Or more to the point: You can't just charge Walmart trucks because you own Target, and you want to use your ownership of the road as leverage against your competitors.
I'm not sure you're criticism is valid. He said, "Science is the willingness to relegate that evidence to be less significant than what some people want it to be."
I don't think he was saying that valid evidence would be dismissed because it didn't fit the theory, but that it would be admitted to be less significant if it's found to insufficient to support the theory.
The "someone to sue" argument is about CYA in a catastrophic event. It's the same argument as "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM".
Yes, I do understand. Both of those arguments are very stupid, though. What you're saying then is, "It won't help our business at all, and it won't give us better options when things fail. I'm just personally preparing an excuse for myself and my own decisions." You're trying to cover your own personal ass, and not really covering your business's ass.
I like LibreOffice, but there are some advantages to Google Apps. First, it's integrated with "cloud storage" so that you can easily share the files or access them anywhere. Their "office suite" is also a web app, meaning you can use it on basically any internet-connected computer with a web browser, without installing or downloading anything. Third, Google Apps has the nice collaboration feature that multiple people can be editing the same document at the same time.
I wouldn't suggest that it's absolutely better than LibreOffice. Having your documents "in the cloud" could be considered a disadvantage, depending on your use case. However, there are certainly situations where I'd rather use Google Apps than LibreOffice.
Working in IT, I hear a lot of argument 1 and argument 2. But then I have to ask those people, "When's the last time you sued Microsoft when things went bad? When's the last time you got official support for a Microsoft product?"
Theoretically there's someone to sue, but if you aren't in the practice of suing software vendors whenever things go wrong, it's not much of an advantage.
Apple actually does have tools to provision and manage their devices. They make tools to do that, and 3rd parties make tools for it. Many schools in fact do mass deployments of the sort you're talking about. It's not without its headaches, but hey... what is?
And though they're not a medical conspiracies, quite a few 'conspiracy theories' have turned out to be true in the past few decades. We've found out in recent years that our government *does* have secret prisons where they torture people. The NSA *does* read your email and tap your phone. People within the finance industry *do* apparently help to torpedo the economy so that they can make money from the collapse. Private prisons *do* raise money for candidates who support excessive prison terms and mandatory sentencing. The Republican party *does* have meetings where rich funders talk to the presidential nominee about how poor people are parasites and rich people deserve more money. Wasn't there something about the CIA selling crack?
All of these conspiracy theories have turned out to be more or less real. It doesn't seem to crazy to think that the pharmaceutical industry has engaged in some kinds of similarly insane shenanigans.
Yeah, I've seen enough Java software that no only requires 1.4 or 1.5 of the plugin, but might require a specific version (e.g. 1.4.2_23) or else it simply won't work. Earlier or later, it won't work. Now maybe the developers who made that app are completely retarded, but I've seen enough of them that I think there must be some fault in the approach Sun took in the first place.
It's definitely not the case that if you install the latest Java plugin, it will support all code written for prior versions.
From your description, it doesn't sound like we aren't a "factory model". It just sounds like the Asian stuff you describe is comparable to another factory with tighter tolerances, perhaps trying to produce different kinds of cogs and widgets.
One of the strange dystopian aspects of our education is that we *do* encourage art, music, and athletics, but in a bizarrely restricted way. Again, in the time and place when I went through school, they would teach the most bland, dry classes in art and music, focusing on classical forms of art yet stressing the idea that "everyone is an artist and there is no 'wrong' way of doing things." They would try to force the math/science nerds to perform in about the same way they'd try to force the art/music kids to do advanced math, and then they'd try to make the children feel inferior and guilty for under-performing.
Now don't get me wrong-- I understand and believe in the need to educate kids in many subjects so that they're well rounded and so that they find things that they love to do. However, that doesn't jibe with the way these things were set up. If they were going to teach art classes focused on classical art, they could have been teaching children art history, or classical techniques. If they wanted to teach children to be expressive, then they could have focused much less on grades and performance; they could have encouraged kids to try things out they they weren't going to be good at. Instead, they'd ask some kid with no sense of color and no instruction in painting to paint an expressive painting based on his feelings, and then give him a bad grade because it was poorly executed.
And going off on a bit of a tangent, but I have a point. The way these things are set up are, at best, incoherent. If they do teach anything, it's how to conform to the whims of an authority figure, and to seek arbitrary approval from others. This is also the case with how we teach literature, math, science, and everything else.
I think we also need to seriously reevaluate how we're thinking about which kids are "smarter". At least when and where I was going through school, the school wouldn't "shove the smart kids to the back of the class," so to speak. By high school, they did put the "smart kids" into honors classes and AP classes and spent a lot of time helping them get into college and all that.
The problem was more that all the "smart kids" were largely upper-middle class white and Asian kids who had no behavior problems, no learning disabilities, and were all sweet little goody-two-shoes who did exactly what their teachers said. If you strayed at any point from the approved path, or from the approved line of thinking, you were a "bad kid" who no longer deserved an education. It very much fit into the complaints that I've read that our education is a "factory model", i.e. children are comparable to cogs being churned out in a factory. If the kids adhere to the specs we have set out, then they're "good" and should be move along in the process. If they don't adhere to spec, then they're defective and need to be thrown out.
The problem is that there are lots of wonderful and intelligent and useful people who don't "adhere to spec". There may be people with a lot of potential who don't score well on standardized tests. They may be brilliant in some ways but a disaster in other areas of their academic career. We learn, sooner or later, that different people have different strengths, but just because they don't fit the mold of a "perfect student" doesn't make them worthless.
Nah, the USA worships one and only one thing: money
>
Former NFL star who blew all his money away? No worship. Might even laugh at him
But you're kind of missing that it's a self-reinforcing cycle. We worship them for being rich, yes, but he's only rich because we worship him. Take away our worship, and the rock-stars, movie stars, and pro-athletes never become rich in the first place.
Well I think ultimately what they've been doing is fairly smart. It seems to me that they have a pattern of developing these things as part of the main project, integrating it in as an experimental/optional feature for a while, and then putting it as the default after the kinks have been worked out. I think a lot of the problem is a perception problem-- people see the roadmap and see the experimental state of the upgrade, and are disappointed when it's not ready as quickly as they expected.
I think if it were a closed-source company with only internal roadmaps, and these things were included in experimental/beta versions that were not released to the public, it would all be normal. It mostly seems problematic because it's FOSS and we get to see the messy behind-the-scenes development.
Of course, that's just my perception of what's going on, as someone who's interested but not knowledgeable and not a developer.
If I were Mark Shuttleworth's technical advisor, I'd suggest examining RedHat's Fedora model. Create a small group called Canonical Labs where stuff like Mir and Unity can flourish, with continuous releases and without the artificial constraint of a set release date.
This brings a different kind of problem, which is that there becomes a whole new management level of keeping the two groups in sync. Otherwise, the "Canonical Labs" group might run off and do all kinds of things that are great, but which never get integrated into the main project.
I'd sooner suggest that they just be more clear in announcing these release dates that they're very tentative estimates of when it'll be included as the default, so that people aren't so damned disappointed. That said, having an unfettered R&D process that can come up with whacky impractical things is also nice.
Ultimately the bitcoins are a digital file that we ascribe value even though there's no inherent entity, and we trust in its value because someone assured us that a computer is sure it's a unique file. So what's a weird thought to me is, when did these accounts actually go to being valueless?
It's like... Pretend there was no insurance or regulation, and I had a bank account with no physical cash, but just a computer entry saying I had $5,000, and the bank has $5,000 to cover it if I need to withdraw. The bank lends out that money, invests it, whatever, and now does not have the $5,000 on-hand to cover my account. Then at some point, the banks investments go belly-up and people stop paying off their loans, and the bank is unable to get enough money together to cover my $5,000, but they still have the computer entry saying I have $5,000. Finally, I go to withdraw it, and they tell me they can't give me my money, and they go out of business.
So the weird question is, at what point did I actually go from having $5,000 to not-having $5,000?
Maybe they're giving different plans based on location? When I look at the website and pick the link for Voice/Data plans, the first things that come up are unlimited talk/text. I didn't even see other options, though I didn't look to deeply for it.
Well no, it's just on their normal plans. Maybe not if you have a dumb phone, but if you go to Verizon, AT&T, or T-Mobile and buy a smartphone, their default plans will include unlimited talk and text.
Can anyone explain why this acquisition is a good idea, and why WhatsApp is worth $16bn? I feel like I must be missing something. My impression of WhatsApp is that the technology behind it would be fairly trivial to recreate. I understand they have a large user base, though I'm not sure why, and I'm unsure how and why Facebook would expect to take on that userbase.
Is there a good hidden reason, or is it just another one of those moments when a tech company doesn't know how to grow beyond their one profitable product, so they just go around buying companies without a real plan?
Except that, in the US at least, carriers have started making text messaging "free". Not actually free, but unlimited and included in the service. They've started charging for data usage instead. As much as people will complain, it makes a lot more sense than previous pricing structures.
You're right, but I still don't think it's a smart purchase, since I don't really see a method to hang on to those users other than, "providing good service". Insofar as Facebook is capable of doing that, they could have stolen the users without buying the company.
It would distort the free market and no one would take the risk or the very hard work like 70 hour work weeks, MBAs, and other things for dozens of years without the compensation.
Huh? People do work very hard for 70 hours a week without making 20 million dollars for it. It happens all the time. Sometimes because they have to, and sometimes because they enjoy their jobs. And getting MBAs? Do people actually need to get MBAs?
If someone is paid too much the market takes care of that with something called a firing.
Are you sure about that?
the shareholders need a return and who is the shareholder? Your elderly mom, YOU, etc.
Except often they're not, at least not to a meaningful degree. Your elderly mom probably has a 401k that gives her a 0.001% share in the company without knowing it. Mostly "the shareholders" are rich people.
The sky is the limit and the CEO didn't start out like this overnight. It was not luck. Even company founders are poor. It took Zuckerberg 10 years before he became very wealthy.
You're conflating some different issues here. The sky is the theoretical limit, in abstract, but not really so much for everyone. Zuckerberg did not start off poor. He started out upper-middle class. And he was lucky. He found himself with a good idea at the right place and at the right time and with the right help. Any number of things could have gone against him, resulting in Facebook never becoming the company that it is today.
So while it wouldn't be fair to claim that Zuckerberg sat around doing nothing and just happened across success, like finding the winning lottery ticket, it's also not fair to everyone else to paint the picture as though Zuckerberg created his own success through pure brilliance and hard work. He made smart decisions and worked hard, but others made equally smart decisions and worked equally hard without ever making a million dollars.
Yeah, well apparently we won't see decent internet from anyone else, either. DSL is unavailable. Verizon has no plans to install FIOS. I thought it was bad being stuck with TWC, but with the Comcast purchase, it's going from bad to worse.
Crap, we're not on the list. Somehow, even the biggest city in the US can't get a decent fiber roll-out. That's how you know the "population density" arguments are BS.
Some of that might depend on what you mean by "on the worker's time". If you're talking about hourly work, then lunch breaks often aren't included in determining pay, but other breaks may be. However, if you're talking about the "40 hour work week", the concept of it originally, and up until recently, included all breaks. It meant that you showed up, and then you left 8 hours later. I believe that was historically the idea even in Europe, but it was very definitely the idea in the US in the 70s and 80s.
Yes, breaks were supposed to be included in the 40 hour work-week. Not just a lunch break, but other ~15 minute breaks throughout the day. The expectation that people don't get to take breaks is recent.
Slashdot Mirror
Or more to the point: You can't just charge Walmart trucks because you own Target, and you want to use your ownership of the road as leverage against your competitors.
That's the real issue.
I'm not sure you're criticism is valid. He said, "Science is the willingness to relegate that evidence to be less significant than what some people want it to be."
I don't think he was saying that valid evidence would be dismissed because it didn't fit the theory, but that it would be admitted to be less significant if it's found to insufficient to support the theory.
The "someone to sue" argument is about CYA in a catastrophic event. It's the same argument as "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM".
Yes, I do understand. Both of those arguments are very stupid, though. What you're saying then is, "It won't help our business at all, and it won't give us better options when things fail. I'm just personally preparing an excuse for myself and my own decisions." You're trying to cover your own personal ass, and not really covering your business's ass.
I like LibreOffice, but there are some advantages to Google Apps. First, it's integrated with "cloud storage" so that you can easily share the files or access them anywhere. Their "office suite" is also a web app, meaning you can use it on basically any internet-connected computer with a web browser, without installing or downloading anything. Third, Google Apps has the nice collaboration feature that multiple people can be editing the same document at the same time.
I wouldn't suggest that it's absolutely better than LibreOffice. Having your documents "in the cloud" could be considered a disadvantage, depending on your use case. However, there are certainly situations where I'd rather use Google Apps than LibreOffice.
Working in IT, I hear a lot of argument 1 and argument 2. But then I have to ask those people, "When's the last time you sued Microsoft when things went bad? When's the last time you got official support for a Microsoft product?"
Theoretically there's someone to sue, but if you aren't in the practice of suing software vendors whenever things go wrong, it's not much of an advantage.
Apple actually does have tools to provision and manage their devices. They make tools to do that, and 3rd parties make tools for it. Many schools in fact do mass deployments of the sort you're talking about. It's not without its headaches, but hey... what is?
And though they're not a medical conspiracies, quite a few 'conspiracy theories' have turned out to be true in the past few decades. We've found out in recent years that our government *does* have secret prisons where they torture people. The NSA *does* read your email and tap your phone. People within the finance industry *do* apparently help to torpedo the economy so that they can make money from the collapse. Private prisons *do* raise money for candidates who support excessive prison terms and mandatory sentencing. The Republican party *does* have meetings where rich funders talk to the presidential nominee about how poor people are parasites and rich people deserve more money. Wasn't there something about the CIA selling crack?
All of these conspiracy theories have turned out to be more or less real. It doesn't seem to crazy to think that the pharmaceutical industry has engaged in some kinds of similarly insane shenanigans.
Yeah, I've seen enough Java software that no only requires 1.4 or 1.5 of the plugin, but might require a specific version (e.g. 1.4.2_23) or else it simply won't work. Earlier or later, it won't work. Now maybe the developers who made that app are completely retarded, but I've seen enough of them that I think there must be some fault in the approach Sun took in the first place.
It's definitely not the case that if you install the latest Java plugin, it will support all code written for prior versions.
From your description, it doesn't sound like we aren't a "factory model". It just sounds like the Asian stuff you describe is comparable to another factory with tighter tolerances, perhaps trying to produce different kinds of cogs and widgets.
One of the strange dystopian aspects of our education is that we *do* encourage art, music, and athletics, but in a bizarrely restricted way. Again, in the time and place when I went through school, they would teach the most bland, dry classes in art and music, focusing on classical forms of art yet stressing the idea that "everyone is an artist and there is no 'wrong' way of doing things." They would try to force the math/science nerds to perform in about the same way they'd try to force the art/music kids to do advanced math, and then they'd try to make the children feel inferior and guilty for under-performing.
Now don't get me wrong-- I understand and believe in the need to educate kids in many subjects so that they're well rounded and so that they find things that they love to do. However, that doesn't jibe with the way these things were set up. If they were going to teach art classes focused on classical art, they could have been teaching children art history, or classical techniques. If they wanted to teach children to be expressive, then they could have focused much less on grades and performance; they could have encouraged kids to try things out they they weren't going to be good at. Instead, they'd ask some kid with no sense of color and no instruction in painting to paint an expressive painting based on his feelings, and then give him a bad grade because it was poorly executed.
And going off on a bit of a tangent, but I have a point. The way these things are set up are, at best, incoherent. If they do teach anything, it's how to conform to the whims of an authority figure, and to seek arbitrary approval from others. This is also the case with how we teach literature, math, science, and everything else.
I think we also need to seriously reevaluate how we're thinking about which kids are "smarter". At least when and where I was going through school, the school wouldn't "shove the smart kids to the back of the class," so to speak. By high school, they did put the "smart kids" into honors classes and AP classes and spent a lot of time helping them get into college and all that.
The problem was more that all the "smart kids" were largely upper-middle class white and Asian kids who had no behavior problems, no learning disabilities, and were all sweet little goody-two-shoes who did exactly what their teachers said. If you strayed at any point from the approved path, or from the approved line of thinking, you were a "bad kid" who no longer deserved an education. It very much fit into the complaints that I've read that our education is a "factory model", i.e. children are comparable to cogs being churned out in a factory. If the kids adhere to the specs we have set out, then they're "good" and should be move along in the process. If they don't adhere to spec, then they're defective and need to be thrown out.
The problem is that there are lots of wonderful and intelligent and useful people who don't "adhere to spec". There may be people with a lot of potential who don't score well on standardized tests. They may be brilliant in some ways but a disaster in other areas of their academic career. We learn, sooner or later, that different people have different strengths, but just because they don't fit the mold of a "perfect student" doesn't make them worthless.
We worship the Low IQ and brawn.
Nah, the USA worships one and only one thing: money
>
Former NFL star who blew all his money away? No worship. Might even laugh at him
But you're kind of missing that it's a self-reinforcing cycle. We worship them for being rich, yes, but he's only rich because we worship him. Take away our worship, and the rock-stars, movie stars, and pro-athletes never become rich in the first place.
Well I think ultimately what they've been doing is fairly smart. It seems to me that they have a pattern of developing these things as part of the main project, integrating it in as an experimental/optional feature for a while, and then putting it as the default after the kinks have been worked out. I think a lot of the problem is a perception problem-- people see the roadmap and see the experimental state of the upgrade, and are disappointed when it's not ready as quickly as they expected.
I think if it were a closed-source company with only internal roadmaps, and these things were included in experimental/beta versions that were not released to the public, it would all be normal. It mostly seems problematic because it's FOSS and we get to see the messy behind-the-scenes development.
Of course, that's just my perception of what's going on, as someone who's interested but not knowledgeable and not a developer.
If I were Mark Shuttleworth's technical advisor, I'd suggest examining RedHat's Fedora model. Create a small group called Canonical Labs where stuff like Mir and Unity can flourish, with continuous releases and without the artificial constraint of a set release date.
This brings a different kind of problem, which is that there becomes a whole new management level of keeping the two groups in sync. Otherwise, the "Canonical Labs" group might run off and do all kinds of things that are great, but which never get integrated into the main project.
I'd sooner suggest that they just be more clear in announcing these release dates that they're very tentative estimates of when it'll be included as the default, so that people aren't so damned disappointed. That said, having an unfettered R&D process that can come up with whacky impractical things is also nice.
Ultimately the bitcoins are a digital file that we ascribe value even though there's no inherent entity, and we trust in its value because someone assured us that a computer is sure it's a unique file. So what's a weird thought to me is, when did these accounts actually go to being valueless?
It's like... Pretend there was no insurance or regulation, and I had a bank account with no physical cash, but just a computer entry saying I had $5,000, and the bank has $5,000 to cover it if I need to withdraw. The bank lends out that money, invests it, whatever, and now does not have the $5,000 on-hand to cover my account. Then at some point, the banks investments go belly-up and people stop paying off their loans, and the bank is unable to get enough money together to cover my $5,000, but they still have the computer entry saying I have $5,000. Finally, I go to withdraw it, and they tell me they can't give me my money, and they go out of business.
So the weird question is, at what point did I actually go from having $5,000 to not-having $5,000?
Maybe they're giving different plans based on location? When I look at the website and pick the link for Voice/Data plans, the first things that come up are unlimited talk/text. I didn't even see other options, though I didn't look to deeply for it.
Well no, it's just on their normal plans. Maybe not if you have a dumb phone, but if you go to Verizon, AT&T, or T-Mobile and buy a smartphone, their default plans will include unlimited talk and text.
...none of which changes the fact that I have shitty internet, and the "free market" is showing no signs of fixing it.
Can anyone explain why this acquisition is a good idea, and why WhatsApp is worth $16bn? I feel like I must be missing something. My impression of WhatsApp is that the technology behind it would be fairly trivial to recreate. I understand they have a large user base, though I'm not sure why, and I'm unsure how and why Facebook would expect to take on that userbase.
Is there a good hidden reason, or is it just another one of those moments when a tech company doesn't know how to grow beyond their one profitable product, so they just go around buying companies without a real plan?
Except that, in the US at least, carriers have started making text messaging "free". Not actually free, but unlimited and included in the service. They've started charging for data usage instead. As much as people will complain, it makes a lot more sense than previous pricing structures.
You're right, but I still don't think it's a smart purchase, since I don't really see a method to hang on to those users other than, "providing good service". Insofar as Facebook is capable of doing that, they could have stolen the users without buying the company.
It would distort the free market and no one would take the risk or the very hard work like 70 hour work weeks, MBAs, and other things for dozens of years without the compensation.
Huh? People do work very hard for 70 hours a week without making 20 million dollars for it. It happens all the time. Sometimes because they have to, and sometimes because they enjoy their jobs. And getting MBAs? Do people actually need to get MBAs?
If someone is paid too much the market takes care of that with something called a firing.
Are you sure about that?
the shareholders need a return and who is the shareholder? Your elderly mom, YOU, etc.
Except often they're not, at least not to a meaningful degree. Your elderly mom probably has a 401k that gives her a 0.001% share in the company without knowing it. Mostly "the shareholders" are rich people.
The sky is the limit and the CEO didn't start out like this overnight. It was not luck. Even company founders are poor. It took Zuckerberg 10 years before he became very wealthy.
You're conflating some different issues here. The sky is the theoretical limit, in abstract, but not really so much for everyone. Zuckerberg did not start off poor. He started out upper-middle class. And he was lucky. He found himself with a good idea at the right place and at the right time and with the right help. Any number of things could have gone against him, resulting in Facebook never becoming the company that it is today.
So while it wouldn't be fair to claim that Zuckerberg sat around doing nothing and just happened across success, like finding the winning lottery ticket, it's also not fair to everyone else to paint the picture as though Zuckerberg created his own success through pure brilliance and hard work. He made smart decisions and worked hard, but others made equally smart decisions and worked equally hard without ever making a million dollars.
Yeah, well apparently we won't see decent internet from anyone else, either. DSL is unavailable. Verizon has no plans to install FIOS. I thought it was bad being stuck with TWC, but with the Comcast purchase, it's going from bad to worse.
Crap, we're not on the list. Somehow, even the biggest city in the US can't get a decent fiber roll-out. That's how you know the "population density" arguments are BS.
Some of that might depend on what you mean by "on the worker's time". If you're talking about hourly work, then lunch breaks often aren't included in determining pay, but other breaks may be. However, if you're talking about the "40 hour work week", the concept of it originally, and up until recently, included all breaks. It meant that you showed up, and then you left 8 hours later. I believe that was historically the idea even in Europe, but it was very definitely the idea in the US in the 70s and 80s.
Yes, breaks were supposed to be included in the 40 hour work-week. Not just a lunch break, but other ~15 minute breaks throughout the day. The expectation that people don't get to take breaks is recent.