Anyone suing U-Tube would be taking the risk of losing the lawsuit and setting a precident.
Elsewhere on/. I pontificated that YouTube was going to get taken down. While YouTube may still get slammed, I'm starting to rethink my position, especially with regard to how things turned out for Napster.
That is, the RIAA took a fairly big risk going after Napster because the music industry truly believed Napster to threaten their bottom line. Without getting into nitty gritties, many people today believe that the RIAA overestimated the damage that illegal music downloads have on sales. In fact, some experts believe music downloads do not significantly effect music sales while contributing to societal good and others assert that filesharing actually spurs music sales.
Given that lesson, it could be that the video industry (and even an overextended and hyper-litigious music industry) is thinking to itself that stopping YouTube is not in their best interests. Not only would the lawsuit be expensive, but it would dampen the enthusiasm people are clearly expressing regarding downloadable video (and I don't mean BitTorrrent).
Now, I'm the last person to believe that the suits have actually learned from their mistakes (*cough* Jack Valenti *cough*)* but it is entirely possible that the industry might have other plans for YouTube including taking a "wait and see" attitude. Then again, they could simply be spellchecking the suit before submitting it.
* Yes, I know Valenti is no longer the head of the MPAA
An RSS reader is better if you want to automate the checking of those sites you're interested in. You don't have to keep refreshing; the RSS aggregator does it for you and, depending on your client, can alert you if there is new content.
This saves you the trouble of loading a new set of tabs and finding no new content. RSS readers are very good with infrequently updated pages. RSS readers also keep you up to date on frequently updated pages because you will be notified of new content once your reader discovers it. RSS readers also are easier to scan content with. I find myself not getting sucked in by story summaries. For many types of news, the headline is enough. In my case, using an RSS reader has cut my surfing time by 75% (as near as I can tell and without exaggeration.)
Finally, some RSS feeds include summaries, others excerpts, and some even the entire article. The amount of information you get depends on the level of detail the feed publisher chooses to provide.
I myself was scratching my own head about RSS readers and so decided to make an effort to see what the hoopdehaw was all about. I blogged about two Mac-based RSS readers (one of them free like beer) and haven't looked back. In fact, I so much prefer surfing by feed that I don't surf without access to an RSS reader. Just thinking about sifting through all the articles, say, on the front page of the NYTimes is fatiguing.
That mental fatigue is the result of the facts that, unlike RSS readers, web pages do not expire older articles as quickly as most RSS feed readers (with their default settings) and that most sites provide no way for you to flag an article for later attention or to mark an article as read.
The short version is try an RSS reader (I mention a few Windows-based clients at the bottom of the above-mentioned blog entry) and see for yourself if loading up Firefox tabs gives you comparable functionality. An RSS reader is one of those things like chat. Trying to explain why chat is in some ways preferable to email gets nowhere fast. You have to try it to understand what is so great about it.
Napster did not redistribute content. Their servers kept a database of the peers who actually provided the content, sort of like BitTorrent except that the peers kept no information about who owned what. Rather, Napster's servers collected and organized that information.
(Remember the publicity Napster got before they brought it down?)
Part of the reason for the publicity of the Napster case is that it happened in the days of Web 1.0 and many people, heck the entire world, were watching to see what would happen. It wasn't exactly clear that Napster would lose. In fact, early public opinion of Judge Patel's ruling was that she didn't know enough about technology to generate a sensible ruling.
When (not if) YouTube goes down, it's gonna do so lickety split because it has the pathway (I'm not sure it's precedent) of Napster to take. This is gonna be fast, folks. Allowing users to violate copyright on a mass scale using centralized servers is entrepreneurial suicide.
Foreskin is vestigial in the same sense that the appendix is vestigial. Humans don't fully understand what biological purposes the foreskin serves and so consider it without biological function. For starters, foreskin is the only external tissue in the human body that has estrogen receptors. What possible biological function could estrogen receptors on the human male body serve? I don't know but I do know I wish my foreskin had not been removed before I even had a say in the matter.
I think you will find that the majority of people that get an Intel mac will end up booting into windows less and less as they get used to OS X. Those "windows only" mac users that buy macs for the "shiny" hardware are probably an even smaller niche than people who by a mac to run linux.
This is what I personally hope. I also hear what you're saying about the appeal of using Apple's Core APIs. Though I am not a developer myself (outside of some limited server-side scripting and the like), I have seen some of the marketing for those APIs and understand some of their ramifications for development. On the other hand, there are many OS X developers that continue to ignore the benefits of Apple APIs. Adobe, who has so far stuck to Carbon all throughout OS X, is especially "guilty" of this.
I'm not knocking the benefit of coding in/for OS X. Don't get me wrong. I even allow that it may be superior to coding on other platforms. I also understand that development houses don't only go for market share numbers. But, I am speaking to the specific case of where a house realizes that most of its users are Windows-capable and that their OS X development costs are greater than their OS X profits.
So, yeah. Who knows what will happen in 5 years? I'm praying I won't be in a situation of trying to compete on eBay for OS X-compatible Apple machines because Apple no longer manufactures such.
I would suggest reading up on OS X on the developer site. Read up on Core Audio, Core Data, Core Image, Core Video and the new Core Animation framework. Before the.NET framework was 1.0, Apple had "frameworks" galore for developers to develop against.
Your post perfectly illustrates how Mac people [often] can't imagine the perspective of others. I am a dyed-in-the-wool Mac user, posting this from one of my two Internet-facing Mac OS X servers.
What you don't get is that Apple may one day to decide to maximize hardware numbers by chasing emphasizing sales to users who run Windows. In other words, one day Windows-running Mac owners may outnumber OS X-running Mac owners. Consider what happened to iPod firewire connectivity once it was clear that more Windows users own iPods than Mac users. I doubt we'll see firewire connections on future iPods and that was the direct result of there being no benefit to pleasing OS X-running users.
Now, an OS is quite a different thing than a peripheral connectivity, but think about development houses faced with an all-Intel user base. You see that 15% of your users are on OS X and the remainder on Windows. You know of that 15%, at least 75% own Intel Macs. Your research also suggests that more than half of that number dual-boot into Windows (leaving just less that 6% of all users who do not use Windows at all). What do you think such a company might do with its Mac development team especially if the Mac effort was more than, say, 10% of total development cost?
In a PowerPC-based Mac world, 15% of OS X users is 15% (installed base, not market share). In a Intel-based Mac world, that 15% could foreseeably become 6%. The advent of Windows-capable Macs extent jeopardizes the future of OS X as a platform. Whether that jeopardy realizes the erosion of OX X's installed base is a question only the future will answer.
My point is that Apple is not doing direct battle with Microsoft but with Windows-users who use non-Apple hardware. I will admit that this is complicated situation because dual-booting for Intel-based Macs can also be a way to get some Windows users to get OS X for free (as in beer) with their next machine.
2)
[. . . ] You know that most OS X PC users have Windows anyways, therefore, does it make sense to make a special OS X PC version of your software? No. Instead, you drop _all_ OS X support, and tell the users to simply boot into Windows when they want to use your software.
[. ..]
You have just described the platform into which Apple's switch to Intel has transformed the Macintosh. The possibility that current OS X developers (and especially OSX/Windows developers) may stop targeting Intel-based OS X in favor of Intel-based Windows is real. Basically, Apple now makes Windows boxen that may be the most predictable in terms of hardware configuration. People pit Apple against Microsoft but in my opinion, the real war is now Apple vs. Dell.
Now exactelly what is it that makes this Writely thingy any better than Open Office, AbiWord, or any of the DOZENS of office apps out there?
It works on any platform with a compatible web browser. You don't need to carry your files with you, anywhere. If you use POP and can't access your email, no problem. You can publish documents to an RSS feed. There are other benefits. There are also drawbacks, but that wasn't your question.
you should really check the crash logs and see why this is happening.
I have a number of macs, all of them running 24/7, two of them Internet-facing servers. One has been running for 3 years, and the other between 17 and 14 months. I have had 1 (ONE) kernel panic on one machine because of faulty USB drivers.
A kernel panic for unknown reasons once every month would make me very suspicious. Get your machines checked, Ford Prefect.
If there's any key that they should nix, it should be the Insert key, or maybe the Scroll Lock key (do any of you even know what it's used for?).
Back in the days when there was ONLY a command line, backspacing (left arrow/CTRL-B) moved the cursor backwards without deleting anything. When one began typing again, it would overwrite the contents of the buffer from the cursor forward. The "INSERT" key changed this behavior so that the new keystrokes were inserted at the cursor and the buffer contents would flow to the end. This functionality is no longer needed because almost all modern day computing contexts assume insert.
If I watch 3 seconds of a dancing comedian from Cleveland before hitting my attention span limit for wacky online videos, do I still count as one of those 30 million?
Many thousands of people rated that video 3 stars or higher (out of 5). I watched the video and it is not funny. At all. The comedian is somewhat talented and he provokes quite a bit of nostalgia but I don't think I even giggled once. He's a no one rehashing has-beens.
What struck me was the audience whose reaction can be heard in the video. I wondered how bored they must be to find the routine funny as opposed to mind-numbing. Or maybe it was a social thing: the stage and the performer socially demands the audience to laugh. I'm thinking of a mythical age when he would have been humored for a minute or so before being booed off the stage.
Maybe that's what the YouTube audience is: people bored enough they'll let amateurs entertain them, just like me and you when we read/.
Everyone has limitations, but one of the beauties of the human mind is metacognition. The phenomenon of having expert knowledge prevent one from reinterpreting contrary data is referred to as "confirmation bias" which I recently read about in a blog post by Bob Sutton. Sutton is a fairly renowned consultant.
In the above post, he refers to a phrase that should be familiar to many geeks, which is "strong opinions, weakly held." This is a very good approach to the study of science. Know what you know with near certainty, but the second you come across contrary evidence be ready to let everything go.
Really, it's just the idea that no one, really, knows anything. All knowledge is contingent and what little we think we know is probably wrong somewhere.
The problem with pseudoscientists such as yourself is that your thinking is limited by what you know.
So what if the fastest information can travel is the speed of light? If this 200-million-light year-wide amoeba is, say, a small part of the being, problems of entropy and decay may not be relevant. How long will the larger structures of such a being persist? What are the structures of such a being?
Imagine a species of "being" existing on the scale of what we call the quantum. Applying what is knowable about the world of the quantum to the world of the molecular would mean that our macro world could not exist. Such beings would say, "the ravages of quantum mechanics and particle decay and instability would not allow such beings to exist." They would be both right and wrong. The world we normally observe cannot be extrapolated from the world of the subatomic. Lucky for us, our world is an empirical fact.
Concerning the grandparent's ideas which you so cavalierly dismiss according to what you know about your sub-universe scale, those ideas are unproven and perhaps unlikely. What is not unlikely is the empirical fact that our universe is part of something whose dimensions and larger nature is UNKNOWABLE TO US
Slashdot would very likely fall under that category, so unlike what the LIES of the reactionary buffoons say, places like Slashdot would very likely not be blocked.
You, Roody Blashes, certainly are naive and a bit new to/. so I'll cut you some slack. Here's a question for you: have you ever seen links on/. to goatse.cx? What about GNAA first posts? How long do you think/. would stay on such the whitelist of allowed sites?
I want Apple to have folders merge their contents when files or folders of the same name are encountered. Currently there is no easy way to syncoronize the contents of folders with the same name
I'm guessing that this functionality is provided in either Windows or Linux. I honestly wonder how it works (little experience with Windows and less w/ Linux).
One possible solution is selecting all the files in a directory (CMD-A is the keyboard shortcut) and moving them into a second directory. In the Finder, you will be told/asked
An item named "SOMETHING" already exists in this location. Do you want to replace it with the one you are moving?
You can choose "Don't Replace", "Stop", or "Replace", with the option to "Apply to all". Choosing "Replace" with "Apply to all" will overwrite the old files, add unique files, and leave files not present in the source folder (but present in the destination folder) untouched. "Don't Replace" with "Apply to all" will only add unique files from the source folder. If you hold down the CMD key during this operation the contents will be merged, leaving behind an empty source folder. If you just drag, you will have a copy of the old source folder.
This is may not be as simple as the implementation you're thinking of, but maybe it will work for you.
While buzzword-laden, "I'm concentrating on continuing to catalyze an interdisciplinary study of cooperation and collective action" does not translate into "I'm still studying collective action."
The correct translation is "I'm encouraging people to study collective action using interdisciplinary methods." Leaving out" interdisciplinary" distorts the meaning, and you flat out miss the fact that he's talking about "catalyzing" such study more than doing it himself.
Seriously, you should at least READ about Quantum Mechanics before spewing BS like this. Quantum effect only happens in INFINITESIMAL scale.
I have read material regarding quantum mechanics and fully understand that quantum effects are negligible, as far as we know, on the macro scale. My point is that we have a very poor understanding of how the human brain--memory, consciousness, unconsciousness--works, and in the absence of robust theories of such one cannot speak with certainty about what effects entanglement may have on its functioning. I say this, even as I know that quantum effects are largely believed to have zero effect on systems larger than the atomic scale.
I do not believe anything about the world of the quantum, my good sir. I am saying that there is a possibility something may be going on that we poorly understand.
but according to all of the current theories, there is no way to actually use that to communicate
The issue is whether quantum entanglement can be a foundation for aligning two information systems. We have a very poor understanding of how the chemical and physical connections between neurons affect conscious thought, let alone the role quantum entanglement may play in the workings of a human mind.
While unlikely, if quantum effects affect perception in the human brain, quantum entanglement between particles in different human brains would have everything to do with giving those different human brains similar perceptions. Such "similar perception" might even be recursive to include not only sense impression but also thought itself. For example, if one brain's perception of its own thoughts is affected by quantum effects occurring within it, a second brain with quantum particles that are entangled with the first brain's might have a similar perception of the first brain's thoughts.
Such quantum effect-influenced perception might even operate in cases of intentional signing--when phrases are constituted volitionally--thus providing a material basis for what is understood as "telepathy." While all of this is conjecture and speculation, it is not difficult to imagine how quantum effect-based telepathy could work even if it is impossible to determine the outcome of quantum effects such as the spin on a quark or the polarization of a photon.
Shoulda used preview (I *did*, honest) and the lameness of replying to my own post, but I meant to say "How did this get moderated up? I'll find you the anomaly: No company in the world has a legitimate market in onlinechildpornography."
Sharing of child pornography leads to more child pornography.
Sharing of copyrighted music leads to less copyrighted music.
Find the anomaly.
How did this get moderated up? I'll find you the anomaly: No company in the world has a legitimate market in online pornography. The rationale is that illicit/illegal downloading leads to more illicit/illegal downloading in the cases of both child pornography and copyrighted music.
The damage (theorized by the RIAA) to legitimate music markets by illegal downloading cannot happen to the market for child pornography because there is no market of child pornography to harm.
We don't know how to effectively stop non-neutrality before it happens,
The first step is to develop a nomenclature that Joe Sixpack (read: your elected representative) will be able to understand is A Bad Thing (TM). Instead of calling it "non-neutrality," using evocative and descriptive phrases such as service discrimination or biased delivery or prejudicial routing might explain more clearly just what the telcos are up to.
Humans are curious, when you find a cd, hard drive, thumb drive, the first thing your going to want to do is stick it in your computer and find out what juicy secrets are on it.
Yes, they are curious about prurient matters, but some of them are also thoughtful and helpful. Notwithstanding the selfish behavior of some people who find unattended hardware, many people would understand the value of the data contained on a lost thumb drive. I personally would have mounted the thumb drive on my desktop in order to find clues that might help me return the drive to its rightful owner.
If along the way I had found a "sexy.jpg" or some email with the subject line "Want to meet for quickie?", yeah, I might have opened it up (I run a Mac and probably live a bit too dangerously even given near-zero infection rates of Macs today). But I would have definitely tried to get the drive back to its owner.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone suing U-Tube would be taking the risk of losing the lawsuit and setting a precident.
Elsewhere on /. I pontificated that YouTube was going to get taken down. While YouTube may still get slammed, I'm starting to rethink my position, especially with regard to how things turned out for Napster.
That is, the RIAA took a fairly big risk going after Napster because the music industry truly believed Napster to threaten their bottom line. Without getting into nitty gritties, many people today believe that the RIAA overestimated the damage that illegal music downloads have on sales. In fact, some experts believe music downloads do not significantly effect music sales while contributing to societal good and others assert that filesharing actually spurs music sales.
Given that lesson, it could be that the video industry (and even an overextended and hyper-litigious music industry) is thinking to itself that stopping YouTube is not in their best interests. Not only would the lawsuit be expensive, but it would dampen the enthusiasm people are clearly expressing regarding downloadable video (and I don't mean BitTorrrent).
Now, I'm the last person to believe that the suits have actually learned from their mistakes (*cough* Jack Valenti *cough*)* but it is entirely possible that the industry might have other plans for YouTube including taking a "wait and see" attitude. Then again, they could simply be spellchecking the suit before submitting it.
* Yes, I know Valenti is no longer the head of the MPAA
Indeed it is a love of liberty that inspires citizens to give the federal government the powerful tools they need to wipe it out completely.
If I'm reading you correctly, you just said that people love their freedom so much that they are willing to be slaves.
An RSS reader is better if you want to automate the checking of those sites you're interested in. You don't have to keep refreshing; the RSS aggregator does it for you and, depending on your client, can alert you if there is new content.
This saves you the trouble of loading a new set of tabs and finding no new content. RSS readers are very good with infrequently updated pages. RSS readers also keep you up to date on frequently updated pages because you will be notified of new content once your reader discovers it. RSS readers also are easier to scan content with. I find myself not getting sucked in by story summaries. For many types of news, the headline is enough. In my case, using an RSS reader has cut my surfing time by 75% (as near as I can tell and without exaggeration.)
Finally, some RSS feeds include summaries, others excerpts, and some even the entire article. The amount of information you get depends on the level of detail the feed publisher chooses to provide.
I myself was scratching my own head about RSS readers and so decided to make an effort to see what the hoopdehaw was all about. I blogged about two Mac-based RSS readers (one of them free like beer) and haven't looked back. In fact, I so much prefer surfing by feed that I don't surf without access to an RSS reader. Just thinking about sifting through all the articles, say, on the front page of the NYTimes is fatiguing.
That mental fatigue is the result of the facts that, unlike RSS readers, web pages do not expire older articles as quickly as most RSS feed readers (with their default settings) and that most sites provide no way for you to flag an article for later attention or to mark an article as read.
The short version is try an RSS reader (I mention a few Windows-based clients at the bottom of the above-mentioned blog entry) and see for yourself if loading up Firefox tabs gives you comparable functionality. An RSS reader is one of those things like chat. Trying to explain why chat is in some ways preferable to email gets nowhere fast. You have to try it to understand what is so great about it.
Napster did not redistribute content. Their servers kept a database of the peers who actually provided the content, sort of like BitTorrent except that the peers kept no information about who owned what. Rather, Napster's servers collected and organized that information.
(Remember the publicity Napster got before they brought it down?)
Part of the reason for the publicity of the Napster case is that it happened in the days of Web 1.0 and many people, heck the entire world, were watching to see what would happen. It wasn't exactly clear that Napster would lose. In fact, early public opinion of Judge Patel's ruling was that she didn't know enough about technology to generate a sensible ruling.
When (not if) YouTube goes down, it's gonna do so lickety split because it has the pathway (I'm not sure it's precedent) of Napster to take. This is gonna be fast, folks. Allowing users to violate copyright on a mass scale using centralized servers is entrepreneurial suicide.
Foreskin is vestigial.
Foreskin is vestigial in the same sense that the appendix is vestigial. Humans don't fully understand what biological purposes the foreskin serves and so consider it without biological function. For starters, foreskin is the only external tissue in the human body that has estrogen receptors. What possible biological function could estrogen receptors on the human male body serve? I don't know but I do know I wish my foreskin had not been removed before I even had a say in the matter.
Here's one site that lists many possible benefits of foreskin.
I think you will find that the majority of people that get an Intel mac will end up booting into windows less and less as they get used to OS X. Those "windows only" mac users that buy macs for the "shiny" hardware are probably an even smaller niche than people who by a mac to run linux.
This is what I personally hope. I also hear what you're saying about the appeal of using Apple's Core APIs. Though I am not a developer myself (outside of some limited server-side scripting and the like), I have seen some of the marketing for those APIs and understand some of their ramifications for development. On the other hand, there are many OS X developers that continue to ignore the benefits of Apple APIs. Adobe, who has so far stuck to Carbon all throughout OS X, is especially "guilty" of this.
I'm not knocking the benefit of coding in/for OS X. Don't get me wrong. I even allow that it may be superior to coding on other platforms. I also understand that development houses don't only go for market share numbers. But, I am speaking to the specific case of where a house realizes that most of its users are Windows-capable and that their OS X development costs are greater than their OS X profits.
So, yeah. Who knows what will happen in 5 years? I'm praying I won't be in a situation of trying to compete on eBay for OS X-compatible Apple machines because Apple no longer manufactures such.
I would suggest reading up on OS X on the developer site. Read up on Core Audio, Core Data, Core Image, Core Video and the new Core Animation framework. Before the .NET framework was 1.0, Apple had "frameworks" galore for developers to develop against.
Your post perfectly illustrates how Mac people [often] can't imagine the perspective of others. I am a dyed-in-the-wool Mac user, posting this from one of my two Internet-facing Mac OS X servers.
What you don't get is that Apple may one day to decide to maximize hardware numbers by chasing emphasizing sales to users who run Windows. In other words, one day Windows-running Mac owners may outnumber OS X-running Mac owners. Consider what happened to iPod firewire connectivity once it was clear that more Windows users own iPods than Mac users. I doubt we'll see firewire connections on future iPods and that was the direct result of there being no benefit to pleasing OS X-running users.
Now, an OS is quite a different thing than a peripheral connectivity, but think about development houses faced with an all-Intel user base. You see that 15% of your users are on OS X and the remainder on Windows. You know of that 15%, at least 75% own Intel Macs. Your research also suggests that more than half of that number dual-boot into Windows (leaving just less that 6% of all users who do not use Windows at all). What do you think such a company might do with its Mac development team especially if the Mac effort was more than, say, 10% of total development cost?
In a PowerPC-based Mac world, 15% of OS X users is 15% (installed base, not market share). In a Intel-based Mac world, that 15% could foreseeably become 6%. The advent of Windows-capable Macs extent jeopardizes the future of OS X as a platform. Whether that jeopardy realizes the erosion of OX X's installed base is a question only the future will answer.
My point is that Apple is not doing direct battle with Microsoft but with Windows-users who use non-Apple hardware. I will admit that this is complicated situation because dual-booting for Intel-based Macs can also be a way to get some Windows users to get OS X for free (as in beer) with their next machine.
2) .]
[. . . ]
You know that most OS X PC users have Windows anyways, therefore, does it make sense to make a special OS X PC version of your software? No. Instead, you drop _all_ OS X support, and tell the users to simply boot into Windows when they want to use your software.
[. .
You have just described the platform into which Apple's switch to Intel has transformed the Macintosh. The possibility that current OS X developers (and especially OSX/Windows developers) may stop targeting Intel-based OS X in favor of Intel-based Windows is real. Basically, Apple now makes Windows boxen that may be the most predictable in terms of hardware configuration. People pit Apple against Microsoft but in my opinion, the real war is now Apple vs. Dell.
Now exactelly what is it that makes this Writely thingy any better than Open Office, AbiWord, or any of the DOZENS of office apps out there?
It works on any platform with a compatible web browser. You don't need to carry your files with you, anywhere. If you use POP and can't access your email, no problem. You can publish documents to an RSS feed. There are other benefits. There are also drawbacks, but that wasn't your question.
you should really check the crash logs and see why this is happening.
I have a number of macs, all of them running 24/7, two of them Internet-facing servers. One has been running for 3 years, and the other between 17 and 14 months. I have had 1 (ONE) kernel panic on one machine because of faulty USB drivers.
A kernel panic for unknown reasons once every month would make me very suspicious. Get your machines checked, Ford Prefect.
If there's any key that they should nix, it should be the Insert key, or maybe the Scroll Lock key (do any of you even know what it's used for?).
Back in the days when there was ONLY a command line, backspacing (left arrow/CTRL-B) moved the cursor backwards without deleting anything. When one began typing again, it would overwrite the contents of the buffer from the cursor forward. The "INSERT" key changed this behavior so that the new keystrokes were inserted at the cursor and the buffer contents would flow to the end. This functionality is no longer needed because almost all modern day computing contexts assume insert.
If I watch 3 seconds of a dancing comedian from Cleveland before hitting my attention span limit for wacky online videos, do I still count as one of those 30 million?
Many thousands of people rated that video 3 stars or higher (out of 5). I watched the video and it is not funny. At all. The comedian is somewhat talented and he provokes quite a bit of nostalgia but I don't think I even giggled once. He's a no one rehashing has-beens.
What struck me was the audience whose reaction can be heard in the video. I wondered how bored they must be to find the routine funny as opposed to mind-numbing. Or maybe it was a social thing: the stage and the performer socially demands the audience to laugh. I'm thinking of a mythical age when he would have been humored for a minute or so before being booed off the stage.
Maybe that's what the YouTube audience is: people bored enough they'll let amateurs entertain them, just like me and you when we read /.
Go figure.
Whose thinking ISN'T limited by what they know?
Everyone has limitations, but one of the beauties of the human mind is metacognition. The phenomenon of having expert knowledge prevent one from reinterpreting contrary data is referred to as "confirmation bias" which I recently read about in a blog post by Bob Sutton. Sutton is a fairly renowned consultant.
In the above post, he refers to a phrase that should be familiar to many geeks, which is "strong opinions, weakly held." This is a very good approach to the study of science. Know what you know with near certainty, but the second you come across contrary evidence be ready to let everything go.
Really, it's just the idea that no one, really, knows anything. All knowledge is contingent and what little we think we know is probably wrong somewhere.
The problem with pseudoscientists such as yourself is that your thinking is limited by what you know.
So what if the fastest information can travel is the speed of light? If this 200-million-light year-wide amoeba is, say, a small part of the being, problems of entropy and decay may not be relevant. How long will the larger structures of such a being persist? What are the structures of such a being?
Imagine a species of "being" existing on the scale of what we call the quantum. Applying what is knowable about the world of the quantum to the world of the molecular would mean that our macro world could not exist. Such beings would say, "the ravages of quantum mechanics and particle decay and instability would not allow such beings to exist." They would be both right and wrong. The world we normally observe cannot be extrapolated from the world of the subatomic. Lucky for us, our world is an empirical fact.
Concerning the grandparent's ideas which you so cavalierly dismiss according to what you know about your sub-universe scale, those ideas are unproven and perhaps unlikely. What is not unlikely is the empirical fact that our universe is part of something whose dimensions and larger nature is UNKNOWABLE TO US
You, Roody Blashes, certainly are naive and a bit new to /. so I'll cut you some slack. Here's a question for you: have you ever seen links on /. to goatse.cx? What about GNAA first posts? How long do you think /. would stay on such the whitelist of allowed sites?
I'm guessing that this functionality is provided in either Windows or Linux. I honestly wonder how it works (little experience with Windows and less w/ Linux).
One possible solution is selecting all the files in a directory (CMD-A is the keyboard shortcut) and moving them into a second directory. In the Finder, you will be told/asked
An item named "SOMETHING" already exists in this location. Do you want to replace it with the one you are moving?
You can choose "Don't Replace", "Stop", or "Replace", with the option to "Apply to all". Choosing "Replace" with "Apply to all" will overwrite the old files, add unique files, and leave files not present in the source folder (but present in the destination folder) untouched. "Don't Replace" with "Apply to all" will only add unique files from the source folder. If you hold down the CMD key during this operation the contents will be merged, leaving behind an empty source folder. If you just drag, you will have a copy of the old source folder.
This is may not be as simple as the implementation you're thinking of, but maybe it will work for you.
While buzzword-laden, "I'm concentrating on continuing to catalyze an interdisciplinary study of cooperation and collective action" does not translate into "I'm still studying collective action."
The correct translation is "I'm encouraging people to study collective action using interdisciplinary methods." Leaving out" interdisciplinary" distorts the meaning, and you flat out miss the fact that he's talking about "catalyzing" such study more than doing it himself.
Looks like he's been Thurrottled. ba-DUM tish
Seriously, you should at least READ about Quantum Mechanics before spewing BS like this. Quantum effect only happens in INFINITESIMAL scale.
I have read material regarding quantum mechanics and fully understand that quantum effects are negligible, as far as we know, on the macro scale. My point is that we have a very poor understanding of how the human brain--memory, consciousness, unconsciousness--works, and in the absence of robust theories of such one cannot speak with certainty about what effects entanglement may have on its functioning. I say this, even as I know that quantum effects are largely believed to have zero effect on systems larger than the atomic scale.
I do not believe anything about the world of the quantum, my good sir. I am saying that there is a possibility something may be going on that we poorly understand.
but according to all of the current theories, there is no way to actually use that to communicate
The issue is whether quantum entanglement can be a foundation for aligning two information systems. We have a very poor understanding of how the chemical and physical connections between neurons affect conscious thought, let alone the role quantum entanglement may play in the workings of a human mind.
While unlikely, if quantum effects affect perception in the human brain, quantum entanglement between particles in different human brains would have everything to do with giving those different human brains similar perceptions. Such "similar perception" might even be recursive to include not only sense impression but also thought itself. For example, if one brain's perception of its own thoughts is affected by quantum effects occurring within it, a second brain with quantum particles that are entangled with the first brain's might have a similar perception of the first brain's thoughts.
Such quantum effect-influenced perception might even operate in cases of intentional signing--when phrases are constituted volitionally--thus providing a material basis for what is understood as "telepathy." While all of this is conjecture and speculation, it is not difficult to imagine how quantum effect-based telepathy could work even if it is impossible to determine the outcome of quantum effects such as the spin on a quark or the polarization of a photon.
Shoulda used preview (I *did*, honest) and the lameness of replying to my own post, but I meant to say "How did this get moderated up? I'll find you the anomaly: No company in the world has a legitimate market in online child pornography."
dur.
How did this get moderated up? I'll find you the anomaly: No company in the world has a legitimate market in online pornography. The rationale is that illicit/illegal downloading leads to more illicit/illegal downloading in the cases of both child pornography and copyrighted music.
The damage (theorized by the RIAA) to legitimate music markets by illegal downloading cannot happen to the market for child pornography because there is no market of child pornography to harm.
The first step is to develop a nomenclature that Joe Sixpack (read: your elected representative) will be able to understand is A Bad Thing (TM). Instead of calling it "non-neutrality," using evocative and descriptive phrases such as service discrimination or biased delivery or prejudicial routing might explain more clearly just what the telcos are up to.
Yes, they are curious about prurient matters, but some of them are also thoughtful and helpful. Notwithstanding the selfish behavior of some people who find unattended hardware, many people would understand the value of the data contained on a lost thumb drive. I personally would have mounted the thumb drive on my desktop in order to find clues that might help me return the drive to its rightful owner.
If along the way I had found a "sexy.jpg" or some email with the subject line "Want to meet for quickie?", yeah, I might have opened it up (I run a Mac and probably live a bit too dangerously even given near-zero infection rates of Macs today). But I would have definitely tried to get the drive back to its owner.