Is it really worth pouring more money into this idiotville if every bit of scientific progress they make is practically public knowledge soon after? Just shut the stupid place down!
Some would argue that the purpose of scientific progress is the advancement of the human race. Not just advancement of those members of the human race who happen to live within the borders of the U.S. of A.
Sometimes, staggering backwards is the wrong choice.
For example, you're standing on the sidewalk with your back to traffic. Someone bumps into you. You will do everything in your power *not* to stagger backwards in this situation -- you might reach out to grab something solid, like a signpost, a trash can, or the hand of someone with a body mass comparable or greater than your own. But you wouldn't reach for the hand of a child -- you'd just end up pulling them into the street with you.
You've got a split second to make this choice, as well. Make it wrong, and you may die, or even take someone else with you.
AMD would be fine if they had an expensive chip they could sell at a premium, or a very cheap to produce chip they could sell for the budget crowd, but right now they have Acura production costs coupled with Kia per-unit revenues: bad times.
AMD actually still rules the absolute low end of the market (and has for years). Semprons ($30+) and old X2s ($60+, new retail box) are dirt cheap, and it's simply not possible to get better performance per dollar.
There isn't much a $60 X2 can't do in your average desktop.
What the fuck is an "isvestor"? We're supposed to believe this Klausner guy is a brilliant inventor, even though he's not aware there are two Ns in "inventor"?
Not everyone is willing to dedicate themselves to multi-year plans, or spend a not-insignificant number of dollars on a handset so they can pay (exhorbitantly) as they go.
I just signed up for AT&T's pay-as-you-go plan. I had to pay $10 for the phone. That was it. The minutes you buy expire after a month or so usually, but if you drop $100 on minutes (at either $0.25/min or $1/day + $0.10/min), they don't expire for a year.
On my last plan, I was paying Sprint $50/month, and using less than 50 minutes a month -- effectively paying upwards of $1/minute. I stand to save a lot of money by switching to AT&T's pay-as-you-go plan -- probably something on the order of $400 a year. I figure, if I ever really need to spend a few hours on the phone for something, I'll use Skype, or my wife's phone.
I'm not sure comcast is *that* sad to see you go. Their entire business model is based on overselling their bandwidth. Their favorite customers are those that pay $50/mo for internet access, and then only check their email.
People like you and I, who actually use most of the bandwidth advertised, make Comcast little, if any profit. If all the heavy bittorrent users followed your example, comcast may well be able to cut their costs enough (with all the bandwidth savings, etc.) that they could stay just as profitable, if not more so.
Think about it. They're already *cutting off* subscriptions of the heaviest users -- they're obviously not concerned about losing that business.
In Canada, you might have a case for wrongful dismissal.
IANAL, but my understanding is: in the US, if you don't have a contract (and it's a pretty safe bet that Best Buy employees don't), then you're employed "At Will", and may be terminated for (almost) any reason at any time -- although it varies by a small. It's very, very hard to successfully sue for wrongful termination of at-will employment, short of cases of gross discrimination -- blatant, documented racism, sexism, or something along those lines.
But thinking about it, a robot looking for better data might be a good idea, but a computer? That might worrry me.
I don't know. I'd hate to see, say, an automobile assembly line robot accidentally skewer someone as part of its learning process. The most common application of robotics in the real world is for extremely dangerous industrial work, where learning by way of mistakes could very well be fatal.
Given that the coffee lawsuit was totally justified (McD's had been cited by inspectors many times) for setting their coffee machines too hot...
Starbucks, and many other coffee shops sell their coffee at the same temperatures to this day. My wife, who worked for 3 different coffee shops in college verified this personally.
--- by law, there's a max temp
Really? The only applicable law I've heard of sets a minimum brew temperature. If there's a law setting maximum serving temperature of coffee at the time the coffee is served, I'd love a reference.
Coffee has been served at these temperatures, industry wide, for decades, and continues to be served this hot to this day. At starbucks, customers actually request temperatures of up to 160 degrees F for their steamed milk drinks (lates, etc.) (that upper bound is based *solely* on the fact that the milk will burn and taste terrible if it gets any hotter), and drip coffee is brewed at 200+ degrees F (which is the ISO standard for brewing machines).
Yes, the woman required reconstructive surgery. She was also an idiot who wasn't appropriate careful with her coffee, and then preceded to sit in the scalding liquid for over a minute and a a half. Anyone with two braincells to rub together should have jumped out of their seat instantly.
If the McDonald's coffee case had any real merit, it would have had coffee-service-industry-wide effects. Short of a "Caution: hot liquid" disclaimer on hot beverage cups, it simply hasn't. While there have been similar suits brought against every major coffee retailer, they've largely failed.
See for yourself -- tell your Starbucks Barista you want your late at 160 Fahrenheit. They'll scribble a note on your cup without hesitation. Order a cup of their drip coffee and stick a thermometer in it. You'll find it's no cooler than the coffee in the McDonald's case.
Same strategy worked for me, back in February. Checked the ad Sunday morning, and strolled in 90 minutes after opening. They had 50+ units left, and there were maybe 10 people in line. I was out of there in under half an hour.
They've been easy to find all year, if you shop smart. Granted, units might be a bit harder to come by this month, as demand spikes again...
It doesn't help those who are fast learners to sail through anything, yet the American educational system ignores the so-called "gifted", or just piles on more homework instead of making things challenging.
That reminds me of something my middle school math classes did. They called it the "Problem of the week". They basically threw a highschool-level math problem at us, put it in a cute story form involving "bobo the clown", and gave us a week to solve it. We basically had to write a report on how we broke the problem down and solved it.
I loved it. At age 12, I started writing hypercard (an old mac app on par with visual basic) "stacks" to help solve problems, or demonstrate them.
Looking back, I think the "Problem of the week" was really a big part of teaching me to love challenges, especially ones I wasn't yet totally equipped to confront -- that, and my father encouraging me to learn how to answer my own questions. The love of intellectual challenge is still a primary driving factor in my life.
Since I'm now the only person working on this code, there's no practical way to report the situation confidentially. I'm new to the company, and the developer who copied the code is the project lead. Reporting him to management doesn't seem like a good career move. I could rewrite the copied code without reporting him, but since the product is very close to release it would be difficult to make a significant change without providing some justification
Hopefully you're working for a decent guy, and you can just say "Hey, dude, I was researching this bug, and in the process, found this code on this forum. You think we should be worried about copyright issues?"
He may, like several slashdotters in this thread, be completely unaware of the fact that code is automatically copyrighted in the US. He may have been aware, but just lazy, and say "Yeah, we should do something about that". He may say "Who cares? No one will ever find out!". In that case, *then* you may consider going over his head and raising the issue with his superiors.
If he's a decent guy at all, he'll appreciate your coming to him politely with your concerns. But even if he's the type of vindictive halfwit likely to take offense at your discovery, he'd probably be hard pressed to come up with an excuse for taking action against you. And really, if you're working for someone like that, you should strongly consider looking for a new position elsewhere.
Ideally, the law should be easily understood; written in the vernacular. We shouldn't need lawyers to translate it for us.
The vernacular is ambiguous. Ambiguity in laws is a bad thing. If you try to write unambiguously in English, you end up with legalese. Additionally, legal jargon is efficient -- a single word in legal jargon communicates an idea that would take many words to describe unambiguously in the vernacular.
Legalese is almost like a programming language -- it must be precise, and ideally, efficient. And lord knows you'd be laughed off of slashdot if you suggested that "programming languages should be easily understood; written in the vernacular. We shouldn't need programmers to translate it for us."
And why should we be suprised by this?. The last time I took my car in for repair, I paid sales tax on part and labor. When I have my car parked Valet, taxes are factored into the the cost. And when UPS delivers a package for me, I pay tax on that too.
Because nuclear plants emit no greenhouse gases, France has the cleanest air in the industrialized world, and because the price of oil is now around $60 a barrel, it has the lowest electric bills in Europe. In fact, France has so much cheap electricity, it exports it to its European neighbors. French nuclear plants supply power to parts of Germany, Italy and help light the city of London.
...So, the UK is importing nuclear power from France. I think that's a pretty clear indicator that nuclear power is currently fairly competitively priced.
Trying to run the thing at a profit, even a hugely government subsidized profit, leads to cutting corners
That's already an issue in... just about every industry. The solution we use in the US is regulation overseen by bodies like the EPA and OSHA.
In fact, there's already a governmental body set up to regulate nuclear power generation: The NRC.
Yes, for-profit businesses try to cut corners. As such, cutting corners has been made illegal (and is heavily monitored) in cases where it causes undue risk to public/employee/environmental safety.
This is really a case of "you get what you pay for".
My last job was with a company that developed a custom point of sale application (including register/order management/inventory management and more) for a retailer with about 20 locations. They wanted it built/maintained/supported by a single full time developer on staff for $30k/year. When you're paying that much below the median wage -- and only hiring a single developer -- for an application that complex, you can expect "15 minute" bugs throughout the system, and minimal testing. They accepted this -- as the saying goes, "Cheap, fast, and good: choose two". They chose "Cheap and fast".
Suffice it to say, the application was riddled with bugs, and they never kept a developer around for long -- the talented ones got hired away at much better wages (e.g. yours truly), and the others turned out to be terrible programmers (most people who are willing to work for that little are extremely inexperienced and untalented).
I guess I'm going to have to start trolling target, walmart and such on a regular basis.
Fortunately, these guys all publicly announce when they'll be receiving shipments via their ads. Check the new weekly ad online at target.com, etc., before open time on Sunday. If the new ad advertises the Wii, it means they're putting a new shipment on the floor that morning. Get in the habit of checking target.com, bestbuy.com, and circuitcity.com every sunday morning.
I managed to score a Wii (in the San Francisco bay area) 9 months ago using this strategy. I just strolled in 90 minutes after opening time; there were a half dozen people in line, and still a stack of nearly a hundred consoles behind the register.
So yeah, you do have to put a little thought into it -- you can't just expect to walk in at 6 PM on a Tuesday and find units in stock -- but it if you know what you're doing, it's really not hard to get your hands on one.
Keyboard and mouse interfaces have lasted for so long because they are VERY VERY good....a mouse is a perfect way of interacting with your monitor
The fuck they are! Keyboards and mice are relatively dreadful, quite frankly. Have you ever tried to draw with a mouse? It's like painting with a shoe. They're also extremely difficult to use for millions of people with various motor-related disabilities. And what's worse using them improperly (which most people do) *causes* disabilities -- carpal tunnel syndrome being the most well known.
They've lasted this long because they're good enough, not because they're great. They're simple, cheap, relatively sturdy, and widely supported.
Keyboards are so difficult to use effectively, almost every school in the country teaches a class (which lasts months) on "keyboarding". It's far from an intuitive interface.
I played EVE under WINE on my macbook. The framerate was terrible. Unplayably so. On the other hand, if I booted into windows via bootcamp, the framrate was great (in excess of 20 FPS).
Having a native executable is always going to be superior to playing via WINE for any 3D game.
So, especially for someone who's used WINE to play, the availability of a native binary is exciting news.
So if that's the beginning and end of corporate responsibility, then clearly IBM was quite right to help the Nazis exterminate Jews, Gypsies and other undesirables
When did congress call IBM out on that one? Where was the public outcry? Obviously, the resulting boycotts (if any) failed.
If anything, the IBM situation just goes to show that historically, Americans *don't* care about corporations' cooperation with oppressive governments. If they do, they certainly haven't shown it.
Slashdot Mirror
Some would argue that the purpose of scientific progress is the advancement of the human race. Not just advancement of those members of the human race who happen to live within the borders of the U.S. of A.
Sometimes, staggering backwards is the wrong choice.
For example, you're standing on the sidewalk with your back to traffic. Someone bumps into you. You will do everything in your power *not* to stagger backwards in this situation -- you might reach out to grab something solid, like a signpost, a trash can, or the hand of someone with a body mass comparable or greater than your own. But you wouldn't reach for the hand of a child -- you'd just end up pulling them into the street with you.
You've got a split second to make this choice, as well. Make it wrong, and you may die, or even take someone else with you.
AMD actually still rules the absolute low end of the market (and has for years). Semprons ($30+) and old X2s ($60+, new retail box) are dirt cheap, and it's simply not possible to get better performance per dollar.
There isn't much a $60 X2 can't do in your average desktop.
What the fuck is an "isvestor"?
We're supposed to believe this Klausner guy is a brilliant inventor, even though he's not aware there are two Ns in "inventor"?
I just signed up for AT&T's pay-as-you-go plan. I had to pay $10 for the phone. That was it.
The minutes you buy expire after a month or so usually, but if you drop $100 on minutes (at either $0.25/min or $1/day + $0.10/min), they don't expire for a year.
On my last plan, I was paying Sprint $50/month, and using less than 50 minutes a month -- effectively paying upwards of $1/minute. I stand to save a lot of money by switching to AT&T's pay-as-you-go plan -- probably something on the order of $400 a year. I figure, if I ever really need to spend a few hours on the phone for something, I'll use Skype, or my wife's phone.
If you don't talk much, pay-as-you-go is a steal.
I'm not sure comcast is *that* sad to see you go. Their entire business model is based on overselling their bandwidth. Their favorite customers are those that pay $50/mo for internet access, and then only check their email.
People like you and I, who actually use most of the bandwidth advertised, make Comcast little, if any profit. If all the heavy bittorrent users followed your example, comcast may well be able to cut their costs enough (with all the bandwidth savings, etc.) that they could stay just as profitable, if not more so.
Think about it. They're already *cutting off* subscriptions of the heaviest users -- they're obviously not concerned about losing that business.
HAH!
Somebody mod this guy up
IANAL, but my understanding is: in the US, if you don't have a contract (and it's a pretty safe bet that Best Buy employees don't), then you're employed "At Will", and may be terminated for (almost) any reason at any time -- although it varies by a small. It's very, very hard to successfully sue for wrongful termination of at-will employment, short of cases of gross discrimination -- blatant, documented racism, sexism, or something along those lines.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment
I don't know. I'd hate to see, say, an automobile assembly line robot accidentally skewer someone as part of its learning process. The most common application of robotics in the real world is for extremely dangerous industrial work, where learning by way of mistakes could very well be fatal.
Wow, that was a bad one. At first I took it for a typo, and later googled several variations of "opun" and "opuning" before I got it.
Starbucks, and many other coffee shops sell their coffee at the same temperatures to this day. My wife, who worked for 3 different coffee shops in college verified this personally.
Really? The only applicable law I've heard of sets a minimum brew temperature. If there's a law setting maximum serving temperature of coffee at the time the coffee is served, I'd love a reference.
Coffee has been served at these temperatures, industry wide, for decades, and continues to be served this hot to this day. At starbucks, customers actually request temperatures of up to 160 degrees F for their steamed milk drinks (lates, etc.) (that upper bound is based *solely* on the fact that the milk will burn and taste terrible if it gets any hotter), and drip coffee is brewed at 200+ degrees F (which is the ISO standard for brewing machines).
Yes, the woman required reconstructive surgery. She was also an idiot who wasn't appropriate careful with her coffee, and then preceded to sit in the scalding liquid for over a minute and a a half . Anyone with two braincells to rub together should have jumped out of their seat instantly.
If the McDonald's coffee case had any real merit, it would have had coffee-service-industry-wide effects. Short of a "Caution: hot liquid" disclaimer on hot beverage cups, it simply hasn't. While there have been similar suits brought against every major coffee retailer, they've largely failed.
See for yourself -- tell your Starbucks Barista you want your late at 160 Fahrenheit. They'll scribble a note on your cup without hesitation. Order a cup of their drip coffee and stick a thermometer in it. You'll find it's no cooler than the coffee in the McDonald's case.
Same strategy worked for me, back in February. Checked the ad Sunday morning, and strolled in 90 minutes after opening. They had 50+ units left, and there were maybe 10 people in line. I was out of there in under half an hour.
They've been easy to find all year, if you shop smart. Granted, units might be a bit harder to come by this month, as demand spikes again...
That reminds me of something my middle school math classes did. They called it the "Problem of the week". They basically threw a highschool-level math problem at us, put it in a cute story form involving "bobo the clown", and gave us a week to solve it. We basically had to write a report on how we broke the problem down and solved it.
I loved it. At age 12, I started writing hypercard (an old mac app on par with visual basic) "stacks" to help solve problems, or demonstrate them.
Looking back, I think the "Problem of the week" was really a big part of teaching me to love challenges, especially ones I wasn't yet totally equipped to confront -- that, and my father encouraging me to learn how to answer my own questions. The love of intellectual challenge is still a primary driving factor in my life.
Hopefully you're working for a decent guy, and you can just say "Hey, dude, I was researching this bug, and in the process, found this code on this forum. You think we should be worried about copyright issues?"
He may, like several slashdotters in this thread, be completely unaware of the fact that code is automatically copyrighted in the US.
He may have been aware, but just lazy, and say "Yeah, we should do something about that".
He may say "Who cares? No one will ever find out!". In that case, *then* you may consider going over his head and raising the issue with his superiors.
If he's a decent guy at all, he'll appreciate your coming to him politely with your concerns. But even if he's the type of vindictive halfwit likely to take offense at your discovery, he'd probably be hard pressed to come up with an excuse for taking action against you. And really, if you're working for someone like that, you should strongly consider looking for a new position elsewhere.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open_source_games
The vernacular is ambiguous. Ambiguity in laws is a bad thing. If you try to write unambiguously in English, you end up with legalese. Additionally, legal jargon is efficient -- a single word in legal jargon communicates an idea that would take many words to describe unambiguously in the vernacular.
Legalese is almost like a programming language -- it must be precise, and ideally, efficient. And lord knows you'd be laughed off of slashdot if you suggested that "programming languages should be easily understood; written in the vernacular. We shouldn't need programmers to translate it for us."
In California, repair and installation labor is non-taxable.
Point being, some labor is untaxed in some parts of the country, so this development may come as a surprise to some of us.
According to CBS/60 minutes:
That's already an issue in... just about every industry. The solution we use in the US is regulation overseen by bodies like the EPA and OSHA.
In fact, there's already a governmental body set up to regulate nuclear power generation: The NRC.
Yes, for-profit businesses try to cut corners. As such, cutting corners has been made illegal (and is heavily monitored) in cases where it causes undue risk to public/employee/environmental safety.
This is really a case of "you get what you pay for".
My last job was with a company that developed a custom point of sale application (including register/order management/inventory management and more) for a retailer with about 20 locations. They wanted it built/maintained/supported by a single full time developer on staff for $30k/year. When you're paying that much below the median wage -- and only hiring a single developer -- for an application that complex, you can expect "15 minute" bugs throughout the system, and minimal testing. They accepted this -- as the saying goes, "Cheap, fast, and good: choose two". They chose "Cheap and fast".
Suffice it to say, the application was riddled with bugs, and they never kept a developer around for long -- the talented ones got hired away at much better wages (e.g. yours truly), and the others turned out to be terrible programmers (most people who are willing to work for that little are extremely inexperienced and untalented).
Fortunately, these guys all publicly announce when they'll be receiving shipments via their ads. Check the new weekly ad online at target.com, etc., before open time on Sunday. If the new ad advertises the Wii, it means they're putting a new shipment on the floor that morning. Get in the habit of checking target.com, bestbuy.com, and circuitcity.com every sunday morning.
I managed to score a Wii (in the San Francisco bay area) 9 months ago using this strategy. I just strolled in 90 minutes after opening time; there were a half dozen people in line, and still a stack of nearly a hundred consoles behind the register.
So yeah, you do have to put a little thought into it -- you can't just expect to walk in at 6 PM on a Tuesday and find units in stock -- but it if you know what you're doing, it's really not hard to get your hands on one.
The fuck they are! Keyboards and mice are relatively dreadful, quite frankly. Have you ever tried to draw with a mouse? It's like painting with a shoe. They're also extremely difficult to use for millions of people with various motor-related disabilities. And what's worse using them improperly (which most people do) *causes* disabilities -- carpal tunnel syndrome being the most well known.
They've lasted this long because they're good enough, not because they're great. They're simple, cheap, relatively sturdy, and widely supported.
Keyboards are so difficult to use effectively, almost every school in the country teaches a class (which lasts months) on "keyboarding". It's far from an intuitive interface.
Oh, there's a statute of limitations on moral outrage then?
If a company manages not to get caught at doing morally reprehensible things for a few decades, it's okay to totally ignore it?
I played EVE under WINE on my macbook. The framerate was terrible. Unplayably so. On the other hand, if I booted into windows via bootcamp, the framrate was great (in excess of 20 FPS).
Having a native executable is always going to be superior to playing via WINE for any 3D game.
So, especially for someone who's used WINE to play, the availability of a native binary is exciting news.
When did congress call IBM out on that one? Where was the public outcry? Obviously, the resulting boycotts (if any) failed.
If anything, the IBM situation just goes to show that historically, Americans *don't* care about corporations' cooperation with oppressive governments. If they do, they certainly haven't shown it.