Therein lies a huge part of the problem, Microsoft lowers people's expectations to the point where they think you *should* need more than 1GB of RAM (which is a crazy amount) "just to" run a basic, basic operating system. This may surprise you, but 1GB RAM is actually the same amount of RAM that 1GB was 3 years ago, the bits don't shrink into littler, slower bits over time or anything like that. Let's call a spade a spade and bad software, bad software.
I installed Vista on my (then) basically top of the range Acer TM 8215 Core 2 Duo 2GHz 2GB RAM laptop, which had XP on it before, and I don't think I can even begin to scrape the surface here of just what a horrible experience it's been. An enormous amount of money's worth of apps were broken - my VS6, Photoshop 7, Acrobat 4 etc. Multi-monitor support has been broken and buggy and flaky since day one. In the default aqua mode, the system runs so slowly that you can 'feel' the lag between pressing keys on the keyboard and the appearing of the characters on screen even in things like Notepad. No amount of driver upgrading has solved this yet (I did however solve it by disabling the only nice thing about Vista, that it looks much better than XP, i.e. I had to go into a classic interface mode). Half the hardware was broken too and it's taken literally man-weeks to fix (almost) everything (so far) --- the most retarded being basic USB devices like Microsoft mice or flash disks or external hard disks didn't even work (fixing it took months of waiting for patches to come out as well as browsing online forums and doing odd registry hacks and manual workarounds); bluetooth still doesn't work, my webcam was broken and I had to jump through crazy hoops and browse lots of online forums to figure out how to get it to work (MS messed up the driver name); my Canon digital camera didn't work with it; my Nokia phone software didn't work - all took hours or days of researching 3rd-party forums etc. to fix. Infra-red and card reader still don't work. Copying/moving/deleting files is ridiculously slow and silly, even if you delete one file you watch this dialog "discovering" and "calculating" and "estimating" and eventually doing its thing. Explorer is a fscking joke - they've somehow made the world's worst file manager even worse - it almost seems to randomly select a different view mode for every folder even though I've told it to view all the same (if I didn't have to use Tortoise I wouldn't use it at all). It keeps grouping the views in stupid ways and I can't see any way to disabled grouped views. It's less keyboard-friendly too, and pressing 'tab' takes you in strange circles sometimes. I also have the 'hard drive going incessantly while idle' that the person in this review had, and I've really tried disabling just about every service etc. but just can't get it to go away. It spontaneously restarted a few days and hard-killed my open applications while I was working to install some updates - no warnings, nothing. It has a stupid bug in it whereby in some applications, it randomly makes a "ding" sound when clicking in any list (seriously - google 'vista ding problem' or 'vista system beep listctrl'). It's generally slower than XP, the memory management is terrible (apps seem to end up in swap just when you breathe funny and never quite come out). There are strange problems with networking, e.g. ODBC is just twice as slow as XP, for no apparent reason. The SAMBA is broken - or at least, it broke support for e.g. my Mac mapped samba drives that worked PERFECTLY in XP, and after some months I eventually found a forum that explained some obscure registry edits you have to do to get it to work. It also doesn't run some of the legacy (e.g. DOS/VGA) apps I used to be able to run perfectly fine on XP. When browsing through a folder of videos, when trying to open them with Media player there is often a huge (e.g. 30 second +) delay before it'll start playing a file. On the plus side, well, actually I can't think of any advantage over XP at all. I only installed it to see what it was like and because our own applications need to run on it. I've had problems with the wireless networking randomly sometimes just 'breaking', and restarting the computer is required to fix it. There are problems with things like networking or USB devices not waking up when coming out of sleep mode. I do not have broken hardware - everything worked fine under XP. I want XP back. I don't think I exaggerate in saying Vista is a horrible tragic disaster and the worst thing MS has ever puked up, and I'll most likely be using a Mac as my next primary system - I honestly now just want to turn my back on them.
Wouldn't each computer only have 2^1024 keys to solve?
No. 2^2048 = 2*2*2*2*... *2*2 (2048 times). Divide that by two (for two computers), so you have that long thing over 2, then only ONE of the "2"s can be cancelled out by the one below, leaving 2047 remaining.
Welcome to capitalism. If one can get away with it, one can make as much money as they want
Really!? Are you SURE that you cannot have intellectual property rights in a capitalist system? (Or is just cool to blindly diss capitalism as evil without understanding it? Do you further think these abuses would not be possible under socialism or communism? Have you really thought this through?)
Admittedly, the stuff about MAFIAA and an outage not costing them squat does sound a bit rabid, you are right. But I think somewhere beneath the rabid confusion are nonetheless one or two grains of understanding.
I'm not referring though to the "expense required to fix the problem" at all - I'm referring to basic *operating costs* of the company over a single hour (in other words, one hour worth of salaries for every employee, plus one hour worth of office space rentals, one hour worth of electricity for all infrastructure, etc. etc.) --- I think the original poster's reasoning (and perhaps confusion) may be stemming from a recognition that these basic operating costs are all SUNK COSTS, i.e. they are spent anyway, and the same, whether the billing system is up or down - i.e. (provided billing system downtime doesn't start extending to lengths of e.g. weeks) virtually NONE of the actual operating costs (bar 'expense required to fix problem', which is probably nearly negligible) increases while the billing system is down. So in this sense, it does 'cost them almost nothing extra' to lose an hour of revenue (and, chances are, their margins were so high that they could 'easily afford' many such lost hours in a month, although that is a separate problem of not-entirely-free-markets etc. - I think the original poster is probably just angered by a perception that companies like this were making obscene profits unfairly). "Sunk costs" are costs that had already been incurred *anyway*, or would've anyway been incurred - i.e. everyone's salaries etc..
Anyway, certainly in terms of the accounting definition of the term "loss", they cannot claim the downtime "cost" them $4m (hence the allusion to using different dictionaries isn't entirely correct, as it depends on the viewpoint). Their monthly 'expenses' are virtually the same whether they have one hour or 20 hours a month downtime on the billing system. Certainly they made a "loss of *potential* revenue" of $4m, but that term's not really for the accountanting department at all, that kind of speak is for the [financial] managers and executives.
I'm not "throwing around accounting terms", this is just how business works; I do understand what you're saying - that without the system failure, they would (essentially) have been making an extra $4mil/hour (that's not *exactly* true, but very very close to it in the context you're mentioning), sure, but let me try use another (crude) example to demonstrate... say a hotdog vendor sells hotdogs in the park every day. On a typical day, he spends, say, $50 on sausages and buns and makes $200 sales, so he typically makes $150 profit a day. One day, um, I don't know, a bear comes and eats all the sausages and buns, and he makes no sales that day. How much has he truly "lost"? $50? $150? $200? Not $150 or $200 - at the end of the day, he literally goes home $50 out of pocket.
Now 'shit happens' in any business, be it a hotdog stand or a telco (e.g. a hotdog vendor knows he can't sell during hurricanes, so he has to make enough on days he can sell to get by on days he can't) --- so you factor this stuff into your business model.
Um, I think what GP meant was that the marginal operating expenses to provide the services on which the income was "lost" are most likely MUCH lower than the marginal revenue at $mil/hour, and that the $4mil/hour figure was probably marginal revenue. There are actually two figures: an "actual" loss (e.g. perhaps it literally cost the company, say, $0.5m/hour to operate with zero income), and the loss of potential revenue of $4m. (I wouldn't be surprised if the marginal operating cost for one hour had been even far less than $0.5m, for a telecomms company that sounds quite feasible, but that doesn't mean we can draw too many interesting conclusions from that.) The only portion of the loss that they could likely get a tax benefit on would be the actual operating cost, and that is hence their "real" loss.
Hmm, you say that, but I can imagine that if there is a genetic propensity for it, it will eventually be selected against
Keep in mind that within 100 years or so, we'll probably be living in a world where: (1) Genetically modifying, tweaking or 'designing' your offspring will likely be highly commonplace, (2) technology may well have developed to the point where babies could grow to term in machines - there could feasibly even be robots that carry human babies to term (surrogates, presumably). The latter idea may seem somewhat repugnant to us, but for those who want children but cannot carry them for whatever reason, it's probably going to eventually be become acceptable and quite common - i.e. it'll only take a generation or two to get used to the idea once the technology arrives, and the demand for it will make it common enough.
Basically our current conceptualisations of how genetics and breeding and evolution take place our going to be almost entirely obsolete quite soon, so you need to use a different mode of thinking to analyse these things - not a 2007 mode of thinking.
Seriously, I'm not going to have sex with a robot. Get over it!
Uh, yeah, slashdot and all these articles and books and research are all aimed at YOU specifically. Thanks for telling us you're not interested, now everybody focusing on this can give it up and go do something else. Right, come on, get real - whether you will use them or not, it's pretty obvious that sex robots are going to be huge someday, millions of people will be using them, and robot technologies probably won't be going backward as time progresses. People already use realdoll and various other toys, and I'm sure that sex robots will be a lot more fun than Mr Right Hand at least for casual entertainment (which itself will become increasingly important as technology replaces humans in almost every role in the economy, freeing us from having to work so much).
I suppose if robots can be programmed to fall in love with humans, they'd also fall in love with one another? Whatever that means.
I guess letting yourself fall for a robot might be a bit like letting yourself fall for an emotionally unavailable human; people do it all the time, but there is surely some level of dysfunction involved in doing so.
In the bigger scheme of things, probably almost negligibly.
You could argue that finding (and contacting) alien races might help ultimately us get the technology to save the planet though, but that's a very long shot.
These days I'm a bit more in favour of projects like folding@home; although they also contribute to global warming, they may contribute to curing diseases; the human resources thusly retained in this way are more likely, in my view, to come up with solutions to global warming (e.g. a scientist who dies of cancer, or his/her offspring or whatever).
Note that simply using electricity doesn't mean you're contributing to global warming. If you're using nuclear or solar power, for example, you're probably contributing extremely little. We mainly burn coal because it's cheap, and because the stupid public freaks out about that evil nukular power.
Taking the Bush administration's stance to it's logical conclusion, the aliens would be stupid NOT to bombard us back to the stone age. I mean, as Cheney paints it, if there's a 1% chance that we MIGHT attack them, they should pre-emptively destroy us for their own safety!
It's possible, but this is not necessarily absolute, and the behaviour of humans is proof of that. If we discovered an alien race, certain things hold true: (1) Some humans will believe we should destroy them ASAP, "just in case"; (2) many (more "humanitarian" (alienitarian?)) humans will believe we should not; (3) some governments will pick one position or the other; (4) everyone will argue no end about what we should do; (5) if they are anything like us, it may be that free trade could be mutually beneficial to both species, and many will recognise that and be willing to take the chance; (6) the final decision may depend on which sub-group holds the most power; (7) even if full-on war breaks out between the two, there will always even be some who pick the side of the other, and depending on the balance of power, such conflict may be protracted and complicated; (8) even if we win in such a conflict, we may not necessarily 'kill them all', and may even have peaceful cooperation thereafter.
What is ALSO quite probable, in my view, is that all of the above points would be true VICE VERSA i.e. for the aliens too. We always seem to assume that aliens are likely to behave as if every single one of them has the same opinion (e.g. "destroy humans" or whatever), like a collective, but the chances of that seem pretty slim to me. Probably they'll be different individuals with different opinions too. I suspect that lots of differing viewpoints/roles and levels of compassion and specialisation etc. may even have been necessary for us to evolve to the point of being capable of creating a modicum of civilisation, and this may be likely for other species.
Probably though, two alien races who meet randomly will likely be at quite different levels of development of technology, so probably one will be at a big advantage. That doesn't necessarily mean certain destruction though; (European colonialism for example did not bode the destruction of every other race at all, even when Europe basically had the technology and advantage to do so.)
On the balance, I do think actively sending out such signals is a BAD idea at this point in our technological development - we're not advanced enough yet to be taking chances with alien races probably far more advanced than us (if they can get to us). Give us another couple hundred years, when our technology is far far more advanced, then we'll be in a better position to tackle whatever comes.
Absence of evidence is evidence of absence? That's new to me, and certainly this amazing new insight of yours will revolutionise science and even philosophy. Fermi paradox isn't a paradox in the true sense of the word.
That's not a new theory at all; I first read about that in the book "The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature" by Geoffrey Miller - good book, worth a read.
Um, Africa has literally hundreds of thousands of schools; check out some of these statistics if you want to base your opinions more closely on reality sometime; there is certainly enough economic activity and education expenditure in Africa to potentially purchase very many OLPC laptops.
And that's based on current OLPC prices; prices are likely to drop significantly in just a few years - you are slamming the idea in general, which means you're also slamming the idea at far cheaper prices - which starts to seem bizarre.
At point 3, if 'man' would really be left in a worse position accepting the loan (and its known associated risks), why doesn't he just say 'no'? You seem to imply the West has a gun against everyones heads, as opposed to the truth, that as free-thinking autonomous entities they make their own decisions for which they are responsible. Anyway, Western capital has on the aggregate helped emerging economies massively to achieve growth, skills and knowledge faster than they would have been able to otherwise (in case you hadn't noticed, emerging economies are booming globally on a scale unprecedented in human history); and ironically enough though, emerging economies like China are also far more flush with capital than Western economies right now. But don't let facts and logic get in the way of a good old-fashioned "West-bashing".
When it comes down to a choice of providing African kids living in absolute poverty with access to Slashdot or a $200 truckload of rice
Um, what about the tens (probably hundreds) of millions of poor African kids who don't live in "absolute poverty" but already have their basic food and shelter needs taken care of? (The MAJORITY in fact - most of Africa isn't starving, do some basic research please) --- don't they deserve charity or education?
Honestly Dvorak, STFU and let people decide for themselves what they think it's best to spend THEIR money on.
So you mean if, say, a US law attempted to illegalise behaviour in a foreign country that isn't illegal in that foreign country, and the company operated in both countries, it should be able to choose to ignore that law? Or do you mean, US law shouldn't be 'allowed' to cover activities of (American or not) companies on foreign soil in the first place? I'm sure the Chinese government probably would attempt to impose their own morality on subsidiaries of Chinese companies operating in the US - e.g. Chinese banks who have bought into some American banks are probably not allowed to criticise the Chinese government in the US or they'd get into trouble back home (I don't know if that's the case for sure, but it seems likely). Likewise if a Chinese-owned search engine opened operations in the US, and allowed totally uncensored searches on American soil, would they be breaking laws in China where head office is based? I'm not sure what really makes sense.
Lop off the guy's head, put it on a stake, and post a vid of all this on YouTube (or liveleak)? I reckon that would make anyone else think twice before doing this!
Did you even read the whole Wikipedia article? It addresses this. What happens to money that isn't spent? It usually gets placed into a bank account or investment account. What happens to it then? Financial institutions, such as banks, then use the cash to invest, usually prudently, in new economic activities, that wouldn't be possible if that money had been spent already. In other words, guys like YOU and ME who go get a bank loan when we decide to try start our own businesses (and/or when we buy the products of such businesses) - we BENEFIT from what would otherwise be idle capital. This is where 'interest' comes from, by the way.
Corporations do not "possess no morality", they are at the very least obligated to respect the laws of the countries they operate in, which is to say, there is a huge amount of "morality" imposed on them. This makes sense. If you're saying you believe that corporations should be allowed to be above the law, then you're just saying that certain people (since companies are just owned by people) should be allowed to be above the law. If you believe that's OK, then you're essentially saying you believe it's OK for people to be able to do whatever they want, even murder other people or abuse children. Since you said you're a relativist, I presume that is exactly what you're saying. Sorry, but the term 'relativist' is just a label designed to give a veneer of ideological legitimacy to 'idiocy'. That's not ad hominen, I'll give you an example: What is the difference between saying "it's OK for the Chinese government to murder its own citizens for merely saying something they disagree with", and saying "it's OK for my next door neighbour to rape and cut up his 8-year-old daughter"? Answer: To a relativist, THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE, you MUST accept one if you accept the other, they're two different levels of the same thing. "But that's an entirely different country, far away", you say. Bollocks - the whole POINT of this issue is that should China become powerful enough (and we're allowing them to), they WILL at some point inevitably use force to *impose* their ("relative") "morality" on the USA, and e.g. YOU. They're not separate worlds, they're just 'next door' actually, and the next fifty years of human history will show that. I guess as a relativist you're OK with that, but most people aren't, so the whole point of laws like this is to draw a line and try to something to prevent that from ever happening. It's certainly not easy, it's a complex issue, but doing nothing is about the least sensible thing you can do.
It's a complex issue because pushing these companies between a rock and a hard place and making it effectively impossible for them to legally operate in a major dictatorship without breaking the law in one country or another, may have the opposite effect to what is desired: American companies may leave the market, and then Chinese companies will simply take their place, rising to power, and thereby *strengthening* the position of the morally corrupt, and weakening the position of the US. The idea of boycotting their markets might've worked a few years when China was highly dependent on exports to the US for growth, but the share of China's exports that goes to the US is shrinking extremely rapidly, and fast approaching the point where a US boycott would have very little effect on China at all. No amount of free trade or economic growth is, by itself, going to cause China to become a free country. This is not only a major problem for a billion Chinese, it's quite possibly going to become a major problem for you and me too; perhaps you feel calling yourself a "relativist" somehow rationalises your arguments to do nothing and allow it - to me, it sounds just like that famous quote, which I'll paraquote, "first, they came for the Chinese citizens, and I did nothing - because I wasn't Chinese..."
I had loose lugnuts once, luckily I noticed it as I pulled back as I heard/felt something was wrong and immediately stopped - the cause was that somebody had been busy trying to steal the tires, and it seems we disturbed them as I came out to go home (just in time, too).
Not very insightful. Firstly it isn't really just trying to replace books - if it was then the project would be "laughably absurd", but it's not. That $200 device does far more than a book ever could. Secondly, fast-forward five to fifteen years as economies of scale and ever-cheapening electronics allow the device to be sold at, say, $20. Third, even if the damn thing is destroyed, with books in electronic format, just buy a new one and transfer thousands of books back to the new one in mere seconds at virtually no cost --- destroying the device doesn't necessarily 'destroy the content', as you imply, and as is the case with books. Finally, I live in a third-world country, and it was access to computers at a very young age that sparked my interest in learning to program, which now allows me to earn a good income and create and export software products to the entire world, bringing forex into the country and creating jobs, so why don't you STFU and let poor people decide for themselves that they "need" - it's not your money, so how is OLPC harmful?
So the news is that a company selling computers is selling something that the consumer's been asking for? Who'd've thought it?
You know, pretty much every news event in the world can be similarly derisively portrayed when distilled to its more abstract or generic form. For example, if a plane crashed killing hundreds, you might say "So the news is that some plane crashed?" - there's nothing insightful about saying "Gee who'dve thought it?" (cynical remark != intelligent remark); just because it's well-known that planes sometimes crash, doesn't mean it's not interesting news when it happens. Likewise for pretty much anything, e.g. troops getting killed, terrorist bombings, mall/school shootings, etc. - their generalised forms are all well-known to occur already; it's not the underlying concept of an event that interests people, it's particular instances of such events. (I'm not saying this story is actually interesting, of course, but your reasoning as portrayed doesn't cut to the cause of its boringness.)
Slashdot Mirror
1 GB ram is "beefy"? Maybe it was 3 years ago.
Therein lies a huge part of the problem, Microsoft lowers people's expectations to the point where they think you *should* need more than 1GB of RAM (which is a crazy amount) "just to" run a basic, basic operating system. This may surprise you, but 1GB RAM is actually the same amount of RAM that 1GB was 3 years ago, the bits don't shrink into littler, slower bits over time or anything like that. Let's call a spade a spade and bad software, bad software.
I installed Vista on my (then) basically top of the range Acer TM 8215 Core 2 Duo 2GHz 2GB RAM laptop, which had XP on it before, and I don't think I can even begin to scrape the surface here of just what a horrible experience it's been. An enormous amount of money's worth of apps were broken - my VS6, Photoshop 7, Acrobat 4 etc. Multi-monitor support has been broken and buggy and flaky since day one. In the default aqua mode, the system runs so slowly that you can 'feel' the lag between pressing keys on the keyboard and the appearing of the characters on screen even in things like Notepad. No amount of driver upgrading has solved this yet (I did however solve it by disabling the only nice thing about Vista, that it looks much better than XP, i.e. I had to go into a classic interface mode). Half the hardware was broken too and it's taken literally man-weeks to fix (almost) everything (so far) --- the most retarded being basic USB devices like Microsoft mice or flash disks or external hard disks didn't even work (fixing it took months of waiting for patches to come out as well as browsing online forums and doing odd registry hacks and manual workarounds); bluetooth still doesn't work, my webcam was broken and I had to jump through crazy hoops and browse lots of online forums to figure out how to get it to work (MS messed up the driver name); my Canon digital camera didn't work with it; my Nokia phone software didn't work - all took hours or days of researching 3rd-party forums etc. to fix. Infra-red and card reader still don't work. Copying/moving/deleting files is ridiculously slow and silly, even if you delete one file you watch this dialog "discovering" and "calculating" and "estimating" and eventually doing its thing. Explorer is a fscking joke - they've somehow made the world's worst file manager even worse - it almost seems to randomly select a different view mode for every folder even though I've told it to view all the same (if I didn't have to use Tortoise I wouldn't use it at all). It keeps grouping the views in stupid ways and I can't see any way to disabled grouped views. It's less keyboard-friendly too, and pressing 'tab' takes you in strange circles sometimes. I also have the 'hard drive going incessantly while idle' that the person in this review had, and I've really tried disabling just about every service etc. but just can't get it to go away. It spontaneously restarted a few days and hard-killed my open applications while I was working to install some updates - no warnings, nothing. It has a stupid bug in it whereby in some applications, it randomly makes a "ding" sound when clicking in any list (seriously - google 'vista ding problem' or 'vista system beep listctrl'). It's generally slower than XP, the memory management is terrible (apps seem to end up in swap just when you breathe funny and never quite come out). There are strange problems with networking, e.g. ODBC is just twice as slow as XP, for no apparent reason. The SAMBA is broken - or at least, it broke support for e.g. my Mac mapped samba drives that worked PERFECTLY in XP, and after some months I eventually found a forum that explained some obscure registry edits you have to do to get it to work. It also doesn't run some of the legacy (e.g. DOS/VGA) apps I used to be able to run perfectly fine on XP. When browsing through a folder of videos, when trying to open them with Media player there is often a huge (e.g. 30 second +) delay before it'll start playing a file. On the plus side, well, actually I can't think of any advantage over XP at all. I only installed it to see what it was like and because our own applications need to run on it. I've had problems with the wireless networking randomly sometimes just 'breaking', and restarting the computer is required to fix it. There are problems with things like networking or USB devices not waking up when coming out of sleep mode. I do not have broken hardware - everything worked fine under XP. I want XP back. I don't think I exaggerate in saying Vista is a horrible tragic disaster and the worst thing MS has ever puked up, and I'll most likely be using a Mac as my next primary system - I honestly now just want to turn my back on them.
Wouldn't each computer only have 2^1024 keys to solve?
No. 2^2048 = 2*2*2*2* ... *2*2 (2048 times). Divide that by two (for two computers), so you have that long thing over 2, then only ONE of the "2"s can be cancelled out by the one below, leaving 2047 remaining.
Welcome to capitalism. If one can get away with it, one can make as much money as they want
Really!? Are you SURE that you cannot have intellectual property rights in a capitalist system? (Or is just cool to blindly diss capitalism as evil without understanding it? Do you further think these abuses would not be possible under socialism or communism? Have you really thought this through?)
Admittedly, the stuff about MAFIAA and an outage not costing them squat does sound a bit rabid, you are right. But I think somewhere beneath the rabid confusion are nonetheless one or two grains of understanding.
I'm not referring though to the "expense required to fix the problem" at all - I'm referring to basic *operating costs* of the company over a single hour (in other words, one hour worth of salaries for every employee, plus one hour worth of office space rentals, one hour worth of electricity for all infrastructure, etc. etc.) --- I think the original poster's reasoning (and perhaps confusion) may be stemming from a recognition that these basic operating costs are all SUNK COSTS, i.e. they are spent anyway, and the same, whether the billing system is up or down - i.e. (provided billing system downtime doesn't start extending to lengths of e.g. weeks) virtually NONE of the actual operating costs (bar 'expense required to fix problem', which is probably nearly negligible) increases while the billing system is down. So in this sense, it does 'cost them almost nothing extra' to lose an hour of revenue (and, chances are, their margins were so high that they could 'easily afford' many such lost hours in a month, although that is a separate problem of not-entirely-free-markets etc. - I think the original poster is probably just angered by a perception that companies like this were making obscene profits unfairly). "Sunk costs" are costs that had already been incurred *anyway*, or would've anyway been incurred - i.e. everyone's salaries etc..
Anyway, certainly in terms of the accounting definition of the term "loss", they cannot claim the downtime "cost" them $4m (hence the allusion to using different dictionaries isn't entirely correct, as it depends on the viewpoint). Their monthly 'expenses' are virtually the same whether they have one hour or 20 hours a month downtime on the billing system. Certainly they made a "loss of *potential* revenue" of $4m, but that term's not really for the accountanting department at all, that kind of speak is for the [financial] managers and executives.
I'm not "throwing around accounting terms", this is just how business works; I do understand what you're saying - that without the system failure, they would (essentially) have been making an extra $4mil/hour (that's not *exactly* true, but very very close to it in the context you're mentioning), sure, but let me try use another (crude) example to demonstrate ... say a hotdog vendor sells hotdogs in the park every day. On a typical day, he spends, say, $50 on sausages and buns and makes $200 sales, so he typically makes $150 profit a day. One day, um, I don't know, a bear comes and eats all the sausages and buns, and he makes no sales that day. How much has he truly "lost"? $50? $150? $200? Not $150 or $200 - at the end of the day, he literally goes home $50 out of pocket.
Now 'shit happens' in any business, be it a hotdog stand or a telco (e.g. a hotdog vendor knows he can't sell during hurricanes, so he has to make enough on days he can sell to get by on days he can't) --- so you factor this stuff into your business model.
Um, I think what GP meant was that the marginal operating expenses to provide the services on which the income was "lost" are most likely MUCH lower than the marginal revenue at $mil/hour, and that the $4mil/hour figure was probably marginal revenue. There are actually two figures: an "actual" loss (e.g. perhaps it literally cost the company, say, $0.5m/hour to operate with zero income), and the loss of potential revenue of $4m. (I wouldn't be surprised if the marginal operating cost for one hour had been even far less than $0.5m, for a telecomms company that sounds quite feasible, but that doesn't mean we can draw too many interesting conclusions from that.) The only portion of the loss that they could likely get a tax benefit on would be the actual operating cost, and that is hence their "real" loss.
Hmm, you say that, but I can imagine that if there is a genetic propensity for it, it will eventually be selected against
Keep in mind that within 100 years or so, we'll probably be living in a world where: (1) Genetically modifying, tweaking or 'designing' your offspring will likely be highly commonplace, (2) technology may well have developed to the point where babies could grow to term in machines - there could feasibly even be robots that carry human babies to term (surrogates, presumably). The latter idea may seem somewhat repugnant to us, but for those who want children but cannot carry them for whatever reason, it's probably going to eventually be become acceptable and quite common - i.e. it'll only take a generation or two to get used to the idea once the technology arrives, and the demand for it will make it common enough.
Basically our current conceptualisations of how genetics and breeding and evolution take place our going to be almost entirely obsolete quite soon, so you need to use a different mode of thinking to analyse these things - not a 2007 mode of thinking.
Seriously, I'm not going to have sex with a robot. Get over it!
Uh, yeah, slashdot and all these articles and books and research are all aimed at YOU specifically. Thanks for telling us you're not interested, now everybody focusing on this can give it up and go do something else. Right, come on, get real - whether you will use them or not, it's pretty obvious that sex robots are going to be huge someday, millions of people will be using them, and robot technologies probably won't be going backward as time progresses. People already use realdoll and various other toys, and I'm sure that sex robots will be a lot more fun than Mr Right Hand at least for casual entertainment (which itself will become increasingly important as technology replaces humans in almost every role in the economy, freeing us from having to work so much).
I suppose if robots can be programmed to fall in love with humans, they'd also fall in love with one another? Whatever that means.
I guess letting yourself fall for a robot might be a bit like letting yourself fall for an emotionally unavailable human; people do it all the time, but there is surely some level of dysfunction involved in doing so.
crappy now...and nowhere to go but up
Yeah, that's what they said about XP.
In the bigger scheme of things, probably almost negligibly.
You could argue that finding (and contacting) alien races might help ultimately us get the technology to save the planet though, but that's a very long shot.
These days I'm a bit more in favour of projects like folding@home; although they also contribute to global warming, they may contribute to curing diseases; the human resources thusly retained in this way are more likely, in my view, to come up with solutions to global warming (e.g. a scientist who dies of cancer, or his/her offspring or whatever).
Note that simply using electricity doesn't mean you're contributing to global warming. If you're using nuclear or solar power, for example, you're probably contributing extremely little. We mainly burn coal because it's cheap, and because the stupid public freaks out about that evil nukular power.
Taking the Bush administration's stance to it's logical conclusion, the aliens would be stupid NOT to bombard us back to the stone age. I mean, as Cheney paints it, if there's a 1% chance that we MIGHT attack them, they should pre-emptively destroy us for their own safety!
It's possible, but this is not necessarily absolute, and the behaviour of humans is proof of that. If we discovered an alien race, certain things hold true: (1) Some humans will believe we should destroy them ASAP, "just in case"; (2) many (more "humanitarian" (alienitarian?)) humans will believe we should not; (3) some governments will pick one position or the other; (4) everyone will argue no end about what we should do; (5) if they are anything like us, it may be that free trade could be mutually beneficial to both species, and many will recognise that and be willing to take the chance; (6) the final decision may depend on which sub-group holds the most power; (7) even if full-on war breaks out between the two, there will always even be some who pick the side of the other, and depending on the balance of power, such conflict may be protracted and complicated; (8) even if we win in such a conflict, we may not necessarily 'kill them all', and may even have peaceful cooperation thereafter.
What is ALSO quite probable, in my view, is that all of the above points would be true VICE VERSA i.e. for the aliens too. We always seem to assume that aliens are likely to behave as if every single one of them has the same opinion (e.g. "destroy humans" or whatever), like a collective, but the chances of that seem pretty slim to me. Probably they'll be different individuals with different opinions too. I suspect that lots of differing viewpoints/roles and levels of compassion and specialisation etc. may even have been necessary for us to evolve to the point of being capable of creating a modicum of civilisation, and this may be likely for other species.
Probably though, two alien races who meet randomly will likely be at quite different levels of development of technology, so probably one will be at a big advantage. That doesn't necessarily mean certain destruction though; (European colonialism for example did not bode the destruction of every other race at all, even when Europe basically had the technology and advantage to do so.)
On the balance, I do think actively sending out such signals is a BAD idea at this point in our technological development - we're not advanced enough yet to be taking chances with alien races probably far more advanced than us (if they can get to us). Give us another couple hundred years, when our technology is far far more advanced, then we'll be in a better position to tackle whatever comes.
Absence of evidence is evidence of absence? That's new to me, and certainly this amazing new insight of yours will revolutionise science and even philosophy. Fermi paradox isn't a paradox in the true sense of the word.
That's not a new theory at all; I first read about that in the book "The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature" by Geoffrey Miller - good book, worth a read.
That's pretty recent indeed; if we don't even know what caused such a catastrophe to occur, surely it's important to learn, as it might happen again.
Um, Africa has literally hundreds of thousands of schools; check out some of these statistics if you want to base your opinions more closely on reality sometime; there is certainly enough economic activity and education expenditure in Africa to potentially purchase very many OLPC laptops.
And that's based on current OLPC prices; prices are likely to drop significantly in just a few years - you are slamming the idea in general, which means you're also slamming the idea at far cheaper prices - which starts to seem bizarre.
At point 3, if 'man' would really be left in a worse position accepting the loan (and its known associated risks), why doesn't he just say 'no'? You seem to imply the West has a gun against everyones heads, as opposed to the truth, that as free-thinking autonomous entities they make their own decisions for which they are responsible. Anyway, Western capital has on the aggregate helped emerging economies massively to achieve growth, skills and knowledge faster than they would have been able to otherwise (in case you hadn't noticed, emerging economies are booming globally on a scale unprecedented in human history); and ironically enough though, emerging economies like China are also far more flush with capital than Western economies right now. But don't let facts and logic get in the way of a good old-fashioned "West-bashing".
When it comes down to a choice of providing African kids living in absolute poverty with access to Slashdot or a $200 truckload of rice
Um, what about the tens (probably hundreds) of millions of poor African kids who don't live in "absolute poverty" but already have their basic food and shelter needs taken care of? (The MAJORITY in fact - most of Africa isn't starving, do some basic research please) --- don't they deserve charity or education?
Honestly Dvorak, STFU and let people decide for themselves what they think it's best to spend THEIR money on.
So you mean if, say, a US law attempted to illegalise behaviour in a foreign country that isn't illegal in that foreign country, and the company operated in both countries, it should be able to choose to ignore that law? Or do you mean, US law shouldn't be 'allowed' to cover activities of (American or not) companies on foreign soil in the first place? I'm sure the Chinese government probably would attempt to impose their own morality on subsidiaries of Chinese companies operating in the US - e.g. Chinese banks who have bought into some American banks are probably not allowed to criticise the Chinese government in the US or they'd get into trouble back home (I don't know if that's the case for sure, but it seems likely). Likewise if a Chinese-owned search engine opened operations in the US, and allowed totally uncensored searches on American soil, would they be breaking laws in China where head office is based? I'm not sure what really makes sense.
Lop off the guy's head, put it on a stake, and post a vid of all this on YouTube (or liveleak)? I reckon that would make anyone else think twice before doing this!
That's your opinion. It may not be spent at all.
Did you even read the whole Wikipedia article? It addresses this. What happens to money that isn't spent? It usually gets placed into a bank account or investment account. What happens to it then? Financial institutions, such as banks, then use the cash to invest, usually prudently, in new economic activities, that wouldn't be possible if that money had been spent already. In other words, guys like YOU and ME who go get a bank loan when we decide to try start our own businesses (and/or when we buy the products of such businesses) - we BENEFIT from what would otherwise be idle capital. This is where 'interest' comes from, by the way.
Corporations do not "possess no morality", they are at the very least obligated to respect the laws of the countries they operate in, which is to say, there is a huge amount of "morality" imposed on them. This makes sense. If you're saying you believe that corporations should be allowed to be above the law, then you're just saying that certain people (since companies are just owned by people) should be allowed to be above the law. If you believe that's OK, then you're essentially saying you believe it's OK for people to be able to do whatever they want, even murder other people or abuse children. Since you said you're a relativist, I presume that is exactly what you're saying. Sorry, but the term 'relativist' is just a label designed to give a veneer of ideological legitimacy to 'idiocy'. That's not ad hominen, I'll give you an example: What is the difference between saying "it's OK for the Chinese government to murder its own citizens for merely saying something they disagree with", and saying "it's OK for my next door neighbour to rape and cut up his 8-year-old daughter"? Answer: To a relativist, THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE, you MUST accept one if you accept the other, they're two different levels of the same thing. "But that's an entirely different country, far away", you say. Bollocks - the whole POINT of this issue is that should China become powerful enough (and we're allowing them to), they WILL at some point inevitably use force to *impose* their ("relative") "morality" on the USA, and e.g. YOU. They're not separate worlds, they're just 'next door' actually, and the next fifty years of human history will show that. I guess as a relativist you're OK with that, but most people aren't, so the whole point of laws like this is to draw a line and try to something to prevent that from ever happening. It's certainly not easy, it's a complex issue, but doing nothing is about the least sensible thing you can do.
..."
It's a complex issue because pushing these companies between a rock and a hard place and making it effectively impossible for them to legally operate in a major dictatorship without breaking the law in one country or another, may have the opposite effect to what is desired: American companies may leave the market, and then Chinese companies will simply take their place, rising to power, and thereby *strengthening* the position of the morally corrupt, and weakening the position of the US. The idea of boycotting their markets might've worked a few years when China was highly dependent on exports to the US for growth, but the share of China's exports that goes to the US is shrinking extremely rapidly, and fast approaching the point where a US boycott would have very little effect on China at all. No amount of free trade or economic growth is, by itself, going to cause China to become a free country. This is not only a major problem for a billion Chinese, it's quite possibly going to become a major problem for you and me too; perhaps you feel calling yourself a "relativist" somehow rationalises your arguments to do nothing and allow it - to me, it sounds just like that famous quote, which I'll paraquote, "first, they came for the Chinese citizens, and I did nothing - because I wasn't Chinese
I had loose lugnuts once, luckily I noticed it as I pulled back as I heard/felt something was wrong and immediately stopped - the cause was that somebody had been busy trying to steal the tires, and it seems we disturbed them as I came out to go home (just in time, too).
Not very insightful. Firstly it isn't really just trying to replace books - if it was then the project would be "laughably absurd", but it's not. That $200 device does far more than a book ever could. Secondly, fast-forward five to fifteen years as economies of scale and ever-cheapening electronics allow the device to be sold at, say, $20. Third, even if the damn thing is destroyed, with books in electronic format, just buy a new one and transfer thousands of books back to the new one in mere seconds at virtually no cost --- destroying the device doesn't necessarily 'destroy the content', as you imply, and as is the case with books. Finally, I live in a third-world country, and it was access to computers at a very young age that sparked my interest in learning to program, which now allows me to earn a good income and create and export software products to the entire world, bringing forex into the country and creating jobs, so why don't you STFU and let poor people decide for themselves that they "need" - it's not your money, so how is OLPC harmful?
So the news is that a company selling computers is selling something that the consumer's been asking for? Who'd've thought it?
You know, pretty much every news event in the world can be similarly derisively portrayed when distilled to its more abstract or generic form. For example, if a plane crashed killing hundreds, you might say "So the news is that some plane crashed?" - there's nothing insightful about saying "Gee who'dve thought it?" (cynical remark != intelligent remark); just because it's well-known that planes sometimes crash, doesn't mean it's not interesting news when it happens. Likewise for pretty much anything, e.g. troops getting killed, terrorist bombings, mall/school shootings, etc. - their generalised forms are all well-known to occur already; it's not the underlying concept of an event that interests people, it's particular instances of such events. (I'm not saying this story is actually interesting, of course, but your reasoning as portrayed doesn't cut to the cause of its boringness.)