And you don't want to depend on other, potentially unstable, countries for food.
Exactly! In fact, we should all be subsistence farmers, since we don't want to rely on other, potentially unstable, businesses for food.
You don't seriously expect the entire rest of the world to just stop producing food at some point, do you? If any particular country becomes too 'unstable' for us to buy food from them, we just buy more from somewhere else, resulting in a short-term spike in food prices. As long as there's money to be made producing and selling food, someone will do it; that's the beauty of a market.
The future of space exploration lies with corporations anyway. NASA, the ISS and the other (national) space programs are just fluff and budget sinkholes.
I couldn't agree more. Someday soon we'll look back on the NASA era as laughably inefficient and slow. Not to denigrate the contributions that many of those men and women made, but we've seen time and time again that the market is capable of running circles around government agencies when it comes to innovation and risk-taking.
Your attitude reeks of elitism and a rose-tinted nostalgia for "the good old days." You say an astronaut is "risking his life every second of the way in a manner that no other man or woman on the planet could even comprehend"? Please. The risk is certainly there, but don't try to pretend it's somehow fundamentally different from all the risks "regular" people take every day in pursuit of less glamorous occupations. Yes, exploration is a noble goal, but you are fooling yourself if you think that's why people used to care more about the space program.
You know what? You're not going to listen to what I have to say, anyway. You're off in your imaginary space-ship, looking down on all of those closed-minded little people who can't see the obvious importance of your personal obsession; and you whine that they won't spend as many of their tax dollars on the space program as they used to in the "glory days." The only thing I can tell you is that you're not going to have much success convincing people with that kind of condescension.
Red Mars is the first book of a trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson about the settlement and terraforming of Mars. There's some biology there, though I can't vouch for it (not having studied any biology beyond high school); but overall it's just gripping and completely plausible hard sci-fi. There's some stuff in the other two books that might not be appropriate for high-schoolers, depending on your attitude, but I don't recall anything too objectionable in the first one at least.
Check it out. Even if the class doesn't end up using it, if you're a sci-fi fan then it will be time well spent.
I'm now OK with money being taken from people (including me) by force and spent on "good things".
Out of curiosity, why have you become OK with it (principles, practicality, defeatism, etc.)? And do you have an answer to the questions of who may collect the money, and on what "good things" they may spend it?
I believe in democracy as a principle, but if 51% of the country voted that black people should be tortured, I would be against it.
I don't think you actually do believe in democracy "in principle." The example you gave is not some sort of aberration or exception; it shows exactly what is wrong with the principle of democracy itself.
It's like someone saying, "I believe in communism as a principle, but if one person abuses the system to gain power and turn himself into a dictator, I would be against it." I've actually heard people saying this-- they say "real" communism has never been tried, because it has always been co-opted by dictators. But that's exactly the point: the principle of communism is flawed because it is prone to that kind of abuse.
"Literally" from scratch?
on
DIY Laptop
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· Score: 1
What, exactly, would it mean to make a laptop "literally" from scratch? The literal meaning of the phrase has to do with a runner starting from a "scratch" on the ground (the starting line), with no head start or handicap. Or perhaps it would refer to the "chicken feed" denotation of scratch-- that would be a feat, indeed.
Even if we assume that the common usage of the phrase is its literal meaning, we still have the problem of deciding what that means in this case. Would building the laptop from transistors, capacitors and wires count as "literally" from scratch? Who made the transistors, etc.?
To the author of this review: you need to cut out about a third of the words you use. For example:
Perl (Practical Extraction and Report Language) -- the language which was created by Larry Wall is arguably one of the greatest programming languages. But it has a reputation for taking an excessive cryptic nature which gives it an image especially among Perl novices as a language which is complex and hard to master. Minimal Perl: for Unix and Linux people, authored by Tim Maher and published by Manning Publications addresses the obstacles presented by Perl's complexity. This book which is divided into two parts comprising of a total of 12 chapters takes a unique methodology to explain the Perl syntax and its use. The author emphasizes on Perl's grep, awk and sed like features and relys on concepts such as inputs, filters and arguments to allow Unix users to directly apply their existing knowledge to the task of learning Perl.
could be shortened to:
Perl's reputation for crypticness gives some people the impression that it is complex and hard to master. "Minimal Perl: for Unix and Linux people," by Tim Maher and published by Manning Publications, addresses this impression. The book, divided into two parts comprising 12 chapters total, explains Perl's syntax and use in a unique way. The author emphasizes Perl's grep-, awk- and sed-like features and uses concepts like inputs, filters and arguments to allow Unix users to apply their existing knowledge to Perl.
This is Slashdot. We don't need you to tell us that Perl is "arguably one of the greatest programming languages," that Larry Wall created it, or that its name stands for "Practical Extraction and Report Language," and those tidbits are irrelevant to the review in any case. The rest of the blurb contains far too many empty words. If you can cut even one useless word from a piece of technical writing, you've saved every member of your audience a bit of time, and you've increased the chances that people will actually read what you've written.
Therefore, there are even multiples of 10, and odd multiples of 10.
The first two statements are true, but the conclusion is obviously false; so the logic is faulty. In other words, the fact that good people and bad people exist, combined with the fact that cops are people, tells you... nothing. It could be the case that all cops are bad people, or that all cops are good people, without contradicting either of those two facts.
It's not the logic that is bad, just bad symantics.
No, that IS bad logic, and you're only making it worse by trying to hand-wave it away. Not many people would disagree with you if you just asserted that good cops exist, and in fact your anecdote would be sufficient to prove that assertion rigorously if we accept the axiom that your cop friend is a "great guy." But your attempt to prove the assertion using faulty logic only detracts from the rest of your argument, and your attempt to defend said faulty logic makes me think you really ought to take that "college course in logic" you refer to.
Note: I like American's just fine... well all the ones that aren't the president... and a few others...
"All the ones that aren't the president... and a few others"? Are you saying there's more than one president of the United States? Actually, that would explain a lot...
I have to agree here. I don't think Macs are too expensive given what you get, but there is definitely a hole in the product line. Just a month or so ago, I was in the market for a new PC. I very badly wanted to get a Mac (have wanted one for years), but the Mac Mini was not upgradeable enough, and I didn't want an iMac with an integrated monitor since I wanted a nice 23" or 24" LCD that wouldn't be tied to a single computer. As for the Mac Pro, I really don't need a computer with two dual-core Xeons, so I couldn't justify the price (~$2200 at bare minimum without monitor).
However, I should point out that I did not end up with a Dell either, even though I was looking at their offerings closely. It was several hundred dollars cheaper for me to get parts from newegg and build it myself, ending up at around $750 for everything except the monitor. If there had been anything like a Mac Pro in the $1000-$1500 area, I probably would have gone with that instead of building my own-- that's how much I wanted a Mac.
My guess is that Apple is too attached to the profit margins they get from the Pro line, so they can't offer something that professionals could use at a lower price point (even if they tried to market it at consumers). This is a shame, but I must acknowledge that what Apple does offer is plenty for the typical consumer, and that I am not a typical consumer. It sucks, but maybe I'll just get a Macbook instead.
I also don't care to hear arguments against this, because those that argue the loudest are usually the ones with the most non-purchased music in their library. They are being just as self-serving as Mr. Jobs.
That may or may not be true, but it is completely irrelevant. A person's motivations for making a certain argument have nothing whatsoever to do with that argument's correctness; this is why ad hominem attacks like yours are considered logical fallacies.
I'm a devout Mac user and even I don't relate to adverts.
Apple has no need to advertise to you, since you already own a Mac. Apple is trying to convince people who are far less tech-savvy than you are, people who may not even know what an "operating system" is, that Macs are a better option than "PCs" (by which they mean PCs running Windows). In fact, just making people realize that Macs are an option may be enough, since many people may just buy a PC without ever considering what kind of software it comes with.
This may be a little off-topic, but I noticed that the article claims that Xen runs on FreeBSD. I was under the impression that Xen support on FreeBSD was still a work in progress, which the Wikipedia article seems to confirm. Can anybody comment on this?
People who argue that they need guns to protect their rights from the government are just gun nuts. The 'protect us from the government' argument is a red herring. If their RIGHTS were really what is important to them, they'd vote for people who wanted to protect their rights instead of people who wanted to protect their guns.
And what do you do when your government turns into a tyranny? When you no longer have a vote? If the citizens have all given up their guns while they still trusted the government, can they just ask politely to have them back so they can stage a rebellion?
Your arguments are full of the worst sorts of logical fallacies (false dilemmas, straw men, ad hominems-- it's like a textbook example of how not to argue). I'd write you off as a troll, but even if you are, there are unfortunately many people who think like you. Keep your blinders on if you wish, but I and those like me will do our damndest to keep you from throwing away the last of the freedoms that made this country worth fighting for.
But they aren't psychopathic because they enjoy being evil - If they don't act like this, the shareholders can sue (If you don't [obviously wrong action], it's bad for profit = lawsuit).
I hear this a lot on Slashdot, but I'm skeptical. Show me a case where a corporation was sued for not doing something "obviously wrong," please.
In the old television series "Space 1999" a nuclear waste dump on the moon exploded with enough force to seen Earth's moon flying through space past a different solar system each week.
Actually, this is possible due to time dilation, assuming the moon is your frame of reference.
I can give up my own property and leave, yeah. Is that right?
Suppose some rich guy buys a whole bunch of land and decides to sell it only to people who will agree explicitly to some set of rules (similar to the laws we have now). That would be fine, of course, since he owns the land and can therefore sell or rent it to people on whatever terms he chooses.
Now, here's the question: does the U.S. Government own all of the land in the United States? If not, it has no right to demand that people obey its laws just so that they can live on their own property. If so, how and when did it acquire all that property? The forming of a Constitution wouldn't do it, because even if forming a Constitution implicitly gave over all property to the new government, there were people who did not agree to that Constitution.
If you had read the rest of my post (in particular the second blockquote), you might realize that "being on [one's] own" in this context means living without safety nets like social security, welfare and medicare. It does not mean being a hermit.
Slashdot Mirror
Totally offtopic, but "the ye" is redundant: "ye" in this context is just an early typesetting substitute for "the."
You don't seriously expect the entire rest of the world to just stop producing food at some point, do you? If any particular country becomes too 'unstable' for us to buy food from them, we just buy more from somewhere else, resulting in a short-term spike in food prices. As long as there's money to be made producing and selling food, someone will do it; that's the beauty of a market.
Your attitude reeks of elitism and a rose-tinted nostalgia for "the good old days." You say an astronaut is "risking his life every second of the way in a manner that no other man or woman on the planet could even comprehend"? Please. The risk is certainly there, but don't try to pretend it's somehow fundamentally different from all the risks "regular" people take every day in pursuit of less glamorous occupations. Yes, exploration is a noble goal, but you are fooling yourself if you think that's why people used to care more about the space program.
You know what? You're not going to listen to what I have to say, anyway. You're off in your imaginary space-ship, looking down on all of those closed-minded little people who can't see the obvious importance of your personal obsession; and you whine that they won't spend as many of their tax dollars on the space program as they used to in the "glory days." The only thing I can tell you is that you're not going to have much success convincing people with that kind of condescension.
Red Mars is the first book of a trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson about the settlement and terraforming of Mars. There's some biology there, though I can't vouch for it (not having studied any biology beyond high school); but overall it's just gripping and completely plausible hard sci-fi. There's some stuff in the other two books that might not be appropriate for high-schoolers, depending on your attitude, but I don't recall anything too objectionable in the first one at least.
Check it out. Even if the class doesn't end up using it, if you're a sci-fi fan then it will be time well spent.
It's like someone saying, "I believe in communism as a principle, but if one person abuses the system to gain power and turn himself into a dictator, I would be against it." I've actually heard people saying this-- they say "real" communism has never been tried, because it has always been co-opted by dictators. But that's exactly the point: the principle of communism is flawed because it is prone to that kind of abuse.
What, exactly, would it mean to make a laptop "literally" from scratch? The literal meaning of the phrase has to do with a runner starting from a "scratch" on the ground (the starting line), with no head start or handicap. Or perhaps it would refer to the "chicken feed" denotation of scratch-- that would be a feat, indeed.
Even if we assume that the common usage of the phrase is its literal meaning, we still have the problem of deciding what that means in this case. Would building the laptop from transistors, capacitors and wires count as "literally" from scratch? Who made the transistors, etc.?
- There are even integers and odd integers.
- Multiples of 10 are integers.
- Therefore, there are even multiples of 10, and odd multiples of 10.
The first two statements are true, but the conclusion is obviously false; so the logic is faulty. In other words, the fact that good people and bad people exist, combined with the fact that cops are people, tells you... nothing. It could be the case that all cops are bad people, or that all cops are good people, without contradicting either of those two facts.Oh, and your "set analysis" is nonsense.
I have to agree here. I don't think Macs are too expensive given what you get, but there is definitely a hole in the product line. Just a month or so ago, I was in the market for a new PC. I very badly wanted to get a Mac (have wanted one for years), but the Mac Mini was not upgradeable enough, and I didn't want an iMac with an integrated monitor since I wanted a nice 23" or 24" LCD that wouldn't be tied to a single computer. As for the Mac Pro, I really don't need a computer with two dual-core Xeons, so I couldn't justify the price (~$2200 at bare minimum without monitor).
However, I should point out that I did not end up with a Dell either, even though I was looking at their offerings closely. It was several hundred dollars cheaper for me to get parts from newegg and build it myself, ending up at around $750 for everything except the monitor. If there had been anything like a Mac Pro in the $1000-$1500 area, I probably would have gone with that instead of building my own-- that's how much I wanted a Mac.
My guess is that Apple is too attached to the profit margins they get from the Pro line, so they can't offer something that professionals could use at a lower price point (even if they tried to market it at consumers). This is a shame, but I must acknowledge that what Apple does offer is plenty for the typical consumer, and that I am not a typical consumer. It sucks, but maybe I'll just get a Macbook instead.
What exactly is your point? Can you offer an alternative?
This may be a little off-topic, but I noticed that the article claims that Xen runs on FreeBSD. I was under the impression that Xen support on FreeBSD was still a work in progress, which the Wikipedia article seems to confirm. Can anybody comment on this?
You do realize that one can put Mac OS applications wherever one wants, don't you? E.g., an "Applications/Photos" subfolder.
Your arguments are full of the worst sorts of logical fallacies (false dilemmas, straw men, ad hominems-- it's like a textbook example of how not to argue). I'd write you off as a troll, but even if you are, there are unfortunately many people who think like you. Keep your blinders on if you wish, but I and those like me will do our damndest to keep you from throwing away the last of the freedoms that made this country worth fighting for.
I can give up my own property and leave, yeah. Is that right?
Suppose some rich guy buys a whole bunch of land and decides to sell it only to people who will agree explicitly to some set of rules (similar to the laws we have now). That would be fine, of course, since he owns the land and can therefore sell or rent it to people on whatever terms he chooses.
Now, here's the question: does the U.S. Government own all of the land in the United States? If not, it has no right to demand that people obey its laws just so that they can live on their own property. If so, how and when did it acquire all that property? The forming of a Constitution wouldn't do it, because even if forming a Constitution implicitly gave over all property to the new government, there were people who did not agree to that Constitution.
If you had read the rest of my post (in particular the second blockquote), you might realize that "being on [one's] own" in this context means living without safety nets like social security, welfare and medicare. It does not mean being a hermit.
Now you're getting it.