A Windows user.
There, the circle has been completed.
Rimshot. Is it just me, or does/. seem to have more trolls these days? I've been using the site for probably ten years now and it seems like this last year has had its fill of them.
They should use this as the basis for compiling a list of things which offend the USPTO, which we then can all use to troll the shit out of them until they cry uncle and stop issuing shitty, inane patents.
That is the fault of the No Child Left Behind Act. The act that tied teacher / administrator salaries to the test results. Public schools across the nation stopped worrying about a kids learning and worried about their bottom line. That leads to doing whatever it takes to make sure the test results are positive.
It's easy to be moral and ethical when there's nothing to lose. To blame the mechanic providing the "something to lose" when weak, immoral and unethical people decide to act in their own best interest at the expense of children's education is irresponsible. I find it fascinating when someone shows their true colors under pressure. Most people call themselves "Christian", "good", "decent", etc., but it's not until the shit hits the fan or some bum asks them for a few bucks for a hamburger that we really find out who they are. As an Atlanta resident, all I have to say to these "teachers" is GO FUCK YOURSELF AND ENJOY PRISON.
I noticed lately I've begun using the work "frak" when talking to myself without even thinking about it. I said it to the guys hauling away my dead CRT televisions today when signing the bill, realizing only just after the word came out that I'd dropped BSG on them. Frak...
Well if it were a simulation, it wouldn't really have a center, just one or more "cameras" creating observable datasets. I suspect "they" would have a "camera" near anything sentient to keep them from completely freaking out. Maybe once a sentient being can prove they are in a simulation, as a reward for their cleverness their consciousness will be transplanted from the simulation to the "real world" where they will join the ranks of the "gods". No doubt pure bullshit, but it's fun to think of such things.
What if, like in OpenGL when you set the near and far clipping planes too far apart, you begin to lose precision on calculations at distances farthest away from the camera. The same thing happens at a certain point when you examine something near the camera too closely; you observe the limit of the floats describing the modelview matrix. This assumes of course that the universe is a simulation and that, being a part of the simulation, we "can't see the forest for all the trees". It might explain the discrepancy between the behavior of matter and energy at quantum scales versus galactic scales and why "normal" (as in Newtonian) physics seems to work perfectly at human scales.
Second, what if there are multiple dimensions affecting space/time/matter/energy/etc. and we and our observations are generally constrained to but a few. If dimensions were like pages in a book, sometimes the words on the next page faintly bleed into the one you're reading if the paper's thin. Perhaps these unexplained phenomena are the result of one or more other dimensions faintly bleeding over into the one we can reliably observe. Dark matter and dark energy could be the shadows of something larger that by our nature we're blind to. To further the craziness, singularities could be gateways that when in sufficient number make the effects observable at galactic scales.
What kind of small, hateful person says "women, children, and other civilians" instead of "people" or "civilians"?
How fucked do you have to be to value the life of one person more than another because of their sex or adulthood?
This isn't pretty, but human life isn't equally valuable and there are nearly infinite ways this can be quantified. First, it's subjective, and second, only a handful of reasons a rational person would agree with. Some examples:
Children generally have more time in front of them and therefore are being robbed of more when killed. If you had to choose between the death of a five year old or a 90 year old, which would you be inclined to choose?
If you believe in justice/punishment/retribution/etc., older people are more likely to have committed acts in their life that are worthy of punishment, while younger people are less likely. Obviously that doesn't necessarily mean they deserve to die or that there's actually a connection between their sins and their death, but again if you had to choose between an aid worker and a serial killer being killed, which would you choose?
If the Earth were about to be hit by an extinction event and only 10000 people could be saved via sci-fi-method-of-your-choice, would you select people at random or choose the best-of-the-best with respect to the successful continuity of the species?
If someone points a gun at your head and says, "I'm going to kill you," you are legally justified in killing them in self defense, which indicates at that moment your life is more valuable than the gunman's. Were it not, you'd be expected to simply run away, try to talk them out of it, or use other non-lethal means to stop them.
@AC and cjameshuff: That is very interesting, and well-explained. Physics is beyond my areas of expertise, but I find it fascinating. As abstract as a lot of the science sounds to a layperson, I see it as a sort of attempt at answering a question we've always had, which is "What the hell is going on? What is all of this?" From the ocean disappearing into the horizon to the spinning pinpoints of light in the sky, physics and all its sub-disciplines someday will provide a solid foundation for us to usefully speculate on the ultimate question, which is "Why?"
Some cities already do this. But now you're also got audio recording devices everywhere. I'm surprised by the amount of people here wanting to erode everyone's privacy to increase the chances of finding the swatters. It's a classic example of a slippery slope. Now that we have this tech, lets apply it everywhere for the smallest benefit.
I'm not advocating for recording devices, audio or video, to be installed at every street corner. A device specifically engineered to detect gunshots is something else entirely. If it's streaming continuous audio that's passed through a speech recognition algorithm on a government supercomputer and scanned for red-flag keywords it is no longer a gunshot detector, it's a nightmare, and the same goes for facial recognition cameras, chip implants, barcode tattoos, NSA hijinks, etc. The problem with privacy loss isn't technology, it's an overbearing and intrusive government and an apathetic citizenry. Technology is ethically agnostic; politicians and voters not so much.
They do that here in DC. It gives them a "heads up" but not much else. Google "DC" and "Gunshot detectors" and get back with us won't you?
Well considering the context of my suggestion is a discussion on swatting, if the police receive an anonymous tip of gunshots but no gunshots were heard by neighbors or the detectors they can slow their roll a bit and not act like they're in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban. Didn't think I'd have to spell that out, AC, but so be it.
How the hell did we get such a militarized police force anyway?
Same old story...a few bad apples ruin it for the rest. They should just put gunshot detectors on light poles and be done with it. They use them in the military to detect the discharge vector using triangulation. Three mics and a Raspberry Pi running off the bulb's current, transmitting to reserved bandwidth on the nearest cell tower. Of course if they actually did this it would cost ONE MILLION DOLLARS per device...
This is probably a really stupid question, but if light has a maximum speed but is also affected by gravity, what would happen if you shined a flashlight/torch into a black hole? It's going the speed of light at the flashlight but should increase in speed as it approaches the black hole's gravity well. Does the light just keep the same speed until it joins the black hole?
who watches the watchmen?
who repairs the watches?
who watches the watch-repair-men repairing the watches?
who repairs the repairmen?
who mans the men?
who mens the man?
Violent sex as a legitimate entertainment tool, seriously?!? I would hardly call it legitimate and do honestly look upon it as a profoundly disturbing reflection of humanity. Why do humans, find humans killing other humans, to be so entertainingly rewarding?
You'd have to ask God/evolution that one. Part of it is cultural, which is a shame, but a lot of "distasteful" media is designed to appeal to our baser natures. I don't think there's anything wrong with indulging in violent fantasy, whether or not sex is involved, as long as you're responsible enough to recognize what's happening and don't hurt people. To attempt to purify your mind will make you crazier than you are already biologically programmed to be and isn't necessary to control oneself. As our technology allows us more and more to indulge every dark whim, it becomes increasingly important to recognize the difference between what's okay to feel and what's okay to do. Our biology won't catch up for a long time, and most likely never will unless we begin engineering ourselves.
I don't worry about my kid going on a killing spree and being taken down by the national guard. I _do_ worry about her getting knocked up. That's the difference.
So games and movies don't make people kill but they make them fuck? That's a new one for me. Content ratings are a reflection of culture and some notion of political correctness, as in the ratings board doesn't want to find itself the target of negative media coverage. The best way to handle it would be to enumerate a game's content based on x number of controversial/sensitive topics as deemed by common cultures and let the parent decide which ones they care about with respect to their children. To say a game is "M" or 18+ is making the decision for the parent and should be outside the scope of an impartial ratings system.
Wikipedia awaits your edit. It wouldn't surprise me if it was false, not because it's unlikely or anything, but once a person's actions reach a certain level of horror and depravity truly anything is possible and believable. You could say Mengele was launching people out of cannons to see if they could orbit the moon and it would sound completely plausible.
Yeah, sorry. Sometimes I think just because I know something that everyone does...I'm weird like that. Here you go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J...
"Mengele's experiments with eyes included attempts to change eye color by injecting chemicals into the eyes of living subjects and killing people with heterochromatic eyes so that the eyes could be removed and sent to Berlin for study."
I heard from other sources that blue was his target color.
I don't argue that it isn't cool, but the German I'm referring to is infamous for the cruelty of his experiments, thus the creepiness. It reminds one of the other.
I started with Linux in 2007 experimenting with Debian and later using Ubuntu. Switched to Kubuntu for several years and just recently to Mint. I think at some point Mint is going to drop its dependence on Ubuntu for its main distro and use Debian exclusively. They're already well-positioned to do so with their Debian variant, and have a rock-solid understanding of what a desktop computing experience should feel like to the average user. To systemd or not to systemd is not the question for most people, the quality and intuitiveness of the user experience is, and I think the Mint team understands that as well as the importance of sane underpinnings. There will come a time when all of us thank Ubuntu for what it has done before letting it go forever.
There was a certain asshole in Germany back in the 40's who did similar research. It creeps me out a bit that people are attempting (and apparently have succeeded at) the very same thing.
My best coding/writing playlist is...the entire set of Moody Blues albums, in chronological order. (I've been listening to them for nearly 50 years. Crap I'm old.) The albums have to play in correct order, and the cuts on each album have to play in standard order. It just pretty much becomes a musical cocoon.
My programming routine is exactly like that, except the songs are beers and I don't listen to anything. The Moody Blues are pretty good, though.
Slashdot Mirror
A Windows user. There, the circle has been completed.
Rimshot. Is it just me, or does /. seem to have more trolls these days? I've been using the site for probably ten years now and it seems like this last year has had its fill of them.
You do, however, need a Windows computer.
I do? All this time I thought I was pretty happy with Mint 17.1 Cinnamon.
They should use this as the basis for compiling a list of things which offend the USPTO, which we then can all use to troll the shit out of them until they cry uncle and stop issuing shitty, inane patents.
That is the fault of the No Child Left Behind Act. The act that tied teacher / administrator salaries to the test results. Public schools across the nation stopped worrying about a kids learning and worried about their bottom line. That leads to doing whatever it takes to make sure the test results are positive.
It's easy to be moral and ethical when there's nothing to lose. To blame the mechanic providing the "something to lose" when weak, immoral and unethical people decide to act in their own best interest at the expense of children's education is irresponsible. I find it fascinating when someone shows their true colors under pressure. Most people call themselves "Christian", "good", "decent", etc., but it's not until the shit hits the fan or some bum asks them for a few bucks for a hamburger that we really find out who they are. As an Atlanta resident, all I have to say to these "teachers" is GO FUCK YOURSELF AND ENJOY PRISON.
I noticed lately I've begun using the work "frak" when talking to myself without even thinking about it. I said it to the guys hauling away my dead CRT televisions today when signing the bill, realizing only just after the word came out that I'd dropped BSG on them. Frak...
So what you're saying is, the world is a simulation centered right around Sol, and we're suffering from IEEE 754 floating-point imprecision ?
I think KSP found a fix for that.
Well if it were a simulation, it wouldn't really have a center, just one or more "cameras" creating observable datasets. I suspect "they" would have a "camera" near anything sentient to keep them from completely freaking out. Maybe once a sentient being can prove they are in a simulation, as a reward for their cleverness their consciousness will be transplanted from the simulation to the "real world" where they will join the ranks of the "gods". No doubt pure bullshit, but it's fun to think of such things.
What if, like in OpenGL when you set the near and far clipping planes too far apart, you begin to lose precision on calculations at distances farthest away from the camera. The same thing happens at a certain point when you examine something near the camera too closely; you observe the limit of the floats describing the modelview matrix. This assumes of course that the universe is a simulation and that, being a part of the simulation, we "can't see the forest for all the trees". It might explain the discrepancy between the behavior of matter and energy at quantum scales versus galactic scales and why "normal" (as in Newtonian) physics seems to work perfectly at human scales.
Second, what if there are multiple dimensions affecting space/time/matter/energy/etc. and we and our observations are generally constrained to but a few. If dimensions were like pages in a book, sometimes the words on the next page faintly bleed into the one you're reading if the paper's thin. Perhaps these unexplained phenomena are the result of one or more other dimensions faintly bleeding over into the one we can reliably observe. Dark matter and dark energy could be the shadows of something larger that by our nature we're blind to. To further the craziness, singularities could be gateways that when in sufficient number make the effects observable at galactic scales.
What kind of small, hateful person says "women, children, and other civilians" instead of "people" or "civilians"? How fucked do you have to be to value the life of one person more than another because of their sex or adulthood?
This isn't pretty, but human life isn't equally valuable and there are nearly infinite ways this can be quantified. First, it's subjective, and second, only a handful of reasons a rational person would agree with. Some examples:
Children generally have more time in front of them and therefore are being robbed of more when killed. If you had to choose between the death of a five year old or a 90 year old, which would you be inclined to choose?
If you believe in justice/punishment/retribution/etc., older people are more likely to have committed acts in their life that are worthy of punishment, while younger people are less likely. Obviously that doesn't necessarily mean they deserve to die or that there's actually a connection between their sins and their death, but again if you had to choose between an aid worker and a serial killer being killed, which would you choose?
If the Earth were about to be hit by an extinction event and only 10000 people could be saved via sci-fi-method-of-your-choice, would you select people at random or choose the best-of-the-best with respect to the successful continuity of the species?
If someone points a gun at your head and says, "I'm going to kill you," you are legally justified in killing them in self defense, which indicates at that moment your life is more valuable than the gunman's. Were it not, you'd be expected to simply run away, try to talk them out of it, or use other non-lethal means to stop them.
@AC and cjameshuff: That is very interesting, and well-explained. Physics is beyond my areas of expertise, but I find it fascinating. As abstract as a lot of the science sounds to a layperson, I see it as a sort of attempt at answering a question we've always had, which is "What the hell is going on? What is all of this?" From the ocean disappearing into the horizon to the spinning pinpoints of light in the sky, physics and all its sub-disciplines someday will provide a solid foundation for us to usefully speculate on the ultimate question, which is "Why?"
Some cities already do this. But now you're also got audio recording devices everywhere. I'm surprised by the amount of people here wanting to erode everyone's privacy to increase the chances of finding the swatters. It's a classic example of a slippery slope. Now that we have this tech, lets apply it everywhere for the smallest benefit.
I'm not advocating for recording devices, audio or video, to be installed at every street corner. A device specifically engineered to detect gunshots is something else entirely. If it's streaming continuous audio that's passed through a speech recognition algorithm on a government supercomputer and scanned for red-flag keywords it is no longer a gunshot detector, it's a nightmare, and the same goes for facial recognition cameras, chip implants, barcode tattoos, NSA hijinks, etc. The problem with privacy loss isn't technology, it's an overbearing and intrusive government and an apathetic citizenry. Technology is ethically agnostic; politicians and voters not so much.
They do that here in DC. It gives them a "heads up" but not much else. Google "DC" and "Gunshot detectors" and get back with us won't you?
Well considering the context of my suggestion is a discussion on swatting, if the police receive an anonymous tip of gunshots but no gunshots were heard by neighbors or the detectors they can slow their roll a bit and not act like they're in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban. Didn't think I'd have to spell that out, AC, but so be it.
How the hell did we get such a militarized police force anyway?
Same old story...a few bad apples ruin it for the rest. They should just put gunshot detectors on light poles and be done with it. They use them in the military to detect the discharge vector using triangulation. Three mics and a Raspberry Pi running off the bulb's current, transmitting to reserved bandwidth on the nearest cell tower. Of course if they actually did this it would cost ONE MILLION DOLLARS per device...
This is probably a really stupid question, but if light has a maximum speed but is also affected by gravity, what would happen if you shined a flashlight/torch into a black hole? It's going the speed of light at the flashlight but should increase in speed as it approaches the black hole's gravity well. Does the light just keep the same speed until it joins the black hole?
who watches the watchmen? who repairs the watches? who watches the watch-repair-men repairing the watches? who repairs the repairmen? who mans the men? who mens the man?
It's just one big circle-watch.
Violent sex as a legitimate entertainment tool, seriously?!? I would hardly call it legitimate and do honestly look upon it as a profoundly disturbing reflection of humanity. Why do humans, find humans killing other humans, to be so entertainingly rewarding?
You'd have to ask God/evolution that one. Part of it is cultural, which is a shame, but a lot of "distasteful" media is designed to appeal to our baser natures. I don't think there's anything wrong with indulging in violent fantasy, whether or not sex is involved, as long as you're responsible enough to recognize what's happening and don't hurt people. To attempt to purify your mind will make you crazier than you are already biologically programmed to be and isn't necessary to control oneself. As our technology allows us more and more to indulge every dark whim, it becomes increasingly important to recognize the difference between what's okay to feel and what's okay to do. Our biology won't catch up for a long time, and most likely never will unless we begin engineering ourselves.
I don't worry about my kid going on a killing spree and being taken down by the national guard. I _do_ worry about her getting knocked up. That's the difference.
So games and movies don't make people kill but they make them fuck? That's a new one for me. Content ratings are a reflection of culture and some notion of political correctness, as in the ratings board doesn't want to find itself the target of negative media coverage. The best way to handle it would be to enumerate a game's content based on x number of controversial/sensitive topics as deemed by common cultures and let the parent decide which ones they care about with respect to their children. To say a game is "M" or 18+ is making the decision for the parent and should be outside the scope of an impartial ratings system.
I think it would be easier to set up a bunch of solar panels at the middle latitudes. Or go nuclear.
You had me at nuclear. That is what is necessary, along with exploiting the environment's flow, to establish stations on bodies.
Wikipedia awaits your edit. It wouldn't surprise me if it was false, not because it's unlikely or anything, but once a person's actions reach a certain level of horror and depravity truly anything is possible and believable. You could say Mengele was launching people out of cannons to see if they could orbit the moon and it would sound completely plausible.
Yeah, sorry. Sometimes I think just because I know something that everyone does...I'm weird like that. Here you go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J...
"Mengele's experiments with eyes included attempts to change eye color by injecting chemicals into the eyes of living subjects and killing people with heterochromatic eyes so that the eyes could be removed and sent to Berlin for study."
I heard from other sources that blue was his target color.
I don't argue that it isn't cool, but the German I'm referring to is infamous for the cruelty of his experiments, thus the creepiness. It reminds one of the other.
I started with Linux in 2007 experimenting with Debian and later using Ubuntu. Switched to Kubuntu for several years and just recently to Mint. I think at some point Mint is going to drop its dependence on Ubuntu for its main distro and use Debian exclusively. They're already well-positioned to do so with their Debian variant, and have a rock-solid understanding of what a desktop computing experience should feel like to the average user. To systemd or not to systemd is not the question for most people, the quality and intuitiveness of the user experience is, and I think the Mint team understands that as well as the importance of sane underpinnings. There will come a time when all of us thank Ubuntu for what it has done before letting it go forever.
Using forged steel axes instead of stone axes. Fucking hypocrites. I'd have jumped up and down howling and beat it with animal bones.
I was thinking he looked more like Briareos from Appleseed: http://collectiondx.com/files/... Those rabbit-ear antennae and all.
There was a certain asshole in Germany back in the 40's who did similar research. It creeps me out a bit that people are attempting (and apparently have succeeded at) the very same thing.
My best coding/writing playlist is...the entire set of Moody Blues albums, in chronological order. (I've been listening to them for nearly 50 years. Crap I'm old.) The albums have to play in correct order, and the cuts on each album have to play in standard order. It just pretty much becomes a musical cocoon.
My programming routine is exactly like that, except the songs are beers and I don't listen to anything. The Moody Blues are pretty good, though.