An aspie probably wouldn't notice flirting attempts. All the things that occur in flirting, eye contact, body language, emotional expression, innuendo, etc. would be lost on most aspies. Aspies of normal IQ tend to have normal or supranormal processing of the literal meaning of language, but miss the subtext or implied meanings. Because of that they probably wouldn't initiate an exchange that relied on subtext they couldn't identify. Even if you gave instructions on how to start, the conversation would go off course very quickly and would end up with the apsie talking about one of the subjects that fascinates him/her.
My netbook has a built in cellular modem. Unfortunately it's locked to AT&T, and I'm not going to buy a subscription to an AT&T data plan because I travel too much. But my Droid does tethering over bluetooth and USB, so I can still compute in the park when necessary. Sorry, did I say compute? In jobspeak, I should have said "consume media".
Apparently to find the address you had to navigate through a big flash thing. I picked a different restaurant.
There seem to be a lot of people here that only have one way to skin a cat. Why not open the "Maps" app and press the microphone icon and say the name of the restaurant (or type if you must). Or do a Google "local" search. Is having an iPhone so limiting that people are only allowed to do things one way?
Having a smart phone doesn't mean that we're not allowed to be smarter than it is.
It's considered a badge of honor to be an aspie among geeks, because they've heard its a sign of skill and intelligence. Sort of like the old "if your IQ is over 150 you're considered to be insane and mine's a 149" lie. Of course it's a self perpetuating myth, because you'll only hear of smart/successful people who (may) have Aspergers when you look in a magazine or on TV. For some reason they don't do stories about aspies with an IQ of 75 that work at Pizza Hut.
If you ever see anyone flirting or making moves on a potential parter, that's not an aspie. The flirt test, I think, is pretty definitive.
I never did like the lumping of Aspergers with Autism. The difference between the two is more than a difference in degree.
With Autism being so prevalent in humans you do have to wonder if it is really a disease or mistake, or perhaps either a previous evolutionary step or our next evolutionary step.
This point gets raised on Slashdot quite often, and it represents in incredible misunderstanding of evolution. Evolution doesn't have steps and doesn't progress in an easily identifiable direction. Genetic features aren't mistakes. They just are. And they are either beneficial in some way or they are not. If there are specific genes responsible for autism and they always cause autism, they would need to spread to a very large fraction of the population to be indicative of evolutionary change. They would also need to be beneficial to reproductive success.
Now it's possible that some of the genes that cause autism are beneficial, but that having too many of them causes autism. It would be difficult to go from that state to an entirely autistic species. I don't see highly autistic individuals finding autistic mates and having large families. Even if they did, the children might not be autistic. We don't understand the genetic and environmental combinations required yet.
If you've had any contact with highly autistic people, you'll know that an autistic species wouldn't survive for long. Fully autistic people (not the ones on slashdot who claim to be autistic but are just lacking in social skills) do not have the skill set to survive alone. Or to recognize that another individual might need help. Or to recognize that another individual has thoughts, emotions, or a different point of view. The savant skills that some autistic people have are rare. Autistic people who can't count past 10 outnumber the "living calculators" by factors of a thousand.
Of couse, Autism isn't "good" or "bad." It just is. But it is hard on families. If a way is ever found to prevent it, I think most people would be happy about it.
A free market economy is impossible once you've got more than a few hundred individuals involved. Someone always ends up on top and makes sure that freedom is restricted to their benefit. However, I believe the OP meant an economy that is not planned from the top down when he said free market economy..
Actually, that's what happens to all legislation that does anything good for the people of this country. Anything that makes it out of committee is a kick back to the corporations that sponsor the legislators.
If they object, why haven't they and their staff managed to come up with a proposal of their own? Its only been, you know, years.
Because by definition any fair proposal on network neutrality that they could put together would anger their corporate sponsors. Any proposal that their corporate sponsors support is, by definition, not network neutrality.
To anyone who doesn't like the depiction of slaughter of animals for food, possibly.
So is the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or Rodin's "The Thinker?"
The former has nudity. The latter depicts Dante contemplating Hell. I think you'd not have a problem finding someone who is offended by either.
So was the entire portraiture of Renoir?
Nudity again.
Who did Seurat offend with his "Sunday Afternoon?"
People who think colored dots are satanic. People who stand too close with their eyes crossed waiting for the 3D image of a dinosaur to appear.
Who's offended by (most) still life or landscape paintings?
Anyone who likes originality.
Not that I'm agreeing that art is required to be offensive. I'm just pointing out that it's impossible to make any statement of any kind without offending someone. Offense is in the eye of the beholder, and is also the fault of the beholder. It is best ignored.
The major question I have is "What hole were you hiding in for the past 20 years?" If you didn't know tuna was a mercury concern (as is any fatty fish that happens to be a top predator) the only thing I can conclude is that you weren't paying attention and never watched the news or read a newspaper. Current recommendations are that you have less than two servings of any kind of fish per week. Even less if you're pregnant, nursing, or under the age of 13.
BTW, don't build a raised vegetable planting bed from pressure treated lumber. Pressure treated lumber contains arsenic, which gets released into the soil as it decays and then ends up in your vegetables. And if the paint is peeling in your house/apartment don't eat it. Antifreeze tastes sweet and is also very toxic.
One more thing. Stop relying on us to tell you what's toxic. Maybe pay attention to news sources.
FTFY. Most tech startups never make it to IPO. The assumption is that those that do make it to IPO or get sold to a large company more than make up for those that don't. That's because your downside is limited to 100% of your investment (if you are investing properly). So if 2/3rd go bust, you need 1/3 to return more than 200%. If you can only afford to invest in one pre-IPO startup, you shouldn't be investing in pre-IPO startups.
But I think this article, by concentrating on the successful startups ignores all those that didn't make it to IPO. Articles in the late 80s about tremendous growth of tech companies generally ignored what happened to Kaypro, Spectravision and a few thousand other.
I think it's pretty obvious that according to TechCrunch, an innovation is "something that impresses the fanbois." If it doesn't impress the fanbois (i.e. is not made by Apple), it's called a "failed experiment" regardless of how innovative or successful it is.
Since you don't need root access for standard tethering (i.e. EasyTether, using a phone as a 3G modem over USB or bluetooth) and since it uses standard Android APIs, I'm not sure that disabling tethering on Android is possible. In fact I'm using it now on my Droid to send this.
I assume you can use EasyTether even on AT&T's droid phones.
I'll try to say this as simply and directly as possible: you can't reduce piracy by lowering the price.
Which is experimentally false. And I've had enough of your bullshit so I'll ignore the rest of it. You're incapable of understanding what is and is not possible or even of understanding simple English.
Nearly every feature on Android is an app (including the phone dialer), even if it's located in the firmware. I would guess most phones come with the "Music" app in firmware. But that doesn't mean people can't download other music players, install them, and use them. Other players may offer features not found in the standard app (visualizations, equalization, special effects, library management).
The intellectual basis of all economics rely on rationality of actors, Keynesianism included.
Not exactly. "Rationality" has a fairly precise definition in economics that doesn't quite match the every day use. The essence of economic rationality is "everyone will seek to maximize their own gain and minimize their losses." An even narrower view would be that they do so in accordance with the predictions of game theory.
Even a monkey can see that people don't act in accordance with this definition of rationality. If you see anyone that claims they do, the rebuttal consists of two words: "casino gambling" The only winning moves in casino gambling are 1) don't go into a casino or 2) pretend to play the slots just to get free drinks. Yet the casinos are packed with people losing money. It's not (economically) rational. It is entirely predictable, however, otherwise there wouldn't be casinos.
People in the markets behave irrationally and not always predictably. What happened with the markets in 2008 is that people suddenly realized that they were in a casino rather than a bank. And then they behaved irrationally and predictably.
Keynesianism doesn't much care why people act the way they do, only that they behave predictably in the long term. And in large groups people are pretty predictable. Not to mention repeatable. "Fiscal Austerity" ala Bruening in Germany and Hoover in the US is going screw things up again because a bunch of idiots think it's rational.
It's more likely he was referencing pneumatic tube systems widely used in office buildings, banks and hospitals up until the late 80s. I've seen some hospitals that still have working tube systems.
The senate office buildings may still have operating pneumatic tube systems, so its possible that a "tube" analogy would work with his brittle boned colleagues.
How brainless can you be. I didn't offer a solution to eliminate piracy nor did I claim to. There is no solution to eliminate piracy because there is no DRM model that works. The online model doesn't work for most games because there are many people who won't buy certain games unless there is a single player practice mode. Other games don't make sense for an online mode.
What I offered was a way to maximize profits in the face of piracy. What you are offering, again and again, is a way to maximize unit price regardless of what that does to profits. And that's just because you are stupid, and so are the heads of most gaming companies because, at least if they are corporations, they have a duty to shareholders to maximize profits. And they aren't doing it. And to say pricing is irrelevant to piracy indicates you really have no understanding of economics.
Note that a lot of the income from World of Goo came from the name-your-price deal. If they had left the price high, they would have not had that income. If I recall correctly the average price for the four games was about $8. (I'm not going to go look it up.) I paid somewhat higher than that. It cost them absolutely nothing. If they hadn't had the sale, I wouldn't have paid what they were asking for games I had never tried. And I doubt their sales are very high right now. An market with unlimited supply and limited demand told them their games were worth $2 a piece. An artificial supply limit (in the games market every supply limit is artificial, including the number of DVDs pressed) might have bumped that somewhat. But I don't see any indication that they learned anything from their experiment.
In a similar way, games on my phone are typically too expensive. For $3.99 you'd better have a free demo. For $0.99, maybe. Google might be able to make a higher profit by developing a market model for the Android Market that sets prices within some range based upon rate of sales (with the min and max selectable by the developer). Unfortunately most developers don't understand sales and would set min and max to the same too high value.
Developer: I'll sell it for $11 each
Marketer: You'll sell a hundred times as many at $0.99
Developer: But I think it's worth $11.
Marketer: Wouldn't you rather make as much money as you can?
Developer: This app goes to $11.
Marketer: You're an idiot.
This may be a virulent virus, but to assume you could cause a pandemic with a release into humans at a single site seems a bit silly. It's more likely that the researcher was studying avian or swine H1N1 from local animals, in which case it would have been virtually identical. BTW, "working on" does not mean "genetically modifying."
Given the distribution of humans and pigs, I wonder what the chances of the first human case in someone who is within range of medical doctors capable of identifying a virus and is also within 80 miles of a pharmaceutical research lab. They are probably pretty good, since most of the world's population probably lives within 80 miles of a pharmaceutical research lab and you probably need to send the specimen to a pharmaceutical research lab or a research hospital in order for the virus to be identified.
But the conspiracy idea is far more fun and frightening, so carry on.
Slashdot Mirror
An aspie probably wouldn't notice flirting attempts. All the things that occur in flirting, eye contact, body language, emotional expression, innuendo, etc. would be lost on most aspies. Aspies of normal IQ tend to have normal or supranormal processing of the literal meaning of language, but miss the subtext or implied meanings. Because of that they probably wouldn't initiate an exchange that relied on subtext they couldn't identify. Even if you gave instructions on how to start, the conversation would go off course very quickly and would end up with the apsie talking about one of the subjects that fascinates him/her.
Because I don't see how you could try it and not enjoy it, it's really smooth.
That's what she said.
Unless the puppets happen to be the crowd. (MST3K)
My netbook has a built in cellular modem. Unfortunately it's locked to AT&T, and I'm not going to buy a subscription to an AT&T data plan because I travel too much. But my Droid does tethering over bluetooth and USB, so I can still compute in the park when necessary. Sorry, did I say compute? In jobspeak, I should have said "consume media".
Apparently to find the address you had to navigate through a big flash thing. I picked a different restaurant.
There seem to be a lot of people here that only have one way to skin a cat. Why not open the "Maps" app and press the microphone icon and say the name of the restaurant (or type if you must). Or do a Google "local" search. Is having an iPhone so limiting that people are only allowed to do things one way?
Having a smart phone doesn't mean that we're not allowed to be smarter than it is.
It's considered a badge of honor to be an aspie among geeks, because they've heard its a sign of skill and intelligence. Sort of like the old "if your IQ is over 150 you're considered to be insane and mine's a 149" lie. Of course it's a self perpetuating myth, because you'll only hear of smart/successful people who (may) have Aspergers when you look in a magazine or on TV. For some reason they don't do stories about aspies with an IQ of 75 that work at Pizza Hut. If you ever see anyone flirting or making moves on a potential parter, that's not an aspie. The flirt test, I think, is pretty definitive.
I never did like the lumping of Aspergers with Autism. The difference between the two is more than a difference in degree.
With Autism being so prevalent in humans you do have to wonder if it is really a disease or mistake, or perhaps either a previous evolutionary step or our next evolutionary step.
This point gets raised on Slashdot quite often, and it represents in incredible misunderstanding of evolution. Evolution doesn't have steps and doesn't progress in an easily identifiable direction. Genetic features aren't mistakes. They just are. And they are either beneficial in some way or they are not. If there are specific genes responsible for autism and they always cause autism, they would need to spread to a very large fraction of the population to be indicative of evolutionary change. They would also need to be beneficial to reproductive success.
Now it's possible that some of the genes that cause autism are beneficial, but that having too many of them causes autism. It would be difficult to go from that state to an entirely autistic species. I don't see highly autistic individuals finding autistic mates and having large families. Even if they did, the children might not be autistic. We don't understand the genetic and environmental combinations required yet.
If you've had any contact with highly autistic people, you'll know that an autistic species wouldn't survive for long. Fully autistic people (not the ones on slashdot who claim to be autistic but are just lacking in social skills) do not have the skill set to survive alone. Or to recognize that another individual might need help. Or to recognize that another individual has thoughts, emotions, or a different point of view. The savant skills that some autistic people have are rare. Autistic people who can't count past 10 outnumber the "living calculators" by factors of a thousand.
Of couse, Autism isn't "good" or "bad." It just is. But it is hard on families. If a way is ever found to prevent it, I think most people would be happy about it.
A free market economy is impossible once you've got more than a few hundred individuals involved. Someone always ends up on top and makes sure that freedom is restricted to their benefit. However, I believe the OP meant an economy that is not planned from the top down when he said free market economy..
The problem is that there are three hundred forty eight species of parrot. You would think writers would do their research.
It died in committee each time. Its that good.
Actually, that's what happens to all legislation that does anything good for the people of this country. Anything that makes it out of committee is a kick back to the corporations that sponsor the legislators.
I wish they took the RISC approach. If the law has 15 parts, then pass 15 different laws.
Then the Republicans would have to filibuster fifteen times as many bills.
If they object, why haven't they and their staff managed to come up with a proposal of their own? Its only been, you know, years.
Because by definition any fair proposal on network neutrality that they could put together would anger their corporate sponsors. Any proposal that their corporate sponsors support is, by definition, not network neutrality.
Cave drawings are offensive?
To anyone who doesn't like the depiction of slaughter of animals for food, possibly.
So is the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or Rodin's "The Thinker?"
The former has nudity. The latter depicts Dante contemplating Hell. I think you'd not have a problem finding someone who is offended by either.
So was the entire portraiture of Renoir?
Nudity again.
Who did Seurat offend with his "Sunday Afternoon?"
People who think colored dots are satanic. People who stand too close with their eyes crossed waiting for the 3D image of a dinosaur to appear.
Who's offended by (most) still life or landscape paintings?
Anyone who likes originality.
Not that I'm agreeing that art is required to be offensive. I'm just pointing out that it's impossible to make any statement of any kind without offending someone. Offense is in the eye of the beholder, and is also the fault of the beholder. It is best ignored.
The major question I have is "What hole were you hiding in for the past 20 years?" If you didn't know tuna was a mercury concern (as is any fatty fish that happens to be a top predator) the only thing I can conclude is that you weren't paying attention and never watched the news or read a newspaper. Current recommendations are that you have less than two servings of any kind of fish per week. Even less if you're pregnant, nursing, or under the age of 13.
BTW, don't build a raised vegetable planting bed from pressure treated lumber. Pressure treated lumber contains arsenic, which gets released into the soil as it decays and then ends up in your vegetables. And if the paint is peeling in your house/apartment don't eat it. Antifreeze tastes sweet and is also very toxic.
One more thing. Stop relying on us to tell you what's toxic. Maybe pay attention to news sources.
Higher risk means higher potential
returns.
FTFY. Most tech startups never make it to IPO. The assumption is that those that do make it to IPO or get sold to a large company more than make up for those that don't. That's because your downside is limited to 100% of your investment (if you are investing properly). So if 2/3rd go bust, you need 1/3 to return more than 200%. If you can only afford to invest in one pre-IPO startup, you shouldn't be investing in pre-IPO startups.
But I think this article, by concentrating on the successful startups ignores all those that didn't make it to IPO. Articles in the late 80s about tremendous growth of tech companies generally ignored what happened to Kaypro, Spectravision and a few thousand other.
I think it's pretty obvious that according to TechCrunch, an innovation is "something that impresses the fanbois." If it doesn't impress the fanbois (i.e. is not made by Apple), it's called a "failed experiment" regardless of how innovative or successful it is.
Which one?
Since you don't need root access for standard tethering (i.e. EasyTether, using a phone as a 3G modem over USB or bluetooth) and since it uses standard Android APIs, I'm not sure that disabling tethering on Android is possible. In fact I'm using it now on my Droid to send this.
I assume you can use EasyTether even on AT&T's droid phones.
I'll try to say this as simply and directly as possible: you can't reduce piracy by lowering the price.
Which is experimentally false. And I've had enough of your bullshit so I'll ignore the rest of it. You're incapable of understanding what is and is not possible or even of understanding simple English.
Nearly every feature on Android is an app (including the phone dialer), even if it's located in the firmware. I would guess most phones come with the "Music" app in firmware. But that doesn't mean people can't download other music players, install them, and use them. Other players may offer features not found in the standard app (visualizations, equalization, special effects, library management).
The intellectual basis of all economics rely on rationality of actors, Keynesianism included.
Not exactly. "Rationality" has a fairly precise definition in economics that doesn't quite match the every day use. The essence of economic rationality is "everyone will seek to maximize their own gain and minimize their losses." An even narrower view would be that they do so in accordance with the predictions of game theory.
Even a monkey can see that people don't act in accordance with this definition of rationality. If you see anyone that claims they do, the rebuttal consists of two words: "casino gambling" The only winning moves in casino gambling are 1) don't go into a casino or 2) pretend to play the slots just to get free drinks. Yet the casinos are packed with people losing money. It's not (economically) rational. It is entirely predictable, however, otherwise there wouldn't be casinos.
People in the markets behave irrationally and not always predictably. What happened with the markets in 2008 is that people suddenly realized that they were in a casino rather than a bank. And then they behaved irrationally and predictably.
Keynesianism doesn't much care why people act the way they do, only that they behave predictably in the long term. And in large groups people are pretty predictable. Not to mention repeatable. "Fiscal Austerity" ala Bruening in Germany and Hoover in the US is going screw things up again because a bunch of idiots think it's rational.
It's more likely he was referencing pneumatic tube systems widely used in office buildings, banks and hospitals up until the late 80s. I've seen some hospitals that still have working tube systems.
The senate office buildings may still have operating pneumatic tube systems, so its possible that a "tube" analogy would work with his brittle boned colleagues.
Oooh! Bold face! I'm scared.
How brainless can you be. I didn't offer a solution to eliminate piracy nor did I claim to. There is no solution to eliminate piracy because there is no DRM model that works. The online model doesn't work for most games because there are many people who won't buy certain games unless there is a single player practice mode. Other games don't make sense for an online mode.
What I offered was a way to maximize profits in the face of piracy. What you are offering, again and again, is a way to maximize unit price regardless of what that does to profits. And that's just because you are stupid, and so are the heads of most gaming companies because, at least if they are corporations, they have a duty to shareholders to maximize profits. And they aren't doing it. And to say pricing is irrelevant to piracy indicates you really have no understanding of economics.
Note that a lot of the income from World of Goo came from the name-your-price deal. If they had left the price high, they would have not had that income. If I recall correctly the average price for the four games was about $8. (I'm not going to go look it up.) I paid somewhat higher than that. It cost them absolutely nothing. If they hadn't had the sale, I wouldn't have paid what they were asking for games I had never tried. And I doubt their sales are very high right now. An market with unlimited supply and limited demand told them their games were worth $2 a piece. An artificial supply limit (in the games market every supply limit is artificial, including the number of DVDs pressed) might have bumped that somewhat. But I don't see any indication that they learned anything from their experiment.
In a similar way, games on my phone are typically too expensive. For $3.99 you'd better have a free demo. For $0.99, maybe. Google might be able to make a higher profit by developing a market model for the Android Market that sets prices within some range based upon rate of sales (with the min and max selectable by the developer). Unfortunately most developers don't understand sales and would set min and max to the same too high value.
Developer: I'll sell it for $11 each
Marketer: You'll sell a hundred times as many at $0.99
Developer: But I think it's worth $11.
Marketer: Wouldn't you rather make as much money as you can?
Developer: This app goes to $11.
Marketer: You're an idiot.
This may be a virulent virus, but to assume you could cause a pandemic with a release into humans at a single site seems a bit silly. It's more likely that the researcher was studying avian or swine H1N1 from local animals, in which case it would have been virtually identical. BTW, "working on" does not mean "genetically modifying."
Given the distribution of humans and pigs, I wonder what the chances of the first human case in someone who is within range of medical doctors capable of identifying a virus and is also within 80 miles of a pharmaceutical research lab. They are probably pretty good, since most of the world's population probably lives within 80 miles of a pharmaceutical research lab and you probably need to send the specimen to a pharmaceutical research lab or a research hospital in order for the virus to be identified.
But the conspiracy idea is far more fun and frightening, so carry on.