Trying to pretend predatorary pricing and arm twisting did / does / will not happen just exposes you ignorance. Thats why we have anti-trust laws. These laws did not come about in a vacuum..... fuck face.
I love it when people try to be tough and at the same time they're whining, "but Wal*Mart is unfaaaaaiiiiirrrrrrrrr!"
Grow a pair.
We have anti-trust laws because there are lots of lemmings who don't understand basic economics and will believe things without evidence.
I guess my basic point was that you don't start putting lead at high velocity towards anything or anyone that you haven't already written off; shooting out the tires of a moving vehicle is right up there with "shoot the gun out of his hand" as a non-lethal takedown procedure.
CN/CS tear gas "blinds" you for a certain amount of time, by making your eyes sting and water, but isn't prohibited for riot control.
The effect of CS gas is 99% psychological. The disorientation, the difficulty breathing (feels like you're drowning) and the burning in your eyes (you can still see just fine, though) and exposed skin fire up your flight instincts. Everyone is different in how they react to it. (I don't know about CN gas, from what I understand it's somewhat more dangerous.)
Also, at least last time I checked, the U.S. wasn't a signatory to the Geneva Convention, it just voluntarily follows it.
No, we're a signatory to it. We aren't a signatory to certain extensions to the Geneva Convention.
I will not be made to feel bad about the fact that minorities make up for the bulk of the poor and for whatever reason these same people feel the need to piss away what little expendable cash they have on smokes.
I don't care how you feel nor do I want to make you feel better or worse. I'm simply pointing out how the racket works and arguing that it doesn't deliver on the promises it makes. We're told that increasing taxes on cigarettes will persuade people to not smoke, the idea being that by increasing these taxes we can wean people off smokes. If this were the case, after seeing that people *weren't* quitting and that the taxes were being used for projects completely unrelated to the welfare of the smokers, we should have dropped these taxes. I think that it's a basic principle of good government that if a law doesn't work that it be taken off the books.
It's odd that "the poor" (which you seem to associate directly with minority races)
Aside from Jews and Asians, minorities have lower incomes and higher unemployment rates than whites. As taxation tends to transfer wealth, it is generally accepted that it is better to transfer from the richer to the poorer rather than the reverse. "Sin taxes" such as cigarettes are an example of claiming that a tax is morally laudable, when in reality it is regressive. I think that's hypocritical.
I won't even go on to my thoughts about the people who pay for their groceries with foodstamps but buy a couple of cartons of smokes either...
There's an old saying, "but for the grace of God, there go I." Most people who are poor tend to get stuck in that rut because, again, "progressive" taxation puts up barriers to increasing their income. People don't improve their situation in life by budgeting, rather, they do it by getting a better paying job and increasing their marketable value. Yet if those people you're talking about did that, the government would take away their food stamps and put them in a higher tax bracket. They might actually be *worse* off by getting a better job!
It's utterly hypocritical to claim that we're helping someone when what we've actually done is set the rungs at the bottom of the ladder further apart.
It's quotes like that that really make me wonder why our goverment doesn't legalize marijuana and tax it like tobacco. Save billions on enforcement (~80% of drug arrests are marijuana possession), and make tens of billions in taxes.
I think the current situation is due to the drug-war lobby which depends on a rather Puritanical streak in American politics.
Who the fuck is bribing the whole games industry into giving the Halo franchise such a cock sucking?
Well... Halo was fun, not so challenging that I couldn't beat it on Legendary if I felt like playing it through a second time. (I'm not as good at video games as when I had an Atari 2600...) Halo 2 did lots of things that probably should have been in Halo. If you were already a Marathon fan playing Halo you probably felt like you were going from Blade Runner to Star Wars/Trek.
Personally, I think a lot of the Halo fanboys just never played any FPSs before Halo or read any good sci-fi. They're the kinds of people who would flip to the end of an Asimov book to find out where the second Foundation was. It also probably appeals to a lot of people who, honestly, aren't very good at video games because it's a very easy game. The gameplay is a lot slower than Quake, and the missions are much simpler than Half Life.
We can't have safe cigarettes. If people had safe cigarettes there wouldn't be any excuse to levy massive taxes on them. Poor minorities generally get a break on taxes, in practice because they don't have much money to take, but in rhetoric because we dislike regressive taxation. However, they also make up the vast bulk of cigarette smokers, and it's okay to demonize cigarette smokers. So under the pretense of discouraging cigarette smoking, politicians can impose a regressive racist tax.
If our government weren't addicted to the $15.7 billion dollars in taxes they collect on an annual basis from cigarettes, we would get safe cigarettes in a heartbeat. Right now, though, too many pet projects depend on cigarettes being dangerous for that to change.
The inside of a CRT is something like 100,000F. But it doesn't melt the glass and then 3 nanoseconds later the faces of everyone watching it.
It's like walking on coals. Coals get red-hot at about 600 degrees Farenheit, due to black body radiation. People can walk on them, though, because human flesh is much denser. (It also helps if you do it right after the morning dew, and it's a bad idea to linger.) The coals are hot but the total amount of energy isn't that high.
It's a bit like having a very high voltage but a low amperage in a circuit. Another example of a plasma having a very high temperature but very low total energy is the temperature of interstellar space: it can be millions of degrees hot, but have a handful of atoms per cubic meter.
What educationally useful things will the child do with the laptop?
Read? For each child it's $100 for the laptop. We can get them electronic textbooks for their entire educational career, whereas that same $100 might buy 3 or 4 textbooks.
As an ex-CS college professor, let me suggest that it would be better to spend that $100 on the developing world on more teachers, education for teachers, roof for schools, etc.
I'm not sure what your CV has to do with it, but there's more than $100 to spend here. I suggest letting the philanthropists decide how their money is spent, since billionaire investors seem to have a knack for investing.
Remember all those silly computer labs back in high schools in the '80s? Did anyone get any real educational value out of them?
I see where you're coming from. Our high school system has been screwed up for 20 years now and has a establishment that conspires to maintain a status quo while deflecting any reforms. That's why there are lots of trendy ideas that wind up burning millions of tax dollars.
If we were donating billions of tax dollars of aid to Africa, I'd agree that exactly the same thing will happen because the established dictators would make sure they all went to prop up their regimes while suppressing real reform. However, this private effort might avoid helping the dictators.
I'd even argue that it's better to donate things that are not of immediate practical benefit. If you donate food and housing, you make it impossible for the locals to make a living selling such things, and they need to do so to establish their economy. This has actually happened in India and such places were foreigners were so generous after famines that the farmers were going broke and it was only when the Indian government got them to stop donating the food that they could reestablish their agriculture sector.
The demo was yesterday afternoon, and while , I learned a great deal more about machine than I have from previous articles, or Negroponte's talk at Pop!Tech. He was able to answer a whole set of questions for me, and raise an entire set of new ones, which, I suspect, will take a number of years to answer accurately.
That's a misquote. It wasn't Negroponte giving the talk, it was Negrodamus.
Apple's Smart Playlists are as close as any software gets to letting me run SQL queries on my music library to generate playlists.
The fact that the live-updating playlists work within a fraction of a second is impressive.
I've never understood why these interfaces have the be so user-obsequious. For example, you *can* have nested smart playlists by using the "Playlist" property as one of your rules. And you can use them to do boolean negation. (You can also use the sorting and limiting to get fairly elaborate.)
So the engine supports nested boolean expressions. Why isn't this made explicit in the UI?
IMHO, I don't think UI designers in general grok relational theory because I've never seen a good GUI for database controls. I think it's partly because their thought processes start with SQL...
When you get past the breathless MoJo-inspired hype you realize that:
a. In spite of the Evil Corporate Overlords, you can walk onto a random showroom, pick a model at random and drive off and be reasonably safe. Spend a few hours sifting through reports and you can find plenty of vehicles that exceed mandated safety requirements.
b. An entity like NASA with no profit incentive and a virtually unlimited safety budget still managed to produce the Challenger accident, and they had to overlook evidence to do so. (This isn't to indict NASA, just to point out that the lack of a profit motive or a bottom line doesn't guarantee a group psychology that will always promote the most reliable engineering.)
Uhh have you ever been to an Ipod message board? Talk about constant firmware updating...
On the Mac, Software Update grabs the latest iPod firmware updates automatically. Not sure how it goes on Windows, but if I were Apple I'd make iTunes grab firmware updates on the PC side.
Many users have had horrible results with the updates btw leading to non-functioning sytems, missing libraries, and no internet access.
If an iPod firmware update crashes your system, kills your Internet or deletes system files I think PEBCAK.
Seeing as how the news industry has been established for about as long as the printing press, I think step 3 is well known to be "sell more ads / subscriptions" so the underwear gnomes meme doesn't work here.
If the fuel tank were to rupture and explode, it would actually be less dangerous than your current gas tank rupturing and exploding.
Gas tanks don't spontaneously explode. A few liters of gasoline will burn quite nicely, but it doesn't explode.
Think of all the car wrecks you've seen. How many were burnt up?
The Hindenburg went up so fast because the canvas was treated with substances that also happen to be used in rocket fuel.
Debatable...
Even so, the passenger compartment itself was unharmed and the passengers survived.
"Of the 97 people on board, 13 passengers and 22 crew-members were killed. One member of the ground crew also died, bringing the death toll to 36." --wikipedia
Though most of them fell to their death...
At any rate, I think comparing an airship with H2 at 1 atmosphere pressure to a vehicle with pressurized H2 is useless for evaluating safety.
You're right, we should stick to powering our cars with a nice, non-volatile, non-explosive substance like gasoline.
Gasoline has plenty of energy, but it's pretty stable stuff. There are plenty of misconceptions brought about by overzealous safety police (like all the "no smoking within 50 ft" rules), stupid movies and outright lies... remember when NBC put the explosives on the GM trucks to show how their side tanks would explode?
Gasoline burns pretty well but short of dropping a lit cigarette in it, it's pretty safe. And you can put a match out in diesel fuel.
Look at it this way: if you're going to rely on *any* internal power source, comparable to gasoline, it's going to have about as much energy as gasoline.
How does MS making a crappy website begin the end of the PC?
Even if they *could* get Office running over a thin client (in 10 years, maybe) there'd be nothing to stop you from simply using OpenOffice. Running Office over a website would never be more than a convenience.
Like this book states in its title, it focuses on MySQL.
It also claims to be the definitive guide. If something is definitive, it's got to be complete. You can't properly use a SQL DBMS without understanding the principles of the SQL language.
This is especially true since MySQL takes liberties with the SQL standard which already diverges widely from the relational model.
Slashdot Mirror
Trying to pretend predatorary pricing and arm twisting did / does / will not happen just exposes you ignorance. Thats why we have anti-trust laws. These laws did not come about in a vacuum ..... fuck face.
I love it when people try to be tough and at the same time they're whining, "but Wal*Mart is unfaaaaaiiiiirrrrrrrrr!"
Grow a pair.
We have anti-trust laws because there are lots of lemmings who don't understand basic economics and will believe things without evidence.
I guess my basic point was that you don't start putting lead at high velocity towards anything or anyone that you haven't already written off; shooting out the tires of a moving vehicle is right up there with "shoot the gun out of his hand" as a non-lethal takedown procedure.
Why even argue with these people?
CN/CS tear gas "blinds" you for a certain amount of time, by making your eyes sting and water, but isn't prohibited for riot control.
The effect of CS gas is 99% psychological. The disorientation, the difficulty breathing (feels like you're drowning) and the burning in your eyes (you can still see just fine, though) and exposed skin fire up your flight instincts. Everyone is different in how they react to it. (I don't know about CN gas, from what I understand it's somewhat more dangerous.)
Also, at least last time I checked, the U.S. wasn't a signatory to the Geneva Convention, it just voluntarily follows it.
No, we're a signatory to it. We aren't a signatory to certain extensions to the Geneva Convention.
creative destruction (n.) - the process of disruptive transformation that accompanies radical innovation
In real life, it means "a bunch of union thugs keeping scabs in line."
I will not be made to feel bad about the fact that minorities make up for the bulk of the poor and for whatever reason these same people feel the need to piss away what little expendable cash they have on smokes.
I don't care how you feel nor do I want to make you feel better or worse. I'm simply pointing out how the racket works and arguing that it doesn't deliver on the promises it makes. We're told that increasing taxes on cigarettes will persuade people to not smoke, the idea being that by increasing these taxes we can wean people off smokes. If this were the case, after seeing that people *weren't* quitting and that the taxes were being used for projects completely unrelated to the welfare of the smokers, we should have dropped these taxes. I think that it's a basic principle of good government that if a law doesn't work that it be taken off the books.
It's odd that "the poor" (which you seem to associate directly with minority races)
Aside from Jews and Asians, minorities have lower incomes and higher unemployment rates than whites. As taxation tends to transfer wealth, it is generally accepted that it is better to transfer from the richer to the poorer rather than the reverse. "Sin taxes" such as cigarettes are an example of claiming that a tax is morally laudable, when in reality it is regressive. I think that's hypocritical.
I won't even go on to my thoughts about the people who pay for their groceries with foodstamps but buy a couple of cartons of smokes either...
There's an old saying, "but for the grace of God, there go I." Most people who are poor tend to get stuck in that rut because, again, "progressive" taxation puts up barriers to increasing their income. People don't improve their situation in life by budgeting, rather, they do it by getting a better paying job and increasing their marketable value. Yet if those people you're talking about did that, the government would take away their food stamps and put them in a higher tax bracket. They might actually be *worse* off by getting a better job!
It's utterly hypocritical to claim that we're helping someone when what we've actually done is set the rungs at the bottom of the ladder further apart.
It's quotes like that that really make me wonder why our goverment doesn't legalize marijuana and tax it like tobacco. Save billions on enforcement (~80% of drug arrests are marijuana possession), and make tens of billions in taxes.
I think the current situation is due to the drug-war lobby which depends on a rather Puritanical streak in American politics.
How the hell do they know Halo 3 will be huge?
Who the fuck is bribing the whole games industry into giving the Halo franchise such a cock sucking?
Well... Halo was fun, not so challenging that I couldn't beat it on Legendary if I felt like playing it through a second time. (I'm not as good at video games as when I had an Atari 2600...) Halo 2 did lots of things that probably should have been in Halo. If you were already a Marathon fan playing Halo you probably felt like you were going from Blade Runner to Star Wars/Trek.
Personally, I think a lot of the Halo fanboys just never played any FPSs before Halo or read any good sci-fi. They're the kinds of people who would flip to the end of an Asimov book to find out where the second Foundation was. It also probably appeals to a lot of people who, honestly, aren't very good at video games because it's a very easy game. The gameplay is a lot slower than Quake, and the missions are much simpler than Half Life.
We can't have safe cigarettes. If people had safe cigarettes there wouldn't be any excuse to levy massive taxes on them. Poor minorities generally get a break on taxes, in practice because they don't have much money to take, but in rhetoric because we dislike regressive taxation. However, they also make up the vast bulk of cigarette smokers, and it's okay to demonize cigarette smokers. So under the pretense of discouraging cigarette smoking, politicians can impose a regressive racist tax.
If our government weren't addicted to the $15.7 billion dollars in taxes they collect on an annual basis from cigarettes, we would get safe cigarettes in a heartbeat. Right now, though, too many pet projects depend on cigarettes being dangerous for that to change.
We'll have sweet revenge when the goatse trolls run an innocuous search for their boss and get their "personalized results."
Congressman Packard did. There have been a few others. :)
People who lie and breath for a living are generally considered oxygen theives, not workers.
The inside of a CRT is something like 100,000F. But it doesn't melt the glass and then 3 nanoseconds later the faces of everyone watching it.
It's like walking on coals. Coals get red-hot at about 600 degrees Farenheit, due to black body radiation. People can walk on them, though, because human flesh is much denser. (It also helps if you do it right after the morning dew, and it's a bad idea to linger.) The coals are hot but the total amount of energy isn't that high.
It's a bit like having a very high voltage but a low amperage in a circuit. Another example of a plasma having a very high temperature but very low total energy is the temperature of interstellar space: it can be millions of degrees hot, but have a handful of atoms per cubic meter.
What educationally useful things will the child do with the laptop?
Read? For each child it's $100 for the laptop. We can get them electronic textbooks for their entire educational career, whereas that same $100 might buy 3 or 4 textbooks.
As an ex-CS college professor, let me suggest that it would be better to spend that $100 on the developing world on more teachers, education for teachers, roof for schools, etc.
I'm not sure what your CV has to do with it, but there's more than $100 to spend here. I suggest letting the philanthropists decide how their money is spent, since billionaire investors seem to have a knack for investing.
Remember all those silly computer labs back in high schools in the '80s? Did anyone get any real educational value out of them?
I see where you're coming from. Our high school system has been screwed up for 20 years now and has a establishment that conspires to maintain a status quo while deflecting any reforms. That's why there are lots of trendy ideas that wind up burning millions of tax dollars.
If we were donating billions of tax dollars of aid to Africa, I'd agree that exactly the same thing will happen because the established dictators would make sure they all went to prop up their regimes while suppressing real reform. However, this private effort might avoid helping the dictators.
I'd even argue that it's better to donate things that are not of immediate practical benefit. If you donate food and housing, you make it impossible for the locals to make a living selling such things, and they need to do so to establish their economy. This has actually happened in India and such places were foreigners were so generous after famines that the farmers were going broke and it was only when the Indian government got them to stop donating the food that they could reestablish their agriculture sector.
The demo was yesterday afternoon, and while , I learned a great deal more about machine than I have from previous articles, or Negroponte's talk at Pop!Tech. He was able to answer a whole set of questions for me, and raise an entire set of new ones, which, I suspect, will take a number of years to answer accurately.
That's a misquote. It wasn't Negroponte giving the talk, it was Negrodamus.
Apple's Smart Playlists are as close as any software gets to letting me run SQL queries on my music library to generate playlists.
The fact that the live-updating playlists work within a fraction of a second is impressive.
I've never understood why these interfaces have the be so user-obsequious. For example, you *can* have nested smart playlists by using the "Playlist" property as one of your rules. And you can use them to do boolean negation. (You can also use the sorting and limiting to get fairly elaborate.)
So the engine supports nested boolean expressions. Why isn't this made explicit in the UI?
IMHO, I don't think UI designers in general grok relational theory because I've never seen a good GUI for database controls. I think it's partly because their thought processes start with SQL...
Yes, you're correct.
When you get past the breathless MoJo-inspired hype you realize that:
a. In spite of the Evil Corporate Overlords, you can walk onto a random showroom, pick a model at random and drive off and be reasonably safe. Spend a few hours sifting through reports and you can find plenty of vehicles that exceed mandated safety requirements.
b. An entity like NASA with no profit incentive and a virtually unlimited safety budget still managed to produce the Challenger accident, and they had to overlook evidence to do so. (This isn't to indict NASA, just to point out that the lack of a profit motive or a bottom line doesn't guarantee a group psychology that will always promote the most reliable engineering.)
Uhh have you ever been to an Ipod message board? Talk about constant firmware updating...
On the Mac, Software Update grabs the latest iPod firmware updates automatically. Not sure how it goes on Windows, but if I were Apple I'd make iTunes grab firmware updates on the PC side.
Many users have had horrible results with the updates btw leading to non-functioning sytems, missing libraries, and no internet access.
If an iPod firmware update crashes your system, kills your Internet or deletes system files I think PEBCAK.
How many iPod ads do you even see in a week? ... Are you such a sheep that marketing controls everything you buy?
Good questions. Let's see: today at work I watched no television. Two people asked me questions about the iPod.
Seeing as how the news industry has been established for about as long as the printing press, I think step 3 is well known to be "sell more ads / subscriptions" so the underwear gnomes meme doesn't work here.
If the fuel tank were to rupture and explode, it would actually be less dangerous than your current gas tank rupturing and exploding.
Gas tanks don't spontaneously explode. A few liters of gasoline will burn quite nicely, but it doesn't explode.
Think of all the car wrecks you've seen. How many were burnt up?
The Hindenburg went up so fast because the canvas was treated with substances that also happen to be used in rocket fuel.
Debatable...
Even so, the passenger compartment itself was unharmed and the passengers survived.
"Of the 97 people on board, 13 passengers and 22 crew-members were killed. One member of the ground crew also died, bringing the death toll to 36." --wikipedia
Though most of them fell to their death...
At any rate, I think comparing an airship with H2 at 1 atmosphere pressure to a vehicle with pressurized H2 is useless for evaluating safety.
You're right, we should stick to powering our cars with a nice, non-volatile, non-explosive substance like gasoline.
Gasoline has plenty of energy, but it's pretty stable stuff. There are plenty of misconceptions brought about by overzealous safety police (like all the "no smoking within 50 ft" rules), stupid movies and outright lies... remember when NBC put the explosives on the GM trucks to show how their side tanks would explode?
Gasoline burns pretty well but short of dropping a lit cigarette in it, it's pretty safe. And you can put a match out in diesel fuel.
Look at it this way: if you're going to rely on *any* internal power source, comparable to gasoline, it's going to have about as much energy as gasoline.
I could have sworn it was called "My Yahoo!"
Ah, and so it finally begins..
How does MS making a crappy website begin the end of the PC?
Even if they *could* get Office running over a thin client (in 10 years, maybe) there'd be nothing to stop you from simply using OpenOffice. Running Office over a website would never be more than a convenience.
Oh and why do you call it football when there is no goddamn kicking in the game?
We asked ourselves, "how about calling it rugby? Nope, sounds like something the British do to sheep."
Now I'm even more pissed off because I became an unintentional karma whore. There is no justice.
Like this book states in its title, it focuses on MySQL.
It also claims to be the definitive guide. If something is definitive, it's got to be complete. You can't properly use a SQL DBMS without understanding the principles of the SQL language.
This is especially true since MySQL takes liberties with the SQL standard which already diverges widely from the relational model.