> You see, YOU don't get to decide for the rest of us what constitutes 'helping'
I'm also not a strawman. Thanks for playing.
Don't worry tho, I can still be selfish; I wouldn't help you even if you asked. From the sounds of it, though, you're probably too kick ass and together to ever have needed help in your life. YOU'RE THE MAN, BRO!
Arguing about Rand is a circular argument. Who the fuck CARES why people do good; if its for yourself, or for others, the point is you're trying to help.
It comes down to this; is it beter to get involved, or isolate one's self? Given the social nature of living creatures, isolationism seems awfully short sighted.
Yet, that doesn't stop people from using the writings of Rand as a reason why they don't believe in charity, helping others, etc.
> Why is it bad to gain from helping people?
Its not bad, until you're ONLY helping people because you gain. If you go down that road, you learn to lie to yourself while you do BAD things to other people.. hey, you're gaining, so you must be helping people!
People turn the whole argument on its head, and their tail ends up wagging THEM.
> American culture has long has a nasty streak of anti-intellectualism. Our public schools are just the thing... if you're trying to educate a bunch of farmer's kids so that they can work in a factory
Whats up with that? Holy fuck, whats going on down there, it sounds like a flat out class war!
Total chicken and egg deal. If the best and brightest folks are indocterated to distain the public system, they will not participate; in turn, public school teachers become realtively dumber and dumber to private school teachers.
The fact is, however, that is that many children don't have the chance to attend private school for financial reasons, so you are really doing your fellow citizens a disservice by spreading contempt for pubic institutions. Many children WILL be educated in a public institution, and the problem isn't that its 'the government'. Attitudes that dismiss public systems destabilize its ability to aquire talented and hardworking employees. Most, if not all, of the people I know went to public school, and are doing quite well for themselves. My brother went to public school (in Canada, no less, gasp,) and is currently on a full scholarship doing his postgrad at MIT.
Unless you believe that those born into relatively poor families are not capable of great things, I don't understand the desire to undermine their access to quality teachers. A lowered expectation of public schooling is causing your country to throw out bucketloads of talent even before you can aqequately educate and evaluate it. Its sad to see people happily support the braindrain from public to private, with no regard for the quality of public institutions. Its too bad, because those who do go to public school are equally capable, and it appears you are all too happy to throw the baby(s) out with the bathwater.
I would be hopping mad if I were a US citizen; all industrialized countries create science, technology and wealth created from the spoils of public school systems. I don't understand the equation of public systems with inplicit lack of quality.
Get your facts straight; Duke Nukem Forever will come out, at which point Team Foress 2 will be re-written yet again on the modified engine.
Doesn't much matter, anyhow. At that point, the latest Nintendo console will be faster than whatever PS and XBox revisions we're out, at which point we're free to get run over at the next zebra crossing.
On an only midly more serious note, when are they going to move the decimal point on the cycle measurement? Seems a hell of a lot easier than having to research the next exponential prefix.
Well, it was itnentionally glib, but my point is that if you go by the old 20/80 rule (20% of your users is 80% of your revenue) that most businesses generally experience, unless you're a really really heavy user of a product or service, your marketplace vote is not nearly as meaningful to a company as a class action lawsuit. Ie, you'd have to already be one of their most important customers to make not purchasing their product a meaningful action.
Incidentally, if you didn't want to dignify it with a response, I wouldn't have responded. You did respond, indicating that you didn't agree with my opinion. Which, amazingly enough, prompted an explaination of my reasoning. I know my original post inferred that only rich people can make a difference in a market place, but I only meant to illustrate that often the most revenue generated for a company is due to a small group of their customers who frequently wouldn't object to politically or legally iffy actions if it doesn't affect the product/service being rendered to them.
The time has come to take a stand against having our cost of living subsidized.
I'd rather pay the full cost for a product than pay a lesser price so I can watch advertising. If you can't produce the thing for a low enough cost such that people value it enough for you to recoup your costs, dont make it.
Man, am I getting sick of this. Bigger and bigger budgets, subsidized by advertising; why not better and better products, succeeding on they're own terms.
Yeah, I wouldn't use a car right now, because so many people use different makes and models that it all seems pointless. In the light 99% of them choosing the wrong model, I guess the right decision is not to use any of them at all!
You shouldn't have asked. I'm starting to find that people just don't get the division between software and the view. Make dicisions for them; if its that niggly, they either won't complain, or won't fire you for making the call.
Let me extrapolate then. I am a developer for an ad detwork that does deal with Active X campaigns (along with totally regular banners from blue chip companies,) and knowing the sensitive political and economic nature of installing background applications that spawn unwanted popups, Yahoo has very little to gain from promoting spyware.
The economics don't pan out; whatever money Yahoo could make from installing something that delivered said popups simply does not compare to what they make from the CPMs they would get from the banners they run on their website alone. Its a simple matter of economics; they don't need to do what the grandparent poster suggests if you go by the current CPM rates the industry bares, nevermind the publicity risk they would assume if they were actually installing flat out spyware with their toolbar.
Maybe they collect browsing habits from the browser that you have the toolbar installed on, I don't know, but they certainly don't deliver ads outside of the normal request chain you'd see if you sniffed your HTTP headers when loading a page from the web.
Thus far, adaware and spybot seem to rid most machines of most infections, and I've never seen anything suggesting that Yahoo software is responsible for this kind of activity.
Another point; if Yahoo delivers spyware that munges your computer up, you probably wouldn't be able to visit their site and view the banners they do place there, thus denying them from the much better rates that their legit banners command over the kind of rates that spyware popups are run at.
I still find it amusing that people from a country based on taking over land from other people, and then repelling the original colonialists by force has the gall to claim that violence is never right.
You wanna enforce property rights? Give the land back to the original owners, or shut the fuck up.
> I said I could tell YOU to fuck off - and you wouldn't have a choice in the matter one way or another.
So your point is that you can kick people off your private property under limited circumstances? Whoa! Call CNN.
We do enjoy reading your posts, however. They're quite amusing for containing so much vitrol, and yet such moot points.
Incidentally, if you're interested, I can rent you some 'pseudo-liberal fucks' to stand on your lawn so you can yell at them to get off or get hauled away by the boys in blue. I'd be willing to bet that the power rush is at least worth 10$ a head to you? Lets work something out...
Still, I do think Windows is probably fairly clean.
I believe the BSD license is the way. If you talk about market forces, I think in general those that produce sweet-ass code under BSD licenses will be employed anyway. If you demand that the user open their own source, you're essentially asking, "If you use our code, and close it up, We'll squash you in court?" Good idea, but how do you prove it? You've already ensured that violaters are fairly difficult to find. The answer might be easy for us developers, but its way to complicated for the courts. You wanna push open source? Eat em from the inside, where they can use your code on their terms, but you can close off the 'innovation' valve at any point. Then you just point out that everybody knows how to build a fucking motor; we all just build motors with different purposes and strengths. The concept itself shouldn't be limited to one company; what we're trying to reward in a market is being able to deliver the solution in a way that people like. Competition *stems* from others being on relatively equal ground.
I hear you. I played for a number of years in jazz bands (tenor saxomophone), and grew up listing to jazz (real jazz) thanks to my dad. Jazz is absolutely what its all about; you're not stealing an idea, youre giving a mindfuck of an intepretation to it. Its a thin line, but Hollywood seems only interested in jacking a built in audience and doing a tepid cover of it replete with self-concious references. I don't need to hear a rendition of a famous piece with a musical 'wink' to the audience. Just make it good. Make it worthwhile. Its almost like people pay to be self-affirmed. I just want new things, interesting things. I don't need to see somebody spend millions of dollars to re-tell me thing I already hold dear.
Blade Runner was fucking incredible, but only because it didn't purpot to be something deep in the first place.
Its a visual masterpiece, and the characters are awesome. Its a Mad Max, if you will; its not conceptually deep, it just sets up a premise, and keeps you glued to your seat until the credits roll.
Its frusterating to hear people say AI was a deep movie. Its not. It might be beautiful, but it sure as hell ain't teaching anybody other than folks for whom this IS the deepest kinda culture they expose themselves too.
AI does not have a high standing in the intellectual crowd you claim to be a part of.
It's a more 'intelligent' movie, in terms of the concepts it deals with, but that doesn't mean that the movie itself executed.
The general concensus of it is that it didn't do the concepts justice. I would really be careful about walking the line you're so intent on walking; for every you, there are 20 other people who are more qualified to judge, in the very same way you claim to be more qualified than the average movie goer.
And Daisy Dukes makes a cameo, where she openly ponders whether autobots can transform into marital aids. It will be scandelous and titillating, the very edgy and pop culture concious version of the Transformers I always wanted!
I am, and I mostly listen to and write drum'n'bass or hiphop, so I dont need to be lectured on how art is interpretation rather than absolute creation.
However, I'm talking about the difference between Classical remixed to Disco, or more subtle interpretations (like, say, transforming robots that arn't the transformers.) I know, its a crazy idea! Write a story with original characters, in an original setting, but we all agree that robots who can transform is cool. It pisses me off, however, that everything is minimal risk; if its a Transformers movie, it has a build in audience already. If its a cool movie about robots that can transform, you don't have to worry about backstory, nods to the 'real fans', etc. You can just focus on making an entertaining movie.
And incidentally, the phrase "interpretations on a theme" is much more relevent when you're talking about one piece, in which the piece has a common theme or two, and provides counterpoint to it, and various interpretations to it. We're not talking about musicians writing Fugue in D Minor again, only different, just because a bunch of people loved Fugue in D Minor.
I love Transformers. Therefore, I could care less about the movie, because there already *was* a TV show and a movie. I like new ideas, not infinate interpretations on a theme.
Slashdot Mirror
MS is so big, you can't expect the 46th hand to know what the 129th hand is doing.
> You see, YOU don't get to decide for the rest of us what constitutes 'helping'
I'm also not a strawman. Thanks for playing.
Don't worry tho, I can still be selfish; I wouldn't help you even if you asked. From the sounds of it, though, you're probably too kick ass and together to ever have needed help in your life. YOU'RE THE MAN, BRO!
Arguing about Rand is a circular argument. Who the fuck CARES why people do good; if its for yourself, or for others, the point is you're trying to help.
.. hey, you're gaining, so you must be helping people!
It comes down to this; is it beter to get involved, or isolate one's self? Given the social nature of living creatures, isolationism seems awfully short sighted.
Yet, that doesn't stop people from using the writings of Rand as a reason why they don't believe in charity, helping others, etc.
> Why is it bad to gain from helping people?
Its not bad, until you're ONLY helping people because you gain. If you go down that road, you learn to lie to yourself while you do BAD things to other people
People turn the whole argument on its head, and their tail ends up wagging THEM.
> American culture has long has a nasty streak of anti-intellectualism. Our public schools are just the thing... if you're trying to educate a bunch of farmer's kids so that they can work in a factory
Whats up with that? Holy fuck, whats going on down there, it sounds like a flat out class war!
Total chicken and egg deal. If the best and brightest folks are indocterated to distain the public system, they will not participate; in turn, public school teachers become realtively dumber and dumber to private school teachers.
The fact is, however, that is that many children don't have the chance to attend private school for financial reasons, so you are really doing your fellow citizens a disservice by spreading contempt for pubic institutions. Many children WILL be educated in a public institution, and the problem isn't that its 'the government'. Attitudes that dismiss public systems destabilize its ability to aquire talented and hardworking employees. Most, if not all, of the people I know went to public school, and are doing quite well for themselves. My brother went to public school (in Canada, no less, gasp,) and is currently on a full scholarship doing his postgrad at MIT.
Unless you believe that those born into relatively poor families are not capable of great things, I don't understand the desire to undermine their access to quality teachers. A lowered expectation of public schooling is causing your country to throw out bucketloads of talent even before you can aqequately educate and evaluate it. Its sad to see people happily support the braindrain from public to private, with no regard for the quality of public institutions. Its too bad, because those who do go to public school are equally capable, and it appears you are all too happy to throw the baby(s) out with the bathwater.
I would be hopping mad if I were a US citizen; all industrialized countries create science, technology and wealth created from the spoils of public school systems. I don't understand the equation of public systems with inplicit lack of quality.
Get your facts straight; Duke Nukem Forever will come out, at which point Team Foress 2 will be re-written yet again on the modified engine.
Doesn't much matter, anyhow. At that point, the latest Nintendo console will be faster than whatever PS and XBox revisions we're out, at which point we're free to get run over at the next zebra crossing.
On an only midly more serious note, when are they going to move the decimal point on the cycle measurement? Seems a hell of a lot easier than having to research the next exponential prefix.
Well, it was itnentionally glib, but my point is that if you go by the old 20/80 rule (20% of your users is 80% of your revenue) that most businesses generally experience, unless you're a really really heavy user of a product or service, your marketplace vote is not nearly as meaningful to a company as a class action lawsuit. Ie, you'd have to already be one of their most important customers to make not purchasing their product a meaningful action.
Incidentally, if you didn't want to dignify it with a response, I wouldn't have responded. You did respond, indicating that you didn't agree with my opinion. Which, amazingly enough, prompted an explaination of my reasoning. I know my original post inferred that only rich people can make a difference in a market place, but I only meant to illustrate that often the most revenue generated for a company is due to a small group of their customers who frequently wouldn't object to politically or legally iffy actions if it doesn't affect the product/service being rendered to them.
BWUAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Here's to hoping you can land a job in Hell's tech support department once you get there. I'll be the guy in the cubicle next to you.
The time has come to take a stand against having our cost of living subsidized.
I'd rather pay the full cost for a product than pay a lesser price so I can watch advertising. If you can't produce the thing for a low enough cost such that people value it enough for you to recoup your costs, dont make it.
Man, am I getting sick of this. Bigger and bigger budgets, subsidized by advertising; why not better and better products, succeeding on they're own terms.
> However, for most people that don't have 5 figures plus of disposable cash, we'd rather the simple option of voting with our wallets.
If you don't have 5 figures plus of disposable cash, how big do you figure that 'wallet vote' is? Probably not very big.
You seem to negate your very argument in the same sentence. Impressive!
Yeah, I wouldn't use a car right now, because so many people use different makes and models that it all seems pointless. In the light 99% of them choosing the wrong model, I guess the right decision is not to use any of them at all!
You shouldn't have asked. I'm starting to find that people just don't get the division between software and the view. Make dicisions for them; if its that niggly, they either won't complain, or won't fire you for making the call.
Let me extrapolate then. I am a developer for an ad detwork that does deal with Active X campaigns (along with totally regular banners from blue chip companies,) and knowing the sensitive political and economic nature of installing background applications that spawn unwanted popups, Yahoo has very little to gain from promoting spyware.
The economics don't pan out; whatever money Yahoo could make from installing something that delivered said popups simply does not compare to what they make from the CPMs they would get from the banners they run on their website alone. Its a simple matter of economics; they don't need to do what the grandparent poster suggests if you go by the current CPM rates the industry bares, nevermind the publicity risk they would assume if they were actually installing flat out spyware with their toolbar.
Maybe they collect browsing habits from the browser that you have the toolbar installed on, I don't know, but they certainly don't deliver ads outside of the normal request chain you'd see if you sniffed your HTTP headers when loading a page from the web.
Thus far, adaware and spybot seem to rid most machines of most infections, and I've never seen anything suggesting that Yahoo software is responsible for this kind of activity.
Another point; if Yahoo delivers spyware that munges your computer up, you probably wouldn't be able to visit their site and view the banners they do place there, thus denying them from the much better rates that their legit banners command over the kind of rates that spyware popups are run at.
Very unlikely. I work in the industry.
I still find it amusing that people from a country based on taking over land from other people, and then repelling the original colonialists by force has the gall to claim that violence is never right.
You wanna enforce property rights? Give the land back to the original owners, or shut the fuck up.
> I said I could tell YOU to fuck off - and you wouldn't have a choice in the matter one way or another.
...
So your point is that you can kick people off your private property under limited circumstances? Whoa! Call CNN.
We do enjoy reading your posts, however. They're quite amusing for containing so much vitrol, and yet such moot points.
Incidentally, if you're interested, I can rent you some 'pseudo-liberal fucks' to stand on your lawn so you can yell at them to get off or get hauled away by the boys in blue. I'd be willing to bet that the power rush is at least worth 10$ a head to you? Lets work something out
no need, we gots .mobil now! /with a grain of salt
The really sad part of all this is that you're not only wrong, you're really proud of being wrong.
Word up. How can anybody prove that?
Still, I do think Windows is probably fairly clean.
I believe the BSD license is the way. If you talk about market forces, I think in general those that produce sweet-ass code under BSD licenses will be employed anyway. If you demand that the user open their own source, you're essentially asking, "If you use our code, and close it up, We'll squash you in court?" Good idea, but how do you prove it? You've already ensured that violaters are fairly difficult to find. The answer might be easy for us developers, but its way to complicated for the courts. You wanna push open source? Eat em from the inside, where they can use your code on their terms, but you can close off the 'innovation' valve at any point. Then you just point out that everybody knows how to build a fucking motor; we all just build motors with different purposes and strengths. The concept itself shouldn't be limited to one company; what we're trying to reward in a market is being able to deliver the solution in a way that people like. Competition *stems* from others being on relatively equal ground.
I hear you. I played for a number of years in jazz bands (tenor saxomophone), and grew up listing to jazz (real jazz) thanks to my dad. Jazz is absolutely what its all about; you're not stealing an idea, youre giving a mindfuck of an intepretation to it. Its a thin line, but Hollywood seems only interested in jacking a built in audience and doing a tepid cover of it replete with self-concious references. I don't need to hear a rendition of a famous piece with a musical 'wink' to the audience. Just make it good. Make it worthwhile. Its almost like people pay to be self-affirmed. I just want new things, interesting things. I don't need to see somebody spend millions of dollars to re-tell me thing I already hold dear.
I think he successfully trolled you. I think.
Blade Runner was fucking incredible, but only because it didn't purpot to be something deep in the first place.
Its a visual masterpiece, and the characters are awesome. Its a Mad Max, if you will; its not conceptually deep, it just sets up a premise, and keeps you glued to your seat until the credits roll.
Its frusterating to hear people say AI was a deep movie. Its not. It might be beautiful, but it sure as hell ain't teaching anybody other than folks for whom this IS the deepest kinda culture they expose themselves too.
AI does not have a high standing in the intellectual crowd you claim to be a part of.
It's a more 'intelligent' movie, in terms of the concepts it deals with, but that doesn't mean that the movie itself executed.
The general concensus of it is that it didn't do the concepts justice. I would really be careful about walking the line you're so intent on walking; for every you, there are 20 other people who are more qualified to judge, in the very same way you claim to be more qualified than the average movie goer.
And Daisy Dukes makes a cameo, where she openly ponders whether autobots can transform into marital aids. It will be scandelous and titillating, the very edgy and pop culture concious version of the Transformers I always wanted!
I am, and I mostly listen to and write drum'n'bass or hiphop, so I dont need to be lectured on how art is interpretation rather than absolute creation.
However, I'm talking about the difference between Classical remixed to Disco, or more subtle interpretations (like, say, transforming robots that arn't the transformers.) I know, its a crazy idea! Write a story with original characters, in an original setting, but we all agree that robots who can transform is cool. It pisses me off, however, that everything is minimal risk; if its a Transformers movie, it has a build in audience already. If its a cool movie about robots that can transform, you don't have to worry about backstory, nods to the 'real fans', etc. You can just focus on making an entertaining movie.
And incidentally, the phrase "interpretations on a theme" is much more relevent when you're talking about one piece, in which the piece has a common theme or two, and provides counterpoint to it, and various interpretations to it. We're not talking about musicians writing Fugue in D Minor again, only different, just because a bunch of people loved Fugue in D Minor.
I love Transformers. Therefore, I could care less about the movie, because there already *was* a TV show and a movie. I like new ideas, not infinate interpretations on a theme.