In practice, did it make a damn bit of difference to me whether my official rep took my order or somebody else did? Nope, not really.
Alienware built its reputation on having a specific support group (the "Roswell Team") assigned to each machine it sold, and the techs were both responsive and competent. That level of support created a following of fanatically loyal customers. Then, of course, they were bought by Dell, which proceeded to take a great thing and screw it up in every possible way.
So yeah, it's possible to do it so it does make a difference; it's just that the giant manufacturers don't get why you should.
Now and then someone will think it is clever to ask "Derp, are they not all personal computers? Derp!" in an attempt to sound like, I don't know, some sort of hipster or cool kid something... who the fuck can tell?
[applause] That line has long been one of the most irritating bits of pseudo-cleverness found in tech discussions, and it should be met with mockery and scorn at every opportunity.
So it hasn't occurred to you that maybe our understanding of the biology of DDT might have advanced just a little in the last fifty-plus years? You seem to have this weird obsession with a book published in 1962, and the only credible source you've cited so far is six years older than that! How about you read some more recent sources, and if you have arguments with their observations or analysis, let us know. And by "sources," I mean scientific publications, not echo-chamber blogs. Here's a place to start.
DDT is safe, effective and non-toxic to humans and animals, period.
Jesus H. Christ. First of all, since insects are in fact animals, no insecticide is "non-toxic to animals" by definition. Second, if by "humans and animals" you actually mean "mammals and birds," go back and read the Wikipedia page -- carefully this time, not just cherry-picking lines that you think support your position. If that doesn't convince you, fine, follow the references. DDT cannot by any stretch of the imagination be called non-toxic.
If you want to argue that the public health benefits of DDT spraying outweight the toxicity risk, go right ahead; it's a reasonable debate to have. But by using such a blatant and easily disproved lie as the one I quoted above, you're drastically weakening whatever case you might make.
Wow, the signature list on that letter is like a Who's Who of the worst people in early 21st-century America.
Note to mods: the parent post is not "offtopic." The story isn't about some random guy building a drone, it's about a specific guy building a drone, and just in case you missed the point, the summary links to the Wikipedia article about the guy! That makes who he is, as well as what he does, a fair topic for conversation. My guess is that whoever slapped nomadic's very insightful post with an "offtopic" mod is someone who still thinks the Iraq war was a good idea. If that's the case, then defend your postion (if you can) rather than using a weasel mod.
Because I don't want my 12-year-old daughter to see that definition if she suddenly takes an interest in my disgust at the primary returns.
-1, think of the chiiiildren.
There are plenty of things about politics that are dirtier and more disgusting by far than Dan Savage's mock definition of "Santorum," and you're worried about your kid running into a joke that's probably mild by comparison to what she hears at school every day? Maybe it will make her wonder what a person would have to do to make a large group of people to start using his name like that. Call it a teachable moment.
Nobody gets where they are alone. Everyone relies on the society they live in for support. That's why you don't see people like Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg coming out of Somalia.
No, no, no! Somalia's not like American because it doesn't have enough Jobses and Zuckerbergs! They're the job creators! If Somalians had more of that entrepeneurial spirit, they'd be rich too!
And how much money might be sunk into providing higher-capacity connectivity to those people, only to find that that they don't contribute anything, tovarisch?
A great deal of modern science comes from the practice of alchemy, which begat chemistry and (less directly) biology. And a lot of what alchemists did looked like what modern scientists do: they had laboratories, they did experiments, they weighed and measured and otherwise quantified their results, they developed theories consistent with their observations. Similarly, modern astronomy and much of physics grew out of the work of astrologers, who, although they obviously couldn't experiment on the subjects of their observation, did take precise, repeated measurements of the apparent motions of celestial bodies, and developed mathematically rigorous models with considerable predictive power.
So what distinguishes the alchemist or astrologer from the modern scientist? The sharing of knowledge. Alchemy and astrology spread knowledge, if at all, by the apprenticeship system, in which well-respected practicioners would take on a small number of apprentices, swear them to secrecy, and slowly teach them the secrets of (their particular version of) the art, often with considerable penalties for revealing this knowledge to anyone outside the circle; the apprentices would then do the same in turn. The very idea of anything like the modern system of peer-reviewed, widely disseminated publication would have been anathema to them. The walls started to crumble during the late Renaissance period and were more or less completely down by the mid-eighteenth century, and thus modern science was born.
Since then we've seen incremental improvements, of which the internet and open access -- fought tooth and nail by certain journal publishers, who used to be allies of the scientist's labor of spreading knowledge, but have now become the last gatekeepers of the alchemical worldview -- are among the most recent and the most successful. But the basic idea is centuries old. It's thoroughly tested, and it works, in a way that the old mysticism, for all its occasional brilliance, never could. And any attempt to drag us back to the days of sages locking up their knowledge behind guild walls must be fought tooth and nail, or science itself will be in danger.
Doesn't true freedom include the option to give up that freedom?
For yourself, sure. Not for other people. Militarization of the police doesn't just threaten the freedom of people who agree with it, but everyone else's freedom as well.
Are the juries in East Texas biased, or do the petitioners know that most East Texans are simple, shoot-from-the-hip, straight talking, honest, hard working, family oriented men and women who aren't going to be easily bedazzled by some legalize gobbledygook that Ivy League Yankees like to throw over the heads of their working-class inferiors?
Wow, that's some serious Poe's Law action, right there.
And I guess that "hoist" or the french origin implies being lifted, but that still seems like the wrong way to say it. You aren't really lifted by an explosive as much as ripped apart.
English does the same thing: think of the literal meaning of "blown up." It sounds like a wind lifts you up in the air.
At a guess, in the age of gunpowder bombs, it was actually much more common for people's bodies to be thrown large distances relatively intact.
If you think I'm a right-winger, I invite you check my posting history. As for the views you ascribe to the American right wing, yes, there are a lot of idiots who think like that. But there are at least as many idiots -- and in my view, they're at least as dangerous -- who fail to understand that the military and the police are different institutions with different purposes who have to have different rules. Using military justifications for police procedures, as I said in a reply to another poster, blurs this line, and that is incredibly dangerous.
BTW, the NSA isn't equivalent to MI5/6; if I understand the organization correctly, MI6 is most like our CIA, and we don't really have an MI5 at all, although the FBI comes closest. But we're not really talking about national law enforcement here in any case. On both sides of the Atlantic, most people's interaction with law enforcement is with city police forces. Our local cops don't report to the President; do yours report to the PM?
Actually, I mean "free" as in "having the brains not to throw away our remaining freedom." We've gone a long way down that road already, and the use of military justifications for police procedures is a big part of the problem.
Indeed, and as the AC who replied to you pointed out, we also have a disturbing tendency to turn police forces into paramilitary forces. These are bad things, and those who advocate continuing the trend should be called on it.
I'm well aware that our freedom is dubious. I'm not happy about this, and I would prefer not to see it eroded any further than it already has been. If I overreacted to your post, it's because I think the confusion between cops and soldiers engendered by the War on Drugs, and exacerbated by the War on Terror, is one of the primary threats to whatever freedom we have left, and I tend to snap at any conflation of the two.
And yes, it no doubt makes things more difficult and dangerous for the police to have their communications on an open channel. All other things being equal, I'm all in favor of making things easier and safer for cops -- but all other things are hardly ever equal. Cops have a unique position of trust, far more than soldiers do; they are the only group of people who are routinely armed by the state (in the generic sense of the word "state," not necessarily with reference to US States) and sent out among the general population with the authority to use deadly force. The first applies to soldiers, the second does not. It would be great if all cops lived up to that trust, and in fact most of them do, but we know damned well that some of them don't. Because of this, the public's interest in keeping police communication in the clear far outweighs the police's interest in keeping their communications secret.
Dear God. I'll make Sean Carrol a deal: I will never again talk in public about physics, as long as he agrees never again to talk in public about statistics. The sheer badness of that post makes my head want to go all splodey.
This is fine advice for every programmer working in every programming language, and I really, really wish more people would follow it. I've noted that the people who say "it doesn't matter what language you use" are among the worst for trying to write code in every language that looks like it belongs in whatever language they learned first.
Slashdot Mirror
In practice, did it make a damn bit of difference to me whether my official rep took my order or somebody else did? Nope, not really.
Alienware built its reputation on having a specific support group (the "Roswell Team") assigned to each machine it sold, and the techs were both responsive and competent. That level of support created a following of fanatically loyal customers. Then, of course, they were bought by Dell, which proceeded to take a great thing and screw it up in every possible way.
So yeah, it's possible to do it so it does make a difference; it's just that the giant manufacturers don't get why you should.
Now and then someone will think it is clever to ask "Derp, are they not all personal computers? Derp!" in an attempt to sound like, I don't know, some sort of hipster or cool kid something... who the fuck can tell?
[applause] That line has long been one of the most irritating bits of pseudo-cleverness found in tech discussions, and it should be met with mockery and scorn at every opportunity.
No, actually, we could pretty much all read it.
So it hasn't occurred to you that maybe our understanding of the biology of DDT might have advanced just a little in the last fifty-plus years? You seem to have this weird obsession with a book published in 1962, and the only credible source you've cited so far is six years older than that! How about you read some more recent sources, and if you have arguments with their observations or analysis, let us know. And by "sources," I mean scientific publications, not echo-chamber blogs. Here's a place to start.
DDT is safe, effective and non-toxic to humans and animals, period.
Jesus H. Christ. First of all, since insects are in fact animals, no insecticide is "non-toxic to animals" by definition. Second, if by "humans and animals" you actually mean "mammals and birds," go back and read the Wikipedia page -- carefully this time, not just cherry-picking lines that you think support your position. If that doesn't convince you, fine, follow the references. DDT cannot by any stretch of the imagination be called non-toxic.
If you want to argue that the public health benefits of DDT spraying outweight the toxicity risk, go right ahead; it's a reasonable debate to have. But by using such a blatant and easily disproved lie as the one I quoted above, you're drastically weakening whatever case you might make.
Wow, the signature list on that letter is like a Who's Who of the worst people in early 21st-century America.
Note to mods: the parent post is not "offtopic." The story isn't about some random guy building a drone, it's about a specific guy building a drone, and just in case you missed the point, the summary links to the Wikipedia article about the guy! That makes who he is, as well as what he does, a fair topic for conversation. My guess is that whoever slapped nomadic's very insightful post with an "offtopic" mod is someone who still thinks the Iraq war was a good idea. If that's the case, then defend your postion (if you can) rather than using a weasel mod.
Because I don't want my 12-year-old daughter to see that definition if she suddenly takes an interest in my disgust at the primary returns.
-1, think of the chiiiildren.
There are plenty of things about politics that are dirtier and more disgusting by far than Dan Savage's mock definition of "Santorum," and you're worried about your kid running into a joke that's probably mild by comparison to what she hears at school every day? Maybe it will make her wonder what a person would have to do to make a large group of people to start using his name like that. Call it a teachable moment.
Nobody gets where they are alone. Everyone relies on the society they live in for support. That's why you don't see people like Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg coming out of Somalia.
No, no, no! Somalia's not like American because it doesn't have enough Jobses and Zuckerbergs! They're the job creators! If Somalians had more of that entrepeneurial spirit, they'd be rich too!
And how much money might be sunk into providing higher-capacity connectivity to those people, only to find that that they don't contribute anything, tovarisch?
Red Godwin.
Caution is good. Paranoia isn't. And the best people to determine which is which are the scientists working on the problem themselves.
nope, just Luddite paranoia and negativity
Well, thanks for being honest. ;)
and I am a fairly good judge of human nature
People who say things like that generally seem to mean, "I assume all people are just like me."
A great deal of modern science comes from the practice of alchemy, which begat chemistry and (less directly) biology. And a lot of what alchemists did looked like what modern scientists do: they had laboratories, they did experiments, they weighed and measured and otherwise quantified their results, they developed theories consistent with their observations. Similarly, modern astronomy and much of physics grew out of the work of astrologers, who, although they obviously couldn't experiment on the subjects of their observation, did take precise, repeated measurements of the apparent motions of celestial bodies, and developed mathematically rigorous models with considerable predictive power.
So what distinguishes the alchemist or astrologer from the modern scientist? The sharing of knowledge. Alchemy and astrology spread knowledge, if at all, by the apprenticeship system, in which well-respected practicioners would take on a small number of apprentices, swear them to secrecy, and slowly teach them the secrets of (their particular version of) the art, often with considerable penalties for revealing this knowledge to anyone outside the circle; the apprentices would then do the same in turn. The very idea of anything like the modern system of peer-reviewed, widely disseminated publication would have been anathema to them. The walls started to crumble during the late Renaissance period and were more or less completely down by the mid-eighteenth century, and thus modern science was born.
Since then we've seen incremental improvements, of which the internet and open access -- fought tooth and nail by certain journal publishers, who used to be allies of the scientist's labor of spreading knowledge, but have now become the last gatekeepers of the alchemical worldview -- are among the most recent and the most successful. But the basic idea is centuries old. It's thoroughly tested, and it works, in a way that the old mysticism, for all its occasional brilliance, never could. And any attempt to drag us back to the days of sages locking up their knowledge behind guild walls must be fought tooth and nail, or science itself will be in danger.
Do you have any support for your assertion, other than Luddite paranoia?
Doesn't true freedom include the option to give up that freedom?
For yourself, sure. Not for other people. Militarization of the police doesn't just threaten the freedom of people who agree with it, but everyone else's freedom as well.
Are the juries in East Texas biased, or do the petitioners know that most East Texans are simple, shoot-from-the-hip, straight talking, honest, hard working, family oriented men and women who aren't going to be easily bedazzled by some legalize gobbledygook that Ivy League Yankees like to throw over the heads of their working-class inferiors?
Wow, that's some serious Poe's Law action, right there.
And I guess that "hoist" or the french origin implies being lifted, but that still seems like the wrong way to say it. You aren't really lifted by an explosive as much as ripped apart.
English does the same thing: think of the literal meaning of "blown up." It sounds like a wind lifts you up in the air.
At a guess, in the age of gunpowder bombs, it was actually much more common for people's bodies to be thrown large distances relatively intact.
If you think I'm a right-winger, I invite you check my posting history. As for the views you ascribe to the American right wing, yes, there are a lot of idiots who think like that. But there are at least as many idiots -- and in my view, they're at least as dangerous -- who fail to understand that the military and the police are different institutions with different purposes who have to have different rules. Using military justifications for police procedures, as I said in a reply to another poster, blurs this line, and that is incredibly dangerous.
BTW, the NSA isn't equivalent to MI5/6; if I understand the organization correctly, MI6 is most like our CIA, and we don't really have an MI5 at all, although the FBI comes closest. But we're not really talking about national law enforcement here in any case. On both sides of the Atlantic, most people's interaction with law enforcement is with city police forces. Our local cops don't report to the President; do yours report to the PM?
Actually, I mean "free" as in "having the brains not to throw away our remaining freedom." We've gone a long way down that road already, and the use of military justifications for police procedures is a big part of the problem.
Indeed, and as the AC who replied to you pointed out, we also have a disturbing tendency to turn police forces into paramilitary forces. These are bad things, and those who advocate continuing the trend should be called on it.
Sorry, your .sig seemed very American to me.
I'm well aware that our freedom is dubious. I'm not happy about this, and I would prefer not to see it eroded any further than it already has been. If I overreacted to your post, it's because I think the confusion between cops and soldiers engendered by the War on Drugs, and exacerbated by the War on Terror, is one of the primary threats to whatever freedom we have left, and I tend to snap at any conflation of the two.
And yes, it no doubt makes things more difficult and dangerous for the police to have their communications on an open channel. All other things being equal, I'm all in favor of making things easier and safer for cops -- but all other things are hardly ever equal. Cops have a unique position of trust, far more than soldiers do; they are the only group of people who are routinely armed by the state (in the generic sense of the word "state," not necessarily with reference to US States) and sent out among the general population with the authority to use deadly force. The first applies to soldiers, the second does not. It would be great if all cops lived up to that trust, and in fact most of them do, but we know damned well that some of them don't. Because of this, the public's interest in keeping police communication in the clear far outweighs the police's interest in keeping their communications secret.
"X is something only Bad Guys do. We're Good Guys, so clearly whatever we're doing, it's not X. X is Bad, and we're Good!"
This kind of thinking can be applied to almost any grotesque act, and it's frightening how often it happens.
You expect police tactical communications to be public?
Yes.
Do you expect military comms to be in the clear as well, for the sake of transparency?
No.
If you can't understand the difference between these two, then GTFO of the Land of the Free.
Dear God. I'll make Sean Carrol a deal: I will never again talk in public about physics, as long as he agrees never again to talk in public about statistics. The sheer badness of that post makes my head want to go all splodey.
This is fine advice for every programmer working in every programming language, and I really, really wish more people would follow it. I've noted that the people who say "it doesn't matter what language you use" are among the worst for trying to write code in every language that looks like it belongs in whatever language they learned first.
Heh, good point.