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User: blahplusplus

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Comments · 3,379

  1. Re:"Unregulated market" is an oxymoron on Nielsen Collects FL Tax Breaks, Then Outsources Jobs · · Score: 1

    "Not sure that forced is the right word although I agree the freedom NOT to partcipate is not in the fundies rule book."

    Forced is the right word because of the threat of ostracism, social stigma, never being able to save much money, being wiped out by increases in electricity/food/gas. Not to mention social issues like poor men have less mating opportunities then women, which is a causitive factor in sexual abuse.

    How can one NOT participate and not be ostracized, or haggled by law enforcement trying to haggle you? They did this with the native peoples up in the yukon and whatnot here in canada.

    Unfortunately we are forced to participate in the market. Even the amish at some point have to participate in the market and their always under pressure from social influences and government.

  2. Re:Just Deserts on Nielsen Collects FL Tax Breaks, Then Outsources Jobs · · Score: 1

    "I've always been amused by people who manage to reveal their hypocrisy in the space of one single sentence."

    Just a comment on human nature. Hypocrisy is the DEFINITION of being human, everyone inconsistently applies their principles, it took me years to finally 'get this' and really grasp that that's how everyone is, if one is to be honest with oneself. i.e. (propertarianism, private property) why can't we own people, when people are just re-organized land?

    We are TOTALLY inconsistent across the board.

  3. Re:Just Deserts on Nielsen Collects FL Tax Breaks, Then Outsources Jobs · · Score: 1

    "Free markets are inherently *inefficient* because characteristically they are able to offset the management of their externalities onto the community. The fact is free markets cannot afford to produce their goods because they are massively subsidised by the community producing the illusion that they are efficient, in the meantime the community (read taxpayers) are left with the burden of dealing with the toxic/social impact"

    Some externalities though are cost-benefit analysis's versus our lack of knowledge and skill to deal with the consequences of our inventions. Ultimately everyone (businesses and customemers), it is our own stupidity and lack of knowledge of the consequencies, we can't stuff the knowledge of all scientists, chemical engineers, etc, etc. We just can't pack that kind of knowledge into each individual human being at present, we are quite limited in our foresight. For instance nuclear power vs waste storage or waste "breakdown" technology (say we found a way to 'neuter' its harmful effects).

    No doubt many of the unseen (and uknown) problems we create and lack of understanding of them come to bite us in the ass in taxes, etc, but this is the nature of ANY development / economic activity, there are always risks. Just like how the romans used lead pipes of waterworks/aqueducts.

  4. Re:"Unregulated market" is an oxymoron on Nielsen Collects FL Tax Breaks, Then Outsources Jobs · · Score: 1

    "reference to a rule of the market that says everyone is free to participate in the market."

    But the world is not a market, it is the world. The parents versino of the market is what free market fundementalists often insinute to justify elimination of minmum wage and offloading tremendous risks onto works and externalizing costs, they act in the direction of the GP when they behave towards non-owners and those without large sums of capital or power.

    In actuality everyone is FORCED to participate in the market because food and energy are under private ownership, most of the population does not own their own infrastructure to produce food, clothing, electricity, water, etc. So even the so called free market today is involuntary because of the technological and cultural changes (specialization, education, etc), that are needed to maintain society and it's technology.

  5. Re:Just Deserts on Nielsen Collects FL Tax Breaks, Then Outsources Jobs · · Score: 1

    "Saying "The world is too complicated" sounds like a cop-out. Sure there's more information available than ever before, but there's also far more effective methods of accessing it than ever before. Knowing how to use google and wikipedia (and evaluate the credibility of the resultant sources) can give you answers to just about any question you can think of."

    It doesn't matter though, think of how much bullshit the copyright lobby is getting away with right now and shit they passed with the DMCA, it proves many of my points in the prior post. Theres too many old people who did not grow up with the technology to understand those political issues and we end up getting fucked.

    See issues @
    http://www.michaelgeist.ca/

  6. Good hellgate sucked... on Flagship Studios Going Under · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Flagship studios was so full of themselves. I knew hellgate london would flop as soon as I saw the title. It made no sense and the lack of 2d isometric (3d rendered) view I knew would kill this game with the variety of easy to play MMO's, and the fact that Hellgate is an action game. The action just doesn't feel the same in 3D, the feel of the game is way off and nowhere near as fun as say diablo 2, I'm sure many diablo fans were hoping it would be good and had the same issues. Doing a 3D action game like diablo takes talent and hellgate didn't have anywhere near enough. The feel of the universe and the art direction was way too MMO'ish, like a cheap knockoff of a real MMO in which you can do more and get more for your money.

  7. Re:Just Deserts on Nielsen Collects FL Tax Breaks, Then Outsources Jobs · · Score: 1

    For you that want to see it immediately, skip to 17 minutes in and watch it until 22ish minutes on the slider.

  8. Re:Just Deserts on Nielsen Collects FL Tax Breaks, Then Outsources Jobs · · Score: 1

    "If people are sitting at home watching 20 hours of reality TV a week, then they have no excuse for being ill-informed."

    According to actual SCIENCE they DO have an excuse, all of you who think 'the public needs ot be informed' need to see the 2nd video called Decieving images. It's the juiciest one and exposes the 'enightenment fallacy' (enlightenment view of reason), but you ALL should watch all three.

    http://www.linktv.org/programs/orwell_deceiving

  9. Re:Creative on Most CF Cards Fail DMA Transfers · · Score: 1

    "Which in this thread [creative.com] is being discussed around X-Fi hardware."

    I have an X-fi (the full version with the faceplate) and I had the 'crackle', but you assume end users know what their 'crackle' causes actually IS, most users I imagine are quite doltish, although some might genuinely have problems but I imagine it's a small group. For me and I found out the crackle was actually because of the soundblaster faceplate 'IDE cable' that connects the card to the faceplate for audio out.

    Once I moved it around a bit away from other devices, the crackle was gone. It was picking up interference from other devices inside the system. I noticed this with (older) video cards a lot. If a video card is really close to a soundcard you'll you'll hear the noise out of your soundcard when your card is being used heavily.

  10. Re:Just Deserts on Nielsen Collects FL Tax Breaks, Then Outsources Jobs · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "This is what happens when a apathetic populace lets fascism or corporatism slide."

    Accurate but missing the reasons why. This is what happens when it takes two incomes, and 50-60+ hour work weeks to raise a family, add in long communtes, then on top of that add in all the distractions and whatnot and you get an overworked, overtired population with scarce little time for everything else.

    If we want this not to happen we have to take people out of the market and pay them to do nothing but investigate and manage these issues, so that they can be reasonably informed instead of sheeps at the slaughter house against trained shady scientists and marketing people who manipulate them.

    Treating these issues like the average person can do it in the free time is nonsense today in the increasing complexity and sophistication of propaganda sciences that take advantage of advancements in psychology, neurology, biology. Not to mention the other areas of technological expertise. It may have been ok 100 or even 60 years ago. But today it's not because of all the technology and the increasing sophistication of business using science unethically to manipulate the government, and the increasing overwork and distraction of todays society.

    Most people simply do not have anywhere near enough time. To really get a grasp of todays complex issues basically means a full time commitment like a full time job for a few years, we should be using public money to 'hire' (or rather shield their wages when they talk 'time off for citizenship') random selections of citizens for a couple years and subsidize the lost wages. This way we can subsidize democracy, so they can take a few years off their job, talk to people, get informed so they can start being a good citizen. Since it really takes a long time to really grasp and read the volumes of stuff out there today.

    Time is a finite resource, and the public doesn't have anywhere near enough today. Thinking the public can do it without the necessary years of time off to focus 100% on these issues shows a lack of perception in how society has changed and how complicated it has become.

  11. Re:AGREED on Usenet Blocking Intensifies · · Score: 1

    And that's exactly what I said! "Next is the fact that you didn't pick up on the truncated thought..."

    i.e. ignore the error I made instead of focusing on it because it was unimportant.

  12. Re:AGREED on Usenet Blocking Intensifies · · Score: 1

    "While there are places that do not share this,"

    And thats why I said it wasn't universal, a universal means its universal, there are no exceptions. You asserted a proposition that asserts something of all members of a class and then said there are places that do not share this.

    Next is the fact that you didn't pick up on the truncated thought (i.e. mental shortcut), in which I made it look like that it was only 'the west' that was repressed, that was the gist you were not picking up. Always remember that when part of a post is made in haste. I could go and write an essay about it but this is slashdot. :P

    So yes it is obvious that you didn't understand the subtext of what I was saying.

  13. Re:AGREED on Usenet Blocking Intensifies · · Score: 1

    You did not understand what I said. You missed the gist of what I said completely.

  14. Re:AGREED on Usenet Blocking Intensifies · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Is some of that really 'kiddie porn'? I checked out naturism newsgroup has lots of regular looking folks not engaging in sex and doing regular activities in the nude, I wouldn't exactly call that 'porn', many of them look like family vacation/bbq/get together photos to me IMHO.

    Looking at pictures in naturism.family doesn't seem like porn to me at all, (disregarding cross posters) there are regular people taking pictures in the background in a few of them.

    I think this all has to do with judeo-christian cultural values of the west and it's crazy puritan heritage, other cultures do not share the same values. The idea of 'kiddie porn' is not universal.

    People are naturally born naked, and many other cultures are comfortable being around people (strangers) in other countries, it's only really the west that is so repressed.

  15. Re:I guess ID really isn't creationism then.. on Louisiana Passes Intelligent Design Law · · Score: 1

    You didn't even understand what I said. Sorry.

  16. Re:I guess ID really isn't creationism then.. on Louisiana Passes Intelligent Design Law · · Score: 1

    "ID is NOT backed by evidence and is NOT falsifiable, thus it is NOT a theory."

    I don't agree with ID but please don't lie. I've read lots from both camps on the net, ID and not, so I know many commenters here are talking out there ass.

    Next in principle ID must be falsifiable, otherwise it's antonym (naturalism) is also unfalsifiable in principle. Either they both are falsifiable or they are both not falsifiable, you can't have it both ways.

    Your argument would make SETI and archeology not really 'sciences' which I doubt anyone would dispute. The truth is SETI and archeology already prove that ID theories already exist for a whole host of phenomena.

    Here's many ways you could falsify ID, explained here:

    http://www.arn.org/docs/behe/mb_philosophicalobjectionsresponse.htm

  17. Re:Wrong direction on Samsung Mass Produces 128GB SSD · · Score: 1

    "We don't need higher capacity."

    People have been saying that forever in computer land, we're not at 2-4GB of RAM as a norm, 3+Ghz processors. There are applications not yet thought of or which require a little more time for significant advances using current computation.

    Don't underestimate our 'needs', we'll find ways to use that space no one has yet dreamed of. While the average bear might not need that much, a significant size of the market will always want more.

  18. Re:Oy vey... on How Technology Changes Classrooms · · Score: 4, Informative

    "Thanks to technology, people are graduating without even knowing how to construct complete sentences. And also thanks to technology, those same people can now go on to be "editors" for major websites."

    Or it could be that most schools do not teach grammar or language structure at all, I know when I was in school we never got any of that crap. We got a few mentions of 'noun' vs 'verb', etc. But nothing like a lecture or classes on proper sentence structure.

  19. Re:Just one more errosion.... on Boiling Down Books, Algorithmically · · Score: 2, Interesting

    "That's very promising. But the fact remains that publishers such as Elsevier own the copyright to many decades-worth of scientific literature. And they're not about to give any of it away."

    Then I submit the scientific community creates a project website to buy the rights to these works, I've come up with many ways for funding such an endeavor. The barrier would primarily be geometric (population size vs amount of money each person could donate/give/invest in such a venture) and the attitudes of the people themselves.

  20. Re:Just one more errosion.... on Boiling Down Books, Algorithmically · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What really hits a nerve with me is why the scientific community hasn't opened up all their journals for others to read. I imagine many retired and amateur scientists, engineers, hobbyists, etc, would have a lot of insight into many engineering and scientific problems and also make many discoveries as well. Intelligence is not limited to the credentialed, those of high status or currently employed, many discoveries happen simply by exposure to as many minds as possible, and finding connections and errors in others works..

  21. Re:And that, boys and girls, on Einstein's Theory Passes Strict New Test · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It's not just about what is taught it's about how one thinks about problems:

    Even more vivid was Albert Einstein's explanation how human reasoning includes visual thinking.

    "The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be 'voluntarily' reproduced and combined .... this combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought before there is any connection with logical construction in words or other kinds of signs which can be communicated to others". Albert Einstein in a letter to Jacques Hadamard.
    A more contemporary example of visual thinking is given by James Gleick from "The Life and Science of Richard Feynman", Vintage Books, New York, 1992.

    "Visualization - you keep repeating that", he (Feynman) said to another historian, Silvan S. Schweber, who was trying to interview him

    Feynman: "What I am really try to do is bring birth to clarity, which is really a half-assedly thought-out-pictorial semi-vision thing. I would see the jiggle-jiggle-jiggle or the wiggle of the path. Even now when I talk about the influence functional, I see the coupling and I take this turn - like as if there was a big bag of stuff - and try to collect it in away and to push it. It's all visual. It's hard to explain."

  22. Re:And that, boys and girls, on Einstein's Theory Passes Strict New Test · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's the value of good old fashioned visual thinking and geometry actually, einstein's theories were so powerful correct BECAUSE he was an excellent visual thinker and thought in terms of geometry. Geometry is highly under-rated in mathematics and physics in my opinion.

  23. Re:Fix your idea... on Is Today's Web Still 'the Web'? · · Score: 1

    I meant web in the general sense of the term of being a network mesh of computers, if you read his article he is mainly complaining the applications run on the network platform are changing... well duh!

  24. Dumb question... on Is Today's Web Still 'the Web'? · · Score: 1

    The web is an abstract term to describe the general topology of interconnected connected computers. It has nothing to do with interfaces, etc. This would be like asking is the internet still the internet now that most of it's users don't use lynx and gopher. It's a ridiculous statement.

    The web is merely a platform, what companies and software developers come up with to deliver what people and/or their customers want, is up to them.

    How is it different from the real world, the real world is a 'web' if you think about it, a bunch of interconnecting roads and transportation lines (trains, etc), although people don't think of it that way, it is essentially a network, a platform for serving needs and solving problems.

  25. Re:Not Sure I'm Getting It on Intel Says to Prepare For "Thousands of Cores" · · Score: 4, Informative

    "Because each core is no longer task switching. Once you have more cores than tasks you can remove all the context switching logic and optimize the cores to run single processes as fast as possible.

    Then you take the tasks that can be broken up over multiple cores (Ray Tracing anyone?) and fill the rest of your cores with that."

    Unfortunately all this is going to lead to bus and memory bandwidth contention, you're just shifting the burden from one point to another. Although their is a 'penalty' for task switching, there is an even greater bottleneck at the bus and memory bandwidth level.

    IMHO intel would have to release a cpu on a card with specialized ram chips and segment the ram like GPU's do to get anything out of multicore over the long term, ram is not keeping up and the current architecture for PC ram is awful for multicore. CPU speed is far outstripping bus and memory bandwidth. I am quite dubious of multi-core architecture, there is fundamental limits of geometry of circuits. I'd be sinking my money into materials research not glueing cores together and praying CS and math guys come up with solutions that take advantage of it.

    The whole of human history of engineering and tool use, is to take something extremely complicated and offload complexity, and compartmentalize it so that it's mangable. I see the opposite happening with multi-core.