The new numbers give a U value of 7.5, which is completely attributable to the latest two movies. Note that 11 is the highest rated by far (adding 5 to the U value) while 10 is lower than 7 and 3 (so it can take credit for adding 2.5 to the U value). I'd say that in addition to rebooting the Star Trek franchise, 11 has rebooted the pattern.
No, you have completely misunderstood me. I don't give a flying fuck how machines are treated. They are just machines, tools for accomplishing a task, and that's all they will ever be. My problem is that people want their machines to look and act like other people.
Why would any sane person want a tool that looks like a person?
I wouldn't know, I've never liked television either. I suppose if that's what we have to look forward to with the field of humanoid robotics, it would be better not to invest any more time and resources into it.
Humanoid robots terrify me to no end. At first, I was simply bothered by the fact that people were trying to develop this technology. I couldn't understand what new functionality they were trying to develop, and I didn't see why they would simply try to duplicate the existing functionality of human beings (since there are already billions of us around).
Now that I've thought about it, I think the new "functionality" they want to add is compliance. They want to say to something, resembling a person, "do this" and have them do it without talking back. Basically, they want someone to serve them without ever having to consider that person's needs or feelings. They want someone to go and take car of their mother or their children for them, so that they don't have to. They want someone who will have sex with them for no reason other than their desire for sex.
So some day, the hope is, we will be surrounded by human-looking robots who will cater to our every whim and never give us any trouble. I don't think that's good for us, and I question the mental stability of someone who would want to live that way.
I've always thought that the desktop metaphor was a short sighted misstep in interface design. It doesn't scale well. It tries to duplicate a convention that is the result of the realities of storing and managing physical files, and along with that it duplicates all of it's shortcomings. I have been very pleased to see, through the iPhone and the internet, that it is finally passing away.
I too hope that the tablet mac follows this trend. Rest in peace desktop metaphor, may your days on my computer soon be ended.
"the holder can restrict all distribution of said information, which is effectively censorship."
Yes, but if I have an opinion I can also withhold it, and that is effectively censorship too. The complaint people have against censorship is when someone wants to speak and another person wants to listen but then a third person gets in the way and stops that from happening. That's not what is happening here.
"The only part of DMCA that explicitly censors something is the anti-circumvention clause."
China has not had a continuous government for thousands of years, so if you want to say they've been around for thousands of years, you are talking about their culture.
Western culture is not a geographically isolated phenomena the way Chinese culture is, because western countries have been building empires making colonies for centuries, which has spread the culture across the western hemisphere.
"When your government/culture will have been at it for a few thousand years, you'll have a point."
The implication is that the Chinese have been at it for thousands of years, while westerners have not. What I'm saying is that either the westerners have been at it for thousands of years (the cultural argument) or the Chinese haven't (the government argument). Either way you look at it, you're wrong.
I know this isn't what you meant, but it sounds like you are advocating camps where we put old people so that robots can kill them in an efficient manner.
The problem (with what you were actually saying) is that old people vote, and they won't vote for that.
Sorry, I was about to make a really rude and sarcastic comment here, but I won't.
Western culture began in the ancient Mediterranean thousands of years ago. You would find most aspects of modern western culture in ancient Greece, but a lot of it was around even before that. The major elements are government by representative democracy, the rule of law and emphasis on scientific legalism (I don't know what else to call it) in the fields of science and philosophy. Also the belief in the right to personal liberty for land owning males remains intact even today. Your claim that western culture is young is patently absurd.
You're trying to make a comparison between the age of the USA and the age of eastern culture. That comparison makes no sense.
First of all, you are factually incorrect. China owns a bout a quarter of our nation's foreign debt, which is about a quarter of our nations total debt. That means that they own less than 7% of our national debt.
Secondly, china selling it's bonds would not lead to hyper-inflation. The only thing that causes that is a rapid increase in the supply of currency. So for that to happen, the treasury would need to make more capital available (such as we saw during the insane bail-outs that have been happening). But, as is now known from the bailouts, even dumping 2 trillion on the market will not cause significant inflation (and China has less than 800 billion).
What's the difference between Zimbabwe and the US? The problem in Zimbabwe is that the government was trying to overcome an actual shortage in resources by printing currency. Since printing currency in no way counteracted their actual food shortages prices rose endlessly as they printed more money. But, since there are no shortages in actual supply in the US, things didn't happen that way here. Banks were showing huge paper losses, so the government bailed them out to meet investor expectations. Basically, the shortage was only really numbers on paper, and raising those numbers counteracted the shortage.
Don't get me wrong, there are real problems in the US. But those are problems of expectations, not supply. People expect to be able to retire, but we soon won't have the workforce to let them. So either the government will force younger generations to work harder for less benefit (there are various ways of doing this) or they will let wall-street shrink retirement accounts and scale back social security. Right now it looks like they prefer the former, but I'd say the latter is the safer option. The real danger is that when the government takes these steps (and they will have to) it may cause social unrest.
There is no effort being made to censor the information based on the DMCA. The act it designed to prevent people from using copyrighted works without paying for them, and that is exactly how it is used. The works are still publicly available, you just have to pay for them. I'm not saying that it's the right thing to do, but it's not the same thing at all.
"I'm certain the Christian Scientists are already advocating a belief that calling hardware tech support at your job is not necessary."
I have found it to be rather ineffective. My coworker has been waiting to get her cd burner replaced for over a month. In the meantime she emails me the file path of the files she want's to burn and I do it for her.
As for software, I've been asking for Acrobat for over a year, and they still won't give it to me, even though I need to edit PDFs all the time. I doubt praying for the software would be less effective.
He's saying they can't be hacked because they aren't on a network (like the Battlestar Galactica). But the images are viewed at a remote location, and the data has to be transmitted somehow. So of course they can be hacked. Even if it weren't so, someone could simply take a picture of the viewing screen with a digital camera.
They probably record every single image generated by those things, and hold it at least until the passenger's flight is over. I don't see why they would do it any other way. It flies in the face of reason. I know they say otherwise, but I doubt they feel bad about lying to the general public. It's for the greater good, right?
I would assume that this would be used in an above-ground treatment plant, given that water wells can be a thousand feet deep, but only a couple inches wide. This process is generally refereed to as "pump and treat", because you pump the water out of the ground, treat it and discharge to some surface body or use it for another application. As you draw down the water table, it causes the surrounding water to be drawn into the system as well, this prevents the contaminated groundwater from migrating down-gradient.
Typically you may use a carbon adsorption system for this application, since carbon will adsorb any kind of organic compound. Once the carbon is full, you treat it and reuse it, or you dispose of it by some other means. Granulated activated carbon is the material they would have to beat in order to make a good business case.
Your poor writing is everybody's problem, but you are the only one who can do anything about it. I have posted here because I wished to politely inform you that it needs some work, and offer some advice.
It sounds like you only want to take advice from a professional with a PHD in english on this. That's reasonable, but please go and find one. Show him or her your posts and ask for an opinion. They will tell you the same thing I am telling you.
Your writing needs to be easy to understand or else people will not want to read it. And yes, some people will also be unable to understand it. You seem to be saying that people who find your posts difficult to read have poor reading comprehension. A lot of people have poor reading comprehension, so making your posts needlessly difficult to understand reduces the number of people that will hear what you have to say.
So in closing, I am sorry if I have offended you. That was not my intention. I can assure you that you really do have a problem, and I sincerely hope you will get help with it, even if you won't listen to me.
So you say you know how to write. I'm sorry, but that was not evident from your posts. Why post things on Slashdot that are poorly written if you can do better? Why defend the writing in posts that anyone with a cursory knowledge of written english can tell are horrible? And why post them AC? What kind of feedback were you expecting?
I do not have a degree in english. However, I have read many books, and I write a lot (for money) so I know a thing or two about the subject.
You may want to reconsider your attitude regarding the readability of your posts. If you write something which no one else can or will read, you are wasting your time. You don't have to follow perfect grammar and punctuation rules for people to understand you, but it helps.
On the other hand, you do need learn to express yourself with complete thoughts arranged in a logical fashion before anyone will give you the time of day. How much work do you expect people to do to read a post on slashdot? If you posts are painful and incoherent, people will skip right over them. Do you think I read your page long comment at the beginning of this thread? Not a chance. I would seriously doubt anyone else did either. The only reason I read your other comment was because the other guy was complaining about it and I wanted to see it for myself.
You have not rebutted this man's point in the least.
That comment (your comment?) is confusing and incoherent.
Next time you post a comment, think about it for a minute first. Try to arrange it logically. It helps if you read through it once or twice before you post it. Each sentence should express a single, coherent thought. Related sentences should be grouped together into paragraphs, with each sentence in the paragraph leading logically into the next. Each paragraph should also lead logically into the next, unless you intend to intend to make more than one point.
I've taken the liberty to rewrite your first couple paragraphs below as an example of what I mean:
Kenny whom I mentioned above? Is mentioned/noted there (and that young man? Is INCREDIBLE @ JAVA (even @ the "DataStructures" level))."
Your first sentence is incomplete. Try this: "Kenny, whom I've mentioned above, is noted in the linked article."
Your nested parentheses may be appropriate when you are writing Java, but the are not a good way to separate thoughts in english. It makes your writing choppy and confusing. Instead try something like: "He is incredible at Java, even at the Data Structures level."
"Yes... the young computer scientists of today, @ least those I was fortunate to have encountered this semester? Impress me, to NO end... & the "proofs in the pudding" above."
I don't want to sound like a broken record, but you absolutely need to express a complete thought in each sentence. In this case your paragraph is only one sentence, not two, three, or four as your punctuation would indicate. "The young computer scientists of today, at least those I was fortunate enough to have encountered this semester, impress me to no end, and the "proof's in the pudding" above." Might I also suggest this sentence could be added to the first paragraph giving you:
"Kenny, whom I've mentioned above, is noted in the linked article. He is incredible at Java, even at the Data Structures level. The young computer scientists of today, at least those I was fortunate enough to have encountered this semester, impress me to no end, and the "proof's in the pudding" above."
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure it's a helium balloon.
Those stats are a little out of date, here are the new ones:
1: 6.2
2: 7.8
3: 6.5
4: 7.3
5: 4.9
6: 7.2
7: 6.5
8: 7.6
9: 6.4
10: 6.4
11: 8.2
The new numbers give a U value of 7.5, which is completely attributable to the latest two movies. Note that 11 is the highest rated by far (adding 5 to the U value) while 10 is lower than 7 and 3 (so it can take credit for adding 2.5 to the U value). I'd say that in addition to rebooting the Star Trek franchise, 11 has rebooted the pattern.
"It is not political"
Just because it's not partisan doesn't mean it's not political.
No, you have completely misunderstood me. I don't give a flying fuck how machines are treated. They are just machines, tools for accomplishing a task, and that's all they will ever be. My problem is that people want their machines to look and act like other people.
Why would any sane person want a tool that looks like a person?
I wouldn't know, I've never liked television either. I suppose if that's what we have to look forward to with the field of humanoid robotics, it would be better not to invest any more time and resources into it.
Humanoid robots terrify me to no end. At first, I was simply bothered by the fact that people were trying to develop this technology. I couldn't understand what new functionality they were trying to develop, and I didn't see why they would simply try to duplicate the existing functionality of human beings (since there are already billions of us around).
Now that I've thought about it, I think the new "functionality" they want to add is compliance. They want to say to something, resembling a person, "do this" and have them do it without talking back. Basically, they want someone to serve them without ever having to consider that person's needs or feelings. They want someone to go and take car of their mother or their children for them, so that they don't have to. They want someone who will have sex with them for no reason other than their desire for sex.
So some day, the hope is, we will be surrounded by human-looking robots who will cater to our every whim and never give us any trouble. I don't think that's good for us, and I question the mental stability of someone who would want to live that way.
I've always thought that the desktop metaphor was a short sighted misstep in interface design. It doesn't scale well. It tries to duplicate a convention that is the result of the realities of storing and managing physical files, and along with that it duplicates all of it's shortcomings. I have been very pleased to see, through the iPhone and the internet, that it is finally passing away.
I too hope that the tablet mac follows this trend. Rest in peace desktop metaphor, may your days on my computer soon be ended.
"the holder can restrict all distribution of said information, which is effectively censorship."
Yes, but if I have an opinion I can also withhold it, and that is effectively censorship too. The complaint people have against censorship is when someone wants to speak and another person wants to listen but then a third person gets in the way and stops that from happening. That's not what is happening here.
"The only part of DMCA that explicitly censors something is the anti-circumvention clause."
How so?
China has never engaged in colonialism, nor has it ever been larger than it is now.
China has not had a continuous government for thousands of years, so if you want to say they've been around for thousands of years, you are talking about their culture.
Western culture is not a geographically isolated phenomena the way Chinese culture is, because western countries have been building empires making colonies for centuries, which has spread the culture across the western hemisphere.
Well, which is it?
Here is what you said:
"When your government/culture will have been at it for a few thousand years, you'll have a point."
The implication is that the Chinese have been at it for thousands of years, while westerners have not. What I'm saying is that either the westerners have been at it for thousands of years (the cultural argument) or the Chinese haven't (the government argument). Either way you look at it, you're wrong.
"let the robots take care of them"
I know this isn't what you meant, but it sounds like you are advocating camps where we put old people so that robots can kill them in an efficient manner.
The problem (with what you were actually saying) is that old people vote, and they won't vote for that.
Sorry, I was about to make a really rude and sarcastic comment here, but I won't.
Western culture began in the ancient Mediterranean thousands of years ago. You would find most aspects of modern western culture in ancient Greece, but a lot of it was around even before that. The major elements are government by representative democracy, the rule of law and emphasis on scientific legalism (I don't know what else to call it) in the fields of science and philosophy. Also the belief in the right to personal liberty for land owning males remains intact even today. Your claim that western culture is young is patently absurd.
You're trying to make a comparison between the age of the USA and the age of eastern culture. That comparison makes no sense.
First of all, you are factually incorrect. China owns a bout a quarter of our nation's foreign debt, which is about a quarter of our nations total debt. That means that they own less than 7% of our national debt.
Secondly, china selling it's bonds would not lead to hyper-inflation. The only thing that causes that is a rapid increase in the supply of currency. So for that to happen, the treasury would need to make more capital available (such as we saw during the insane bail-outs that have been happening). But, as is now known from the bailouts, even dumping 2 trillion on the market will not cause significant inflation (and China has less than 800 billion).
What's the difference between Zimbabwe and the US? The problem in Zimbabwe is that the government was trying to overcome an actual shortage in resources by printing currency. Since printing currency in no way counteracted their actual food shortages prices rose endlessly as they printed more money. But, since there are no shortages in actual supply in the US, things didn't happen that way here. Banks were showing huge paper losses, so the government bailed them out to meet investor expectations. Basically, the shortage was only really numbers on paper, and raising those numbers counteracted the shortage.
Don't get me wrong, there are real problems in the US. But those are problems of expectations, not supply. People expect to be able to retire, but we soon won't have the workforce to let them. So either the government will force younger generations to work harder for less benefit (there are various ways of doing this) or they will let wall-street shrink retirement accounts and scale back social security. Right now it looks like they prefer the former, but I'd say the latter is the safer option. The real danger is that when the government takes these steps (and they will have to) it may cause social unrest.
There is no effort being made to censor the information based on the DMCA. The act it designed to prevent people from using copyrighted works without paying for them, and that is exactly how it is used. The works are still publicly available, you just have to pay for them. I'm not saying that it's the right thing to do, but it's not the same thing at all.
The content of your post is implied in all Slashdot stories, since there inevitably is someone who will find anything irrelevant.
"Apple users will first pray to Jobs, and only then resort to an alternative deity."
Are you crazy?! A true believer would never pray to another deity. If Steve doesn't fix your problem, it's because it doesn't need to be fixed.
"I'm certain the Christian Scientists are already advocating a belief that calling hardware tech support at your job is not necessary."
I have found it to be rather ineffective. My coworker has been waiting to get her cd burner replaced for over a month. In the meantime she emails me the file path of the files she want's to burn and I do it for her.
As for software, I've been asking for Acrobat for over a year, and they still won't give it to me, even though I need to edit PDFs all the time. I doubt praying for the software would be less effective.
He's saying they can't be hacked because they aren't on a network (like the Battlestar Galactica). But the images are viewed at a remote location, and the data has to be transmitted somehow. So of course they can be hacked. Even if it weren't so, someone could simply take a picture of the viewing screen with a digital camera.
They probably record every single image generated by those things, and hold it at least until the passenger's flight is over. I don't see why they would do it any other way. It flies in the face of reason. I know they say otherwise, but I doubt they feel bad about lying to the general public. It's for the greater good, right?
I would assume that this would be used in an above-ground treatment plant, given that water wells can be a thousand feet deep, but only a couple inches wide. This process is generally refereed to as "pump and treat", because you pump the water out of the ground, treat it and discharge to some surface body or use it for another application. As you draw down the water table, it causes the surrounding water to be drawn into the system as well, this prevents the contaminated groundwater from migrating down-gradient.
Typically you may use a carbon adsorption system for this application, since carbon will adsorb any kind of organic compound. Once the carbon is full, you treat it and reuse it, or you dispose of it by some other means. Granulated activated carbon is the material they would have to beat in order to make a good business case.
Ok, this is my last comment.
Your poor writing is everybody's problem, but you are the only one who can do anything about it. I have posted here because I wished to politely inform you that it needs some work, and offer some advice.
It sounds like you only want to take advice from a professional with a PHD in english on this. That's reasonable, but please go and find one. Show him or her your posts and ask for an opinion. They will tell you the same thing I am telling you.
Your writing needs to be easy to understand or else people will not want to read it. And yes, some people will also be unable to understand it. You seem to be saying that people who find your posts difficult to read have poor reading comprehension. A lot of people have poor reading comprehension, so making your posts needlessly difficult to understand reduces the number of people that will hear what you have to say.
So in closing, I am sorry if I have offended you. That was not my intention. I can assure you that you really do have a problem, and I sincerely hope you will get help with it, even if you won't listen to me.
Best regards,
Bob Mosby
So you say you know how to write. I'm sorry, but that was not evident from your posts. Why post things on Slashdot that are poorly written if you can do better? Why defend the writing in posts that anyone with a cursory knowledge of written english can tell are horrible? And why post them AC? What kind of feedback were you expecting?
I do not have a degree in english. However, I have read many books, and I write a lot (for money) so I know a thing or two about the subject.
You may want to reconsider your attitude regarding the readability of your posts. If you write something which no one else can or will read, you are wasting your time. You don't have to follow perfect grammar and punctuation rules for people to understand you, but it helps.
On the other hand, you do need learn to express yourself with complete thoughts arranged in a logical fashion before anyone will give you the time of day. How much work do you expect people to do to read a post on slashdot? If you posts are painful and incoherent, people will skip right over them. Do you think I read your page long comment at the beginning of this thread? Not a chance. I would seriously doubt anyone else did either. The only reason I read your other comment was because the other guy was complaining about it and I wanted to see it for myself.
You have not rebutted this man's point in the least.
That comment (your comment?) is confusing and incoherent.
Next time you post a comment, think about it for a minute first. Try to arrange it logically. It helps if you read through it once or twice before you post it. Each sentence should express a single, coherent thought. Related sentences should be grouped together into paragraphs, with each sentence in the paragraph leading logically into the next. Each paragraph should also lead logically into the next, unless you intend to intend to make more than one point.
I've taken the liberty to rewrite your first couple paragraphs below as an example of what I mean:
Kenny whom I mentioned above? Is mentioned/noted there (and that young man? Is INCREDIBLE @ JAVA (even @ the "DataStructures" level))."
Your first sentence is incomplete. Try this: "Kenny, whom I've mentioned above, is noted in the linked article."
Your nested parentheses may be appropriate when you are writing Java, but the are not a good way to separate thoughts in english. It makes your writing choppy and confusing. Instead try something like: "He is incredible at Java, even at the Data Structures level."
"Yes... the young computer scientists of today, @ least those I was fortunate to have encountered this semester? Impress me, to NO end... & the "proofs in the pudding" above."
I don't want to sound like a broken record, but you absolutely need to express a complete thought in each sentence. In this case your paragraph is only one sentence, not two, three, or four as your punctuation would indicate. "The young computer scientists of today, at least those I was fortunate enough to have encountered this semester, impress me to no end, and the "proof's in the pudding" above." Might I also suggest this sentence could be added to the first paragraph giving you:
"Kenny, whom I've mentioned above, is noted in the linked article. He is incredible at Java, even at the Data Structures level. The young computer scientists of today, at least those I was fortunate enough to have encountered this semester, impress me to no end, and the "proof's in the pudding" above."
I hope that my advice is helpful to you.
~Bob