That Bill Gates will get charged $1000 for a pack of gum?
Not really... I mean, sure he could get charged $1000 for a pack uf gum, but this is still capitalism we're talking about here. If you try to charge him $1000, then I'll ofer him $999. But then, someone else will be willing to sell it to him for $800. Eventually, the price will be driven back down to where it would have been anyways. That's how capitalism works. Even if we all know that he is suer rich, we all want to get the sale, and all it takes is one person to be charging $1.50, and then we all have to affer comparative prices, or we'll go out of business.
The problem isn't when soda machines charge more on hot days (I don't even know why article metioned that, it's irrelevant). The problem is when companies gather information about you in order to either raise or lower prices for you.
The easy solution to this though is to simply not let the companies gather any information about you. For example, if you are a businessman, they will try to charge you more for airfare. Whereas, if they no nothing about you, they will assume that you are just a vacationer, and you can get a cheaper fare. It's all about working the system.
Well, don't just tell the slashdot crowd that. Let BuyMusic know that you can't use their service from your browser of choice. If they don't see any business lost from not supporting Moz, then they will see no reason to support Moz.
I truly don't understand everyone's fasincation with opera. I mean, its a good browser, I would use it over IE any day, but it is not super fast and bloat free. Mozilla feels much faster to me. When I open up a page that is stored on my local hard drive, in Moz I can't even see any evidence of load time. Whereas in Opera, it will actually take a second to load. No that that is a scientific study or anything, but Moz feels faster to me.
Also, Moz is so much more standards compliant. If you've ever tried making a webpage with CSS you would see. Opera is not horrible (certainly not as crappy as IE when it comes to CSS), but the page elements always seems to be off be one pixel or so in Opera, so I have to resort to hacks to get it to look right in Opera. In Moz all of me CSS just works the way it should.
Like I said though, it's not like Opera is really bad, its just not that great, and I really don't see why people on/. prefer it so much. (It's not even open source!)
I don't watch movies on my computer screen either, but I have a video card with TV-out, so I just hook up my computer to the TV, and watch away. Most laptops these days have an S-Video jack.
Well then, what we really need to do is blow smoke up Daryl McBride's ass, you know give him a taste of his own medicine. We need to dig up any dirt that we can find on him. Has he ever cheated on his wife? Has he ever rented a porno? Was he ever caught cheating on a test? And, if he hasn't done any of these things, then we should just make up our own claims. I don't like to do this type of things to people, but he's really left us with no choice in the matter.
I'll start now:
I heard that Daryl McBride wears women's clothing every Saturday. I have proof, but I'm gonna wait a few months to release it. In the meantime, just believe that I am right.
Do you think that they don't care about money in Japan? They do. The reason that it is so much easier for them to roll out such a great broadband service over there is simple. They have a MUCH greater population density than we do. They are a tiny island compared to the vastness of the good 'ol USA. For a company to attempt to roll out the type of broadband like they are doing in Japan would be suicide. It would cost at least 10 times as much to create a network that could support a 12 MBit connection. It will take them 15 months to recover, it would take a US company 15 YEARS to recover the costs. Sorry but, there are a lot of great benefits to the US, we get bigger houses more land and more wilderness, as opposed to being cramped in a tiny apartment. But, we won't have broadband like Japan does for at least another 5 years or so. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
He did say that murder and rape are easy to prosecute, while spam is not. Therefore, it is logical to make murder, speeding, and rape illegal, but making spam illegal is illogical becouse it is impossible to prosecute wothout spending an inordinate amount of money. And, if you think that spam is hurting the economy, just think how much the increase in taxes from the FBI spending billions tracking down some spammer would hurt the economy.
Why, exactly? Spam is a social problem, just like any other type of fraud. Please list one social problem that had a technological solution.
Excluding the fact that there is no clear definition to a 'social problem', your argument is still invalid. You advocate the use of laws to fix this social problem, but can you tell me one law that has ever fixed a social problem? The war on drugs is unsuccessful, and a war on spam would be no more so. Technological solutions always are better than social engineering. (The equivilent of a technological solution for the war on drugs would be greater education, which has been shown through studies to be a more effective deterent to drugs than the law.)
Technological solutions can fix spam. Bayesian mail filters are a good start. I use one and barely any spam gets through. Also, if everyone were to digitally sign their email, then people that really didn't want spam could simply reject all mail from individuals that don't sign their mail, and automatically send them a note back that they won't accept their mail unless it is signed. And spammers will never sign their mail, becuse then their isp will quickly cancel their account. This method satisfies both your requests, it doesn't make email useless, and it does make spam more difficult.
So, rather than runing to the government to hold your hand, next time try to use your head and think of how you could get by without additional laws.
But you are wrong, because microsoft never did metaphorically own "all the roads". You yourself are reading slashdot, so you have to know about Linux, and Macs, and all of the other OS's out there. Microsoft does have competition. Microsoft makes a fairly decent product that most people find easy to use, so microsoft makes money. However, people are starting to see that there are alternatives, so microsoft is starting to lose market share (especially in the server end) here's a reference). And microsoft isn't losing because of the DOJ. (Name one major thing that the DOJ has done to help microsoft's competition. IE is still embedded into windows, Office is still a closed format, and now Java will still be crippled). Therefore, capitalism is working, on its own. Next time study some economics before you post here.
Re:YANANS (You Are Not A Neuroscientist)
on
Working with ADHD?
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· Score: 1
I pretty much tend to agree with that. In all of me rambling, that's really what it comes down to.
Re:YANANS (You Are Not A Neuroscientist)
on
Working with ADHD?
·
· Score: 1
...our society suffers in a very real way by dismissing people with psychological disorders as just "weak" or "bad" or "lazy."
I think that our society suffers from prescibing too much medication when (for a lack of better words) self-healing is the best answer. While one side of society may ridicule people with mental disorders, the other side is pitying them, and telling them that it is not their fault. So then we end up with people that have mental disorders that feel like crap because they are either pitied or mocked. The truth is, in my opinion, is while their mental disorder is not really their fault, they can do something about it on their own. They don't really need medications to fix their problem (most of the time). This brings me to the issue of free will. I believe that while someone may have an inbalance of chemicals in their brain, it is in their ability to control these chemicals, becuase they are in control of their own life.
Now, this is not true all the time, sometimes the person can be so far gone, that there is no way that he can heal himself without some external help. But when it comes to something more minor, like ADHD, I think that there should never be any drugs prescribed. Thomas Edison was most likely ADHD. He failed out of school becase of it. But, he was still very smart, just in a different way. If ritalin had been around back then, we might still be living without light-bulbs.
But anyways, back to the issue. Yes, I would say that I am a dualist. As I cannot say that I am a materialist. I find it difficult to believe that you can be a materialist, and also believe in free will, but I admit that I am not familiar with Penrose or Dennett. However, tending toward dualism does not mean that I believe that the mind gives rise to the brain, as I said before, the truth is probably somewhere in between. Also, I want to clarify that I don't believe that there are "a class of "real" organic disorders of the brain, and then there a bunch of fluffy dysfunctions of the "mind"". I think that mental disorders are all in the brain, but the mind can control these chemical inbalances, and stop them from occuring.
Re:YANANS (You Are Not A Neuroscientist)
on
Working with ADHD?
·
· Score: 1
Here's the truth: You are your brain, your brain is you. The brain gives wholly rise to the mind, and the mind is wholly derived from the function of the brain. One is a phenomenological construct, the other is the implementing hardware.
That is not a "truth". That is a HUGE debate in psychology and all of philosophy. Basically if what you said is true, then there is no free will, and all of our actions are determined not by us, but for us by our brian, which is in effect something that (according to you) we have no control over.
The other side of the debate is: You are your mind, your mind is you. Your mind gives rise to the brain, and the brain is derived from the function of the mind.
Which side is right? I don't know. It's probably something in between the two extremes. But you don't know either. So please don't spout it off as the absolute truth and then base the rest of your post on this "factual" statement.
Re:Theres no scientific proof for any of this.
on
Working with ADHD?
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· Score: 1
The difference is, if you break your leg, it is becuase of some external cause like falling off a cliff or something. Whereas if you have a mental disorder, then that came from within, and therefore it should be cured from within. Which means that you should find a way to cure yourself. You should not depend on an external drug to make you "feel better".
But to each his own. If you actually do have a mental disorder and you take drugs, and it makes you feel better, than good. But a lot of times the drugs will become ineffective in time because your body will get used to them, and then you won't have anything left to make you feel better. I think that the best way to truly heal yourself is to find the cure from within.
And by the way, I do speak from experience. A while ago, I was diagnosed with OCD. I washed my hands upwards of 50 times per day. I went to a psyciatrist and all he wanted to do was prescribe me meds. He told me about "success" stories of his previous patients that reduced thier obsessions and only have to take one Paxil a day. Of course they were still taking them, and if the missed a day, they would have a relapse. I knew that I didn't want to be taking a medication for the rest of my life, so I forced myself to reduce washing my hands by my own free will. I am thankful I did, because I would say today that I am actually healed. I don't think that no one should ever take drugs for mental diseases. But I think that if you can find a way to cure yourself, then you will be much better off, becuase you will be permanantly healed.
I would suggest to you that you re-evaluate your current position as an employee. As another poster said, engineering isn't a job that is really going anywhere in the future. If you allow yourself to be _just_ an engineer, than that is all you will ever be. Whereas if you work hard and prove to your employers that you are worth more to them than the average engineer, then you'll actually go places. So call me what you want, and mock me as much as you will, but I'm actually going somewhere with my carreer because I put in the extra effort.
And by the way, saying that it was too hard there, and saying that they wanted you to work 90-hour weeks, are not vastly different. I know that if I were an employer and I had the choice between the guy that stayed and toughed it out, and the guy that left is previous job, I would defintely pick the hard-worker over the lazy quitter.
So sure, keep doing what you are doing. Keep working 40-hour weeks and no more. Keep making excuses to your managers. That will just leave more jobs for the rest of us.
That's a really good point. Especially about the fact that if he does well at this job, even though it may be tough, managment will see that he did well. And in 1 year or so when the economy picks up, they'll still remember and he will be rewarded with a promotion or raise. The contractors, even though they get overtime now, won't get any sort of promotion in a year. Whereas if he quits, and a year later he's still looking for a job, and his potential employer asks why he quit his last job, it won't look good to say, "Oh, it was too hard there, and I'm too lazy to put in the extra effort when the going gets tough, so I just quit."
Well, the money has to come from somewhere to pay for all of the extra workers that are necessary. If you assume a $7/hr. wage, and that each worker pumps about 300 gallons per hour, that add up to about 11 cents per gallon. That money has to come from somewhere. So even if in some areas of Ney York, the prices are higher than some areas of New Jersey doesn't mean that forcing you to not pump your own gas lowers the price of gas. A few examples of lower gas doesn't prove anything. Anyways, just compare the prices of a gas station where they offer both self-serve and full-serve. The full-serve is almost always 10 cents more per gallon.
Use Winamp 2.9. It's the best media player around. It now has support for video and it has a decent media library that comes with it. If you really want a great media library though, use MEXP, a plugin for winamp 2.x. I have been using MEXP for the last 6 months and absolutely love it. (It is shareware, which kinda sucks, but there are no ads/spayware with it, and in 30 days you can just re-install it and start over.)
I've also heard rumors that they are going to release a winamp 5 (I don't know what happened to 4) that is based off of winamp 2, but has the skinning capabilities of winamp 3. Should be good.
But I can't understand why people hold it up as an example of great game storytelling when there are so many better examples to choose from
I think that the reason is, is that although compared to a lot of other games, half-life's stortelling is sub-par (i agree with you here), compared to almost every other shoot-em-up action type game, half-life's story is great. I mean, compare half-life to doom or even better mario brothers (or any other old-school console game) Half-life has so much more story than those. And for me, when I first played half-life, it really was the first action game that had any real story, so I remember it as having a great story.
I think that you slightly miss how the half-life story is supposed to be told. Rather than really having a main character, YOU are the main character. Throughout the game, your objective does change. First, you just want to get to the surface, then before you know it, you have to go to an alien planet to save all of earth. Half-life does a glorious job of telling the story through the game, by interacting with the characters. There are so many subtle things that you can just miss. (The mysterious briefcase guy; talking to all of the scientists)The thing is, you can get as much or as little of the story as you want, because you are in control of whether or not to spend the extra time to fully explore the levels or not.
So, when you look at all of the questions that you posed above and think of you being the main character, then yes, they are all answerable. (You want to live, your goals change from living to saving earth, the army coming in to kill you is pretty unexpected)
Slashdot Mirror
Not really... I mean, sure he could get charged $1000 for a pack uf gum, but this is still capitalism we're talking about here. If you try to charge him $1000, then I'll ofer him $999. But then, someone else will be willing to sell it to him for $800. Eventually, the price will be driven back down to where it would have been anyways. That's how capitalism works. Even if we all know that he is suer rich, we all want to get the sale, and all it takes is one person to be charging $1.50, and then we all have to affer comparative prices, or we'll go out of business.
The easy solution to this though is to simply not let the companies gather any information about you. For example, if you are a businessman, they will try to charge you more for airfare. Whereas, if they no nothing about you, they will assume that you are just a vacationer, and you can get a cheaper fare. It's all about working the system.
Well, don't just tell the slashdot crowd that. Let BuyMusic know that you can't use their service from your browser of choice. If they don't see any business lost from not supporting Moz, then they will see no reason to support Moz.
(Although, the server is kinda slow, so give it a few tries.)
Also, Moz is so much more standards compliant. If you've ever tried making a webpage with CSS you would see. Opera is not horrible (certainly not as crappy as IE when it comes to CSS), but the page elements always seems to be off be one pixel or so in Opera, so I have to resort to hacks to get it to look right in Opera. In Moz all of me CSS just works the way it should.
Like I said though, it's not like Opera is really bad, its just not that great, and I really don't see why people on /. prefer it so much. (It's not even open source!)
It doesn't work becuase /. doesn't allow javasrcipt in the user space. Nice try though.
I don't watch movies on my computer screen either, but I have a video card with TV-out, so I just hook up my computer to the TV, and watch away. Most laptops these days have an S-Video jack.
Well then, what we really need to do is blow smoke up Daryl McBride's ass, you know give him a taste of his own medicine. We need to dig up any dirt that we can find on him. Has he ever cheated on his wife? Has he ever rented a porno? Was he ever caught cheating on a test? And, if he hasn't done any of these things, then we should just make up our own claims. I don't like to do this type of things to people, but he's really left us with no choice in the matter.
I'll start now:
I heard that Daryl McBride wears women's clothing every Saturday. I have proof, but I'm gonna wait a few months to release it. In the meantime, just believe that I am right.
Do you think that they don't care about money in Japan? They do. The reason that it is so much easier for them to roll out such a great broadband service over there is simple. They have a MUCH greater population density than we do. They are a tiny island compared to the vastness of the good 'ol USA. For a company to attempt to roll out the type of broadband like they are doing in Japan would be suicide. It would cost at least 10 times as much to create a network that could support a 12 MBit connection. It will take them 15 months to recover, it would take a US company 15 YEARS to recover the costs. Sorry but, there are a lot of great benefits to the US, we get bigger houses more land and more wilderness, as opposed to being cramped in a tiny apartment. But, we won't have broadband like Japan does for at least another 5 years or so. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
You... have been trolled, sorry to say, but next time just don't respond to anonymous coward trolls like that.
He did say that murder and rape are easy to prosecute, while spam is not. Therefore, it is logical to make murder, speeding, and rape illegal, but making spam illegal is illogical becouse it is impossible to prosecute wothout spending an inordinate amount of money. And, if you think that spam is hurting the economy, just think how much the increase in taxes from the FBI spending billions tracking down some spammer would hurt the economy.
Excluding the fact that there is no clear definition to a 'social problem', your argument is still invalid. You advocate the use of laws to fix this social problem, but can you tell me one law that has ever fixed a social problem? The war on drugs is unsuccessful, and a war on spam would be no more so. Technological solutions always are better than social engineering. (The equivilent of a technological solution for the war on drugs would be greater education, which has been shown through studies to be a more effective deterent to drugs than the law.)
Technological solutions can fix spam. Bayesian mail filters are a good start. I use one and barely any spam gets through. Also, if everyone were to digitally sign their email, then people that really didn't want spam could simply reject all mail from individuals that don't sign their mail, and automatically send them a note back that they won't accept their mail unless it is signed. And spammers will never sign their mail, becuse then their isp will quickly cancel their account. This method satisfies both your requests, it doesn't make email useless, and it does make spam more difficult.
So, rather than runing to the government to hold your hand, next time try to use your head and think of how you could get by without additional laws.
I laughed my ass off reading that. I guess you know you're a nerd if you found yourself laughing after reading that.
But you are wrong, because microsoft never did metaphorically own "all the roads". You yourself are reading slashdot, so you have to know about Linux, and Macs, and all of the other OS's out there. Microsoft does have competition. Microsoft makes a fairly decent product that most people find easy to use, so microsoft makes money. However, people are starting to see that there are alternatives, so microsoft is starting to lose market share (especially in the server end) here's a reference). And microsoft isn't losing because of the DOJ. (Name one major thing that the DOJ has done to help microsoft's competition. IE is still embedded into windows, Office is still a closed format, and now Java will still be crippled). Therefore, capitalism is working, on its own. Next time study some economics before you post here.
I pretty much tend to agree with that. In all of me rambling, that's really what it comes down to.
...our society suffers in a very real way by dismissing people with psychological disorders as just "weak" or "bad" or "lazy."
I think that our society suffers from prescibing too much medication when (for a lack of better words) self-healing is the best answer. While one side of society may ridicule people with mental disorders, the other side is pitying them, and telling them that it is not their fault. So then we end up with people that have mental disorders that feel like crap because they are either pitied or mocked. The truth is, in my opinion, is while their mental disorder is not really their fault, they can do something about it on their own. They don't really need medications to fix their problem (most of the time). This brings me to the issue of free will. I believe that while someone may have an inbalance of chemicals in their brain, it is in their ability to control these chemicals, becuase they are in control of their own life.
Now, this is not true all the time, sometimes the person can be so far gone, that there is no way that he can heal himself without some external help. But when it comes to something more minor, like ADHD, I think that there should never be any drugs prescribed. Thomas Edison was most likely ADHD. He failed out of school becase of it. But, he was still very smart, just in a different way. If ritalin had been around back then, we might still be living without light-bulbs.
But anyways, back to the issue. Yes, I would say that I am a dualist. As I cannot say that I am a materialist. I find it difficult to believe that you can be a materialist, and also believe in free will, but I admit that I am not familiar with Penrose or Dennett. However, tending toward dualism does not mean that I believe that the mind gives rise to the brain, as I said before, the truth is probably somewhere in between. Also, I want to clarify that I don't believe that there are "a class of "real" organic disorders of the brain, and then there a bunch of fluffy dysfunctions of the "mind"". I think that mental disorders are all in the brain, but the mind can control these chemical inbalances, and stop them from occuring.
Here's the truth: You are your brain, your brain is you. The brain gives wholly rise to the mind, and the mind is wholly derived from the function of the brain. One is a phenomenological construct, the other is the implementing hardware.
That is not a "truth". That is a HUGE debate in psychology and all of philosophy. Basically if what you said is true, then there is no free will, and all of our actions are determined not by us, but for us by our brian, which is in effect something that (according to you) we have no control over.
The other side of the debate is: You are your mind, your mind is you. Your mind gives rise to the brain, and the brain is derived from the function of the mind.
Which side is right? I don't know. It's probably something in between the two extremes. But you don't know either. So please don't spout it off as the absolute truth and then base the rest of your post on this "factual" statement.
The difference is, if you break your leg, it is becuase of some external cause like falling off a cliff or something. Whereas if you have a mental disorder, then that came from within, and therefore it should be cured from within. Which means that you should find a way to cure yourself. You should not depend on an external drug to make you "feel better".
But to each his own. If you actually do have a mental disorder and you take drugs, and it makes you feel better, than good. But a lot of times the drugs will become ineffective in time because your body will get used to them, and then you won't have anything left to make you feel better. I think that the best way to truly heal yourself is to find the cure from within.
And by the way, I do speak from experience. A while ago, I was diagnosed with OCD. I washed my hands upwards of 50 times per day. I went to a psyciatrist and all he wanted to do was prescribe me meds. He told me about "success" stories of his previous patients that reduced thier obsessions and only have to take one Paxil a day. Of course they were still taking them, and if the missed a day, they would have a relapse. I knew that I didn't want to be taking a medication for the rest of my life, so I forced myself to reduce washing my hands by my own free will. I am thankful I did, because I would say today that I am actually healed. I don't think that no one should ever take drugs for mental diseases. But I think that if you can find a way to cure yourself, then you will be much better off, becuase you will be permanantly healed.
I would suggest to you that you re-evaluate your current position as an employee. As another poster said, engineering isn't a job that is really going anywhere in the future. If you allow yourself to be _just_ an engineer, than that is all you will ever be. Whereas if you work hard and prove to your employers that you are worth more to them than the average engineer, then you'll actually go places. So call me what you want, and mock me as much as you will, but I'm actually going somewhere with my carreer because I put in the extra effort.
And by the way, saying that it was too hard there, and saying that they wanted you to work 90-hour weeks, are not vastly different. I know that if I were an employer and I had the choice between the guy that stayed and toughed it out, and the guy that left is previous job, I would defintely pick the hard-worker over the lazy quitter.
So sure, keep doing what you are doing. Keep working 40-hour weeks and no more. Keep making excuses to your managers. That will just leave more jobs for the rest of us.
That's a really good point. Especially about the fact that if he does well at this job, even though it may be tough, managment will see that he did well. And in 1 year or so when the economy picks up, they'll still remember and he will be rewarded with a promotion or raise. The contractors, even though they get overtime now, won't get any sort of promotion in a year. Whereas if he quits, and a year later he's still looking for a job, and his potential employer asks why he quit his last job, it won't look good to say, "Oh, it was too hard there, and I'm too lazy to put in the extra effort when the going gets tough, so I just quit."
Well, the money has to come from somewhere to pay for all of the extra workers that are necessary. If you assume a $7/hr. wage, and that each worker pumps about 300 gallons per hour, that add up to about 11 cents per gallon. That money has to come from somewhere. So even if in some areas of Ney York, the prices are higher than some areas of New Jersey doesn't mean that forcing you to not pump your own gas lowers the price of gas. A few examples of lower gas doesn't prove anything. Anyways, just compare the prices of a gas station where they offer both self-serve and full-serve. The full-serve is almost always 10 cents more per gallon.
Yeah, but if I pump my own gas, then the price is lower for me. That is all I care about.
And I like having the choice to pay lower price and pump the gas myself, or pay more and let someone else pump it for me.
Use Winamp 2.9. It's the best media player around. It now has support for video and it has a decent media library that comes with it. If you really want a great media library though, use MEXP, a plugin for winamp 2.x. I have been using MEXP for the last 6 months and absolutely love it. (It is shareware, which kinda sucks, but there are no ads/spayware with it, and in 30 days you can just re-install it and start over.)
I've also heard rumors that they are going to release a winamp 5 (I don't know what happened to 4) that is based off of winamp 2, but has the skinning capabilities of winamp 3. Should be good.
But I can't understand why people hold it up as an example of great game storytelling when there are so many better examples to choose from
I think that the reason is, is that although compared to a lot of other games, half-life's stortelling is sub-par (i agree with you here), compared to almost every other shoot-em-up action type game, half-life's story is great. I mean, compare half-life to doom or even better mario brothers (or any other old-school console game) Half-life has so much more story than those. And for me, when I first played half-life, it really was the first action game that had any real story, so I remember it as having a great story.
I think that you slightly miss how the half-life story is supposed to be told. Rather than really having a main character, YOU are the main character. Throughout the game, your objective does change. First, you just want to get to the surface, then before you know it, you have to go to an alien planet to save all of earth. Half-life does a glorious job of telling the story through the game, by interacting with the characters. There are so many subtle things that you can just miss. (The mysterious briefcase guy; talking to all of the scientists)The thing is, you can get as much or as little of the story as you want, because you are in control of whether or not to spend the extra time to fully explore the levels or not.
So, when you look at all of the questions that you posed above and think of you being the main character, then yes, they are all answerable. (You want to live, your goals change from living to saving earth, the army coming in to kill you is pretty unexpected)