it is the consensus of almost everyone on the planet in the 21st century that some forms of censorship are necessary.
Uhhh...what? Care to provide any evidence for this? I'm not sure where you're from, but this certainly isn't the consensus here in the US.
Speech that incites hatred against favored groups in a country will simply not be permitted on the grounds that the public order is threatened. For example, see the case of Oriana Fallaci...the principle stands that there is a line somewhere that cannot be crossed without a person being liable for government sanctions.
It's not clear whether you're being descriptive (telling us how laws actually are in some places unfortunate enough not have a written constitution or a bill of rights), or whether you're being prescriptive (telling us that this is the kind of law that everyone should have).
If the former: yes, you're right, there are some people who are opressed by their governments and do not have free speech (Canadians, Brits, French, Germans, etc.).
If the latter: shove it up your ass, fascist.
almost everyone, regardless of civilization, accepts that there is no such principle as the unlimited right to publish any book.
Again, it's not clear whether you're describing how things are (in which case you're wrong), or whether you're telling us that we should all trust the all-wise, all-benevolent government to tell us what we're allowed to say and what we're allowed to publish. If the latter, you should note that governments (even the most friendly looking, benign ones) ALWAYS use speech control, if it exists, to protect themselves and cover up their mistakes. Even Canadian political parties were doing this a few weeks ago.
there is a consensus that some political parties should be banned.
Really? Evidence, please?
For an example, Belgium's highest court ruled that the Vlaams Blok is racist and banned it from political participation.
You're asserting that there is a consensus among PEOPLE, but then justifying this with data showing that certain governments do something. PEOPLE != GOVERNMENTS.
Such a move doesn't make sense for Apple. They have a really nice OS, but their business is selling hardware at absurd markups. They can only justify those markups when the hardware is drastically differentiated from commodity hardware.
Uhh...what?
What does "justify" mean? Is Apple forced to go before some review board every years to explain their prices?
Here's how the market works: Apply provides a computer, at a certain price. Consumers either buy it, or they don't.
When you bought your last car, did you go through the vehicle, add up the price of components, and then tell the manufacturer wether the price was "justified" or not?
Apple does not need to use an expensive part to explain why their computers are expensive.
Apple just needs to say "This is a box running windows; *this* is a box running OS X. Which do you want to buy?".
have you ever considered what life might be like for her?
Most of the retarded people I have met have been fairly happy. I might go so far as to suggest that the average retarded person is at least as happy as the average cubical dweller.
don't be so quick to judge those who don't make the same decisions as you. in other cultures a child born with such a defect would be left in the woods, or similarly cast out
I, for one, am not wildly enthusiastic about cultures that would leave an infant to die alone in the woods.
Hopefully, we're not yet so politically correct that we have to affirm that cultures that kill infants, or own slaves, or torture animals before death to make them taste better, etc. are just as good as our own.
I run Technical Video Rental, a small firm that rents out specialized instructional videos (welding, bowl turning, case mods, etc.) and we have a corporate blog.
The reason is two-fold:
1) community for greed's sake. 2) community for its own sake.
To expand on the first: I get lots of email from customers who are anxious to share the details of their metalworking and electronics projects with someone; hardware hacking can be a bit of a lonely hobby. By helping customers share their stories with each other, it gives customers an outlet, and a sense of shared community...which gives them positive associations with the website/service/brand...which keeps them coming back (or at least, adds a very very minor reason to check out the corporate website with some regularity).
To expand on the second: running a small corporation can be a lonely activity as well. One spends a lot of time coding, dealing with customer support issues, dealing with vendors, etc...and not nearly as much time hanging around the water cooler or throwing nerf footballs as one might have done as an engineer. So, putting my own projects in the blog lets me interact with my customers, which is a nice break from regular work.
... whereas tracking and killing innocent animals on foot is just fine."
shows some fuzzy thinking.
Like most/.-ers, I'm an omnivore. I'm known to eat the occassional burger, ham sandwhich, carnitas burrito, etc.
...and when I do, as an animal lover, I often think that the factory farming system we have sucks. Animals are raised in tight conditions, under artificial lights, and never get to go outside, or live in the environment their species evolved in.
I consider it far more moral, as a consumer of animal protein, to harvest animals that have lived full natural lives outdoors, than it is to outsource the process, and delegate to others the raising, handling, and slaughter of animals in factory farms ("there are vast fields, Neo, where...").
The more I think about it, the more I think that I should start hunting, and should ONLY eat meat that comes from creatures that got to live outside.
why doesn't congress... pass some... legislation to reduce wasteful energy use, implement a rational gasoline use tax, and other things that would actually address the real problem?
Perhaps because under Article I, section 8, the people have not delegated to Congress the power to do any of those things.
Before modding this down as libertarian propaganda, do me the favor of actually thinking about it.
This doesn't strike me as suprising at all. The free market is absolutely ruthless in attracting folks to markets, and it's absolutely ruthless in pressuring them to drive their prices down. (As the joke goes: the businessman spends his evenings on his knees, praying for prices to rise, and all day at his desk, working to make them go down).
A do-gooder non-profit, no matter how wonderful and benevolant, just doesn't have the incentives in place to motivate the same sort of EFFECTIVE action. I'm sure all of the people involved had their hearts in the right place, and they prob even worked reasonably hard...but the outcome was entirely predictable.
TJIC
scientists are apparently good at...press releases
on
Sunlight in a Tube
·
· Score: -1, Flamebait
It seems like this is the 4,000th time I've come across some headline on Slashdot of the form "scientists report...", followed by some process of product that's been on the market for a decade or three.
Light tubes? There have been companies advertising these things in the back of Fine Homebuilding magazine for a decade or so.
Big whoop.
Attention: folks at Oak Ridge: a bit more science, and a bit less prostituting yourselves to reporters, please...
I will never understand the mindset of someone who thinks that brainstorming is the hard part, and DOING something is "simple".
I - like most other smart people I know - have dozens of ideas a day, and a really good one every week or month.
...yet, in the last decade, I've actually pushed three or so of these through to full implementation - business plan, customer base, capital, code release, etc.
The Devil is in the details.
I am not at all impressed by someone who "comes up with a great idea".
I bow down before the person who IMPLEMENTS and DELIVERS.
Tone down the "simply moving to production" ivory tower attitude.
Having grown up with someone who now runs a grocery store, I can tell you that...
He needs to make a living and in exchange for his service, his community provides him with one
I can hear all of the Smithians screaming, "but (b) is just another way of saying 'to make money,' they're the same statement!"
No. The goal of "making money" is significantly different from the goal of "making a living,"...
The former is greedy and unindividuated...
The latter is a matter of personal survival and good intentions--
Your argument seems to be that if there are two people, running identical stores in identical ways, and charging identical prices, and one of people those people wants to earn money, and the other one wants to "help people", then there's some magical difference in result. The guy who runs identical store A is "sucking wealth out of the economy for personal use", but the guy who runs store B is some sort of magical goodness munchkin, creating rainbows and pixie dust wherever he goes.
I don't think that intentions matter a whole lot - tons of people with good intentions make big messes, and tons of people who are shallow and boring end up delivering outstanding service because they're interested in making a profit.
A) I'd rather deal with the person who's trying to make money - I know that he's got his interests aligned with mine
B) dealing with folks who have enlightened self interest is a heck of a lot more pragmatic than dealing with onley wonderfully self-less folks, if for no other reason than there's a whole lot more self-interested folks around than there are saints.
A system that demands saints to work will fail.
A system that assumes normal human motivations and harnesses them to provide good things to others will thrive.
The only reason my super-market provides groceries is to make money, and the result is a valid service.
The only reason the movie theater down the road plays movies is to make money, and the result is a valid service.
Just because this blogger is motivated by money does not mean that the service he provides is a scam. He's aggregating information, and will likely eventually - after he's been covering the topic long enough - provide knowledgeable commentary on it. I wouldn't be suprised if, in a few years, he's doing original research on the issue, iterviewing people, and digging up articles in libraries.
What he's doing is indistinguishable from someone starting up a new magazine because they see a demographic that would read it and an advertising base that would purchase ads (see, for example Make). The end result is that all three parties are better off: the readers get something that they choose to read, the advertisers get eyeballs, and the guy who puts it all together gets a slice.
What you're seeing is actually history in the making - the decoupling of demand-driven journalism from media companies.
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.
-- Adam Smith
Solar output is better correlated with temperature
on
NASA Proposes Warming Mars
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You can believe what you hear on from Pop science places like FoxNews, but there is a dramatic change going on and CO2 is the only explanation that's been found to fit.
You're speaking in ignorance.
Solar output correlates better with global climate change than does CO2.
Don't bother giving my what ever phony story you have. I've heard them all and I've seen the real data.
Translation: poster's belief is not scientific and fact-based, but ideological and faith-based, therefore additional facts will NOT be considered.
Any data that disagrees with poster's preformulated conslusions will be denied as a Papist Plot...er.... anti-Muslism heresy...wait... Communist propaganda...got it!... "right wing lies".
So, Anonymous Coward, if you've seen all the "real data", please give your cutting one sentence rebuttal of the Stanford reference above.
Because of the evil forces of capitalism, people who once would have worked in mines or rice paddies are being paid to slave away, indoors, playing video games.
Is there no end to the greed of capitalists, and the damage that they cause?!?!?!?
Something Must Be Done(tm)!!!
...The over 100 Billion pumped into the US economy alone may have fueled the boom...
No money was pumped "in" to the US economy. Money was merely moved from one use to another.
While the economy gained from the new spending, it lost from the lack of the default spending.
Without any hard data, one should assume that this was either a wash or - more likely - a net productivity hit.
People make this mistake all the time: "ooh! hurricane! I bet all that spending on new windows helped the economy!". No, it didn't. It took money that would have otherwise been spent at restaurants, book stores, etc., (or left in banks and brokerage accounts, where it helps build other sectors of the economy) and moved that money into glass repair shops and plywood factories.
we're growing paper-hat jobs faster than either white-collar or blue-collar jobs.
False. Try to come up with some data to support that. You can't do it.
The average service industry job pays *more* than the average manufacturing job...because stock brokers, IT contractors, photographers, etc., are all in the "service industry" sector that you've read so much about.
If you look at the break down of where the service industry is actually growing, it's not just a matter of more burger flippers.
Losing *jobs* might be a very good thing. Imagine that both people in a household have jobs. Imagine that over time the productivity of one of them goes up by 250%. One person can now afford not to work, and the total household income is higher, the total productivity of the economy is higher, and the total labor is lower.
Further, the US economy is not employing either less people, or a lower percent of the population than it was before.
Certain *jobs* go away, but other jobs are created faster than the old jobs disappear. This is how we have a historically low unemployment rate today, while having a historically high population in the US.
Read
this book (written by a German citizen, by the way) for supportive data.
Slashdot Mirror
In Hardwired, Walter Jon Williams talked about CNC machines spitting out custom firearms.
It is already the case that one can, with some skill and difficulty, make a reasonable firearm using desktop machine tools.
Sherline, maker of the preeminent hobbyist desktop lathe and mill, is already shipping turn-key desktop CNC machines, based around linux boxes.
Technical Video Rental rents out DVDs on how to build firearms from scratch.
All these trends are accelerating, and about to converge.
In 20 years, no matter what the politicians say, gun control is going to be DEAD.
A linux box + a $1k three axis desktop mill + some scraps of steel + HEAP.sourceforge.net = downloadable firearms.
it is the consensus of almost everyone on the planet in the 21st century that some forms of censorship are necessary.
Uhhh...what? Care to provide any evidence for this? I'm not sure where you're from, but this certainly isn't the consensus here in the US.
Speech that incites hatred against favored groups in a country will simply not be permitted on the grounds that the public order is threatened. For example, see the case of Oriana Fallaci...the principle stands that there is a line somewhere that cannot be crossed without a person being liable for government sanctions.
It's not clear whether you're being descriptive (telling us how laws actually are in some places unfortunate enough not have a written constitution or a bill of rights), or whether you're being prescriptive (telling us that this is the kind of law that everyone should have).
If the former: yes, you're right, there are some people who are opressed by their governments and do not have free speech (Canadians, Brits, French, Germans, etc.).
If the latter: shove it up your ass, fascist.
almost everyone, regardless of civilization, accepts that there is no such principle as the unlimited right to publish any book.
Again, it's not clear whether you're describing how things are (in which case you're wrong), or whether you're telling us that we should all trust the all-wise, all-benevolent government to tell us what we're allowed to say and what we're allowed to publish. If the latter, you should note that governments (even the most friendly looking, benign ones) ALWAYS use speech control, if it exists, to protect themselves and cover up their mistakes. Even Canadian political parties were doing this a few weeks ago.
there is a consensus that some political parties should be banned.
Really? Evidence, please?
For an example, Belgium's highest court ruled that the Vlaams Blok is racist and banned it from political participation.
You're asserting that there is a consensus among PEOPLE, but then justifying this with data showing that certain governments do something. PEOPLE != GOVERNMENTS.
Uhh...what?
What does "justify" mean? Is Apple forced to go before some review board every years to explain their prices?
Here's how the market works: Apply provides a computer, at a certain price. Consumers either buy it, or they don't.
When you bought your last car, did you go through the vehicle, add up the price of components, and then tell the manufacturer wether the price was "justified" or not?
Apple does not need to use an expensive part to explain why their computers are expensive.
Apple just needs to say "This is a box running windows; *this* is a box running OS X. Which do you want to buy?".
have you ever considered what life might be like for her?
Most of the retarded people I have met have been fairly happy. I might go so far as to suggest that the average retarded person is at least as happy as the average cubical dweller.
Agree / disagree / other?
don't be so quick to judge those who don't make the same decisions as you. in other cultures a child born with such a defect would be left in the woods, or similarly cast out
I, for one, am not wildly enthusiastic about cultures that would leave an infant to die alone in the woods.
Hopefully, we're not yet so politically correct that we have to affirm that cultures that kill infants, or own slaves, or torture animals before death to make them taste better, etc. are just as good as our own.
Josh Tickell also has DVDs on biodiesel, which can be rented or purchased.
I run Technical Video Rental, a small firm that rents out specialized instructional videos (welding, bowl turning, case mods, etc.) and we have a corporate blog.
The reason is two-fold:
1) community for greed's sake.
2) community for its own sake.
To expand on the first: I get lots of email from customers who are anxious to share the details of their metalworking and electronics projects with someone; hardware hacking can be a bit of a lonely hobby. By helping customers share their stories with each other, it gives customers an outlet, and a sense of shared community...which gives them positive associations with the website/service/brand...which keeps them coming back (or at least, adds a very very minor reason to check out the corporate website with some regularity).
To expand on the second: running a small corporation can be a lonely activity as well. One spends a lot of time coding, dealing with customer support issues, dealing with vendors, etc...and not nearly as much time hanging around the water cooler or throwing nerf footballs as one might have done as an engineer. So, putting my
own projects in the blog lets me interact with my customers, which is a nice break from regular work.
"aspersions" are negative statements.
"aspirations" are those things that you desire.
E.g.: if I were to "cast aspirations" on hunters, I'd be wishing them brand new fast servers, to host my ripped collection of FLAC files.
However, I think that the stance in this post:
shows some fuzzy thinking.
Like most /.-ers, I'm an omnivore. I'm known to eat the occassional burger, ham sandwhich, carnitas burrito, etc.
I consider it far more moral, as a consumer of animal protein, to harvest animals that have lived full natural lives outdoors, than it is to outsource the process, and delegate to others the raising, handling, and slaughter of animals in factory farms ("there are vast fields, Neo, where...").
The more I think about it, the more I think that I should start hunting, and should ONLY eat meat that comes from creatures that got to live outside.
So...how long until we have a conflict where there are weapons systems running Linux on *BOTH* sides?
Perhaps because under Article I, section 8, the people have not delegated to Congress the power to do any of those things.
Before modding this down as libertarian propaganda, do me the favor of actually thinking about it.
This doesn't strike me as suprising at all. The free market is absolutely ruthless in attracting folks to markets, and it's absolutely ruthless in pressuring them to drive their prices down. (As the joke goes: the businessman spends his evenings on his knees, praying for prices to rise, and all day at his desk, working to make them go down).
A do-gooder non-profit, no matter how wonderful and benevolant, just doesn't have the incentives in place to motivate the same sort of EFFECTIVE action. I'm sure all of the people involved had their hearts in the right place, and they prob even worked reasonably hard...but the outcome was entirely predictable.
TJIC
It seems like this is the 4,000th time I've come across some headline on Slashdot of the form "scientists report...", followed by some process of product that's been on the market for a decade or three.
Light tubes? There have been companies advertising these things in the back of Fine Homebuilding magazine for a decade or so.
Big whoop.
Attention: folks at Oak Ridge: a bit more science, and a bit less prostituting yourselves to reporters, please...
I will never understand the mindset of someone who thinks that brainstorming is the hard part, and DOING something is "simple".
I - like most other smart people I know - have dozens of ideas a day, and a really good one every week or month.
The Devil is in the details.
I am not at all impressed by someone who "comes up with a great idea".
I bow down before the person who IMPLEMENTS and DELIVERS.
Tone down the "simply moving to production" ivory tower attitude.
Sounds like a fair price.
I can hear all of the Smithians screaming, "but (b) is just another way of saying 'to make money,' they're the same statement!"
No. The goal of "making money" is significantly different from the goal of "making a living,"... The former is greedy and unindividuated...
The latter is a matter of personal survival and good intentions-- Your argument seems to be that if there are two people, running identical stores in identical ways, and charging identical prices, and one of people those people wants to earn money, and the other one wants to "help people", then there's some magical difference in result. The guy who runs identical store A is "sucking wealth out of the economy for personal use", but the guy who runs store B is some sort of magical goodness munchkin, creating rainbows and pixie dust wherever he goes.
I don't think that intentions matter a whole lot - tons of people with good intentions make big messes, and tons of people who are shallow and boring end up delivering outstanding service because they're interested in making a profit.
A) I'd rather deal with the person who's trying to make money - I know that he's got his interests aligned with mine
B) dealing with folks who have enlightened self interest is a heck of a lot more pragmatic than dealing with onley wonderfully self-less folks, if for no other reason than there's a whole lot more self-interested folks around than there are saints.
A system that demands saints to work will fail.
A system that assumes normal human motivations and harnesses them to provide good things to others will thrive.
the only real reason he's doing this is the money
These two things aren't incompatible.
The only reason my super-market provides groceries is to make money, and the result is a valid service.
The only reason the movie theater down the road plays movies is to make money, and the result is a valid service.
Just because this blogger is motivated by money does not mean that the service he provides is a scam. He's aggregating information, and will likely eventually - after he's been covering the topic long enough - provide knowledgeable commentary on it. I wouldn't be suprised if, in a few years, he's doing original research on the issue, iterviewing people, and digging up articles in libraries.
What he's doing is indistinguishable from someone starting up a new magazine because they see a demographic that would read it and an advertising base that would purchase ads (see, for example Make). The end result is that all three parties are better off: the readers get something that they choose to read, the advertisers get eyeballs, and the guy who puts it all together gets a slice.
What you're seeing is actually history in the making - the decoupling of demand-driven journalism from media companies.
You're speaking in ignorance.
Solar output correlates better with global climate change than does CO2.
Do a little googling. One example: stanford.edu
Don't bother giving my what ever phony story you have. I've heard them all and I've seen the real data.
Translation: poster's belief is not scientific and fact-based, but ideological and faith-based, therefore additional facts will NOT be considered. Any data that disagrees with poster's preformulated conslusions will be denied as a Papist Plot ...er.... anti-Muslism heresy ...wait... Communist propaganda...got it! ... "right wing lies".
So, Anonymous Coward, if you've seen all the "real data", please give your cutting one sentence rebuttal of the Stanford reference above.
Because of the evil forces of capitalism, people who once would have worked in mines or rice paddies are being paid to slave away, indoors, playing video games. Is there no end to the greed of capitalists, and the damage that they cause?!?!?!? Something Must Be Done(tm)!!!
to "debrief" means to ask THEM for details.
I sincerely doubt that Google brought 1,500 marketroids out to harvest intelligence from them.
Snipers work in teams, for this very reason.
Why do you assume that, despite 10,000 yrs of military experience, the brass would suddenly forget all tactics because a robot is involved?
And this differs from the norms of government behavior over the last 5,000 yrs...how?
No money was pumped "in" to the US economy. Money was merely moved from one use to another.
While the economy gained from the new spending, it lost from the lack of the default spending.
Without any hard data, one should assume that this was either a wash or - more likely - a net productivity hit.
People make this mistake all the time: "ooh! hurricane! I bet all that spending on new windows helped the economy!". No, it didn't. It took money that would have otherwise been spent at restaurants, book stores, etc., (or left in banks and brokerage accounts, where it helps build other sectors of the economy) and moved that money into glass repair shops and plywood factories.
Don't fall for the myth.
False. Try to come up with some data to support that. You can't do it.
The average service industry job pays *more* than the average manufacturing job...because stock brokers, IT contractors, photographers, etc., are all in the "service industry" sector that you've read so much about.
If you look at the break down of where the service industry is actually growing, it's not just a matter of more burger flippers.
False.
Lost *productivity* hurts an economy.
Losing *jobs* might be a very good thing. Imagine that both people in a household have jobs. Imagine that over time the productivity of one of them goes up by 250%. One person can now afford not to work, and the total household income is higher, the total productivity of the economy is higher, and the total labor is lower.
Further, the US economy is not employing either less people, or a lower percent of the population than it was before.
Certain *jobs* go away, but other jobs are created faster than the old jobs disappear. This is how we have a historically low unemployment rate today, while having a historically high population in the US.
Read this book (written by a German citizen, by the way) for supportive data.