If you think World War 2 was caused by excessive friskiness, I have an entertaining and educational correction for you (you can skip to 8:15 if you want to avoid the summary, I wouldn't):
No, they haven't been wrong - we've already fought our first major modern war over food, that was World War 2.
Shortly after that was the green revolution, which drastically increased crop yields and has allowed us to put off the next war for a long while. Ten billion people is unsustainable though, or at least it is as long as certain selfish countries keep insisting on dragging themselves out of poverty.
The short is: switching to dollar coins is both less convenient and more expensive than sticking with bills. It's surprising, given the much longer lifetime of coins, but unambiguous.
Okay, from the Wikipedia article on Greenland then:
DNA of trees, plants, and insects including butterflies and spiders from beneath the southern Greenland glacier was estimated to date to 450,000 to 900,000 years ago, according to the remnants retrieved from this long-vanished boreal forest. That view contrasts sharply with the prevailing one that a lush forest of this kind could not have existed in Greenland any later than 2.4 million years ago.
So the most recent time Greenland could have supported significant plant life was 450,000 years ago. More recently than expected, still not recent.
The Wikipedia article does not say that Greenland's climate has changed dramatically many times over the last 100,000 years, it says that ice cores from Greenland have shown that the world's weather and temperature can change rapidly and that this has happened often over the last 100,000 years. This is not a reassuring finding, as it implies that the seemingly stable climate that we've enjoyed over the last few thousand years can change very quickly if pushed.
Yes, we all know that older folk have been ignoring warnings about global warming since the seventies. That's not something to brag about.
Yes, the climate has not been the same and will not remain the same forever. This is not an excuse to continue polluting. All people die sometime, right? So shooting them in the head now doesn't really matter, does it?
Usenet as a discussion forum has been dying thanks to web forums, and no other reason. It's too bad, functionality is much greater with Usenet, but much like email clients vs. web mail most people seem to think that having these discussions on web pages is more convenient.
Publishers generally make far more money than developers and I don't begrudge Wolfire one bit for making money. I don't think that making money from the Humble Bundle means that they've sold out either - they took a stab at doing something new, and something that originally had some principles, and they struck it big in the process. Good for them.
Selling out is when you give up the principles for the sake of money. That's new for Wolfire.
Now, to be fair, I don't know how Wolfire actually feels about DRM. When the first Humble Bundle came out the fact that it was DRM free was more or less treated as a marketing tool - "No excuse not to buy," they said. But regardless how they feel about it, by positioning themselves as one of the few and most prominent DRM free publishers, and advertising that fact, they've set themselves up for this.
Okay, I know nothing of these people, but did they ever promise to always be free and cross-platform?
Pretty much, yeah. From the Humble Bundle's blog:
Welcome to the blog of the Humble Bundle. We sell bundles of cross-platform, DRM-free video games by independent developers. You get to set your own price while supporting the Electronic Frontier...
Cross platform, DRM free, indie, and "pay what you want" are the four things that the Humble Bundle has built their brand on. Ars has a pretty good write up on the problems here:
I did understand that part, but again: how can you say this for sure? Every program is considered pork by someone, even education. All the news I get out of California (and I don't live there, so I don't get everything) is cut after cut after cut. Some of those may be good, some of those may be bad, but every cut has people cheering and jeering about it.
I expect it's used much more often by conspiracy theorists than conspirators. Consider your California example: it's well known that the state is in trouble financially and lack of money always means cuts somewhere. How is it that you can say with such confidence that the education system wouldn't lose funding?
"I don't think in the outside world, outside tech, anyone in their 40s would think age discrimination was happening to them," says Cliff Palefsky
I love this, only a person who can't remember their youth would make such a ridiculous statement. Age discrimination is ever-present, but tech is one of the few areas where it works in reverse. Remember not being able to vote or drink or smoke or drive or choose where you wanted to live or go to school? Yeah... no age discrimination.
There is no reason to assume that mandating driverless cars would restrict freedom of travel. Freedom of choice is vague and arguably not something which exists in this context - why can't I drive around in a car made out of jelly? Answer: it's not road legal because it's unsafe.
Your assumption that the bus would be fine is false:
I'm delighted to hear that while NASA is underfunded to the point where they've needed to cancel maintenance of the Hubble and the James Webb telescope is on the verge of being scrapped, our spy organization is so overflowing with money that they can make two Hubble equivalents which are, apparently, redundant next to all of their other money and toys.
There's something that a lot of people in this thread seem to be missing. You, as many people here, are equating guilt and innocence with "something which did or did not happen" and this is not the way the system works. Guilt and innocence are not provable facts in the rigorous sense and, as such, are not facts at all in the way that a person commonly thinks of that term.
The jurors' official roles in court are as the "finders of fact." The system operates under the necessary assumption that the jurors are correct when they find someone to be not guilty, not because the jurors are always right but because operating under this assumption is the only way to hold a real trial where an accused person who hasn't committed a crime can walk away at the end.
The important thing here is that this does not end in the courtroom, the assumption of innocence is a sadly neglected obligation that the population holds as well. Our justice system relies on the idea that a person can be tried and found not guilty and be unharmed by the process. This can only happen if that person's friends and neighbors hold to the presumption of innocence just as the court does. Unfortunately the media circumvents this, and for that reason reporting on pending court cases is banned or partially banned in many countries.
I have no idea what the development cost for something like this would be, but I do know that it isn't as simple as a high profit margin paying for that investment.
I recall that one of the issues with the development of the B-2 was that the government was paying a private contractor (Northrup Grumman) to develop this thing, and then also paid for the product. I believe that this is how many if not most military contracts work.
Here's a random question for some knowledgeable person: how much of that $100,000 cost per interceptor is overhead? I realize that missiles aren't simple things, but that strikes me as way out of line with what it would actually cost to build one of these.
That goes for other missiles as well - you always hear about Tomahawks, etc., costing $1 million+, how much do they actually cost to build?
Wasn't this the reasoning behind the "enhanced patdown" procedure? To get more people to go through the nudie scanners? I recall the head of the TSA said this explicitly.
Foreign films - incensing for streaming in different countries is often complicated, but as long as the DVD is available for your region then you can always rent it out.
I know this is being framed as a unions / management story, and that's fine and at least partly true, but really: Hostess is losing money because their products are horribly unhealthy and people are wising up about it. People wonder why Americans are fat, and the reason is always because companies like Hostess haven't gone out of business sooner.
When people learn about junk like healthy eating, companies like Hostess need to either reform or get replaced. And that's fine. There's nothing wrong with a company being replaced.
I want to be clear that I don't dislike Hostess, but it appears that they have served their purpose.
The point of free speech to protect unpopular speech.
That's what he said: "The point of free speech is to protect informative discussion and analysis of policy."
What do you think that means?
It's not really true regardless - free speech, like freedom of the press and many other rights, is an attempt to reign in corruption and tyranny. Protecting unpopular speech is just a means to an end. The GP really has a point here, he clearly wasn't trolling. Shame he was modded down just because people disagree with the point he was making.
As for the point he was making: I disagree with it. It's true that flag burning can get in the way of rational discussion, but if you've ever been to a protest you know that they aren't places for rational discourse. They're places for outrage and people doing stupid shit. You don't want the people to do this, it can really harm a good cause when a protest turns ugly, but a protest that is guaranteed to be orderly is a protest over an issue that no one cares about.
Outlawing flag burning, or outlawing cursing at authorities, or outlawing stupid chants, means outlawing protests. And as much as rational discourse is needed to find solutions to problems, protests are needed to implement those solutions. (Yes, really. Some protests are stupid, some are useless, but others have changed the world.)
Because of the artificial scarcity of housing, "beach front" doesn't carry much value in NYC.
What aspect of the scarcity of housing is artificial? I've never heard of this. I'd always thought the problem was simpler - a lot of people and a lack of space.
This is a very limited definition of monopoly. The classic monopoly case, the one that created the antitrust laws, was Standard Oil: Rockefeller would move into an area, sell at a loss until all of his smaller competition was out of business, then jack up the price once he had a local monopoly (or local... something, if I'm not allowed to use the word monopoly).
No government involved here, no guns except those carried by Rockefeller's pinkertons. And most certainly not a figment of the imagination.
Pie-in-the-sky idealism aside, the laws in question (about car resale) were certainly not failures. They were clearly aimed at maintaining a functioning independent dealership marketplace, and the fact that independent dealerships exist shows that that objective has been at least partially fulfilled.
Not only that, in the last year listed, 1998, not one of them sold a million cars. Foreign competition is largely responsible. And it would not be possible without restrictive regulations.
You're complaining that unspecified regulations make the market too free? The cars designed in Japan (but manufactured here) were cheaper and better made than the American designed ones... Americans love crappy rust buckets, if only regulations had let us buy them instead of those functional and competently designed cars (::spit::) from foreign competitors.
What nonsense. I searched through your comment history looking for the Wikipedia link you mentioned and couldn't find it. I did notice you talking about how Obama's birth certificate is faked.
Slashdot Mirror
If you think World War 2 was caused by excessive friskiness, I have an entertaining and educational correction for you (you can skip to 8:15 if you want to avoid the summary, I wouldn't):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q78COTwT7nE&feature=BFa&list=PLBDA2E52FB1EF80C9
No, they haven't been wrong - we've already fought our first major modern war over food, that was World War 2.
Shortly after that was the green revolution, which drastically increased crop yields and has allowed us to put off the next war for a long while. Ten billion people is unsustainable though, or at least it is as long as certain selfish countries keep insisting on dragging themselves out of poverty.
Planet Money did a whole podcast on this. Don't see anyone linking to it, so here's the most current thing:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/11/29/166103071/no-killing-the-dollar-bill-would-not-save-the-government-money
The short is: switching to dollar coins is both less convenient and more expensive than sticking with bills. It's surprising, given the much longer lifetime of coins, but unambiguous.
DNA of trees, plants, and insects including butterflies and spiders from beneath the southern Greenland glacier was estimated to date to 450,000 to 900,000 years ago, according to the remnants retrieved from this long-vanished boreal forest. That view contrasts sharply with the prevailing one that a lush forest of this kind could not have existed in Greenland any later than 2.4 million years ago.
So the most recent time Greenland could have supported significant plant life was 450,000 years ago. More recently than expected, still not recent.
The Wikipedia article does not say that Greenland's climate has changed dramatically many times over the last 100,000 years, it says that ice cores from Greenland have shown that the world's weather and temperature can change rapidly and that this has happened often over the last 100,000 years. This is not a reassuring finding, as it implies that the seemingly stable climate that we've enjoyed over the last few thousand years can change very quickly if pushed.
Yes, we all know that older folk have been ignoring warnings about global warming since the seventies. That's not something to brag about.
Yes, the climate has not been the same and will not remain the same forever. This is not an excuse to continue polluting. All people die sometime, right? So shooting them in the head now doesn't really matter, does it?
Usenet as a discussion forum has been dying thanks to web forums, and no other reason. It's too bad, functionality is much greater with Usenet, but much like email clients vs. web mail most people seem to think that having these discussions on web pages is more convenient.
Publishers generally make far more money than developers and I don't begrudge Wolfire one bit for making money. I don't think that making money from the Humble Bundle means that they've sold out either - they took a stab at doing something new, and something that originally had some principles, and they struck it big in the process. Good for them.
Selling out is when you give up the principles for the sake of money. That's new for Wolfire.
Now, to be fair, I don't know how Wolfire actually feels about DRM. When the first Humble Bundle came out the fact that it was DRM free was more or less treated as a marketing tool - "No excuse not to buy," they said. But regardless how they feel about it, by positioning themselves as one of the few and most prominent DRM free publishers, and advertising that fact, they've set themselves up for this.
Okay, I know nothing of these people, but did they ever promise to always be free and cross-platform?
Pretty much, yeah. From the Humble Bundle's blog:
Welcome to the blog of the Humble Bundle. We sell bundles of cross-platform, DRM-free video games by independent developers. You get to set your own price while supporting the Electronic Frontier...
Cross platform, DRM free, indie, and "pay what you want" are the four things that the Humble Bundle has built their brand on. Ars has a pretty good write up on the problems here:
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/11/humble-thq-bundle-threatens-to-ruin-the-brands-reputation/
I did understand that part, but again: how can you say this for sure? Every program is considered pork by someone, even education. All the news I get out of California (and I don't live there, so I don't get everything) is cut after cut after cut. Some of those may be good, some of those may be bad, but every cut has people cheering and jeering about it.
I expect it's used much more often by conspiracy theorists than conspirators. Consider your California example: it's well known that the state is in trouble financially and lack of money always means cuts somewhere. How is it that you can say with such confidence that the education system wouldn't lose funding?
"I don't think in the outside world, outside tech, anyone in their 40s would think age discrimination was happening to them," says Cliff Palefsky
I love this, only a person who can't remember their youth would make such a ridiculous statement. Age discrimination is ever-present, but tech is one of the few areas where it works in reverse. Remember not being able to vote or drink or smoke or drive or choose where you wanted to live or go to school? Yeah... no age discrimination.
There is no reason to assume that mandating driverless cars would restrict freedom of travel. Freedom of choice is vague and arguably not something which exists in this context - why can't I drive around in a car made out of jelly? Answer: it's not road legal because it's unsafe.
Your assumption that the bus would be fine is false:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrollton,_Kentucky_bus_collision
To answer your question: for convenience, and because in this hypothetical situation driverless cars are the only cars which are road legal.
I'm delighted to hear that while NASA is underfunded to the point where they've needed to cancel maintenance of the Hubble and the James Webb telescope is on the verge of being scrapped, our spy organization is so overflowing with money that they can make two Hubble equivalents which are, apparently, redundant next to all of their other money and toys.
There's something that a lot of people in this thread seem to be missing. You, as many people here, are equating guilt and innocence with "something which did or did not happen" and this is not the way the system works. Guilt and innocence are not provable facts in the rigorous sense and, as such, are not facts at all in the way that a person commonly thinks of that term.
The jurors' official roles in court are as the "finders of fact." The system operates under the necessary assumption that the jurors are correct when they find someone to be not guilty, not because the jurors are always right but because operating under this assumption is the only way to hold a real trial where an accused person who hasn't committed a crime can walk away at the end.
The important thing here is that this does not end in the courtroom, the assumption of innocence is a sadly neglected obligation that the population holds as well. Our justice system relies on the idea that a person can be tried and found not guilty and be unharmed by the process. This can only happen if that person's friends and neighbors hold to the presumption of innocence just as the court does. Unfortunately the media circumvents this, and for that reason reporting on pending court cases is banned or partially banned in many countries.
There is no statement about the innocence of the person.
Yes, there is. A person is presumed innocent until the jury finds a guilty verdict, an acquittal is simply a confirmation of this assumption.
She may actually be guilty.
No, she's innocent. She wasn't proven guilty. Why is this so hard to understand?
I have no idea what the development cost for something like this would be, but I do know that it isn't as simple as a high profit margin paying for that investment.
I recall that one of the issues with the development of the B-2 was that the government was paying a private contractor (Northrup Grumman) to develop this thing, and then also paid for the product. I believe that this is how many if not most military contracts work.
Here's a random question for some knowledgeable person: how much of that $100,000 cost per interceptor is overhead? I realize that missiles aren't simple things, but that strikes me as way out of line with what it would actually cost to build one of these.
That goes for other missiles as well - you always hear about Tomahawks, etc., costing $1 million+, how much do they actually cost to build?
Wasn't this the reasoning behind the "enhanced patdown" procedure? To get more people to go through the nudie scanners? I recall the head of the TSA said this explicitly.
Foreign films - incensing for streaming in different countries is often complicated, but as long as the DVD is available for your region then you can always rent it out.
I know this is being framed as a unions / management story, and that's fine and at least partly true, but really: Hostess is losing money because their products are horribly unhealthy and people are wising up about it. People wonder why Americans are fat, and the reason is always because companies like Hostess haven't gone out of business sooner.
When people learn about junk like healthy eating, companies like Hostess need to either reform or get replaced. And that's fine. There's nothing wrong with a company being replaced.
I want to be clear that I don't dislike Hostess, but it appears that they have served their purpose.
The point of free speech to protect unpopular speech.
That's what he said: "The point of free speech is to protect informative discussion and analysis of policy."
What do you think that means?
It's not really true regardless - free speech, like freedom of the press and many other rights, is an attempt to reign in corruption and tyranny. Protecting unpopular speech is just a means to an end. The GP really has a point here, he clearly wasn't trolling. Shame he was modded down just because people disagree with the point he was making.
As for the point he was making: I disagree with it. It's true that flag burning can get in the way of rational discussion, but if you've ever been to a protest you know that they aren't places for rational discourse. They're places for outrage and people doing stupid shit. You don't want the people to do this, it can really harm a good cause when a protest turns ugly, but a protest that is guaranteed to be orderly is a protest over an issue that no one cares about.
Outlawing flag burning, or outlawing cursing at authorities, or outlawing stupid chants, means outlawing protests. And as much as rational discourse is needed to find solutions to problems, protests are needed to implement those solutions. (Yes, really. Some protests are stupid, some are useless, but others have changed the world.)
Because of the artificial scarcity of housing, "beach front" doesn't carry much value in NYC.
What aspect of the scarcity of housing is artificial? I've never heard of this. I'd always thought the problem was simpler - a lot of people and a lack of space.
Monopolies don't exist in a free market system.
This is a very limited definition of monopoly. The classic monopoly case, the one that created the antitrust laws, was Standard Oil: Rockefeller would move into an area, sell at a loss until all of his smaller competition was out of business, then jack up the price once he had a local monopoly (or local... something, if I'm not allowed to use the word monopoly).
No government involved here, no guns except those carried by Rockefeller's pinkertons. And most certainly not a figment of the imagination.
Pie-in-the-sky idealism aside, the laws in question (about car resale) were certainly not failures. They were clearly aimed at maintaining a functioning independent dealership marketplace, and the fact that independent dealerships exist shows that that objective has been at least partially fulfilled.
Not only that, in the last year listed, 1998, not one of them sold a million cars. Foreign competition is largely responsible. And it would not be possible without restrictive regulations.
You're complaining that unspecified regulations make the market too free? The cars designed in Japan (but manufactured here) were cheaper and better made than the American designed ones... Americans love crappy rust buckets, if only regulations had let us buy them instead of those functional and competently designed cars (::spit::) from foreign competitors.
What nonsense. I searched through your comment history looking for the Wikipedia link you mentioned and couldn't find it. I did notice you talking about how Obama's birth certificate is faked.
Thank you, GP's comment confused me too. This is obviously a law directed at preventing abuse from monopolies.