"You think the allies won because of "better guns"?
There was a lot more to it than that, man. Strategy, luck and countless thousands of men all played a part in winning WW2."
Rrrright. Good strategy and thousands of men without guns. That would work just great.
People like you are absolutely clueless. Maybe you could show me where I said we won with "better guns". Nice try setting up a straw man. Too bad it didn't work out for you. Idiot.
If I remember correctly, that paid off the last time Japan attacked us. We ended up overcoming our adversaries and helping out our European allies who were naive enough to think that after WW1, the world was a more modern, civilized place where warfare was a thing of the past.
From personal experience, school was too boring to be able to sit there for that long. Increasing the time spent at school would only make the problem worse. We spent a lot of time sitting there and not much time learning.
I did have a few teachers who were more "hands on" and would do experiments in class, but those teachers never seemed to last- they were replaced by seemingly less intelligent teachers who only read from a book. Not surprisingly, I learned from the "hands on" teachers while I couldn't even keep my concentration when the teacher just read from books.
My point is that it's the quality of the education that's all wrong here, not the quantity. Keep kids interested in learning and they'll learn. Bore them to death and they'll look out the window.
Mr. Madison, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no mod points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
It is not in our best interest to build up India.
on
Offshoring IT
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You are correct when looking at it from the overall world view, but we're talking about decisions made by the US which affect the US. Right now we have the money and we're quickly giving it away with these huge trade deficits.
Yes, eliminating outsourcing would hurt the vast majority of people who benefit from outsourcing. Most of those people live in China/India. But it would help the minority of people- those who live in the US. The average US worker does NOT benefit from outsourcing. Sure, the TV he wants is now half the price. But he can't buy it because his job is about to go to India. And if he does still have a job, that TV isn't such a great deal anymore because of the pay cuts he took to compete with foreign labor. So now we're back to square one, with the exception that another country has skimmed off the money.
Whereas before all the money stayed within the US, now it is permanently leaving our hands. Whereas before goods cost more but your town was in better shape because people had good jobs, now goods are cheaper but your town has declined because people have lost their jobs or taken pay cuts (and at the same time a town in India has been modernized with your money.)
Outsourcing is a short term solution whose long term affect is mainly taking money from the American workers and distributing it between American execs and the population of third world countries. It has a sapping effect on America. Those who make the decisions (execs) do benefit greatly, but for every American exec there are thousands of American workers who are losing out.
The US has a very small population compared to China/India. They could take every one of our jobs and still have hundreds of millions of people left over to fight over those jobs.
And this isn't uniquely a problem the US has to deal with. European counties, with their small, relatively highly paid populations are subject to the same demise. Who wants to pay a German engineer $50,000 when you could pay a whole team of Indian engineers the same wage?
"We are undone, my dear sir, if legislation is still permitted which makes our money, much or little, real or imaginary, as the moneyed interests shall choose to make it." -- Thomas Jefferson"
I understand what you're saying about getting a reliable car. If you're just looking for a car to get you to work in the morning then a car such as that is a great choice. I had a Toyota Corolla as my daily driver and it did its job well. Putting an expensive badge on that car wouldn't have increased its value to me because that doesn't help its intended purpose.
That being said, Mercedes is a premium brand. Your average Mercedes customer isn't looking for basic, inexpensive transportation that gets them from point A to point B. Their customers are people with more money to burn, who are willing to pay the extra cash for a car with more amenities, who want to drive in style. You don't need heated leather seats to get to work, but some people want that and will pay extra for it.
Now that they own Chrysler, they'll sell those cheap cars under the Dodge name (or the Smart name).
But I do understand what the original poster was getting at. Don't sell off your prestige...what you're good at. Imagine Rolex selling their name to Timex. It kind of dilutes everything that made the name a Premium name in the first place.
You are correct that the IBM PC architecture came about by reverse engineering and cloning a proprietary architecture.
You are also correct that PowerPC started as a more open specification.
But in the end the market determines what really is "standard". Since IBM compatible PC's completely dominate the market with more than 90% market share, they have become the "standard".
Just like Microsoft OS's are the de facto standard of operating systems. Yes, if you look at details you'll see that Microsoft OSes are a completely propriety, closed architecture while Linux is an open architecture. But since the vast majority of people on Earth use MS OS's, they have become the standard by default since nearly everyone adopted them instead of any alternative.
A tumor's cells do die. They are constantly growing new cells just like the rest of our body. When we age, the tumor ages also. It's not in the shape we're accustomed to but it does age.
Look at someone with a mole, when they grow old the mole grows old also. It doesn't stay nice and young looking while the rest of their body looks old. The aging of cells stays proportional.
Take a look at the guy. You can tell he's a loon. He's not in touch with reality.
Just based on probability, any mutation that can happen will happen- people are born with 6 fingers, 1 leg, 1 eye, etc.
But I have *NEVER* heard of any living thing having a mutation that allowed it to not age. You'd think if it was possible you'd see numerous people throughout history that did not age, did not grow old and die, etc. Or at least someone would have a pet dog that lived forever.
But none of this has happened. Because it cannot happen.
With most of these systems, common sense tells you that they can (and will eventually) be abused, but they initially don't tell us of that capability because it would create a backlash.
So what they do is:
1.) Get the system installed first, and don't use it until people calm down
2.) Then begin seeing what "uses" you can find for it.
Things like automatic toll collecting systems (EZ pass), GPS transmitters in cars, etc. will be installed and not abused until they are more widely adopted, then once they are commonplace they can begin to abuse their power with the public having little recourse.
They're still going to fuck up and shoot their allies by mistake
George Bush has all that figured out. You see, on the current path he's guiding our country, in a few years we won't have any allies left.
Then we won't have to worry about that problem.
You're missing a very important factor
on
HIV Vaccine
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· Score: 1
You're missing the factor of corruption, or legalized corruption anyway.
One of the biggest reasons for drug costs in the USA is because of the pharmaceutical industry's massive influence in the government. Big Business in general seems to control our government in the US. They'll make sure that laws are passed which help keep their selling prices high.
Take a look at the article about PA passing a law pushed by Verizon stopping WiFi. That's one of those situations were there's no good reason for it, but the company managed to get a law passed which will undoubtedly help their profits.
The pharm companies have a stranglehold of the FDA, do you really think they'd allow a cheap alternative to reach our shores? If there was one, you could bet that they'd find some kind of legal complaint of why it can't be sold here, and then reach an "agreement" with the FDA that it can be sold after a hefty levy has been placed on the product which would enable them to stay competitive.
With the drugs from Canada issue, you're buying the same product produced in the same factories, but for a much cheaper price... but you're not getting it through the "proper" channel which they've set up here in the US to milk the most money out of us as possible. Their market research shows that if we had to, we'd pay the higher price and there's no way they'll let us pay anything but that higher price.
Do you want to be successful like John Smith? How about Robert Jimmyjoiner? Sam Francisco? Well you better stay in school. You'll go nowhere fast without a degree because that piece of paper validates you and determines your worth as a human being.
If you drop out you are destined to become a small time failure, keeping company with such delinquents as Paul Allen, Larry Ellison, John D. Rockefeller, Thomas Edison and some other guys you've never heard of.
People are rushing to correct you and they can't even see that this is a joke.
Why can't we just get the stem cells from plants? Stems are abundant with them!
The article says that embryonic stem cells tend to form tumors. Therefore if you you tried to repair someone's severed limb with embryonic plant stems, there is a chance that the person wouldn't grow their limb back, but an oversized tree limb which would be offensive to pro-lifers and environmentalists alike.
Microdrives cannot store 60GB of data. You might be thinking of other kinds of drives, but not Microdrives.
The 60GB drive in the Ipod Photo that you are referring to is a 1.8" drive which is almost twice as large as the Microdrive, which is 1". The largest capacity of Microdrive is currently 4 GB.
An Ipod has the space to store more than enough mp3's. It usually takes people months (or even years, or never) to fill up its hard drive with mp3's.
The same amount of space for video on the other hand isn't enough. You can fill it up in a couple of hours, or even less if you set the resolution to the highest setting (to compete with MiniDV quality).
Imagine going on a vacation and having to keep buying new microdrives to shoot more video. On my vacation to Europe I filled up 4 miniDV tapes. It was easy to swap tapes on a ski lift. It wouldn't have been as easy, inexpensive, or had as good video quality if I was using this hard drive based camcorder.
PS- The Mpeg compression this uses is just like the MicroMV camcorders from Sony. People that have used them say they don't approach the video quality of MiniDV camcorders, they're closer to 8mm video quality.
While this is certainly something different, I think its limitations show the usefulness of tape. I don't think it's the future of camcorders.
This uses a 4 GB hard drive. A MiniDV tape holds about 25 GB. As such, this hard drive based camcorder needs to use lossy compression in order to give it a good recording time. While the picture quality won't be that bad, it's not going to be as good as raw video that MiniDV stores.
In addition, once this drive is filled up you're kind of out of luck unless you have a PC to upload the data to or you purchase additional microdrive cards, which are expensive. With the MiniDV camcorder you simply put a new tape in, and MiniDV tapes are cheap so most people usually carry around packs of spare tapes. For $10 I can get a couple of tapes. You're not going to get a 4 GB microdrive for $10, and certainly not a 25 GB microdrive.
So while this camcorder is viewed as something neat because it is different, it's not exactly revolutionary since it's of limited use. I think if hard drive based camcorders were the norm and someone came out with a new design that used cheap tapes which held 6x the data, such a design would be viewed as revolutionary.
The fact of the matter: if you're going 60mph and then suddenly de-accelerate to 0 in less than 12 feet, you are going to get hurt. Will you get hurt more in a SMART? No.
Why would both the smart car and an SUV decelerate in 12 feet? If they both had an equal distance to decelerate then yeah you'd have the same deceleration forces in each car.
But that's not quite reality.
In reality if you both went head-on into the same object, the crumple zones will pretty much dictate the stopping distance when you hit a solid object, and the Smart doesn't have a very big crumple zone.
I hate SUVs as much as the next guy but I won't ignore the physics of an impact.
If you were able to make a car that was indestructible, that didn't bent at all when you hit something, you'd die in most impacts because the amount of energy absorbed by the car would be none.
However, if you had a car that folded up like an accordian except for where you're sitting, the impact would be much less since the metal absorbed a lot of the energy from the impact.
That is the point of crumple zones. You have a cage around the passenger compartment which is not supposed to deform, and then you have the sheet metal around that cage to act as a shock absorber. The bumpers push in, the engine drops down, the hood bends, etc... the whole car in front of the passenger compartment is designed to deform.
In the case of the Smart car, regardless of how strong the cage is in a Smart car, it only has about a foot of metal in front of the passenger compartment to absorb the impact. If you hit a solid object you'd have a foot to decelerate. However, if you had a car with 4 feet of metal in front of the cage you'd have 4 times the distance to decelerate in a collision, and you'd experience only a fraction of the full impact you'd experience otherwise.
It's sick the way they do business. They'll inject anything they can get away with into the cattle if it helps their profit.
Also when mad cow cases were suspected here, they had already butchered and sold the suspected animals. I'd think they'd want to hold the animal until it could be tested, not get it on store shelves ASAP.
And the dumbest thing is when they get an infected animal, first they try to feed it to us, and when we see the dreadful results from that they decide to feed it to other livestock. Now that's been banned, too, so they feed it to chickens. Why can't they just play it safe and accept that the infected animal is a total loss? Better that than risking people's lives.
He's been hopping around from place to place, ignoring problems, and doing everything half assed. How about you RTFA and see for yourself.
I mean if this was a matter of a few months I'd understand, but this has been plaguing him for years and only recently did he begin to get some REAL help.
Slashdot Mirror
"You think the allies won because of "better guns"?
There was a lot more to it than that, man. Strategy, luck and countless thousands of men all played a part in winning WW2."
Rrrright. Good strategy and thousands of men without guns. That would work just great.
People like you are absolutely clueless. Maybe you could show me where I said we won with "better guns". Nice try setting up a straw man. Too bad it didn't work out for you. Idiot.
If I remember correctly, that paid off the last time Japan attacked us. We ended up overcoming our adversaries and helping out our European allies who were naive enough to think that after WW1, the world was a more modern, civilized place where warfare was a thing of the past.
The REAL goal is not to control computers with people's brains, it is to control people's brains with computers.
From personal experience, school was too boring to be able to sit there for that long. Increasing the time spent at school would only make the problem worse. We spent a lot of time sitting there and not much time learning.
I did have a few teachers who were more "hands on" and would do experiments in class, but those teachers never seemed to last- they were replaced by seemingly less intelligent teachers who only read from a book. Not surprisingly, I learned from the "hands on" teachers while I couldn't even keep my concentration when the teacher just read from books.
My point is that it's the quality of the education that's all wrong here, not the quantity. Keep kids interested in learning and they'll learn. Bore them to death and they'll look out the window.
Right wing fundamentalists, that is...
Good one.
Yes, we ALL noticed it. That's what this entire thread is about!
Mr. Madison, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no mod points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
You are correct when looking at it from the overall world view, but we're talking about decisions made by the US which affect the US. Right now we have the money and we're quickly giving it away with these huge trade deficits.
Yes, eliminating outsourcing would hurt the vast majority of people who benefit from outsourcing. Most of those people live in China/India. But it would help the minority of people- those who live in the US. The average US worker does NOT benefit from outsourcing. Sure, the TV he wants is now half the price. But he can't buy it because his job is about to go to India. And if he does still have a job, that TV isn't such a great deal anymore because of the pay cuts he took to compete with foreign labor. So now we're back to square one, with the exception that another country has skimmed off the money.
Whereas before all the money stayed within the US, now it is permanently leaving our hands. Whereas before goods cost more but your town was in better shape because people had good jobs, now goods are cheaper but your town has declined because people have lost their jobs or taken pay cuts (and at the same time a town in India has been modernized with your money.)
Outsourcing is a short term solution whose long term affect is mainly taking money from the American workers and distributing it between American execs and the population of third world countries. It has a sapping effect on America. Those who make the decisions (execs) do benefit greatly, but for every American exec there are thousands of American workers who are losing out.
The US has a very small population compared to China/India. They could take every one of our jobs and still have hundreds of millions of people left over to fight over those jobs.
And this isn't uniquely a problem the US has to deal with. European counties, with their small, relatively highly paid populations are subject to the same demise. Who wants to pay a German engineer $50,000 when you could pay a whole team of Indian engineers the same wage?
"We are undone, my dear sir, if legislation is still permitted which makes our money, much or little, real or imaginary, as the moneyed interests shall choose to make it." -- Thomas Jefferson"
I understand what you're saying about getting a reliable car. If you're just looking for a car to get you to work in the morning then a car such as that is a great choice. I had a Toyota Corolla as my daily driver and it did its job well. Putting an expensive badge on that car wouldn't have increased its value to me because that doesn't help its intended purpose.
That being said, Mercedes is a premium brand. Your average Mercedes customer isn't looking for basic, inexpensive transportation that gets them from point A to point B. Their customers are people with more money to burn, who are willing to pay the extra cash for a car with more amenities, who want to drive in style. You don't need heated leather seats to get to work, but some people want that and will pay extra for it.
Now that they own Chrysler, they'll sell those cheap cars under the Dodge name (or the Smart name).
But I do understand what the original poster was getting at. Don't sell off your prestige...what you're good at. Imagine Rolex selling their name to Timex. It kind of dilutes everything that made the name a Premium name in the first place.
You are correct that the IBM PC architecture came about by reverse engineering and cloning a proprietary architecture.
You are also correct that PowerPC started as a more open specification.
But in the end the market determines what really is "standard". Since IBM compatible PC's completely dominate the market with more than 90% market share, they have become the "standard".
Just like Microsoft OS's are the de facto standard of operating systems. Yes, if you look at details you'll see that Microsoft OSes are a completely propriety, closed architecture while Linux is an open architecture. But since the vast majority of people on Earth use MS OS's, they have become the standard by default since nearly everyone adopted them instead of any alternative.
A tumor's cells do die. They are constantly growing new cells just like the rest of our body. When we age, the tumor ages also. It's not in the shape we're accustomed to but it does age.
Look at someone with a mole, when they grow old the mole grows old also. It doesn't stay nice and young looking while the rest of their body looks old. The aging of cells stays proportional.
Take a look at the guy. You can tell he's a loon. He's not in touch with reality.
Just based on probability, any mutation that can happen will happen- people are born with 6 fingers, 1 leg, 1 eye, etc.
But I have *NEVER* heard of any living thing having a mutation that allowed it to not age. You'd think if it was possible you'd see numerous people throughout history that did not age, did not grow old and die, etc. Or at least someone would have a pet dog that lived forever.
But none of this has happened. Because it cannot happen.
With most of these systems, common sense tells you that they can (and will eventually) be abused, but they initially don't tell us of that capability because it would create a backlash.
So what they do is:
1.) Get the system installed first, and don't use it until people calm down
2.) Then begin seeing what "uses" you can find for it.
Things like automatic toll collecting systems (EZ pass), GPS transmitters in cars, etc. will be installed and not abused until they are more widely adopted, then once they are commonplace they can begin to abuse their power with the public having little recourse.
They're still going to fuck up and shoot their allies by mistake
George Bush has all that figured out. You see, on the current path he's guiding our country, in a few years we won't have any allies left.
Then we won't have to worry about that problem.
You're missing the factor of corruption, or legalized corruption anyway.
One of the biggest reasons for drug costs in the USA is because of the pharmaceutical industry's massive influence in the government. Big Business in general seems to control our government in the US. They'll make sure that laws are passed which help keep their selling prices high.
Take a look at the article about PA passing a law pushed by Verizon stopping WiFi. That's one of those situations were there's no good reason for it, but the company managed to get a law passed which will undoubtedly help their profits.
The pharm companies have a stranglehold of the FDA, do you really think they'd allow a cheap alternative to reach our shores? If there was one, you could bet that they'd find some kind of legal complaint of why it can't be sold here, and then reach an "agreement" with the FDA that it can be sold after a hefty levy has been placed on the product which would enable them to stay competitive.
With the drugs from Canada issue, you're buying the same product produced in the same factories, but for a much cheaper price... but you're not getting it through the "proper" channel which they've set up here in the US to milk the most money out of us as possible. Their market research shows that if we had to, we'd pay the higher price and there's no way they'll let us pay anything but that higher price.
Whatever you do, stay in school.
Do you want to be successful like John Smith? How about Robert Jimmyjoiner? Sam Francisco? Well you better stay in school. You'll go nowhere fast without a degree because that piece of paper validates you and determines your worth as a human being.
If you drop out you are destined to become a small time failure, keeping company with such delinquents as Paul Allen, Larry Ellison, John D. Rockefeller, Thomas Edison and some other guys you've never heard of.
Don't be Bill Gates- stay in school.
People are rushing to correct you and they can't even see that this is a joke.
Why can't we just get the stem cells from plants? Stems are abundant with them!
The article says that embryonic stem cells tend to form tumors. Therefore if you you tried to repair someone's severed limb with embryonic plant stems, there is a chance that the person wouldn't grow their limb back, but an oversized tree limb which would be offensive to pro-lifers and environmentalists alike.
Microdrives cannot store 60GB of data. You might be thinking of other kinds of drives, but not Microdrives.
The 60GB drive in the Ipod Photo that you are referring to is a 1.8" drive which is almost twice as large as the Microdrive, which is 1". The largest capacity of Microdrive is currently 4 GB.
An Ipod has the space to store more than enough mp3's. It usually takes people months (or even years, or never) to fill up its hard drive with mp3's.
The same amount of space for video on the other hand isn't enough. You can fill it up in a couple of hours, or even less if you set the resolution to the highest setting (to compete with MiniDV quality).
Imagine going on a vacation and having to keep buying new microdrives to shoot more video. On my vacation to Europe I filled up 4 miniDV tapes. It was easy to swap tapes on a ski lift. It wouldn't have been as easy, inexpensive, or had as good video quality if I was using this hard drive based camcorder.
PS- The Mpeg compression this uses is just like the MicroMV camcorders from Sony. People that have used them say they don't approach the video quality of MiniDV camcorders, they're closer to 8mm video quality.
While this is certainly something different, I think its limitations show the usefulness of tape. I don't think it's the future of camcorders.
This uses a 4 GB hard drive. A MiniDV tape holds about 25 GB. As such, this hard drive based camcorder needs to use lossy compression in order to give it a good recording time. While the picture quality won't be that bad, it's not going to be as good as raw video that MiniDV stores.
In addition, once this drive is filled up you're kind of out of luck unless you have a PC to upload the data to or you purchase additional microdrive cards, which are expensive. With the MiniDV camcorder you simply put a new tape in, and MiniDV tapes are cheap so most people usually carry around packs of spare tapes. For $10 I can get a couple of tapes. You're not going to get a 4 GB microdrive for $10, and certainly not a 25 GB microdrive.
So while this camcorder is viewed as something neat because it is different, it's not exactly revolutionary since it's of limited use. I think if hard drive based camcorders were the norm and someone came out with a new design that used cheap tapes which held 6x the data, such a design would be viewed as revolutionary.
The fact of the matter: if you're going 60mph and then suddenly de-accelerate to 0 in less than 12 feet, you are going to get hurt. Will you get hurt more in a SMART? No.
Why would both the smart car and an SUV decelerate in 12 feet? If they both had an equal distance to decelerate then yeah you'd have the same deceleration forces in each car.
But that's not quite reality.
In reality if you both went head-on into the same object, the crumple zones will pretty much dictate the stopping distance when you hit a solid object, and the Smart doesn't have a very big crumple zone.
I hate SUVs as much as the next guy but I won't ignore the physics of an impact.
If you were able to make a car that was indestructible, that didn't bent at all when you hit something, you'd die in most impacts because the amount of energy absorbed by the car would be none.
However, if you had a car that folded up like an accordian except for where you're sitting, the impact would be much less since the metal absorbed a lot of the energy from the impact.
That is the point of crumple zones. You have a cage around the passenger compartment which is not supposed to deform, and then you have the sheet metal around that cage to act as a shock absorber. The bumpers push in, the engine drops down, the hood bends, etc... the whole car in front of the passenger compartment is designed to deform.
In the case of the Smart car, regardless of how strong the cage is in a Smart car, it only has about a foot of metal in front of the passenger compartment to absorb the impact. If you hit a solid object you'd have a foot to decelerate. However, if you had a car with 4 feet of metal in front of the cage you'd have 4 times the distance to decelerate in a collision, and you'd experience only a fraction of the full impact you'd experience otherwise.
It's sick the way they do business. They'll inject anything they can get away with into the cattle if it helps their profit.
Also when mad cow cases were suspected here, they had already butchered and sold the suspected animals. I'd think they'd want to hold the animal until it could be tested, not get it on store shelves ASAP.
And the dumbest thing is when they get an infected animal, first they try to feed it to us, and when we see the dreadful results from that they decide to feed it to other livestock. Now that's been banned, too, so they feed it to chickens. Why can't they just play it safe and accept that the infected animal is a total loss? Better that than risking people's lives.
He's been hopping around from place to place, ignoring problems, and doing everything half assed. How about you RTFA and see for yourself. I mean if this was a matter of a few months I'd understand, but this has been plaguing him for years and only recently did he begin to get some REAL help.