I used one of those briefly in Singapore airport (dunno if it was Boingo, but some wireless hotspot provider) which claimed to be free for Telstra customers (my phone company at the time). It asked for my number to prove that I had a Telstra phone, and when I got my next bill I had a $25 charge on it for internet usage. Bastards.
Or a slightly less pathological solution which would nevertheless fix the issue: Simply record MAC addresses and after 15 minutes (or whatever) of use, ban the address for a couple of hours. Sure, a few of us will spoof MAC addresses until we find an unbanned one but the vast majority (and it's the vast majority's asses that are causing the problem) will just mooch off to a different Maccas.
Ah OK, I get ya. Still, "no exclusively vegetarian cultures exist" does not imply "exclusively vegetarian individuals have a disadvantage", other than the disadvantage of not having tasty animals to fall back on if necessary. And that isn't a disadvantage if you consider that vegetarian humans are still omnivores, who choose particular foods, and can generally begin to eat meat if the situation dictates it.
I would concede that I'm missing one thing (the "taste of meaty meaty goodness" which my friends rave about, but which I never particularly liked), but nutrition-wise I seem to be doing quite alright.:) I can't find any actual dietary need that's only obtainable from meat products. Enough vegetarians live long and healthy lives that I think we can rule out a physiological requirement for a meat-based diet.
As for your lack of exclusively vegetarian cultures, I'm not sure what cultures you're referring to that died out - I don't think I've heard of an exclusively vegetarian historical culture (although Buddhism, alive and well as the world's 4th largest religion, does strongly discourage eating meat especially for monks).
Regardless, a balanced vegetarian diet is at least as healthy as a balanced meat-based diet. I don't think that's realistically disputable given the weight of medical evidence for (most meat gives you cancer sooner or later) and against (none really, slightly harder to get iron and protein I guess) vegetarianism.
I'm not saying everyone should be vegetarian... I'm just saying stop trying to talk me into eating steak when I don't like or want steak.
Hmm... OK, fair enough. I can go with that. And I agree with your conclusion (if I understand it correctly) - let them be published, and history will judge 'em.
You agree to their terms the moment you access the site. If you don't like the terms, you are free to browse elsewhere.
Not until I've seen their terms and clicked 'agree', I didn't. They're welcome to put ads up but without a pre-existing agreement I'm not bound by their optimism about me reading their site ads.
If you disagree, then by disagreeing with my post you're entering into a contract whereby you must give me a dollar and I may laugh at you.
I'm not sure what you're trying to do with your post, but there seems to be a strange pattern with the line lengths. BUY TOMS TOP TOFFEE IT'S TOFFEE THAT'S GOOD FOR YOUR TEETH! Maybe you were saying something about it being impossible to strip out inline advertising in 'infomercial' style content?
The god of the old testament was a right sod bastard. The new one is a bit more hands off, which is probably good for all of us. I don't think either are particularly consistent or objectively benificent.
Neither of those arguments are against vegetarianism. They're merely defenses against arguments FOR vegetarianism. I've never heard an argument against vegetarianism that didn't boil down to either "meat is a dietary requirement" (bzzt, I've been vegetarian for 27 years now and I'm nice and healthy tyvm) or "but meat is so tasty" (so go ahead, I'm not stopping you but that doesn't mean I have to follow suit).
It's no more and no less bullshit than drawing an arbitrary line between, say, cows and horses and declaring that if you eat one of them you're a patriot and if you eat the other one you're a bad man.
As a vegetarian, I wholeheartedly agree. I never understood why people happily eat lamb chops and yet are horrified at the thought of moggy chow mein, and downright disgusted at eating roast cavies (and I had a pet guinea pig when I was a kid, those things are born and bred to be food)... anyway they're all animals, aren't they? I can understand an aversion to human flesh for health reasons but other than that... it's meat, why draw distinctions?
As for plants vs animals, there's clearly orders of magnitude of difference in complexity between a sheaf of wheat and a cow. I simply see no reason to cause more entropy than I have to in order to eat (plus I don't like the taste, and the idea of consuming another creature's flesh is kinda icky to me - but hey, whatever floats your boat.) If I could get purely synthetic food I'd probably be happy with it (mi goreng is pretty close:P ), and likewise if it were a choice between me or a cow, I'm sorry but when I get hungry enough the cow goes. Until there's a real need for me to eat it, however, I'll leave it alone.
I always hear about preachy vegetarians but honestly, I've never met one. I *have* met a whole load of meat-eaters who refuse to accept that I simply don't want to eat meat, and generally it takes them an hour or two to give up trying to convince me that I'm wrong and a bad person for not being exactly like them. It's not me that raises the topic either, unless I'm asking whether there's meat in the noodle salad. I figure diet is a personal choice, I wish more non-vegetarians could figure that out.:/
The thing about art is that you don't get it unless you get it.
Yeah, and only wise people can see the Emperor's new clothes.
Admit it, the art world contains an incredible amount of pretension and wank. Creating an artwork (in ANY medium) that touches the human soul and helps us learn more about ourselves? Sure, that's a worthy pursuit. Buying the biggest canvas you can afford, then drinking all your paint at once and vomiting on the canvas, then lastly spending the next year trying to convince people that the resulting chunderstorm is somehow significant? That's not worth beans, no matter what label you put on it or how intellectually arrogant you are.
About 70% of the quests in the game follow the same formula of "Kill this guy, because I want you to." What really, really annoys me is the ones, like the long quest chain in New Hearthglen, where the first few quests have you massacring the entire population of the town in question about 5 times over, destroying their defenses, torturing their head interrogator for information, and mind-controlling then killing their leaders... and then you have to figure out what their 'grand attack plans' are? You should just be able to tell the questgiver "look, EVERYBODY'S DEAD, DAVE" and he should say "oh, OK, there's no-one left to HAVE plans, here's a beer".
Yeah, I'm workin' on that bit.:P LCD should be coming soon, I'm still trying to convince the missus that a media PC won't be any harder to use than a VCR. She seems to have taken the observation "spontaneously trying to hook random hardware up to our old TV often fails because we don't have the right cables" and inferred that "computers are a pain in the ass if they're near a TV".:/
Ah, but I was the host and my computer doesn't need fixing (not to mention I don't really want everyone crowding into our bedroom to watch youtube videos on my computer). And if you think it's possible for a slashdotter to have a party without *someone* needing to check their mail, you obviously don't go to parties.:P
Even if it turns out they just wore a jacket. Capital offense right there. The police involved then fabricated an incredible amount of bullshit to try and make themselves look good. What the police claimed was that he'd jumped a turnstile and sprinted onto the train, at which point they opened fire. What actually happened is this poor sod hopped off the bus, paid his train fare, walked onto the train and sat down. The police then dragged him out of the train, held him down, and shot him in the head five times at close range.
I'll take essential liberty, please. Perceived safety seems pretty worthless.
I've got a better idea: demand to see a warrant to search the car when they come back to get it.
Actually, wasn't there a case a while ago where police attached a GPS tracking unit to a guy's car, he found it, and ebayed it? As I recall they weren't very happy, he got charged with selling stolen property or interfering with police operations or something.
In my book, if someone attaches something to my car without my permission they damn well better NOT expect to see it again. It won't end up on eBay, though, because I'm not stupid enough to not learn from this guy's mistake.:P
I've never heard of it _not_ being legal (unless there's a restraining order or something in place). Trespass is illegal, as is harassment, but simply following someone from a reasonable distance is not in itself illegal as far as I (who am not a lawyer:P ) know.
Or perhaps activate the cone for your talking, and sending out a pre-recorded signal of innocuous things to mask your real activity.
Asimov had a similar device in one of the Foundation books whereby when one of his characters wanted privacy, he'd activate a screen that generated small office-y noises and quiet inane conversation. Much more effective than dead silence, leading to awkward "what are you hiding?" type questions.
Exactly! If it's bigger than 10" tops, and it's more expensive than $300-$400, then it's not a netbook. Netbooks were created to fill a market void of a small, cheap, robust device that you can leave in your bag or on your coffee table, that will let people load web pages. It's the answer to the question "hey man can I just check my mail" at a party when you don't really want everyone invading your bedroom to use your personal computer.
By all means, make smallish slightly cheaper subnotebooks. Make full fledged full price subnotebooks. But don't forget the market for a very cheap dedicated web-page-displaying machine.
Slashdot Mirror
I used one of those briefly in Singapore airport (dunno if it was Boingo, but some wireless hotspot provider) which claimed to be free for Telstra customers (my phone company at the time). It asked for my number to prove that I had a Telstra phone, and when I got my next bill I had a $25 charge on it for internet usage. Bastards.
Or a slightly less pathological solution which would nevertheless fix the issue: Simply record MAC addresses and after 15 minutes (or whatever) of use, ban the address for a couple of hours. Sure, a few of us will spoof MAC addresses until we find an unbanned one but the vast majority (and it's the vast majority's asses that are causing the problem) will just mooch off to a different Maccas.
Ah OK, I get ya. Still, "no exclusively vegetarian cultures exist" does not imply "exclusively vegetarian individuals have a disadvantage", other than the disadvantage of not having tasty animals to fall back on if necessary. And that isn't a disadvantage if you consider that vegetarian humans are still omnivores, who choose particular foods, and can generally begin to eat meat if the situation dictates it.
I would concede that I'm missing one thing (the "taste of meaty meaty goodness" which my friends rave about, but which I never particularly liked), but nutrition-wise I seem to be doing quite alright. :) I can't find any actual dietary need that's only obtainable from meat products. Enough vegetarians live long and healthy lives that I think we can rule out a physiological requirement for a meat-based diet.
As for your lack of exclusively vegetarian cultures, I'm not sure what cultures you're referring to that died out - I don't think I've heard of an exclusively vegetarian historical culture (although Buddhism, alive and well as the world's 4th largest religion, does strongly discourage eating meat especially for monks).
Regardless, a balanced vegetarian diet is at least as healthy as a balanced meat-based diet. I don't think that's realistically disputable given the weight of medical evidence for (most meat gives you cancer sooner or later) and against (none really, slightly harder to get iron and protein I guess) vegetarianism.
I'm not saying everyone should be vegetarian... I'm just saying stop trying to talk me into eating steak when I don't like or want steak.
Hmm... OK, fair enough. I can go with that. And I agree with your conclusion (if I understand it correctly) - let them be published, and history will judge 'em.
You agree to their terms the moment you access the site. If you don't like the terms, you are free to browse elsewhere.
Not until I've seen their terms and clicked 'agree', I didn't. They're welcome to put ads up but without a pre-existing agreement I'm not bound by their optimism about me reading their site ads.
If you disagree, then by disagreeing with my post you're entering into a contract whereby you must give me a dollar and I may laugh at you.
I'm not sure what you're trying to do with your post, but there seems to be a strange pattern with the line lengths. BUY TOMS TOP TOFFEE IT'S TOFFEE THAT'S GOOD FOR YOUR TEETH! Maybe you were saying something about it being impossible to strip out inline advertising in 'infomercial' style content?
The god of the old testament was a right sod bastard. The new one is a bit more hands off, which is probably good for all of us. I don't think either are particularly consistent or objectively benificent.
Neither of those arguments are against vegetarianism. They're merely defenses against arguments FOR vegetarianism. I've never heard an argument against vegetarianism that didn't boil down to either "meat is a dietary requirement" (bzzt, I've been vegetarian for 27 years now and I'm nice and healthy tyvm) or "but meat is so tasty" (so go ahead, I'm not stopping you but that doesn't mean I have to follow suit).
It's no more and no less bullshit than drawing an arbitrary line between, say, cows and horses and declaring that if you eat one of them you're a patriot and if you eat the other one you're a bad man.
As a vegetarian, I wholeheartedly agree. I never understood why people happily eat lamb chops and yet are horrified at the thought of moggy chow mein, and downright disgusted at eating roast cavies (and I had a pet guinea pig when I was a kid, those things are born and bred to be food)... anyway they're all animals, aren't they? I can understand an aversion to human flesh for health reasons but other than that... it's meat, why draw distinctions?
:P ), and likewise if it were a choice between me or a cow, I'm sorry but when I get hungry enough the cow goes. Until there's a real need for me to eat it, however, I'll leave it alone.
:/
As for plants vs animals, there's clearly orders of magnitude of difference in complexity between a sheaf of wheat and a cow. I simply see no reason to cause more entropy than I have to in order to eat (plus I don't like the taste, and the idea of consuming another creature's flesh is kinda icky to me - but hey, whatever floats your boat.) If I could get purely synthetic food I'd probably be happy with it (mi goreng is pretty close
I always hear about preachy vegetarians but honestly, I've never met one. I *have* met a whole load of meat-eaters who refuse to accept that I simply don't want to eat meat, and generally it takes them an hour or two to give up trying to convince me that I'm wrong and a bad person for not being exactly like them. It's not me that raises the topic either, unless I'm asking whether there's meat in the noodle salad. I figure diet is a personal choice, I wish more non-vegetarians could figure that out.
The thing about art is that you don't get it unless you get it.
Yeah, and only wise people can see the Emperor's new clothes.
Admit it, the art world contains an incredible amount of pretension and wank. Creating an artwork (in ANY medium) that touches the human soul and helps us learn more about ourselves? Sure, that's a worthy pursuit. Buying the biggest canvas you can afford, then drinking all your paint at once and vomiting on the canvas, then lastly spending the next year trying to convince people that the resulting chunderstorm is somehow significant? That's not worth beans, no matter what label you put on it or how intellectually arrogant you are.
I like you.
About 70% of the quests in the game follow the same formula of "Kill this guy, because I want you to." What really, really annoys me is the ones, like the long quest chain in New Hearthglen, where the first few quests have you massacring the entire population of the town in question about 5 times over, destroying their defenses, torturing their head interrogator for information, and mind-controlling then killing their leaders... and then you have to figure out what their 'grand attack plans' are? You should just be able to tell the questgiver "look, EVERYBODY'S DEAD, DAVE" and he should say "oh, OK, there's no-one left to HAVE plans, here's a beer".
Axum!
I guess it was quicker to type than "Fireumall".
Yeah, I'm workin' on that bit. :P LCD should be coming soon, I'm still trying to convince the missus that a media PC won't be any harder to use than a VCR. She seems to have taken the observation "spontaneously trying to hook random hardware up to our old TV often fails because we don't have the right cables" and inferred that "computers are a pain in the ass if they're near a TV". :/
Irony? I'm pretty sure they did it for the lulz.
Ah, but I was the host and my computer doesn't need fixing (not to mention I don't really want everyone crowding into our bedroom to watch youtube videos on my computer). And if you think it's possible for a slashdotter to have a party without *someone* needing to check their mail, you obviously don't go to parties. :P
Some guy did that a while ago (can't find a link now, maybe someone else will be more helpful?) and he got in deep shit. :/
Even if it turns out they just wore a jacket. Capital offense right there. The police involved then fabricated an incredible amount of bullshit to try and make themselves look good. What the police claimed was that he'd jumped a turnstile and sprinted onto the train, at which point they opened fire. What actually happened is this poor sod hopped off the bus, paid his train fare, walked onto the train and sat down. The police then dragged him out of the train, held him down, and shot him in the head five times at close range.
I'll take essential liberty, please. Perceived safety seems pretty worthless.
I've got a better idea: demand to see a warrant to search the car when they come back to get it.
Actually, wasn't there a case a while ago where police attached a GPS tracking unit to a guy's car, he found it, and ebayed it? As I recall they weren't very happy, he got charged with selling stolen property or interfering with police operations or something.
:P
In my book, if someone attaches something to my car without my permission they damn well better NOT expect to see it again. It won't end up on eBay, though, because I'm not stupid enough to not learn from this guy's mistake.
Stalking is legal now?
I've never heard of it _not_ being legal (unless there's a restraining order or something in place). Trespass is illegal, as is harassment, but simply following someone from a reasonable distance is not in itself illegal as far as I (who am not a lawyer :P ) know.
If you're up against the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen you probably have worse problems than figuring out what the invisible man is saying.
The best thing about learning ASL is that most of the students are female.
And 13, and live in California?
Or perhaps activate the cone for your talking, and sending out a pre-recorded signal of innocuous things to mask your real activity.
Asimov had a similar device in one of the Foundation books whereby when one of his characters wanted privacy, he'd activate a screen that generated small office-y noises and quiet inane conversation. Much more effective than dead silence, leading to awkward "what are you hiding?" type questions.
Exactly! If it's bigger than 10" tops, and it's more expensive than $300-$400, then it's not a netbook. Netbooks were created to fill a market void of a small, cheap, robust device that you can leave in your bag or on your coffee table, that will let people load web pages. It's the answer to the question "hey man can I just check my mail" at a party when you don't really want everyone invading your bedroom to use your personal computer.
By all means, make smallish slightly cheaper subnotebooks. Make full fledged full price subnotebooks. But don't forget the market for a very cheap dedicated web-page-displaying machine.