Millions have already starved. Know you no history? No anthropology? No biology? Starvation is natural.
Cyanide is natural too, doesn't mean it's a good thing for me. That something is "natural" doesn't mean it's a good or a bad thing.
Countless numbers of countless species have starved in many different eras, some to extinction, so what? What do you care of the starved creatures of the Devonian? It's all the same. You, like most people, are so sentimental about the current biosphere you think it's special, some kind of sacred cow. It's not.
Oh, no. I'm an egoist. I care about me, and a few other people. I do not want to starve, nor see the people I care about do, so I looked at what happened in some countries that managed to really screw up their ecology and agriculture, and want none of it.
I have no conceit. In fact, if humanity is supplanted by a superior life form, so be it. Life is bigger than species, even ours. You don't even know what the business of life is.
Yeah, life will go on and all that. If it goes on without me, that's not so fun, so I don't want it to go on in such a way.
Now with such a philosophy, maybe you could give evolution a little push and become fertilizer as soon as possible.
Where did you get the idea that "surviving" automatically means life would be as pleasant as it is now?
Sure, the human race will survive. But screw up the ecology enough and millions who end on the wrong side of it will starve. And don't be so sure that you'll be on the winning side, as since modern agriculture isn't very diverse, just a few of the right species going extinct could cause a whole lot of trouble.
You've got a lot of conceit yourself, but of the reverse kind that you're complaining about. You're making the mistaken assumption of that since "life goes on" it'll also mean it'll be "business as usual", forever, regardless of whatever we do. Sorry, but it doesn't work that way.
One position is all about money. Depriving people of money is bad, if they're not earning money it's not a big deal. I strongly disagree with this one.
Another is if you see it as that copyright gives authors the ability to dictate how their work should be used, and any terms they come up with are equally valid, then all violations are bad, and both regular copyright infringement and GPL infringement are equally serious. It's not about money, it's about doing what the author wishes.
But if you see the GPL as what should exist instead of copyright, then regular infringement isn't a big deal, and GPL infringement is serious.
I should note people make money writing GPL licensed software too. I do.
The Internet should transfer data whatever data I want, when I want, between endpoint A and endpoint B. If governments and companies start getting in the way of that it stops being a good tool.
What I'm saying is, automation and safeguards are nice, but they should always be bypassable just by responding "yes" to a warning prompt.
It's been tried, doesn't work well for a large amount of people. Ever seen how "normal people" use their computer? Warning pops up "Do you want to install the RootKit ActiveX from l33th4x0rs.com?". Typical user doesn't even read it, clicks OK, keeps on browsing as if nothing happened. If you ask them what they did and why they'll go "Huh?". Because that's what they normally do: when a dialog box pops up they click "Ok" regardless of what it says (without even reading in fact), then go back to what they were doing.
That's because lots of things ask trivial questions, or questions the users don't know how to answer, on a daily basis. So people get used to getting them out of the way as fast as possible.
In a way it kind of reminds me of the problems non-technology people have with computers that technology people don't suffer from; these issues don't really get addressed within technology itself very aggressively because to the people who don't have these issues, they aren't considered serious problems or are considered side effects of other problems (general ignorance or lack of intelligence, etc).
Actually, forgot to say, the solution to this exists, it's known as a "console", or a "cell phone". I mean purpose limited machines, where all running code is either heavily sandboxed, or manually vetted by some party.
On general purpose machines such tactics are much less successful, because users actively fight such measures. At some point the user runs into a conflict between that they want to do something that the firewall/permissions/etc don't want to allow. And in such a case the security system is never seen as a good thing, and actively fought, disabled and worked around. Even if what the user wants to do is a seriously bad idea.
It's like trying to protect somebody who insists on that yes, they really want to cut the branch they're sitting on, and if their tool prevents committing suicide they get another that doesn't.
Seriously, I never understood the whole "you have to spend money to save money" mentality that so many people have.
I understand it this way: If you buy too cheap, you may have to buy the same thing of kind again in the future when it breaks, or turns out to be not good enough for your needs.
For instance, my recent experiences with that:
1. I bought a high end point and shoot camera before going on vacation. Took me about 2 days to realize that it still wasn't good enough, and that I couldn't make it better by putting another lens on it, because they're not interchangeable. Now I have a DSLR and am much happier with the results. It's a midrange sort so it could be better still, but with a DSLR I have enough flexibility that I almost never happen to be in a situation that a better camera would make something significantly better. That was a waste of money on the P&S.
2. Some time ago I bought a fairly high end phone... with a T9 keyboard. It was capable of fairly decent web browsing, and could run applications, but was utter horror to type anything with. I'd have been much better off with something with a real keyboard. I could have got that for $50 more. In hindsight that was a waste. Now I have a N900 and couldn't be happier.
3. I tried VIA's MiniITX boards as a way of having a "cheap server". Turned out to be anything but, because it was horribly unreliable, so after months of fighting with it, it now sits in the closet.
So, overall, buying too cheap often turns out expensive, when the cheap product isn't good enough and has to be replaced. Then you end up buying two things instead of one.
The telegraph enabled communication on a very limited level compared to the Internet. The press, and for the most part radio are broadcasting methods.
What I think the Internet brought is the ability for people from different continents (as we probably are) to easily talk to each other, and realize that there are people on the other side of the globe too, and that civilization doesn't end at their country's border.
Yeah, you could do that with the phone and telegraph as well, but you couldn't just happen to converse with somebody without having a prior reason for it.
It's a bit worrying that standards were set, but after they were violated we hear that it's no big deal. You can't argue that is consistent with effective and rational regulation. Either (a) the standards were set irrationally low, or (b) the public's interests are being shortchanged here.
If you set the standard to be right below the dangerous level it would mean that any time anything went even slightly wrong, the concentration could easily rise to an unhealthy level. Also for poisonous things the amount somebody gets can vary quite a lot. Some people could be especially sensitive, or consume more water than average.
The smart thing would be to set the maximum allowed limit high enough above that there isn't a panic every time somebody accidentally flushes a glass of the wrong thing down the drain, but low enough that if something unusual happens, alarms are triggered before people start getting sick.
So, in this case, tritium isn't found in nature in any significant amounts due to its very short half life. So any time you can find anything beyond a very tiny amount of it would mean that something somewhere went wrong. Even if it's nowhere near the unhealthy amount, a leak at a nuclear power plant can't be a good thing.
So, in exchange for the government not taking money from you, you'd rather pay more than the government would take to a third party, to get worse service? That doesn't make sense.
The way I see it, money is money. If in place A getting a good health plan costs $X and in place B a bad one costs $2X, then place A is better regardless of who is getting the money.
Yeah, you can rant about "choice" and "not being forced to", but you don't have any real choice anyway. You're guaranteed to have to pay for medicine at some point in your life, one way or another.
Modems have a fixed limit, because on the ISP side the audio is converted to digital, and goes over a 64Kbps link, of which a part is reserved for signalling, leaving 56K for the user.
It's not a question of being unable to make a better encoder, it's that the line is not able to transmit data any faster.
If you have a line that once a second measures the voltage and outputs a "1" or "0", it doesn't matter what fancy stuff you put on the sending end, the receiver still won't output more than a bit a second.
Okay, I'm confused. Whenever privacy is discussed around here, we say "wouldn't it be great if we could retain personal control over our data, and could willingly decide whom to sell our data to?"
So know someone with a great deal of economic leverage is trying to push exactly such a system, and all of slashdot goes "Oh my god, how evil! Quick, everyone give your data away for free, so nobody can monetize them any more, not even yourself!"
Where do you get the user would get to set a price? And why would somebody interested in letting people put their data on sale patent it, which would ensure very few people could do it?
In any case, I object to the data being collected in the first place.
Guys, Bill Gates stopped being the most evil man about five years ago. I care much less about the shortcomings of Windows than I care about Google and Facebook knowing more about me than I do myself. At this point, I'd be willing to pay Bill Gates if he offers to secure all my personal data.
No, he's still evil, he just moved to doing other kinds of it.
The still has an enormous influence and can use it to evil ends.
What is that good for? Seriously, I can't think of a single application that does it. Databases write in small blocks. Copying DVDs around will use a much smaller buffer. The uses for this seem rather limited.
It's a limit alright, but what is the situation where it becomes a problem?
I don't live in the US, I live in Europe, where university is dirt cheap compared to the US due to the government subsidies. I'm pretty happy with that situation really and have no problem with paying the taxes to support it.
For universities it's easy: as most of them benefit from public funds, they shouldn't be able to patent anything and release it all under the public domain for the public's benefit.
I dunno, I usually find that the people "not willing to learn the in's and out's" are the same people who aren't willing to consider Mac as an option. They want to eat their cake and have it too: they don't want a machine that is considered "easy to use" as an affront to their egos, but they don't want to spend any effort learning either.
I'm the reverse of that. I refuse to get anything made by Apple because it's not open. And yes, I will pay even more than Apple charges, if it's open. To me, a tool has no value if I can't do whatever I want with it.
There is also the money thing, but often as not I'll see them drop more bucks on a noisy beige box with too-small screen than they would have spent on the "low end" apple. And although there is much more variety of PC equipment, they will inexplicably end up with slower specs than the low end apple.
I consistently buy fairly expensive equipment. Server boards in desktops, ECC RAM, RAID, high end video cards, etc.
Thing is, not everybody obsesses about the same things that Apple does. I don't care if it's not perfectly silent. I care that it's well cooled and stable, and does what I want, and doesn't put weird restrictions in my way. It doesn't matter if it's beige or has a seam here or there, especially when it has other things in exchange, such as a swappable battery, standard USB connector, etc.
Of course it's not helped that the stores put the ram capacity on the sticker, but the ram speed is unmentioned. Or the raw clock rate of the cpu, but not the size of the last level cache.
RAM speed is mostly unimportant. It's popular for gamers to obsess over, but the practical difference DDR3-1066 and DDR3-1333 is maybe a 5% at most - because as far as your CPU is concerned RAM is really slow in any case, and it has the cache for that. RAM speed will only make a large difference if your cache is way too small, and then things aren't going to be very fast anyway, and you'd be better off with a CPU with more cache instead.
If they're willing to learn the ins and outs, mac actually has a lot to offer. But if they need excel macros, Windows is the only choice: office mac doesn't have 'em. (or doesn't have vbscript or something. It's not the complete ms office product) and mac's office suite doesn't understand 'em.
For learning ins and outs, there's Linux and BSD, where you can tinker with everything, starting at the boot loader (or even BIOS) and ending in the user facing GUI applications.
Uh huh. Until Hulu switches to HTML5 video embeds and Farmville writes their app in a standard format, like JavaScript + HTML5 canvas. Fuck Flash.
Funny thing is that this seems a rather recent attitude. On any Linux related thread somebody is bound to mention that flash doesn't work well fullscreen, meaning flash is a good thing to have, and not having proper support for it is a weakness. Now when Apple fails to provide support for it, that suddenly goes away and it's suddenly "eh, flash sucks".
It's an interesting inconsistency. Even more interesting since the N900 runs on an ARM CPU as well and plays flash perfectly fine, so it's not because there's no plugin.
It seems to me like a pointless thing to require. A student at this point should be able to figure out on their own "I can save time by using $spreadsheet/calculator". I think you should neither require nor forbid usage of tools like calculators of spreadsheets, so long the student demonstrates they actually understand what's going on.
Teach things with an actual specific application to chemistry. Programs that render chemical structures in 3D, programs that display the periodic table, etc. Show programs that actually could make things less tedious, clearer and more interesting in chemistry class, instead of turning your class into yet another boring lesson on the usage of office applications.
Yep, I always thought it was unfortunate that it seemed people tried the hardest back when tech wasn't there yet, but just as it started getting good people lost interest for some reason.
I remember back then people were experimenting with helmets with *CRTs* mounted in them, and graphics much worse than you could have on a modern phone.
By the 1000 bugs, Google will have paid about 590K, at 10K it'd be 8.2M. Right now the mozilla bugzilla has more than 500K bugs in it, though of course most of those wouldn't qualify.
Slashdot Mirror
Cyanide is natural too, doesn't mean it's a good thing for me. That something is "natural" doesn't mean it's a good or a bad thing.
Oh, no. I'm an egoist. I care about me, and a few other people. I do not want to starve, nor see the people I care about do, so I looked at what happened in some countries that managed to really screw up their ecology and agriculture, and want none of it.
Yeah, life will go on and all that. If it goes on without me, that's not so fun, so I don't want it to go on in such a way.
Now with such a philosophy, maybe you could give evolution a little push and become fertilizer as soon as possible.
Where did you get the idea that "surviving" automatically means life would be as pleasant as it is now?
Sure, the human race will survive. But screw up the ecology enough and millions who end on the wrong side of it will starve. And don't be so sure that you'll be on the winning side, as since modern agriculture isn't very diverse, just a few of the right species going extinct could cause a whole lot of trouble.
You've got a lot of conceit yourself, but of the reverse kind that you're complaining about. You're making the mistaken assumption of that since "life goes on" it'll also mean it'll be "business as usual", forever, regardless of whatever we do. Sorry, but it doesn't work that way.
It depends on how you see things.
One position is all about money. Depriving people of money is bad, if they're not earning money it's not a big deal. I strongly disagree with this one.
Another is if you see it as that copyright gives authors the ability to dictate how their work should be used, and any terms they come up with are equally valid, then all violations are bad, and both regular copyright infringement and GPL infringement are equally serious. It's not about money, it's about doing what the author wishes.
But if you see the GPL as what should exist instead of copyright, then regular infringement isn't a big deal, and GPL infringement is serious.
I should note people make money writing GPL licensed software too. I do.
IMO, a tool must do whatever I want it to do.
The Internet should transfer data whatever data I want, when I want, between endpoint A and endpoint B. If governments and companies start getting in the way of that it stops being a good tool.
It's been tried, doesn't work well for a large amount of people. Ever seen how "normal people" use their computer? Warning pops up "Do you want to install the RootKit ActiveX from l33th4x0rs.com?". Typical user doesn't even read it, clicks OK, keeps on browsing as if nothing happened. If you ask them what they did and why they'll go "Huh?". Because that's what they normally do: when a dialog box pops up they click "Ok" regardless of what it says (without even reading in fact), then go back to what they were doing.
That's because lots of things ask trivial questions, or questions the users don't know how to answer, on a daily basis. So people get used to getting them out of the way as fast as possible.
Actually, forgot to say, the solution to this exists, it's known as a "console", or a "cell phone". I mean purpose limited machines, where all running code is either heavily sandboxed, or manually vetted by some party.
On general purpose machines such tactics are much less successful, because users actively fight such measures. At some point the user runs into a conflict between that they want to do something that the firewall/permissions/etc don't want to allow. And in such a case the security system is never seen as a good thing, and actively fought, disabled and worked around. Even if what the user wants to do is a seriously bad idea.
It's like trying to protect somebody who insists on that yes, they really want to cut the branch they're sitting on, and if their tool prevents committing suicide they get another that doesn't.
It exists: Dental sealant
I understand it this way: If you buy too cheap, you may have to buy the same thing of kind again in the future when it breaks, or turns out to be not good enough for your needs.
For instance, my recent experiences with that:
1. I bought a high end point and shoot camera before going on vacation. Took me about 2 days to realize that it still wasn't good enough, and that I couldn't make it better by putting another lens on it, because they're not interchangeable. Now I have a DSLR and am much happier with the results. It's a midrange sort so it could be better still, but with a DSLR I have enough flexibility that I almost never happen to be in a situation that a better camera would make something significantly better. That was a waste of money on the P&S.
2. Some time ago I bought a fairly high end phone... with a T9 keyboard. It was capable of fairly decent web browsing, and could run applications, but was utter horror to type anything with. I'd have been much better off with something with a real keyboard. I could have got that for $50 more. In hindsight that was a waste. Now I have a N900 and couldn't be happier.
3. I tried VIA's MiniITX boards as a way of having a "cheap server". Turned out to be anything but, because it was horribly unreliable, so after months of fighting with it, it now sits in the closet.
So, overall, buying too cheap often turns out expensive, when the cheap product isn't good enough and has to be replaced. Then you end up buying two things instead of one.
The telegraph enabled communication on a very limited level compared to the Internet. The press, and for the most part radio are broadcasting methods.
What I think the Internet brought is the ability for people from different continents (as we probably are) to easily talk to each other, and realize that there are people on the other side of the globe too, and that civilization doesn't end at their country's border.
Yeah, you could do that with the phone and telegraph as well, but you couldn't just happen to converse with somebody without having a prior reason for it.
If you set the standard to be right below the dangerous level it would mean that any time anything went even slightly wrong, the concentration could easily rise to an unhealthy level. Also for poisonous things the amount somebody gets can vary quite a lot. Some people could be especially sensitive, or consume more water than average.
The smart thing would be to set the maximum allowed limit high enough above that there isn't a panic every time somebody accidentally flushes a glass of the wrong thing down the drain, but low enough that if something unusual happens, alarms are triggered before people start getting sick.
So, in this case, tritium isn't found in nature in any significant amounts due to its very short half life. So any time you can find anything beyond a very tiny amount of it would mean that something somewhere went wrong. Even if it's nowhere near the unhealthy amount, a leak at a nuclear power plant can't be a good thing.
So, in exchange for the government not taking money from you, you'd rather pay more than the government would take to a third party, to get worse service? That doesn't make sense.
The way I see it, money is money. If in place A getting a good health plan costs $X and in place B a bad one costs $2X, then place A is better regardless of who is getting the money.
Yeah, you can rant about "choice" and "not being forced to", but you don't have any real choice anyway. You're guaranteed to have to pay for medicine at some point in your life, one way or another.
Modems have a fixed limit, because on the ISP side the audio is converted to digital, and goes over a 64Kbps link, of which a part is reserved for signalling, leaving 56K for the user.
It's not a question of being unable to make a better encoder, it's that the line is not able to transmit data any faster.
If you have a line that once a second measures the voltage and outputs a "1" or "0", it doesn't matter what fancy stuff you put on the sending end, the receiver still won't output more than a bit a second.
Where do you get the user would get to set a price? And why would somebody interested in letting people put their data on sale patent it, which would ensure very few people could do it?
In any case, I object to the data being collected in the first place.
No, he's still evil, he just moved to doing other kinds of it.
The still has an enormous influence and can use it to evil ends.
No.
1sq mm is a square with 1mm sides
240sq mm is 240 of them.
The side is sqrt 240 for a square shape.
Why ugly? It's better than the project dying, period.
And one of those forks may become the new official version.
You mean like writing a block of 4GB in one go?
What is that good for? Seriously, I can't think of a single application that does it. Databases write in small blocks. Copying DVDs around will use a much smaller buffer. The uses for this seem rather limited.
It's a limit alright, but what is the situation where it becomes a problem?
My refusal to do what?
I don't live in the US, I live in Europe, where university is dirt cheap compared to the US due to the government subsidies. I'm pretty happy with that situation really and have no problem with paying the taxes to support it.
For universities it's easy: as most of them benefit from public funds, they shouldn't be able to patent anything and release it all under the public domain for the public's benefit.
I'm the reverse of that. I refuse to get anything made by Apple because it's not open. And yes, I will pay even more than Apple charges, if it's open. To me, a tool has no value if I can't do whatever I want with it.
I consistently buy fairly expensive equipment. Server boards in desktops, ECC RAM, RAID, high end video cards, etc.
Thing is, not everybody obsesses about the same things that Apple does. I don't care if it's not perfectly silent. I care that it's well cooled and stable, and does what I want, and doesn't put weird restrictions in my way. It doesn't matter if it's beige or has a seam here or there, especially when it has other things in exchange, such as a swappable battery, standard USB connector, etc.
RAM speed is mostly unimportant. It's popular for gamers to obsess over, but the practical difference DDR3-1066 and DDR3-1333 is maybe a 5% at most - because as far as your CPU is concerned RAM is really slow in any case, and it has the cache for that. RAM speed will only make a large difference if your cache is way too small, and then things aren't going to be very fast anyway, and you'd be better off with a CPU with more cache instead.
For learning ins and outs, there's Linux and BSD, where you can tinker with everything, starting at the boot loader (or even BIOS) and ending in the user facing GUI applications.
Funny thing is that this seems a rather recent attitude. On any Linux related thread somebody is bound to mention that flash doesn't work well fullscreen, meaning flash is a good thing to have, and not having proper support for it is a weakness. Now when Apple fails to provide support for it, that suddenly goes away and it's suddenly "eh, flash sucks".
It's an interesting inconsistency. Even more interesting since the N900 runs on an ARM CPU as well and plays flash perfectly fine, so it's not because there's no plugin.
It runs Linux actually. And there is SamyGO, which is an alternative firmware for Samsung TVs.
Not sure what this even means, since the ATM isn't mine to mess with.
There exist open banking protocols, however, like HBCI.
No. When I was younger, TVs would come with the schematics. That's the way I like things to be.
It's a computer. An "appliance" is a locked down computer.
Most awesome phone ever. Completely open, runs a very normal Linux distro, and you can "apt-get install" stuff on it.
No jailbreaking needed, the terminal is one of the applications in the default installation, and you can install SSH.
It seems to me like a pointless thing to require. A student at this point should be able to figure out on their own "I can save time by using $spreadsheet/calculator". I think you should neither require nor forbid usage of tools like calculators of spreadsheets, so long the student demonstrates they actually understand what's going on.
Teach things with an actual specific application to chemistry. Programs that render chemical structures in 3D, programs that display the periodic table, etc. Show programs that actually could make things less tedious, clearer and more interesting in chemistry class, instead of turning your class into yet another boring lesson on the usage of office applications.
Yep, I always thought it was unfortunate that it seemed people tried the hardest back when tech wasn't there yet, but just as it started getting good people lost interest for some reason.
I remember back then people were experimenting with helmets with *CRTs* mounted in them, and graphics much worse than you could have on a modern phone.
Maybe it's time to give it another try.
Take your example, and multiply by 100 (or a larger number if you prefer, but it seems reasonable to me):
log(5)*100 = $160
log(10)*100 = $230
log(100)*100 = $460
log(1000)*100 = $690
By the 1000 bugs, Google will have paid about 590K, at 10K it'd be 8.2M. Right now the mozilla bugzilla has more than 500K bugs in it, though of course most of those wouldn't qualify.