Re:Ramblings on overpriced labor & ecology
on
Giant Sucking Noise
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· Score: 1
Its called a free market economy. Its kinda the same concept that American became properous under.
Right, but the free market in question covered only all the US states. The laws were basically the same everywhere, standards of living not overly disparate- a level playing field in other words- and there's a strong impartial federal government to appeal to in order to right wrongs, address constitutional issues, build an interstate system, defend from foreign intereference or invasion, etc. Having all this and a single spoken language, and free trade together (with many other factors) is responsible for the prosperity.
Of course, this same situation is not present in the world at large currently, and free trade alone will not necessarily drive progeress in the other areas.
First they took the jobs of the factory workers
on
Giant Sucking Noise
·
· Score: 1
And I did not speak up because I was not a factory worker Then they took the jobs of the IT workers And I did not speak up because I was not an IT worker Then they took the jobs of the scientists And I did not speak up because I was not a scientist Then they took my job- and by that time no one was left to speak up
...drug users obviously don't care about the immediate and personal effects
I'd would say that's almost all they care about.
Ads pointing out long-term, personal, and more-or-less real effects were the norm years ago. But brain damage, lung damage, addiction/dependency, etc. are usually associated with extended use or harder drugs. Most of these effects are probably deemed avoidable by the casual user. There are people responsible enough to want to avoid these long-term effects altogether, so non-exaggerated (credibility is an issue otherwise) information may help them make the right decisions.
The new ads point out short-term, immediate, and non-physiological effects, and aim to create a sense of guilt- but the presented ill-effects are even more exaggerated and tenuously connected to use of the illicit substance (e.g. people die from loaded guns laying around the house regardless of how legal their intoxication is, or even if they're not on anything at all). Last years superbowl ad tried to cash in on high-profile tragedy with the most preposterous claims (opium is/was being grown in Afghanistan, not weed- and the money for plane tickets and box cutters probably came from oil revenues from Saudi Arabia, not drug sales). The new ads are slightly more in tune with reality, and not quite as immediately offensive. I'm not in the target audience and therefore can't say directly whether the ads work, but I think this guilt-trip bs is just going to generate a lot of ill-will and not rectify the problem at all.
Who are the ad wizards...
on
Superbowl XXXVII
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· Score: 3, Interesting
That the Partnership for a Drug Free America hired? Are tax dollars paying for this garbage?
This is the organization that last year told us bald-faced that buying any illicit substance is tantamount to buying plane tickets and box cutters for terrorists.
Recently, their ads have shown that 1/3 of all marijuana use results in shooting a friend in the face, running over kids on bikes, rape, or (slightly more realistically) arrest. Replace weed with alcohol and the commercials make a lot more sense.
This time, for the Superbowl, 'Drugs pay for Terrible Things'- a man on a subway is confronted by murdered innocents that died indirectly because of his casual drug use. I guess I shouldn't give the pizza boy a tip, or any money to anybody ever- because somewhere down the line it might be used for buying drugs and cause the deaths of untold people and it'll be COMPLETELY MY FAULT. It would be great to live in a world were I could know for certain that my spent money will never be used for something disagreeable to me, or unlawful, but it's not going to happen- the best thing is not to pay suspect organizations and individuals directly, but I can't guarantee everyone who meets my criteria will share my good judgement in their own purchases.
The army should be setting up lans running AA at their recruiting centers, hosting tournaments, matches against or teamups with real soldiers, and so on, so anyone can come in and play for free and come into close contact with more direct propaganda/recruiting efforts. Instead they're just targeting the much smaller community of users with adequating computers and broadband (and wouldn't those users have enough money/education to not make them infantry candidates anyhow?).
Granted, that would cost a lot more than running a few servers and supporting game development, but probably be more effective.
Substantial character death. No saving, except to stop playing for the night and to come back in the morning. When you die, you _die_.
Or, when you die, you reload the other save file you had to manually duplicate the last time you were out of the game.
Maybe I wasn't very hard-core to be 'cheating' in this fashion, but that's how I killed the Balrog and beat Moria (the superior colored-font version on the Amiga) a decade ago.
Sound files are not getting much bigger per minute. Totally uncompressed audio is no more than 5MB/min tops in a format like shn.
What about multitrack audio- and not just for surround sound like another poster mention, but for every track of audio prior to being mixed together into the finished song. Plus a makefile that will explain to the music compiler how to generate the finished song from the multitrack source. That'll take a little more space, especially for the very complex and multi-layered music some people like.
I'm sure the many eyeballs effect would keep backwards devil messages out of the music distributed in this fashion, in addition to benefiting the musical types who would want to remix music and so on.
I've gained a lot from using Linux, moreso than any other person...that I've used so far in my short life.
I think you'll find your interpersonal relationships more fulfilling if you base them on mutual friendship, respect, trust, etc., rather than their utility to you.
It's fine to insist that political speech is free speech and protected by the First Amendment, but there's no basis for claiming that it is "more free" than commercial speech.
I believe there's a set of supreme court and lesser decisions going back decades or more on the division between commercial speech and other forms. Commercial speech is more restricted: you can't make false claims about a product you're trying to sell. Political speech, either from individuals or organizations, is a fundamental part of our system's democratic features and likewise is most protected, short of libel or slander.
What would be next? Deciding that personal speech is less protected than commercial speech? Distinguishing between different kinds of commercial speech, with some more protected than others? I shudder to think of where this could lead.
Some sorts of personal speech are probably less protected than commercial speech, or are even outright illegal. Commercial speech _is_ divvied up into different sorts with different regulations, especially where medication or narcotics are the products in question.
The First Amendment does not make such a distinction, and it would set a very bad precedent if the courts decided that commercial speech was less protected.
There's lots of issues not mentioned in the original constitution and the initial amendments, but the system was set up so that clarifications and reasonable exceptions could be made. Also, there's more to the original consitution than the first ten amendments, as in the stuff the amendments were being amended to...
ISP's oversell capacity. Last I heard it was something like 5-10 to 1 on high quality ISP's...you realize you'll get to pay server prices for your bandwidth right?
But the whole point would be to increase download speeds. What good is all this surplus bandwidth if the content provider can only use a fraction of it?
So have the content providers pay the ISPs to make up the difference. Since overall bandwidth usage and the load on the original servers goes down, the ISPs and servers both save. The ISP would then pass some of the savings to the subscriber in exchange for the gig or two used on their hd.
no way this can ever be as good as the anime. there's something about anime that just can't be done right with live-action and real actors.
Likewise, there's something about several thousand pages of black & white inkings that can't be done right with a couple hours of animation. Comprehensible story-line, for one.
Roger Penrose had a pretty good visual explanation for entropy in The Emperor's New Mind. The gist of it was to have a volume, where every point in the volume is a different state for a system. In your case, there'd be a point for every possible configuration of books on the shelf. Anyhow, the different point-states each have equally miniscule probabilities, but the trick is to put them into groups, whose fraction of the total volume is the amount of entropy.
A non-subjective example that Penrose uses is particles of gas in a box. A low-entropy group would be all the states that have the particles bunch up into a corner of the box, and high entropy group would be all the states where the particles fill the volume as a gas normally does. (This example might suffer from confusion between the literal volume of the gas-filled box and the abstract volume of states)
The final and most elegant part of this kind of explanation is its accounting for the tendency of systems to progress towards higher entropy. If you start with a point inside volume, say in the lower entropy group, and let it move randomly, it'll will naturally work it's way out of the low entropy parts into the high simply because there's so much more high entropy volume to move into.
Read the chapter in the Penrose book for a better explanation and pictures... The whole thesis of the book (regarding AI) is pretty weak but there's good popular science material.
The trajectory still needs to be taken into account, but even then I concede it's going fast enough to escape. This applet shows I & II's flight plans in 3d, and it looks like I is heading more directly away from the sun than II, so a larger component of its speed is actually contributing to that escape velocity.
Is the Voyager really going fast enough to make it to another star, even if it was pointed at one? A lot of these posts and articles similar to this seem to imagine the thing just sailing on forever, not in a particularly long orbit around our sun.
If I'm plugging in the equation right, taking into account the 93 AU that the Voyager has already reached, and the present speed (39,000 miles an hour, assuming none of that's tangential velocity), I get a required speed of 4000 km/s, and the Voyager is going far slower.
So as far as I can tell, really the gold record, etc. on board are more of a time capsule for when the craft swings back around on its comet-like trajectory, rather than for contacting aliens. I think the nasa people and popular science writers like to preserve the more romantic notion of an unintentional first instellar voyage, though my calculations could be wrong.
Check out freesfonline for links to a bunch of his stories. Two of them made it into last year's The Years Best Science Fiction 18 (Gardner Dozois, ed.), and while one poster mentioned that Antibodies was good (it reminded me of The One for some reason), A Colder War is far better.
Slashdot Mirror
Its called a free market economy. Its kinda the same concept that American became properous under.
Right, but the free market in question covered only all the US states. The laws were basically the same everywhere, standards of living not overly disparate- a level playing field in other words- and there's a strong impartial federal government to appeal to in order to right wrongs, address constitutional issues, build an interstate system, defend from foreign intereference or invasion, etc. Having all this and a single spoken language, and free trade together (with many other factors) is responsible for the prosperity.
Of course, this same situation is not present in the world at large currently, and free trade alone will not necessarily drive progeress in the other areas.
And I did not speak up because I was not a factory worker
Then they took the jobs of the IT workers
And I did not speak up because I was not an IT worker
Then they took the jobs of the scientists
And I did not speak up because I was not a scientist
Then they took my job-
and by that time no one was left to speak up
Yes, it's probably been done, and better too...
...drug users obviously don't care about the immediate and personal effects
I'd would say that's almost all they care about.
Ads pointing out long-term, personal, and more-or-less real effects were the norm years ago. But brain damage, lung damage, addiction/dependency, etc. are usually associated with extended use or harder drugs. Most of these effects are probably deemed avoidable by the casual user. There are people responsible enough to want to avoid these long-term effects altogether, so non-exaggerated (credibility is an issue otherwise) information may help them make the right decisions.
The new ads point out short-term, immediate, and non-physiological effects, and aim to create a sense of guilt- but the presented ill-effects are even more exaggerated and tenuously connected to use of the illicit substance (e.g. people die from loaded guns laying around the house regardless of how legal their intoxication is, or even if they're not on anything at all). Last years superbowl ad tried to cash in on high-profile tragedy with the most preposterous claims (opium is/was being grown in Afghanistan, not weed- and the money for plane tickets and box cutters probably came from oil revenues from Saudi Arabia, not drug sales). The new ads are slightly more in tune with reality, and not quite as immediately offensive. I'm not in the target audience and therefore can't say directly whether the ads work, but I think this guilt-trip bs is just going to generate a lot of ill-will and not rectify the problem at all.
That the Partnership for a Drug Free America hired?
Are tax dollars paying for this garbage?
This is the organization that last year told us bald-faced that buying any illicit substance is tantamount to buying plane tickets and box cutters for terrorists.
Recently, their ads have shown that 1/3 of all marijuana use results in shooting a friend in the face, running over kids on bikes, rape, or (slightly more realistically) arrest. Replace weed with alcohol and the commercials make a lot more sense.
This time, for the Superbowl, 'Drugs pay for Terrible Things'- a man on a subway is confronted by murdered innocents that died indirectly because of his casual drug use. I guess I shouldn't give the pizza boy a tip, or any money to anybody ever- because somewhere down the line it might be used for buying drugs and cause the deaths of untold people and it'll be COMPLETELY MY FAULT. It would be great to live in a world were I could know for certain that my spent money will never be used for something disagreeable to me, or unlawful, but it's not going to happen- the best thing is not to pay suspect organizations and individuals directly, but I can't guarantee everyone who meets my criteria will share my good judgement in their own purchases.
Cluelessness is not an anti-drug...
The army should be setting up lans running AA at their recruiting centers, hosting tournaments, matches against or teamups with real soldiers, and so on, so anyone can come in and play for free and come into close contact with more direct propaganda/recruiting efforts. Instead they're just targeting the much smaller community of users with adequating computers and broadband (and wouldn't those users have enough money/education to not make them infantry candidates anyhow?).
Granted, that would cost a lot more than running a few servers and supporting game development, but probably be more effective.
The solution- Emilio Estevez with a rocket launcher.
Y'know, from Maximum Overdrive? Also with cars and appliances come to life? Nevermind...
Substantial character death. No saving, except to stop playing for the night and to come back in the morning. When you die, you _die_.
Or, when you die, you reload the other save file you had to manually duplicate the last time you were out of the game.
Maybe I wasn't very hard-core to be 'cheating' in this fashion, but that's how I killed the Balrog and beat Moria (the superior colored-font version on the Amiga) a decade ago.
Sound files are not getting much bigger per minute. Totally uncompressed audio is no more than 5MB/min tops in a format like shn.
What about multitrack audio- and not just for surround sound like another poster mention, but for every track of audio prior to being mixed together into the finished song. Plus a makefile that will explain to the music compiler how to generate the finished song from the multitrack source. That'll take a little more space, especially for the very complex and multi-layered music some people like.
I'm sure the many eyeballs effect would keep backwards devil messages out of the music distributed in this fashion, in addition to benefiting the musical types who would want to remix music and so on.
This is as obvious trolling as I've ever seen:
...liberals hate sweatshops because they hate the poor.
...few liberals respect the Bill of Rights...
Liberals apparently never took economics.
Moderators, please moderate appropriately, not according to negative psychology like:
And when you mod me down, realize you're trying to shut me up, just like liberals always do
Being able to predict bad moderation doesn't cancel out inflammatory comments, and doesn't count as insightful.
I've gained a lot from using Linux, moreso than any other person...that I've used so far in my short life.
I think you'll find your interpersonal relationships more fulfilling if you base them on mutual friendship, respect, trust, etc., rather than their utility to you.
It's fine to insist that political speech is free speech and protected by the First Amendment, but there's no basis for claiming that it is "more free" than commercial speech.
I believe there's a set of supreme court and lesser decisions going back decades or more on the division between commercial speech and other forms. Commercial speech is more restricted: you can't make false claims about a product you're trying to sell. Political speech, either from individuals or organizations, is a fundamental part of our system's democratic features and likewise is most protected, short of libel or slander.
What would be next? Deciding that personal speech is less protected than commercial speech? Distinguishing between different kinds of commercial speech, with some more protected than others? I shudder to think of where this could lead.
Some sorts of personal speech are probably less protected than commercial speech, or are even outright illegal. Commercial speech _is_ divvied up into different sorts with different regulations, especially where medication or narcotics are the products in question.
The First Amendment does not make such a distinction, and it would set a very bad precedent if the courts decided that commercial speech was less protected.
There's lots of issues not mentioned in the original constitution and the initial amendments, but the system was set up so that clarifications and reasonable exceptions could be made. Also, there's more to the original consitution than the first ten amendments, as in the stuff the amendments were being amended to...
ISP's oversell capacity. Last I heard it was something like 5-10 to 1 on high quality ISP's...you realize you'll get to pay server prices for your bandwidth right?
But the whole point would be to increase download speeds. What good is all this surplus bandwidth if the content provider can only use a fraction of it?
So have the content providers pay the ISPs to make up the difference. Since overall bandwidth usage and the load on the original servers goes down, the ISPs and servers both save. The ISP would then pass some of the savings to the subscriber in exchange for the gig or two used on their hd.
no way this can ever be as good as the anime. there's something about anime that just can't be done right with live-action and real actors.
Likewise, there's something about several thousand pages of black & white inkings that can't be done right with a couple hours of animation. Comprehensible story-line, for one.
Here's hundreds of comments debating creationism vs. evolution, all redundant and offtopic.
Has there ever been an evolution book review on slashdot that resulted in any significant discussion of the book in question?
Roger Penrose had a pretty good visual explanation for entropy in The Emperor's New Mind. The gist of it was to have a volume, where every point in the volume is a different state for a system. In your case, there'd be a point for every possible configuration of books on the shelf. Anyhow, the different point-states each have equally miniscule probabilities, but the trick is to put them into groups, whose fraction of the total volume is the amount of entropy.
A non-subjective example that Penrose uses is particles of gas in a box. A low-entropy group would be all the states that have the particles bunch up into a corner of the box, and high entropy group would be all the states where the particles fill the volume as a gas normally does. (This example might suffer from confusion between the literal volume of the gas-filled box and the abstract volume of states)
The final and most elegant part of this kind of explanation is its accounting for the tendency of systems to progress towards higher entropy. If you start with a point inside volume, say in the lower entropy group, and let it move randomly, it'll will naturally work it's way out of the low entropy parts into the high simply because there's so much more high entropy volume to move into.
Read the chapter in the Penrose book for a better explanation and pictures... The whole thesis of the book (regarding AI) is pretty weak but there's good popular science material.
I was only off by a factor of a thousand...
The trajectory still needs to be taken into account, but even then I concede it's going fast enough to escape. This applet shows I & II's flight plans in 3d, and it looks like I is heading more directly away from the sun than II, so a larger component of its speed is actually contributing to that escape velocity.
Is the Voyager really going fast enough to make it to another star, even if it was pointed at one? A lot of these posts and articles similar to this seem to imagine the thing just sailing on forever, not in a particularly long orbit around our sun.
If I'm plugging in the equation right, taking into account the 93 AU that the Voyager has already reached, and the present speed (39,000 miles an hour, assuming none of that's tangential velocity), I get a required speed of 4000 km/s, and the Voyager is going far slower.
So as far as I can tell, really the gold record, etc. on board are more of a time capsule for when the craft swings back around on its comet-like trajectory, rather than for contacting aliens. I think the nasa people and popular science writers like to preserve the more romantic notion of an unintentional first instellar voyage, though my calculations could be wrong.
Check out freesfonline for links to a bunch of his stories. Two of them made it into last year's The Years Best Science Fiction 18 (Gardner Dozois, ed.), and while one poster mentioned that Antibodies was good (it reminded me of The One for some reason), A Colder War is far better.