If you look at some of the posts in this article, there are a few believers (some of which are probably trolls), a healthy majority of disbelievers deriding believers and/or their beliefs, and few if any non-believers. When it comes to matters of religion, most people here on Slashdot. hold one particular opinion very strongly and have little patience for anybody who doesn't share that opinion.
You're making a very common mistake - most people who bother to post will usually have a strong opinion on the subject. Non-believers don't go into these discussions because they're not interested in them. You can't tell what the opinion is of most people on Slashdot. The people who do have patience for people with another opinion have no reason to post.
"Completely not religious" is not the same as dogmatic atheist. I can't speak for most Slashdotters, but I just grew up without any religion whatsoever, don't know much about it, and have no interest in it. To be dogmatic about atheism, I'd need to have a concept of God, and some pretty strong feelings... that was the generation that grew up in the 60s, perhaps.
It's probably different in the US, but in western Europe I'm in the large majority for people my age (say, below 40, I'm 31).
Please don't use the word 'leverage' again unless you can estimate a value in newton metres. It makes you sound like a PHB.
A bit like "Web 2.0", "enabled", "Podcast", "advent"... but unlike terms like "AJAX" and "Ruby on Rails", which make you look like a web programmer buying into the hype of the day.
The sibling is right, it was probably meant as a joke.
Why does it have to be a benefit, why can't evolution sometimes make a bad turn, am I alone in thinking that not every mutation has to be a good one.
If it was one single mutation, that had no benefits except it causes cancer... in each generation, part of the bearers of the mutation would die before they had bred, and each generation the percentage of people(*) having the mutation would go down. It's just extremely unlikely that such a mutation would spread to affect the whole of humanity.
What's much more likely is that there are a number of different causes, some of them not genetic at all, some part of a bunch of mutations that have benefits as well as causing cancer.
Why don't governments simply pass laws to encourage retailers and manufacturers to deal in a more straightforward way with consumers?
Because that's not how the free market economy works.
Actually, that is how a free market works - buyer and seller know the product and the price, money changes hands, buyer owns the product. Among the reasons it works well is that the buyer has full information and can make a well informed choice. This is a case of the retailer trying to make the market less free by making it less transparent (buyer isn't 100% sure which store is more reliable giving rebates) and introducing friction (buyer isn't sure if all the work is going to be worth it), in the hopes of getting an advantage.
If government is supposed to protect freedom of markets, they should make rules against this practice - like making it illegal to make a price after rebate look like the normal store price in ads.
In the meantime, China seems to be the only large country that's actually working on decreasing CO2 output. I don't believe the EU countries are going to make their targets, too much rhetoric and too little action.
In a few years, we'll be forced to switch to other energy sources anyway, because peak oil is more or less here. We'll see what happens then.
The change is coming so fast that local flora and fauna has huge trouble surviving, but flora and fauna from other areas of the planet have no time to migrate over (that would take a few thousands of years, if habitats weren't as constrained as they are).
Of course, you may now debate whether that's good or bad.
I don't agree at all. Let's look at the post that got downmodded:
Yawn... IE is vulnerable and this is news, why? Seriously, people, if you're using IE to actually surf the Web I would argue you're probably already vulnerable because your system is running Windows, all your settings are probably default, and you probably don't care.
The post adds nothing to the discussion, says this article isn't newsworthy and does a broad ad hominem attack on all users of IE. How is that not flamebait?
I probably wouldn't have wasted a mod point on it, but -1 flamebait is fair. If you want to think critically, don't just believe someone who says the downmod was only about the sig.
But then, I can't really think of any articles here where a comment like "I think all American chicks have huger asses than the global norm" would be on-topic and a decent contribution to the discussion, can you?
One of the professors at my CS study taught theoretical computer science; he was a pretty brilliant mathematician. At some point he started following the basic Pascal course that the first year students did though, since he thought that perhaps he should be able to program.
And I totally agree with Dijkstra. People who criticize CS for not teaching them how to program in a professional environment are confused.
But of course that doesn't help, since the 2nd time in a minute you type slashdot.org and it doesn't work, you'll be annoyed and edit it to put a # in front of those lines before you're even conscious of it.
Somebody has a script out there, that changes the root password to something random, and uses cron to put the old password back at some specific time. You can use that to lock yourself out of your/etc/hosts file for a time, if you don't need root access in the meantime. Yay, managed to Google it - http://thomer.com/lockout/lockout.
Re:Can AJAX finally bring us "push technology"
on
Ajax in Action
·
· Score: 1
Well, no, but what you can do is make your refreshy polling things more lightweight and more invisible, so that they sometimes give the illusion of being a push technology.
Interesting, perhaps, though not a "primate response". It's a result of social constructions!
Of course. A social construction that happens to be shared by all humans and other primates. We give authority to people who look like authority (that doesn't always mean a suit - I guess that in a California meeting between managers and top techies, the one with the blue dreads and Sri Lanka cricket shirt looks like authority).
You can whine about it, like some people whine about the fact that men have to make the first move to get into contact with a woman. If you actually want to get what you want, you'd better accept is as fact and adapt.
It seems to have something to do with a forum spam generator that incorporates parts of real messages, and apparently that 'reunite gondwondaland!' is in some fortune file that both Slashdot and some forum software uses?
Percentages are really important. That the rest of the world combined designs and manufactures more cool crap than you guys do "alone" doesn't really mean anything; if you design and manufacture much more cool crap per person you stay wealthier per person.
I've actually tried to get medical help with internet addiction, and the first thing they said is that I'd have to avoid all contact with it.
Considering that I'm a web programmer, M.Sc. in CS, get all my entertainment on the net, get most of my education and news on the net... That's just not on. So they couldn't help me.
Way back when, a friend of mine made a "DOOM area" for our MUD, Powerstruggle. It was exactly like what you describe, with +- 260 rooms with descriptions like that. I think it was based on Doom episode 3, level 5 or so.
It was seperate from the rest of the mud - hitpoints worked differently, and you couldn't take items from outside into it. Doom weapons had commands like "fire west" that would fire up to three rooms in that direction; there were minimap commands, that showed a 5x5 area around you; monsters would be asleep at first, until they were woken up (say by nearby shots), and then they'd have pretty nice AI. And there was deathmatch, for a number of players. Rather good, for 1995 or so.
That said, real PK muds like Genocide (still exists, telnet geno.org 2222) or Tron (down, as far as I know) were much, much better. Doom deathmatch was weak compared to good 40 player Geno team wars, with some of the best players doing 200 commands per minute... and every room had beautifully detailed descriptions (you could go exploring while you were dead and waiting for the next war).
In fact, it seems to me he could be rather rich rather quickly by selling his services (making small blood samples available for research) for a pretty high price.
Slashdot Mirror
If you look at some of the posts in this article, there are a few believers (some of which are probably trolls), a healthy majority of disbelievers deriding believers and/or their beliefs, and few if any non-believers. When it comes to matters of religion, most people here on Slashdot. hold one particular opinion very strongly and have little patience for anybody who doesn't share that opinion.
You're making a very common mistake - most people who bother to post will usually have a strong opinion on the subject. Non-believers don't go into these discussions because they're not interested in them. You can't tell what the opinion is of most people on Slashdot. The people who do have patience for people with another opinion have no reason to post.
It's probably different in the US, but in western Europe I'm in the large majority for people my age (say, below 40, I'm 31).
Please don't use the word 'leverage' again unless you can estimate a value in newton metres. It makes you sound like a PHB.
A bit like "Web 2.0", "enabled", "Podcast", "advent"... but unlike terms like "AJAX" and "Ruby on Rails", which make you look like a web programmer buying into the hype of the day.
The sibling is right, it was probably meant as a joke.
Why does it have to be a benefit, why can't evolution sometimes make a bad turn, am I alone in thinking that not every mutation has to be a good one.
If it was one single mutation, that had no benefits except it causes cancer... in each generation, part of the bearers of the mutation would die before they had bred, and each generation the percentage of people(*) having the mutation would go down. It's just extremely unlikely that such a mutation would spread to affect the whole of humanity.
What's much more likely is that there are a number of different causes, some of them not genetic at all, some part of a bunch of mutations that have benefits as well as causing cancer.
Rodent brains may seem small, but think of where we can go if we can ramp this technology... One day we may have humans flying planes!
Is "orangutang" the correct spelling in English? The original Malay is "orang utan".
Because that's not how the free market economy works.
Actually, that is how a free market works - buyer and seller know the product and the price, money changes hands, buyer owns the product. Among the reasons it works well is that the buyer has full information and can make a well informed choice. This is a case of the retailer trying to make the market less free by making it less transparent (buyer isn't 100% sure which store is more reliable giving rebates) and introducing friction (buyer isn't sure if all the work is going to be worth it), in the hopes of getting an advantage.
If government is supposed to protect freedom of markets, they should make rules against this practice - like making it illegal to make a price after rebate look like the normal store price in ads.
In the meantime, China seems to be the only large country that's actually working on decreasing CO2 output. I don't believe the EU countries are going to make their targets, too much rhetoric and too little action.
In a few years, we'll be forced to switch to other energy sources anyway, because peak oil is more or less here. We'll see what happens then.
The change is coming so fast that local flora and fauna has huge trouble surviving, but flora and fauna from other areas of the planet have no time to migrate over (that would take a few thousands of years, if habitats weren't as constrained as they are).
Of course, you may now debate whether that's good or bad.
I don't agree at all. Let's look at the post that got downmodded:
Yawn... IE is vulnerable and this is news, why? Seriously, people, if you're using IE to actually surf the Web I would argue you're probably already vulnerable because your system is running Windows, all your settings are probably default, and you probably don't care.
The post adds nothing to the discussion, says this article isn't newsworthy and does a broad ad hominem attack on all users of IE. How is that not flamebait?
I probably wouldn't have wasted a mod point on it, but -1 flamebait is fair. If you want to think critically, don't just believe someone who says the downmod was only about the sig.
the ij is originally a y with an umlaut - Dutch
Ahem. The Dutch letter 'ij' is not an y with an umlaut.
But then, I can't really think of any articles here where a comment like "I think all American chicks have huger asses than the global norm" would be on-topic and a decent contribution to the discussion, can you?
One of the professors at my CS study taught theoretical computer science; he was a pretty brilliant mathematician. At some point he started following the basic Pascal course that the first year students did though, since he thought that perhaps he should be able to program.
And I totally agree with Dijkstra. People who criticize CS for not teaching them how to program in a professional environment are confused.
Actually, anybody who just posts now and then and behaves a bit on /. will have their karma maxed pretty easily. Who cares.
The thing is though that sometimes the "+1, Informative" mods rather add to the joke, or are a joke in themselves.
But of course that doesn't help, since the 2nd time in a minute you type slashdot.org and it doesn't work, you'll be annoyed and edit it to put a # in front of those lines before you're even conscious of it.
Somebody has a script out there, that changes the root password to something random, and uses cron to put the old password back at some specific time. You can use that to lock yourself out of your /etc/hosts file for a time, if you don't need root access in the meantime. Yay, managed to Google it - http://thomer.com/lockout/lockout.
Well, no, but what you can do is make your refreshy polling things more lightweight and more invisible, so that they sometimes give the illusion of being a push technology.
Interesting, perhaps, though not a "primate response". It's a result of social constructions!
Of course. A social construction that happens to be shared by all humans and other primates. We give authority to people who look like authority (that doesn't always mean a suit - I guess that in a California meeting between managers and top techies, the one with the blue dreads and Sri Lanka cricket shirt looks like authority).
You can whine about it, like some people whine about the fact that men have to make the first move to get into contact with a woman. If you actually want to get what you want, you'd better accept is as fact and adapt.
It seems to have something to do with a forum spam generator that incorporates parts of real messages, and apparently that 'reunite gondwondaland!' is in some fortune file that both Slashdot and some forum software uses?
Percentages are really important. That the rest of the world combined designs and manufactures more cool crap than you guys do "alone" doesn't really mean anything; if you design and manufacture much more cool crap per person you stay wealthier per person.
Dear coffee guru, I want to learn about making great coffee. Any URLs you would recommend?
Have you ever owned rats? Existence causes cancer in rats.
I've actually tried to get medical help with internet addiction, and the first thing they said is that I'd have to avoid all contact with it.
Considering that I'm a web programmer, M.Sc. in CS, get all my entertainment on the net, get most of my education and news on the net... That's just not on. So they couldn't help me.
Way back when, a friend of mine made a "DOOM area" for our MUD, Powerstruggle. It was exactly like what you describe, with +- 260 rooms with descriptions like that. I think it was based on Doom episode 3, level 5 or so.
It was seperate from the rest of the mud - hitpoints worked differently, and you couldn't take items from outside into it. Doom weapons had commands like "fire west" that would fire up to three rooms in that direction; there were minimap commands, that showed a 5x5 area around you; monsters would be asleep at first, until they were woken up (say by nearby shots), and then they'd have pretty nice AI. And there was deathmatch, for a number of players. Rather good, for 1995 or so.
That said, real PK muds like Genocide (still exists, telnet geno.org 2222) or Tron (down, as far as I know) were much, much better. Doom deathmatch was weak compared to good 40 player Geno team wars, with some of the best players doing 200 commands per minute... and every room had beautifully detailed descriptions (you could go exploring while you were dead and waiting for the next war).
In fact, it seems to me he could be rather rich rather quickly by selling his services (making small blood samples available for research) for a pretty high price.
Don't worry about bad things that may possibly happen in the future but that you have no influence over whatsoever. It's a waste of energy.