Why is it we eat lots of herbivores (chickens, pigs, cows, etc), but we don't eat carnivores (dogs, cats, tigers, lions)? Is it because it doesn't seem "right", or because carnivores being higher up the food chain concentrate toxins?
You forgetting some important facts.
The anti-carnivore taboo isn't nearly as universal as you think it is. Dogs are a part of many Asian cuisines, and there doesn't seem to be any associated health problem -- other than PETA death threats. Some popular food animals (inlcuding a couple you cite) are thought of as herbivores but are actually carnivores or ominvores -- Salmon, pigs.
Many Asian cultures seem to have a taboo, or at least some aversion, to eating draft animals. No obvious answer for that one. Then there's horsemeat -- popular in continental Europe, gross in English-speaking countries. Cuteness factor?
Health issues are often cited as a source of taboo, but that's hard to justify. The usual example is the tricinosis spread by pigs. But there are easier ways to prevent this disease -- like cooking thoroughly. Every animal food, even eggs, spreads diseases that can be controlled by cooking.
(Incidentally, the fact that pigs spread trich has more to do with the similarity between human and porcine physiology. It's quite striking. Pig embryoes are sometimes used in human anatomy classes. One 16th century scientist even though that humans evolved from pigs. I'd tell you his name, but I'd stand accused of a gratuitous pun.)
Taboos have a lot more to do with defining your cultural identity, and separating your own culture from others. Jewish culture (my own heritage) is full of bizarre prohibitions. No mixing meat and milk -- you even have to have separate containers and utensils for them. (Though somehow fish is not considered a meat!) No flicking a light switch on the sabbath. (Electricity is a kind of fire, and you can't light or douse a fire on the sabbath.) No consumption of any non-scaly aquatic life. (Salmon is OK, even though they're carnivores, but sturgeon is not.) It goes on and on.
My own pet theory about the pork taboo goes like this: many, many years ago, the ancestors of todays Jews and Arabs were nomadic peoples who had a free open life in the deserts and hills. They looked down upon (and occassionally conquered or pillaged) the agricultural peoples who spent their life mucking out a living in the various river basins. Clean noble nomads raise herd animals. Filthy peasants raise disgusting dirty pigs. And a taboo is born. Just a theory!
If I register floobydust.com, and I fill in a contact email that becomes invalid three days after I go live, is that Verisign's fault?
You're forgetting that domain owners are also supposed to give physical addresses. Of course spammers (and shy people) give a bogus address. Apparently some registrars check that the address actually exists, but that's not really useful if they don't verify that the registree receives mail there. Doing that would add a couple bucks to the cost of registering a domain -- but does the world really need ten-buck registration services?
Once, on some weird whim, I tracked down and contacted the person registered as owner of a spam domain. Turned out to be an elderly lady who didn't even own a computer! Obviously the real owner got her name and address out of a phone book. I reported this to the registrar, Verisign, and got back a form email about jerking domains not having any effect on spam. No comment on the fact that they had helped perpetrate a fraud!
Hey, I have a friend who teaches a 6502 assember class at a local community college. Quite well-attended. I doubt if any of his students use this skill in real life, but it is a good way to pick up basic computer architecture.
When he started the class, he used Apple IIs. School wouldn't keep these around just for one class, so now he uses an Apple II emulator running on PCs.
According to the preface (warning, PDF file) this is strictly an IA-32 book. Which doesn't make it obsolete. Quite the contrary -- it'll be a long time before more assembly-language programming is done for Itaniums than for Pentiums and their clones. If ever.
Omitting Linux makes a book a little more narrow than some of us would like, but that doesn't make it obsolete it either. Last time I looked, there were one or two Windows programmers gainfully employed.
So the title is misleading. Probably chosen by the publisher, after they decided that an accurate title ("IA-32 programming for Windows and DOS"?) wouldn't sell. And it doesn't cover topics some (but not most) of us are interested in. Sounds like 90% of the computer books in print.
I've been looking at Chapter 1 of Duntemann's book Fourteen pages of lame jokes, complicated metaphors, and totally redundant explanations of basic programming concepts. (Everybody who doesn't know what a loop is, raise your hand!) The first serious technical information is in chapter 2, where he explains non-decimal math by presenting a table labeled "Counting in Martian, base fooby." (Xip means 0, foo means 1.. foobity-barby-foo means 25) OK, maybe you think this is very witty, but it all goes by most of us. And separating the technical detail from the hyperactive comedy requires more energy than a serious student can spare.
Here. This project is referered to as a "reference source" by the file system team -- whatever that means.
One thing that bothers me about most filesystems is limited metadata support. BFS is a notable exception. One hopes that KDE and GNOME developers could use this to improve on the primitive file handling tools desktop users are currently stuck with.
I find it interesting that the author thinks that Tucows has a lot of power. I never go there for software. I use Google and sometimes go to CNet or ZD-Net
I'm suprised Tucows has any following at all, given how difficult it is to navigate through their libraries. But their web presence is huge, so they must have a significant following.
Sure Google works well if you're trying to find software. But if you have a new product in an established category (like text editors), you're invisible in Google until you achieve something like critical mass. So you need to get noticed.
(Bad spelling is traditional on/., but "male/femail" is a bit much!)
Yeah, the pornographic nature of electrical connectors is pretty strange and amusing. One wonder how the bluenoses let this happen!
Another example: joystick. These were originally invented for high-accelleration aircraft, where the pilot was subjected to G-forces that prevented him (it was always a him, of course) from lifting his hands out of his lap. So they invented a flight control that consisted of a simple stick between the pilots legs. The masturbation metaphor was unavoidable, but where were the censors when all this was a happening? This was the 1950s and America was overrun with Guadians of Virtue. I guess the only answer is that GoVs are just plain dense!
Yep, that's the episode that sucked me in when it was first shown back in '99. Before that, I didn't get the basic premise of Buffy -- in fact, I'm still not sure I do. But "Hush" was so different from anything I'd seen before, I had to stick around. It isn't the creepiness of the story. (It's plenty creepy, but that sort of thing goes right by me.) It's the sheer beauty of the storytelling. Which, interestingly enough, makes very effective use of sound. And the final scene, where silence is inflicted for one last ironic moment, is priceless. I won't say, "beyond words"!
Unfortunately, this ep loses some of its best moments in the FX version. It's a decent job of editing, but a lot of my favorite visual jokes are gone. I may have to buy the DVD. Oh wait, I don't even own a player...
Don't knock it until you try seasons 1 through 4.
People who aren't already hooked are not going to have the patience to sit through the the first season or the the first half of the second. If you can live with not knowing all the backstory (and you're sort of in trouble there anyway -- part of the premise is only documented properly in an out-of-print comic book), a good place to start is midway through Season 2, with "Suprise", which is the 13th ep in Season 2. This ep begins the first really great story arc, and trots out a whole slew of really well-acted bad guys.
I actually rather like season 5. The first ep was awful, but it's my personal favorite story arc -- my favorite villain, and a new character is introduced in a truely originaly way.
I agree that the premise of Buffy is beginning to wear out. I'm a rabid fan, but I'd rather see the show go away than descend into standard TV mediocrity.
That being said, I really think that Season 6 was almost great. Unfortunately, when you're doing this kind of creative risk-taking "almost great" usually is equivalent to "bad".
When you say, "They should have let her stay dead", you're forgetting that they chose to kill her off in the first place. In fact, the death and ressurrection had been planned more than a season before. A big gamble -- especially when you've just made a big point that Bringing Back the Dead is a big no-no.
Such an ambitious story twist required soom really good follow-up. And that's where they blew it. Af first they seemed to be leading into a really good arc, which involved a long-standing "good" character getting seduced by her own power and going over to the dark side. But then they seemed to lose track of what they were doing, going off in every which direction. Some of these directions were sort of good (the Evil Nerds had their moments) but most of it was recycled corniness that was better suited to an After School Special. (Magic as addiction? Barf!) Worst of all, none of it did anything to advance the main story arc.
Plus they put some of the characters though changes totally at odds with their past history. And then finally they picked up the original arc very clumsily, killing off a popular character in the process, but not making any real connection with the ideas raised at the beginning of the season. The final eps were very well done -- but I couldn't enjoy them, having been so frustrated by the way they were set up.
Despite his protestations to the contrary, I've come to think that Joss Whedon has spread himself too thin. He claims he delegated Buffy to people who know his mind, but the sad truth is that Season 6 foundered on gimmicks that he never allowed when he ran the show directly. He needs either to do a better job of delegating, or scale his work back.
This is not worth a headline on Slashdot. I'm qualified to say this as a Buffy fan and as Eliza fan (though maybe "fan" is the wrong word). It's just a minor casting decision, fer crisakes.
If we're all so thoroughly into the Whedonverse, let's concentrate on the important stuff -- like the absence of space noise from Firefly.
You have a point. I certainly wouldn't expect electric cars to take over the market, no matter how heavily they're promoted. But the fact is, they're hardly promoted at all. It's hard to accept that nobody wants them if the car companies aren't really trying to sell them.
This page really brings back some memories, both good and bad.
Now that comment demands amplification. I'm also frustrated by all the posts talking about NT's VMS roots, but few specifics as to what features and technologies NT inherited from VMS.
I never used VMS, and I was ignorant of the VMS-NT connection. I lost my chance to use VMS when my school got its first VAX, and decided to run Unix on it instead of VMS. The decision was not universally popular on campus! Unix was still a work in progress. In particular, Bill Joy and his bunch at Berkeley were still hacking out a Unix that could make proper use of the VAX's memory management hardware.
It's funny. We think of the rivalry between Linux and NT as part of the broader conflict between Microsoft and various anti-Microsoft forces: the open-source community, MS's competitors and detractors, etc. But it seems that it's partly a continuation of the decades-old rivalry between Unix and VMS!
...due to poor customer demand and lack of government support for the environmentally friendly cars.
You have to ask how much demand there'd be if Ford marketed these vehicles as hard as they market SUVs. And how much support they'd get if the White House weren't overflowing with former oil industry executives.
Thanks for the link to the SuperCookies page. Curiously, the demo page was able to identify my SuperCookie, even though I have the relevent WMP option disabled. Can't have the PR0N sites tracking me!;)
I don't see how you can fault IE for not having a complete P3P implementation, when P3P itself is not complete. You can fault Microsoft for insisting that IE be integrated with everything. A bad idea for a bunch of reasons, not the least of which is that it makes holes like this inevitable.
Unfortunately, Microsoft's superintegration approach is being too-thoroughly imitated by the very projects that are supposed to give us an alternative: Mozilla, KDE, and Gnome.
I personally always *liked* the size of the Newton. Sure, it wouldn't hurt if it were lighter, but I am the kind of person that likes to get a lot of use out of a PDA device- not just use it to keep track of appointments. I took all of my college lecture notes on my Newton, read a lot of ebooks/websites, IRCd, read/wrote email, even wrote full-blown Newton OS applications on the device itself.
Well, yeah, that's the basic difference between the Newton and the Palm. Newton tries to be an open-ended general purpose system. (Though still an extension of the desktop, not a replacement -- Apple never really dealt with that aspect.) Palm just tries to do specific things. So of course the Newton has to have a bigger screen.
But if it's for all the things you describe then the screen isn't big enough. Unless you're very good at working in such a small are (Newton die-hards always seem to have skills the rest of us lack, like consistent handwriting) you need something about the size of a composition book. If Newton had been that size, it would have worked much better. Of course, it would also have been too expensive to sell....
What's particularly silly is that both Mozilla and IE support XML/XSL documents. I don't mean silly in itself -- client-side XML on the web is a good way to break out of the whole browser compatibility thing, and design yourself a more sensible set of tags than what HTML provides. But.
To use client-side XML you need a way to specify the fine details of your documents -- how much space between paragraphs, how big is your text, that sort of thing. XSL isn't up to that yet, so that leaves you with CSS. And CSS is quite nice -- easy to work with, powerful enough for most web documents -- and most documents in general. But.
Both Mozilla/Netscape and IE implement CSS -- badly. Mozilla makes some stupid mistakes with layout, while IE's CSS support is incomplete and buggy. Wouldn't be that hard to fix, but they've both been working on it for five years now!
If there's a standard that web designers should be pushing for it's CSS.
..is P3P support. A little shocking that IE got this long before anybody else. The AOL and Webmail integration is actually a pain. All the other features I care about are in Mozilla, and less of a pain to deal with.
I specifically do not want features like messaging in my browser!
It's a pity no web browser has intelligent pop-up control built in. You can get the same three from the aftermarket, but it works best when the policy is part of the browser. I'd particularly like something that lets you configure your policy on the fly -- like Konqueror does with cookies, only for popups.
If there's no reliable source of line power, you're going to have to look at solar power. I don't think there's an affordable battery that will keep you cams online for any length of time. Here's somebody else who did that.
Slashdot Mirror
The anti-carnivore taboo isn't nearly as universal as you think it is. Dogs are a part of many Asian cuisines, and there doesn't seem to be any associated health problem -- other than PETA death threats. Some popular food animals (inlcuding a couple you cite) are thought of as herbivores but are actually carnivores or ominvores -- Salmon, pigs.
Many Asian cultures seem to have a taboo, or at least some aversion, to eating draft animals. No obvious answer for that one. Then there's horsemeat -- popular in continental Europe, gross in English-speaking countries. Cuteness factor?
Health issues are often cited as a source of taboo, but that's hard to justify. The usual example is the tricinosis spread by pigs. But there are easier ways to prevent this disease -- like cooking thoroughly. Every animal food, even eggs, spreads diseases that can be controlled by cooking.
(Incidentally, the fact that pigs spread trich has more to do with the similarity between human and porcine physiology. It's quite striking. Pig embryoes are sometimes used in human anatomy classes. One 16th century scientist even though that humans evolved from pigs. I'd tell you his name, but I'd stand accused of a gratuitous pun.)
Taboos have a lot more to do with defining your cultural identity, and separating your own culture from others. Jewish culture (my own heritage) is full of bizarre prohibitions. No mixing meat and milk -- you even have to have separate containers and utensils for them. (Though somehow fish is not considered a meat!) No flicking a light switch on the sabbath. (Electricity is a kind of fire, and you can't light or douse a fire on the sabbath.) No consumption of any non-scaly aquatic life. (Salmon is OK, even though they're carnivores, but sturgeon is not.) It goes on and on.
My own pet theory about the pork taboo goes like this: many, many years ago, the ancestors of todays Jews and Arabs were nomadic peoples who had a free open life in the deserts and hills. They looked down upon (and occassionally conquered or pillaged) the agricultural peoples who spent their life mucking out a living in the various river basins. Clean noble nomads raise herd animals. Filthy peasants raise disgusting dirty pigs. And a taboo is born. Just a theory!
Once, on some weird whim, I tracked down and contacted the person registered as owner of a spam domain. Turned out to be an elderly lady who didn't even own a computer! Obviously the real owner got her name and address out of a phone book. I reported this to the registrar, Verisign, and got back a form email about jerking domains not having any effect on spam. No comment on the fact that they had helped perpetrate a fraud!
When he started the class, he used Apple IIs. School wouldn't keep these around just for one class, so now he uses an Apple II emulator running on PCs.
Omitting Linux makes a book a little more narrow than some of us would like, but that doesn't make it obsolete it either. Last time I looked, there were one or two Windows programmers gainfully employed.
So the title is misleading. Probably chosen by the publisher, after they decided that an accurate title ("IA-32 programming for Windows and DOS"?) wouldn't sell. And it doesn't cover topics some (but not most) of us are interested in. Sounds like 90% of the computer books in print.
I've been looking at Chapter 1 of Duntemann's book Fourteen pages of lame jokes, complicated metaphors, and totally redundant explanations of basic programming concepts. (Everybody who doesn't know what a loop is, raise your hand!) The first serious technical information is in chapter 2, where he explains non-decimal math by presenting a table labeled "Counting in Martian, base fooby." (Xip means 0, foo means 1 .. foobity-barby-foo means 25) OK, maybe you think this is very witty, but it all goes by most of us. And separating the technical detail from the hyperactive comedy requires more energy than a serious student can spare.
Was funny the first couple hundred times you posted it. Now it's beginning to get stale.
One thing that bothers me about most filesystems is limited metadata support. BFS is a notable exception. One hopes that KDE and GNOME developers could use this to improve on the primitive file handling tools desktop users are currently stuck with.
...every time somebody goes on a silly hackers witchhunt. Been asking for a long time!
Sure Google works well if you're trying to find software. But if you have a new product in an established category (like text editors), you're invisible in Google until you achieve something like critical mass. So you need to get noticed.
Yeah, the pornographic nature of electrical connectors is pretty strange and amusing. One wonder how the bluenoses let this happen!
Another example: joystick. These were originally invented for high-accelleration aircraft, where the pilot was subjected to G-forces that prevented him (it was always a him, of course) from lifting his hands out of his lap. So they invented a flight control that consisted of a simple stick between the pilots legs. The masturbation metaphor was unavoidable, but where were the censors when all this was a happening? This was the 1950s and America was overrun with Guadians of Virtue. I guess the only answer is that GoVs are just plain dense!
Not all systems scale badly!
Unfortunately, this ep loses some of its best moments in the FX version. It's a decent job of editing, but a lot of my favorite visual jokes are gone. I may have to buy the DVD. Oh wait, I don't even own a player...
People who aren't already hooked are not going to have the patience to sit through the the first season or the the first half of the second. If you can live with not knowing all the backstory (and you're sort of in trouble there anyway -- part of the premise is only documented properly in an out-of-print comic book), a good place to start is midway through Season 2, with "Suprise", which is the 13th ep in Season 2. This ep begins the first really great story arc, and trots out a whole slew of really well-acted bad guys.I actually rather like season 5. The first ep was awful, but it's my personal favorite story arc -- my favorite villain, and a new character is introduced in a truely originaly way.
That being said, I really think that Season 6 was almost great. Unfortunately, when you're doing this kind of creative risk-taking "almost great" usually is equivalent to "bad".
When you say, "They should have let her stay dead", you're forgetting that they chose to kill her off in the first place. In fact, the death and ressurrection had been planned more than a season before. A big gamble -- especially when you've just made a big point that Bringing Back the Dead is a big no-no.
Such an ambitious story twist required soom really good follow-up. And that's where they blew it. Af first they seemed to be leading into a really good arc, which involved a long-standing "good" character getting seduced by her own power and going over to the dark side. But then they seemed to lose track of what they were doing, going off in every which direction. Some of these directions were sort of good (the Evil Nerds had their moments) but most of it was recycled corniness that was better suited to an After School Special. (Magic as addiction? Barf!) Worst of all, none of it did anything to advance the main story arc.
Plus they put some of the characters though changes totally at odds with their past history. And then finally they picked up the original arc very clumsily, killing off a popular character in the process, but not making any real connection with the ideas raised at the beginning of the season. The final eps were very well done -- but I couldn't enjoy them, having been so frustrated by the way they were set up.
Despite his protestations to the contrary, I've come to think that Joss Whedon has spread himself too thin. He claims he delegated Buffy to people who know his mind, but the sad truth is that Season 6 foundered on gimmicks that he never allowed when he ran the show directly. He needs either to do a better job of delegating, or scale his work back.
If we're all so thoroughly into the Whedonverse, let's concentrate on the important stuff -- like the absence of space noise from Firefly.
You have a point. I certainly wouldn't expect electric cars to take over the market, no matter how heavily they're promoted. But the fact is, they're hardly promoted at all. It's hard to accept that nobody wants them if the car companies aren't really trying to sell them.
I never used VMS, and I was ignorant of the VMS-NT connection. I lost my chance to use VMS when my school got its first VAX, and decided to run Unix on it instead of VMS. The decision was not universally popular on campus! Unix was still a work in progress. In particular, Bill Joy and his bunch at Berkeley were still hacking out a Unix that could make proper use of the VAX's memory management hardware.
It's funny. We think of the rivalry between Linux and NT as part of the broader conflict between Microsoft and various anti-Microsoft forces: the open-source community, MS's competitors and detractors, etc. But it seems that it's partly a continuation of the decades-old rivalry between Unix and VMS!
I think there'd be a certain amount of consumer resistence to buying beverages from a gas pump!
I don't see how you can fault IE for not having a complete P3P implementation, when P3P itself is not complete. You can fault Microsoft for insisting that IE be integrated with everything. A bad idea for a bunch of reasons, not the least of which is that it makes holes like this inevitable.
Unfortunately, Microsoft's superintegration approach is being too-thoroughly imitated by the very projects that are supposed to give us an alternative: Mozilla, KDE, and Gnome.
But if it's for all the things you describe then the screen isn't big enough. Unless you're very good at working in such a small are (Newton die-hards always seem to have skills the rest of us lack, like consistent handwriting) you need something about the size of a composition book. If Newton had been that size, it would have worked much better. Of course, it would also have been too expensive to sell....
To use client-side XML you need a way to specify the fine details of your documents -- how much space between paragraphs, how big is your text, that sort of thing. XSL isn't up to that yet, so that leaves you with CSS. And CSS is quite nice -- easy to work with, powerful enough for most web documents -- and most documents in general. But.
Both Mozilla/Netscape and IE implement CSS -- badly. Mozilla makes some stupid mistakes with layout, while IE's CSS support is incomplete and buggy. Wouldn't be that hard to fix, but they've both been working on it for five years now!
If there's a standard that web designers should be pushing for it's CSS.
I specifically do not want features like messaging in my browser!
It's a pity no web browser has intelligent pop-up control built in. You can get the same three from the aftermarket, but it works best when the policy is part of the browser. I'd particularly like something that lets you configure your policy on the fly -- like Konqueror does with cookies, only for popups.
If there's no reliable source of line power, you're going to have to look at solar power. I don't think there's an affordable battery that will keep you cams online for any length of time. Here's somebody else who did that.