I agree that we need to take all of the other factors into account (continuing cost to run outdated equipment, comparing total costs of computers vs total costs of other manufactured goods, etc).
I still disagree with the direction you seem to be trying to push it. Absent an explanation of what you're factoring in and what you're ignoring, you should try to factor in everything. Of course, since a person can't think of everything, the real answer is to always show your calculations. The problem there is that people are built to see such arguments as boring and too detail oriented.
I think the long term answer to the general problem of showing the factors used in arguments that list derived facts like this is to put the argument in a user-rated wiki style format, so we can say "what the hell calculations did you base this on?", get an answer, criticize the answer, etc. and meanwhile let casual viewers choose to just see the high rated overview of the report.
Unfortunately, I think people are generally more interested in a high level overview that supports their predisposition than in informed debate to settle on a position that corresponds with reality. I'm not sure if any organization other than academia would use the kind of revision controlled, collaboratively rated, trust based wiki system I'm talking about.
What you say makes perfect sense for someone who likes coffee. It's pure self-aggrandizing elitism to assert that you have a better life than someone who doesn't, though.
If they had said, "it takes this much to run the electricity necessary for the administrative offices of the company that happens to manufacture CRTs--and they produce this many of them," I'd buy it. They're not, so the argument sounds like "the actual activity of making the CRT takes this much energy," which is rather dishonest and that was my point.
I don't think it's dishonest at all. It's dishonest to try to convince yourself that the cost of making a CRT doesn't include the energy for the utilities in the buildings devoted to its manufacture.
I guarantee you would feel better if you directly stimulate your pleasure center. Like I said, even you don't believe the tripe you're espousing.
Besides- how do you know I'm not high on dope right now?!
The only responses I have to that are ad hominem (though apt), so I'll refrain from making them.
It's obvious you're here to have some juvenile philosophical argument in which we snipe at each other rather than actually discussing something you believe in. I'm not interested.
If pleasure and pain is all there is, why are you messaging on slashdot instead of snorting/shooting up/directly stimulating your pleasure center? Even you don't believe that tripe.
AFAIK, you can't determine the nature of morality. You can only choose a morality that works for you and adhere to it. When your morality is broken, you do poorly in the world and you leave the things you care about without support. A morality that says there's nothing but pleasure & pain leads to a quick (if enjoyable) death. If you want that, go for it. I certainly won't tell you not to. But I'll do my damnedest to demonstrate just how stupid it is.
P.S. postscripts are stupid in a fully editable medium.
that same argument applies to drama, comedy, and tragedy. Which invalidates the original post from a different angle.
I am no history buff, but I'll bet the Odyssey was not commonly believed to be a true history. There are too many elements that fall apart under honest scrutiny, and many of the Greeks were big on honest scrutiny.
Fantasy has been around forever. What do you call the Odyssey (8th century), Faerie Queen (16th century), and Beowulf (9th-10th century)?
I love fantasy, and I agree that it doesn't get the credit it deserves. What you have to say sounds pretty accurate regarding science fiction, but it holds no water whatsoever with regards to fantasy.
The solution is to alter a DNS server so it examines the results it gets back from its parents, and if it's a BS Verisign auto-search response, tell the requestor that the domain doesn't exist. Then we all start running and/or pointing to a DNS server that runs this new & improved DNS server, and all is good.
Be sure to make the change modular so we can remove it when Verisign pulls their head out.
We either fix things here on earth or we die: colonization of other planets is not a viable alternative over the next couple of centuries at least.
I agree with you that there is no time in the forseeable future that we will solve overpopulation problems with interplanetary migration, but that doesn't discount the usefulness of colonization as a safety net.
We are "advanced" enough now to essentially destroy the planet. While life on another planet would be very tough for the forseeable future, I don't think it's impossible once the infrastructure is set up. And having a society beyond the reach of our worst screwups seems like a good safety net to me.
No problem. Wow, a tiny bit of knowledge (listed multiple times already in the comments) + 15 seconds of work with google = +5 informative.
MOD PARENT UP
on
Brine on Mars?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The parent is right; the "+5 informative" grandparent is just wrong. We have known for some time that at least the north polar cap was composed mostly of water ice.
How precisely would MS (or any company) enter a market that is satisfied by GPL software by buying out or squeezing out? They can't buy out GPL code; if they buy out the main group managing it we'll just fork. And what company can, or wants to, squeeze out a product that is satisfying the market for free, or essentially for free?
The obvious counterexample is the web browser, but that is a special case: it's a possible new open computing platform that could get rid of MS's computing platform monopoly, so it was worth spending lots of money to build a product they have to give away.
Not to mention that you can fix it one time, for all your code, in C++ by creating and using a template wrapper for all arrays.
template class Array { private:
T* buff; public:
Array()
{
buff = new T[size];
}
Array(T* b)
{
buff = b;
}
T& operator[](int index)
{
if( index = size ) {
throw string("index out of bounds, size: ")+size+", index: "+index;
}
return buff[index];
}
const T& operator[](int index) const
{
if( index = size ) {
throw string("index out of bounds, size: ")+size+", index: "+index;
}
return buff[index];
} }
That code's probably buggy as hell since it's the first C++ I've written in four years, but nonetheless, it's an easy problem to solve, and one that's been solved over and over again, if people would just use it. Just never ever create a raw buffer in your code and never ever do anything with a buffer someone passes to you without wrapping it first, and you eliminate the vast majority of buffer overflow bugs.
Or you could just write your code in a language with built-in buffer overflow detection.
I have yet to see Linux being used in a desktop environment. I've seen a few macs, but a majority have been Windows based.
What you see yourself is what's called an anecdote. Sales statistics, surveys, referrer logs on web servers, those are reliable facts.
My anecdote is that I am writing this right now on a Debian machine, and 5 out of the last 6 years of my development work have been purely on Linux machines. I can't remember the last time I saw a Mac in use.
That's why we shouldn't base our opinions about statistics on our personal experiences, but by examining trends over a broad base.
At least in the US, you absolutely have fair use rights, which include parody, archiving, and excerpts for exemplary or non-commercial purposes. You can see the law here.
What's more, you have every right to get together with friends and make tape copies or digital copies of music on digital audio recording equipment.
I'm not sure what this means about copying a CD someone else bought to a tape, but copying a CD for a friend using digital audio equipment and audio cds is perfectly legal, and copying an audio tape to another audio tape is also legal. We pay a "tax" to the RIAA on every piece of digital audio equipment, audio CD, and audio tape to allow this per The Audio Home Recording Act of 1992.
1) The vast majority of his stuff is worth reading. To me, that's fairly high praise. 2) The vast majority of his stuff is available for free and easy to find if you start from the slashdot/kuro5hin culture. 3) He gets the IP and tech issues that affect us today and tomorrow.
What it boils down to is that I haven't seen anyone else present a believable day-after-tomorrow view of how globalization, pc miniaturization, and wireless/minicam/etc will affect us. He seems to present that view in Unwirer and... hmm, whoah, little conflation going on here. Gah. My other one was actually Pattern Recognition, Gibson's latest.
Maybe you have something there;-)
Regarding copyright, I (and I think Cory opines similarly) believe that a short term copyright would be for the good, and it is entirely the author's discretion to release under more lenient terms than copyright allows. However, our current 70 years+++ copyright is unethical, counterproductive, and unconstitutional.
What is it you don't like about Cory Doctorow? 0wnzered seems quite good, if a little soft, sci-fi; Unwirer was very good and didn't seem at all soft; Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is great stuff in the spirit of Gibson and Stephenson. Sometimes his stuff is off (I thought the basic premise of Eastern Standard Tribe was pretty lame. Sure I can see your group affiliations affecting your sleep schedule, but it makes no sense to say you will have a group called "Eastern Standard"; lots of groups are based in the EST time zone) but if you ignore the name of the group, it's a cool story. See http://www.craphound.com to read some of his stuff.
He has some insight on copyright. It's really not much more than you get pretty commonly at slashdot, but he's out there living the "right way" wrt copyright as an author, which is a pretty uncommon thing.
So, what's the problem? Maybe he gets more press in geek circles than he quite deserves, but not by a lot.
I'm no doctor either, but the references I can find on the web assert ~300,000 eggs. Apparently a woman releases more eggs each month than just the one that they ovulate, and they also have many many eggs left after menopause.
I don't know why that would be, except that cells are tiny and the resources to produce 300k of them (or 2 million; read the referenced link) probably don't amount to much.
I still disagree, most especially from the ethical perspective (I actually suspect you agree with me on the ethical perspective, but your first post appeared to be making the opposite point).
It was an embryo - I don't think you will contest that. Its process of maturation was aborted. Ergo it was an aborted embryo. I agree that its long term viability was in question, but I don't think the ethics of killing something should have much to do with the fact that it was going to die anyway (isn't everything?).
Personally, I can't see how there could be any sane non-religious issue with aborting an embryo that is less sentient than a goldfish, but I think that point stands aside from establishing the ethical equivalent of killing a clone that could have become a human baby and killing a 'normal' embryo that could have become a human baby. I think inserting ethical ambiguity there is a big mistake. They are the same.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone failed to close the i tag in the post for this story.
And don't forget, rotate the latters to a random angle, within say 45 degrees of vertical.
I agree that we need to take all of the other factors into account (continuing cost to run outdated equipment, comparing total costs of computers vs total costs of other manufactured goods, etc).
I still disagree with the direction you seem to be trying to push it. Absent an explanation of what you're factoring in and what you're ignoring, you should try to factor in everything. Of course, since a person can't think of everything, the real answer is to always show your calculations. The problem there is that people are built to see such arguments as boring and too detail oriented.
I think the long term answer to the general problem of showing the factors used in arguments that list derived facts like this is to put the argument in a user-rated wiki style format, so we can say "what the hell calculations did you base this on?", get an answer, criticize the answer, etc. and meanwhile let casual viewers choose to just see the high rated overview of the report.
Unfortunately, I think people are generally more interested in a high level overview that supports their predisposition than in informed debate to settle on a position that corresponds with reality. I'm not sure if any organization other than academia would use the kind of revision controlled, collaboratively rated, trust based wiki system I'm talking about.
What you say makes perfect sense for someone who likes coffee. It's pure self-aggrandizing elitism to assert that you have a better life than someone who doesn't, though.
If they had said, "it takes this much to run the electricity necessary for the administrative offices of the company that happens to manufacture CRTs--and they produce this many of them," I'd buy it. They're not, so the argument sounds like "the actual activity of making the CRT takes this much energy," which is rather dishonest and that was my point.
I don't think it's dishonest at all. It's dishonest to try to convince yourself that the cost of making a CRT doesn't include the energy for the utilities in the buildings devoted to its manufacture.
I guarantee you would feel better if you directly stimulate your pleasure center. Like I said, even you don't believe the tripe you're espousing.
Besides- how do you know I'm not high on dope right now?!
The only responses I have to that are ad hominem (though apt), so I'll refrain from making them.
It's obvious you're here to have some juvenile philosophical argument in which we snipe at each other rather than actually discussing something you believe in. I'm not interested.
If pleasure and pain is all there is, why are you messaging on slashdot instead of snorting/shooting up/directly stimulating your pleasure center? Even you don't believe that tripe.
AFAIK, you can't determine the nature of morality. You can only choose a morality that works for you and adhere to it. When your morality is broken, you do poorly in the world and you leave the things you care about without support. A morality that says there's nothing but pleasure & pain leads to a quick (if enjoyable) death. If you want that, go for it. I certainly won't tell you not to. But I'll do my damnedest to demonstrate just how stupid it is.
P.S. postscripts are stupid in a fully editable medium.
P.P.S- Immoral behavior? Guess what- there is no wrong and no right. There's only pleasure and pain.
And you wonder why people criticize GTA3? Your moral compass is broken.
that same argument applies to drama, comedy, and tragedy. Which invalidates the original post from a different angle.
I am no history buff, but I'll bet the Odyssey was not commonly believed to be a true history. There are too many elements that fall apart under honest scrutiny, and many of the Greeks were big on honest scrutiny.
Fantasy has been around forever. What do you call the Odyssey (8th century), Faerie Queen (16th century), and Beowulf (9th-10th century)?
I love fantasy, and I agree that it doesn't get the credit it deserves. What you have to say sounds pretty accurate regarding science fiction, but it holds no water whatsoever with regards to fantasy.
I should have known this was either somehow a bad idea, had already been done, or both ;)
Thanks
The solution is to alter a DNS server so it examines the results it gets back from its parents, and if it's a BS Verisign auto-search response, tell the requestor that the domain doesn't exist. Then we all start running and/or pointing to a DNS server that runs this new & improved DNS server, and all is good.
Be sure to make the change modular so we can remove it when Verisign pulls their head out.
We either fix things here on earth or we die: colonization of other planets is not a viable alternative over the next couple of centuries at least.
I agree with you that there is no time in the forseeable future that we will solve overpopulation problems with interplanetary migration, but that doesn't discount the usefulness of colonization as a safety net.
We are "advanced" enough now to essentially destroy the planet. While life on another planet would be very tough for the forseeable future, I don't think it's impossible once the infrastructure is set up. And having a society beyond the reach of our worst screwups seems like a good safety net to me.
Drat! I thought I was radiating a type 4 fermionic mental confusion field.
;-)
:)
You must be wearing your tin-foil hat
BTW, DNS is down on magicosm.net right now. If you were thinking of checking it out, it should be back up in a couple of days. Blame Verizon
No problem. Wow, a tiny bit of knowledge (listed multiple times already in the comments) + 15 seconds of work with google = +5 informative.
The parent is right; the "+5 informative" grandparent is just wrong. We have known for some time that at least the north polar cap was composed mostly of water ice.
r _040123.html
References:
http://www.nature.com/nsu/030210/030210-9.html
http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/express_wate
Point taken. If it's successful.
How precisely would MS (or any company) enter a market that is satisfied by GPL software by buying out or squeezing out? They can't buy out GPL code; if they buy out the main group managing it we'll just fork. And what company can, or wants to, squeeze out a product that is satisfying the market for free, or essentially for free?
The obvious counterexample is the web browser, but that is a special case: it's a possible new open computing platform that could get rid of MS's computing platform monopoly, so it was worth spending lots of money to build a product they have to give away.
Not to mention that you can fix it one time, for all your code, in C++ by creating and using a template wrapper for all arrays.
template
class Array
{
private:
T* buff;
public:
Array()
{
buff = new T[size];
}
Array(T* b)
{
buff = b;
}
T& operator[](int index)
{
if( index = size ) {
throw string("index out of bounds, size: ")+size+", index: "+index;
}
return buff[index];
}
const T& operator[](int index) const
{
if( index = size ) {
throw string("index out of bounds, size: ")+size+", index: "+index;
}
return buff[index];
}
}
That code's probably buggy as hell since it's the first C++ I've written in four years, but nonetheless, it's an easy problem to solve, and one that's been solved over and over again, if people would just use it. Just never ever create a raw buffer in your code and never ever do anything with a buffer someone passes to you without wrapping it first, and you eliminate the vast majority of buffer overflow bugs.
Or you could just write your code in a language with built-in buffer overflow detection.
I have yet to see Linux being used in a desktop environment. I've seen a few macs, but a majority have been Windows based.
What you see yourself is what's called an anecdote. Sales statistics, surveys, referrer logs on web servers, those are reliable facts.
My anecdote is that I am writing this right now on a Debian machine, and 5 out of the last 6 years of my development work have been purely on Linux machines. I can't remember the last time I saw a Mac in use.
That's why we shouldn't base our opinions about statistics on our personal experiences, but by examining trends over a broad base.
What's more, you have every right to get together with friends and make tape copies or digital copies of music on digital audio recording equipment.
I'm not sure what this means about copying a CD someone else bought to a tape, but copying a CD for a friend using digital audio equipment and audio cds is perfectly legal, and copying an audio tape to another audio tape is also legal. We pay a "tax" to the RIAA on every piece of digital audio equipment, audio CD, and audio tape to allow this per The Audio Home Recording Act of 1992.
1) The vast majority of his stuff is worth reading. To me, that's fairly high praise.
;-)
2) The vast majority of his stuff is available for free and easy to find if you start from the slashdot/kuro5hin culture.
3) He gets the IP and tech issues that affect us today and tomorrow.
What it boils down to is that I haven't seen anyone else present a believable day-after-tomorrow view of how globalization, pc miniaturization, and wireless/minicam/etc will affect us. He seems to present that view in Unwirer and... hmm, whoah, little conflation going on here. Gah. My other one was actually Pattern Recognition, Gibson's latest.
Maybe you have something there
Regarding copyright, I (and I think Cory opines similarly) believe that a short term copyright would be for the good, and it is entirely the author's discretion to release under more lenient terms than copyright allows. However, our current 70 years+++ copyright is unethical, counterproductive, and unconstitutional.
What is it you don't like about Cory Doctorow? 0wnzered seems quite good, if a little soft, sci-fi; Unwirer was very good and didn't seem at all soft; Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is great stuff in the spirit of Gibson and Stephenson. Sometimes his stuff is off (I thought the basic premise of Eastern Standard Tribe was pretty lame. Sure I can see your group affiliations affecting your sleep schedule, but it makes no sense to say you will have a group called "Eastern Standard"; lots of groups are based in the EST time zone) but if you ignore the name of the group, it's a cool story. See http://www.craphound.com to read some of his stuff.
He has some insight on copyright. It's really not much more than you get pretty commonly at slashdot, but he's out there living the "right way" wrt copyright as an author, which is a pretty uncommon thing.
So, what's the problem? Maybe he gets more press in geek circles than he quite deserves, but not by a lot.
I don't know why that would be, except that cells are tiny and the resources to produce 300k of them (or 2 million; read the referenced link) probably don't amount to much.
I still disagree, most especially from the ethical perspective (I actually suspect you agree with me on the ethical perspective, but your first post appeared to be making the opposite point).
It was an embryo - I don't think you will contest that. Its process of maturation was aborted. Ergo it was an aborted embryo. I agree that its long term viability was in question, but I don't think the ethics of killing something should have much to do with the fact that it was going to die anyway (isn't everything?).
Personally, I can't see how there could be any sane non-religious issue with aborting an embryo that is less sentient than a goldfish, but I think that point stands aside from establishing the ethical equivalent of killing a clone that could have become a human baby and killing a 'normal' embryo that could have become a human baby. I think inserting ethical ambiguity there is a big mistake. They are the same.