I've had a lot of trouble with game pad support on the PC. Some games won't recognize it at all, or sometimes I end up resetting the config multiple times. I've also had to upgrade the video card.
So not huge, but not universal compatibility.
On the other hand, I've got a stack of PS2 games I can't play because the PS3 wasn't compatible, and I've avoided the PS4 because I'd have the same problem with my PS3 games.
I was reading slashdot comments from 2014 today. They weren't bad, and were exceptional quality compared to today. Even the trolls and spam were of a higher standard, no joke.
Two changes of site ownership with varying agendas, the threat of slashdot beta, a soylent news spinoff, a general trend in the dumbification/twitterification of discourse, heightened political aggression, the rise of Creimerspam, and the slow, creeping decay of our minds and bodies.
Did I miss anything?
For me, the site lost about half of its good the day Athanausis Kircher (sp?) stopped posting. They had an incredible ability to summarize and encapsulate complicated arguments clearly and rationally, and I for one miss that.
True. My experience in cities is you can barely see any stars. In Chicago, at least, I'd joke "the airplanes are bright tonight" because that was mostly what you'd see, plus maybe a couple of planets and at most a dozen other stars. I've got to wonder if this ad would be bright enough to even be noticeable to city dwellers. If not, that'd be a big waste of advertising dollars, putting up a constellation that could only be seen in rural parts, by people who aren't inside watching TV.
I'm going to disagree. Hard atheism is a strawman that people like to smack around because it's illogical, but almost nobody is a hard atheist. Even Dawkins, if cornered, is on record as saying things like "god seems highly unlikely" rather than "I know for a fact God doesn't exist". It wouldn't make much sense to have a term for a thing almost nobody believes, and fail to make a distinction between true-neutral agnosticism (I don't know at all, about any of them) and soft atheism (I don't know, but in the absence of evidence I'll proceed as if it doesn't). Now if you're suggesting that we find some extra word between agnosticism and hard atheism, I'd be okay with that, but I constantly fight against getting lumped in with agnosticism, because it's not hard enough.
As an aside, I've always heard the "original" definition of atheism was applied to early Jews and Christians by the pantheist pagans, because to them monotheists worshipping only one god was so badly misguided, but I'll admit that's not well researched, and may be apocryphal.
While not a "religion" per se, atheism is just as much a faith as any religion.
Logically, you cannot prove a negative (other than disproving every other possible case), meaning you can't prove that there is no god. So the only logically supportable belief is agnosticism - you are uncertain if a god does or does not exist. To take that extra step to atheism - being convinced that there is no god - requires a leap of faith.
That's only "hard" atheism. There's a "soft" atheism where the thesis is much closer to "I don't know if there's a god, but in the absence of evidence I will act like it doesn't exist."
Some people will lump this in with agnosticism, but I think there's a difference. For me, agnosticism is a shrug: "I don't know." If this was something insignificant and ordinary, like "Is there a dinosaur in my closet?" maybe "I don't know" is enough. But in a world where half the population is arguing they do have knowledge about the unknowable, and their leaps of faith are dictating how to live, how to make laws, and how to organize society, I feel like "I don't know" is insufficient. What I need is: "I don't know; I don't accept *your* leap of faith as my own; and I demand enough space where I can live a life without making any leap of faith." For me, that's soft atheism, rather than agnosticism, and it is definitively NOT just as much a faith as any religion.
The only astronomical constant is noon (and midnight but that's harder to tell). You can set noon to be when the sun is exactly in the middle of its travel through the sky, and that noon will remain constant year-round with 24 hour days.
Not with time zones, it isn't. If the zones were totally regular, there'd still be at least an hour of variance. But time zones are irregular, so it's as much as an hour and a half in some places.
IMHO we are rapidly departing from our founding principles to our peril because folks somehow think states don't mater or the division of power between the states and the people isn't being respected. Someday, we will look back and realize the genius of our founders, but most folks don't understand how the system was designed because we've not taught basic civics for more than a generation now.
Or maybe some combination of travel, communication, and globalization is making states less significant than they used to be, and the shift of focus to the federal level is just how things are going, and not a sign of disrespect and decay of the founding vision. Change isn't necessarily bad. (Not that it's necessarily good, either.)
I have a second grader. There was one week where they did practice grouping things into tens, and for that exercise grouping into tens was a requirement. The rest of the time it's just regular addition, as far as I've seen. At this point she's into two-digit word problems, and just lines them up and does the arithmetic like normal. Also, I've never seen anything with lines and circles the way you describe.
There could be any number of reasons for this and I don't know the answer. It could be different districts, schools, or teachers interpret the program differently. It could be I'm experiencing confirmation bias and focusing on the things I recognize and tuning out the atrocious assignments. It could be the people who have a bone to pick with CC are focusing on one atrocious assignment and extrapolating negatively. Or all of the above, or something else.
Funny story. When I started at my office I went to the supply closet and found a red Swingline stapler. Used it for a couple of years, and then one night it disappeared off of my desk. I was kind of annoyed, but it wasn't really *my* stapler, and the supply closet had some replacements (black, not Swingline, but really, it's a stapler I use a dozen times a year, so who cares). Eight years later I was joking with a co-worker about Office Space and he mentions that he used to have a red Swingline, which he'd stolen from a co-worker who said he'd stolen it from someone else (me), but that it had been further stolen by yet another co-worker. Apparently they're a hot item, or everyone has a one-track mind. So I went and checked, and indeed the original model was on another guy's desk. I don't actually know if it was the one I had, but it doesn't really matter. I taped a bunch of strips of paper to my black stapler and wrote "Red" all over it. Then I swapped it for the red one, which I covered in paper that had "black" written on it, as the world's worst disguise and to make it more of a prank. I figured it would make it two days before someone noticed and swapped it back. It's been 18 months. One of the middle-men in the chain did actually notice, but he laughed his ass off and didn't say anything. At this point I'm just waiting for an opportunity to pull out Ol' Red--disguised as blackie--and see the realization in the other guy's eyes, but he got shifted to the other side of the building and it's unlikely to come up.
Sure, it might be a little mixed, even in my own experience. I'm old enough that when I stumbled onto Photoshop, it was in competition with MacPaint. Gimp wasn't around. For me, it was "here's how to do fun stuff with pictures" and then I got to know the interface and filters and other tools, and never wanted to switch. I tried Gimp later, and couldn't deal with it because everything looked different, before deciding to pay for Photoshop. If Gimp had been around and free and I learned it first, I might have stuck with it. I also glommed on to BBEdit and Debabelizer doing early web development, and specifically requested them for work because they were what I knew best. There's no arguing I couldn't have picked a different or maybe even free text editor, so the free exposure early directly translated to a sale later. Civilization 1 came to me free. That addiction led to me buying probably 6-8 other copies of other versions in later years. I don't know if I would have tried it without that free sample.
There's other stuff I poked at for a bit and then never used again. This includes Illustrator, another Adobe product. Just wasn't my thing. But no sale was lost, because my couple of hours of fumbling didn't lead anywhere and wouldn't have ever justified payment.
Word was ubiquitous, but I went out of my way to try other software, and did purchase WordPerfect because I wanted to be a rebel who didn't support the evil empire. Later compatibility issues pulled me into the fold anyway, and now I've got a whole bunch of unreadable old files for my troubles.
The weirdest edge case is probably a 3D modeler program called Bryce. I had no valid use for it, but I really loved playing with it. I couldn't afford to pay for it when young, and then several computers later, by the time I had the money I had lost interest in messing with it.
I heard if you snorted ground-up dinosaur fossil, it was an aphrodisiac. All these scientists just want to keep the good stuff for themselves. Hurry up and buy your stash now, before it goes black market.
I questioned the wisdom in introducing a game-changing character this close to the climax of the story they've been telling for the last decade.
That's my biggest concern. They just whittled down the cast to the mostly original Avengers, and I'd like to see those six do most of the heavy lifting. Some sort of Deus Ex Captaina would be really unsatisfying.
Outside of that, I have no opinion. I know almost nothing about Captain Marvel, but the same was true of Iron Man or Dr. Strange back in the day, and it didn't keep me from enjoying those movies. I like Brie Larsen, too, so I'll happily go see the movie. Depending on what it's like, my girls (still kind of young) might actually enjoy that one more than most. It's only the risk of how she's carried over into Avengers Endgame that worries me.
Did you just confuse "round" with "perfectly spherical"? Because I'd say "round" in many cases just means vaguely spherical at best. Is a baseball round, even with the stitching? Is a grape round? A balloon? I'd say yes.
Also, if you actually travel to a time zone, you have to recalculate everything. Bedtime, meal times, get up time, work time, etc. It's doable, but potentially exhausting, and it would be pretty easy to slip up occasionally and think "2 p.m." is as reasonable as "3 p.m." for waking up when you're halfway across the world without realizing you've miscalculated by an hour.
There's got to be more to it than that. I put my kids to bed at 8 every day. In winter, that's 3 hours after sunset. In summer, that's an hour before sunset. On average, they actually get to sleep at roughly the same time in either season.
Oddly, I point to that same joke as the moment I decided I was too old for cartoons. I used to be a big G.I. Joe fan for a few years, but they went on hiatus for a while. A few years later I caught a new episode for about 30 seconds, where the above joke was delivered.
"Man," I said to myself, "Was it always this bad and I just didn't notice?" Then I turned it off.
Humor is situational, of course. Unprompted Jedi heckling, I could it see it working. Scripted in a terrorist assault, not so much.
Nah, it's a case of poor translation because they didn't have the tech. God took out part of a chromosome. This means the first human was a female (XX) and God made a male by turning the clone into XY.
Also, the Garden of Eden was a seed-ship with cloning capabilities, and God was the AI on the ship. The flaming swords were either a laser system that protected the ship, or its rockets as it took off and left the people behind.
The story just got muddled because ancient Hebrew didn't have the right words for this stuff.
So, 67 percent take home gives me a tax rate of 33 percent.
What? That is really sloppy math.
- 401(k) is YOUR money. Taking it out before you get the paycheck doesn't make it a tax.
- Health insurance is not a tax. It is an expense.
Assuming typical numbers, that probably bumps you back down to around 25% in actual taxes, maybe less. There's also the issue that what you take home isn't precisely what you pay - if you're getting a big refund at the end of the year, that'll drop your actual tax rate lower.
Slashdot Mirror
.. in mice.
I've had a lot of trouble with game pad support on the PC. Some games won't recognize it at all, or sometimes I end up resetting the config multiple times. I've also had to upgrade the video card.
So not huge, but not universal compatibility.
On the other hand, I've got a stack of PS2 games I can't play because the PS3 wasn't compatible, and I've avoided the PS4 because I'd have the same problem with my PS3 games.
All in all, probably a wash.
I was reading slashdot comments from 2014 today. They weren't bad, and were exceptional quality compared to today. Even the trolls and spam were of a higher standard, no joke.
Two changes of site ownership with varying agendas, the threat of slashdot beta, a soylent news spinoff, a general trend in the dumbification/twitterification of discourse, heightened political aggression, the rise of Creimerspam, and the slow, creeping decay of our minds and bodies.
Did I miss anything?
For me, the site lost about half of its good the day Athanausis Kircher (sp?) stopped posting. They had an incredible ability to summarize and encapsulate complicated arguments clearly and rationally, and I for one miss that.
True. My experience in cities is you can barely see any stars. In Chicago, at least, I'd joke "the airplanes are bright tonight" because that was mostly what you'd see, plus maybe a couple of planets and at most a dozen other stars. I've got to wonder if this ad would be bright enough to even be noticeable to city dwellers. If not, that'd be a big waste of advertising dollars, putting up a constellation that could only be seen in rural parts, by people who aren't inside watching TV.
I'm going to disagree. Hard atheism is a strawman that people like to smack around because it's illogical, but almost nobody is a hard atheist. Even Dawkins, if cornered, is on record as saying things like "god seems highly unlikely" rather than "I know for a fact God doesn't exist". It wouldn't make much sense to have a term for a thing almost nobody believes, and fail to make a distinction between true-neutral agnosticism (I don't know at all, about any of them) and soft atheism (I don't know, but in the absence of evidence I'll proceed as if it doesn't). Now if you're suggesting that we find some extra word between agnosticism and hard atheism, I'd be okay with that, but I constantly fight against getting lumped in with agnosticism, because it's not hard enough.
As an aside, I've always heard the "original" definition of atheism was applied to early Jews and Christians by the pantheist pagans, because to them monotheists worshipping only one god was so badly misguided, but I'll admit that's not well researched, and may be apocryphal.
While not a "religion" per se, atheism is just as much a faith as any religion.
Logically, you cannot prove a negative (other than disproving every other possible case), meaning you can't prove that there is no god. So the only logically supportable belief is agnosticism - you are uncertain if a god does or does not exist. To take that extra step to atheism - being convinced that there is no god - requires a leap of faith.
That's only "hard" atheism. There's a "soft" atheism where the thesis is much closer to "I don't know if there's a god, but in the absence of evidence I will act like it doesn't exist."
Some people will lump this in with agnosticism, but I think there's a difference. For me, agnosticism is a shrug: "I don't know." If this was something insignificant and ordinary, like "Is there a dinosaur in my closet?" maybe "I don't know" is enough. But in a world where half the population is arguing they do have knowledge about the unknowable, and their leaps of faith are dictating how to live, how to make laws, and how to organize society, I feel like "I don't know" is insufficient. What I need is: "I don't know; I don't accept *your* leap of faith as my own; and I demand enough space where I can live a life without making any leap of faith." For me, that's soft atheism, rather than agnosticism, and it is definitively NOT just as much a faith as any religion.
The only astronomical constant is noon (and midnight but that's harder to tell). You can set noon to be when the sun is exactly in the middle of its travel through the sky, and that noon will remain constant year-round with 24 hour days.
Not with time zones, it isn't. If the zones were totally regular, there'd still be at least an hour of variance. But time zones are irregular, so it's as much as an hour and a half in some places.
Time is a problem any way you slice it.
IMHO we are rapidly departing from our founding principles to our peril because folks somehow think states don't mater or the division of power between the states and the people isn't being respected. Someday, we will look back and realize the genius of our founders, but most folks don't understand how the system was designed because we've not taught basic civics for more than a generation now.
Or maybe some combination of travel, communication, and globalization is making states less significant than they used to be, and the shift of focus to the federal level is just how things are going, and not a sign of disrespect and decay of the founding vision. Change isn't necessarily bad. (Not that it's necessarily good, either.)
I have a second grader. There was one week where they did practice grouping things into tens, and for that exercise grouping into tens was a requirement. The rest of the time it's just regular addition, as far as I've seen. At this point she's into two-digit word problems, and just lines them up and does the arithmetic like normal. Also, I've never seen anything with lines and circles the way you describe.
There could be any number of reasons for this and I don't know the answer. It could be different districts, schools, or teachers interpret the program differently. It could be I'm experiencing confirmation bias and focusing on the things I recognize and tuning out the atrocious assignments. It could be the people who have a bone to pick with CC are focusing on one atrocious assignment and extrapolating negatively. Or all of the above, or something else.
The best way to be more inclusive is to exclude white male hetrosexual Christians.
Thank God I'm an atheist then, so I won't be excluded!
Now I'm curious. What game is that?
Funny story. When I started at my office I went to the supply closet and found a red Swingline stapler. Used it for a couple of years, and then one night it disappeared off of my desk. I was kind of annoyed, but it wasn't really *my* stapler, and the supply closet had some replacements (black, not Swingline, but really, it's a stapler I use a dozen times a year, so who cares). Eight years later I was joking with a co-worker about Office Space and he mentions that he used to have a red Swingline, which he'd stolen from a co-worker who said he'd stolen it from someone else (me), but that it had been further stolen by yet another co-worker. Apparently they're a hot item, or everyone has a one-track mind. So I went and checked, and indeed the original model was on another guy's desk. I don't actually know if it was the one I had, but it doesn't really matter. I taped a bunch of strips of paper to my black stapler and wrote "Red" all over it. Then I swapped it for the red one, which I covered in paper that had "black" written on it, as the world's worst disguise and to make it more of a prank. I figured it would make it two days before someone noticed and swapped it back. It's been 18 months. One of the middle-men in the chain did actually notice, but he laughed his ass off and didn't say anything. At this point I'm just waiting for an opportunity to pull out Ol' Red--disguised as blackie--and see the realization in the other guy's eyes, but he got shifted to the other side of the building and it's unlikely to come up.
I lost $56,000,002 by buying the *wrong* lottery ticket.
Sure, it might be a little mixed, even in my own experience. I'm old enough that when I stumbled onto Photoshop, it was in competition with MacPaint. Gimp wasn't around. For me, it was "here's how to do fun stuff with pictures" and then I got to know the interface and filters and other tools, and never wanted to switch. I tried Gimp later, and couldn't deal with it because everything looked different, before deciding to pay for Photoshop. If Gimp had been around and free and I learned it first, I might have stuck with it. I also glommed on to BBEdit and Debabelizer doing early web development, and specifically requested them for work because they were what I knew best. There's no arguing I couldn't have picked a different or maybe even free text editor, so the free exposure early directly translated to a sale later. Civilization 1 came to me free. That addiction led to me buying probably 6-8 other copies of other versions in later years. I don't know if I would have tried it without that free sample.
There's other stuff I poked at for a bit and then never used again. This includes Illustrator, another Adobe product. Just wasn't my thing. But no sale was lost, because my couple of hours of fumbling didn't lead anywhere and wouldn't have ever justified payment.
Word was ubiquitous, but I went out of my way to try other software, and did purchase WordPerfect because I wanted to be a rebel who didn't support the evil empire. Later compatibility issues pulled me into the fold anyway, and now I've got a whole bunch of unreadable old files for my troubles.
The weirdest edge case is probably a 3D modeler program called Bryce. I had no valid use for it, but I really loved playing with it. I couldn't afford to pay for it when young, and then several computers later, by the time I had the money I had lost interest in messing with it.
I learned Photoshop in college, through illicit copies. I can't even guess how many copies I've since paid for, between personal use and work.
I heard if you snorted ground-up dinosaur fossil, it was an aphrodisiac. All these scientists just want to keep the good stuff for themselves. Hurry up and buy your stash now, before it goes black market.
I questioned the wisdom in introducing a game-changing character this close to the climax of the story they've been telling for the last decade.
That's my biggest concern. They just whittled down the cast to the mostly original Avengers, and I'd like to see those six do most of the heavy lifting. Some sort of Deus Ex Captaina would be really unsatisfying.
Outside of that, I have no opinion. I know almost nothing about Captain Marvel, but the same was true of Iron Man or Dr. Strange back in the day, and it didn't keep me from enjoying those movies. I like Brie Larsen, too, so I'll happily go see the movie. Depending on what it's like, my girls (still kind of young) might actually enjoy that one more than most. It's only the risk of how she's carried over into Avengers Endgame that worries me.
Did you just confuse "round" with "perfectly spherical"? Because I'd say "round" in many cases just means vaguely spherical at best. Is a baseball round, even with the stitching? Is a grape round? A balloon? I'd say yes.
Also, if you actually travel to a time zone, you have to recalculate everything. Bedtime, meal times, get up time, work time, etc. It's doable, but potentially exhausting, and it would be pretty easy to slip up occasionally and think "2 p.m." is as reasonable as "3 p.m." for waking up when you're halfway across the world without realizing you've miscalculated by an hour.
There's got to be more to it than that. I put my kids to bed at 8 every day. In winter, that's 3 hours after sunset. In summer, that's an hour before sunset. On average, they actually get to sleep at roughly the same time in either season.
"Which one's Will?"
Oddly, I point to that same joke as the moment I decided I was too old for cartoons. I used to be a big G.I. Joe fan for a few years, but they went on hiatus for a while. A few years later I caught a new episode for about 30 seconds, where the above joke was delivered.
"Man," I said to myself, "Was it always this bad and I just didn't notice?" Then I turned it off.
Humor is situational, of course. Unprompted Jedi heckling, I could it see it working. Scripted in a terrorist assault, not so much.
and not the feral hellhole that wants to kill you at every turn
Are we using the same internet? Because I'd say that actually describes it pretty well.
Nah, it's a case of poor translation because they didn't have the tech. God took out part of a chromosome. This means the first human was a female (XX) and God made a male by turning the clone into XY.
Also, the Garden of Eden was a seed-ship with cloning capabilities, and God was the AI on the ship. The flaming swords were either a laser system that protected the ship, or its rockets as it took off and left the people behind.
The story just got muddled because ancient Hebrew didn't have the right words for this stuff.
I studied undergrad physics with one of the astronomers cited in the article. Really weird reading along and then going, "Oh, I know them!"
So, 67 percent take home gives me a tax rate of 33 percent.
What? That is really sloppy math.
- 401(k) is YOUR money. Taking it out before you get the paycheck doesn't make it a tax.
- Health insurance is not a tax. It is an expense.
Assuming typical numbers, that probably bumps you back down to around 25% in actual taxes, maybe less. There's also the issue that what you take home isn't precisely what you pay - if you're getting a big refund at the end of the year, that'll drop your actual tax rate lower.