Those are still opinions, that could be countered with the "vital necessity to fight terrorism and threats", for what its worth.
What can't be denied, though, is that Iraq was definitely poorly managed, in forseeing the issues that would arise (which, apparently, was forseen by some generals but ignored.)
So you may be right, but not for the reasons you list.
Support nationalized, single-payer video game development and distribution, and more games like Portal and Spore will make it out, and on a timely basis rather than this delayed-maybe crap. If it's good enough for something vital and serious like medicine, how much more useful for our fun?
> The FTP client is being treated like an unloved stepchild, to the point > where it is not even included in the Server Manager.
Oh, so I guess people want MS to bundle up apps when it's convenient, but not when it serves their political interests to tear MS down loudly and publically.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled outrage sessions. [/sarcasm]
> We realized murdering people was a bad thing, we realized stupid laws against > wearing purple were a bad thing, and we're realizing this intellectual property garbage is a bad thing.
No, we do not realize "this intellectual property garbage is a bad thing." There's a reason Congress was directly given the power to secure patents, copyrights, and the like, for a limited time, and it's a good thing.
They are perhaps not property per se, but they behave in the same way as property, and for the exact same reason.
In any case, the point of my post was showing how those who want free downloads of music without paying the creator are altering their own perception in order to justify a change in policy. This is decidedly not in the spirit of respecting other people's efforts.
> "The idea here is that if we create this intense beam of antimatter electrons -- the > complete opposite of the electron, basically -- we can then use them in investigating > and understanding the new types of materials being used in many applications."
The Professor continues, "And watch the screen here. That's a student standing talking with his friends completely on the other side of campus. In a second you'll see him jump as his ass starts burning."
> an array of simple, readily fabricated chemically sensitive conducted polymer film. > An array of broadly-cross reactive sensors respond to a variety of odors. However, > the pattern of differential responses across the array produces a unique pattern for each odorant.
"And you can see right here, look at response matrix 74-delta-zed, that's the one that detects 'smells like ass'."
> But he insisted the company was not stopping file transfers from happening, > only postponing them in certain cases.
ZOMG! He should call the FBI because somebody in-between is generating fake packets to disable, not just delay, the transfer. And if it ain't Comcast, it must be god only knows who!
This is an excellent example of how what we think of as ethical derives not from a god, but rather from evolved justifications of behavior. There's a mighty struggle going on to re-define taking music without the author's permission as ethical, based on the ego-soothing concepts that it's really in their interest.
So let's see, a middle-Eastern guy happens to be in a New York hotel room on 9/11, and it happens to be a room that some legitimate pilot happened to leave a transponder that could communicate with planes?
Ok, so far so good.
Then comes 9/11 and they find this thing and someone wants to question him.
So far so good.
They threaten his family with bad stuff, nudge nudge, wink wink, unless he confesses.
It's later broken up as the real pilot tells about the transponder.
So far so good.
Guy goes to sue, and has the right to.
So far so good.
Government claims the suit cannot go foreward because the details are classified due to national security.
Distasteful in the extreme, but so far so good, as (true) national security should outweigh a lawsuit.
So far so good....but it turns out that's a big, fat lie as there is no real reason it should be classified.
Whew! I'm glad they don't do that in the US. What the hell country was this?
> "including making economy passengers pay a fee unless they want > their luggage to come last off the plane."
I wonder how Wall Street will react to him being CEO of United after people start thinking, as of today, "Hey, I'm not buying United tickets anymore...just in case."
Dr. Evil: "Ahhhh, my plan to get the governments of the world to pay for giant microwave-beaming satellites which I'll hijack is finally coming to fruition."
Number Two: "What argument will you use to get them to sell it to this to their own constituents?"
Dr. Evil: "Well...solar power generation beamed to earth, maybe double as a heating agent to attempt to steer hurricanes by 'refraction'." You know, I leave the details to you.
Scott: "Why not just launch your own satellite? You've built more expensive satellites and launched them yourself. Heck, you can pay the Russians to launch it for only $25 million."
Dr. Evil: "Zip it."
Scott: "I'm only saying you've got all the tech here you need already, and even if you didn't, it would be cheap to pay for it just with your Starbuck's profits alone, heck, I just saw how to build your own sputnik with storebought and crashed 747 parts. You've got a 747 painted to look like Austin Power's plane for that other plan...."
Dr. Evil: "Look at me...I'm Zippy Longstockings. When a problem comes along, you must zip it. Zip it...zip it good (whuh-crack)..."
Many people have that problem because the BitTorrent underlayer for WoW needs certain ports on your home router or whatever opened up. Otherwise it will take hours.
That's fine, but it's a nightmare to do this in spite of the detailed instructions the WoW website will give you for every known router. Many people won't ever figure out there's even something they can do about it.
As an engineering problem (how to help out millions of people), a pointer to a web site is a crappy way to do it. Ideally, WoW sofwtare would just open up the ports, perhaps with a confirmation dialog. In the best of situations, with a million users, if only 1 in 1000 has a problem, that's still 1000 problems. And for something hideously complex as opening up router ports, you've got a hell of a lot more than 1 in 1000 who can't do it. Hell, probably a lot more than that who never even figure out something is wrong with hours to download a patch.
In their (partial) defense, their business model is probably something like:
- Offer a huge bandwidth that most people won't use
- Some will use it, costing us more than we charge, but that's overwhelmed by increased business by people who want the bandwidth from the ad while not actually using it
But then this happens:
- Whoops! File sharing is a Killer App that many people are using.
- On average we are now losing money.
Of course, the proper course of action is to alter their contracts (after the current ones expire) to charge more money for more use, perhaps in various rates. Yes, that will drive people to other companies who don't do this...who will also lose money.
Let the market figure it out.
Anyway, wouldn't generating fake signals to alter the operation of your applications be illegal? That's above and beyond throttling or blocking (gray enough as it is.)
"Everyone knows you can't just do something irreversible, much less charge cash, without a confirmation dialog."
Seems to me they discovered a new process (claims of prior art aside for the moment). The presumptive need for confirmation was wrong, and, as it turns out, something good to get rid of, for business reasons, in this case.
> Actually it was extremely obvious. It was also considered an extremely bad idea. Anybody who has ever > mis-clicked anything will know why it is a bad idea if they take a moment to generalize their knowledge.
You just proved Amazon's point!
It was "obvious", but an "extremely bad idea".
No, as it turned out, it was not, was it? If it were a bad idea, nobody would give a rat's ass about it today, because nobody would be using it.
The "considered an extremely bad idea" just proves Amazon's point.
It's really about pipelining massive amounts of data and calculations. While each calculation may take a noticeable finite amount of time, if each step of the calculation is lightning fast, then the average becomes lightning fast.
This is like an assembly line where it may take 8 hours to build a car, but if the longest stage of the assembly line is 30 seconds, then a car is "made" every 30 seconds as one rolls off the end.
Supercomputers try to use this many-stage pipelining for everything from reading in the data into gigantic local vector registers, then providing operands to operate on the gigantic vector of numbers as a whole, then read it back out pipelined.
A game machine makes for a good supercomputer because the I/O is designed to be fast so it can load up bitmaps quickly, and it has massive parallelism to crunch billions of numbers, all in the same way. If you can write code to take advantage of this (especially if you can split it up amongst several such game machines) bingo!
"Very well, then. Cisco will never, ever again bring another one of our high-powered, world-leading routers or other equipment into Brazil. Good day, sir!"
(A few months later after Brazil's Internet starts falling apart...)
Slashdot Mirror
Those are still opinions, that could be countered with the "vital necessity to fight terrorism and threats", for what its worth.
What can't be denied, though, is that Iraq was definitely poorly managed, in forseeing the issues that would arise (which, apparently, was forseen by some generals but ignored.)
So you may be right, but not for the reasons you list.
Support nationalized, single-payer video game development and distribution, and more games like Portal and Spore will make it out, and on a timely basis rather than this delayed-maybe crap. If it's good enough for something vital and serious like medicine, how much more useful for our fun?
So...there're actually two reasons to like Natalie?
> The FTP client is being treated like an unloved stepchild, to the point
> where it is not even included in the Server Manager.
Oh, so I guess people want MS to bundle up apps when it's convenient, but not when it serves their political interests to tear MS down loudly and publically.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled outrage sessions. [/sarcasm]
Thank god somebody's finally invented chat windows attached to web-based games.
I sure as hell hope they have 2-player chess and euchre in the works!
> We realized murdering people was a bad thing, we realized stupid laws against
> wearing purple were a bad thing, and we're realizing this intellectual property garbage is a bad thing.
No, we do not realize "this intellectual property garbage is a bad thing." There's a reason Congress was directly given the power to secure patents, copyrights, and the like, for a limited time, and it's a good thing.
They are perhaps not property per se, but they behave in the same way as property, and for the exact same reason.
In any case, the point of my post was showing how those who want free downloads of music without paying the creator are altering their own perception in order to justify a change in policy. This is decidedly not in the spirit of respecting other people's efforts.
> "The idea here is that if we create this intense beam of antimatter electrons -- the
> complete opposite of the electron, basically -- we can then use them in investigating
> and understanding the new types of materials being used in many applications."
The Professor continues, "And watch the screen here. That's a student standing talking with his friends completely on the other side of campus. In a second you'll see him jump as his ass starts burning."
> there are plenty of gems to be found amidst the flotsam and jetsam
Yeah, and you can find excellent arthouse films amidst the Jim Carrey movies and ominpresent remakes. What's your point?
> an array of simple, readily fabricated chemically sensitive conducted polymer film.
> An array of broadly-cross reactive sensors respond to a variety of odors. However,
> the pattern of differential responses across the array produces a unique pattern for each odorant.
"And you can see right here, look at response matrix 74-delta-zed, that's the one that detects 'smells like ass'."
> But he insisted the company was not stopping file transfers from happening,
> only postponing them in certain cases.
ZOMG! He should call the FBI because somebody in-between is generating fake packets to disable, not just delay, the transfer. And if it ain't Comcast, it must be god only knows who!
Holy cow! Somebody do something!
This is an excellent example of how what we think of as ethical derives not from a god, but rather from evolved justifications of behavior. There's a mighty struggle going on to re-define taking music without the author's permission as ethical, based on the ego-soothing concepts that it's really in their interest.
So let's see, a middle-Eastern guy happens to be in a New York hotel room on 9/11, and it happens to be a room that some legitimate pilot happened to leave a transponder that could communicate with planes?
...but it turns out that's a big, fat lie as there is no real reason it should be classified.
Ok, so far so good.
Then comes 9/11 and they find this thing and someone wants to question him.
So far so good.
They threaten his family with bad stuff, nudge nudge, wink wink, unless he confesses.
It's later broken up as the real pilot tells about the transponder.
So far so good.
Guy goes to sue, and has the right to.
So far so good.
Government claims the suit cannot go foreward because the details are classified due to national security.
Distasteful in the extreme, but so far so good, as (true) national security should outweigh a lawsuit.
So far so good.
Whew! I'm glad they don't do that in the US. What the hell country was this?
> "including making economy passengers pay a fee unless they want
> their luggage to come last off the plane."
I wonder how Wall Street will react to him being CEO of United after people start thinking, as of today, "Hey, I'm not buying United tickets anymore...just in case."
You know, weather satellites don't actually control the weather, don't you?
Sheesh!
Dr. Evil: "Ahhhh, my plan to get the governments of the world to pay for giant microwave-beaming satellites which I'll hijack is finally coming to fruition."
Number Two: "What argument will you use to get them to sell it to this to their own constituents?"
Dr. Evil: "Well...solar power generation beamed to earth, maybe double as a heating agent to attempt to steer hurricanes by 'refraction'." You know, I leave the details to you.
Scott: "Why not just launch your own satellite? You've built more expensive satellites and launched them yourself. Heck, you can pay the Russians to launch it for only $25 million."
Dr. Evil: "Zip it."
Scott: "I'm only saying you've got all the tech here you need already, and even if you didn't, it would be cheap to pay for it just with your Starbuck's profits alone, heck, I just saw how to build your own sputnik with storebought and crashed 747 parts. You've got a 747 painted to look like Austin Power's plane for that other plan...."
Dr. Evil: "Look at me...I'm Zippy Longstockings. When a problem comes along, you must zip it. Zip it...zip it good (whuh-crack)..."
Senator: What good is electricity in the home?
Not a Senator: Sir, in 20 years, you'll be taxing it.
Many people have that problem because the BitTorrent underlayer for WoW needs certain ports on your home router or whatever opened up. Otherwise it will take hours.
That's fine, but it's a nightmare to do this in spite of the detailed instructions the WoW website will give you for every known router. Many people won't ever figure out there's even something they can do about it.
As an engineering problem (how to help out millions of people), a pointer to a web site is a crappy way to do it. Ideally, WoW sofwtare would just open up the ports, perhaps with a confirmation dialog. In the best of situations, with a million users, if only 1 in 1000 has a problem, that's still 1000 problems. And for something hideously complex as opening up router ports, you've got a hell of a lot more than 1 in 1000 who can't do it. Hell, probably a lot more than that who never even figure out something is wrong with hours to download a patch.
In their (partial) defense, their business model is probably something like:
- Offer a huge bandwidth that most people won't use
- Some will use it, costing us more than we charge, but that's overwhelmed by increased business by people who want the bandwidth from the ad while not actually using it
But then this happens:
- Whoops! File sharing is a Killer App that many people are using.
- On average we are now losing money.
Of course, the proper course of action is to alter their contracts (after the current ones expire) to charge more money for more use, perhaps in various rates. Yes, that will drive people to other companies who don't do this...who will also lose money.
Let the market figure it out.
Anyway, wouldn't generating fake signals to alter the operation of your applications be illegal? That's above and beyond throttling or blocking (gray enough as it is.)
"Everyone knows you need a backup chute."
"Everyone knows you can't just do something irreversible, much less charge cash, without a confirmation dialog."
Seems to me they discovered a new process (claims of prior art aside for the moment). The presumptive need for confirmation was wrong, and, as it turns out, something good to get rid of, for business reasons, in this case.
> Actually it was extremely obvious. It was also considered an extremely bad idea. Anybody who has ever
> mis-clicked anything will know why it is a bad idea if they take a moment to generalize their knowledge.
You just proved Amazon's point!
It was "obvious", but an "extremely bad idea".
No, as it turned out, it was not, was it? If it were a bad idea, nobody would give a rat's ass about it today, because nobody would be using it.
The "considered an extremely bad idea" just proves Amazon's point.
So:
:boggle:
- Slap some robotic skins on dark elves and orcs
- Grind to get to high levels so you can...
- Grind until the plans for that super-rare thing drops, and then...
- Grind to get all the super-rare components that make the super-rainbow-colored thing, then...
- Grind to get eighteen octillion gold pieces (re-skinned as circuit boards, and called "credits", no doubt) to pay for this thing to be constructed.
Yeah, I can't imagine why their previous showing "bombed".
It's really about pipelining massive amounts of data and calculations. While each calculation may take a noticeable finite amount of time, if each step of the calculation is lightning fast, then the average becomes lightning fast.
This is like an assembly line where it may take 8 hours to build a car, but if the longest stage of the assembly line is 30 seconds, then a car is "made" every 30 seconds as one rolls off the end.
Supercomputers try to use this many-stage pipelining for everything from reading in the data into gigantic local vector registers, then providing operands to operate on the gigantic vector of numbers as a whole, then read it back out pipelined.
A game machine makes for a good supercomputer because the I/O is designed to be fast so it can load up bitmaps quickly, and it has massive parallelism to crunch billions of numbers, all in the same way. If you can write code to take advantage of this (especially if you can split it up amongst several such game machines) bingo!
I'll bet not.
...and the only cure is more cowmethane!
Here's what I'd say to the Brazilian government:
"Very well, then. Cisco will never, ever again bring another one of our high-powered, world-leading routers or other equipment into Brazil. Good day, sir!"
(A few months later after Brazil's Internet starts falling apart...)
"I said, 'good day, sir!' "