For sure. Actually, this is a good reason to avoid implementing "free" software in a commercial environment, no matter how good the quality is. You never know when the cranks and kooks are going to crawl out of the woodwork and create a disruption. Who needs that?
We've been sending people into space for half a century. Has this:
Given us universal healthcare? (Most of the rest of the industrialized nations have it. Please don't post "but universal healthcare often sucks" unless you've lived without ANY HEALTH CARE INSURANCE and needed health care.) Helped us educate our children, and feed the poor ones? Helped us cut CO2 emissions in industry and power generation? Helped turn the disadvantaged (disabled, undereducated, homeless) into productive members of society - or at least fed, clothed, housed, and cared for them medically?
It's unpopular to point out that we have a host of pretty important (and solveable) problems that need good minds and resources, but I don't care. Maybe some day slashdotters will start listening, learn that as a society we need to have some priorties, and stop abusing the moderation system to suppress opinions they don't agree with.
I'm really interested in knowing who died and left you the spokesman for "we as a society". The last time I checked, I was as much of a member of "society" as you or anyone else is, and to be blunt, your list of concerns are mostly matters I don't give a shit about. I'll take a good space program over any of them any day.
As per the problems requiring "good minds" to solve them, may I remind you it isn't the obligation of the owners of those minds to provide you with the kind of world you want to live in. If you think those problems are urgent enough to require a solution, feel free to take a crack at them yourself. The rest of us have other priorities.
The point, as KillerDeathRobot already pointed out, is that many people don't have a choice. If you're unskilled, uneducated, and lack the resources to gain marketable human capital, low-wage jobs - such as waitressing in bars - are pretty much your only choice.
So, basically your lack of options incurs a responsibility on the part of an employer to provide you with your prefered conditions? How does that work? It isn't the employer who put you in the position of lacking options, indeed, he's the one providing you with an option.
Again, what you're demanding is that the employer absorb the cost of your lack of options. Can't for the life of me why he should be obliged to do that.
By your logic, a teenager or someone in their early twenties that has to bus and wait on tables to get through college is a dim-wit, right? What if that individual can barely sustain themselves through college on $2.50 plus tips, and has to cut back on classes or forgo school altogether to get a second (and possibly third) just to be able to survive?
Since when does that mean you have a right to demand somebody else provide you with a job on your terms?
Making a living is your responsibility, it is not your employer's responsibility to see that you earn one. If you don't want to accept the terms or the conditions of employment, then don't work there.
Believe it or not, everybody else has as much of a right to act in their own interest as much as you have to act in yours. If your interests aren't compatable with your employer's, that's hardly his problem.
But private healthcare does the same thing by charging smokers more for health insurance.
Sure. And if you're paying for your own health care, if you want to pay more for the cost incurred by your smoking, it's nobody's damn business but your own.
When the taxpayers are footing the bill for your health care, then your personal habits are everybody's business.
I'd prefer to foot the bill for my own healthcare, and have the taxpayers mind their own damn business, thankyouverymuch,
Oh right, I forgot that everyone always has the choice to have a different job than they currently have. No one ever gets stuck, unable to find a better job and unable to quit and live with no job.
Whose problem is that - your's or your employers? It's not your employer's fault if you're too much of a dim bulb to improve your circumstances.
If the state is to be exptected to pay for a steady stream of oxygen tanks, heart stints and bypasses and the like, then the state is justified in reducing the costs to the taxpayers by reducing their frequency.
And that is the best argument I've heard all day as to why the state should not be in the business of providing health care at taxpayer expense. Period.
But yeah, when a company tries to save payroll costs by squeezing its staff too hard, management has no right whatsoever to expect anything resembling loyalty from said employees... yet it does! That's the amazing thing. Some of these guys honestly don't understand why their people would resent working 80 hour weeks, especially when the managers leave on time every day. The problems start when corporate types begin to see their underlings as "lucky to have a job". Things usually go from bad to worse at that point.
Gee - you must work for IBM too! (Open source advocates or not - those guys haven't made the Fortune 100 list of best companies to work for in years - but oddly enough, Microsoft does.)
The first thing I thought when I read the title was that, yet again, people were cancelling missions because they had no "obvious benefit" or some such nonsense, completely missing the point that science for science's sake has often lead to many of the greatest breakthroughs in science history.
NASA = National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Not a word in there about science.
If the scientists want an exclusive space program, let 'em pay for their own. This ain't it, no matter how much they might wish that to be the case.
Solution: Reduce the focus on having humans flying around like Buck Rogers until launch costs become reasonable.
Better solution: quit wasting money collecting fun facts about distant destinations we won't have the technology to visit for centuries, if ever, and concentrate our resources on local destinations that might actually yeild some practical use to us sometime before the 29th century.
In my book, they're setting their priorities exactly right.
That explains the results of the special election in California and the last two presidential elections.
It sure does! From the The Guardian article someone posted earlier in the thread:
Furthermore, given that at least a third of Brits are already unwitting carriers (rising to about 80% in France and Germany), the effects are clearly less pronounced than some press reports earlier this week may have led you to believe.
Apparently, the countries that have the higher rates of infection tend towards more socialistic governments.
It's good to know California and the rest of the US are recovering from the infection!
It really pisses me off that armchair scientist wankers such as yourself want to dismiss the overwhelming amount of evidence that the climate is going through major changes.
And your qualifications for evaluating the available evidence is better than their's - how?
My entire home town has been reduced to rubble.
Moving to a town that wasn't built under sea-level in the first place might be a good way to avoid that in the future.
The reality is that Open Standards/Open Source will foster competition rater than stop it -
Well, I half agree. Having open standards will foster competition for effectively meeting the standard.
I'm a little less certain about the mandate for open source. Where are the incentives if all of your innovations are available to your competitors without compensation?
That sounds like an incentive to meet the standards at the lowest development cost possible, with no further investment for innovation. Vendors would wind up competing solely on price, rather than on adding new features.
In a way it does need social institutions to be implemented such as universal health care here in Canada. It's damn expensive but practically everyone thinks it's a damn good idea.
Yeah, they think it's such a good idea that emigration to the United States from Canada has consistently exceeded emigration from the United States to Canada, the sole exception being during the Vietnam war. This despite the fact that Canada has a smaller population than California. And it's especially true of professional classes such as doctors and engineers that wind up paying the taxes to support such generosity.
Sure, the like the idea of universal health care.
But, apparently, they don't much like the economic consequences of it.
I was actually impressed with its ability to work with other devices to include an iPOD and PsP. The nice thing about this machine is that it really is expandable as wireless gives them many options. You will probably see an addon keyboard/mouse combo one day.
There are many of us out here who don't need our PCs to program on, we have them for games, other entertainment, e-mail, and surfing. Give me an insta-on box with those features and I may just consider it. The XBOX360 is actually the first console I am seriously considering because of the potential.
That's the point I think is being missed. After everything is said and done, the thing is still, design-wise, pretty much a glorified PC. Microsoft has come out with a proprietary platform which they're using the gamer market to propagate. They can gradually add other functionality to increase it's market.
Don't be surprised when it eventually evolves into what amounts to the Microsoft version of the Mac.
I'm all in favor of Google as the search engine but the capability that a network of these things would give to a single corporation which owns them outright makes me more than a little uneasy.
And an American corporation at that.
Now, how long do you think it will be before the UN demands international control of Google?
You think this is bad, just wait until someone patents "hero fights villian." That's pretty much on par with some of the things other kinds of pattents are issued for.
Individuals can say whatever they want. The problem comes when they're spending gobs of money from a few, wealthy vested interests to promote their ideals.
In other words, free speech is fine - as long as no one can hear what you're saying.
Slashdot Mirror
For sure. Actually, this is a good reason to avoid implementing "free" software in a commercial environment, no matter how good the quality is. You never know when the cranks and kooks are going to crawl out of the woodwork and create a disruption. Who needs that?
We've been sending people into space for half a century. Has this:
Given us universal healthcare? (Most of the rest of the industrialized nations have it. Please don't post "but universal healthcare often sucks" unless you've lived without ANY HEALTH CARE INSURANCE and needed health care.)
Helped us educate our children, and feed the poor ones?
Helped us cut CO2 emissions in industry and power generation?
Helped turn the disadvantaged (disabled, undereducated, homeless) into productive members of society - or at least fed, clothed, housed, and cared for them medically?
It's unpopular to point out that we have a host of pretty important (and solveable) problems that need good minds and resources, but I don't care. Maybe some day slashdotters will start listening, learn that as a society we need to have some priorties, and stop abusing the moderation system to suppress opinions they don't agree with.
I'm really interested in knowing who died and left you the spokesman for "we as a society". The last time I checked, I was as much of a member of "society" as you or anyone else is, and to be blunt, your list of concerns are mostly matters I don't give a shit about. I'll take a good space program over any of them any day.
As per the problems requiring "good minds" to solve them, may I remind you it isn't the obligation of the owners of those minds to provide you with the kind of world you want to live in. If you think those problems are urgent enough to require a solution, feel free to take a crack at them yourself. The rest of us have other priorities.
The point, as KillerDeathRobot already pointed out, is that many people don't have a choice. If you're unskilled, uneducated, and lack the resources to gain marketable human capital, low-wage jobs - such as waitressing in bars - are pretty much your only choice.
So, basically your lack of options incurs a responsibility on the part of an employer to provide you with your prefered conditions? How does that work? It isn't the employer who put you in the position of lacking options, indeed, he's the one providing you with an option.
Again, what you're demanding is that the employer absorb the cost of your lack of options. Can't for the life of me why he should be obliged to do that.
This reminds me of an Aug. 3rd comment by nationally syndicated radio show host Neal Boortz. It just seems too nasty.
Look, if it upsets you that much, post your address and I'll be glad to mail you a hankie. A nice pink one to go with your politics.
By your logic, a teenager or someone in their early twenties that has to bus and wait on tables to get through college is a dim-wit, right? What if that individual can barely sustain themselves through college on $2.50 plus tips, and has to cut back on classes or forgo school altogether to get a second (and possibly third) just to be able to survive?
Since when does that mean you have a right to demand somebody else provide you with a job on your terms?
Making a living is your responsibility, it is not your employer's responsibility to see that you earn one. If you don't want to accept the terms or the conditions of employment, then don't work there.
Believe it or not, everybody else has as much of a right to act in their own interest as much as you have to act in yours. If your interests aren't compatable with your employer's, that's hardly his problem.
But private healthcare does the same thing by charging smokers more for health insurance.
Sure. And if you're paying for your own health care, if you want to pay more for the cost incurred by your smoking, it's nobody's damn business but your own.
When the taxpayers are footing the bill for your health care, then your personal habits are everybody's business.
I'd prefer to foot the bill for my own healthcare, and have the taxpayers mind their own damn business, thankyouverymuch,
Oh right, I forgot that everyone always has the choice to have a different job than they currently have. No one ever gets stuck, unable to find a better job and unable to quit and live with no job.
Whose problem is that - your's or your employers? It's not your employer's fault if you're too much of a dim bulb to improve your circumstances.
If the state is to be exptected to pay for a steady stream of oxygen tanks, heart stints and bypasses and the like, then the state is justified in reducing the costs to the taxpayers by reducing their frequency.
And that is the best argument I've heard all day as to why the state should not be in the business of providing health care at taxpayer expense. Period.
But yeah, when a company tries to save payroll costs by squeezing its staff too hard, management has no right whatsoever to expect anything resembling loyalty from said employees ... yet it does! That's the amazing thing. Some of these guys honestly don't understand why their people would resent working 80 hour weeks, especially when the managers leave on time every day. The problems start when corporate types begin to see their underlings as "lucky to have a job". Things usually go from bad to worse at that point.
Gee - you must work for IBM too! (Open source advocates or not - those guys haven't made the Fortune 100 list of best companies to work for in years - but oddly enough, Microsoft does.)
Hell, every year, my company gives us a bonus...
....they bend us over a barrel, and then they bone us.
...piling on Rick Santorum at Hit & Run!
The first thing I thought when I read the title was that, yet again, people were cancelling missions because they had no "obvious benefit" or some such nonsense, completely missing the point that science for science's sake has often lead to many of the greatest breakthroughs in science history.
NASA = National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Not a word in there about science.
If the scientists want an exclusive space program, let 'em pay for their own. This ain't it, no matter how much they might wish that to be the case.
This is an argument we hear time and again.
And the fact that you are apparently unable to understand it in no way undermines it's validity.
Solution: Reduce the focus on having humans flying around like Buck Rogers until launch costs become reasonable.
Better solution: quit wasting money collecting fun facts about distant destinations we won't have the technology to visit for centuries, if ever, and concentrate our resources on local destinations that might actually yeild some practical use to us sometime before the 29th century.
In my book, they're setting their priorities exactly right.
It sure does! From the The Guardian article someone posted earlier in the thread:
Apparently, the countries that have the higher rates of infection tend towards more socialistic governments.
It's good to know California and the rest of the US are recovering from the infection!
It really pisses me off that armchair scientist wankers such as yourself want to dismiss the overwhelming amount of evidence that the climate is going through major changes.
And your qualifications for evaluating the available evidence is better than their's - how?
My entire home town has been reduced to rubble.
Moving to a town that wasn't built under sea-level in the first place might be a good way to avoid that in the future.
The aliens must be laughing themselves sick at our hubris.
If they laugh themselves sick, are they eligable for treatment in the Canadian free health-care system?
The reality is that Open Standards/Open Source will foster competition rater than stop it -
Well, I half agree. Having open standards will foster competition for effectively meeting the standard.
I'm a little less certain about the mandate for open source. Where are the incentives if all of your innovations are available to your competitors without compensation?
That sounds like an incentive to meet the standards at the lowest development cost possible, with no further investment for innovation. Vendors would wind up competing solely on price, rather than on adding new features.
In a way it does need social institutions to be implemented such as universal health care here in Canada. It's damn expensive but practically everyone thinks it's a damn good idea.
Yeah, they think it's such a good idea that emigration to the United States from Canada has consistently exceeded emigration from the United States to Canada, the sole exception being during the Vietnam war. This despite the fact that Canada has a smaller population than California. And it's especially true of professional classes such as doctors and engineers that wind up paying the taxes to support such generosity.
Sure, the like the idea of universal health care.
But, apparently, they don't much like the economic consequences of it.
I was actually impressed with its ability to work with other devices to include an iPOD and PsP. The nice thing about this machine is that it really is expandable as wireless gives them many options. You will probably see an addon keyboard/mouse combo one day.
There are many of us out here who don't need our PCs to program on, we have them for games, other entertainment, e-mail, and surfing. Give me an insta-on box with those features and I may just consider it. The XBOX360 is actually the first console I am seriously considering because of the potential.
That's the point I think is being missed. After everything is said and done, the thing is still, design-wise, pretty much a glorified PC. Microsoft has come out with a proprietary platform which they're using the gamer market to propagate. They can gradually add other functionality to increase it's market.
Don't be surprised when it eventually evolves into what amounts to the Microsoft version of the Mac.
I'm all in favor of Google as the search engine but the capability that a network of these things would give to a single corporation which owns them outright makes me more than a little uneasy.
And an American corporation at that.
Now, how long do you think it will be before the UN demands international control of Google?
just wait, on one hand the lawsuits will start flying and hopefully this ID "theory" will get relegated to the crapper. (me with my optimism hat on)
I thought it got relegated to the crapper nearly a century ago (see "Scopes monkey trial"). You can take your optimism hat off now.
Welcome to the Crotch of America - enjoy your stay!
So yes, Coffee and Alcohol should be banned too?
Good luck on that one.
Don't laugh too fast. Not more than 20 years ago, people said the same thing about smoking.
Don't be surprised when your favorite vice is next on the list.
You think this is bad, just wait until someone patents "hero fights villian." That's pretty much on par with some of the things other kinds of pattents are issued for.
Here we have a case of art anticipating life.
Individuals can say whatever they want. The problem comes when they're spending gobs of money from a few, wealthy vested interests to promote their ideals.
In other words, free speech is fine - as long as no one can hear what you're saying.