...I let my MAD subscription lapse a few months ago, more out of laziness than anything else. There could have been more content, but what there was I still found pretty funny, at least the first few times around.
The compilation books of old stuff are still solid gold funny stuff; I received one yesterday
An Intellectual Property phone? Got Beckerman on speed-dial or something? Also, Valenti & co - making crank calls is good way to bust stress if you manage to mask your caller-ID. Not that I would *know* about any of *that*.:cool:
Fortunately, none of my professors have ever been asshats to this extent. Though, I must admit that making packup copies is a real pain if you can't type 'em to begin with, and I'm assuming you can't type 'em (i.e. have a computer with you in class)
I can, and thanks to that, it makes the backup real easy. (copy to USB flash drive, copy to home computer's hard drive later) As y'all know, text files (whether.odt,.abw,.rtf or.doc) consume barely any drive space in this day and age. PDFs do, especially if the scanner's OCR sucks (not to mention the actual scanning work)
My university pays "regular" students in the class to compose a copy of the lecture notes for any students with learning disabilities in the class; I like that job and tend to take the opportunity to do that when available. (It's part of their legal disability-access requirements, and they like to hand off the job to their own students.)
Even though I'm being paid to take the notes in a clear employer-employee relationship, I still get to keep them! (I get online access to them along with the "target" students, and I can claim the originals at the end of the quarter. [Although I can reference the their copy if I wanted to, I tend to reference my own digital-file copies]) Their only big rule is that I'm not supposed to be double-dipping: that is being paid to take notes for them and then selling the notes to some other students on top of that.
I've discovered that I don't reference my notes a whole lot; the act of writing them down (and paying enough attention to write them down) is where a lot of the learning value comes from.
in all seriousness, being deaf and blind is a small enough corner case overall, even if deafness and blindness aren't always caused independently of one another.
specific statistics are evidently not available in the relevant WP articles. Trying a general Google search:
Heck, my grandparents have broadband (phone-company DSL), and I think my sister & myself use it more when visiting than Grandma does. (I doubt Grandpa even touches their computer much - yeah, maybe we show a loaded webpage to him occassionally) Thing is, he expects that Internet research on anything is instantaneous...
They have Excel (we had an old MS Office 2000 disk around when setting up the machine), and they STILL use paper spreadsheets. I have repeatedly tried evangelizing on this to no avail.
Another person pointing out the age-based attitude differences, I guess.
I 'm only 19, and I even I get pretty stuck in a habit...
Not sure if military spending is completely wasted. In many ways, military spending is wasteful (negative externalities to the areas in which the war is fought, diversion of social focus, lost productive capacity of dead, injured & psychologically damaged personnel, etc)
Not sure it's 100% though.
However, Keynesian economics, which makes a lot of sense in many regards, holds that increased government spending boosts the economy, no matter which form that government spending takes.
Germany lost WWI, but hadn't absolutely completely lost in the way they had in WWII. Thus, that is one reason the German populace was so angry about German surrender, not to mention anger about the harsh punishments mentioned in Versailles Treaty (France/Britain wanted these, US President Wilson didn't). This is anger that Hitler effectively tapped into, throwing in all sorts of virulent & murderous bigotry for bad measure. (see, a *relevant* invocation of Godwin's Law)
Quotes that are food-for-thought; these are part of "the other side" - I find it interesting that they come form highly respected & highly ranked US military men of the era
"Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act.... During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face'. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude... " -General Dwight D. Eisenhower http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dwight_Eisenhower#Post presidency
The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace before the atomic age was announced to the world with the destruction of Hiroshima and before the Russian entry into war.... The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military standpoint, in the defeat of Japan.
Versus a large loss of life amongst both American military and Japanese civilians in the event of a land invasion? (Yes, there was a huge death toll at Hiroshima/Nagasaki, but there certainly would have huge amounts of civilian collateral damage in
Some Japanese were ready to surrender, but, then again, a lot weren't. Japanese military, and last-ditch defenders would further add to the death toll.
The death of X people is definitely a tragedy, especially for large values of X. However, how is killing X people with a nuke worse than killing the same type of X people in conventional warfare? It's just more death per payload, and it makes a bigger statement, important to inducing psychological defeat. [Granted, this psychological warfare maneuver was at least in part to be directed at the Russkies; this part at least is disturbing]
Honestly, it seems up in the air as to whether the A-bombs were necessary historically speaking, and some of the estimates and data have apparently been lost to time/are still classified. I can see both sides of the argument
The DoD doesn't need metamaterials to waste tax dollars...this sounds like the kind of speculative research where you need to "take a gamble"...gov't is good for supporting this type of basic research (although it is here, doesn't necessarily need to be military)
Ockheedlay Artinmay "ostcay overrunsay", on the other hand...
Ten years is kinda old for computer hardware, though.
>The whole attitude of "it shouldn't need to be any faster" just flies in the face of logic, I'm sorry.
Exactly! - I say "There are improvements in general, but so much of it is just stupid waste." So I do recognize that modern computers really do bring some new features to the table. However, some of these "features" are features to some, resource hogs to others.
Does this go back to the geek/average-user dichotomy?
Preinstalled OSes do have their value. It is a pain to install a new OS on existing hardware; even if you know a friendly geek, they may not want to go through it on your behalf Adding RAM and other such components (to extend the life of the current case and the other components) isn't 100% intuitive either.
Does installing OSes and adding new hardware components have to be that way? (Truth be told, I've never tried to do either myself.)
Not to mention that new OSes often consume more system resources, and that retail copies are so expensive compared to OEM copies.
FYI, my main computer, which I'm using right now, is a box that came with a 2.93GHz Pentium 4, XP Home & 256 MB RAM. It's on XP Pro now, but that's the only upgrade to the OS or hardware configuration itself. (I've cycled through various keyboards & mice, and I've gotten a bigger monitor, but that's about it.)
It maybe could use 512MB or a gig, but that's not critical.
So, the computer's old, but not ridiculously old.
The computer-upgrade stuff is just one symptom of a planned-obsolescence problem with manufactured goods in this country (and probably elsewhere)
----
One related thing that comes to mind is: just because you have money, doesn't mean you should waste it.
Although I haven't used Steam in particular, I applaud this guy for being a realist.
Maybe people "shouldn't" pirate your content, but the fact remains that people can and do, and that it's nigh-impossible to stop, so you have to learn to live with it, hopefully being able to manage/control the problem.
Kind of reminds me of a lot of other things that many people find unpleasant that seemingly can't be stopped. Some people feel that way about firearms, other people feel that way about porn or drugs. [I do *not* mean to start a flamewar about *those* topics right now...]
Sort of reminds me of the spam checklist (http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt) whether technical, market-based, legislative or vigilante, there are all sorts of reasons why various approaches won't work well.
I'm not saying that *I* find moderate levels of piracy offensive...
How do you keep people from buying at the el-cheapo foreign price and selling at the ~$60 price? Postage costs & customs charges (even if you do get it with them) wouldn't fill up the difference.
Thing is, I don't want to see region-encoding crap either.
Slashdot Mirror
...About time Apple started copying Microsoft "features".
Just a metaphor for how those countries are relatively small compared to the US...come on.
Sounds like a great example of the cool projects that us geeks often get carried up in.
Though, I'm wondering why the guy ended up as a *truck driver* by trade...
Most of the time, I come by /. for the comments; this is one of the relatively rare top-quality *articles*
...I let my MAD subscription lapse a few months ago, more out of laziness than anything else.
There could have been more content, but what there was I still found pretty funny, at least the first few times around.
The compilation books of old stuff are still solid gold funny stuff; I received one yesterday
An Intellectual Property phone? :cool:
Got Beckerman on speed-dial or something?
Also, Valenti & co - making crank calls is good way to bust stress if you manage to mask your caller-ID. Not that I would *know* about any of *that*.
Fortunately, none of my professors have ever been asshats to this extent.
Though, I must admit that making packup copies is a real pain if you can't type 'em to begin with, and I'm assuming you can't type 'em (i.e. have a computer with you in class)
I can, and thanks to that, it makes the backup real easy. (copy to USB flash drive, copy to home computer's hard drive later) As y'all know, text files (whether .odt, .abw, .rtf or .doc) consume barely any drive space in this day and age. PDFs do, especially if the scanner's OCR sucks (not to mention the actual scanning work)
My university pays "regular" students in the class to compose a copy of the lecture notes for any students with learning disabilities in the class; I like that job and tend to take the opportunity to do that when available. (It's part of their legal disability-access requirements, and they like to hand off the job to their own students.)
Even though I'm being paid to take the notes in a clear employer-employee relationship, I still get to keep them! (I get online access to them along with the "target" students, and I can claim the originals at the end of the quarter. [Although I can reference the their copy if I wanted to, I tend to reference my own digital-file copies])
Their only big rule is that I'm not supposed to be double-dipping: that is being paid to take notes for them and then selling the notes to some other students on top of that.
I've discovered that I don't reference my notes a whole lot; the act of writing them down (and paying enough attention to write them down) is where a lot of the learning value comes from.
(see http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1102967&cid=26584721)
in all seriousness, being deaf and blind is a small enough corner case overall, even if deafness and blindness aren't always caused independently of one another.
specific statistics are evidently not available in the relevant WP articles. Trying a general Google search:
http://gri.gallaudet.edu/Demographics/deaf-US.php Deafness @ 0.1% to 0.2%-0.4%
http://www.cde.state.co.us/cdesped/SD-Deafblind.asp
Lits deafblindees as 0.003% at birth
There are some people that are both blind and deaf [gratuitous meme], you insensitive clod.[/meme]
WoW is rated Gold on WINE's app database. I suppose that counts for something...
http://appdb.winehq.org/
"So it's half an OS?". Nah, that's OS/2. $foo/2 equals half of $foo, I would think....
Heck, my grandparents have broadband (phone-company DSL), and I think my sister & myself use it more when visiting than Grandma does. (I doubt Grandpa even touches their computer much - yeah, maybe we show a loaded webpage to him occassionally) Thing is, he expects that Internet research on anything is instantaneous...
They have Excel (we had an old MS Office 2000 disk around when setting up the machine), and they STILL use paper spreadsheets. I have repeatedly tried evangelizing on this to no avail.
Another person pointing out the age-based attitude differences, I guess.
I 'm only 19, and I even I get pretty stuck in a habit...
Would have redefined "legal brief", there would have been a motion called "of the ocean"...
[scrubs out mind now]
I think Cory Doctorow (www.craphound.com) started it; the blank checklist is stored at www.craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
Not sure if military spending is completely wasted.
In many ways, military spending is wasteful (negative externalities to the areas in which the war is fought, diversion of social focus, lost productive capacity of dead, injured & psychologically damaged personnel, etc)
Not sure it's 100% though.
However, Keynesian economics, which makes a lot of sense in many regards, holds that increased government spending boosts the economy, no matter which form that government spending takes.
Something compounded at 3% interest doubles in 24 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_72
Germany lost WWI, but hadn't absolutely completely lost in the way they had in WWII.
Thus, that is one reason the German populace was so angry about German surrender, not to mention anger about the harsh punishments mentioned in Versailles Treaty (France/Britain wanted these, US President Wilson didn't). This is anger that Hitler effectively tapped into, throwing in all sorts of virulent & murderous bigotry for bad measure. (see, a *relevant* invocation of Godwin's Law)
Quotes that are food-for-thought; these are part of "the other side" - I find it interesting that they come form highly respected & highly ranked US military men of the era
"Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. ... During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face'. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude... "
-General Dwight D. Eisenhower
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dwight_Eisenhower#Post presidency
The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace before the atomic age was announced to the world with the destruction of Hiroshima and before the Russian entry into war. ... The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military standpoint, in the defeat of Japan.
* Public statement quoted in The New York Times (6 October 1945)
Chester Nimitz
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Chester_Nimitz
Versus a large loss of life amongst both American military and Japanese civilians in the event of a land invasion? (Yes, there was a huge death toll at Hiroshima/Nagasaki, but there certainly would have huge amounts of civilian collateral damage in
Some Japanese were ready to surrender, but, then again, a lot weren't. Japanese military, and last-ditch defenders would further add to the death toll.
The death of X people is definitely a tragedy, especially for large values of X. However, how is killing X people with a nuke worse than killing the same type of X people in conventional warfare?
It's just more death per payload, and it makes a bigger statement, important to inducing psychological defeat.
[Granted, this psychological warfare maneuver was at least in part to be directed at the Russkies; this part at least is disturbing]
Honestly, it seems up in the air as to whether the A-bombs were necessary historically speaking, and some of the estimates and data have apparently been lost to time/are still classified.
I can see both sides of the argument
The DoD doesn't need metamaterials to waste tax dollars...this sounds like the kind of speculative research where you need to "take a gamble"...gov't is good for supporting this type of basic research (although it is here, doesn't necessarily need to be military)
Ockheedlay Artinmay "ostcay overrunsay", on the other hand...
ah, Slashdot. :D
D&D rule nitpicking is "informative".
Ten years is kinda old for computer hardware, though.
>The whole attitude of "it shouldn't need to be any faster" just flies in the face of logic, I'm sorry.
Exactly!
-
I say "There are improvements in general, but so much of it is just stupid waste." So I do recognize that modern computers really do bring some new features to the table.
However, some of these "features" are features to some, resource hogs to others.
Does this go back to the geek/average-user dichotomy?
Preinstalled OSes do have their value.
It is a pain to install a new OS on existing hardware; even if you know a friendly geek, they may not want to go through it on your behalf
Adding RAM and other such components (to extend the life of the current case and the other components) isn't 100% intuitive either.
Does installing OSes and adding new hardware components have to be that way? (Truth be told, I've never tried to do either myself.)
Not to mention that new OSes often consume more system resources, and that retail copies are so expensive compared to OEM copies.
FYI, my main computer, which I'm using right now, is a box that came with a 2.93GHz Pentium 4, XP Home & 256 MB RAM.
It's on XP Pro now, but that's the only upgrade to the OS or hardware configuration itself. (I've cycled through various keyboards & mice, and I've gotten a bigger monitor, but that's about it.)
It maybe could use 512MB or a gig, but that's not critical.
So, the computer's old, but not ridiculously old.
The computer-upgrade stuff is just one symptom of a planned-obsolescence problem with manufactured goods in this country (and probably elsewhere)
----
One related thing that comes to mind is: just because you have money, doesn't mean you should waste it.
Although I haven't used Steam in particular, I applaud this guy for being a realist.
Maybe people "shouldn't" pirate your content, but the fact remains that people can and do, and that it's nigh-impossible to stop, so you have to learn to live with it, hopefully being able to manage/control the problem.
Kind of reminds me of a lot of other things that many people find unpleasant that seemingly can't be stopped. Some people feel that way about firearms, other people feel that way about porn or drugs. [I do *not* mean to start a flamewar about *those* topics right now...]
Sort of reminds me of the spam checklist (http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt) whether technical, market-based, legislative or vigilante, there are all sorts of reasons why various approaches won't work well.
I'm not saying that *I* find moderate levels of piracy offensive...
How do you keep people from buying at the el-cheapo foreign price and selling at the ~$60 price? Postage costs & customs charges (even if you do get it with them) wouldn't fill up the difference.
Thing is, I don't want to see region-encoding crap either.