FYI, one of the less well-known bits of Google's repertoire is the "define:" interface. In this case, searching for "define:skeuomorphic" will answer the original question. The top result is, unsurprisingly, the wikipedia article, which tells us "A skeuomorph/ËskjuËÉ(TM)mÉ"rf/ SKEW-É(TM)-morf, or skeuomorphism (Greek: skeuosâ"vessel or tool, morpheâ"shape),[1] is a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues to a structure that was necessary in the original."
as for whether it's good or bad... "meh". It's not as if you have any choice in the software that you use, so shut up and get on with your job, unless part of your job is to answer questions from the designers working on the next generation of your in-house software.
Strange. I did exactly the same in the Russian Federation a couple of years ago. We actually crossed an oblast border by canoeing down a river gorge. Are you sure that you're not in Russia? (Asking the natives isn't reliable ; so many Russians speak American-accented English, and have such a bizarre sense of humour that you couldn't be sure from their answers.
Your evidence is not sufficient to decide the case, in itself.
One of the many tools that I'd not use for driving a post into the ground is a sledge hammer. Dangerous and inefficient.
Another of the many tools that I'd not use for driving a post into the ground is a toffee hammer. Not particularly dnagerous, but slightly less inefficient than a sledge hammer.
What I would rent (if I knew I had to drive ten posts into the ground today, on the way to the timber yard to collect the posts), or buy (20 or more posts, or multiple days), or make (if I happened to know where to get a test-failed industrial gas cylinder and some re-bar and a friend with a welder) would be a post driver. Vastly more efficient and much safer to use than a sledge hammer.
Structural engineers would then be copying from a better engineer who left behind some impressive work.
I'd waste time answering you, but I'm just a few days from finishing this job and going home to my wife. Who I'll enjoy fingering in the pleasure-garden (located between the sewage outfalls). Then after a few hour of rampant sex, no doubt my back is going to be killing me. Meanwhile, my slowly failing pancreas is storing up death in another way for me. And my feet are agony after 16 hours on deck.
Tell me about this "impressive work" again : your "intelligent designer" looks like a fucking retard to me, and I look forward to you producing her so that she can get the baseball bat in the kidneys that she so richly deserves.
The counter-idea has been a well-mined seam in both SF and fantasy (fiction). Terry Pratchett's 'DEATH' took a vacation (and thereby bonded with his estranged daughter, Susan) ; Piers Anthony's "Incarnations of Immortality" series had a similar event (published at about the same time) ; the Greeks had at least one mortal who got what they asked for (eternal life) but didn't get what he didn't ask for (eternal youth). Oh, it got TorchWooded too, a couple of years back.
Actually, knucklehead, Microshaft Winblows was the soggy glue that held the parts together long enough for an incredibly diverse ecosystem to develop; we affectionately refer to this as "the PC."
Actually, knucklehead, the incredibly diverse PC ecosystem (the ISA bus and clean-room reimplementations of the IBM BIOS) was built before version 1 of Windoze was launched (remember - the one that ran on dual-floppy machines). Another layer was added with the VL / PCI bus wars (about Windows 3 and 3.1).
Since then (Windows 95 and more recent), the only significant advance in consumer architectures has been the replacement of "Plug'n'Pray" by the USB bus. Which is, of course, not restricted to PC hardware.
Unfortunately, they have the right to be stupid.
Their stupidity could well have detrimental consequences for people who are not stupid (and who get their vaccinations).
So, really, the only option for the not-stupid is to not associate with the stupid. And if that means segregation of the children of stupid and not-stupid parents into separate schools.... well that opens up a whole new can of worms.
Strictly, no. We pay for the right to have possession of equipment capable of receiving and decoding television signals. Strictly speaking there is no need to have a TV license for a machine that is designed to only play back pre-recorded media (DVDs, video tapes etc.)
Considering that the money goes to fund the BBC, which even the most blinkered of Americans has to accept as being "one of the best" broadcasters in the world, and I can watch it's entire output for under 1/4 of the cost of my satellite subscription, I don't have any problem with that. See above comment about paying for a satellite service too, which is vastly poorer value (the satellite fuckers waste much of their income on retard-entertainment like sports!).
What I do still have a problem with, is that they got rid of the Radio reception license - it's incorporated into the TV license. So there is no way for someone who honestly has no TV but does have (and use) a radio to provide funding for the radio system without also paying the far higher licensing fee for the TV (which they don't have.
It's a few years since I succumbed to the wife's demand to have a TV, so I've forgotten some of the details. IIRC the Radio license was subsumed into the TV license in the late 1970s and cost around 1/6th of the TV license at that time. Cheap at twice the price.
Oh... just try to envisage this : no adverts except for trailers. None. Nada. Zilch.
You are engaged/married, you have family living in the same city.
Let's be just slightly realistic about this, and make the people who are following you credible : they're criminals engaged in something major.
If your family are very, very lucky, your mobile phone is at home and you are dead. Under torture (footnote), you have told Them (whoever they are) your family's contact details and confirmed the details repeatedly in an unsuccessful attempt to get the pain to stop. If your family are very, very lucky, your absence of phone (or more credibly, having your phone with a battery that went flat several hours before the event of interest ; they re-charge it and check, because they're not idiots) may convince your captors that you haven't told anyone what you saw. You earnestly try to convince them that you really did not have another phone which you disposed of shortly before your capture, because if they think that, then your family and friends are also dead. This becomes your only goal in what remains of your agonising life. But, frankly, you're unlikely to be able to think that far ahead.
Then you disappear. Into a bridge foundation ; into a pig's stomach ; into a furnace ; whatever. You are no longer even meat. If you're lucky you're killed before you're incinerated/ buried/ eaten.
Your grieving family / friends eventually settle the probate (it's 7 years in this country), but may well be bankrupted in the process. But they'll be alive. If your ghost (ghosts don't exist) contacts them and persuades them to act on what you saw, then the criminals will kill them. Tragic car crash. Wiring fault burns the house down. Gunman at Batman movie. Whatever. Dead meat.
Oh, sorry, did you want a warm fuzzy feeling?
(footnote : torture for answers, not for cinematic effect : gag the victim and restrain. Cut them up - carefully - burn and electrocute at will ; on one side. The meat is a talking corpse, so the meat is not going to bear witness against you. Then remove the gag and ask questions. Re-gag. Repeat the torture, on the OTHER, previously undamaged side of the body. Repeat the questions. Compare the sets of answers. Repeat until meat dies or questions are consistently given the same answers. Not Hollywood torture with feather dusters and no cutting-off of faces and sex organs.)
campers who buy house-sized motorhomes and the fuel to operate them
Oh tempora! Oh mores!
How the language shifts. I can remember back to last week, when "going camping" meant putting your tent into the rucksac with a week or two of food, and walking (or cycling) off into (what passes for) the wilderness of Britain.
the rules may be completely different if one is by oneself in the aircraft.
If you're on your own in the aircraft, then it's vanity flying, not anything practically useful.
I can see the benefits of a pilots license for some degree of mobility - I rely on helicopters for getting to and from many of my work sites. But for regular use... it's far too much like hard work to be a convenience. "A hobby, which has useful side effects" I can see (I have several myself). But I don't really see it as being any stronger than that.
If nothing else, any significant uptake of private air transport is going to clog the air traffic control system absolutely solid. We already get up to an hour of delay getting to work because of ATC issues (25 helicopters queued for take off at 06:00 when the airport opens, and in competition for the single runway with the red-eye shuttles to the outlying heliports, capital cities, etc.) If we had to add a dozen private pilots going home / arriving for work... that'll be the airport just chock full. The next nearest airfield is 40-odd miles away, an hour's drive, and was decommissioned in the 1950s, so it's only fit as an emergency touchdown point for helicopters these days. I don't see the place ever being re-built as an airport.
It might be credible for the people living within a few hours travel of the border to hop the border as you suggest. But it may have escaped your attention that Mexico is a fairly large and elongated country. simply getting from one end of the country to the American end is a major investment.
Someone else, probably many "someone else"s, have described it as a supply and demand problem. Providing reasonable quality health care across most of the country is going to actually reduce the demand to cross the border and thus reduce the number of maids, gardeners and prostitutes that you get to cheat, abuse and humiliate. It must suck to be you.
Go find out. Head to a local airport and take lessons.
Taking a pinch of "ha ha, but serious" with that...
How much does getting a private pilot's license cost? In terms of hours of classroom, hours on the throttle, and medical checks ; not just lucre?
How many hours/ year do you need to fly to retain your PPL?
How many passengers can you fly on your PPL?
How many "hire plane" companies are there at a typical airport?
How closely does the plane "type" that you're licensed for have to correlate with the type that's on the tarmac and available for hire tomorrow. (Otherwise we get into the economic insanity of having a transport device that only gets used every few months - which is why I didn't get a car until my wife got her deriving license, because I'd only use it every few months.)
How many hours a year do you have to log flying to retain your PPL?
It's not that simple.
I had some vague thoughts in the direction of flying for myself, for fun, a few years ago. Then I realised that hours at the control of a glider contributed to your annual log-book hours (a friend was into gliding), though not at 1-for-1. A little more thought reminded me that learning how to parachute would also be a good idea, before trying to learn how to fly. I like to have an escape route planned - it's part of fire survival training.
As a general rule, if someone in the free world just says "Korea," they usually mean South Korea.
True ; and the emphasis is necessary since some of Slashdot's correspondents (myself for one) are anticipating work in North Korea at some point in the (near) future. When the fucking politicians get their communal arses out of the way.
The meaning of "heterosexual" is clearly culturally dependent. Different cultures have different degrees of sharpness of dividing lines. For example, would you consider a man who enjoys buggering women to be heterosexual?
I do accept your point about being misled though. I did find it highly annoying when I was chatting up a bint in a bar (before I got married) and then got her home and undressed to find that her firmness was more due to support bras and other "slap." Very misleading.
I'd recommend investing in "The Dragon's Egg" by Robert Forward.
Safe to say it can withstand scratching by the hardest of hard-SF. And it's a damned good story too.
As for a reaction between a Higg's boson and an oxygen atom... I don't see that as a problem. No more a problem than (say) the reaction between a free electron and a metal plate. There will be a lot of "stuff" floating around in either reaction which doesn't actually play a meaningful role in the interaction , and conventionally one doesn't bystanders any more that the cricket commentator mentions that the ice-cream seller has fallen asleep while describing the hitting of a six. But, yeah, if you think that the protons (say) are important as your Higgs interacts with one gluon inside one neutron inside the oxygen atom inside the molecule. You didn't specify mono-oxygen, di-oxygen or tri-oxygen. Which do you want?
Which XKCD is that? Oh, the one that leaves out the pointless topologists. Riiiight, them's fighting photons!
Drug synthesis isn't "chemistry?" Wow, the meth cookers will be queueing up to get you to testify at their trials.
Interactions between a gas and a surface are not chemistry?
Go on, enlighten us with your definition of what "old school chemistry" is. I'll get some Marmite toasties and a cuppa. (I can't stand popcorn.) (Oh, for the record ; IANA-Chemist ; but my day job involves understanding and advising on tonnes of chemistry being mixed by machines supervised by people who don't call themselves chemists either ; I deal with the interaction of those tonnes of chemistry with tonnes of other (natural material) chemistry. But I also used to enjoy making my own explosives from things I could buy in town.)
You promised us something disturbing. So, where is it?
As the Romans were perfectly happy to point out, where or who my dick goes into doesn't change the fact that it's my dick doing the going into and someone else getting the "gone into" done unto them.
Actually, most of them weren't particularly bothered by whether it was a "someone" the dick went into. Goat, bitch, slave, human, noble ; didn't much matter. Except for "noble" ; that could get you into some seriously deep shit.
Incredible! Instead of rubbing woad into their belly buttons and praying to Jesus, these filthy scientists have gone away and performed EXPERIMENTS - real, disgusting physical EXPERIMENTS, I tell you !!! to try to evaluate a complicated technical question.
We must band together to stop this erosion of the power of prayer to the All-Mighty YHWH. If these disgusting, sub-religious people and their filthy, filthy heresies were to gain a foothold, then you never know but the altars of Zeus will one day not be piled high with burnt offerings. And where would we be then?
No longer in a state of God-given grace, but instead we'll be wallowing in hygiene where we should be sitting in our shit. And no-longer would half our children die by the age of two years and go to feed the ever-hungry maw of God. Our people "injured in the stones" might get some sort of effective medical treatment, instead of having their familes tomented for the next seven generations (and their goods going to the temple!!).
What sort of a world would that be, I ask you? It would be Hell. On Earth.
Slashdot Mirror
FYI, one of the less well-known bits of Google's repertoire is the "define:" interface. In this case, searching for "define:skeuomorphic" will answer the original question. The top result is, unsurprisingly, the wikipedia article, which tells us "A skeuomorph /ËskjuËÉ(TM)mÉ"rf/ SKEW-É(TM)-morf, or skeuomorphism (Greek: skeuosâ"vessel or tool, morpheâ"shape),[1] is a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues to a structure that was necessary in the original."
as for whether it's good or bad ... "meh". It's not as if you have any choice in the software that you use, so shut up and get on with your job, unless part of your job is to answer questions from the designers working on the next generation of your in-house software.
Your evidence is not sufficient to decide the case, in itself.
So ... since you've been diligent in your entrusted tasks :
Where is the problem?
Another of the many tools that I'd not use for driving a post into the ground is a toffee hammer. Not particularly dnagerous, but slightly less inefficient than a sledge hammer.
What I would rent (if I knew I had to drive ten posts into the ground today, on the way to the timber yard to collect the posts), or buy (20 or more posts, or multiple days), or make (if I happened to know where to get a test-failed industrial gas cylinder and some re-bar and a friend with a welder) would be a post driver. Vastly more efficient and much safer to use than a sledge hammer.
If you can.
I'd waste time answering you, but I'm just a few days from finishing this job and going home to my wife. Who I'll enjoy fingering in the pleasure-garden (located between the sewage outfalls). Then after a few hour of rampant sex, no doubt my back is going to be killing me. Meanwhile, my slowly failing pancreas is storing up death in another way for me. And my feet are agony after 16 hours on deck.
Tell me about this "impressive work" again : your "intelligent designer" looks like a fucking retard to me, and I look forward to you producing her so that she can get the baseball bat in the kidneys that she so richly deserves.
The results are not pretty.
Around Almeria, according to friends of mine who've studied there. Wikipedia agrees. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almeria#Geography
... for you, or for your partner?
Actually, knucklehead, the incredibly diverse PC ecosystem (the ISA bus and clean-room reimplementations of the IBM BIOS) was built before version 1 of Windoze was launched (remember - the one that ran on dual-floppy machines). Another layer was added with the VL / PCI bus wars (about Windows 3 and 3.1). Since then (Windows 95 and more recent), the only significant advance in consumer architectures has been the replacement of "Plug'n'Pray" by the USB bus. Which is, of course, not restricted to PC hardware.
What were you doing in the 1980s? Potty training?
Of Spain.
By an Italian director.
Only car drivers get to vote in America (and car drivers with passengers only get a half vote).
Or are you specifically talking about media that have DRM embedded in them? Or loosely pasted on top of them, as is more often the case?
Do people actually still try to use that shit?
Unfortunately, they have the right to be stupid.
Their stupidity could well have detrimental consequences for people who are not stupid (and who get their vaccinations).
So, really, the only option for the not-stupid is to not associate with the stupid. And if that means segregation of the children of stupid and not-stupid parents into separate schools .... well that opens up a whole new can of worms.
Considering that the money goes to fund the BBC, which even the most blinkered of Americans has to accept as being "one of the best" broadcasters in the world, and I can watch it's entire output for under 1/4 of the cost of my satellite subscription, I don't have any problem with that. See above comment about paying for a satellite service too, which is vastly poorer value (the satellite fuckers waste much of their income on retard-entertainment like sports!).
What I do still have a problem with, is that they got rid of the Radio reception license - it's incorporated into the TV license. So there is no way for someone who honestly has no TV but does have (and use) a radio to provide funding for the radio system without also paying the far higher licensing fee for the TV (which they don't have.
It's a few years since I succumbed to the wife's demand to have a TV, so I've forgotten some of the details. IIRC the Radio license was subsumed into the TV license in the late 1970s and cost around 1/6th of the TV license at that time. Cheap at twice the price.
Oh ... just try to envisage this : no adverts except for trailers. None. Nada. Zilch.
Let's be just slightly realistic about this, and make the people who are following you credible : they're criminals engaged in something major.
If your family are very, very lucky, your mobile phone is at home and you are dead. Under torture (footnote), you have told Them (whoever they are) your family's contact details and confirmed the details repeatedly in an unsuccessful attempt to get the pain to stop. If your family are very, very lucky, your absence of phone (or more credibly, having your phone with a battery that went flat several hours before the event of interest ; they re-charge it and check, because they're not idiots) may convince your captors that you haven't told anyone what you saw. You earnestly try to convince them that you really did not have another phone which you disposed of shortly before your capture, because if they think that, then your family and friends are also dead. This becomes your only goal in what remains of your agonising life. But, frankly, you're unlikely to be able to think that far ahead.
Then you disappear. Into a bridge foundation ; into a pig's stomach ; into a furnace ; whatever. You are no longer even meat. If you're lucky you're killed before you're incinerated/ buried/ eaten.
Your grieving family / friends eventually settle the probate (it's 7 years in this country), but may well be bankrupted in the process. But they'll be alive. If your ghost (ghosts don't exist) contacts them and persuades them to act on what you saw, then the criminals will kill them. Tragic car crash. Wiring fault burns the house down. Gunman at Batman movie. Whatever. Dead meat.
Oh, sorry, did you want a warm fuzzy feeling?
(footnote : torture for answers, not for cinematic effect : gag the victim and restrain. Cut them up - carefully - burn and electrocute at will ; on one side. The meat is a talking corpse, so the meat is not going to bear witness against you. Then remove the gag and ask questions. Re-gag. Repeat the torture, on the OTHER, previously undamaged side of the body. Repeat the questions. Compare the sets of answers. Repeat until meat dies or questions are consistently given the same answers. Not Hollywood torture with feather dusters and no cutting-off of faces and sex organs.)
Oh tempora! Oh mores!
How the language shifts. I can remember back to last week, when "going camping" meant putting your tent into the rucksac with a week or two of food, and walking (or cycling) off into (what passes for) the wilderness of Britain.
If you're on your own in the aircraft, then it's vanity flying, not anything practically useful.
I can see the benefits of a pilots license for some degree of mobility - I rely on helicopters for getting to and from many of my work sites. But for regular use ... it's far too much like hard work to be a convenience. "A hobby, which has useful side effects" I can see (I have several myself). But I don't really see it as being any stronger than that.
If nothing else, any significant uptake of private air transport is going to clog the air traffic control system absolutely solid. We already get up to an hour of delay getting to work because of ATC issues (25 helicopters queued for take off at 06:00 when the airport opens, and in competition for the single runway with the red-eye shuttles to the outlying heliports, capital cities, etc.) If we had to add a dozen private pilots going home / arriving for work ... that'll be the airport just chock full. The next nearest airfield is 40-odd miles away, an hour's drive, and was decommissioned in the 1950s, so it's only fit as an emergency touchdown point for helicopters these days. I don't see the place ever being re-built as an airport.
Someone else, probably many "someone else"s, have described it as a supply and demand problem. Providing reasonable quality health care across most of the country is going to actually reduce the demand to cross the border and thus reduce the number of maids, gardeners and prostitutes that you get to cheat, abuse and humiliate. It must suck to be you.
Taking a pinch of "ha ha, but serious" with that ...
It's not that simple.
I had some vague thoughts in the direction of flying for myself, for fun, a few years ago. Then I realised that hours at the control of a glider contributed to your annual log-book hours (a friend was into gliding), though not at 1-for-1. A little more thought reminded me that learning how to parachute would also be a good idea, before trying to learn how to fly. I like to have an escape route planned - it's part of fire survival training.
True ; and the emphasis is necessary since some of Slashdot's correspondents (myself for one) are anticipating work in North Korea at some point in the (near) future. When the fucking politicians get their communal arses out of the way.
I do accept your point about being misled though. I did find it highly annoying when I was chatting up a bint in a bar (before I got married) and then got her home and undressed to find that her firmness was more due to support bras and other "slap." Very misleading.
Safe to say it can withstand scratching by the hardest of hard-SF. And it's a damned good story too.
As for a reaction between a Higg's boson and an oxygen atom ... I don't see that as a problem. No more a problem than (say) the reaction between a free electron and a metal plate. There will be a lot of "stuff" floating around in either reaction which doesn't actually play a meaningful role in the interaction , and conventionally one doesn't bystanders any more that the cricket commentator mentions that the ice-cream seller has fallen asleep while describing the hitting of a six. But, yeah, if you think that the protons (say) are important as your Higgs interacts with one gluon inside one neutron inside the oxygen atom inside the molecule. You didn't specify mono-oxygen, di-oxygen or tri-oxygen. Which do you want?
Which XKCD is that? Oh, the one that leaves out the pointless topologists. Riiiight, them's fighting photons!
Interactions between a gas and a surface are not chemistry?
Go on, enlighten us with your definition of what "old school chemistry" is. I'll get some Marmite toasties and a cuppa. (I can't stand popcorn.)
(Oh, for the record ; IANA-Chemist ; but my day job involves understanding and advising on tonnes of chemistry being mixed by machines supervised by people who don't call themselves chemists either ; I deal with the interaction of those tonnes of chemistry with tonnes of other (natural material) chemistry. But I also used to enjoy making my own explosives from things I could buy in town.)
You promised us something disturbing. So, where is it?
As the Romans were perfectly happy to point out, where or who my dick goes into doesn't change the fact that it's my dick doing the going into and someone else getting the "gone into" done unto them.
Actually, most of them weren't particularly bothered by whether it was a "someone" the dick went into. Goat, bitch, slave, human, noble ; didn't much matter. Except for "noble" ; that could get you into some seriously deep shit.
We must band together to stop this erosion of the power of prayer to the All-Mighty YHWH. If these disgusting, sub-religious people and their filthy, filthy heresies were to gain a foothold, then you never know but the altars of Zeus will one day not be piled high with burnt offerings. And where would we be then?
No longer in a state of God-given grace, but instead we'll be wallowing in hygiene where we should be sitting in our shit. And no-longer would half our children die by the age of two years and go to feed the ever-hungry maw of God. Our people "injured in the stones" might get some sort of effective medical treatment, instead of having their familes tomented for the next seven generations (and their goods going to the temple!!).
What sort of a world would that be, I ask you? It would be Hell. On Earth.