I'm an American, and have been drinking Guinness since long before the buy-out that led to it being a "trendy" beer. I drink it because:
6. I tried it and found that it tastes better than most beers, and is more readilly available than other stouts (like Schmalt's Alt).
As for the "forced carbonation" issue, any pub worthy of their liquer license knows that Guiness taps use Nitrogen taps, not the CO2 taps used by other beers. Maybe where you live they draft it from the same taps is all the other beers... if so, all I can say is that you need to move.
Also, many american pubs serve Guiness at the wrong temperature. German beers (and the American beers, most of which use German-derived formulae) are brewed and drafted from the bottom of the keg, and are best served cold... the colder it is, the better it tastes. Irish beers like Guinness (and many English beers) are traditionally drawn from the top of the keg, and should be no colder than wine-cellar temperature in order to get the best possible flavor. If a bar serves you an ice-cold Guiness, complain.
(The sad part is that many "Irish" and "English" pubs in the US still chill the hell out of their GB imports, even when the owner knows better, because so many Americans, weaned on pisswater like Budweiser, are conditioned to think that beer should be cold. If you complain in places like this, you often get a sympathetic shrug and little else, but some bar owners have their own unadvertised means of serving their more discriminating customers.)
And Excel is called a spreadsheet, even though it really is an application that lets a user edit a spreadsheet. What's your point?
Um, not it's not. It's called a spreadsheet application. When people say "an Excel spreadsheet", they mean a spreadsheet created with Excel. Likewise, when somebody says "an Oracle database", they don't mean the application, they mean the database which Oracle is managing.
Sometimes, a tool and its function ARE the same thing (Hand me that level, I don't
think this table is level). The tool that is used for leveling tables is, indeed, called a level... but Oracle, PostgreSQL, and others are not called databases, they are called database management systems.
A lot of us nerds have worked on the kind of technology that goes into those big boards. For my own part, I shed my baby teeth doing tech support for a brokerage firm. Also, most geeks are piling up huge retirement plans to invest with, so there are a lot more of us that understand the ebb and tide of the trading floors than you would think.
3 seconds... That's good enough to play nethack! We just need to tweak it so shining it on the moon will be visible from earth
Of course, if we built a laser that powerful... all they would need is a large mirror for a targeting system and they could destroy civilian targets from space. I know, let's fill the dean's house with popcorn and redirect the beam at it! Then everything would be okay, and the new kid would get lucky with the hyperactive geek girl. It can't fail!
(sigh) yet another pontification about how "It's All Changing Because Of The Internet".
I have two counterpoints to make:
1. Nothing on the net is new. SSDM (Same Shit, Different Media)
2. Use of the prefix "Cyber" in front of any English word should not get past the Slash lameness filter. Katz has been writing in this forum long enough that he ought to know how ignorant he sounds when trying to coin a term like "Cyber-democracy". Yuck!
Re:Did you watch the Mac Expo Europe?
on
X On OSX Now Free
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· Score: 1
What would happen, for
example, if the Photoshop filter was optimized for MMX2/KNI/SMID/whatever the hell it is the P3 has?
It is. Adobe Photoshop for Windows is tricked out for the Pentium CPU in all it's sub-processing glory. It takes full advantage of on-board caching and MMX instructions. It really is a great product (if you can afford it and are doing things that GIMP can't handle).
The reason for application benchmarking is that it is one of the few ways you can do a meaningful cross-platform comparison. Will the 500Mhz G4 beat the 1G PIII on all applications? No. Will it score well enough that it is fair to say "up to twice as fast", based on the fact that in many applications it can be? You betcha.
But don't take my word for it... if raw speed matters to you, do some side-by-sides in applications you rely on. I can tell you that running Photoshop on one of those new dual-CPU Macs is wicked fast... like nothing you will see any Windows system do for at least another year or two.
I use both platforms a lot, and I use the various Unices as well... but I would never kid myself into thinking my Windows box could replace my Mac when it comes to media creation.
"What the people want" is determined by who they vote for. Otherwise, we would have rule-by-gallop-poll. (No thanks... We tried that once; it was called the Carter Administration.)
Yet another tortured-metaphor from somebody who probably can't read a single line of code and therefore assumes that "Open Source" must be some kind of political movement akin to Glasnost, rather than the opinion of techies that it is useful to be able to read, edit, and recompile the programs we use.
Mr. Katz is obviously very passionate about issues such as abortion and something about corporations really frightens him, but when he tried to speak in the language of geeks to "reach out" with his message, his words contain about as much authenticity as the rap groups that can be heard of Christian radio stations, shouting about how they're "down wit' Jesus".
In the long view, our form of democracy has worked out fairly well, voter apathy and all. We've been having these elections for over 200 years, and no Hitlers so far. Sure, we occationally have voted in a Polk or Harding, but will it really matter to bored 5th-grade history students 50 years from now whether Bush or Gore wins this November? My suspicion is no.
Many non-USians do not know of the National Guard.
I'm positive that there is no such thing as a "USian", but most Americans are VERY familiar with the National Guard.
Their recruiting commercials are on the air all the time, they are the fist to arrive during national disasters (like floods, earthquakes, etc.), and one of our current Presidential candidates (Bush) used to be a member.
Actually, it's a paraphrase. What he said was, "I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
He also claimed to have helped write the McCain/Feingold act, when, as GWB pointed out during the debate, he didn't have anything to do with it.
It's sad that Gore feels he needs to pad his resume with such transparent lies, when he was VP for eight years and a relatively important Senator before that. The reason why Gore does not spend much time talking about his real record is two-fold: 1) He has reversed his position on several issues since joining the Clinton administration, and 2) Many of the views he expressed in the past are now considered unpopular, and his advisers are telling him not to emphasize them.
As for GWB... I don't think much of his intellect, and I disagree with him on many issues. But one key difference is that while Gore has established himself as a partisan bulldog (he has probably cast more Senate tie-breaker votes than any other VP in the last Century), Bush's reputation in Texas is that he is a master coalition builder. Democrats who have worked closely with Bush all praise his willingness to listen to all sides and consider all issues before taking action.
Kennedy and Reagan shared this quality. A cabinet member who worked with both of them once pointed out that they could "walk into a room not knowing their ass from a hole in the ground, listen silently for most of the meeting, and then speak with authority on the crux of the issue."
I don't plan on voting for Bush, but I will acknowledge that we could do a lot worse.
The problem is that their network is supposed to be their number one asset, but it is actually their number one liability. Either the rules need to be changed so that someone can make a profit off of this kind of operation, or the government needs to turn it into a public utility.
Setting asside the disturbance of my network sensibilities... I strongly disagree.
Qwest and Sprint have spent tons of money setting up networking pipes, and both make plenty-o-money off it. The problem with AT&T is that their business model, for the last half century, was entirely based on overcharging consumers for long distance service. Now that they've gradually lost their edge on reliability, service and customer loyalty, they have to compete on price alone... just like every other "M" "C" and "I"
but how often are Patrick Henry, Sam Adams, or even Crispus Attucks given due credit for their role.
Every time an American history class is taught in a public school. They do still teach history in school, don't they?
Come to think of it, your comparison is interesting. We remember Patrick Henry, not for killing English soldiers, but for his stirring words, "give me liberty, or give me death." His rhetoric is the most famous thing about him. That kind of makes him the ESR of the American Revolution, doesn't it?:)
Whether if it's me lowering my standards or Voyager improving
A little from column A, a little from column B.
Voyager hired a lot of the DS9 writers when that show folded... unfortunately, it is still impossible to give a crap about the characters. Who really cared about the fate of Captain Hepburn^H^H^H^H^H^H^HJaneway and the cardboard-cutouts on that damned ship.
Okay, the EMH was cool for all of two or three episodes... but then, like every other non-human on Star Trek, he announces that he wants to be more human. Whatever.
Anybody who thinks the closing episodes of Voyager will be anything less than crap, I have two words for you: "Galactica 1980".
If it looks viable, a major player could push them out in months.
Paypal loses money right now to build market share by paying $5 per sign-up and another $5 per referral.
Now suppose CitiBank decides they want to play. They set up a system along similar lines, but pay $20 per sign-up, %10 per referral, and $50 for every former PayPal customer that switches. Paypal can't afford to piss money all over the internet that fast, but Citibank can... plus they have name recognition and an IRL customer base that Paypal lacks.
It's like if Barnes and Noble had several hundred billion dollars lying around when they decided to take on Amazon. It would be over in no time flat.
Now, suppose you are a blood-sucking CEO of a major international bank, and you arrive at the conclusion that Paypal is not only going to make money, but will slowly migrate into the banking business... What would you do? Let it happen, or pull a Microsoft? Thought so.
I was incorrect... so are you, though. Here's what a little googling through news sites produced:
175F surface temp is not easy to accomplish north of the Mason-Dixon line. Nearly every documented case of tread separation has happened in the south. It ususally has to get over 100 degrees outside for this to happen.
The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found out about the problem on Aug 3, and by Aug 9 Firestone had issues a recall on all 6.5 Million tires, even though there is evidence that some of the recalled models do not even have the defect in question. Confirmation from the NHTSA of 62 fatalities related to tire blow-outs (the vast majority of which were in Florida, Texas, and California) came on Aug 15.
While making the tire was definately a f*-up, it reflects well on Firestone that they addressed it right away instead of trying to fight it and suppress it. I'm sure they had lawyers telling them that they could have disputed the claims.
This reminds me of things like Ford covering up problems with the Pinto and their tires.
Cute.
Ford's actions concerning the Pinto (back in the 70's) was utterly reprehensible. You will get no argument from me there.
However, the way they handled this recent Firestone problem is more open and ethical than I've seen from any company in a long time!
For those who are not up on the news... A recent Firestone tire has a flaw: if it heats up above 175 F (which is sometimes possible in southern states during the summer), ka-blooie. Ford uses that tire on their Explorer trucks. Although there have been no cases reported of accidents caused by this flaw, Ford and Firestone immediately put out a recall. The CEO of Ford has also bought up a shitload of prime-time TV spots to announce the recall, and they have committed millions to getting these tires replaced as fast as possible.
I still think the Ford Explorer is a total piece of crap, no matter what tires are on it, but I gotta give props to both Firestone and Ford for going far beyond what was simply legally required of them.
Except most of Asimov's robot stories were about the failure of these laws to deal with real-world situations and morallity. The most simple problem was the following:
"I can not allow humans to come to harm, therefore I can not allow you to kill yourself." "You are eating fatty foods and engaging in dangerous behavior, and therefore I must detain you to prevent you from harm" "I can not obey your command that I release you, because the second law can not over-ride the first".
Should the eletrical company be able to sue someone for giving away free solar cells and batteries?
No.
...and Sony has not sued anybody for trying to use other servers for EQ. Why not get hysterical about stupid lawsuits that are happening, instead of ones that might happen?
I wasn't talking about the likelyhood of legal action. If you care to follow the thread, it was a discussion of whether Sony has the right to charge for both the game and the service. My point is that they do... and you have the right to buy neither if you don't like it.
Slashdot Mirror
6. I tried it and found that it tastes better than most beers, and is more readilly available than other stouts (like Schmalt's Alt).
As for the "forced carbonation" issue, any pub worthy of their liquer license knows that Guiness taps use Nitrogen taps, not the CO2 taps used by other beers. Maybe where you live they draft it from the same taps is all the other beers... if so, all I can say is that you need to move.
Also, many american pubs serve Guiness at the wrong temperature. German beers (and the American beers, most of which use German-derived formulae) are brewed and drafted from the bottom of the keg, and are best served cold... the colder it is, the better it tastes. Irish beers like Guinness (and many English beers) are traditionally drawn from the top of the keg, and should be no colder than wine-cellar temperature in order to get the best possible flavor. If a bar serves you an ice-cold Guiness, complain.
(The sad part is that many "Irish" and "English" pubs in the US still chill the hell out of their GB imports, even when the owner knows better, because so many Americans, weaned on pisswater like Budweiser, are conditioned to think that beer should be cold. If you complain in places like this, you often get a sympathetic shrug and little else, but some bar owners have their own unadvertised means of serving their more discriminating customers.)
Um, not it's not. It's called a spreadsheet application. When people say "an Excel spreadsheet", they mean a spreadsheet created with Excel. Likewise, when somebody says "an Oracle database", they don't mean the application, they mean the database which Oracle is managing.
Sometimes, a tool and its function ARE the same thing (Hand me that level, I don't think this table is level). The tool that is used for leveling tables is, indeed, called a level... but Oracle, PostgreSQL, and others are not called databases, they are called database management systems.
A lot of us nerds have worked on the kind of technology that goes into those big boards. For my own part, I shed my baby teeth doing tech support for a brokerage firm. Also, most geeks are piling up huge retirement plans to invest with, so there are a lot more of us that understand the ebb and tide of the trading floors than you would think.
Of course, if we built a laser that powerful... all they would need is a large mirror for a targeting system and they could destroy civilian targets from space. I know, let's fill the dean's house with popcorn and redirect the beam at it! Then everything would be okay, and the new kid would get lucky with the hyperactive geek girl. It can't fail!
I have two counterpoints to make:
1. Nothing on the net is new. SSDM (Same Shit, Different Media)
2. Use of the prefix "Cyber" in front of any English word should not get past the Slash lameness filter. Katz has been writing in this forum long enough that he ought to know how ignorant he sounds when trying to coin a term like "Cyber-democracy". Yuck!
It is. Adobe Photoshop for Windows is tricked out for the Pentium CPU in all it's sub-processing glory. It takes full advantage of on-board caching and MMX instructions. It really is a great product (if you can afford it and are doing things that GIMP can't handle).
The reason for application benchmarking is that it is one of the few ways you can do a meaningful cross-platform comparison. Will the 500Mhz G4 beat the 1G PIII on all applications? No. Will it score well enough that it is fair to say "up to twice as fast", based on the fact that in many applications it can be? You betcha.
But don't take my word for it... if raw speed matters to you, do some side-by-sides in applications you rely on. I can tell you that running Photoshop on one of those new dual-CPU Macs is wicked fast... like nothing you will see any Windows system do for at least another year or two.
I use both platforms a lot, and I use the various Unices as well... but I would never kid myself into thinking my Windows box could replace my Mac when it comes to media creation.
Almost as quickly as systems become obsolete.
"What the people want" is determined by who they vote for. Otherwise, we would have rule-by-gallop-poll. (No thanks... We tried that once; it was called the Carter Administration.)
Mr. Katz is obviously very passionate about issues such as abortion and something about corporations really frightens him, but when he tried to speak in the language of geeks to "reach out" with his message, his words contain about as much authenticity as the rap groups that can be heard of Christian radio stations, shouting about how they're "down wit' Jesus".
In the long view, our form of democracy has worked out fairly well, voter apathy and all. We've been having these elections for over 200 years, and no Hitlers so far. Sure, we occationally have voted in a Polk or Harding, but will it really matter to bored 5th-grade history students 50 years from now whether Bush or Gore wins this November? My suspicion is no.
Dirty commie martian bastards!
I'm positive that there is no such thing as a "USian", but most Americans are VERY familiar with the National Guard.
Their recruiting commercials are on the air all the time, they are the fist to arrive during national disasters (like floods, earthquakes, etc.), and one of our current Presidential candidates (Bush) used to be a member.
What country are you from?
Actually, it's a paraphrase. What he said was, "I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
He also claimed to have helped write the McCain/Feingold act, when, as GWB pointed out during the debate, he didn't have anything to do with it.
It's sad that Gore feels he needs to pad his resume with such transparent lies, when he was VP for eight years and a relatively important Senator before that. The reason why Gore does not spend much time talking about his real record is two-fold: 1) He has reversed his position on several issues since joining the Clinton administration, and 2) Many of the views he expressed in the past are now considered unpopular, and his advisers are telling him not to emphasize them.
As for GWB... I don't think much of his intellect, and I disagree with him on many issues. But one key difference is that while Gore has established himself as a partisan bulldog (he has probably cast more Senate tie-breaker votes than any other VP in the last Century), Bush's reputation in Texas is that he is a master coalition builder. Democrats who have worked closely with Bush all praise his willingness to listen to all sides and consider all issues before taking action.
Kennedy and Reagan shared this quality. A cabinet member who worked with both of them once pointed out that they could "walk into a room not knowing their ass from a hole in the ground, listen silently for most of the meeting, and then speak with authority on the crux of the issue."
I don't plan on voting for Bush, but I will acknowledge that we could do a lot worse.
Setting asside the disturbance of my network sensibilities... I strongly disagree.
Qwest and Sprint have spent tons of money setting up networking pipes, and both make plenty-o-money off it. The problem with AT&T is that their business model, for the last half century, was entirely based on overcharging consumers for long distance service. Now that they've gradually lost their edge on reliability, service and customer loyalty, they have to compete on price alone... just like every other "M" "C" and "I"
True. He said he took the initiative in creating the Internet. That's totally different. It's still wrong, stupid and arrogant, but different.
-Al Gore
He said it. Truth hurts sometimes.
Every time an American history class is taught in a public school. They do still teach history in school, don't they?
Come to think of it, your comparison is interesting. We remember Patrick Henry, not for killing English soldiers, but for his stirring words, "give me liberty, or give me death." His rhetoric is the most famous thing about him. That kind of makes him the ESR of the American Revolution, doesn't it? :)
A little from column A, a little from column B.
Voyager hired a lot of the DS9 writers when that show folded... unfortunately, it is still impossible to give a crap about the characters. Who really cared about the fate of Captain Hepburn^H^H^H^H^H^H^HJaneway and the cardboard-cutouts on that damned ship.
Okay, the EMH was cool for all of two or three episodes... but then, like every other non-human on Star Trek, he announces that he wants to be more human. Whatever.
Anybody who thinks the closing episodes of Voyager will be anything less than crap, I have two words for you: "Galactica 1980".
Hahahahahahaha!
I haven't seen a "Steve Woston" troll in quite a whille. That was very subtle... very funny. Thanks.
Paypal loses money right now to build market share by paying $5 per sign-up and another $5 per referral.
Now suppose CitiBank decides they want to play. They set up a system along similar lines, but pay $20 per sign-up, %10 per referral, and $50 for every former PayPal customer that switches. Paypal can't afford to piss money all over the internet that fast, but Citibank can... plus they have name recognition and an IRL customer base that Paypal lacks.
It's like if Barnes and Noble had several hundred billion dollars lying around when they decided to take on Amazon. It would be over in no time flat.
Now, suppose you are a blood-sucking CEO of a major international bank, and you arrive at the conclusion that Paypal is not only going to make money, but will slowly migrate into the banking business... What would you do? Let it happen, or pull a Microsoft? Thought so.
175F surface temp is not easy to accomplish north of the Mason-Dixon line. Nearly every documented case of tread separation has happened in the south. It ususally has to get over 100 degrees outside for this to happen.
The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found out about the problem on Aug 3, and by Aug 9 Firestone had issues a recall on all 6.5 Million tires, even though there is evidence that some of the recalled models do not even have the defect in question. Confirmation from the NHTSA of 62 fatalities related to tire blow-outs (the vast majority of which were in Florida, Texas, and California) came on Aug 15.
While making the tire was definately a f*-up, it reflects well on Firestone that they addressed it right away instead of trying to fight it and suppress it. I'm sure they had lawyers telling them that they could have disputed the claims.
Cute.
Ford's actions concerning the Pinto (back in the 70's) was utterly reprehensible. You will get no argument from me there.
However, the way they handled this recent Firestone problem is more open and ethical than I've seen from any company in a long time!
For those who are not up on the news... A recent Firestone tire has a flaw: if it heats up above 175 F (which is sometimes possible in southern states during the summer), ka-blooie. Ford uses that tire on their Explorer trucks. Although there have been no cases reported of accidents caused by this flaw, Ford and Firestone immediately put out a recall. The CEO of Ford has also bought up a shitload of prime-time TV spots to announce the recall, and they have committed millions to getting these tires replaced as fast as possible.
I still think the Ford Explorer is a total piece of crap, no matter what tires are on it, but I gotta give props to both Firestone and Ford for going far beyond what was simply legally required of them.
"I can not allow humans to come to harm, therefore I can not allow you to kill yourself."
"You are eating fatty foods and engaging in dangerous behavior, and therefore I must detain you to prevent you from harm"
"I can not obey your command that I release you, because the second law can not over-ride the first".
Or Dark Star
No.
I wasn't talking about the likelyhood of legal action. If you care to follow the thread, it was a discussion of whether Sony has the right to charge for both the game and the service. My point is that they do... and you have the right to buy neither if you don't like it.