I was just about to post something along the same lines.
The "slippery slope" argument is nothing more than an appeal to irrational fear, and any person of reasonable intelligence should recognize it as such.
When a bill is proposed that actually crosses the line of common sense, then we should start forming the lynch mob. But we shouldn't allow ourselves to be emotionally manipulated "slippery slope" arguments.
At least not in a way that is immediately noticeable and traceable to the act of smoking.
It's one of the long-term effects of smoking. It causes the tiny veins in your body to become blocked or constricted; the penis has a lot of these, so the long-term effect of smoking may be that you can no longer get an erection.
Microsoft will never approve Linux for the X-Box; here's why:
1) It would be a tremondours PR blow to actively give Linux inroads to their system 2) As everyone says, they make money on the games and lose money on the consoles 3) If they approve an open-source OS, then they will also lose money on games because developers will circumvent the licensing process and develop games in Linux
The section of their FAQ that discusses the problem of large electrical currents generated by long space tethers was really interesting...
Would it be feasible to create a tether to low-earth orbit for the express purpose of generating electricity? I wonder how the cost would compare over the long-term to other low-cost sources like wind and nuclear.
I have a photo of SH shaking Mr Rumfeld's hand warmly dated about 1988. Then SH really had WMD and was using them.
So, WTF does that mean? Because someone took a picture of Rumsfeld and Hussein in 1998, we should now and for all time look the other way when third-world countries, particularly those with ties to al-Qaida, develop chemical and biological weapons (which are banned by the Geneva Convention)?
More liberal criticisms that lack a solution.
Why can't the warmonger be a little bit patient? because it's not about war to bring about peace(!) and security, it's about manipulating the US opinion into thinking that they are under threat RIGHT NOW. And if you let the opinion sit still for too long they will see through that game.
Read a paper. A majority of the public already does, and has for some time, supported the Iraq war. Infact, I don't think the polls have *ever* shown that a majority of Americans weren't behind President Bush on this issue.
And as to the "warmongering" issue... guess what. We already had the war. The US won, Iraq lost. Iraq surrendered unconditionally, and agreed to abandon their illegal weapons program. Iraq is now in violation of international law. To look the other way has far larger implications than just Iraq, it would mean that the law were meaningless.
And then next time we had an incident where the US was building up to war, some liberal would pipe up with "Yeah, but we didn't enforce the law last time, why should we enforce it this time?"
That's the problem with liberals. You see problems, but you don't offer any real solutions, just criticisms.
Inaction is *not* a solution.
Where were all these liberal peace-niks when Clinton was firing missles and dropping bombs and invading countries? Oh, that's right... they were hiding under the desks with the feminists, who were similarly faced with the dicotomy of supporting a liberal president who happened to be sexually assaulting women, and were just praying that it would all go away.
The people doing the research will still get to run and hide.
The people who die instantly if an asteroid hits will probably be the lucky ones. The idea of surviving on an Earth that has gone from bright and fertile to dark and barren virtually overnight is not a pleasant one. Spending weeks, maybe months, scrounging for food until you either starve to death or freeze to death is not the way that most people want to die.
Can someone explain the economic reasoning to me on why we are bothering to spend money searching for life-ending asteroids
Probably because not all asteroids would fit the profile of an inevitable extinction event. There are probably smaller ones that we can do something about, given a fair enough lead time.
Are they saying that as many people have died by asteroid strike as plane crash?
I don't think so; not yet, anyway.
Look at it this way: If, over a 10 year period, 100 people die each year in plane crashes, then the total will be 1,000 deaths.
However, it only takes one event for a meteor to kill as many people. Same ten year period, but no meteor deaths until the last minute of the last day in the tenth year, a meteorite strikes the earth and kills 1,000 people.
Statistically, the odds of dying either way are the same.
So, right now, we have lots of people dying in plane crashes, but no one dying from meteorites. But when a meteorite strikes the earth, it is estimated to kill as many people as plane crashes have.
Very simplified. I'm sure someone will want to flame me and clean this up a bit....
Re:He is insane...
on
The Faded Sun
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I agree. I also think that a merger with Apple would be a good idea. They complement each other, really. Apple lacks solid credibility in the server market, and Sun lacks solid crediblity in the desktop market. But Apple clearly is a serious contender in the desktop Unix market, and Sun will continue to be a serious contender in the server market, at least until the transformation of Linux into a serious, competent enterprise platform is complete.
Apple's stength in Sun's weakness and vice versa.
It's difficult to imagine how you could bring the two together, though. Apple's not going to offer Solaris boxes when they've got their own industrial-strength *nix OS. It might have been a good complement back in '97 when Apple lacked an OS for the enterprise back office; in fact, Apple *did* have a similar strategy back in the mid-90's when they shipped some serious server hardware running A/UX. With the purchase of NeXTStep/OpenStep, though, they now have one codebase for both server and workstation, so segmenting into two codebases wouldn't make much sense at this point.
It's also difficult to imagine Apple getting much mileage out of the Sparc systems. Hardware is almost completely commoditized these days, and the mainstream processor market is just about to go 64-bit anyway, so Sun's hardware would not give Apple a strategic long-term position.
Java is probably the only thing of any real value to Apple, since Apple has taken a real shine to it in the last few years. I'm not sure it's worth buying the company, though.
As Cringely points out, a Sun acquisition makes a lot more sense for a larger PC company that currently doesn't have a path to server market penetration.
how the hell does a game that's so far from mainstream get strung along in development for this long?
The question is, Does the Product Manager have the balls to pull the plug on a project whose development costs are already in the seven figure range?
I suspect the project "died" at least a year or two ago, and nobody really had the cajones to say it.
As someone who's followed Verant almost from the start, I have to say that I never saw the appeal of Sovereign. It sounded way too ambitious to really pull off and way too complex to hit a mass audience.
In fact, I've never really understood why they let the Tanarus franchise fall by the wayside. It was the most popular game on the internet when it was in open beta; but by the time the shrinkwrapped version hit retail shelves, a lot of gamers had had their fill and were ready to move on. To this day, they've still got a solid base of Tanarus players (7 years after the open beta was first released!), but they have no interest on following up with these players.
Yes, Disney is kid-friendly. I've watched countless hours of the Disney Channel with my kids, I've seen countless Disney movies, bought countless Disney toys, and visited several Disney theme parks. I have no problem declaring that anything marketed under the "Disney" brand is going to be kid-friendly.
The advantage of having a company the size of Disney involved in the management of ".kids" is that 1) they're going to use it themselves, and 2) they'd actually put a little marketing muscle behind it so that maybe somebody will hear it exists (unlike ".name").
It seems bizarre that anyone thinks they are going to make money with a new TLD, when ".org" and ".net" registrations COMBINED pale in comparison to ".com" registrations. Businesses are scared to register anything other than ".com", so they certainly aren't going to go with a TLD that most people haven't heard of.
I would say that, in order for a new TLD to really make money, it would have to be issued by companies that are willing to manage the content. In this way, TLD's could be really useful by classifying websites; keep.com,.org, and.net for general content. For example, I know that the idea of using ".kids" for kid-friendly websites has been discussed; great idea, but who is going to ensure that ONLY kid-friendly websites use that TLD? Maybe if a coalition of kid-friendly companies (Disney, CTW, etc.) managed it; I could even see them being able to charge a premium price ($500?), because owning a ".kids" site would be a stamp of approval. Pricing it high would also dissuade jokesters from setting up ".kids" porn sites or hosting adult content.
But, there's is NO FRICKEN WAY another TLD is going to make a dent in the market without adding some additional value in.
What about underground power lines? Are they still subject to the same problems, or does the ground provide sufficient shielding?
I live in Charlotte, NC, and just a couple of months ago we were hit with a really bad ice storm that downed a lot of powerlines. There has been some discussion since then of burying lines, although Duke Power put the cost at around $300/ft., I believe.
I wonder if offering broadband services might be a way for power companies to subsidize burying and/or upgrading power lines.
Did you ever manage any large Mac networks back then? These were they days before 100Mbit networks, fast machines, etc. We're talking Mac SE and such.
I believe the SE dates back to 1987(?), so that wouldn't be too surprising. However, I do know that Apple made significant strides in reducing the chattiness of AppleTalk by the mid- to late-90's. But by that time, most network admins were heavily biased against it.
I believe the point that the author was making was that this is one more tool to reduce platform-dependence. The more freely programs and peripherals are able to communicate with one another across various platforms, the more Microsoft and Windows shrink into the background.
That's why MS got all fired up about stomping Netscape into the ground, because the browser is supposed to enable platform-independent computing.
Yeah, it's kind of a stretch to think of Rendezvous as a "Windows killer," but it's just one technology of many to accomplish that task.
The big criticism of of AppleTalk was that it was too chatty (really, I think the issue was overblown, but that was the reputation it picked up). And yet, Rendezvous seems to be doing a lot of the same things that AppleTalk was doing.
Has Rendezvous really addressed the issue that got AppleTalk locked out of a lot of corporate networks? I wonder how it compares to AT.
Well, they do allow you to manually enter the email addresses of emails you want to receive. Whether or not the user properly manages his own account is another issue.
They guys are a joke. I took a look at them for a job a while back. The guy I was looking at replacing had been working for them for less than 90 days. What's that tell ya?
Absolutely nothing. Every company I've ever worked for has had someone leave in less than 90 days.
They got a real expensive downtown Seattle high-rise and a whole lotta blank answer when it goes to discussing their business model or future. These guys are a flash in the pan. Poof and one day they will be listed as a new "Hall of fame inductee" on f'ckedcompany.com.
Maybe, maybe not. Two things, though:
One, they aren't the only company doing this; I've heard of (but haven't seen) some other companies doing the exact same thing, and
Two, the idea is great and will survive, regardless of the particular company. I, myself, had been working on a very similar idea, but considered their approach to be more elegant.
Personally, I think that the one flaw in their business plan is that they are trying to route all of the email through their pipe and base their revenue stream on a subscription model. Big mistake. They should have set a compteitive price on their SMTP server, tossed it out there and let each company worry about maintaining their own whitelists. That's where competition is going to enter in and eat their lunch. Besides, they are going to have an enormous amount of spam traffic on their internet connection that they'll be paying for.
For about $20, you route your incoming domain email through their whitelist email servers. Anyone who's not on the list is automatically sent an email with a link for people who want to be added to the whitelist. The link takes you to a page where you have to type in a word that you see on the page (the word is in a graphic and is partially obscurred to twart spammer countermeasures).
Of course, a spammer could just click on the link and add his name, but is he going to do that for all 60,000 emails he just sent out? Probably not.
Slashdot Mirror
Given that line of reasoning, *anything* can be a "slippery slope" for *anything else* occurring, depending on your particular point-of-view.
I was just about to post something along the same lines.
The "slippery slope" argument is nothing more than an appeal to irrational fear, and any person of reasonable intelligence should recognize it as such.
When a bill is proposed that actually crosses the line of common sense, then we should start forming the lynch mob. But we shouldn't allow ourselves to be emotionally manipulated "slippery slope" arguments.
It doesn't, though.
At least not in a way that is immediately noticeable and traceable to the act of smoking.
It's one of the long-term effects of smoking. It causes the tiny veins in your body to become blocked or constricted; the penis has a lot of these, so the long-term effect of smoking may be that you can no longer get an erection.
SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: Smoking Cigarettes Can Be Hazardous To Your Health.
lot of good that one does. what if this one isn't different?
What the warning really needs to say is:
SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: Smoking Cigarettes Causes Impotence
I'm sure a lot more guys would pay attention.
Microsoft will never approve Linux for the X-Box; here's why:
1) It would be a tremondours PR blow to actively give Linux inroads to their system
2) As everyone says, they make money on the games and lose money on the consoles
3) If they approve an open-source OS, then they will also lose money on games because developers will circumvent the licensing process and develop games in Linux
The section of their FAQ that discusses the problem of large electrical currents generated by long space tethers was really interesting...
Would it be feasible to create a tether to low-earth orbit for the express purpose of generating electricity? I wonder how the cost would compare over the long-term to other low-cost sources like wind and nuclear.
I have a photo of SH shaking Mr Rumfeld's hand warmly dated about 1988. Then SH really had WMD and was using them.
So, WTF does that mean? Because someone took a picture of Rumsfeld and Hussein in 1998, we should now and for all time look the other way when third-world countries, particularly those with ties to al-Qaida, develop chemical and biological weapons (which are banned by the Geneva Convention)?
More liberal criticisms that lack a solution.
Why can't the warmonger be a little bit patient? because it's not about war to bring about peace(!) and security, it's about manipulating the US opinion into thinking that they are under threat RIGHT NOW. And if you let the opinion sit still for too long they will see through that game.
Read a paper. A majority of the public already does, and has for some time, supported the Iraq war. Infact, I don't think the polls have *ever* shown that a majority of Americans weren't behind President Bush on this issue.
And as to the "warmongering" issue... guess what. We already had the war. The US won, Iraq lost. Iraq surrendered unconditionally, and agreed to abandon their illegal weapons program. Iraq is now in violation of international law. To look the other way has far larger implications than just Iraq, it would mean that the law were meaningless.
And then next time we had an incident where the US was building up to war, some liberal would pipe up with "Yeah, but we didn't enforce the law last time, why should we enforce it this time?"
That's the problem with liberals. You see problems, but you don't offer any real solutions, just criticisms.
Inaction is *not* a solution.
Where were all these liberal peace-niks when Clinton was firing missles and dropping bombs and invading countries? Oh, that's right... they were hiding under the desks with the feminists, who were similarly faced with the dicotomy of supporting a liberal president who happened to be sexually assaulting women, and were just praying that it would all go away.
The people doing the research will still get to run and hide.
The people who die instantly if an asteroid hits will probably be the lucky ones. The idea of surviving on an Earth that has gone from bright and fertile to dark and barren virtually overnight is not a pleasant one. Spending weeks, maybe months, scrounging for food until you either starve to death or freeze to death is not the way that most people want to die.
Can someone explain the economic reasoning to me on why we are bothering to spend money searching for life-ending asteroids
Probably because not all asteroids would fit the profile of an inevitable extinction event. There are probably smaller ones that we can do something about, given a fair enough lead time.
Are they saying that as many people have died by asteroid strike as plane crash?
I don't think so; not yet, anyway.
Look at it this way: If, over a 10 year period, 100 people die each year in plane crashes, then the total will be 1,000 deaths.
However, it only takes one event for a meteor to kill as many people. Same ten year period, but no meteor deaths until the last minute of the last day in the tenth year, a meteorite strikes the earth and kills 1,000 people.
Statistically, the odds of dying either way are the same.
So, right now, we have lots of people dying in plane crashes, but no one dying from meteorites. But when a meteorite strikes the earth, it is estimated to kill as many people as plane crashes have.
Very simplified. I'm sure someone will want to flame me and clean this up a bit....
I agree. I also think that a merger with Apple would be a good idea. They complement each other, really. Apple lacks solid credibility in the server market, and Sun lacks solid crediblity in the desktop market. But Apple clearly is a serious contender in the desktop Unix market, and Sun will continue to be a serious contender in the server market, at least until the transformation of Linux into a serious, competent enterprise platform is complete.
Apple's stength in Sun's weakness and vice versa.
It's difficult to imagine how you could bring the two together, though. Apple's not going to offer Solaris boxes when they've got their own industrial-strength *nix OS. It might have been a good complement back in '97 when Apple lacked an OS for the enterprise back office; in fact, Apple *did* have a similar strategy back in the mid-90's when they shipped some serious server hardware running A/UX. With the purchase of NeXTStep/OpenStep, though, they now have one codebase for both server and workstation, so segmenting into two codebases wouldn't make much sense at this point.
It's also difficult to imagine Apple getting much mileage out of the Sparc systems. Hardware is almost completely commoditized these days, and the mainstream processor market is just about to go 64-bit anyway, so Sun's hardware would not give Apple a strategic long-term position.
Java is probably the only thing of any real value to Apple, since Apple has taken a real shine to it in the last few years. I'm not sure it's worth buying the company, though.
As Cringely points out, a Sun acquisition makes a lot more sense for a larger PC company that currently doesn't have a path to server market penetration.
The more realistic you make a war game, the less fun it is.
The beta testers' number one complaint about Sovereign was the napalm-spraying USB peripheral included in the box.
how the hell does a game that's so far from mainstream get strung along in development for this long?
The question is, Does the Product Manager have the balls to pull the plug on a project whose development costs are already in the seven figure range?
I suspect the project "died" at least a year or two ago, and nobody really had the cajones to say it.
As someone who's followed Verant almost from the start, I have to say that I never saw the appeal of Sovereign. It sounded way too ambitious to really pull off and way too complex to hit a mass audience.
In fact, I've never really understood why they let the Tanarus franchise fall by the wayside. It was the most popular game on the internet when it was in open beta; but by the time the shrinkwrapped version hit retail shelves, a lot of gamers had had their fill and were ready to move on. To this day, they've still got a solid base of Tanarus players (7 years after the open beta was first released!), but they have no interest on following up with these players.
Yes, Disney is kid-friendly. I've watched countless hours of the Disney Channel with my kids, I've seen countless Disney movies, bought countless Disney toys, and visited several Disney theme parks. I have no problem declaring that anything marketed under the "Disney" brand is going to be kid-friendly.
The advantage of having a company the size of Disney involved in the management of ".kids" is that 1) they're going to use it themselves, and 2) they'd actually put a little marketing muscle behind it so that maybe somebody will hear it exists (unlike ".name").
You would think that at least one of these several hundred Cowards would register with their name.
I believe those have all been reserved by France. Try checking coward.name.fr.
It seems bizarre that anyone thinks they are going to make money with a new TLD, when ".org" and ".net" registrations COMBINED pale in comparison to ".com" registrations. Businesses are scared to register anything other than ".com", so they certainly aren't going to go with a TLD that most people haven't heard of.
.com, .org, and .net for general content. For example, I know that the idea of using ".kids" for kid-friendly websites has been discussed; great idea, but who is going to ensure that ONLY kid-friendly websites use that TLD? Maybe if a coalition of kid-friendly companies (Disney, CTW, etc.) managed it; I could even see them being able to charge a premium price ($500?), because owning a ".kids" site would be a stamp of approval. Pricing it high would also dissuade jokesters from setting up ".kids" porn sites or hosting adult content.
I would say that, in order for a new TLD to really make money, it would have to be issued by companies that are willing to manage the content. In this way, TLD's could be really useful by classifying websites; keep
But, there's is NO FRICKEN WAY another TLD is going to make a dent in the market without adding some additional value in.
What about underground power lines? Are they still subject to the same problems, or does the ground provide sufficient shielding?
I live in Charlotte, NC, and just a couple of months ago we were hit with a really bad ice storm that downed a lot of powerlines. There has been some discussion since then of burying lines, although Duke Power put the cost at around $300/ft., I believe.
I wonder if offering broadband services might be a way for power companies to subsidize burying and/or upgrading power lines.
Did you ever manage any large Mac networks back then? These were they days before 100Mbit networks, fast machines, etc. We're talking Mac SE and such.
I believe the SE dates back to 1987(?), so that wouldn't be too surprising. However, I do know that Apple made significant strides in reducing the chattiness of AppleTalk by the mid- to late-90's. But by that time, most network admins were heavily biased against it.
I believe the point that the author was making was that this is one more tool to reduce platform-dependence. The more freely programs and peripherals are able to communicate with one another across various platforms, the more Microsoft and Windows shrink into the background.
That's why MS got all fired up about stomping Netscape into the ground, because the browser is supposed to enable platform-independent computing.
Yeah, it's kind of a stretch to think of Rendezvous as a "Windows killer," but it's just one technology of many to accomplish that task.
The big criticism of of AppleTalk was that it was too chatty (really, I think the issue was overblown, but that was the reputation it picked up). And yet, Rendezvous seems to be doing a lot of the same things that AppleTalk was doing.
Has Rendezvous really addressed the issue that got AppleTalk locked out of a lot of corporate networks? I wonder how it compares to AT.
The crimes of eBay are a disgrace to it's pig latin heritage!
eBay protest cry:
IX-NAY ON THE EBAY!
Well, they do allow you to manually enter the email addresses of emails you want to receive. Whether or not the user properly manages his own account is another issue.
They guys are a joke. I took a look at them for a job a while back. The guy I was looking at replacing had been working for them for less than 90 days. What's that tell ya?
Absolutely nothing. Every company I've ever worked for has had someone leave in less than 90 days.
They got a real expensive downtown Seattle high-rise and a whole lotta blank answer when it goes to discussing their business model or future. These guys are a flash in the pan. Poof and one day they will be listed as a new "Hall of fame inductee" on f'ckedcompany.com.
Maybe, maybe not. Two things, though:
One, they aren't the only company doing this; I've heard of (but haven't seen) some other companies doing the exact same thing, and
Two, the idea is great and will survive, regardless of the particular company. I, myself, had been working on a very similar idea, but considered their approach to be more elegant.
Personally, I think that the one flaw in their business plan is that they are trying to route all of the email through their pipe and base their revenue stream on a subscription model. Big mistake. They should have set a compteitive price on their SMTP server, tossed it out there and let each company worry about maintaining their own whitelists. That's where competition is going to enter in and eat their lunch. Besides, they are going to have an enormous amount of spam traffic on their internet connection that they'll be paying for.
Check out an online service called SpamArrest.
For about $20, you route your incoming domain email through their whitelist email servers. Anyone who's not on the list is automatically sent an email with a link for people who want to be added to the whitelist. The link takes you to a page where you have to type in a word that you see on the page (the word is in a graphic and is partially obscurred to twart spammer countermeasures).
Of course, a spammer could just click on the link and add his name, but is he going to do that for all 60,000 emails he just sent out? Probably not.