If people are inherently evil, then where did the "innocence project" come from? Why does anyone drop cash in a Salvation Army kettle or a church collection basket? Why did I give away most of the nectarines in the tree in my front yard when I could easily sold them at the Farmer's Market? You only read about robberies and murder in the paper because they're rare. You don't hear about feats of great self-sacrifice and heroism because they're simply too common.
Yes, look at history, and see what a tiny percent of people there are lording it over others, what a tiny percentage have been thieves, how few murder. That Stanford experiment didn't show that people were evil, it showed that people are lemmings.
Selfishness isn't human nature, it's natural to every animal. Our species is a social species, which is why the few sociopathic scumbags can get away with leading people to commit atrocities.
It has nothing to do with the "noble savage". Were we not inherently good, there could be no civilization and we would have probably become extinct.
What else is human nature is that we tend to think everyone is like us. If you're a selfish sociopath who would steal his mother's gold teeth and sell them on the black market, you're going to think that everyone else is, too.
Amazon's main competitor is Walmart not Google or Apple.
Then why do I see Nooks at WalMart? And note that Amazon's main competetitor is the internet archive, where the books are all free?
I agree with the moderators, the GP's comment was indeed insightful. Did computers make pocket calculators obsolete? Phone and tablet screens are hard to see in the daytime outside, and impossible in sunshine. A tablet's battery lasts a LOOOOOONG time compared to the shrt time of a tablet.
A tablet is a poor substitute for an e-reader. That said, after reading this morning that only 10% of the horny women who read that "50 shades" book finished it, I no longer want an e-reader. It's nobody's damned business what I read, or how much of it. I'm stalked and spied on by big corporations way too much already. I guess I'll have to stick to paper until the publishers stop being ass clowns.
BTW, why is it legal for Amazon and B&N to stalk you? Why can't we get some serious privacy laws passed?
Then submit a story about the Nexus 7. It's offtopic in this thread. A tablet is not an e-reader any more than a computer is a pocket calculator.
Can you read that Nexus in the sun? You can read an ebook reader there. Can you go for a month without a charge? An e-reader can.
As to the GP, if you don't like a story you see on the front page, just DON'T CLICK! What's interesting about the topic is that it could signal a price war. As someone who's baeen thinking semi-seriously (until this morning) abouot getting a Nook, this is interesting to me. If it doesn't interest you, GTFO.
I stopped wanting an e-reaer this morning when I saw a newscast that said that of those who bought that "50 shades of gray" book in e-reader form, only 10% finished the book. God damn it, I don't want every facet of my life tracked by those corporate bastards. I guess I'll stick to paper for my reading, checking to see whether or not you finished a book is WAY out of line.
You guys who don't like this topic might consider submitting that one.
I mean what do you accomplish by voting for someone else?
Not having you counted as either being in favor the D and R policies, or being counted as apathetic. It's a vote for "none of the above." If enough non-voters did this, things would change.
Just a tiny sidebar, you actually come off as a bit holier-than-thou to me.
I'm no better than anyone else. Everyone is holy whether they realize it or not.
What if I said "yes, atheists are universally smarter, but we don't take any joy in it"?
Universally smarter? You believe that no atheists are learning-disabled? It's possible that average or median intelligence of atheists is higher, but equally possible the other way. If it were a true statement I would have no problem with it.
I don't know how you define "anti-Christian"
One who teaches the opposite of what Jesus taught. The "greed is good" crowd comes to mind, and unfortunately many of those folks consider themselves Christians. Anti-theists want all religions abolished.
assholes may benefit far more from pretending to be religious than from being openly non-religious. See: prison populations.
Yes, that's true, but I think politicians and Wall Streeters are better examples.
Nasa's web site is the first place I look. There's a treasure trove of beautiful high resolution photos, movies, data. The photo you're looking for is there. I linked the panoramic shot in a comment farther down.
It's certainly not running Windows. In non-retarded operating systems you don't have to reboot for system changes unless you're changing the operating system's kernel, and I really doubt that's what they're changing. I just don't see them doing a reboot unless the whole system crashes, which also is pretty unlikely.
The patent system was used by the King of England to reward his friends with monopolies. The whole "encourage innovation" and especially the whole "protect the little guy" arguments is mainly a pretty story to sell it to the masses.
Wrong, at least in the US. It was written into the Constituion like that. Remember, we'd just been at war to be free of the king and his laws. Whether or not that power was to be given to government was hotly debated and grudgingly granted.
I mean, just look at the arguments of patent system fans. Half the time they'll say "Patents are required, because otherwise everyone will keep everything secret and all knowledge will be lost." The other half of the time they say "Patents are required, because otherwise everyone will immediately duplicate every innovation without the original inventor being able to get any money out of it." While both statements can't be right at the same time, they sure can be wrong at the same time.
You're mischaracterizing it. Before patents, you could either keep your invention secret and sell stuff your invention produced (loom, cotton gin, etc) and the invention and its workings would die with you, or if you invented a product, big players would copy it and eat your lunch. Patents prevent both from happening.
Why are there still trade secrets, then? First, because patents only last 20 years and second, many things can't be patented. Recipes are an example of that.
A poll that spins is a bad poll. A good pollster will make the questions as neutral as possible. Like
[ ] TSA is doing an excellent job [ ] TSA is doing a good job [ ] TSA is doing an OK job [ ] TSA is doing a mediocre job [ ] TSA is doing a terrible job [ ] TSA should be shut down and its employees jailed
A good poll will also ask the same question more than once using different wording. If you see a poll from a political party, you can be pretty sure it's bullshit (I've had these polls sent to me, both major parties' polls are utter shit). OTOH a poll by a reputable pollster is designed to gain information for whoever commissioned the study. They have PhDs in statistics, psychology, and other disciplines to design the poll and do the statistical analysis on the results --I've worked with them and have done this sort of thing in the past. I was in charge of the designing and writing the database of the results for the statistitians to analyze. It was pretty interesting work. Of course, back then I was writing in NOMAD for mainframe size data and dBase for smaller datasets, not (ugh!) Access like I'm stuck with now. I'm glad I'm close to retiring, work isn't as fun as it used to be.
That's actually correct, at least in my case. Only it would be "Different is Bad. GOD DAMN THAT FUCKING MICROSOFT! Damn it, I'm trying Linux!"
Which is what got me to Linux ten years ago. Change for the sake of change is stupid. Change to improve somthing is good. From DOS to Windows? That was a good change. Changing the placement of "options" in every version of IE from 1 to 4? Just fucking retarded.
When my shop migrated to Excel from Quattro ten or fifteen years ago, I took a class in Excel. It was on my desk for a week when they upgraded to a newer version of Excel, and the money my employer paid for my training and the time I spent attending was completely wasted. The newer version of Excel was more like Quattro than it was the older version. Microsoft has been bad about this ever since Windows, they weren't guilty of this with DOS.
If I have to learn a new thing to be able to do a new thing, that is a good thing. But having to relearn how to do somenthing I've done a thousand times before is just idiotic.
On the other hand an automated car would have likely crashed in a few hundred other situations I've encountered, that after having reacted and averted the danger have left me going "huh, what the FUCK just happened?"
What leads you to think that in those unlikely situations the computer-driven car would crash? After all, it's logged 300,000 miles without a crash, have you? It seems the math kind of makes your hypothesis a bit illogical.
I used to think the same about antilock brakes. I was trained as a driver in the USAF where you learn NOT to lock up the brakes, as locking them up you lose all steering and it will actually take longer to stop than if you don't quite lock them up. But I have to say, after having them, stomping on the antilock brakes is far superior to doing it like the AF taught me in a car without them.
Plus, the computer is going to see the unexpected situation faster than you can, particularly if it's a car running a stop sign. You can only see in one direction at a time, the computer can "see" all around.
Do you have a citation for that? Because I don't think I'd ever heard the word "terrorist" until Clinton was in office. And there were no drones when Nixon was in office (at least nobody was supposed to know about them; they were classified then).
The day I got home from SEA, the headlines were screaming "NIXON RESIGNS!!!" so it's not like I wasn't around back then. In that time period it was communists, not terrorists, that were the bugaboo.
I don't think there is much choice since you can either vote for member A or B, throw you vote away on C or not vote.
That "throw your vote away" is bovine manure. If that were true, then anyone in Illinois who votes for anybody but Obama is throwing his vote away, because Obama has Illinois sewn up and will win here by a landslide. By the "voting for a loser is throwing your vote away" metric, there's no reason for anyone from Illinois to even bother voting.
I consider "throwing your vote away" to be voting for someone who wants to put someone you love or admire in prison, and both Obama and Romney want your loved ones in prison. So out of the five viable parties (there are five parties on ballots in enough states to win the election), if you don't vote Green or Libertarian, you're voting for a man who wants someone you love to go to prison.
Yes, I'm talking about marijuana. Chances are slim that none of your friends or relatives smoke it. And both major parties are behind the "war" on (some) drugs, for ever more draconian copyright laws, etc. Neither of the majors look out for my interests and both look out for the corporates, why in the HELL could voting against them be throwing away a vote? That's just insane.
How is my doing anything I want to any piece of equipment I own in any way "theft"? When I was a teen in the '60s, guitar fuzzboxes cost well over a hundred dollars, I'd make them out of a ten dollar transistor radio and two dollars worth of parts.
I guess I was a theif, then. I was always hacking hardware. I guess I'm still a thief, because I'm in the process of turning an old computer into a DVR.
Hmmm... until now, I respected that dictionary, but its definition of "hack" is sorely lacking. As a noun, "hack" can also mean a cab driver or a magazine writer, and those weren't included.
They do better with "hacker" though --
hackÂerâ noun 1. a person or thing that hacks. 2. Slang . a person who engages in an activity without talent or skill: weekend hackers on the golf course. 3. Computer Slang . a. a computer enthusiast. b. a microcomputer user who attempts to gain unauthorized access to proprietary computer systems. Origin: 1200â"50; Middle English (as surname); see hack1 , -er
Which is probably not a coincidence. "Tinkerer" sounds lame.
Thats a good example of the evolution of language. Before there were engines, engineers wer called "tinkers" becaise of the TINK TINK sounds they made bending metal. So if you were repurposing someone else's invention, rather than "re-engineering" (since there were no engines) you were "tinkering" with it. The tinker morphed into tinkerer after the invention of engines, which were, of course, invented by tinkers. Or tinkerers.
I have to agree with you, the DRM they started using on games so they could fight piracy is one of the things that got me out of gaming. I used to spend rediculous amounts on new games, but I haven't bought a game in a decade or so. So yes, piracy hurts sales. Or rather, the fight against it does.
Slashdot Mirror
He's saying he refuses to be embarrassed by his ignorance, lack of education, and aliteracy.
If people are inherently evil, then where did the "innocence project" come from? Why does anyone drop cash in a Salvation Army kettle or a church collection basket? Why did I give away most of the nectarines in the tree in my front yard when I could easily sold them at the Farmer's Market? You only read about robberies and murder in the paper because they're rare. You don't hear about feats of great self-sacrifice and heroism because they're simply too common.
Yes, look at history, and see what a tiny percent of people there are lording it over others, what a tiny percentage have been thieves, how few murder. That Stanford experiment didn't show that people were evil, it showed that people are lemmings.
Selfishness isn't human nature, it's natural to every animal. Our species is a social species, which is why the few sociopathic scumbags can get away with leading people to commit atrocities.
It has nothing to do with the "noble savage". Were we not inherently good, there could be no civilization and we would have probably become extinct.
What else is human nature is that we tend to think everyone is like us. If you're a selfish sociopath who would steal his mother's gold teeth and sell them on the black market, you're going to think that everyone else is, too.
Amazon's main competitor is Walmart not Google or Apple.
Then why do I see Nooks at WalMart? And note that Amazon's main competetitor is the internet archive, where the books are all free?
I agree with the moderators, the GP's comment was indeed insightful. Did computers make pocket calculators obsolete? Phone and tablet screens are hard to see in the daytime outside, and impossible in sunshine. A tablet's battery lasts a LOOOOOONG time compared to the shrt time of a tablet.
A tablet is a poor substitute for an e-reader. That said, after reading this morning that only 10% of the horny women who read that "50 shades" book finished it, I no longer want an e-reader. It's nobody's damned business what I read, or how much of it. I'm stalked and spied on by big corporations way too much already. I guess I'll have to stick to paper until the publishers stop being ass clowns.
BTW, why is it legal for Amazon and B&N to stalk you? Why can't we get some serious privacy laws passed?
I haven't used Pearl, you're saying p34r1 is $#!+?
Then submit a story about the Nexus 7. It's offtopic in this thread. A tablet is not an e-reader any more than a computer is a pocket calculator.
Can you read that Nexus in the sun? You can read an ebook reader there. Can you go for a month without a charge? An e-reader can.
As to the GP, if you don't like a story you see on the front page, just DON'T CLICK! What's interesting about the topic is that it could signal a price war. As someone who's baeen thinking semi-seriously (until this morning) abouot getting a Nook, this is interesting to me. If it doesn't interest you, GTFO.
I stopped wanting an e-reaer this morning when I saw a newscast that said that of those who bought that "50 shades of gray" book in e-reader form, only 10% finished the book. God damn it, I don't want every facet of my life tracked by those corporate bastards. I guess I'll stick to paper for my reading, checking to see whether or not you finished a book is WAY out of line.
You guys who don't like this topic might consider submitting that one.
No vote is wasted, period. Even a vote for Mickey Mouse is a vote for "none of the above". I guess everyone who voted for McCain wasted their votes?
I mean what do you accomplish by voting for someone else?
Not having you counted as either being in favor the D and R policies, or being counted as apathetic. It's a vote for "none of the above." If enough non-voters did this, things would change.
Just a tiny sidebar, you actually come off as a bit holier-than-thou to me.
I'm no better than anyone else. Everyone is holy whether they realize it or not.
What if I said "yes, atheists are universally smarter, but we don't take any joy in it"?
Universally smarter? You believe that no atheists are learning-disabled? It's possible that average or median intelligence of atheists is higher, but equally possible the other way. If it were a true statement I would have no problem with it.
I don't know how you define "anti-Christian"
One who teaches the opposite of what Jesus taught. The "greed is good" crowd comes to mind, and unfortunately many of those folks consider themselves Christians. Anti-theists want all religions abolished.
assholes may benefit far more from pretending to be religious than from being openly non-religious. See: prison populations.
Yes, that's true, but I think politicians and Wall Streeters are better examples.
Nasa's web site is the first place I look. There's a treasure trove of beautiful high resolution photos, movies, data. The photo you're looking for is there. I linked the panoramic shot in a comment farther down.
Here is NASA's version
That depends on what OS they're running
It's certainly not running Windows. In non-retarded operating systems you don't have to reboot for system changes unless you're changing the operating system's kernel, and I really doubt that's what they're changing. I just don't see them doing a reboot unless the whole system crashes, which also is pretty unlikely.
Since when has right and wrong had anything to do with business?
The patent system was used by the King of England to reward his friends with monopolies. The whole "encourage innovation" and especially the whole "protect the little guy" arguments is mainly a pretty story to sell it to the masses.
Wrong, at least in the US. It was written into the Constituion like that. Remember, we'd just been at war to be free of the king and his laws. Whether or not that power was to be given to government was hotly debated and grudgingly granted.
I mean, just look at the arguments of patent system fans. Half the time they'll say "Patents are required, because otherwise everyone will keep everything secret and all knowledge will be lost." The other half of the time they say "Patents are required, because otherwise everyone will immediately duplicate every innovation without the original inventor being able to get any money out of it." While both statements can't be right at the same time, they sure can be wrong at the same time.
You're mischaracterizing it. Before patents, you could either keep your invention secret and sell stuff your invention produced (loom, cotton gin, etc) and the invention and its workings would die with you, or if you invented a product, big players would copy it and eat your lunch. Patents prevent both from happening.
Why are there still trade secrets, then? First, because patents only last 20 years and second, many things can't be patented. Recipes are an example of that.
Before anybosy mods this guy down, read this newspaper article from yesterday and you'll see why an awful lot of folks loathe and fear cops.
To a cop, there are five kinds of people: cops, family of cops, judges and politicians, and suspects.
A poll that spins is a bad poll. A good pollster will make the questions as neutral as possible. Like
[ ] TSA is doing an excellent job
[ ] TSA is doing a good job
[ ] TSA is doing an OK job
[ ] TSA is doing a mediocre job
[ ] TSA is doing a terrible job
[ ] TSA should be shut down and its employees jailed
A good poll will also ask the same question more than once using different wording. If you see a poll from a political party, you can be pretty sure it's bullshit (I've had these polls sent to me, both major parties' polls are utter shit). OTOH a poll by a reputable pollster is designed to gain information for whoever commissioned the study. They have PhDs in statistics, psychology, and other disciplines to design the poll and do the statistical analysis on the results --I've worked with them and have done this sort of thing in the past. I was in charge of the designing and writing the database of the results for the statistitians to analyze. It was pretty interesting work. Of course, back then I was writing in NOMAD for mainframe size data and dBase for smaller datasets, not (ugh!) Access like I'm stuck with now. I'm glad I'm close to retiring, work isn't as fun as it used to be.
That's actually correct, at least in my case. Only it would be "Different is Bad. GOD DAMN THAT FUCKING MICROSOFT! Damn it, I'm trying Linux!"
Which is what got me to Linux ten years ago. Change for the sake of change is stupid. Change to improve somthing is good. From DOS to Windows? That was a good change. Changing the placement of "options" in every version of IE from 1 to 4? Just fucking retarded.
When my shop migrated to Excel from Quattro ten or fifteen years ago, I took a class in Excel. It was on my desk for a week when they upgraded to a newer version of Excel, and the money my employer paid for my training and the time I spent attending was completely wasted. The newer version of Excel was more like Quattro than it was the older version. Microsoft has been bad about this ever since Windows, they weren't guilty of this with DOS.
If I have to learn a new thing to be able to do a new thing, that is a good thing. But having to relearn how to do somenthing I've done a thousand times before is just idiotic.
On the other hand an automated car would have likely crashed in a few hundred other situations I've encountered, that after having reacted and averted the danger have left me going "huh, what the FUCK just happened?"
What leads you to think that in those unlikely situations the computer-driven car would crash? After all, it's logged 300,000 miles without a crash, have you? It seems the math kind of makes your hypothesis a bit illogical.
I used to think the same about antilock brakes. I was trained as a driver in the USAF where you learn NOT to lock up the brakes, as locking them up you lose all steering and it will actually take longer to stop than if you don't quite lock them up. But I have to say, after having them, stomping on the antilock brakes is far superior to doing it like the AF taught me in a car without them.
Plus, the computer is going to see the unexpected situation faster than you can, particularly if it's a car running a stop sign. You can only see in one direction at a time, the computer can "see" all around.
Do you have a citation for that? Because I don't think I'd ever heard the word "terrorist" until Clinton was in office. And there were no drones when Nixon was in office (at least nobody was supposed to know about them; they were classified then).
The day I got home from SEA, the headlines were screaming "NIXON RESIGNS!!!" so it's not like I wasn't around back then. In that time period it was communists, not terrorists, that were the bugaboo.
Virus software? I doubt Curiosity is running Windows, and nobody at NASA is going to be fooled by a trojan. Well, unless they let Walowitz loose...
I don't think there is much choice since you can either vote for member A or B, throw you vote away on C or not vote.
That "throw your vote away" is bovine manure. If that were true, then anyone in Illinois who votes for anybody but Obama is throwing his vote away, because Obama has Illinois sewn up and will win here by a landslide. By the "voting for a loser is throwing your vote away" metric, there's no reason for anyone from Illinois to even bother voting.
I consider "throwing your vote away" to be voting for someone who wants to put someone you love or admire in prison, and both Obama and Romney want your loved ones in prison. So out of the five viable parties (there are five parties on ballots in enough states to win the election), if you don't vote Green or Libertarian, you're voting for a man who wants someone you love to go to prison.
Yes, I'm talking about marijuana. Chances are slim that none of your friends or relatives smoke it. And both major parties are behind the "war" on (some) drugs, for ever more draconian copyright laws, etc. Neither of the majors look out for my interests and both look out for the corporates, why in the HELL could voting against them be throwing away a vote? That's just insane.
Sort of Object Oriented theft?
How is my doing anything I want to any piece of equipment I own in any way "theft"? When I was a teen in the '60s, guitar fuzzboxes cost well over a hundred dollars, I'd make them out of a ten dollar transistor radio and two dollars worth of parts.
I guess I was a theif, then. I was always hacking hardware. I guess I'm still a thief, because I'm in the process of turning an old computer into a DVR.
Ahh, Java developers. *ducks*
I agree, *ducks* would have been a much better program had it not been written in Java.
Hmmm... until now, I respected that dictionary, but its definition of "hack" is sorely lacking. As a noun, "hack" can also mean a cab driver or a magazine writer, and those weren't included.
They do better with "hacker" though --
Which is probably not a coincidence. "Tinkerer" sounds lame.
Thats a good example of the evolution of language. Before there were engines, engineers wer called "tinkers" becaise of the TINK TINK sounds they made bending metal. So if you were repurposing someone else's invention, rather than "re-engineering" (since there were no engines) you were "tinkering" with it. The tinker morphed into tinkerer after the invention of engines, which were, of course, invented by tinkers. Or tinkerers.
I have to agree with you, the DRM they started using on games so they could fight piracy is one of the things that got me out of gaming. I used to spend rediculous amounts on new games, but I haven't bought a game in a decade or so. So yes, piracy hurts sales. Or rather, the fight against it does.