Who are you to say it's not the best decision? Buying a TV or stereo is not like a medical procedure where there are long-term unforseen consequences. Whatever Joe Stupid likes the best is the best... for him.
Subjectivity is rampant among experts also, for instance many long-time photographers love film grain but can't stand pixelization or compression artifacts. Why? Conditioning.
Do uninformed people have the right to have their opinions heard, on the same level as informed ones?
A big question. It is counterintuitive that each person should have an equal vote, and historically most countries have not run this way. Yet I think history shows that democracy does work. (At least in the political realm. I don't know of an economic system based on equality that has worked).
My point is very simple: you said a strong constitution guarantees freedom, and clearly it doesn't. People (slaves) were denied personal liberty by the very authors of the constitution.
I'm not slandering Jefferson, I'm simply observing that slaves lived under a strong constitution but had no personal liberty.
Here I think my definition of freedom as collective self-determination is more explanitory: America at the time was a less free country than it is now, because more of the population can now vote.
A "free country" isn't a country where there are no laws. It's a country where the laws approximate the collective will of the people, and not just of a few at the top.
The US keeps making laws I have problems with, like the Patriot Act, but then I see the polls which show that most people support them.
All of this business about virtual combat training is crap. There's a reason small unit combat courses aren't virtual.... The closer you can replicate the real experience in training, the more likely you'll do the right thing reflexively in real combat.
Don't make the mistake of assuming live exercises are so realistic, either. Live exercises are limited by safety, logistics, and cost. There are things you just can't follow through with. And don't focus exclusively on dismounted infantry, where simulation is weakest.
Anyways, nobody is suggesting doing away with live exercises.
Except that's not what a bunch of people are talking about -- there's a substantial effort out there to *dual boot* WinXP, which is a far cry from virtualization.
Because dual-booting (unlike virtualization) gives you full performance and hardware device support.
I think you're going to see a full-speed version of VirtualPC or something similar (VMWare) very soon
I don't. (Though it would be great.) And I don't believe Wine will ever really work.
I'm one of those who is likely to buy a MacBook if it can run Windows and all the hardware works well. This would finally give me a risk-free way to gradually switch over to OSX. But if it can't run Windows, forget it. Sometimes I have to run Windows, regardless of whether it excites me.
Since when does running a company have anything to do with furthering American Values?
Ideally furthering, but more likely just preserving (i.e. not violating). For instance, your business cannot be grossly hazardous to your employees, or damaging to the environment. There are also restrictions relating to civil liberties, such as anti-discrimination, and minimum wage.
And since when does the American government have the right to tell me what my values are?
It doesn't tell you what to value, but what laws you must follow. Democracy is a means of determining which values are of the highest value to the most people, and thus should be preserved when freedoms conflict. For instance, the existence of environmental law shows that most people value reasonably clear air and water over marginally more profitable industry and the freedom to pollute.
Furthermore, I don't believe that I have any right or reason to leverage my values onto the Chinese citizenry, let alone the absurdity of leveraging my values onto a 'market'.
Then you are in a very small interest group whose values will (fortunately) never become law. For instance, most of us think child labor should be illegal, and that the products of child labor should be illegal to import. Most of us also believe the national and international arms trade must be regulated, at least in extreme cases such as nuclear weapons.
The fact that we still worry about certain nations acquiring nuclear weapons 60 years after their invention tells me that embargos can work... otherwise they'd already have them. The fact that google has a leg up in China tells me there would be some cost to re-creating the technology overseas. I say, let China bear those costs, or else accept our technology on our terms. You might argue it's not "our" (national) technology, but I'd argue there's a reason it wasn't invented in China in the first place, and it's not mainly because of shareholders.
Besides, whether principles "work" isn't the necessarily the issue. I'd like to see a hitman argue in court that he's not guilty because the contract would simply have gone to somebody else anyways.
Also why target high tech.. what about walmart?
Now that is a brilliant question. Why should we allow Walmart to circumvent all environmental, safety, and fairness laws simply by moving operations to another country through outsourcing, and then let them punish american-made companies for playing by the rules? I think you're really on to something here.
No, don't sanction China. There's no reason even to mention them in the legislation. Just say "America doesn't do business with companies who oppress people by doing XX and YY," then leave the ball in Google/China's court.
Let's agree on some basic principles. If you want access to our markets, then play by our rules. And don't be fooled into thinking that these companies are one of "us." By their own words, they are not American businesses, they are
multi-national businesses. That's fine, but America sets the rules for America's market, and if we're to stand for anything, it has to be by using our economic influence.
And if google loses out on becoming #1 in China, no, I do not really care. If they're not furthering American values there anyways, then it might as well be a Chinese company.
They're still just games, and nothing more. We all know of a few subgroups in society who change their title every decade or so when the new name becomes sullied with all the old connotations. What does it accomplish?
Why is a trade deficit bad? If we can't maintain it, it will go away
Of course it will go away. It will go away when China reaches (or exceeds) economic parity with the United States. And then China will be a superpower. A Communist, authoritarian, nuke-wieldng superpower with several times our population, competing us for the world's limited natural resources. What could possibly go wrong?
Because according to the story, it's not required to maintain employment.
Of course it isn't... although we do appreciate good team players. And none of our other employees seem to mind. And frankly we're a little insulted by the implicit accusation that we'd ever abuse this power. It's not like you have something to hide... do you? Well, anyways, it's not a requirement, so here's the key to your new office. Go ahead and move the brooms and mops over to one side.
With multiple cores, you need software able to use these cores, am I wrong
The transition from single-threaded to multi-threaded is fundamental, and will require a permanant increase in code complexity that we'll all have to learn to live with. However, the transition from 2 to 4 to more should be little or no trouble. At this point only a foolish programmer would think in terms of exactly 2 cores instead of N cores.
The main mistake I think people are making is the idea of having each thread do something different, e.g. one thread for graphics and one for AI. To harness a large number of cores equally, we need libaries which divide up big repetitive tasks (say, collision detection or matrix multiplication) into a large number of chunks. Of course you can't write heavily procedural logic that way, (say, a word processor), but for the most part that stuff runs fast enough on one core anyways.
Personally I think the question is more about what the United States should do, as expecting anything of the companies themselves has proven unrealistic. They are happy to reap the benefits of freedom and democracy but will never lift a finger to protect or promote it.
As for our government, it's ironic that we sacrifice our troops for democracy on the one hand, then sell out democracy so cheaply on the other hand when the almighty buck speaks. We are running a $201,000,000,000 annual trade deficit with China. That means every year, any disparity in world influence between the two countries decreases by twice that amount, half a trillion within the next year or two. And we rationalize it all with the notion that we'll have our cake and eat it too, that buying $30 DVD players from China is the best way to assure international goodwill and freedom for their people. When in fact the Soviet Union was defeated with precisely the opposite approach.
Eventually the game industry is going to have to figure out how to market to the older demographic
Maybe they already have... the summary mentions web-based games in a negative light, but what's wrong with them? If you're not pushing the graphics envelope, it's a very convenient and low-cost way to go for everybody involved. Works fine for all manner of card games and adventure games.
This study is interesting because it ties antidepressants right back to behavior.
The percentage of Americans who use antidepressants is at least 15% and rising. Taken together, this means a sizeable segment of society is acting differently than they would have before. What, I wonder, are the aggregate impacts on society?
The "compliance" they refer to is that this encrypted IM will have a logging capability. What this means is that outsiders won't be able to snoop (without a court order), which is fine. But your words can still be dug up out of context months or years later if somebody high enough on the ladder decides they want to get rid of you.
Whether email or IM, writing anything controversial is a really bad idea. Say it face to face or on the phone instead.
Of course the question arises of what to do when you receive a verbal order to do something against company policy. You could comply, and take a small chance of later reprecussions, or else refuse or demand the order in writing, and face smaller but almost guaranteed reprecussions over time.
Surely prioritising people who don't rent as many movies is an improvement
From the article, it's not clear to me whether they're A) prioritizing requests so customers with fewer requests are more likely to get them or B) simply delaying the requests of active users, even if they have the movie, in order to save shipping.
To my mind, A) seems OK while B) seems like false advertising. Of course only Netflix knows for sure.
Slashdot Mirror
Subjectivity is rampant among experts also, for instance many long-time photographers love film grain but can't stand pixelization or compression artifacts. Why? Conditioning.
I'm not slandering Jefferson, I'm simply observing that slaves lived under a strong constitution but had no personal liberty.
Here I think my definition of freedom as collective self-determination is more explanitory: America at the time was a less free country than it is now, because more of the population can now vote.
Is this where I point out that Jefferson was both a slave owner, and one of the authors of the Constitution?
The US keeps making laws I have problems with, like the Patriot Act, but then I see the polls which show that most people support them.
Anyways, nobody is suggesting doing away with live exercises.
I'm one of those who is likely to buy a MacBook if it can run Windows and all the hardware works well. This would finally give me a risk-free way to gradually switch over to OSX. But if it can't run Windows, forget it. Sometimes I have to run Windows, regardless of whether it excites me.
it's somewhat pointless as they don't compare the best of each company's current offerings.
Besides, whether principles "work" isn't the necessarily the issue. I'd like to see a hitman argue in court that he's not guilty because the contract would simply have gone to somebody else anyways.
Now that is a brilliant question. Why should we allow Walmart to circumvent all environmental, safety, and fairness laws simply by moving operations to another country through outsourcing, and then let them punish american-made companies for playing by the rules? I think you're really on to something here.Sorry libertarians, but not all freedoms are mutually compatible. Sometimes you have to pick and choose.
Let's agree on some basic principles. If you want access to our markets, then play by our rules. And don't be fooled into thinking that these companies are one of "us." By their own words, they are not American businesses, they are multi-national businesses. That's fine, but America sets the rules for America's market, and if we're to stand for anything, it has to be by using our economic influence.
And if google loses out on becoming #1 in China, no, I do not really care. If they're not furthering American values there anyways, then it might as well be a Chinese company.
They're still just games, and nothing more. We all know of a few subgroups in society who change their title every decade or so when the new name becomes sullied with all the old connotations. What does it accomplish?
So? The Nazi tatoos happen to be relevant to RFID implantation. Godwin's "Law", on the other hand, is not. In fact it's utterly pointless.
The main mistake I think people are making is the idea of having each thread do something different, e.g. one thread for graphics and one for AI. To harness a large number of cores equally, we need libaries which divide up big repetitive tasks (say, collision detection or matrix multiplication) into a large number of chunks. Of course you can't write heavily procedural logic that way, (say, a word processor), but for the most part that stuff runs fast enough on one core anyways.
As for our government, it's ironic that we sacrifice our troops for democracy on the one hand, then sell out democracy so cheaply on the other hand when the almighty buck speaks. We are running a $201,000,000,000 annual trade deficit with China. That means every year, any disparity in world influence between the two countries decreases by twice that amount, half a trillion within the next year or two. And we rationalize it all with the notion that we'll have our cake and eat it too, that buying $30 DVD players from China is the best way to assure international goodwill and freedom for their people. When in fact the Soviet Union was defeated with precisely the opposite approach.
This study is interesting because it ties antidepressants right back to behavior. The percentage of Americans who use antidepressants is at least 15% and rising. Taken together, this means a sizeable segment of society is acting differently than they would have before. What, I wonder, are the aggregate impacts on society?
Whether email or IM, writing anything controversial is a really bad idea. Say it face to face or on the phone instead.
Of course the question arises of what to do when you receive a verbal order to do something against company policy. You could comply, and take a small chance of later reprecussions, or else refuse or demand the order in writing, and face smaller but almost guaranteed reprecussions over time.
Agreed. On the other hand, it's all too easy to ridicule a bug after it's discovered.
To my mind, A) seems OK while B) seems like false advertising. Of course only Netflix knows for sure.