Sorry, but I was laughing too hard to notice. Really. My son got embarassed by my laughing at the places where the science/plot/dialog were so stupid that one had no other choice (and there were plenty of these). Kids these days...
He seems like a duck out of water in anything else.
My God, man! How can you say that about him after seeing his inspired acting on T. J. Hooker and the amazing hosting abilities displayed on Rescue 911! With such versatility, I would be surprised if he couldn't sing just as well, too!!!
[J]ust because Bush is a Christian who is outspoken about he beliefs in God does not make him a bad president.
Even as a non-Christian, I must concede this point.
It's the economically counterproductive, imperialist, geopolitically dangerous things he does and the corrupt, crony capitalist cabinet he surrounds himself with that makes him a bad President. His supposed beliefs seem to have no bearing on these particular items.
The auction is designed so the that initial price is as high as people are willing to pay.
Not necessarily. There is also an incentive to try to get the stock as cheaply as possible, meaning that people will bid the price they *hope* to pay for the stock. Once the auction is completed, I am sure that there will be many out there who bid too low in the hopes that their orders would be covered, but who are willing to buy a lesser number of shares for a higher price in order not to be locked out of this "golden opportunity".
I'm seriously wondering whether the US isn't heading for a fall of Roman proportions. I'm not saying that to bash the US; I have American friend, and I like Americans in general. I'm saying it because since the last few months I genuinely believe it to be a possibility.
I hope to God not. Not only because I live in the US, but also because I think that the effective removal of ~1/4-1/3 of the GWP would have detrimental effects on a lot of other places on this planet that I admire.
The sad news is that I really don't think there's much of a way to prevent it. We really have reached a point where the economy is global (for better or worse) and, right now, a large part of the developing world is mainly turning out widgets and services that have few markets other than the US. Could the EU and the rest of the world cope with the price consequences of an influx of PC's if the US market died? Think of this multiplied by every other trade good that the US imports. Could China's economy last long if all the workers currently employed turning out crap for US markets suddenly lost their jobs?
I also fear is that this decline is inevitable. There is no global institution to effectively moderate global economic swings, nor would our current leaders allow their fiscal policies to be limited by the same even if there were one. As such, I think that the US may have used its globalization policies to reduce its national business cycles only to create the stage for a coming global economic bust that will take a long time to repair (you may now send me my tinfoil hat).
Rather the combination of technology and outsourcing is leading to steady increases in standrads of living; the US has shown GDP growth of around 3% for a long time.
GDP, although it might correlate to a mean of some measure of standard of living, certainly doesn't imply a rise in the median or the mode of the same. If Bill Gates walks into a five person meeting meeting the mean income of the attendees has just gone up by a few billion dollars. This doesn't mean that all of those people now have a few billion to spend. And, at the end of the day, Bill only needs to spend so much so only some small portion of that GDP is available for "trickle down".
You also confuse GDP with quality of life. If I can make a billion dollars by poisoning the water supply of two hundred people who make fourty thousand dollars per year, GDP arguments say to do it. It doesn't mean that the mean, median or mode of the quality of life has increased.
In other words, your contention that a rising GDP necessarily leads to increases in "standards of living" is utter crap. It is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition to insure the same. And those who tout rising GDPs are often loathe to put into place sufficient conditions to insure that the benefits of that increase are actually distributed into a rising standard of living for most of the populace. This leads to an in-the-large version of the tragedy of the commons (in this case, an economic commons), where the well-being of many is plundered for the good of the few. But, hey! The GDP is going up (at least for the short run), so all must be well...
Something tells me this guy was severely impaired when he typed this. This shows the hazards of drinking and posting to Slashdot at the same time. Please folks, if you have to drink, get a designated poster before you end up killing someone due to their laughing (or crying) too hard.
Here in Oregon, we have vote by mail - all of the convenience of any internet system, but no DoS worries, etc. The voting is done on a Scantron sheet (think #2 pencil), the ballot is concealed in a secrecy envelope, the outer envelope is signed and sent to the elections office. At the elections office, the signature on the cover envelope is checked, and the secret vote is placed into a container. When the counting is to be done, the secrecy envelopes are opened and fed into a Scantron counting machhine. The process is auditable, as non-forgeable as any voting methodology, and secured (mainly) by the USPS. If it gets close to voting time or you don't have 43 cents for a stamp, you can drop your ballot into boxes that can be found at public libraries or the county election officials' offices. Plus, all of this is pretty inexpensive.
Of course, none of this has the gee whiz, gosh golly technology crap that this crowd loves so much, but it works well, is inexpensive, and the process can be easily adapted for in situ voting as well. So why the hell do you need touch screens when Scantron works just as well AND you can get lazy voters to vote by mail, too?
happy that I can typically watch Chicago's very own... Channel 9 (WGN)
And you can see it in many other areas of the country where WGN is carried on the local cable, ala Ted Turner's "SuperStation" format. But while Ted might have the Braves, he'll never have the Cubs!!!
Do we have a God-given entitlement to jobs? Fuck no!
Spoken like a person who is currently employed. The bottom line is that no one has a right to anything other than whatever they happen to have brought into the world. You are not entitled to law, a civil society, democracy, or anything else you seem to take as a natural state of being. However, if you want to keep those things, you had better stop thinking of your fellow countrymen (and women) as whiners and start figuring out how you maintain democracy, law, civil society, etc., when most people are unable to find their next meal. Because that's where all of this is heading. But then, I'm sure that you feel so much that you are not entitled to a job that you'd be happy to give yours to someone in India or China. What's that? Oh, it's OK for other folks to do so, but not you. Well, that's good to know...
Just a quick question - if you're doing math intensive stuff, why the hell are you doing it in Java?
No offense intended, but that's about the dumbest thing I've ever heard, especially when you have convenient libraries in C++ and better AI coding capabilities in either Lisp or ML, and all of those languages have significant performance advantages over Java. Don't tell me - you're selling a system and the more computational power it takes, the bigger the machine you can mark up for sale, right?
Tom Friedman is also a guy who promulgates misleading anecdotes as evidence and then refuses to retract them when proven wrong. I'll let the reader judge for himself Mr. Friedman's intellectual and journalistic integrity. He's also not an economist, but a specialist in Middle Eastern affairs.
For those of you who want a real economist's viewpoint, I suggest you real Paul Krugman (also in the Times), who actually is an economist (Enough so to have several economic research papers published and to be allowed to teach the subject at Princeton, unlike Friedman, who has been nothing except a writer and gabber since he left school).
Re:Warning: Coffee contains DHMO
on
Death by Coffee?
·
· Score: 1
most coffee is contaminated with DHMO...
I, and the other employees at ChemCo,Inc., dispute the notion that DHMO is dangerous IN ANY WAY! In fact, many of our employees have drunk several cups of the substance (sometimes with added chemical flavorings) WITH NO ILL EFFECTS. I, personnally, have challenged the press to watch me drink a liter of the substance so I can demonstrate that no ill effects ensue. Of course, the sensationalistic press has refused to take me up on this offer, showing that they are more interested in a yellow story than in showing THE FACTS!
Our company's revenue and profitability have been enhanced greatly over the past few years by the increasing sale of anhydrous DHMO. By adding liquid water to this colorless and odorless substance, one can obtain DHMO as needed, rather than by ordering the original chemical directly from the supplier, saving the users storage space and shipping cost.
In addition, the ability to ship anhydrous DHMO more easily and inexpensively has allowed the company to move production of this substance from New Jersey to India (with only minimal manufacturing employment loss of around 500 workers), increasing our profitability even more! This, in turn, has allowed the company's stock to increase threefold in the last year which let us hire two more janitorial staff, improving the US economy immensely!
The fact that anhydrous DHMO is VERY profitable for us in no way alters our knowledge that the use of DHMO is safe and effective. We thank the Slashdot editors for letting us refute the SCURILOUS LIES about DHMO promulgated by the popular (and Liberal) press. Please remember ChemCo for all of your DHMO and anhydrous DHMO needs!
When was the last time you saw a story here about Bush or Republicans that wasn't given a negative spin?
You make the fatal assumption that the Republicans actually do things that can have a positive interpretation without lying about it. Spin is one thing - lying another...
I can see why it is necessary to keep these records public, but I can also see some potential for mis-use.
Not unless you contribute to a Republican so I have an excuse to burn your house down:-).
Actually, this type of info is very important to have, but I'm not sure that it's a great thing to have it so publically accessable. The access could easily be used to target individuals supporting either side. For those of us who do want to be involved with the political process monitarily, this could at some point become a very scary thing. OTOH, I've never been particularly quiet about my political beliefs in the past, so I doubt this would stop me.
So, yes, I'm concerned, but I'd try to rely on the good will of my neighbors with the backup of the authorities if needed for the time being.
And what if they get angry enough to stop doing business in Europe at all, rather than honoring those conditions?
Then Microsoft will lose about 30% of its business.
On the other hand, the EU would sieze all Microsoft property in lieu of payment, including all IP (read source code) held on their European servers and probably force compliance by release of said IP.
But one can always hope.
In the final analysis, Microsoft has two choices, comply in a manner controlled by them, or comply in a manner controlled by the EU. If they're smart they'll choose the former.
This position, held by most Slashdotters who have commented on this issue, is highly contradictory.
Consistency is a property that is often overrated by geeks. In the real world, logical consistency often leads to such stupidity as monopoly, anarchism, facism, the religion of "free markets", and Libertarianism. There are two reasons for this:
First, logic is a process by which models are built, not a reality. As a modeling methodology, it is very sensitive to the axioms chosen from which to start the process and many "true believers" in logic are very non-selective in their axiom selection. In addition, the models produced by this method, like all models, distort some aspects of reality, and these models need to be probed for limitations and inacuracies and validated against the real situation. Again, those who most often prattle on about "consistency" are often least likely to test their models for the only consistency that really matters - consistency with the real world.
The second problem with consistency is that the real world simply isn't. The real world is an incredibly messy system. Can you predict with logical certainty that a particular lion will attack a wildebeast at a given time? That a human will make a certain stock trade? Human beings have evolved a highly complex, but inconsistent processing unit (called a brain) that copes pretty well with the world as a whole. Compared to this processor's proven longevity, the creation of logic has been a relatively recent innovation and one that is (as of yet) evolutionarily unproven. Given this, it is highly specious to assume that this new (and unnatural) processing mode is superior to the messier and fuzzier processing that has insured our (and other creatures') survival over millions of years. It is also most probably false that a pure use of logic is superior to a synthesis of the Aristotlian model and a more fuzzy one.
In short, cowboy, people ain't machines - stop tryin' to turn folks into them. I know it would make them a heck of lot easier to model of they were and you think that people would be a lot easier to understand if they were mechanistic and that your natural ability to understand mechanisms would give you an upper hand if they were and you'd be a lot more comfortable with that, but all that just means I'm really glad that you're not in charge. I refuse to surrender my humanity to your logic.
If you are under the age of 45, we are prime candidates.
So does that mean if all you young punks get killed, us old farts can get jobs again!?!? Don't get your knickers in a knot - I'm kidding... They'd probably just raise the H1-B visa cap again "due to lack of qualified workers" or outsorce the positions, anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Come on people! Do you know how stupid you sound when you can't use a word correctly? Let's get this sorted out once and for all:
jive - To cajole or mislead.
jibe - To be in accord; agree: Your figures jibe with mine.
I and my ears both thank you...
Sorry, but I was laughing too hard to notice. Really. My son got embarassed by my laughing at the places where the science/plot/dialog were so stupid that one had no other choice (and there were plenty of these). Kids these days...
My God, man! How can you say that about him after seeing his inspired acting on T. J. Hooker and the amazing hosting abilities displayed on Rescue 911! With such versatility, I would be surprised if he couldn't sing just as well, too!!!
Even as a non-Christian, I must concede this point.
It's the economically counterproductive, imperialist, geopolitically dangerous things he does and the corrupt, crony capitalist cabinet he surrounds himself with that makes him a bad President. His supposed beliefs seem to have no bearing on these particular items.
Not necessarily. There is also an incentive to try to get the stock as cheaply as possible, meaning that people will bid the price they *hope* to pay for the stock. Once the auction is completed, I am sure that there will be many out there who bid too low in the hopes that their orders would be covered, but who are willing to buy a lesser number of shares for a higher price in order not to be locked out of this "golden opportunity".
I hope to God not. Not only because I live in the US, but also because I think that the effective removal of ~1/4-1/3 of the GWP would have detrimental effects on a lot of other places on this planet that I admire.
The sad news is that I really don't think there's much of a way to prevent it. We really have reached a point where the economy is global (for better or worse) and, right now, a large part of the developing world is mainly turning out widgets and services that have few markets other than the US. Could the EU and the rest of the world cope with the price consequences of an influx of PC's if the US market died? Think of this multiplied by every other trade good that the US imports. Could China's economy last long if all the workers currently employed turning out crap for US markets suddenly lost their jobs?
I also fear is that this decline is inevitable. There is no global institution to effectively moderate global economic swings, nor would our current leaders allow their fiscal policies to be limited by the same even if there were one. As such, I think that the US may have used its globalization policies to reduce its national business cycles only to create the stage for a coming global economic bust that will take a long time to repair (you may now send me my tinfoil hat).
GDP, although it might correlate to a mean of some measure of standard of living, certainly doesn't imply a rise in the median or the mode of the same. If Bill Gates walks into a five person meeting meeting the mean income of the attendees has just gone up by a few billion dollars. This doesn't mean that all of those people now have a few billion to spend. And, at the end of the day, Bill only needs to spend so much so only some small portion of that GDP is available for "trickle down".
You also confuse GDP with quality of life. If I can make a billion dollars by poisoning the water supply of two hundred people who make fourty thousand dollars per year, GDP arguments say to do it. It doesn't mean that the mean, median or mode of the quality of life has increased.
In other words, your contention that a rising GDP necessarily leads to increases in "standards of living" is utter crap. It is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition to insure the same. And those who tout rising GDPs are often loathe to put into place sufficient conditions to insure that the benefits of that increase are actually distributed into a rising standard of living for most of the populace. This leads to an in-the-large version of the tragedy of the commons (in this case, an economic commons), where the well-being of many is plundered for the good of the few. But, hey! The GDP is going up (at least for the short run), so all must be well...
And, if you can't do that, use your psychic powers or cast the yarrow stalks.
And, if that doesn't work, well, there's always print statements...
Soylent Diamond is PEOPLE!!!!!!
Something tells me this guy was severely impaired when he typed this. This shows the hazards of drinking and posting to Slashdot at the same time. Please folks, if you have to drink, get a designated poster before you end up killing someone due to their laughing (or crying) too hard.
Of course, none of this has the gee whiz, gosh golly technology crap that this crowd loves so much, but it works well, is inexpensive, and the process can be easily adapted for in situ voting as well. So why the hell do you need touch screens when Scantron works just as well AND you can get lazy voters to vote by mail, too?
I guess we'd need to legislate to require you to get a scrubber...
I don't know that I want an alcoholic vehicle. It seems dangerous enough when just the driver is...
And you can see it in many other areas of the country where WGN is carried on the local cable, ala Ted Turner's "SuperStation" format. But while Ted might have the Braves, he'll never have the Cubs!!!
Go WGN!!! Go Cubbies!!!!
Spoken like a person who is currently employed. The bottom line is that no one has a right to anything other than whatever they happen to have brought into the world. You are not entitled to law, a civil society, democracy, or anything else you seem to take as a natural state of being. However, if you want to keep those things, you had better stop thinking of your fellow countrymen (and women) as whiners and start figuring out how you maintain democracy, law, civil society, etc., when most people are unable to find their next meal. Because that's where all of this is heading. But then, I'm sure that you feel so much that you are not entitled to a job that you'd be happy to give yours to someone in India or China. What's that? Oh, it's OK for other folks to do so, but not you. Well, that's good to know...
Just a quick question - if you're doing math intensive stuff, why the hell are you doing it in Java?
No offense intended, but that's about the dumbest thing I've ever heard, especially when you have convenient libraries in C++ and better AI coding capabilities in either Lisp or ML, and all of those languages have significant performance advantages over Java. Don't tell me - you're selling a system and the more computational power it takes, the bigger the machine you can mark up for sale, right?
For those of you who want a real economist's viewpoint, I suggest you real Paul Krugman (also in the Times), who actually is an economist (Enough so to have several economic research papers published and to be allowed to teach the subject at Princeton, unlike Friedman, who has been nothing except a writer and gabber since he left school).
I, and the other employees at ChemCo,Inc., dispute the notion that DHMO is dangerous IN ANY WAY! In fact, many of our employees have drunk several cups of the substance (sometimes with added chemical flavorings) WITH NO ILL EFFECTS. I, personnally, have challenged the press to watch me drink a liter of the substance so I can demonstrate that no ill effects ensue. Of course, the sensationalistic press has refused to take me up on this offer, showing that they are more interested in a yellow story than in showing THE FACTS!
Our company's revenue and profitability have been enhanced greatly over the past few years by the increasing sale of anhydrous DHMO. By adding liquid water to this colorless and odorless substance, one can obtain DHMO as needed, rather than by ordering the original chemical directly from the supplier, saving the users storage space and shipping cost.
In addition, the ability to ship anhydrous DHMO more easily and inexpensively has allowed the company to move production of this substance from New Jersey to India (with only minimal manufacturing employment loss of around 500 workers), increasing our profitability even more! This, in turn, has allowed the company's stock to increase threefold in the last year which let us hire two more janitorial staff, improving the US economy immensely!
The fact that anhydrous DHMO is VERY profitable for us in no way alters our knowledge that the use of DHMO is safe and effective. We thank the Slashdot editors for letting us refute the SCURILOUS LIES about DHMO promulgated by the popular (and Liberal) press. Please remember ChemCo for all of your DHMO and anhydrous DHMO needs!
Sincerely,
I. M. Chemiko
President & CEO
ChemCo, Inc.
Another developing place to offshore jobs to!
You make the fatal assumption that the Republicans actually do things that can have a positive interpretation without lying about it. Spin is one thing - lying another...
Not unless you contribute to a Republican so I have an excuse to burn your house down :-).
Actually, this type of info is very important to have, but I'm not sure that it's a great thing to have it so publically accessable. The access could easily be used to target individuals supporting either side. For those of us who do want to be involved with the political process monitarily, this could at some point become a very scary thing. OTOH, I've never been particularly quiet about my political beliefs in the past, so I doubt this would stop me.
So, yes, I'm concerned, but I'd try to rely on the good will of my neighbors with the backup of the authorities if needed for the time being.
Then Microsoft will lose about 30% of its business.
On the other hand, the EU would sieze all Microsoft property in lieu of payment, including all IP (read source code) held on their European servers and probably force compliance by release of said IP.
But one can always hope.
In the final analysis, Microsoft has two choices, comply in a manner controlled by them, or comply in a manner controlled by the EU. If they're smart they'll choose the former.
Consistency is a property that is often overrated by geeks. In the real world, logical consistency often leads to such stupidity as monopoly, anarchism, facism, the religion of "free markets", and Libertarianism. There are two reasons for this:
First, logic is a process by which models are built, not a reality. As a modeling methodology, it is very sensitive to the axioms chosen from which to start the process and many "true believers" in logic are very non-selective in their axiom selection. In addition, the models produced by this method, like all models, distort some aspects of reality, and these models need to be probed for limitations and inacuracies and validated against the real situation. Again, those who most often prattle on about "consistency" are often least likely to test their models for the only consistency that really matters - consistency with the real world.
The second problem with consistency is that the real world simply isn't. The real world is an incredibly messy system. Can you predict with logical certainty that a particular lion will attack a wildebeast at a given time? That a human will make a certain stock trade? Human beings have evolved a highly complex, but inconsistent processing unit (called a brain) that copes pretty well with the world as a whole. Compared to this processor's proven longevity, the creation of logic has been a relatively recent innovation and one that is (as of yet) evolutionarily unproven. Given this, it is highly specious to assume that this new (and unnatural) processing mode is superior to the messier and fuzzier processing that has insured our (and other creatures') survival over millions of years. It is also most probably false that a pure use of logic is superior to a synthesis of the Aristotlian model and a more fuzzy one.
In short, cowboy, people ain't machines - stop tryin' to turn folks into them. I know it would make them a heck of lot easier to model of they were and you think that people would be a lot easier to understand if they were mechanistic and that your natural ability to understand mechanisms would give you an upper hand if they were and you'd be a lot more comfortable with that, but all that just means I'm really glad that you're not in charge. I refuse to surrender my humanity to your logic.
Yeah, Ashcroft *is* pretty bad - even his own pancreas is trying to kill him...
So does that mean if all you young punks get killed, us old farts can get jobs again!?!? Don't get your knickers in a knot - I'm kidding... They'd probably just raise the H1-B visa cap again "due to lack of qualified workers" or outsorce the positions, anyway.