It's just the frustration of seeing what's essentially a good thing (the internet) being turned into just another corporate abomination People are greedy, and people are assholes. A fatal combination that means that anything popular will be subverted and bastardised. Take consolation in the fact that the internet is so much bigger than it was; it's still possible to do cool stuff, and to read cool stuff. I read a newspaper from a different country every day. this is partially possible because of those self-same corporate bastards that are ruining other parts of the net.
These are the same buffoons who think that showing you the same Nexium ad 50 times is gonna make you want to go see your doctor for some I'm with the buffoons on this. People are assholes, and like nothing better than going to the doctor and telling him/^H^Her what they need. Much as the US tendency towards litigation pisses me off, I'd love to see one of these companies get sued for reckless abuse of patients' stupidity. Look at all the morons who inisist on antibiotics to cure their cold; this sort of ludicrious hubris - actively encouraged by the drug companies - is going to kill us all.
I won't argue; but it's never happened to me. Granted, it's a rare circumstance in which I won't go a-googling when I need to find something, but even in those rare circumstances when google fails me, I can rely on ask.com (although Jeeves does seem overly enmoured of the CIA), hotbot or av.com . I've also learned that if I'm searching for hardware drivers or help, then judicious use of the '-' before a few select words'll generally clear away the chaff. And if you're still seeing popups, it's time you either a) downloaded mozilla or b) checked out its "Script & Windows" options.
Again: I'm not defending immoral search engines. But I do think people should check out a few of the more arcane commands on their engine of choice. A good search engine is more than another web page. I don't know about the rest of you, a day doesn't go by when I don't google for several things. If I was still using it the way I was three years ago, I'd deserve all I got. Technology - and knowledge - move on. Adapt.
I've wandered through a few search engines just now, and typed 'house sales' into each. netscape and teoma gave sponsored links, yahoo didn't (and stated categorically on its site that it doesn't jiggle with the results), but they all gave essentially the same thing; sites that I'd conceivably be interested in if I were search for House Sales.
On the subject of how they rate their results: the word 'proprietary' pops up a lot, along with some variation on 'we won't tell you how we do it'. Hard to deceive under those circumstances.
And to quote the cnn article: "The spot checks found few changes had been made." Hardly a drama.
How exactly is it deceiving the consumer? If I search for, say, "cars for sale" should I care about whence the reference comes? All I'm interested in is links, and if a paid link points me towards a car for sale, woohoo! If it doesn't, I've got a browser that comes equipped with a Back button. BFD. Your time may be worth thousands of dollars per hour, but I'm willing to spend that extra seven seconds per day to find out that what I see is what I get.
I'm not here to say that unannounced, paid links are dandy; I'm just saying that they're not the end of the bloody universe. And they're most emphatically not deceiving anyone. A lot of sites ask you to submit URLs to their search engine. Who gives a rat's arse whether it's paid for or not?
They're public lands! Public!
Yeah. And if you're driving in London, you've got plenty of time to examine those public lands. The average speed inside the city is about 15Km/h. The city's residents (and workers) are already paying in terms of increased pollutants, shitty travel times and the aggravation of seeing hundreds of cars going in the same direction, each of which contains only the driver. Ken Livingstone has stated that the money raised (about UKP150M, if memory serves) will go to improving public transport. Ten years from now, it's vaguely possible that London will have a transport system the envy of the world, and only the most determined of assholes will travel by car.
think about the holy hell that would get raised if you decided to charge a fee of $2500 a year to drive to Manhattan Island! Think of the holy hell that would get raised if the Bush 'administration' decided to intern hundreds of people without trial, or access to a lawyer! Everyone - americans included - will put up with a lot if they're given a half-assed excuse as to why it's necessary. If it took you three hours to traverse a few streets every day of the week, you can bet your ass that there'd be holy hell to pay for whomever decided that the status quo was better than any attempt at decreasing the traffic, and therefore the problem.
Actually, now that I re-read the article, it doesn't seem quite so condescending as once it did. Guess I should say sorry to the author for such egregious name-calling.
The news is not that terrabit densities have been achieved Yeah; that's not news. Terrabit=piece of Earth. Not that dense at all, cosmically speaking. No, I'm not blaming you. I'm not even blaming He Who Posted the Story. I figure it's a new US law, or something. Like the one that requires every american to spell 'lose' with two Os.
Suppose I'd better say something partially constructive. Here's the story from about six months ago.
You don't have registered mail in the US? I imagine you've got some manner of equivalent thingy whereby mail can be guaranteed intact and untampered on delivery. Doesn't really matter what it's called. Or do you guys all just really trust one another?
There's no formal procedure - in the UK or the US. If you write it, it's yours. If you so desire, you can register it with a copyright agency (such as this one in the UK), but that's only to establish precedence in case someone claims to have written your stuff before you did. Of course, if you're that paranoid, sending a copy to yourself by registered mail and not opening it is just as safe - and probably a lot cheaper.
Will someone please explain to me the attraction of the Sims? When it first came out, I gave it a couple of hours, and decided it was a waste of time. When everyone tried to convince me it was great, I gave it another go. Still nothing. I'll grant that all video games are pretty much a waste of time, but this brings inanity to new levels.
Note: this is not a troll. I just don't understand why people would want to play the damn thing.
Imagine that the only record you had of life before WWI was a collection black and white films, from which 99% of the frames had been distroyed and 99% of each remaining frame was damaged beyond recognition. With years of hard work you'd managed to piece together a pretty good--if very incomplete--idea of what life was like in those day. Then a Gould comes along and proposes a threory of "punctuated hanging out," claiming that people used to move by teleporting from place to place (thus "explaning" the lack of examples of coherent motion in your data). Would you welcome him?
Or to put it another way: after putting together the partial frames, scientists managed to come up with a picture that stated telportation was the norm. Then along comes Gould...
I'm not stating that PE is definitely correct. To me it seems the most reasonable explanation. If you disagree, that's cool. But to state that offering an alternative explanation is wrong because it'll give ammunition to the Enemy is just bullshit.
The reasoning behind PE is based on more that just gaps in the fossil record, BTW. If a sparse fossil record were the sole basis for any theory, I'd cheerfully sneer. But from a logical and statistical POV, I'm behind PE.
I personally feel much more loss over the death of the hundreds of interesting people who died today without every becoming famous. If I had a little machine for measuring sanctimony, you'd have just blown it up. Yours is the sort of bullshit statement designed so that mindless moderators'll think it's insightful, without taking the several seconds to realise it's full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
I feel he did a great deal of harm to the public acceptance of evolution by inventing controversy I can think of few people who've done more for the public acceptance of evolutionary theory. He's certainly the man who got me interested in the subject. Punctuated equilibrium, to my mind, answers so many questions it's amazing people are so dismissive of it. And what's so bad about controversy? If scientists aren't controversial at some stage, they're not doing their job.
Funny... I always thought Ceres was much smaller than that. And if one can be that big now, I can't in all honesty argue that there weren't bigger ones in the past. Bugger.
Now all I need to do is try to be happy that I've been corrected rather than disgruntled at having my spurious pontification shown to be in error in front of millions of erudite personages. No, wait... only/. readers know I'm an idiot. Hooray!
Why emilinate a larger asteroid? The very nature of the asteroid belt is such that huge asteroids are unlikely (note: IANAA). Jupiter's gravitational influence would stop bodies of sufficient size from forming; loose agglomerations are possible - even likely - but these wouldn't, TTBOMK, be sufficiently packed for their own gravity to allow the iron to sink into the centre.
Re:Am I missing something??? Nope...regrettably
on
Meteorite from Mercury?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The impression I got from the BBC article was that the meteorite came from a body considerably larger than Vesta. I'm not sure how that oxygen-isotope thingy they're talking about works, but if it's deficient in the chunkier elements, that would imply - to my mind - that it came from a big-assed body. If that's the case - and we can assume it's not from the moon or Mars - then it must've come from a really big asteroid, or from Mercury.
So people're inferring that it's from Mercury through a process of elimination. Seems reasonable to me.
I'd make a different list, but I'm not going to complain that any list that doesn't have Spaced Invaders on it isn't worth including. Having said that, Robocop deserved to be higher on the list, and I wouldn't have included Jurassic Park at all in terms of the criteria given. Of course, the criteria are bullshit. Futurism? that excludes every time travel movie ever made (probably). The same could be said for plausiblility. That means Terminator made it in by Entertainment values alone.
Anyway, all kidding aside - I realise I'm the only person on Earth who thinks that Spaced Invaders (aka Martians!!!) is a truly great movie - I would've included a few other movies...
Ghost in the Shell A far more visionary peek at the future, IMO, than anything listed (except, perhaps, Gattaca). For the sake of brevity, I'll list this as the only anime, even though I could fill the list with better films than these
The Abyss Not just included cos it's Cameron's last good movie. There may have been better First Contact movies, but I can't think of any offhand.
Star Trek: Generations Only kidding.
Re:Slashdot FUD?
on
Enigma
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
How many people do you think will only read the main page, and go away thinking it's the truth? Two points about this: 1. It's on/. That doesn't make it the truth, irrespective of how many paragraphs you read. 2. It's about a movie. If you go to see it based on a review you didn't read, you deserve to be disappointed. 3. It's a movie about codebreaking, and it's called Enigma. How much of a clue do you need? 4. I meant three points.
It's all very well cutting out Head-butt (who was much funnier than Beavis, IMO), but what happens when a bunch of impressionable six-year-olds watch the movie and emulate the language of their heroes? I can just picture them reciting their twelve-times-tables in class...
Four times twelve, forty-eight is Five times twelve, sixty is
This is a much more egregious assault on our children than a guy with a lightsabre quoting Ezekiel 25:17 as he pops a photon in a bot's ass.
Coders are human, and therefore assholes. Exactly how much spamware do you think is written by enslaved hackers, bewailing the evil they're forced to write? And how much of it is written by people who don't give a shit? An hippocratic oath is all very well, but it's not going to accomplish anything. Conscientious programmers will refuse to write stuff to which they object, other programmers won't. That'll always be the case, irrespective of any resolution.
I believe teh British Computer Society has a clause in its members' charter which is akin to this sort of thing; it says something along the lines of programmers having to bear in mind the social impact of their work, but I don't know whether they've every kicked any spamware programmers out. I kinda doubt it.
I don't know about the US, but here in Ireland a yellow light means 'stop unless it's dangerous to do so'. If that's the case across the pond, then I don't see how an extra second can make a difference.
Of course, 90% of Irish drivers think a yellow light (or 'amber' in the vernacular) means 'speed up' and every colour light means 'feel free to park in the cycle lane'.
Slashdot Mirror
It's just the frustration of seeing what's essentially a good thing (the internet) being turned into just another corporate abomination
People are greedy, and people are assholes. A fatal combination that means that anything popular will be subverted and bastardised. Take consolation in the fact that the internet is so much bigger than it was; it's still possible to do cool stuff, and to read cool stuff. I read a newspaper from a different country every day. this is partially possible because of those self-same corporate bastards that are ruining other parts of the net.
These are the same buffoons who think that showing you the same Nexium ad 50 times is gonna make you want to go see your doctor for some
I'm with the buffoons on this. People are assholes, and like nothing better than going to the doctor and telling him/^H^Her what they need. Much as the US tendency towards litigation pisses me off, I'd love to see one of these companies get sued for reckless abuse of patients' stupidity. Look at all the morons who inisist on antibiotics to cure their cold; this sort of ludicrious hubris - actively encouraged by the drug companies - is going to kill us all.
I won't argue; but it's never happened to me. Granted, it's a rare circumstance in which I won't go a-googling when I need to find something, but even in those rare circumstances when google fails me, I can rely on ask.com (although Jeeves does seem overly enmoured of the CIA), hotbot or av.com . I've also learned that if I'm searching for hardware drivers or help, then judicious use of the '-' before a few select words'll generally clear away the chaff.
And if you're still seeing popups, it's time you either a) downloaded mozilla or b) checked out its "Script & Windows" options.
Again: I'm not defending immoral search engines. But I do think people should check out a few of the more arcane commands on their engine of choice. A good search engine is more than another web page. I don't know about the rest of you, a day doesn't go by when I don't google for several things. If I was still using it the way I was three years ago, I'd deserve all I got. Technology - and knowledge - move on. Adapt.
I've wandered through a few search engines just now, and typed 'house sales' into each. netscape and teoma gave sponsored links, yahoo didn't (and stated categorically on its site that it doesn't jiggle with the results), but they all gave essentially the same thing; sites that I'd conceivably be interested in if I were search for House Sales.
On the subject of how they rate their results: the word 'proprietary' pops up a lot, along with some variation on 'we won't tell you how we do it'. Hard to deceive under those circumstances.
And to quote the cnn article: "The spot checks found few changes had been made." Hardly a drama.
he didn't just take the same answer and reprint it twenty times in slightly varying formats. That was unexpected.
Not that I'm disagreeing with you, but...
How exactly is it deceiving the consumer? If I search for, say, "cars for sale" should I care about whence the reference comes? All I'm interested in is links, and if a paid link points me towards a car for sale, woohoo! If it doesn't, I've got a browser that comes equipped with a Back button. BFD. Your time may be worth thousands of dollars per hour, but I'm willing to spend that extra seven seconds per day to find out that what I see is what I get.
I'm not here to say that unannounced, paid links are dandy; I'm just saying that they're not the end of the bloody universe. And they're most emphatically not deceiving anyone. A lot of sites ask you to submit URLs to their search engine. Who gives a rat's arse whether it's paid for or not?
Yeah; it's regressive. Perhaps you can think of a progressive version that's efficient and targets only car drivers?
Again, I say: something had to be done. This is the most practical solution.
Note: I'm speaking here as an Irishman and a cyclist, so I'm doubly unqualified. Which means I fit right in here.
They're public lands! Public!
Yeah. And if you're driving in London, you've got plenty of time to examine those public lands. The average speed inside the city is about 15Km/h. The city's residents (and workers) are already paying in terms of increased pollutants, shitty travel times and the aggravation of seeing hundreds of cars going in the same direction, each of which contains only the driver.
Ken Livingstone has stated that the money raised (about UKP150M, if memory serves) will go to improving public transport. Ten years from now, it's vaguely possible that London will have a transport system the envy of the world, and only the most determined of assholes will travel by car.
think about the holy hell that would get raised if you decided to charge a fee of $2500 a year to drive to Manhattan Island!
Think of the holy hell that would get raised if the Bush 'administration' decided to intern hundreds of people without trial, or access to a lawyer! Everyone - americans included - will put up with a lot if they're given a half-assed excuse as to why it's necessary. If it took you three hours to traverse a few streets every day of the week, you can bet your ass that there'd be holy hell to pay for whomever decided that the status quo was better than any attempt at decreasing the traffic, and therefore the problem.
Actually, now that I re-read the article, it doesn't seem quite so condescending as once it did. Guess I should say sorry to the author for such egregious name-calling.
Sorry, author.
It's published in Las Vegas' News and Culture Weekly. So which is it... news or culture? Normally I wouldn't have to ask, but, y'know, Las Vegas...
Oh, and is it just me, or is the author the most condescending fucker on the face of the planet?
So this means that our beloved RotJ is going to be ruined by annoying creatures added in to appeal to the kids? Nooooooo!
Next thing you know, he'll follow it up with a movie called Jar Jar : The Battle for Naboo, which'll be inane, cute and a travesty of... oh, wait.
The news is not that terrabit densities have been achieved
Yeah; that's not news. Terrabit=piece of Earth. Not that dense at all, cosmically speaking.
No, I'm not blaming you. I'm not even blaming He Who Posted the Story. I figure it's a new US law, or something. Like the one that requires every american to spell 'lose' with two Os.
Suppose I'd better say something partially constructive. Here's the story from about six months ago.
You don't have registered mail in the US? I imagine you've got some manner of equivalent thingy whereby mail can be guaranteed intact and untampered on delivery. Doesn't really matter what it's called. Or do you guys all just really trust one another?
There's no formal procedure - in the UK or the US. If you write it, it's yours.
If you so desire, you can register it with a copyright agency (such as this one in the UK), but that's only to establish precedence in case someone claims to have written your stuff before you did. Of course, if you're that paranoid, sending a copy to yourself by registered mail and not opening it is just as safe - and probably a lot cheaper.
Will someone please explain to me the attraction of the Sims? When it first came out, I gave it a couple of hours, and decided it was a waste of time. When everyone tried to convince me it was great, I gave it another go. Still nothing. I'll grant that all video games are pretty much a waste of time, but this brings inanity to new levels.
Note: this is not a troll. I just don't understand why people would want to play the damn thing.
Imagine that the only record you had of life before WWI was a collection black and white films, from which 99% of the frames had been distroyed and 99% of each remaining frame was damaged beyond recognition. With years of hard work you'd managed to piece together a pretty good--if very incomplete--idea of what life was like in those day.
Then a Gould comes along and proposes a threory of "punctuated hanging out," claiming that people used to move by teleporting from place to place (thus "explaning" the lack of examples of coherent motion in your data). Would you welcome him?
Or to put it another way: after putting together the partial frames, scientists managed to come up with a picture that stated telportation was the norm. Then along comes Gould...
I'm not stating that PE is definitely correct. To me it seems the most reasonable explanation. If you disagree, that's cool. But to state that offering an alternative explanation is wrong because it'll give ammunition to the Enemy is just bullshit.
The reasoning behind PE is based on more that just gaps in the fossil record, BTW. If a sparse fossil record were the sole basis for any theory, I'd cheerfully sneer. But from a logical and statistical POV, I'm behind PE.
I personally feel much more loss over the death of the hundreds of interesting people who died today without every becoming famous.
If I had a little machine for measuring sanctimony, you'd have just blown it up. Yours is the sort of bullshit statement designed so that mindless moderators'll think it's insightful, without taking the several seconds to realise it's full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
I feel he did a great deal of harm to the public acceptance of evolution by inventing controversy
I can think of few people who've done more for the public acceptance of evolutionary theory. He's certainly the man who got me interested in the subject. Punctuated equilibrium, to my mind, answers so many questions it's amazing people are so dismissive of it.
And what's so bad about controversy? If scientists aren't controversial at some stage, they're not doing their job.
Funny... I always thought Ceres was much smaller than that. And if one can be that big now, I can't in all honesty argue that there weren't bigger ones in the past. Bugger.
/. readers know I'm an idiot. Hooray!
Now all I need to do is try to be happy that I've been corrected rather than disgruntled at having my spurious pontification shown to be in error in front of millions of erudite personages.
No, wait... only
Why emilinate a larger asteroid?
The very nature of the asteroid belt is such that huge asteroids are unlikely (note: IANAA). Jupiter's gravitational influence would stop bodies of sufficient size from forming; loose agglomerations are possible - even likely - but these wouldn't, TTBOMK, be sufficiently packed for their own gravity to allow the iron to sink into the centre.
The impression I got from the BBC article was that the meteorite came from a body considerably larger than Vesta. I'm not sure how that oxygen-isotope thingy they're talking about works, but if it's deficient in the chunkier elements, that would imply - to my mind - that it came from a big-assed body. If that's the case - and we can assume it's not from the moon or Mars - then it must've come from a really big asteroid, or from Mercury.
So people're inferring that it's from Mercury through a process of elimination. Seems reasonable to me.
Having said that, Robocop deserved to be higher on the list, and I wouldn't have included Jurassic Park at all in terms of the criteria given.
Of course, the criteria are bullshit. Futurism? that excludes every time travel movie ever made (probably). The same could be said for plausiblility. That means Terminator made it in by Entertainment values alone.
Anyway, all kidding aside - I realise I'm the only person on Earth who thinks that Spaced Invaders (aka Martians!!!) is a truly great movie - I would've included a few other movies...
Ghost in the Shell
A far more visionary peek at the future, IMO, than anything listed (except, perhaps, Gattaca). For the sake of brevity, I'll list this as the only anime, even though I could fill the list with better films than these
The Abyss
Not just included cos it's Cameron's last good movie. There may have been better First Contact movies, but I can't think of any offhand.
Star Trek: Generations
Only kidding.
How many people do you think will only read the main page, and go away thinking it's the truth? /. That doesn't make it the truth, irrespective of how many paragraphs you read.
Two points about this:
1. It's on
2. It's about a movie. If you go to see it based on a review you didn't read, you deserve to be disappointed.
3. It's a movie about codebreaking, and it's called Enigma. How much of a clue do you need?
4. I meant three points.
I bet you meant to say " shiny metal ass "...
Damn, damn, damn! Yeah, that's what I meant.
It's all very well cutting out Head-butt (who was much funnier than Beavis, IMO), but what happens when a bunch of impressionable six-year-olds watch the movie and emulate the language of their heroes?
I can just picture them reciting their twelve-times-tables in class...
Four times twelve, forty-eight is
Five times twelve, sixty is
This is a much more egregious assault on our children than a guy with a lightsabre quoting Ezekiel 25:17 as he pops a photon in a bot's ass.
Coders are human, and therefore assholes. Exactly how much spamware do you think is written by enslaved hackers, bewailing the evil they're forced to write? And how much of it is written by people who don't give a shit?
An hippocratic oath is all very well, but it's not going to accomplish anything. Conscientious programmers will refuse to write stuff to which they object, other programmers won't. That'll always be the case, irrespective of any resolution.
I believe teh British Computer Society has a clause in its members' charter which is akin to this sort of thing; it says something along the lines of programmers having to bear in mind the social impact of their work, but I don't know whether they've every kicked any spamware programmers out. I kinda doubt it.
I don't know about the US, but here in Ireland a yellow light means 'stop unless it's dangerous to do so'. If that's the case across the pond, then I don't see how an extra second can make a difference.
Of course, 90% of Irish drivers think a yellow light (or 'amber' in the vernacular) means 'speed up' and every colour light means 'feel free to park in the cycle lane'.