>>A bit off topic, but it'd be interesting to see how often one would need to do truck-only activities in order for it to make more financial sense to own a truck than it would to own a car and only rent a truck as needed.
Well to be honest, my last car (the Prizm) didn't really get very good mileage at all. Usually around 20-24 MPG in the city, which is where I do all my driving. The truck is a little worse, and maybe because of that I drive it less. I consolidate trips into town. I'm not paying much more for fuel now than I did in my car.
But in the end it comes down to absolute necessity- there is no compact car with mileage high enough to make it more attractive than a truck for my needs. And to keep this on topic, there is no other MP3 player with features amazing enough to satisfy my needs: removable battery, wireless, big screen, WMA file support, etc.- those are all irrelevant when what I absolutely need is support for a huge library, easy access to new media, and an integrated and simple method of updating and syncing data. Plug in, go to bed, unplug, go to work. Everything does what it's supposed to. I'll take that over a removable battery any day.
Field of windmills stretching along 100 miles of coastline. Nothing within miles except other sparsely spaced windmills (maybe 500 yards apart). Compare that to a large coal or nuclear power plant. One plant supplying power to an entire state(s). Or massive power switching stations using uninsulated high voltage lines- these could be disabled by one bomb, or even one specialized bomb like the BLU-114/B that would cause no collateral damage.
In terms of national defense, windmills would be perfect. During an all-out war, no one will concentrate resources on taking out tiny, isolated powerplants especially since each one only represents a tiny percentage of the total generating capacity of the field. No one would waste a nuke to take out 50 windmills (remember that the ONLY casualties will be the windmills- they're out in the ocean).
Recall how long it took to get our domestic oil refineries back online after Katrina; imagine how long it would take to get disabled power plants online after an attack. And the people working on the refineries had electricity. Imagine rebuilding a nuclear power plant using generators and flashlights.
Small scale terrorism would be annoying and expensive, but that's what insurance is for. If terrorists took out one windmill, your lightbulbs wouldn't even flicker. And if their attacks happen out at sea, that's all the better for innocent civilians back on land.
During an all-out war, the vanes could be feathered, generation stopped, and the main lines disconnected. At the end of the war, if anyone was around, the windmills would still be there. They wouldn't need fuel (coal power plants go through a train-load of fuel a day) or specialized technicians (nuke plants). If they could power even a small portion of the eastern seaboard, we'd be all set for reconstruction. We wouldn't have any choice, really, because every other power plant would be gone. Partial warfare: same deal, but maybe you lose fewer power plants. Windmills still come out the clear winner as the power source of a nation on the defense.
Which we are not, so I don't expect wind energy to go anywhere anytime soon:(
LOL. It was an analogy, fella. Sort of like A is to B like C is to D kind of thing.
Sorry my post went a little over your head. But that's OK, I can tell from your other posts on this thread that you are HEAVILY invested in your sansa and your zen. You fanboys can get so emotional:)
>>Fuck that, Apple is just another Microsoft, and the reason people don't see it is this weird blindness people get when the "in-thing" is around
Gosh, I really am tired of this argument. I think it's annoying because when you say that someone bought something just because it's the 'in thing', you are telling that person that they are so stupid that they don't know what they want, don't know why they want what they want, and in fact want stupid things.
My iPod is not a slap bracelet or zubaz or a mullet. It's a tool that I use to get something done (it plays music for me). I don't use it in public. Only one of my friends owns an iPod besides me. In addition, it comes with tools for managing and aquiring music, videos, podcasts, games, and other stuff.
Maybe, just maybe, you could get off your high horse and admit that some people aren't fucking idiots and consciously chose iPod over something else for good reasons. You want a car, I want a truck, and I don't need to hear your theories about why owning a truck makes me a trendy redneck asshat. Some people buy trucks because they're remodeling their house and can't fit lumber and sheetrock in their geo prizm.
Sorry to pick on your post but I am pretty sick of pretentious trolls considering anything popular to be crap.
Oh jeez my bad. What a faux pas. Like using a holy trinity reference in a protestant church. Or maybe the DL would get the damned point and have a little laugh unlike you.
Because: 1- Internet dating is not illegal 2- Being weird is not illegal 3- Vigilantism IS illegal because 4- Police are held to a higher standard than citizens in that 5- Due process must be used in court and 6- The police (typically) are not using sting ops for personal gain or aggrandizement and 7- many other reasons 8 goto 1
I wonder if the absence of the experience of carrying a baby to term has an affect on the emotional commitment of the parents?
I wonder if anyone has done a large-scale study of couples who've used surrogate mothers or adopted very young (just-born) babies.
Like love and other chemical con-jobs, it seems that a large part of the attitude of new parents stems from chemical cues triggered by pregnancy. I've been around enough pregnant women to know that a pregnant woman is not the same as a woman who knows that she'll have a baby of her own soon.
Not meant as disrespect to anyone- there are simply some aspects of human behavior that are governed by hormones that we simply cannot reproduce synthetically.
I think the main difference (besides the bacteria fta being prokaryotes vs eukaryotic parasites) is that our gut bacteria help us (symbiosis) while parasites merely feed on us. I cannot think of a single human parasite that, were it to vanish today, would be missed- emotionally or physiologically.
Humans are no longer a part of the interesting snail/fish/fluke/bird ecosystems described in the book, and I think it is correct to say that total eradication of human parasites should be a priority.
The organism you describe is a eukaryotic parasite (toxoplasmo gondii, forgive the spelling)- not a bacteria- and it does not normally form a symbiotic/parasitic relationship with humans. It will infect humans if the cysts or cercari are ingested but its life cycle effectively ends there unless the human is eaten by a cat. It just lives there on top of your brain sending out signals that are designed to affect mice. Also, it would not be hereditary (unless you count the child being infected by the same cat shit that the parent was exposed to).
I'm not saying that bacteria may not affect behavior, but your example (while very cool and creepy) falls in a different category.
-b
Check out the book 'parasite rex' for a much more in-depth discussion of the eukaryotic parasites. You will never... ever... ever... want to go on a tropical vacation again.
I just think it's strange that this mysterious recessive gene that has laid dormant for so many centuries finally reared its head in the last 30 years.
Maybe you are one of the people who are stuck with their bodies being a little large, but I find it hard to believe that the vast majority of obese people have no control over their condition. All of a sudden thousands of people in ONE country are rapidly gaining weight?
Most of the thin people I know go to the gym or walk their dog or work on their house or chop wood or go dancing or whatever when they are done with work. Most of the obese people I know go home and sit in front of the TV or computer screen until bedtime.
I'm just saying. Not trying to be disrespectful to anyone.
I know many people who were like your friends when they were younger. Trust me, it will come back to haunt them someday in the form of hardened arteries, arterial plaque, diabetes, etc.
Hang in there. Obesity itself is not a health risk. You'll probably outlive them.
Maybe people under 30 use google as their primary method of finding new web addresses, but...
I work with several people (all over 45, and all technically-minded people) who will type in 'www.yahoo.com', then type in 'www.whatever.com', then press search, and then click on the search results for whatever.com to get to the website.
I wish I was kidding.
Unfortunately, by the time our kids are using the next greatest thing, they'll be telling stories like that about us.:)
Because that would result in fewer stories and thus fewer discussions. I wouldn't even come to slashdot every day just to see two or three new stories. I would like the same number of stories that we have now, and I would like them to be higher quality.
I have nothing against kdawson as a person, but I've yet to see a/. post defending him. Slashdot has made its opinion very clear.
Just a quick fyi- In the u.s., slander and libel both fall under the legal heading of defamation; i.e., they are not separate charges, as they would be in the u.k. or other countries using a different law system (napoleonic code, english common law, etc.).
If a certain brand of car ran just fine until you put a soda in the cupholder or put a CD in the CD player or stashed some maps in the glove box, I think I actually WOULD blame the car's manufacturer.
Or from another perspective: VW's and Porsches are probably great cars but there are no parts or mechanics for them within 200 miles, and that's why I'll never buy one. Maybe it's the 'car culture' but that doesn't make the german cars any the less undesirable.
Well on the other hand, it would be nice to use an operating system that doesn't explode just because of a faulty printer driver or crappy 3rd-party software...
>>a rock exposed to supercooled rock vapour will have said vapour condense and freeze on its surface, resulting in a bigger rock.
But that is true of basically anything. People, metals, cats- any solid matter will grow under the right circumstances when exposed to its respective vapor.
Things that are considered living by traditional standards will usually stop being considered living if they are subjected to your process, though.
I use and downright require FB on my firefox installs, but one minor(?) problem with it pops up when you visit all-flash websites: You are greeted by a screen of empty white boxes with no clue what to do. You need to click each square one by one until you come across the menu item/gui element you were looking for.
Not much to be done except avoid those sites, but that can be difficult.
My job basically amounts to finding and killing people (military).
Big tobacco sat on their findings for quite a while.
The 'real people' who made zyklon B during world war 2 probably knew what it was being used for, but...
Conservatives probably are comfortable hiding statistics about sex, disease, and pregnancy that undermines their positions- data that could otherwise save lives...
Yes, I do believe a company would sit on a cure.
-b
Re:The reviewer is missing the point of the book
on
Anathem
·
· Score: 1
It makes me sad that people use 'made up words' as a criticism of this book...
The reason it makes me sad is not that I like made-up words (it usually bugs me) but that the words in Anathem are for the most part not made up, really. I just flipped through the book and found about a 50/50 mix of french and latin words, word roots, and phonetic spellings of words. This is not PhD-level language, either. I don't expect everyone (or anyone, for that matter) to know english, french, latin, and the history of monastic ritual and terminology- but for heaven's sake people, can't you at least notice the pattern of french-sounding words and latin-sounding words?
The story ostensibly takes place in a different dimension but I assure you that the unfamiliar wording in anathem is very much rooted in our own planet's languages.
Sorry for the rant but I hear the nonsense-words criticism every time I come across a book review for Anathem.
The media server that we use in Iraq is commander-sanctioned. In Iraq, a commander has the power of life or death. If he says it's legal, it's legal. We're talking about someone who has the power to have subordinates taken outside and shot (not that that happens anymore).
I suppose you wouldn't be happy about the football-field sized bazaar on base that specializes in pirate dvd's, operating systems, and rolexes...
I don't see the difference between playing media off the server and copying it- either way, you're using X MB of bandwidth on the network. Our roaming profiles are limited to much less than a GB, so it's not really practical to copy entire movies for local use. IMO we're using the network exactly the way it was intended to be used.
Not true, in my experience. You had to buy your own flash drives, because supply wouldn't issue them. As long as you had an 'unclassified' sticker on your media, you were golden.
In Iraq, we have a huge media server with thousands of songs and movies. Soldiers and airmen are free to take from it using their personal HDDs and ipods.
With this new ban, my shop is hosed. We got tired of saving all our CTK (toolbox) inventories on CD-R's so we bought a flash drive to use instead. Damn it.
Slashdot Mirror
>>A bit off topic, but it'd be interesting to see how often one would need to do truck-only activities in order for it to make more financial sense to own a truck than it would to own a car and only rent a truck as needed.
Well to be honest, my last car (the Prizm) didn't really get very good mileage at all. Usually around 20-24 MPG in the city, which is where I do all my driving. The truck is a little worse, and maybe because of that I drive it less. I consolidate trips into town. I'm not paying much more for fuel now than I did in my car.
But in the end it comes down to absolute necessity- there is no compact car with mileage high enough to make it more attractive than a truck for my needs. And to keep this on topic, there is no other MP3 player with features amazing enough to satisfy my needs: removable battery, wireless, big screen, WMA file support, etc.- those are all irrelevant when what I absolutely need is support for a huge library, easy access to new media, and an integrated and simple method of updating and syncing data. Plug in, go to bed, unplug, go to work. Everything does what it's supposed to. I'll take that over a removable battery any day.
-b
>>be big targets if there was a war
Field of windmills stretching along 100 miles of coastline. Nothing within miles except other sparsely spaced windmills (maybe 500 yards apart). Compare that to a large coal or nuclear power plant. One plant supplying power to an entire state(s). Or massive power switching stations using uninsulated high voltage lines- these could be disabled by one bomb, or even one specialized bomb like the BLU-114/B that would cause no collateral damage.
In terms of national defense, windmills would be perfect. During an all-out war, no one will concentrate resources on taking out tiny, isolated powerplants especially since each one only represents a tiny percentage of the total generating capacity of the field. No one would waste a nuke to take out 50 windmills (remember that the ONLY casualties will be the windmills- they're out in the ocean).
Recall how long it took to get our domestic oil refineries back online after Katrina; imagine how long it would take to get disabled power plants online after an attack. And the people working on the refineries had electricity. Imagine rebuilding a nuclear power plant using generators and flashlights.
Small scale terrorism would be annoying and expensive, but that's what insurance is for. If terrorists took out one windmill, your lightbulbs wouldn't even flicker. And if their attacks happen out at sea, that's all the better for innocent civilians back on land.
During an all-out war, the vanes could be feathered, generation stopped, and the main lines disconnected. At the end of the war, if anyone was around, the windmills would still be there. They wouldn't need fuel (coal power plants go through a train-load of fuel a day) or specialized technicians (nuke plants). If they could power even a small portion of the eastern seaboard, we'd be all set for reconstruction. We wouldn't have any choice, really, because every other power plant would be gone. Partial warfare: same deal, but maybe you lose fewer power plants. Windmills still come out the clear winner as the power source of a nation on the defense.
Which we are not, so I don't expect wind energy to go anywhere anytime soon :(
-b
LOL. It was an analogy, fella. Sort of like A is to B like C is to D kind of thing.
Sorry my post went a little over your head. But that's OK, I can tell from your other posts on this thread that you are HEAVILY invested in your sansa and your zen. You fanboys can get so emotional :)
-b
take a joke
>>Fuck that, Apple is just another Microsoft, and the reason people don't see it is this weird blindness people get when the "in-thing" is around
Gosh, I really am tired of this argument. I think it's annoying because when you say that someone bought something just because it's the 'in thing', you are telling that person that they are so stupid that they don't know what they want, don't know why they want what they want, and in fact want stupid things.
My iPod is not a slap bracelet or zubaz or a mullet. It's a tool that I use to get something done (it plays music for me). I don't use it in public. Only one of my friends owns an iPod besides me. In addition, it comes with tools for managing and aquiring music, videos, podcasts, games, and other stuff.
Maybe, just maybe, you could get off your high horse and admit that some people aren't fucking idiots and consciously chose iPod over something else for good reasons. You want a car, I want a truck, and I don't need to hear your theories about why owning a truck makes me a trendy redneck asshat. Some people buy trucks because they're remodeling their house and can't fit lumber and sheetrock in their geo prizm.
Sorry to pick on your post but I am pretty sick of pretentious trolls considering anything popular to be crap.
-b
Oh jeez my bad. What a faux pas. Like using a holy trinity reference in a protestant church. Or maybe the DL would get the damned point and have a little laugh unlike you.
-b
>>Less attackers will be aware of an exploit, but less defenders will be aware of it as well.
What a perfect koan. The DL would be proud. "Can a mountain be too high to climb? Can a climber be too high to climb a mountain?"
How do you kill that which has no life?
-b
Because:
1- Internet dating is not illegal
2- Being weird is not illegal
3- Vigilantism IS illegal because
4- Police are held to a higher standard than citizens in that
5- Due process must be used in court and
6- The police (typically) are not using sting ops for personal gain or aggrandizement and
7- many other reasons
8 goto 1
-b
I wonder if the absence of the experience of carrying a baby to term has an affect on the emotional commitment of the parents?
I wonder if anyone has done a large-scale study of couples who've used surrogate mothers or adopted very young (just-born) babies.
Like love and other chemical con-jobs, it seems that a large part of the attitude of new parents stems from chemical cues triggered by pregnancy. I've been around enough pregnant women to know that a pregnant woman is not the same as a woman who knows that she'll have a baby of her own soon.
Not meant as disrespect to anyone- there are simply some aspects of human behavior that are governed by hormones that we simply cannot reproduce synthetically.
-b
I think the main difference (besides the bacteria fta being prokaryotes vs eukaryotic parasites) is that our gut bacteria help us (symbiosis) while parasites merely feed on us. I cannot think of a single human parasite that, were it to vanish today, would be missed- emotionally or physiologically.
Humans are no longer a part of the interesting snail/fish/fluke/bird ecosystems described in the book, and I think it is correct to say that total eradication of human parasites should be a priority.
-b
The organism you describe is a eukaryotic parasite (toxoplasmo gondii, forgive the spelling)- not a bacteria- and it does not normally form a symbiotic/parasitic relationship with humans. It will infect humans if the cysts or cercari are ingested but its life cycle effectively ends there unless the human is eaten by a cat. It just lives there on top of your brain sending out signals that are designed to affect mice. Also, it would not be hereditary (unless you count the child being infected by the same cat shit that the parent was exposed to).
I'm not saying that bacteria may not affect behavior, but your example (while very cool and creepy) falls in a different category.
-b
Check out the book 'parasite rex' for a much more in-depth discussion of the eukaryotic parasites. You will never... ever... ever... want to go on a tropical vacation again.
I just think it's strange that this mysterious recessive gene that has laid dormant for so many centuries finally reared its head in the last 30 years.
Maybe you are one of the people who are stuck with their bodies being a little large, but I find it hard to believe that the vast majority of obese people have no control over their condition. All of a sudden thousands of people in ONE country are rapidly gaining weight?
Most of the thin people I know go to the gym or walk their dog or work on their house or chop wood or go dancing or whatever when they are done with work. Most of the obese people I know go home and sit in front of the TV or computer screen until bedtime.
I'm just saying. Not trying to be disrespectful to anyone.
-b
I know many people who were like your friends when they were younger. Trust me, it will come back to haunt them someday in the form of hardened arteries, arterial plaque, diabetes, etc.
Hang in there. Obesity itself is not a health risk. You'll probably outlive them.
-b
I see that you went to class with my ex-girlfriend.
Maybe people under 30 use google as their primary method of finding new web addresses, but...
I work with several people (all over 45, and all technically-minded people) who will type in 'www.yahoo.com', then type in 'www.whatever.com', then press search, and then click on the search results for whatever.com to get to the website.
I wish I was kidding.
Unfortunately, by the time our kids are using the next greatest thing, they'll be telling stories like that about us. :)
-b
Because that would result in fewer stories and thus fewer discussions. I wouldn't even come to slashdot every day just to see two or three new stories. I would like the same number of stories that we have now, and I would like them to be higher quality.
I have nothing against kdawson as a person, but I've yet to see a /. post defending him. Slashdot has made its opinion very clear.
-b
Just a quick fyi- In the u.s., slander and libel both fall under the legal heading of defamation; i.e., they are not separate charges, as they would be in the u.k. or other countries using a different law system (napoleonic code, english common law, etc.).
-b
If a certain brand of car ran just fine until you put a soda in the cupholder or put a CD in the CD player or stashed some maps in the glove box, I think I actually WOULD blame the car's manufacturer.
Or from another perspective: VW's and Porsches are probably great cars but there are no parts or mechanics for them within 200 miles, and that's why I'll never buy one. Maybe it's the 'car culture' but that doesn't make the german cars any the less undesirable.
-b
Well on the other hand, it would be nice to use an operating system that doesn't explode just because of a faulty printer driver or crappy 3rd-party software...
-b
You missed one:
-Being pious carries a higher incidence of terminal cancer.
Just trying to be thorough :)
-b
>>a rock exposed to supercooled rock vapour will have said vapour condense and freeze on its surface, resulting in a bigger rock.
But that is true of basically anything. People, metals, cats- any solid matter will grow under the right circumstances when exposed to its respective vapor.
Things that are considered living by traditional standards will usually stop being considered living if they are subjected to your process, though.
I use and downright require FB on my firefox installs, but one minor(?) problem with it pops up when you visit all-flash websites: You are greeted by a screen of empty white boxes with no clue what to do. You need to click each square one by one until you come across the menu item/gui element you were looking for.
Not much to be done except avoid those sites, but that can be difficult.
-b
My job basically amounts to finding and killing people (military).
Big tobacco sat on their findings for quite a while.
The 'real people' who made zyklon B during world war 2 probably knew what it was being used for, but...
Conservatives probably are comfortable hiding statistics about sex, disease, and pregnancy that undermines their positions- data that could otherwise save lives...
Yes, I do believe a company would sit on a cure.
-b
It makes me sad that people use 'made up words' as a criticism of this book...
The reason it makes me sad is not that I like made-up words (it usually bugs me) but that the words in Anathem are for the most part not made up, really. I just flipped through the book and found about a 50/50 mix of french and latin words, word roots, and phonetic spellings of words. This is not PhD-level language, either. I don't expect everyone (or anyone, for that matter) to know english, french, latin, and the history of monastic ritual and terminology- but for heaven's sake people, can't you at least notice the pattern of french-sounding words and latin-sounding words?
The story ostensibly takes place in a different dimension but I assure you that the unfamiliar wording in anathem is very much rooted in our own planet's languages.
Sorry for the rant but I hear the nonsense-words criticism every time I come across a book review for Anathem.
-b
The media server that we use in Iraq is commander-sanctioned. In Iraq, a commander has the power of life or death. If he says it's legal, it's legal. We're talking about someone who has the power to have subordinates taken outside and shot (not that that happens anymore).
I suppose you wouldn't be happy about the football-field sized bazaar on base that specializes in pirate dvd's, operating systems, and rolexes...
I don't see the difference between playing media off the server and copying it- either way, you're using X MB of bandwidth on the network. Our roaming profiles are limited to much less than a GB, so it's not really practical to copy entire movies for local use. IMO we're using the network exactly the way it was intended to be used.
-b
Not true, in my experience. You had to buy your own flash drives, because supply wouldn't issue them. As long as you had an 'unclassified' sticker on your media, you were golden.
In Iraq, we have a huge media server with thousands of songs and movies. Soldiers and airmen are free to take from it using their personal HDDs and ipods.
With this new ban, my shop is hosed. We got tired of saving all our CTK (toolbox) inventories on CD-R's so we bought a flash drive to use instead. Damn it.
-b