Today's technology isn't anywhere near advanced enough for interstellar travel, getting to Alpha Proxima is as impossible for us as getting to the moon was two hundred years ago.
We need to understand this --- it's like archeology --- what we do today might affect the future generations --- if we dig up the ancient grave today we might get X number of discoveries But if we leave that ancient grave untouched, and leave it to future generations who may have even better equipments and technologies to excavate that ancient grave, they may yield EVEN MORE INFORMATION than what we can obtain
Tomorrow will always have better tech than today no matter what "today" you're talking about. If you always wait for tomorrow's tech, you'll wait forever; tomorrow never comes.
Unfortunately, they went all MS last year with the exception of Java and the mainframe. The web apps are all Java based, and web apps don't translate to paper very well. Actually I'm glad they're not moving to web apps for what I do, it would be a tremendous amount of work to rewrite all the reports.
The great depression wasn't caused by the stock market crash, by the way.
Indeed. It was caused by the very same actions that caused the 2008 meltdown. There's an excellent history of the 1920s written shortly after the crash that was required reading in a class I took at SIU about 40 years ago, Only Yesterday. It's a good read, and an eye-opener about our own time.
After the crash, the unemployment rate was about what it is now - floating between 9 and 10 percent
I'd be very interested in a citation -- everything I've read (and my grandparents, who were born about the turn of the century) said it was more like 25-35%.
Notice below how you see the dow begin to recover up until Smoot-Hawly
That was enacted in 1930, your graph shows no such thing. Read the book I linked, the full text is there.
Wow, what a horrible moderation. Troll? Really? Looks like the idiots from 4chan have mod points today, or maybe a disgruntled MBA. You are entirely correct, I had an undergrad psychology prof say that there isn't a psychologist that there's another calling him a gold-studded liar, the same could be said for economists, who seem to ignore results. Example: Cut taxes on the rich for job creation, ignoring all of history. Even after the Bush cuts (among other mistakes) ruined the economy.
However, rather than being stupid, IMO economists are simply dishonest. Most people who worship money are.
Waste your points on me, 4channers, so you won't mod good comments like the parent's down. This is ridiculous. Please, slashdot, bring back the old metamoderstion (or give me a few ponts, haven't had any in ages).
Unless, of course, you expect a strong AI to reside inside Excel which is able to distinguish between what the user wanted and what he actually did.
Unfortunately, that's what MS tries to do and fails badly at it. Most of my frustration with Excel is it attempting to read my mind and failing miserably at it. That said, despite its shortcomings IMO it's still better than Lotus, Corel, or Oo's spreadsheets. Excel is really the only MS product I actually like (and I hate spreadsheets in general).
Contrast that to Access, the worst clusterfuck of a dbms I've ever used. I miss Nomad on the mainframe and dBase and pre-MS FoxPro on the PC; you told them what to do and it did it. Tell Access what to do and it does something else or argues with you. It frustrated the hell out of me just last week when a screen stopped working that had been fine for years, returning a "return without gosub" error as if I'd been programming in BASIC. Copying that screen to another, empty database, deleting in the real db, and copying it back fixed it.
I suspect that MS puts their least competent programmers on the Access team. I fucking HATE that program, glad I retire next year.
But then again, most economies (other than that of North Korea) are dynamic, and the amount of resource fluctuates
That depends on what you mean by "resources." An MBA Romney-style corporate raider considers "resources" to mean "cash and credit" while someone who isn't a rent-seeking parasite considers things like timber, ore, fuel, and available labor to be resources. The only real resources that fluctuate are labor and renewables.
I see your kids aren't grown. It pisses my daughter off that all her friends like Zeppelin and Floyd, she was burned out on it when she was a kid.
The reason my generation didn't like our parents' music is because it wasn't really all that good. Nobody in their twenties in the seventies listened to music from the thirties, but music from the late sixties to the early 2000s seems to be timeless; go into any bar with a cover band and it will be full of twentysomethings yelling "FREE BIRD!" as the band plays some Nugent or Sabbath.
Also, at least in my case, my tastes in music have expanded greatly. These days I'll listen to about anything except hiphop, opera, or bubblegum pop (Beiber, the Archies, every generation has that dreck). When she was a teen my daughter turned me onto ska. My ex always hated punk, so it never got played. One evening when she was at the store I put on a punk cassette. Daughter's eyes got big and she said "Dead Kennedies? You like the Dead Kennedies?" Turns out that the music I loved that she never heard, she also loved.
As to the submitter's question: Physical media, baby. Records, tapes, CDs, DVDs you can sample and rip to your hard drive. I know you guys in a dorm room or tiny apartment say "But I don't have the room!" Don't worry, you will. Just store the physical media at your parents house. You'll have room soon enough.
Save a place for me in hell.. Right by all the whores and drugs, and rock & roll music..
JWSmythe dies and goes to hell. Satan says he's been pleased with the old fellow, and says he's free to pick his own punishment and shows him around.
The first room is full of fire, with people screaming in agony. The second has people in chains, starving forever, in a room full of mosquitos.
The third room has a bunch of people up to their waists in sewage, drinking coffee, with Black Sabbath belting out "Children of the Grave". JWSmythe says "That one doesn't look too bad" and Satan hands him a cup of coffee. No sooner does he get in the sewage pit when a demon says "OK, folks, coffee break's over. Time to stand on your heads again."
But there is nowhere else in the entire universe that's anywhere near as friendly to humans as Earth.
We don't know one way or another, but if you're talking about the entire universe, there are billions of stars in just this galaxy alone. Mars was once wet and warm enough for humans to live comfortably on. It's highly unlikely that there are no other habitable planets anywhere. There probably are in our own galaxy.
It's extremely small minded/short sighted of the worlds most famous physicist, to assume the current system will keep chugging along, with business as usual, for a THOUSAND more years.
Well, he's opinionating a little out of his field. Kind of like a sociologist opinionating about subatomic particle physics. Where's Hari Seldon when you need him?
Or we can just send Hawking and be done with his babble if he wants to go so bad.
Hawking has been paralyzed for decades. It isn't that he wants to go to space, he wants humanity to survive.
You got it right though, Human beings are just a Virus, moving into areas just to consume it's resources, only to move on to another after we've laid barren the lands.
Then explain the existence of farms. You have it backwards - we're one of very few species that doesn't do that.
The problem is, we can't change because all we care about is money.
We? Who's "we", Mr. Trump? Not everyone worships money.
we're just not doing enough to matter.
How could anything anyone does matter at all in the long run? Our species has only been around for the blink of an eye in cosmological timescales.
It's false advertising. In the UK the ASA would prevent it. In the US, customers can't win a suit for false advertising, only a competitor can. But I agree, they should all get refunds.
Based on the costs born by the seller, which are practically zero. I agree with the GP that a dime would be reasonable for a digital file, which is why I buy physical media. iTunes is a ripoff and I refuse to do business with thieves.
Yes, I agree that CDs are overpriced unless you buy an indie title (five or ten bucks) and shitty bands produce CDs with maybe one acceptable song and the rest dreck, but at least with a CD you own it, unlike an MP3.
I never DL from iTunes, I just buy used CDs at Recycled Records or the Elf Shelf. Again, five or ten bucks -- and I won't buy music from shitty bands that can only have one in fifteen songs worth listening to. There are just too many talented musicians to waste my time and money on the semi-talented.
If I pay to download a song from iTunes or wherever, in what way is it false to call that a purchase of digital goods?
You didn't buy anything, you paid a fee to download a file.
I get to legally listen to the song, the same as if I had bought it on a CD. The physical CD was never what I was buying anyway.
Yes, it was. You don't own the songs on the CD, only the CD. Nobody owns a song, not even the copyright holder, who only holds a "limited" time monopoly on its publication. Buy the CD, rip it to MP3 and resell the CD. You're not breaking the law, since you didn't publish anything.
I really don't see why anyone was surprised at this ruling.
Slashdot Mirror
Today's technology isn't anywhere near advanced enough for interstellar travel, getting to Alpha Proxima is as impossible for us as getting to the moon was two hundred years ago.
We need to understand this --- it's like archeology --- what we do today might affect the future generations --- if we dig up the ancient grave today we might get X number of discoveries But if we leave that ancient grave untouched, and leave it to future generations who may have even better equipments and technologies to excavate that ancient grave, they may yield EVEN MORE INFORMATION than what we can obtain
Tomorrow will always have better tech than today no matter what "today" you're talking about. If you always wait for tomorrow's tech, you'll wait forever; tomorrow never comes.
I guess you are not in the high tech field
100% of my job is brainpower and computers. Don't tell me what I do isn't work!
Which was a few years after Smoot-Hawley, so I don't see the correlation at all. If it was six months or a year I'd probably agree with you.
That sounds like where I work.
Unfortunately, they went all MS last year with the exception of Java and the mainframe. The web apps are all Java based, and web apps don't translate to paper very well. Actually I'm glad they're not moving to web apps for what I do, it would be a tremendous amount of work to rewrite all the reports.
I'm just glad I'm retiring next year.
The great depression wasn't caused by the stock market crash, by the way.
Indeed. It was caused by the very same actions that caused the 2008 meltdown. There's an excellent history of the 1920s written shortly after the crash that was required reading in a class I took at SIU about 40 years ago, Only Yesterday. It's a good read, and an eye-opener about our own time.
After the crash, the unemployment rate was about what it is now - floating between 9 and 10 percent
I'd be very interested in a citation -- everything I've read (and my grandparents, who were born about the turn of the century) said it was more like 25-35%.
Notice below how you see the dow begin to recover up until Smoot-Hawly
That was enacted in 1930, your graph shows no such thing. Read the book I linked, the full text is there.
Wow, what a horrible moderation. Troll? Really? Looks like the idiots from 4chan have mod points today, or maybe a disgruntled MBA. You are entirely correct, I had an undergrad psychology prof say that there isn't a psychologist that there's another calling him a gold-studded liar, the same could be said for economists, who seem to ignore results. Example: Cut taxes on the rich for job creation, ignoring all of history. Even after the Bush cuts (among other mistakes) ruined the economy.
However, rather than being stupid, IMO economists are simply dishonest. Most people who worship money are.
Waste your points on me, 4channers, so you won't mod good comments like the parent's down. This is ridiculous. Please, slashdot, bring back the old metamoderstion (or give me a few ponts, haven't had any in ages).
Unless, of course, you expect a strong AI to reside inside Excel which is able to distinguish between what the user wanted and what he actually did.
Unfortunately, that's what MS tries to do and fails badly at it. Most of my frustration with Excel is it attempting to read my mind and failing miserably at it. That said, despite its shortcomings IMO it's still better than Lotus, Corel, or Oo's spreadsheets. Excel is really the only MS product I actually like (and I hate spreadsheets in general).
Contrast that to Access, the worst clusterfuck of a dbms I've ever used. I miss Nomad on the mainframe and dBase and pre-MS FoxPro on the PC; you told them what to do and it did it. Tell Access what to do and it does something else or argues with you. It frustrated the hell out of me just last week when a screen stopped working that had been fine for years, returning a "return without gosub" error as if I'd been programming in BASIC. Copying that screen to another, empty database, deleting in the real db, and copying it back fixed it.
I suspect that MS puts their least competent programmers on the Access team. I fucking HATE that program, glad I retire next year.
But then again, most economies (other than that of North Korea) are dynamic, and the amount of resource fluctuates
That depends on what you mean by "resources." An MBA Romney-style corporate raider considers "resources" to mean "cash and credit" while someone who isn't a rent-seeking parasite considers things like timber, ore, fuel, and available labor to be resources. The only real resources that fluctuate are labor and renewables.
Using a process I like to dub: Pulse Emitted Waves.
Wouldn't those "lazorz" go "Pew! Pew! Pew"? and what does l.a.z.o.r.z. stand for?
Lazorz? Light amplification by zoological ordinary zebras? How would that device work?
I see your kids aren't grown. It pisses my daughter off that all her friends like Zeppelin and Floyd, she was burned out on it when she was a kid.
The reason my generation didn't like our parents' music is because it wasn't really all that good. Nobody in their twenties in the seventies listened to music from the thirties, but music from the late sixties to the early 2000s seems to be timeless; go into any bar with a cover band and it will be full of twentysomethings yelling "FREE BIRD!" as the band plays some Nugent or Sabbath.
Also, at least in my case, my tastes in music have expanded greatly. These days I'll listen to about anything except hiphop, opera, or bubblegum pop (Beiber, the Archies, every generation has that dreck). When she was a teen my daughter turned me onto ska. My ex always hated punk, so it never got played. One evening when she was at the store I put on a punk cassette. Daughter's eyes got big and she said "Dead Kennedies? You like the Dead Kennedies?" Turns out that the music I loved that she never heard, she also loved.
As to the submitter's question: Physical media, baby. Records, tapes, CDs, DVDs you can sample and rip to your hard drive. I know you guys in a dorm room or tiny apartment say "But I don't have the room!" Don't worry, you will. Just store the physical media at your parents house. You'll have room soon enough.
Save a place for me in hell.. Right by all the whores and drugs, and rock & roll music..
JWSmythe dies and goes to hell. Satan says he's been pleased with the old fellow, and says he's free to pick his own punishment and shows him around.
The first room is full of fire, with people screaming in agony. The second has people in chains, starving forever, in a room full of mosquitos.
The third room has a bunch of people up to their waists in sewage, drinking coffee, with Black Sabbath belting out "Children of the Grave". JWSmythe says "That one doesn't look too bad" and Satan hands him a cup of coffee. No sooner does he get in the sewage pit when a demon says "OK, folks, coffee break's over. Time to stand on your heads again."
But there is nowhere else in the entire universe that's anywhere near as friendly to humans as Earth.
We don't know one way or another, but if you're talking about the entire universe, there are billions of stars in just this galaxy alone. Mars was once wet and warm enough for humans to live comfortably on. It's highly unlikely that there are no other habitable planets anywhere. There probably are in our own galaxy.
It's extremely small minded/short sighted of the worlds most famous physicist, to assume the current system will keep chugging along, with business as usual, for a THOUSAND more years.
Well, he's opinionating a little out of his field. Kind of like a sociologist opinionating about subatomic particle physics. Where's Hari Seldon when you need him?
Or we can just send Hawking and be done with his babble if he wants to go so bad.
Hawking has been paralyzed for decades. It isn't that he wants to go to space, he wants humanity to survive.
You got it right though, Human beings are just a Virus, moving into areas just to consume it's resources, only to move on to another after we've laid barren the lands.
Then explain the existence of farms. You have it backwards - we're one of very few species that doesn't do that.
The problem is, we can't change because all we care about is money.
We? Who's "we", Mr. Trump? Not everyone worships money.
we're just not doing enough to matter.
How could anything anyone does matter at all in the long run? Our species has only been around for the blink of an eye in cosmological timescales.
Amazon's wording is "Buy MP3"
It's false advertising. In the UK the ASA would prevent it. In the US, customers can't win a suit for false advertising, only a competitor can. But I agree, they should all get refunds.
Based on what, other than a sense of entitlement?
Based on the costs born by the seller, which are practically zero. I agree with the GP that a dime would be reasonable for a digital file, which is why I buy physical media. iTunes is a ripoff and I refuse to do business with thieves.
Yes, I agree that CDs are overpriced unless you buy an indie title (five or ten bucks) and shitty bands produce CDs with maybe one acceptable song and the rest dreck, but at least with a CD you own it, unlike an MP3.
I never DL from iTunes, I just buy used CDs at Recycled Records or the Elf Shelf. Again, five or ten bucks -- and I won't buy music from shitty bands that can only have one in fifteen songs worth listening to. There are just too many talented musicians to waste my time and money on the semi-talented.
Thank you! When did copyright change from outlawing publication? After all, there are Xerox machines in the library.
You're forgetting that US law enforcement considers smoking pot to be worse than murder.
And, er, why was the parent post modded "flamebait"? Something's seriously wrong with the moderation system.
If I pay to download a song from iTunes or wherever, in what way is it false to call that a purchase of digital goods?
You didn't buy anything, you paid a fee to download a file.
I get to legally listen to the song, the same as if I had bought it on a CD. The physical CD was never what I was buying anyway.
Yes, it was. You don't own the songs on the CD, only the CD. Nobody owns a song, not even the copyright holder, who only holds a "limited" time monopoly on its publication. Buy the CD, rip it to MP3 and resell the CD. You're not breaking the law, since you didn't publish anything.
I really don't see why anyone was surprised at this ruling.
The lesson -- you can't buy am MP3. I would think people would understand that. Buy the CD instead, you CAN resell physical media.
What do Gomez and Morticia have to do with it?
Nothing. It's this guy.
Um, should I add a woosh to that, sir?