You mean Proletariat. And no, it's not. It's long been something taught in economics courses that the way to judge the prosperity of a nation is to look at the size of its middle class.
"Move to Cuba, communista"
There's not a single communist ideea in what I said. It's capitalism at it's best, you brain-dead troll. If no one can afford a refridgerator, will the people who own stock in a refridgerator manufacturer prosper? No.
"They are all valuable, including the shareholders which provide the capital to grow"
Real capital to grow comes from profit. Capital to BEGIN comes from investors. There's a difference. After a company is turning a profit and doing well in it's economic niche as you put it, the shareholders are mostly superfluous.
"Oracle does not expect their employees to become their customers, nor does Boeing or Northrup/Grumman. "
Oracle's employees get payed a wage. With that wage they buy things from a store. That store needs to keep track of it's inventory with a databse - so, they go buy an oracle database. Similarly, Boeing's customers are airlines. Boeing employees get paid and want to take the family to disneyworld. So, he buys four tickets on Delta to go from Seattle to Orlando. To add to that, Wal-Mart has to have product shipped to them, so they use a Boeing plane. Boeing has to have databases to manage their business, so they buy oracle. Oracle employees like to go to disneyworld too, so they buy tickets from delta. It's called Capitalism, you troll! Henry Ford was just one of the first guys to see the interconnections.
"No, the problem is the lineworker, because he/she are f**king morons."
The lineworkers are a problem; quite often they are lazy, stupid and union-guarded. I didn't say I had the answer, but I did imply that stealing isn't a way to fix it.
"And last week, they elected people who will continue to aid the CEO in their fraud and oppression of the worker. (Unbelievable!) Don't believe me? Who was the Chairman of the SEC, and who currently is? How will putting Republicans in control of both legislative houses encourage hearings to expose economic corruption from the people who spend billions to get them in that position?"
OH MY GOD! and anti-labor Democrat? WTF huh? Or are you one of those insane, gibbering, strict Libertarians? I used to be one of those, till I realized that the idea just plain ol won't work. Why did you have to drag politics into this?
"Life does not have the obligation to make the dumbasses' life easier or more fair"
No, but our government has an obligation to protect its citizens from criminals. It's printed on the side of quite a few Police cars, you know.
"The only reason you think otherwise was that your dumbass parents told you so. Here's a clue, stop being a dumbass."
Uhm - Huh? No...The reason I think this is because I lost quite a bit of money to one particular...what did I call them? Corporate Butt-Pirate. over 450 people lost jobs just to "Make the Company more 'nimble'" - What the fuck does that mean?
A computer explain what women want! That's rich! That's a laugh! I imagine an AI trying to do that would be like the time Kirk and Spock fried the robot by Kirk saying Spock always lies, and Spock saying he's lying.
I could see even Lt. Commander Data getting a BSOD from a woman telling him "If I have to explain it to you, you'll never understand."
*General Protection Fault in module Sanity32.dll * Data's skin turns blue, he goes stiff and falls on his face.
Though not a regular gig, you've appeared in what? Three? Twilight Zone episodes. Or is it two? There's the "There's something on the WING!" episode 'Nightmare at 20,000 feet', and then there's the coin-operated-Devil-knows-the-future episode,'Nick Of Time' . (By the way - I especially liked your first appearance on "Third Rock From The Sun" where your character and John Lithgow's character had that "moment" about there being something on the wing...) You were also in an episode of The Outter Limits, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Alfred Hitchcock Presents and a whole mess of other sci-fi/quasi-sci-fi shows in the late 50s/early 60s. These shows (Twilight Zone and Outter Limits, most memorably) had a great impact for "serious" Science Fiction on TV - at least something other than just blasting the bug-eyed monsters with a ray gun for half an hour. Did you search out roles in those kinds of shows for any particular reasons, or were they just the ones that hired you?
Maybe I didn't make my point clear. My point isn't showing "profit" or not...My point is that many corporations show no shame in what they do to make a profit. Jack Welsh in particular RUINED many workers just to bump up that profit a smidgen. Henry Ford figured something out back in the 30s - your employees eventually become your customers. Money (in the "Strong Economy" sense) doesn't come from nowhere. "Shareholder Value" comes from the fact that there is an economy out there that supports the products that GE makes (aircraft engines, light bulbs, etc. etc.). That strong economy comes from middle class workers. Jack Welsh had a history of laying off middle class workers, cutting their salary, shutting down plants and moving jobs elsewhere. And yes, there are scumbags out there, and yes, Jack Welsh is close to the top of the heap.
Shareholders aren't the ones that make america go - it's the guy out there in the hangar twisting the wrench that makes america go. If he looses his job, his 401K isn't shit. Shareholder Value is the least of my worries. I want to make sure my son has dinner tonight!
This is an old trick. Happened to my dad several times in the 80s (luckily, he was one of the ones that was left in the shop to do the work of two employees the company just laid off) I'm not a reflex "Proud To Be Union"-bumper-sticker-posting moron, but Corporate Greed is the greatest of those two evils. Corporate Greed knowns no shame. And since Enron, it knows no fear. Sure - this happened in the past, but they (being greedy corporate officers) had to at least hide it - which made it less noticable or insulting. Airlines in the 80s did similar things on a smaller scale. Today we have CEOs that lay-off thousands of employees just to "make the company more 'nimble'" (Jack Welsh, of General Electric) who then -on the way to his retirement mansion- starts stuffing his pockets with money while asking "You don't mind, do you?"
So - here's a bit of help for the greedy corporate butt-pirates out there: Don't hire anyone to a permanent position. Get all your employees as contractors or, better yet, as "temps". If possible, hire half to 2/3rds the employees you need, and then guilt/guile/corral/cajole them into doing the work of two people. Make it well known that they need the paycheck more than you need the job done. Don't forget to line your pockets. Make sure your HR person knows how to write the job description you post so that you can easily tell the few experienced applicants that they are overqualified (read that as "cost too much") and make the other applicants feel inferior, so they feel lucky to have the job, don't complain, and work harder for less money. Quality? Fuck it. Honesty? Laugh at that, then fuck it. Quantity? Fuck it too. Employee moral? Fuck that hard. Money? Money is god. And you, being the High Priest, cannot suffer to allow anyone other than you to have god. So make sure you take god away from them and put god back in the temple (your pocket) where it belongs.
I'm using a Microsoft Trackball Explorer 1.0 PS2/USB optical trackball right now. The big red marble pops out of the frame and you can throw it around the office. The coolest thing about it is when I turn the lights in my office off - The ring around the ball glows, making the transparent red shell of the ball glow slightly - looks like I have the eye of sauron on my desk.
go here for a review of the thing, with pics and all. I love mine. Keeps the shoulder from burining after a long day of waving a mouse around (bad shoulder, motorcycle accident)
Still too much pressure in my spleen - gotta vent it on this....
IANAME (I Am Not A Microchip Engineer) but I would assume the "chemicals" they use in processing silicone would be something acidic (rinse away everything but the silicone) and then water to rinse away the acid. Those can all be neutralized easily. Then there would be the pollutants in the silicone, but typically that shouldn't be anything REALLY bad in large ammounts. Then there's the germanium, gallium et al. that they dope the semiconductor with - but the idea is to keep those inside the chip. Then there's the lead solder.
If you want to bust some ass on heavy metals, how about we go after battery makers - you know - those HUGE batteries they want to put in gas/electric hybrid cars... How much "chemicals" do they produce as waste to make one of THOSE?
I love it when people throw around words like "Chemicals" when they really mean "TOXIC chemicals". Such as - "That hot dog you are eating has lots of chemicals in it! You shouldn't eat it!"
At which point, I slap the hippy herbivore and say "There's even more chemicals in your bean curds, you idiot. Chemicals like 'hydrocarbons', 'hydrogen di-oxide' etc. etc.....Did you know that Hydrogen Di-Oxide is a mild acid, typically in nature is a breeding ground for bacteria and infectious diseases? It's addictive! Once you take it once, you have to take it for the rest of your life...or the withdrawls will kill you!"
Specifically WHAT evil chemicals do they use in making microchips? How much as compared to making...the jars they sell babyfood in? What exactly is the environmental impact of these evil chemicals?
Until those questions are answered, this article is just running around screaming that the sky is falling....
If you buy a CD-ROM drive for your computer that will play the copy protected CD, you have definitively broken the law and can be criminally prosecuted. THAT is the point.
UHm - no. If a hardware company built a cd-rom drive that only read the first ToC - like old CD players used to (I guess most still do) - all they are doing is complying to a standard that has been around for nigh on twenty-five years now. Matter of fact, most quad-speed CD-ROM drives didn't read the multiple ToC thing...Hence early CD-RW drives would make gibberish CDs that weren't portable.
There's you answer - go dig up that old Mitsumi 2X or 4X CD-ROM that came in your gateway 486DX100 and pop it in and burn off that. Might take a while, but it'll be a digital bit-for-bit copy.
Isn't this the scene where the old japanese man and the kid are talking (to themselves, because they aren't in the same room) about telemarketers, telemarketer busters, telemarketer buster busters, telemarketer buster buster busters, telemarketer buster buster buster busters, telemarketer buster buster buster buster busters and telemarketer buster buster buster buster buster busters. And because the kid doesn't have a telemarketer buster buster buster buster buster buster buster buster, the Disabled Veterans call Mark Walhberg and try to get him to donate just $35 *guilt trip* and make the life of an American hero just a little more tolerable */guilt trip*
My friend Frazier, a tall skinny brit with a bad attitude, and I were on an outing to the theater one evening - to see "Unforgiven" - the Clint Eastwood bad-ass western....at "Mann's Chinese Theater" in Hollywood. Frazier had a huge 32oz. Dr. Pepper. The guy in front of us spent the whole moving laughing slowly and loudly - at all the wrong places in the movie. When it was a sad scene, or the middle of the action scene, the fat bastard would burst out "HA!.....HA!....HA!....."
Finally Frazier had had enough - so he jumped up over the row of seats between us and the fat guy, and spiked his Dr.P. on the guy's head. It exploded all over the guy, soaking him to his wide-ass underwear. Frazier screamed in his face "SHUT UP DAMMIT! SHUT UP! JUST SHUT UP!"
Someone in the back of the theater shouted "It's about damn time!" and the entire audience cheered. Frazier ran back to his seat, hands clasped over his head like the winner of a prize-fight. The fat guy sat there shivering for the rest of the movie and didn't make a sound.
>........He wasn't saying autoCADs interface was good.. just that it was complex.
But Autocad has a very good interface. The interface is flexible (you can edit every menu in the program - even the one that pops up when you hit the 4th button on the digitizer puck - and you can create alias shortcuts for your favorite commands), it's simple (If you know the name of your command you can just type it in, rather than hunt for it in the menus)....etc. etc. etc.
And it's fairly intuitive. For 2d drafting, it's almost exactly like sitting down to a drafting board (granted, it's alot faster, but it feels the same way). I'll admit the learning curve for 3d modelling with autocad is kinda steep, and the curve for solid modelling is nearly verticle - but those are fucked up concepts in the first place.
I've been an Autocad professional since release 10, way back in the day. I've drawn the plans for parts that go on commercial airplanes that fly over your house every day...and Autocad has been there with me every day.
Even while learning the software in the first place, I could relate it to the training I'd had with pencil-paper-TSquare drafting and it made a decent amount of sense. I've never had the interface for any release of autocad (up until release 13...and the fact that it was a windows app kinda felt funny) get in the way of my productivity.
But - back on topic: The software packages he mentioned are NOT for general use. The apps he mentioned aren't MSWord, Mozilla or IE - we're talking about stuff a person would go to school to learn how to drive.... software packages a person could make a career out of.
And keep in mind:
COMPLEX != BAD
SIMPLE !=GOOD
when it comes to UIs... The UI has to match the complexity level of the software, or you'll have intelligent trained professionals being insulted by "drool proof" software. Or, you'll have a newbie lost among a maze of menus and tech terms he/she can't understand.
My Opinion - my little $0.02 to add: Menus with pictures instead of words FUCKING SUCK! Toolbars... You know - with the little icon of a floppy, and if you poke at the floppy with a mouse it saves what you are working on... But what if you don't want to save it to the floppy? WAUGH! Why not just put a drop down menu with the word "SAVE" in a box?
Go here - read: User Interface Hall of Shame
I knew a guy that was almost this stupid. He took his student loans from college, didn't pay tuition and didn't go to class...Well, he took his big wad of cash and bought a Playstation and ALL the games on the market for it. He then went back to his trailer (he lived in a trailer with ratty carpet and wall-to-wall fleas)and hooked up his Playstation. His fiance had left town to visit her family, so he spent the next 72 hours playing playstation games.
Here's the terrible part. His fiance had just got a teeny little kitten. It was barely weened. The guy got to playing games and completely forgot about the kitten. 72 hours later, it was dead in the bathroom behind the toilet from dehydration. He didn't notice for another couple days... when it started smelling like...well...a rotten kitten.
So now, when my son plays video games too much, I tell him the story of the guy that played so many video games, his cat died.
Just recently taking a job in IT, I've been thinking about this heavily. What if the Brown Shirts kicked in my server room door and threatened me unless I could produce liscenses for all the software in there? Some of that crap dates back...What? FOUR IT managers ago? Two Office buildings ago.... At a couple of the workstations out in the workshop, they've got 386s and Win3.1...Just enough to let them run the purchasing database front-end...(and something that doesn't need a fan - which would be gummed up and on fire in days). Many companies go through this! WAUUUGH!
I wish I had enough money to write my own laws and have my own army to enforce them.
Who knows what survived the moves and the re-organizations, the buyouts...etc. etc. etc.
Maybe I'll be joining Chris here in a "Federal Pound-me-up-the-ASS Prison"...
Because obviously, the had already looked through the little hole and saw there was no alien spacecraft...
Or they found the craft and moved it, so it is now sitting in a huge hangar burried under an Arizona desert; right next to the Ark of the Covenant, half a million alien fetuses (fetii?), Hitler's living brain, the Time Machine H.G. Wells wrote about, Jules Verne's Nautilus and the Stargate they found buried a half mile from the pyramids at Giza.
Granted, I like Keaton best as batman - but both Clooney and Kilmer did a decent batman (ignoring the scripts - the scripts for all batman movies after the second one have been sickeningly bad). Batman back in the forties and fifties was, while still his "I am the night" bad-ass self, still sort of optomistic and good natured. Kilmer fit this quite well. Yes, Kilmer played Bruce Wayne as a playboy, but that would have been fine for a just-starting batman. Batman of the fifties and sixties was a little sillier (as were all comics of the time) and sort of the leader of the "bat-pack" -- because all superheros had to have an army of side-kicks. Clooney did this pretty well.
And then - there's the Batman of the mid-to-late eighties. The original Robin has run out on him, his replacement Robin was murdered by the Joker and he really hates himself. Now - he's more Batman than Bruce Wayne - Wayne is just a thin veneer over his true self. Bruce Wayne is stretched thin and tired, and becoming transparent... Pretty soon, Batman will be all that's left. Keaton did this excellently.
What really makes me mad is this: Joel Schumacher, in 1994 when he begins Batman Forever, has two options: On the one hand he has a pile of work by Frank MIller and Walter Simonson, filled with panel after panel of a dark, gritty batman that has been selling like hotcakes for fifteen years or so (at least that *style* of batman, if not ALL their work)....
On the other hand, he has a laughable and ridiculous 1966 TV show starring Adam West's fat ass - that most of the world would like to forget. At least, everyone who grew up in the 80s reading batman comics and seeing Batman as part Sam Spade, part psycho, and all super hero....At least we didn't want to be confronted with Adam West's beer gut and patently stupid television show.
I just thank the Lord that Kevin Altieri and Kent Butterworth got it right with Batman:TAS. Damn - that was the best show on TV from '92-'95.
MOVIE EXECS: If you are reading this - take this as one lone hint that Batman SHOULD NOT be silly. Batman should be scary.
Go to college with the guy you are about to interview for four years, and during the interview, you can just bullshit and talk about how that one instructor was a bastard and gave impossible to finish tests, then turn to the other interviewer (typically someone from HR) and say "I know he can do the job. I've seen him work - under pressure and all - and I know he has the skills to do what we need done."
That's what my last interviewer did. Now, if he'd just get the paperwork filed and light a fire under his boss' ass.... *hahahah* - Sorry Mike....
Over the past two years, I've developed a decent "haha, only serious" model of the universe. It works sort of like this:
About two years ago, Slashdot ran a story talking about the theoretical upper limit of computer speed (sorry, couldn't find a link). Basically, the idea was to convert the mass of your computer to energy to allow ALL of it to work for you. This energy, in the form of light, will create intereference patterns - just like you did with the two slits in 5th grade science - and that's how the computer (which now resembles a small star) does it's computing kinda thing (gross oversimplification of what the article said, but that's the gist). Now if you compress enough energy into a singularity, you have pretty much (and the "pretty much" is important) infinite computing power (due to time dialation and so on).
Well, it just so happens that God has one of these things on his desk. Our universe is a program running inside this uber-computer that resembles a black hole. Earlier I said the processing power of this computer would be "pretty much" infinite. Well - it isn't big enough to handle every particle in the universe simultaneously. Some of the universe is "swapped out". Ever sit down at the computer to read slashdot, and whammo, four hours have gone by? Wonder what happened to the time? You were swapped out, that's what. There also appears to be problems with the branch prediction unit of this computer. Deja vu? branch prediction made an error, and the queue had to be recalculated. Ever reached in your pocket and pulled out a $5 bill you didn't know you had? bad branch prediction.
If a tree falls in the woods, and no one was there to witness, does it make a sound? No. It didn't even fall. Actually, it wasn't even there. Years later, when a witness comes upon the site, all the events since the last witness came by are quickly approximated and the end results are what the new witness sees. What constitutes a witness? People? squirrels? I dunno. Doesn't matter, really.
Can't remember if you left the oven on? Well, both options are possible, and both have been approximated. The appropriate one will be chosen when someone sees the end result (either your house burns down, or it doesn't).
Lots of strange events can be explained with this model of the universe:
Reincarnation/past lives/Ghosts? Bad garbage collection, or the Divine Coder forgot to unallocate memory.
ESP? Packet snooping.
Why can't objects with mass go faster than the speed of light? Think of everything like an object in C++. If you have a "mass" property, your object is too big to fit through the "bus" in one "fetch cycle", so your "position" property can't be updated as fast as say...a photon, which fits through the bus in one cycle.
Why is the rules of Quantum Mechanics so strange/Planck's Constant? In the world of computers we know, what's smaller than a bit? Looking at things on that small a scale, we're seeing the individual bits flip from 1 to 0 in God's workstation. Of course it will look odd, and it won't mean much when compared to the world as we perceive it. Combine that with the fact that most of the universe is approximated, and you end up with really strange things happening on that small a scale.
Why are some people luckier than others? Not all people call the same random number generator, or maybe some people can call it with a certain "seed value".
Bermuda triangle? think of something like a bad sector on a disk, or a faulty RAM stick - of course, the computer this runs on doesn't use disks or RAM sticks, but it's still a decent analogy.
Jesus? You play Quake/Unreal/The Sims, don't you? It just so happens that God's version of "The Sims" is a hell of a lot better than yours.
Don't think of this as something akin to the movie "The Matrix" - because these rules we live by in this universe can't be broken. There's no dodging bullets. there's no agents... We were created parts of this simulation, and are ourselves simulated and no more or less real than the world we live in - and there's no way to get out of this simulation. However, maybe there is a way to use the rules to our advantage? But to do that, you need to know the real rules behind the physics we see. We'd need to know what's happening to those individual bits in the processor. If we can affect those often enough, maybe we could effectively beat the rules...?
More important is this question: Were we created on purpose, or is this entire universe of ours that exists inside God's Workstation meant to be something else entirely? Maybe we were supposed to model plasma dynamics, and the system taking on intelligence was a by-product of the genetic algorithm that was used? Or maybe we're something like an AI experiment?
Okay - so here's the next question: Suppose the speed of light through medium X is 38 MPH... Speed of light through a vaccuum is 186K MPS... Einstein says you can't go faster than the speed of light in a vaccuum.
Does that mean if you traveled trhough "medium X" that the new maximum speed limit is now 38MPH?
Is light ALWAYS the fastest thing in any given medium?
Seeing as how they slowed light by passing it through "medium X" could there be a way to make a medium that would speed up light - say the speed of light through "medium Y" is 500K MPS? If so, wouldn't that mean the amount of energy to go that fast would be reduced (if not, then the photon that started going faster would have acquired energy from somethin-or-other)? And if so, wouldn't that allow faster-than-light(-through-what-we-call-space) speeds?
I dunno - I watched a Star Trek marathon today. I've absorbed too much fantasy physics to think...
/proc can be a dangerous place to poke around. Multiply that by a zillion if you are a boob with root...
Sitting at my friends linux box, I went to/proc and poked at some stuff to check out his hardware without opening the case, switched terminals and untarred a tarball with the current project we were working on, switched back to look at his amount of RAM, switched back to get the one file out of the tarball I needed and put it in ~/project, switched back to look at some more stuff in/proc...then I wanted to delete the rest of the crap from the tarball, so I typed: rm -rf * And quickly realized I was in/proc and not ~ Needless to say, the computer grabbed its throat and choked to death right before my eyes.
My friend came in - sees the thing just sitting there, with the hard drive grinding away and sees what I had typed in. He asked "So, if you delete the cpu in/proc, is it still on the motherboard?" I almost opened the case to see.
Had I been joeuser instead of ROOT things would have been okay, and I would have gotten a nasty-gram telling me what a boob I was.
There's something to be said for Sci-Fi/Fantasy or any fiction that is INTERNALLY CONSISTANT. Any time a person experiences a work of fiction, they are asking ot be lied to, basically. We want to believe this lie. So - as long as the lie remains consistant, it's okay, we agreed to believe it (for a little while anyway) when we decided to read/watch/listen to it.
But - especially with a long-running work such as a TV show - this consistancy breaks down. You start seeing the lie for what it really is, instead of what you are supposed to see it as. In short: It stops being entertaining.
There's a couple ways to cope with this: someone else mentioned the method "Gloss-over-and-ignore-it", and that's probably the best one. The less you say, the less you get nailed on. Take Star Wars for instance. How do lightsabers work? Doesn't matter, isn't important. All you need to know is that they can cut off Walrus Man's arm in the cantina. Then look at Star Trek: How does Warp Drive work? Well, it creates a bias in subspace blah blahblahblah. Anyone who payed attention to high school physics will eventaully have trouble swallowing this.
Another method of maintaining suspension of disbelief is "F*ck you, it's magic!" How did Harry Potter's broom fly? Magic. How did The One Ring make Frodo invisible? Magic. How does Luke move his lightsaber in the Wampa cave without touching it? Magic. That's all you need to know.
So - how does a Warp Drive work? The smart answer for the Star Trek crowd would be "Your primitive mind couldn't grasp the concepts. Sorry, but most of what you know of physics is wrong." and then you set course for the Neutral Zone and engage at warp 8.
As any good sci-fi/fantasy writer knows: the less you say, the better. Explain it too much, and you are likely to get it wrong. And - don't expect people to believe too much too quickly.
While Armageddon takes the cake for the worst ever - what with the big red switch in the background marked "science" - and it's always in the "off" position, there are some equally bad, and pretty recent movies:
Independence day: Lots of people had problems with the Mac being compatible with the alien tech...But hey... Maybe that's where we got the technology to make laptops - From Data there in the underground bunker tearing apart the roswell crash.
Aliens: The alien's biology is pretty damn improbable. What kind of environment did it evolve in to get that low a PH? And since it's got that low a PH, why not just go into the alien nest with a big bottle of Ammonia and hose them down? They'd foam alot, and makes lots of nasty salts, but Ammonia should burn them worse than their blood burns us.
Terminator: Why didn't skynet send Arnie back with a cow...hidden inside the cow is an "Ames plasma rifle, in the 40 watt range" and other high-tech, human slaying goodness? Once he gets here, he rips open the cow and gets his cool futuristic blaster out of it's guts and shows the 20th century how a real cyborg goes on a killing spree.
Men In Black: Without touching the "Neuralizer" we'll just go to the bug in the "Edgar-Suit". How did such a big bug fit inside Edgar's skin? That thing was 20' tall, with a head big enough to swallow Tommy Lee Jones whole!
Star Trek? Too Easy. stuff like: How can Geordi's visor "see" neutrinos when a neutrinos can pass through light-years of lead and not hit anything? If Data sweats to cool himself (which is something they said he does) why doesn't he have to eat *something* to replenish his supply of "sweat"? etc. etc. etc.
Robocop? oh god...His bullets can penetrate body armor, yet bounce off a refridgerator door?
and finally for me: every Jackie Chan movie ever made. I'm supposed to believe he can do all that stuff? I mean, come on - some of the jumps he does are just plain impossib....Huh? He really does do all that stuff for real? DAMN!
I take a look at this story and wonder - what threshold will I have to set to keep from seeing the really awful jokes? 12?
The only thing that would have been worse, is if they had been shaped like penises! Penii? How the hell...? What kind of discussion...? I'm at a loss for words.
Slashdot Mirror
"Typical prolectariat mindset"
...what did I call them? Corporate Butt-Pirate. over 450 people lost jobs just to "Make the Company more 'nimble'" - What the fuck does that mean?
You mean Proletariat. And no, it's not. It's long been something taught in economics courses that the way to judge the prosperity of a nation is to look at the size of its middle class.
"Move to Cuba, communista"
There's not a single communist ideea in what I said. It's capitalism at it's best, you brain-dead troll. If no one can afford a refridgerator, will the people who own stock in a refridgerator manufacturer prosper? No.
"They are all valuable, including the shareholders which provide the capital to grow"
Real capital to grow comes from profit. Capital to BEGIN comes from investors. There's a difference. After a company is turning a profit and doing well in it's economic niche as you put it, the shareholders are mostly superfluous.
"Oracle does not expect their employees to become their customers, nor does Boeing or Northrup/Grumman. "
Oracle's employees get payed a wage. With that wage they buy things from a store. That store needs to keep track of it's inventory with a databse - so, they go buy an oracle database.
Similarly, Boeing's customers are airlines. Boeing employees get paid and want to take the family to disneyworld. So, he buys four tickets on Delta to go from Seattle to Orlando.
To add to that, Wal-Mart has to have product shipped to them, so they use a Boeing plane. Boeing has to have databases to manage their business, so they buy oracle. Oracle employees like to go to disneyworld too, so they buy tickets from delta.
It's called Capitalism, you troll! Henry Ford was just one of the first guys to see the interconnections.
"No, the problem is the lineworker, because he/she are f**king morons."
The lineworkers are a problem; quite often they are lazy, stupid and union-guarded. I didn't say I had the answer, but I did imply that stealing isn't a way to fix it.
"And last week, they elected people who will continue to aid the CEO in their fraud and oppression of the worker. (Unbelievable!) Don't believe me? Who was the Chairman of the SEC, and who currently is? How will putting Republicans in control of both legislative houses encourage hearings to expose economic corruption from the people who spend billions to get them in that position?"
OH MY GOD! and anti-labor Democrat? WTF huh? Or are you one of those insane, gibbering, strict Libertarians? I used to be one of those, till I realized that the idea just plain ol won't work.
Why did you have to drag politics into this?
"Life does not have the obligation to make the dumbasses' life easier or more fair"
No, but our government has an obligation to protect its citizens from criminals. It's printed on the side of quite a few Police cars, you know.
"The only reason you think otherwise was that your dumbass parents told you so. Here's a clue, stop being a dumbass."
Uhm - Huh? No...The reason I think this is because I lost quite a bit of money to one particular
Here's a clue to you: Stop being a troll.
A computer explain what women want! That's rich! That's a laugh! I imagine an AI trying to do that would be like the time Kirk and Spock fried the robot by Kirk saying Spock always lies, and Spock saying he's lying.
I could see even Lt. Commander Data getting a BSOD from a woman telling him "If I have to explain it to you, you'll never understand."
*General Protection Fault in module Sanity32.dll *
Data's skin turns blue, he goes stiff and falls on his face.
Thou Shalt Not Make a Machine in the image of the mind of Man.
Somehow, I think that might be good advice.
Though not a regular gig, you've appeared in what? Three? Twilight Zone episodes. Or is it two? There's the "There's something on the WING!" episode 'Nightmare at 20,000 feet', and then there's the coin-operated-Devil-knows-the-future episode,'Nick Of Time' . (By the way - I especially liked your first appearance on "Third Rock From The Sun" where your character and John Lithgow's character had that "moment" about there being something on the wing...)
You were also in an episode of The Outter Limits, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Alfred Hitchcock Presents
and a whole mess of other sci-fi/quasi-sci-fi shows in the late 50s/early 60s. These shows (Twilight Zone and Outter Limits, most memorably) had a great impact for "serious" Science Fiction on TV - at least something other than just blasting the bug-eyed monsters with a ray gun for half an hour.
Did you search out roles in those kinds of shows for any particular reasons, or were they just the ones that hired you?
Maybe I didn't make my point clear. My point isn't showing "profit" or not...My point is that many corporations show no shame in what they do to make a profit. Jack Welsh in particular RUINED many workers just to bump up that profit a smidgen.
Henry Ford figured something out back in the 30s - your employees eventually become your customers. Money (in the "Strong Economy" sense) doesn't come from nowhere. "Shareholder Value" comes from the fact that there is an economy out there that supports the products that GE makes (aircraft engines, light bulbs, etc. etc.). That strong economy comes from middle class workers. Jack Welsh had a history of laying off middle class workers, cutting their salary, shutting down plants and moving jobs elsewhere.
And yes, there are scumbags out there, and yes, Jack Welsh is close to the top of the heap.
Shareholders aren't the ones that make america go - it's the guy out there in the hangar twisting the wrench that makes america go. If he looses his job, his 401K isn't shit.
Shareholder Value is the least of my worries. I want to make sure my son has dinner tonight!
This is an old trick. Happened to my dad several times in the 80s (luckily, he was one of the ones that was left in the shop to do the work of two employees the company just laid off)
I'm not a reflex "Proud To Be Union"-bumper-sticker-posting moron, but Corporate Greed is the greatest of those two evils.
Corporate Greed knowns no shame. And since Enron, it knows no fear. Sure - this happened in the past, but they (being greedy corporate officers) had to at least hide it - which made it less noticable or insulting. Airlines in the 80s did similar things on a smaller scale. Today we have CEOs that lay-off thousands of employees just to "make the company more 'nimble'" (Jack Welsh, of General Electric) who then -on the way to his retirement mansion- starts stuffing his pockets with money while asking "You don't mind, do you?"
So - here's a bit of help for the greedy corporate butt-pirates out there:
Don't hire anyone to a permanent position. Get all your employees as contractors or, better yet, as "temps".
If possible, hire half to 2/3rds the employees you need, and then guilt/guile/corral/cajole them into doing the work of two people. Make it well known that they need the paycheck more than you need the job done.
Don't forget to line your pockets.
Make sure your HR person knows how to write the job description you post so that you can easily tell the few experienced applicants that they are overqualified (read that as "cost too much") and make the other applicants feel inferior, so they feel lucky to have the job, don't complain, and work harder for less money.
Quality? Fuck it. Honesty? Laugh at that, then fuck it. Quantity? Fuck it too. Employee moral? Fuck that hard. Money? Money is god. And you, being the High Priest, cannot suffer to allow anyone other than you to have god. So make sure you take god away from them and put god back in the temple (your pocket) where it belongs.
Oh shit, there goes the Karma.....
I'm using a Microsoft Trackball Explorer 1.0 PS2/USB optical trackball right now. The big red marble pops out of the frame and you can throw it around the office.
The coolest thing about it is when I turn the lights in my office off - The ring around the ball glows, making the transparent red shell of the ball glow slightly - looks like I have the eye of sauron on my desk.
go here for a review of the thing, with pics and all. I love mine. Keeps the shoulder from burining after a long day of waving a mouse around (bad shoulder, motorcycle accident)
Still too much pressure in my spleen - gotta vent it on this....
IANAME (I Am Not A Microchip Engineer) but I would assume the "chemicals" they use in processing silicone would be something acidic (rinse away everything but the silicone) and then water to rinse away the acid. Those can all be neutralized easily.
Then there would be the pollutants in the silicone, but typically that shouldn't be anything REALLY bad in large ammounts. Then there's the germanium, gallium et al. that they dope the semiconductor with - but the idea is to keep those inside the chip. Then there's the lead solder.
If you want to bust some ass on heavy metals, how about we go after battery makers - you know - those HUGE batteries they want to put in gas/electric hybrid cars... How much "chemicals" do they produce as waste to make one of THOSE?
That should just about do it...
I love it when people throw around words like "Chemicals" when they really mean "TOXIC chemicals".
Such as - "That hot dog you are eating has lots of chemicals in it! You shouldn't eat it!"
At which point, I slap the hippy herbivore and say "There's even more chemicals in your bean curds, you idiot. Chemicals like 'hydrocarbons', 'hydrogen di-oxide' etc. etc.....Did you know that Hydrogen Di-Oxide is a mild acid, typically in nature is a breeding ground for bacteria and infectious diseases? It's addictive! Once you take it once, you have to take it for the rest of your life...or the withdrawls will kill you!"
Specifically WHAT evil chemicals do they use in making microchips? How much as compared to making...the jars they sell babyfood in? What exactly is the environmental impact of these evil chemicals?
Until those questions are answered, this article is just running around screaming that the sky is falling....
BAh!
OOPS - got my blockquote backwards...
MUST.....rEmEmBeR....HiT.....pREvIEw....BUttON!
Isn't this the scene where the old japanese man and the kid are talking (to themselves, because they aren't in the same room) about telemarketers, telemarketer busters, telemarketer buster busters, telemarketer buster buster busters, telemarketer buster buster buster busters, telemarketer buster buster buster buster busters and telemarketer buster buster buster buster buster busters.
And because the kid doesn't have a telemarketer buster buster buster buster buster buster buster buster, the Disabled Veterans call Mark Walhberg and try to get him to donate just $35 *guilt trip* and make the life of an American hero just a little more tolerable */guilt trip*
My friend Frazier, a tall skinny brit with a bad attitude, and I were on an outing to the theater one evening - to see "Unforgiven" - the Clint Eastwood bad-ass western....at "Mann's Chinese Theater" in Hollywood. Frazier had a huge 32oz. Dr. Pepper.
The guy in front of us spent the whole moving laughing slowly and loudly - at all the wrong places in the movie. When it was a sad scene, or the middle of the action scene, the fat bastard would burst out "HA!.....HA!....HA!....."
Finally Frazier had had enough - so he jumped up over the row of seats between us and the fat guy, and spiked his Dr.P. on the guy's head. It exploded all over the guy, soaking him to his wide-ass underwear. Frazier screamed in his face "SHUT UP DAMMIT! SHUT UP! JUST SHUT UP!"
Someone in the back of the theater shouted "It's about damn time!" and the entire audience cheered.
Frazier ran back to his seat, hands clasped over his head like the winner of a prize-fight.
The fat guy sat there shivering for the rest of the movie and didn't make a sound.
>........He wasn't saying autoCADs interface was good .. just that it was complex.
But Autocad has a very good interface. The interface is flexible (you can edit every menu in the program - even the one that pops up when you hit the 4th button on the digitizer puck - and you can create alias shortcuts for your favorite commands), it's simple (If you know the name of your command you can just type it in, rather than hunt for it in the menus)....etc. etc. etc.
And it's fairly intuitive. For 2d drafting, it's almost exactly like sitting down to a drafting board (granted, it's alot faster, but it feels the same way). I'll admit the learning curve for 3d modelling with autocad is kinda steep, and the curve for solid modelling is nearly verticle - but those are fucked up concepts in the first place.
I've been an Autocad professional since release 10, way back in the day. I've drawn the plans for parts that go on commercial airplanes that fly over your house every day...and Autocad has been there with me every day.
Even while learning the software in the first place, I could relate it to the training I'd had with pencil-paper-TSquare drafting and it made a decent amount of sense. I've never had the interface for any release of autocad (up until release 13...and the fact that it was a windows app kinda felt funny) get in the way of my productivity.
But - back on topic: The software packages he mentioned are NOT for general use. The apps he mentioned aren't MSWord, Mozilla or IE - we're talking about stuff a person would go to school to learn how to drive.... software packages a person could make a career out of.
And keep in mind:
COMPLEX != BAD
SIMPLE !=GOOD
when it comes to UIs... The UI has to match the complexity level of the software, or you'll have intelligent trained professionals being insulted by "drool proof" software. Or, you'll have a newbie lost among a maze of menus and tech terms he/she can't understand.
My Opinion - my little $0.02 to add: Menus with pictures instead of words FUCKING SUCK! Toolbars... You know - with the little icon of a floppy, and if you poke at the floppy with a mouse it saves what you are working on... But what if you don't want to save it to the floppy? WAUGH! Why not just put a drop down menu with the word "SAVE" in a box?
Go here - read:
User Interface Hall of Shame
I knew a guy that was almost this stupid. He took his student loans from college, didn't pay tuition and didn't go to class...Well, he took his big wad of cash and bought a Playstation and ALL the games on the market for it.
He then went back to his trailer (he lived in a trailer with ratty carpet and wall-to-wall fleas)and hooked up his Playstation. His fiance had left town to visit her family, so he spent the next 72 hours playing playstation games.
Here's the terrible part. His fiance had just got a teeny little kitten. It was barely weened. The guy got to playing games and completely forgot about the kitten. 72 hours later, it was dead in the bathroom behind the toilet from dehydration. He didn't notice for another couple days... when it started smelling like...well...a rotten kitten.
So now, when my son plays video games too much, I tell him the story of the guy that played so many video games, his cat died.
Just recently taking a job in IT, I've been thinking about this heavily. What if the Brown Shirts kicked in my server room door and threatened me unless I could produce liscenses for all the software in there?
...etc. etc. etc.
Some of that crap dates back...What? FOUR IT managers ago? Two Office buildings ago.... At a couple of the workstations out in the workshop, they've got 386s and Win3.1...Just enough to let them run the purchasing database front-end...(and something that doesn't need a fan - which would be gummed up and on fire in days). Many companies go through this! WAUUUGH!
I wish I had enough money to write my own laws and have my own army to enforce them.
Who knows what survived the moves and the re-organizations, the buyouts
Maybe I'll be joining Chris here in a "Federal Pound-me-up-the-ASS Prison"...
Because obviously, the had already looked through the little hole and saw there was no alien spacecraft...
Or they found the craft and moved it, so it is now sitting in a huge hangar burried under an Arizona desert; right next to the Ark of the Covenant, half a million alien fetuses (fetii?), Hitler's living brain, the Time Machine H.G. Wells wrote about, Jules Verne's Nautilus and the Stargate they found buried a half mile from the pyramids at Giza.
Granted, I like Keaton best as batman - but both Clooney and Kilmer did a decent batman (ignoring the scripts - the scripts for all batman movies after the second one have been sickeningly bad).
Batman back in the forties and fifties was, while still his "I am the night" bad-ass self, still sort of optomistic and good natured. Kilmer fit this quite well. Yes, Kilmer played Bruce Wayne as a playboy, but that would have been fine for a just-starting batman.
Batman of the fifties and sixties was a little sillier (as were all comics of the time) and sort of the leader of the "bat-pack" -- because all superheros had to have an army of side-kicks. Clooney did this pretty well.
And then - there's the Batman of the mid-to-late eighties. The original Robin has run out on him, his replacement Robin was murdered by the Joker and he really hates himself. Now - he's more Batman than Bruce Wayne - Wayne is just a thin veneer over his true self. Bruce Wayne is stretched thin and tired, and becoming transparent... Pretty soon, Batman will be all that's left. Keaton did this excellently.
What really makes me mad is this:
Joel Schumacher, in 1994 when he begins Batman Forever, has two options:
On the one hand he has a pile of work by Frank MIller and Walter Simonson, filled with panel after panel of a dark, gritty batman that has been selling like hotcakes for fifteen years or so (at least that *style* of batman, if not ALL their work)....
On the other hand, he has a laughable and ridiculous 1966 TV show starring Adam West's fat ass - that most of the world would like to forget. At least, everyone who grew up in the 80s reading batman comics and seeing Batman as part Sam Spade, part psycho, and all super hero....At least we didn't want to be confronted with Adam West's beer gut and patently stupid television show.
I just thank the Lord that Kevin Altieri and Kent Butterworth got it right with Batman:TAS. Damn - that was the best show on TV from '92-'95.
MOVIE EXECS: If you are reading this - take this as one lone hint that Batman SHOULD NOT be silly. Batman should be scary.
Go to college with the guy you are about to interview for four years, and during the interview, you can just bullshit and talk about how that one instructor was a bastard and gave impossible to finish tests, then turn to the other interviewer (typically someone from HR) and say "I know he can do the job. I've seen him work - under pressure and all - and I know he has the skills to do what we need done."
That's what my last interviewer did. Now, if he'd just get the paperwork filed and light a fire under his boss' ass....
*hahahah* - Sorry Mike....
Over the past two years, I've developed a decent "haha, only serious" model of the universe. It works sort of like this:
About two years ago, Slashdot ran a story talking about the theoretical upper limit of computer speed (sorry, couldn't find a link). Basically, the idea was to convert the mass of your computer to energy to allow ALL of it to work for you. This energy, in the form of light, will create intereference patterns - just like you did with the two slits in 5th grade science - and that's how the computer (which now resembles a small star) does it's computing kinda thing (gross oversimplification of what the article said, but that's the gist). Now if you compress enough energy into a singularity, you have pretty much (and the "pretty much" is important) infinite computing power (due to time dialation and so on).
Well, it just so happens that God has one of these things on his desk. Our universe is a program running inside this uber-computer that resembles a black hole.
Earlier I said the processing power of this computer would be "pretty much" infinite. Well - it isn't big enough to handle every particle in the universe simultaneously. Some of the universe is "swapped out". Ever sit down at the computer to read slashdot, and whammo, four hours have gone by? Wonder what happened to the time? You were swapped out, that's what.
There also appears to be problems with the branch prediction unit of this computer. Deja vu? branch prediction made an error, and the queue had to be recalculated. Ever reached in your pocket and pulled out a $5 bill you didn't know you had? bad branch prediction.
If a tree falls in the woods, and no one was there to witness, does it make a sound? No. It didn't even fall. Actually, it wasn't even there. Years later, when a witness comes upon the site, all the events since the last witness came by are quickly approximated and the end results are what the new witness sees. What constitutes a witness? People? squirrels? I dunno. Doesn't matter, really.
Can't remember if you left the oven on? Well, both options are possible, and both have been approximated. The appropriate one will be chosen when someone sees the end result (either your house burns down, or it doesn't).
Lots of strange events can be explained with this model of the universe:
Reincarnation/past lives/Ghosts? Bad garbage collection, or the Divine Coder forgot to unallocate memory.
ESP? Packet snooping.
Why can't objects with mass go faster than the speed of light? Think of everything like an object in C++. If you have a "mass" property, your object is too big to fit through the "bus" in one "fetch cycle", so your "position" property can't be updated as fast as say...a photon, which fits through the bus in one cycle.
Why is the rules of Quantum Mechanics so strange/Planck's Constant? In the world of computers we know, what's smaller than a bit? Looking at things on that small a scale, we're seeing the individual bits flip from 1 to 0 in God's workstation. Of course it will look odd, and it won't mean much when compared to the world as we perceive it. Combine that with the fact that most of the universe is approximated, and you end up with really strange things happening on that small a scale.
Why are some people luckier than others? Not all people call the same random number generator, or maybe some people can call it with a certain "seed value".
Bermuda triangle? think of something like a bad sector on a disk, or a faulty RAM stick - of course, the computer this runs on doesn't use disks or RAM sticks, but it's still a decent analogy.
Jesus? You play Quake/Unreal/The Sims, don't you? It just so happens that God's version of "The Sims" is a hell of a lot better than yours.
Don't think of this as something akin to the movie "The Matrix" - because these rules we live by in this universe can't be broken. There's no dodging bullets. there's no agents... We were created parts of this simulation, and are ourselves simulated and no more or less real than the world we live in - and there's no way to get out of this simulation.
However, maybe there is a way to use the rules to our advantage? But to do that, you need to know the real rules behind the physics we see. We'd need to know what's happening to those individual bits in the processor. If we can affect those often enough, maybe we could effectively beat the rules...?
More important is this question: Were we created on purpose, or is this entire universe of ours that exists inside God's Workstation meant to be something else entirely? Maybe we were supposed to model plasma dynamics, and the system taking on intelligence was a by-product of the genetic algorithm that was used? Or maybe we're something like an AI experiment?
Okay - so here's the next question:
Suppose the speed of light through medium X is 38 MPH...
Speed of light through a vaccuum is 186K MPS...
Einstein says you can't go faster than the speed of light in a vaccuum.
Does that mean if you traveled trhough "medium X" that the new maximum speed limit is now 38MPH?
Is light ALWAYS the fastest thing in any given medium?
Seeing as how they slowed light by passing it through "medium X" could there be a way to make a medium that would speed up light - say the speed of light through "medium Y" is 500K MPS? If so, wouldn't that mean the amount of energy to go that fast would be reduced (if not, then the photon that started going faster would have acquired energy from somethin-or-other)? And if so, wouldn't that allow faster-than-light(-through-what-we-call-space) speeds?
I dunno - I watched a Star Trek marathon today. I've absorbed too much fantasy physics to think...
/proc can be a dangerous place to poke around. Multiply that by a zillion if you are a boob with root...
/proc and poked at some stuff to check out his hardware without opening the case, switched terminals and untarred a tarball with the current project we were working on, switched back to look at his amount of RAM, switched back to get the one file out of the tarball I needed and put it in ~/project, switched back to look at some more stuff in /proc...then I wanted to delete the rest of the crap from the tarball, so I typed: /proc and not ~
/proc, is it still on the motherboard?"
Sitting at my friends linux box, I went to
rm -rf *
And quickly realized I was in
Needless to say, the computer grabbed its throat and choked to death right before my eyes.
My friend came in - sees the thing just sitting there, with the hard drive grinding away and sees what I had typed in. He asked "So, if you delete the cpu in
I almost opened the case to see.
Had I been joeuser instead of ROOT things would have been okay, and I would have gotten a nasty-gram telling me what a boob I was.
There's something to be said for Sci-Fi/Fantasy or any fiction that is INTERNALLY CONSISTANT. Any time a person experiences a work of fiction, they are asking ot be lied to, basically. We want to believe this lie. So - as long as the lie remains consistant, it's okay, we agreed to believe it (for a little while anyway) when we decided to read/watch/listen to it.
But - especially with a long-running work such as a TV show - this consistancy breaks down. You start seeing the lie for what it really is, instead of what you are supposed to see it as. In short: It stops being entertaining.
There's a couple ways to cope with this: someone else mentioned the method "Gloss-over-and-ignore-it", and that's probably the best one. The less you say, the less you get nailed on. Take Star Wars for instance. How do lightsabers work? Doesn't matter, isn't important. All you need to know is that they can cut off Walrus Man's arm in the cantina. Then look at Star Trek: How does Warp Drive work? Well, it creates a bias in subspace blah blahblahblah. Anyone who payed attention to high school physics will eventaully have trouble swallowing this.
Another method of maintaining suspension of disbelief is "F*ck you, it's magic!" How did Harry Potter's broom fly? Magic. How did The One Ring make Frodo invisible? Magic. How does Luke move his lightsaber in the Wampa cave without touching it? Magic. That's all you need to know.
So - how does a Warp Drive work? The smart answer for the Star Trek crowd would be "Your primitive mind couldn't grasp the concepts. Sorry, but most of what you know of physics is wrong." and then you set course for the Neutral Zone and engage at warp 8.
As any good sci-fi/fantasy writer knows: the less you say, the better. Explain it too much, and you are likely to get it wrong. And - don't expect people to believe too much too quickly.
While Armageddon takes the cake for the worst ever - what with the big red switch in the background marked "science" - and it's always in the "off" position, there are some equally bad, and pretty recent movies:
Independence day: Lots of people had problems with the Mac being compatible with the alien tech...But hey... Maybe that's where we got the technology to make laptops - From Data there in the underground bunker tearing apart the roswell crash.
Aliens: The alien's biology is pretty damn improbable. What kind of environment did it evolve in to get that low a PH? And since it's got that low a PH, why not just go into the alien nest with a big bottle of Ammonia and hose them down? They'd foam alot, and makes lots of nasty salts, but Ammonia should burn them worse than their blood burns us.
Terminator: Why didn't skynet send Arnie back with a cow...hidden inside the cow is an "Ames plasma rifle, in the 40 watt range" and other high-tech, human slaying goodness? Once he gets here, he rips open the cow and gets his cool futuristic blaster out of it's guts and shows the 20th century how a real cyborg goes on a killing spree.
Men In Black: Without touching the "Neuralizer" we'll just go to the bug in the "Edgar-Suit". How did such a big bug fit inside Edgar's skin? That thing was 20' tall, with a head big enough to swallow Tommy Lee Jones whole!
Star Trek? Too Easy. stuff like: How can Geordi's visor "see" neutrinos when a neutrinos can pass through light-years of lead and not hit anything? If Data sweats to cool himself (which is something they said he does) why doesn't he have to eat *something* to replenish his supply of "sweat"? etc. etc. etc.
Robocop? oh god...His bullets can penetrate body armor, yet bounce off a refridgerator door?
and finally for me: every Jackie Chan movie ever made. I'm supposed to believe he can do all that stuff? I mean, come on - some of the jumps he does are just plain impossib....Huh? He really does do all that stuff for real? DAMN!
I take a look at this story and wonder - what threshold will I have to set to keep from seeing the really awful jokes? 12?
The only thing that would have been worse, is if they had been shaped like penises! Penii?
How the hell...? What kind of discussion...?
I'm at a loss for words.