It seems that the source of pursuasion comes not from demonstration that your position is right (or that their position is wrong), but from making people feel uncomfortable for believing the opposing side.
He's more so appealing to the "Wake up sheeple!!" argument. It's pretty common, and based on the idea that everyone is blindly accepting the propaganda of $THE_RULING_CLASSES which is necessary to maintain the unequal status quo.
Now I personally don't believe in this idea, but not because I don't think there's a status quo, but because I don't believe that a propaganda campaign is necessary to maintain that status quo. Rather the unequal and often unjust status quo is autonomically maintained by societies as a function of their existing cultures, institutions, and belief systems. There is some "propaganda" supporting ideological beliefs, but overall people and societies tend to have a lot of inertia in the way that they think.
As an example, let's return to TFA. We have this latest iDink consumer gadget being made by those wonderful slave drivers at Foxconn, and when it looks like the plans might have been leaked, there's an investigation. However, when we have actual leaks of abuse, exploitation, and criminal conditions at Foxconn during the manufacturer of the iDink, no-one notices. If they do notice, the usually don't care. If they care, they usually come up with some rationalisation about globalisation and the invisible pink market for cyan iDinks or some such drivel. It suffices to say, neither Foxconn, Apple or Taiwan are likely to investigate the latter concern before they do the former.
There's no real propaganda here (Leaving aside Cult of Mac, which is a singular case). Society simply has not structured itself in such a way as to deal with these matters in a way that most agree would be appropriate. Instead, it runs on autopilot though the clouds of history. It typically takes a revolution--industrial, social or actual--to force societies to really change the way they operate on just about every level.
They also loved in an age where beating the Soviets in science and technology was considered more important than building the next iDink consumer device, or concocting some alchemical algorithm for market traders.
The best talent available to us is being wasted on pointless commercialism.
The kangaroo courts could run amok, and all their decisions could later be invalidated by the actual justice system, at which point the taxpayer will have to compensate the victims of the system en-masse at huge expense.
You know, there are always debates raging online about whether keyboard and mouse, or controllers are a better control scheme. And while keyboards have advantages, you have to admire how the restricted amount of buttons on a controller forces designers to rationalise their control schemes.
Keyboard based developers on the other hand never really have to face the problem of running out of buttons, and as such tend to designate every command to its own button, sometimes without any thought at all. Sometimes, out of necessity, the control scheme can be somewhat egonomicised , particularly for FPS games and the like. But for "roguelike" games, sometimes it feels like the developers matched keys to commands by rolling a dice. A little thought could drastically reduce the and rationalise the amount and kind of keys being used.
Sometimes, the controls for games like Nethack and Dwarf Fortress are so bad that I think the developers never actually sit down and play the game themselves; eat their own dog food so to speak. i think if they did, alternative control schemes would emerge very quickly. Then again, maybe they play a lot, and have just become inured to their own creations.
I respect your right to have these beliefs, but they are nonetheless completely wrong. The free market is what brought us to this point. Publishers monopolised, lobbied, and gamed the system to bring about gross overcharging and profiteering. What is needed is a clean sweep, up to and including governments appropriating publishers copyrights in the public interest.
Nice advice, but that doesn't help me as a researcher right now.
Every day, as I search for papers to research, I encounter pay-walls asking for $30, $40, $50 for a single paper. If I had paid for every paper I wanted to read of the course of my academic career, I the bill would have run into the tens of thousands.
Multiply that by the number of researcher in the world and you begin to grasp the scale of the legacy problem that the world research community is facing. The last 75+ years of published papers are locked up forever in what is essentially an extortion racket.
Bottom line, following market philosophies and greed, the academic publishing industry has hiked prices to unbelievable levels. $40 for a 200KB pdf is by now, the industry standard price. True, researchers need not pay such costs up front if their library has paid for a subscription to the required journal, but this merely passes the cost to the library and the institution to which it is attached. (I suspect researchers at wealthier institutions are utterly oblivious to the problem of academic pay-walls as their libraries have subscriptions to everything.)
My position is simple. We don't need the academic publishing industry(Except for their illgotten trove of past papers). Papers are written, reviewed, and edited by academic volunteers for free. What should simply happen is that universities should publish their own journals, online, using the simple, cheap web distribution methods.
The academic publishers would kick and scream about government monopolies and such rot, but they are nothing more than parasites who are stifling legitimate academic research and progress and should be ignored. Their "services" cost no more than pennies for each journal annually, yet we are expected to pay a significant percentage of our national GDPs to access research which was originally funding by the public purse anyway. Scams like this make me wonder if something is pathologically wrong with western society.
Look, without putting too fine a point on it, your country was racially segregated only 50 years ago, failed to pass an equal rights amendment only 30 years, and is currently running extra-judicial internment camps right now.
I don't know what it is you can have reasonable expectations of.
Lots of people grumbling about how they think CDs are inferior etc. I don't get why.
There's nothing to get. We're talking about audiophiles here; the kind of people who claim that they can tell the difference between gold and copper cabling in headphones. To them, of course CD players are inferior when compared with whatever obscure technology they use to make themselves feel superior to the common man.
Apparently, a scratchy vinyl analogue copy on a turntable will sound superior to a digitised recording made under studio conditions, and copied perfectly to the disc. Since I'm someone who can't really tell the difference between FM radio and FLAC, I suppose I'll just have to take their word for it.
I expect Iron Mountain would comply with a court order just as readily as a cloud operator.
Ha! I fully expert Iron Mountain or any other "backup company" would mine the data for all it was worth and sell the results to marketers long before the police got involved.
NES > SNES (graphics only upgrade really for the SNES) N64 > Gamecube (N64 brings 3D and anaolgue, Gamecube enhances graphics)
You are seriously downplaying the advances in each case. Please do not be fooled by retrospective appearances.
The SNES was a major leap forward from the NES. Major. It's difficult to really stress this enough. Nintendo were riding high from the huge success of the NES and built a worthy successor. The breadth, depth and variety of SNES games is a testament to the capability of the system, capability which simply did not exist on the NES in any fashion.
Mode 7 is the obvious feature here, but the sheer level of improvements in basic functionality opened up a new world of potential in games. Just compare say, Super Metroid, with the original game, or consider the entirely new Genre's like 2D fighters which came to consoles during this time. The NES could not have supported these games or anything even resembling them.
The Gamecube is similar, though comparisons with contemporary rivals can skew things. However, it suffices to say that even a game like Luigi's Mansion would never have fit on the N64.
But--to play devil's advocate here--what happens if you're Julian Assange and the organisation is Wikileaks? I'm hoping someone can do an appropriate compare and contrast on the two situations.
IPv4 addresses may be running out, but we can all look forward to supporting them forever in a second stack, running parallel to our IPv6 software, now and forever, for the rest of eternity, Amen.
Unless the entire world magically switches over to IPv6 all at once like the designers planned for. Hasn't happened yet though.
Personally, I've had such ongoing, persistent library and software problems since I switched to 64-bit in 2006, that at this point I just want to go back to 32 bit. Just last week I had to spend 4 hours fixing a 32-bit library bug. Flash has of course been the single biggest and most obnoxious problem with my still ongoing 64-bit upgrade process.
The fundamental problem is that people don't understand Java semantics. In Java, equality testing is consistent and efficient: for reference types (everything except primitives), == always means reference equality.
Basically they argue that economic purposes always trump public good, because economy is more important than anything. They probably even believe it, too.
We live in a democratic society. And since at least 1982, a "democracy" has meant a free market consumer economy, operating on top of a nominally free and representative society. Democracy has hitched itself to marketism and the two are by now, probably inextricably linked.
Every decision, every strategy, every policy and certainly every election in the modern democracy is focused around one thing: the economy. Nothing else matters; nothing. Not society, not progress, not religion, not justice, not equality, not fraternity, not libertyâ"nothing matters but the economy.
So I don't know how people can really complain here. We live in a democracy and that means the economy comes first. If longer copyrights are better for the economy, meaning that they make profit for private companies, then they will be extended. Nothing else matters. The economy comes first, now and always, above all other things, Amen.
Slashdot Mirror
He's more so appealing to the "Wake up sheeple!!" argument. It's pretty common, and based on the idea that everyone is blindly accepting the propaganda of $THE_RULING_CLASSES which is necessary to maintain the unequal status quo.
Now I personally don't believe in this idea, but not because I don't think there's a status quo, but because I don't believe that a propaganda campaign is necessary to maintain that status quo. Rather the unequal and often unjust status quo is autonomically maintained by societies as a function of their existing cultures, institutions, and belief systems. There is some "propaganda" supporting ideological beliefs, but overall people and societies tend to have a lot of inertia in the way that they think.
As an example, let's return to TFA. We have this latest iDink consumer gadget being made by those wonderful slave drivers at Foxconn, and when it looks like the plans might have been leaked, there's an investigation. However, when we have actual leaks of abuse, exploitation, and criminal conditions at Foxconn during the manufacturer of the iDink, no-one notices. If they do notice, the usually don't care. If they care, they usually come up with some rationalisation about globalisation and the invisible pink market for cyan iDinks or some such drivel. It suffices to say, neither Foxconn, Apple or Taiwan are likely to investigate the latter concern before they do the former.
There's no real propaganda here (Leaving aside Cult of Mac, which is a singular case). Society simply has not structured itself in such a way as to deal with these matters in a way that most agree would be appropriate. Instead, it runs on autopilot though the clouds of history. It typically takes a revolution--industrial, social or actual--to force societies to really change the way they operate on just about every level.
They also loved in an age where beating the Soviets in science and technology was considered more important than building the next iDink consumer device, or concocting some alchemical algorithm for market traders.
The best talent available to us is being wasted on pointless commercialism.
The kangaroo courts could run amok, and all their decisions could later be invalidated by the actual justice system, at which point the taxpayer will have to compensate the victims of the system en-masse at huge expense.
Once again, the free market finds a way.
Well, they own all your factories.
Amen.
You know, there are always debates raging online about whether keyboard and mouse, or controllers are a better control scheme. And while keyboards have advantages, you have to admire how the restricted amount of buttons on a controller forces designers to rationalise their control schemes.
Keyboard based developers on the other hand never really have to face the problem of running out of buttons, and as such tend to designate every command to its own button, sometimes without any thought at all. Sometimes, out of necessity, the control scheme can be somewhat egonomicised , particularly for FPS games and the like. But for "roguelike" games, sometimes it feels like the developers matched keys to commands by rolling a dice. A little thought could drastically reduce the and rationalise the amount and kind of keys being used.
Sometimes, the controls for games like Nethack and Dwarf Fortress are so bad that I think the developers never actually sit down and play the game themselves; eat their own dog food so to speak. i think if they did, alternative control schemes would emerge very quickly. Then again, maybe they play a lot, and have just become inured to their own creations.
I respect your right to have these beliefs, but they are nonetheless completely wrong. The free market is what brought us to this point. Publishers monopolised, lobbied, and gamed the system to bring about gross overcharging and profiteering. What is needed is a clean sweep, up to and including governments appropriating publishers copyrights in the public interest.
Nice advice, but that doesn't help me as a researcher right now.
Every day, as I search for papers to research, I encounter pay-walls asking for $30, $40, $50 for a single paper. If I had paid for every paper I wanted to read of the course of my academic career, I the bill would have run into the tens of thousands.
Multiply that by the number of researcher in the world and you begin to grasp the scale of the legacy problem that the world research community is facing. The last 75+ years of published papers are locked up forever in what is essentially an extortion racket.
Bottom line, following market philosophies and greed, the academic publishing industry has hiked prices to unbelievable levels. $40 for a 200KB pdf is by now, the industry standard price. True, researchers need not pay such costs up front if their library has paid for a subscription to the required journal, but this merely passes the cost to the library and the institution to which it is attached. (I suspect researchers at wealthier institutions are utterly oblivious to the problem of academic pay-walls as their libraries have subscriptions to everything.)
My position is simple. We don't need the academic publishing industry(Except for their illgotten trove of past papers). Papers are written, reviewed, and edited by academic volunteers for free. What should simply happen is that universities should publish their own journals, online, using the simple, cheap web distribution methods.
The academic publishers would kick and scream about government monopolies and such rot, but they are nothing more than parasites who are stifling legitimate academic research and progress and should be ignored. Their "services" cost no more than pennies for each journal annually, yet we are expected to pay a significant percentage of our national GDPs to access research which was originally funding by the public purse anyway. Scams like this make me wonder if something is pathologically wrong with western society.
Look, without putting too fine a point on it, your country was racially segregated only 50 years ago, failed to pass an equal rights amendment only 30 years, and is currently running extra-judicial internment camps right now.
I don't know what it is you can have reasonable expectations of.
And are regarded as the finest men in the country. Never forget that.
There's nothing to get. We're talking about audiophiles here; the kind of people who claim that they can tell the difference between gold and copper cabling in headphones. To them, of course CD players are inferior when compared with whatever obscure technology they use to make themselves feel superior to the common man.
Apparently, a scratchy vinyl analogue copy on a turntable will sound superior to a digitised recording made under studio conditions, and copied perfectly to the disc. Since I'm someone who can't really tell the difference between FM radio and FLAC, I suppose I'll just have to take their word for it.
Nobody expected anything. The IPv6 designers never had a transition plan and still don't. There's no-one at the tiller of this boat.
Hope.....,oh and NAT, otherwise known as "despair".
Ha! I fully expert Iron Mountain or any other "backup company" would mine the data for all it was worth and sell the results to marketers long before the police got involved.
I have yet to see this feature enabled in my locale. Maybe they haven't converted the code to PAL yet?
Does the seat have a notch in the front? No? Back to the drawing board then.
What opportunity? When was the last time the Chinese bought anything from the West.
Yeah; For the world's lack of an ambitious space program. They're succeeding.
You are seriously downplaying the advances in each case. Please do not be fooled by retrospective appearances.
The SNES was a major leap forward from the NES. Major. It's difficult to really stress this enough. Nintendo were riding high from the huge success of the NES and built a worthy successor. The breadth, depth and variety of SNES games is a testament to the capability of the system, capability which simply did not exist on the NES in any fashion.
Mode 7 is the obvious feature here, but the sheer level of improvements in basic functionality opened up a new world of potential in games. Just compare say, Super Metroid, with the original game, or consider the entirely new Genre's like 2D fighters which came to consoles during this time. The NES could not have supported these games or anything even resembling them.
The Gamecube is similar, though comparisons with contemporary rivals can skew things. However, it suffices to say that even a game like Luigi's Mansion would never have fit on the N64.
But--to play devil's advocate here--what happens if you're Julian Assange and the organisation is Wikileaks? I'm hoping someone can do an appropriate compare and contrast on the two situations.
IPv4 addresses may be running out, but we can all look forward to supporting them forever in a second stack, running parallel to our IPv6 software, now and forever, for the rest of eternity, Amen.
Unless the entire world magically switches over to IPv6 all at once like the designers planned for. Hasn't happened yet though.
Personally, I've had such ongoing, persistent library and software problems since I switched to 64-bit in 2006, that at this point I just want to go back to 32 bit. Just last week I had to spend 4 hours fixing a 32-bit library bug. Flash has of course been the single biggest and most obnoxious problem with my still ongoing 64-bit upgrade process.
Heh!
We read about it instead in an expanded universe novel.
We live in a democratic society. And since at least 1982, a "democracy" has meant a free market consumer economy, operating on top of a nominally free and representative society. Democracy has hitched itself to marketism and the two are by now, probably inextricably linked.
Every decision, every strategy, every policy and certainly every election in the modern democracy is focused around one thing: the economy. Nothing else matters; nothing. Not society, not progress, not religion, not justice, not equality, not fraternity, not libertyâ"nothing matters but the economy.
So I don't know how people can really complain here. We live in a democracy and that means the economy comes first. If longer copyrights are better for the economy, meaning that they make profit for private companies, then they will be extended. Nothing else matters. The economy comes first, now and always, above all other things, Amen.
Since you mentioned, it turn out that Pharma has pills for all those potential "ailments" as well.