"Yeah, and remember when they criminalized drugs, and everybody stopped using them and there was no more money to be made in the field?"
The reason prices are high is because there's no legal way to obtain them, so the risk of producing and distributing are built in. In fact that's one of the arguments for legalization, is the price would drop out and you'd have less money going to organized crime and fewer property crimes being committed to fuel expensive habits.
As long as the media content is availabe legally the price can't climb any higher than legitimate copies, and generally will be much lower, to compensate for the risk of getting caught/inferior quality.
Have you seen the kind of people that sell CD and DVD rips at flea markets or on the streets. Not exactly living large are they now?
I would second the cheaper also. I've had a Tuner card that has seen me through three full systems and about seven video card upgrades and is still working great. In comparison the 2MB video card, 64MB memory, 56k modem, 4X CD Rom etc that shared space with it when it was new have long since hit the dustbin.
While this would be difficult to do currently, the hurdles will likely fall in the next year or two.
The solution is to tailor distribution packages and prices according to intended usage.
Continue selling physical media that can be resold/traded at current prices or perhaps a little higher.
Sell physical media with restrictions that tie usage to a single individual for less.
Sell digital media with time limited (perhaps even per unit of time, day or week) restrictions for less than the common price points of used media or rentals.
This way everyone gets what they want (albeit by paying what the item they want is worth instead of everyone paying the same price that averages the cost of all user types together). Want a copy that you can play forever or sell later if you get bored with it, you can get it. Want to just play a game cheaply and then be done with it (and not have to hassle with reselling the game later to recoup part of the purchase price thus making it cheap as you desire), you can get it. Want to have the game in perpetuity but know you'll never sell or share the game with other people, you can get it and cheaper than it would cost now because the company doesn't have to factor in lost sales in the price you pay due to something you won't even be doing.
Granted protection schemes and content delivery systems of today aren't yet up to the task, but these are solvable problems and I expect that day to not be long in coming.
Would game companies make more money if everyone paid full price and there was no used market or piracy? Well the decision makers need to be careful they base their decisions on achievable contexts, not candyland fantasies.
Personally I'd be satisfied with some sort of a trusted archive that allows you to research different programs/sites/companies. There's a lot of info available on the web but most of it is buried in tech forums or as come ons for dubious spyware removal programs, both of which you're never really confident about the truth. That way it wouldn't be just a yay or nay that goes on under the covers, but a place where you could find out what a program's issues are, or the track record of a developer.
I don't disagree with anything you've said here, it just leaves us still with the tough nut to crack of soverignty. If children in a family want to watch R rated movies but their parents won't allow it, do you recognize the "soverignty" of the parents and respect their right to approve/disapprove what their children are exposed to? What about PG movies? G movies? Or TV/movies at all? Or do you overrule the parents and allow the children to do what they like (as long as it agrees with you of course;)?
I'm not suggesting Chinese citizens are kids, just that in a variety of spheres we recognize some degree of independence or sovereignty and acknowledge that as outsiders it is not within our rights to interfere (free to disapprove or discourage, but ultimately not our decision to make). And really it's the only way to have our own rights respected within our respective spheres. Are there limits on the country level? I would hope so, but I would also hope that the bar be sufficiently high that the concept itself doesn't lose meaning, and we become subject to the whims of anyone that might disagree with how we operate.
If the Chinese people want to surf unimpeded using Google, they need to stand up and make the sacrifices necessary to allow that to happen. I'll probably take a lot of flak for saying this, but even in dictatorial and authoritian regimes, their power is derived from the consent of the people. Implicit consent allows them to do what they do just as well as explicit consent.
As much as I support OSS and I think the argument that commercial software is just as vulnerable to the risk of patent infringing, I disagree that they are comparable in likely outcomes. A business that sells the software under their own liscence has the option of settling with the patent holder, paying liscence fees, mounting a legal challenge that invalidates the patent, etc. That none of these things happened in the Blackberry case is more the result of factors unique to this particular conflict and the players themselves.
But take an OSS software that is distributed for free. Most if not all of these options are off the table, meaning they are much more likely to get shut down as a result of an infringement case. Hence more risk. Though in a shutdown situation I agree that OSS would be preferable as it would at least allow individual users to continue in-house development until they were able to move on to something else instead of potentially facing an overnight shutdown situation.
You're familiar I'm sure with the Safesearch option that Google provides, by default it is on. Are your searches any less useful or meaningful given that you are searching a subset of the world's information that doesn't include pornography? Is it any less "accurate" to use your words? Certainly by some degree, but we still find such searches useful don't we? As will the Chinese benefit in all their searches that are not politically oriented.
No one here is arguing this isn't an undesirable situation, but in a choice between filtering political content (a subset of all the information indexed by Google) and China restricting all access to the search engine which is worse? It's the same reason I brought up Cuba and Iraq, not to compare specific situations (filtering vs UN sanctioned embargos) but rather the rationale behind the decision and the negative consequences of taking such a course on the people. So you would rather they have zero access, rather than access to everything but political content objectionable to China's Regime?
Hopefully China can be convinced to be more open and tolerant, but given that it's unlikely to happen today or the next day, what do we do in the meantime?
I wish I could view the world in the terms you describe, where decisions like this are "slam-dunk[s], no brainer[s]" but there just seems to be no optimal path that avoids all harm. The best I can see is choosing the path of least harm/greatest good, keeping an eye both on the short and the long term consequences. It makes things more complicated and decisions more agonizing, but I'm not willing to pay the price of harmful outcomes on the ground just for moral convenience.
"Neither of those gets them out of the hypocrisy hole."
Wrong. Hypocrisy requires enough control over the situation to be able to do what one says. Is a mother a hypocrite when she says she loves her child but the child dies from luekemia? I mean how could you say you love your child and then let the child die?
You shouldn't judge based on a situation that doesn't exist. Google only has certain options when dealing with China, a sovereign nation. Did they choose the option most consistent with their guiding philosophy?
The parent is correct, unless you can suggest something else, doing no business with China almost certainly would have resulted in the greater harm for the Chinese. Just look at what we have done to the people of Cuba and Iraq (the general population).
Don't take the roof from over my head, the food off my table, or the book out of my hands and crow you are doing me a favor. Blind adherence to "ideals" that ignores the real world consequences is the true hypocrisy I believe.
Depends I suppose on your precise defintion. Up until about 10 years ago or so would you consider photo development equipment to be consumer level? More expensive than most people would pay to buy one themselves, but almost everyone had no problem dropping their film off at a developers and paying a few bucks for the "use" of the equipment.
Same here, lots of fabrication shops out there that you can send your data and they send you the object (most are not exclusive to this, just one of their many tools).
And 10-15 years from now it wouldn't surprise me to be able to pick one of these up for a hundred bucks, just as you can now with digital photography and photo printers.
"Are you American by any chance? Demonising sex seems to be an American peculiarity I've never fully understood..."
You really want to know? Same reason some animals have dominant males that hoarde sexual access to multiple females while discouraging other males, often through threat of violence. In humans it takes the form of encouraging celibacy/monagamy, while at the same time having sex with as many partners in secret as possible.
In other words, by demonizing sex, you are able to procure reproductive advantage for yourself by not practicing what you preach. Not all animals are like this, and not all human societies have been developed by leaders inclined to do this, although most people have some shades of it in some form or another. (You'd have a much bigger problem with your spouse or the people around you sleeping around then with yourself doing so).
Don't get distracted by the whole "it's a natural act so nobody should have a problem with it" tangent. Because you can't believe the words coming out of people's mouths to justify why they don't want this or that to go on. Hypocrisy benefits the hypocrits, they get to have it both ways. That's the start and the finish of it. And why it's so common to have religious/political leaders embroiled in scandal when they get caught doing what they preached against.
In the modern age with GPS cell phones and paternity tests our natural inclinations for duplicity in the sexual arena are becoming more and more difficult to pull off effectively.
Which isn't bad. As always happens, as conditions change, what works best will be selected for, and what doesn't will be selected against.
You're misreading the intent. This device isn't intended to make expensive wine cheap. It's intended to make cheap wine taste better.
People who drive Lexus automobiles aren't a relevant concern when making more comfortable seats in Camrys.
For your comment to be true, there can't be anyone out there that buys cheap wine. As two buck chuck demonstrated, there's a tremendous market out there for cheap wine that's decent quality.
Actually I may have paraphrased too much, I think the specific point was more along the lines of they once had a person to edit the crap mistakes out, but instead of complaining about those, people just complained about other stuff, so better to just spend time flogging submissions than worrying about satisfying people that are going to complain no matter what, so give them some low hanging fruit to complain about.
You must have missed the recent news post where Taco answered a bunch of questions about SD and talked about this point, he basically said that all the grammar and spelling errors are part of the charm of Slashdot.
In other words, it's a feature, not a bug lol.
I'd find a link to the discussion but I can't be arsed to wade through the hundreds of posts in the discussion to find it.
I admit to it bothering the hell out of me before also (the frequent, obvious screwups in the postings), but now that I know they purposefully don't care, it doesn't bother me as much anymore (I guess what bothered me most was the leaving the errors unfixed more than the errors being made in the first place, now I'm not left there hanging, waiting for them to fix the crap and I just move on to the discussion and forget it).
"You do realize Heinlein has you beat by 50 years or more, right?"
If you worry about filtering your knowledge against all that has come before you and all that is going on right now, you will be paralyzed into inaction. There's just way too many people out there all working with essentially the same wetware for much unique thought to pop into existance. Outside of academia where novel thought is the currency of the profession, it's simply more practical to charge ahead with your own thoughts and claim them for what they are, yours. I'm perfectly willing to take it on faith that when someone says they thought something up on their own that they are bring truthful.
Anyone who has done any serious reading will know that eerie feeling of encountering someone else who has developed a similar line of thought as one of your own, especially when it comes from a source hundreds or even thousands of years old.
So what's my point? Not that you shouldn't point out the reference to Heinlein, just try not to be so condescending about it. As if it's somehow the person's fault they don't already know about someone else who has developed a similar or parallel idea. There's lots of ways of making a friendly connection to older material. If anything it's a bit of a compliment I think to mirror thought that has become recognized as important enough that people 50 years later still associate it with a particular person in history.
Here's one with a nice example of an exercise you can do at your computer screen (there's a ton of people selling these programs, I have yet to find a good online one that is both comprehensive and free, but this link will at least give you the general flavor).
"Thats not the issue. Obviously I prefer Gates helping the less fortunate to hoarding his money, I just happen to think that writing a few checks shouldn't buy the guy a hero's legacy and overshadow the 20 years of unethical/monopolistic buisness practices that created said money."
Ok, so what are some examples of things that would be sufficient pennance for his misdeeds? You say that erasing third world debt, immunizing about a third of the worlds children against various diseases, funding a cure for AIDS, etc aren't good enough, what would be? Or are his sins unforgivable?
So you have now taken care of illegitimate information that should never have been recorded in the first place. How does your "solution" resolve disclosure of legitimately sensitive information? Are you actually suggesting that the solution is to not have trade secrets, not have private client contact lists, medical information, pay rates, future plans, employee evaluations, etc.? That any information that should not be made public is therefore by definition verboten?
so it's mostly the right wing attacking that which they can't understand and don't like
I'm not saying they all have good intentions, but I think it's not unfair to say that most of the rank and file are of the opinion that this material actually harms people. And just as you might distribute mosquito netting to reduce malaria, reducing the outlets where this stuff gets shown will reduce the damage.
As long as they aren't getting this stuff outlawed, I think they are well within their rights to try to convince people to not watch it, not distribute it, and not profit from it (where all the interactions are voluntary).
I suspect many of the politicians are involved for self-serving and rather cynical reasons, but in the end that doesn't matter, as long as you are able to say what you want and use your own resources to get that message out. Just don't make the mistake of thinking that free speech gives you the right to use other people's resources to convey your speech or to force anyone to listen to you.
I agree, I'm dreading the day when I put in my VB6 disc in for a reinstall and it fails. I'd say about 90% of the tinkering and proof of concepting I do is still in VB6.
They still haven't delivered copies of 2005 locally for me to pick one up, but I'm really hoping that for one thing the documentation is improved. As frustrating as it was to spend hours digging around trying to find the exact syntax for some out of the way function in vb.net it was even more so for all the useless descriptions for the common stuff that I swear must have been machine generated as it was generic to the point of being useless, or if not machine generated maybe written by President Bush's press secretary lol, that guy can talk for 20 minutes without ever actually saying anything.
You back yourself up from an ill-reputable source, like wikipedia. "Look, wikipedia said it!"
You're barking up the wrong tree. People use citations for two purposes, for authority or to provide more detailed information. Sometimes it's both, somtimes it's just one or the other.
Wikipedia doesn't have much authority, but it's a great source for providing detailed information in a concise format that almost everyone will have direct access to (unlike most references where you have to take it on faith that the person has made a reasonable interpretation of the source material and you don't actually go yourself to the primary sources to digest everything there). Especially for a topic such as this where you would never find much detailed information if any at all in an encyclopedia or dictionary that has a high authority value. Nor is there much need for it in this case regardless.
For example, if you were curious about the different treatments and their success rates for treating a particular disease, you'd want high authority sources. But what high value facts are on the table in knowing more about a type of chatbot and how and where it's been used. It's just descriptive information.
You mean the IPO which set an opening share price which immediately doubled after the funds had been raised? Oh yeah that was a great IPO. It's a wonder that not a single IPO since then has imitated the model.
First of all your basic premise is false, it took quite a while before it doubled and that was only after Google showed what a profit engine it is. Secondly, the model has been little imitated for exactly the same reason it was rarely used before Google's IPO. It doesn't benefit the decision makers and backroom dealmakers nearly as much as the standard way of doing business. There really are very few people in the world of business like Sergi and Brin, whether that's good or bad is up to you to decide, because it's a value neutral decision, rather it just reflects who benefits the most.
So what if we are exitinct? Who cares? The Earth doesn't.
While it might seem like we have a pretty good idea how things will play out, it's far from certain. The very fact that we can envision alternative scenarios and possiblities argue strongly to keep our race alive as long as possible. Even the ultimate demise of this universe doesn't necessarily constrain our ability to continue. Either way though, between the people that don't really care and don't make any effort to influence the world around them and those who try to survive no matter what the cost and continually strive to influence their environment to the benefit of themselves and their progeny, one is much more likely to see that day should it ever come. In other words, no one's going to make you do anything spectacular with your life but you'll need a much more persuasive argument if you ever hope to convert everyone else to your sloth and mortal resignation.
I suspect you must have misplaced a decimal or some such in your "calculations" because what you describe as impossible is a common product used by most households throughout Central and South America. Called a Ducha, it's basically a glorified showerhead with a power hookup that heats the water as you shower.
When the wiring was slipshod and unsightly it always made me think twice about turning it on.
Microwaves kill various germs too, don't they? They should market this as both a water heater and a sanitizer.
The linked article is only two paragraphs, the second one was...
"The tankless system uses microwave technology to heat water on demand, saving energy and providing an endless supply of hot water for residential and commercial usage. The technology is designed to eliminate the deadly Legionella Pneumophila, since water will not stagnate, as it does with conventional hot water heaters."
Some things are riskier than others, the decision is to avoid behaviors that exceed your risk tolerance threshold. For me that's the case with IE, it's just too risky for me to use it. Firefox on the other hand is currently tolerable, the benefit outweighs the risk.
Slashdot Mirror
"Yeah, and remember when they criminalized drugs, and everybody stopped using them and there was no more money to be made in the field?"
The reason prices are high is because there's no legal way to obtain them, so the risk of producing and distributing are built in. In fact that's one of the arguments for legalization, is the price would drop out and you'd have less money going to organized crime and fewer property crimes being committed to fuel expensive habits.
As long as the media content is availabe legally the price can't climb any higher than legitimate copies, and generally will be much lower, to compensate for the risk of getting caught/inferior quality.
Have you seen the kind of people that sell CD and DVD rips at flea markets or on the streets. Not exactly living large are they now?
I would second the cheaper also. I've had a Tuner card that has seen me through three full systems and about seven video card upgrades and is still working great. In comparison the 2MB video card, 64MB memory, 56k modem, 4X CD Rom etc that shared space with it when it was new have long since hit the dustbin.
While this would be difficult to do currently, the hurdles will likely fall in the next year or two.
The solution is to tailor distribution packages and prices according to intended usage.
Continue selling physical media that can be resold/traded at current prices or perhaps a little higher.
Sell physical media with restrictions that tie usage to a single individual for less.
Sell digital media with time limited (perhaps even per unit of time, day or week) restrictions for less than the common price points of used media or rentals.
This way everyone gets what they want (albeit by paying what the item they want is worth instead of everyone paying the same price that averages the cost of all user types together). Want a copy that you can play forever or sell later if you get bored with it, you can get it. Want to just play a game cheaply and then be done with it (and not have to hassle with reselling the game later to recoup part of the purchase price thus making it cheap as you desire), you can get it. Want to have the game in perpetuity but know you'll never sell or share the game with other people, you can get it and cheaper than it would cost now because the company doesn't have to factor in lost sales in the price you pay due to something you won't even be doing.
Granted protection schemes and content delivery systems of today aren't yet up to the task, but these are solvable problems and I expect that day to not be long in coming.
Would game companies make more money if everyone paid full price and there was no used market or piracy? Well the decision makers need to be careful they base their decisions on achievable contexts, not candyland fantasies.
Personally I'd be satisfied with some sort of a trusted archive that allows you to research different programs/sites/companies. There's a lot of info available on the web but most of it is buried in tech forums or as come ons for dubious spyware removal programs, both of which you're never really confident about the truth. That way it wouldn't be just a yay or nay that goes on under the covers, but a place where you could find out what a program's issues are, or the track record of a developer.
I don't disagree with anything you've said here, it just leaves us still with the tough nut to crack of soverignty. If children in a family want to watch R rated movies but their parents won't allow it, do you recognize the "soverignty" of the parents and respect their right to approve/disapprove what their children are exposed to? What about PG movies? G movies? Or TV/movies at all? Or do you overrule the parents and allow the children to do what they like (as long as it agrees with you of course ;)?
I'm not suggesting Chinese citizens are kids, just that in a variety of spheres we recognize some degree of independence or sovereignty and acknowledge that as outsiders it is not within our rights to interfere (free to disapprove or discourage, but ultimately not our decision to make). And really it's the only way to have our own rights respected within our respective spheres. Are there limits on the country level? I would hope so, but I would also hope that the bar be sufficiently high that the concept itself doesn't lose meaning, and we become subject to the whims of anyone that might disagree with how we operate.
If the Chinese people want to surf unimpeded using Google, they need to stand up and make the sacrifices necessary to allow that to happen. I'll probably take a lot of flak for saying this, but even in dictatorial and authoritian regimes, their power is derived from the consent of the people. Implicit consent allows them to do what they do just as well as explicit consent.
As much as I support OSS and I think the argument that commercial software is just as vulnerable to the risk of patent infringing, I disagree that they are comparable in likely outcomes. A business that sells the software under their own liscence has the option of settling with the patent holder, paying liscence fees, mounting a legal challenge that invalidates the patent, etc. That none of these things happened in the Blackberry case is more the result of factors unique to this particular conflict and the players themselves.
But take an OSS software that is distributed for free. Most if not all of these options are off the table, meaning they are much more likely to get shut down as a result of an infringement case. Hence more risk. Though in a shutdown situation I agree that OSS would be preferable as it would at least allow individual users to continue in-house development until they were able to move on to something else instead of potentially facing an overnight shutdown situation.
You're familiar I'm sure with the Safesearch option that Google provides, by default it is on. Are your searches any less useful or meaningful given that you are searching a subset of the world's information that doesn't include pornography? Is it any less "accurate" to use your words? Certainly by some degree, but we still find such searches useful don't we? As will the Chinese benefit in all their searches that are not politically oriented.
No one here is arguing this isn't an undesirable situation, but in a choice between filtering political content (a subset of all the information indexed by Google) and China restricting all access to the search engine which is worse? It's the same reason I brought up Cuba and Iraq, not to compare specific situations (filtering vs UN sanctioned embargos) but rather the rationale behind the decision and the negative consequences of taking such a course on the people. So you would rather they have zero access, rather than access to everything but political content objectionable to China's Regime?
Hopefully China can be convinced to be more open and tolerant, but given that it's unlikely to happen today or the next day, what do we do in the meantime?
I wish I could view the world in the terms you describe, where decisions like this are "slam-dunk[s], no brainer[s]" but there just seems to be no optimal path that avoids all harm. The best I can see is choosing the path of least harm/greatest good, keeping an eye both on the short and the long term consequences. It makes things more complicated and decisions more agonizing, but I'm not willing to pay the price of harmful outcomes on the ground just for moral convenience.
"Neither of those gets them out of the hypocrisy hole."
Wrong. Hypocrisy requires enough control over the situation to be able to do what one says. Is a mother a hypocrite when she says she loves her child but the child dies from luekemia? I mean how could you say you love your child and then let the child die?
You shouldn't judge based on a situation that doesn't exist. Google only has certain options when dealing with China, a sovereign nation. Did they choose the option most consistent with their guiding philosophy?
The parent is correct, unless you can suggest something else, doing no business with China almost certainly would have resulted in the greater harm for the Chinese. Just look at what we have done to the people of Cuba and Iraq (the general population).
Don't take the roof from over my head, the food off my table, or the book out of my hands and crow you are doing me a favor. Blind adherence to "ideals" that ignores the real world consequences is the true hypocrisy I believe.
Depends I suppose on your precise defintion. Up until about 10 years ago or so would you consider photo development equipment to be consumer level? More expensive than most people would pay to buy one themselves, but almost everyone had no problem dropping their film off at a developers and paying a few bucks for the "use" of the equipment.
Same here, lots of fabrication shops out there that you can send your data and they send you the object (most are not exclusive to this, just one of their many tools).
And 10-15 years from now it wouldn't surprise me to be able to pick one of these up for a hundred bucks, just as you can now with digital photography and photo printers.
"Are you American by any chance? Demonising sex seems to be an American peculiarity I've never fully understood..."
You really want to know? Same reason some animals have dominant males that hoarde sexual access to multiple females while discouraging other males, often through threat of violence. In humans it takes the form of encouraging celibacy/monagamy, while at the same time having sex with as many partners in secret as possible.
In other words, by demonizing sex, you are able to procure reproductive advantage for yourself by not practicing what you preach. Not all animals are like this, and not all human societies have been developed by leaders inclined to do this, although most people have some shades of it in some form or another. (You'd have a much bigger problem with your spouse or the people around you sleeping around then with yourself doing so).
Don't get distracted by the whole "it's a natural act so nobody should have a problem with it" tangent. Because you can't believe the words coming out of people's mouths to justify why they don't want this or that to go on. Hypocrisy benefits the hypocrits, they get to have it both ways. That's the start and the finish of it. And why it's so common to have religious/political leaders embroiled in scandal when they get caught doing what they preached against.
In the modern age with GPS cell phones and paternity tests our natural inclinations for duplicity in the sexual arena are becoming more and more difficult to pull off effectively.
Which isn't bad. As always happens, as conditions change, what works best will be selected for, and what doesn't will be selected against.
You're misreading the intent. This device isn't intended to make expensive wine cheap. It's intended to make cheap wine taste better.
People who drive Lexus automobiles aren't a relevant concern when making more comfortable seats in Camrys.
For your comment to be true, there can't be anyone out there that buys cheap wine. As two buck chuck demonstrated, there's a tremendous market out there for cheap wine that's decent quality.
Low price doesn't mean a wine isn't worth drinking.
Actually I may have paraphrased too much, I think the specific point was more along the lines of they once had a person to edit the crap mistakes out, but instead of complaining about those, people just complained about other stuff, so better to just spend time flogging submissions than worrying about satisfying people that are going to complain no matter what, so give them some low hanging fruit to complain about.
You must have missed the recent news post where Taco answered a bunch of questions about SD and talked about this point, he basically said that all the grammar and spelling errors are part of the charm of Slashdot.
In other words, it's a feature, not a bug lol.
I'd find a link to the discussion but I can't be arsed to wade through the hundreds of posts in the discussion to find it.
I admit to it bothering the hell out of me before also (the frequent, obvious screwups in the postings), but now that I know they purposefully don't care, it doesn't bother me as much anymore (I guess what bothered me most was the leaving the errors unfixed more than the errors being made in the first place, now I'm not left there hanging, waiting for them to fix the crap and I just move on to the discussion and forget it).
"You do realize Heinlein has you beat by 50 years or more, right?"
If you worry about filtering your knowledge against all that has come before you and all that is going on right now, you will be paralyzed into inaction. There's just way too many people out there all working with essentially the same wetware for much unique thought to pop into existance. Outside of academia where novel thought is the currency of the profession, it's simply more practical to charge ahead with your own thoughts and claim them for what they are, yours. I'm perfectly willing to take it on faith that when someone says they thought something up on their own that they are bring truthful.
Anyone who has done any serious reading will know that eerie feeling of encountering someone else who has developed a similar line of thought as one of your own, especially when it comes from a source hundreds or even thousands of years old.
So what's my point? Not that you shouldn't point out the reference to Heinlein, just try not to be so condescending about it. As if it's somehow the person's fault they don't already know about someone else who has developed a similar or parallel idea. There's lots of ways of making a friendly connection to older material. If anything it's a bit of a compliment I think to mirror thought that has become recognized as important enough that people 50 years later still associate it with a particular person in history.
Here's one with a nice example of an exercise you can do at your computer screen (there's a ton of people selling these programs, I have yet to find a good online one that is both comprehensive and free, but this link will at least give you the general flavor).
t ml
http://www.holistichealthtools.com/eye-exercise.h
"Thats not the issue. Obviously I prefer Gates helping the less fortunate to hoarding his money, I just happen to think that writing a few checks shouldn't buy the guy a hero's legacy and overshadow the 20 years of unethical/monopolistic buisness practices that created said money."
Ok, so what are some examples of things that would be sufficient pennance for his misdeeds? You say that erasing third world debt, immunizing about a third of the worlds children against various diseases, funding a cure for AIDS, etc aren't good enough, what would be? Or are his sins unforgivable?
So you have now taken care of illegitimate information that should never have been recorded in the first place. How does your "solution" resolve disclosure of legitimately sensitive information? Are you actually suggesting that the solution is to not have trade secrets, not have private client contact lists, medical information, pay rates, future plans, employee evaluations, etc.? That any information that should not be made public is therefore by definition verboten?
so it's mostly the right wing attacking that which they can't understand and don't like
I'm not saying they all have good intentions, but I think it's not unfair to say that most of the rank and file are of the opinion that this material actually harms people. And just as you might distribute mosquito netting to reduce malaria, reducing the outlets where this stuff gets shown will reduce the damage.
As long as they aren't getting this stuff outlawed, I think they are well within their rights to try to convince people to not watch it, not distribute it, and not profit from it (where all the interactions are voluntary).
I suspect many of the politicians are involved for self-serving and rather cynical reasons, but in the end that doesn't matter, as long as you are able to say what you want and use your own resources to get that message out. Just don't make the mistake of thinking that free speech gives you the right to use other people's resources to convey your speech or to force anyone to listen to you.
I agree, I'm dreading the day when I put in my VB6 disc in for a reinstall and it fails. I'd say about 90% of the tinkering and proof of concepting I do is still in VB6.
They still haven't delivered copies of 2005 locally for me to pick one up, but I'm really hoping that for one thing the documentation is improved. As frustrating as it was to spend hours digging around trying to find the exact syntax for some out of the way function in vb.net it was even more so for all the useless descriptions for the common stuff that I swear must have been machine generated as it was generic to the point of being useless, or if not machine generated maybe written by President Bush's press secretary lol, that guy can talk for 20 minutes without ever actually saying anything.
You back yourself up from an ill-reputable source, like wikipedia. "Look, wikipedia said it!"
You're barking up the wrong tree. People use citations for two purposes, for authority or to provide more detailed information. Sometimes it's both, somtimes it's just one or the other.
Wikipedia doesn't have much authority, but it's a great source for providing detailed information in a concise format that almost everyone will have direct access to (unlike most references where you have to take it on faith that the person has made a reasonable interpretation of the source material and you don't actually go yourself to the primary sources to digest everything there). Especially for a topic such as this where you would never find much detailed information if any at all in an encyclopedia or dictionary that has a high authority value. Nor is there much need for it in this case regardless.
For example, if you were curious about the different treatments and their success rates for treating a particular disease, you'd want high authority sources. But what high value facts are on the table in knowing more about a type of chatbot and how and where it's been used. It's just descriptive information.
You mean the IPO which set an opening share price which immediately doubled after the funds had been raised? Oh yeah that was a great IPO. It's a wonder that not a single IPO since then has imitated the model.
First of all your basic premise is false, it took quite a while before it doubled and that was only after Google showed what a profit engine it is. Secondly, the model has been little imitated for exactly the same reason it was rarely used before Google's IPO. It doesn't benefit the decision makers and backroom dealmakers nearly as much as the standard way of doing business. There really are very few people in the world of business like Sergi and Brin, whether that's good or bad is up to you to decide, because it's a value neutral decision, rather it just reflects who benefits the most.
So what if we are exitinct? Who cares? The Earth doesn't.
While it might seem like we have a pretty good idea how things will play out, it's far from certain. The very fact that we can envision alternative scenarios and possiblities argue strongly to keep our race alive as long as possible. Even the ultimate demise of this universe doesn't necessarily constrain our ability to continue. Either way though, between the people that don't really care and don't make any effort to influence the world around them and those who try to survive no matter what the cost and continually strive to influence their environment to the benefit of themselves and their progeny, one is much more likely to see that day should it ever come. In other words, no one's going to make you do anything spectacular with your life but you'll need a much more persuasive argument if you ever hope to convert everyone else to your sloth and mortal resignation.
I suspect you must have misplaced a decimal or some such in your "calculations" because what you describe as impossible is a common product used by most households throughout Central and South America. Called a Ducha, it's basically a glorified showerhead with a power hookup that heats the water as you shower.
. html
When the wiring was slipshod and unsightly it always made me think twice about turning it on.
Here's a link if you are still incredulous:
http://www.cpsc.gov/cpscpub/prerel/prhtml04/04044
Microwaves kill various germs too, don't they? They should market this as both a water heater and a sanitizer.
The linked article is only two paragraphs, the second one was...
"The tankless system uses microwave technology to heat water on demand, saving energy and providing an endless supply of hot water for residential and commercial usage. The technology is designed to eliminate the deadly Legionella Pneumophila, since water will not stagnate, as it does with conventional hot water heaters."
It's relative risk, not a yes or no situation.
Some things are riskier than others, the decision is to avoid behaviors that exceed your risk tolerance threshold. For me that's the case with IE, it's just too risky for me to use it. Firefox on the other hand is currently tolerable, the benefit outweighs the risk.