I don't see why it's so popular on Slashdot to hate people who believe in some sort of God.
Because most people on/. have taken Logic 101 and know that a false assumption is incredibly dangerous. From it, you can conclude whatever you want in a seemingly consistent way. Everything that follows from a false assumption is worse than false, it is meaningless.
If your core assumption about the world is wrong, then everything you say is suspect, until shown to be free from that particular taint. That is not hatred, that is applied logic.
And we don't hate you. We despise your faith. Big difference.
Being charitable does not mean you can't be fraudulent.
Robin Hood was a thief. The whole giving-to-the-poor part doesn't undo the stealing part. It definitely figures in if you want to cast a summary judgement, and I agree that there are some religious organisations that I believe have a net benefit to society due to the work they do.
Surface is where in which market? It's a prototype for a niche market.
Metro is another UI "innovation" that will be going the way of the Dodo very quickly, because it's a dumb idea from the get go. It's UI built to a technical vision, not a user vision - a typical MS fault they repeat again and again.
Kinect is the one where you have something. It is a big step up from what Nintendo and Sony did in the same area. I'm not yet sure it will fly beyond being an interesting games interface. Time will tell.
Aside from the god joke, you are right on the money.
Living organisms haven't evolved to survive very long. Passing on your genes to a couple new specimen has turned out to be the superior strategy. Obviously, since eternal life is pretty much the end of evolution in organisms that don't do runtime-mutations very well.
Shapeshifters are about the only imaginable species where eternal life could evolve, and even there I'd say the odds are stacked against the trait for reasons of risk-spread.
The british health-care system works like that. It's not heavily advertised, because it's difficult for people to accept, but the measure used to decide which technologies to fund and which not is a measure called "quality years of life". A treatment that gives you 5 more years, but you'll be able to make use of them almost as if you were healthy will get more money than a treatment that gives you 10 years, but leaves you crippled for most of them.
It really is a tough decision to make, because you don't know what advances could come along in those years you deny people that could save them or lessen their misery, reversing your original estimate.
businesses will adapt anything that improves productivity while conforming to security's infrastructure.
ROFL
You've never been in a large corporation, have you? Politics and whatever the decision makers believe in plays a much bigger role than productivity, even if you manage to measure it.
The last company I worked for introduced the iPad into the company as an "information device for the top 50 managers". Top 50 wasn't selected by who actually had the most immediate need to have an information device with them, it was by selected who the top 50 people in the corporate hierarchy were. In other words, they handed out shiny toys to themselves. You could literally smell the ego-boost for weeks when you entered their offices and they were reading their e-mail on the iPad instead of the desktop PC that was an arm's length away.
That is how corporations select what to adapt. Playing golf with the CTO has ten times the chances of landing you the deal that presenting excellent performance measures does.
Yes, I have a low opinion of most managers. I've worked closely with too many of them. There are exceptions, as everywhere. The average manager could be exchanged with a 9 year old and aside from the redecorated office, nobody would notice. And yes, there were studies about decision quality of so called top managers against random selection and kids. In almost all of them, either the kids or random chance wins.
Sorry, but despite dreams and wishes of the shareholders and shills, MS is not the company to use opportunities. They had a lucky break once and that was it.
The MS approach is to wait until they're sure a market exists, then enter it with a plan to outspend the competitors until they go broke. Seriously, I've been watching these jokers for almost 20 years, and I've never seen them employ any other strategy.
It'll be a very cool day in hell when MS takes on a market with actual innovation.
While it may be the job of a company, as an entity, to make money, the company is made of individuals that still ought to be directed by some semblance of common decency.
Are you kidding us? We're talking about the recording industry. The guys who have made it a business model to screw both sides of their market - the artists as well as the customers. The only person with any decency left that I can possibly imagine working there is the janitor.
Free market at work - if demand increases, you can raise the price. That's how it works. We love the free market, don't we?
Come on, americans! Where's the cries that any outrage over this is socialism? We wouldn't want to interfere with the magic of the free market, right? It's as important as free speech!
Just like our politicians sell out to the highest bidder...
I know. That is exactly the point I'm making. We are allowing your representatives to boss us around. We need to put an end to this before the only way to do it is to shoot them all.
No matter the system you devise the problem is that of concentration of power
Wrong. Solutions to this problem are 2000 years old. Read up on the ancient Athenian democracy. Limits on terms, mandatory terms for public service and systems to get rid of upcoming tyrants. It wasn't perfect, certainly (nothing man-made ever is), but they had solutions to these problems.
This is the change Robert Heinlein wrote about in Take Back Your Government. It can still be done.
Example: Over here in Germany, we have for years been pushing for laws to force the representatives to disclose their sources of income. We've made lots of progress, but there's still too many exceptions. But a meme has been created - we pay you to serve us, so we ought to know who else pays you to serve them. Ever since, the public and the media have had an eye on where our representatives get money and favours, and our current president just might fall over accepting too many favours.
The ISP has neither the storage (at the petabyte level, storage is far from cheap) nor the desire to track you. I used to work at an ISP. We sued the government when they wanted us to track our customers for law-enforcement purposes, because it would've been horribly expensive. We won.
I don't think people truly realize how much money will dry up without targeted advertising.
I don't think you realize how much of that money is exploiting you to your disadvantage. On a macro-economic scale, I would challenge you to show that it provides a positive effect to society. My counter-claim would be that it is actually doing damage.
Advertisement money is not used for production or research. Thus it does not add to the GDP. It is not a null value, however, as that money could have been spend on production or research.
Advertisement does not generate additional money on the macro-economic scale, only on the micro-economic (single business) scale. Since the total amount of money is fixed (M2), advertisement does not increase it.
So, advertisement is the transaction cost of shifting income from one entity (business) to another. It does not have a value in itself.
In sum, I don't think you realize how much additional money we all would have available without advertising.
I hate it when these marketing zombies go about claiming how they built everything and nothing would exist if they weren't around to leech on it.
People, the Internet was built and only after it had grown fairly large came the advertisers. There are enough people here on/. who still remember times when you didn't need AdBlock or spam filters, because there was little to no advertisement.
The free Internet doesn't have ads. It is free. Anything with ads is not free, it is merely shifting the paying to someone else. It is "free" only in the same sense that food at home was "free" because your parents paid for it. But that also meant they got to choose what's for dinner. Maybe it's time to grow up.
Disclaimer: I'm not saying everything should be free and without ads. I pay for stuff in real life, I don't see why I couldn't pay for stuff online. I do say we need a new word for ad-supported crap, because it is conceptually different from actually free stuff. Ad support means your business and mental model changes. Your visitors are no longer your guests, they are your product that you sell to your advertisers. A new word would make that clear to the visitors, which is why we need to come up with it, because it is not in the interest of anyone else.
And then they're surprised that we distrust them. Seriously?
The common theme I see behind all the recent political issues is transparency - and not of the "we need more surveilance" kind, but of the "you are supposed to be our representatives, not our masters, so start treating us as the real boss" kind.
I personally think that we need something like an amendment to the western constitutions that makes it clear that the phrase "we, the people" or "the people are the souvereign", etc. that appear in one form or another in all of them includes the fact that the souvereign has the right to know what his representatives are up to at any time.
As with all things, exceptions are invitations for abuse. There are a few cases (immediate danger) where a delay seems useful. Terorrist attack? Well, think again. If it were all over the evening news that terrorists plan to hijack four airplanes tomorrow and fly them into buildings - what do you think their chances of success have just become?
There are very few cases where secrecy is actually warranted in politics, and we need a strict full-disclosure afterwards policy for those. And by "afterwards", I don't mean 20 years, I mean "before the next election".
It's time these jokers are told again that they govern us, not rule us. Because in a democracy (or republic, for the nitpickers), the people rule.
IANAL, but since when does lawyer mean "someone who reinterprets every word in a new and twisted way, just to make profit"?
Since ever. It was only when I worked a lot with the lawyers that I realized how geeky (in their own way) they are.
Just like MUST, SHOULD, CAN, etc. have precise, exactly defined meanings in RFCs, so do words in legalese have precise, specific meanings. Apparently, the term "famous" has not yet been defined legally, so it's a proper attack vector.
And lawyers don't just reinterpret words. It is their job to get the interests of their clients seen to, no matter how. The bar associations put limits on what they may and may not do, but playing word-games isn't disallowed - the judge will be, well, the judge on that.
No so sure. Pressing down thumb-middle-ring is as much a muscle-memory thing as pressing on a specific point on a keyboard. In fact, for people who didn't learn to touch-type and acquired speed through many years of training, losing the home row is the most common cause of mistakes. I rarely make typo errors, but when I do, it's usually something like "qwkxinw".
This keyboard's best feature, IMHO, is that it is large independent of the particular place on the screen. Especially on a small screen, that's a main problem. On the iPhone keyboard, I constantly hit the wrong letters, one left or right of the one I intend to hit.
Seriously. Even if you are against nuclear power, you would be a dangerous fanatic if you'd not rather have modern, much safer reactors around than the old crap that can blow up any day.
That's the problem with our western politics. It's really hard to follow a set direction for a decade or two with elections every few years. So one government wants to get out of nuclear power, the next one doesn't - in the end, you don't get out but you also don't invest, and the power companies are too scared that the next time it really is the end of it all and thus save on modernizing as much as they legally can.
And then you end up with really old, horribly insecure and outright dangerous nuclear reactors. In other words, you get the worst-case scenario that absolutely nobody on either side of the discussion ever wanted.
Slashdot Mirror
Same with the non-religious fraud. But if it prevents other people from falling for the scam, then it has been worthwhile.
I don't see why it's so popular on Slashdot to hate people who believe in some sort of God.
Because most people on /. have taken Logic 101 and know that a false assumption is incredibly dangerous. From it, you can conclude whatever you want in a seemingly consistent way. Everything that follows from a false assumption is worse than false, it is meaningless.
If your core assumption about the world is wrong, then everything you say is suspect, until shown to be free from that particular taint. That is not hatred, that is applied logic.
And we don't hate you. We despise your faith. Big difference.
Being charitable does not mean you can't be fraudulent.
Robin Hood was a thief. The whole giving-to-the-poor part doesn't undo the stealing part. It definitely figures in if you want to cast a summary judgement, and I agree that there are some religious organisations that I believe have a net benefit to society due to the work they do.
That doesn't mean their foundation isn't fraud.
Surface is where in which market? It's a prototype for a niche market.
Metro is another UI "innovation" that will be going the way of the Dodo very quickly, because it's a dumb idea from the get go. It's UI built to a technical vision, not a user vision - a typical MS fault they repeat again and again.
Kinect is the one where you have something. It is a big step up from what Nintendo and Sony did in the same area. I'm not yet sure it will fly beyond being an interesting games interface. Time will tell.
Aside from the god joke, you are right on the money.
Living organisms haven't evolved to survive very long. Passing on your genes to a couple new specimen has turned out to be the superior strategy. Obviously, since eternal life is pretty much the end of evolution in organisms that don't do runtime-mutations very well.
Shapeshifters are about the only imaginable species where eternal life could evolve, and even there I'd say the odds are stacked against the trait for reasons of risk-spread.
Parts of the world have realized that already.
The british health-care system works like that. It's not heavily advertised, because it's difficult for people to accept, but the measure used to decide which technologies to fund and which not is a measure called "quality years of life". A treatment that gives you 5 more years, but you'll be able to make use of them almost as if you were healthy will get more money than a treatment that gives you 10 years, but leaves you crippled for most of them.
It really is a tough decision to make, because you don't know what advances could come along in those years you deny people that could save them or lessen their misery, reversing your original estimate.
businesses will adapt anything that improves productivity while conforming to security's infrastructure.
ROFL
You've never been in a large corporation, have you? Politics and whatever the decision makers believe in plays a much bigger role than productivity, even if you manage to measure it.
The last company I worked for introduced the iPad into the company as an "information device for the top 50 managers".
Top 50 wasn't selected by who actually had the most immediate need to have an information device with them, it was by selected who the top 50 people in the corporate hierarchy were.
In other words, they handed out shiny toys to themselves. You could literally smell the ego-boost for weeks when you entered their offices and they were reading their e-mail on the iPad instead of the desktop PC that was an arm's length away.
That is how corporations select what to adapt. Playing golf with the CTO has ten times the chances of landing you the deal that presenting excellent performance measures does.
Yes, I have a low opinion of most managers. I've worked closely with too many of them. There are exceptions, as everywhere. The average manager could be exchanged with a 9 year old and aside from the redecorated office, nobody would notice.
And yes, there were studies about decision quality of so called top managers against random selection and kids. In almost all of them, either the kids or random chance wins.
Sorry, but despite dreams and wishes of the shareholders and shills, MS is not the company to use opportunities. They had a lucky break once and that was it.
The MS approach is to wait until they're sure a market exists, then enter it with a plan to outspend the competitors until they go broke. Seriously, I've been watching these jokers for almost 20 years, and I've never seen them employ any other strategy.
It'll be a very cool day in hell when MS takes on a market with actual innovation.
While it may be the job of a company, as an entity, to make money, the company is made of individuals that still ought to be directed by some semblance of common decency.
Are you kidding us? We're talking about the recording industry. The guys who have made it a business model to screw both sides of their market - the artists as well as the customers. The only person with any decency left that I can possibly imagine working there is the janitor.
Businesses arent supposed to "benefit society."
Actually, at least in the US, corporations are. That's what the corporate charter is all about.
But that idea has been purely theoretical for decades, if not centuries.
Free market at work - if demand increases, you can raise the price. That's how it works. We love the free market, don't we?
Come on, americans! Where's the cries that any outrage over this is socialism? We wouldn't want to interfere with the magic of the free market, right? It's as important as free speech!
Just like our politicians sell out to the highest bidder...
Absolutely, it is! I've been blocking hotmail for years, and while I still get spam, the volume has dropped considerably.
Oh, wait... that's not what they meant, was it?
It hasn't been a functioning democracy for years.
I know. That is exactly the point I'm making. We are allowing your representatives to boss us around. We need to put an end to this before the only way to do it is to shoot them all.
No matter the system you devise the problem is that of concentration of power
Wrong. Solutions to this problem are 2000 years old. Read up on the ancient Athenian democracy. Limits on terms, mandatory terms for public service and systems to get rid of upcoming tyrants. It wasn't perfect, certainly (nothing man-made ever is), but they had solutions to these problems.
This is the change Robert Heinlein wrote about in Take Back Your Government. It can still be done.
Example: Over here in Germany, we have for years been pushing for laws to force the representatives to disclose their sources of income. We've made lots of progress, but there's still too many exceptions. But a meme has been created - we pay you to serve us, so we ought to know who else pays you to serve them. Ever since, the public and the media have had an eye on where our representatives get money and favours, and our current president just might fall over accepting too many favours.
Yes, in discussing the importance of the separation of church and state, of course we only count state-sponsored executions.
Accepted. Put in that context, you are right.
Is this an automated comment posted to every topic?
If so, smart move, you've also killed the "first post" meme in the same go. :-)
much fewer commercials
Watch your measurement. Take into account that TV shows are a lot longer than most online video clips.
10 ads in a 15 minute show is the same percentage as one ad in a 90 second clip.
The ISP will track your every move.
The ISP has neither the storage (at the petabyte level, storage is far from cheap) nor the desire to track you. I used to work at an ISP. We sued the government when they wanted us to track our customers for law-enforcement purposes, because it would've been horribly expensive. We won.
I don't think people truly realize how much money will dry up without targeted advertising.
I don't think you realize how much of that money is exploiting you to your disadvantage. On a macro-economic scale, I would challenge you to show that it provides a positive effect to society. My counter-claim would be that it is actually doing damage.
Advertisement money is not used for production or research. Thus it does not add to the GDP. It is not a null value, however, as that money could have been spend on production or research.
Advertisement does not generate additional money on the macro-economic scale, only on the micro-economic (single business) scale. Since the total amount of money is fixed (M2), advertisement does not increase it.
So, advertisement is the transaction cost of shifting income from one entity (business) to another. It does not have a value in itself.
In sum, I don't think you realize how much additional money we all would have available without advertising.
I hate it when these marketing zombies go about claiming how they built everything and nothing would exist if they weren't around to leech on it.
People, the Internet was built and only after it had grown fairly large came the advertisers. There are enough people here on /. who still remember times when you didn't need AdBlock or spam filters, because there was little to no advertisement.
The free Internet doesn't have ads. It is free. Anything with ads is not free, it is merely shifting the paying to someone else. It is "free" only in the same sense that food at home was "free" because your parents paid for it. But that also meant they got to choose what's for dinner. Maybe it's time to grow up.
Disclaimer: I'm not saying everything should be free and without ads. I pay for stuff in real life, I don't see why I couldn't pay for stuff online. I do say we need a new word for ad-supported crap, because it is conceptually different from actually free stuff. Ad support means your business and mental model changes. Your visitors are no longer your guests, they are your product that you sell to your advertisers. A new word would make that clear to the visitors, which is why we need to come up with it, because it is not in the interest of anyone else.
And then they're surprised that we distrust them. Seriously?
The common theme I see behind all the recent political issues is transparency - and not of the "we need more surveilance" kind, but of the "you are supposed to be our representatives, not our masters, so start treating us as the real boss" kind.
I personally think that we need something like an amendment to the western constitutions that makes it clear that the phrase "we, the people" or "the people are the souvereign", etc. that appear in one form or another in all of them includes the fact that the souvereign has the right to know what his representatives are up to at any time.
As with all things, exceptions are invitations for abuse. There are a few cases (immediate danger) where a delay seems useful. Terorrist attack? Well, think again. If it were all over the evening news that terrorists plan to hijack four airplanes tomorrow and fly them into buildings - what do you think their chances of success have just become?
There are very few cases where secrecy is actually warranted in politics, and we need a strict full-disclosure afterwards policy for those. And by "afterwards", I don't mean 20 years, I mean "before the next election".
It's time these jokers are told again that they govern us, not rule us. Because in a democracy (or republic, for the nitpickers), the people rule.
Do you only count court-ordered execution? If not, a doctor was shot in the US in 2009 by anti-abortionists.
IANAL, but since when does lawyer mean "someone who reinterprets every word in a new and twisted way, just to make profit"?
Since ever. It was only when I worked a lot with the lawyers that I realized how geeky (in their own way) they are.
Just like MUST, SHOULD, CAN, etc. have precise, exactly defined meanings in RFCs, so do words in legalese have precise, specific meanings. Apparently, the term "famous" has not yet been defined legally, so it's a proper attack vector.
And lawyers don't just reinterpret words. It is their job to get the interests of their clients seen to, no matter how. The bar associations put limits on what they may and may not do, but playing word-games isn't disallowed - the judge will be, well, the judge on that.
No so sure. Pressing down thumb-middle-ring is as much a muscle-memory thing as pressing on a specific point on a keyboard. In fact, for people who didn't learn to touch-type and acquired speed through many years of training, losing the home row is the most common cause of mistakes. I rarely make typo errors, but when I do, it's usually something like "qwkxinw".
This keyboard's best feature, IMHO, is that it is large independent of the particular place on the screen. Especially on a small screen, that's a main problem. On the iPhone keyboard, I constantly hit the wrong letters, one left or right of the one I intend to hit.
Seriously. Even if you are against nuclear power, you would be a dangerous fanatic if you'd not rather have modern, much safer reactors around than the old crap that can blow up any day.
That's the problem with our western politics. It's really hard to follow a set direction for a decade or two with elections every few years. So one government wants to get out of nuclear power, the next one doesn't - in the end, you don't get out but you also don't invest, and the power companies are too scared that the next time it really is the end of it all and thus save on modernizing as much as they legally can.
And then you end up with really old, horribly insecure and outright dangerous nuclear reactors. In other words, you get the worst-case scenario that absolutely nobody on either side of the discussion ever wanted.
You mean, like I did with my original (1st gen) iPhone ?
Worked out well for me.