How exactly does one become a grand master in chess? Do you have to win a certain # of matches against highly ranked opponents? Is there a chess board somewhere that deems one a 'grand master'?
This seems like a fairly appropriate place to ask..
Why are the phone and cable companies taking so long to deliver high speed access to consumers? For example, my friend, who is 7 blocks from me, will have to wait at least 1 month longer than I before cable modems are available to him. People are not only willing, but are eager to hand over money to the companies to get faster internet access.
Is the process of setting up the line more difficult than I realize? Or are the companies just being lazy slobs?
Not in any significant amount. Sure, maybe 1,000 copies of NT weren't sold in the past year. Why should Microsoft care?
And even if linux should become the holy grail of the server operating system, Microsoft will not die that easily. They're into far more things than simply NT. Linux users serverly underestimate Microsoft. Just because you drop NT sales by 2% does not mean MS will shut down it's entire OS devision to commit itself to working on linux. Microsoft didn't become this big by sitting on their asses while competitors waltz in and steal their markets.
"Making babies" sexually, not sex in general. Humans will never stop having sex, no matter how many reasons are given to stop. Disease, heartache, unplanned pregnancy, and a myriad of other things still haven't put a damper on the desire for sex.
Woo woo. Look at me! I can fight a meaningless little battle so mommy doesn't dare call anyone less elite than me a "hacker." After all, who would want to be deprived of their deity-given right to have a REALLY ph3ersome moniker with which to label themselves?
Those with real knowledge don't concern themselves with labels. They know they're good, so they go and do what they need to do, media be damned.
With all the spec monkeys screaming about how their favorite console system can pump out 3 billion shaded, textured, bump mapped, anti-aliased triangles per second at a 48bpp color depth, I have a question.. isn't all of this going to be put out to a television that is made for general tv show and movie viewing? Without the brightness or color saturation or sharpness of a monitor, what good is all that horsepower going to do?
(note: rich kids with hdtv's can disregard this post)
They'll say that redhat's stock price shot up because of hype about them and the stock then settled down to a reasonable price. I have my doubts that everyone at microsoft will suddenly quit their jobs because another company's stock price closed higher 1 day.
Human workers on demand. Combined with some fancy genetics, human workers that won't mind being abused as slaves.
You're assuming that there is some kind of "Clone-O-Matic 4000: Ready to Use Clones in 10 Minutes (r)." Clones would take time to develop, just like any other human. Labor laws still apply to "dumbed down" clones, just like they apply to mentally retarded people. It would be much easier just to build a machine to do repetative tasks, as people seem to want to use mindless clones for. No labor laws, no food (except for electricity, and that's not too expensive), no wages to pay, no vacation or holiday time, and no complaints. Clones would be better used for spare organs and such. As far as I can see, you can't have human-level intelligence without human-level emotion and reasoning.
And Sodom and Gamora, infidels, anyone not around to here the 'wonderful word of god', and even men who have had their penises crushed by a rock. No lie. Look around in Deuteronomy, I think it's in verse 26 somewhere. Bastards can't 'enter the house of the lord' for 5 generations, even though the great great great grandchildren had nothing to do with the fact that a man left his wife so many years ago. Christianity is a tyrant religion. Millions of people have been killed because they had different ideas. I simply can't bring myself to believe that a loving god would let this happen.
On a lighter note, did god send down a Holy Pooper-Scooper to help clean up all the feces that surely built up on that ark?
Since bringing a cloned child into the world would, quite obviously, cause a damn lot of controversy and harassment for the cloned child, is it ethical for someone to do this to a child? Clone or not, it is still a child, just like everyone else, excepting the method of conception. If I know that if I bring a black man to a kkk meeting that the chances are pretty slim that he'll get out unscathed from the ensuing barrage of 'good ol boys', then I would be partially ethically responsible for his misfortune. The same goes that if I choose to bring a clone into the world, knowing fully that the clone will be singled out by an even larger group of 'good ol boys', would I be wrong for doing so?
There's no point in harassing a child because it is a clone. Just like I had no say in the way I was born, neither does the child. No one has a perfectly easy life, but a clone would have an even harder life if the news got out that the person was a clone.
Some of the ethical questions aren't merely about the cloned person. It's how to react to the clone. For instance, if a mother loses a baby when it's 3 months old and they have tissue from the now deceased baby, they could make a clone of the baby and it would be the absolute genetic match of the original. But, how would the mother react to it? It is, afterall, an exact replica of the original child. But, something is just different. If the child grows into adulthood, at what point do you tell him/her that he/she is a clone? How would the clone take it?
Then you get into the religious issue. Whether you agree with the religionists or not, they are a powerful force in the world today. I doubt many christians would buy into the idea that a clone is a human, simply because it "wasn't made by god." Although, I find it hard to fathom that "kind-hearted christian folk" could look into the pale blue eyes of a 7 year old girl and tell her she has no soul and that she's a monster. I also fear what would be done to the parents of a clone. They would be repeatedly harassed by closed-minded fools who think that just because something didn't follow the status quo of arrival into the world that they have fewer rights.
Some people would even think that the clone is an alien. And you know well what would happen to an alien that stumbled onto earth. People would grow into a hateful mob and kill the unfortunate being. "We don't want your kind here." Kinda like what happened to various non-white ethnic groups in various periods of american history. Rounded into camps or ostracized or just plain killed. Hell, americans don't even like the idea of others simply having differing opinions! Remember the Red Scare? People were turning in their neighbors and family for being communist. Scary thought that it could happen all over again with clones.
Hardware support, seamless integration with other apps, standardization, etc. Linux isn't shitty, but don't try to ignore the fact that is does, indeed, have drawbacks. Instead of pointing out how bad NT is, why don't you try spending that time improving linux?
Many people use programs that won't run on non windows operating systems. And no one wants to boot into another OS just so they can use 1 program. 'Get a different program' you say? No can do. All of the researchers here use software for data analysis and information management that isn't available for anything except windows.
Windows is secure enough for simple office environments if precautions are used. Antivirus programs, user education, backups in case something does happen, etc. Linux, as good as it may be, is only as secure as it is set up to be. And most setups are not secure. So, even with linux, the users are back in the same position. More weight should fall onto the shoulders of the IT workers and admins for not securing their network. I admin a very small, 30 computer network and I tell my users that if they aren't sure about an attachment or they didn't request a file from someone to contact me immediately. Antivirus programs are set up on all computers as well as the server and there are daily backups. That has been enough to keep anything bad out so far.
In the end, user education on safe computing is key to any effective security policy.
Why do so many of you feel the need to laugh at the ms office users and defend the virus writer? Most people in an office environment have no computer experience beyond doing normal office work. They're not educated by their IT department on the dangers of opening attachments. They just want to do their work so they can feed and clothe their kids. I don't think it's funny or cool that some guy wrote a virus that will destroy the work of others. Would you like it if mechanics started kicking your windows in and slashing your tires because you don't know how to overhaul your engine? Afterall, you're not elite and smart in the ways of cars, so you have no right to be driving.
Just because someone doesn't know what you consider to be common sense isn't a reason to hurt them. New users need to be educated and computer security policies need to be implimented. It's not the users' fault that they use MS Office. It's what they were told to use, so they happily use it, unaware of the bugs in it. And they don't care. They just want to finish up a presentation or a word document and get on with their lives. Not everyone's life revolves around computers. Some people work away from monitors for long periods of time.
Email is for transfer of information and data. Sometimes it happens to be in a file. If I want to send my boss a document, I should setup an ftp site, tell him where to get it, where to get an ftp client, how to set it up, how to log in, and how to transfer the files? That's just plain stupid. Email is a quick and easy way to spread information. Education of users is the answer, not doing things much harder than they should be done.
I work for a medical research place. So, would you consider it to be funny if a researcher was set back in important research because they happen to use ms office? They're doctors, not techs. I don't consider anyone who destroys data to be 'doing us all a favor'. The guy is an asshole, plain and simple.
Something funny to do would be to delete ms office itself, not the associated files.
Suppressing the speech of another just because it dosen't happen to be your favorite flavor is just wrong. It wouldn't be right of me to walk into your house and start trashing your place because I don't like the style of your jeans. Maybe I hate people who like blue jeans, because I happen to be a black jean wearing person. As long as freedom of expression dosen't hamper someone else's rights, then the person has a right to express himself in whatever fashion so chosen.
You support damaging someone's property because of their views, yet I doubt you would be too happy if a nazi guy kicked your ass because of your views. Just because you don't like someone's ideas dosen't mean you have the right to suppress them. Is mindlessly destroying someone's property going to change anything for the better? Using my previous example, would you suddently realize the error of your ways of wearing blue colored jeans and become 'enlightened' to the ways of black jeans? Many, many people have been killed and tortured because of this kind of ignorant intolerance.
It IS the OS of choice for home users. People can go to the store, pick up a game or something, go home, pop it into their cdrom, watch it autorun, and play within 2 minutes. No screwing with command line things or make files or imcompatible window managers. Plain, simple, ease of use. And linux dosen't have the shelf share that windows apps do. Nor does it have seamless support for usb, dvd, and other nifty home-user goodies. Say, for example, the home users has a problem and the system won't boot up. There's no flyers telling who to call for support, so he takes it down to Joe's Computer Shack and wants it fixed. But, as it turns out, Joe dosen't support linux and neither do any of the other local shops. Home user is screwed.
Just because someone dosen't run your particular favorite OS dosen't mean they're a damn clueless fool. I'd like to run linux if it had support for my hardware. And I'm not going to buy a whole new computer just so I can run an OS.
There's more to an operating system than just technial superiority.
I would adore the opportunity to buy professional level programs such as Photoshop for discounted prices. I would pay the $100 today if they offered it, even though I already have a copy. They could remove some of the professional-level features, such as the Pantone color sets. I don't pirate software because it makes my balls bigger, I do it because I can't afford it.
I'd love to move to linux where there is gpl software abound, but it dosen't support all of my hardware yet, so I'm forced to cool out for a bit.
I have a question for you: am I hurting Adobe by not paying for the copy of Photoshop I use for personal use for fixing up old pictures my grandmother has of her grandmother and other relatives? I'm not distributing it to others. I'm not using it to gain a profit. I certainly hope that my single pirated copy of Photoshop hasn't put any managers or programmers out of their jobs. If I had the money, I certainly would pay for my copy. But, I have bills and such and can't afford to run around writing $500 checks whenever I feel the urge. I agree with another reply to my original comment, suggesting a discount for personal use. If it were only $100 or $150, I would gladly put some money into Adobe's hands. They make good quality software and I think that should be rewarded.
For the sake of argument, let's say that it was bad for me to pirate Photoshop and Illustrator, regardless of my reasons or use for them. In the couple of years I've been using them, I've bought $150 worth of third party plugins for use with them. And I also bought (at work. I'm the only tech there, so I get to be graphics/admin/web/everything guy) Photoshop ($500), Illustrator ($500), Acrobat ($200), and ImageReady ($200); all adobe programs. So, that's $1,000 worth of 'bad' in the form of pirating vs. $1,550 worth of 'good' in the form of paid-for software.
I, personally, think the ends justified the means. Adobe never actually lost anything due to my piracy. It was harmless piracy. If no one ever broke the rules, there would be no progress whatsoever in the world. Countries would still be ruled my tyrrants, there would be no political reform, and software companies would probably be in worse shape than they think they are now. You can't always operate purely on moral theory. You have to look at what happens in the end in reality.
US software companies alone reported $3 billion in "losses" due to piracy. They didn't actually lose that much money to piracy. That figure is assuming that for each pirated package, there was a 100% possibility of the person paying for the software if they hadn't pirated it. This, of course, isn't reasonable at all. I, personally, wouldn't have paid $500 for photoshop or illustrator if I hadn't pirated them. I simply can't afford to throw down $1k for software. But, since I pirated them and used them for personal use for a while, I chose to buy both of those and several other adobe products at work. The study is critically flawed if it says that the software companies actually lost $3 billion to piracy.
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How exactly does one become a grand master in chess? Do you have to win a certain # of matches against highly ranked opponents? Is there a chess board somewhere that deems one a 'grand master'?
This seems like a fairly appropriate place to ask..
Why are the phone and cable companies taking so long to deliver high speed access to consumers? For example, my friend, who is 7 blocks from me, will have to wait at least 1 month longer than I before cable modems are available to him. People are not only willing, but are eager to hand over money to the companies to get faster internet access.
Is the process of setting up the line more difficult than I realize? Or are the companies just being lazy slobs?
Not in any significant amount. Sure, maybe 1,000 copies of NT weren't sold in the past year. Why should Microsoft care?
And even if linux should become the holy grail of the server operating system, Microsoft will not die that easily. They're into far more things than simply NT. Linux users serverly underestimate Microsoft. Just because you drop NT sales by 2% does not mean MS will shut down it's entire OS devision to commit itself to working on linux. Microsoft didn't become this big by sitting on their asses while competitors waltz in and steal their markets.
"Making babies" sexually, not sex in general. Humans will never stop having sex, no matter how many reasons are given to stop. Disease, heartache, unplanned pregnancy, and a myriad of other things still haven't put a damper on the desire for sex.
Woo woo. Look at me! I can fight a meaningless little battle so mommy doesn't dare call anyone less elite than me a "hacker." After all, who would want to be deprived of their deity-given right to have a REALLY ph3ersome moniker with which to label themselves?
Those with real knowledge don't concern themselves with labels. They know they're good, so they go and do what they need to do, media be damned.
With all the spec monkeys screaming about how their favorite console system can pump out 3 billion shaded, textured, bump mapped, anti-aliased triangles per second at a 48bpp color depth, I have a question.. isn't all of this going to be put out to a television that is made for general tv show and movie viewing? Without the brightness or color saturation or sharpness of a monitor, what good is all that horsepower going to do?
(note: rich kids with hdtv's can disregard this post)
Anybody know when support for ATI's Rage Fury will be added?
Since when is the register a reliable source of information?
They'll say that redhat's stock price shot up because of hype about them and the stock then settled down to a reasonable price. I have my doubts that everyone at microsoft will suddenly quit their jobs because another company's stock price closed higher 1 day.
Flash cards are expensive as all hell. A mere 4 meg smart media card is $35. So, I would guess it's the storage on the rio that's so expensive.
Human workers on demand. Combined with some fancy genetics, human workers that won't mind being abused as slaves.
You're assuming that there is some kind of "Clone-O-Matic 4000: Ready to Use Clones in 10 Minutes (r)." Clones would take time to develop, just like any other human. Labor laws still apply to "dumbed down" clones, just like they apply to mentally retarded people. It would be much easier just to build a machine to do repetative tasks, as people seem to want to use mindless clones for. No labor laws, no food (except for electricity, and that's not too expensive), no wages to pay, no vacation or holiday time, and no complaints. Clones would be better used for spare organs and such. As far as I can see, you can't have human-level intelligence without human-level emotion and reasoning.
And Sodom and Gamora, infidels, anyone not around to here the 'wonderful word of god', and even men who have had their penises crushed by a rock. No lie. Look around in Deuteronomy, I think it's in verse 26 somewhere. Bastards can't 'enter the house of the lord' for 5 generations, even though the great great great grandchildren had nothing to do with the fact that a man left his wife so many years ago. Christianity is a tyrant religion. Millions of people have been killed because they had different ideas. I simply can't bring myself to believe that a loving god would let this happen.
On a lighter note, did god send down a Holy Pooper-Scooper to help clean up all the feces that surely built up on that ark?
Since bringing a cloned child into the world would, quite obviously, cause a damn lot of controversy and harassment for the cloned child, is it ethical for someone to do this to a child? Clone or not, it is still a child, just like everyone else, excepting the method of conception. If I know that if I bring a black man to a kkk meeting that the chances are pretty slim that he'll get out unscathed from the ensuing barrage of 'good ol boys', then I would be partially ethically responsible for his misfortune. The same goes that if I choose to bring a clone into the world, knowing fully that the clone will be singled out by an even larger group of 'good ol boys', would I be wrong for doing so?
There's no point in harassing a child because it is a clone. Just like I had no say in the way I was born, neither does the child. No one has a perfectly easy life, but a clone would have an even harder life if the news got out that the person was a clone.
Some of the ethical questions aren't merely about the cloned person. It's how to react to the clone. For instance, if a mother loses a baby when it's 3 months old and they have tissue from the now deceased baby, they could make a clone of the baby and it would be the absolute genetic match of the original. But, how would the mother react to it? It is, afterall, an exact replica of the original child. But, something is just different. If the child grows into adulthood, at what point do you tell him/her that he/she is a clone? How would the clone take it?
Then you get into the religious issue. Whether you agree with the religionists or not, they are a powerful force in the world today. I doubt many christians would buy into the idea that a clone is a human, simply because it "wasn't made by god." Although, I find it hard to fathom that "kind-hearted christian folk" could look into the pale blue eyes of a 7 year old girl and tell her she has no soul and that she's a monster. I also fear what would be done to the parents of a clone. They would be repeatedly harassed by closed-minded fools who think that just because something didn't follow the status quo of arrival into the world that they have fewer rights.
Some people would even think that the clone is an alien. And you know well what would happen to an alien that stumbled onto earth. People would grow into a hateful mob and kill the unfortunate being. "We don't want your kind here." Kinda like what happened to various non-white ethnic groups in various periods of american history. Rounded into camps or ostracized or just plain killed. Hell, americans don't even like the idea of others simply having differing opinions! Remember the Red Scare? People were turning in their neighbors and family for being communist. Scary thought that it could happen all over again with clones.
Hardware support, seamless integration with other apps, standardization, etc. Linux isn't shitty, but don't try to ignore the fact that is does, indeed, have drawbacks. Instead of pointing out how bad NT is, why don't you try spending that time improving linux?
Many people use programs that won't run on non windows operating systems. And no one wants to boot into another OS just so they can use 1 program. 'Get a different program' you say? No can do. All of the researchers here use software for data analysis and information management that isn't available for anything except windows.
Windows is secure enough for simple office environments if precautions are used. Antivirus programs, user education, backups in case something does happen, etc. Linux, as good as it may be, is only as secure as it is set up to be. And most setups are not secure. So, even with linux, the users are back in the same position. More weight should fall onto the shoulders of the IT workers and admins for not securing their network. I admin a very small, 30 computer network and I tell my users that if they aren't sure about an attachment or they didn't request a file from someone to contact me immediately. Antivirus programs are set up on all computers as well as the server and there are daily backups. That has been enough to keep anything bad out so far.
In the end, user education on safe computing is key to any effective security policy.
Why do so many of you feel the need to laugh at the ms office users and defend the virus writer? Most people in an office environment have no computer experience beyond doing normal office work. They're not educated by their IT department on the dangers of opening attachments. They just want to do their work so they can feed and clothe their kids. I don't think it's funny or cool that some guy wrote a virus that will destroy the work of others. Would you like it if mechanics started kicking your windows in and slashing your tires because you don't know how to overhaul your engine? Afterall, you're not elite and smart in the ways of cars, so you have no right to be driving.
Just because someone doesn't know what you consider to be common sense isn't a reason to hurt them. New users need to be educated and computer security policies need to be implimented. It's not the users' fault that they use MS Office. It's what they were told to use, so they happily use it, unaware of the bugs in it. And they don't care. They just want to finish up a presentation or a word document and get on with their lives. Not everyone's life revolves around computers. Some people work away from monitors for long periods of time.
And not so evil to go for harmless users just doing their work like they get paid to do?
Email is for transfer of information and data. Sometimes it happens to be in a file. If I want to send my boss a document, I should setup an ftp site, tell him where to get it, where to get an ftp client, how to set it up, how to log in, and how to transfer the files? That's just plain stupid. Email is a quick and easy way to spread information. Education of users is the answer, not doing things much harder than they should be done.
I work for a medical research place. So, would you consider it to be funny if a researcher was set back in important research because they happen to use ms office? They're doctors, not techs. I don't consider anyone who destroys data to be 'doing us all a favor'. The guy is an asshole, plain and simple.
Something funny to do would be to delete ms office itself, not the associated files.
Suppressing the speech of another just because it dosen't happen to be your favorite flavor is just wrong. It wouldn't be right of me to walk into your house and start trashing your place because I don't like the style of your jeans. Maybe I hate people who like blue jeans, because I happen to be a black jean wearing person. As long as freedom of expression dosen't hamper someone else's rights, then the person has a right to express himself in whatever fashion so chosen.
You support damaging someone's property because of their views, yet I doubt you would be too happy if a nazi guy kicked your ass because of your views. Just because you don't like someone's ideas dosen't mean you have the right to suppress them. Is mindlessly destroying someone's property going to change anything for the better? Using my previous example, would you suddently realize the error of your ways of wearing blue colored jeans and become 'enlightened' to the ways of black jeans? Many, many people have been killed and tortured because of this kind of ignorant intolerance.
It IS the OS of choice for home users. People can go to the store, pick up a game or something, go home, pop it into their cdrom, watch it autorun, and play within 2 minutes. No screwing with command line things or make files or imcompatible window managers. Plain, simple, ease of use. And linux dosen't have the shelf share that windows apps do. Nor does it have seamless support for usb, dvd, and other nifty home-user goodies. Say, for example, the home users has a problem and the system won't boot up. There's no flyers telling who to call for support, so he takes it down to Joe's Computer Shack and wants it fixed. But, as it turns out, Joe dosen't support linux and neither do any of the other local shops. Home user is screwed.
Just because someone dosen't run your particular favorite OS dosen't mean they're a damn clueless fool. I'd like to run linux if it had support for my hardware. And I'm not going to buy a whole new computer just so I can run an OS.
There's more to an operating system than just technial superiority.
I would adore the opportunity to buy professional level programs such as Photoshop for discounted prices. I would pay the $100 today if they offered it, even though I already have a copy. They could remove some of the professional-level features, such as the Pantone color sets. I don't pirate software because it makes my balls bigger, I do it because I can't afford it.
I'd love to move to linux where there is gpl software abound, but it dosen't support all of my hardware yet, so I'm forced to cool out for a bit.
I have a question for you: am I hurting Adobe by not paying for the copy of Photoshop I use for personal use for fixing up old pictures my grandmother has of her grandmother and other relatives? I'm not distributing it to others. I'm not using it to gain a profit. I certainly hope that my single pirated copy of Photoshop hasn't put any managers or programmers out of their jobs. If I had the money, I certainly would pay for my copy. But, I have bills and such and can't afford to run around writing $500 checks whenever I feel the urge. I agree with another reply to my original comment, suggesting a discount for personal use. If it were only $100 or $150, I would gladly put some money into Adobe's hands. They make good quality software and I think that should be rewarded.
For the sake of argument, let's say that it was bad for me to pirate Photoshop and Illustrator, regardless of my reasons or use for them. In the couple of years I've been using them, I've bought $150 worth of third party plugins for use with them. And I also bought (at work. I'm the only tech there, so I get to be graphics/admin/web/everything guy) Photoshop ($500), Illustrator ($500), Acrobat ($200), and ImageReady ($200); all adobe programs. So, that's $1,000 worth of 'bad' in the form of pirating vs. $1,550 worth of 'good' in the form of paid-for software.
I, personally, think the ends justified the means. Adobe never actually lost anything due to my piracy. It was harmless piracy. If no one ever broke the rules, there would be no progress whatsoever in the world. Countries would still be ruled my tyrrants, there would be no political reform, and software companies would probably be in worse shape than they think they are now. You can't always operate purely on moral theory. You have to look at what happens in the end in reality.
US software companies alone reported $3 billion in "losses" due to piracy. They didn't actually lose that much money to piracy. That figure is assuming that for each pirated package, there was a 100% possibility of the person paying for the software if they hadn't pirated it. This, of course, isn't reasonable at all. I, personally, wouldn't have paid $500 for photoshop or illustrator if I hadn't pirated them. I simply can't afford to throw down $1k for software. But, since I pirated them and used them for personal use for a while, I chose to buy both of those and several other adobe products at work. The study is critically flawed if it says that the software companies actually lost $3 billion to piracy.