And Lord of the Rings, the Iliad, Grimms Fairy Tales, 1001 Nights, the 12 Labors of Hercules, the Bible, the Koran, etc...
Congratulations you've discovered mythology!
You have obviously never read The Iliad. It has absolutely no romance, no evil empire, and no rebellion. It is about the pride and honor of one of the greatest warriors in Greek history/mythology, set during the greatest siege in Greek history.
1 mile = 5,280 feet
3 miles = 15,840 feet
Lowest reasonable estimate estimate for the number of participants = 669,600
Assumed # of participants per link in your hypothetical chain (at 12 links per foot) = 3.5
Your attempt at a racist joke = Fail
Your estimated IQ based on aforementioned attempt = 1-24
Anyway, I'm not sure I would consider it spam if Obama had a message stating something like "I, the new President, invite you, the people of the U.S., to join together and help us rise out of our current situation. I welcome your comments."
Replace "comments" with "zip codes", and voilÃ, SPAM!
...get the phone company to provide the cell tower location they are connected to....
I'm not sure you comprehend the logistics involved in doing this for tens of millions of users. And besides supposedly, according to the article, people spending the effort to send back the text message will give him an indication of "those who wants to 'help' solve the crisis", not "those who received this message". Otherwise, just pulling the address database from the telecoms would be a helluva lot easier then your method.
This whole attempt, of course, speaks volumes, mostly to the apparent idiocy of a PM who believes that either:
1) The people who respond really want to help (instead of just responding to the novelty of it)
2) People that don't respond want the crisis to continue
3) The people that are intelligent/capable enough to actually provide major support for his efforts would be attracted to his cause by this text message.
I'm betting more that he's actually not an idiot, but has some shady deal/debt with the telecoms.
The postal code reply would give the government a clearer idea about which parts of the country wanted to take part in the government's attempt to solve the crisis.
Seems more likely that you'll get a sense of where the concentrations are of idiots who believe that they can actually solve a political crisis by sending their postal code in a text message.
After having read through more than half the currently 400+ comments, I've come back up here to respond to this one, the first instance of "I setup my $ANCIENT_RELATIVE with $MY_FAVORITE_FLAVOR_OF_LINUX over $RANDOM_INTEGER years ago, and they love it! Not only that, but just recently I discovered that they have been building Slackware installations for all their bingo friends!! They are also now regular kernel contributors!! $MY_FAVORITE_FLAVOR_OF_LINUX is the bee's knees for elderly with NO previous computer experience!!!
Unfortunately, there are large, and increasing, proportion of the elderly who have had some previous computer experience, that experience (for the far greatest parts) was with Windows. And the TFA is about a request for tips for help configuring a Windows installation, not a question about which OS should be used for some particular subset of the elderly community.
I, myself, have been looking for just these kinds of tips for "locking down" Windows for an elderly friend who has extensive previous experience with Windows but who I believe is suffering from the slow onset of Alzheimer's/dementia, and is constantly forgetting how to do certain things (and then breaking the OS through his experimentation). Unfortunately he is unable to learn a new OS/interface (even Kubuntu customized to look/act as much like XP as possible) and so I was definitely hopeful when I saw the title of this article (and I've seen multiple others like it over the years here on/.) hoping for some good tips/tricks that I would be able to apply to my particular situation. Instead, the FAR majority of the comments I've read are just part of the regular *nix v. Windows flamewar. Sooooo disappointing...
Basic Computer Science is far more useful than teaching 'American History from the Revolutionary War to the Civil War' for the fourth year in a row in Elementary School. You can drop one of those years for a course in 'Logic for Children' and get far more out of it.
What elementary school did you go to?!? We didn't touch American History until we were well into 7th/8th grade, where we browsed it for a total of 2 semesters, memorizing the Preamble, the Bill of Rights, and the Schoolhouse Rock "I'm just a Bill" song. Oh yeah, most of us also learned somewhere along the way that the North won the War (although many of my classmates may have been confused about which War), Abraham Lincoln was tall (and there might have been some short dude named Douglas something-or-other), and that the Shot Heard Round the World was, probably not, literally "heard round the world".
Also, the statement that Basic Computer Science (however it might be defined) is More Useful than $SUBJECT_I_HATED can only have meaning after the purposes of basic (K-12) education have been defined and prioritized. Without agreed upon ends, there can be very little, if any, meaningful discussion on this matter.
If you would like to propose that the primary purpose of basic education is to obtain a career in the CS industry, I don't think many would argue with you about the greater usefulness of Basic CS over something as inapplicable as History. If you took a more moderate stance, and said that the primary purpose of basic education was to train the minds of the youth to be able to approach the problems of the adult world (and life) in general, well, I personally know some historians who would disagree with you about the usefulness of replacing some of the History classes with Computer Science classes.
But this is/., and we do so love to revel in the glory of our own achievements/greatness and belittle things proportionally to their distance from our own sphere. So by all means, continue to build a cultural of arrogance and superiority akin to the ones used by academia/law-enforcement/politicos to insulate themselves from tribulations of the masses they are so willing to manipulate/bully/deceive when it serves their purposes.
True story (and as close to verbatim as I can remember):
Ventura County Superior Court, CA Court Clerk: Next, case... ___ Inc... I get up from my row of chairs, papers in hand, and approach the defendant's stand Me: Your Honor, I'm representing ___ Inc in this matter.
Judge: I see that (looking over a brief statement to that effect, signed by the President of ___ Inc)...so you are here to dispute this? (picks up the other case documents (including the photos) and begins to look them over) Me: Yes, Your Honor. As you can now see, the defendant, my client, is a corporation, and is consequently unable to commit a moving violation as is claimed on this ticket...
Judge:...Yes...I see that...I don't know how this got this far. The charge is dismissed. The clerk will handle the rest of this paperwork... Me: Thank you, Your Honor. Judge nods distractedly and waves his hand dismissively as he reaches for the paperwork for the next case.
Full disclosure: IANAL, but was hired by the company (one of my regular clients for tech consulting) to be there. Definitely goes down as the consulting job most outside my areas of expertise.
and aren't parasites on a fundamental biological level.
Perhaps you would believe in "removing" the "parasitic" twin (there commonly is one) from sets of conjoined twins?
The absurdity of labeling one's own dependent offspring as parasitic in "biological" terms is blindingly absurd (if you believe in such silly things as evolutionary imperatives, continuation of the species, and all that junk, that is).
Granted, once that offspring hits 32 and still won't move out of the basement, or get a girlfriend, the whole "protect and propagate your genes" impulse may be a little weak in the parents.
"Murder"
"I don't think it means what you think it means..."
In answer to your "Ooooo...I can think of some almost-but-not-completely-outside-the-scope-of-the-discussion" questions:
1) South Park said it best.
2) How do you "know"? Medical science, like all good science only measures probabilities of future contingents. How high of a degree of certainty do you have? To look at the choice positively: What are the chances of the child growing up to lead a happy, fulfilled life, in each case? Isn't some chance better than no chance? I know that I'd take a one-in-a-million chance at decades of life (with a 999,999-in-a-million chance at an agonizing death months from now) vs. an immediate death.
3) Murder requires intent to cause the death. By definition. Maybe you meant "kill" in the sense of material/accidental cause. In which case, it seems appropriate. Hurricanes kill people. Earthquakes kill people. Water kills people. Windshields of cars kill people. You get the point (I hope).
4) Is it murder when one doctor can't save the life of a patient who got sepsis from the some surgeon's previous bad decision?
Embryos can't live outside of a uteris or other life-sustaining environment. Neither can removed warts.
Billy the Mountain can't live outside of an atmosphere or other life-sustaining environment. Neither can warts.
Congratulations, you've just shown that life needs things to survive, and that certain parts of living organisms will die if removed from them... For your next stunning demonstration you could explain to us all how a fetus is "totally tiny and so are fleas" and that they both require the blood of another organism to survive, therefore...OMG they're the totally the same!11!!1! thus proving once and for all that gene pool truly would be bettered by the removal of yourself.
I was going to waste the time trying to explain to you the difference between "whole" and "part" with an aside about presence of autonomy being a defining characteristic of an individual, but I decided I could achieve my goals in this mildly
insulting sentence.
I consider something "human" when a brain capable of becoming a human brain has fired off its first thought.
That's cute. Totally aside from all the questions of how you define "first thought"...hows about you look to what every single modern biologist will say, namely, "DNA determines species". At the point of conception, the zygote is genetically/biologically a human. He/She is classified/identified as a male/female individual of the species homo sapiens (that means "human" in Grown-Up science-talk). For everyone who paid attention in high-school science, though, the debate is about "life" and "when" it should be defined/protected.
Now I'm going to apologize, but I can't ignore the idiocy of your last sentence. So, please explain to me, with your Grown-Up words, what species of life-form did that brain belong to 3 seconds before it "fired off its first thought"? Also, to every other point you made:
1) Evolutionary imperative. We better not give as much of a shit about anything else as we do about our own species...
2) You're retarded.
3) That's about it.
Interesting choice. Personally I've been looking to "adopt" a gorgeous, wealthy nymphomaniac with her own island. Although to be honest, I'm really hoping to find twins. But, y'know, the GP is right. It takes a lot of courage.
You do remember this is/. you're posting on, right?! Half of us are "that creepy guy in the office". And the other half were "that creepy guy" until they got their revenge, and now we have comfortably retired to our parents basement.
Actually, what I think he's doing isolating the oscillator while impeding the capacitive antenna, all the while the couplings' reactance which is usually between 1.85 GHz and 6.1 dB/mW is going to undergo a radical departure from its aperture (commonly also acting as the modulating amplifier) while the multiband waveguide is going to totally remove the need for the baluns. Now of course this won't have any measurable effect on the odd-order harmonics, which are going to continue to radiate (at 50 Ohms) to their hearts content without any EMF shielding on their carrier-transmit line. And don't make me go into bandlimiting filters...I'll go ALL Marconi on your ass!
Whenever I see this I'm always expecting it to be followed by the obligatory long explanation of how "it's not a bad analogy blah blah blah" scattered with links to other people who are saying the same thing.
I'm kinda happy that there wasn't one after yours, although I'm secretly cheering for it-wasn't-a-bad-analogy to become its own meme, representing that portion of the tech community that cares just a bit too much about the logic of memes.
Hmmm...now that I've spent so much time on this response I feel like a should copy-and-paste it everywhere I see a lonely "tubes" comment...but I won't.
Back in my day we only had analog downloads! And we were glad to have any at all! Why, if we wanted to play a video game one of us had to mentally interpret and reconstruct the current running through our hands back into the original binary! Then we had to crack the DRM - by slamming our heads just right against a stone wall to purge it from our memory. And we were grateful for the opportunity!
...
Then our father would cut us in two wit' a bread knife.
Slashdot Mirror
I promise you, I was NOT trying to show off how fucking smaert I am.
And Lord of the Rings, the Iliad, Grimms Fairy Tales, 1001 Nights, the 12 Labors of Hercules, the Bible, the Koran, etc...
Congratulations you've discovered mythology!
You have obviously never read The Iliad. It has absolutely no romance, no evil empire, and no rebellion. It is about the pride and honor of one of the greatest warriors in Greek history/mythology, set during the greatest siege in Greek history.
1 mile = 5,280 feet
3 miles = 15,840 feet
Lowest reasonable estimate estimate for the number of participants = 669,600
Assumed # of participants per link in your hypothetical chain (at 12 links per foot) = 3.5
Your attempt at a racist joke = Fail
Your estimated IQ based on aforementioned attempt = 1-24
No, that's when I rememeber how that music used to make me smile. And anyway, I'm a mayfly, you insens
Apparently a dictating mayfly...
I call "idiot". The "sec" actually stands for arcsecond (an angular quantity), as in "the parallax of one arcsecond".
Nice rendition of the sound the Falcon made when leaving the spaceport on that (in)famous run!
Anyway, I'm not sure I would consider it spam if Obama had a message stating something like "I, the new President, invite you, the people of the U.S., to join together and help us rise out of our current situation. I welcome your comments."
Replace "comments" with "zip codes", and voilÃ, SPAM!
...get the phone company to provide the cell tower location they are connected to....
I'm not sure you comprehend the logistics involved in doing this for tens of millions of users. And besides supposedly, according to the article, people spending the effort to send back the text message will give him an indication of "those who wants to 'help' solve the crisis", not "those who received this message". Otherwise, just pulling the address database from the telecoms would be a helluva lot easier then your method.
This whole attempt, of course, speaks volumes, mostly to the apparent idiocy of a PM who believes that either:
1) The people who respond really want to help (instead of just responding to the novelty of it)
2) People that don't respond want the crisis to continue
3) The people that are intelligent/capable enough to actually provide major support for his efforts would be attracted to his cause by this text message.
I'm betting more that he's actually not an idiot, but has some shady deal/debt with the telecoms.
The postal code reply would give the government a clearer idea about which parts of the country wanted to take part in the government's attempt to solve the crisis.
Seems more likely that you'll get a sense of where the concentrations are of idiots who believe that they can actually solve a political crisis by sending their postal code in a text message.
After having read through more than half the currently 400+ comments, I've come back up here to respond to this one, the first instance of "I setup my $ANCIENT_RELATIVE with $MY_FAVORITE_FLAVOR_OF_LINUX over $RANDOM_INTEGER years ago, and they love it! Not only that, but just recently I discovered that they have been building Slackware installations for all their bingo friends!! They are also now regular kernel contributors!! $MY_FAVORITE_FLAVOR_OF_LINUX is the bee's knees for elderly with NO previous computer experience!!!
/.) hoping for some good tips/tricks that I would be able to apply to my particular situation. Instead, the FAR majority of the comments I've read are just part of the regular *nix v. Windows flamewar. Sooooo disappointing...
Unfortunately, there are large, and increasing, proportion of the elderly who have had some previous computer experience, that experience (for the far greatest parts) was with Windows. And the TFA is about a request for tips for help configuring a Windows installation, not a question about which OS should be used for some particular subset of the elderly community.
I, myself, have been looking for just these kinds of tips for "locking down" Windows for an elderly friend who has extensive previous experience with Windows but who I believe is suffering from the slow onset of Alzheimer's/dementia, and is constantly forgetting how to do certain things (and then breaking the OS through his experimentation). Unfortunately he is unable to learn a new OS/interface (even Kubuntu customized to look/act as much like XP as possible) and so I was definitely hopeful when I saw the title of this article (and I've seen multiple others like it over the years here on
Did you get the memo about this?
I pronounced that "meme-oh" in my mind...waaay too much /. for me...
Basic Computer Science is far more useful than teaching 'American History from the Revolutionary War to the Civil War' for the fourth year in a row in Elementary School. You can drop one of those years for a course in 'Logic for Children' and get far more out of it.
What elementary school did you go to?!? We didn't touch American History until we were well into 7th/8th grade, where we browsed it for a total of 2 semesters, memorizing the Preamble, the Bill of Rights, and the Schoolhouse Rock "I'm just a Bill" song. Oh yeah, most of us also learned somewhere along the way that the North won the War (although many of my classmates may have been confused about which War), Abraham Lincoln was tall (and there might have been some short dude named Douglas something-or-other), and that the Shot Heard Round the World was, probably not, literally "heard round the world".
/., and we do so love to revel in the glory of our own achievements/greatness and belittle things proportionally to their distance from our own sphere. So by all means, continue to build a cultural of arrogance and superiority akin to the ones used by academia/law-enforcement/politicos to insulate themselves from tribulations of the masses they are so willing to manipulate/bully/deceive when it serves their purposes.
Also, the statement that Basic Computer Science (however it might be defined) is More Useful than $SUBJECT_I_HATED can only have meaning after the purposes of basic (K-12) education have been defined and prioritized. Without agreed upon ends, there can be very little, if any, meaningful discussion on this matter.
If you would like to propose that the primary purpose of basic education is to obtain a career in the CS industry, I don't think many would argue with you about the greater usefulness of Basic CS over something as inapplicable as History. If you took a more moderate stance, and said that the primary purpose of basic education was to train the minds of the youth to be able to approach the problems of the adult world (and life) in general, well, I personally know some historians who would disagree with you about the usefulness of replacing some of the History classes with Computer Science classes.
But this is
True story (and as close to verbatim as I can remember): ...Yes...I see that...I don't know how this got this far. The charge is dismissed. The clerk will handle the rest of this paperwork...
Ventura County Superior Court, CA
Court Clerk: Next, case... ___ Inc...
I get up from my row of chairs, papers in hand, and approach the defendant's stand
Me: Your Honor, I'm representing ___ Inc in this matter.
Judge: I see that (looking over a brief statement to that effect, signed by the President of ___ Inc)...so you are here to dispute this? (picks up the other case documents (including the photos) and begins to look them over)
Me: Yes, Your Honor. As you can now see, the defendant, my client, is a corporation, and is consequently unable to commit a moving violation as is claimed on this ticket...
Judge:
Me: Thank you, Your Honor.
Judge nods distractedly and waves his hand dismissively as he reaches for the paperwork for the next case.
Full disclosure: IANAL, but was hired by the company (one of my regular clients for tech consulting) to be there. Definitely goes down as the consulting job most outside my areas of expertise.
and aren't parasites on a fundamental biological level.
Perhaps you would believe in "removing" the "parasitic" twin (there commonly is one) from sets of conjoined twins?
The absurdity of labeling one's own dependent offspring as parasitic in "biological" terms is blindingly absurd (if you believe in such silly things as evolutionary imperatives, continuation of the species, and all that junk, that is).
Granted, once that offspring hits 32 and still won't move out of the basement, or get a girlfriend, the whole "protect and propagate your genes" impulse may be a little weak in the parents.
"Murder"
"I don't think it means what you think it means..."
In answer to your "Ooooo...I can think of some almost-but-not-completely-outside-the-scope-of-the-discussion" questions:
1) South Park said it best.
2) How do you "know"? Medical science, like all good science only measures probabilities of future contingents. How high of a degree of certainty do you have? To look at the choice positively: What are the chances of the child growing up to lead a happy, fulfilled life, in each case? Isn't some chance better than no chance? I know that I'd take a one-in-a-million chance at decades of life (with a 999,999-in-a-million chance at an agonizing death months from now) vs. an immediate death.
3) Murder requires intent to cause the death. By definition. Maybe you meant "kill" in the sense of material/accidental cause. In which case, it seems appropriate. Hurricanes kill people. Earthquakes kill people. Water kills people. Windshields of cars kill people. You get the point (I hope).
4) Is it murder when one doctor can't save the life of a patient who got sepsis from the some surgeon's previous bad decision?
Embryos can't live outside of a uteris or other life-sustaining environment. Neither can removed warts.
Billy the Mountain can't live outside of an atmosphere or other life-sustaining environment. Neither can warts.
Congratulations, you've just shown that life needs things to survive, and that certain parts of living organisms will die if removed from them... For your next stunning demonstration you could explain to us all how a fetus is "totally tiny and so are fleas" and that they both require the blood of another organism to survive, therefore...OMG they're the totally the same!11!!1! thus proving once and for all that gene pool truly would be bettered by the removal of yourself.
I was going to waste the time trying to explain to you the difference between "whole" and "part" with an aside about presence of autonomy being a defining characteristic of an individual, but I decided I could achieve my goals in this mildly insulting sentence.
I consider something "human" when a brain capable of becoming a human brain has fired off its first thought.
That's cute. Totally aside from all the questions of how you define "first thought"...hows about you look to what every single modern biologist will say, namely, "DNA determines species". At the point of conception, the zygote is genetically/biologically a human. He/She is classified/identified as a male/female individual of the species homo sapiens (that means "human" in Grown-Up science-talk). For everyone who paid attention in high-school science, though, the debate is about "life" and "when" it should be defined/protected.
Now I'm going to apologize, but I can't ignore the idiocy of your last sentence. So, please explain to me, with your Grown-Up words, what species of life-form did that brain belong to 3 seconds before it "fired off its first thought"?
Also, to every other point you made:
1) Evolutionary imperative. We better not give as much of a shit about anything else as we do about our own species...
2) You're retarded.
3) That's about it.
Interesting choice. Personally I've been looking to "adopt" a gorgeous, wealthy nymphomaniac with her own island. Although to be honest, I'm really hoping to find twins. But, y'know, the GP is right. It takes a lot of courage.
You do remember this is /. you're posting on, right?! Half of us are "that creepy guy in the office". And the other half were "that creepy guy" until they got their revenge, and now we have comfortably retired to our parents basement.
Actually, what I think he's doing isolating the oscillator while impeding the capacitive antenna, all the while the couplings' reactance which is usually between 1.85 GHz and 6.1 dB/mW is going to undergo a radical departure from its aperture (commonly also acting as the modulating amplifier) while the multiband waveguide is going to totally remove the need for the baluns. Now of course this won't have any measurable effect on the odd-order harmonics, which are going to continue to radiate (at 50 Ohms) to their hearts content without any EMF shielding on their carrier-transmit line. And don't make me go into bandlimiting filters...I'll go ALL Marconi on your ass!
I love slashdot
I'm calling Shenanigans on you for making this statement with a glaringly obvious lack of a basic understanding of how karma is doled out!
Whenever I see this I'm always expecting it to be followed by the obligatory long explanation of how "it's not a bad analogy blah blah blah" scattered with links to other people who are saying the same thing.
I'm kinda happy that there wasn't one after yours, although I'm secretly cheering for it-wasn't-a-bad-analogy to become its own meme, representing that portion of the tech community that cares just a bit too much about the logic of memes.
Hmmm...now that I've spent so much time on this response I feel like a should copy-and-paste it everywhere I see a lonely "tubes" comment...but I won't.
Or will I?
No, no I won't.
Is there any other kind?
Back in my day we only had analog downloads! And we were glad to have any at all! Why, if we wanted to play a video game one of us had to mentally interpret and reconstruct the current running through our hands back into the original binary! Then we had to crack the DRM - by slamming our heads just right against a stone wall to purge it from our memory. And we were grateful for the opportunity!
...
Then our father would cut us in two wit' a bread knife.
Standoff enters day 11,834. It's a powder-keg. For sure. They could totally nuke each other any second.
"Yes, we can!"
Who?! WTF!? I was talking about Cesar Chavez...