here, as the perceptions go, you either are a Tea Partying, evangelical with a giant Ayn Rand tattoo; or a Communist, Pinko, Commie red only in favor of the government taking over everything. There is no middle, and [there is] no room for actual conversation.
Blog responses on a site like Slashdot are not the place for an "actual conversation". The points made are disjointed and passed over shortly after they're written. And no one reads a lengthy response chain days later and expects them to continue once a new participant chimes in. Blaming Slashdot for lack of "actual conversation" makes about as much sense as blaming an automobile for not traveling to outer space under its own power - it was simply not designed for that.
If you want "actual conversation" on politics, go to a coffee shop or a bar, sit at the counter, and talk to actual people. Or maybe try Usenet, if you can wade through the spam. Or, even better, one of the message boards that do engage in long, repetitive threads on politics, where people just talk each other into exhaustion rather than change each others minds. Maybe you'll have better luck there.
2: If you're an idiot, you're fired [a] without severance or [b] health benefits.
Issue [a] is illegal in some jurisdictions, especially if union employees are involved, and not many Departments of Labor will back you up as firing for cause in this case. Issue [b] is illegal due to IRS finding 2009-27 which allows even people terminated for cause to continue under COBRA coverage. Please don't make HR proclamations without doing your research.
So you can detect (and potentially clean) Windows viruses that end up on your servers or are forwarded through your Mac's email before it needs to be detected and increases the load on your Windows boxes. Yes, this is a problem. And AV vendors have been offering this feature for years. Why is this a Slashdot story?
... that might be OK if one's major concerns are debating just how many ferries dance on the head of a pin...
Ferries do not dance on pinheads - they move across bodies of water. Fairies (or Faeries, if you wish) may dance on pinheads, but only if they are wearing boots with very thick soles. In general, most philosophical debates (mainly in the religious camp) are over how many "angels" may dance simultaneously on the head of a pin - unfortunately, the jury is still out on that one.
There are few, if any, empirically supported treatments/preventions/interventions much less supported by longitudinal data.
That is because psychological treatments are extraordinarily hard to evaluate and longitudinal data is extraordinarily expensive to generate and analyze. Given that we lose only 0.011% of our population to this cause yearly, devoting moneys to this seems to government funders as not worth the potential benefit. Given that PhD candidates can get degrees based on theories that can be tested by small studies and given the lack of funds for other, more expensive approaches, their behavior is completely rational.
But look on the bright side - the scourge of ugly, stupid tattoos effects many more people than suicide. Perhaps some day, research will show why idiots do what they do and we can end idiocy forever. Maybe we can merge the two areas and figure out how to get idiots to commit suicide.
Still the more I use my tablet the more I begin to wonder how long they will persist, they are good for presenting what I have, not so much for creating on, at least in the business environment.
If your business is so cheap that it can't give you more than one system - one for creating (which should be more powerful than what an underpowered tablet can provide) and one for displaying presentations / email / dicking about on the interwebs - then you have more problems than the usability of your tablet.
If you truly think that you are in the same situation as an engineer below decks on the Titanic, your choice is obvious... abandon ship! Preferably before it hits the iceberg. Ships turn slowly, no matter who is at the wheel.
This is true in most good hardware and software companies. In my last three management positions, I've managed engineers who make more than I do. None of them have ever wanted my job and, to be honest, there are days I think that maybe I should transfer back to the technical track. But then there's also the days when I am quite thankful that I'm not trying to debug synchronization issues in some crufty bit of multi-threaded code that someone in another part of the organization wrote.
So, what's the final answer here? All jobs suck in their own way; all jobs provide reward in there own way. Moving to a job in another company will probably allow you to garner income more quickly, but the risk comes from not really understanding the suck/reward profile (which is never clear going in) and ending up a loser. Choose carefully.
Because, contrary to a lot of people's ideology, competition isn't always an efficient way to fix problems. And as long as the dictator remains benevolent, he can allocate resources in a way that makes sure the problem stays solved.
Texas hold'em at the table is lucrative if you can read people well and also have an understanding of probability
Yeah, but you still have collusion there, too. Why do you think that the OL poker folk aren't on the lookout for this sort of thing, as well? There are algorithmic ways of detecting potentially fraudulent plays. There are process checkers to see if you have an IM client open and scrapers to see what you're typing. I used to know a guy who worked for a vendor who sold to the OL poker sites and did checking for just these sorts of things. The last thing an OL poker site wants is to be known as a site where you're being cheated.
Either the descendants of the creator who might collect any payments or sell the rights to a corporation, or the shareholders of a corporation who own the rights to the content. Granted, it's not easy to feel moral outrage for these kind of rightsholders, given that the actual creator of the work often does not see much, if any, remuneration after the initial creation and/or sale of the work, but if you believe in intellectual property and that it should be treated the same as any other property (a different debate in and of itself), it is taking some amount of profit from the rightsholders and, legally speaking, it is little better than theft.
But, as you state, it's not simple. If you're looking for a rational justification in the downloading of copyrighted material, you must come at it from the viewpoint that either intellectual property or property as a whole is a specious concept, or that intellectual property cannot be stolen (and, if so, why have the notion that it's property in the first place), or that the laws surrounding copyright are so onerous that you are participating in civil disobedience to protest them. Otherwise, you're just involved in vigilantism (I am striking back for the poor downtrodden artist who the rightsholders are screwing) or theft of property.
Some languages gain phonemes, some languages lose phonemes.
Some species gain genes, some species lose genes (and in a non-monotonic fashion), but yet we believe maps of genes provide reasonable taxonomic structures that descend from a single root (unless you're disputing this as well). Languages mutate and recombine just like genetic material. Why do you think we should believe in one and not the other?
That's a great diagram. I shows that there were only nine ancestral languages: FORTRAN, LISP, SNOBOL, COBOL (actually B-O), JOSS, PROLOG, ML, FORTH, and sh. I actually feel lucky to have programmed in eight of those and, if someone could come up with a JOSS implementation, I could brag about all nine.
That way you're not just linking, your embedding documents and parts of documents.
How are you embedding just "part" of a document? You're pointing into the middle of a document, but you're not preventing the viewer from seeing parts that the original document producer (or the referer) might not want them to see. This comment just shows that you didn't get what Nelson was saying. Not that that's uncommon - he doesn't do a very good job of describing what he wants - but your simplified (and incorrect) solution is not "Done" by any stretch of the imagination. So, no $Billions for you...
Yet another visionary wanting to do something different just for the sake [of] being different.
Well, except that he proposed this fifteen years before the web came into existence. It had a lot of good ideas which, had they been implemented, would have solved a lot of the issues plaguing the web today: Spam? Gone, because it could be backtraced to its original secured source and either be filtered, or allowed legal action to be taken. Same for most other malware. The whole issue about copyrighted content being downloaded? Again, solved, because he proposed a system where access could be tracked and micropayments exchanged. If you look at the original 17 rules of Project Xanadu, most of them seem quite sane, if you were starting from scratch.
Granted, he could never bring his ideas to fruition (and, given that he wanted the system to be monetizable, it might have been a good thing that he couldn't), but the ideas behind it were sound. This is the better solution that the more quickly delivered "worse is better" WWW displaced. From a purely engineering standpoint, it actually would have been a better solution. Forget the stupid UI that Nelson slapped on it - that's only the skinning of the ideas. It is the seventeen rules that were pretty clever.
For example, not one would miss 400 x 400 kilometers of Kansas.
Well not no one - I think that Dorothy will, once she gets all of her new friends' problems sorted out. There's no place like home... there's no place like home...
Slashdot Mirror
crush those in rural areas...
Well, never let it be said that some legislation does not have unintended good outcomes.
here, as the perceptions go, you either are a Tea Partying, evangelical with a giant Ayn Rand tattoo; or a Communist, Pinko, Commie red only in favor of the government taking over everything. There is no middle, and [there is] no room for actual conversation.
Blog responses on a site like Slashdot are not the place for an "actual conversation". The points made are disjointed and passed over shortly after they're written. And no one reads a lengthy response chain days later and expects them to continue once a new participant chimes in. Blaming Slashdot for lack of "actual conversation" makes about as much sense as blaming an automobile for not traveling to outer space under its own power - it was simply not designed for that.
If you want "actual conversation" on politics, go to a coffee shop or a bar, sit at the counter, and talk to actual people. Or maybe try Usenet, if you can wade through the spam. Or, even better, one of the message boards that do engage in long, repetitive threads on politics, where people just talk each other into exhaustion rather than change each others minds. Maybe you'll have better luck there.
You need grounds for an appeal. What you think of as denial of justice is not grounds. Show me where the judge made an improper ruling in law.
The company made money, the lawyers made money, and, when you consider the customer, two out of three ain't bad...
2: If you're an idiot, you're fired [a] without severance or [b] health benefits.
Issue [a] is illegal in some jurisdictions, especially if union employees are involved, and not many Departments of Labor will back you up as firing for cause in this case. Issue [b] is illegal due to IRS finding 2009-27 which allows even people terminated for cause to continue under COBRA coverage. Please don't make HR proclamations without doing your research.
So you can detect (and potentially clean) Windows viruses that end up on your servers or are forwarded through your Mac's email before it needs to be detected and increases the load on your Windows boxes. Yes, this is a problem. And AV vendors have been offering this feature for years. Why is this a Slashdot story?
Education, and the costs there of, should not be operated on a supply and demand curve..
I agree, but I'll worry about education after I get health care fixed in this regard. A bad/expensive education won't kill me.
... that might be OK if one's major concerns are debating just how many ferries dance on the head of a pin...
Ferries do not dance on pinheads - they move across bodies of water. Fairies (or Faeries, if you wish) may dance on pinheads, but only if they are wearing boots with very thick soles. In general, most philosophical debates (mainly in the religious camp) are over how many "angels" may dance simultaneously on the head of a pin - unfortunately, the jury is still out on that one.
Sadly, I agree with the rest of your post.
There are few, if any, empirically supported treatments/preventions/interventions much less supported by longitudinal data.
That is because psychological treatments are extraordinarily hard to evaluate and longitudinal data is extraordinarily expensive to generate and analyze. Given that we lose only 0.011% of our population to this cause yearly, devoting moneys to this seems to government funders as not worth the potential benefit. Given that PhD candidates can get degrees based on theories that can be tested by small studies and given the lack of funds for other, more expensive approaches, their behavior is completely rational.
But look on the bright side - the scourge of ugly, stupid tattoos effects many more people than suicide. Perhaps some day, research will show why idiots do what they do and we can end idiocy forever. Maybe we can merge the two areas and figure out how to get idiots to commit suicide.
All books on web services are RESTful... I tend to fall asleep about five pages in.
Still the more I use my tablet the more I begin to wonder how long they will persist, they are good for presenting what I have, not so much for creating on, at least in the business environment.
If your business is so cheap that it can't give you more than one system - one for creating (which should be more powerful than what an underpowered tablet can provide) and one for displaying presentations /
email / dicking about on the interwebs - then you have more problems than the usability of your tablet.
Isn't the generic sucktitude that any Microsoft portable device has "distinctive" enough?
If you truly think that you are in the same situation as an engineer below decks on the Titanic, your choice is obvious... abandon ship! Preferably before it hits the iceberg. Ships turn slowly, no matter who is at the wheel.
This is true in most good hardware and software companies. In my last three management positions, I've managed engineers who make more than I do. None of them have ever wanted my job and, to be honest, there are days I think that maybe I should transfer back to the technical track. But then there's also the days when I am quite thankful that I'm not trying to debug synchronization issues in some crufty bit of multi-threaded code that someone in another part of the organization wrote.
So, what's the final answer here? All jobs suck in their own way; all jobs provide reward in there own way. Moving to a job in another company will probably allow you to garner income more quickly, but the risk comes from not really understanding the suck/reward profile (which is never clear going in) and ending up a loser. Choose carefully.
Because, contrary to a lot of people's ideology, competition isn't always an efficient way to fix problems. And as long as the dictator remains benevolent, he can allocate resources in a way that makes sure the problem stays solved.
Texas hold'em at the table is lucrative if you can read people well and also have an understanding of probability
Yeah, but you still have collusion there, too. Why do you think that the OL poker folk aren't on the lookout for this sort of thing, as well? There are algorithmic ways of detecting potentially fraudulent plays. There are process checkers to see if you have an IM client open and scrapers to see what you're typing. I used to know a guy who worked for a vendor who sold to the OL poker sites and did checking for just these sorts of things. The last thing an OL poker site wants is to be known as a site where you're being cheated.
Where's the harm in piracy? Who is hurt by it?
Either the descendants of the creator who might collect any payments or sell the rights to a corporation, or the shareholders of a corporation who own the rights to the content. Granted, it's not easy to feel moral outrage for these kind of rightsholders, given that the actual creator of the work often does not see much, if any, remuneration after the initial creation and/or sale of the work, but if you believe in intellectual property and that it should be treated the same as any other property (a different debate in and of itself), it is taking some amount of profit from the rightsholders and, legally speaking, it is little better than theft.
But, as you state, it's not simple. If you're looking for a rational justification in the downloading of copyrighted material, you must come at it from the viewpoint that either intellectual property or property as a whole is a specious concept, or that intellectual property cannot be stolen (and, if so, why have the notion that it's property in the first place), or that the laws surrounding copyright are so onerous that you are participating in civil disobedience to protest them. Otherwise, you're just involved in vigilantism (I am striking back for the poor downtrodden artist who the rightsholders are screwing) or theft of property.
Some languages gain phonemes, some languages lose phonemes.
Some species gain genes, some species lose genes (and in a non-monotonic fashion), but yet we believe maps of genes provide reasonable taxonomic structures that descend from a single root (unless you're disputing this as well). Languages mutate and recombine just like genetic material. Why do you think we should believe in one and not the other?
That's a great diagram. I shows that there were only nine ancestral languages: FORTRAN, LISP, SNOBOL, COBOL (actually B-O), JOSS, PROLOG, ML, FORTH, and sh. I actually feel lucky to have programmed in eight of those and, if someone could come up with a JOSS implementation, I could brag about all nine.
[Citation needed]
That way you're not just linking, your embedding documents and parts of documents.
How are you embedding just "part" of a document? You're pointing into the middle of a document, but you're not preventing the viewer from seeing parts that the original document producer (or the referer) might not want them to see. This comment just shows that you didn't get what Nelson was saying. Not that that's uncommon - he doesn't do a very good job of describing what he wants - but your simplified (and incorrect) solution is not "Done" by any stretch of the imagination. So, no $Billions for you...
He'll tell us that humanity is doing sex the wrong way and teledildonics is the way to go?
It may be the only way for those on Slashdot to go.
Yet another visionary wanting to do something different just for the sake [of] being different.
Well, except that he proposed this fifteen years before the web came into existence. It had a lot of good ideas which, had they been implemented, would have solved a lot of the issues plaguing the web today: Spam? Gone, because it could be backtraced to its original secured source and either be filtered, or allowed legal action to be taken. Same for most other malware. The whole issue about copyrighted content being downloaded? Again, solved, because he proposed a system where access could be tracked and micropayments exchanged. If you look at the original 17 rules of Project Xanadu, most of them seem quite sane, if you were starting from scratch.
Granted, he could never bring his ideas to fruition (and, given that he wanted the system to be monetizable, it might have been a good thing that he couldn't), but the ideas behind it were sound. This is the better solution that the more quickly delivered "worse is better" WWW displaced. From a purely engineering standpoint, it actually would have been a better solution. Forget the stupid UI that Nelson slapped on it - that's only the skinning of the ideas. It is the seventeen rules that were pretty clever.
Why should anyone be surprised by this? Flash usually fails to impress on any platform. In fact, it usually epic fails to impress.
For example, not one would miss 400 x 400 kilometers of Kansas.
Well not no one - I think that Dorothy will, once she gets all of her new friends' problems sorted out. There's no place like home... there's no place like home...