They could just be shutting down iCrave to give them a chance to start net broadcasting their own stuff. That way they either get to sell all the ad time themselves or, if they use a third party, they'd be able to offer exclusivity, which would allow them to enter negotiations from a postion of strength. Just because they're not playing along right now doesn't mean they have no long-term plans.
Jon's taken a lot of flak over the time I've been reading/. for writing useless junk. People filter out his stories, critique his writing, and hurl some pretty vicious insults, all of which I consider to be the kind of unnecessary, near-rabid behavior Linux Zealots are well, if generally falsely, known for.
However, the fact that this article is even posted is just sad, no matter who wrote it. The editors and submitters to/. should know it's okay if news is a little slow and there's not much to post. Anything is better than this filler.
Before I posted it, the story before this had stuff coming so fast it was almost a chatroom. Only 1/12th of the world had it when I posted, but a much larger percentage of/. users live here, and since there was nothing on TV, we all checked/. at the same time.
True about the "vegans can...", I think the guy was riffing on my crude earlier attempt at humor. The concept of reducing suffering isn't complicated only if you believe it in the first place; ie. you start from a position of assuming it's true. The problem with it ultimately isn't Singer's argument that animals rate on a utilitarian scale of global happiness, it's suggesting that it then ethically follows that we need to stop eating animals to increase that happiness total, when there isn't enough science to back up the idea that we as a civilization can just drop eating meat without serious consequence. While you can get all of the FDA-approved nutrients from alternative sources, science's knowledge of human nutrition is incomplete. Nothing they know, for example, explains why children's brains develop slower (and show less total development in the long run) if they are raised on a vegetarian diet.
I'm not suggesting that this above example will have a necessarily detrimental effect on intelligence, but I am suggesting that using the argument "stop using animal products and reduce world suffering" assumes that not eating meat has no cost to us whatsoever, when the truth is the science behind maintaining a complete vegetarian diet isn't thorough engouh for you to make that decision for the rest of the world.
Nothing I've said, however, reduces the need for people to recognize the unnecessarily vicious treatment animals recieve in the name of making clothing, food and tons of other products we use. I would say (and suspect you'd agree) that the methods used to raise and slaughter these animals couldn't have been more horrific if they were designed as methods of torture, and in this the argument that we need to "increase the total amount of happiness by reducing the total amount of pain" stands on solid ethical ground: animals feel pain and shouldn't be tortured under any circumstances.
The last story had 300 posts while everyone's waiting for Futurama, now that it's on, this story gets nothing.
I told a few of my users at work the free pcs were okay for them since they weren't doing anything important with their machines, but that I'd never get one. Looks like they win out.
...are tied to local markets to the point where I think we're talking apples and oranges (no pun). Here even your standard fast food is like 7 bucks a meal (sandwich, fries, drink), so four for Taco Hell (3 tacos, nachos, drink) was a godsend. I say was because they're prices are nickel-and-diming up to the same rate as the other guys.
When I was a kid, I couldn't eat anything with protein in it...except steak and chicken. Weird, huh? The critters' immune systems nullified whatever it was that I was allergic to in the soy or whatever they fed them. Now it's mostly habit.
I know what they do to those animals, and I read Peter Singer's books, too. His arguments about reducing suffering by torturing/killing fewer animals hold very well when you talk about fur or glue or whatnot, but the plain fact is human beings are designed to eat both vegetables and animals.
Meat contains certain nutrients in concentrations higher than you'll find elsewhere, and if your genetic makeup expects those nutrients you'd damn well better eat it. My sister's still on iron pills from the time she tried to go vegan.
The point here is that your oversimplification of our civilization's mass-consumption of animals into "they suffer, so don't do it" is an emotional appeal that's unfair to the complexity of the issue and the principles of public debate. Your suggestion that the truth of the ethics of that particular issue have been predetermined is in itself an ethical violation of the worst sort.
Both in Boston (where I live) and Forida (where I used to live) Taco Bell had to make their stuff cheap so people will buy it. Back in high school I could buy like fifteen tacos for six or seven dollars, which made them quite a bit cheaper than everything else around. Now that everyone's hooked on the heroin they put in there their prices are similar to McD's.
Meatless? Mango chutney? WTF? These are little bread-bags of salty vegetables. Look at the barbecue one, it doesn't even look edible. Whoever made these things clearly lives in CA.
Touch, sight, smell, taste, and hearing are all determined by configurations of highly sensitive nerves. The fact that you know what organ measures this only makes Tim's point for him. Balance and motion (more specifically acceleration) could be fairly called a sense.
Why is this stuff always reported on BBC but ignored by the American media? It's our fscking satellite. Still, this means the NASA mailing list will start getting interesting again...
In film they call directors whose works show a strong vision auteurs, and Auteur Theory does seem to cross over nicely into both video game design and animation, both of which are currently dominated by (film term again) a "studio system." Because Sid Meier's games have such a consistent, recognizable look and feel, he could be called a game auteur (loosely). While there aren't too many in the marketplace now, there could be more, if game buyers were interested in that sort of thing. "Game Auteur Theory" (a hypothetical) and a consequent market for individualist games would require a few things:
History of Auteurs: What genius wrote Hunt the Wampus? Who was responsible for Pac-Man?
Current Auteurs: Does Meier still qualify? I saw someone mention the guy who made (is making?) Daikatana... game critics would have to take the developer's name into account when reviewing the game. Does it show the same "personality" his last one did? We saw this with the recent Zelda sequel, all the magazines talked about the lead developer when discussing details from the game itself.
Indie Marketplace: A group of game buyers who will go out of their way to play (and pay for) games developed by individuals, eschewing slick style and overlooking a few bugs here and there in order to play something new and different.
This stuff hasn't quite gotten off the ground in animation yet, but looking at the stellar rise in indie films and music over the last 10 years, (and to a lesser degree televised animation) it isn't inconceivable that it could happen to video games as well.
I wish I went to Harvard. The Dana Farber Cancer Institute (that's jimmy as in "The Jimmy Fund") uses Harvard's subnet, and we here at ECOG piggy back off them. Thanks for the vote of confidence, but if I was that funny I would have gone to Harvard and I'd be writing for Futurama by now. jpowers
Absolutely. Some of the people I support have been using computers as long as I've been alive, and I get calls like "Help! I lost my Word Perfect!" all the time. I remember what it was like before I knew how to format a disk (age 5), and I have some practice dealing with them, having spent some time teaching newbies Windows ("Okay people, hold the mouse like this so it doesn't drag when you click..."), but it gets real frustrating, especially when the same people accidentally recycle the same icons week after week after week after week...
Did you look at the independent test result links? Those documents are all on his site, posted and authored by him. Not one is hosted by other institutions. I don't know enough math to say one way or another if his theories are based on sound reason, but the independent confirmation is suspect, to say the least.
Fileservice for Win98SE can be done with SAMBA, which is not too heavy-duty a process. Staroffice runs on the same machines MSOffice does, usually needs a little less juice, though it will use whatever you give it. Maybe look to buy a new machine and run linux on the old one. If you'd rather go cheap, head over to http://www.deepspacetech.com
and get one of their dual 133's (used). I've bought a few of them and they're old workstations with big cases and SCSI and stuff, they kick ass and everything works. $150, with a good monitor for another $150. Ethernet built in (tulip) but no modem, though. Again a warning about not using winmodems.
If you do any math or database stuff, I'd get SuSE 6.3, which is easy to install and comes with like 6 discs of free apllications, including Staroffice. If not, whatever Mandrake is out whould work, since it's easy to install and comes with a licensed copy of Staroffice. Either one is about $50 at the store. Get them from linuxmall if you can wait for shipping, because they'll send you a free copy of another distro with your order (RedHat 6.0 is a good bet for the free one.)
Slashdot Mirror
What if you forgot and left it in the sun? Gooey!
-jpowers
Offtopic, actually. Catherine Wheel have a new album ETA June. Love their first two.
jpowers
-jpowers
What are you, four?
-jpowers
At least it has a consistent tone.
-jpowers
I was thinking what I would do if I had a colossal salary and no conscience.
jpowers
-jpowers
They could just be shutting down iCrave to give them a chance to start net broadcasting their own stuff. That way they either get to sell all the ad time themselves or, if they use a third party, they'd be able to offer exclusivity, which would allow them to enter negotiations from a postion of strength. Just because they're not playing along right now doesn't mean they have no long-term plans.
jpowers
-jpowers
Jon's taken a lot of flak over the time I've been reading /. for writing useless junk. People filter out his stories, critique his writing, and hurl some pretty vicious insults, all of which I consider to be the kind of unnecessary, near-rabid behavior Linux Zealots are well, if generally falsely, known for.
/. should know it's okay if news is a little slow and there's not much to post. Anything is better than this filler.
However, the fact that this article is even posted is just sad, no matter who wrote it. The editors and submitters to
Jpowers
-jpowers
Before I posted it, the story before this had stuff coming so fast it was almost a chatroom. Only 1/12th of the world had it when I posted, but a much larger percentage of /. users live here, and since there was nothing on TV, we all checked /. at the same time.
jpowers
True about the "vegans can...", I think the guy was riffing on my crude earlier attempt at humor.
The concept of reducing suffering isn't complicated only if you believe it in the first place; ie. you start from a position of assuming it's true. The problem with it ultimately isn't Singer's argument that animals rate on a utilitarian scale of global happiness, it's suggesting that it then ethically follows that we need to stop eating animals to increase that happiness total, when there isn't enough science to back up the idea that we as a civilization can just drop eating meat without serious consequence.
While you can get all of the FDA-approved nutrients from alternative sources, science's knowledge of human nutrition is incomplete. Nothing they know, for example, explains why children's brains develop slower (and show less total development in the long run) if they are raised on a vegetarian diet.
I'm not suggesting that this above example will have a necessarily detrimental effect on intelligence, but I am suggesting that using the argument "stop using animal products and reduce world suffering" assumes that not eating meat has no cost to us whatsoever, when the truth is the science behind maintaining a complete vegetarian diet isn't thorough engouh for you to make that decision for the rest of the world.
Nothing I've said, however, reduces the need for people to recognize the unnecessarily vicious treatment animals recieve in the name of making clothing, food and tons of other products we use. I would say (and suspect you'd agree) that the methods used to raise and slaughter these animals couldn't have been more horrific if they were designed as methods of torture, and in this the argument that we need to "increase the total amount of happiness by reducing the total amount of pain" stands on solid ethical ground: animals feel pain and shouldn't be tortured under any circumstances.
Jpowers
The last story had 300 posts while everyone's waiting for Futurama, now that it's on, this story gets nothing.
I told a few of my users at work the free pcs were okay for them since they weren't doing anything important with their machines, but that I'd never get one. Looks like they win out.
New Pam Brand Spray-On No-Stick Vitamins!
(If it tastes like butter I'll try it on my girlfriend.)
jpowers
...are tied to local markets to the point where I think we're talking apples and oranges (no pun). Here even your standard fast food is like 7 bucks a meal (sandwich, fries, drink), so four for Taco Hell (3 tacos, nachos, drink) was a godsend. I say was because they're prices are nickel-and-diming up to the same rate as the other guys.
Jason
When I was a kid, I couldn't eat anything with protein in it...except steak and chicken. Weird, huh? The critters' immune systems nullified whatever it was that I was allergic to in the soy or whatever they fed them. Now it's mostly habit.
I know what they do to those animals, and I read Peter Singer's books, too. His arguments about reducing suffering by torturing/killing fewer animals hold very well when you talk about fur or glue or whatnot, but the plain fact is human beings are designed to eat both vegetables and animals.
Meat contains certain nutrients in concentrations higher than you'll find elsewhere, and if your genetic makeup expects those nutrients you'd damn well better eat it. My sister's still on iron pills from the time she tried to go vegan.
The point here is that your oversimplification of our civilization's mass-consumption of animals into "they suffer, so don't do it" is an emotional appeal that's unfair to the complexity of the issue and the principles of public debate. Your suggestion that the truth of the ethics of that particular issue have been predetermined is in itself an ethical violation of the worst sort.
Oh yeah, I think you meant UNpopular.
jpowers
Both in Boston (where I live) and Forida (where I used to live) Taco Bell had to make their stuff cheap so people will buy it. Back in high school I could buy like fifteen tacos for six or seven dollars, which made them quite a bit cheaper than everything else around. Now that everyone's hooked on the heroin they put in there their prices are similar to McD's.
jpowers
They spray it with vitamins and stuff. Now I'm going to be sick.
d /index.html
http://cnn.com/FOOD/news/9910/20/functional.foo
jpowers
Meatless? Mango chutney? WTF? These are little bread-bags of salty vegetables. Look at the barbecue one, it doesn't even look edible. Whoever made these things clearly lives in CA.
Boston needs delivery Taco Bell!
jpowers
Yankees selling snake oil? Never happen...
Jpowers
------
Kibo lives in my town
Touch, sight, smell, taste, and hearing are all determined by configurations of highly sensitive nerves. The fact that you know what organ measures this only makes Tim's point for him. Balance and motion (more specifically acceleration) could be fairly called a sense.
jpowers
Why is this stuff always reported on BBC but ignored by the American media? It's our fscking satellite. Still, this means the NASA mailing list will start getting interesting again...
Jpowers
In film they call directors whose works show a strong vision auteurs, and Auteur Theory does seem to cross over nicely into both video game design and animation, both of which are currently dominated by (film term again) a "studio system."
Because Sid Meier's games have such a consistent, recognizable look and feel, he could be called a game auteur (loosely). While there aren't too many in the marketplace now, there could be more, if game buyers were interested in that sort of thing.
"Game Auteur Theory" (a hypothetical) and a consequent market for individualist games would require a few things:
History of Auteurs:
What genius wrote Hunt the Wampus? Who was responsible for Pac-Man?
Current Auteurs:
Does Meier still qualify? I saw someone mention the guy who made (is making?) Daikatana... game critics would have to take the developer's name into account when reviewing the game. Does it show the same "personality" his last one did? We saw this with the recent Zelda sequel, all the magazines talked about the lead developer when discussing details from the game itself.
Indie Marketplace:
A group of game buyers who will go out of their way to play (and pay for) games developed by individuals, eschewing slick style and overlooking a few bugs here and there in order to play something new and different.
This stuff hasn't quite gotten off the ground in animation yet, but looking at the stellar rise in indie films and music over the last 10 years, (and to a lesser degree televised animation) it isn't inconceivable that it could happen to video games as well.
jpowers
I wish I went to Harvard. The Dana Farber Cancer Institute (that's jimmy as in "The Jimmy Fund") uses Harvard's subnet, and we here at ECOG piggy back off them. Thanks for the vote of confidence, but if I was that funny I would have gone to Harvard and I'd be writing for Futurama by now. jpowers
"Or do we techies understand the realm of law on a level higher than the lawyer's understanding of technology?"
It's all about humility with us techies, isn't it?
jpowers
Absolutely. Some of the people I support have been using computers as long as I've been alive, and I get calls like "Help! I lost my Word Perfect!" all the time. I remember what it was like before I knew how to format a disk (age 5), and I have some practice dealing with them, having spent some time teaching newbies Windows ("Okay people, hold the mouse like this so it doesn't drag when you click..."), but it gets real frustrating, especially when the same people accidentally recycle the same icons week after week after week after week...
jpowers
Did you look at the independent test result links? Those documents are all on his site, posted and authored by him. Not one is hosted by other institutions. I don't know enough math to say one way or another if his theories are based on sound reason, but the independent confirmation is suspect, to say the least.
Jason
Fileservice for Win98SE can be done with SAMBA, which is not too heavy-duty a process. Staroffice runs on the same machines MSOffice does, usually needs a little less juice, though it will use whatever you give it. Maybe look to buy a new machine and run linux on the old one. If you'd rather go cheap, head over to
http://www.deepspacetech.com
and get one of their dual 133's (used). I've bought a few of them and they're old workstations with big cases and SCSI and stuff, they kick ass and everything works. $150, with a good monitor for another $150. Ethernet built in (tulip) but no modem, though. Again a warning about not using winmodems.
If you do any math or database stuff, I'd get SuSE 6.3, which is easy to install and comes with like 6 discs of free apllications, including Staroffice. If not, whatever Mandrake is out whould work, since it's easy to install and comes with a licensed copy of Staroffice. Either one is about $50 at the store. Get them from linuxmall if you can wait for shipping, because they'll send you a free copy of another distro with your order (RedHat 6.0 is a good bet for the free one.)
Jpowers