The difference is that communism leaves the control in the hands of the people at large, while capitalism concentrates control in the hands of the wealthy few, while the public is expected to stay a herd of mindless, consuming sheep.
There should be some way for search engines to ensure that meta data is at least partially related. Either train an AI, or just manually keep a really large list of "yes, this term is somewhat related to this other term", and then check that what's in the meta data is related by a certain percentage to the content of the page displayed to users.
Re:Would that also mean they had fillings?
on
Stone Age Dentists
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· Score: 1
Self-aware intellects who weren't beaten with a stupid-stick this morning? (speaking for myself anyway). If it's a joke, I don't get it... but dental mites don't exist.
Unless the cycle reverses itself like last time. I'm sure that then, all the scientists will be claiming a new ice age like they were decades ago, which didn't turn out to be true.
The Atlantic Conveyor is still backing up, and when it stops there may well be a mini ice age. Whether this will reverse the warming and restart the current, or just stop and keep on warming up is an open question.
What really astounds me, though, is this attitude by anti-environmentalists that nothing could possibly change to make the earth one iota less habitable for our species. We've adapted to how the planet is right now, but that's absolutely no guarantee that it has to stay hospitable, or even that it must continue to support human life. You talk about "cycles" and "regulating mechanisms" as if the whole thing is somehow set up to keep the planet habitable for us, but it could just as easily enter a new cycle that spirals more and more quickly away from the human comfort zone.
Re:Would that also mean they had fillings?
on
Stone Age Dentists
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· Score: 1
Uh... dental mites? Nests behind the tonsils?? What crack-smokery is this??
I know there's a high nerd-factor, but it's the little details like this that keep making me think there's something to the idea of advanced civilizations predating the birth of civilization as we understand it today.
Hindi mystics traditionally have a word for 1/36,000,000th of a second, although none of them know why. Indian atomism describes 3 types of indivisible particles that can combine to form all the elements we know (a theory that suspiciously resembles current ideas of subatomic particles). Now "cavemen" understood that drilling cavities and filling the holes would prevent long-term pain and health problems, a fact which the species forgot and didn't rediscover for thousands of years.
Yeah, in reality it's very unlikely, but I like the fact that so many things can be fit together into an elaborate theory of prior civilization.
Penn and Teller ARE bullshit, first off. That show is not science, their analyses of basically every topic they've tried have been lopsided and skewed, and you would do well to not take it as anything more than a fictional bit of entertainment.
As for the "we don't really have any control" thing... cite your sources and we'll see. But even if it's true, it doesn't decrease the steaming pile of shit that humanity finds itself in at the moment. If global temperatures really are rising without our help, that just means that there's NOTHING to stop the mass destruction that's going to happen in the next couple hundred years. The end effects of global warming aren't in dispute, and they are not pretty.
Joking or not, the fact remains that they are writing about conciousness and divinity, as opposed to most bands who do about 40 "hey baby" or "omg my daddy didn't love me" songs and then break up. And given his work with A Perfect Circle, it certainly seems he's just a very artistic writer who likes to explore unconventional themes.
As for "The fact of the matter is, any moron can understand Tool"... there are plenty of people out there who listen to the music but ignore the lyrics completely, and couldn't tell you what a single one of the songs is actually about. I don't see how that equates to "getting it" as well as someone who has actually listened for the lyrics.
Of course everything *could* have just been created 100 years ago in the exact form we know today. Or the world *could* have been created 6000 years ago, or 6 billion and God directed genetic mutation which wasn't really random at all. We would never know, because if that's the case the creator has gone to the trouble of making it look like something completely different happened instead. Even if you can show exactly how things evolved, with photographic evidence and eyewitness accounts, it's still not proof that God wasn't acting behind the scenes to make it all happen the way it did. It's Descarte's "Deceiver" problem. If the creator wants to fuck with you, there's really nothing we can do to know that it's happening, let alone work around it.
Not to take away from this poster's message, but this has been done elsewhere as well. The lyrics to Tool's song "Lateralus" are written in Fibonacci rhythm (I think up to 13).
It is very well defined, though. Even higher primates live what, maybe 10 years or so in the wild? Assuming they produce offspring at 5 years old (likely much sooner than that) you have 500,000 generations of a species in 1 million years alone. Humans breed at a generously low average of 15 years, so all of recorded human history (6000 years) only amounts to 400 generations, and that's a high estimate. It's not "vaguely plausible" that groups would seperate due to some climatic, geographical, or other change in their living areas... it's a completely reasonable explanation.
The reason that we don't see examples of all stages in a species evolution alive today is that frequently the "old" versions die out or breed with the "new" and the entire species becomes the "new" version. If all members of a species are free to interbreed, a new mutation that is advantageous over the old genome will spread through the entire population in very short order (on an evolutionary time scale). Only if a population is separated from each other will you sometimes see an "earlier" form exist at the same time as a "later" form. For example, if a species evolves in a certain type of forest, and eventually some of the population moves onto the plains and stops going into the forest. The population in the forest, if they are already well adapted, will likely not change much, while the population on the plains may change drastically. That's a pretty uncommon scenario though, and you have to remember that BOTH sets might evolve. If a new predator appears in the forest, that group will start changing as well. So you're not going to see "first version" and "second version", but rather two species that evolved from a common ancestor.
Visual Studio 2005. SQL 2005. The.NET framework. All fantastic products, all developed in-house. I agree with you on some products, but it's flat out wrong to say that nothing well-made ever comes out of Microsoft.
Sounds like you were using 8.5 on an outdated computer. I ran it on a PPC 7100/66mhz, and it didn't have any of those problems you were describing. The power macs at school needed a force kill more than a couple times, but that's because they were laden down with a bunch of poorly written security software. From everything I remember, OS 8.5 was an amazingly friendly and performant system compared to windows 95. Now, I'm the first to say that I think the balance has shifted today. I can't stand OSX compared to XP, and I'll take KDE over either of them. But back in the day, Apple was fantastic.
As far as patents, I can't really say. Linux seems to have done fine so far, but I don't know whether that's an exception to the rule or what.
The rest of your post is exactly the attitude I'm talking about, though. The fact that MS's marketing strategy worked is because consumers didn't take the time to actually research the other choices out there. Then Microsoft had a foothold, and people just used whatever apps (IE, Word, etc) Microsoft shoved at them, instead of looking at alternatives. Microsoft doesn't have a true monopoly on anything. They're not stopping anybody from coming along and making a better word processor, or a better media player. In fact, many people already have. What they have, though, is a brand and a delivery model, and a user base that doesn't bother to take the effort or expense to examine their options.
Now they're entrenched, and yes, Dell ships every system with Windows. But that's just because that's what 98% of their users WANT. Show Dell that they're losing thousands of orders a month because people want bare systems, and they'll start shipping them so fast it'll make your head spin. But the level of demand just isn't there yet.
Your last paragraph is the most telling, though. People want better quality than Windows, but they don't want to have to find new applications, or repurchase some hardware to get everything working with Linux. That's exactly what I meant by "people won't pay the price for quality". You can't have "as easy and cheap as Windows, but better than Windows". Windows is inherently crufty because it supports almost every application written for every version of the OS since 95. Its interface is the same as it's been for years because most consumers are scared of change.
If you want better choices, they're out there, but you have to invest the time to learn it, and invest the money to get compatible hardware. Sitting there and saying "I want higher quality software, but I'm not prepared to actually do anything about it" is pretty hypocritical. What you're really saying is, you've made your choice, and whatever may be bad about Windows is a lower cost than the trouble of switching to something better. Microsoft doesn't owe you a single thing past that point. They're making the product that you admit, by your actions, is "the best", security holes, bugs and all.
If you want it to change, you have to be prepared to work for it. Complaining how you want everything to be different, and then going and buying the next broken version anyway, is not the way to fix things.
While I agree entirely with your criticism of the software industry, I don't think Bill Gates or even Microsoft as a whole are to blame. The consumers pick the level of quality in their products by what they purchase. Six or eight years ago, Mac OS 8.5 was clearly superior to Windows. The desktop was more intuitive, more responsive, crashed less, and had far fewer security problems. The main difference was the price. Today, Linux is faster than Windows, more secure, and can even run most of the same applications. But, it costs more (if you buy a for-pay distro like SuSE or Fedora), and it takes an investment of time to learn to transition from a Windows installation. There are systems out there with better software and better support than Windows, but you have to pay more for them; and that's something the average consumer just won't do. Everyone seems to want software to be completely stable, idiot proof in its simplicity, and also very cheap. You won't get all three of those out of software of any type.
Just because the opioid activators are naturally generated instead of introduced from an external source doesn't make it any less of a physical response. If you want to call it psychological because it's all internal interaction, fine, but that basically makes the distinction meaningless. If something's causing a chemical imbalance, whether it's physical or psychological, there ARE withdrawal effects, and dismissing them as "only psychological" is stupid.
For someone who "works with addicts" and "understands addiction", you seem woefully unaware that pornography and masturbation both provoke an endorphin response in the body, thus allowing them to be accurately described as causing physical addiction.
The thing that Linux has over Microsoft is a shift in accountability. Microsoft has the attitude that if any six-year-old broken as hell 3rd party product doesn't work on the newest Windows, their customers aren't going to upgrade. And they may be right, at that. But this leads to whole DIVISIONS of programmers writing bits into the operating system that detect if the application in question is Defunct Spreadsheet Product version 0.55 alpha, and hacking the registry to work in the old (and quite broken) way that the program expected when it was written back in 1997. Microsoft holds itself responsible for busted 3rd party applications. No such thing exists in open source, that I'm aware of. If the Linux kernel is behaving incorrectly, and fixing it breaks a 3rd party application, the fix gets made and nobody looks back. It's up to the app developer to make it work with the new system. This means that old applications on Linux aren't guaranteed to "just work" for decades to come, which might slow adoption by some businesses that don't want to worry about such things, but it also means they're not tied to being backwards compatible forever. The cost of that compatibility in Windows is huge, and affects all these things like security, filesystems, etc.
Thank god software code doesn't gestate inside our bodies until it's complete, but rather exists in a networked computer environment where multiple people CAN contribute at the same time.
I know a lot of smart people have contributed to this, but a lot of smart people have also contributed to Economics, which is largely bunk. FairTax seems to rely on people to continue spending, so that all the new business opportunities raised by not taxing business to business transactions will have somewhere to put their new goods, but as soon as people figure out that their money is taxed when they spend it on goods, but not when they invest it, everyone's going to want to be on the supply side. I already know quite a few people who file their tax returns at the last minute, and underestimate their withholding so they owe money at the end of the year, in order to get every possible bit of interest out of their cash. If this tax went into effect, everyone would rush to the supply side even more than before, purchasing would drop among anyone who actually watches their finances, and there'd be a supply glut. And say all you want about "these people must have thought of this", Economics is historically very bad at factoring in actual human reactions, which is what this entire opinion is based on.
Okay... so what would that prove, exactly? That many humans standing about a foot apart is completely meaningless... the people in the center would starve long before the ones on the outside lined up. Hell, that many oxygen-consuming entities in such close proximity, I could see them giving off such a huge amount of hydrogen and waste gasses that the people in the center of the state asphyxiate. Now, if you want to talk about densities that have some chance of being livable, accounting for space to grow food, cope with waste, dispose of byproducts of our current lifestyles, and everything else that goes with civilization, please do. Without that, this is useless.
You don't see how taxing spending rather than income would dampen the economy? Every average joe is gonna see they untaxed money coming in, and a big free money pool in the stock market, while when purchasing goods the money instantly becomes worth about 3/4 the "held value". Unless you plan to tax stock purchases, this plan would decimate the economy.
Slashdot Mirror
The difference is that communism leaves the control in the hands of the people at large, while capitalism concentrates control in the hands of the wealthy few, while the public is expected to stay a herd of mindless, consuming sheep.
There should be some way for search engines to ensure that meta data is at least partially related. Either train an AI, or just manually keep a really large list of "yes, this term is somewhat related to this other term", and then check that what's in the meta data is related by a certain percentage to the content of the page displayed to users.
Self-aware intellects who weren't beaten with a stupid-stick this morning? (speaking for myself anyway). If it's a joke, I don't get it... but dental mites don't exist.
Unless the cycle reverses itself like last time. I'm sure that then, all the scientists will be claiming a new ice age like they were decades ago, which didn't turn out to be true. The Atlantic Conveyor is still backing up, and when it stops there may well be a mini ice age. Whether this will reverse the warming and restart the current, or just stop and keep on warming up is an open question.
What really astounds me, though, is this attitude by anti-environmentalists that nothing could possibly change to make the earth one iota less habitable for our species. We've adapted to how the planet is right now, but that's absolutely no guarantee that it has to stay hospitable, or even that it must continue to support human life. You talk about "cycles" and "regulating mechanisms" as if the whole thing is somehow set up to keep the planet habitable for us, but it could just as easily enter a new cycle that spirals more and more quickly away from the human comfort zone.
Uh... dental mites? Nests behind the tonsils?? What crack-smokery is this??
I know there's a high nerd-factor, but it's the little details like this that keep making me think there's something to the idea of advanced civilizations predating the birth of civilization as we understand it today.
Hindi mystics traditionally have a word for 1/36,000,000th of a second, although none of them know why. Indian atomism describes 3 types of indivisible particles that can combine to form all the elements we know (a theory that suspiciously resembles current ideas of subatomic particles). Now "cavemen" understood that drilling cavities and filling the holes would prevent long-term pain and health problems, a fact which the species forgot and didn't rediscover for thousands of years.
Yeah, in reality it's very unlikely, but I like the fact that so many things can be fit together into an elaborate theory of prior civilization.
Penn and Teller ARE bullshit, first off. That show is not science, their analyses of basically every topic they've tried have been lopsided and skewed, and you would do well to not take it as anything more than a fictional bit of entertainment.
As for the "we don't really have any control" thing... cite your sources and we'll see. But even if it's true, it doesn't decrease the steaming pile of shit that humanity finds itself in at the moment. If global temperatures really are rising without our help, that just means that there's NOTHING to stop the mass destruction that's going to happen in the next couple hundred years. The end effects of global warming aren't in dispute, and they are not pretty.
Joking or not, the fact remains that they are writing about conciousness and divinity, as opposed to most bands who do about 40 "hey baby" or "omg my daddy didn't love me" songs and then break up. And given his work with A Perfect Circle, it certainly seems he's just a very artistic writer who likes to explore unconventional themes.
As for "The fact of the matter is, any moron can understand Tool"... there are plenty of people out there who listen to the music but ignore the lyrics completely, and couldn't tell you what a single one of the songs is actually about. I don't see how that equates to "getting it" as well as someone who has actually listened for the lyrics.
Of course everything *could* have just been created 100 years ago in the exact form we know today. Or the world *could* have been created 6000 years ago, or 6 billion and God directed genetic mutation which wasn't really random at all. We would never know, because if that's the case the creator has gone to the trouble of making it look like something completely different happened instead. Even if you can show exactly how things evolved, with photographic evidence and eyewitness accounts, it's still not proof that God wasn't acting behind the scenes to make it all happen the way it did. It's Descarte's "Deceiver" problem. If the creator wants to fuck with you, there's really nothing we can do to know that it's happening, let alone work around it.
Not to take away from this poster's message, but this has been done elsewhere as well. The lyrics to Tool's song "Lateralus" are written in Fibonacci rhythm (I think up to 13).
It is very well defined, though. Even higher primates live what, maybe 10 years or so in the wild? Assuming they produce offspring at 5 years old (likely much sooner than that) you have 500,000 generations of a species in 1 million years alone. Humans breed at a generously low average of 15 years, so all of recorded human history (6000 years) only amounts to 400 generations, and that's a high estimate. It's not "vaguely plausible" that groups would seperate due to some climatic, geographical, or other change in their living areas... it's a completely reasonable explanation.
The reason that we don't see examples of all stages in a species evolution alive today is that frequently the "old" versions die out or breed with the "new" and the entire species becomes the "new" version. If all members of a species are free to interbreed, a new mutation that is advantageous over the old genome will spread through the entire population in very short order (on an evolutionary time scale). Only if a population is separated from each other will you sometimes see an "earlier" form exist at the same time as a "later" form. For example, if a species evolves in a certain type of forest, and eventually some of the population moves onto the plains and stops going into the forest. The population in the forest, if they are already well adapted, will likely not change much, while the population on the plains may change drastically. That's a pretty uncommon scenario though, and you have to remember that BOTH sets might evolve. If a new predator appears in the forest, that group will start changing as well. So you're not going to see "first version" and "second version", but rather two species that evolved from a common ancestor.
Visual Studio 2005. SQL 2005. The .NET framework. All fantastic products, all developed in-house. I agree with you on some products, but it's flat out wrong to say that nothing well-made ever comes out of Microsoft.
Sounds like you were using 8.5 on an outdated computer. I ran it on a PPC 7100/66mhz, and it didn't have any of those problems you were describing. The power macs at school needed a force kill more than a couple times, but that's because they were laden down with a bunch of poorly written security software. From everything I remember, OS 8.5 was an amazingly friendly and performant system compared to windows 95. Now, I'm the first to say that I think the balance has shifted today. I can't stand OSX compared to XP, and I'll take KDE over either of them. But back in the day, Apple was fantastic.
As far as patents, I can't really say. Linux seems to have done fine so far, but I don't know whether that's an exception to the rule or what.
The rest of your post is exactly the attitude I'm talking about, though. The fact that MS's marketing strategy worked is because consumers didn't take the time to actually research the other choices out there. Then Microsoft had a foothold, and people just used whatever apps (IE, Word, etc) Microsoft shoved at them, instead of looking at alternatives. Microsoft doesn't have a true monopoly on anything. They're not stopping anybody from coming along and making a better word processor, or a better media player. In fact, many people already have. What they have, though, is a brand and a delivery model, and a user base that doesn't bother to take the effort or expense to examine their options.
Now they're entrenched, and yes, Dell ships every system with Windows. But that's just because that's what 98% of their users WANT. Show Dell that they're losing thousands of orders a month because people want bare systems, and they'll start shipping them so fast it'll make your head spin. But the level of demand just isn't there yet.
Your last paragraph is the most telling, though. People want better quality than Windows, but they don't want to have to find new applications, or repurchase some hardware to get everything working with Linux. That's exactly what I meant by "people won't pay the price for quality". You can't have "as easy and cheap as Windows, but better than Windows". Windows is inherently crufty because it supports almost every application written for every version of the OS since 95. Its interface is the same as it's been for years because most consumers are scared of change.
If you want better choices, they're out there, but you have to invest the time to learn it, and invest the money to get compatible hardware. Sitting there and saying "I want higher quality software, but I'm not prepared to actually do anything about it" is pretty hypocritical. What you're really saying is, you've made your choice, and whatever may be bad about Windows is a lower cost than the trouble of switching to something better. Microsoft doesn't owe you a single thing past that point. They're making the product that you admit, by your actions, is "the best", security holes, bugs and all.
If you want it to change, you have to be prepared to work for it. Complaining how you want everything to be different, and then going and buying the next broken version anyway, is not the way to fix things.
While I agree entirely with your criticism of the software industry, I don't think Bill Gates or even Microsoft as a whole are to blame. The consumers pick the level of quality in their products by what they purchase. Six or eight years ago, Mac OS 8.5 was clearly superior to Windows. The desktop was more intuitive, more responsive, crashed less, and had far fewer security problems. The main difference was the price. Today, Linux is faster than Windows, more secure, and can even run most of the same applications. But, it costs more (if you buy a for-pay distro like SuSE or Fedora), and it takes an investment of time to learn to transition from a Windows installation. There are systems out there with better software and better support than Windows, but you have to pay more for them; and that's something the average consumer just won't do. Everyone seems to want software to be completely stable, idiot proof in its simplicity, and also very cheap. You won't get all three of those out of software of any type.
well... there's always the Book of Mary Magdelene in the apocrypha.
ps. Dan Brown is full of crap, and DaVinci Code is one of the five worst books of all time.
Just because the opioid activators are naturally generated instead of introduced from an external source doesn't make it any less of a physical response. If you want to call it psychological because it's all internal interaction, fine, but that basically makes the distinction meaningless. If something's causing a chemical imbalance, whether it's physical or psychological, there ARE withdrawal effects, and dismissing them as "only psychological" is stupid.
dude... Jesus married a hooker.
For someone who "works with addicts" and "understands addiction", you seem woefully unaware that pornography and masturbation both provoke an endorphin response in the body, thus allowing them to be accurately described as causing physical addiction.
The thing that Linux has over Microsoft is a shift in accountability. Microsoft has the attitude that if any six-year-old broken as hell 3rd party product doesn't work on the newest Windows, their customers aren't going to upgrade. And they may be right, at that. But this leads to whole DIVISIONS of programmers writing bits into the operating system that detect if the application in question is Defunct Spreadsheet Product version 0.55 alpha, and hacking the registry to work in the old (and quite broken) way that the program expected when it was written back in 1997. Microsoft holds itself responsible for busted 3rd party applications. No such thing exists in open source, that I'm aware of. If the Linux kernel is behaving incorrectly, and fixing it breaks a 3rd party application, the fix gets made and nobody looks back. It's up to the app developer to make it work with the new system. This means that old applications on Linux aren't guaranteed to "just work" for decades to come, which might slow adoption by some businesses that don't want to worry about such things, but it also means they're not tied to being backwards compatible forever. The cost of that compatibility in Windows is huge, and affects all these things like security, filesystems, etc.
Thank god software code doesn't gestate inside our bodies until it's complete, but rather exists in a networked computer environment where multiple people CAN contribute at the same time.
I know a lot of smart people have contributed to this, but a lot of smart people have also contributed to Economics, which is largely bunk. FairTax seems to rely on people to continue spending, so that all the new business opportunities raised by not taxing business to business transactions will have somewhere to put their new goods, but as soon as people figure out that their money is taxed when they spend it on goods, but not when they invest it, everyone's going to want to be on the supply side. I already know quite a few people who file their tax returns at the last minute, and underestimate their withholding so they owe money at the end of the year, in order to get every possible bit of interest out of their cash. If this tax went into effect, everyone would rush to the supply side even more than before, purchasing would drop among anyone who actually watches their finances, and there'd be a supply glut. And say all you want about "these people must have thought of this", Economics is historically very bad at factoring in actual human reactions, which is what this entire opinion is based on.
Okay... so what would that prove, exactly? That many humans standing about a foot apart is completely meaningless... the people in the center would starve long before the ones on the outside lined up. Hell, that many oxygen-consuming entities in such close proximity, I could see them giving off such a huge amount of hydrogen and waste gasses that the people in the center of the state asphyxiate. Now, if you want to talk about densities that have some chance of being livable, accounting for space to grow food, cope with waste, dispose of byproducts of our current lifestyles, and everything else that goes with civilization, please do. Without that, this is useless.
You don't see how taxing spending rather than income would dampen the economy? Every average joe is gonna see they untaxed money coming in, and a big free money pool in the stock market, while when purchasing goods the money instantly becomes worth about 3/4 the "held value". Unless you plan to tax stock purchases, this plan would decimate the economy.