If you're considering only America, you can call the Democrats the "American left". If you're considering only females, you can call the clitoris the "female penis".
Well the Democrats are neither socially left wing or economically left wing.
They still haven't made up their minds that gay relationships have equal value to straight relationships. They still advocate idiotic conservative drug laws that do nothing but waste money and lives and serve to help the illegal drug trade. They silently support an oppressive foreign policy, and when in power implement similarly themed foreign policy on a smaller scale (Clinton didn't mind bombing random countries all that much either).
On the economic side, the Democrats still treat "the market" as a god, and not a tool. They are willing to restrict the market for social reasons, much as Republicans are, but aren't willing to acknowledge that the market DOES fail economically at times, and unwilling to do anything about it.
Democrats and Republicans are just two shades of the same party, each with their set of pet issues that are, in the end, irrelevant. The deep debates in the US boil down to flamewars about which side of the bread people should spread their butter on. There's no real debate, just a show.
There's no "American Left" just like there's no "high end" merchandise at a dollar store, even though some of the merchandise might be twice as expensive as the other.
The joke is that the "American Left" doesn't really exist, except if you're willing to distort the meaning of "left" to apply to things it doesn't apply to.
To make it clearer, I'm a dirty hippie pinko commie (but I'm not all that huge on gun control, it's kind of a waste of time IMHO).
Pumpkin: The way it is now, you're taking the same risk as when you rob a bank. You take more of a risk, banks are easier. You don't even need a gun in a federal bank. I mean, they're insured, why should they give a fuck? I heard of this one guy, walks into a bank with a portable phone. He gives the phone to the teller, a guy on the other end of the line says, we've got this guy's little girl, if you don't give him all your money, we're gonna kill her.
Yolanda: Did it work?
Pumpkin: Fucking-A right, it worked. That's what I'm saying. Knucklehead walks into a bank with a telephone! Not a pistol, not a shotgun, but a fucking phone. Cleans the place out, doesn't even lift a fucking finger.
Yolanda: Did they hurt the little girl?
Pumpkin: I don't know, there probably never was a little girl in the first place. The point of the story isn't the little girl, the point of the story is, they robbed a bank with a telephone.
I agree with you. What it means is that ultimately, the investment CB made to acquire that property is as much an investment in Second Life as it is in the actual real estate. Considering the cost of real-estate in second life, though (65,536 m2, roughly an 8km x 8km chunk of "land" for US$195), it's not a hefty outlay, so they can afford to be risky with it. On the other hand, if it does take off for whatever reason, they have a leg in the market and can capitalize on it. Why not do it? Cheap outlay for something that might take off.
> Today, family and friends ask me to not mention any of this to their kids finishing high school/starting college. Go figure.
Unlike the other response to you, I'm not going to berate you or belittle your accomplishments. If you've done well for yourself, then that's something to be proud about. On the same token, it's legitimate for family and friends to ask you not to give their children the impression that your path is something they should explicitly follow.
At the end of the day, a college degree is a very useful tool for starting out in life. It doesn't make you or break you, but it does give you more opportunities than you would have if you didn't hold a degree. Simply because you didn't utilize that tool to build your life doesn't mean that it's not extremely valuable for your younger family members. It also doesn't mean that it wouldn't have been a useful tool for you, either.
Having a CS degree from a reasonably prestigious university, I can attest that it has opened many doors for me which would otherwise have been closed. The same is true of many friends who graduated with me.
Dammit, sorry. Thought you were replying to the GP, not the parent.
God, the lines that/. uses to delineate thread structure are fucking useless.. especially the automatic culling of -1 troll posts so it magically looks like you're replying to the wrong person.
Thank you slashdot, for setting the bar so low: your sacrifice elevates the status of all other websites.
You want to follow up on his story and verify or something?
Who knows, maybe he IS some random troll, and he made it up. That could very well be the case... but why the fuck do you care? Leave well enough alone, busybody.
Tell me something.. how the hell do you delete a paypal account? I've had one for a while and not used it. So where the hell are the interface options for killing the account? I don't feel comfortable having an idle paypal account linked to my bank account. It's asking for trouble. But I can't find any clear method in their user interface for deleting your account, or requesting to have it removed. Their UI is so horrible.. it's just awful.
"'You can improve productivity by 20%', Hoyle advised, 'by killing time with management consultants when you should: which is early in the lifecycle.'"
In the future, no-one will wear pants! The pantsaphogia virus, to be engineered by terrorists in 1999, will leave us all restricted to wearing breezy summer dresses or short-shorts.
In the future, the only colors allowed will be those based on citrus. This will be mandated by the Tangerine Council world government, headquartered in Morocco. In an effort to reintroduce all the beautiful colors of the world into human products, scientists will genetically engineer strains of lemon with tunable 48-bit color, with the exception of mauve, and there will be much rejoicing.
In the future, spammers will form a revolutionary movement to fight for their right to speech, and incite a rebellion. The rebellion will be crushed mercilessly, but create the foundations for the great Spam Wars of 2015.
That's all for now.
-Laxitive
Re:It's like nothing we've seen .. since Linux
on
A New Kind of OS
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I get sick of authors that think everyone should know how to read and write.
Actually, no I don't.. that was sarcasm.
Programming isn't like learning to maintain your own cars. It's a general purpose ability to express particular thoughts in a structured way such that one of the most powerful general purpose tools in the world can be applied to it. It's worth learning for EVERYBODY. You may not realize it, just as 2000 years ago people may not have realized the value of an entire society that could communicate via written communication.
Speaking as a programmer... I don't want programmers to be the scribes of the 20th century. We should not be gatekeepers to this powerful system.
You should still be able to do that in the new KDE. Maybe the command name will change (I hope not, because I have several scripts I'd have to change over).. but the functionality should still be there, the same interfaces should still be exposed by apps, and the ability to access it from the shell should still be preserved.
DBUS is just a message passing layer implementation. How that functionality is exposed is still well within the control of the KDE developers.
I don't think you have anything to worry about. If you have something to worry about, then I have something to worry about... and I'm not worried.
Just chill and look forward to Kerry, solid, phonon, plasma, and all the rest of the good stuff coming our way:)
No, you will NOT be able to switch from a Yankees Jersey to a Mets Jersey in the flip of a switch. That would violate intellectual property rules.
But you'll be able to do things ALMOST as cool. For a low payment of $2.50 per use, your fabric will connect to a AT&T mobile fabric pattern access point, from which you will be able to download AWESOME patterns which include all your favourite TV stars, American Idols, and Pop Starlets. "Locked" fabric will be rented to you at discounted prices in exchange for 2 year contracts costing roughly $200. Fabrics will be locked to only allow patterns from the manufacturer you bought it from. You will not be able to upload patterns from your computer to your fabric. You will not be able to share patterns with your neighbor.
Obviously einstein here is too cerebral to ever consider gangsta rap as a valid musical artform.
Unfortunately, in his snobbery and pride, he joins the ranks of those who scoffed at blues, who scoffed at the lascivious riffs of rock, who scoffed at the indecent improvisation of jazz, and watched the objects of their derision go onto be the foundations of modern music.
Sad, how people don't seem to learn from history.
-Laxitive
Re:Teach her yourself
on
Chess for Kids?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
That's really interesting, since I actually learned that style of play when I was learning go. It's a very enjoyable approach to the game, where you're ostensibly opponents, but fundamentally it's more about exploring the game space than beating the other guy.
Anyway, I brought that approach back to chess, and I find it works really well when you're playing with kids: really provides a fun and relaxed atmosphere.
-Laxitive
Teach her yourself
on
Chess for Kids?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I'd echo the sentiments of others. Teach her yourself. It's far more important that she be learning from someone she is comfortable with than from some random chess teacher guy, or a soulless program.
One thing I've found works well when playing chess (or for that matter, go) with kids is this: interact with them during the game. I don't refrain from talking with them about the game AS it's progressing. Most of the time their strategy is going to be really naive and short-term.. but that's ok. I grin and say things like "oh, you're not getting away with that!" and respond to their moves. If they're about to make a particularly obvious error, I ask if they're sure they want to make the move (and if they want me to, I'll explain why they shouldn't). Also, if I'm setting up some particular attack, I give hints along the way about what they should be worrying about. That way, I don't have to dumb down MY game, but I don't easily defeat them either (which is no fun at all). As time passes, they'll require less and less of your helping hand when making their moves.
If you're successful in achieving that comfortable, interactive environment, you'll find that your daughter really responds to you. It becomes less of a combative game and more of a shared adventure, a little mini-storybook, and that's when kids show the most interest and learn the best. The important thing is to achieve a nice balance between completely disconnecting yourself from interacting with her (professional chess player attitude) and boring her by making it into a lesson instead of a game. Make jokes, have fun, and look at the experience as a way to get some insight into the way your kid thinks. Give her hints and advice when she needs it, leave her alone when she's trying to figure something out herself. Remember, you're playing chess WITH her, not AGAINST her.
If she picks up and runs with it, then she'll figure out how to proceed after she goes past your limits. If she doesn't, then that's fine too, but you got to spend some good quality time with your kid and that's worth a lot all by itself.
I'd like to expand on the current logistical issues on making this functionality available at the OS level. I've already mentioned that there is no standard for how these IO portal semantics should be expressed. For example, most remote SSH filesystem access methods require a login and password: how is the kernel filesystem abstraction going to take care of that? Will it be encoded into the path, or will it be prompted for? Is that secure (I'm not saying that it isn't, just saying that these issues need to be thought about).
Secondly, even with FUSE, you need to have root access before you're even able to MOUNT your fancy filesystems. That's easy enough to get around, but again the standardization issue comes into play.
Thirdly, filesystem semantics are explicitly oriented towards tree (or maybe digraph) structures. KDE ioslaves use a simpler more general abstration: URI access points. It's hard to see how to shoehorn these more general semantics into normal filesystem semantics in a straightforward way.
So what's clear is that any desktop system will need to have SOME abstraction layer above the OS filesystem (irrespective of wether the OS filesystem is extensible or not). What the KDE developers have done is implement their end of the abstraction in one particular way due to the lack of standard lower-level implementations. IF and when those lower-level standard implementations become available, the KDE ioslave custom implementation can be changed to use that backend instead.
Until then, I get a nice application suite which gives me great usability and makes my life a hell of a lot easier. So what we have is a perfectly future-proof abstraction which also provides useful functionality right now. What exactly is the problem with that?
Slashdot Mirror
Thus we come back to the joke:
If you're considering only America, you can call the Democrats the "American left".
If you're considering only females, you can call the clitoris the "female penis".
Well the Democrats are neither socially left wing or economically left wing.
They still haven't made up their minds that gay relationships have equal value to straight relationships. They still advocate idiotic conservative drug laws that do nothing but waste money and lives and serve to help the illegal drug trade. They silently support an oppressive foreign policy, and when in power implement similarly themed foreign policy on a smaller scale (Clinton didn't mind bombing random countries all that much either).
On the economic side, the Democrats still treat "the market" as a god, and not a tool. They are willing to restrict the market for social reasons, much as Republicans are, but aren't willing to acknowledge that the market DOES fail economically at times, and unwilling to do anything about it.
Democrats and Republicans are just two shades of the same party, each with their set of pet issues that are, in the end, irrelevant. The deep debates in the US boil down to flamewars about which side of the bread people should spread their butter on. There's no real debate, just a show.
There's no "American Left" just like there's no "high end" merchandise at a dollar store, even though some of the merchandise might be twice as expensive as the other.
The joke is that the "American Left" doesn't really exist, except if you're willing to distort the meaning of "left" to apply to things it doesn't apply to.
To make it clearer, I'm a dirty hippie pinko commie (but I'm not all that huge on gun control, it's kind of a waste of time IMHO).
Pumpkin: The way it is now, you're taking the same risk as when you rob a bank. You take more of a risk, banks are easier. You don't even need a gun in a federal bank. I mean, they're insured, why should they give a fuck? I heard of this one guy, walks into a bank with a portable phone. He gives the phone to the teller, a guy on the other end of the line says, we've got this guy's little girl, if you don't give him all your money, we're gonna kill her.
Yolanda: Did it work?
Pumpkin: Fucking-A right, it worked. That's what I'm saying. Knucklehead walks into a bank with a telephone! Not a pistol, not a shotgun, but a fucking phone. Cleans the place out, doesn't even lift a fucking finger.
Yolanda: Did they hurt the little girl?
Pumpkin: I don't know, there probably never was a little girl in the first place. The point of the story isn't the little girl, the point of the story is, they robbed a bank with a telephone.
No, they're big green wobbly things with mermaids in them!
I agree with you. What it means is that ultimately, the investment CB made to acquire that property is as much an investment in Second Life as it is in the actual real estate. Considering the cost of real-estate in second life, though (65,536 m2, roughly an 8km x 8km chunk of "land" for US$195), it's not a hefty outlay, so they can afford to be risky with it. On the other hand, if it does take off for whatever reason, they have a leg in the market and can capitalize on it. Why not do it? Cheap outlay for something that might take off.
-Laxitive
> Today, family and friends ask me to not mention any of this to their kids finishing high school/starting college. Go figure.
Unlike the other response to you, I'm not going to berate you or belittle your accomplishments. If you've done well for yourself, then that's something to be proud about. On the same token, it's legitimate for family and friends to ask you not to give their children the impression that your path is something they should explicitly follow.
At the end of the day, a college degree is a very useful tool for starting out in life. It doesn't make you or break you, but it does give you more opportunities than you would have if you didn't hold a degree. Simply because you didn't utilize that tool to build your life doesn't mean that it's not extremely valuable for your younger family members. It also doesn't mean that it wouldn't have been a useful tool for you, either.
Having a CS degree from a reasonably prestigious university, I can attest that it has opened many doors for me which would otherwise have been closed. The same is true of many friends who graduated with me.
Dammit, sorry. Thought you were replying to the GP, not the parent.
God, the lines that
Thank you slashdot, for setting the bar so low: your sacrifice elevates the status of all other websites.
What the fuck is wrong with posting as an AC?
You want to follow up on his story and verify or something?
Who knows, maybe he IS some random troll, and he made it up. That could very well be the case... but why the fuck do you care? Leave well enough alone, busybody.
How about:
iPwnd!
Why would you think seniors are compelled by games that simulate the past?
Tell me something.. how the hell do you delete a paypal account? I've had one for a while and not used it. So where the hell are the interface options for killing the account? I don't feel comfortable having an idle paypal account linked to my bank account. It's asking for trouble. But I can't find any clear method in their user interface for deleting your account, or requesting to have it removed. Their UI is so horrible.. it's just awful.
How are you "going about deleting" it?
No, what it REALLY said was...
*Brushes off dust from the paper*
"'You can improve productivity by 20%', Hoyle advised, 'by killing time with management consultants when you should: which is early in the lifecycle.'"
Sorry, had to do it.
In the future, no-one will wear pants! The pantsaphogia virus, to be engineered by terrorists in 1999, will leave us all restricted to wearing breezy summer dresses or short-shorts.
In the future, the only colors allowed will be those based on citrus. This will be mandated by the Tangerine Council world government, headquartered in Morocco. In an effort to reintroduce all the beautiful colors of the world into human products, scientists will genetically engineer strains of lemon with tunable 48-bit color, with the exception of mauve, and there will be much rejoicing.
In the future, spammers will form a revolutionary movement to fight for their right to speech, and incite a rebellion. The rebellion will be crushed mercilessly, but create the foundations for the great Spam Wars of 2015.
That's all for now.
-Laxitive
I get sick of authors that think everyone should know how to read and write.
Actually, no I don't.. that was sarcasm.
Programming isn't like learning to maintain your own cars. It's a general purpose ability to express particular thoughts in a structured way such that one of the most powerful general purpose tools in the world can be applied to it. It's worth learning for EVERYBODY. You may not realize it, just as 2000 years ago people may not have realized the value of an entire society that could communicate via written communication.
Speaking as a programmer... I don't want programmers to be the scribes of the 20th century. We should not be gatekeepers to this powerful system.
-Laxitive
You should still be able to do that in the new KDE. Maybe the command name will change (I hope not, because I have several scripts I'd have to change over).. but the functionality should still be there, the same interfaces should still be exposed by apps, and the ability to access it from the shell should still be preserved.
:)
DBUS is just a message passing layer implementation. How that functionality is exposed is still well within the control of the KDE developers.
I don't think you have anything to worry about. If you have something to worry about, then I have something to worry about... and I'm not worried.
Just chill and look forward to Kerry, solid, phonon, plasma, and all the rest of the good stuff coming our way
-Laxitive
remove Lock = Caps_Lock
:)
keysym Caps_Lock = Escape
Happy vimming
If the judge had ordered them to roshambo to settle the dispute.
-Laxitive
No, you will NOT be able to switch from a Yankees Jersey to a Mets Jersey in the flip of a switch. That would violate intellectual property rules.
But you'll be able to do things ALMOST as cool. For a low payment of $2.50 per use, your fabric will connect to a AT&T mobile fabric pattern access point, from which you will be able to download AWESOME patterns which include all your favourite TV stars, American Idols, and Pop Starlets. "Locked" fabric will be rented to you at discounted prices in exchange for 2 year contracts costing roughly $200. Fabrics will be locked to only allow patterns from the manufacturer you bought it from. You will not be able to upload patterns from your computer to your fabric. You will not be able to share patterns with your neighbor.
Enjoy your high-tech clothing of the future.
-Laxitive
Kanedaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!
Obviously einstein here is too cerebral to ever consider gangsta rap as a valid musical artform.
Unfortunately, in his snobbery and pride, he joins the ranks of those who scoffed at blues, who scoffed at the lascivious riffs of rock, who scoffed at the indecent improvisation of jazz, and watched the objects of their derision go onto be the foundations of modern music.
Sad, how people don't seem to learn from history.
-Laxitive
That's really interesting, since I actually learned that style of play when I was learning go. It's a very enjoyable approach to the game, where you're ostensibly opponents, but fundamentally it's more about exploring the game space than beating the other guy.
Anyway, I brought that approach back to chess, and I find it works really well when you're playing with kids: really provides a fun and relaxed atmosphere.
-Laxitive
I'd echo the sentiments of others. Teach her yourself. It's far more important that she be learning from someone she is comfortable with than from some random chess teacher guy, or a soulless program.
One thing I've found works well when playing chess (or for that matter, go) with kids is this: interact with them during the game. I don't refrain from talking with them about the game AS it's progressing. Most of the time their strategy is going to be really naive and short-term.. but that's ok. I grin and say things like "oh, you're not getting away with that!" and respond to their moves. If they're about to make a particularly obvious error, I ask if they're sure they want to make the move (and if they want me to, I'll explain why they shouldn't). Also, if I'm setting up some particular attack, I give hints along the way about what they should be worrying about. That way, I don't have to dumb down MY game, but I don't easily defeat them either (which is no fun at all). As time passes, they'll require less and less of your helping hand when making their moves.
If you're successful in achieving that comfortable, interactive environment, you'll find that your daughter really responds to you. It becomes less of a combative game and more of a shared adventure, a little mini-storybook, and that's when kids show the most interest and learn the best. The important thing is to achieve a nice balance between completely disconnecting yourself from interacting with her (professional chess player attitude) and boring her by making it into a lesson instead of a game. Make jokes, have fun, and look at the experience as a way to get some insight into the way your kid thinks. Give her hints and advice when she needs it, leave her alone when she's trying to figure something out herself. Remember, you're playing chess WITH her, not AGAINST her.
If she picks up and runs with it, then she'll figure out how to proceed after she goes past your limits. If she doesn't, then that's fine too, but you got to spend some good quality time with your kid and that's worth a lot all by itself.
-Laxitive
I have some suggestions:
Why don't we judge companies based on the company's behaviour, and judge individuals based on the individual's behaviour?
Why don't we stop imagining that somehow a multibillion dollar company is still largely a projection of one man's personality?
Why don't we acknowledge that contributing to charity does not absolve anyone of responsibility they may have for wrongs they committed in the past?
Why don't we acknowledge that a person's psyche is not one-dimensional.. that an individual can do good in some contexts and bad in other contexts?
Does that sound reasonable?
-Laxitive
I'd like to expand on the current logistical issues on making this functionality available at the OS level. I've already mentioned that there is no standard for how these IO portal semantics should be expressed. For example, most remote SSH filesystem access methods require a login and password: how is the kernel filesystem abstraction going to take care of that? Will it be encoded into the path, or will it be prompted for? Is that secure (I'm not saying that it isn't, just saying that these issues need to be thought about).
Secondly, even with FUSE, you need to have root access before you're even able to MOUNT your fancy filesystems. That's easy enough to get around, but again the standardization issue comes into play.
Thirdly, filesystem semantics are explicitly oriented towards tree (or maybe digraph) structures. KDE ioslaves use a simpler more general abstration: URI access points. It's hard to see how to shoehorn these more general semantics into normal filesystem semantics in a straightforward way.
So what's clear is that any desktop system will need to have SOME abstraction layer above the OS filesystem (irrespective of wether the OS filesystem is extensible or not). What the KDE developers have done is implement their end of the abstraction in one particular way due to the lack of standard lower-level implementations. IF and when those lower-level standard implementations become available, the KDE ioslave custom implementation can be changed to use that backend instead.
Until then, I get a nice application suite which gives me great usability and makes my life a hell of a lot easier. So what we have is a perfectly future-proof abstraction which also provides useful functionality right now. What exactly is the problem with that?
-Laxitive