Strictly speaking that's true, although the way you've worded that, you might lead people to believe that there is some doubt that FDR had polio. Who doubts this? Why?
Yea, I say we be really freaking careful how we handle this virus.
You better send those researchers a memo or something. I'm sure they're being all careless and shit, flinging beakers and test tubes back and forth across the lab, since they must not understand the danger.
If it was something that involved 1,000 people, 72 hours would probably be a safe bet. If it involves 100,000+, even if relief get's in it probably won't be enough to get to you for awhile.
I think you might be misreading the lessons of Katrina. Some of the delays involved in response were because of the scale of the disaster. Others were simply because the proper forms hadn't been pushed around.
Barring a really effective way of knowing whether your state's paper-pushers are good or not so good, get ready for some very long delays in the event of any disaster. 72 hours is just pure optimism.
tape it to your chests so your bodies could theoretically be ID'ed if you were to die
Unless you have dentures instead of teeth and are in the habit of razoring off the tips of your fingers like Kevin Spacey in Se7en, you've pretty much got this covered already. If something happens to erase those features, it'll probably erase those documents, too.
Third, keep a decent supply of water and canned food. Rotate the supplies to keep them fresh but always maintain one weeks worth of supplies. Figure at least one week before outside relief gets to you. Two weeks would be a safer bet.
Very smart. One result of Katrina is that it kind of blew away the "72 hours" guideline that the government and relief agencies, and even some survivalist howtos, always recommended.
I think it is time for the open source community, as a whole, to better consider its public image. Incidents like this, involving one of the premiere Linux vendors, do unfortunately tarnish the image of our community quite badly. And then you have rogue open source developers publically insulting users [slashdot.org]. Such incidents make people remember open source software for all the wrong reasons.
The fact that "users" in this case was just you makes your post kind of pathetic. Nobody else cares, just so you know.
If you do something differently, and something goes wrong, the lawyers come out and sue because you were doing something non standard.
Part of medicine is research. You can be sure the first patients to receive a new technique have signed appropriate waivers.
You have the soul of an HMO administrator.:)
I find it a bit spooky that a doctor would even need to look at old drawings to know how heart valves work. Isn't this why they are made to work on cadavers, so they know the body inside and out?
He sited Leonardo's drawings as being inspirational. Inspiration tends not to be entirely rational.
Doesn't the real thing trump some old drawings?
If the technique he has developed works, the answer in this case would be "no".
It would be 5, but you didn't have any links to nefarious activities by auto makers.
I take it all back, auto makers would never do anything nefarious.
You've never read about the various "counterfeit parts" cases? I don't pretend to understand all the issues, but the "fraud" asserted in a lot of those cases seems to be nothing more than "they tried to enter a market we happily control."
It's much easier to cut costs up front to increase your profit margin than it is to try and maintain a bunch of back room deals.
Odd that you would imply there is some kind of dichotomy there, when a successful company like Toyota works really hard at both.
That's kind of interesting, in a way. If someone shells out $3.5 million to Neiman Marcus, they're going to expect it to live up to something close to its "specifications." I don't think Neiman Marcus will be happy if the thing ends up making them look bad...
Possibly, but not necessarily. Do you take your car to the dealership for service after the warranty expires?
Depends on a lot of factors. I tend not to, but a lot of people do.
Even then, the manufacturer isn't getting money because you chose their dealership. The simply get dealerships with more resources for supporting their warranties.
Actually, it's a bit more complicated than that, though I think you've got it right. There's the bizarre price-fixing relationship between the dealership and the manufacturer. Anyone who takes their car into a dealership for a non-warranty repair is paying a premium above the cost of the repair which would ordinarily be covered by the manufacturer in a warranty repair, as you know. Suffice it to say, the manufacturer is very happy if you choose to take your car in for dealer maintenance. The jist of what you're saying is absolutely right: the manufacturer likes this because it keeps their dealerships healthy. This in turn keeps them healthy.
I'm not necessarily endorsing the dealer/manufacturer relationship. It's got its own problems, but at least in that case the manufacturer realizes that its product will be resold, and offers services accordingly. When compared to software companies they're so much more evolved as far as addressing customer's needs is concerned, it's not even funny. Part of that is because they've been around a long time, part is that everyone in our society takes the business very seriously. If auto manufacturers or their dealers try to get away with too much, society lashes back.
(Interesting to consider whether society will ever lash back against software makers. You could sort of consider the anti-trust case against Microsoft in that light, but I don't think that is correct. The vast majority of people couldn't care less, and I think a poll of the public would reveal that very few people both understood the issues of the anti-trust case and supported the government in its action. Very different than lemon-laws, safety or emissions standards, or some of the other stuff which has confronted auto manufacturers.)
And again, unless you are going to a dealership you probably are not buying parts from the manufacturer. You're buying from the OE supplier.
Who will generally have their own relationship with the auto manufacturer. Getting true aftermarket parts where the auto manufacturer or their loyal henchmen did not get any kind of cut is awfully difficult. My understanding is that everyone concerned kind of plays ball and lets the money trickle down, and when they don't, there tend to be legal consequences. You might know an awful lot more about the business than I do, but I've read about random (foreign?) aftermarket parts manufacturers being sued out of existence, and I always assumed this was why. As if in principle they weren't doing anything different than "performance" aftermarket parts manufacturers, but they were grabbing for a slice of the pie that wasn't theirs.
Mark Rein's call for some kind of recompense from Best Buy isn't totally off the wall, but the way he's going about it amounts to public whining. He's either going to have to switch to something like Steam, or make cooperation worthwhile for a retailer like Best Buy, or live with the status quo of retailers having their way with him. I tend to think it's going to end up being something like Steam: he just doesn't have much leverage at this point. After setting up an online alternative maybe he will.
(using "he" in the above paragraph is probably giving him way too much credit, since we are probably talking about the publisher)
Taking Epic's advertising money but then selling a similar product (the used game) that they make no profit on is ripping them off.
The short answer is "don't buy advertising if you aren't happy with what you are getting". And you'll know exactly what you're getting, down to a third-party-audited study of how many people typically walk past your ad in a given spot in a given store. End caps and shelf placement are a competitive market, and if Epic doesn't want to pay for them, someone else certainly will. Sucks to be them, but they ought to quit whining.
Sure, developers aren't making any money the second time around, but neither is a car maker when a used car is sold.
Actually, the manufacturer has some ways of making money off a used car. Service and parts.
Here, we begin to see what the problem with Mark Rein's business model is. It's a small problem, really: the people supporting his software (the publisher supports it, not his company, his whining not withstanding) might have to support it for each person who buys the software, which in some universe could be construed as unfair to the publisher (or in Mark Rein's bizarro world, unfair to his company). The average person wouldn't consider this unfair, since a call into support generally means that the developer fucked something up, but still.
There is a simple solution. For any given serial number, the first person who registers the software gets 30 days of support for the thing, at which point additional support must be purchased. Boom, you're extracting revenue from those evil people who bought your game used, just like an auto manufacturer extracts some revenue from those older cars on the road.
I thought that's how a lot of publishers operated anyhow, so it's really hard to see how Rein's bitching is legitimate.
If they can't compete, let them die. I'm a little less sympathetic than I would be to the shops and small stores displaced by a Wal-Mart arriving in a small town or something. Those little game shops tend to be dirty, stupid little places where people who don't know about ebay and amazon.com get ripped off by losers who do.
Then stop comparing this with selling a used car. A slightly closer analogy would be buying Harry Potter, then scanning / photocopying it before reselling it.
And a better analogy still would be buying Harry Potter, reading Harry Potter, and then selling Harry Potter. Which is perfectly legal, oddly enough.
I would consider buying one too. That's why it makes no sense for them to talk about only selling them into the third world, or whatever. If every other person on slashdot bought one, economy of scale should force the price for each individual unit lower, making them even more available to the needy customers. I don't know.
Yeah, they're more a way of speeding development than creating development, I guess.
I tend to think that if these machines are economically viable to manufacture they should be made available to everyone, everywhere, who can pay for them, without worrying too much about the finer points. (the only possible downside being that, if we get the price way down like we want to, there will be some who can afford to pay for them but can't afford to dispose of them properly. fun.)
Right, but if there is no "relative usefulness" because there is currently no education, then even textbooks on CDs is a total winner.
Pure nonsense. This is so strange that I wonder if I'm understanding you correctly.
In the absence of an education system, you would need to show that shipping over a bunch of laptops is more useful than taking the equivalent amount of money and putting it toward some other, more sensible use. Like, for example, supporting teachers and construction of schools.
They become progressively more useful and more appropriate as the level of development increases. The good news is that they're apparently targeted at more developed countries like South Africa, Thailand, and a few others. Not sub-saharan Africa or something.
Hell, the only reason this probably doesn't happen now is due to the cabal of textbook publishers in the US (for instance) - in a country without such problems, this thing should be a winner.
In most countries other than the US, you're weighing the cost of laptops against textbooks which are so cheap one is basically paying for paper and ink, sold at third-world prices. Something to keep in mind.
If you've read Neal Stephenson, I'm thinking of this as a low-tech "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer." Computer + CDs is better than no education.
Of course, there is not really a low-tech equivalent. The big difference between the situation we have now and The Diamond Age is that in Stephenson's fictional universe, the cost of manufacturing the gadgets is almost zero. Right now, even at $100, they're expensive enough that we need to weigh their relative usefulness quite carefully.
Also, that assumes that the entire third world is starving. It's not, mostly. Many need education more than anything. This helps solve that.
That's certainly not proven. I know plenty of people who question whether computers are doing much good in American schools, and whether they are worth the money. Those questions are every bit as valid in a country where the value of the computers you're talking about equals over a year's wages...
Slashdot Mirror
Ah. Interesting article, thanks for that.
Strictly speaking that's true, although the way you've worded that, you might lead people to believe that there is some doubt that FDR had polio. Who doubts this? Why?
You better send those researchers a memo or something. I'm sure they're being all careless and shit, flinging beakers and test tubes back and forth across the lab, since they must not understand the danger.
That is indisputably the dorkiest sentence I've read all week.
Let's!
Paragraph.
I think you might be misreading the lessons of Katrina. Some of the delays involved in response were because of the scale of the disaster. Others were simply because the proper forms hadn't been pushed around.
Barring a really effective way of knowing whether your state's paper-pushers are good or not so good, get ready for some very long delays in the event of any disaster. 72 hours is just pure optimism.
Unless you have dentures instead of teeth and are in the habit of razoring off the tips of your fingers like Kevin Spacey in Se7en, you've pretty much got this covered already. If something happens to erase those features, it'll probably erase those documents, too.
You're telling me! Keep it hidden, or Pooh Bear will bust in and mess up all of your shit.
Very smart. One result of Katrina is that it kind of blew away the "72 hours" guideline that the government and relief agencies, and even some survivalist howtos, always recommended.
Most hardware vendors say "no" to Linux.
The fact that "users" in this case was just you makes your post kind of pathetic. Nobody else cares, just so you know.
Part of medicine is research. You can be sure the first patients to receive a new technique have signed appropriate waivers.
You have the soul of an HMO administrator.
He sited Leonardo's drawings as being inspirational. Inspiration tends not to be entirely rational.
If the technique he has developed works, the answer in this case would be "no".
I take it all back, auto makers would never do anything nefarious.
You've never read about the various "counterfeit parts" cases? I don't pretend to understand all the issues, but the "fraud" asserted in a lot of those cases seems to be nothing more than "they tried to enter a market we happily control."
Odd that you would imply there is some kind of dichotomy there, when a successful company like Toyota works really hard at both.
That's kind of interesting, in a way. If someone shells out $3.5 million to Neiman Marcus, they're going to expect it to live up to something close to its "specifications." I don't think Neiman Marcus will be happy if the thing ends up making them look bad...
Depends on a lot of factors. I tend not to, but a lot of people do.
Actually, it's a bit more complicated than that, though I think you've got it right. There's the bizarre price-fixing relationship between the dealership and the manufacturer. Anyone who takes their car into a dealership for a non-warranty repair is paying a premium above the cost of the repair which would ordinarily be covered by the manufacturer in a warranty repair, as you know. Suffice it to say, the manufacturer is very happy if you choose to take your car in for dealer maintenance. The jist of what you're saying is absolutely right: the manufacturer likes this because it keeps their dealerships healthy. This in turn keeps them healthy.
I'm not necessarily endorsing the dealer/manufacturer relationship. It's got its own problems, but at least in that case the manufacturer realizes that its product will be resold, and offers services accordingly. When compared to software companies they're so much more evolved as far as addressing customer's needs is concerned, it's not even funny. Part of that is because they've been around a long time, part is that everyone in our society takes the business very seriously. If auto manufacturers or their dealers try to get away with too much, society lashes back.
(Interesting to consider whether society will ever lash back against software makers. You could sort of consider the anti-trust case against Microsoft in that light, but I don't think that is correct. The vast majority of people couldn't care less, and I think a poll of the public would reveal that very few people both understood the issues of the anti-trust case and supported the government in its action. Very different than lemon-laws, safety or emissions standards, or some of the other stuff which has confronted auto manufacturers.)
Who will generally have their own relationship with the auto manufacturer. Getting true aftermarket parts where the auto manufacturer or their loyal henchmen did not get any kind of cut is awfully difficult. My understanding is that everyone concerned kind of plays ball and lets the money trickle down, and when they don't, there tend to be legal consequences. You might know an awful lot more about the business than I do, but I've read about random (foreign?) aftermarket parts manufacturers being sued out of existence, and I always assumed this was why. As if in principle they weren't doing anything different than "performance" aftermarket parts manufacturers, but they were grabbing for a slice of the pie that wasn't theirs.
Mark Rein's call for some kind of recompense from Best Buy isn't totally off the wall, but the way he's going about it amounts to public whining. He's either going to have to switch to something like Steam, or make cooperation worthwhile for a retailer like Best Buy, or live with the status quo of retailers having their way with him. I tend to think it's going to end up being something like Steam: he just doesn't have much leverage at this point. After setting up an online alternative maybe he will.
(using "he" in the above paragraph is probably giving him way too much credit, since we are probably talking about the publisher)
The short answer is "don't buy advertising if you aren't happy with what you are getting". And you'll know exactly what you're getting, down to a third-party-audited study of how many people typically walk past your ad in a given spot in a given store. End caps and shelf placement are a competitive market, and if Epic doesn't want to pay for them, someone else certainly will. Sucks to be them, but they ought to quit whining.
Actually, the manufacturer has some ways of making money off a used car. Service and parts.
Here, we begin to see what the problem with Mark Rein's business model is. It's a small problem, really: the people supporting his software (the publisher supports it, not his company, his whining not withstanding) might have to support it for each person who buys the software, which in some universe could be construed as unfair to the publisher (or in Mark Rein's bizarro world, unfair to his company). The average person wouldn't consider this unfair, since a call into support generally means that the developer fucked something up, but still.
There is a simple solution. For any given serial number, the first person who registers the software gets 30 days of support for the thing, at which point additional support must be purchased. Boom, you're extracting revenue from those evil people who bought your game used, just like an auto manufacturer extracts some revenue from those older cars on the road.
I thought that's how a lot of publishers operated anyhow, so it's really hard to see how Rein's bitching is legitimate.
If they can't compete, let them die. I'm a little less sympathetic than I would be to the shops and small stores displaced by a Wal-Mart arriving in a small town or something. Those little game shops tend to be dirty, stupid little places where people who don't know about ebay and amazon.com get ripped off by losers who do.
OH MY GOD, SAVE THEM! THINK OF THE CHILDREN!
And a better analogy still would be buying Harry Potter, reading Harry Potter, and then selling Harry Potter. Which is perfectly legal, oddly enough.
I would consider buying one too. That's why it makes no sense for them to talk about only selling them into the third world, or whatever. If every other person on slashdot bought one, economy of scale should force the price for each individual unit lower, making them even more available to the needy customers. I don't know.
Yeah, they're more a way of speeding development than creating development, I guess.
I tend to think that if these machines are economically viable to manufacture they should be made available to everyone, everywhere, who can pay for them, without worrying too much about the finer points. (the only possible downside being that, if we get the price way down like we want to, there will be some who can afford to pay for them but can't afford to dispose of them properly. fun.)
Pure nonsense. This is so strange that I wonder if I'm understanding you correctly.
In the absence of an education system, you would need to show that shipping over a bunch of laptops is more useful than taking the equivalent amount of money and putting it toward some other, more sensible use. Like, for example, supporting teachers and construction of schools.
They become progressively more useful and more appropriate as the level of development increases. The good news is that they're apparently targeted at more developed countries like South Africa, Thailand, and a few others. Not sub-saharan Africa or something.
In most countries other than the US, you're weighing the cost of laptops against textbooks which are so cheap one is basically paying for paper and ink, sold at third-world prices. Something to keep in mind.
Of course, there is not really a low-tech equivalent. The big difference between the situation we have now and The Diamond Age is that in Stephenson's fictional universe, the cost of manufacturing the gadgets is almost zero. Right now, even at $100, they're expensive enough that we need to weigh their relative usefulness quite carefully.
I'm sure they'll be useful in a lot of places.
That's certainly not proven. I know plenty of people who question whether computers are doing much good in American schools, and whether they are worth the money. Those questions are every bit as valid in a country where the value of the computers you're talking about equals over a year's wages...