Oh, I agree completely, and I suspect that at some point in my life, I will find myself stranded along the road.
I just don't have any reason to suspect that this will be a frequent occurrence, and the very small number of times that it may happen doesn't seem to come close to offsetting the cost of a cellphone and a service plan, the irritation of hauling around another object, and the needed effort in remembering to charge its batteries regularly. It also seems environmentally wasteful to indulge in a product which I'm likely to rarely - if ever - use.
People have had their cars break down for how many years now, and survived just fine without cellphones in most cases? I'm not too worried.
I think pushing cell phones as preventative measures in cases like these is just plain silly.
Maybe five years ago, when cell phone popularity was just building up, a woman came up to me on the street and asked me if I wanted a free phone. I told her that I wasn't interested. When she stopped looking at me as if I was mentally deficient, she asked me why.
I replied, "I just don't want to be that accessible. I don't even like to answer the phone when I'm home half the time."
She proceeded, for several seconds, to glare at me as if she had just met the most incomprehensibly retarded person that she had had the pleasure of encountering in her entire life.
She then gave me the spiel about how useful a cell phone would be if I was ever to find myself stranded on the side of the road, my car refusing to start, in the cold Canadian winter.
My response? "In the 22 years I've been alive, I've never found myself in that situation. Paying $20 or more a month to address the unlikelihood of it ever happening seems a little excessive."
She then got a cell phone call and ended the conversation.
And if the banks (at least around here) were open on weekends, or on weekdays at hours before 10:00 AM or after 4:00 PM, that might just be a possibility.
The fact of the matter is that banks are open for businesses. The rest of us are thrown the internet and phone banking bone to shut us up as we're not valued customers.
Is it a difficult or expensive process to become eligible to work in Australia? I'm a Canadian / American / European citizen right now, and my partner and I are currently living in Canada but would like to move a little further away from the US as we don't feel particularly safe living this close to it or in a country where it's very much trying to exert it's influence. Australia would probably be my first choice of country to move to.
Incidentally, I have a BSc in comp sci, an MSc in comp sci, and soon a PhD in mathematics. My partner has a BSc in biological anthropology, and will likely be getting either an MSc and PhD in the same or a degree in radiology.
As well, what's the prospects looking like for gay marriage out there? What are the general feelings right now?
Some friends of mine last night took me to see the movie, and based on the opinions I'd heard up until that point, I didn't think that I'd particularly like it or find it funny. I went in with very negative expectations.
This wasn't the case at all! We all found the movie to be exceptionally well done, and the entire theatre was laughing consistently throughout the film. The special effects were very well done, the jokes captured Adams' humour well and stayed faily true to the book, and I could muster up no complaints.
I'm not sure why there've been so many negative reviews, to be honest. I loved it, and I'd strongly recommend it. One of the first good movies I've seen in a long time.
I second the poster. Definitely try replacing the RAM. I had similar problems to what you're describing on an iBook on which OS 9 ran without problems, but on which OS X would balk and die.
First off, how does it make sense to anyone whatsoever that common nouns like "tiger", "windows", etc. should be subject to copyright? It's absolute lunacy. If these companies exercised any cleverness in coming up with a unique name that wasn't already found in the language of manufacture, alright, I could see how copyrights should be allowed... but for existing nouns? There's no creativity to be found there.
I'd wager that through his completely absurd security measures (and then being stupid enough to announce them on the internet), this guy is opening himself up to attack. Some people will view this kind of paranoia as a challenge, which will only encourage them to attack him. Had he just your run-of-the-mill everyday security measures, I sincerely doubt that anyone would be interested enough to engage in more than your standard quick and rudimentary hack attempt to break into his system.
For example, a company I used to work for had this policy that you had to change your password every 30 days, have at least 1 special character, one capital, one number, etc.
My work has this security requirement as well, and given that we simply develop financial performance analysis software, I think it's utterly absurd.
I don't know about others at my company, but after I had exhausted my normal six passwords, I began relying on things like "Qwerty1!", and when that expired, "Poiuyt1!". Additionally, I had to write these passwords down because there was no way I was likely to remember them, and having your password scrawled on a piece of paper in your desk doesn't bode well for security.
Regardless, I feel no particular urge to exercise honesty in the face of companies with dishonest practices; for example, I feel loyalty to Apple because I approve of them on the whole as a company, and will opt to purchase any Apple product I use as a result, whereas on the other hand, I will never pay for a Microsoft product, nor will I feel any guilt at downloading one and using it illegally (although, as a rule, I tend to avoid them when possible).
I may not be free under the law to change the terms of such a contract, but I don't necessarily feel bound to follow the laws in all cases, either.
My problem is that I listen to a lot of music that's not well-known and not readily available through online services; thus, I'm forced to either buy the CD, or download it illegally. Because of the relative obscurity of the artists, I've found that the CD prices are astronomical. I will not pay that much money for music, nor do I think it's fair that I should be expected to. Furthermore, it makes no sense to me that the prices of technology and materials seems to have declined considerably over the years, and yet, if anything, the price of music CDs and movie DVDs has only gone up.
I would prefer to support my artists, but if it's not feasible, I have no particular qualm with stealing. By "not feasible", I mean that overpriced and DRMed music is not feasible, when I can obtain the same music for free, sans DRM, in just a few moments of effort. I've decided that not only will I engage in this behaviour, but I will make it clear to the people involved that I will do so, as evidenced by the following conversation I had with an employee of a music store the other day over the phone:
Store worker: Hello! Can I help you? Me: I was wondering if you could tell me if you have the new CD by Monade? Store worker: Let me check for you. *pause* We have one copy available. Would you like me to put it on hold? Me: Could you tell me how much it is? Store worker: It's $25.99. Me: No thank you. For that price, I'll download it.
A song simply isn't worth $2.60 to me. Furthermore, I will not shell out money for a CD when I'm not even sure I will like the songs. I was able to download the album within an hour with virtually no effort on my part. The artists are coming locally to perform in a few weeks, at which point I'll buy the CD directly from them so that they receive a much larger cut of the profits.
While I'll concede that math may be a little dry and bereft of creativity at the undergrad level, that definitely changes at the grad level.
I'm also not sure why you felt the need to demonstrate so much hostility here:
Also, you really have to read my fucking post again. I said "one of the hardest", not "the hardest." I hope that you know the difference between the two expressions...
I spoke entirely on the grounds that you said "one of the hardest". If you go back and read my post, you'll see that; I pointed to the fact that I didn't think it was one of the hardest, citing a good number of disciplines that I thought were much harder. To be "one of the hardest", you need to be amongst the hardest, and if I point out a sufficient proportion of harder disciplines, you're not "one of the hardest". That was my intent, and I'm sorry if you couldn't appreciate that.
In any case, as a person who is both artistically and scientifically inclined (I enjoy writing novels as much as I enjoy programming or learning math), creativity comes naturally to me, so perhaps this is why I found CS fundamentally very easy. I don't think I got less than an A in any CS class and never worked particularly hard, although I struggle to get those As in my math courses.
You find CS to be one of the HARDEST fields? I find that claim dubious. On what grounds do you make that judgment? As someone who did his undergrad and Master's in CS and who is switching to math for his Ph.D., I'd say that I consider CS to be a relatively easy field in comparison to many of the others (math, engineering, physical sciences, etc).
LOL! Tell me about it:D. I've written some pretty sweet code while stoned (probably because I code more deliberately and less recklessly), and some terrible code while drinking (I've never seen to many compiler errors in my life *shudders with embarrassment*).
I can only speak from personal experience here: I've been smoking pot every night before bed for years now, and I just recently finished my Master's degree in computer science (combinatorics) with almost straight A+s. I realize that my pot use does negatively impact my focus and memory, but I tend to keep that unfortunate side effect in check by offsetting it to the best of my ability through focus developing activities: I engage in personal research, read novels and math books, and challenge myself daily with a number of different puzzles and mental exercises.
Personally, I find that the internet has done far worse things for my focus than marijuana. When I spend long periods of time online, I find it difficult to stay centered and linear in my thinking. I tend to psychotically webpage-hop, reading several sentences on a slashdot post before scampering off to check e-mail, LJ, and then coming back to slashdot. It's probably very unhealthy behaviour, but it's difficult to overcome.
Then how about you and those Christians who feel similarly let us exercise our god-given free will and decide whether or not we want to live by those laws instead of trying to make god's rules into law, thereby essentially stripping of us free will?
I don't see how the ability to use Word serves as an indication of computer aptitude. I'm a Word-tard and can barely perform anything but the simplest of tasks using it, but that's because I don't like the software and hence, never use it; however, several months ago, I completed writing an isomorph-free branch-and-cut solver for ILPs in C++ for my Master's degree and subsequently wrote a 185 page thesis using LaTeX. I'd say that I'm far more computer proficient than 99% of the population, and yet Word and Excel are products that make me look like an idiot.
I don't feel that there's anything unethical in exposing myself to the abuse of advertisements. Not only are the ads designed to prey obnoxiously on the insecurities and structure of human psychology, but they're often boring, repetitive, and downright insulting to the intelligence. The television companies show me no respect by increasing ad time over the years, synching up ad time with other television companies to eliminate channel surfing, and trying to force ads upon people who find means to circumvent them, so I feel no particular inclination to show them respect in return.
I have ethics, thanks kindly. They may not correspond entirely with yours, but you're hardly the authority on what constitutes ethical practices and what doesn't.
The article was unreadable. I went to the page and was presented with a large, intrusive flash-based (I believe) advertisement that refused to let me read the text until it was over, and given the obnoxious nature of the ad, that's not a feasible option, IMO.
Yes... the four major dissociative anaesthetics are PCP, ketamine, dextromethorphan, and nitrous oxide. There are many others, but I don't know what they are offhand and most people probably haven't even heard of them before in any case. There are some structural similarities between ketamine and PCP (a benzene ring and another similar carbon ring), but they are quite different; however, they probably act in the brain in similar ways with action on the PCP and possibly sigma family of receptors, IIRC.
All dissociatives cause similar dissociation and anaesthetisation, which can be quite amusing provided that the user isn't placing themselves in physical danger: a friend of mine on a moderate dose of dextromethorphan rolled over towards me and complained that she had these breasts on her chest that were not hers, and she had problems identifying with the notion that she had two legs. While her thinking was not rational, she was not actively seeking to remedy either situation, and so she was fine and we could both laugh about it later. I'm under the impression that PCP is often different in these regards in that users may try to fix the situation, which is where you hear the horror stories of people cutting off body parts, etc.
Nitrous oxide is a fantastic dissociative that's dramatically different from dextromethorphan, in my experience. Incredibly interesting and while the dissociation is probably stronger, you're so detached from your body and mind that you're likely not aware of the extent of it. Additionally, it's also short lived and fairly physically safe. Great stuff.
While never having tried PCP myself, I'm well experienced with other dissociatives (most notably dextromethorphan and nitrous oxide), and I can speak from experience that they're an incredibly bizarre family of drugs.
On dextromethorphan, for example, even at low doses, looking in the mirror is absolutely shocking because while you intuitively know what you will see, you're so dissociated that you can't identify with your reflection.
A friend of mine was slipped a joint laced with what I can (based on her account of the story) only conclude was PCP; her mind was filled with violent imagery and self destructive thoughts for several hours, and then she had to endure another four days of dissociation where she had difficulty associating her body parts with "her". It was very disturbing to hear about.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I agree completely, and I suspect that at some point in my life, I will find myself stranded along the road.
I just don't have any reason to suspect that this will be a frequent occurrence, and the very small number of times that it may happen doesn't seem to come close to offsetting the cost of a cellphone and a service plan, the irritation of hauling around another object, and the needed effort in remembering to charge its batteries regularly. It also seems environmentally wasteful to indulge in a product which I'm likely to rarely - if ever - use.
People have had their cars break down for how many years now, and survived just fine without cellphones in most cases? I'm not too worried.
I think pushing cell phones as preventative measures in cases like these is just plain silly.
...is up there on my list of priorities, right under buying a toaster with built in HDTV.
Hear, hear.
Maybe five years ago, when cell phone popularity was just building up, a woman came up to me on the street and asked me if I wanted a free phone. I told her that I wasn't interested. When she stopped looking at me as if I was mentally deficient, she asked me why.
I replied, "I just don't want to be that accessible. I don't even like to answer the phone when I'm home half the time."
She proceeded, for several seconds, to glare at me as if she had just met the most incomprehensibly retarded person that she had had the pleasure of encountering in her entire life.
She then gave me the spiel about how useful a cell phone would be if I was ever to find myself stranded on the side of the road, my car refusing to start, in the cold Canadian winter.
My response? "In the 22 years I've been alive, I've never found myself in that situation. Paying $20 or more a month to address the unlikelihood of it ever happening seems a little excessive."
She then got a cell phone call and ended the conversation.
And if the banks (at least around here) were open on weekends, or on weekdays at hours before 10:00 AM or after 4:00 PM, that might just be a possibility.
The fact of the matter is that banks are open for businesses. The rest of us are thrown the internet and phone banking bone to shut us up as we're not valued customers.
Is it a difficult or expensive process to become eligible to work in Australia? I'm a Canadian / American / European citizen right now, and my partner and I are currently living in Canada but would like to move a little further away from the US as we don't feel particularly safe living this close to it or in a country where it's very much trying to exert it's influence. Australia would probably be my first choice of country to move to.
Incidentally, I have a BSc in comp sci, an MSc in comp sci, and soon a PhD in mathematics. My partner has a BSc in biological anthropology, and will likely be getting either an MSc and PhD in the same or a degree in radiology.
As well, what's the prospects looking like for gay marriage out there? What are the general feelings right now?
Thanks tons!
Creationism and intelligent design have about as much place in a science class as evolution and chemistry have in a religious studies course.
Some friends of mine last night took me to see the movie, and based on the opinions I'd heard up until that point, I didn't think that I'd particularly like it or find it funny. I went in with very negative expectations.
This wasn't the case at all! We all found the movie to be exceptionally well done, and the entire theatre was laughing consistently throughout the film. The special effects were very well done, the jokes captured Adams' humour well and stayed faily true to the book, and I could muster up no complaints.
I'm not sure why there've been so many negative reviews, to be honest. I loved it, and I'd strongly recommend it. One of the first good movies I've seen in a long time.
I second the poster. Definitely try replacing the RAM. I had similar problems to what you're describing on an iBook on which OS 9 ran without problems, but on which OS X would balk and die.
Replacing the RAM solved everything nicely.
First off, how does it make sense to anyone whatsoever that common nouns like "tiger", "windows", etc. should be subject to copyright? It's absolute lunacy. If these companies exercised any cleverness in coming up with a unique name that wasn't already found in the language of manufacture, alright, I could see how copyrights should be allowed... but for existing nouns? There's no creativity to be found there.
I'd wager that through his completely absurd security measures (and then being stupid enough to announce them on the internet), this guy is opening himself up to attack. Some people will view this kind of paranoia as a challenge, which will only encourage them to attack him. Had he just your run-of-the-mill everyday security measures, I sincerely doubt that anyone would be interested enough to engage in more than your standard quick and rudimentary hack attempt to break into his system.
For example, a company I used to work for had this policy that you had to change your password every 30 days, have at least 1 special character, one capital, one number, etc.
My work has this security requirement as well, and given that we simply develop financial performance analysis software, I think it's utterly absurd.
I don't know about others at my company, but after I had exhausted my normal six passwords, I began relying on things like "Qwerty1!", and when that expired, "Poiuyt1!". Additionally, I had to write these passwords down because there was no way I was likely to remember them, and having your password scrawled on a piece of paper in your desk doesn't bode well for security.
I live in Canada. There's certainly a (d) option.
Regardless, I feel no particular urge to exercise honesty in the face of companies with dishonest practices; for example, I feel loyalty to Apple because I approve of them on the whole as a company, and will opt to purchase any Apple product I use as a result, whereas on the other hand, I will never pay for a Microsoft product, nor will I feel any guilt at downloading one and using it illegally (although, as a rule, I tend to avoid them when possible).
I may not be free under the law to change the terms of such a contract, but I don't necessarily feel bound to follow the laws in all cases, either.
I call bullshit. I've never had emacs crash on me on Mac OS X... not once since I've been using it, which is near-daily since Mac OS X 10.0.
My problem is that I listen to a lot of music that's not well-known and not readily available through online services; thus, I'm forced to either buy the CD, or download it illegally. Because of the relative obscurity of the artists, I've found that the CD prices are astronomical. I will not pay that much money for music, nor do I think it's fair that I should be expected to. Furthermore, it makes no sense to me that the prices of technology and materials seems to have declined considerably over the years, and yet, if anything, the price of music CDs and movie DVDs has only gone up.
I would prefer to support my artists, but if it's not feasible, I have no particular qualm with stealing. By "not feasible", I mean that overpriced and DRMed music is not feasible, when I can obtain the same music for free, sans DRM, in just a few moments of effort. I've decided that not only will I engage in this behaviour, but I will make it clear to the people involved that I will do so, as evidenced by the following conversation I had with an employee of a music store the other day over the phone:
Store worker: Hello! Can I help you?
Me: I was wondering if you could tell me if you have the new CD by Monade?
Store worker: Let me check for you. *pause* We have one copy available. Would you like me to put it on hold?
Me: Could you tell me how much it is?
Store worker: It's $25.99.
Me: No thank you. For that price, I'll download it.
A song simply isn't worth $2.60 to me. Furthermore, I will not shell out money for a CD when I'm not even sure I will like the songs. I was able to download the album within an hour with virtually no effort on my part. The artists are coming locally to perform in a few weeks, at which point I'll buy the CD directly from them so that they receive a much larger cut of the profits.
While I'll concede that math may be a little dry and bereft of creativity at the undergrad level, that definitely changes at the grad level.
I'm also not sure why you felt the need to demonstrate so much hostility here:
Also, you really have to read my fucking post again. I said "one of the hardest", not "the hardest." I hope that you know the difference between the two expressions...
I spoke entirely on the grounds that you said "one of the hardest". If you go back and read my post, you'll see that; I pointed to the fact that I didn't think it was one of the hardest, citing a good number of disciplines that I thought were much harder. To be "one of the hardest", you need to be amongst the hardest, and if I point out a sufficient proportion of harder disciplines, you're not "one of the hardest". That was my intent, and I'm sorry if you couldn't appreciate that.
In any case, as a person who is both artistically and scientifically inclined (I enjoy writing novels as much as I enjoy programming or learning math), creativity comes naturally to me, so perhaps this is why I found CS fundamentally very easy. I don't think I got less than an A in any CS class and never worked particularly hard, although I struggle to get those As in my math courses.
You find CS to be one of the HARDEST fields? I find that claim dubious. On what grounds do you make that judgment? As someone who did his undergrad and Master's in CS and who is switching to math for his Ph.D., I'd say that I consider CS to be a relatively easy field in comparison to many of the others (math, engineering, physical sciences, etc).
LOL! Tell me about it :D. I've written some pretty sweet code while stoned (probably because I code more deliberately and less recklessly), and some terrible code while drinking (I've never seen to many compiler errors in my life *shudders with embarrassment*).
I can only speak from personal experience here: I've been smoking pot every night before bed for years now, and I just recently finished my Master's degree in computer science (combinatorics) with almost straight A+s. I realize that my pot use does negatively impact my focus and memory, but I tend to keep that unfortunate side effect in check by offsetting it to the best of my ability through focus developing activities: I engage in personal research, read novels and math books, and challenge myself daily with a number of different puzzles and mental exercises.
Personally, I find that the internet has done far worse things for my focus than marijuana. When I spend long periods of time online, I find it difficult to stay centered and linear in my thinking. I tend to psychotically webpage-hop, reading several sentences on a slashdot post before scampering off to check e-mail, LJ, and then coming back to slashdot. It's probably very unhealthy behaviour, but it's difficult to overcome.
Then how about you and those Christians who feel similarly let us exercise our god-given free will and decide whether or not we want to live by those laws instead of trying to make god's rules into law, thereby essentially stripping of us free will?
I don't see how the ability to use Word serves as an indication of computer aptitude. I'm a Word-tard and can barely perform anything but the simplest of tasks using it, but that's because I don't like the software and hence, never use it; however, several months ago, I completed writing an isomorph-free branch-and-cut solver for ILPs in C++ for my Master's degree and subsequently wrote a 185 page thesis using LaTeX. I'd say that I'm far more computer proficient than 99% of the population, and yet Word and Excel are products that make me look like an idiot.
People aren't superior to others.
Bzzzt. Wrong. Anyone - even old cadavers - are superior to advertisers.
I don't feel that there's anything unethical in exposing myself to the abuse of advertisements. Not only are the ads designed to prey obnoxiously on the insecurities and structure of human psychology, but they're often boring, repetitive, and downright insulting to the intelligence. The television companies show me no respect by increasing ad time over the years, synching up ad time with other television companies to eliminate channel surfing, and trying to force ads upon people who find means to circumvent them, so I feel no particular inclination to show them respect in return.
I have ethics, thanks kindly. They may not correspond entirely with yours, but you're hardly the authority on what constitutes ethical practices and what doesn't.
The article was unreadable. I went to the page and was presented with a large, intrusive flash-based (I believe) advertisement that refused to let me read the text until it was over, and given the obnoxious nature of the ad, that's not a feasible option, IMO.
Yes... the four major dissociative anaesthetics are PCP, ketamine, dextromethorphan, and nitrous oxide. There are many others, but I don't know what they are offhand and most people probably haven't even heard of them before in any case. There are some structural similarities between ketamine and PCP (a benzene ring and another similar carbon ring), but they are quite different; however, they probably act in the brain in similar ways with action on the PCP and possibly sigma family of receptors, IIRC.
All dissociatives cause similar dissociation and anaesthetisation, which can be quite amusing provided that the user isn't placing themselves in physical danger: a friend of mine on a moderate dose of dextromethorphan rolled over towards me and complained that she had these breasts on her chest that were not hers, and she had problems identifying with the notion that she had two legs. While her thinking was not rational, she was not actively seeking to remedy either situation, and so she was fine and we could both laugh about it later. I'm under the impression that PCP is often different in these regards in that users may try to fix the situation, which is where you hear the horror stories of people cutting off body parts, etc.
Nitrous oxide is a fantastic dissociative that's dramatically different from dextromethorphan, in my experience. Incredibly interesting and while the dissociation is probably stronger, you're so detached from your body and mind that you're likely not aware of the extent of it. Additionally, it's also short lived and fairly physically safe. Great stuff.
While never having tried PCP myself, I'm well experienced with other dissociatives (most notably dextromethorphan and nitrous oxide), and I can speak from experience that they're an incredibly bizarre family of drugs.
On dextromethorphan, for example, even at low doses, looking in the mirror is absolutely shocking because while you intuitively know what you will see, you're so dissociated that you can't identify with your reflection.
A friend of mine was slipped a joint laced with what I can (based on her account of the story) only conclude was PCP; her mind was filled with violent imagery and self destructive thoughts for several hours, and then she had to endure another four days of dissociation where she had difficulty associating her body parts with "her". It was very disturbing to hear about.