FTA: "Every person who submits themselves to Microsoft indoctrination..."
Coming from Slashdot, of all places, that is some really rich irony, right there. Funnier, still, is the fact that most slashdotters are actually not smart enough to realize it.
A) Make all of their existing "customers" update preexisting pages, which were designed to be viewed in IE6 or IE7, update their pages even though they may or may not have the resources to do so.
B) Ask developers working on NEW pages to simply insert a single meta tag at the top of their page, since they're already there anyway?
B is a lot less work for a lot less people. Microsoft is an enormous company with enormous responsibilities. It's easy to get pissy at them for what appears, superficially, to be a snubbing of standards, but the things they do can affect literally billions of people.
As an aside, are any of the web developers out there (who actually are the only ones with any real cause for concern) prepared to say that you never have to include code that is directed at a specific browser to ensure that that browser renders your page the way you want it to? What is the difference?
It doesn't cost Ubuntu anything (in practical terms) to do that. It does cost Microsoft to do that. Microsoft pays people to work for them. Time absolutely is money.
First of all, if you had that more specific group of strict, literal creationists in mind, then I apologize... Slashdot has a long, established history of thoughtlessly bigoted reaction to anything that even hints at religious belief (specifically, it seems, Christianity, which I find odd). I'm not particularly religious myself, but that sort of ignorance drives me insane, so I apologize for reading too much into you comment.
It's worth nothing, though, that it doesn't require any more than a tiny but vocal minority to impose ridiculous rules with little popular support in institutions like public schools. I think you are dead wrong on the predominance of strict creationists in parts of the US, if you intend for the "ist" designation to imply activism and whatnot. In other words, I think that the overwhelming majority of Americans, even in the Bible belt, couldn't care less if evolution is taught in schools. I'm not saying that there isn't a large percentage who may quietly and personally believe creationist beliefs--which is absolutely fine and none of your business, I think--but almost universally they are not these cartoonish Nazi's that slashdotters like to make them out to be.
Again, you are making a straw man argument. The majority of people you would call "creationists", simply because they believe in a God that created the universe, believe in evolution, etc., as their God's method of creation. You're trying, again, to pigeonhole anyone who believes in a Biblical creation (or that of any other religion) into the small minority who believe that the Bible's account of creation was meant to be absolutely literal. I grew up in the "Bible belt", and my experience is that you are very misguided in that regard.
You should self-apply your own last sentence, I think, particularly the part about the "whole image".
Just because people who are smarter than I believe stupid things doesn't mean that those things aren't stupid. For example, James Watson (one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA) is clearly an intelligent man who's made significant contributions to science, and who still holds the idiotic belief that some races are naturally more intelligent than others owing purely to genetic reasons.
You don't believe that intelligence can have a genetic component? That sounds awfully faith-based to me.
If, on the other hand, you believe that genetics do play a role, you have absolutely no choice but to consider the possibility that his belief is, perhaps, not as "idiotic" as you think. It doesn't mean that any person of any given race is more or less intelligent than anyone else, but genetics absolutely could explain a predisposition to possess certain types of intelligence and lack others, just as genetics explain a predisposition to particular skin tones and physical features.. To deny such makes you as guilty of irrational, blind faith as those you are criticizing. It doesn't help your case when you accuse people of blinding themselves to reality only to proceed, immediately afterward, to summarily rejecting what would appear to be a possible genetic reality.
Again, you are dealing in black-and-white caricatures. Most people who believe in a biblical creation don't believe that dinosaur bones were put there "4000 years ago to confuse us". You are reducing a very large group of people to one grossly-oversimplified straw man (admittedly based on a real but tiny minority) that you can conveniently--and, perhaps, therapeutically--knock down.
That doesn't always work for a code base with millions of lines of atrociously written code. I've worked with code where it is absolutely not feasible to step through everything.
It seems like in those cases I end up working from effects... I note some program behavior and then try to find exactly what causes that behavior, which can be surprisingly difficult if you are dealing with the "right" kind of code. After a while, though, the patterns begin to emerge in the system as a whole.
The fact that you yourself are ostensibly unable to comprehend the idea of "faith", which underpins all religions, doesn't mean that anyone who holds religious beliefs is "uneducated" or "right on the bottom". In fact, I'm sure there are a lot of people who are much more intelligent than you are, who much more thoroughly understand evolutionary theory than you do, and who are much more generally enlightened and educated than you, but who still hold religious views which might properly be called "creationist" views.
There's a lot of this sort of bigotry--apparently rooted in insecurity--on Slashdot. In the end, though, you end up looking more like an ignorant, black-or-white thinker than the people who you intend to mock, but whose views to choose to caricature rather than actually understand. That's not to say that there aren't some hard-core "creationists" who are irrational, but they are certainly a minority amid a sea of people who are more-or-less intelligent than you but who believe in God, and you don't allow for that at all. That's why you sound like an idiot to me.
I suggest you all note that the only words quoted from the patent itself were "unique monitoring system" and "heart rate, galvanic skin response, EMG, brain signals, respiration rate, body temperature, movement facial movements, facial expressions and blood pressure"... I strongly suspect that there is a less-than-honest reason that the author saw fit selectively edit the excerpts in those particular places.
You can leap to your paranoid conclusions based on nearly nothing, but I am going to go with the more reasonable, intelligent, thoughtful assumption that it is actually software to allow hospitals to more cheaply monitor patients using a PC-based solution--until I hear otherwise, of course. (Though I do think it reflects VERY poorly on most of you that you so willingly swallow whatever line the media feeds you.)
...then you really need to chill. It isn't that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. Watch some football, drink a beer or 10, and quit stressing about who will win the HD format war. Competition is good.
What an obnoxiously simplistic analysis... I don't disagree that CDs are WAY overpriced, but a lot more goes into the cost of a CD than what is accounted for in the simple "I can buy CD's for $1, so the rest is profit" formulation. If you want to effectively criticize the industry, use rational, accurate criticisms.
Why cheat by exploiting flaws in voting machines when you can just bus in people from other states to vote for you (which you can do in NH, as long as they claim that they MIGHT move to NH)?
Where have you people been? Microsoft has been in the search/portal business for years and years and years. How did THAT headline ever get posted here?
Slashdot Mirror
FTA: "Every person who submits themselves to Microsoft indoctrination..."
Coming from Slashdot, of all places, that is some really rich irony, right there. Funnier, still, is the fact that most slashdotters are actually not smart enough to realize it.
So "trolling" is now to be considered a complete and perfect synonym for "negotiating an acquisition"?
Grow up people. It isn't 1997 anymore. It's not cute anymore. It doesn't make you sound smart anymore. Give up the irrational MS hatred.
... Slashdot is a self-parody at this point.
And they aren't really big or heavy.
I'm not confused. I just think it sounds silly, and smacks of the typical slashdot groupthink.
You sound like a bunch of Scientologists. Just say "Stallman".
Slashdotters, if anything, are consistent in their selective usage of the "fud" tag and in the groupthink that its usage reflects.
Absolutely, Second Reality set the "Holy Shit" bar for me back in the day, and nothing has surpassed it to this point.
.the .product demo in under 64k back in 2000.
The only thing that has come close was the fr-08:
A rail gun would be a very effective tool for destroying incoming ICBMs and whatnot.
You're Microsoft... Do you?
A) Make all of their existing "customers" update preexisting pages, which were designed to be viewed in IE6 or IE7, update their pages even though they may or may not have the resources to do so.
B) Ask developers working on NEW pages to simply insert a single meta tag at the top of their page, since they're already there anyway?
B is a lot less work for a lot less people. Microsoft is an enormous company with enormous responsibilities. It's easy to get pissy at them for what appears, superficially, to be a snubbing of standards, but the things they do can affect literally billions of people.
As an aside, are any of the web developers out there (who actually are the only ones with any real cause for concern) prepared to say that you never have to include code that is directed at a specific browser to ensure that that browser renders your page the way you want it to? What is the difference?
Watch were you point that thing*, dude. This is slashdot, someone might get hurt.
*And by "thing", I mean "logical, sensible statement".
It doesn't cost Ubuntu anything (in practical terms) to do that. It does cost Microsoft to do that. Microsoft pays people to work for them. Time absolutely is money.
First of all, if you had that more specific group of strict, literal creationists in mind, then I apologize... Slashdot has a long, established history of thoughtlessly bigoted reaction to anything that even hints at religious belief (specifically, it seems, Christianity, which I find odd). I'm not particularly religious myself, but that sort of ignorance drives me insane, so I apologize for reading too much into you comment.
It's worth nothing, though, that it doesn't require any more than a tiny but vocal minority to impose ridiculous rules with little popular support in institutions like public schools. I think you are dead wrong on the predominance of strict creationists in parts of the US, if you intend for the "ist" designation to imply activism and whatnot. In other words, I think that the overwhelming majority of Americans, even in the Bible belt, couldn't care less if evolution is taught in schools. I'm not saying that there isn't a large percentage who may quietly and personally believe creationist beliefs--which is absolutely fine and none of your business, I think--but almost universally they are not these cartoonish Nazi's that slashdotters like to make them out to be.
Again, you are making a straw man argument. The majority of people you would call "creationists", simply because they believe in a God that created the universe, believe in evolution, etc., as their God's method of creation. You're trying, again, to pigeonhole anyone who believes in a Biblical creation (or that of any other religion) into the small minority who believe that the Bible's account of creation was meant to be absolutely literal. I grew up in the "Bible belt", and my experience is that you are very misguided in that regard.
You should self-apply your own last sentence, I think, particularly the part about the "whole image".
If, on the other hand, you believe that genetics do play a role, you have absolutely no choice but to consider the possibility that his belief is, perhaps, not as "idiotic" as you think. It doesn't mean that any person of any given race is more or less intelligent than anyone else, but genetics absolutely could explain a predisposition to possess certain types of intelligence and lack others, just as genetics explain a predisposition to particular skin tones and physical features.. To deny such makes you as guilty of irrational, blind faith as those you are criticizing. It doesn't help your case when you accuse people of blinding themselves to reality only to proceed, immediately afterward, to summarily rejecting what would appear to be a possible genetic reality.
Again, you are dealing in black-and-white caricatures. Most people who believe in a biblical creation don't believe that dinosaur bones were put there "4000 years ago to confuse us". You are reducing a very large group of people to one grossly-oversimplified straw man (admittedly based on a real but tiny minority) that you can conveniently--and, perhaps, therapeutically--knock down.
And the "Fortunately, no" bit was irony gold.
That doesn't always work for a code base with millions of lines of atrociously written code. I've worked with code where it is absolutely not feasible to step through everything.
It seems like in those cases I end up working from effects... I note some program behavior and then try to find exactly what causes that behavior, which can be surprisingly difficult if you are dealing with the "right" kind of code. After a while, though, the patterns begin to emerge in the system as a whole.
The fact that you yourself are ostensibly unable to comprehend the idea of "faith", which underpins all religions, doesn't mean that anyone who holds religious beliefs is "uneducated" or "right on the bottom". In fact, I'm sure there are a lot of people who are much more intelligent than you are, who much more thoroughly understand evolutionary theory than you do, and who are much more generally enlightened and educated than you, but who still hold religious views which might properly be called "creationist" views.
There's a lot of this sort of bigotry--apparently rooted in insecurity--on Slashdot. In the end, though, you end up looking more like an ignorant, black-or-white thinker than the people who you intend to mock, but whose views to choose to caricature rather than actually understand. That's not to say that there aren't some hard-core "creationists" who are irrational, but they are certainly a minority amid a sea of people who are more-or-less intelligent than you but who believe in God, and you don't allow for that at all. That's why you sound like an idiot to me.
The application itself.
I think this is being blown out of proportion. There is nothing in it to indicate that they are planning on "spying on employees".
I suggest you all note that the only words quoted from the patent itself were "unique monitoring system" and "heart rate, galvanic skin response, EMG, brain signals, respiration rate, body temperature, movement facial movements, facial expressions and blood pressure"... I strongly suspect that there is a less-than-honest reason that the author saw fit selectively edit the excerpts in those particular places.
You can leap to your paranoid conclusions based on nearly nothing, but I am going to go with the more reasonable, intelligent, thoughtful assumption that it is actually software to allow hospitals to more cheaply monitor patients using a PC-based solution--until I hear otherwise, of course. (Though I do think it reflects VERY poorly on most of you that you so willingly swallow whatever line the media feeds you.)
...then you really need to chill. It isn't that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. Watch some football, drink a beer or 10, and quit stressing about who will win the HD format war. Competition is good.
What an obnoxiously simplistic analysis... I don't disagree that CDs are WAY overpriced, but a lot more goes into the cost of a CD than what is accounted for in the simple "I can buy CD's for $1, so the rest is profit" formulation. If you want to effectively criticize the industry, use rational, accurate criticisms.
Why cheat by exploiting flaws in voting machines when you can just bus in people from other states to vote for you (which you can do in NH, as long as they claim that they MIGHT move to NH)?
Where have you people been? Microsoft has been in the search/portal business for years and years and years. How did THAT headline ever get posted here?