You're anthropomorphizing companies. Companies are owned and run by people, and can only perform actions that are driven by human decision makers - the morals, or lack of them, are human qualities by the human decision makers.
I am sick of these "challenges" that effectively try get programmers to work for effectively well below market rates. As if we're like children, a "challenge" is supposed to make us set aside months or years of income to work on a really difficult problem that if we had to actually go out and do for a company in the job market, we'd be paid $100K/year or more. I think they probably attract young people who don't understand the value of their own time or skills, or who are more easily lured by childish notions like that it's a "challenge", or some of these types of "challenges" attract good programmers from poor countries who are desperate to become more recognized in the longer term - in that case they may at least get something useful out of it, but still I'd rather see these "challenges" pay at *least* closer to market rates for programming labor. As they say in prostitution and marriage, don't 'give away the goods for free'.
the real reason they'll die is because they can't get a foothold in the mobile market - Google doesn't allow Android devices to be bundled with another browser by default
Which is why Mozilla are trying to make Firefox OS.
Do they have much chance? Probably not, it's a long shot. But I say, worth a shot.
But Firefox was *born out of*, and partly a response to, a monopoly situation where one provider's browser had 95% market share. So I don't think Firefox is going to be killed by another monopoly provider reaching 95% market share - just go back to the sidelines, until Google's increasingly monopolistic practices piss off enough people that momentum develops behind promoting alternatives again.
Funnily enough for some things I find better porn results with Bing. But Google seems to deliver the best results for coding-related queries in general.. it's like a drug, I keep trying to switch to other search providers but end up migrating back to Google.
Mozilla likely don't have a choice in the matter: Once Firefox share sinks below a certain point where Google considers them "irrelevant", Google will drop their agreement like a hot potato anyway. You speak as if Google will just keep paying Mozilla Foundation forever. The purpose of Google paying Mozilla wasn't some noble gesture to help them, it was to deliver the trojan horse that would kill them in the form of the "Install Chrome Now" message that appears on search results delivered to Firefox.
Personally I don't know why everyone is so keen to embrace using products that spy on everything you do and collect profiles on you. I don't like living in a panopticon.
"Hooking up" is the tiniest portion of the cost of a small solar setup such as a home - what's actually happening is the opposite, the home users effectively become a "power plant" and are personally subsidizing the 'power plant production costs' (to the utility's benefit), whereas previously the utility (or taxpayer) were paying for power plant construction cost. The alternative for the power company is not "not hooking you up" - it's "not hooking you up, and then building another huge coal/nuclear/whatever plant" - because in that latter case they're not getting that extra generation capacity, they have to create the capacity to meet the demand. If you think hooking you up is cheaper than building an alternative plant you're mad. Of course one way or another the costs eventually get foisted on the energy consumers.
Selling your product at market prices in order to try increase market share toward levels where economies of scale kick in enough to cover R&D and operational costs, is not "dumping", it's just normal business that basically every company that makes a product does.
If e.g. BMW makes a new model of car, the first sale of that car will be at a loss of hundreds of millions. It requires selling many cars to break even on a new model, and if they don't sell enough of that model in the end, the model is just a normal business failure (there are always going to be products that don't make money) - it doesn't mean BMW must try charge customers billions for each car - they can't, they have to sell cars at market rates.
"By the end of 2014, it is forecast that there will be more than 635m mobile subscriptions in sub-Saharan Africa. This is predicted to rise, to about 930m by late 2019, when it is estimated that three in four mobile subscriptions will be internet inclusive. The growth is attributed to the rise of social media, content-rich apps and video content accessed from a new range of smartphones costing less than $50 (£30)"http://www.theguardian.com/wor...
Polygraphs are at best a cheap party trick. They shouldn't be used anywhere near anything to do with law enforcement or anything that has any influence over peoples lives.
The problem is not just the false positives - i.e. people lying, and beating the test - but false negatives - people who fail the test when telling the truth.
Polygraphs are an abomination and should be all destroyed and thrown in the trash.
If you lose your job and have to take a new lower-paying job, and you have to cut your daughter's allowance as a result so you can pay the bills, and your daughter protests at having her allowance cut, would that be a sign that cutting her allowance "isn't working"? No, because the purpose cutting her allowance is so that you can pay more important bills, like rent and food. If cutting her allowance helps you pay the grocery bill, then cutting her allowance is "working" no matter how unhappy she is about it.
Protests aren't a sign that austerity "isn't working", on the contrary, you'd have to be a fool not to expect protests on austerity measures - the purpose of austerity isn't to keep everyone happy, it's to prevent bankruptcy.
There is no downside to lower gas prices. lower prices on anything is always a positive.
Yup. You have to look carefully at where the "information" in this "article" is coming from - this is not even an article, it's basically a piece of political propaganda for the government - the same "author"'s other "article" headlines look like this: "More Evidence Austerity Is Terrible", "President Obama Deserves a Vacation", "Sympathy for the IRS on Tax Day", "How Cheap and Free Parking Is Screwing Up Cities".
Why do people seem to take political propaganda at face value, as if this article actually carries weight as a piece of economic advice, ha ha ha.
A more action-grounded response than my previous comment is that, what you are saying is an excellent suggestion, but needs to be actively promoted by people like yourself. E.g. do things like, write letters to those who set school curricula, requesting such additions. Do things like, write to teachers, speak to teachers, ask teachers - eventually you will find teachers who are emboldened to start sneaking such thoughts into their own classes here and there, making at least a small difference, keeping the torch of resistive thought burning.
Those in charge of educating our children are the same people who benefit from ensuring they grow up completely passive and obedient good little taxpayers.
Unlike what, all the "innovation" going on with Android and iOS? Really? "Innovative" business models maybe, like forcing ISVs to basically zero margins to subsidize the OS's R&D by taking 30% and offering a cut of that to the OEMs.
I know everyone likes to criticize NASA, but they have pulled off some extraordinary research on their really tight budgets. E.g. the initial cost for the Kepler Spacecraft mission was just something like $600million - and that project has quietly and with little fanfare achieved some of the most potentially history-changing research in the history of astronomy. (Why? Because for the first time in human history we are not only discovering many potentially 'earth-like' worlds, but actually basically starting to build the first "maps" of the planets in our galaxy - these are basically the first maps that will be used when we start sending probes to, and then later traveling to and colonizing other star systems - historians of the future will understand the significance in hindsight in a way few seem to grasp today.)
I think the best approach would be a hybrid one. Though healthcare sector is NOT any sort of 'role model'. Companies like SpaceX clearly have a lot to bring to the table in terms of innovation and bringing costs down, but to achieve large, visionary goals for man, will probably be helped a lot by government funding.
There is a myth though that anything to do with space is hideously unaffordably expensive. If you look at the actual numbers, this isn't really true. E.g. NASA's annual budget is just 0.5% of the money we blew on the Iraq War.
American healthcare system is not really "private" unless you consider a fasco-Corporatist system with government-protected cartels and monopolies and protections an example of a "private" system. I don't.
It's a bit shocking that on a supposedly nerd site like slashdot, most here seem to completely fail to understand even basic statistics, but I suppose that's the world we live in, no wonder it's such a mess.
With the small sample size, you'd need a bigger gap. If the numbers were 70% and 20%, you'd have conclusive evidence of a significant difference between populations. At 70% and 77%, you have no evidence for any difference at all; a small difference could exist, but it is exceedingly unlikely that a LARGE difference exists.
It's possible also the difference of 70% vs 77% (IF those are relatively representative) count be accounted for by other qualitative differences between the photos - e.g. the black woman is in public while the white woman's photo appears that it may be in a more private setting.
Americans seem to be equal opportunity hysterical haters of breastfeeding. It was interesting to me also just how it is indeed much more predominantly men who seem to want to dictate that women cover up - I'm surprised to see the feminists were right about that one.
The science seems to still be out on whether earthquakes may trigger other earthquakes, but many consider it plausible:
http://news.nationalgeographic...
"Earthquakes Can Trigger More Earthquakes, Experts Say" "Can one earthquake cause another? A developing theory holds that quakes can pressure highly stressed fault lines and trigger subsequent seismic events"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
Just some long-term thinking here: A point to remember is that the first trip would be the most expensive. If the first trip to Mars costs $100 billion, the second one would cost only a fraction of that, as then all the technologies would have been developed, and we'd have the requisite body of expertise.
Do you think that if they get the funding they need they don't intend to follow through? If not, then in what sense is it a "scam"? That is not what the word "scam" means.
Slashdot Mirror
You're anthropomorphizing companies. Companies are owned and run by people, and can only perform actions that are driven by human decision makers - the morals, or lack of them, are human qualities by the human decision makers.
The taxi industry is an example of a capitalist economy? Lolz. They're the very epitome of corporatist protectionism.
I am sick of these "challenges" that effectively try get programmers to work for effectively well below market rates. As if we're like children, a "challenge" is supposed to make us set aside months or years of income to work on a really difficult problem that if we had to actually go out and do for a company in the job market, we'd be paid $100K/year or more. I think they probably attract young people who don't understand the value of their own time or skills, or who are more easily lured by childish notions like that it's a "challenge", or some of these types of "challenges" attract good programmers from poor countries who are desperate to become more recognized in the longer term - in that case they may at least get something useful out of it, but still I'd rather see these "challenges" pay at *least* closer to market rates for programming labor. As they say in prostitution and marriage, don't 'give away the goods for free'.
the real reason they'll die is because they can't get a foothold in the mobile market - Google doesn't allow Android devices to be bundled with another browser by default
Which is why Mozilla are trying to make Firefox OS.
Do they have much chance? Probably not, it's a long shot. But I say, worth a shot.
But Firefox was *born out of*, and partly a response to, a monopoly situation where one provider's browser had 95% market share. So I don't think Firefox is going to be killed by another monopoly provider reaching 95% market share - just go back to the sidelines, until Google's increasingly monopolistic practices piss off enough people that momentum develops behind promoting alternatives again.
Funnily enough for some things I find better porn results with Bing. But Google seems to deliver the best results for coding-related queries in general .. it's like a drug, I keep trying to switch to other search providers but end up migrating back to Google.
Mozilla likely don't have a choice in the matter: Once Firefox share sinks below a certain point where Google considers them "irrelevant", Google will drop their agreement like a hot potato anyway. You speak as if Google will just keep paying Mozilla Foundation forever. The purpose of Google paying Mozilla wasn't some noble gesture to help them, it was to deliver the trojan horse that would kill them in the form of the "Install Chrome Now" message that appears on search results delivered to Firefox.
Personally I don't know why everyone is so keen to embrace using products that spy on everything you do and collect profiles on you. I don't like living in a panopticon.
@" If you think hooking you up is cheaper than building an alternative plant" - Ugh, I meant, MORE EXPENSIVE, sorry.
"Hooking up" is the tiniest portion of the cost of a small solar setup such as a home - what's actually happening is the opposite, the home users effectively become a "power plant" and are personally subsidizing the 'power plant production costs' (to the utility's benefit), whereas previously the utility (or taxpayer) were paying for power plant construction cost. The alternative for the power company is not "not hooking you up" - it's "not hooking you up, and then building another huge coal/nuclear/whatever plant" - because in that latter case they're not getting that extra generation capacity, they have to create the capacity to meet the demand. If you think hooking you up is cheaper than building an alternative plant you're mad. Of course one way or another the costs eventually get foisted on the energy consumers.
Selling your product at market prices in order to try increase market share toward levels where economies of scale kick in enough to cover R&D and operational costs, is not "dumping", it's just normal business that basically every company that makes a product does.
If e.g. BMW makes a new model of car, the first sale of that car will be at a loss of hundreds of millions. It requires selling many cars to break even on a new model, and if they don't sell enough of that model in the end, the model is just a normal business failure (there are always going to be products that don't make money) - it doesn't mean BMW must try charge customers billions for each car - they can't, they have to sell cars at market rates.
It's the same for any old widget.
You must be new here. Bad summaries with garden path constructions are part of old slashdot tradition.
Downmodded for posting pure fact. Vested interests?
Mobile phones.
"By the end of 2014, it is forecast that there will be more than 635m mobile subscriptions in sub-Saharan Africa. This is predicted to rise, to about 930m by late 2019, when it is estimated that three in four mobile subscriptions will be internet inclusive. The growth is attributed to the rise of social media, content-rich apps and video content accessed from a new range of smartphones costing less than $50 (£30)" http://www.theguardian.com/wor...
Polygraphs are at best a cheap party trick. They shouldn't be used anywhere near anything to do with law enforcement or anything that has any influence over peoples lives.
The problem is not just the false positives - i.e. people lying, and beating the test - but false negatives - people who fail the test when telling the truth.
Polygraphs are an abomination and should be all destroyed and thrown in the trash.
If only you could print wealth.
Protests aren't a sign that austerity "isn't working", on the contrary, you'd have to be a fool not to expect protests on austerity measures - the purpose of austerity isn't to keep everyone happy, it's to prevent bankruptcy.
There is no downside to lower gas prices. lower prices on anything is always a positive.
Yup. You have to look carefully at where the "information" in this "article" is coming from - this is not even an article, it's basically a piece of political propaganda for the government - the same "author"'s other "article" headlines look like this: "More Evidence Austerity Is Terrible", "President Obama Deserves a Vacation", "Sympathy for the IRS on Tax Day", "How Cheap and Free Parking Is Screwing Up Cities".
Why do people seem to take political propaganda at face value, as if this article actually carries weight as a piece of economic advice, ha ha ha.
A more action-grounded response than my previous comment is that, what you are saying is an excellent suggestion, but needs to be actively promoted by people like yourself. E.g. do things like, write letters to those who set school curricula, requesting such additions. Do things like, write to teachers, speak to teachers, ask teachers - eventually you will find teachers who are emboldened to start sneaking such thoughts into their own classes here and there, making at least a small difference, keeping the torch of resistive thought burning.
Those in charge of educating our children are the same people who benefit from ensuring they grow up completely passive and obedient good little taxpayers.
Unlike what, all the "innovation" going on with Android and iOS? Really? "Innovative" business models maybe, like forcing ISVs to basically zero margins to subsidize the OS's R&D by taking 30% and offering a cut of that to the OEMs.
I know everyone likes to criticize NASA, but they have pulled off some extraordinary research on their really tight budgets. E.g. the initial cost for the Kepler Spacecraft mission was just something like $600million - and that project has quietly and with little fanfare achieved some of the most potentially history-changing research in the history of astronomy. (Why? Because for the first time in human history we are not only discovering many potentially 'earth-like' worlds, but actually basically starting to build the first "maps" of the planets in our galaxy - these are basically the first maps that will be used when we start sending probes to, and then later traveling to and colonizing other star systems - historians of the future will understand the significance in hindsight in a way few seem to grasp today.)
I think the best approach would be a hybrid one. Though healthcare sector is NOT any sort of 'role model'. Companies like SpaceX clearly have a lot to bring to the table in terms of innovation and bringing costs down, but to achieve large, visionary goals for man, will probably be helped a lot by government funding.
There is a myth though that anything to do with space is hideously unaffordably expensive. If you look at the actual numbers, this isn't really true. E.g. NASA's annual budget is just 0.5% of the money we blew on the Iraq War.
American healthcare system is not really "private" unless you consider a fasco-Corporatist system with government-protected cartels and monopolies and protections an example of a "private" system. I don't.
^This. I wish I had mod points now to mod you up.
It's a bit shocking that on a supposedly nerd site like slashdot, most here seem to completely fail to understand even basic statistics, but I suppose that's the world we live in, no wonder it's such a mess.
With the small sample size, you'd need a bigger gap. If the numbers were 70% and 20%, you'd have conclusive evidence of a significant difference between populations. At 70% and 77%, you have no evidence for any difference at all; a small difference could exist, but it is exceedingly unlikely that a LARGE difference exists.
It's possible also the difference of 70% vs 77% (IF those are relatively representative) count be accounted for by other qualitative differences between the photos - e.g. the black woman is in public while the white woman's photo appears that it may be in a more private setting.
Americans seem to be equal opportunity hysterical haters of breastfeeding. It was interesting to me also just how it is indeed much more predominantly men who seem to want to dictate that women cover up - I'm surprised to see the feminists were right about that one.
The science seems to still be out on whether earthquakes may trigger other earthquakes, but many consider it plausible: http://news.nationalgeographic... "Earthquakes Can Trigger More Earthquakes, Experts Say" "Can one earthquake cause another? A developing theory holds that quakes can pressure highly stressed fault lines and trigger subsequent seismic events" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
Just some long-term thinking here: A point to remember is that the first trip would be the most expensive. If the first trip to Mars costs $100 billion, the second one would cost only a fraction of that, as then all the technologies would have been developed, and we'd have the requisite body of expertise.
Do you think that if they get the funding they need they don't intend to follow through? If not, then in what sense is it a "scam"? That is not what the word "scam" means.