That's the point though. Bringing something new into the world isn't the same kind of motivation as receiving financial benefit. Your reaction to getting screwed in the former is going to be a lot more extreme than the latter. Kickstarter is essentially a charitable donation without the tax write off or good feeling. It's not the same as buying stock for all that both involve faith.
You're right in the purest sense, but completely wrong in every other sense.
There is a substantial difference between giving someone money for a portion of ownership of a company and giving someone money to achieve a goal. Buying stock is a risk reward proposition. I own a portion of the company equal to the number of shares I own over the total number of shares available. If the company does well, I do well, if the company does poorly, I do poorly, if the owners of the company steal from the company I can put them in jail. Yes there's an aspect of faith, but it's faith that a gamble will pay off.
With Kickstarter, you own nothing whatever. If the company does well you get nothing, if they do poorly you get nothing, and if they walk off with your money you have no recourse.
Psychologically losing on a roll of the dice is much easier to take than being taken advantage of by someone who you gave a gift to in good faith. It feels different because it is different. Yes both require faith, but they're very different kinds of faith, and you feel very different when your faith is betrayed.
On top of that, as far as acts of charity go, Kickstarter projects are a pretty crappy one. You don't help anyone except the people running the project, and you don't even get some piece of crappy art to hang on your wall. It's the most indulgent of indulgences, and the kind of people who have the money for that sort of thing don't need kickstarter.
Not necessarily one version(though the current 5 or whatever it is is a little excessive, but the price point is a probably about close to right, at least IMO. You can sometimes manage to get hold of an OEM license even if you're building yourself if you're buying enough parts from a single supplier, but it's still not cheap.
That said, when you buy a new PC you'll either get or need to buy a new license anyway, and for all that upgrades aren't pushed by software anymore, 5 years is about the longest life you're likely to get out a regularly used desktop these days before you start getting faults, so the upgrades still happen.
Note I didn't say that you should pay cash to upgrade. I said that Windows 7 was a good OS with a lot of noticeable improvements in terms of support, stability, security, and productivity. You're welcome to make the decision to say "Financially for me, it doesn't work out", and if you have a full retail license of XP and you want to keep installing that, lord knows it's none of my business. I don't work for Microsoft and I don't get a cut of sales. Piracy of course is not a way of saving money.
In general, my position is as follows.
Windows 7 is an excellent OS, in terms of functionality and in the general case it is as good as anything else I have tried including Several Linux Distros and OSX. In the specific case it's certainly possible that it may not be the best choice for your needs(I've seen people using NT because they had software or hardware which only ran on NT and for which there was no replacement), and I'm getting into the discussion about open vs closed source here because the OP was happy using Windows, not Linux.
People who claim that Microsoft are a decade behind Linux in terms of features and insist on using XP as their source of comparison are asshats. XP is more than a decade old and has a large number of resulting flaws(the security architecture for instance sucks for one). This is one of my pet peeves because I believe in giving credit where credit is due, and comparing this years Linux build to a a decade old Windows version which is two releases behind is no more right nor fair than comparing Windows 7 to Redhat 5.
As a side note, the vast majority of the improvements are actually in the UI, if you switch to classic mode, you'll get none of them. I understand where you're coming from, I switched XP to the old 98 style start menu for years, but when you start using thins like jump lists, pinned apps, and the like, you'll wonder how you lived without them, particularly in a work environment.
There's a lot of little things. Better dual monitor support(Windows + left and Windows + right will swap a window from one screen to the other including resizing maximized windows, you could get this in XP, but not without a third party program). Plug and Play drivers for hardware made in the last 10 years. Jump lists and pinned applications are pretty great when you actually start using them. Pinning documents is also helpful in certain circumstances.
There's nothing ground breaking, but the added little things can be pretty great for your productivity. I'm not arguing that people with a 5 or 6 year old computer really need to upgrade their XP machines, but there's really no excuse for taking an existing machine with 7 installed and replacing it with XP.
I get a bit annoyed about this issue because Slashdot is full of people complaining that everything Microsoft makes is buggy, insecure and massively behind the times and then they reveal they're using Windows and Office XP. The OS has come a long way both in terms of features, security and stability. It's still not open source of course so if that's your primary judgement of an OS, that's a perfectly legitimate criticism, but if you're going to be using a Windows OS it really ought to be 7. It's a genuinely good OS. Not so convinced about Windows 8, but time will tell.
You're missing out, Windows 7 is actually a lot better than XP was, Vista you have an argument on, but 7 has a lot of nice stuff, not least of which is 64 bit support which doesn't suck.
Americans need to realize that the US constitution specifically states that it does not enumerate every single right that the people hold.
Instead you have the Tea Party who believe in some sort of strict interpretation of a document they've probably never read and don't understand. Ironically enough, a strict interpretation of the constitution forbids a strict interpretation of the constitution.
If corporations are people, then it's not unreasonable to expect them to behave like people and act in a moral way. Personally I think the idea that corporations are people is ridiculous, but the supreme court disagrees.
It's also not a particularly funny joke anymore as she's been acquitted and all indications are that the current re-examination will list the kid's cause of death as a dingo attack.
It was a joke because it was believed to be a lame excuse to cover up a murder, this is no longer believed to have been the case.
Actually, our version of the MPAA and RIAA got their asses handed to them when they tried to claim one of the local ISPs was responsible for infringement by its users. There have been political rumblings to try and change that situation, but nothing much has come of it. For all that we get a few loony ideas out of the government every once in a while(like the filter which has sort of disappeared into the ether since its grand architect got shafted and the balance of power in the senate stopped relying on the religious right for a vote) the courts are actually pretty good over here.
Oddly enough, for a country with no official bill of rights or even codified freedom of speech, we have a lot more freedom down here than the US does. Our government is slightly more repressive, but they also keep our corporations much more in line so we don't have the oligarchy the US has and which the bill of rights doesn't protect you from. On balance folks have more rights here, even if none of them are written down.
In the case of a full on natural disaster of pretty much any type what will determine the state of any data you have in the range of said disaster is going to be dumb luck. When something like that hits, there's nothing at all you can do. Surge protectors, stuff off the floor, none of it makes a damned bit of difference. If you have off site backups and off site is outside the disaster zone you'll have data, if you have enough warning and can physically move your hardware out of the disaster zone before said disaster strikes, you'll probably be fine, absolutely anything else is a waste of time.
A search engine can display anything they like, they are largely unregulated. An advertising business on the other hand cannot, and that is what Google actually is.
It was possible, whether it still is at current data densities I don't know.
What I do know is that it's astronomically expensive and the CIA can make you disappear a lot cheaper and easier if that's what they want so they don't bother much.
Well there is a sort of irony about the fact that a man who has turned what was supposed to be an open organization into a gigantic nest of nepotism, cronyism, corruption and abuse of power in charge of an "open government" initiative.
Whatever you might think about Wikipedia, and it has a lot of positive attributes, its governance sucks. The place is in a lot of ways more corrupt and has a greater lack of transparency than the government he's now advising.
Even if that were true, and it's not, stack pointer errors can potentially cause issues other than segfaults, the bigger difference is very simple. Intel in the early 90's could afford a CPU recall. AMD in 2012 cannot, nor can they afford the hit to their reputation. This is a big deal for AMD, and indirectly a big deal for the PC market. I don't much like AMD anymore, their chips aren't as good as the competition and they're not all that much cheaper, but I do like competition existing.
Rocket Scientists won't, not just because NASA isn't giving up on rockets, but because those are used by the military too. Astronauts might be SOL for a while though as we seem to be done with federally funding orbital missions and we're probably not technologically ready yet to do much else.
Not that there's anything wrong with the changes in NASA's focus so long as they aren't used as an excuse to defund the entire organization. Government organizations like NASA are at least in part about doing the things which won't be remotely profitable for another half a century after they've been discovered, and that means setting our sights a little higher.
Herd immunity is the idea that because everyone around you is immune it's very difficult for a pathogen to spread far enough to actually get to you. In some cases a virus can survive in extremely harsh conditions and be transported around without a host, but examples are fairly rare and the traits which allow this to occur are generally counter productive when it comes to easy infection.
Some very few viruses have been rendered genuinely extinct or would have been if military groups hadn't kept samples. Small pox for instance is, to the best of my knowledge, not naturally occurring in any human population in the world at this point in time. There's some of it frozen in a couple of labs, but there's no one out there with Small Pox right now. This happens when herd immunity extends to the general human population.
And of course the actual answer is that "Research is showing a correlation to the definition of autism as a disease and reported incidents of autism".
Anyone who has had any experience with people on the autism spectrum will recognize that these people are not new. Even the most extreme cases are not new. Go talk to your grand parents, don't ask them if they knew anyone who was autistic but describe the symptoms. It's a safe bet they knew someone like that when they were growing up.
We define new diseases which is great, but then when the number of cases increases dramatically over time we freak out as more people become capable of diagnosis.
Actually that's a pretty good analogy. Lead pipes caused some problems, but indoor plumbing and proper sanitation created much more significant benefits for public health. They were replaced with better pipes not removed entirely, and I would say that over the course of time their benefits have far outweighed their costs.
Immunizations also have some problems(though nowhere near as severe as lead pipes), but they also have massive benefits. My Aunt had polio. She was fairly lucky and it only caused her to go through torturous rehab and be in residual pain for the rest of her life, which is much better than paralysis or death. These days polio incidence in the western world is effectively zero. On the down side, modern immunizations have been causally linked to a few short term adverse reactions and the occasional incident which is more related to poor care than the vaccine. Responsible practitioners keep children for an hour or so after an immunization to deal with any reactions and the vast majority of the serious consequences for immunizations would have been prevented by this practice.
The link between autism and vaccines has not only been discredited on the basis of the science, it has also been conclusively proven that the doctor who performed the original study rigged his results.
There is hard science behind the benefits of immunization and belief in proven science is not fundamentalism. Belief in Jenny McCarthy whose greatest achievement in life has been posing naked, despite a mountain of scientific evidence refuting her BS however is.
I often see the 1918 flu referenced this way, and it's true as far as it goes that this strain of flu had an inordinately high death toll compared to ordinary flu strains, but that isn't entirely because the flu strain was particularly lethal in and of itself. H1N1 was probably just as lethal in terms of the symptoms, but didn't have anywhere near the death toll. 1918 had a number of extenuating circumstances related to the war, general economic conditions, and the medical treatment available at the time.
TLDR: The flu can be dangerous, particularly for small children and the elderly and flu shots, particularly for people in these population groups are a good idea. However, just because the 1918 flu killed 100 million people doesn't mean that the same would happen today.
Because your "iTunes account" is your Apple Id, which is how you do everything with your iPhone/iPad/etc. Apple devices are not particularly enterprise friendly, but enterprise staff still want them, hence the adapt or die problem.
It's a trivial example certainly, given it's a recessive trait with a fairly simple gene pattern it's probably about the most trivial example you could take, much more so than this particular experiment. Nor was it my intention to imply they were similar, merely that selecting for an existing trait is fairly easy if you are rigorous enough in your selection processes.
That said, performing even the trivial human example could the first step along a continuum. After this point you have a population which is genetically different from the rest of the species. Evolution is a lot of little steps, maybe the blue eyed folks haven't evolved, but that's a little bit like looking at the moment a levee breaks and ignoring all the build of water that got you there. Generally speaking water doesn't just magically fill a damn or overflow a levee, the individual drops which get added may not make much difference, but when you're looking at a process of change, where do you draw the line? Do you count the original mutation, even if it may only have affected one individual? Do you wait until a unique population has been created(as would be the case with the blue eyed folks)? Do you not count it as evolution until there's a certain amount of difference from the baseline? Are you waiting for a new species? How do you determine where in a process of change that process has occurred?
Natural and artificial selection acts on all species all the time, a lot of the time it acts to keep things exactly the way they are, but that doesn't mean it's not acting. I'm arguing that there's a distinction between saying that something has "evolved" and the process of "evolution".
Slashdot Mirror
That's the point though. Bringing something new into the world isn't the same kind of motivation as receiving financial benefit. Your reaction to getting screwed in the former is going to be a lot more extreme than the latter. Kickstarter is essentially a charitable donation without the tax write off or good feeling. It's not the same as buying stock for all that both involve faith.
You're right in the purest sense, but completely wrong in every other sense.
There is a substantial difference between giving someone money for a portion of ownership of a company and giving someone money to achieve a goal. Buying stock is a risk reward proposition. I own a portion of the company equal to the number of shares I own over the total number of shares available. If the company does well, I do well, if the company does poorly, I do poorly, if the owners of the company steal from the company I can put them in jail. Yes there's an aspect of faith, but it's faith that a gamble will pay off.
With Kickstarter, you own nothing whatever. If the company does well you get nothing, if they do poorly you get nothing, and if they walk off with your money you have no recourse.
Psychologically losing on a roll of the dice is much easier to take than being taken advantage of by someone who you gave a gift to in good faith. It feels different because it is different. Yes both require faith, but they're very different kinds of faith, and you feel very different when your faith is betrayed.
On top of that, as far as acts of charity go, Kickstarter projects are a pretty crappy one. You don't help anyone except the people running the project, and you don't even get some piece of crappy art to hang on your wall. It's the most indulgent of indulgences, and the kind of people who have the money for that sort of thing don't need kickstarter.
Not necessarily one version(though the current 5 or whatever it is is a little excessive, but the price point is a probably about close to right, at least IMO. You can sometimes manage to get hold of an OEM license even if you're building yourself if you're buying enough parts from a single supplier, but it's still not cheap.
That said, when you buy a new PC you'll either get or need to buy a new license anyway, and for all that upgrades aren't pushed by software anymore, 5 years is about the longest life you're likely to get out a regularly used desktop these days before you start getting faults, so the upgrades still happen.
Note I didn't say that you should pay cash to upgrade. I said that Windows 7 was a good OS with a lot of noticeable improvements in terms of support, stability, security, and productivity. You're welcome to make the decision to say "Financially for me, it doesn't work out", and if you have a full retail license of XP and you want to keep installing that, lord knows it's none of my business. I don't work for Microsoft and I don't get a cut of sales. Piracy of course is not a way of saving money.
In general, my position is as follows.
As a side note, the vast majority of the improvements are actually in the UI, if you switch to classic mode, you'll get none of them. I understand where you're coming from, I switched XP to the old 98 style start menu for years, but when you start using thins like jump lists, pinned apps, and the like, you'll wonder how you lived without them, particularly in a work environment.
There's a lot of little things. Better dual monitor support(Windows + left and Windows + right will swap a window from one screen to the other including resizing maximized windows, you could get this in XP, but not without a third party program). Plug and Play drivers for hardware made in the last 10 years. Jump lists and pinned applications are pretty great when you actually start using them. Pinning documents is also helpful in certain circumstances.
There's nothing ground breaking, but the added little things can be pretty great for your productivity. I'm not arguing that people with a 5 or 6 year old computer really need to upgrade their XP machines, but there's really no excuse for taking an existing machine with 7 installed and replacing it with XP.
I get a bit annoyed about this issue because Slashdot is full of people complaining that everything Microsoft makes is buggy, insecure and massively behind the times and then they reveal they're using Windows and Office XP. The OS has come a long way both in terms of features, security and stability. It's still not open source of course so if that's your primary judgement of an OS, that's a perfectly legitimate criticism, but if you're going to be using a Windows OS it really ought to be 7. It's a genuinely good OS. Not so convinced about Windows 8, but time will tell.
Also true, Vista had good 64 bit support. XPx64 however is shite.
You're missing out, Windows 7 is actually a lot better than XP was, Vista you have an argument on, but 7 has a lot of nice stuff, not least of which is 64 bit support which doesn't suck.
Americans need to realize that the US constitution specifically states that it does not enumerate every single right that the people hold.
Instead you have the Tea Party who believe in some sort of strict interpretation of a document they've probably never read and don't understand. Ironically enough, a strict interpretation of the constitution forbids a strict interpretation of the constitution.
By our version I meant ARIA, and I believe it's AMPA, which are yes, just local branches of the RIAA and MPAA.
Point still stands.
If corporations are people, then it's not unreasonable to expect them to behave like people and act in a moral way. Personally I think the idea that corporations are people is ridiculous, but the supreme court disagrees.
It's also not a particularly funny joke anymore as she's been acquitted and all indications are that the current re-examination will list the kid's cause of death as a dingo attack.
It was a joke because it was believed to be a lame excuse to cover up a murder, this is no longer believed to have been the case.
Actually, our version of the MPAA and RIAA got their asses handed to them when they tried to claim one of the local ISPs was responsible for infringement by its users. There have been political rumblings to try and change that situation, but nothing much has come of it. For all that we get a few loony ideas out of the government every once in a while(like the filter which has sort of disappeared into the ether since its grand architect got shafted and the balance of power in the senate stopped relying on the religious right for a vote) the courts are actually pretty good over here.
Oddly enough, for a country with no official bill of rights or even codified freedom of speech, we have a lot more freedom down here than the US does. Our government is slightly more repressive, but they also keep our corporations much more in line so we don't have the oligarchy the US has and which the bill of rights doesn't protect you from. On balance folks have more rights here, even if none of them are written down.
In the case of a full on natural disaster of pretty much any type what will determine the state of any data you have in the range of said disaster is going to be dumb luck. When something like that hits, there's nothing at all you can do. Surge protectors, stuff off the floor, none of it makes a damned bit of difference. If you have off site backups and off site is outside the disaster zone you'll have data, if you have enough warning and can physically move your hardware out of the disaster zone before said disaster strikes, you'll probably be fine, absolutely anything else is a waste of time.
A search engine can display anything they like, they are largely unregulated. An advertising business on the other hand cannot, and that is what Google actually is.
It was possible, whether it still is at current data densities I don't know.
What I do know is that it's astronomically expensive and the CIA can make you disappear a lot cheaper and easier if that's what they want so they don't bother much.
Well there is a sort of irony about the fact that a man who has turned what was supposed to be an open organization into a gigantic nest of nepotism, cronyism, corruption and abuse of power in charge of an "open government" initiative.
Whatever you might think about Wikipedia, and it has a lot of positive attributes, its governance sucks. The place is in a lot of ways more corrupt and has a greater lack of transparency than the government he's now advising.
Even if that were true, and it's not, stack pointer errors can potentially cause issues other than segfaults, the bigger difference is very simple. Intel in the early 90's could afford a CPU recall. AMD in 2012 cannot, nor can they afford the hit to their reputation. This is a big deal for AMD, and indirectly a big deal for the PC market. I don't much like AMD anymore, their chips aren't as good as the competition and they're not all that much cheaper, but I do like competition existing.
Rocket Scientists won't, not just because NASA isn't giving up on rockets, but because those are used by the military too. Astronauts might be SOL for a while though as we seem to be done with federally funding orbital missions and we're probably not technologically ready yet to do much else.
Not that there's anything wrong with the changes in NASA's focus so long as they aren't used as an excuse to defund the entire organization. Government organizations like NASA are at least in part about doing the things which won't be remotely profitable for another half a century after they've been discovered, and that means setting our sights a little higher.
Herd immunity is the idea that because everyone around you is immune it's very difficult for a pathogen to spread far enough to actually get to you. In some cases a virus can survive in extremely harsh conditions and be transported around without a host, but examples are fairly rare and the traits which allow this to occur are generally counter productive when it comes to easy infection.
Some very few viruses have been rendered genuinely extinct or would have been if military groups hadn't kept samples. Small pox for instance is, to the best of my knowledge, not naturally occurring in any human population in the world at this point in time. There's some of it frozen in a couple of labs, but there's no one out there with Small Pox right now. This happens when herd immunity extends to the general human population.
And of course the actual answer is that "Research is showing a correlation to the definition of autism as a disease and reported incidents of autism".
Anyone who has had any experience with people on the autism spectrum will recognize that these people are not new. Even the most extreme cases are not new. Go talk to your grand parents, don't ask them if they knew anyone who was autistic but describe the symptoms. It's a safe bet they knew someone like that when they were growing up.
We define new diseases which is great, but then when the number of cases increases dramatically over time we freak out as more people become capable of diagnosis.
Actually that's a pretty good analogy. Lead pipes caused some problems, but indoor plumbing and proper sanitation created much more significant benefits for public health. They were replaced with better pipes not removed entirely, and I would say that over the course of time their benefits have far outweighed their costs.
Immunizations also have some problems(though nowhere near as severe as lead pipes), but they also have massive benefits. My Aunt had polio. She was fairly lucky and it only caused her to go through torturous rehab and be in residual pain for the rest of her life, which is much better than paralysis or death. These days polio incidence in the western world is effectively zero. On the down side, modern immunizations have been causally linked to a few short term adverse reactions and the occasional incident which is more related to poor care than the vaccine. Responsible practitioners keep children for an hour or so after an immunization to deal with any reactions and the vast majority of the serious consequences for immunizations would have been prevented by this practice.
The link between autism and vaccines has not only been discredited on the basis of the science, it has also been conclusively proven that the doctor who performed the original study rigged his results.
There is hard science behind the benefits of immunization and belief in proven science is not fundamentalism. Belief in Jenny McCarthy whose greatest achievement in life has been posing naked, despite a mountain of scientific evidence refuting her BS however is.
Just because the value you choose to set $DEITY to is a poor one doesn't refute the value of the algorithm. Garbage in, Garbage out after all.
I often see the 1918 flu referenced this way, and it's true as far as it goes that this strain of flu had an inordinately high death toll compared to ordinary flu strains, but that isn't entirely because the flu strain was particularly lethal in and of itself. H1N1 was probably just as lethal in terms of the symptoms, but didn't have anywhere near the death toll. 1918 had a number of extenuating circumstances related to the war, general economic conditions, and the medical treatment available at the time.
TLDR: The flu can be dangerous, particularly for small children and the elderly and flu shots, particularly for people in these population groups are a good idea. However, just because the 1918 flu killed 100 million people doesn't mean that the same would happen today.
Because your "iTunes account" is your Apple Id, which is how you do everything with your iPhone/iPad/etc. Apple devices are not particularly enterprise friendly, but enterprise staff still want them, hence the adapt or die problem.
It's a trivial example certainly, given it's a recessive trait with a fairly simple gene pattern it's probably about the most trivial example you could take, much more so than this particular experiment. Nor was it my intention to imply they were similar, merely that selecting for an existing trait is fairly easy if you are rigorous enough in your selection processes.
That said, performing even the trivial human example could the first step along a continuum. After this point you have a population which is genetically different from the rest of the species. Evolution is a lot of little steps, maybe the blue eyed folks haven't evolved, but that's a little bit like looking at the moment a levee breaks and ignoring all the build of water that got you there. Generally speaking water doesn't just magically fill a damn or overflow a levee, the individual drops which get added may not make much difference, but when you're looking at a process of change, where do you draw the line? Do you count the original mutation, even if it may only have affected one individual? Do you wait until a unique population has been created(as would be the case with the blue eyed folks)? Do you not count it as evolution until there's a certain amount of difference from the baseline? Are you waiting for a new species? How do you determine where in a process of change that process has occurred?
Natural and artificial selection acts on all species all the time, a lot of the time it acts to keep things exactly the way they are, but that doesn't mean it's not acting. I'm arguing that there's a distinction between saying that something has "evolved" and the process of "evolution".