If you actually read TFA you'll see the low-powered bomb was as intended as a test, and he planned to use bombs 10x as powerful as that for a major terrorist attack on 11 airliners over the Pacific ocean. Sound familiar?
Yes, it sounds like another failed plot, broken up in 1995 by ordinary police work without the aid of warrentless wiretapping, extreme rendition, torture, or invasion of sovereign nations.
The odd thing is that in 1995 ordinary good police work broke up a serious plot to bomb planes and no one ran hysterically in circles screaming the world was going to end if we didn't all go thirsty on our next international flight. Whereas in 2006, acting on "information" that was tortured out of a suspect in Pakistan a purported plot that violates empirically known facts of chemical synthesis was broken up, and much hysteria ensued.
So while the plot looks vaguely familiar--there is a family resemblence, Witgenstein might say--the reaction looks totally unfamiliar. It's almost as if the organs of the state want us to be afraid, even though there is so much less to be afrid of.
Violence in pursuit of peace and freedom is terrible inefficient. Civil disobedience in one form or another is vastly more effective, as the case of Gandhi's India shows.
People who choose violence as a means of pursuing their goals are either a) immensely stupid or b) not really interested in the purported goal, but really interested in exploiting the chaos that violence brings. There is a final possibility, that they are cowards. Civil disobedience requires far greater courage than blowing yourself up, because it takes away your control of the situation.
Many of us are aware of how beneficial it is to the Bush/Blair folks to keep everyone scared and to portray the current world situation as a state of war. It is worth remembering that this state of war benefits the leaders on the other side just as much or more. It gives them power and prestige within their communities, where otherwise they would just be arrogant blowhards with major adequacy issues.
The one fact we can be sure of: people using violence to bring about political change are not interested in bringing about the goals they claim to be pursuing. If they did, they would use more efficient means.
Whether you actually are can only be decided from whether your actions are in keeping with that organisation's goals.
There is no doubt that there are large, powerful Muslim organizations, up to and including the Clerical Council that has the final say in Iran, which support the goals of Islamic terrorists.
This is not "all Muslims" by any means, but there is no doubt that these are Muslim organizations and they do represent a significant minority of Muslims (even dictatorships require a minimum minority support, as the old USSR showed) and they are as "Muslim" in their character as any moderate Muslim organization.
There is likewise no doubt that these organizations have sound scriptural and doctrinal justification for their acts, just as Christian organizations have been able to justify the most terrible tortures by reference to scripture and general doctrine. The Koran is comparable to the Old Testament in its exhortations to violence against those who do not submit to god, and there is no levening New Testament commandment of love to go with it.
So the argument that terrorists aren't "really Muslim" is about as interesting as the argument that the Soviets weren't "really communist". The point is that there is a significant group of people, who are Muslims in the ordinary sense of the word, who are blowing people up, purported contradiction with the articles of their faith notwithstanding.
It would be just as wrong to declare all terrorists non-Muslim as it would be to declare all Muslims terrorists.
Almost all terrorists have been foreign nationals flying on a passport from a mid-east country.
Your claim is trivially false.
Even if we just focus on successful terrorist attacks, the Madrid, London and Mumbai bombings were not carried out primarily by foreign nationals carrying passports from a mid-east country.
If we are willing to count the alleged terrorist cells recently broken up in Canada (where the evidence and plot look plausible) and Britain (where the evidence and plot look thin and absurd) then the numbers get even more skewed away from the Middle East.
The remarkable thing is that we are arguing over the national identity of people who pose a negligable threat to us, while doing nothing about things that kill far more people every year, like falling down, and getting struck by lightning.
Planet: A celestial object orbiting a star that is massive enough for its own gravity to warp itself into a nearly round, spherical shape...
The question is, why use the word "planet" for this class of bodies, when the definition is completely unrelated to the classical term?
Historically, a "planet" was a body that had three unrelated properties:
1) It orbits the Sun 2) It is far enough from the Earth to not show a disc and not have any visible moons 3) It is large enough to be visible from the Earth without too much trouble
These are the things that were called planets up until recently. With the invention of the telescope we got a couple of new ones, but apart from Pluto they were so similar to the other gas giants in the outer solar system as to be obviously classifiable in the same way.
But these properties have no interest to the scientific community, which is more interested in planetary formation and current planetary physics than how far things are from Earth. If any planet had had a visible moon or was close enough to show a visible disk for part of the year, for example, we might not have arrived at the concept of "planet" in the first place, but come up with some other sort of classification scheme for celistial bodies.
As such, "planet" is an arbitrary historical term that has as much place in the scientific lexicon as phlogiston or caloric.
Re:Formal study vs. Hard Work
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The Expert Mind
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Winning a presidency is not an easy thing to do, and Bush is good enough that he makes it look like anyone can do it.
The presidency is not won by a person, but a team. The team with the most money and the fewest ethical constraints generally wins.
It's a blanket term used for stuff in the universe we think is there but haven't seen because we can not detect it's presence.
It is worth pointing out (as I do every time this topic comes up on/.) that there are multiple dark matter problems on different scales, and there may be multiple kinds of dark matter to explain them (or conversly, multiple defects in our understanding of the laws govering large-scale gravitational dynamics.)
Galactic dark matter, which is used to explain the flat rotation curves of spiral galaxies, could be baryonic--that is, the same stuff we are made out of. There are small enough amounts of it that if it is baryonic it is still consistent with limits on baryon density from primordial nucleosynthesis.
Dark matter on much larger scales cannot be baryonic, and so more exotic particles are required.
Dark matter requires at least three properties to fit the observations:
1) There has to be a lot of it (suggesting a light elementary particle, but not a heavy neutrino because they are too light)
2) It has to have the right dissipation properties. Galaxies, stars and people form because ordinary matter loses kinetic energy to heat in collisions at a fairly high rate. At different scales dark matter needs to lose energy at just the right rate. If it is insufficiently dissipative then galaxy formation does not occur at all, and if it is too disipative then it will condense along with baryonic matter and not give the large scale structure required. It is tricky to get the right mix, especially on all scales.
3) It needs to be hard to detect. If dark matter as an exotic particle exists, it is here now, all around us. Various deep underground experiments have been trying to detect it for over ten years now without any success.
It sounds like this announcement, which is the worst kind of sensationalist science-by-press-release, may be about a detailed study of a colliding cluster, which allows us to pin down the dynamical parameters of the missing matter a bit more precisely. But until we see it in AP.J., who knows?
The drug companies need to recover enough money to support all their research -- including trials of the many compounds that just don't work out. And they also need to self-insure against liability should one of their products kill or maim a bunch of folks even after all the testing.
In common law countries, the courts create common law that is every bit as binding as legislative law.
And just in passing, the executive branch of governments in common law countries has railed against "the abomination of judge-made law" since at least the time of James I/VI back in 1600 or so, and probably earlier.
Socialism at it's best. History is repeating itself, types of government have ceased to matter (democracy, socialist, communist), corporations/money run the place.
Instead, her preferred solution is to home page Google and search for the sites there. I've explained the inherent wastefulness of using search for something where just typing into the Firefox's address bar will do the trick... but no dice.
"Inherent wastefulness"?
Nope.
"Different way of doing things."
She is finding the information she wants in a way that lowers her cognative load. Who knows what goes on in her mind or how it is organized. There is nothing "inherently wasteful" about doing things the way she finds most efficient, and the argument, "If your brain were organized differently than it actually is you would find this other way of doing things more effective" is not germaine.
I knew a woman once who was failing art history because she couldn't remember dates. But she is a highly skilled bargainer when it comes to shopping, and has left entire retail districts in European cities reeling. So she hit upon the idea of translating dates in her head to prices, and passed with flying colours. She found an internal tool for organizing information and applied it to a novel problem.
You would probably say what she was doing was "inherently wasteful", but you'd be neglecting the fact that it actually solved the real problem that she actually had, which the "inherently efficient" advice "just remember the dates" ("just type it into the address bar") would not solve.
Yeah, this is more of a Beavis vs Butthead story, and is fairly typical of the way new technology is introduced.
Part 1: Clever, arrogant guy gets brilliant idea and develops it to the point where he is convinced it'll change the world. That's the science and tech part. Now it's all done, ok? There is no more science or technology in this story after this point. Only politics and monkey psychology.
Part 2: Clever, arrogant guy tries to change the course of history in a year or so, and cash in hugely in the process, by selling his idea or some instantiation thereof to established industry players. He pisses off everyone in the industry in the processes, which is easy to do because they are at least as arrogant and far less clever than he is.
Part 3: A messy, improbably stupid battle of wills ensues as the industry tries to do an end-run around the inventor and the inventor tries to harrass the industry in to buying his tech. This can go on for as long as decades, but if anyone "gave in" it would be a matter of "losing face", and "face" is extremely important to monkeys. If a monkey loses face, he will be demoted in the hierarchy of the troop, and that has all kinds of costs associated with it, including potential mating opportunities. So evolution has pretty much tuned monkeys up to act like arrogant assholes in these situations, because arrogant assholes are what female monkeys are most interested in, because arrogant assholes can command a greater fraction of the troop's resources.
Epilogue: Many years later, the technology is widely adopted and all concerned are hailed for their forward-looking stance and innovative thinking. Companies that fought the tech tooth and nail now tout themselves as early adopters (which they may well be, relative to other companies.) The original inventor, ignoring all the progress that has been made in making his original prototype a practical, manufacturable device, is hailed as a great innovator.
The amazing thing about modern social democratic market societies is that we are actually the most efficient innovators in history, and not by a small fraction.
Look at all of the companies where the workers voted themselves higher and higher wages and more benefits... and then went bankrupt or out of business because they were no longer competitive.
Offhand, though, I can't think of a single case where a worker-run company has suffered anything comparable. Certainly not in the last few decades.
Corporate governance is about monkey psychology, which in practical terms means the tendency for arrogant idiots to rise to the top of human social hierarchies. Smart people realize their own limitations, and don't have deep-seated adequacy issues, and so tend to stay out of the climb to the "top", leaving a clear field for the kind of losers we get there. Most of whom, I agree, aren't competent to run a lemonade stand.
I understand that a military flight vs a civilian flight is totally different, but c'mon. You let me bring my GUN on the plane?
Unbelievable, unless in the U.S. soldiers don't know the difference between guns (which is what the artillery has) and rifles (which is probably what you are claiming to have carried.)
Your theory might work for gang-banging ghetto thugs, but for murderers who think they're doing Allah's work your view is entirely naive. This is ideological war, make no mistake. I'm not saying every Muslim is a terrorist or even sympathetic to them but you're being willfully blind of the common thread between them all.
Experience precedes ideology.
Ideologies only resonate with people who have experiences and personal histories that make them feel. Ideologies are the simplistic systems used by people to explain things that they can't otherwise understand, like why their world is so entirely screwed up. To the average arab, radical Islam's demonization of the West is consistent with their experience, because the reality is that the West has interfered with and messed up many things in the Arab world. This does not make radical Islam "true" in any sane sense of the word, but it does explain the resonance it gets from unreflective people, who are the majority in any group anywhere at any time.
If the West wasn't currently tacitly supporting Israel's bombing of innocent Lebanese civilians, it would be harder for Islamic radicals to recruit. But as it is, when a radical says, "The West says they want Arab democracy, but the supported Israel when it invaded and bombarded an Arab democractic state in Lebanon! We must kill the infidels before they kill us!" it has a certain prima facie plausibility.
And that creates a fertile recruiting ground for terrorists.
I agree that the game in itself would not easily survive without addicts at some level... But ultimately, I don't think the addicts are the big moneymaker for Blizzard.
If the addicts keep the game alive, and Blizzard makes its money from the game, then the addicts are indeed a big moneymaker for Blizzard, in the same way that any product division that brings in lots of customers is a big moneymaker.
What you are saying is something like, "Ford could not easily survive without the workers that make their cars, but ultimately the workers aren't the big moneymaker for Ford" because it is the purchasers who generate the ultimate revenues.
Perhaps what Blizzard has done is co-opt the addicts to facilitate the production of their online virtual world. They may not make money off them in fees gathered, any more than Ford makes money off employee auto purchases, but they are an essential part of the production cycle nonetheless.
In cold economic terms, it would be good business for Blizzard to tune the game to achieve the minimum population of addicts they need to keep the game going (and make the experience just annoying enough to regular users that they don't to play all the time, but don't want to give up their accounts, either.)
Democratic socialism levened with a healthy respect for markets is a far better mix for humans than pure capitalism (and infinitely better than pure communism, but then again, what isn't?) because it recognizes and attempts to accomodate the natural tendencies that people have, rather than arbitrarily declare them "imperfections" that must be "fought against".
This thing with the parkade is just a case where humans have behaved exactly as anyone without ideological blinkers would expect humans to behave: basically dysfunctionally. As others have pointed out, this is going to be very, very bad for the business involved because it poisons future relations with the city, and puts potential customers on alert for this kind of behaviour. It probably feels good to the belicose monkey boys at head office right now, who are jumping up and down on the board tables and hooting their alpha-ness to all who can hear, but it is a basically stupid move, and the company will eventually get kicked in the teeth for it, either by the market or by the law, or both.
Aye, faith and reason need be seperate. Reason is for science, it's how progress occurs...faith is for the development of a human being.
Faith and reason are both ways of justifying claims about the way the world actually is.
Reason is a process of justifying claims about world. Consider the claim, "There is no evidence that the God of the Bible exists in the perfectly ordinary meaning of 'exists' that everyone who is not a lawyer or pedant understands." A rational individual will tend to believe this claim because there is empirical evidence for it, and theoretical problems with the alternative--the God of the Bible is not even self-consistent, which is generally considered desireable in things that exist.
Faith is also a means of justifying claims about the world. It consists of stating, "I believe this because it seems right to me" and sometimes, "If you disagree with me things will go badly for you." People who use reason to justify their beliefs specifically eshew the latter form because it does not constitute evidence, and so to use it is to explicitly abandon the use of reason.
The two cannot be kept separate because they are both ways of justifying claims about the world, and any claim that is meaningful can be justified (or refuted) via a rational processes (note that "rational" does not mean "deductive" or "axiomatic"--experimental scientists use reason too!)
So anyone who wants to keep reason and faith separate has fundamentally misunderstood one or both of them. They cannot be kept separate because reason at least is a universal tool, so there are no rational grounds for restricting its application only to claims that the faithful are comfortable applying it to.
You're joking, right? I'd estimate 99% of the replies to this article on Slashdot are people with pre-formed hard-boiled views who are just pushing their side or looking for people who agree with them.
Perhaps English is not your first language. This is one of those subtle aspects of English that give non-native-speakers quite legitimate fits.
"Dis-interested" in this context means that you do not have a financial interest in a given position.
The CEO of a company that is embedded in the hydrocarbon economy--an oil, coal or automobile company, to name but a few examples--has an interest in convincing people that global warming is nothing to worry about, because their company's profits and the CEO's fat bonus and golden handshake depends on it.
The average/. poster has no such interest. Even those of us, like me, who are heavily invested in the stock market, are mostly smart enough to be well-diversified, and therefore not hugely exposed to a downturn in the fosil energy sector.
"Dis-interested" does not mean "has no opinion." It means, "has no non-rational (financial , religious or similar) reason for pushing a particular opinion over others."
There are still lots of folks out there who are trying the old scam of trying to get VCs to give them money based on a business plan and a Flash demo. It's just that now instead of "we'll give it away at a loss, but make it up on volume" there's the "we'll create a 'community' and sell advertising" theme.
But this is completely different. The first model is insanely stupid--the sort of thing that only bubblistas would invest in (and they did). The second is not only a potentially viable business model, it may be the only viable business model on the Web, absent some other viable form of micropayments.
As it stands, ads are the only known micropayment system that has a proven track-record because they do not suffer from any of the defects that plague other ideas. They have the lowest possible transaction cost and require no book-keeping. The disputes surrounding page view and click-through issues are an indication of how terribly difficult any real micropayment system would be to implement. Ads are as close as anyone is likely to get.
The drug companies don't get any bennefit from producing drugs that kill people.
I'm not sure what you intend by this statement. As stated, it isn't a logical proposition because it lacks proper qualifiers, and no set of qualifiers I can come up with makes any sense--they produce propositions that are either trivially false or trivially true.
You can't mean: "No drug company ever gets any benefit from producing any drug that kills anyone" because that is so trivially false that no one readin/. is likely to believe it. Even asprin is thought likely to kill people via its contribution to Reye's syndrome, and acetaminophen-induced liver toxicity is a rare but sometimes lethal side-effect of that common pain killer.
You might also mean: "No drug company ever gets any benefit from producing any drug that kill everyone who takes it", and this is trivially true, and entirely uninteresting.
All drugs have a risk of death associated with them. For some of the population that risk is typically much higher than average. If that high-risk population is small, it may very well be to a drug company's benefit to produce a drug that kills those people. And then cover it up for as long as possible, the way Merck was accused of doing with Vioxx.
Like it or not some levels of 'trusted computing' will be needed or desired in the future - especially by governments and big businesses, and saying that it's unacceptable is only going to kill FOSS in those areas.
This in no way interferes with systems that help the user trust their computer.
The only thing here is stuff to prevent hardware manufacturers from impeding user's freedom to run alternative code. And because users--not hardware manufacturers--own user's computers, it would obviously be impossible for any user to trust a computer that had secret keys built into by the hardware manufacturer. I know I wouldn't.
No system that keeps secrets from the user is "trusted computing". If I am to trust my computer, it must not keep secrets from me. I must have full access to any keys or validation data that are encoded in the hardware. If I do not have that access, I cannot trust my computer, and nothing in the GPLv3 impedes me from knowing those keys etc.
So there is obviously no problem with the GPLv3 interfering with the user's trust of their computer.
The fundamental thing is that we infer the existence of black holes because of the inadquacy of alternatives.
If a generic alternative exists, we need to stop and question all inferences about black holes. There is little or nothing that can directly confirm the existence of an event horizon (direct observation of the characteristic spectrum of Hawking radiation might do it, but so far as I know that is beyond the dreams of the most audacious observers.)
In life-critical applications locking the software is a must in many cases.
If it is a must, why is it not done? Because the fact is, and you'll have to trust me on this, it is not done.
In reality, as opposed to in paranoid fantasy, physical access controls and good policy are what prevent anyone from messing with life-critical systems. There is no evidence at all that anyone anywhere has ever been harmed by alternate code being run on such systems.
The invocation of this issue is just an unsubstantiated scare tactic, based on faith rather than evidence.
Slashdot Mirror
If you actually read TFA you'll see the low-powered bomb was as intended as a test, and he planned to use bombs 10x as powerful as that for a major terrorist attack on 11 airliners over the Pacific ocean. Sound familiar?
Yes, it sounds like another failed plot, broken up in 1995 by ordinary police work without the aid of warrentless wiretapping, extreme rendition, torture, or invasion of sovereign nations.
The odd thing is that in 1995 ordinary good police work broke up a serious plot to bomb planes and no one ran hysterically in circles screaming the world was going to end if we didn't all go thirsty on our next international flight. Whereas in 2006, acting on "information" that was tortured out of a suspect in Pakistan a purported plot that violates empirically known facts of chemical synthesis was broken up, and much hysteria ensued.
So while the plot looks vaguely familiar--there is a family resemblence, Witgenstein might say--the reaction looks totally unfamiliar. It's almost as if the organs of the state want us to be afraid, even though there is so much less to be afrid of.
This is a tremendously important point.
Violence in pursuit of peace and freedom is terrible inefficient. Civil disobedience in one form or another is vastly more effective, as the case of Gandhi's India shows.
People who choose violence as a means of pursuing their goals are either a) immensely stupid or b) not really interested in the purported goal, but really interested in exploiting the chaos that violence brings. There is a final possibility, that they are cowards. Civil disobedience requires far greater courage than blowing yourself up, because it takes away your control of the situation.
Many of us are aware of how beneficial it is to the Bush/Blair folks to keep everyone scared and to portray the current world situation as a state of war. It is worth remembering that this state of war benefits the leaders on the other side just as much or more. It gives them power and prestige within their communities, where otherwise they would just be arrogant blowhards with major adequacy issues.
The one fact we can be sure of: people using violence to bring about political change are not interested in bringing about the goals they claim to be pursuing. If they did, they would use more efficient means.
Whether you actually are can only be decided from whether your actions are in keeping with that organisation's goals.
There is no doubt that there are large, powerful Muslim organizations, up to and including the Clerical Council that has the final say in Iran, which support the goals of Islamic terrorists.
This is not "all Muslims" by any means, but there is no doubt that these are Muslim organizations and they do represent a significant minority of Muslims (even dictatorships require a minimum minority support, as the old USSR showed) and they are as "Muslim" in their character as any moderate Muslim organization.
There is likewise no doubt that these organizations have sound scriptural and doctrinal justification for their acts, just as Christian organizations have been able to justify the most terrible tortures by reference to scripture and general doctrine. The Koran is comparable to the Old Testament in its exhortations to violence against those who do not submit to god, and there is no levening New Testament commandment of love to go with it.
So the argument that terrorists aren't "really Muslim" is about as interesting as the argument that the Soviets weren't "really communist". The point is that there is a significant group of people, who are Muslims in the ordinary sense of the word, who are blowing people up, purported contradiction with the articles of their faith notwithstanding.
It would be just as wrong to declare all terrorists non-Muslim as it would be to declare all Muslims terrorists.
Almost all terrorists have been foreign nationals flying on a passport from a mid-east country.
Your claim is trivially false.
Even if we just focus on successful terrorist attacks, the Madrid, London and Mumbai bombings were not carried out primarily by foreign nationals carrying passports from a mid-east country.
If we are willing to count the alleged terrorist cells recently broken up in Canada (where the evidence and plot look plausible) and Britain (where the evidence and plot look thin and absurd) then the numbers get even more skewed away from the Middle East.
The remarkable thing is that we are arguing over the national identity of people who pose a negligable threat to us, while doing nothing about things that kill far more people every year, like falling down, and getting struck by lightning.
Planet: A celestial object orbiting a star that is massive enough for its own gravity to warp itself into a nearly round, spherical shape...
The question is, why use the word "planet" for this class of bodies, when the definition is completely unrelated to the classical term?
Historically, a "planet" was a body that had three unrelated properties:
1) It orbits the Sun
2) It is far enough from the Earth to not show a disc and not have any visible moons
3) It is large enough to be visible from the Earth without too much trouble
These are the things that were called planets up until recently. With the invention of the telescope we got a couple of new ones, but apart from Pluto they were so similar to the other gas giants in the outer solar system as to be obviously classifiable in the same way.
But these properties have no interest to the scientific community, which is more interested in planetary formation and current planetary physics than how far things are from Earth. If any planet had had a visible moon or was close enough to show a visible disk for part of the year, for example, we might not have arrived at the concept of "planet" in the first place, but come up with some other sort of classification scheme for celistial bodies.
As such, "planet" is an arbitrary historical term that has as much place in the scientific lexicon as phlogiston or caloric.
Winning a presidency is not an easy thing to do, and Bush is good enough that he makes it look like anyone can do it.
The presidency is not won by a person, but a team. The team with the most money and the fewest ethical constraints generally wins.
It's a blanket term used for stuff in the universe we think is there but haven't seen because we can not detect it's presence.
/.) that there are multiple dark matter problems on different scales, and there may be multiple kinds of dark matter to explain them (or conversly, multiple defects in our understanding of the laws govering large-scale gravitational dynamics.)
It is worth pointing out (as I do every time this topic comes up on
Galactic dark matter, which is used to explain the flat rotation curves of spiral galaxies, could be baryonic--that is, the same stuff we are made out of. There are small enough amounts of it that if it is baryonic it is still consistent with limits on baryon density from primordial nucleosynthesis.
Dark matter on much larger scales cannot be baryonic, and so more exotic particles are required.
Dark matter requires at least three properties to fit the observations:
1) There has to be a lot of it (suggesting a light elementary particle, but not a heavy neutrino because they are too light)
2) It has to have the right dissipation properties. Galaxies, stars and people form because ordinary matter loses kinetic energy to heat in collisions at a fairly high rate. At different scales dark matter needs to lose energy at just the right rate. If it is insufficiently dissipative then galaxy formation does not occur at all, and if it is too disipative then it will condense along with baryonic matter and not give the large scale structure required. It is tricky to get the right mix, especially on all scales.
3) It needs to be hard to detect. If dark matter as an exotic particle exists, it is here now, all around us. Various deep underground experiments have been trying to detect it for over ten years now without any success.
It sounds like this announcement, which is the worst kind of sensationalist science-by-press-release, may be about a detailed study of a colliding cluster, which allows us to pin down the dynamical parameters of the missing matter a bit more precisely. But until we see it in AP.J., who knows?
The drug companies need to recover enough money to support all their research -- including trials of the many compounds that just don't work out. And they also need to self-insure against liability should one of their products kill or maim a bunch of folks even after all the testing.
Drug companies need to recover enough money to support all of their marketing. Research budgets at drug majors are always considerably smaller than marketing budgets.
In common law countries, the courts create common law that is every bit as binding as legislative law.
And just in passing, the executive branch of governments in common law countries has railed against "the abomination of judge-made law" since at least the time of James I/VI back in 1600 or so, and probably earlier.
Socialism at it's best. History is repeating itself, types of government have ceased to matter (democracy, socialist, communist), corporations/money run the place.
Corporations are persons.
Persons are animals.
Some animals are more equal than others.
Instead, her preferred solution is to home page Google and search for the sites there. I've explained the inherent wastefulness of using search for something where just typing into the Firefox's address bar will do the trick... but no dice.
"Inherent wastefulness"?
Nope.
"Different way of doing things."
She is finding the information she wants in a way that lowers her cognative load. Who knows what goes on in her mind or how it is organized. There is nothing "inherently wasteful" about doing things the way she finds most efficient, and the argument, "If your brain were organized differently than it actually is you would find this other way of doing things more effective" is not germaine.
I knew a woman once who was failing art history because she couldn't remember dates. But she is a highly skilled bargainer when it comes to shopping, and has left entire retail districts in European cities reeling. So she hit upon the idea of translating dates in her head to prices, and passed with flying colours. She found an internal tool for organizing information and applied it to a novel problem.
You would probably say what she was doing was "inherently wasteful", but you'd be neglecting the fact that it actually solved the real problem that she actually had, which the "inherently efficient" advice "just remember the dates" ("just type it into the address bar") would not solve.
This isn't a David vs. Goliath story.
Yeah, this is more of a Beavis vs Butthead story, and is fairly typical of the way new technology is introduced.
Part 1: Clever, arrogant guy gets brilliant idea and develops it to the point where he is convinced it'll change the world. That's the science and tech part. Now it's all done, ok? There is no more science or technology in this story after this point. Only politics and monkey psychology.
Part 2: Clever, arrogant guy tries to change the course of history in a year or so, and cash in hugely in the process, by selling his idea or some instantiation thereof to established industry players. He pisses off everyone in the industry in the processes, which is easy to do because they are at least as arrogant and far less clever than he is.
Part 3: A messy, improbably stupid battle of wills ensues as the industry tries to do an end-run around the inventor and the inventor tries to harrass the industry in to buying his tech. This can go on for as long as decades, but if anyone "gave in" it would be a matter of "losing face", and "face" is extremely important to monkeys. If a monkey loses face, he will be demoted in the hierarchy of the troop, and that has all kinds of costs associated with it, including potential mating opportunities. So evolution has pretty much tuned monkeys up to act like arrogant assholes in these situations, because arrogant assholes are what female monkeys are most interested in, because arrogant assholes can command a greater fraction of the troop's resources.
Epilogue: Many years later, the technology is widely adopted and all concerned are hailed for their forward-looking stance and innovative thinking. Companies that fought the tech tooth and nail now tout themselves as early adopters (which they may well be, relative to other companies.) The original inventor, ignoring all the progress that has been made in making his original prototype a practical, manufacturable device, is hailed as a great innovator.
The amazing thing about modern social democratic market societies is that we are actually the most efficient innovators in history, and not by a small fraction.
Look at all of the companies where the workers voted themselves higher and higher wages and more benefits... and then went bankrupt or out of business because they were no longer competitive.
I sure do--that would be guys like these, right?
Offhand, though, I can't think of a single case where a worker-run company has suffered anything comparable. Certainly not in the last few decades.
Corporate governance is about monkey psychology, which in practical terms means the tendency for arrogant idiots to rise to the top of human social hierarchies. Smart people realize their own limitations, and don't have deep-seated adequacy issues, and so tend to stay out of the climb to the "top", leaving a clear field for the kind of losers we get there. Most of whom, I agree, aren't competent to run a lemonade stand.
I understand that a military flight vs a civilian flight is totally different, but c'mon. You let me bring my GUN on the plane?
Unbelievable, unless in the U.S. soldiers don't know the difference between guns (which is what the artillery has) and rifles (which is probably what you are claiming to have carried.)
Your theory might work for gang-banging ghetto thugs, but for murderers who think they're doing Allah's work your view is entirely naive. This is ideological war, make no mistake. I'm not saying every Muslim is a terrorist or even sympathetic to them but you're being willfully blind of the common thread between them all.
Experience precedes ideology.
Ideologies only resonate with people who have experiences and personal histories that make them feel. Ideologies are the simplistic systems used by people to explain things that they can't otherwise understand, like why their world is so entirely screwed up. To the average arab, radical Islam's demonization of the West is consistent with their experience, because the reality is that the West has interfered with and messed up many things in the Arab world. This does not make radical Islam "true" in any sane sense of the word, but it does explain the resonance it gets from unreflective people, who are the majority in any group anywhere at any time.
If the West wasn't currently tacitly supporting Israel's bombing of innocent Lebanese civilians, it would be harder for Islamic radicals to recruit. But as it is, when a radical says, "The West says they want Arab democracy, but the supported Israel when it invaded and bombarded an Arab democractic state in Lebanon! We must kill the infidels before they kill us!" it has a certain prima facie plausibility.
And that creates a fertile recruiting ground for terrorists.
I agree that the game in itself would not easily survive without addicts at some level... But ultimately, I don't think the addicts are the big moneymaker for Blizzard.
If the addicts keep the game alive, and Blizzard makes its money from the game, then the addicts are indeed a big moneymaker for Blizzard, in the same way that any product division that brings in lots of customers is a big moneymaker.
What you are saying is something like, "Ford could not easily survive without the workers that make their cars, but ultimately the workers aren't the big moneymaker for Ford" because it is the purchasers who generate the ultimate revenues.
Perhaps what Blizzard has done is co-opt the addicts to facilitate the production of their online virtual world. They may not make money off them in fees gathered, any more than Ford makes money off employee auto purchases, but they are an essential part of the production cycle nonetheless.
In cold economic terms, it would be good business for Blizzard to tune the game to achieve the minimum population of addicts they need to keep the game going (and make the experience just annoying enough to regular users that they don't to play all the time, but don't want to give up their accounts, either.)
Ahh... Capitalism.
Nope.
Ahh... Humanity.
Democratic socialism levened with a healthy respect for markets is a far better mix for humans than pure capitalism (and infinitely better than pure communism, but then again, what isn't?) because it recognizes and attempts to accomodate the natural tendencies that people have, rather than arbitrarily declare them "imperfections" that must be "fought against".
This thing with the parkade is just a case where humans have behaved exactly as anyone without ideological blinkers would expect humans to behave: basically dysfunctionally. As others have pointed out, this is going to be very, very bad for the business involved because it poisons future relations with the city, and puts potential customers on alert for this kind of behaviour. It probably feels good to the belicose monkey boys at head office right now, who are jumping up and down on the board tables and hooting their alpha-ness to all who can hear, but it is a basically stupid move, and the company will eventually get kicked in the teeth for it, either by the market or by the law, or both.
Aye, faith and reason need be seperate. Reason is for science, it's how progress occurs...faith is for the development of a human being.
Faith and reason are both ways of justifying claims about the way the world actually is.
Reason is a process of justifying claims about world. Consider the claim, "There is no evidence that the God of the Bible exists in the perfectly ordinary meaning of 'exists' that everyone who is not a lawyer or pedant understands." A rational individual will tend to believe this claim because there is empirical evidence for it, and theoretical problems with the alternative--the God of the Bible is not even self-consistent, which is generally considered desireable in things that exist.
Faith is also a means of justifying claims about the world. It consists of stating, "I believe this because it seems right to me" and sometimes, "If you disagree with me things will go badly for you." People who use reason to justify their beliefs specifically eshew the latter form because it does not constitute evidence, and so to use it is to explicitly abandon the use of reason.
The two cannot be kept separate because they are both ways of justifying claims about the world, and any claim that is meaningful can be justified (or refuted) via a rational processes (note that "rational" does not mean "deductive" or "axiomatic"--experimental scientists use reason too!)
So anyone who wants to keep reason and faith separate has fundamentally misunderstood one or both of them. They cannot be kept separate because reason at least is a universal tool, so there are no rational grounds for restricting its application only to claims that the faithful are comfortable applying it to.
You're joking, right? I'd estimate 99% of the replies to this article on Slashdot are people with pre-formed hard-boiled views who are just pushing their side or looking for people who agree with them.
/. poster has no such interest. Even those of us, like me, who are heavily invested in the stock market, are mostly smart enough to be well-diversified, and therefore not hugely exposed to a downturn in the fosil energy sector.
Perhaps English is not your first language. This is one of those subtle aspects of English that give non-native-speakers quite legitimate fits.
"Dis-interested" in this context means that you do not have a financial interest in a given position.
The CEO of a company that is embedded in the hydrocarbon economy--an oil, coal or automobile company, to name but a few examples--has an interest in convincing people that global warming is nothing to worry about, because their company's profits and the CEO's fat bonus and golden handshake depends on it.
The average
"Dis-interested" does not mean "has no opinion." It means, "has no non-rational (financial , religious or similar) reason for pushing a particular opinion over others."
There are still lots of folks out there who are trying the old scam of trying to get VCs to give them money based on a business plan and a Flash demo. It's just that now instead of "we'll give it away at a loss, but make it up on volume" there's the "we'll create a 'community' and sell advertising" theme.
But this is completely different. The first model is insanely stupid--the sort of thing that only bubblistas would invest in (and they did). The second is not only a potentially viable business model, it may be the only viable business model on the Web, absent some other viable form of micropayments.
As it stands, ads are the only known micropayment system that has a proven track-record because they do not suffer from any of the defects that plague other ideas. They have the lowest possible transaction cost and require no book-keeping. The disputes surrounding page view and click-through issues are an indication of how terribly difficult any real micropayment system would be to implement. Ads are as close as anyone is likely to get.
Zero-risk interest rates in the U.S. are around 5% and inflation is about 4%. European rates are somewhat lower and inflation is about 2%. Canadian rates are more in line with European than American, although out unemployment rate is more in line with the U.S. (i.e., low) and our public finances are unique (that is, in surplus federally and near balanced provincially.)
So most of us aren't quite in the cheap-money days of the late '90's, although the U.S. is coming close.
The drug companies don't get any bennefit from producing drugs that kill people.
/. is likely to believe it. Even asprin is thought likely to kill people via its contribution to Reye's syndrome, and acetaminophen-induced liver toxicity is a rare but sometimes lethal side-effect of that common pain killer.
I'm not sure what you intend by this statement. As stated, it isn't a logical proposition because it lacks proper qualifiers, and no set of qualifiers I can come up with makes any sense--they produce propositions that are either trivially false or trivially true.
You can't mean: "No drug company ever gets any benefit from producing any drug that kills anyone" because that is so trivially false that no one readin
You might also mean: "No drug company ever gets any benefit from producing any drug that kill everyone who takes it", and this is trivially true, and entirely uninteresting.
All drugs have a risk of death associated with them. For some of the population that risk is typically much higher than average. If that high-risk population is small, it may very well be to a drug company's benefit to produce a drug that kills those people. And then cover it up for as long as possible, the way Merck was accused of doing with Vioxx.
Like it or not some levels of 'trusted computing' will be needed or desired in the future - especially by governments and big businesses, and saying that it's unacceptable is only going to kill FOSS in those areas.
This in no way interferes with systems that help the user trust their computer.
The only thing here is stuff to prevent hardware manufacturers from impeding user's freedom to run alternative code. And because users--not hardware manufacturers--own user's computers, it would obviously be impossible for any user to trust a computer that had secret keys built into by the hardware manufacturer. I know I wouldn't.
No system that keeps secrets from the user is "trusted computing". If I am to trust my computer, it must not keep secrets from me. I must have full access to any keys or validation data that are encoded in the hardware. If I do not have that access, I cannot trust my computer, and nothing in the GPLv3 impedes me from knowing those keys etc.
So there is obviously no problem with the GPLv3 interfering with the user's trust of their computer.
The fundamental thing is that we infer the existence of black holes because of the inadquacy of alternatives.
If a generic alternative exists, we need to stop and question all inferences about black holes. There is little or nothing that can directly confirm the existence of an event horizon (direct observation of the characteristic spectrum of Hawking radiation might do it, but so far as I know that is beyond the dreams of the most audacious observers.)
In life-critical applications locking the software is a must in many cases.
If it is a must, why is it not done? Because the fact is, and you'll have to trust me on this, it is not done.
In reality, as opposed to in paranoid fantasy, physical access controls and good policy are what prevent anyone from messing with life-critical systems. There is no evidence at all that anyone anywhere has ever been harmed by alternate code being run on such systems.
The invocation of this issue is just an unsubstantiated scare tactic, based on faith rather than evidence.