In reality, there is of course only a percentual difference between having everything be nothing or 'nearly' nothing if you look at atoms as being mostly empty anyway.
My 'Whoa. Déjà vu" was actually a smart ass reference to The Matrix because if everything is essentially non-existant, then what is the difference between our reality and a virtual reality simulation.
I had the exact same association with GEM, but the link you provided really made me relive moments from over 25 odd years ago in college where I first saw that beast called GEM. Seeing your #id, I guess our lawns are in the same street.
Let's convince the bean counter's boss that Somali accounting methods and bookkeeping practices - require less staff - require fewer resources - are much easier to use
It would amount to a great cost reduction and the boss would have to deal with less of those pesky bean counters!
What's more, the bean counters can hardly protest such a smart business measure...
It was around the year 2000 I heard a long speech by a short American woman in the Kürhaus in Scheveningen (The Netherlands.) This freshly arrived UUNet manager proclaimed that the Internet would double in traffic every 9 months.
I preferred to listen the two (very tall, Dutch) senior networkadminstrators that looked at each other in disbelief while muttering "Where did she get her figures from?"
Contrary to what some might expect, I believe Cisco is akin to the very short American UUNet manager, not the very tall networkadmins.
I haven't even bothered to read other replies before posting my own so forgive any redundancy. I think it important to respond on my own.
First of all, no you're probably no devil. Your bossess may be devils, but they're irrelevant for the moment.
I would like you to read back your own statement and, after reading the next part, decide for yourself if you're morally responsible.
Now I'd like you to try and imagine that the problems you're solving are in military biotech instead of mathematical finance. I can imagine it's very interesting and even fulfilling to create new and innovative bio-weapons for the company or governement you're working for. Yet, if you think about the consequences of the deployment of your inventions, would you still feel the same way about your work? Proud of being influential, responsible?
You can decide for yourself if you're evil. Other people, like me, can have an opinion on your ethics, but we're just 'us'. You're you and you have to live with yourself.
In other words, because land becomes uninhabitable, a nuclear disaster is worse than a hydro-dam failure? Do you understand that for comparable loss of life to that dam failing in China, there would have to be 40 chernobyl style accidents? As to your comments on Chinese geography being responsible instead of human failure, perhaps this example will make you think again: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajont_Dam
Besides, the area of habitable land made inhabitable by hydro dams/while in operation/ is quite probably a lot larger than the area made uninhabitable by nuclear accidents. I can't find a good comparison, though.
Chernobyl was an older, less safe style reactor that was badly designed, built and operated than those in Japan.
A modern style reactor would not suffer from cooling failure and a pebblebed reactor would even go on without any consequences if all people would suddenly disappear from the face of the planet. (Hmmm. Not the best example as there would be no humans to 'inconvenience' with relocation anyway:)
The amount of lives lost, financial and other consequences, over the lifetime of this way of energy production are all well below those for other types of energy production. This is just like a large aircraft accident: the sheer number of casualties makes people/feel/ unsafe but airtravel is still a very safe if you look at the bigger picture. The shortcomings you mention are all addressable.
In other words: if this accident makes you feel 'Nuclear energy lost its gloss' then I wonder how you would feel if you informed yourself properly of the consequences of the alternatives. To me, nuclear energy has proven itself beyond a shadow of a doubt in the Japan disaster and I think we should use nuclear energy more, not less, because of this.
Thanks. As a non-native speaker I'm pretty glad I make as few mistakes as I do but it never hurts to have mistakes pointed out so I can keep improving.
If you feel insulted by that, you better thicken your hide, nerd! You're going to need it...:D
But honestly, I never intended to insult anyone, not even marketing droids... (Or perhaps, especially marketing droids, since they might have a modulating armour and heavier weapons;P)
..."lying to the robots so they'll tell the humans that it's interesting"...
Precisely. In the Google case, lying to robots==lying to humans. Not Google employees, but the people that use Google to search for something. Google understands very well that if their customers get lied to and Google doesn't stop that, they'll go elsewhere for their search results and Google will do anything it can to prevent that. If that makes Google behave ethically, that's fine with me.
In other words: all this is, is a turfwar by companies. Some behave worse, in the common ethical sense that most humans share, than others, but this is always by proxy because it's always humans making the decisions. Ultimately it's about the bottom line. As long as you know what the bottom line is for a certain company, you can figure out how its overlords will act and thus how the company will act. Capitalism may, and probably isn't, the end-all of social systems, but at least normal humans can understand it if they care to, because the drivers are both open and something that most humans 'get'.
"To play devil's advocate, who says that JC Penny did this themselves?"
I'm going to be rude and answer a question with a question: does it matter?
Unless you've been hiding somewhere dark for quite a while, you would know these things happen.
Companies act like assholes all the time. If they act like assholes against Google and Google finds out, they react to them to keep their business 'safe'.
How is this 'news' to a nerd? To a marketing droid somewhere, maybe but even that I doubt in this day and age.
Combining this quote from the second post in this thread:
"I mean, if they have that mindset and level of intelligence they could easily have gone to a business school and gone on to make millions."
with your observation:
"The obvious solution is to make a webpage to crack the code, and then make a deal with someone who has a smartphone but makes much less than $600/day."
Makes it quite obvious why this guy isn't in management or making millions. He has a statician's mind, not that of a business man.
I'm not really interested in fairness and 'politcal correctness' towards Sony anymore. As far as I'm concerned Sony 'altered the deal' and is muttering that we should pray it alters it no further.
Unfortunately for Sony, as soon as you change one end of the bargain unilaterally, I feel no obligation to uphold any the deal from my end and so I feel no obligation towards Sony. None. Whatsoever.
(The fact that buying a PS3 was my first Sony purchase after the DRM fiasco and making me feel like a sucker now for slowly starting to trust them again has nothing to do with it. No. Really.;p )
What he says. There's an XBMC android App that does most of what you want for A/V and I bet you can get apps for most home-automation systems if not now, then very soon:).
Sounds like the rantings of a paranoid schizophrenic. Reminds me of the SNL skits where Assange reminds people that no matter how he dies, even if it's decades from now and peacefully in his sleep, "it was murder!".
Just because he may be (or merely act) paranoid doesn't mean they're not really after him...
Slashdot Mirror
The difference between alpha and beta testing:
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Diff...
Enough said.
Obligatory :)
My thoughts exactly.
(I explicitly browsed through all comments to see if this remark was made, yet :)
In reality, there is of course only a percentual difference between having everything be nothing or 'nearly' nothing if you look at atoms as being mostly empty anyway.
My 'Whoa. Déjà vu" was actually a smart ass reference to The Matrix because if everything is essentially non-existant, then what is the difference between our reality and a virtual reality simulation.
Cool stuff!
"The entire world is made of nothing, of moving twists in space. 100% empty."
I wasn't aware that this is an implication of finding the Higgs. If that is true... Whoa. Déjà vu.
I'd mod you to +6, if only I could. So we'll just leave it at heart felt: if only Timothy would be running on Debian (the person, not his computer.)
I had the exact same association with GEM, but the link you provided really made me relive moments from over 25 odd years ago in college where I first saw that beast called GEM. Seeing your #id, I guess our lawns are in the same street.
negating failed mod
... is pretty cheap (5$ is for a family account). But as BB itself says, you can only upload 2 to 4 GB per day.
They should be making a mint on that service! They use home-brew storage pods and are very open about it, too!
http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v2-0revealing-more-secrets/
Anyway, be careful to read all the gotchas:
http://www.backblaze.com/remote-backup-everything.html (hint: 'everything' for a certain definition of everything. No virtual machines, ISO's and NAS storage by default.)
http://www.backblaze.com/internet-backup.html (hint: not all OSes are treated equally.)
(Full disclosure: I work for a storage manufacturer that sells de-duping storage so I think I understand their cost model a bit better than most.)
Good to hear you've your arrangements in place.
Thanks for those links, I know people wanting to take a look at that MFLB :)
Again, all the best to you and your loved ones.
Please make sure you get a vaporizer? No need to cough your lungs up during the other... 'discomforts'.
There are several options to choose between. This one I know to be good: http://www.de-verdamper.nl/uk
All the best to you in these difficult times.
Let's convince the bean counter's boss that Somali accounting methods and bookkeeping practices
- require less staff
- require fewer resources
- are much easier to use
It would amount to a great cost reduction and the boss would have to deal with less of those pesky bean counters!
What's more, the bean counters can hardly protest such a smart business measure...
It was around the year 2000 I heard a long speech by a short American woman in the Kürhaus in Scheveningen (The Netherlands.) This freshly arrived UUNet manager proclaimed that the Internet would double in traffic every 9 months.
I preferred to listen the two (very tall, Dutch) senior networkadminstrators that looked at each other in disbelief while muttering "Where did she get her figures from?"
Contrary to what some might expect, I believe Cisco is akin to the very short American UUNet manager, not the very tall networkadmins.
I haven't even bothered to read other replies before posting my own so forgive any redundancy. I think it important to respond on my own.
First of all, no you're probably no devil. Your bossess may be devils, but they're irrelevant for the moment.
I would like you to read back your own statement and, after reading the next part, decide for yourself if you're morally responsible.
Now I'd like you to try and imagine that the problems you're solving are in military biotech instead of mathematical finance. I can imagine it's very interesting and even fulfilling to create new and innovative bio-weapons for the company or governement you're working for. Yet, if you think about the consequences of the deployment of your inventions, would you still feel the same way about your work? Proud of being influential, responsible?
You can decide for yourself if you're evil. Other people, like me, can have an opinion on your ethics, but we're just 'us'. You're you and you have to live with yourself.
Good luck!
In other words, because land becomes uninhabitable, a nuclear disaster is worse than a hydro-dam failure? Do you understand that for comparable loss of life to that dam failing in China, there would have to be 40 chernobyl style accidents? As to your comments on Chinese geography being responsible instead of human failure, perhaps this example will make you think again: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajont_Dam
Besides, the area of habitable land made inhabitable by hydro dams /while in operation/ is quite probably a lot larger than the area made uninhabitable by nuclear accidents. I can't find a good comparison, though.
Chernobyl was an older, less safe style reactor that was badly designed, built and operated than those in Japan.
A modern style reactor would not suffer from cooling failure and a pebblebed reactor would even go on without any consequences if all people would suddenly disappear from the face of the planet. (Hmmm. Not the best example as there would be no humans to 'inconvenience' with relocation anyway :)
The amount of lives lost, financial and other consequences, over the lifetime of this way of energy production are all well below those for other types of energy production. This is just like a large aircraft accident: the sheer number of casualties makes people /feel/ unsafe but airtravel is still a very safe if you look at the bigger picture. The shortcomings you mention are all addressable.
In other words: if this accident makes you feel 'Nuclear energy lost its gloss' then I wonder how you would feel if you informed yourself properly of the consequences of the alternatives. To me, nuclear energy has proven itself beyond a shadow of a doubt in the Japan disaster and I think we should use nuclear energy more, not less, because of this.
Thanks. As a non-native speaker I'm pretty glad I make as few mistakes as I do but it never hurts to have mistakes pointed out so I can keep improving.
"Please do not insult us nerds"...
If you feel insulted by that, you better thicken your hide, nerd! You're going to need it... :D
But honestly, I never intended to insult anyone, not even marketing droids... ;P)
(Or perhaps, especially marketing droids, since they might have a modulating armour and heavier weapons
You're welcome!
Precisely. In the Google case, lying to robots==lying to humans. Not Google employees, but the people that use Google to search for something. Google understands very well that if their customers get lied to and Google doesn't stop that, they'll go elsewhere for their search results and Google will do anything it can to prevent that. If that makes Google behave ethically, that's fine with me.
In other words: all this is, is a turfwar by companies. Some behave worse, in the common ethical sense that most humans share, than others, but this is always by proxy because it's always humans making the decisions. Ultimately it's about the bottom line. As long as you know what the bottom line is for a certain company, you can figure out how its overlords will act and thus how the company will act. Capitalism may, and probably isn't, the end-all of social systems, but at least normal humans can understand it if they care to, because the drivers are both open and something that most humans 'get'.
Again, ymmv ;).
"To play devil's advocate, who says that JC Penny did this themselves?"
I'm going to be rude and answer a question with a question: does it matter?
Unless you've been hiding somewhere dark for quite a while, you would know these things happen.
Companies act like assholes all the time. If they act like assholes against Google and Google finds out, they react to them to keep their business 'safe'.
How is this 'news' to a nerd? To a marketing droid somewhere, maybe but even that I doubt in this day and age.
News at 11.
Reasonably written article.
If you already know the ins and outs of search or have no interest in it's specifics you can spare yourself the read, though. Ymmv.
Combining this quote from the second post in this thread:
"I mean, if they have that mindset and level of intelligence they could easily have gone to a business school and gone on to make millions."
with your observation:
"The obvious solution is to make a webpage to crack the code, and then make a deal with someone who has a smartphone but makes much less than $600/day."
Makes it quite obvious why this guy isn't in management or making millions. He has a statician's mind, not that of a business man.
I second your motion! All in favour, say 'Aye'. :D
I'm not really interested in fairness and 'politcal correctness' towards Sony anymore. As far as I'm concerned Sony 'altered the deal' and is muttering that we should pray it alters it no further.
Unfortunately for Sony, as soon as you change one end of the bargain unilaterally, I feel no obligation to uphold any the deal from my end and so I feel no obligation towards Sony. None. Whatsoever.
(The fact that buying a PS3 was my first Sony purchase after the DRM fiasco and making me feel like a sucker now for slowly starting to trust them again has nothing to do with it. No. Really. ;p )
What he says. There's an XBMC android App that does most of what you want for A/V and I bet you can get apps for most home-automation systems if not now, then very soon :).
Sounds like the rantings of a paranoid schizophrenic. Reminds me of the SNL skits where Assange reminds people that no matter how he dies, even if it's decades from now and peacefully in his sleep, "it was murder!".
Just because he may be (or merely act) paranoid doesn't mean they're not really after him...
"Nearly every legal expert who has spoken on this topic has argued that Wikileaks has not violated US law."
More to the point: is Amazon now Judge Dredd?
Oh who are we kidding, they're censoring bloody books. The ship to the new world sailed long ago... :P