But then the guy spouts off on the theory of nuclear winter which turned out to be totally bogus and a fabrication of the KGB to deter NATO from placing nukes in western Europe
Last I checked it was still a pretty valid theory of what would happen in a widespread nuclear engagement. There's lots of argument about how severe it would be, but there aren't really any papers from anyone credible that say that it definitely would not happen.
I'm pretty sure that was the World Health Organization. The US was certainly part of that effort. It just wasn't the only part. This is not to say that I neccessarily agree with the thesis statement about a peak for the US on July 20th, 1969. Any argument about a historical "peak" for a nation is going to be highly subjective.
If a bunch of monkeys end up typing Shakespeare is that proof of a God, or proof that somebody finally found enough monkeys?
The problem with using monkeys is, of course, that they possess intelligence and adaptability. So, you really have to carefully design your experiment to make sure that the keypresses from the monkeys are truly random or you could have really skewed results one way or another. If you're using a truly random keypresser, however, you can work out odds on how often you should get the complete works of Shakespeare. If you get a lot more or a lot fewer copies than you statistically should, that would indicate a bias somewhere. So, if you find hidden messages in constants that are extremely unlikely to be there mathematically, you've either discovered something profound (either a real hidden message, or something wrong in the laws of statistics) or you've just exerpienced an astoundingly unlikely coincidence.
Since Pi is 1/2 Tau, I'm pretty sure that a hidden message in Tau would show up in Pi as well. I'm never quite sure how serious the Tau people are. They alway sound a bit like the people warning about the dangers of DHMO.
Steam is the closest thing to DRM done right available. You get actual VALUE out of the relationship (all the perks of STEAM) AND it's unobtrusive.
Unobtrusive... Except for all the spying on you and handing out the data to pretty much anyone who pays (does anyone believe that their "privacy policy" is actually binding on them?) or demands with some sort of legal clout.
Nowadays, you only need one IP address for your home and let the router sort it out.
The fact that so many people accept that you only "need" one IP address for your home is a huge problem. The way that NAT breaks the basic idea behind TCP/IP causes all kinds of completely unneccessary compromise in the way that network services operate.
I've been a Dr Who fan since I was a small child, and I personally class it under sci-fi. I also class it under fantasy. Actually, more broadly, I class all sci-fi, including hard science fiction, as a form of fantasy, although different examples of the genre obviously fall into different areas on a spectrum.
Anyway regarding:
If years of the story revolve around the time traveler being the last of his kind (and that's an interesting angle) then don't retcon and futureproof for the sake of ratings
This is a show about a time traveler, who is a member of a civilization who named themselves after the fact that they're time travelers. Pretty much every episode deals with a trip through time and space that alters the course of history. In other words, retroactive continuity, is at the heart of the entire series.
The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping.
I'm pretty sure ColdWetDog meant to say Ziggurat. It's worth noting. however, that the Marvel character "The Juggernaut" is named for a term meaning an unstoppable force. That term is derived from the Hindu god Jagganath. One form of worship of Jagganath involves a giant rolling temple pulled through the streets on holidays. Such temple cars have been known to (or are at least said to) crush people underfoot and be fairly hard to stop once they've gotten moving. Anyway rolling religious displays aren't unique to Hinduism, they just happen to have some really big ones. Maybe the Sumerians had them too and that's what ColdWetDog was referring to. Probably just ziggurats though.
Also, most supervillains in ancient middle eastern comics only appeared once. Unless they fought the good guy to a standstill then became friends... Of course, now I'm trying to figure out if Gilgamesh counts as the supervillian or Enkidu on this one. Mythology has a lot of guys with superpowers, but they're traditionally heros even if they go on wild murder sprees every time they're in a bad mood, so it kind of breaks down. It is interesting that one of the oldest recorded stories in the world has the standard modern superhero greeting ritual (they meet and fight, then get along after).
It's worth noting for anyone who hasn't read the book that Van Atta had been one of Leo's engineering trainees who he recommended for a management training program because he thought he'd be dangerous as an engineer. The end result was Van Atta working as Leo's boss and in charge of a large space installation housing a large number of children and young adults (who for reasons I won't go into here were effectively not legally protected people) whose welfare he completely ignores in favor of the bottom line and his own career.
Think it's stupid in routers? Patriot missile systems used to have a timing bug that would reduce accuracy the longer the unit was in operation. The bug was that the time in seconds since initialization was being converted from an int to a float and divided by 10, causing precision to go down as the time value went up. The inaccuracy was pronounced after 8 hours of continuous operation and the workaround was to restart the unit frequently (actually, it was apparently to assume that the units would be restarted frequently). As a result a unit that had been operating for 100+ hours failed to track an incoming scud missile and there were 126 US Army casualties (28 fatalities). That's the kind of software bug you can get worked up about! It is worth noting that they did actually patch it, and the patch was actually available before that incident, but had not yet been applied to that particular unit.
Every idiot kid who throws a rock off an overpass could potentially kill a busload of people. Sometimes they do kill someone, but most of the time they don't and most of the time, they don't get executed or sent to prison for life. That doesn't mean that they aren't being rotten, disgusting excuses for human beings when they do it, it just means that they didn't actually kill anyone. Frankly it seems to me that the people I know personally who are most in favor of extremely harsh punishments for everything are exactly the same people who also did (or sometimes still do) things like driving drunk, racing on public roads, discharging firearms illegally, etc. The hypocricy, self-entitlement and exceptionalism just gets sickening.
I'm by no means suggesting that doing anything to intentionally put a plane full of people at risk, even when the risk is small, isn't a scummy thing to do, nor that it shouldn't be illegal. That doesn't mean that we have to go insane on punishment. Let's not forget that such punishments would end up being applied equally both to psychos who really want to murder hundreds of people and to anyone who simply says to themselves: "gee, I can see the dot from my harmless class 1 laser pointer on the fuselage of that distant plane when I track it. Neat!".
No, this is the right approach. Every time you caught someone pointing a laser pointer to a plane, fine the idiot to bankruptcy to cover the rewards and potential damages to the crew, then throw some terrorism charges and lock them behind bars for 20 years and the number of incidents WILL get down.
No, the right approach is obviously to confiscate all of his property, then execute him slowly and painfully in the public square. Better yet, execute him after executing his family and closest friends in front of him. For that matter, death penalty for the slightest infraction. Traffic infraction: death! Littering: death! Late library book: death! Sneeze too loud in public: death! Heck, sneeze too loud at home: death!
Seriously, what is wrong with people and their complete lack of perspective on the harshness of punishments? I
It sounds like it's not your code that's buggy, but your requirements. If your requirements are "parse input in a format meeting specification X", and the input doesn't meet specification x, then your program isn't neccessarily buggy if it can't parse the input. Your problem is that the specification you're expected to build a parser for is actually the union of specification X, the format of all extant documents purportedly meeting that specification, and the format of all future documents that are meant to meet specification X. Is a speech recognition engine buggy if it can't understand a person who randomly starts squawking like a chicken?
Consider: someone comes to me and asks me to write a program that will take any arbitrary program and set of inputs as input and determine if the arbitrary program will ever halt with those inputs. Is my program buggy if it doesn't work for all possible input programs and sets of inputs? True, I would be remiss if I didn't point out to the person asking me to do it that what they want is either impossible or that, if I managed to do it (and more importantly prove somehow that my program worked as advertised), I would be a god capable of toppling the pillars of the universe. Programmers are asked frequently to do things that are effectively impossible to do perfectly, but that can be often be approximated to within acceptable tolerances or even be done perfectly within a limited subset of the problem domain. Trouble is, when the solution isn't impossibly perfect or doesn't work outside the limited domain it's intended for, it's "buggy".
As for Bizzeh's boss... Since I don't work for him I feel quite comfortable advising him that he can shove his point and analogy somewhere very uncomfortable after wrapping it in rusty barbed wire and dousing it in an some staphylococcus cultures. Obviously Bizzeh has to use a bit more tact.
You're joking, right? There are huge changes to Earth visible from space even if you completely ignore the really obvious changes if you're looking at the nightside. Do you have any idea how many man-made deserts there are in the world? Then there's the 16,000 square miles or so of "reclaimed" land in the Netherlands that used to be underwater. All the areas once covered by forest that are no longer covered by forest. The Aral sea is practically gone, having lost an area close to the size of the state of Maryland. There's all the man-made atmospheric effects visible from space. Ice sheets? Glaciers? There's pretty much... everything really. I mean, if you just think of Earth from space as a bunch of undifferentiated green and brown blobs then sure, I get your point. If you're actually paying attention, however, then you just sound crazy.
I don't really like to contribute to the off topic threads on this any more, but I have to still throw in my two cents here. Dice did buy Slashdot. It's sad that it's been bought by an entity that doesn't seem to care for the community and the history of Slashdot the way we do, but they do own it.
People have talked about boycotts and Slashdot alternatives and both of those are perfectly valid ways of attempting to influence Slashdot or just plain leave it behind. I'm wondering, however, if anyone has considered putting together an offer to Dice to buy Slashdot back from them? I've been using Slashdot since very close to the start (came in after Chips and Dips, but very shortly after that and lurked and posted as AC for a long time before getting an account). I have enough of an emotional investment in the site that I'd certainly be willing to throw a few thousand dollars into owning a piece of it. How many Slashdotters are there who care enough to do the same? Could we get together twenty thousand people willing to throw in a thousand dollars each and pay Dice the $20 million they paid for Slashdot? 200,000 willing to pay $100.00 each? Are there anything like that number of Slashdotters who really care? Anyone know what the best way to do that would be? Would a Kickstarter campaign be a valid avenue, or would it be better to create some sort of co-op or corporation and sell shares, or are there other ways a large group of people could get together to do something like this (in a form that might allow for a return on investment, but probably not)?
Has anyone already proposed this? Is anyone already working on it? I would search comments for that, but Slashdot's search tools have been broken and near useless for years, even before Dice came along. Maybe if the community actually owned Slashdot, we could do something about the problems with Slashdot. Personally, I've always wanted an open API for Slashdot so that users can use whatever front-end suits their fancy and even download the entire Slashdot database (well, not the entire database, obviously, but the comments and articles certainly). Maybe, if we owned it, we could actually do something like that and everyone, including Dice, could be happy about how it turned out.
It's probably a pipe dream, however. There's a lot of vocal complaint (enough to really damage enjoyment of Slashdot lately and I'm sorry to be adding to this thread for that reason), but I don't know if there's really enough of a "core" Slashdot readership left who would be willing to put in that much for our beloved site.
I might be misunderstanding you, but it sounds like you're suggesting that you either need to have no new medicines and let people remain sick, or you have to allow monopoly rents to be extracted from the sick. The entire point of my post was that such an idea is a false dichotomy. The amount spent paying for the products of medical research is so much more than the amount spent researching them that additional tax money could be spent on the medical research with control of the results going back to the taxpayers who paid for it rather than private, profit-seeking entities. The cost to the taxpayer would be greater on the research end, but the savings in medical expenditures would be greater still than the extra money spent on research.
jtara wrote (and was bizarrely moderated insightful):
And why is it that you are owed free content?
This article isn't talking about people being given free content, it's talking about the lack of options for anyone who doesn't want to tie themselves into a long-term service contract for a service they don't need. There's an argument that exclusive content is a standard way for providers to sell their services, so this is perfectly acceptable. However, a lot of people like to believe the lie that the Olypics (in its current form) is part of our cultural heritage and belongs to the world as a whole. The IOC likes to promote this view as long as no-one tries to steal "their" valuable intellectual property by trying to have their own Olypmic games or something like that. As a consequence of this, people tend to believe that the Olympics should be used as an exclusive to force people into buying other things if they just want the Olympics. In other words, people think it's unreasonable that they can't get the Olympics a la carte. No one (at least in this article) was demanding it for free.
nor is reducing fillers and calling it "extended release."
Right, because all the extended release versions of doxycycline have totally been denied patent protection as new drugs. Incidentally, I don't think any of us are particularly impressed that your company got a new patent on an old drug by doubling the dose (I'm sure they threw in something to reduce irritation from the higher dose too making totally a new invention).
Well, that $130 Billion works out to about $415 per person in the US. Government and charaties and the like paid about half of that and "industry" paid the other half. Total healthcare spending from that same PDF was $2,939 Billion (although those numbers are a bit confusing because it seems to include the money industry spent on the research added to the amount industry was paid by patients). In any case, that's about $9390 per person in the US, or around 45 times the amount industry spent on research. So, if a few percent of total healthcare spending goes towards the pharm/biotech/medical devices industry, they're doing just fine. Also the answer to who is paying for medical research is that the taxpayers and patients are. Frankly, if you look at the math, it's pretty ridiculous. If half of the research costs aren't going to be paid by industry anyway, and it's such a small fraction of the total healthcare costs, why not just double or triple what the government is paying for research and stop giving a cent of it to for profit industries. Then, do all the research through public research institutions and relegate industry to a manufacturing role. Let them all be 'generic' manufacturers competing on production of the same drugs. In the meantime the few extra percent that would raise total healthcare expenditure by would be offset by the much larger drop in healthcare spending due to the fact that a bunch of artificial monopolies just vanished. Now, I know it's tragic that people who didn't pay might also benefit from this research. Even worse than the people in other countries are the untold future generations of humans who will also benefit with better health and happier lives without paying for it. Bunch of filthy freeloading descendants.
Kanji seem like an awesome idea at first. You make a picture of the sun, and voila, you have the sun! And then a picture of the moon, and you have that idea. Moonlight? Combine kanji for moon plus kanji for light and you probably have moonlight!
Awesome right? Yeah it's just fucking great until you realize you have to start making 30 strokes for one word, and that small pics start looking like each other, and that unless you know that very specific kanji, you have no clue how to write it out. And unlike the english alphabet which has 26 letters and once you learn them and combination you can sound out most words, you have to memorize thousands of kanji and even more kanji combinations or you'll get hung up reading highschool level newspapers.
You forgot about Kanji dictionaries. Want to look something up, just count the strokes. It's easy, as long as you've spent years practicing forming the strokes in the first place. If not, it's a bit of a wild guess what constitutes one or two or three strokes. But hey, once you've counted the strokes, you just have to jump to the section of the dictionary for characters with that many strokes then look through a few thousand characters until you see one that matches. Piece of cake!
It may make sense to have an automatic expiration on bills like the PATRIOT ACT, but as a general rule for law that would result in complete chaos. Good God, we would never get anything done if we had to rehash out **EVERYTHING** every 5, 10 or 20 years.
I think that would be a great idea for exactly that reason. It would create a limit on how big the active body of law could get. That would be a good thing. You could create a system where laws could get a longer term if, for example, they were put to a public vote.
It's used in fiction because the writers are on a tight schedule and so aren't above a bit of deus ex machina to get over a sticky plot point. Of course, fiction writers need not concern themselves with the human rights of fictional characters.
Actually, I think it's more used because they like to pander to the large subset of the population that _loves_ to see fictional heroes violate the rights of the "bad guys". It works in real life politics, after all. Just look at the ridiculous populatic of Sherrif Joe Arpaio. TV crime dramas are full of "good guys" who lie, cheat, steal, torture, murder, and otherwise violate pretty much every principle they're supposed to uphold, but it's ok because they have virtually a 100% success rate (except for the recurring genius serial killers with whom they're involved in an intensely personal cat and mouse game) at not only closing cases, but getting the right guy. Most of the heros of these shows belong behind bars themselves, but people cheer them on because they're "getting" the bad guys one way or another.
Of course, aside from the pandering, there's also the possibility of direct influence by the military and three letter agencies and their ilk (not to mention affiliated commercial entities with a financial interest in the spying industry). That may sound like conspiracy theory material, but it's really not. It's quite well known that the US military has, for example, certain requirements for how the military is depicted in exchange for use of military resources in entertainment. It's also completely factual that the CIA used to have a movie financing arm and still provides all kinds of consulting services to Hollywood. Frankly, it wouldn't be too surprising if there were still producers, directors and writers directly on their payroll like there were back in the 1950s.
Slashdot Mirror
But then the guy spouts off on the theory of nuclear winter which turned out to be totally bogus and a fabrication of the KGB to deter NATO from placing nukes in western Europe
Last I checked it was still a pretty valid theory of what would happen in a widespread nuclear engagement. There's lots of argument about how severe it would be, but there aren't really any papers from anyone credible that say that it definitely would not happen.
I'm pretty sure that was the World Health Organization. The US was certainly part of that effort. It just wasn't the only part. This is not to say that I neccessarily agree with the thesis statement about a peak for the US on July 20th, 1969. Any argument about a historical "peak" for a nation is going to be highly subjective.
In the process we invented the modern world, which is one of the things that makes advanced science possible.
--The Cat
The moon belongs to America, and anxiously awaits the arrival of our astro-men. Will you be among them?
_Simpsons_
If a bunch of monkeys end up typing Shakespeare is that proof of a God, or proof that somebody finally found enough monkeys?
The problem with using monkeys is, of course, that they possess intelligence and adaptability. So, you really have to carefully design your experiment to make sure that the keypresses from the monkeys are truly random or you could have really skewed results one way or another. If you're using a truly random keypresser, however, you can work out odds on how often you should get the complete works of Shakespeare. If you get a lot more or a lot fewer copies than you statistically should, that would indicate a bias somewhere. So, if you find hidden messages in constants that are extremely unlikely to be there mathematically, you've either discovered something profound (either a real hidden message, or something wrong in the laws of statistics) or you've just exerpienced an astoundingly unlikely coincidence.
Since Pi is 1/2 Tau, I'm pretty sure that a hidden message in Tau would show up in Pi as well. I'm never quite sure how serious the Tau people are. They alway sound a bit like the people warning about the dangers of DHMO.
Steam is the closest thing to DRM done right available. You get actual VALUE out of the relationship (all the perks of STEAM) AND it's unobtrusive.
Unobtrusive... Except for all the spying on you and handing out the data to pretty much anyone who pays (does anyone believe that their "privacy policy" is actually binding on them?) or demands with some sort of legal clout.
Nowadays, you only need one IP address for your home and let the router sort it out.
The fact that so many people accept that you only "need" one IP address for your home is a huge problem. The way that NAT breaks the basic idea behind TCP/IP causes all kinds of completely unneccessary compromise in the way that network services operate.
I've been a Dr Who fan since I was a small child, and I personally class it under sci-fi. I also class it under fantasy. Actually, more broadly, I class all sci-fi, including hard science fiction, as a form of fantasy, although different examples of the genre obviously fall into different areas on a spectrum.
Anyway regarding:
If years of the story revolve around the time traveler being the last of his kind (and that's an interesting angle) then don't retcon and futureproof for the sake of ratings
This is a show about a time traveler, who is a member of a civilization who named themselves after the fact that they're time travelers. Pretty much every episode deals with a trip through time and space that alters the course of history. In other words, retroactive continuity, is at the heart of the entire series.
The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping.
I'm pretty sure ColdWetDog meant to say Ziggurat. It's worth noting. however, that the Marvel character "The Juggernaut" is named for a term meaning an unstoppable force. That term is derived from the Hindu god Jagganath. One form of worship of Jagganath involves a giant rolling temple pulled through the streets on holidays. Such temple cars have been known to (or are at least said to) crush people underfoot and be fairly hard to stop once they've gotten moving. Anyway rolling religious displays aren't unique to Hinduism, they just happen to have some really big ones. Maybe the Sumerians had them too and that's what ColdWetDog was referring to. Probably just ziggurats though.
Also, most supervillains in ancient middle eastern comics only appeared once. Unless they fought the good guy to a standstill then became friends... Of course, now I'm trying to figure out if Gilgamesh counts as the supervillian or Enkidu on this one. Mythology has a lot of guys with superpowers, but they're traditionally heros even if they go on wild murder sprees every time they're in a bad mood, so it kind of breaks down. It is interesting that one of the oldest recorded stories in the world has the standard modern superhero greeting ritual (they meet and fight, then get along after).
It's worth noting for anyone who hasn't read the book that Van Atta had been one of Leo's engineering trainees who he recommended for a management training program because he thought he'd be dangerous as an engineer. The end result was Van Atta working as Leo's boss and in charge of a large space installation housing a large number of children and young adults (who for reasons I won't go into here were effectively not legally protected people) whose welfare he completely ignores in favor of the bottom line and his own career.
Think it's stupid in routers? Patriot missile systems used to have a timing bug that would reduce accuracy the longer the unit was in operation. The bug was that the time in seconds since initialization was being converted from an int to a float and divided by 10, causing precision to go down as the time value went up. The inaccuracy was pronounced after 8 hours of continuous operation and the workaround was to restart the unit frequently (actually, it was apparently to assume that the units would be restarted frequently). As a result a unit that had been operating for 100+ hours failed to track an incoming scud missile and there were 126 US Army casualties (28 fatalities). That's the kind of software bug you can get worked up about! It is worth noting that they did actually patch it, and the patch was actually available before that incident, but had not yet been applied to that particular unit.
Every idiot kid who throws a rock off an overpass could potentially kill a busload of people. Sometimes they do kill someone, but most of the time they don't and most of the time, they don't get executed or sent to prison for life. That doesn't mean that they aren't being rotten, disgusting excuses for human beings when they do it, it just means that they didn't actually kill anyone. Frankly it seems to me that the people I know personally who are most in favor of extremely harsh punishments for everything are exactly the same people who also did (or sometimes still do) things like driving drunk, racing on public roads, discharging firearms illegally, etc. The hypocricy, self-entitlement and exceptionalism just gets sickening.
I'm by no means suggesting that doing anything to intentionally put a plane full of people at risk, even when the risk is small, isn't a scummy thing to do, nor that it shouldn't be illegal. That doesn't mean that we have to go insane on punishment. Let's not forget that such punishments would end up being applied equally both to psychos who really want to murder hundreds of people and to anyone who simply says to themselves: "gee, I can see the dot from my harmless class 1 laser pointer on the fuselage of that distant plane when I track it. Neat!".
No, this is the right approach. Every time you caught someone pointing a laser pointer to a plane, fine the idiot to bankruptcy to cover the rewards and potential damages to the crew, then throw some terrorism charges and lock them behind bars for 20 years and the number of incidents WILL get down.
No, the right approach is obviously to confiscate all of his property, then execute him slowly and painfully in the public square. Better yet, execute him after executing his family and closest friends in front of him. For that matter, death penalty for the slightest infraction. Traffic infraction: death! Littering: death! Late library book: death! Sneeze too loud in public: death! Heck, sneeze too loud at home: death!
Seriously, what is wrong with people and their complete lack of perspective on the harshness of punishments? I
It sounds like it's not your code that's buggy, but your requirements. If your requirements are "parse input in a format meeting specification X", and the input doesn't meet specification x, then your program isn't neccessarily buggy if it can't parse the input. Your problem is that the specification you're expected to build a parser for is actually the union of specification X, the format of all extant documents purportedly meeting that specification, and the format of all future documents that are meant to meet specification X. Is a speech recognition engine buggy if it can't understand a person who randomly starts squawking like a chicken?
Consider: someone comes to me and asks me to write a program that will take any arbitrary program and set of inputs as input and determine if the arbitrary program will ever halt with those inputs. Is my program buggy if it doesn't work for all possible input programs and sets of inputs? True, I would be remiss if I didn't point out to the person asking me to do it that what they want is either impossible or that, if I managed to do it (and more importantly prove somehow that my program worked as advertised), I would be a god capable of toppling the pillars of the universe. Programmers are asked frequently to do things that are effectively impossible to do perfectly, but that can be often be approximated to within acceptable tolerances or even be done perfectly within a limited subset of the problem domain. Trouble is, when the solution isn't impossibly perfect or doesn't work outside the limited domain it's intended for, it's "buggy".
As for Bizzeh's boss... Since I don't work for him I feel quite comfortable advising him that he can shove his point and analogy somewhere very uncomfortable after wrapping it in rusty barbed wire and dousing it in an some staphylococcus cultures. Obviously Bizzeh has to use a bit more tact.
You're joking, right? There are huge changes to Earth visible from space even if you completely ignore the really obvious changes if you're looking at the nightside. Do you have any idea how many man-made deserts there are in the world? Then there's the 16,000 square miles or so of "reclaimed" land in the Netherlands that used to be underwater. All the areas once covered by forest that are no longer covered by forest. The Aral sea is practically gone, having lost an area close to the size of the state of Maryland. There's all the man-made atmospheric effects visible from space. Ice sheets? Glaciers? There's pretty much... everything really. I mean, if you just think of Earth from space as a bunch of undifferentiated green and brown blobs then sure, I get your point. If you're actually paying attention, however, then you just sound crazy.
I don't really like to contribute to the off topic threads on this any more, but I have to still throw in my two cents here. Dice did buy Slashdot. It's sad that it's been bought by an entity that doesn't seem to care for the community and the history of Slashdot the way we do, but they do own it.
People have talked about boycotts and Slashdot alternatives and both of those are perfectly valid ways of attempting to influence Slashdot or just plain leave it behind. I'm wondering, however, if anyone has considered putting together an offer to Dice to buy Slashdot back from them? I've been using Slashdot since very close to the start (came in after Chips and Dips, but very shortly after that and lurked and posted as AC for a long time before getting an account). I have enough of an emotional investment in the site that I'd certainly be willing to throw a few thousand dollars into owning a piece of it. How many Slashdotters are there who care enough to do the same? Could we get together twenty thousand people willing to throw in a thousand dollars each and pay Dice the $20 million they paid for Slashdot? 200,000 willing to pay $100.00 each? Are there anything like that number of Slashdotters who really care? Anyone know what the best way to do that would be? Would a Kickstarter campaign be a valid avenue, or would it be better to create some sort of co-op or corporation and sell shares, or are there other ways a large group of people could get together to do something like this (in a form that might allow for a return on investment, but probably not)?
Has anyone already proposed this? Is anyone already working on it? I would search comments for that, but Slashdot's search tools have been broken and near useless for years, even before Dice came along. Maybe if the community actually owned Slashdot, we could do something about the problems with Slashdot. Personally, I've always wanted an open API for Slashdot so that users can use whatever front-end suits their fancy and even download the entire Slashdot database (well, not the entire database, obviously, but the comments and articles certainly). Maybe, if we owned it, we could actually do something like that and everyone, including Dice, could be happy about how it turned out.
It's probably a pipe dream, however. There's a lot of vocal complaint (enough to really damage enjoyment of Slashdot lately and I'm sorry to be adding to this thread for that reason), but I don't know if there's really enough of a "core" Slashdot readership left who would be willing to put in that much for our beloved site.
I might be misunderstanding you, but it sounds like you're suggesting that you either need to have no new medicines and let people remain sick, or you have to allow monopoly rents to be extracted from the sick. The entire point of my post was that such an idea is a false dichotomy. The amount spent paying for the products of medical research is so much more than the amount spent researching them that additional tax money could be spent on the medical research with control of the results going back to the taxpayers who paid for it rather than private, profit-seeking entities. The cost to the taxpayer would be greater on the research end, but the savings in medical expenditures would be greater still than the extra money spent on research.
jtara wrote (and was bizarrely moderated insightful):
And why is it that you are owed free content?
This article isn't talking about people being given free content, it's talking about the lack of options for anyone who doesn't want to tie themselves into a long-term service contract for a service they don't need. There's an argument that exclusive content is a standard way for providers to sell their services, so this is perfectly acceptable. However, a lot of people like to believe the lie that the Olypics (in its current form) is part of our cultural heritage and belongs to the world as a whole. The IOC likes to promote this view as long as no-one tries to steal "their" valuable intellectual property by trying to have their own Olypmic games or something like that. As a consequence of this, people tend to believe that the Olympics should be used as an exclusive to force people into buying other things if they just want the Olympics. In other words, people think it's unreasonable that they can't get the Olympics a la carte. No one (at least in this article) was demanding it for free.
nor is reducing fillers and calling it "extended release."
Right, because all the extended release versions of doxycycline have totally been denied patent protection as new drugs. Incidentally, I don't think any of us are particularly impressed that your company got a new patent on an old drug by doubling the dose (I'm sure they threw in something to reduce irritation from the higher dose too making totally a new invention).
...someone has to pay for drug research...
Well, that $130 Billion works out to about $415 per person in the US. Government and charaties and the like paid about half of that and "industry" paid the other half. Total healthcare spending from that same PDF was $2,939 Billion (although those numbers are a bit confusing because it seems to include the money industry spent on the research added to the amount industry was paid by patients). In any case, that's about $9390 per person in the US, or around 45 times the amount industry spent on research. So, if a few percent of total healthcare spending goes towards the pharm/biotech/medical devices industry, they're doing just fine. Also the answer to who is paying for medical research is that the taxpayers and patients are. Frankly, if you look at the math, it's pretty ridiculous. If half of the research costs aren't going to be paid by industry anyway, and it's such a small fraction of the total healthcare costs, why not just double or triple what the government is paying for research and stop giving a cent of it to for profit industries. Then, do all the research through public research institutions and relegate industry to a manufacturing role. Let them all be 'generic' manufacturers competing on production of the same drugs. In the meantime the few extra percent that would raise total healthcare expenditure by would be offset by the much larger drop in healthcare spending due to the fact that a bunch of artificial monopolies just vanished.
Now, I know it's tragic that people who didn't pay might also benefit from this research. Even worse than the people in other countries are the untold future generations of humans who will also benefit with better health and happier lives without paying for it. Bunch of filthy freeloading descendants.
Kanji seem like an awesome idea at first. You make a picture of the sun, and voila, you have the sun! And then a picture of the moon, and you have that idea. Moonlight? Combine kanji for moon plus kanji for light and you probably have moonlight!
Awesome right? Yeah it's just fucking great until you realize you have to start making 30 strokes for one word, and that small pics start looking like each other, and that unless you know that very specific kanji, you have no clue how to write it out. And unlike the english alphabet which has 26 letters and once you learn them and combination you can sound out most words, you have to memorize thousands of kanji and even more kanji combinations or you'll get hung up reading highschool level newspapers.
You forgot about Kanji dictionaries. Want to look something up, just count the strokes. It's easy, as long as you've spent years practicing forming the strokes in the first place. If not, it's a bit of a wild guess what constitutes one or two or three strokes. But hey, once you've counted the strokes, you just have to jump to the section of the dictionary for characters with that many strokes then look through a few thousand characters until you see one that matches. Piece of cake!
It may make sense to have an automatic expiration on bills like the PATRIOT ACT, but as a general rule for law that would result in complete chaos. Good God, we would never get anything done if we had to rehash out **EVERYTHING** every 5, 10 or 20 years.
I think that would be a great idea for exactly that reason. It would create a limit on how big the active body of law could get. That would be a good thing. You could create a system where laws could get a longer term if, for example, they were put to a public vote.
It's used in fiction because the writers are on a tight schedule and so aren't above a bit of deus ex machina to get over a sticky plot point. Of course, fiction writers need not concern themselves with the human rights of fictional characters.
Actually, I think it's more used because they like to pander to the large subset of the population that _loves_ to see fictional heroes violate the rights of the "bad guys". It works in real life politics, after all. Just look at the ridiculous populatic of Sherrif Joe Arpaio. TV crime dramas are full of "good guys" who lie, cheat, steal, torture, murder, and otherwise violate pretty much every principle they're supposed to uphold, but it's ok because they have virtually a 100% success rate (except for the recurring genius serial killers with whom they're involved in an intensely personal cat and mouse game) at not only closing cases, but getting the right guy. Most of the heros of these shows belong behind bars themselves, but people cheer them on because they're "getting" the bad guys one way or another.
Of course, aside from the pandering, there's also the possibility of direct influence by the military and three letter agencies and their ilk (not to mention affiliated commercial entities with a financial interest in the spying industry). That may sound like conspiracy theory material, but it's really not. It's quite well known that the US military has, for example, certain requirements for how the military is depicted in exchange for use of military resources in entertainment. It's also completely factual that the CIA used to have a movie financing arm and still provides all kinds of consulting services to Hollywood. Frankly, it wouldn't be too surprising if there were still producers, directors and writers directly on their payroll like there were back in the 1950s.
To pass a lie detector test, you must 'believe' the lie is true.
Actually, to pass a lie detector test, the tester must believe what you are saying is true. They're not objective tests.