Ha Ha. I think the funniest part of the NYTimes article, however, is that the author won't dare to utter "fuck" in his column, but instead directs people to view the website at its IP address, 164.109.135.183, which is of course ford.com. Bet THAT clarifies things for the average reader.
I knew someone was going to say this, and be called "insightful" over it. Thing is, there were new developments (I think an article in a major media source, the NYTimes, counts), and so they were keeping track of the story. What a horrible editorial technique it is to be persistent.
Advance warning: there might even be Another story when this goes to trial. Beware.
Do you have a source about the third world countries growing cash crops instead of food?
Well, here's a good start. That's just the GDP breakdown for Kenya for 1997-98. To be fair, I'm only going to discuss what I know, and since your argument was about yams in Africa, this particular example is probably apropos. Notice first that the top GDP producers are agriculture and tourism, and foremost among their exports are tea, coffee, and "horticultural products" (notably carnations). Sisal is also in the top 10.
Just from having spent some time there, I can tell you that there are huge tracts of pinapple, coffee, tea, and sisal, all of which are cash crops. If you look at that page again, you'll also notice that their main sources of imports are the EU, UK, and US, and their main imported products are machinery and refined petroleum. This is the typical 3rd world scenario: export raw materials at fluctuating world market prices, and import processed products at significant markups. This dichotomy demands lots of cash cropping to maintain the supply to the first world countries.
Now, this doesn't mean that subsistence farming is gone, or even necessarily rare. But when I was there, there was a famine in northeast Kenya, and the farmers in the central province couldn't be bothered to stop their cash crop production to help. Ironically enough, there was also a glut of corn on the world market at the time, and so the farmers who DID grow that were going broke at the same time people 200 miles away were starving.
But Joe and Jane Average don't know the details of the GPL or the businesses that make their living off of GPL software, and they're going to look at Craig Mundie's comments and keep their investment dollars away from Linux based companies.
Alright, you know what? I don't have such a problem with this. I've used linux for 6 years, and I love that linux companies are popping up all over the place and great software is coming from it. But those companies are facing quite a challenge in taking Linus's hobby and the GNU's political activism and combining them to make a business. And if Joe and Jane Average don't understand what a risky proposition this is, then they shouldn't be investing their retirement accounts in linux stocks.
I for one am quite skeptical that companies like VA and Redhat should in fact be public at this point. Maybe redhat, since they're much closer to turning an actual profit (or did they last quarter? I don't watch their bottom line much), but in general, Linux companies who went public did so because it was en vogue in the late 90s. Those that make it, good for them, but if they shouldn't have been in that position in the first place, I can't really encourage investment in them by people who aren't familiar with the issues.
Well, okay, just for the record, the reason that there are starving people in the world has nothing to do with a global food shortage. In the world, there exists tons and tons of extra food - much surplus is destroyed every year.
Sure, there are periodic famines when arid areas have droughts. In times like these, the real problem is with food distribution. Particularly, the problem is that they often try to ship (ie) corn meal from the US to east africa, and big surprise, it's rotten when it arrives. It'd be nice if they had a more regional food supply to tap into, wouldn't it? Except eveyone else in east africa is busy growing cash crops so they can "benefit" from participation in the global economy instead of growing adequate food for their region.
So the starvation excuse for GM is just that: an excuse. There are many less threatening ways to feed the world's population. Furthermore, regarding your "fat" comment: in fact, the most overweight people in western nations are the lower classes, and they suffer disproportionately many health problems on account of this. The "big corporate fatcat" metaphor is tired and outdated.
but anyone want to start the Free Food Foundation?
Well, it's not exactly that, but Native Seeds/SEARCH is an important step. Their goal is to "conserve, distribute and document the adapted and diverse varieties of agricultural seed and their wild relatives" in the Southwest US.
These hearty species have adapted to life here over thousands of years (well, as far back as you want to go, actually, but the climate has changed radically in that period), and are already resistent to the blights found here. Plus biodiversity is maintained, so no particular scourge should wipe out an entire species.
Oh yeah, and you're free to plant as many times as you want after buying the seeds. In fact, you're encouraged to cultivate your own line.
Given that Radiation stays in one place, more or less,
What?! Seasonal winds and jetstreams have a HUGE impact on the spread of nuclear fallout. Did you know that people in Sweden were affected by the fallout from Chernobyl? So, yes, if "every nation within several hundred miles" is acceptable collateral damage, then we can heave megaton nukes around without issue.
I don't know why it just occurred to me with this article, but has anyone else noticed that the editors described damn near everything as "interesting?" A quick search reveals 32 occurrences in May so far. If you include April, the number rises to 101. That comes to a little over 2 uses per day, and considering there are only several 2-3 sentence articles posted daily, that's a pretty high "interesting" density.
I'm glad the editors are posting stuff that piques their interest, but maybe it's time for a bit more editorial creativity? A vocab building class perhaps? Or maybe they should change the site name to "Slashdot: An interesting idea."
[ yes, this is offtopic. It's probably also flaimbait. But I, for one, think it's funny. Or at least intersting. hehehe ]
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Re:Please lose the icon before you get in trouble
on
RFC for Spammers
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· Score: 3
OMFG... A company with a reasonable trademark policy! I'm eating nothing but Hormel from now on in order to display my gratitude.
In related news, can anyone give me a ride to the hospital when I get scurvy?
Lycos, I think, via Wired. What's your point? They were acquired before it was cool to be acquired - and have long predicted the same outcome for other new media firms. They've had a lot of really prescient commentary over the years. Pretty much every other media source is corporate owned, or is even a corporation in itself (NYTimes, anyone?). In fact, why are you posting to slashdot? We know it's just a corporate mouthpiece now, too, right?
Suck readers got over the acquisition years ago. You can too.
If you have already lost these people as a client, let them go.
That's true. But on the flip side, why let it get to that point in the first place? You say these people choose companies who are using ASP/NT servers, which leads me to believe you're using something different (probably unix/php, eh? this is/. afterall:).
So, why don't you tell them why your solution is better?! There should *definitely* be a section in your bid that describes the technology you use and why it's better than ASP on NT. Maybe you can even include a section about how "other firms using ASP solutions will tell you how easy they are to use, but in fact these solutions are highly insecure and risky to your business, which is why WE use..." and then go into your spiel.
It's called "vaccinating" your potential client against the competitors' reasoning. Politicians use this technique all the time, when they say stuff like "my opponent is going to tell you..." Except they lie, and you'll be telling the truth:).
What he's looking for is massive word for word copies, and thats what he's found.
No, what he looked for were matches of 6 continuous words or more. It just so happened that when he found them, he also frequently found whole sentences (or more) that were identical. Again, in this case, he probably found a bunch of real cheating. BUT, sequences like that might be more common in a more text-based course. Which isn't to say that cheating doesn't occur there, but you might need a different standard to look for it, is all I'm saying.
Mark down, sure. And hopefully require some sort of basic paper-writing instruction. But expulsion? Too harsh. Better to just kick the student's ass a bit (metaphorically of course:) and make them try harder next time.
Holy vehement slashdot! I didn't know everyone here was so spittin' mad about cheating.
I'm certainly not in favor of it, but I doubt this approach would routinely work, and here's why.
This particular prof was acting on a report that there was rampant cheating, and he was more or less looking to confirm. That makes sense.
However, in other fields where it's more text based (like "read these 4 books" instead of "study chapter 3 on partial differentials"), the papers could be excessively similar because they all draw phrases from the same sources.
Of course, you could argue plagiarism if students are pulling quotes and not citing, but a realistic instructor would realize that the students obviously draw from the assigned texts, and kind of take them as an "implied bibliography."
Which doesn't make it right to take other people's words and pass them off as your own. But it's so damn common that it passes for decent paper writing at 5/6 of the institutions in this country. While that's depressing, I don't think the kids need to be busted for cheating as much as get some remedial paper writing classes.
Again, these arugments may not apply to this particular case; these students might indeed deserve expulsion. However, I don't know that the approach is widely applicable.
Hey, I thought I was trolled by the genuine signal 11... faker.
Anyway, I know how CDs are generally constructed, but I'm tellin' ya, the silver stuff is falling off. I'll send you one if you give me your address. They're seriously crappy media.
Good point. Which made me wonder about this part of the article:
"A strong tendency for the number of new bands to decrease with elapsed time between exposure and offspring conception was established for the Ukrainian families.
Which means, children conceived long AFTER the blast had FEWER mutations, right? But how can this be? If the parents' germline cells were damanged, "never again [to] figure out what the correct base was," why did the effect fade with time?
Okay, sure, you can get a 100-disc spindle for $15 bucks at pricewatch, but those are pretty weak discs. I'll never buy generic media again after a fiasco last summer where my reflective surfaces actually started PEELING...
This isn't the kind of thing you want to archive to. So you gotta buy brand name media, which are ALREADY like $0.40 per disc in bulk. So, my question is, what happens to those? It's not gonna be $1 for a decent CDR again is it?
I think that the public is starting to lose its compunctions about infringing on copyrights. What goes around comes around I guess.
So when some company comes along and grabs linux, makes a bunch of proprietary extensions, and sells it for a bunch of money without releasing the source, what then? That's "just" copyright infringement. What goes around comes around, and most linux-users have been stealing software (eg NT) for a long time, right?
Remember, the copyright laws allow the GPL to exist just as much as they allow proprietary software to exist.
Of course some of this selling could be attributed to pressures from other losses to raise capital...
And some of it could be attributed to investors diversifying their portfolios as they haven't been allowed to do for 6 months. It is a good investment idea.
One idea: serve up a geek-friendly service. The Internet has been dumbed down so much that those who would like things like a full NNTP feed or shell access have trouble finding it with the right combination of reliability and price.
Ahh! Yes, exactly! I've been wishing for so long that I could find a place like this in the desert of Qwest and AT&T. Of course it won't be the most profitable ISP ever. On the off chance that this is your primary reason for setting up an ISP (ie, you and your friends want "real" connectivity instead of going with a big dumb name), see about setting it up as some kind of cooperative. Hell, you could probably even get nonprofit status if you did it right.
The Zarathustra reference is very deliberate. In fact, the opening theme by Richard Strauss is called "Also Sprach Zarathustra," after the book by Nietzsche.
Napster started blocking and she stopped using it, and now it's basically dead.
You know, it's really unfortunate that people keep saying this in the past few weeks. Napster is not "dead." All the reports I read said that usage was down something like 20-25% from the pre-filter average.
If you're counting, that means upwards of 70% of napster users are still there. What on earth could they be trading?! Probably a bunch of name-mangled stuff, but I doubt that's all. RIAA gave Napster a list of songs/artists that had to be blocked. And insisted that the Billboard top 100 be blocked each week. Which really screws over people trying to get the latest "Destiny's Child" remix, but not, by and large, people trading electronic, punk, classical, or folk music. Or anything legally traded.
So, let's not start with Napster doomsday scenarios. They might start doing some crappy things like restricting the copying of mp3s you download, but so far, it's not at all dead.
Slashdot Mirror
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Advance warning: there might even be Another story when this goes to trial. Beware.
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Well, here's a good start. That's just the GDP breakdown for Kenya for 1997-98. To be fair, I'm only going to discuss what I know, and since your argument was about yams in Africa, this particular example is probably apropos. Notice first that the top GDP producers are agriculture and tourism, and foremost among their exports are tea, coffee, and "horticultural products" (notably carnations). Sisal is also in the top 10.
Just from having spent some time there, I can tell you that there are huge tracts of pinapple, coffee, tea, and sisal, all of which are cash crops. If you look at that page again, you'll also notice that their main sources of imports are the EU, UK, and US, and their main imported products are machinery and refined petroleum. This is the typical 3rd world scenario: export raw materials at fluctuating world market prices, and import processed products at significant markups. This dichotomy demands lots of cash cropping to maintain the supply to the first world countries.
Now, this doesn't mean that subsistence farming is gone, or even necessarily rare. But when I was there, there was a famine in northeast Kenya, and the farmers in the central province couldn't be bothered to stop their cash crop production to help. Ironically enough, there was also a glut of corn on the world market at the time, and so the farmers who DID grow that were going broke at the same time people 200 miles away were starving.
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Alright, you know what? I don't have such a problem with this. I've used linux for 6 years, and I love that linux companies are popping up all over the place and great software is coming from it. But those companies are facing quite a challenge in taking Linus's hobby and the GNU's political activism and combining them to make a business. And if Joe and Jane Average don't understand what a risky proposition this is, then they shouldn't be investing their retirement accounts in linux stocks.
I for one am quite skeptical that companies like VA and Redhat should in fact be public at this point. Maybe redhat, since they're much closer to turning an actual profit (or did they last quarter? I don't watch their bottom line much), but in general, Linux companies who went public did so because it was en vogue in the late 90s. Those that make it, good for them, but if they shouldn't have been in that position in the first place, I can't really encourage investment in them by people who aren't familiar with the issues.
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Sure, there are periodic famines when arid areas have droughts. In times like these, the real problem is with food distribution. Particularly, the problem is that they often try to ship (ie) corn meal from the US to east africa, and big surprise, it's rotten when it arrives. It'd be nice if they had a more regional food supply to tap into, wouldn't it? Except eveyone else in east africa is busy growing cash crops so they can "benefit" from participation in the global economy instead of growing adequate food for their region.
So the starvation excuse for GM is just that: an excuse. There are many less threatening ways to feed the world's population. Furthermore, regarding your "fat" comment: in fact, the most overweight people in western nations are the lower classes, and they suffer disproportionately many health problems on account of this. The "big corporate fatcat" metaphor is tired and outdated.
---
Well, it's not exactly that, but Native Seeds/SEARCH is an important step. Their goal is to "conserve, distribute and document the adapted and diverse varieties of agricultural seed and their wild relatives" in the Southwest US.
These hearty species have adapted to life here over thousands of years (well, as far back as you want to go, actually, but the climate has changed radically in that period), and are already resistent to the blights found here. Plus biodiversity is maintained, so no particular scourge should wipe out an entire species.
Oh yeah, and you're free to plant as many times as you want after buying the seeds. In fact, you're encouraged to cultivate your own line.
---
What?! Seasonal winds and jetstreams have a HUGE impact on the spread of nuclear fallout. Did you know that people in Sweden were affected by the fallout from Chernobyl? So, yes, if "every nation within several hundred miles" is acceptable collateral damage, then we can heave megaton nukes around without issue.
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I'm glad the editors are posting stuff that piques their interest, but maybe it's time for a bit more editorial creativity? A vocab building class perhaps? Or maybe they should change the site name to "Slashdot: An interesting idea."
[ yes, this is offtopic. It's probably also flaimbait. But I, for one, think it's funny. Or at least intersting. hehehe ]
---
In related news, can anyone give me a ride to the hospital when I get scurvy?
---
Lycos, I think, via Wired. What's your point? They were acquired before it was cool to be acquired - and have long predicted the same outcome for other new media firms. They've had a lot of really prescient commentary over the years. Pretty much every other media source is corporate owned, or is even a corporation in itself (NYTimes, anyone?). In fact, why are you posting to slashdot? We know it's just a corporate mouthpiece now, too, right?
Suck readers got over the acquisition years ago. You can too.
---
That's true. But on the flip side, why let it get to that point in the first place? You say these people choose companies who are using ASP/NT servers, which leads me to believe you're using something different (probably unix/php, eh? this is /. afterall:).
So, why don't you tell them why your solution is better?! There should *definitely* be a section in your bid that describes the technology you use and why it's better than ASP on NT. Maybe you can even include a section about how "other firms using ASP solutions will tell you how easy they are to use, but in fact these solutions are highly insecure and risky to your business, which is why WE use..." and then go into your spiel.
It's called "vaccinating" your potential client against the competitors' reasoning. Politicians use this technique all the time, when they say stuff like "my opponent is going to tell you..." Except they lie, and you'll be telling the truth :).
---
It may be, and I'm not defending it.
What he's looking for is massive word for word copies, and thats what he's found.
No, what he looked for were matches of 6 continuous words or more. It just so happened that when he found them, he also frequently found whole sentences (or more) that were identical. Again, in this case, he probably found a bunch of real cheating. BUT, sequences like that might be more common in a more text-based course. Which isn't to say that cheating doesn't occur there, but you might need a different standard to look for it, is all I'm saying.
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Mark down, sure. And hopefully require some sort of basic paper-writing instruction. But expulsion? Too harsh. Better to just kick the student's ass a bit (metaphorically of course:) and make them try harder next time.
---
This particular prof was acting on a report that there was rampant cheating, and he was more or less looking to confirm. That makes sense.
However, in other fields where it's more text based (like "read these 4 books" instead of "study chapter 3 on partial differentials"), the papers could be excessively similar because they all draw phrases from the same sources.
Of course, you could argue plagiarism if students are pulling quotes and not citing, but a realistic instructor would realize that the students obviously draw from the assigned texts, and kind of take them as an "implied bibliography."
Which doesn't make it right to take other people's words and pass them off as your own. But it's so damn common that it passes for decent paper writing at 5/6 of the institutions in this country. While that's depressing, I don't think the kids need to be busted for cheating as much as get some remedial paper writing classes.
Again, these arugments may not apply to this particular case; these students might indeed deserve expulsion. However, I don't know that the approach is widely applicable.
---
Anyway, I know how CDs are generally constructed, but I'm tellin' ya, the silver stuff is falling off. I'll send you one if you give me your address. They're seriously crappy media.
---
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This isn't the kind of thing you want to archive to. So you gotta buy brand name media, which are ALREADY like $0.40 per disc in bulk. So, my question is, what happens to those? It's not gonna be $1 for a decent CDR again is it?
---
So when some company comes along and grabs linux, makes a bunch of proprietary extensions, and sells it for a bunch of money without releasing the source, what then? That's "just" copyright infringement. What goes around comes around, and most linux-users have been stealing software (eg NT) for a long time, right?
Remember, the copyright laws allow the GPL to exist just as much as they allow proprietary software to exist.
---
And some of it could be attributed to investors diversifying their portfolios as they haven't been allowed to do for 6 months. It is a good investment idea.
---
Ahh! Yes, exactly! I've been wishing for so long that I could find a place like this in the desert of Qwest and AT&T. Of course it won't be the most profitable ISP ever. On the off chance that this is your primary reason for setting up an ISP (ie, you and your friends want "real" connectivity instead of going with a big dumb name), see about setting it up as some kind of cooperative. Hell, you could probably even get nonprofit status if you did it right.
But a mass-market, for-profit ISP? Good luck.
---
The Zarathustra reference is very deliberate. In fact, the opening theme by Richard Strauss is called "Also Sprach Zarathustra," after the book by Nietzsche.
---
Yeah, tell people Windows has bugs. That's always stopped them from buying it in the past.
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You know, it's really unfortunate that people keep saying this in the past few weeks. Napster is not "dead." All the reports I read said that usage was down something like 20-25% from the pre-filter average.
If you're counting, that means upwards of 70% of napster users are still there. What on earth could they be trading?! Probably a bunch of name-mangled stuff, but I doubt that's all. RIAA gave Napster a list of songs/artists that had to be blocked. And insisted that the Billboard top 100 be blocked each week. Which really screws over people trying to get the latest "Destiny's Child" remix, but not, by and large, people trading electronic, punk, classical, or folk music. Or anything legally traded.
So, let's not start with Napster doomsday scenarios. They might start doing some crappy things like restricting the copying of mp3s you download, but so far, it's not at all dead.
---