From what I read there it seems pretty reasonable. Not that I support censorship in general but they state that TheHeterosexualGamer would be banned for similar reasons. I don't really see how this as a discrimination issue.
If more GLBT would learn this lesson they would probably be perceived better by the general public.
In my experience Americans tend not to respect people who knuckle under at the slightest resistance either. Becoming known as pushovers and cowards probably isn't a viable solution.
Many women are interested in using technology, they just don't want to dive in to quite the same depth. Or they may not be interested in the way most men approach it.
But getting deeper into it is what makes a geek. If you don't want a deeper understanding of it then you don't want to be a geek. Well, unless, like a lot of people, you think that this is something that you can buy off the shelf.
Most likely the latter. I've noticed that with a lot of men it's a 'size' contest. I was more interested in knowing about it because that's how I avoid getting taken to the cleaners by people. I started out in cars back in the 70's and discovered that I like it and that was it.
Well, actually I suppose I started back when I was given my brother's hand-me-down toys. I spent more time playing with the army men, spaceships and Legos than the 'proper' toys that some relatives insisted I should have.
Frankly, I think the former is part of the reason why there are relatively few women in tech. It's that classic "Power is about getting people to do it for you, silly." mentality. In that traditional female power mindset the only reason for a woman to bother learning this stuff is if she's somehow a failure as a woman.
Who the heck are these people using S3 cards nowadays?
Tough question... the last S3 card I've seen was a 2Mb Trio.
Truth that. An old ATi or Nvidea card is a better buy and is more available as well. The only market I can see for them is OEM integrated and brick and mortar sales and I haven't seen an S3 card for sale in a local store since the 90's.
Both parties have figured out that the best way to get control is to take advantage of the fact that everybody thinks everybody else is an idiot and cannot be trusted with their own money.
Nobody in their right mind will vote Govt. into taking decision making power over themselves but it's usually acceptable to do it to 'those people'.
The net result of this is that if you are in the under six-figure income bracket you'd probably better get used to the idea that there will soon be a bureaucracy in charge of everything in you life.
If you were capable of making good decisions you'd be wealthier wouldn't you?
Similarly, those of you who are in the over six-figure bracket will get your own bureaucracy to redistribute the wealth. No don't whine. You get your own welfare too.
Everything has to be managed. And, of course, anything not controlled by bureaucrats is not managed.
I honestly am not convinced that we'd need any brand new branch of physics to send someone to a star 10 lightyears away.
We don't really. We just need much, much better fusion tech than we've got. Well that or antimatter in large quantities. The best fusion drive designs that they've come up with would probably be good for ~.1c or maybe ~.2c at most if we ever do get good enough to actually build them. Antimatter could probably get us to ~.4c or ~.5c at most.
With a good fusion drive we're looking at about a ~50 to ~100 years or so for a 10LY trip one-way. With antimatter it's more like ~20-40 years
Starting with math: primary numbers, Fibonnacci sequence and other natural patterns, on to addition, subtraction, etc... then to logical propositions and conclusions... we could communicate an entire language and maybe even a couple of encyclopedias in the time it took for ONE 10-year round trip of communication.
Agreed. Communication does not always have to be unidirectional. There's no good reason why we couldn't both be sending and receiving at the same time.
And with ion drives, or Bussard ramjets (especially if they are Pellegrino-style vehicles that pull instead of push), maybe we could get there in, say, 50 years or so. And spend most of that time in something like cold sleep. There have been advances in that direction, too. Do we have the technology to do this? No. But we might in 10 years, or 20.
That's a bit optimistic. Make that ~500 and ~200 years and I'll agree with you.
Any technology capable of crossing the distance between stars could be enormously dangerous. Take a ship weighing ~100 tons for example. At.1c it could hit the earth with more than enough energy to end civilization.
Just the engine exhaust alone would be a hot plasma plume thousands of kilometers long at least. That's quite enough to create a global EMP among other things.
Only experts with many years of experience can tell the difference between the various species. It is largely considered a mere academic exercise with no functional utility.
Hear, hear. That's the damned truth. Well ok, yes one group might sell different sub-cultures out in different order than the other but they are fighting over us like two pit bulls fight over a steak. You know how its going to go no matter who wins.
I would agree with you except that the fundamentalists are pretty heavily into this sort of thing too. Well not so much the anti-nuclear thing but in my experience the main difference between the left and right in this is in which particular attack strategy is preferred.
The rabid conservatives tend to rave against microwaves, wi-fi, aspartame and such whereas the loony liberals go after the vaccines, and anything with 'nuclear' in the description.
Hm, it seems likely that human consciousness is a derived form of schizophrenia so I'd go with Attractive and Intelligent and take it on faith that Insane will be part of the base package.
As for men. I'd say it's about the same. I've not been with one recently so YMMV but in general most of them seem to want a hooker not a date anyway so it probably doesn't really matter much.
Iowa has no voice as it now stands. Not only that, but in LARGE states that tend to be foregone conclusions, many voters don't have a say... if you're going to vote for the republican candidate in California, why did you even get out of bed this morning?
It is interesting that the comments in this thread tend toward the Republican view for the most part. I remember hearing similar talk from the Democrats in the '01 Presidential election.
That's one of the problems with changing this: By definition only those who lost are actually motivated to do it. The ones who have the power to make headway won't try because they'd have to take the long view and fight for something that won't benefit them directly.
And forget the odd notion that the artificial enunciation of plain text is equivalent to a person's nuanced and emotive reading.
Where can you get that? I've never heard this in an audiobook. Screenplay adaptations yes but audiobooks are, in my experience, an excellent substitute for insomnia medication
I've had two PCChips boards fail. We had ten installed when I got here. Junk. They were aging so I replaced them with mostly Biostar and MSI board machines. Now I've actually had pretty good results with the six MSI based machines we have. Only two failures in ~7 years here; One Biostar and one Gigabyte machine and that was due to a power surge.
Even with good earbuds this would probably not be noticeable. This will have a huge impact upon DSP systems if it pans out. It could have many other applications as well. Robotics, artificial intelligence, fuzzy logic, neural networks, just to name a few.
The U.S prison system is the largest in the world, but it is also the fastest expanding system too. It serves private interests to the tune of billions to create policies that fill these prisons as fast as possible. Every single person is worth between 30K and 100K per year to the system.
This is one of the main reasons why I suspect that our general slide towards either communism or fascism may be unstoppable. It's becoming more cost effective for the lower 25% or so of the demographic to be in prison than it is for them to be out of it.
This, of course, is not economically sustainable, but it is useful to create what amounts to a slave class to whom work is more important as a means of staying out of prison than making a living. All that's needed is a socially acceptable way to make prison worse than life in a slum.
We couldn't bring back debtor's prison so we're working on another way to achieve the same thing.
There is still some good science fiction out there. Admittedly its hard to find amid all the Star Trek, Star Wars, and other 'mill product' but there is some, Alistair Reynolds for instance.
Just avoid the stuff aimed at the teen market and you can still find good writing. Note by teen I mean that aimed at those who apparently never made it past early adolescence. Most of the 'teen' books are not in that section no matter the category.
Apparently they mix them in with the stuff aimed at adults in order to avoid embarrassing their chief audience. Whoever said the US is full of children over the age of 20 was right.
Truth. I just recently learned that my ISP has apparently decided to let its infrastructure in our subdivision rot. We cannot get them to perform maintenance via tech support as all they do is run us through the standard scripts. The intermittent drop outs have gotten to the point where the service is unusable from ~4:30PM to ~10:30PM every day and it is unreliable most of the rest of the day.
We looked for another ISP and managed to find three. One of them is wireless and at extreme range through trees I doubt it is viable. Another is cable which I'm told is as bad as our current one is so there is really one available option.
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There was a previous instance of something similar happening. Stephen Toulouse, who heads up the team that handles enforcement, wrote up a blog entry about the policy choice.
From what I read there it seems pretty reasonable. Not that I support censorship in general but they state that TheHeterosexualGamer would be banned for similar reasons. I don't really see how this as a discrimination issue.
If more GLBT would learn this lesson they would probably be perceived better by the general public.
In my experience Americans tend not to respect people who knuckle under at the slightest resistance either. Becoming known as pushovers and cowards probably isn't a viable solution.
Damn the submarine! Full speed ahead!
True. Geeks do the work. we're mortals in that we get dirty sometimes. Suits would be the gods. Above it all and yet utterly dependent.
Many women are interested in using technology, they just don't want to dive in to quite the same depth. Or they may not be interested in the way most men approach it.
But getting deeper into it is what makes a geek. If you don't want a deeper understanding of it then you don't want to be a geek. Well, unless, like a lot of people, you think that this is something that you can buy off the shelf.
Most likely the latter. I've noticed that with a lot of men it's a 'size' contest. I was more interested in knowing about it because that's how I avoid getting taken to the cleaners by people. I started out in cars back in the 70's and discovered that I like it and that was it.
Well, actually I suppose I started back when I was given my brother's hand-me-down toys. I spent more time playing with the army men, spaceships and Legos than the 'proper' toys that some relatives insisted I should have.
Frankly, I think the former is part of the reason why there are relatively few women in tech. It's that classic "Power is about getting people to do it for you, silly." mentality. In that traditional female power mindset the only reason for a woman to bother learning this stuff is if she's somehow a failure as a woman.
At least that's what I was told.
Who the heck are these people using S3 cards nowadays?
Tough question... the last S3 card I've seen was a 2Mb Trio.
Truth that. An old ATi or Nvidea card is a better buy and is more available as well. The only market I can see for them is OEM integrated and brick and mortar sales and I haven't seen an S3 card for sale in a local store since the 90's.
Both parties have figured out that the best way to get control is to take advantage of the fact that everybody thinks everybody else is an idiot and cannot be trusted with their own money.
Nobody in their right mind will vote Govt. into taking decision making power over themselves but it's usually acceptable to do it to 'those people'.
The net result of this is that if you are in the under six-figure income bracket you'd probably better get used to the idea that there will soon be a bureaucracy in charge of everything in you life.
If you were capable of making good decisions you'd be wealthier wouldn't you?
Similarly, those of you who are in the over six-figure bracket will get your own bureaucracy to redistribute the wealth. No don't whine. You get your own welfare too.
Everything has to be managed. And, of course, anything not controlled by bureaucrats is not managed.
I honestly am not convinced that we'd need any brand new branch of physics to send someone to a star 10 lightyears away.
We don't really. We just need much, much better fusion tech than we've got. Well that or antimatter in large quantities. The best fusion drive designs that they've come up with would probably be good for ~.1c or maybe ~.2c at most if we ever do get good enough to actually build them. Antimatter could probably get us to ~.4c or ~.5c at most.
With a good fusion drive we're looking at about a ~50 to ~100 years or so for a 10LY trip one-way. With antimatter it's more like ~20-40 years
Starting with math: primary numbers, Fibonnacci sequence and other natural patterns, on to addition, subtraction, etc... then to logical propositions and conclusions... we could communicate an entire language and maybe even a couple of encyclopedias in the time it took for ONE 10-year round trip of communication.
Agreed. Communication does not always have to be unidirectional. There's no good reason why we couldn't both be sending and receiving at the same time.
And with ion drives, or Bussard ramjets (especially if they are Pellegrino-style vehicles that pull instead of push), maybe we could get there in, say, 50 years or so. And spend most of that time in something like cold sleep. There have been advances in that direction, too. Do we have the technology to do this? No. But we might in 10 years, or 20.
That's a bit optimistic. Make that ~500 and ~200 years and I'll agree with you.
Any technology capable of crossing the distance between stars could be enormously dangerous. Take a ship weighing ~100 tons for example. At .1c it could hit the earth with more than enough energy to end civilization.
Just the engine exhaust alone would be a hot plasma plume thousands of kilometers long at least. That's quite enough to create a global EMP among other things.
They're made of meat!?
Only experts with many years of experience can tell the difference between the various species. It is largely considered a mere academic exercise with no functional utility.
Hear, hear. That's the damned truth. Well ok, yes one group might sell different sub-cultures out in different order than the other but they are fighting over us like two pit bulls fight over a steak. You know how its going to go no matter who wins.
I would agree with you except that the fundamentalists are pretty heavily into this sort of thing too. Well not so much the anti-nuclear thing but in my experience the main difference between the left and right in this is in which particular attack strategy is preferred.
The rabid conservatives tend to rave against microwaves, wi-fi, aspartame and such whereas the loony liberals go after the vaccines, and anything with 'nuclear' in the description.
Hm, it seems likely that human consciousness is a derived form of schizophrenia so I'd go with Attractive and Intelligent and take it on faith that Insane will be part of the base package.
As for men. I'd say it's about the same. I've not been with one recently so YMMV but in general most of them seem to want a hooker not a date anyway so it probably doesn't really matter much.
Er.. make that the '00 election. Blah..
Iowa has no voice as it now stands. Not only that, but in LARGE states that tend to be foregone conclusions, many voters don't have a say... if you're going to vote for the republican candidate in California, why did you even get out of bed this morning?
It is interesting that the comments in this thread tend toward the Republican view for the most part. I remember hearing similar talk from the Democrats in the '01 Presidential election.
That's one of the problems with changing this: By definition only those who lost are actually motivated to do it. The ones who have the power to make headway won't try because they'd have to take the long view and fight for something that won't benefit them directly.
And forget the odd notion that the artificial enunciation of plain text is equivalent to a person's nuanced and emotive reading.
Where can you get that? I've never heard this in an audiobook. Screenplay adaptations yes but audiobooks are, in my experience, an excellent substitute for insomnia medication
I've had two PCChips boards fail. We had ten installed when I got here. Junk. They were aging so I replaced them with mostly Biostar and MSI board machines. Now I've actually had pretty good results with the six MSI based machines we have. Only two failures in ~7 years here; One Biostar and one Gigabyte machine and that was due to a power surge.
Even with good earbuds this would probably not be noticeable. This will have a huge impact upon DSP systems if it pans out. It could have many other applications as well. Robotics, artificial intelligence, fuzzy logic, neural networks, just to name a few.
Beating? That kid will be a minor hero once they figure out he was as high as a kite in this video.
The U.S prison system is the largest in the world, but it is also the fastest expanding system too. It serves private interests to the tune of billions to create policies that fill these prisons as fast as possible. Every single person is worth between 30K and 100K per year to the system.
This is one of the main reasons why I suspect that our general slide towards either communism or fascism may be unstoppable. It's becoming more cost effective for the lower 25% or so of the demographic to be in prison than it is for them to be out of it.
This, of course, is not economically sustainable, but it is useful to create what amounts to a slave class to whom work is more important as a means of staying out of prison than making a living. All that's needed is a socially acceptable way to make prison worse than life in a slum.
We couldn't bring back debtor's prison so we're working on another way to achieve the same thing.
Windows, of course, has already been neutered.
There is still some good science fiction out there. Admittedly its hard to find amid all the Star Trek, Star Wars, and other 'mill product' but there is some, Alistair Reynolds for instance.
Just avoid the stuff aimed at the teen market and you can still find good writing. Note by teen I mean that aimed at those who apparently never made it past early adolescence. Most of the 'teen' books are not in that section no matter the category.
Apparently they mix them in with the stuff aimed at adults in order to avoid embarrassing their chief audience. Whoever said the US is full of children over the age of 20 was right.
Truth. I just recently learned that my ISP has apparently decided to let its infrastructure in our subdivision rot. We cannot get them to perform maintenance via tech support as all they do is run us through the standard scripts. The intermittent drop outs have gotten to the point where the service is unusable from ~4:30PM to ~10:30PM every day and it is unreliable most of the rest of the day.
We looked for another ISP and managed to find three. One of them is wireless and at extreme range through trees I doubt it is viable. Another is cable which I'm told is as bad as our current one is so there is really one available option.
If I could mod you up I would. Current US policy concerning nuclear waste is rife with kindergarten logic.