Oh, I don't know. Half a billion Indians and Chinese dying from hunger because Himalayan glaciers that supplied their agricultural water vanished? Polar bears who drown because they can not find any ice to swim to? Me, after suffering from deadly heat waves in formerly mild summer and having my house flooded when SF Bay water level rises by a foot or two? Honestly, solar cells on roof and taking an electric trolley to work doesn't sound too bad considering the alternatives.
Do we really need diagnosis like "addiction to chess", "addiction to talking to people", "addiction to gardening"? Playing MMORGs is not any different from these activities and generally it's nobody's business how we spend our free time. If you feel you have a problem, treatment would be the same no matter which activity it is you are addicted to.
Oh well, your UK sword guy wounded 17 people and didn't kill anyone, least of all anyone smart enough to run like crazy when they see something like this happening. Sounds like those British have some good laws regarding weapon possession, although perhaps they should also be extended to swords.
The idea of an 'unreloadable by the owner' gun is ludicrous. For one thing, how on earth are you going to expect the owner of this 'wonderful' piece of technology to be able to get enough practice to be able to reasonably hit what he needs to? After all, he's only got ten shots before he has to go back to town!
He will be able to get a similar gun without armor restrictions to practice on a shooting range, under supervision of armed guards who make sure he doesn't harm others and returns it back.
That and, if it's only reloadable by a factory/technician/expensive-and-heavy machine... how do you unload it to render it safe, perhaps for storage? If you're going in to town because you used it to shoot a fox that went into your hen-house, and you fired two rounds, do you just blow off the other 8 (yay, practice!) before driving to town with it?
Hey, aren't you supposed to be a nerd? I am sure that if you are willing to accept the concept of not being able to just come to your workplace with hundreds of rounds and lock-and-load, you can come up with a good solution to this additional problem. Let say you still insert and remove a clip of ammo into the gun, but each chamber in the magazine is fused shut after a shot is fired. Certainly experienced weapon engineers would be able to create a good solution.
That, and if wildlife is your legitimate concern - you actually own a farm - you can get a weapon without ammo restrictions but, as much as reasonable, less likely to be fatal to humans. Pellet guns, tranquilizer darts and small caliber bullets come to mind.
But it seems to me that there are as many arguments against 'gun control' (say more clearly, gun restriction - because illegal weapons are still every bit as available and out of control) legislation as there are for it.
Are you saying if there are 1 million unrestricted guns in the country, it's quite as easy to get one illegally - say by breaking into a random house and searching for one - as if there are 20 million?
Belt-fed, 40mm grenade launchers? No, I can't really see any logical reason to have one of these unless you're, you know - the military.
Well, at least we agree that the idea of an armed LA gang overthrowing city government somehow sounds less appealing than glorious revolutions of the past:-)
I think if you talk to a few schizophrenics who take their meds, you will find them very much in favor of laws that prevent them from buying guns and otherwise keep them from harming themselves and others. I think a compromise can be reached where restricted items and activities don't curtail one's future much beyond options of serving in armed forces or law enforcement. As for using objects not normally classified as weapons, such as kitchen knives, a surprising number of non-schizophrenics screw up even when it comes to taking their own lives. I think I can live with reducing my risk of being murdered by a nutcase "only" twice as a result of them not being able to just go into a shop and pick up a gun.
Privacy of gun buyers to get weapons of their choice without research into concerns about their mental health raised by medical professionals or an interview that would evaluate their need for this type of gun as well as strength of character necessary for a responsible owner. Farmers can kill, repel or immobilize wild animals by weapons that are not likely to kill humans. Guys living in a remote area and concerned about crime can own one 10-shot revolver which can not be reloaded by the owner. We need privacy laws for people's sex lives or freedom of travel, but privacy of an obviously disturb person to get guns capable of firing hundreds of shots in a killing spree is taking things too far.
This is basically what I said - most currently proprietary products would not be able to rely on traditional OSS sources of funding to open their software. I just don't agree with dazedNconfuzed that government grants for any software is something unspeakable.
I am pretty sure BSD and MIT software development, including much of GNU software, was payed for entirely by government grants and private donations (parents supporting students through tuition and cost of living) rather than by selling software itself or support for the same. Which actually raises a question on weather restrictions imposed by GPL or worse patents on university research (like RSA) are justifiable for something developed on taxpayer's dime.
Releasing an open source product and recovering development costs through support, donations and government grants is NOT the only option this time. In fact, it's not an option at all for most currently sold software products, given the number of developers required to write and maintain them vs need for support and public goodwill.
I buy locally products which are environmentally responsible and produced by local, non-monopolistic businesses whenever I get a chance. The trouble is, there are not enough of those to cover even a modest lifestyle. This is like saying that Chinese citizens who use search engines that censor results are voluntarily supporting their government's policy - true perhaps, but beyond ability of most people to stop. I would love mandatory labels such as "supports communism", "supports terrorists" and "made with child labor" on the approporiate products.
javascript is a very powerful and flexible language Tetris is trivial to implement
I want an option to run somewhat more substantial apps on my phone. For example, as long as I have a camera, why not provide a bar code scanner program that works by analyzing the image. Sending every picture to the server drains more battery than local processing and doesn't give instant response.
There are more profitable things to do then making personal computers that must have higher value/$ than competition to compensate for tiny market share and lack of applications. I don't see Apple selling off their business and investing money in a Las Vegas casino, high-interest loans for the poor or defense contracts. I'll take a wild guess that Steve Jobs, Apple employees and Apple shareholders value what they do as much as how much money they make.
With AJAX, DHTHML, and Javascript, you can build fairly advanced consumer-interfaces.
Here, fixed this for you. These technologies are fairly useless for creating new content. Sure you can write some text with bold, italic and underline, but good luck calculating values for a complex spreadsheet once more than 10 users hit the server. Forget about video editing, custom multi-touch UI or robotics control.
Umm, school students are not allowed to bring their homework on CD-Rs or USB drives and work on it in school? They don't get to actually upload and work with their own photos in a digital photography class? If the same kind of "education" is taking place in my town, I better take another look at private or home schooling and demand a voucher so that I don't have to pay for installation of useless bricks in other kids' classrooms.
Time and time again, this architecture proved to overwhelm resources of local client that can not access swap space, become sluggish at inconvenient times as network and/or server is overwhelmed, completely drop the connection and lose all user's changes because of a congestion, intermittent noise in the LAN or just someone kicking the cable, fail to reboot most of the machines after a power outage, making it difficult to impossible for the user to get his own data from a USB drive, require unnecessary amount of effort to make an extra application available to a particular user... And still control freaks everywhere are pushing for an architecture that inhibits user creativity, kills performance and suffers frequent outages.
There are decent alternatives though, such as a fast, convenient way to re-image the machine over the network. It doesn't require any more IT support, as the user would be required to do this with a machine where he is experiencing problems before any other investigation is done. I had this setup on a NeXT network around 20 years ago.
I would support mandatory - forcible - vaccination when there is an epidemic killing or crippling large numbers of people. This was certainly true of polio or plague in their hay day. I don't see how this statement would apply to HPV. Only 1% of people contracting HPV get cervical cancer and it's not certain that all of them get cancer because of HPV. You can not accidentally get infected or infect others with HPV. Certain lifestyle choices and precautions pose only negligible risk of infection. By the age you are at risk of HPV - around 14 - you are capable of voluntarily getting vaccination (I do believe teenagers should have right to choose health care approved by the doctor regardless of what parents think) or understanding alternative methods to avoid infection.
Giving these circumstances, I don't see how use of force is justified.
or the recent example of opposing an executive order (in Texas) to require young girls be given the HPV vaccine
I am not, and have never been, a religious man. But the concept of someone forcibly snatching a little girl from the hands of her parents and injecting her with germs against her will sounds pretty horrifying to me.
Really? How does discovering something again lead to progress? I could re-invent the wheel, or prove that 2+2=4 for independently, but neither would advance the fields of engineering or mathematics.
Best: I have no idea of how to push a heavy weight for a long distance. I search the patent database (on the cave celling) for you wheel patent, implement it and solve my problem in exchange for giving you a small piece of meet of every animal that I haul.
Good: I reinvent the wheel and pay no royalties to you. Other people have a choice to license the wheel from any one of us.
Worse: Everyone is free to copy your or my wheel. However, we are able to get some food for ourselves by making higher quality wheels, or providing technical support for other people's carts.
Worst: You invent moving heavy objects by putting two rocks underneath a log. I independently come with a concept of round wheels with holes drilled for axles. You send your warlords (lawyers) after me to stop me from using your intellectual property. As a result, I die from hunger and don't go on to invent fire. The tribe is stuck with rolling logs on two stones.
Woah, obviously logically challenged person here. We can only, at most, discuss weather patents as currently provided for by law are essential. The law doesn't codify experience level of the reviews and instead relies on filers to be honest and thorough. Obviously this is ridiculous in todays business environment and allows a company with the most litigation money to win in 90% of cases, even if they stole and patented someone else's work.
What you are doing is like arguing that "copyright" will benefit the society, where you understand copyright to be a mandatory GPL on all software. Say what you want, but don't call your system "patents". Call it "foobar" or something...
There are already bacteria living in active zones of nuclear reactors. Animals with fast reproductive cycle will likely adapt first, both because of faster evolution - especially in the face of accelerated mutations - and because they don't have to survive as long to produce offsprings. It's only a matter of decades before we catch 5 eared rabbits with ECC in their DNA in addition to RAID1 that we currently have.
Minimally educated government clerks deciding the fate of inventions in the areas where they are not knowledgeable are necessary in many areas? You got to be kidding.
Did Qualcomm employees actually read Broadcom's patent and use the helpful diagrams to build the phone chips? I rather suspect not - this is another example of independent discovery. I understand that the patent law doesn't allow that as a defense, as it's hard to prove that someone didn't read the publicly available patent. But the fact that it happens over and over again just shows that the current system blocks progress of art and science rather than encouraging it. We have to start only allowing patents that are judged non-obvious by leading experts in the area.
Chances are, Gateway will not bother to appeal a small claim. Talking to a customer service supervisor is usually enough to be offered a discount similar in value to what he might get. Appeal would also most probably be rejected, since they are no complicated legal issues in this case. And if the case will ever get to a civil trial by jury, well juries have little sympathy for big companies with lots of money to award to the underdog.
What fertilizers do you have in mind in the absence of manure? Most crops don't grow well otherwise.
Resources being land water and solar radiation. your wild mixed plants which feed animals that then feed humans, take more resources then does growing wheat, and soya for example to feed humans directly.
Well, they sure don't require as much artificial irrigation and are healthier for grazing wild animals than monoculture wheat and soya fields. Especially if human diet is balanced between wild+cultured meat, fish and plants, pressure on each particular resource lessens.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I don't know. Half a billion Indians and Chinese dying from hunger because Himalayan glaciers that supplied their agricultural water vanished? Polar bears who drown because they can not find any ice to swim to? Me, after suffering from deadly heat waves in formerly mild summer and having my house flooded when SF Bay water level rises by a foot or two? Honestly, solar cells on roof and taking an electric trolley to work doesn't sound too bad considering the alternatives.
Do we really need diagnosis like "addiction to chess", "addiction to talking to people", "addiction to gardening"? Playing MMORGs is not any different from these activities and generally it's nobody's business how we spend our free time. If you feel you have a problem, treatment would be the same no matter which activity it is you are addicted to.
it becomes VERY hard to have intelligent discussions on the matter.
Do you think our discussions on slashdot would become more intelligent if we were all in the same room and holding guns?
Oh well, your UK sword guy wounded 17 people and didn't kill anyone, least of all anyone smart enough to run like crazy when they see something like this happening. Sounds like those British have some good laws regarding weapon possession, although perhaps they should also be extended to swords.
:-)
The idea of an 'unreloadable by the owner' gun is ludicrous. For one thing, how on earth are you going to expect the owner of this 'wonderful' piece of technology to be able to get enough practice to be able to reasonably hit what he needs to? After all, he's only got ten shots before he has to go back to town!
He will be able to get a similar gun without armor restrictions to practice on a shooting range, under supervision of armed guards who make sure he doesn't harm others and returns it back.
That and, if it's only reloadable by a factory/technician/expensive-and-heavy machine... how do you unload it to render it safe, perhaps for storage? If you're going in to town because you used it to shoot a fox that went into your hen-house, and you fired two rounds, do you just blow off the other 8 (yay, practice!) before driving to town with it?
Hey, aren't you supposed to be a nerd? I am sure that if you are willing to accept the concept of not being able to just come to your workplace with hundreds of rounds and lock-and-load, you can come up with a good solution to this additional problem. Let say you still insert and remove a clip of ammo into the gun, but each chamber in the magazine is fused shut after a shot is fired. Certainly experienced weapon engineers would be able to create a good solution.
That, and if wildlife is your legitimate concern - you actually own a farm - you can get a weapon without ammo restrictions but, as much as reasonable, less likely to be fatal to humans. Pellet guns, tranquilizer darts and small caliber bullets come to mind.
But it seems to me that there are as many arguments against 'gun control' (say more clearly, gun restriction - because illegal weapons are still every bit as available and out of control) legislation as there are for it.
Are you saying if there are 1 million unrestricted guns in the country, it's quite as easy to get one illegally - say by breaking into a random house and searching for one - as if there are 20 million?
Belt-fed, 40mm grenade launchers? No, I can't really see any logical reason to have one of these unless you're, you know - the military.
Well, at least we agree that the idea of an armed LA gang overthrowing city government somehow sounds less appealing than glorious revolutions of the past
I think if you talk to a few schizophrenics who take their meds, you will find them very much in favor of laws that prevent them from buying guns and otherwise keep them from harming themselves and others. I think a compromise can be reached where restricted items and activities don't curtail one's future much beyond options of serving in armed forces or law enforcement. As for using objects not normally classified as weapons, such as kitchen knives, a surprising number of non-schizophrenics screw up even when it comes to taking their own lives. I think I can live with reducing my risk of being murdered by a nutcase "only" twice as a result of them not being able to just go into a shop and pick up a gun.
Privacy of gun buyers to get weapons of their choice without research into concerns about their mental health raised by medical professionals or an interview that would evaluate their need for this type of gun as well as strength of character necessary for a responsible owner. Farmers can kill, repel or immobilize wild animals by weapons that are not likely to kill humans. Guys living in a remote area and concerned about crime can own one 10-shot revolver which can not be reloaded by the owner. We need privacy laws for people's sex lives or freedom of travel, but privacy of an obviously disturb person to get guns capable of firing hundreds of shots in a killing spree is taking things too far.
This is basically what I said - most currently proprietary products would not be able to rely on traditional OSS sources of funding to open their software. I just don't agree with dazedNconfuzed that government grants for any software is something unspeakable.
I am pretty sure BSD and MIT software development, including much of GNU software, was payed for entirely by government grants and private donations (parents supporting students through tuition and cost of living) rather than by selling software itself or support for the same. Which actually raises a question on weather restrictions imposed by GPL or worse patents on university research (like RSA) are justifiable for something developed on taxpayer's dime.
Releasing an open source product and recovering development costs through support, donations and government grants is NOT the only option this time. In fact, it's not an option at all for most currently sold software products, given the number of developers required to write and maintain them vs need for support and public goodwill.
I buy locally products which are environmentally responsible and produced by local, non-monopolistic businesses whenever I get a chance. The trouble is, there are not enough of those to cover even a modest lifestyle. This is like saying that Chinese citizens who use search engines that censor results are voluntarily supporting their government's policy - true perhaps, but beyond ability of most people to stop. I would love mandatory labels such as "supports communism", "supports terrorists" and "made with child labor" on the approporiate products.
javascript is a very powerful and flexible language
Tetris is trivial to implement
I want an option to run somewhat more substantial apps on my phone. For example, as long as I have a camera, why not provide a bar code scanner program that works by analyzing the image. Sending every picture to the server drains more battery than local processing and doesn't give instant response.
I welcome police to videotape me while I am working on taxpayer's dime and not taking part in an authorized undercover operation.
There are more profitable things to do then making personal computers that must have higher value/$ than competition to compensate for tiny market share and lack of applications. I don't see Apple selling off their business and investing money in a Las Vegas casino, high-interest loans for the poor or defense contracts. I'll take a wild guess that Steve Jobs, Apple employees and Apple shareholders value what they do as much as how much money they make.
With AJAX, DHTHML, and Javascript, you can build fairly advanced consumer-interfaces.
Here, fixed this for you. These technologies are fairly useless for creating new content. Sure you can write some text with bold, italic and underline, but good luck calculating values for a complex spreadsheet once more than 10 users hit the server. Forget about video editing, custom multi-touch UI or robotics control.
Umm, school students are not allowed to bring their homework on CD-Rs or USB drives and work on it in school? They don't get to actually upload and work with their own photos in a digital photography class? If the same kind of "education" is taking place in my town, I better take another look at private or home schooling and demand a voucher so that I don't have to pay for installation of useless bricks in other kids' classrooms.
Time and time again, this architecture proved to overwhelm resources of local client that can not access swap space, become sluggish at inconvenient times as network and/or server is overwhelmed, completely drop the connection and lose all user's changes because of a congestion, intermittent noise in the LAN or just someone kicking the cable, fail to reboot most of the machines after a power outage, making it difficult to impossible for the user to get his own data from a USB drive, require unnecessary amount of effort to make an extra application available to a particular user... And still control freaks everywhere are pushing for an architecture that inhibits user creativity, kills performance and suffers frequent outages.
There are decent alternatives though, such as a fast, convenient way to re-image the machine over the network. It doesn't require any more IT support, as the user would be required to do this with a machine where he is experiencing problems before any other investigation is done. I had this setup on a NeXT network around 20 years ago.
I would support mandatory - forcible - vaccination when there is an epidemic killing or crippling large numbers of people. This was certainly true of polio or plague in their hay day. I don't see how this statement would apply to HPV. Only 1% of people contracting HPV get cervical cancer and it's not certain that all of them get cancer because of HPV. You can not accidentally get infected or infect others with HPV. Certain lifestyle choices and precautions pose only negligible risk of infection. By the age you are at risk of HPV - around 14 - you are capable of voluntarily getting vaccination (I do believe teenagers should have right to choose health care approved by the doctor regardless of what parents think) or understanding alternative methods to avoid infection.
Giving these circumstances, I don't see how use of force is justified.
or the recent example of opposing an executive order (in Texas) to require young girls be given the HPV vaccine
I am not, and have never been, a religious man. But the concept of someone forcibly snatching a little girl from the hands of her parents and injecting her with germs against her will sounds pretty horrifying to me.
Really? How does discovering something again lead to progress? I could re-invent the wheel, or prove that 2+2=4 for independently, but neither would advance the fields of engineering or mathematics.
Best: I have no idea of how to push a heavy weight for a long distance. I search the patent database (on the cave celling) for you wheel patent, implement it and solve my problem in exchange for giving you a small piece of meet of every animal that I haul.
Good: I reinvent the wheel and pay no royalties to you. Other people have a choice to license the wheel from any one of us.
Worse: Everyone is free to copy your or my wheel. However, we are able to get some food for ourselves by making higher quality wheels, or providing technical support for other people's carts.
Worst: You invent moving heavy objects by putting two rocks underneath a log. I independently come with a concept of round wheels with holes drilled for axles. You send your warlords (lawyers) after me to stop me from using your intellectual property. As a result, I die from hunger and don't go on to invent fire. The tribe is stuck with rolling logs on two stones.
Woah, obviously logically challenged person here. We can only, at most, discuss weather patents as currently provided for by law are essential. The law doesn't codify experience level of the reviews and instead relies on filers to be honest and thorough. Obviously this is ridiculous in todays business environment and allows a company with the most litigation money to win in 90% of cases, even if they stole and patented someone else's work.
What you are doing is like arguing that "copyright" will benefit the society, where you understand copyright to be a mandatory GPL on all software. Say what you want, but don't call your system "patents". Call it "foobar" or something...
There are already bacteria living in active zones of nuclear reactors. Animals with fast reproductive cycle will likely adapt first, both because of faster evolution - especially in the face of accelerated mutations - and because they don't have to survive as long to produce offsprings. It's only a matter of decades before we catch 5 eared rabbits with ECC in their DNA in addition to RAID1 that we currently have.
Minimally educated government clerks deciding the fate of inventions in the areas where they are not knowledgeable are necessary in many areas? You got to be kidding.
Did Qualcomm employees actually read Broadcom's patent and use the helpful diagrams to build the phone chips? I rather suspect not - this is another example of independent discovery. I understand that the patent law doesn't allow that as a defense, as it's hard to prove that someone didn't read the publicly available patent. But the fact that it happens over and over again just shows that the current system blocks progress of art and science rather than encouraging it. We have to start only allowing patents that are judged non-obvious by leading experts in the area.
Chances are, Gateway will not bother to appeal a small claim. Talking to a customer service supervisor is usually enough to be offered a discount similar in value to what he might get. Appeal would also most probably be rejected, since they are no complicated legal issues in this case. And if the case will ever get to a civil trial by jury, well juries have little sympathy for big companies with lots of money to award to the underdog.
did I say anyting about chemicals?
What fertilizers do you have in mind in the absence of manure? Most crops don't grow well otherwise.
Resources being land water and solar radiation. your wild mixed plants which feed animals that then feed humans, take more resources then does growing wheat, and soya for example to feed humans directly.
Well, they sure don't require as much artificial irrigation and are healthier for grazing wild animals than monoculture wheat and soya fields. Especially if human diet is balanced between wild+cultured meat, fish and plants, pressure on each particular resource lessens.