"Interest rate fluctuations not withstanding"?????
You're right that the banks lend way too much. They don't lose much if they wring every last cent out of you for years then take your home and auction it.
Fortunately my mortgage is reasonable, but I live in constant fear that interest rates "fluctuate" a few percent instead of a few quarters and that I end up in a financial mess.
Only the completely stupid ones. As far as I'm concerned you can pour as many chemically inert (well, Ok - relatively inert) plastic ducks as are needed
Yeah right until they block a whale's blow hole or cause the death of a seal because the dumb animal ate the damned thing. Last time I checked fishing line and many shark nets are relatively chemically inert too but they do some damage nonetheless.
Nope I haven't used an iPhone. I haven't jumped off a cliff either, but I don't need to do so to have an opinion that doing such a thing would be stupid.
find me a phone anywhere that has 1 gb of memory I have a Nokia N70 which is last year's model: It has 1 Gig of memory. (Yes that's in the form of an expansion card, but it's still a gig). It plays music and video. Can't quote screen res but it works well. It actually runs several emulators. I can even run the doom demo.
The UI I have to admit isn't spectacular. However I wouldn't rate my IPods UI as spectacular either.
Honestly this is what I get from mac zealots who are oblivious to what else is out there all the time.
I don't get it. What's so damned special about the iPhone? Any other company puts out a device like this and I guarantee you there'd be very few people taking it up, and they'd be labelled suckers by the rest of us. However Apple does it and suddenly its cool. Honestly I have had crap luck with Apple products - even my Ipod and my fiancee's - the only personal Apple gear I've bought in 2 decades have been trouble. Her's had a scratched screen, mine has a temperamental click wheel. Without those flaws they'd be good but not spectacular for what they are.
I set up an eMac for work a few years back and in a month it was off back to the Apple shop because the mother board had just suddenly died cold. This was a rarely used but usually left on and idle developers test machine. I saw enough to tell you I hate the interface and sadly my new Vista laptop looks just like a damned Mac.
I've come to the conclusion that Apple is good at one thing: Hype that creates a fanatical following.
Mod as you will. This being/. I don't expect much.
Take a look at the stupid things that smart successful people have predicted and you'll see "smart" people can be terrible at predicting the future. Why?
1) There may be important things the person has overlooked or is unaware of. Technologies, politics etc. This is more likely if the "smart" person is commenting on something outside their own expertise. 2) Rare events can and do happen, albeit by definition less frequently than common ones. 3) "Smart" people are often surprised at how things turn out.
Would you call Bill Gates stupid? Take a look at "The Road Ahead" Would you call Isaac Netwon stupid? Yet the laws of motion turn out to be an approximation as Einstein discovered. Would you call Einstein stupid? Yet most scientists today do accept that "God does play dice".
Google for: Bad technology predictions or just: Bad predictions
Your argument is flawed. Computers can only model based on what we've learnt from real experiments. Without that data the models are useless. So a halt on biotech research until the computers can "model it all" actually starves researchers of the data required to program the machines.
We should certainly be proceeding more slowly and modeling what we can but modeling will never replace actual experimentation.
I wasn't talking about a few day jaunt in a crummy tin can. I'm talking about being able to survive this planet becoming uninhabitable.
The assumption that the rate of technological progress will continue exponentially is also flawed. There are physical limits and things improve in rapid spurts with lulls inbetween
Google person is offering to help health care organizations tell their side of the story, and this is "evil"? If you think this is "evil" then I guess you think there is no room for debate here.
So were Hitler's Nazi publicists evil or simply helping the Nazi party tell it's side of the story? Should those that denied the holocaust or backed "the final solution" bear any responsibility? I know. Godwin and all but I've always thought Godwin's law was a stupid act of censorship by ridicule. In this case a Nazi analogy is apt.
While I believe that speech should NOT be restricted, I also believe people should be held accountable for what they say and who they help say it.
What is the point of this article? That we should be planning for 100 billion years into the future, when the whole universe is around 14 billion years old? We can't even get off this damned rock yet and until we can there's no chance of our species outlasting the sun going red giant and nova which is no where near 100 billion years out.
Interesting to ponder but of not much use even to the theoreticians at this stage.
Ready to restrict people with hideous DRM and milk them for every cent they'll spend. Ready to take on slogans from the people at large because their own ad execs can no longer stomach the BS long enough to produce a slogan.
Sorry, believe it or not I've not seen the film. Always meant to, but never got round to it.
Recently watched the Godfather movies (well 1 and 2 so far) after playing the relatively recent game. Liked the first one, but I want the 3 odd hours of my life back for the travesty that was the second.
You had me right up until suggesting they didn't have a scientific method.
I'm sure I could find a better source but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method "Ancient Egyptian documents, such as early papyri, describe methods of medical diagnosis. In ancient Greek culture, the method of empiricism was described. The experimental scientific method was developed by Muslim scientists, who introduced the use of experiments to distinguish between competing scientific theories set within a generally empirical orientation, which emerged with Alhazen's optical experiments in his Book of Optics (c. 1000)."
Unfortunately Empiricism and the Greek culture is usually attributed with the "discovery" of the scientific method.
Now as for antibiotics, again modern anti-biotics - sure they didn't have them. However the ancient Chinese did have them in some primitive form.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic#History "Although potent antibiotic compounds for treatment of human diseases caused by bacteria (such as tuberculosis, bubonic plague, or leprosy) were not isolated and identified until the twentieth century, the first known use of antibiotics was by the ancient Chinese over 2,500 years ago"
How about anesthetics? To be fair your description of "precious little" is probably about right. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anesthesia "The first herbal anesthesia was administered in prehistory. Opium poppy capsules were collected in 4200 B.C., and opium poppies were farmed in Sumeria and succeeding empires. The use of opium-like preparations in anaesthesia is recorded in the Ebers Papyrus of 1500 B.C."
I was watching a documentary on Ancient Rome and a surgical kit circa 100BC pretty much matched the metal surgical tools that are still used today and were the only option until a handful of decades back.
My point is don't write off ancient cultures as primitive. They certainly didn't have the things we have that make our knowledge so much more advanced - mass manufacturing capability, near instantaneous exchange of information, electronics and precision manufacturing - but they had capable competent and inquisitive people and we're only where we are today because we built on what they invented.
The U.S. is far from perfect. But in general, the U.S. is not evil and hasn't changed in the last 10 years.
If trying to kill foreign leaders, making deals with mobsters, breaking your own laws, holding people for 5 years without charge in an overseas country to prevent them falling under your laws then coercing them to confess to crimes that weren't on the books when the person allegedly commited them, and invading countries "is not evil" in general I'd hate to know what your definition of evil is.
This is your ignorance at play. Learn to use the damned Windows Task Manager. Look under processes, then choose View->Select Columns... from the menu and enable all the IO related options. Then maximize the task manager, and sort by the various IO columns. Look for the one that's changing most.
It's not hard, it doesn't require non-standard software, and doesn't require a comp. sci. degree. At least learn to use the tools available to you or pose it as a question instead of claiming there's no easy way as far as you can tell.
Sheesh!
Now as for file locking. Download a piece of freeware called unlocker. It lets you unlock files without rebooting. I agree this is a long standing and annoying bug - there are too many of these in explorer - but with Unlocker this particular is very easily managed. Would be nice if it were fixed instead of having to work around it.
...and if you get hit in spite of not pirating? The wonders of DHCP coupled with the notoriously insecure networks that most colleges run* tend to make it drop-easy for innocents to get snagged by this dragnet of theirs.
I wonder if there's a negligence case in there against the University for not better securing the network?
That argument regarding being a U.S. citizen is somewhat weak. Most of us choose where we work, but not what country we live in. Changing jobs is usually somewhat easier than changing citizenship. You are a citizen of a country by default if you were born in that country, whereas you actively have to seek out a record deal (or at least agree to one).
Musicians are selling out. They're making a compromise in the hope that it'll pay off when historically that happens rarely if at all. They might as well buy a lottery ticket. However most musicians choose to believe that they are sooo incredibly good that they'll eventually make a squillion dollars. They've bought the RIAA dream hook line and sinker.
My musical ability isn't up to producing music for the public but if it were I wouldn't join a record label. If I were to write a book I wouldn't go to a publisher and have others make money off my work in the hope I'd be rich and famous. To do that you have to be very fortunate (lucky like a lotto winner) as well as dedicated. What percentage of authors or musicians even manage to make a living at what they do? Contrast that to what percentage of record execs or pubishers make more than just a living but are well and truly overpaid. They're selling greed, and you're buying it if you agree to their ridiculous terms. You'd be better off starting your own small label and publishing your work on the net. Others have done it, and yeah they won't get rich but many are better off than those who've gotten those "lucrative" deals. They generally aren't lucrative for the artists.
Prostitution isn't illegal in many parts of the world, but it's certainly not a pleasant way to live your life.
Working for a large IT company that does harm to its customers and employees is immoral and unpleasant and is selling out. Taking a company's impact on the world into account when choosing to work for them is a good idea unless you want to wake up and realize you're part of the problem....and if you think that artists make money signing on to large labels, you're dead wrong on the whole. Take a look for yourself. http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/l ove/index.html
But then you're probably a troll or the original poster if you feel you need anonymity to say what you've said.
When you drive a beat-to-shit Chevy van that you bought with money from working in a butchers shop, the prospect of getting the largest paycheck of your life looks pretty damn good, no matter what your ideology.
You could say the same thing about anyone earning a low wage: * Becoming a drug trafficer * Getting involved with organized crime or a terrorist group who offers to compensate you financially * Becoming a high price hooker
It's called selling out, and if your "ideology" isn't strong enough to prevent you from making that compromise and taking that offer that looks "pretty damn good" no amount of money's gonna make you feel good about your life.
Slashdot Mirror
Do I get to call them fun-bags if I put games on the hard-disk?
"Interest rate fluctuations not withstanding"?????
You're right that the banks lend way too much. They don't lose much if they wring every last cent out of you for years then take your home and auction it.
Fortunately my mortgage is reasonable, but I live in constant fear that interest rates "fluctuate" a few percent instead of a few quarters and that I end up in a financial mess.
It's no different when you have a mortgage on your home. The banks own you then too. I can tell you first hand.
Only the completely stupid ones. As far as I'm concerned you can pour as many chemically inert (well, Ok - relatively inert) plastic ducks as are needed
Yeah right until they block a whale's blow hole or cause the death of a seal because the dumb animal ate the damned thing. Last time I checked fishing line and many shark nets are relatively chemically inert too but they do some damage nonetheless.
Lovely speech. Nice sentiment. Ain't gonna happen though.
Nope I haven't used an iPhone. I haven't jumped off a cliff either, but I don't need to do so to have an opinion that doing such a thing would be stupid.
That's quite simply rubbish.
find me a phone anywhere that has 1 gb of memory
I have a Nokia N70 which is last year's model:
It has 1 Gig of memory. (Yes that's in the form of an expansion card, but it's still a gig).
It plays music and video. Can't quote screen res but it works well.
It actually runs several emulators. I can even run the doom demo.
The UI I have to admit isn't spectacular. However I wouldn't rate my IPods UI as spectacular either.
Honestly this is what I get from mac zealots who are oblivious to what else is out there all the time.
I don't get it. What's so damned special about the iPhone? Any other company puts out a device like this and I guarantee you there'd be very few people taking it up, and they'd be labelled suckers by the rest of us. However Apple does it and suddenly its cool. Honestly I have had crap luck with Apple products - even my Ipod and my fiancee's - the only personal Apple gear I've bought in 2 decades have been trouble. Her's had a scratched screen, mine has a temperamental click wheel. Without those flaws they'd be good but not spectacular for what they are.
/. I don't expect much.
I set up an eMac for work a few years back and in a month it was off back to the Apple shop because the mother board had just suddenly died cold. This was a rarely used but usually left on and idle developers test machine. I saw enough to tell you I hate the interface and sadly my new Vista laptop looks just like a damned Mac.
I've come to the conclusion that Apple is good at one thing: Hype that creates a fanatical following.
Mod as you will. This being
This gets modded insightful????
Take a look at the stupid things that smart successful people have predicted and you'll see "smart" people can be terrible at predicting the future. Why?
1) There may be important things the person has overlooked or is unaware of. Technologies, politics etc. This is more likely if the "smart" person is commenting on something outside their own expertise.
2) Rare events can and do happen, albeit by definition less frequently than common ones.
3) "Smart" people are often surprised at how things turn out.
Would you call Bill Gates stupid? Take a look at "The Road Ahead"
Would you call Isaac Netwon stupid? Yet the laws of motion turn out to be an approximation as Einstein discovered. Would you call Einstein stupid? Yet most scientists today do accept that "God does play dice".
Google for: Bad technology predictions
or just: Bad predictions
Your argument is flawed. Computers can only model based on what we've learnt from real experiments. Without that data the models are useless. So a halt on biotech research until the computers can "model it all" actually starves researchers of the data required to program the machines.
We should certainly be proceeding more slowly and modeling what we can but modeling will never replace actual experimentation.
I wasn't talking about a few day jaunt in a crummy tin can. I'm talking about being able to survive this planet becoming uninhabitable.
The assumption that the rate of technological progress will continue exponentially is also flawed. There are physical limits and things improve in rapid spurts with lulls inbetween
Google person is offering to help health care organizations tell their side of the story, and this is "evil"? If you think this is "evil" then I guess you think there is no room for debate here.
So were Hitler's Nazi publicists evil or simply helping the Nazi party tell it's side of the story? Should those that denied the holocaust or backed "the final solution" bear any responsibility? I know. Godwin and all but I've always thought Godwin's law was a stupid act of censorship by ridicule. In this case a Nazi analogy is apt.
While I believe that speech should NOT be restricted, I also believe people should be held accountable for what they say and who they help say it.
What is the point of this article? That we should be planning for 100 billion years into the future, when the whole universe is around 14 billion years old? We can't even get off this damned rock yet and until we can there's no chance of our species outlasting the sun going red giant and nova which is no where near 100 billion years out.
Interesting to ponder but of not much use even to the theoreticians at this stage.
Try Pretty Ridiculous Business.
Ready to restrict people with hideous DRM and milk them for every cent they'll spend. Ready to take on slogans from the people at large because their own ad execs can no longer stomach the BS long enough to produce a slogan.
Sorry, believe it or not I've not seen the film. Always meant to, but never got round to it.
Recently watched the Godfather movies (well 1 and 2 so far) after playing the relatively recent game. Liked the first one, but I want the 3 odd hours of my life back for the travesty that was the second.
If you ask me all 3 of them are whack looney tune nutburgers.
I feel sorry for the kids.
You had me right up until suggesting they didn't have a scientific method.
I'm sure I could find a better source but
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method
"Ancient Egyptian documents, such as early papyri, describe methods of medical diagnosis. In ancient Greek culture, the method of empiricism was described. The experimental scientific method was developed by Muslim scientists, who introduced the use of experiments to distinguish between competing scientific theories set within a generally empirical orientation, which emerged with Alhazen's optical experiments in his Book of Optics (c. 1000)."
Unfortunately Empiricism and the Greek culture is usually attributed with the "discovery" of the scientific method.
Now as for antibiotics, again modern anti-biotics - sure they didn't have them. However the ancient Chinese did have them in some primitive form.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic#History
"Although potent antibiotic compounds for treatment of human diseases caused by bacteria (such as tuberculosis, bubonic plague, or leprosy) were not isolated and identified until the twentieth century, the first known use of antibiotics was by the ancient Chinese over 2,500 years ago"
How about anesthetics? To be fair your description of "precious little" is probably about right.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anesthesia
"The first herbal anesthesia was administered in prehistory. Opium poppy capsules were collected in 4200 B.C., and opium poppies were farmed in Sumeria and succeeding empires. The use of opium-like preparations in anaesthesia is recorded in the Ebers Papyrus of 1500 B.C."
I was watching a documentary on Ancient Rome and a surgical kit circa 100BC pretty much matched the metal surgical tools that are still used today and were the only option until a handful of decades back.
My point is don't write off ancient cultures as primitive. They certainly didn't have the things we have that make our knowledge so much more advanced - mass manufacturing capability, near instantaneous exchange of information, electronics and precision manufacturing - but they had capable competent and inquisitive people and we're only where we are today because we built on what they invented.
Worse, if innocent people often go to jail, where's the disincentive to commit crime? You'll probably be caught whether you did commit a crime or not.
The U.S. is far from perfect. But in general, the U.S. is not evil and hasn't changed in the last 10 years.
If trying to kill foreign leaders, making deals with mobsters, breaking your own laws, holding people for 5 years without charge in an overseas country to prevent them falling under your laws then coercing them to confess to crimes that weren't on the books when the person allegedly commited them, and invading countries "is not evil" in general I'd hate to know what your definition of evil is.
This is your ignorance at play. Learn to use the damned Windows Task Manager. Look under processes, then choose View->Select Columns... from the menu and enable all the IO related options. Then maximize the task manager, and sort by the various IO columns. Look for the one that's changing most.
It's not hard, it doesn't require non-standard software, and doesn't require a comp. sci. degree. At least learn to use the tools available to you or pose it as a question instead of claiming there's no easy way as far as you can tell.
Sheesh!
Now as for file locking. Download a piece of freeware called unlocker. It lets you unlock files without rebooting. I agree this is a long standing and annoying bug - there are too many of these in explorer - but with Unlocker this particular is very easily managed. Would be nice if it were fixed instead of having to work around it.
Or maybe you should just strive to be a decent human being?
When the suggestion brings on criticism like this (sens of grandeur my arse!), it leaves little room for wonder why things are going to shit.
...and if you get hit in spite of not pirating? The wonders of DHCP coupled with the notoriously insecure networks that most colleges run* tend to make it drop-easy for innocents to get snagged by this dragnet of theirs.
I wonder if there's a negligence case in there against the University for not better securing the network?
That argument regarding being a U.S. citizen is somewhat weak. Most of us choose where we work, but not what country we live in. Changing jobs is usually somewhat easier than changing citizenship. You are a citizen of a country by default if you were born in that country, whereas you actively have to seek out a record deal (or at least agree to one).
Musicians are selling out. They're making a compromise in the hope that it'll pay off when historically that happens rarely if at all. They might as well buy a lottery ticket. However most musicians choose to believe that they are sooo incredibly good that they'll eventually make a squillion dollars. They've bought the RIAA dream hook line and sinker.
My musical ability isn't up to producing music for the public but if it were I wouldn't join a record label. If I were to write a book I wouldn't go to a publisher and have others make money off my work in the hope I'd be rich and famous. To do that you have to be very fortunate (lucky like a lotto winner) as well as dedicated. What percentage of authors or musicians even manage to make a living at what they do? Contrast that to what percentage of record execs or pubishers make more than just a living but are well and truly overpaid. They're selling greed, and you're buying it if you agree to their ridiculous terms. You'd be better off starting your own small label and publishing your work on the net. Others have done it, and yeah they won't get rich but many are better off than those who've gotten those "lucrative" deals. They generally aren't lucrative for the artists.
Prostitution isn't illegal in many parts of the world, but it's certainly not a pleasant way to live your life.
...and if you think that artists make money signing on to large labels, you're dead wrong on the whole. Take a look for yourself.l ove/index.html
Working for a large IT company that does harm to its customers and employees is immoral and unpleasant and is selling out. Taking a company's impact on the world into account when choosing to work for them is a good idea unless you want to wake up and realize you're part of the problem.
http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/
But then you're probably a troll or the original poster if you feel you need anonymity to say what you've said.
When you drive a beat-to-shit Chevy van that you bought with money from working in a butchers shop, the prospect of getting the largest paycheck of your life looks pretty damn good, no matter what your ideology.
You could say the same thing about anyone earning a low wage:
* Becoming a drug trafficer
* Getting involved with organized crime or a terrorist group who offers to compensate you financially
* Becoming a high price hooker
It's called selling out, and if your "ideology" isn't strong enough to prevent you from making that compromise and taking that offer that looks "pretty damn good" no amount of money's gonna make you feel good about your life.