Hey, I have a can of the government pork too! (That's what I bought it for, as a gag - "government pork", you know...) I believe the recipe on it is "Pork with Tomato Sauce". Frankly, the sloshing noise it makes is a little scary, and after it's been sitting around for about 10 years, I don't think I'd want to eat it.
Ha - pretty much the same thing happened to me. Hell Atlantic came to do my wiring for DSL, and then claimed that they couldn't do it because I didn't have a free pair. The Covad installer came by and dropped off the router, which was all he could do without the line being in place. A while later BA came back and did their thing, and then Covad tried to come by a couple times (always without notifying me first) and then mysteriously cancelled my order, claiming alternately that there was a break in the line between the CO and me, and that I couldn't get the grade of service they'd had no problem signing me up for a couple months before! I said what the hell, BA said the line was good, and tried plugging the router in...and it worked.
IME, the failure of broadband companies has more to do with their gross mismanagement than with the realities of the market. Usually if you try and walk out of a store without paying for something, the proprietor will stop you; the broadband companies are not just failing to notice, but are actually shoving equipment and service into your hands and then insisting it doesn't exist. (BTW, when I finally managed to get my order officially reinstated and another Covad guy visited (while I pretended it hadn't been already working for three months), he actually had the nerve to say "Yes, we're known for our speedy service." I stifled my laughter...)
The adrenaline and endorphine rush you get from those kinds of activities FAR outweighs anything you'll get from a video game...
Sez you, Mr. Self-righteous. I/have/ nearly killed myself on a bike, driven at over 100mph through the desert, and had sex. (Not terribly interested in sticking bits of metal in my body.) I/haven't/ ever fought off an alien invasion, ruled nations, or searched through the pits of hell for a magic amulet, though...except on the computer. Games allow us to experience things that we can't do otherwise, and with a minimum of the bad side effects - I can't ever recall when playing a video game made me feel dizzy and sick to my stomach, either, like working out has, or seriously threatened to kill me, like nearly losing control of my bike on a hill did. Maybe/you/ find these things infinitely better than gaming, but don't presume to preach to everyone what they should feel.
I've been a fan of Joel's work for a while now, and he seems like a smart guy who believes in DTRT. It's hard to believe people like that work at MS, given the quality of most of MS's output. But I know another MS programmer, and he too is a very smart guy with a sense of morals and a sense of the Right Thing. So where's all the evil come from? Or is there something I'm missing in all this?
Re:They just demoed it on ABC / Good Morning Ameri
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Guys, this thing looks really cool. It is time for you to give this thing the props it deserves. If you still want to knock it, fine, but remember: the "hype" attached with this thing came from totally unrealistic expectations and wild speculation, fueled in part by Slashdot reader comments.
Sure, it's cool. The technology in it is very neat, and I'd like to try one myself. So what? It's a cool toy, and that's basically it. I can see the auto-balancing thing having some neat applications in robotics, but a scooter that will change the world? The hype does not come just from/. et al - read www.segway.com. "This amazing invention will change the world! It is the future of transportation! It makes you stronger and faster and smarter! Everyone will want one! Segway makes the sun shine and the grass grow!" etc, etc.
Read www.segway.com, and look at the pictures. It isn't even/close/ to "zero-footprint", and I sure as hell don't want someone banging a 65-pound chunk of machinery into/my/ ankle on the morning train. And here in NYC, there's a ton of stuff that's not handicapped-accessible.
Re:Why can't anyone see the implications of this?
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If you were an NYC city planner, you'd know
A) NYC bicyclists don't stick to lanes (because they are insane, and you'd have to be insane to ride a bicycle here), and
B) anything that decreases the amount of space available to motor vehicles is only going to make traffic worse.
I disagree with you about the "horribly unethical monstrosity" bit, but I agree that the reporting stinks, and Slashdot isn't helping! Creating human-animal hybrids through cloning? "Cloning" means making an exact copy of something! Unless you already have human-animal hybrids, you can't "make more through cloning"! (Hmm, maybe the Japanese are hiding something from us...) "Created through genetic manipulation, without the use of two opposite-sex members of the target species" is correct, but it's sort of a mouthful as well. Looking for a shorter way to say it is fine, but I wish people wouldn't misuse existing terms.
...people have been hunting and eating chimps for millenia. If there was the potential for the virus jumping species why did it wait until the 1950s to do so?
You're letting your devotion to the "man caused it" theory overwhelm your critical thinking. If it were due to a mutation, it would have happened whenever the mutation happened. If it had happened in 1910, you'd be saying "Why 1910?" The fact that it happened about the time that new vaccines were being tried is not proof of anything, because (say it with me, now!) correlation is not causation.
...shifting blame from the intervention of western medicine to the ignorance of native hunters.
"ignorance"? You're way reading things into this. Animal blood does get all over when you butcher an animal; people do cut themselves now and then. No one is calling this "ignorance" except you.
My biggest concern over the 'cut hunter' theory is that when the theory was the behavior of the field when the theory was challenged.
I can't even decipher this sentence. If you mean that Western scientists were uncomfortable with a theory that suggested that they might be to blame, then yes, that's quite possible and should be examined for what it says about the philosophy and practice of science. But it doesn't prove that Western science had anything to do with the origin of AIDS.
...I have worked in enough academic disciplines to be able to use a certain degree of meta-logic.
Not enough, I'm afraid. "Scientists using experimental vaccines caused AIDS" is a hypothesis. But it is not a testable hypothesis as it currently stands, and the evidence you've provided is only the most circumstantial sort. The fact that scientists don't wish to investigate the hypothesis may be troubling, but it says nothing about the truth value of the hypothesis. Scientists aren't rushing to examine the hypothesis that the moon is made of green cheese (under a thin layer of dust) either, but that isn't evidence of a conspiracy to hide the truth of the green-cheese hypothesis.
Can any convicted burglar claim to be a locksmith?
Actually, yes: there are many laws about owning "burglary tools", and most of them state it's OK if you are a "professional locksmith" - which is never defined anywhere. So if you/say/ you are, then you/are/... (IANAL, so don't blame me if you end up in jail anyway.)
Can you imagine trying to read a book where all the pages were transparent celluloid?
Been there, read that. Look for "Circus in the Mist", by Bruno Munari, a book where most of the pages are translucent plastic. It actually works really well - although it/is/ a book about approaching a circus through mist, so it makes sense. For a math textbook, I'd probably have a different opinion. I'd post a link, but I can't find anything useful through Google.
Amen to that! I have a feeling a lot of organizations both public and private would have second thoughts about demanding so much information if the customer demanded the same from them. It's a shame that so many people will readily answer any question asked of them by any "official" figure and never question why.
Anyway, if you haven't seen it before, you might be interested in the Public Servant Questionnaire - a document created by people who believed in "asking back".
Hmm...I always thought that it wasn't due to a bug (after all, the same bug in every version of sync on every version of Unix?), but rather to the fact that writes might be going on at the same time as the sync. If you do 'time sync; time sync' on a busy system, you'll notice that the first one often takes a lot longer than the second. If you only type sync once, you run the risk of having things that/still/ haven't been written to disk because they were going on at the time you typed sync.
The whole "co-own the copyrights" thing sounds fishy to me, and I've never heard it anywhere else. Here's a point that (I believe) Courtney Love made: look at a John Updike book: it says something like "Copyright John Updike, A Fawcett Crest Book, Published by Ballantine Books", not "Copyright Ballantine Books". Look at a Monster Magnet CD: it says "Copyright A&M Records", not "Copyright Monster Magnet".
One of these models is messed up, and I don't think it takes an intellectual property lawyer to figure out which one it is. And you hear neither people complaining about how evil the book publishing industry is nor the book publishers wailing about how hard their lives are, despite the similarities between book and record publishing.
What's to stop them? Nothing, really, aside from their own lack of brains and/or energy. Look at it this way: given the choice between writing a really simple address-skimming program and writing a smart, address-fixing address-skimming program, most people are going to choose to do the first - especially as most spammers are probably not going to pay any extra for the extra "feature", considering that their response rate is infinitesimally small anyway.
I just discovered that my ISP permits a double plus hack (me+foo+bar@privacy.org), which might be handy...
I did not see much about denying access. What I did read in the article was about controlling and monitoring access...
Maybe you missed the bit that said "The Government Printing Office has begun ordering about 1,300 libraries nationwide that serve as federal depositories to destroy government records..." Destroying the records sure looks like denying access to me. Or maybe you just consider "denying" to be a special case of "controlling". Nice to see that the doublethink extends throughout the FedGov...
Give them their sandbox and when they trash it, delete the user and their resources. If they complain, then tell them not to fuck around and hand them a policy sheet.
Then they go to the Senior Director and whine that you're not helping them. The Senior Director tells you, sure, we don't want them trashing the system, but they have to be able to do their stuff, so they have to sit with you and you have to vet everything they want to do. Then the user (sullen because his rights have been taken away) submits instructions (which don't make sense half the time) to you (sullen because you have to put up with this BS). If you just do whatever they want, the box gets trashed again. If you examine everything carefully, it takes forever to get anything done and the user goes back to the Senior Director and whines again and he yells at you about how you're not helping.
That, and it said to me (spelling it out phonetically), "welcome to uh t and t labs"... It does get "ballerina" right, which is nice; that's tripped up a bunch of speech synthesizers I've tried before.
I can't really blame it for its minor failings, though; English is/very/ inconsistent, and a good speech synthesizer has to have a lot of special-case rules.
Yeah, but this is why you NEVER EVER use spaces in filenames under Unix if you can possibly avoid it. Whitespaces within tokens clash with a grammar in which whitespaces/separate/ tokens, and if you ignore this, it/will/ bite you at some point. Not that Apple's people are idiots, but they're clearly not used to thinking this sort of thing through.
Sorry, but I'm going to have to agree with moniker_21. On window managers that I can configure to my liking (ie, not 4Dwm, which I'm using right now), I set Alt-v to be "minimize window". It sure as hell does NOT take me two seconds (one-thousand-one, one-thousand-two) to remember and hit Alt-v. (Try it. It's very convenient from the "standard position" for typing.) I suppose you can argue that I just don't remember the time it takes me, which is an unanswerable statement, but I would lay dollars to donuts that it isn't so. I respect Tog, but I think his blithe assertion that "users don't remember trying to remember a key combination because it's a higher-level cerebral function" is pure horse hockey with nothing to back it up beyond his wishful thinking.
Exactly...thank you for making the point in a less heavy-handed way than I would have done. What happens when nanotech falls into the wrong hands? We deal with it, that's what happens. Just like when fire, bronze, iron, steel, crossbows, gunpowder, machine guns, chemical weapons, and nuclear weapons "fell" into the "wrong" hands. (I love that term "fall" into the "wrong hands". As though technology just sort of went oops! and happened to drop on somebody else.)
I think speculating in any more depth about the dangers of nanotech is pointless. I'm sure the Foresight Institute is proud of itself being so fore-thoughtful and all, (a more self-congratulatory name is hard to imagine) but lacking even a single working nanotech weapon, their "foresight" is about as useful as a freshman bull session.
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Hey, I have a can of the government pork too! (That's what I bought it for, as a gag - "government pork", you know...) I believe the recipe on it is "Pork with Tomato Sauce". Frankly, the sloshing noise it makes is a little scary, and after it's been sitting around for about 10 years, I don't think I'd want to eat it.
IME, the failure of broadband companies has more to do with their gross mismanagement than with the realities of the market. Usually if you try and walk out of a store without paying for something, the proprietor will stop you; the broadband companies are not just failing to notice, but are actually shoving equipment and service into your hands and then insisting it doesn't exist. (BTW, when I finally managed to get my order officially reinstated and another Covad guy visited (while I pretended it hadn't been already working for three months), he actually had the nerve to say "Yes, we're known for our speedy service." I stifled my laughter...)
I've been a fan of Joel's work for a while now, and he seems like a smart guy who believes in DTRT. It's hard to believe people like that work at MS, given the quality of most of MS's output. But I know another MS programmer, and he too is a very smart guy with a sense of morals and a sense of the Right Thing. So where's all the evil come from? Or is there something I'm missing in all this?
Read www.segway.com, and look at the pictures. It isn't even /close/ to "zero-footprint", and I sure as hell don't want someone banging a 65-pound chunk of machinery into /my/ ankle on the morning train. And here in NYC, there's a ton of stuff that's not handicapped-accessible.
If you were an NYC city planner, you'd know
A) NYC bicyclists don't stick to lanes (because they are insane, and you'd have to be insane to ride a bicycle here), and
B) anything that decreases the amount of space available to motor vehicles is only going to make traffic worse.
I disagree with you about the "horribly unethical monstrosity" bit, but I agree that the reporting stinks, and Slashdot isn't helping! Creating human-animal hybrids through cloning? "Cloning" means making an exact copy of something! Unless you already have human-animal hybrids, you can't "make more through cloning"! (Hmm, maybe the Japanese are hiding something from us...) "Created through genetic manipulation, without the use of two opposite-sex members of the target species" is correct, but it's sort of a mouthful as well. Looking for a shorter way to say it is fine, but I wish people wouldn't misuse existing terms.
You think they don't already (in certain cases)? Search the Web for " promis backdoor" and read some of the stuff that comes up.
Anyway, if you haven't seen it before, you might be interested in the Public Servant Questionnaire - a document created by people who believed in "asking back".
Hmm...I always thought that it wasn't due to a bug (after all, the same bug in every version of sync on every version of Unix?), but rather to the fact that writes might be going on at the same time as the sync. If you do 'time sync; time sync' on a busy system, you'll notice that the first one often takes a lot longer than the second. If you only type sync once, you run the risk of having things that /still/ haven't been written to disk because they were going on at the time you typed sync.
One of these models is messed up, and I don't think it takes an intellectual property lawyer to figure out which one it is. And you hear neither people complaining about how evil the book publishing industry is nor the book publishers wailing about how hard their lives are, despite the similarities between book and record publishing.
What's to stop them? Nothing, really, aside from their own lack of brains and/or energy. Look at it this way: given the choice between writing a really simple address-skimming program and writing a smart, address-fixing address-skimming program, most people are going to choose to do the first - especially as most spammers are probably not going to pay any extra for the extra "feature", considering that their response rate is infinitesimally small anyway.
I just discovered that my ISP permits a double plus hack (me+foo+bar@privacy.org), which might be handy...
I can only conclude I did something horribly evil in a former life to deserve this. Given my current job, I may have been Hitler.
That, and it said to me (spelling it out phonetically), "welcome to uh t and t labs"... It does get "ballerina" right, which is nice; that's tripped up a bunch of speech synthesizers I've tried before.
/very/ inconsistent, and a good speech synthesizer has to have a lot of special-case rules.
I can't really blame it for its minor failings, though; English is
Yeah, but this is why you NEVER EVER use spaces in filenames under Unix if you can possibly avoid it. Whitespaces within tokens clash with a grammar in which whitespaces /separate/ tokens, and if you ignore this, it /will/ bite you at some point. Not that Apple's people are idiots, but they're clearly not used to thinking this sort of thing through.
Sorry, but I'm going to have to agree with moniker_21. On window managers that I can configure to my liking (ie, not 4Dwm, which I'm using right now), I set Alt-v to be "minimize window". It sure as hell does NOT take me two seconds (one-thousand-one, one-thousand-two) to remember and hit Alt-v. (Try it. It's very convenient from the "standard position" for typing.) I suppose you can argue that I just don't remember the time it takes me, which is an unanswerable statement, but I would lay dollars to donuts that it isn't so. I respect Tog, but I think his blithe assertion that "users don't remember trying to remember a key combination because it's a higher-level cerebral function" is pure horse hockey with nothing to back it up beyond his wishful thinking.
I think speculating in any more depth about the dangers of nanotech is pointless. I'm sure the Foresight Institute is proud of itself being so fore-thoughtful and all, (a more self-congratulatory name is hard to imagine) but lacking even a single working nanotech weapon, their "foresight" is about as useful as a freshman bull session.