Funny, you guys don't seem to have problems telling others how they should live...
This isn't an America vs. the world issue. All I was saying is that non-Americans bring a different point of view to the table.
If you can't tolerate another point of view, then you can just go on being a xenophobic, ignorant, sheltered, small minded individual. e.g., the typical american.:-) [kiddin about that last bit].
I think you'd find Slashdot very much more trivial and redundant if all non-Americans left.
That said, ADA's can go fuck themselves. I can see making exceptions for EMPLOYEES but why would I have to go out of my way to help customers? What if it's simply not cost effective? If it costs millions to placate the handful of noisemakers is it worth the effort?
Being blind really has to suck. And *I DO* wish that companies would help them out. I don't think we should force them though as it can lead to smaller companies who can't afford to deal with it going out of business.
Sure, our websites would then be ADA compliant, but there would only be a handful of mega-corp websites at that point. So you're trading what little free market economy we have left to placate special interest groups.
Frankly, if I were blind I'd make due and where I couldn't I'd rely on friends or family. No shame in asking a family member to order something from a website for you. Granted "disabled" folk want their independence, they also have to be practical about it....
I'm always amazed at the size of soft drinks in theaters in the US. Even in Canada (I'd put us between USA and western europe for portions sizes) our drinks are normal sizes, not 48oz monstrocities they have...
I love the large size McD fries. Myself and two friends called a single large fries "lunch" once and weren't hungry afterwards. And that's coming from a big dude!
Personally I agree with your post, except that for many, healthier foods (e.g. couscous, salad, fat-free turkey, etc) *are* boring because they lack the fat, salt nad sugar they're used to in things like cola, salad dressing, and deep fried foods.
There is an even simpler diet
1. Exercise to raise metabolism 2. Count calories.
If your BMR is $x calories, and you consume $x + $y calories in a day... danger. Just read the portion size and calories/fat/sodium per serving to get an idea of whether you should put that food in your face. If your lunch is more than 500 calories, chances are it's not healthy for you. If that snack is more than 80 calories, it's probably a bad idea, etc, etc...
It would help if people stopped blindly buying their products... but again we can't count on people being remotely smart about things...... still need a cookie....
People should stop buying more than they need for graphics. That's the real problem [same could be said for processors, but frankly I think that's less of a problem].
Nvidias business model revolves around rolling out the largest, most current consuming monstrosity possible so long as consumers keep buying it. If the customers shifted their spending habits from "I got a small wee wee and need a big pee cee" to "I really can get by with a 6xxx or 5xxx series card" they would spend more time making the middle-line products more mature and refined.
It happens. It isn't like there isn't a huge market for yuppy gamers who HAVE TO HAVE THE LATEST.
If people were a bit more conservative we wouldn't have a 4-month release cycle for GPUs. They'd spend more time refining the technology, and you'd be doing more with less.... yada yada.
Personally, my GeForce 5200 was fine, the only reason I got a 6600 was that it was the cheapest non-turbocache PCI-E card I could get at the time [and the 7xxx series was out then]. I can play doom3/quake/enemyterritory just fine at high res (well not for doom3, but the rest is fine) and decent frame rates.
If I wanted to spend $400 on my computer I'd upgrade the CPU from the current E6300 (which is overclocked to 2.94GHz) to a E6600 and put less stress on the northbridge (which is clocked at 420MHz up from 266MHz).
I just think building really huge radios isn't super useful, at least not anymore.
And that if you really want to sit in the desert or in a rain forrest looking at the sky, you should do it with your own damn money.
I'm really not impressed with the idea of finding ET. Specifically because I ASSUME there *is* ET. But until we can actually do something useful with that info (e.g. faster than light comm) it's all just "nice to think about."
Try this experiment. Communicate with your friends ONLY through snail mail for 3 months. By comparison to cell phones, pagers, IMs, emails, and the like it's light years away. Now, try this out. Only read your received snail mail when it's 25 years old. Get your friends to do the same.
True that. I generally prefer smaller shops myself. I buy my computer gear from a small firm instead of the likes of BestBuy. not only because the small firm has better selection and can order random things, but because it's not going into some large corporation that then pays the employees the LEGAL MINIMUMS and stocks up on things like "Monster Cables." Similarly, I have lunch at local pizzerias and the like instead of McDs and BK. Better food, often cheaper, and goes to the local economy.
What I don't get about most people is the feeling of self-entitlement. Even when I get angry on the phone with a large corp, I may vent but never at the person themselves. E.g. "That policy is stupid" or "how is that in anyways fair?". I don't call the person themselves names or whatever because as a former cash monkey myself I know how it feels to be personally caught in the middle (I worked at a department store when the N64 was just coming out and I was personally blamed for not having enough Zeldas on hand, even though I worked part time, didn't perform orders and it was Nintendo who didn't ship enough).
It's hard to really respect any large corporation when their sole reason for existing is acquiring your money. Deceptive advertising, faux-sales/deals, faulty products, low quality of service, etc. Those are the norm, not the exception. So if I'm late on a payment or otherwise piss off a large corporation, all the power to me.
Though I haven't been late on any payments since college... the only reason I'm prompt is to keep a decent credit rating.
I wasn't trying to say all money spent on the space program (and related) was wasted. Quite a few scientific discoveries that have made it back to life on Earth are because of it.
I'm just trying to say that radio telescopy on it's own is a fairly benign study. About the only useful things it can tell you is
1. An asteroid will hit Earth [*] 2. There are a billion trillion stars out there.
[*] We lack the bruce willis team to divert asteroids anyways.
I mean honestly. Suppose we did discover life 100 LY away. First, the discussions would be GENERATIONAL. That is, your grand father would say something and your GRAND CHILDREN would listen to the reply (200LY round trip). Not much use to that.
Second, suppose we find life in say 10LY, the first thing we'd do is find their natural resources, declare them an enemy of the state and send Patriotic missles at them. In short, doing nobody a favour there either.
I have a right to not receive fax-spam. It's my fax machine and my paper/ink, in short my property.
The judge notes that there is no evidence that it's a problem... that's because fax-spam has been stopped [for the most part] by the law designed to do just that. That's like saying we should make treason ok since it so rarely happens.
What next? telemarketers calling cell phones? Oh christ I just gave him an idea...
but if you want to spend millions upon millions of dollars looking up at the sky, then do it with your own damn money.
It's bad enough to bleed money into the military to fight random wars, we need not lose it in other ways. Especially since there is more vital science to be had.
The likelyhood that simple RF is how advanced cultures communicate is ludicrous. I don't want to get all sci-fi on this thread, but chances are something like subspace (e.g. faster than light) communication is required to really be effective. Otherwise you'll have years and years to wait for a reply from anything, especially given the nearest possibly populated planets are what, hundreds of light years away?
Now granted, radio telescopy is used for more than just audio/video. They use it to take pseudo-colour images of things like x-ray and gamma-ray bursts . cool stuff, but honestly not really a priority. On the one hand we can learn to grow better crops, treat diesease and advance physics, on the other we can build really large [brute force] radio telescopy to take better pictures of things that were going on, supposedly, billions of years ago.
And that's just it, a lot of this "science" is just a hypothesis. The beginings, yet when trying to get funding they state it as fact. As in, WE KNOW that this is a blackhole or dwarf star and that we KNOW it's 4.3 billion years old, etc...
I have no problem with a uni offering consulting or products [they can produce] for sale. I have a problem with patents.
The POINT of a uni is to train/educate and THEN PROMOTE FURTHER DEVELOPMENT. That's the point of your PhD is to add something new to the field.
If I'm paying you to develop science for society [e.g. a good thing] and then you rob society of the use of your idea then what's the point? Oh in 20 years society will benefit of it... big whoop.
I wouldn't have a problem if a gang of grad students got together and offered consulting [for example] services to raise funds for their studies. At least they're providing something of value to society.
Think about it, it's like having one of your own employees patent something from under your feet that they invented while you paid them to work in your lab.
Hint: They do enforce patents, that's why they get them.
There is a way to document prior art. It's called a journal.
These are not defensive patents. They're designed solely to make the uni money. The problem? They made those patents with your tax dollars [at least the public unis]. So you have a public institution telling you that you can't use an algorithm or idea because they took YOUR money and patented it.
and centre, and favour, and rumour, and honour, and pronounce "roof" (not as ruff) and say "chimney" not as "chiminey", and pronounce freedom as "being alive and in the absence of tyranny" and...
Wait a sec... I love America though. Where else can I get my Jack in the box and hollywood?
That and Canada sucks. Stupid fence sitting hypocrites. All they talk about on CSPAN is whom has to apologize to who. Instead of having real debate it just boils down to pointless name calling all day long. Christ, I'd do that for free, unlike these shites who get paid four times the poverty line "just to keep honest."
Yeah except that copyright includes fairuse. Don't like it? Then PROPERLY LICENSE your software (e.g. have the purchaser sign an agreement when they buy a copy of the game...).
Chances are if your kid can't handle polyboobies, they can't handle a game in which you steal cars, drive recklessly and MURDER HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE!
I'm all for having a choice whether your kids play/see/listen with media. What I hate is how they then enforce their values on others. Your kid may not handle polyboobies, but mine sure as heck will.
HEY EMI GUYS, read these statements in your heads. Customers are like me. Forget about the people who pirate things because frankly they're the minority anyways.
I wouldn't say I didn't enjoy it, but I didn't really get excited to see it. For one, the games sucked ass bad. And frankly there is way more better porn on the net than some lame video game.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny, you guys don't seem to have problems telling others how they should live...
:-) [kiddin about that last bit].
This isn't an America vs. the world issue. All I was saying is that non-Americans bring a different point of view to the table.
If you can't tolerate another point of view, then you can just go on being a xenophobic, ignorant, sheltered, small minded individual. e.g., the typical american.
Tom
I think you'd find Slashdot very much more trivial and redundant if all non-Americans left.
That said, ADA's can go fuck themselves. I can see making exceptions for EMPLOYEES but why would I have to go out of my way to help customers? What if it's simply not cost effective? If it costs millions to placate the handful of noisemakers is it worth the effort?
Being blind really has to suck. And *I DO* wish that companies would help them out. I don't think we should force them though as it can lead to smaller companies who can't afford to deal with it going out of business.
Sure, our websites would then be ADA compliant, but there would only be a handful of mega-corp websites at that point. So you're trading what little free market economy we have left to placate special interest groups.
Frankly, if I were blind I'd make due and where I couldn't I'd rely on friends or family. No shame in asking a family member to order something from a website for you. Granted "disabled" folk want their independence, they also have to be practical about it....
Tom
I'm always amazed at the size of soft drinks in theaters in the US. Even in Canada (I'd put us between USA and western europe for portions sizes) our drinks are normal sizes, not 48oz monstrocities they have...
I love the large size McD fries. Myself and two friends called a single large fries "lunch" once and weren't hungry afterwards. And that's coming from a big dude!
Personally I agree with your post, except that for many, healthier foods (e.g. couscous, salad, fat-free turkey, etc) *are* boring because they lack the fat, salt nad sugar they're used to in things like cola, salad dressing, and deep fried foods.
There is an even simpler diet
1. Exercise to raise metabolism
2. Count calories.
If your BMR is $x calories, and you consume $x + $y calories in a day... danger. Just read the portion size and calories/fat/sodium per serving to get an idea of whether you should put that food in your face. If your lunch is more than 500 calories, chances are it's not healthy for you. If that snack is more than 80 calories, it's probably a bad idea, etc, etc...
Tom
No. For several reasons.
1. I'm full of shit
2. I'm Canadian
3. see #1
4. My way or the highway leads to people shooting me.
5. People don't want solutions, they want to bitch, because if they didn't want to bitch they'd solve their problems.
Tom
Give it time... :-)
... still need a cookie....
It would help if people stopped blindly buying their products... but again we can't count on people being remotely smart about things...
Tom
Again this is a problem which has a solution. Judges can be impeached and some classes of judges are elected aren't they?
If people voted [and spent their money] with open eyes we'd have a bit more common sense in the world. Let's see how Emperor Tom would do things
1. Drugs: Make them locally. Enforce drug tests in public schools, expel violators, the problem will weed itself out in a generation or two
2. Poverty: Make businesses capitalistic again.
3. Gay Marriages: Let the church decide, tell the homophobes and flower-power kids to STFU
4. War: Enact the prime directive, stop selling weapons abroad.
5. Science: Protect life, dissolve any hints of "spirituality"
6. Schools: Put money here
7. Military: Take money from here
8. Foreign Policy: let people sort their own problems out. Have dinner with leaders at white house.
9. Media: Enact time restrictions on programming nature (e.g. violence, cussing, etc) and allow anything after [say] 10PM
10. Business: Go all medevil on anti-trust violators
etc, etc, etc.
Sometimes the solution is blindingly obvious, just not very popular.
Tom
People should stop buying more than they need for graphics. That's the real problem [same could be said for processors, but frankly I think that's less of a problem].
Nvidias business model revolves around rolling out the largest, most current consuming monstrosity possible so long as consumers keep buying it. If the customers shifted their spending habits from "I got a small wee wee and need a big pee cee" to "I really can get by with a 6xxx or 5xxx series card" they would spend more time making the middle-line products more mature and refined.
Tom
It happens. It isn't like there isn't a huge market for yuppy gamers who HAVE TO HAVE THE LATEST.
If people were a bit more conservative we wouldn't have a 4-month release cycle for GPUs. They'd spend more time refining the technology, and you'd be doing more with less.... yada yada.
Personally, my GeForce 5200 was fine, the only reason I got a 6600 was that it was the cheapest non-turbocache PCI-E card I could get at the time [and the 7xxx series was out then]. I can play doom3/quake/enemyterritory just fine at high res (well not for doom3, but the rest is fine) and decent frame rates.
If I wanted to spend $400 on my computer I'd upgrade the CPU from the current E6300 (which is overclocked to 2.94GHz) to a E6600 and put less stress on the northbridge (which is clocked at 420MHz up from 266MHz).
Tom
I'm no fundamentalist or whatever.
I just think building really huge radios isn't super useful, at least not anymore.
And that if you really want to sit in the desert or in a rain forrest looking at the sky, you should do it with your own damn money.
I'm really not impressed with the idea of finding ET. Specifically because I ASSUME there *is* ET. But until we can actually do something useful with that info (e.g. faster than light comm) it's all just "nice to think about."
Try this experiment. Communicate with your friends ONLY through snail mail for 3 months. By comparison to cell phones, pagers, IMs, emails, and the like it's light years away. Now, try this out. Only read your received snail mail when it's 25 years old. Get your friends to do the same.
Now replace 25 with more than 100.
Tom
True that. I generally prefer smaller shops myself. I buy my computer gear from a small firm instead of the likes of BestBuy. not only because the small firm has better selection and can order random things, but because it's not going into some large corporation that then pays the employees the LEGAL MINIMUMS and stocks up on things like "Monster Cables." Similarly, I have lunch at local pizzerias and the like instead of McDs and BK. Better food, often cheaper, and goes to the local economy.
What I don't get about most people is the feeling of self-entitlement. Even when I get angry on the phone with a large corp, I may vent but never at the person themselves. E.g. "That policy is stupid" or "how is that in anyways fair?". I don't call the person themselves names or whatever because as a former cash monkey myself I know how it feels to be personally caught in the middle (I worked at a department store when the N64 was just coming out and I was personally blamed for not having enough Zeldas on hand, even though I worked part time, didn't perform orders and it was Nintendo who didn't ship enough).
Tom
It's hard to really respect any large corporation when their sole reason for existing is acquiring your money. Deceptive advertising, faux-sales/deals, faulty products, low quality of service, etc. Those are the norm, not the exception. So if I'm late on a payment or otherwise piss off a large corporation, all the power to me.
... the only reason I'm prompt is to keep a decent credit rating.
Though I haven't been late on any payments since college
Tom
I wasn't trying to say all money spent on the space program (and related) was wasted. Quite a few scientific discoveries that have made it back to life on Earth are because of it.
I'm just trying to say that radio telescopy on it's own is a fairly benign study. About the only useful things it can tell you is
1. An asteroid will hit Earth [*]
2. There are a billion trillion stars out there.
[*] We lack the bruce willis team to divert asteroids anyways.
I mean honestly. Suppose we did discover life 100 LY away. First, the discussions would be GENERATIONAL. That is, your grand father would say something and your GRAND CHILDREN would listen to the reply (200LY round trip). Not much use to that.
Second, suppose we find life in say 10LY, the first thing we'd do is find their natural resources, declare them an enemy of the state and send Patriotic missles at them. In short, doing nobody a favour there either.
Tom
I have a right to not receive fax-spam. It's my fax machine and my paper/ink, in short my property.
... that's because fax-spam has been stopped [for the most part] by the law designed to do just that. That's like saying we should make treason ok since it so rarely happens.
The judge notes that there is no evidence that it's a problem
What next? telemarketers calling cell phones? Oh christ I just gave him an idea...
Tom
but if you want to spend millions upon millions of dollars looking up at the sky, then do it with your own damn money.
It's bad enough to bleed money into the military to fight random wars, we need not lose it in other ways. Especially since there is more vital science to be had.
The likelyhood that simple RF is how advanced cultures communicate is ludicrous. I don't want to get all sci-fi on this thread, but chances are something like subspace (e.g. faster than light) communication is required to really be effective. Otherwise you'll have years and years to wait for a reply from anything, especially given the nearest possibly populated planets are what, hundreds of light years away?
Now granted, radio telescopy is used for more than just audio/video. They use it to take pseudo-colour images of things like x-ray and gamma-ray bursts . cool stuff, but honestly not really a priority. On the one hand we can learn to grow better crops, treat diesease and advance physics, on the other we can build really large [brute force] radio telescopy to take better pictures of things that were going on, supposedly, billions of years ago.
And that's just it, a lot of this "science" is just a hypothesis. The beginings, yet when trying to get funding they state it as fact. As in, WE KNOW that this is a blackhole or dwarf star and that we KNOW it's 4.3 billion years old, etc...
In short, it's monday and I want a cookie.
Tom
I have no problem with a uni offering consulting or products [they can produce] for sale. I have a problem with patents.
... big whoop.
The POINT of a uni is to train/educate and THEN PROMOTE FURTHER DEVELOPMENT. That's the point of your PhD is to add something new to the field.
If I'm paying you to develop science for society [e.g. a good thing] and then you rob society of the use of your idea then what's the point? Oh in 20 years society will benefit of it
I wouldn't have a problem if a gang of grad students got together and offered consulting [for example] services to raise funds for their studies. At least they're providing something of value to society.
Think about it, it's like having one of your own employees patent something from under your feet that they invented while you paid them to work in your lab.
Watch "cops" for a while if you want to hear chiminey.
And yes, I know not all Americans are crazy. I'm just messing around here folks.
Tom
Hint: They do enforce patents, that's why they get them.
There is a way to document prior art. It's called a journal.
These are not defensive patents. They're designed solely to make the uni money. The problem? They made those patents with your tax dollars [at least the public unis]. So you have a public institution telling you that you can't use an algorithm or idea because they took YOUR money and patented it.
Tom
and centre, and favour, and rumour, and honour, and pronounce "roof" (not as ruff) and say "chimney" not as "chiminey", and pronounce freedom as "being alive and in the absence of tyranny" and ...
Wait a sec... I love America though. Where else can I get my Jack in the box and hollywood?
That and Canada sucks. Stupid fence sitting hypocrites. All they talk about on CSPAN is whom has to apologize to who. Instead of having real debate it just boils down to pointless name calling all day long. Christ, I'd do that for free, unlike these shites who get paid four times the poverty line "just to keep honest."
Wait, what are we talking about?
Tom
I found your pacifier. Plug your pie hole ya big baby.
Tom
... "the revolution will not be televised..." :-)
Your paragraph made me think of that...
Tom
Yeah except that copyright includes fairuse. Don't like it? Then PROPERLY LICENSE your software (e.g. have the purchaser sign an agreement when they buy a copy of the game...).
I think MSFT should do this and more. Stop them users from using their boxes!!!
... I run Gentoo :-)
Of course I agree with this
Tom
Chances are if your kid can't handle polyboobies, they can't handle a game in which you steal cars, drive recklessly and MURDER HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE!
I'm all for having a choice whether your kids play/see/listen with media. What I hate is how they then enforce their values on others. Your kid may not handle polyboobies, but mine sure as heck will.
Tom
1. I will pay to download music that I like.
2. I will avoid DRM where possible.
3. I will REMOVE DRM when found.
HEY EMI GUYS, read these statements in your heads. Customers are like me. Forget about the people who pirate things because frankly they're the minority anyways.
Tom
I wouldn't say I didn't enjoy it, but I didn't really get excited to see it. For one, the games sucked ass bad. And frankly there is way more better porn on the net than some lame video game.
Tom