I apologize if I appeared to be trolling; I was most certainly not (although it did generate a bit of healthy (and not so) discussion).
I firmly believe that one of the causes (or perhaps effects) of our insane society is routine circumcision. I witnessed my Jewish friend's child's briss, and the Moyle used no anaesthetic. The baby cried something fierce, and one of the witnesses passed out from the sight and sound.
It is barbaric to remove any part of the body. If you're religious, it's the body that God gave you. Even if you're not, it's your body and nobody should be making any decisions about whether to keep or remove parts of it except you.
If you choose to be circumsized after you've become an adult then more power to you. But it was forced on me and I can never get it back (at least, not until nanotechnology but even then I'll still have the pain and suffering of growing up missing parts of my body), and I refuse to force that decision on my children.
I'm no biologist, but I would imagine that the eddies (in the space-time continuum! Is he, is he?) caused by the pulsing would be essential to proper functioning. If the blood is constantly flowing, how do the blood cells "slow down" so they can deliver their nutrients?
I'm sure the doctors doing the research know much more about this than I do, and have done sufficient animal testing to prove the device's safety in humans, but I still have to wonder, like you said, that we may not know all of what we're messing with.
That said, it'd probably be great fun at parties. "Man, I think I smoked too much, I can't feel my pulse!"
Well, my point was that I would teach my children to be as efficient as possible in all areas of their lives, so as not to waste. This includes any dealings with the governments: if the government says that my children are legally able to pay less taxes because they fit a certain mold (whatever that mold may be), then I would consider my children irresponsible to not pay less taxes.
I don't see "paying taxes" as helping people out. The government wastes money left and right, and data supports that charities are far more efficient than government. Charities spend 5-15% of their funds in the process of collecting those funds; government spends upwards of 50%. So if my children want to help those less fortunate, their money will be far better spent donating to charities than it would overpaying their taxes.
Now, it sound like you're arguing that my children shouldn't lobby the government for tax breaks for their pet cause, like mohair subsidies and whatnot, and if that's what you're advocating then I agree. However, that's not what the granparent said, he said "getting a tax break" which I assumed to mean filling out the right form for the IRS, not changing the law (which would have been "getting a tax break passed").
There's nothing disingenuous about teaching your children to be efficient. Efficient, and compassionate.
I may be like the last guy to get on the boat, but I just realized through your parenthetical remark that "C#" is a lot like "C++" squished together: the "#", when separated, is two plus signs.
I had some cool ASCII art showing what I meant but the fucking lameness filter wouldn't let it through, even with a ton of extra text around the art. So, just imagine that the top line and left line form the first "+", and the bottom line and right line form the second "+", and then pull them apart, the first to the top and left and the second to the bottom and right, and you'll have seen what I saw when I read your comment.
Not that it helps me understand the language any, but I thought it was a neat "pun".
Without gene patents, unless you're Craig Venter or Paul Allen and just have money to play with for the sake of discovery, there is no motivation what-so-ever to create future theraputics and bio-devices.
I completely disagree. The delivery mechanisms and "bulk" structures can still be patented. But patenting genes themselves is a lot like patenting 1+1=2, or one-click shopping: there is a logical way to reduce it to its absolute minimum effort, so patenting that seems a bit absurd. (I should patent two-click shopping, or better yet, zero-click shopping: the site knows what you want and orders it for you without you lifting a finger.)
If we teach our kids that getting a tax break is more important than sacrificing a little to help those who are not as lucky as ourselves, our kids are going to turn out to be MUCH worse than kids who watch "trash" on television - our kids are going to be selfish, callous, and uncompassionate.
How about, best of both worlds:
Teach our kids to get a tax break, so that they can help out those less fortunate.
i think people are very hard-up about anything regarding sex in this country
Nothing more needs be said, really. We mutilate our male children's genitals and recoil in horror when told that African tribes cauterize their female children's genitals.
Neither society uses anesthesia.
I may seem like I'm ranting, but one reason given for circumcision was to cut down on masturbation. Like feeling good is a bad thing! And it doesn't seem to work, but it sure does make us crazy about sex.
who could complain about making sure that felons don't vote (in those states where felons are not allowed to vote?)
Actually, I find the practice abhorrent to remove voting capability for the rest of one's life after serving time.
And of course it makes it really easy to stay in power: declare something innocuous to be a felony (like smoking pot or, back in the 20s, drinking alcohol), and lock up all your opponents. BAM! You've just swung the vote.
Of course, now that we've got Diebold making voting machines, perhaps we don't need vote-fixing-felonies any more? (One can dream.)
I'm reading the Discworld books and recently came across the footnote "Ankh-Morpork had dallied with many forms of government and had ended up with that form of democracy known as One Man, One Vote. The Patrician was the Man; he had the Vote."
And in true 1984 style: an automatic open source software remover.
Actually, several years ago I wanted to do the reverse: silently and seamlessly "upgrade" a Windows box to Linux. Create a custom boot sequence so it looks the same; beef up XPde so the desktop looks the same; fix WINE so all the APIs (documented and un-) are supported; and do a bazillion years of regression testing, and then release it as a virus that downloads itself through something like Microsoft's BITS (Background Intelligent Transfer Service), using only idle bandwidth.
The next time the user reboots, it will have already installed itself so there will be no delay during boot time (and of course Linux boot time will have to be improved since XP gives the login screen long before all the services are actually started).
I gave up on this idea after realizing the word "bazillion" above. It's a nice pipe dream but I just don't have the resources and I'm pretty sure it's not an itch that most developers are willing to scratch.
Can you debug Perl using Emacs? As in, single-step through your program and watch variables, expand arrays/hashes, and have full control over what happens? If so that's great but I wasn't aware of it (I haven't used Emacs for many years, though...).
I've been using Komodo since v1.0 and could not imagine developing Perl without it; one of the coolest features is that it runs "perl -c" on your script in the background and gives red squiggly underlines for errors, green for warnings--similar to Word's spelling and grammar highlights.
That one feature alone has saved me countless hours, since I don't have to continually debug the script; I'll know it "compiles" properly before I even start to run it. Then I just have to fix the logic errors, which are more insidious but we tend to make "less" of them than syntax errors (over the scope of start-to-finish developing, that is). I think this feature is similar to Delphi; although I've never used it, I've heard people talk of "one second compile times" for million-line applications, because it does background compiling. I wonder why no C/C++ IDE does that? (Or do they?)
Komodo also handles Python and PHP, among other formats (it syntax highlights many more styles than it can debug, for example HTML, XML, even straight text I got an error on yesterday--a line didn't end with CR/LF, just CR, and it pointed it out to me).
Note the spare Marvin head on a bench in the mirror.
I think it's really cool that, not only are they developing top-heavy Marvins, but they also can use a mirror as a storage device for heads and benches!
Thanks for the info, I didn't know about the LaCie drives.
One potential issue with them, though, is that they appear to use two 250 GB hard drives in RAID-0 setup (striping), so that if any one drive fails you've lost all your data. Of course, using them strictly as a backup makes them less likely to fail since they're in use a lot less.
I guess I'll just have to set up two arrays (most likely not at the same time) and run some performance tests on them to see which will be best for my needs. I do some video editing, so the striping of RAID0+1 is attractive. Thanks again!
I agree completely, and would like to clarify my position: a lot of people are carefree while driving thinking that they're walking or running, and can maneuver nimbly. I, on the other hand, am fully aware that I'm piloting a 2-ton machine which, while it has good brakes, can't stop on a dime and I realize that other vehicles may not have as good brakes, either.
To me it's somewhat like programming (fancy that) -- if everything happens in an orderly fashion there's less chance of bugs. So I never swerve or cut people off; even driving in rush-hour traffic I tend to let people get in front of me simply due to the fact that I will not tailgate: I always leave 2 seconds, preferably 3, between the car in front of me and my car to give me time to stop if the driver slams on his brakes. (I've been a passenger in an accident in which the driver followed too closely, and learned from it.) Leaving that much space, though, during rush hour, encourages the other drivers to "fill in the hole" and I'm okay with that, I just back off a bit more. We're all going to get there pretty much at the same time, especially when it turns into a parking lot.
All of these organisations are switching because they don't want to use proprietary software.
That makes sense. But from the blurb:
Meanwhile, when they choose Microsoft software, fast-growing emerging markets like China and India opt for pirated copies. Salkever explains that the concerns for customers like these are the 'relatively high price of Microsoft software' and the 'concerns about buying proprietary software to run critical government operations.'
So China and India are opting for pirated copies because they're concerned about using proprietary software? That just doesn't make sense. If I was concerned about using proprietary software then it doesn't matter whether I pay for it or not; I'd run OpenOffice instead.
How do you like your RAID-5 array? I'm considering building one myself but I'm torn between 4 x 250 GB drives in RAID-5 (750 GB storage) or a RAID0+1 setup (500 GB storage, but faster because it doesn't have to compute parity).
Did you try RAID0+1? (Or RAID10, the difference really doesn't matter with just 4 drives but with 6 it's important because one version can lose more drives and maintain the data.)
What do you back up onto? Few tape solutions are cost-effective at that size; it might be better to just clone the array and then vault that. Of course it'll experience effects from magnetism... Or are DVDs an acceptable solution? (It would take ~125 DVDs to back up 500 GB...)
Actually, I never look at other drivers. I view other cars as just that, other cars, not really acknowledging the fact that there are other humans doing the piloting. I guess driver's ed worked well for me, as I don't experience (or express) road rage.
I'm not a robot, not yet at least;-) but vehicles to me are entities in and of themselves. So if the vehicle itself gives me an expression, I'd give it some attention (and thus have less attention left for the rest of the driving experience), but even if a driver gives me the finger and falls halfway out of his window doing so, I wouldn't notice him -- unless his car happened to start swerving.
yes, every packet will contain an easter egg flight simulator.
Now that's a funny image... "Egg goes up, egg comes down... crack/splat!"
An easter egg in flight just doesn't seem like a fun game.
Re:v6 could help solve some net problems
on
IPv6 is Here
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· Score: 1
To pick nits, you're not receiving mail anonymously at Mailboxes Etc. I can send mail to you and then post a guard watching to see who picks the mail up that way, and follow you home.
I have served people that way in the past. ("Served" in the legal sense, that is.)
Well, I tend to have Outlook maximized anyway, and when I'm not using it I Alt+Esc it rather than minimizing it, so I'm rarely looking at the background anyway.
Besides, if I want to look at pretty pictures I'll use IrfanView or PolyView for that; I like having a spartan background. But then, I work for work, not for pleasure (for instance, Slashdot is a home-only activity).
No way man. I like reading on the train and my Palm gives me 5-7 books in its measly 8 MB of RAM. It fits in my back pocket which a book does not, and it requires less "work" to read (I keep my thumb on the "page turn" button so I just need to move my thumb about 2 mm each page turn, as opposed to moving my whole hand about 8" for a page turn, plus a book requires two hands). To be completely fair, the Palm requires about 4 times as many page turns since the screen is smaller, but still 8 mm is less than half an inch and that's just thumb muscles, not fingers/wrist/elbows.
Of course, not moving my body around makes me fall asleep more easily, but napping while commuting isn't so bad. If I really don't want to fall asleep I'll grab a paper someone discarded and read that, but this is getting offtopic. I don't intend to forget eBooks no matter how easy it is to produce a real book.
Slashdot Mirror
Yuck, I wouldn't want to eat off dishes cleaned in that sink...
I apologize if I appeared to be trolling; I was most certainly not (although it did generate a bit of healthy (and not so) discussion).
I firmly believe that one of the causes (or perhaps effects) of our insane society is routine circumcision. I witnessed my Jewish friend's child's briss, and the Moyle used no anaesthetic. The baby cried something fierce, and one of the witnesses passed out from the sight and sound.
It is barbaric to remove any part of the body. If you're religious, it's the body that God gave you. Even if you're not, it's your body and nobody should be making any decisions about whether to keep or remove parts of it except you.
If you choose to be circumsized after you've become an adult then more power to you. But it was forced on me and I can never get it back (at least, not until nanotechnology but even then I'll still have the pain and suffering of growing up missing parts of my body), and I refuse to force that decision on my children.
I'm sure the doctors doing the research know much more about this than I do, and have done sufficient animal testing to prove the device's safety in humans, but I still have to wonder, like you said, that we may not know all of what we're messing with.
That said, it'd probably be great fun at parties. "Man, I think I smoked too much, I can't feel my pulse!"
The government owns your home; you are merely licensing it from them.
Don't believe me? Stop paying your property taxes.
Reminds me of a Confucious saying: "To get back on feet, miss two car payments."
I don't see "paying taxes" as helping people out. The government wastes money left and right, and data supports that charities are far more efficient than government. Charities spend 5-15% of their funds in the process of collecting those funds; government spends upwards of 50%. So if my children want to help those less fortunate, their money will be far better spent donating to charities than it would overpaying their taxes.
Now, it sound like you're arguing that my children shouldn't lobby the government for tax breaks for their pet cause, like mohair subsidies and whatnot, and if that's what you're advocating then I agree. However, that's not what the granparent said, he said "getting a tax break" which I assumed to mean filling out the right form for the IRS, not changing the law (which would have been "getting a tax break passed").
There's nothing disingenuous about teaching your children to be efficient. Efficient, and compassionate.
I may be like the last guy to get on the boat, but I just realized through your parenthetical remark that "C#" is a lot like "C++" squished together: the "#", when separated, is two plus signs.
I had some cool ASCII art showing what I meant but the fucking lameness filter wouldn't let it through, even with a ton of extra text around the art. So, just imagine that the top line and left line form the first "+", and the bottom line and right line form the second "+", and then pull them apart, the first to the top and left and the second to the bottom and right, and you'll have seen what I saw when I read your comment.
Not that it helps me understand the language any, but I thought it was a neat "pun".
I completely disagree. The delivery mechanisms and "bulk" structures can still be patented. But patenting genes themselves is a lot like patenting 1+1=2, or one-click shopping: there is a logical way to reduce it to its absolute minimum effort, so patenting that seems a bit absurd. (I should patent two-click shopping, or better yet, zero-click shopping: the site knows what you want and orders it for you without you lifting a finger.)
How about, best of both worlds:
Teach our kids to get a tax break, so that they can help out those less fortunate.
Nothing more needs be said, really. We mutilate our male children's genitals and recoil in horror when told that African tribes cauterize their female children's genitals.
Neither society uses anesthesia.
I may seem like I'm ranting, but one reason given for circumcision was to cut down on masturbation. Like feeling good is a bad thing! And it doesn't seem to work, but it sure does make us crazy about sex.
The caption is "Who is this?" I believe it's that Dark Angel chick, Jessica Alba, or a strong resemblance...
And her! Both redheads, but this one seems more dangerous...
Actually, I find the practice abhorrent to remove voting capability for the rest of one's life after serving time.
And of course it makes it really easy to stay in power: declare something innocuous to be a felony (like smoking pot or, back in the 20s, drinking alcohol), and lock up all your opponents. BAM! You've just swung the vote.
Of course, now that we've got Diebold making voting machines, perhaps we don't need vote-fixing-felonies any more? (One can dream.)
I'm reading the Discworld books and recently came across the footnote "Ankh-Morpork had dallied with many forms of government and had ended up with that form of democracy known as One Man, One Vote. The Patrician was the Man; he had the Vote."
Actually, several years ago I wanted to do the reverse: silently and seamlessly "upgrade" a Windows box to Linux. Create a custom boot sequence so it looks the same; beef up XPde so the desktop looks the same; fix WINE so all the APIs (documented and un-) are supported; and do a bazillion years of regression testing, and then release it as a virus that downloads itself through something like Microsoft's BITS (Background Intelligent Transfer Service), using only idle bandwidth.
The next time the user reboots, it will have already installed itself so there will be no delay during boot time (and of course Linux boot time will have to be improved since XP gives the login screen long before all the services are actually started).
I gave up on this idea after realizing the word "bazillion" above. It's a nice pipe dream but I just don't have the resources and I'm pretty sure it's not an itch that most developers are willing to scratch.
Can you debug Perl using Emacs? As in, single-step through your program and watch variables, expand arrays/hashes, and have full control over what happens? If so that's great but I wasn't aware of it (I haven't used Emacs for many years, though...).
I've been using Komodo since v1.0 and could not imagine developing Perl without it; one of the coolest features is that it runs "perl -c" on your script in the background and gives red squiggly underlines for errors, green for warnings--similar to Word's spelling and grammar highlights.
That one feature alone has saved me countless hours, since I don't have to continually debug the script; I'll know it "compiles" properly before I even start to run it. Then I just have to fix the logic errors, which are more insidious but we tend to make "less" of them than syntax errors (over the scope of start-to-finish developing, that is). I think this feature is similar to Delphi; although I've never used it, I've heard people talk of "one second compile times" for million-line applications, because it does background compiling. I wonder why no C/C++ IDE does that? (Or do they?)
Komodo also handles Python and PHP, among other formats (it syntax highlights many more styles than it can debug, for example HTML, XML, even straight text I got an error on yesterday--a line didn't end with CR/LF, just CR, and it pointed it out to me).
I think it's really cool that, not only are they developing top-heavy Marvins, but they also can use a mirror as a storage device for heads and benches!
One potential issue with them, though, is that they appear to use two 250 GB hard drives in RAID-0 setup (striping), so that if any one drive fails you've lost all your data. Of course, using them strictly as a backup makes them less likely to fail since they're in use a lot less.
I guess I'll just have to set up two arrays (most likely not at the same time) and run some performance tests on them to see which will be best for my needs. I do some video editing, so the striping of RAID0+1 is attractive. Thanks again!
To me it's somewhat like programming (fancy that) -- if everything happens in an orderly fashion there's less chance of bugs. So I never swerve or cut people off; even driving in rush-hour traffic I tend to let people get in front of me simply due to the fact that I will not tailgate: I always leave 2 seconds, preferably 3, between the car in front of me and my car to give me time to stop if the driver slams on his brakes. (I've been a passenger in an accident in which the driver followed too closely, and learned from it.) Leaving that much space, though, during rush hour, encourages the other drivers to "fill in the hole" and I'm okay with that, I just back off a bit more. We're all going to get there pretty much at the same time, especially when it turns into a parking lot.
Thanks for listening!
That makes sense. But from the blurb:
So China and India are opting for pirated copies because they're concerned about using proprietary software? That just doesn't make sense. If I was concerned about using proprietary software then it doesn't matter whether I pay for it or not; I'd run OpenOffice instead.
Did you try RAID0+1? (Or RAID10, the difference really doesn't matter with just 4 drives but with 6 it's important because one version can lose more drives and maintain the data.)
What do you back up onto? Few tape solutions are cost-effective at that size; it might be better to just clone the array and then vault that. Of course it'll experience effects from magnetism... Or are DVDs an acceptable solution? (It would take ~125 DVDs to back up 500 GB...)
Thanks!
I'm not a robot, not yet at least ;-) but vehicles to me are entities in and of themselves. So if the vehicle itself gives me an expression, I'd give it some attention (and thus have less attention left for the rest of the driving experience), but even if a driver gives me the finger and falls halfway out of his window doing so, I wouldn't notice him -- unless his car happened to start swerving.
ABM? Anti- Ballistic Missile? I would think we'd be promoting ballistic missiles as a solution to the SPAM problem...
An easter egg in flight just doesn't seem like a fun game.
I have served people that way in the past. ("Served" in the legal sense, that is.)
Besides, if I want to look at pretty pictures I'll use IrfanView or PolyView for that; I like having a spartan background. But then, I work for work, not for pleasure (for instance, Slashdot is a home- only activity).
No way man. I like reading on the train and my Palm gives me 5-7 books in its measly 8 MB of RAM. It fits in my back pocket which a book does not, and it requires less "work" to read (I keep my thumb on the "page turn" button so I just need to move my thumb about 2 mm each page turn, as opposed to moving my whole hand about 8" for a page turn, plus a book requires two hands). To be completely fair, the Palm requires about 4 times as many page turns since the screen is smaller, but still 8 mm is less than half an inch and that's just thumb muscles, not fingers/wrist/elbows.
Of course, not moving my body around makes me fall asleep more easily, but napping while commuting isn't so bad. If I really don't want to fall asleep I'll grab a paper someone discarded and read that, but this is getting offtopic. I don't intend to forget eBooks no matter how easy it is to produce a real book.