What about film sales to movie networks such as HBO? Airlines? What about sales to TV networks?
I'm sure these add up to more than 1% of many films income.
You're missing the point. What if the filmaker doesn't want their work shown in those ways? What if it's not main-stream enough to merit a slot on HBO's limited hours on or the fixed number of flights an airline runs... and the only thing the filmaker can expect to earn on is limited art house release and DVD sales? Then, it's OK if someone just rips the DVD and away they go? Or, what if, like what just happened with Start Wars, you've got people "sharing" the stolen material before it's even been released to the theatres. That's not "fair use," it is and should continue to be illegal. What's "draconian" about cracking down on people that set up sites boasting that they've got 10,000 such illegally obtained/distributed files?
FWIW, I'm also repulsed by McCain-Feingold, and agree that the average Joe needs a better understanding of how communicating online does (and spectacularly does not, sometimes) contribute to our wider cultural discourse. That being said, the topic here is corporate blogging. Censorship, per se, isn't an issue. Forget the web, blogs, the net. 20 years ago, people working for publicly held (hey, private, too) companies were always told to refer press inquiries to the people in the organization that were trained and authorized to handle them well. Plenty of companies got in hot water for something an employee wrote in a letter to editor, or communicated incorrectly to a customer, vendor, or partner. This is nothing new, but the wide reach and spontaneity of a blog has made it that much more delicate of an issue.
The result is anonymized rebel blogs that actually mean something, but which by their nature aren't trustworthy... or, sanctioned blogs that pretty much cling to the press release theme either on purpose or at least in practice. Juicier internal blogs are probably going to get toned down some, too, because they are still "discoverable" like e-mail, and can immortalize Really Dumb Things Someone Said.
Now, none of this has any bearing on the general issue of free speech, but when we talk down blogging (in this context - as company communications, no matter how formal or informal) we want to be sure that we're not letting that spill into the concept of more free-wheeling public blogs by enthusiasts and know-it-alls like the people here. Personally, I find forums like this, even with the impact of the periodic Moderation Insantity to be a more likely spot to find some insights (in the same amount of time searching) than I'd experience in the "wild" looking through blogs.
Oy. The Coast Guard remains part of the DOD, and the Secret Service is still part of Treasury. Customs and FEMA are very appropriately going to be a part of DHS. The tinfoil hat impication comes from the tone of the comment - as in, "don't you see, you uninformed Americans? The evil administration is making everything part of one evil agency!" It's just a silly, tinfoilish perspective that isn't even factually correct.
Um, no. And, since you brought it up, recall that part of the way that Stalin crushed the will of many sectors of his territory's population was by literally starving them. You'll notice that the US is actually a net food exporter. And we've got this little things called elections (as opposed to say, the ruler-for-life approach taken by people like Stalin, Saddam, Qaddafi, Kim Jong Il, etc.).
I like to think that in the modern age, people are protected by bodies like the UN. It pisses me off when the governing bodies of countries like America ignore UN rules because they think they are above the international law. In a perfect world, no one would have such extreme power over anyone else...
Are you even listening to yourself? To translate: no one should have power over anyone else... except for the UN, which is made up of people, who would then have power over other people?
That would be the UN, which has done such a fabuluous job of protecting people in Africa? Or in preventing Iran for forging ahead with nukes? Or in helping the poor bastards living in North Korea? Or in stopping China from threatening Taiwan? Or which kept the Baltics all nice and tidy when the Serbs and the Croats blew up? Or the UN that did such a great job of making Saddam even richer as they put together a totally corrupt oil-for-food program? Ask the people living in Darfur how protected they're feeling.
departments like the CIA, FBI, Secret Service, Coast Guard, Customs, and FEMA; have all been moved to, or are in the process of being moved to the DHS
Perhaps the people that are modding this as "interesting" should ask themselves whether or not the comment is, or is not, BS. As an example, the CIA is not a piece of DHS, and is not being moved to DHS. Rather, we've got a new office (now occupied by Negroponte) that is coordinating the intelligence output (though not necessarily operations) of several disparate agencies or units within other agencies. While DHS has a strong interest in coordinated intelligence, it is not an intelligence agency, per se. The FBI, likewise, is still part of Justice, and neither are, or will be, part of DHS. Get your damn facts as straight as your tinfoil hat.
If the journals don't like being published online by google, they will stop publishing, fizzle...
Do you suppose that the only function a journal (for example) provides is to physically print what they publish, bind it, maintain business relationships with its consumers, and distribute it? No. They also have editors, reviewers, and usually other organizational players that keep the journal credible and worth the subscription. Certainly leaving the paper behind would reduce their overhead (and thus the price per subscriber), but many of them are already doing that. It doesn't mean that they can do it for free.
and something else will come and replace them...
"Something?" You mean, a team of industry or research topic professionals willing to gather, edit, and credibly present authoritative information... for free? The people who are up to that task are not hobbyists, or bored retired people. If they put hours into that activity, it's hours they can't put into something else. Their time is worth something, and that's expressed in the subscription price of the journals they produce.
Now if only the RIAA/MPAA would have the same fate...
Yes, I can see how, based on your thinking, that you don't think that musicians, filmakers, and other creative types should have the option of using an industry layer to take care of their business dealings with a jillion radio stations, clubs, and publishers. Better for the artists to stop wasting their time with all of that creating and to spend all their time on business instead. And every radio station can then start doing individual bits of business with 10,000 different musicians, each with different expectations about whether and how they want their work paid for. That would sure encourage more airplay, that's for sure!
Google, help me out here!
Great idea! You should encourage Google to also do what they do for free. They should put all of their huge monthly costs aside, and just do things like publish directories, terabytes of hard-won data, and ads at no cost to anyone, just for you. They've got enough cash - they should be able to coast for a few weeks spending millions on datacenters and bandwidth before witless expectations for free everything run them into the ground. Certainly they won't mind if their proprietary software, research, and compiled index is published with no strings attached, too. They've spent millions of dollars and untold thousands of man hours developing it, and it's a closely held trade secret that is the backbone of their ability to grow and thrive, but they're just as bad as the RIAA for not wanting people to lay hands on it for free, aren't they?
What are the chances that you're not actually thinking past the simple words in the comment? It's called a metaphor.
The point of the metaphor is to illustrate that some of the other comments, especially those that are ragging on MS for not being "first" (even though Google itself was not first either, in this context) are possibly missing the importance of the subject. Specifically, sometimes the people that take their time and watch the success/failure of others can come into a market and do something as good or better, with less risk and investment, and actually come out ahead. This applies perfectly to the search/mapping topic, and MS would be the second mouse, which might just get the cheese.
The comment must have struck some people as interesting because it implies an understanding of the larger context in which these huge tech operators (the very thing we should be talking about on slashdot, no?) are doing what they do. Millions upon millions of dollars are at stake, with people both very- and not-so-very technical using the systems in question. The people who succeed in this area will set the tone for a lot of other initiatives.
For a proper nerd reading the post, all of that is implied in a simple, somewhat poetic and self-referential two-layer (and slightly ironic) aphorism. What is not nerdy about that? If you long for the "good old days" of slashdot, you'd be rooting for a little more subtlety and nuance in the discussions, and the expectations that people will get the references without it all being spelled out for them. This is the sort of thing that keeps the IQs higher here, and improves the level of discourse.
This doesn't protect anybody but the government...
Though I'm not sure that's exactly true, the real issue is that if somebody's malware does get onto the desktop of, say, a project manager working at the Agriculture Department, then that publisher's going to wind up in heaps o' trouble regardless. I don't care if they go down because my local sheriff presses the case, or the feds do. They'll go down harder if the feds do it.
Oh come on. If that's your take on it, then you should rag on Google, too, since MapQuest had maps and integrated areal photos online a couple years ago.
But that's exactly my point: people who wrongly (say, completely irrationally) arrive at a conclusion about something are, well, wrong. Hopefully you're not feeling guilty about the person whose entire life has been ruined (thinking that you've cursed them because you looked at them), and hopefully you don't feel any real kinship with people who assign guilt over something just as loopy. 9/11 would have happened regardless of who was in the White House that day. The things that were driving that were boiling along in the 8 years of the previous administration, and the plan was already in motion in the many months before hand. The presence of terrorists in the world is a fact, and whether this president or another told people that they shouldn't assume the worst about every Muslim in the country, and that we're doing what we can to secure what we can - it doesn't matter who said it. People as broken as the tinfoil house crew will have found their inspiration in the new Pope, Darth Vader, or a change in the paint job on the local police force's cars. The point of my comment was that, as usual, a slashdotter is leveraging a dumb bit of news to add to his/her personal mythology of Bush as some sort of Dr. Evil, and attempting to score some sort of rhetorical points therein. It's just idiotic and tiresome, but some other readers decided to mod it interesting.
Excellent satire! I totally get your humorous tinfoil-hat-within-the-tinfoil-hat-story Meta Tinfoilness.
Really now: the Bush administration is somehow behind this family's total lack of any critical thinking skills or capacity for grip on reality? It takes a lifetime of living with a broken brain, or some pretty serious actual mental problems to really believe the sorts of phantom problems that rule the lives of people like this. Latching onto current events in some way is completely typical, but that's correlation, not causation.
But you do get full credit for an excellent Kook Impression. Nicely done.
So you're saying 10-13k people are "dead wood". Nice of you to jump to conclusions there. Hope your job is on the line next
It doesn't matter how many people it is. Unless you're suggesting that companies should be forced to employ people they don't need, what is your point? For a smaller company, laying off only 10 people might be a larger percentage of the workers. If the company needs to do it to stay fiscally sound for the future, should it instead be forced to make a small number of people happy, and thus jeopardize the long term prospects for everyone in the company? And, in doing so, kill off the value of the stock, which is held by people all over the world in their retirement portfolios, the mutual fund they're banking on to grow money for their kid's education, and so on?
This is the main problem with unions - they treat the job like an entitlement, and many of their positions seem to suggest that they'd rather see the company - and all of the jobs it provides - go down the toilet, rather than prune back staff in areas where they no longer need them.
If 10,000 people are that sure that what they're doing is absolutely so necessary in the market, then surely they're not worried about a job, right? If there's that much demand, then one of the competition will snatch them right up. But: what if, because of a thousand different variables, it's just that they're not that valuable? What if there really isn't a need for them at that moment, in that company, in that industry? As unfortunate as that is, should they penalize the company for it, and insist that everyone gets to go down with the ship?
Or, there's the people that say that if the company would just stop trying to profit so much, there wouldn't be a problem. But, if that's the strategy the company takes, watch the investors pull out their money and go somewhere else where that capital will be put to more productive use.
But mostly: if those 10,000 are so sure that they know better how to run a business that can compete in the incredibly awkward business environment in which IBM now finds itself, then they should also have no problem starting up a new company to do all that business that they seem to think that IBM wants to leave on the table.
I really wonder why "Will it Float" is so popular. It is so stupid. I mean...some things are funny. Some things are so stupid they are funny. But that segment fits in between where it isn't funny at all. But then again...I don't find Letterman very funny either. Give me Conan over him anyday
I think it's closer to the non-funny-therefore-funny model. As with most of Letterman's long-running gags, it ceases to be about the actual activity at hand (like throwing things off the building, etc), and more about the Kabuki-like form of the thing. There's a rhythm to it - a set of familiar expectations that makes things like the "what are playing for today?" question and the actual dunking totally beside the point. Personally, I think Letterman keeps doing it because it's a good excuse to keep bringing out the Grinder Girl, which is certainly a highlight.
I also really like Conan, but it's just apples and oranges - totally different stuff for a different audience at a different time of night. The real thing will be to watch how he changes his stuff when he moves into Leno's slot in a few years. Letterman's dry, more subtle manner grows on you though - well, on me, anyway. He's more the eccentric uncle we all wish we had, and Conan's more like the joker cousin we do have. Love 'em both, though.
How is "dirty work" for a provider of a service (and the only people who actually do know to whom they've assigned an IP address) to be the ones who keep track of this stuff? How is it any different than the trail that your cell phone leaves? That's all subject to court requests.
You view a group of cells that all humans once were as disposable but view the same group of cells that has been given the time and nuture to replicate and develop facets that you are able to identify(i.e. lungs, nerves, etc)as life
But that's the whole point: those cells are not put into a situation where that could or would take place. There's no person waiting to be born before the doctor seeks to use a process like this, and there's no person waiting to born after, either. Incidentally, I think part of the problem here is that you use the word "life" when you mean "human life." Those are not same thing. Bacteria are alive. Cellary is alive. Every time you swat a mosquito, you're ending life.
Clearly you view complexity and size as an indicator of life
Certainly you cannot achieve the level of cognitive complexity that we associate with humanity without involving a certain amount of brain tissue, arranged in a certain way. So "size" in that sense is meaningful. Size, as it relates to a microscopic collection of a dozen cells, is also meaningful because you can't look at it and find a very small, curled up baby hiding in there. It doesn't exist yet, at that stage.
My gorilla example showed how your life status indication method is flawed by applying it to another scenario
Sorry, don't see it that way. A gorilla, while very advanced as mammals go, doesn't have the mental horsepower of homo sapiens. Neither does a blue whale. You're confusing the difference between 20 cells and a more developed fetus (where there is a size difference, but that's mostly incidental to the complexity issue) with the difference in size between me and a mountain gorilla. That's a red herring. A 10 pound baby is a less than a 20th of my size, but almost entirely as complex, mentally. The adult gorilla, at that point, is probably smarter than the baby, but the baby will completely eclipse it because it's got the DNS to do so.
Your position is that "life" starts at conception is tangental to what that form of life is. Whether or not a fertilized egg does or does not have the potential to become a healthy human baby doesn't mean that, half a dozen cell divisions later, you're looking at a person. There is no structure present that allows you to apply that label.
Boiling this discussion down to the crux of the matter (that you consider that fertilized egg to be a person) is not a waste of time: it exposes the nature of the debate.
The scientist, in his act of forming the embryo with no intention of fostering its development has taken responsibility for the viability of the life. His very action is the killing of the embryo.
No, the scientist is creating a small group of cells, using material from the person that he intends to help, and with no intention or expectation that those small cells will or could form a viable embryo. You can call it an embryo if you want, but it only has life in the sense that any small group of cells has life. There is no nervous system, there is no means by which those cells can respirate, and certainly no means by which they can be invested with any of the qualities we assign to a more fully formed organism (let alone a person). The scientist isn't suddenly confronted with a "life", he's just looking at the cells he put together specifically to accomplish the theraputic task that is his goal. You make it sound like he's looking at a fetus, which, of course, we're not talking about. When he uses those cells to theraputic effect in his patient, he is, of course, sending some of them off to live and reproduce as part of the therapy. Those that he doesn't need aren't preserved any more than you preserve all of the cells that make up your arm when you scratch an itch (the act of which "kills" hundreds or thousands of your cells).
Okay so life as you understand it is defined by the number of cells that make up any being.
You won't be any more credible or pursuasive by putting words in someone else's mouth. I didn't say that, and you know it. This issue is about whether or not a dozen or two cells provide an adequate source of stem cells. One thing we don't have to worry about is whether or not those same dozen or two cells are a person, because they simply are not. If all goes well in a scenario supportive of gestation, those cells can wind up, millions of divisions later, being the start of a fetus. Until then, you've got undifferentiated cells (which is why they have so much theraputic promise) and no structure that could conceivably be referred to as a fetus, let alone a "baby" or "unborn person."
So according to your logic gorrilas are more alive than humans are
No, that's according to your twisted rhetorical version of what I'm saying. Just because it would serve your point of view to somehow "catch" me saying that, I didn't say that, nor can you infer that (with any intellectual honesty) from what I said. Gorilla embryos, at the dozen-or-two-cells level, are virtually indistinguishable from ours. But in any way that matters, so are chickens and toads. The meaningful differences between us and gorillas (which are slim indeed, as an expressed percentage of their DNA) don't really manifest themselves until farther along in development. That species evolved along a different path, and found (until pretty recently) a succesful niche that didn't require quite the IQ or communications skills that man did. They stayed in the jungle, while we spread out into the steppes and savannah, where better upright mobility and keener group predation made for better survival. Either way, both the gorilla and the human are fantastically complex by the time gestation is complete - but then, so is a mouse, just not as much so, on the neurological front.
Your understanding of the ethical implications of embryonic research is hinged on number of cells and viability. So according to your theory, my friend who was born very prematurely was technically not alive while being cared for in an incubator.
Again, you're pretending, because you think it helps your case, that I've said something that I did not. Because you find it important to see a "person" in a dozen cells, you can't imagine (even if it's shown to you, which surely it has been, if you've managed to get through junior high school) any middle ground between the first few divisions of the cells of an embryo, and the extremely complex structures of a several month old fetus. It's not like the
Apology accepted. Please remember that most people over here do not make cheese or grow tulips, just like you are probaly not herding your cattle from horseback while shooting indians...
Well, I would be herding my cattle, but the Indians took them all when I ran out of ammo. I've switched over to German hunting dogs now, though they make terrible dairy products (the dogs, not the Germans).
Actually, I'll bet that many people in Europe would be surprised just how many gun-owning, horse-riding country-folk there still are in the US, very few of which are idiots, Indian-killers, or otherwise the stereotypes one might expect. On the other hand, one of my favorite artists (Rein Poortvliet) is Dutch, and liked to own the same kind of hunting dogs that I do. I also spent years working for a Dutch family here in the US (they were Venemans), and he loved to make fun of my Scando-heritage, with is about three quarters. The Rasmusens (on one side of the family) he assured me were really mostly good for loading ships, and the Kuykendaals (on the other side) were, as he put it, translating, "the people from Chicken Valley." He loved Gouda too, though, and reminded me that it's not pronounced "gew-da". On the other hand, he was not a very good businessman sometimes, and his company got gobbled up by a much larger one. Given his personal clunkiness as a business manager, I feel that dealing with him for years as an IT person earned me the right to poke fun at at least some people from his home town, while perhaps not the entire country. And, while you can jab at me for mentioning tulips, I think you can credit me with the restraint I used in not mentioning windmills or wooden shoes. That's just how sensitive I am.
so what's the difference between getting some kid's organs and killing an embryo to harvest them?
Do you mean the organs of a child who has died in an accident? Nothing wrong there - you'd expect most parents to be proud that their kid's brief life might at least have continued to flourish in some indirect way.
Or do you mean, killing kids to get their organs? I'll be looking forward to your pointing that one out in the news when the time comes.
But killing an embryo? OK, so you've got a handful of cells dividing, at least for a little while, anyway, in a petri dish. No mom, no pregnancy, and no way they would ever amount to anything - let alone a person - without continual intervention from science, which is still beyond us anyway. So, that group of cells, completely unviable as they sit there, and without any means by which to be differentiated from a similarly complex group of paramecium (which is to say, there is no there there yet, no framework on which to hang the concept of person-hood - merely the eventual potential, which could also be said of the reproductive organs of a man and a women eyeing each other over a beer), what's wrong with using them to save lives? To shoot for getting the paralyzed to walk again? For that kid nearly does die in an accident to breath again off a respirator?
just to improve the quality of an old one - that possibly won't last much longer?
So, the son of a friend just had his spine severed in a road accident. He's done from the waist down, now. He's 22. Might as well write him off, huh? After all, he's so old, he's pretty much close to dead. Those dozen cells in the petri dish, though - set them next to his hospital bed, and they'll thrive! Why, they'll be a smiling, bubbly little baby in just a matter of months! No? No.
Whether you eat plants or meat or both, you kill billions of cells every day to improve the quality of your life. You eat them to survive, remember? There's as much of a human being in a dozen cells as there is in a stalk of asparagus. But if I could produce eggs (that would otherwise go to waste) that could be used to help restore my friend's son's mobility to him, I'd do it in a heartbeat. And, any dozen cells that divide along the way won't have it in them, under the circumstances (lacking, as they do, any sort of nervous system as a platform to have anything), to really weigh in on it. That's not an "all-new human life," it's a dozen cells. But a 22-year-old able to walk again: that would be an all-new human life. When we've made it that far, bio-tech-wise, and your child is lying there with a broken back, pretty much guaranteed never to have children as a result, would you begrudge her the same? Or, does God prefer a dozen unviable cells in a dish over paralyzed people or new mothers with degenerative neural diseases that will rob their children of a normal life? Getting that mom healthy is for her young children, though you're not set up to see that larger picture, it seems.
Not really. Just ask yourself: would you rather pay those same sites to see the content without ads? If not, you either aren't that interested in the material, or you are willing to put up with the ads. There really aren't any other options (other than the content going away because the providers don't want to pay all that overhead and burn all that time as a charity to you, their loyal visitors).
If we could just de-escalate back down to simpler text ads that you won't block, then we might be in good shape. The problem is that visitors have different levels of I/O. Some people respond to simple text ads, and some people literally don't notice things that aren't 460 pixels wide and flashing pictures of ducks. Even allowing for some understanding of a site's audience, it's hard to nail that sweet spot directly. So, you have to ask yourself how much you really value the content.
Slashdot Mirror
What about film sales to movie networks such as HBO? Airlines? What about sales to TV networks?
I'm sure these add up to more than 1% of many films income.
You're missing the point. What if the filmaker doesn't want their work shown in those ways? What if it's not main-stream enough to merit a slot on HBO's limited hours on or the fixed number of flights an airline runs... and the only thing the filmaker can expect to earn on is limited art house release and DVD sales? Then, it's OK if someone just rips the DVD and away they go? Or, what if, like what just happened with Start Wars, you've got people "sharing" the stolen material before it's even been released to the theatres. That's not "fair use," it is and should continue to be illegal. What's "draconian" about cracking down on people that set up sites boasting that they've got 10,000 such illegally obtained/distributed files?
FWIW, I'm also repulsed by McCain-Feingold, and agree that the average Joe needs a better understanding of how communicating online does (and spectacularly does not, sometimes) contribute to our wider cultural discourse. That being said, the topic here is corporate blogging. Censorship, per se, isn't an issue. Forget the web, blogs, the net. 20 years ago, people working for publicly held (hey, private, too) companies were always told to refer press inquiries to the people in the organization that were trained and authorized to handle them well. Plenty of companies got in hot water for something an employee wrote in a letter to editor, or communicated incorrectly to a customer, vendor, or partner. This is nothing new, but the wide reach and spontaneity of a blog has made it that much more delicate of an issue.
The result is anonymized rebel blogs that actually mean something, but which by their nature aren't trustworthy... or, sanctioned blogs that pretty much cling to the press release theme either on purpose or at least in practice. Juicier internal blogs are probably going to get toned down some, too, because they are still "discoverable" like e-mail, and can immortalize Really Dumb Things Someone Said.
Now, none of this has any bearing on the general issue of free speech, but when we talk down blogging (in this context - as company communications, no matter how formal or informal) we want to be sure that we're not letting that spill into the concept of more free-wheeling public blogs by enthusiasts and know-it-alls like the people here. Personally, I find forums like this, even with the impact of the periodic Moderation Insantity to be a more likely spot to find some insights (in the same amount of time searching) than I'd experience in the "wild" looking through blogs.
Oy. The Coast Guard remains part of the DOD, and the Secret Service is still part of Treasury. Customs and FEMA are very appropriately going to be a part of DHS. The tinfoil hat impication comes from the tone of the comment - as in, "don't you see, you uninformed Americans? The evil administration is making everything part of one evil agency!" It's just a silly, tinfoilish perspective that isn't even factually correct.
is there?
Um, no. And, since you brought it up, recall that part of the way that Stalin crushed the will of many sectors of his territory's population was by literally starving them. You'll notice that the US is actually a net food exporter. And we've got this little things called elections (as opposed to say, the ruler-for-life approach taken by people like Stalin, Saddam, Qaddafi, Kim Jong Il, etc.).
I like to think that in the modern age, people are protected by bodies like the UN. It pisses me off when the governing bodies of countries like America ignore UN rules because they think they are above the international law. In a perfect world, no one would have such extreme power over anyone else...
Are you even listening to yourself? To translate: no one should have power over anyone else... except for the UN, which is made up of people, who would then have power over other people?
That would be the UN, which has done such a fabuluous job of protecting people in Africa? Or in preventing Iran for forging ahead with nukes? Or in helping the poor bastards living in North Korea? Or in stopping China from threatening Taiwan? Or which kept the Baltics all nice and tidy when the Serbs and the Croats blew up? Or the UN that did such a great job of making Saddam even richer as they put together a totally corrupt oil-for-food program? Ask the people living in Darfur how protected they're feeling.
departments like the CIA, FBI, Secret Service, Coast Guard, Customs, and FEMA; have all been moved to, or are in the process of being moved to the DHS
Perhaps the people that are modding this as "interesting" should ask themselves whether or not the comment is, or is not, BS. As an example, the CIA is not a piece of DHS, and is not being moved to DHS. Rather, we've got a new office (now occupied by Negroponte) that is coordinating the intelligence output (though not necessarily operations) of several disparate agencies or units within other agencies. While DHS has a strong interest in coordinated intelligence, it is not an intelligence agency, per se. The FBI, likewise, is still part of Justice, and neither are, or will be, part of DHS. Get your damn facts as straight as your tinfoil hat.
Check out 'Blind Man's Bluff', which is about the post-WWII craziness that was Cold War submarine espionage. This guy is smart, smart, smart.
If the journals don't like being published online by google, they will stop publishing, fizzle...
Do you suppose that the only function a journal (for example) provides is to physically print what they publish, bind it, maintain business relationships with its consumers, and distribute it? No. They also have editors, reviewers, and usually other organizational players that keep the journal credible and worth the subscription. Certainly leaving the paper behind would reduce their overhead (and thus the price per subscriber), but many of them are already doing that. It doesn't mean that they can do it for free.
and something else will come and replace them...
"Something?" You mean, a team of industry or research topic professionals willing to gather, edit, and credibly present authoritative information... for free? The people who are up to that task are not hobbyists, or bored retired people. If they put hours into that activity, it's hours they can't put into something else. Their time is worth something, and that's expressed in the subscription price of the journals they produce.
Now if only the RIAA/MPAA would have the same fate...
Yes, I can see how, based on your thinking, that you don't think that musicians, filmakers, and other creative types should have the option of using an industry layer to take care of their business dealings with a jillion radio stations, clubs, and publishers. Better for the artists to stop wasting their time with all of that creating and to spend all their time on business instead. And every radio station can then start doing individual bits of business with 10,000 different musicians, each with different expectations about whether and how they want their work paid for. That would sure encourage more airplay, that's for sure!
Google, help me out here!
Great idea! You should encourage Google to also do what they do for free. They should put all of their huge monthly costs aside, and just do things like publish directories, terabytes of hard-won data, and ads at no cost to anyone, just for you. They've got enough cash - they should be able to coast for a few weeks spending millions on datacenters and bandwidth before witless expectations for free everything run them into the ground. Certainly they won't mind if their proprietary software, research, and compiled index is published with no strings attached, too. They've spent millions of dollars and untold thousands of man hours developing it, and it's a closely held trade secret that is the backbone of their ability to grow and thrive, but they're just as bad as the RIAA for not wanting people to lay hands on it for free, aren't they?
What are the chances that you're not actually thinking past the simple words in the comment? It's called a metaphor.
The point of the metaphor is to illustrate that some of the other comments, especially those that are ragging on MS for not being "first" (even though Google itself was not first either, in this context) are possibly missing the importance of the subject. Specifically, sometimes the people that take their time and watch the success/failure of others can come into a market and do something as good or better, with less risk and investment, and actually come out ahead. This applies perfectly to the search/mapping topic, and MS would be the second mouse, which might just get the cheese.
The comment must have struck some people as interesting because it implies an understanding of the larger context in which these huge tech operators (the very thing we should be talking about on slashdot, no?) are doing what they do. Millions upon millions of dollars are at stake, with people both very- and not-so-very technical using the systems in question. The people who succeed in this area will set the tone for a lot of other initiatives.
For a proper nerd reading the post, all of that is implied in a simple, somewhat poetic and self-referential two-layer (and slightly ironic) aphorism. What is not nerdy about that? If you long for the "good old days" of slashdot, you'd be rooting for a little more subtlety and nuance in the discussions, and the expectations that people will get the references without it all being spelled out for them. This is the sort of thing that keeps the IQs higher here, and improves the level of discourse.
This doesn't protect anybody but the government...
Though I'm not sure that's exactly true, the real issue is that if somebody's malware does get onto the desktop of, say, a project manager working at the Agriculture Department, then that publisher's going to wind up in heaps o' trouble regardless. I don't care if they go down because my local sheriff presses the case, or the feds do. They'll go down harder if the feds do it.
I'm reminded of the saying: "The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese."
Oh come on. If that's your take on it, then you should rag on Google, too, since MapQuest had maps and integrated areal photos online a couple years ago.
Rightly or wrongly, that's the train of thought
But that's exactly my point: people who wrongly (say, completely irrationally) arrive at a conclusion about something are, well, wrong. Hopefully you're not feeling guilty about the person whose entire life has been ruined (thinking that you've cursed them because you looked at them), and hopefully you don't feel any real kinship with people who assign guilt over something just as loopy. 9/11 would have happened regardless of who was in the White House that day. The things that were driving that were boiling along in the 8 years of the previous administration, and the plan was already in motion in the many months before hand. The presence of terrorists in the world is a fact, and whether this president or another told people that they shouldn't assume the worst about every Muslim in the country, and that we're doing what we can to secure what we can - it doesn't matter who said it. People as broken as the tinfoil house crew will have found their inspiration in the new Pope, Darth Vader, or a change in the paint job on the local police force's cars. The point of my comment was that, as usual, a slashdotter is leveraging a dumb bit of news to add to his/her personal mythology of Bush as some sort of Dr. Evil, and attempting to score some sort of rhetorical points therein. It's just idiotic and tiresome, but some other readers decided to mod it interesting.
Excellent satire! I totally get your humorous tinfoil-hat-within-the-tinfoil-hat-story Meta Tinfoilness.
Really now: the Bush administration is somehow behind this family's total lack of any critical thinking skills or capacity for grip on reality? It takes a lifetime of living with a broken brain, or some pretty serious actual mental problems to really believe the sorts of phantom problems that rule the lives of people like this. Latching onto current events in some way is completely typical, but that's correlation, not causation.
But you do get full credit for an excellent Kook Impression. Nicely done.
To produce Extremely Large Shark?
So you're saying 10-13k people are "dead wood". Nice of you to jump to conclusions there. Hope your job is on the line next
It doesn't matter how many people it is. Unless you're suggesting that companies should be forced to employ people they don't need, what is your point? For a smaller company, laying off only 10 people might be a larger percentage of the workers. If the company needs to do it to stay fiscally sound for the future, should it instead be forced to make a small number of people happy, and thus jeopardize the long term prospects for everyone in the company? And, in doing so, kill off the value of the stock, which is held by people all over the world in their retirement portfolios, the mutual fund they're banking on to grow money for their kid's education, and so on?
This is the main problem with unions - they treat the job like an entitlement, and many of their positions seem to suggest that they'd rather see the company - and all of the jobs it provides - go down the toilet, rather than prune back staff in areas where they no longer need them.
If 10,000 people are that sure that what they're doing is absolutely so necessary in the market, then surely they're not worried about a job, right? If there's that much demand, then one of the competition will snatch them right up. But: what if, because of a thousand different variables, it's just that they're not that valuable? What if there really isn't a need for them at that moment, in that company, in that industry? As unfortunate as that is, should they penalize the company for it, and insist that everyone gets to go down with the ship?
Or, there's the people that say that if the company would just stop trying to profit so much, there wouldn't be a problem. But, if that's the strategy the company takes, watch the investors pull out their money and go somewhere else where that capital will be put to more productive use.
But mostly: if those 10,000 are so sure that they know better how to run a business that can compete in the incredibly awkward business environment in which IBM now finds itself, then they should also have no problem starting up a new company to do all that business that they seem to think that IBM wants to leave on the table.
I really wonder why "Will it Float" is so popular. It is so stupid. I mean...some things are funny. Some things are so stupid they are funny. But that segment fits in between where it isn't funny at all. But then again...I don't find Letterman very funny either. Give me Conan over him anyday
I think it's closer to the non-funny-therefore-funny model. As with most of Letterman's long-running gags, it ceases to be about the actual activity at hand (like throwing things off the building, etc), and more about the Kabuki-like form of the thing. There's a rhythm to it - a set of familiar expectations that makes things like the "what are playing for today?" question and the actual dunking totally beside the point. Personally, I think Letterman keeps doing it because it's a good excuse to keep bringing out the Grinder Girl, which is certainly a highlight.
I also really like Conan, but it's just apples and oranges - totally different stuff for a different audience at a different time of night. The real thing will be to watch how he changes his stuff when he moves into Leno's slot in a few years. Letterman's dry, more subtle manner grows on you though - well, on me, anyway. He's more the eccentric uncle we all wish we had, and Conan's more like the joker cousin we do have. Love 'em both, though.
Um, I know it's "Idol." "Idle" was a lame joke. Oh well.
This looks way more interesting than "American Idle," which isn't nearly as good as the original, "Eric Idle."
David Letterman, though, does acknowledge that his very popular "Will It Float" segment is based on the original British "Is It Buoyant."
How is "dirty work" for a provider of a service (and the only people who actually do know to whom they've assigned an IP address) to be the ones who keep track of this stuff? How is it any different than the trail that your cell phone leaves? That's all subject to court requests.
You view a group of cells that all humans once were as disposable but view the same group of cells that has been given the time and nuture to replicate and develop facets that you are able to identify(i.e. lungs, nerves, etc)as life
But that's the whole point: those cells are not put into a situation where that could or would take place. There's no person waiting to be born before the doctor seeks to use a process like this, and there's no person waiting to born after, either. Incidentally, I think part of the problem here is that you use the word "life" when you mean "human life." Those are not same thing. Bacteria are alive. Cellary is alive. Every time you swat a mosquito, you're ending life.
Clearly you view complexity and size as an indicator of life
Certainly you cannot achieve the level of cognitive complexity that we associate with humanity without involving a certain amount of brain tissue, arranged in a certain way. So "size" in that sense is meaningful. Size, as it relates to a microscopic collection of a dozen cells, is also meaningful because you can't look at it and find a very small, curled up baby hiding in there. It doesn't exist yet, at that stage.
My gorilla example showed how your life status indication method is flawed by applying it to another scenario
Sorry, don't see it that way. A gorilla, while very advanced as mammals go, doesn't have the mental horsepower of homo sapiens. Neither does a blue whale. You're confusing the difference between 20 cells and a more developed fetus (where there is a size difference, but that's mostly incidental to the complexity issue) with the difference in size between me and a mountain gorilla. That's a red herring. A 10 pound baby is a less than a 20th of my size, but almost entirely as complex, mentally. The adult gorilla, at that point, is probably smarter than the baby, but the baby will completely eclipse it because it's got the DNS to do so.
Your position is that "life" starts at conception is tangental to what that form of life is. Whether or not a fertilized egg does or does not have the potential to become a healthy human baby doesn't mean that, half a dozen cell divisions later, you're looking at a person. There is no structure present that allows you to apply that label.
Boiling this discussion down to the crux of the matter (that you consider that fertilized egg to be a person) is not a waste of time: it exposes the nature of the debate.
The scientist, in his act of forming the embryo with no intention of fostering its development has taken responsibility for the viability of the life. His very action is the killing of the embryo.
No, the scientist is creating a small group of cells, using material from the person that he intends to help, and with no intention or expectation that those small cells will or could form a viable embryo. You can call it an embryo if you want, but it only has life in the sense that any small group of cells has life. There is no nervous system, there is no means by which those cells can respirate, and certainly no means by which they can be invested with any of the qualities we assign to a more fully formed organism (let alone a person). The scientist isn't suddenly confronted with a "life", he's just looking at the cells he put together specifically to accomplish the theraputic task that is his goal. You make it sound like he's looking at a fetus, which, of course, we're not talking about. When he uses those cells to theraputic effect in his patient, he is, of course, sending some of them off to live and reproduce as part of the therapy. Those that he doesn't need aren't preserved any more than you preserve all of the cells that make up your arm when you scratch an itch (the act of which "kills" hundreds or thousands of your cells).
Okay so life as you understand it is defined by the number of cells that make up any being.
You won't be any more credible or pursuasive by putting words in someone else's mouth. I didn't say that, and you know it. This issue is about whether or not a dozen or two cells provide an adequate source of stem cells. One thing we don't have to worry about is whether or not those same dozen or two cells are a person, because they simply are not. If all goes well in a scenario supportive of gestation, those cells can wind up, millions of divisions later, being the start of a fetus. Until then, you've got undifferentiated cells (which is why they have so much theraputic promise) and no structure that could conceivably be referred to as a fetus, let alone a "baby" or "unborn person."
So according to your logic gorrilas are more alive than humans are
No, that's according to your twisted rhetorical version of what I'm saying. Just because it would serve your point of view to somehow "catch" me saying that, I didn't say that, nor can you infer that (with any intellectual honesty) from what I said. Gorilla embryos, at the dozen-or-two-cells level, are virtually indistinguishable from ours. But in any way that matters, so are chickens and toads. The meaningful differences between us and gorillas (which are slim indeed, as an expressed percentage of their DNA) don't really manifest themselves until farther along in development. That species evolved along a different path, and found (until pretty recently) a succesful niche that didn't require quite the IQ or communications skills that man did. They stayed in the jungle, while we spread out into the steppes and savannah, where better upright mobility and keener group predation made for better survival. Either way, both the gorilla and the human are fantastically complex by the time gestation is complete - but then, so is a mouse, just not as much so, on the neurological front.
Your understanding of the ethical implications of embryonic research is hinged on number of cells and viability. So according to your theory, my friend who was born very prematurely was technically not alive while being cared for in an incubator.
Again, you're pretending, because you think it helps your case, that I've said something that I did not. Because you find it important to see a "person" in a dozen cells, you can't imagine (even if it's shown to you, which surely it has been, if you've managed to get through junior high school) any middle ground between the first few divisions of the cells of an embryo, and the extremely complex structures of a several month old fetus. It's not like the
Apology accepted. Please remember that most people over here do not make cheese or grow tulips, just like you are probaly not herding your cattle from horseback while shooting indians...
Well, I would be herding my cattle, but the Indians took them all when I ran out of ammo. I've switched over to German hunting dogs now, though they make terrible dairy products (the dogs, not the Germans).
Actually, I'll bet that many people in Europe would be surprised just how many gun-owning, horse-riding country-folk there still are in the US, very few of which are idiots, Indian-killers, or otherwise the stereotypes one might expect. On the other hand, one of my favorite artists (Rein Poortvliet) is Dutch, and liked to own the same kind of hunting dogs that I do. I also spent years working for a Dutch family here in the US (they were Venemans), and he loved to make fun of my Scando-heritage, with is about three quarters. The Rasmusens (on one side of the family) he assured me were really mostly good for loading ships, and the Kuykendaals (on the other side) were, as he put it, translating, "the people from Chicken Valley." He loved Gouda too, though, and reminded me that it's not pronounced "gew-da". On the other hand, he was not a very good businessman sometimes, and his company got gobbled up by a much larger one. Given his personal clunkiness as a business manager, I feel that dealing with him for years as an IT person earned me the right to poke fun at at least some people from his home town, while perhaps not the entire country. And, while you can jab at me for mentioning tulips, I think you can credit me with the restraint I used in not mentioning windmills or wooden shoes. That's just how sensitive I am.
so what's the difference between getting some kid's organs and killing an embryo to harvest them?
Do you mean the organs of a child who has died in an accident? Nothing wrong there - you'd expect most parents to be proud that their kid's brief life might at least have continued to flourish in some indirect way.
Or do you mean, killing kids to get their organs? I'll be looking forward to your pointing that one out in the news when the time comes.
But killing an embryo? OK, so you've got a handful of cells dividing, at least for a little while, anyway, in a petri dish. No mom, no pregnancy, and no way they would ever amount to anything - let alone a person - without continual intervention from science, which is still beyond us anyway. So, that group of cells, completely unviable as they sit there, and without any means by which to be differentiated from a similarly complex group of paramecium (which is to say, there is no there there yet, no framework on which to hang the concept of person-hood - merely the eventual potential, which could also be said of the reproductive organs of a man and a women eyeing each other over a beer), what's wrong with using them to save lives? To shoot for getting the paralyzed to walk again? For that kid nearly does die in an accident to breath again off a respirator?
just to improve the quality of an old one - that possibly won't last much longer?
So, the son of a friend just had his spine severed in a road accident. He's done from the waist down, now. He's 22. Might as well write him off, huh? After all, he's so old, he's pretty much close to dead. Those dozen cells in the petri dish, though - set them next to his hospital bed, and they'll thrive! Why, they'll be a smiling, bubbly little baby in just a matter of months! No? No.
Whether you eat plants or meat or both, you kill billions of cells every day to improve the quality of your life. You eat them to survive, remember? There's as much of a human being in a dozen cells as there is in a stalk of asparagus. But if I could produce eggs (that would otherwise go to waste) that could be used to help restore my friend's son's mobility to him, I'd do it in a heartbeat. And, any dozen cells that divide along the way won't have it in them, under the circumstances (lacking, as they do, any sort of nervous system as a platform to have anything), to really weigh in on it. That's not an "all-new human life," it's a dozen cells. But a 22-year-old able to walk again: that would be an all-new human life. When we've made it that far, bio-tech-wise, and your child is lying there with a broken back, pretty much guaranteed never to have children as a result, would you begrudge her the same? Or, does God prefer a dozen unviable cells in a dish over paralyzed people or new mothers with degenerative neural diseases that will rob their children of a normal life? Getting that mom healthy is for her young children, though you're not set up to see that larger picture, it seems.
It's a complicated issue
Not really. Just ask yourself: would you rather pay those same sites to see the content without ads? If not, you either aren't that interested in the material, or you are willing to put up with the ads. There really aren't any other options (other than the content going away because the providers don't want to pay all that overhead and burn all that time as a charity to you, their loyal visitors).
If we could just de-escalate back down to simpler text ads that you won't block, then we might be in good shape. The problem is that visitors have different levels of I/O. Some people respond to simple text ads, and some people literally don't notice things that aren't 460 pixels wide and flashing pictures of ducks. Even allowing for some understanding of a site's audience, it's hard to nail that sweet spot directly. So, you have to ask yourself how much you really value the content.