My best friend and his little brother had a similar problem. The little brother I gave math tutorials too and he was extremely capable in the sections with numbers but once it hit the prose he had problems thanks to dyslexia. They both had flavours of dyslexia/dyspraxia and my best friend was almost the opposite or his brother, he could do the questions phrased as prose but not the pure numbers ones.
It's a pity there's no realistic way that the voting system will be changed in the states. It really is the case that when faced with 2 crap mainstream choices you can screw yourself by voting for someone you're really like to see in rather than the lesser of the 2 evils.
Here we have a vastly superior voting system called Proportional representation. I'm probably going to make a mess explaining this. It's a little more complex.
You number your choices 1,2,3,4,etc so say there was 4 choices:
Now say after the 1st count Joe has 1000 votes Jill has 2000 votes John Jackson has 10000 votes Jack Johnson has 11000 votes
Under your system Jack Johnson would get the seat and the people who voted for joe and jill would be screwed if John Jacksons policies were slightly better for them than Jack Johnsons.
Under PR the limit is 12001 votes to get the seat. Now when it comes time to count the vote it's clear that Joe isn't going to get in no matter what so he's removed and all the votes for him move to second choices. jill still isn't going to get in so her votes are moved to their second or 3rd choice. most of the people who voted for joe or jill would prefer John Jackson over Jack Johnson which pushes John Jackson over the 12001 limit and he gets in.
I was fairly similar. My parents would let me have a small bit of alcohol from an early age which was no problem since as a kid I just thought it tasted awful and was never interested in more than a sip.
When I got into my early teens my parents were still fairly relaxed, only time anything bad ever happened was when I was on holiday and made the mistake of letting my brother in law (well brothers,wifes,brother) keep handing me drinks without keeping track of how much I'd drunk and I slipped on a steep slope and (probably) got a mild concussion. It was no big disaster. Admittedly I was an odd teenager. I remember one day before I ever went out with friends drinking I deciding that it would be best to know what to expect. Not just read someone elses description, I wanted to know for myself without having to find out in some club somewhere by falling over drunk.
I sat down with a pen, paper, a clock and measured quantities of alcohol. Over the course of a few hours I drank an unhealthy amount while writing notes which got harder and harder to decipher on the effects at various stages. (w shots, w time: head clear, mental arithmetic still easy. x shots,x time:vision clear when static, turning head causes slight disorientation and more blurring than normal. y shots,y time: blurbly cnt keep making nooots, hrd to thnk clear, going bed.)
It was one of my nerdier moments and left me feeling crap the next day but I'm glad I did it since it gave me a very clear idea of what my limits were and which effects meant that I was getting close to being uncomfortably drunk.
My friends have never had to carry me home although I've had to help someone who's had too much a few times.
I know more 50 year olds who drive drunk than 17 year olds.
I used to work at a restaurant which was a little out of the way and even though there was always a fleet of taxis there at the end of the night it was common enough as I went home to see the car in front meandering around the road with an obviously drunk driver. I'd pass them later and it was almost always some white haired old codger.
You see old people can be idiots too but the difference is that they're certain they can handle it because they've been doing it for years and nothing bad has happened yet! You'd hear a crowd of them talking about the "disgraceful way young people act now days" and the "sure we'd always stop at 2 or 3 pints (reassuring isn't it)" would inevitably come up in the conversation. Of course these guys never drank less than 5 or 6 pints on their nights out but they were sure they were fine and wouldn't dream of wasting money on a taxi!
I've been temped more than a few times to call up one of the local police I know and hint that outside where I work might be a good spot to watch for drunk drivers.
In their favor they tended towards swerving around at 20 miles per hour rather than 80 but it's still fucking stupid.
As for the risky behaviors bit, being a few years on from that age group I can agree with you on some counts but there is a reason why young people do stupid things- much of what you're told is dangerous really is, some of what you're told is dangerous isn't dangerous at all and the person doing the telling be it a parent or other authority figurte is just neurotic in some shape or form and has a warped view of risk in certain areas. Had I not ignored my uncle (who is mortally terrified of heights) whenever he got freaked out because I was more than 6 feet off the ground and climbed around in trees etc then I would have never learned that the risks involved are minor as long as you follow a few extremely simple safety precautions.
If everyone took everything their parents claimed to be dangerous and didn't challenge it or try it out for themselves then humans would do nothing but sit very quietly inside rooms lined entirely with pillows quivering in fear. Sometimes when parents claim something is dangerous they're wrong. Simple as that, they're crazy or they don't look at the risk in a sensible manner.
Admitedly I tend towards slightly higher risk sports like kayaking, rock climbing etc but it's always annoying when you run into someone who's way of deciding if something is dangerous is to assume that nobody else around them is any more experienced than themselves and from there make up their lack of experience with what their friend told them in the pub.
I think it's insane that this is left to a private company to do anything more than fit the parts together. I mean this is the sort of thing which Open Source would be perfect for. There would be no shortage of coders willing to review the code and point out any problems. It would help with the "open" part of "open and fair" election
Stan: This rocket will fly to the moon? MASA: Sí, fly. Stan: To the moon? MASA: Sí. Stan: We want to take something to the moon. How much would that cost? MASA: O-ah... Two hundred. Stan: Two hundred? Million? MASA: Two hundred... dollars.
Well they can still take your product apart and try to build a knock off. and if someone else discovers your trade secret on their own and files a patent then you can have problems.
Dear Slashdot admins This letter is to inform you that your domain slashdot.org infringes on the trademark of our new product line, the Slashdotatron3000(TM). You must surrender all rights to the domain or risk being thrown into a pit of ravenous lawyer. Scumbag Inc
Well if they're willing to keep paying the registration costs for the next thousand years then yes, they they should. If you want a perticular domain then register early, don't just decide what you want and try to push the legitimate owner off with threats of legal action.
didn't that one just pop up under a different name with the exact same buisness model. It even had the same user tables if I remember. The only real sucess they had was to stop US citizens from being able to pay with a credit card easily.
ya, people seem to underestimate life. I hear talk about how we're "killing the planet" when at worst we're still a less cataclysmic event than your average asteroid strike. We'll never kill earths biosphere although we might kill ourselves.
thing is Chicago2016.com is an obvious choice for a name for his own site. Think of it like this- You start out wanting to make a site discussing the costs in the case that chicago hosts the olympics in 2016.
Should you choose adsjhasduh32432432.com for fear of someone confusing your site with another? Or should you choose a name which hints at the sites purpose. You could try chicagoolympics.com or chicagoolympics2016.com or even chicago2016.com if you wanted to be sure of being done for using the word olympics in your domain name. That-thing-that-might-happen-in-chicago-in-2016.com isn't really going to get many visitors and Trade-marks-can-be-restrospective-now?.com probably isn't a valid name.
You want your name to be a decent one. That means it has to make sense. That means it has to have some relevance to the subject.
He has a perfectly valid reason for having that domain.
Yes, I got that impression too, it's not so much that their chips are the most fantastic on the market but rather that they can produce more, faster and for less money than everyone else.
Saying it supports drugs dealers is a bit silly since drug dealing tends to be self financing. If terrorists are making their money from pirating DVD's then we're getting much more pathetic terrorists than in my day! In my day they robbed banks and held people for ransom!
Gangs perhaps but the more torrent sites grow the harder it is for them to sell pirate DVD's. (Fight gang violence! download your pirated movies!)
I can remember a debate I had a while back about the potential of some cheap wifi tech hooked up to a small webcam and worn on your person when going to protests or other events where you expect there to be a high chance of the police breaking the law. So that it could stream everything you see directly to a secure online store. This would have great potential for making sure police who abuse their power get in trouble or are at least publicly shown to be abusing their power. My friends rebuttal was that they'd simply introduce a law banning private citizens from using such devices at protests and call it a measure against pedophiles (to stop them filming the little kids walking around in the streets! You never know what they'd be thinking about if they had video of your children walking on a public street!!!). As long as people will accept anything in the name of fighting terrorists or paedophiles then civil liberties are fucked.
Another big problem with this is that it requires users to be security experts. Will it be illegal to run a WEP network? terrorists can use one almost as easily as an open network so for the stated purpose this law would fail unless WEP were banned. WPA can be cracked too, it's just harder, takes longer and you have no certainty of success within minutes.
It's like making it a crime to not lock your mailbox because someone might send threatening letters from it.
It requires your average Joe to be a security expert who can lock down his network enough to make sure nobody can hack in.
Even then there's still a host of ways to be completely anonymous online. This will achieve nothing, absolutely nothing useful.
We don't seem to have expanded to use all oxygen yet, we don't seem to have used up all the salt water, both are freely available to a great many people.
Human resource usage expands to quite a high point but to assume it's infinite is a little presumptuous.
It was assumed that the human population would continue to increase exponentially but in some developed nations we're seeing a birth rates drop below 2 children per couple.
People multiply insanely when the chance of their children reaching adulthood is low, people try to obtain stupidly large amounts of resources when resources are scarce. Average resource usage may not increase forever. It'll probably still has a way to go but I can see the average leveling out at some point.
I second this one, why don't they just pack up and move somewhere out of the RIAA's reach? It's the internet after all, where doesn't matter too much as long as you have a decent pipe.
Slashdot Mirror
My best friend and his little brother had a similar problem.
The little brother I gave math tutorials too and he was extremely capable in the sections with numbers but once it hit the prose he had problems thanks to dyslexia.
They both had flavours of dyslexia/dyspraxia and my best friend was almost the opposite or his brother, he could do the questions phrased as prose but not the pure numbers ones.
It's a pity there's no realistic way that the voting system will be changed in the states.
It really is the case that when faced with 2 crap mainstream choices you can screw yourself by voting for someone you're really like to see in rather than the lesser of the 2 evils.
Here we have a vastly superior voting system called Proportional representation.
I'm probably going to make a mess explaining this.
It's a little more complex.
You number your choices 1,2,3,4,etc
so say there was 4 choices:
Rep:Jack Johnson:
Dem:John Jackson:
3rd party: Joe:
3rd party: Jill:
I just number them
Joe:1
Jill:2
John Jackson:3
Now say after the 1st count
Joe has 1000 votes
Jill has 2000 votes
John Jackson has 10000 votes
Jack Johnson has 11000 votes
Under your system Jack Johnson would get the seat and the people who voted for joe and jill would be screwed if John Jacksons policies were slightly better for them than Jack Johnsons.
Under PR the limit is 12001 votes to get the seat.
Now when it comes time to count the vote it's clear that Joe isn't going to get in no matter what so he's removed and all the votes for him move to second choices.
jill still isn't going to get in so her votes are moved to their second or 3rd choice.
most of the people who voted for joe or jill would prefer John Jackson over Jack Johnson which pushes John Jackson over the 12001 limit and he gets in.
If I had mod points I'd push the above up to a 5.
I was fairly similar.
My parents would let me have a small bit of alcohol from an early age which was no problem since as a kid I just thought it tasted awful and was never interested in more than a sip.
When I got into my early teens my parents were still fairly relaxed, only time anything bad ever happened was when I was on holiday and made the mistake of letting my brother in law (well brothers,wifes,brother) keep handing me drinks without keeping track of how much I'd drunk and I slipped on a steep slope and (probably) got a mild concussion. It was no big disaster.
Admittedly I was an odd teenager. I remember one day before I ever went out with friends drinking I deciding that it would be best to know what to expect. Not just read someone elses description, I wanted to know for myself without having to find out in some club somewhere by falling over drunk.
I sat down with a pen, paper, a clock and measured quantities of alcohol. Over the course of a few hours I drank an unhealthy amount while writing notes which got harder and harder to decipher on the effects at various stages. (w shots, w time: head clear, mental arithmetic still easy. x shots,x time:vision clear when static, turning head causes slight disorientation and more blurring than normal. y shots,y time: blurbly cnt keep making nooots, hrd to thnk clear, going bed.)
It was one of my nerdier moments and left me feeling crap the next day but I'm glad I did it since it gave me a very clear idea of what my limits were and which effects meant that I was getting close to being uncomfortably drunk.
My friends have never had to carry me home although I've had to help someone who's had too much a few times.
I know more 50 year olds who drive drunk than 17 year olds.
I used to work at a restaurant which was a little out of the way and even though there was always a fleet of taxis there at the end of the night it was common enough as I went home to see the car in front meandering around the road with an obviously drunk driver. I'd pass them later and it was almost always some white haired old codger.
You see old people can be idiots too but the difference is that they're certain they can handle it because they've been doing it for years and nothing bad has happened yet! You'd hear a crowd of them talking about the "disgraceful way young people act now days" and the "sure we'd always stop at 2 or 3 pints (reassuring isn't it)" would inevitably come up in the conversation. Of course these guys never drank less than 5 or 6 pints on their nights out but they were sure they were fine and wouldn't dream of wasting money on a taxi!
I've been temped more than a few times to call up one of the local police I know and hint that outside where I work might be a good spot to watch for drunk drivers.
In their favor they tended towards swerving around at 20 miles per hour rather than 80 but it's still fucking stupid.
As for the risky behaviors bit, being a few years on from that age group I can agree with you on some counts but there is a reason why young people do stupid things- much of what you're told is dangerous really is, some of what you're told is dangerous isn't dangerous at all and the person doing the telling be it a parent or other authority figurte is just neurotic in some shape or form and has a warped view of risk in certain areas.
Had I not ignored my uncle (who is mortally terrified of heights) whenever he got freaked out because I was more than 6 feet off the ground and climbed around in trees etc then I would have never learned that the risks involved are minor as long as you follow a few extremely simple safety precautions.
If everyone took everything their parents claimed to be dangerous and didn't challenge it or try it out for themselves then humans would do nothing but sit very quietly inside rooms lined entirely with pillows quivering in fear. Sometimes when parents claim something is dangerous they're wrong. Simple as that, they're crazy or they don't look at the risk in a sensible manner.
Admitedly I tend towards slightly higher risk sports like kayaking, rock climbing etc but it's always annoying when you run into someone who's way of deciding if something is dangerous is to assume that nobody else around them is any more experienced than themselves and from there make up their lack of experience with what their friend told them in the pub.
Great fun when practiced on a grassy or otherwise soft area :D
You can't actually hold companies responsible for their mistakes!!!
I think it's insane that this is left to a private company to do anything more than fit the parts together.
I mean this is the sort of thing which Open Source would be perfect for.
There would be no shortage of coders willing to review the code and point out any problems.
It would help with the "open" part of "open and fair" election
Stan: This rocket will fly to the moon?
MASA: Sí, fly.
Stan: To the moon?
MASA: Sí.
Stan: We want to take something to the moon. How much would that cost?
MASA: O-ah... Two hundred.
Stan: Two hundred? Million?
MASA: Two hundred... dollars.
only applies to published material.
Well they can still take your product apart and try to build a knock off.
and if someone else discovers your trade secret on their own and files a patent then you can have problems.
Dear Slashdot admins
This letter is to inform you that your domain slashdot.org infringes on the trademark of our new product line, the Slashdotatron3000(TM). You must surrender all rights to the domain or risk being thrown into a pit of ravenous lawyer.
Scumbag Inc
Well if they're willing to keep paying the registration costs for the next thousand years then yes, they they should.
If you want a perticular domain then register early, don't just decide what you want and try to push the legitimate owner off with threats of legal action.
didn't that one just pop up under a different name with the exact same buisness model. It even had the same user tables if I remember.
The only real sucess they had was to stop US citizens from being able to pay with a credit card easily.
ya, people seem to underestimate life.
I hear talk about how we're "killing the planet" when at worst we're still a less cataclysmic event than your average asteroid strike.
We'll never kill earths biosphere although we might kill ourselves.
How so?
Do you think they could have started production of the core2duo back in 1970?
thing is Chicago2016.com is an obvious choice for a name for his own site.
Think of it like this-
You start out wanting to make a site discussing the costs in the case that chicago hosts the olympics in 2016.
Should you choose adsjhasduh32432432.com for fear of someone confusing your site with another?
Or should you choose a name which hints at the sites purpose.
You could try chicagoolympics.com or chicagoolympics2016.com or even chicago2016.com if you wanted to be sure of being done for using the word olympics in your domain name.
That-thing-that-might-happen-in-chicago-in-2016.com isn't really going to get many visitors and Trade-marks-can-be-restrospective-now?.com probably isn't a valid name.
You want your name to be a decent one.
That means it has to make sense.
That means it has to have some relevance to the subject.
He has a perfectly valid reason for having that domain.
Yes, I got that impression too, it's not so much that their chips are the most fantastic on the market but rather that they can produce more, faster and for less money than everyone else.
He said Organic Chem not plain old Chemistry.
Saying it supports drugs dealers is a bit silly since drug dealing tends to be self financing.
If terrorists are making their money from pirating DVD's then we're getting much more pathetic terrorists than in my day! In my day they robbed banks and held people for ransom!
Gangs perhaps but the more torrent sites grow the harder it is for them to sell pirate DVD's. (Fight gang violence! download your pirated movies!)
3 lefts.
4 lefts cancel themselves out.
I can remember a debate I had a while back about the potential of some cheap wifi tech hooked up to a small webcam and worn on your person when going to protests or other events where you expect there to be a high chance of the police breaking the law. So that it could stream everything you see directly to a secure online store.
This would have great potential for making sure police who abuse their power get in trouble or are at least publicly shown to be abusing their power.
My friends rebuttal was that they'd simply introduce a law banning private citizens from using such devices at protests and call it a measure against pedophiles (to stop them filming the little kids walking around in the streets! You never know what they'd be thinking about if they had video of your children walking on a public street!!!).
As long as people will accept anything in the name of fighting terrorists or paedophiles then civil liberties are fucked.
Another big problem with this is that it requires users to be security experts.
Will it be illegal to run a WEP network?
terrorists can use one almost as easily as an open network so for the stated purpose this law would fail unless WEP were banned.
WPA can be cracked too, it's just harder, takes longer and you have no certainty of success within minutes.
It's like making it a crime to not lock your mailbox because someone might send threatening letters from it.
It requires your average Joe to be a security expert who can lock down his network enough to make sure nobody can hack in.
Even then there's still a host of ways to be completely anonymous online. This will achieve nothing, absolutely nothing useful.
No but the organisms which produced the oxygen first probably weren't the ones which needed it to survive, oxygen was waste, a poison to them.
Although there are animals and plants which by one means or another make more space for themselves to live in.
We don't seem to have expanded to use all oxygen yet, we don't seem to have used up all the salt water, both are freely available to a great many people.
Human resource usage expands to quite a high point but to assume it's infinite is a little presumptuous.
It was assumed that the human population would continue to increase exponentially but in some developed nations we're seeing a birth rates drop below 2 children per couple.
People multiply insanely when the chance of their children reaching adulthood is low, people try to obtain stupidly large amounts of resources when resources are scarce.
Average resource usage may not increase forever. It'll probably still has a way to go but I can see the average leveling out at some point.
I second this one, why don't they just pack up and move somewhere out of the RIAA's reach?
It's the internet after all, where doesn't matter too much as long as you have a decent pipe.