If you do these things you are as guilty or more so than those in washington.
I disagree, particularly given that the vast majority of employees there do their work without breaking the law. We know some people at the NSA break the law (Snowden, for one), but we don't know that everyone does. In fact, I'm pretty damn comfortable saying the number of people who do so at the NSA isn't any higher than any other company. If anything, its probably lower.
People with integrity are not going to be working for the NSA. Kinda runs counter to what they do.
The NSA didn't somehow magically find and hire many thousands of evil people, any more than the military managed to find and hire a quarter million murderers. People tend to take jobs like that because they believe in what they're doing, and because they believe they're helping. Now, their beliefs may be wrong by your opinion, or by a large swath of society, but it doesn't invalidate their beliefs or suggest they have no integrity. In fact, I'd argue its the exact opposite. They have so much integrity, they're willing to do things that most people would frown on for what they believe is the common good.
Don't conflate the rank and file at the NSA (or any government agency) with the crooks in Washington who create these projects.
can we get rid of realtors next? And the general class of human cancers known as middlemen?
Here's the unfortunate problem -- efficiency has gotten so high in most industries, half the people in the world would be unemployed without middlemen (ie, stores, resellers, distributers, online retail, etc)... and you'll end up paying just as much money in taxes to support their social welfare programs.
I don't want you trouncing through my house without an escort, thank you. I think the Buyer's agent is still a good thing. The seller's agent, however, could probably go away without causing too much trouble.
The realtor... I mean Realtor(tm)... cartel leams without a seller's agent, you won't have buyers agents coming through, and essentially no visibility because you won't be in MLS. Some agent services will do an MLS listing for you without full representation, although I don't think they're supposed to be doing that. Without a buyer's agent, you're not getting into a house that isn't having an open house because seller's agents don't do that. Its a scam.
The real problem is that you, as a buyer or seller, are paying for the time of all the people who use up an agents time "just looking". If buyer agents universally charged people for their time -- credited to the split of the seller's fees at sale time -- so people who look and don't buy aren't being subsidized by those who do, then the rates would go down a lot and the seller and buyer would probably be getting a reasonable value for their dollar.
Yes. The Internet already does 90% of what a realtor does.
Which makes me wonder what I need them for and why I am legally required to only sell my real-estate through a realtor. They only use I can see for a realtor like person is to act as a trusted intermediary who checks buyers/sellers criminal records and verifies everything is in order before a sale is finalised (ya'know basic stuff like does he actually own or have authority to sell the house?) but unfortunately, as the system currently works in my country, they are not required by law to do either because I regularly read news of people being cheated.
If your understanding of what is involved in a real-estate transaction is so... well "off", to be polite... I'd strongly suggest if you ever do so, use a real estate agent. In the buying and selling side, I think they provide value, but not good value at a split of 5% of a transaction. On the selling side, some do earn that with sufficient work but most don't. On the buying side, some earn it with dozens or hundreds of hours of showing houses to inexperienced buyers. As a seller I'd prefer a buyer with one because the odds are higher that the process will go smoothly.
But, at least in the US, there's no law requiring it for sale or purchase. Your might need to drop a few hundred more in lawyer fees, but the forms you need are public and easy to fill out. And, as a seller without one, you do have to understand that you're not likely to find a buyer if you're not willing to pony up the 2.5% to a buyer's agent that they would've gotten from the seller's agent if you had one.
Its a staggeringly inefficient process, but there are too many people with their fingers in the pie to ever optimize it. At least the Internet has streamlined the mortgage process and passing around documents.
Yeah, people fucking pointed this multiple times (here and elsewhere), but this rather important tidbit was lost among the noise that is misguided Internet rage.
Its not the Internet -- its an overall rise in douchebaggery and exploding belief that ones' instinctual sense of the truth is, in fact, always the truth. Its permeating society -- not just in the US, but globally. I think the only thing the Internet contributes to it is the ease at which it allows people to wall themselves off in a like-minded narrow community that will consistently produce and echo messages that resonate with that narrow viewpoint. For some reason -- probably because so many people have just given up on it over the years -- Slashdot seems to be one of the worst main-stream offenders. I've said before and its worth saying again that Slashdot is basically the Fox News of the tech community -- polarizing stories and discussions of varying, but usually low, relation to reality intended to target a very specific subset of the public for the purpose of driving ads views.
(I do suspect the rise in the number of people who lives as professional "bloggers" contributes greatly to the overall polarization of information on the Internet, because extreme bias may find a small audience, but it'll find a consistent audience.)
It won't work. When you hold your hand out from your body for an extended period of time, your arm gets tired and begins to droop. This is known as "gorilla arm syndrome" and is used as a textbook example of what not to do when designing user interfaces.
However, it looks so cool, ignoring the fact that the first priority of any user interface is usability. Well, any user interface that you use for any length of time. It's sad that movies so pervade the modern consciousness that people can't see outside their blinders.
You could always put your arms down for a break. You know, like glass blowers, potters, or pretty much anyone who builds things with their hands already does and have done pretty much as long as creatures had arms.
So, as you say, those who do not study the past...
How do you consider a near billion dollar inventory write-off a success?
Nokia is still a bit player on the global market with their Windows phones. They are not the powerhouse they were with their own OS previously.
Sorry, but a billion dollar market share for a product that had the entrenched footprint that Office did is a joke.
1st point -- that's just plain wrong, so there's not much to say about it. You have a right to your opinion, but not your own facts and that's just plain incorrect. 2nd point I explained. You can go back and re-read if you want (although I suspect you have a bias of which facts really have no impact). 3rd point, also incorrect, but again. Facts are probably not what you're looking for. And your last point is just stupid. A billion dollars in sales of any product after a year is a big deal. If that's not just plain obvious to you, you (again) are either ignoring facts for a pre-existing bias, or don't understand business. All things considered, I suspect the former.
Avoiding those disastrous products would have made Microsoft billions, and those decisions were made by you, Ballmer.
Um, those product have made Microsoft billions.
Win8 -- selling better than Win7. WinRT -- Intel is really who killed RT by fixing their shitty low-end CPUs finally when they realized the risk ARM was going to bring. WinRT (and any losses from it) are absolutely worth it to Microsoft if it means Intel chips can work in competitive tablets. A billion dollar loss is more than worth it for that. RT was win-win in that regard -- either it worked (and given the success Nokia is having outside North American, their impending release of an RT tablet suggest not counting it out yet), or it pressured Intel into being competitive with their hardware in that space (which it did). WP/Nokia -- the world is bigger than the US, and they've already knocked Apple out of #2 in quite a few markets. And given Microsoft makes quite a bit off every Android handset, that's win/win. Office365 -- $1b in annual sales and growing.
Does this money actually go to a project before it reaches the end-date? The details on the site don't really mention either way. On KS projects, your donation is more of a pledge, which only goes through if the target is made by the end-date of the project.
Loaned to Indiegogo... the project doesn't get it, but you can make a LOT of money off the float.
That was my point -- the people who "donated" basically lost the interest on all of that money, Canonical got free advertising, and Indiegogo makes a lot of money off the interest. Everyone wins! Except the people who donated in good faith. (Although, frankly, it should've been obvious to anyone that they'd never actually be able to manufacture a quality phone at that small of a number of units at that price point as a 3rd party paying an OEM to make them.)
.... now! "Fukushima is just the same as eating ten bananas, see? I saw it on xkcd!"
Radiation exists in the environment. Fukushima being worse than they're disclosing is, generally speaking, a very localized problem. There's lots of radioactive stuff in the "food chain", and only nebulous comments about potential "health concerns" in the article.
The oceans are big, and the radioactive tanks there are small. Its the radioactive equivalent of homeopathy, when you look at things on the global scale.
So, XKCD (although I don't recall the comic you're talking about ) would be absolutely correct if they're mocking the overhyped concern about the food chain.
IMO, the goal was deliberately set too high to meet. Now all the money goes back to the donators.
Huge amounts of free advertising, hype generation and likely leverage in existing negotiations with hardware vendors, care of the interest $13m worth of donations the "chumps" who bought into it loaned to Indiegogo for a couple months.
Just look at Slashdot. In 1998 they started a clandestine cloning program on a set of donor DNA tagged "Anonymous Coward" and fifteen years later, we still can't eradicate them.
I'm sure a strawberry is even simpler, and even that comes out as mush once de-thawed from frozen. It's the principle that it can be done at all on living cells.
Not if your goal is to keep the strawberry from freezing.
Ugh, speaking of mush, need coffee... I meant if your goal is to keep the strawberry from turning to mush.
I'm sure a strawberry is even simpler, and even that comes out as mush once de-thawed from frozen. It's the principle that it can be done at all on living cells.
Not if your goal is to keep the strawberry from freezing.
It's reasonable to assume that future technology (look at 500 or even 5000 years ahead) can be so advanced that it can successfully defreeze someone, especially if they are frozen immediately after 'death'. A rabbit kidney has apparently been "completely vitrified to solid state at 135C, rewarmed and transplanted to a rabbit with complete viability".
Even if you assume it's possible (a *big* assumption), the bigger question is *why* would society want to thaw someone from our time 500 or even 5000 years ahead? Sure, there might be enough scientific curiosity to thaw a few of us just to talk with us to find out what life was really like back in 2020, but why would they want to thaw hundreds or thousands of people who are jobless with no family or means to support themselves, and will need extensive education and rehabilitation to re-enter society?
Simple math. Any chance is greater than zero, and zero is what you get otherwise. You're literally infinitely more likely to be thawed and revived to continue your life than you are to die and continue your life.
I'm assuming in your zeal to post something negative on Slashdot that you misread the original post, and I'm not wasting time pointing this out to someone just trolling...
I didn't misread it, but I did misinterpret your comment. There were multiple ACs, and I thought you were referring to another one. The person you were replying to wasn't an AC, but he was replying to this AC comment which claimed nothing should be rigid ever. I thought you were supporting him, which made the rollbars comment strange.
So I apologize, but in my defense you didn't make it that clear who you were talking about. I was just following the thread.
I didn't even notice the dimwit who replied as also an AC.
Slashdot Mirror
"Befehl ist befehl" was never a good reason.
If you do these things you are as guilty or more so than those in washington.
I disagree, particularly given that the vast majority of employees there do their work without breaking the law. We know some people at the NSA break the law (Snowden, for one), but we don't know that everyone does. In fact, I'm pretty damn comfortable saying the number of people who do so at the NSA isn't any higher than any other company. If anything, its probably lower.
People with integrity are not going to be working for the NSA. Kinda runs counter to what they do.
The NSA didn't somehow magically find and hire many thousands of evil people, any more than the military managed to find and hire a quarter million murderers. People tend to take jobs like that because they believe in what they're doing, and because they believe they're helping. Now, their beliefs may be wrong by your opinion, or by a large swath of society, but it doesn't invalidate their beliefs or suggest they have no integrity. In fact, I'd argue its the exact opposite. They have so much integrity, they're willing to do things that most people would frown on for what they believe is the common good.
Don't conflate the rank and file at the NSA (or any government agency) with the crooks in Washington who create these projects.
So they've disallowed software patents, but allowed more extensive spying. Dammit New Zealand, you need to pick one.
If it makes you feel better, they didn't actually disallow software patents.
can we get rid of realtors next? And the general class of human cancers known as middlemen?
Here's the unfortunate problem -- efficiency has gotten so high in most industries, half the people in the world would be unemployed without middlemen (ie, stores, resellers, distributers, online retail, etc)... and you'll end up paying just as much money in taxes to support their social welfare programs.
I don't want you trouncing through my house without an escort, thank you. I think the Buyer's agent is still a good thing. The seller's agent, however, could probably go away without causing too much trouble.
The realtor ... I mean Realtor(tm) ... cartel leams without a seller's agent, you won't have buyers agents coming through, and essentially no visibility because you won't be in MLS. Some agent services will do an MLS listing for you without full representation, although I don't think they're supposed to be doing that. Without a buyer's agent, you're not getting into a house that isn't having an open house because seller's agents don't do that. Its a scam.
The real problem is that you, as a buyer or seller, are paying for the time of all the people who use up an agents time "just looking". If buyer agents universally charged people for their time -- credited to the split of the seller's fees at sale time -- so people who look and don't buy aren't being subsidized by those who do, then the rates would go down a lot and the seller and buyer would probably be getting a reasonable value for their dollar.
Yes. The Internet already does 90% of what a realtor does.
Which makes me wonder what I need them for and why I am legally required to only sell my real-estate through a realtor. They only use I can see for a realtor like person is to act as a trusted intermediary who checks buyers/sellers criminal records and verifies everything is in order before a sale is finalised (ya'know basic stuff like does he actually own or have authority to sell the house?) but unfortunately, as the system currently works in my country, they are not required by law to do either because I regularly read news of people being cheated.
If your understanding of what is involved in a real-estate transaction is so ... well "off", to be polite... I'd strongly suggest if you ever do so, use a real estate agent. In the buying and selling side, I think they provide value, but not good value at a split of 5% of a transaction. On the selling side, some do earn that with sufficient work but most don't. On the buying side, some earn it with dozens or hundreds of hours of showing houses to inexperienced buyers. As a seller I'd prefer a buyer with one because the odds are higher that the process will go smoothly.
But, at least in the US, there's no law requiring it for sale or purchase. Your might need to drop a few hundred more in lawyer fees, but the forms you need are public and easy to fill out. And, as a seller without one, you do have to understand that you're not likely to find a buyer if you're not willing to pony up the 2.5% to a buyer's agent that they would've gotten from the seller's agent if you had one.
Its a staggeringly inefficient process, but there are too many people with their fingers in the pie to ever optimize it. At least the Internet has streamlined the mortgage process and passing around documents.
Yeah, people fucking pointed this multiple times (here and elsewhere), but this rather important tidbit was lost among the noise that is misguided Internet rage.
Its not the Internet -- its an overall rise in douchebaggery and exploding belief that ones' instinctual sense of the truth is, in fact, always the truth. Its permeating society -- not just in the US, but globally. I think the only thing the Internet contributes to it is the ease at which it allows people to wall themselves off in a like-minded narrow community that will consistently produce and echo messages that resonate with that narrow viewpoint. For some reason -- probably because so many people have just given up on it over the years -- Slashdot seems to be one of the worst main-stream offenders. I've said before and its worth saying again that Slashdot is basically the Fox News of the tech community -- polarizing stories and discussions of varying, but usually low, relation to reality intended to target a very specific subset of the public for the purpose of driving ads views.
(I do suspect the rise in the number of people who lives as professional "bloggers" contributes greatly to the overall polarization of information on the Internet, because extreme bias may find a small audience, but it'll find a consistent audience.)
It won't work. When you hold your hand out from your body for an extended period of time, your arm gets tired and begins to droop. This is known as "gorilla arm syndrome" and is used as a textbook example of what not to do when designing user interfaces.
However, it looks so cool, ignoring the fact that the first priority of any user interface is usability. Well, any user interface that you use for any length of time. It's sad that movies so pervade the modern consciousness that people can't see outside their blinders.
You could always put your arms down for a break. You know, like glass blowers, potters, or pretty much anyone who builds things with their hands already does and have done pretty much as long as creatures had arms.
So, as you say, those who do not study the past ...
This has been posted all over the place, and it always talks about the Iron Man displays.
Nowhere does Musk say that. He says he will design a rocket nozzle with his hands and print it with a 3D printer.
You can do that today with some software and a Kinect or other motion tracker.
Nowhere does he talk about 3D displays hanging in space. Gesture controlled solid modeler and 3D printer. That's it.
Only in a delusional fanboi's world would a 66% unit sales drop be a "success".
You do realize Office is still for sale, right? That total sales across the two are up quite a bit?
I don't tend to like to make personal comments about people on here, but you are really dumb as a fucking post.
Win 7 downgrades are selling, not Win 8.
How do you consider a near billion dollar inventory write-off a success?
Nokia is still a bit player on the global market with their Windows phones. They are not the powerhouse they were with their own OS previously.
Sorry, but a billion dollar market share for a product that had the entrenched footprint that Office did is a joke.
1st point -- that's just plain wrong, so there's not much to say about it. You have a right to your opinion, but not your own facts and that's just plain incorrect.
2nd point I explained. You can go back and re-read if you want (although I suspect you have a bias of which facts really have no impact).
3rd point, also incorrect, but again. Facts are probably not what you're looking for.
And your last point is just stupid. A billion dollars in sales of any product after a year is a big deal. If that's not just plain obvious to you, you (again) are either ignoring facts for a pre-existing bias, or don't understand business. All things considered, I suspect the former.
because Microsoft is basically like Mike the headless chicken. 2014 may be the year of Linux on the laptop.
Wait, I clearly remember 2004 was the year of Linux on the laptop!
Or was it 1994?
1994 was definitely the year of Linux on the desktop, once Doom was released! I was poor and didn't have a laptop then :(
There was a perfect time for the transition:
Avoiding those disastrous products would have made Microsoft billions, and those decisions were made by you, Ballmer.
Um, those product have made Microsoft billions.
Win8 -- selling better than Win7.
WinRT -- Intel is really who killed RT by fixing their shitty low-end CPUs finally when they realized the risk ARM was going to bring. WinRT (and any losses from it) are absolutely worth it to Microsoft if it means Intel chips can work in competitive tablets. A billion dollar loss is more than worth it for that. RT was win-win in that regard -- either it worked (and given the success Nokia is having outside North American, their impending release of an RT tablet suggest not counting it out yet), or it pressured Intel into being competitive with their hardware in that space (which it did).
WP/Nokia -- the world is bigger than the US, and they've already knocked Apple out of #2 in quite a few markets. And given Microsoft makes quite a bit off every Android handset, that's win/win.
Office365 -- $1b in annual sales and growing.
Does this make anyone else happy for some reason?
Only people whose total understanding of global economics comes from things they've read on Slashdot.
I've only used KS etc, rather than Indiegogo.
Does this money actually go to a project before it reaches the end-date? The details on the site don't really mention either way.
On KS projects, your donation is more of a pledge, which only goes through if the target is made by the end-date of the project.
Loaned to Indiegogo... the project doesn't get it, but you can make a LOT of money off the float.
That was my point -- the people who "donated" basically lost the interest on all of that money, Canonical got free advertising, and Indiegogo makes a lot of money off the interest. Everyone wins! Except the people who donated in good faith. (Although, frankly, it should've been obvious to anyone that they'd never actually be able to manufacture a quality phone at that small of a number of units at that price point as a 3rd party paying an OEM to make them.)
.... now! "Fukushima is just the same as eating ten bananas, see? I saw it on xkcd!"
Radiation exists in the environment. Fukushima being worse than they're disclosing is, generally speaking, a very localized problem. There's lots of radioactive stuff in the "food chain", and only nebulous comments about potential "health concerns" in the article.
The oceans are big, and the radioactive tanks there are small. Its the radioactive equivalent of homeopathy, when you look at things on the global scale.
So, XKCD (although I don't recall the comic you're talking about ) would be absolutely correct if they're mocking the overhyped concern about the food chain.
IMO, the goal was deliberately set too high to meet. Now all the money goes back to the donators.
Huge amounts of free advertising, hype generation and likely leverage in existing negotiations with hardware vendors, care of the interest $13m worth of donations the "chumps" who bought into it loaned to Indiegogo for a couple months.
Smart. Very smart.
Too bad though that because of people like him mine will never be proud of me. :(
Slashdot is still proud of you!
Why?
Just look at Slashdot. In 1998 they started a clandestine cloning program on a set of donor DNA tagged "Anonymous Coward" and fifteen years later, we still can't eradicate them.
"Damn it, I hate Slashdot on April Fools day"...
Then I realized it was October. I think I have 4/1 PTSD.
I'm sure a strawberry is even simpler, and even that comes out as mush once de-thawed from frozen. It's the principle that it can be done at all on living cells.
Not if your goal is to keep the strawberry from freezing.
Ugh, speaking of mush, need coffee... I meant if your goal is to keep the strawberry from turning to mush.
I'm sure a strawberry is even simpler, and even that comes out as mush once de-thawed from frozen. It's the principle that it can be done at all on living cells.
Not if your goal is to keep the strawberry from freezing.
It's reasonable to assume that future technology (look at 500 or even 5000 years ahead) can be so advanced that it can successfully defreeze someone, especially if they are frozen immediately after 'death'. A rabbit kidney has apparently been "completely vitrified to solid state at 135C, rewarmed and transplanted to a rabbit with complete viability".
Even if you assume it's possible (a *big* assumption), the bigger question is *why* would society want to thaw someone from our time 500 or even 5000 years ahead? Sure, there might be enough scientific curiosity to thaw a few of us just to talk with us to find out what life was really like back in 2020, but why would they want to thaw hundreds or thousands of people who are jobless with no family or means to support themselves, and will need extensive education and rehabilitation to re-enter society?
Simple math. Any chance is greater than zero, and zero is what you get otherwise. You're literally infinitely more likely to be thawed and revived to continue your life than you are to die and continue your life.
Is that a 7 passenger vehicle like the Tesla?
I was being conservative, giving the GP the benefit of the doubt.
Although, to be fair the Model S isn't really 7 passenger. Its 5, with an option to stick some kids in the trunk.
I'm assuming in your zeal to post something negative on Slashdot that you misread the original post, and I'm not wasting time pointing this out to someone just trolling ...
I didn't misread it, but I did misinterpret your comment. There were multiple ACs, and I thought you were referring to another one. The person you were replying to wasn't an AC, but he was replying to this AC comment which claimed nothing should be rigid ever. I thought you were supporting him, which made the rollbars comment strange.
So I apologize, but in my defense you didn't make it that clear who you were talking about. I was just following the thread.
I didn't even notice the dimwit who replied as also an AC.