Let me draw on another cancelled-before-its-time-then-revived-by-a-fan-campaign-only-to-vanish-into-obscurity sci fi show: Farscape. One of the most memorable moments of the series was when, after a close-call escaping the bad guys, the crew seek solitude from each other to consider what has happened. One works on his space plane, another meditates, another sharpens his sword, another does a grueling workout. We see those characters engaged in their everyday life, away from the action. It made you think of them as people, not just as card-board cutout action heros.
I would gladly watch a Firefly episode where the characters made dinner, maintained the engines, checked the navigation computer, and whatnot, and simply let the personality dynamics carry the interest of the viewer. When you have sufficiently engaging characters, you don't need things blowing up every 5 minutes to produce compelling television.
I have two monitors - one big and horizontal, one small and vertical. It's great because I can display documents like datasheets on the small vertical one and play games/watch movies/do circuit layout on the large horizontal one. The only problem is that monitors have a built-in viewing angle that's not perfectly normal to the screen; the point of optimum viewing is raised about 15-20 degrees. That means, to view my vertical monitor correctly, it has to be tilted sideways by about the same amount, which is really annoying.
I've seen it happen at a robotics seminar - poor guy pulled up his video player's history by mistake and all the files were located in "c:/megaporn/" He closed it fast, but not fast enough. We were all very polite to him during the coffee break.:)
You are quite right: they are two different tasks with two different sets of skills. One cannot live long without the other. Engineers must never give into the conceit of amazing technology you can't sell, and marketers must never fall into the conceit of amazing promotion that isn't backed up by performance.
Ok, I'll bite. "Utilize illegal practices" - couple of things wrong with that. I'll completely skip the ethics argument on this one, since we're talking about companies. Instead, consider how a company engaging in unlawful practices exposes shareholders to prosecution, should it become known that the shareholders were aware of these activities of the company and was profiting from them.
Furthermore, while you require the profit to be greater than the cost of settlement, that's a short-term strategy. Firstly, If a company regularly flouts the law it may face increasing censure, imprisonment of its officers and eventual deregistration - none of these are good for business. Secondly, it can be difficult to assess what the exact penalties for any given course of action is. For example, breaking EPA regulations might slap you with a fine if it was unintentional, whereas a judge may increase the fine punitively if he/she decides the company was intentionally violating the law.
While it is perfectly expected that company act ruthlessly and without mercy - and there are plenty of ways for a company to be anti-social without being criminal - engaging in illegal activities is never in the real interest of shareholders. More often than not, illegal business practices serve to inflate the standing of an executive in the eyes of the shareholders by making larger than expected profits for them - the driver is not the shareholders so much as the executive's ambitions.
Death threats seem incongruous when you consider that the clearly identifiable action Anonymous has taken here came in the form of 'vandalism', by which he means "A paper sign written with black sharpie."
Perhaps I'm mistaken, but people intend on actually doing you injury tend not to leave signs around saying they're in it for the fun of it.
Really, though, nobody has any illusions that any member of Anonymous is causally related to any other. "Anonymous" is just a name. A lot of the strength of anonymous as a concept comes from the vast majority of its members just being disaffected kids; which makes identifying the movers and shakers more difficult. It seems to me that the only way to 'stop' Anonymous would be to hold each and every member identified as such accountable for any/all of Anonymous' actions. Ie. make the cost of identifying as 'Anonymous' such that assuming the label is too expensive. You'd destroy 'anonymous' but they'd just choose other labels (and more of them) and you'd have to start again. Anonymous is a stable concept and anyone trying to stop them is playing whack-a-mole.
If they're conflating Wikileaks with hackers, then it's pretty clear to me that they either don't know what hackers are, don't know what Wikileaks is, or are riding the Wikileaks-hater bandwagon.
You know, I have wondered about that. Even in gender-specific toilets, there is sufficient privacy for the individual. Non-co-ed bathrooms strike me as something of a cultural vestige that is kept out of tradition more than any innate utility.
Can anyone think of reasons why they should remain segregated in the modern world?
Re:At least they won't be using Symbian
on
Why Nokia Is Toast
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· Score: 1
I for one would rather my software written by fat virgin neckbeards than pretty much anyone else. If a geek has nothing to do all day - no other source of self-esteem even aside from kudos for writing sharp, secure, functional code - then it stands to reason that the programs he produces will be good.
Underpaid sweatshop coders, on the other hand, aren't coding because they like it - they're counting the minutes until they can go home to their wives and kids. Unless they're driven to get promotions or take an interest in their work, the code they produce will be the minimum standard needed to get to the next milestone. And really, who can blame them?
Teaching aside, post-doc salaries are a joke. I could (literally) be being paid three times what I'm making now. The consolation is that I get to build cool stuff for a career, but that wears thin after your sixth straight 100 hour week. I tell myself an academic career is worth it, but really, I begin to wonder. It's no surprise people bail and take teaching jobs - you make more and it's much less stress/hard work.
You make an excellent point, and one which I actually had intended to address in a much longer-winded original draft of my post. I posited that what humanity really needed was to exploit technology so that the basic needs and comfort of human beings could be met at very low cost, such that all humans could live fulfilling lives, regardless of economics. Soup kitchens and knock-off iPods are great examples of this - even the very poorest living in developed nations can get nutritious food and even luxuries like music players. I'm not sure if it's optimistic or pessimistic, but the only way I see to break the cycle of poverty is to make the essentials of life so cheap that rich people gain nothing by denying them to the poor.
Of course, the people on top will also want power, and a great way to have power over people is to control their access to things they need. Hence, we also need a sea-change in the way people think about wealth, power, greed and prestige. Until amassing stuff and pushing people around becomes 'uncool', humans won't really be free.
Don't worry - we won't lock you up. Punishment arising from failing to vaccinate your children will occur in the form of you having to explain to them why they got sick with a preventable disease.
You're drawing a false dichotomy between collaboration and competition. It's a matter of perspective - it's realising that by working with your neighbors, you can all reach a better result than if you worked alone. Rather than fighting with the next tribe over food, you can work with them to gather food and share the bounty. The same logic works for towns, cities, and nations. Super-national organisations that organise military, economic and social cooperation are a natural extension of the idea. Yes, you're still competing, but rather than with each other as individuals you compete as a team. Perhaps one day our conception of 'team' will encompass the whole world and the 'other team' will be recognised as material wants and unhappiness.
I know exactly how you feel. You grow up a product of your environment and you don't really look back until you're 30 and realise what could have been, if things had been different. I certainly grew up in the shadow of potential I was supposed to be meeting, even when I wasn't encouraged at home and being bullied mercilessly. I think it's insane how we expect children to learn and study at school and then send them home to parents who tell them that hard work is dumb. Even with the best genetics in the world, those kids are going to have it tough later in life.
Interestingly, the 'small scale' project that is the ISS happens to be the single most expensive object. That's a hopelessly small craft compared to an interstellar vehicle.
Mind you, we aren't really going out of our way to produce large quantities of antimatter at the moment. One wonders how the technology to do so would scale if we mass produced the equipment necessary to synthesize it. Ultimately, producing any product in volume is simply a matter of scaling up the fabrication process. Sure, it would be extremely expensive at the start, but so were computers once upon a time.
Well... yes, except that carbon being released into the atmosphere is the same quantity of carbon that was taken out of the atmosphere to produce the fuel in the first place. Arguably, chemically produced petroleum would have fewer contaminants and byproducts than ground oil derived petrol, and would burn cleaner. If you had to worry about polution, it would be in the form of waste heat.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought British Petroleum was... er.. British?
Let me draw on another cancelled-before-its-time-then-revived-by-a-fan-campaign-only-to-vanish-into-obscurity sci fi show: Farscape. One of the most memorable moments of the series was when, after a close-call escaping the bad guys, the crew seek solitude from each other to consider what has happened. One works on his space plane, another meditates, another sharpens his sword, another does a grueling workout. We see those characters engaged in their everyday life, away from the action. It made you think of them as people, not just as card-board cutout action heros.
I would gladly watch a Firefly episode where the characters made dinner, maintained the engines, checked the navigation computer, and whatnot, and simply let the personality dynamics carry the interest of the viewer. When you have sufficiently engaging characters, you don't need things blowing up every 5 minutes to produce compelling television.
I have two monitors - one big and horizontal, one small and vertical. It's great because I can display documents like datasheets on the small vertical one and play games/watch movies/do circuit layout on the large horizontal one. The only problem is that monitors have a built-in viewing angle that's not perfectly normal to the screen; the point of optimum viewing is raised about 15-20 degrees. That means, to view my vertical monitor correctly, it has to be tilted sideways by about the same amount, which is really annoying.
I've seen it happen at a robotics seminar - poor guy pulled up his video player's history by mistake and all the files were located in "c:/megaporn/" He closed it fast, but not fast enough. We were all very polite to him during the coffee break. :)
You are quite right: they are two different tasks with two different sets of skills. One cannot live long without the other. Engineers must never give into the conceit of amazing technology you can't sell, and marketers must never fall into the conceit of amazing promotion that isn't backed up by performance.
Hmmm... autonomous satellites in control of power grid and nuclear weapons.... that's a great idea! I'll write the grant proposal immediately!
Ok, I'll bite. "Utilize illegal practices" - couple of things wrong with that. I'll completely skip the ethics argument on this one, since we're talking about companies. Instead, consider how a company engaging in unlawful practices exposes shareholders to prosecution, should it become known that the shareholders were aware of these activities of the company and was profiting from them.
Furthermore, while you require the profit to be greater than the cost of settlement, that's a short-term strategy. Firstly, If a company regularly flouts the law it may face increasing censure, imprisonment of its officers and eventual deregistration - none of these are good for business. Secondly, it can be difficult to assess what the exact penalties for any given course of action is. For example, breaking EPA regulations might slap you with a fine if it was unintentional, whereas a judge may increase the fine punitively if he/she decides the company was intentionally violating the law.
While it is perfectly expected that company act ruthlessly and without mercy - and there are plenty of ways for a company to be anti-social without being criminal - engaging in illegal activities is never in the real interest of shareholders. More often than not, illegal business practices serve to inflate the standing of an executive in the eyes of the shareholders by making larger than expected profits for them - the driver is not the shareholders so much as the executive's ambitions.
Death threats seem incongruous when you consider that the clearly identifiable action Anonymous has taken here came in the form of 'vandalism', by which he means "A paper sign written with black sharpie."
Perhaps I'm mistaken, but people intend on actually doing you injury tend not to leave signs around saying they're in it for the fun of it.
Really, though, nobody has any illusions that any member of Anonymous is causally related to any other. "Anonymous" is just a name. A lot of the strength of anonymous as a concept comes from the vast majority of its members just being disaffected kids; which makes identifying the movers and shakers more difficult. It seems to me that the only way to 'stop' Anonymous would be to hold each and every member identified as such accountable for any/all of Anonymous' actions. Ie. make the cost of identifying as 'Anonymous' such that assuming the label is too expensive. You'd destroy 'anonymous' but they'd just choose other labels (and more of them) and you'd have to start again. Anonymous is a stable concept and anyone trying to stop them is playing whack-a-mole.
If they're conflating Wikileaks with hackers, then it's pretty clear to me that they either don't know what hackers are, don't know what Wikileaks is, or are riding the Wikileaks-hater bandwagon.
You know, I have wondered about that. Even in gender-specific toilets, there is sufficient privacy for the individual. Non-co-ed bathrooms strike me as something of a cultural vestige that is kept out of tradition more than any innate utility.
Can anyone think of reasons why they should remain segregated in the modern world?
I for one would rather my software written by fat virgin neckbeards than pretty much anyone else. If a geek has nothing to do all day - no other source of self-esteem even aside from kudos for writing sharp, secure, functional code - then it stands to reason that the programs he produces will be good.
Underpaid sweatshop coders, on the other hand, aren't coding because they like it - they're counting the minutes until they can go home to their wives and kids. Unless they're driven to get promotions or take an interest in their work, the code they produce will be the minimum standard needed to get to the next milestone. And really, who can blame them?
I am interested in your idea and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
No seriously - a combination cafe/hackerspace would be awesome.
I am sure that he's very loyal to Australia. The United States, on the other hand...
Teaching aside, post-doc salaries are a joke. I could (literally) be being paid three times what I'm making now. The consolation is that I get to build cool stuff for a career, but that wears thin after your sixth straight 100 hour week. I tell myself an academic career is worth it, but really, I begin to wonder. It's no surprise people bail and take teaching jobs - you make more and it's much less stress/hard work.
You make an excellent point, and one which I actually had intended to address in a much longer-winded original draft of my post. I posited that what humanity really needed was to exploit technology so that the basic needs and comfort of human beings could be met at very low cost, such that all humans could live fulfilling lives, regardless of economics. Soup kitchens and knock-off iPods are great examples of this - even the very poorest living in developed nations can get nutritious food and even luxuries like music players. I'm not sure if it's optimistic or pessimistic, but the only way I see to break the cycle of poverty is to make the essentials of life so cheap that rich people gain nothing by denying them to the poor.
Of course, the people on top will also want power, and a great way to have power over people is to control their access to things they need. Hence, we also need a sea-change in the way people think about wealth, power, greed and prestige. Until amassing stuff and pushing people around becomes 'uncool', humans won't really be free.
Don't worry - we won't lock you up. Punishment arising from failing to vaccinate your children will occur in the form of you having to explain to them why they got sick with a preventable disease.
You're drawing a false dichotomy between collaboration and competition. It's a matter of perspective - it's realising that by working with your neighbors, you can all reach a better result than if you worked alone. Rather than fighting with the next tribe over food, you can work with them to gather food and share the bounty. The same logic works for towns, cities, and nations. Super-national organisations that organise military, economic and social cooperation are a natural extension of the idea. Yes, you're still competing, but rather than with each other as individuals you compete as a team. Perhaps one day our conception of 'team' will encompass the whole world and the 'other team' will be recognised as material wants and unhappiness.
They should have paid more attention to the tell-tale stubble.
I know exactly how you feel. You grow up a product of your environment and you don't really look back until you're 30 and realise what could have been, if things had been different. I certainly grew up in the shadow of potential I was supposed to be meeting, even when I wasn't encouraged at home and being bullied mercilessly. I think it's insane how we expect children to learn and study at school and then send them home to parents who tell them that hard work is dumb. Even with the best genetics in the world, those kids are going to have it tough later in life.
Interestingly, the 'small scale' project that is the ISS happens to be the single most expensive object. That's a hopelessly small craft compared to an interstellar vehicle.
Mind you, we aren't really going out of our way to produce large quantities of antimatter at the moment. One wonders how the technology to do so would scale if we mass produced the equipment necessary to synthesize it. Ultimately, producing any product in volume is simply a matter of scaling up the fabrication process. Sure, it would be extremely expensive at the start, but so were computers once upon a time.
Not quite true - as your orbital radius increases, your velocity decreases or else you have a hyperbolic trajectory and aren't 'orbiting' per se.
Well... yes, except that carbon being released into the atmosphere is the same quantity of carbon that was taken out of the atmosphere to produce the fuel in the first place. Arguably, chemically produced petroleum would have fewer contaminants and byproducts than ground oil derived petrol, and would burn cleaner. If you had to worry about polution, it would be in the form of waste heat.
You're right! It's insane to think that any living organism can survive on sunlight, water and CO2. Excuse me, I need to go water my pot plants.