Having faith in other people should never be considered stupid.
People. Not corporations. Not representatives of corporations.
In dealing with any entity lacking even the faintest trace of a
conscience (one might go so far as to say a soul, but morality
doesn't require religion), only a fool would assume the other
party will act "nicely". The other party will act in the manner
it deems optimal for its scoring criterion - In the case of
corporations, that means money.
Put less abstractly - Corporations exist to make money, and only
to make money. Expecting basic "human" decency from them will
leave you with a sore ass and not even a "thanks" in the
morning, much less a reacharound.
35nm is planned but hasn't actually been done yet. It's
unlikely to help much either, because current leakage at those
levels is being insane.
Although we might not gain anything by going below 30-35nm
gates, don't overlook the huge fallout rate of current
photolithography (if you can still call it "photo" when dealing
with "soft" x-rays as the light source).
If you can produce, at your extreme limit, a 65nm feature, then
trying to produce exactly 65nm features leaves almost no room
for error. If, however, you can produce down to 5nm features,
then you can manage 35nm features with a huge margin of
error.
Thus, your fallout rate drops from the current of over
50% (or so I've heard - I don't know the exact figure), to very
nearly zero.
The practicality of clock speed increases and heat/energy
reduction aside, better photolithography (or whatever
manufacturing techniques we eventually move on to) means
higher yields of better quality at the same size.
Also, consider the fact that some parts of a modern CPU
run a LOT faster than other parts - Compare addition with
division, for example. Addition has taken a single clock
(less, actually, but assuming a serial dependancy, you
can't do better than one op per clock) for several
generations now, while division still brings the CPU
to a crawl. If you could make a full adder "fast enough"
at whatever size optimizes energy consumption (90nm seems
pretty good at the moment; 65 might waste more than it
saves), while chewing through power to perform a division
in fewer clocks with 15nm gates - That would both improve
performance and save power at the same time.
Do you give a child Legos in the hopes they'll still
be playing with them as adults? Of course not,
New to Slashdot, eh?;-)
Overall, I agree with you completely (except not expecting
adults to use Lego). Had I started my computer experience
with Windows, I fully expect I would not currently work in
IT/CS/SE/whatever. Not for the classic "Windowz sux"
battlecry; but rather, because Windows doesn't challenge
the user to improve themselves. The user has no motivation
to learn how the underlying OS works, much less the hardware
itself. Hell, at least DOS came with qbasic - XP doesn't
come with any programming interface included with
the core OS.
Compare that with my first computer - At school, a TRS-80,
and at home, a Coleco Adam. They didn't come up to a friendly
screen telling you exactly what to do... They came up to
a BASIC interpreter prompt as the primary user interface.
Learning to "use" the computer meant learning to program.
As much of an improvement as I saw upgrading to my first
PC clone, I remember feeling cheated that I could choose
between crappy resolution with 4 colors or slightly less
crappy in black and white. And how do you make a simple
3-voice sound? You just couldn't, directly. So I learned
how the machine actually generated sound, and that I would
need to go a tad bit lower-level to get anything beyond
single-voice square-wave sound (for graphics, I just had to
wait for VGA, no way around it sucking with CGA).
But all that, while perhaps sounding like a nightmare to
the typical "I just want to use Word" user, encouraged
me rather than turning me off on the whole thing.
Hmm, I don't seem to have a point here... I suppose just
that the more OSs and even hardware platforms we expose
kids to, the less they'll mistake "Windows" and "computer"
as synonymous terms.
You could use a dremel in a drill press and make
really nice holes in just about anything. But you can
do so much more with it freehand.
We already define what a programming language is and is not.
Distinctions are made between different kinds of computer languages
(programming languages, markup languages, etc) right now.
I still think you've missed my point. Okay, perhaps I went too far
it jumping right to HTML (or "any other SGML markup", I don't really
care which - The distinction doesn't matter here).
So two examples...
Postscript - Markup or programming language? Although used almost
exclusively as a print-time markup language, it *does* support
general recursion. And the source code equals the executable
code.
Perl - I don't think anyone would disagree that this counts as
a programming language, yet you can't distinguish between the
source code and the executable code, because it (almost) always
runs under interpretation (well, okay, compiled Perl does
exist, but as more of a curiosity than anything really used).
Would the French really outlaw the second most commonly used
programming language on the planet?
If you want to set an arbitrary limit such as "general recursive",
fine, we can do that. But don't think that politicians
grasp that distinction, nor will any law explicitly consider it.
And even if we do use such a qualifier, that still leaves a
huge question mark over all the languages that generally run under
interpretation.
AFAIK, In most countries, they do count as illegal.
This topic, without mentioning it, pretty much only applies
to the US.
The put them out full well knowing that something
like only 40% of rebates are returned.
You forgot to mention the 90% of those rebates that
customers do file for, which the company conveniently
ignores (aka "rejects without notification"). Okay, I
made that number up, but back when I still naively believed
"Oh golly gee, lookit that, I can get this $200 hard drive
for a penny after the rebate!", I batted a perfect
zero on at least half a dozen tries.
As with class action suits I find myself having "won",
I've learned not to even bother. I now completely
disregard the rebate price when making purchases. I
assume it costs full retail, and unless that still
beats all competitors of comparable quality, I move on to
the next item in the "sort[ed] by price" list.
First of all... Why the hell did I get rated "Offtopic"? Perhaps
"overrated" makes sense, but I very much posted on the topic presented.
Sigh. Whatever. No use bitching about Slashdot mods, for all I know
we have a French telecom industry fanboy group almost as strong as
our Apple fanboy club.
Anyway...
SGML and XML are not programming languages, and cannot be used
to create programs. They are not executed.
I very deliberately said "HTML" because you write it as text,
and it magically turns into something else when interpreted
in the correct way. They may lack flow control, but you can
very legitimately consider them a means of issuing commands
to the CPU, however indirectly.
The point I meant to make (and apparently failed miserably)
involved the ambiguity of just what does count as a
programming "language". Does a <B> tag not act as an
"instruction", of sorts, that commands the HTML "interpreter"
to write the following text bolded?
For that matter, doesn't plain ordinary English - sorry, French - text
count as a form of "programming", a VERY symbolic set of instructions
that our brains "intepret" into a meaningful experience relative to
our own consciousness?
Not even getting that "deep", I could establish an entire continuum
of examples that make such a law absolutely absurd. Even going the
other way - How about if I wrote a program directly in machine
language using a hex editor - The binary would count as its own
source code. And reducing that to the more realistic case of coding
in assembly, which translates (almost) directly into the final
executable code... Legal or illegal?
"In exchange for making the happy little numbers on
our router increase faster, you may use and redistribute
this however you want". Rephrase in a more GPL-like
manner, and translate it into French, and problem
solved. No more "free" software.
Although, one does have to wonder how this applies
to non-binary code - Has France effectively banned interpreted
languages? I wonder if they realize just how much of
their infrastructure depends on Perl. Or for that matter,
what about HTML or XML, where the "program" basically
resembles plain-text in the first place, and only a
under certain interpretations does it do anything extra?
Overall, just dumb. I don't know all that much about
the French legal system, but enforcing this seems quite
thoroughly impossible.
The article uses Prohibition as a comparison...but
Prohibition was not a product of corporate greed.
The article didn't really focus on corporate greed
or any sort of collusion, though - It talked more about
the overall problems of attempting broad societal
control via niche legislation.
In the case of prohibition, the religious right (huh,
imagine that, we never hear any trouble from them
these days...) managed to scapegoat alcohol for all
the ills of our society at the time. A decade later,
and it turns out that not only did alcohol have very
little effect on any of the problems used to justify
its prohibition, but society had an entirely new class
of crimes and social problems related to the lack of
legal access to safe alcoholic beverages.
Why? People wanted to drink, whether socially,
recreationally, or just to get hammered on occasion,
and would damned well do so regardless of what
Washington had to say about it. Sounds kinda like
the War On (some) Drugs in general so far, eh?
Anyway, in the case of the DMCA, we have tried to
address a different set of societal ills (namely,
the steady erosion of US dominance in the global
economy or even relevance in the world of
technology).
And as with prohibition - People really don't give
a damn about what those twits in Washington say.
If I want a digital version of a copy-protected
CD I just bought, you can bet that I'll get it
without paying for the same songs a second
time via iTunes or the like. Legal or not, doesn't
really matter. Only "Possible".
Can I do a base install of Linux in 30 seconds like you say
A base-only Slackware installation, telling it to not check the
target partition, actually takes about two or three minutes. So a
tiny bit of hyperbole on my part - But if I planned to do this for
real, to any significant number of machines, I'd probably boot to
Knoppix, and run a fire-and-forget script that partitions and formats
the target drive, then copies the "real" installed system from a
network path to the target drive.
Given a gigabit LAN and a decent modern drive, you could probabably
get it done it in less than half an hour, with no manual interaction
required.
How do you make sure the kernel is compiled with all of the
appropriate drivers?
A stock 2.6 kernel really should work on just about any PC
you set up. I've only ever needed to tweak the
kernel when dealing with pretty exotic hardware. Of course,
you might need a module to support some NICs and video cards,
but it sounds like you control the specifics of the
hardware involved, so just pick something well-supported
(still PLENTY of choice within that).
I'm well aware that these things can be done, but I'm not
aware of how
I think you just sort of "expect" it to take a lot more
work than it will. In the absolute simplest case... I'll
presume you can set up a complete working system once,
right?
Do so, making your/dev/hda1 no bigger than the smallest
drive you want this to work on. Reboot that system to
Knoppix (or any cd-bootable reasonably complete disto
you prefer) and log in.
"mkdir/mnt/network"
"mount -t smbfs//server/pathname/mnt/network"
"dd if=/dev/hda of=/mnt/network/install.img"
Then on each target machine, boot into Knoppix.
"mkdir/mnt/network"
"mount -t smbfs//server/pathname/mnt/network"
"dd if=/mnt/network/install.img of=/dev/hda"
Reboot, let Kudzu do its thing, and you should have a
normally functioning system.
You can get a lot more fancy that that (you'd probably
want better partitioning and a format with error
checking), but that really will do it for a quick
installation on a bunch of machines.
All of my new deployments utilise RIS (Remote Install
Services) which greatly reduces client installation times.
Roaming Profiles and publishing applications via Active Directory
also greatly reduces on site time.
RIS helps greatly under Windows because you can't just install
everything you want and then image the drive (unless you plan
to put it on 100% identical hardware, and even then you need
to sysprep it). With Linux, you can do an absolute base install
in about thirty seconds more than it takes to format the HDD,
then just do a normal copy from a CD (or networked) image to
a live system. Or if you trust the drive, you can even skip
the install, and just dd an image directly onto the HDD.
As for roaming profiles - Just put home directories on a network
share. Simple as that.
Not to say that one should try to force Linux onto
otherwise unwilling companies and users... But most of the
reasons I've heard not to switch simply don't hold true.
I'm sure it can be done, perhaps by remotely mounting
common application and/home folders to a central server.
For apps, include them in the base image you put on each
machine. For home dirs, you apparently already understand
the easy and obvious solution.
I find it interesting that criminals are touted
as a Linux success story.
A "few dozen" unlicensed apps on a network with 300 people
shouldn't have warranted BSA-imposed pariahdom. A small fine
and forcing them to fix their licensure status, yes. Disgracing
them on the evening news and in an ad campaign, no.
Although it might count as blasphemy to say as much on Slashdot,
Microsoft, of all companies, understands that, and except
in really extreme situations will usually work with a company
to get them in compliance, for NO fine (even offering a discount
to "help them out" in some cases). The BSA, on the other hand...
Absolute pure evil. It amazes me that anyone would allow them
on-site without a warrant and a police escort.
You also have to wonder what "unlicensed" means, in context...
For only a "few dozen" installations, does that mean they
accidentally exceeded their number of VLKs? Shareware that
had expired without buying the full version? Random programs
that employees had brought in from home that the company didn't
even know about? "Out-of-upgrade-path" upgrades (meaning,
for example, that you can't take an OEM Win95 machine to XP
via an upgrade copy - but you can upgrade it to NT4,
which you can then upgrade to XP)? Plenty of situations to
consider before calling them outright criminals. Oh, by the
way, you need to fix that tail light, sir - I'll let you
off with a $65K fine this time.
Yes, you can say that none of those situations should have
occurred. But welcome to the real world, where even the
most diligent IT department can't catch everything.
tell me what was the 5th banner back that you saw on slashdot.
Slashdot has banner ads?
I leave unobtrusive text sidebar ads alone. For everything
else, a combination of AdBlock and FlashBlock make the web
FAR more tolerable.
People wonder why Google has done so well, despite having
the potential to turn into the next Microsoft-like Evil
Empire? Simple - They "get" it. Provide me with something
useful (a great search engine), and don't deliberately piss
me off to get my attention.
If EVERY single online advertiser used a small text sidebar to
advertise, I wouldn't bother blocking any of them. But
when some marketing "genius" decides that garish colors, loud
sounds, and insanely distracting motion will make me more likely
to buy their product - Welcome to AdBlock.
Of course, "unobtrusive" also includes only taking up one
fairly modest sidebar with text. If I start seeing two-deep
sidebars on both the left and right, along with top and bottom
"side" bars, I suppose I'd have to start blocking those
as well. But as long as they stay reasonable, I'll
stay reasonable.
I seriously doubt your statistic of 78% to 90% of the
population is Christian.
Those numbers (rounded, obviously) come straight from the 1990
and 2001 ARIS, conducted by the US Census Bureau. Argue with
them, if you want, but don't accuse me of making
up numbers you couldn't bother to look up on an easily
navigable government US website.
Maybe 78% are "cultural" Christians (i.e. in name only)
And you would consider that more or less bothersome
than the underlying fact that millions of Good American Christians
enjoy sex, drugs, and violence?
Doesn't matter, though - In this domain, you can really only go
by what people considers themselves... Unless you want to
add some arbitrary test to the qualification, such as "as good
as Christian as me" - In which case, I have no doubt we'd
have somewhat over 200 million different criteria, which everyone
but a single person fails to meet.
Because that would leave 10% of the population that still
might buy it.
..."Might". BIIIIIIG qualifier there.
Titanic sold 129 million tickets, just under half of the US population
(281.5M). Applying the lower end of the range I previously mentioned,
78%, gives roughly 28 million tickets sold to non-Christians. In one
stroke, we've dropped the (second) biggest boxoffice hit of all time
down to a "popular flop" that failed to even make up its budget.
Of course, I can't debate that the biggest boxoffice hit
would still have done well - Yet, oddly enough, even that
fact seems to support my stance, in that the massed buying power of
220+ million US Christians managed to push The Passion, a
fairly bad movie in a dead language, into the #1 spot.
The argument you make is a straw man.
"As the "straw man" metaphor suggests, the counterfeit position
attacked in a Straw Man argument is typically weaker than the
opponent's actual position, just as a straw man is easier to
defeat than a flesh-and-blood one. Of course, this is no accident,
but is part of what makes the fallacy tempting to commit, especially
to a desperate debater who is losing an argument. Thus, it is no
surprise that arguers seldom misstate their opponent's position
so as to make it stronger. Of course, if there is an obvious way
to make a debating opponent's position stronger, then one is up
against an incompetent debater. Debaters usually try to take the
strongest position they can, so that any change is likely to be
for the worse. However, attacking a logically stronger position
than that taken by the opponent is a sign of strength, whereas
attacking a straw man is a sign of weakness."
Before accusing a programmer of arguing from a particular type of
logical error, you might want to look into the validating
subtypes of that fallacy first.
Maybe if more Christians took more of a stand and
told people to stop
If more Christians "practiced what they preach", plain old
market forces would instantly result in the nonavailability
of these products.
At least in the US, we have somewhere between a 78 and 90%
Christian population (according to the last two census).
If 90% of people refused to support content that included
violence, sex, profanity, blasphemy, science, drugs, firearms,
toilet paper, or whatever peeve-of-the-week you want to claim
makes the baby Jesus cry, then such content would vanish
overnight.
"Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye,
but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?"
Maybe Christians are tired of seeing the proliferation
of these things throughout society, because they see them
as harmful to people whether they are Christian or not.
If I want to "harm" myself by pretending to blast aliens
with my demonic powers while scantily clad CG cheerleaders
talk dirty to me, you don't have any say in that.
I think this Utah proposal has merit and I support it
While the rest of us just use something called "self control".
Or in the case of parents, a magical tool called "supervision".
Incidentally, even if it did have some practical use
(which it does not), it lacks technological merit. Even ignoring
such spooky technology as proxy servers, you have other places in
the world that don't have the same hangups as Mormons and have no
motivation or obligation to observe US law.
I've found a lot of happiness and self-esteem avoiding porn
Funny, I've found a lot of self-happiness looking at porn.
To each their own, eh?
If you want to have the choice whether to look at
porn, you have to choose not to look at it.
Uhhh... Yeah? I have to choose not to brutally
murder every idiot who can't turn their cell phone off
in the theatre, too - But I (so far) have managed that
just fine, with plain ol' fashioned will power.
Anyone who has become addicted to porn will know what I mean.
Y'know, in the realm of drug addiction, I advocate 100%
legalization and just let the junkies OD and die. I don't
think that would apply so well to a porn addiction.
C'mon, give up the "Little Polly Pretty" naivete. If you don't
mean this as a troll, you need to get out more. And I say that
as a hard-core introvert.
This is such a good idea. Which means it will never happen.
The underlying idea of A la carte programming seems like
a good idea, and will even cost those of us who couldn't care
less about sports a LOT less (disgustingly enough, the bulk of your
"extended basic" cable bill goes toward subsidizing the sports
channels, which cost more than premium channels like HBO
and contractually force cable carriers to include them in anything
beyond their most basic package).
However, BEWARE of this FCC "ruling" - It counts as
little less than an attempted power-grab.
The FCC does not currently have the authority to regulate
cable. They can't tell the cable companies to unbundle their
offerings, and more importantly, they can't censor cable-only
channels on the basis of content. In even looking at
this issue, the FCC has bluntly said "we support this extremely
popular move, but don't have the authority to make it a
reality... But! If congress would just give us a little
more power..."
I'll gladly pay a bit more if it means the PTC can't make
cable as pablum-like as broadcast TV. I would hope
that some day the cable companies would grow a pair and
tell the sports networks to take a hike, but in the mean
time, I'll take bundled programming over all "child friendly"
programming.
Fair enough. I won't even try to deny it. But sometimes,
responsible adults have to suck it up and play the "bad"
guy for the better good. If you enjoy lies and delusion - hey,
your damage, not mine. I ask nothing more than that you don't
expect me to play along.
If they want to believe in Santa, it's respectful
to play along. It's very rude not to.
And if they believe in child rape, should we just play along?
If they believe females need to have their external genitalia
removed for societal control? If they believe that a
shall-remain-nameless masculinized clone of Inanna wants
them to blow up US landmarks?
As I said, I don't go out of my way to steal the "magic" of
the jolly fat Coca Cola salesman from kids - I consider it
harmless enough (in fact far more damaging to the idea
of blind adherence to a traditional family religion than to
me or society in general). But I draw the line at asking
me to participate in the lies. Just... don't.
For the record, I don't see what Santa has to do with religion.
If you don't see the glaring connection between "Oh, how cute,
little Billy believes in Santa Claus" and "Oh, how cute, little
Billy believes in Jesus", well, let's just say that apparently
your parents never expected me to play along with a "cute"
societal myth/delusion. I quite honestly wonder just how many
good little sheep The Christ has lost from the flock when they managed
to put those two ideas together. But I can't, and won't, stop you
from lying to your own kids so long as you leave me out of it.
It's really more about being nice to each other. Something that
seems pretty lost on you, at least from your statements here.
Oddly enough, you can derive the entirety of most reasonable
religious/moral rules from the "golden" one. And conveniently
enough, I follow that one.
If I espouse a delusion, I sincerely wish for nothing better
than to have someone correct me.
Evidently not everyone feels similarly, not even in the abstract
third-person sense.
I do understand you don't believe in this stuff. That's
totally fine.
Ah, now there, you have it wrong.
I do believe in this stuff. All of it. I consider the divine
far, far larger than anything we mere hairless apes can ever imagine,
encompassing not just what we consider true and false, but also that
to which we can't even assign a truth-value.
But when the hairless apes try to make specific statements
about "the truth", or worse, "the divine"... Well, even if it held
true, just try to imagine what it would mean if Santa really
existed. Seriously. Consider the religious, political, economic,
even physical, ramifications of a guy flying around the world once
per year, in a single night, to give slave-elf-labor-crafted goods
to all the under-18 hairless apes that have rigorously followed an
arbitrary code of conduct defined by a 3800 year old Jew (a term I
use literally, not derogatorily) primarily preoccupied with a very
legitimate concern for food-borne pathogens and the societal stability
of a nomadic tribe of conquering thunder-worshippers.
If the words "crusades", "sharia", "misogyny", and "inquisition"
didn't enter your mind, you don't actually see my point yet.
So, no, I will not play along. If I have any "faith" at all, which
I do, it lies in my belief that I should interact with the physical
reality presented to me on-the-level; that my Creator did not put
me here and give me eyes and a mind that I might see the planets orbit
the sun and deem the "obvious" solution heresy.
Occam's razor can even cut God.
Re:For the same reason Black Friday *does* exist!
on
Cyber Monday Doesn't Exist
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I'm sure you already know that the reason it's called
"Black Friday" is because it's the time of year when
retailers finally move out of the red and into the profitable
black column on their balance sheets
Although this doesn't apply to privately held stores, at least any
corporate retail chains have to report their earnings quarterly.
And any non-R&D company that reported three out of four quarters in
the red would find itself trading as penny stocks within just a few
cycles of that.
Not to say that such a claim counts as entirely untrue, though - I
suspect it counts as "true" in the same way that you can
truthfully claim that Americans have to work almost until
June to reach
"Tax Freedom Day", the day we stop working just to pay our
taxes, and start our year "in the black" so to speak.
So, I suppose that in some retail sectors, the fairly thin
profit margins mean that, if you add up all their costs for
the coming year and start counting income against them from
January 1st onward, they might experience an analogous
"Overhead Freedom Day" sometime in late November. But
looking at the numbers like that would leave
everything after that point, including the very lucrative
holiday season, as pure profit... So not quite such a
bleak outlook as staying in the red for 11 months.
Or to look at from a more common-sense approach - Why even
open the doors from February to October if you'll only run
a loss for the first 11 months? They'd make more, in
the long run, to go on vacation for nine or ten months out of
the year.
Re:For the same reason Black Friday *does* exist!
on
Cyber Monday Doesn't Exist
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
However, Christian or not, it would be nice if you
showed a little more respect
For the most part, I do respect people's religious
beliefs. I will, to my dying death, argue in support of
your right to believe in anything that makes you feel
better about your relation to Life, The Universe, and
Everything. So long as it doesn't directly affect me;
for example if your beliefs tell you to blow me up, you
have lost any claim on my "respect".
I won't, however, humor you about your particular
choice of imaginary friend. I don't humor parents who lie
to their kids about Santa and the Eostre Bunny, either (I
don't go out of my way to disillusion them, but asking me
a direct question such as "so what time do you think Santa
visited last night" for the amusement of the wee ones will
not have a good outcome). And I'll damn sure
put my foot down when it comes to indoctrinating kids with
FSM-worthy nonsense in direct contradiction with demonstrable
facts.
Personally, I do believe in a creator deity, but I
don't have the impudence (or ignorance) to claim I can ever
"know" anything about that deity... Beyond the mere fact
that I exist, or more accurately, that existance itself
exists.
Now, if you happen to consider yourself a Christian, then
you should feel offended by what I wrote. But
not because of how I wrote it, rather, because
I described the sad reality of your biggest religious
festival. The material world has taken what should count
as a joyous celebration of the birth of the son of your
bhakti's god (time shifted to match the winter
solstice, no doubt out of "respect" for those
religions that held that as a holy day), and turned
it into a day of worship of the jolly fat consumer
of Coca Cola.
Black Friday exists because physical shopping at a Brick-n'-Mortar
has a number of very real constraints on when it can occur - You
need the store open and staffed; You need to have free time (ie,
not at work) to go; You need a reason to go; You need money to
spend there.
Most people meeting the last condition have the Friday after
Turkey-day off from work, thus meeting the second condition.
Most retail sales staff do not, thus meeting the first condition.
And our annual Materialism-and-oh-yeah-that-dead-Jew festival
provides the final condition, a reason to go shopping in the first
place.
Shopping on-line changes all that. The store always has
its virtual doors open. They always have what you want, even
if you don't know you want something. You can even find things
on the cheap, if you look around carefully. It eliminates three
of the four constraints necessary for a "holiday" flood of
shoppers to occur on a particular day. And for the only one
remaining, we still have at least another 20 or so "shopping"
days up to which Amazon will guarantee delivery by December 25th.
So no rush.
The entire premise of a mad rush to shop on one particular
day comes from the same minds that can't understand why we
"abandon" 90% of shopping carts at online stores, after they
force us to add items to a cart to see its price.
Nothing to see here, move along - Captain Obvious has
struck again.
and they found that the happiest students were the ones
that had an active social life
When studying matters of perception, you can't just come
right out and ask people to rate themselves on a vague
term. Do you "love" you father, your dog, and your wife?
Trying to evaluate that question with any single definition
of "love" would make you either really sick, or really cold.
So, you ask related questions, hopefully of a more objective
nature, about related behaviors and actions, which you
can measure.
Behaviors and actions, however, do not adequately express
the "happiness" of an introvert. Very few people, even
introverts, would describe sitting alone in a room for
hours at a time as overly indicative of feeling happy. But
give me a good book, and in exactly that externally-visible
state, I feel just about as "happy" as I get.
Maybe that's because you didn't read the manual, which says:
My most recent 20" box fan came with a manual. It says to never ever EVER
put the fan in a window. The picture on the box shows it in a window. I
have it in a window. It works fine there.
I have a humidifier, with a great big scary orange sticker on the
inside of the lid, that actually says (paraphrased) "WARNING: If this
unit becomes wet, unplug it, let it dry fully, and have it inspected
by an authorized service technician before attempting to use it again".
And what purpose does this lid, with so dire a warning, serve? You lift
this particular lid to... FILL THE THING WITH WATER!
Virtually the entire warning section in most manuals exists solely
for the purpose of helping the manufacturer fight off product liability
suits. In the case of the box fan, some moron probably tried to use
one in a window in the rain, and got zapped or burned his house down.
That doesn't mean that I can't put a fan in the window on a nice
sunny day, it just means if I do something stupid Lesko can say "see,
we told you so!". For the humidifier, I don't quite know what
they had in mind, but I have 100% confidence it involves covering their
butts in some way.
So when the XBox360 says not to use it on a bed or sofa, which I expect
accounts for where 99% of people would use it... Even those who read
the warnings will tend to ignore it as just another sad attempt
to protect Microsoft from morons.
I said this about hurricanes (and caught hell in moderation for the
un-PC nature of my sentiment), and I'll say it about water...
I chose to live in the NorthEast US because we don't get any
real natural disasters. We don't get deadly droughts that last for
20-year stretches. We have plentiful clean fresh water. We produce
most of our own food (or rather, could and once did - Huge arable
tracts of Northern New Engand have lain fallow for decades because,
although extremely fertile, we just can't compete economically with
the midwest industrial-ag operations).
So when you suggest "we all" conserve water for SoCal's use - I say
go pound sand... Let the idiots that decided to live in a frickin'
DESERT die.
low-flow shower heads
No. Plain and simple. For one thing, given decent water pressure in
the shower, I'll take a four minute shower (vs over 20 at some hotels,
before I started carrying a pair of pliers to "fix" that while travelling).
For another, as I point out above - Not all of us live in the desert.
If you want to live in the desert, you can have to take
20 minute showers trying in vain to get all the soap off you; bathrooms
that always smell like piss no matter how many times you flush;
drinking water made from recycling your own waste (and yes, technically
it all comes from there, but I'll take "three centuries undergoing
biological filtration in a wetland" over "filtered, sterilized, and
deodorized").
Now, believe it or not after that mini-rant, I do agree
with your sentiment for the most part - But don't get carried away.
The planet will make more fresh water. It just happens.
We need to focus on not polluting our water (including
our "waste" water), and not draining, clearing, and building condos
on, the natural filters already in place on this planet. The rest
of the problem just comes as a natural consequence of people living
1where Mother Nature has put up great big "no trespassing" signs.
The line between voluntary and reluctant donation is very
vague because it can be assumed that lab workers can easily
be put under pressure
I hate to break it to you, but outside the hard physical
sciences, at least 90% of research involves freshmen
and sophmores (and mostly female at that) "pressured" into
"volunteering", usually for a significant part of their
grade in an "intro to experimental methodology" (or
comparable) class.
The problem here involves pure and unadulterated
BS politics. The professor "lied" to protect his staff,
the info got out anyway, so his affiliation panicked over
the nature of his work and requested he take a hike. Nothing
more, nothing less.
And the real pity here? Not just his career - He'll get
another non-research academic job within a few years. No,
instead, we should feel bad about the invalidation of
his findings just because of a combination of unfortunate
circumstances, with his area of study not the least of which.
First of all, these don't "spray" bugs, in the pesticide sense.
They burn propane and mix it with octenol (basically a mosquito
pheromone) to very specifically attract breeding (and thus
blood-feeding) female mosquitos. No actual pesticides involved.
So to those who worried about bacteria, birds, frogs, and other
bugs - This pretty much ONLY catches and kills female
mosquitos (though possibly a few other biting flies). Nothing
else would deliberately seek out what "smells" like a human meal
surrounded by horny male mosquitos.
As for this oh-so-high-tech use of computers - It basically reports
the status of each "magnet", such as the remaining propane level.
It also potentially (from what I've read, I don't think
they've implemented this on an automatic basis yet, though it works
manually from a remote site) saves on propane by shutting down those
nodes not likely to accomplish anything (for example, if you had a
ring around a city, the downwind nodes would just waste fuel).
Slashdot Mirror
Having faith in other people should never be considered stupid.
People. Not corporations. Not representatives of corporations.
In dealing with any entity lacking even the faintest trace of a conscience (one might go so far as to say a soul, but morality doesn't require religion), only a fool would assume the other party will act "nicely". The other party will act in the manner it deems optimal for its scoring criterion - In the case of corporations, that means money.
Put less abstractly - Corporations exist to make money, and only to make money. Expecting basic "human" decency from them will leave you with a sore ass and not even a "thanks" in the morning, much less a reacharound.
35nm is planned but hasn't actually been done yet. It's unlikely to help much either, because current leakage at those levels is being insane.
Although we might not gain anything by going below 30-35nm gates, don't overlook the huge fallout rate of current photolithography (if you can still call it "photo" when dealing with "soft" x-rays as the light source).
If you can produce, at your extreme limit, a 65nm feature, then trying to produce exactly 65nm features leaves almost no room for error. If, however, you can produce down to 5nm features, then you can manage 35nm features with a huge margin of error.
Thus, your fallout rate drops from the current of over 50% (or so I've heard - I don't know the exact figure), to very nearly zero.
The practicality of clock speed increases and heat/energy reduction aside, better photolithography (or whatever manufacturing techniques we eventually move on to) means higher yields of better quality at the same size.
Also, consider the fact that some parts of a modern CPU run a LOT faster than other parts - Compare addition with division, for example. Addition has taken a single clock (less, actually, but assuming a serial dependancy, you can't do better than one op per clock) for several generations now, while division still brings the CPU to a crawl. If you could make a full adder "fast enough" at whatever size optimizes energy consumption (90nm seems pretty good at the moment; 65 might waste more than it saves), while chewing through power to perform a division in fewer clocks with 15nm gates - That would both improve performance and save power at the same time.
Do you give a child Legos in the hopes they'll still be playing with them as adults? Of course not,
;-)
New to Slashdot, eh?
Overall, I agree with you completely (except not expecting adults to use Lego). Had I started my computer experience with Windows, I fully expect I would not currently work in IT/CS/SE/whatever. Not for the classic "Windowz sux" battlecry; but rather, because Windows doesn't challenge the user to improve themselves. The user has no motivation to learn how the underlying OS works, much less the hardware itself. Hell, at least DOS came with qbasic - XP doesn't come with any programming interface included with the core OS.
Compare that with my first computer - At school, a TRS-80, and at home, a Coleco Adam. They didn't come up to a friendly screen telling you exactly what to do... They came up to a BASIC interpreter prompt as the primary user interface. Learning to "use" the computer meant learning to program.
As much of an improvement as I saw upgrading to my first PC clone, I remember feeling cheated that I could choose between crappy resolution with 4 colors or slightly less crappy in black and white. And how do you make a simple 3-voice sound? You just couldn't, directly. So I learned how the machine actually generated sound, and that I would need to go a tad bit lower-level to get anything beyond single-voice square-wave sound (for graphics, I just had to wait for VGA, no way around it sucking with CGA).
But all that, while perhaps sounding like a nightmare to the typical "I just want to use Word" user, encouraged me rather than turning me off on the whole thing.
Hmm, I don't seem to have a point here... I suppose just that the more OSs and even hardware platforms we expose kids to, the less they'll mistake "Windows" and "computer" as synonymous terms.
You could use a dremel in a drill press and make really nice holes in just about anything. But you can do so much more with it freehand.
We already define what a programming language is and is not. Distinctions are made between different kinds of computer languages (programming languages, markup languages, etc) right now.
I still think you've missed my point. Okay, perhaps I went too far it jumping right to HTML (or "any other SGML markup", I don't really care which - The distinction doesn't matter here).
So two examples...
Postscript - Markup or programming language? Although used almost exclusively as a print-time markup language, it *does* support general recursion. And the source code equals the executable code.
Perl - I don't think anyone would disagree that this counts as a programming language, yet you can't distinguish between the source code and the executable code, because it (almost) always runs under interpretation (well, okay, compiled Perl does exist, but as more of a curiosity than anything really used). Would the French really outlaw the second most commonly used programming language on the planet?
If you want to set an arbitrary limit such as "general recursive", fine, we can do that. But don't think that politicians grasp that distinction, nor will any law explicitly consider it. And even if we do use such a qualifier, that still leaves a huge question mark over all the languages that generally run under interpretation.
IMHO they should be 100% illegal.
AFAIK, In most countries, they do count as illegal. This topic, without mentioning it, pretty much only applies to the US.
The put them out full well knowing that something like only 40% of rebates are returned.
You forgot to mention the 90% of those rebates that customers do file for, which the company conveniently ignores (aka "rejects without notification"). Okay, I made that number up, but back when I still naively believed "Oh golly gee, lookit that, I can get this $200 hard drive for a penny after the rebate!", I batted a perfect zero on at least half a dozen tries.
As with class action suits I find myself having "won", I've learned not to even bother. I now completely disregard the rebate price when making purchases. I assume it costs full retail, and unless that still beats all competitors of comparable quality, I move on to the next item in the "sort[ed] by price" list.
First of all... Why the hell did I get rated "Offtopic"? Perhaps "overrated" makes sense, but I very much posted on the topic presented. Sigh. Whatever. No use bitching about Slashdot mods, for all I know we have a French telecom industry fanboy group almost as strong as our Apple fanboy club.
Anyway...
SGML and XML are not programming languages, and cannot be used to create programs. They are not executed.
I very deliberately said "HTML" because you write it as text, and it magically turns into something else when interpreted in the correct way. They may lack flow control, but you can very legitimately consider them a means of issuing commands to the CPU, however indirectly.
The point I meant to make (and apparently failed miserably) involved the ambiguity of just what does count as a programming "language". Does a <B> tag not act as an "instruction", of sorts, that commands the HTML "interpreter" to write the following text bolded?
For that matter, doesn't plain ordinary English - sorry, French - text count as a form of "programming", a VERY symbolic set of instructions that our brains "intepret" into a meaningful experience relative to our own consciousness?
Not even getting that "deep", I could establish an entire continuum of examples that make such a law absolutely absurd. Even going the other way - How about if I wrote a program directly in machine language using a hex editor - The binary would count as its own source code. And reducing that to the more realistic case of coding in assembly, which translates (almost) directly into the final executable code... Legal or illegal?
To charge a "fee", of "services rendered"...
"In exchange for making the happy little numbers on our router increase faster, you may use and redistribute this however you want". Rephrase in a more GPL-like manner, and translate it into French, and problem solved. No more "free" software.
Although, one does have to wonder how this applies to non-binary code - Has France effectively banned interpreted languages? I wonder if they realize just how much of their infrastructure depends on Perl. Or for that matter, what about HTML or XML, where the "program" basically resembles plain-text in the first place, and only a under certain interpretations does it do anything extra?
Overall, just dumb. I don't know all that much about the French legal system, but enforcing this seems quite thoroughly impossible.
The article uses Prohibition as a comparison...but Prohibition was not a product of corporate greed.
The article didn't really focus on corporate greed or any sort of collusion, though - It talked more about the overall problems of attempting broad societal control via niche legislation.
In the case of prohibition, the religious right (huh, imagine that, we never hear any trouble from them these days...) managed to scapegoat alcohol for all the ills of our society at the time. A decade later, and it turns out that not only did alcohol have very little effect on any of the problems used to justify its prohibition, but society had an entirely new class of crimes and social problems related to the lack of legal access to safe alcoholic beverages.
Why? People wanted to drink, whether socially, recreationally, or just to get hammered on occasion, and would damned well do so regardless of what Washington had to say about it. Sounds kinda like the War On (some) Drugs in general so far, eh?
Anyway, in the case of the DMCA, we have tried to address a different set of societal ills (namely, the steady erosion of US dominance in the global economy or even relevance in the world of technology).
And as with prohibition - People really don't give a damn about what those twits in Washington say. If I want a digital version of a copy-protected CD I just bought, you can bet that I'll get it without paying for the same songs a second time via iTunes or the like. Legal or not, doesn't really matter. Only "Possible".
Can I do a base install of Linux in 30 seconds like you say
/dev/hda1 no bigger than the smallest
drive you want this to work on. Reboot that system to
Knoppix (or any cd-bootable reasonably complete disto
you prefer) and log in. /mnt/network" //server/pathname /mnt/network"
/mnt/network" //server/pathname /mnt/network"
A base-only Slackware installation, telling it to not check the target partition, actually takes about two or three minutes. So a tiny bit of hyperbole on my part - But if I planned to do this for real, to any significant number of machines, I'd probably boot to Knoppix, and run a fire-and-forget script that partitions and formats the target drive, then copies the "real" installed system from a network path to the target drive.
Given a gigabit LAN and a decent modern drive, you could probabably get it done it in less than half an hour, with no manual interaction required.
How do you make sure the kernel is compiled with all of the appropriate drivers?
A stock 2.6 kernel really should work on just about any PC you set up. I've only ever needed to tweak the kernel when dealing with pretty exotic hardware. Of course, you might need a module to support some NICs and video cards, but it sounds like you control the specifics of the hardware involved, so just pick something well-supported (still PLENTY of choice within that).
I'm well aware that these things can be done, but I'm not aware of how
I think you just sort of "expect" it to take a lot more work than it will. In the absolute simplest case... I'll presume you can set up a complete working system once, right?
Do so, making your
"mkdir
"mount -t smbfs
"dd if=/dev/hda of=/mnt/network/install.img"
Then on each target machine, boot into Knoppix.
"mkdir
"mount -t smbfs
"dd if=/mnt/network/install.img of=/dev/hda"
Reboot, let Kudzu do its thing, and you should have a normally functioning system.
You can get a lot more fancy that that (you'd probably want better partitioning and a format with error checking), but that really will do it for a quick installation on a bunch of machines.
All of my new deployments utilise RIS (Remote Install Services) which greatly reduces client installation times.
/home folders to a central server.
Roaming Profiles and publishing applications via Active Directory also greatly reduces on site time.
RIS helps greatly under Windows because you can't just install everything you want and then image the drive (unless you plan to put it on 100% identical hardware, and even then you need to sysprep it). With Linux, you can do an absolute base install in about thirty seconds more than it takes to format the HDD, then just do a normal copy from a CD (or networked) image to a live system. Or if you trust the drive, you can even skip the install, and just dd an image directly onto the HDD.
As for roaming profiles - Just put home directories on a network share. Simple as that.
Not to say that one should try to force Linux onto otherwise unwilling companies and users... But most of the reasons I've heard not to switch simply don't hold true.
I'm sure it can be done, perhaps by remotely mounting common application and
For apps, include them in the base image you put on each machine. For home dirs, you apparently already understand the easy and obvious solution.
I find it interesting that criminals are touted as a Linux success story.
A "few dozen" unlicensed apps on a network with 300 people shouldn't have warranted BSA-imposed pariahdom. A small fine and forcing them to fix their licensure status, yes. Disgracing them on the evening news and in an ad campaign, no.
Although it might count as blasphemy to say as much on Slashdot, Microsoft, of all companies, understands that, and except in really extreme situations will usually work with a company to get them in compliance, for NO fine (even offering a discount to "help them out" in some cases). The BSA, on the other hand... Absolute pure evil. It amazes me that anyone would allow them on-site without a warrant and a police escort.
You also have to wonder what "unlicensed" means, in context... For only a "few dozen" installations, does that mean they accidentally exceeded their number of VLKs? Shareware that had expired without buying the full version? Random programs that employees had brought in from home that the company didn't even know about? "Out-of-upgrade-path" upgrades (meaning, for example, that you can't take an OEM Win95 machine to XP via an upgrade copy - but you can upgrade it to NT4, which you can then upgrade to XP)? Plenty of situations to consider before calling them outright criminals. Oh, by the way, you need to fix that tail light, sir - I'll let you off with a $65K fine this time.
Yes, you can say that none of those situations should have occurred. But welcome to the real world, where even the most diligent IT department can't catch everything.
tell me what was the 5th banner back that you saw on slashdot.
Slashdot has banner ads?
I leave unobtrusive text sidebar ads alone. For everything else, a combination of AdBlock and FlashBlock make the web FAR more tolerable.
People wonder why Google has done so well, despite having the potential to turn into the next Microsoft-like Evil Empire? Simple - They "get" it. Provide me with something useful (a great search engine), and don't deliberately piss me off to get my attention.
If EVERY single online advertiser used a small text sidebar to advertise, I wouldn't bother blocking any of them. But when some marketing "genius" decides that garish colors, loud sounds, and insanely distracting motion will make me more likely to buy their product - Welcome to AdBlock.
Of course, "unobtrusive" also includes only taking up one fairly modest sidebar with text. If I start seeing two-deep sidebars on both the left and right, along with top and bottom "side" bars, I suppose I'd have to start blocking those as well. But as long as they stay reasonable, I'll stay reasonable.
I seriously doubt your statistic of 78% to 90% of the population is Christian.
..."Might". BIIIIIIG qualifier there.
Those numbers (rounded, obviously) come straight from the 1990 and 2001 ARIS, conducted by the US Census Bureau. Argue with them, if you want, but don't accuse me of making up numbers you couldn't bother to look up on an easily navigable government US website.
Maybe 78% are "cultural" Christians (i.e. in name only)
And you would consider that more or less bothersome than the underlying fact that millions of Good American Christians enjoy sex, drugs, and violence?
Doesn't matter, though - In this domain, you can really only go by what people considers themselves... Unless you want to add some arbitrary test to the qualification, such as "as good as Christian as me" - In which case, I have no doubt we'd have somewhat over 200 million different criteria, which everyone but a single person fails to meet.
Because that would leave 10% of the population that still might buy it.
Titanic sold 129 million tickets, just under half of the US population (281.5M). Applying the lower end of the range I previously mentioned, 78%, gives roughly 28 million tickets sold to non-Christians. In one stroke, we've dropped the (second) biggest boxoffice hit of all time down to a "popular flop" that failed to even make up its budget.
Of course, I can't debate that the biggest boxoffice hit would still have done well - Yet, oddly enough, even that fact seems to support my stance, in that the massed buying power of 220+ million US Christians managed to push The Passion, a fairly bad movie in a dead language, into the #1 spot.
The argument you make is a straw man.
"As the "straw man" metaphor suggests, the counterfeit position attacked in a Straw Man argument is typically weaker than the opponent's actual position, just as a straw man is easier to defeat than a flesh-and-blood one. Of course, this is no accident, but is part of what makes the fallacy tempting to commit, especially to a desperate debater who is losing an argument. Thus, it is no surprise that arguers seldom misstate their opponent's position so as to make it stronger. Of course, if there is an obvious way to make a debating opponent's position stronger, then one is up against an incompetent debater. Debaters usually try to take the strongest position they can, so that any change is likely to be for the worse. However, attacking a logically stronger position than that taken by the opponent is a sign of strength, whereas attacking a straw man is a sign of weakness."
Before accusing a programmer of arguing from a particular type of logical error, you might want to look into the validating subtypes of that fallacy first.
your mom
You mentioned something about logical fallacies?
Maybe if more Christians took more of a stand and told people to stop
If more Christians "practiced what they preach", plain old market forces would instantly result in the nonavailability of these products.
At least in the US, we have somewhere between a 78 and 90% Christian population (according to the last two census). If 90% of people refused to support content that included violence, sex, profanity, blasphemy, science, drugs, firearms, toilet paper, or whatever peeve-of-the-week you want to claim makes the baby Jesus cry, then such content would vanish overnight.
"Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?"
Maybe Christians are tired of seeing the proliferation of these things throughout society, because they see them as harmful to people whether they are Christian or not.
If I want to "harm" myself by pretending to blast aliens with my demonic powers while scantily clad CG cheerleaders talk dirty to me, you don't have any say in that.
Deal.
I think this Utah proposal has merit and I support it
While the rest of us just use something called "self control". Or in the case of parents, a magical tool called "supervision".
Incidentally, even if it did have some practical use (which it does not), it lacks technological merit. Even ignoring such spooky technology as proxy servers, you have other places in the world that don't have the same hangups as Mormons and have no motivation or obligation to observe US law.
I've found a lot of happiness and self-esteem avoiding porn
Funny, I've found a lot of self-happiness looking at porn. To each their own, eh?
If you want to have the choice whether to look at porn, you have to choose not to look at it.
Uhhh... Yeah? I have to choose not to brutally murder every idiot who can't turn their cell phone off in the theatre, too - But I (so far) have managed that just fine, with plain ol' fashioned will power.
Anyone who has become addicted to porn will know what I mean.
Y'know, in the realm of drug addiction, I advocate 100% legalization and just let the junkies OD and die. I don't think that would apply so well to a porn addiction.
C'mon, give up the "Little Polly Pretty" naivete. If you don't mean this as a troll, you need to get out more. And I say that as a hard-core introvert.
This is such a good idea. Which means it will never happen.
The underlying idea of A la carte programming seems like a good idea, and will even cost those of us who couldn't care less about sports a LOT less (disgustingly enough, the bulk of your "extended basic" cable bill goes toward subsidizing the sports channels, which cost more than premium channels like HBO and contractually force cable carriers to include them in anything beyond their most basic package).
However, BEWARE of this FCC "ruling" - It counts as little less than an attempted power-grab.
The FCC does not currently have the authority to regulate cable. They can't tell the cable companies to unbundle their offerings, and more importantly, they can't censor cable-only channels on the basis of content. In even looking at this issue, the FCC has bluntly said "we support this extremely popular move, but don't have the authority to make it a reality... But! If congress would just give us a little more power..."
I'll gladly pay a bit more if it means the PTC can't make cable as pablum-like as broadcast TV. I would hope that some day the cable companies would grow a pair and tell the sports networks to take a hike, but in the mean time, I'll take bundled programming over all "child friendly" programming.
But you're an ass.
Fair enough. I won't even try to deny it. But sometimes, responsible adults have to suck it up and play the "bad" guy for the better good. If you enjoy lies and delusion - hey, your damage, not mine. I ask nothing more than that you don't expect me to play along.
If they want to believe in Santa, it's respectful to play along. It's very rude not to.
And if they believe in child rape, should we just play along? If they believe females need to have their external genitalia removed for societal control? If they believe that a shall-remain-nameless masculinized clone of Inanna wants them to blow up US landmarks?
As I said, I don't go out of my way to steal the "magic" of the jolly fat Coca Cola salesman from kids - I consider it harmless enough (in fact far more damaging to the idea of blind adherence to a traditional family religion than to me or society in general). But I draw the line at asking me to participate in the lies. Just... don't.
For the record, I don't see what Santa has to do with religion.
If you don't see the glaring connection between "Oh, how cute, little Billy believes in Santa Claus" and "Oh, how cute, little Billy believes in Jesus", well, let's just say that apparently your parents never expected me to play along with a "cute" societal myth/delusion. I quite honestly wonder just how many good little sheep The Christ has lost from the flock when they managed to put those two ideas together. But I can't, and won't, stop you from lying to your own kids so long as you leave me out of it.
It's really more about being nice to each other. Something that seems pretty lost on you, at least from your statements here.
Oddly enough, you can derive the entirety of most reasonable religious/moral rules from the "golden" one. And conveniently enough, I follow that one.
If I espouse a delusion, I sincerely wish for nothing better than to have someone correct me.
Evidently not everyone feels similarly, not even in the abstract third-person sense.
I do understand you don't believe in this stuff. That's totally fine.
Ah, now there, you have it wrong.
I do believe in this stuff. All of it. I consider the divine far, far larger than anything we mere hairless apes can ever imagine, encompassing not just what we consider true and false, but also that to which we can't even assign a truth-value.
But when the hairless apes try to make specific statements about "the truth", or worse, "the divine"... Well, even if it held true, just try to imagine what it would mean if Santa really existed. Seriously. Consider the religious, political, economic, even physical, ramifications of a guy flying around the world once per year, in a single night, to give slave-elf-labor-crafted goods to all the under-18 hairless apes that have rigorously followed an arbitrary code of conduct defined by a 3800 year old Jew (a term I use literally, not derogatorily) primarily preoccupied with a very legitimate concern for food-borne pathogens and the societal stability of a nomadic tribe of conquering thunder-worshippers.
If the words "crusades", "sharia", "misogyny", and "inquisition" didn't enter your mind, you don't actually see my point yet.
So, no, I will not play along. If I have any "faith" at all, which I do, it lies in my belief that I should interact with the physical reality presented to me on-the-level; that my Creator did not put me here and give me eyes and a mind that I might see the planets orbit the sun and deem the "obvious" solution heresy.
Occam's razor can even cut God.
I'm sure you already know that the reason it's called "Black Friday" is because it's the time of year when retailers finally move out of the red and into the profitable black column on their balance sheets
Although this doesn't apply to privately held stores, at least any corporate retail chains have to report their earnings quarterly. And any non-R&D company that reported three out of four quarters in the red would find itself trading as penny stocks within just a few cycles of that.
Not to say that such a claim counts as entirely untrue, though - I suspect it counts as "true" in the same way that you can truthfully claim that Americans have to work almost until June to reach "Tax Freedom Day", the day we stop working just to pay our taxes, and start our year "in the black" so to speak.
So, I suppose that in some retail sectors, the fairly thin profit margins mean that, if you add up all their costs for the coming year and start counting income against them from January 1st onward, they might experience an analogous "Overhead Freedom Day" sometime in late November. But looking at the numbers like that would leave everything after that point, including the very lucrative holiday season, as pure profit... So not quite such a bleak outlook as staying in the red for 11 months.
Or to look at from a more common-sense approach - Why even open the doors from February to October if you'll only run a loss for the first 11 months? They'd make more, in the long run, to go on vacation for nine or ten months out of the year.
However, Christian or not, it would be nice if you showed a little more respect
For the most part, I do respect people's religious beliefs. I will, to my dying death, argue in support of your right to believe in anything that makes you feel better about your relation to Life, The Universe, and Everything. So long as it doesn't directly affect me; for example if your beliefs tell you to blow me up, you have lost any claim on my "respect".
I won't, however, humor you about your particular choice of imaginary friend. I don't humor parents who lie to their kids about Santa and the Eostre Bunny, either (I don't go out of my way to disillusion them, but asking me a direct question such as "so what time do you think Santa visited last night" for the amusement of the wee ones will not have a good outcome). And I'll damn sure put my foot down when it comes to indoctrinating kids with FSM-worthy nonsense in direct contradiction with demonstrable facts.
Personally, I do believe in a creator deity, but I don't have the impudence (or ignorance) to claim I can ever "know" anything about that deity... Beyond the mere fact that I exist, or more accurately, that existance itself exists.
Now, if you happen to consider yourself a Christian, then you should feel offended by what I wrote. But not because of how I wrote it, rather, because I described the sad reality of your biggest religious festival. The material world has taken what should count as a joyous celebration of the birth of the son of your bhakti's god (time shifted to match the winter solstice, no doubt out of "respect" for those religions that held that as a holy day), and turned it into a day of worship of the jolly fat consumer of Coca Cola.
"Ford be praised!"
Black Friday exists because physical shopping at a Brick-n'-Mortar has a number of very real constraints on when it can occur - You need the store open and staffed; You need to have free time (ie, not at work) to go; You need a reason to go; You need money to spend there.
Most people meeting the last condition have the Friday after Turkey-day off from work, thus meeting the second condition. Most retail sales staff do not, thus meeting the first condition. And our annual Materialism-and-oh-yeah-that-dead-Jew festival provides the final condition, a reason to go shopping in the first place.
Shopping on-line changes all that. The store always has its virtual doors open. They always have what you want, even if you don't know you want something. You can even find things on the cheap, if you look around carefully. It eliminates three of the four constraints necessary for a "holiday" flood of shoppers to occur on a particular day. And for the only one remaining, we still have at least another 20 or so "shopping" days up to which Amazon will guarantee delivery by December 25th. So no rush.
The entire premise of a mad rush to shop on one particular day comes from the same minds that can't understand why we "abandon" 90% of shopping carts at online stores, after they force us to add items to a cart to see its price.
Nothing to see here, move along - Captain Obvious has struck again.
and they found that the happiest students were the ones that had an active social life
When studying matters of perception, you can't just come right out and ask people to rate themselves on a vague term. Do you "love" you father, your dog, and your wife? Trying to evaluate that question with any single definition of "love" would make you either really sick, or really cold. So, you ask related questions, hopefully of a more objective nature, about related behaviors and actions, which you can measure.
Behaviors and actions, however, do not adequately express the "happiness" of an introvert. Very few people, even introverts, would describe sitting alone in a room for hours at a time as overly indicative of feeling happy. But give me a good book, and in exactly that externally-visible state, I feel just about as "happy" as I get.
Maybe that's because you didn't read the manual, which says:
My most recent 20" box fan came with a manual. It says to never ever EVER put the fan in a window. The picture on the box shows it in a window. I have it in a window. It works fine there.
I have a humidifier, with a great big scary orange sticker on the inside of the lid, that actually says (paraphrased) "WARNING: If this unit becomes wet, unplug it, let it dry fully, and have it inspected by an authorized service technician before attempting to use it again". And what purpose does this lid, with so dire a warning, serve? You lift this particular lid to... FILL THE THING WITH WATER!
Virtually the entire warning section in most manuals exists solely for the purpose of helping the manufacturer fight off product liability suits. In the case of the box fan, some moron probably tried to use one in a window in the rain, and got zapped or burned his house down. That doesn't mean that I can't put a fan in the window on a nice sunny day, it just means if I do something stupid Lesko can say "see, we told you so!". For the humidifier, I don't quite know what they had in mind, but I have 100% confidence it involves covering their butts in some way.
So when the XBox360 says not to use it on a bed or sofa, which I expect accounts for where 99% of people would use it... Even those who read the warnings will tend to ignore it as just another sad attempt to protect Microsoft from morons.
Why not a nationwide water grid?
I said this about hurricanes (and caught hell in moderation for the un-PC nature of my sentiment), and I'll say it about water... I chose to live in the NorthEast US because we don't get any real natural disasters. We don't get deadly droughts that last for 20-year stretches. We have plentiful clean fresh water. We produce most of our own food (or rather, could and once did - Huge arable tracts of Northern New Engand have lain fallow for decades because, although extremely fertile, we just can't compete economically with the midwest industrial-ag operations).
So when you suggest "we all" conserve water for SoCal's use - I say go pound sand... Let the idiots that decided to live in a frickin' DESERT die.
low-flow shower heads
No. Plain and simple. For one thing, given decent water pressure in the shower, I'll take a four minute shower (vs over 20 at some hotels, before I started carrying a pair of pliers to "fix" that while travelling). For another, as I point out above - Not all of us live in the desert. If you want to live in the desert, you can have to take 20 minute showers trying in vain to get all the soap off you; bathrooms that always smell like piss no matter how many times you flush; drinking water made from recycling your own waste (and yes, technically it all comes from there, but I'll take "three centuries undergoing biological filtration in a wetland" over "filtered, sterilized, and deodorized").
Now, believe it or not after that mini-rant, I do agree with your sentiment for the most part - But don't get carried away. The planet will make more fresh water. It just happens. We need to focus on not polluting our water (including our "waste" water), and not draining, clearing, and building condos on, the natural filters already in place on this planet. The rest of the problem just comes as a natural consequence of people living 1where Mother Nature has put up great big "no trespassing" signs.
The line between voluntary and reluctant donation is very vague because it can be assumed that lab workers can easily be put under pressure
I hate to break it to you, but outside the hard physical sciences, at least 90% of research involves freshmen and sophmores (and mostly female at that) "pressured" into "volunteering", usually for a significant part of their grade in an "intro to experimental methodology" (or comparable) class.
The problem here involves pure and unadulterated BS politics. The professor "lied" to protect his staff, the info got out anyway, so his affiliation panicked over the nature of his work and requested he take a hike. Nothing more, nothing less.
And the real pity here? Not just his career - He'll get another non-research academic job within a few years. No, instead, we should feel bad about the invalidation of his findings just because of a combination of unfortunate circumstances, with his area of study not the least of which.
a wireless mesh network of bugspraying "magnets"
First of all, these don't "spray" bugs, in the pesticide sense.
They burn propane and mix it with octenol (basically a mosquito pheromone) to very specifically attract breeding (and thus blood-feeding) female mosquitos. No actual pesticides involved.
So to those who worried about bacteria, birds, frogs, and other bugs - This pretty much ONLY catches and kills female mosquitos (though possibly a few other biting flies). Nothing else would deliberately seek out what "smells" like a human meal surrounded by horny male mosquitos.
As for this oh-so-high-tech use of computers - It basically reports the status of each "magnet", such as the remaining propane level. It also potentially (from what I've read, I don't think they've implemented this on an automatic basis yet, though it works manually from a remote site) saves on propane by shutting down those nodes not likely to accomplish anything (for example, if you had a ring around a city, the downwind nodes would just waste fuel).