The bit I don't like is the new "contactless" payment system. I want any payment system to require purposeful contact on my part and not just require that my card was somewhere nearby since standing in a checkout queue I may well be near someone else making a payment
I don't like it either, but since the first of my credit cards came back with a contactless symbol on it, I've been wondering whether to cut the wires, or what.
When I get round to it (since I normally don't even take that card out of the house ; I only use it for buying things online, and I've not brought anything online for months), I'll probably claim to have lost the card (to get a new one issued), then dissect the old card to find out where the wires are. A few seconds work with a file should make it contact-only again.
YMMV
Hey, is it my flu', or have I got a dozen or so comments into a thread and not seen a "Fuck BETA" piece of graffiti? Hoo-bloody-ray!
The upshot is, even if you live six blocks away, the safest way to transport your kid to and from school is by car.
And... you supported this planning madness by buying property there. Good grounds for being upset.
There is planning madness pretty much everywhere. I got on the committee and tried to change it. What did you do?
Well, trying to change established (and erroneous) rules is a good thing. "Making the best of a bad job," as the saying goes. But it would have been better to simply let the development / suburb/ city die in the dust with the aspirations and bankruptcies of the incompetent developers, if you'd had sufficient choice about where to go.
When we were moving last, for some insane reason my wife thought it might be important to live on the same side of town as my employers, despite me being intercontinental field staff (i.e. 0.5 days/month in the office, or less) ; despite the company having moved offices three times during my employment, each time to a different side of town (one side left!) ; and despite my encouragement that we might like to try living in a country with a different climate (since she complains about the weather during at least 51 weeks of each year). So... moving was going to happen ; moving internationally wasn't going to happen ; and therefore where to move to becomes an issue. The next thing to do was establish important criteria : schooling (utterly unimportant - the sprog was on the other side of the world at the time and hadn't decided which continent to go to university on) ; flooding (real issue) ; security (definite issue).
Having established general criteria, I put some numbers to it : a minimum of 20m of freeboard from any flood levels on a 10,000 year timescale (any further back and we were under a glacier) ; surface slope of not less than 2 degrees (so that intense rainfall has some incentive to flow away into rivers) ; and finally, rule out the rougher postcodes of the town. Those considerations lead me to do some research on the tsunami threat (3 events in approximately 9000 years ; worth considering), but with a run up of not more than 15m at this location, I was actually already covered by the flooding criterion. But the exercise was worthwhile, because it made me think about the hazard.
Now I'd got my criteria, I took a map of the city, and crossed off large areas of it which failed on one criterion or other (or both). When we then looked at adverts for housing, if the house was on a street in the "RED ZONE", we moved on to the next advert. No further consideration necessary.
Well, you did ask what I'd done. Now you know.
I'm not going to get involved in local politics - for one thing, I'm only within a thousand miles of home about a half of the time. And secondly, I loathe and detest politics with a vengeance, having done far too much of it when I was young and stupid and thought that I could change the world. And thirdly, if someone asks me (or even pays me, be it only a pint of beer) for advice, I'll happily give it, but I will not lose sleep if they then ignore me and then find themselves in trouble.
The central government and city council have agreed to sell a number of public parks etc to developers to build housing on. They've re-labelled the areas as having a low but acceptable risk of flooding (1-2 events/ decade, which isn't quite a lie), and the properties are being sold. None of which reduces the actual risk of flooding. And when friends or contacts ask me, I explain to them what the risks are. And on at least one occasion, I'd persuaded my friend (colleague ; we worked together in Russia) to not buy it, but his wife over-ruled him, "Because it's NEW. And it looks so pretty in the brochure!" And when (not "if") they get flooded, I'll help them to evacuate. But I'll be wearing my "Told you so!" tee-shirt, errrr, because I did.
As the Nivenism says, "Not responsible for advice not followed."
I would find someone "abusing" the rules that I don't understand to be frustrating.
If you don't understand the rules, how do you know they're being amused? Abused, even ; Freudian slit there!
As for the rest... sorry, but despite repeated beating with a stick, my games master failed to smash an interest in team sports into me. In fact, his efforts to beat interest into me may have been counter-productive. In a major step forward for sporting knowledge, last year I discovered what the "offside rule" in football (spheroidal ball, not squashed ball) is, because a graphic explaining it was part of a series of coins issued in commemoration of some other sporting event (my wife collects the coins, which is why I noticed). Now that I know what the rule is, I may attempt to work out why the fuck anyone should give a shit about it. If I have any motivation to do so. Which I don't.
I don't particularly find myself experiencing "frustration" over people breaking the offside rule. Even now that I understand it, I still don't give a shit which side breaks it. And they will always break it, because the focus of all team sports (and probably most individual sports) has moved from following the rules (if it was really ever there) to winning at any cost which doesn't get the team ejected from the league. (I did notice that Rangers Football Club had a spectacular fail on that point recently. Something to do with lying, cheating, stealing from the tax man, and not paying the correct bribes to the rest of the "football administration" ; the last was of course what sealed their fate, and they're playing unimportant amateur teams for the next seven eternities, or something.)
There seems to be some disconnect between your assertion of not caring about sports, but yet you care to (1) know their rules ; and (2) to be "frustrated" by abuses of the rules.
How should people voice their displeasure with the potential death of Slashdot?
How about by not destroying the thing which you want to preserve, which is Slashdot's user base and moderations system.
so you are one of the 25% who've been asked to look at "beta", and you've decided to use the experience to ruin the site for the rest of us. Like, thanks man. If I find myself fucking off to avoid "fuck beta trolls" like you, I'm sure that'll make you so happy in your denuded and shrunken rump of Slashdot.
We've all been there. You're relying on your vehicle's built-in navigation system to get to that meeting downtown,
Errr, no.
What is the usage case again?
You're in a concrete canyon downtown. So what the fuck are you doing driving? That's what taxis and tube trains and buses are for. Cars in the city centre are almost always a guarantee for frustration and delay.
Besides, if it's your own city, how on earth can you exist without knowing it at least as well as the Sat Nav, and also knowing the pedestrian-only short cuts that go against the flow of one-way streets, across parks and directly under 14-way road junctions designed to get people from somewhere where you didn't start, going to somewhere you're not going to.
You can store whatever you like on them as long as you're not breaking copyright obviously. Not sure what you mean.
Read your T+Cs. When I tried this, a good few years ago now, Things were fine for about 8 months and I carried both my photo collection and was starting to upload my father's (with his permission ; I held his offsite backup. 500 miles offsite!). Then someone at the "Unlimited Hosting" provider (I even forget their name now, it may have been "Unlimited Hosting", or someone with a completely different name) noticed, checked the links, realised that none of the JPEG files were linked to from the 3 kb of web pages. Bang! "T+Cs violation. We think that you're hosting copyrighted material and are therefore a pirate. All media files that you upload must be publicly visible from your hosted website, not linked to on someone else's. Your account has been deleted. Your pirated data (all data is assumed pirated) has been deleted from our servers and backups. Have a nice day!"
Fortunately, both Dad and I had not relied on this expedient as a backup. So, it's back to a hard drive in the post every few months.
On the other hand, the profits from existing drugs helps pay for research into new drugs to some degree, so could India be similar to a big company that uses Open Source but doesn't release any of their own code?
Why do you think that Big Companies who use Open Source are obliged to develop new code or modify it in any way?
After all, a huge amount of most Big Companies is simply doing paperwork, for which Open-/Libre-/ApacheOpen- Office is perfectly adequate.
What the US is concerned about is a country like North Korea nuking Japan or the US West Coast.
That is a pretty strong argument that the first DPRK strike will happen using a weapon arriving on the East coast, probably on a boat.
I bet, I just bet, that their Ground Zero would be pretty close to the World Trade Centre site. I mean, if you were choosing an enemy site to nuke, wouldn't you choose something so culturally symbolic?
The problem with people like me is that I don't know the rules of the game. Watching a game you don't understand would be frustrating.
... And being of a mindset to come to a site that proclaims "News For Nerds", you know exactly what to do about your frustration about your lack of knowledge of the rules of the game.
Soccer mums are pretty dangerous, as a demographic, due to their frequent misattention to the road (distractions in the car?) and their steep concentration gradient focussing on schools. (It's not my version of English ; I think of suburban housewives on the "School Run" ; why the hell they just don't walk their kids to school, I don't know ; far safer for everyone!)
They had all sorts of out clauses in that the show was pre-recorded well in advance. One of the major ones was that unless they aired an episode featuring you, they did not have to pay you, and no payment would be coming until after airing.
SHRUG. Not a quiz that I'd waste effort on applying for.
Look, fuckwit, I do realise that there is both an entertainment side to this site as well as the educational side ; but trying to drag what started as a perfectly reasonable "education" type comment - a "first post!" too! - down into the shite of your so-called "entertainment" is exactly what is likely to fuck viewers off from this site.
If you don't like this "beta" thing (which I haven't seen yet ; but it's only about the 4th re-make of the site, so "meh!"), then fuck off to redigit or whatever you do prefer and don't let the door hit you on the ass as you leave. But don't shit on your neighbour's doorstep in the process.
For those who are way low, it tells me that they're they're the sort of people who were here before discussion boards were mainstream.
Depressingly for you, discussion boards were commonplace for decades before Slashdot came along -though I'll only admit it having used them for around 5 years before Slashdot was produced, because I didn't have a telephone before then.
That doesn't make old-timers inherently wise or whatever, but I'll pay a little more attention to what they have to say on that basis.
I'm sure Jeremiah Cornelius will be along some time to correct your impression.
What is this Slashdot Beta, and when is Slashdot going to start running adverts again? I can hardly remember when I last saw an advert on Slashdot.
But how can the black hole's mass go down when particles are being added to it?
ShanghaiBill answered you:
Because the mass of that particle, and the particle that escaped, came from the black hole.
, but you still didn't get it, because ShanghaiBill missed an important part of the explanation.
The energy to create the pair of particles came from the potential energy of the strained space time in which the black hole is embedded.
It is a zero-sum game : two particle's worth of energy came from the virtual background to make the original particles ; the black hole swallowed one of the particles and the other escaped to infinity (it had to have some kinetic energy to do this, but that's part of the sum) ; the virtual background then reclaimed the energy debt from the gravitationally strained space time of the black hole, which reduced the gravitational mass of the black hole by the mass of two particles (plus an appropriate amount of energy for the kinetic energy).
Read your "Highway Code." What information does a flash of the headlights convey? The answer is in there : a flash of the headlights means only, and precisely, "My vehicle is here." Nothing else ; not an iota nor a meme. Any interpretation that the viewer puts on the signal other than about your vehicle's location is a figment of their imagination.
Incidentally, the kid in the guy's trunk is more likely to be (1) dead and (2) his own child. But you won't get that from reading the newspapers.
as all Oil selling countries have to sell Oil in dollars.
Not exactly true - several times, and continuing, a variety of countries have attempted to break the dollar basis of the oil market and to re-establish it on an Euro basis. Or on an open basis (which would make it a mixed dollar/ Euro/ Yuan basis.
It's going to happen. Whether it happens driven by governments trying to reduce their economies' exposure to American economic policy, or by traders fleeing a collapse of the dollar when the Chinese call in some of the debt they own, doesn't really matter. At some point, probably in the near future, oil and the dollar are going to decouple.
Strange, but I thought that the purpose of appearing on a game show was to either win money or prestige with your peer group. Certainly they're the motivations amongst the 5 or 6 of my associates who've appeared on (UK) national TV game shows.(footnote)
Of course, the peer groups in question are fellow quizzers, Scrabblers, etc. Not the man on the Clapham omnibus.
If the games designers design a game with a weakness in it's rule set, that's their problem. They do know that if the game is successful, they're going to attract the attention of some of the smarter people in the general population. So they'd better get it right!
Who give a shit about the audience? Certainly not the contestants.
(footnote : a couple of 15-to-1-ers, a team of Egghead contenders and several Scrabble-ists ; the categories are not exclusive.)
Of course, the whole registry thing is simply to convince suburban housewives that evil is always lurking around the corner, and that they should be perpetually afraid of events with little statistical significance.
You're forgetting one of the main purposes of sex offender databases and that sort of thing : to cover up from the general public the fact that the large majority of sex assaults and abuses are by parents against their children, or between close relatives of different ages.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't like it either, but since the first of my credit cards came back with a contactless symbol on it, I've been wondering whether to cut the wires, or what.
When I get round to it (since I normally don't even take that card out of the house ; I only use it for buying things online, and I've not brought anything online for months), I'll probably claim to have lost the card (to get a new one issued), then dissect the old card to find out where the wires are. A few seconds work with a file should make it contact-only again.
YMMV
Hey, is it my flu', or have I got a dozen or so comments into a thread and not seen a "Fuck BETA" piece of graffiti? Hoo-bloody-ray!
Well, trying to change established (and erroneous) rules is a good thing. "Making the best of a bad job," as the saying goes. But it would have been better to simply let the development / suburb/ city die in the dust with the aspirations and bankruptcies of the incompetent developers, if you'd had sufficient choice about where to go.
When we were moving last, for some insane reason my wife thought it might be important to live on the same side of town as my employers, despite me being intercontinental field staff (i.e. 0.5 days/month in the office, or less) ; despite the company having moved offices three times during my employment, each time to a different side of town (one side left!) ; and despite my encouragement that we might like to try living in a country with a different climate (since she complains about the weather during at least 51 weeks of each year). So ... moving was going to happen ; moving internationally wasn't going to happen ; and therefore where to move to becomes an issue. The next thing to do was establish important criteria : schooling (utterly unimportant - the sprog was on the other side of the world at the time and hadn't decided which continent to go to university on) ; flooding (real issue) ; security (definite issue).
Having established general criteria, I put some numbers to it : a minimum of 20m of freeboard from any flood levels on a 10,000 year timescale (any further back and we were under a glacier) ; surface slope of not less than 2 degrees (so that intense rainfall has some incentive to flow away into rivers) ; and finally, rule out the rougher postcodes of the town. Those considerations lead me to do some research on the tsunami threat (3 events in approximately 9000 years ; worth considering), but with a run up of not more than 15m at this location, I was actually already covered by the flooding criterion. But the exercise was worthwhile, because it made me think about the hazard.
Now I'd got my criteria, I took a map of the city, and crossed off large areas of it which failed on one criterion or other (or both). When we then looked at adverts for housing, if the house was on a street in the "RED ZONE", we moved on to the next advert. No further consideration necessary.
Well, you did ask what I'd done. Now you know.
I'm not going to get involved in local politics - for one thing, I'm only within a thousand miles of home about a half of the time. And secondly, I loathe and detest politics with a vengeance, having done far too much of it when I was young and stupid and thought that I could change the world. And thirdly, if someone asks me (or even pays me, be it only a pint of beer) for advice, I'll happily give it, but I will not lose sleep if they then ignore me and then find themselves in trouble.
The central government and city council have agreed to sell a number of public parks etc to developers to build housing on. They've re-labelled the areas as having a low but acceptable risk of flooding (1-2 events/ decade, which isn't quite a lie), and the properties are being sold. None of which reduces the actual risk of flooding. And when friends or contacts ask me, I explain to them what the risks are. And on at least one occasion, I'd persuaded my friend (colleague ; we worked together in Russia) to not buy it, but his wife over-ruled him, "Because it's NEW. And it looks so pretty in the brochure!" And when (not "if") they get flooded, I'll help them to evacuate. But I'll be wearing my "Told you so!" tee-shirt, errrr, because I did.
As the Nivenism says, "Not responsible for advice not followed."
If you don't understand the rules, how do you know they're being amused? Abused, even ; Freudian slit there!
As for the rest ... sorry, but despite repeated beating with a stick, my games master failed to smash an interest in team sports into me. In fact, his efforts to beat interest into me may have been counter-productive. In a major step forward for sporting knowledge, last year I discovered what the "offside rule" in football (spheroidal ball, not squashed ball) is, because a graphic explaining it was part of a series of coins issued in commemoration of some other sporting event (my wife collects the coins, which is why I noticed). Now that I know what the rule is, I may attempt to work out why the fuck anyone should give a shit about it.
If I have any motivation to do so.
Which I don't.
I don't particularly find myself experiencing "frustration" over people breaking the offside rule. Even now that I understand it, I still don't give a shit which side breaks it. And they will always break it, because the focus of all team sports (and probably most individual sports) has moved from following the rules (if it was really ever there) to winning at any cost which doesn't get the team ejected from the league. (I did notice that Rangers Football Club had a spectacular fail on that point recently. Something to do with lying, cheating, stealing from the tax man, and not paying the correct bribes to the rest of the "football administration" ; the last was of course what sealed their fate, and they're playing unimportant amateur teams for the next seven eternities, or something.)
There seems to be some disconnect between your assertion of not caring about sports, but yet you care to (1) know their rules ; and (2) to be "frustrated" by abuses of the rules.
How about by not destroying the thing which you want to preserve, which is Slashdot's user base and moderations system.
so you are one of the 25% who've been asked to look at "beta", and you've decided to use the experience to ruin the site for the rest of us. Like, thanks man. If I find myself fucking off to avoid "fuck beta trolls" like you, I'm sure that'll make you so happy in your denuded and shrunken rump of Slashdot.
And ... you supported this planning madness by buying property there. Good grounds for being upset.
So, in this case, you don't find it frustrating?
Errr, no.
What is the usage case again?
You're in a concrete canyon downtown. So what the fuck are you doing driving? That's what taxis and tube trains and buses are for. Cars in the city centre are almost always a guarantee for frustration and delay.
Besides, if it's your own city, how on earth can you exist without knowing it at least as well as the Sat Nav, and also knowing the pedestrian-only short cuts that go against the flow of one-way streets, across parks and directly under 14-way road junctions designed to get people from somewhere where you didn't start, going to somewhere you're not going to.
Do people not use their brains these days?
Correct.
And your point is what? That people meeting people is bad?
Enjoying it was never part of the arrangement. Bend over!
MOD parent up! I don't have mod points today - which is slightly unusual.
Read your T+Cs. When I tried this, a good few years ago now, Things were fine for about 8 months and I carried both my photo collection and was starting to upload my father's (with his permission ; I held his offsite backup. 500 miles offsite!). Then someone at the "Unlimited Hosting" provider (I even forget their name now, it may have been "Unlimited Hosting", or someone with a completely different name) noticed, checked the links, realised that none of the JPEG files were linked to from the 3 kb of web pages. Bang! "T+Cs violation. We think that you're hosting copyrighted material and are therefore a pirate. All media files that you upload must be publicly visible from your hosted website, not linked to on someone else's. Your account has been deleted. Your pirated data (all data is assumed pirated) has been deleted from our servers and backups. Have a nice day!"
Fortunately, both Dad and I had not relied on this expedient as a backup. So, it's back to a hard drive in the post every few months.
Why do you think that Big Companies who use Open Source are obliged to develop new code or modify it in any way? After all, a huge amount of most Big Companies is simply doing paperwork, for which Open-/Libre-/ApacheOpen- Office is perfectly adequate.
That is a pretty strong argument that the first DPRK strike will happen using a weapon arriving on the East coast, probably on a boat.
I bet, I just bet, that their Ground Zero would be pretty close to the World Trade Centre site. I mean, if you were choosing an enemy site to nuke, wouldn't you choose something so culturally symbolic?
... And being of a mindset to come to a site that proclaims "News For Nerds", you know exactly what to do about your frustration about your lack of knowledge of the rules of the game.
Soccer mums are pretty dangerous, as a demographic, due to their frequent misattention to the road (distractions in the car?) and their steep concentration gradient focussing on schools. (It's not my version of English ; I think of suburban housewives on the "School Run" ; why the hell they just don't walk their kids to school, I don't know ; far safer for everyone!)
SHRUG. Not a quiz that I'd waste effort on applying for.
Tough shit. Don't let the door smack you on the arse as you leave.
If you don't like this "beta" thing (which I haven't seen yet ; but it's only about the 4th re-make of the site, so "meh!"), then fuck off to redigit or whatever you do prefer and don't let the door hit you on the ass as you leave. But don't shit on your neighbour's doorstep in the process.
Depressingly for you, discussion boards were commonplace for decades before Slashdot came along -though I'll only admit it having used them for around 5 years before Slashdot was produced, because I didn't have a telephone before then.
I'm sure Jeremiah Cornelius will be along some time to correct your impression.
What is this Slashdot Beta, and when is Slashdot going to start running adverts again? I can hardly remember when I last saw an advert on Slashdot.
ShanghaiBill answered you :
, but you still didn't get it, because ShanghaiBill missed an important part of the explanation.
The energy to create the pair of particles came from the potential energy of the strained space time in which the black hole is embedded.
It is a zero-sum game : two particle's worth of energy came from the virtual background to make the original particles ; the black hole swallowed one of the particles and the other escaped to infinity (it had to have some kinetic energy to do this, but that's part of the sum) ; the virtual background then reclaimed the energy debt from the gravitationally strained space time of the black hole, which reduced the gravitational mass of the black hole by the mass of two particles (plus an appropriate amount of energy for the kinetic energy).
Then don't.
Read your "Highway Code." What information does a flash of the headlights convey? The answer is in there : a flash of the headlights means only, and precisely, "My vehicle is here." Nothing else ; not an iota nor a meme. Any interpretation that the viewer puts on the signal other than about your vehicle's location is a figment of their imagination.
Incidentally, the kid in the guy's trunk is more likely to be (1) dead and (2) his own child. But you won't get that from reading the newspapers.
Do the cops themselves actually know why they're parked up? Not necessarily.
Busy junction? Good place to sit and watch for people driving dangerously, without tax, insurance, seat belts ...
Not exactly true - several times, and continuing, a variety of countries have attempted to break the dollar basis of the oil market and to re-establish it on an Euro basis. Or on an open basis (which would make it a mixed dollar/ Euro/ Yuan basis.
It's going to happen. Whether it happens driven by governments trying to reduce their economies' exposure to American economic policy, or by traders fleeing a collapse of the dollar when the Chinese call in some of the debt they own, doesn't really matter. At some point, probably in the near future, oil and the dollar are going to decouple.
Doesn't fuss me ; I get paid in sterling anyway.
Of course, the peer groups in question are fellow quizzers, Scrabblers, etc. Not the man on the Clapham omnibus.
If the games designers design a game with a weakness in it's rule set, that's their problem. They do know that if the game is successful, they're going to attract the attention of some of the smarter people in the general population. So they'd better get it right!
Who give a shit about the audience? Certainly not the contestants.
(footnote : a couple of 15-to-1-ers, a team of Egghead contenders and several Scrabble-ists ; the categories are not exclusive.)
You're forgetting one of the main purposes of sex offender databases and that sort of thing : to cover up from the general public the fact that the large majority of sex assaults and abuses are by parents against their children, or between close relatives of different ages.
It's a question of access, primarily.