Something must be done! Cap & Trade is something, Therefore it must be done!
Red herring. Combating pollution doesn't imply Cap & Trade. It may work, it may not, there are good arguments for both sides but what's clear is that a) it's an idea mostly cooked up by politicians wanting to appear 'enviromentally-friendly' without pissing off too many of their corporate sponsors, and b) even in the best-case scenario, it is by itself insuficient to reduce contamination to acceptable levels.
Besides, if pollution were really a problem the people meeting would act like it instead of renting thousands of limos and taking private jets to converge to talk about it while using a ton of energy to heat large conference centers...
Ad hominem. Besides, it's the same thing as charities which spend thousands of dollars feeding their guests trying to get donations for the poor: the rich and influential people who need to be swayed to create a real, tangible change are by and large a bunch of superficial, luxury-addicted idiots who won't give two seconds of their time to somebody who goes to pick them up in a bycicle. Just look at Richard Stallman to see how people treat you when you live consistently with your ideals.
Besides the corruption, I tend to suspect the whole "if you aren't peer reviewed you aren't allowed to have an opinion" line of argument to be just a dressed up appeal to authority. Peer review is useful but should never be an argument ender. And then they go back to the appeal to authority well and try to say anyone who isn't a degreed climatalogist you can't have an opinion. Nope, just another appeal to authority.
Technically true, but without some sort of filter the idiots of the world can and do run DDOS attacks against scientists in "controversial" topics such as this one. And so far, 'peer review' is the best we've been able to come up with.
Go ahead and ask a scientist studying evolution how he feels with regard to creationists for instance. "Oh, I love discussing my work with them" is one answer you will *NOT* find, trust me.
...and probably a lot more healthy than the PC monoculture, with a diversity of different platforms and applications which (by necessity) exchanged data in standardized formats. The big snag of the IBM PC "standard" was that it wasn't really a standard - just a closed proprietary system that got cloned.
Not really. The unwashed masses are paranoid of choices, one or two they can tolerate but more than that and they'll ignore anything but the two most popular ones. Therefore, the PC world would've turned into a monoculture regardless, we're just lucky it was a relatively open one with an OS whose owner was ready to sell it to anyone and everyone, instead of trying to control the entirety of the user's experience ala Apple.
Of the software, not hardware so the comparison *is* flawed. A closer one would've been if everything went as it did with Compaq assembling their own computers out of generic parts, but MS-DOS refused to run on the 'clone' for some reason, and so Compaq decided to modify it in the name of interoperability then resell the whole package anyways.
Copyright infringement or allowed modification? either way, I'm glad Microsoft was greedy enough to pimp their OS to anybody and everybody, and we didn't have to find out the hard way.
The OP's answer to someone saying "Microsoft is violating our rights" was to say "they make the rules, leave if you don't like it" as well, so in that context at least the GP's argument is valid.
So you buy a game every 3-4 months, yet you upgraded your GPU every year!? unless you used them for scientific work and gaming was only a secondary concern, you *really* should've re-examined your priorities before blaming PC gaming.
Me, I just grabbed the very same computer I had built to do Java and C# dev work, and put a $80 GPU on it. Plays even the latest and greatest strategy games flawlessly, and runs nearly all multiplayer FPSs without a problem as well, what more could I ask for? MMOs I guess, but I trust anything powerful enough to run Left 4 Dead with everything on High will be more than enough for World of Warcraft or Everquest 2, should I ever decide to play those things. And if not, I can just wait for the next work-related upgrade, stick a newer $80 GPU on it, and get crackin'.
Mass Effect was pretty much a standard FPS with Shephard's butt on-screen, so I didn't have a problem with good ol' keyb+mouse control. Gears of War I haven't tried, though, but I can't see it being too different, there's plenty of good TPS that work quite well on PCs already.
Correction: a "date" is where you go and sit in the dark, so other people can't see you doing things other than talking for an hour or two.
Not that the sibling post is wrong, mind you, there's also something to be said for simply enjoying a personal pasttime alongside a person you appreciate and ocassionally engaging in some silent communication, but they're also *such* great places for letting a teenager's hormones run wild my definition cannot be easily dismissed;)
So you object to the blantant misrepresentation of scientific facts by mass-media journalists lacking the necessary education to understand the issue they're writing about?
Welcome to the club, active since... well, one hell of a long time. Read this and this for a rough idea on how modern journalism really works.
Occam's razor states that the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible, eliminating those that make no difference in the observable predictions of the explanatory hypothesis or theory.
Or later on:
When competing hypotheses are equal in other respects, the principle recommends selection of the hypothesis that introduces the fewest assumptions and postulates the fewest entities while still sufficiently answering the question. It is in this sense that Occam's razor is usually understood.
So, same meaning, only sightly different phrasing.
There's nothing about "must assume." Occam's razor is a general guideline, not a law of nature.
"Must assume" != "it is so". "Must assume" = "should assume to avoid burdening one's own hypothesis with unnecessary problems". You can believe, of course, that the entire scientific body of the world is conspiring against Truth, Justice and the American Way of Life, much like you can believe your cat created the universe yesterday and your whole "life" is nothing but a memory implanted by him in your brain. It's just that, without specific data making it the simplest explanation over those we already use, you'll just end up looking like a fool in the world's eyes if you do so.
I had a friend one time tell me that he heard my earbuds from all the way across the street (seriously). My chronic tinnitus aside, if you limit my decibelage, I will find a way to crank it.
Not if my way of limiting your decibelage includes smashing your MP3 player (and potentially you as well) against the ground.
My rule 'o thumb concerning headphones: if somebody else other than you can listen to it, it's too loud.
Wrong. Occam's Razor says that, faced with alternate theories both explaining satisfactorily the same phenomena, you must assume as correct that which requires the least assumptions.
Here it's between "people who have studied for many years the field have determined such, and have decided not to answer critiques from anybody who can't demonstrate having studied the field similarly" and "people who have studied the field for many years have conspired to create a false impression upon everybody else, and silence any critic who dares break the illusion". The one that requires the least assumptions is, obviously, the former instead of the latter, therefore that's what you must assume as true until proven otherwise.
To a single person, yes, as was the case in TFA. To a hundred, or a thousand however? the lifetime of an individual only goes for so long, y'know, and if the internet has proven anything is that there's no shortage of idiots.
The moment you demand all skeptics believe "just because", it stops being science. global warming is a perfect example of something with questionable science reaching the point it's being treated as a religion, and anyone questioning it is a heretic.
If you *know* it's questionable, then send your explanation to a peer-reviewed journal for all of us to see.
You can't? pity, but chances are then you're no different from the thousands of other "armchair scientists" making outrageous claims with no actual backing, as the guy analyzed in TFA. And making actual scientists try and reason with all of you is an utter waste of their time, which we'd rather they spent doing their actual job.
But similarly, you can prove anything when you're allowed to use anything anyone's ever published on the internet.
Trying to put some sense in the head of the guy from the Time Cube is nothing but a waste of time for all those involved. And since peer-reviewed journals are the best way we've found yet to determine who knows what they're talking about and who doesn't, that's the method they're gonna use.
Pity that most of you, alleged converted-to-be, are just closet ostriches who try to make themselves feel better about it by either demanding unreasonable levels of evidence before converting, such as asking for accurate temperature readings from everywhere around the world for the past 500 years, or simply apply a vague and/or subjective criteria such as "make me feel you're right" so they can answer "I don't think it's enough" to anything they show.
GNOME, on the other hand, hasn't seen a major release since GNOME 2.0 in 2002!
MacOSX hasn't seen a major change in its desktop since 2001 either. Your point? as the saying goes, "if it ain't broken, *don't* fix it".
It'll take time, but people are already moving over to KDE, especially as the more recent KDE 4.3 and the upcoming KDE Software Compilation 4.4 releases have shown to be of a very high quality.
If there's a movement, I haven't seen it. Which is kind of a pity, opinions have been pretty good on KDE 4.4 so far, but most folks are still bitter over 4.0 to give it a try.
KDE is just technically better these days. It is implemented in a better programming language (even C++ is better than the C-and-GObject hellhole), built upon a better GUI toolkit (Qt kicks the fuck out of GTK+), and offers much better desktop applications and a more integrated desktop experience.
Opinions, opinions and opinions. In mine, even Pascal and Perl are better than the attrocity inflicted upon mankind under the name of C++ (and regardless, Gnome is moving towards the far superior C#, which is partly the reason why this whole mess came to be), GTK is still superior to Qt, and the toolkit behind the best desktop applications in Linux. But what does that prove? not fucking much, that's the thing with opinions.
ATI's closed-source driver is Hell on Earth. The one that shipped with Ubuntu 9.04 caused the first crash I had ever seen of a Linux machine not caused by hardware problems *five* minutes after first use, and even the latest ones still have problems playing full-screen video.
The open-source drivers on the other hand are reliable, solid, and even support 3D acceleration in many (though not all) chips. The only problem is that it's development is pretty fast so if you don't run a rolling release distro ala Arch or Gentoo, you end up reading about lots of cool features you can't try 'til your distro bothers with making a new release.
Hence the "unsupported hardware platforms" bit, I believe. Whenever we Free Software supporters use the phrase, for some reason most people automatically think "NetBSD on a toaster" instead of "64-bit CPUs". Hopefully as 64-bit CPUs increase in use and more people get screwed by lazy manufacturers, they'll start to take notice.
It wouldn't do you much good. I'd wager that a good percentage of the Slashdot population is knowledgeable in IT and programming, yet they'll still happily provide legal advice in the YRO and Ask Slashdot sections.
You could say that, then, the test should be divided by areas and then the bonus be applied to comments belonging to related stories but there's been plenty of ocassions where a simple joke or off-topic comment turns into a debate that may be insightful, but have absolutely nothing to do with the story it belongs to.
The problem with your suggestion with respect to meta-modding, is that the more complex you make the procedure, the more you ensure only fanatical people follow it.
Hell, as it is right now I can't be arsed to meta-mod most of the time, having to read an entire thread to determine whether a short one-liner is an innocent joke or some stupid flamebait is enough of a pain without having to check the moderator's entire modding history to see whether there's a 'bias' or not.
The problem of rewarding good posters too much is that it tends to make the community degenerate into a clique. Look at Wikipedia and its editors, for example.
The best thing about Slashdot's moderation system, IMHO, is that it rewards good *posts* rather than posters because even Anonymous Cowards can provide interesting insight, and even the most intelligent fellow is liable to the ocassional episode of stupidity.
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Something must be done! Cap & Trade is something, Therefore it must be done!
Red herring. Combating pollution doesn't imply Cap & Trade. It may work, it may not, there are good arguments for both sides but what's clear is that a) it's an idea mostly cooked up by politicians wanting to appear 'enviromentally-friendly' without pissing off too many of their corporate sponsors, and b) even in the best-case scenario, it is by itself insuficient to reduce contamination to acceptable levels.
Besides, if pollution were really a problem the people meeting would act like it instead of renting thousands of limos and taking private jets to converge to talk about it while using a ton of energy to heat large conference centers...
Ad hominem. Besides, it's the same thing as charities which spend thousands of dollars feeding their guests trying to get donations for the poor: the rich and influential people who need to be swayed to create a real, tangible change are by and large a bunch of superficial, luxury-addicted idiots who won't give two seconds of their time to somebody who goes to pick them up in a bycicle. Just look at Richard Stallman to see how people treat you when you live consistently with your ideals.
Besides the corruption, I tend to suspect the whole "if you aren't peer reviewed you aren't allowed to have an opinion" line of argument to be just a dressed up appeal to authority. Peer review is useful but should never be an argument ender. And then they go back to the appeal to authority well and try to say anyone who isn't a degreed climatalogist you can't have an opinion. Nope, just another appeal to authority.
Technically true, but without some sort of filter the idiots of the world can and do run DDOS attacks against scientists in "controversial" topics such as this one. And so far, 'peer review' is the best we've been able to come up with.
Go ahead and ask a scientist studying evolution how he feels with regard to creationists for instance. "Oh, I love discussing my work with them" is one answer you will *NOT* find, trust me.
...and probably a lot more healthy than the PC monoculture, with a diversity of different platforms and applications which (by necessity) exchanged data in standardized formats. The big snag of the IBM PC "standard" was that it wasn't really a standard - just a closed proprietary system that got cloned.
Not really. The unwashed masses are paranoid of choices, one or two they can tolerate but more than that and they'll ignore anything but the two most popular ones. Therefore, the PC world would've turned into a monoculture regardless, we're just lucky it was a relatively open one with an OS whose owner was ready to sell it to anyone and everyone, instead of trying to control the entirety of the user's experience ala Apple.
Of the software, not hardware so the comparison *is* flawed. A closer one would've been if everything went as it did with Compaq assembling their own computers out of generic parts, but MS-DOS refused to run on the 'clone' for some reason, and so Compaq decided to modify it in the name of interoperability then resell the whole package anyways.
Copyright infringement or allowed modification? either way, I'm glad Microsoft was greedy enough to pimp their OS to anybody and everybody, and we didn't have to find out the hard way.
The OP's answer to someone saying "Microsoft is violating our rights" was to say "they make the rules, leave if you don't like it" as well, so in that context at least the GP's argument is valid.
So you buy a game every 3-4 months, yet you upgraded your GPU every year!? unless you used them for scientific work and gaming was only a secondary concern, you *really* should've re-examined your priorities before blaming PC gaming.
Me, I just grabbed the very same computer I had built to do Java and C# dev work, and put a $80 GPU on it. Plays even the latest and greatest strategy games flawlessly, and runs nearly all multiplayer FPSs without a problem as well, what more could I ask for? MMOs I guess, but I trust anything powerful enough to run Left 4 Dead with everything on High will be more than enough for World of Warcraft or Everquest 2, should I ever decide to play those things. And if not, I can just wait for the next work-related upgrade, stick a newer $80 GPU on it, and get crackin'.
Mass Effect was pretty much a standard FPS with Shephard's butt on-screen, so I didn't have a problem with good ol' keyb+mouse control. Gears of War I haven't tried, though, but I can't see it being too different, there's plenty of good TPS that work quite well on PCs already.
Correction: a "date" is where you go and sit in the dark, so other people can't see you doing things other than talking for an hour or two.
Not that the sibling post is wrong, mind you, there's also something to be said for simply enjoying a personal pasttime alongside a person you appreciate and ocassionally engaging in some silent communication, but they're also *such* great places for letting a teenager's hormones run wild my definition cannot be easily dismissed ;)
So you object to the blantant misrepresentation of scientific facts by mass-media journalists lacking the necessary education to understand the issue they're writing about?
Welcome to the club, active since... well, one hell of a long time. Read this and this for a rough idea on how modern journalism really works.
From your link:
Occam's razor states that the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible, eliminating those that make no difference in the observable predictions of the explanatory hypothesis or theory.
Or later on:
When competing hypotheses are equal in other respects, the principle recommends selection of the hypothesis that introduces the fewest assumptions and postulates the fewest entities while still sufficiently answering the question. It is in this sense that Occam's razor is usually understood.
So, same meaning, only sightly different phrasing.
There's nothing about "must assume." Occam's razor is a general guideline, not a law of nature.
"Must assume" != "it is so". "Must assume" = "should assume to avoid burdening one's own hypothesis with unnecessary problems". You can believe, of course, that the entire scientific body of the world is conspiring against Truth, Justice and the American Way of Life, much like you can believe your cat created the universe yesterday and your whole "life" is nothing but a memory implanted by him in your brain. It's just that, without specific data making it the simplest explanation over those we already use, you'll just end up looking like a fool in the world's eyes if you do so.
I had a friend one time tell me that he heard my earbuds from all the way across the street (seriously). My chronic tinnitus aside, if you limit my decibelage, I will find a way to crank it.
Not if my way of limiting your decibelage includes smashing your MP3 player (and potentially you as well) against the ground.
My rule 'o thumb concerning headphones: if somebody else other than you can listen to it, it's too loud.
Wrong. Occam's Razor says that, faced with alternate theories both explaining satisfactorily the same phenomena, you must assume as correct that which requires the least assumptions.
Here it's between "people who have studied for many years the field have determined such, and have decided not to answer critiques from anybody who can't demonstrate having studied the field similarly" and "people who have studied the field for many years have conspired to create a false impression upon everybody else, and silence any critic who dares break the illusion". The one that requires the least assumptions is, obviously, the former instead of the latter, therefore that's what you must assume as true until proven otherwise.
If the dissenters are morons who don't understand it, what does that make the believers? Blind-faith followers?
Well, yeah. But Occam's Razor says that it's better to trust the guy with the PhD than the guy without, so we're marginally superior sheep at least ;)
To a single person, yes, as was the case in TFA. To a hundred, or a thousand however? the lifetime of an individual only goes for so long, y'know, and if the internet has proven anything is that there's no shortage of idiots.
The moment you demand all skeptics believe "just because", it stops being science. global warming is a perfect example of something with questionable science reaching the point it's being treated as a religion, and anyone questioning it is a heretic.
If you *know* it's questionable, then send your explanation to a peer-reviewed journal for all of us to see.
You can't? pity, but chances are then you're no different from the thousands of other "armchair scientists" making outrageous claims with no actual backing, as the guy analyzed in TFA. And making actual scientists try and reason with all of you is an utter waste of their time, which we'd rather they spent doing their actual job.
But similarly, you can prove anything when you're allowed to use anything anyone's ever published on the internet.
Trying to put some sense in the head of the guy from the Time Cube is nothing but a waste of time for all those involved. And since peer-reviewed journals are the best way we've found yet to determine who knows what they're talking about and who doesn't, that's the method they're gonna use.
Pity that most of you, alleged converted-to-be, are just closet ostriches who try to make themselves feel better about it by either demanding unreasonable levels of evidence before converting, such as asking for accurate temperature readings from everywhere around the world for the past 500 years, or simply apply a vague and/or subjective criteria such as "make me feel you're right" so they can answer "I don't think it's enough" to anything they show.
Actually, you do.
Sincerely, somebody who knows enough to know he knows nothing.
GNOME, on the other hand, hasn't seen a major release since GNOME 2.0 in 2002!
MacOSX hasn't seen a major change in its desktop since 2001 either. Your point? as the saying goes, "if it ain't broken, *don't* fix it".
It'll take time, but people are already moving over to KDE, especially as the more recent KDE 4.3 and the upcoming KDE Software Compilation 4.4 releases have shown to be of a very high quality.
If there's a movement, I haven't seen it. Which is kind of a pity, opinions have been pretty good on KDE 4.4 so far, but most folks are still bitter over 4.0 to give it a try.
KDE is just technically better these days. It is implemented in a better programming language (even C++ is better than the C-and-GObject hellhole), built upon a better GUI toolkit (Qt kicks the fuck out of GTK+), and offers much better desktop applications and a more integrated desktop experience.
Opinions, opinions and opinions. In mine, even Pascal and Perl are better than the attrocity inflicted upon mankind under the name of C++ (and regardless, Gnome is moving towards the far superior C#, which is partly the reason why this whole mess came to be), GTK is still superior to Qt, and the toolkit behind the best desktop applications in Linux. But what does that prove? not fucking much, that's the thing with opinions.
Care to point at an instance of Stallman stating his desire for propietary software developers to die horribly in a plague?
Thought so.
ATI's closed-source driver is Hell on Earth. The one that shipped with Ubuntu 9.04 caused the first crash I had ever seen of a Linux machine not caused by hardware problems *five* minutes after first use, and even the latest ones still have problems playing full-screen video.
The open-source drivers on the other hand are reliable, solid, and even support 3D acceleration in many (though not all) chips. The only problem is that it's development is pretty fast so if you don't run a rolling release distro ala Arch or Gentoo, you end up reading about lots of cool features you can't try 'til your distro bothers with making a new release.
Hence the "unsupported hardware platforms" bit, I believe. Whenever we Free Software supporters use the phrase, for some reason most people automatically think "NetBSD on a toaster" instead of "64-bit CPUs". Hopefully as 64-bit CPUs increase in use and more people get screwed by lazy manufacturers, they'll start to take notice.
It wouldn't do you much good. I'd wager that a good percentage of the Slashdot population is knowledgeable in IT and programming, yet they'll still happily provide legal advice in the YRO and Ask Slashdot sections.
You could say that, then, the test should be divided by areas and then the bonus be applied to comments belonging to related stories but there's been plenty of ocassions where a simple joke or off-topic comment turns into a debate that may be insightful, but have absolutely nothing to do with the story it belongs to.
The problem with your suggestion with respect to meta-modding, is that the more complex you make the procedure, the more you ensure only fanatical people follow it.
Hell, as it is right now I can't be arsed to meta-mod most of the time, having to read an entire thread to determine whether a short one-liner is an innocent joke or some stupid flamebait is enough of a pain without having to check the moderator's entire modding history to see whether there's a 'bias' or not.
The problem of rewarding good posters too much is that it tends to make the community degenerate into a clique. Look at Wikipedia and its editors, for example.
The best thing about Slashdot's moderation system, IMHO, is that it rewards good *posts* rather than posters because even Anonymous Cowards can provide interesting insight, and even the most intelligent fellow is liable to the ocassional episode of stupidity.