True, but I've seen countless stories citing a warmer than usual winter as direct evidence for global warming. I guess the converse isn't true when it doesn't support the environmentalist dogma.
Same here. I've been looking for a Wii on a daily basis for about a month now, in four major metropolitan areas, and have come up empty-handed. I've been offered PS3s multiple times. Yesterday I found one at a store but by the time I got there, a kid was at the check out buying it. Also, our local Fry's just got five in but refuses to sell them without the purchase of a bundle of five games, which brings the price up to an outrageous $500. Fuck that, there aren't five games I want out right now, I just want Zelda and maybe Elebits.
I was working for a small newspaper as a Photoshop monkey. Being semi-competent in Linux, I was pleased when the company switched to OSX from OS9 since I would be able to play with something resembling a modern operating system. The IT staff was still stuck in the OS9 mentality, so I was the one that fixed computers when they broke.
Keep in mind that the photo department doesn't generally employ technically proficient people, they're usually of a more artsy background. My former employer, surprisingly, had promoted two technically proficient photographers to photo editor positions, but the third, incompetent one, was quite a problem. She called me one night in a panic to solve a problem we commonly had with photos that came down from the AP wire. She was the only one on duty at the time
For our paper, the AP photos came in via satellite and were temporarily stored on one of two aging OS9 G4s. The database software, which was used for layout and image storage, would grab the images, extract caption data, and store them on what I believe was a Sun server somewhere. After the designers placed the image on a page, it would go to the engravers, which would Photoshop the image so that it appeared correctly when printed. However, the machines the engravers worked on were OSX. Sometimes, for no good reason, a photo that we had to have came down the wire with a filename that had a leading period. OS9 machines, the ones that caught the images coming from the wire, had absolutely no problem with this. However, whenever the engraver saved the file out to his OSX machine, nothing would appear in the target directory since a leading period in OSX and other Unices hides the file.
So, I'd just gotten off the bus after a long night at work when the editor calls and wants me to come back in to fix this trivial problem. It's 11pm and I don't want to ride the bus all the way back across town without being paid for it, so over the phone I coach a woman who has never heard the word terminal used in this context to "Click on the hard drive icon, the one at the top right of your screen. No, you have to minimize such and such first, you minimize by clicking on this, it's located here... Are you seeing the icons on your desktop? No? What do you see? Hit Apple+M. It is the button with the weird symbol between CTRL and ALT. OK, now go to Applications. Click on it. Go to Utilities. Click on it. Go to Terminal. Click on it."
After that I just gave up on instructing her on what to do and moved down a layer of abstraction to tell her exactly what keys to press. The fix was trivial, you had to go to the terminal and do a mv.filename filename, something I could have done in seconds if I'd had access to the company network but which took thirty minutes over the phone with a panicked, menopausal woman on a deadline.
I did an experiment recently. Someone I vaguely knew through a friend had come across a laptop that he thought was "hot". As the only nerd he knew, he wanted me to wipe off anything that the hard disk might have had on it. I was amused and thought he was just paranoid, but I humored him.
To be honest, I was the one that alerted him to the existence of programs that phone home when the laptop is stolen. I don't think any normal user ever uses these, but they exist. However, the license number on the pre-existing XP install could probably be matched to the computer it was sold on and maybe to its rightful owner.
The computer looked like a fresh install, complete with with all the worthless bullshit that big-name PC laptop manufacturers bundle with their machines. The goddamned system tray must have had 15 icons in it when expanded, and they all were about to expire. It was 15 or so inches, a widescreen, some year- or two-year old middle of the line model. Nothing to sneeze at.
I told him that I had no version of Windows that predates XP, and the ones I have are legally licensed to me (thank you $5 University copy, it's almost worth it). So he had two options: I could blank the hard disk until he could scare up a copy of XP (he won't, not for normal prices), or I could install Linux. After some explaining, he chose Linux.
I don't think he's ever owned a computer or had access to a family machine, so I figure KDE should be just as easy to learn as Explorer for a first timer. He only wanted to get on the web and play DVDs. The only modern implementation of Linux I've used has been Gentoo, and it has always worked flawlessly, once you get it set up. Portage is amazing, and if things compile, they'll work. Before that I had used Redhat 5, but the RPM system annoyed me to the point that I switched back to Windows for years. It could be because I was using it on an old laptop from 1996 that had a winmodem, but it was a pain in the ass.
I wanted to see if a normal person, a Kaspar Hauser of computing, would pick up on KDE. But not bad enough that I want to toil for days making Gentoo work on his machine. I opted for a precompiled distribution, instead.
I'd heard good things about Ubuntu, but I hate Gnome. So I got Kubuntu. It installed out of a LiveCD, which is much slicker than Windows XPs primitive installation process. Wireless seemed to work, but I wasn't letting this guy on my network and I live in the only complex in the world where everyone has renamed their routers, changed the channels, encrypted, and MAC filtered their wireless. The laptop picked up the neighbors, though, and it sure seemed to be working. DVDs kicked up some error about a decss library and quit after the FBI warning. I tried to install the required library through the graphical upgrade interface, but it didn't work. Very annoying.
So I gave him the laptop and he didn't figure out that its functionality had been severely decreased since recently, when I was out of town. I heard that he was having trouble watching his movies and needed help, but I'm rarely home and he doesn't, and won't, have my numbers. Also, he moved to another complex while I was away, so he's pretty much on his own.
Will he sink or swim? He'll have to hit up the message boards to get things to work, and I think Kubuntu left a way to get there from the desktop or K menu. He's a smart guy in fields outside of computing, and he could learn Linux the hard way and become the greatest programmer ever. Or he could hock it for a few ounces of dirt weed.
But I think you'll probably have to pop out of your game to the OS, though you shouldn't have to eject the disk. On the games I've played, you can exit a game and get back to the main screen with the home button and a dialog box.
Well, in my scenerio, I and thousands of others have private roads already installed to the mainland, and the government would be proposing to build a pot-hole filled bridge over which it could concievable restrict access based on the contents of your car.
Free market darwinism would be allowing private entities to compete for the dollars of customers on the basis of quality of service.
This is taxing everybody to create a service that will be useful to a small portion of the population. I like my Internet connection to have a low latency, and a citywide wireless network would definitely not provide the latency I need for gaming, so I would just be paying for a service that would be useless to me as well as the broadband access I'm already paying for.
Where do you live? For example, in British and French politics, as far as I know, conservative means righist views. I've never heard of a conservative, one who by definition supports the status quo, also being a communist.
Look, I'm just tired of Bush being blamed on us when he is obviously just another carpetbagging yankee. The casual overseas observer can be excused since I have no idea where the hell Tony Blair or whatever equivalent leader was born.
Somehow I doubt that, but I don't feel like conducting the experiment myself. I'll just say that even if it does turn out like that, it still does not contradict my point that the water is not radioactive. If you were to put a radiation detector above the water, the reading would not differ from normal tap.
Additionally, who said the the radiation level after using a microwave on your food is safe? Many people, I for one, refuse to eat anything that came out of a microwave. Not only because of the radiation but also because it modifies food on a molecular level, potentially stripping it of the nutrients humans need to be healthy.
Microwaves heat food by exciting the water molecules in it with non-ionizing radiation that is pretty close to the frequency of WiFi, cell phones, etc. There is no contamination of the food and it is not radioactive.
The transition from Win3.1 to Win95 took the longest for me to deal with. 2K to XP took me a day (and I prefer the interface in XP now) to get completely familiar with. I tried the Vista Beta advertised here on Slashdot the other day and it took me 30 seconds. There is a phase of "OK, what did they add to the interface? Oh that, that's kind of neat. I was kind of hoping for something more, but I could see using that. What the hell did they do to the Start Menu?"
I wouldn't have bought a Mac if the interface looked the same as OS09. Sorry. The UNIX guts were nice, but I could get a PC laptop for half the price and run somthing better than OS9 in front of Linux. The OS9->OSX transition took very little difficulty even after having used the old interface for about eight years.
I regularly switch between XP and KDE. XP is standard with the taskbar on the bottom, KDE has the taskbar on autohide on the left of the screen. It takes zero effort to reorient your brain between tasks. In a regular day I use intefaces on KDE, XP, OSX, a PSP, and a DS in addition to whatever video games I play, to do basically the same thing.
The problem wasn't that Clinton was getting any in the White House, it's that he lied about it under oath in a sexual harassment case. His crime was not getting a blowjob, but perjury. And it is relevant to a sexual harassment case if the defendent is currently boning a subordinate. Democrats were, for the most part, responsible for laws in that area, but I guess they don't have to follow them themselves.
Also, as for people dying because of this, Clinton attacked Iraq for having WMDs directly afterwards. Maybe he did it to bury the Lewinski scandal in the news. Maybe he did it because he believed the speech he gave, which was almost identical to the one Bush later gave. This event certainly did result in deaths, but it seems to have been completely forgotten by most people in the country.
You refer to the Kyoto protocol? The treaty that hasn't actaully changed the emissions output by any signing countries but has cost them oodles of money? Yeah, the US sure missed the boat on that one... They could have made a difference.
This story is sure to bring about the usual Leftist vs. Rightist flamefest which is fought out every time a story on climate change is posted on Slashdot.
Certain factions of the rightists will tell you that the Earth has remained the same for it's 6,000 years of existence. No new species have evolved, dinosaur bones were placed in the ground to test our faith, etc. They will then be flamed by the leftists, who will tell you that the Earth and the species it contains have been changing throughout the planet's history, but that such change is somehow unnatural now since every bit of climate change and every extinct species is directly the fault of George W. Bush, who cackles as he kills pandas, pours arsenic into lakes, and makes white people idle their Suburbans just for the sake of adding greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere.
Here's what I think (if you care): The Earth has been in a constant state of flux since it cooled from a molten ball five billion years ago. The climate would change whether humans existed or not. Yes, we may accelerate such change, but life, including human life, by its nature changes its surroundings and adapts to such changes. The Earth is a system with billions upon billions of inputs and outputs, and climate change is just a convenient way of attributing various events to whichever political groups one opposes. A bad hurricane comes around and disproportionately affects minorities? It was caused by global warming. The summer is hot? Global warming. There's an unseasonable late blizzard in the Northeast? Crickets, even though the logic behind the global warming argument could attribute it to human sources, the public wouldn't be swayed by it.
Ah, yes, those wonderful years when we got into Vietnam... now there was a war that was necessary, that was just.
Re:George Bush is Workin' Hard For You
on
Growing Insulin
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· Score: 1
Exactly how much advancement has been made in the space program in the last 25 years? Just about none? In the sixties and seventies, the space program was really just part of a larger strategy to bankrupt the Soviet Union, and it worked. As soon as the USSR was broke, all advancement stopped. The private industry has done more to advance the science of space flight in the last 10 years than NASA has done in the last 25, due at least in part to the profit motive. So let the profit motive fund stem cell research. It's not like pharmaceutical companies don't already spend billions of dollars researching non-lifesaving drugs like viagra. The first company that figures out how to grow livers from scratch will be rewarded handsomely.
Re:George Bush is Workin' Hard For You
on
Growing Insulin
·
· Score: 1
Speaking as someone who wouldn't mind seeing Bush impeached now (not that it would do a whole lot of good...), someone who is pro-abortion under pretty much any circumstance, and someone who has no problem with stem cell research, I am glad he vetoed the bill. Why? It's not the federal government's job to fund this research.
California (IIRC) pledged $2 billion for stem cell research, and that's fine for them. They will probably make their money back in taxes when the investment pays off and biotech firms are attracted to or persuaded to stay in the state. Any private company that invests in stem cell research will also be likely to recover their investment as their research bears fruit. Nothing is stopping anyone from researching stem cells.
As a sibling comment pointed out, you of course, are free to invest in whatever biotech firm you feel is promising or to donate your money to a university that is persuing the research. But keep your damned hands off of my money, and lay off the DailyKos.
I am as concerned about the topic as anyone, but has anyone considered the consumer backlash that would happen should net neutrality become a thing of the past? If my ISP suddenly blocks or degrades traffic to Google or whoever fails to pay them extortion money, the internet will become far less useful to me, and I will cancel my service immediately, possibly expressing my thoughts on the issue on a piece of paper taped to a brick and my cable modem before throwing it through the windows of the Time Warner office.
I've owned and used many laptops, and they all have one thing in common: they get really hot when placed on a thermal insulator that conforms to their shape. Your pants, your bed, all impede the flow of heat from almost half the surface area of the part of the laptop that produces it. When it's on a flat surface like a table air can flow through the bottom since it's raised on those little rubber feet.
According to the professor in my Radioactive Waste Management class, one of the methods for propagating the "Stay the hell away from Yucca Mountain" message for the 100,000 years of its projected duty cycle was to start a religion whose main tenet is to avoid the area. The rationale was that since religions are good at propagating information over spans of time when language, culture, and the like change drastically, it could effectively communicate this information to subsequent generations. It was, of course, dismissed as a possible plan of action. I wish I could find a link to substantiate this....
Slashdot Mirror
Too few people pay too little attention.
Shouldn't that be "Too many people pay too little attention"?
...and noone wants to get involved in a fabricated war...
Oh, you didn't?
True, but I've seen countless stories citing a warmer than usual winter as direct evidence for global warming. I guess the converse isn't true when it doesn't support the environmentalist dogma.
Same here. I've been looking for a Wii on a daily basis for about a month now, in four major metropolitan areas, and have come up empty-handed. I've been offered PS3s multiple times. Yesterday I found one at a store but by the time I got there, a kid was at the check out buying it. Also, our local Fry's just got five in but refuses to sell them without the purchase of a bundle of five games, which brings the price up to an outrageous $500. Fuck that, there aren't five games I want out right now, I just want Zelda and maybe Elebits.
I was working for a small newspaper as a Photoshop monkey. Being semi-competent in Linux, I was pleased when the company switched to OSX from OS9 since I would be able to play with something resembling a modern operating system. The IT staff was still stuck in the OS9 mentality, so I was the one that fixed computers when they broke.
.filename filename, something I could have done in seconds if I'd had access to the company network but which took thirty minutes over the phone with a panicked, menopausal woman on a deadline.
Keep in mind that the photo department doesn't generally employ technically proficient people, they're usually of a more artsy background. My former employer, surprisingly, had promoted two technically proficient photographers to photo editor positions, but the third, incompetent one, was quite a problem. She called me one night in a panic to solve a problem we commonly had with photos that came down from the AP wire. She was the only one on duty at the time
For our paper, the AP photos came in via satellite and were temporarily stored on one of two aging OS9 G4s. The database software, which was used for layout and image storage, would grab the images, extract caption data, and store them on what I believe was a Sun server somewhere. After the designers placed the image on a page, it would go to the engravers, which would Photoshop the image so that it appeared correctly when printed. However, the machines the engravers worked on were OSX. Sometimes, for no good reason, a photo that we had to have came down the wire with a filename that had a leading period. OS9 machines, the ones that caught the images coming from the wire, had absolutely no problem with this. However, whenever the engraver saved the file out to his OSX machine, nothing would appear in the target directory since a leading period in OSX and other Unices hides the file.
So, I'd just gotten off the bus after a long night at work when the editor calls and wants me to come back in to fix this trivial problem. It's 11pm and I don't want to ride the bus all the way back across town without being paid for it, so over the phone I coach a woman who has never heard the word terminal used in this context to "Click on the hard drive icon, the one at the top right of your screen. No, you have to minimize such and such first, you minimize by clicking on this, it's located here... Are you seeing the icons on your desktop? No? What do you see? Hit Apple+M. It is the button with the weird symbol between CTRL and ALT. OK, now go to Applications. Click on it. Go to Utilities. Click on it. Go to Terminal. Click on it."
After that I just gave up on instructing her on what to do and moved down a layer of abstraction to tell her exactly what keys to press. The fix was trivial, you had to go to the terminal and do a mv
I did an experiment recently. Someone I vaguely knew through a friend had come across a laptop that he thought was "hot". As the only nerd he knew, he wanted me to wipe off anything that the hard disk might have had on it. I was amused and thought he was just paranoid, but I humored him.
To be honest, I was the one that alerted him to the existence of programs that phone home when the laptop is stolen. I don't think any normal user ever uses these, but they exist. However, the license number on the pre-existing XP install could probably be matched to the computer it was sold on and maybe to its rightful owner.
The computer looked like a fresh install, complete with with all the worthless bullshit that big-name PC laptop manufacturers bundle with their machines. The goddamned system tray must have had 15 icons in it when expanded, and they all were about to expire. It was 15 or so inches, a widescreen, some year- or two-year old middle of the line model. Nothing to sneeze at.
I told him that I had no version of Windows that predates XP, and the ones I have are legally licensed to me (thank you $5 University copy, it's almost worth it). So he had two options: I could blank the hard disk until he could scare up a copy of XP (he won't, not for normal prices), or I could install Linux. After some explaining, he chose Linux.
I don't think he's ever owned a computer or had access to a family machine, so I figure KDE should be just as easy to learn as Explorer for a first timer. He only wanted to get on the web and play DVDs. The only modern implementation of Linux I've used has been Gentoo, and it has always worked flawlessly, once you get it set up. Portage is amazing, and if things compile, they'll work. Before that I had used Redhat 5, but the RPM system annoyed me to the point that I switched back to Windows for years. It could be because I was using it on an old laptop from 1996 that had a winmodem, but it was a pain in the ass.
I wanted to see if a normal person, a Kaspar Hauser of computing, would pick up on KDE. But not bad enough that I want to toil for days making Gentoo work on his machine. I opted for a precompiled distribution, instead.
I'd heard good things about Ubuntu, but I hate Gnome. So I got Kubuntu. It installed out of a LiveCD, which is much slicker than Windows XPs primitive installation process. Wireless seemed to work, but I wasn't letting this guy on my network and I live in the only complex in the world where everyone has renamed their routers, changed the channels, encrypted, and MAC filtered their wireless. The laptop picked up the neighbors, though, and it sure seemed to be working. DVDs kicked up some error about a decss library and quit after the FBI warning. I tried to install the required library through the graphical upgrade interface, but it didn't work. Very annoying.
So I gave him the laptop and he didn't figure out that its functionality had been severely decreased since recently, when I was out of town. I heard that he was having trouble watching his movies and needed help, but I'm rarely home and he doesn't, and won't, have my numbers. Also, he moved to another complex while I was away, so he's pretty much on his own.
Will he sink or swim? He'll have to hit up the message boards to get things to work, and I think Kubuntu left a way to get there from the desktop or K menu. He's a smart guy in fields outside of computing, and he could learn Linux the hard way and become the greatest programmer ever. Or he could hock it for a few ounces of dirt weed.
But I think you'll probably have to pop out of your game to the OS, though you shouldn't have to eject the disk. On the games I've played, you can exit a game and get back to the main screen with the home button and a dialog box.
Well, in my scenerio, I and thousands of others have private roads already installed to the mainland, and the government would be proposing to build a pot-hole filled bridge over which it could concievable restrict access based on the contents of your car.
Free market darwinism would be allowing private entities to compete for the dollars of customers on the basis of quality of service.
This is taxing everybody to create a service that will be useful to a small portion of the population. I like my Internet connection to have a low latency, and a citywide wireless network would definitely not provide the latency I need for gaming, so I would just be paying for a service that would be useless to me as well as the broadband access I'm already paying for.
Where do you live? For example, in British and French politics, as far as I know, conservative means righist views. I've never heard of a conservative, one who by definition supports the status quo, also being a communist.
Look, I'm just tired of Bush being blamed on us when he is obviously just another carpetbagging yankee. The casual overseas observer can be excused since I have no idea where the hell Tony Blair or whatever equivalent leader was born.
Somehow I doubt that, but I don't feel like conducting the experiment myself. I'll just say that even if it does turn out like that, it still does not contradict my point that the water is not radioactive. If you were to put a radiation detector above the water, the reading would not differ from normal tap.
You are an idiot. ID is not taught in Texas, and Bush is from Connecticut, so stop blaming him on us.
Microwaves heat food by exciting the water molecules in it with non-ionizing radiation that is pretty close to the frequency of WiFi, cell phones, etc. There is no contamination of the food and it is not radioactive.
I wouldn't have bought a Mac if the interface looked the same as OS09. Sorry. The UNIX guts were nice, but I could get a PC laptop for half the price and run somthing better than OS9 in front of Linux. The OS9->OSX transition took very little difficulty even after having used the old interface for about eight years.
I regularly switch between XP and KDE. XP is standard with the taskbar on the bottom, KDE has the taskbar on autohide on the left of the screen. It takes zero effort to reorient your brain between tasks. In a regular day I use intefaces on KDE, XP, OSX, a PSP, and a DS in addition to whatever video games I play, to do basically the same thing.
Hey, I'd be somewhat interested, and my roommate is programming his own indie game. Do you teach at ACC or UT?
Also, as for people dying because of this, Clinton attacked Iraq for having WMDs directly afterwards. Maybe he did it to bury the Lewinski scandal in the news. Maybe he did it because he believed the speech he gave, which was almost identical to the one Bush later gave. This event certainly did result in deaths, but it seems to have been completely forgotten by most people in the country.
You refer to the Kyoto protocol? The treaty that hasn't actaully changed the emissions output by any signing countries but has cost them oodles of money? Yeah, the US sure missed the boat on that one... They could have made a difference.
Certain factions of the rightists will tell you that the Earth has remained the same for it's 6,000 years of existence. No new species have evolved, dinosaur bones were placed in the ground to test our faith, etc. They will then be flamed by the leftists, who will tell you that the Earth and the species it contains have been changing throughout the planet's history, but that such change is somehow unnatural now since every bit of climate change and every extinct species is directly the fault of George W. Bush, who cackles as he kills pandas, pours arsenic into lakes, and makes white people idle their Suburbans just for the sake of adding greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere.
Here's what I think (if you care): The Earth has been in a constant state of flux since it cooled from a molten ball five billion years ago. The climate would change whether humans existed or not. Yes, we may accelerate such change, but life, including human life, by its nature changes its surroundings and adapts to such changes. The Earth is a system with billions upon billions of inputs and outputs, and climate change is just a convenient way of attributing various events to whichever political groups one opposes. A bad hurricane comes around and disproportionately affects minorities? It was caused by global warming. The summer is hot? Global warming. There's an unseasonable late blizzard in the Northeast? Crickets, even though the logic behind the global warming argument could attribute it to human sources, the public wouldn't be swayed by it.
Ah, yes, those wonderful years when we got into Vietnam... now there was a war that was necessary, that was just.
Exactly how much advancement has been made in the space program in the last 25 years? Just about none? In the sixties and seventies, the space program was really just part of a larger strategy to bankrupt the Soviet Union, and it worked. As soon as the USSR was broke, all advancement stopped. The private industry has done more to advance the science of space flight in the last 10 years than NASA has done in the last 25, due at least in part to the profit motive. So let the profit motive fund stem cell research. It's not like pharmaceutical companies don't already spend billions of dollars researching non-lifesaving drugs like viagra. The first company that figures out how to grow livers from scratch will be rewarded handsomely.
Speaking as someone who wouldn't mind seeing Bush impeached now (not that it would do a whole lot of good...), someone who is pro-abortion under pretty much any circumstance, and someone who has no problem with stem cell research, I am glad he vetoed the bill. Why? It's not the federal government's job to fund this research.
California (IIRC) pledged $2 billion for stem cell research, and that's fine for them. They will probably make their money back in taxes when the investment pays off and biotech firms are attracted to or persuaded to stay in the state. Any private company that invests in stem cell research will also be likely to recover their investment as their research bears fruit. Nothing is stopping anyone from researching stem cells.
As a sibling comment pointed out, you of course, are free to invest in whatever biotech firm you feel is promising or to donate your money to a university that is persuing the research. But keep your damned hands off of my money, and lay off the DailyKos.
Got it?
Good.
I am as concerned about the topic as anyone, but has anyone considered the consumer backlash that would happen should net neutrality become a thing of the past? If my ISP suddenly blocks or degrades traffic to Google or whoever fails to pay them extortion money, the internet will become far less useful to me, and I will cancel my service immediately, possibly expressing my thoughts on the issue on a piece of paper taped to a brick and my cable modem before throwing it through the windows of the Time Warner office.
I've owned and used many laptops, and they all have one thing in common: they get really hot when placed on a thermal insulator that conforms to their shape. Your pants, your bed, all impede the flow of heat from almost half the surface area of the part of the laptop that produces it. When it's on a flat surface like a table air can flow through the bottom since it's raised on those little rubber feet.
According to the professor in my Radioactive Waste Management class, one of the methods for propagating the "Stay the hell away from Yucca Mountain" message for the 100,000 years of its projected duty cycle was to start a religion whose main tenet is to avoid the area. The rationale was that since religions are good at propagating information over spans of time when language, culture, and the like change drastically, it could effectively communicate this information to subsequent generations. It was, of course, dismissed as a possible plan of action. I wish I could find a link to substantiate this....