Look at it this way: everyone's all "we gotta have email encryption" and we've completely lost interest in "OMG 99% of all email is spam and we can't get rid of it." It's the NSA's way of encouraging Internet Businesses. (please please PLEASE don't make me bring out the whoosh or sarcasm tags m'kay?)
The problem is the economic instability it would create, as so much of the world's production capacity is devoted to a vanity project useless to 99.99999% of the population
Umm, yeah,... like say ultra-luxury yachts and jet aircraft, or US Navy carrier groups, or golf clubs w/ $1million USD membership fees.
I wonder if they thought to make the solar panels attachable by cable so you can at least take the thing inside while it's charging.
Heck, we can do better than that. Have the solar panels deploy in the shape of a large parasol. You get to sit in a nice shady spot while your laptop charges up.
I'd hardly call any industry that uses a physical key "high security" in an age of individually-revokable key card technologies.
Remember that electronic locks can have various vulnerabilities too.
That's why I'm going to put in a voice-activated lock system. You have to know the secret word, which I've cleverly stuck inside the Welcome Notice printed over the door. Just don't throw things into the pond while working out the right word.
PS #1: Please, explain how the extraordinary improvement in computer hardware since WWII was encouraged by lack of patents. Another counter-example: genome sequencing technology has become orders of magnitude faster in the last dozen or so years. (No, I'm not arguing that we should patent everything; I'm still against patents on software and gene sequences.)
PS #2: Don't assume that scientists aren't motivated by crushing the opposition. That's part of the joy of success, and while we may not be doing it for the money, our egos are at least as big as everyone else's.
Re #1: go back and read about the (then legal) reverse-engineering of the IBM BIOS, without which most of our current software and hardware wouldn't exist.
Re #2: Neither you nor I represent the median ego of "scientist" -- class humanoids. Sure, getting there first is more fun, but that sort of competition is rather different from locking down your knowledge so nobody can review your results, reproduce your results, or improve upon them.
No, prosecution is not there to find yuo guilty but to find the truth of a case. There's no simmetry between prosecution and defense.
Your reality meter just exploded (in the negative limit). First of all, the State (prosecution) is incredibly highly motivated to get a conviction. Their reputation and salary and promotions depend upon it. Second, there is complete equivalence between the behavior of prosecution and defense. In theory, the defense is supposed to ensure that the trial is conducted openly and fairly (hence the "face his accuser" stuff). In practice, they do whatever they can to achieve a verdict of innocence. The day I hear a CDL tell the post-trial media conference "well, we presented all valid evidence, and the witnesses were truthful, but my client was guilty as sin and justice was properly served" is the day I begin to trust our justice system.
That kind of overselling is very common in all litigation - this is what lawyers do.
And the really sad thing is that the judges continue to allow the lawyers (for both sides) to pull this bullshit. If the judges weren't all former lawyers, highly trained in the art of lying and hostile (verbal) attacks, they (the judges) might possibly have the balls to tell the lawyers to STFU and stick to facts. Not to mention that, in any case involving technology, medicine, or anything that is not "the law," the judges should draw expert testimony from some random pool of specialists. Allowing either side to pick their own "expert witness" is just more bullshit.
Why the fuck is humanity such a bunch of MORONS, and how can we get rid of that pest once and for all
1. Perfect spaceflight up to the point where very large spaceships are possible. 2. Construct three very large spaceships, let's call them arks 3. ??? 4. Profit!!!
To belabor the obvious, Step 3 is "Load them up with all the people who sterilize pay phones and launch away"
The only thing drug patents do is make drug companies rich. If we as a nation (USAians here) truly wanted to maximize progress in medical treatment, we'd nationalize all drug research. Don't even bother arguing that profit motivates progress. The overwhelming majority of researchers and engineers are motivated by the joy of success, not crushing the opposition and getting filthy rich. As we've seen over and over again in nearly every technology area, the greatest progress occurs either in "open source" areas or when patents expire and everyone can innovate. (Yes, I'm a socialist. No, I don't think that in any way invalidates the fundamental claims I'm making here.)
I'm using the word "plagiarized" in the sense that the names and places he uses are not his own. Everyone who uses a line like, "You bastards. You killed Kenny!", is plagiarizing South Park.
Good luck making that claim hold up. The line you quote has for a long time been a standard parodic cliche. The thought that anyone would fail to recognize the source is laughable. You might as well claim that writing "Veni, vidi, vici" without attribution is plagiarism.
The former employeeâ(TM)s computer searches took place on this employeeâ(TM)s workplace computer. On that computer, the employee searched the terms âpressure cooker bombsâ(TM) and âbackpacks.â(TM)
Yeah, because there's zero chance he was just searching for news stories about the Marathon bombing and possible copycats. Or because he was just plain interested, as an intellectual exercise, in the relative efficacy of pressure cookers as a bomb containment device vs., say, a layer of ball bearings embedded in a core of C4.
You're missing the point. It's not a choice for us peons. Granted, for 90% of the folks, you could put a framed landscape on their desk with a piece of string attached to a hockey puck and they couldn't tell the difference, but for the few of us who actually know something, things like The Ribbon make workflow incredibly slower than drop-menus (which BTW used to be completely configurable, too). What is necessary in a corporate environment is document compatibility among users. That can be far better achieved via either OpenDoc or, say, RTF format than Office's latest CharlieFoxtrot format. Not to mention that Office{pick a version} can't even open documents from a couple or three versions past.
It's all in how you read that stats. Maybe 70 or 90% of desktop machines are Windows, but 99% of those are in corporate environments where one or two asswipes (CTO) choose the machines for everyone. If you re-do the numbers to rank Windows vs Linux vs OSX, etc. by the number of actual people *making* the choice, I bet you'd get a dramatically different number. I understand that from a cash-flow point of view, this is irrelevant, but don't confuse money (and centralized power) with popularity.
On the bright side: a Service Pack couldn't possibly make Office2010 any worse than it already is. (or COULD it? creepy music...)
I mean, really: do you know how embarrassing it is to send a finished document to your boss, have him throw it up on the screen in a review meeting, and see the formatting fouled up, all because his Office default is set to load the default Styles from his template, rather than stick with the ones in the (corporate template based) incoming document?
True story: I was laid off on a Tuesday morning and by the end of the week had a new job at a 17% pay increase. The recruiter found me through Linkedin.
For those who don't know: that part was played by Lotte Lenya, a woman with an incredibly wonderful voice. She's probably best known for her role in Threepenny Opera. (granted she was somewhat younger then)
Slashdot Mirror
Look at it this way: everyone's all "we gotta have email encryption" and we've completely lost interest in "OMG 99% of all email is spam and we can't get rid of it." It's the NSA's way of encouraging Internet Businesses.
(please please PLEASE don't make me bring out the whoosh or sarcasm tags m'kay?)
Digital voting == voting with one's digits. Typically the center, longest one. Just ask any cab driver.
Malaria kills 1.2 MILLION people EVERY year. That's like everyone in Dallas dying, every year.
You say that like killing off Dallas is a bad thing. Can we take out North Carolina and Florida as well?
I only trust Amazon product comments if they are vetted and posted to http://leasthelpful.com/
The problem is the economic instability it would create, as so much of the world's production capacity is devoted to a vanity project useless to 99.99999% of the population
Umm, yeah,... like say ultra-luxury yachts and jet aircraft, or US Navy carrier groups, or golf clubs w/ $1million USD membership fees.
I wonder if they thought to make the solar panels attachable by cable so you can at least take the thing inside while it's charging.
Heck, we can do better than that. Have the solar panels deploy in the shape of a large parasol. You get to sit in a nice shady spot while your laptop charges up.
I'd hardly call any industry that uses a physical key "high security" in an age of individually-revokable key card technologies.
Remember that electronic locks can have various vulnerabilities too.
That's why I'm going to put in a voice-activated lock system. You have to know the secret word, which I've cleverly stuck inside the Welcome Notice printed over the door.
Just don't throw things into the pond while working out the right word.
PS #1: Please, explain how the extraordinary improvement in computer hardware since WWII was encouraged by lack of patents. Another counter-example: genome sequencing technology has become orders of magnitude faster in the last dozen or so years. (No, I'm not arguing that we should patent everything; I'm still against patents on software and gene sequences.)
PS #2: Don't assume that scientists aren't motivated by crushing the opposition. That's part of the joy of success, and while we may not be doing it for the money, our egos are at least as big as everyone else's.
Re #1: go back and read about the (then legal) reverse-engineering of the IBM BIOS, without which most of our current software and hardware wouldn't exist.
Re #2: Neither you nor I represent the median ego of "scientist" -- class humanoids. Sure, getting there first is more fun, but that sort of competition is rather different from locking down your knowledge so nobody can review your results, reproduce your results, or improve upon them.
You didn't read a word of what I wrote, did you.
No comfy chair or chocolate for you.
Molpy down.
No, prosecution is not there to find yuo guilty but to find the truth of a case. There's no simmetry between prosecution and defense.
Your reality meter just exploded (in the negative limit).
First of all, the State (prosecution) is incredibly highly motivated to get a conviction. Their reputation and salary and promotions depend upon it.
Second, there is complete equivalence between the behavior of prosecution and defense. In theory, the defense is supposed to ensure that the trial is conducted openly and fairly (hence the "face his accuser" stuff). In practice, they do whatever they can to achieve a verdict of innocence.
The day I hear a CDL tell the post-trial media conference "well, we presented all valid evidence, and the witnesses were truthful, but my client was guilty as sin and justice was properly served" is the day I begin to trust our justice system.
That kind of overselling is very common in all litigation - this is what lawyers do.
And the really sad thing is that the judges continue to allow the lawyers (for both sides) to pull this bullshit. If the judges weren't all former lawyers, highly trained in the art of lying and hostile (verbal) attacks, they (the judges) might possibly have the balls to tell the lawyers to STFU and stick to facts. Not to mention that, in any case involving technology, medicine, or anything that is not "the law," the judges should draw expert testimony from some random pool of specialists. Allowing either side to pick their own "expert witness" is just more bullshit.
Why the fuck is humanity such a bunch of MORONS, and how can we get rid of that pest once and for all
1. Perfect spaceflight up to the point where very large spaceships are possible.
2. Construct three very large spaceships, let's call them arks
3. ???
4. Profit!!!
To belabor the obvious, Step 3 is "Load them up with all the people who sterilize pay phones and launch away"
The only thing drug patents do is make drug companies rich. If we as a nation (USAians here) truly wanted to maximize progress in medical treatment, we'd nationalize all drug research. Don't even bother arguing that profit motivates progress. The overwhelming majority of researchers and engineers are motivated by the joy of success, not crushing the opposition and getting filthy rich.
As we've seen over and over again in nearly every technology area, the greatest progress occurs either in "open source" areas or when patents expire and everyone can innovate.
(Yes, I'm a socialist. No, I don't think that in any way invalidates the fundamental claims I'm making here.)
I'm using the word "plagiarized" in the sense that the names and places he uses are not his own. Everyone who uses a line like, "You bastards. You killed Kenny!", is plagiarizing South Park.
Good luck making that claim hold up. The line you quote has for a long time been a standard parodic cliche. The thought that anyone would fail to recognize the source is laughable. You might as well claim that writing "Veni, vidi, vici" without attribution is plagiarism.
The former employeeâ(TM)s computer searches took place on this employeeâ(TM)s workplace computer. On that computer, the employee searched the terms âpressure cooker bombsâ(TM) and âbackpacks.â(TM)
Yeah, because there's zero chance he was just searching for news stories about the Marathon bombing and possible copycats. Or because he was just plain interested, as an intellectual exercise, in the relative efficacy of pressure cookers as a bomb containment device vs., say, a layer of ball bearings embedded in a core of C4.
Come and get me, you NSA assholes.
You're missing the point. It's not a choice for us peons. Granted, for 90% of the folks, you could put a framed landscape on their desk with a piece of string attached to a hockey puck and they couldn't tell the difference, but for the few of us who actually know something, things like The Ribbon make workflow incredibly slower than drop-menus (which BTW used to be completely configurable, too).
What is necessary in a corporate environment is document compatibility among users. That can be far better achieved via either OpenDoc or, say, RTF format than Office's latest CharlieFoxtrot format. Not to mention that Office{pick a version} can't even open documents from a couple or three versions past.
Nobelian? Is a Nobelian Group anything like an Abelian Group?
A personal friend, who knows that Gary Becker is a stanch believer in the doctrine of Alfred Nobel.
So your friend the Nobelist wants to stop the belief in said doctrine? (stanch!=staunch) :-)
It's all in how you read that stats. Maybe 70 or 90% of desktop machines are Windows, but 99% of those are in corporate environments where one or two asswipes (CTO) choose the machines for everyone. If you re-do the numbers to rank Windows vs Linux vs OSX, etc. by the number of actual people *making* the choice, I bet you'd get a dramatically different number. I understand that from a cash-flow point of view, this is irrelevant, but don't confuse money (and centralized power) with popularity.
On the bright side: a Service Pack couldn't possibly make Office2010 any worse than it already is. (or COULD it? creepy music...)
I mean, really: do you know how embarrassing it is to send a finished document to your boss, have him throw it up on the screen in a review meeting, and see the formatting fouled up, all because his Office default is set to load the default Styles from his template, rather than stick with the ones in the (corporate template based) incoming document?
True story: I was laid off on a Tuesday morning and by the end of the week had a new job at a 17% pay increase. The recruiter found me through Linkedin.
Wow: Wendy's pays17% more than MacDonald's?
For those who don't know: that part was played by Lotte Lenya, a woman with an incredibly wonderful voice. She's probably best known for her role in Threepenny Opera. (granted she was somewhat younger then)
Where do used batteries go?
Tyrion? Is that you -- given up on your wife and getting into the Green Movement?
I hope that was sarcastic. I really hope so. If not...
It is not possible to weaponize weather in any meaningful way.
Before you continue thinking reality has anything to do with what CIA spends its money on, read The Men Who Stare at Goats.
I know it's a thought doomed from the start, but switching from pdf to epub as the document standard would be a big help.