Hardly. I'm not from the US, but I feel very much te same about Iran. I also say: let 'm drown
They won't drown in Iran. They'll probably starve or die of preventable diseases. But I imagine you didn't think of that.
There isn't a citizenry in the world that deserves to suffer because of the actions of its leaders.
They'll be the one that suffer. Remember our embargo on Iraq in the 90's? The one that deprvied Iraqis of healthcare, food and basic medicine? That was the one that by most estimates killed about 300,000 children.
All sanctions do is enable both sides to use the innocent as pawns in a ridiculous cock waving contest.
I'm curious why people see this as so much worse than the police helicopters that have been in use for decades. Is it because they cost less money, and thus can be operated more frequently? Or because people associate them with the military?
Its the same problem people have with CCTV cameras or other monitoring equipment. Without proper regulations for their use by law enforcement (or private companies, for that matter), they are so cheap to buy and use that a city or country can quickly become swamped in monitoring equipment with no limits to how or where the data is used or retained.
Expense has prohibited the rollout of a panopticon, and people who are concerned about drones (myself included) see their use as another substantial lowering of that barrier. There seems to be little appetite to regulate against it, so technology is seen as the last barrier against intrusive mass surveillance.
It astonishes me that a technology as safe, environmentally friendly and cheap as this still isn't being used. As always, the political will and understanding is lacking. For christs sake, here in the UK we're still talking about building "traditional" nuclear stations and natural gas burning plants!
Cheap, abundant electricity without the CO2 emissions of burning fossil fuels will be a revelation.
[for those] who want to decide what others should do with their technology rather than those who would actually use technology to change the world.
The problem is not all technological change is for the better. I can't imagine the families of civilians being killed by unmanned drones feel particularly good about it just because the tech is new. What's the harm in discussing something?
YEAH! let's discuss that! let's NOT discuss anything technological that could have an effect on people today
This might surprise you, but discussing one thing doesn't preclude discussing something else at the same time. The Internet has more than enough space.
Society needs to come to terms with the fact that most people will not be able to work.
Exactly. The next revolution will be one of automation.
We're already seeing some evidence of this, but the majority still cling to old industrail principles and an outdated ethic that work is somehow "moral" and the fault of unemployment is with the individual and not the society or economic system of the place they live. They don't understand that there is simply not enough work for everyone.
Don't believe me? Look at the net. Could you imagine how many workers say, Amazon, would need if it was done over the phone? The net isn't just an information thing, its automation. I'm not deriding it, but its a trend that is certain to continue. The question is how we deal with it.
There are three ways I could see this panning out:
1: Our current model, which still believes in Industrial-era principles of wage work. Intense competition and fewer jobs would essentially scrap-heap vast swathes of the population.
I believe this is already happening. Job creation has lagged behind population growth (in the US at least) for decades. This naturally results in lower wages and poorer conditions. If you then couple it with neoliberal attacks on the welfare state it will result in untold human misery.
2: Make-work, where the "moral" component is kept but the work is essentially meaningless, a way of providing a living. Better, but still inadequete and reactionary. Another possibility is a cap on working hours, but of course this cannot be done without greatly increasing wages and enforcing the cap.
3: A revolution where working for a living no longer becomes a survival necessity. A guaranteed minimum income or government stipends, perhaps. Done right, this could be a stunning revolution in living standards and our civilisation.
We are being suckered into an immense data gathering exercise for the sake of a few pages which are "ours".
Perhaps commodification is a better word. I sometimes feel that we have been duped into becoming a product rather than a customer or a user. Worse, this is becoming acceptable for many people.
The thought is disconcerting. After all, what rights do products have? What ramifications does that have for the future? We rely on some misguided sense that these companies or our lawmakers are ethical or reasonable enough to provide safeguards and prevent abuse. That is our only defence, and I have little faith in the competence or ethical integrity of either.
If our personal data is a commodity, as FB and Google and others seem to indicate by their business models, then its only a matter of time before systematic and serious abuses of that data mining become commonplace. Selling fucking personalised ads is the tip of an incredibly large iceberg.
SRSly, Slashdot, it's a joke currency used by a few fantasists and dreamers
All currencies are ethereal, the difference is belief that it has value.
Think of it this way. I can go into a shop, with a selection of rectangular pieces of paper with fancy designs on them, and I can come out with food, cigarettes, or a laptop, or a television. Why would anyone trade something useful like a laptop, or a basic necessity like food, for some fancy bits of paper? Simple: we all believe the paper has value. You think it does, the shop thinks it does, and so on.
If you want to talk about digital currency, its even more ethereal. You're attributing value to nothing more than a number.
Say there's $100.00 in your bank account, and for the sake of argument its represented as a cell on a spreadsheet at the bank. What is the difference between that $100.00 in the banks DB over say, opening a file and writing $100.00 in the first cell. Again, value. Both figures are identical. The way of storing them is identical. They are the same in every way.
The difference is belief means their cell in the DB is worth something, and yours isn't.
Then you realise central banks create money by nothing more than writing enormous numbers in the cells of spreadsheets.
The only way something stops becoming a currency is when no-one believes in the value of it. Likewise, belief creates currency.
Not to mention that he quite happily did minecraft pocket edition for the ipad, an ARM ecosystem that is just as restrictive as the Microsoft app store on windows RT.
No hypocrisy there, no siree.
That's because of money. No such thing as hypocrisy as long as money is involved!
Its cheap grandstanding and nothing more. MC will work fine on x86 Win8 without certification, and lets be honest, RT is probably going to bomb badly.
an achievement that would have extraordinary energy and defense implications.
Says a lot about the times we live in (or the short sightedness of TFA) when the second biggest benefit of a breakthrough in fusion would be fucking weapons.
I'd be looking forward to a revolution in energy usage and a massive increase in living standards for the entire planet myself, but hey.
Not quite OT, but Jeremy Hunt also believes in dismantling and privatising the NHS. He co-authored a book called "Direct Democracy", details of which can be found below:
So now, to add to our welfare and disabilty minister who despises the disabled and needy, an environment minister who doesn't give a toss about the environment and a justice minister who wants to abolish the human rights act, we now have a health minister who wants to dismantle the health service.
IQ tests are incredibly subjective anyway, and have innate cultural biases. Essentially all an IQ test calculates is how good you are at the test. It has very little to do with "intelligence", however loosely defined.
You you loose, the company looses. The only one getting big money are the lawyers, unless you happen to get a movie deal out of it.
I can understand your point about lawyers, but part of the whole idea of class action suits are to bring an offending company to task.
Without class action, how else can that be done? Individual lawsuits? That has the burden of being able to afford to do such a thing in the first place, and the awards will never be large enough to act as a deterrent. Companies would just pay out and carry on. Prosecution by the state? That doesn't sound entirely appealing either, especially considering how cozy the government gets with large corporations.
It seems to me that removing class action suits just further insulates companies from their actions.
If they 'enjoy' and are 'content', then it's hard to say they've 'undermined' themselves. They have perhaps undermined 'you' and your conditions, but that's called competition.
Hard to say they've undermined themselves? How about if they were paid, lets say, $10/hour. That contentment of which you speak is costing them $200 per week net, assuming 20 hours a week. Quite a sacrifice, wouldn't you say?
Secondly, you're damn right it undermines me. It undermines you as well. Working extra hours a week unpaid isn't competition, its a race to the bottom. How precisely does one compete with someone who works for free?.
Non user replaceable batteries were inevitable. Instead of charging $60 or whatever for a battery, why not charge double that?
Apple want a black box that no-one can service, even so much as replacing as battery. Purely a profit thing I imagine, but it does fit into their "don't touch our vision, plebian!" ideology.
At the risk of burning karma, disposing of perfectly functional items because they're a few years old and there's a fancier, flashier model seems to be the encouraged behavior with some Apple stuff anyway. They'd probably be wanting to junk it by the time the battery fails anyway.
It seems to me to be a horribly arbitrary thing to do. Say what you like about spells, incantations, charms and the whole belief in magic, but banning those while allowing Christian items seems very short sighted.
What happened to the idea that beliefs are relative? Ebay seems to be saying "no sorry, incantations and spells are a crock of shit, we're saving you from your own naivety." To do that while still allowing the so called mainstream faiths to peddle the exact same items strikes me as ridiculous. Ebay in my mind shouldn't be involved in discussions like that. It's an auction site, not the fountain of truth.
Slashdot Mirror
Unlike PC games, which may require finicky custom settings, consoles 'just work,' fans have long pointed out. Well, so does the iPad.
My washing machine "just works", it doesn't mean game consoles are losing market share to it.
Games consoles and iPads are completely different things. Just because it has a processor and a screen and UI doesn't mean its the bloody same.
Replace /. with Microsoft on that thing and you will be able to enjoy automated +5 Insightful until the end of days.
i agree. i'm running netbsd as i type and it has neve
never impeded your inability to finish a sentence :P
Hardly. I'm not from the US, but I feel very much te same about Iran. I also say: let 'm drown
They won't drown in Iran. They'll probably starve or die of preventable diseases. But I imagine you didn't think of that.
There isn't a citizenry in the world that deserves to suffer because of the actions of its leaders.
They'll be the one that suffer. Remember our embargo on Iraq in the 90's? The one that deprvied Iraqis of healthcare, food and basic medicine? That was the one that by most estimates killed about 300,000 children.
All sanctions do is enable both sides to use the innocent as pawns in a ridiculous cock waving contest.
I'm curious why people see this as so much worse than the police helicopters that have been in use for decades. Is it because they cost less money, and thus can be operated more frequently? Or because people associate them with the military?
Its the same problem people have with CCTV cameras or other monitoring equipment. Without proper regulations for their use by law enforcement (or private companies, for that matter), they are so cheap to buy and use that a city or country can quickly become swamped in monitoring equipment with no limits to how or where the data is used or retained.
Expense has prohibited the rollout of a panopticon, and people who are concerned about drones (myself included) see their use as another substantial lowering of that barrier. There seems to be little appetite to regulate against it, so technology is seen as the last barrier against intrusive mass surveillance.
It astonishes me that a technology as safe, environmentally friendly and cheap as this still isn't being used. As always, the political will and understanding is lacking. For christs sake, here in the UK we're still talking about building "traditional" nuclear stations and natural gas burning plants!
Cheap, abundant electricity without the CO2 emissions of burning fossil fuels will be a revelation.
[for those] who want to decide what others should do with their technology rather than those who would actually use technology to change the world.
The problem is not all technological change is for the better. I can't imagine the families of civilians being killed by unmanned drones feel particularly good about it just because the tech is new. What's the harm in discussing something?
YEAH! let's discuss that! let's NOT discuss anything technological that could have an effect on people today
This might surprise you, but discussing one thing doesn't preclude discussing something else at the same time. The Internet has more than enough space.
Shit, take a valium or something.
Society needs to come to terms with the fact that most people will not be able to work.
Exactly. The next revolution will be one of automation.
We're already seeing some evidence of this, but the majority still cling to old industrail principles and an outdated ethic that work is somehow "moral" and the fault of unemployment is with the individual and not the society or economic system of the place they live. They don't understand that there is simply not enough work for everyone.
Don't believe me? Look at the net. Could you imagine how many workers say, Amazon, would need if it was done over the phone? The net isn't just an information thing, its automation. I'm not deriding it, but its a trend that is certain to continue. The question is how we deal with it.
There are three ways I could see this panning out:
1: Our current model, which still believes in Industrial-era principles of wage work. Intense competition and fewer jobs would essentially scrap-heap vast swathes of the population.
I believe this is already happening. Job creation has lagged behind population growth (in the US at least) for decades. This naturally results in lower wages and poorer conditions. If you then couple it with neoliberal attacks on the welfare state it will result in untold human misery.
2: Make-work, where the "moral" component is kept but the work is essentially meaningless, a way of providing a living. Better, but still inadequete and reactionary. Another possibility is a cap on working hours, but of course this cannot be done without greatly increasing wages and enforcing the cap.
3: A revolution where working for a living no longer becomes a survival necessity. A guaranteed minimum income or government stipends, perhaps. Done right, this could be a stunning revolution in living standards and our civilisation.
The question is not if but when.
We are being suckered into an immense data gathering exercise for the sake of a few pages which are "ours".
Perhaps commodification is a better word. I sometimes feel that we have been duped into becoming a product rather than a customer or a user. Worse, this is becoming acceptable for many people.
The thought is disconcerting. After all, what rights do products have? What ramifications does that have for the future? We rely on some misguided sense that these companies or our lawmakers are ethical or reasonable enough to provide safeguards and prevent abuse. That is our only defence, and I have little faith in the competence or ethical integrity of either.
If our personal data is a commodity, as FB and Google and others seem to indicate by their business models, then its only a matter of time before systematic and serious abuses of that data mining become commonplace. Selling fucking personalised ads is the tip of an incredibly large iceberg.
SRSly, Slashdot, it's a joke currency used by a few fantasists and dreamers
All currencies are ethereal, the difference is belief that it has value.
Think of it this way. I can go into a shop, with a selection of rectangular pieces of paper with fancy designs on them, and I can come out with food, cigarettes, or a laptop, or a television. Why would anyone trade something useful like a laptop, or a basic necessity like food, for some fancy bits of paper? Simple: we all believe the paper has value. You think it does, the shop thinks it does, and so on.
If you want to talk about digital currency, its even more ethereal. You're attributing value to nothing more than a number.
Say there's $100.00 in your bank account, and for the sake of argument its represented as a cell on a spreadsheet at the bank. What is the difference between that $100.00 in the banks DB over say, opening a file and writing $100.00 in the first cell. Again, value. Both figures are identical. The way of storing them is identical. They are the same in every way.
The difference is belief means their cell in the DB is worth something, and yours isn't.
Then you realise central banks create money by nothing more than writing enormous numbers in the cells of spreadsheets.
The only way something stops becoming a currency is when no-one believes in the value of it. Likewise, belief creates currency.
Not to mention that he quite happily did minecraft pocket edition for the ipad, an ARM ecosystem that is just as restrictive as the Microsoft app store on windows RT.
No hypocrisy there, no siree.
That's because of money. No such thing as hypocrisy as long as money is involved!
Its cheap grandstanding and nothing more. MC will work fine on x86 Win8 without certification, and lets be honest, RT is probably going to bomb badly.
Quite the example of an empty gesture.
an achievement that would have extraordinary energy and defense implications.
Says a lot about the times we live in (or the short sightedness of TFA) when the second biggest benefit of a breakthrough in fusion would be fucking weapons.
I'd be looking forward to a revolution in energy usage and a massive increase in living standards for the entire planet myself, but hey.
The bastards have enough weapons, nothing good can come from giving them more.
What is the global SI-standard for anticipation you say? Well, it's measured in Daikatanas...
Ah, I was wondering what John Romero was up to these days.
Not quite OT, but Jeremy Hunt also believes in dismantling and privatising the NHS. He co-authored a book called "Direct Democracy", details of which can be found below:
http://eoin-clarke.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/jeremy-hunt-co-authored-book-calling.html
So now, to add to our welfare and disabilty minister who despises the disabled and needy, an environment minister who doesn't give a toss about the environment and a justice minister who wants to abolish the human rights act, we now have a health minister who wants to dismantle the health service.
Sigh, fucking politicians.
Quoth the man himself:
I'll bet you right now that the next app developer to hit it really big will be a developer on Windows."
I'd quite like to take him up on that bet.
I first read that as "Ask Slashdot: Why Does The World Exist?"
Imagine my disappointment.
You need SINGLE intelligence to coordinate complex maneuvers, and many minds to search out the plain of solutions like hunters of old.
It sounds like they desperately need to employ Borg as developers.
IQ tests are incredibly subjective anyway, and have innate cultural biases. Essentially all an IQ test calculates is how good you are at the test. It has very little to do with "intelligence", however loosely defined.
You you loose, the company looses. The only one getting big money are the lawyers, unless you happen to get a movie deal out of it.
I can understand your point about lawyers, but part of the whole idea of class action suits are to bring an offending company to task.
Without class action, how else can that be done? Individual lawsuits? That has the burden of being able to afford to do such a thing in the first place, and the awards will never be large enough to act as a deterrent. Companies would just pay out and carry on. Prosecution by the state? That doesn't sound entirely appealing either, especially considering how cozy the government gets with large corporations.
It seems to me that removing class action suits just further insulates companies from their actions.
If they 'enjoy' and are 'content', then it's hard to say they've 'undermined' themselves. They have perhaps undermined 'you' and your conditions, but that's called competition.
Hard to say they've undermined themselves? How about if they were paid, lets say, $10/hour. That contentment of which you speak is costing them $200 per week net, assuming 20 hours a week. Quite a sacrifice, wouldn't you say?
Secondly, you're damn right it undermines me. It undermines you as well. Working extra hours a week unpaid isn't competition, its a race to the bottom. How precisely does one compete with someone who works for free?.
The report also said that 92% of mobile workers 'enjoy their job flexibility' and are 'content' with working longer hours
Well done, what a great way to undermine your own wage and working conditions.
Non user replaceable batteries were inevitable. Instead of charging $60 or whatever for a battery, why not charge double that?
Apple want a black box that no-one can service, even so much as replacing as battery. Purely a profit thing I imagine, but it does fit into their "don't touch our vision, plebian!" ideology.
At the risk of burning karma, disposing of perfectly functional items because they're a few years old and there's a fancier, flashier model seems to be the encouraged behavior with some Apple stuff anyway. They'd probably be wanting to junk it by the time the battery fails anyway.
It seems to me to be a horribly arbitrary thing to do. Say what you like about spells, incantations, charms and the whole belief in magic, but banning those while allowing Christian items seems very short sighted.
What happened to the idea that beliefs are relative? Ebay seems to be saying "no sorry, incantations and spells are a crock of shit, we're saving you from your own naivety." To do that while still allowing the so called mainstream faiths to peddle the exact same items strikes me as ridiculous. Ebay in my mind shouldn't be involved in discussions like that. It's an auction site, not the fountain of truth.
"Bill Gates, the man responsible for bringing software to the masses with Microsoft and Windows..."
Fucking hell, this is Slashdot, not Readers Digest.