Too bad I don't have any mod points this go-round.
That's alright. I've said this before to someone else, but I enjoy it more to see people replying and sharing their opinion (whether it be in support of my argument or not) than I enjoy seeing a +5 next to my comment.
This is the best described vision of rights I have read. Now, to convince the world of this vision.
Thanks. I wish I could say that I was this incredibly intelligent and astute hobby philosopher and that I came up with that stuff all on my own. Unfortunately, that's not the case and that view of rights isn't even particularly new. Hobbes and Locke definitely phrased it better than I did when they described their concept of a social contract. I like their views for two reasons. First, because it really emphasizes individual freedom. Second, because it does recognize that there's a need for a government and that some regulations are actually necessary.
I didn't always share those views. It took a history class which introduced those guys to make me form the opinion I have today. If you're going to try to convince anyone to see rights in that way, you're probably going to get farther quoting those guys than you would by quoting me:)
That's not how I view things. I view as humans have "every" right to "everything". Obviously, many rights will conflict in that view. My right to murder you because I don't like your opinion and your right to life conflict. In that situation, the stronger wins, case closed. Well, living afraid someone might kill you at any moment sounds bad, so we form a society and we decide that your right to life is more important, and for that reason (and that reason only) laws are enacted to remove my right to murder.
The difference between these two forms of thinking is that everytime someone wants to do something you have to justify what gives them the right to do it. If you think as I do, everyone can do whatever they want, and if the government wants to pass a law saying I can't do it, they better be able to justify why. Society has to agree that some other right is more important before any right can be removed.
In the US, that's exactly how it works. It's called the tenth amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people." Basically, "if the right isn't being prohibited by society (federal constitution or the states), the people have it."
In case of copyright, it works like this. Without copyright, if you write a book and you don't want everyone to read it without compensation, you are certainly free to hide it in a safe. If you convince someone that they should pay you for it, that's fine. However, whoever paid you has the right to copy and distribute however many times they want to whoever they want for whatever price they want. Obviously, if that happens a lot, you're not going to want to write any more books. Since society values having new books to read, we agreed to give up our right to copy and distribute your work by allowing Congress "to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries".
Since you need an incentive, and we want your book, we'll give you a greater chance to profit for it for some time, but then we want our right to copy back, when that time expires.
The grandparent has some form of religious view to backup the copyright point above. I just have this other view which works out to about the same thing. You want to "own" an idea? Fine, keep your idea secret and don't tell anyone. You need to tell people about it in order to profit? Well, that's your problem, I have a right to appropriate and use your idea. I'll even agree to not do it for a limited time period, because I want you to have an incentive to give more good ideas to society...but after that time is up, I'm taking it.
Show me a reputable news source, professional journal, or educational institution which does not include the overuse of the source material as plagiarism.
How about a dictionary dude? Any reputable news source, professional journal, or education institution will have rules against copyright violations as well as plagiarism, but they won't call the "overuse of source material" something that it is not, even as they burn you for it. There are laws against that already, no need to try to fit it into another term.
The collection should be kept whole and rented out to people and groups who want to make low-budget Star Trek movies.
I think you overestimate the quality of the props. Most toys that you buy are much better quality. I believe it was in the "I Am Spock" (or "I Am Not Spock") autobiography that I read this, but Nimoy said that it was easy to spot fake Tribbles being sold at conventions as the actual props used: if they actually looked anything like tribbles, they were fake. Basically, the art department people didn't even bother covering the entire prop with fur, since only sections at a time would be shown on camera.
I guess this means a lot of people search for these things. But it's probably fair to complain about Google actually suggesting these search terms.
What's wrong with suggesting those search terms? First of all they are search terms. Searching for them isn't illegal. Getting pirated copies is. Second, some of those have dual meanings that are hard to filter. Cracks could relate to things that are not software related, how would the software know the difference? Finally, not every one of those are necessarily illegitimate. Cracks have their legitimate uses. Every gamer I know cracks their single player games that they paid for, so that they don't have to keep the cd in the drive when playing. People with legitimate copies of windows crack them so they don't have to go through the activation process every time they format / reinstall.
DMCA, yeah, yeah...That law needs to be rescinded.
Often they're two semi-random words stuck together like that
ThinThread is anything but random. Given that they recognized the illegality of performing surveillance on American citizens without the proper warrants, they devised this plan of encrypting the numbers in order to get what they want while still walking the thin line between the illegal action and the legal one.
That's because people got stuck in this notion that fuel cells are a replacement for batteries. They're great, but they make horrible batteries. I know I don't want to go back to the days when I have to buy new batteries every time they exhaust. I like the convenience of recharging them at home, something you just can't do with fuel cells.
Right now, if my laptop batteries are running low, I have to plug it into an outlet to keep using it. The fuel cell laptops will have longer "battery" life, of course, but when they're running low you still have to plug it into an outlet. The difference is that when you unplug them, one of them will be recharged, the other will require you to buy more stuff before you can use your laptop without plugging it in again.
Watch "Saving Private Ryan" over and over and see if the opening scene gives you the same reaction it did before.
I think that's more because you know exactly what's going to happen than because you're being desensitized to violence. The first time, things that are happening catch you by surprise. Now, I don't care how many times you've seen Saving Private Ryan, if you get placed in a real battle situation, you're going to freak out (unless you've had other training, of course).
The same thing is much more easily seen with comedies. The first time I see a good comedy, I spend most of the time laughing. I'll never laugh as much in subsequent viewings. It doesn't mean I'm getting desensitized to comedy. It means I've seen that scene before.
Guess how many terrorists have been caught by the London camera network - which was installed to track down terrorists. If you guessed "zero" you'd be 100% correct.
I'm against invasion of privacy just as much as you are but if you use incorrect arguments that'll work against your case. The terrorists from the 2005 London bombings were caught on camera. Not in time to save anyone, but it does help with investigations.
The question that needs to be asked is whether or not the extra security we gain is worth all the rights we're losing. You and I don't think so, but giving incorrect facts will just give people that don't agree an easy way to win the argument against you.
Components in satellites are rad-hardened because the Earth's magnetic field does not protect them from solar radiation.
Well, sort of. Satellites at orbits that take them through the South Atlantic Anomaly have to withstand a few minutes unprotected by the magnetic field per orbital cycle. Their lifetimes would definitely decrease if they were exposed to the radiation the entire time, I have no idea by how much. Then again, since the Van Allen belt exists due to the trapping of solar wind by the Earth's magnetic field, the satellites might be fine after all.
You aren't even "entitled" to a job. There is nothing, at least in the U.S. Constitution, that says you are entitled to a job.
I didn't say you were entitled to a job. I said that being employed by a company doesn't give them the right to exploit you, one form of which could be making you work unreasonable hours.
A job is a contract. You are free to negotiate the terms of that contract.
There are certain rights you can't sign away.
Furthermore, define reasonable.
I don't have to. It's a representative government. We've defined a 40-hour week as reasonable. Does that mean you shouldn't be allowed to work more than that if you want to volunteer for it? Not at all. It means that your job shouldn't depend on you working for longer than that. I'm not claiming this is what the laws say, but it's my view of fairness.
Is it reasonable to work a 14 hour day because a server has crashed and must be up again by tomorrow or the company loses millions? To the company it is. Maybe not to you.
It's reasonable to volunteer to do that. It's expected that a company should reward you, through overtime pay (even if you are a salaried employee) for saving them millions, thus providing the incentive for you to volunteer. If the server is crashing on your watch too often, it's reasonable for the company to get someone better for the job and fire you. If it's not possible for a single man to do your job in a 40-hour week, it's reasonable that a company would hire someone else to help you.
If I were running the show, I would expect my employees to, barring issues out of thier control, take one for the team during crunch time. I would expect all of my team members to do that. And when crunch time is over, they all get a nice break and a bonus (based on performance during the crunch time). This is just good for morale.
Sounds good. The only problem I have with that is that you expect it to be your employees' responsiblity to stay during crunch time, unless they have an excuse not to. I say you're allowed to expect to get their 40 hours a week from them. If you want them to volunteer for more, I'm sure that promised bonus and break will convince quite a few people to do it. That is much better for morale than having that guy who doesn't really value the bonus as much as he does time with his family, but is working overtime anyway because he fears getting fired.
Now let's say you take the approach that lack of "reasonable" work hours impedes those unalienable rights. How so? Will you lose your life if you don't work those hours? No. Are you being held hostage and forced to work those hours unable to quit? No.
You forget something. You need money to pay for shelter, to buy food. You need money to live. That means quitting a job because you don't like your contract isn't always an option, and thus you don't really have the liberty to quit. Now, you already expected this argument from me, because you said:
...nothing is FORCING you to stay with that company. Sure, you may feel trapped by a poor job market or lifestyle/family choices that will put you in a bind if you leave the current salary or position but as with the other two you aren't being FORCED.
All I can say to that is if your choice is to leave the company or be without money (important for survival as mentioned above), then that's not a choice, that's coersion. You wouldn't approve of someone threatening to hurt you unless you did something for them because that's encroaching on your right to liberty. However, you seem to approve of someone threatening to fire you and take away your source of income if you don't work more than the agreed upon by society number of reasonable work hours.
An employment contract is different from most other contracts because it's a contract you must enter. If you don't choose to enter one with one company, you'll have to enter one with another. If there are no regulations protecting your rights, that shifts the market forces against you, and every company will end up with unreasonable contracts, thus removing your choices.
Yeah, I agree with you. I run ubuntu on my laptop because I don't want to do anything with my laptop other than "just have it work." The parent poster just seems to dislike the fact that they try to make things easy for those who are novices, as well as secure by default. He mentioned he doesn't want it to be another linspire, but the problem with linspire is that it's not good for novices. It teaches them bad practices, like logging on as root by default. With no password. So Ubuntu set up sudo to make sure that the environment is a bit more secure by default, without the user having to know anything about security, and it doesn't require the user to remember two passwords.
In my opinion, and probably yours since you like Ubuntu, that's a Good Thing (TM).
The project treats its users as if they were complete idiots
--- It's linux "for the rest of us." Linux for people who don't know a thing about computers
Thank you for proving my point.
Well...you just proved why there's a need for a distribution like that. People like you think that because someone doesn't know and doesn't want to know anything more about computers than what they need to accomplish their daily tasks are "idiots." So Linux has always been "too hard" for the average user to migrate to because people like you expect everyone else to just put up with it and learn. Well, they don't want to.
And why should they have to? My mother doesn't want to learn how to configure networking. She just wants to browse, send e-mail, organize her pictures in some sort of photo software. I've set her up with Ubuntu, and she's happy with it. What do you want me to do? Have her pay for a windows license? Pirate windows? Tell her that she can't use the computer unless she learns how to do certain basic things that have nothing to do with what she wants to do with it?
Oh wait...people like you might answer 'yes' to that last one. If you do, I'll classify you as the idiot. If not, then you should understand my point.
Seriously, people who want more freedom and less of a safety net have plenty of choices in the linux world. Why are you so against having some choices available for the people who will be more comfortable with the safety net?
I once actually got banned on freenode for advising a newbie to use su.
That seems pretty bad. Unless they politely said that su was a bad idea, and you tried insisting that it's not in front of the newbie. That just brings up confusion, and somebody needs to pull rank.
I'll explain to you why sudo is the way to go. With my school research, we were using some software that required linux, and I set up a few computers with it for some other students. They didn't know much of anything about linux at the time, and I explained to them how to work the basics. For installing software and for doing something else in particular, you needed root privileges, and I showed them how to use su. Now, you have to understand. These people come from a Windows environment. They don't like having to switch to an adminstrator account, they want to be the administrator. So, now that they knew the root password, it wasn't long before they were just logged on as root the entire time so as to not go through the bother of typing 'su' and a password. I know that's a bad idea, you know that's a bad idea, they didn't, regardless of how I explained to them. Regardless of the fact that the default wallpaper for the root user on KDE was a big red thing that said, "DON'T LOG IN AS ROOT." It's just much safer for newbies to use sudo, and not even be aware of a root account, and ubuntu is a distribution for newbies. That was always its purpose
The thing about ubuntu. It was made to be the safety scissors of linux. It's linux "for the rest of us." Linux for people who don't know a thing about computers, don't want to learn a thing about computers, but just want to use it for their day-to-day activities. It's the distribution I tell anyone new to linux to try out. If you want something more expert-like, you still have plenty of choices. What's wrong with Debian? It's essentially the same thing, and you can configure it the way you want.
I thought you were TheSkepticalOptimist. That's certainly skeptical, but...
First, and foremost, you could never have a mixed environment of automated and manually driven vehicles.
There are some convenient automatic driving function for which that applies, but these are only things which would require communication between vehicles in order to reach social equilibriums. It would do wonders to help traffic problems, but it would indeed require every car to be automated. Nothing you mentioned is in that category though.
Computers cannot anticipate the irradict behaviour of a drunk driver. Nor can they anticipate a woman swearving across 6 lanes of traffic to hit her exit because she was too busy putting on lipstick to pay attention to the exit signs.
Can you? See, those things happen today. Pileups happen because of it, and computers have nothing to do with it...the reason is because humans do stupid things, and the other humans are slow to react. The only question is, when that car is coming to hit you, who can react faster, you or the computer? If there are signs that the other driver is going to do something stupid before they actually do it, I'll agree you'll be able to identify them much better than a computer. However, in an emergency situation where the other car is already coming at you, the computer won't suffer the initial moment of panic before it starts reacting. The computer also has a better chance of seeing it then you, because it can have sensors in all directions simultaneously.
Not to mention that it will cut down on the idiots. That woman putting on her lipstick will definitely use automation (if she can afford a car with it), so she can save all sorts of time on the road.
There is no way a computer driven vehicle will respond appropriately if a deer rushes on the road...a human might pick up a deer standing still off the side of the road and slow down anticipating if it might jump out
That's not true though. In the vast majority of cases, the deers are hidden in a lot of vegetation to the side of the road before they jump out. And at night, even if the deer were to be standing around stopped or walking slowly in the middle of the road before deciding to start racing to the side (heh), you still wouldn't see it until you're too close. Since that's not a situation where the driver is likely to get an early warning, a properly designed computer system will most definitely react better than the human. Speed of reaction along with awareness of other cars that might be near you is everything in that situation, thus the computer has the advantage.
Again...people hit deers all the time now and it has nothing to do with computers. I don't know the stats for sure, but if I were to guess, I'd guess most people that have an encounter with a deer jumping in front of them end up hitting it, and the minority manage to get out of the way safely (without hitting another car, or a tree to the side of the road, or something). People who actually drive in heavy deer crossing areas can correct me here if I'm wrong.
or suddenly there is a freak blizzard and the road conditions go from dry to slick
Again, computer control systems can react to that faster than humans. Didn't you read the article summary, where the control system of a car in existence today was able to right the fishtail effect after the test driver was going too fast on a wet road, in a tight curve and jerked the wheel? There's obviously room for improvement, as we can see from all the ABS people talking about how it sucks in snow, but that's already getting better.
And once more people have weather related accidents all the time as is. Most people suck at driving...I should know, I'm not a great driver myself. I mean, people get the reminder signs that "bridges ice before roads" but still slip as soon as they hit the bridge on
You make a valid point, but I would argue that the PVR is as much like a VCR as a horse and buggy is like a motor vehicle.
I completely agree with you. Let me remind you that the motor vehicle was once referred to as a "horseless carriage." It goes back to the fact that explaining things to people is always easier if you explain to them in terms of things which they already understand.
I say the PVR isn't novel not because it's not ages ahead of the VCR, but because people with tuners already had essentially a PVR in their computer. Tivo most certainly did a great job in writing clever software to make it a much more attractive solution, but it's still not a new invention in the sense of the word. It's a great product, but I don't think it's a patenteable product. You argue that the initial confusion was because it was so novel that people couldn't understand what it was, I claim the confusion was because they were so afraid of comparing themselves to a VCR, that they couldn't just explain that it was the VCR of the computer age.
Back then, people still saw TiVo as a kind of VCR, which it really wasn't.
Heh...actually, it really is. It's a vast improvement over a VCR, no doubt, but it's not really that different. The difficulty in explaining what a PVR did was because people kept trying to say that it's not a VCR, instead of just describing what the improvements were.
A PVR record shows. So does a VCR. That's the primary function.
You can schedule something to be recorded at a time when you won't be available to watch the show. You can do that with both the VCR and the PVR, however, the PVR's scheduling is vastly improved. Instead of scheduling by time, you can schedule by the name of the show. And have it record all instances, or only new instances. It also has a very easy interface, so it eliminates the problem that so many people don't know how to program their VCR. That's what they should have told people when they were explaining it. "You can schedule a recording based only on the name of the show. And all you need to do is to scroll to that show via a menu and press a button."
There's a large storage on the machine itself. No need to buy tape. No need to search for a tape. Nice, organized menu with all the available shows, which you can select and play. They should have explained THAT: "All the shows are organized on the machine itself. No more looking for where you put that tape."
Again, with the no tape concept, it's all stored digitally. That means no rewinding, or searching for something on a tape. If you want to skip commercials, you can skip them faster by set increments...or if you have the fancy commercial detection algorithms like mythtv, it's even easier. And again, that's what they should have done: "Just like with a VCR, you can fast forward, rewind, replay, and pause. However, you get the benefits you're already familiar from the DVD. We do it faster, and you don't have the rewind the tape."
The point is, it is pretty much a VCR. Its pupose is to record shows. It's much, much, better than VCR, and once you start using a PVR, you don't want to go back. However, every single one of the improvements are natural extensions of moving from a tape to a hard drive, and having some sort of nice software to browse through the files. People with tuners in their computers were doing that already, it just wasn't nice and polished like it is now.
Besides, it's always easy to explain something new to a person by comparing it to something they're already familiar with. But they tried so hard to distance themselves from the VCR image that it caused extra confusion.
Synthehol doesn't get you drunk in Star Trek. It's just that a lot of the characters manage to get their hands on real drinks. From the TNG episode Family:
Robert: "Your synthehol...never leaves you out of control, isn't that so?"
Picard: "That is so."
Robert: "This will. Now there's something I'd like to see."
Picard: "What's that?"
Robert: "I venture you've probably never been drunk in your entire life."
The episode you're remembering is Relics. Data does claim that synthehol, "simulates the appearance, smell, and taste of alcohol, but the intoxicating effects can be easily dismissed." I suppose you could interpret "easily dismissed" as "easily shaken off" but given the evidence from other episodes, I interpret it as him saying that the intoxicating effects are so low that they can be dismissed as inexistent.
using profiling in airport security checks out of fear of 'offending' political correctness people
I assume you meant not using profiling in airport security. I agree with you on all your points, and I personally believe that airport security right now doesn't do much more than inconvenience people anyway. However, I'd just like to point out that if you were trying to secure the airport, instead of just trying to make people feel safer and think you're doing something, profiling is a really bad idea. If the people performing the attack are aware of a certain type of person you're not checking as thoroughly (let's say, caucasian pregnant women), they'll try to use that. It's not like caucasian americans haven't been brainwashed before, and it's not like you can't just sneak things into another person's bag, even if people are supposed to pay attention to their luggage at all times.
That's not even mentioning that there may be other groups interested in hijacking or blowing up planes that have nothing to do with arab terrorists. Profiling just isn't smart, and it has nothing to do with political correctness.
Which is really the thing about proofreading your own work: You tend to see what you meant to type, not what you actually typed. Which is why there's a need for editors
Good work on the submission, I, for one, highly enjoyed it.
Ironically, they have a better product on many levels, but that kind of zealotry just plain puts me off.
Heh...you'd dismiss a product which you claim to know is superior on many levels because of a joke on the part of the people representing the product?
I don't really know if postgresql is better than mysql or oracle or whatever...but if I had some need of finding out, postcards on the table of some people I'd probably never meet again wouldn't be one of the variables that I would be considering.
Negative advertisement is everywhere, from political ads, to the Sun "screw Dell" ads. Some are funny, some show a lack of taste or professionalism. And these are real ad campaigns that get seen by millions of people. The postcards were just at the darn convention, obviously meant for humor, not zealotry. None of these should be a part of serious consideration when choosing a product. Best tool for the job is all you should care about.
...doesn't mean it's off topic. I guess that explains why Arrested Development got cancelled though. None of the mods seemed to get it. If it's any consolation, that's exactly what I was thought when I saw the title:)
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That's alright. I've said this before to someone else, but I enjoy it more to see people replying and sharing their opinion (whether it be in support of my argument or not) than I enjoy seeing a +5 next to my comment.
This is the best described vision of rights I have read. Now, to convince the world of this vision.
Thanks. I wish I could say that I was this incredibly intelligent and astute hobby philosopher and that I came up with that stuff all on my own. Unfortunately, that's not the case and that view of rights isn't even particularly new. Hobbes and Locke definitely phrased it better than I did when they described their concept of a social contract. I like their views for two reasons. First, because it really emphasizes individual freedom. Second, because it does recognize that there's a need for a government and that some regulations are actually necessary.
I didn't always share those views. It took a history class which introduced those guys to make me form the opinion I have today. If you're going to try to convince anyone to see rights in that way, you're probably going to get farther quoting those guys than you would by quoting me :)
That's not how I view things. I view as humans have "every" right to "everything". Obviously, many rights will conflict in that view. My right to murder you because I don't like your opinion and your right to life conflict. In that situation, the stronger wins, case closed. Well, living afraid someone might kill you at any moment sounds bad, so we form a society and we decide that your right to life is more important, and for that reason (and that reason only) laws are enacted to remove my right to murder.
The difference between these two forms of thinking is that everytime someone wants to do something you have to justify what gives them the right to do it. If you think as I do, everyone can do whatever they want, and if the government wants to pass a law saying I can't do it, they better be able to justify why. Society has to agree that some other right is more important before any right can be removed.
In the US, that's exactly how it works. It's called the tenth amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people." Basically, "if the right isn't being prohibited by society (federal constitution or the states), the people have it."
In case of copyright, it works like this. Without copyright, if you write a book and you don't want everyone to read it without compensation, you are certainly free to hide it in a safe. If you convince someone that they should pay you for it, that's fine. However, whoever paid you has the right to copy and distribute however many times they want to whoever they want for whatever price they want. Obviously, if that happens a lot, you're not going to want to write any more books. Since society values having new books to read, we agreed to give up our right to copy and distribute your work by allowing Congress "to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries".
Since you need an incentive, and we want your book, we'll give you a greater chance to profit for it for some time, but then we want our right to copy back, when that time expires.The grandparent has some form of religious view to backup the copyright point above. I just have this other view which works out to about the same thing. You want to "own" an idea? Fine, keep your idea secret and don't tell anyone. You need to tell people about it in order to profit? Well, that's your problem, I have a right to appropriate and use your idea. I'll even agree to not do it for a limited time period, because I want you to have an incentive to give more good ideas to society...but after that time is up, I'm taking it.
How about a dictionary dude? Any reputable news source, professional journal, or education institution will have rules against copyright violations as well as plagiarism, but they won't call the "overuse of source material" something that it is not, even as they burn you for it. There are laws against that already, no need to try to fit it into another term.
I think you overestimate the quality of the props. Most toys that you buy are much better quality. I believe it was in the "I Am Spock" (or "I Am Not Spock") autobiography that I read this, but Nimoy said that it was easy to spot fake Tribbles being sold at conventions as the actual props used: if they actually looked anything like tribbles, they were fake. Basically, the art department people didn't even bother covering the entire prop with fur, since only sections at a time would be shown on camera.
A higher chance to make money. Whether he actually does or not isn't guaranteed.
What's wrong with suggesting those search terms? First of all they are search terms. Searching for them isn't illegal. Getting pirated copies is. Second, some of those have dual meanings that are hard to filter. Cracks could relate to things that are not software related, how would the software know the difference? Finally, not every one of those are necessarily illegitimate. Cracks have their legitimate uses. Every gamer I know cracks their single player games that they paid for, so that they don't have to keep the cd in the drive when playing. People with legitimate copies of windows crack them so they don't have to go through the activation process every time they format / reinstall.
DMCA, yeah, yeah...That law needs to be rescinded.
ThinThread is anything but random. Given that they recognized the illegality of performing surveillance on American citizens without the proper warrants, they devised this plan of encrypting the numbers in order to get what they want while still walking the thin line between the illegal action and the legal one.
That's because people got stuck in this notion that fuel cells are a replacement for batteries. They're great, but they make horrible batteries. I know I don't want to go back to the days when I have to buy new batteries every time they exhaust. I like the convenience of recharging them at home, something you just can't do with fuel cells.
Right now, if my laptop batteries are running low, I have to plug it into an outlet to keep using it. The fuel cell laptops will have longer "battery" life, of course, but when they're running low you still have to plug it into an outlet. The difference is that when you unplug them, one of them will be recharged, the other will require you to buy more stuff before you can use your laptop without plugging it in again.
I think that's more because you know exactly what's going to happen than because you're being desensitized to violence. The first time, things that are happening catch you by surprise. Now, I don't care how many times you've seen Saving Private Ryan, if you get placed in a real battle situation, you're going to freak out (unless you've had other training, of course).
The same thing is much more easily seen with comedies. The first time I see a good comedy, I spend most of the time laughing. I'll never laugh as much in subsequent viewings. It doesn't mean I'm getting desensitized to comedy. It means I've seen that scene before.
I'm against invasion of privacy just as much as you are but if you use incorrect arguments that'll work against your case. The terrorists from the 2005 London bombings were caught on camera. Not in time to save anyone, but it does help with investigations.
The question that needs to be asked is whether or not the extra security we gain is worth all the rights we're losing. You and I don't think so, but giving incorrect facts will just give people that don't agree an easy way to win the argument against you.
Well, sort of. Satellites at orbits that take them through the South Atlantic Anomaly have to withstand a few minutes unprotected by the magnetic field per orbital cycle. Their lifetimes would definitely decrease if they were exposed to the radiation the entire time, I have no idea by how much. Then again, since the Van Allen belt exists due to the trapping of solar wind by the Earth's magnetic field, the satellites might be fine after all.
You aren't even "entitled" to a job. There is nothing, at least in the U.S. Constitution, that says you are entitled to a job.
I didn't say you were entitled to a job. I said that being employed by a company doesn't give them the right to exploit you, one form of which could be making you work unreasonable hours.
A job is a contract. You are free to negotiate the terms of that contract.
There are certain rights you can't sign away.
Furthermore, define reasonable.
I don't have to. It's a representative government. We've defined a 40-hour week as reasonable. Does that mean you shouldn't be allowed to work more than that if you want to volunteer for it? Not at all. It means that your job shouldn't depend on you working for longer than that. I'm not claiming this is what the laws say, but it's my view of fairness.
Is it reasonable to work a 14 hour day because a server has crashed and must be up again by tomorrow or the company loses millions? To the company it is. Maybe not to you.
It's reasonable to volunteer to do that. It's expected that a company should reward you, through overtime pay (even if you are a salaried employee) for saving them millions, thus providing the incentive for you to volunteer. If the server is crashing on your watch too often, it's reasonable for the company to get someone better for the job and fire you. If it's not possible for a single man to do your job in a 40-hour week, it's reasonable that a company would hire someone else to help you.
If I were running the show, I would expect my employees to, barring issues out of thier control, take one for the team during crunch time. I would expect all of my team members to do that. And when crunch time is over, they all get a nice break and a bonus (based on performance during the crunch time). This is just good for morale.
Sounds good. The only problem I have with that is that you expect it to be your employees' responsiblity to stay during crunch time, unless they have an excuse not to. I say you're allowed to expect to get their 40 hours a week from them. If you want them to volunteer for more, I'm sure that promised bonus and break will convince quite a few people to do it. That is much better for morale than having that guy who doesn't really value the bonus as much as he does time with his family, but is working overtime anyway because he fears getting fired.
Now let's say you take the approach that lack of "reasonable" work hours impedes those unalienable rights. How so? Will you lose your life if you don't work those hours? No. Are you being held hostage and forced to work those hours unable to quit? No.
You forget something. You need money to pay for shelter, to buy food. You need money to live. That means quitting a job because you don't like your contract isn't always an option, and thus you don't really have the liberty to quit. Now, you already expected this argument from me, because you said:
All I can say to that is if your choice is to leave the company or be without money (important for survival as mentioned above), then that's not a choice, that's coersion. You wouldn't approve of someone threatening to hurt you unless you did something for them because that's encroaching on your right to liberty. However, you seem to approve of someone threatening to fire you and take away your source of income if you don't work more than the agreed upon by society number of reasonable work hours.
An employment contract is different from most other contracts because it's a contract you must enter. If you don't choose to enter one with one company, you'll have to enter one with another. If there are no regulations protecting your rights, that shifts the market forces against you, and every company will end up with unreasonable contracts, thus removing your choices.
I see this a lot. Just exactly what is wrong with acknowledging that there are some things people are entitled to? Like reasonable work hours?
In my opinion, and probably yours since you like Ubuntu, that's a Good Thing (TM).
The project treats its users as if they were complete idiots
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It's linux "for the rest of us." Linux for people who don't know a thing about computers
Thank you for proving my point.
Well...you just proved why there's a need for a distribution like that. People like you think that because someone doesn't know and doesn't want to know anything more about computers than what they need to accomplish their daily tasks are "idiots." So Linux has always been "too hard" for the average user to migrate to because people like you expect everyone else to just put up with it and learn. Well, they don't want to.
And why should they have to? My mother doesn't want to learn how to configure networking. She just wants to browse, send e-mail, organize her pictures in some sort of photo software. I've set her up with Ubuntu, and she's happy with it. What do you want me to do? Have her pay for a windows license? Pirate windows? Tell her that she can't use the computer unless she learns how to do certain basic things that have nothing to do with what she wants to do with it?
Oh wait...people like you might answer 'yes' to that last one. If you do, I'll classify you as the idiot. If not, then you should understand my point.
Seriously, people who want more freedom and less of a safety net have plenty of choices in the linux world. Why are you so against having some choices available for the people who will be more comfortable with the safety net?
That seems pretty bad. Unless they politely said that su was a bad idea, and you tried insisting that it's not in front of the newbie. That just brings up confusion, and somebody needs to pull rank.
I'll explain to you why sudo is the way to go. With my school research, we were using some software that required linux, and I set up a few computers with it for some other students. They didn't know much of anything about linux at the time, and I explained to them how to work the basics. For installing software and for doing something else in particular, you needed root privileges, and I showed them how to use su. Now, you have to understand. These people come from a Windows environment. They don't like having to switch to an adminstrator account, they want to be the administrator. So, now that they knew the root password, it wasn't long before they were just logged on as root the entire time so as to not go through the bother of typing 'su' and a password. I know that's a bad idea, you know that's a bad idea, they didn't, regardless of how I explained to them. Regardless of the fact that the default wallpaper for the root user on KDE was a big red thing that said, "DON'T LOG IN AS ROOT." It's just much safer for newbies to use sudo, and not even be aware of a root account, and ubuntu is a distribution for newbies. That was always its purpose
The thing about ubuntu. It was made to be the safety scissors of linux. It's linux "for the rest of us." Linux for people who don't know a thing about computers, don't want to learn a thing about computers, but just want to use it for their day-to-day activities. It's the distribution I tell anyone new to linux to try out. If you want something more expert-like, you still have plenty of choices. What's wrong with Debian? It's essentially the same thing, and you can configure it the way you want.
I thought you were TheSkepticalOptimist. That's certainly skeptical, but...
First, and foremost, you could never have a mixed environment of automated and manually driven vehicles.
There are some convenient automatic driving function for which that applies, but these are only things which would require communication between vehicles in order to reach social equilibriums. It would do wonders to help traffic problems, but it would indeed require every car to be automated. Nothing you mentioned is in that category though.
Computers cannot anticipate the irradict behaviour of a drunk driver. Nor can they anticipate a woman swearving across 6 lanes of traffic to hit her exit because she was too busy putting on lipstick to pay attention to the exit signs.
Can you? See, those things happen today. Pileups happen because of it, and computers have nothing to do with it...the reason is because humans do stupid things, and the other humans are slow to react. The only question is, when that car is coming to hit you, who can react faster, you or the computer? If there are signs that the other driver is going to do something stupid before they actually do it, I'll agree you'll be able to identify them much better than a computer. However, in an emergency situation where the other car is already coming at you, the computer won't suffer the initial moment of panic before it starts reacting. The computer also has a better chance of seeing it then you, because it can have sensors in all directions simultaneously.
Not to mention that it will cut down on the idiots. That woman putting on her lipstick will definitely use automation (if she can afford a car with it), so she can save all sorts of time on the road.
There is no way a computer driven vehicle will respond appropriately if a deer rushes on the road...a human might pick up a deer standing still off the side of the road and slow down anticipating if it might jump out
That's not true though. In the vast majority of cases, the deers are hidden in a lot of vegetation to the side of the road before they jump out. And at night, even if the deer were to be standing around stopped or walking slowly in the middle of the road before deciding to start racing to the side (heh), you still wouldn't see it until you're too close. Since that's not a situation where the driver is likely to get an early warning, a properly designed computer system will most definitely react better than the human. Speed of reaction along with awareness of other cars that might be near you is everything in that situation, thus the computer has the advantage.
Again...people hit deers all the time now and it has nothing to do with computers. I don't know the stats for sure, but if I were to guess, I'd guess most people that have an encounter with a deer jumping in front of them end up hitting it, and the minority manage to get out of the way safely (without hitting another car, or a tree to the side of the road, or something). People who actually drive in heavy deer crossing areas can correct me here if I'm wrong.
or suddenly there is a freak blizzard and the road conditions go from dry to slick
Again, computer control systems can react to that faster than humans. Didn't you read the article summary, where the control system of a car in existence today was able to right the fishtail effect after the test driver was going too fast on a wet road, in a tight curve and jerked the wheel? There's obviously room for improvement, as we can see from all the ABS people talking about how it sucks in snow, but that's already getting better.
And once more people have weather related accidents all the time as is. Most people suck at driving...I should know, I'm not a great driver myself. I mean, people get the reminder signs that "bridges ice before roads" but still slip as soon as they hit the bridge on
I completely agree with you. Let me remind you that the motor vehicle was once referred to as a "horseless carriage." It goes back to the fact that explaining things to people is always easier if you explain to them in terms of things which they already understand.
I say the PVR isn't novel not because it's not ages ahead of the VCR, but because people with tuners already had essentially a PVR in their computer. Tivo most certainly did a great job in writing clever software to make it a much more attractive solution, but it's still not a new invention in the sense of the word. It's a great product, but I don't think it's a patenteable product. You argue that the initial confusion was because it was so novel that people couldn't understand what it was, I claim the confusion was because they were so afraid of comparing themselves to a VCR, that they couldn't just explain that it was the VCR of the computer age.
Heh...actually, it really is. It's a vast improvement over a VCR, no doubt, but it's not really that different. The difficulty in explaining what a PVR did was because people kept trying to say that it's not a VCR, instead of just describing what the improvements were.
The point is, it is pretty much a VCR. Its pupose is to record shows. It's much, much, better than VCR, and once you start using a PVR, you don't want to go back. However, every single one of the improvements are natural extensions of moving from a tape to a hard drive, and having some sort of nice software to browse through the files. People with tuners in their computers were doing that already, it just wasn't nice and polished like it is now.
Besides, it's always easy to explain something new to a person by comparing it to something they're already familiar with. But they tried so hard to distance themselves from the VCR image that it caused extra confusion.
Robert: "Your synthehol...never leaves you out of control, isn't that so?"
Picard: "That is so."
Robert: "This will. Now there's something I'd like to see."
Picard: "What's that?"
Robert: "I venture you've probably never been drunk in your entire life."
The episode you're remembering is Relics. Data does claim that synthehol, "simulates the appearance, smell, and taste of alcohol, but the intoxicating effects can be easily dismissed." I suppose you could interpret "easily dismissed" as "easily shaken off" but given the evidence from other episodes, I interpret it as him saying that the intoxicating effects are so low that they can be dismissed as inexistent.
I assume you meant not using profiling in airport security. I agree with you on all your points, and I personally believe that airport security right now doesn't do much more than inconvenience people anyway. However, I'd just like to point out that if you were trying to secure the airport, instead of just trying to make people feel safer and think you're doing something, profiling is a really bad idea. If the people performing the attack are aware of a certain type of person you're not checking as thoroughly (let's say, caucasian pregnant women), they'll try to use that. It's not like caucasian americans haven't been brainwashed before, and it's not like you can't just sneak things into another person's bag, even if people are supposed to pay attention to their luggage at all times.
That's not even mentioning that there may be other groups interested in hijacking or blowing up planes that have nothing to do with arab terrorists. Profiling just isn't smart, and it has nothing to do with political correctness.
Which is really the thing about proofreading your own work: You tend to see what you meant to type, not what you actually typed. Which is why there's a need for editors
Good work on the submission, I, for one, highly enjoyed it.
Or they could have Mac OS IX. "No, we're not going back to OS 9, we're just getting more letters off UNIX." :)
Heh...you'd dismiss a product which you claim to know is superior on many levels because of a joke on the part of the people representing the product?
I don't really know if postgresql is better than mysql or oracle or whatever...but if I had some need of finding out, postcards on the table of some people I'd probably never meet again wouldn't be one of the variables that I would be considering.
Negative advertisement is everywhere, from political ads, to the Sun "screw Dell" ads. Some are funny, some show a lack of taste or professionalism. And these are real ad campaigns that get seen by millions of people. The postcards were just at the darn convention, obviously meant for humor, not zealotry. None of these should be a part of serious consideration when choosing a product. Best tool for the job is all you should care about.
...doesn't mean it's off topic. I guess that explains why Arrested Development got cancelled though. None of the mods seemed to get it. If it's any consolation, that's exactly what I was thought when I saw the title :)