No, those are just the obvious con men. The ones 'everyone' knows about because after it's over 'everyone' goes "How stupid would you have to have been to fall for that."
Believe me, there are plenty of other people out there who are willing to con you that don't rely on your greed.
Ever been the fall guy? The one left holding the bag?
Ever get suckered into buying a lemon car from used car salemen.
Ever been suckered into being 'friend' that gets the 'ugly one' on a double date?
Ever donate to a charity because the guy on the TV asked you too and said "Your dollars can help".
Greed is a tool to catch the greedy. Compasion is the tool used to catch the compasionate. Pride is the tool used to catch the prideful (as in "You are too smart to ever fall for such an obvious con...)
There are plenty of clay feet out there to aim at, greed is just one of them.
There are a few, decidedly few, moments in the Trek series as a whole where I think the level of what is provided matches the level or woreship that fans give it (and please don't mistake me, I'm a fan of Trek). But honestly, if you step back and rewatch the majority of it, you realize that a good deal of it is just mindless entertainment dressed up as thinking the same way an article in Cosmo, GQ, or Playboy is there. Primarily as an excuse to yourself so you can avoid feeling bad for looking at the pictures.
Especially the movies. There have been relatively hard hitting episodes in the various series, but very little of the movies have ever come across as more than popcorn flick fodder.
Touching and strong moments, yes. I still tear up at Spock's death. But was it revealing anything substantial about human nature outside of the preconceived notions Gene had? Not a chance.
"Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down, so it can be replaced with a government that will respect and support marriage, and help me raise my children in a society where they will expect to marry in their turn."
If that is not one step from Philips, you have to have the smallest stride on the planet.
Re:Nope, sorry
on
Ender in Exile
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· Score: 1, Informative
If it were a case of "Red vs. Blue", I'd agree with you. Take the product as a separate item and if it is enjoyable on its own, forget that you may hold a different worldview than the author.
When it comes down to someone being a step away from Fred Philips land, I draw the line. Supporting radical hate by funding it, regardless of the flavor of hate, is not acceptable. As long as someone holds or espouses an opinion that makes me feel it's likely that money I pay to them for their work might go into the hands of people who hate, me or someone else, I'll be damned if I give them a red cent.
From the article linked in GP:
"Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down, so it can be replaced with a government that will respect and support marriage, and help me raise my children in a society where they will expect to marry in their turn. Only when the marriage of heterosexuals has the support of the whole society can we have our best hope of raising each new generation to aspire to continue our civilization.."
"In the first place," he writes, "no law in any state in the United States now or ever has forbidden homosexuals to marry. Any homosexual man who can persuade a woman to take him as her husband can avail himself of all the rights of husbandhood under the law. Ditto with lesbian women. To get those civil rights, all homosexuals have to do is find someone of the opposite sex willing to join them in marriage."
"However emotionally bonded a pair of homosexual lovers may feel themselves to be, what they are doing is not marriage. they are not turning their relationship into what my wife and I have created, because no court has the power to change what their relationship actually is. They steal from me what I treasure most, and gain for themselves nothing at all. They won't be married. They'll just be playing dress-up in their parents' clothes."
Because if there is nothing worse than a Swiss army knife solution, it certainly can't be the "We have 1,000 flavors of this item, and you'll need to carry one of each to be prepared" solution.
I know, let's develop a version of the Predator that is about hand grenade sized, and instead of being capable of unmanned flight, let's just make it able to withstand being launched from a grenade launcher. And instead of using mm level radar, why don't we just give it 360 vision.
Oh wait... I think they are already doing that one.
Right and how much do those cost? Oh, right. They don't cost because one is still in development and the other is a big kite with a digital camera attached hand made by a hobbist.
The article was about a small grenade sized web cam, your arguement such a thing is pointless because the government has access to high tech UAV's which have powerful enough radar to see through several feet of concrete and pinpoint where people are standing on the other side.
Do either of the above do that? Do you have an effing clue how much equipment is required to do that? It doesn't sound like. It sounds like you are just playing arm chair general and puffing smoke out of your ass to cover your ignorance.
Sounds like someone talking out of their ass to me.
Tell you what, why don't you start up your own company and start selling these cheap UAV's you can make to the military. Get back to us when you become rich and famous, OK?
People make RF controlled planes all the time. People don't make UAV drones capable of being flown from the other side of the world for up to 24 hours at a stretch all the time.
When they can, call me. Better yet, call the Air Force.
Perhaps because you aren't going to have a UAV watching over your shoulder every day you go out on patrol.
Perhaps because when you get into a situation where you are having to clean out a building manually and don't have time for some one to get a UAV out there, you'd like to know if the next room is full of non-coms or actual hostiles before you start wasting ammo and native goodwill by filling it full of death.
"Hey! We are in Iraq, every motherfucking towel wearing asshole must be out to kill us here, shoot them all!"
Please!
You sound like Dirty Harry's illegitimate love child with Joe McCarthy.
You don't consider my porn collection to be of valuable use when the barbarians left alive from the Great War are trying to figure out what a Sybian or TENS unit was for? FOOL! They'll need study guides and inspiration if we truely want to repopulate the world.
And yet, extinction was not what I was asking for the relevance of.
The question is, does it matter that when whatever is around 35,462 AD looks back at what we were in 2008, they will see virtually zero resemblance to themselves. Be they our biological descendants or otherwise our creation (intentional or not). They are continuing the journey we ourselves were on. And in this case it truely is the journey, not the destination, that matters.
"Life was, Life is, Life will be." It is all we are given, it is all we can ask.
"This was a triumph. I'm making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS. It's hard to overstate my satisfaction. Aperture Science We do what we must because we can. For the good of all of us. Except the ones who are dead. But there's no sense crying over every mistake. You just keep on trying till you run out of cake. And the Science gets done. And you make a neat gun. For the people who are still alive. I'm not even angry. I'm being so sincere right now. Even though you broke my heart. And killed me. And tore me to pieces. And threw every piece into a fire. As they burned it hurt because I was so happy for you! Now these points of data make a beautiful line. And we're out of beta. We're releasing on time. So I'm GLaD. I got burned. Think of all the things we learned for the people who are still alive. Go ahead and leave me. I think I prefer to stay inside. Maybe you'll find someone else to help you. Maybe Black Mesa THAT WAS A JOKE. HAHA. FAT CHANCE. Anyway, this cake is great. It's so delicious and moist. Look at me still talking when there's Science to do. When I look out there, it makes me GLaD I'm not you. I've experiments to run. There is research to be done. On the people who are still alive. And believe me I am still alive. I'm doing Science and I'm still alive. I feel FANTASTIC and I'm still alive. While you're dying I'll be still alive. And when you're dead I will be still alive."
My sole hope in life is that someday I'll have a legitimate excuse to scream out "It's not my goddamn planet! Understand, monkeyboy?". Should that ever happen, my life will be complete.
The company says accounting rules known as generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) force it to ask for money for the download.
"During the past several months Apple has shipped some Macs with the hardware to support 802.11n, but the draft of the 802.11n specification was not complete enough to create the required software," Apple spokeswoman Lynn Fox said in an e-mail to CNET News.com. "Now that the draft specification is complete, we are ready to distribute the software to make the 802.11n hardware in these Macs come to life."
But because the company has already recognized all the revenue from the sales of those computers, it has to now charge customers at least a nominal fee in order to establish the value of its software upgrade and satisfy an obscure accounting regulation known as SOP 97-2, said Fox.
Update 2: Another Apple representative has added details on the Sarbanes situation: it's about accounting. Because of the Act, the company believes that if it sells a product, then later adds a feature to that product, it can be held liable for improper accounting if it recognizes revenue from the product at the time of sale, given that it hasn't finished delivering the product at that point. Ridiculous.
Update 3: Apple has confirmed today to CNet that it will be selling 802.11n unlock software for its Core 2 Duo Macs, and indeed cited accounting concerns as the reason for selling the feature rather than giving it away. If you're not buying the new 802.11n AirPort Extreme, the good news is that the software will be available for $1.99 through its web site - a truly token price for an improvement of this caliber - and in light of the comments below, I'll clarify two major points on this whole situation.
I'm more scared of is the combination of nanotech and AI that would reduce human beings to mere drones of a hive mind. Is the human race still human if it's subjugated to the will of our future digital overlords?
More to the point, does it matter?
Is there a point to clinging to what we are now, beyond the same sense of nogstalgia that we feel when we hear of some historical location being renovated/removed to make way for something better?
I may not be a Transhumanist but I'm also not entirely certain trying to keep us as we are today is all that beneficial. Or that the ultimate end of the journey will be made with our footsteps.
It sounds a bit like this story about Apple charging for the software to upgrade your wireless to 802.11n (purely a firmware/driver issue) because they thought Sarbanes Oxley required it.
In other words, it wasn't so much a legal issue as much as an accounting issue. People don't know how to deal with $0.00 items in accounting appearently.
Instead of using $10,000 per gigabyte SMS, use email
I understand your point, but my fingers still have sympathy blisters and my wrists ache thinking about actually sending a gigabyte's worth of SMS texting....
Nonprofit mostly means that your directors don't get $1 billion a year compensation programs and you don't issue stock. The rest is in the flavor of the organization and the laws of the state you incorporated in.
You are correct. I missed those. Though I would argue that ID doesn't support their games as much as they open source the game after a number of years.
On the other hand, these are also the 'giants' of their field and very much the exception rather than the rule.
If you walked into a Best Buy and purchased one copy of every game they sold today, I would give you great odds that if you were to look for updates for those games five years from now, most wouldn't even have an active web site.
Even if the hard disks were FREE, the cost of replacing them, both in downtime, and in labor, and in higher risk of cascading failures (second drive fails when restoring a raid5, requiring a full restore from backups), are more than the cost of proper cooling.
This is assuming that "proper cooling" actually extends the life of the drive significantly past that of "improper cooling". And truthfully, I can't say that observational experience or my limited reading on the subject backs such an assumption.
Proper cooling might make a "60 month" drive last 62 months and less cooling might mean it only lasts 58. Or they might both have drives that drop dead at the 8 month mark.
That would happen regardless of the nature of the falling snow.
Just as donations for a project can dry up regardless of whether or not they are done randomly or via a regular schedule.
But to stretch the analogy, order requires effort. Therefore, which do you think would end first? Something that happens naturally on it's own accord or something that someone has to organize first?
To add support for your premise, albiet in a limited niche, I've yet to see a commercially produced closed source game outside of Valve's products and MMO's that was supported more than a year from it's inital release date.
Slashdot Mirror
No, those are just the obvious con men. The ones 'everyone' knows about because after it's over 'everyone' goes "How stupid would you have to have been to fall for that."
Believe me, there are plenty of other people out there who are willing to con you that don't rely on your greed.
Ever been the fall guy? The one left holding the bag?
Ever get suckered into buying a lemon car from used car salemen.
Ever been suckered into being 'friend' that gets the 'ugly one' on a double date?
Ever donate to a charity because the guy on the TV asked you too and said "Your dollars can help".
Greed is a tool to catch the greedy. Compasion is the tool used to catch the compasionate. Pride is the tool used to catch the prideful (as in "You are too smart to ever fall for such an obvious con...)
There are plenty of clay feet out there to aim at, greed is just one of them.
There are a few, decidedly few, moments in the Trek series as a whole where I think the level of what is provided matches the level or woreship that fans give it (and please don't mistake me, I'm a fan of Trek). But honestly, if you step back and rewatch the majority of it, you realize that a good deal of it is just mindless entertainment dressed up as thinking the same way an article in Cosmo, GQ, or Playboy is there. Primarily as an excuse to yourself so you can avoid feeling bad for looking at the pictures.
Especially the movies. There have been relatively hard hitting episodes in the various series, but very little of the movies have ever come across as more than popcorn flick fodder.
Touching and strong moments, yes. I still tear up at Spock's death. But was it revealing anything substantial about human nature outside of the preconceived notions Gene had? Not a chance.
"Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down, so it can be replaced with a government that will respect and support marriage, and help me raise my children in a society where they will expect to marry in their turn."
If that is not one step from Philips, you have to have the smallest stride on the planet.
If it were a case of "Red vs. Blue", I'd agree with you. Take the product as a separate item and if it is enjoyable on its own, forget that you may hold a different worldview than the author.
When it comes down to someone being a step away from Fred Philips land, I draw the line. Supporting radical hate by funding it, regardless of the flavor of hate, is not acceptable. As long as someone holds or espouses an opinion that makes me feel it's likely that money I pay to them for their work might go into the hands of people who hate, me or someone else, I'll be damned if I give them a red cent.
From the article linked in GP:
Right...
Because if there is nothing worse than a Swiss army knife solution, it certainly can't be the "We have 1,000 flavors of this item, and you'll need to carry one of each to be prepared" solution.
I know, let's develop a version of the Predator that is about hand grenade sized, and instead of being capable of unmanned flight, let's just make it able to withstand being launched from a grenade launcher. And instead of using mm level radar, why don't we just give it 360 vision.
Oh wait... I think they are already doing that one.
Right and how much do those cost? Oh, right. They don't cost because one is still in development and the other is a big kite with a digital camera attached hand made by a hobbist.
The article was about a small grenade sized web cam, your arguement such a thing is pointless because the government has access to high tech UAV's which have powerful enough radar to see through several feet of concrete and pinpoint where people are standing on the other side.
Do either of the above do that? Do you have an effing clue how much equipment is required to do that? It doesn't sound like. It sounds like you are just playing arm chair general and puffing smoke out of your ass to cover your ignorance.
Sounds like someone talking out of their ass to me.
Tell you what, why don't you start up your own company and start selling these cheap UAV's you can make to the military. Get back to us when you become rich and famous, OK?
People make RF controlled planes all the time. People don't make UAV drones capable of being flown from the other side of the world for up to 24 hours at a stretch all the time.
When they can, call me. Better yet, call the Air Force.
Perhaps because you aren't going to have a UAV watching over your shoulder every day you go out on patrol.
Perhaps because when you get into a situation where you are having to clean out a building manually and don't have time for some one to get a UAV out there, you'd like to know if the next room is full of non-coms or actual hostiles before you start wasting ammo and native goodwill by filling it full of death.
"Hey! We are in Iraq, every motherfucking towel wearing asshole must be out to kill us here, shoot them all!"
Please!
You sound like Dirty Harry's illegitimate love child with Joe McCarthy.
You don't consider my porn collection to be of valuable use when the barbarians left alive from the Great War are trying to figure out what a Sybian or TENS unit was for? FOOL! They'll need study guides and inspiration if we truely want to repopulate the world.
And yet, extinction was not what I was asking for the relevance of.
The question is, does it matter that when whatever is around 35,462 AD looks back at what we were in 2008, they will see virtually zero resemblance to themselves. Be they our biological descendants or otherwise our creation (intentional or not). They are continuing the journey we ourselves were on. And in this case it truely is the journey, not the destination, that matters.
"Life was, Life is, Life will be." It is all we are given, it is all we can ask.
Stay out of Power Dome A unless you've learned Old Magic from your local exterminator.
Maybe if Raptor Jesus is leading them?
I think GlaDos has the pulse of the matter:
My sole hope in life is that someday I'll have a legitimate excuse to scream out "It's not my goddamn planet! Understand, monkeyboy?". Should that ever happen, my life will be complete.
And the CNet article mentioned in the above: Apple's 802.11n accounting conundrum
It's out there becaus that's what Apple said.
Specificly
More to the point, does it matter?
Is there a point to clinging to what we are now, beyond the same sense of nogstalgia that we feel when we hear of some historical location being renovated/removed to make way for something better?
I may not be a Transhumanist but I'm also not entirely certain trying to keep us as we are today is all that beneficial. Or that the ultimate end of the journey will be made with our footsteps.
It sounds a bit like this story about Apple charging for the software to upgrade your wireless to 802.11n (purely a firmware/driver issue) because they thought Sarbanes Oxley required it.
In other words, it wasn't so much a legal issue as much as an accounting issue. People don't know how to deal with $0.00 items in accounting appearently.
I understand your point, but my fingers still have sympathy blisters and my wrists ache thinking about actually sending a gigabyte's worth of SMS texting....
Actually they are the same for most of us.
Nonprofit mostly means that your directors don't get $1 billion a year compensation programs and you don't issue stock. The rest is in the flavor of the organization and the laws of the state you incorporated in.
You are correct. I missed those. Though I would argue that ID doesn't support their games as much as they open source the game after a number of years.
On the other hand, these are also the 'giants' of their field and very much the exception rather than the rule.
If you walked into a Best Buy and purchased one copy of every game they sold today, I would give you great odds that if you were to look for updates for those games five years from now, most wouldn't even have an active web site.
This is assuming that "proper cooling" actually extends the life of the drive significantly past that of "improper cooling". And truthfully, I can't say that observational experience or my limited reading on the subject backs such an assumption.
Proper cooling might make a "60 month" drive last 62 months and less cooling might mean it only lasts 58. Or they might both have drives that drop dead at the 8 month mark.
That would happen regardless of the nature of the falling snow.
Just as donations for a project can dry up regardless of whether or not they are done randomly or via a regular schedule.
But to stretch the analogy, order requires effort. Therefore, which do you think would end first? Something that happens naturally on it's own accord or something that someone has to organize first?
To add support for your premise, albiet in a limited niche, I've yet to see a commercially produced closed source game outside of Valve's products and MMO's that was supported more than a year from it's inital release date.
Again though, that's a limited niche.
Snowfall is informal and erratic. Chaotic and unplanned. And yet every year I manage to wake at least once to an entire world covered in snow.
Random simply means you need a large number of participants.