It's there for a purpose. It's to give the people with normally nothing better to do occupied. It's to give the dregs of society a way to feel good about their job, by giving them the ability to point to somebody and have them pulled out of the line for a cavity search. Most of them don't care. But if they see that your skin is a color they don't like, that's when they'll come after you like hawks on a rabbit.
That, and it's to appease the stupid masses. Since they're usually dumb enough to accept what the television says, and the television can say anything that isn't untrue, then it's important politicians don't do anything that the television can say is unsafe, or the stupid masses will revolt and vote in the other guy.
A functioning democracy requires a knowledgeable populace. A country where people are anti-intellectual is not one that can sustain a functioning democracy.
The cost overruns pretty much describe every government project. Look at the 2nd ave. subway in NYC. It was delayed since the 60's, suddenly restarted a couple of years ago, and now they're talking about delays again.
But the thing about going 35MPH 'cause somebody's going to be scared of little Timmy running onto the tracks, that's Cali for ya.
Besides, this bullet train isn't going to solve any traffic problems. SF and SD are so far away, flights from SF to SD will still be cheaper, faster, and probably more reliable.
If they want to solve the traffic problems with trains, then it's time to stop building suburbs and start squeezing people together again. Or, they could just rip out the middle two lanes in every major highway and build some rails there, with footpaths or underground tunnels to reach the station in the middle and a parking lot at the other end. Trains work best where population density is highest. At least one end has to have everything within walking distance. Otherwise, people'll just drive.
As a programmer, B is far more appealing, if it was ever possible. I mean, look how boring Spore is, while the Game of Life is so interesting. Just imagine that on steroids.
And the increase in speed at which treatments have been coming out have also resulted in many more errors and mistakes. Call it corporate greed, but it amounts to the same thing. Sometimes, it's better to take things slowly.
Of course, I firmly believe in a midpoint, where a drug doesn't get released to the general public, but if a consenting individual wants it, can get it, perhaps at a discount or for free. Sort of like an extended clinical trial.
No, because mathematics is a world of abstraction and precision.
We live in a world of approximation.
Ever hear the old joke about two runners, the one behind always halfway closer to the one ahead at every interval? From a mathematician's standpoint, the runner behind will never catch the runner ahead. From a physicist's standpoint, when the runner behind gets close enough, that's sufficient.
So no, things in the real world cannot be described by maths, because they're too precise. I mean, there's a special symbol called PI used to represent the missing length of a perfect circle, which is irrational and will never be precisely defined. Yet, we can, in the real world, take a compass and draw a circle that's damn near perfect, and it's damn good enough. Thus any mathematical representation of a real-world object wouldn't be sufficient, because it wouldn't be descriptive enough mathematically to take into account the real world imperfections.
Or, you can put it this way: Copy and paste a lot, and you'll start to see the occasional data corruption. It's usually a bit flip here or there, but occasionally. In the old days, only the flipped bits that don't matter get passed on, so functionally, there's no difference between a true copy and paste.
Now, copy and paste a shitload, and you'll see lots of data corruption, but independently, and in no particular pattern. Occasionally, that bit flip turns something that says true into something that says false, or turns 110 into 111. Then suddenly, the execution path changes a bit. And even more rarely, that execution path produces something interesting, because data and code are stored together and data can be misinterpreted as code with a bit flip and vise versa (and we know how dangerous that is).
Copy and pasting is cellular division. It's not reproduction. Copy and pasting a lot is the creation and maintenance of an organism. So in our lifetime, we copy and past billions of times. Imagine the sheer amount of diversity if every time your program ran, some bits flipped, but it may have an effect or it may not. You can think of sexual reproduction as code that writes itself, but each parent writes every other bit.
Now, add natural selection to it, whereby there are outside variables that result in only a subset of variations to continue to reproduce. Since the world's climate is pretty diverse, then the programs running in different parts of the world would quickly be very diverse. After a while, you'll end up with a set of pretty varied programs. After billions of years, you might even end up with consciousness.
even several million years after we split off from our common ancestor, we were still occasionally getting it on with them and making babies. It was discussed right here on Slashdot some time ago.
Funny, I don't remember an article about slashdotters getting it on with monkeys...
Basically, Wave is good for brainstorm sessions. But most people I know are perfectly happy to do that the old fashioned way: lock everybody up in a conference room and don't let anyone out until a certain goal is met.
Some ads are there to sell you a product. Some are just there to create mindshare. Word of mouth is great, but how do you get the initial early adopters? Advertisement of course.
People don't hate ads, they hate intrusive ads. They hate stupid ads. They hate ads that waste their time. But everybody loves watching super bowl ads. These are the cool ads that you talk about at work over the water cooler or among friends. Ads aren't bad in and of themselves. Ads are bad when they don't serve a purpose, be it informative or entertainment.
Digital ads are mostly intrusive. This includes online ads, and product placement in games. So people don't like them. But Google's done very successfully for this very reason, and their ads are targetted. Their ads are neither intrusive, nor do they lack a purpose. In fact, because the ads are targetted, the ads can be useful.
Mindshare ads for the online space though, need to be rethought.
There is freedom, and there is security. They are typically diametrically opposed, though if you get somebody smart, you can achieve both to a certain degree.
Some of us value freedom over security.
It seems that there is neither freedom nor security in Japan. It seems like people want security, but the government wants to grant them more freedom. So it becomes half-assed, and nobody has anything.
You can't be forced to turn it over. Everybody else around you can be subpoenaed for information, and your possessions can be siezed as the police come upon them, but if you have papers in a hole ten feet under the ground in a plot of forest somewhere, you can't be forced to reveal the location of that hole.
There is knowing someone, and then there is knowing of someone. GP is talking about the former, you are talking about the latter.
Knowing a person gives that person's existence value to you. Prior to knowing that person, their existence has no value. Even knowing of that person gives no value, as your only exposure is through anecdotes and stories. But once you've been exposed, and that person has likewise acknowledged you, then that person has value. It's very difficult to do harm to somebody you know, and the better you know a person, the harder it is to do harm to that person. In fact, this can extend to two degrees of separation when you're close to the person. And just as you wouldn't throw your fancy gaming rig out the window for anything but a really good reason, you'd need a really damn good reason to harm somebody you know well.
Most killing falls under crimes of passion. After the act, whether successful or not, the perpetrator is as devastated as the victim (should it be unsuccessful).
There are obvious exceptions. Psychopaths and sociopaths have no such inhibitions. Value does not get created when somebody acknowledges them. Value is created when they affect that person, usually adversely. And that is why they are capable of hurting the people they interact with.
Unfortunately, most political leaders are probably sociopathic to some degree, simply because being sociopathic makes getting to that position so much easier. That, and they're usually so removed from the everyday, average citizen that we're just faceless people to them. And you wonder why politicians can screw us over so easily for some special interest money.
War's a pretty nasty thing all around. Morals blur in wartime. It's why so many soldiers come out with PTSD. It's not a sane thing, for a person to willingly kill another person.
There is no humanity in warfare. War is humanity as its ugliest, basest, most primal state. We like to think we are better than that, that we are capable of reason, but war is proof that we are not. There is no excuse for killing, because the act isn't excusable. Killing a soldier is no different from killing a civilian. We've used reasoning to convince ourselves otherwise, but I don't think that justification holds up internally.
Even in self defense, it's a terrible thing. Self defense is post-justification. Nobody sane uses it to justify killing beforehand. Yet, that's exactly what soldiers do. They're asked to justify killing the enemy soldiers before actually killing them, but it doesn't make sense to our innate humanity. After all, how can somebody who hasn't made any threatening motions (even if they're carrying a weapon) be threatening?
Various cultures historically have used different means to overcome this hurdle. In particular, the most common thing to do is to paoint the enemy has subhuman, so therefore killing the enemy isn't actually killing another person. In the process, the soldiers subject to this conditioning see everybody on the other side, civilian or military, as less than human, and treats them as such.
And I haven't even begun to talk about when civilian and military lines start blurring a la guerrilla warfare.
I believe the objects of your frustrations lie in that direction. Since you're not getting the joke, I might as well water it down and spell it out for you:
I find it hard to believe that: 1) You're a girl AND 2) You play video games AND 3) You're posting on slashdot
Congratulations on catching parts 1 and 2, but the punchline is at part 3. And, there's an easter egg with your account being relatively new, but that's something I don't expect too many people to catch.
And if that's not clear enough, I can very much believe that there exists girls who enjoy video games (I know of quite a few personally), but I'd think they'd have far better things lined up to do than post on slashdot and associate with a bunch of antisocial or socially inept, overweight, middle age nerds.
Yes, a 70-year old does impart greater wisdom than a 60-year old. Yes, an 80-year old does impart greater wisdom than a 70-year old. Yes, there's diminishing returns. But on the other hand, you can think of it this way: somebody's who's made it to 80-years old has to be doing something especially right, while everybody else is dying at 70. It's not diminishing returns, it's survival of the fittest, and longer the person lives while remaining mentally competent, the fitter the person is.
My point has nothing to do with social differences (and there weren't very a great deal of differences in social values until very recently). Humans are social creatures. We are unable to rely on our instincts (we don't have very many), so we became social so that we can pass on our survival knowledge through other means. Remember that knowledge comes about through repeated observation, and the more repititions, the more solid knowledge is. The older a person is, the more that person has survived, and the greater and more valuable the knowledge.
This is a workaround. It is the modder complying with the C&D, and working around Google's restrictions by not including the closed-source apps. What it isn't is the modder trying to "outmaneuver" Google.
FWIW, a compromise would involve some sort of mutual agreement between the two parties whom originally set conflicting terms. In this case, only Google has set the terms, and only the modder has agreed to those terms. The opposite hasn't happened, since the modder's ability to mod Android is separate from the matter at hand.
Now, if Google and the modder agreed to allow the distribution of the closed source apps with the mod in exchange for certain concessions by the modder, then it'd be a compromise.
And don't get me started on how ridiculously long-winded the summary is. By the second sentence, I was thinking, it's a summary, not the actual friggin article. Get to the point already!
And exactly how would royalties from copyrighted works benefit his daughter? That the rest of his "estate" was able to so effectively wipe her off the face of history using the copyright cudgel seems to invalidate your point entirely.
Slashdot Mirror
It's there for a purpose. It's to give the people with normally nothing better to do occupied. It's to give the dregs of society a way to feel good about their job, by giving them the ability to point to somebody and have them pulled out of the line for a cavity search. Most of them don't care. But if they see that your skin is a color they don't like, that's when they'll come after you like hawks on a rabbit.
That, and it's to appease the stupid masses. Since they're usually dumb enough to accept what the television says, and the television can say anything that isn't untrue, then it's important politicians don't do anything that the television can say is unsafe, or the stupid masses will revolt and vote in the other guy.
A functioning democracy requires a knowledgeable populace. A country where people are anti-intellectual is not one that can sustain a functioning democracy.
The cost overruns pretty much describe every government project. Look at the 2nd ave. subway in NYC. It was delayed since the 60's, suddenly restarted a couple of years ago, and now they're talking about delays again.
But the thing about going 35MPH 'cause somebody's going to be scared of little Timmy running onto the tracks, that's Cali for ya.
Besides, this bullet train isn't going to solve any traffic problems. SF and SD are so far away, flights from SF to SD will still be cheaper, faster, and probably more reliable.
If they want to solve the traffic problems with trains, then it's time to stop building suburbs and start squeezing people together again. Or, they could just rip out the middle two lanes in every major highway and build some rails there, with footpaths or underground tunnels to reach the station in the middle and a parking lot at the other end. Trains work best where population density is highest. At least one end has to have everything within walking distance. Otherwise, people'll just drive.
As a programmer, B is far more appealing, if it was ever possible. I mean, look how boring Spore is, while the Game of Life is so interesting. Just imagine that on steroids.
I was actually curious as to when Hershey acquired Mars.
Everybody's body is different in a variety of little ways. Yours is probably among the small percentage that doesn't take to it.
And the increase in speed at which treatments have been coming out have also resulted in many more errors and mistakes. Call it corporate greed, but it amounts to the same thing. Sometimes, it's better to take things slowly.
Of course, I firmly believe in a midpoint, where a drug doesn't get released to the general public, but if a consenting individual wants it, can get it, perhaps at a discount or for free. Sort of like an extended clinical trial.
You'd probably still need the chemo immediately, but so far, this sounds more like it'd prevent a recurrance over a long period of time.
No, because mathematics is a world of abstraction and precision.
We live in a world of approximation.
Ever hear the old joke about two runners, the one behind always halfway closer to the one ahead at every interval? From a mathematician's standpoint, the runner behind will never catch the runner ahead. From a physicist's standpoint, when the runner behind gets close enough, that's sufficient.
So no, things in the real world cannot be described by maths, because they're too precise. I mean, there's a special symbol called PI used to represent the missing length of a perfect circle, which is irrational and will never be precisely defined. Yet, we can, in the real world, take a compass and draw a circle that's damn near perfect, and it's damn good enough. Thus any mathematical representation of a real-world object wouldn't be sufficient, because it wouldn't be descriptive enough mathematically to take into account the real world imperfections.
Or, you can put it this way: Copy and paste a lot, and you'll start to see the occasional data corruption. It's usually a bit flip here or there, but occasionally. In the old days, only the flipped bits that don't matter get passed on, so functionally, there's no difference between a true copy and paste.
Now, copy and paste a shitload, and you'll see lots of data corruption, but independently, and in no particular pattern. Occasionally, that bit flip turns something that says true into something that says false, or turns 110 into 111. Then suddenly, the execution path changes a bit. And even more rarely, that execution path produces something interesting, because data and code are stored together and data can be misinterpreted as code with a bit flip and vise versa (and we know how dangerous that is).
Copy and pasting is cellular division. It's not reproduction. Copy and pasting a lot is the creation and maintenance of an organism. So in our lifetime, we copy and past billions of times. Imagine the sheer amount of diversity if every time your program ran, some bits flipped, but it may have an effect or it may not. You can think of sexual reproduction as code that writes itself, but each parent writes every other bit.
Now, add natural selection to it, whereby there are outside variables that result in only a subset of variations to continue to reproduce. Since the world's climate is pretty diverse, then the programs running in different parts of the world would quickly be very diverse. After a while, you'll end up with a set of pretty varied programs. After billions of years, you might even end up with consciousness.
Pictures, or it didn't happen.
Yeah, and they have free healthcare, those commie bastards.
even several million years after we split off from our common ancestor, we were still occasionally getting it on with them and making babies. It was discussed right here on Slashdot some time ago.
Funny, I don't remember an article about slashdotters getting it on with monkeys...
Basically, Wave is good for brainstorm sessions. But most people I know are perfectly happy to do that the old fashioned way: lock everybody up in a conference room and don't let anyone out until a certain goal is met.
Some ads are there to sell you a product. Some are just there to create mindshare. Word of mouth is great, but how do you get the initial early adopters? Advertisement of course.
People don't hate ads, they hate intrusive ads. They hate stupid ads. They hate ads that waste their time. But everybody loves watching super bowl ads. These are the cool ads that you talk about at work over the water cooler or among friends. Ads aren't bad in and of themselves. Ads are bad when they don't serve a purpose, be it informative or entertainment.
Digital ads are mostly intrusive. This includes online ads, and product placement in games. So people don't like them. But Google's done very successfully for this very reason, and their ads are targetted. Their ads are neither intrusive, nor do they lack a purpose. In fact, because the ads are targetted, the ads can be useful.
Mindshare ads for the online space though, need to be rethought.
- eating of an innocent pastor by police.
I'll bet he was claiming to be the Son at the time.
There is freedom, and there is security. They are typically diametrically opposed, though if you get somebody smart, you can achieve both to a certain degree.
Some of us value freedom over security.
It seems that there is neither freedom nor security in Japan. It seems like people want security, but the government wants to grant them more freedom. So it becomes half-assed, and nobody has anything.
You can't be forced to turn it over. Everybody else around you can be subpoenaed for information, and your possessions can be siezed as the police come upon them, but if you have papers in a hole ten feet under the ground in a plot of forest somewhere, you can't be forced to reveal the location of that hole.
And filesharers. Don't forget the filesharers!
And they're all linked by an intricate network of tubes, which are getting clogged up.
There is knowing someone, and then there is knowing of someone. GP is talking about the former, you are talking about the latter.
Knowing a person gives that person's existence value to you. Prior to knowing that person, their existence has no value. Even knowing of that person gives no value, as your only exposure is through anecdotes and stories. But once you've been exposed, and that person has likewise acknowledged you, then that person has value. It's very difficult to do harm to somebody you know, and the better you know a person, the harder it is to do harm to that person. In fact, this can extend to two degrees of separation when you're close to the person. And just as you wouldn't throw your fancy gaming rig out the window for anything but a really good reason, you'd need a really damn good reason to harm somebody you know well.
Most killing falls under crimes of passion. After the act, whether successful or not, the perpetrator is as devastated as the victim (should it be unsuccessful).
There are obvious exceptions. Psychopaths and sociopaths have no such inhibitions. Value does not get created when somebody acknowledges them. Value is created when they affect that person, usually adversely. And that is why they are capable of hurting the people they interact with.
Unfortunately, most political leaders are probably sociopathic to some degree, simply because being sociopathic makes getting to that position so much easier. That, and they're usually so removed from the everyday, average citizen that we're just faceless people to them. And you wonder why politicians can screw us over so easily for some special interest money.
War's a pretty nasty thing all around. Morals blur in wartime. It's why so many soldiers come out with PTSD. It's not a sane thing, for a person to willingly kill another person.
There is no humanity in warfare. War is humanity as its ugliest, basest, most primal state. We like to think we are better than that, that we are capable of reason, but war is proof that we are not. There is no excuse for killing, because the act isn't excusable. Killing a soldier is no different from killing a civilian. We've used reasoning to convince ourselves otherwise, but I don't think that justification holds up internally.
Even in self defense, it's a terrible thing. Self defense is post-justification. Nobody sane uses it to justify killing beforehand. Yet, that's exactly what soldiers do. They're asked to justify killing the enemy soldiers before actually killing them, but it doesn't make sense to our innate humanity. After all, how can somebody who hasn't made any threatening motions (even if they're carrying a weapon) be threatening?
Various cultures historically have used different means to overcome this hurdle. In particular, the most common thing to do is to paoint the enemy has subhuman, so therefore killing the enemy isn't actually killing another person. In the process, the soldiers subject to this conditioning see everybody on the other side, civilian or military, as less than human, and treats them as such.
And I haven't even begun to talk about when civilian and military lines start blurring a la guerrilla warfare.
I believe the objects of your frustrations lie in that direction. Since you're not getting the joke, I might as well water it down and spell it out for you:
I find it hard to believe that:
1) You're a girl AND
2) You play video games AND
3) You're posting on slashdot
Congratulations on catching parts 1 and 2, but the punchline is at part 3. And, there's an easter egg with your account being relatively new, but that's something I don't expect too many people to catch.
And if that's not clear enough, I can very much believe that there exists girls who enjoy video games (I know of quite a few personally), but I'd think they'd have far better things lined up to do than post on slashdot and associate with a bunch of antisocial or socially inept, overweight, middle age nerds.
Yes, a 70-year old does impart greater wisdom than a 60-year old. Yes, an 80-year old does impart greater wisdom than a 70-year old. Yes, there's diminishing returns. But on the other hand, you can think of it this way: somebody's who's made it to 80-years old has to be doing something especially right, while everybody else is dying at 70. It's not diminishing returns, it's survival of the fittest, and longer the person lives while remaining mentally competent, the fitter the person is.
My point has nothing to do with social differences (and there weren't very a great deal of differences in social values until very recently). Humans are social creatures. We are unable to rely on our instincts (we don't have very many), so we became social so that we can pass on our survival knowledge through other means. Remember that knowledge comes about through repeated observation, and the more repititions, the more solid knowledge is. The older a person is, the more that person has survived, and the greater and more valuable the knowledge.
This is a workaround. It is the modder complying with the C&D, and working around Google's restrictions by not including the closed-source apps. What it isn't is the modder trying to "outmaneuver" Google.
FWIW, a compromise would involve some sort of mutual agreement between the two parties whom originally set conflicting terms. In this case, only Google has set the terms, and only the modder has agreed to those terms. The opposite hasn't happened, since the modder's ability to mod Android is separate from the matter at hand.
Now, if Google and the modder agreed to allow the distribution of the closed source apps with the mod in exchange for certain concessions by the modder, then it'd be a compromise.
And don't get me started on how ridiculously long-winded the summary is. By the second sentence, I was thinking, it's a summary, not the actual friggin article. Get to the point already!
And exactly how would royalties from copyrighted works benefit his daughter? That the rest of his "estate" was able to so effectively wipe her off the face of history using the copyright cudgel seems to invalidate your point entirely.