Google was the most popular search engine long before FireFox ever had that search box. Thus even if Google weren't funding Mozilla at all, it would still be the most obvious and logical "default choice", provided one does not limit people from choosing others or making it difficult to do so (which they haven't). I mean, it (a) just wouldn't have made sense anyway to deliberately choose a less popular search engine and (b) choosing some other search engine would still be unfairly favouring one over another. Asking the user every time they run FF for the first time would be silly. No, the only clear choice is to please the most users by choosing the most popular search engine.
I still don't agree that it's anything like the Skype situation. In the Skype situation, they had something they'd developed that worked on all platforms, and then they sat down and intentionally spent additional time and effort to deliberately break it on some platforms. In the case of the search box in FF, they started with nothing, i.e. no search box at all, and sat down and added a new feature that contains no limitations. It's like someone gives you a free ice-cream and you complain because it's not your favourite flavour. What Skype did takes something away from users, what FF have done has only added.
Oh for God's sake what do you expect, that the Mozilla developers should be "pure" and "untainted" by commercial interests that might "bias" them towards pushing their solutions over others for reasons other than technical? Get over yourself, there just aren't enough programmers willing to live like paupers giving up their lives in some mother theresa style gesture doing volunteer development work while starving and living in the gutter... you can't *make* software for free, programmers not only need money, they tend to demand a lot of it... further it's a free market, the Mozilla Foundation have found a business model that allows them to make money off a free browser and there is nothing wrong with that... if it was so terrible, then the free market would reject it and come up with alternate solutions. If their browser was shit nobody would use it no matter how much they astroturfed, and if they were raking in unjustifiable amounts of money and spending it on yachts then the free market would eventually find another cheaper way to make browsers. Nobody is forced to use FireFox and people are broadly capable of knowing whether the browser they are using sucks or not. Having more "motivation to market" (and money to do so) is a good thing, you speak as though marketing itself is some form of evil.
Funny how it's always "other people" we expect to live to insanely idealised standards of devotion to ideologies of untainted technical purity, while for ourselves it's always OK to maximise the income we can earn from our own endeavours.
Choice? The FireFox search bar is configurable, so your post is either ignorant or a troll. It's not like the Skype case AT ALL: The Skype case was extra effort to create artificial limitations... tell me, in what way have they gone to extra effort to create artificial limitations?
It seems obvious to me that users benefit when the Mozilla Foundation is able to fund development of alternate browsers. If they had no money, we wouldn't have FireFox... "having FireFox" seems like a benefit to me.
Hmm... very interesting stats there, thanks! Not quite what my 'perception' had been of Apple's recovery. Indeed, it will be interesting to see if Jobs can keep up the growth (especially with Vista coming out within the next year or so, which means Windows catching up to OS X in several respects in which the latter has been ahead).
That's an interesting way of looking at things, but the use of averages is misleading, as we all know Apple went through a horrible near-death "dip" several years ago. Take a look at the graph here: http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/other/print/200506092 15358.html... sales of Macs grew 40% last year, and the sales growth rate has been steadily increasing for a few years. Apple sold over a million computers in just the last quarter... they will sell at least several million during 2006 and several million the year thereafter, so the Mac software market is anything but flat.
Another point, if 'gwerdna' won't take part in the second contest 'so as not to reveal secrets', why would he have taken part in the first? What makes the first one trustworthy as not being a honeypot?
I wouldn't be surprised to learn there's been some string pulling behind the scenes.
Personally, I would be surprised if there hasn't! These days, in marketing agencies, these kinds of FUD campaigns are not tinfoil hat conspiracy theory stuff - they're mundane everyday 'textbook' activities.
False analogy; in business, if you fail to meet sales projections by a large gap, you have probably lost a lot of money. Generally most people don't start out business ventures planning to lose money, usually a business plan that loses money is regarded as a failure - almost by definition.
Now this gwerdna's claims take on an absurd sense of non-falsifiability... we all just have to take some anonymous stranger on the Internet's word for it that OS X has these alleged vulnerabilities.
I agree that the honeypot approach isn't perfect because it won't necessarily catch every hack. However it's silly to suggest that because it isn't perfect it shouldn't be employed --- if it causes even a few vulnerabilities to be discovered then it's worth it, even if it doesn't catch all, because catching some is better than catching none.
Mac's are not immune and the sooner people realize it and cast off their false sense of security the better.
Stop talking in absolutes (black/white, binary 1/0 etc.) about security. Are you saying the guy with triple sets of gates and CCTV and 6-foot high walls with electric fencing and a permanent security guard outside his house and alarm system linked to the security company has a "false sense of security" compared to the guy with nothing but a normal door and a low picket fence because neither are 'totally immune' to being broken into? Come on, at some point we have to stop calling it a "false sense of security" and really admit that the statistical probability of being 'broken into' in one case is miniscule compared to the other case. Of course the probability will probably never be zero, but that doesn't mean all non-zero probabilities are equal.
To be fair, Walmart are in a very low-margin industry, which warrants and requires an "extreme" level of frugality and efficiency, while Microsoft operate in a very high-margin industry. Of course that doesn't mean frugality should go out the window. I know I might be sounding like I'm arguing that Microsoft should pay more "because they can easily afford it" - I'm not - I'm just refuting the suggestion that it wouldn't be feasible (financially speaking) for Microsoft to give such raises, and putting it into perspective.
Ultimately what it boils down to though is that Microsoft (of course) shouldn't pay more than "fair market value" for labour in any segment - regardless of whether or not "they can easily afford it". The market itself should decide what "fair market value" is, and whether it is, indeed, "fair". If Microsoft were really paying very badly then they would be seeing such a mass-exodus of employees that they would collapse (as it's still a free labour market). In some sense workers collectively set the average level of pay by accepting to work at certain rates... we don't live in a time where people are literally forced to work somewhere or forced to earn no more than a certain amount. It often boils down to how easily replaceable you are (that's why the floor sweeper earns so little). Note there is another angle though, that it may be in Microsoft's benefit to pay more if it causes brighter people to be attracted and retained --- an extra $65,000,000/year could well generate more value than that each year in terms of innovative and/or productive output. Sometimes it doesn't pay to be overly stingy. This is only true for some types of workers of course --- doubling the salaries of all the floor sweepers "just to be nice and because we can" probably would not generate any additional value for the company.
The implication also appears to be that Microsoft has addressed all the security problems, and yet still struggle with their image only because it's "hard to get user confidence back once lost" - aw, how unfair. But this isn't true, MS software is still vulnerable and nowhere near secure (they are still regularly releasing updates for dozens of critical security flaws, this has been going on for years and shows no signs of slowing down, meaning any Windows system has dozens of holes in it right now waiting for black hats). Perhaps the reason it's 'hard to get user confidence back' is, oh I don't know, that a large percentage of their users still struggle to keep their systems safe from the onslaught of 150,000+ viruses and tonnes of malware?
In fact, even giving raises to just top 1% of employees still would bump the salary budget significantly every year.
Hmm... really? Let's see, 1% of about 65000 employees is 650. If these 1% earn on average $100,000/year, and you give them each a (generous) 20% raise, then you are paying an extra $20,000*650/year, which is a whopping, um, $13,000,000/year. I hate to break it to you but that's absolutely nothing for Microsoft - they earn that much every three hours.
OK, but giving raises to only 1% is unrealistic. Let's say we give 10% raises to 10% of the workers - say $10,000*6500 - that's still only $65,000,000 - Microsoft earn that much in just 14 hours.
Sorry, but it doesn't sound quite so unrealistic to me.
What's interesting is that we are only now (with the Web allowing new channels for publication and for reaching dispersed niche markets) really starting to properly recover from the harmful effects of decades of self-censorship and extreme sanitisation in comics. The proverbial pendulum is swinging the other way again and comics as an art form is recovering (sort of), although sometimes what's published is so extreme that it just seems like deliberately going to the opposite extreme.
Now imagine that it is proven that violent games cause physiological brain changes that predispose you to acts of violence.
Bzzt, you said "predispose", you lose. That very term negates your argument as it still leaves people with free will, control over their actions, an understanding of right and wrong and legal/illegal, and an understanding that their actions have consequences.
You've cited the example of "shouting fire in a crowded theater" in a way that suggests it is analogous to playing games, but I fail to see how it is analogous, could you explain? When I play violent games, do dozens of people rush for the door and crush one another?
Given that millions of people frequently play violent video games, some for years, and yet continue to be completely healthy, well-adapted functional and law-abiding citizens, I think you would have a pretty hard time proving that video games would be "likely to incite imminent lawless action". If it were, we'd have millions of video game players going out and committing acts of violence. And that isn't happening. In fact violent crime is on the decline even as violent games are on the rise.
I'm not sure why there is such resistance here on/. (other than the fact that most/.'ers are possibly adolecent gamers) to the idea that activities you engage in for a large percentage of your time can have an impact on brain development and function.
It's not that idea to which there is resistance - it's the idea that it should be legislated and regulated even if the idea is true. "Freedom" means allowing people to do basically anything so long as those things don't harm others or impinge on the freedoms of others. Gaming does neither, nor does allowing one's children to play games. It's not the job of some "nanny state" government to regulate anything and everything that might be considered "harmful" to someone (even "the children") or might conceivably lead someone somewhere to contemplate possibly committing a crime. Playing games doesn't cause violence - at best you could argue that it might provoke people to think about possibly committing an act of violence -- and suddenly you're on very tenuous ground, because it's exactly like the argument that viewing porn causes people to commit rape. People should be punished for the actual crimes they commit. Real violence is already illegal, we don't need new legislation for that, and thinking about violence shouldn't be illegal.
It's interesting to note that the explosive rise of increasingly violent (and realistic) games over the last couple of decades has also seen a steady decrease in violent juvenile crime rates. Now there are of course many variables at play there, but it's interesting in that it's the opposite of what one would expect given your assertions --- if violent games led to any not-insignificant amount of real violence, then with the incredibly massive popularity of violent games we should have seen a massive upswing in violent crime among juveniles recently. We haven't, in fact we've seen the opposite. (That of course doesn't necessarily mean that there hasn't been such an increase, it may simply be masked by other trends, but it does seem to suggest that if there is such an increase that it is very likely insignificantly small.)
Not a very good analogy. Even though the polystyrene is only eroded to microparticles, it isn't actually poisonous.
True, but the point of the GP post wasn't that the polystyrene wasn't poisonous, but rather that he thought that it was "gone" simply because he couldn't see it anymore, and for that point the analogy still stands.
The general public's understanding and 'lay' usage of the word "biodegradability" may be a 'red herring', but the actual notion is important in studies of industrial chemicals and so on (e.g. cf http://www.steve.gb.com/me/work.html). Whether something can be eaten by bacteria (and broken down in this way) is actually pretty important, in fact it is one of the primary ways in which dangerous molecules are broken down in the environment into non-dangerous molecules. You make it sound like nobody worries about this sort of thing ever, which isn't true, there are plenty of once-common chemicals that have now been banned because they were toxic and found to persist in the environment (and more in the pipeline e.g. PBDEs) - the very reason we don't have to fear modern landfills so much is precisely because there is now a lot more 'control' over what is used or discarded in manufacturing and so the things we buy these days are a lot more "harmless". This isn't because biodegradability isn't a concern, it's precisely because it has been a very real concern.
As for 100 year old newspapers being readable on a landfill, I'm rather skeptical of that claim, given that having "studied" my own garbage I've found that anything paper rots away within mere weeks. It's practically impossible to stop the stuff from rotting unless it's sealed, and there will always be humidity in the heap because a large portion of stuff on the landfill is 'wet' in nature (e.g. bits of rotting fruit peels) so you can't keep anything paper dry.
Seriously though, your point is absurd. Of COURSE things are different if you know that you will cease to be sometime in mid-July.
Yup, I agree fully, it's absurd. I have enough savings to go perhaps a year without working, so if I'm going to live only 3 months then sure as hell I'll stop working and burn through my money trying to enjoy the last few months. OTOH if I have to live another 30-40 years then I need to keep working to maintain my skillset and savings to plan for that, so that I can actually still eat and have a roof over my head.
Do you really not even know the difference between "bio-degrade" and "dissolve"? As others have pointed out, "bio-degrade" does not mean "becoming so small that it can't be seen with the naked eye anymore". Here's a little analogy to help you: If I dissolve a bit of arsenic in a glass of water until you can't see it at all, will you drink it? I mean, according to your analytical skills, the arsenic must be, um, "gone", so no worries right? I find such a depth of ignorance and lack of insight a little hard to believe from someone supposedly educated... perhaps you were just trolling. What's perhaps more disturbing is your +4 moderation.
Well, at least it can be seen that there is overwhelming bias at slashdot.
- Saying that one race group is inferior to another constitutes a "bias": correct.
- Saying that some software is better than other software constitutes a "bias": incorrect
The two are not analogous. The flaw in your argument is the implicit assertion put forth that "all software is created equal" (so to speak) and that any preference of some software over another must therefore constitute a bias. Here's a cluestick for you: Software really does differ.
I suppose you would also slate a mechanic for "hypocrisy" and "bias" if he said that a Ferrari is better than a Hyundai.
How much do you get paid for an 'astroturf' post like that? (You're not very good at it though... the whole formulaic "pretend to be an OSS advocate" to score mod points, it's like you pulled it from a marketing 101 textbook.)
And I wonder how many more millions they can now save by using OSS, now that they know they can be more confident in its quality? Have you ever heard of the word "investment"?
Slashdot Mirror
Google was the most popular search engine long before FireFox ever had that search box. Thus even if Google weren't funding Mozilla at all, it would still be the most obvious and logical "default choice", provided one does not limit people from choosing others or making it difficult to do so (which they haven't). I mean, it (a) just wouldn't have made sense anyway to deliberately choose a less popular search engine and (b) choosing some other search engine would still be unfairly favouring one over another. Asking the user every time they run FF for the first time would be silly. No, the only clear choice is to please the most users by choosing the most popular search engine.
I still don't agree that it's anything like the Skype situation. In the Skype situation, they had something they'd developed that worked on all platforms, and then they sat down and intentionally spent additional time and effort to deliberately break it on some platforms. In the case of the search box in FF, they started with nothing, i.e. no search box at all, and sat down and added a new feature that contains no limitations. It's like someone gives you a free ice-cream and you complain because it's not your favourite flavour. What Skype did takes something away from users, what FF have done has only added.
Oh for God's sake what do you expect, that the Mozilla developers should be "pure" and "untainted" by commercial interests that might "bias" them towards pushing their solutions over others for reasons other than technical? Get over yourself, there just aren't enough programmers willing to live like paupers giving up their lives in some mother theresa style gesture doing volunteer development work while starving and living in the gutter ... you can't *make* software for free, programmers not only need money, they tend to demand a lot of it ... further it's a free market, the Mozilla Foundation have found a business model that allows them to make money off a free browser and there is nothing wrong with that ... if it was so terrible, then the free market would reject it and come up with alternate solutions. If their browser was shit nobody would use it no matter how much they astroturfed, and if they were raking in unjustifiable amounts of money and spending it on yachts then the free market would eventually find another cheaper way to make browsers. Nobody is forced to use FireFox and people are broadly capable of knowing whether the browser they are using sucks or not. Having more "motivation to market" (and money to do so) is a good thing, you speak as though marketing itself is some form of evil.
Funny how it's always "other people" we expect to live to insanely idealised standards of devotion to ideologies of untainted technical purity, while for ourselves it's always OK to maximise the income we can earn from our own endeavours.
Choice? The FireFox search bar is configurable, so your post is either ignorant or a troll. It's not like the Skype case AT ALL: The Skype case was extra effort to create artificial limitations ... tell me, in what way have they gone to extra effort to create artificial limitations?
It seems obvious to me that users benefit when the Mozilla Foundation is able to fund development of alternate browsers. If they had no money, we wouldn't have FireFox ... "having FireFox" seems like a benefit to me.
Hmm ... very interesting stats there, thanks! Not quite what my 'perception' had been of Apple's recovery. Indeed, it will be interesting to see if Jobs can keep up the growth (especially with Vista coming out within the next year or so, which means Windows catching up to OS X in several respects in which the latter has been ahead).
the Mac software market is at best flat.
That's an interesting way of looking at things, but the use of averages is misleading, as we all know Apple went through a horrible near-death "dip" several years ago. Take a look at the graph here: http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/other/print/200506092 15358.html ... sales of Macs grew 40% last year, and the sales growth rate has been steadily increasing for a few years. Apple sold over a million computers in just the last quarter ... they will sell at least several million during 2006 and several million the year thereafter, so the Mac software market is anything but flat.
Another point, if 'gwerdna' won't take part in the second contest 'so as not to reveal secrets', why would he have taken part in the first? What makes the first one trustworthy as not being a honeypot?
I wouldn't be surprised to learn there's been some string pulling behind the scenes.
Personally, I would be surprised if there hasn't! These days, in marketing agencies, these kinds of FUD campaigns are not tinfoil hat conspiracy theory stuff - they're mundane everyday 'textbook' activities.
False analogy; in business, if you fail to meet sales projections by a large gap, you have probably lost a lot of money. Generally most people don't start out business ventures planning to lose money, usually a business plan that loses money is regarded as a failure - almost by definition.
Heh ... u beat me to it ... funny, MS using Macs for their marketing material, says it all.
Interestingly, even the images on the "Acrylic" site are not made with MS products ... they also sport "Adobe" in the headers.
Now this gwerdna's claims take on an absurd sense of non-falsifiability ... we all just have to take some anonymous stranger on the Internet's word for it that OS X has these alleged vulnerabilities.
I agree that the honeypot approach isn't perfect because it won't necessarily catch every hack. However it's silly to suggest that because it isn't perfect it shouldn't be employed --- if it causes even a few vulnerabilities to be discovered then it's worth it, even if it doesn't catch all, because catching some is better than catching none.
Mac's are not immune and the sooner people realize it and cast off their false sense of security the better.
Stop talking in absolutes (black/white, binary 1/0 etc.) about security. Are you saying the guy with triple sets of gates and CCTV and 6-foot high walls with electric fencing and a permanent security guard outside his house and alarm system linked to the security company has a "false sense of security" compared to the guy with nothing but a normal door and a low picket fence because neither are 'totally immune' to being broken into? Come on, at some point we have to stop calling it a "false sense of security" and really admit that the statistical probability of being 'broken into' in one case is miniscule compared to the other case. Of course the probability will probably never be zero, but that doesn't mean all non-zero probabilities are equal.
To be fair, Walmart are in a very low-margin industry, which warrants and requires an "extreme" level of frugality and efficiency, while Microsoft operate in a very high-margin industry. Of course that doesn't mean frugality should go out the window. I know I might be sounding like I'm arguing that Microsoft should pay more "because they can easily afford it" - I'm not - I'm just refuting the suggestion that it wouldn't be feasible (financially speaking) for Microsoft to give such raises, and putting it into perspective.
Ultimately what it boils down to though is that Microsoft (of course) shouldn't pay more than "fair market value" for labour in any segment - regardless of whether or not "they can easily afford it". The market itself should decide what "fair market value" is, and whether it is, indeed, "fair". If Microsoft were really paying very badly then they would be seeing such a mass-exodus of employees that they would collapse (as it's still a free labour market). In some sense workers collectively set the average level of pay by accepting to work at certain rates ... we don't live in a time where people are literally forced to work somewhere or forced to earn no more than a certain amount. It often boils down to how easily replaceable you are (that's why the floor sweeper earns so little). Note there is another angle though, that it may be in Microsoft's benefit to pay more if it causes brighter people to be attracted and retained --- an extra $65,000,000/year could well generate more value than that each year in terms of innovative and/or productive output. Sometimes it doesn't pay to be overly stingy. This is only true for some types of workers of course --- doubling the salaries of all the floor sweepers "just to be nice and because we can" probably would not generate any additional value for the company.
The implication also appears to be that Microsoft has addressed all the security problems, and yet still struggle with their image only because it's "hard to get user confidence back once lost" - aw, how unfair. But this isn't true, MS software is still vulnerable and nowhere near secure (they are still regularly releasing updates for dozens of critical security flaws, this has been going on for years and shows no signs of slowing down, meaning any Windows system has dozens of holes in it right now waiting for black hats). Perhaps the reason it's 'hard to get user confidence back' is, oh I don't know, that a large percentage of their users still struggle to keep their systems safe from the onslaught of 150,000+ viruses and tonnes of malware?
In fact, even giving raises to just top 1% of employees still would bump the salary budget significantly every year.
Hmm ... really? Let's see, 1% of about 65000 employees is 650. If these 1% earn on average $100,000/year, and you give them each a (generous) 20% raise, then you are paying an extra $20,000*650/year, which is a whopping, um, $13,000,000/year. I hate to break it to you but that's absolutely nothing for Microsoft - they earn that much every three hours.
OK, but giving raises to only 1% is unrealistic. Let's say we give 10% raises to 10% of the workers - say $10,000*6500 - that's still only $65,000,000 - Microsoft earn that much in just 14 hours.
Sorry, but it doesn't sound quite so unrealistic to me.
What's interesting is that we are only now (with the Web allowing new channels for publication and for reaching dispersed niche markets) really starting to properly recover from the harmful effects of decades of self-censorship and extreme sanitisation in comics. The proverbial pendulum is swinging the other way again and comics as an art form is recovering (sort of), although sometimes what's published is so extreme that it just seems like deliberately going to the opposite extreme.
Now imagine that it is proven that violent games cause physiological brain changes that predispose you to acts of violence.
Bzzt, you said "predispose", you lose. That very term negates your argument as it still leaves people with free will, control over their actions, an understanding of right and wrong and legal/illegal, and an understanding that their actions have consequences.
You've cited the example of "shouting fire in a crowded theater" in a way that suggests it is analogous to playing games, but I fail to see how it is analogous, could you explain? When I play violent games, do dozens of people rush for the door and crush one another?
Given that millions of people frequently play violent video games, some for years, and yet continue to be completely healthy, well-adapted functional and law-abiding citizens, I think you would have a pretty hard time proving that video games would be "likely to incite imminent lawless action". If it were, we'd have millions of video game players going out and committing acts of violence. And that isn't happening. In fact violent crime is on the decline even as violent games are on the rise.
I'm not sure why there is such resistance here on /. (other than the fact that most /.'ers are possibly adolecent gamers) to the idea that activities you engage in for a large percentage of your time can have an impact on brain development and function.
It's not that idea to which there is resistance - it's the idea that it should be legislated and regulated even if the idea is true. "Freedom" means allowing people to do basically anything so long as those things don't harm others or impinge on the freedoms of others. Gaming does neither, nor does allowing one's children to play games. It's not the job of some "nanny state" government to regulate anything and everything that might be considered "harmful" to someone (even "the children") or might conceivably lead someone somewhere to contemplate possibly committing a crime. Playing games doesn't cause violence - at best you could argue that it might provoke people to think about possibly committing an act of violence -- and suddenly you're on very tenuous ground, because it's exactly like the argument that viewing porn causes people to commit rape. People should be punished for the actual crimes they commit. Real violence is already illegal, we don't need new legislation for that, and thinking about violence shouldn't be illegal.
It's interesting to note that the explosive rise of increasingly violent (and realistic) games over the last couple of decades has also seen a steady decrease in violent juvenile crime rates. Now there are of course many variables at play there, but it's interesting in that it's the opposite of what one would expect given your assertions --- if violent games led to any not-insignificant amount of real violence, then with the incredibly massive popularity of violent games we should have seen a massive upswing in violent crime among juveniles recently. We haven't, in fact we've seen the opposite. (That of course doesn't necessarily mean that there hasn't been such an increase, it may simply be masked by other trends, but it does seem to suggest that if there is such an increase that it is very likely insignificantly small.)
Not a very good analogy. Even though the polystyrene is only eroded to microparticles, it isn't actually poisonous.
True, but the point of the GP post wasn't that the polystyrene wasn't poisonous, but rather that he thought that it was "gone" simply because he couldn't see it anymore, and for that point the analogy still stands.
The general public's understanding and 'lay' usage of the word "biodegradability" may be a 'red herring', but the actual notion is important in studies of industrial chemicals and so on (e.g. cf http://www.steve.gb.com/me/work.html). Whether something can be eaten by bacteria (and broken down in this way) is actually pretty important, in fact it is one of the primary ways in which dangerous molecules are broken down in the environment into non-dangerous molecules. You make it sound like nobody worries about this sort of thing ever, which isn't true, there are plenty of once-common chemicals that have now been banned because they were toxic and found to persist in the environment (and more in the pipeline e.g. PBDEs) - the very reason we don't have to fear modern landfills so much is precisely because there is now a lot more 'control' over what is used or discarded in manufacturing and so the things we buy these days are a lot more "harmless". This isn't because biodegradability isn't a concern, it's precisely because it has been a very real concern.
As for 100 year old newspapers being readable on a landfill, I'm rather skeptical of that claim, given that having "studied" my own garbage I've found that anything paper rots away within mere weeks. It's practically impossible to stop the stuff from rotting unless it's sealed, and there will always be humidity in the heap because a large portion of stuff on the landfill is 'wet' in nature (e.g. bits of rotting fruit peels) so you can't keep anything paper dry.
Seriously though, your point is absurd. Of COURSE things are different if you know that you will cease to be sometime in mid-July.
Yup, I agree fully, it's absurd. I have enough savings to go perhaps a year without working, so if I'm going to live only 3 months then sure as hell I'll stop working and burn through my money trying to enjoy the last few months. OTOH if I have to live another 30-40 years then I need to keep working to maintain my skillset and savings to plan for that, so that I can actually still eat and have a roof over my head.
Do you really not even know the difference between "bio-degrade" and "dissolve"? As others have pointed out, "bio-degrade" does not mean "becoming so small that it can't be seen with the naked eye anymore". Here's a little analogy to help you: If I dissolve a bit of arsenic in a glass of water until you can't see it at all, will you drink it? I mean, according to your analytical skills, the arsenic must be, um, "gone", so no worries right? I find such a depth of ignorance and lack of insight a little hard to believe from someone supposedly educated ... perhaps you were just trolling. What's perhaps more disturbing is your +4 moderation.
Well, at least it can be seen that there is overwhelming bias at slashdot.
- Saying that one race group is inferior to another constitutes a "bias": correct.
- Saying that some software is better than other software constitutes a "bias": incorrect
The two are not analogous. The flaw in your argument is the implicit assertion put forth that "all software is created equal" (so to speak) and that any preference of some software over another must therefore constitute a bias. Here's a cluestick for you: Software really does differ.
I suppose you would also slate a mechanic for "hypocrisy" and "bias" if he said that a Ferrari is better than a Hyundai.
I think the problem is that around here "criticism" passes for "intelligence" and gets modded up. People can't seem to distinguish the two.
How much do you get paid for an 'astroturf' post like that? (You're not very good at it though ... the whole formulaic "pretend to be an OSS advocate" to score mod points, it's like you pulled it from a marketing 101 textbook.)
And I wonder how many more millions they can now save by using OSS, now that they know they can be more confident in its quality? Have you ever heard of the word "investment"?