awww... we can send all the negroes to the moon if you'd prefer? Honestly, given the choice between the moon and a little flood... I'd pick the water anyday. And you KNOW congress would never approve of a spacesuit with a pantyhose stretched over the helmet.
For the record, not everyone out here on/. is a bafoon and some of us see your valid points without having to resort degrading how you presented them.
The replies to your post make valid points too however. Though just because someone appears on Fox does not discredit them (where he came up with that one I'll never know). Just because the scientific community has formed an 'agreement' on something dosen't make it fact (see the last 2000+ years of science. the track record isn't that impressive). The thing about the CO2/ozone issue is legit. ozone seems to be the principle barrier preventing us from being bombarded by solar radiation, whilst CO2 preventing heat from escaping back out into space (the so-called greenhouse effect).
I for one am not so self-centere as to think that I could have any impact at all on the global environment.
But I don't care to argue it. I just wanted to point out that you make valid points not all of us think you're wrong.
Landing on the moon was a crazy achievement.. In fact it was so crazy that there are people who, to this day, think we never made it. Making that voyage was like squeezing a baby until it makes it's first sounds. You wouldn't claim that it could talk. No where near. So now the kid knows it can make noises (not the best way to teach it) and it can spend the time learning new ones and fine-tuning the ones that it knows.
Space travel is the same way. So we punched through the glass ceiling (so to speak) but we've been focusing our energy of late on sustaining life in a vastly different environment. The trip to the moon was roughly 3 days to, 3 days on, and 3 days to return home. The trip to mars is roughly a 6 year round trip? There are significant obstacles that have to be overcome before we can afford to send live humans out there. Not only that, but because of the length of each experimental trial, 40 years would only afford... 6? MAX (granted multiple trials can be undertaken simultaneously, shorter peices of the whole, etc, etc, but the point is made, and I can't picture anything less than full scale, full length simulations).
Food is an issue. Air is an issue. Water is an issue. Muscle atrophy is an issue. The list goes on. All of these things are being investigated at the ISS, and the MIR as well I presume.
In this day and age NASA can't afford to 'screw up' any more so I don't blame them for taking their good old time getting on track for mars. I say send lots of probes that can't die. If I were them I'd send a few monkeys with no families (you know, the hobo monkeys) up first as well.;)
You're a classic example of today's modern, plugged in, brilliant, and utterly uninspired people.
It's difficult to fathom the fact that a collection of atoms formed together to produce you in such a fashion that you can create such a statement. Life is utterly amazing in that regard. We're having an argument. THAT is awe-inspiring.
How can the idea of having overcome so many obstacles, arguably way before our time, traveled such a distance, and achieved such a feat. The idea that there's a massive rock orbiting our tiny little planet is crazy as it is but that we were able to get people there is insane.
Now I think that our progress in getting people more than 365 times as far (mars versus the moon) has been rather astounding. We managed, on only our second shot, to hit a target as small as mars (technically we 'hit' it twice) from literally ~50 million miles away. We have photographs taken from the surface of a completely different planet.
You're amazingly desensitized by tv, media, movies, music, videogames... i dunno what.
agreed... The article has nothing to do with ID and the first 2 pages of comments go something like this:
OMGWTFBBQ! STOOPID CREATIONISTS! IT'S NOT SCIENCE! QUIT TRYING TO SHOVE IT DOWN OUR THROATS! YOUR STOOPID! YOU HAVE NO EVIDENCE! HAHAHA!! SILLY BELIEFS! I AM THE WALMART!
I really don't see any comments refuting or arguing FOR id... Maybe one or two commenting that this is all offtopic?
this argument is myopic and flawed. you can make the exact same argument, the potential for failure, with anything. What is an airbag fails and stays inflated and kills everyone in the car.. What is a seatbelt rips just right and slices you in half, what if your... etc.etc. It's good to play the what-if game but don't think for a moment that it dosen't apply to the other options.
Now see the flipside: It's an automatic traffic system that will increase productivity, reduce transit time, and save lives. Sure the system can still fail from time to time but in general this is a good thing.
The ACLU would have very little ground to stand on. Using the system on select toll roads where it's required would be paid for by the people taking those roads. This is an established way of controlling traffic used in many roads across the nation. I'm not saying they wouldn't fight it... they do many stupid things. But I have a hard time believing they'd win.
The argument that a road requiring a particular peice of equipment descriminates against the lower-income bracket, is akin to the same argument against roads requiring cars with working headlights, brakelights, inflated tires, etc, etc. It all costs money, and it's all required to drive with some measure of assured safety on our public roads.
Features and batterlife, while legit reasons to purchase something, don't nessicarily make something a better product.
My mother recently bought an iPod specifically for 2 reasons. It looks better, and it was simpler. Translation: fewer features.
That's always been Apple's strength. Stop piling on useless features, and focus on what the majority of people actually want, instead of the FOSS community approach of provide-every-imaginable-bell-and-whistle-that-any -possible-person-could-want-just-in-case-they-actu ally-want-it-even-once-durring-the-entire-time-the y-use-the-product-even-if-we-have-to-shoehorn-the- button-somewhere-over-in-the-corner-next-to-the-po wer-button-between-the-volume-wheel-and-the-fm-ane tenna-module-plug.
People don't always need/want an infinite list of features. They just want their product to work out of the box, with minimal fuss so they can go work out with music. For these people (the majority of mp3 buyers) fewer features and a more attractive case make the ipod vastly superior to anything that has come out of Creative.
ooh! you're talking about Linux right? It's been *how many years* and we're still knocking out bugs that users are expected to find with each revision.;o) Plus bugs in the windowing system, bugs in the various libraries, bugs in security, patches here and there...etc.etc... but it's perfect I swear!
But if you want to talk about products that you pay for... When a hardware (or car) company releases a product, alot of care is put forth before release because fixing a mass problem is expensive (ala a recall). And then there's the whole a*b*c=x thing where the recall may not be economical given the rate and seriousness of the malfunction.
With software, a recall is much easier and much cheaper (programming time and bandwidth to distribute it... but of which are planned for, or should be). Since no lives are at stake (in general) they don't expect multimillion dollar lawsuits over an application exiting unexpectedly and someone losing their powerpoint presentations. It's cheaper to just take errors are they come, fix them, and move on, than to try to fix every imaginable (and unimaginable) bug before a package ships.
And honestly as long as the patches are free... I'm ok with that. The grey area (or black and white if you're more resolute) comes into play when you're paying for an upgrade to a software package that you yourself (since you're submitting your bug reports with proper logfiles and such every time anything happens) helped to create. It's admitedly an upgrade (since they're calling it that) to a peice of software that you already bought. With a car, this would mean replacing the engine. With software, this most often means just a big ball of bug-fixes, though they're clearly feeding off of our want to see it as a total engine replacement.
"I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force- if necessary- to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security."
You'd be amazed at how small the anti-microsoft group actually is. People wavering on the edge of MS v. Linux are probably just looking at it because it's the other alternative. Business likes alternatives. It gives the illusion of choice. But recognize the mountain of obstacles that stand in the way of this option. Total software incompatibility (probably MS's fault, many linux projects focus on supporting MS's closed formats). Linux is still very user-unfriendly (not arguing this point as it's not pivitol, but linux still has a long way to go to catch up with MS's multimillion dollar user-interface design, and users like pointless bells, whistles and glitter, something that most users of linux aren't fans of), as well as unfamiliar to what most people are going to be using at home leading to high training costs.
Add this marketing ploy from MS onto the stack of reasons NOT to make a switch to linux and I think it would be hard to convince your management to spend alot of money to change especially when what you already have is "working fine".
(ps: i'm targeting the business example since a TCO analysis would be pointed squarely at businesses)
I'm not saying the report is fair or unbiased, or that MS dosen't have exactly those intentions in their attempt to 'befriend' the ODSL. But I think that out of everything MS does, marketing is their strength (look at it, with inferior product they control the market) and I don't see this as the hole digging that you do.
I think the implication is that 10 years ago a user who wanted to do most anything HAD to have some understanding of command prompts, memory, drivers, INI files, and had the ability to trick it all into doing what you intended for it to do (connecting to the internet back in the mosaic/win3.1/modem days for example).
In today's world users expect (and rightfully so) that they not be required to understand all of these things in order to research a school project, investigate a company's financial history, type it all up and print it. Generally we don't want the computer to be the work, we want it to be the tool that we use to accomplish the work, much like we shouldn't have to understand how to extract and forge steel into a hammer to build a house.
For these reasons, yes, kids today understand how to use computers and you might call them skilled in it. But computers expect less of their users. The power-users who understand and apply regularly their understanding of interrupts, console-based computing, and the like make up a very small portion of the computing universe (which make up a large-ish percent of/.)
They're marketing to the people who are looking at linux for the first time as thought they just 'might' give it a shot. They read this saying that linux is crap (true or not) and think again. nevermind... i'll just stick with good old faithful MS. They're not marketing to you fool.;)
melting ice isn't like pouring alot of new material into the oceans. it's already there. melting the ice that is already floating there displacing water won't affect the position of the sealevel at all.
What it might do (assuming that global warming is fact, which all proven scientific evidence shows it's not) is cause changes in the motion of hot and cold water under-sea currents. This could potentially change global climate patterns (note: change != destroy).
Slashdot Mirror
a heroic captain who plugged a dyke with his ship... ahh... I love /. :D
I'm picturing the size of the surge protector I'd need to make sure I don't fry my powersupply when that happenes.
awww... we can send all the negroes to the moon if you'd prefer? Honestly, given the choice between the moon and a little flood... I'd pick the water anyday. And you KNOW congress would never approve of a spacesuit with a pantyhose stretched over the helmet.
ALL INSECTS BOW TO MORVO!
haven't you heard? MS Hot-Female© 2002 is set to ship just in time for the holiday season. Of course they're releasing it for Mac as well, but Apple is has recently trademarked the name 'Woman' so you can expect a Mac only clone to be close on it's heels.
this is offtopic so this isn't really the place for the discussion
but... Peta is anti-pets, anti-mascots, against the use of animals in anyway whatsoever for our amusement.
finally... darth vader is leaving us alone and returning to his galaxy far far away.
I wish mine had a 150 decibel ringer
Gimp, Linux, KDE, freeBSD, gnome, firefox, FOSS...
I love the verbage you use. :D
:D
The people in the trenches...being dictated to by a boss. You need to find a new job before you have a stroke
Someone else already said it but I'll be redudant if I must. I helped pay for it.
;)
Assuming you're a tax-paying citizen of the US then you did too. Of course if you're not... then I did more than you did. swish!
For the record, not everyone out here on /. is a bafoon and some of us see your valid points without having to resort degrading how you presented them.
The replies to your post make valid points too however. Though just because someone appears on Fox does not discredit them (where he came up with that one I'll never know). Just because the scientific community has formed an 'agreement' on something dosen't make it fact (see the last 2000+ years of science. the track record isn't that impressive). The thing about the CO2/ozone issue is legit. ozone seems to be the principle barrier preventing us from being bombarded by solar radiation, whilst CO2 preventing heat from escaping back out into space (the so-called greenhouse effect).
I for one am not so self-centere as to think that I could have any impact at all on the global environment.
But I don't care to argue it. I just wanted to point out that you make valid points not all of us think you're wrong.
Landing on the moon was a crazy achievement.. In fact it was so crazy that there are people who, to this day, think we never made it. Making that voyage was like squeezing a baby until it makes it's first sounds. You wouldn't claim that it could talk. No where near. So now the kid knows it can make noises (not the best way to teach it) and it can spend the time learning new ones and fine-tuning the ones that it knows.
;)
Space travel is the same way. So we punched through the glass ceiling (so to speak) but we've been focusing our energy of late on sustaining life in a vastly different environment. The trip to the moon was roughly 3 days to, 3 days on, and 3 days to return home. The trip to mars is roughly a 6 year round trip? There are significant obstacles that have to be overcome before we can afford to send live humans out there. Not only that, but because of the length of each experimental trial, 40 years would only afford... 6? MAX (granted multiple trials can be undertaken simultaneously, shorter peices of the whole, etc, etc, but the point is made, and I can't picture anything less than full scale, full length simulations).
Food is an issue. Air is an issue. Water is an issue. Muscle atrophy is an issue. The list goes on. All of these things are being investigated at the ISS, and the MIR as well I presume.
In this day and age NASA can't afford to 'screw up' any more so I don't blame them for taking their good old time getting on track for mars. I say send lots of probes that can't die. If I were them I'd send a few monkeys with no families (you know, the hobo monkeys) up first as well.
You're a classic example of today's modern, plugged in, brilliant, and utterly uninspired people.
It's difficult to fathom the fact that a collection of atoms formed together to produce you in such a fashion that you can create such a statement. Life is utterly amazing in that regard. We're having an argument. THAT is awe-inspiring.
How can the idea of having overcome so many obstacles, arguably way before our time, traveled such a distance, and achieved such a feat. The idea that there's a massive rock orbiting our tiny little planet is crazy as it is but that we were able to get people there is insane.
Now I think that our progress in getting people more than 365 times as far (mars versus the moon) has been rather astounding. We managed, on only our second shot, to hit a target as small as mars (technically we 'hit' it twice) from literally ~50 million miles away. We have photographs taken from the surface of a completely different planet.
You're amazingly desensitized by tv, media, movies, music, videogames... i dunno what.
we don't want their squids! gross little creatures... and Canada can keep the looney-bins! the US is crazy enough as it is! :D
agreed... The article has nothing to do with ID and the first 2 pages of comments go something like this: OMGWTFBBQ! STOOPID CREATIONISTS! IT'S NOT SCIENCE! QUIT TRYING TO SHOVE IT DOWN OUR THROATS! YOUR STOOPID! YOU HAVE NO EVIDENCE! HAHAHA!! SILLY BELIEFS! I AM THE WALMART! I really don't see any comments refuting or arguing FOR id... Maybe one or two commenting that this is all offtopic?
this argument is myopic and flawed. you can make the exact same argument, the potential for failure, with anything. What is an airbag fails and stays inflated and kills everyone in the car.. What is a seatbelt rips just right and slices you in half, what if your... etc.etc. It's good to play the what-if game but don't think for a moment that it dosen't apply to the other options. Now see the flipside: It's an automatic traffic system that will increase productivity, reduce transit time, and save lives. Sure the system can still fail from time to time but in general this is a good thing. The ACLU would have very little ground to stand on. Using the system on select toll roads where it's required would be paid for by the people taking those roads. This is an established way of controlling traffic used in many roads across the nation. I'm not saying they wouldn't fight it... they do many stupid things. But I have a hard time believing they'd win. The argument that a road requiring a particular peice of equipment descriminates against the lower-income bracket, is akin to the same argument against roads requiring cars with working headlights, brakelights, inflated tires, etc, etc. It all costs money, and it's all required to drive with some measure of assured safety on our public roads.
Features and batterlife, while legit reasons to purchase something, don't nessicarily make something a better product.
y -possible-person-could-want-just-in-case-they-actu ally-want-it-even-once-durring-the-entire-time-the y-use-the-product-even-if-we-have-to-shoehorn-the- button-somewhere-over-in-the-corner-next-to-the-po wer-button-between-the-volume-wheel-and-the-fm-ane tenna-module-plug.
My mother recently bought an iPod specifically for 2 reasons. It looks better, and it was simpler. Translation: fewer features.
That's always been Apple's strength. Stop piling on useless features, and focus on what the majority of people actually want, instead of the FOSS community approach of provide-every-imaginable-bell-and-whistle-that-an
People don't always need/want an infinite list of features. They just want their product to work out of the box, with minimal fuss so they can go work out with music. For these people (the majority of mp3 buyers) fewer features and a more attractive case make the ipod vastly superior to anything that has come out of Creative.
ooh! you're talking about Linux right? It's been *how many years* and we're still knocking out bugs that users are expected to find with each revision. ;o) Plus bugs in the windowing system, bugs in the various libraries, bugs in security, patches here and there...etc.etc... but it's perfect I swear!
But if you want to talk about products that you pay for... When a hardware (or car) company releases a product, alot of care is put forth before release because fixing a mass problem is expensive (ala a recall). And then there's the whole a*b*c=x thing where the recall may not be economical given the rate and seriousness of the malfunction.
With software, a recall is much easier and much cheaper (programming time and bandwidth to distribute it... but of which are planned for, or should be). Since no lives are at stake (in general) they don't expect multimillion dollar lawsuits over an application exiting unexpectedly and someone losing their powerpoint presentations. It's cheaper to just take errors are they come, fix them, and move on, than to try to fix every imaginable (and unimaginable) bug before a package ships.
And honestly as long as the patches are free... I'm ok with that. The grey area (or black and white if you're more resolute) comes into play when you're paying for an upgrade to a software package that you yourself (since you're submitting your bug reports with proper logfiles and such every time anything happens) helped to create. It's admitedly an upgrade (since they're calling it that) to a peice of software that you already bought. With a car, this would mean replacing the engine. With software, this most often means just a big ball of bug-fixes, though they're clearly feeding off of our want to see it as a total engine replacement.
"I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force- if necessary- to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security."
Sen. John F. Kerry (D, MA), Oct. 9, 2002
never underestimate the power of a person's own name ;)
You'd be amazed at how small the anti-microsoft group actually is. People wavering on the edge of MS v. Linux are probably just looking at it because it's the other alternative. Business likes alternatives. It gives the illusion of choice. But recognize the mountain of obstacles that stand in the way of this option. Total software incompatibility (probably MS's fault, many linux projects focus on supporting MS's closed formats). Linux is still very user-unfriendly (not arguing this point as it's not pivitol, but linux still has a long way to go to catch up with MS's multimillion dollar user-interface design, and users like pointless bells, whistles and glitter, something that most users of linux aren't fans of), as well as unfamiliar to what most people are going to be using at home leading to high training costs.
:D
Add this marketing ploy from MS onto the stack of reasons NOT to make a switch to linux and I think it would be hard to convince your management to spend alot of money to change especially when what you already have is "working fine".
(ps: i'm targeting the business example since a TCO analysis would be pointed squarely at businesses)
I'm not saying the report is fair or unbiased, or that MS dosen't have exactly those intentions in their attempt to 'befriend' the ODSL. But I think that out of everything MS does, marketing is their strength (look at it, with inferior product they control the market) and I don't see this as the hole digging that you do.
But you are entitled to your oppinion!
I think the implication is that 10 years ago a user who wanted to do most anything HAD to have some understanding of command prompts, memory, drivers, INI files, and had the ability to trick it all into doing what you intended for it to do (connecting to the internet back in the mosaic/win3.1/modem days for example).
/.)
In today's world users expect (and rightfully so) that they not be required to understand all of these things in order to research a school project, investigate a company's financial history, type it all up and print it. Generally we don't want the computer to be the work, we want it to be the tool that we use to accomplish the work, much like we shouldn't have to understand how to extract and forge steel into a hammer to build a house.
For these reasons, yes, kids today understand how to use computers and you might call them skilled in it. But computers expect less of their users. The power-users who understand and apply regularly their understanding of interrupts, console-based computing, and the like make up a very small portion of the computing universe (which make up a large-ish percent of
They're marketing to the people who are looking at linux for the first time as thought they just 'might' give it a shot. They read this saying that linux is crap (true or not) and think again. nevermind... i'll just stick with good old faithful MS. They're not marketing to you fool. ;)
melting ice isn't like pouring alot of new material into the oceans. it's already there. melting the ice that is already floating there displacing water won't affect the position of the sealevel at all. What it might do (assuming that global warming is fact, which all proven scientific evidence shows it's not) is cause changes in the motion of hot and cold water under-sea currents. This could potentially change global climate patterns (note: change != destroy).