books in their physical, paper form are nowhere near being obsolete, outmoded, or about to be left to fall by the side Completely true. As it is, physical books have an intuitive, unrivaled GUI, better resolution and a screen that's far easier on the eyes than any other device on the market, and absolutely insane battery life. They're also DRM-free and if you're willing to pay a little more you can get some really tough hardware.
Cool! I wonder how many others have Ogg music libraries and use Dvorak. I've never met another...
We should take a roll call! *raises hand and looks around excitedly, completely unphased by the dead silence of the room*
I still have a physical Qwerty keyboard, so Dvorak acts as an extra layer of security (mainly just an entertaining one) as any Qwerty-based intruder will have to use blind trial-and-error to type out anything intelligible. It's fun to watch.
...sufficient to provide all the world's energy needs for several millennia. So, it's pretty easy to imagine what happens when we run out of oil or coal, there will just be none left to find. But what happens when we exhaust our geothermal energy supply? Will the earth be all cold as far down as we can reach? Will caves no longer hold their current temperature (generally around 55 fahrenheit, IIRC) but rather linger below freezing? Will the groundwater freeze? Will the earth crumble and collapse in on itself? I'll probably be dead by then, but this is something I might come back and check up on if the opportunity presents itself.
So, in 1808, Humphry Davy was trying to isolate some yet unnamed metal from alumina ("aluminium" oxide), and coined it alumium. Four years later, he decided to go with aluminum instead. From the OED:
1812 SIR H. DAVY Chem. Philos. I. 355 As yet Aluminum has not been obtained in a perfectly free state. Shortly afterwards, some pretentious (anonymous) dipshit wrote in the Quarterly Review that he thought aluminium would be better sounding. OED:
1812Q. Rev. VIII. 72 Aluminium, for so we shall take the liberty of writing the word, in preference to aluminum, which has a less classical sound. And you Britons, most surprisingly, decided the more pretentious choice sounded better, and it pretty much stuck from then on, except in the US.
Oh, and of course if you look up "aluminium" you'll find it pronounced Britishly. You should look up "aluminum" real quick, and find out we've been using a different word! Interestingly, OED says under "aluminum"
=aluminium Now, that's a pretty straightforward assignment operator we've got there, so quite obviously "aluminum" has the same value as "aluminium" and they're pretty much interchangable and equally correct.
Personally, it seems like Sir Davy should have had dibs on naming rights, so I'll go ahead and stick with aluminum.
Really? I wish they'd do that with their music downloads store. I've only used it once or twice but I accidentally deleted an album I'd just bought (It's an embarrassing story, let's just say I was relatively new to the linux terminal) and hadn't yet backed up.
I guess it kinda makes sense, that if you get something DRM-laden, they'll back it up for you, because you can't necessarily do it yourself. But if you download DRM-free music you're completely responsible for it because you can back it up and do whatever the hell you want with it.
Still, deleting that album pissed me off. Especially after taking the time to get their crappy downloader app working in Wine!
Personally, I don't think few scrolls would be nearly worth dying for. If someone else felt differently, all power to them, but if I found myself in a life-vs-scrolls scenario, I'd sooner wipe my ass with them than sacrifice myself. Of course, this could change if I discovered a scroll with the answer (and question!) to life, the universe, and everything, or some equivalently profound revelation that would allow me to die in complete peace and contentment.
In short, they'd have to be some convincingly damn good scrolls for me to die for them, not just standand maps and legal records and religious texts.
Ooh, good thought. I was looking up what they already used as currency, and it all seemed like the exchange rates from today wouldn't be very favorable, despite wider availability. I'd abandoned the precious metals because displaying god-like powers sounds like more fun, but copious aluminum would probably bolster my deity status, too.
Naturally, the gun was my first thought, and it'd be hella fun to bring one along regardless. I guess I was thinking that shooting someone would just make them attack you, and peacefully convincing them that you're a god might make it easier to work undisturbed, or make silly demands and edicts. On second thought, though, shooting someone through the chest would probably instantly elevate you to god status, and you could just point or make silly noises to command them from then on.
And taking the scrolls is a damn good idea, but you're making assumptions about our time-travel technology. It's possible that the only matter that could come back to the present time is exactly that matter which started out there. The time machine might act as an anchor, allowing you to return to exactly when you left, but not necessarily bringing anything new with you. Without the anchor to gauge your relative location in the timeline, you might end up traversing time without any bearing, landing in an almost random time/place. In order to send/take something forward in time, you might need a time machine at the origin time, to give a known point to move from.
Of course, I'm sure there are workarounds and ways to append the scrolls' matter to the time-traveling package, but I'd have to mess around with the time machine to figure all that out.
I think bringing a digital camera and a stack of memory cards (not that I actually have either in my dorm room, but I could on short notice if I had plans to time travel) would be more efficient than the portable scanner, and you could go for longer. The challenge would be convincing the librarians or guards or whatever to let you in and not run you through with a spear. I'm sure they protected their scrolls pretty carefully...
I suppose you could bring a supply of gold/precious stones, though they might be more expensive now than they were back then. Bringing along some good technology could facilitate pretending to be a god, which would certainly work. You could use the camera, along with some good acting, to convince them that you captured their soul, or ka, or whatever it is. Heh, especially if you can take a video clip of them, show them the clip, watch them panic, then "let them go" by taking a picture with flash, or something.
I might bring this game up next time I'm drinking heavily...
Even if the GP ignores your point, he could do well to read up on Hanlon's Razor, a personal favorite of mine. If he's truly convinced that failing to delete cookies by default is idiotic, it seems the logical conclusion is the developers are idiots.
Yeah, they weren't good comparisons, but I was having trouble thinking of a comparably popular webmail app. This was about my train of thought: "What's a good comparison to Gmail? Hotmail? Does Hotmail still exist? Shit, what other mail sites are there? Screw it, I'll just use the iPod. Oh, and the iPhone would actually be relevant!"
I've only been using Gmail and my university address for a while, and using a web app to check email just seems silly to me compared to a nice IMAP.
On topic, though, Yahoo mail would have made an apt comparison, but they actually had fewer results, so it would have undercut my point, and I just can't accept with a clear conscience any evidence that contradicts me.
Hmm, that actually seems like relatively few results for "$PRODUCT problems". Especially if you compare to the results for "iphone problems" or "ipod problems".
Possibly because, in attempting to protect society and its interests, prison sentences do more than simply keep criminals away from innocent civilians for a while; they act as a punishment and a deterrent. Murder, though more often than not a one-time thing, is viewed as one of the worst offenses against humanity (which makes sense, as the murderer is quite literally destroying a bit of humanity), and thus should have a hefty punishment associated with it.
Someone who wants to commit murder could/should think, "Killing that person is not worth spending the rest of my life [or 20 years, or whatever] in prison," and decide not to go through with it. Someone who has already committed murder has done a very bad thing, and should get a very big punishment for that.
That's actually a really good point, 10 years is a really long time (as old as Slashdot, incidentally). It's, what, more than a third of the age* of the whole internet? They've got plenty of time for the world to be ready for such rich online apps.
*Note: The implied age of the internet is not conclusive nor based on any sort of fact, but rather was a mostly uninformed guess. Please don't kill me.
The word may have been shunned in print, but it continued in conversation, especially among soldiers during WWI.
"It became so common that an effective way for the soldier to express this emotion was to omit this word. Thus if a sergeant said, 'Get your ----ing rifles!' it was understood as a matter of routine. But if he said 'Get your rifles!' there was an immediate implication of urgency and danger."
I'd just like to thank you, I checked out Schlock Mercenary after seeing it sandwiched between two webcomics I approve of. Long story short, I got hooked and read all 7+ years of archives in three days, not including the two days this weekend I was without a computer. It's so awesome!
I'm not sure exactly where I stand in this argument, but the natural rebuttal is that the money spent on computers for the children might be better spent on things like malaria research/treatment and providing more food. It's not so much "computers could be used for bad, so we shouldn't get them," but more like "computers come with a small number of bad things, whereas only good can come from giving starving people food."
I'm kinda the opposite of an old timer in engineering (a current undergrad), so maybe I can give a good opposing viewpoint.
Bean counters run companies now and they don't like what a good engineer has to say.
Olin College was my first choice when I was applying to colleges a few years back (alas, I got rejected) largely because the things they emphasize ("creativity, teamwork, and entrepreneurship") aren't geared to produce engineers that will simply serve the "bean counters" better. Note the emphasis they place on entrepreneurship. These "new" engineers are not supposed to take your standard entry-level engineering job, they're supposed to come up with brand new ideas and create new companies that will be founded on the same concepts that Olin was, thus actually chaging the role of engineers, not just how they're taught.
I think they think that long term change is easier to accomplish by changing the playing field rather than just training the players differently.
Slashdot Mirror
eBooks have some big shoes to fill.
Cool! I wonder how many others have Ogg music libraries and use Dvorak. I've never met another...
We should take a roll call! *raises hand and looks around excitedly, completely unphased by the dead silence of the room*
I still have a physical Qwerty keyboard, so Dvorak acts as an extra layer of security (mainly just an entertaining one) as any Qwerty-based intruder will have to use blind trial-and-error to type out anything intelligible. It's fun to watch.
...sufficient to provide all the world's energy needs for several millennia. So, it's pretty easy to imagine what happens when we run out of oil or coal, there will just be none left to find. But what happens when we exhaust our geothermal energy supply? Will the earth be all cold as far down as we can reach? Will caves no longer hold their current temperature (generally around 55 fahrenheit, IIRC) but rather linger below freezing? Will the groundwater freeze? Will the earth crumble and collapse in on itself? I'll probably be dead by then, but this is something I might come back and check up on if the opportunity presents itself.So, in 1808, Humphry Davy was trying to isolate some yet unnamed metal from alumina ("aluminium" oxide), and coined it alumium. Four years later, he decided to go with aluminum instead. From the OED: 1812 SIR H. DAVY Chem. Philos. I. 355 As yet Aluminum has not been obtained in a perfectly free state. Shortly afterwards, some pretentious (anonymous) dipshit wrote in the Quarterly Review that he thought aluminium would be better sounding. OED: 1812 Q. Rev. VIII. 72 Aluminium, for so we shall take the liberty of writing the word, in preference to aluminum, which has a less classical sound. And you Britons, most surprisingly, decided the more pretentious choice sounded better, and it pretty much stuck from then on, except in the US.
Oh, and of course if you look up "aluminium" you'll find it pronounced Britishly. You should look up "aluminum" real quick, and find out we've been using a different word! Interestingly, OED says under "aluminum" =aluminium Now, that's a pretty straightforward assignment operator we've got there, so quite obviously "aluminum" has the same value as "aluminium" and they're pretty much interchangable and equally correct.
Personally, it seems like Sir Davy should have had dibs on naming rights, so I'll go ahead and stick with aluminum.
Really? I wish they'd do that with their music downloads store. I've only used it once or twice but I accidentally deleted an album I'd just bought (It's an embarrassing story, let's just say I was relatively new to the linux terminal) and hadn't yet backed up.
I guess it kinda makes sense, that if you get something DRM-laden, they'll back it up for you, because you can't necessarily do it yourself. But if you download DRM-free music you're completely responsible for it because you can back it up and do whatever the hell you want with it.
Still, deleting that album pissed me off. Especially after taking the time to get their crappy downloader app working in Wine!
Personally, I don't think few scrolls would be nearly worth dying for. If someone else felt differently, all power to them, but if I found myself in a life-vs-scrolls scenario, I'd sooner wipe my ass with them than sacrifice myself. Of course, this could change if I discovered a scroll with the answer (and question!) to life, the universe, and everything, or some equivalently profound revelation that would allow me to die in complete peace and contentment.
In short, they'd have to be some convincingly damn good scrolls for me to die for them, not just standand maps and legal records and religious texts.
Ooh, good thought. I was looking up what they already used as currency, and it all seemed like the exchange rates from today wouldn't be very favorable, despite wider availability. I'd abandoned the precious metals because displaying god-like powers sounds like more fun, but copious aluminum would probably bolster my deity status, too.
Naturally, the gun was my first thought, and it'd be hella fun to bring one along regardless. I guess I was thinking that shooting someone would just make them attack you, and peacefully convincing them that you're a god might make it easier to work undisturbed, or make silly demands and edicts. On second thought, though, shooting someone through the chest would probably instantly elevate you to god status, and you could just point or make silly noises to command them from then on.
And taking the scrolls is a damn good idea, but you're making assumptions about our time-travel technology. It's possible that the only matter that could come back to the present time is exactly that matter which started out there. The time machine might act as an anchor, allowing you to return to exactly when you left, but not necessarily bringing anything new with you. Without the anchor to gauge your relative location in the timeline, you might end up traversing time without any bearing, landing in an almost random time/place. In order to send/take something forward in time, you might need a time machine at the origin time, to give a known point to move from.
Of course, I'm sure there are workarounds and ways to append the scrolls' matter to the time-traveling package, but I'd have to mess around with the time machine to figure all that out.
I think bringing a digital camera and a stack of memory cards (not that I actually have either in my dorm room, but I could on short notice if I had plans to time travel) would be more efficient than the portable scanner, and you could go for longer. The challenge would be convincing the librarians or guards or whatever to let you in and not run you through with a spear. I'm sure they protected their scrolls pretty carefully...
I suppose you could bring a supply of gold/precious stones, though they might be more expensive now than they were back then. Bringing along some good technology could facilitate pretending to be a god, which would certainly work. You could use the camera, along with some good acting, to convince them that you captured their soul, or ka, or whatever it is. Heh, especially if you can take a video clip of them, show them the clip, watch them panic, then "let them go" by taking a picture with flash, or something.
I might bring this game up next time I'm drinking heavily...
After some searching, I actually found a series of images documenting the discovery of the dinosaur:
1
2
3
4
5
And, of course, Profit!!!
Even if the GP ignores your point, he could do well to read up on Hanlon's Razor, a personal favorite of mine. If he's truly convinced that failing to delete cookies by default is idiotic, it seems the logical conclusion is the developers are idiots.
Yeah, they weren't good comparisons, but I was having trouble thinking of a comparably popular webmail app. This was about my train of thought: "What's a good comparison to Gmail? Hotmail? Does Hotmail still exist? Shit, what other mail sites are there? Screw it, I'll just use the iPod. Oh, and the iPhone would actually be relevant!"
I've only been using Gmail and my university address for a while, and using a web app to check email just seems silly to me compared to a nice IMAP.
On topic, though, Yahoo mail would have made an apt comparison, but they actually had fewer results, so it would have undercut my point, and I just can't accept with a clear conscience any evidence that contradicts me.
Google makes software that works. LOL
Hmm, that actually seems like relatively few results for "$PRODUCT problems". Especially if you compare to the results for "iphone problems" or "ipod problems".
(For a cheap laugh, compare to "vista problems")
Possibly because, in attempting to protect society and its interests, prison sentences do more than simply keep criminals away from innocent civilians for a while; they act as a punishment and a deterrent. Murder, though more often than not a one-time thing, is viewed as one of the worst offenses against humanity (which makes sense, as the murderer is quite literally destroying a bit of humanity), and thus should have a hefty punishment associated with it.
Someone who wants to commit murder could/should think, "Killing that person is not worth spending the rest of my life [or 20 years, or whatever] in prison," and decide not to go through with it. Someone who has already committed murder has done a very bad thing, and should get a very big punishment for that.
That's actually a really good point, 10 years is a really long time (as old as Slashdot, incidentally). It's, what, more than a third of the age* of the whole internet? They've got plenty of time for the world to be ready for such rich online apps.
*Note: The implied age of the internet is not conclusive nor based on any sort of fact, but rather was a mostly uninformed guess. Please don't kill me.
Well damn, fourth to post Foxit. That's what I get for actually skimming over the page I linked to, to say nothing of actually previewing my post!
I must be new here.
Sheldon called this!
I'd just like to thank you, I checked out Schlock Mercenary after seeing it sandwiched between two webcomics I approve of. Long story short, I got hooked and read all 7+ years of archives in three days, not including the two days this weekend I was without a computer. It's so awesome!
I agree, but if we had the opportunity, I'd choose to be hit by a whole comet. An asteroid is just a rock, but a comet! That would be awesome.
I think the tail and the ice and everything would make for a much more enthralling death.
I'm not sure exactly where I stand in this argument, but the natural rebuttal is that the money spent on computers for the children might be better spent on things like malaria research/treatment and providing more food. It's not so much "computers could be used for bad, so we shouldn't get them," but more like "computers come with a small number of bad things, whereas only good can come from giving starving people food."
Good job! You used "paradigm" correctly!
Olin College was my first choice when I was applying to colleges a few years back (alas, I got rejected) largely because the things they emphasize ("creativity, teamwork, and entrepreneurship") aren't geared to produce engineers that will simply serve the "bean counters" better. Note the emphasis they place on entrepreneurship. These "new" engineers are not supposed to take your standard entry-level engineering job, they're supposed to come up with brand new ideas and create new companies that will be founded on the same concepts that Olin was, thus actually chaging the role of engineers, not just how they're taught.
I think they think that long term change is easier to accomplish by changing the playing field rather than just training the players differently.