Re:Maybe it is because we are skeptical...
on
A New Ice Age?
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· Score: 1
Frankly I think the only real way of stopping global warming is to kill off about 2/3 of our planet. There are just too many of us.
So unless you are ready to volenteer your life in the name of "humanity" nothing much is going to change.
Honestly, I suspect that a good many of us are completely willing to volunteer others. It's called "war".:)
The other problem is that if we were to go about doing ourselves in like that, is that smaller societies don't do so well. We have this great technological society that we all enjoy so much because we have cities of millions of people. Because we have the ability to support such cities - methods of transporting food and raw materials to the city fast enough to keep up with that demand - it means that people are freed from the daily demands of just staying alive. And those people can specialize in something else, like building warehouses, widgets, and web pages.
Technological advancement is the tip of a huge pyramid of logistical support. It can't continue with only one third of that pyramid.
Better than other methods...
on
Paid To Spam
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· Score: 1
At $1/hour, this sounds like a low-gain way to infuriate both your friends and perfect strangers.
Well, that sure beats doing it for shits and giggles by being a punk in Counter-strike or Day of Defeat. Heck, it even beats welfare at $720 a month for loaning out CPU time on a $25 Pentium 100.
At the end of Cringeley's article, he says that Microsoft will enter a phase where it misses the next big thing because it's so complacent about dominating the industry. He expects that after Microsoft does it's usual round of raping its customers, its customers will be less afraid of going somewhere else once this happens.
The problem is that Microsoft has already been there and done that with Netscape and the Internet. It's now on the lookout for its existing and new competitors to do something totally new and outrun it.
However we all know that the problem with that is that noone can outrun Microsoft. It's like trying to run away from the Mafia. Sure, you might have a nice lead at first, but Microsoft's ship is not only really fucking big, but really fucking fast and has big fucking guns. Once this ship notices you, you don't have a prayer, no matter how fast and how far ahead you are.
Actually, I think he's trying to point out that competition with Microsoft won't be won in the past, but in the future. And the future of "computers" is in appliances that do more than just turn on and off like a Microwave does.
Competing with Microsoft on the desktop however is a losing proposition right now. People choose Windows over its easier-to-use competitor with a large advertising budget and spiffy in-store displays for two reasons: 1) PCs are a hell of a lot cheaper (something that Apple seems completely clueless about) and thus the people buying the machines are actually *able* to afford them, and 2) they know that they can buy any program off the shelf in the same store and it will work with Windows.
Now, while Linux can compete based on the cheapness of the hardware it runs on, and the cheapness of Linux itself, it sure as hell can't even come close to competing with item #2. In fact, it can't even come close to competing with Apple on item #2, and they're losing just the same.
Of course, getting Linux to the point where it can compete in this area is an impossibility because of the old developer-user loop: Not enough people sell software that runs on Linux because there aren't enough people running Linux. And there aren't enough people running Linux because not enough people sell software that runs on Linux.
So trying to compete in the appliance market is a much better choice for Linux, because Microsoft doesn't already completely dominate that market, and it's a market where it actually stands a chance to win.
With the same projectile, but an impact angle of only 1 degree, you get:
Energy: 4.50 x 10^26 Megatons, Transient crater diameter: a merciful 843508.02 km, or a mere 66 times the diameter of the earth.
The crater formed is a complex crater.
It's also worth noting that at this density, impact angle, and speed, it would take an object only 10 Km in diameter to completely annihilate the earth.
That is, if you don't bother to take into account that the mass of any projectile moving at the speed of light is infinite...
Which means that the transient crater would be slightly more than 227 times the size of the earth.
I think they may want to put in a little error checking into this program, since the final crater diameter would in fact be much larger than the transient.;)
No, I really do believe that he was bored because the entire first three quarters of the movie was boring as shit. And he said this right in the middle of the Anakin-and-Padme-frolicking-in-the-meadows-of-the- swiss-alps scene, which coincidentally was about 15 minutes too long and horribly botched as well.
I can't remember if he stayed the course, but I found it especially amusing and telling that the very audience this movie was *guaranteed* to appeal to through its sheer lack of sophistication, thought that it sucked every bit as much as I thought it did.
This movie sucked. It had few if any redeeming features. The first movie, which everyone hated because of Jar-Jar, sucked marginally less. And there is no doubt in my mind that movie 3 will suck just as hard. George Lucas can make things look pretty, but as a director he's a fucking hack. He's solely responsible for the horrible performances that a cast of perfectly good actors turned out in this movie. And episode three deserves to hemmorhage money at the box office.
If those documents were so easily produced, then where are they?
Likely in a vault guarded by Very Serious Men with guns, in a folder marked "Classified".
The sort of documents that the CIA keeps have this nasty tendency towards putting people in prison for treason and espionage if the documents leave the building. That is, if those people aren't shot trying to leave the building.
So in essence those doing the theivery have to keep up with technology to know the difference between something he can pawn off at $100 vs something he can pawn off at $2, if at all.
I find that pretty hard to believe, since most thugs wouldn't know the difference between an ipod and a palm m105 until Rocco the fence told him to fuck off.
Verisign (or for that matter, a host of other companies too) will remind you to renew with an e-mail, regardless of whether or not your domain name is registered with them.
So I suspect that the person responsible for renewing it will be called "info@yourdomain.com".
But here at $WeSellTehIntarweb, it takes us 10 minutes to get a dialup connection and Outlook Express configured. That means that if a customer calls in with their credit card (and most new customers do) they're online in 10 minutes. Customers like this. The software is simply already there, ready to set up.
We *could* just send them a CD, but it would take 1-2 *days* to get there, and save us 10 minutes of phone time per customer.
Thus, we choose to saddle our customers with whatever shitty software Microsoft decides to unleash upon the unsuspecting populace. Because people like it that way.
Probably because a good, oh, 80% of the people that use computers don't know enough to know how to patch the system, or to even know that it should be? About 50%-60% of users have a virus scanner on their system, but the process is pretty arcane to most of them.
These numbers are precisely the reason why viruses and worms exist, you know?
Simplicity is best. A nice, big X next to the candidate of your choice is what we use.
Mind you, in many places in the US, they have way too many candidates to fit on the tiny sheets we use here. Maybe what they really need is a way to weed out the candidates rather than introducing oddball and buggy computers.
I was always irritated as a kid because our encyclopedia (bought when I was about 3) was woefully out of date.
At work, I can search google for the technical details of solutions to problems quickly and easily. I can find documentation on programming languages and obscure references for hardware.
I can discover bits of geography relevent to the world as it is today, rather than how the borders were at the time of publishing. I can get differing opinions of world events.
The articles available on the internet might not be quite as detailed as you would find in Encyclopedias, but considering how I found much of it to be inaccurate, outdated, wrong or misleading, I think it's a good tradeoff. The encyclopedia is dead. Long live the Internet!
Heh. This sure would have helped me as a teenager.
It wasn't until I was about 19 or 20 that I learned that the only thing that keeps you from getting laid is shyness. Intelligence (or lack thereof) and good looks (or lack thereof) have nothing to do with it. Hell, you could be the greatest lover in the world but if you don't get out and introduce yourself to members of the opposite sex, THEY WILL NEVER FIND OUT!
Right when I learned this, there was an epiphany for me. Actually what I learned was that ugly people *do* get laid, which shocked me since I figured that's what was the root cause of my lonliness, and once I realized I wasn't half bad after all I started concentrating my energy on meeting new and interesting people. It took a while, and I had a rocky start, but it sure paid off in the end. My wife and a number of friends have often marvelled at how easily I attract women (we have an open marriage). It turns out that the "harmless geek" attitude, intelligence, confidence, and a willingness to please are in demand. Whod've thunk it eh?
Slashdot Mirror
Frankly I think the only real way of stopping global warming is to kill off about 2/3 of our planet. There are just too many of us.
:)
So unless you are ready to volenteer your life in the name of "humanity" nothing much is going to change.
Honestly, I suspect that a good many of us are completely willing to volunteer others. It's called "war".
The other problem is that if we were to go about doing ourselves in like that, is that smaller societies don't do so well. We have this great technological society that we all enjoy so much because we have cities of millions of people. Because we have the ability to support such cities - methods of transporting food and raw materials to the city fast enough to keep up with that demand - it means that people are freed from the daily demands of just staying alive. And those people can specialize in something else, like building warehouses, widgets, and web pages.
Technological advancement is the tip of a huge pyramid of logistical support. It can't continue with only one third of that pyramid.
At $1/hour, this sounds like a low-gain way to infuriate both your friends and perfect strangers.
Well, that sure beats doing it for shits and giggles by being a punk in Counter-strike or Day of Defeat. Heck, it even beats welfare at $720 a month for loaning out CPU time on a $25 Pentium 100.
I can't wait to see a big billboard with the message "0\/\/N3d by c0D3c!" on a background of the playboy centerfold of Pam Anderson, during rush hour.
:)
Makes one wonder how tight the security will be after that!
At the end of Cringeley's article, he says that Microsoft will enter a phase where it misses the next big thing because it's so complacent about dominating the industry. He expects that after Microsoft does it's usual round of raping its customers, its customers will be less afraid of going somewhere else once this happens.
The problem is that Microsoft has already been there and done that with Netscape and the Internet. It's now on the lookout for its existing and new competitors to do something totally new and outrun it.
However we all know that the problem with that is that noone can outrun Microsoft. It's like trying to run away from the Mafia. Sure, you might have a nice lead at first, but Microsoft's ship is not only really fucking big, but really fucking fast and has big fucking guns. Once this ship notices you, you don't have a prayer, no matter how fast and how far ahead you are.
Actually, I think he's trying to point out that competition with Microsoft won't be won in the past, but in the future. And the future of "computers" is in appliances that do more than just turn on and off like a Microwave does.
Competing with Microsoft on the desktop however is a losing proposition right now. People choose Windows over its easier-to-use competitor with a large advertising budget and spiffy in-store displays for two reasons: 1) PCs are a hell of a lot cheaper (something that Apple seems completely clueless about) and thus the people buying the machines are actually *able* to afford them, and 2) they know that they can buy any program off the shelf in the same store and it will work with Windows.
Now, while Linux can compete based on the cheapness of the hardware it runs on, and the cheapness of Linux itself, it sure as hell can't even come close to competing with item #2. In fact, it can't even come close to competing with Apple on item #2, and they're losing just the same.
Of course, getting Linux to the point where it can compete in this area is an impossibility because of the old developer-user loop: Not enough people sell software that runs on Linux because there aren't enough people running Linux. And there aren't enough people running Linux because not enough people sell software that runs on Linux.
So trying to compete in the appliance market is a much better choice for Linux, because Microsoft doesn't already completely dominate that market, and it's a market where it actually stands a chance to win.
With the same projectile, but an impact angle of only 1 degree, you get:
Energy: 4.50 x 10^26 Megatons,
Transient crater diameter: a merciful 843508.02 km, or a mere 66 times the diameter of the earth.
The crater formed is a complex crater.
It's also worth noting that at this density, impact angle, and speed, it would take an object only 10 Km in diameter to completely annihilate the earth.
That is, if you don't bother to take into account that the mass of any projectile moving at the speed of light is infinite...
The diameter of the earth is 12,756 Km.
;)
Which means that the transient crater would be slightly more than 227 times the size of the earth.
I think they may want to put in a little error checking into this program, since the final crater diameter would in fact be much larger than the transient.
No, I really do believe that he was bored because the entire first three quarters of the movie was boring as shit. And he said this right in the middle of the Anakin-and-Padme-frolicking-in-the-meadows-of-the- swiss-alps scene, which coincidentally was about 15 minutes too long and horribly botched as well.
I can't remember if he stayed the course, but I found it especially amusing and telling that the very audience this movie was *guaranteed* to appeal to through its sheer lack of sophistication, thought that it sucked every bit as much as I thought it did.
This movie sucked. It had few if any redeeming features. The first movie, which everyone hated because of Jar-Jar, sucked marginally less. And there is no doubt in my mind that movie 3 will suck just as hard. George Lucas can make things look pretty, but as a director he's a fucking hack. He's solely responsible for the horrible performances that a cast of perfectly good actors turned out in this movie. And episode three deserves to hemmorhage money at the box office.
Wrong, it should go straight to bittorrent. It's not even worth paying to rent.
Nope. The 8 year old kid sitting two rows in front of me said halfway through Episode II: "This is boring. Can we go home yet?"
Or worse, you could quote from Alien Resurrection and ask "Who do I have to fuck to get off this boat?"
If those documents were so easily produced, then where are they?
Likely in a vault guarded by Very Serious Men with guns, in a folder marked "Classified".
The sort of documents that the CIA keeps have this nasty tendency towards putting people in prison for treason and espionage if the documents leave the building. That is, if those people aren't shot trying to leave the building.
So in essence those doing the theivery have to keep up with technology to know the difference between something he can pawn off at $100 vs something he can pawn off at $2, if at all.
I find that pretty hard to believe, since most thugs wouldn't know the difference between an ipod and a palm m105 until Rocco the fence told him to fuck off.
At least there aren't ads in the middle of my game.
Oh yeah? What about the public service advertisements in Counter-strike?
Oh, you know.
"Who's j00 daddy? Adopt a fatherless terrorist today!"
This guy has a very good point and counter-argument.
Verisign (or for that matter, a host of other companies too) will remind you to renew with an e-mail, regardless of whether or not your domain name is registered with them.
So I suspect that the person responsible for renewing it will be called "info@yourdomain.com".
But here at $WeSellTehIntarweb, it takes us 10 minutes to get a dialup connection and Outlook Express configured. That means that if a customer calls in with their credit card (and most new customers do) they're online in 10 minutes. Customers like this. The software is simply already there, ready to set up.
We *could* just send them a CD, but it would take 1-2 *days* to get there, and save us 10 minutes of phone time per customer.
Thus, we choose to saddle our customers with whatever shitty software Microsoft decides to unleash upon the unsuspecting populace. Because people like it that way.
Heh. I can't wait until spam causes data loss instead of being a mere nuisance. *That* problem is 10 times worse.
Probably because a good, oh, 80% of the people that use computers don't know enough to know how to patch the system, or to even know that it should be? About 50%-60% of users have a virus scanner on their system, but the process is pretty arcane to most of them.
These numbers are precisely the reason why viruses and worms exist, you know?
That sounds suspiciously like the line "Cattle mutilations are up," out of a certain geek-oriented movie.
Yes, it's very timely, don't you think?
It must be a slow news day or something. Either that or slashdot has gone to the dogs.
Simplicity is best. A nice, big X next to the candidate of your choice is what we use.
Mind you, in many places in the US, they have way too many candidates to fit on the tiny sheets we use here. Maybe what they really need is a way to weed out the candidates rather than introducing oddball and buggy computers.
I was always irritated as a kid because our encyclopedia (bought when I was about 3) was woefully out of date.
At work, I can search google for the technical details of solutions to problems quickly and easily. I can find documentation on programming languages and obscure references for hardware.
I can discover bits of geography relevent to the world as it is today, rather than how the borders were at the time of publishing. I can get differing opinions of world events.
The articles available on the internet might not be quite as detailed as you would find in Encyclopedias, but considering how I found much of it to be inaccurate, outdated, wrong or misleading, I think it's a good tradeoff. The encyclopedia is dead. Long live the Internet!
Heh. This sure would have helped me as a teenager.
It wasn't until I was about 19 or 20 that I learned that the only thing that keeps you from getting laid is shyness. Intelligence (or lack thereof) and good looks (or lack thereof) have nothing to do with it. Hell, you could be the greatest lover in the world but if you don't get out and introduce yourself to members of the opposite sex, THEY WILL NEVER FIND OUT!
Right when I learned this, there was an epiphany for me. Actually what I learned was that ugly people *do* get laid, which shocked me since I figured that's what was the root cause of my lonliness, and once I realized I wasn't half bad after all I started concentrating my energy on meeting new and interesting people. It took a while, and I had a rocky start, but it sure paid off in the end. My wife and a number of friends have often marvelled at how easily I attract women (we have an open marriage). It turns out that the "harmless geek" attitude, intelligence, confidence, and a willingness to please are in demand. Whod've thunk it eh?