Rewards and prizes are great and grand, but can we seriously expect to match the amount spent in development, not to mention provide some sort of profit? They spend years developing these drugs and only manage to pull through through the sales thereof. If a drug fails, like torcetrapib just did for Pfizer, who is willing to step up and compensate the company for a billion or so odd dollars? If people really want to solve this problem, they need to either be willing to take on the burden of having to regularly pay medical research taxes, or is more likely, accept that patents can be worked around for cases where the drug is hard to afford, either by forcing the companies to offer huge discounts to those under a certain income level, or offer up tax money to those who buy the drugs, not sell them, so that they can purchase what they need without deciding against food, shelter, or drugs.
Until a system comes into place where compensation for drug development can be made through generics, in a market where the ultimate idea is to not have anyone have to use your product (ideally), or until a magical "third option" comes along outside of capitalist or governmental compensation, patents are an ugly, necessary evil. The best solution, again, would be to prop up those in the lower income bracket with drug money, or better yet, buy the drugs en masse and distribute them. I'm sure something along the lines is going on right now in parts of Africa and maybe the occasional clinic, so why not simply add more funding to this system to compensate while eyeballing the companies to ensure that no one company is getting fat off a drug monopoly?
It's one thing to discard privacy in the name of a liberating freedom of expression, but with that you have to accept the fact that people now have the ability to make presumptions about you based on how this information is leaked to them and what information is true. If you make certain of revealing all of your dark secrets -- dirty sexual things, for instance -- then the latter is no longer a problem: they have the story. Now comes the disconnect, however, as a lot of people really aren't as open as you and still cling onto values at odds with what you say and do. Ever try running for office? It's the same effect and it has destroyed politicians over some of the simplest falls from grace to underground things that were never intended to get out.
Here's my question: is it safer to bear all secrets and have none, and risk offending a lot of people and putting yourself in harm's way if one of them takes it personally, or should we just use some basic common sense, be open with a lot of things but hold the things that might get us in trouble as secret as possible? We can never assume how every person will act, so taking at some precautions is always a social necessity. I'm not saying you should hide all of your pornography and put Bibles on the table in fear of someone noticing -- if you can get away with something, then you're fine. It's when people start avoiding you that you should either change, make new friends, or try to change them, aka, when it's a bit too late to remove that factor from the equation.
As I figure the difference between "large rock orbiting the sun" and "larger rock orbiting the sun" will never be too important, why not define a planet by some standard of surface gravity, the point where it can hold gases without requiring the gases to be attracted to the body by some other force?
The true "morons" are the ones who love group projects, because they can do very little work and leach off the rest of the group. So a team-based software development project ends up catering to the folks who don't deserve it.
That's assuming one thing, that the grade from the project comes from the result. Seeing as the point of the project is to teach each student how to work in a development cycle, wouldn't it make more sense to grade the student on what they contribute? Maybe have the professor assume some superficial management role and get on their case when they slack off?
The Genius' Expression
on
The Expert Mind
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The question I have is, had Mozart been taught to write and to write constantly, would he be a famous writer? Or would his interests lie elsewhere and writing simply serve to be a hobby?
I think what seperates genius from someone who is simply "good" at something is a geniuine love for what they do later in life. They tend to be more well-rounded and express themselves through the various mediums, but the true geniuses excel in one or more of these modes of expression. The fact that they're well-versed in some skill just makes it all the more likely they'll end up producing something of great value in that area of the arts or science.
Why does this remind me so much of the anti-drug situation? Some people turning what is a hobby into something that controls their lives, with those in government trying to target those parts which it feels are undesirable, which just happen to be the part everyone enjoys. They ride on those who let the game consume them and generalize it until there's no money left to be made in the legal market and it just because something done at parties. When it's all said and done, the only thing left legal will be alcohol and The Sims.
Working in a grocery store, I thought of an idea that would possibly drive up little purchases like this: advertisements on the monitors, perhaps with arrows point to the merchandise while advertising the sale price (if any). Perhaps if you spend more than a certain amount, an ad offering a special price comes up before you pay...something like that. I know the last thing some of you want is more advertising in a grocery store, but you're already submerged and bombarded enough as-is inside of them... a quick flick of the wrist and press of the "No Thanks" button will become automatic.
So we reform it now...and once the pronounciation drifts, we keep changing it. Just like we have before. Why do you think Shakespeare's English varies from our own?
Writing is an attempt to express one's verbal language in a more permanent form, something to pass on to the next generation or at least record information for the larger masses. This is all fine and well until the verbal language changes. Suddenly, the permanence of the written language becomes its own worst problem -- the spelling, originally meant to reflect sounds, suddenly leaves this and becomes more abstract.
Written English is really less about preserving our pronounciation than giving clues: we can make a general assumption of what the word is based on what is written. It has a certain amount of ambiguity to it, so that one word can have multiple pronounciations. Why not expand upon this... as opposed to specifying the language to one set of "official" pronounciations, make it more ambigious. Take note of what seems to be the common threads in the spelling and pronounciation and what varies with the accent -- you may pronounce "tomato" different, but there are still sounds that remain common in every accent. Identify those and go from there if you want to improve English.
Maybe the introduction of an Ambigiuity marker, similar to the accent mark, to settle once and finally that it is both "tow-mah-tow" and "tow-may-tow"? Say, "tomXto", with a more appropriate symbol for X? There's a lot more you can do in generalizing the language... I'm just throwing stuff off the top of my head...
How about dropping the vowels altogether, like some varieties of Arabic... we read the words, not the letters, so turn them into the ultimate visual cues... it's too radical to be adoptable, but I'm just saying it would work individually.
It's easy when you have a fuzzy memory. It was a different car, but it was still an electric/gas hybrid that the company tried to buy back en masse. Or maybe not -- all I know is that he's had the thing for a couple of years before the concept became more mainstream, as he'd sneak up on people using the almost-silence electric engine. Sorry if I misled, either way.
PS: You're completely right. It's kinda silly I would get ranked so high. Then again, they aren't ranked on truth...
I think the reason we have fewer friends online is because there's more to becoming friends than just working with them, knowing them, or even living near them: you have to respect them mentally, something almost completely overlooked in the physical world. It's the difference between having a lot of friends and having a few close friends... every ally you have online is usually a close friend, or at least someone you have a genuine interest in talking to.
There are exceptions to the rule -- take MySpace, for example. In lowering the classification of a friend from mental relationship to point-and-click buddy, you get into a strange game of numbers. There's no close chance in Hell someone has a close relationship with the hundreds of people on their Friends list and, odds are, they probably haven't even met a fourth. In lowering the bar you've made more friends, but cheapened the definition.
No offense to those who live to surround themselves, but I'd rather have one good relationship than a thousand distant bodies floating around some club... but hey, everyone is different. It's really a matter of what you get out of friends; the more friends you have, the less they mean to you and the less you mean to them.
My chemistry teacher actually owns one of these. He purchased it when they were first introduced, and then was offered almost twice of what he paid for it to sell it back to them. He turned them down and still drives the thing to this day, much to GM's dismay, I'm sure.
So wait a minute - weren't we just getting all up-in-arms over the Chinese blocking their people from viewing unsolicited western sites? And now we should go ahead and block the entire country because of the rogue elements? I agree Chinese cr/hackers (take your pick) are a problem, but at the same time, so are any other skilled cr/hackers - just because this one has malicious intent doesn't mean we're doing any good by blocking such a large audience simply because of the possibility. Cracking will still occur, as with worms and trojans. Those who really want to will find alternate means of access (perhaps through countries a bit more generous than the United States). What is there to gain by this?
This will never work. As long as anyone on the WWW can post a picture of a penis on their personal website, there will never be a reason to have a.xxx domain - unless you plan to enforce it with a no-tolerance policy and an iron fist, which is the last thing I'm sure anyone here wants.
Move the couch foward. Problem solved. Move it back when you're done. Not being sarcastic, just trying to save you a little money until you get a proper table...
The Mozilla staff find this a morale booster since recent security vulnerabilities have slightly lowered the browser's growth rate.
...about that...Seventy-four million of those were me - you see, I've got AOL, and it has a tendency to disconnect me mid-download, so a lot of that was probably me trying to get a full copy. But hey! There's always next month.
It's also a good example of just how robust Windows is. There is a LOT of things that are failing gracefully behind the scenes and yet it's still useable to the extent possible.
I mean I see how you could see it as possibly a bad influence for kids. I never said it should be illegal to play it / handle it (in fact I said I was a fan of the series, if you actually paid attention to the post). My point is that I can see how he can make a logical jump with GTA, but not The Sims.
Please, The Sims is a tame as milk. I can almost agree with him on the GTA thing (although I enjoy the series), simply because it's obviously designed and left in the game, even though I find it hypocritical that he wouldn't seek a lawsuit before the mini-game was common knowledge (as if the violence and the hooker-in-a-car from the original weren't enough). But The Sims / The Sims 2 (the "blur" occurs on both version, if you remember)? Has this man ever seen a Barbie or Ken doll naked? That's about the extent of it. I especially love this line:
"Sims 2, the latest version of the Sims video game franchise...
contains, according to video game news sites, full frontal nudity, including nipples, penises, labia, and pubic hair."
No, no it doesn't, and "video game news sites" are not a source to base a lawsuit on, especially if you can't name the site or sites in question. The only thing that might make for evidence in anything whatsoever is the following site I ran into on the way to look for "proper" screenshots:
Now, this is not what he is accusing EA of - this is a skin patch, which should tell you right there what the deal is - if you want to see nude Sims with details, you're going to need a patch, because they're little more than mannequins under the blur. This would not exist if they had full-frontal nudity, penii, etc.
Groundless lawsuit by an ignorant man. Sick of this shit.
Great, so an entire domain series that porn sites can expand to, and have entirely blocked by every public and private filter known to man. What advantage is there to serving porn on the.xxx domain name when it's common knowledge that many sites already spoof well-known domain look-alikes with porn redirects, since the exposure is much greater. The only possibility I can see is that the extension allows those who are looking for porn to find it with ease - but honestly, who will actually admit to anyone else that they are the ones looking for a good porn site? If nothing else, the.xxx domain will just be full of mirrors to the.com sites - reliance on the.xxx domains would just lead to fears of the site being blocked, and of easier investigation and control of said domain by higher authorities.
I know/. has been getting a bit of an anti-Scientific leaning as of late, focusing more on the trend of Geekdom moreso than the reality, but you don't have to call them Bird Brains...
Goddammit, I'm confused - what exactly makes RSS different from any of these other standards out there for passing off documents? I mean, I realize it makes a good feed and such, but really, there's nothing involved that screams make-or-break. The same with XML, and all of these other buzzword bullshit standards. Can someone actually give me a purpose to use RSS for anything other than circulating feeds?
Slashdot Mirror
Rewards and prizes are great and grand, but can we seriously expect to match the amount spent in development, not to mention provide some sort of profit? They spend years developing these drugs and only manage to pull through through the sales thereof. If a drug fails, like torcetrapib just did for Pfizer, who is willing to step up and compensate the company for a billion or so odd dollars? If people really want to solve this problem, they need to either be willing to take on the burden of having to regularly pay medical research taxes, or is more likely, accept that patents can be worked around for cases where the drug is hard to afford, either by forcing the companies to offer huge discounts to those under a certain income level, or offer up tax money to those who buy the drugs, not sell them, so that they can purchase what they need without deciding against food, shelter, or drugs.
Until a system comes into place where compensation for drug development can be made through generics, in a market where the ultimate idea is to not have anyone have to use your product (ideally), or until a magical "third option" comes along outside of capitalist or governmental compensation, patents are an ugly, necessary evil. The best solution, again, would be to prop up those in the lower income bracket with drug money, or better yet, buy the drugs en masse and distribute them. I'm sure something along the lines is going on right now in parts of Africa and maybe the occasional clinic, so why not simply add more funding to this system to compensate while eyeballing the companies to ensure that no one company is getting fat off a drug monopoly?
It's one thing to discard privacy in the name of a liberating freedom of expression, but with that you have to accept the fact that people now have the ability to make presumptions about you based on how this information is leaked to them and what information is true. If you make certain of revealing all of your dark secrets -- dirty sexual things, for instance -- then the latter is no longer a problem: they have the story. Now comes the disconnect, however, as a lot of people really aren't as open as you and still cling onto values at odds with what you say and do. Ever try running for office? It's the same effect and it has destroyed politicians over some of the simplest falls from grace to underground things that were never intended to get out.
Here's my question: is it safer to bear all secrets and have none, and risk offending a lot of people and putting yourself in harm's way if one of them takes it personally, or should we just use some basic common sense, be open with a lot of things but hold the things that might get us in trouble as secret as possible? We can never assume how every person will act, so taking at some precautions is always a social necessity. I'm not saying you should hide all of your pornography and put Bibles on the table in fear of someone noticing -- if you can get away with something, then you're fine. It's when people start avoiding you that you should either change, make new friends, or try to change them, aka, when it's a bit too late to remove that factor from the equation.
As I figure the difference between "large rock orbiting the sun" and "larger rock orbiting the sun" will never be too important, why not define a planet by some standard of surface gravity, the point where it can hold gases without requiring the gases to be attracted to the body by some other force?
That's assuming one thing, that the grade from the project comes from the result. Seeing as the point of the project is to teach each student how to work in a development cycle, wouldn't it make more sense to grade the student on what they contribute? Maybe have the professor assume some superficial management role and get on their case when they slack off?
The question I have is, had Mozart been taught to write and to write constantly, would he be a famous writer? Or would his interests lie elsewhere and writing simply serve to be a hobby?
I think what seperates genius from someone who is simply "good" at something is a geniuine love for what they do later in life. They tend to be more well-rounded and express themselves through the various mediums, but the true geniuses excel in one or more of these modes of expression. The fact that they're well-versed in some skill just makes it all the more likely they'll end up producing something of great value in that area of the arts or science.
Why does this remind me so much of the anti-drug situation? Some people turning what is a hobby into something that controls their lives, with those in government trying to target those parts which it feels are undesirable, which just happen to be the part everyone enjoys. They ride on those who let the game consume them and generalize it until there's no money left to be made in the legal market and it just because something done at parties. When it's all said and done, the only thing left legal will be alcohol and The Sims.
Overtly dramatic, but I'm just making a point.
Working in a grocery store, I thought of an idea that would possibly drive up little purchases like this: advertisements on the monitors, perhaps with arrows point to the merchandise while advertising the sale price (if any). Perhaps if you spend more than a certain amount, an ad offering a special price comes up before you pay...something like that. I know the last thing some of you want is more advertising in a grocery store, but you're already submerged and bombarded enough as-is inside of them ... a quick flick of the wrist and press of the "No Thanks" button will become automatic.
So we reform it now...and once the pronounciation drifts, we keep changing it. Just like we have before. Why do you think Shakespeare's English varies from our own?
... as opposed to specifying the language to one set of "official" pronounciations, make it more ambigious. Take note of what seems to be the common threads in the spelling and pronounciation and what varies with the accent -- you may pronounce "tomato" different, but there are still sounds that remain common in every accent. Identify those and go from there if you want to improve English.
... I'm just throwing stuff off the top of my head ...
... we read the words, not the letters, so turn them into the ultimate visual cues ... it's too radical to be adoptable, but I'm just saying it would work individually.
Writing is an attempt to express one's verbal language in a more permanent form, something to pass on to the next generation or at least record information for the larger masses. This is all fine and well until the verbal language changes. Suddenly, the permanence of the written language becomes its own worst problem -- the spelling, originally meant to reflect sounds, suddenly leaves this and becomes more abstract.
Written English is really less about preserving our pronounciation than giving clues: we can make a general assumption of what the word is based on what is written. It has a certain amount of ambiguity to it, so that one word can have multiple pronounciations. Why not expand upon this
Maybe the introduction of an Ambigiuity marker, similar to the accent mark, to settle once and finally that it is both "tow-mah-tow" and "tow-may-tow"? Say, "tomXto", with a more appropriate symbol for X? There's a lot more you can do in generalizing the language
How about dropping the vowels altogether, like some varieties of Arabic
It's easy when you have a fuzzy memory. It was a different car, but it was still an electric/gas hybrid that the company tried to buy back en masse. Or maybe not -- all I know is that he's had the thing for a couple of years before the concept became more mainstream, as he'd sneak up on people using the almost-silence electric engine. Sorry if I misled, either way.
PS: You're completely right. It's kinda silly I would get ranked so high. Then again, they aren't ranked on truth...
I think the reason we have fewer friends online is because there's more to becoming friends than just working with them, knowing them, or even living near them: you have to respect them mentally, something almost completely overlooked in the physical world. It's the difference between having a lot of friends and having a few close friends ... every ally you have online is usually a close friend, or at least someone you have a genuine interest in talking to.
... but hey, everyone is different. It's really a matter of what you get out of friends; the more friends you have, the less they mean to you and the less you mean to them.
There are exceptions to the rule -- take MySpace, for example. In lowering the classification of a friend from mental relationship to point-and-click buddy, you get into a strange game of numbers. There's no close chance in Hell someone has a close relationship with the hundreds of people on their Friends list and, odds are, they probably haven't even met a fourth. In lowering the bar you've made more friends, but cheapened the definition.
No offense to those who live to surround themselves, but I'd rather have one good relationship than a thousand distant bodies floating around some club
My chemistry teacher actually owns one of these. He purchased it when they were first introduced, and then was offered almost twice of what he paid for it to sell it back to them. He turned them down and still drives the thing to this day, much to GM's dismay, I'm sure.
"Relating his personal experience to the industry's lack of engineers is stupid. I mean, it's been my experience that..."
So wait a minute - weren't we just getting all up-in-arms over the Chinese blocking their people from viewing unsolicited western sites? And now we should go ahead and block the entire country because of the rogue elements? I agree Chinese cr/hackers (take your pick) are a problem, but at the same time, so are any other skilled cr/hackers - just because this one has malicious intent doesn't mean we're doing any good by blocking such a large audience simply because of the possibility. Cracking will still occur, as with worms and trojans. Those who really want to will find alternate means of access (perhaps through countries a bit more generous than the United States). What is there to gain by this?
This will never work. As long as anyone on the WWW can post a picture of a penis on their personal website, there will never be a reason to have a .xxx domain - unless you plan to enforce it with a no-tolerance policy and an iron fist, which is the last thing I'm sure anyone here wants.
Move the couch foward. Problem solved. Move it back when you're done. Not being sarcastic, just trying to save you a little money until you get a proper table...
Cancer isn't a disease...
I notice you didn't say by who.
I mean I see how you could see it as possibly a bad influence for kids. I never said it should be illegal to play it / handle it (in fact I said I was a fan of the series, if you actually paid attention to the post). My point is that I can see how he can make a logical jump with GTA, but not The Sims.
Please, The Sims is a tame as milk. I can almost agree with him on the GTA thing (although I enjoy the series), simply because it's obviously designed and left in the game, even though I find it hypocritical that he wouldn't seek a lawsuit before the mini-game was common knowledge (as if the violence and the hooker-in-a-car from the original weren't enough). But The Sims / The Sims 2 (the "blur" occurs on both version, if you remember)? Has this man ever seen a Barbie or Ken doll naked? That's about the extent of it. I especially love this line:
No, no it doesn't, and "video game news sites" are not a source to base a lawsuit on, especially if you can't name the site or sites in question. The only thing that might make for evidence in anything whatsoever is the following site I ran into on the way to look for "proper" screenshots:
Now, this is not what he is accusing EA of - this is a skin patch, which should tell you right there what the deal is - if you want to see nude Sims with details, you're going to need a patch, because they're little more than mannequins under the blur. This would not exist if they had full-frontal nudity, penii, etc.
Groundless lawsuit by an ignorant man. Sick of this shit.
Great, so an entire domain series that porn sites can expand to, and have entirely blocked by every public and private filter known to man. What advantage is there to serving porn on the .xxx domain name when it's common knowledge that many sites already spoof well-known domain look-alikes with porn redirects, since the exposure is much greater. The only possibility I can see is that the extension allows those who are looking for porn to find it with ease - but honestly, who will actually admit to anyone else that they are the ones looking for a good porn site? If nothing else, the .xxx domain will just be full of mirrors to the .com sites - reliance on the .xxx domains would just lead to fears of the site being blocked, and of easier investigation and control of said domain by higher authorities.
I know /. has been getting a bit of an anti-Scientific leaning as of late, focusing more on the trend of Geekdom moreso than the reality, but you don't have to call them Bird Brains...
Goddammit, I'm confused - what exactly makes RSS different from any of these other standards out there for passing off documents? I mean, I realize it makes a good feed and such, but really, there's nothing involved that screams make-or-break. The same with XML, and all of these other buzzword bullshit standards. Can someone actually give me a purpose to use RSS for anything other than circulating feeds?
"Finally, after being in a constant state of hibernation for the last fifty years, I am ready to greet the future!"
"Yeah...about that...we all kinda went in after you...so science and technology is about at the same point you left off."
"So I still have cancer?"
"Technically, yes. But hey, at least that asteroid never hit...right?"
Injectable Hybernation. I'm sure this can't be abused in any way whatsoever.