Speaking as a vegetarian, I must say I've no idea why it's shagadelic; but then that's because I have no actual clue as to what the word means. As for the 'murdering cattle'; grow up. I don't want this to sound like a flame, but showing cows respect because we feel like a leather computer case is a bit above and beyond the call of sanity. Why is it, for example, that cows and doggies are considered unassailable, but grass -- something that's equally alive -- is not? Why don't we try to stop evil, insensitive cows munching on grass? Vegetable rights now!
Actually, the first amendment is specifically designed to protect the speech of the Anonymous Coward I was unclear; my apologies. My point was that/. is not required under the first amendment to allow ACs; that is the choice of the owner of the site, and that was decision was based on the very considerations that informed the first amendment./. may be considered by many of us as a public service, but it is still a site that is owned by one company (Andover), and they are free to allow or deny posting privileges to whomever they wish.
Last night The Irish Times hosted a lecture by Ian Wilmut (excellent talk, btw), and during the q&a he was asked about patenting. His reply was that the UK government was cutting back on research, and that the Roslin Institute needed the money. On the back of the patent, they were able to get investment and increase spending; pre-investment they were spending GBP400,000 a year, and they're able to spend ten times as much now. He also pointed out that the Institute doesn't qualify for Wellcome Trust grants, leaving patents as the most obvious method for paying the bills and increasing their research budget.
The people who post Elian Gonzalez Naked And Petrified posts aren't stifling free speech, they are in fact its most oppressed practicioners. Bullshit. The first amendment is not designed to allow ACs to post on/. any more than it's designed to protect grafitti artists who write their names on billboards. To my (foreign) mind,/. is an exemplar of free speech; no comment is removed; everyone who visits the site is free to read as many or as few of these comments as they wish. You can blame moderators, meta moderators or rob for the karma of a given comment, but ultimately, you will be able to read that comment. And the poster of that comment can do so anonymously.
I'm not sure I'm getting my value out of these tax dollers. Were I an american, I'd be quite happy with the way NASA spent my tax dollars. As many have said, you can have any two of 'better, faster, cheaper', but even with a high failure rate, this 'shotgun' approach will yield results.
A return to the halcyon days of a billion dollars on one mission would be foolish; what's needed now is either a continuation of the present policy (which will result in more [acceptable] failures), or a change to the Mars Direct approach, which could see us with a permanent base on Mars in 20 years for a trifling $50bn.
how does that affect the possibility of life arriving on Earth from elsewhere in the solar system? It's pretty accepted these days that the moon was created in such a collision; but it happened a lot more than a couple of billion years ago. AFAIR it was about four billion; not long after the earth was first created. At the time, there were probably tens of protoplanets in the inner solar system; collisions on a smaller scale (but still huge) would have happened very frequently. As for life: there's no question that any life would have had to have evolved (or arrived) after the collision; quite a while after, in fact.
Remember, too, that it's possible that life evolved on mars before a cataclysmic impact, and that it spent a billion years or so floating around the system before being sucked in by Earth's gravity.
The sky is falling again!
on
AOL Nation
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· Score: 3
I don't like AOL, and I'm not a huge fan of Time, either. Nor do I like monopolies. But Jon's doomsday predictions are premature; he's basing his assumptions on no-one else jumping on the megacontent bandwagon. This is not going to be the case; in the next few months -- certainly by the beginning of the next millennium -- we'll see many mergers being made. This time next year, there'll probably be four or five megacontent providers. What does this mean for the consumer? I reckon it's a case of plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. Ten years ago we had media corporations that told us what the news was. The internet changed that -- temporarily. Now we're back into the same position, with the exception that it's easier to get alternative viewpoints. If I hear Dan Rather tell me about something that's happening in China, I can check out the South China Morning Post for an alternate view. However big the corporation get, I can't see that changing any time soon.
If you ask me the guys who came up with repeated reports of cold fusion after it had started being debunked should be dragged through the streets and forced to repay every penny of taxpayers' money that they got in grants
If that's an example of your opinion, I wont' be asking.
So it's okay to follow a line of research as long as no-one's debunked it? That'd be great for the idiots who spend their lives debunking evolution, and it also pretty much puts paid to extra-solar planets, cloning, relativity and... well, pretty much everything. Look back far enough and you'll probably find someone grunting the caveman equivalent of 'fire? load of bollocks, that'.
It's not the end of the world if a group of cars are going 115km/h in a 100km/h highway You're making the same assumption that everyone else is: that everyone only drives on multi-lane highways. This is not the case. The majority of accidents (in the UK and Ireland, at any rate) occur on smaller roads, where the speed limit is not 100km/h but about 60. And the majority of accidents are caused by people who drive at 100km/h+ regardless of the quality of the roads, or how far into the distance they can see.
It looks like we're fighting over a definition of 'required'. As far as I'm concerned, a company is 'required' to carry out inspections if their insurance company refuses to cover them if they don't do so. And a company without liability insurance will last, oh, about three hours in america.
Legally, the company isn't required to carry out inspections. Practically, they are.
I read the damn article. And I think that the two statments are incompatible. If the company is unable to hold inspections, then it's unreasonable to expect them to be responsible for injuries.
...that your company is obliged to make periodic checks on your house to make sure your cables are all tidied away, and that you've got soap in the toilet?
Next you'll be telling us that Rush Limbaugh, another entertainer who lies outrageously on the air, should be arrested.
Well, now that you mention it...
Actually, I was more concerned with the fact that he charges corporations large chunks of money to dowse for oil or to make them, ahem, lucky. Even if he doesn't guarantee anything, he's still charging money for something he knows won't work
Although it did ruin our Olympic shooting teams practicing. Fortunately for you, Northern Ireland was/is still part of the UK. You couldn't ask for a more qualified bunch of shooters.
I've spent a lot of time in Michigan, where they saw a marked decrease in fatal auto accidents after uping their speed limit to 70 & 75 on freeways. My concern isn't the freeways; I can see how a high speed would be less dangerous when driving in a more-or-less straight line. The problem lies in areas like residential settings, or in smaller single-lane roads. Here in Ireland, many accidents take place on narrow roads, where speeding drivers are unable to stay on their own side of the roads on medium-to-sharp bends. In these cases, they crash head-on into cars coming in the opposite direction; cars that may have been 10kph under the limit.
this is the same right that allows a person to do lots of other "dumb" things I'm all for allowing people to do dumb things, as long as the only people they kill are themselves. This is demonstrably not the case with speeders.
Notice how laws like this are popping up in the UK and Australia since they put in strict gun laws You're not seriously suggesting that fear of armed revolution is the only thing that stops the US congress from passing oppressive laws, are you?
What if there's an instance where a driver has to speed, such as to avoid an accident or rush to a hospital
Granted, that's a valid concern, but consider: how many people each year must speed to save a life, compared to the number of people who are killed because of speeeding? Alcohol is unquestionably a contributing factor, but speed kills; of this there is no question.
The 'must speed to get to hospital' argument is, to my mind, comparable to the 'If I was wearing a seatbelt I'd be dead now' argument. There are people who are alive because they didn't wear seatbelts, but the number is tiny compared to the number of people whose lives were saved by them.
Since when does "doing something for the money" automatically negate its authenticity? It doesn't. Geller could go around pretending to bend spoons for free, and he'd still be a fake and a charlatan. He's an opportunitist because he's suing a multi-million dollar company because they made an oblique reference to his name. He's suing so he can get some free money that he doesn't deserve. A few people have stated that he may have a valid case, but I disagree. However, all this is incidental to the fact that he's lied to millions of people.
On the subject of money, though, my question is this: he's appeared on television programmes, published books and worked for oil companies, all based on his spurious clames of psychic ability. Why doesn't this constitute fraud? Why hasn't he been arrested?
I speak for me. Not my employer, not slashdot, not Xenu.
Uri Geller is a fake. He's an opportunist. He's doing this for the money. He's described as a real-life spoonbender, which he may well be. But he does it using regular, non-psychic methods.
Deeply boring fact of the day: The most hygienic way of hand-washing-and-drying is to wash your handies for five minutes (not four, not six. Seven is right out), and then to dry them with a paper towel, and then to use a hand dryer. I'm not sure why I know that, but now you know it too. You read it on slashdot, so it must be true.
It's called the "Plow". Only for your farmer types. For us city folk, the can opener serves much the same purpose -- providing food -- and has the added advantage of being more portable.
Most engineers and programmers seemed to agree that there were, in fact, real problems associated with Y2K bugs, and that real trouble had been averted by the billions spent globally to upgrade and de-bug.
But it also seems obvious that Y2K problems were wildly exaggerated, online and off.
This is Y2K summed up. Nothing more need be said. Not that that'll stop anyone.
At my previous residence, elevator surfing was a popular fad until one of the little moppets made the fatal discovery that you shouldn't put your body in between the cab and the wall of the shaft. People talk about how violent computer games have no redeeming value, but that's a mistake no quake player would ever make.
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking as a vegetarian, I must say I've no idea why it's shagadelic; but then that's because I have no actual clue as to what the word means.
As for the 'murdering cattle'; grow up. I don't want this to sound like a flame, but showing cows respect because we feel like a leather computer case is a bit above and beyond the call of sanity.
Why is it, for example, that cows and doggies are considered unassailable, but grass -- something that's equally alive -- is not? Why don't we try to stop evil, insensitive cows munching on grass?
Vegetable rights now!
Actually, the first amendment is specifically designed to protect the speech of the Anonymous Coward /. is not required under the first amendment to allow ACs; that is the choice of the owner of the site, and that was decision was based on the very considerations that informed the first amendment. /. may be considered by many of us as a public service, but it is still a site that is owned by one company (Andover), and they are free to allow or deny posting privileges to whomever they wish.
I was unclear; my apologies. My point was that
Last night The Irish Times hosted a lecture by Ian Wilmut (excellent talk, btw), and during the q&a he was asked about patenting. His reply was that the UK government was cutting back on research, and that the Roslin Institute needed the money. On the back of the patent, they were able to get investment and increase spending; pre-investment they were spending GBP400,000 a year, and they're able to spend ten times as much now.
He also pointed out that the Institute doesn't qualify for Wellcome Trust grants, leaving patents as the most obvious method for paying the bills and increasing their research budget.
The people who post Elian Gonzalez Naked And Petrified posts aren't stifling free speech, they are in fact its most oppressed practicioners. /. any more than it's designed to protect grafitti artists who write their names on billboards. To my (foreign) mind, /. is an exemplar of free speech; no comment is removed; everyone who visits the site is free to read as many or as few of these comments as they wish.
Bullshit. The first amendment is not designed to allow ACs to post on
You can blame moderators, meta moderators or rob for the karma of a given comment, but ultimately, you will be able to read that comment. And the poster of that comment can do so anonymously.
I'm not sure I'm getting my value out of these tax dollers.
Were I an american, I'd be quite happy with the way NASA spent my tax dollars. As many have said, you can have any two of 'better, faster, cheaper', but even with a high failure rate, this 'shotgun' approach will yield results.
A return to the halcyon days of a billion dollars on one mission would be foolish; what's needed now is either a continuation of the present policy (which will result in more [acceptable] failures), or a change to the Mars Direct approach, which could see us with a permanent base on Mars in 20 years for a trifling $50bn.
how does that affect the possibility of life arriving on Earth from elsewhere in the solar system?
It's pretty accepted these days that the moon was created in such a collision; but it happened a lot more than a couple of billion years ago. AFAIR it was about four billion; not long after the earth was first created. At the time, there were probably tens of protoplanets in the inner solar system; collisions on a smaller scale (but still huge) would have happened very frequently.
As for life: there's no question that any life would have had to have evolved (or arrived) after the collision; quite a while after, in fact.
Remember, too, that it's possible that life evolved on mars before a cataclysmic impact, and that it spent a billion years or so floating around the system before being sucked in by Earth's gravity.
I don't like AOL, and I'm not a huge fan of Time, either. Nor do I like monopolies. But Jon's doomsday predictions are premature; he's basing his assumptions on no-one else jumping on the megacontent bandwagon. This is not going to be the case; in the next few months -- certainly by the beginning of the next millennium -- we'll see many mergers being made. This time next year, there'll probably be four or five megacontent providers.
What does this mean for the consumer? I reckon it's a case of plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. Ten years ago we had media corporations that told us what the news was. The internet changed that -- temporarily. Now we're back into the same position, with the exception that it's easier to get alternative viewpoints. If I hear Dan Rather tell me about something that's happening in China, I can check out the South China Morning Post for an alternate view. However big the corporation get, I can't see that changing any time soon.
If you ask me the guys who came up with repeated reports of cold fusion after it had started being debunked should be dragged through the streets and forced to repay every penny of taxpayers' money that they got in grants
If that's an example of your opinion, I wont' be asking.
So it's okay to follow a line of research as long as no-one's debunked it? That'd be great for the idiots who spend their lives debunking evolution, and it also pretty much puts paid to extra-solar planets, cloning, relativity and... well, pretty much everything. Look back far enough and you'll probably find someone grunting the caveman equivalent of 'fire? load of bollocks, that'.
It's not the end of the world if a group of cars are going 115km/h in a 100km/h highway
You're making the same assumption that everyone else is: that everyone only drives on multi-lane highways. This is not the case. The majority of accidents (in the UK and Ireland, at any rate) occur on smaller roads, where the speed limit is not 100km/h but about 60. And the majority of accidents are caused by people who drive at 100km/h+ regardless of the quality of the roads, or how far into the distance they can see.
What was the middle bit again?
It looks like we're fighting over a definition of 'required'. As far as I'm concerned, a company is 'required' to carry out inspections if their insurance company refuses to cover them if they don't do so. And a company without liability insurance will last, oh, about three hours in america.
Legally, the company isn't required to carry out inspections. Practically, they are.
Don't tell me you tolerate dirty poo! Mens sana, coprus sanum.
I read the damn article. And I think that the two statments are incompatible. If the company is unable to hold inspections, then it's unreasonable to expect them to be responsible for injuries.
...that your company is obliged to make periodic checks on your house to make sure your cables are all tidied away, and that you've got soap in the toilet?
Next you'll be telling us that Rush Limbaugh, another entertainer who lies outrageously on the air, should be arrested.
Well, now that you mention it...
Actually, I was more concerned with the fact that he charges corporations large chunks of money to dowse for oil or to make them, ahem, lucky. Even if he doesn't guarantee anything, he's still charging money for something he knows won't work
Although it did ruin our Olympic shooting teams practicing.
Fortunately for you, Northern Ireland was/is still part of the UK. You couldn't ask for a more qualified bunch of shooters.
I've spent a lot of time in Michigan, where they saw a marked decrease in fatal auto accidents after uping their speed limit to 70 & 75 on freeways.
My concern isn't the freeways; I can see how a high speed would be less dangerous when driving in a more-or-less straight line. The problem lies in areas like residential settings, or in smaller single-lane roads. Here in Ireland, many accidents take place on narrow roads, where speeding drivers are unable to stay on their own side of the roads on medium-to-sharp bends. In these cases, they crash head-on into cars coming in the opposite direction; cars that may have been 10kph under the limit.
this is the same right that allows a person to do lots of other "dumb" things
I'm all for allowing people to do dumb things, as long as the only people they kill are themselves. This is demonstrably not the case with speeders.
Notice how laws like this are popping up in the UK and Australia since they put in strict gun laws
You're not seriously suggesting that fear of armed revolution is the only thing that stops the US congress from passing oppressive laws, are you?
What if there's an instance where a driver has to speed, such as to avoid an accident or rush to a hospital
Granted, that's a valid concern, but consider: how many people each year must speed to save a life, compared to the number of people who are killed because of speeeding? Alcohol is unquestionably a contributing factor, but speed kills; of this there is no question.
The 'must speed to get to hospital' argument is, to my mind, comparable to the 'If I was wearing a seatbelt I'd be dead now' argument. There are people who are alive because they didn't wear seatbelts, but the number is tiny compared to the number of people whose lives were saved by them.
Since when does "doing something for the money" automatically negate its authenticity?
It doesn't. Geller could go around pretending to bend spoons for free, and he'd still be a fake and a charlatan.
He's an opportunitist because he's suing a multi-million dollar company because they made an oblique reference to his name. He's suing so he can get some free money that he doesn't deserve. A few people have stated that he may have a valid case, but I disagree. However, all this is incidental to the fact that he's lied to millions of people.
On the subject of money, though, my question is this: he's appeared on television programmes, published books and worked for oil companies, all based on his spurious clames of psychic ability. Why doesn't this constitute fraud? Why hasn't he been arrested?
I speak for me. Not my employer, not slashdot, not Xenu.
Uri Geller is a fake. He's an opportunist. He's doing this for the money. He's described as a real-life spoonbender, which he may well be. But he does it using regular, non-psychic methods.
Deeply boring fact of the day:
The most hygienic way of hand-washing-and-drying is to wash your handies for five minutes (not four, not six. Seven is right out), and then to dry them with a paper towel, and then to use a hand dryer. I'm not sure why I know that, but now you know it too. You read it on slashdot, so it must be true.
It's called the "Plow".
Only for your farmer types. For us city folk, the can opener serves much the same purpose -- providing food -- and has the added advantage of being more portable.
S/he seem to be a he, according to s/his bio. And he's still posting. See?
Most engineers and programmers seemed to agree that there were, in fact, real problems associated with Y2K bugs, and that real trouble had been averted by the billions spent globally to upgrade and de-bug.
But it also seems obvious that Y2K problems were wildly exaggerated, online and off.
This is Y2K summed up. Nothing more need be said. Not that that'll stop anyone.
At my previous residence, elevator surfing was a popular fad until one of the little moppets made the fatal discovery that you shouldn't put your body in between the cab and the wall of the shaft.
People talk about how violent computer games have no redeeming value, but that's a mistake no quake player would ever make.