I think people who prefer obfuscated prose to plain english simply do it to differentiate themselves from average "laymen terms", even when they know that their multi-syllable-filled bullshit usually isn't any more understandable even to those skilled in the art. The thing is that the manager-types of the world who don't get the BS-joke are big on appearances and perceived intellectual status, and so the snowjobs will continue since they're more fit to survive.
I wonder if anybody's written a B.S. detector? One that can score:
Back when I was in college, I directly asked if I could skip a few CS classes (since I already knew the basics) and just show up to take the midterm and finals. They all said yes, and I passed to get the credit.
So not all professors are anal about mandatory attendance; they're the grown-ups.
Re:Conflicts of Interest & a House of Cards
on
Our Ratings, Ourselves
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I recently did some web work for a big, evil pharma company via a marketing firm, and I found it amazing how much money they're willing to throw away on "marketing websites" that get virtually no traffic.
I submitted a "6month website status report" last week (because detailed webstats weren't wanted for some reason), and for all the thousands they've spent and will continue to spend on maintenance, the site only averages 12 unique visits per day (including SE bots)... and they're happy with this. *shrug*. The air up there...
You're right, this money should have gone to a "Faith-based organization", then at least it would have done some Good(TM)! Damn scientists always mucking around in things they shouldn't! Hey... I hope you weren't being sarcastic, heathen.
Greedy control-freaks of the world, rejoice!
Egalitarian people of the world, *sob*
It's too bad that the control-freaks actually own much of both the wire & media; they actually have a chance to subvert - "for our own good" - the open end-to-end net with their master/serf model. All part of the plan...
a world where no one is required to work is a good thing.
Except from the point of view of religious zealots and others would seek to control people. A job -- either actually useful and in demand, or "make work" artificial -- keeps people busy and usually under somebody's thumb.
Some people really believe that "idles hands are the devils tools", but IMO, future self-sufficiency (with nanotech and other huge efficiencies) will eventually allow for a leisure society as long as the theocratic tragedian "suffering is good" idea doesn't get in the way.
But honestly, as far as this space elevator is concerned, what exactly is the practical reason that it is discussed so often?
Because, honestly, this fountain of paradise is definitely within the realm of possibility (despite all the usual naysaying pessimism), and it's the only way to sustainably and very cheaply get mass out of the gravity well. Chemical rockets don't scale.
I know that a lot of people have romantic notions ingrained in their psyche about space travel being all about riding independant phallic rockets into orbit. By comparison a space elevator would be seen as a giant liability anchored to the ground with travel rights subject to the political whims of the various elevators' gatekeepers.
Yay. More TLD's that nobody but spammers will use. Everybody else will continue to default to the "gold standard" in domain branding: the.COM.
.COM has been-- and will be for a long time -- the most recognized and most valuable namespace.
(Personally, I almost never care where a domain is hosted, because I use Google to search for my "bookmarks" and rarely type-in domain URLs manually. The new TLDs are just a limited opportunity for registrars to print new money, IMO.)
What technology would make it possible for us (in the sense of you, I or our great-grandchildren) to get off this "rock" in significant numbers?
Chemical rockets are out of the question on this scale, but here are two realistic options, IMO:
An equatorial ring of space elevators that is able to physically move bio-bodies w/ bio-brains offworld faster than they are being being born (~356,000 people/day if we assume the aging disease has been cured by then). SPS-powered.
Transmitting your pattern of mind (aka: "you") to an offworld host reality and/or replacement body (bio or not) in reality. This option's too shockingly sci-fi for most to take seriously.
Few people realize that Moore's Law is just one component of an even greater overall exponential trend which has been called The Law of Accelerating Returns (by Ray Kurzweil).
Basically, it has been observed that any evolutionary process (including technology) will progress exponentially as it builds on past progress, with barely perceptable slow-down/speed-up "S-curves" as paradigm shifts occur.
Moore's Law is certainly an important component of this trend, as it relates to computing power and eventual AI/IA accelerating to Singularity in ~25 years, but there are many others in parallel: storage space, networking bandwidth, # of internet nodes, transportation speed, etc.
One thing that certainly ISN'T keeping pace with our technology is our old evolutionary psychology; hopefully we can fix some of the more disgusting aspects of human nature before it's too late.
Blatant plagiarism is a far worse offense than simple copyright infringement, you ass. Almost every(1) creator would agree on that.
1)Only the greediest of the greedy care less about their work being falsly credited to someone else than they do about potential DRM dollars from copyright artificial scarcity.
Hey, at least it's not as bad as it could have been: I was fearing an entire day of "Roland Piqypail" spam articles where the joke was on us (all the way to the bank).
I think the problem is that the parent poster is either using a broken mailreader that doesn't understand how to handle the multiplart/alternative mimetype, or, he assumes that google is as stupid as some spammers and will ONLY send text/html (rather than text/plain AND text/html parts).
It would have been a better joke if you could actually see your quota size increasing fractionally every 50ms. Mine only updates on page refresh every so often.
An even better idea would be keep the joke going, but peg everybody's available space just below the exponentially increasing $/GB curve. The only downside is that you make less money that way (because it's too fair), and you don't get to beat your chest in press releases when you graciously bump up the available space in big delayed steps.
I've always read that the ratio of introverts (mostly geeks) to extroverts in society was about 1 in 10. I assumed this was cross-gender, so maybe there's another reason at work, such as cultural attitudes about certain kinds of work. Aren't more Indian chicks into coding?
Very funny, except how much history is packed into those 2.5 years? Quite a bit. It's the whole exponential nature of progress thing. Every year that we build on past advances we compress more progress into less time (until... Singularity in ~2030).
Oh, and FireFox NeuralInterface Edition 12.0.1 is much faster than IE 7.501 SP4
I think most people just learn to accept mediocrity & corruption behind the curtains of most organizations, because they see it themselves. When most people hear official PR-speak or read a privacy policy and whatnot, they know it's all BS on some level; nobody really cares.
I hear graphics people always throwing around the names Tohoma and Verdana, so I know they are fonts. I have no idea WHAT they look like versus, say, Times New Roman, or Arial, which, by the way, are the ONLY TWO FONTS anybody cares about.
The only major difference you need to know, is if it's a sans-serif or serif font.
sans-serif fonts such as Arial, Verdana, and Trebuchet are easy on the eyes on low DPI displays like your monitor (~100DPI), but serif fonts such as Times New Roman, with their tiny details, are best used in print with much higher DPI resolution.
I almost always go with a font-family of Verdana with fallback to generic sans-serif, because it just looks the best, even if it is a slightly x over-sized font.
Puh-leeeaze, the data is all that really matters (unless you obsess over the physical containers like many collectors do), and I bet there's still tens of thousands of copies out there. For one, my dad has a copy of it in the attic, along with many other abandonware apps from only two decades ago.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if anybody's written a B.S. detector? One that can score:
The funny thing is that I'd be midly angry if it were any other post you copied, but Singularity awareness must increase by any means...
BSD is only more free if you consider the freedom to "enslave", freedom.
Back when I was in college, I directly asked if I could skip a few CS classes (since I already knew the basics) and just show up to take the midterm and finals. They all said yes, and I passed to get the credit.
So not all professors are anal about mandatory attendance; they're the grown-ups.
I submitted a "6month website status report" last week (because detailed webstats weren't wanted for some reason), and for all the thousands they've spent and will continue to spend on maintenance, the site only averages 12 unique visits per day (including SE bots)... and they're happy with this. *shrug*. The air up there...
You're right, this money should have gone to a "Faith-based organization", then at least it would have done some Good(TM)! Damn scientists always mucking around in things they shouldn't! Hey... I hope you weren't being sarcastic, heathen.
Egalitarian people of the world, *sob*
It's too bad that the control-freaks actually own much of both the wire & media; they actually have a chance to subvert - "for our own good" - the open end-to-end net with their master/serf model. All part of the plan...
Except from the point of view of religious zealots and others would seek to control people. A job -- either actually useful and in demand, or "make work" artificial -- keeps people busy and usually under somebody's thumb.
Some people really believe that "idles hands are the devils tools", but IMO, future self-sufficiency (with nanotech and other huge efficiencies) will eventually allow for a leisure society as long as the theocratic tragedian "suffering is good" idea doesn't get in the way.
Because, honestly, this fountain of paradise is definitely within the realm of possibility (despite all the usual naysaying pessimism), and it's the only way to sustainably and very cheaply get mass out of the gravity well. Chemical rockets don't scale.
I know that a lot of people have romantic notions ingrained in their psyche about space travel being all about riding independant phallic rockets into orbit. By comparison a space elevator would be seen as a giant liability anchored to the ground with travel rights subject to the political whims of the various elevators' gatekeepers.
(Personally, I almost never care where a domain is hosted, because I use Google to search for my "bookmarks" and rarely type-in domain URLs manually. The new TLDs are just a limited opportunity for registrars to print new money, IMO.)
I will be selling all of my shares at once! There is no place for humanity in a *serious* corporation!
Chemical rockets are out of the question on this scale, but here are two realistic options, IMO:
Basically, it has been observed that any evolutionary process (including technology) will progress exponentially as it builds on past progress, with barely perceptable slow-down/speed-up "S-curves" as paradigm shifts occur.
Moore's Law is certainly an important component of this trend, as it relates to computing power and eventual AI/IA accelerating to Singularity in ~25 years, but there are many others in parallel: storage space, networking bandwidth, # of internet nodes, transportation speed, etc.
One thing that certainly ISN'T keeping pace with our technology is our old evolutionary psychology; hopefully we can fix some of the more disgusting aspects of human nature before it's too late.
1)Only the greediest of the greedy care less about their work being falsly credited to someone else than they do about potential DRM dollars from copyright artificial scarcity.
Just a coincidence? Or do they have some new TV campaign I'm not aware of?
You mean like this dork who was caught lipsynching "My Hero" on his webcam? I admit, I too have lipsung to stupid songs, but I'm smart enough not to get caught... :-)
Hey, at least it's not as bad as it could have been: I was fearing an entire day of "Roland Piqypail" spam articles where the joke was on us (all the way to the bank).
I think the problem is that the parent poster is either using a broken mailreader that doesn't understand how to handle the multiplart/alternative mimetype, or, he assumes that google is as stupid as some spammers and will ONLY send text/html (rather than text/plain AND text/html parts).
An even better idea would be keep the joke going, but peg everybody's available space just below the exponentially increasing $/GB curve. The only downside is that you make less money that way (because it's too fair), and you don't get to beat your chest in press releases when you graciously bump up the available space in big delayed steps.
I've always read that the ratio of introverts (mostly geeks) to extroverts in society was about 1 in 10. I assumed this was cross-gender, so maybe there's another reason at work, such as cultural attitudes about certain kinds of work. Aren't more Indian chicks into coding?
Oh, and FireFox NeuralInterface Edition 12.0.1 is much faster than IE 7.501 SP4
I think most people just learn to accept mediocrity & corruption behind the curtains of most organizations, because they see it themselves. When most people hear official PR-speak or read a privacy policy and whatnot, they know it's all BS on some level; nobody really cares.
Ray Kurzweil, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Hans Moravec, and many other credible thinkers put their conservative extrapolation to Singularity much earlier: About 2030.
The only major difference you need to know, is if it's a sans-serif or serif font.
sans-serif fonts such as Arial, Verdana, and Trebuchet are easy on the eyes on low DPI displays like your monitor (~100DPI), but serif fonts such as Times New Roman, with their tiny details, are best used in print with much higher DPI resolution.
I almost always go with a font-family of Verdana with fallback to generic sans-serif, because it just looks the best, even if it is a slightly x over-sized font.
Puh-leeeaze, the data is all that really matters (unless you obsess over the physical containers like many collectors do), and I bet there's still tens of thousands of copies out there. For one, my dad has a copy of it in the attic, along with many other abandonware apps from only two decades ago.