The key to how an individual perceives Windows XP is based on expectations. Those with low expectations generally think Windows XP is good. Those with high expectations realise it is not. The way to develop realistic expectations is to have an in-depth knowledge of the *potential* of software vs the current reality of software. Kids today who grew up on Windows 98 have low expectations and so they think XP is actually *good*.
the Democrat-controlled Senate wouldn't ratify it. You see, neither party is really itching to commit political suicide.
You're missing an important point: The Republications are in power right now. The Dems are not. So the Dems couldn't change anything even if they wanted to. Strange as it may sound, it's right to criticise the party who holds the power to make change but chooses not to, as opposed to any other party who "would probably" do the same. You are implying that it OK for the Republicans to do the wrong thing based on that fact that if others were in power they would probably also do the wrong thing. That's a really lame argument, even if it's right.
Could this be related to the temperature? I'll let you in on a secret: yes it could.
It could, but not for the reason you imply. It's simpler than that. When cold, the muscles responsible for this naturally contract and become tense, and when warm they expand and relax... but this happens naturally with most muscles in your body, and has absolutely nothing to do with trying to control the temperature of your nads. Jump in a cold pool and I promise you most of the muscles in your body will tense up as soon as you're in the water. Part of the reason is that your body is converting stored energy into heat to make up for the heat loss, but this is NOT to regulate the temperature of your balls, it's to save you from going hypothermic and dying. Honestly, your balls do not need such quick reactions to temperature changes, firstly because warm temperatures pose no risk to fertility unless sustained for months or years, and secondly because even then, the infertility effects are generally only temporary, i.e. once your balls are back to a few degrees below the rest of your body, you'll be producing again.
But thanks anyway for "letting us in" on that "secret".
You joke, but there was actually a fairly big court case here in South Africa earlier this year, where an employer did feed a recently-laid-off employee to the lions (with the help of a few other staff members they threw him over a fence into a lion enclosure, where the lions ate him). Don't remember the details but I think they were all charged with murder in the end.
Sure. Let's think about this for a moment. The NSA knows about vulnerabilities in widely used encryption, but want to keep it secret to give them the US an "edge". Pretty soon thousands of US companies and even government and military organisations are using that encryption. Sooner or later of course someone finds the vulnerability, and bam, a huge section of the US economy is suddenly exposed. Real clever going there with that "advantage".. good luck with it.
No, I didn't, I think you missed the "but either way" text in my post (read again!), which indicates that the second part was not intended to follow on from the first. The first part was just a response to the implication that you basically can't see anything due to the speed of the images. And the second part, well, still applies 100%.
Apple is a monopoly in the Apple market? WTF, so any company is a monopoly as long as you define "the market" in terms of that company's products? I guess that makes McDonalds a monopoly - in the market for McDonalds food. And Gap is a monopoly in the market for Gap clothing. And so on.
If Apple controls "the system" on their hardware, why can you delete OS X and install Linux on a PPC Mac?
I saw the bloody hand quite clearly and immediately the first time I ran the test, but hardly registered any of the other 'boring' images. Still, I knew what the test was about, so one could argue I was simply "looking for" something gory. But either way, your hypothesis that the speed of the images is the problem totally fails to explain the actual, measured differences in awareness of different images amongst test subjects between the experiment and control image sequences. (That's the whole point of having a control part of an experiment!)
Profits from selling OS's are only in the ten's of dollars.
That depends how many you sell. Economies of scale apply particularly well to software because the marginal cost per unit is very low. (Not too long ago, MS's profit margins on Windows were around 80%.. not sure where they are now.)
Hmm.. I would guess the potential initial market for an Intel OS X would probably be around 1,000,000/year (<- more or less pulled out of my arse right now)... at $129, that's revenue of $129m. Indeed, not too stellar, especially compared to their current profits on iPods and Macs. Of course, if the market could grow to several million per year after a few years, then it starts to look worth it. Extrapolating Apple's current growth rate, this seems feasible. But I guess SJ will probably decide closer to the time if and when he wants to try pursue that.
Good question. (Although it doesn't really have any bearing on the issue of whether or not the police got a warrant or should have gotten a warrant, because the outcome would be the same, and you'd probably go to jail and be labelled a paedophile anyway.) Scary thought.
Do you have a daughter or a wife? Would you like a bunch of random teenage employees at the local Gap watching her everytime she tried on a piece of clothing?
Worse, such pics would be leaking onto the Net all the time:/
industrial farming, the use of pesticides, and all the things that make food abundant, cheap, and sustainable
Industrial (oil-reliant) farming and pesticides make food "sustainable"? You were making sense right up until that point. Modern agriculture is anything but sustainable. The world is full of large sections of land that were once fertile but are now nearly useless for farming because people practiced the unsustainable farming methodologies in widespread use today.
I don't deny the "white, upper-class, bourgeoise" accusation - in fact I admit it, you summed me up well;)... there is definitely much truth to what you say. But frankly, a good, well-prepared juicy thick steak really is an order of magnitude nicer than the kind of artificial processed "meat" you get in the average Big Mac. I don't want a world where that's the only kind of meat available. Hopefully, as someone suggested, the new generations of artificial meat will be able to taste as good. I suspect though that it's always going to cost too much more to make better-tasting artificial meat than to make bland mediocre artificial meat to justify making the good stuff "en masse" (just like the greater economies of scale afforded by integrating sound cards into motherboards has led to a proliferation of absolutely awful sound cards, so the average "32-bit" sound card today sounds crap compared to the average "16-bit" sound card ten years ago.. it's just cheaper). So more likely we'll end up seeing the same market differentiation taking place as in today's foods --- cheap, bland stuff for most people, and good-tasting overpriced artificial meat for the bourgeoise:). Then we're just back where we started, but with less of an environmental impact.
I don't see what the problem is. If the meat tastes like meat and has roughly the same protein and calorie content but costs much less then this can only be a good thing, right?
Because it won't taste like meat. It'll taste "something like meat, but not quite as good". Like soya-based 'meat' products. It'll taste just a little more mediocre, more bland, and more 'homogenised' than the real thing. You may not care, but many people already think modern packaged foods (and society in general) has become too bland, mediocre and homogenous, and this is just another step towards the ultimate bland, generic society. (Maybe. Maybe not. Probably.) Of course, the first generation to grow up on the stuff will just think that's normal.
I just don't understand how being able to synthesize food in every home in America means there would suddenly be a shortage of non-synthesized food
Because industrial agriculture requires economies of scale to work effectively. If the majority of people mostly eat synthesized food, modern large-scale agriculture will collapse. (Of course, it's debatable as to whether or not this is good or bad in itself, because industrial agriculture is not sustainable anyway.)
And why exactly would any company (e.g. Coca-Cola) deserve such protection at the expense of freedom of speech of actual humans, simply because they put money in? Does a company's right to get return on investment trump individual human rights? (And for the observant, yes, that was a loaded question, the right response is 'WTF, companies have a right to ROI?')
(And why yes I do own a company. And I think this goes way too far. I think it's chilling that my kids/grandkids will grow up in a world where it will eventually be considered totally normal for corporates to "own" everyday words "because they paid for them".)
OK, just to add to that, fuzza is definitely working for Jeremy, he admits as much, and all the others supporting Jeremy on this thread happen to be "friends" of fuzza.
It's interesting that the small group of people on this thread that are (rather loudly) posting claims supporting this Jeremy character are all linked to one another as slashdot "friends" (fuzza, QuantumG, Bandraginus, jonoxer).
In fact in most cases they are just replying to one another's posts, but with the text implying they are merely strangers that are "independently verifying" what the "parent poster" is saying. Like the case in the GP post. And like hereAll rather suspect. Sock puppet accounts? Or a small handful of people who are linked to this?
I think it is possible that Yahoo! has more items indexed than Google... Yahoo can search subscription based content. That has got to boost their numbers considerably beyond the range of queries that typically return less than one thousand results
If we assume that Yahoo has offered subscription-based content searching for about two years (not sure of the exact length of time), then to get even close to the difference they are citing here in their marketing (over 11 billion more items), they would have to have added over 116 subscription-based items per second, every single second since they started. This seems rather unlikely. Far far far more likely is that this is just a case of extremely "creating (ac)counting" on Yahoo's part.
WTF? No, it isn't. Stop perpetuating this myth that the ONLY reason for Windows sucking is that it 'has to support many configurations'. That's only one of many reasons.
I agree, so I'll take the chance, and repost the GP without the -1:
Your post fits the profile of a 'paid-astroturfer-post' "to the tee". (1) spelling errors for believability, (2) a claim to be a Linux admin for credibility amongst the/. audience, (3) claims of severe interoperability problems with OSS and of the indirect cost of OSS being high, (4) specifically attempt to induce fear of OSS - could cost your job if you use OO, wooh!!
Basically you pretend to advocate other alternatives but you really only advocate Windows etc.... samples. from your other posts:
"I don't see many great differences. My end users working in marketing or whatever prefer Windows/Office. They do think differently than us geeks, and aren't willing to spend hours dealing with archaic command lines. Windows performs admirably there."
"Mr Gates is the biggest... philanthropist in the world"
Unfortunately most people seem to be too naive and trusting to believe that slashdot is crawling with paid astroturfers and, yes, moderators too:/ They also mod one another up to keep giving each other karma though, and mod down specific 'dissenters'... I've watched occasionally and seen some VERY suspicious moderation patterns.
I believe this will vastly outweigh all the 10 features the other guy can possibly list.
Sure, I understand that. But he/she claims that the reason people choose Office is that it has vastly more features than OO. You are stating (and I agree with you) that the reason people choose Office is that no other software properly works with Microsoft's proprietary formats but you'll need to work with those formats".
All I'm saying is, claims such as "Office has lots more features than OO" should be backed up, and if they can't be backed up, then admit the truth (as you have stated it - we're all 'locked in') and retract the claim.
office 2003 has more features than the best of what openoffice has to offer
OK, since you seem knowledgeable about it and you brought it up: Please list ten such features (and subtracting one from the list for each feature OpenOffice has that Word doesn't, e.g. built-in PDF export, word auto-completion, a styles system that actually works properly, etc.... and for some of us, "non-proprietary file format" is also a feature).
Slashdot Mirror
The key to how an individual perceives Windows XP is based on expectations. Those with low expectations generally think Windows XP is good. Those with high expectations realise it is not. The way to develop realistic expectations is to have an in-depth knowledge of the *potential* of software vs the current reality of software. Kids today who grew up on Windows 98 have low expectations and so they think XP is actually *good*.
But I'm happy to see that they're finally free of Saddam.
It's kind of cute how naive you are.
the Democrat-controlled Senate wouldn't ratify it. You see, neither party is really itching to commit political suicide.
You're missing an important point: The Republications are in power right now. The Dems are not. So the Dems couldn't change anything even if they wanted to. Strange as it may sound, it's right to criticise the party who holds the power to make change but chooses not to, as opposed to any other party who "would probably" do the same. You are implying that it OK for the Republicans to do the wrong thing based on that fact that if others were in power they would probably also do the wrong thing. That's a really lame argument, even if it's right.
anthropomorphized
That word, I don't think it means whatever you seem to think it means.
Could this be related to the temperature? I'll let you in on a secret: yes it could.
It could, but not for the reason you imply. It's simpler than that. When cold, the muscles responsible for this naturally contract and become tense, and when warm they expand and relax ... but this happens naturally with most muscles in your body, and has absolutely nothing to do with trying to control the temperature of your nads. Jump in a cold pool and I promise you most of the muscles in your body will tense up as soon as you're in the water. Part of the reason is that your body is converting stored energy into heat to make up for the heat loss, but this is NOT to regulate the temperature of your balls, it's to save you from going hypothermic and dying. Honestly, your balls do not need such quick reactions to temperature changes, firstly because warm temperatures pose no risk to fertility unless sustained for months or years, and secondly because even then, the infertility effects are generally only temporary, i.e. once your balls are back to a few degrees below the rest of your body, you'll be producing again.
But thanks anyway for "letting us in" on that "secret".
You joke, but there was actually a fairly big court case here in South Africa earlier this year, where an employer did feed a recently-laid-off employee to the lions (with the help of a few other staff members they threw him over a fence into a lion enclosure, where the lions ate him). Don't remember the details but I think they were all charged with murder in the end.
Ah, here we go, found a link.
Sure. Let's think about this for a moment. The NSA knows about vulnerabilities in widely used encryption, but want to keep it secret to give them the US an "edge". Pretty soon thousands of US companies and even government and military organisations are using that encryption. Sooner or later of course someone finds the vulnerability, and bam, a huge section of the US economy is suddenly exposed. Real clever going there with that "advantage" .. good luck with it.
I think you misunderstood
No, I didn't, I think you missed the "but either way" text in my post (read again!), which indicates that the second part was not intended to follow on from the first. The first part was just a response to the implication that you basically can't see anything due to the speed of the images. And the second part, well, still applies 100%.
Apple is a monopoly in the Apple market? WTF, so any company is a monopoly as long as you define "the market" in terms of that company's products? I guess that makes McDonalds a monopoly - in the market for McDonalds food. And Gap is a monopoly in the market for Gap clothing. And so on.
If Apple controls "the system" on their hardware, why can you delete OS X and install Linux on a PPC Mac?
I saw the bloody hand quite clearly and immediately the first time I ran the test, but hardly registered any of the other 'boring' images. Still, I knew what the test was about, so one could argue I was simply "looking for" something gory. But either way, your hypothesis that the speed of the images is the problem totally fails to explain the actual, measured differences in awareness of different images amongst test subjects between the experiment and control image sequences. (That's the whole point of having a control part of an experiment!)
In what market is Apple a monopoly? Definitely not computer hardware or computer software.
Profits from selling OS's are only in the ten's of dollars.
That depends how many you sell. Economies of scale apply particularly well to software because the marginal cost per unit is very low. (Not too long ago, MS's profit margins on Windows were around 80% .. not sure where they are now.)
Hmm .. I would guess the potential initial market for an Intel OS X would probably be around 1,000,000/year (<- more or less pulled out of my arse right now) ... at $129, that's revenue of $129m. Indeed, not too stellar, especially compared to their current profits on iPods and Macs. Of course, if the market could grow to several million per year after a few years, then it starts to look worth it. Extrapolating Apple's current growth rate, this seems feasible. But I guess SJ will probably decide closer to the time if and when he wants to try pursue that.
Good question. (Although it doesn't really have any bearing on the issue of whether or not the police got a warrant or should have gotten a warrant, because the outcome would be the same, and you'd probably go to jail and be labelled a paedophile anyway.) Scary thought.
Do you have a daughter or a wife? Would you like a bunch of random teenage employees at the local Gap watching her everytime she tried on a piece of clothing?
Worse, such pics would be leaking onto the Net all the time :/
industrial farming, the use of pesticides, and all the things that make food abundant, cheap, and sustainable
Industrial (oil-reliant) farming and pesticides make food "sustainable"? You were making sense right up until that point. Modern agriculture is anything but sustainable. The world is full of large sections of land that were once fertile but are now nearly useless for farming because people practiced the unsustainable farming methodologies in widespread use today.
I don't deny the "white, upper-class, bourgeoise" accusation - in fact I admit it, you summed me up well ;) ... there is definitely much truth to what you say. But frankly, a good, well-prepared juicy thick steak really is an order of magnitude nicer than the kind of artificial processed "meat" you get in the average Big Mac. I don't want a world where that's the only kind of meat available. Hopefully, as someone suggested, the new generations of artificial meat will be able to taste as good. I suspect though that it's always going to cost too much more to make better-tasting artificial meat than to make bland mediocre artificial meat to justify making the good stuff "en masse" (just like the greater economies of scale afforded by integrating sound cards into motherboards has led to a proliferation of absolutely awful sound cards, so the average "32-bit" sound card today sounds crap compared to the average "16-bit" sound card ten years ago .. it's just cheaper). So more likely we'll end up seeing the same market differentiation taking place as in today's foods --- cheap, bland stuff for most people, and good-tasting overpriced artificial meat for the bourgeoise :). Then we're just back where we started, but with less of an environmental impact.
I don't see what the problem is. If the meat tastes like meat and has roughly the same protein and calorie content but costs much less then this can only be a good thing, right?
Because it won't taste like meat. It'll taste "something like meat, but not quite as good". Like soya-based 'meat' products. It'll taste just a little more mediocre, more bland, and more 'homogenised' than the real thing. You may not care, but many people already think modern packaged foods (and society in general) has become too bland, mediocre and homogenous, and this is just another step towards the ultimate bland, generic society. (Maybe. Maybe not. Probably.) Of course, the first generation to grow up on the stuff will just think that's normal.
I just don't understand how being able to synthesize food in every home in America means there would suddenly be a shortage of non-synthesized food
Because industrial agriculture requires economies of scale to work effectively. If the majority of people mostly eat synthesized food, modern large-scale agriculture will collapse. (Of course, it's debatable as to whether or not this is good or bad in itself, because industrial agriculture is not sustainable anyway.)
And why exactly would any company (e.g. Coca-Cola) deserve such protection at the expense of freedom of speech of actual humans, simply because they put money in? Does a company's right to get return on investment trump individual human rights? (And for the observant, yes, that was a loaded question, the right response is 'WTF, companies have a right to ROI?')
(And why yes I do own a company. And I think this goes way too far. I think it's chilling that my kids/grandkids will grow up in a world where it will eventually be considered totally normal for corporates to "own" everyday words "because they paid for them".)
OK, just to add to that, fuzza is definitely working for Jeremy, he admits as much, and all the others supporting Jeremy on this thread happen to be "friends" of fuzza.
It's interesting that the small group of people on this thread that are (rather loudly) posting claims supporting this Jeremy character are all linked to one another as slashdot "friends" (fuzza, QuantumG, Bandraginus, jonoxer).
In fact in most cases they are just replying to one another's posts, but with the text implying they are merely strangers that are "independently verifying" what the "parent poster" is saying. Like the case in the GP post. And like hereAll rather suspect. Sock puppet accounts? Or a small handful of people who are linked to this?
Hey Mr. Naive, does this finally prove to you that this is a problem?
I think it is possible that Yahoo! has more items indexed than Google ... Yahoo can search subscription based content. That has got to boost their numbers considerably beyond the range of queries that typically return less than one thousand results
If we assume that Yahoo has offered subscription-based content searching for about two years (not sure of the exact length of time), then to get even close to the difference they are citing here in their marketing (over 11 billion more items), they would have to have added over 116 subscription-based items per second, every single second since they started. This seems rather unlikely. Far far far more likely is that this is just a case of extremely "creating (ac)counting" on Yahoo's part.
Windows, which is really a great OS
WTF? No, it isn't. Stop perpetuating this myth that the ONLY reason for Windows sucking is that it 'has to support many configurations'. That's only one of many reasons.
I agree, so I'll take the chance, and repost the GP without the -1:
Unfortunately most people seem to be too naive and trusting to believe that slashdot is crawling with paid astroturfers and, yes, moderators too :/ They also mod one another up to keep giving each other karma though, and mod down specific 'dissenters' ... I've watched occasionally and seen some VERY suspicious moderation patterns.
I believe this will vastly outweigh all the 10 features the other guy can possibly list.
Sure, I understand that. But he/she claims that the reason people choose Office is that it has vastly more features than OO. You are stating (and I agree with you) that the reason people choose Office is that no other software properly works with Microsoft's proprietary formats but you'll need to work with those formats".
All I'm saying is, claims such as "Office has lots more features than OO" should be backed up, and if they can't be backed up, then admit the truth (as you have stated it - we're all 'locked in') and retract the claim.
office 2003 has more features than the best of what openoffice has to offer
OK, since you seem knowledgeable about it and you brought it up: Please list ten such features (and subtracting one from the list for each feature OpenOffice has that Word doesn't, e.g. built-in PDF export, word auto-completion, a styles system that actually works properly, etc. ... and for some of us, "non-proprietary file format" is also a feature).