Did it ever occur to anyone that he probably sought compensation when he found out he was HIV negative because he thought it was impossible to have been cured and therefore concluded that the first tests were a false positive?
If I had a test, had been told I was HIV positive, spent a number of years undergoing the stress of actually thinking I had HIV, taking the anti-retroviral drugs and not having sex with anyone for fear of accidental infection through a split/burst condom (it happens), then I think I'd be looking for compensation if I later found out that I was never HIV positive at all and it was down to a mess up at the lab.
It wouldn't have even occured to him that his immune system fought off the virus, so he naturally assumed that someone borked the first set of tests & ruined his live.
Hmmm okay yea sorry I was going a bit off the scent with that:o/ You're right, in the definitions of capitalist and communist, neither system has at its center a govornment that is for sale. And yea don't get me wrong, capitalism works much better in the real world, it helps to keep everyone honest.
Its just that the system needs to have a leftish feesback loop that means everyone has 'enough', whatever that amount may be.
Yup, thats the thing about the scale of things. I think Socialism is to a degree an inherent facet of human nature- we've evolved this way because at the tribe (or sub-100 person-ish) level where everyone knows everyone, a little Communism means that when somone gets sick, or when their home floods or slides down the side of the mountain, everyone pulls together, lends them the medicines or some shelter and the society is the better for it.
The failure of the second is that as soon as survival seems assured, people start wishing to improve their personal lot with respect to their fellow humans.
Exactly. Someone has to run the show in a larger economy, otherwise things become more and more confused and inefficient. However, this power corrupts, and abuse of this power results in the kind of system created by the Soviets and the CCCP. Human nature works for us in our traditional everyone-knows-everyone system which has existed for the critical bits of our evolutionary progression (while we learned to sow crops, domesticate animals and the social human made more babies). However it works against us when, as you put it very well 'people start wishing to improve their personal lot'
Well, okay sorry I exaggerated slightly, but he did manage to kill about 70 million people (as a conservative estimate) mostly through starvation, torture and ambition-motivated war (i.e the Korean war- which would never have happened without him and his lust for American blood).
His policy of supporting other budding so-called 'Communist' states and of paying the Soviets to supply him with arms factories (which were useless) caused the worst famine in history. He exported hundreds of millions of tonnes of grain, every ounce of which which was forcibly taken from rural families who were already leading a harsh existance.
As for Stalin, I think on one level he believed in Communism, and wanted to make it work whatever the cost, even if that meant being an evil, manipulative bastard. Mao never believed in communism, he just used the party to rise to power. He was even ejected from the top echelons of the party twice, and from the party once if i remember correctly, but he had enough dirt on everyone to claw his way back all the way to the top.
Oh no. I'm about to run into Goodwin's law (wiki it) here, but this is justified. Can I just say that Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot et. al had nothing on Mao?
I agree that a totally captitalist system will in 99.99% of cases create the strongest economy, which would be fine if the economy was the be-all and end-all of creating a society that works.
Equally important to a society's success are law & order, social equality, healthcare and education. In a totally capitalist state, everyone pays their own way whether they can afford to or not. This creates a situation where the rich get richer, healthier and more powerful (see lobbyists for details. The Pharma. industry couldnt get their way in govornment if they hadn't so much money, nor could the food industry). The poor of society loose out, become disaffected, angry and ultimately someone pays the price. The French govornment are finding that out the hard way, and the collectve tragedy of New Orleans stripped bare the inequality of American society. The poor people of N.O had less say in what happens in the court than one lobbying group in Washington
No country is immune. I'm Irish, and proud of it. We have one of the strongest economies in the world, it's easily outperforming the USA at the moment (in terms of percentages, not overall size) but I see ways in which money is starting to sway govornment decisions here, such as the decision to allow a butt-ugly & potentially unsafe Natural Gas pipeline and processing plant to be built in one of the most picturesque parts of our west coast. The company responsible is Shell, and they're f**king the Irish people over for govornment backhanders (probably). The gap between the rich and the poor is growing here, and i'ts a sad thing to see.
The best way to maintain relative equality is to provide a (hopefully positive) feedback loop between the higher echelons of economic success and the poorest in society, through good, affordable healthcare, free(ish) education and laws & tax systems that let people who work hard earn good money (and therefore strengthen the economy). It's a big chunk of capitalism mixed with a small dose of socialism.
All of these things, if implemented by smart, forward thinking politicians who are chosen in free & fair elections, will in themselves bolster the economy and look after the interests of the people of that country, which is basically what Govornments are there for.
No country is perfect.
I agree with parent. Its kinda sad that Communism itself has become so associated with being 'evil', mostly I suppose because of the anti-Soviet rehetoric of the US Govornment, which i suppose was necessary at the time.
People confuse the utterly vile evil of Stalin & Mao with the Communist ideals, which are pretty benign and were designed to create an equal society. Mao (who was an order of magniture more dispicable than stalin) & co. abused these ideals for personal gain as soon as they took power.
In the end, communism doesnt really work in the real world because of human nature. Power corrputs, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Shame:o(
Oh, BTW absolute Capitalism doesnt work either. See USA for details
I agree- Google are bound to have noticed at this stage, and picasa is such a sweet lil' piece of software that it would make perfect sense to integrate this functionality.
Alternatively, this could be produced as a separate app. that tags your photos with picasa-fiendly info, like metadata, which will then read in when you use picasa.
I don't see a piece of software getting good penetration without being a killer way of managing your photos as well- and that is a large design task in itself. Better to latch onto someone like Google with Picasa rather than go up picasa's tools.
And defending/protecting against them should be a primary function of the OS.
And they do actually defend in a lot of ways, preventing modifications to the registry, stopping spyware installing itself and stopping viruses getting executing on your machine by scanning files as they are opened/run.
E-zactly, and if they choose to plug the leaks themselves, then the companies with leak plugging machines can all go out of business and not a tear will be shed.
Surely defending against spyware and security breaches should be a primary function of the OS, rather than an application that is built to run on the operating system. People who make antispyware software are making up for a deficiency in an operating system that people already havbe paid good money for.
They should have no complaints if Microsoft take it upon themselves to actually fix what's wrong with their operating systems. If Microsoft were somehow 100% successful in defending against spyware & malware and suddenly no-one needed any antispyware, that's just tough for antispyware companies, and it's great news for computer users everywhere.
Similarly, say windows Vista was (you'll laugh at this) 100% secure against virus attack (as if!) and no-one needed any antivirus, surely that'd be a great thing and we could have a big bonfire with all our copies of Norton.
Yup Flash video was Sorenson 3, but has recently moved onto H.264 since the development of Flash 8, with support for Alpha channels etc. Seems these boys are a version behind. Too bad...
I haven't found any kind of nirvana in paid-for software- aspects of it bug the shit out of me.
However I have requirements that need to be met for me to make any money out of being a multimedia designer, and no open source software meets the requirements. Therefore I pay large amounts of money to the people who DO make software that's good enough, and open-source advocates whine that I should use their software instead. What software would that be, exactly- GIMP?
GIMP is pretty good and I've used it a fair bit, but I'd like to see it try applying a layer mask to a group of vector smart objects in CMYK mode and to slice the image and save as a transparent PNG.
I use open source software where it meets my needs (Firefox & Thunderbird as examples) but where it doesn't meet them, open source advocates shouldn't expect me not to pay for commerical software.
I've been had? If open source apps could do even 50% of what my creative apps can do in terms of workflow, cross-platform compatability, flexibility and sheer power, then I'd be there. Illustrator is a magnificent piece of software that not even macromedia were able to properly rival with freehand. Photoshop is head and shoulders the best image editing application on the planet. It reads anything, lets you manipulate Vector & raster information and will write to basically any file format.
As for Macromedia's apps and Flash, I don't see anothter single cross platform, almost universal multimedia content display system that even comes close to what flash can do, and I'm only scratching the surface with flash at the moment. The only other thing that comes close to the effort/results ratio is Director and shockwave - and guuess who developed that?
Don't get me started on how f***ng awesome dreamweaver is compared to the nearest competitors. Integration with fireworks, reading of databases, the works.
Asype for the PDF format- at least I've gone for PDF instead of the Word format, which will disappear next year as MS move their office filetype to an XML based format. PDF is the best file format on the planet for still or printed visual information. It integrates raster, vector , font, transparency and now interactive elements in one standard file based around EPS.
yup, it's the sniper rifle i meant - it's a scary, scary device in the right kind of way. I hadn't specifically heard about it piercing the Iraqi APC armour, but i did know it could pierce the glass on attack choppers etc.
Aha,
Battlefield 2, Half Life 2, Fable, Rome:Total war, FEAR.
none of those are available for the mac, and neither is 3ds max (though you do have maya)
"In a June 2004demonstration, an ALONtm test pieces held up to both a.30 caliber Russian M-44 sniper rifle and a.50 caliber Browning Sniper Rifle with armor piercing bullets."
I don't care if it's see through or not. Stopping a.50 armour piercing round from a browning pretty damn impressive. I wonder if the compound suffers from the same degradation due to exposure to sunlight as some types of bullet proof glass.
Then how on earth to i run.... *clears throat.... Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobar, Dreamweaver, Flash, 3D Studio MAX or Adobe Premiere... PVR software, a decent media player
GAMES FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!
Until software developers start writing every windows app that isnt an email client or office application for linux, then I'm sticking with windows. The rest? I hate Office, IE gets me down, and Outlook can get stuffed!
Any step that is taken to isolate a feature of online security from your PC is going to make it more secure.
It'll probably inconvenience people in a lot of situations though- say you're abroad and you've had your bags & wallet stolen, including your hard key. You won't be able to access your online account to get money transferred locally etc.
Still, sounds good to me:o)
"The scientists initially cloned the fruit fly gene that naturally produces the material. It was then put into bacteria, creating a biological "factory" to reproduce it as a liquid. The liquid was then cured under projector bulbs to form a workable solid."
As far as i'm aware, insulin is made by a similar process using bacteria that have been genetically altered to produce the substance in large quntities. It isn't a particularly new technique past the point of getting the initial bacteria to produce the substance, so here's hoping (hopping!!) that we can make use of what sounds like a great material as cheap as possible.
No, it'd be like holding the car manufacturer accountable if someone could walk up to your car, work the windshield wipers back and forth 3 times, try all 4 door handles in just the right order and by doing so gain access to the vehicle.
That or Firestone type tyre blowouts.
Slashdot Mirror
Did it ever occur to anyone that he probably sought compensation when he found out he was HIV negative because he thought it was impossible to have been cured and therefore concluded that the first tests were a false positive?
If I had a test, had been told I was HIV positive, spent a number of years undergoing the stress of actually thinking I had HIV, taking the anti-retroviral drugs and not having sex with anyone for fear of accidental infection through a split/burst condom (it happens), then I think I'd be looking for compensation if I later found out that I was never HIV positive at all and it was down to a mess up at the lab.
It wouldn't have even occured to him that his immune system fought off the virus, so he naturally assumed that someone borked the first set of tests & ruined his live.
Hmmm okay yea sorry I was going a bit off the scent with that :o/ You're right, in the definitions of capitalist and communist, neither system has at its center a govornment that is for sale. And yea don't get me wrong, capitalism works much better in the real world, it helps to keep everyone honest.
Its just that the system needs to have a leftish feesback loop that means everyone has 'enough', whatever that amount may be.
Yup, thats the thing about the scale of things. I think Socialism is to a degree an inherent facet of human nature- we've evolved this way because at the tribe (or sub-100 person-ish) level where everyone knows everyone, a little Communism means that when somone gets sick, or when their home floods or slides down the side of the mountain, everyone pulls together, lends them the medicines or some shelter and the society is the better for it.
The failure of the second is that as soon as survival seems assured, people start wishing to improve their personal lot with respect to their fellow humans.
Exactly. Someone has to run the show in a larger economy, otherwise things become more and more confused and inefficient. However, this power corrupts, and abuse of this power results in the kind of system created by the Soviets and the CCCP. Human nature works for us in our traditional everyone-knows-everyone system which has existed for the critical bits of our evolutionary progression (while we learned to sow crops, domesticate animals and the social human made more babies). However it works against us when, as you put it very well 'people start wishing to improve their personal lot'
Evoltion's a bitch, don't you think?
Well, okay sorry I exaggerated slightly, but he did manage to kill about 70 million people (as a conservative estimate) mostly through starvation, torture and ambition-motivated war (i.e the Korean war- which would never have happened without him and his lust for American blood).
His policy of supporting other budding so-called 'Communist' states and of paying the Soviets to supply him with arms factories (which were useless) caused the worst famine in history. He exported hundreds of millions of tonnes of grain, every ounce of which which was forcibly taken from rural families who were already leading a harsh existance.
As for Stalin, I think on one level he believed in Communism, and wanted to make it work whatever the cost, even if that meant being an evil, manipulative bastard. Mao never believed in communism, he just used the party to rise to power. He was even ejected from the top echelons of the party twice, and from the party once if i remember correctly, but he had enough dirt on everyone to claw his way back all the way to the top.
Oh no. I'm about to run into Goodwin's law (wiki it) here, but this is justified. Can I just say that Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot et. al had nothing on Mao?
I agree that a totally captitalist system will in 99.99% of cases create the strongest economy, which would be fine if the economy was the be-all and end-all of creating a society that works.
Equally important to a society's success are law & order, social equality, healthcare and education. In a totally capitalist state, everyone pays their own way whether they can afford to or not. This creates a situation where the rich get richer, healthier and more powerful (see lobbyists for details. The Pharma. industry couldnt get their way in govornment if they hadn't so much money, nor could the food industry). The poor of society loose out, become disaffected, angry and ultimately someone pays the price. The French govornment are finding that out the hard way, and the collectve tragedy of New Orleans stripped bare the inequality of American society. The poor people of N.O had less say in what happens in the court than one lobbying group in Washington
No country is immune. I'm Irish, and proud of it. We have one of the strongest economies in the world, it's easily outperforming the USA at the moment (in terms of percentages, not overall size) but I see ways in which money is starting to sway govornment decisions here, such as the decision to allow a butt-ugly & potentially unsafe Natural Gas pipeline and processing plant to be built in one of the most picturesque parts of our west coast. The company responsible is Shell, and they're f**king the Irish people over for govornment backhanders (probably). The gap between the rich and the poor is growing here, and i'ts a sad thing to see.
The best way to maintain relative equality is to provide a (hopefully positive) feedback loop between the higher echelons of economic success and the poorest in society, through good, affordable healthcare, free(ish) education and laws & tax systems that let people who work hard earn good money (and therefore strengthen the economy). It's a big chunk of capitalism mixed with a small dose of socialism.
All of these things, if implemented by smart, forward thinking politicians who are chosen in free & fair elections, will in themselves bolster the economy and look after the interests of the people of that country, which is basically what Govornments are there for. No country is perfect.
I agree with parent. Its kinda sad that Communism itself has become so associated with being 'evil', mostly I suppose because of the anti-Soviet rehetoric of the US Govornment, which i suppose was necessary at the time.
:o(
Oh, BTW absolute Capitalism doesnt work either. See USA for details
People confuse the utterly vile evil of Stalin & Mao with the Communist ideals, which are pretty benign and were designed to create an equal society. Mao (who was an order of magniture more dispicable than stalin) & co. abused these ideals for personal gain as soon as they took power.
In the end, communism doesnt really work in the real world because of human nature. Power corrputs, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Shame
I agree- Google are bound to have noticed at this stage, and picasa is such a sweet lil' piece of software that it would make perfect sense to integrate this functionality.
Alternatively, this could be produced as a separate app. that tags your photos with picasa-fiendly info, like metadata, which will then read in when you use picasa.
I don't see a piece of software getting good penetration without being a killer way of managing your photos as well- and that is a large design task in itself. Better to latch onto someone like Google with Picasa rather than go up picasa's tools.
Or a totally capitalist country where everything matters except the progression of the state?
And defending/protecting against them should be a primary function of the OS.
And they do actually defend in a lot of ways, preventing modifications to the registry, stopping spyware installing itself and stopping viruses getting executing on your machine by scanning files as they are opened/run.
E-zactly, and if they choose to plug the leaks themselves, then the companies with leak plugging machines can all go out of business and not a tear will be shed.
Surely defending against spyware and security breaches should be a primary function of the OS, rather than an application that is built to run on the operating system. People who make antispyware software are making up for a deficiency in an operating system that people already havbe paid good money for. They should have no complaints if Microsoft take it upon themselves to actually fix what's wrong with their operating systems. If Microsoft were somehow 100% successful in defending against spyware & malware and suddenly no-one needed any antispyware, that's just tough for antispyware companies, and it's great news for computer users everywhere. Similarly, say windows Vista was (you'll laugh at this) 100% secure against virus attack (as if!) and no-one needed any antivirus, surely that'd be a great thing and we could have a big bonfire with all our copies of Norton.
Uh? oh damn, I definitely read that they are using H.264 somewhere, but that may have near the start of the year :o(
Sorry!
Yup Flash video was Sorenson 3, but has recently moved onto H.264 since the development of Flash 8, with support for Alpha channels etc. Seems these boys are a version behind. Too bad...
... it may be working now, but I think they may have invalidated the warranty (^^)
I haven't found any kind of nirvana in paid-for software- aspects of it bug the shit out of me. However I have requirements that need to be met for me to make any money out of being a multimedia designer, and no open source software meets the requirements. Therefore I pay large amounts of money to the people who DO make software that's good enough, and open-source advocates whine that I should use their software instead. What software would that be, exactly- GIMP? GIMP is pretty good and I've used it a fair bit, but I'd like to see it try applying a layer mask to a group of vector smart objects in CMYK mode and to slice the image and save as a transparent PNG. I use open source software where it meets my needs (Firefox & Thunderbird as examples) but where it doesn't meet them, open source advocates shouldn't expect me not to pay for commerical software.
well acually i want a pair that won't scratch every time i look at them ( which is about 16 hours a day!!)
I've been had? If open source apps could do even 50% of what my creative apps can do in terms of workflow, cross-platform compatability, flexibility and sheer power, then I'd be there. Illustrator is a magnificent piece of software that not even macromedia were able to properly rival with freehand. Photoshop is head and shoulders the best image editing application on the planet. It reads anything, lets you manipulate Vector & raster information and will write to basically any file format. As for Macromedia's apps and Flash, I don't see anothter single cross platform, almost universal multimedia content display system that even comes close to what flash can do, and I'm only scratching the surface with flash at the moment. The only other thing that comes close to the effort/results ratio is Director and shockwave - and guuess who developed that? Don't get me started on how f***ng awesome dreamweaver is compared to the nearest competitors. Integration with fireworks, reading of databases, the works. Asype for the PDF format- at least I've gone for PDF instead of the Word format, which will disappear next year as MS move their office filetype to an XML based format. PDF is the best file format on the planet for still or printed visual information. It integrates raster, vector , font, transparency and now interactive elements in one standard file based around EPS.
yup, it's the sniper rifle i meant - it's a scary, scary device in the right kind of way. I hadn't specifically heard about it piercing the Iraqi APC armour, but i did know it could pierce the glass on attack choppers etc.
Aha, Battlefield 2, Half Life 2, Fable, Rome:Total war, FEAR. none of those are available for the mac, and neither is 3ds max (though you do have maya)
"In a June 2004demonstration, an ALONtm test pieces held up to both a .30 caliber Russian M-44 sniper rifle and a .50 caliber Browning Sniper Rifle with armor piercing bullets."
.50 armour piercing round from a browning pretty damn impressive. I wonder if the compound suffers from the same degradation due to exposure to sunlight as some types of bullet proof glass.
I don't care if it's see through or not. Stopping a
I want a pair of glasses made of this stuff!
Then how on earth to i run.... *clears throat.... Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobar, Dreamweaver, Flash, 3D Studio MAX or Adobe Premiere... PVR software, a decent media player
GAMES FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!
Until software developers start writing every windows app that isnt an email client or office application for linux, then I'm sticking with windows. The rest? I hate Office, IE gets me down, and Outlook can get stuffed!
Any step that is taken to isolate a feature of online security from your PC is going to make it more secure. It'll probably inconvenience people in a lot of situations though- say you're abroad and you've had your bags & wallet stolen, including your hard key. You won't be able to access your online account to get money transferred locally etc. Still, sounds good to me :o)
"The scientists initially cloned the fruit fly gene that naturally produces the material. It was then put into bacteria, creating a biological "factory" to reproduce it as a liquid. The liquid was then cured under projector bulbs to form a workable solid."
As far as i'm aware, insulin is made by a similar process using bacteria that have been genetically altered to produce the substance in large quntities. It isn't a particularly new technique past the point of getting the initial bacteria to produce the substance, so here's hoping (hopping!!) that we can make use of what sounds like a great material as cheap as possible.
Good god, he was joking. Modded....funny...see?
No, it'd be like holding the car manufacturer accountable if someone could walk up to your car, work the windshield wipers back and forth 3 times, try all 4 door handles in just the right order and by doing so gain access to the vehicle. That or Firestone type tyre blowouts.