forgotmylastone

Maybe, but maybe it just means our universe is full of real contradictions.

Nope, otherwise hot girls would be having sex with any ugly guy that wanted it.

You can't follow every rule in the bible if they all conflict with each other; he had to leave out one of the testaments.

Einsteinium? (yes, I'm away Einstein didn't discover that =P)

I think he meant something along the lines of "Few were sufficiently correct that they were remembered for their discovery."

>I can tell you what an integer is, what a square root is, and what a ratio is, and as a result, I can (by looking it up in a book and typing in the text, heh heh) prove that the square root of 2 can't be expressed as the ratio of two integers.

Not without words you can't.

"There are things I know I learned from studying philosophy. The most dramatic I learned immediately, in the first semester of freshman year, in a class taught by Sydney Shoemaker. I learned that I don't exist. I am (and you are) a collection of cells that lurches around driven by various forces, and calls itself I. But there's no central, indivisible thing that your identity goes with. You could conceivably lose half your brain and live. Which means your brain could conceivably be split into two halves and each transplanted into different bodies. Imagine waking up after such an operation. You have to imagine being two people."

Whew, I'm glad I just watched Star Trek to learn this, and didn't spend tens of thousands at Harvard. (I'm referring to the numerous times someone was 'duplicated' in a transporter accident)

Huge bias--they've been invested in by Bezos.

If it had to do with emails, then this wouldn't just apply to rich people, it would apply to everyone with an email account. Have you never seen spam?

Now maybe his co-founder will leave, and the founders of Digg will be so impressed that they invite him to be a co-founder--on equal terms.

Genius didn't drive Turing insane, society did.

If SVG had taken off in all browsers by now, PowerPoint would be toast.

Do you even have ownership of the project at this point? Don't all these others have a claim to it? Are you prepared to buy them out and/or completely start from scratch?

Rebirth of the wizard!

Lisp stuff practically only ever shows up on reddit; it is way overrepresented there compared to Slashdot et. al.. And it is a similar sort of thing--people want others to run into Lisp, while not actually finding the articles interesting.

I'll give it to you on your essays though, they do pop up all over (however, I will say that although I avoid Digg, Ron Paul can be found all over the place over there).

The proliferation of Paul Graham stories on reddit were evidence of a design flaw in version 1 of social news.

Such a small proportion of people who visit news sites vote that a group of zealots can easily overtake a site like this. Spammers are comparatively easy to guard against; they don't care enough to create 100 sockpuppet accounts, and in any case the guys at reddit wouldn't have any qualms about killing spams that seemed to be merely for profit. This is a tougher problem.

You could say all the anti-C++ stories were already evidence of this problem. But a large proportion of programmers, even C++ users, disapprove of C++, and an even larger proportion of the kind of people who would use a social news site.

The Lisp zealots are another matter. This is more like spam; it's not just people who hate C++ so much that they reflexively upvote stories that sound critical of him; it's a deliberate attempt to market something online.

Incidentally, I'm not saying this because I have some kind of ulterior motives. I think C++ is the worst language of my lifetime. And I am not anti-Paul Graham. I know nothing about him except that every article he writes makes it onto reddit--no one writes that much gold.

This whole thing is stupid. They set the price. In the product they sold, they made no guarantee that the price wasn't going to drop--lack of a future price drop wasn't part of the product. If anything, the main 'intangible' in this product was 'smugness'.

So, they set the price, and people bought it. End of story. They didn't force anyone to. If someone thought it was worth $600 when, as Cringely says, the 'real' price was the current price, then you made the mistake.

yeah

Basically the iphone had a $200 smugness cost built-in that provided way more than $200 of smugness, so all the smug seekers made out well--for a while. They forgot to factor in the fact that the smugness thereby provided was contingent on the absence of a near-future "now who's smug?" award for those society deems "not so smug as an early iPhone adopter," which, a some short time after all the shaken chicken-bones had settled, is exactly what happened.

Let's say the iPhone was given free today instead of just price-reduced: that would make you even angrier! Imagine the gall--other people getting things! Why, if we carry out your logic to its conclusion, you'd be happy if people had to pay more tomorrow than today, as though taking from others somehow justifies and internally authenticates your existence.

I am so pissed that my million dollar cancer treatment has come down in price to $500. I mean, sure, I got treated two months ago, and I would be dead right now had I not, but that wasn't the point. Living is nice, but what I really wanted from this cancer treatment was to live while others who couldn't afford it died. I guess there is some small consolation in the fact that a lot of people died during a couple months there, but this whole thing just pisses me off. I don't know if my slight, smug satisfaction at their deaths was worth the million bucks. On a normal technology schedule, I would expect at least a year of deaths; didn't Apple know we were counting on that? I hate you Apple.

Are we talking about Valleywag or the Catholic Church. It really could apply to either.

And it will mean you can't use it from a library or a phone.

Cool, in the US, the people would be arrested after the show (see 'to catch a predator', senator foot tapper, etc.).

Yes, but only in the following way: sorted by highest score, -2 funny modifier, and with a plugin to allow thread collapsing.

You sound much more like you are from 'Slashdot'.

That way we could have discounted Einstein's relativity theory after he failed to explain the capillary effect.

The difference with a backup hard drive is that it's dedicated to music. No one wants to share their backup hard drive, but they might share or even sell their MP3 player. The legit use for the MP3 player is probably legally safe, but things can get gray quickly.

Since this particular MP3 player can only hold MP3s, not arbitrary files, they should be required to implement a self distruct feature, even though a device that could store MP3s and files shouldn't need one.