"I didn't get a pony for Christmas, therefore there is no God!" is not a viable disproof.
Yes. Absolutely true. Also true of magic unicorns and ghosts and intelligent, orbiting teapots. Does that make you feel that magic unicorns and ghosts and intelligent, orbiting teapots are therefore more likely?
The idea that some idea can't be disproved in no way serves to validate that idea. There's an unlimited number of such ideas. None of them, not one, has any value whatsoever to anyone until or unless it moves into a domain such that it can be tested.
When you venture into the kind of pseudo-intellectual morass that hangs on "disproof", you're only fooling yourself, and the already-fooled.
That's utter nonsense. Gods don't define a boundary of knowledge. Citing "gods" is a direct admission that you know nothing. It's not "next to" knowledge, or near knowledge, it's infinitely far from knowledge. Your brain is empty of knowledge, and you have filled the resulting void with worthless (in the scientific sense) superstition. You may have a window of opportunity to manipulate others with your false claims of knowledge, but science, actual science, will almost certainly put that to the torch eventually. With what? With knowledge.
It doesn't matter how illogical, factually inaccurate, or plain wrong religious beliefs are, they are here to stay.
Perhaps. However, consistent progress in the nascent science of genetics gives me hope that we can eradicate fear of the unknown, weak critical thinking skills and gullibility. These lead, in various combinations, to susceptibility to superstition.
Once (if) we can trap such traits out before they contaminate the learning process, I rather think it would be considered abuse if you didn't offer your child such benefits (along with freedom from all other genetic disorders, while ensuring high intelligence and a strong immune system.) Given a starting point of such advantage, along with a decent education, I don't think superstition could survive. It's a product of weak minds. Remove the latter, and you remove the former.
What don't YOU understand about the privilege of copyright being extended for a limited time? What don't YOU understand about the fact that without this...
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
...there would be no protection for these works at all? What don't YOU understand about the fact that by taking those inventions away from the public other than for one glimpse, the intent of the entire system is being suborned?
By moving your expectations to rental, they've created an imaginary divide, as if these inventions were somehow immune from the obligation to the public they were produced under the aegis of. They're not.
If the public cannot obtain the full benefit of the work, then the obligation to the public has been sundered and the author(s) should be taken to task for it. We have every reason to expect that a purchase results in ownership, and that ownership carries the ability to protect that property and use it as we see fit, as long as we don't interfere with those rights during the protected period. From this comes the right to copy for our own use; to back up; to create mixes of titles in the order that pleases us; to review and study the content; to excerpt sections for fair use in conveying to others our opinions and interpretations of the work itself.
DRM advocates have almost completely snowed the American public (and likely, others) in taking from them the very benefits the constitution intended to secure for them WRT artistic productions. That you have been taken in by this does not surprise me. What concerns me isn't your individual error, but the broad negative effects this will have on our society. It is insidious in the short term and invidious in the long.
Yes. Everybody wins. Except consumers, who can't record it, can't excerpt it for fair use, can't back it up, can't move it to a later media format, and so will lose their investment eventually either because the media is obsolete or because the media the content is provided on has gone bad.
Slashdot could make subscriptions work, I think, if they fixed the moderation problems. I really like it here, think highly of the content, but the utterly broken moderation forces me to read at -1, which, frankly, I resent.
All subscriptions really offer you is the ability to have a list of your old (stale) comments -- which you can find via Google anyway.
If the subscription gave you a working site with user-id'd thumbs up and down and the ability to disallow users to affect moderation of posts you're looking at, I'd be all in. For example, you see a post from Joe with a thumbs down from me, that you think is worthy. You'd add me to your list of "thumbs downs from these people don't count." Next time you see a post from Joe, my thumbs down doesn't show. That allows users to directly moderate the moderation; I can tailor what I see to be what I want, and it won't affect your tailoring at all.
I think slashdot has some of the best posters on the Internet. They could fix it pretty easily. The problem has always been hubris; they think it's *already* as good as it can be, and they have never listened to suggestions. So slashdot's value has always been in spite of management, rather than with management's assistance. It's all about the geeks. Geeks, generally speaking, are good. If you're a bit thick skinned, admittedly, but I am, and so I like it here.
Broadcast TV? Broadcast radio? Both of those only work because the advertisement is inserted into the stream
No. They work because governments give commercial interests a monopoly. That's the only reason they work. The current cost to set up a radio station? Near a million bucks, time, lawyers, etc. The actual cost, meaning, what it would cost me to do it without the government interfering? About $250.00. But I can't do that. So the only music / entertainment choice you have, is, ta-da, a commercial one. The benefit? The commercial stations are arranged so they don't interfere with one another (except for AM at night, which is just as chaotic as a license free environment would be, and you'll note it hasn't harmed AM radio in the least.) There are no other benefits.
Without that monopoly, you'd have choices that did not abuse you with advertising, play only limited playlists, and pre-digest your news. With it, you have exactly one choice: you will consume the commercial stream, or you will consume nothing.
If the government ever does the same thing to the Internet -- disallows content provision unless you jump through very expensive hoops -- you can look forward to the commercial model working perfectly fine.
The problem right now with the Internet is that the commercial model is trying to co-exist with free, user driven content -- a considerable amount of which is better than what the commercial sites supply. That is why they can't hold on to users.
You know what, though? I keep a website up. I write free, optionally donation supported software. Which has thousands of users (which represents a huge success in a very narrow niche.) I have a few things on there that can earn (I sell a t-shirt through Zazzle every few months or so, mainly.) I make donations available, but neither mandatory or nagging -- that's resulted in $120 over a period of one year. The site costs me about $40 every three months, plus name registration, so about $200/year, realistically.
I do it because I like to do it. People do come. But I never assumed it was going to support me or go so far as to break even. Yet, there the website is, no abusive ads (I source my own t-shirt ads... they're just images / css tricks. No audio, no video, no abuse of mouse hovering, no cracking articles into ridiculous numbers of pages.)
The world is full of other things we can do to earn. I'm not sure that the Internet's ability to share information and the commercial interest of maximizing earnings was ever a good fit.
Free is sustainable. There have always been people who do things on the web with a primary goal of sharing (whatever it is) and I can't say I'd shed any tears for sites that have a purely commercial model that involves no more than information transfer.
Without getting argumentative -- there is definitely much truth to what you say -- I would like to suggest SEIZE THE DAYLIGHT to you. The story isn't really that simple. I didn't mean to imply it was. I was referring to the relationship between farmers who get up with the livestock, and the businesses, which, without DST, can end up keeping somewhat different -- inconvenient -- hours. With lighting inexpensively and readily available, DST's real usefulness is dead. I should have been more careful in my original assertion, and I thank you for the correction.
You are the poster child for someone who babbles uselessly and pointlessly about irrelevancies when the actual conversation is about something completely different.
So, how long do you think before being within X yards of a cop doing these kinds of things renders the glasses' network connection unusable?
They routinely take down cell sites now when they think they need to. Your google glasses are just another radio, and almost any conventional radio can be jammed beyond recovery with almost no effort.
It isn't legal by any means, but you can buy, right now, a compact device that will render every cellphone in a movie theater deaf as a post, the idea behind the device being that you could actually enjoy the presentation. You can jam police radar (again, not usually legal, but...) You can certainly jam wifi, nothing special about that at all.
Of course, the police would never break the law, right? Oh, wait. They're already breaking the law, that's why they don't want you recording the acts in questions. So, like most criminals, what's just one more law sundered?
People don't typically understand how uniformly corrupt the police and the courts and the underlying legislation are until they've been dragged through the system unjustly. It's a complete eye-opener.
They also don't understand how tightly the self-supporting web underneath these elements of the system is woven.
Personally, I have come to the conclusion that there is no solution to be had.
If you don't understand why putting things in date time order is valuable, I'm certainly not going to attempt to teach you. Hey, aren't you missing an episode of "Lost" or something?
The time in another timezone doesn't affect the time in my timezone, so if I fix my clocks, they're fixed, period.
As for jet lagging over an hour, yeah, it affects me, as as the summary puts forth (if you read it, lol), it can affect you very significantly. It's more than sleep -- it's about my internal clock being wrong, knowing what time it is goes away for many days and is replaced with "oh shit, it's that late/early?" It's disruptive. If you have no particular time sense, I understand why that wouldn't occur to you, but that doesn't mean others aren't affected.
Whats wrong with the date notation? It matches the exact way dates are spoken.
You say "March 8th 2013" That exactly matches 3/8/2013
Doesn't sort well.
20130308 sorts perfectly. That's why, I suspect, that the standard way to express the date is "2013-03-08" (see the 1988 ISO 8601 standard), as it also sorts perfectly.
For that matter, date+time as 20130308120000 sorts perfectly. I use it in all my database work. Throw in some separators, viz. 2013-03-08 12:00:00 and it's perfectly human readable and makes sense right out of the gate, most significant to least.
I love it when someone implies that because [serious problems] exist elsewhere, that dealing with local problems of less magnitude is somehow a bad idea or a wasted exercise, thereby demonstrating a complete failure to understand how the world works, and why, in fact, the entire world isn't "third world" right now.
Not all, certainly, but a lot of my gear has a switch or checkbox for DST, as in, pay attention to it, or don't. I'd be more than happy to get in there and flip that switch or check that box, not only for my health and to avoid that jet-lagged feeling twice a year, but so it would be that much easier to deal with other timezones, so I don't have to look at clocks that are an hour off if I forget to reset them, etc.
It wasn't broken; it didn't need "fixed"; we really should see to it that the whole idea is shitcanned.
One last change I could deal with. Been through it already, they obsoleted my alarm clock and every computer needed an update after the last bit of congressional time-fuckery.
As for the farmers -- the people whom this was originally meant to benefit -- they can set their alarms an hour earlier or later any bloody time they like. They can even make it progressive so the cows are always fed at dawn, or any other thing they like. No need to go screwing up everything else.
The entire DST thing is the perfect poster child for government getting in where it isn't needed and totally screwing the pooch.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. Absolutely true. Also true of magic unicorns and ghosts and intelligent, orbiting teapots. Does that make you feel that magic unicorns and ghosts and intelligent, orbiting teapots are therefore more likely?
The idea that some idea can't be disproved in no way serves to validate that idea. There's an unlimited number of such ideas. None of them, not one, has any value whatsoever to anyone until or unless it moves into a domain such that it can be tested.
When you venture into the kind of pseudo-intellectual morass that hangs on "disproof", you're only fooling yourself, and the already-fooled.
That's utter nonsense. Gods don't define a boundary of knowledge. Citing "gods" is a direct admission that you know nothing. It's not "next to" knowledge, or near knowledge, it's infinitely far from knowledge. Your brain is empty of knowledge, and you have filled the resulting void with worthless (in the scientific sense) superstition. You may have a window of opportunity to manipulate others with your false claims of knowledge, but science, actual science, will almost certainly put that to the torch eventually. With what? With knowledge.
Perhaps. However, consistent progress in the nascent science of genetics gives me hope that we can eradicate fear of the unknown, weak critical thinking skills and gullibility. These lead, in various combinations, to susceptibility to superstition.
Once (if) we can trap such traits out before they contaminate the learning process, I rather think it would be considered abuse if you didn't offer your child such benefits (along with freedom from all other genetic disorders, while ensuring high intelligence and a strong immune system.) Given a starting point of such advantage, along with a decent education, I don't think superstition could survive. It's a product of weak minds. Remove the latter, and you remove the former.
Palm T|X. I still have mine. Glass screen, wifi, IR, full color, and pretty thin, too.
I swear, sometimes the most amusing things I see in a day are either typos or auto-corrections. :)
What don't YOU understand about the privilege of copyright being extended for a limited time? What don't YOU understand about the fact that without this...
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
By moving your expectations to rental, they've created an imaginary divide, as if these inventions were somehow immune from the obligation to the public they were produced under the aegis of. They're not.
If the public cannot obtain the full benefit of the work, then the obligation to the public has been sundered and the author(s) should be taken to task for it. We have every reason to expect that a purchase results in ownership, and that ownership carries the ability to protect that property and use it as we see fit, as long as we don't interfere with those rights during the protected period. From this comes the right to copy for our own use; to back up; to create mixes of titles in the order that pleases us; to review and study the content; to excerpt sections for fair use in conveying to others our opinions and interpretations of the work itself.
DRM advocates have almost completely snowed the American public (and likely, others) in taking from them the very benefits the constitution intended to secure for them WRT artistic productions. That you have been taken in by this does not surprise me. What concerns me isn't your individual error, but the broad negative effects this will have on our society. It is insidious in the short term and invidious in the long.
The risk is that you'll hear Rush Limpballs; the benefit is that you can clout him with the radio. Is that it?
Yes. Everybody wins. Except consumers, who can't record it, can't excerpt it for fair use, can't back it up, can't move it to a later media format, and so will lose their investment eventually either because the media is obsolete or because the media the content is provided on has gone bad.
So, yeah, absolutely, everybody wins.
Not.
Let's not get into mythology here.
Personally, I think waiting until tomorrow before raking him over the coals is called for. We don't know what tomorrow's portion will be.
Well... maybe.
Slashdot could make subscriptions work, I think, if they fixed the moderation problems. I really like it here, think highly of the content, but the utterly broken moderation forces me to read at -1, which, frankly, I resent.
All subscriptions really offer you is the ability to have a list of your old (stale) comments -- which you can find via Google anyway.
If the subscription gave you a working site with user-id'd thumbs up and down and the ability to disallow users to affect moderation of posts you're looking at, I'd be all in. For example, you see a post from Joe with a thumbs down from me, that you think is worthy. You'd add me to your list of "thumbs downs from these people don't count." Next time you see a post from Joe, my thumbs down doesn't show. That allows users to directly moderate the moderation; I can tailor what I see to be what I want, and it won't affect your tailoring at all.
I think slashdot has some of the best posters on the Internet. They could fix it pretty easily. The problem has always been hubris; they think it's *already* as good as it can be, and they have never listened to suggestions. So slashdot's value has always been in spite of management, rather than with management's assistance. It's all about the geeks. Geeks, generally speaking, are good. If you're a bit thick skinned, admittedly, but I am, and so I like it here.
No. They work because governments give commercial interests a monopoly. That's the only reason they work. The current cost to set up a radio station? Near a million bucks, time, lawyers, etc. The actual cost, meaning, what it would cost me to do it without the government interfering? About $250.00. But I can't do that. So the only music / entertainment choice you have, is, ta-da, a commercial one. The benefit? The commercial stations are arranged so they don't interfere with one another (except for AM at night, which is just as chaotic as a license free environment would be, and you'll note it hasn't harmed AM radio in the least.) There are no other benefits.
Without that monopoly, you'd have choices that did not abuse you with advertising, play only limited playlists, and pre-digest your news. With it, you have exactly one choice: you will consume the commercial stream, or you will consume nothing.
If the government ever does the same thing to the Internet -- disallows content provision unless you jump through very expensive hoops -- you can look forward to the commercial model working perfectly fine.
The problem right now with the Internet is that the commercial model is trying to co-exist with free, user driven content -- a considerable amount of which is better than what the commercial sites supply. That is why they can't hold on to users.
You know what, though? I keep a website up. I write free, optionally donation supported software. Which has thousands of users (which represents a huge success in a very narrow niche.) I have a few things on there that can earn (I sell a t-shirt through Zazzle every few months or so, mainly.) I make donations available, but neither mandatory or nagging -- that's resulted in $120 over a period of one year. The site costs me about $40 every three months, plus name registration, so about $200/year, realistically.
I do it because I like to do it. People do come. But I never assumed it was going to support me or go so far as to break even. Yet, there the website is, no abusive ads (I source my own t-shirt ads... they're just images / css tricks. No audio, no video, no abuse of mouse hovering, no cracking articles into ridiculous numbers of pages.)
The world is full of other things we can do to earn. I'm not sure that the Internet's ability to share information and the commercial interest of maximizing earnings was ever a good fit.
Free is sustainable. There have always been people who do things on the web with a primary goal of sharing (whatever it is) and I can't say I'd shed any tears for sites that have a purely commercial model that involves no more than information transfer.
Without getting argumentative -- there is definitely much truth to what you say -- I would like to suggest SEIZE THE DAYLIGHT to you. The story isn't really that simple. I didn't mean to imply it was. I was referring to the relationship between farmers who get up with the livestock, and the businesses, which, without DST, can end up keeping somewhat different -- inconvenient -- hours. With lighting inexpensively and readily available, DST's real usefulness is dead. I should have been more careful in my original assertion, and I thank you for the correction.
You are the poster child for someone who babbles uselessly and pointlessly about irrelevancies when the actual conversation is about something completely different.
So, how long do you think before being within X yards of a cop doing these kinds of things renders the glasses' network connection unusable?
They routinely take down cell sites now when they think they need to. Your google glasses are just another radio, and almost any conventional radio can be jammed beyond recovery with almost no effort.
It isn't legal by any means, but you can buy, right now, a compact device that will render every cellphone in a movie theater deaf as a post, the idea behind the device being that you could actually enjoy the presentation. You can jam police radar (again, not usually legal, but...) You can certainly jam wifi, nothing special about that at all.
Of course, the police would never break the law, right? Oh, wait. They're already breaking the law, that's why they don't want you recording the acts in questions. So, like most criminals, what's just one more law sundered?
People don't typically understand how uniformly corrupt the police and the courts and the underlying legislation are until they've been dragged through the system unjustly. It's a complete eye-opener.
They also don't understand how tightly the self-supporting web underneath these elements of the system is woven.
Personally, I have come to the conclusion that there is no solution to be had.
Well, there's a first time for everything, I suppose.
If you don't understand why putting things in date time order is valuable, I'm certainly not going to attempt to teach you. Hey, aren't you missing an episode of "Lost" or something?
The time in another timezone doesn't affect the time in my timezone, so if I fix my clocks, they're fixed, period.
As for jet lagging over an hour, yeah, it affects me, as as the summary puts forth (if you read it, lol), it can affect you very significantly. It's more than sleep -- it's about my internal clock being wrong, knowing what time it is goes away for many days and is replaced with "oh shit, it's that late/early?" It's disruptive. If you have no particular time sense, I understand why that wouldn't occur to you, but that doesn't mean others aren't affected.
Doesn't sort well.
20130308 sorts perfectly. That's why, I suspect, that the standard way to express the date is "2013-03-08" (see the 1988 ISO 8601 standard), as it also sorts perfectly.
For that matter, date+time as 20130308120000 sorts perfectly. I use it in all my database work. Throw in some separators, viz. 2013-03-08 12:00:00 and it's perfectly human readable and makes sense right out of the gate, most significant to least.
I love it when someone implies that because [serious problems] exist elsewhere, that dealing with local problems of less magnitude is somehow a bad idea or a wasted exercise, thereby demonstrating a complete failure to understand how the world works, and why, in fact, the entire world isn't "third world" right now.
Not all, certainly, but a lot of my gear has a switch or checkbox for DST, as in, pay attention to it, or don't. I'd be more than happy to get in there and flip that switch or check that box, not only for my health and to avoid that jet-lagged feeling twice a year, but so it would be that much easier to deal with other timezones, so I don't have to look at clocks that are an hour off if I forget to reset them, etc.
It wasn't broken; it didn't need "fixed"; we really should see to it that the whole idea is shitcanned.
One last change I could deal with. Been through it already, they obsoleted my alarm clock and every computer needed an update after the last bit of congressional time-fuckery.
As for the farmers -- the people whom this was originally meant to benefit -- they can set their alarms an hour earlier or later any bloody time they like. They can even make it progressive so the cows are always fed at dawn, or any other thing they like. No need to go screwing up everything else.
The entire DST thing is the perfect poster child for government getting in where it isn't needed and totally screwing the pooch.