or right-handedness, inclinations towards violent behavior, certain personality types, and sexual orientation. You're also collecting a bit of information on all of their relatives (who can now be identified as such) and could trace lineage for centuries.
They don't have DRM either, which is an even bigger point for me than price. But I'm not really complaining, I just find it a bit odd and disappointing. Even knowing now their limitations I'd still buy most of them again.
I've been buying more games lately and have been amazed at how many have to be run in windowed mode, run at an incredibly low resolution, or both. And most of those games are not even ports.
Minecraft, probably the current king of indie games, only runs at 800x600, Cogs only supports up to 1280x1024 and Hammerfight by default is windowed at something like 800x600 and requires editing a config file to increase it.
You're right in that 10% is what you can expect to get in a year. These guys, however, are getting 10% in a week. So in reality, these guys ARE doing that great.
The two-year study, commissioned by the U.S. Justice Department for $939,233, has come under withering attack from other experts. The department has not endorsed the study, saying Fleisher has yet to turn over his data for closer examination.
Cindy Struckman-Johnson, professor of psychology at the University of South Dakota and one of nine commission members, said Fleisher's 155-page study is not in scientific form. She said there is no literature review, no raw data, and no in-depth explanation of his subjects or research methods.
So, when the Department of Justice gives you a million dollars, obviously you're supposed to lie and tell them what they want to hear, but this guy went so far overboard with it (essentially, nobody in prison is ever raped and anyone who claims they are is lying), even the sponsor will say "hold on a sec..."
Yeah, tens of thousands is a stretch (depends on the place, nicer places seem less likely to be damaged in the first place) but $10k isn't out of the question at all, especially if you factor in that "doing the work yourself" isn't free unless you consider your time to be worthless.
I guess so. In my own personal experience, literally 2 out of 4 of my renters have been absolutely horrible and caused damage only slightly below what they were paying in rent (when they felt like paying it at all). I also saw some of my neighbors places when I myself was renting an apartment, and have a relative whose primary income came from managing rental properties and heard a lot of stories.
Most temporary home renting schemes I've seen that actually -work- are either upper class places (summer homes and the like) or low-income borderline slums where it doesn't matter if damage is done.
I know that realistically there's no way it could ever be possible in our society (it's about as likely as humanity giving up on all war), but I've always dreamed of the day where 90%+ of all labor is handled by robots and the remaining percent can be handled by people working a couple of days a week. Robots could maintain a reasonable standard of living for everyone, regardless of if they chose to work or not, and anyone who wanted a bit more (buying power, respect, power) could get a job repairing/building/improving machines or handling something else only people could do.
I agree with breaking the ties between the military-industrial complex and government, but if you CUT federal salaries I don't see how you can manage to keep any competent employees. You already make about twice as much by working in private industry.
Members of congress make less than $200k per year. Their campaigns (admittedly not out of their own pockets) cost millions of dollars, and most of them were millionaires before running. And anyway, eliminating their salaries completely would pay for about 15 minutes in Iraq.
Guarding your pocket change is pointless when big business has the key to your safe.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's the tl;dr version of that bug report: Techies should no longer suggest Firefox to their friends and relatives and should start installing Chrome, Opera, or Safari instead. The Mozilla devs have completely gone off the deep end, in case that wasn't already apparent to anyone for the last year or two.
That sounds like total bullshit. If you somehow MADE $3 million on your investment in the past year alone, I'd say now is the perfect time to get out. Not because it's a rainy day, but because that's enough money to retire and do whatever the hell expensive things you want for the rest of your life.
I'm 28, have smoked pot maybe 5 times in my life, and have never been drunk. Yet I fully support legalizing, at the least, any drug that is safer than alcohol, which is a good portion of them. Does that make me a "drug addled looser"?
Another problem is that this leads to the same problems as racial profiling. That is, once you start devoting more resources to specific areas, of course you're going to start finding more criminals there, until it gets to the point that those are pretty much the only areas you ever even find crime, because you don't bother to look anywhere else.
That's a good point, and partially what led to my quitting. One of my few remaining friends who played on my server started spending more and more time on another server until it eventually became his main character. In order for me to play there with him, I could either spend 100+ hours grinding a new character and gear, or spend $55 to transfer one of my existing characters there and change faction. $55 is the cost of buying the game again, just for them to have an automated script move a few bits around from one server to another.
See, I tried Rift but everything about it screamed "WoW clone" and the whole point of me trying it was trying to escape WoW. If you compare the Rift classes to WoW talent specs, you'll see they all match up almost exactly. The gameplay and UI are basically the same, but without the ability to customize your interface with addons (at least back when I tried it).
So instead of switching to Rift, I just quit WoW, and now I have far more free time to enjoy doing things that are actually fun, and even productive.
Most people have not cared as much about massive quantities of cash throughout history.
Money has always been a motivating factor certainly, but without the American get-rich-quick, your-life-is-meaningless-if-you're-poor culture, there were a lot more people who did things "just because", regardless of profitability.
In addition to that, I find it harder to blame people for just trying to improve their lives by purchasing a home than bankers who knew exactly what they were doing and what would happen.
I think you're both right, and are mostly arguing a theoretical point of philosophy. This is what he was replying to:
If you're really fancy you do 2 in the chest and 1 in the head. When you fire your weapon you should mean it. Don't shoot to injure or incapacitate. Shoot to kill.
To me, and probably him, that sounded more like macho chest-thumping "shoot until they stop breathing" than your rational explanation of "shoot to kill".
On the other hand, if we ever got to the mythical "human drivers are banned and all cars are networked and computer-controlled", it would still be a hundred times safer to drive at 130mph than a human driving is right now.
Humans should have to PAY for delaying a robot, in order to cross a street? Are you out of your mind?
In your original post you said "nice to know that the robot car people have, basically, no ethics whatsoever, considering that automobile-travel systems have killed more people than terrorism." which I assumed you meant referred to ALL automated control systems.
Here, you're basically saying that you only meant the fully robotic controlled cars.
Can you point out even one single death from one of these cars?
It's a moot point anyway, since it doesn't use normal HIV, but I don't really understand what you mean.
"Honey, I'm going to get HIV and live a relatively normal life for the next 20 years or so. We'll have to start using condoms though."
vs.
"Honey, I'm going to die over the next year or so in agonizing torture. What? Sex? I haven't felt like doing that since chemo started and in a few more months I'll barely have the energy to piss myself."
No, I'm sorry, I disagree. Have you met the average person on the street? They can often be very nice, friendly, hardworking people, but most of them are so ignorant or stupid that I'm amazed when they are capable of forming sentences. Just being here debating an issue with coherent thoughts, even thinking about an issue for oneself beyond what a friend or pastor said to think, puts one leaps and bounds above "Mr or Mrs John Q Voter".
To the article: the difference is that a fingerprint doesn't really tell you anything about a person. I suspect it can be used to predict gender, and maybe age and race with some fancy algorithms. It's not a very big violation of privacy (in most people's opinion, not everyone obviously) because all it can really do is identify. With DNA, depending on how in-depth the data collected is, you almost know more about a person than they do. Admittedly, the DNA testing that modern police use isn't usually good enough to tell you much, and in fact are often not adequate even for identification.
But with vaguely written laws, it's usually not specified what the testing and data retention is restricted to. In the future, a full genome could be sequenced while someone is being booked at the station. It tells you hair color, eye color, predisposition to diseases, allergies. It suggests likely height, left- or right-handedness, inclinations towards violent behavior, certain personality types, and sexual orientation. You're also collecting a bit of information on all of their relatives (who can now be identified as such) and could trace lineage for centuries.
A much higher percentage than Google, I'm fairly certain of that. And I have far more need for my money than they do.
So that it can run at 800x600 resolution fullscreen?
They don't have DRM either, which is an even bigger point for me than price. But I'm not really complaining, I just find it a bit odd and disappointing. Even knowing now their limitations I'd still buy most of them again.
I've been buying more games lately and have been amazed at how many have to be run in windowed mode, run at an incredibly low resolution, or both. And most of those games are not even ports.
Minecraft, probably the current king of indie games, only runs at 800x600, Cogs only supports up to 1280x1024 and Hammerfight by default is windowed at something like 800x600 and requires editing a config file to increase it.
You're right in that 10% is what you can expect to get in a year. These guys, however, are getting 10% in a week. So in reality, these guys ARE doing that great.
Next time read the link all the way to the end instead of just the first two paragraphs.
The two-year study, commissioned by the U.S. Justice Department for $939,233, has come under withering attack from other experts. The department has not endorsed the study, saying Fleisher has yet to turn over his data for closer examination.
Cindy Struckman-Johnson, professor of psychology at the University of South Dakota and one of nine commission members, said Fleisher's 155-page study is not in scientific form. She said there is no literature review, no raw data, and no in-depth explanation of his subjects or research methods.
So, when the Department of Justice gives you a million dollars, obviously you're supposed to lie and tell them what they want to hear, but this guy went so far overboard with it (essentially, nobody in prison is ever raped and anyone who claims they are is lying), even the sponsor will say "hold on a sec..."
Yeah, tens of thousands is a stretch (depends on the place, nicer places seem less likely to be damaged in the first place) but $10k isn't out of the question at all, especially if you factor in that "doing the work yourself" isn't free unless you consider your time to be worthless.
I guess so. In my own personal experience, literally 2 out of 4 of my renters have been absolutely horrible and caused damage only slightly below what they were paying in rent (when they felt like paying it at all). I also saw some of my neighbors places when I myself was renting an apartment, and have a relative whose primary income came from managing rental properties and heard a lot of stories.
Most temporary home renting schemes I've seen that actually -work- are either upper class places (summer homes and the like) or low-income borderline slums where it doesn't matter if damage is done.
I know that realistically there's no way it could ever be possible in our society (it's about as likely as humanity giving up on all war), but I've always dreamed of the day where 90%+ of all labor is handled by robots and the remaining percent can be handled by people working a couple of days a week. Robots could maintain a reasonable standard of living for everyone, regardless of if they chose to work or not, and anyone who wanted a bit more (buying power, respect, power) could get a job repairing/building/improving machines or handling something else only people could do.
I agree with breaking the ties between the military-industrial complex and government, but if you CUT federal salaries I don't see how you can manage to keep any competent employees. You already make about twice as much by working in private industry.
Members of congress make less than $200k per year. Their campaigns (admittedly not out of their own pockets) cost millions of dollars, and most of them were millionaires before running. And anyway, eliminating their salaries completely would pay for about 15 minutes in Iraq.
Guarding your pocket change is pointless when big business has the key to your safe.