I could get behind that, but only if it's amended to: "But I do think marriages should be annulled if they don't lead to child raising inside of a reasonable window of time, 2-3 years perhaps," with the rest of it being dropped.
After all, as a socio-economic contract the tax breaks are theoretically intended to defray the cost of _raising_ the children. It doesn't matter how the children are produced, only that they are produced and then raised, regardless of whether the child is "naturally" born from the couple in the old fashioned way, carried to term by surrogate mother, produced in a test tube, or adopted.
Now maybe that's what you actually meant to say, but if so your original wording wasn't clear to me.
"A posthumous pardon was not considered appropriate as Alan Turing was properly convicted of what at the time was a criminal offence."
It doesn't matter how stupid the laws, it's their fault if they broke them! The Catholic church was waaaay too progressive in admitting they screwed up in convicting Galileo after just 400 years! The UK isn't going to make that kind of mistake!
Uh, scanning for malware is great. But i don't want Google putting itself in the position of deciding what apps are "good enough" to be in their store. There have already been enough questionable decisions based on things like copyright, i don't want them having to make judgement calls on something even more nebulous like "quality."
If you've found apps that aren't of high enough quality to suit you i suggest you just find a better app and/or tell the author what the problems are and ask them to improve it. Or if you can't find a better version and the problems really bother you that much, just uninstall it. If the problem is dealt with by Google wielding a ban hammer then it is "solved" not only for you, but also for all the people who thought the value of the app was worth dealing with the problems.
It's the government's "get out of jail free" card to regulate anything they want. If you're doing something involving interstate commerce, clearly that affects interstate commerce. If you choose to avoid doing anything that involves interstate commerce, well then obviously that intentional lack of interaction has an effect on interstate commerce as well!
Personally i don't believe it. A mile away? They probably couldn't hit an elephant at that dist
Re:Welcome to reality jackass, where've you been?
on
Building the Bionic Man
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Kids shows and cartoons have been covering this for like 50 years too.
So if something has been consistently featured in kids shows or cartoons then it's entirely reasonable to expect it to show up in real life and totally not worthy of comment when it does? That's great! I'm looking forward to being able to buy my flying car soon, which i will use to commute to a wizard school where i can learn magic. Remind me to stay away from japan though. I'd like to avoid the tentacle monsters and i can always just import the cool mecha.
There's a reviewed research paper? Why didn't you cite it then? Until then, one meteorologist's speculations, with no reference to supporting facts, ranks higher than one random slashdotter's speculations, with no reference to supporting facts.
And we're going to get that law passed _and_ retroactively seize the $21 million that the SOPA supporters have already paid, all in less than a few weeks?
Your idea is laudable, i think outlawing campaign contributions and actually making it stick is totally impossible, but the idea is laudable. However there's no way it could be implemented within the time frame we're talking about. Until we can actually get some kind of reform passed i sure hope the tech companies are willing to lobby in the only way that's currently effective.
Seeing Avatar in theaters is the only time when 3D enhanced my experience rather than detracting from it like all the other movies over the past few years that used 3D as a last second gimmick.
"How To Train Your Dragon" also made worthwhile use of 3D, especially for the flying scenes. However the fact that we're arguing over whether there were two movies that were worth the extra price or just one doesn't change the gist of what you're saying.
It's funny how when the story about the "nuclear option" was posted a few days ago people were questioning why/if it should be an international outage, rather than just for the US users. Sadly(?) it didn't take long for evidence to surface of why this is something that affects everyone in the world.
These numbers seem odd. Android has the lion's share of the smartphone market but is getting only a fraction of the browser usage. I do wonder though, i've used about:debug on both my phone and my Nook to set the ID flag thing to "Desktop" (because so many sites of mobile views that are absolute crap.) Does that mean that i wouldn't show up in their numbers at all? I wonder how many other geeks, the people who are probably the heaviest users of the web on smartphones, have also done the same thing?
...yes, to reiterate what i said the first time, it seems like they're the only government agency making ANY decisions/taking any actions that i actually agree with these days. At least as far as gets on the news anyways.
I prefer science fiction & fantasy, which probably puts me in the same group as a significant percentage of the rest of the people on Slashdot. But here are some of my favorites.
Lois McMaster Bujold: Multiple Hugo and Nebula award winner. Her "Vorkosigan series" is outstanding. Some of the books are military space opera. Some of the books are detective stories. Some of the books have romance. Most of them combine more than one of the above. All of them are very funny in spots, at least if you have a rather dry sense of humor.
Jams Alan Gardner: Not especially well known, but his "League of Peoples" is a great SF series for those who have a darker sense of humor. The protagonist of the first book is a member of the "Explorer Corps", a bunch of officially designated Red Shirts who know that they're Red Shirts.
David Weber: He writes doorstoppers. And after reading enough of his books he's got an occasional turn of phrase that might start to get a little outworn. However if you want a _lot_ of military in your SF but also want some politics and character development then he's the one to go with. The Honor Harrington series starts out as "Horatio Hornblower" in space, but then recapitulates the development of naval warfare from the age of sail to modern battleships. It has lots of technical detail about imaginary futuristic weapon systems. The "Safehold" series is set on a future colony where a malignant theocracy has been holding back technology for centuries. It has lots of technical detail about real historical innovations, mostly relating to the age of sail and gunpowder weapons. The "Empire of Man"/"Prince Roger" series (co-written with John Ringo, and are the only John Ringo books i've liked so far) is about a bunch of space marines who get stranded on a primitive planet and have to fight their way across two continents to get to the only space port. It has a lots of technical detail about blowing people up.
Jack Campbell/John G Hemry: His "Lost Fleet" series starts out as "the March of the Ten Thousand" with a bit of Arthurian mythology thrown in, in space, but develops from there. It has a lot of focus on the actual scale of things in "realistic" space combat.
Naomi Novik: If you want to read about the Napoleonic Wars being fought using dragons, this is the place to go.
Robert J Sawyer: He has several good series. I think my favorite is probably his recent "WWW" or "Wake/Watch/Wonder" series about a naturally emergent AI in the internet.
Seanan McGuire/Mira Grant: The "October Daye" series is gritty urban fantasy featuring faeries that actually follow "real" folklore to a reasonable degree. The "Newsflesh" series (of which the first book, "Feed" was recently nominated for a Hugo) does a pretty good job of presenting a "post-apocalyptic" world after a "realistic" zombie outbreak. As in her explanation for how the zombies came about and how they still remain a threat is definitely within the realm of reasonable suspension of disbelief.
Vernor Vinge: He's often credited with the first story about cyberspace ("True Names") and has continued to evolve the cyberpunk genre past the point where Gibson and Stephenson pulled off the road ("Rainbows End") and he's also got some great space opera books ("A Fire Upon the Deep" and sequels) and if you can find it "The Peace War"/"Marooned in Realtime" aka "Across Realtime" are a good action story and a great post-apocalypse/singularity detective story.
John Scalzi: He's rebooted "Little Fuzzy" with "Fuzzy Nation" and completely reinvented "Starship Troopers" with the "Old Man's War" series, and he's got a number of other eclectic but good books, all with a good sense of humor.
Glen Cook: If you want dark, gritty fantasy, his "Black Company" series is it.
Now if you want to go old school i'd personally suggest the following:
Heinlein: All his "juveniles" are pretty good, plus a lot of the "middle period" stu
Why would Google want to kill Firefox? They don't make a profit directly from Chrome, they make money off of people using Chrome to go to Google pages where they'll be served ads. If people are using Firefox instead but still going to Google pages Google still makes just as much money. If they were somehow able to kill Firefox then some of the ex-Firefox users would move to Chrome, but some would move to IE or Safari or who knows what else.
And don't a lot of countries already do something similar to this for cattle after the whole prion/mad cow thing? The US only tracks a small percentage of our animals due to some protest or other involving big agribusiness. At least that's what i vaguely remember, i'd welcome anyone who could supply specific facts for or against that.
Firefox: Usual generic browser with NoScript on.
Chrome: My Google+ games account, YouTube and Topless Robot (since half the links on there are YouTube videos anyways.)
Internet Explorer: My "private" G+ account.
Opera: My Google Apps email account.
Along with making it easy to log into different Google related accounts without worrying about fiddling with settings, it makes it easy to switch tasks quickly based on the icons in the taskbar.
I probably ought to do some research and figure out something else to replace the IE slot with though. It feels kinda embarrassing to be using IE for anything at all on a regular basis =P
I like the idea limiting politicians to one term, but you can then run for election again in the next cycle after that. So one term on, one term off. I don't know if it should be applied to the president or not, but it should certainly apply to both the Senate and House.
Pros:
It's got ICS, ahead of everything else.
It's a Nexus device, which means it won't have any carrier skins or pre-installed crap (including CarrierIQ) and it will be updated in a timely manner with each new release of Android that it's capable of running.
It's got a high end chip with a dual core, putting it in a small class of mobile phones.
It's got a very large screen.
Cons:
It's got a very large screen. I'm not sure if the phone will actually fit in my pocket.
It's got ICS, which is great overall but i'm unsure about the lack of a global Menu button.
It's made out of plastic rather than a nice metal case like my Nexus One has. Some people have reported it feels kind of flimsy because of that.
It has no expandable memory, you're stuck with the 16/32 GB you start with.
It doesn't have Google Wallet (in the US.) I'm not sure if i want to use Google Wallet to pay for my groceries or whatever, but i'm not sure that i _won't_ want to do that in the future either.
Unknowns:
It is (so far) exclusive to Verizon in the US. I'm currently on T-Mobile and don't want to switch... unless the T-Mobile/AT&T deal goes through that is...
I'm not sure if it's possible to get an unlocked version, unless you're willing to import it from Europe. Which might let me use it on T-Mobile depending on the frequencies but certainly doesn't help with the price.
It only has a 5 MP camera. I don't actually care about the MP per se (it's already greater than the resolution of an HD screen after all) but they don't really give you any other specs to go by so i don't know how else to judge it.
Of course the biggest pro in my personal book is that my Nexus One is getting a little long in the tooth (in particular it has no space left for new apps) and i'm not sure how long i'm willing to wait for the next Nexus device. It's either that or get another high end phone that i can root and install Cyanogen on.
That was in fact exactly what he said. To quote: "Not to sound like an ad here, but Kindle versions usually run anywhere from $5-$10 cheaper than their print counterparts, you get them right away, and there is no $4 extra for shipping."
I agree with what _you_ are saying. People are choosing from the cheaper set of ebooks rather than the entirely different set of more expensive print books, not choosing the cheaper ebooks over the (theoretically) more expensive print version of the exact same book.
Really? I haven't done a lot of comparisons yet since i've only had my Nook Tablet for a couple weeks, but so far on both B&N and Amazon i've found that the ebook version is at most a dollar or two cheaper than the paper version, and often it's the exact same price as the paper version. I could swear i've seen cases where the ebook version was actually more but i can't find any quick examples via spot checking. This of course leaves aside the numerous books for which no ebook version exists at all yet.
There certainly _are_ a lot of things available in ebook format that are significantly cheaper than an averaged price "real" book, but so far ebook versions of current popular titles don't seem to be among them.
In fact that may be part of why there's a discrepancy between the two lists. If the same books as are popular in the paper list were priced much cheaper as ebooks perhaps they would have scored higher (or at all) in that list as well?
Slashdot Mirror
I could get behind that, but only if it's amended to: "But I do think marriages should be annulled if they don't lead to child raising inside of a reasonable window of time, 2-3 years perhaps," with the rest of it being dropped.
After all, as a socio-economic contract the tax breaks are theoretically intended to defray the cost of _raising_ the children. It doesn't matter how the children are produced, only that they are produced and then raised, regardless of whether the child is "naturally" born from the couple in the old fashioned way, carried to term by surrogate mother, produced in a test tube, or adopted.
Now maybe that's what you actually meant to say, but if so your original wording wasn't clear to me.
"A posthumous pardon was not considered appropriate as Alan Turing was properly convicted of what at the time was a criminal offence."
It doesn't matter how stupid the laws, it's their fault if they broke them! The Catholic church was waaaay too progressive in admitting they screwed up in convicting Galileo after just 400 years! The UK isn't going to make that kind of mistake!
Uh, scanning for malware is great. But i don't want Google putting itself in the position of deciding what apps are "good enough" to be in their store. There have already been enough questionable decisions based on things like copyright, i don't want them having to make judgement calls on something even more nebulous like "quality."
If you've found apps that aren't of high enough quality to suit you i suggest you just find a better app and/or tell the author what the problems are and ask them to improve it. Or if you can't find a better version and the problems really bother you that much, just uninstall it. If the problem is dealt with by Google wielding a ban hammer then it is "solved" not only for you, but also for all the people who thought the value of the app was worth dealing with the problems.
It's the government's "get out of jail free" card to regulate anything they want. If you're doing something involving interstate commerce, clearly that affects interstate commerce. If you choose to avoid doing anything that involves interstate commerce, well then obviously that intentional lack of interaction has an effect on interstate commerce as well!
There's this equation that relates energy to mass, let's see, how does it go? Oh yes, e=mc^2.
Personally i don't believe it. A mile away? They probably couldn't hit an elephant at that dist
Kids shows and cartoons have been covering this for like 50 years too.
So if something has been consistently featured in kids shows or cartoons then it's entirely reasonable to expect it to show up in real life and totally not worthy of comment when it does? That's great! I'm looking forward to being able to buy my flying car soon, which i will use to commute to a wizard school where i can learn magic. Remind me to stay away from japan though. I'd like to avoid the tentacle monsters and i can always just import the cool mecha.
There's a reviewed research paper? Why didn't you cite it then? Until then, one meteorologist's speculations, with no reference to supporting facts, ranks higher than one random slashdotter's speculations, with no reference to supporting facts.
That is a stupid and immature response for such an important topic!
Everyone knows it should be "Kame-Hame-Ha!"
And we're going to get that law passed _and_ retroactively seize the $21 million that the SOPA supporters have already paid, all in less than a few weeks?
Your idea is laudable, i think outlawing campaign contributions and actually making it stick is totally impossible, but the idea is laudable. However there's no way it could be implemented within the time frame we're talking about. Until we can actually get some kind of reform passed i sure hope the tech companies are willing to lobby in the only way that's currently effective.
Seeing Avatar in theaters is the only time when 3D enhanced my experience rather than detracting from it like all the other movies over the past few years that used 3D as a last second gimmick.
"How To Train Your Dragon" also made worthwhile use of 3D, especially for the flying scenes. However the fact that we're arguing over whether there were two movies that were worth the extra price or just one doesn't change the gist of what you're saying.
It's funny how when the story about the "nuclear option" was posted a few days ago people were questioning why/if it should be an international outage, rather than just for the US users. Sadly(?) it didn't take long for evidence to surface of why this is something that affects everyone in the world.
These numbers seem odd. Android has the lion's share of the smartphone market but is getting only a fraction of the browser usage. I do wonder though, i've used about:debug on both my phone and my Nook to set the ID flag thing to "Desktop" (because so many sites of mobile views that are absolute crap.) Does that mean that i wouldn't show up in their numbers at all? I wonder how many other geeks, the people who are probably the heaviest users of the web on smartphones, have also done the same thing?
Okay, so what other agency has done more good stuff and less bad stuff than the FCC lately?
...yes, to reiterate what i said the first time, it seems like they're the only government agency making ANY decisions/taking any actions that i actually agree with these days. At least as far as gets on the news anyways.
It seems like the FCC is the only government agency making any decisions/taking any actions that i actually agree with these days =P
Given that two of your four suggestions are identical to two of the suggestions i made a little lower down, i'd be curious to hear who else you like :)
I prefer science fiction & fantasy, which probably puts me in the same group as a significant percentage of the rest of the people on Slashdot. But here are some of my favorites.
Lois McMaster Bujold: Multiple Hugo and Nebula award winner. Her "Vorkosigan series" is outstanding. Some of the books are military space opera. Some of the books are detective stories. Some of the books have romance. Most of them combine more than one of the above. All of them are very funny in spots, at least if you have a rather dry sense of humor.
Jams Alan Gardner: Not especially well known, but his "League of Peoples" is a great SF series for those who have a darker sense of humor. The protagonist of the first book is a member of the "Explorer Corps", a bunch of officially designated Red Shirts who know that they're Red Shirts.
David Weber: He writes doorstoppers. And after reading enough of his books he's got an occasional turn of phrase that might start to get a little outworn. However if you want a _lot_ of military in your SF but also want some politics and character development then he's the one to go with. The Honor Harrington series starts out as "Horatio Hornblower" in space, but then recapitulates the development of naval warfare from the age of sail to modern battleships. It has lots of technical detail about imaginary futuristic weapon systems. The "Safehold" series is set on a future colony where a malignant theocracy has been holding back technology for centuries. It has lots of technical detail about real historical innovations, mostly relating to the age of sail and gunpowder weapons. The "Empire of Man"/"Prince Roger" series (co-written with John Ringo, and are the only John Ringo books i've liked so far) is about a bunch of space marines who get stranded on a primitive planet and have to fight their way across two continents to get to the only space port. It has a lots of technical detail about blowing people up.
Jack Campbell/John G Hemry: His "Lost Fleet" series starts out as "the March of the Ten Thousand" with a bit of Arthurian mythology thrown in, in space, but develops from there. It has a lot of focus on the actual scale of things in "realistic" space combat.
Naomi Novik: If you want to read about the Napoleonic Wars being fought using dragons, this is the place to go.
Robert J Sawyer: He has several good series. I think my favorite is probably his recent "WWW" or "Wake/Watch/Wonder" series about a naturally emergent AI in the internet.
Seanan McGuire/Mira Grant: The "October Daye" series is gritty urban fantasy featuring faeries that actually follow "real" folklore to a reasonable degree. The "Newsflesh" series (of which the first book, "Feed" was recently nominated for a Hugo) does a pretty good job of presenting a "post-apocalyptic" world after a "realistic" zombie outbreak. As in her explanation for how the zombies came about and how they still remain a threat is definitely within the realm of reasonable suspension of disbelief.
Vernor Vinge: He's often credited with the first story about cyberspace ("True Names") and has continued to evolve the cyberpunk genre past the point where Gibson and Stephenson pulled off the road ("Rainbows End") and he's also got some great space opera books ("A Fire Upon the Deep" and sequels) and if you can find it "The Peace War"/"Marooned in Realtime" aka "Across Realtime" are a good action story and a great post-apocalypse/singularity detective story.
John Scalzi: He's rebooted "Little Fuzzy" with "Fuzzy Nation" and completely reinvented "Starship Troopers" with the "Old Man's War" series, and he's got a number of other eclectic but good books, all with a good sense of humor.
Glen Cook: If you want dark, gritty fantasy, his "Black Company" series is it.
Now if you want to go old school i'd personally suggest the following:
Heinlein: All his "juveniles" are pretty good, plus a lot of the "middle period" stu
Why would Google want to kill Firefox? They don't make a profit directly from Chrome, they make money off of people using Chrome to go to Google pages where they'll be served ads. If people are using Firefox instead but still going to Google pages Google still makes just as much money. If they were somehow able to kill Firefox then some of the ex-Firefox users would move to Chrome, but some would move to IE or Safari or who knows what else.
And don't a lot of countries already do something similar to this for cattle after the whole prion/mad cow thing? The US only tracks a small percentage of our animals due to some protest or other involving big agribusiness. At least that's what i vaguely remember, i'd welcome anyone who could supply specific facts for or against that.
I use pretty much all the browsers.
Firefox: Usual generic browser with NoScript on.
Chrome: My Google+ games account, YouTube and Topless Robot (since half the links on there are YouTube videos anyways.)
Internet Explorer: My "private" G+ account.
Opera: My Google Apps email account.
Along with making it easy to log into different Google related accounts without worrying about fiddling with settings, it makes it easy to switch tasks quickly based on the icons in the taskbar.
I probably ought to do some research and figure out something else to replace the IE slot with though. It feels kinda embarrassing to be using IE for anything at all on a regular basis =P
I like the idea limiting politicians to one term, but you can then run for election again in the next cycle after that. So one term on, one term off. I don't know if it should be applied to the president or not, but it should certainly apply to both the Senate and House.
The pros and cons, at least as far as i've heard.
Pros:
It's got ICS, ahead of everything else.
It's a Nexus device, which means it won't have any carrier skins or pre-installed crap (including CarrierIQ) and it will be updated in a timely manner with each new release of Android that it's capable of running.
It's got a high end chip with a dual core, putting it in a small class of mobile phones.
It's got a very large screen.
Cons:
It's got a very large screen. I'm not sure if the phone will actually fit in my pocket.
It's got ICS, which is great overall but i'm unsure about the lack of a global Menu button.
It's made out of plastic rather than a nice metal case like my Nexus One has. Some people have reported it feels kind of flimsy because of that.
It has no expandable memory, you're stuck with the 16/32 GB you start with.
It doesn't have Google Wallet (in the US.) I'm not sure if i want to use Google Wallet to pay for my groceries or whatever, but i'm not sure that i _won't_ want to do that in the future either.
Unknowns:
It is (so far) exclusive to Verizon in the US. I'm currently on T-Mobile and don't want to switch... unless the T-Mobile/AT&T deal goes through that is...
I'm not sure if it's possible to get an unlocked version, unless you're willing to import it from Europe. Which might let me use it on T-Mobile depending on the frequencies but certainly doesn't help with the price.
It only has a 5 MP camera. I don't actually care about the MP per se (it's already greater than the resolution of an HD screen after all) but they don't really give you any other specs to go by so i don't know how else to judge it.
Of course the biggest pro in my personal book is that my Nexus One is getting a little long in the tooth (in particular it has no space left for new apps) and i'm not sure how long i'm willing to wait for the next Nexus device. It's either that or get another high end phone that i can root and install Cyanogen on.
That was in fact exactly what he said. To quote: "Not to sound like an ad here, but Kindle versions usually run anywhere from $5-$10 cheaper than their print counterparts, you get them right away, and there is no $4 extra for shipping."
I agree with what _you_ are saying. People are choosing from the cheaper set of ebooks rather than the entirely different set of more expensive print books, not choosing the cheaper ebooks over the (theoretically) more expensive print version of the exact same book.
Really? I haven't done a lot of comparisons yet since i've only had my Nook Tablet for a couple weeks, but so far on both B&N and Amazon i've found that the ebook version is at most a dollar or two cheaper than the paper version, and often it's the exact same price as the paper version. I could swear i've seen cases where the ebook version was actually more but i can't find any quick examples via spot checking. This of course leaves aside the numerous books for which no ebook version exists at all yet.
There certainly _are_ a lot of things available in ebook format that are significantly cheaper than an averaged price "real" book, but so far ebook versions of current popular titles don't seem to be among them.
In fact that may be part of why there's a discrepancy between the two lists. If the same books as are popular in the paper list were priced much cheaper as ebooks perhaps they would have scored higher (or at all) in that list as well?