leot

50 ms·

571.
by leot 15y ago
The point was that RMS is wrong when he asserts[1] that Apple and Jobs have hurt the development of free software. [1] RMS: " we all deserve the end of Jobs' malign influence on people's computing "
572.
by leot 15y ago
RMS is glad Jobs is gone. This means he thinks Jobs' non-FOSS is a net negative for the world. [edit of first sentence for clarity]
573.
by leot 15y ago
That RMS wrote the GPL, or extended LLNL's Pastel compiler into GCC, does not endow him with responsibility for the success of all free software. Do you really think, given the influence of academia, that there would be no FOSS-equivalent
574.
by leot 15y ago
RMS is wrong insofar as he believes that FOSS exclusively will result in more people having better software than if there is FOSS + ~FOSS.
575.
by leot 15y ago
Yes, but RMS is simply wrong, here. Jobs has put great software into more hands than RMS ever did. Jobs might well have (indirectly) had an even more positive influence on FOSS by spreading BSD. (I'm not saying that there isn't a ton of FO
576.
by leot 15y ago
Is he? Or is he fundamentally a troubled, self-righteous individual with an axe to grind? It's easy to rationalize this behavior as primarily altruistic, but in RMS's case I kind of doubt it.
577.
by leot 15y ago
Apparently, RMS would seem to prefer that technology be exclusively Free and used by an tiny elite group of hackers than by millions of non-programmers and only partly Free. Dear RMS: when it comes to creating good UIs, FOSS has never succe
578.
by leot 15y ago
I think you need to take the absolute value of the error, rather than the simple sum of negative and positive. I keep getting 100 when I'm slightly off in two directions.
579.
by leot 15y ago
I can't think of one. Hopefully there is -- if not, it needs coining. Your friend is wrong, though, if this extra information was "cheap" to obtain (caused no harm to the patient and was low cost). The argument used is that extra testing ca
580.
by leot 15y ago
Extra true information can only ever be a good thing if handled properly.
581.
This is what happens when too few MDs understand Bayesian inference(nytimes.com)
3 points by leot 15y ago|6 comments
582.
by leot 15y ago
I would agree with you if three other things were comparably inexpensive: 1) quality education (including post-secondary, which would otherwise need to be saved-for) 2) portable, quality basic health care 3) inexpensive, safe, spartan-but-q
583.
by leot 15y ago
Who said anything about impoverishing anyone? What does "impoverish" mean, exactly, to you? In France, the wealth tax is 0% under €800k, increasing to a maximum of 1.8% (once the person gets to ~€17 million). How could this lead to impoveri
584.
by leot 15y ago
Well put, as pg's essays usually are. But I think there are rather large gaps: 1) He glosses together reduction of income inequality with elimination of it. The zero inequality thing has been tried and failed. 2) one of his arguments is tha
585.
by leot 15y ago
I call b.s. In economics, the extremes are strongly self-reinforcing. I would be really surprised if in a given year more people left the top 0.05% (in net worth) than stayed there. I'd even be surprised if the ratio were less than 5 to 1
586.
by leot 15y ago
There's an assumption here that being richer just lets you buy more stuff and services. Wealth, however, is power. While Bill Gates may be no more capable than me at driving faster on the 101, I definitely can't pay a lobbying firm 10 milli
587.
by leot 15y ago
Yeah, standards seem to differ a lot . There's also the whole grade inflation problem: http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/93987 ... perhaps a part of the problem is accreditation of higher ed schools?
588.
by leot 15y ago
> "... the only person suffering from this behavior is the student." Actually, everyone suffers. Fellow students suffer, as some are compelled to cheat to compete because their peers do. Alumni suffer as students grades lose their value
589.
by leot 15y ago
G+ is also about giving Google a much richer social relationships graph than anyone has ever had. I can only wonder at the long-term effects of the information asymmetries that are developing. At least with twitter (and fb, for that matter)
590.
by leot 15y ago
Further reply from study author in response to my message stating that I had posted his reply to this forum, and pointed him to it: === Thanks for your interest. With regard to filling the air gap region with conductive fluid, the problem
591.
by leot 15y ago
Reply from study author: You raise a very good point. The philosophy thus far is to see how far we can get with conventional, inexpensive materials, and periodically reevaluate where problems remain. Low-cost manufacturability is critical
592.
by leot 15y ago
Could diamond-like carbon (which is very slick) be used instead of the air bearing, so that the spinning heatsink remained in contact with its heat source? EDIT: Apparently, DLC is more conductive than copper ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wik
593.
by leot 15y ago
But they didn't put the infrastructure up to support SMS. They put it up to support voice calls, primarily.
594.
by leot 15y ago
You're advocating that there be no tax on consumer goods from other states. That's fine, but it's a different issue. There is tax on goods from other states, it's just that there's a lot of, ahem, non-compliance. Your argument also assumes
595.
by leot 15y ago
No, you're right, they're the shell companies designed to avoid asking customers to pay CA sales tax. Virtual presence is fun until it means you have to start competing on a level playing field. The affiliate program might be the strongest
596.
by leot 15y ago
Yup, I did too. The email had a scary title and was filled with threats and dire warnings, even though nothing's likely to go down before Sep 30th.
597.
by leot 15y ago
You're not taxing the corporations. You're taxing the people, as they would be if they bought the exact same thing locally.
598.
by leot 15y ago
Amazon doesn't lose money necessarily, it just becomes less competitive (especially with vendors that are have charge sales tax). Boohoo. I had thought sales taxes were the darlings of the anti-tax crowd ... because, you know, they're so "f
599.
by leot 15y ago
You can't be serious. It's not really the affiliates that make the difference here -- it's all of Amazon's operations in CA. We're all futurists here except when that means losing affiliate revenue and/or no longer having a tax dodge. It's
600.
by leot 15y ago
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/opinion/13kristof.html Pay particular attention to the McKinsey report results, which found that a teacher that is a standard deviation better than the norm adds $20k to a student's lifetime earnings. Two

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