Also, if the limit is 50, but the flow of traffic is going 70, the few cars that ARE going 50 are impeding the flow of traffic and are themselves a hazard. Arguing whether its right or wrong is moot because its just the way it IS.
And jumping off a cliff isn't dangerous until you hit the ground. Just because it's not immediately damaging to exceed the speed limit doesn't mean the consequences aren't much greater if and when you do hit someone (or ram a guardrail) at that greatly increased speed.
As for "right or wrong", it's wrong if the increased frequency and severity of accidents ruins human lives for no good reason other than getting people to work slightly earlier. "That's just the way it is" can never be an adequate response to such pointless, selfish endangerment of other human beings, and I'm disgusted with you for saying such. If you think 50 mph is lower than necessary for a safe speed limit, then say so directly, but the safe, intelligent speed at which everyone ought to travel is not relative to how fast everyone already travels. Would you not have any problem if the freeway nearest your house suddenly traveled at 90 mph? 110 mph?
Apparently it's so overwhelming in its power and beauty my current graphics card can't bear to render it! It just gets halfway through, and then after the third set of HDMI ports comes into view it chokes up and halts, too depressed and intimidated to go further.
Seriously, though, either my connection sucks or the pictures are all slashdotted.
Yeah, but getting the original bet returned still isn't fair; that was my unspoken point. Why is the defectiveness of the machine only worrisome the one second per year it costs the house money, and fuck all the months and months it's just costing the worthless patrons money? Do they send the machine to the gaming commission post-haste if it seems to be paying out too little? If defects void transactions, why shouldn't every single dollar anyone's put into that machine since it's last clean inspection be returned, or at least forcibly donated to charity?
This bullshit about malfunctions voiding the transaction only protects the casino, and it literally never protects the patrons.
So the casino isn't responsible for the operating condition of their machines, or for standing behind the results said machines promise customers? Why can the gambling industry get away with something we would never tolerate from power companies, car manufacturers, clothing companies, etc.?
They paid for a chance to win, and the machine told them they'd won. It's like buying a new shirt, finding a giant hole in it, and Banana Republic says "Sorry, the sewing machine was miscalibrated! No, we won't take it back. Maybe you can use it as leg warmers or something!"
I love that you put Republican in bold, as if it needs no further explanation that Republicans are the worst sort of human being since Nazis. Just because half of them are assholes doesn't mean the party doesn't stand for anything worthwhile and doesn't have millions of decent, sensitive, rational people in its membership.
The more interesting question isn't whether caffeine gets one to above normal levels of energy but whether it can enable a user to remain at baseline for longer periods of time compared to someone not on caffeine.
No. If I remember right caffeine messes with your ATP regulation, which is a process way too important and central in metabolism to even slightly alter for more than a few hours at a time without, perhaps literally, dying. It's no surprise the human body, according to this study, simply incorporates caffeine into the baseline rather than allowing the baseline to change, and for the same reasons I don't think the duration of baseline changes, either.
They [religious authorities] tell you with a straight face that these people [scientists] who have nothing to gain by lying, and who have dedicated their lives to understanding how things work through empirical research, and who aren't trying to take your money, are not to be trusted.
Completely untrue. The following applies, probably, to fewer scientists than pastors, but scientists have exactly as much to gain by lying as unethical paid clergy, slimy lawyers, etc. have: they get to keep their jobs, and often move up to better jobs, if they lie as much as possible without getting caught. It may be easier for scientists to get caught when they lie than many other people, and probably they lie less, but the pressure to publish - including the absolute certainty of losing your job if you do not publish - creates plenty of incentive to lie.
Many, many scientists live on public money, and many of their jobs depend on publishing; thus they *are* "trying to take my [public] money" and they do *not* "have nothing to gain by lying".
Being a scientist doesn't make you automatically virtuous any more than claiming to be the mouthpiece of Jesus makes you automatically virtuous.
It's not like "sight" and "smell" go into totally separate processing units along totally separate conductors: both signals still went through a nerve and into a little fly brain.
All they did was get a perception of light to travel into the brain on a different bundle of almost identical nerves. What's the big deal? Haven't these people ever seen the Matrix? If you perceive it, you perceive it; for most purposes it doesn't make a damn bit of difference how the perception got into your brain.
Alright, so in your specific case the financial ramifications aren't there. I also raised the point about how much environmental damage building, say, two extra starters per year would do. Just because you, personally, wouldn't lose money doesn't mean my whole point is invalid; finance was only half my point in the first place.
The break even point is much less than 3 minutes. It's actually around 7-10 seconds. And it's a fairly noticeable improvement in MPG, depending on your city driving miles. I've gotten upwards of 4-5+ MPG per tank with turning the engine off vs. idling at the stop lights.
But isn't turning the thing on and off creating enough extra wear on the engine that, over the long haul, replacing all those parts and hastening the death of the car creates a worse financial and environmental impact than letting it run?
A fuel efficiency increase of 5 MPG is a few hundred bucks a year, but if it causes you to replace major parts even a month or two sooner than it could cost you at least that much money, not to mention the increased cost of buying a new car even a month sooner than otherwise. Add to this the fact that new parts (not to mention new cars) have hundreds or thousands of gallons of fuels tied up in their mining, smelting, machining, and transport. Turning off the car at intersections seems like a lose-lose, if any of my (conservative) suppositions on increased purchasing on non-gasoline items are correct.
Somebody that "grinds" all the time in EVE has no skill advantage over the casual player.
They don't have a skill advantage in WOW, either; they have a cash advantage. This isn't supporting your claim that EVE doesn't require grinding. In WOW, legitimate skill can be had by level 20. Most people never get skilled, but nevertheless many people achieve guild raiding status through sheer dedication [grinding], cover themselves in purple, orange, or whatever the color is now, and kick everyone's ass regardless of skill level.
If you are claiming that skill affects your EVE performance much more than time invested you might have a point, but you aren't stating it very explicitly and your comparisons to WOW are misleading.
So before you call AUO a patent troll, keep in mind that LGD shot first
Who shot first doesn't matter. Patent trolling, in my opinion, concerns using patents to suppress other innovations, particularly when the plaintiff isn't using the patents for any product or active research at the time; the mere presence of an IP-based lawsuit isn't worthy of calling someone a troll.
Which company is actually using a smaller proportion of the patents they sued over, and which of them has the most patents at issue working in products and current research? The first one would be more of a troll, the second more like an ordinary company fighting for its legal rights. I know we on slashdot don't agree much with patents, but they're not 100% useless and not every single person or business who likes patents, holds patents, or uses them in litigation amounts to some hobgoblin suppressing innovation for the sole purpose of lining their pockets.
People today are broken and oversocialized, and more importantly, too careful...people "construct" their image of self that others perceive
Too careful? They 'construct' the image others see? Do you read the kind of crap people plaster all over Facebook? The ridiculous, copious honesty of those people is exactly why I don't use social media at all. Between the disgusting, the bizarre, and (this is most of it) the completely boring, there's no frickin end to the completely true, unedited drivel oozing all over these social networking venues. There's a difference between open, honest dialogue and telling everything about everything, and these people by and large passed that line five years ago.
Too careful couldn't be more wrong; social networkers have become so completely unfiltered the entirety of cyberspace overflows with their useless raw data.
most of there "insights" were over active imaginations.
Not quite. Sometimes, certainly, they just imagined the threat, but equally often they fell for some simple, yet clever, Soviet spoofs. Much was made in intelligence and in the popular press, for example, of those terrifying parade ground films showing division after division of Soviet infantry marching through Red Square, with air support flying over and armored divisions interspersed. It turned out at least once, however, that the hundreds of bombers flying overhead consisted of just a couple squadrons flying a continuous loop above the parade ground, circling behind the camera to pass by again and again. Very likely the same happened with the armor sometimes.
The Cold War was all about fear, and when analysts fell for something that seems stupid now it's not exclusively that they convinced themselves or became hysterical; the armed forces of both sides did a lot of work to keep up credible appearances of overwhelming force, usually without the actual hardware to back them up.
so why do you fucking care so much about a fucking word?
"hacking" has evolved to have different meanings. big fucking deal
Ok, number one, mellow out. Why you're legitimately angry over my response is beyond me. Number two, words may change, but this use of the word 'hacking' is way, way outside even the most peripheral usage of the word today. Words, however they change or whatever word you select, still have to *communicate* with the people to whom you are speaking, and this word was badly chosen enough to nearly fail at communication. I don't care what word he chooses so long as it actually says something accurate *to me* and that word said something distinctly *not* accurate, so I called him on it. I'm not some insane language purist or grammar nazi, I merely called the guy on choosing the wrong word for his intended audience in addition to misusing the dictionary definition of the word.
There's no hacking involved, and the word hacking wasn't even necessary for sensationalism's sake. Seriously, I know people write misleading headlines to get eyeballs, but a perfectly accurate title could have been just as enticing: how about "Evading Big Brother with Help from Revlon?" Isn't evading about as interesting as hacking, Big Brother-wise?
Even when they could be honest, accurate, and interesting the Slashdot editors simply don't bother. Why?
It seems to me that if the government thinks it can predict these things and takes certain actions in prevention, it might actually cause the problem that is predicted, and thus validate the method.
It's certainly possible. It's also possible that giant space lizards will land on the planet tomorrow and make humans work in the cricket mines of Gringaxx 7 as a slave race, but that's just wild speculation. You, also, appear to be throwing around wild speculations from the extreme brevity of your comment: what makes you feel your concern represents a distinctly plausible outcome rather than just a possible outcome?
The point being that EVERY major entertainment medium for at least a hundred years uses this model of giving a little bit away for free to create interest and to promote themselves.
You, among others, come up with this claim that every entertainment or information product involves a headline, a trailer, or some other brief facsimile served up for free, yet you ignore the other parts of the equation. I'm not sure what sort of investment or difficulty level demos involve, but I'm gonna go out on a really short limb here and say it's a lot more difficult and expensive than slapping six words at the top of the newspaper page or splicing together some shots of the completed film or television show with a voice-over.
Furthermore, demos may have simply outlived their usefulness, for consumers and publishers alike. For the publishers, demos may have an unacceptable return on investment, and even as someone who hates the capitalist system I can't request that companies simply ignore it. Even for the consumer, video game reviews are generally of higher quality and more consistency than those for other products, and I'm not sure I value a demo over simple word of mouth and professional critique.
So there is a good argument for "vote for the lesser evil" when it's a close election between completely evil and not-so-completely evil, and "vote for what you really want" when it isn't.
Except that presidential elections are "close", as in less than 10% spread, like 9 out of 10 times. If a "close" election is all it takes before you're willing to vote for the lesser of two evils, and it's always close, than you're just perpetuating a really awful compromise instead of standing up for anything.
However, in first-past-the-post systems (Canada, US, UK) these vanity parties are only self-defeating.
Damn straight, and it's amazing the kind of stupid things you hear people say about them, too. I knew a guy who always told me "Most independents are more liberal than conservative, and they get their votes from potential democrats, so a vote for an independent is a vote for a Republican."
And I suppose he was right, in terms of the immediate effect, but he used this as a justification for consolidating the Democratic party, whether or not you disagreed with them almost as much as you disagreed with the Republicans, just so long as you prevented the Republican from winning. So his overall effect was to encourage voting against the people you didn't like rather than finding something you actually liked and running on it or finding a candidate for your views. It's hopelessly stupid.
Of course, if you are referring to the use of "you're", then feel free to be a genocidal grammaticist...
Wow...it's "genocidal" asking people to know the correct spelling of a five-letter word. I seriously hope you're kidding. Ooh, I got to use the word in question correctly. Snarky, yet unintentional. How delicious.
I don't know just what makes you think vaccination remains voluntary...you can barely get away with attending school if you don't have vaccinations. My mom thought she didn't like them and had to use some form to pretend she held a 'religious objection' to the required vaccines. Some
Not that I think vaccines are useless, but I think vaccinating everyone for everything we possibly can- regardless of how transmissible a given pathogen really is, relative prevalence of a given disease, or the actual severity of the disease- isn't necessary. More prevention isn't always better prevention, just like more treatment is only sometimes better treatment.
Slashdot Mirror
Dear RIAA,
Fine then. But you owe me $170,000 in pain and suffering for that Britney Spears CD I bought.
Sincerely, everyone who ever bought a Britney Spears CD
Total bill, at $170,000 per legitimate purchase, comes to $ 1.73 trillion.
What do you say we call it even?
Also, if the limit is 50, but the flow of traffic is going 70, the few cars that ARE going 50 are impeding the flow of traffic and are themselves a hazard. Arguing whether its right or wrong is moot because its just the way it IS.
And jumping off a cliff isn't dangerous until you hit the ground. Just because it's not immediately damaging to exceed the speed limit doesn't mean the consequences aren't much greater if and when you do hit someone (or ram a guardrail) at that greatly increased speed.
As for "right or wrong", it's wrong if the increased frequency and severity of accidents ruins human lives for no good reason other than getting people to work slightly earlier. "That's just the way it is" can never be an adequate response to such pointless, selfish endangerment of other human beings, and I'm disgusted with you for saying such. If you think 50 mph is lower than necessary for a safe speed limit, then say so directly, but the safe, intelligent speed at which everyone ought to travel is not relative to how fast everyone already travels. Would you not have any problem if the freeway nearest your house suddenly traveled at 90 mph? 110 mph?
Apparently it's so overwhelming in its power and beauty my current graphics card can't bear to render it! It just gets halfway through, and then after the third set of HDMI ports comes into view it chokes up and halts, too depressed and intimidated to go further.
Seriously, though, either my connection sucks or the pictures are all slashdotted.
They will get the original bet returned.
Yeah, but getting the original bet returned still isn't fair; that was my unspoken point. Why is the defectiveness of the machine only worrisome the one second per year it costs the house money, and fuck all the months and months it's just costing the worthless patrons money? Do they send the machine to the gaming commission post-haste if it seems to be paying out too little? If defects void transactions, why shouldn't every single dollar anyone's put into that machine since it's last clean inspection be returned, or at least forcibly donated to charity?
This bullshit about malfunctions voiding the transaction only protects the casino, and it literally never protects the patrons.
So the casino isn't responsible for the operating condition of their machines, or for standing behind the results said machines promise customers? Why can the gambling industry get away with something we would never tolerate from power companies, car manufacturers, clothing companies, etc.?
They paid for a chance to win, and the machine told them they'd won. It's like buying a new shirt, finding a giant hole in it, and Banana Republic says "Sorry, the sewing machine was miscalibrated! No, we won't take it back. Maybe you can use it as leg warmers or something!"
I love that you put Republican in bold, as if it needs no further explanation that Republicans are the worst sort of human being since Nazis. Just because half of them are assholes doesn't mean the party doesn't stand for anything worthwhile and doesn't have millions of decent, sensitive, rational people in its membership.
The more interesting question isn't whether caffeine gets one to above normal levels of energy but whether it can enable a user to remain at baseline for longer periods of time compared to someone not on caffeine.
No. If I remember right caffeine messes with your ATP regulation, which is a process way too important and central in metabolism to even slightly alter for more than a few hours at a time without, perhaps literally, dying. It's no surprise the human body, according to this study, simply incorporates caffeine into the baseline rather than allowing the baseline to change, and for the same reasons I don't think the duration of baseline changes, either.
They [religious authorities] tell you with a straight face that these people [scientists] who have nothing to gain by lying, and who have dedicated their lives to understanding how things work through empirical research, and who aren't trying to take your money, are not to be trusted.
Completely untrue. The following applies, probably, to fewer scientists than pastors, but scientists have exactly as much to gain by lying as unethical paid clergy, slimy lawyers, etc. have: they get to keep their jobs, and often move up to better jobs, if they lie as much as possible without getting caught. It may be easier for scientists to get caught when they lie than many other people, and probably they lie less, but the pressure to publish - including the absolute certainty of losing your job if you do not publish - creates plenty of incentive to lie.
Many, many scientists live on public money, and many of their jobs depend on publishing; thus they *are* "trying to take my [public] money" and they do *not* "have nothing to gain by lying".
Being a scientist doesn't make you automatically virtuous any more than claiming to be the mouthpiece of Jesus makes you automatically virtuous.
It's not like "sight" and "smell" go into totally separate processing units along totally separate conductors: both signals still went through a nerve and into a little fly brain.
All they did was get a perception of light to travel into the brain on a different bundle of almost identical nerves. What's the big deal? Haven't these people ever seen the Matrix? If you perceive it, you perceive it; for most purposes it doesn't make a damn bit of difference how the perception got into your brain.
Alright, so in your specific case the financial ramifications aren't there. I also raised the point about how much environmental damage building, say, two extra starters per year would do. Just because you, personally, wouldn't lose money doesn't mean my whole point is invalid; finance was only half my point in the first place.
The break even point is much less than 3 minutes. It's actually around 7-10 seconds. And it's a fairly noticeable improvement in MPG, depending on your city driving miles. I've gotten upwards of 4-5+ MPG per tank with turning the engine off vs. idling at the stop lights.
But isn't turning the thing on and off creating enough extra wear on the engine that, over the long haul, replacing all those parts and hastening the death of the car creates a worse financial and environmental impact than letting it run?
A fuel efficiency increase of 5 MPG is a few hundred bucks a year, but if it causes you to replace major parts even a month or two sooner than it could cost you at least that much money, not to mention the increased cost of buying a new car even a month sooner than otherwise. Add to this the fact that new parts (not to mention new cars) have hundreds or thousands of gallons of fuels tied up in their mining, smelting, machining, and transport. Turning off the car at intersections seems like a lose-lose, if any of my (conservative) suppositions on increased purchasing on non-gasoline items are correct.
Somebody that "grinds" all the time in EVE has no skill advantage over the casual player.
They don't have a skill advantage in WOW, either; they have a cash advantage. This isn't supporting your claim that EVE doesn't require grinding. In WOW, legitimate skill can be had by level 20. Most people never get skilled, but nevertheless many people achieve guild raiding status through sheer dedication [grinding], cover themselves in purple, orange, or whatever the color is now, and kick everyone's ass regardless of skill level.
If you are claiming that skill affects your EVE performance much more than time invested you might have a point, but you aren't stating it very explicitly and your comparisons to WOW are misleading.
Dow Jones is the name of a chemical manufacturer, not some weird acronym. No need to capitalize every letter.
Wait, Dow is the chemical company; Dow Jones is a publishing and financial business that invented the index. Same point, though.
Dow Jones is the name of a chemical manufacturer, not some weird acronym. No need to capitalize every letter.
So before you call AUO a patent troll, keep in mind that LGD shot first
Who shot first doesn't matter. Patent trolling, in my opinion, concerns using patents to suppress other innovations, particularly when the plaintiff isn't using the patents for any product or active research at the time; the mere presence of an IP-based lawsuit isn't worthy of calling someone a troll.
Which company is actually using a smaller proportion of the patents they sued over, and which of them has the most patents at issue working in products and current research? The first one would be more of a troll, the second more like an ordinary company fighting for its legal rights. I know we on slashdot don't agree much with patents, but they're not 100% useless and not every single person or business who likes patents, holds patents, or uses them in litigation amounts to some hobgoblin suppressing innovation for the sole purpose of lining their pockets.
People today are broken and oversocialized, and more importantly, too careful...people "construct" their image of self that others perceive
Too careful? They 'construct' the image others see? Do you read the kind of crap people plaster all over Facebook? The ridiculous, copious honesty of those people is exactly why I don't use social media at all. Between the disgusting, the bizarre, and (this is most of it) the completely boring, there's no frickin end to the completely true, unedited drivel oozing all over these social networking venues. There's a difference between open, honest dialogue and telling everything about everything, and these people by and large passed that line five years ago.
Too careful couldn't be more wrong; social networkers have become so completely unfiltered the entirety of cyberspace overflows with their useless raw data.
most of there "insights" were over active imaginations.
Not quite. Sometimes, certainly, they just imagined the threat, but equally often they fell for some simple, yet clever, Soviet spoofs. Much was made in intelligence and in the popular press, for example, of those terrifying parade ground films showing division after division of Soviet infantry marching through Red Square, with air support flying over and armored divisions interspersed. It turned out at least once, however, that the hundreds of bombers flying overhead consisted of just a couple squadrons flying a continuous loop above the parade ground, circling behind the camera to pass by again and again. Very likely the same happened with the armor sometimes.
The Cold War was all about fear, and when analysts fell for something that seems stupid now it's not exclusively that they convinced themselves or became hysterical; the armed forces of both sides did a lot of work to keep up credible appearances of overwhelming force, usually without the actual hardware to back them up.
so why do you fucking care so much about a fucking word? "hacking" has evolved to have different meanings. big fucking deal
Ok, number one, mellow out. Why you're legitimately angry over my response is beyond me. Number two, words may change, but this use of the word 'hacking' is way, way outside even the most peripheral usage of the word today. Words, however they change or whatever word you select, still have to *communicate* with the people to whom you are speaking, and this word was badly chosen enough to nearly fail at communication. I don't care what word he chooses so long as it actually says something accurate *to me* and that word said something distinctly *not* accurate, so I called him on it. I'm not some insane language purist or grammar nazi, I merely called the guy on choosing the wrong word for his intended audience in addition to misusing the dictionary definition of the word.
There's no hacking involved, and the word hacking wasn't even necessary for sensationalism's sake. Seriously, I know people write misleading headlines to get eyeballs, but a perfectly accurate title could have been just as enticing: how about "Evading Big Brother with Help from Revlon?" Isn't evading about as interesting as hacking, Big Brother-wise?
Even when they could be honest, accurate, and interesting the Slashdot editors simply don't bother. Why?
It seems to me that if the government thinks it can predict these things and takes certain actions in prevention, it might actually cause the problem that is predicted, and thus validate the method.
It's certainly possible. It's also possible that giant space lizards will land on the planet tomorrow and make humans work in the cricket mines of Gringaxx 7 as a slave race, but that's just wild speculation. You, also, appear to be throwing around wild speculations from the extreme brevity of your comment: what makes you feel your concern represents a distinctly plausible outcome rather than just a possible outcome?
The point being that EVERY major entertainment medium for at least a hundred years uses this model of giving a little bit away for free to create interest and to promote themselves.
You, among others, come up with this claim that every entertainment or information product involves a headline, a trailer, or some other brief facsimile served up for free, yet you ignore the other parts of the equation. I'm not sure what sort of investment or difficulty level demos involve, but I'm gonna go out on a really short limb here and say it's a lot more difficult and expensive than slapping six words at the top of the newspaper page or splicing together some shots of the completed film or television show with a voice-over.
Furthermore, demos may have simply outlived their usefulness, for consumers and publishers alike. For the publishers, demos may have an unacceptable return on investment, and even as someone who hates the capitalist system I can't request that companies simply ignore it. Even for the consumer, video game reviews are generally of higher quality and more consistency than those for other products, and I'm not sure I value a demo over simple word of mouth and professional critique.
So there is a good argument for "vote for the lesser evil" when it's a close election between completely evil and not-so-completely evil, and "vote for what you really want" when it isn't.
Except that presidential elections are "close", as in less than 10% spread, like 9 out of 10 times. If a "close" election is all it takes before you're willing to vote for the lesser of two evils, and it's always close, than you're just perpetuating a really awful compromise instead of standing up for anything.
However, in first-past-the-post systems (Canada, US, UK) these vanity parties are only self-defeating.
Damn straight, and it's amazing the kind of stupid things you hear people say about them, too. I knew a guy who always told me "Most independents are more liberal than conservative, and they get their votes from potential democrats, so a vote for an independent is a vote for a Republican."
And I suppose he was right, in terms of the immediate effect, but he used this as a justification for consolidating the Democratic party, whether or not you disagreed with them almost as much as you disagreed with the Republicans, just so long as you prevented the Republican from winning. So his overall effect was to encourage voting against the people you didn't like rather than finding something you actually liked and running on it or finding a candidate for your views. It's hopelessly stupid.
Of course, if you are referring to the use of "you're", then feel free to be a genocidal grammaticist...
Wow...it's "genocidal" asking people to know the correct spelling of a five-letter word. I seriously hope you're kidding. Ooh, I got to use the word in question correctly. Snarky, yet unintentional. How delicious.
I don't know just what makes you think vaccination remains voluntary...you can barely get away with attending school if you don't have vaccinations. My mom thought she didn't like them and had to use some form to pretend she held a 'religious objection' to the required vaccines. Some
Not that I think vaccines are useless, but I think vaccinating everyone for everything we possibly can- regardless of how transmissible a given pathogen really is, relative prevalence of a given disease, or the actual severity of the disease- isn't necessary. More prevention isn't always better prevention, just like more treatment is only sometimes better treatment.