e-books have been tried, and they've failed. They will continue to fail until we somehow figure out a way to make an e-book that looks, feels, and behaves exactly like a real book. Good luck with that.
I read text files from Gutenburg.org on my Treo every day. Why, even when I have a paper copy of the book, do I choose to read it on my phone/PDA instead? Because it's always with me. I actually go to Gutenberg.org with the Treo itself and download something new whenever I find myself in need of good reading material. It's only a matter of time before this catches on; it's just too convenient. The only pitfall of this system is that I have no access to more recent copyrighted works. I would easily drop hundreds a year if it were possible to buy these online (as long as the site saved my information and didn't force me to reenter it at each purchase).
While it's been shown that men and women are of the same intelligence on average, it's also true that men have more brain matter, and women have more efficient brain matter. The result, allegedly, is that men have far greater spacial intelligence (the ability to mentally manipulate objects in the mind), and women far better visual memory.
What the hell does any of this have to do with Microsoft? Your government chose Windows. Then your government chose.Net. Whose fault is that?
.Net is obviously not the right solution for this situation, even if you're dealing with Microsoft. The problem, as always, has nothing do to the business, but the incompetent bureaucrats who took your money at gun point and gave it to them.
You're exactly right. Microsoft has no responsibility whatsoever to give away trade secrets to their competitors. In a perfect world though, Microsoft would likewise not be able to use laws such as the DMCA (which I'm sure Europe has the equivalent of) to strangle competition.
The problem is begins with one government law that empowers businesses to abrogate the rights of others, corporate or individual. What we see now is government futility attempting to patch-up their legislation--legislation predicated on the fallacious premise that government should intervene in the economy.
Understand also that (and it's the same with Google in China) companies MUST, even if their leaders have serious reservations about it, take every dirty advantage the government allows them, or they'll simply be trampled by the competition who will.
Actually, many people including myself have taken apart their RadioSharks to better implement them in a carputer setup--fitting them in the dash and connecting the antenna to the car's.
A Brave New World had exactly nothing to do with evolution. The members of the society depicted in that story were tailored to their specific function via genetic engineering.
1984, on the other hand, does suggest this, in almost the precise words of the article:
"He looked round the canteen again. Nearly everyone was ugly, and would still have been ugly even if dressed otherwise than in the uniform blue overalls. On the far side of the room, sitting at a table alone, a small, curiously beetle-like man was drinking a cup of coffee, his little eyes darting suspicious glances from side to side. How easy it was, thought Winston, if you did not look about you, to believe that the physical type set up by the Party as an ideal-tall muscular youths and deep-bosomed maidens, blond-haired, vital, sunburnt, carefree -- existed and even predominated. Actually, so far as he could judge, the majority of people in Airstrip One were small, dark, and ill-favoured. It was curious how that beetle-like type proliferated in the Ministries: little dumpy men, growing stout very early in life, with short legs, swift scuttling movements, and fat inscrutable faces with very small eyes. It was the type that seemed to flourish best under the dominion of the Party."
My best posts are always modded troll. Ok, ok. I'll give in. From now on I declare my uncritical allegance to the government and any official representing it. I relegate my mind to the abitrary whim of the majority to be determined by opinion poll or post score.
Surely you will accept me into your Slashdot hive now! Sweet validation here I come!
No, "and" in itself doesn't have a temporal meaning, but the order in which we say things implies a sequence or priority. Of course if you take the conjuction "and" and stick it between two meaningless letters the implication isn't the same--you've divorced the statement of its context: the laws of causality. Besides, if you were correct no one would say it.
I'm going to have some sugar and coffee now.
You could actually have your cake then eat it. The maxim is You can't eat your cake and have it too because you can't have your cake after it's been eaten.
Evolution is an existing, observable process. That things evolved is a contentious proposition.
Sort of like the presumptuous notion that mountains and valleys were formed by geological processes and not some other phenomena that, unknown to humanity, happen to produce mountains and valleys as well.
At 95/hr, my average residential job (typically removing malware or reinstalling Windows) comes to about 140 for 1.5 hours labor. Sometimes 95, sometimes 190, depending on the amount of user accounts, peripheral devices, etc. I charge by the hour and it takes me 1-2 hours to complete the work. I am able to work and chat with the customer at once, answering any questions they have.
Geek Squad charges 230 for the same job. I've heard accounts from their previous customers of this taking up to four hours (and when the geek left, there were still problems, which is why the customer contacted me). They also tend to push a lot of unnecessary hardware while explaining nothing, or worse, making it up as they go along.
Incorrect. It's our ability to seek knowledge that sets us apart from the apes. Our motivations--to survive and further our existence--we actually share with the apes, and all other living things as well.
To seek knowledge purely for it's own sake is to take it out of context. Knowledge has no purpose outside the realm of living entities that make use of it in the course of living. Knowledge couldn't even exist without something to know it.
And while it's possible to stumble upon gainful knowledge in the course of arbitrary studies "for the sake of studying," one is far more likely to attain useful information by studing a specific problem and seeking a solution to it.
Just a comment about child labor which I haven't seen mentioned: the mortality rate for children under 10 years of age was something like 70% before the industrial revolution. Most of these children starved to death.
In school we're taught about the evil capitalists who forced children to work in such abhorable conditions, but the fact that these children would otherwise have starved is ignored. As a direct result of the jobs created by evil capitalist factory owners, these children lived. You might say that such a awful existence is not worth the trouble, but all the children who refused to lay down and die in the face of this option obviously disagree.
Right. So, what if I went to Sweden and I didn't want to pay to send someone else to school or the doctor? What if I do not recognize any inborn debt to society, and understand my debts to be no greater than the precise amount of what I take, and that I expect to pay the precise amount of these debts and not a cent or krona more or less? What if I believe in measurement of who earns what and who's rewarded for what, and that this concept correlates with that of justice. No offense to your values or anything, I'm just saying, I'm a hypothetical guy coming to Sweden and this is what I believe.
I know nothing about Swedish government, but speaking of government in general, no matter how high the stack of papers on the bureaucrat's desk, beneath it lies a gun. Eventually, What happens after I continually refuse to pay this mandatory charity? Do men with guns come knocking at my door? Because if that's what happens, I'm going to have to call you on this notion of being "no less free". I might even say that to the extent you must finance someone else's existence, you are their slave.
If you believe that men are born indebted to each other, then by all means act accordingly, give three quarters of your income to charity if it pleases you. If, however, you feel the need to impose this 'responsibility' on others with guns, then what is it you really believe?
And what amount of your income is expropriated from you at gun-point by the government and given to someone else? I'm talking about taxation here. What if you run a business?
Important things to consider when rating a government.
Slashdot Mirror
"teach their brains to think in three dimensions"
While it's been shown that men and women are of the same intelligence on average, it's also true that men have more brain matter, and women have more efficient brain matter. The result, allegedly, is that men have far greater spacial intelligence (the ability to mentally manipulate objects in the mind), and women far better visual memory.
What the hell does any of this have to do with Microsoft? Your government chose Windows. Then your government chose .Net. Whose fault is that?
.Net is obviously not the right solution for this situation, even if you're dealing with Microsoft. The problem, as always, has nothing do to the business, but the incompetent bureaucrats who took your money at gun point and gave it to them.
Haven't you ever heard the old saying "Easy as malware"?
In Soviet Russia... Oh yeah, that's right, Soviet Russia no longer exists. So much for leaving it to the state.
You're exactly right. Microsoft has no responsibility whatsoever to give away trade secrets to their competitors. In a perfect world though, Microsoft would likewise not be able to use laws such as the DMCA (which I'm sure Europe has the equivalent of) to strangle competition.
The problem is begins with one government law that empowers businesses to abrogate the rights of others, corporate or individual. What we see now is government futility attempting to patch-up their legislation--legislation predicated on the fallacious premise that government should intervene in the economy.
Understand also that (and it's the same with Google in China) companies MUST, even if their leaders have serious reservations about it, take every dirty advantage the government allows them, or they'll simply be trampled by the competition who will.
Actually, many people including myself have taken apart their RadioSharks to better implement them in a carputer setup--fitting them in the dash and connecting the antenna to the car's.
"surely everyone else must be concerned that their obese friend/colleague/themselves/relative is going to die decades before they're meant to."
HAH. I do not associate with fat people.
The sooner Vistas out, the sooner it comes pre-installed on all those Dells and HPs.
It says Opera made an "MDI-based" browser, which is like AOL or Photoshop. BookLink Technologies was supposedly the first with a tabbed interface.
A Brave New World had exactly nothing to do with evolution. The members of the society depicted in that story were tailored to their specific function via genetic engineering.
1984, on the other hand, does suggest this, in almost the precise words of the article:
"He looked round the canteen again. Nearly everyone was ugly, and would still have been ugly even if dressed otherwise than in the uniform blue overalls. On the far side of the room, sitting at a table alone, a small, curiously beetle-like man was drinking a cup of coffee, his little eyes darting suspicious glances from side to side. How easy it was, thought Winston, if you did not look about you, to believe that the physical type set up by the Party as an ideal-tall muscular youths and deep-bosomed maidens, blond-haired, vital, sunburnt, carefree -- existed and even predominated. Actually, so far as he could judge, the majority of people in Airstrip One were small, dark, and ill-favoured. It was curious how that beetle-like type proliferated in the Ministries: little dumpy men, growing stout very early in life, with short legs, swift scuttling movements, and fat inscrutable faces with very small eyes. It was the type that seemed to flourish best under the dominion of the Party."
My best posts are always modded troll. Ok, ok. I'll give in. From now on I declare my uncritical allegance to the government and any official representing it. I relegate my mind to the abitrary whim of the majority to be determined by opinion poll or post score.
Surely you will accept me into your Slashdot hive now! Sweet validation here I come!
"... Microsoft who spend three years ignoring a government directive..."
Possibly the only good reason to like Microsoft. By the way, no government has a monopoly on the terms "right" and "wrong".
Yes, "oblate spheroid" is the term for the shape.
No, "and" in itself doesn't have a temporal meaning, but the order in which we say things implies a sequence or priority. Of course if you take the conjuction "and" and stick it between two meaningless letters the implication isn't the same--you've divorced the statement of its context: the laws of causality. Besides, if you were correct no one would say it. I'm going to have some sugar and coffee now.
You can have your cake and eat it. You cannot eat your cake and have it.
You could actually have your cake then eat it. The maxim is You can't eat your cake and have it too because you can't have your cake after it's been eaten.
Evolution is an existing, observable process. That things evolved is a contentious proposition.
Sort of like the presumptuous notion that mountains and valleys were formed by geological processes and not some other phenomena that, unknown to humanity, happen to produce mountains and valleys as well.
At 95/hr, my average residential job (typically removing malware or reinstalling Windows) comes to about 140 for 1.5 hours labor. Sometimes 95, sometimes 190, depending on the amount of user accounts, peripheral devices, etc. I charge by the hour and it takes me 1-2 hours to complete the work. I am able to work and chat with the customer at once, answering any questions they have.
Geek Squad charges 230 for the same job. I've heard accounts from their previous customers of this taking up to four hours (and when the geek left, there were still problems, which is why the customer contacted me). They also tend to push a lot of unnecessary hardware while explaining nothing, or worse, making it up as they go along.
You would probably sense it and pull your hand away as from a hot stove before anything happens.
Incorrect. It's our ability to seek knowledge that sets us apart from the apes. Our motivations--to survive and further our existence--we actually share with the apes, and all other living things as well.
To seek knowledge purely for it's own sake is to take it out of context. Knowledge has no purpose outside the realm of living entities that make use of it in the course of living. Knowledge couldn't even exist without something to know it.
And while it's possible to stumble upon gainful knowledge in the course of arbitrary studies "for the sake of studying," one is far more likely to attain useful information by studing a specific problem and seeking a solution to it.
Just a comment about child labor which I haven't seen mentioned: the mortality rate for children under 10 years of age was something like 70% before the industrial revolution. Most of these children starved to death.
In school we're taught about the evil capitalists who forced children to work in such abhorable conditions, but the fact that these children would otherwise have starved is ignored. As a direct result of the jobs created by evil capitalist factory owners, these children lived. You might say that such a awful existence is not worth the trouble, but all the children who refused to lay down and die in the face of this option obviously disagree.
Right. So, what if I went to Sweden and I didn't want to pay to send someone else to school or the doctor? What if I do not recognize any inborn debt to society, and understand my debts to be no greater than the precise amount of what I take, and that I expect to pay the precise amount of these debts and not a cent or krona more or less? What if I believe in measurement of who earns what and who's rewarded for what, and that this concept correlates with that of justice. No offense to your values or anything, I'm just saying, I'm a hypothetical guy coming to Sweden and this is what I believe.
I know nothing about Swedish government, but speaking of government in general, no matter how high the stack of papers on the bureaucrat's desk, beneath it lies a gun. Eventually, What happens after I continually refuse to pay this mandatory charity? Do men with guns come knocking at my door? Because if that's what happens, I'm going to have to call you on this notion of being "no less free". I might even say that to the extent you must finance someone else's existence, you are their slave.
If you believe that men are born indebted to each other, then by all means act accordingly, give three quarters of your income to charity if it pleases you. If, however, you feel the need to impose this 'responsibility' on others with guns, then what is it you really believe?
And what amount of your income is expropriated from you at gun-point by the government and given to someone else? I'm talking about taxation here. What if you run a business?
Important things to consider when rating a government.