Possibly by some definitions of "better". Higher yield, longer storage life, possibly. Better tasting, more nutritious, that's arguable.
You're free not to buy their stuff if you don't like it. But most people seem to like it otherwise they'd be out of business.
That doesn't seem to be the case. Pesticide use ramping up as GMO crop technology backfires
That particular news story is poorly written and politically biased. Even the title incorrectly supposes that this is unexpected. Of course, you need to keep developing new GMOs regularly in order to keep benefiting from them.
You can get emulators for just about every machine you can imagine: PDP-10, PDP-11, DOS, Atari, Amiga, C64, microcontroller, etc. You can get hardware emulators with FPGAs if you like. Almost any important format is documented or has been reverse engineered. Yes, you can easily read 1997 PowerPoint files, even if his weird choice of Office on Mac can't. And that's only with current technology. Give it a few decades and all that can happen behind the scenes and computers will just automatically perform even the most complicated data conversions behind the scenes. "Computer, scan the 1997 floppy and put the data on screen."
First of all, the groups being bribed are small special interests, like unions. They then deliver votes and are politically active on the part of candidates. No position in the US ever receives a majority of voters.
Second, even if a majority of voters vote for something, that doesn't mean it's constitutional. That's why even decisions like Prop 8 can be challenged in court.
Third, my parenthetical remark wasn't even intended to challenge the legitimacy of such votes; I actually think people are short-sighted if they let their votes be bought way: it is against their own interests.
It's going to entitlements, mostly. Increased taxes and spending are justified by progressives with phrases like "taxes buy civilization", but they choose to spend most of the new money coming in on increasing individual benefits (it buys votes, I suppose). A lot of the rest is spent on bailouts and subsidies to failing industries. Infrastructure and non-profits are stagnating or get cut.
I understood that he is comparing the book authors and that their view is "banal", as such "“Progress” is driven by the inexorable spread of American consumer technology over the surface of the earth." which is in fact a "banal" view of "progress".
My response is that this is bullshit. The voluntary adoption of US culture, lifestyle, and goods around the world is a good thing and it is exactly what "progress" is supposed to mean. Europeans have failed to come up with a compelling alternative vision for the future of humanity.
First, a lengthy anti-American diatribe, now just a list of generic platitudes. You're a perfect representative of the kind of vapidity and consumer culture you yourself complain about.
Because he is using the word "banal" he is paraphrasing "The banality of evil"?
His article is entitled "The Banality of 'Don't be Evil'". You have to be wearing ideological blinders if you think that isn't a reference to "The Banality of Evil".
as such "“Progress” is driven by the inexorable spread of American consumer technology over the surface of the earth." which is in fact a "banal" view of "progress"
People read more, write more, research more, travel more, invent more, learn more, communicate more than ever before. People can do more science in their kitchen and more computing on their phone today than you could do in a million dollar lab a few decades ago. You can access millions of books, the DNA sequences of thousands of species, intricate chemical databases, vast astrophysical database, and a huge library of software, scientific and otherwise. That seems anything but "banal" to me.
But if you whine and complain about US culture, there must be some alternative, better view of "progress" that you have in mind. So what is it? Or are you just blowing smoke? For that matter, what distinctive contribution to progress and culture has your own country made, other than following the US model with typical German efficiency?
All he is saying is that some companies are rushing ahead with new tech like Google Glass and Streetview and telling us everything is fine and its good for us.
That's tendentious bullshit. Google is offering two legal products that people apparently want. That's what companies are supposed to do. If you think they are "bad" for "us", then go through the political and legal process to ban such products.
Of course, so far, such challenges have been completely unsuccessful, and for good reason: it's an infringement on our liberties and you can expect strong opposition to any such attempts to restrict the freedom to take photographs in public places.
so this ruling basically can add everybody who drives to your national DNA tracking database
Don't kid your self, most developed countries have one (US, Canada, Australia, Germany, UK, etc.), and in many of them, you can be added without being a convicted criminal.
1920x1200 has 200 extra vertical pixels, meaning quite a bit more vertical room for text
No, it has 120 extra vertical pixels, i.e. 10% more. But that's irrelevant, since HD resolutions on laptops are high enough that you simply choose a 10% lower DPI and your text is going to look fine. On an 18.5" diagonal laptop with 1920x1080 resolution, you are going to have more room, not less, than on a 17" 16:10 display, even if your DPI are a little lower.
Apple is just a run-of-the-mill laptop vendor; they have no magic source for 16:10 displays or any other special display. Like everybody else, they shipped 1920x1200 when LCD manufacturers made it. Now they have to ship 16:9, like everybody else.
Democracy can't function without a consumption-based culture!
Yes. Democracy can't function without individual liberty. If you give people individual liberty, many of them will choose to consume and many others will choose to market and sell to them. Furthermore, the economy will be doing well enough to support and enable such behaviors. So, yes, democracy and consumerism are inextricably linked. You can't have democracy and liberty without lots of people making stupid choices, including (over-)consumption.
Sign the right NDA and most of what you are missing becomes available.
While the term "open" may mean different things to different people, "open" never meant "you have to sign an NDA to get the spec".
as we have for longer than you, RMS, GPL or the entire Loony libre movement has been alive.
Actually, this has nothing to do with loony ideology, and everything with hard-nosed business decisions. For any software or hardware I buy, I want competitive pricing and long term availability. Designs that anybody can implement freely give me that automatically. Anything that requires an NDA or a license likely is not competitively priced and may disappear or increase in price overnight at the whim of the company issuing the license; that adds a huge amount of risk and cost to my projects. Sometimes, I have no choice but to accept that extra risk and cost, but as soon as someone comes up with an "open" alternative, I'll switch to that.
The rest of us consider open to be fair and non-discriminatory terms,
Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, you, and a bunch of law firms? A small "rest" that is. More like the "residue" at the bottom of a barrel.
You're welcome to found your own newspaper and try to compete. You'll quickly realize why these companies are reducing their staff in order to make ends meet.
Why you remove progressional photographers from the equation you'll get amateur quality photography
Professional press photographers seem to be competing about how much they can manipulate readers emotionally and push an agenda. A little less "professionalism" seems like a positive change.
Photoshop was a low-end rip-off of other software developed and published mostly with government funds or to address specific in-house needs. Most of the libraries to build Photoshop were developed by others and effectively available for free. The original Photoshop also wasn't a very complicated program, and because there were several widely used existing versions from other vendors, the risk was nearly nil. So I'd say the first copy of Photoshop should have been nearly free.
In fact, that's true for a lot of the software you use day-to-day: the people making the big bucks are usually not the people who originally put in the hard work and took the big risks. Instead, after the original development, someone swoops in, takes no significant risks, clones the best parts of existing software, sells it really cheap (they had none of the overhead), then markets the hell out of it, and finally runs the innovators out of business. And unfortunately software patents just aren't a feasible mechanism stopping that.
The current patent and copyright system rewards such behavior and punishes innovators. It's arguably even worse than not having IP protection on software at all.
Sun might not have brought the lawsuit for business reasons, but they set up the process and the licenses in a way that they could bring such lawsuits. Relying on the goodwill of a company not to sue you is foolish, because sooner or later they are going to come under new management and the new management may well decide you that it is in their best interest to sue you.
People should have abandoned Java as soon as Sun reneged on their promise to make it an open, non-proprietary standard through a standards process, which would have involved legally binding commitments on their part not to do what their new owners are doing now.
the removal of the macbook pro 17" laptop left a big hole in the marketplace for 'high text density' laptops.
There are plenty of 17" HD laptops around, just not from Apple. That's what you get if you tie yourself to a single vendor for your software and hardware.
Quantum efficiency is the percentage of photons that actually are registered by an electronic device and has nothing to do with eyes, naked or otherwise. And for photographic application, all that matters is "visible light". You can't make a sensor that registers more than 100% of all incoming photons.
In different words, your response is complete nonsense.
The problem isn't with a Dutch lab that asks for payment in return for results and a cut of the potential profit. The problem is with the Saudi government that fires people who actually try to alert the world.
I'd say the problem is with both. The financial rewards should go to whoever develops treatments and cures, not to a publicly funded research lab that happens to have received disease samples for free and is now trying to profit from them.
Slashdot Mirror
You're free not to buy their stuff if you don't like it. But most people seem to like it otherwise they'd be out of business.
That particular news story is poorly written and politically biased. Even the title incorrectly supposes that this is unexpected. Of course, you need to keep developing new GMOs regularly in order to keep benefiting from them.
They make better crops, increase productivity, reduce pesticide use, and now they even use IT to aid in their nefarious plans! Oh the horror if it!
You can get emulators for just about every machine you can imagine: PDP-10, PDP-11, DOS, Atari, Amiga, C64, microcontroller, etc. You can get hardware emulators with FPGAs if you like. Almost any important format is documented or has been reverse engineered. Yes, you can easily read 1997 PowerPoint files, even if his weird choice of Office on Mac can't. And that's only with current technology. Give it a few decades and all that can happen behind the scenes and computers will just automatically perform even the most complicated data conversions behind the scenes. "Computer, scan the 1997 floppy and put the data on screen."
Of course, it's not actually as good as a regular, cheap motion sensor.
First of all, the groups being bribed are small special interests, like unions. They then deliver votes and are politically active on the part of candidates. No position in the US ever receives a majority of voters.
Second, even if a majority of voters vote for something, that doesn't mean it's constitutional. That's why even decisions like Prop 8 can be challenged in court.
Third, my parenthetical remark wasn't even intended to challenge the legitimacy of such votes; I actually think people are short-sighted if they let their votes be bought way: it is against their own interests.
It's going to entitlements, mostly. Increased taxes and spending are justified by progressives with phrases like "taxes buy civilization", but they choose to spend most of the new money coming in on increasing individual benefits (it buys votes, I suppose). A lot of the rest is spent on bailouts and subsidies to failing industries. Infrastructure and non-profits are stagnating or get cut.
I faced "the issue" squarely:
My response is that this is bullshit. The voluntary adoption of US culture, lifestyle, and goods around the world is a good thing and it is exactly what "progress" is supposed to mean. Europeans have failed to come up with a compelling alternative vision for the future of humanity.
First, a lengthy anti-American diatribe, now just a list of generic platitudes. You're a perfect representative of the kind of vapidity and consumer culture you yourself complain about.
His article is entitled "The Banality of 'Don't be Evil'". You have to be wearing ideological blinders if you think that isn't a reference to "The Banality of Evil".
People read more, write more, research more, travel more, invent more, learn more, communicate more than ever before. People can do more science in their kitchen and more computing on their phone today than you could do in a million dollar lab a few decades ago. You can access millions of books, the DNA sequences of thousands of species, intricate chemical databases, vast astrophysical database, and a huge library of software, scientific and otherwise. That seems anything but "banal" to me.
But if you whine and complain about US culture, there must be some alternative, better view of "progress" that you have in mind. So what is it? Or are you just blowing smoke? For that matter, what distinctive contribution to progress and culture has your own country made, other than following the US model with typical German efficiency?
That's tendentious bullshit. Google is offering two legal products that people apparently want. That's what companies are supposed to do. If you think they are "bad" for "us", then go through the political and legal process to ban such products.
Of course, so far, such challenges have been completely unsuccessful, and for good reason: it's an infringement on our liberties and you can expect strong opposition to any such attempts to restrict the freedom to take photographs in public places.
Don't kid your self, most developed countries have one (US, Canada, Australia, Germany, UK, etc.), and in many of them, you can be added without being a convicted criminal.
No, it has 120 extra vertical pixels, i.e. 10% more. But that's irrelevant, since HD resolutions on laptops are high enough that you simply choose a 10% lower DPI and your text is going to look fine. On an 18.5" diagonal laptop with 1920x1080 resolution, you are going to have more room, not less, than on a 17" 16:10 display, even if your DPI are a little lower.
Apple is just a run-of-the-mill laptop vendor; they have no magic source for 16:10 displays or any other special display. Like everybody else, they shipped 1920x1200 when LCD manufacturers made it. Now they have to ship 16:9, like everybody else.
Yes. Democracy can't function without individual liberty. If you give people individual liberty, many of them will choose to consume and many others will choose to market and sell to them. Furthermore, the economy will be doing well enough to support and enable such behaviors. So, yes, democracy and consumerism are inextricably linked. You can't have democracy and liberty without lots of people making stupid choices, including (over-)consumption.
While the term "open" may mean different things to different people, "open" never meant "you have to sign an NDA to get the spec".
Actually, this has nothing to do with loony ideology, and everything with hard-nosed business decisions. For any software or hardware I buy, I want competitive pricing and long term availability. Designs that anybody can implement freely give me that automatically. Anything that requires an NDA or a license likely is not competitively priced and may disappear or increase in price overnight at the whim of the company issuing the license; that adds a huge amount of risk and cost to my projects. Sometimes, I have no choice but to accept that extra risk and cost, but as soon as someone comes up with an "open" alternative, I'll switch to that.
Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, you, and a bunch of law firms? A small "rest" that is. More like the "residue" at the bottom of a barrel.
You're welcome to found your own newspaper and try to compete. You'll quickly realize why these companies are reducing their staff in order to make ends meet.
It's press photography; they are supposed to be reporting the news, not "framing" it, literally or figuratively.
Professional press photographers seem to be competing about how much they can manipulate readers emotionally and push an agenda. A little less "professionalism" seems like a positive change.
You're saying that 17" 1920x1200 is good enough but 18.5" 1920x1080 is not? Sorry, that's silly.
Photoshop was a low-end rip-off of other software developed and published mostly with government funds or to address specific in-house needs. Most of the libraries to build Photoshop were developed by others and effectively available for free. The original Photoshop also wasn't a very complicated program, and because there were several widely used existing versions from other vendors, the risk was nearly nil. So I'd say the first copy of Photoshop should have been nearly free.
In fact, that's true for a lot of the software you use day-to-day: the people making the big bucks are usually not the people who originally put in the hard work and took the big risks. Instead, after the original development, someone swoops in, takes no significant risks, clones the best parts of existing software, sells it really cheap (they had none of the overhead), then markets the hell out of it, and finally runs the innovators out of business. And unfortunately software patents just aren't a feasible mechanism stopping that.
The current patent and copyright system rewards such behavior and punishes innovators. It's arguably even worse than not having IP protection on software at all.
Sun might not have brought the lawsuit for business reasons, but they set up the process and the licenses in a way that they could bring such lawsuits. Relying on the goodwill of a company not to sue you is foolish, because sooner or later they are going to come under new management and the new management may well decide you that it is in their best interest to sue you.
People should have abandoned Java as soon as Sun reneged on their promise to make it an open, non-proprietary standard through a standards process, which would have involved legally binding commitments on their part not to do what their new owners are doing now.
There are plenty of 17" HD laptops around, just not from Apple. That's what you get if you tie yourself to a single vendor for your software and hardware.
Yeah, I know basic math too, but you're just guessing. If that's what they mean, it wouldn't make a big difference in low-light photography.
So the question still is: do they mean something difference or is their work just uninteresting?
Quantum efficiency is the percentage of photons that actually are registered by an electronic device and has nothing to do with eyes, naked or otherwise. And for photographic application, all that matters is "visible light". You can't make a sensor that registers more than 100% of all incoming photons.
In different words, your response is complete nonsense.
As I recall, quantum efficiency of current sensors is around 50%. I don't see how you can get "1000 time more sensitive".
I'd say the problem is with both. The financial rewards should go to whoever develops treatments and cures, not to a publicly funded research lab that happens to have received disease samples for free and is now trying to profit from them.