Pretty much says that God made a mistake by giving you a foreskin to begin with (yes I know it's awfully off-topic, sorry).
...unless of course you believe that foreskin was created for the specific purpose of circumcision... Sorry, but no contradiction there. But read on, I'm pretty sure there are many other contradictions even on the same page that talks about circumcision, which ever holy book you pick;-)
Before guns and bullets it was arrows, pointy sharp objects, cutting sharp objects, blunt heavy objects, rocks, fingers...
Actually, I think ban on fingers would be the most effective way to stop murders. It's very hard to kill somebody if you have no fingers to strangle or to pull the trigger or to hold a knife... The only alternative is pretty much pushing somebody off a cliff, and that can be easily prevented by nailing everybody to the ground.
Rather pessimistic of you, considering how little we know, and how much is just speculation... A lot of what you write doesn't make sense considered what we know.
We don't know if life could develop around other elements than carbon chains, but there certainly are several possibilities, they just require unlikely environments. But we don't know that such environments don't exist. As an example, we don't really know much about high-pressure chemistry that might be going on at the solid surface or in the oceans of different gas giants, so it's kind of arrogant to rule out any life developing there.
And details like rotation... At the bottom of an ocean, the wind doesn't matter much. With active enough geology, there could easily be enough surface features to create a lot of protective places on land, too. Or "plants" could just grow strong enough to stand the winds, and then provide shelter for less robust life forms. The possible possibilities are endless, so ruling stuff out based on detail like doesn't make sense to me.
About color of parent star, certainly photosynthesis on Earth developed to match the colour of our sun. In another planet, the chemical process, the molecules and the structures involved, would of course be optimized for it's parent star. I mean, that's what life does for living, optimization, and you'll have hard time proving non-existence of any plausible photosynthesis mechanism for pretty much any star.
Now it may turn out that any other kind of life, except our carbon-DNA-kind just isn't practical in our Universe, either there just aren't suitable environments, or the chemistry just doesn't work. But based on what possibilities on exotic life we have imagined, and adding the unknown possibilities we haven't imagined, some of them probably work.
Well, the parent post said "semi-totalitarian", and therefore recognizes that Russia is not the same as USSR.
However, just looking at the history of Russia/USSR/Russia, it's the their job to prove they're not the same beast. But they're doing the opposite... With their opression of free press and with their heavy-handed tactics with their neighbors, they are seriously hinting that they indeed are the same beast.
But being the same is no big surprise, the surprise would have been if Russia had changed... And for a moment it looked like they might even pull it off, but right now it doesn't look good, no, not good at all.
If the society allowed such contracts as I outlined, then certainly the employer would take the employee/slave to court for breaching the agreement by not showing up at work as requested (and win if they kept their side of the deal). Ie. in the scenario I outlined, there would be legal obligation to obey the contract, ie. a legal obligation to show up for work as outlined in the contract (in this case, whenever the employer wants, for as many hours the employer wants). That was kind of the whole point of my scenario.
In our current society, such a contract is invalid, as you point out. The "slave" can just break it without any consequence, so the contract is only worth the paper it's printed on. And I get the impression that you too think this is a good thing that such a contract would not be binding, that there are at least some laws that limit the freedoms of individuals and companies in making employment contracts.
Then the rest is just deciding what can be agreed upon, and what kind of agreements are invalid by law. It's all shades of gray between libertarianism and full state communism.
result was made into laws and indsutry-wide agreements.
Now, that is a serious problem in it self. There never should be an industry-wide agreement. Such a monstrosity hampers competition, decreases the flexibility of the (labour and investment) markets and leads to irrational wage policies therefore increasing inflation and creating increasing economic inequality.
With this I can mostly agree with, at least to the extent that such industry-wide agreements should never be explicitly supported by laws, but neither should they be explicitly prevented.
In some industries, wide agreements will probably rise automatically, and be a good thing too for all parties involved. They give stability to the job market, at the expense of flexibility, and stability supports investments too. But they should never become a permanent institution, never something where stability vs. flexibility is not flexible itself.
The only things that can't be outsourced (yet) are stuff that needs physical presence. Who knows, maybe your sysadmin might end up being a walking robot remote controlled by a low paid worker in china.....
Why on earth would you want robots, if you could have young female secretaries in skirts doing the physical stuff?
(Or, to avoid being sexist, young muscular males in tight jeans, if the boss happens to be a woman or a homosexual man...)
The way I see it, if you agree to use the infrastructure created and/or supported by the society, and if you agree to take advantage of skilled people educated in society-supported schools, then you implicitly agree to follow the laws of that same society. You can't pick one and reject the other.
I don't see a company being forced to accept the laws, any more than I see a hungry unemployed being forced to take a crappy job. Both can choose to reject the agreement (not hire people, not eat), or to ignore the law (but possibly face the consequences if they get caught). Both can also move out of the country if they think it's a better solution for them. Etc.
Do you approve having contracts that would make the employees effectively slaves for life with no right to resign without your approval, and unspecified pay and working hours? Of course voluntarily signed (eg. by a parent who's kid is mortally ill, in exchange for your company to provide the expensive health care the kid needs to live). And I'm not asking if such an agreement would be a good deal for your specific business, I'm asking if you would approve that such voluntary agreements could be made in our society?
And if there was a contractual agreement on overtime, stating exaclty the things now stated by law, and Apple didn't obey it, how would that make the problem go away?
Why would Apple honour such an agreement, even if they aren't honouring the law?
The suit is being filed by a Network Engineer. These are the guys who keep the local infrastructure running - its tough to outsource that kind of thing to India.
Just have an Indian support professional walk any secretary though any network maintenance procedures over IP phone. Easy! Efficient! Almost free! Then you can "let go" a few better paid network professionals, and hire an extra secretary or two (at minimun pay of course) to be the hands and eyes of the Indian network professionals. Guaranteed to save you big bucks on the long run!
And remember, young female secretaries in skirts reaching up to change some cable is a much more aesthetic view, than a slightly overweight, bearded male engineer doing the same, Even assuming he doesn't wear a skirt... (Just try not get a mental image of him doing it in a skir...AAaaieee
Your argument is flawed because it is based on the assumption that a free market would contain laws pertaining to employee pay and overtime.
A free market would still contain agreements, and it would out of necessity need laws for situations when somebody breaks the agreement, no? If there was no government to enforce agreements (and define what an "agreement" is), but only private "security" bought with money, then the law would simply be what ever the one with most money for the best "security" would dictate.
Obviously this is a figment of my imagination, then.
Nah. It's just an example demonstrating I was wrong;-).
Though I imagine there are some technical (mechanical durability) and pricing difficulties with putting that on the laptop displayed. It'd need to be pretty durable to take normal laptop display abuse without fracturing if it's glass. And it would have to be hinged with a... rotating hinge (I'm sure those have a name, since there are a few laptops with them?) so that the display can be turned and rotated to cover the keyboard for serious tablet-style drawing. And even then, if you need to both draw and use the keyboard, it might be inconvenient.
But your point stands, it could be done that way too, and at least for some users it would be much better too.
And if you hate steak enough to order it ruined (with lots of nasty steak sauce to replace the flavor, I can only assume), why the heck would you eat at a steakhouse?
So, you are among the an anti-freedom crowd, one of those people who think it's their right to tell other people what their tastes and opinions should be, and to try to drive away those that refuse to conform to what you want.
I think cooking pretty directly allowed farming, by giving both time (cooking gathered plants allowed less time spent gathering, leaving time for farming) and motivation (if you can "gather" in your own back yard, there's no need to go to the wild and expose yourself to the predators and human enemies) for it.
I don't know if cooking *really* brings anything extra to preserving meat. Drying meat surely predates cooking, though cooking before drying might make the whole process faster, and help it stay good longer... But probably not a dramatic improvement.
If you fry mushrooms in a little butter or oil, grill them slowly, or simmer them for a little while until they give up their liquids, their taste and texture changes quite a bit.
Yes, the taste of the butter gets enhanced and especially the texture of the butter is greatly enhanced. I mean, that's what the mushrooms are grown for, enhancing other flavors;-).
(Above is mostly about button mushrooms. There definitely are plenty of mushrooms that have strong flavors of their own! But as far as I understand, in everyday usage "mushroom" means the white button mushrooms without much flavor of their own.)
Well, depending on your local laws and criminal penalties, your connections to the people already working in the car-stealing industry, and your current wealth and income, it may actually be in your best financial interests to start stealing cars until you get caught...
I hear fuel-efficient cars are in pretty high demand (compared to the supply) in some parts of the USA right now, so I think stealing those is a growing "business". Get in now, while it's a new trend!
Or not, if you don't like the idea of being a crook.
Seems to me that litigation is pretty lousy substitute for negotiating skills.
But isn't it so that the "negotiations" have already been done, and the result was made into laws and indsutry-wide agreements. Now Apple is breaking the agreements (or at least somebody believes they are, if they are going to court over it), and therefore litigation is the way to go.
If one side wants to change the laws and wants the old agreements discarded, then it's their responsibility to initiate the negotiation/lobbying/bribing process to make it happen. Until then, stick to the law or face litigation.
I kinda think touch-sensitive displays are not an option for serious drawing... They'd start to wear out really really fast. And even a little visible wear on the display would be a show-stopper annoying for anybody doing serious graphics stuff... Not to mention all the fingerprints etc.
Now if anybody here does serious visual work on a touch-sensitive display and knows fingerprints and wear are not a problem, feel free to correct me...
Indeed. So where would you put the Wacom on this laptop, assuming you still have to be able to sell a lot of them to make it worth making them in the first place?
(This is a serious question. Is there a solution?)
Ideal unless you're left handed and therefore cursed to spend all your time catching the trackpad while trying to write/draw anything.
The secret, jealously guarded by a sect of IBM laptop fanatics, is of course to disable the cursed trackpad/touchpad frustrator device, and use the laptop the way laptops were meant to be used (in absense of a real mouse anyway), ie. using the red button of happiness.
Please don't tell me this thing only has touchpad...?
If this unique hash were like a MD5 hash than the complexity of the hash is simply the range of characters raised to the power of 32, the length of a MD5 hash. MD5 is hexadecimal I think (off the top of my head here), so that would be 16 unique characters. So a MD5 hash has 16^32 permutations.
Just to clarify, MD5 itself is not "hexadecimal" or anything like that. MD5 sum is a string of 128 bits, not any string of characters (well, unless you call a bit a character). MD5 sum can be and usually is interpreted as a number between 0 and 340282366920938463463374607431768211455, and can be represented in any numeral system. In non-ASCII contexts it usually is in raw binary, and hexadecimal or base64 is often used when using printable characters.
But really, it's a number, and can be represented in any way a number can be represnted, like in Roman numerals...;-)
So basically the solution is to live close to an urban center. Unfortunately, housing is generally prohibitively expensive close to most urban centers (except for the ones that are so far gone with blight that there are no real jobs there anyway).
The answer is having enough smaller (say, half a million people) urban centers, connected by efficient mass transit. This would also allow more food to be grown locally, around each dense urban center. But keeping things this way, preventing some urban centers from growing together into massive sprawls, that'd be the real challenge even in this scenario.
The American city (especially in the west) is built around personal automobiles.
And you know, unless radical advances are made in energy production soon (so that all the oil can just be replaced with electricy or hydrogen or whatever), the current Americans will curse the previous generations for letting that happen...
Slashdot Mirror
Pretty much says that God made a mistake by giving you a foreskin to begin with (yes I know it's awfully off-topic, sorry).
...unless of course you believe that foreskin was created for the specific purpose of circumcision... Sorry, but no contradiction there. But read on, I'm pretty sure there are many other contradictions even on the same page that talks about circumcision, which ever holy book you pick ;-)
Before guns and bullets it was arrows, pointy sharp objects, cutting sharp objects, blunt heavy objects, rocks, fingers...
Actually, I think ban on fingers would be the most effective way to stop murders. It's very hard to kill somebody if you have no fingers to strangle or to pull the trigger or to hold a knife... The only alternative is pretty much pushing somebody off a cliff, and that can be easily prevented by nailing everybody to the ground.
Rather pessimistic of you, considering how little we know, and how much is just speculation... A lot of what you write doesn't make sense considered what we know.
We don't know if life could develop around other elements than carbon chains, but there certainly are several possibilities, they just require unlikely environments. But we don't know that such environments don't exist. As an example, we don't really know much about high-pressure chemistry that might be going on at the solid surface or in the oceans of different gas giants, so it's kind of arrogant to rule out any life developing there.
And details like rotation... At the bottom of an ocean, the wind doesn't matter much. With active enough geology, there could easily be enough surface features to create a lot of protective places on land, too. Or "plants" could just grow strong enough to stand the winds, and then provide shelter for less robust life forms. The possible possibilities are endless, so ruling stuff out based on detail like doesn't make sense to me.
About color of parent star, certainly photosynthesis on Earth developed to match the colour of our sun. In another planet, the chemical process, the molecules and the structures involved, would of course be optimized for it's parent star. I mean, that's what life does for living, optimization, and you'll have hard time proving non-existence of any plausible photosynthesis mechanism for pretty much any star.
Now it may turn out that any other kind of life, except our carbon-DNA-kind just isn't practical in our Universe, either there just aren't suitable environments, or the chemistry just doesn't work. But based on what possibilities on exotic life we have imagined, and adding the unknown possibilities we haven't imagined, some of them probably work.
Well, the parent post said "semi-totalitarian", and therefore recognizes that Russia is not the same as USSR.
However, just looking at the history of Russia/USSR/Russia, it's the their job to prove they're not the same beast. But they're doing the opposite... With their opression of free press and with their heavy-handed tactics with their neighbors, they are seriously hinting that they indeed are the same beast.
But being the same is no big surprise, the surprise would have been if Russia had changed... And for a moment it looked like they might even pull it off, but right now it doesn't look good, no, not good at all.
If the society allowed such contracts as I outlined, then certainly the employer would take the employee/slave to court for breaching the agreement by not showing up at work as requested (and win if they kept their side of the deal). Ie. in the scenario I outlined, there would be legal obligation to obey the contract, ie. a legal obligation to show up for work as outlined in the contract (in this case, whenever the employer wants, for as many hours the employer wants). That was kind of the whole point of my scenario.
In our current society, such a contract is invalid, as you point out. The "slave" can just break it without any consequence, so the contract is only worth the paper it's printed on. And I get the impression that you too think this is a good thing that such a contract would not be binding, that there are at least some laws that limit the freedoms of individuals and companies in making employment contracts.
Then the rest is just deciding what can be agreed upon, and what kind of agreements are invalid by law. It's all shades of gray between libertarianism and full state communism.
Have you conisdered that when a law is being broken that it might be an indication that the law should be repealed?
Yes. After consideration, I think this law should not be repelled.
result was made into laws and indsutry-wide agreements.
Now, that is a serious problem in it self. There never should be an industry-wide agreement. Such a monstrosity hampers competition, decreases the flexibility of the (labour and investment) markets and leads to irrational wage policies therefore increasing inflation and creating increasing economic inequality.
With this I can mostly agree with, at least to the extent that such industry-wide agreements should never be explicitly supported by laws, but neither should they be explicitly prevented.
In some industries, wide agreements will probably rise automatically, and be a good thing too for all parties involved. They give stability to the job market, at the expense of flexibility, and stability supports investments too. But they should never become a permanent institution, never something where stability vs. flexibility is not flexible itself.
The only things that can't be outsourced (yet) are stuff that needs physical presence. Who knows, maybe your sysadmin might end up being a walking robot remote controlled by a low paid worker in china.....
Why on earth would you want robots, if you could have young female secretaries in skirts doing the physical stuff?
(Or, to avoid being sexist, young muscular males in tight jeans, if the boss happens to be a woman or a homosexual man...)
The way I see it, if you agree to use the infrastructure created and/or supported by the society, and if you agree to take advantage of skilled people educated in society-supported schools, then you implicitly agree to follow the laws of that same society. You can't pick one and reject the other.
I don't see a company being forced to accept the laws, any more than I see a hungry unemployed being forced to take a crappy job. Both can choose to reject the agreement (not hire people, not eat), or to ignore the law (but possibly face the consequences if they get caught). Both can also move out of the country if they think it's a better solution for them. Etc.
Do you approve having contracts that would make the employees effectively slaves for life with no right to resign without your approval, and unspecified pay and working hours? Of course voluntarily signed (eg. by a parent who's kid is mortally ill, in exchange for your company to provide the expensive health care the kid needs to live). And I'm not asking if such an agreement would be a good deal for your specific business, I'm asking if you would approve that such voluntary agreements could be made in our society?
And if there was a contractual agreement on overtime, stating exaclty the things now stated by law, and Apple didn't obey it, how would that make the problem go away?
Why would Apple honour such an agreement, even if they aren't honouring the law?
The suit is being filed by a Network Engineer. These are the guys who keep the local infrastructure running - its tough to outsource that kind of thing to India.
Just have an Indian support professional walk any secretary though any network maintenance procedures over IP phone. Easy! Efficient! Almost free! Then you can "let go" a few better paid network professionals, and hire an extra secretary or two (at minimun pay of course) to be the hands and eyes of the Indian network professionals. Guaranteed to save you big bucks on the long run!
And remember, young female secretaries in skirts reaching up to change some cable is a much more aesthetic view, than a slightly overweight, bearded male engineer doing the same, Even assuming he doesn't wear a skirt... (Just try not get a mental image of him doing it in a skir...AAaaieee
Your argument is flawed because it is based on the assumption that a free market would contain laws pertaining to employee pay and overtime.
A free market would still contain agreements, and it would out of necessity need laws for situations when somebody breaks the agreement, no? If there was no government to enforce agreements (and define what an "agreement" is), but only private "security" bought with money, then the law would simply be what ever the one with most money for the best "security" would dictate.
Obviously this is a figment of my imagination, then.
Nah. It's just an example demonstrating I was wrong ;-).
Though I imagine there are some technical (mechanical durability) and pricing difficulties with putting that on the laptop displayed. It'd need to be pretty durable to take normal laptop display abuse without fracturing if it's glass. And it would have to be hinged with a... rotating hinge (I'm sure those have a name, since there are a few laptops with them?) so that the display can be turned and rotated to cover the keyboard for serious tablet-style drawing. And even then, if you need to both draw and use the keyboard, it might be inconvenient.
But your point stands, it could be done that way too, and at least for some users it would be much better too.
And if you hate steak enough to order it ruined (with lots of nasty steak sauce to replace the flavor, I can only assume), why the heck would you eat at a steakhouse?
So, you are among the an anti-freedom crowd, one of those people who think it's their right to tell other people what their tastes and opinions should be, and to try to drive away those that refuse to conform to what you want.
There's no flavor left when it's well done.
Or maybe you just have underdeveloped taste buds, if you can't taste the flavor...? ;-)
I think cooking pretty directly allowed farming, by giving both time (cooking gathered plants allowed less time spent gathering, leaving time for farming) and motivation (if you can "gather" in your own back yard, there's no need to go to the wild and expose yourself to the predators and human enemies) for it.
I don't know if cooking *really* brings anything extra to preserving meat. Drying meat surely predates cooking, though cooking before drying might make the whole process faster, and help it stay good longer... But probably not a dramatic improvement.
Only uncooked.
If you fry mushrooms in a little butter or oil, grill them slowly, or simmer them for a little while until they give up their liquids, their taste and texture changes quite a bit.
Yes, the taste of the butter gets enhanced and especially the texture of the butter is greatly enhanced. I mean, that's what the mushrooms are grown for, enhancing other flavors ;-).
(Above is mostly about button mushrooms. There definitely are plenty of mushrooms that have strong flavors of their own! But as far as I understand, in everyday usage "mushroom" means the white button mushrooms without much flavor of their own.)
Well, depending on your local laws and criminal penalties, your connections to the people already working in the car-stealing industry, and your current wealth and income, it may actually be in your best financial interests to start stealing cars until you get caught...
I hear fuel-efficient cars are in pretty high demand (compared to the supply) in some parts of the USA right now, so I think stealing those is a growing "business". Get in now, while it's a new trend!
Or not, if you don't like the idea of being a crook.
Seems to me that litigation is pretty lousy substitute for negotiating skills.
But isn't it so that the "negotiations" have already been done, and the result was made into laws and indsutry-wide agreements. Now Apple is breaking the agreements (or at least somebody believes they are, if they are going to court over it), and therefore litigation is the way to go.
If one side wants to change the laws and wants the old agreements discarded, then it's their responsibility to initiate the negotiation/lobbying/bribing process to make it happen. Until then, stick to the law or face litigation.
I kinda think touch-sensitive displays are not an option for serious drawing... They'd start to wear out really really fast. And even a little visible wear on the display would be a show-stopper annoying for anybody doing serious graphics stuff... Not to mention all the fingerprints etc.
Now if anybody here does serious visual work on a touch-sensitive display and knows fingerprints and wear are not a problem, feel free to correct me...
Indeed. So where would you put the Wacom on this laptop, assuming you still have to be able to sell a lot of them to make it worth making them in the first place?
(This is a serious question. Is there a solution?)
Ideal unless you're left handed and therefore cursed to spend all your time catching the trackpad while trying to write/draw anything.
The secret, jealously guarded by a sect of IBM laptop fanatics, is of course to disable the cursed trackpad/touchpad frustrator device, and use the laptop the way laptops were meant to be used (in absense of a real mouse anyway), ie. using the red button of happiness.
Please don't tell me this thing only has touchpad...?
If this unique hash were like a MD5 hash than the complexity of the hash is simply the range of characters raised to the power of 32, the length of a MD5 hash. MD5 is hexadecimal I think (off the top of my head here), so that would be 16 unique characters. So a MD5 hash has 16^32 permutations.
Just to clarify, MD5 itself is not "hexadecimal" or anything like that. MD5 sum is a string of 128 bits, not any string of characters (well, unless you call a bit a character). MD5 sum can be and usually is interpreted as a number between 0 and 340282366920938463463374607431768211455, and can be represented in any numeral system. In non-ASCII contexts it usually is in raw binary, and hexadecimal or base64 is often used when using printable characters.
But really, it's a number, and can be represented in any way a number can be represnted, like in Roman numerals... ;-)
So basically the solution is to live close to an urban center. Unfortunately, housing is generally prohibitively expensive close to most urban centers (except for the ones that are so far gone with blight that there are no real jobs there anyway).
The answer is having enough smaller (say, half a million people) urban centers, connected by efficient mass transit. This would also allow more food to be grown locally, around each dense urban center. But keeping things this way, preventing some urban centers from growing together into massive sprawls, that'd be the real challenge even in this scenario.
The American city (especially in the west) is built around personal automobiles.
And you know, unless radical advances are made in energy production soon (so that all the oil can just be replaced with electricy or hydrogen or whatever), the current Americans will curse the previous generations for letting that happen...