I ran the Windows 7 RC on my home computer and Windows Vista Professional on my work computer for around 9 months. Both machines were roughly the same spec and purchased at the same time. Vista was an absolute hog, while Windows 7 felt fairly snappy and responsive. The free RC trial wasn't enough to convince me to pay $130 for an OEM license, but it was enough to convince me that Windows 7 is at least as good as Ubuntu for a general home computing / gaming platform.
Exactly. I'd let my coffee habit build up to 3-4 strong cups a day, and when it stopped helping me stay awake at my boring-ass old job, I quit. Friday I was drinking coffee, Monday I just didn't have any. By Tuesday I had a shit of a headache that lasted a couple of days. By the end of the week I was fine, though. Now I'll have maybe 2-3 cups of tea a day if that.
and disagree. Education: yes. Using erowid as a single source: definitely not.
Absolutely. When I had my first (and only) 'proper' experience with cannabis. I'd tried it before (in countries where it was legal) and it'd had no effect whatsoever. This time I had some strong psychoactive effects and was curious to see whether my experience was typical. All I could find on erowid was the usual vanilla crap about "gives a general sense of wellbeing" and "mild dissociative effects", and a bunch of personal accounts of people who thought they'd had some huge meaningful revelation, and that weed somehow held the universe together at a sub-atomic level.
(For what it's worth, my experience was that it messed with about about the last 10-20 seconds of my short term memory, leading to me feeling very disoriented and paranoid that I was acting weird. Apparently I just sat there for a couple of hours. It also gave me some mild open- and closed-eye visuals, which were fun but in no way good enough to justify the rest of the effects.)
You say that like having a full time job, financial success, and parental status has anything to do with whether or not one has a dependency issue.
You say that like repeatedly indulging in any activity, even if doing so doesn't impact negatively on the rest of your life, is an indication of 'dependence' on that activity, rather than simply indication of a preference for a particular recreational activity.
The article you linked is crazy.
“People can be dependent and not have abuse problems at all. They’re successful students. They’re good parents, good workers. They watch their weight. They go to the gym. Then they go home and have four martinis or two bottles of wine. Are they alcoholics? You bet.”
High-functioning alcoholics also may not be physically addicted to alcohol, abstaining for days or weeks without suffering withdrawal symptoms.
Let's get this straight - we're talking about someone who likes occasionally drinking to excess, but can stop any time they want, can go weeks without ever feeling that they "need" a drink, and whose drinking doesn't impact on their professional or social lives. That's not an alcoholic. That's someone who enjoys getting drunk.
The defining factor of any addict, alcoholism included, is the inability to stop. Someone who can reliably, repeatably demonstrate their independence from a substance is NOT an addict. The NYT article is merely a sensationalist attempt to drum up a moral panic and sell more books and rehab therapy.
Geez..what happened to the good old days in the late 70's, when people would just light up a doobie and listen to Pink Floyd on the headphones...?
:)
Nothing at all happened to it. My money's on these kids spliffing up and then when they got busted... "no mum it's... the MUSIC, I'm... just listening to... this music, I haven't been taking... drugs or anything... it's the music that smells like weed... it's DRUG MUSIC".
I think the implication is that once you've gathered the stuff and made a big block of molten plastic, it's trivial and very cheap to turn it into a flotation tank. It's the initial manufacturing step that's the hard bit, and if (big 'if', I agree) you can make it in the first place, you might as well make it into real estate instead of boat anchors.
A study of marine debris near the center of the gyre as part of the Southern California Water Research Project found 334,271 pieces of plastic per square kilometer with a weight of 5.1 kilograms per square kilometer.[3]. If this 11.2 lb/km found near the center were the same throughout its estimated 20 million square kilometers expanse, the gyre would contain 225 million pounds or 113,000 tons of plastic waste. This is less than some estimates of from three to 100 million tons of plastic in the gyre.
(a) Yes it is. Or rather, it occupies one: The North Pacific Gyre.
(b) Yes they are. According to the first link in TFA:
The tiny pieces of plastic are “the size of a grain of rice”, small enough to be eaten by fish. Chemicals, like “PCBs, DDT, and other toxins” that don’t dissolve in water are soaked up by the plastic. Those toxic chemicals get ingested by the fish eating the tiny pieces of plastic. Those fish are eaten by bigger fish that absorb the chemicals from the smaller fish. Ultimately, the contaminated fish may wind up on your dinner tables. We already know how dangerous these chemicals can be when ingested.
(c) If the plastic is indeed spread throughout the top several meters, then yes, there is.
Seems more sensible to make it all heavier than water and sink it. Once it's on the bottom natural sedimentation processes will bury it for good.
Why would you do that when, for equal effort, you could make a self-sustaining self-powering island from it? One that you can then sell or lease out real-estate on for ridiculous prices, because it's the only remaining unpopulated temperate coastline in the world?
Despite the fact that no "real" fix was ever released, reports of unintended acceleration subsided. Problems like this don't fix themselves unless there was really no problem to begin with.
There're two different things here. There's the (very rare) real problem, which I doubt IS fixed, although the software update you mention could well have provided a workaround. Then there's the 'me too' effect where anyone who's mistakenly stepped on the accelerator rather than the brake (honestly, do people really do this?!) suddenly sees a way to shift the blame.
For one thing, with a placebo fix, the likelihood of weasels trying to blame the car subsides. For another thing, if the problem is actually a very rare, unanticipated failure mode in the accelerator position sensor, the "full brake plus full accelerator equals full reset" software update would have fixed it. People make noise when they get into a car crash because the car accelerates suddenly on its own and won't stop. People probably grumble to their friends but don't bother filing an official report when their car suddenly accelerates, they stomp on the brake pedal, and it immediately stops.
Are you the dude whose laptop was stolen and the police didn't care?:P Maybe report that you had (legally, purchased on iTunes) MP3s on it, and that they PIRATED your MUSIC?:P
In circles of "Nerds" this happens all the time and people get along swimmingly. Then some emotional girl comes along and one guy wants to mount her and another gets jealous and the shit hits the fan because the girl doesn't know what the fuck she wants because she's "only in college" nevermind the fact that she is a legal consenting adult at this point and needs to take responsibility for her own fucking life and make some damn decisions every now and then for herself!
+1 goddamn truth. It's all simple and logical until glands get involved.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but you say social skills aren't hard to learn. Speaking as someone with Asperger's syndrome... HOW!? I've been trying for 38 years, and still seem to be a complete failure.
Speaking as someone with a healthy social life and ostensibly good social skills and who used to check a lot of the boxes for Aspergers - you have to throw yourself in at the deep end. I didn't really get over my inability to talk to people until I went traveling, and spent a lot of time on my own in foreign countries, where I had to talk to many random people a day just to survive. Like many traits, social ability needs to be exercised if you want to improve it. I basically forced myself to exercise it, and the end result was a permanent improvement in my ability to relate to other humans.
I don't know, maybe even this won't work for you. If you're truly, diagnosably afflicted with Aspergers, you may not have the hardware required for this stuff, just like some people are born without, say, legs. In that case, telling you to 'just learn social skills' is like telling someone born with no legs to 'just practice running'.
You both completely failed at learning jack, and resorted to the threat of violence. NERD FAIL.
Learn social skills. THAT'S the lesson. They aren't hard and a handful of social cues makes all the difference.
And you completely fail to account for the fact that no matter HOW good your social skills are, sometimes you will be victimised for reasons beyond your control. You'll have to move schools, for instance, and the other kids will throw you to the dogs to save themselves. You'll get stuck in a class with kids who are truly damaged and can't be reasoned with short of violence. Some social, physical or racial factor will turn kids against you. The one thing that the pack mentality needs is an outsider to hate.
Once you've been put in this situation, you can't recover. None of the other kids will break ranks for fear of being victimised themselves. If the population is big enough you can find other outsiders, but even then, there's a chance that they'll see abusing you as a stepping stone to acceptance in the eyes of the other kids. The only way out is to start again in a new social environment. That's why, for instance, I'll make sure my kids are there on the first day/week of school, so they're only new while everyone else is too.
That's because soft arts are stupid for showing off. They give you zero attacks; everything in Aikido is reactive. All an attacker has from training is how to submit and fall without getting hurt; the attacker is completely powerless.
Funny, I think they're the best for showing off, purely for the same reason. Then again, I'm thinking of it in terms of some douche taking a swing in a bar, not in terms of a montage of flashy routines on a mat with silk drapes around it and soft oriental music playing.:)
I'm still tossing up what martial art to study, I'll probably go back to Wing Chun kung fu, purely because it generalises well to dual wielding whatever implements come to hand, and that's badass. But I love the aesthetic of soft martial arts, so maybe I'll try something new.
So you're saying, basically, that you need to increase your 'emotion', intelligence, or wisdom. I guess that makes sense, we can spend additional stat points when we gain enough experience to 'level up'. And you thought D&D was an escape from the real world, not just a model of it!:)
Maybe it's because I went to a private school, but I didn't see this dynamic, the nerds were not bothered they hung out with everyone else there wasn't much of a problem.
Where did you go to school? I'll send my kids there... then again your sentence here needs more commas so maybe not.:P
I had a shit of a time in primary school, and at the time I thought it was just because I was badly defective in some way. It wasn't until I got to highschool that I realised I'd just had the bad luck to be in 'one of those years' where every other kid apart from me was a little turd. Highschool was a bit better, but only a bit. Children aren't complete people yet, they're half-animals who are just learning to be people. If you're unlucky enough not to have an instinctive understanding of pack behaviour then you're going to get crucified until either you learn to fight them off, or they grow up enough to start being civil.
I have a friend who put all his points in dexies and now hes like really nervous and energetic and he dont stop talking and moving around all the time and hes like really active I dont think dexies are as good as you think and he certainly doesnt get to touch boobs.
We agree on the first point - that's what I was trying to convey with the "or if they're not, they rapidly become huge hits" part. As for the second - I contend that 'massively popular' will ultimately entail commercial success, which is the most basic, all-encompassing measure of overall quality. Not specifically technical excellence, but overall fitness. A shitty piece of code which nonetheless more adequately fulfills a business requirement than any other piece of code is, by this holistic definition, 'better'.
I didn't say "absolute smash hit unlike the flop that it was". I'm well aware that the movie is very successful. I was just saying that an Attenborough-style documentary about the human tech and the ecosystem of Pandora would be more interesting (to me, at least) than the movie was. I'd submit that it's the vividly imagined world and the possibilities that consciousness uploading affords that form the basis for the movie's success.
Where are my mod points when I need 'em? It doesn't matter whether some welfare- or parent-supported douche thinks they're the foremost authority on something. Ultimately, how successful and effective something is is the ultimate measure of quality. Just like the way low-budget arthouse films are generally absolutely crap (or if they're not, they rapidly become huge hits, reinforcing the "if it's popular then it's good, and if it's good it will be popular" theme).
It's the same reason that no matter how much your hacker's aesthetics cringe at using Microsoft Office, it's still used by so many businesses. It gets the job done with less fuss than anything else, and results in a better rate of return on investment, therefore however much you, personally, dislike it - it IS better.
If they just cut out the character development and anvilicious Pocahontas-meets-Fern-Gully storyline, and instead added a voiceover by Richard Attenborough, it'd be an absolute smash hit.
Slashdot Mirror
I ran the Windows 7 RC on my home computer and Windows Vista Professional on my work computer for around 9 months. Both machines were roughly the same spec and purchased at the same time. Vista was an absolute hog, while Windows 7 felt fairly snappy and responsive. The free RC trial wasn't enough to convince me to pay $130 for an OEM license, but it was enough to convince me that Windows 7 is at least as good as Ubuntu for a general home computing / gaming platform.
Really? Can you find a bug in this... #include <stdio.h> int main() {
int main(int argc, void **argv) {
Exactly. I'd let my coffee habit build up to 3-4 strong cups a day, and when it stopped helping me stay awake at my boring-ass old job, I quit. Friday I was drinking coffee, Monday I just didn't have any. By Tuesday I had a shit of a headache that lasted a couple of days. By the end of the week I was fine, though. Now I'll have maybe 2-3 cups of tea a day if that.
and disagree. Education: yes. Using erowid as a single source: definitely not.
Absolutely. When I had my first (and only) 'proper' experience with cannabis. I'd tried it before (in countries where it was legal) and it'd had no effect whatsoever. This time I had some strong psychoactive effects and was curious to see whether my experience was typical. All I could find on erowid was the usual vanilla crap about "gives a general sense of wellbeing" and "mild dissociative effects", and a bunch of personal accounts of people who thought they'd had some huge meaningful revelation, and that weed somehow held the universe together at a sub-atomic level.
(For what it's worth, my experience was that it messed with about about the last 10-20 seconds of my short term memory, leading to me feeling very disoriented and paranoid that I was acting weird. Apparently I just sat there for a couple of hours. It also gave me some mild open- and closed-eye visuals, which were fun but in no way good enough to justify the rest of the effects.)
You say that like having a full time job, financial success, and parental status has anything to do with whether or not one has a dependency issue.
You say that like repeatedly indulging in any activity, even if doing so doesn't impact negatively on the rest of your life, is an indication of 'dependence' on that activity, rather than simply indication of a preference for a particular recreational activity.
The article you linked is crazy.
“People can be dependent and not have abuse problems at all. They’re successful students. They’re good parents, good workers. They watch their weight. They go to the gym. Then they go home and have four martinis or two bottles of wine. Are they alcoholics? You bet.”
High-functioning alcoholics also may not be physically addicted to alcohol, abstaining for days or weeks without suffering withdrawal symptoms.
Let's get this straight - we're talking about someone who likes occasionally drinking to excess, but can stop any time they want, can go weeks without ever feeling that they "need" a drink, and whose drinking doesn't impact on their professional or social lives. That's not an alcoholic. That's someone who enjoys getting drunk.
The defining factor of any addict, alcoholism included, is the inability to stop. Someone who can reliably, repeatably demonstrate their independence from a substance is NOT an addict. The NYT article is merely a sensationalist attempt to drum up a moral panic and sell more books and rehab therapy.
Geez..what happened to the good old days in the late 70's, when people would just light up a doobie and listen to Pink Floyd on the headphones...?
Nothing at all happened to it. My money's on these kids spliffing up and then when they got busted... "no mum it's... the MUSIC, I'm ... just listening to... this music, I haven't been taking... drugs or anything... it's the music that smells like weed... it's DRUG MUSIC".
I think the implication is that once you've gathered the stuff and made a big block of molten plastic, it's trivial and very cheap to turn it into a flotation tank. It's the initial manufacturing step that's the hard bit, and if (big 'if', I agree) you can make it in the first place, you might as well make it into real estate instead of boat anchors.
A study of marine debris near the center of the gyre as part of the Southern California Water Research Project found 334,271 pieces of plastic per square kilometer with a weight of 5.1 kilograms per square kilometer.[3]. If this 11.2 lb/km found near the center were the same throughout its estimated 20 million square kilometers expanse, the gyre would contain 225 million pounds or 113,000 tons of plastic waste. This is less than some estimates of from three to 100 million tons of plastic in the gyre.
(b) Yes they are. According to the first link in TFA:
The tiny pieces of plastic are “the size of a grain of rice”, small enough to be eaten by fish. Chemicals, like “PCBs, DDT, and other toxins” that don’t dissolve in water are soaked up by the plastic. Those toxic chemicals get ingested by the fish eating the tiny pieces of plastic. Those fish are eaten by bigger fish that absorb the chemicals from the smaller fish. Ultimately, the contaminated fish may wind up on your dinner tables. We already know how dangerous these chemicals can be when ingested.
(c) If the plastic is indeed spread throughout the top several meters, then yes, there is.
Seems more sensible to make it all heavier than water and sink it. Once it's on the bottom natural sedimentation processes will bury it for good.
Why would you do that when, for equal effort, you could make a self-sustaining self-powering island from it? One that you can then sell or lease out real-estate on for ridiculous prices, because it's the only remaining unpopulated temperate coastline in the world?
Despite the fact that no "real" fix was ever released, reports of unintended acceleration subsided. Problems like this don't fix themselves unless there was really no problem to begin with.
There're two different things here. There's the (very rare) real problem, which I doubt IS fixed, although the software update you mention could well have provided a workaround. Then there's the 'me too' effect where anyone who's mistakenly stepped on the accelerator rather than the brake (honestly, do people really do this?!) suddenly sees a way to shift the blame.
For one thing, with a placebo fix, the likelihood of weasels trying to blame the car subsides. For another thing, if the problem is actually a very rare, unanticipated failure mode in the accelerator position sensor, the "full brake plus full accelerator equals full reset" software update would have fixed it. People make noise when they get into a car crash because the car accelerates suddenly on its own and won't stop. People probably grumble to their friends but don't bother filing an official report when their car suddenly accelerates, they stomp on the brake pedal, and it immediately stops.
Are you the dude whose laptop was stolen and the police didn't care? :P Maybe report that you had (legally, purchased on iTunes) MP3s on it, and that they PIRATED your MUSIC? :P
In circles of "Nerds" this happens all the time and people get along swimmingly. Then some emotional girl comes along and one guy wants to mount her and another gets jealous and the shit hits the fan because the girl doesn't know what the fuck she wants because she's "only in college" nevermind the fact that she is a legal consenting adult at this point and needs to take responsibility for her own fucking life and make some damn decisions every now and then for herself!
+1 goddamn truth. It's all simple and logical until glands get involved.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but you say social skills aren't hard to learn. Speaking as someone with Asperger's syndrome... HOW!? I've been trying for 38 years, and still seem to be a complete failure.
Speaking as someone with a healthy social life and ostensibly good social skills and who used to check a lot of the boxes for Aspergers - you have to throw yourself in at the deep end. I didn't really get over my inability to talk to people until I went traveling, and spent a lot of time on my own in foreign countries, where I had to talk to many random people a day just to survive. Like many traits, social ability needs to be exercised if you want to improve it. I basically forced myself to exercise it, and the end result was a permanent improvement in my ability to relate to other humans.
I don't know, maybe even this won't work for you. If you're truly, diagnosably afflicted with Aspergers, you may not have the hardware required for this stuff, just like some people are born without, say, legs. In that case, telling you to 'just learn social skills' is like telling someone born with no legs to 'just practice running'.
You both completely failed at learning jack, and resorted to the threat of violence. NERD FAIL.
Learn social skills. THAT'S the lesson. They aren't hard and a handful of social cues makes all the difference.
And you completely fail to account for the fact that no matter HOW good your social skills are, sometimes you will be victimised for reasons beyond your control. You'll have to move schools, for instance, and the other kids will throw you to the dogs to save themselves. You'll get stuck in a class with kids who are truly damaged and can't be reasoned with short of violence. Some social, physical or racial factor will turn kids against you. The one thing that the pack mentality needs is an outsider to hate.
Once you've been put in this situation, you can't recover. None of the other kids will break ranks for fear of being victimised themselves. If the population is big enough you can find other outsiders, but even then, there's a chance that they'll see abusing you as a stepping stone to acceptance in the eyes of the other kids. The only way out is to start again in a new social environment. That's why, for instance, I'll make sure my kids are there on the first day/week of school, so they're only new while everyone else is too.
That's because soft arts are stupid for showing off. They give you zero attacks; everything in Aikido is reactive. All an attacker has from training is how to submit and fall without getting hurt; the attacker is completely powerless.
Funny, I think they're the best for showing off, purely for the same reason. Then again, I'm thinking of it in terms of some douche taking a swing in a bar, not in terms of a montage of flashy routines on a mat with silk drapes around it and soft oriental music playing. :)
I'm still tossing up what martial art to study, I'll probably go back to Wing Chun kung fu, purely because it generalises well to dual wielding whatever implements come to hand, and that's badass. But I love the aesthetic of soft martial arts, so maybe I'll try something new.
So you're saying, basically, that you need to increase your 'emotion', intelligence, or wisdom. I guess that makes sense, we can spend additional stat points when we gain enough experience to 'level up'. And you thought D&D was an escape from the real world, not just a model of it! :)
Maybe it's because I went to a private school, but I didn't see this dynamic, the nerds were not bothered they hung out with everyone else there wasn't much of a problem.
Where did you go to school? I'll send my kids there... then again your sentence here needs more commas so maybe not. :P
I had a shit of a time in primary school, and at the time I thought it was just because I was badly defective in some way. It wasn't until I got to highschool that I realised I'd just had the bad luck to be in 'one of those years' where every other kid apart from me was a little turd. Highschool was a bit better, but only a bit. Children aren't complete people yet, they're half-animals who are just learning to be people. If you're unlucky enough not to have an instinctive understanding of pack behaviour then you're going to get crucified until either you learn to fight them off, or they grow up enough to start being civil.
I have a friend who put all his points in dexies and now hes like really nervous and energetic and he dont stop talking and moving around all the time and hes like really active I dont think dexies are as good as you think and he certainly doesnt get to touch boobs.
We agree on the first point - that's what I was trying to convey with the "or if they're not, they rapidly become huge hits" part. As for the second - I contend that 'massively popular' will ultimately entail commercial success, which is the most basic, all-encompassing measure of overall quality. Not specifically technical excellence, but overall fitness. A shitty piece of code which nonetheless more adequately fulfills a business requirement than any other piece of code is, by this holistic definition, 'better'.
That is the single best refutation to that link that I've ever seen. Well done, sir!
I didn't say "absolute smash hit unlike the flop that it was". I'm well aware that the movie is very successful. I was just saying that an Attenborough-style documentary about the human tech and the ecosystem of Pandora would be more interesting (to me, at least) than the movie was. I'd submit that it's the vividly imagined world and the possibilities that consciousness uploading affords that form the basis for the movie's success.
Where are my mod points when I need 'em? It doesn't matter whether some welfare- or parent-supported douche thinks they're the foremost authority on something. Ultimately, how successful and effective something is is the ultimate measure of quality. Just like the way low-budget arthouse films are generally absolutely crap (or if they're not, they rapidly become huge hits, reinforcing the "if it's popular then it's good, and if it's good it will be popular" theme).
It's the same reason that no matter how much your hacker's aesthetics cringe at using Microsoft Office, it's still used by so many businesses. It gets the job done with less fuss than anything else, and results in a better rate of return on investment, therefore however much you, personally, dislike it - it IS better.
Some people? You mean all of them who penises but aren't attracted to them.
Men do everything they do in order to get laid.
If they just cut out the character development and anvilicious Pocahontas-meets-Fern-Gully storyline, and instead added a voiceover by Richard Attenborough, it'd be an absolute smash hit.