I think you're right. It's hard on any narrowly-defined topic to differentiate between being left and simply disagreeing with the majority of Bush's policies. I think that a large majority of "geeks" - the people who actually visit/. - can agree that stem cell research is good, implying that a multi-year war will last six months is bad, etc, etc.
With the narrow scope that most of these articles have, it becomes even harder to discern someone's full political views. The fiscal conservatives don't get a voice because there are very few economic stories on/. You don't even hear much from social conservatives - once again because you hear very little on this geeksite about those types of stories.
What you get most of are tech stories - which are mostly related to war, security, and civil liberties. Even if you agree with Bush on fiscal and social issues - if you're anti-war, you - and the site- will get branded as a lefty.
True - I was just referring to the actual precipitation and access to water. Intuitively, there should be an increase in rainfall (freshwater - not salt).
Global warming will be a distaster, but I don't think we're going to stop it. Even if we all make the effort now to change our ways, there is simply too much inertia. Our next step shouldn't be aimed at stopping it, but slowing it down, and beginning to prepare for the effects.
Personally, I'm not too worried about thousand-year-old ecosystems. They've been wiped out before in non-manmade climate change, and will be again. I think we're doing more damage in our hunt for resources and more land than climate change will ever do - evolution has proven resilient to climate change, I don't know if it is as resiliant to a species' takeover of the earth - creating unnatural barriers in the form of dams and roads and cities.
I also think it's time to start talking about specific effects - and planning for them. And we should be talking about the good along with the bad. Higher precipitation going further inland could open up deserts to irrigation and colonization. Same goes for the excess heat opening up the Canadian and Russian northlands. Should we start building infrastructure towards these places so that when the time comes, they'll be ready?
I don't expect anyone to celebrate global warming - it's a disruption in how the earth as we know it is working. But unless we can stop it - and most accounts I've heard have said the best we can hope for is slowing it down decades from now - we should start preparations.
Is it possible to admire half a man? Hitler inspired people, brought them out of a crushing depression, and personally rose from nothing to the very top.
He was also directly responsible for possibly the greatest atrocity in the history of mankind.
Am I allowed to admire the first half, and not the second? Are the two inextricably intertwined?
I'll admit the "...and what he did with it" is vague - but I truly doubt Arnold was referring to the Holocaust.
Now someone correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that water would actually become *cheaper* given a higher global temperature. More heat = more evaporation = more precipitation going even further inland from the ocean?
Well our bodies give off an electical charge (which is very close to a hotdog) and the blade being metal.
Close. The blade itself is charged (a sine wave). If our conductive bodies come into contact with it the electrons flow into (or out of - depends on where we are in the sine wave) our bodies. This distorts the wave, and that's where the chip comes in and notices that it's not dealing with just the saw blade anymore.
As if fate wanted to make it challenging, the maximum size of the HTML input field...
Someone who considers it challenging to send more than the maximum characters of an input field? And he's the one writing the article? I hope that was just flavour-text, not his true feelings about the "challenge"
We as people are pretty easy to detect directly, and are great reflectors of light.
Only if we are measured here on earth. If the universe was 90% human corpses, that would be dark matter. We don't reflect/generate enough light to be seen if we're scattered uniformly in the dark spaces between galaxies.
I think Zelda is a rare exception, for the simple reason that they wait so long between games, and make each game unique in its own right. I could deal with a GTA release every 3 or 4 years as well - long enough for the older version to be completely obsolete, so the developers have to go back and look at it with a fresh mind.
I don't think I understand your argument. Why would the long tail become unprofitable? For music, for instance - storage is going to cost next to nothing, bandwidth a per-purchase cost that exactly matches that of hits. Administration costs diminish with every new item added. With next to no per-item-offered expenses, how could it possibly be unprofitable to carry an item?
It doesn't though. In your example, whether there's enough for 5% or 20%, the 10% of people who purchase gold are the only people with a reasonable expectation of getting these items. That's not levelling out, that's concentrating opportunity in a small group of people who act outside the terms of the game.
Economy is the problem. If there is 10x as much gold because people are "producing" more of it by farming, then those who don't farm can't buy the good items. It actively decreases the value of other players' gold.
That's how it affects other players' experiences. Blizzard has made a decision that this is a bad thing in terms of fun, so they delete accounts accordingly.
I personally think it's a Sisyphusian task, but I'm certainly not against trying.
increasing the cutoff percentile of those items that make a profit and removing this "Long Tail" nonsense.
I don't think you understand the term "long tail" - it's a demand tail, not a profit tail. There will still only be a small demand for [obscure topic], no matter how the pricing and profit models change. It will still be a part of the "long tail" of demand.
The point isn't to cater to the niche though - just make it available. The niche will take care of itself, but when one Pinhead asks another "Where can I get 'Double-tips and Printed Pins' by Graydon X Philmore", it's in Amazon's best interest that Pinhead B says "Amazon", rather than "it's out of print, there will never be another, here, let me just photocopy my 20-year-old 1st Edition".
The Long Tail may apply to other domains, but at the moment it's mostly applicable to distribution. Distributors don't have to know a thing about the niche or the audience - they just need to provide a place where people enter their CC number and a database ID to get a product. All niches are represented equally by these distributors, but (and here's the important bit) all niches are represented.
But it moves the power of choice from the distributor to the consumer. Before, a lot of genres simply didn't have a chance because you could get a Greatest Hits album and not much else in most record stores. Now if you have different tastes from everyone else, your entire 100 items will be taken up by items that simply weren't available before.
The "top 100" phenomenon is more about retailers than consumers, since a top 100 list for retailers all look the same - "What sells the most". Consumers can pick their top 100 on "What do I like the most", and while there will be overlap, will be significantly more varied than what a retailer would select.
That quote is just as true as Al Gore claiming to "invent the internet" - maybe even less. The sole source is from Capital Hill Blue - the TheOnion of political news.
The problem, as always, is corruption and incompetance. If a region actually gains something (cheap labour) by having more convicts, then you can be sure that that's going to be abused somwhere down the line. And prisoners are already regarded as sub-human by a lot of guards anyway - can you imagine the situation if they also had a quota to meet?
Now, you could probably overcome these problems, but I guarantee the Law of Unintended Consequences would haunt this system for decades and more.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you're right. It's hard on any narrowly-defined topic to differentiate between being left and simply disagreeing with the majority of Bush's policies. I think that a large majority of "geeks" - the people who actually visit /. - can agree that stem cell research is good, implying that a multi-year war will last six months is bad, etc, etc.
/. You don't even hear much from social conservatives - once again because you hear very little on this geeksite about those types of stories.
With the narrow scope that most of these articles have, it becomes even harder to discern someone's full political views. The fiscal conservatives don't get a voice because there are very few economic stories on
What you get most of are tech stories - which are mostly related to war, security, and civil liberties. Even if you agree with Bush on fiscal and social issues - if you're anti-war, you - and the site- will get branded as a lefty.
the mistake of the left is the increasingly successful attempt to make the main purpose compensating the injured
The second anyone (left, right, up or down) pulls the political card in a non-political article, I have trouble trusting anything else they say.
True - I was just referring to the actual precipitation and access to water. Intuitively, there should be an increase in rainfall (freshwater - not salt).
Global warming will be a distaster, but I don't think we're going to stop it. Even if we all make the effort now to change our ways, there is simply too much inertia. Our next step shouldn't be aimed at stopping it, but slowing it down, and beginning to prepare for the effects.
Personally, I'm not too worried about thousand-year-old ecosystems. They've been wiped out before in non-manmade climate change, and will be again. I think we're doing more damage in our hunt for resources and more land than climate change will ever do - evolution has proven resilient to climate change, I don't know if it is as resiliant to a species' takeover of the earth - creating unnatural barriers in the form of dams and roads and cities.
I also think it's time to start talking about specific effects - and planning for them. And we should be talking about the good along with the bad. Higher precipitation going further inland could open up deserts to irrigation and colonization. Same goes for the excess heat opening up the Canadian and Russian northlands. Should we start building infrastructure towards these places so that when the time comes, they'll be ready?
I don't expect anyone to celebrate global warming - it's a disruption in how the earth as we know it is working. But unless we can stop it - and most accounts I've heard have said the best we can hope for is slowing it down decades from now - we should start preparations.
Is it possible to admire half a man? Hitler inspired people, brought them out of a crushing depression, and personally rose from nothing to the very top.
He was also directly responsible for possibly the greatest atrocity in the history of mankind.
Am I allowed to admire the first half, and not the second? Are the two inextricably intertwined?
I'll admit the "...and what he did with it" is vague - but I truly doubt Arnold was referring to the Holocaust.
Tough to say - race and height simply don't receive the same type of sensistivity.
Now someone correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that water would actually become *cheaper* given a higher global temperature. More heat = more evaporation = more precipitation going even further inland from the ocean?
Pass me the speech center of the brain!
Well our bodies give off an electical charge (which is very close to a hotdog) and the blade being metal.
Close. The blade itself is charged (a sine wave). If our conductive bodies come into contact with it the electrons flow into (or out of - depends on where we are in the sine wave) our bodies. This distorts the wave, and that's where the chip comes in and notices that it's not dealing with just the saw blade anymore.
This bothers me:
As if fate wanted to make it challenging, the maximum size of the HTML input field...
Someone who considers it challenging to send more than the maximum characters of an input field? And he's the one writing the article? I hope that was just flavour-text, not his true feelings about the "challenge"
We as people are pretty easy to detect directly, and are great reflectors of light.
Only if we are measured here on earth. If the universe was 90% human corpses, that would be dark matter. We don't reflect/generate enough light to be seen if we're scattered uniformly in the dark spaces between galaxies.
I think Zelda is a rare exception, for the simple reason that they wait so long between games, and make each game unique in its own right. I could deal with a GTA release every 3 or 4 years as well - long enough for the older version to be completely obsolete, so the developers have to go back and look at it with a fresh mind.
(accused) incumbents.
Nice. Accused incumbents and a suspected president.
I don't think I understand your argument. Why would the long tail become unprofitable? For music, for instance - storage is going to cost next to nothing, bandwidth a per-purchase cost that exactly matches that of hits. Administration costs diminish with every new item added. With next to no per-item-offered expenses, how could it possibly be unprofitable to carry an item?
It all levels out, though.
It doesn't though. In your example, whether there's enough for 5% or 20%, the 10% of people who purchase gold are the only people with a reasonable expectation of getting these items. That's not levelling out, that's concentrating opportunity in a small group of people who act outside the terms of the game.
Economy is the problem. If there is 10x as much gold because people are "producing" more of it by farming, then those who don't farm can't buy the good items. It actively decreases the value of other players' gold.
That's how it affects other players' experiences. Blizzard has made a decision that this is a bad thing in terms of fun, so they delete accounts accordingly.
I personally think it's a Sisyphusian task, but I'm certainly not against trying.
Stupid me, didn't RTFA and just took others' word for it in this thread.
In that case, not an MS vulnerability, not an FF vulnerability, and if something similar were to occur in IE, not an IE vulnerability.
There's no protection against a stupid user*
* in any common desktop system
being Microsoft's fault whenever there is anything like this targeted at IE
That's right - because it's an OUTLOOK BUG.
increasing the cutoff percentile of those items that make a profit and removing this "Long Tail" nonsense.
I don't think you understand the term "long tail" - it's a demand tail, not a profit tail. There will still only be a small demand for [obscure topic], no matter how the pricing and profit models change. It will still be a part of the "long tail" of demand.
The point isn't to cater to the niche though - just make it available. The niche will take care of itself, but when one Pinhead asks another "Where can I get 'Double-tips and Printed Pins' by Graydon X Philmore", it's in Amazon's best interest that Pinhead B says "Amazon", rather than "it's out of print, there will never be another, here, let me just photocopy my 20-year-old 1st Edition".
The Long Tail may apply to other domains, but at the moment it's mostly applicable to distribution. Distributors don't have to know a thing about the niche or the audience - they just need to provide a place where people enter their CC number and a database ID to get a product. All niches are represented equally by these distributors, but (and here's the important bit) all niches are represented.
But it moves the power of choice from the distributor to the consumer. Before, a lot of genres simply didn't have a chance because you could get a Greatest Hits album and not much else in most record stores. Now if you have different tastes from everyone else, your entire 100 items will be taken up by items that simply weren't available before.
The "top 100" phenomenon is more about retailers than consumers, since a top 100 list for retailers all look the same - "What sells the most". Consumers can pick their top 100 on "What do I like the most", and while there will be overlap, will be significantly more varied than what a retailer would select.
What happens when you're wrong, and you've already "defeated" those who you now realize are right?
Oh, I'm sorry - I'm sure you'll never make a mistake.
More than anything else, it's the rank certainty of neocons that frightens me so much.
When your "logical, rational thought process" is a series of unsources vague attacks, imitation becomes the sincerest form of sarcasm.
That quote is just as true as Al Gore claiming to "invent the internet" - maybe even less. The sole source is from Capital Hill Blue - the TheOnion of political news.
Not to mention that it would probably remain illegal for minors. That would give parents a choice like:
If your child was caught smoking pot, would you rather :
A) He is sent to jail for years.
B) The person who provided it is sent to jail for years
The problem, as always, is corruption and incompetance. If a region actually gains something (cheap labour) by having more convicts, then you can be sure that that's going to be abused somwhere down the line. And prisoners are already regarded as sub-human by a lot of guards anyway - can you imagine the situation if they also had a quota to meet?
Now, you could probably overcome these problems, but I guarantee the Law of Unintended Consequences would haunt this system for decades and more.