Based on slashdotters telling me these problems have been solved, I went out and bought 5 more CFLs. Still takes a minute to reach full brightness.
I wonder what bulbs you must be using.. the CFLs I use reach full brightness nearly immediately after being turned on. They're your standard 60-watt equivalent lighting CFL.
I honestly don't even know what brand these are. I think they're Phillips. Anyway, I bought them at Home Depot, and I think they only sell one brand of CFL's.
Back 20,000 years ago there was no health care system. If you got a cut you could die. So what did people do? Be careful.
No, people helped each other. Society was a mutually beneficial endeavor. You get sick, your friends and family and everyone comes together to get you well. Socialized medicine seems like the next best thing. These days your friends and family STILL help you, but with the increasing social anomie that our entire culture is experiencing, very few people actually know enough people for social support groups to be useful.
Humans are controlled by incentives. Make something free and guess what happens.
They're also controlled by dis-incentives. Nobody WANTS to experience extreme pain just because the price for repairing the damage is free. That's like saying you'd cut your arm off repeatedly because there are no consequences.
But just look around, just about everyone is overweight, fat, and eats poor.
Not as many as you'd think, although general health and eating habits correlate strongly with wealth (although the high calorie diet is beginning to creep into the very wealthy, too).
And these eating habits are as much a function of our culture as they are of people's choices. When a 1000 calorie, high-fat food is 1/5 the price of a 300 calorie, high-vitamin food, someone who is watching their food budget will usually choose the first food.
But it's more than that. The more stress we endure, the less sleep we get, the less normally we eat, and that has as great an impact on health and weight as any food choice. We live in a society that encourages those irresponsible behaviors. Fast food, pre-packaged breakfasts, the whole concept of eating health has been thrown out the window in exchange for expediency and convenience, early morning meetings and constant stress with no opportunity to relax and have a good meal.
All of that sounds great for lawyers, corporations, and patent holders, but it sounds horrible for consumers. I thought the purpose of patents was to foster innovation for the benefit of the society - if so many great inventions get trapped inside patent hell, exactly how does that benefit anyone?
Sounds more to me like a bunch of individual monopolies each trying to force their competitors either out of business or to their knees, resulting in a slew of competing products that do nothing but frustrate consumers due to their lack of interoperability.
How many picture card formats do we have now? 15 major ones? Is that REALLY necessary? There's something to be said for innovation and competition, sure, but there's a reason we invent standards.
But if you post as an Anonymous Coward in a thread you have moderated your previous moderations in the thread will be canceled.
Wrong. That is not how the moderation system works. Posting AC in a thread you have moderated does not cancel your mods. (Didn't the GPP just say that?)
I bet you can't name one facet of your life that been made worse due to the Bush administration. You're just an ignorant buffoon spouting liberalist propaganda.
My living wage has fallen considerably in the past 3 years. 5% pay raises are not keeping up with inflation and fuel prices. When it becomes a bit harder to go to the grocery store, yes, I would say my life has been made worse by the Bush administration.
But how about the fact that EVERY DAY I wake up and feel a little more like I'm living in the totalitarian dystopia we all supposedly fear. Police with ever-increasing powers and courts encouraging it. "Free speech zones" which are the very REASON "liberals" get so violent in the first place - if nobody is listening, the impulse to destroy is understandable (and if you claim otherwise, you're lying. I said understandable, not defensible). Habeas corpus suspended for a certain class of criminals who, incidentally, are denied the protections guaranteed them in the Constitution - and SCOTUS defends this.
All of this has happened under Bush's watch and that barely scratches the surface. The effect on my personal life is irrelevant when one considers where this country is going. If all we care about is the effect to us personally, by the time we notice, we'll have long since fallen into totalitarianism and any hope to ever dig ourselves out will be gone.
You don't have to. It's HIS job to prove it IS there (e.g., you have to be proven GUILTY in a court of law, not NOT guilty. A subtle but important distinction). He can't strongarm you into giving up the hidden volume, if it exists, and if it doesn't exist, he especially can't.
I was hoping you'd mention how the structured nature of the hidden volume is a dead giveaway. But you didn't say anything about that, leading me to think you don't believe it to be a problem. Right?
So you're anthrocentric to the point where you believe humanity owns the whole world. You continue to make my case for me.
I guess I really do have to spell it out for you.
When I use the phrase "our world" I am referring to the civilization that WE have built. The word is not used in the sense of ownership, but rather in the sense of participation (for example, the phrase 'my family' means 'the family I am part of', not 'the family I own').
Consequently, when I say we light our world, I mean that we have such wonderful potential to create such beautiful things both for ourselves and each other; and yet at the same time, we have such darkness about us, in our ability to destroy and to hate and to cause pain.
Incidentally, I am fully aware that our culture DOES believe it owns the world, although that is not what I am referring to in my quote. I do not think we own the world; we are part of it (ever seen the movie Instinct? Or read anything by Daniel Quinn?). But we think we do - we believe we are its masters, that through the application of our knowledge and our science we can solve any problem, control any process, that always the world's shape is ours to mold.
In some ways, it is precisely that arrogance to which I refer when I call it the FIRE that consumes us. We're burning ourselves by how we behave.
...people and businesses should not need to hold a bunch of patents in order to maintain their freedom of activity. The fact that we are even using the word "patent" in this context shows that patents are actually working against their primary purpose: to encourage innovation.
If the rules do not accomplish their stated goal, then they must be changed.
For the cynics: if the actual goals of the rules is to harm the many to the advantage of the few, then again, they must be changed.
The business world has been openly operating under these conditions for years, and many of them are PROUD they're doing it.
They actually think that the paragon of Capitalism is to screw everyone over as much as possible in the pursuit of a buck.
Actually the owner of Amazon points out regularly that he had to keep telling the programmers, no, do not put up a confirmation dialog.
So this part was truly novel.
No it isn't. Does the clerk at the grocery store ask you "Are you SURE you want to make this purchase?" Of course not. And the reason they don't is the same reason Jeff Bezos didn't want his website asking: because impulse buyers will put things back if they are asked. The decision to remove a confirmation dialog is a BUSINESS decision and a DESIGN decision, not an invention of ANY sort.
Just because people had been using confirmation screens before, doesn't make their removal "original." Novel, meaning unusual, in the context of a web based checkout, perhaps, but not "original" and certainly not patentable.
I believe it's time to work on making process/software patents unacceptable, especially when they are so broad that no other company could work in the same space. Patents on things like "integrating email client functionality into office apps" is just too broad, and as such can only serve to hamper innovation and business in general.
What Microsoft is trying to do (and other companies are doing it to - patenting a business model? Come on) is trying to patent their competition out of business. Since they can't win on the economic battlefield, they just want to bankrupt every other company competing with them by claiming their violating some patent or another.
What they're doing should be illegal and probably is, if anyone would have the balls to charge them with racketeering.
I've always been curious of why Microsoft has not pursued things that, in MHO, are slam dunks in patent infringement. I'm not going to go into specifics because that would violated attorney ethics, but there are many clear cut cases of patent infringement in several high profile Linux applications.
This assumes those patents are even valid. Patents have to be non-obvious and if the developers merely implemented this stuff on their own it stands to reason that it's not an obvious invention. Not that "non-obvious" inventions can't be discovered more than once, but the vast, VAST majority of software development IS obvious, if not necessarily easy, and most of the stuff that is hard or non-obvious is based on math that is in the public domain.
At any rate, this is one of the biggest reasons Microsoft hasn't challenged those patents. They're afraid of losing. Imagine what it would mean: that all that time and money was a waste of time, but more, it would undermine the whole concept of software patentability.
When the Soviet Union and the East Bloc fell, it wasn't because of a few "enemies of the state". It was because millions of people were sick and tired of having their lives interfered with and controlled by a government that wanted to know every detail of their life. They should call this "The STASI archive act", maybe that'd raise a few eyebrows. Then again, how many Americans would recognize history if it was staring them right in the face...
The really sick part is, once we do realize it it will be way to late to change it. It pretty much already is. War, REAL war, not these stupid "occupational skirmishes", has become something very few in our society have any stomach for. Armed resistance against the US military is pretty much pointless since any weapons of merit have been outlawed. The whole point of the 2nd Amendment was to make sure the people could go toe-to-toe with the government, and the government has made nice and sure that will never happen.
Alas, all is not lost. All we'd need is a couple of intelligent military commanders to switch loyalties and rebels would have several divisions on their side. I suppose it's supposed to be that hard by design - armed resistance is a last ditch effort when all else has failed.
Incidentally, the wrongs visited upon the American people by our current government FAR outstrip anything George III ever did to the American colonists.
How quickly everyone forgets FOX - Firefly, Family Guy, Futurama.......Married with Children
Firefly: Killed after 11 episodes.
Family Guy: Killed after 3 seasons and the only reason they brought it back is because of fantastic DVD sales.
Futurama: Killed after 4 seasons because Matt Groening refused to compromise the show like they did with the Simpsons. So, they cancelled it instead to spite him, even though it still had good viewership.
Married With Children is the only one on that list Fox can be given credit for, and that was back when Fox was attempting to battle it out with the larger networks for a piece of the pie. Once they got that piece, they became exactly like the other networks: appealing to the lowest common denominator with garbage shows.
The only possible exception is 24, which I don't even find that interesting. You can only stop the terrorists so many time before it gets boring.
kids, and the wife, who for some bizarre reason doesn't understand that Battlestar Galactica time is no interruptions time make it hard to give it the attention that it deserves.
Especially when THEIR shows are inviolate and if you even think about walking in the ROOM you get a dirty look..
More specifically, it will ONLY last three seasons - it is scheduled to end in the 2009-2010 TV season. There is a definite last episode so now they can actually plan out the rest of the show instead of finding ways to keep it going.
9 years. 9 years of prosecution. 9 years of our EFF dollars wasted having to fight this.
Think of it instead as a group of motivated people, aware of the slippery slope that was approaching, taking action to prevent it from becoming firmly entrenched.
If those 9 years of battle hadn't been fought, and instead people lay down and accept it until it was too late to fight it, we'd then experience.. who knows? how many years of locked down content and bland crap produced by the people rich enough to pay licensing fees.
Once a system becomes widely used and mostly accepted, it's difficult if not impossible to change it, no matter how heinous, illegal, or rights-infringing. That these 9 years were marked by a battle against that is something to be proud of.
One could argue it's a battle that should never have been fought, which is true, but there will always be someone or some corporation willing to push the limits of rights and ethics to make a buck. The battle never ends.
If you stop thinking of school (all school, from kindergarten through college) as "where you went when you wanted to learn about things, test things, build new things, and in general broaden your horizons and expand what you are capable of doing" and instead start thinking about it as a way to keep people busy and out of the work force for awhile, then the whole thing starts to make alot more sense.
Imagine what the job market and the economy would look like if everyone in our overpopulated civilization who could work, had one.
Slashdot Mirror
My mod points just expired or I would fix that stupid 'Flamebait' mod. Instead, I'll just post my agreement with your sentiment.
I wonder what bulbs you must be using.. the CFLs I use reach full brightness nearly immediately after being turned on. They're your standard 60-watt equivalent lighting CFL.
I honestly don't even know what brand these are. I think they're Phillips. Anyway, I bought them at Home Depot, and I think they only sell one brand of CFL's.
He pays taxes too. One could say he merely got out of it what he put in.
No, people helped each other. Society was a mutually beneficial endeavor. You get sick, your friends and family and everyone comes together to get you well. Socialized medicine seems like the next best thing. These days your friends and family STILL help you, but with the increasing social anomie that our entire culture is experiencing, very few people actually know enough people for social support groups to be useful.
They're also controlled by dis-incentives. Nobody WANTS to experience extreme pain just because the price for repairing the damage is free. That's like saying you'd cut your arm off repeatedly because there are no consequences.
Not as many as you'd think, although general health and eating habits correlate strongly with wealth (although the high calorie diet is beginning to creep into the very wealthy, too).
And these eating habits are as much a function of our culture as they are of people's choices. When a 1000 calorie, high-fat food is 1/5 the price of a 300 calorie, high-vitamin food, someone who is watching their food budget will usually choose the first food.
But it's more than that. The more stress we endure, the less sleep we get, the less normally we eat, and that has as great an impact on health and weight as any food choice. We live in a society that encourages those irresponsible behaviors. Fast food, pre-packaged breakfasts, the whole concept of eating health has been thrown out the window in exchange for expediency and convenience, early morning meetings and constant stress with no opportunity to relax and have a good meal.
All of that sounds great for lawyers, corporations, and patent holders, but it sounds horrible for consumers. I thought the purpose of patents was to foster innovation for the benefit of the society - if so many great inventions get trapped inside patent hell, exactly how does that benefit anyone?
Sounds more to me like a bunch of individual monopolies each trying to force their competitors either out of business or to their knees, resulting in a slew of competing products that do nothing but frustrate consumers due to their lack of interoperability.
How many picture card formats do we have now? 15 major ones? Is that REALLY necessary? There's something to be said for innovation and competition, sure, but there's a reason we invent standards.
Yes I've tried it. In response to your other post - I logged out when I posted AC. I think that's why it didn't undo my mods.
Wrong. That is not how the moderation system works. Posting AC in a thread you have moderated does not cancel your mods. (Didn't the GPP just say that?)
My living wage has fallen considerably in the past 3 years. 5% pay raises are not keeping up with inflation and fuel prices. When it becomes a bit harder to go to the grocery store, yes, I would say my life has been made worse by the Bush administration.
But how about the fact that EVERY DAY I wake up and feel a little more like I'm living in the totalitarian dystopia we all supposedly fear. Police with ever-increasing powers and courts encouraging it. "Free speech zones" which are the very REASON "liberals" get so violent in the first place - if nobody is listening, the impulse to destroy is understandable (and if you claim otherwise, you're lying. I said understandable, not defensible). Habeas corpus suspended for a certain class of criminals who, incidentally, are denied the protections guaranteed them in the Constitution - and SCOTUS defends this.
All of this has happened under Bush's watch and that barely scratches the surface. The effect on my personal life is irrelevant when one considers where this country is going. If all we care about is the effect to us personally, by the time we notice, we'll have long since fallen into totalitarianism and any hope to ever dig ourselves out will be gone.
The future. In a world where nobody is free to innovate, develop, invent, produce, or brainstorm, there is only one inevitable result: stagnation.
You don't have to. It's HIS job to prove it IS there (e.g., you have to be proven GUILTY in a court of law, not NOT guilty. A subtle but important distinction). He can't strongarm you into giving up the hidden volume, if it exists, and if it doesn't exist, he especially can't.
I was hoping you'd mention how the structured nature of the hidden volume is a dead giveaway. But you didn't say anything about that, leading me to think you don't believe it to be a problem. Right?
I guess I really do have to spell it out for you.
When I use the phrase "our world" I am referring to the civilization that WE have built. The word is not used in the sense of ownership, but rather in the sense of participation (for example, the phrase 'my family' means 'the family I am part of', not 'the family I own').
Consequently, when I say we light our world, I mean that we have such wonderful potential to create such beautiful things both for ourselves and each other; and yet at the same time, we have such darkness about us, in our ability to destroy and to hate and to cause pain.
Incidentally, I am fully aware that our culture DOES believe it owns the world, although that is not what I am referring to in my quote. I do not think we own the world; we are part of it (ever seen the movie Instinct? Or read anything by Daniel Quinn?). But we think we do - we believe we are its masters, that through the application of our knowledge and our science we can solve any problem, control any process, that always the world's shape is ours to mold.
In some ways, it is precisely that arrogance to which I refer when I call it the FIRE that consumes us. We're burning ourselves by how we behave.
My quote says OUR world, not THE world.
Think about the difference and see if you still interpret it the same way.
Really? Are you sure? Stanford doesn't think so.
And that took me about 3 seconds to find.
The business world has been openly operating under these conditions for years, and many of them are PROUD they're doing it.
They actually think that the paragon of Capitalism is to screw everyone over as much as possible in the pursuit of a buck.
No it isn't. Does the clerk at the grocery store ask you "Are you SURE you want to make this purchase?" Of course not. And the reason they don't is the same reason Jeff Bezos didn't want his website asking: because impulse buyers will put things back if they are asked. The decision to remove a confirmation dialog is a BUSINESS decision and a DESIGN decision, not an invention of ANY sort.
Just because people had been using confirmation screens before, doesn't make their removal "original." Novel, meaning unusual, in the context of a web based checkout, perhaps, but not "original" and certainly not patentable.
What Microsoft is trying to do (and other companies are doing it to - patenting a business model? Come on) is trying to patent their competition out of business. Since they can't win on the economic battlefield, they just want to bankrupt every other company competing with them by claiming their violating some patent or another.
What they're doing should be illegal and probably is, if anyone would have the balls to charge them with racketeering.
This assumes those patents are even valid. Patents have to be non-obvious and if the developers merely implemented this stuff on their own it stands to reason that it's not an obvious invention. Not that "non-obvious" inventions can't be discovered more than once, but the vast, VAST majority of software development IS obvious, if not necessarily easy, and most of the stuff that is hard or non-obvious is based on math that is in the public domain.
At any rate, this is one of the biggest reasons Microsoft hasn't challenged those patents. They're afraid of losing. Imagine what it would mean: that all that time and money was a waste of time, but more, it would undermine the whole concept of software patentability.
The really sick part is, once we do realize it it will be way to late to change it. It pretty much already is. War, REAL war, not these stupid "occupational skirmishes", has become something very few in our society have any stomach for. Armed resistance against the US military is pretty much pointless since any weapons of merit have been outlawed. The whole point of the 2nd Amendment was to make sure the people could go toe-to-toe with the government, and the government has made nice and sure that will never happen.
Alas, all is not lost. All we'd need is a couple of intelligent military commanders to switch loyalties and rebels would have several divisions on their side. I suppose it's supposed to be that hard by design - armed resistance is a last ditch effort when all else has failed.
Incidentally, the wrongs visited upon the American people by our current government FAR outstrip anything George III ever did to the American colonists.
Firefly: Killed after 11 episodes.
Family Guy: Killed after 3 seasons and the only reason they brought it back is because of fantastic DVD sales.
Futurama: Killed after 4 seasons because Matt Groening refused to compromise the show like they did with the Simpsons. So, they cancelled it instead to spite him, even though it still had good viewership.
Married With Children is the only one on that list Fox can be given credit for, and that was back when Fox was attempting to battle it out with the larger networks for a piece of the pie. Once they got that piece, they became exactly like the other networks: appealing to the lowest common denominator with garbage shows.
The only possible exception is 24, which I don't even find that interesting. You can only stop the terrorists so many time before it gets boring.
And don't even get me started on American Idol..
Especially when THEIR shows are inviolate and if you even think about walking in the ROOM you get a dirty look..
More specifically, it will ONLY last three seasons - it is scheduled to end in the 2009-2010 TV season. There is a definite last episode so now they can actually plan out the rest of the show instead of finding ways to keep it going.
Think of it instead as a group of motivated people, aware of the slippery slope that was approaching, taking action to prevent it from becoming firmly entrenched.
If those 9 years of battle hadn't been fought, and instead people lay down and accept it until it was too late to fight it, we'd then experience.. who knows? how many years of locked down content and bland crap produced by the people rich enough to pay licensing fees.
Once a system becomes widely used and mostly accepted, it's difficult if not impossible to change it, no matter how heinous, illegal, or rights-infringing. That these 9 years were marked by a battle against that is something to be proud of.
One could argue it's a battle that should never have been fought, which is true, but there will always be someone or some corporation willing to push the limits of rights and ethics to make a buck. The battle never ends.
If you stop thinking of school (all school, from kindergarten through college) as "where you went when you wanted to learn about things, test things, build new things, and in general broaden your horizons and expand what you are capable of doing" and instead start thinking about it as a way to keep people busy and out of the work force for awhile, then the whole thing starts to make alot more sense.
Imagine what the job market and the economy would look like if everyone in our overpopulated civilization who could work, had one.