I wonder why is it taking so long for people to take back the representational democracy. I mean, there are much more music listeners than music industry execs. If every P2P user gave five bucks, we could buy half of the Congress with ease.
According to OpenSecrets.Org, congresscritters from the house cost around half a million on average, senators are a bit more expensive, with price tags of around 1-2 million. That is for a wholesale purchase, where you provide 100% of their campaign financing and so have 100% of their attention when it comes to legislating. If you only need their votes on one particular issue, like filesharing, the prices can drop as low as 10-50 grands for a congresscritter.
Assuming there are roughly 60 million filesharers in the US (according to some research, look up the reference yourself), to buy 50% of the Congress will take about 200 million for the House (for two year term) and about 70 million for the Senate (for six year term).
So what? We just need to keep up. And when it becomes impossible to remove the ad, it will still be possible to overlay it with something else (a naked chick, a quotation from Plato, a reminder from your PIM, etc.). Just say "NO!" to advertisements and eventually they will lose.
The technology already exists to filter the ads in real life in real time (but you need to wear vr glasses). Check out Steve Mann's site, some of his students wrote it.
Some sort of AI based network of vehicles that are available on demand (the nearest parked car will come to you -- or to the nearest "junction"). No one needs to "own" a vehicle. They will all be safe too.
There was a nice BBC article on future transport possibilities linked recently from Slashdot. Not that I read it or anything, I just heard it talks about ULTra, which is, incidentally, precisely what you describe.
There have been many attempts to coin an adjective - specifically, a demonym - for United States nationals, as an alternative to American, a term which can be ambiguous. The various attempts include:
Appalacian
Colonican
Columbard
Columbian
Frede
Fredonian
Uesican
Uessian
Unisan
Unisian
United States (as an adjective)
United States American
United Statesian
USAian
US American
Usan
USAn
Usanian
Usian (pronounced "YOU-zhuhn")
U-S-ian
Usonian
Washingtonian
References to these words have been around since the early days of the United States, but all of the variants are virtually unused and American remains by far the most common usage.
Use of these terms has been practiced and advocated to distinguish U.S. nationals from people living in other countries in the Americas. In practice, in the English language, American without any modifier (such as South American) is generally understood to be a U.S. national and nobody else. In other languages, notably Spanish, American is more ambiguous.
Advocates of these terms believe that, since America is part of the names of both North America and South America, American ought to be understood to mean, "inhabitant of the Americas". Indeed, in the Iberoamerican countries, the use of "American" to refer only to a US citizen could be considered politically incorrect and culturally agressive.
It should be noted that several of these terms have direct parallels in languages other than English. Many languages have already created their own distinct word for a citizen of the United States:
United Statesian directly parallels the Spanish term estadounidense. In French, the term Etatsunien has also been coined, but enjoys little more currency than United Statesian in English.
Usonian, a term used by Samuel Butler and other British writers in the 19th century and later used by Frank Lloyd Wright to describe his vision for American architecture and cities.
Usanian is derived from the Ido word Usana.
Despite being grammatically non-standard, "US" is increasingly accepted as the preferred adjectival form when precision is necessary.
In other parts of the world, there are also pejorative synonyms of the standard word for American. In Latin America, there is gringo (although that can also apply to the English), and, in several languages, local adaptations of Yankee. In the UK and Australia, the name septic tank or septic is sometimes used, based on rhyming slang for Yank. In Australia this is sometimes further shortened to seppo.
Because it it not efficient. The advantage of a car is its autonomy. If you abandon the requirement for autonomy, you better abandon the car itself and switch to something like ULTra, which was designed precisely for the environment you describe.
What other vehicle can connect the nodes in the transport networks, such as rail/bus? Unless you like everyone using a car to get from the doorstep to wherever they need to go, regardless of the burden on the society/nature/urban environment/etc., we need something like Segway. You don't use Concord to move from your home to your vacation hotel. Common sense dictates we should not use the car to do the same inside the country/city. Thus we need something on both ends of the journey, something small, easy to use and cheap (Segway will eventually be cheap and it is already cheap to operate).
There is a problem with what the system you describe. When someone makes their living selling frivolous crap, he is not being a productive memeber of the society. Yes, others decide to support him and he has something to waste the time on, but he is not providing anything valuable.
The society would be much better off if he was paid the same amount of money by the same people, but he would instead do something useful. Of course, under capitalism there is no distinction between something useful and some crap, if someone pays money for this, it is valuable, period.
This makes so many Americans (since the US is the most capitalistic) believe that anything that creates jobs is good. This also makes the US the country that spends the biggest chunk of its research budget on military stuff (more than 50%, actually). Other countries, like, say, Finland, spend 0.1% on military research. Americans choose to convince themselves that a dollar spent on designing a bomber is somehow as useful as a dollar spent on designing a cargo jet.
P.S. May be I strayed from the topic too far... The point was that, all things equal, people should do useful things instead of wasting their time on some crap (said I on Slashdot). P.P.S. I do realise that some of the tech is dual-use, but it is still ridiculous. Only 5 countries (IIRC) spend more than 5% of research budget on military stuff, including the US, and only 15 countries or so spend more than 1% on it. Why does US feel it is necessary (a rhetorical question)?
One of the problems is described in the first part of the article. People using Excel don't account for risk, creating completely unrealistic forecasts and coming to wrong conclusions. The issue is bad enough even without Excel, sure. Like when Ameritech seniour managers accounced they will start monitoring the efficiency of ongoing investment projects, 700 internal requests for financing were not confirmed, presumably, because the estimates were overoptimistic. But Excel compounds the problem to ridiculous extent. I am currently reviewing final projects of some business graduates (real projects in real companies) and 100% IRRs is a rule rather than the exception. Needless to say, I don't believe for a second that these figures are real. The infamous flexibility of Excel is all too often used for creative accounting/planning as well. If a bank says they need a certain indicator to be at least 17% to give the credit, too many people succumb to temptation to tweak the input parameters to get the 17% often without realising how much they compromise the integrity of the analisys.
P.S. I have a BBA and I worked as a financial analyst for 2+ years among other things. I also teach financial management to stupid students. Believe me, Excel is dangerous and it is not at all clear if its benefits outweight its disadvantages in some specific areas (overall they do).
I agree. The real problem, in my opinion, is that most of the 6+ billion people are superfluous and useless. Even in the developed countries as much as 30% of people are complete morons. It is much worse elsewhere, where the majority of people are ignorant and stupid (rationality and logic are learned skills). There are too many people simply because most of them are not needed (except by their close relatives).
But this problem is much harder to solve - you can't ship American (European, Japanese, South Korean, etc.) brains to Africa and even if you could, it would be next to impossible to fit them inside the heads of people there.
The problem is - no browser will work if you do that. Browsers were not designed for that and if you increase the cache too much, they break (or just start working very slowly). Not to mention that they don't have necessary search facilities built-in and using external search tools doesn't allow access to metainformation (when the page was opened, do you visit it often, where did you come to that page from, what links did you click there, etc.).
The problem is it doesn't scale well. If you set it to remember 5000 pages, it will take about 2-3 seconds to use quickfind on the history records. The interface would be nice if it actually worked. As it is, it's pretty useless. I find it easier and quicker to use the old html-based history to find something.
I don't know how you would design the explosive device, but I would not have the explosion triggered automatically. I think requiring me to enter a code on the transmitter would be much safer.
Actually one can start doing the directory with Wiki as it is without changing the engine. You don't really need a badass database backend if all you need is categories and name/link/description items. The freeform structure of the articles also allows for better flexibility in presenting and organising the results. After all, it is no longer enough to just list the search engines, today one may need to write several paragraphs to introduce the reader to each group of search engines and to their S&Ws.
If you take the time value of money into account, that seems unlikely. Face it, since the perceived human life expectancy is so low, the discounting rate is relatively high. This means that huge projects can rarely pay off if you need 10% estimated annual return. Even if the fusion works in 2015, by 2050 provides 100 billion dollars profit that then doubles every decade, the project would still not pay back even a meager 20 bn investment in 1990-2010.
You have to approach all such projects differently, from the point of view of the whole humankind, where year 2100 is every bit as important as 2004 is.
And then another question is why it changes the font when you move to the end of the whole document. Quite often, if you use a different font size, it would keep the last line break the default size, no matter how hard you try to delete it or change its size.
Well, I didn't RTFP, at least not all of it.:) But I already disagree with your opinion about HL2. It is not the best-looking game anymore. Far from that, actually. It's pretty good, but we've already saw Max Payne 2, Far Cry and some lesser games like Yager et al. When Half-Life 2 comes out (if it comes out) it will not be the best looking one, period. Modern games often take upwards to 5 years from conception to release. If you release a demo/videos to the public early, you will get admiration and delight. That's what Valve and id did. Do you remember videos of FarCry two years ago? I don't, just a tech demo one year ago. But if they showed a full-featured 10 minute gameplay video at 2002 E3, they might have beaten id. If they did it a year ago, they might have beaten Valve. But instead they mostly kept a low profile and concentrated on the game. Now they have the game on the market and most reviewers agree that it's the best looking game ever...
Honestly, there is nothing particularly complex about game graphics. Not everyone can do it, but there are plently of people who can. And the look of best games depend on state of the art and state of the hardware, not on some mythical talents of John Carmack.
Trying to not wander too far offtopic, let me say that creativity is overrated. Standard gameplay types will remain actual as long as the gamers do not change very much. With yet more eye-candy an old game DOES become a new one.
Being logical, one has to admit that not all murder is wrong. There is simply no reason why murdering the fetus should be wrong. As another poster above said, the laws are needed to prevent things from falling apart. And killing fetuses doesn't harm society.
While I agree that some people might oppose abortion for other reasons, the fact is the attitude is very much determined by religion/lack thereof.
Yes, PDF has lots of problems. From my experience, it either has incompatibility between different versions or network printing problems (probably the first). It often mangles up the fonts, printing some crazy things instead of the text (but retaining the layout).
Just a quick factoid: Kiev is not some sort of CS mecca. People there have the same or lower CS skills than anywhere in the US/Europe. Unless you are talking about counter-strike.:)
Slashdot Mirror
It was just as bad then as it is now.
I wonder why is it taking so long for people to take back the representational democracy. I mean, there are much more music listeners than music industry execs. If every P2P user gave five bucks, we could buy half of the Congress with ease.
According to OpenSecrets.Org, congresscritters from the house cost around half a million on average, senators are a bit more expensive, with price tags of around 1-2 million. That is for a wholesale purchase, where you provide 100% of their campaign financing and so have 100% of their attention when it comes to legislating. If you only need their votes on one particular issue, like filesharing, the prices can drop as low as 10-50 grands for a congresscritter.
Assuming there are roughly 60 million filesharers in the US (according to some research, look up the reference yourself), to buy 50% of the Congress will take about 200 million for the House (for two year term) and about 70 million for the Senate (for six year term).
So what? We just need to keep up. And when it becomes impossible to remove the ad, it will still be possible to overlay it with something else (a naked chick, a quotation from Plato, a reminder from your PIM, etc.). Just say "NO!" to advertisements and eventually they will lose.
The technology already exists to filter the ads in real life in real time (but you need to wear vr glasses). Check out Steve Mann's site, some of his students wrote it.
Some sort of AI based network of vehicles that are available on demand (the nearest parked car will come to you -- or to the nearest "junction"). No one needs to "own" a vehicle. They will all be safe too.
There was a nice BBC article on future transport possibilities linked recently from Slashdot. Not that I read it or anything, I just heard it talks about ULTra, which is, incidentally, precisely what you describe.
There have been many attempts to coin an adjective - specifically, a demonym - for United States nationals, as an alternative to American, a term which can be ambiguous. The various attempts include:
References to these words have been around since the early days of the United States, but all of the variants are virtually unused and American remains by far the most common usage.
Use of these terms has been practiced and advocated to distinguish U.S. nationals from people living in other countries in the Americas. In practice, in the English language, American without any modifier (such as South American) is generally understood to be a U.S. national and nobody else. In other languages, notably Spanish, American is more ambiguous.
Advocates of these terms believe that, since America is part of the names of both North America and South America, American ought to be understood to mean, "inhabitant of the Americas". Indeed, in the Iberoamerican countries, the use of "American" to refer only to a US citizen could be considered politically incorrect and culturally agressive.
It should be noted that several of these terms have direct parallels in languages other than English. Many languages have already created their own distinct word for a citizen of the United States:
Despite being grammatically non-standard, "US" is increasingly accepted as the preferred adjectival form when precision is necessary.
In other parts of the world, there are also pejorative synonyms of the standard word for American. In Latin America, there is gringo (although that can also apply to the English), and, in several languages, local adaptations of Yankee. In the UK and Australia, the name septic tank or septic is sometimes used, based on rhyming slang for Yank. In Australia this is sometimes further shortened to seppo.
Source: Wikipedia
Because it it not efficient. The advantage of a car is its autonomy. If you abandon the requirement for autonomy, you better abandon the car itself and switch to something like ULTra, which was designed precisely for the environment you describe.
What other vehicle can connect the nodes in the transport networks, such as rail/bus? Unless you like everyone using a car to get from the doorstep to wherever they need to go, regardless of the burden on the society/nature/urban environment/etc., we need something like Segway. You don't use Concord to move from your home to your vacation hotel. Common sense dictates we should not use the car to do the same inside the country/city. Thus we need something on both ends of the journey, something small, easy to use and cheap (Segway will eventually be cheap and it is already cheap to operate).
There is a problem with what the system you describe. When someone makes their living selling frivolous crap, he is not being a productive memeber of the society. Yes, others decide to support him and he has something to waste the time on, but he is not providing anything valuable.
The society would be much better off if he was paid the same amount of money by the same people, but he would instead do something useful. Of course, under capitalism there is no distinction between something useful and some crap, if someone pays money for this, it is valuable, period.
This makes so many Americans (since the US is the most capitalistic) believe that anything that creates jobs is good. This also makes the US the country that spends the biggest chunk of its research budget on military stuff (more than 50%, actually). Other countries, like, say, Finland, spend 0.1% on military research. Americans choose to convince themselves that a dollar spent on designing a bomber is somehow as useful as a dollar spent on designing a cargo jet.
P.S. May be I strayed from the topic too far... The point was that, all things equal, people should do useful things instead of wasting their time on some crap (said I on Slashdot).
P.P.S. I do realise that some of the tech is dual-use, but it is still ridiculous. Only 5 countries (IIRC) spend more than 5% of research budget on military stuff, including the US, and only 15 countries or so spend more than 1% on it. Why does US feel it is necessary (a rhetorical question)?
Q: Is it true that under communism we will be able to order food via telephone?
A: Yes, but it will be delivered via television.
One of the problems is described in the first part of the article. People using Excel don't account for risk, creating completely unrealistic forecasts and coming to wrong conclusions. The issue is bad enough even without Excel, sure. Like when Ameritech seniour managers accounced they will start monitoring the efficiency of ongoing investment projects, 700 internal requests for financing were not confirmed, presumably, because the estimates were overoptimistic. But Excel compounds the problem to ridiculous extent. I am currently reviewing final projects of some business graduates (real projects in real companies) and 100% IRRs is a rule rather than the exception. Needless to say, I don't believe for a second that these figures are real. The infamous flexibility of Excel is all too often used for creative accounting/planning as well. If a bank says they need a certain indicator to be at least 17% to give the credit, too many people succumb to temptation to tweak the input parameters to get the 17% often without realising how much they compromise the integrity of the analisys.
P.S. I have a BBA and I worked as a financial analyst for 2+ years among other things. I also teach financial management to stupid students. Believe me, Excel is dangerous and it is not at all clear if its benefits outweight its disadvantages in some specific areas (overall they do).
I agree. The real problem, in my opinion, is that most of the 6+ billion people are superfluous and useless. Even in the developed countries as much as 30% of people are complete morons. It is much worse elsewhere, where the majority of people are ignorant and stupid (rationality and logic are learned skills). There are too many people simply because most of them are not needed (except by their close relatives).
But this problem is much harder to solve - you can't ship American (European, Japanese, South Korean, etc.) brains to Africa and even if you could, it would be next to impossible to fit them inside the heads of people there.
They don't need to store all copies of the spam messages. :)
The problem is - no browser will work if you do that. Browsers were not designed for that and if you increase the cache too much, they break (or just start working very slowly). Not to mention that they don't have necessary search facilities built-in and using external search tools doesn't allow access to metainformation (when the page was opened, do you visit it often, where did you come to that page from, what links did you click there, etc.).
The problem is it doesn't scale well. If you set it to remember 5000 pages, it will take about 2-3 seconds to use quickfind on the history records. The interface would be nice if it actually worked. As it is, it's pretty useless. I find it easier and quicker to use the old html-based history to find something.
I don't know how you would design the explosive device, but I would not have the explosion triggered automatically. I think requiring me to enter a code on the transmitter would be much safer.
Actually one can start doing the directory with Wiki as it is without changing the engine. You don't really need a badass database backend if all you need is categories and name/link/description items. The freeform structure of the articles also allows for better flexibility in presenting and organising the results. After all, it is no longer enough to just list the search engines, today one may need to write several paragraphs to introduce the reader to each group of search engines and to their S&Ws.
Yes, but to heat a few grams of coffee from -100 to 10^6 in 2x10^9 seconds requires a badass laser installation. :)
If you take the time value of money into account, that seems unlikely. Face it, since the perceived human life expectancy is so low, the discounting rate is relatively high. This means that huge projects can rarely pay off if you need 10% estimated annual return. Even if the fusion works in 2015, by 2050 provides 100 billion dollars profit that then doubles every decade, the project would still not pay back even a meager 20 bn investment in 1990-2010.
You have to approach all such projects differently, from the point of view of the whole humankind, where year 2100 is every bit as important as 2004 is.
And then another question is why it changes the font when you move to the end of the whole document. Quite often, if you use a different font size, it would keep the last line break the default size, no matter how hard you try to delete it or change its size.
Well, I didn't RTFP, at least not all of it. :) But I already disagree with your opinion about HL2. It is not the best-looking game anymore. Far from that, actually. It's pretty good, but we've already saw Max Payne 2, Far Cry and some lesser games like Yager et al. When Half-Life 2 comes out (if it comes out) it will not be the best looking one, period. Modern games often take upwards to 5 years from conception to release. If you release a demo/videos to the public early, you will get admiration and delight. That's what Valve and id did. Do you remember videos of FarCry two years ago? I don't, just a tech demo one year ago. But if they showed a full-featured 10 minute gameplay video at 2002 E3, they might have beaten id. If they did it a year ago, they might have beaten Valve. But instead they mostly kept a low profile and concentrated on the game. Now they have the game on the market and most reviewers agree that it's the best looking game ever...
Honestly, there is nothing particularly complex about game graphics. Not everyone can do it, but there are plently of people who can. And the look of best games depend on state of the art and state of the hardware, not on some mythical talents of John Carmack.
Trying to not wander too far offtopic, let me say that creativity is overrated. Standard gameplay types will remain actual as long as the gamers do not change very much. With yet more eye-candy an old game DOES become a new one.
Being logical, one has to admit that not all murder is wrong. There is simply no reason why murdering the fetus should be wrong. As another poster above said, the laws are needed to prevent things from falling apart. And killing fetuses doesn't harm society.
While I agree that some people might oppose abortion for other reasons, the fact is the attitude is very much determined by religion/lack thereof.
No, you got it all wrong.
When you use OpenOffice, Bill Gates kills a puppy. Please, try to think of something Microsoft won't do to retain its monopoly...
I would really appreciate if you can tell me why it keeps changing the font if you move to the last line. Never understood that one...
Yes, PDF has lots of problems. From my experience, it either has incompatibility between different versions or network printing problems (probably the first). It often mangles up the fonts, printing some crazy things instead of the text (but retaining the layout).
Just a quick factoid: Kiev is not some sort of CS mecca. People there have the same or lower CS skills than anywhere in the US/Europe. Unless you are talking about counter-strike. :)