Let's get real. Sport is a business, a very big one, and growing fast. The managers of the business know probably a lot about maximizing profit. If allowing doping would improve the profits, a case for it could be made. Focusing it from the point of view of the health problems of athletes is naive. You can tell the manager of a sweatshop that if he allows breaks every 4 hours of work, slave workers would have a better health, but if you don't link that to higher profits, he's just going to look blankly at you, in a so-what's-your-point way.
Do you have a job that you landed because of you unpaid open-source programming?
I lost my last job for using the dead compile times for working on my pet open source project. Then I found another job, so you can say I landed there because of my unpaid open-source programming. Does that count?
Just because someone is "interested in computers" doesn't mean (s)he is a computer geek like in days of yore
Yup. The son of a friend of mine decided to study computing. Reason? He liked computers. Turned out that what he really liked was chatting, internet browsing and playing PC games. The whole "programming" part that they try to teach him completely bores him. Just discovered that the career he chose wasn't the career he thought he chose.
When I was 15, I had never seen a computer, but I knew that I wanted to work with them. The _idea_ of computing, of writing instructions to make the computer do what I wanted, of playing with something that exhibited some of the powers of human mind, was terribly interesting to me. Getting my hands on my first PC, a thing with a BASIC interpreter and graphics! display in a TV monitor, was an intense experience, even if I cannot say why, what clicked inside me. The making of my very first BASIC program, unaided, reading a manual in a foreign almost-unknown language (English) was a triumph. The making of a program that draw a circle on the screen by calculating the distance to the center, was making mathematics come alive for me for the first time.
What I mean is that, in my case, no stimulation was needed, and probably difficulties just added emotion. The interest and emotional attachment to the computing world was immediate and intense. I don't know if I'm a typical case, but my anecdotal evidence is yours for what's worth.
topics that need critical thinking, as it cites scientific subjects 'including, but not limited to, evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning'
Right. And I'm glad we aren't limited to these, because I'd like to add my own little list:
- Government policies - Existence of Jesus - Development Aid - Love to the flag - Selective Religion - Comparative Religion - Nationalism - Capitalism - Sports as spectacle - War on drugs - News spinning - Education system
I'm sure many other topics can be added, much improving general education.
if Java really were released today, brand-new, would it be a tool you'd choose
If Windows were released today, brand-new, would it be a tool you'd choose?
Who cares. It's not today that it's released, and the importance of availability, mind-share and already developed applications around it, gives it a clear importance, even if you have better hammers for your particular nail.
In time, they will miniaturize the things a bit more, and use it to inspect our pipes. I can already picture the nurse saying "Now this is not going to hurt a bit, just bend over and I'll insert this tiny little robotic thing (BoaScope TM), and it'll be over in a minute. If you feel it squirming inside you, it's all perfectly normal, dear."
would give the much-derided ISS a stab at doing some decent science for a change
That won't necessarily help with the derision, as nobody denies the fact that interesting experiments are possible in space. The main point of contention will still be if you need to keep live persons there continuously to perform them. It'd have to be shown that a satellite or a simple orbiting mission couldn't have performed the same experiments for a fraction of the total costs.
1 - No. Intellectual property is an artificial construct. You compose a song. From the moment you sing it, it's ridiculous to assert that you have a right to the knowledge of that son in other peoples' heads. Assert that you have a right to those persons not writing your song down, singing it or modifying it is just a god-complex. We are so used to the idea now, that we don't recognize how ridiculous it is.
That said, I also think that perhaps patents may be helpful in improving technology and general well being. But I also find that a rigorous study of the alternative has not been done. Would we be so much worse off if there were no patents? Are engineers going to suddenly stop searching for better ways of doing things just because they won't get rich for doing it? The classical example for patents is medical investigation, but how many good drugs have been pushed out by others less good, just because the new one has still the patent valid? Perhaps if there were no patents, medical investigation would take another form, probably less manipulative, funded by governments and others non-for-profit entities. Perhaps the end result wouldn't be so good as what we now have, but perhaps it would be better. Who knows? There is certainly little debate on the topic.
And of course copyright is just a tax on knowledge, serving no useful purpose but transferring wealth from the general public to a minority, that uses the said wealth to prevent any change in the absurd but very lucrative situation We have better medicine now than two hundred years ago, and perhaps patents have had something to do with that, but music and literature and poetry haven't certainly improved in this last two centuries.
2- N/A
In breaking news...
on
I Will Derive
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Could we please restrict all further "cold fusion" articles to at least the level of "cold fusion experiment of X successfully reproduced by Y"?. That would help keeping the noise level down.
Nations are not so big a problem, because you can hit them back on earth self. But think of an isolationist sect, that could one day decide that the Earth is a sink of iniquity, and must be destroyed. That's the kind of problems that could happen with private colonization of the moon.
Let's be real, the moon is never going to be like Florida, even if it's really sunny and the reduced gravity helps even feeble elderly people play golf (those big craters come really handy there!) Even if it could be, the powers that be cannot really allow private property in the moon, or private developments in space. Just read a bit of SF. The Earth sits in the bottom of a gravity well. It cannot allow people outside (or almost outside) of that gravity well, with the possibility of throwing down big stones, and no fear of reprisals. Only big changes in technology could change that reality.
The new OMEGA EP laser will be able to manifest power densities sufficient to examine Unruh and Hawking radiation-like phenomena in the laboratory and will have the capability to directly produce nuclear reactions through ultra high electric field initiated photodisintegration
What about black holes? I refuse to be impressed except if it can create at least a tiny black hole. They seem to be all the rage nowadays.
When on the road there is only one thing that is important and that is safety
If that's true you'll certainly support my law project about setting the global speed limit to ten miles an hour. That will certainly improve safety. If you don't, then it follows that safety is not the only important thing on the road.
Is that supposed to be a good thing? After all, you have to pay them. And looking it against your other figures, you get that, by more than doubling the people, you just double the revenue and not even double the income. So the income generated per person has in fact diminished.
How is it, concern? Is there any evidence of shadow access to the cloned hardware or not? At the very least it should be rather easy to know if the cloned firmware is an exact copy of the Cisco firmware or not. I can understand the concern of cloned equipment in general, but to speak about a particular case and be so vague means for me that there is in fact no evidence of any type of backdoor.
Has anybody done an study on how much is generating for the users. Of course we have those same 60 billions saved. But I mean not only by direct savings in licenses, but by novel uses in places where licensed software would be uneconomical, new business that could not have been created otherwise, etc.
I'd think that the move to widescreen is global, and not reduced to laptops. Desktop screens in bigger sizes are only widescreen. I think 20" is about the maximum you get in 4:3. Even these are in very short supply. 22" and 24" are just widescreen, and of course I don't think we'll ever see a 30" 4:3 monitor, even if that were desirable.
I think the laptops are adapting to a general tide in the industry. It's probably not economically viable to keep making 4:3 screens. Also, the laptops have an easier time growing horizontally. You can after all offer a better keyboard. But vertically there is nothing you can add at the "other side of the clap" that has user value.
That's extraordinary news because it means a quantum sensor is determining the macroscopic behavior of living birds."
I don't see the novelty. Quantum effects are what determine the behavior, the existence and everything else about the living birds, the dead mammals, the burning stars and whatever else you can imagine.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's get real. Sport is a business, a very big one, and growing fast. The managers of the business know probably a lot about maximizing profit. If allowing doping would improve the profits, a case for it could be made. Focusing it from the point of view of the health problems of athletes is naive. You can tell the manager of a sweatshop that if he allows breaks every 4 hours of work, slave workers would have a better health, but if you don't link that to higher profits, he's just going to look blankly at you, in a so-what's-your-point way.
Do you have a job that you landed because of you unpaid open-source programming?
I lost my last job for using the dead compile times for working on my pet open source project. Then I found another job, so you can say I landed there because of my unpaid open-source programming. Does that count?
Just because someone is "interested in computers" doesn't mean (s)he is a computer geek like in days of yore
Yup. The son of a friend of mine decided to study computing. Reason? He liked computers. Turned out that what he really liked was chatting, internet browsing and playing PC games. The whole "programming" part that they try to teach him completely bores him. Just discovered that the career he chose wasn't the career he thought he chose.
When I was 15, I had never seen a computer, but I knew that I wanted to work with them. The _idea_ of computing, of writing instructions to make the computer do what I wanted, of playing with something that exhibited some of the powers of human mind, was terribly interesting to me. Getting my hands on my first PC, a thing with a BASIC interpreter and graphics! display in a TV monitor, was an intense experience, even if I cannot say why, what clicked inside me. The making of my very first BASIC program, unaided, reading a manual in a foreign almost-unknown language (English) was a triumph. The making of a program that draw a circle on the screen by calculating the distance to the center, was making mathematics come alive for me for the first time.
What I mean is that, in my case, no stimulation was needed, and probably difficulties just added emotion. The interest and emotional attachment to the computing world was immediate and intense. I don't know if I'm a typical case, but my anecdotal evidence is yours for what's worth.
topics that need critical thinking, as it cites scientific subjects 'including, but not limited to, evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning'
Right. And I'm glad we aren't limited to these, because I'd like to add my own little list:
- Government policies
- Existence of Jesus
- Development Aid
- Love to the flag
- Selective Religion
- Comparative Religion
- Nationalism
- Capitalism
- Sports as spectacle
- War on drugs
- News spinning
- Education system
I'm sure many other topics can be added, much improving general education.
if Java really were released today, brand-new, would it be a tool you'd choose
If Windows were released today, brand-new, would it be a tool you'd choose?
Who cares. It's not today that it's released, and the importance of availability, mind-share and already developed applications around it, gives it a clear importance, even if you have better hammers for your particular nail.
In time, they will miniaturize the things a bit more, and use it to inspect our pipes. I can already picture the nurse saying "Now this is not going to hurt a bit, just bend over and I'll insert this tiny little robotic thing (BoaScope TM), and it'll be over in a minute. If you feel it squirming inside you, it's all perfectly normal, dear."
would give the much-derided ISS a stab at doing some decent science for a change
That won't necessarily help with the derision, as nobody denies the fact that interesting experiments are possible in space. The main point of contention will still be if you need to keep live persons there continuously to perform them. It'd have to be shown that a satellite or a simple orbiting mission couldn't have performed the same experiments for a fraction of the total costs.
1 - No. Intellectual property is an artificial construct. You compose a song. From the moment you sing it, it's ridiculous to assert that you have a right to the knowledge of that son in other peoples' heads. Assert that you have a right to those persons not writing your song down, singing it or modifying it is just a god-complex. We are so used to the idea now, that we don't recognize how ridiculous it is.
That said, I also think that perhaps patents may be helpful in improving technology and general well being. But I also find that a rigorous study of the alternative has not been done. Would we be so much worse off if there were no patents? Are engineers going to suddenly stop searching for better ways of doing things just because they won't get rich for doing it? The classical example for patents is medical investigation, but how many good drugs have been pushed out by others less good, just because the new one has still the patent valid? Perhaps if there were no patents, medical investigation would take another form, probably less manipulative, funded by governments and others non-for-profit entities. Perhaps the end result wouldn't be so good as what we now have, but perhaps it would be better. Who knows? There is certainly little debate on the topic.
And of course copyright is just a tax on knowledge, serving no useful purpose but transferring wealth from the general public to a minority, that uses the said wealth to prevent any change in the absurd but very lucrative situation We have better medicine now than two hundred years ago, and perhaps patents have had something to do with that, but music and literature and poetry haven't certainly improved in this last two centuries.
2- N/A
Slahsdot to change name and become Slashitt!
Could we please restrict all further "cold fusion" articles to at least the level of "cold fusion experiment of X successfully reproduced by Y"?. That would help keeping the noise level down.
Nations are not so big a problem, because you can hit them back on earth self. But think of an isolationist sect, that could one day decide that the Earth is a sink of iniquity, and must be destroyed. That's the kind of problems that could happen with private colonization of the moon.
Let's be real, the moon is never going to be like Florida, even if it's really sunny and the reduced gravity helps even feeble elderly people play golf (those big craters come really handy there!) Even if it could be, the powers that be cannot really allow private property in the moon, or private developments in space. Just read a bit of SF. The Earth sits in the bottom of a gravity well. It cannot allow people outside (or almost outside) of that gravity well, with the possibility of throwing down big stones, and no fear of reprisals. Only big changes in technology could change that reality.
That movie is 11 years old now. The joke is dead.
Good jokes die with age. Bad jokes instead, become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
The new OMEGA EP laser will be able to manifest power densities sufficient to examine Unruh and Hawking radiation-like phenomena in the laboratory and will have the capability to directly produce nuclear reactions through ultra high electric field initiated photodisintegration
What about black holes? I refuse to be impressed except if it can create at least a tiny black hole. They seem to be all the rage nowadays.
When on the road there is only one thing that is important and that is safety
If that's true you'll certainly support my law project about setting the global speed limit to ten miles an hour. That will certainly improve safety. If you don't, then it follows that safety is not the only important thing on the road.
would have appeared in the sky like bright stars.
Appeared to whom?
- Headcount has increased from 35,000 to 80,000
Is that supposed to be a good thing? After all, you have to pay them. And looking it against your other figures, you get that, by more than doubling the people, you just double the revenue and not even double the income. So the income generated per person has in fact diminished.
and rely on humans to sort millions of emails.
No problem. They had the job outsourced to India.
new ideas for space sports. Have any suggestions?"
Please...
Eat lots of calcium! You might develop a backbone!
How is it, concern? Is there any evidence of shadow access to the cloned hardware or not? At the very least it should be rather easy to know if the cloned firmware is an exact copy of the Cisco firmware or not. I can understand the concern of cloned equipment in general, but to speak about a particular case and be so vague means for me that there is in fact no evidence of any type of backdoor.
Has anybody done an study on how much is generating for the users. Of course we have those same 60 billions saved. But I mean not only by direct savings in licenses, but by novel uses in places where licensed software would be uneconomical, new business that could not have been created otherwise, etc.
I'd think that the move to widescreen is global, and not reduced to laptops. Desktop screens in bigger sizes are only widescreen. I think 20" is about the maximum you get in 4:3. Even these are in very short supply. 22" and 24" are just widescreen, and of course I don't think we'll ever see a 30" 4:3 monitor, even if that were desirable.
I think the laptops are adapting to a general tide in the industry. It's probably not economically viable to keep making 4:3 screens. Also, the laptops have an easier time growing horizontally. You can after all offer a better keyboard. But vertically there is nothing you can add at the "other side of the clap" that has user value.
That's extraordinary news because it means a quantum sensor is determining the macroscopic behavior of living birds."
I don't see the novelty. Quantum effects are what determine the behavior, the existence and everything else about the living birds, the dead mammals, the burning stars and whatever else you can imagine.