"...are using up their infinite mod points to protect some of the stories more than others."
Doesn't even have to be that.
One person with 15 mod points(for me, that is about 75-80% of the time) can go back in your post history (further they go back in time, the less likely you are to notice it) and mod down 15 "+0" posts, knocking them all into the -1 state. Two people? 30 posts in negative land. Really, it takes very few people to completely ruin your reputation here...except the smart ones on/. know better--they actually read your posts rather then the fucking mod points.
Let it go. Most of us don't need moderation to know intelligence and wisdom when we see it.
And yeah...I could see Apple shills working the forums. I could see that quite clearly.
People get seriously unpredictable when you attack their drug of choice, especially when there is addiction involved.
I happen to agree with you, by the way. Doctors (at least the ones I have been to) are far too liberal with pharmaceuticals. Ever notice the level of blatant marketing in the doctor's office these days? Advertisements on the walls, the clock, every pad of paper, the magazines in the waiting room...
I actually use that as a sort of gauge of "concern" when I enter a doctor's office. The less adverts, the more I feel the concern is my health, not a profit.
"...even if I'm so high I'm shaking and the burning in my blood is almost painful I think clearly and feel nothing in particular aside from a sort of dead, throbbing blood-thirst in the back of my head), they sent me to a heart specialist."
So. Did ya kill him? Don't leave us hanging, dude.
Does this mean that if I have had a DNA sample taken, all of my direct ancestors can be traced without ever being a "part" of the DNA database?
Alternatively, can a descendant of mine provide a DNA sample sometime in the far future and inadvertently "include" me in the system?
Is there some point in time where the introduction of new genetic material "breaks" this continuity between generations, in terms of DNA as a legal identifier?
My understanding of genetics simply isn't up to the task of answering these questions.
And I don't appreciate you saying I called you a liar. I didn't. I was merely suggesting your mother received special consideration because you work for the company--special consideration that the rest of us do not receive.
"In this day and age, chances are if you can call 911, even if you don't say anything, that they can use the devices GPS to find you."
Did the 911 call center actually get GPS coordinates though? I'd be interested in knowing how this looked from the their end. Did it look like a hang-up with no GPS data sent? Isn't the GPS data sent over the same data channel?
"My MOTHER got caught in a phishing scheme. Her bank account and credit cards were all linked through PayPal. They contacted all the banks for her and got all the charges reversed."
"I agree that anonymity allows people to be the kind of jerks that you wouldn't want to be if your reputation was at stake."
That very same anonymity also protects me from those jerks, and that is what I am pissed about--the forced loss of this protection.
Blizzard just circumvented ALL of my efforts to distance myself, as far as possible, from Facebook's data-mining practices. The deal between Activision-Blizzard and Facebook went through months ago. My guess (I can only guess, I no longer trust what they say) is that they have already shared my personal information with Facebook by now. I don't just feel betrayed, I WAS betrayed. The simple fact that I can no longer trust them is an indicator of that betrayal.
The whole "Real names in the forums" thing was simply an end-run around Blizzard's own privacy policy. The ONLY reason Real ID could be turned off was not because they wanted to provide us with an opt-out, but because child privacy laws are FAR more strict, and they had to in order to comply with those laws. The simple fact that the ONLY place to disable it is in "Parental Controls" seems to be enough confirmation for me.
It also occurred to me that it is possible that they never intended on implementing the full names thing on the forums, but instead used it as a smoke-screen to "minimize" the backlash from their real goal--full integration with Facebook. That integration may seem like the lesser of two evils to some, when the reality is that the real evil remains.
I have a 14-year old daughter that also plays (played...) WoW, using my wife's account. So now, even though Real ID is disabled, my daughter's chat logs can now be shared with Facebook. The WoW TOS is quite clear that they intend to/do share information, INCLUDING chat logs and voice communications, with their "partners" regardless of whether or not you have Parental Controls active. The really fucked aspect of this is that I have ZERO way of knowing how exposed I am in terms of privacy and that will remain the case until...it's too late.
As long as Blizzard has ANYTHING to do with Facebook, I will not give them a single penny, nor will I do any business with ANY company, EVER, that has anything to do with Bobby Kotich.
It seems that speaking with your wallets, as MANY people did in the case of the forums, actually works (unless it really was a smoke-screen). They caved to some small degree, I suspect in response to a slew of canceled accounts, so I will continue speaking with my wallet. $300 for 2 games and 4 x-pacs, 4 1/2 years of monthly fees for two accounts...and this is how they reward me for my business? A complete betrayal of trust? On behalf of an entire family of gamers, just let me say one thing...Fuck You.
Are Jack Thompson and Bobby Kotich somehow related? They both seem to have the shared goal of killing video gaming.
What Gandhi did was show the world that grassroots movements, passive movements at that, could actually make a difference--maybe not the exact desired difference--but a difference nonetheless.
He also showed the world that ONE man could be the seed of that movement, a lens for global empathy and understanding, and quite possibly one very cool dude.
"Even the well-educated in India have become the laughing stock of the technical world, thanks to outsourcing and shitty education. Their call centers are a fucking joke here in the West, their shitty software has caused us nothing but problems, and we laugh at all of the bullshit certifications they have from Microsoft, Sun, Oracle and Cisco."
I think you've reached the "Then they ridicule you." stage of the discussion.
When I was a kid, one could throw a AA battery against the ground, real hard, and have a roughly 25% chance of it going bang, releasing all the energy at once. At least I assume that was what powered the small explosion. The cheap Chinese ones that sometimes came with toys had a much higher explosion rate. It was like getting free firecrackers with every battery powered toy.
Not what you had in mind though, I suspect.
My guess would be a chemical reaction that cracked the material into component materials, releasing energy in some form or another, heat or light being the most probable.
"They have manual control available for once the Progress gets to the parking orbit. The issue is Progress 38 didn't go to the parking orbit, it just went straight on past."
Ok, new plan.
Train Proboscis Monkeys (extra digit for controls) to pilot Progress in for the last docking maneuver and solve the "Fresh Food" issue at the same time.
Why didn't they have some sort of override for the Astronauts/Cosmonauts on board the station to correct trajectory in the last few moments? After all, they are the only ones that actually have a real eye on the situation and can react the fastest.
That must have been frustrating watching Mom's chocolate chip cookies and the latest issue of "High Times" go sailing past and not be able to do anything about it.
Perhaps the problem is that Americans, in general...there are obviously exceptions, don't really recognize quality when they see it?
Perhaps they don't have the patience to actually remember which brand names have let them down and which have kept on working?
Technology was supposed to give us BETTER products, now we don't even know what better IS because there is so much garbage out there? One would think with all the garbage out there, the really high-quality stuff would shine brightly and people would remember the brand.
"And one day, with enough technology and patience, we will be able to grow people who can use the apostrophe. Seriously, it's means IT IS. How is this difficult?"
And one day, with enough technology and patience, we will be able to recycle nitpicking assholes like you in the very same vats, hopefully into something a little more useful.
"They might be made in China, but the decent ones aren't designed there. They're designed in Israel."
You know what? I don't care WHERE they are designed, if they are CONSTRUCTED (and then not even tested...how often do you find them little "Tested by 108" stickers on Chinese products?) in China, more then likely it is a piece of junk.
I bought a 110v appliance timer a few weeks ago from Lowe's, a nice programmable one. Not the cheapest one on the shelf by any means.
I plug it in, hook up the appliance, program it...then just for the hell of it (I'm funny that way), I decide to test it. I set the clock so it would complete the circuit while I watched...the thing literally squirted dense smoke and got exceedingly hot the moment the circuit was completed. Yanking the timer out of the the wall was the only thing that kept it from bursting in flames.
In short (no pun intended), if I had not tested it and had simply plugged it in, as I am sure many people do, it would have burnt my house to the ground when the timer went off.
I took it back. I was pissed. I went and looked at ALL of the timers Lowe's had in stock...and without exception, every single model was imported from China by one of three distributors, that were in reality all the same company. The addresses on the boxes were all the same for all the brands.
I then started walking around Lowe's, randomly pulling stuff off the shelf and looking to see where it was made. Every single item I picked up, ALL OF THEM, were from China. I must have picked up 60+ items in the half hour I was in there, and they were all Chinese products.
Home Depot is pretty much the same.
I don't know where I am going with this, but I can say one thing. Sad, just...sad.
I have some bad mental imagery associated with the phrase "Stem Cell Clinic".
Every time I hear that term, I think about the scenes in one of Edgar Rice Burroughs' "John Carter of Mars" books, where the antagonist is quite literally growing his army in vats, one glob of goo at a time.
Rooms full of vats, writhing and squirming as unformed body parts start to coalesce. An arm flailing out of the goo...an eye watching you from the corner of a vat, consciousness already apparent in it's solitary gaze.
For some odd reason, I also associate this mental imagery with what must surely go on in the kitchen of my old elementary school's cafeteria.
I've actually read my way through all the posts above this one and have come to the same conclusion that I had held before.
All of mankind has individually wired brains. All of our brains are the product of genetic destiny combined with environmental influences--something that cannot be reproduced from one human to another. In short, we are all different in that we THINK different. Minor differences in the big picture, to be sure, but different nonetheless.
I believe that these differences account for the vast majority of communication breakdowns. We speak as if we expect the listener to comprehend as we do when in fact they may comprehend things in a totally different way.
I am sure most people that read this have hit an invisible "wall" of understanding when trying to explain something to someone--no matter how you phrase things, they just don't get it and both parties just end up frustrated, often giving up altogether. I think that sometimes the differences between two individual's thought processes are just insurmountable and you end up with those kinds of situations. In my own life, I've found that getting a third party to "translate" sometimes helps. A bridge.
I also believe that these differences are the "magic" that drive our technological prowess as a species. When one solution doesn't work, another mind takes the problem from a different direction, and so on until someone hits the nail on the head, so to speak.
"Many, many people have gotten themselves trapped into paying off student loans for the rest of their lives for a degree that is inherently worthless."
And it is a totally contrived system, to boot. Diplomas and degrees are essentially a form of currency--they act as a proxy for the subject of real value--you and your skills. The problem lies in the fact that that currency has suffered from a sort of inflation. The currency simply isn't worth shit these days, for numerous reasons.
Whatever happened to apprenticeships? Forgo the proxy and get the real thing--a person with skills that you yourself have helped shape. You know, learn as you earn?
Mr. Vembu's idea is not all that novel. People have been kicking their kids out the front door and into apprenticeships for centuries. Do they give you a piece of paper when you are done? Nope. They give you a job.
Slashdot Mirror
"...are using up their infinite mod points to protect some of the stories more than others."
Doesn't even have to be that.
One person with 15 mod points(for me, that is about 75-80% of the time) can go back in your post history (further they go back in time, the less likely you are to notice it) and mod down 15 "+0" posts, knocking them all into the -1 state. Two people? 30 posts in negative land. Really, it takes very few people to completely ruin your reputation here...except the smart ones on /. know better--they actually read your posts rather then the fucking mod points.
Let it go. Most of us don't need moderation to know intelligence and wisdom when we see it.
And yeah...I could see Apple shills working the forums. I could see that quite clearly.
"How is this a troll?"
Let it go, dude.
People get seriously unpredictable when you attack their drug of choice, especially when there is addiction involved.
I happen to agree with you, by the way. Doctors (at least the ones I have been to) are far too liberal with pharmaceuticals. Ever notice the level of blatant marketing in the doctor's office these days? Advertisements on the walls, the clock, every pad of paper, the magazines in the waiting room...
I actually use that as a sort of gauge of "concern" when I enter a doctor's office. The less adverts, the more I feel the concern is my health, not a profit.
"...even if I'm so high I'm shaking and the burning in my blood is almost painful I think clearly and feel nothing in particular aside from a sort of dead, throbbing blood-thirst in the back of my head), they sent me to a heart specialist."
So. Did ya kill him? Don't leave us hanging, dude.
Most disconcerting.
Does this mean that if I have had a DNA sample taken, all of my direct ancestors can be traced without ever being a "part" of the DNA database?
Alternatively, can a descendant of mine provide a DNA sample sometime in the far future and inadvertently "include" me in the system?
Is there some point in time where the introduction of new genetic material "breaks" this continuity between generations, in terms of DNA as a legal identifier?
My understanding of genetics simply isn't up to the task of answering these questions.
"So botnets are the most trusted entities in Bitcoin."
Wouldn't it make Bots sort of obvious, what with the processors running flat-out all the time?
I have to admit you made my day with the link in your signature.
Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed and the like all categorized under "Stalk Me"?
Priceless.
"I don't appreciate being called a liar."
And I don't appreciate you saying I called you a liar. I didn't. I was merely suggesting your mother received special consideration because you work for the company--special consideration that the rest of us do not receive.
"In this day and age, chances are if you can call 911, even if you don't say anything, that they can use the devices GPS to find you."
Did the 911 call center actually get GPS coordinates though? I'd be interested in knowing how this looked from the their end. Did it look like a hang-up with no GPS data sent? Isn't the GPS data sent over the same data channel?
"Full disclosure, I'm a PayPal engineer."
"My MOTHER got caught in a phishing scheme. Her bank account and credit cards were all linked through PayPal. They contacted all the banks for her and got all the charges reversed."
Nice try. Next!
"I agree that anonymity allows people to be the kind of jerks that you wouldn't want to be if your reputation was at stake."
That very same anonymity also protects me from those jerks, and that is what I am pissed about--the forced loss of this protection.
Blizzard just circumvented ALL of my efforts to distance myself, as far as possible, from Facebook's data-mining practices. The deal between Activision-Blizzard and Facebook went through months ago. My guess (I can only guess, I no longer trust what they say) is that they have already shared my personal information with Facebook by now. I don't just feel betrayed, I WAS betrayed. The simple fact that I can no longer trust them is an indicator of that betrayal.
The whole "Real names in the forums" thing was simply an end-run around Blizzard's own privacy policy. The ONLY reason Real ID could be turned off was not because they wanted to provide us with an opt-out, but because child privacy laws are FAR more strict, and they had to in order to comply with those laws. The simple fact that the ONLY place to disable it is in "Parental Controls" seems to be enough confirmation for me.
It also occurred to me that it is possible that they never intended on implementing the full names thing on the forums, but instead used it as a smoke-screen to "minimize" the backlash from their real goal--full integration with Facebook. That integration may seem like the lesser of two evils to some, when the reality is that the real evil remains.
I have a 14-year old daughter that also plays (played...) WoW, using my wife's account. So now, even though Real ID is disabled, my daughter's chat logs can now be shared with Facebook. The WoW TOS is quite clear that they intend to/do share information, INCLUDING chat logs and voice communications, with their "partners" regardless of whether or not you have Parental Controls active. The really fucked aspect of this is that I have ZERO way of knowing how exposed I am in terms of privacy and that will remain the case until...it's too late.
As long as Blizzard has ANYTHING to do with Facebook, I will not give them a single penny, nor will I do any business with ANY company, EVER, that has anything to do with Bobby Kotich.
It seems that speaking with your wallets, as MANY people did in the case of the forums, actually works (unless it really was a smoke-screen). They caved to some small degree, I suspect in response to a slew of canceled accounts, so I will continue speaking with my wallet. $300 for 2 games and 4 x-pacs, 4 1/2 years of monthly fees for two accounts...and this is how they reward me for my business? A complete betrayal of trust? On behalf of an entire family of gamers, just let me say one thing...Fuck You.
Are Jack Thompson and Bobby Kotich somehow related? They both seem to have the shared goal of killing video gaming.
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=128252
(Warning! Long load time as the forum posts are all on one page, but well worth the wait if you're interested in understanding the motives/history of Bobby "Fuck 'em all!" Kotich)
"Gandhi did not win. India did not win."
The entire world won.
What Gandhi did was show the world that grassroots movements, passive movements at that, could actually make a difference--maybe not the exact desired difference--but a difference nonetheless.
He also showed the world that ONE man could be the seed of that movement, a lens for global empathy and understanding, and quite possibly one very cool dude.
"Even the well-educated in India have become the laughing stock of the technical world, thanks to outsourcing and shitty education. Their call centers are a fucking joke here in the West, their shitty software has caused us nothing but problems, and we laugh at all of the bullshit certifications they have from Microsoft, Sun, Oracle and Cisco."
I think you've reached the "Then they ridicule you." stage of the discussion.
Why is this an issue?
If journalists want to get pictures of oil, it's all over the fucking place.
I want to see pictures of a nuke being loaded up on a ship so we can get this well plugged, PRONTO.
If ever there was a good reason to use a nuclear weapon, this is it.
When I was a kid, one could throw a AA battery against the ground, real hard, and have a roughly 25% chance of it going bang, releasing all the energy at once. At least I assume that was what powered the small explosion. The cheap Chinese ones that sometimes came with toys had a much higher explosion rate. It was like getting free firecrackers with every battery powered toy.
Not what you had in mind though, I suspect.
My guess would be a chemical reaction that cracked the material into component materials, releasing energy in some form or another, heat or light being the most probable.
Bingo.
At 01:30 in this video, you get a short clip of the machine in action! It can be heard and plays again a few seconds later.
The video was found following links on the Evoluon website, so proof they once had it, at the very least.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KXTJ2vYwRM
"DOES NOT COMPUTE"
Judging by the look on her face, I'd say she agrees... http://www.dse.nl/~evoluon/avscan5k.jpg
"For Internet Explorer, Ctrl+Alt+Delete is tops"
That is almost as bad as setting my Hunter's Feign Death hotkey in Warcraft to Alt-F4...and not testing it until the 4th boss fight in Black Temple.
"They have manual control available for once the Progress gets to the parking orbit. The issue is Progress 38 didn't go to the parking orbit, it just went straight on past."
Ok, new plan.
Train Proboscis Monkeys (extra digit for controls) to pilot Progress in for the last docking maneuver and solve the "Fresh Food" issue at the same time.
Even Hollywood had this one figured out.
Manual override.
Why didn't they have some sort of override for the Astronauts/Cosmonauts on board the station to correct trajectory in the last few moments? After all, they are the only ones that actually have a real eye on the situation and can react the fastest.
That must have been frustrating watching Mom's chocolate chip cookies and the latest issue of "High Times" go sailing past and not be able to do anything about it.
Perhaps the problem is that Americans, in general...there are obviously exceptions, don't really recognize quality when they see it?
Perhaps they don't have the patience to actually remember which brand names have let them down and which have kept on working?
Technology was supposed to give us BETTER products, now we don't even know what better IS because there is so much garbage out there? One would think with all the garbage out there, the really high-quality stuff would shine brightly and people would remember the brand.
"And one day, with enough technology and patience, we will be able to grow people who can use the apostrophe. Seriously, it's means IT IS. How is this difficult?"
And one day, with enough technology and patience, we will be able to recycle nitpicking assholes like you in the very same vats, hopefully into something a little more useful.
"They might be made in China, but the decent ones aren't designed there. They're designed in Israel."
You know what? I don't care WHERE they are designed, if they are CONSTRUCTED (and then not even tested...how often do you find them little "Tested by 108" stickers on Chinese products?) in China, more then likely it is a piece of junk.
I bought a 110v appliance timer a few weeks ago from Lowe's, a nice programmable one. Not the cheapest one on the shelf by any means.
I plug it in, hook up the appliance, program it...then just for the hell of it (I'm funny that way), I decide to test it. I set the clock so it would complete the circuit while I watched...the thing literally squirted dense smoke and got exceedingly hot the moment the circuit was completed. Yanking the timer out of the the wall was the only thing that kept it from bursting in flames.
In short (no pun intended), if I had not tested it and had simply plugged it in, as I am sure many people do, it would have burnt my house to the ground when the timer went off.
I took it back. I was pissed. I went and looked at ALL of the timers Lowe's had in stock...and without exception, every single model was imported from China by one of three distributors, that were in reality all the same company. The addresses on the boxes were all the same for all the brands.
I then started walking around Lowe's, randomly pulling stuff off the shelf and looking to see where it was made. Every single item I picked up, ALL OF THEM, were from China. I must have picked up 60+ items in the half hour I was in there, and they were all Chinese products.
Home Depot is pretty much the same.
I don't know where I am going with this, but I can say one thing. Sad, just...sad.
I have some bad mental imagery associated with the phrase "Stem Cell Clinic".
Every time I hear that term, I think about the scenes in one of Edgar Rice Burroughs' "John Carter of Mars" books, where the antagonist is quite literally growing his army in vats, one glob of goo at a time.
Rooms full of vats, writhing and squirming as unformed body parts start to coalesce. An arm flailing out of the goo...an eye watching you from the corner of a vat, consciousness already apparent in it's solitary gaze.
For some odd reason, I also associate this mental imagery with what must surely go on in the kitchen of my old elementary school's cafeteria.
I've actually read my way through all the posts above this one and have come to the same conclusion that I had held before.
All of mankind has individually wired brains. All of our brains are the product of genetic destiny combined with environmental influences--something that cannot be reproduced from one human to another. In short, we are all different in that we THINK different. Minor differences in the big picture, to be sure, but different nonetheless.
I believe that these differences account for the vast majority of communication breakdowns. We speak as if we expect the listener to comprehend as we do when in fact they may comprehend things in a totally different way.
I am sure most people that read this have hit an invisible "wall" of understanding when trying to explain something to someone--no matter how you phrase things, they just don't get it and both parties just end up frustrated, often giving up altogether. I think that sometimes the differences between two individual's thought processes are just insurmountable and you end up with those kinds of situations. In my own life, I've found that getting a third party to "translate" sometimes helps. A bridge.
I also believe that these differences are the "magic" that drive our technological prowess as a species. When one solution doesn't work, another mind takes the problem from a different direction, and so on until someone hits the nail on the head, so to speak.
Diversity is our advantage, in all things.
Scientist: "we should study this to find out if its true."
Public: "Absolutely right. Form a hypotenuse and experiment the danged thing. What's all this subjective shit?"
Scientist: "Perhaps after you construct a right-angled triangle you might want to form a hypothesis."
Public: "Whooosh!"
Scientist: "I believe that was the joke ;)"
Public: "Doh!"
"Many, many people have gotten themselves trapped into paying off student loans for the rest of their lives for a degree that is inherently worthless."
And it is a totally contrived system, to boot. Diplomas and degrees are essentially a form of currency--they act as a proxy for the subject of real value--you and your skills. The problem lies in the fact that that currency has suffered from a sort of inflation. The currency simply isn't worth shit these days, for numerous reasons.
Whatever happened to apprenticeships? Forgo the proxy and get the real thing--a person with skills that you yourself have helped shape. You know, learn as you earn?
Mr. Vembu's idea is not all that novel. People have been kicking their kids out the front door and into apprenticeships for centuries. Do they give you a piece of paper when you are done? Nope. They give you a job.