Oh. so not only do the universities get a buttload of money from the students, they also can publish the best literature or history papers and exams and make a profit off of it (because that is what it means for them to have all the rights to your intellectual property). I, for one, don't remember ever signing my rights over to them, ever agreeing to it and I don't remember the professors wanting to keep my work after it has been graded.
Well you made a good point. So what is your theory then, why are we so overweight? And you still have to think why does McDonalds fries taste so good to you? I think there is a very high probability that if someone gave you the same fries but put them in a plain white box you will not rate them as high. Those kinds of studies have been done. Besides don't you find a little "odd" the fact that _all_ the americans find McDonalds fries so tasty but the rest of the world doesn't?
Lastly, please stop trying to hide your cultural elitism behind the facade of behavioral psychology.
I am not a cultural elitist by any means, unless you consider advocating eating healthy being the same as advocating "cultural elitism". The fact that a light salad is better for you than french fries is pretty much a fact if you ask any nutrionist.
I have lived in America for 15 years now and this is my culture too, that is why I want _us_ to be healthier, I don't want people to go listen to opera and eat fine French cusine, I just want them to eat better. Our country not only is falling behind as far as academic standards are concerned, we are falling behind as far as health is concerned because we are overweight.
Junk food is tasting better for _every_ teenager in US? What does the U.S. genetic pool have specially evolved taste buds that those from other countries don't have? Stuff tastes better to you because that is the only thing you ate since you were 4! You will not know what healthy food tastes because you have never tried it (your taste buds and your brain have never seen it, so you'll never crave it and it take a very long time to acquire a taste).
For example if you have never had eggplant salad, how do you expect one day to just wake-up one day and say "I think I want some eggplant salad today!". No, if you have only eaten hot dogs, pizza and McDonalds hamburgers that is the only thing you'll want. There might be really good healthy food there but you just won't know about it.
So yes, on individual level it seems kind of silly to say that people are "addicted" to food, but at the global scale certain pattern emerge. Also, just "tastes better" is not enough of an explanation, you need to ask "why does it taste better?". You see people do have an emotional response to a product's brand name. If you give someone a Coca-cola cup but put Pepsi-cola in it, they will prefer that even though in a trial with un-labeled cups they'll choose Pepsi because it is a little sweeter. (Not that any of those are good for you, I was just describing an experiment performed by a team of neuroscientists...) So people respond very much so to "brands" and that cannot possible have anything to do with tasting it but it is rather an emotional response.
Good point. I think in general there is just a lot we don't know about our own bodies. We fly into space and split nuclei up into subparticles but are still yet to figure out how our bodies work. Scientists try to always simplify things - x calories go in, out of that y get burnt up and z get stored. It is much more complicated than that, that is not even considering the environment.
My personal "thoery of the month" about weight gain is that it is somehow stress related. One of the first stereotypes about Americans is that we are "workoholics", we have less vacations than anyone else. We are always on the run, always trying to measure up to somebody/something (the Jones, the co-worker, the competition in India and so on). If you look at a U.S. city you will not see very many cafes with an outside patio full of people just sitting relaxing and enjoying a meal, instead everyone is rushing through the drivethrough or stockpiling TV dinners. We just don't know how to slow down. In America if you have a gap in your resume and you tell them you just took some time off and traveled they'll throw it in the shredder -- "How dare you not work day and night!". In U.S., despite our affluence we have a very high rate of depression and anxiety (good time to work for Merk and friends, Prosac is making them very rich). Look at the insomnia medications on the market now -- Lunesta, Rozerem and so on!
So I think stress is a double whammy because on one hand, we don't have time to cook good foods, because we are in such a rush, and that will take it's toll and then the body is in constant fight or flight mode and cannot process the food properly, just tries to store it as much as possible. Now I don't really know how heart disease and diabetes are related to this whole mess. Do we get more heart disease because we are fat or we are more overweight and get heart disease because of stress...
And the worst thing is, you cannot relax in U.S. If you just quit your job and to stay at a beach resort for a month and live off of the money you saved, you will somehow be stigmatized as "lazy" "unfit" "unproductive" "un-American" and so on. You would then have to deal with social stigmas like that and always trying to "explain" yourself. It seems to me that our affluence is also our punishment. We are slaves to our own life-styles...
The problem with this conclusion is the fact that it means the food is the problem.
Yes, food is the problem. It is a problem in U.S. The best way to notice is to move there from a part of the world that still cooks their meals at home and don't have a McFatolds at any corner. I grew up in Eastern Europe. Growing up my mother prepared a large array of home foods, all kinds. I have always loved fruits (like apples and peaches) and vegetables and legumes (like tomatoes, garlic and beans). Everything was prepared at home by my mother from raw ingridients, we didn't even eat out because we couldn't afford it.
When I came to U.S. all my peers liked to eat hot dogs, hamburgers, pizza, mac and cheese and of course, fries. They all hated vegetables! I thought "how sad", the chain resturants have gotten these kids addicted to crap. Now I am married to an american and my wife still gets excited a lot more about pizza, fries and mac and cheese even though she rationally knows that grilled chicken with a light tomato sauce, or a salad with olive oil and vinegar is much better -- that doesn't matter. The emotional response for her is that "junk foods are somehow FUN!" and "veggies are BORING!".
Perception makes a huge difference. I see a pot of beans and I get excited -- "Woo, beans and toast!" she sees it and thinks "Yuk, but I guess I have to eat cause it's supposed to be better than a McFatburger".
My theory is that children here are just not exposed to good food. Just look at what babies and toddlers start eating here -- cerial, high carb, high fructose corn syrup + carbs kind of foods. Have you ever seen a "children's" menu in U.S.? -It is the "happy heart-attack by the time you are 30 in a shiny box" -- fries, corndogs, pizza and hamburgers. All these children grow up and do we really expect them to one day say "Hmm, I think I'll have some caviar or a grilled chicken breast with basil and olive oil?" No, they will still eat the same crap they grewu up eating. Everyone is obsessed about the calories they eat, I think they should be obsessing more about the quality of the food, not just pure calories.
Then we should have nuclear power behind all those 220v outlets... and 90% of cars should be much smaller,
Exactly. During the summer when the grids are already at full capacity it would be a very bad idea to have hundreds of thousands of electric cars charging at the same time. Then you won't pay your hard earned $$$ to BP or Exxon but instead to power companies like Enron. We actually need two things - 1) more energy and 2) a good way to store it (this implies a safe and economical way to distribute it as well...). It would also be nice not to make much of a mess in the process. Nuclear power seems like the way to go. In US they have not build a nuclear power plant in ages instead they burn tons and tons of coal that ironically enough releases a lot more radio-isotopes into the environment than nuclear power plants would, not to mention other more obvious pollutants. Check this link out.
I think the wishy-washy one is likely to trade immediate success like access to more markets (India, Pakistan, China, Turkey...) than their competitors for long-term success such as customer loyalty.
Serghey Brin a while ago mentioned that making deals with shady governments such as China for ex. was a bad mistake, in retrospect. I think what he really said was that "I wish we didn't make any moral claims concerning our business practices so we wouldn't have measure up to them when we cut corners."
I still see the "do no evil" claim as just another marketing strategy to maximize their shareholder value. It was supposed to work long term and short term. _However_ if it would have been a real moral principle and not just a marketing slogan, they would have passed up the shady deals and taken a loss. That is just as good of a test with humans as well. If I claim "I would never steal" but then live a nice happy life with a cushy $1M job (which I don't), never get sick, never get hungry, my statement of "I would never steal" doesn't mean much, because I would never even be tempted or "need" to steal. But if I was a homeless man who is starving, then I would really have to think about it, if I resist the temptation and don't steal, then I would really show that my "slogan" from above is a true moral principle.
The real problem with Google is that it tries to anthropomorphisize itself (make itself seem as if it is a person, or some entinty with human qualities). People like to deal with other people, they want their business partner to be a human. Google now is a publically traded company, it is just a money making machine and it will do whatever it can to make money both long term and short term. If they make a shady deal with China, someone from Google will make a statement that it was a "bad thing to do" (Brin did) and Google will probably donate some money to EFF so something like that and trumpet that all over media to rescue it's image _but_ at the same time it would not pull the China deal!
Companies do this all the time. Did you ever wonder why corporations like to make huge donations to local museums and and build huge sport arenas? Every city has a P&G hall, or Staples center, or Wal*Mart Park or something like that. If these companies are trully "good" and want to help out the most, they should be willing to donate to a local homeless shelters. They should be helping the poor, they should be helping lower incoome people get housing and so on. But they don't do that, because they would not get to trumpet their "charitable" quality all over the city and the media that way. It is all marketing. As individuals we do charitable things becuase we want to help, if we do it anonymously then we really do it to help and not to show off to others, but companies never do that!
Google is not different. The mistake was ours to believe that it would be a better company which truly cares and would never help send a person to jail because of their political views just to make an extra $10/share.
Yes, my email and many documents are on Google's server, and I am too in a process of moving them to my hosting company so and would pay $5/month for a website/email/domain just not to have some gian corp. look through may personal business.
Oh, yes, modded as Troll. How dare one not assume that America is superior on Slashdot. The nerds might be anti-social but they very are patriotic, that's good to know...
Google is a company and not a non-for-profit-feed-the-starving-children organisation. Let's get that out of the way first...
Google's sole allegience is to their investors, period. What the investors want? Surprise! - Money! Google at any moment will evaluate the function called f$$$="how much money are we making?" and try to maximize it. They are not there to spread good, love, freedom and democracy. They are maximizing f$$$. When they stop doing it they will stop existing as a company.
But I can hear thousands of Sladotters' voices saying "But doesn't Google do good things and isn't it nicer than Microsoft? You better say YES or we'll mod you into oblivion, traitor!" The answer is that the whole "do no evil" and being nice _is_ part of maximizing f$$$. It has been determined that a company that says "we do no evil" will make more money under certain conditions. Granted when the comany was just the 2 founders they did mean "do no evil" because they would "do no evil", I understand that. But as the company grew it wasn't just the two founders, it turned into a regular public traded company, just as good and just as evil as any other.
This explains why Google is "forced" very often to trump the "do no evil" priority with the "make max $$$" priority. If one would really want to test the "goodness" of Google they would have to point to an instance where Google chose to do "good" at the expense of taking a significant loss (and know about it in advance). So far the China deal and other such happenings point that Google is only maximizing f$$$. Do I think that it is evil? - No. Do I think they are the embodiment of "Mother Theresa - No. Are they just a regular company who is very succesful? - Yes!
Of course the real problem here is with the adjectives of "good" and "evil". One can write a dissertation on how "my good" is not "your good" and how to redefine them for profit. But's that's another comment as they say...
Well the Chinese then should just zap all our satellites from space then, because clearly many of our satellites are an attack system, and any and all such systems should be banned, and destroyed on launch.. Would you go for that? Or is U.S. somehow excempt because we are "God's country" or we have "freedom" and so on?
By comparison, the American students have had much more exposure to a variety of lifestyles, cultural variety, and different "classes" (if you will) of recreation (i.e. not just opera but also monster truck rallies), but the American students are simply not competitive academically,
I thought about that too and I think it comes to survival. When everything is great and the American kids have all the food, toys, athletic afterschool clubs, music, TV, computer games, they see no real reason to study. As far as they are concerned the "good life" will just continue no matter what. In Soviet Union we all got an equal but very small piece of pie. And especially during the last years (mid 80's to late 80's), it was very hard. The share got smaller and smaller until you had to stay for 4 hours in line just to get a piece of bread or some flour. I remember doing that. It was hard for my parents, my mother often cried because she just didn't have enough money to feed me. My father, a 1st class engineer was without a job and then finally got a job loading trucks in a warehouse.
The best I could do to support my family was at least to study well in school. I wasn't exceptional I got Bs mostly and As once in a while (4s and 5s actually...). But I did the best I could to help my family. Well one of the subjects we studied was English and because I did well in it, I eventually got to come to US. And I love US, it is my home now. And I want to make it better. I hurts me when I see American students do so badly in science. I would gladly pay more taxes to have good teachers and equipment in schools if possible.
The problems is that developers, users and managers all speak somewhat different languages. It's all English but they all see things in a different way and that leads to confusion. In general developers should spend a considerable amount of time with the users in their domain to really understand the needs of those users.
Case in point, I worked for a CAD firm and our developers would be sent to different companies to observe how the engineers use our product. We would invite many of those engineers to our headquarters and let them just spend time with the developers. It worked great, especially as far as the user interface of our systems was concerned. To an average non-engineer Joe it would look totally ugly and counter-intuitive but the engineers (our real customers) loved the user interface. When the company was bought out and new management came in they decided to single-handedly change to interface to make it more Windows-like. It ended up sucking and every single real user of our product hated it and refused to upgrade to the new version. The company went downhill after that. I quit too...
I have no problem paying more in taxes - though it means less money in my pocket - if we get better schools, healthcare, roads, etc. for everyone.
I lived under a complete communism. And yes, as far as it worked, we all got a small but mostly even part.
HEALTHCARE:
As far as health care was concerned, the Soviets did alright. You would just show up to any hospital / clinic with your book of medical history and you would get medical treatment, no need for insurance cards or anything like that, if you had to stay in the hospital for a month, so be it, you wouldn't have to sell your house, car and blood to be able to do it. Youd didn't get super friendly service with a smile and tons of pain pills but they cured you. I still go back to Russia for medical treatment. I pay less there [they are not communist anymore;) and I trust those doctors just as much as I trust American doctors.
SCHOOLS:
Primary schools definetly better. I came to US when I was in the 10th grade and I ended up taking Calculus with the seniors and even tutoring them. I was a good student in Russia but not a genius, just average. Secondary education was not as good, a lot of the stuff was not up to date. I never went to a University there but from what I understood that was the case.
ROADS:
Public transportation did work in the cities. But only in the cities in rural areas it wasn't as easy.
Of course...this is assuming that our tax money is actually well-spent, which isn't always the case.
Bingo! That is why it went down to hell. We paid loads of taxes, 30% and up if I am not mistaken. What happens eventually is that 1) some people find a way to not work and still get the common share of the pie 2) the government apparatus starts growing to un-imaginable proportions because those in the government got more than average worker/citizen. All this and constant spending on militarization eventually led to a crash. So total communism/socialism doesn't work. I don't know if total laisser-fair would work either. The giant corporations would suck all the money from everyone. Imagine that all the schools and roads are owned by Enrons or Microsoft..! The answer is probably somewhere in between...who knows...
>$100 million... for someone to kill their own family, children and all, getting away scott free guaranteed,
Do you honestly believe that? I think that says something about you. Would you be really surprised if I told you that a lot of people do honestly love their spouses and children more than life. I know I would give my life up for my wife or child without thinking twice about it. I like to believe that most average/normal individual would. Maybe I am optimistic but your point of view is disturbing (to me at least).
I do know that people can be very greedy and cruel but they can also be honest, compassionate and loving. Sometimes the same person will exhibit either of these, either randomly or under certain circumstances.
It seems also that you probably encountered more people of the first kind, while I _chose_ to associate with the second kind, that probably explains our different view of basic human nature.
Honestly, I love my country, but I hate the direction it's headed in... someone really needs to convince the public to stop being so afraid so that politicians will stop pulling the wool over their eyes and pushing bad legislation through in the name of "protecting the people".
Welcome to our 'democracy'.
You cannot control a democratic country by force but you can easily do it with fear and lies. Here is the algorithm:
--Fuck up a country algorithm:-- Input: Country founded on freedom, democracy, individual privacy Output: Complete government control, 0 rights, 0 privacy
1. Make the people afraid. Could be anything, terrorists, communists, mexicans, chinese, witches etc.
2. Tell them that you can make the fear go away if they just willingly relinquish a little bit of their rights and freedoms.
3. Repeat 3 until no more rights and freedoms remain
4. Done.
Don't worry under the new legislation everyone is a terrorist until proven otherwise.
Did you ever forget to report that extra income you made mawing lawns in that summer, well you hid money from Uncle Sam and you probably used it to fun al-Qaeda which makes you a terrorist.
Did you ever think bad thoughts about the president? Well are definetly a terrorist.
Did you ever use encryption? Only pedophiles and terrorists use encryption so you are probably a terrorist.
Taking all this into consideration, we (the DHS) are offering you a once in a lifetime opportunity to travel. You'll be scheduled on the next flight to Egypt on our luxurious private jets. You'll be viziting old prisons and other historical sites where you'll get to take part in exciting age-old interrogation by torture performances to learn local culture and expand your horizons. Oh and...you'll be the one being interrogated, oh and... it's not a performance. Kthxbi
DNG = TIFF (with a restricted subset of tags) + extra meta information.
There's a lot to be said for it; anyone can implement it, but at the same time, there's some centralized control over the format, so that every Tom, Dick, and Harry can't build on their own crappy extension to the format and create the sort of Balkanization that's plagued TIFF.
Until one day Adobe is bought by some other software giant and abandons DNG or moves to JPEG9324 (just kidding, but you get the idea). All of the sudden it will be up to Harry Volunteer to write encoders/decoders for DNG. The answer is a an open _standard _ like PNG. The 'standard' part is important because there are already 200+ different tiff types and subtypes. Some use restricted compression standards some have funky tags that will crash some specific program etc. So use PNG! [Unless you desperately need to store data in CMYK only...].
DNG can compress raw data (without loss). It basically wraps TIFF and adds extra meta-information about camera settings. But note that not all TIFF tags are supported so it is not a strict extension of TIFF.
I personally would choose PNG. Compared to TIFF...
It's pros:
1. Newer, very open (TIFF might have problems with its optional LZW compression scheme)
2. Has better compression than TIFF
3. More uniform standard (there are 200+ version of TIFF files and there is always some program that cannot decode some TIFF file). It's cons:
4. Cannot encode images as CMYK, while TIFF can. Unless you need to print (on a real printer not inkjet) immediatly this doesn't apply.
So I choose PNG. JPEG2000 is actually better format with a much better lossless encoding in theory but there aren't that many applications that support it yet...
Here's my workflow:
Camera[Pentax K10D] -> PEF [proprietary Pentax RAW file]
Copy PEF to PC
Delete the bad (unrecoverable) ones
Archive raw PEF files to backup file server
Process raw PEF files -> PNG [sharpen, fix WB, etc.]
Archive PNG files to backup file server
Delete raw PEF files from PC, but keep PNGs
Which raw are you talking about? Is it DNG, PEF or a hundred other proprietary raw formats?
limited uptake as jpeg2000 vs jpg, mp4/wma/ogg vs mp3, png vs gif, etc
As opposed to a rapid updake of Pentax's PEF raw format. How many browsers do you know that render that format?
What about an electrostatic approach? Charge up the outside of the suite then charge a wall panel that also has sticky scotch like stuff on it with the oppsite charge and let the dust jump right off the suite. Cover the panel and re-pressurize the cabin. I would think a giant vacuum would be heavier than a sheet of scotch tape and a high voltage generator...
The best thing Microsoft can do is to crack down on all those illegal copies of Office. I dream of the imaginary day when Microsoft will issue an update that will disable invalid copies of Windows and Office. That will be the day when OO will start shinning. Not because it is a better product but because it will simply appear in the spotlight as everyone will rush to find a replacement. Most people will just have to deal with OO's problems, but 1 out of 10,000 new users might be a developer and eventually decide to contribute to the project. A lot of those developers, including some companies and we got ourselves a nice open source office product.
It's funny how when they discontinued it, they just claimed that new Velvia 100 will replace it and provide the same amount of detail but with the benefit of a higher sensitivity. It was too good to be true and now in the link you provided they finally came clean and admited that it was because of a lack of materials that they disconintued the production, not because they inveted a new and better Velvia 100.
Company talk, you gotta love. Always read between the lines, kind of like talking to women...
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Oh. so not only do the universities get a buttload of money from the students, they also can publish the best literature or history papers and exams and make a profit off of it (because that is what it means for them to have all the rights to your intellectual property).
I, for one, don't remember ever signing my rights over to them, ever agreeing to it and I don't remember the professors wanting to keep my work after it has been graded.
Lastly, please stop trying to hide your cultural elitism behind the facade of behavioral psychology.
I am not a cultural elitist by any means, unless you consider advocating eating healthy being the same as advocating "cultural elitism". The fact that a light salad is better for you than french fries is pretty much a fact if you ask any nutrionist.
I have lived in America for 15 years now and this is my culture too, that is why I want _us_ to be healthier, I don't want people to go listen to opera and eat fine French cusine, I just want them to eat better. Our country not only is falling behind as far as academic standards are concerned, we are falling behind as far as health is concerned because we are overweight.
For example if you have never had eggplant salad, how do you expect one day to just wake-up one day and say "I think I want some eggplant salad today!". No, if you have only eaten hot dogs, pizza and McDonalds hamburgers that is the only thing you'll want. There might be really good healthy food there but you just won't know about it.
So yes, on individual level it seems kind of silly to say that people are "addicted" to food, but at the global scale certain pattern emerge. Also, just "tastes better" is not enough of an explanation, you need to ask "why does it taste better?". You see people do have an emotional response to a product's brand name. If you give someone a Coca-cola cup but put Pepsi-cola in it, they will prefer that even though in a trial with un-labeled cups they'll choose Pepsi because it is a little sweeter. (Not that any of those are good for you, I was just describing an experiment performed by a team of neuroscientists...) So people respond very much so to "brands" and that cannot possible have anything to do with tasting it but it is rather an emotional response.
My personal "thoery of the month" about weight gain is that it is somehow stress related. One of the first stereotypes about Americans is that we are "workoholics", we have less vacations than anyone else. We are always on the run, always trying to measure up to somebody/something (the Jones, the co-worker, the competition in India and so on). If you look at a U.S. city you will not see very many cafes with an outside patio full of people just sitting relaxing and enjoying a meal, instead everyone is rushing through the drivethrough or stockpiling TV dinners. We just don't know how to slow down. In America if you have a gap in your resume and you tell them you just took some time off and traveled they'll throw it in the shredder -- "How dare you not work day and night!". In U.S., despite our affluence we have a very high rate of depression and anxiety (good time to work for Merk and friends, Prosac is making them very rich). Look at the insomnia medications on the market now -- Lunesta, Rozerem and so on!
So I think stress is a double whammy because on one hand, we don't have time to cook good foods, because we are in such a rush, and that will take it's toll and then the body is in constant fight or flight mode and cannot process the food properly, just tries to store it as much as possible. Now I don't really know how heart disease and diabetes are related to this whole mess. Do we get more heart disease because we are fat or we are more overweight and get heart disease because of stress...
And the worst thing is, you cannot relax in U.S. If you just quit your job and to stay at a beach resort for a month and live off of the money you saved, you will somehow be stigmatized as "lazy" "unfit" "unproductive" "un-American" and so on. You would then have to deal with social stigmas like that and always trying to "explain" yourself. It seems to me that our affluence is also our punishment. We are slaves to our own life-styles...
Yes, food is the problem. It is a problem in U.S. The best way to notice is to move there from a part of the world that still cooks their meals at home and don't have a McFatolds at any corner. I grew up in Eastern Europe. Growing up my mother prepared a large array of home foods, all kinds. I have always loved fruits (like apples and peaches) and vegetables and legumes (like tomatoes, garlic and beans). Everything was prepared at home by my mother from raw ingridients, we didn't even eat out because we couldn't afford it.
When I came to U.S. all my peers liked to eat hot dogs, hamburgers, pizza, mac and cheese and of course, fries. They all hated vegetables! I thought "how sad", the chain resturants have gotten these kids addicted to crap. Now I am married to an american and my wife still gets excited a lot more about pizza, fries and mac and cheese even though she rationally knows that grilled chicken with a light tomato sauce, or a salad with olive oil and vinegar is much better -- that doesn't matter. The emotional response for her is that "junk foods are somehow FUN!" and "veggies are BORING!".
Perception makes a huge difference. I see a pot of beans and I get excited -- "Woo, beans and toast!" she sees it and thinks "Yuk, but I guess I have to eat cause it's supposed to be better than a McFatburger".
My theory is that children here are just not exposed to good food. Just look at what babies and toddlers start eating here -- cerial, high carb, high fructose corn syrup + carbs kind of foods. Have you ever seen a "children's" menu in U.S.? -It is the "happy heart-attack by the time you are 30 in a shiny box" -- fries, corndogs, pizza and hamburgers. All these children grow up and do we really expect them to one day say "Hmm, I think I'll have some caviar or a grilled chicken breast with basil and olive oil?" No, they will still eat the same crap they grewu up eating. Everyone is obsessed about the calories they eat, I think they should be obsessing more about the quality of the food, not just pure calories.
Exactly. During the summer when the grids are already at full capacity it would be a very bad idea to have hundreds of thousands of electric cars charging at the same time. Then you won't pay your hard earned $$$ to BP or Exxon but instead to power companies like Enron. We actually need two things - 1) more energy and 2) a good way to store it (this implies a safe and economical way to distribute it as well...). It would also be nice not to make much of a mess in the process. Nuclear power seems like the way to go. In US they have not build a nuclear power plant in ages instead they burn tons and tons of coal that ironically enough releases a lot more radio-isotopes into the environment than nuclear power plants would, not to mention other more obvious pollutants. Check this link out.
Serghey Brin a while ago mentioned that making deals with shady governments such as China for ex. was a bad mistake, in retrospect. I think what he really said was that "I wish we didn't make any moral claims concerning our business practices so we wouldn't have measure up to them when we cut corners."
I still see the "do no evil" claim as just another marketing strategy to maximize their shareholder value. It was supposed to work long term and short term. _However_ if it would have been a real moral principle and not just a marketing slogan, they would have passed up the shady deals and taken a loss. That is just as good of a test with humans as well. If I claim "I would never steal" but then live a nice happy life with a cushy $1M job (which I don't), never get sick, never get hungry, my statement of "I would never steal" doesn't mean much, because I would never even be tempted or "need" to steal. But if I was a homeless man who is starving, then I would really have to think about it, if I resist the temptation and don't steal, then I would really show that my "slogan" from above is a true moral principle.
The real problem with Google is that it tries to anthropomorphisize itself (make itself seem as if it is a person, or some entinty with human qualities). People like to deal with other people, they want their business partner to be a human. Google now is a publically traded company, it is just a money making machine and it will do whatever it can to make money both long term and short term. If they make a shady deal with China, someone from Google will make a statement that it was a "bad thing to do" (Brin did) and Google will probably donate some money to EFF so something like that and trumpet that all over media to rescue it's image _but_ at the same time it would not pull the China deal!
Companies do this all the time. Did you ever wonder why corporations like to make huge donations to local museums and and build huge sport arenas? Every city has a P&G hall, or Staples center, or Wal*Mart Park or something like that. If these companies are trully "good" and want to help out the most, they should be willing to donate to a local homeless shelters. They should be helping the poor, they should be helping lower incoome people get housing and so on. But they don't do that, because they would not get to trumpet their "charitable" quality all over the city and the media that way. It is all marketing. As individuals we do charitable things becuase we want to help, if we do it anonymously then we really do it to help and not to show off to others, but companies never do that!
Google is not different. The mistake was ours to believe that it would be a better company which truly cares and would never help send a person to jail because of their political views just to make an extra $10/share.
Yes, my email and many documents are on Google's server, and I am too in a process of moving them to my hosting company so and would pay $5/month for a website/email/domain just not to have some gian corp. look through may personal business.
Oh, yes, modded as Troll. How dare one not assume that America is superior on Slashdot. The nerds might be anti-social but they very are patriotic, that's good to know...
Google's sole allegience is to their investors, period. What the investors want? Surprise! - Money! Google at any moment will evaluate the function called f$$$="how much money are we making?" and try to maximize it. They are not there to spread good, love, freedom and democracy. They are maximizing f$$$. When they stop doing it they will stop existing as a company.
But I can hear thousands of Sladotters' voices saying "But doesn't Google do good things and isn't it nicer than Microsoft? You better say YES or we'll mod you into oblivion, traitor!" The answer is that the whole "do no evil" and being nice _is_ part of maximizing f$$$. It has been determined that a company that says "we do no evil" will make more money under certain conditions. Granted when the comany was just the 2 founders they did mean "do no evil" because they would "do no evil", I understand that. But as the company grew it wasn't just the two founders, it turned into a regular public traded company, just as good and just as evil as any other.
This explains why Google is "forced" very often to trump the "do no evil" priority with the "make max $$$" priority. If one would really want to test the "goodness" of Google they would have to point to an instance where Google chose to do "good" at the expense of taking a significant loss (and know about it in advance). So far the China deal and other such happenings point that Google is only maximizing f$$$. Do I think that it is evil? - No. Do I think they are the embodiment of "Mother Theresa - No. Are they just a regular company who is very succesful? - Yes!
Of course the real problem here is with the adjectives of "good" and "evil". One can write a dissertation on how "my good" is not "your good" and how to redefine them for profit. But's that's another comment as they say...
Well the Chinese then should just zap all our satellites from space then, because clearly many of our satellites are an attack system, and any and all such systems should be banned, and destroyed on launch.. Would you go for that? Or is U.S. somehow excempt because we are "God's country" or we have "freedom" and so on?
I thought about that too and I think it comes to survival. When everything is great and the American kids have all the food, toys, athletic afterschool clubs, music, TV, computer games, they see no real reason to study. As far as they are concerned the "good life" will just continue no matter what. In Soviet Union we all got an equal but very small piece of pie. And especially during the last years (mid 80's to late 80's), it was very hard. The share got smaller and smaller until you had to stay for 4 hours in line just to get a piece of bread or some flour. I remember doing that. It was hard for my parents, my mother often cried because she just didn't have enough money to feed me. My father, a 1st class engineer was without a job and then finally got a job loading trucks in a warehouse.
The best I could do to support my family was at least to study well in school. I wasn't exceptional I got Bs mostly and As once in a while (4s and 5s actually...). But I did the best I could to help my family. Well one of the subjects we studied was English and because I did well in it, I eventually got to come to US. And I love US, it is my home now. And I want to make it better. I hurts me when I see American students do so badly in science. I would gladly pay more taxes to have good teachers and equipment in schools if possible.
The problems is that developers, users and managers all speak somewhat different languages. It's all English but they all see things in a different way and that leads to confusion. In general developers should spend a considerable amount of time with the users in their domain to really understand the needs of those users.
Case in point, I worked for a CAD firm and our developers would be sent to different companies to observe how the engineers use our product. We would invite many of those engineers to our headquarters and let them just spend time with the developers. It worked great, especially as far as the user interface of our systems was concerned. To an average non-engineer Joe it would look totally ugly and counter-intuitive but the engineers (our real customers) loved the user interface. When the company was bought out and new management came in they decided to single-handedly change to interface to make it more Windows-like. It ended up sucking and every single real user of our product hated it and refused to upgrade to the new version. The company went downhill after that. I quit too...
I lived under a complete communism. And yes, as far as it worked, we all got a small but mostly even part.
HEALTHCARE: ;) and I trust those doctors just as much as I trust American doctors.
As far as health care was concerned, the Soviets did alright. You would just show up to any hospital / clinic with your book of medical history and you would get medical treatment, no need for insurance cards or anything like that, if you had to stay in the hospital for a month, so be it, you wouldn't have to sell your house, car and blood to be able to do it. Youd didn't get super friendly service with a smile and tons of pain pills but they cured you. I still go back to Russia for medical treatment. I pay less there [they are not communist anymore
SCHOOLS:
Primary schools definetly better. I came to US when I was in the 10th grade and I ended up taking Calculus with the seniors and even tutoring them. I was a good student in Russia but not a genius, just average. Secondary education was not as good, a lot of the stuff was not up to date. I never went to a University there but from what I understood that was the case.
ROADS:
Public transportation did work in the cities. But only in the cities in rural areas it wasn't as easy.
Of course...this is assuming that our tax money is actually well-spent, which isn't always the case.
Bingo! That is why it went down to hell. We paid loads of taxes, 30% and up if I am not mistaken. What happens eventually is that 1) some people find a way to not work and still get the common share of the pie 2) the government apparatus starts growing to un-imaginable proportions because those in the government got more than average worker/citizen. All this and constant spending on militarization eventually led to a crash. So total communism/socialism doesn't work. I don't know if total laisser-fair would work either. The giant corporations would suck all the money from everyone. Imagine that all the schools and roads are owned by Enrons or Microsoft..! The answer is probably somewhere in between...who knows...
he never said that he himself would do it And where did I say that he would do it?
Oh well no need to waste my time with you. Go take English 101 again then come back.
Do you honestly believe that? I think that says something about you. Would you be really surprised if I told you that a lot of people do honestly love their spouses and children more than life. I know I would give my life up for my wife or child without thinking twice about it. I like to believe that most average/normal individual would. Maybe I am optimistic but your point of view is disturbing (to me at least).
I do know that people can be very greedy and cruel but they can also be honest, compassionate and loving. Sometimes the same person will exhibit either of these, either randomly or under certain circumstances.
It seems also that you probably encountered more people of the first kind, while I _chose_ to associate with the second kind, that probably explains our different view of basic human nature.
Welcome to our 'democracy'.
You cannot control a democratic country by force but you can easily do it with fear and lies. Here is the algorithm:
--Fuck up a country algorithm:--
Input: Country founded on freedom, democracy, individual privacy
Output: Complete government control, 0 rights, 0 privacy
1. Make the people afraid. Could be anything, terrorists, communists, mexicans, chinese, witches etc.
2. Tell them that you can make the fear go away if they just willingly relinquish a little bit of their rights and freedoms.
3. Repeat 3 until no more rights and freedoms remain
4. Done.
Wat? Spel? Us...Amerikanz? Haha...ha...haha!
Did you ever forget to report that extra income you made mawing lawns in that summer, well you hid money from Uncle Sam and you probably used it to fun al-Qaeda which makes you a terrorist.
Did you ever think bad thoughts about the president? Well are definetly a terrorist.
Did you ever use encryption? Only pedophiles and terrorists use encryption so you are probably a terrorist.
Taking all this into consideration, we (the DHS) are offering you a once in a lifetime opportunity to travel. You'll be scheduled on the next flight to Egypt on our luxurious private jets. You'll be viziting old prisons and other historical sites where you'll get to take part in exciting age-old interrogation by torture performances to learn local culture and expand your horizons. Oh and...you'll be the one being interrogated, oh and... it's not a performance. Kthxbi
There's a lot to be said for it; anyone can implement it, but at the same time, there's some centralized control over the format, so that every Tom, Dick, and Harry can't build on their own crappy extension to the format and create the sort of Balkanization that's plagued TIFF.
Until one day Adobe is bought by some other software giant and abandons DNG or moves to JPEG9324 (just kidding, but you get the idea). All of the sudden it will be up to Harry Volunteer to write encoders/decoders for DNG. The answer is a an open _standard _ like PNG. The 'standard' part is important because there are already 200+ different tiff types and subtypes. Some use restricted compression standards some have funky tags that will crash some specific program etc. So use PNG! [Unless you desperately need to store data in CMYK only...].
I personally would choose PNG. Compared to TIFF...
It's pros:
1. Newer, very open (TIFF might have problems with its optional LZW compression scheme)
2. Has better compression than TIFF
3. More uniform standard (there are 200+ version of TIFF files and there is always some program that cannot decode some TIFF file).
It's cons:
4. Cannot encode images as CMYK, while TIFF can. Unless you need to print (on a real printer not inkjet) immediatly this doesn't apply.
So I choose PNG. JPEG2000 is actually better format with a much better lossless encoding in theory but there aren't that many applications that support it yet...
Here's my workflow:
Camera[Pentax K10D] -> PEF [proprietary Pentax RAW file]
Copy PEF to PC
Delete the bad (unrecoverable) ones
Archive raw PEF files to backup file server
Process raw PEF files -> PNG [sharpen, fix WB, etc.]
Archive PNG files to backup file server
Delete raw PEF files from PC, but keep PNGs
limited uptake as jpeg2000 vs jpg, mp4/wma/ogg vs mp3, png vs gif, etc As opposed to a rapid updake of Pentax's PEF raw format. How many browsers do you know that render that format?
Company talk, you gotta love. Always read between the lines, kind of like talking to women...