I thought politics.slashdot.org was just set up for this non-online stuff.
Re:Will expanding the roads get you to work faster
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Did You VoteOrNot.org?
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There is tons and tons of psuedo ('social') science involving people meddling with traffic patterns, and engaging in wholesale social control. There's a big unelected body that engages in this in the Twin Cities metropolitan area (Minnesota) called the Metro Council. They apply the political pressure to prevent road widening that would reduce traffic congestion.
Their solution is to build a light rail corridor and then construct high density housing along said corridor. They want to pack the humans in like sardines where they can easily be controlled.
Organisations like this, and many 'self appointed experts' who claim people can't be trusted to make decisions, are profoundly undemocratic. They often are cheered on by the same political forces that run around labelling others 'fascist.' Which is really, really ironic.
Because clearly making sure that quacks don't prey on people by peddling untested remedies is out-of-control.
I worked for over a decade in the Medical Device industry. The stories of '$800 hammer' that people decry when it comes to the Defense industry are very much so mirrored in the Medical Device industry.
There's a cushy relationship between Industry and the FDA. The big companies use the massive regulatory overhead as a barrier to entry for startups and new device categories.
The old 'quack medicine' saw has been used to justify the FDA for over a century now. Isn't it time to give people more credit and not give 'Momma-FDA' complete oversight and control over what medicines, procedures, and devices they're allowed to purchase? The 'regulatory affairs' people really get twitchy about stuff like this. Their bread-and-butter comes into it.
Those $80 power-cords with the green dot on them are every-so-slighty more safe than the common $2 power cords. I guess some people think it's worth while.
I wrote the firmware that controls a medical device that had less circuitry in it than a common AM radio. It sells for in excess of $1000.
From what I've seen of them, their entire purpose appears to be to sign whatever papers the board votes as appropriate and to network.
Here's a clue: The journalists at Mother Jones magazine don't realistically depict how modern business is conducted.
Games developers aren't really interested in dedicating 20% additional effort on game features that 2% of their market can make use of.
It used to be that 'Game' vendors pushed the envelope. Hell, I remember upgrading from paperwhite to a Color VGA monitor mostly because of Sim Earth.
Game vendors develop to the center of their market. They have to. Less than 10% of their market is people who are willing to spend $300 to get their $50 game to run properly.
I once stood in the checkout line at CompUSA. There was a crying small boy and his mom behind me in the line. He was pointing to game shrinkrwapped-boxes near the checkout. His mom was saying 'no, that won't run on an Apple.'
I thought it was a perfect marketing opportunity:
"Macintosh- The Computer That Makes Small Children Cry."
This is a games.slashdot.org thread. Shouldn't you be off somewhere fiddling with a spreadsheet or something?
It's probably a good thing we can't track you down by any personal information, as there are probably a half dozen people now wishing they could get your ass fired.
upper-middle-class people in the US routinely leave the country for major elective surgeries, to have them done by American-schooled foreign doctors in modern facilities in other countries where expenses are lower?
That sounds to me like running away from the over-the-top liability costs, and the obscene cost-ballooning effects of out-of-control FDA bureaucrats.
As for earning wealth, what exactly does a CEO do that merits their "vast" wealth?
Obviously, they do absolutely nothing. It's a good thing we have your ignorant stereotypes to fall back on, or we'd never understand those people.
You're a little confused about stock. Stock costs a lot (relatively) to buy, but pays out small dividends (relatively) if at all. If it costs you $100 to get $1 (but that $1 will be every year), then it will take you 100 years... well, most people won't live long enough to see the benefit.
Good god. You're more than a little confused about stock. The stock purchaser collects the dividend, but retains the value of the stock itself. Then, after collecting some dividends, if the company has done well in investing the purchaser's money, the value of the share of stock increases and the purchaser can sell the share for a profit if desired.
Since there is a finite amount of wealth at any given time,
You mean, at any instant in time. But it is not a zero-sum game, even if you insist on pretending it is. At any other instant in time there is a different finite amount of wealth.
To put it succinctly: new wealth is being created all the time. The growth of the economy depends on said wealth being redeployed. Not on it being collected by government agencies and directed to soup kitchens.
What I haven't done is make the switch to Firefox from Mozilla. Because I like the ability to do things like cut/paste/save formatted web content, and casually compose web pages.
Why did they remove the Composer component of Mozilla in Firefox? Why is Firefox being heralded, when it's just another consumer-grade browser engineered to discourage content creation.
It's possible for a 'user' to have a mousepad with offensive artwork on it. It's possible for them to have flowers in a vase on their desk that someone else in the office will be allergic to.
That doesn't mean that drab grey mousepads should be cemented to the desktop. It doesn't mean that flower vases should be prohibited.
I mean, let's not go overboard justifying Admin-From-Hell power trips, okay?
Insert some bogus information into an "authoritative" encyclopedia and see how long it takes for that to be corrected.
I can't. I'm not considered sufficiently 'authoritative' to insert the information. Which is a big plus, in the favor of 'authoritative' reference works.
'Controversial' topics in general, don't belong in encyclopedias. Encyclopedias should be used as reference works for 'stable' subjects. Any student is (or should be) taught to rely on resources like periodicals for 'controversial' topics.
These online references, and online 'research' as a whole, focus on what online-types are interested in.
The Internet is a great place to research about what your next video card should be (and, interestingly, a poor place to research and study the history of video cards- My Trident 8900cl seems to have dropped off the face of the Earth.) It's a poor choice to research geological topics. And it probably will remain a poor choice indefinitely, for many topics.
Not every intellectual is hunkered over a keyboard and facing a screen.
Neither my bound 1986 edition of Britannica, nor my bound 191x (can't remember exact year) edition contain any blather about 'Online.'
Why do you compare one short-attention-span reference resource to another? My paper editions of Britannica have articles much more substancial that I've found on the 'on-line' editions.
Originally I got the CD-ROM edition thinking I could replace the four feet of shelf-space for the paper edition. That was a major error on my part.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought politics.slashdot.org was just set up for this non-online stuff.
There is tons and tons of psuedo ('social') science involving people meddling with traffic patterns, and engaging in wholesale social control. There's a big unelected body that engages in this in the Twin Cities metropolitan area (Minnesota) called the Metro Council. They apply the political pressure to prevent road widening that would reduce traffic congestion.
Their solution is to build a light rail corridor and then construct high density housing along said corridor. They want to pack the humans in like sardines where they can easily be controlled.
Organisations like this, and many 'self appointed experts' who claim people can't be trusted to make decisions, are profoundly undemocratic. They often are cheered on by the same political forces that run around labelling others 'fascist.' Which is really, really ironic.
It's fascist to make arguments that deny people the right to vote.
Actually, no. Fascism is something else. But it is ignorant to bandy around the term fascist like some sort of generic 'bad word to call somebody'.
I once paid $70 for 4 megs of ram, where was I?
Considering the fact that I once paid $120 for 256K of RAM, you were probably in nursery school.
Yes, but the 5.1 sticker on the headphones makes up for that.
Because clearly making sure that quacks don't prey on people by peddling untested remedies is out-of-control.
I worked for over a decade in the Medical Device industry. The stories of '$800 hammer' that people decry when it comes to the Defense industry are very much so mirrored in the Medical Device industry.
There's a cushy relationship between Industry and the FDA. The big companies use the massive regulatory overhead as a barrier to entry for startups and new device categories.
The old 'quack medicine' saw has been used to justify the FDA for over a century now. Isn't it time to give people more credit and not give 'Momma-FDA' complete oversight and control over what medicines, procedures, and devices they're allowed to purchase? The 'regulatory affairs' people really get twitchy about stuff like this. Their bread-and-butter comes into it.
Those $80 power-cords with the green dot on them are every-so-slighty more safe than the common $2 power cords. I guess some people think it's worth while.
I wrote the firmware that controls a medical device that had less circuitry in it than a common AM radio. It sells for in excess of $1000.
From what I've seen of them, their entire purpose appears to be to sign whatever papers the board votes as appropriate and to network.
Here's a clue: The journalists at Mother Jones magazine don't realistically depict how modern business is conducted.
Games developers aren't really interested in dedicating 20% additional effort on game features that 2% of their market can make use of.
It used to be that 'Game' vendors pushed the envelope. Hell, I remember upgrading from paperwhite to a Color VGA monitor mostly because of Sim Earth.
Game vendors develop to the center of their market. They have to. Less than 10% of their market is people who are willing to spend $300 to get their $50 game to run properly.
I once paid $1200 for a 486 motherboard, with 33 MHz processor and 16 megs of RAM.
I once paid $2200 for a 386sx-16 laptop with 2 megs of RAM.
The ultra pure copper in the cable insures that there's no phase distortion of the 60 hz power signal.
I once stood in the checkout line at CompUSA. There was a crying small boy and his mom behind me in the line. He was pointing to game shrinkrwapped-boxes near the checkout. His mom was saying 'no, that won't run on an Apple.'
I thought it was a perfect marketing opportunity:
"Macintosh- The Computer That Makes Small Children Cry."
This is a games.slashdot.org thread. Shouldn't you be off somewhere fiddling with a spreadsheet or something?
It's probably a good thing we can't track you down by any personal information, as there are probably a half dozen people now wishing they could get your ass fired.
But the government is one of the primary tools for re-deployment.
Perhaps that's so in your perfect world. I view government meddling in the economy as an unfortunate side effect at best.
That's why the corporate income tax should be used as a sword to DISCOURAGE outsourcing.
I would prefer, rather, to use tax cuts as a sword, to discourage meddling by Politicians in affairs they are not qualified to be meddling in.
upper-middle-class people in the US routinely leave the country for major elective surgeries, to have them done by American-schooled foreign doctors in modern facilities in other countries where expenses are lower?
That sounds to me like running away from the over-the-top liability costs, and the obscene cost-ballooning effects of out-of-control FDA bureaucrats.
As for earning wealth, what exactly does a CEO do that merits their "vast" wealth?
Obviously, they do absolutely nothing. It's a good thing we have your ignorant stereotypes to fall back on, or we'd never understand those people.
Good god. You're more than a little confused about stock. The stock purchaser collects the dividend, but retains the value of the stock itself. Then, after collecting some dividends, if the company has done well in investing the purchaser's money, the value of the share of stock increases and the purchaser can sell the share for a profit if desired.
Since there is a finite amount of wealth at any given time,
You mean, at any instant in time. But it is not a zero-sum game, even if you insist on pretending it is. At any other instant in time there is a different finite amount of wealth.
To put it succinctly: new wealth is being created all the time. The growth of the economy depends on said wealth being redeployed. Not on it being collected by government agencies and directed to soup kitchens.
Well, okay.
Accountants, lawyers, burger flippers, and WalMart greeters.
Plus some grounds crew workers and janitors, I suppose.
What I haven't done is make the switch to Firefox from Mozilla. Because I like the ability to do things like cut/paste/save formatted web content, and casually compose web pages.
Why did they remove the Composer component of Mozilla in Firefox? Why is Firefox being heralded, when it's just another consumer-grade browser engineered to discourage content creation.
Here's to the full Mozilla suite, forever.
It's possible for a 'user' to have a mousepad with offensive artwork on it. It's possible for them to have flowers in a vase on their desk that someone else in the office will be allergic to.
That doesn't mean that drab grey mousepads should be cemented to the desktop. It doesn't mean that flower vases should be prohibited.
I mean, let's not go overboard justifying Admin-From-Hell power trips, okay?
Yes, but that 1200 day uptime means you're running a kernel that doesn't support anything fancy-schmancy in the first place.
Good old kernel 1.2.13 is good enough for anybody.
Some would argue that the nature of the Internet is as the new Tower of Babel.
Well, that, or he used the founder's name as a
Slashdot nick awhile back.
Insert some bogus information into an "authoritative" encyclopedia and see how long it takes for that to be corrected.
I can't. I'm not considered sufficiently 'authoritative' to insert the information. Which is a big plus, in the favor of 'authoritative' reference works.
'Controversial' topics in general, don't belong in encyclopedias. Encyclopedias should be used as reference works for 'stable' subjects. Any student is (or should be) taught to rely on resources like periodicals for 'controversial' topics.
His message meshes nicely with your message.
These online references, and online 'research' as a whole, focus on what online-types are interested in.
The Internet is a great place to research about what your next video card should be (and, interestingly, a poor place to research and study the history of video cards- My Trident 8900cl seems to have dropped off the face of the Earth.) It's a poor choice to research geological topics. And it probably will remain a poor choice indefinitely, for many topics.
Not every intellectual is hunkered over a keyboard and facing a screen.
Neither my bound 1986 edition of Britannica, nor my bound 191x (can't remember exact year) edition contain any blather about 'Online.'
Why do you compare one short-attention-span reference resource to another? My paper editions of Britannica have articles much more substancial that I've found on the 'on-line' editions.
Originally I got the CD-ROM edition thinking I could replace the four feet of shelf-space for the paper edition. That was a major error on my part.