Yet another reason for the "Law to Prevent the Creation of Stupid Laws" law. Can we please divert the RIAA's lobbying budget to something like providing shelter for disaster victims or something? Or maybe they could spend that money giving away free iPods. The resulting royalties, though small would probably give a better ROI than campaigning for the destruction of civil liberties.
This seems like an odd response, given that I am in favor of freedom of speech and blogging is a form of it. What I was saying is that Forbes' commentary is really counter to the idea of freedom of speech since the article read more like an ethical judgement against bloggers for speaking their minds. Freedom of speech comes down to respecting the opinions of others even if you do not agree with them, and that article did not have much respect for those that opine counter to the Forbes Way.
Perhap some tags would be prudent next time.
Yes, let's just bash the 1st Ammendment. Bravo, Forbes. Then again, not really a magazine that believes all men are created equal either,:-). Hrm, maybe I should blog this Forbes bashing post.
Quit WoW last month because of the assine GM behavior. I said something like, "Dwarven priests would probably be Irish Catholic because they are very fond of their drink." Warned for negative comments against a race or religion. Now wait a minute, WoW goes to great lengths to indicate how fond dwarves are of their drink and that is seen as a positive thing. And culturally, the Irish have a long tradition of fondness for their drink. Catholics even have the consumption of wine as part of their sacrament and hey--they drink the blood of their God, and that's a fact!
Well let's just say that my counter argument that I was not being negative and they were being hypocritical caused a Cut & Paste EULA section meltdown of epic proportions. The email bounced back and forth for weeks until finally a GM said, "It is an RPG server and that was a real world reference." Thank you, GM! You are absolutely correct and I have no issue with that. But I will never play that game again. I did take a moment to point out that they were actually the people that were racially discriminating because they were implying that the well-know fondness of the Irish for their pubs and their beer was in some way a negative thing.
Different situation than OP, but the same abysmal customer service. The whole thing could have been resolved quite happily if 1 of the first 10 emails had contained anything more than Cut & Paste of the same EULA section again, and again, and again.
The system we've currently established is that drug manufacturers outlay a truly phenomenal amount of money to develop and test any particular drug. They do this on the assumption that they will, in the future, be able to charge good money for the results of their research. If they can't charge for it in the future, there's no incentive for them to develop new drugs today.
I think saving lives is an incentive. It is certainly true that there is a great deal of money in recurring treatment costs. I went to a dentist a year ago and he strongly encouraged me to get veneers and have other things done to my teeth. I did a little research and found that what he was suggesting was purely cosmetic (I was already happy with the appearance of my teeth), but the rub was, the veneers would need to be replaced every 10 to 15 years ($$$) and require removing a portion of your enamel. Cha-ching!
There are definitely tremendous economic pressures to encourage recurring treatment costs over cure. The flip side of that is that a company that comes up with a cure for cancer (hypothetically, let's say all cancers) could charge a very large fee. Far larger than initial recurring treatment cost for managing the disease. In the short term they would make tremendous money (and thus they do have a strong incentive to develop the technology), but over the long term the companies behind recurring treatments are losing tremendous revenue.
To me it is just simple economics that companies want you to pay recurring treatment or maintenance costs because it ensures a stable source of revenue and since populations are rising, company growth is assured (or at least strongly encouraged--of course there are competitive factors which might lead to one company going out of business, but as a business category, the group of companies profitting from recurring costs will continue to profit and grow as long as no one finds a permanent solution for the problem).
Personally, I think all patents should go out the window. That brings us a little closer to developing the drugs just because they save lives and improve the quality of life. But even if all patents were out the window, you would still have a competitive service based free market, and I think it would be very much like the open source Linux market. There is still a tremendous amount of money to be made and many reasons to continue with development because the focus becomes quality of service. What I am saying is that in a patent-free world, the billions of dollars would still be there, and the innovation would still be there. But instead, companies would cooperate on innovation, and compete on service. There would still be more and more money because there are more and more people and they all want service.
Has anyone had luck with running VMWare on Linux and using a virtual machine to play Windows games? I play two online games and they are the only reason that I use Windows as my primary operating system. Not familiar with the performance concerns, but it looks like I could prepare a Windows gaming VM and run it when I game, and then work on other tasks in my preferred Linux environment.
Googling...
Things will be free when people stop paying for useless shit. And I guess it is too obvious to say, but Ebay is lying. They do not want phone service to be free. They want to be collecting revenue from you indirectly through lucrative advertising deals. What they should say is, "We want things to look free as soon as possible so that cost is not an obstacle to you entering our consumer market and buying non-free shit as soon as possible."
Since the patient survived, it clearly was operated on when it was living. Therefore, it does logically follow that the patient surviving implies that the operation was a vivisection. Your statement is correct, but the OP's statement was as well.
Connections between nerve cells are initially random but they are reinforced by stimulus. In the brain, cells connect to nearby cells and some of those connections are reinforced whereas others are not...this is part of the way we learn and our brains mature. We connect and reinforce useful pathways and let go of others. How it happens is a chemistry question I do not know the answer to, but I imagine the presence of acetolcolyne A and some of those other synaptic chemicals as well as the biolectric current that results from a "reinforcing" stimulus causes certain nerve cells to be physically drawn together on a microscopic scale and then bind.
Totally non-scientific explanation, but consider this: how does your finger know to grow into a finger? How does your skin know to reseal itself after it is cut. It does happen and there is an algorithm for it encoded in your DNA, but it is not exactly obvious exactly how it works.
For that matter, one thing I always wonder is how does your face know to take the form it does and how does it manage to retain its shape and features over an entire lifetime? They say all the cells in your body are replaced every 7 years. It is just amazing to me that the body continues to remember the shape those cells need to be in from the very microscopic all the way up to the macroscopic facial features that you have. I've never really read a good explanation for this.
That first link displayed something very...interesting on my workplace monitor. No idea why it happened or if others experience the same thing but...seeing a man from that particular angle and with that particular aperture...
*shiver*
I think you misunderstand the motivation for the apologists. It's not that people suddenly like M$. People have always hated M$. Even the people working there would hate themselves if they could get over themselves! The simple fact is that no one wants to express the unreserved hope that M$ will topple because such hopes have been shattered in the past and who wants to jinx a good thing if it is going to happen?
I imagine M$ will become like IBM and Google will become the new M$, and then people will apologize for Google because we all saw it as someone that could topple the evil empire but then it became what we hate and we do not want to admit it. Pass that torch, yeah!
Or something entirely different could happen and I am totally wrong,:-).
Same as AIDs in the late 80s and 90s. Everyone thought it was a homosexual thing so heterosexuals did not take precautions. Oops. Then people get wise. Same as the Katrina. Oops. Now Rita comes and people actually make an effort to evacuate without hesitation.
I wouldn't worry too much. There will be a big upswing of exploits as Firefox becomes mainstream and with that should come more diligent effort to address the exploits and likely an automated system for patching. That's the same as Microsoft had to do and that's not where Firefox and IE differ. Where they differ is in the fact that Firefox is opensource and can be fixed by any person willing to contribute (and in this case, fixing exploits is very much motivated by self-interest which is doubly good). With Firefox you won't have to hear "Oh, it's just too hard for us to fix the codebase; you have to wait for Vista" and then when marketshare dips, suddenly it's fixable.
If anything, the more scrutiny Firefox is subjected to, the more open source has an opportunity to outshine closed source, so bring it on. As far as updates, I play several online games and patching is automatic and not optional when the time comes. This does not bother me at all. Personally, I would be completely happy with Firefox automatically downloading and installing security updates. I'm as partial to allowing people to run an un-updated Firefox as I am to putting a loaded.357 in a child's hand. "Oh, I just really needed to run my browser without the latest security updates. It was an emergency!" Yeah, right. Try reprioritizing your life so it can sustain an occasional 10 minute download and install that will save you hours of grief when some malicious application brings your computer and every computer on your network to its knees.
(Sure there are expections here and my analogy is a bit extreme, but the basic principal is the same. Don't let people do stupid things that endanger them and everyone else. "But it's my right to blow my head off with a gun." Ok, whatever: *takes the gun away and chucks it in a river*. Go find it if you want it so badly.)
I'm probably a "hardcore" gamer. I average about 4 hours a night after work and various other activities. One thing I see in the responses here is this idea that people that want to be able to go out and do things on their own are casual gamers. That is untrue. There are certainly such people that have only an hour here or there and cannot commit to a 40 person raid. But I think there are many people, and I am definitely one of them, that will set aside a day on the weekend just to go out on my own and run quests for an entire area and explore. In fact, I often find myself going out and buying RPGs to play instead of WoW because I just enjoy the quiet time to myself where I can accomplish some things and experience a nice story and environment.
I think several of the questions here were speaking to this. When I hit 60, why isn't there something exciting for me to do on my own? Why are there no new places for me to discover that require some real skill and determination but not 20 to 40 other people as an escort. Anyway, I think the responses to these questions indicate a lack of understanding of a not-so-small component of the playerbase and I know it is one of the reasons I suspended my WoW account for half a year and I know it is likely the reason I will do so again when the next nice MMORPG comes out with a new solo experience that lasts for 40 or 60 or X levels.
(I should add that I do play the raid content and the BGs and I know what they offer and they can be enjoyable. For whatever reason, I personally gravitate toward doing that as a "special" occasion and prefer going out alone most of the time. Maybe it's because gaming is decompression from 8 hours of interacting with all kinds of people,:-))
Hurricanes are Nature's way of maintaining balance. They are not some economically inconvenient phenomenon that we should "fix". Human beings are the creatures on this planet that do things like pump billions of kilograms of CO2 into the air to support ever growing populations that are sustained by industries that are based on a dwindling natural resource.
This is a "What the Hell is wrong with you?" wake up call. Haven't we done enough?
Hurricanes have many purposes, one of which is heat transfer. Elevated levels of CO2 increase global temperatures. The heat must be balanced or entire ecosystems will be destroyed. People laugh and doubt the reality of global warming. "Oh, it is a natural phenomenon." It happens cyclically. It certainly does happen naturally and guess what--Nature can manage the process all by itself. How do you prevent large portions of the planet from turning into warm liquid goo? You transfer the heat with globally significant events: hurricanes.
Nature has been balancing the Earth for millions of years. We have had our hand in it for a few hundred (on a global scale). I have been doing my job for 15 years. Guess what happens when some new kid comes in, wet behind the ears, with a thousand great ideas, a prodigious intellect, and an unshakable determination to make his mark and improve things? That's right. Disaster.
It is the same lesson over and over again and we never, as a population, seem to learn. Until we are faced with death on a massive scale. Then we learn for a while if there is time. Then we forget. Well some of us don't forget. Some of us Cassandras will warn and remind you for all the good it will do us.
Leave the damn Hurricanes alone. Stop building coastal cities under sea level and stop building the houses out of sticks. "But it costs less!" Less than the 100 billion in damage and loss of life we currently see? No. Fix the problem. Don't "fix" Nature's way of really repairing the damage we do.
And in the future, not only will people no longer remember how to grow their own food, but natural selection will no longer take place and we will each develop a radically unique diet that is only sustainable with the help of a nanomolecular factory.
Having friends over for dinner? Disaster! You think it is bad when you have friends over and 1 is a vegetarian? You just wait...
"Hey, everyone! I made my specialty tonight: avocado creamsicle pasta!"
"Sorry, I think I would die if I ate that. Literally."
"Me, too."
"Me, three."
Smart people build amazing technology with incredibly stupid consequences.
Gravimagnetic energy pulses from the galactic core to our sun and from the sun to the earth. The energy pulse from the sun is like a blade turning in the blender.
The whipped cream at the center is rotating faster because the liquid metal core is the most efficient converter of the incoming energy, and the rotation speed tapers off toward the outside. Since it is not a homogeneous medium (different densities in the layers) you get discontinuous jumps in velocity from layer to layer. In other words, the core rotates faster than the surface.
Such wisdom in baking.
Information is a communication from one person to another (or more generally, a stimulus created by one thing and received by another). Information wants to be free in the sense that a person wants to communicate with the people that need the information that they have.
Information cannot be perfectly "free", because people are not perfectly good. The balance between freedom of information and protection of privacy is determined by the overall goodness of society. In a society of good people, we fear less. We are less afraid that a person will do us harm if they learn the truth of who were are. In a good society we would know that placing our contact information on our website is not an invitation for all manner of harassment.
In a bad society, privacy supercedes all other things because privacy is self-preservation in the face of the evil that bad people can do with our information. The cost of a bad society is that while people can survive, they do so by imprisoning information (not only their personal information, but more general information that other people could benefit from). The cost of this loss of freedom is inhibited self-development.
An evil society is therefore self-reinforcing and ultimately self-destructive. Fear imprisons information, which leads to greater uncertainty and fear. Fear crushes the human spirit and leads to revolution or annihilation. A good society on the other hand is very hard to achieve because people must continually walk the difficult path of what is right and shake off the tendency to fear what is unknown and different. Coming full circle, people hide information out of fear, but the only thing that can overcome fear is information.
Slashdot Mirror
We keep them in the jale for refusing to divulge proper spelling.
Probably.
This seems like an odd response, given that I am in favor of freedom of speech and blogging is a form of it. What I was saying is that Forbes' commentary is really counter to the idea of freedom of speech since the article read more like an ethical judgement against bloggers for speaking their minds. Freedom of speech comes down to respecting the opinions of others even if you do not agree with them, and that article did not have much respect for those that opine counter to the Forbes Way. Perhap some tags would be prudent next time.
Yes, let's just bash the 1st Ammendment. Bravo, Forbes. Then again, not really a magazine that believes all men are created equal either, :-). Hrm, maybe I should blog this Forbes bashing post.
(Enter: the usual suspects.)
(From a speaker)
AAAAGGUATCUCGCUAGCUAUTCGGGCA...GTAC, please step forward!
(Suspects look around in confusion.)
(The third suspect tenatively steps forward.)
(From a speaker)
I said AAAAGGUATCUCGCUAGCUAUTCGGGCA...GTAC, AAAAGGUATCUCGCUAGCUAUTCGGGCA...GTAT! Get back in the line-up.
(AAAAGGUATCUCGCUAGCUAUTCGGGCA...GTAT shuffles back into the line-up.)
(The suspects look around in apprehensively and glance furtively at each other.)
Well let's just say that my counter argument that I was not being negative and they were being hypocritical caused a Cut & Paste EULA section meltdown of epic proportions. The email bounced back and forth for weeks until finally a GM said, "It is an RPG server and that was a real world reference." Thank you, GM! You are absolutely correct and I have no issue with that. But I will never play that game again. I did take a moment to point out that they were actually the people that were racially discriminating because they were implying that the well-know fondness of the Irish for their pubs and their beer was in some way a negative thing.
Different situation than OP, but the same abysmal customer service. The whole thing could have been resolved quite happily if 1 of the first 10 emails had contained anything more than Cut & Paste of the same EULA section again, and again, and again.
There are definitely tremendous economic pressures to encourage recurring treatment costs over cure. The flip side of that is that a company that comes up with a cure for cancer (hypothetically, let's say all cancers) could charge a very large fee. Far larger than initial recurring treatment cost for managing the disease. In the short term they would make tremendous money (and thus they do have a strong incentive to develop the technology), but over the long term the companies behind recurring treatments are losing tremendous revenue.
To me it is just simple economics that companies want you to pay recurring treatment or maintenance costs because it ensures a stable source of revenue and since populations are rising, company growth is assured (or at least strongly encouraged--of course there are competitive factors which might lead to one company going out of business, but as a business category, the group of companies profitting from recurring costs will continue to profit and grow as long as no one finds a permanent solution for the problem).
Personally, I think all patents should go out the window. That brings us a little closer to developing the drugs just because they save lives and improve the quality of life. But even if all patents were out the window, you would still have a competitive service based free market, and I think it would be very much like the open source Linux market. There is still a tremendous amount of money to be made and many reasons to continue with development because the focus becomes quality of service. What I am saying is that in a patent-free world, the billions of dollars would still be there, and the innovation would still be there. But instead, companies would cooperate on innovation, and compete on service. There would still be more and more money because there are more and more people and they all want service.
Has anyone had luck with running VMWare on Linux and using a virtual machine to play Windows games? I play two online games and they are the only reason that I use Windows as my primary operating system. Not familiar with the performance concerns, but it looks like I could prepare a Windows gaming VM and run it when I game, and then work on other tasks in my preferred Linux environment. Googling...
Things will be free when people stop paying for useless shit. And I guess it is too obvious to say, but Ebay is lying. They do not want phone service to be free. They want to be collecting revenue from you indirectly through lucrative advertising deals. What they should say is, "We want things to look free as soon as possible so that cost is not an obstacle to you entering our consumer market and buying non-free shit as soon as possible."
An alternative meaning...
2 : minute or pitiless examination or criticism
Since the patient survived, it clearly was operated on when it was living. Therefore, it does logically follow that the patient surviving implies that the operation was a vivisection. Your statement is correct, but the OP's statement was as well.
I think you should mind your P's and Q's!
The natural conclusion to draw here is that every person will have a chip, since by far, human beings are the most dangerous animals on earth.
Totally non-scientific explanation, but consider this: how does your finger know to grow into a finger? How does your skin know to reseal itself after it is cut. It does happen and there is an algorithm for it encoded in your DNA, but it is not exactly obvious exactly how it works.
For that matter, one thing I always wonder is how does your face know to take the form it does and how does it manage to retain its shape and features over an entire lifetime? They say all the cells in your body are replaced every 7 years. It is just amazing to me that the body continues to remember the shape those cells need to be in from the very microscopic all the way up to the macroscopic facial features that you have. I've never really read a good explanation for this.
That first link displayed something very...interesting on my workplace monitor. No idea why it happened or if others experience the same thing but...seeing a man from that particular angle and with that particular aperture... *shiver*
BUT, if we run out of oil...mysteriously, all the many obstacles to a truly reliable and widely available alternative fuel source will disappear!
I imagine M$ will become like IBM and Google will become the new M$, and then people will apologize for Google because we all saw it as someone that could topple the evil empire but then it became what we hate and we do not want to admit it. Pass that torch, yeah!
Or something entirely different could happen and I am totally wrong, :-).
I wouldn't worry too much. There will be a big upswing of exploits as Firefox becomes mainstream and with that should come more diligent effort to address the exploits and likely an automated system for patching. That's the same as Microsoft had to do and that's not where Firefox and IE differ. Where they differ is in the fact that Firefox is opensource and can be fixed by any person willing to contribute (and in this case, fixing exploits is very much motivated by self-interest which is doubly good). With Firefox you won't have to hear "Oh, it's just too hard for us to fix the codebase; you have to wait for Vista" and then when marketshare dips, suddenly it's fixable.
If anything, the more scrutiny Firefox is subjected to, the more open source has an opportunity to outshine closed source, so bring it on. As far as updates, I play several online games and patching is automatic and not optional when the time comes. This does not bother me at all. Personally, I would be completely happy with Firefox automatically downloading and installing security updates. I'm as partial to allowing people to run an un-updated Firefox as I am to putting a loaded .357 in a child's hand. "Oh, I just really needed to run my browser without the latest security updates. It was an emergency!" Yeah, right. Try reprioritizing your life so it can sustain an occasional 10 minute download and install that will save you hours of grief when some malicious application brings your computer and every computer on your network to its knees.
(Sure there are expections here and my analogy is a bit extreme, but the basic principal is the same. Don't let people do stupid things that endanger them and everyone else. "But it's my right to blow my head off with a gun." Ok, whatever: *takes the gun away and chucks it in a river*. Go find it if you want it so badly.)
I think several of the questions here were speaking to this. When I hit 60, why isn't there something exciting for me to do on my own? Why are there no new places for me to discover that require some real skill and determination but not 20 to 40 other people as an escort. Anyway, I think the responses to these questions indicate a lack of understanding of a not-so-small component of the playerbase and I know it is one of the reasons I suspended my WoW account for half a year and I know it is likely the reason I will do so again when the next nice MMORPG comes out with a new solo experience that lasts for 40 or 60 or X levels.
(I should add that I do play the raid content and the BGs and I know what they offer and they can be enjoyable. For whatever reason, I personally gravitate toward doing that as a "special" occasion and prefer going out alone most of the time. Maybe it's because gaming is decompression from 8 hours of interacting with all kinds of people, :-))
I don't think Blizzard gets this.
This is a "What the Hell is wrong with you?" wake up call. Haven't we done enough?
Hurricanes have many purposes, one of which is heat transfer. Elevated levels of CO2 increase global temperatures. The heat must be balanced or entire ecosystems will be destroyed. People laugh and doubt the reality of global warming. "Oh, it is a natural phenomenon." It happens cyclically. It certainly does happen naturally and guess what--Nature can manage the process all by itself. How do you prevent large portions of the planet from turning into warm liquid goo? You transfer the heat with globally significant events: hurricanes.
Nature has been balancing the Earth for millions of years. We have had our hand in it for a few hundred (on a global scale). I have been doing my job for 15 years. Guess what happens when some new kid comes in, wet behind the ears, with a thousand great ideas, a prodigious intellect, and an unshakable determination to make his mark and improve things? That's right. Disaster.
It is the same lesson over and over again and we never, as a population, seem to learn. Until we are faced with death on a massive scale. Then we learn for a while if there is time. Then we forget. Well some of us don't forget. Some of us Cassandras will warn and remind you for all the good it will do us.
Leave the damn Hurricanes alone. Stop building coastal cities under sea level and stop building the houses out of sticks. "But it costs less!" Less than the 100 billion in damage and loss of life we currently see? No. Fix the problem. Don't "fix" Nature's way of really repairing the damage we do.
End of Rant.
4. The very low efficieny of getting the CO2 out of the air. Insert tree seed into ground.
Having friends over for dinner? Disaster! You think it is bad when you have friends over and 1 is a vegetarian? You just wait...
"Hey, everyone! I made my specialty tonight: avocado creamsicle pasta!"
"Sorry, I think I would die if I ate that. Literally."
"Me, too."
"Me, three."
Smart people build amazing technology with incredibly stupid consequences.
Gravimagnetic energy pulses from the galactic core to our sun and from the sun to the earth. The energy pulse from the sun is like a blade turning in the blender. The whipped cream at the center is rotating faster because the liquid metal core is the most efficient converter of the incoming energy, and the rotation speed tapers off toward the outside. Since it is not a homogeneous medium (different densities in the layers) you get discontinuous jumps in velocity from layer to layer. In other words, the core rotates faster than the surface. Such wisdom in baking.
Information cannot be perfectly "free", because people are not perfectly good. The balance between freedom of information and protection of privacy is determined by the overall goodness of society. In a society of good people, we fear less. We are less afraid that a person will do us harm if they learn the truth of who were are. In a good society we would know that placing our contact information on our website is not an invitation for all manner of harassment.
In a bad society, privacy supercedes all other things because privacy is self-preservation in the face of the evil that bad people can do with our information. The cost of a bad society is that while people can survive, they do so by imprisoning information (not only their personal information, but more general information that other people could benefit from). The cost of this loss of freedom is inhibited self-development.
An evil society is therefore self-reinforcing and ultimately self-destructive. Fear imprisons information, which leads to greater uncertainty and fear. Fear crushes the human spirit and leads to revolution or annihilation. A good society on the other hand is very hard to achieve because people must continually walk the difficult path of what is right and shake off the tendency to fear what is unknown and different. Coming full circle, people hide information out of fear, but the only thing that can overcome fear is information.
When we run out of fossil fuels, clean up emissions and realize: someone forgot to install the "off" switch for the huge ring in space.