Thank you for that revealing demonstration of the difference between civilization and barbarism. "Devil's Advocate" can be an extremely effective rhetorical device.
Of course, if you're serious, then you wouldn't mind if I came over to your house and murdered you and your family -- because after all, by your logic if I'm physically capabable of doing it, then I have every right to do so and you have no right to live.
We would be better off if all science had a governing body that said which studies are worthwhile
No, we absolutely wouldn't be. The problem is that nobody knows what is "worthwhile" and what isn't. It's obvious in hindsight, for example, that studying aerodynamics to learn how to make a workable airplane was a productive application of science, but at the time many people thought it was a complete waste of time (i.e. how could anything heavier than air possibly fly?). If science had a "governing body" that ordered the Wright brothers (etc) to work on "something more worthwhile", would the airplane ever have been invented?
On a different topic: shouldn't this specimen properly be called a "T. Regina"?
On the disgusting scale, how does eating meating containing traces of fecal matter, compare to eating plants, which are grown in, and indirectly constructed out of, fecal matter?
To the average person, it's probably quite a bit worse, since once the plant has absorbed the nutrients from the soil, they are no longer considered to be fecal matter. The fecal matter in the meat, on the other hand, is still in its original form.
Let me put it this way: People won't be very afraid after the terrorists fail to kill anyone after the second or third attempt.
Perhaps... but even with no casualties, the ability to cause a panic-evacuation and week-long shutdown/"decontamination" of all businesses in a major metropolitan area is nothing to sneeze at. Between the psychological effects, the economic effects, and the long-term effect on property values, even a "placebo" dirty bomb is a pretty good deal for your up-and-coming terrorist.
On the plus side, maybe some actual experience with the harmful effects (or lack thereof) of low-level radiation will make people more reasonable on the subject, at which point dirty-bombs will no longer be so useful to terrorists. In the meantime, the public's irrational fear of radiation is quite exploitable as a means of sowing havoc.
Repeat after me: Dirty bombs don't work. They are a media scare and nothing else. Campaigns of FUD are designed to fool idiots into believing that everything they read in comic books is true.
Now repeat after me: What is the objective of terrorism? To make people afraid. Do "dirty bombs" make people afraid? Yes. Therefore, they work just fine.
I don't know about you, but irrated shit is still shit. Safe or not, it's still fucking disgusting.
Very true. On the other hand, so is cutting up an animal and eating its flesh. Most people have a very simple method for dealing with that fact: they ignore it. And if they can ignore that, I don't think they will have any problems ignoring the presence of feces, either, as long as they can't recognize it as such, don't have to hear about it, and don't get sick from it.
What would then happen, is that this would create a market for nuclear materials. Once this market existed, it would continue to drive down prices until nuclear-only batteries become affordable.
Thereby making it trivial for anyone with Wal-Mart access to put together a "dirty bomb"? Sounds exciting!
If manufacturer's create a battery that lasts for years...how is that good business?
It's good for business in that people will buy such a battery, and will be willing to pay a premium for it. By your logic, nobody would bother selling cars, since they last for a good ten years.
The overlooked question is whether Microsoft will institute a saner shell folder structure more akin to what's found elsewhere. Removing overlong directory names would go a long way, and removing spaces from those names and announcing the person in charge for coming up with that scheme was fired would also help.
There are many people who think that doing just the opposite makes things more sane. I guess it probably comes down to the slow typists vs. the people with poor memory...
How is "System" any clearer than "Computer"? At least the layman knows what a "Computer" is... a "System" could mean just about anything.
In any case, what you should actually say is "click on the XYZ icon", where XYZ is whatever the icon has for a label. That makes it obvious to the layman that you are referring to an icon, and not some other less-than-obvious object.
Burning an oil derived from a carbon sink (like the algae described in the article) only takes excess pollutants from one place and puts it somewhere else.
True, but if (say) your nation's fleet of 18-wheelers is now re-emitting CO2 that had previously been emitted by power plants, that means that they aren't burning CO2 that was dug out of the ground separately just for them. So you are still in a better position that you would have been otherwise... instead of CO2 entering the atmosphere from both the trucks and the power plants, you are effectively only emitting the CO2 from the power plants. It's a twofer.
Re:It will be economically viable, one day
on
Filling Up On Algae
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· Score: 1
So, like the same old story goes for all alternative fuels and energy, we'll just have to wait for peak oil to make it economically viable
Not necessarily... it just has to be cheap enough to be practical. If they can make it cheap/economical enough to compete with today's mined oil, then there is no need to wait for some future "peak event".
have you ever heard of playing Devil's Advocate and simply debating for the sake of debate?
The point is that the other person needs to be aware that that is what you are doing. If you just walk up to someone and say something unconscionable without any context or pretext, they are likely to conclude that you have an unstable personality. If you want to play Devil's Advocate, fine, but basic social skills require that you make that clear in advance.
You would think smart people would be running the USA, but we invaded Iraq anyway... And yet these smart people continue to defend that stupid idea too
Hey, would you want to be the guy who stands up and admits that we spent $300+ billion and killed 100,000+ people by mistake? Anyone who does that will get torn limb from limb by both the left (who want a scapegoat) and the right (who want to maintain their delusions of competence and morality).
Back in the old BeOS days, they used to talk about companies playing games of "launchpad chicken". This is the situation where the a software release is scheduled to be shipped on a certain date, and all the engineers know that the software has no chance of being shippable by that date, but nobody wants to be the guy who tells management and ends up being blamed for the schedule slipping. So everybody keeps their head down and says nothing, hoping that someone else will be the one to admit that things are screwed up. And so the release date gets nearer and nearer, and management have no idea how bad the situation is until it's too late to do much about it. I'd say there is something similar going on between the American government and the American public -- everyone in the government and the military knows how badly things have been screwed up, but nobody wants to be the one to tell the public about it, and (inevitably) get blamed for the failure.
For example: "If the US government really wants to save as many lives as possible, they should give everybody two weeks' notice and then drop a nuclear bomb in the center of Jerusalem" [...] Sadly, the vast majority of people either disagree without justification, or (even more worryingly) agree without justification -- which just demonstrates how unwilling most sheep^Wpeople are to engage in thought and/or debate
.... with an apparent genocidal psychopath. I too would nod, smile, and back away slowly to the nearest exit....;^)
So Dennis Leary, the famous entertainer, thinks that entertainers shouldn't be allowed to express political opinions? I wonder, is he just trying to defend his turf, or has his irony meter gone completely offline?
You are 100% incorrect. You're allowed to create your own slipstreamed driver and service pack disk, regardless of whether you're a home user or a business user.
Interesting -- I did not know that. Given that you are then installing one copy of Windows onto multiple machines, how are the licensing issues handled?
Isn't this a bad thing? You would never catch typos when using variables.
Definitely. I used to do a lot of ARexx programming on the Amiga, and I have spent hours trying to figure out why my script wasn't working quite right (it would run without giving any errors, but do the wrong thing), only to eventually find out that in one place I had a tiny typo in a variable reference, causing it to use the value '0' in the calculation instead of the proper value.
Having to declare variables is annoying, but the alternative is worse.
i would just like to point out that just as easily as you could create a linux install CD with a custom set of drivers, you can do the same for Windows XP.
From a technical perspective, that is correct, but from a legal perspective you are treading on very thin ice. If you are creating custom Windows distributions to install on computers at work, you'd better make sure you have Microsoft's permission to do so, or some day the BSA may raid your office and your company might end up liable for some very hefty fines.
Re:So, you programmers ready to give up your jobs?
on
McVoy Strikes Back
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· Score: 1
So, what happens to all the programmers in the world when everything goes open source and free?
The good ones continue to write programs and get paid for them. I get paid to work on open source software; other people get paid to work on open source software, and so can you. Open source is not the same as profitless.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, if you're serious, then you wouldn't mind if I came over to your house and murdered you and your family -- because after all, by your logic if I'm physically capabable of doing it, then I have every right to do so and you have no right to live.
What, you mean Turing Machines? Big deal, we've had those since the '30s...
No, we absolutely wouldn't be. The problem is that nobody knows what is "worthwhile" and what isn't. It's obvious in hindsight, for example, that studying aerodynamics to learn how to make a workable airplane was a productive application of science, but at the time many people thought it was a complete waste of time (i.e. how could anything heavier than air possibly fly?). If science had a "governing body" that ordered the Wright brothers (etc) to work on "something more worthwhile", would the airplane ever have been invented?
On a different topic: shouldn't this specimen properly be called a "T. Regina"?
Bah... the universe is mostly empty space. It would compress nicely.
To the average person, it's probably quite a bit worse, since once the plant has absorbed the nutrients from the soil, they are no longer considered to be fecal matter. The fecal matter in the meat, on the other hand, is still in its original form.
Perhaps... but even with no casualties, the ability to cause a panic-evacuation and week-long shutdown/"decontamination" of all businesses in a major metropolitan area is nothing to sneeze at. Between the psychological effects, the economic effects, and the long-term effect on property values, even a "placebo" dirty bomb is a pretty good deal for your up-and-coming terrorist.
On the plus side, maybe some actual experience with the harmful effects (or lack thereof) of low-level radiation will make people more reasonable on the subject, at which point dirty-bombs will no longer be so useful to terrorists. In the meantime, the public's irrational fear of radiation is quite exploitable as a means of sowing havoc.
Now repeat after me: What is the objective of terrorism? To make people afraid. Do "dirty bombs" make people afraid? Yes. Therefore, they work just fine.
Very true. On the other hand, so is cutting up an animal and eating its flesh. Most people have a very simple method for dealing with that fact: they ignore it. And if they can ignore that, I don't think they will have any problems ignoring the presence of feces, either, as long as they can't recognize it as such, don't have to hear about it, and don't get sick from it.
Thereby making it trivial for anyone with Wal-Mart access to put together a "dirty bomb"? Sounds exciting!
It's good for business in that people will buy such a battery, and will be willing to pay a premium for it. By your logic, nobody would bother selling cars, since they last for a good ten years.
Better call them something else, though, or you'll hear a lot more screaming from the market. And not in a good way.
There are many people who think that doing just the opposite makes things more sane. I guess it probably comes down to the slow typists vs. the people with poor memory...
In any case, what you should actually say is "click on the XYZ icon", where XYZ is whatever the icon has for a label. That makes it obvious to the layman that you are referring to an icon, and not some other less-than-obvious object.
The parent poster doth protest too much, methinks.
True, but if (say) your nation's fleet of 18-wheelers is now re-emitting CO2 that had previously been emitted by power plants, that means that they aren't burning CO2 that was dug out of the ground separately just for them. So you are still in a better position that you would have been otherwise... instead of CO2 entering the atmosphere from both the trucks and the power plants, you are effectively only emitting the CO2 from the power plants. It's a twofer.
Not necessarily... it just has to be cheap enough to be practical. If they can make it cheap/economical enough to compete with today's mined oil, then there is no need to wait for some future "peak event".
It's nothing other than "The Matrix" for the poor algae! Why won't somebody think of the algae?
The point is that the other person needs to be aware that that is what you are doing. If you just walk up to someone and say something unconscionable without any context or pretext, they are likely to conclude that you have an unstable personality. If you want to play Devil's Advocate, fine, but basic social skills require that you make that clear in advance.
Hey, would you want to be the guy who stands up and admits that we spent $300+ billion and killed 100,000+ people by mistake? Anyone who does that will get torn limb from limb by both the left (who want a scapegoat) and the right (who want to maintain their delusions of competence and morality).
Back in the old BeOS days, they used to talk about companies playing games of "launchpad chicken". This is the situation where the a software release is scheduled to be shipped on a certain date, and all the engineers know that the software has no chance of being shippable by that date, but nobody wants to be the guy who tells management and ends up being blamed for the schedule slipping. So everybody keeps their head down and says nothing, hoping that someone else will be the one to admit that things are screwed up. And so the release date gets nearer and nearer, and management have no idea how bad the situation is until it's too late to do much about it. I'd say there is something similar going on between the American government and the American public -- everyone in the government and the military knows how badly things have been screwed up, but nobody wants to be the one to tell the public about it, and (inevitably) get blamed for the failure.
So Dennis Leary, the famous entertainer, thinks that entertainers shouldn't be allowed to express political opinions? I wonder, is he just trying to defend his turf, or has his irony meter gone completely offline?
Interesting -- I did not know that. Given that you are then installing one copy of Windows onto multiple machines, how are the licensing issues handled?
Definitely. I used to do a lot of ARexx programming on the Amiga, and I have spent hours trying to figure out why my script wasn't working quite right (it would run without giving any errors, but do the wrong thing), only to eventually find out that in one place I had a tiny typo in a variable reference, causing it to use the value '0' in the calculation instead of the proper value.
Having to declare variables is annoying, but the alternative is worse.
From a technical perspective, that is correct, but from a legal perspective you are treading on very thin ice. If you are creating custom Windows distributions to install on computers at work, you'd better make sure you have Microsoft's permission to do so, or some day the BSA may raid your office and your company might end up liable for some very hefty fines.
The good ones continue to write programs and get paid for them. I get paid to work on open source software; other people get paid to work on open source software, and so can you. Open source is not the same as profitless.