If you vacation in Tahiti (french polynesia) do not tip. They take it as an insult. It was explained to me that their "work ethic" does not permit tipping, they don't feel that it's a fair reward for work, or something like that, their regular salary should be the fair reward.
On that note, maybe if employers PAID service people enough money to live on, the tipping culture wouldn't be necessary, along with all the bs (tipping based on breast-size, bad math skills, the tax questions, etc).
That's because Intel keeps FUCKING with us. They lie, they release crappy products, they make absurd FUD-filled product roadmaps they have no intention of fulfilling, they release products that do not ship in sufficient quantities, they perpetuate old out-dated worthless technology (x86, ISA, IDE, etc.), and the new technology they do promote is almost always totally bass-ackwards, and designed primarily to either grab more marketshare, or defend marketshare they have to the death, by any means other than what you'd logically think would be the BEST way to get marketshare: make faster, more stable, more affordable chips than the competition. (USB, Slot1, AGP, etc.)
And most infuriatingly, the main reason Intel seems to succeed is because stupid people buy into their "Intel Inside" campaign, that a PIII makes surfing the internet faster.
Sure, that would be like the Columbian drug lords financing genetic research to insert a coccaine gene into humans.
I believe that any gene research company that isn't presently owned by a pharmaceutical company or agro-giant (like ADM or Monsanto), will soon be bought out, because this threatens their market.
I would say that my first experience with Pay Pal was a blazing success. It was buying my Apex 600a DVD player off of eBay.
However, my next use, I solicited payment to someone else over Pay Pal, was a dismal failure - this was at the start of this summer. The guy couldn't get to their website. I couldn't get to their website. The shennanigans went on for over two weeks. I haven't used PayPal since, but I hope they've improved their infrastructure.
My final note on Pay Pal is, as soon as they get to a respectable size (marketshare), they're going to enact a minimum payment amount, probably over a dollar, just like all the rest. Because they can. I don't think it's economically feasible for micropayments to be handled, long-term. Sure companies can make money doing it, but why would they if they didn't have to? There's plenty of big-ticket commerce going on, this nickel and dime stuff isn't worth anyone's time. Unfortunately. So the model for online transactions will continue to be big $$ only. For a while, we'll have some products come up that take micropayments. But only for a while. They'll die as the micropayment banks get greedy and take bigger peices of the pie. That's the way things go.
having been on and off caffeine for some 20 years, I can attest to the tolerance factor in drug addiction.
The nice thing is, if you quit for a while (several weeks, not hours, you dolt!), your tolerance drops. But if you get "hooked" again, or regularly satisfy the habit, the tolerance builds up much more quickly. This was less true for my first relapse, than it was for my tenth.
The best relapse was last month, I gave a pint of blood, then I guzzled a bunch of diet Pepsi (whatever's available at the time!), zooooooom! came down HARD from that one.
It wasn't necessarily the poor design of the characters (with NO thought at all to realism), nor was it the incredibly STUPID dialog - but the overall quality of the images was just too poor. The quality of the shading and animation, coupled with the unbelievability of the design concept, is what blew it more than anything else. The whole package was just stupid.
I'm very glad that R2D2 is not going to be done with all-CGI in EP2, because, frankly, if EP1 CGI was state-of-the-art (I suspect it wasn't), then "the-art" isn't quite ready yet; some of the CGI in EP1 ranged from "not good enough" to "sucky".
Some scenes that stand out in my mind as really bad; The announcer at the Pod Races: Cartoony in quality, totally bottomed-out my suspension of disbelief. . . The scene where queen Amidala's ship landed on Tatooine; the shadow cast on the ground looked like the drop-shadow filter from Alien Skin 2.1. . . The scene where the two Jedi sneak out of an air-duct into the landing bay of the trade-federation ship - can you say "poor understanding of physics"? While there was a lot of good stuff in this movie, there was also a lot of really, really bad stuff. Bad enough for me to think that the technolgy for CGI isn't quite ready to replace live actors for some time, even if the live actor is an R/C mockup. Sometimes, the old, tried-and-true methods are best.
How long before the.Net version of Word gives us banner ads on our documents that we can not remove without a hex-editor (which would probably invalidate the checksum embedded in the GUID which would probably make Word crash, and corrupt your dial-up account so you couldn't access the internet anymore).
Yeah, subscription fee: $100/month, or $50/month with banner ads.
Sure, I think all that stuff ought to be tacked on to the end of the Drake equation.
Which would explain the current results.
As others have said here, I think our best bet is to refine our technology for locating planets around other (local) stars, fish out the best likely candidates, and start sending probes. There was a/. discussion a few months ago about some type of new drive that could propel a probe to a nearby star in about 10 years or so? It generated a magnetic field that worked like a solar sail against the solar wind - we'd get some nice photos, and a return trip as well. We'd have to loft a lot of Pu tho.
But I don't believe that humans have been striving to be replaced by intelligent machines all along. I think they built intelligent machines because they were sick of doing dishes. Then they got sick of formatting text, then they got sick of designing airplanes, then they got sick of thinking, period.
We're just sick and tired of being human. So we're building something to do it for us, because we can't be bothered with trivial tasks like, pondering the ultimate fate of the universe, or how all the elves and dwarves disappeared. Stuff like that.
By the way, Elves and Dwarves persisted on this world, in small numbers, until roughly 1996. It started in the 50's, and the operation continued on until the last Elves and Dwarves had been abducted by UFO's, in a secret plot by the US government, in a deal with the aliens, to remove the Elves and Dwarves from Earth, and provide the Aliens with fresh meat. Unfortunately, the Aliens aren't very careful, and have, from time to time, abducted humans instead. Since there are now no more Elves and Dwarves left, that's about all they abduct now.
IMNSHO, this is one of the great weaknesses in American government. The system of checks and balances works fairly well for Congress and the President. Pretty much nothing meaningful ever gets done there. But in the Judicial branch, where they don't necessarily have a lot of "do stuff" power, when the DO do stuff, it's VERY powerful, nobody can veto a judge (except other higher-up judges, and if the Supreme Court rules, it's final). Judges can't normally be removed or voted out - they're selected for life, and appointed, not picked by the people. Judges don't have enough checks against them.
just to play devil's advocate, if you say that intelligent life may be super-rare, yes, the dimensions of space and time make it possible, but what is the probability that ANOTHER intelligent species arose *locally*, that is, within a meaningful locality. Intelligent species arising 5 billion years from now, or 5 billion light years away, may as well not exist, they may as well be in a different universe. Most dreamers believe that we will one day master faster than light travel, and populate our galaxy, but few believe that within the scope of the existence of Homo Sapiens, that other galaxies will be contacted, let alone travelled to and colonized. The distances involved are nothing to a dreamer, but if you've got ANY realist in you at all, you realize that other galaxies are simply way too far away.
So as the probability of intelligent species arising declines, the probability of their MEANINGFUL existance declines as well. If there are no others within this Galaxy, we might very well just hang it up. Of course, we'll never know until we've explored every speck of dust in the universe, not only for signs of current life, or evidence of the past existance. There's no way anybody can ever accurately say "there is NO other life in the universe".
We're not looking for stray TV or cell-phone signals. We're looking for a specific signal, deliberately transmitted to us, on a specific frequency, by a civilization that has enough power to burn, to send this signal with enough energy that would power the United States. Continuously. Non deliberate signals, we probably would not be able to pick up, not at that strength, at that range.
Wrong, 50000 years from now, future inhabitants of Earth will recover this capsule as it plunges into a desert somewhere (it deorbits in 50000 years, right?) - and the Wintel employees (because 50000 years from now, Microsoft OS (Windows) and Intel have merged, and taken over the government, and every other corporation, so every human is an employee) open it up and see the shiny DVD disks. One of them absently tries to insert it into the 3.5" floppy drive on his 733 MHz P9million, with ISA slots and UltraSuperMegaATA hard drive, but it won't fit.
"damn Mac shit" he'll mutter, and toss the whole lot.
You forgot that the reason the Humans survived, WON, was because of their short lifespans, they also had a higher reproductive rate, and were better able to withstand disruptions to their populations like the ice ages, diseases, and the Wars. Also, because humans were more violent and vicious, they tended to START more of the wars, which tactically gave them the element of suprise more often than not, so more often than not, they won based on that. Another factor that caused the humans to start more wars, was that since they were so short-lived, they didn't tend to remember the devestation caused by previous wars 30-50 years earlier - plus for some reason, even though they had shorter lives, they were more willing to die, especially in battle, the element of being able to sacrifice troops was often very decisive. Religion may have played a role there, because it promised an eternal afterlife.
Perhaps the greatest advantage the humans had over their dwarven and elvish foes; the humans WEREN'T IMAGINARY CREATURES!
I bet Bill's happy now about all the people who PIRATED Windows products, because now he won't have to pay those people 3x the cost of a license. Those people are still an ASSET to Microsoft, because each of them uses IE, and reports as a statistic in MS's favor for World Domination of web standards.
(I've NEVER paid for Windows myself, even as a bundle with PC's I've bought, because when I've bought a PC with a bundled OS, it was either OS/2 (long time ago), or Mac OS, or no OS and I installed Linux - at work, it's always been a site-license).
But I like the idea of charging MS for lost productivity from crashes and Macro virus exploits. Kind of like when the first Mac was being built, and legend has it that Steve Jobs was bitching and moaning about how long it took to boot up, and suggested that if they could shave 5 seconds off the boot time, it would save every (projected) Mac owner 21 minutes per year, and if there were 2 million Mac owners, that was like 60 years, so for every 5 seconds of boot time they shaved off, they were saving one human life. Apparently they're thinking different now.
What about overly inflated MSCE test and class prices?
If MS weren't THE thing in the computer industry, I wouldn't have had to waste so much money and time learing about the menus in the network control panel, so I could have a piece of paper - similar to the money and time I wasted on my NOvell piece of paper back in 1994. (at least when I do the Solaris certification thing this fall, it won't be a complete waste of time - yes I will technically become a marketing tool of Sun, but at least the skills I will learn will be applicable).
Kato *was* on crack (prolly still is), and he was the reason the Columbians murdered Ms. Simpson; he stole the drug money she owed them for the party she threw for the football team where she got nekkid in front of them all.
FYI; Juan Gutierrez is pretty much the "John Smith" of the Hispanic world. In fact, Juan==John. In fact, there are TWO Juan Gutierrezes in my company (not Apple.)
Slashdot Mirror
If you vacation in Tahiti (french polynesia) do not tip. They take it as an insult. It was explained to me that their "work ethic" does not permit tipping, they don't feel that it's a fair reward for work, or something like that, their regular salary should be the fair reward.
On that note, maybe if employers PAID service people enough money to live on, the tipping culture wouldn't be necessary, along with all the bs (tipping based on breast-size, bad math skills, the tax questions, etc).
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
Slashdot seems to have anti-Intel mania!
That's because Intel keeps FUCKING with us. They lie, they release crappy products, they make absurd FUD-filled product roadmaps they have no intention of fulfilling, they release products that do not ship in sufficient quantities, they perpetuate old out-dated worthless technology (x86, ISA, IDE, etc.), and the new technology they do promote is almost always totally bass-ackwards, and designed primarily to either grab more marketshare, or defend marketshare they have to the death, by any means other than what you'd logically think would be the BEST way to get marketshare: make faster, more stable, more affordable chips than the competition. (USB, Slot1, AGP, etc.)
And most infuriatingly, the main reason Intel seems to succeed is because stupid people buy into their "Intel Inside" campaign, that a PIII makes surfing the internet faster.
Intel can go to hell.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
Sure, that would be like the Columbian drug lords financing genetic research to insert a coccaine gene into humans.
I believe that any gene research company that isn't presently owned by a pharmaceutical company or agro-giant (like ADM or Monsanto), will soon be bought out, because this threatens their market.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
I would say that my first experience with Pay Pal was a blazing success. It was buying my Apex 600a DVD player off of eBay.
However, my next use, I solicited payment to someone else over Pay Pal, was a dismal failure - this was at the start of this summer. The guy couldn't get to their website. I couldn't get to their website. The shennanigans went on for over two weeks. I haven't used PayPal since, but I hope they've improved their infrastructure.
My final note on Pay Pal is, as soon as they get to a respectable size (marketshare), they're going to enact a minimum payment amount, probably over a dollar, just like all the rest. Because they can. I don't think it's economically feasible for micropayments to be handled, long-term. Sure companies can make money doing it, but why would they if they didn't have to? There's plenty of big-ticket commerce going on, this nickel and dime stuff isn't worth anyone's time. Unfortunately. So the model for online transactions will continue to be big $$ only. For a while, we'll have some products come up that take micropayments. But only for a while. They'll die as the micropayment banks get greedy and take bigger peices of the pie. That's the way things go.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
having been on and off caffeine for some 20 years, I can attest to the tolerance factor in drug addiction.
The nice thing is, if you quit for a while (several weeks, not hours, you dolt!), your tolerance drops. But if you get "hooked" again, or regularly satisfy the habit, the tolerance builds up much more quickly. This was less true for my first relapse, than it was for my tenth.
The best relapse was last month, I gave a pint of blood, then I guzzled a bunch of diet Pepsi (whatever's available at the time!), zooooooom! came down HARD from that one.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
It wasn't necessarily the poor design of the characters (with NO thought at all to realism), nor was it the incredibly STUPID dialog - but the overall quality of the images was just too poor. The quality of the shading and animation, coupled with the unbelievability of the design concept, is what blew it more than anything else. The whole package was just stupid.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
I'm very glad that R2D2 is not going to be done with all-CGI in EP2, because, frankly, if EP1 CGI was state-of-the-art (I suspect it wasn't), then "the-art" isn't quite ready yet; some of the CGI in EP1 ranged from "not good enough" to "sucky".
Some scenes that stand out in my mind as really bad; The announcer at the Pod Races: Cartoony in quality, totally bottomed-out my suspension of disbelief. . . The scene where queen Amidala's ship landed on Tatooine; the shadow cast on the ground looked like the drop-shadow filter from Alien Skin 2.1. . . The scene where the two Jedi sneak out of an air-duct into the landing bay of the trade-federation ship - can you say "poor understanding of physics"? While there was a lot of good stuff in this movie, there was also a lot of really, really bad stuff. Bad enough for me to think that the technolgy for CGI isn't quite ready to replace live actors for some time, even if the live actor is an R/C mockup. Sometimes, the old, tried-and-true methods are best.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
How long before the .Net version of Word gives us banner ads on our documents that we can not remove without a hex-editor (which would probably invalidate the checksum embedded in the GUID which would probably make Word crash, and corrupt your dial-up account so you couldn't access the internet anymore).
Yeah, subscription fee: $100/month, or $50/month with banner ads.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
Sure, I think all that stuff ought to be tacked on to the end of the Drake equation.
/. discussion a few months ago about some type of new drive that could propel a probe to a nearby star in about 10 years or so? It generated a magnetic field that worked like a solar sail against the solar wind - we'd get some nice photos, and a return trip as well. We'd have to loft a lot of Pu tho.
Which would explain the current results.
As others have said here, I think our best bet is to refine our technology for locating planets around other (local) stars, fish out the best likely candidates, and start sending probes. There was a
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
I predicted that you would predict this.
But I don't believe that humans have been striving to be replaced by intelligent machines all along. I think they built intelligent machines because they were sick of doing dishes. Then they got sick of formatting text, then they got sick of designing airplanes, then they got sick of thinking, period.
We're just sick and tired of being human. So we're building something to do it for us, because we can't be bothered with trivial tasks like, pondering the ultimate fate of the universe, or how all the elves and dwarves disappeared. Stuff like that.
By the way, Elves and Dwarves persisted on this world, in small numbers, until roughly 1996. It started in the 50's, and the operation continued on until the last Elves and Dwarves had been abducted by UFO's, in a secret plot by the US government, in a deal with the aliens, to remove the Elves and Dwarves from Earth, and provide the Aliens with fresh meat. Unfortunately, the Aliens aren't very careful, and have, from time to time, abducted humans instead. Since there are now no more Elves and Dwarves left, that's about all they abduct now.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
It's been said that the best form of government would be a Benevolent Dictatorship.
The only problem is, it's really tough to find a benevolent dictator.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
MPAA needs to be a card in Illuminati;
."
"The Network, using transferrable power from the MPAA and The Scientologists, attack to destroy the OpenSource Movement. .
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
IMNSHO, this is one of the great weaknesses in American government. The system of checks and balances works fairly well for Congress and the President. Pretty much nothing meaningful ever gets done there. But in the Judicial branch, where they don't necessarily have a lot of "do stuff" power, when the DO do stuff, it's VERY powerful, nobody can veto a judge (except other higher-up judges, and if the Supreme Court rules, it's final). Judges can't normally be removed or voted out - they're selected for life, and appointed, not picked by the people. Judges don't have enough checks against them.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
just to play devil's advocate, if you say that intelligent life may be super-rare, yes, the dimensions of space and time make it possible, but what is the probability that ANOTHER intelligent species arose *locally*, that is, within a meaningful locality. Intelligent species arising 5 billion years from now, or 5 billion light years away, may as well not exist, they may as well be in a different universe. Most dreamers believe that we will one day master faster than light travel, and populate our galaxy, but few believe that within the scope of the existence of Homo Sapiens, that other galaxies will be contacted, let alone travelled to and colonized. The distances involved are nothing to a dreamer, but if you've got ANY realist in you at all, you realize that other galaxies are simply way too far away.
So as the probability of intelligent species arising declines, the probability of their MEANINGFUL existance declines as well. If there are no others within this Galaxy, we might very well just hang it up. Of course, we'll never know until we've explored every speck of dust in the universe, not only for signs of current life, or evidence of the past existance. There's no way anybody can ever accurately say "there is NO other life in the universe".
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
We're not looking for stray TV or cell-phone signals. We're looking for a specific signal, deliberately transmitted to us, on a specific frequency, by a civilization that has enough power to burn, to send this signal with enough energy that would power the United States. Continuously. Non deliberate signals, we probably would not be able to pick up, not at that strength, at that range.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
They're receiving those I Love Lucy broadcasts, but they've been modded down.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
you forgot the obligitory Echelon .sig:
napalm c4 cyanide water supply terrorist stinger president airforce one bomb enriched uranium acid glue marx linux opensource gnu manifesto guns
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
Wrong, 50000 years from now, future inhabitants of Earth will recover this capsule as it plunges into a desert somewhere (it deorbits in 50000 years, right?) - and the Wintel employees (because 50000 years from now, Microsoft OS (Windows) and Intel have merged, and taken over the government, and every other corporation, so every human is an employee) open it up and see the shiny DVD disks. One of them absently tries to insert it into the 3.5" floppy drive on his 733 MHz P9million, with ISA slots and UltraSuperMegaATA hard drive, but it won't fit.
"damn Mac shit" he'll mutter, and toss the whole lot.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
You forgot that the reason the Humans survived, WON, was because of their short lifespans, they also had a higher reproductive rate, and were better able to withstand disruptions to their populations like the ice ages, diseases, and the Wars. Also, because humans were more violent and vicious, they tended to START more of the wars, which tactically gave them the element of suprise more often than not, so more often than not, they won based on that. Another factor that caused the humans to start more wars, was that since they were so short-lived, they didn't tend to remember the devestation caused by previous wars 30-50 years earlier - plus for some reason, even though they had shorter lives, they were more willing to die, especially in battle, the element of being able to sacrifice troops was often very decisive. Religion may have played a role there, because it promised an eternal afterlife.
Perhaps the greatest advantage the humans had over their dwarven and elvish foes; the humans WEREN'T IMAGINARY CREATURES!
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
I bet Bill's happy now about all the people who PIRATED Windows products, because now he won't have to pay those people 3x the cost of a license. Those people are still an ASSET to Microsoft, because each of them uses IE, and reports as a statistic in MS's favor for World Domination of web standards.
(I've NEVER paid for Windows myself, even as a bundle with PC's I've bought, because when I've bought a PC with a bundled OS, it was either OS/2 (long time ago), or Mac OS, or no OS and I installed Linux - at work, it's always been a site-license).
But I like the idea of charging MS for lost productivity from crashes and Macro virus exploits. Kind of like when the first Mac was being built, and legend has it that Steve Jobs was bitching and moaning about how long it took to boot up, and suggested that if they could shave 5 seconds off the boot time, it would save every (projected) Mac owner 21 minutes per year, and if there were 2 million Mac owners, that was like 60 years, so for every 5 seconds of boot time they shaved off, they were saving one human life. Apparently they're thinking different now.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
What about overly inflated MSCE test and class prices?
If MS weren't THE thing in the computer industry, I wouldn't have had to waste so much money and time learing about the menus in the network control panel, so I could have a piece of paper - similar to the money and time I wasted on my NOvell piece of paper back in 1994. (at least when I do the Solaris certification thing this fall, it won't be a complete waste of time - yes I will technically become a marketing tool of Sun, but at least the skills I will learn will be applicable).
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
Kato *was* on crack (prolly still is), and he was the reason the Columbians murdered Ms. Simpson; he stole the drug money she owed them for the party she threw for the football team where she got nekkid in front of them all.
and Linux r00lz
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
Microsoft Office Pro, Microsoft Office Deluxe, Microsoft Office Enterprise, Microsoft Office.Net. . .
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
The XBox is the "me too" of game consoles.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
FYI; Juan Gutierrez is pretty much the "John Smith" of the Hispanic world. In fact, Juan==John. In fact, there are TWO Juan Gutierrezes in my company (not Apple.)
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!