I am glad that so many people responded to my sarcastic comment; I am also glad that some understood the sarcasm. Anonymous Coward, I am not naive. I have in fact tried to negotiate contracts with cellphone companies, ISP's, university services, and others. The point of my post is that an individual can not negotiate a corporate contract with out being told, f-u, don't buy it.
One of many reasons that I do not pay for cable (I watch sports that I care about at friends houses or at the bar), I don't have a smart phone, (I pay about $20 a month for unlimited calls and text), and I do not sign contracts without reading them and responding with modifications.
I may be a Herb, but I respect the right to retain my rights, regardless of how big the company I am buying services or products from.
The only way to fight what you think is wrong is to do it your own way. Think about that, anonymous coward.
-bwag
I don't want to defend publishers "in this day and age"; however, some context is necessary. IAAS, but history plays a big part. For a long period of time in the US, authors of original and controversial works were not only unable to publish because they didn't have the means, but those that did were ostracized and in some cases persecuted for doing so. Publishers have had a large role in making good literature available to common people, and I do believe that is still true. Corporate publishers, however, are different, and have very different goals.
Full disclaimer, I volunteer at a cooperatively run bookstore in MPLS, Boneshaker Books. And I'm not trolling. The guys who put out Slingshot, for example, are publishers. And if you look at the major publishing companies, they all sort of started out in the same way, but they 'capitolized'. In the end, I think they lost out. Try and ride your bike across the country and wind up at harper collins guy's house hungry and tired, you'll be treated like a criminal. Slingshot guy's house, you'll be treated like a friend. Millions of dollars might not ever be made, maybe they will. But making friends with a similar minded stranger will be a friendship that goes beyond those limits. And everyone will still keep writing.
Publishers once helped,
ideas spread, knowledge grow, but,
now U.S. is tough.
Disclaimer, I volunteer at a collective and I like riding bikes. I also run a legal business, it can be hard to keep perspectives straight between the cultures. I like writing bad slashdot comments and haikus to get my thoughts out.
bda
I was born and raised on windows machines and am by no means linux literate. Six weeks ago I came into posession of a netbook with a busted hardrive. I looked into booting XP from an external, but that was too daunting, so I decided on Ubuntu. Great booting from a flash drive, but when I tried to install to external the screen size was not compatable and I could not select an image for the user. Install stopped there. After several hours of interwebbing to find a solution to the screen problem, I just scrapped and went with Xubuntu. It is my understanding that this is based on the KDE model. It works great and I like it.
To play the devil's advocate, I did almost get kicked out of school in '95 when a friend directed me to www.whitehouse.com. He told me I would find info about the Clinton's kitty kat, Socks. I browsed for a while, and it happened that the dean of students was monitoring our computers at the time, and he thought that the amount of time I spent browsing "socks" violated the voluntarty 'STOP' policy.
Swedish girls in Finnish saunas... or was that the other way around? Maybe it was Norwegian girls in a Lapp sauna. It might have just been Scandinavian girls in a Vietnamese shower.
That is not the only way to have a new species, you can have bottlenecks, genetic drift, geographic isolation... The only requirement is isolated gene pools that become unable to interbreed with each other.
If Facebook goes public, it will be under extreme operational legal scrutiny. Enter the lawyers writing 'corporation guidelines'. As this happens, the people who made Facebook as effective and usable as it is will lose full control of internal decisions.
The value of Facebook, even though it will continue to add users, will drop as the people who use Facebook login less, give less personal information, and spend less time viewing other's profitable 'Facertisements'.
I don't think what I did what I did six years ago as a college student are relevant to advertisers seeking my attention as a 27 year old biologist.
IAAB. Not to be a critic, but water is not a fundamental attribute of soil. A property of soil is its ability to hold water, and water content is an attribute of a given soil at a given time, but that does not imply that the water mass of a plant comes out of the soil from which it is derived.
Example: water a houseplant, then do not water it for a month. The plant will extract some water from the soil, the rest of the water will drain or evaporate. At the end of the month, you still have the same soil that you started with, but it will contain very little water, most of which has not been added to the mass of or transpired by the plant.
- bodaciouswaggler
I bought the Humble Bundle 2 with no knowledge of either Braid or Machinarium. I haven't played the others yet, but from those two have already gotten more than my money's worth (doubled the price I payed for Avernum 6, about $40). I still have three games to go; even if they are completely useless, which I doubt they are, I am still much happier than I was when I payed ~$100 dollars for GTA S.A. and the accompanying guide (the last time I payed retail for a game, circa six years ago). Thank you indie devs. Also, Commander Keen being available on steam brought me back to some old memories and a few hours for five dollars. All that when seeing a movie at my local cinema costs me about ten to fifteen dollars for ninety minutes of shit.
Why would you need tuberculosis sized drives to handle this? And why do we need to hold in the kink? Is there a kink-based TB outbreak in the UK? Shit, I just canceled my flight to Heathrow to visit family for Christmas!
What does the shuttle 'imaging' team have to show us? As a nerd-loving public, other than good imagery, this shows me nothing of the previous failures and bad launch images that have plagued the shuttle history. Show me something like a new vehicle, even a new concept design. "We had bad launches in the past, so we videotaped our next launches" doesn't cut it for me.
Something like, "We have an experimental launch vehicle to access other planets and explore the boundaries of human exploration, similar to what the Apollo Astronauts did, and the heroes died... That would cut it. But, "we are so afraid to continue launching people into space because the bureaucracy of our space program is so bad that we have not made any improvements in fifty years and have actually continued a program in which two vehicles of the same design disintegrated upon launch and re-entry. We can no longer afford to put humans into space because our bureaucracy has made it prohibitively expensive, therefore, that is a useless endeavor. I call bullshit, and I call bullshit on the people who spend money on war instead of money on human exploration. There are many soldiers who would be willing to risk their lives going back to the moon, and beyond that, going to Mars. If JFK had the balls to make that call, and the governers of this country respect him, why have we not been back there?
Don't tell me it is funding, because the current military expenditure annualy in the US could easily fund at least some research on the project. Compound that billions of dollars of funding since the Iran Contra, and we could have a man, woman, and family on the Moon, not to mention an exploratory team going to mars. People like Jim Lovell, who were willing to say, this has never been done before, but maybe it can. If it can, I will risk my life to make it happen. The age of communication has destroyed the idea of centralized regimes like the Germans in 1939. That horror physically and informationally cannot happen again. So lets get past it, change our goals, and realize the limitations and possibilities of life on our planet. It needs to be preserved, and expanded. Expansion is not possible while people are still fighting over things as trivial as religion, philosophy, and wealth. All three are fairly relative when you consider survival, are they not?
i love 9/11 jokes, but that was just a a bad titanic/fe microbe joke. you should be modded down for bad joke. I know it won't happen, because my commentary is so late, but really, a joke about the iron bugs when all we really need to worry about is the the uranium and plutonium left on this planet.
Mass questions aside, how do we know the age of these stars? The cores of rock planets in this solar system, especially Earth and Mars, resemble red dwarfs, and at a young age they were probably very similar. What about the planets of origins that are not so similar as ours, like Jupiter? There is some evidence that Jupiter, at an early stage of our solar system, was very similar to the Sun. By chance or what have you, two massive gas balls had a gravity fight, and the Sun won. The gas giants are more similar to the sun than they are to the interior planets and the outlying planetoids (as we apparently are now refering to neptune and pluto).
If the collusion of gas and heavier element clouds create stars, and the collision of condensed gas and heavier element clouds create planets, and the gravitational eccentrices decide which cloud becomes a star and dominates its system, where the heavier, rockier objects collude, how do we know what designs a solar system?
The point is, are these red dwarfs actually stars, or are they planetary objects orbiting in a still undefined system? Will one of them become a star like the sun, or will they collide and disperse into the galaxy as a mix of chemical elements? Is anything orbiting them, if so, is anything orbiting one of them at a more rapid rate than its partner?
If Jupiter could have been a star, how do we not know that these phenomena are the birth of solar systems?
I guess this news is not new to me, it just opens a lot of unanswered questions, and the proposition that Jupiter, at one point, may have been the center of the solar system, but remains a outlying planet of fusion reaction of gas and is not a star, begs more questions.
Like are these dwarfs nebulous accumulations of gas that are in the process of forming solar systems? Will one of these red dwarfs become a sun and contain a system like ours? Or will many of them collide and become a blue giant and blast off there accumulative accretion disk, maybe become a gravitational phenomena?
Will one red dwarf become a Jupiter while the other red dwarf is bombarded with outliers until it becomes a Sun and develops rocky planets like ours?
A non-apple user, non much of computer software user except what I need to get along (internet, pdf reader, games, sometimes I experiment)... My first experience with Apple was a fifteen dollar Itunes gift card this christmas. I thought I could watch a movie or something so I tried to redeem it. When I signed up and tried to download the Departed, I also got Itunes, an Ipod registration, and Apple downloader showing up in my task manager. I would not be that mad but I could not stop the AppleHelper task from running. I stop it in my windows TM, and it starts again within twenty seconds. The only way I could get rid of it was deleting the program through my windows control panel. I call BS. Apple has the fifteen dollars that a friend of my dad's spent on a gift card that will never be redeemed. They also have a person that will never buy apple mediated content because they are not trustworthy and "hack" their customers.
Also, the next time someone asks me what my zipcode is to buy a piece of cheese and a bottle of wine, I am going to tell them no. If they tell me I can't buy without exposing myself, I will tell them to go fuck themselves and then steal a bottle of wine and a piece of cheese.
I have been telling the war mongers for ten years that we need to learn arabic. Not redneck, arabic.
Learn a language, learn a culture, learn more. Christians don't understand the Q'uaran because they don't speak arabic! I joined the islam american culture group and they sent me a beautiful quaran for free. Im not a muslim, but at least i am not so stupid as to dismiss their language and culture as stupid. It is in fact beautiful. They gave us such familiar things as our alphabet, the study of chemistry, and our world-view is more influenced by the middle- eastern history than can be imagined.
I only hope that futting oil doesnt destroy that relationship to an irreparable condition before I can see it in person. I am only twenty five, I have been to the tip of south america, I have been in Europe, but If I die before I have a chance to spend at least one or two years in the arabic world I will die unfulfilled. So rich, so deep. In some instances, more rich, more deep than the consumerism in which I exist. Give me a light cotton robe, some people to talk to, and places to explore.
I am an optomist, but also pragmatic. I have never been in a fight. I feel like if I had a chance to spend a year in Iran, perhaps travel all over the arabic world, I would only meet friends. My travels everywhere, I think everybody wants the same thing. Companionship, discussion, language, culture, food, risks, takings risks and realizing that your not that different.
I think it would be great to speak arabic and travel in arabic speaking countries. I hear that the food is incredible, and the culture is so rich that it would make me cry realizing that my lost scandinavian farming culture had a similar richness that has been lost to western wealth.
food and family isn't good enough. But I have hope. The asian kid from school of rock said "i'm not cool" lawrence. Lawrence is good at the piano.
If this country has hope it is in our young people realizing that money does not equal wealth, rather wealth is happiness, and the only true way to achieve wealth is by having convictions, following them, and doing everything you can to show your worth.
Showboating and rich is over. I am sick of watching priveleged US athletes showboating like war heroes because they did mundane details. We need to start giving them a dose of reality at a young age.
When I see things happen like college athletes getting taken down for stealing, raping, and fighting, and not getting in trouble, and tech people getting in trouble for lying, cheating, and manipulating, I feel the same way.
Where are the parents? Who are we holding accountable?
Our leaders in business are not accountable. Our scientists are not accountable. Our politicians are not accountable. Our governments are not accountable. They have destroyed global wealth. The system is not working. Why not?
What can we do to make it work?
Slashdot Mirror
I am glad that so many people responded to my sarcastic comment; I am also glad that some understood the sarcasm. Anonymous Coward, I am not naive. I have in fact tried to negotiate contracts with cellphone companies, ISP's, university services, and others. The point of my post is that an individual can not negotiate a corporate contract with out being told, f-u, don't buy it. One of many reasons that I do not pay for cable (I watch sports that I care about at friends houses or at the bar), I don't have a smart phone, (I pay about $20 a month for unlimited calls and text), and I do not sign contracts without reading them and responding with modifications. I may be a Herb, but I respect the right to retain my rights, regardless of how big the company I am buying services or products from. The only way to fight what you think is wrong is to do it your own way. Think about that, anonymous coward. -bwag
What would happen if an individual tried to send Disney a revised TOS for one of their services?
There should be an interstate trade clause restricting the use of *asterisks* for emphasis.
I don't want to defend publishers "in this day and age"; however, some context is necessary. IAAS, but history plays a big part. For a long period of time in the US, authors of original and controversial works were not only unable to publish because they didn't have the means, but those that did were ostracized and in some cases persecuted for doing so. Publishers have had a large role in making good literature available to common people, and I do believe that is still true. Corporate publishers, however, are different, and have very different goals. Full disclaimer, I volunteer at a cooperatively run bookstore in MPLS, Boneshaker Books. And I'm not trolling. The guys who put out Slingshot, for example, are publishers. And if you look at the major publishing companies, they all sort of started out in the same way, but they 'capitolized'. In the end, I think they lost out. Try and ride your bike across the country and wind up at harper collins guy's house hungry and tired, you'll be treated like a criminal. Slingshot guy's house, you'll be treated like a friend. Millions of dollars might not ever be made, maybe they will. But making friends with a similar minded stranger will be a friendship that goes beyond those limits. And everyone will still keep writing. Publishers once helped, ideas spread, knowledge grow, but, now U.S. is tough. Disclaimer, I volunteer at a collective and I like riding bikes. I also run a legal business, it can be hard to keep perspectives straight between the cultures. I like writing bad slashdot comments and haikus to get my thoughts out. bda
I was born and raised on windows machines and am by no means linux literate. Six weeks ago I came into posession of a netbook with a busted hardrive. I looked into booting XP from an external, but that was too daunting, so I decided on Ubuntu. Great booting from a flash drive, but when I tried to install to external the screen size was not compatable and I could not select an image for the user. Install stopped there. After several hours of interwebbing to find a solution to the screen problem, I just scrapped and went with Xubuntu. It is my understanding that this is based on the KDE model. It works great and I like it.
Okay, this is neat. But did I miss something? What exactly is a gigabit optical wave, and why don't I have one?
To play the devil's advocate, I did almost get kicked out of school in '95 when a friend directed me to www.whitehouse.com. He told me I would find info about the Clinton's kitty kat, Socks. I browsed for a while, and it happened that the dean of students was monitoring our computers at the time, and he thought that the amount of time I spent browsing "socks" violated the voluntarty 'STOP' policy.
Jurassic Park, anyone? THE DOORLOCKS TESS!!!... I know this, its a Unix system!
IANAL, but where do we draw the line?
Should we collect DNA at traffic stops as well?
Swedish girls in Finnish saunas... or was that the other way around? Maybe it was Norwegian girls in a Lapp sauna. It might have just been Scandinavian girls in a Vietnamese shower.
That is not the only way to have a new species, you can have bottlenecks, genetic drift, geographic isolation... The only requirement is isolated gene pools that become unable to interbreed with each other.
This is just my theory.
If Facebook goes public, it will be under extreme operational legal scrutiny. Enter the lawyers writing 'corporation guidelines'. As this happens, the people who made Facebook as effective and usable as it is will lose full control of internal decisions.
The value of Facebook, even though it will continue to add users, will drop as the people who use Facebook login less, give less personal information, and spend less time viewing other's profitable 'Facertisements'.
I don't think what I did what I did six years ago as a college student are relevant to advertisers seeking my attention as a 27 year old biologist.
IAAB. Not to be a critic, but water is not a fundamental attribute of soil. A property of soil is its ability to hold water, and water content is an attribute of a given soil at a given time, but that does not imply that the water mass of a plant comes out of the soil from which it is derived. Example: water a houseplant, then do not water it for a month. The plant will extract some water from the soil, the rest of the water will drain or evaporate. At the end of the month, you still have the same soil that you started with, but it will contain very little water, most of which has not been added to the mass of or transpired by the plant. - bodaciouswaggler
How does one spell Santa Clause and "Merry Christmas, Ho Ho Ho!" in the Cyrillic alphabet?
I bought the Humble Bundle 2 with no knowledge of either Braid or Machinarium. I haven't played the others yet, but from those two have already gotten more than my money's worth (doubled the price I payed for Avernum 6, about $40). I still have three games to go; even if they are completely useless, which I doubt they are, I am still much happier than I was when I payed ~$100 dollars for GTA S.A. and the accompanying guide (the last time I payed retail for a game, circa six years ago). Thank you indie devs. Also, Commander Keen being available on steam brought me back to some old memories and a few hours for five dollars. All that when seeing a movie at my local cinema costs me about ten to fifteen dollars for ninety minutes of shit.
Why would you need tuberculosis sized drives to handle this? And why do we need to hold in the kink? Is there a kink-based TB outbreak in the UK? Shit, I just canceled my flight to Heathrow to visit family for Christmas!
What does the shuttle 'imaging' team have to show us? As a nerd-loving public, other than good imagery, this shows me nothing of the previous failures and bad launch images that have plagued the shuttle history. Show me something like a new vehicle, even a new concept design. "We had bad launches in the past, so we videotaped our next launches" doesn't cut it for me. Something like, "We have an experimental launch vehicle to access other planets and explore the boundaries of human exploration, similar to what the Apollo Astronauts did, and the heroes died... That would cut it. But, "we are so afraid to continue launching people into space because the bureaucracy of our space program is so bad that we have not made any improvements in fifty years and have actually continued a program in which two vehicles of the same design disintegrated upon launch and re-entry. We can no longer afford to put humans into space because our bureaucracy has made it prohibitively expensive, therefore, that is a useless endeavor. I call bullshit, and I call bullshit on the people who spend money on war instead of money on human exploration. There are many soldiers who would be willing to risk their lives going back to the moon, and beyond that, going to Mars. If JFK had the balls to make that call, and the governers of this country respect him, why have we not been back there? Don't tell me it is funding, because the current military expenditure annualy in the US could easily fund at least some research on the project. Compound that billions of dollars of funding since the Iran Contra, and we could have a man, woman, and family on the Moon, not to mention an exploratory team going to mars. People like Jim Lovell, who were willing to say, this has never been done before, but maybe it can. If it can, I will risk my life to make it happen. The age of communication has destroyed the idea of centralized regimes like the Germans in 1939. That horror physically and informationally cannot happen again. So lets get past it, change our goals, and realize the limitations and possibilities of life on our planet. It needs to be preserved, and expanded. Expansion is not possible while people are still fighting over things as trivial as religion, philosophy, and wealth. All three are fairly relative when you consider survival, are they not?
i love 9/11 jokes, but that was just a a bad titanic/fe microbe joke. you should be modded down for bad joke. I know it won't happen, because my commentary is so late, but really, a joke about the iron bugs when all we really need to worry about is the the uranium and plutonium left on this planet.
Mass questions aside, how do we know the age of these stars? The cores of rock planets in this solar system, especially Earth and Mars, resemble red dwarfs, and at a young age they were probably very similar. What about the planets of origins that are not so similar as ours, like Jupiter? There is some evidence that Jupiter, at an early stage of our solar system, was very similar to the Sun. By chance or what have you, two massive gas balls had a gravity fight, and the Sun won. The gas giants are more similar to the sun than they are to the interior planets and the outlying planetoids (as we apparently are now refering to neptune and pluto). If the collusion of gas and heavier element clouds create stars, and the collision of condensed gas and heavier element clouds create planets, and the gravitational eccentrices decide which cloud becomes a star and dominates its system, where the heavier, rockier objects collude, how do we know what designs a solar system? The point is, are these red dwarfs actually stars, or are they planetary objects orbiting in a still undefined system? Will one of them become a star like the sun, or will they collide and disperse into the galaxy as a mix of chemical elements? Is anything orbiting them, if so, is anything orbiting one of them at a more rapid rate than its partner? If Jupiter could have been a star, how do we not know that these phenomena are the birth of solar systems? I guess this news is not new to me, it just opens a lot of unanswered questions, and the proposition that Jupiter, at one point, may have been the center of the solar system, but remains a outlying planet of fusion reaction of gas and is not a star, begs more questions. Like are these dwarfs nebulous accumulations of gas that are in the process of forming solar systems? Will one of these red dwarfs become a sun and contain a system like ours? Or will many of them collide and become a blue giant and blast off there accumulative accretion disk, maybe become a gravitational phenomena? Will one red dwarf become a Jupiter while the other red dwarf is bombarded with outliers until it becomes a Sun and develops rocky planets like ours?
A non-apple user, non much of computer software user except what I need to get along (internet, pdf reader, games, sometimes I experiment)... My first experience with Apple was a fifteen dollar Itunes gift card this christmas. I thought I could watch a movie or something so I tried to redeem it. When I signed up and tried to download the Departed, I also got Itunes, an Ipod registration, and Apple downloader showing up in my task manager. I would not be that mad but I could not stop the AppleHelper task from running. I stop it in my windows TM, and it starts again within twenty seconds. The only way I could get rid of it was deleting the program through my windows control panel. I call BS. Apple has the fifteen dollars that a friend of my dad's spent on a gift card that will never be redeemed. They also have a person that will never buy apple mediated content because they are not trustworthy and "hack" their customers. Also, the next time someone asks me what my zipcode is to buy a piece of cheese and a bottle of wine, I am going to tell them no. If they tell me I can't buy without exposing myself, I will tell them to go fuck themselves and then steal a bottle of wine and a piece of cheese.
Yes but... calorie-ation is causation... of gaining weight.
you are either autistic, retarded, or black.
I have been telling the war mongers for ten years that we need to learn arabic. Not redneck, arabic. Learn a language, learn a culture, learn more. Christians don't understand the Q'uaran because they don't speak arabic! I joined the islam american culture group and they sent me a beautiful quaran for free. Im not a muslim, but at least i am not so stupid as to dismiss their language and culture as stupid. It is in fact beautiful. They gave us such familiar things as our alphabet, the study of chemistry, and our world-view is more influenced by the middle- eastern history than can be imagined. I only hope that futting oil doesnt destroy that relationship to an irreparable condition before I can see it in person. I am only twenty five, I have been to the tip of south america, I have been in Europe, but If I die before I have a chance to spend at least one or two years in the arabic world I will die unfulfilled. So rich, so deep. In some instances, more rich, more deep than the consumerism in which I exist. Give me a light cotton robe, some people to talk to, and places to explore. I am an optomist, but also pragmatic. I have never been in a fight. I feel like if I had a chance to spend a year in Iran, perhaps travel all over the arabic world, I would only meet friends. My travels everywhere, I think everybody wants the same thing. Companionship, discussion, language, culture, food, risks, takings risks and realizing that your not that different. I think it would be great to speak arabic and travel in arabic speaking countries. I hear that the food is incredible, and the culture is so rich that it would make me cry realizing that my lost scandinavian farming culture had a similar richness that has been lost to western wealth. food and family isn't good enough. But I have hope. The asian kid from school of rock said "i'm not cool" lawrence. Lawrence is good at the piano. If this country has hope it is in our young people realizing that money does not equal wealth, rather wealth is happiness, and the only true way to achieve wealth is by having convictions, following them, and doing everything you can to show your worth. Showboating and rich is over. I am sick of watching priveleged US athletes showboating like war heroes because they did mundane details. We need to start giving them a dose of reality at a young age. When I see things happen like college athletes getting taken down for stealing, raping, and fighting, and not getting in trouble, and tech people getting in trouble for lying, cheating, and manipulating, I feel the same way. Where are the parents? Who are we holding accountable? Our leaders in business are not accountable. Our scientists are not accountable. Our politicians are not accountable. Our governments are not accountable. They have destroyed global wealth. The system is not working. Why not? What can we do to make it work?
The space is already folded. You just need the spice so you can see where before you get there.