We need to talk about your approach to information theory.
Well, if we can redefine the concept of life, from a chemical process to a mathematical process, we can surely redefine what the concept of "first" is, can we not?
That means they have something to hide, it means that they are automatically in the wrong.
And if they do label, it means there is something wrong with their product. This is a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.
Speaking of labels, I've never seen it labeled that oranges are often grafted into Poncitrus trifoliata rootstocks. Does that mean that all orange growers are also hiding something, or do I first have to start a movement convincing people that grafting causes cancer before the orange farmers must either put a scarlet letter on their fruit or become also in the wrong?
Labeling doesn't mean there is something wrong with their product. All it means is that the consumer knows what they are actually buying. As for oranges, your argument is a misdirect. An orange grown from a orange tree that has been grafted onto the rootstock of another plant is genetically no different than an orange grown for an orange tree that has its own roots. We don't eat the roots, nor is the DNA from the roots passed on to the fruit.
However, with GMO products, the same cannot be said, at least in most cases. The argument for these salmon are that everything in the GMO version comes from another salmon, so it really is "natural." Of course, they could have just crossbred those features, and probably tried, but something wasn't as good as the original salmon, so they went to engineering the features.
The problem with this approach is just because the parts are natural, doesn't mean the results are natural. Aspartame used to advertise that everything in it was found in bananas and milk. That is true. However, the human body behaves differently when eating a banana and drinking a glass of milk versus using the artificial sweetener..
Just because something is engineered from naturally occurring "parts," doesn't mean it is safe for consumption. It also doesn't mean that its not safe, either. We should just let the data speak for itself. I would assume that the FDA has reviewed the data and determined it is safe. Why, at a time when they are wanting food labels to have even more data so that consumers can be better informed, they chose to not have these salmon labeled accurately seems to be more about politics than public safety.
After all, if the United States truly believes in capitalism, shouldn't the product be accurately labeled and let the consumer decide? Isn't that how supply and demand is supposed to work?
Actually, economics just describes what happens. Like science, it is agnostic. If you want to blame somebody, blame the people running businesses that put their personal gain above the health of other people. Its really all about greed.
Science has made many things better for us. Food included.
One would argue that science hasn't done anything for us. Now, people have used science to make many things better for us. Of course, people have used science to make many things worse, too.
And what is so scary about GMO? Bad taste, fearmongerer, and a luddite, sheesh...
That's the point. Nobody knows what's scary about GMO. There isn't enough data. At one time, radium was used to treat all sorts of ailments. It was only stopped later, when there was data to show that it was indeed harmful. Same can be said about hormone and antibiotic laced cattle. At one time, it was said to be safe, not there is data showing otherwise.
So, where is the data regarding GMO salmon show it is safe?
Tax dollars are indeed very limited in UK. Sometimes I wonder if you guys read further than subject line; in UK, we use Pounds for legal tender, our government is formed by the Conservative party, the Liberal Democrats are no longer in coalition government with them, and they would probably have been against these short-sighted plans to more or less abandon renewable energy and go for gas instead.
Just out of curiousity - is 'liberal' now the new 'communist' - ie. a word used as a derogatory epithet with no trace of understanding of what the word actually means?
It sounds like both sides of the Atlantic have bought into what's good for business is good for the people. What's the saying -- those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it -- or something like that? We've been down this path before and will suffer the same consequences before things normalize. But hey, at least on your side of the pond, the trains run on time!
Well, as you might have guessed, I'm from the other side of the pond and while I know that the UK uses pounds, tax pounds sounds awkward to me, so I just used generic language.
With regards to liberal being the new communist or at least socialist, well, it's been that way on this side of the pond for quite awhile. If you mention the doing something for the common good - you are a socialist. If you mention helping the poor, again, you are a socialist. If you mention helping millionaires and big business, you are a true red blooded American.
Why phase it out? Is it more expensive than the alternatives? Is the coal going to be used for something else? Are modern coal plants really all that harmful to the environment? I thought they were able to capture the emissions at these big plants.
None of these questions enter into the "mind" of the liberal demoncrap. They are only concerned with making things more expensive and shouting you down for employing basic logic and asking simple questions which expose their positions for the lunacy that they are.
Maybe the problem is in the way the questions are asked? Maybe a better approach would be to show that a coal fired plant can be retrofitted to release no more emissions than a natural gas fired plant for 1/4 the cost. If tax dollars are limited, wouldn't it make more sense to retrofit four plants for the cost of one new plant? Then the savings could be used for other programs.
Put differently, if my utility bills for my house are too high, I just add more insulation, I don't build a new house.
"So a model gets discarded because it won't work. Nothing to see here."
Fortunately, this model is in a discipline which has not gone political. We can make changes to it without holding any Maoist show trials where researchers get called "deniers."
I don't know about that. The status of Pluto seems/ed to be pretty political.
"It's literally one punch in the balls out of thousands of friendly hand-shakes per year."
Yeah, I wouldn't submit patches to him either. The GP is right, if your boss came in to the office and started ranting about a couple of admittedly bad lines in your code in front of everyone now and then, he would be fired pretty quickly. People say Linus needs to be like that when controlling a large open source project like the Linux kernel, but plenty of other large open source projects get by without public shaming rants. Major sub-systems in Linux, for example.
So the complaint is that the kernel development does everything in the open, including airing dirty laundry, while other projects keep disagreements quiet behind the scenes (at least until something is forked). Personally, I don't like to be yelled at any more than the next person, but I would prefer open and transparent.
Johnny (and Jane) can code. They just don't want to. Back in the 80s and 90s, computers were new and cool and if you could code, you could even make the computer do what you wanted it to do. Back then coding was freedom. It's like hot rods in the 50s. If you could soup up a car and make it run fast, others looked up to you. Now, fast cars, like computers, are common place and the "skill" isn't needed or valued like it was.
In the future, today's hot fields will be asking the same question. Once the newness and prestige wear off, the Johnny's and Jane's of the world move on to something else.
well... perhaps this would open the market to more manufacturers then.
Perhaps the current distribution model is what actually makes it hard for new manufacturers to "break in" to the market.
The economies of scale would indicate that the current distribution model is more efficient than ordering a custom vehicle direct from the manufacture. Instead of the distribution model, most likely, it is the large investment in capital to build a factory to produce a car that is the limiting factor. There are many more manufactures today than 20 years ago, so its probably not the distribution model, but the capital model that is the problem.
Remove the prohibitions on direct sales from manufacturers to the public. If the dealers survive, they are worth keeping. If the dealers fail, they were not.
That assumes the dealer model is the problem. Studies regarding dealers for BMW and Mercedes show that most customers are satisfied with the dealer. So, it isn't necessarily the dealer model that is the problem, but the way the franchise holder runs their dealership. Throwing out the dealers may solve the problem, but there are probably other ways, less drastic, to do so. For instance, manufactures can tie dealer bonus payments to customer satisfaction surveys. Then, those dealerships that provide good customer service receive a benefit for doing so.
Given that it is impractical to build and ship one vehicle at a time, there are still going to be dealers. The only change is who owns the dealership - an individual franchisee or the company. As such, there is no guarantee that the manufacture owned and operated dealer will be any more customer oriented than the old dealer model was.
So the real question, is what is the purpose of pushing to remove dealerships? Is it really about improving customer services or something else?
Allowing direct sales will get rid of dealers because it is very unlikely that a dealer will be able to undersell the factory. So, instead of being able to choose from a number of dealers, which effectively compete against each other, you will deal directly with the factory whose only competition are the other manufacturers. Effectively, you go from an imperfect network of dealers in competition with each other, to four of five manufacturers. Removing competition benefits consumers, how?
Hey, this is open-source. People join and quit projects all the time. They do it for any number of reasons. In this case, is the departure over the attitude as stated in the article or is it over the direction (Linus not wanting to include a BSD-style secure level interface)? Both are acceptable reasons. Why? Because the contributors are volunteers and can leave for any reason they want.
There isn't a story here. People already know that people join and quit OS projects all the time, so this departure isn't news. People already know that LInus can be brutally honest in his comments to others, so the reason for the departure isn't news either. Even a fork of the kernel isn't news because there are a number of them.
So, unless I'm missing something, there is no news here and we should all just move on.
Yeah, god forbid you actually prefer something that isn't the latest and [sometimes] greatest... You'll be labeled a hater if you do.
Most likely people that did not want to use something that is the latest and the greatest, they would have long ago switched to a different desktop. Things like XFCE or Mate are good alternative. However, the rants about Gnome 3, every time it is mentioned, would indicate that people haven't really moved on (at least emotionally) and have some other agenda fueling their angst.
It's not the dislike of Gnome 3 that causing one to be a hater, it's the rants about any change to the way things were (not just Gnome 3) that causes people to be a hater.
"Just because you know how to write, doesn't mean you have anything worthwhile to write about."
Quite true, but still irrelevant in shaping a future. Geocities, Twitter, Facebook, Wordpress... all be my guest.
But that just goes to prove my point. Look at how those services are used by millions of people, the vast majority of which are not programmers. In the early days of the automobile, one had to pretty much be a mechanic to drive and keep a car running. Today, that is no longer the case. Likewise with programming. Just as driving a car doesn't require special skills anymore, neither will using online services.
Programming is like writing. Just because you know how to write, doesn't mean you have anything worthwhile to write about. Likewise, just because you know how to code, doesn't mean you have anything needing to be coded.
"But when coding becomes universal, so will the expectation that websites become accessible to more than just browsers" That's just not true. Website want you to go to the... you guessed it, the website!
Do you really think everyone will offer access to content without making you see these pesky ads?
Ain't gonna happen dude.
Yes, because in the future, where everybody codes and everything on the web is a service, you won't have ads. You'll just pay directly for the services you want to access.
If we have AI good enough to drive a car by itself, then surely, we will have AI good enough to access the online services that the article is talking about. Instead of a future where everybody knows how to code, wouldn't it be better to create one where nobody needs to code?
Do we really want Google or Mozilla, or any other browser determining what content we can see or not see in a browser? I understand the security problems with Flash and I am not a fan of Flash, but everybody gets upset if an ISP blocks content, so why is it okay for a browser to do so? What next, will they block? This seems like an awfully big slippery slope and people are just accepting it.
I'm not sure that is correct. Apple was going under in the 90s. Then Microsoft bailed them out to avoid anti-trust problems.
Apple became more fragmented and thus less simple in the first non-Steve-Jobs era. Look for it to happen again. Without clear focus provided by a leader with forward vision, any company goes sideways. Just look at what Carly did to HP, only looking back. Now I have to suffer idiots in my fb stream suggesting they might vote for her.
I think your analysis is pretty accurate. Jobs had a vision and drove the company towards it. Others, have an MBA where they've been indoctrinated to focus only on next quarter's numbers. While Jobs did not intentionally try to displease or appease the shareholders, they were overall pleased with his results. However, if one's motivation is to please the shareholders, then you tend not to make strategic decisions that might be needed for the long term future. That is what happened at HP (and others) and happened prior to Jobs return. It's too early to tell if it will happen again at Apple.
Slashdot Mirror
We need to talk about your approach to information theory.
Well, if we can redefine the concept of life, from a chemical process to a mathematical process, we can surely redefine what the concept of "first" is, can we not?
That means they have something to hide, it means that they are automatically in the wrong.
And if they do label, it means there is something wrong with their product. This is a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.
Speaking of labels, I've never seen it labeled that oranges are often grafted into Poncitrus trifoliata rootstocks. Does that mean that all orange growers are also hiding something, or do I first have to start a movement convincing people that grafting causes cancer before the orange farmers must either put a scarlet letter on their fruit or become also in the wrong?
Labeling doesn't mean there is something wrong with their product. All it means is that the consumer knows what they are actually buying. As for oranges, your argument is a misdirect. An orange grown from a orange tree that has been grafted onto the rootstock of another plant is genetically no different than an orange grown for an orange tree that has its own roots. We don't eat the roots, nor is the DNA from the roots passed on to the fruit.
However, with GMO products, the same cannot be said, at least in most cases. The argument for these salmon are that everything in the GMO version comes from another salmon, so it really is "natural." Of course, they could have just crossbred those features, and probably tried, but something wasn't as good as the original salmon, so they went to engineering the features.
The problem with this approach is just because the parts are natural, doesn't mean the results are natural. Aspartame used to advertise that everything in it was found in bananas and milk. That is true. However, the human body behaves differently when eating a banana and drinking a glass of milk versus using the artificial sweetener..
Just because something is engineered from naturally occurring "parts," doesn't mean it is safe for consumption. It also doesn't mean that its not safe, either. We should just let the data speak for itself. I would assume that the FDA has reviewed the data and determined it is safe. Why, at a time when they are wanting food labels to have even more data so that consumers can be better informed, they chose to not have these salmon labeled accurately seems to be more about politics than public safety.
After all, if the United States truly believes in capitalism, shouldn't the product be accurately labeled and let the consumer decide? Isn't that how supply and demand is supposed to work?
Actually he should be blaming economics.
Actually, economics just describes what happens. Like science, it is agnostic. If you want to blame somebody, blame the people running businesses that put their personal gain above the health of other people. Its really all about greed.
So you aren't a big fan of science, then?
Science has made many things better for us. Food included.
One would argue that science hasn't done anything for us. Now, people have used science to make many things better for us. Of course, people have used science to make many things worse, too.
And what is so scary about GMO? Bad taste, fearmongerer, and a luddite, sheesh...
That's the point. Nobody knows what's scary about GMO. There isn't enough data. At one time, radium was used to treat all sorts of ailments. It was only stopped later, when there was data to show that it was indeed harmful. Same can be said about hormone and antibiotic laced cattle. At one time, it was said to be safe, not there is data showing otherwise.
So, where is the data regarding GMO salmon show it is safe?
If tax dollars are limited,
Tax dollars are indeed very limited in UK. Sometimes I wonder if you guys read further than subject line; in UK, we use Pounds for legal tender, our government is formed by the Conservative party, the Liberal Democrats are no longer in coalition government with them, and they would probably have been against these short-sighted plans to more or less abandon renewable energy and go for gas instead.
Just out of curiousity - is 'liberal' now the new 'communist' - ie. a word used as a derogatory epithet with no trace of understanding of what the word actually means?
It sounds like both sides of the Atlantic have bought into what's good for business is good for the people. What's the saying -- those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it -- or something like that? We've been down this path before and will suffer the same consequences before things normalize. But hey, at least on your side of the pond, the trains run on time!
Well, as you might have guessed, I'm from the other side of the pond and while I know that the UK uses pounds, tax pounds sounds awkward to me, so I just used generic language.
With regards to liberal being the new communist or at least socialist, well, it's been that way on this side of the pond for quite awhile. If you mention the doing something for the common good - you are a socialist. If you mention helping the poor, again, you are a socialist. If you mention helping millionaires and big business, you are a true red blooded American.
Why phase it out? Is it more expensive than the alternatives? Is the coal going to be used for something else? Are modern coal plants really all that harmful to the environment? I thought they were able to capture the emissions at these big plants.
None of these questions enter into the "mind" of the liberal demoncrap. They are only concerned with making things more expensive and shouting you down for employing basic logic and asking simple questions which expose their positions for the lunacy that they are.
Maybe the problem is in the way the questions are asked? Maybe a better approach would be to show that a coal fired plant can be retrofitted to release no more emissions than a natural gas fired plant for 1/4 the cost. If tax dollars are limited, wouldn't it make more sense to retrofit four plants for the cost of one new plant? Then the savings could be used for other programs.
Put differently, if my utility bills for my house are too high, I just add more insulation, I don't build a new house.
Great example why autonomous cars will be far superior to human drivers.
Actually, that would be one of the use cases where the driver would have to take control of the vehicle.
"So a model gets discarded because it won't work. Nothing to see here."
Fortunately, this model is in a discipline which has not gone political. We can make changes to it without holding any Maoist show trials where researchers get called "deniers."
I don't know about that. The status of Pluto seems/ed to be pretty political.
"It's literally one punch in the balls out of thousands of friendly hand-shakes per year."
Yeah, I wouldn't submit patches to him either. The GP is right, if your boss came in to the office and started ranting about a couple of admittedly bad lines in your code in front of everyone now and then, he would be fired pretty quickly. People say Linus needs to be like that when controlling a large open source project like the Linux kernel, but plenty of other large open source projects get by without public shaming rants. Major sub-systems in Linux, for example.
So the complaint is that the kernel development does everything in the open, including airing dirty laundry, while other projects keep disagreements quiet behind the scenes (at least until something is forked). Personally, I don't like to be yelled at any more than the next person, but I would prefer open and transparent.
Johnny (and Jane) can code. They just don't want to. Back in the 80s and 90s, computers were new and cool and if you could code, you could even make the computer do what you wanted it to do. Back then coding was freedom. It's like hot rods in the 50s. If you could soup up a car and make it run fast, others looked up to you. Now, fast cars, like computers, are common place and the "skill" isn't needed or valued like it was.
In the future, today's hot fields will be asking the same question. Once the newness and prestige wear off, the Johnny's and Jane's of the world move on to something else.
well... perhaps this would open the market to more manufacturers then.
Perhaps the current distribution model is what actually makes it hard for new manufacturers to "break in" to the market.
The economies of scale would indicate that the current distribution model is more efficient than ordering a custom vehicle direct from the manufacture. Instead of the distribution model, most likely, it is the large investment in capital to build a factory to produce a car that is the limiting factor. There are many more manufactures today than 20 years ago, so its probably not the distribution model, but the capital model that is the problem.
from the ./ headline:
Are Car Dealers a Business Worth Keeping?
Remove the prohibitions on direct sales from manufacturers to the public. If the dealers survive, they are worth keeping. If the dealers fail, they were not.
That assumes the dealer model is the problem. Studies regarding dealers for BMW and Mercedes show that most customers are satisfied with the dealer. So, it isn't necessarily the dealer model that is the problem, but the way the franchise holder runs their dealership. Throwing out the dealers may solve the problem, but there are probably other ways, less drastic, to do so. For instance, manufactures can tie dealer bonus payments to customer satisfaction surveys. Then, those dealerships that provide good customer service receive a benefit for doing so.
Given that it is impractical to build and ship one vehicle at a time, there are still going to be dealers. The only change is who owns the dealership - an individual franchisee or the company. As such, there is no guarantee that the manufacture owned and operated dealer will be any more customer oriented than the old dealer model was.
So the real question, is what is the purpose of pushing to remove dealerships? Is it really about improving customer services or something else?
Allowing direct sales will get rid of dealers because it is very unlikely that a dealer will be able to undersell the factory. So, instead of being able to choose from a number of dealers, which effectively compete against each other, you will deal directly with the factory whose only competition are the other manufacturers. Effectively, you go from an imperfect network of dealers in competition with each other, to four of five manufacturers. Removing competition benefits consumers, how?
Technology does not encompass computer science. It encompasses Technology, things like Robotics, not whether or not you know .NET.
Actually, isn't technology just applied engineering, kind of like physics is applied mathematics?
Hey, this is open-source. People join and quit projects all the time. They do it for any number of reasons. In this case, is the departure over the attitude as stated in the article or is it over the direction (Linus not wanting to include a BSD-style secure level interface)? Both are acceptable reasons. Why? Because the contributors are volunteers and can leave for any reason they want.
There isn't a story here. People already know that people join and quit OS projects all the time, so this departure isn't news. People already know that LInus can be brutally honest in his comments to others, so the reason for the departure isn't news either. Even a fork of the kernel isn't news because there are a number of them.
So, unless I'm missing something, there is no news here and we should all just move on.
Yeah, god forbid you actually prefer something that isn't the latest and [sometimes] greatest... You'll be labeled a hater if you do.
Most likely people that did not want to use something that is the latest and the greatest, they would have long ago switched to a different desktop. Things like XFCE or Mate are good alternative. However, the rants about Gnome 3, every time it is mentioned, would indicate that people haven't really moved on (at least emotionally) and have some other agenda fueling their angst.
It's not the dislike of Gnome 3 that causing one to be a hater, it's the rants about any change to the way things were (not just Gnome 3) that causes people to be a hater.
It seems that the only acceptable change to Gnome for slashdotters is going back to the version 2 interface.
"Just because you know how to write, doesn't mean you have anything worthwhile to write about."
Quite true, but still irrelevant in shaping a future. Geocities, Twitter, Facebook, Wordpress... all be my guest.
But that just goes to prove my point. Look at how those services are used by millions of people, the vast majority of which are not programmers. In the early days of the automobile, one had to pretty much be a mechanic to drive and keep a car running. Today, that is no longer the case. Likewise with programming. Just as driving a car doesn't require special skills anymore, neither will using online services.
So, if the government needs a warrant to read your emails, what about Google?
Programming is like writing. Just because you know how to write, doesn't mean you have anything worthwhile to write about. Likewise, just because you know how to code, doesn't mean you have anything needing to be coded.
"But when coding becomes universal, so will the expectation that websites become accessible to more than just browsers" That's just not true. Website want you to go to the ... you guessed it, the website!
Do you really think everyone will offer access to content without making you see these pesky ads?
Ain't gonna happen dude.
Yes, because in the future, where everybody codes and everything on the web is a service, you won't have ads. You'll just pay directly for the services you want to access.
If we have AI good enough to drive a car by itself, then surely, we will have AI good enough to access the online services that the article is talking about. Instead of a future where everybody knows how to code, wouldn't it be better to create one where nobody needs to code?
Do we really want Google or Mozilla, or any other browser determining what content we can see or not see in a browser? I understand the security problems with Flash and I am not a fan of Flash, but everybody gets upset if an ISP blocks content, so why is it okay for a browser to do so? What next, will they block? This seems like an awfully big slippery slope and people are just accepting it.
I'm not sure that is correct. Apple was going under in the 90s. Then Microsoft bailed them out to avoid anti-trust problems.
Apple became more fragmented and thus less simple in the first non-Steve-Jobs era. Look for it to happen again. Without clear focus provided by a leader with forward vision, any company goes sideways. Just look at what Carly did to HP, only looking back. Now I have to suffer idiots in my fb stream suggesting they might vote for her.
I think your analysis is pretty accurate. Jobs had a vision and drove the company towards it. Others, have an MBA where they've been indoctrinated to focus only on next quarter's numbers. While Jobs did not intentionally try to displease or appease the shareholders, they were overall pleased with his results. However, if one's motivation is to please the shareholders, then you tend not to make strategic decisions that might be needed for the long term future. That is what happened at HP (and others) and happened prior to Jobs return. It's too early to tell if it will happen again at Apple.