Well, I'm tuning back to see when they drop their #1 show, Joan of Arcadia. You see, the other week, one of the characters who plays God (who occasionally also appears in the form of a *gasp* woman on the show, as well) had the temerity to say that He (i.e., God) had so many religions because people had so many way's of relating to Him, acknowledging Hinduism as an example. I'm sure that goes over well with the thumpers that put that show as numero uno on their list! Like I said, I'm anxious to see what they have to say when they next revise the list, because I'm pretty sure neither polythism nor spiritual eclecticism is high on their list of core values.
When I did the math, here's what I found: sold in pill form, the only form available for dogs, the cost at wholesale to treat 30 medium-sized dogs for one year was $1500.
Well, do what I did. When my daughter's pet rat developed a case of mites, I found out online that ivermectin was the proper cure. I went to the local feed and grain and got a bottle of the topical solution that was at sheep/cattle/horse concentration, diluted it and applied it to the rat. The mite issue was solved and the patient survived (For a few months more, that is. It was an older rat).
Since they sell Ivermec (again in horse/sheep/cattle concentration) in an orally ingestible form (for intestinal worms), you could do the same by buying the Ivermec as for a horse, and reducing the dose to one proper for dogs. If a horse can eat it, so can a dog. Best of all, all of the information on dosing and dispensing is on the web.
Removing corporate personhood would hurt consumers in many ways as well.
You don't need personhood to do this - just corporate entityhood. What's the difference? Personhood entitles one to various "human rights" such as freedom of speech, rights to participate in the political arena, etc., that are not actually required for a corporation to operate as an economic entity. In short, why do you need to be a person for me to sue you?
This blurring of lines between personhood and "corporate economic function" has hurt people in that it gives certain "economic supermen" (e.g., vast resources, live forever, etc.) undue influence in the polity and hurts the economic world by making it easier for corporations to use political and judicial influence to distort the economic plane. It was a bad decision that will lead to capitalism's downfall (and perhaps that of enlightenment era governance, as well).
The principal reports to the superintendent who is a political appointee of an elected school board. Don't like your kids grades, call up the politician, and if you're in the right crowd a few "suggestions" can be made to the teacher about what grades little Johnny should get.
And that's why teachers need a union.
Here, that statement will get me flamed six months from Sunday, but this is precisely the type of thing that most civil servant unions are formed to fight against. I assume, because you haven't mentioned union intervention, that your town is either small enough not to have a union, you're located in some red state, third world-like hellhole where the union has already been busted or is in the pocket of the administration, or there's more going on here than meets the eye.
Authors agree to produce work for society, society agrees to give the author a fair chance at compensation for their work.
In general, this is true. But what if part of the deal the author wants is to withhold his work from further distribution so that he may proceed with production and sales of a newer version of his "product"?
I've been around the Internet for a long time -- since the early 90s in fact...
Well, I've been around the "Internet" since the early 80's and remember when you had to manually route email across the UUCP network. I also know people who have been on the "Internet" ever since it was only the ARPANET. And you know what? I started complaining around the early nineties when this "Mosaic" thing showed up and started to screw up the Internet. And the guys who were on the ARPANET bitched when our machines started routing USENET and email through their network. Bottom line, whenever new people come in and change things, the "old timers" say that it sucks. Old immigrants always dislike new immigrants. Welcome to reality, where things always will suck more next year because kids these days just don't know how to behave.
But in the end, you know what? I wouldn't have changed a thing. It was what it was, it will be what it will be because people try to make it better and it's still a hundred times better than if it would have been if it had stayed the same. Stop thinking about how great things were in "the good old days" and trying to keep people from doing interesting stuff (and, yes, even worms and viruses are interesting in a malevolent way). Instead, figure out how to improve things without cutting off access and help build "the good new days".
I use a lot of applications with a lot of menu items...
Which is a problem in its own right. Applications that have a lot of menu items are either (a) trying to be too many things to too many people; (b) have poor menu organization; (c) have designers with fairly poor notions of actual workflows so that they can offer nothing but disembodied atomic actions; or (d) have designers that are too lazy to do the work to embed workflow into the application in meaningful ways, forcing the user to deal with workflow organization himself. The greying out of menu items is a fairly half-assed way of dealing with workflow (i.e., the implicit "you can't do that now" message). If the workflow system was properly designed, it would probably be obvious *why* you couldn't do something.
Bottom line, PC's and PC hardware will never be cool. If you drive a truck for your work every day, do you really want to drive a truck going home and around on your free time? No, you want a sports car. More importantly, day after day, you see bunches of snotty IT mechanics having to keep repairing the trucks you drive. When you get back to your sports car, you just want it to look nice and work. The Apple message of style and simplicity, coupled with elegant functionality looks better and better each year as the Wintel hegemony keeps putting on layer after complex layer of crap - even with the additional up-front cost of the Apple.
And, BTW, even though I use Linux at home, it's still not close to a replacement for a Mac. It is getting crufted up enough to be a solid replacement for a Wintel PC, though. But getting back to the comment...
Apple for years has been targeting the audience of simple function that just works, even if it does cost a bit more. The fact that the iPod introduces users to this concept, who then wonder why they have to screw around with Windows is just an extension of this model. In fact, if Apple wanted to make a killing, they'd market an easy to setup and use home media center - combo Mac, PVR, stereo, and display with their famed ease of setup and use. I'd buy one of those.
...why the hell is the city government planning on offering this service anyway?
Because the elected officials who represent the city (and who the affected populace elected, by the way) think it's a good idea?
More to the point, what, other than some anti-government or free market fetish you have, makes you think the government, as a representative of people who probably want these services, shouldn't provide these services?
Nah, it's just too cold up there for them to take off their clothes.
Re:Still can't see how Sun will survive
on
Sun-isms Debunked
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· Score: 1
No chance of that happening quickly until IBM can sucessfully fork linux.
Who do you think funds Linus' employer? Do you think they're (or he's) stupid enough to bite the hand that feeds them? That's why you're seeing lots o'stuff about improving multiprocessor scalability in the kernel. How many single box runners do you know that need 512+-way scalability. Kernel development is well under IBM's thumb already. They don't have to fork anything.
I'm sure, by the time this slashdotting is over, the dispute over Hamilton's date will be well presented.
Which, yet again, shows that people are all too ready to miss the point. You may have thousands of Hamilton-like articles out there. The fact that it takes a rather large stick (metaphorically speaking) to get this one article accurate shows that getting the whole to be accurate (even asymtotically) is almost an insurmountable task.
An online encyclopaedia filled with factual errors is just a group blog and should be held in the same regard with respect to being an authoritative source. By some people's standards (and obviously by those of the Wikipaedia supporters) I could call a public toilet stall an encyclopaedia if I had enough people who have high opinions of themselves and their own importance scrawl on it. I choose to hold those who claim to produce an encyclopaedia to a higher standard. If you can't meet it, that's your problem.
The Wikipedia is accessable knowledge for the masses.
Yes. And television is accessabile entertainment for the masses. And, left to their own devices, both will converge to the same level. Welcome to the new epistimology, where availability and quantity trumps quality. I can't wait.
Chemistry set, microscope, telescope. Oh yeah - Mouse Trap (the game, not the object, though we had several of the later around the house to play with, too)...
And that's why we need tort reform. So that businesses that do this sort of thing only have to recompense the employee and have no punative damages to pay that might prevent them from doing so in the future. So that managers can continue practicing their love for their employees all accross this great nation.
A better question is why geeks would have a fetish for Crays at all these days, other than those with a historical bent.
It's not about the machine, as much as the man and the philosophy behind the machine.
Seymour Cray was one of the first true legends of computing. His mixture of sheer architectural intelligence and interesting personality quirks made him one of computing's first media stars (for small niche values of media). His architectural philosophy was to do one thing and do it well. For example, the main issue leading to his break with CDC was that they wanted the new generation of Cybers to be multi-purpose, while Seymour wanted to crunch scientific bits really, really fast.
If you look at the processors he designed, there were almost never any architectural compromises to his goal of making the machine having the most FLOPs. If that meant memory had no parity (His quote: "Parity is for farmers.") so be it. If it meant new cooling technologies, he'd design it. If it meant a design of a new chip, he'd do it. That sort of single-minded devotion to architectural purity is pretty much unknown today, because companies aren't interested in pushing the technological envelope the way Seymour did. And that's why Cray's are legendary - something that an SGI or Intel multi-processor never will be.
Are you trying to tell me that there are *more* "conservative" (they're really radicals) people Shrub could potentially appoint than Ashcroft? Just how scary do your wingnuts get?
I hear Alan Keyes is looking for a job, right now...
This would eliminate the need for shelving for CD's, as well as allow retailers to have a much wider selection of music available.
But at a much higher cost. Not only do you have to pay for the burner machine, but you also have to deal with issues like what to do about inserts, cases, etc. Also, a listen/burn machine is a serial use item, while shelving is parallel use. Finally maintenance, content updating, etc., all raise the cost even more.
Anyway, it's non-viable when I can just sub in another rack of DVD's at a higher margin. If we end up where DVD's are the only thing available, who cares. People will generally spend their entertainment income on what's promoted and available. Which bits happen to be on the plastic doesn't matter to the retailers. Nor does it matter to the conglomerates who are just as happy (if not more so) to sell a crappy DVD as opposed to a crapy CD.
At the quantum level, everything is a probability.
But what about below that?
We still don't know the structure at or about the Planck length. Is it deterministic with minute variations in dimensional string tension percolating through the quantum foam so that, via the law of large numbers, it looks predictably probabilistic? Beneath that, is the universe governed by a deterministic cellular sub-space? Who knows. All I know is that any-time you got 10^34 things in a single centimeter, whatever the heck you measure there is going to look pretty random, whether it's random or not.
And, just because it's deterministic doesn't mean it's predictable, usually because of the non-linear nature of the system, the imprecise knowledge of the initial state, and the sheer size of the computation.
though I can't think of any princess with a good story they haven't done already yet... Favorite US Historical Figures:... Abe Lincoln...
Sorry, man. I saw your sig after that comment and putting it together with Disney's notable rewriting of any historical tale, just got this really creepy image of Abe Lincoln as a princess in the next Disney movie. Yeah. It's high concept. Poor little pioneer girl, grows up to be a lawyer, puts on a fake beard and becomes President... We're talking mega-box office boffo here, babe!
I am appalled at how this article trivializes the wonder that the original book The Polar Express creates. I just want to say that calling the book "slim" might be true of the physical thickness of the book but the story and pictures contained within are fantastic.
And this is why I cringe at the idea of a Robert Z. redition of the book. The whole reason why the book was able to sustain its stunning dark beauty was the denseness of the artwork and story line. In stretching the story to ninety minutes in length you cannot help but reduce the density and the beauty of the original. You can see it already in the TV commercials for the film where they show stupid roller-coaster ride imagery, include a back story of Hanks as wandering hobo, etc. I'd like to think this would have made a good twenty-minute short. But since we need a full ninety minutes to sell popcorn, it's proabably going to suck. Dark beauty traded for fluffiness.
Zemeckis doing it doesn't raise my confidence, either.
many nations will require that they start honoring these agreements.
This is highly unlikely. We are far too reliant on their manufacturing capabilities to make unreasonable demands like this. This is especially true of American pressure. We are far too dependent on foreign currency holdings to prop up the value of the USD.
Far more likely are the scenarios that either companies who own patents will negotiate very nominal payments for use of their patents or that the First World will simply learn to use the Developing World's lack of IP respect as a way of "routing around" the damage in the free market.
They are clearly putting in far more effort than any western government to modernize their country.
This is one of the tradeoffs between free markets and command economies. Although free markets are great from the point of view of moving quickly to a local optimum in resource utilization, their coverage and consistency are spotty. Command economies tend to pick winners too early and their implementations can be inefficient and hang around too long, but they usually achieve complete coverage and relative consistency.
The best of both worlds is when you "let a thousand flowers bloom" in the early stages, pick a winner for full implementation, and revisit the infrastructure choices on a regular basis to reopen debate. Of course, ideologues of either stripe would usually disavow this solution, as that might force them to widen their narrow models of the world - far too painful to comptemplate!
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I'm tuning back to see when they drop their #1 show, Joan of Arcadia. You see, the other week, one of the characters who plays God (who occasionally also appears in the form of a *gasp* woman on the show, as well) had the temerity to say that He (i.e., God) had so many religions because people had so many way's of relating to Him, acknowledging Hinduism as an example. I'm sure that goes over well with the thumpers that put that show as numero uno on their list! Like I said, I'm anxious to see what they have to say when they next revise the list, because I'm pretty sure neither polythism nor spiritual eclecticism is high on their list of core values.
Well, do what I did. When my daughter's pet rat developed a case of mites, I found out online that ivermectin was the proper cure. I went to the local feed and grain and got a bottle of the topical solution that was at sheep/cattle/horse concentration, diluted it and applied it to the rat. The mite issue was solved and the patient survived (For a few months more, that is. It was an older rat).
Since they sell Ivermec (again in horse/sheep/cattle concentration) in an orally ingestible form (for intestinal worms), you could do the same by buying the Ivermec as for a horse, and reducing the dose to one proper for dogs. If a horse can eat it, so can a dog. Best of all, all of the information on dosing and dispensing is on the web.
You don't need personhood to do this - just corporate entityhood. What's the difference? Personhood entitles one to various "human rights" such as freedom of speech, rights to participate in the political arena, etc., that are not actually required for a corporation to operate as an economic entity. In short, why do you need to be a person for me to sue you?
This blurring of lines between personhood and "corporate economic function" has hurt people in that it gives certain "economic supermen" (e.g., vast resources, live forever, etc.) undue influence in the polity and hurts the economic world by making it easier for corporations to use political and judicial influence to distort the economic plane. It was a bad decision that will lead to capitalism's downfall (and perhaps that of enlightenment era governance, as well).
And that's why teachers need a union.
Here, that statement will get me flamed six months from Sunday, but this is precisely the type of thing that most civil servant unions are formed to fight against. I assume, because you haven't mentioned union intervention, that your town is either small enough not to have a union, you're located in some red state, third world-like hellhole where the union has already been busted or is in the pocket of the administration, or there's more going on here than meets the eye.
In general, this is true. But what if part of the deal the author wants is to withhold his work from further distribution so that he may proceed with production and sales of a newer version of his "product"?
Well, I've been around the "Internet" since the early 80's and remember when you had to manually route email across the UUCP network. I also know people who have been on the "Internet" ever since it was only the ARPANET. And you know what? I started complaining around the early nineties when this "Mosaic" thing showed up and started to screw up the Internet. And the guys who were on the ARPANET bitched when our machines started routing USENET and email through their network. Bottom line, whenever new people come in and change things, the "old timers" say that it sucks. Old immigrants always dislike new immigrants. Welcome to reality, where things always will suck more next year because kids these days just don't know how to behave.
But in the end, you know what? I wouldn't have changed a thing. It was what it was, it will be what it will be because people try to make it better and it's still a hundred times better than if it would have been if it had stayed the same. Stop thinking about how great things were in "the good old days" and trying to keep people from doing interesting stuff (and, yes, even worms and viruses are interesting in a malevolent way). Instead, figure out how to improve things without cutting off access and help build "the good new days".
Which is a problem in its own right. Applications that have a lot of menu items are either (a) trying to be too many things to too many people; (b) have poor menu organization; (c) have designers with fairly poor notions of actual workflows so that they can offer nothing but disembodied atomic actions; or (d) have designers that are too lazy to do the work to embed workflow into the application in meaningful ways, forcing the user to deal with workflow organization himself. The greying out of menu items is a fairly half-assed way of dealing with workflow (i.e., the implicit "you can't do that now" message). If the workflow system was properly designed, it would probably be obvious *why* you couldn't do something.
And, BTW, even though I use Linux at home, it's still not close to a replacement for a Mac. It is getting crufted up enough to be a solid replacement for a Wintel PC, though. But getting back to the comment...
Apple for years has been targeting the audience of simple function that just works, even if it does cost a bit more. The fact that the iPod introduces users to this concept, who then wonder why they have to screw around with Windows is just an extension of this model. In fact, if Apple wanted to make a killing, they'd market an easy to setup and use home media center - combo Mac, PVR, stereo, and display with their famed ease of setup and use. I'd buy one of those.
Because the elected officials who represent the city (and who the affected populace elected, by the way) think it's a good idea?
More to the point, what, other than some anti-government or free market fetish you have, makes you think the government, as a representative of people who probably want these services, shouldn't provide these services?
It's not technology! It's a magic glowing rock!
Nah, it's just too cold up there for them to take off their clothes.
Who do you think funds Linus' employer? Do you think they're (or he's) stupid enough to bite the hand that feeds them? That's why you're seeing lots o'stuff about improving multiprocessor scalability in the kernel. How many single box runners do you know that need 512+-way scalability. Kernel development is well under IBM's thumb already. They don't have to fork anything.
Which, yet again, shows that people are all too ready to miss the point. You may have thousands of Hamilton-like articles out there. The fact that it takes a rather large stick (metaphorically speaking) to get this one article accurate shows that getting the whole to be accurate (even asymtotically) is almost an insurmountable task.
An online encyclopaedia filled with factual errors is just a group blog and should be held in the same regard with respect to being an authoritative source. By some people's standards (and obviously by those of the Wikipaedia supporters) I could call a public toilet stall an encyclopaedia if I had enough people who have high opinions of themselves and their own importance scrawl on it. I choose to hold those who claim to produce an encyclopaedia to a higher standard. If you can't meet it, that's your problem.
Yes. And television is accessabile entertainment for the masses. And, left to their own devices, both will converge to the same level. Welcome to the new epistimology, where availability and quantity trumps quality. I can't wait.
Chemistry set, microscope, telescope. Oh yeah - Mouse Trap (the game, not the object, though we had several of the later around the house to play with, too)...
And that's why we need tort reform. So that businesses that do this sort of thing only have to recompense the employee and have no punative damages to pay that might prevent them from doing so in the future. So that managers can continue practicing their love for their employees all accross this great nation.
It's not about the machine, as much as the man and the philosophy behind the machine.
Seymour Cray was one of the first true legends of computing. His mixture of sheer architectural intelligence and interesting personality quirks made him one of computing's first media stars (for small niche values of media). His architectural philosophy was to do one thing and do it well. For example, the main issue leading to his break with CDC was that they wanted the new generation of Cybers to be multi-purpose, while Seymour wanted to crunch scientific bits really, really fast.
If you look at the processors he designed, there were almost never any architectural compromises to his goal of making the machine having the most FLOPs. If that meant memory had no parity (His quote: "Parity is for farmers.") so be it. If it meant new cooling technologies, he'd design it. If it meant a design of a new chip, he'd do it. That sort of single-minded devotion to architectural purity is pretty much unknown today, because companies aren't interested in pushing the technological envelope the way Seymour did. And that's why Cray's are legendary - something that an SGI or Intel multi-processor never will be.
I hear Alan Keyes is looking for a job, right now...
Of course it is. It's going on over E-mail. Unless, of course, your lips move while you read.
Mr. Language Person says, "Learn the difference between mute and moot. Using one when you mean the other makes you look really, really stupid."
But at a much higher cost. Not only do you have to pay for the burner machine, but you also have to deal with issues like what to do about inserts, cases, etc. Also, a listen/burn machine is a serial use item, while shelving is parallel use. Finally maintenance, content updating, etc., all raise the cost even more.
Anyway, it's non-viable when I can just sub in another rack of DVD's at a higher margin. If we end up where DVD's are the only thing available, who cares. People will generally spend their entertainment income on what's promoted and available. Which bits happen to be on the plastic doesn't matter to the retailers. Nor does it matter to the conglomerates who are just as happy (if not more so) to sell a crappy DVD as opposed to a crapy CD.
But what about below that?
We still don't know the structure at or about the Planck length. Is it deterministic with minute variations in dimensional string tension percolating through the quantum foam so that, via the law of large numbers, it looks predictably probabilistic? Beneath that, is the universe governed by a deterministic cellular sub-space? Who knows. All I know is that any-time you got 10^34 things in a single centimeter, whatever the heck you measure there is going to look pretty random, whether it's random or not.
And, just because it's deterministic doesn't mean it's predictable, usually because of the non-linear nature of the system, the imprecise knowledge of the initial state, and the sheer size of the computation.
Favorite US Historical Figures:
Sorry, man. I saw your sig after that comment and putting it together with Disney's notable rewriting of any historical tale, just got this really creepy image of Abe Lincoln as a princess in the next Disney movie. Yeah. It's high concept. Poor little pioneer girl, grows up to be a lawyer, puts on a fake beard and becomes President... We're talking mega-box office boffo here, babe!
And this is why I cringe at the idea of a Robert Z. redition of the book. The whole reason why the book was able to sustain its stunning dark beauty was the denseness of the artwork and story line. In stretching the story to ninety minutes in length you cannot help but reduce the density and the beauty of the original. You can see it already in the TV commercials for the film where they show stupid roller-coaster ride imagery, include a back story of Hanks as wandering hobo, etc. I'd like to think this would have made a good twenty-minute short. But since we need a full ninety minutes to sell popcorn, it's proabably going to suck. Dark beauty traded for fluffiness.
Zemeckis doing it doesn't raise my confidence, either.
This is highly unlikely. We are far too reliant on their manufacturing capabilities to make unreasonable demands like this. This is especially true of American pressure. We are far too dependent on foreign currency holdings to prop up the value of the USD.
Far more likely are the scenarios that either companies who own patents will negotiate very nominal payments for use of their patents or that the First World will simply learn to use the Developing World's lack of IP respect as a way of "routing around" the damage in the free market.
This is one of the tradeoffs between free markets and command economies. Although free markets are great from the point of view of moving quickly to a local optimum in resource utilization, their coverage and consistency are spotty. Command economies tend to pick winners too early and their implementations can be inefficient and hang around too long, but they usually achieve complete coverage and relative consistency.
The best of both worlds is when you "let a thousand flowers bloom" in the early stages, pick a winner for full implementation, and revisit the infrastructure choices on a regular basis to reopen debate. Of course, ideologues of either stripe would usually disavow this solution, as that might force them to widen their narrow models of the world - far too painful to comptemplate!