It could be... but in practice, we'd give up a huge swath of the gaming market if those were the only options. Including (historically speaking) damn near every game I've ever liked.
Finally some honest truth. We can and will adapt. Anyone who can't deserves to lose and have their civilization replaced by a more technologically advanced and fit one. It's harsh, but necessary.
Your position isn't harsh; it's stupid.
I can adapt if my house burns down, but that doesn't mean I should set it on fire or watch it burn without trying to stop it. Being able to adapt is good; choosing a difficult adaptation for no reason other than laziness or unwillingness to face reality is stupid.
Telling a family in Africa that they have to watch their children die of malnourishment, exposure to the elements and disease because we're going to make it too expensive for them to afford energy is pretty drastic.
Unless the alternative is telling all families everywhere that they have to watch each other die. I'm just saying.
At some point, warm is too warm and Waterworld isn't just a shitty movie.
First, the post you're responding to is obviously a joke. (And, for the record, it's a funny joke.)
Second, without saying that criminals deserve to be raped or murdered -- you know, it's not like these risks as part of being in prison are a surprise to any adult. These are risks you choose to take when you choose to commit crimes like this. I don't want to get speared through the heart by a stingray, and as a result I choose to not try to wrestle dangerous wildlife like the Crocodile Hunter. Along similar lines, I don't want to get stabbed repeatedly with a makeshift knife and raped by a gang of large men, so I don't commit felonies.
Either of these things could happen to you even if you weren't engaging in risky behavior, and that's a tragedy when it does, but that also doesn't absolve people of some responsibility when they knowingly do something that drastically increases their chances of these events befalling them.
Hey, don't take me as slighting Slovenia -- people are extradited in international crimes all the time.
Obviously Slovenia has jurisdiction and did the arresting, but if Slovenian authorities feel like the bulk of the crime was committed in Spain, for example, it's possible they might choose to give him to Spain. It's their choice but it's still a choice.
We don't know the specifics of his case -- in his case, it could be an imminent death sentence. Just like some people survive cancer and some people die of it in short order. Usually an appropriate doctor can take a pretty good guess on these things even if it's not flawless.
It's our odd modern sense of justice. We don't consider incarceration to be an effective deterrent or just punishment, but throw in a little jailhouse rape and suddenly everyone's appropriately scared or satisfied.
It took two years and a task force of how many, costing how much, to bring down three people?
You're probably right, but it's not totally beyond the pale that they pretty much have known who the guy was for a while, but wanted extra time to either build a stronger case or to watch him and see what information they could gather on his associates. After all, these things do happen for non-technology crimes.
The article doesn't make it clear where (given that a multinational team worked together on the arrest), for what charges exactly he'll be tried, and what the likely sentences are.
1) While the sticker price for the Volt is over $40k, a $7.5k tax incentive brings that down a fair bit for practical purposes.
2) Yes, right now "greener" cars are expensive and probably for richer people. However, it's not unlike the early adopters for any newer technology. People who buy cars like the Volt now aren't any different from the people who bought the first run of iPhones, the earliest VCRs, etc. -- they're helping the companies who developed those products recoup some of their initial investment and acting as unpaid beta testers to boot.
Eventually, "green" cars will be cheaper, greener, and more reliable. Early adopters paying a premium are a part of the path to get there. I don't know that it's necessary to offer additional incentives at this point to get enough people to take on that role, but if it is, then offering those incentives isn't elitist -- in the not-os-long run, it's good for everybody.
I think copying Apple is a good idea up to a point, and I'll qualify that: the thing that was most revolutionary about the iPhone (and something that I think is often missed) is its inversion of how phones were created.
Old model: the wireless carriers essentially go to phone manufacturers and say what they want. The problem with this model is that while the wireless carriers have an excellent sense of what is selling currently at that moment, they don't have a lot of vision or expertise in the realm of the innovative or possible in their market.
Apple's model: We're going to make this cool phone. We've already decided it's going to have these new features seen before, and we think we know best about what it should or shouldn't provide. We don't care what you think about it, wireless providers. We're just making this phone we like. Who wants to make a deal to sell it?
I think if Microsoft is to have any prayer in the phone market (and it is a slim prayer at its best), they need to take the same mindset of figuring out a bunch of cool/useful things and making a phone that does it. I can't see them having a lot of success with the Android model of "we built this platform, now anyone go and make a cool phone out of it."
Frankly, after some of the boggling omissions in the Kin's feature set, I have my doubts that Microsoft's phone people have the vision to even know what the killer features would be -- but as dubious as that is, I can't see any other way in which they can make a serious dent.
Yup. Don't many sizeable cities have a city dump? Not just for the city government's trash, you understand, but owned/maintained by the city for its own and its residents use.
It's possible, although more than for just about any private business, paperwork/information/emails of city governments are usually considered to be public information subject to disclosure on demand -- even including a lot of things I wouldn't have expected before working a contract for one.
Not that there isn't some information that isn't in some cases, but your odds of randomly hitting confidential information are much lower than with most corporations.
I assume you guys also do your own payroll, manage your own 401a/pension plans, store your own paper archives, repair your own photocopy machines, do your own warranty work on failed hard drives, maintain your own waste disposal landfill, do your own shredded paper disposal, and grow your own fruits and vegetables on premises as well.
Other than the fruits and vegetables, which I assume you threw in just to be ridiculous, the last government entity I worked for in fact did do all of those things internally.
Yes, but... if we're playing the "what could Oracle do by throwing ridiculous amounts of money around" game, there are probably ways around that.
For example, Oracle buys up most of the top contributors to PostgreSQL by offering them much better salaries/benefits to work on OraclePostgre than they could get in any other way, and additionally offers them $X giant bonus or stock options or what have you if OraclePostgre has Y% market share by some metric in two years -- such that they legally could choose to compete with themselves in an open source fork, but would be throwing away big piles of money to do it.
You can't buy everyone, but probably it's not even very expensive in the grand scheme of things to buy enough of the people that matter.
Oracle can invest all the capital they want, all I want is a decent install package for the Oracle Instant Client.
I've long been convinced that Oracle's developer/administrator tools are written by self-loathing developers who want to vent their hatred by tormenting other developers. There's just no other logical explanation for how infuriating they can be.
Mainly, what they can accomplish is to all-but-kill further open source development on a given project. It's very possible to fork, but that doesn't help much to move forward if they buy most of the people making useful improvements/additions to it.
In most cases, I don't think this is smart business -- if you kill a MySQL (and I don't mean to get into the various politics or advantages of these different databases, they're just an easy example that most people will recognize) you probably don't drive enough business to Oracle to make it worth it. As likely you drive as much or more business to other competitors in the same space.
If there's a situation in which killing an open source project nets Oracle an effective monopoly in some space, then maybe it makes business sense. Of course, I've long privately thought that Oracle plans its acquisitions more to take things that are in some way beautiful and ruin them than for any comprehensible business purpose. If corporations are people, they come across as Edward Norton looking to beat the shit out of Jared Leto because they can.
Slashdot Mirror
Mostly, they live in apartments you wouldn't want to live in in neighborhoods you'd probably get shot in.
I spent a week in a hotel in Harlem for business about ten years ago. I'm not in a rush to go back.
It could be... but in practice, we'd give up a huge swath of the gaming market if those were the only options. Including (historically speaking) damn near every game I've ever liked.
Finally some honest truth. We can and will adapt. Anyone who can't deserves to lose and have their civilization replaced by a more technologically advanced and fit one. It's harsh, but necessary.
Your position isn't harsh; it's stupid.
I can adapt if my house burns down, but that doesn't mean I should set it on fire or watch it burn without trying to stop it. Being able to adapt is good; choosing a difficult adaptation for no reason other than laziness or unwillingness to face reality is stupid.
Telling a family in Africa that they have to watch their children die of malnourishment, exposure to the elements and disease because we're going to make it too expensive for them to afford energy is pretty drastic.
Unless the alternative is telling all families everywhere that they have to watch each other die. I'm just saying.
At some point, warm is too warm and Waterworld isn't just a shitty movie.
First, the post you're responding to is obviously a joke. (And, for the record, it's a funny joke.)
Second, without saying that criminals deserve to be raped or murdered -- you know, it's not like these risks as part of being in prison are a surprise to any adult. These are risks you choose to take when you choose to commit crimes like this. I don't want to get speared through the heart by a stingray, and as a result I choose to not try to wrestle dangerous wildlife like the Crocodile Hunter. Along similar lines, I don't want to get stabbed repeatedly with a makeshift knife and raped by a gang of large men, so I don't commit felonies.
Either of these things could happen to you even if you weren't engaging in risky behavior, and that's a tragedy when it does, but that also doesn't absolve people of some responsibility when they knowingly do something that drastically increases their chances of these events befalling them.
Hey, don't take me as slighting Slovenia -- people are extradited in international crimes all the time.
Obviously Slovenia has jurisdiction and did the arresting, but if Slovenian authorities feel like the bulk of the crime was committed in Spain, for example, it's possible they might choose to give him to Spain. It's their choice but it's still a choice.
We don't know the specifics of his case -- in his case, it could be an imminent death sentence. Just like some people survive cancer and some people die of it in short order. Usually an appropriate doctor can take a pretty good guess on these things even if it's not flawless.
Sell your organs to who? Highest bidder?
Well, sure. How else could the free market sort this problem out? :)
Well, not exactly -- that's where he was arrested, but will he be tried in Slovenia? Or will he be extradited to Spain or the U.S.?
Given just the information in the articles, any of those seems possible to me.
It's our odd modern sense of justice. We don't consider incarceration to be an effective deterrent or just punishment, but throw in a little jailhouse rape and suddenly everyone's appropriately scared or satisfied.
People are strange.
It took two years and a task force of how many, costing how much, to bring down three people?
You're probably right, but it's not totally beyond the pale that they pretty much have known who the guy was for a while, but wanted extra time to either build a stronger case or to watch him and see what information they could gather on his associates. After all, these things do happen for non-technology crimes.
The article doesn't make it clear where (given that a multinational team worked together on the arrest), for what charges exactly he'll be tried, and what the likely sentences are.
This:
at least with current technology
is the catch. The way to better consumer technology tomorrow is through trying to do our best to make a cost-effective-ish green-ish car today.
You can figure a lot out in the lab or factory, but there equally are things you only learn by trying them in the field and market.
1) While the sticker price for the Volt is over $40k, a $7.5k tax incentive brings that down a fair bit for practical purposes.
2) Yes, right now "greener" cars are expensive and probably for richer people. However, it's not unlike the early adopters for any newer technology. People who buy cars like the Volt now aren't any different from the people who bought the first run of iPhones, the earliest VCRs, etc. -- they're helping the companies who developed those products recoup some of their initial investment and acting as unpaid beta testers to boot.
Eventually, "green" cars will be cheaper, greener, and more reliable. Early adopters paying a premium are a part of the path to get there. I don't know that it's necessary to offer additional incentives at this point to get enough people to take on that role, but if it is, then offering those incentives isn't elitist -- in the not-os-long run, it's good for everybody.
I think copying Apple is a good idea up to a point, and I'll qualify that: the thing that was most revolutionary about the iPhone (and something that I think is often missed) is its inversion of how phones were created.
Old model: the wireless carriers essentially go to phone manufacturers and say what they want. The problem with this model is that while the wireless carriers have an excellent sense of what is selling currently at that moment, they don't have a lot of vision or expertise in the realm of the innovative or possible in their market.
Apple's model: We're going to make this cool phone. We've already decided it's going to have these new features seen before, and we think we know best about what it should or shouldn't provide. We don't care what you think about it, wireless providers. We're just making this phone we like. Who wants to make a deal to sell it?
I think if Microsoft is to have any prayer in the phone market (and it is a slim prayer at its best), they need to take the same mindset of figuring out a bunch of cool/useful things and making a phone that does it. I can't see them having a lot of success with the Android model of "we built this platform, now anyone go and make a cool phone out of it."
Frankly, after some of the boggling omissions in the Kin's feature set, I have my doubts that Microsoft's phone people have the vision to even know what the killer features would be -- but as dubious as that is, I can't see any other way in which they can make a serious dent.
They had their own landfill site?
Yup. Don't many sizeable cities have a city dump? Not just for the city government's trash, you understand, but owned/maintained by the city for its own and its residents use.
Even the much smaller suburb I live in does this.
But then where would they, uh, borrow ideas from? :)
(Yes, a lot of 'borrowing' goes both ways, and probably makes both better than they would be in a vacuum.)
It's possible, although more than for just about any private business, paperwork/information/emails of city governments are usually considered to be public information subject to disclosure on demand -- even including a lot of things I wouldn't have expected before working a contract for one.
Not that there isn't some information that isn't in some cases, but your odds of randomly hitting confidential information are much lower than with most corporations.
I assume you guys also do your own payroll, manage your own 401a/pension plans, store your own paper archives, repair your own photocopy machines, do your own warranty work on failed hard drives, maintain your own waste disposal landfill, do your own shredded paper disposal, and grow your own fruits and vegetables on premises as well.
Other than the fruits and vegetables, which I assume you threw in just to be ridiculous, the last government entity I worked for in fact did do all of those things internally.
Pretty spot on. I only disagree with you inasmuch as you make using Notes on purpose seem like a reasonable idea. :)
Yes, but... if we're playing the "what could Oracle do by throwing ridiculous amounts of money around" game, there are probably ways around that.
For example, Oracle buys up most of the top contributors to PostgreSQL by offering them much better salaries/benefits to work on OraclePostgre than they could get in any other way, and additionally offers them $X giant bonus or stock options or what have you if OraclePostgre has Y% market share by some metric in two years -- such that they legally could choose to compete with themselves in an open source fork, but would be throwing away big piles of money to do it.
You can't buy everyone, but probably it's not even very expensive in the grand scheme of things to buy enough of the people that matter.
Oracle can invest all the capital they want, all I want is a decent install package for the Oracle Instant Client.
I've long been convinced that Oracle's developer/administrator tools are written by self-loathing developers who want to vent their hatred by tormenting other developers. There's just no other logical explanation for how infuriating they can be.
Mainly, what they can accomplish is to all-but-kill further open source development on a given project. It's very possible to fork, but that doesn't help much to move forward if they buy most of the people making useful improvements/additions to it.
In most cases, I don't think this is smart business -- if you kill a MySQL (and I don't mean to get into the various politics or advantages of these different databases, they're just an easy example that most people will recognize) you probably don't drive enough business to Oracle to make it worth it. As likely you drive as much or more business to other competitors in the same space.
If there's a situation in which killing an open source project nets Oracle an effective monopoly in some space, then maybe it makes business sense. Of course, I've long privately thought that Oracle plans its acquisitions more to take things that are in some way beautiful and ruin them than for any comprehensible business purpose. If corporations are people, they come across as Edward Norton looking to beat the shit out of Jared Leto because they can.
Thanks!
At least I didn't say it'd be the first killer app for the platform. Man, these jokes write themselves!
Blue Screen of Death, now with real death?