Why do that when they can keep making money by spreading FUD and ruckus? Besides, the truth is for commies and terrorists. Real patriots take pride in their ignorance and cognitive dissonance!
A) I don't use, and have never used, KDE.
B) You can be skeptical all you want. I've had it running 10.04 for about 3 months now. It chugs along just fine. (I will acknowledge that GIMP takes a long time to open).
Yep, they are the only organization to stand up to governments and expose what they were doing, period./sarcasm
It's not like the EFF ever made any attempt to disseminate information about the threats to freedom of speech online. It's not like the ACLU ever made any attempt, whatsoever, in the past 30 years to educate American citizens on how to exercise their rights to the freedom of speech. It's not like Ron Paul (crazy as he is) made any political effort to convince Americans that it is okay to let people say stupid, mean shit since freedom ensures that you get to hear the bad as well as the good.
Nope, none of those organizations, nor any other individuals (Who got the prize last year? Liu Xiaobo? What was that for again?) have contributed to the cause of free speech in the last 30 years.
Look unity, I appreciate what Wikileaks has done as much as the next guy (at least, the next intelligent guy who can think for himself), but claiming that they are the only organization to defend free speech in the last 30 years is just downright dishonest. Not to mention the fact that it belittles the contributions of every other organization and individual that has put any time and effort into sticking up for the right to free speech.
Love on Wikileaks all you want, but tone down the extremism and hyperbole. Keep things in perspective. Otherwise folks won't take you seriously.
While nothing can beat seeing a work of art in person....
I disagree wholeheartedly here. If Google, or someone else, can, one day, download the world's most famous art projects directly into my visual, auditory, olfactory, and other sensory lobes in my brain, that would beat the hell out of traveling through the meatspace to see a piece of art in person. I know we're not there yet, but we're chugging forward baby steps at a time. So yeah, nostalgia and all that says that a visit to The Louvre is a life-changing experience, blah blah blah.
But frankly, I don't have the time or patience to deal with the hordes of gawking art patrons at a museum. So yeah, Google, keep up the work (along with everyone else bringing information to the masses). One day, when I can press a button on my phone, and have my brain light up like it just saw Mona Lisa in person, then I certainly will proclaim that such an experience beats the hell out of actually seeing that painting in person.
Wake me when a group of amateurs puts a rocket into orbit, or, better yet, when a group of amateurs demonstrates some kind of new technology on a piggyback payload in space. I like the DIY scene. I like the Space industry. Hell, I'm a member of both. But until the DIYer's start putting hardware on orbit, then the only thing they will be contributing towards the actual space industry is weather balloon data for a particular date (a compendium of which, for numerous dates, is actually useful in the launch industry).
In other words, I love the zeal folks are starting to develop for cheapening access to space, but there is still a huge gap between the duct tape engineers and the engineering companies that pay good salaries for professional level work. It will be news when that gap decreases down to a blurry line.
I had a fling with Chrome, but it made me feel like I was being bukake'd by internet advertisement companies, so I switched back to Firefox. Firefox may be a bit curvier than she used to, but at least she doesn't dress me up in a garter belt and stockings and put me on display for the old boy's club of the internet data mining community.
...and while 512MB of DDR2 memory might not sound very generous, if you need more then your project probably isn't suited to the plug computing model.
Hey now, my primary desktop PC is still running with 512 MB of DDR ram (not even DDR2). What's wrong with that? Hell, my primary laptop is running with 128 MB RAM so suck on that!
Then again, that may explain why firefox crashes all my computers and my N900 has become my favored internet browsing device. But hey, 512 is enough for Arduino projects, Matlab, Ubuntu 10.04, perl hacking, home network management. =)
We're part of nature, as are all of our bad habits. All species consume to reproduce and progress. That's what they do. That's what we do. Humans aren't alone in this. It's just that humans have gotten so good at it that we pretty much out compete everything we have come into contact with so far. There is nothing wrong, or unnatural, about utilizing our planet to the fullest extent to further our species. The only trick is to make sure that we have other resources available before we use up the ones that we presently rely upon.
Same thing goes for riding a motorcycle. Once you've had someone in a car cut you off at 70 miles an hour while on a bike, or once you've had someone with their 5 ton pick-up truck change lanes into you like you don't even exist, you learn really quick just how dangerous driving really is. When there is nothing between you and a body cast save some kevlar and nylon, you wise-up to just what dickheads other drivers are...mostly due to incompetence rather than aggression.
Ha! That's a fun conclusion. Let's think about this. In a manual, when you shift up or down, it dramatically affects how your car is going to respond (more power, or mroe speed? etc.). Whereas if you drive an automatic transmission, your car is going to respond in whatever manner it is programmed to. So, driving stick, you pay attention to the road, the grade, the bank, and so on, because you need to know the appropriate power necessary to negotiate a maneuver given the road. Driving automatic, however, you just go into the maneuver trusting your car to do the right thing for you. And, on the chance that your car shifts down when you don't want it to, or shifts up when you don't want it to, you ask yourself, "What the fuck is my car doing?" Whereas, since you shifted to your gear in the stick, you can shift out or stay put based on your judging of the conditions (the shifting action itself takes no attention, it's pure instinct).
So, in which scenario are you actually paying attention to your car, and in which scenario are you actually paying more attention to the road? Think about it.
I live on the California central coast. We have a nuclear power plant operating here. There is a large group of enviromentalists that are currently doing their best to impede, delay, and otherwise ruin the re-licensing and upgrading of the power plant. (Effectively, if they block the license process long enough, the plant will simply shut down as it will cost too much money to keep up the legal hearings). The group is known as Mothers for Peace, you can find their website with a simple google search (look in the San Luis Obispo area). Mind you, they are not strictly an environmentalist group, they are really just a bunch of unintelligent nutters with various agendas. However, a large portion of their membership is part of the group because they are environmentalists. So yes, in some instances, environmentalists really do oppose intelligent progress and good engineering and science.
You're right that there are a lot of enviromentalists that are not that freakin' stupid. However, the vocal groups like the one I described, that actively impede the steady progress of our society, bring a bad name to those more level headed (as is the case with all interest groups). The best thing that level-headed environmentalists could do would be to speak out, vocally, about this kind of nonsense and condemn groups that simply take contrary positions by default. In other words, if the more level-headed environmentalists would throw their collective voice behind developing something like safe, reliable nuclear technology, more folks in the general public would see that, rather than the nutter-fringe elements that collectively act as attention whores. Until then, however, I am afraid that environmentalist will always be a word associated with activist schmucks who refuse to understand good science and engineering.
The Diablo Canyon Plant in California has been operating safely for almost 30 years now, on a fault line nonetheless. It provides a huge chunk of the power available to the Western seaboard. The license is currently up for renewal, and there are some upgrades under discussion to go along with the new license. This 30 year positive track record, however, has not stopped a local group of protesters (Mothers for Peace, blech) from impeding the licensing process every step of the way.
At every local hearing, engineers and safety experts address, rationally, the concerns of the protesters. At every local hearing, the protesters walk away insisting that the scientists are trying to kill them and bomb the Central Coast. That's not hyperbole, that's literally what I have heard come out of their mouths. So to answer your question, nuclear power, even dated nuclear power plants, can be safe and can produce plenty of electricity to pay for themselves. It really is the enviro-nuts that have a stick up their ass about that big scary thing called science that are holding our society back.
Never underestimate the power of looking trendy in America. We may be a bunch of hedonistic, materialist, self-centered assholes on the world stage, but those are precisely the qualities that make our consumer market so damn powerful.
On the bright side, more girls are wearing thick rimmed glasses with ironic t-shirts and letting their hair down in an attempt to look semi-geeky/hipster. I can't be the only one who is enjoying that change in style can I?
The result is that whoever actually gets elected finds it increasingly difficult to actually secure the majority one always needs in order to create a functioning government.
Good! Lately in the States having a functioning government has been precisely the problem when it comes to citizen's rights. The only useful government is one that's so broken it fights itself. That leaves the citizens free to go about their lives without having to fuck about with the heavy hand of useless government bureaucracy and monitoring.
Well that's pretty damn selfish. Some of us honestly don't give a fuck about your god or your lord and have better things to do with our time than listen to you and your ideas about the universe. But that's not going to stop you from trying to talk to us anyways is it? Nope, you have to make brownie points with your imaginary sky fairy so we have to suffer your intolerable intrusiveness into our lives. And with each chance to tell people about god, Jesus, and all that mumbo jumbo you waste a little mroe of our time, and impede a little bit more into our lives and our privacy.
It never ceases to amaze me how fucking selfish religious people are, as if they and their beliefs are the center of the whole frackin' universe.
That's kind of what I was thinking. We pay attention to all of China's launch facilities (hell, you can read about every one of their launches on most space websites). You can't exactly keep a rocket launch under wraps. To the best of my knowledge, we have known well ahead of time which payloads were launched on which Chinese boosters. So, I would be really surprised if they somehow concealed an entire launch and/or payload from but the U.S. government and the very active space enthusiast news agencies.
Because compared to the current state of the U.S. space industry, China is decades behind. And if you don't believe that, then you've been reading too many sensationalist headlines. As someone who has been actively watching space industry jobs worldwide I can guarantee you that nobody, not even China, is employing as many folks in a Space industry as the U.S. government and various U.S. based commercial companies. China may be kicking our ass economically, but when it comes to space, we Americans are still top dogs.
And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle's takeoff. I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them.
Dammit I wish that lesson had impressed upon more folk back then. I wish that lesson could be impressed upon every generation from here on out. Today's leaders like to talk about keeping America innovative, and strong, and all that jazz. But the one thing they leave out of their speeches is the simple fact that anything worth doing, anything that can make use stronger, is risky. With risk, eventually, comes sacrifice. And where sacrifice leads to a fire of mourning, the phoenix of greatness will always rise from the ashes. Say what you will about Reagan, but he nailed it with this one. The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted, and those societies that wish to remain relevant in the future need to learn that. Plain and simple.
Well good for you, but I actually have the birth certificate to prove it. You can probably even find a sentence or two about it in the local paper of my hometown on that date. I think the published birth and deaths in the county daily back then.
As someone who grew up in a very small town in some foothills in California I can tell you that, yes, indeed, you must be living in a different part of the country. In the town of 5k people where I grew up, it is an exceptional rarity that I meet anyone who actually does consider evolution to be worth a second thought. Even in my own family, I am almost always met with the line, "I believe in evolution within a species, but I don't think one species can evolve into another." And when I try to explain that this type of mindset is completely inconsistent with the theory of evolution or, for that matter, pull up speciation examples in various animals, I am simply met with a glazed over gaze and something along the lines of, "Well I don't know about all that, but I sure as hell didn't evolve from a monkey!"
And yes, in our HS, evolution was a hot topic that got our teachers in hot water when it was taught appropriately. Having been religious through HS, I would like to take this moment to apologize to my HS biology teacher for the bullshit I gave her regarding the subject. But all personal anecdotes aside, yes, indeed, there are parts of this country, entire towns even, where dumb religious fundies have a huge sway over the education system.
Oddly enough, the small set of Catholics in my hometown were never the ones to throw up a fuss about evolution. It was mostly the people that attended Baptist, Methodist, and Episcopalian churches, as well as the many members of the local Calvary Chapel and Seventh Day Advenist's academy.
Slashdot Mirror
By your powers combined, I am Captain Hide-the-Truth!
Why do that when they can keep making money by spreading FUD and ruckus? Besides, the truth is for commies and terrorists. Real patriots take pride in their ignorance and cognitive dissonance!
I'm not sure why Apple would want to get involved in this manner with the greatest evil in our world today.
Answer: Money.
A) I don't use, and have never used, KDE.
B) You can be skeptical all you want. I've had it running 10.04 for about 3 months now. It chugs along just fine. (I will acknowledge that GIMP takes a long time to open).
Yep, they are the only organization to stand up to governments and expose what they were doing, period. /sarcasm
It's not like the EFF ever made any attempt to disseminate information about the threats to freedom of speech online. It's not like the ACLU ever made any attempt, whatsoever, in the past 30 years to educate American citizens on how to exercise their rights to the freedom of speech. It's not like Ron Paul (crazy as he is) made any political effort to convince Americans that it is okay to let people say stupid, mean shit since freedom ensures that you get to hear the bad as well as the good.
Nope, none of those organizations, nor any other individuals (Who got the prize last year? Liu Xiaobo? What was that for again?) have contributed to the cause of free speech in the last 30 years.
Look unity, I appreciate what Wikileaks has done as much as the next guy (at least, the next intelligent guy who can think for himself), but claiming that they are the only organization to defend free speech in the last 30 years is just downright dishonest. Not to mention the fact that it belittles the contributions of every other organization and individual that has put any time and effort into sticking up for the right to free speech.
Love on Wikileaks all you want, but tone down the extremism and hyperbole. Keep things in perspective. Otherwise folks won't take you seriously.
Porn, art, the only difference is what part of your body you're masturbating over it.
While nothing can beat seeing a work of art in person....
I disagree wholeheartedly here. If Google, or someone else, can, one day, download the world's most famous art projects directly into my visual, auditory, olfactory, and other sensory lobes in my brain, that would beat the hell out of traveling through the meatspace to see a piece of art in person. I know we're not there yet, but we're chugging forward baby steps at a time. So yeah, nostalgia and all that says that a visit to The Louvre is a life-changing experience, blah blah blah.
But frankly, I don't have the time or patience to deal with the hordes of gawking art patrons at a museum. So yeah, Google, keep up the work (along with everyone else bringing information to the masses). One day, when I can press a button on my phone, and have my brain light up like it just saw Mona Lisa in person, then I certainly will proclaim that such an experience beats the hell out of actually seeing that painting in person.
Wake me when a group of amateurs puts a rocket into orbit, or, better yet, when a group of amateurs demonstrates some kind of new technology on a piggyback payload in space. I like the DIY scene. I like the Space industry. Hell, I'm a member of both. But until the DIYer's start putting hardware on orbit, then the only thing they will be contributing towards the actual space industry is weather balloon data for a particular date (a compendium of which, for numerous dates, is actually useful in the launch industry).
In other words, I love the zeal folks are starting to develop for cheapening access to space, but there is still a huge gap between the duct tape engineers and the engineering companies that pay good salaries for professional level work. It will be news when that gap decreases down to a blurry line.
To 11?
I had a fling with Chrome, but it made me feel like I was being bukake'd by internet advertisement companies, so I switched back to Firefox. Firefox may be a bit curvier than she used to, but at least she doesn't dress me up in a garter belt and stockings and put me on display for the old boy's club of the internet data mining community.
...and while 512MB of DDR2 memory might not sound very generous, if you need more then your project probably isn't suited to the plug computing model.
Hey now, my primary desktop PC is still running with 512 MB of DDR ram (not even DDR2). What's wrong with that? Hell, my primary laptop is running with 128 MB RAM so suck on that!
Then again, that may explain why firefox crashes all my computers and my N900 has become my favored internet browsing device. But hey, 512 is enough for Arduino projects, Matlab, Ubuntu 10.04, perl hacking, home network management. =)
Does the word "nature" mean anything to you?
We're part of nature, as are all of our bad habits. All species consume to reproduce and progress. That's what they do. That's what we do. Humans aren't alone in this. It's just that humans have gotten so good at it that we pretty much out compete everything we have come into contact with so far. There is nothing wrong, or unnatural, about utilizing our planet to the fullest extent to further our species. The only trick is to make sure that we have other resources available before we use up the ones that we presently rely upon.
Same thing goes for riding a motorcycle. Once you've had someone in a car cut you off at 70 miles an hour while on a bike, or once you've had someone with their 5 ton pick-up truck change lanes into you like you don't even exist, you learn really quick just how dangerous driving really is. When there is nothing between you and a body cast save some kevlar and nylon, you wise-up to just what dickheads other drivers are...mostly due to incompetence rather than aggression.
Ha! That's a fun conclusion. Let's think about this. In a manual, when you shift up or down, it dramatically affects how your car is going to respond (more power, or mroe speed? etc.). Whereas if you drive an automatic transmission, your car is going to respond in whatever manner it is programmed to. So, driving stick, you pay attention to the road, the grade, the bank, and so on, because you need to know the appropriate power necessary to negotiate a maneuver given the road. Driving automatic, however, you just go into the maneuver trusting your car to do the right thing for you. And, on the chance that your car shifts down when you don't want it to, or shifts up when you don't want it to, you ask yourself, "What the fuck is my car doing?" Whereas, since you shifted to your gear in the stick, you can shift out or stay put based on your judging of the conditions (the shifting action itself takes no attention, it's pure instinct).
So, in which scenario are you actually paying attention to your car, and in which scenario are you actually paying more attention to the road? Think about it.
I live on the California central coast. We have a nuclear power plant operating here. There is a large group of enviromentalists that are currently doing their best to impede, delay, and otherwise ruin the re-licensing and upgrading of the power plant. (Effectively, if they block the license process long enough, the plant will simply shut down as it will cost too much money to keep up the legal hearings). The group is known as Mothers for Peace, you can find their website with a simple google search (look in the San Luis Obispo area). Mind you, they are not strictly an environmentalist group, they are really just a bunch of unintelligent nutters with various agendas. However, a large portion of their membership is part of the group because they are environmentalists. So yes, in some instances, environmentalists really do oppose intelligent progress and good engineering and science.
You're right that there are a lot of enviromentalists that are not that freakin' stupid. However, the vocal groups like the one I described, that actively impede the steady progress of our society, bring a bad name to those more level headed (as is the case with all interest groups). The best thing that level-headed environmentalists could do would be to speak out, vocally, about this kind of nonsense and condemn groups that simply take contrary positions by default. In other words, if the more level-headed environmentalists would throw their collective voice behind developing something like safe, reliable nuclear technology, more folks in the general public would see that, rather than the nutter-fringe elements that collectively act as attention whores. Until then, however, I am afraid that environmentalist will always be a word associated with activist schmucks who refuse to understand good science and engineering.
The Diablo Canyon Plant in California has been operating safely for almost 30 years now, on a fault line nonetheless. It provides a huge chunk of the power available to the Western seaboard. The license is currently up for renewal, and there are some upgrades under discussion to go along with the new license. This 30 year positive track record, however, has not stopped a local group of protesters (Mothers for Peace, blech) from impeding the licensing process every step of the way.
At every local hearing, engineers and safety experts address, rationally, the concerns of the protesters. At every local hearing, the protesters walk away insisting that the scientists are trying to kill them and bomb the Central Coast. That's not hyperbole, that's literally what I have heard come out of their mouths. So to answer your question, nuclear power, even dated nuclear power plants, can be safe and can produce plenty of electricity to pay for themselves. It really is the enviro-nuts that have a stick up their ass about that big scary thing called science that are holding our society back.
Never underestimate the power of looking trendy in America. We may be a bunch of hedonistic, materialist, self-centered assholes on the world stage, but those are precisely the qualities that make our consumer market so damn powerful.
On the bright side, more girls are wearing thick rimmed glasses with ironic t-shirts and letting their hair down in an attempt to look semi-geeky/hipster. I can't be the only one who is enjoying that change in style can I?
The result is that whoever actually gets elected finds it increasingly difficult to actually secure the majority one always needs in order to create a functioning government.
Good! Lately in the States having a functioning government has been precisely the problem when it comes to citizen's rights. The only useful government is one that's so broken it fights itself. That leaves the citizens free to go about their lives without having to fuck about with the heavy hand of useless government bureaucracy and monitoring.
Well that's pretty damn selfish. Some of us honestly don't give a fuck about your god or your lord and have better things to do with our time than listen to you and your ideas about the universe. But that's not going to stop you from trying to talk to us anyways is it? Nope, you have to make brownie points with your imaginary sky fairy so we have to suffer your intolerable intrusiveness into our lives. And with each chance to tell people about god, Jesus, and all that mumbo jumbo you waste a little mroe of our time, and impede a little bit more into our lives and our privacy.
It never ceases to amaze me how fucking selfish religious people are, as if they and their beliefs are the center of the whole frackin' universe.
That's kind of what I was thinking. We pay attention to all of China's launch facilities (hell, you can read about every one of their launches on most space websites). You can't exactly keep a rocket launch under wraps. To the best of my knowledge, we have known well ahead of time which payloads were launched on which Chinese boosters. So, I would be really surprised if they somehow concealed an entire launch and/or payload from but the U.S. government and the very active space enthusiast news agencies.
Because compared to the current state of the U.S. space industry, China is decades behind. And if you don't believe that, then you've been reading too many sensationalist headlines. As someone who has been actively watching space industry jobs worldwide I can guarantee you that nobody, not even China, is employing as many folks in a Space industry as the U.S. government and various U.S. based commercial companies. China may be kicking our ass economically, but when it comes to space, we Americans are still top dogs.
And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle's takeoff. I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them.
Dammit I wish that lesson had impressed upon more folk back then. I wish that lesson could be impressed upon every generation from here on out. Today's leaders like to talk about keeping America innovative, and strong, and all that jazz. But the one thing they leave out of their speeches is the simple fact that anything worth doing, anything that can make use stronger, is risky. With risk, eventually, comes sacrifice. And where sacrifice leads to a fire of mourning, the phoenix of greatness will always rise from the ashes. Say what you will about Reagan, but he nailed it with this one. The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted, and those societies that wish to remain relevant in the future need to learn that. Plain and simple.
Well good for you, but I actually have the birth certificate to prove it. You can probably even find a sentence or two about it in the local paper of my hometown on that date. I think the published birth and deaths in the county daily back then.
As someone who grew up in a very small town in some foothills in California I can tell you that, yes, indeed, you must be living in a different part of the country. In the town of 5k people where I grew up, it is an exceptional rarity that I meet anyone who actually does consider evolution to be worth a second thought. Even in my own family, I am almost always met with the line, "I believe in evolution within a species, but I don't think one species can evolve into another." And when I try to explain that this type of mindset is completely inconsistent with the theory of evolution or, for that matter, pull up speciation examples in various animals, I am simply met with a glazed over gaze and something along the lines of, "Well I don't know about all that, but I sure as hell didn't evolve from a monkey!"
And yes, in our HS, evolution was a hot topic that got our teachers in hot water when it was taught appropriately. Having been religious through HS, I would like to take this moment to apologize to my HS biology teacher for the bullshit I gave her regarding the subject. But all personal anecdotes aside, yes, indeed, there are parts of this country, entire towns even, where dumb religious fundies have a huge sway over the education system.
Oddly enough, the small set of Catholics in my hometown were never the ones to throw up a fuss about evolution. It was mostly the people that attended Baptist, Methodist, and Episcopalian churches, as well as the many members of the local Calvary Chapel and Seventh Day Advenist's academy.