No offense mate, but that is such a classic American response... wouldn't be a yank you ya?
No, a classical American response would be to point out that if you own a DVD burner, you already have a more-powerful laser than many of the banned devices.
But then I guess that's the difference between a country of free people who had to earn that freedom by force, versus a country full of quavering subjects who've been taught, as a culture, that they're not to be trusted.
Provigil is useful, but its effects are heavily-exaggerated (thanks, Wired.) It is basically a slightly-better-than-caffeine stimulant with fewer side effects.
It will not allow you to go for days at a time without sleep, unless your reason for needing to do so is that your friend is shooting a zombie movie and needs extras.
It's useful when you need to pull an all-nighter, and only then if you take it before you actually get sleepy. That's about it.
....you also alter your own self-perception, permanently and negatively.
You don't have to take drugs to get that effect. All you have to do is grow older.
Wait until you're 40, and have to compete with 20-year-olds who sleep like the Terminator and think like Skynet. You'll be up for some Adderall, some Provigil, some synthmesc with a drencrom chaser, whatever it takes.
Too bad oil is fungible [wikipedia.org], so OPEC can still hurt us monetarily
Completely invalid assertion, if a popular one. Oil costs whatever you have to do to get at it. We actually should be buying and burning foreign oil first. That way, when they run out, we'll still have plenty within our own borders... and what we have will be worth 20x what it is today.
Same argument applies against those who want to drill in ANWR. WTF is the hurry? It'll be there when we need it, if we don't burn it now.
You make some valid points there, although I don't think it's possible to build a complex consumer device that's "perfect" from everyone's point of view. When something like the iPhone is announced and hyped to death, I feel fortunate if it doesn't just outright suck.
When I want to use the phone while driving -- which is rare -- I just do it, the same way I'll drive 65 in a 55 zone when I feel like doing that. Yay for individual judgment.
And I rarely use the phone for email. I was (un)lucky enough to be one of the first GMail users, so I had my pick of user names. I picked a short one with a variant of my (relatively-common) name. Now I get an impractical volume of misaddressed email that renders the account useless, although amusing. So, since I don't delete anything or otherwise make any effort to manage the mailbox, the email UI is fine for my purposes.
Yes, Safari crashes fairly often, and no, the telephone itself is not exactly the best out there. And I definitely agree that the built-in specialty apps are either superfluous, or full of forehead-slapping missed opportunities. But the fact that the iPhone does so much stuff, and does it at least reasonably well, means that I'm pretty sure I'll never live without one unless forced to by extreme poverty or disease.:-P
Several months later, here I am... frigging iPhone doesn't sport ActiveSync, email is a throw back to the dark ages (I think Pine had more features), friggen OS X without copy/cut/paste - WTF?!?! Edge Wireless? That's all? You're kidding right? No voice dialing? No Bluetooth tethering? The list of gripes goes on... But Oooh... it's so pretty...
<shrug> It's a 1.0 product. When's the last time you bought version 1 of anything that was anywhere near as well-developed as an iPhone?
You really think Math, Science and Engineering students can make better films?
It depends on the definition of "better." Some of Hollywood's most influential directors, from Stanley Kubrick to Jim Cameron, were/are hardcore engineering geeks. But most movies made by geeks end up being made for geeks... more like Primer, in other words, than The Terminator.
It would suck if nerdhood was the only point of view represented in the film industry.
Try setting the alarm to wake you up after 7 1/2 hours. Supposedly, REM cycles come in 90-minute phases, so by cutting out the extra 1/2 hour of sleep, you may be able to avoid being interrupted in the middle of a cycle.
Unfortunately, most of his time now is dedicated to lame attacks against theism in general.
If I tried to tell you that Elvis Presley was going to return next week and rule the Earth for a thousand years, you'd laugh at me and call me crazy.
Well, that's "theism," and it's semantically indistinguishable from any other religious point of view. By mocking me, you would have just done exactly what you accuse Dawkins of doing. What would make you right, and him wrong?
It's 2008, and religious thought processes are hurting us badly, as a civilization. Isn't it time to call bullshit for what it is?
Why does BitTorrent use TCP at all? If it used UDP, there would be many ways to detect and ignore forged packets.
Non-trivial applications are almost always better off managing their own connection state in my experience. A lot of TCP/IP networking code seems to be written to work around the quirks of TCP connections rather than to take advantage of them. UDP is clearly the better choice in cases like this.
I'm sorry; I missed the part of your post where you explained exactly what harm those magazines are doing to your fifth grader. Your post begs so many questions that it ought to be written on a cardboard sign.
From what I can tell, if you want your fifth-grader to grow up without getting dangerously-wrong ideas about human sexuality, all you have to do is keep him or her away from churches.
So, then, I've been written off before I've begun. Interestingly, this is my experience. Yes, I'm religious; yes, I deny evolution in the general use of the term;
Sorry, man, but you're basically a Flat Earther. We have clear evidence of speciation by, among other possible causes, natural selection. You have words in a book written by Bronze-Age goatherders... words with no predictive power whatsoever.
The only reason you're a Christian is because someone else got to you first, probably early in life, and made a lot of promises and threats that they can't possibly be held accountable for. Your science teachers just couldn't offer you as good a deal, I guess.
That's a bummer, because you do sound like a bright, personable fellow. There are none so blind as those who will not see.
Bureaucracy has not changed much since those times, but Government has.
Correct. Back in the day, the Civil Defense people would give you a radiation meter and teach you how to use it. You were encouraged to do your part to keep Elm Street safe from the Red Menace.
Now, in 2007, the Communists are gone, and the New York city council wants to prohibit the ownership of unregistered Geiger counters.
I think I liked the Cold War better. At least you knew who your enemies were.
Did you RTFA? If requiring registration of personally-owned Geiger counters isn't something to get angry about, what do you consider worth getting angry about?
That's a serious question, by the way. Is there anything that an overbearing, totalitarian-inclined government couldn't propose that would make you sit up and take notice?
So why not license and regulate the manufacturers of these types of products, so that the products have to produce "correct" results? Why punish the end-user for buying a shoddy product?
Straw man. That is nothing like what the proposed law would do. The proposed law would enforce registration of ownership of monitoring devices, without regard to whether they're properly calibrated or do what their manufacturer claims.
In the 1960s the government distributed radiation meters to the populace, and engaged in widespread efforts to educate people on how to use, test, and maintain them.
In 2008, the government is doing something very different. You don't see a problem with that?
You think that the police and government of NYC somehow have different DNA than the people who visited schools and laboratories in Poland after Chernobyl to confiscate their Geiger counters?
You think we're somehow a different species?
God. I'll admit that I have no idea how to argue with people you; I give up. You win, if only by dint of superior numbers. Enjoy.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't change the subject.
No offense mate, but that is such a classic American response... wouldn't be a yank you ya?
No, a classical American response would be to point out that if you own a DVD burner, you already have a more-powerful laser than many of the banned devices.
But then I guess that's the difference between a country of free people who had to earn that freedom by force, versus a country full of quavering subjects who've been taught, as a culture, that they're not to be trusted.
Provigil is useful, but its effects are heavily-exaggerated (thanks, Wired.) It is basically a slightly-better-than-caffeine stimulant with fewer side effects.
It will not allow you to go for days at a time without sleep, unless your reason for needing to do so is that your friend is shooting a zombie movie and needs extras.
It's useful when you need to pull an all-nighter, and only then if you take it before you actually get sleepy. That's about it.
....you also alter your own self-perception, permanently and negatively.
You don't have to take drugs to get that effect. All you have to do is grow older.
Wait until you're 40, and have to compete with 20-year-olds who sleep like the Terminator and think like Skynet. You'll be up for some Adderall, some Provigil, some synthmesc with a drencrom chaser, whatever it takes.
What's cheaper? An oil-drilling platform, or an occupying army?
People are fixated on the price of oil now, but that's not a very interesting question over the long term, is it?
Too bad oil is fungible [wikipedia.org], so OPEC can still hurt us monetarily
Completely invalid assertion, if a popular one. Oil costs whatever you have to do to get at it. We actually should be buying and burning foreign oil first. That way, when they run out, we'll still have plenty within our own borders... and what we have will be worth 20x what it is today.
Same argument applies against those who want to drill in ANWR. WTF is the hurry? It'll be there when we need it, if we don't burn it now.
You make some valid points there, although I don't think it's possible to build a complex consumer device that's "perfect" from everyone's point of view. When something like the iPhone is announced and hyped to death, I feel fortunate if it doesn't just outright suck.
:-P
When I want to use the phone while driving -- which is rare -- I just do it, the same way I'll drive 65 in a 55 zone when I feel like doing that. Yay for individual judgment.
And I rarely use the phone for email. I was (un)lucky enough to be one of the first GMail users, so I had my pick of user names. I picked a short one with a variant of my (relatively-common) name. Now I get an impractical volume of misaddressed email that renders the account useless, although amusing. So, since I don't delete anything or otherwise make any effort to manage the mailbox, the email UI is fine for my purposes.
Yes, Safari crashes fairly often, and no, the telephone itself is not exactly the best out there. And I definitely agree that the built-in specialty apps are either superfluous, or full of forehead-slapping missed opportunities. But the fact that the iPhone does so much stuff, and does it at least reasonably well, means that I'm pretty sure I'll never live without one unless forced to by extreme poverty or disease.
It's thin enough to fit in a jeans pocket without anyone noticing
You can bet the engineer responsible for that has been sacked.
Several months later, here I am... frigging iPhone doesn't sport ActiveSync, email is a throw back to the dark ages (I think Pine had more features), friggen OS X without copy/cut/paste - WTF?!?! Edge Wireless? That's all? You're kidding right? No voice dialing? No Bluetooth tethering? The list of gripes goes on... But Oooh... it's so pretty...
<shrug> It's a 1.0 product. When's the last time you bought version 1 of anything that was anywhere near as well-developed as an iPhone?
You may be of the opinion that the violence allowed on broadcast TV is excessive (and I wouldn't argue), but it is regulated right along with sex.
Catch the season finale of LOST? My last Quake tournament didn't have that high a body count.
I'm pretty sure Cameron holds at least a BSEE.
You really think Math, Science and Engineering students can make better films?
It depends on the definition of "better." Some of Hollywood's most influential directors, from Stanley Kubrick to Jim Cameron, were/are hardcore engineering geeks. But most movies made by geeks end up being made for geeks... more like Primer, in other words, than The Terminator.
It would suck if nerdhood was the only point of view represented in the film industry.
"If the answer involves giving money to Sony, you must have asked a really silly question."
Do you even know what Theism is, and how it differs, from, say Deism?
Do you know what Frotzianism is, and how it differs from, say, Ozmology?
That question is just as relevant to our daily lives. My made-up "isms" are just as valid as yours.
Try setting the alarm to wake you up after 7 1/2 hours. Supposedly, REM cycles come in 90-minute phases, so by cutting out the extra 1/2 hour of sleep, you may be able to avoid being interrupted in the middle of a cycle.
Unfortunately, most of his time now is dedicated to lame attacks against theism in general.
If I tried to tell you that Elvis Presley was going to return next week and rule the Earth for a thousand years, you'd laugh at me and call me crazy.
Well, that's "theism," and it's semantically indistinguishable from any other religious point of view. By mocking me, you would have just done exactly what you accuse Dawkins of doing. What would make you right, and him wrong?
It's 2008, and religious thought processes are hurting us badly, as a civilization. Isn't it time to call bullshit for what it is?
I wonder whose bright idea was it to build a huge linear accelerator almost on top of a known fault system in the first place?
Valve Software's?
Why does BitTorrent use TCP at all? If it used UDP, there would be many ways to detect and ignore forged packets.
Non-trivial applications are almost always better off managing their own connection state in my experience. A lot of TCP/IP networking code seems to be written to work around the quirks of TCP connections rather than to take advantage of them. UDP is clearly the better choice in cases like this.
I'm sorry; I missed the part of your post where you explained exactly what harm those magazines are doing to your fifth grader. Your post begs so many questions that it ought to be written on a cardboard sign.
From what I can tell, if you want your fifth-grader to grow up without getting dangerously-wrong ideas about human sexuality, all you have to do is keep him or her away from churches.
So, then, I've been written off before I've begun. Interestingly, this is my experience. Yes, I'm religious; yes, I deny evolution in the general use of the term;
Sorry, man, but you're basically a Flat Earther. We have clear evidence of speciation by, among other possible causes, natural selection. You have words in a book written by Bronze-Age goatherders... words with no predictive power whatsoever.
The only reason you're a Christian is because someone else got to you first, probably early in life, and made a lot of promises and threats that they can't possibly be held accountable for. Your science teachers just couldn't offer you as good a deal, I guess.
That's a bummer, because you do sound like a bright, personable fellow. There are none so blind as those who will not see.
Bureaucracy has not changed much since those times, but Government has.
Correct. Back in the day, the Civil Defense people would give you a radiation meter and teach you how to use it. You were encouraged to do your part to keep Elm Street safe from the Red Menace.
Now, in 2007, the Communists are gone, and the New York city council wants to prohibit the ownership of unregistered Geiger counters.
I think I liked the Cold War better. At least you knew who your enemies were.
Nicely-put. If this were Fark you'd have about 2 years' free sponsorship for that. :)
Well, he seems very angry
Did you RTFA? If requiring registration of personally-owned Geiger counters isn't something to get angry about, what do you consider worth getting angry about?
That's a serious question, by the way. Is there anything that an overbearing, totalitarian-inclined government couldn't propose that would make you sit up and take notice?
So why not license and regulate the manufacturers of these types of products, so that the products have to produce "correct" results? Why punish the end-user for buying a shoddy product?
Straw man. That is nothing like what the proposed law would do. The proposed law would enforce registration of ownership of monitoring devices, without regard to whether they're properly calibrated or do what their manufacturer claims.
In the 1960s the government distributed radiation meters to the populace, and engaged in widespread efforts to educate people on how to use, test, and maintain them.
In 2008, the government is doing something very different. You don't see a problem with that?
You think that the police and government of NYC somehow have different DNA than the people who visited schools and laboratories in Poland after Chernobyl to confiscate their Geiger counters?
You think we're somehow a different species?
God. I'll admit that I have no idea how to argue with people you; I give up. You win, if only by dint of superior numbers. Enjoy.
This is how it happens, people. This is how liberty dies.
Not with a bang, not with a whimper, and not even with thunderous applause.
It dies with a "+5, Informative" score from the very people -- Slashdot geeks! -- who should be taking to the streets with torches and tire irons.