Why are the military so goddam stupid? They have been transmitting video unencrypted ever since the Bosnia conflict. And apperantly they're still happily going on making same mistake as Joe Sixpack, setting up his new home wireless router.
How could they possibly avoid it? Most people working there are average, and if average person has trouble setting up his home wireless router, why would that same average person do any better when dressed in uniform?
So, only the "base metal slugs" count? What's wrong with paper money?
I suppose metal is more durable, but then again, at least euro bills can pass through washing machine with no damage.
What they have is irredeemable bearer bonds.
The grocery store just redeemed some of them for beer and pizza, and earlier today the service station redeemed some for gasoline. Oh, and a repairman redeemed some for services (repairing a broken water pump). And of course I redeem them regularly for work.
Authorisation consists of ticking the boxes and entering an address.
Interesting. When I said "authorized", I of course meant that the guy who's account is being debited must authorize the transfer at his bank, using his passwords to do it if it's done over the Net. I honestly never even dreamed that a bank would let someone debit someone else's account just because that someone claimed to have his permission.
I wouldn't accept a cheque for a house, especially not if I was incommunicado and thus unable to verify it immediately.
The drugs squad would like to have a word with you...
Please explain why drugs squad would be interested in the method of payment I used to purchase my residence? Money laundering investigators I could understand, but drugs squad?
There's not a lot of room for Necrophiliac Sadism in chemistry, but I suppose if you were making (and taking) LSD or pouring HCL on biology's lab mice for therapy, you'd be having a sit-down with your dean.
Nice strawman. As it happens, some chemistry labs do indeed involve dissolving various things in HCl (capitalization matters here, so get it right). Suppose I said I enjoyed them (I do) and were looking forward to the next one (I am); should that get me banned?
You do realize that embalming (or some methods of it, anyway) requires cutting open the corpse, right?
Yes - it SHOULD discourage the expression of similar thoughts, because sometimes that expression is MURDER.
I think you are vastly underestimating the built-in prohibitions against killing people.
And asking if students are any safer is a question that can't be answered, and you know it. There is no measure of how effective these policies are since life as we know it isn't a controlled experiment. Correlation is not causation.
So we can't measure the effect of these practices, yet we can say for certain that they at the very least inconvenienced people. The conclusion seems to be that these parctices have a cost, yet it can't be shown that they have a benefit, thus they should be discontinued.
Now, given that we knew there was a chance, IE, her expression implied that she had those thoughts, I think its best we NOT roll the dice, don't leave that to chance, and stop a potential murder. It's not like she is going to jail. It's not like she has been fined. She was taken off campus, for making death threats. That is about as minimal a punishment you can get for something this serious.
She hasn't made death threats. She has said that she's looking forward to stabbing corpses (you know, already dead people) in the throat as a part of her curriculum. That's not a death threat (or any kind of threat) by any stretch of imagination, except apparently the American one.
America: Land of the paranoid, home of the pussies.
People leave their [dead] bodies to science, not recreational therapy. If she wants to stab something, she should go deer hunting with a Bowie knife. If I were a prof in mortuary science, I'd boot her for expressing pleasure for stabbing a human corpse.
And if I was your dean, I'd reprimand you for abusing your power. After all, all that really matters is if the person in question learns morturaly science, not if she takes a pleasure in doing so. Science doesn't care about your attitude, no matter how unpleasant it might be to other humans, as long as you accept the supremacy of facts over your pet theory.
She just learned a useful life lesson, not to show emotion.
Fixed that for you.
Only inhumans with no emotions have a place in Corporate America, as you said. Cogs don't get upset over anything, after all, and no human is anything but one.
We all start at Day 0. Where we go from that point forward makes up the inequality.
So some people can earn the divine right of the kings?
Anyway, people are obviously not equal: some are stronger than others, some are smarter than others. That doesn't mean that the strong have the right to mug the weak, nor the smart to con the stupid. Rather, the strong should protect the weak and the smart should lead for the benefit of all. That allows us all to achieve to the best of our ability and fulfil our potential.
Socialism, first and foremost, is about the government's control over the means of production.
No, that's communism, which is the extreme end of socialism and will very likely be made completely obsolete by personal nanomanufacturing.
Your "minimum guaranteed quality of life" is a lie: once you make the electorate accept the need for a "certain minimum quality of life" for the "unfortunate", you will begin to continuously raise that minimum, until the "safety net" becomes a perfectly comfortable place for perpetual occupation.
Yes, that's the point where I think our current level of technological progress, combined with current social fads - unfettered capitalism and the associated predatory behaviour - really ought to set the minimum bar. Ambition will make sure that people will reach higher, and the social safety net will encourage taking risks by making sure you'll survive.
Unfortunately, the current system benefits robber barons instead.
Another lie -- intended for the already mentioned establishing and maintaining the power to redistribute ever bigger share of the nation's wealth.
Really? Getting 700 billion dollars as a reward for incompetence isn't enough to make someone a robber baron for you? Out of curiosity: just where do you draw the line?
For the record: I'm all for putting the nation's wealth into the hands of all of its citizens, rather than just a tiny elite.
Canada has the same geography -- even better, for they don't have a northern neighbor (hint: the only time, the residence of the US President was captured by an enemy, the enemy was Canadian.)
Canada doesn't have the same geography as the United States. As you yourself said, it's as far North as a nation can get - there's nothing but the polar icecap further north.
Brazil is even more wonderfully endowed -- Amazon alone is a treasure trove. Unfortunately, they've dabbled with Socialism too much -- some say, it is due to their being dominated by Catholicism.
Brazil is a local superpower, and will likely increase its global influence in the future.
Either way, US is not unique in its geography. The GP is right about American exceptionalism.
However, the fallacy in your statement is that, after birth, all humans are interchangeable (actually that's an argument for equivalence, not equality, but that's a lesser standard). There are wide ranges of intelligence, strength, courage, stamina, dexterity...OK I'll quit listing role-playing statistics. I'm sure you get my point.
Try to make up your mind. Either "all people are equal" means that no one has a right to lord it over others, or it means that all people must be made interchangeable. Which one is it?
Or is this another misinformed rant about some kind of socialistic strawman to justify the divine rights of CEOs?
Any system that attempts to enforce the "equality" of people in general, such as socialism, is doomed to failure.
Socialism is about minimum guaranteed quality of life (the point of welfare), rather than forcing everyone to be identical. But I suppose you can't be blamed for falling for right-wing propaganda.
And I take it that you don't believe in equality before law either?
Those who excel, which generally benefits society, should be rewarded. Those who don't, not so much.
Obviously. Unfortunately, the current system benefits robber barons instead.
That simple principle is responsible for the success of the United States, and is ignored at our peril. Yes, I strongly believe in American Exceptionalism, since it's an observed fact.
Vast natural resources, large inhabitable surface area, and protection of two major oceans from other world powers are the major sources of US success. The rest of the world being ravaged by two World Wars helped too.
And I suggest getting over your hubris, otherwise China will overtake and pass you; and despite your flaws, I'd still rather have American than Chinese as overlords.
This is one of the fundamental flaws in the concept of free speech for all; it does not account for relative differences in resources. One wealthy liar can out-campaign ten poor truthful scientists.
On the contrary, that is the benefit of free speech. If speech is limited, the liar with lots of resources is far more likely to be the one to have it than the poor truthful scientist.
That's the very reason why free speech is so essential to a well-working society, and why it was enabled in the first place.
Try pulling yourself away from the screen and figure out how to convince a person in power over you that your point of view is correct.
More cynically: how to convince them that they came up with whatever ideas you like and someone who they really dislike came up with ideas you don't like.
If you convince them that your idea is correct, they might be tempted to reinforce their authority by forcing you to go ahead with what they know you know is the incorrect choice.
2) band together with the other exploited workers to put a stop to oppressive management. Workers of the world, unite! In short, communism.
I just thought of something interesting: would having the state run everything be a net plus or minus to a programmer? It would imply a massive bureuecracy, and a bureuecracy is designed to eliminate human thought and judgement as much as possible; it bureuecrat has a set of rules he's supposed to follow in all circumstances, never mind his own common sense, which is the source of both jokes and inefficiency. In other words, a bureuecracy is a machine; having it run the country is like having a kind of computer (with the rules as a program) in charge. Theoretically, a programmer would be ideally suited to manipulating this machine to get what he wants.
Of course corruption re-introduces a human element, so you'd want to insist on a transparent system with as uncharismatic and weak leaders as possible. I'm not sure if you can get a communistic state without a revolution, and revolutions tend to put charismatic people in charge, so that's a problem to solve first.
It can take a year to bring up a new person to speed. And they can make some horrific errors while coming up to speed.
That affects this particular bosses bonus very little, while having his authority undermined causes a loss of face, at least to the kind of a moron who would care about this in the first place.
2012 to 2027 are going to be awesome for workers.
Why's that? There are plenty of untapped hellholes left in this world even after India and China get too prosperous to be viable offshoring targets.
If you think of the labor market in those terms, it's easy to see.
Yes! First, we'll form an industry group, then we'll lobby the Congress to rise barriers of entry to our market to keep competition out, and finally use our newfound monopoly position to charge our customers through the nose!
Naturally we'd need to demand subsidies to counter the lost profits due to outsourcing, insist on dividing the world into market regions with different pricing and a ban on importing or exporting code from one to another, etc. Oh, and we'd need to get paid for the same code for forever minus a day, but these are details for our lawyers to handle.
If you ignore the possible invasion of privacy which is kind of moot in such a public place, then if the algorithms to match faces work well enough, you could use it to identify criminals.
There's a difference between "someone might see me" and "someone is watching my every move". The latter is stalking, and we have laws against stalkers. And I don't think "officer, I stalked him just in case he happened to be a criminal" would fly in court.
I don't know if sex offenders are limited from being in malls with kid play areas, but if they are, that would be one good application I would stand for.
I don't. I can understand why such people might be banned from working as kindergarden teachers or other positions requiring trust, but banning them from shops because there might be children in the same building is just ridiculous. The whole "sex offender" thing is nowadays simply used as an excuse to bully a socially accepted target; I find the practice every bit as disgusting as rape.
Not that being a "sex offender" has anything to do with rape, or even with sex; you can get on the list for urinating in public.
Also if someone loses a child in a mall, this could make finding said child a lot easier.
Think of the chiiildren!
Ironically enough, without the whole "sex offender" hysteria lost children would probably be escorted to security personnel, who would then find the parents. Instead everyone will steer clear of them for fear of being accused of being a "predator", the accusation being sufficient to get them inserted into the sex offender registry and apparently banned from malls forever, as well as being subjected to any arbitrary punishment someone who "thinks of the children" can come up with.
This is the opposite of a police state, this is a free state that lets the corporations do whatever they want.
As someone once said: one pole isn't really all that different from the other if you're stranded there.
Extreme libertarians and extreme communists have a lot in common: they have ideology, will sacrifice anything for their ideology, consider it the perfect solution to every problem, refuse to listen to any indication that there might be a problem with it, etc etc. The end result of either ideology getting control is an economic and humanitarian disaster. The same is true of every ideology: taking a good idea too far turns it into a parody of itself. That's why people who want economic and personal freedom end up building a private police state. The state with the smallest possible government is known as a jungle, and only the biggest gorillas have freedom there, the rest having only the freedom to obey or die.
I wonder how many "libertarians don't support corporations" replies will I get? They all miss the point, of course: the shield of limited liability is not needed if you're too big for anyone to hold you liable. That's why you can't sue the government: who would enforce the judgement?
Super Mario Bros. 3: 393 KB. An Eminem album compressed with Ogg Vorbis or AAC: 70,000 KB.
And Witcher Enhanced Edition is 9 gigabytes, while the MOD file War in Middle-Earth is less than a megabyte. However, a typical modern game takes a few gigabytes while a typical record album takes a few hundred megabytes.
Second, according to information theory, it is not sufficient to compare just the input; you also have to take into account the complexity of the device decoding it. An SNES is far more complex than a minimal CD player; take that into account, and SMB3 does indeed contain more information than the Eminem album.
It should also be noted that the information in the Eminem album was far easier to come by than the information in SMB3. If the singer mispronounces a word, or a microphone pics up some static, or a mixer doesn't adjust the levels just right, it's no big deal. The listener will fix small errors automatically upon hearing, and the producer can play it by the ear to get it approximately right. On the other hand, if there's a single erroneous bit on a computer program, it will most likely crash.
That, and there is a powerful oligopoly that opposes amateur or semi-professional outfits self-publishing their games because they're amateur or semi-professional. This oligopoly comprises three companies, none of them named EA.
Given that all major gaming consoles have their own Net stores that mostly sell just such games, and PC has Steam and a number of independent publishers, I'd say that EA isn't doing a very good job at it;).
One of those uses is, apparently, an Internet connection to get a break from all that hanging around the streets doing things.
Nope, naturally aggressive, mainly because I'm sick and tired of assholes bossing around the little guy.
Given your threats of "breaking" the parent poster in a show of physical strength just because you disagree with the "unnatural" method he plans to get muscles in, I'd say you sound more like said bullies than anything.
Do you know enough about your body to just start wantonly adjusting your carefully-balanced chemistry?
No, but I'm pretty sure that the researchers do. I'll wait and see if they'll be using their own pills, though.
Are you nuts?
That is difficult for me to say, but I feel no desire to "break" anyone to show them what "REAL power" is, so I guess I'm saner than you.
Re:I don't think anybody should pirate anything
on
Pirates as a Marketplace
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· Score: 2, Informative
Why does it cost more to develop and publish a video game than to develop and publish a couple books or a couple record albums?
A video game has inherently more information than a book or a record. It's closer to a movie, but while a movie lasts two hours and is completely linear, a video game lasts tens of hours and has plenty of interaction with a reactive world, which requires realtime AI of some sort.
Video games can be made very cheaply; 3D action games with photorealistic graphics, voice acting and RPG elements, however, require an enormous amount of work to create, and that translates directly to costs.
Dedicated amateurs seem to have little or no problem doing that.
Amateur games tend to be pretty small, precisely because large games require a lot of work. There are exceptions, but those typically leverage an already-existing game (total conversions).
Slashdot Mirror
How could they possibly avoid it? Most people working there are average, and if average person has trouble setting up his home wireless router, why would that same average person do any better when dressed in uniform?
Joe Grunt is Joe Sixpack.
So, only the "base metal slugs" count? What's wrong with paper money?
I suppose metal is more durable, but then again, at least euro bills can pass through washing machine with no damage.
The grocery store just redeemed some of them for beer and pizza, and earlier today the service station redeemed some for gasoline. Oh, and a repairman redeemed some for services (repairing a broken water pump). And of course I redeem them regularly for work.
What do you use for bartering where you live?
Interesting. When I said "authorized", I of course meant that the guy who's account is being debited must authorize the transfer at his bank, using his passwords to do it if it's done over the Net. I honestly never even dreamed that a bank would let someone debit someone else's account just because that someone claimed to have his permission.
Surreal.
Well, that sentence certainly hexed it ;).
Direct debit needs to be authorized by the account holder, the same as any other money transfer from the account.
In other words, they have cash: physical tokens that can be used as payment.
Why, would it be somehow magically better if the slugs were made of some other material?
I wouldn't accept a cheque for a house, especially not if I was incommunicado and thus unable to verify it immediately.
Please explain why drugs squad would be interested in the method of payment I used to purchase my residence? Money laundering investigators I could understand, but drugs squad?
Nice strawman. As it happens, some chemistry labs do indeed involve dissolving various things in HCl (capitalization matters here, so get it right). Suppose I said I enjoyed them (I do) and were looking forward to the next one (I am); should that get me banned?
You do realize that embalming (or some methods of it, anyway) requires cutting open the corpse, right?
I think you are vastly underestimating the built-in prohibitions against killing people.
So we can't measure the effect of these practices, yet we can say for certain that they at the very least inconvenienced people. The conclusion seems to be that these parctices have a cost, yet it can't be shown that they have a benefit, thus they should be discontinued.
She hasn't made death threats. She has said that she's looking forward to stabbing corpses (you know, already dead people) in the throat as a part of her curriculum. That's not a death threat (or any kind of threat) by any stretch of imagination, except apparently the American one.
America: Land of the paranoid, home of the pussies.
People leave their [dead] bodies to science, not recreational therapy. If she wants to stab something, she should go deer hunting with a Bowie knife. If I were a prof in mortuary science, I'd boot her for expressing pleasure for stabbing a human corpse.
And if I was your dean, I'd reprimand you for abusing your power. After all, all that really matters is if the person in question learns morturaly science, not if she takes a pleasure in doing so. Science doesn't care about your attitude, no matter how unpleasant it might be to other humans, as long as you accept the supremacy of facts over your pet theory.
For the record, I enjoy my (chemics) labs.
Fixed that for you.
Only inhumans with no emotions have a place in Corporate America, as you said. Cogs don't get upset over anything, after all, and no human is anything but one.
Land of the Free(*), home of the Brave(*)
*) Your mileage might vary
So some people can earn the divine right of the kings?
Anyway, people are obviously not equal: some are stronger than others, some are smarter than others. That doesn't mean that the strong have the right to mug the weak, nor the smart to con the stupid. Rather, the strong should protect the weak and the smart should lead for the benefit of all. That allows us all to achieve to the best of our ability and fulfil our potential.
No, that's communism, which is the extreme end of socialism and will very likely be made completely obsolete by personal nanomanufacturing.
Yes, that's the point where I think our current level of technological progress, combined with current social fads - unfettered capitalism and the associated predatory behaviour - really ought to set the minimum bar. Ambition will make sure that people will reach higher, and the social safety net will encourage taking risks by making sure you'll survive.
Really? Getting 700 billion dollars as a reward for incompetence isn't enough to make someone a robber baron for you? Out of curiosity: just where do you draw the line?
For the record: I'm all for putting the nation's wealth into the hands of all of its citizens, rather than just a tiny elite.
Canada doesn't have the same geography as the United States. As you yourself said, it's as far North as a nation can get - there's nothing but the polar icecap further north.
Brazil is a local superpower, and will likely increase its global influence in the future.
Yes, it is, and no, he isn't.
Try to make up your mind. Either "all people are equal" means that no one has a right to lord it over others, or it means that all people must be made interchangeable. Which one is it?
Or is this another misinformed rant about some kind of socialistic strawman to justify the divine rights of CEOs?
Socialism is about minimum guaranteed quality of life (the point of welfare), rather than forcing everyone to be identical. But I suppose you can't be blamed for falling for right-wing propaganda.
And I take it that you don't believe in equality before law either?
Obviously. Unfortunately, the current system benefits robber barons instead.
Vast natural resources, large inhabitable surface area, and protection of two major oceans from other world powers are the major sources of US success. The rest of the world being ravaged by two World Wars helped too.
And I suggest getting over your hubris, otherwise China will overtake and pass you; and despite your flaws, I'd still rather have American than Chinese as overlords.
On the contrary, that is the benefit of free speech. If speech is limited, the liar with lots of resources is far more likely to be the one to have it than the poor truthful scientist.
That's the very reason why free speech is so essential to a well-working society, and why it was enabled in the first place.
More cynically: how to convince them that they came up with whatever ideas you like and someone who they really dislike came up with ideas you don't like.
If you convince them that your idea is correct, they might be tempted to reinforce their authority by forcing you to go ahead with what they know you know is the incorrect choice.
I just thought of something interesting: would having the state run everything be a net plus or minus to a programmer? It would imply a massive bureuecracy, and a bureuecracy is designed to eliminate human thought and judgement as much as possible; it bureuecrat has a set of rules he's supposed to follow in all circumstances, never mind his own common sense, which is the source of both jokes and inefficiency. In other words, a bureuecracy is a machine; having it run the country is like having a kind of computer (with the rules as a program) in charge. Theoretically, a programmer would be ideally suited to manipulating this machine to get what he wants.
Of course corruption re-introduces a human element, so you'd want to insist on a transparent system with as uncharismatic and weak leaders as possible. I'm not sure if you can get a communistic state without a revolution, and revolutions tend to put charismatic people in charge, so that's a problem to solve first.
That affects this particular bosses bonus very little, while having his authority undermined causes a loss of face, at least to the kind of a moron who would care about this in the first place.
Why's that? There are plenty of untapped hellholes left in this world even after India and China get too prosperous to be viable offshoring targets.
Yes! First, we'll form an industry group, then we'll lobby the Congress to rise barriers of entry to our market to keep competition out, and finally use our newfound monopoly position to charge our customers through the nose!
Naturally we'd need to demand subsidies to counter the lost profits due to outsourcing, insist on dividing the world into market regions with different pricing and a ban on importing or exporting code from one to another, etc. Oh, and we'd need to get paid for the same code for forever minus a day, but these are details for our lawyers to handle.
I suggest we call this new association the IIAA.
There's a difference between "someone might see me" and "someone is watching my every move". The latter is stalking, and we have laws against stalkers. And I don't think "officer, I stalked him just in case he happened to be a criminal" would fly in court.
I don't. I can understand why such people might be banned from working as kindergarden teachers or other positions requiring trust, but banning them from shops because there might be children in the same building is just ridiculous. The whole "sex offender" thing is nowadays simply used as an excuse to bully a socially accepted target; I find the practice every bit as disgusting as rape.
Not that being a "sex offender" has anything to do with rape, or even with sex; you can get on the list for urinating in public.
Think of the chiiildren!
Ironically enough, without the whole "sex offender" hysteria lost children would probably be escorted to security personnel, who would then find the parents. Instead everyone will steer clear of them for fear of being accused of being a "predator", the accusation being sufficient to get them inserted into the sex offender registry and apparently banned from malls forever, as well as being subjected to any arbitrary punishment someone who "thinks of the children" can come up with.
As someone once said: one pole isn't really all that different from the other if you're stranded there.
Extreme libertarians and extreme communists have a lot in common: they have ideology, will sacrifice anything for their ideology, consider it the perfect solution to every problem, refuse to listen to any indication that there might be a problem with it, etc etc. The end result of either ideology getting control is an economic and humanitarian disaster. The same is true of every ideology: taking a good idea too far turns it into a parody of itself. That's why people who want economic and personal freedom end up building a private police state. The state with the smallest possible government is known as a jungle, and only the biggest gorillas have freedom there, the rest having only the freedom to obey or die.
I wonder how many "libertarians don't support corporations" replies will I get? They all miss the point, of course: the shield of limited liability is not needed if you're too big for anyone to hold you liable. That's why you can't sue the government: who would enforce the judgement?
And Witcher Enhanced Edition is 9 gigabytes, while the MOD file War in Middle-Earth is less than a megabyte. However, a typical modern game takes a few gigabytes while a typical record album takes a few hundred megabytes.
Second, according to information theory, it is not sufficient to compare just the input; you also have to take into account the complexity of the device decoding it. An SNES is far more complex than a minimal CD player; take that into account, and SMB3 does indeed contain more information than the Eminem album.
It should also be noted that the information in the Eminem album was far easier to come by than the information in SMB3. If the singer mispronounces a word, or a microphone pics up some static, or a mixer doesn't adjust the levels just right, it's no big deal. The listener will fix small errors automatically upon hearing, and the producer can play it by the ear to get it approximately right. On the other hand, if there's a single erroneous bit on a computer program, it will most likely crash.
Given that all major gaming consoles have their own Net stores that mostly sell just such games, and PC has Steam and a number of independent publishers, I'd say that EA isn't doing a very good job at it ;).
One of those uses is, apparently, an Internet connection to get a break from all that hanging around the streets doing things.
Given your threats of "breaking" the parent poster in a show of physical strength just because you disagree with the "unnatural" method he plans to get muscles in, I'd say you sound more like said bullies than anything.
No, but I'm pretty sure that the researchers do. I'll wait and see if they'll be using their own pills, though.
That is difficult for me to say, but I feel no desire to "break" anyone to show them what "REAL power" is, so I guess I'm saner than you.
A video game has inherently more information than a book or a record. It's closer to a movie, but while a movie lasts two hours and is completely linear, a video game lasts tens of hours and has plenty of interaction with a reactive world, which requires realtime AI of some sort.
Video games can be made very cheaply; 3D action games with photorealistic graphics, voice acting and RPG elements, however, require an enormous amount of work to create, and that translates directly to costs.
Amateur games tend to be pretty small, precisely because large games require a lot of work. There are exceptions, but those typically leverage an already-existing game (total conversions).