Yea, the article is quite disingenuous with the math.
Blu-ray player + 5 movies = $70 + $150 = $220 DVD player + 5 movies = $30 + $75 = $105
In other words, you get about 90% of what you want for about 50% of the cost. Heck, if you buy used, you can probably get 80% of what you want for 20% of the cost. It's pretty obvious to me that until blu-ray players charge a 10-20% premium instead of a 100-200% premium on their products, it's not going to be the dominant thing.
Taking something on faith means that you simply believe and you have no option of ever verifying it yourself.
Seems to me a very strange division of faith and trust.
Here's something normall in the category of "science" that you can't verify. You can't "verify" that a proto-horse evolved into a giraffe without millions of years of observation. You can't very well say it's theoretically possible to verify something so therefore it's science. If it's not practically possible, it's not really verifiable.
Conversely, if you want to verify things that one would normally put in the category of "faith", there is a very simple way to do it. Kill yourself. You can find out then whether there is an afterlife or if there's reincarnation or nothing whatsoever. And you'll know conclusively so there is an option to verify it (though I imagine very few would).
Well, there are people who have walked across America and other continents, so the distance is not a problem. You're only making it more difficult/impossible by adding water, whereas the original argument does not have any significant hurdles to overcome.
You're proving my point. You can't get walk from Boston to London. Micro-evolution is walking in the analogy. Macro may include walking but is absolutely not the same thing as walking. Unless you want to posit that you can walk on water, the arguments/methods for the micro are not sufficient for the macro. As for the charge that "the original argument does not have any significant hurdles", I'll note two logical errors:
1. You did not make an argument. You asserted "micro is the same as macro" as fact. Where's the evidence that they're the same? 2. You again do the same by saying there are no significant hurdles. Where's the evidence that there are no significant hurdles?
I'm not aware of evidence for either so what you're stating is nothing more than faith.
Macro and micro evolution are the same thing on different time scales, and if one works, the other has to.
By this logic if I can walk from my house to the store, I should be able to walk from Boston to London. They're just at different scales!
What evidence do you have that macro and micro evolution are the same thing? Your argument "it has to" is exactly no argument at all, but a statement of faith.
You're attacking a straw man here. I never said they shouldn't be allowed to do research. I just questioned whether all this research is always a good thing like you claimed. I'm saying that it's not.
For now, China seems satisfied to get scientific prestige measured by how much they publish. But it's not stopping there. All this research is to get an edge on the rest of the world, not for the good of the international community or science or whatever. Once they have the edge, are they going to use it benevolently? Either to the world or to their own citizens? I highly doubt it.
In my view, this large recent increase in research has as good a chance of being a bad thing as it is a good thing.
More research and more results is a win for everyone.
I understand the sentiment of this quote, but I have to disagree. Suppose they develop something harmful? An example might be a new biological weapon or technology to make government control more pervasive. We already know that their human rights record is horrifying. What makes you think that all the developments will inevitably be positive?
1. Number of lawyers goes down dramatically. So much of what everyone argues about is what did A say vs what did B say? A jury of your peers would be able to tell what exactly was an agreement based on first-hand evidence instead of second/third-hand evidence. 2. Every industry would be innovation-based. Now that your trade secrets are exposed as well as how you make money, I can go and make the exact same company but take a few cents less per unit. Just about everything would commoditize very quickly, so the main advantage would become innovation. 3. Everyone would get paid what they're worth. Bad employees would get fired all the time. Good employees would be seen for what they were very quickly and be offered better compensation until it didn't make sense to do so.
2&3 make it a perfect market economy. Everyone and everything gets the exact price it deserves.
This would require storage that's so ubiquitous that we can record literally every moment of everyone's life.
It's not hard to understand their thinking. They saw the amount of money that Apple was making and realized that the key piece to what Apple has is their own OS. They want their own iTunes, app store, etc.
Not saying it will work, but I can see where they're trying to go. The big advantage Apple has over all the other PC manufacturers is that they control everything from hardware to software. HP took a step in that direction so they can give the user a better experience.
I mean, Dell's acquiring AMD and that's pretty much the same play in the hardware direction.
Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.
on
AMD Sale to Dell Rumored
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Let's see. HP has a WebOS PC coming out. Dell buys AMD...
My guess is they're both moving towards Apple's model. Could a real Dell-customized Linux desktop be far off?
It will not happen overnight (hell, I have been watching it for 30+ years), but economic prosperity was the US' to lose, and the Religious Right is destroying it, bit by bit.
[sarcasm]Yep, it's all their fault. Not exploding deficits, corrupt unions, a horrible school system or stupid regulations. The religious right's fault, entirely [/sarcasm]
Once upon a time, I thought that open communication would help empiricism win out over magical thought, but after watching a couple of decades of religious right mumbo jumbo flowing out over the Internet, unperterbed by anything resembling empirical scepticism, I think nothing will penetrate their confirmation bias.
s/religious right/environuts/. Clearly, this is exactly what's happened with climategate.
By pandering to our population's basest fears, they are systematically destroying the ability of one generation to teach the next how to think critically, and disrupting our ability to maintain science and math competence. We're toast, and it is time to acknowledge that, as the primitives dance around celebrating the 100th birthday of their harbinger, Ronald Reagan.
Nice bait-and-switch. Religious people must be terrible at math then! Please do not put climatology and evo-psyche on par with 2 + 2 = 4, that's just offensive.
I am so glad my SOs do not want children.
I, along with other Christians, would like to thank you for this. Clearly your Christophobia will not be spread into the next generation.
why don't you understand how you are being used by the rich moneyed government workers and public employee unions?
if you ARE rich and moneyed government worker, congratulations on your successful manipulation of your larger herd of sheep
------
you act as if one side is more virtuous than the other. totally not true. fact is it's a fight between evil corporations vs. incompetent government. i'd rather not have one side dominate, thank you very much.
Well, for starters, it is set in the best possible time frame...
Are you kidding me? The prequels had so much potential, a great subtext for plots and whatnot. Think about it. The reason Lucas made the films in the first place is because everyone was curious about how Darth Vader became Darth Vader. If that's not a good setup to a story, I don't know what is. The corruption of Anakin Skywalker is an amazing setup for a good story. Instead, it was Lucas that bogged down the prequels with useless CG, pointless Senate meetings and a Jedi Council that really wasn't anything more than a showcase for Yoda. Lucas was the one that felt the need to recycle every character from the first films.
Put a talented writer like Joss Whedon on a project with such clear boundaries and he would have made an amazing film. We could have seen the slow moral corruption of an innocent Jedi. The seduction to the dark side by the emperor. A realistic romance between Anakin and Padme. Several brand new characters that would have depth to them and interesting plot twists could have been made all around. Instead we got a train wreck full of discombobulated stories about characters that no one finds interesting. In short, the story was set up well by episodes 4-6. Lucas just blew every advantage he had in Episode 1. He had three fat pitches down the middle and he swung and missed every one.
Compare that to the setup for this series. You have an already evil Darth Vader hunting down Jedi. Somehow, the emperor is going to show his evilness to the world such that rebels will start rising up. You think senate hearings are boring? How else are you going to show any protest by rebelling planets? Remember that the emperor doesn't dissolve the senate until ep. 4. What about action? The Jedi are mostly already dead. Yoda and Obiwan are supposed to be hiding. What can you anchor the story around? Some Jedi that's running away? A planet that keeps getting oppressed (how exactly? through trade embargos)? It's not obvious and not easy to tell a good story in such a setting. This is like a slider away that you have to hit. A single is possible. A strike is more likely.
if by depth you mean CG animation in the background, yes, it will.
if by depth you mean actual storytelling, i'm afraid this won't. if episodes 1-3 proved anything, it's that lucas just doesn't know how to tell a good story unless he's ripping off kurasawa.
Really? Just those three things? Let me point out why the movie really sucked.
In IV - VI, we find the story of a character who's very evil who finds redemption. We also find out that he used to be good.
That should have been the heart of the story. Why and how did Darth Vader become so evil? How did he get seduced to the dark side? The films hand-waved through the most important question that everyone had. He thought his wife was going to die and started killing children or something.
The flaws weren't that there were too many characters. The flaw was that there just wasn't a coherant story.
Do you know how many lotteries there are for charter schools? Clearly, the parents care the same whether they get in or not. But the student performance is vastly different. Sure, parents have a lot of responsibility, but that's not really something a government mandate is going to solve.
I can tell you as a parent that it's horribly difficult to get a teacher fired. Seriously, have you tried? You may say all you want that if parents demanded it, they could get rid of the teacher, but that's simply not true. There are tons of bad teachers that can't get fired because of the protection that unions provide.
And really, the material that charter schools teach isn't the problem. Parochial schools and religious schools do just as well as many charter schools. Why are they better than the standard school? It's because they have better teachers. There are many kids that get free rides to these charter/religious schools (due to some service the town can't provide for example) and they do just as well, so it's not about the parents per se.
I stand by my statement, real education reform means better teachers. Better teachers require better motivators and that means getting rid of or heavily reforming the current teacher's union systems.
Blaming the DoE, standardized tests and zero tolerance for education failure is like blaming extra paper cups for the bankruptcy of Enron. It might contribute, but it isn't the big problem.
There are tons of other countries with bigger standardized tests, even less tolerance and bigger departments of education with more heavy-handed bureaucracy that produce way more scientists per capita. Look at any east Asian country, for instance.
The big problem is really obvious. It's the quality of teachers. And it's not that the teachers are bad per se, it's that they're unmotivated to do better. Teacher's unions make it so that you get paid on years on the job and tenure, not how well you teach. Decoupling rewards with results in this way has been the single worst decision in education in this country.
Look at most charter schools. They flourish. Why? Because the teachers are motivated to teach well, not just do well until they get to tenure status.
Unfortunately this still doesn't provide a good alternative to one important service the major record labels provide: promotion.
Well, this is the essence of what the future of the Record industry is, isn't it? You have two distinct businesses that are finally getting separated. On the one hand, you have the music sales group which makes money based on sales of the actual music. On the other, you have a marketing/promotion group which makes money off of concerts and the like. The former is a dead business model that'll go away with services like the one mentioned in this story. The latter is something that an agent or a marketing company or a PR firm can do. Really, this is what a record company will eventually evolve to.
>No, he's not going to do any of those things in the first week, month, or most likely even first year > he's in office.
Are you campaigning for his re-election already? By your standard, we have no way of telling whether he's succeeded in doing what he promised because it'll take too long. Fact is, he's like any other politician. He has to start doing some of the things he promised or he'll face the consequences.
Sadly, a vote for Obama was also a vote for the nutroots. We've already rewarded their despicable behavior and we'll have to live with that for the next four years.
As bad as it can get? Really? Have you looked at some other countries around the world? If you think this is as bad as it can get, you're not paying attention to countries like Zimbabwe or Myanmar.
Fact is, things can be A LOT more screwed up. Our hope should be at the very least that Obama doesn't make things any worse.
Slashdot Mirror
Bill Gates with better design sense.
Fixed that for you.
In other words, 3d isn't selling, so we have to come up with something else to make everyone upgrade their TV sets.
Yea, the article is quite disingenuous with the math.
Blu-ray player + 5 movies = $70 + $150 = $220
DVD player + 5 movies = $30 + $75 = $105
In other words, you get about 90% of what you want for about 50% of the cost. Heck, if you buy used, you can probably get 80% of what you want for 20% of the cost. It's pretty obvious to me that until blu-ray players charge a 10-20% premium instead of a 100-200% premium on their products, it's not going to be the dominant thing.
Taking something on faith means that you simply believe and you have no option of ever verifying it yourself.
Seems to me a very strange division of faith and trust.
Here's something normall in the category of "science" that you can't verify. You can't "verify" that a proto-horse evolved into a giraffe without millions of years of observation. You can't very well say it's theoretically possible to verify something so therefore it's science. If it's not practically possible, it's not really verifiable.
Conversely, if you want to verify things that one would normally put in the category of "faith", there is a very simple way to do it. Kill yourself. You can find out then whether there is an afterlife or if there's reincarnation or nothing whatsoever. And you'll know conclusively so there is an option to verify it (though I imagine very few would).
Well, there are people who have walked across America and other continents, so the distance is not a problem. You're only making it more difficult/impossible by adding water, whereas the original argument does not have any significant hurdles to overcome.
You're proving my point. You can't get walk from Boston to London. Micro-evolution is walking in the analogy. Macro may include walking but is absolutely not the same thing as walking. Unless you want to posit that you can walk on water, the arguments/methods for the micro are not sufficient for the macro. As for the charge that "the original argument does not have any significant hurdles", I'll note two logical errors:
1. You did not make an argument. You asserted "micro is the same as macro" as fact. Where's the evidence that they're the same?
2. You again do the same by saying there are no significant hurdles. Where's the evidence that there are no significant hurdles?
I'm not aware of evidence for either so what you're stating is nothing more than faith.
Macro and micro evolution are the same thing on different time scales, and if one works, the other has to.
By this logic if I can walk from my house to the store, I should be able to walk from Boston to London. They're just at different scales!
What evidence do you have that macro and micro evolution are the same thing? Your argument "it has to" is exactly no argument at all, but a statement of faith.
You're attacking a straw man here. I never said they shouldn't be allowed to do research. I just questioned whether all this research is always a good thing like you claimed. I'm saying that it's not.
For now, China seems satisfied to get scientific prestige measured by how much they publish. But it's not stopping there. All this research is to get an edge on the rest of the world, not for the good of the international community or science or whatever. Once they have the edge, are they going to use it benevolently? Either to the world or to their own citizens? I highly doubt it.
In my view, this large recent increase in research has as good a chance of being a bad thing as it is a good thing.
More research and more results is a win for everyone.
I understand the sentiment of this quote, but I have to disagree. Suppose they develop something harmful? An example might be a new biological weapon or technology to make government control more pervasive. We already know that their human rights record is horrifying. What makes you think that all the developments will inevitably be positive?
In such a world I see a few other consequences:
1. Number of lawyers goes down dramatically. So much of what everyone argues about is what did A say vs what did B say? A jury of your peers would be able to tell what exactly was an agreement based on first-hand evidence instead of second/third-hand evidence.
2. Every industry would be innovation-based. Now that your trade secrets are exposed as well as how you make money, I can go and make the exact same company but take a few cents less per unit. Just about everything would commoditize very quickly, so the main advantage would become innovation.
3. Everyone would get paid what they're worth. Bad employees would get fired all the time. Good employees would be seen for what they were very quickly and be offered better compensation until it didn't make sense to do so.
2&3 make it a perfect market economy. Everyone and everything gets the exact price it deserves.
This would require storage that's so ubiquitous that we can record literally every moment of everyone's life.
It's not hard to understand their thinking. They saw the amount of money that Apple was making and realized that the key piece to what Apple has is their own OS. They want their own iTunes, app store, etc.
Not saying it will work, but I can see where they're trying to go. The big advantage Apple has over all the other PC manufacturers is that they control everything from hardware to software. HP took a step in that direction so they can give the user a better experience.
I mean, Dell's acquiring AMD and that's pretty much the same play in the hardware direction.
Let's see. HP has a WebOS PC coming out. Dell buys AMD...
My guess is they're both moving towards Apple's model. Could a real Dell-customized Linux desktop be far off?
It will not happen overnight (hell, I have been watching it for 30+ years), but economic prosperity was the US' to lose, and the Religious Right is destroying it, bit by bit.
[sarcasm]Yep, it's all their fault. Not exploding deficits, corrupt unions, a horrible school system or stupid regulations. The religious right's fault, entirely [/sarcasm]
Once upon a time, I thought that open communication would help empiricism win out over magical thought, but after watching a couple of decades of religious right mumbo jumbo flowing out over the Internet, unperterbed by anything resembling empirical scepticism, I think nothing will penetrate their confirmation bias.
s/religious right/environuts/. Clearly, this is exactly what's happened with climategate.
By pandering to our population's basest fears, they are systematically destroying the ability of one generation to teach the next how to think critically, and disrupting our ability to maintain science and math competence. We're toast, and it is time to acknowledge that, as the primitives dance around celebrating the 100th birthday of their harbinger, Ronald Reagan.
Nice bait-and-switch. Religious people must be terrible at math then! Please do not put climatology and evo-psyche on par with 2 + 2 = 4, that's just offensive.
I am so glad my SOs do not want children.
I, along with other Christians, would like to thank you for this. Clearly your Christophobia will not be spread into the next generation.
are you implying there will be a war due to global warming?
why don't you understand how you are being used by the rich moneyed government workers and public employee unions?
if you ARE rich and moneyed government worker, congratulations on your successful manipulation of your larger herd of sheep
------
you act as if one side is more virtuous than the other. totally not true. fact is it's a fight between evil corporations vs. incompetent government. i'd rather not have one side dominate, thank you very much.
3142 comments?
Submission Summary: 36 pending, 879 rejected, 607 accepted (1522 total, 39.88% accepted)?
Yes, surely that is why I have no life! See you in court, Slashdot!
I'm suing you for making your comments too entertaining!
Well, for starters, it is set in the best possible time frame...
Are you kidding me? The prequels had so much potential, a great subtext for plots and whatnot. Think about it. The reason Lucas made the films in the first place is because everyone was curious about how Darth Vader became Darth Vader. If that's not a good setup to a story, I don't know what is. The corruption of Anakin Skywalker is an amazing setup for a good story. Instead, it was Lucas that bogged down the prequels with useless CG, pointless Senate meetings and a Jedi Council that really wasn't anything more than a showcase for Yoda. Lucas was the one that felt the need to recycle every character from the first films.
Put a talented writer like Joss Whedon on a project with such clear boundaries and he would have made an amazing film. We could have seen the slow moral corruption of an innocent Jedi. The seduction to the dark side by the emperor. A realistic romance between Anakin and Padme. Several brand new characters that would have depth to them and interesting plot twists could have been made all around. Instead we got a train wreck full of discombobulated stories about characters that no one finds interesting. In short, the story was set up well by episodes 4-6. Lucas just blew every advantage he had in Episode 1. He had three fat pitches down the middle and he swung and missed every one.
Compare that to the setup for this series. You have an already evil Darth Vader hunting down Jedi. Somehow, the emperor is going to show his evilness to the world such that rebels will start rising up. You think senate hearings are boring? How else are you going to show any protest by rebelling planets? Remember that the emperor doesn't dissolve the senate until ep. 4. What about action? The Jedi are mostly already dead. Yoda and Obiwan are supposed to be hiding. What can you anchor the story around? Some Jedi that's running away? A planet that keeps getting oppressed (how exactly? through trade embargos)? It's not obvious and not easy to tell a good story in such a setting. This is like a slider away that you have to hit. A single is possible. A strike is more likely.
if by depth you mean CG animation in the background, yes, it will.
if by depth you mean actual storytelling, i'm afraid this won't. if episodes 1-3 proved anything, it's that lucas just doesn't know how to tell a good story unless he's ripping off kurasawa.
Really? Just those three things? Let me point out why the movie really sucked.
In IV - VI, we find the story of a character who's very evil who finds redemption. We also find out that he used to be good.
That should have been the heart of the story. Why and how did Darth Vader become so evil? How did he get seduced to the dark side? The films hand-waved through the most important question that everyone had. He thought his wife was going to die and started killing children or something.
The flaws weren't that there were too many characters. The flaw was that there just wasn't a coherant story.
Do you know how many lotteries there are for charter schools? Clearly, the parents care the same whether they get in or not. But the student performance is vastly different. Sure, parents have a lot of responsibility, but that's not really something a government mandate is going to solve.
I can tell you as a parent that it's horribly difficult to get a teacher fired. Seriously, have you tried? You may say all you want that if parents demanded it, they could get rid of the teacher, but that's simply not true. There are tons of bad teachers that can't get fired because of the protection that unions provide.
And really, the material that charter schools teach isn't the problem. Parochial schools and religious schools do just as well as many charter schools. Why are they better than the standard school? It's because they have better teachers. There are many kids that get free rides to these charter/religious schools (due to some service the town can't provide for example) and they do just as well, so it's not about the parents per se.
I stand by my statement, real education reform means better teachers. Better teachers require better motivators and that means getting rid of or heavily reforming the current teacher's union systems.
Blaming the DoE, standardized tests and zero tolerance for education failure is like blaming extra paper cups for the bankruptcy of Enron. It might contribute, but it isn't the big problem.
There are tons of other countries with bigger standardized tests, even less tolerance and bigger departments of education with more heavy-handed bureaucracy that produce way more scientists per capita. Look at any east Asian country, for instance.
The big problem is really obvious. It's the quality of teachers. And it's not that the teachers are bad per se, it's that they're unmotivated to do better. Teacher's unions make it so that you get paid on years on the job and tenure, not how well you teach. Decoupling rewards with results in this way has been the single worst decision in education in this country.
Look at most charter schools. They flourish. Why? Because the teachers are motivated to teach well, not just do well until they get to tenure status.
Unfortunately this still doesn't provide a good alternative to one important service the major record labels provide: promotion.
Well, this is the essence of what the future of the Record industry is, isn't it? You have two distinct businesses that are finally getting separated. On the one hand, you have the music sales group which makes money based on sales of the actual music. On the other, you have a marketing/promotion group which makes money off of concerts and the like. The former is a dead business model that'll go away with services like the one mentioned in this story. The latter is something that an agent or a marketing company or a PR firm can do. Really, this is what a record company will eventually evolve to.
I wonder how much of this increase in "traffic" is just Nigerian scammers trying to get you to ship your item overseas.
>No, he's not going to do any of those things in the first week, month, or most likely even first year
> he's in office.
Are you campaigning for his re-election already? By your standard, we have no way of telling whether he's succeeded in doing what he promised because it'll take too long. Fact is, he's like any other politician. He has to start doing some of the things he promised or he'll face the consequences.
Sadly, a vote for Obama was also a vote for the nutroots. We've already rewarded their despicable behavior and we'll have to live with that for the next four years.
As bad as it can get? Really? Have you looked at some other countries around the world? If you think this is as bad as it can get, you're not paying attention to countries like Zimbabwe or Myanmar.
Fact is, things can be A LOT more screwed up. Our hope should be at the very least that Obama doesn't make things any worse.