Money spent on e.g. breast cancer awareness goes towards raising awareness of breast cancer, not to finding a cure or even a treatment. It's the same with every other X cancer awareness non-profit charitable organization.
Except that it almost certainly doesn't go fully to raising awareness. Most is probably spent on overheads as with many charities. Such overheads include large expensive buildings, ridiculous salaries for people on the 'board' etc.
Here in the Netherlands there was an outrage about the heart foundation's director getting a salary of nearly 200,000 euro (annually) a few years ago. And rightly so. If you're in a charity, you should make do with a more modest salary because of the fact that the money should go to research/prevention etc., not paying a fat-cat. The people who collect the money are usually volunteers and get nothing, yet the guy/guys in the top positions get loads of money basically for being nothing more than a secretary/secretaries.
IDC says lowering software piracy by just 10 percentage points during the next four years would create nearly 500,000 new jobs and pump $140 billion into 'ailing economies.'
And where do those jobs come from? There will only be new jobs if the economy as a whole is improved not by shuffling money from say DIY stores (just an example industry which will get less money if consumers buy more legal software), to software firms. And where do those $140 billion to aid 'ailing economies' come from? I'll tell you where: The asses of IDC and BSA people!
"Few if any industries could withstand the theft of $51 billion worth of their products." It's unclear whether that was a brag about the industry's robustness, or a result of the industry's low cost of goods sold.
Neither. It was moronic babble as nothing was stolen. Copying cost is near zero, so if they make a good profit they should shut up whining.
These people are almost as bad as the liars and manipulators in the Air travel industry who always whine about rules of noise calculation/measurement not being just (they're always restricting them) and any new rules are bad because it would restrict them and their immense importance to the economy.
Bullshit! They're all parts of the economy. They are all small parts of the economy so a small change to them won't make a speck of difference to the whole.
Another flamebait iPad post! Another chance for me to say iPads are a waste of money!
I agree, but then again, I don't need nor use a laptop, a mobile phone, and flash on the PC.
I don't follow trends, I just use what I need. So to me, an ipad doesn't appear useful until I find a use for it:)
And related to this, my view on 'owning' is: The more stuff you own, the more stuff owns you...
Good grief, let's not overstate the importance of this case.
Are you kidding? This is monumental in showing clearly how stupid courts/court cases can be. This case went on for years without any shred of evidence ever!
There is generally very little respect for lawyers, and at uni (math/physics) we all think/thought such studies were basically worthless. These cases confirm we were/are right;-)
And what about that comment I read in another story here on slashdot (about the Apple phone prototype):
Furthermore, while cops can use anything you say AGAINST you in a court of law, if you ask them to repeat something you said that would help your case, that would be heresay, and therefore can not help you.
That's just fooking unbelievable. If that sort of nonsense persists in law and/or the way it's practiced, I have no respect for it nor the people involved in it.
Oh yeah, and I recently heard of a bunch of Lawyers in Alphen aan den Rijn near where I live (Netherlands) who double charge hours, charge hours as if they did the work themselves when some interns did it etc. This is not in the news but I know it via someone who worked there and left because of it. I would have gone to the police and get these basterds convicted! (but that's the choice the person who worked there).
In a nutshell: cleaner air will give even higher temperatures which means the warming by increased greenhouse gasses is in fact worse than what you might expect by naive interpretation of the temperature data.
Trying to pollute the atmosphere (or not clean it up) because of this would give all sorts of other problems.
And as to this guy:
Climate change scientists have now resorted to trolling us.
Seriously. Cleaner air is bad for the planet? Shut up. As someone who has asthma, this pisses me off. I like breathing, thanks. Stop wasting time blaming the Clean Air Act and look at practical ways to cut carbon emissions in ways that don't knock us back to the stone age.
No, they are not trolling. They are in fact saying the problem of global warming is worse than you might think. But as I said, this is NOT news.
fan-boyish groveling which I totally don't understand. "We shouldn't use adblockers anyway!! Thanks for unbanning! Much respect!!" Respect for what? Taking the boot off your throat?
It's juvenile behaviour of people who who have not grown up enough (mentally) to be something on their own but get their self esteem by belonging to a group.
To give some examples more relevant to slashdot where I've seen/experienced this: gnu.misc.discuss springs to mind where everything Stallman says or does is perfect and noone should ever criticize him or suggest alternatives. It's quite similar to religious zealotry and Linux enthusiasts often are no better than that (dare to criticize the GPL or suggest alternatives and see what happens). BSD people are often tired of this and it's one of the reasons I switched to FreeBSD (the final straw was Torvalds behaviour, esp. the unfounded (read as: based on made up 'facts') criticism of John Dyson (the FreeBSD VM guy)). I tried OpenBSD but there's a similar situation with Theo de Raadt. He has done some good things but he's also an ass. The group-following-a-leader phenomenon is clearly visible there too and I wanted none of that.
Then it dawned on me. Anne Frank's "The Diary of a Young Girl"! Surely, no one could find fault with the poignant and honest writing of a young girl caught up in the evil of the Holocaust, setting down on paper her hopes, longings and yearnings -- a book that has made countless women want to become writers and which has inspired generations of readers to denounce hate and live more compassionate lives. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
But, oh, how wrong I was.
I didn't like this book because it was boring. That's all that needs to be said. It was very very very very very very very very very very very boring. If you have to read this book shoot yourself first.
Can you imagine being this person? It seems like a life completely devoid of any subtlety, introspection, caring or empathy.
What a nutter! Of course someone can find fault with that book. I read part of it and I agree with the reviewer: It's very very boring. I didn't read further into this book for 2 reasons in particular: 1. It's a diary, so personal, so should not be read by anyone but the writer unless he/she authorizes it. 2. It's boring.
That diary has only got well known because the writer died in the war. There are better and more poignant writings from people during WW2 about life during that time. There are many other diaries from that time which are not well known or not published because the writers didn't die... Why should a book be good just because it's a diary of someone who died in a war?
At first I thought this salon article was looking for a problem where there was none, but after reading that bit about the diary (the bit about the bible is also stupid btw.) I find this salon article to nothing more than moronic uninsightful rubbish...
The terrifying conclusion of this research is that when you randomly assign normal people to positions of power, they become psychopaths.
No, they show their true nature, i.e. most people don't give a damn about anyone else except themselves and possibly their family.
Psychopaths are always like this, but in a much worse way, whether they are in power or not. You can very easily determine if someone is a psychopath by what he says (i.e. they have no empathy and this quickly shows). That power makes it easier to tell lies doesn't change that, you can differentiate between such people.
People who are psychopaths/sociopaths are quite different from people who get into power and then behave like assholes. Someone mentioned that people who get into power are more likely to be psychopaths, and this is obviously true. Therefore this study isn't particularly useful in seeing what would happen if psychopaths were to be excluded from government etc. (because then the whole climate would improve, less emphasis on "who's in power" etc.). Years ago I suggested to dutch political parties that people there should get a psychological test so that these kind of people (who are only in politics for themselves and don't give a damn about anyone/anything except when it benefits their own career) be excluded from politics...
Oh btw, someone mentioned 'Power corrupts' and if you consider 'to corrupt' to mean his personality will change, this is not true. Give someone power, and he will show his true personality (because he doesn't have to hide anything, doesn't have to suck up to people etc.)
Bullshit. You know what may be a reason? The extreme restrictions.
Just to clarify: I obviously mean the restrictions in general, not in Basic. All languages on the 1980s computers had severe limitations. And the 8 bit machines had severe limitations in speed and memory. To make a good program that was fast and that fit into memory was always hard work...
The Reinvigorated Programmer argues that the world is full of excellent programmers who cut their teeth on BASIC, and suggests it could even be because they started out with BASIC."
Bullshit. You know what may be a reason? The extreme restrictions. In the 80s I used a fairly good Basic, BBC Basic, but I mostly used 6502 assembler. This on a machine with very limited memory. What that does is cause you to do things as efficiently as possible, it makes you think how to best represent the data in memory etc. In german there's a saying: In der Beschraenkung zeigt sich der Meister" (which translates loosely to "given restrictions, the expert will show himself to be an expert") but I think even better would be "In der Beschraenkung bildet sich der Meister", i.e. given limitations you will become an expert at various problems.
In literature there are similar situations. Limits of form/rhyme may instead of restrict a writer, actually make him write better material...
But back to Basic: The limitations in there (the early 1980s and some later versions) are mostly not helping one to become an expert. They just annoy. What I clearly feel and which is what Dijkstra probably refers to (as it may be a strong effect in some programmers) is that I know how to do something directly, and thus the minimalist urge is there to write something different to using the features of the language you're using because for example you may think that would be less efficient.
Such copying of course falls under copyright law so in theory you can warn people off (muddied a bit in that the program files read in from old tapes/disks are in fact still under copyright! So you can claim copyright on your HTML, layout and perhaps the collection as a whole).
Just to make it clear: By publishing a free access website, in effect you are giving a licence to copy. However, how broad this is isn't clear. That's what the licence could be for. Perhaps by default some sort of (to be determined) non-commercial redistribution licence should be implicit for any website? (And if there is a licence file, that will give more freedom as described therein, including selling of archived backups).
Currently, archivists have to seek permission from webmasters of every single site before they are able to take snapshots and retain data.
That seems stupid as everyone can do it for themselves, but not everyone will, so you then end up with a problem of accessing information when a website is gone.
For me it seems more important is the use. All free-access websites are by definition used to convey information and to anyone who is interested. Therefore dissemination of that information by means of an archived version should be ok.
Perhaps there's a case of besides a robots.txt to have a licence file on how to use it. What some people will especially object to is commercial selling of that archive. Particularly when it's done while the original website is still around!
For example, I started a website for 8 bit BBC micro software and documentation in 1995 which was the first of its type (for this machine). The emphasis was on trying out stuff myself and making it available to others. But I wouldn't have liked to have someone sell CDs with my website, i.e. profiteering of mainly my work. This didn't actually happen but having put in the effort for such a website myself, I know what it means were this to happen. This actually happens a lot and has happened to a friend of mine who maintains a similar website. Such copying of course falls under copyright law so in theory you can warn people off (muddied a bit in that the program files read in from old tapes/disks are in fact still under copyright! So you can claim copyright on your HTML, layout and perhaps the collection as a whole). Perhaps one should just take it on the chin as something that will happen and just be happy the stuff gets out there. A stance more like the BSD licence (do what you want with it as long as you give credit) than the GPL licence (lots of restrictions on redistribution).
In any event, as I said, perhaps a good idea for a licence file for websites.
'It's just funny that we pay our taxes to the city and the city is now prosecuting us with our own money,' says Quan Ha."
A mind bogglingly stupid thing to say. Prosecution is always done with taxpayer's money. It's not funny, it's downright scary that anyone can make such a moronic comment. The reason 'Quan Ha' does it is of course a lack of real arguments... (A very well known type of tactic for certain people, i.e. a certain personality)
> The problem for companies is that they might have lost track of what patents
> cover a given product, or might have forgotten to update packaging to remove
> numbers of patents that had expired.
Don't "lose track". Don't "forget". Or don't mark (it isn't required). Problem solved.
Nonsense. Materials may be made before the patent expires. What about stuff a few years old that didn't sell at the regular price and is now being sold off for a low price? CD players for example. Should patent numbers be removed before selling? Of course not.
In any event, this whole suing because of patents no longer being valid is nonsensical. Anyone who cares about the patents in a product, will look them up. No need to be pedantic about some patent not being valid any more.
One area to be examined is whether the panel should incorporate so-called gray literature, a term to describe nonpeer-reviewed science, in its reports. Many scientists say that such material, ranging from reports by government agencies to respected research not published in scientific journals,
The whole point of peer reviewed literature is that you can accept it as being probably well researched, having assumptions that are probably correct. If you want to include non-peer reviewed research you cannot scan the article, and especially not its conclusions, but you will have to check everything! So you start doing your own peer-reviewing turning them in peer-reviewed articles. If that's not done by someone qualified, having some non-peer reviewed 'respected research' included is dangerous in that it may contaminate good research with crappy stuff.
And if this 'respected research' is worth something, it's probably already used/cited in peer reviewed articles I would imagine.
In any event, the non-believers have a small success. From mistakes in a report (everyone makes mistakes), results a scan of more literature. Will that change anything? Almost certainly not. The uncertainties in climate models are known, but what's not in doubt (by real scientists) is that there is change (at least partially man-made) and besides the crackpots or people who just don't give a damn [ I remember an interview in a dutch TV programme ca. 2004 IIRC with someone senior in the US government who simply said: If other countries want to clean up the air, fine, we're not going to do it because it would hurt our economy ], this seems to serve no-one. I.e. it's more like politics.
1) Think about the return on investment.
Let's say we can cool the earth one degree by spending a trillion dollars. Is it worth the investment? What do we really get out of it? How many other problems could have been fixed with that money?
Anyone who talks of return on investment if one of the possible outcomes is a huge impact on the environment that no money can ever fix, is crazy.
I have not read his books and have no intention. The experience I have with similar Dutch types (from groups such as groene rekenkamer) is that they too talk about the money involved and their conclusions (naturally) are that it's pointless until you're sure. Which is moronic since something needs to be done ASAP as real scientists all agree on. You can't gamble with the environment as you only have one! Note that I have examined many of their claims (from those Dutch groups I mean) and found them to be bullshit. These people are pseudo-scientists and amateurs with no understanding of reasoning nor logic and their 'material' should be avoided like the plague as it results in only one thing: A waste of time (well, for me it was nice to debunk their arguments, which I did on my website. I quite enjoyed making them look like the fools they are...).
People who are complaining about the cost seem to think pumping out tons of junk into the atmosphere is ok. But, cleaning up your act, besides being beneficial to the environment, will improve your technology. There's a saying: It's an ill wind that blows no one any good. In other words, deal with it!
I can go on with reasons, but usually it just takes examining one or two claims from such pseudo-skeptics to see how stupid they are (note: Scientists are skeptics, these people are actually just non-believers with no good arguments to do so). If that's the case with Lomborg, I don't know, and I'm not really interested either as I've only seen moronic arguments from non-believers and am not inclined to waste my time on this stuff any more.
This reminds me of the 'Abmanhnungen' in Germany. In both cases it's gaming the system and should be severely punished...
For many years in Germany attorneys have gamed the system, related to what you are allowed and not allowed to do esp. when selling something. These 'people' have for example scoured ebay ads, and when they found say a missing telephone number or missing note on how to undo the deal for a business seller, they sent such a 'Mahnung'. Not for free obviously, no, with an invoice for payment (for their own time/effort!). Yes, you will have to pay... It gets even worse. Suppose you've got an old magazine with old demo software disk on it and put it on ebay.de (as a German, I don't think you can be touched if not), then you'd better check there are no programs on there that are now forbidden. DVD copying software for example that circumvents the protection scheme is no longer allowed since several years.
People have been sent a 'Mahnung' for putting a mag with such no longer allowed software on ebay, and had to pay large amounts of money to such 'scammers'. You think you get a few euros, but you have to pay many hundreds. Nice.
These people are the worst kinds of assholes around just as the guy I mentioned in a previous posting, 'Pieter Lakeman' (who created a foundation supposedly to help clients of the DSB bank with supposedly bad loans, but in reality this foundation just pays his 300 euro/hour salary and there were hardly any bad loans anyway; He then influenced people to take away their money from DSB which led to its collapse. Nice!), and I consider them to be legal scammers.
See for one notorious guy, who was sentenced to jail for other things, this page (it didn't end well for him and I don't think many people will give a damn, he was really hated as one can see in many forums...): http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCnter_Freiherr_von_Gravenreuth
I don't believe this is real. There are a number of indicators such the language/wording/phrasing being extremely similar between both the interviewer and interviewee. Why would someone fake this? To get more traffic on their site? A con about a con...
It can be. The scammer is nigerian and possibly has a poor command of english so the interviewer makes it readable. Also, transcribing a conversation often doesn't give a readable text, people edit what they say with afterthoughts etc., so putting it up verbatim might not be readable at all (and thus not quickly understandable) while it was perfectly understandable to the interviewer (his train of thought is not the same as that of a reader).
So, such editing can very well produce apparantly similar language from the one who's been interviewed.
The problem is the general attitude in Nigeria. This scamming is like a national pastime.
What causes it I don't know, but I'd like to point out:
1. Being stupid is no justification for being ripped off, so please no moronic comments that those were were duped deserved it.
2. There are far far worse people around you, from your own country, that are ripping off you and many others for far greater amounts of money and/or doing far worse damage in other ways. An example is of course many politicians. But on the whole, the entire layer of top management and politicians who often end up in those positions, are causing much more harm and sucking huge amounts of money out of companies and healthcare too. Did you ever hear of a manager who performed badly, was fired and therefore got no further payments? No? I haven't either. They make a mess of things, then get fired and get a bonus or severance pay, whatever you want to call it, higher than the first prize in the national lottery here... If you're a lowly worker, you get fired and need to request unemployment benefits and start applying for jobs immediately. Why don't they need to?
These people keep getting such jobs, probably because of friends in boards of various companies. Or if not real friends, then it's done as a mutual favour: I help you and in the future you will help me. Which is essentially what 'networking' is all about, i.e. a form of cronyism.
Another example I recently encountered made me think that there are lawyers who have found the perfect legal scam. The example I'm giving here is Pieter Lakeman, who set up a foundation "stichting DSB leed" for supposed victims of bad mortgages given out by the BSD bank. What is going on is as follows: He identified that there might be some bad loans, badly given advice, then extrapolates this to almost all loans, sets up this foundation, from which you can get help for a small amount of money, sa 50 euro. Now there's no guarantee that your loan is bad/badly done or you were given wrong information by the bank, so this foundation can 'check' loans, say "nothing we can do" and they don't need to pay back any money of that. I read that he and another guy who set up this foundation gave themselves a salary of 300 euro per hour...
That's a nice way of getting yourself self-employed at stratosphere salaries.
This asshole then proceeds to put the word out that people should remove money from DSB and in the end it goes bankrupt because of this (and because the finance minister doesn't want to help. Eh, why not after the billions of loans to other banks? Why indeed...)
It turns out, as checks after this bankruptcy have shown, that very few loans were bad (inappropriate, or given with bad advice etc.).
He has not only caused a great amount of damage, he's also legally scammed almost all the people who paid money for that 'review of their loan'.
It's a fantastic scam: You identify something that might be wrong somewhere, then set up a foundation, which people can become a member of or have something checked out by, for a relatively small amount, such that you wouldn't go to court over it... Then you just check loans or whatever that foundation would do, at 300 euro an hour (i.e. 10 minutes per loan in this case) and of course find nothing wrong or say "it will be included in the legal action". In the end nothing happens, and in this case, making the bank go bankrupt is a pretty good way to say you can't do anything any more as the executors now say what will happen with assets/loans etc.
I have suggestion for another ruthless lawyer: Set up a foundation to counter the scam of Lakeman. Charge 15 euro per case, then of course in the end you say after studying the foundation's charter that there's nothing you can do...
Predicting the weather (or climate) 340 years from now, nobody can do that. It's like telling about the economy in 100 years from now. Who can believe someone claiming such thing? Not me at least.
Well, this is the sort of thing the manmade global warming deniers say. And it's a very stupid argument.
It's very well possible to say what will happen on a larger scale/timeframe. More energy in the atmosphere means it's getting hotter on average and the weather will become more extreme.
Here's an example to give you an idea of why this is possible to predict, for those of you who are not too well trained in scientific thought: If someone rides his car with 300 km/h (almost 200 mph for no-SI lovers) into a solid wall, I will predict he's dead after that crash. What I cannot predict however, is precisely what damage is sustained to what parts of his body and/or in how many parts his body lies scattered around!
If your organization used Paypal and they froze your assets once, and you "struggled for more than half a year" to resolve it, why the fuck would you STILL be using Paypal?
Because they would probably need to setup many bank accounts in many countries. It's probably also ease-of-use. Easy to press a few buttons and fill out an amount with paypal and transfer money, than to transfer using say direct bank-transfer. This means people are more likely to donate...
Another example: I use paypal but I'd rather not. However, I sell specific items worldwide, and there are no other good wide used systems to transfer money from say the USA to the Netherlands. Bank transfer is something hardly used in the US for example, and if used, the cost is often prohibitive. So if I want to sell to the US, there's no real choice.
What's then annoying is that many Europeans (in euro countries) also use paypal... In Ebay you are not allowed to say "I won't use paypal for people in counties using the EURO".
This doesn't apply to wikileaks, but just gives an idea why sometimes you don't have a choice, or the others are just too expensive (bank transfer in the US too expensive, Western union is also fairly expensive and has other problems, etc.)
Slashdot Mirror
Except that it almost certainly doesn't go fully to raising awareness. Most is probably spent on overheads as with many charities. Such overheads include large expensive buildings, ridiculous salaries for people on the 'board' etc.
Here in the Netherlands there was an outrage about the heart foundation's director getting a salary of nearly 200,000 euro (annually) a few years ago. And rightly so. If you're in a charity, you should make do with a more modest salary because of the fact that the money should go to research/prevention etc., not paying a fat-cat. The people who collect the money are usually volunteers and get nothing, yet the guy/guys in the top positions get loads of money basically for being nothing more than a secretary/secretaries.
And where do those jobs come from? There will only be new jobs if the economy as a whole is improved not by shuffling money from say DIY stores (just an example industry which will get less money if consumers buy more legal software), to software firms. And where do those $140 billion to aid 'ailing economies' come from? I'll tell you where: The asses of IDC and BSA people!
Neither. It was moronic babble as nothing was stolen. Copying cost is near zero, so if they make a good profit they should shut up whining.
These people are almost as bad as the liars and manipulators in the Air travel industry who always whine about rules of noise calculation/measurement not being just (they're always restricting them) and any new rules are bad because it would restrict them and their immense importance to the economy.
Bullshit! They're all parts of the economy. They are all small parts of the economy so a small change to them won't make a speck of difference to the whole.
I agree, but then again, I don't need nor use a laptop, a mobile phone, and flash on the PC. I don't follow trends, I just use what I need. So to me, an ipad doesn't appear useful until I find a use for it :)
And related to this, my view on 'owning' is: The more stuff you own, the more stuff owns you...
Yes, rat infested they were. I counted a massive number of 4 gophers in my booksmarks from 1996.
"gopher://cwis.usc.edu/11/Other_Gophers_and_Information_Resources/Gophers_by_Subject/Gopher_Jewels/Istuff/fun/fun" (a list of cool resources...)
"gopher://gopher.lysator.liu.se:70/11/lysator-Science_Fiction_Archive" (I think this is where I got the Blake's 7 scrips from)
"gopher://www.library.ucsb.edu:70/11/journals/usenet" (not sure what this was about)
"gopher://wiretap.spies.com:70/11/Library/Fringe/Ufo"
I wonder if they're in the archive...
Are you kidding? This is monumental in showing clearly how stupid courts/court cases can be. This case went on for years without any shred of evidence ever!
;-)
There is generally very little respect for lawyers, and at uni (math/physics) we all think/thought such studies were basically worthless. These cases confirm we were/are right
And what about that comment I read in another story here on slashdot (about the Apple phone prototype):
That's just fooking unbelievable. If that sort of nonsense persists in law and/or the way it's practiced, I have no respect for it nor the people involved in it.
Oh yeah, and I recently heard of a bunch of Lawyers in Alphen aan den Rijn near where I live (Netherlands) who double charge hours, charge hours as if they did the work themselves when some interns did it etc. This is not in the news but I know it via someone who worked there and left because of it. I would have gone to the police and get these basterds convicted! (but that's the choice the person who worked there).
See for example:
BBC__Horizon__2005.01.13__Global_dimming
In a nutshell: cleaner air will give even higher temperatures which means the warming by increased greenhouse gasses is in fact worse than what you might expect by naive interpretation of the temperature data.
Trying to pollute the atmosphere (or not clean it up) because of this would give all sorts of other problems.
And as to this guy:
No, they are not trolling. They are in fact saying the problem of global warming is worse than you might think. But as I said, this is NOT news.
It's juvenile behaviour of people who who have not grown up enough (mentally) to be something on their own but get their self esteem by belonging to a group.
To give some examples more relevant to slashdot where I've seen/experienced this: gnu.misc.discuss springs to mind where everything Stallman says or does is perfect and noone should ever criticize him or suggest alternatives. It's quite similar to religious zealotry and Linux enthusiasts often are no better than that (dare to criticize the GPL or suggest alternatives and see what happens). BSD people are often tired of this and it's one of the reasons I switched to FreeBSD (the final straw was Torvalds behaviour, esp. the unfounded (read as: based on made up 'facts') criticism of John Dyson (the FreeBSD VM guy)). I tried OpenBSD but there's a similar situation with Theo de Raadt. He has done some good things but he's also an ass. The group-following-a-leader phenomenon is clearly visible there too and I wanted none of that.
Of course: all the chicks want to play with his joystick.
Note: The bigger your joystick, the better you can play...
What a nutter! Of course someone can find fault with that book. I read part of it and I agree with the reviewer: It's very very boring. I didn't read further into this book for 2 reasons in particular: 1. It's a diary, so personal, so should not be read by anyone but the writer unless he/she authorizes it. 2. It's boring.
That diary has only got well known because the writer died in the war. There are better and more poignant writings from people during WW2 about life during that time. There are many other diaries from that time which are not well known or not published because the writers didn't die... Why should a book be good just because it's a diary of someone who died in a war?
At first I thought this salon article was looking for a problem where there was none, but after reading that bit about the diary (the bit about the bible is also stupid btw.) I find this salon article to nothing more than moronic uninsightful rubbish...
No, they show their true nature, i.e. most people don't give a damn about anyone else except themselves and possibly their family.
Psychopaths are always like this, but in a much worse way, whether they are in power or not. You can very easily determine if someone is a psychopath by what he says (i.e. they have no empathy and this quickly shows). That power makes it easier to tell lies doesn't change that, you can differentiate between such people.
People who are psychopaths/sociopaths are quite different from people who get into power and then behave like assholes. Someone mentioned that people who get into power are more likely to be psychopaths, and this is obviously true. Therefore this study isn't particularly useful in seeing what would happen if psychopaths were to be excluded from government etc. (because then the whole climate would improve, less emphasis on "who's in power" etc.). Years ago I suggested to dutch political parties that people there should get a psychological test so that these kind of people (who are only in politics for themselves and don't give a damn about anyone/anything except when it benefits their own career) be excluded from politics...
Oh btw, someone mentioned 'Power corrupts' and if you consider 'to corrupt' to mean his personality will change, this is not true. Give someone power, and he will show his true personality (because he doesn't have to hide anything, doesn't have to suck up to people etc.)
Just to clarify: I obviously mean the restrictions in general, not in Basic. All languages on the 1980s computers had severe limitations. And the 8 bit machines had severe limitations in speed and memory. To make a good program that was fast and that fit into memory was always hard work...
Bullshit. You know what may be a reason? The extreme restrictions. In the 80s I used a fairly good Basic, BBC Basic, but I mostly used 6502 assembler. This on a machine with very limited memory. What that does is cause you to do things as efficiently as possible, it makes you think how to best represent the data in memory etc. In german there's a saying: In der Beschraenkung zeigt sich der Meister" (which translates loosely to "given restrictions, the expert will show himself to be an expert") but I think even better would be "In der Beschraenkung bildet sich der Meister", i.e. given limitations you will become an expert at various problems.
In literature there are similar situations. Limits of form/rhyme may instead of restrict a writer, actually make him write better material...
But back to Basic: The limitations in there (the early 1980s and some later versions) are mostly not helping one to become an expert. They just annoy. What I clearly feel and which is what Dijkstra probably refers to (as it may be a strong effect in some programmers) is that I know how to do something directly, and thus the minimalist urge is there to write something different to using the features of the language you're using because for example you may think that would be less efficient.
Just to make it clear: By publishing a free access website, in effect you are giving a licence to copy. However, how broad this is isn't clear. That's what the licence could be for. Perhaps by default some sort of (to be determined) non-commercial redistribution licence should be implicit for any website? (And if there is a licence file, that will give more freedom as described therein, including selling of archived backups).
That seems stupid as everyone can do it for themselves, but not everyone will, so you then end up with a problem of accessing information when a website is gone.
For me it seems more important is the use. All free-access websites are by definition used to convey information and to anyone who is interested. Therefore dissemination of that information by means of an archived version should be ok.
Perhaps there's a case of besides a robots.txt to have a licence file on how to use it. What some people will especially object to is commercial selling of that archive. Particularly when it's done while the original website is still around!
For example, I started a website for 8 bit BBC micro software and documentation in 1995 which was the first of its type (for this machine). The emphasis was on trying out stuff myself and making it available to others. But I wouldn't have liked to have someone sell CDs with my website, i.e. profiteering of mainly my work. This didn't actually happen but having put in the effort for such a website myself, I know what it means were this to happen. This actually happens a lot and has happened to a friend of mine who maintains a similar website. Such copying of course falls under copyright law so in theory you can warn people off (muddied a bit in that the program files read in from old tapes/disks are in fact still under copyright! So you can claim copyright on your HTML, layout and perhaps the collection as a whole). Perhaps one should just take it on the chin as something that will happen and just be happy the stuff gets out there. A stance more like the BSD licence (do what you want with it as long as you give credit) than the GPL licence (lots of restrictions on redistribution).
In any event, as I said, perhaps a good idea for a licence file for websites.
A mind bogglingly stupid thing to say. Prosecution is always done with taxpayer's money. It's not funny, it's downright scary that anyone can make such a moronic comment. The reason 'Quan Ha' does it is of course a lack of real arguments... (A very well known type of tactic for certain people, i.e. a certain personality)
Nonsense. Materials may be made before the patent expires. What about stuff a few years old that didn't sell at the regular price and is now being sold off for a low price? CD players for example. Should patent numbers be removed before selling? Of course not.
In any event, this whole suing because of patents no longer being valid is nonsensical. Anyone who cares about the patents in a product, will look them up. No need to be pedantic about some patent not being valid any more.
One area to be examined is whether the panel should incorporate so-called gray literature, a term to describe nonpeer-reviewed science, in its reports. Many scientists say that such material, ranging from reports by government agencies to respected research not published in scientific journals,
The whole point of peer reviewed literature is that you can accept it as being probably well researched, having assumptions that are probably correct. If you want to include non-peer reviewed research you cannot scan the article, and especially not its conclusions, but you will have to check everything! So you start doing your own peer-reviewing turning them in peer-reviewed articles. If that's not done by someone qualified, having some non-peer reviewed 'respected research' included is dangerous in that it may contaminate good research with crappy stuff.
And if this 'respected research' is worth something, it's probably already used/cited in peer reviewed articles I would imagine.
In any event, the non-believers have a small success. From mistakes in a report (everyone makes mistakes), results a scan of more literature. Will that change anything? Almost certainly not. The uncertainties in climate models are known, but what's not in doubt (by real scientists) is that there is change (at least partially man-made) and besides the crackpots or people who just don't give a damn [ I remember an interview in a dutch TV programme ca. 2004 IIRC with someone senior in the US government who simply said: If other countries want to clean up the air, fine, we're not going to do it because it would hurt our economy ], this seems to serve no-one. I.e. it's more like politics.
Anyone who talks of return on investment if one of the possible outcomes is a huge impact on the environment that no money can ever fix, is crazy.
I have not read his books and have no intention. The experience I have with similar Dutch types (from groups such as groene rekenkamer) is that they too talk about the money involved and their conclusions (naturally) are that it's pointless until you're sure. Which is moronic since something needs to be done ASAP as real scientists all agree on. You can't gamble with the environment as you only have one! Note that I have examined many of their claims (from those Dutch groups I mean) and found them to be bullshit. These people are pseudo-scientists and amateurs with no understanding of reasoning nor logic and their 'material' should be avoided like the plague as it results in only one thing: A waste of time (well, for me it was nice to debunk their arguments, which I did on my website. I quite enjoyed making them look like the fools they are...).
People who are complaining about the cost seem to think pumping out tons of junk into the atmosphere is ok. But, cleaning up your act, besides being beneficial to the environment, will improve your technology. There's a saying: It's an ill wind that blows no one any good. In other words, deal with it!
I can go on with reasons, but usually it just takes examining one or two claims from such pseudo-skeptics to see how stupid they are (note: Scientists are skeptics, these people are actually just non-believers with no good arguments to do so). If that's the case with Lomborg, I don't know, and I'm not really interested either as I've only seen moronic arguments from non-believers and am not inclined to waste my time on this stuff any more.
This reminds me of the 'Abmanhnungen' in Germany. In both cases it's gaming the system and should be severely punished...
For many years in Germany attorneys have gamed the system, related to what you are allowed and not allowed to do esp. when selling something. These 'people' have for example scoured ebay ads, and when they found say a missing telephone number or missing note on how to undo the deal for a business seller, they sent such a 'Mahnung'. Not for free obviously, no, with an invoice for payment (for their own time/effort!). Yes, you will have to pay... It gets even worse. Suppose you've got an old magazine with old demo software disk on it and put it on ebay.de (as a German, I don't think you can be touched if not), then you'd better check there are no programs on there that are now forbidden. DVD copying software for example that circumvents the protection scheme is no longer allowed since several years.
People have been sent a 'Mahnung' for putting a mag with such no longer allowed software on ebay, and had to pay large amounts of money to such 'scammers'. You think you get a few euros, but you have to pay many hundreds. Nice.
These people are the worst kinds of assholes around just as the guy I mentioned in a previous posting, 'Pieter Lakeman' (who created a foundation supposedly to help clients of the DSB bank with supposedly bad loans, but in reality this foundation just pays his 300 euro/hour salary and there were hardly any bad loans anyway; He then influenced people to take away their money from DSB which led to its collapse. Nice!), and I consider them to be legal scammers.
See for one notorious guy, who was sentenced to jail for other things, this page (it didn't end well for him and I don't think many people will give a damn, he was really hated as one can see in many forums...): http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCnter_Freiherr_von_Gravenreuth
Yes, of course that's what I mean. I thought that was obvious...
Without doubt that guy could be on the board or be CEO of a big company...
(I'm being serious!)
I don't believe this is real. There are a number of indicators such the language/wording/phrasing being extremely similar between both the interviewer and interviewee. Why would someone fake this? To get more traffic on their site? A con about a con...
It can be. The scammer is nigerian and possibly has a poor command of english so the interviewer makes it readable. Also, transcribing a conversation often doesn't give a readable text, people edit what they say with afterthoughts etc., so putting it up verbatim might not be readable at all (and thus not quickly understandable) while it was perfectly understandable to the interviewer (his train of thought is not the same as that of a reader).
So, such editing can very well produce apparantly similar language from the one who's been interviewed.
The problem is the general attitude in Nigeria. This scamming is like a national pastime.
What causes it I don't know, but I'd like to point out:
1. Being stupid is no justification for being ripped off, so please no moronic comments that those were were duped deserved it.
2. There are far far worse people around you, from your own country, that are ripping off you and many others for far greater amounts of money and/or doing far worse damage in other ways. An example is of course many politicians. But on the whole, the entire layer of top management and politicians who often end up in those positions, are causing much more harm and sucking huge amounts of money out of companies and healthcare too. Did you ever hear of a manager who performed badly, was fired and therefore got no further payments? No? I haven't either. They make a mess of things, then get fired and get a bonus or severance pay, whatever you want to call it, higher than the first prize in the national lottery here... If you're a lowly worker, you get fired and need to request unemployment benefits and start applying for jobs immediately. Why don't they need to?
These people keep getting such jobs, probably because of friends in boards of various companies. Or if not real friends, then it's done as a mutual favour: I help you and in the future you will help me. Which is essentially what 'networking' is all about, i.e. a form of cronyism.
Another example I recently encountered made me think that there are lawyers who have found the perfect legal scam. The example I'm giving here is Pieter Lakeman, who set up a foundation "stichting DSB leed" for supposed victims of bad mortgages given out by the BSD bank. What is going on is as follows: He identified that there might be some bad loans, badly given advice, then extrapolates this to almost all loans, sets up this foundation, from which you can get help for a small amount of money, sa 50 euro. Now there's no guarantee that your loan is bad/badly done or you were given wrong information by the bank, so this foundation can 'check' loans, say "nothing we can do" and they don't need to pay back any money of that. I read that he and another guy who set up this foundation gave themselves a salary of 300 euro per hour...
That's a nice way of getting yourself self-employed at stratosphere salaries.
This asshole then proceeds to put the word out that people should remove money from DSB and in the end it goes bankrupt because of this (and because the finance minister doesn't want to help. Eh, why not after the billions of loans to other banks? Why indeed...)
It turns out, as checks after this bankruptcy have shown, that very few loans were bad (inappropriate, or given with bad advice etc.).
He has not only caused a great amount of damage, he's also legally scammed almost all the people who paid money for that 'review of their loan'.
It's a fantastic scam: You identify something that might be wrong somewhere, then set up a foundation, which people can become a member of or have something checked out by, for a relatively small amount, such that you wouldn't go to court over it... Then you just check loans or whatever that foundation would do, at 300 euro an hour (i.e. 10 minutes per loan in this case) and of course find nothing wrong or say "it will be included in the legal action". In the end nothing happens, and in this case, making the bank go bankrupt is a pretty good way to say you can't do anything any more as the executors now say what will happen with assets/loans etc.
I have suggestion for another ruthless lawyer: Set up a foundation to counter the scam of Lakeman. Charge 15 euro per case, then of course in the end you say after studying the foundation's charter that there's nothing you can do...
Predicting the weather (or climate) 340 years from now, nobody can do that. It's like telling about the economy in 100 years from now. Who can believe someone claiming such thing? Not me at least.
Well, this is the sort of thing the manmade global warming deniers say. And it's a very stupid argument. It's very well possible to say what will happen on a larger scale/timeframe. More energy in the atmosphere means it's getting hotter on average and the weather will become more extreme.
Here's an example to give you an idea of why this is possible to predict, for those of you who are not too well trained in scientific thought: If someone rides his car with 300 km/h (almost 200 mph for no-SI lovers) into a solid wall, I will predict he's dead after that crash. What I cannot predict however, is precisely what damage is sustained to what parts of his body and/or in how many parts his body lies scattered around!
If your organization used Paypal and they froze your assets once, and you "struggled for more than half a year" to resolve it, why the fuck would you STILL be using Paypal?
Because they would probably need to setup many bank accounts in many countries. It's probably also ease-of-use. Easy to press a few buttons and fill out an amount with paypal and transfer money, than to transfer using say direct bank-transfer. This means people are more likely to donate...
Another example: I use paypal but I'd rather not. However, I sell specific items worldwide, and there are no other good wide used systems to transfer money from say the USA to the Netherlands. Bank transfer is something hardly used in the US for example, and if used, the cost is often prohibitive. So if I want to sell to the US, there's no real choice.
What's then annoying is that many Europeans (in euro countries) also use paypal... In Ebay you are not allowed to say "I won't use paypal for people in counties using the EURO".
This doesn't apply to wikileaks, but just gives an idea why sometimes you don't have a choice, or the others are just too expensive (bank transfer in the US too expensive, Western union is also fairly expensive and has other problems, etc.)