f I lived next door I frankly wouldn't give a crap how Eco-friendly the sea of wood chips next door was - if it looked like crap and it was next to my house I would be pissed off. I'm all for creative ways to help the environment and save money - but not if it means violating ordinances that exist for very good reason.
It's none of your goddamn business what goes on in your neighbors property. None. Laws made to that effect are either communist (enforcing a community good over personal freedom) or they are authoritarian (I'm gonna tell you how to live, and you better like it).
My beef with this is that ordinances like this aren't exactly put to a public vote - they're voted on by a bunch of blow-hards who see themselves as the second coming of Martha Stewart or Napoleon Bonaparte. Furthermore, they're generally supported by blow-hards who argue for free markets, freedom and personal liberty in every other circumstance that doesn't cost them money. These things are short-sighted and just plain wrong on so many levels that I'm amazed people who think that way managed to find their way to the meeting where the vote was held.
The issue is in the article - they keep mixing city and county laws and officials as well. If I were a betting man, I'd say that this is the city of Irvine in Orange County. It's the only place in the area that I know that looks like it's located in Oregon, rather than a semi-arid desert. Not to mention that it also has insane laws designed to keep out low-earning immigrants and single people. Forcing people to have a water-guzzling lawn sounds about right for them.
We live in a country that is supposed to cherish free speech, not stifle it in case it harms the business model of a company. We live in a country that is supposed to encourage the free expression of ideas — not lock it up and take it down because one company doesn't know how to adapt its business model. We should never be silencing videos because they might infringe on copyright."
I think it's quite obvious what's going on. The new sacred cows of America are not free speech, individual pursuit of happiness and safety from tyranny, but corporate profits and dictating morals to others.
Sad, really. Well, there's still hope that maybe the US won't make Churchill into a liar when he said that America always does the right thing - after it tried everything else. But it's not looking good.
I can understand why diplomats tend to like their meetings and discussions to be private. It's a hard enough dance between a few select people in a government that it doesn't need to be complicated by the public getting involved.
However, in this case, this is hardly a private conversation. Business is involved, pretty much all the world's governments are involved, and the only group not at the table is the largest and the one with the most to lose: actual people. I'd like to see what kind of justification politicians will come up with to argue that corporations can make suggestions, governments can provide input, but god forbid the people actually have a say in the way this sausage is made.
Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure that the end of the Internet as we know it is near. Too many organizations with too much clout have too many reasons to see the current Internet go away. I don't know what will come in its place, but I'm pretty sure I'll look back at the 90s/early 00s with nostalgia.
And now they are getting complaints that they are too successful? Bunch of communists.
Spot on. It seems to me that MS primary complaint is that Google's product is so good that they can't catch up. Really? What happened to Capitalism? Free market? Not to mention that I don't buy the argument, for two reasons.
One, the basic algorithm had nothing to do with what users click on after they search, and I don't know how much weight that gives to links now. My guess is: not all that much. I frequently click on multiple links in a search, and, if I'm not happy, I change the query. I doubt Google's analysis of user behavior is that sophisticated that it can distinguish between a successful and a failed search.
Two, the long-tail argument is nonsense in the context of a monopoly. Them being successful in rare queries does not translate to being successful overall. On the contrary: when I test out a search engine, I use common queries where I know the results already. So the engine better be successful on the common stuff - where apparently, there's no network effect that Google can exploit.
I'm not shocked that MS is trying that bullshit, but I'm kinda shocked and disappointed by how many techies buy that argument.
Nonsense. The search engine market is the closest thing people are ever going to get to a perfect market: no barrier to switch, and the quality of the service is directly visible in the search results themselves. From a business perspective, the barrier to entry is high, but Google has absolutely no network effect it can exploit to keep people on its search engine. Especially now with the configurable search box in modern browsers.
Technically, you could build a better search engine in your bedroom, demonstrate it to a few VCs and start gaining market share as you build your datacenter. And there's nothing Google can do to kill you off outside of buying you out. It can't lower its prices, it can't offer cheaper tie-ins, it can do absolutely nothing. As a result, even if the entire world would run all of its search queries through Google, it would be a monopoly that is broken by the next company to do search better.
Finally, there are two things that could kill Google instantly, even if it has the entire search engine market on lock-down: a browser that doesn't accept a connection to Google (or breaks the Google site) and an ISP that refuses to transmit packets to and from Google. Now who plays in those markets, and is as close as possible to a monopoly? Yep, you guessed it - Microsoft and ATT/Comcast. See where the difference is? Google might have a monopoly, but even if that would be true (and it certainly isn't), it would be a monopoly based on users wanting to use Google. Compare that to Microsoft and ATT/Comcast, where users frequently don't have a choice at all.
The beauty of the internet is that you can get information about everything. The problem is that you can get the information about everything. This means that Slashdot is a perfectly good way of getting information, along with all of the standard research and government agencies dealing with this. I'd look at Slashdot as a secondary source, in case there's someone checking it that day who knows what he/she's talking about.
Not to mention that it's a question that's being frequently asked in the media these days, and I trust Slashdot posters more than I trust the media. Largely because I can read the equivalent of 150 MSM articles on the topic in the course of a single Slashdot thread.
The people who approved this contract ought to be drawn and quartered. Not only did the guy get paid royally for his work, he gets to keep the IP without actually contributing anything to its maintenance. I couldn't find anything about how much the upkeep is, but it seems to me that if the guy wants to keep control over his work, he ought to maintain it himself, along with the park in which it stands. If he doesn't want to do that, he clearly is not interested in keeping control of it.
You're right in that. However, the general stance that this means that conservation is a wild goose chase is still ridiculous. Either the situation follows some basic economic principles, and then the economy is strengthened, or a minor miracle occurs, and resource utilization is indeed reduced. Either way, the society wins. It boggles my mind when I hear some small-government, free market type people argue that conservation will make things worse.
As for my post being modded down - I find it interesting that the general mod trends actually match very well with the overall mood of the US.
I know that you think you're making a legitimate point.... however, your rephrasing of his comment is every bit as ridiculous as what he said.
No. I'm trying to transform his statement into something that is even vaguely related to the point I was trying to make. The fact that it is still ridiculous is more an indicator of exactly how retarded the initial statement was.
If we were burning beach-sand at the same rate that we're burning oil, we'd run out of sand a LOT sooner than we'd run out of oil.
If you're arguing that the resource in question is sand on a beach, then yes, potentially. On the other hand, if it's just silicon and its various forms that you're looking for, then no.
You do realize that asking questions is trivial? And that without answers, questions are completely useless? It's one thing to question something, it's something else entirely to argue that a valuable service is provided by merely asking a question.
Uh.... I'm confused. Are you arguing that conserving materials is a badly thought out idea? How so? Or are you just generally pissed off about badly thought ideas? If it's latter, sorry to hear that - there really can't be any group of people left in the world you don't hate, as there isn't a single one that has never proposed a single bad idea.
As for the Gore dig, I always thought that was sour grapes. You can't tell me that if you had enough money where you can create a business that allows you to pay yourself, you wouldn't do it. Everyone's just mad that they don't have the resources to set up a gig like that.
No. It's like saying that we should clean all the sand off our feet before leaving the beach, or there'll be less sand on the beach for others to use.
And since when is oil as common and cheap as sand on the beach? Man. Comments like this wouldn't worry me so much if they wouldn't track so well with what the average Joe Sixpack and Dick Politician says.
Good grief. At least know how to read. I'm not talking about increasing efficiency - I'm talking about using less. And the Wikipedia article itself states that Jevon's Paradox ONLY applies to technological improvements. If you're so high and mighty about being a results driven person, you should seriously pay more attention to the details of the situation.
And just for the sake of argument, what would you rather have - a situation where you can power 10 widgets with a given unit of energy, or a situation where you can power 100 gadgets with that same unit? If nothing else, productivity goes up as technological efficiency goes up. And that can lead to a host of new solutions.
Arguing that conservation has no benefits is about the most ridiculous argument in economics - right up there with the question why people would walk on escalators.
Why is it BS to turn down the radio? Because it's only a small percentage decrease? Newsflash: any decrease helps. I don't understand this general derision that is specific to Americans when the topic turns to conservation. Yes, one little change by itself won't change the world, but then again, nothing will to that. Instead, it will be a combination of lots of small, little things. Maybe that's the reason: Americans are singularly fascinated by the one big thing - everything has to be historic, unique; a silver bullet in every box of Cheerios....
Which global warming model predicted massive blizzards in the northern hemisphere in 2010?
None. Because no global climate model predicts local occurrences in a single season. What they do predict though is that increases in temperatures will lead to more snowfall in certain areas as what would normally be dry cold air is now warm, moist air hitting a cold front. Which leads to snow. That's just basic physics.
The only problem is that no politician, no media outlet and the vast majority of the public isn't interested in phrases like "there is a 70% chance that global yearly average temperatures will increase between 1c and 2C in the next 50years (numbers subject to change as models and data is refined)". IF you want people's attention, you gotta talk about all polar bears dying in the next 10 years. Sad, but true.
Rule of thumb: there is no provable premise in science. The only thing that exists is data that either supports your claim or doesn't. Also note that data that doesn't support your claim is not the same as disproving your claim. In that context, settled science just means that no one has been able to do a generally accepted experiment that contradicts the major ideas in a field.
I wish that people would know just these two things before talking about science.
The future obviously does not exist. The past? Doesn't exist either. Hence, only this present moment exists.
You can't even prove that the past existed. The only thing we have is present-moment memories, etc. I remember typing "Prove me wrong" but my memory is hardly reliable. If thirty seconds ago you spilled milk on your pants, all you have now is wet, soggy pants, not any "chain of events". Even if you filmed it, all you have is the present-moment series of images, not some actual piece of the past.
Only this present moment exists. All else is wild speculation and fantasy. Time does not exist.
And this is why Philosophy students have a bad rep. Some think that a semantic argument somehow creates a truth about the world. In the meantime, the rest of the world just continues to use words the way that they were intended to be used.
A broken clock is right twice a day, throwing darts a board with stock quotes will yield a winner, 100 million people playing the lotto often enough yields a winner at some point.... It's all about statistics. When you're predictive power is above random, we'll have another talk. When it's indistinguishable from random, it's just.... random.
I left my blackberry in my pants once when I put them in the washer. The phone was on during the entire cycle. I feared the worst, but put them on the heater for a day, turned it on, and.... it worked. Ok, so for the next two weeks or so buttons would randomly press themselves, and login was occasionally tedious, but it worked - and still does. I'm still pretty amazed that it didn't completely short it out.
Oh, and to you nitwit support people who gaze at that stupid little humidity strip and tell me that it is my fault the phone is crashing all the time.... go hump a lamp post. That strip turns pink when it's just somewhat humid outside. Since submerging a phone in water for about 20 minutes doesn't kill it, I'd like you to support your piece of crap hardware like you promised you would.
I don't know. I'm hugely suspicious of this, for two reasons: Congress has a nasty habit of not understanding the technological ramifications of their legislation. And when they do make legislation where they understand the ramifications, it's generally for the purpose of making sure that corporations don't have their business models cut out from underneath them.
While on the face of it, the bill seems alright (don't hide what your program does), I don't understand why it's specifically targeting P2P programs. Wouldn't it make sense to have the bill simply say "software should never be installed without the users consent" and "software should not be misleading in their activities"? What bothers me is the insistence from the two politicians that P2P programs somehow present an inherent privacy and security risk. I'm putting on my tinfoil hat here for a second, but I'm guessing that this has to be read in the larger context that P2P software is bad in general, and should be tightly regulated.
I don't like where this is going. As the bill reads, it won't solve any problem that currently exists, and assumes something dangerous: that a specific type of software is somehow worse than others. I'm expecting that these two politicians will soon propose bills that restrict peer-to-peer connectivity in general (goodbye net neutrality) and legislate what software can and cannot do (goodbye software startups written by a single person).
One word: convenience. Better battery life means I can leave it disconnected longer. I don't worry about drivers, screen resolution (or at least, I better not) or fiddling with program configuration.
Here are three things though that are an absolute must for me, and why I'm not waiting in line for it: it has to multitask (with IM's running in the background), the battery has to last for a transatlantic flight in video mode and the video experience has to be seamless.
Otherwise no go. But if I ever want my mom to get on Skype, it'll be via an iPad only.
Slashdot Mirror
f I lived next door I frankly wouldn't give a crap how Eco-friendly the sea of wood chips next door was - if it looked like crap and it was next to my house I would be pissed off. I'm all for creative ways to help the environment and save money - but not if it means violating ordinances that exist for very good reason.
It's none of your goddamn business what goes on in your neighbors property. None. Laws made to that effect are either communist (enforcing a community good over personal freedom) or they are authoritarian (I'm gonna tell you how to live, and you better like it).
My beef with this is that ordinances like this aren't exactly put to a public vote - they're voted on by a bunch of blow-hards who see themselves as the second coming of Martha Stewart or Napoleon Bonaparte. Furthermore, they're generally supported by blow-hards who argue for free markets, freedom and personal liberty in every other circumstance that doesn't cost them money. These things are short-sighted and just plain wrong on so many levels that I'm amazed people who think that way managed to find their way to the meeting where the vote was held.
The issue is in the article - they keep mixing city and county laws and officials as well. If I were a betting man, I'd say that this is the city of Irvine in Orange County. It's the only place in the area that I know that looks like it's located in Oregon, rather than a semi-arid desert. Not to mention that it also has insane laws designed to keep out low-earning immigrants and single people. Forcing people to have a water-guzzling lawn sounds about right for them.
We live in a country that is supposed to cherish free speech, not stifle it in case it harms the business model of a company. We live in a country that is supposed to encourage the free expression of ideas — not lock it up and take it down because one company doesn't know how to adapt its business model. We should never be silencing videos because they might infringe on copyright."
I think it's quite obvious what's going on. The new sacred cows of America are not free speech, individual pursuit of happiness and safety from tyranny, but corporate profits and dictating morals to others.
Sad, really. Well, there's still hope that maybe the US won't make Churchill into a liar when he said that America always does the right thing - after it tried everything else. But it's not looking good.
He's working really hard to turn that joke into serious business.
I can understand why diplomats tend to like their meetings and discussions to be private. It's a hard enough dance between a few select people in a government that it doesn't need to be complicated by the public getting involved.
However, in this case, this is hardly a private conversation. Business is involved, pretty much all the world's governments are involved, and the only group not at the table is the largest and the one with the most to lose: actual people. I'd like to see what kind of justification politicians will come up with to argue that corporations can make suggestions, governments can provide input, but god forbid the people actually have a say in the way this sausage is made.
Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure that the end of the Internet as we know it is near. Too many organizations with too much clout have too many reasons to see the current Internet go away. I don't know what will come in its place, but I'm pretty sure I'll look back at the 90s/early 00s with nostalgia.
And now they are getting complaints that they are too successful? Bunch of communists.
Spot on. It seems to me that MS primary complaint is that Google's product is so good that they can't catch up. Really? What happened to Capitalism? Free market? Not to mention that I don't buy the argument, for two reasons.
One, the basic algorithm had nothing to do with what users click on after they search, and I don't know how much weight that gives to links now. My guess is: not all that much. I frequently click on multiple links in a search, and, if I'm not happy, I change the query. I doubt Google's analysis of user behavior is that sophisticated that it can distinguish between a successful and a failed search.
Two, the long-tail argument is nonsense in the context of a monopoly. Them being successful in rare queries does not translate to being successful overall. On the contrary: when I test out a search engine, I use common queries where I know the results already. So the engine better be successful on the common stuff - where apparently, there's no network effect that Google can exploit.
I'm not shocked that MS is trying that bullshit, but I'm kinda shocked and disappointed by how many techies buy that argument.
Nonsense. The search engine market is the closest thing people are ever going to get to a perfect market: no barrier to switch, and the quality of the service is directly visible in the search results themselves. From a business perspective, the barrier to entry is high, but Google has absolutely no network effect it can exploit to keep people on its search engine. Especially now with the configurable search box in modern browsers.
Technically, you could build a better search engine in your bedroom, demonstrate it to a few VCs and start gaining market share as you build your datacenter. And there's nothing Google can do to kill you off outside of buying you out. It can't lower its prices, it can't offer cheaper tie-ins, it can do absolutely nothing. As a result, even if the entire world would run all of its search queries through Google, it would be a monopoly that is broken by the next company to do search better.
Finally, there are two things that could kill Google instantly, even if it has the entire search engine market on lock-down: a browser that doesn't accept a connection to Google (or breaks the Google site) and an ISP that refuses to transmit packets to and from Google. Now who plays in those markets, and is as close as possible to a monopoly? Yep, you guessed it - Microsoft and ATT/Comcast. See where the difference is? Google might have a monopoly, but even if that would be true (and it certainly isn't), it would be a monopoly based on users wanting to use Google. Compare that to Microsoft and ATT/Comcast, where users frequently don't have a choice at all.
The beauty of the internet is that you can get information about everything. The problem is that you can get the information about everything. This means that Slashdot is a perfectly good way of getting information, along with all of the standard research and government agencies dealing with this. I'd look at Slashdot as a secondary source, in case there's someone checking it that day who knows what he/she's talking about.
Not to mention that it's a question that's being frequently asked in the media these days, and I trust Slashdot posters more than I trust the media. Largely because I can read the equivalent of 150 MSM articles on the topic in the course of a single Slashdot thread.
The people who approved this contract ought to be drawn and quartered. Not only did the guy get paid royally for his work, he gets to keep the IP without actually contributing anything to its maintenance. I couldn't find anything about how much the upkeep is, but it seems to me that if the guy wants to keep control over his work, he ought to maintain it himself, along with the park in which it stands. If he doesn't want to do that, he clearly is not interested in keeping control of it.
BTW, I do appreciate the reasoned response, despite the fact that we disagree on the premise. Seems rare enough that I want to point it out.
You're right in that. However, the general stance that this means that conservation is a wild goose chase is still ridiculous. Either the situation follows some basic economic principles, and then the economy is strengthened, or a minor miracle occurs, and resource utilization is indeed reduced. Either way, the society wins. It boggles my mind when I hear some small-government, free market type people argue that conservation will make things worse.
As for my post being modded down - I find it interesting that the general mod trends actually match very well with the overall mood of the US.
I know that you think you're making a legitimate point .... however, your rephrasing of his comment is every bit as ridiculous as what he said.
No. I'm trying to transform his statement into something that is even vaguely related to the point I was trying to make. The fact that it is still ridiculous is more an indicator of exactly how retarded the initial statement was.
If we were burning beach-sand at the same rate that we're burning oil, we'd run out of sand a LOT sooner than we'd run out of oil.
If you're arguing that the resource in question is sand on a beach, then yes, potentially. On the other hand, if it's just silicon and its various forms that you're looking for, then no.
You do realize that asking questions is trivial? And that without answers, questions are completely useless? It's one thing to question something, it's something else entirely to argue that a valuable service is provided by merely asking a question.
Uh.... I'm confused. Are you arguing that conserving materials is a badly thought out idea? How so? Or are you just generally pissed off about badly thought ideas? If it's latter, sorry to hear that - there really can't be any group of people left in the world you don't hate, as there isn't a single one that has never proposed a single bad idea.
As for the Gore dig, I always thought that was sour grapes. You can't tell me that if you had enough money where you can create a business that allows you to pay yourself, you wouldn't do it. Everyone's just mad that they don't have the resources to set up a gig like that.
No. It's like saying that we should clean all the sand off our feet before leaving the beach, or there'll be less sand on the beach for others to use.
And since when is oil as common and cheap as sand on the beach? Man. Comments like this wouldn't worry me so much if they wouldn't track so well with what the average Joe Sixpack and Dick Politician says.
Good grief. At least know how to read. I'm not talking about increasing efficiency - I'm talking about using less. And the Wikipedia article itself states that Jevon's Paradox ONLY applies to technological improvements. If you're so high and mighty about being a results driven person, you should seriously pay more attention to the details of the situation.
And just for the sake of argument, what would you rather have - a situation where you can power 10 widgets with a given unit of energy, or a situation where you can power 100 gadgets with that same unit? If nothing else, productivity goes up as technological efficiency goes up. And that can lead to a host of new solutions.
Arguing that conservation has no benefits is about the most ridiculous argument in economics - right up there with the question why people would walk on escalators.
Why is it BS to turn down the radio? Because it's only a small percentage decrease? Newsflash: any decrease helps. I don't understand this general derision that is specific to Americans when the topic turns to conservation. Yes, one little change by itself won't change the world, but then again, nothing will to that. Instead, it will be a combination of lots of small, little things. Maybe that's the reason: Americans are singularly fascinated by the one big thing - everything has to be historic, unique; a silver bullet in every box of Cheerios....
Which global warming model predicted massive blizzards in the northern hemisphere in 2010?
None. Because no global climate model predicts local occurrences in a single season. What they do predict though is that increases in temperatures will lead to more snowfall in certain areas as what would normally be dry cold air is now warm, moist air hitting a cold front. Which leads to snow. That's just basic physics.
The only problem is that no politician, no media outlet and the vast majority of the public isn't interested in phrases like "there is a 70% chance that global yearly average temperatures will increase between 1c and 2C in the next 50years (numbers subject to change as models and data is refined)". IF you want people's attention, you gotta talk about all polar bears dying in the next 10 years. Sad, but true.
Rule of thumb: there is no provable premise in science. The only thing that exists is data that either supports your claim or doesn't. Also note that data that doesn't support your claim is not the same as disproving your claim. In that context, settled science just means that no one has been able to do a generally accepted experiment that contradicts the major ideas in a field.
I wish that people would know just these two things before talking about science.
Prove me wrong.
The future obviously does not exist. The past? Doesn't exist either. Hence, only this present moment exists.
You can't even prove that the past existed. The only thing we have is present-moment memories, etc. I remember typing "Prove me wrong" but my memory is hardly reliable. If thirty seconds ago you spilled milk on your pants, all you have now is wet, soggy pants, not any "chain of events". Even if you filmed it, all you have is the present-moment series of images, not some actual piece of the past.
Only this present moment exists. All else is wild speculation and fantasy. Time does not exist.
And this is why Philosophy students have a bad rep. Some think that a semantic argument somehow creates a truth about the world. In the meantime, the rest of the world just continues to use words the way that they were intended to be used.
A broken clock is right twice a day, throwing darts a board with stock quotes will yield a winner, 100 million people playing the lotto often enough yields a winner at some point.... It's all about statistics. When you're predictive power is above random, we'll have another talk. When it's indistinguishable from random, it's just.... random.
I left my blackberry in my pants once when I put them in the washer. The phone was on during the entire cycle. I feared the worst, but put them on the heater for a day, turned it on, and.... it worked. Ok, so for the next two weeks or so buttons would randomly press themselves, and login was occasionally tedious, but it worked - and still does. I'm still pretty amazed that it didn't completely short it out.
Oh, and to you nitwit support people who gaze at that stupid little humidity strip and tell me that it is my fault the phone is crashing all the time.... go hump a lamp post. That strip turns pink when it's just somewhat humid outside. Since submerging a phone in water for about 20 minutes doesn't kill it, I'd like you to support your piece of crap hardware like you promised you would.
I don't know. I'm hugely suspicious of this, for two reasons: Congress has a nasty habit of not understanding the technological ramifications of their legislation. And when they do make legislation where they understand the ramifications, it's generally for the purpose of making sure that corporations don't have their business models cut out from underneath them.
While on the face of it, the bill seems alright (don't hide what your program does), I don't understand why it's specifically targeting P2P programs. Wouldn't it make sense to have the bill simply say "software should never be installed without the users consent" and "software should not be misleading in their activities"? What bothers me is the insistence from the two politicians that P2P programs somehow present an inherent privacy and security risk. I'm putting on my tinfoil hat here for a second, but I'm guessing that this has to be read in the larger context that P2P software is bad in general, and should be tightly regulated.
I don't like where this is going. As the bill reads, it won't solve any problem that currently exists, and assumes something dangerous: that a specific type of software is somehow worse than others. I'm expecting that these two politicians will soon propose bills that restrict peer-to-peer connectivity in general (goodbye net neutrality) and legislate what software can and cannot do (goodbye software startups written by a single person).
One word: convenience. Better battery life means I can leave it disconnected longer. I don't worry about drivers, screen resolution (or at least, I better not) or fiddling with program configuration.
Here are three things though that are an absolute must for me, and why I'm not waiting in line for it: it has to multitask (with IM's running in the background), the battery has to last for a transatlantic flight in video mode and the video experience has to be seamless.
Otherwise no go. But if I ever want my mom to get on Skype, it'll be via an iPad only.