Thank you for that explanation. It makes some sense that they don't trust FB to be anonymous enough, but on the other hand, if you go off and start your own social network composed of people who think like you, how do you draw people to the cause?
If people taste the difference, it's psychological. It's because they expect to taste the difference.
As for "Why not?", there's a simple answer: Because it promotes scientific ignorance and actually hurts the effort to feed people if they refuse to accept food that we can make more plentiful or more hardy by genetic engineering.
The Kindle Fire is nothing more than another cheap E-pad made in China! Slow, unresponsive and is not compatible with many Android Apps. At least the E-Pad I can get fro around $100 vs. the $200 Kindle Fire.
I've got one of those E-pads. The Kindle Fire is nothing like that. E-pads come with crappy app stores (e.g., SlideMe), have non-multitouch screens, don't come with good software pre-installed, and don't come from good companies with quality support.
If you want quality you need to fork over more money, or wait for another deal like the HP Touchpad to come around.
Have you read anything about the TouchPad? I used to be a WebOS user, but it's dead. Dead. And even when it was alive the TouchPad had like 300 apps total.
And waiting for a deal like the TouchPad to come along is a losing proposition. There's no $99 fire sale in any tablet's immediate future. Even if a company wanted to throw product away like that, people have already been burned by the $99 "deal", and won't be so quick to grab one up again.
I'm another one of those people that bought a Chinese tablet. (I wouldn't exactly call it an iPad knock-off, because it didn't even remotely appear to be trying to hold up to iPad standards.)
If all you wanted to do with it was run Android apps and browse the Web, you could. You could even root it to get the full Android Market. But it was big and bulky, had a non-multitouch screen, and the hardware was crap. (In particular, the touchscreen calibration was very inaccurate.)
I just don't think $99 buys a very good tablet. (You could make an argument for the TouchPad, but that was a fire sale, and in all likelihood, those TouchPads will soon be orphans.)
I don't know about anyone else but I actually got my diaspora invite yesterday (that I signed up for a year back).
Right there is the problem with Diaspora. Their sign-up process is ridiculous. I'm still waiting for my invite, and probably for just as long. At least Google let people invite their friends, when they were still doing the invite-only thing with Google+.
I used a Palm Pre (the original on Sprint) for two years. It was a decent phone. I didn't even mind the keyboard. What drove me away was the appalling lack of apps for it. Keep in mind: At the time I abandoned the platform, it didn't even have a Kindle application yet. (I'm not sure if any of the phones do, even now, even though I know the TouchPad does.) Palm and HP both dropped the ball on that. A beautiful OS with a dearth of apps might as well be an ugly OS, for all it matters.
Sell WebOS. Even if HP decides that the OS has a solid strategic future, their release of the TouchPad only to can it in under two months will raise significant doubts in the mind of customers and developers.
What makes you think WebOS would be an attractive buy for anyone? Palm and HP both bungled it. It's hard for me to imagine some other company picking up the ball and running with it.
"Developmentally disabled" isn't the same thing as "mentally retarded". You can have a developmental disability and not be intellectually impaired. Developmental disabilities can also be phyiscal, and they need not involve intellectual impairment. (They could involve cognitive or perceptual impairment.)
That's kind of what I was thinking, too. I remember reading years ago about experiments w/ HOX genes (I think) where they were able to get flies' limbs to grow out of their eyes and things like that. This doesn't seem like too much of an advance to me.
As someone else has said, you do not badmouth your bosses or your company among coworkers. And especially not online.
I think the real proof that this guy is no genius is that he doesn't even know enough about his company's own product to avoid a mistake like that. It actually takes effort to post something publicly in Google+.
What about someone who sacrifices their own life to save the lives of their children? What about soldiers who sacrifice their lives to save the lives of their unit? The promise of the afterlife may provide some comfort to someone who knows what they do will cost them their life, but it is not the only comfort or motivation for carrying out such a mission.
I'm not saying it's the only comfort. I'm saying it's part of the comfort. It's very difficult to picture a psychology that can envision a good outcome without being there to see that outcome in some sense. Human beings are like that. We want to have some way of knowing we did the thing we set out to do, even if it costs us our lives.
The state became God. If someone knows they're committing suicide, they need an afterlife to fall back on.
Even if you consider Soviet stalinism a religion, one thing it most certainly did not have was any notion of afterlife.
What it did have was the notion of "eternal memory" - death is death, but heroes are to be remembered and venerated (in fact, specifically in connection with WW2, this persists in Russia to this day).
That's a form of immortality, though. The point is, if someone thinks that death snuffs out their existence entirely, he/she isn't going to throw his/her life away. It's one thing to risk your life. It's quite another thing to toss it.
It's all true, but most Soviet soldiers did not sacrifice themselves in suicide missions "for God". They died "for Stalin and motherland".
Though cult of personality is also very much like a religion in practice...
There wasn't any real difference between the two. The state became God.
If someone knows they're committing suicide, they need an afterlife to fall back on.
Not true at all. Many scientific endeavors have public policy and ethical considerations that very much are matters that should be political. Not everything that can be done in the name of science should be done.
I should've said "necessarily". You certainly don't have to believe in an afterlife to be willing to die, but you certainly do to throw your life away.
Suicide attacks are always about religion, in some form. A person who doesn't believe in an afterlife finds ways to fight that don't involve his own death.
+1 If I could mod this up, I would.
Bin Laden was actually counting on the idea that we wouldn't retaliate. This idea that the past 10 years have all been part of his awesome plan is just a liberal hippie-minded peace-and-love myth.
The headline is misleading but if you read TFA you understand that we learned about some cool bacteria while we were busy finding them cute and cuddly.
AC
That's not terribly relevant to his point. His point is that we a) can't save every species, and b) probably shouldn't save every species.
Human beings are a species just like every other animal. We have adapted extremely well, which is why we're the controlling (if not exactly dominant) lifeform on the planet. We should do what we can to make sure we can still survive (which might mean trying to keep some species from going extinct), but the idea that we should drastically impact our own survival to save animals we have some emotional attachment to (even if that emotional attachment accidentally has some benefit somewhere down the line) is silly.
Clearly, not all organisms are needed. Species have gone extinct since long before we got here and will continue to go extinct long after we're gone.
I'm not saying we should just ravage the planet and not worry about it. I'm saying the idea that every species is precious and any species going extinct is a disaster is clearly, demonstrably false.
The ultimate issue is whether or not we can adapt to the planet's changes, not whether or not we can keep it from changing. We can't.
But if your phone number is listed in the phone book, anyone with an IQ above freezing (Celsius) can get your phone number from Google (or Bing, or Yahoo) trivially, without you ever having seen Google+.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you for that explanation. It makes some sense that they don't trust FB to be anonymous enough, but on the other hand, if you go off and start your own social network composed of people who think like you, how do you draw people to the cause?
You first, cretin.
If people taste the difference, it's psychological. It's because they expect to taste the difference.
As for "Why not?", there's a simple answer: Because it promotes scientific ignorance and actually hurts the effort to feed people if they refuse to accept food that we can make more plentiful or more hardy by genetic engineering.
...for bribery. These patents are so ridiculous that obviously they're bribing someone at the patent office to get them through.
The Kindle Fire is nothing more than another cheap E-pad made in China! Slow, unresponsive and is not compatible with many Android Apps. At least the E-Pad I can get fro around $100 vs. the $200 Kindle Fire.
I've got one of those E-pads. The Kindle Fire is nothing like that. E-pads come with crappy app stores (e.g., SlideMe), have non-multitouch screens, don't come with good software pre-installed, and don't come from good companies with quality support.
If you want quality you need to fork over more money, or wait for another deal like the HP Touchpad to come around.
Have you read anything about the TouchPad? I used to be a WebOS user, but it's dead. Dead. And even when it was alive the TouchPad had like 300 apps total.
And waiting for a deal like the TouchPad to come along is a losing proposition. There's no $99 fire sale in any tablet's immediate future. Even if a company wanted to throw product away like that, people have already been burned by the $99 "deal", and won't be so quick to grab one up again.
Nonsense.
CNet gave it a good review. Ditto for ZDnet. Engadget's review was critical, but came out positive for the Kindle Fire.
Every review I've read so far has said that the only people who will be disappointed w/ the Kindle Fire are those who expect an iPad 2 for $200.
I'm another one of those people that bought a Chinese tablet. (I wouldn't exactly call it an iPad knock-off, because it didn't even remotely appear to be trying to hold up to iPad standards.)
If all you wanted to do with it was run Android apps and browse the Web, you could. You could even root it to get the full Android Market. But it was big and bulky, had a non-multitouch screen, and the hardware was crap. (In particular, the touchscreen calibration was very inaccurate.)
I just don't think $99 buys a very good tablet. (You could make an argument for the TouchPad, but that was a fire sale, and in all likelihood, those TouchPads will soon be orphans.)
Right there is the problem with Diaspora. Their sign-up process is ridiculous. I'm still waiting for my invite, and probably for just as long. At least Google let people invite their friends, when they were still doing the invite-only thing with Google+.
I used a Palm Pre (the original on Sprint) for two years. It was a decent phone. I didn't even mind the keyboard. What drove me away was the appalling lack of apps for it. Keep in mind: At the time I abandoned the platform, it didn't even have a Kindle application yet. (I'm not sure if any of the phones do, even now, even though I know the TouchPad does.) Palm and HP both dropped the ball on that. A beautiful OS with a dearth of apps might as well be an ugly OS, for all it matters.
Sell WebOS. Even if HP decides that the OS has a solid strategic future, their release of the TouchPad only to can it in under two months will raise significant doubts in the mind of customers and developers.
What makes you think WebOS would be an attractive buy for anyone? Palm and HP both bungled it. It's hard for me to imagine some other company picking up the ball and running with it.
"Developmentally disabled" isn't the same thing as "mentally retarded". You can have a developmental disability and not be intellectually impaired. Developmental disabilities can also be phyiscal, and they need not involve intellectual impairment. (They could involve cognitive or perceptual impairment.)
That's kind of what I was thinking, too. I remember reading years ago about experiments w/ HOX genes (I think) where they were able to get flies' limbs to grow out of their eyes and things like that. This doesn't seem like too much of an advance to me.
I mean, what more can you ask for.
Professionalism?
Tact?
Discretion?
As someone else has said, you do not badmouth your bosses or your company among coworkers. And especially not online.
I think the real proof that this guy is no genius is that he doesn't even know enough about his company's own product to avoid a mistake like that. It actually takes effort to post something publicly in Google+.
...but not really unexpected. Apple does have good lawyers.
What about someone who sacrifices their own life to save the lives of their children? What about soldiers who sacrifice their lives to save the lives of their unit? The promise of the afterlife may provide some comfort to someone who knows what they do will cost them their life, but it is not the only comfort or motivation for carrying out such a mission.
I'm not saying it's the only comfort. I'm saying it's part of the comfort. It's very difficult to picture a psychology that can envision a good outcome without being there to see that outcome in some sense. Human beings are like that. We want to have some way of knowing we did the thing we set out to do, even if it costs us our lives.
The state became God. If someone knows they're committing suicide, they need an afterlife to fall back on.
Even if you consider Soviet stalinism a religion, one thing it most certainly did not have was any notion of afterlife.
What it did have was the notion of "eternal memory" - death is death, but heroes are to be remembered and venerated (in fact, specifically in connection with WW2, this persists in Russia to this day).
That's a form of immortality, though. The point is, if someone thinks that death snuffs out their existence entirely, he/she isn't going to throw his/her life away. It's one thing to risk your life. It's quite another thing to toss it.
It's all true, but most Soviet soldiers did not sacrifice themselves in suicide missions "for God". They died "for Stalin and motherland".
Though cult of personality is also very much like a religion in practice...
There wasn't any real difference between the two. The state became God. If someone knows they're committing suicide, they need an afterlife to fall back on.
Not true at all. Many scientific endeavors have public policy and ethical considerations that very much are matters that should be political. Not everything that can be done in the name of science should be done.
I should've said "necessarily". You certainly don't have to believe in an afterlife to be willing to die, but you certainly do to throw your life away.
Suicide attacks are always about religion, in some form. A person who doesn't believe in an afterlife finds ways to fight that don't involve his own death.
+1 If I could mod this up, I would. Bin Laden was actually counting on the idea that we wouldn't retaliate. This idea that the past 10 years have all been part of his awesome plan is just a liberal hippie-minded peace-and-love myth.
The headline is misleading but if you read TFA you understand that we learned about some cool bacteria while we were busy finding them cute and cuddly.
AC
That's not terribly relevant to his point. His point is that we a) can't save every species, and b) probably shouldn't save every species. Human beings are a species just like every other animal. We have adapted extremely well, which is why we're the controlling (if not exactly dominant) lifeform on the planet. We should do what we can to make sure we can still survive (which might mean trying to keep some species from going extinct), but the idea that we should drastically impact our own survival to save animals we have some emotional attachment to (even if that emotional attachment accidentally has some benefit somewhere down the line) is silly.
Clearly, not all organisms are needed. Species have gone extinct since long before we got here and will continue to go extinct long after we're gone. I'm not saying we should just ravage the planet and not worry about it. I'm saying the idea that every species is precious and any species going extinct is a disaster is clearly, demonstrably false. The ultimate issue is whether or not we can adapt to the planet's changes, not whether or not we can keep it from changing. We can't.
But if your phone number is listed in the phone book, anyone with an IQ above freezing (Celsius) can get your phone number from Google (or Bing, or Yahoo) trivially, without you ever having seen Google+.
Stopping the lolcats madness is easy, I think. Just create a Lolcat circle and dump those people there, or uncircle them altogether. :)