I wouldn't say it's not damage, I would rather say that it's this type of damage is just a normal part of the Earth's processes. It's still damage, although I understand your point that that is probably too abstract for Joe Public to grasp by him/herself, and so the term is misleading to the public, who only think of damage in purely negative terms.
Next we'll be hearing that the predator/prey relationship needs to be banned because it damages animal populations
Similar but true: For a long time people thought that forests and other ecosystems such as grasslands and vynbos should be "protected" from fires, because it "obviously causes damage", or so people intuitively thought. This causes problems such as excessive amounts of flammable material building up on forest floors, making fires far worse when they do occur, and complicating necessary natural decomposition processes. More importantly, fires have been burning in these ecosystems for so long that the plants and animals have evolved to in some cases require them to occur, for example some types of seeds will only germinate once they have been burned or smoked. Nowadays the focus is usually on better management through controlled burnings so as to avoid the burnings causing problems for human activities.
As with all complex systems, the natural world is not always intuitive. Also, wanting to protect nature and *understanding* nature are two different things. The problems stem from incomplete knowledge (as with global climate change). The answer is always more knowledge.
Gosh, it almost always happens that people incorrectly credit Microsoft for something that Microsoft copied from someone else.. that's the first time I've seen not only where MS actually came up with something original, but someone (i.e. me) incorrectly credited someone who copied from MS.
I know I saw that in one of the Firefox betas long before I saw it in IE... definitely long before XP SP2, but I can't remember which update brought the feature to IE, if it was before SP2 or not... can anyone confirm who copied who?
Yup. Microsoft is one of the worst offenders here. E.g. try moving a large folder containing a few read only files, system files etc. in Windows Explorer. Plenty of other examples though.
A general rule of interface design, if the user is busy typing something, you just don't rudely grab the focus from them. This is a general problem with Windows.
Occasionally they've tried to improve it and do like Outlook where the taskbar app button flashes blue like crazy. However this is practically as bad, because it's too distracting to be able to do anything while that button flashes, and the worst is that even though the app is DEMANDING your attention, most of the time it was for something totally stupid and pointless. Don't demand the user's attention unless it's for something important. In XP they also try to use those comic-bubble-style popups from the taskbar, which then cover part of your Window and don't go away, and they come up far too much in a default XP install, to harass you into registering for Passport and whatnot.
The Firefox designers 'got it right' with their popup blocker window thing that appears on the top.
Is that what people who aren't going to amount to much in life tell themselves to make them feel better that they're not as smart as smart people? Because I know many smart people who do "rise to the occasion" to meet challenges head on, most of the smart people I know have become very successful in life, and are much better at hacking it "in the real world" than less smart people.
It's true that there are many who have been babied and will not amount to much in the real world, but the fact is smart people are far more likely to become very successful, and extremely few of the most successful people in the world are not very smart, and people who play down the value of being smart are usually just trying to make themselves feel better.
Huh? Stress really isn't healthy. It's linked causally to hundreds of different disorders, dysfunctions, and increased vulnerability to diseases. It's linked causally to many life-threatening and potentially debilitating problems like heart attacks and strokes.
I don't know what doctors would take issue with the claim that stress isn't healthy, but I certainly don't want to be visiting those doctors.
(Or did you mean that a certain, low level of stress is healthy? Sure. But when people say things like "stress isn't healthy", in the English language this n implicitly means "high levels of stress". Without a qualifying adjective, the "default" meaning of the word "stress" is "excess stress", similar to how "luck" defaults to "good luck" unless qualified by an adjective such as "bad".)
It's true. Some people are very smart. Some people are very hard-working. These are separate traits. It's rare to find someone with the right combination that includes both traits (and other required 'success' traits). (Plus, life has to deal that person the right circumstances, or rather, not the wrong circumstances.) Being smart and having good ideas is almost entirely meaningless if you aren't willing to work hard at it.
Since the OS X core is BSD, I wouldn't be so sure about that, although to be honest I think they're both pretty "proven servers", you could probably go either way here.
Many girls like to dress up 'glamorously' and barbie doll like. There isn't necessarily any harm in it. Those girls are smiling and happy. In fact it would be pretty much impossible to prove harm is done here - I challenge you to do so. But I suppose instead of rationally demonstrating to me the proof of harm (because you can't), you're just going to call me a troll. You can dismiss me as a troll, but you know I'm right.
Hope meta-mod gets you. There was nothing troll-ish about the question, and you clearly aren't able to answer the question, or perhaps you know the answer but don't like the answer.
Yes, the diamond jewelry market is entirely artificially created, women have been brainwashed to believe this imaginary fairy-tale about symbols of undying love, men have been brainwashed to mindlessly crack open their wallets every time and waste an awful lot of money on this unnecessary rubbish. It's totally imaginary, a make-believe world, virtual products, it's like buying vapour. Yet our unquestioning gullibility keeps us hanging on every word their massive marketing machine says. I for one wish that someone would bring tonnes of diamonds back from an extra-solar planet and dump them in the streets, so that women would finally realise that diamonds don't actually have any value.
Awfully alarmist, but I don't see how you can equate changing the access mode from 'credit card' to 'free' and immediately changing it back again with continually making withdrawals at an ATM. That's insane. That doesn't mean what he did is correct, but it is certainly NOTHING like "the people who abused the ATMs".
*Sigh* Yes, they do, and I'd actually know, so either post non-anonymous references or bugger off with your FUD. Unless you think I mean billions *each*, obviously I mean billions *combined*.
He can't possibly convince people that he isn't in it for the money
Well, he certainly isn't in it because he likes making good software. Haha. No, Bill Gates got where he is through several decades of continuous highly unethical behaviour, and people don't disrespect him "because he is rich" but because of his unethical behavious. In fact, just to prove that people don't inherently disrespect rich people: in South Africa we have a self-made billionaire, Mark Shuttleworth, who, after making billions, now spends his time and money developing and promoting OpenSource, funding local math/science development initiatives, funding local 'innovation reward' programs and 'business incubators', developing educational software for poor schools, funds translation of OpenSource software into various indigenous language, and all sorts of other positive things. And he is very widely respected here, I've never met anyone who did not regard him with respect.
The only people I've ever met who do not think that Bill Gates rise was due to unethical behaviour, also, when questioned, reveal that they have absolutely no knowledge of the history of Microsoft, or of anything that Microsoft have done. Ah, ignorance, bliss.
Leverage...... as much as people here may think 3rd world countries are irrelevant, Microsoft still gets billions from them... and charity donations, vaccines etc. is a nice way of saying "your government [which is about to purchase 10,000 PCs and considering OpenSource] had better not consider running anything other than Microsoft Windows and Office". It gives Microsoft massive amounts of political leverage in countries they sell to, and also serves as a major "feel-good" PR marketing campaign, makes people all feel-good about that wonderful Microsoft company. (Microsoft always milk their major charity donations for every bit of publicity they're worth.)
It's much like 3rd-world "aid" from developed countries.. there are always strings attached, and the developed countries almost always make the money back somehow in some other indirect way (e.g. World Food Program in Africa gathers cash donations from a.o. European countries and uses it to buy American agricultural products, instead of buying those same products available from an African country right next door to the one they're helping... which also helps kill the agricultural market in the neighbouring country.)
As far as I'm aware nobody's ever done it before, which makes it both non-obvious and novel
W.r.t. patents "obvious" doesn't refer to whether or not anyone's ever thought of doing it. It refers to whether or not the solution to a problem (i.e. the "method" being patented) would be obvious i.e. easy for a person somewhat skilled in the arts if asked to solve the problem. In other words, if you were a programmer and someone came up to you and said "we need to come up with a scheme for encoding lat/long values in a compact way", and you could come up with this idea in, what, a few hours max, then it's "obvious". If another programmer can look at the solution and understand it within a few minutes, as is the case here, it's also "obvious". "Non-obvious" would mean if you described it to a programmer, and he/she went off and scratched their heads for a few days/weeks/months thinking "HOW did they DO that?" (E.g. take MP3 compression: although many of us have now read descriptions how it works, at the time it was patented, if someone had asked "please come up with a method of compressing music at a factor greater than 10 with almost no audible quality loss", the solution would not have been obvious to, well, pretty much any programmer I would venture to guess, and also would have boggled the minds (and it did) of many programmers at the time, saying "HOW did they manage such good compression that still sounds so good", and take weeks or months to figure out how.
People are dependent on crappy jobs (rather, on jobs at all) because people are for some reason no longer able to do what their ancestors likely did for centuries - live off the land. Why is this? Overpopulation in some regions? Government decided it 'owned' all the land? Big corporations decided it 'owned' all the land? European settlers (or other foreign entity) moved in and decided they owned all the land? Big commercial industrialized farming organizations decided they 'owned' all the land? All of the above? Or have people somehow been convinced that the agrarian lifestyle is too "backwards", that they should rather be "modern" and "sophisticated" by living in a small box & slaving all hours in a tinier box for (basically) food and some bad sitcoms and a few "cool" electronic appliances in exchange? I don't know, but it all seems to boil down to land. If you don't have land, you are forced to join somehow this massive "industrial machine" that is the world economy. And all over the world, those in power (economic and/or political) have ensured massively distorted land ownership. Not new of course, but the scale of it is unprecedented.
I got that wrong.. my bad.. was reading too quickly and had just "scanned through" it, getting the wrong message.. *blush*. I guess trying to cram some slashdot reading in amongst tight work deadlines isn't the greatest idea.
I'm not trying to find the "gotcha" here, but what if you really are going to send a relative/friend/whatever to pick up your kids after a few hours? I'm sure this happens all the time.
... can you demonstrate that any of the girls on that site are being harmed? You seem to take it self-evident that this is "bad".. I'm not so sure. Forget all your pre-existing notions about this subject and just try to focus on that one question.
Depends how old he is. If you think it's unnatural for, say, an 18 or 19 year old male to feel attracted to a sexually developed, attractive 14-year old female, then you're more than a little confused.
BTW, society parades scantily-clad underage women around in front of adult males all the time with the only purpose being for the adult males to ogle their bodies and feel attracted to them. Kate Moss was "discovered" when she was 14. Frequently we see images of models in magazines or on television who are 15 or 16 or 17. Guys stare, and nobody even seems to realise the obvious contradiction with the claim that we're "not supposed to" be attracted to that. You've probably been attracted to underage women hundreds of times without even realising it. I guess that also makes you "sick"?
I agree. I don't see why they needed to release the name of the hotel.. now the hotel owner and employees are going to suffer. If it was my hotel, I'd probably be busy making plans to change the name right now.
(How is that flamebait? It's true. Oh wait, it's "I don't like the message" moderation)
Anyway, back to the topic, South Africa is another example, where most whites are still whining that "we should forget Apartheid", only 11 years after it ended.
Aw gee you're so clever, you really got me there, NOT. I presume you're not in charge of corporate desktops, if you were you'd be fired quickly for being incredibly stupid. Do you have any idea how fast a worm can spread through a LAN of over 1000 PCs if they don't have anti-viruses on them? Do you know what it costs a company to have to clean an infection of that size? Let me put it this way: if it was your company, would you take the chance of not installing anti-virus software on any of the 1000+ desktops? No? I thought so - sorry, you lose, thanks for playing.
The free anti-viruses have nowhere near as comprehensive virus checking as the major commercial ones, and aren't generally as quick to be updated against new viruses.
Hmm... on second thought, I think you're just a Microsoft shill.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't say it's not damage, I would rather say that it's this type of damage is just a normal part of the Earth's processes. It's still damage, although I understand your point that that is probably too abstract for Joe Public to grasp by him/herself, and so the term is misleading to the public, who only think of damage in purely negative terms.
Next we'll be hearing that the predator/prey relationship needs to be banned because it damages animal populations
Similar but true: For a long time people thought that forests and other ecosystems such as grasslands and vynbos should be "protected" from fires, because it "obviously causes damage", or so people intuitively thought. This causes problems such as excessive amounts of flammable material building up on forest floors, making fires far worse when they do occur, and complicating necessary natural decomposition processes. More importantly, fires have been burning in these ecosystems for so long that the plants and animals have evolved to in some cases require them to occur, for example some types of seeds will only germinate once they have been burned or smoked. Nowadays the focus is usually on better management through controlled burnings so as to avoid the burnings causing problems for human activities.
As with all complex systems, the natural world is not always intuitive. Also, wanting to protect nature and *understanding* nature are two different things. The problems stem from incomplete knowledge (as with global climate change). The answer is always more knowledge.
Thanks, I stand corrected.
Gosh, it almost always happens that people incorrectly credit Microsoft for something that Microsoft copied from someone else .. that's the first time I've seen not only where MS actually came up with something original, but someone (i.e. me) incorrectly credited someone who copied from MS.
I know I saw that in one of the Firefox betas long before I saw it in IE ... definitely long before XP SP2, but I can't remember which update brought the feature to IE, if it was before SP2 or not ... can anyone confirm who copied who?
Yup. Microsoft is one of the worst offenders here. E.g. try moving a large folder containing a few read only files, system files etc. in Windows Explorer. Plenty of other examples though.
A general rule of interface design, if the user is busy typing something, you just don't rudely grab the focus from them. This is a general problem with Windows.
Occasionally they've tried to improve it and do like Outlook where the taskbar app button flashes blue like crazy. However this is practically as bad, because it's too distracting to be able to do anything while that button flashes, and the worst is that even though the app is DEMANDING your attention, most of the time it was for something totally stupid and pointless. Don't demand the user's attention unless it's for something important. In XP they also try to use those comic-bubble-style popups from the taskbar, which then cover part of your Window and don't go away, and they come up far too much in a default XP install, to harass you into registering for Passport and whatnot.
The Firefox designers 'got it right' with their popup blocker window thing that appears on the top.
Try walking around a lot in a hurry
Holding a few pieces of paper while walking helps here too :)
Is that what people who aren't going to amount to much in life tell themselves to make them feel better that they're not as smart as smart people? Because I know many smart people who do "rise to the occasion" to meet challenges head on, most of the smart people I know have become very successful in life, and are much better at hacking it "in the real world" than less smart people.
It's true that there are many who have been babied and will not amount to much in the real world, but the fact is smart people are far more likely to become very successful, and extremely few of the most successful people in the world are not very smart, and people who play down the value of being smart are usually just trying to make themselves feel better.
Huh? Stress really isn't healthy. It's linked causally to hundreds of different disorders, dysfunctions, and increased vulnerability to diseases. It's linked causally to many life-threatening and potentially debilitating problems like heart attacks and strokes.
I don't know what doctors would take issue with the claim that stress isn't healthy, but I certainly don't want to be visiting those doctors.
(Or did you mean that a certain, low level of stress is healthy? Sure. But when people say things like "stress isn't healthy", in the English language this n implicitly means "high levels of stress". Without a qualifying adjective, the "default" meaning of the word "stress" is "excess stress", similar to how "luck" defaults to "good luck" unless qualified by an adjective such as "bad".)
It's true. Some people are very smart. Some people are very hard-working. These are separate traits. It's rare to find someone with the right combination that includes both traits (and other required 'success' traits). (Plus, life has to deal that person the right circumstances, or rather, not the wrong circumstances.) Being smart and having good ideas is almost entirely meaningless if you aren't willing to work hard at it.
Since the OS X core is BSD, I wouldn't be so sure about that, although to be honest I think they're both pretty "proven servers", you could probably go either way here.
Many girls like to dress up 'glamorously' and barbie doll like. There isn't necessarily any harm in it. Those girls are smiling and happy. In fact it would be pretty much impossible to prove harm is done here - I challenge you to do so. But I suppose instead of rationally demonstrating to me the proof of harm (because you can't), you're just going to call me a troll. You can dismiss me as a troll, but you know I'm right.
Hope meta-mod gets you. There was nothing troll-ish about the question, and you clearly aren't able to answer the question, or perhaps you know the answer but don't like the answer.
Yes, the diamond jewelry market is entirely artificially created, women have been brainwashed to believe this imaginary fairy-tale about symbols of undying love, men have been brainwashed to mindlessly crack open their wallets every time and waste an awful lot of money on this unnecessary rubbish. It's totally imaginary, a make-believe world, virtual products, it's like buying vapour. Yet our unquestioning gullibility keeps us hanging on every word their massive marketing machine says. I for one wish that someone would bring tonnes of diamonds back from an extra-solar planet and dump them in the streets, so that women would finally realise that diamonds don't actually have any value.
Awfully alarmist, but I don't see how you can equate changing the access mode from 'credit card' to 'free' and immediately changing it back again with continually making withdrawals at an ATM. That's insane. That doesn't mean what he did is correct, but it is certainly NOTHING like "the people who abused the ATMs".
*Sigh* Yes, they do, and I'd actually know, so either post non-anonymous references or bugger off with your FUD. Unless you think I mean billions *each*, obviously I mean billions *combined*.
He can't possibly convince people that he isn't in it for the money
Well, he certainly isn't in it because he likes making good software. Haha. No, Bill Gates got where he is through several decades of continuous highly unethical behaviour, and people don't disrespect him "because he is rich" but because of his unethical behavious. In fact, just to prove that people don't inherently disrespect rich people: in South Africa we have a self-made billionaire, Mark Shuttleworth, who, after making billions, now spends his time and money developing and promoting OpenSource, funding local math/science development initiatives, funding local 'innovation reward' programs and 'business incubators', developing educational software for poor schools, funds translation of OpenSource software into various indigenous language, and all sorts of other positive things. And he is very widely respected here, I've never met anyone who did not regard him with respect.
The only people I've ever met who do not think that Bill Gates rise was due to unethical behaviour, also, when questioned, reveal that they have absolutely no knowledge of the history of Microsoft, or of anything that Microsoft have done. Ah, ignorance, bliss.
Leverage ...... as much as people here may think 3rd world countries are irrelevant, Microsoft still gets billions from them ... and charity donations, vaccines etc. is a nice way of saying "your government [which is about to purchase 10,000 PCs and considering OpenSource] had better not consider running anything other than Microsoft Windows and Office". It gives Microsoft massive amounts of political leverage in countries they sell to, and also serves as a major "feel-good" PR marketing campaign, makes people all feel-good about that wonderful Microsoft company. (Microsoft always milk their major charity donations for every bit of publicity they're worth.)
It's much like 3rd-world "aid" from developed countries .. there are always strings attached, and the developed countries almost always make the money back somehow in some other indirect way (e.g. World Food Program in Africa gathers cash donations from a.o. European countries and uses it to buy American agricultural products, instead of buying those same products available from an African country right next door to the one they're helping ... which also helps kill the agricultural market in the neighbouring country.)
As far as I'm aware nobody's ever done it before, which makes it both non-obvious and novel
W.r.t. patents "obvious" doesn't refer to whether or not anyone's ever thought of doing it. It refers to whether or not the solution to a problem (i.e. the "method" being patented) would be obvious i.e. easy for a person somewhat skilled in the arts if asked to solve the problem. In other words, if you were a programmer and someone came up to you and said "we need to come up with a scheme for encoding lat/long values in a compact way", and you could come up with this idea in, what, a few hours max, then it's "obvious". If another programmer can look at the solution and understand it within a few minutes, as is the case here, it's also "obvious". "Non-obvious" would mean if you described it to a programmer, and he/she went off and scratched their heads for a few days/weeks/months thinking "HOW did they DO that?" (E.g. take MP3 compression: although many of us have now read descriptions how it works, at the time it was patented, if someone had asked "please come up with a method of compressing music at a factor greater than 10 with almost no audible quality loss", the solution would not have been obvious to, well, pretty much any programmer I would venture to guess, and also would have boggled the minds (and it did) of many programmers at the time, saying "HOW did they manage such good compression that still sounds so good", and take weeks or months to figure out how.
People are dependent on crappy jobs (rather, on jobs at all) because people are for some reason no longer able to do what their ancestors likely did for centuries - live off the land. Why is this? Overpopulation in some regions? Government decided it 'owned' all the land? Big corporations decided it 'owned' all the land? European settlers (or other foreign entity) moved in and decided they owned all the land? Big commercial industrialized farming organizations decided they 'owned' all the land? All of the above? Or have people somehow been convinced that the agrarian lifestyle is too "backwards", that they should rather be "modern" and "sophisticated" by living in a small box & slaving all hours in a tinier box for (basically) food and some bad sitcoms and a few "cool" electronic appliances in exchange? I don't know, but it all seems to boil down to land. If you don't have land, you are forced to join somehow this massive "industrial machine" that is the world economy. And all over the world, those in power (economic and/or political) have ensured massively distorted land ownership. Not new of course, but the scale of it is unprecedented.
I got that wrong .. my bad .. was reading too quickly and had just "scanned through" it, getting the wrong message .. *blush*. I guess trying to cram some slashdot reading in amongst tight work deadlines isn't the greatest idea.
I'm not trying to find the "gotcha" here, but what if you really are going to send a relative/friend/whatever to pick up your kids after a few hours? I'm sure this happens all the time.
... can you demonstrate that any of the girls on that site are being harmed? You seem to take it self-evident that this is "bad" .. I'm not so sure. Forget all your pre-existing notions about this subject and just try to focus on that one question.
Depends how old he is. If you think it's unnatural for, say, an 18 or 19 year old male to feel attracted to a sexually developed, attractive 14-year old female, then you're more than a little confused.
BTW, society parades scantily-clad underage women around in front of adult males all the time with the only purpose being for the adult males to ogle their bodies and feel attracted to them. Kate Moss was "discovered" when she was 14. Frequently we see images of models in magazines or on television who are 15 or 16 or 17. Guys stare, and nobody even seems to realise the obvious contradiction with the claim that we're "not supposed to" be attracted to that. You've probably been attracted to underage women hundreds of times without even realising it. I guess that also makes you "sick"?
I agree. I don't see why they needed to release the name of the hotel .. now the hotel owner and employees are going to suffer. If it was my hotel, I'd probably be busy making plans to change the name right now.
(How is that flamebait? It's true. Oh wait, it's "I don't like the message" moderation)
Anyway, back to the topic, South Africa is another example, where most whites are still whining that "we should forget Apartheid", only 11 years after it ended.
Aw gee you're so clever, you really got me there, NOT. I presume you're not in charge of corporate desktops, if you were you'd be fired quickly for being incredibly stupid. Do you have any idea how fast a worm can spread through a LAN of over 1000 PCs if they don't have anti-viruses on them? Do you know what it costs a company to have to clean an infection of that size? Let me put it this way: if it was your company, would you take the chance of not installing anti-virus software on any of the 1000+ desktops? No? I thought so - sorry, you lose, thanks for playing.
The free anti-viruses have nowhere near as comprehensive virus checking as the major commercial ones, and aren't generally as quick to be updated against new viruses.
Hmm ... on second thought, I think you're just a Microsoft shill.