there were a giant wall separating texas from the rest of the usa
but as it is, what texas decides to do has an effect on me. thus, i have a right to say on what texas decides to do. if texas is going to unleash a bunch of propagandized holy warrior children into the usa, i want to clear my throat and say "no, texas, you don't get to whitewash history and zombify your children, because the influx of propagandized morons affects my life: these people vote, they make decisions, large and small, in loca, state and federal government, that affect my quality of life, and you will not drag me and my country down to third world status"
the lie is that state rights somehow have a superior advantage to federal rights. they only valid rights wall exists between the individual and society. the idea that state rights has some sort of validity is a false construct, that somehow the decisions a state makes is somehow superior or less superior, in terms of trouncing on indivudal rights, or upholding them, as compared to federal decisions
in other words: individual rights is the paramount issue, correct?
in that regard, how is it possible that what a state decides can somehow protect the individual, or trample on the individual, to a better or worse degree than a federal decision? on what logical basis is that possible?
state's rights ia c ontrived false construct, if you are truly motivated by the only morally and intellectually defensible cause: individual rights. state's rights cuts both ways. it is neither more for individual rights, or more against them. its a red herring to confuse the two concepts
That's the equivalent of a significant angel round of funding in the internet startup world, and their fundraising on the Kickstarter crowdsourced funding site has another 19 days to go. It's also an impressive for a project proposal from four students who say they aren't going to start coding until they graduate from college this summer. And a testament to how strongly that a growing number of people want an alternative to a centralized and dominant social networking site.
but there's a major difference between recognizing that bias is a permanent aspect of media and history no matter how hard we scrub it... and purposefully going out of your way to stick truly outrageous bias into your history/ media with no shame at all
it's also a form of dangerous idealism to equate the inevitable shades of bias in history with an outright propaganda whitewash of history
an analogy: there will always be crime in society. you can bust your ass fighting crime as hard as you can, but there still will be some crime. you'd have to magically remove human free will to prevent absolutely everyone from making bad choices that lead to a life of crime. but is that the same as completely stopping the fight against crime? to just let it go unimpeded?
obviously not. in the same way, accepting the inevitable slight bias in all of history and media is NOT the same as accepting complete propagandistic whitewashing. to equate them is idealism
that you cannot have the impossible (crime free society, unbiased history/ media) is no reason to accept the truly terrible (run away crime/ outright propaganda)
somethings in life you can never achieve. but stopping to work hard to get as close as possible to the impossible to achieve, is simply worse
that joke map showing canada absorbing the west coast and the east coat down to maryland, calling the south and the middle "jesusland" was a funny internet meme at one time, but as of late, is looking more like a serious cause
i admire canada's healthcare, it's sober banking rules, it's pragmatic international policies. and meanwhile i am stuck in this country with these fucking morons in the south ruining this country with neocon presidents, religious fundamentalism and ignorant libertarian wish fulfillment fantasies of the market just taking care of itself with unicorns and rainbows
give the south and the plains their assault guns and their abstinence education leading to lots more pregnant teens and their creationism denying leading to ignorance of basic science, and let them sink into the third world hellhole they so fervently desire to be
canada: give them alberta for the northeast usa, pretty please?
i honestly feel more affinity with canadians, in terms of morality and values, then i do with faux news zombified morons in the lower regions of my own country
i seriously, seriously have a major problem with some of my own countrymen who live in some sort of medieval parallel universe of prideful ignorance
that someone who will get a song or movie for free represents someone that would have otherwise bought one
if given no other choice than to buy a lady gaga mp3/ cd, or rent/ buy avatar on dvd, most wouldn't consume that media at all
plenty of people are just tasting media. free media represents window shopping
how many? 10% 90%?
i don't know, but my assertion is this: free media, like radio or broadcast tv gives away media for free, represents a form of advertising for the artist, exposure. that if all songs and movies were free, all you would do is put more warm butts in seats in cinema houses and concert venues. THAT's how you make money, from here on out
of course, i've made no mention of distributors. which is the only people who are hurt in this model. avatar made HOW MUCH FUCKING MONEY?! and all of it IN THE CINEMA HOUSE. don't believe the distributor's lies! think about this: in a world where media is free on the internet, musicians and artists and movie makers will STILL make a buttload of cash, from concerts and cinema houses ONLY
that's the model we're moving to, no matter what the fucking dying distributors say, or what the fuck bullshit laws they pay legislators to pass. simply because you are dealing with tens of millions of POOR technically astute teenagers. you don't legislate around that: the teenagers route around your dumb ass laws, you morons!
welcome to reality distributor morons: get busy dying, and shut the fuck up. you're done for, you're dead. the internet killed you. culture and media are not dying, artists are not getting put in the poorhouse (but you did a good job of that when you ran the show, btw), only YOU are dying
there are grey areas in any sacred text. from the bible, to the quran, to the constitution and the bill of rights. any document, written down by anyone (or anything, since some believe some texts are actually from nonhuman beings) requires interpretation
it is not possible to write down every shade of meaning in words. words have an automatic built on grey area. there is no such thing possible as capturing every nuance of your meaning in the written word. that's why legal documents are so mind numbingly tedious: they are trying to capture every nuance. and yet they still fail. that's why new law is always being written: constantly nailing down the gray areas, creating new gray areas... repeat ad nauseum
but what we have in this world are people like yourself: fundamentalists
whether constitutional fundamentalist, or christian or muslim fundamentalist, it does not matter, you fall into the same problem: you interpret your sacred text a certain way, and then assert that your interpretation is the only interpretation possible. despite the fact that you depend upon just as many assumptions when you gloss over the grey area in your sacred texts as the most liberal "activist judges" or whatever you think is a horrible person: you do the same thing, you're a hypocrite
you'd have even less shoddy education than that found in these medieval texan proposals
private institutions would have a lot more latitude. you'd have the christian version of fundamentalist madrassas churning out christian holy warriors in texas
to tell someone that they don't have enough promise for college, that they don't need to fill their brain with more "stuff" that only a few people actually need to know, that maybe they haven't demonstrated that trying to fill their brains with more difficult subject matter would be worth their or anyone else's time... at the age we are talking about, when you're whole life is ahead of you and you are filled with optimism about yourself... it tends to be an emotional reaction, not a rational one
obviously, not everyone needs to go to a 4 year college. they've reached the height of the skills the need in high school for a rewarding and productive life. however, the promise of college, that it is intended only for a promising few, makes it desirable for the sake of your ego that you belong to that group of people
so as soon as you stop 18 year olds from believing in themselves and the promise of their lives to do incredible things, that's when you convince more people not to go to college. so who here wants the task of destroying millions of young people's faith in themselves?
additionally, you have the problem of a free market: there is a large demand, so the supply has grown to reach that demand for colleges. all you have to do shrink supply as demand gets more vocal. go ahead, close down a bunch of colleges and severely restrict the accreditation process, all the while millions of parents and children scream to get into college. good luck!
database -> stored procedures -> ashx (c#, know your libraries) -> xslt (still version 1.0, grrrr) -> html (which version?)
+ css
+ js support files (javascript, know your libraries)
+ maybe flash, which is its own parallel universe
the js part is a huge deal when dealing with ajax schemes, xmlhttprequest... which loops back to another completely parallel track of the main DSAXH sequence above
and then you need to take into consideration the different browsers and their rendering quirks
it really is pretty nutty the number of languages and open windows you need to jump back and forth between and what you need to take into consideration
you also need to set up and configure the web server os and webserver software
but you know what? you look at the early industrial age, when they were still just imagining locomotives and automobiles and airplanes, and you're talking about guys who had to be good draftsmen, machinists, metallurgists, mechanical engineers, office managers, etc. and you think "how the hell did they do it?"
so when you think about all the disparate languages and moving parts you need to integrate, just to build a coherent, not very complicated, website, you think you know some small pantomime of the complexity of the world the early industrialists had to work in. its not that bad, its a living. what can one ask of work except that it challenges you and doesn't bore you and might offer some sort of exciting fruits from your labors? a chance to change the world? you are demanded to do many things and wear many hats, and this means you work in an environment where YOU are important, where YOU can prove your mettle and prove valuable above other "wed developers" who just find nothing but tedium in the whole endeavour and disparage it
they apparently yearn for a world, some future generation of web programmers, who will operate more along the lines of "buy car, press start button. if car breaks, take to repair shop. end job function"
i don't envy this less complicated world. in such a world, web programming will be as a exciting as being a check out cashier (and pay at the same rate too, and YOU will be as completely interchangeable and forgettable as a coffee filter)
revel in it, don't disparage the complexity. in full work mode, all 400 cylinders firing, you are something of a god, bringing forth new technologies that might still be used hundreds of years from now, and be the very backbone of human society. enjoy living in the dawn of a new technological era, which is what the web still is, so much of the ground beneath our feet is still in play, and some of us get to be influential in that, in much the same way that early railroads shaped the fate of nations and ideas and the birth of cities
we are doing something of the same today, and by necessity, by working on the cutting edge, that is complicated, difficult, and messy
and that's good
roll up your sleeves, and shape the world. if all you can think is "this is too complicated", you're in the wrong line of work
rather than proprietary plugins, you get native support in the browser, in the markup itself
this is important, and it is revolutionary, and it is 100% worthy of the hype
it gets us out of this balkanized world of plugin nonsense and overlapping incompatible other track code bases. it gets us away from the nightmare of licensing and security issues and performance hiccups and browsers crashing and unresponsive threads running at 100% cpu, no power management... etc
html 5 is a much better world, for the user and the developer, and we cannot possibly hype html 5 enough to get us to this better world asap
because the multitouch patent also applies to any other instantiation of the multitouch idea. so yes, you have to build it, but once you build it, no one else can build it, even from scratch
in other words, yes: you thought up some stupid "no shit" idea, and now you are blocking anyone else from obvious no brainer low level technology. this is not fostering innovation, this is a troll living under a bridge, preventing anyone from crossing
patents are not tools of lone innovators to protect them from predatory established companies
patents are the tools that predatory established companies use to ensure their monopoly/ oligopoly
this is flat out wrong: "The solution is to fix what causes people to commit crime"
what causes people to commit crime is the same thing that causes anyone of any socioeconomic background, from any walk of life, any culture, any country, any time period in all of human history to commit crime: failure of character
its a constant. crime always happened. crime will always happen. crime is never going away. its simply a maintenance function of society to clean up and lock away their bad seeds. there's a core amount of people who need to be locked away, in any society, or any time period, now and forever. not locking this group away simply means they commit more crimes
there is no cure for crime. some amount always seem to choose to commit crime. unless you want to propose we transgress against the concept of free will, you need to accept that there will be some who choose badly, and consequences must exist for that after the fact. there is no cure for that, ever
your current understanding of human nature is woefully naive
the oh-so-telling preemptory defensive stance "we really don't give a shit about the rest of europe". oh really? that's why you needed to preemptively defend europe from my global pronouncements? pfffffft. you obviously care a lot. that you need to say you don't shows your insecurity
you know, there's a funny guy from one of the countries near you, austria, by the name of freud, who started this funny field of inquiry called psychoanalysis. he would have a field day the way you practically fall over yourself, hopelessly and hilariously revealing your various inadequacies and inferiorities in spite of your sputtering attempts at superiority to them
and finally, i think a fellow swiss would be horrified at you, that such a small little angry insignificant person should assume that they speak for switzerland on the international stage about anything. when clearly you only speak for a small cold little pathetic bitter hate that has nothing to do with switzerland, europe, or even the usa, only your own poor character. i see nothing of a swiss character about you or what you say. sorry switzerland: what went wrong with this one, huh?
oh well, i guess every country needs a bottom of the bell curve
you would fit in well at a tea party rally here in the usa
when you get over your superiority complex, get back to me, then there might actually be a chance of some sort of communication
until then, you're a sad pathetic example of what is wrong with this world, europe, the usa, or anywhere else: all reactive, defensive prideful posturing in defense of your little tribe
fuck the usa, i don't care about the usa. or europe. fuck them both
i was attacking a failure in logic: that somehow the rest of the world is happy they don't have the jail occupancy rates of the usa. but go to your average brazilian favela, and you might find a different opinion of what the ideal prison population rate should be. in other words, most people in this world think the ideal incarceration rate is much higher than it is in their country currently, from seeing all the criminals running around. that most countries in this world, the low incarceration rate is due to a corrupt or apathetic police and judiciary, not some sort of enlightenment or tolerance
that's my thesis. would you like to take issue with the concepts? or would you like to engage in some more mindless ethnocentric tribal chest thumping that doesn't prvoe me wrong, but only proves you are as hopelessly provincial as sarah palin or any other arrogant american neocon?
might i introduce you to these amazing places called africa, south america, asia? or did you think comparisons to europe was the only thing that mattered?
additionally, i don't think you're the right voice to represent the reality of crime in europe. you enjoy your coffee and brie in your upper middle class enclave, meanwhile, i'll walk around the block, to some neighborhoods you never go to and never think about, and i'll listen to what the voices i meet there say about criminality and the police in europe. how does that sound darling?
however, i'm kind of sick of this tired line: "The US has 3% of the world's population and 25% of it's prison population. Numerically and per capita, we have the highest prison population on the planet"
the reason i'm sick of this line is that other countries aren't going "oh my gosh, what is wrong with the usa! so many people are in prison there!"
what those other people in other countries are saying is "man i'm thick of these thieves and murderers running around free. we need to crack down in these elements ruining our society"
in other words, other countries aren't bemoaning our high prison rates, they're bemoaning the thieves getting away scott free in their own country. high prison populations aren't necessarily a bad thing, assuming the laws make sense. it could just mean you have an efficient police and judicial system (relatively speaking), catching more crooks
lower prison populations in other countries in other words, isn't some sign of tolerance or enlightenment, its a sign of a corrupt and inefficient police/ judiciary. in those other countries with lower prison populations, you are simply talking about more assholes getting away with robbery and murder and walking around free
other people in other countries are actually envying the usa's high incarceration rate
the reason i'm bringing this up is that the obvious solution to the greek financial confidence crisis is for europe to announce that all of the world's intellectual property is actually greece's sole patent domain, and all royalties on every invention ever should from now on flow to greece
that is until, of course, china stands up and announces that all ancient greece did was rip off ancient china. and don't even get me started with ancient india...
they were the first to put it in the browser though. that makes what they did extremely significant
sikorsky was not the first to engineer a helicopter, but the first to build one
davinci was not the first to think of a helicopter, but the first to engineer one
etc...
there's something like 22 guys who invented the lightbulb. what does that mean? it means that idea to actual widepsread use is not a simple path. innovation is not a binary subject matter. there are many fine grains of innovation in any subject matter, and sometimes they incrementally build on each other and other times they are wholeheartedly independently realized despite previous dead ends or concurrent efforts. finally, the guy who gets the lion share of the credit is not always the guy who deserves the lion share of the credit, if ANYONE deserves the lion share of credit for complicated slowly evolving inventions, which natural language search is most definitely an example thereof, and is in fact not yet fully "invented"
i think the idea of patenting business ideas is absurd
but of course, the originator of a business idea deserves some recognition for being the first, and my comment is merely an attempt to give credit where credit is due
google's chrome browser is also happily gobbling up and incorporating good ideas pioneered by firefox and opera and safari, and stealing their market share by using their own ideas against them. that's ok by me. mainly because google is also doing some things that firefox, opera, nor safari ever did as well or at all. and perhaps google's version of ask.com will be better than ask.com itself. good, that's fine. but i'm not going to forget who pioneered the ideas
google is simply doing what microsoft is usually vilified for doing on slashdot. throughout the 1990s microsoft copied the pioneers, used their corporate heft to muscle the innovators out of their own niches, and dominated. now google is the new microsoft
its ugly. its the way of the capitalism: abuse of smaller players by bigger players is the inevitable reality of any marketplace, forever (in spite of hilarious libertarian fantasies of a marketplace of equals: utopian impossibility). it is what it is
but that doesn't mean i myself have to be ignorant of the true innovators in this world. nor should you
Slashdot Mirror
there were a giant wall separating texas from the rest of the usa
but as it is, what texas decides to do has an effect on me. thus, i have a right to say on what texas decides to do. if texas is going to unleash a bunch of propagandized holy warrior children into the usa, i want to clear my throat and say "no, texas, you don't get to whitewash history and zombify your children, because the influx of propagandized morons affects my life: these people vote, they make decisions, large and small, in loca, state and federal government, that affect my quality of life, and you will not drag me and my country down to third world status"
the lie is that state rights somehow have a superior advantage to federal rights. they only valid rights wall exists between the individual and society. the idea that state rights has some sort of validity is a false construct, that somehow the decisions a state makes is somehow superior or less superior, in terms of trouncing on indivudal rights, or upholding them, as compared to federal decisions
in other words: individual rights is the paramount issue, correct?
in that regard, how is it possible that what a state decides can somehow protect the individual, or trample on the individual, to a better or worse degree than a federal decision? on what logical basis is that possible?
state's rights ia c ontrived false construct, if you are truly motivated by the only morally and intellectually defensible cause: individual rights. state's rights cuts both ways. it is neither more for individual rights, or more against them. its a red herring to confuse the two concepts
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/05/facebook-open-alternative/
they haven't started programming it!
"hey, i got a cool idea, wanna give me $115K?
holy the awesome power of media coverage batman
but there's a major difference between recognizing that bias is a permanent aspect of media and history no matter how hard we scrub it... and purposefully going out of your way to stick truly outrageous bias into your history/ media with no shame at all
it's also a form of dangerous idealism to equate the inevitable shades of bias in history with an outright propaganda whitewash of history
an analogy: there will always be crime in society. you can bust your ass fighting crime as hard as you can, but there still will be some crime. you'd have to magically remove human free will to prevent absolutely everyone from making bad choices that lead to a life of crime. but is that the same as completely stopping the fight against crime? to just let it go unimpeded?
obviously not. in the same way, accepting the inevitable slight bias in all of history and media is NOT the same as accepting complete propagandistic whitewashing. to equate them is idealism
that you cannot have the impossible (crime free society, unbiased history/ media) is no reason to accept the truly terrible (run away crime/ outright propaganda)
somethings in life you can never achieve. but stopping to work hard to get as close as possible to the impossible to achieve, is simply worse
that joke map showing canada absorbing the west coast and the east coat down to maryland, calling the south and the middle "jesusland" was a funny internet meme at one time, but as of late, is looking more like a serious cause
i admire canada's healthcare, it's sober banking rules, it's pragmatic international policies. and meanwhile i am stuck in this country with these fucking morons in the south ruining this country with neocon presidents, religious fundamentalism and ignorant libertarian wish fulfillment fantasies of the market just taking care of itself with unicorns and rainbows
give the south and the plains their assault guns and their abstinence education leading to lots more pregnant teens and their creationism denying leading to ignorance of basic science, and let them sink into the third world hellhole they so fervently desire to be
canada: give them alberta for the northeast usa, pretty please?
i honestly feel more affinity with canadians, in terms of morality and values, then i do with faux news zombified morons in the lower regions of my own country
i seriously, seriously have a major problem with some of my own countrymen who live in some sort of medieval parallel universe of prideful ignorance
that someone who will get a song or movie for free represents someone that would have otherwise bought one
if given no other choice than to buy a lady gaga mp3/ cd, or rent/ buy avatar on dvd, most wouldn't consume that media at all
plenty of people are just tasting media. free media represents window shopping
how many? 10% 90%?
i don't know, but my assertion is this: free media, like radio or broadcast tv gives away media for free, represents a form of advertising for the artist, exposure. that if all songs and movies were free, all you would do is put more warm butts in seats in cinema houses and concert venues. THAT's how you make money, from here on out
of course, i've made no mention of distributors. which is the only people who are hurt in this model. avatar made HOW MUCH FUCKING MONEY?! and all of it IN THE CINEMA HOUSE. don't believe the distributor's lies! think about this: in a world where media is free on the internet, musicians and artists and movie makers will STILL make a buttload of cash, from concerts and cinema houses ONLY
that's the model we're moving to, no matter what the fucking dying distributors say, or what the fuck bullshit laws they pay legislators to pass. simply because you are dealing with tens of millions of POOR technically astute teenagers. you don't legislate around that: the teenagers route around your dumb ass laws, you morons!
welcome to reality distributor morons: get busy dying, and shut the fuck up. you're done for, you're dead. the internet killed you. culture and media are not dying, artists are not getting put in the poorhouse (but you did a good job of that when you ran the show, btw), only YOU are dying
to believe otherwise is FUD and being trolled
there are grey areas in any sacred text. from the bible, to the quran, to the constitution and the bill of rights. any document, written down by anyone (or anything, since some believe some texts are actually from nonhuman beings) requires interpretation
it is not possible to write down every shade of meaning in words. words have an automatic built on grey area. there is no such thing possible as capturing every nuance of your meaning in the written word. that's why legal documents are so mind numbingly tedious: they are trying to capture every nuance. and yet they still fail. that's why new law is always being written: constantly nailing down the gray areas, creating new gray areas... repeat ad nauseum
but what we have in this world are people like yourself: fundamentalists
whether constitutional fundamentalist, or christian or muslim fundamentalist, it does not matter, you fall into the same problem: you interpret your sacred text a certain way, and then assert that your interpretation is the only interpretation possible. despite the fact that you depend upon just as many assumptions when you gloss over the grey area in your sacred texts as the most liberal "activist judges" or whatever you think is a horrible person: you do the same thing, you're a hypocrite
you'd have even less shoddy education than that found in these medieval texan proposals
private institutions would have a lot more latitude. you'd have the christian version of fundamentalist madrassas churning out christian holy warriors in texas
the ideal female has to have a milk line of three tits on each side
my id has spoketh
to tell someone that they don't have enough promise for college, that they don't need to fill their brain with more "stuff" that only a few people actually need to know, that maybe they haven't demonstrated that trying to fill their brains with more difficult subject matter would be worth their or anyone else's time... at the age we are talking about, when you're whole life is ahead of you and you are filled with optimism about yourself... it tends to be an emotional reaction, not a rational one
obviously, not everyone needs to go to a 4 year college. they've reached the height of the skills the need in high school for a rewarding and productive life. however, the promise of college, that it is intended only for a promising few, makes it desirable for the sake of your ego that you belong to that group of people
so as soon as you stop 18 year olds from believing in themselves and the promise of their lives to do incredible things, that's when you convince more people not to go to college. so who here wants the task of destroying millions of young people's faith in themselves?
additionally, you have the problem of a free market: there is a large demand, so the supply has grown to reach that demand for colleges. all you have to do shrink supply as demand gets more vocal. go ahead, close down a bunch of colleges and severely restrict the accreditation process, all the while millions of parents and children scream to get into college. good luck!
database ->
stored procedures ->
ashx (c#, know your libraries) ->
xslt (still version 1.0, grrrr) ->
html (which version?)
+ css
+ js support files (javascript, know your libraries)
+ maybe flash, which is its own parallel universe
the js part is a huge deal when dealing with ajax schemes, xmlhttprequest... which loops back to another completely parallel track of the main DSAXH sequence above
and then you need to take into consideration the different browsers and their rendering quirks
it really is pretty nutty the number of languages and open windows you need to jump back and forth between and what you need to take into consideration
you also need to set up and configure the web server os and webserver software
but you know what? you look at the early industrial age, when they were still just imagining locomotives and automobiles and airplanes, and you're talking about guys who had to be good draftsmen, machinists, metallurgists, mechanical engineers, office managers, etc. and you think "how the hell did they do it?"
so when you think about all the disparate languages and moving parts you need to integrate, just to build a coherent, not very complicated, website, you think you know some small pantomime of the complexity of the world the early industrialists had to work in. its not that bad, its a living. what can one ask of work except that it challenges you and doesn't bore you and might offer some sort of exciting fruits from your labors? a chance to change the world? you are demanded to do many things and wear many hats, and this means you work in an environment where YOU are important, where YOU can prove your mettle and prove valuable above other "wed developers" who just find nothing but tedium in the whole endeavour and disparage it
they apparently yearn for a world, some future generation of web programmers, who will operate more along the lines of "buy car, press start button. if car breaks, take to repair shop. end job function"
i don't envy this less complicated world. in such a world, web programming will be as a exciting as being a check out cashier (and pay at the same rate too, and YOU will be as completely interchangeable and forgettable as a coffee filter)
revel in it, don't disparage the complexity. in full work mode, all 400 cylinders firing, you are something of a god, bringing forth new technologies that might still be used hundreds of years from now, and be the very backbone of human society. enjoy living in the dawn of a new technological era, which is what the web still is, so much of the ground beneath our feet is still in play, and some of us get to be influential in that, in much the same way that early railroads shaped the fate of nations and ideas and the birth of cities
we are doing something of the same today, and by necessity, by working on the cutting edge, that is complicated, difficult, and messy
and that's good
roll up your sleeves, and shape the world. if all you can think is "this is too complicated", you're in the wrong line of work
rather than proprietary plugins, you get native support in the browser, in the markup itself
this is important, and it is revolutionary, and it is 100% worthy of the hype
it gets us out of this balkanized world of plugin nonsense and overlapping incompatible other track code bases. it gets us away from the nightmare of licensing and security issues and performance hiccups and browsers crashing and unresponsive threads running at 100% cpu, no power management... etc
html 5 is a much better world, for the user and the developer, and we cannot possibly hype html 5 enough to get us to this better world asap
you honestly don't understand how malicious software patents are
please read up:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/12/us-patent-office-tightens-the-screws-on-software-patents.ars
because the multitouch patent also applies to any other instantiation of the multitouch idea. so yes, you have to build it, but once you build it, no one else can build it, even from scratch
in other words, yes: you thought up some stupid "no shit" idea, and now you are blocking anyone else from obvious no brainer low level technology. this is not fostering innovation, this is a troll living under a bridge, preventing anyone from crossing
patents are not tools of lone innovators to protect them from predatory established companies
patents are the tools that predatory established companies use to ensure their monopoly/ oligopoly
patents hinder innovation, they don't foster it
is one of the most beautiful, of the greek islands that i have visited
this is flat out wrong: "The solution is to fix what causes people to commit crime"
what causes people to commit crime is the same thing that causes anyone of any socioeconomic background, from any walk of life, any culture, any country, any time period in all of human history to commit crime: failure of character
its a constant. crime always happened. crime will always happen. crime is never going away. its simply a maintenance function of society to clean up and lock away their bad seeds. there's a core amount of people who need to be locked away, in any society, or any time period, now and forever. not locking this group away simply means they commit more crimes
there is no cure for crime. some amount always seem to choose to commit crime. unless you want to propose we transgress against the concept of free will, you need to accept that there will be some who choose badly, and consequences must exist for that after the fact. there is no cure for that, ever
your current understanding of human nature is woefully naive
the colossal need to judge?
the oh-so-telling preemptory defensive stance "we really don't give a shit about the rest of europe". oh really? that's why you needed to preemptively defend europe from my global pronouncements? pfffffft. you obviously care a lot. that you need to say you don't shows your insecurity
you know, there's a funny guy from one of the countries near you, austria, by the name of freud, who started this funny field of inquiry called psychoanalysis. he would have a field day the way you practically fall over yourself, hopelessly and hilariously revealing your various inadequacies and inferiorities in spite of your sputtering attempts at superiority to them
and finally, i think a fellow swiss would be horrified at you, that such a small little angry insignificant person should assume that they speak for switzerland on the international stage about anything. when clearly you only speak for a small cold little pathetic bitter hate that has nothing to do with switzerland, europe, or even the usa, only your own poor character. i see nothing of a swiss character about you or what you say. sorry switzerland: what went wrong with this one, huh?
oh well, i guess every country needs a bottom of the bell curve
hugs and kisses!
(snicker)
for the word
temppot
or
teapest
you would fit in well at a tea party rally here in the usa
when you get over your superiority complex, get back to me, then there might actually be a chance of some sort of communication
until then, you're a sad pathetic example of what is wrong with this world, europe, the usa, or anywhere else: all reactive, defensive prideful posturing in defense of your little tribe
fuck the usa, i don't care about the usa. or europe. fuck them both
i was attacking a failure in logic: that somehow the rest of the world is happy they don't have the jail occupancy rates of the usa. but go to your average brazilian favela, and you might find a different opinion of what the ideal prison population rate should be. in other words, most people in this world think the ideal incarceration rate is much higher than it is in their country currently, from seeing all the criminals running around. that most countries in this world, the low incarceration rate is due to a corrupt or apathetic police and judiciary, not some sort of enlightenment or tolerance
that's my thesis. would you like to take issue with the concepts? or would you like to engage in some more mindless ethnocentric tribal chest thumping that doesn't prvoe me wrong, but only proves you are as hopelessly provincial as sarah palin or any other arrogant american neocon?
xoxoxoxoxoxox
might i introduce you to these amazing places called africa, south america, asia? or did you think comparisons to europe was the only thing that mattered?
additionally, i don't think you're the right voice to represent the reality of crime in europe. you enjoy your coffee and brie in your upper middle class enclave, meanwhile, i'll walk around the block, to some neighborhoods you never go to and never think about, and i'll listen to what the voices i meet there say about criminality and the police in europe. how does that sound darling?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_2009_French_riots
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_civil_unrest_in_Villiers-le-Bel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_civil_unrest_in_France
all these naysaying party poopers in the comments here saying we can't do this, you ruin all the fun
all we need are michael bay, jerry bruckheimer, and bruce willis
maybe billy bob thornton, ben affleck, steve buscemi, and a russian peter stormare for wisecracking
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armageddon_(1998_film)
and since they are oil rig workers, maybe they can clean up the BP mess in the gulf of mexico too in their spare time
but noooo... you people and your geosynchronous orbits and your "physics", nothing but a bunch of negative whiners
such as prison for marijuana use: that's stupid
however, i'm kind of sick of this tired line: "The US has 3% of the world's population and 25% of it's prison population. Numerically and per capita, we have the highest prison population on the planet"
the reason i'm sick of this line is that other countries aren't going "oh my gosh, what is wrong with the usa! so many people are in prison there!"
what those other people in other countries are saying is "man i'm thick of these thieves and murderers running around free. we need to crack down in these elements ruining our society"
in other words, other countries aren't bemoaning our high prison rates, they're bemoaning the thieves getting away scott free in their own country. high prison populations aren't necessarily a bad thing, assuming the laws make sense. it could just mean you have an efficient police and judicial system (relatively speaking), catching more crooks
lower prison populations in other countries in other words, isn't some sign of tolerance or enlightenment, its a sign of a corrupt and inefficient police/ judiciary. in those other countries with lower prison populations, you are simply talking about more assholes getting away with robbery and murder and walking around free
other people in other countries are actually envying the usa's high incarceration rate
even the computer:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism
the reason i'm bringing this up is that the obvious solution to the greek financial confidence crisis is for europe to announce that all of the world's intellectual property is actually greece's sole patent domain, and all royalties on every invention ever should from now on flow to greece
that is until, of course, china stands up and announces that all ancient greece did was rip off ancient china. and don't even get me started with ancient india...
they were the first to put it in the browser though. that makes what they did extremely significant
sikorsky was not the first to engineer a helicopter, but the first to build one
davinci was not the first to think of a helicopter, but the first to engineer one
etc...
there's something like 22 guys who invented the lightbulb. what does that mean? it means that idea to actual widepsread use is not a simple path. innovation is not a binary subject matter. there are many fine grains of innovation in any subject matter, and sometimes they incrementally build on each other and other times they are wholeheartedly independently realized despite previous dead ends or concurrent efforts. finally, the guy who gets the lion share of the credit is not always the guy who deserves the lion share of the credit, if ANYONE deserves the lion share of credit for complicated slowly evolving inventions, which natural language search is most definitely an example thereof, and is in fact not yet fully "invented"
i think the idea of patenting business ideas is absurd
but of course, the originator of a business idea deserves some recognition for being the first, and my comment is merely an attempt to give credit where credit is due
google's chrome browser is also happily gobbling up and incorporating good ideas pioneered by firefox and opera and safari, and stealing their market share by using their own ideas against them. that's ok by me. mainly because google is also doing some things that firefox, opera, nor safari ever did as well or at all. and perhaps google's version of ask.com will be better than ask.com itself. good, that's fine. but i'm not going to forget who pioneered the ideas
google is simply doing what microsoft is usually vilified for doing on slashdot. throughout the 1990s microsoft copied the pioneers, used their corporate heft to muscle the innovators out of their own niches, and dominated. now google is the new microsoft
its ugly. its the way of the capitalism: abuse of smaller players by bigger players is the inevitable reality of any marketplace, forever (in spite of hilarious libertarian fantasies of a marketplace of equals: utopian impossibility). it is what it is
but that doesn't mean i myself have to be ignorant of the true innovators in this world. nor should you
is just rip off http://ask.com/