The flip side of this is when you just want to play a game. There is a bit of fun in bashing shit, taking its stuff, then being able to bash BIGGER shit and getting BETTER stuff.
People I know set up a game for after work, asked me to play, and I had to sa no. Why? The thought of having to wait 40 minutes between events where we got things done because you always had to wait for whoever felt the need to ROLE PLAY MY WACKY QUIRKS at that exact time, when I just want to buy some fucking rope, would have made it a horribly unpleasant experience.
I've watched them play a couple times. Its amazing how long a combat takes when every die roll is precedeed by a speech about the glory of wherever-you're-from. ugh.
I just got this email - spam, like most of them. It has the following body:
0ur Attorneys have discovered a loop-hole in the banking laws. Applying what we have found, we're successfu1 by totally eliminating creditcarddebt with out them having to pay another cent, We know that our firm can help you with this too.
You can contact us at : 1--3 1 3--263--2706
[[plus that common gibberish that tries to make it look like a real letter from someone...]]
Fun way to tie up their phone number? Hit Google Maps and start connecting their phone number to varous businesses thruought the country. Best part? You can call with their number, and then once it connects to THEM, cancel the call once it starts dailing the business.
Yeah. Good times.
I'm also well aware that this method really does nothing and furthers the abuse, but it's sort of interesting.
In William Gibson's Virtual Light, AIDS was cured by finding a variant of AIDS that destroyed other AIDS strains and did no harm to its host. I think they guy they "discovered" that strain in was named JD Shapley.
The story of it is spread thruoghout the novel, which I though was pretty damn good.
I'm well aware I used AIDS three times on one sentence. Hey, it's late.
I remember a game back from grade school, it didnt really have a name, but it basically involved EVERYONE getting out on one of the all-dirt softball fields behind the school and playing a form of dodgeball.
With frisbees. Lots and lots of frisbees.
Like, "Everybody bring as many frisbees as you can find from your basement and bring them to school, becuase after lunch, all hundred of us are going to go out to the softball field and fling them at each others heads as hard as we freaking can."
I don't even remember anybody ever being "out" when they got hit, that just meant they got another frisbee to fling back at the other side, hopefully damaging more of your schoolmates.
Bonus coolness was to the kid who could use one frisbee to block another, Tron-style.
I can also remember playing dodgeball where one kid was throwing at everyone else, who was standing against a brick wall. If you got hit hard enough, you'd get smashed into the wall, too. Last kid standing got to be the next thrower.
1. Since it is genetically impossible for a dog to give birth to a cat, or a bird to lay an egg from which a frog pops out, etc etc (species reproduce "after their kind"), and since evolutionary theory dictates (as far as I understand it) that the forks/mutations in species occur over millions of years, how can they occur at all in a species that doesn't live past a few decades? A dog lives what, 10-15 years? How much genetic adaptation to it's environent can it make in 10-15 years, to a point that a passes down a "new" trait to it's progeny?
A creature does not GENETICALLY adapt to its environment. BEHAVORIALLY adapt, yes, but not genttically. Don't let the human tendancy to anthromorphicze animals fool you into thinking that most of their behaviors (especially less intelligent animals) are more than instinctual (and derivative from their genetic makeup).
Once a being is born, its genes do not change because of their actions in the environment (short of maybe getting a giant dose of radiation), but the genes they are born with will possibly make that being more likely to better survive the environment they live in for whatever reason. Those that survive better are more likely to reach maturity and be able to reproduce anad pass their genetic traits to their offspring.
Goofy Example: Baby artic seals are born with white fur to allow themselves to blend into their environment anad be less likely to be found by predators. Imagine thousands of years ago there were two types of fur baby seals could be born with, one group is born with the white fur, one group is born with dark brown fur. For a barely mobile inafnt, this coat is the equivalant of a giant "FREE EATS, MISTER POLAR BEAR!" sign.
Those seals that are easily found by predators are killed and eaten before they get the chance to pass on their genetically brown baby-fur, those that hide well because of their white coats mature to adulthood and breed, passing on the white coat to their offspring. Seals that are boorn wiith non-white fur due to an old recessive gene or a mutation are less likely to survive and pass that gene on.
The actions of the seals themselves (beyond mating) have nothing to do with changing the genetic makeup of the species.
Another good example is how humans selectively breed animals to create dominant traits, resulting in the numerous breeds of dogs that are out there. The "environment" isnt natural, but the outside influence brings that species of dog about by strengthing specific traits.
The individuals of a species that can pass on their genetics better (more often) are the more successful members of their race and they decide where that species is going.
Its pretty basic science. I think I was taught about basic genetic inheretance somewhere around 5th grade.
Counter-argument to your faith based creationism: Science proves its theories wholly or in part by doing the experiments that prove the theory over and over again and getting the same result. Then OTHER scientists recreate the experiments and TRY to disprove the theory for completeness. Its called "The scientific method." Humans have been breeding doge for centuries into specific types; scientists breed mice for specific traits so they have a "common test subject"
As far as I can see for the creation side of the argument, that experiment has been done entirely once, and the documentation on it isnt very good beyond saying "this happened." Show the scientific community another example of "POOF! Heres a species!" and sciencec will give faith-based theories a lot more weight.
We usually just ask to write out fairly common perl tasks, like sorting a hash, to get a sense of the experience level. I've hired people who couldn't get all the perl stuff if I sensed they were into learning.
Then I probably didn't talk to you, becuase once we started talking about what the system was actually running on, the first thing I said was "I'm not an expert, I don't use it that often. I just need to remember all the exact syntax to do what I know needs to happen."
I shoulda fibbed more like most other people do, but then again, I hate that.
I remember the catchy website name,
Well, thank you.
I remember someone who seemed to be suited for the more of a sysadmin position than a developer position, but we weren't looking for sysadmins at the time. Might that have been you? For all I know, it was a mistake not to hire you.
No, this was a developer position. I wouldn't have bothered applying for a sysadmin position. That stuff gives me a headache and makes me crabby.
And sorry if HR took a while to get back to you.
Actually, HR never did get back to me. I had to email the guy who gave me his card and ask him, "What the hell is going on?"
In my opinion, HR departments are pretty much a waste of time as far as being involved in the hiring process when choosing - or even whittling down - candidates for further contact. Their thing is HR, and unless you're looking to hire another HR person, they have about as much business choosing as proper a candidate as a sysadmin does handling employee health insurance needs.
Endnote: I'm glad I stayed where I'm at. Doing stagehand work is highly entertaining, more physical, and you don't have to worry about some kiddie running scripts against your DMX network.
While I do agree with your point, on the whole thign working both ways, I have this to say to you, sir:
I applied with you guys when you moved to Vegas a little while ago, even though I already had a gig, so I wasn't shotgunning. I was one of the last three people interviewed, in fact. After I talked systems, enhancements to them, and overall engineering on/for your site for about an hour with big happy smiles from your people all around, and then they tossed me because I couldn't write obfuscated Perl off the top of my head.
Of course, they only told me about it after I dogged them for a week and a half. Nice.
Don't whine about people not being out there. No one is a perfect match, don't expect everyone to have the same exact strengths as the rest of your guys.
Lastly, if you think pornography doesn't hurt children, tell that to thousands of children who are abused in the production of child pornography.
Don't twist issues to go to an emotional reaction. Original Poster was talking about the VIEWING of pornograpy, not the creation of it. Going to a different topic (and it IS a different topic) means you don't have a point on this one. You are, however, correct in the statement that making porn is harmful to children that are participants. Hell, its harmful in many ways to some of the adults that make it.
But that's not what were talking about here.
Why don't you drink a gallon of crude oil and get back to us on that.
Because that's a documented physical harm that we konw for a fact that will physically fuck us up really bad. I can feed crude oiil to almost any human on the planet no matter what culture they come from and it will harm them (I'm leaving in the thought that we may find some hidden tribe somewhere that actuall drinks crued for fun.) Psycological reaction to outside stimulus has been proven to vary widely depending on cultural differences.
The truth is we are about to find out just how harmful pornography can be. Never before in the history of mankind have humans had such readily available and immediate access to pornography via the Internet.
So just not true. Contraty to what the puritian background of the US would have you to beleive, pornography has been pretty much readily available to most people for pretty much forever. No, you couldnt always get streaming broadband hot donkey sex, but for pretty much all of history people have been keeping around erotic images and telling stories to each other of who they fucked and how they did it in amazingly great detail.
It is the eqivalent of keeping alcohol, drugs and loaded fire arms in every household in America and waiting to see what happens.
This statement is highly overblown - it also assumes that there is pornography just laying around open in every house in America, which there is not. Also, theres a huge difference in sitting my 8 year old neice down unsupervised for a few hours next to a loaded Glock as opposed to my latest issue of "Double D Sluts Monthly" or my half empty bottle of PBR or a half pack of smokes.
Making an argument based on the ultimate worst case scenario (children getting strapped down Kubrick-Style in front of streaming porn) to compare it to other things? Bad argument, and not really making an argument. I could make the same argument about children's ability to read religious websites that conflict with the one their parent are trying to raise them with. Think it might cause a little strife and anguish when little timmy walks up to his fundamentalist parents and announces he's gonna walk the path of the buddah?
Also, much of the other 95% of the worlds population that isn't US of American doesn't have a big issue with human sexuality and last I checked they weren't all constantly engrossed in a neverending spoogefest to the exclusion of all other things.
A few of them WERE, however, fighting to cut all the good violence out of exported US television. Think on that a few minutes.
Divorces due to pornography? Where'd you get that from, because I'd love to see the raw numbers on it.
"The whole business of protecting society from porn is predicated on the lie that porn is harmful to society."
No. To some people pornography can be very harmful even deadly.
"Some People" are not a whole soceity. To some people, getting some peaunt oil in their food can be deadly, but soceity doesn't consider peanut oil harmful.
Yes, thats an allergy, but whats the difference between a biological reaction to someting and an addictive reaction? Most people go with the science that addictive behaviors are genetically influenced, and thus biological. Do the math.
When I was in London for a few months I used a Nokia 6630 for a while and it really showed me what a craptastic system we have here. That phone was great. Mini MMC chip with some sweet headphones that allowed me to listen to music on the Tube and a document reader so I could put books on the thing and read them while listening to my music (only put a chapter at a time in a file, though - large files tended to cause the thing to choke.) Bluetooth file transfer between phones allowed us all to swap files without pain.
The first thing I did when I got back to the States is go straight to the Nokia website and get myself a 6682. Nice fat chunk of phone, big screen, good camera, basic office software (that I never use), useful calendar and todo list (that you can have listed permanently on the screen) and a nifty little MP3 player. One trip to the local electronics superbox and for $65 my phone can now hold half a gig of data (Dual-Voltage Half Sized MMC, little pricier than the standard ones). Thats roughly 600 pretty good sized images or more songs than that goofy Rokr will hold.
Call sound quality is great, even when using the stereo headset.
Contacts are stored as vCards, which - after a little scripting - works very well with my contacts on my PC for synchronizing data.
The only BAD thing I can think of with this phone is that when you plug it into a USB port it wont show up as a USB drive on the computer. You need the Nokia drivers, and transfer rates could maybe be better, but otherwise its just like another little drive on a windows box.
The website says it'll only work with Cingular, which is the service I have, and it a total bunch of bullshit. Just to test it I pulled my friends t-mobile card and popped it into my phone and it worked just fine.
The battery? Huge. One charge lasts me about a week with just talking, 2-3 days if I listen to music and take photos a lot.
All this goodness in a phone about the size of a pack of smokes, and you dont have to unfold the goddamn thing. Those Finns have their shit together, and I won't buy anything else from now on.
and all of this without silly commercials containing dancin' hipsters!
Once the economic non-argument fails, you guys always rally around the "liberals stealing your freedoms." I don't want your freedoms. In fact, I'd like you to have more of them.
The decision of what is excess is mainly a personal one. Unfortunately restraint, for the most part, is no longer considered a virtue in American soceity. Neither is common sense or being educated (as it's own pursuit), both things fairly useful when making any decision, not just deciding what is excessive.
Restraint from excess is sometimes, but not always, synonymous with sacrifice.
Sacrifice is typically required for the betterment of others or soceity as a whole, not to mention often being just pain good for the individual doing the sacrificing.
The population of this Country is rapidly sliding towards the attitude of "getting mine beause its mines right to have it" without an understanding of or care for where those rights and freedoms come from, much less having with any appreciation for those that exercised restraint and/or sacrifice in order to purchase those rights and freedoms in the first place. They don't, as a whole, give a damn what the cost is/was or who shoulders/shouldered the burden so long as it isn't them...
And that's the problem.
Think beyond your own experience. It doesn't hurt. Really.
I wasn't trying to be elitist. I was simply pointing out how silly the "crammed into..." comment in TFA was... And please, quit the ameri-dick waving, ok?
And those were the points I was trying to get across. I'd love to see that long reply if you can still pop it out.
On the fun side however, the ameri-dick wavers are so easy to stick a thorn into. One comment about controling excess and they immediately go to the "SOAIALIST! GO TO ( China || Iraq || Cuba)!" argument. Best part of it all is, they don't know enough about worl dpolitics to konw socialist China from Socialist Sweden. Maube its because Fox News doesn't talk about the Swiss that much.
Capitalism without education will eat itself.
(FYI - I wasn't using "another soul" in the hippy-new-agey way. fool)
Jeez, i guess its a good thing I didn't bring up the right to drive your SUV while packing.
[ Please, mod-Troll away; I can use some bad Karma.]
Living in a 10m^2 here would be called poverty, for a reason. By our standards, it is.
Exactly the point I was making. America consumes. Showing your level of consumption is important to many Americans and is somehow equates to self worth. I find it embarrassing.
Some people choose to live with less than their means could provide - smaller house, smaller car, generally less stuff owned - and most americans think they're poor or not right in the head. Some people choose to live actually IN the city they tell people they're from, and deal with the cost/inconveniences associated with city living because they enjoy it, and most americans assume they can't "escape" to a big house in the suburbs.
I find it embarrassing that this method of living has led people to think it's okay to live with an amount of debt that is typically equal to three months of their pay so they can drive 350 cubic inch sport trucks (used maybe twice a year to carry a load bigger than a dozen bags of groceries, and usually because someone has some big furniture) 30 miles from their gated neighborhood (actually not a neighborhood, because it contains zero support infrastructure, though you can build one of seven fabulously generic models of home in it) to their insulated and guarded workspace. "Yeah, I may not interact with another soul; but DAMN to I have some big stuff! Look at it!"
I happen to be American, and the general direction of my country's attitudes embarasses me. This isn't the place I signed on the dotted line and swore to take a bullet for. Not anymore....and before you say it, I'm actively TRYING to get the fuck out.
I worked for a small ecommerce site and these were the current rules as explained by our lawyers:
We were required to charge sales tax to all customers in states where we had a NEXUS. "Nexus" being defined as any office or building where we conducted business. We had our offices in San Francisco and a fulfillment center in Chicago somewhere.
We were at first concerned with the multiple county and municipality taxes, and after many hours of expensive lawyering, the ruling came down that we only needed one tax rate for each state. Thats what we did, and paid quarterly taxes. There was never any heat brought down on us from either state for conducting business that way.
I do beleive we chose the tax rate for the state acording to the tax rate for where our physical presences were. Of course, these were the highest taxes in both states, which wouuld be an easy shortcut.
-----
As far as making a list of what taxes go where, it shouldnt be that hard tor the feds (through the IRS) to make a flatfile with the breakdowns and just put a friggin torrent of it somewhere. You check it every day, and if the file has changed (easy md5 hash, no?) you go get it again.
Of course, being that the this would be a gub'ment thing, it would take roughly 3-7 years to implement in a way that would protect them from getting sued and have their hardened seurity all over it.
The data is already out there, it just needs someone to aggregate it.
Due to some level of user stupidity, the trust system has been compromised.
This should be the title of a textbook used in a mandatory class taught to all 13 year olds.
The administator of the site just trys username and password combinations until they get one that gets them into eBay. They look for an account with a positive feedback score that hasn't been active for a while and start posting items.
As far as the user/pass bashing until you get in, thats fairly easy - once you miss five times, you get blocked for a day. Do it by cookie, by IP, by whatever. We did this with scammers testing purchased lists of credit cards againist our site and it stopped them, mainly becuase it was just easier for them to go somewhere else.
We banned by cookie after four mistakes, which I KNOW is easy to kill off and start again with, but the thing is, that cookie also domes whatever shopping basket they had to put together to test a purchase with anyway. If they deleted the cookie, they had to go and make another basket and then go through the rigamaroll of entering billing and shipping addresses and whatnot.
Yes, easy to automate with a little time and work, but 99% of these guys aren't that into time and work - if they were they wouldnt be doing small-potatoe scams.
With eBay, theres no real cookie yet because you;ree not logged in, so you block by IP. The key here is to show a friendly message explaining WHY the IP address was blocked in the first place and how this method helps protect accounts from being abused. Most rational people would be fine with that, the 90% of the population that isnt rational would bitch and moan until there was doccumented evidence that this was doing them some good. The non-rationals would also maybe learn to remember their friggin passwords (but probably not, I was once told "oh, i can't be bothehred to remember those" by someone that was capable of giving blow-by-blow Survivor recaps from many past seasons off the top of their heads. I gave up on helping them after that.)
sidenote: I generally don't use eBay anymore. I used it once to buy a battery for an on-its-last-legs-laptop, and they guy sent me one that worked, but wasn't the right one. Friends of mine use it and have all sorts of shady tales. Bottom line is that if I need something, I'll just go buy it at a store or get it online at a site I can trust.
[ poster comment - I am well aware I spelled potato wrong. it was on purpose. ]
While you're basically right, what this guy did was a total shitcock move, what about the retard consumer that psid $1500 for it?
stupid dumb inane comsumerism. That guy will probably take two years to pay off that $1500 charge on their credit card and the thing will have wound up costing him about $2200.
At least we can all chuckle at the fact that they have to take the 360's powersupply and dangle it from a string so their homes don't burn down.
...and was FORCED to make violent ones. The market wouldn't have anything else.
After creating a game engine very similar to Valves Source, I went on to make a few really beautiful and compelling titles: Getting ready for Work, Chores!, Making Dinner and Making Dinner 2: Grocery Store. All of these titles could hook into each other anad make for a wider game. Multiplayer online options were available - whats more exciting that doing your chores with a friend!?! Nothing, i tell you!
For some reason none of them really sold at all. Focus groups kept trying to take the coffee pot with them on the way to work the smash their boss with it. In another test, the kids kept trying to order pizza and steal the guy's car. In no tests did the subjects try to actually try to meat their actual goals of living a mundane everyday life.
is the phrase: "tissues, muscles, arteries and veins."
This sounds like they went to the bone as far as where they stopped removing tissues to put on the inured woman. The muscle structure would give the shape of the face, but I cannot imagine that she'd look much like the donor, unless they had identical bone strucure underneath it all.
I'm pretty sure if I was brain dead [really braindead, and not just my normal state of dumb], and my long and skinny face was donated to my short and stocky friend; he wouldn't look that much like me. He WOULD look really frikkin different when you consider the fact that things like the nose and lips are all soft tissue, and were "items" that were transplanted, but not look like me. Similar to me, maybe.
Its a little creepy, but good for the woman that got her face back, even if it's a new one. I just hope it doesnt get to the point where people are saying "man, I wish I could have gotten my face from a better looking person..."
I don't know what some people feel they are accomplishing by attempts to fight decisions about what content I can and cannot see like this.
In truth, limiting my choices for me only leads to my passivity, so I would think that those who love the new freedom would be more interested in trying to eliminate choice from their lives rather than trying to rely on education and self-responsibility, even if freedom of choice may have some human-nature flaws.
Personally, I love being freed from responsibility, therefore I try to avoid self-responsibility as much as possible, and if some law is going to make it that much easier for me to avoid the burdens of making decisions and self responsibility by putting it all in in the hands of someone else, so much the better for me and my family. Why? Because free thiking is not worth protecting!
And being lazy, I love free thinking too, but I love how easy giving it all over to a theocracy is. For those of you who have never given in and and never experienced how wonderful letting others make your choices for you, with complete supplication, let me tell you, it is totally worth it. The Elders tell us so many simplicities about life, but thinking of all the decisions I would have to make on my own just makes me sad.
Freedom is just a big lie. Instead of trying to save it, let's just be rid of it. Sure this guy's attempt may have some ideological flaws, but at least he loves Jesus.
See, I seem to remember back in the day before this whole an-internet-account-in-every-pot thing when the best firewall for pornograpy was giving your kids a good solid beating when they looked at shit they were expressly told not to look at.
Didn't even require $600,000 worth of printing up legislative documents, either.
Slashdot Mirror
The flip side of this is when you just want to play a game. There is a bit of fun in bashing shit, taking its stuff, then being able to bash BIGGER shit and getting BETTER stuff.
People I know set up a game for after work, asked me to play, and I had to sa no. Why? The thought of having to wait 40 minutes between events where we got things done because you always had to wait for whoever felt the need to ROLE PLAY MY WACKY QUIRKS at that exact time, when I just want to buy some fucking rope, would have made it a horribly unpleasant experience.
I've watched them play a couple times. Its amazing how long a combat takes when every die roll is precedeed by a speech about the glory of wherever-you're-from. ugh.
I just got this email - spam, like most of them. It has the following body:
0ur Attorneys have discovered a loop-hole in the banking laws. Applying what
we have found, we're successfu1 by totally eliminating creditcarddebt with
out them having to pay another cent, We know that our firm can help you
with this too.
You can contact us at :
1--3 1 3--263--2706
[[plus that common gibberish that tries to make it look like a real letter from someone...]]
Fun way to tie up their phone number? Hit Google Maps and start connecting their phone number to varous businesses thruought the country. Best part? You can call with their number, and then once it connects to THEM, cancel the call once it starts dailing the business.
Yeah. Good times.
I'm also well aware that this method really does nothing and furthers the abuse, but it's sort of interesting.
In William Gibson's Virtual Light, AIDS was cured by finding a variant of AIDS that destroyed other AIDS strains and did no harm to its host. I think they guy they "discovered" that strain in was named JD Shapley.
The story of it is spread thruoghout the novel, which I though was pretty damn good.
I'm well aware I used AIDS three times on one sentence. Hey, it's late.
I remember a game back from grade school, it didnt really have a name, but it basically involved EVERYONE getting out on one of the all-dirt softball fields behind the school and playing a form of dodgeball.
With frisbees. Lots and lots of frisbees.
Like, "Everybody bring as many frisbees as you can find from your basement and bring them to school, becuase after lunch, all hundred of us are going to go out to the softball field and fling them at each others heads as hard as we freaking can."
I don't even remember anybody ever being "out" when they got hit, that just meant they got another frisbee to fling back at the other side, hopefully damaging more of your schoolmates.
Bonus coolness was to the kid who could use one frisbee to block another, Tron-style.
I can also remember playing dodgeball where one kid was throwing at everyone else, who was standing against a brick wall. If you got hit hard enough, you'd get smashed into the wall, too. Last kid standing got to be the next thrower.
ah, good times.
1. Since it is genetically impossible for a dog to give birth to a cat, or a bird to lay an egg from which a frog pops out, etc etc (species reproduce "after their kind"), and since evolutionary theory dictates (as far as I understand it) that the forks/mutations in species occur over millions of years, how can they occur at all in a species that doesn't live past a few decades? A dog lives what, 10-15 years? How much genetic adaptation to it's environent can it make in 10-15 years, to a point that a passes down a "new" trait to it's progeny?
A creature does not GENETICALLY adapt to its environment. BEHAVORIALLY adapt, yes, but not genttically. Don't let the human tendancy to anthromorphicze animals fool you into thinking that most of their behaviors (especially less intelligent animals) are more than instinctual (and derivative from their genetic makeup).
Once a being is born, its genes do not change because of their actions in the environment (short of maybe getting a giant dose of radiation), but the genes they are born with will possibly make that being more likely to better survive the environment they live in for whatever reason. Those that survive better are more likely to reach maturity and be able to reproduce anad pass their genetic traits to their offspring.
Goofy Example: Baby artic seals are born with white fur to allow themselves to blend into their environment anad be less likely to be found by predators. Imagine thousands of years ago there were two types of fur baby seals could be born with, one group is born with the white fur, one group is born with dark brown fur. For a barely mobile inafnt, this coat is the equivalant of a giant "FREE EATS, MISTER POLAR BEAR!" sign.
Those seals that are easily found by predators are killed and eaten before they get the chance to pass on their genetically brown baby-fur, those that hide well because of their white coats mature to adulthood and breed, passing on the white coat to their offspring. Seals that are boorn wiith non-white fur due to an old recessive gene or a mutation are less likely to survive and pass that gene on.
The actions of the seals themselves (beyond mating) have nothing to do with changing the genetic makeup of the species.
Another good example is how humans selectively breed animals to create dominant traits, resulting in the numerous breeds of dogs that are out there. The "environment" isnt natural, but the outside influence brings that species of dog about by strengthing specific traits.
The individuals of a species that can pass on their genetics better (more often) are the more successful members of their race and they decide where that species is going.
Its pretty basic science. I think I was taught about basic genetic inheretance somewhere around 5th grade.
Counter-argument to your faith based creationism:
Science proves its theories wholly or in part by doing the experiments that prove the theory over and over again and getting the same result. Then OTHER scientists recreate the experiments and TRY to disprove the theory for completeness. Its called "The scientific method." Humans have been breeding doge for centuries into specific types; scientists breed mice for specific traits so they have a "common test subject"
As far as I can see for the creation side of the argument, that experiment has been done entirely once, and the documentation on it isnt very good beyond saying "this happened." Show the scientific community another example of "POOF! Heres a species!" and sciencec will give faith-based theories a lot more weight.
some days I just want to punch all the cryptoloons in the balls. And if they don't have balls, I'll graft donor balls onto them and punch those.
Thats quite possibly the funniest thing i've read this year.
and I'm going to steal it and use it in conversation.
Thank you, Sir, thankk you very much.
If the summary is that bad, I'm not about to click the link.
/. link. I mean, i know the bits are expensive, but geez.
wow. afraid to click a
it's tongue in cheek humor. get some.
We usually just ask to write out fairly common perl tasks, like sorting a hash, to get a sense of the experience level. I've hired people who couldn't get all the perl stuff if I sensed they were into learning.
Then I probably didn't talk to you, becuase once we started talking about what the system was actually running on, the first thing I said was "I'm not an expert, I don't use it that often. I just need to remember all the exact syntax to do what I know needs to happen."
I shoulda fibbed more like most other people do, but then again, I hate that.
I remember the catchy website name,
Well, thank you.
I remember someone who seemed to be suited for the more of a sysadmin position than a developer position, but we weren't looking for sysadmins at the time. Might that have been you? For all I know, it was a mistake not to hire you.
No, this was a developer position. I wouldn't have bothered applying for a sysadmin position. That stuff gives me a headache and makes me crabby.
And sorry if HR took a while to get back to you.
Actually, HR never did get back to me. I had to email the guy who gave me his card and ask him, "What the hell is going on?"
In my opinion, HR departments are pretty much a waste of time as far as being involved in the hiring process when choosing - or even whittling down - candidates for further contact. Their thing is HR, and unless you're looking to hire another HR person, they have about as much business choosing as proper a candidate as a sysadmin does handling employee health insurance needs.
Endnote: I'm glad I stayed where I'm at. Doing stagehand work is highly entertaining, more physical, and you don't have to worry about some kiddie running scripts against your DMX network.
While I do agree with your point, on the whole thign working both ways, I have this to say to you, sir:
I applied with you guys when you moved to Vegas a little while ago, even though I already had a gig, so I wasn't shotgunning. I was one of the last three people interviewed, in fact. After I talked systems, enhancements to them, and overall engineering on/for your site for about an hour with big happy smiles from your people all around, and then they tossed me because I couldn't write obfuscated Perl off the top of my head.
Of course, they only told me about it after I dogged them for a week and a half. Nice.
Don't whine about people not being out there. No one is a perfect match, don't expect everyone to have the same exact strengths as the rest of your guys.
Your arguments are for the most part horrible.
.
Lastly, if you think pornography doesn't hurt children, tell that to thousands of children who are abused in the production of child pornography.
Don't twist issues to go to an emotional reaction. Original Poster was talking about the VIEWING of pornograpy, not the creation of it. Going to a different topic (and it IS a different topic) means you don't have a point on this one. You are, however, correct in the statement that making porn is harmful to children that are participants. Hell, its harmful in many ways to some of the adults that make it.
But that's not what were talking about here.
Why don't you drink a gallon of crude oil and get back to us on that.
Because that's a documented physical harm that we konw for a fact that will physically fuck us up really bad. I can feed crude oiil to almost any human on the planet no matter what culture they come from and it will harm them (I'm leaving in the thought that we may find some hidden tribe somewhere that actuall drinks crued for fun.) Psycological reaction to outside stimulus has been proven to vary widely depending on cultural differences.
The truth is we are about to find out just how harmful pornography can be. Never before in the history of mankind have humans had such readily available and immediate access to pornography via the Internet.
So just not true. Contraty to what the puritian background of the US would have you to beleive, pornography has been pretty much readily available to most people for pretty much forever. No, you couldnt always get streaming broadband hot donkey sex, but for pretty much all of history people have been keeping around erotic images and telling stories to each other of who they fucked and how they did it in amazingly great detail.
It is the eqivalent of keeping alcohol, drugs and loaded fire arms in every household in America and waiting to see what happens.
This statement is highly overblown - it also assumes that there is pornography just laying around open in every house in America, which there is not. Also, theres a huge difference in sitting my 8 year old neice down unsupervised for a few hours next to a loaded Glock as opposed to my latest issue of "Double D Sluts Monthly" or my half empty bottle of PBR or a half pack of smokes.
Making an argument based on the ultimate worst case scenario (children getting strapped down Kubrick-Style in front of streaming porn) to compare it to other things? Bad argument, and not really making an argument. I could make the same argument about children's ability to read religious websites that conflict with the one their parent are trying to raise them with. Think it might cause a little strife and anguish when little timmy walks up to his fundamentalist parents and announces he's gonna walk the path of the buddah?
Also, much of the other 95% of the worlds population that isn't US of American doesn't have a big issue with human sexuality and last I checked they weren't all constantly engrossed in a neverending spoogefest to the exclusion of all other things.
A few of them WERE, however, fighting to cut all the good violence out of exported US television. Think on that a few minutes.
Divorces due to pornography? Where'd you get that from, because I'd love to see the raw numbers on it.
"The whole business of protecting society from porn is predicated on the lie that porn is harmful to society."
No. To some people pornography can be very harmful even deadly.
"Some People" are not a whole soceity. To some people, getting some peaunt oil in their food can be deadly, but soceity doesn't consider peanut oil harmful.
Yes, thats an allergy, but whats the difference between a biological reaction to someting and an addictive reaction? Most people go with the science that addictive behaviors are genetically influenced, and thus biological. Do the math.
. . .
I suppose what it all com
When I was in London for a few months I used a Nokia 6630 for a while and it really showed me what a craptastic system we have here. That phone was great. Mini MMC chip with some sweet headphones that allowed me to listen to music on the Tube and a document reader so I could put books on the thing and read them while listening to my music (only put a chapter at a time in a file, though - large files tended to cause the thing to choke.) Bluetooth file transfer between phones allowed us all to swap files without pain.
The first thing I did when I got back to the States is go straight to the Nokia website and get myself a 6682. Nice fat chunk of phone, big screen, good camera, basic office software (that I never use), useful calendar and todo list (that you can have listed permanently on the screen) and a nifty little MP3 player. One trip to the local electronics superbox and for $65 my phone can now hold half a gig of data (Dual-Voltage Half Sized MMC, little pricier than the standard ones). Thats roughly 600 pretty good sized images or more songs than that goofy Rokr will hold.
Call sound quality is great, even when using the stereo headset.
Contacts are stored as vCards, which - after a little scripting - works very well with my contacts on my PC for synchronizing data.
The only BAD thing I can think of with this phone is that when you plug it into a USB port it wont show up as a USB drive on the computer. You need the Nokia drivers, and transfer rates could maybe be better, but otherwise its just like another little drive on a windows box.
The website says it'll only work with Cingular, which is the service I have, and it a total bunch of bullshit. Just to test it I pulled my friends t-mobile card and popped it into my phone and it worked just fine.
The battery? Huge. One charge lasts me about a week with just talking, 2-3 days if I listen to music and take photos a lot.
All this goodness in a phone about the size of a pack of smokes, and you dont have to unfold the goddamn thing. Those Finns have their shit together, and I won't buy anything else from now on.
and all of this without silly commercials containing dancin' hipsters!
Cute.
Once the economic non-argument fails, you guys always rally around the "liberals stealing your freedoms." I don't want your freedoms. In fact, I'd like you to have more of them.
The decision of what is excess is mainly a personal one. Unfortunately restraint, for the most part, is no longer considered a virtue in American soceity. Neither is common sense or being educated (as it's own pursuit), both things fairly useful when making any decision, not just deciding what is excessive.
Restraint from excess is sometimes, but not always, synonymous with sacrifice.
Sacrifice is typically required for the betterment of others or soceity as a whole, not to mention often being just pain good for the individual doing the sacrificing.
The population of this Country is rapidly sliding towards the attitude of "getting mine beause its mines right to have it" without an understanding of or care for where those rights and freedoms come from, much less having with any appreciation for those that exercised restraint and/or sacrifice in order to purchase those rights and freedoms in the first place. They don't, as a whole, give a damn what the cost is/was or who shoulders/shouldered the burden so long as it isn't them...
And that's the problem.
Think beyond your own experience. It doesn't hurt. Really.
I wasn't trying to be elitist. I was simply pointing out how silly the "crammed into..." comment in TFA was ... And please, quit the ameri-dick waving, ok?
And those were the points I was trying to get across. I'd love to see that long reply if you can still pop it out.
On the fun side however, the ameri-dick wavers are so easy to stick a thorn into. One comment about controling excess and they immediately go to the "SOAIALIST! GO TO ( China || Iraq || Cuba)!" argument. Best part of it all is, they don't know enough about worl dpolitics to konw socialist China from Socialist Sweden. Maube its because Fox News doesn't talk about the Swiss that much.
Capitalism without education will eat itself.
(FYI - I wasn't using "another soul" in the hippy-new-agey way. fool)
Jeez, i guess its a good thing I didn't bring up the right to drive your SUV while packing.
[ Please, mod-Troll away; I can use some bad Karma.]
Living in a 10m^2 here would be called poverty, for a reason. By our standards, it is.
...and before you say it, I'm actively TRYING to get the fuck out.
Exactly the point I was making. America consumes. Showing your level of consumption is important to many Americans and is somehow equates to self worth. I find it embarrassing.
Some people choose to live with less than their means could provide - smaller house, smaller car, generally less stuff owned - and most americans think they're poor or not right in the head. Some people choose to live actually IN the city they tell people they're from, and deal with the cost/inconveniences associated with city living because they enjoy it, and most americans assume they can't "escape" to a big house in the suburbs.
I find it embarrassing that this method of living has led people to think it's okay to live with an amount of debt that is typically equal to three months of their pay so they can drive 350 cubic inch sport trucks (used maybe twice a year to carry a load bigger than a dozen bags of groceries, and usually because someone has some big furniture) 30 miles from their gated neighborhood (actually not a neighborhood, because it contains zero support infrastructure, though you can build one of seven fabulously generic models of home in it) to their insulated and guarded workspace. "Yeah, I may not interact with another soul; but DAMN to I have some big stuff! Look at it!"
I happen to be American, and the general direction of my country's attitudes embarasses me. This isn't the place I signed on the dotted line and swore to take a bullet for. Not anymore.
Holy christ, that's quite possibly the most American thing I've seen written on /. to date, and it embarasses me to no end.
I worked for a small ecommerce site and these were the current rules as explained by our lawyers:
We were required to charge sales tax to all customers in states where we had a NEXUS. "Nexus" being defined as any office or building where we conducted business. We had our offices in San Francisco and a fulfillment center in Chicago somewhere.
We were at first concerned with the multiple county and municipality taxes, and after many hours of expensive lawyering, the ruling came down that we only needed one tax rate for each state. Thats what we did, and paid quarterly taxes. There was never any heat brought down on us from either state for conducting business that way.
I do beleive we chose the tax rate for the state acording to the tax rate for where our physical presences were. Of course, these were the highest taxes in both states, which wouuld be an easy shortcut.
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As far as making a list of what taxes go where, it shouldnt be that hard tor the feds (through the IRS) to make a flatfile with the breakdowns and just put a friggin torrent of it somewhere. You check it every day, and if the file has changed (easy md5 hash, no?) you go get it again.
Of course, being that the this would be a gub'ment thing, it would take roughly 3-7 years to implement in a way that would protect them from getting sued and have their hardened seurity all over it.
The data is already out there, it just needs someone to aggregate it.
Due to some level of user stupidity, the trust system has been compromised.
This should be the title of a textbook used in a mandatory class taught to all 13 year olds.
The administator of the site just trys username and password combinations until they get one that gets them into eBay. They look for an account with a positive feedback score that hasn't been active for a while and start posting items.
As far as the user/pass bashing until you get in, thats fairly easy - once you miss five times, you get blocked for a day. Do it by cookie, by IP, by whatever. We did this with scammers testing purchased lists of credit cards againist our site and it stopped them, mainly becuase it was just easier for them to go somewhere else.
We banned by cookie after four mistakes, which I KNOW is easy to kill off and start again with, but the thing is, that cookie also domes whatever shopping basket they had to put together to test a purchase with anyway. If they deleted the cookie, they had to go and make another basket and then go through the rigamaroll of entering billing and shipping addresses and whatnot.
Yes, easy to automate with a little time and work, but 99% of these guys aren't that into time and work - if they were they wouldnt be doing small-potatoe scams.
With eBay, theres no real cookie yet because you;ree not logged in, so you block by IP. The key here is to show a friendly message explaining WHY the IP address was blocked in the first place and how this method helps protect accounts from being abused. Most rational people would be fine with that, the 90% of the population that isnt rational would bitch and moan until there was doccumented evidence that this was doing them some good. The non-rationals would also maybe learn to remember their friggin passwords (but probably not, I was once told "oh, i can't be bothehred to remember those" by someone that was capable of giving blow-by-blow Survivor recaps from many past seasons off the top of their heads. I gave up on helping them after that.)
sidenote: I generally don't use eBay anymore. I used it once to buy a battery for an on-its-last-legs-laptop, and they guy sent me one that worked, but wasn't the right one. Friends of mine use it and have all sorts of shady tales. Bottom line is that if I need something, I'll just go buy it at a store or get it online at a site I can trust.
[ poster comment - I am well aware I spelled potato wrong. it was on purpose. ]
"If you are on fire you can just stop, drop, and roll. If you fall into Lava you are just dead." - my 5yr old daughter
You give that daughter of yours a big hug and thank her for making me laugh so hard I almost drstroyed my laptop by spitting my coffee out onto it.
While you're basically right, what this guy did was a total shitcock move, what about the retard consumer that psid $1500 for it?
stupid dumb inane comsumerism. That guy will probably take two years to pay off that $1500 charge on their credit card and the thing will have wound up costing him about $2200.
At least we can all chuckle at the fact that they have to take the 360's powersupply and dangle it from a string so their homes don't burn down.
...and was FORCED to make violent ones. The market wouldn't have anything else.
After creating a game engine very similar to Valves Source, I went on to make a few really beautiful and compelling titles: Getting ready for Work, Chores!, Making Dinner and Making Dinner 2: Grocery Store. All of these titles could hook into each other anad make for a wider game. Multiplayer online options were available - whats more exciting that doing your chores with a friend!?! Nothing, i tell you!
For some reason none of them really sold at all. Focus groups kept trying to take the coffee pot with them on the way to work the smash their boss with it. In another test, the kids kept trying to order pizza and steal the guy's car. In no tests did the subjects try to actually try to meat their actual goals of living a mundane everyday life.
I blame the universities.
is the phrase: "tissues, muscles, arteries and veins."
This sounds like they went to the bone as far as where they stopped removing tissues to put on the inured woman. The muscle structure would give the shape of the face, but I cannot imagine that she'd look much like the donor, unless they had identical bone strucure underneath it all.
I'm pretty sure if I was brain dead [really braindead, and not just my normal state of dumb], and my long and skinny face was donated to my short and stocky friend; he wouldn't look that much like me. He WOULD look really frikkin different when you consider the fact that things like the nose and lips are all soft tissue, and were "items" that were transplanted, but not look like me. Similar to me, maybe.
Its a little creepy, but good for the woman that got her face back, even if it's a new one. I just hope it doesnt get to the point where people are saying "man, I wish I could have gotten my face from a better looking person..."
I know perfectly well that you didn't say any of those things, nor do I give a damn.
Hopefully this cp80 garbage will never gather steam and waste too much government time which should be resourced to more serious issues
It's funny you mention this, because when I logged into my Steam account this morning, I had the option to download and install this CP80 grabage.
I don't know what some people feel they are accomplishing by attempts to fight decisions about what content I can and cannot see like this.
In truth, limiting my choices for me only leads to my passivity, so I would think that those who love the new freedom would be more interested in trying to eliminate choice from their lives rather than trying to rely on education and self-responsibility, even if freedom of choice may have some human-nature flaws.
Personally, I love being freed from responsibility, therefore I try to avoid self-responsibility as much as possible, and if some law is going to make it that much easier for me to avoid the burdens of making decisions and self responsibility by putting it all in in the hands of someone else, so much the better for me and my family. Why? Because free thiking is not worth protecting!
And being lazy, I love free thinking too, but I love how easy giving it all over to a theocracy is. For those of you who have never given in and and never experienced how wonderful letting others make your choices for you, with complete supplication, let me tell you, it is totally worth it. The Elders tell us so many simplicities about life, but thinking of all the decisions I would have to make on my own just makes me sad.
Freedom is just a big lie. Instead of trying to save it, let's just be rid of it. Sure this guy's attempt may have some ideological flaws, but at least he loves Jesus.
See, I seem to remember back in the day before this whole an-internet-account-in-every-pot thing when the best firewall for pornograpy was giving your kids a good solid beating when they looked at shit they were expressly told not to look at.
Didn't even require $600,000 worth of printing up legislative documents, either.