I don't mean to imply that I am p-whipped but my wife forced me to quit that job.
You should thank her. That's not even close to p***y-whipping, that's called "looking out for your partner when they're getting screwed". And it sounds like you were, like in so many tech jobs where you are "indispensible", but under-rewarded and ultimately expendable.
Other recently uncovered tablets from the time around 2300 BC refer to attempts to construct a pair of reusable launch vehicles and several nuclear weapons out of mud bricks and papyrus, with the intent of diverting the meteorite before impact. Unfortunately, even though a team of expert well-diggers were assembled for the task, the plan "never got off the ground"...
Ha ha:-) You know what's not funny? We're still about as prepared as they were to actually protect ourselves against such an impact.
It looks from the photos that the minigun is powered ENTIRELY by a commercially available electric hand drill. The drill chuck turns the mechanism and it looks like there's some sort of chain drive connecting the mechanism to the ammo feeders. Most of this is probably obvious to those of us with rudimentary meatspace-hacking (aka. mechanical) ability. So... how long before others start building with this design?:-)
At 50 rounds/second and a 6000-round hopper, the minigun runs out of ammo after only, um, 2 WHOLE MINUTES of sustained fire:-) Wow. If you made it with only 3 barrels (or 2 like some helicopter cannon) and stepped the rate down to maybe 3-5 rounds/s, you'd still have a formidable (but human-luggable) weapon ^H^H^H^H^H... marker which wouldn't break the bank on ammo:-)
Not only did you link to your home box on Slashdot (as we know, infamous for bringing even the largest websites to their knees), but now everybody knows your IP address too. That takes guts. Of course, if you're not online all the time, you'll be of much less interest to jerkwad scr1pt k1dd13z who want to run their personal pr0n site off your HD... Cheers!
Yes, I'm positive that my friends' future biographers will wish they had access to all the rude Flash animation links, pornographic.jpg's and fake virus warnings I have received over the years. It would actually provide a lot of insight into their characters. Not neccessarily flattering insight though...
Obviously any activity you engage in (modern or primitive) probably has animal-killing involved somewhere down the line. Walking down the street probably involves stepping on a lot of tiny bugs, after all. Washing yourself kills numerous tiny bugs that reside on your skin. Veganism is about avoiding harm or exploitation of animals, but of course you can't have zero impact on the world no matter how hard you try. From Everything2.org:
Veganism may be defined as a way of living which seeks to exclude, as far as possible and practical, all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose.
"As far as possible and practical". Anti-Vegans love to bait Vegans by looking far enough "down the line" to find some fault in their behaviour, but this is not a productive mode of criticism. After all, at least they're trying.
I hated Phantom Menance - not just because it was a kid's movie, but because it forced me to realize, as a 28 year old, that the first three weren't amazing films in my mind because they were amazing films, but because I saw them when I was in grade school.
I personally thought that, apart from some truly fantastic action sequences (the lightsaber battles, the pod race), The Phantom Menace really brought out the quality of Episodes 4-6. While they too were cartoony, they really had an "edge" that TPM lacked - especially Empire of course but even Jedi had some truly dark moments and mature drama. Episode 1 generally lacked these. Not to mention that compared to the freezing wasteland Hoth or the arid beauty of Tatooine, the CGI Naboo looked like ass...
Recently at a trade conference (Crestech) I saw a demo of a system some grad students had put together which paired a panoramic low-rez camera with a moveable hi-res camera. The panoramic would observe an area, and software would recognize areas of activity and focus the other camera on it. But this isn't really what the Ask Slashdot'er was looking for, obviously.
The Soviets had great reluctance to kill us, and we have great reluctance to kill them.
Perhaps true. After all, both sides had the technical ability to eradicate all multicellular life on the planet with nuclear missiles. Not a desirable outcome in anybody's ideological books. However, both sides were more than happy to let millions of people in other, smaller countries die in horrible, underhanded little "proxy wars" in order to satisfy their own imperialist designs. The Soviets were not "noble foes", they were as bad as the Americans in every way (and yes, worse in many).
(Score 0, Redundant) I can only imagine the repercussions. You and your L33t kr3w hit a website, haxxor the heck out of it, leaving tags and props to your LAN-party buddies. 24 hours later, some guys (the webmaster and HIS "kr3w") drive by your suburban evil genius hideout and pump a few clips into your mom's Ford Explorer. Try explaining THAT to her.
Arguably, spreading a white powder on a co-worker's desk in these times is pretty serious - and a STUPID prank. The hazmat could be called in, you could have all been quarantined etc. I assume the person fessed up, and that's how this was all averted, right?
Now, carrying a foot-long ass-widener of a dildo in your bags, that is a little harder to characterize as anything other than funny (it was one of those ones with the balls molded onto the base, wasn't it, you pervert!). There's probably no rule at ANY airline, company or gov't agency saying you can't carry a rubber phallus in your briefcase, after all. You could go a step farther and wrap the thing in a copy of the US Constitution, if you wanted to really drive the point home (so to speak, heh).
The "boil a frog" metaphor is a _metaphor_. It may or may not literally be true, but more importantly, it describes people's tendency to ignore a worsening situation until they are well and truly f*cked. This is NOT a "fantasy about how people behave" but is pretty close to a ubiquitous behavoiur. I sure do it - I have f*cked myself this way soooooo many times:-) I suspect that Passport becoming a paid service would turn a lot of people off using it (people are cheap, as stated in several other posts) UNLESS M$ waits until Passport is required to make almost any purchase or financial transaction on the Internet. Then people will have no choice but to shell out, or go back to mail order catalogues and "allow 4-6 weeks for delivery"...
That's not very nice. Do you think that being nasty to the person on the phone (ie. call-centre-galley-slave) will make any difference in the amount of telemarketing that goes on? All you succeed in doing is making a working person's shitty day even shittier by being an asshole perv to her when she's not allowed to hang up on you. A friend of mine was a telemarketer for a while, they're just people like you and me, who need to pay the rent, and feed themselves.
Any second there I was expecting you to start talking about the Zionist banking cartels, the Trilateral Commission, and how the moon landing was a hoax. It just shows how well-programmed I am, I guess.
Not a bad idea. It would circumvent the Taliban's ban on radios, televisions and computers, and you could easily produce a device which was (I won't use the term "idiot-proof") usable by somebody with no knowledge of the English language and little experience with tech. The problem? The drops would be impossible to keep secret, and the Taliban seem so obsessed with preventing cultural "contamination" that they would likely have no problem with butchering whole villages where they suspected the devices were hidden - even if they never found them! All it would take would be the knowledge of a drop near town X, and everyone there would be under a death sentence. Some help.
I am amazed that the Taliban have not been more closely compared to the Khmer Rouge, or possibly the more extreme Communist revolutionaries in China, or the French Revolution. In all cases, ideology was considered infinitely more important than human lives, with the underlying idea that history could be "re-started" back to a year zero under their control. As far as I can tell, essentially anything goes (eg. placing women in impossible catch-22 situations where they must either starve or break the law and be executed) as long as the ideology is maintained and the elite stay in power.
At the risk of sounding like a grim, joyless pragmatist, wouldn't the resources of the Royal Mail be better spent improving service and not producing gimmicky stamps? These things have GOT to be significantly more expensive to produce than regular stamps, even in large #s. The collectors must be all drooling over them, but when I use a stamp, I rarely care what it looks like (Christmas stamps are the exception). I have to admit though, the sticker-stamp sure beats the lick & stick any day. My tongue always felt dirty after licking those things...
As for 'virtual' porn. It's got to be bad. Where do 'celebrity fakes' stand in the law? Surely other virtual porn has to follow in a similar way.
I imagine celebrity fakes are covered under libel/slander law. After all, distributing a (competently) doctored picture which appears to show Jennifer Aniston having sex with Ron Jeremy is the same as saying "Jennifer Aniston had sex with Ron Jeremy". That would be slander, and Ms. Aniston (or indeed, Mr. Jeremy) could sue you for it.
Does virtual porn "have to be bad"? I agree that depictions of children in sexual situations (with prurient intent - this doesn't include for instance a novel featuring a scene where children "play doctor") are in general harmful to us as a society, but that doesn't cut it! For child porn to be rightfully illegal it has to feature REAL CHILDREN. If it doesn't, then no individuals were harmed in its making - period! I may be harmed by reading/viewing it - I am rather sensitive and would probably feel bad for having seen it. But that shouldn't affect the creator's right to create such things. One of the burdens of having free speech in a free and supposedly democratic society is that we sometimes have to endure the existence of unpleasant, shocking, or poor-quality forms of expression. The creator has the freedom to create it, and we have the freedom to NOT VIEW IT if we don't like it.
They have to do something for revenue. It's so true. To all of you who used to go out and buy a newspaper every day: you shouldn't gripe that the news is now available for "free" (obviously not counting your ISP bill) but features ads. No ads = no content. Ugly but true. And Salon's content is among the best.
The article says that geneticists delayed the development of transgenic technology in the 1970's until scientists' fears of germ warfare could be assuaged.
Hmm. Does this mean that "safeguards" were developed (I cannot imagine what safeguards *could* be developed)? Or does it simply mean that scientists became "comfortable" with the idea, after the passage of some time?
Well, for starters, safe vectors (DNA fragments allowing gene cloning and replication in bacteria and yeast) and "disabled" bacterial strains were developed, ensuring that cloned genes could not replicate outside the laboratory. This wasn't to allay fears of germ warfare but more to ensure that laboratory experiments didn't "escape into the wild" if a careless student poured bacteria down the drain. Of course the time wasn't just so that scientists could become comfortable with the risk, it was a couple of years that were needed to develop the technology to make it safe to do genetic engineering research! Contrary to popular belief, us scientists are thoughtful, intelligent people and not just a bunch of wild-haired crazies (I for one comb my hair regulary) running around telling Igor to pump up the juice so the monster will wake up...
"...the little lego men look really cool and all, but where's the creativity? Unless you have serious cash to drop on the Mindstorms, the sets are so specialized that you can only make one thing out of them."
Ah, the old "nowadays Lego has too many specialized pieces" complaint. In a few cases justified, but doesn't anybody remember what their early Lego creations looked like? I'll answer that: "crap". Yes, they looked like crap. The basic rectangular bricks are versatile, but if you are trying to make more sophisticated creations or "model-quality" recreations of actual vehicles or buildings, they're not sufficient. Even as a kid I *loved* all the specialized pieces, because without them you couldn't build a Cylon raider or an X-wing fighter or a dump truck that actually dumped. If you're still unconvinced see Brickshelf to see how creative one can be with the "single-use" parts.
The BBC world service covered this story a lot though I don't know how much N.Am. media did. I recall one small story about it on cbc.ca, but mostly I heard about it on the radio. Every day in fact. The Afghan judge trying their cases was apparently openly calling for a harsh sentence before the trial! Disturbing to say the least, well beyond the gut "westerners languishing in third world jail" emotional response one gets. Most Afghans would probably let them go free if they could, but their gov't is of a different mind. In fact, I suspect they probably *were* prosyletising (sp?) and thus are in fact guilty under current Afghan law. A civilized gov't would kick them out - now alas they share an unfair fate with the Afghan people...
Slashdot Mirror
I don't mean to imply that I am p-whipped but my wife forced me to quit that job.
You should thank her. That's not even close to p***y-whipping, that's called "looking out for your partner when they're getting screwed". And it sounds like you were, like in so many tech jobs where you are "indispensible", but under-rewarded and ultimately expendable.
Other recently uncovered tablets from the time around 2300 BC refer to attempts to construct a pair of reusable launch vehicles and several nuclear weapons out of mud bricks and papyrus, with the intent of diverting the meteorite before impact. Unfortunately, even though a team of expert well-diggers were assembled for the task, the plan "never got off the ground"...
:-) You know what's not funny? We're still about as prepared as they were to actually protect ourselves against such an impact.
Ha ha
It looks from the photos that the minigun is powered ENTIRELY by a commercially available electric hand drill. The drill chuck turns the mechanism and it looks like there's some sort of chain drive connecting the mechanism to the ammo feeders. Most of this is probably obvious to those of us with rudimentary meatspace-hacking (aka. mechanical) ability. So... how long before others start building with this design? :-)
:-) Wow. If you made it with only 3 barrels (or 2 like some helicopter cannon) and stepped the rate down to maybe 3-5 rounds/s, you'd still have a formidable (but human-luggable) weapon ^H^H^H^H^H... marker which wouldn't break the bank on ammo :-)
At 50 rounds/second and a 6000-round hopper, the minigun runs out of ammo after only, um, 2 WHOLE MINUTES of sustained fire
Not only did you link to your home box on Slashdot (as we know, infamous for bringing even the largest websites to their knees), but now everybody knows your IP address too. That takes guts. Of course, if you're not online all the time, you'll be of much less interest to jerkwad scr1pt k1dd13z who want to run their personal pr0n site off your HD... Cheers!
Yes, I'm positive that my friends' future biographers will wish they had access to all the rude Flash animation links, pornographic .jpg's and fake virus warnings I have received over the years. It would actually provide a lot of insight into their characters. Not neccessarily flattering insight though...
Veganism may be defined as a way of living which seeks to exclude, as far as possible and practical, all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose.
"As far as possible and practical". Anti-Vegans love to bait Vegans by looking far enough "down the line" to find some fault in their behaviour, but this is not a productive mode of criticism. After all, at least they're trying.
I hated Phantom Menance - not just because it was a kid's movie, but because it forced me to realize, as a 28 year old, that the first three weren't amazing films in my mind because they were amazing films, but because I saw them when I was in grade school.
I personally thought that, apart from some truly fantastic action sequences (the lightsaber battles, the pod race), The Phantom Menace really brought out the quality of Episodes 4-6. While they too were cartoony, they really had an "edge" that TPM lacked - especially Empire of course but even Jedi had some truly dark moments and mature drama. Episode 1 generally lacked these. Not to mention that compared to the freezing wasteland Hoth or the arid beauty of Tatooine, the CGI Naboo looked like ass...
Recently at a trade conference (Crestech) I saw a demo of a system some grad students had put together which paired a panoramic low-rez camera with a moveable hi-res camera. The panoramic would observe an area, and software would recognize areas of activity and focus the other camera on it. But this isn't really what the Ask Slashdot'er was looking for, obviously.
Perhaps true. After all, both sides had the technical ability to eradicate all multicellular life on the planet with nuclear missiles. Not a desirable outcome in anybody's ideological books. However, both sides were more than happy to let millions of people in other, smaller countries die in horrible, underhanded little "proxy wars" in order to satisfy their own imperialist designs. The Soviets were not "noble foes", they were as bad as the Americans in every way (and yes, worse in many).
(Score 0, Redundant) I can only imagine the repercussions. You and your L33t kr3w hit a website, haxxor the heck out of it, leaving tags and props to your LAN-party buddies. 24 hours later, some guys (the webmaster and HIS "kr3w") drive by your suburban evil genius hideout and pump a few clips into your mom's Ford Explorer. Try explaining THAT to her.
Arguably, spreading a white powder on a co-worker's desk in these times is pretty serious - and a STUPID prank. The hazmat could be called in, you could have all been quarantined etc. I assume the person fessed up, and that's how this was all averted, right?
Now, carrying a foot-long ass-widener of a dildo in your bags, that is a little harder to characterize as anything other than funny (it was one of those ones with the balls molded onto the base, wasn't it, you pervert!). There's probably no rule at ANY airline, company or gov't agency saying you can't carry a rubber phallus in your briefcase, after all. You could go a step farther and wrap the thing in a copy of the US Constitution, if you wanted to really drive the point home (so to speak, heh).
Um, this is *so* OT but I'm kicking myself trying to remember what that reference is from... Care to enlighten me, "rsteele19"?
The "boil a frog" metaphor is a _metaphor_. It may or may not literally be true, but more importantly, it describes people's tendency to ignore a worsening situation until they are well and truly f*cked. This is NOT a "fantasy about how people behave" but is pretty close to a ubiquitous behavoiur. I sure do it - I have f*cked myself this way soooooo many times :-)
I suspect that Passport becoming a paid service would turn a lot of people off using it (people are cheap, as stated in several other posts) UNLESS M$ waits until Passport is required to make almost any purchase or financial transaction on the Internet. Then people will have no choice but to shell out, or go back to mail order catalogues and "allow 4-6 weeks for delivery"...
That's not very nice. Do you think that being nasty to the person on the phone (ie. call-centre-galley-slave) will make any difference in the amount of telemarketing that goes on? All you succeed in doing is making a working person's shitty day even shittier by being an asshole perv to her when she's not allowed to hang up on you. A friend of mine was a telemarketer for a while, they're just people like you and me, who need to pay the rent, and feed themselves.
(MIB)
:-)
Any second there I was expecting you to start talking about the Zionist banking cartels, the Trilateral Commission, and how the moon landing was a hoax. It just shows how well-programmed I am, I guess.
Not a bad idea. It would circumvent the Taliban's ban on radios, televisions and computers, and you could easily produce a device which was (I won't use the term "idiot-proof") usable by somebody with no knowledge of the English language and little experience with tech. The problem? The drops would be impossible to keep secret, and the Taliban seem so obsessed with preventing cultural "contamination" that they would likely have no problem with butchering whole villages where they suspected the devices were hidden - even if they never found them! All it would take would be the knowledge of a drop near town X, and everyone there would be under a death sentence. Some help.
I am amazed that the Taliban have not been more closely compared to the Khmer Rouge, or possibly the more extreme Communist revolutionaries in China, or the French Revolution. In all cases, ideology was considered infinitely more important than human lives, with the underlying idea that history could be "re-started" back to a year zero under their control. As far as I can tell, essentially anything goes (eg. placing women in impossible catch-22 situations where they must either starve or break the law and be executed) as long as the ideology is maintained and the elite stay in power.
At the risk of sounding like a grim, joyless pragmatist, wouldn't the resources of the Royal Mail be better spent improving service and not producing gimmicky stamps? These things have GOT to be significantly more expensive to produce than regular stamps, even in large #s. The collectors must be all drooling over them, but when I use a stamp, I rarely care what it looks like (Christmas stamps are the exception). I have to admit though, the sticker-stamp sure beats the lick & stick any day. My tongue always felt dirty after licking those things...
Smurf pr0n... schwing! Post URL please :-)
I imagine celebrity fakes are covered under libel/slander law. After all, distributing a (competently) doctored picture which appears to show Jennifer Aniston having sex with Ron Jeremy is the same as saying "Jennifer Aniston had sex with Ron Jeremy". That would be slander, and Ms. Aniston (or indeed, Mr. Jeremy) could sue you for it.
Does virtual porn "have to be bad"? I agree that depictions of children in sexual situations (with prurient intent - this doesn't include for instance a novel featuring a scene where children "play doctor") are in general harmful to us as a society, but that doesn't cut it! For child porn to be rightfully illegal it has to feature REAL CHILDREN. If it doesn't, then no individuals were harmed in its making - period! I may be harmed by reading/viewing it - I am rather sensitive and would probably feel bad for having seen it. But that shouldn't affect the creator's right to create such things. One of the burdens of having free speech in a free and supposedly democratic society is that we sometimes have to endure the existence of unpleasant, shocking, or poor-quality forms of expression. The creator has the freedom to create it, and we have the freedom to NOT VIEW IT if we don't like it.
They have to do something for revenue. It's so true. To all of you who used to go out and buy a newspaper every day: you shouldn't gripe that the news is now available for "free" (obviously not counting your ISP bill) but features ads. No ads = no content. Ugly but true. And Salon's content is among the best.
Well, for starters, safe vectors (DNA fragments allowing gene cloning and replication in bacteria and yeast) and "disabled" bacterial strains were developed, ensuring that cloned genes could not replicate outside the laboratory. This wasn't to allay fears of germ warfare but more to ensure that laboratory experiments didn't "escape into the wild" if a careless student poured bacteria down the drain. Of course the time wasn't just so that scientists could become comfortable with the risk, it was a couple of years that were needed to develop the technology to make it safe to do genetic engineering research! Contrary to popular belief, us scientists are thoughtful, intelligent people and not just a bunch of wild-haired crazies (I for one comb my hair regulary) running around telling Igor to pump up the juice so the monster will wake up...
Ooooh! I can't wait for a 3D shooter in the style of Picasso's "Guernica", or Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase". How about an axe-only level done in the style of medieval paintings? Of course, concerned parents everywhere would scream bloody murder at Hieronymus Bosch Quake.
Ah, the old "nowadays Lego has too many specialized pieces" complaint. In a few cases justified, but doesn't anybody remember what their early Lego creations looked like? I'll answer that: "crap". Yes, they looked like crap. The basic rectangular bricks are versatile, but if you are trying to make more sophisticated creations or "model-quality" recreations of actual vehicles or buildings, they're not sufficient. Even as a kid I *loved* all the specialized pieces, because without them you couldn't build a Cylon raider or an X-wing fighter or a dump truck that actually dumped. If you're still unconvinced see Brickshelf to see how creative one can be with the "single-use" parts.
The BBC world service covered this story a lot though I don't know how much N.Am. media did. I recall one small story about it on cbc.ca, but mostly I heard about it on the radio. Every day in fact. The Afghan judge trying their cases was apparently openly calling for a harsh sentence before the trial! Disturbing to say the least, well beyond the gut "westerners languishing in third world jail" emotional response one gets. Most Afghans would probably let them go free if they could, but their gov't is of a different mind. In fact, I suspect they probably *were* prosyletising (sp?) and thus are in fact guilty under current Afghan law. A civilized gov't would kick them out - now alas they share an unfair fate with the Afghan people...