Bzzt, no, it's not a "proper role" for Government to protect me from myself. If my insurance carrier wants to penalize me for a being a fatass then all the power to them. It's none of Washington's business.
I think what P was suggesting is that you can have absolute freedom to harm yourself, or socialized medicine. Choose one. Me, I'd choose the second, but by failing to choose you have effectively given up your right to criticize either.
And people think admitting that installing "Jaunty Jackalope" is embarrasing. Cupcake.
When I was running 8.04, I was always annoyed by the "Heron" name. The folks at Canonical missed the opportunity of the century: to name a software release after Norm Peterson's favorite restaurant on Cheers: The "Hungry Heifer."
I have never, ever, heard of someone suing over poor (or even malicious) technical advice. Why is law different on that? Serious question.
Hedley-Byrne, although it's a UK, not an American case. was taught to us in my (Canadian) "Law for Engineers" course. In 1964, a business sued a bank over a letter in which the bank seemed to have said that a company was solvent. Hedley-Byrne entered into a business arrangement with the firm, the firm went under owing lots of money. The judge ruled in favour of Hedley-Byrne, saying:
I consider that it follows and that it should now be regarded as settled that if someone possessed of a special skill undertakes, quite irrespective of contract, to apply that skill for the assistance of another person who relies upon such skill, a duty of care will arise. The fact that the service is to be given by means of or by the instrumentality of words can make no difference. Furthermore, if in a sphere in which a person is so placed that others could reasonably rely upon his judgment or his skill or upon his ability to make careful inquiry, a person takes it upon himself to give information or advice to, or allows his information or advice to be passed on to, another person who, as he knows or should know, will place reliance upon it, then a duty of care will arise.
"Duty of Care" has a very specific legal meaning, and you don't want to be accused of neglecting one. While UK decisions are not legal precedent in the USA, courts are usually open to being convinced by the same underlying logic.
No, you will just pull your child out of school, and send them to some fundamentalist indoctrination camp.
Straw Man. Parent didn't say anything about pulling kids out of school; I have had kids in private and public school and share many of his concerns, but I've never considered pulling them. I have known home-schooled kids who seemed to do alright, if their home schooling was supplemented by team sports or other peer interactions.
Public education is a good idea. Its the only method in history to achieve over 95% literacy. Vouchers are just a political gimmick aimed at those who like a level of control over their children's minds that borders on Orwellian.
What? Vouchers give more control to parents, at the expense of school teachers and administrators. No rational person would have an argument with that concept, IMO, and it's demonstrably not Orwelllian.
I had read tenure as 'seniority' in the traditional union-speak. I think that is the best way to read it, but like you I deplore the warrantless promotion of school teachers to people in a position where their right to free speech requires special protection. I also noticed when my kids' school called their teachers, their elementary school teachers, 'faculty'. Give me a break.
here in Soviet Canuckistan, my friend just got hired as a full time teacher, and he's set to earn $90,000 a year.
Wow. I grew up in Canada, and I can't believe a teacher can make that salary. I accept that most of them are better than the chalk-hurling, crossword-puzzle-finishing crowd I had, but that's still a lot. And I have a brother and several friends who teach. The hours, while not as easy as the 5 hours a day, 5 days a week, 2.5 months off that it looks like, are still very relaxed in comparison with the private sector. Since Canadian teachers' unions still seem to rule the roost, I imagine job security is also off the scale.
In the softwood lumber dispute the US not only flipped the bird at Canada, but refused to accept several judgments against them by the WTO and NAFTA.
I'd love to see that, the PM standing up in Question Period and going on the record as saying Canada will pass a new copyright law after an amount of time equal to the time America ignored numerous rulings by tribunals and courts on the softwood lumber issue. Followed, hopefully, "Take that, bitch!"
As an aside, I'm a Canadian, I've lived in Canada for 29 years and Indonesia for the last 17. As far as I know, it's not possible in Toronto to walk down to the mall and drop 75 cents on the latest Hollywood DVD. I can get an 11-DVD television series for less than 8 dollars here. It's very hard to actually buy software here, it's so widely pirated. Microsoft et al know this, and talk about enforcement, etc but they know that if people had to pay then Linux would have a much bigger share of the PC base, to their long-term detriment.
For the record, I am against anything that keeps the SMS system relevant in this day and age.
Well, you are against it. I don't think that will stop the billions of people who have and use SMS access but don't have internet access. Poor rural farmers in developing countries who use SMS to get price information for their crops, reducing the potential for middlemen to gouge them out of food money for their kids (this is not an exaggeration). Young folks shouldn't share their lives with their friends by SMS because YOU pay rip-off prices? Bully for you.
And, Mr. Rich Guy, most of the world also doesn't pay 15 cents to send or receive a message. Here in Indonesia I think it's less than 3 cents.
Yes, but (and I can't believe this needs mentioning), the USA invaded a foreign country, without the support of the UN, and as it turned out, with no real reason whatsoever. It's not a traffic accident, and pretending that it is only makes me think you are an idiot. Of course, if you can somehow come up with a logical reason why the war in Iraq should be compared to a traffic accident, I promise to listen. Forgive me if I don't hold my breath...
I've no mod points, and I wouldn't know where to drop them if I did, but I'd like to to say:
This has been by far the most hopeful discussion I've ever read on./, and I've read a lot. While I freely admit that my praise comes at least in part because I support the basic premise, and the ideals, of so many posters, I also think that I've seldom found such a group of intelligent and literate folks. I thank you for reaffirming my hope in mankind.
Actually, AutoCAD was the classic example of companies that "just don't get it" when it comes to the Mac.
AutoCAD for the Mac was released back in 1988, I believe. But what they did was port their DOS-based product to the Mac. It didn't work or look like a Mac product (no menubar, windows, or anything like that), it worked and looked just like the DOS product. The company said that they planned to release this version first and then make a "more Mac-like" one later on based upon how well this one sold.
Of course, nobody bought it. If you were already doing CAD work on the Mac using one of AutoCAD's competitors, you certainly weren't going to give it up. If you didn't have any Macs, why would you buy the Mac version when it didn't give you anything you couldn't do with the DOS version? Even better, AutoCAD announced their plan to create a "more Mac-like" version. So most Mac users said, "Cool. We'll wait for that one, thank you."
A few years later, AutoCAD for Mac was dropped because there "just wasn't a big enough market for CAD on the Mac." The reality, though, was that there wasn't a big enough market for DOS ports to the Mac. Mac users expected a Mac interface.
I was working in sales and technical support for a CAD/CAM vendor in when Autodesk released Autocad for the Mac, and we took it for a test drive, even signed up to be a Mac dealer.
While you're right that Autocad on the Mac wasn't "Mac enough," that wasn't the main problem -- speed was. Autocad on DOS came with a bunch of "close to the metal" drivers for graphics cards and other resources, and these were, by 1988, written mostly by the hardware manufacturers to a well-defined API. They couldn't do this on the Mac, and as a result the software took 2-4 times as long to do anything on the Mac. CAD systems, at least in those days, weren't used part-time, they were expensive tools for full-time designers (more likely draftspeople). So, the market for Autocad on the Mac ended up being people who would put up with terrible performance for interface compatibility with other applications they were seldom likely to use. Not a huge market.
My Eee also came with Xandros, and it didn't last long for me. Now that kubuntu is running, I couldn't be happier. (Well, okay, if the battery lasted longer, or if the keyboard was a better match for my finger size I'd be happier, but in general...) I'm running Jaunty Alpha 4 and it's very stable -- more stable than my desktop with kde 4.1.4, which still has too much weirdness under the hood. Damn thing just works, and with OOffice 3 now the default, it's even now *almost* painless to share files with windows users. I've taken it on short business trips, and two week personal trips, and it's been great for me, never left me wanting more aside from above physical limitations.
Lemme get this straight. Someone posts something as stupid, as ignorant, as unscientific and as unsupported as a one-sentence refuting the basic, generally accepted impact of ice melting, and this:
Yes, because we have lost the technology to build ports...
gets modded: (Score:5, Insightful)?
Where's the insight? He didn't parse a logical argument; he didn't even attempt to engage in reasonable discourse. He didn't address the many reasons already posted why building ports is a poor solution to the problem he waves away. I would think his post is flamebait at best, and he's Insightful?
I hope you lose your grasp of science, reason and consequences the same way the parent poster did.
Thanks for the anecdote. It illuminates why laissez-faire capitalism fails again and again: market capitalism works flawlessly in theory. This theory, however, rests on the assumption that all market participants are rational actors, and that these participants have access to all the information they need. This assumption does not hold in real life.
I'm not an economist, but I think what you're trying to say is that in theory "perfect" markets work flawlessly. A perfect market is based on the idea of many suppliers and buyers, so that no one firm or person, or small group, can set the price. The problem is that there are very few of these in reality, so regulations have been developed to prevent any buyer(s) or seller(s) getting too pushy and setting an "unfair" price.
I'm not disagreeing with the need for regulation in general, but I think getting the regulation right requires understanding why it is needed in the first place -- the oligopoly of current suppliers of service. Where I live in Indonesia, there are about eight suppliers (three big ones), different kinds of service (although the market is probably 90% prepaid), all phones are bought at one of the hundred thousand (guess) of phone stores, and prices are way low. There are no -- zero -- contracts or "plans". I think it costs a few cents a minute local talk, and 0.25 cents for a text message.
So while I disagree with your analysis to some extent, the two data points of USA and Indonesia do suggest that the perfect market does offer lower prices. How to regulate better competition in the USA is the question, and it seems the solution hasn't been introduced yet, on the basis of all the complaints I hear.
It goes further than that. Try Googling "how old is Britney Spears"
Interestingly, I tried using this to find William Shatner's age, and it didn't return the answer, but it works for Britney Spears. Maybe the RIAA are taking over the internet?
The difference here is that in the airline example, the same product is sold at different prices to maximize profit. MS is selling different products at different prices. To extend the analogy, a person is willing to pay $75 but wants non-alcoholic drinks, snacks, and use a pillow. The $25 person doesn't care for any of it. So do you differentiate your services on the plane that so that the $25 person sitting next to the $75 can't get drinks, snacks, and pillow even if they ask?
Yes. Exactly. That's how it should work (each gets what he wants to pay for) and that's how it does work. As an experiment, to keep the airline analogy going, next time you're on a long flight in coach, try asking for a business class meal instead, and see how far you get.
Having to give the OS away for free in order to sell the apps only makes sense if you don't already have a stranglehold on the OS market. Sure, MS has gotten some bad press lately but they still enjoy the overwhelming share of the OS market, and that isn't likely to change anytime soon.
That's mostly true, for developed countries, but that's not where the growth is gonna be over the next five years. Microsoft is already offering a panoply of cut-rate prices to governments and large companies in developing countries, to counter FOSS alternatives. As linux develops, and the recession continues to bite, they may very well find that they can't sell Windows at a price high enough to make it worthwhile. End-user support disappeared years ago, so all you're buying when you buy windows is the software (not even a CD anymore!).
While obviously the jury's still out, there may very well be a quantum change in the market, where linux hits, say, 20-30% (where it is for netbooks), and is suddenly a viable alternative. Having read the article, I think the author is spot on. I'm not betting the farm on timing, however.
I'm feeling terribly left out of all of this. I've got tons of albums, most of which are electronic copies of stuff I've bought, in many cases more than once. I bought my SO an iPod Touch for Christmas, and was gutted to learn that it doesn't work with Linux, which is all I run at home. Amarok will sync my older iPod just fine, but Apple apparently encrypts all the contents of the iPod Touch library as some kind of DRM thing. So, anybody wanna buy a $350 iPod Touch?
Isn't that still too big to get through a capillary? Eventually they'll still get stuck somewhere, I'd imagine, and then you get a little tiny blood clot in a capillary. Maybe that's not a problem in the brain, I don't know. I still don't think you'd want millions of them blocking random capillaries and killing random nerve cells.
There's two schools of thought when it comes to management:
1. Managers should have experience in the field so they can make informed decisions based on their background knowledge.
2. Managers should know how to manage and can rely on advisers to provide the technical information upon which they base their decisions
And the thing is, neither school of thought is inherently right or wrong.
It is totally dependent on the position to be filled and many can go either way.
Management consultant here, e focused on HR management....
If by right or wrong, you mean what works, then one school is right. Managers, at least at a moderately senior level, should be selected on their ability to manage. Subject matter experience, for almost all positions, should not ba prerequisite at senior levels. If you're smart enough to get there, you're smart enough to learn what you need.
Slashdot Mirror
I think what P was suggesting is that you can have absolute freedom to harm yourself, or socialized medicine. Choose one. Me, I'd choose the second, but by failing to choose you have effectively given up your right to criticize either.
When I was running 8.04, I was always annoyed by the "Heron" name. The folks at Canonical missed the opportunity of the century: to name a software release after Norm Peterson's favorite restaurant on Cheers: The "Hungry Heifer."
Hedley-Byrne, although it's a UK, not an American case. was taught to us in my (Canadian) "Law for Engineers" course. In 1964, a business sued a bank over a letter in which the bank seemed to have said that a company was solvent. Hedley-Byrne entered into a business arrangement with the firm, the firm went under owing lots of money. The judge ruled in favour of Hedley-Byrne, saying:
"Duty of Care" has a very specific legal meaning, and you don't want to be accused of neglecting one. While UK decisions are not legal precedent in the USA, courts are usually open to being convinced by the same underlying logic.
Straw Man. Parent didn't say anything about pulling kids out of school; I have had kids in private and public school and share many of his concerns, but I've never considered pulling them. I have known home-schooled kids who seemed to do alright, if their home schooling was supplemented by team sports or other peer interactions.
What? Vouchers give more control to parents, at the expense of school teachers and administrators. No rational person would have an argument with that concept, IMO, and it's demonstrably not Orwelllian.
I had read tenure as 'seniority' in the traditional union-speak. I think that is the best way to read it, but like you I deplore the warrantless promotion of school teachers to people in a position where their right to free speech requires special protection. I also noticed when my kids' school called their teachers, their elementary school teachers, 'faculty'. Give me a break.
Wow. I grew up in Canada, and I can't believe a teacher can make that salary. I accept that most of them are better than the chalk-hurling, crossword-puzzle-finishing crowd I had, but that's still a lot. And I have a brother and several friends who teach. The hours, while not as easy as the 5 hours a day, 5 days a week, 2.5 months off that it looks like, are still very relaxed in comparison with the private sector. Since Canadian teachers' unions still seem to rule the roost, I imagine job security is also off the scale.
Sounds like a sweetheart deal to me.
It's nice to see someone who criticizes grammar understands grammar.
I'd love to see that, the PM standing up in Question Period and going on the record as saying Canada will pass a new copyright law after an amount of time equal to the time America ignored numerous rulings by tribunals and courts on the softwood lumber issue. Followed, hopefully, "Take that, bitch!"
As an aside, I'm a Canadian, I've lived in Canada for 29 years and Indonesia for the last 17. As far as I know, it's not possible in Toronto to walk down to the mall and drop 75 cents on the latest Hollywood DVD. I can get an 11-DVD television series for less than 8 dollars here. It's very hard to actually buy software here, it's so widely pirated. Microsoft et al know this, and talk about enforcement, etc but they know that if people had to pay then Linux would have a much bigger share of the PC base, to their long-term detriment.
Well, you are against it. I don't think that will stop the billions of people who have and use SMS access but don't have internet access. Poor rural farmers in developing countries who use SMS to get price information for their crops, reducing the potential for middlemen to gouge them out of food money for their kids (this is not an exaggeration). Young folks shouldn't share their lives with their friends by SMS because YOU pay rip-off prices? Bully for you. And, Mr. Rich Guy, most of the world also doesn't pay 15 cents to send or receive a message. Here in Indonesia I think it's less than 3 cents.
In fact, STFU.
Yes, but (and I can't believe this needs mentioning), the USA invaded a foreign country, without the support of the UN, and as it turned out, with no real reason whatsoever. It's not a traffic accident, and pretending that it is only makes me think you are an idiot. Of course, if you can somehow come up with a logical reason why the war in Iraq should be compared to a traffic accident, I promise to listen. Forgive me if I don't hold my breath...
This has been by far the most hopeful discussion I've ever read on ./, and I've read a lot. While I freely admit that my praise comes at least in part because I support the basic premise, and the ideals, of so many posters, I also think that I've seldom found such a group of intelligent and literate folks. I thank you for reaffirming my hope in mankind.
Works for me.
I was working in sales and technical support for a CAD/CAM vendor in when Autodesk released Autocad for the Mac, and we took it for a test drive, even signed up to be a Mac dealer.
While you're right that Autocad on the Mac wasn't "Mac enough," that wasn't the main problem -- speed was. Autocad on DOS came with a bunch of "close to the metal" drivers for graphics cards and other resources, and these were, by 1988, written mostly by the hardware manufacturers to a well-defined API. They couldn't do this on the Mac, and as a result the software took 2-4 times as long to do anything on the Mac. CAD systems, at least in those days, weren't used part-time, they were expensive tools for full-time designers (more likely draftspeople). So, the market for Autocad on the Mac ended up being people who would put up with terrible performance for interface compatibility with other applications they were seldom likely to use. Not a huge market.
My Eee also came with Xandros, and it didn't last long for me. Now that kubuntu is running, I couldn't be happier. (Well, okay, if the battery lasted longer, or if the keyboard was a better match for my finger size I'd be happier, but in general...) I'm running Jaunty Alpha 4 and it's very stable -- more stable than my desktop with kde 4.1.4, which still has too much weirdness under the hood. Damn thing just works, and with OOffice 3 now the default, it's even now *almost* painless to share files with windows users. I've taken it on short business trips, and two week personal trips, and it's been great for me, never left me wanting more aside from above physical limitations.
gets modded: (Score:5, Insightful)?
Where's the insight? He didn't parse a logical argument; he didn't even attempt to engage in reasonable discourse. He didn't address the many reasons already posted why building ports is a poor solution to the problem he waves away. I would think his post is flamebait at best, and he's Insightful ?
I hope you lose your grasp of science, reason and consequences the same way the parent poster did.
Wow! April is winter in Antartica? And you got modded informative???
Slashdot moderators seem particularly, well, stupid on this topic today...
P.S. You're right about your ice receding, but that's not because it's getting colder
Wow, that's pretty cool really. If I guess the URL I can see images that don't even exist?
I'm not an economist, but I think what you're trying to say is that in theory "perfect" markets work flawlessly. A perfect market is based on the idea of many suppliers and buyers, so that no one firm or person, or small group, can set the price. The problem is that there are very few of these in reality, so regulations have been developed to prevent any buyer(s) or seller(s) getting too pushy and setting an "unfair" price.
I'm not disagreeing with the need for regulation in general, but I think getting the regulation right requires understanding why it is needed in the first place -- the oligopoly of current suppliers of service. Where I live in Indonesia, there are about eight suppliers (three big ones), different kinds of service (although the market is probably 90% prepaid), all phones are bought at one of the hundred thousand (guess) of phone stores, and prices are way low. There are no -- zero -- contracts or "plans". I think it costs a few cents a minute local talk, and 0.25 cents for a text message.
So while I disagree with your analysis to some extent, the two data points of USA and Indonesia do suggest that the perfect market does offer lower prices. How to regulate better competition in the USA is the question, and it seems the solution hasn't been introduced yet, on the basis of all the complaints I hear.
Interestingly, I tried using this to find William Shatner's age, and it didn't return the answer, but it works for Britney Spears. Maybe the RIAA are taking over the internet?
Yes. Exactly. That's how it should work (each gets what he wants to pay for) and that's how it does work. As an experiment, to keep the airline analogy going, next time you're on a long flight in coach, try asking for a business class meal instead, and see how far you get.
That's mostly true, for developed countries, but that's not where the growth is gonna be over the next five years. Microsoft is already offering a panoply of cut-rate prices to governments and large companies in developing countries, to counter FOSS alternatives. As linux develops, and the recession continues to bite, they may very well find that they can't sell Windows at a price high enough to make it worthwhile. End-user support disappeared years ago, so all you're buying when you buy windows is the software (not even a CD anymore!).
While obviously the jury's still out, there may very well be a quantum change in the market, where linux hits, say, 20-30% (where it is for netbooks), and is suddenly a viable alternative. Having read the article, I think the author is spot on. I'm not betting the farm on timing, however.
I'm feeling terribly left out of all of this. I've got tons of albums, most of which are electronic copies of stuff I've bought, in many cases more than once. I bought my SO an iPod Touch for Christmas, and was gutted to learn that it doesn't work with Linux, which is all I run at home. Amarok will sync my older iPod just fine, but Apple apparently encrypts all the contents of the iPod Touch library as some kind of DRM thing. So, anybody wanna buy a $350 iPod Touch?
Well, I got one with useful pointers, also in the 5th position:
Anal sex instructions
Spanish ass. Ass and tits. And an probable run for one's life but I dead until how you doubtful point of no return crazy take hold of does. ...
http://www.google.com/notebook/public/04165599404137770374/BDR-CSgoQh4CE0scj
Isn't that still too big to get through a capillary? Eventually they'll still get stuck somewhere, I'd imagine, and then you get a little tiny blood clot in a capillary. Maybe that's not a problem in the brain, I don't know. I still don't think you'd want millions of them blocking random capillaries and killing random nerve cells.
Management consultant here, e focused on HR management....
If by right or wrong, you mean what works, then one school is right. Managers, at least at a moderately senior level, should be selected on their ability to manage. Subject matter experience, for almost all positions, should not ba prerequisite at senior levels. If you're smart enough to get there, you're smart enough to learn what you need.