Sex does not map onto procreation one-to-one. Even if you discount contraceptives as completely untrustworthy, there are plenty of ways to have sex - both homo- and hetero-sexual - that carry no risk of pregnancy.
Conflating sex with procreation is what various religions have done for much of human history - which is exactly what got us into the 6-billion-plus population mess we've got right now. Please don't perpetuate this idea.
While limiting sex would, necessarily, limit procreation, there are other almost as effective ways of accomplishing the same thing without denying people the enjoyment of sex, or trying to pretend that the human sex drive either doesn't exist or is easily suppressed.
(Well, that and basic economics. In an agrarian society, the ROI for children is high and soon. In a modern industrial society, the ROI for children is much lower - if not negative - and much, much later.)
There is a deep satisfaction to finally nailing down that piece of code, or finally grokking what's going on in that core dump, or putting the finishing touches on your life-size popsicle-stick replica of the Death Star - and I've been able to enjoy all but one of those (I'll let you guess which) - it is really, really no replacement for good sex.
It may be better than the average teenage flopping about and random clumsy poking that the kids are calling sex these days, but it just doesn't compare to the kind of great sex you can have with someone you're comfortable with and care about. Truth be told, there's a similar feeling of achievement to be had when you see that look on your partner's face and know you just rocked her (his, whatever) world. But with the added bonus that it was pretty damn good for you, too.
Which is not to say that you should completely forego the more intellectual achievements in favor of getting it on. But, in my view, a life spent never having good sex is missing something just as much as a life spent never creating anything. You really ought to have both.
Yeah, you got me. My wife frowns on excessive porn viewing, so I have to rely on my imagination, as fuelled by slashdot.;)
More importantly: school of nursing, man, school of nursing. Fantasies about short skirts and funny hats aside, nurses are overwhelmingly women (at least as much as engineers are overwhelmingly men), the median intelligence is above average, and there are plenty of hot ones. Besides, they make damn good money out in the real world.
Tangentially, I was on my honeymoon in the UK last month. At the end of our trip (I think the last night, actually, in a cheap hotel near Heathrow), we caught the show "Embarassing Illness" on television. I do not, unfortunately, recall which station it was on.
Regardless - aside from the anal warts*, yeast-infected ears, and explosive, abnormally stinky diarrhea, the show did a segment on STDs. They tested a bunch of twenty-somethings from a night club for an STD (I believe gonorrhea, but I might be misremembering), and found that twenty percent of them were infected; double the (claimed by that show) national average. Obviously, it wasn't a controlled study, and I don't know anything about the lifestyles of these people, but that still seemed shockingly high to me, even amongst a set who self-select for more casual sex than the population at large. Judging by their faces, they found it surprising, too.
Particularly entertaining was the chap who explained that he found it scary; it was like there were people running around infecting other people who wouldn't even know it, it might get out of control and infect everyone! To which my response was, roughly: well, yes - it's called an STD.
(And why the fuck would you go on TV with your case of anal warts?!? Listening to the news over there, I heard some pretty scary stats about the availability of non-critical health care, but is it really so bad that displaying your anal warts on national TV is a reasonable option?)
Well, as it turns out: "being on campus with 30,000 other students" and "being on campus with 15,000 other young women" don't actually mean the same thing, whether or not you can presume that roughly half of those 30,000 comprises young women.
I was thinking you meant what you said, and you were on campus with 15,000 other young women, bemoaning your ongoing virginity.
Alternatively, I was thinking you had humorously erred in your sentence construction such that I could take advantage of the mishap in a mildly comedic fashion.
Seriously, though, to be here on campus with 15,000 other young women and still a virgin
Which just goes to show - regardless of what those Wild Co-eds On Spring Break Woo-Hoo! videos seem to show, it's just as hard to get some if you're a lesbian.
Out of curiosity, which AT&T IDC do you use? We're operating out of their Lisle, IL building, and I know exactly what you mean about following their own power/cooling procedures (of course, when they're up against the wall on power and cooling, whose contracts do you think they breach first? Google's, eBay's, or the 2200-employee accounting firm leasing a five-rack cage?)
Not that power and cooling SOP is the only victim - we were down for a cage move this last weekend; most of the times we walked into the building, the joker working the desk didn't even ask to see our IDs and didn't bat an eye when we piggybacked two people through the mantrap.
That's the most insightful thing I've seen on/. in a long time; thank you for that.
That's the part everyone missed/is still missing post-9/11. There's no security that can overcome the compliance of all the people on the plane. The problem wasn't lack of security in boarding, or lack of air marshals on the plane (which may or may not have helped*), or even easy access to the cockpit.
The problem, as you state, was that everyone from the passengers through the captain was trained to do what the hijackers wanted. The (presumed) worst-case scenario was they'd all have a frightening three months in Tehran, then they'd all get to go home.
That is no longer the presumption; that attack will never work again. Flight 93 demonstrates that perfectly well. I imagine the group of people most irate at the 9/11 hijackers are all the other organizations who were thinking about hijacking a plane in the more traditional fashion; now they can't.
All the new tightening of security is, literally, meaningless. Boxcutters weren't the problem; the attackers having a scheme whereby everyone on the plane is helping them was the problem.
*Odds are not bad that the air marshal, even if present, would have judged the risk to the plane of acting against the terrorists not worth it - that's certainly what everyone else judged the case to be.
I think you just proved his point. He didn't say he supported Bush; he didn't even imply it, as far as I can tell. In fact, one could read his actual liberalism into the comment, insofar as he's offended that his team goes all frothy-mouthed whenever anyone mentions Bush.
But feel free to keep spitting out accusations, and making liberals everywhere look like raving lunatics.
Of course I realize that, to you, this post is clear proof I'm a neo-Nazi fascist authoritarian statist bent on imposing my right-wing religious creed upon the rest of the world by trampling my way to power on the back of the honest proletariat.
"it only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea."
I don't think you understand that quote, or you wouldn't be using it. Unless you're using it to ridicule it, but I didn't get that from your post.
The quote claims the country is becoming more liberal as time goes on, such that what was "liberal" in 1950 is considered "conservative" in 1970. You seem to be ignoring the "without changing a single idea" portion of the sentence.
Hyphens are easy to use well, as in "short-sighted," or (not often applicable online) when a word will not fit on the current line.
Em dashes (or em rules, depending on to whom you're speaking) are indeed a little trickier, but they aren't exactly NP-hard. The em dash can be thought of as a pause in the sentence, stronger than a comma, but weaker than a parentheses. One wouldn't be far off base thinking of it as similar to a colon - though the two aren't perfectly interchangeable, of course.
Frankly, I don't see a problem with the use of the em dash in the submission.
On the other hand, you're right about the overall quality of the submission. "Elucidate" is far from a necessary word choice; one could even argue it's not even the right word to begin with. The ambiguous predicate clause, which seems to say the users shouldn't elucidate which are superfluous is very poorly written.
Your suggestion is much better, except that it should be: "In the authors' opinion, users should deregister all unnecessary URIs. They do not, however, give instructions on how to do so."
(By preference, I would have kept it as one sentence separated by a semicolon, but I have an illicit love affair with sentences that are too complex; I have a peculiar weakness for the semicolon in particular)
First: price/service competition works well in a competitive market. For most consumers, the market is highly non-competitive; they are faced with two choices of provider (BigTelCo or BigCableCo).
Second: it's not really the last-mile ISPs that are the worry with this, it's the upstream providers. If Level3 decides to implement DPI, there's nothing you can do about it. It's essentially impossible for you to make sure none of your packets route across Level3's network.
One can hope that the availability of an additional revenue stream will allow for the creation of more (or better) content, given more money available for development.
You're right, though, that we probably won't see prices drop. After all, once you know people will pay $60/game, why would you charge less than that?
A) There probably isn't any way for you to see if your ISP is doing this.
B) Even if you could, it doesn't matter. You may be able to switch your last-mile provider, but you probably can't switch their upstream provider. It's the upstream/backbone providers who will be racing to do this.
Basically, if providers are doing this, you're hosed. It's going to be real, real difficult for you to somehow make sure your traffic doesn't route across Level3's (or Cogent's, or whomever's) network at any point.
ISPs don't have common carrier status. They're "information services." They've historically fought getting common carrier status, because they believe it would subject them to a different set of rules; the ones pertaining to telecommunications common carriers (as distinct from seaway common carriers, railway common carriers, etc).
This is a questionable belief, since there isn't necessarily any equality between "common carrier" and "telecom provider," but it's the reasoning, anyway.
Basically, AT&T (the phone company) is a common carrier. AT&T (the ISP) is not.
(that's one of the greatest episodes - not just because the movie re-uses old BSG props, but because it's the best "wrong name" gag implementation in all of entertainment, ever)
I'm not normally one to kvetch if some device isn't perfectly tailored to the disabled - and the iPhone is a perfect example. No, a blind person can't effectively use it, but that same blind person can acquire another device that mimics the essential functionality.
With an elevator, though, if you get rid of braille and tactile buttons, you've essentially prevented a blind person from reaching the upper floors of the building. There isn't a feasible alternative to the elevator to get from the lobby to the 20th floor.
Slashdot Mirror
coëxist? Is that similar to anæsthetic, insofar as it's the correct British and/or obsolete spelling of the word?
Wow.
Thanks for that.
Your assumption that I'm not religious is an interesting one, insofar as it's completely wrong. Roman Catholic, specifically. But thanks for playing.
Sex does not map onto procreation one-to-one. Even if you discount contraceptives as completely untrustworthy, there are plenty of ways to have sex - both homo- and hetero-sexual - that carry no risk of pregnancy.
Conflating sex with procreation is what various religions have done for much of human history - which is exactly what got us into the 6-billion-plus population mess we've got right now. Please don't perpetuate this idea.
While limiting sex would, necessarily, limit procreation, there are other almost as effective ways of accomplishing the same thing without denying people the enjoyment of sex, or trying to pretend that the human sex drive either doesn't exist or is easily suppressed.
(Well, that and basic economics. In an agrarian society, the ROI for children is high and soon. In a modern industrial society, the ROI for children is much lower - if not negative - and much, much later.)
Um...
There is a deep satisfaction to finally nailing down that piece of code, or finally grokking what's going on in that core dump, or putting the finishing touches on your life-size popsicle-stick replica of the Death Star - and I've been able to enjoy all but one of those (I'll let you guess which) - it is really, really no replacement for good sex.
It may be better than the average teenage flopping about and random clumsy poking that the kids are calling sex these days, but it just doesn't compare to the kind of great sex you can have with someone you're comfortable with and care about. Truth be told, there's a similar feeling of achievement to be had when you see that look on your partner's face and know you just rocked her (his, whatever) world. But with the added bonus that it was pretty damn good for you, too.
Which is not to say that you should completely forego the more intellectual achievements in favor of getting it on. But, in my view, a life spent never having good sex is missing something just as much as a life spent never creating anything. You really ought to have both.
Yeah, you got me. My wife frowns on excessive porn viewing, so I have to rely on my imagination, as fuelled by slashdot. ;)
More importantly: school of nursing, man, school of nursing. Fantasies about short skirts and funny hats aside, nurses are overwhelmingly women (at least as much as engineers are overwhelmingly men), the median intelligence is above average, and there are plenty of hot ones. Besides, they make damn good money out in the real world.
Tangentially, I was on my honeymoon in the UK last month. At the end of our trip (I think the last night, actually, in a cheap hotel near Heathrow), we caught the show "Embarassing Illness" on television. I do not, unfortunately, recall which station it was on.
Regardless - aside from the anal warts*, yeast-infected ears, and explosive, abnormally stinky diarrhea, the show did a segment on STDs. They tested a bunch of twenty-somethings from a night club for an STD (I believe gonorrhea, but I might be misremembering), and found that twenty percent of them were infected; double the (claimed by that show) national average. Obviously, it wasn't a controlled study, and I don't know anything about the lifestyles of these people, but that still seemed shockingly high to me, even amongst a set who self-select for more casual sex than the population at large. Judging by their faces, they found it surprising, too.
Particularly entertaining was the chap who explained that he found it scary; it was like there were people running around infecting other people who wouldn't even know it, it might get out of control and infect everyone! To which my response was, roughly: well, yes - it's called an STD.
(And why the fuck would you go on TV with your case of anal warts?!? Listening to the news over there, I heard some pretty scary stats about the availability of non-critical health care, but is it really so bad that displaying your anal warts on national TV is a reasonable option?)
Well, as it turns out: "being on campus with 30,000 other students" and "being on campus with 15,000 other young women" don't actually mean the same thing, whether or not you can presume that roughly half of those 30,000 comprises young women.
I was thinking you meant what you said, and you were on campus with 15,000 other young women, bemoaning your ongoing virginity.
Alternatively, I was thinking you had humorously erred in your sentence construction such that I could take advantage of the mishap in a mildly comedic fashion.
You decide.
Seriously, though, to be here on campus with 15,000 other young women and still a virgin
Which just goes to show - regardless of what those Wild Co-eds On Spring Break Woo-Hoo! videos seem to show, it's just as hard to get some if you're a lesbian.
This is slashdot we're talking about.
The poll needs to start at 19, and go to at least 25.
And no, I'm not only saying this because I was a virgin until 23.
Wiii.
Wrong. Nintendo's next game console will clearly be called "Biiver".
Out of curiosity, which AT&T IDC do you use? We're operating out of their Lisle, IL building, and I know exactly what you mean about following their own power/cooling procedures (of course, when they're up against the wall on power and cooling, whose contracts do you think they breach first? Google's, eBay's, or the 2200-employee accounting firm leasing a five-rack cage?)
Not that power and cooling SOP is the only victim - we were down for a cage move this last weekend; most of the times we walked into the building, the joker working the desk didn't even ask to see our IDs and didn't bat an eye when we piggybacked two people through the mantrap.
That's the most insightful thing I've seen on /. in a long time; thank you for that.
That's the part everyone missed/is still missing post-9/11. There's no security that can overcome the compliance of all the people on the plane. The problem wasn't lack of security in boarding, or lack of air marshals on the plane (which may or may not have helped*), or even easy access to the cockpit.
The problem, as you state, was that everyone from the passengers through the captain was trained to do what the hijackers wanted. The (presumed) worst-case scenario was they'd all have a frightening three months in Tehran, then they'd all get to go home.
That is no longer the presumption; that attack will never work again. Flight 93 demonstrates that perfectly well. I imagine the group of people most irate at the 9/11 hijackers are all the other organizations who were thinking about hijacking a plane in the more traditional fashion; now they can't.
All the new tightening of security is, literally, meaningless. Boxcutters weren't the problem; the attackers having a scheme whereby everyone on the plane is helping them was the problem.
*Odds are not bad that the air marshal, even if present, would have judged the risk to the plane of acting against the terrorists not worth it - that's certainly what everyone else judged the case to be.
I think you just proved his point. He didn't say he supported Bush; he didn't even imply it, as far as I can tell. In fact, one could read his actual liberalism into the comment, insofar as he's offended that his team goes all frothy-mouthed whenever anyone mentions Bush.
But feel free to keep spitting out accusations, and making liberals everywhere look like raving lunatics.
Of course I realize that, to you, this post is clear proof I'm a neo-Nazi fascist authoritarian statist bent on imposing my right-wing religious creed upon the rest of the world by trampling my way to power on the back of the honest proletariat.
Not until, at least, we have resolved the issue of Green vs Purple debate.
PURPLE!
"it only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea."
I don't think you understand that quote, or you wouldn't be using it. Unless you're using it to ridicule it, but I didn't get that from your post.
The quote claims the country is becoming more liberal as time goes on, such that what was "liberal" in 1950 is considered "conservative" in 1970. You seem to be ignoring the "without changing a single idea" portion of the sentence.
Hyphens are easy to use well, as in "short-sighted," or (not often applicable online) when a word will not fit on the current line.
Em dashes (or em rules, depending on to whom you're speaking) are indeed a little trickier, but they aren't exactly NP-hard. The em dash can be thought of as a pause in the sentence, stronger than a comma, but weaker than a parentheses. One wouldn't be far off base thinking of it as similar to a colon - though the two aren't perfectly interchangeable, of course.
Frankly, I don't see a problem with the use of the em dash in the submission.
On the other hand, you're right about the overall quality of the submission. "Elucidate" is far from a necessary word choice; one could even argue it's not even the right word to begin with. The ambiguous predicate clause, which seems to say the users shouldn't elucidate which are superfluous is very poorly written.
Your suggestion is much better, except that it should be: "In the authors' opinion, users should deregister all unnecessary URIs. They do not, however, give instructions on how to do so."
(By preference, I would have kept it as one sentence separated by a semicolon, but I have an illicit love affair with sentences that are too complex; I have a peculiar weakness for the semicolon in particular)
Two problems.
First: price/service competition works well in a competitive market. For most consumers, the market is highly non-competitive; they are faced with two choices of provider (BigTelCo or BigCableCo).
Second: it's not really the last-mile ISPs that are the worry with this, it's the upstream providers. If Level3 decides to implement DPI, there's nothing you can do about it. It's essentially impossible for you to make sure none of your packets route across Level3's network.
Cheaper, no, but better, possibly.
One can hope that the availability of an additional revenue stream will allow for the creation of more (or better) content, given more money available for development.
You're right, though, that we probably won't see prices drop. After all, once you know people will pay $60/game, why would you charge less than that?
A) There probably isn't any way for you to see if your ISP is doing this.
B) Even if you could, it doesn't matter. You may be able to switch your last-mile provider, but you probably can't switch their upstream provider. It's the upstream/backbone providers who will be racing to do this.
Basically, if providers are doing this, you're hosed. It's going to be real, real difficult for you to somehow make sure your traffic doesn't route across Level3's (or Cogent's, or whomever's) network at any point.
ISPs don't have common carrier status. They're "information services." They've historically fought getting common carrier status, because they believe it would subject them to a different set of rules; the ones pertaining to telecommunications common carriers (as distinct from seaway common carriers, railway common carriers, etc).
This is a questionable belief, since there isn't necessarily any equality between "common carrier" and "telecom provider," but it's the reasoning, anyway.
Basically, AT&T (the phone company) is a common carrier. AT&T (the ISP) is not.
Also from Phantom Planet:
"I like potatoes!"
Dirk Hardpeck
Butch Deadlift
Blast Thickneck
Lump Beefrock
(that's one of the greatest episodes - not just because the movie re-uses old BSG props, but because it's the best "wrong name" gag implementation in all of entertainment, ever)
Whoops - forgot to mention that the second quote is from The Amazing Transparent Man.
Great line, that one, but the best part of that episode had to be the names...
Big McLargehuge!
Pack Blowfist!
Slab Bulkhead!
Stump Chunkman!
(Are the first few I remember off the top of my head)
Never have I seen the "wrong name" gag taken to such dizzying heights of hilarity.
OTOH, if we're just going all-time great lines:
"Gamera's never seen a mohel" (from one of the Gamera movies, obviously, though I regret to admit I don't recall which)
or
Actor: "Why are you so worried about this box?"
Mike: "Because it doesn't practice safe sex."
Both were "I can't believe they just said that" moments when I saw them.
You're obviously not blind.
I'm not normally one to kvetch if some device isn't perfectly tailored to the disabled - and the iPhone is a perfect example. No, a blind person can't effectively use it, but that same blind person can acquire another device that mimics the essential functionality.
With an elevator, though, if you get rid of braille and tactile buttons, you've essentially prevented a blind person from reaching the upper floors of the building. There isn't a feasible alternative to the elevator to get from the lobby to the 20th floor.