If you are in a profession that biases towards intellect (physicist, biologist, etc), chances are the people you encounter outside your work environment and in the general population are going to be dumber than you are. If everybody was smart, it wouldn't be called smart, it'd be called 'normal'.
If you hang out with physicists in California, there's a good chance you'll run into a physicists who likes to surf. Because even smart people have hobbies, and a common hobby in California is surfing.
But, that's just because you know a smart guy who likes to surf. Just because most A are B does not mean that most B are A. Lots of people in California like to surf, and just like anything else that doesn't have a bias towards intellect, most people who surf are dumb. But not all people who surf are dumb.
You can get a university education for a price. That price can vary from very reasonable to very expensive. Some schools cost $5,000 a semester, some cost $15,000. If you choose to go to a $15,000/semester school, hopefully you're choosing to do that because you think you'll ultimately make that money back.
You can get a perfectly valuable degree for a perfectly reasonable price if you go to community college, transfer, work hard, and graduate in 4 years. But if you want to go to that big school as a freshman so you can join the fraternity and drink it up because you're sick of living with your parents, well, that was your choice, wasn't it?
So if you choose to spend $150,000 on a private-university education to get a degree for a job that pays $35,000 a year, the only person you have to blame for your student loans eating up all of your income is yourself.
People need to understand that there is a value for everything. If the price is higher than the value, DO NOT BUY IT!
Plenty of single AND multiplayer games have long lasting appeal without introducing a grind, so why do ALL MMMORPG designers have this desperate urge to inject it into their games?
Because an MMORPG without grind is a FPS.
If everyone in EVE could fly a Titan (the most skill intensive ship to fly) the first day they logged in, you'd have a first-person shooter, not a role playing game.
Although I do agree that having to log in to change skills is stupid.
If there is a contest between various people trying to silence those that they deem 'stupid', the stupid people will be the ones who get silenced. If they were not actually stupid, they'd be smart enough to be silencing the people silencing them instead of the other way around.
Slashdot editors are the exception that proves the rule.
Government expenditures in science and research provide a way to achieve technological improvements where the inventor would not normally be able to recoup direct financial benefits, or where it would be prohibitive to raise the amount of capital necessary to complete the project.
The shuttle program costs BILLIONS of dollars. The only entity that has BILLIONS of dollars available to spend is the federal government. And maybe Microsoft. And since we're on Slashdot, I'm pretty sure you don't want Microsoft launching satellites.
I interact with TSA employees about 100 times per year, and they are generally lazy, sloth like goons. They are a disaster that does nothing to improve air safety.
Where do you fly out of? I fly through a variety of airports every year (mainly EAU and MSP, but also LAX, SAN, LAS, DFW, MCO, CLT, EWR, JFK...
I've found TSA employees to be some of the best people I encounter in a face-to-face situation when dealing with either the government or the private sector. Consistently. The only other people I encounter who I have that consistent of an experience with are small-town postal service employees.
Now, I don't suppose I can really tell if they're actually looking at the screen or not, but the whole process seems pretty organized and efficient to me - and about as convenient and friendly as possible.
MUCH, MUCH better than the private security companies used to be.
Comparatively, it is much easier to alter a balance than it is to kill things, WITHOUT killing the patient.
For example, if you have a hormone deficiency, it's pretty 'easy' to replace the hormone you're missing.
But if your body is being killed by a living organism (bacteria/virus/cancer/etc), it is much harder to kill the bad thing WITHOUT killing the good thing.
That's why it's easy to create anti-depressants and things that make it easier to have an erection, but hard to create drugs that kill cancer but NOT the rest of you.
There is no financial interest in developing new drugs when old drugs are still protected under obscenely long lasting patents.
Wow.. that statement is just fundamentally stupid.
A new drug is either better than an old drug, or it isn't.
If it's better, then it doesn't matter if the patent on the old drug is 5, 10, 20, or 100 years long - your new drug will sell better than the old drug. And if it's worse, it still doesn't matter how long the patent on the old drug is - nobody is going to use your new drug.
If anything, long patents ENCOURAGE new drug development, because you can develop a slightly better drug and then compete patented-drug to patented-drug, whereas if patent duration is short, by the time you develop your new and improved patented drug, you have to compete with a now un-patented drug that is sold at generic prices.
Honestly, what does it really matter? Information is information, and I thought the goal behind Wikipedia was to centralize as much of it as possible.
No, the idea behind Wikipedia is to be a USER-EDITED ENCYCLOPEDIA.
By definition, an encyclopedia contains NOTABLE information. An encyclopedia is not, for example, a phone book, nor is it a magazine, nor collection of advertisements.
Yes, there may be plenty of nifty bands in the Philadelphia area that haven't been released on major labels or haven't toured much. And guess what? NONE of them belong on Wikipedia! That's what myspace is for.
This is just Wikipedia saying "Hey, we only want really notable things in here." and everyone thinking "I'm important, no really!" and not liking it when Wikipedia gives them a healthy dose of "You're one of 10,000 web comics. Anybody who cares reads your comic. You aren't worth an article."
Oh, sure, they put those tags on the bags, but it makes no difference as to when the bags come out. I flew just two days ago on Northwest Airlines with 1st Class priority tags, and one of my bags was LITERALLY the last bag out. The LAST one. The other was a few bags before that.
One thing you can do for fun is when you're waiting for the baggage claim belt to start up, and it finally does, note how many of the first bags to come out are priority tagged. It won't be any greater than if the bags came out in random order, because, well, they're coming out in random order.
You don't want to give certain information to Google for the same reason you don't want to give certain powers to George W. Bush, even if you're a republican - you don't know who the next President is going to be, and you don't know who is going to be in control of Google 10, 20, 50 years from now.
The problem was caused by the record labels themselves.
Anytime you have something that people want, and you do not give them a legitimate market to get it, a black market will develop.
Ten years ago, technology advanced to the point that you could distribute music digitally. By denying a legitimate means of digital distribution of music from the market for so long, the music labels essentially ENCOURAGED a black market in digital music to develop. That means that 10 years later, there are mature digital distribution methods and massive amounts of consumers who know how to use them. If, instead, the labels had just charged a reasonable rate 10 years ago, these illegitimate means of distribution would not have developed nearly as much.
So when consumers have the option of a free song from Radiohead's site, and a free song from the same place they're getting all of their other free music, why bother going to the Radiohead site?
It wasn't intended to be a morally right argument. I have no objection to people having to beg for their money. But I find it very annoying when people beg me for money. I would rather proceed from place to place unmolested by beggars, car window washers, etc. So I would prefer that the disabled receive proper accommodation so that they do not have to beg so that I do not have to be begged.
And I'm not going to make a single "because it's morally right' argument.
Free enterprise works pretty well - when everyone decides to spend money in whichever way satisfies their greedy nature, resources get allocated fairly efficiently.
But this is not always the case. For example, if you run a manufacturing business that produces toxic chemical waste, depending on how greedy your nature is, you may choose to just dump your waste in the nearest river. While this works well for you in the short run, it works well for no one in the long run if all businesses operate that way because soon everything would be too polluted to use. So we have government regulations that say 'Hey, if you make waste, you have to pay to dispose of it properly', and then the costs of that get passed on to the consumers of the product that caused the generation of the waste in the first place.
Did you see how that worked? In this case, government regulation ENHANCES the proper allocation of resources, by making sure the entire costs of manufacturing a product is borne by those who use the product.
Legally mandated disability access works in a similar manner. For any given business, the direct cost to them of maintaining access for the disabled may not balance out just not accepting that business in the first place. But, if we don't require that all businesses make reasonable efforts to be accessible to the disabled, then very soon no businesses would be accessible to the disabled. And that's a problem for everyone - because now instead of having disabled people, who through reasonable accommodations made to them are independent productive members of society, we now have disabled people who are essentially locked up in their homes, unable to participate and contribute to society, where we then have to either divert our tax dollars to support them, or let them starve to death (or in the very least, let them out on the street to beg).
Secondary to that, disability access is a bit like health insurance. While most of us are not disabled CURRENTLY, it's quite possible something might happen where we become disabled in the future. An accident, a disease, or shit, we could just get old, and not be able to walk or see as well as we used to. So, as a society, by deciding to make reasonable accommodation for the disabled, we also ensure that in the event we ourselves become disabled in the future, access is available to us. We may not ever need it, but if we do, we'll be glad we have it.
Another point to note here is that web accessibility is NOT just about seeing-eye-dog-blind people. Some people can't see very well just because they get old and lose their vision. That's probably not as big a deal now because most older Americans don't use computers anyway, but in 20-30 years, it'll be quite important as the internet generation starts to lose their eyesight.
Either way, if their trademark use policy doesn't allow for nominative use, it's faulty and needs to be fixed.
Didn't this policy result from Google getting sued for allowing competitors to buy ads that keyed off a trademarked name?
I.e. if you searched for 'Hertz rental car', you'd get a bunch of Avis ads because Avis had paid for their ads to show up whenever someone searched for 'Hertz'?
Assuming that's the case, you can hardly blame Google - they're screwed either way.
This is the show that gave us the term, "red shirt," after all.
I thought that was from College Football.
Note for Star Trek Fans: Football is a form of athletic contest between two groups of players, each group fielding twelve* players at one time. The game is divided into a series of downs, where each team lines up on opposite sides of a brown ball called a 'football', and one group tries to take the ball and advance it past the other group, by carying or throwing the ball, without getting tackled. If they advance it far enough, they get more attempts, and eventually score. But if they don't advance the ball at least 10 yards in 4 tries, the opposing team gets the ball.
Secondary Note for Star Trek Fans: An 'Athletic Contest' is an event in which multiple participants compete under a set of rules designed to compare the relative motor skills and/or strength/endurance possessed by the participants, although many athletic contests also include a strategy component.
I have. In fact, that's the ONLY way I've bought music in the past 10 years - if I'm at a concert with an 'indie' artist or an opening act I like, I buy their CD. Some of the CD's I don't even listen to (I mostly listen to XM radio) - I view it as a way to tip the performer. Sometimes I pass the CDs on to someone else.
Sorry people, Ebay is NOT in the business to help you rip off fools.
What? That's EXACTLY the business that eBay is in. They charge sellers for selling. The more the sellers sell for, the more eBay makes. The ENTIRE business is getting sellers to sell as many things as possible at as high a price as possible.
Well, at least until they added ads.
I think eBay is being dumb here, because they get paid when sellers sell stuff. Ads don't just compete with the seller selling things, they compete with eBay getting paid by the seller when the seller sells things.
The goal isn't the FEELINGS of the Americans. The goal is the COST to the Americans. The more and more security you have, the greater burden that security has on your society. Hiring more security guards, spending more time waiting in line, that all has a cost.
Slashdot Mirror
How is this thing going to dissipate its waste heat?
Put it in a bathtub?
Most people are dumb.
Most surfers are dumb.
Most skydivers are dumb.
Most people who drive cars are dumb.
Most people who live in your town/city are dumb.
If you are in a profession that biases towards intellect (physicist, biologist, etc), chances are the people you encounter outside your work environment and in the general population are going to be dumber than you are. If everybody was smart, it wouldn't be called smart, it'd be called 'normal'.
If you hang out with physicists in California, there's a good chance you'll run into a physicists who likes to surf. Because even smart people have hobbies, and a common hobby in California is surfing.
But, that's just because you know a smart guy who likes to surf. Just because most A are B does not mean that most B are A. Lots of people in California like to surf, and just like anything else that doesn't have a bias towards intellect, most people who surf are dumb. But not all people who surf are dumb.
University loans are shackles.
But they are shackles people put on themselves.
You can get a university education for a price. That price can vary from very reasonable to very expensive. Some schools cost $5,000 a semester, some cost $15,000. If you choose to go to a $15,000/semester school, hopefully you're choosing to do that because you think you'll ultimately make that money back.
You can get a perfectly valuable degree for a perfectly reasonable price if you go to community college, transfer, work hard, and graduate in 4 years. But if you want to go to that big school as a freshman so you can join the fraternity and drink it up because you're sick of living with your parents, well, that was your choice, wasn't it?
So if you choose to spend $150,000 on a private-university education to get a degree for a job that pays $35,000 a year, the only person you have to blame for your student loans eating up all of your income is yourself.
People need to understand that there is a value for everything. If the price is higher than the value, DO NOT BUY IT!
Plenty of single AND multiplayer games have long lasting appeal without introducing a grind, so why do ALL MMMORPG designers have this desperate urge to inject it into their games?
Because an MMORPG without grind is a FPS.
If everyone in EVE could fly a Titan (the most skill intensive ship to fly) the first day they logged in, you'd have a first-person shooter, not a role playing game.
Although I do agree that having to log in to change skills is stupid.
Bigger problem is who decides what is stupid?
The people with the ability to do so.
If there is a contest between various people trying to silence those that they deem 'stupid', the stupid people will be the ones who get silenced. If they were not actually stupid, they'd be smart enough to be silencing the people silencing them instead of the other way around.
Slashdot editors are the exception that proves the rule.
Government expenditures in science and research provide a way to achieve technological improvements where the inventor would not normally be able to recoup direct financial benefits, or where it would be prohibitive to raise the amount of capital necessary to complete the project.
The shuttle program costs BILLIONS of dollars. The only entity that has BILLIONS of dollars available to spend is the federal government. And maybe Microsoft. And since we're on Slashdot, I'm pretty sure you don't want Microsoft launching satellites.
I interact with TSA employees about 100 times per year, and they are generally lazy, sloth like goons. They are a disaster that does nothing to improve air safety.
Where do you fly out of? I fly through a variety of airports every year (mainly EAU and MSP, but also LAX, SAN, LAS, DFW, MCO, CLT, EWR, JFK...
I've found TSA employees to be some of the best people I encounter in a face-to-face situation when dealing with either the government or the private sector. Consistently. The only other people I encounter who I have that consistent of an experience with are small-town postal service employees.
Now, I don't suppose I can really tell if they're actually looking at the screen or not, but the whole process seems pretty organized and efficient to me - and about as convenient and friendly as possible.
MUCH, MUCH better than the private security companies used to be.
Some drugs alter a chemical balance.
Other drugs kill things.
Comparatively, it is much easier to alter a balance than it is to kill things, WITHOUT killing the patient.
For example, if you have a hormone deficiency, it's pretty 'easy' to replace the hormone you're missing.
But if your body is being killed by a living organism (bacteria/virus/cancer/etc), it is much harder to kill the bad thing WITHOUT killing the good thing.
That's why it's easy to create anti-depressants and things that make it easier to have an erection, but hard to create drugs that kill cancer but NOT the rest of you.
There is no financial interest in developing new drugs when old drugs are still protected under obscenely long lasting patents.
Wow.. that statement is just fundamentally stupid.
A new drug is either better than an old drug, or it isn't.
If it's better, then it doesn't matter if the patent on the old drug is 5, 10, 20, or 100 years long - your new drug will sell better than the old drug. And if it's worse, it still doesn't matter how long the patent on the old drug is - nobody is going to use your new drug.
If anything, long patents ENCOURAGE new drug development, because you can develop a slightly better drug and then compete patented-drug to patented-drug, whereas if patent duration is short, by the time you develop your new and improved patented drug, you have to compete with a now un-patented drug that is sold at generic prices.
Honestly, what does it really matter? Information is information, and I thought the goal behind Wikipedia was to centralize as much of it as possible.
No, the idea behind Wikipedia is to be a USER-EDITED ENCYCLOPEDIA.
By definition, an encyclopedia contains NOTABLE information. An encyclopedia is not, for example, a phone book, nor is it a magazine, nor collection of advertisements.
Yes, there may be plenty of nifty bands in the Philadelphia area that haven't been released on major labels or haven't toured much. And guess what? NONE of them belong on Wikipedia! That's what myspace is for.
This is just Wikipedia saying "Hey, we only want really notable things in here." and everyone thinking "I'm important, no really!" and not liking it when Wikipedia gives them a healthy dose of "You're one of 10,000 web comics. Anybody who cares reads your comic. You aren't worth an article."
Oh, sure, they put those tags on the bags, but it makes no difference as to when the bags come out. I flew just two days ago on Northwest Airlines with 1st Class priority tags, and one of my bags was LITERALLY the last bag out. The LAST one. The other was a few bags before that.
One thing you can do for fun is when you're waiting for the baggage claim belt to start up, and it finally does, note how many of the first bags to come out are priority tagged. It won't be any greater than if the bags came out in random order, because, well, they're coming out in random order.
In Soviet Russia, if you leave sodium chloride under a red-orange lamp overnight, it'll emit gamma radiation for the next 24 hours.
Besides, isn't a drive-by more of an upload?
/* The following function takes a single integer input, x, and returns an integer output, x + 4 */
int addFour ( int x ) {
return (x - 4);
}
Google = Good, other companies (Microsoft) = Bad
For now.
You don't want to give certain information to Google for the same reason you don't want to give certain powers to George W. Bush, even if you're a republican - you don't know who the next President is going to be, and you don't know who is going to be in control of Google 10, 20, 50 years from now.
Bad is when you can google "Where are my neighbor's car keys?"
The problem was caused by the record labels themselves.
Anytime you have something that people want, and you do not give them a legitimate market to get it, a black market will develop.
Ten years ago, technology advanced to the point that you could distribute music digitally. By denying a legitimate means of digital distribution of music from the market for so long, the music labels essentially ENCOURAGED a black market in digital music to develop. That means that 10 years later, there are mature digital distribution methods and massive amounts of consumers who know how to use them. If, instead, the labels had just charged a reasonable rate 10 years ago, these illegitimate means of distribution would not have developed nearly as much.
So when consumers have the option of a free song from Radiohead's site, and a free song from the same place they're getting all of their other free music, why bother going to the Radiohead site?
It wasn't intended to be a morally right argument. I have no objection to people having to beg for their money. But I find it very annoying when people beg me for money. I would rather proceed from place to place unmolested by beggars, car window washers, etc. So I would prefer that the disabled receive proper accommodation so that they do not have to beg so that I do not have to be begged.
And I'm not going to make a single "because it's morally right' argument.
Free enterprise works pretty well - when everyone decides to spend money in whichever way satisfies their greedy nature, resources get allocated fairly efficiently.
But this is not always the case. For example, if you run a manufacturing business that produces toxic chemical waste, depending on how greedy your nature is, you may choose to just dump your waste in the nearest river. While this works well for you in the short run, it works well for no one in the long run if all businesses operate that way because soon everything would be too polluted to use. So we have government regulations that say 'Hey, if you make waste, you have to pay to dispose of it properly', and then the costs of that get passed on to the consumers of the product that caused the generation of the waste in the first place.
Did you see how that worked? In this case, government regulation ENHANCES the proper allocation of resources, by making sure the entire costs of manufacturing a product is borne by those who use the product.
Legally mandated disability access works in a similar manner. For any given business, the direct cost to them of maintaining access for the disabled may not balance out just not accepting that business in the first place. But, if we don't require that all businesses make reasonable efforts to be accessible to the disabled, then very soon no businesses would be accessible to the disabled. And that's a problem for everyone - because now instead of having disabled people, who through reasonable accommodations made to them are independent productive members of society, we now have disabled people who are essentially locked up in their homes, unable to participate and contribute to society, where we then have to either divert our tax dollars to support them, or let them starve to death (or in the very least, let them out on the street to beg).
Secondary to that, disability access is a bit like health insurance. While most of us are not disabled CURRENTLY, it's quite possible something might happen where we become disabled in the future. An accident, a disease, or shit, we could just get old, and not be able to walk or see as well as we used to. So, as a society, by deciding to make reasonable accommodation for the disabled, we also ensure that in the event we ourselves become disabled in the future, access is available to us. We may not ever need it, but if we do, we'll be glad we have it.
Another point to note here is that web accessibility is NOT just about seeing-eye-dog-blind people. Some people can't see very well just because they get old and lose their vision. That's probably not as big a deal now because most older Americans don't use computers anyway, but in 20-30 years, it'll be quite important as the internet generation starts to lose their eyesight.
Either way, if their trademark use policy doesn't allow for nominative use, it's faulty and needs to be fixed.
Didn't this policy result from Google getting sued for allowing competitors to buy ads that keyed off a trademarked name?
I.e. if you searched for 'Hertz rental car', you'd get a bunch of Avis ads because Avis had paid for their ads to show up whenever someone searched for 'Hertz'?
Assuming that's the case, you can hardly blame Google - they're screwed either way.
This is the show that gave us the term, "red shirt," after all.
I thought that was from College Football.
Note for Star Trek Fans: Football is a form of athletic contest between two groups of players, each group fielding twelve* players at one time. The game is divided into a series of downs, where each team lines up on opposite sides of a brown ball called a 'football', and one group tries to take the ball and advance it past the other group, by carying or throwing the ball, without getting tackled. If they advance it far enough, they get more attempts, and eventually score. But if they don't advance the ball at least 10 yards in 4 tries, the opposing team gets the ball.
Secondary Note for Star Trek Fans: An 'Athletic Contest' is an event in which multiple participants compete under a set of rules designed to compare the relative motor skills and/or strength/endurance possessed by the participants, although many athletic contests also include a strategy component.
* If you are not a Star Trek fan, shhhhh.
Congressmen fly too. As does every other person with money. You don't piss off people with money.
72-hour-advance-notice to ride the Greyhound, sure, that might get passed. But airplanes? No way. People Who Matter fly on airplanes.
I have. In fact, that's the ONLY way I've bought music in the past 10 years - if I'm at a concert with an 'indie' artist or an opening act I like, I buy their CD. Some of the CD's I don't even listen to (I mostly listen to XM radio) - I view it as a way to tip the performer. Sometimes I pass the CDs on to someone else.
Sorry people, Ebay is NOT in the business to help you rip off fools.
What? That's EXACTLY the business that eBay is in. They charge sellers for selling. The more the sellers sell for, the more eBay makes. The ENTIRE business is getting sellers to sell as many things as possible at as high a price as possible.
Well, at least until they added ads.
I think eBay is being dumb here, because they get paid when sellers sell stuff. Ads don't just compete with the seller selling things, they compete with eBay getting paid by the seller when the seller sells things.
The goal isn't the FEELINGS of the Americans. The goal is the COST to the Americans. The more and more security you have, the greater burden that security has on your society. Hiring more security guards, spending more time waiting in line, that all has a cost.