which, in the words of Soledad O'brien, was the belief that man evolved from apes
That's seems to be the part that really gets the fundies' collective goat, so I say approach it more directly. If there really are any good, scientific (or even semi-scientific) arguments against the notion that man descended from apes (or common ancestor, etc), incorporate those opposing ideas into the topic. If there is any credible evidence whatsoever against evolution, then include it in the curriculum. And by extension, also include arguments against those arguments. Further, while explaining the terms as the article said, maybe include intelligent design and say "here we have laws, theories, hypotheses, and 14 rungs down we have a notion, which is what intelligent design is"
Another way would be to develop some scientific consensus to establish a Law of Evolution or somesuch and get the word "theory" out of it completely since we will *never* be able to trust the ability of laymen to use "theory" properly. I found this: "The biggest difference between a law and a theory is that a theory is much more complex and dynamic. A law governs a single action, whereas a theory explains an entire group of related phenomena." so I don't know if evolution could be simplified enough to ever attain law status, maybe a subset of the theory, or a more direct line like "things evolve." but it would make it a lot easier to explain things and dodge the theory argument completely.
Demand has gone up, supply has not. Why hasn't the price gone up? I would probably be $50 richer and not have 5 empty domains on my hands (I should only buy domains when sober) if the price were higher.
So the traffic consists basically of people you specifically send there? I find it hard to see how it could be so lucrative for these parasites to make money like that. Of the small number of people who go there, how small a number make a typo in the process? And of those, how many wind up paying money for anything such that the money winds up back in the squatter's hands? But yet the problem persists... This is clearly Dell's fault. =]
Play it over a few times and listen to the dialog again, that's what I did. Or play the challenge maps where you try to beat the levels using the fewest number of portals possible. I think it was the last one where I actually beat the #1 score by 2 portals (14 instead of 16). Hell, the end song alone would be worth a buck on itunes. =]
But can you give a reason anyone should use Vista on a system, new or otherwise? That's the question I've been asking since Vista was released sans all the promised features.
Well, for one thing, I've never *had* to install a driver on it. It has thusfar automatically picked up 100% of the hardware I've thrown at it. But I do build all my own systems from scratch with cheap but name brand parts. It picked up 100% of my Dell laptop's drivers too, power management and everything. Don't get me wrong, I still go back and update to the latest video drivers, etc, but out of the box, I have never had to install a single driver to get a usable system. This is especially nice compared to the prospect of formatting someone's hard drive, installing xp, and they don't have the network driver, so you can't get online to get the network driver. If I never get caught in that catch-22 again, I will be happy.
Also, supposedly the Windows Server 2008 will have dramatically improved performance when talking to a Vista box, but that's more of a corporate thing, and I haven't used 2008 yet, so I can't speak from experience on that, but the benchmarks look like nearly double throughput on simple file copies.
I've used Vista Ultimate hooked up to a 1080p dhtv, and the media center stuff was pretty sweet. All we did was watch a pirated copy of I Am Legend (which was pretty good) and played a slideshow of some nudy pics, so we didn't beat it to death, but the media center thing also has a really nifty LCD calibration routine that shows pictures with varying shades of gray and tells you to adjust the tv's contrast until such and such is barely visible, etc, and then some colored stripes and adjust brightness until something else happens, etc, and at the end, the color on the hdtv did look much better during standard tv viewing.
On a wide screen monitor, the gadget column on the right is pretty nifty.. there are some neat gadgets available for it. I don't particularly like the screen encroachment on a 4x3 or 5x4 monitor, though, so I turn it off. I assume it does eat a bit of resources too.
It is actually "butched up" (more manly), in my opinion. I always found the icon naming distasteful for "my computer", "network neighborhood", or the ultimate mamby pamby thumb sucking "my network places" (BLeeeeaaachc). Now it's just called "computer" "network" "documents" etc. YMMV according to personal preference on this one, but I really like the newly refined interface, INCLUDING Aero. I set my background to black and transparency to granite, and the whole desktop looks very clean and tasteful. I'm still too set in my ways to switch from alt-tab to window-tab, but every now and then I use it.
If you play WoW, you know you occassionally have to wait for a boat or a zeppelin or a train or something to show up. I run WoW in windowed mode so I can alt-tab to thottbot without making my monitor change resolutions. Well, if you leave WoW running, and DO NOT MINIMIZE it, and lay thottbot (or anything) over it, you can hover your mouse over the window button on the task bar, and it will give you a thumbnail of WoW that actually moves, so you can keep the mouse hovered while reading something else, and still keep your eye on the live thumbnail to see when your zep/boat/train arrives.
They got rid of the crappy start button that I've always hated and replaced it with a nice blue ball thing.
The start menu freaking rocks. That may be my #1 favorite thing about Vista. Just press the window key on your keyboard and start typing. As long as your indexing and whatnot is correctly configured you will get almost instantaneous results. Say you're doing tech support over the phone and you want someone to look at their printers, well the start menu is configurable such that maybe the printers icon is there, maybe it's not. Maybe my computer has the control panel in it, maybe it doesn't. Then you have to wait for the end luser to hunt around before finally declaring that it just isn't there and you have to go to yet
I've been saying the same thing on here for a while, but it's like talking to a wall. People want Vista to suck, so they say it sucks. As near as I can tell it's some desperate attempt to influence reality. IMHO, the bottom line is that if you have the hardware to run it, Vista is pretty decent. I've been running it on 4 systems for about a year now, including gaming, I'm 70-620 certified, and I see no reason to go back to XP or avoid Vista on new systems.
The flip side is that if you are salary, theoretically you can take paid time off as long as all your work is done. Salary is historically (legally) resticted to management type positions where, again theoretically, you won't be doing actual work anyway. Lastly, and lastly theoretically, we can actually sue for overtime pay retroactively if we can prove we should have been hourly but were being treated as salary and working unpaid overtime. At my first hands-on IT job, I was specifically directed to work 8:30 to 6:00 with a one hour lunch, ie 2.5 unpaid hours weekly, for a year. I definitely could have sued, but I did the math at the time I took the job and decided it was worth it anyway. Had they tried to screw me on my way out (they owed me a lot of unpaid mileage), the story may have ended differently. But yes, it happens. We're actually kind of a hard working bunch here in a lot of ways.
See, I don't get that.. it seems like there would still be a place for the 40 mans. I'm still wearing a couple pieces of tier 1 at 70 (I quit for a while, so I got 70 less than a week ago), mainly because the green chest pieces look f'n retarded compared to my sweet looking robe from MC.. so it seems like the tier 3 stuff would be A) decent, and B) attainable.. plus, those are some of the coolest dungeons, and part of the reason I want to progress at all is just to see all the content. As it is, I'm absolutely jonesing for an instance, but my entire freaking guild quit the game, so I'm not even in a guild at all anymore. There is nothing like having 40 people in ventrilo running a 40 man. It's absolutely the pinnacle of gaming and the most fun/intense mmo experience I've had (in my admittedly limited experience).. I did 2/3 of BWL before the expansion, but I've never even set foot in Naxx:( If they would just make it way, WAY easier to level alts, that would rock.. but at 10 million paid subscribers, I doubt they are desperate enough to start sweetening the pot that much. It would also be nice to be able to copy characters onto another server rather than transfer, or else just make it $10 to transfer instead of $25, but with no limitations. Once my guild split up, I wound up with 1 friend each on a handful of servers and a level 5 on there to play with.. what's the point? It's an MMO, but I can't hang out with my friends.. kind of frustrating.
If I were a terrorist, which I am not, I think that would be an absolutely stellar way to screw with Infidels. Send over a few mules with their asses packed full of whatever, force them to get caught, and see if the TSA responds by giving everyone the ufia treatment. Heh, if there is any terrorism going on locally, it's us doing to ourselves.
Heh, yes, maybe the gp was a troll, but the sentiment is all too real, and specific arguable "evidence" was there to be refuted, so why not? I look at it a bit like trademark defense, defend it, or lose it. I'm not convinced that was 100% troll anyway, 50/50 at best.
Listen buddy, you obviously have a driver problem or some incompatibility on your bleeding edge hardware, because I do a lot more, a lot faster, on a lot less computer, all the while using Vista. Since evidently you are smart enough that someone thinks you're worthy of such a beefy rig, I'm sure you know that yours is the exception and not the rule. At 20 minutes per 17k, it would take aproximately 87 years to install the OS, which it does not. I directly support a handful of Vista machines at work, and I find most problems of the type described (ie, random bs) are easily solved by trying again. If you really want an intelligent reason why anyone would choose it, it is because when you get it stable (or rather, if you don't make it unstable, because I have found it 100% stable on all systems, right out of the box), it A) works, B) is good, and C) has all the new Vista stuff in it. If the new stuff works just as well as the old stuff and doesn't give you any trouble, then why the hell not? And from my fairly considerable (yet admittedly anecdotal) experience with it, I can state very matter-of-factly that it IS good enough, for 90% of users. If you have some app that won't run, then those are the breaks with a new system. Or someone messed up your system before you got it. Did you install the OS yourself?
Regarding your 486 comparison, might I humbly suggest that you start the diagnosis by quieting background processes? I know that's been slow-system-troubleshooting 101 for the last 15 years, but go ahead and give it a shot anyway. It might still work. Specifically make sure Windows Defender isn't actively processing. You can also go into Task Manager, Performance tab, click Resource Monitor and Allow, and then check the disk utilization. I find that Defender and Indexing are the biggest problems. Hopefully SP1 will make them smarter.
PS, please mod me UP for a change. Sarcasm aside, I'm 70-620 certified, and I know what I'm talking about. Vista is maybe not worth the hassle everyone (to each his own, etc). Other OS's are good too, etc, but stop acting like Vista definitively sucks by every available metric, because that's just fantasy, even as an x.0 release./OS agnostic, FTW
Upgrade to Vista. It uses a standalone updater that doesn't go through the browser (in the classic sense, but it may do some ocx mumbo jumbo.. who knows). Just press hit start (press window key), type "update", press down arrow to select windows update program, and press enter. Slicker'n snot on a doorknob.
You do without TV for a couple of days. Look out of the window, buy a newspaper, read a book, maybe even talk to people. It's survivable.
Amen to that. I was watching a pbs program on personal finance, and the discussion was about prioritizing bills and whatnot. The list went something like: rent, electricity, water, cable, food, etc... One of these things is not like the others. One of these things just doesn't belong.
This. There's nothing quite like being really in the zone, 8 loops deep in a complex routine, when the phone rings, and some boob says "hey bro, not to interrupt, cuz I know you're busy today, but can I ask you a quick question?" Maybe it's important, maybe it's not, but it sure is frustrating.
I dunno, I'm not convinced. How would one provide the input for the desired power budget? What unit of measurement? How about a big button that just says "do the best you can" which is basically what all the appliances will do right now anyway? You still have choices for hot start, dry, etc, but those choices are based on your results, ie, if your dishes don't get clean enough, try hot start, etc. Will it know that this is a particularly dirty load that needs the extended wash? The dishwasher is not going to even try to make that determination for you. IMHO, dish washers are probably already as advanced as they will ever need to be. You have your 2-3 basic settings and an optional timer for delayed start. In general, one should not replace the human in a well running system unless the human does the exact same thing the exact same way every single time. I think one of the previous posters was absolutely right in that the vast majority of this magic kitchen stuff is driven by "because we can," and in the end, people will pay double for it and then turn off all the automation features a week later and use it the old way.
On the other hand, a vicious, little, web-activated, robomonkey/webcam to chase my mother-in-law's fatass cat around the house.. now that would be a breakthrough.
I'd just like to point out that I now get about 10 times as many posts of people bitching about myminicity than actual links to it. In fact, I can't even remember the last time I saw an operational link to it on here (I filter at 0). If you get a link and it was in the last 5 minutes, just chill out and wait, someone will mod it down, and then it will be gone(ish).
Slashdot Mirror
which, in the words of Soledad O'brien, was the belief that man evolved from apes That's seems to be the part that really gets the fundies' collective goat, so I say approach it more directly. If there really are any good, scientific (or even semi-scientific) arguments against the notion that man descended from apes (or common ancestor, etc), incorporate those opposing ideas into the topic. If there is any credible evidence whatsoever against evolution, then include it in the curriculum. And by extension, also include arguments against those arguments. Further, while explaining the terms as the article said, maybe include intelligent design and say "here we have laws, theories, hypotheses, and 14 rungs down we have a notion, which is what intelligent design is" Another way would be to develop some scientific consensus to establish a Law of Evolution or somesuch and get the word "theory" out of it completely since we will *never* be able to trust the ability of laymen to use "theory" properly. I found this: "The biggest difference between a law and a theory is that a theory is much more complex and dynamic. A law governs a single action, whereas a theory explains an entire group of related phenomena." so I don't know if evolution could be simplified enough to ever attain law status, maybe a subset of the theory, or a more direct line like "things evolve." but it would make it a lot easier to explain things and dodge the theory argument completely.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that last "his" should be "how".. but I'm fluent in many dialects of Typo.
We all fial!!1
And then you're just going to want to post their nudy pics on the net anyway, so we're back to square one.
You still get Internets? I haven't gotten one in a few years, at least in my mail. I still get one in the back of magazines every now and then.
Demand has gone up, supply has not. Why hasn't the price gone up? I would probably be $50 richer and not have 5 empty domains on my hands (I should only buy domains when sober) if the price were higher.
So the traffic consists basically of people you specifically send there? I find it hard to see how it could be so lucrative for these parasites to make money like that. Of the small number of people who go there, how small a number make a typo in the process? And of those, how many wind up paying money for anything such that the money winds up back in the squatter's hands? But yet the problem persists... This is clearly Dell's fault. =]
Play it over a few times and listen to the dialog again, that's what I did. Or play the challenge maps where you try to beat the levels using the fewest number of portals possible. I think it was the last one where I actually beat the #1 score by 2 portals (14 instead of 16). Hell, the end song alone would be worth a buck on itunes. =]
But can you give a reason anyone should use Vista on a system, new or otherwise? That's the question I've been asking since Vista was released sans all the promised features.
Well, for one thing, I've never *had* to install a driver on it. It has thusfar automatically picked up 100% of the hardware I've thrown at it. But I do build all my own systems from scratch with cheap but name brand parts. It picked up 100% of my Dell laptop's drivers too, power management and everything. Don't get me wrong, I still go back and update to the latest video drivers, etc, but out of the box, I have never had to install a single driver to get a usable system. This is especially nice compared to the prospect of formatting someone's hard drive, installing xp, and they don't have the network driver, so you can't get online to get the network driver. If I never get caught in that catch-22 again, I will be happy.
Also, supposedly the Windows Server 2008 will have dramatically improved performance when talking to a Vista box, but that's more of a corporate thing, and I haven't used 2008 yet, so I can't speak from experience on that, but the benchmarks look like nearly double throughput on simple file copies.
I've used Vista Ultimate hooked up to a 1080p dhtv, and the media center stuff was pretty sweet. All we did was watch a pirated copy of I Am Legend (which was pretty good) and played a slideshow of some nudy pics, so we didn't beat it to death, but the media center thing also has a really nifty LCD calibration routine that shows pictures with varying shades of gray and tells you to adjust the tv's contrast until such and such is barely visible, etc, and then some colored stripes and adjust brightness until something else happens, etc, and at the end, the color on the hdtv did look much better during standard tv viewing.
On a wide screen monitor, the gadget column on the right is pretty nifty.. there are some neat gadgets available for it. I don't particularly like the screen encroachment on a 4x3 or 5x4 monitor, though, so I turn it off. I assume it does eat a bit of resources too.
It is actually "butched up" (more manly), in my opinion. I always found the icon naming distasteful for "my computer", "network neighborhood", or the ultimate mamby pamby thumb sucking "my network places" (BLeeeeaaachc). Now it's just called "computer" "network" "documents" etc. YMMV according to personal preference on this one, but I really like the newly refined interface, INCLUDING Aero. I set my background to black and transparency to granite, and the whole desktop looks very clean and tasteful. I'm still too set in my ways to switch from alt-tab to window-tab, but every now and then I use it.
If you play WoW, you know you occassionally have to wait for a boat or a zeppelin or a train or something to show up. I run WoW in windowed mode so I can alt-tab to thottbot without making my monitor change resolutions. Well, if you leave WoW running, and DO NOT MINIMIZE it, and lay thottbot (or anything) over it, you can hover your mouse over the window button on the task bar, and it will give you a thumbnail of WoW that actually moves, so you can keep the mouse hovered while reading something else, and still keep your eye on the live thumbnail to see when your zep/boat/train arrives.
They got rid of the crappy start button that I've always hated and replaced it with a nice blue ball thing.
The start menu freaking rocks. That may be my #1 favorite thing about Vista. Just press the window key on your keyboard and start typing. As long as your indexing and whatnot is correctly configured you will get almost instantaneous results. Say you're doing tech support over the phone and you want someone to look at their printers, well the start menu is configurable such that maybe the printers icon is there, maybe it's not. Maybe my computer has the control panel in it, maybe it doesn't. Then you have to wait for the end luser to hunt around before finally declaring that it just isn't there and you have to go to yet
I've been saying the same thing on here for a while, but it's like talking to a wall. People want Vista to suck, so they say it sucks. As near as I can tell it's some desperate attempt to influence reality. IMHO, the bottom line is that if you have the hardware to run it, Vista is pretty decent. I've been running it on 4 systems for about a year now, including gaming, I'm 70-620 certified, and I see no reason to go back to XP or avoid Vista on new systems.
The flip side is that if you are salary, theoretically you can take paid time off as long as all your work is done. Salary is historically (legally) resticted to management type positions where, again theoretically, you won't be doing actual work anyway. Lastly, and lastly theoretically, we can actually sue for overtime pay retroactively if we can prove we should have been hourly but were being treated as salary and working unpaid overtime. At my first hands-on IT job, I was specifically directed to work 8:30 to 6:00 with a one hour lunch, ie 2.5 unpaid hours weekly, for a year. I definitely could have sued, but I did the math at the time I took the job and decided it was worth it anyway. Had they tried to screw me on my way out (they owed me a lot of unpaid mileage), the story may have ended differently. But yes, it happens. We're actually kind of a hard working bunch here in a lot of ways.
See, I don't get that.. it seems like there would still be a place for the 40 mans. I'm still wearing a couple pieces of tier 1 at 70 (I quit for a while, so I got 70 less than a week ago), mainly because the green chest pieces look f'n retarded compared to my sweet looking robe from MC.. so it seems like the tier 3 stuff would be A) decent, and B) attainable.. plus, those are some of the coolest dungeons, and part of the reason I want to progress at all is just to see all the content. As it is, I'm absolutely jonesing for an instance, but my entire freaking guild quit the game, so I'm not even in a guild at all anymore. There is nothing like having 40 people in ventrilo running a 40 man. It's absolutely the pinnacle of gaming and the most fun/intense mmo experience I've had (in my admittedly limited experience).. I did 2/3 of BWL before the expansion, but I've never even set foot in Naxx :( If they would just make it way, WAY easier to level alts, that would rock.. but at 10 million paid subscribers, I doubt they are desperate enough to start sweetening the pot that much. It would also be nice to be able to copy characters onto another server rather than transfer, or else just make it $10 to transfer instead of $25, but with no limitations. Once my guild split up, I wound up with 1 friend each on a handful of servers and a level 5 on there to play with.. what's the point? It's an MMO, but I can't hang out with my friends.. kind of frustrating.
These analogies are completely over my head. Are you or are you not giving out free fajitas and beer?
If I were a terrorist, which I am not, I think that would be an absolutely stellar way to screw with Infidels. Send over a few mules with their asses packed full of whatever, force them to get caught, and see if the TSA responds by giving everyone the ufia treatment. Heh, if there is any terrorism going on locally, it's us doing to ourselves.
Fwiw, I liked the first version better: uuencoding is an ascii encoding of binary data.
I was the original poster. 100% troll. An oldie but a goodie.
Lol, ok, I'll be more careful next time. So were you lying about the 4gig machine or not?
For most things it is fine.
Except copying 17k files? Do you see the real problem with subtle trolling now? =]
Heh, yes, maybe the gp was a troll, but the sentiment is all too real, and specific arguable "evidence" was there to be refuted, so why not? I look at it a bit like trademark defense, defend it, or lose it. I'm not convinced that was 100% troll anyway, 50/50 at best.
Listen buddy, you obviously have a driver problem or some incompatibility on your bleeding edge hardware, because I do a lot more, a lot faster, on a lot less computer, all the while using Vista. Since evidently you are smart enough that someone thinks you're worthy of such a beefy rig, I'm sure you know that yours is the exception and not the rule. At 20 minutes per 17k, it would take aproximately 87 years to install the OS, which it does not. I directly support a handful of Vista machines at work, and I find most problems of the type described (ie, random bs) are easily solved by trying again. If you really want an intelligent reason why anyone would choose it, it is because when you get it stable (or rather, if you don't make it unstable, because I have found it 100% stable on all systems, right out of the box), it A) works, B) is good, and C) has all the new Vista stuff in it. If the new stuff works just as well as the old stuff and doesn't give you any trouble, then why the hell not? And from my fairly considerable (yet admittedly anecdotal) experience with it, I can state very matter-of-factly that it IS good enough, for 90% of users. If you have some app that won't run, then those are the breaks with a new system. Or someone messed up your system before you got it. Did you install the OS yourself?
/OS agnostic, FTW
Regarding your 486 comparison, might I humbly suggest that you start the diagnosis by quieting background processes? I know that's been slow-system-troubleshooting 101 for the last 15 years, but go ahead and give it a shot anyway. It might still work. Specifically make sure Windows Defender isn't actively processing. You can also go into Task Manager, Performance tab, click Resource Monitor and Allow, and then check the disk utilization. I find that Defender and Indexing are the biggest problems. Hopefully SP1 will make them smarter.
PS, please mod me UP for a change. Sarcasm aside, I'm 70-620 certified, and I know what I'm talking about. Vista is maybe not worth the hassle everyone (to each his own, etc). Other OS's are good too, etc, but stop acting like Vista definitively sucks by every available metric, because that's just fantasy, even as an x.0 release.
Upgrade to Vista. It uses a standalone updater that doesn't go through the browser (in the classic sense, but it may do some ocx mumbo jumbo.. who knows). Just press hit start (press window key), type "update", press down arrow to select windows update program, and press enter. Slicker'n snot on a doorknob.
You do without TV for a couple of days. Look out of the window, buy a newspaper, read a book, maybe even talk to people. It's survivable.
Amen to that. I was watching a pbs program on personal finance, and the discussion was about prioritizing bills and whatnot. The list went something like: rent, electricity, water, cable, food, etc... One of these things is not like the others. One of these things just doesn't belong.
Writing software.
This. There's nothing quite like being really in the zone, 8 loops deep in a complex routine, when the phone rings, and some boob says "hey bro, not to interrupt, cuz I know you're busy today, but can I ask you a quick question?" Maybe it's important, maybe it's not, but it sure is frustrating.
I dunno, I'm not convinced. How would one provide the input for the desired power budget? What unit of measurement? How about a big button that just says "do the best you can" which is basically what all the appliances will do right now anyway? You still have choices for hot start, dry, etc, but those choices are based on your results, ie, if your dishes don't get clean enough, try hot start, etc. Will it know that this is a particularly dirty load that needs the extended wash? The dishwasher is not going to even try to make that determination for you. IMHO, dish washers are probably already as advanced as they will ever need to be. You have your 2-3 basic settings and an optional timer for delayed start. In general, one should not replace the human in a well running system unless the human does the exact same thing the exact same way every single time. I think one of the previous posters was absolutely right in that the vast majority of this magic kitchen stuff is driven by "because we can," and in the end, people will pay double for it and then turn off all the automation features a week later and use it the old way.
On the other hand, a vicious, little, web-activated, robomonkey/webcam to chase my mother-in-law's fatass cat around the house.. now that would be a breakthrough.
I'd just like to point out that I now get about 10 times as many posts of people bitching about myminicity than actual links to it. In fact, I can't even remember the last time I saw an operational link to it on here (I filter at 0). If you get a link and it was in the last 5 minutes, just chill out and wait, someone will mod it down, and then it will be gone(ish).
You've been watching too much Ghostbusters.
"Man, this food tastes like ass"
$250,000 and 20 years.
I would think $300 and a cockpunch should be sufficient.
I wonder what they had in mind exactly when they put that maximum on that category?