Is the world flat for you? does heavier then air flight exists in your tiny, stupid world?
Do you also ask these questions of people who classify spiders and insects together as "bugs"? Or do you reserve your strawmen solely for people who disagree with astronomers on what to call a frozen ball of rock over 4 light-hours away?
No it isn't. It's a definition, and an arbitrary one since the class "planet" as currently defined has no particular physical significance. "Member of the list of planets of Sol" is no less (and no more) "factual".
The word "continent" is also a matter of definition: how large does an island have to be before it qualifies? However, for practical purposes, there is a sharp divide between major and minor land masses, just as there is a sharp divide between major and minor solar satellites.
Of course, we could simply agree that "planet" means one of the nine, and use "major satellite" and "minor satellite" in a scientific context.
But then again, there seems to be a general fanon consensus that Pluto is a homi/genocidal psychopath, so this could be seen as a karmic punishment. Or perhaps this is the very reason she went over the edge: "Demote my planet, will they? I'll show them! I'll show them ALL! MUAHAAHAHAHAAA!!!
Not really. All it really means is that the lawyers are looking out for each other. But we already knew that, and, well, there's a reason why they are so universally despised.
That line alone shows that they basically see suing people as a way to stop free speech - and that it should be allowed, even if the law isn't technically on their side. Basically, abusing the system to get people to stop saying things you don't like is considered legal.
This, in turn, implies that the law sides with whoever has the most money, which is another well-known fact. Nothing new here either.
Can you imagine how many people have been in a situation like Chris, but haven't had the money to go into a legal battle with them?
And since they don't have the money, it doesn't really matter what decision the court would have given some years down the road, now does it?
It sucks indeed.
It will always and inevitably suck, as long as both sides need to pay for their own legal expences and they have vastly different resource levels. If you want justice, then pay for all legal expenses of both sides from public funds; if you don't want that, then accept that "he who has the gold makes the rules". There are no third alternatives.
Definitely. Steam games don't require a no-CD patch, and auto-update. They're as convenient as the Pirate Bay edition. Many of them are even competitive on price, costing less than 5 euros. A store-bought game has no fighting chance whatsoever, unless it's a second-hand game or sellable as one - and gaming companies are doing their best to kill those.
"The report also explains that US Army researchers developed a protein that attacks the bacteria that causes plaque, which can lead to gum disease. This protein can easily be incorporated into the gum, making it a serious alternative to toothbrush and toothpaste, the researchers claim. "
Seriously, this has been invented over 35 years ago (in 1975). And to add insult to injury, the word "Jenkki" is derived from "Yankee" and means an American in Finnish.
Or is the problem that Xylitol is patent-free while this new molecule might not be? You can't charge $10 per piece for a nonproprietary gum...
As all good science fiction does, current events and the human condition were examined, placing the characters in moral quandaries throughout the show.
No, all good science fiction does not examine current events, the human condition, or moral quandaries. In fact I'd be thankful if less scifi writers felt the need to do so, especially since most of them aren't very good at it and even those who are tend to let the requirements of such examinations dictate the plot and the setting.
I'd much rather see more examinations of possible futures and advanced super-tech.
Religion, origins, etc. were explored while maintaining a reasonable level of scientific realism. Significantly, B5 had none of these things.
Well, not much anyway, and that was its best feature. The parts that did examine them tended to be cringeworthy, just like they usually are anywhere.
I know SA has a ton of other issues that are going to take decades to get out of, but some of those rules would be a BIG headache for an entrepeneur who cannot afford the overhead.
If your business can't survive with this "overhead", then it never was profitable in the first place, except by shifting its externalities into the society at large - which made it a net loss for the economy, so good riddance. That's what this "overhad" is: the costs resulting from your business. It's only fair that you should pay it, and also a requirement for working markets.
The US isn't a dumptruck you can throw blanket assessments on; it's a series of
tubes, clogged with shit and badly overdue for maintenance because upkeeping infrastructure would require taxation for purposes other than corporate welfare and that would be communism!
People with minority tastes usually DO have better information because they take the time to seek it out, and the Internet is a fantastic tool for that purpose.
People with minority tastes may or may not have better information than the rest. That, however, is irrelevant to the question of whether those tastes themselves are better than those of the rest. For that matter, it is unclear what "better taste in music" even means - that you like the same thing as the speaker?
Everybody else buys what they are told to, more or less.
By now, we should have had a plethora of different applications running on such a card: audio encoding, compression, encryption, gaming AI. I know about CUDA, but why aren't we seeing such applications? Are they held back because of lacking OS support? Lacking driver support? Lacking deployment infrastructure? Lacking developer initiative? Is the GPU architecture (disparate memory) unsuitable?
Well, for me having the application utilize the GPU is a big minus, since the cooling fan will spin up and make noise. On the other hand, my CPU is pretty much completely quiet due to a combination of a large heatsink and a large, low-RPM fan which replaced the pathetic thing Intel had packaged with the CPU. But GPU coolers can't be replaced as easily, due to a lack of standard form-factor.
The worst is that every Bethesda game (Daggerfall, Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3) has had issues like this which shouldn't have made it past quality control.
To be fair, these are all massive sandbox games, which is likely the gametype most prone to bugs due to the possibility of sequence breaking and the sheer number of scripts you need to write. Add to this a complex, massive 3D world and the requirements of realtime, and it should come as no surprise that the end result is very fragile.
Bethesda's problem is having too much ambition and thus always biting more than they can chew. Which, I suppose, is preferable to the sad lack of ambition a typical game shows...
What if one guy is running an MRI machine or something that sucks up insane amounts of juice? Obviously the electric company shouldn't be required to upgrade their infrastructure to accommodate that load. So where do we draw the line?
Well, I don't know about how you do it where you live, but my electric connection has both maximum power and circuit breakers to enforce it. So yes, the company should be required to upgrade their infrastructure to accomodate the load since they sold me that level of connection.
Honestly, nowhere else than the world of Internet connections would the line "Yes, we sold it but it's unreasonable to expect us to actually deliver it" fly.
They didn't create mini big bangs. They smashed lead ions to try to recreate the conditions that existed shortly after the big bang.
I'm not so sure that there is a difference. From what I've understood, the "Big Bang" really refers to the period of inflation due to Higgs field being stuck on a supercooled state, and these conditions could potentially be re-created by rising energy density high enough to re-create the correct symmetries and then letting it fall very fast again.
Dunno what the word "mini" is doing there, though; any Big Bang will either fizzle out or become the full-sized version.
Otherwise, why shouldn't they cancel my trades if I ever lose more than 60% on Nasdaq? Or poker?
Think of the economy as a Magic the Gathering -tournament. With money, you can buy cards which bend the rules in various ways, which allows you to win more often, which gets you more cards and so on.
I wonder if Stock the Acquisition would become a new hit?
That's where the real profit is coming from - these people cheat and they get away with it.
Cheat? Heads they win, tails you lose. What's unfair about that?
Even I could make money like that. I just have a conscience and I wouldn't be able to fool myself on what I'm actually doing.
But you do have a conscience, and that makes you a loser in a capitalistic society. I wonder what evolutionary consequences this fact might have?
They are not producing anything. They are buying low and selling high units of wealth that others have produced. They are not creating wealth, they are redistributing it.
They aren't redistributing wealth, they are stealing a few pennies from every trade. Which might create a market opening for a stock exchange with synchronized trading - that is, a stock exchange where all trades are processed once per minute at the same time, making it impossible to do "high-frequency" parasiting.
This is the kind of shit that has madmen and economists thinking you can forever grow an economy in a finite world with finite resources.
You can, if the limits also keep growing, which they have for the whole of human history due to improving technology with no ending in sight.
You know how you can avoid ever having a huge national housing market crash? Easy. Limit the purchasing of non-commercial residential homes to people who actually intend to live in them.
Like most easy solutions to complex problems this won't work. It doesn't stop me from taking a loan and buying a McMansion I can't really afford in the hopes that its value will keep going up. It also limits my rights in a rather arbitrary manner.
Do that and DON'T make "securities" out of them. Then you can't have a bubble in the first place -- no bubble, no burst.
Of course you can have a bubble. Tulip Mania predates modern financial system by centuries. Financial bubbles are caused by greed and stupidity overwhelming common sense, and neither greed nor stupidity shows no signs of vanishing from the human race.
It's not rocket science, but its way too complicated, and it unfairly penalize the rich. Why should they pay a higher percentage than you or I?
Because they can afford it. A minimum-wage employee who gets taxes 50% of his income will go without eating; a CEO who gets gets taxed 50% of his income will simply invest a bit less.
The more you earn, the smaller percentage of your income you spend on food, housing and other unavoidable costs. Progressive taxation is simply taking this into account.
Re:Oracle is doing everything they can to fuck up
on
Oracle To Monetize Java VM
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
If Oracle starts locking things up in the premium version, OpenJDK will be forked (there are already some shallow forks like IceTea that take OpenJDK and replace the remaining closed-source bits with stuff from GNU Classpath etc) and the community will shift.
I'm sure that Oracle will find some obscure patent- or other issue to crush the free version. That is what patent law exists for, after all: to help build monopolies.
Oh well, I guess it's time to start looking for another language to start new projects in.
Yes. Modern mechanical pencils are a huge improvement over the original.
How about the wheel?
Yes. Spoked wheels are an improvement over the original round disk, as is making the metal parts out of aluminum. Magnetic levitation trains might also count.
Are we still burning gasoline in cylinders with pistons to power cars, like we started doing in the 1880s?
Care to compare modern cars to 1880s ones in any metric and tell me there's not been improvement? And let us not forget Wankel engines, fuel cells, etc.
Do we still use propellors to make boats move?
Yes, we do. Of course, modern propellors are not only more efficient than old ones, but are also often mounted so they can be turned, to help steering.
Et cetera.
Yup, pretty much.
I'm not suggesting it's not possible to improve the Shuttle -- but that case has to be made in detail, not tossed off with an assumption that because it was designed in the 60s and built in the 70s there must be a far better idea.
To put it bluntly: aerodynamics, material science, and chemistry have all moved on. So have flow dynamics and the ability simulate various scenarios. As a result, to suggest that a modern replacement of the Space Shuttle wouldn't be an improvement over the current one is simply idiotic.
Or, we can look for an answer that doesn't paint most of us as backwards hyper-religious hicks... I know that (especially from the outside) it certainly seems like we are from all the news coverage and wacky stories, but most people here who are religious follow a gentler, kinder, more accepting version.
The question is: do sufficient number of you follow the "God is a psychopath" version of Christianity to account for the differences in this poll? Well, according to this Slactivist post, Tim LaHaye has sold 65 million books. Now, these books aren't going to sell on quality - because they're bloody awful - so they must be selling because there's at least 65 million people who agree with his viewpoint. And 65 million of 310 million is about 20%, which is certainly enough to affect statistics.
Unfortunately, those of us who share some views considered right wing (eg, my views on taxes, many social programs, and guns) get lumped together with those assholes
I'm sorry to say this, but sharing right-wing viewpoint on taxes and social programs - namely, that the poor should shoulder the majority of the tax burden and die rather than get any support - does make you an asshole. In fact it's pretty much the definition of an asshole. Perhaps you meant "those lunatics"?
I would suggest that a non-religious reason for not giving up or resigning ourselves is just a "don't ever give up" mentality.
"Don't ever give up" is a fine explanation when you're, say, fighting cancer. It doesn't really make sense when you're dying of old age and have no chance of ever leaving hospital.
It has been my experience that Americans hold onto life harder than almost anyone else on the planet. There is no saying "Well, that's enough then." There is no accepting the inevitable. No matter how sick, how weak, how miserable a person is, in the US it seems that it's still better than throwing in the towel.
I wonder if this has to do with the American Religious Right and the rather bleak picture they paint of the afterlife where the absolute best you can hope for is an eternity under a sadistic, totalitarian and arbitrary demon-god who makes a passable impression of Hitler (but more likely you'll burn in Hell due to some slight doctrinal misunderstanding)? Offhand, I can't think of anyone else with such dim prospects - Atheists think they'll face peaceful oblivion, Catholics, Protestants and Muslims think they'll face a generally benevolent deity, Hindus think they'll get re-incarnated, Buddhists think they'll be re-incarnated or reach Nirvana, etc. etc.
It seems to me that nobody else has as much reason to fear death than Americans. If you thought you'd face after death a being whose defining characteristics are hating gays/communists/arabs/whatever and torturing anyone who annoys him in horrible ways, wouldn't you cling to life with desperate zeal? Talk about your self-inflicted Hell.
I can infer that some parallel can be made with the general speed of progress in electronics and expect that within a quick decade it will be hi-res and not require too much power to be implanted with day-long batteries.
Why not simply use a small fuel cell and generate power from glucose and oxygen from bloodstream?
Slashdot Mirror
Do you also ask these questions of people who classify spiders and insects together as "bugs"? Or do you reserve your strawmen solely for people who disagree with astronomers on what to call a frozen ball of rock over 4 light-hours away?
For the record, Eris will always be Xena to me.
The word "continent" is also a matter of definition: how large does an island have to be before it qualifies? However, for practical purposes, there is a sharp divide between major and minor land masses, just as there is a sharp divide between major and minor solar satellites.
Of course, we could simply agree that "planet" means one of the nine, and use "major satellite" and "minor satellite" in a scientific context.
But then again, there seems to be a general fanon consensus that Pluto is a homi/genocidal psychopath, so this could be seen as a karmic punishment. Or perhaps this is the very reason she went over the edge: "Demote my planet, will they? I'll show them! I'll show them ALL! MUAHAAHAHAHAAA!!!
...What?
Not really. All it really means is that the lawyers are looking out for each other. But we already knew that, and, well, there's a reason why they are so universally despised.
This, in turn, implies that the law sides with whoever has the most money, which is another well-known fact. Nothing new here either.
And since they don't have the money, it doesn't really matter what decision the court would have given some years down the road, now does it?
It will always and inevitably suck, as long as both sides need to pay for their own legal expences and they have vastly different resource levels. If you want justice, then pay for all legal expenses of both sides from public funds; if you don't want that, then accept that "he who has the gold makes the rules". There are no third alternatives.
Definitely. Steam games don't require a no-CD patch, and auto-update. They're as convenient as the Pirate Bay edition. Many of them are even competitive on price, costing less than 5 euros. A store-bought game has no fighting chance whatsoever, unless it's a second-hand game or sellable as one - and gaming companies are doing their best to kill those.
I guess the researchers forgot to read the Wikipedia article on Xylitol Jenkki first.
Seriously, this has been invented over 35 years ago (in 1975). And to add insult to injury, the word "Jenkki" is derived from "Yankee" and means an American in Finnish.
Or is the problem that Xylitol is patent-free while this new molecule might not be? You can't charge $10 per piece for a nonproprietary gum...
No, all good science fiction does not examine current events, the human condition, or moral quandaries. In fact I'd be thankful if less scifi writers felt the need to do so, especially since most of them aren't very good at it and even those who are tend to let the requirements of such examinations dictate the plot and the setting.
I'd much rather see more examinations of possible futures and advanced super-tech.
Well, not much anyway, and that was its best feature. The parts that did examine them tended to be cringeworthy, just like they usually are anywhere.
If your business can't survive with this "overhead", then it never was profitable in the first place, except by shifting its externalities into the society at large - which made it a net loss for the economy, so good riddance. That's what this "overhad" is: the costs resulting from your business. It's only fair that you should pay it, and also a requirement for working markets.
tubes, clogged with shit and badly overdue for maintenance because upkeeping infrastructure would require taxation for purposes other than corporate welfare and that would be communism!
You walked right into that one :).
Thus proving that unions are still a necessity, and that minimum-wage employees should form their own ASAP.
People with minority tastes may or may not have better information than the rest. That, however, is irrelevant to the question of whether those tastes themselves are better than those of the rest. For that matter, it is unclear what "better taste in music" even means - that you like the same thing as the speaker?
Isn't RIAA's whole issue here that they don't ?-)
It is, the period of oscillation is simply a lot longer.
Well, for me having the application utilize the GPU is a big minus, since the cooling fan will spin up and make noise. On the other hand, my CPU is pretty much completely quiet due to a combination of a large heatsink and a large, low-RPM fan which replaced the pathetic thing Intel had packaged with the CPU. But GPU coolers can't be replaced as easily, due to a lack of standard form-factor.
To be fair, these are all massive sandbox games, which is likely the gametype most prone to bugs due to the possibility of sequence breaking and the sheer number of scripts you need to write. Add to this a complex, massive 3D world and the requirements of realtime, and it should come as no surprise that the end result is very fragile.
Bethesda's problem is having too much ambition and thus always biting more than they can chew. Which, I suppose, is preferable to the sad lack of ambition a typical game shows...
Well, I don't know about how you do it where you live, but my electric connection has both maximum power and circuit breakers to enforce it. So yes, the company should be required to upgrade their infrastructure to accomodate the load since they sold me that level of connection.
Honestly, nowhere else than the world of Internet connections would the line "Yes, we sold it but it's unreasonable to expect us to actually deliver it" fly.
I'm not so sure that there is a difference. From what I've understood, the "Big Bang" really refers to the period of inflation due to Higgs field being stuck on a supercooled state, and these conditions could potentially be re-created by rising energy density high enough to re-create the correct symmetries and then letting it fall very fast again.
Dunno what the word "mini" is doing there, though; any Big Bang will either fizzle out or become the full-sized version.
Think of the economy as a Magic the Gathering -tournament. With money, you can buy cards which bend the rules in various ways, which allows you to win more often, which gets you more cards and so on.
I wonder if Stock the Acquisition would become a new hit?
Cheat? Heads they win, tails you lose. What's unfair about that?
But you do have a conscience, and that makes you a loser in a capitalistic society. I wonder what evolutionary consequences this fact might have?
They aren't redistributing wealth, they are stealing a few pennies from every trade. Which might create a market opening for a stock exchange with synchronized trading - that is, a stock exchange where all trades are processed once per minute at the same time, making it impossible to do "high-frequency" parasiting.
You can, if the limits also keep growing, which they have for the whole of human history due to improving technology with no ending in sight.
Like most easy solutions to complex problems this won't work. It doesn't stop me from taking a loan and buying a McMansion I can't really afford in the hopes that its value will keep going up. It also limits my rights in a rather arbitrary manner.
Of course you can have a bubble. Tulip Mania predates modern financial system by centuries. Financial bubbles are caused by greed and stupidity overwhelming common sense, and neither greed nor stupidity shows no signs of vanishing from the human race.
They're not the flip side, they are the "idiots who don't realize they are idiots".
Because they can afford it. A minimum-wage employee who gets taxes 50% of his income will go without eating; a CEO who gets gets taxed 50% of his income will simply invest a bit less.
The more you earn, the smaller percentage of your income you spend on food, housing and other unavoidable costs. Progressive taxation is simply taking this into account.
I'm sure that Oracle will find some obscure patent- or other issue to crush the free version. That is what patent law exists for, after all: to help build monopolies.
Oh well, I guess it's time to start looking for another language to start new projects in.
Yes. Modern mechanical pencils are a huge improvement over the original.
Yes. Spoked wheels are an improvement over the original round disk, as is making the metal parts out of aluminum. Magnetic levitation trains might also count.
Care to compare modern cars to 1880s ones in any metric and tell me there's not been improvement? And let us not forget Wankel engines, fuel cells, etc.
Yes, we do. Of course, modern propellors are not only more efficient than old ones, but are also often mounted so they can be turned, to help steering.
Yup, pretty much.
To put it bluntly: aerodynamics, material science, and chemistry have all moved on. So have flow dynamics and the ability simulate various scenarios. As a result, to suggest that a modern replacement of the Space Shuttle wouldn't be an improvement over the current one is simply idiotic.
The question is: do sufficient number of you follow the "God is a psychopath" version of Christianity to account for the differences in this poll? Well, according to this Slactivist post, Tim LaHaye has sold 65 million books. Now, these books aren't going to sell on quality - because they're bloody awful - so they must be selling because there's at least 65 million people who agree with his viewpoint. And 65 million of 310 million is about 20%, which is certainly enough to affect statistics.
I'm sorry to say this, but sharing right-wing viewpoint on taxes and social programs - namely, that the poor should shoulder the majority of the tax burden and die rather than get any support - does make you an asshole. In fact it's pretty much the definition of an asshole. Perhaps you meant "those lunatics"?
"Don't ever give up" is a fine explanation when you're, say, fighting cancer. It doesn't really make sense when you're dying of old age and have no chance of ever leaving hospital.
I wonder if this has to do with the American Religious Right and the rather bleak picture they paint of the afterlife where the absolute best you can hope for is an eternity under a sadistic, totalitarian and arbitrary demon-god who makes a passable impression of Hitler (but more likely you'll burn in Hell due to some slight doctrinal misunderstanding)? Offhand, I can't think of anyone else with such dim prospects - Atheists think they'll face peaceful oblivion, Catholics, Protestants and Muslims think they'll face a generally benevolent deity, Hindus think they'll get re-incarnated, Buddhists think they'll be re-incarnated or reach Nirvana, etc. etc.
It seems to me that nobody else has as much reason to fear death than Americans. If you thought you'd face after death a being whose defining characteristics are hating gays/communists/arabs/whatever and torturing anyone who annoys him in horrible ways, wouldn't you cling to life with desperate zeal? Talk about your self-inflicted Hell.
Why not simply use a small fuel cell and generate power from glucose and oxygen from bloodstream?