Probably I am in a minority ; but being a nerd does not necessarily imply being interested in movies, TV or music - I spent my first 13 years in this house without a TV, because I wasn't interested. Radio is perfectly adequate for getting the news and commentary.
(Wife and step-daughter insisted on getting a telly when we got married.)
I gave away my music collection about a year after moving in. I was always much more interested in the politics in the lyrics than in the sounds themselves.
I'm still not even sure if I've got a device - TV, laptop or whatever - which has a DVI connector - that's the ones with the two blocks of pins on a square grid? (Wikis ; yes, thought so.) So it's all utterly academic. Oddly, though I do have a DVI cable floating around in the mound of stuff - don't know where that appeared from.
Has anyone on Slashdot bought anything from IBM in the last 5 years?
Hasn't IBM been out of the hardware business for over 5 years?
("business consultancy" and "management services", or whatever they call it these days, if that's their current line of business, means as much to me as "SAP administrator" or "flange-sprocket discombobulator." They may do whatever that is wonderfully well, but what it actually is means absolutely nothing to me. Probability of being brought is zero.)
Considering that I've never (knowingly) seen a DVI cable, and have absolutely no idea what a "single-link" or "double-link" cable is (nor need to know)... aren't you being a bit presumptuous that everyone in the universe cares as much about cables as you do.
I've gone to see 3-d movies ; nothing worth seeing. I know that it's heretical, and that people who work in TV factories will be selling their babies to fricassee because of me ; that doesn't make me feel guilty enough to care about the technology.
Ditto for stereo sound - I can barely tell whether the sound from anything is in mono or stereo, and bitterly resent the wasted speakers. (In any case, isn't "live" meant to be so much better than "stored", whatever the technology?)
HD, be it with TV or that $COLOUR$-Ray disc thing... allegedly wonderful, so I asked my buddy to show me the difference on his several thousand $CURRENCY$ system. Things were different, certainly ; "better"... well, not worth several thousand $CURRENCY$ of "different".
No doubt, when the current TV gets broken, I'll have no choice but to replace it with a HD one. But change every other component of the system ?... Why?
Oh, I just thought I'd better check... there are logos for "HD", "SRS" and "DOLBY" on the front of the telly. Does that mean that I'd actually got a HD TV and not known about it? Well, even less reason to change.
Are we really expected to care about this? Isn't good content much more important than the box you replay it on? And the desperate shortage of good quality content is the real problem. (Fast-forwarding through the adverts is taken as a given.)
Would like to see at least 500 km capacity on a 15 minute charge, and able to last several thousand cycles.
Not disagreeing with your general points, but have you worked out what that sort of demand means in terms of chemistry? Unless the battery is also the main structural material for your vehicle, and the payload is a 70kg human plus 5kg of freight, then you're likely to be requiring energy densities that imply internal electric fields near to the ionisation potential of covalent bonds. At which point you leave normal chemistry and are breaking into the field of liquid plasmas. MHD batteries, here we come.
Chemistry does have limits. We may not be approaching them (yet), but that doesn't mean to say that they're not present.
It's probably the children of rich, inattentive, gated-community parents who're going to sue ; the law suits are what will be triggering this.
Poor people can't afford to sue, and can be brought off much more cheaply.
I say bring back the death penalty for illegal-immigrant maids who are inattentive enough to allow this to happen. That will make sure that the blame attaches in the right place. If they're dead, then the next maid to work for a pittance (and no health insurance, of course) will know that doing six things at once is not enough, she'll have to watch the kids too. Or bring along a child of her own for the employer's kids to vivisect.
(Your sarcasm-meter ought to be registering now.)
Oh, and shoot ambulance-chasing lawyers on sight - fit automated machine guns in the tail pipes of ambulances. Them and their "no-win-no-fee" deals are crushing the spirit of free enterprise.
If now is the first time the HR department want to talk to you, then
(1) they're not doing their job properly ; and
(2) you were probably in a company that it was a good idea to be leaving anyway.
HR are, almost without exception, useless parasites, intent only on covering their own arses and justifying their parasitism. If your company grows/ develops / acquires a HR department, then now is probably a good time to be leaving. (There may be a case for a HR department if your weekly hires/ fires is in the dozens or more. But then they're treating people like a commodity, and that's not good. Even if they are a commodity, like a burger-flipper, or a shovel-pusher.)
the song Rock the Casbah was actually about a situation in Afghanistan,
I'd always thought that it was about Morocco carrying out internal repression around the time they were also invading and annexing, ummm... Western Sahara? Long before any Western interest in Afghanistan.
[Wikis]
Oh, boring - just a smart-alek comment by their manager getting free-associated. How dull. I guess I'll just have sit back and enjoy the song for itself.
I don't want everyone to have my cellphone number. That means Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Gmail can all bugger off.
Give them the phone number for a £5 supermarket-brought phone that you keep switched off 98%+ of the time. I do.
It's the phone that goes on the boat when scuba diving, and has numbers for the decompression doctors and coastguard ; if it dies in the boat, it cost less than re-filling an air bottle. It's a dumb-as-a-brick phone : voice and SMS only ; it's first £5 PAYG has lasted for 18 months now. And no, the phone-owner doesn't pay to receive calls here, so that's not a problem. Not that it's switched on 8% of the time anyway.
That's Napoleon, emperor of France, between approximately 1805 and 1810. As a military communications tool, he sponsored the development of chains of semaphore towers that used
digital encoding
parallel transmission of multiple bits
a multi-national network of data links
Maybe not a full digital data network in the modern sense, but a large number of the fundamental ideas of such networks were exercised well before the introduction of the (serial) telegraph system.
I learn that the Internet Engineering Task Force has produced an RFC ( http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4824 ) for using semaphore systems as a physical layer under IP and TCP.
The next time I'm speaking to Prof Ruggles (Professor of Archaeoastronomy @ Leicester ; a distant acquaintance) I'll ask if there are any grounds for dismissing logic in these cases. I have a suspicion of what his answer will be, so I'll get the whiskey in first.
I read a newspaper article long ago about a guy in Italy who boarded a city bus and drew a gun on the driver trying to rob him. Eleven out of the seventeen people on the bus drew pistols and shot the guy.
Sounds pretty implausible to me. In fact, on analysis,it sounds extremely implausible. Eleven people shooting at one perp at the front of the bus... would mean multiple shooters firing past the ears of other shooters in front of them. So, in the almost incredible circumstance that you did get that many people on one bus who had guns, then most of them had no training in how to use guns, and were willing to trust their shooting to hit a guy multiple yards away, while shooting past innocent other people. That's pretty damned scary when you think about it. Well I find it scary.
Is the count of gunmen credible? I suppose if the perp was stupid enough to try robbing a bus that was taking the night shift of policemen away from a central police station... just about credible. If the police are allowed to take their weapons home with them, which they're certainly not in this country.
Surprising in Colorado that nobody returned fire.
Maybe the people of Colorado are not as lethally-inclined as the gun-nuts claim they are.
Or, equally credible - people in the movie house who had weapons, panicked when the bullets started flying (after all, how many people actually have the experience of being under fire from a machine gun?) and by the time they'd remembered that they had a gun, the perp was gone.
Regardless, well done in your work for the Canadian tourist board ; you've certainly left me with a clear impression of how dangerous America is to visit.
Ah, that does make a difference. Quite a significant difference.
You made it sound as if there were people patrolling the streets of $CITY$, inspecting random handbags (those companies make hand bags? I don't waste attention on fashion.) and arresting people who'd brought a counterfeit.
Arresting people with stocks of counterfeit X, who are trying to sell them, happens all over the world. Mostly it's intelligence-led policing (i.e. "grasses", "snouts" and "informants"), but they do inspect shops, street markets etc too. Depends on your police's local priorities too ; I'd guess America has more urgent concerns like the gun-nuts roaming the streets.
I guess blind people in France will have to remain blind if they don't want to run the risk of being beaten to death.
Somewhat hyperbolic, but a reasonable point.
My comment (emailed to this country's Mcdonalds) was:
I am highly concerned about the reports of McDonalds staff assaulting a person who uses vision assistance technology. Reports are at http://eyetap.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/physical-assault-by-mcdonalds-for.html I use a different sort of vision assistance technology.
Is it safe for me to visit a McDonalds?
Now, I don't mention that you'd need several strong men to hold me down to force me to eat a McSludge - no need for them to know that. But an implicit threat to their profitability and PR situation, for the actions of a different country's McDonalds organisation should get awkward questions being asked within the big happy family that is "McDonalds."
There is a "reasonable expectation of privacy" in retail business premises?
Not around here there isn't. If you've got a business that is open to the public, you don't have an expectation of privacy. In areas behind a receptionist, or a locked door, then the argument might be different, so you can stack your disease-ridden floor wipes in a locked cupboard perfectly happily. But if you use them to smear germs all over the floor while the shop is open and full of customers, you're liable to get photographed.
When you get to the bottom of it, the perps are likely to argue that they thought he was a paediatrician (yes, I do know what that means).
I'm just wondering how much targeted bombing of the Autobahn system took place during the war, as opposed to targeted bombing of factories and ports at the ends of the autobahns.
I don't recall hearing of any such bombing raids. Not one. Which clearly suggests what Bomber Command thought of this argument.
The only problem I see with a Pluto-Charon binary planet is whether the other moons orbit the barycenter or not.
Err, if they're not orbiting the barycentre of the largest nearby masses (which themselves orbit their own barycentre) , what do you think they are orbiting?
The unstated sub-text is that the CIA / GCHQ etc are most pissed off about someone else approaching their level of penetration of other people's communications.
Slashdot Mirror
(Wife and step-daughter insisted on getting a telly when we got married.)
I gave away my music collection about a year after moving in. I was always much more interested in the politics in the lyrics than in the sounds themselves.
I'm still not even sure if I've got a device - TV, laptop or whatever - which has a DVI connector - that's the ones with the two blocks of pins on a square grid? (Wikis ; yes, thought so.) So it's all utterly academic. Oddly, though I do have a DVI cable floating around in the mound of stuff - don't know where that appeared from.
Hasn't IBM been out of the hardware business for over 5 years?
("business consultancy" and "management services", or whatever they call it these days, if that's their current line of business, means as much to me as "SAP administrator" or "flange-sprocket discombobulator." They may do whatever that is wonderfully well, but what it actually is means absolutely nothing to me. Probability of being brought is zero.)
I've gone to see 3-d movies ; nothing worth seeing. I know that it's heretical, and that people who work in TV factories will be selling their babies to fricassee because of me ; that doesn't make me feel guilty enough to care about the technology. ... allegedly wonderful, so I asked my buddy to show me the difference on his several thousand $CURRENCY$ system. Things were different, certainly ; "better" ... well, not worth several thousand $CURRENCY$ of "different".
... Why?
... there are logos for "HD", "SRS" and "DOLBY" on the front of the telly. Does that mean that I'd actually got a HD TV and not known about it? Well, even less reason to change.
Ditto for stereo sound - I can barely tell whether the sound from anything is in mono or stereo, and bitterly resent the wasted speakers. (In any case, isn't "live" meant to be so much better than "stored", whatever the technology?)
HD, be it with TV or that $COLOUR$-Ray disc thing
No doubt, when the current TV gets broken, I'll have no choice but to replace it with a HD one. But change every other component of the system ?
Oh, I just thought I'd better check
Are we really expected to care about this? Isn't good content much more important than the box you replay it on? And the desperate shortage of good quality content is the real problem. (Fast-forwarding through the adverts is taken as a given.)
He's showing the military the respect they are due : none.
Not disagreeing with your general points, but have you worked out what that sort of demand means in terms of chemistry? Unless the battery is also the main structural material for your vehicle, and the payload is a 70kg human plus 5kg of freight, then you're likely to be requiring energy densities that imply internal electric fields near to the ionisation potential of covalent bonds. At which point you leave normal chemistry and are breaking into the field of liquid plasmas. MHD batteries, here we come.
Chemistry does have limits. We may not be approaching them (yet), but that doesn't mean to say that they're not present.
Poor people can't afford to sue, and can be brought off much more cheaply.
I say bring back the death penalty for illegal-immigrant maids who are inattentive enough to allow this to happen. That will make sure that the blame attaches in the right place. If they're dead, then the next maid to work for a pittance (and no health insurance, of course) will know that doing six things at once is not enough, she'll have to watch the kids too. Or bring along a child of her own for the employer's kids to vivisect.
(Your sarcasm-meter ought to be registering now.)
Oh, and shoot ambulance-chasing lawyers on sight - fit automated machine guns in the tail pipes of ambulances. Them and their "no-win-no-fee" deals are crushing the spirit of free enterprise.
HR are, almost without exception, useless parasites, intent only on covering their own arses and justifying their parasitism. If your company grows/ develops / acquires a HR department, then now is probably a good time to be leaving.
(There may be a case for a HR department if your weekly hires/ fires is in the dozens or more. But then they're treating people like a commodity, and that's not good. Even if they are a commodity, like a burger-flipper, or a shovel-pusher.)
I'd always thought that it was about Morocco carrying out internal repression around the time they were also invading and annexing, ummm ... Western Sahara? Long before any Western interest in Afghanistan.
[Wikis]
Oh, boring - just a smart-alek comment by their manager getting free-associated. How dull. I guess I'll just have sit back and enjoy the song for itself.
Give them the phone number for a £5 supermarket-brought phone that you keep switched off 98%+ of the time. I do.
It's the phone that goes on the boat when scuba diving, and has numbers for the decompression doctors and coastguard ; if it dies in the boat, it cost less than re-filling an air bottle. It's a dumb-as-a-brick phone : voice and SMS only ; it's first £5 PAYG has lasted for 18 months now. And no, the phone-owner doesn't pay to receive calls here, so that's not a problem. Not that it's switched on 8% of the time anyway.
Maybe not a full digital data network in the modern sense, but a large number of the fundamental ideas of such networks were exercised well before the introduction of the (serial) telegraph system.
Further reading : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semaphore_line
I learn that the Internet Engineering Task Force has produced an RFC ( http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4824 ) for using semaphore systems as a physical layer under IP and TCP.
The status of this post is : ha-ha, but serious.
The next time I'm speaking to Prof Ruggles (Professor of Archaeoastronomy @ Leicester ; a distant acquaintance) I'll ask if there are any grounds for dismissing logic in these cases. I have a suspicion of what his answer will be, so I'll get the whiskey in first.
Sounds pretty implausible to me. In fact, on analysis,it sounds extremely implausible. Eleven people shooting at one perp at the front of the bus ... would mean multiple shooters firing past the ears of other shooters in front of them. So, in the almost incredible circumstance that you did get that many people on one bus who had guns, then most of them had no training in how to use guns, and were willing to trust their shooting to hit a guy multiple yards away, while shooting past innocent other people. That's pretty damned scary when you think about it. Well I find it scary.
Is the count of gunmen credible? I suppose if the perp was stupid enough to try robbing a bus that was taking the night shift of policemen away from a central police station ... just about credible. If the police are allowed to take their weapons home with them, which they're certainly not in this country.
Maybe the people of Colorado are not as lethally-inclined as the gun-nuts claim they are.
Or, equally credible - people in the movie house who had weapons, panicked when the bullets started flying (after all, how many people actually have the experience of being under fire from a machine gun?) and by the time they'd remembered that they had a gun, the perp was gone.
Regardless, well done in your work for the Canadian tourist board ; you've certainly left me with a clear impression of how dangerous America is to visit.
Ah, that does make a difference. Quite a significant difference.
You made it sound as if there were people patrolling the streets of $CITY$, inspecting random handbags (those companies make hand bags? I don't waste attention on fashion.) and arresting people who'd brought a counterfeit.
Arresting people with stocks of counterfeit X, who are trying to sell them, happens all over the world. Mostly it's intelligence-led policing (i.e. "grasses", "snouts" and "informants"), but they do inspect shops, street markets etc too. Depends on your police's local priorities too ; I'd guess America has more urgent concerns like the gun-nuts roaming the streets.
Ah, poison by a different dose. Way to go, Paracelsus!, I see you've learned nothing in nearly 500 years.
That would be interesting if you had any evidence to back up what sounds like unjustified spleen.
Your evidence?
Because a caustic application of wit .... will get you dead.
Effect
ReArrange
Somewhat hyperbolic, but a reasonable point.
My comment (emailed to this country's Mcdonalds) was :
Now, I don't mention that you'd need several strong men to hold me down to force me to eat a McSludge - no need for them to know that. But an implicit threat to their profitability and PR situation, for the actions of a different country's McDonalds organisation should get awkward questions being asked within the big happy family that is "McDonalds."
Not around here there isn't. If you've got a business that is open to the public, you don't have an expectation of privacy. In areas behind a receptionist, or a locked door, then the argument might be different, so you can stack your disease-ridden floor wipes in a locked cupboard perfectly happily. But if you use them to smear germs all over the floor while the shop is open and full of customers, you're liable to get photographed.
When you get to the bottom of it, the perps are likely to argue that they thought he was a paediatrician (yes, I do know what that means).
I don't recall hearing of any such bombing raids. Not one. Which clearly suggests what Bomber Command thought of this argument.
How many I/O ports does your mobile phone expose for controling your putative robot's motors, reading it's limb positions, etc?
Flying in formation.
That would be a rational response to the threat of invasion from the US's neighbours?
Err, if they're not orbiting the barycentre of the largest nearby masses (which themselves orbit their own barycentre) , what do you think they are orbiting?
No, seriously?
The unstated sub-text is that the CIA / GCHQ etc are most pissed off about someone else approaching their level of penetration of other people's communications.