I think they're trying to be MS when they had a shot at being Apple.
Mainstream works good for the couple players who dominate the mainstream, outside of that you need a niche. Right now they have a niche and they're just throwing it away, they might do better in the short term but I can't help but think they're overlooking the fact that they have(had?) a loyal audience which is a pretty damn rare thing for a network to have.
At least here in Canada we still have Space which is doing a pretty decent job with SF content. Hope we don't fall into the same trap.
I visited my alma mater recently, and I was stuck by how much changed in just ten years time. The students are doing "cool" projects that I can only dream of doing in the real world. (Example - Programming a robot to swim across a lake and collect trash.) It makes me wonder if they will be disappointed with their first jobs, which will mostly consist of sitting at a cubicle all day and writing documents.
I don't consider myself a narcissistic student, but I wonder, what's the point of going through years of education, if not to use it? Ok, there is the money and having a less difficult time at getting a job, but, I see it as a tragedy if a company some time to explore cool stuff because it's worried about micro-efficiency. Considering this, I'm reminded of something a friend (double major CE & Chemistry) once told me: Education is dumb because you work really hard to accumulate all this knowledge only to be placed in management and never use it again. I'm sure that's not true for all situations, but I do think I'd be disappointed to not apply what I've learned to what I'm interested in.
Certainly you won't use 90% of what you learned in school in any particular your job. The question is which 90%?
Also note that school projects are designed to be cool while work projects are designed to be useful.
The first world would seem to serve as a counter-example.
Both would happen. The first world will become more stable as the third will destabilize. Kinda like what has been happening in gallium producing nations in Africa.
I think it's kind of like a bubble market. There's some initial instability while things are sorting out and when the bubble bursts, but then there's some long term stability and prosperity.
When we have energy in surplus, at the (general) expense of no one, the world may move much more easily to peaceful respect and cooperation.
Ultra-cheap energy will create devices that require materials and technology which yield other shortages. Wars will continue over those items.
War itself will be cheaper to wage due to the low energy costs, removing a major incentive not to wage it.
The first world would seem to serve as a counter-example.
True as our standards improve we'll squabble over more trivial things.
But I don't think it's as hopeless as you make it sound, there's a reason why the world is as peaceful as its ever been and I think it's related to the fact our material wealth is also as great as its ever been.
Really? I wasn't aware of slave labour being used in China. Do you have any examples?
Clearly, your brain was produced by someone not interested in doing a good job.
Cool, thanks for keeping the discussion civilized.
Go rent What Would Jesus Buy, and watch the extras. You will get as much evidence as you can stomach. Synopsis: A Chinese woman gives an account of how she was tortured, imprisoned, and forced to make Christmas lights for the crime of being a Christian.
This sort of thing is status quo, but if what you want is an eyewitness account, it's not hard to come by.
There's certainly instances of slave labour by individuals, though I don't know how endemic it is and even in the US there have been instances of what could be considered slavery with immigrants. As for the government workcamps I don't know a ton. I'm not 100% certain whether it should be called slavery as they are prisoners (how valid those sentences are who knows) and the US has used prison work gangs in the past (I don't know if there's any form of compensation for the Chinese prisoners).
Basically when I see made in China I want to know if all the labour involved was voluntary. Certainly it's a higher probability than from western nations but I still don't get the feeling that it makes a significant contribution to the final product (I could be wrong of course).
When people/companies/countries trade, then both of the trading partners are better off. Otherwise they wouldn't trade...
Trade is generally, though not always, good for society as a whole. It is always good for the traders. It is often not good for the labors, especially when one partner in the trade uses unethical labor practices to reduce prices.
The labourers are traders too, when I go to work I trade my time and expertise for money, I wouldn't make this trade if it wasn't in my best interest. What makes these Chinese labourers any different? Why am I qualified to make that trade but you feel the need to remove that option from them for their own good?
Let's do a prison scenario:
Prisoner A offers to make Prisoner B his bitch. A will protect B from getting raped by the rest of the inmates. In return, B will give his ass freely to A anytime he wants it.
Was this a valid trade? Maybe. But no matter whether Prisoner B takes the deal or not, he's going to get fucked.
Clearly Prisoner B is in a pretty bad position. If A's offer isn't extortion (ie take the offer or I'll arrange rapes) than it is a valid trade and B could be better off taking the deal.
Obviously it would be best if B wasn't getting raped at all, but if there's no one offering B a deal that doesn't involve rape than I don't think you're doing B any favours by prohibiting him from making a deal that involves less rape.
Agreed, but the implicit point in GP was that the problem is that Prisoner B shouldn't be forced to choose between those two options. A third option, not getting raped, should be available to him. In much the same way, Laborers who are forced to either starve or work 100 hours a week are not being given a real choice, either. The reason they are made to choose between such dismal fates is because a few very rich and/or powerful people control their choices (the very thing communism is supposed to prevent, ironically).
I don't see many people arguing that getting raped is a good thing. Where we differ is in how to prevent it.
In the context of this discussion I think a lot of anti-globalization people tend to forget that these people are already getting raped heavily, what globalization does is presents a chance for the west to come in and offer to rape them, but rape them less. Anti-globalization doesn't want us to do any of the raping, which is a good ideal, but the problem is that there isn't anyone offering a rapeless solution.
The metaphor is getting kinda strained, the point I'm making is that capitalism is really the only system we have that we know can improve the situation of these people, and we've seen it do that multiple times. I don't like workers having far poorer working conditions than we have but there's no magic wand that can change that. We simply have to give their economy time to grow and eventually their economy will be strong enough that the workers will be in high enough demand that employers will give them better working conditions just so they have people in their factories.
When people/companies/countries trade, then both of the trading partners are better off. Otherwise they wouldn't trade...
Trade is generally, though not always, good for society as a whole. It is always good for the traders. It is often not good for the labors, especially when one partner in the trade uses unethical labor practices to reduce prices.
The labourers are traders too, when I go to work I trade my time and expertise for money, I wouldn't make this trade if it wasn't in my best interest. What makes these Chinese labourers any different? Why am I qualified to make that trade but you feel the need to remove that option from them for their own good?
Let's do a prison scenario:
Prisoner A offers to make Prisoner B his bitch. A will protect B from getting raped by the rest of the inmates. In return, B will give his ass freely to A anytime he wants it.
Was this a valid trade? Maybe. But no matter whether Prisoner B takes the deal or not, he's going to get fucked.
Clearly Prisoner B is in a pretty bad position. If A's offer isn't extortion (ie take the offer or I'll arrange rapes) than it is a valid trade and B could be better off taking the deal.
Obviously it would be best if B wasn't getting raped at all, but if there's no one offering B a deal that doesn't involve rape than I don't think you're doing B any favours by prohibiting him from making a deal that involves less rape.
How would it help Chinese workers is they are out of jobs???
It wouldn't. But slave labor and unemployment are not the only options.
Yeah, they could have jobs like they do now.
How would it help the developed world if everything costs more???
You might see a resurgence of a local service industry repairing these more expensive components. So the chinese could get paid more to build higher quality parts, and we wouldn't need to buy a new keyboard every year, and there would be some moderately skilled service jobs in the developed world.
How generous of you, don't make the Chinese go through the effort of building their own manufacturing industry, they can just repair our castoffs!
When people/companies/countries trade, then both of the trading partners are better off. Otherwise they wouldn't trade...
Trade is generally, though not always, good for society as a whole. It is always good for the traders. It is often not good for the labors, especially when one partner in the trade uses unethical labor practices to reduce prices.
The labourers are traders too, when I go to work I trade my time and expertise for money, I wouldn't make this trade if it wasn't in my best interest. What makes these Chinese labourers any different? Why am I qualified to make that trade but you feel the need to remove that option from them for their own good?
Okay, so here's the thing.. The rest of the world needs to refuse to do any sort of business with China until business practices are brought in line with at least a minimal respect for human life. It would help Chinese workers because they wouldn't have to endure this kind of shit, and it would help the developed world because our factories wouldn't have to try to compete with stuff produced in this way.
Awesome idea.
Then those factory workers won't even have those jobs!
Those Chinese workers aren't stupid, they're working those jobs because it beats working in the fields or other jobs they can get. Yes those jobs suck, that's because China is still very poor, but trade embargos aren't what's going to fix that. Trade with them all we can, soon some other factory is going to have to offer 42c/hr and decent lunch breaks to get their workforce and this factory will have to adjust.
With all the anti-globalization talk there's a lot of talk about how much worse the working conditions are than in the west, rarely is the question asked how much worse the working conditions are than those countries sans-globalization.
Do we really want courts deciding scientific fact?
Who else will?
There's no central board of scientists that declares "X is a scientific consensus and is now declared a scientific fact!", there are occasionally groups like the IPCC that make statements but there's no organization that can speak for the opinion of science as a whole.
The only problem I have is that is would be nice if the judges were also trained scientists. In this case it worked but in general I'm not convinced that judges have the scientific judgment to smell BS.
I'm not sure if I would characterize it as being too depressing.
More to the point is the characters are always depressed. With most shows you look at the characters and think, "I respect that person and they seem like a likable individual". For BSG I frankly can't think of a single character for whom I could actually say that, maybe Baltar since he actually has an interesting personality but that's about it.
SPOILER
When a certain character died last episode I didn't even give a damn. Back when Billy died in season 2 or something it was actually interesting because the characters still had redeeming qualities. But at this point I just don't give a damn. You can take a character people like and put them through hardships and depression and it resonates because people care for them. But if they're depressed for the entire damn show people don't like them and don't care.
Why not make lemonade from lemons and accept a layoff? If you're financially stable with few or no obligations such as family, mortgage, etc. and you've had a reasonable work history why not just collect unemployment until you can find a decent-paying gig?
You won't make as much money, true, but if you satisfy the above conditions you'll probably make enough to afford food and a roof. You'll be able to sleep in every day, go to the gym, work on personal projects, go out on dates, and much more! It's not like you're being lazy or anything -- "the economy" is a very acceptable excuse for not having a job, at least until the economy goes back into full swing.
Great idea,
I guess while you're collecting unemployment I'll just keep working. After all someone has to keep creating value to help rescue the economy, and I guess I'll have to chip in my part of your unemployment check. Hope you enjoy those personal projects, I only wish I had that much free time!
TFA specifically states that they ruled out echolocation.
Well they said they found no evidence that he was, I'd still like if they elaborated that they gave him earplugs or something, even footsteps could give him enough audible info to navigate.
Ideally I'd like some mention of a control using a blindfold or something. From the sounds of it he wasn't truly blind, the eyes worked fine but signals either weren't getting to the brain, or weren't getting processed by the visual cortex. They seem to be suggesting the visual info is still somehow being processed to aid navigation.
Imagine Linux on the desktop taking off due to support from a totalitarian regime!
Btw. does anyone know if Red Flag contributes any code back to the community? It would be interesting if they've submitted any of their changes to KDE, Gnome, or OpenSSH...
And those upsides are what exactly? I'm not trolling, I really just don't see a whole lot that religion has provided that either wouldn't have happened anyway or that we actually need....
Most religions suggest that unrestrained cruelty and selfishness against other humans will result in unpleasant consequences later on. Judging by human behaviour, I'd say that all help there is needed.
If anything religion has a tendency to overwrite our innate morality and replace it with whatever someone has interpreted from some text.
Hurting someone is clearly wrong, you don't need religion for that, but if a book seems to say it's alright to hurt those evil folk? Go right ahead.
It really is astounding how Obama triumphed despite discrimination.
I know his group has a lot of bad sterotypes, and there's a lot of talk about how harmful they are to themselves and others. I have to admit I have stronger negative feelings about his group than most and I never imagined in this modern day that one of them would be elected president. But then, against all odds and sterotypes, it happened.
Slashdot Mirror
I think they're trying to be MS when they had a shot at being Apple.
Mainstream works good for the couple players who dominate the mainstream, outside of that you need a niche. Right now they have a niche and they're just throwing it away, they might do better in the short term but I can't help but think they're overlooking the fact that they have(had?) a loyal audience which is a pretty damn rare thing for a network to have.
At least here in Canada we still have Space which is doing a pretty decent job with SF content. Hope we don't fall into the same trap.
...actually most kids would text SF coz it's shorter!
Yeah but you can't trademark SF (sure that doesn't really make sense but you're not a marketing exec).
I visited my alma mater recently, and I was stuck by how much changed in just ten years time. The students are doing "cool" projects that I can only dream of doing in the real world. (Example - Programming a robot to swim across a lake and collect trash.) It makes me wonder if they will be disappointed with their first jobs, which will mostly consist of sitting at a cubicle all day and writing documents.
I don't consider myself a narcissistic student, but I wonder, what's the point of going through years of education, if not to use it? Ok, there is the money and having a less difficult time at getting a job, but, I see it as a tragedy if a company some time to explore cool stuff because it's worried about micro-efficiency. Considering this, I'm reminded of something a friend (double major CE & Chemistry) once told me: Education is dumb because you work really hard to accumulate all this knowledge only to be placed in management and never use it again. I'm sure that's not true for all situations, but I do think I'd be disappointed to not apply what I've learned to what I'm interested in.
Certainly you won't use 90% of what you learned in school in any particular your job. The question is which 90%?
Also note that school projects are designed to be cool while work projects are designed to be useful.
Those result in different amounts of fun.
The first world would seem to serve as a counter-example.
Both would happen. The first world will become more stable as the third will destabilize. Kinda like what has been happening in gallium producing nations in Africa.
I think it's kind of like a bubble market. There's some initial instability while things are sorting out and when the bubble bursts, but then there's some long term stability and prosperity.
Ultra-cheap energy will create devices that require materials and technology which yield other shortages. Wars will continue over those items.
War itself will be cheaper to wage due to the low energy costs, removing a major incentive not to wage it.
The first world would seem to serve as a counter-example.
True as our standards improve we'll squabble over more trivial things.
But I don't think it's as hopeless as you make it sound, there's a reason why the world is as peaceful as its ever been and I think it's related to the fact our material wealth is also as great as its ever been.
Wait, you have a plant that grows coal? Are you selling seed packets?
You should be forewarned that it takes a little while after planting the seeds before you can start digging out coal.
Really? I wasn't aware of slave labour being used in China. Do you have any examples?
Clearly, your brain was produced by someone not interested in doing a good job.
Cool, thanks for keeping the discussion civilized.
Go rent What Would Jesus Buy, and watch the extras. You will get as much evidence as you can stomach. Synopsis: A Chinese woman gives an account of how she was tortured, imprisoned, and forced to make Christmas lights for the crime of being a Christian.
This sort of thing is status quo, but if what you want is an eyewitness account, it's not hard to come by.
There's certainly instances of slave labour by individuals, though I don't know how endemic it is and even in the US there have been instances of what could be considered slavery with immigrants. As for the government workcamps I don't know a ton. I'm not 100% certain whether it should be called slavery as they are prisoners (how valid those sentences are who knows) and the US has used prison work gangs in the past (I don't know if there's any form of compensation for the Chinese prisoners).
Basically when I see made in China I want to know if all the labour involved was voluntary. Certainly it's a higher probability than from western nations but I still don't get the feeling that it makes a significant contribution to the final product (I could be wrong of course).
In any case, we already have slavery by proxy in this country, because we import literally tons of goods made with slave labor in China.
Really? I wasn't aware of slave labour being used in China. Do you have any examples?
When people/companies/countries trade, then both of the trading partners are better off. Otherwise they wouldn't trade...
Trade is generally, though not always, good for society as a whole. It is always good for the traders. It is often not good for the labors, especially when one partner in the trade uses unethical labor practices to reduce prices.
The labourers are traders too, when I go to work I trade my time and expertise for money, I wouldn't make this trade if it wasn't in my best interest. What makes these Chinese labourers any different? Why am I qualified to make that trade but you feel the need to remove that option from them for their own good?
Let's do a prison scenario:
Prisoner A offers to make Prisoner B his bitch. A will protect B from getting raped by the rest of the inmates. In return, B will give his ass freely to A anytime he wants it.
Was this a valid trade? Maybe. But no matter whether Prisoner B takes the deal or not, he's going to get fucked.
Clearly Prisoner B is in a pretty bad position. If A's offer isn't extortion (ie take the offer or I'll arrange rapes) than it is a valid trade and B could be better off taking the deal.
Obviously it would be best if B wasn't getting raped at all, but if there's no one offering B a deal that doesn't involve rape than I don't think you're doing B any favours by prohibiting him from making a deal that involves less rape.
Agreed, but the implicit point in GP was that the problem is that Prisoner B shouldn't be forced to choose between those two options. A third option, not getting raped, should be available to him. In much the same way, Laborers who are forced to either starve or work 100 hours a week are not being given a real choice, either. The reason they are made to choose between such dismal fates is because a few very rich and/or powerful people control their choices (the very thing communism is supposed to prevent, ironically).
I don't see many people arguing that getting raped is a good thing. Where we differ is in how to prevent it.
In the context of this discussion I think a lot of anti-globalization people tend to forget that these people are already getting raped heavily, what globalization does is presents a chance for the west to come in and offer to rape them, but rape them less. Anti-globalization doesn't want us to do any of the raping, which is a good ideal, but the problem is that there isn't anyone offering a rapeless solution.
The metaphor is getting kinda strained, the point I'm making is that capitalism is really the only system we have that we know can improve the situation of these people, and we've seen it do that multiple times. I don't like workers having far poorer working conditions than we have but there's no magic wand that can change that. We simply have to give their economy time to grow and eventually their economy will be strong enough that the workers will be in high enough demand that employers will give them better working conditions just so they have people in their factories.
When people/companies/countries trade, then both of the trading partners are better off. Otherwise they wouldn't trade...
Trade is generally, though not always, good for society as a whole. It is always good for the traders. It is often not good for the labors, especially when one partner in the trade uses unethical labor practices to reduce prices.
The labourers are traders too, when I go to work I trade my time and expertise for money, I wouldn't make this trade if it wasn't in my best interest. What makes these Chinese labourers any different? Why am I qualified to make that trade but you feel the need to remove that option from them for their own good?
Let's do a prison scenario:
Prisoner A offers to make Prisoner B his bitch. A will protect B from getting raped by the rest of the inmates. In return, B will give his ass freely to A anytime he wants it.
Was this a valid trade? Maybe. But no matter whether Prisoner B takes the deal or not, he's going to get fucked.
Clearly Prisoner B is in a pretty bad position. If A's offer isn't extortion (ie take the offer or I'll arrange rapes) than it is a valid trade and B could be better off taking the deal.
Obviously it would be best if B wasn't getting raped at all, but if there's no one offering B a deal that doesn't involve rape than I don't think you're doing B any favours by prohibiting him from making a deal that involves less rape.
How would it help Chinese workers is they are out of jobs???
It wouldn't. But slave labor and unemployment are not the only options.
Yeah, they could have jobs like they do now.
How would it help the developed world if everything costs more???
You might see a resurgence of a local service industry repairing these more expensive components. So the chinese could get paid more to build higher quality parts, and we wouldn't need to buy a new keyboard every year, and there would be some moderately skilled service jobs in the developed world.
How generous of you, don't make the Chinese go through the effort of building their own manufacturing industry, they can just repair our castoffs!
When people/companies/countries trade, then both of the trading partners are better off. Otherwise they wouldn't trade...
Trade is generally, though not always, good for society as a whole. It is always good for the traders. It is often not good for the labors, especially when one partner in the trade uses unethical labor practices to reduce prices.
The labourers are traders too, when I go to work I trade my time and expertise for money, I wouldn't make this trade if it wasn't in my best interest. What makes these Chinese labourers any different? Why am I qualified to make that trade but you feel the need to remove that option from them for their own good?
Okay, so here's the thing.. The rest of the world needs to refuse to do any sort of business with China until business practices are brought in line with at least a minimal respect for human life. It would help Chinese workers because they wouldn't have to endure this kind of shit, and it would help the developed world because our factories wouldn't have to try to compete with stuff produced in this way.
Awesome idea.
Then those factory workers won't even have those jobs!
Those Chinese workers aren't stupid, they're working those jobs because it beats working in the fields or other jobs they can get. Yes those jobs suck, that's because China is still very poor, but trade embargos aren't what's going to fix that. Trade with them all we can, soon some other factory is going to have to offer 42c/hr and decent lunch breaks to get their workforce and this factory will have to adjust.
With all the anti-globalization talk there's a lot of talk about how much worse the working conditions are than in the west, rarely is the question asked how much worse the working conditions are than those countries sans-globalization.
Do we really want courts deciding scientific fact?
Who else will?
There's no central board of scientists that declares "X is a scientific consensus and is now declared a scientific fact!", there are occasionally groups like the IPCC that make statements but there's no organization that can speak for the opinion of science as a whole.
The only problem I have is that is would be nice if the judges were also trained scientists. In this case it worked but in general I'm not convinced that judges have the scientific judgment to smell BS.
Just checked my saved passwords list and the monster one is a one off.
Backups, one time passwords, they're a pain to do but at times like this I'm glad I only have one password to update!
I'm not sure if I would characterize it as being too depressing.
More to the point is the characters are always depressed. With most shows you look at the characters and think, "I respect that person and they seem like a likable individual". For BSG I frankly can't think of a single character for whom I could actually say that, maybe Baltar since he actually has an interesting personality but that's about it.
SPOILER
When a certain character died last episode I didn't even give a damn. Back when Billy died in season 2 or something it was actually interesting because the characters still had redeeming qualities. But at this point I just don't give a damn. You can take a character people like and put them through hardships and depression and it resonates because people care for them. But if they're depressed for the entire damn show people don't like them and don't care.
Why not make lemonade from lemons and accept a layoff? If you're financially stable with few or no obligations such as family, mortgage, etc. and you've had a reasonable work history why not just collect unemployment until you can find a decent-paying gig?
You won't make as much money, true, but if you satisfy the above conditions you'll probably make enough to afford food and a roof. You'll be able to sleep in every day, go to the gym, work on personal projects, go out on dates, and much more! It's not like you're being lazy or anything -- "the economy" is a very acceptable excuse for not having a job, at least until the economy goes back into full swing.
Great idea,
I guess while you're collecting unemployment I'll just keep working. After all someone has to keep creating value to help rescue the economy, and I guess I'll have to chip in my part of your unemployment check. Hope you enjoy those personal projects, I only wish I had that much free time!
TFA specifically states that they ruled out echolocation.
Well they said they found no evidence that he was, I'd still like if they elaborated that they gave him earplugs or something, even footsteps could give him enough audible info to navigate.
Ideally I'd like some mention of a control using a blindfold or something. From the sounds of it he wasn't truly blind, the eyes worked fine but signals either weren't getting to the brain, or weren't getting processed by the visual cortex. They seem to be suggesting the visual info is still somehow being processed to aid navigation.
1. The chemicals cause a much higher rate of miscarriage for boys than girls, leading to the imbalance.
2. The chemicals cause some boys to develop as girls, XY but with all the girl parts instead of boy parts.
3. There's something wrong with the studies.
That's going to be a lot of new Linux users.
Imagine Linux on the desktop taking off due to support from a totalitarian regime!
Btw. does anyone know if Red Flag contributes any code back to the community? It would be interesting if they've submitted any of their changes to KDE, Gnome, or OpenSSH...
Well you just made his
-- Death threats and persons of interest file
Let us know if you get picked up :)
Oh don't worry about that.
I'm routing my session through your router.
Most religions suggest that unrestrained cruelty and selfishness against other humans will result in unpleasant consequences later on. Judging by human behaviour, I'd say that all help there is needed.
If anything religion has a tendency to overwrite our innate morality and replace it with whatever someone has interpreted from some text.
Hurting someone is clearly wrong, you don't need religion for that, but if a book seems to say it's alright to hurt those evil folk? Go right ahead.
Damn that's an awesome setup!
I really want to kill you now just to see your system in action!
no one in Hollywood would risk offending the "gay" mafia
Gay mafia?
That puts a whole new meaning on the kiss of death!
It really is astounding how Obama triumphed despite discrimination.
I know his group has a lot of bad sterotypes, and there's a lot of talk about how harmful they are to themselves and others. I have to admit I have stronger negative feelings about his group than most and I never imagined in this modern day that one of them would be elected president. But then, against all odds and sterotypes, it happened.
A smoker was elected President!
Blaming Bush will only work for so long.
Want to bet?
Blaming Hoover worked for FDR's entire reign.
-jcr
And the republicans are still blaming FDR!