where some smell bullshit, i smell an opportunity
on
On Apple vs Apple
·
· Score: 3, Funny
I just came up with the most amazing idea. There are clearly no damages to apple corp in this case, itunes only benefits from using apple computer's reputation, apple corp is as irrelevant as can be. Yet apple corp has already managed to squeeze a bit of money out of apple comp. Clearly the only things that determine whether or not you win a case are the size of your target and the amount of publicity you get. So I am going to start a company that tries to predeict what software companies are going to name future releases of their software. We will also try to predict what businisses will be computerized next and strategically name a company so that by the time apple, microsoft, google, yahoo, or whoever comes around, there will already be a company in that field with their name attatched to it. Then we'll sue major companies and pay off the press to print front-page articles about our cases. I'll be rich. Imagine if Blinds-to-go had changed its name to Windows 2000 in 1999. Our first projects will be Vista Records, Vista Productions, Vista Search, etc. Maybe we're too late to take advantage of Vista, but its worth a try.
im studying physics at mcgill university. our expermintal methods class requires us to use linux. we code in pico and compile with a linux prompt. i was a little surprised with the first question. anyone else required to use linux for school?
But it's perfectly possible to be ambitious and competitive without being violent, criminal, or unethical.
and where did you get the idea i was advocating violent, criminal and unethical behavior? theres a difference between reading between the lines, and reading in new lines.
Most starvation in the modern world is due to political conflict, not to lack of innovation.
Sorry, but youve got that backwards. Political science offers far more evidence that conflict happens as a result of starvation than vice versa. Which came first, Germany's economic collaspe (mostly caused by the US stock market crash) or Hitler's rise to power? Israel and the US are both involved in gigantic political conflicts, but starvation is at most a minor issue in both countries. So you can clearly be involved in a conflict without starving. Palestine is in the same conflict as Israel, and they have a poverty problem. Whats the difference? Israel has an excellent economy.
And that makes perfect sense: the more resources that are wasted on conflict, the fewer that are left over to be used for other things (like food production).
Only if you have resources to begin with. The world produces enough food to feed everyone, the problem is that people can't afford it in some places. The only country where resources spent on military expenditures clearly cause a lack of food is North Korea, but it takes the most sophisticated mass brainwashing in the world to pull that off. The most recent US budget appropriates $440 Billion (3.7% of current GDP, figure does not include spending in Iraq/Afganistan) for defense, the most anyone in the world spends on their military. China spends about $30 Billion. Yet Americans can afford food because our GDP is so freakin huge. So we have more money going into food production AND conflict than anyone else. Clearly no exclusion.
Pretty paintings and clever inventions are not an end unto themselves -- they are means towards a larger end, which is an improved quality of life.
I'd say theyre neither, they're signs that a society is developing. When a single society develops, everyone benefits. In the US, we invented things like cars and lightbulbs, but now everyone gets to use them. Our inventions improve economies around the world, helping more people put food on their tables. Our secret: competition. US companies spend more on R&D than anyone else becuase thats what it takes to get ahead here. The companies in Europe that spend the most on R&D (Drug/Auto makers) are the ones that compete with American companies.
everyone who grew up in a developed country, including me, went through a stage in life where what you are saying made a whole lot of sense. then we slowly began to understand that although we were born into a developed and highly structured society, things simply do not appear out of nowhere. maintaining the quality of life we have developed over the past few centuries requires constant innovation and development. if we had an entire society of people who were only capable of resolving issues, our entire world would slowly fade away. it takes ambitious risk-takers (read: dicks) to sustain an economy. if bill gates wasnt there to sell his dirt-cheap knockoff OSs, do you think PCs would be so readily available today? (open source projects like linux require that people already have PCs) communism tried to circumvent the need for this, and gues what... it wasnt sustainable. so while its easy for you to look at the world from a developed contry and say "boy life would be a lot easier if people just got along" the fact is we would starve if everyone just got along. Theres a speech in my favorite movie, The Third Man, which is delivered by an extremely immoral character, but that has quite a bit of truth to it. "In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."
the focus of treatment is not judging, its about solving people's problems. if you take a socially incompetent 25 year old and tell him the guys who beat him up in high school were assholes, then look them all up and tell them they were assholes, youre not going to solve anything. some people do try to deal with bullying by going after the group instead of the individual. there are misguided efforts to eliminate bullying altogether in many preschools and elementary schools. unfortunately, most are designed by women who dont understand the development of boys, so theyll probably end up turning the entire classes into pussies. if i ever have a kid, im sending him to a daycare center thats staffed entirely by superintelligent wolves. he'll get so many women it will be scary.
theres a big difference between substituting prized for salary for contracted employees and giving rewards to people who work voluntarily. if a person is donating their time to an open source project, they obviosly dont need pay as a motivation. they really couldnt start paying a salary to everyone who works on open source projects that end up benefitting them. this adds a precedint of giving something to people in a field that usually offers little or no monatary benefit. theres no comparison to regular employment.
i suspect that theyre collecting all this data so that they can set some neural net on it that will learn the secrets of humanity and ultimately pass the turing test. but then again, im on crack.
the problem i had with google recording search histories was that they automatically switched the default option from no to yes without telling anyone. so if you already looked at it, decided you didnt want to do it, and left the feature off, it automatically activated it behind your back. that's what i consider evil.
heres the problem. you cost these companies more than non-geeks by using more bandwidth. if you and every other geek switches to a company, youre acually hurting it. i cant claim to know how isps do their pricing, but they very well may loose money on those of us residential users who use a lot of bandwidth. but take a look at business dsl pricing, it costs more for the same bandwidth because a business is more likely to use all of their bandwidth. moral of the story: a nerd boycott could be the best thing that ever happened to an isp.
spiderman has these, i think he calls them spidey tracers or something. batman has them too. this is just the next step in the slow transformation of law enforcement officers into super-heros. they can already see in the dark, stop bullets, crash through skylights, and see through walls. in about 10 years fat men with moustaches in skin-tight rubber suits will be known as police officers instead of fetishists.
the most impressive thing to me is the side panel with all the connectors. that is really amazing. he could sell those things at specialty shops or the sharper image or harrods or something for a fortune. as a side note, this is the only modding project i've seen that i'd ever bring up at a party.
Note: Your connection to Google has been limited by Verizon. If you would like to experience Google at full speed, please switch to another internet service provider. For a list of internet service providers in your area that do not limit access to Google, click here.
the term monopoly means a lot to me. once you proove a monopoly in court, theres all sorts of things you can do. if verizon forces the entire ISP market to use the same pricing scheme, that probably constitutes abuse of a monopoly. they'll get a LOT of well-funded opposition in court if they try anything stupid like that.
we pay taxes and the police protect us from being stabbed by the creepy guy next door. the media corporations pay taxes and the government protexts them from having their product distributed for free (stolen). remind me, which of these people is a terrorist? one could easily argue your point. one could also easily jump off a cliff. i dont think either is a very good idea though.
memorize a story before hand. better yet, use more improvisation in all your stories so that its harder to tell the difference between a remembered story and a made up one. the more faith we put in lie detection technology, the more a good lier will get away with.
i used to know abramoff and one of his sons. the man is a republican through and through. he broke new ground by working through democratic channels too, but its a mistake to think of him as anything but a part of the republican machine.
thats funny, it wasn't the default option for me at first. i thought they werent going to be evil like that. then they changed it and started doing it without telling me. i just lost my faith in google. time to change my start page.
How could my interactions with people of other racial identities possibly be beside the point? If people from different ethnic backgrounds can interact on an equal footing, where is the problem? Why the expectation that racial distinctions will disapear entirely? Some people are proud of their background and would rather hang onto it. They tend to identify with other people from the same background. As long as questions of superiority don't enter the picture and it doesn't stop them from identifying with other people, I can't see any reason why this is wrong. If equality is the obliteration of every person's identification with their own background, then let me be the first to say that equality is a very bad thing. And pardon me for not taking everything a professor says as gospel truth. Or even partial truth for that matter. We have a professor here at McGill who every year convinces a few hundred gullible freshmen that gender roles are entirely social constructions. There is always confusion in well meaning movements once the basic objectives have already been achieved. Once a movement's principles have been accepted as truth by the vast majority of people, reform becomes easy. But at a certain point, you run our of obvious reforms and it is unclear what to do next or when to stop. Thats where the racial equality movement in most of North America is now. Psychologocally unhealthy behavior? How far are we going to take this thing? There used to be real problems, you know.
Several reasons for this language test other than the one in the original article have come up in theis thread. One that has come up several times is communication. And the fact is that this language test will not filter out Chinese people with passable English. If they required people to speak a few sentences into a webcam, that would be another story entirely.
Slashdot Mirror
I just came up with the most amazing idea. There are clearly no damages to apple corp in this case, itunes only benefits from using apple computer's reputation, apple corp is as irrelevant as can be. Yet apple corp has already managed to squeeze a bit of money out of apple comp. Clearly the only things that determine whether or not you win a case are the size of your target and the amount of publicity you get. So I am going to start a company that tries to predeict what software companies are going to name future releases of their software. We will also try to predict what businisses will be computerized next and strategically name a company so that by the time apple, microsoft, google, yahoo, or whoever comes around, there will already be a company in that field with their name attatched to it. Then we'll sue major companies and pay off the press to print front-page articles about our cases. I'll be rich. Imagine if Blinds-to-go had changed its name to Windows 2000 in 1999. Our first projects will be Vista Records, Vista Productions, Vista Search, etc. Maybe we're too late to take advantage of Vista, but its worth a try.
im studying physics at mcgill university. our expermintal methods class requires us to use linux. we code in pico and compile with a linux prompt. i was a little surprised with the first question. anyone else required to use linux for school?
But it's perfectly possible to be ambitious and competitive without being violent, criminal, or unethical.
and where did you get the idea i was advocating violent, criminal and unethical behavior? theres a difference between reading between the lines, and reading in new lines.
Most starvation in the modern world is due to political conflict, not to lack of innovation.
Sorry, but youve got that backwards. Political science offers far more evidence that conflict happens as a result of starvation than vice versa. Which came first, Germany's economic collaspe (mostly caused by the US stock market crash) or Hitler's rise to power? Israel and the US are both involved in gigantic political conflicts, but starvation is at most a minor issue in both countries. So you can clearly be involved in a conflict without starving. Palestine is in the same conflict as Israel, and they have a poverty problem. Whats the difference? Israel has an excellent economy.
And that makes perfect sense: the more resources that are wasted on conflict, the fewer that are left over to be used for other things (like food production).
Only if you have resources to begin with. The world produces enough food to feed everyone, the problem is that people can't afford it in some places. The only country where resources spent on military expenditures clearly cause a lack of food is North Korea, but it takes the most sophisticated mass brainwashing in the world to pull that off. The most recent US budget appropriates $440 Billion (3.7% of current GDP, figure does not include spending in Iraq/Afganistan) for defense, the most anyone in the world spends on their military. China spends about $30 Billion. Yet Americans can afford food because our GDP is so freakin huge. So we have more money going into food production AND conflict than anyone else. Clearly no exclusion.
Pretty paintings and clever inventions are not an end unto themselves -- they are means towards a larger end, which is an improved quality of life.
I'd say theyre neither, they're signs that a society is developing. When a single society develops, everyone benefits. In the US, we invented things like cars and lightbulbs, but now everyone gets to use them. Our inventions improve economies around the world, helping more people put food on their tables. Our secret: competition. US companies spend more on R&D than anyone else becuase thats what it takes to get ahead here. The companies in Europe that spend the most on R&D (Drug/Auto makers) are the ones that compete with American companies.
everyone who grew up in a developed country, including me, went through a stage in life where what you are saying made a whole lot of sense. then we slowly began to understand that although we were born into a developed and highly structured society, things simply do not appear out of nowhere. maintaining the quality of life we have developed over the past few centuries requires constant innovation and development. if we had an entire society of people who were only capable of resolving issues, our entire world would slowly fade away. it takes ambitious risk-takers (read: dicks) to sustain an economy. if bill gates wasnt there to sell his dirt-cheap knockoff OSs, do you think PCs would be so readily available today? (open source projects like linux require that people already have PCs) communism tried to circumvent the need for this, and gues what... it wasnt sustainable. so while its easy for you to look at the world from a developed contry and say "boy life would be a lot easier if people just got along" the fact is we would starve if everyone just got along. Theres a speech in my favorite movie, The Third Man, which is delivered by an extremely immoral character, but that has quite a bit of truth to it. "In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."
good question. ill have to learn wolf sign-language to clear that up with the management.
the focus of treatment is not judging, its about solving people's problems. if you take a socially incompetent 25 year old and tell him the guys who beat him up in high school were assholes, then look them all up and tell them they were assholes, youre not going to solve anything. some people do try to deal with bullying by going after the group instead of the individual. there are misguided efforts to eliminate bullying altogether in many preschools and elementary schools. unfortunately, most are designed by women who dont understand the development of boys, so theyll probably end up turning the entire classes into pussies. if i ever have a kid, im sending him to a daycare center thats staffed entirely by superintelligent wolves. he'll get so many women it will be scary.
theres a big difference between substituting prized for salary for contracted employees and giving rewards to people who work voluntarily. if a person is donating their time to an open source project, they obviosly dont need pay as a motivation. they really couldnt start paying a salary to everyone who works on open source projects that end up benefitting them. this adds a precedint of giving something to people in a field that usually offers little or no monatary benefit. theres no comparison to regular employment.
i suspect that theyre collecting all this data so that they can set some neural net on it that will learn the secrets of humanity and ultimately pass the turing test. but then again, im on crack.
the problem i had with google recording search histories was that they automatically switched the default option from no to yes without telling anyone. so if you already looked at it, decided you didnt want to do it, and left the feature off, it automatically activated it behind your back. that's what i consider evil.
heres the problem. you cost these companies more than non-geeks by using more bandwidth. if you and every other geek switches to a company, youre acually hurting it. i cant claim to know how isps do their pricing, but they very well may loose money on those of us residential users who use a lot of bandwidth. but take a look at business dsl pricing, it costs more for the same bandwidth because a business is more likely to use all of their bandwidth. moral of the story: a nerd boycott could be the best thing that ever happened to an isp.
tire irons are good for so much more than changing tires. sigh... makes me nostalgic.
spiderman has these, i think he calls them spidey tracers or something. batman has them too. this is just the next step in the slow transformation of law enforcement officers into super-heros. they can already see in the dark, stop bullets, crash through skylights, and see through walls. in about 10 years fat men with moustaches in skin-tight rubber suits will be known as police officers instead of fetishists.
the most impressive thing to me is the side panel with all the connectors. that is really amazing. he could sell those things at specialty shops or the sharper image or harrods or something for a fortune. as a side note, this is the only modding project i've seen that i'd ever bring up at a party.
or maybe just water with caramel color in it. hmmmm this is off subject, but has anyone bred blacklight responsive goldfish yet?
Note: Your connection to Google has been limited by Verizon. If you would like to experience Google at full speed, please switch to another internet service provider. For a list of internet service providers in your area that do not limit access to Google, click here.
the term monopoly means a lot to me. once you proove a monopoly in court, theres all sorts of things you can do. if verizon forces the entire ISP market to use the same pricing scheme, that probably constitutes abuse of a monopoly. they'll get a LOT of well-funded opposition in court if they try anything stupid like that.
we pay taxes and the police protect us from being stabbed by the creepy guy next door. the media corporations pay taxes and the government protexts them from having their product distributed for free (stolen). remind me, which of these people is a terrorist? one could easily argue your point. one could also easily jump off a cliff. i dont think either is a very good idea though.
memorize a story before hand. better yet, use more improvisation in all your stories so that its harder to tell the difference between a remembered story and a made up one. the more faith we put in lie detection technology, the more a good lier will get away with.
sometimes i wonder if anyone who uses the word orwellian has read that book
i used to know abramoff and one of his sons. the man is a republican through and through. he broke new ground by working through democratic channels too, but its a mistake to think of him as anything but a part of the republican machine.
thats funny, it wasn't the default option for me at first. i thought they werent going to be evil like that. then they changed it and started doing it without telling me. i just lost my faith in google. time to change my start page.
not whitehouse.com?
How could my interactions with people of other racial identities possibly be beside the point? If people from different ethnic backgrounds can interact on an equal footing, where is the problem? Why the expectation that racial distinctions will disapear entirely? Some people are proud of their background and would rather hang onto it. They tend to identify with other people from the same background. As long as questions of superiority don't enter the picture and it doesn't stop them from identifying with other people, I can't see any reason why this is wrong. If equality is the obliteration of every person's identification with their own background, then let me be the first to say that equality is a very bad thing. And pardon me for not taking everything a professor says as gospel truth. Or even partial truth for that matter. We have a professor here at McGill who every year convinces a few hundred gullible freshmen that gender roles are entirely social constructions. There is always confusion in well meaning movements once the basic objectives have already been achieved. Once a movement's principles have been accepted as truth by the vast majority of people, reform becomes easy. But at a certain point, you run our of obvious reforms and it is unclear what to do next or when to stop. Thats where the racial equality movement in most of North America is now. Psychologocally unhealthy behavior? How far are we going to take this thing? There used to be real problems, you know.
Several reasons for this language test other than the one in the original article have come up in theis thread. One that has come up several times is communication. And the fact is that this language test will not filter out Chinese people with passable English. If they required people to speak a few sentences into a webcam, that would be another story entirely.
they cleaned surgical tools with urine in the civil war. lots of ammonia.
looks like a walking toilet. is that supposed to be scary?