You responded to a snide comment, telling the poster not to be snide in his/her future replies. You then proceeded to make a snide comment within the very same reply in which you condemned snideness. Generally, this is defined as being a 'hypocrite.' The tone of your original post has absolutely no bearing on whether or not your reply was snide.
Does this help? I mean, I know I'm not the greatest communicator ever, and the/. audience of Engineers, Developers, etc. in general has a tough time grasping the subtleties of concisely communicating thoughts through a text medium, so perhaps this still isn't quite getting the point across? Maybe I could draw you a picture? I'm sure I can track down some crayons, somewhere, so the format wouldn't be foreign to you. Let me know where to send it.
(Yes, that was snide. After all, I'm just replying in turn, with my "great insight." And just so we're crystal clear -- a phrase you seem to be fond of from past posts:) -- I'm now giving you an external example of hypocrisy by responding to your snide comments with my own. This makes me a hypocrite, too.)
You make a fair point with regard to fraud. Knowing the guy who did this, and knowing that the reason they're able to do this is that his fiancee has a full ride to school (and thus doesn't need the money to pay tuition), I must assume that I misunderstood him: they're likely not interest-free, but rather just low-interest, loans (at a rate lower than the rate being made on the savings.)
Who knows, though. Maybe you're right and he is guilty of fraud. I just doubt it. The point stands: if you have an opportunity to take low-/no-interest loans, and make more money investing than you're paying on interest, it's a good idea.
To GenKreton: Taking loan to save your own money was stupid. Loans must be paid back with interest. You'd been better off living out of your own money and only borrowing money if you actually needed it.
This depends on the variety of loan (s)he has. If they're student loans on which (a) no payment is due until 6mo after graduation, and (b) don't accrue interest until payments become due, it was absolutely a smart idea to take the loans. I have friends who have very successfully taken every dime worth of these loans they could, stuck them in a high yield savings account (hsbcdirect.com currently pays out at 5.05% interest, with little/no risk on the principal), and pulled down the interest for years. I believe their intention is to pay the money back in a lump-sum following graduation next summer.
(For reference, six years of loans -- four years undergrad, two years grad school -- at $25,000 per year, pulling 5.05% for the full six years will net approximately $20,000 in interest, minus the costs of taking the loan.)
While you're entirely correct in your use of the colon to denote a ratio that is equivalent to the original article's claim of $250 million for 10mg, you've only really shown one thing through this entire (off-topic) thread:
You only used the $25 billion per gram so that you could use a larger number, and make it seem less economically feasible. While it is in fact the same cost, my interpretation of this use is that you've trumped up the apparent (i.e.: not actual) cost by raising the number of produced units in a hope to appeal to human's psychological tendency to only examine a given option's total cost, and not the cost per unit, in determining desirability. This argumentative trick doesn't enhance your case at all, but rather only plays on the assumed stupidity of your audience.
I think the reason people keep saying you need to prove is that your use of the word "recovered" seems to indicate you think of homosexuality as a negative affliction, rather than just a difference from someone who is heterosexual. This implied opinion throws your credibility generally into question.
Not necessarilly. I know that a single fringe case doesn't prove a point, but take this as an example: a sixteen year old kid is annoyed because he's forced to pay income tax, but can't vote -- clearly going against that whole "taxation without representation" ideal. Is it an invalid opinion, because the 16 year old has it, that he shouldn't be forced to pay the tax because he can't vote? The fact that he's "a teenager" doesn't change the validity of the opinion.
I sure hope Tice gets his wish to reform the intelligence community as to how they handle wiretapping Americans. They can wiretap everyone else in the world but I don't want our government wiretapping us without the usual requisite warrants.
Beware the slippery slope this line of thinking leads to. As mentioned many times previously in this thread, a give-and-take relationship along with this thinking can give our government the authority to tap us indirectly, by having our allies (who also think this way) tap the citizen and give our government the info. This likely already occurs, but doesn't make it any more "right."
You should no-follow the links to submitter's pages, every time. They still get their "creds", in that the slashdot user base still gets a link to their page. They can profit from this link by slashdot users hitting their ads. They also don't get bumps up from pagerank, profiting from a googlebot sending more people their way who didn't find them through slashdot, word of mouth, or an individual linking them. And finally, it's got the added benefit of destroying the temptation to consistently bitch about submission system abuses for the benefit of raising pagerank.
I can't believe I didn't notice that until now. I've been reading through all of these comments, figuring that maybe, just maybe, there is still a shred of accountability in the Slashdot.org editors, and **Beatles-Beatles was submitting all his stories directly to Scuttlemonkey or something (which would explain the posting history.) But then, the submission isn't quoted, leading me to believe SM wrote it... and now it's including the phrase "vinyl record". I gotta say this is lending a whole lot of credibility to the belief that SM and BB are in cahoots to raise his pagerank.
It would seem that a low-priced Google PC, being sold at Wal-Mart and similar outlets, targets a very specific audience; that is, the buyers are expected to be non-technically savvy, non-wealthy "average joes" who can't afford/justify the expenditure for a standard Windows PC from Dell or some such.
That being said, and if you agree with me that this is the target audience, do you believe the portion of this audience that owns an HDTV capable display is non-negligible? It seems to me that the price of most/all of these displays is still out of the range of this audience. Accordingly, in my opinion the idea about HDTV capability selling a sub-200$ PC "replacement" somewhat kills itself.
Additionally, for the more paranoid readers, even after solving the problems outlined above, by implementing this you open yourself to a very large governmental problem: regulation. If licenses must be granted, licenses can be denied, and if they can be denied, then requirements can easily be added to their issuance. How happy would you be if, all of a sudden, everyone on the net had to be 18? (Probably a bad example;-) Or -insert other random gub'mint requirement here-? To take it to an extreme -- maybe income, or race, or gender requirements could be enacted for Net Licensing? Personally, I'd rather have stupid people losing money (and by extension, be losing money myself through the cost to the various institutions involved) than even the chance of being denied access to the net.
Why's that flamebait? First of all, it's hillarious, and second, it's informative: I always thought Michael Moore was one really, really fat monkey -- according to parent, he's actually made up of two distinctly separate monkeys!
Comments such as this one have me wondering: has anyone really thought about who it is that makes up "the corporation" that posts such as the parent speak of?
I put in my 2 weeks and kept working as usual up until the end. And the day I left, they already started talking bad about me to all other employees... it always seems that employers want to make you look like the bad guy for leaving.
In the case above, it wasn't the corporation that was talking bad about the poster -- it was a specific (group of) individual(s). I question the disdain that the parent has for his/her previous employer, as unless it was a very small firm and the owner doing the bad-mouthing, the corporation isn't really who you should be upset with. It's the specific person who was doing it, and you should realize that this person simply has a rather terrible management style (as they're obviously shifting blame and attention away from where it should be -- the fact that they were ill prepared to transition your responsibilities to another individual, which caused problems within the organization, should the inevitable change be necessary at some point -- to somewhere that it shouldn't be -- your leaving and 'causing problems as a result.'
Selling stock causes the price of that stock to fall. So, Elison selling earlier leads to investors selling it at a lower price (later, when the news that was considered "insider info" became public) than they would have been able to had he not done this.
So while you're correct that they would have lost money, some portion of them would have lost some lesser amount in this fictional hypothesis than they did in reality. (Mostly, mutual funds and institutional investors -- the "little guys" in this case are still very, very wealthy people. Your average Joe wouldn't have benefitted by Elison selling after the info became public, rather than before... they couldn't react in time. Unless, of course, they owned said mutual funds.)
Also, don't forget, that now, after MA was able to get such a directive through without seriously hurting their own IT infrastructure (changing all departments from MS Word to some other suite is not easy), other states or countries may follow suit....
Curious, as I haven't really been following this story: can you elaborate on why you believe that they made (or will make) the change easily (as your statement, "(changing all departments from MS Word to some other suite is not easy)", implies)? Is this not a case of legislators saying, "We're going to do such-and-such," with the standard lack of involvement from anyone with a technical background?
You made a very good, but very subtle, point with your last statement, and I doubt you even realized it. If you did, kudos - if not, and for all those who likely missed it...
For many companies, customer service is dead (consumers don't need it).
We are no longer customers to many of the companies that are being brought up in this discussion. We are consumers - here only to purchase their goods and move on. The on-going relationship that exists between a customer and the company simply isn't there between a consumer and the company. (No, in my book, customer and consumer are not synonyms.)
You damn city-folk and coastal-dwelling hippies need to be told what's best for you, because you obviously don't know yourself. (See, e.g.: Governor of California.)
(As a side note: I wonder how itchy the mods' trigger fingers are today.)
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, let me make it a little clearer for you.
You responded to a snide comment, telling the poster not to be snide in his/her future replies. You then proceeded to make a snide comment within the very same reply in which you condemned snideness. Generally, this is defined as being a 'hypocrite.' The tone of your original post has absolutely no bearing on whether or not your reply was snide.
Does this help? I mean, I know I'm not the greatest communicator ever, and the /. audience of Engineers, Developers, etc. in general has a tough time grasping the subtleties of concisely communicating thoughts through a text medium, so perhaps this still isn't quite getting the point across? Maybe I could draw you a picture? I'm sure I can track down some crayons, somewhere, so the format wouldn't be foreign to you. Let me know where to send it.
(Yes, that was snide. After all, I'm just replying in turn, with my "great insight." And just so we're crystal clear -- a phrase you seem to be fond of from past posts :) -- I'm now giving you an external example of hypocrisy by responding to your snide comments with my own. This makes me a hypocrite, too.)
Hmm. Sounds like the boss found this thread ;-)
You make a fair point with regard to fraud. Knowing the guy who did this, and knowing that the reason they're able to do this is that his fiancee has a full ride to school (and thus doesn't need the money to pay tuition), I must assume that I misunderstood him: they're likely not interest-free, but rather just low-interest, loans (at a rate lower than the rate being made on the savings.)
Who knows, though. Maybe you're right and he is guilty of fraud. I just doubt it. The point stands: if you have an opportunity to take low-/no-interest loans, and make more money investing than you're paying on interest, it's a good idea.
To GenKreton: Taking loan to save your own money was stupid. Loans must be paid back with interest. You'd been better off living out of your own money and only borrowing money if you actually needed it.
This depends on the variety of loan (s)he has. If they're student loans on which (a) no payment is due until 6mo after graduation, and (b) don't accrue interest until payments become due, it was absolutely a smart idea to take the loans. I have friends who have very successfully taken every dime worth of these loans they could, stuck them in a high yield savings account (hsbcdirect.com currently pays out at 5.05% interest, with little/no risk on the principal), and pulled down the interest for years. I believe their intention is to pay the money back in a lump-sum following graduation next summer.
(For reference, six years of loans -- four years undergrad, two years grad school -- at $25,000 per year, pulling 5.05% for the full six years will net approximately $20,000 in interest, minus the costs of taking the loan.)
Well said, Anonymous Coward.
While you're entirely correct in your use of the colon to denote a ratio that is equivalent to the original article's claim of $250 million for 10mg, you've only really shown one thing through this entire (off-topic) thread:
You only used the $25 billion per gram so that you could use a larger number, and make it seem less economically feasible. While it is in fact the same cost, my interpretation of this use is that you've trumped up the apparent (i.e.: not actual) cost by raising the number of produced units in a hope to appeal to human's psychological tendency to only examine a given option's total cost, and not the cost per unit, in determining desirability. This argumentative trick doesn't enhance your case at all, but rather only plays on the assumed stupidity of your audience.
The pretzel's on the Mac keyboard, but be careful: the pretzel Apple used has four segments, instead of the more typical three.
I think the reason people keep saying you need to prove is that your use of the word "recovered" seems to indicate you think of homosexuality as a negative affliction, rather than just a difference from someone who is heterosexual. This implied opinion throws your credibility generally into question.
Not necessarilly. I know that a single fringe case doesn't prove a point, but take this as an example: a sixteen year old kid is annoyed because he's forced to pay income tax, but can't vote -- clearly going against that whole "taxation without representation" ideal. Is it an invalid opinion, because the 16 year old has it, that he shouldn't be forced to pay the tax because he can't vote? The fact that he's "a teenager" doesn't change the validity of the opinion.
I dunno. I heard from a very reputable source that he just double-fists hot-dogs all day ... that doesn't sound like eating well to me.
I sure hope Tice gets his wish to reform the intelligence community as to how they handle wiretapping Americans. They can wiretap everyone else in the world but I don't want our government wiretapping us without the usual requisite warrants.
Beware the slippery slope this line of thinking leads to. As mentioned many times previously in this thread, a give-and-take relationship along with this thinking can give our government the authority to tap us indirectly, by having our allies (who also think this way) tap the citizen and give our government the info. This likely already occurs, but doesn't make it any more "right."
What should I do?
You should no-follow the links to submitter's pages, every time. They still get their "creds", in that the slashdot user base still gets a link to their page. They can profit from this link by slashdot users hitting their ads. They also don't get bumps up from pagerank, profiting from a googlebot sending more people their way who didn't find them through slashdot, word of mouth, or an individual linking them. And finally, it's got the added benefit of destroying the temptation to consistently bitch about submission system abuses for the benefit of raising pagerank.
I can't believe I didn't notice that until now. I've been reading through all of these comments, figuring that maybe, just maybe, there is still a shred of accountability in the Slashdot.org editors, and **Beatles-Beatles was submitting all his stories directly to Scuttlemonkey or something (which would explain the posting history.) But then, the submission isn't quoted, leading me to believe SM wrote it ... and now it's including the phrase "vinyl record". I gotta say this is lending a whole lot of credibility to the belief that SM and BB are in cahoots to raise his pagerank.
Honest question here:
It would seem that a low-priced Google PC, being sold at Wal-Mart and similar outlets, targets a very specific audience; that is, the buyers are expected to be non-technically savvy, non-wealthy "average joes" who can't afford/justify the expenditure for a standard Windows PC from Dell or some such.
That being said, and if you agree with me that this is the target audience, do you believe the portion of this audience that owns an HDTV capable display is non-negligible? It seems to me that the price of most/all of these displays is still out of the range of this audience. Accordingly, in my opinion the idea about HDTV capability selling a sub-200$ PC "replacement" somewhat kills itself.
Additionally, for the more paranoid readers, even after solving the problems outlined above, by implementing this you open yourself to a very large governmental problem: regulation. If licenses must be granted, licenses can be denied, and if they can be denied, then requirements can easily be added to their issuance. How happy would you be if, all of a sudden, everyone on the net had to be 18? (Probably a bad example ;-) Or -insert other random gub'mint requirement here-? To take it to an extreme -- maybe income, or race, or gender requirements could be enacted for Net Licensing? Personally, I'd rather have stupid people losing money (and by extension, be losing money myself through the cost to the various institutions involved) than even the chance of being denied access to the net.
Why's that flamebait? First of all, it's hillarious, and second, it's informative: I always thought Michael Moore was one really, really fat monkey -- according to parent, he's actually made up of two distinctly separate monkeys!
Knowledge is power, people.
Comments such as this one have me wondering: has anyone really thought about who it is that makes up "the corporation" that posts such as the parent speak of?
I put in my 2 weeks and kept working as usual up until the end. And the day I left, they already started talking bad about me to all other employees ... it always seems that employers want to make you look like the bad guy for leaving.
In the case above, it wasn't the corporation that was talking bad about the poster -- it was a specific (group of) individual(s). I question the disdain that the parent has for his/her previous employer, as unless it was a very small firm and the owner doing the bad-mouthing, the corporation isn't really who you should be upset with. It's the specific person who was doing it, and you should realize that this person simply has a rather terrible management style (as they're obviously shifting blame and attention away from where it should be -- the fact that they were ill prepared to transition your responsibilities to another individual, which caused problems within the organization, should the inevitable change be necessary at some point -- to somewhere that it shouldn't be -- your leaving and 'causing problems as a result.'
Selling stock causes the price of that stock to fall. So, Elison selling earlier leads to investors selling it at a lower price (later, when the news that was considered "insider info" became public) than they would have been able to had he not done this.
So while you're correct that they would have lost money, some portion of them would have lost some lesser amount in this fictional hypothesis than they did in reality. (Mostly, mutual funds and institutional investors -- the "little guys" in this case are still very, very wealthy people. Your average Joe wouldn't have benefitted by Elison selling after the info became public, rather than before... they couldn't react in time. Unless, of course, they owned said mutual funds.)
Gotcha. Thanks for the clarification.
Also, don't forget, that now, after MA was able to get such a directive through without seriously hurting their own IT infrastructure (changing all departments from MS Word to some other suite is not easy), other states or countries may follow suit ....
Curious, as I haven't really been following this story: can you elaborate on why you believe that they made (or will make) the change easily (as your statement, "(changing all departments from MS Word to some other suite is not easy)", implies)? Is this not a case of legislators saying, "We're going to do such-and-such," with the standard lack of involvement from anyone with a technical background?
You made a very good, but very subtle, point with your last statement, and I doubt you even realized it. If you did, kudos - if not, and for all those who likely missed it...
For many companies, customer service is dead (consumers don't need it).
We are no longer customers to many of the companies that are being brought up in this discussion. We are consumers - here only to purchase their goods and move on. The on-going relationship that exists between a customer and the company simply isn't there between a consumer and the company. (No, in my book, customer and consumer are not synonyms.)
You damn city-folk and coastal-dwelling hippies need to be told what's best for you, because you obviously don't know yourself. (See, e.g.: Governor of California.)
(As a side note: I wonder how itchy the mods' trigger fingers are today.)
Try the google cache.
http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:zQLM8Fs0lo8J:You sure it's not a penguin?