It will only effect geeks that tell and receive insults, because they are the only ones that will be able to reference this.
While it may or may not be true that "most geeks receive insults", it is also very likely true that most geeks don't notice many of the insults they receive.
[grammar-nazi]"affect" here, not "effect"[/grammar-nazi]
"Yo momma is so fat. If she gained another pound, she would collapse in on herself and become a black hole."
Apart from being literally impossible, and allowing for literary hyperbole, is this an insult? Surely the person delivering this so-called insult is simply showing the paucity of his imagination and his weakness in the cutting invective stakes. Pathetic.
Then again, it has the down side that if you do your job properly, you LOOK expendable. And in a way you are, until you've been gone for about six months and everything suddenly falls in a flaming heap.
... IF you've designed it properly, then the date of the flaming heaps can be calculated by adding "1" (day/ hour/ femtosecond) to the date on which any perceived or contracted support obligations expire.
And of course, the dialect of Klingon in which the important bits of the documentation are written is a dialect shared by you and precisely three other people, all of whom have also been outsourced.
I don't know how much of this is still considered cannon to the Mormon faith,
None.
Ever.
Ah. Denial. It must be true.
No, seriously. Well, as seriously as you can get when laughing at religion and the religious.
I guess I'm going to have to find out who this organism "Glen Beck" is now ; I deduce that he's something to do with American TV?
[Googles. No, Wikis.]
Oh, one of those. Well, negligible chance of it disturbing my ears.
BTW, something is "canon" when it is a definitive, authoritative statement on a matter, for example "Captain Kirk's rampant zoophilia (his desire to have sex outside his species) is a canon item in all productions set in the Star Trek universe. "Cannon" are a weapons technology. Please educate your spelling checker if you can't be bothered to educate yourself.
Thanks for the link, but at $0.04 to a nickel for these paper guys, I could buy 20 to 25 of them for every silicon accelerometer I bought from digikey. That matters.;)
It does matter, but not as much as the headline figures suggest.
An accelerometer sensor (or any other sensor) needs wires to be installed to it, connections to be made (manually or as pads on a circuit board, whatever), a monitoring channel in an A-to-D (dedicated or multiplexed, it matters little), and calibration. Assigning a fixed and utterly randomly selected cost of $0.5 for all of these associated components, then your silicon sensor costs $1.50/sensor circuit, and the paper accelerometer 1/3 of that at $0.54.
If you wired up your dollar worth of paper accelerometers, it'd cost you around $13 dollars. (Actually, for such a drastic change in usage, probably more. How are you going to process this 24-fold increase in accelerometry? That likely implies a complete re-write of any software or a redesign of any analogue computing.
this is potentially another way of tracking that few people would have thought about.
Speak for yourself. I've been using this username on Slashdot for over a decade now (I can't remember when Slashdot started, it was so long ago) and deliberately re-using the user name on other services since. And yes, it was obvious what I was doing, and yes, I did think about it.
I may have made a choice different to what you'd have done, but that doesn't make me necessarily wrong.
My friend set his arm on fire under one the experimental lessons we had in chemistry class in 9th grade. No injuries, though I never saw him wearing that sweater again.
Obviously he had no affinity for the subject. A real chemist, no matter where in his educational career, would have worn the sweater as a badge of honour, until he had something even more disreputable, smelly and interestingly tattered to replace it with.
(I considered "s/he-ing" the genders ; but sadly, I've almost certainly got the gender correct.)
Tunisia and Egypt are some more recent examples. Followed swiftly by Algeria, Yemen, and others...
Could I borrow the time machine when you've done with it. I want to check the 2015 stock market prices (I already have a sufficiently good idea of what the oil price is going to be).
What makes you think that any of the governments of Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria, Yemen or any of the other countries in the region are going to be democracies in the foreseeable future? There are only a couple of countries in the region with anything resembling a democratic government - Turkey and Israel - and both of those are pretty strained.
Apple, on the other hand, makes a near-perfect software experience
That rather implies that you believe that there is only one possible perfect software experience. That, in the multi-dimensional space of "software experience", measured by however many metrics you wish to define, there is one identifiable point where for all people, the experience is "perfect".
Have you ever considered if your perception of that "perfect software experience" might just possibly change if you were to be, for example, blinded? Would that change the location of "the perfect software experience" for you (though obviously not for anyone else)? Slightly less extremely, if you simply lost the use of the hand that you normally write with (I assume that you can write ; this assumption may not be valid ; can a mobile-phone interface designer assume that her users will be able to read or write?), would that change the location of "the perfect software experience" ?
There is a logical error called "reification" which boils down to "if I can name it, then it must exist". It is a fertile breeding ground for other logical errors.
how much it actually does not resemble the anticipated properties? Like, f.i. [SNIP] "The Pacific Ocean"?
The Pacific Ocean was named by people who had just passed through the Straight of Magellan.
It (the Pacific) was (by comparison) "pacific", i.e. "peaceful".
Then again, from what I've heard from people who've sailed there, just about ANYTHING is "pacific" compared to sailing through the Straights of Magellan.
What the fuck (and I mean that literally) is a call girl going to do to be worth $1000/hour? No, seriously. I'd be expecting barely-legal (like about 2 days over legal minimum in the relevant jurisdiction) bareback anal with about 6 of them simultaneously to justify prices like that.
Oh, hang on - price inflation. 5 simultaneously. 4, if they're good looking. 3, if you're doing video too.
OK, for a barely-legal, absolutely-anything-goes good-looking girl, who provides her own camera and someone to run the camera, and a couple of copies of the home movie... OK, I can just about see that coming to $1000/hour.
You could maybe substitute coprophagy (she eats mine) for the camera crew. I don't know the prices for that.
The discussion of weighing the benefits versus the disadvantages is nonetheless an interesting one.
It may have been the first time that it was held. Does someone have a link to the cuneiform language version of Slashdot, where the subject of the economics of caravanserai space was beaten to death just after that monotheistic heretic Abraham passed through into exile? He was a coffee-hogger and no mistake! And the way he treated those kids of his!
And, perhaps such discussions will give cafe owners food for thought in making their business decisions.
The number of cafe owners likely to read this blog is, I hope, near zero. Read the strapline : "news for nerds ; stuff that matters".
... Proterozoic which go far, far beyond what we actually know about life then.
I do realise that it's mostly journalistic hype, but evidence of "tissued" life (as opposed to merely multicellular life) a billion years ago is pretty weak. What the biochemistry of those life forms was is even more speculative.
(Damn - I'm having a brain fade and can't remember what the most primitive present-day, undifferentiated multicellular organisms is. The flat disc-y things - Placozoa, that's them!)
Placozoa manage motile multicellular life with even less tissue differentiation than sponges, and appear at least as structurally complex as billion-year old organisms (NB I'm not talking about the 700~550 million year old organisms of the Ediacaran fauna, and I do know the difference). So significant cooperative behaviour of multiple cells (as seen in Placozoa) probably significantly pre-dates 1 billion years ago, while the development of differentiated tissues appears to have happened later.
There's a lot that we don't know about the transition between single-celled life and multiple-celled (or even multiple-tissued) life. While this work seems to be trying to find out what is happening, it does seem to be rather more wedded to a particular set of assumptions about the sequence of development of certain traits (inter-cellular signalling, differentiation of tissues) than we have evidence for.
If your girlfriend gets all hot and bothered watching chimps fornicate, I'd say it's time for a new girlfriend.
Why would you say that?
No, seriously. Why?
I could understand it if you were worried about her being interested in the sexual habits of, say, spiders (accept male nuptial gift ; eat male's body while male's sex organs get on with pumping her) or some cephalopod molluscs (don't let male within about 5 body-lengths of you, forcing him to detach one of his penises and send it hunting around for you like a "fire'n'forget" guided missile). But mammals that are sufficiently physically and behaviourally similar to humans to be used as performing actors in some of the less classy brothels in the world... that's close enough to normal to verge on the boring.
2- Make up some remote-control thingie to fire them.
3- Re-install 2.5in form-factor drives inside cheap+nasty (i.e. plastic) 3.5in external drive enclosures along with batteries to fire the thermite trigger.
What? You wanted an answer that would make you feel comfortable? Sorry, you've got the wrong department. This is Reality, not Fantasy. Go down the corridor, take a flying car at the end and turn into the 4th dimension at the second orc on the right.
What subject are you teaching? If they know any internet memes then they know that one.
Sorry, jgtg32a, but you're showing your age.
I actually learned of that meme from/. , because I've never been particularly into video games, consoles and all that jazz. But I gather that it's from an 80's or 90s game (series?). I may not have been particularly interested in computerised game systems at that time, but at least I was around at the time, and knew of their existence and played them. Occasionally and with little interest, but I did play them. Block-out, MortalKombat and shit like that - worth maybe a quarter-pint of beer money, once.
So, kids coming into college today - depending on which country and which education system you're in are 16, 17, 18 years old, and you're talking about a meme that originated little later than the time of their birth, at the latest.
Welcome to old-fogie-dom. I can give you the name of a good supplier of Zimmer frames if you need it.
If I set up my DNS to support the ".wgaf-about-DC" TLD, there's sweet fuck-all the US government can do about it.
My problem then becomes one of finding other people who support that TLD, and arranging to share updates with each other. Maybe I can use the internet to find such people?
he didn't get his bonus last year because of the Kin debacle
A CEO performed badly and *didn't* get a bonus? What kinda crazy topsy-turvy world do we live in now?
While you're clawing back Ballmer's bonus from his cold, dead hands, would you stop by the advertising department and mug a few of those animated shit piles too.
It wasn't until I saw a comment below that I had any idea what the "Kin" was, or why it was a debacle. Now, from the "screwing the mobile pooch" comment, I have reason to believe that Microsoft have launched some innovative products aimed at the male canine beastialty participant.
It's not about anywhere that matters except to Americans. And for most of them, it's not terribly important either, because most of America is quite a distance from the coast.
Actually, I'm forgetting that I'm used to living on an island in a "storm-toss'd sea" ; there's probably enough potential for offshore wind energy on the Atlantic seaboard to power a large chunk of Europe, and a high proportion of it is in British and Irish waters. And it's increasingly potentially important here, as well as being controversial.
I think it might plausibly pay to train to be a geologist with sufficient soil-science, engineering and maritime safety certificates to get employment in site-investigation work in this industry. Oh, hang on. I already am a geologist with relevant experience, training and certificates.
OK, next important question : do they pay as well as my current jobs? Hmmm, have to talk to the account manager about that. Got to look forward to the second 30 years of my career, after all. A bit of "civils" never hurt anyone's CV.
That is one fucking big human that has no business being in the air.
Speaking as someone trying (not very hard) to get my weight down from ~95kg to ~85kg, you're not terribly wrong.
On the other hand, since I'm currently working at sea where there are sometimes operations on the vessel which require "overside" work... I read that as being quite useful for a 100kg human plus around 30 kg of tools, spare parts, that sort of thing. I'm not sure that I'd want to work on the sharp end of this particular Indian Rope Trick, but with a payload of ~150kg, this has some fairly obvious industrial applications.
Slashdot Mirror
Errr, "null" ?
While it may or may not be true that "most geeks receive insults", it is also very likely true that most geeks don't notice many of the insults they receive. [grammar-nazi]"affect" here, not "effect"[/grammar-nazi]
Apart from being literally impossible, and allowing for literary hyperbole, is this an insult? Surely the person delivering this so-called insult is simply showing the paucity of his imagination and his weakness in the cutting invective stakes. Pathetic.
... IF you've designed it properly, then the date of the flaming heaps can be calculated by adding "1" (day/ hour/ femtosecond) to the date on which any perceived or contracted support obligations expire.
And of course, the dialect of Klingon in which the important bits of the documentation are written is a dialect shared by you and precisely three other people, all of whom have also been outsourced.
Speaking as a Nokia user for around 10 years now, I wasn't aware that I had a "shininess" department. Do I need one?
Fish paste?
Ah. Denial. It must be true.
No, seriously. Well, as seriously as you can get when laughing at religion and the religious.
I guess I'm going to have to find out who this organism "Glen Beck" is now ; I deduce that he's something to do with American TV?
[Googles. No, Wikis.]
Oh, one of those. Well, negligible chance of it disturbing my ears.
BTW, something is "canon" when it is a definitive, authoritative statement on a matter, for example "Captain Kirk's rampant zoophilia (his desire to have sex outside his species) is a canon item in all productions set in the Star Trek universe. "Cannon" are a weapons technology. Please educate your spelling checker if you can't be bothered to educate yourself.
No need to - it's in my signature. After all, it's likely to retain it's freshness and relevance for a disturbingly long time.
It does matter, but not as much as the headline figures suggest. An accelerometer sensor (or any other sensor) needs wires to be installed to it, connections to be made (manually or as pads on a circuit board, whatever), a monitoring channel in an A-to-D (dedicated or multiplexed, it matters little), and calibration. Assigning a fixed and utterly randomly selected cost of $0.5 for all of these associated components, then your silicon sensor costs $1.50/sensor circuit, and the paper accelerometer 1/3 of that at $0.54.
If you wired up your dollar worth of paper accelerometers, it'd cost you around $13 dollars. (Actually, for such a drastic change in usage, probably more. How are you going to process this 24-fold increase in accelerometry? That likely implies a complete re-write of any software or a redesign of any analogue computing.
Speak for yourself. I've been using this username on Slashdot for over a decade now (I can't remember when Slashdot started, it was so long ago) and deliberately re-using the user name on other services since. And yes, it was obvious what I was doing, and yes, I did think about it.
I may have made a choice different to what you'd have done, but that doesn't make me necessarily wrong.
s/free/cheap/ FTFY
Obviously he had no affinity for the subject. A real chemist, no matter where in his educational career, would have worn the sweater as a badge of honour, until he had something even more disreputable, smelly and interestingly tattered to replace it with.
(I considered "s/he-ing" the genders ; but sadly, I've almost certainly got the gender correct.)
Could I borrow the time machine when you've done with it. I want to check the 2015 stock market prices (I already have a sufficiently good idea of what the oil price is going to be).
What makes you think that any of the governments of Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria, Yemen or any of the other countries in the region are going to be democracies in the foreseeable future? There are only a couple of countries in the region with anything resembling a democratic government - Turkey and Israel - and both of those are pretty strained.
That rather implies that you believe that there is only one possible perfect software experience. That, in the multi-dimensional space of "software experience", measured by however many metrics you wish to define, there is one identifiable point where for all people, the experience is "perfect".
Have you ever considered if your perception of that "perfect software experience" might just possibly change if you were to be, for example, blinded? Would that change the location of "the perfect software experience" for you (though obviously not for anyone else)? Slightly less extremely, if you simply lost the use of the hand that you normally write with (I assume that you can write ; this assumption may not be valid ; can a mobile-phone interface designer assume that her users will be able to read or write?), would that change the location of "the perfect software experience" ?
There is a logical error called "reification" which boils down to "if I can name it, then it must exist". It is a fertile breeding ground for other logical errors.
The Pacific Ocean was named by people who had just passed through the Straight of Magellan.
It (the Pacific) was (by comparison) "pacific", i.e. "peaceful".
Then again, from what I've heard from people who've sailed there, just about ANYTHING is "pacific" compared to sailing through the Straights of Magellan.
Oh, hang on - price inflation. 5 simultaneously. 4, if they're good looking. 3, if you're doing video too.
OK, for a barely-legal, absolutely-anything-goes good-looking girl, who provides her own camera and someone to run the camera, and a couple of copies of the home movie ... OK, I can just about see that coming to $1000/hour.
You could maybe substitute coprophagy (she eats mine) for the camera crew. I don't know the prices for that.
It may have been the first time that it was held. Does someone have a link to the cuneiform language version of Slashdot, where the subject of the economics of caravanserai space was beaten to death just after that monotheistic heretic Abraham passed through into exile? He was a coffee-hogger and no mistake! And the way he treated those kids of his!
The number of cafe owners likely to read this blog is, I hope, near zero. Read the strapline : "news for nerds ; stuff that matters".
I do realise that it's mostly journalistic hype, but evidence of "tissued" life (as opposed to merely multicellular life) a billion years ago is pretty weak. What the biochemistry of those life forms was is even more speculative.
(Damn - I'm having a brain fade and can't remember what the most primitive present-day, undifferentiated multicellular organisms is. The flat disc-y things - Placozoa, that's them!)
Placozoa manage motile multicellular life with even less tissue differentiation than sponges, and appear at least as structurally complex as billion-year old organisms (NB I'm not talking about the 700~550 million year old organisms of the Ediacaran fauna, and I do know the difference). So significant cooperative behaviour of multiple cells (as seen in Placozoa) probably significantly pre-dates 1 billion years ago, while the development of differentiated tissues appears to have happened later.
There's a lot that we don't know about the transition between single-celled life and multiple-celled (or even multiple-tissued) life. While this work seems to be trying to find out what is happening, it does seem to be rather more wedded to a particular set of assumptions about the sequence of development of certain traits (inter-cellular signalling, differentiation of tissues) than we have evidence for.
Why would you say that?
No, seriously. Why?
I could understand it if you were worried about her being interested in the sexual habits of, say, spiders (accept male nuptial gift ; eat male's body while male's sex organs get on with pumping her) or some cephalopod molluscs (don't let male within about 5 body-lengths of you, forcing him to detach one of his penises and send it hunting around for you like a "fire'n'forget" guided missile). But mammals that are sufficiently physically and behaviourally similar to humans to be used as performing actors in some of the less classy brothels in the world ... that's close enough to normal to verge on the boring.
What? You wanted an answer that would make you feel comfortable? Sorry, you've got the wrong department. This is Reality, not Fantasy.
Go down the corridor, take a flying car at the end and turn into the 4th dimension at the second orc on the right.
Sorry, jgtg32a, but you're showing your age.
I actually learned of that meme from /. , because I've never been particularly into video games, consoles and all that jazz. But I gather that it's from an 80's or 90s game (series?). I may not have been particularly interested in computerised game systems at that time, but at least I was around at the time, and knew of their existence and played them. Occasionally and with little interest, but I did play them. Block-out, MortalKombat and shit like that - worth maybe a quarter-pint of beer money, once.
So, kids coming into college today - depending on which country and which education system you're in are 16, 17, 18 years old, and you're talking about a meme that originated little later than the time of their birth, at the latest.
Welcome to old-fogie-dom. I can give you the name of a good supplier of Zimmer frames if you need it.
If I set up my DNS to support the ".wgaf-about-DC" TLD, there's sweet fuck-all the US government can do about it.
My problem then becomes one of finding other people who support that TLD, and arranging to share updates with each other. Maybe I can use the internet to find such people?
While you're clawing back Ballmer's bonus from his cold, dead hands, would you stop by the advertising department and mug a few of those animated shit piles too.
It wasn't until I saw a comment below that I had any idea what the "Kin" was, or why it was a debacle. Now, from the "screwing the mobile pooch" comment, I have reason to believe that Microsoft have launched some innovative products aimed at the male canine beastialty participant.
Straps, or something?
[Looks it up]
Damn : "Lysistrata (Attic Greek: ÎÏ...ÏfÎÏfÏÏÎÏÎ, "Army-disbander") ; "Aristophanes." ; "411 BC,"
Only one out of 3 - either my brain is getting fossilised, or Wikipedia is wrong.
Sadly, I fear that it's my brain.
Not In YOUR Back Yard.
FTFY.
It's not about anywhere that matters except to Americans. And for most of them, it's not terribly important either, because most of America is quite a distance from the coast. Actually, I'm forgetting that I'm used to living on an island in a "storm-toss'd sea" ; there's probably enough potential for offshore wind energy on the Atlantic seaboard to power a large chunk of Europe, and a high proportion of it is in British and Irish waters. And it's increasingly potentially important here, as well as being controversial.
I think it might plausibly pay to train to be a geologist with sufficient soil-science, engineering and maritime safety certificates to get employment in site-investigation work in this industry.
Oh, hang on. I already am a geologist with relevant experience, training and certificates.
OK, next important question : do they pay as well as my current jobs?
Hmmm, have to talk to the account manager about that. Got to look forward to the second 30 years of my career, after all. A bit of "civils" never hurt anyone's CV.
Speaking as someone trying (not very hard) to get my weight down from ~95kg to ~85kg, you're not terribly wrong.
On the other hand, since I'm currently working at sea where there are sometimes operations on the vessel which require "overside" work ... I read that as being quite useful for a 100kg human plus around 30 kg of tools, spare parts, that sort of thing. I'm not sure that I'd want to work on the sharp end of this particular Indian Rope Trick, but with a payload of ~150kg, this has some fairly obvious industrial applications.
Sorry. Boring. That's life.