One of the commercials actually was talking/showing a photoshoot from Maxim magazine where apparently one of the actresses came from.
I agree with most of your rant, but should point out that Maxim does not typically feature models. They feature celebrities (usually acresses and musicians) who model for them. Nobody "comes from" Maxim (yes, I know there's a funny pun there... leave it alone), in the way that Tyra Banks "came from" Victoria Secret, because the women Maxim photographs are already famous from elsewhere. In the case of the actress you are speaking of, she probably is doing the Maxim shoot because of ther role on Battlestar Galactica.
(Maxim has actually become a common vehicle for promoting new shows and movies. Both X-Men movies were hyped by Maxim spreads of Famke Janssen, Halle Barry, and Rebecca Romjin-Stamos a month before each release.)
Then the US/imperial/CSG systems use a lot of units to measure one property, just look at lenght. You have to know how much inch go in a feet, how much feet in a yard, how much yards on a rod
Ooo... I was mostly with you up until there. By including vastly unused measurements like "rod" and "hand", you reveal yourself as trying to make English measurements sound more complex than they really are.
As a programmer, it certainly seems easier, at first glance, to know that measurement of length will be based on the meter. When you list a person's height in feet, you need to include another field for inches... but then, when we speak of people's height, the flaw in this argument is exposed. Most customers of a software product which displays a persons height does not want it to say "1.87 m." They want height to be "187 cm." How do you know whether to use m or cm? By the context of what you are measuring. Often, people will accept "67.5 inches" as happilly as "5 feet, 7.5 inches", so now the systems come close to being equally simple: Know the context of what you are measuring, and use the correct unit for that context. Likewise, measuring distance in meters is fine if you are speaking of a sprint race (the 100 meter dash), but if you expressed the distance from Torronto to Montreal in meters, you would be regarded as kind of crazy. Likewise, an American football field is 100 yards from one end-zone to the other, and we measure the distance between cities in miles. It's not harder, it's just different than what you use.
Well, rachets could have been divided into tenths of inches. "9/16th" is not really part of any standard, other than the fact that American auto manufacturers chose to use such goofy measurments for their nuts and bolts.
If you're going to defend a system because it's commonplace and everyone knows how to use it, that's one thing, but I can't see how you can argue that metric doesn't simply make more sense.
It doesn't. It's just as arbitrary, and while the uniform increments of 10s might sometimes make the math a little easier, it doesn't always. Nor does it always make sense to go up an entire factor of 10 for the next unit of measurment. Four quarts to the gallon makes a hell of a lot of sensse, because those are the two units by which people are most likely to buy beverages at the supermarket (orange juice, milk, etc.) "A gallon" is simpler than "four litres."
Our temperatures are also more useful, at least for weather reports, because it's centered on human comfort levels, not the sea-level boiling and freezing temps of water.
In F, a weather report of zero degrees means "fucking cold", and 100 means "fucking hot". Anything inside that range means you can probably stand to be outside for a few hours, provided you dress appropriately. In C, zero means "kinda cold, watch out for freezing rain and wear a hat", while 100 would mean "the world is coming to an end. Repent and prepare to meet thy God!"
I'm very anti-train for most of America, but I agree with you on that one. The East Coast has a dense enough population for a train system to make a lot of sense. Out here in the lands of the Louisiana Purchace, trying to install a mass-transit system on fixed lines is just stupid. The city of Minneapolis just piddled away billions on a rail line from the airport to our downtown area which will do nothing to releive traffic and will never be utilized enough to pay for itself with fares alone. Our transportation taxes (we pay a "gas tax" to avoid the need for toll roads) will be subsidizing this absurd project for as long as it continues to run.
Both are very simple unless you are a total moron. Is multiplying 3 by 12 too hard for you? If so, you need more help than a strict decimal-based system of weights and measures.
Or how about: water freezes at 0 and boils at 100?
Except that it almost never does. How close are you to sea level where you live? What's the atmospheric pressure today?
Compare to: water freezes at 32 and boils at 212?
That means F has 181 units from freezing to boiling, while C only has 101. This means metric is less precise, especially for climate temperatures. I can tell when somebody adjusts my house thermostat from 73 F to 72 F, so we are talking about useful degrees. To represent a change of the same ammount in the metric system, I would need to use fractions of degrees.
Airlines have tight security just at the airports because it's hard to take down a plane in flight from the ground. A train rail, on the other hand, is right there at (or near) ground level. Some jackass could damage the line at just the worst moment and cause a disaster.
A perfect example of why not every country does things our way. In America, we would rather see a double-murder go unavenged once in a while than put up with the sort of government harrassment we are reading about in this story. Choices have consequences. We chose one way, it looks like Norway chose another.
Just another example of why, in spite of all the whining you hear, America is one of the most free places to live.
If I am accused of a crime, I have a right to face my accusers before a jury of my peers, and if found "not guilty," I can not be charged with the same crime again. Not every part of the world does things this way.
It seems to me many baseball fans would be more into being the manager of the team than a player. Being able to create a lineup, and 'strategize' during the game e.g. control when to bunt, hit-and-run, move around the fielders, etc.
A lot of strategy goes on for individual players, too. A good second-baseman knows where to stand based on the tendencies of the batter and the types of pitches his current pitcher likes to throw. (If he knows the catcher's signals, he can also mentally prepare for a grounder vs. a pop-up, etc.) He also covers first on the bunt in some situations, sometiems covers second on the steal, but sometimes lets the shortstop get it and backs it up, etc. There's a lot to think about if you want to play at even a slight level above your church-league slow-pitch softball team.
Even the catcher, who doesn't look like he's doing much, gets to call pitches. A catcher who really knows the opposing batters gives his team a big edge.
Won't the current pantent laws, as they apply in most Western countries, take care of this?
Free Software needed the GPL (or the BSD License... Let's not start up that Holy War again) because software is usually locked up by copyright, and copyright lasts a long time.
Genetic research usually results in patents, though.
Patents give researchers a few years to make "ph4t l00t" as a return on their investment, and then lapse into the public domain. It's a pretty good balance between incentive for research and sharing of knowledge. What exactly is the problem here?
1) I would utterly hate it if they switched to AA or AAA batteries. The current battery is one of the best things about the iPod.
2) It's not Apple's fault that you chose to rip your CD's using a compression format that most of the industry (and most users) has chosen to to adopt. Ogg advocates are starting to sound like Betamax owners from around 1990 or so.
"fax" has been around for decades. "email" almost as long.
And the title of this article is "20 Years of Virii." 20 years is two decades.
"Virii" doesn't bother me, because it's fun to say out loud. As is "boxen." The word that bugs me is "workaholic." That would imply somebody who abuses a substance called workahol.
Re: Lets get this out of the way
on
20 Years of Virii
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Figurative expressions always gain emphasis when you wrongly claim that they are not figurative.
For example: "My head exploded when I heard that, and when I say exploded, I mean that chucks of my brains and skill actually burst all over the walls of the room, leaving a sticky, gory mess all around my headless corpse."
Understanding the purpose of the exaggeration is all about context, which is an important element of the way we communicate.
Re:The english language is not static
on
20 Years of Virii
·
· Score: 1
Hebrew has evolved, and everybody who's not French think the French are incredibly silly for having a government Ministry to enforce their language.
Re:A summary of the comments
on
20 Years of Virii
·
· Score: 2, Funny
You forgot
* 3 posts that list off all the ubiquitous predicable posts which are sure to follow.
I just think that both groups dislike him and find "another McGovern" to be a convenient smear.
Again with the notion that calling him "another McGovern" is a smear. A lot of old-school liberals always liked McGovern, and still do.
And the DLC's strategy was successful in the Clinton years
Successful for moderate Democrats, but not for liberals, hense the rise of Ralph Nader and the Greens.
Kerry would get some of the moderates and most mainstream Democrats.
Read as: "enough votes to win"
But the genuine center-left moderation of Dean's politics (no matter how much his opponents try to paint him as to the left of Vladimir Lenin) combined with his willingness to fight the good fight in a public forum represents, IMO, the Democrats' best chance for victory.
If you even suspect that Dean could win the moderate vote after the campaign he as run so far, you are so far out of touch with reality, you probably are one of those people who think Paul Wellstone "definately would have won" had he not died.
The ironic thing about Goldwater is that he turned into quite the libertarian in his later years...
No, it's not ironic, Miss Morresette. Goldwater was always "quite the libertarian." The term "populist right-winger" was practically invented to refer to him. Most modern libertarian conservatives consider his "extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice" address from the 60's to be the dawning moment of their entire movement.
So, by the fact that you think some RNC/DLC conspiracy is responsible for the McGovern comparisons would indicate that you think it's a Bad Think, I guess.
He's being compared to McGovern because 99% of the emphasis of his campaign is an anti-war message, and he's clobbering more moderate candidates in the Democrat primaies as a result (as McGovern did to Humphrey.)
Also, his party is likely to get utterly spanked in the general election if he becomes the candidate (as Nixon did no McGovern.)
Guys like Lieberman or even Kerry would have a pretty good shot at stealing the moderate vote away from Bush, and winning by a narrow margin. By positioning himself as the True Blue Liberal Davior of the party (in spite of the fact that he was actually a somewhat moderate Governor) he is pretty much doomed to get about as much of the moderate "swing" vote as Goldwater did against Johnson in a general election.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. If you're a liberal, a loss by a "pure" liberal candidate could be better for the cause than a win by another triangulating Clinton-style Democrat. Were it not for the Goldwater loss, the Reagan presidency might not have happened.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with most of your rant, but should point out that Maxim does not typically feature models. They feature celebrities (usually acresses and musicians) who model for them. Nobody "comes from" Maxim (yes, I know there's a funny pun there... leave it alone), in the way that Tyra Banks "came from" Victoria Secret, because the women Maxim photographs are already famous from elsewhere. In the case of the actress you are speaking of, she probably is doing the Maxim shoot because of ther role on Battlestar Galactica.
(Maxim has actually become a common vehicle for promoting new shows and movies. Both X-Men movies were hyped by Maxim spreads of Famke Janssen, Halle Barry, and Rebecca Romjin-Stamos a month before each release.)
You just said it better than I could have, iamblades. I'm happy to leave it at that.
Ooo... I was mostly with you up until there. By including vastly unused measurements like "rod" and "hand", you reveal yourself as trying to make English measurements sound more complex than they really are.
As a programmer, it certainly seems easier, at first glance, to know that measurement of length will be based on the meter. When you list a person's height in feet, you need to include another field for inches... but then, when we speak of people's height, the flaw in this argument is exposed. Most customers of a software product which displays a persons height does not want it to say "1.87 m." They want height to be "187 cm." How do you know whether to use m or cm? By the context of what you are measuring. Often, people will accept "67.5 inches" as happilly as "5 feet, 7.5 inches", so now the systems come close to being equally simple: Know the context of what you are measuring, and use the correct unit for that context. Likewise, measuring distance in meters is fine if you are speaking of a sprint race (the 100 meter dash), but if you expressed the distance from Torronto to Montreal in meters, you would be regarded as kind of crazy. Likewise, an American football field is 100 yards from one end-zone to the other, and we measure the distance between cities in miles. It's not harder, it's just different than what you use.
Yes. I just didn't make the error of revealing the identity behind my user ID to the world.
If you're going to defend a system because it's commonplace and everyone knows how to use it, that's one thing, but I can't see how you can argue that metric doesn't simply make more sense.
It doesn't. It's just as arbitrary, and while the uniform increments of 10s might sometimes make the math a little easier, it doesn't always. Nor does it always make sense to go up an entire factor of 10 for the next unit of measurment. Four quarts to the gallon makes a hell of a lot of sensse, because those are the two units by which people are most likely to buy beverages at the supermarket (orange juice, milk, etc.) "A gallon" is simpler than "four litres."
Our temperatures are also more useful, at least for weather reports, because it's centered on human comfort levels, not the sea-level boiling and freezing temps of water.
In F, a weather report of zero degrees means "fucking cold", and 100 means "fucking hot". Anything inside that range means you can probably stand to be outside for a few hours, provided you dress appropriately. In C, zero means "kinda cold, watch out for freezing rain and wear a hat", while 100 would mean "the world is coming to an end. Repent and prepare to meet thy God!"
I'm very anti-train for most of America, but I agree with you on that one. The East Coast has a dense enough population for a train system to make a lot of sense. Out here in the lands of the Louisiana Purchace, trying to install a mass-transit system on fixed lines is just stupid. The city of Minneapolis just piddled away billions on a rail line from the airport to our downtown area which will do nothing to releive traffic and will never be utilized enough to pay for itself with fares alone. Our transportation taxes (we pay a "gas tax" to avoid the need for toll roads) will be subsidizing this absurd project for as long as it continues to run.
Both are very simple unless you are a total moron. Is multiplying 3 by 12 too hard for you? If so, you need more help than a strict decimal-based system of weights and measures.
Or how about: water freezes at 0 and boils at 100?
Except that it almost never does. How close are you to sea level where you live? What's the atmospheric pressure today?
Compare to: water freezes at 32 and boils at 212?
That means F has 181 units from freezing to boiling, while C only has 101. This means metric is less precise, especially for climate temperatures. I can tell when somebody adjusts my house thermostat from 73 F to 72 F, so we are talking about useful degrees. To represent a change of the same ammount in the metric system, I would need to use fractions of degrees.
On every inch of the track?
Airlines have tight security just at the airports because it's hard to take down a plane in flight from the ground. A train rail, on the other hand, is right there at (or near) ground level. Some jackass could damage the line at just the worst moment and cause a disaster.
OJ Simpson
A perfect example of why not every country does things our way. In America, we would rather see a double-murder go unavenged once in a while than put up with the sort of government harrassment we are reading about in this story. Choices have consequences. We chose one way, it looks like Norway chose another.
If I am accused of a crime, I have a right to face my accusers before a jury of my peers, and if found "not guilty," I can not be charged with the same crime again. Not every part of the world does things this way.
As far as I'm concerned, '1337 is still funny after all these years.
It's functional, too: Instead of expanding ASCII to Unicode, we can reduce the keyboard set to numbers and special characters only.
Sarcasm. Also still funny.
A lot of strategy goes on for individual players, too. A good second-baseman knows where to stand based on the tendencies of the batter and the types of pitches his current pitcher likes to throw. (If he knows the catcher's signals, he can also mentally prepare for a grounder vs. a pop-up, etc.) He also covers first on the bunt in some situations, sometiems covers second on the steal, but sometimes lets the shortstop get it and backs it up, etc. There's a lot to think about if you want to play at even a slight level above your church-league slow-pitch softball team.
Even the catcher, who doesn't look like he's doing much, gets to call pitches. A catcher who really knows the opposing batters gives his team a big edge.
Free Software needed the GPL (or the BSD License... Let's not start up that Holy War again) because software is usually locked up by copyright, and copyright lasts a long time.
Genetic research usually results in patents, though.
Patents give researchers a few years to make "ph4t l00t" as a return on their investment, and then lapse into the public domain. It's a pretty good balance between incentive for research and sharing of knowledge. What exactly is the problem here?
Really, would it be so hard to add a feature to the Slashcode that lets you go back and edit your remarks after they're posted?
2) It's not Apple's fault that you chose to rip your CD's using a compression format that most of the industry (and most users) has chosen to to adopt. Ogg advocates are starting to sound like Betamax owners from around 1990 or so.
Right. He hates this place. It's the smell. He can taste your stink and every time he does he feels somehow... infected by it.
And the title of this article is "20 Years of Virii." 20 years is two decades.
"Virii" doesn't bother me, because it's fun to say out loud. As is "boxen." The word that bugs me is "workaholic." That would imply somebody who abuses a substance called workahol.
For example: "My head exploded when I heard that, and when I say exploded, I mean that chucks of my brains and skill actually burst all over the walls of the room, leaving a sticky, gory mess all around my headless corpse."
Understanding the purpose of the exaggeration is all about context, which is an important element of the way we communicate.
Hebrew has evolved, and everybody who's not French think the French are incredibly silly for having a government Ministry to enforce their language.
* 3 posts that list off all the ubiquitous predicable posts which are sure to follow.
A pun is the lowest form of wit only because sarcasm is not witty.
Right, which we knew they had because civilizations who sometimes use horse-drawn carts always have access to advanced technology.
Again with the notion that calling him "another McGovern" is a smear. A lot of old-school liberals always liked McGovern, and still do.
And the DLC's strategy was successful in the Clinton years
Successful for moderate Democrats, but not for liberals, hense the rise of Ralph Nader and the Greens.
Kerry would get some of the moderates and most mainstream Democrats.
Read as: "enough votes to win"
But the genuine center-left moderation of Dean's politics (no matter how much his opponents try to paint him as to the left of Vladimir Lenin) combined with his willingness to fight the good fight in a public forum represents, IMO, the Democrats' best chance for victory.
If you even suspect that Dean could win the moderate vote after the campaign he as run so far, you are so far out of touch with reality, you probably are one of those people who think Paul Wellstone "definately would have won" had he not died.
The ironic thing about Goldwater is that he turned into quite the libertarian in his later years ...
No, it's not ironic, Miss Morresette. Goldwater was always "quite the libertarian." The term "populist right-winger" was practically invented to refer to him. Most modern libertarian conservatives consider his "extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice" address from the 60's to be the dawning moment of their entire movement.
He's being compared to McGovern because 99% of the emphasis of his campaign is an anti-war message, and he's clobbering more moderate candidates in the Democrat primaies as a result (as McGovern did to Humphrey.)
Also, his party is likely to get utterly spanked in the general election if he becomes the candidate (as Nixon did no McGovern.)
Guys like Lieberman or even Kerry would have a pretty good shot at stealing the moderate vote away from Bush, and winning by a narrow margin. By positioning himself as the True Blue Liberal Davior of the party (in spite of the fact that he was actually a somewhat moderate Governor) he is pretty much doomed to get about as much of the moderate "swing" vote as Goldwater did against Johnson in a general election.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. If you're a liberal, a loss by a "pure" liberal candidate could be better for the cause than a win by another triangulating Clinton-style Democrat. Were it not for the Goldwater loss, the Reagan presidency might not have happened.
The consensus seems to be that he's another George McGovern. Whether or not you think that's a Good Thing is up to you.