So basically, if you're going to be using e anywhere close to regularly, go down to the local pharmacy/GNC and pick up some 5-HTP and some multi-vitamins (or however you feel like loading up on anti-oxidants). I can't offer any scientific evidence that this works, but within my circle of friends (about 30-45...all of whom follow this advice), not one person has complained about depression as a side effect of e.
That's cool. I haven't tried 5-HTP yet myself, but I have been mega-dosing Vitamin C lately and the effects are almost miraculous (not with e, just in general). Anti-oxidants should not be underestimated. Anyone doing drugs should mass up on vitamins big-time.
As an individual who suffers from both chronic depression and insomnia,
if you suffer from depression, try changing your circumstances. my experience has been that people are pretty good at natural adaptation, if they are depressed, it's usually because the environment has thrown them off.
this could be physical, social, financial...whatever.
you say you are "chronically" depressed, but i don't necessarily buy that. doctors et. al. have a pretty strong interest in getting you to believe that, because then they can pump you full of drugs. it's pretty rare that somebody is "fucked up" right out of the womb.
try listening to yourself. it usually works, as far as society allows anyway. try taking the premise that there is nothing wrong with you, and only believe otherwise if the evidence mounts.
modern society is pretty fucked up, you could be more normal than you think and not even know it. you are insomniac...maybe because you are terrified of failing exams? try taking things less seriously. mom and pop and doc don't know best, they are from a different era, they hurt themselves more to achieve less than we do.
after that, it fucked me up - i can't really describe what would happen, but i'd get this wierd feeling that my immune system was just sort of tenuously holding on.
try st. john's wort. you can get it cheap as a tea. i've found that every 12-oz glass drank reduced my need for sleep by about an hour.
might take 2-3 weeks to start working (if you read up on st. john's wort, this is a pretty standard estimate).
haven't used it in a while because i haven't needed it, and it does have stimulant-like side effects, although fewer side effects than any other drug i've tried. great hangover killer.
st. john's wort is good for the brain. too bad it has been advertised as a cure for depression. you can use it anyway.
Ever notice how hard it is to keep a costant speed while taking 10-second naps while driving?
instead of taking naps, try going into a continuous low-grade sleep. relax your focus, your vision, and your head. flutter your eyes. stay conscious, but dumb yourself down, reduce to the essentials.
i think we are doing basically the same thing but you are letting yourself nod off. i can do this for a few minutes at a time. i stay awake, with reduced reflexes, and when i go fully-conscious again i usually feel refreshed as if i had slept.
sometimes tiredness has more to do with the eyes than anything else.
Lately I've switched to buying loose lea. I find that it is usually cheaper (less processing) and better quality (it has to be whole leaves so it won't pass through the strainer).
Try using your coffee machine as well. Throw some loose tea in the basket, then make a pot, or two or three, all at once. Then put the tea in the fridge.
I've never understood why coffee requires a machine but tea takes some sort of bag, or diffuser, or whatever. The coffee machine works great for both.
one shot nyquil (The icky green liquid stuff, not Gelcaps), $2
I know this is essentially a joke, but I have to throw this in for all the drug newbs out there.
Nyquil (DXM) is a dissociative, as is Robitussin (DXM), ketamine, pcp, nitrous, and OTC sleep aids like Unisom. Dissociatives cause brain damage. Do all the drugs you want, but stay away from dissociatives.
Sure, many drugs can permanently alter brain chemistry, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand why dissociatives are different. Whereas stimulants and hallucinogens provide an "enhanced" experience, dissociatives do the opposite, breaking down neural connections to provide an anesthetic, disconnected experience. Ketamine also tends to make people unhappy, which is a pretty weird way to get high.
I've done my fair share of DXM, so this is certainly not a moral rant.
Other things to keep in mind:
Alcohol is pretty efficient at destroying neurons as well Stimulants are bad for the heart (incl. caffeine/nicotine) Acid affects certain people poorly Mushrooms are challenging Exstacy can make you depressed Coke is a hard, hard drug Shooting heroin is how you kill yourself
The only drug I know of that is safe from a physiological point of view is pot. And natural drugs (pot, mushrooms, smoked opium/heroin) seem most certainly safer in general (not a 100% rule) than synthetics.
Synthetic OTC's, such as Unisom (dissociative), Adderol (speed), and Vicodin (opiate) scare hell out of me in terms of physiological health. Synthetics produce a hangover that is quite distinctly alien, and just because you haven't noticed it doesn't mean it's not there. Vicodin's hangover, for example, is pretty subtle. Unisom's is not.
Keep in mind that mankind has bad night vision. Apparently, nature decided since we can't do much else in the dark, so we should sleep and occasionally get our sookie sookie on.
Yeah well, keep in mind that cats have great night vision and they sleep at all hours.
If I show pictures of breasts, am I.prn automagically?
Maybe if you sell pornography then you are.prn automagically.
Convenience stores don't have difficulty filtering magazines to the back of the counter. Video stores don't have difficulty filtering tapes to a second room. Hell, Google filters porn as well.
I don't think this is hard. Rather, semantic categorization is the first step towards organizing anything. Maybe it's time the web got organized.
Forget the per-seat cost of an oracle license and read between the lines here. Exactly why did California officials decide to go with Oracle in the first place?
The only justification in the article is "claims of savings." In other words, Logicon handed California a balance sheet that said, "You can save $150m (or whatever) by using Oracle, therefore $95m is a deal." And California said, "Oh gee, the math works, sign us up!"
Nobody ever asked real-world questions like, what exactly do we need Oracle for? Who is going to install it? How difficult/costly will the changeover be? What alternatives are there?
Sounds to me like California believed the old hype that software is magic and that savings are automatic. This is what happens when you base too many of your decisions on "studies" and not enough on cold, hard logic.
How do you enumerate "savings" from installing a piece of software anyway? Is the existing system too slow? Are developers expensive? Is there too much red tape? It's such sketchy math.
If the existing system works, then it's probably not all that expensive. New systems should be based on a need for a faster, cleaner implementation, not on illusory "savings."
So relax, dude; this isn't bottom feeding. I'm just trying to get this dinosaur turned around in the right direction.
Wow, dude, you're proposing to save the OSS movement all by yourself. I am an ambitious person, this is the kind of nonsense I used to say. Now I am 26, and I realize that I do not have the influence or resources to alter the landscape of software development all by myself.
Yet here you are, proposing to do exactly that. Where did this even come from? Your original post was a meek little request for info about Flash. Now all of a sudden you are our Lord Savior? What's your angle?
You paint a rosy picture of putting union resources behind OSS to miraculous effect. I would say you are naive non-CS type, but your second post is articulate enough to make it clear that you know about previous multi-million dollar cash injections from startups like RedHat and (the now defunct) V/A Linux. What makes you think your union of janitors and nurses is going to help any more than V/A Linux did?
Your organization, the SEIU, does not have a clean track record for "helping" or "working with" other organizations. In fact, the examples of CSEA and Intercity indicate that the SEIU will go to any lengths to infiltrate and co-opt existing organizations.
Your second post - a rallying cry for clarity in the struggling OSS world - amounts to little more than re-stating the obvious. This is a common tactic. By stating the obvious, you instantly win the hearts and minds of people who already agree. In reality, you have offered no new information, you have dreamed nothing we all haven't dreamed ourselves.
This is somewhat off topic, but my question is what does your site www.seiu.org [seiu.org] actually stand behind? Is there a page that clearly states your objectives? I see "current events", "get involved", "working family issues", but nothing that really states what your guys want and where you guys are going.
Thank God, one person noticed the obvious. The SEIU is a cult. Read my post further down for a full explanation.
Fellow slashdotters, please check out this guy's website before giving him any more help. Read it thorougly, do not simply gloss over. Notice the saturation of blue-collar propaganda, and the lack of any relevant details as to how the SEIU works. The SEIU is a cult.
The SEIU is, ostensibly, a union, and they do in fact unionize people. Like all unions, they have their share of corruption, money laundering, and influence peddling. However, what sets the SEIU apart from other unions is a singular pattern of coercive, manipulative, and undemocratic behavior towards their members, hostility towards other unions, and strict top-down financial and administrative control.
For documentation, please visit the Organized Labor Accountability Project Please compare the SEIU with the other unions listed at this link. I doubt you will find this pattern of cult-like behavior in any other union.
Local 32B-32J: Our union president... conducts general membership meetings in total violation of the LMRDA, our Local's constitution and basic parliamentary procedure. Mr. Fishman... refuses to open the floor for new business, refuses to take unrehearsed questions and refuses to open the floor to independent motions.
Local 32B-32J:...on Sept. 11, the original primary day, many of the local's staff were forced to volunteer to campaign for mayoral candidate Mark Green. Staffers were allegedly forced to sign vouchers stating they were taking a vacation day so they can go campaign...
Local 79: [Employees] become union members only after working a probationary period of 100 events in a 12-month period. If a worker cannot work 100 events in twelve months, [he] must start over again... "The workers end up perpetually on probation."
Local 1212: In an effort to lure members away from the United Industry Workers Local 424, SEIU Local 1212... claimed to be the largest transportation union in N.Y. state... However, examination of the union's financial reports... destroy the claims. The report shows the union has only 5 officers and employees...[and] has only 94 members. And it is unclear whether any members are in the transportation industry.
CSEA: CSEA has refused to participate in SEIU's unity plan... which required locals to abandon their names and logos, and use the purple and gold SEIU banner. The unity plan also called for fees that would cost CSEA $18 million... Kenny summarized CSEA's complaints: "SEIU has disenfranchised CSEA."
Intercity Janitorial Services: SEIU began attempts to organize Intercity in late 1994. Intercity's president refused to sign... saying it was up to the workers to decide whether to unionize. SEIU's assistant director of organizing repeatedly warned Intercity... to sign the agreement or SEIU would attempt to drive the company out of business...
OSS users are usually the sorts who prefer the experiences inside their heads to external experiences. Reading roller coaster specs is just as good for a lot of them as actually riding the roller coaster.
Not so for normal folks.
Heh. Excellent stab at dorks. You're right, Flash is good, people who bash it are knee-jerking. But since you pitted dorks up against graphic designers, I'm going to have to step out of character and actually defend the dorks.
Yes, normal people want to see a professional presentation. The trick is that in the case of the web, dorks usually have a better understanding of what a professional presentation actually is.
Graphic designers are woefully under-equipped for the web. They think it's a piece of paper, and no amount of 7pt font can make this true. They see what's up on their 21-inch monitor and they think this is what the world sees. Graphic designers, sadly, have only one set of eyes.
Socialism is the centralization of capital, so it can be dolled out by those who know better. This doesn't tend to work too well.
No, it certainly doesn't. My point in comparing CEO's to warlords is that corporations are little more than modern-day armies. They have a strict hierarchy of command and control. The guy at the top controls the resources and can give direct orders to his troops. That sounds an awful lot like socialism to me.
You can say that a CEO will lose his job if he does it poorly, but that's a shallow analysis. The reality is that CEO's can get away with a lot of bad behavior before they cause a strike or a boycott. That's because job conditions and other ethical/moral issues are not part of the market. The market is defined by the bottom line.
Microsoft, for example, is an army without peer. They live outside the market; no amount of "voting with your dollars" is going to change their behavior. That's where the part about rape comes in - if Microsoft wants to cripple your OS, there's nothing you can do to stop it. You live at the mercy of the ruling warlords, Gates in this example.
This is not a radical theory. It is firmly understood in capitalist theory as "monopoly" and "collusion," which are illegal. The problem is that capitalism actively encourages monopoly. It's a positive feedback loop - larger companies keep getting larger until the DoJ arbitrarily steps in. A better system would have a natural, negative feedback loop instead encouraging perpetual growth.
The closest thing to a negative feedback loop is an economic downturn, when companies usually shed excess holdings. But nobody wants an economic downturn, so that's not great either.
Capitalism is king, I support it. But large-scale corporatism focuses too much power in the hands of individuals. Capitalism on this scale becomes very similar to socialism. Any large accumulation of wealth is the same, no matter what system it rose out of.
My suggestion for fixing the system? Bring ethical issues like sweatshops and environmenttal damage into the market by setting a price on them. If that's too complex, then simply force corporations to disclose their behavior.
Currently, the public grants corporations the right to exist, but in return, all they have to do is issue occasional stock reports. Even these tend to be pretty insightful. Imagine if, in addition to that, Nike had to issue reports detailing how much they pay their Indonesian workers. Maybe then consumers would really be able to vote with their dollars.
I've gotten pretty used to explaining Akira to people, but in this case I stopped about 15 minutes in because I realized I was being condescending. She got it, no question.
I was stoned too, the movie made more sense than ever before. I hope you're not being sarcastic and implying that people can't grok stuff when they're stoned. The best way to describe pot is that it limits your attention to one thing. If it happens to be the TV, you can pierce Akira like a knife.
It's hit or miss. I watched Barbarella stoned and I don't remember a damn thing. In this case, we both hit. It was nice to have an Akira newb there to independently verify this. If it was myself alone, I might have simply chalked it up to the 17th viewing being better than the 16th.
You mean, like an oil refinery, or a one mile section of any industrial area in any city in the world? OK, I'm imagining it.
Heh. I spent a while looking for the size of nuclear power facilities (building size, not land area), and since I didn't find it, I went with the above examples of the pyramids, pentagon, etc.
But since you mentioned industrial city space, I found that NYC (all five boroughs) is 321 square miles. Total office space is 179 square miles. That's conveniently similar to my 161 square mile estimate for the scrubber.
Build another NYC to clean the air? Okay, seems feasible, if obtuse. But office space is basically inert. In order to make a valid comparison, you have to build a second NYC and then fill it entirely with air conditioners.
Hey, I don't know if these analogies are useful for predicting whether this is actually buildable. I'm mainly trying to point out that "1 sq. yard per person" is a cheesy marketing ploy, the old trick of dividing by a very large number. It implies that we can put these things in our backyards.
Their $0.20/gal statistic lies as well. I dissected that one in a separate post.
60,000 acres is the size of a moderate wheat ranch in Montana. It's a tiny fraction of the size of the US, and it doesn't have to be centralized.
Well here's my math. I assumed 0.5b people in the developed world, which is probably lowball. At 1sq yard per person, that's 161 square miles of facility.
Do we have 161 square miles of open space? Enough limestone? Of course we do, so forget it.
Massive size
Instead, concentrate on imagining a one square mile machine. This is not a farm, you don't throw seeds in the ground and walk away. This is a massive facility that needs to be built, serviced, and resupplied.
An aircraft carrier, by example, is 0.007 sq. mi. The largest Pyramid is 0.02 sq. mi, and the Pentagon building is 0.04 sq. mi. The Three Gorges Dam in China is 1.2 miles wide, probably not as tall, and there is only one of them. We need 161 of these machines.
If you think "a one square mile machine" is a poor point of reference, think of it another way: If we need 1 sq. yd. per person, how many square yards of facility can be built and operated by a single worker? One, ten, a hundred? No matter what the ratio, it's still a massive, Pyramid-building fraction of the workforce.
Rate of emissions
Assuming we built these facilities, project success relies upon the assumption that we've already halted the rate of emissions. This is a distant fantasy. Carbon emissions are accelerating, this is what Kyoto is trying to fix.
Now, think about what it would take to reverse global warming. Double the number of facilities and you can go backwards at the same rate you were going forwards. In other words, pre-industrial levels 50-100 years from now, and a corresponding surcharge on every gallon of gas we ever burned.
Feasibility of scrubbing
Active technologies, as opposed to passive ones, are not applied to whole environments as a rule. If they were, where would you send the waste products? Where does the fuel come from? You need to delineate two environments in order to clean one of them.
In this case, the proposed delineation is air/ground. I think this is dubious at best.
Active scrubbing seems about as smart as using an open refrigerator to cool one's apartment. Better to halt emissions and let the earth fix itself.
To extract 1 ton of CO2, we will use about 1/4 ton of gasoline (.255ton)
That's some cool math, but I arrived at the same conclusion simply from using gas prices.
I typed "gasoline price breakdown" into Google and the first hit - www.energy.ca.gov - says that crude oil is $0.50 and refining is $0.30. Eighty cents a gallon, the rest is tax. The quoted price of this technology is $0.20. Boom! 1:1/4 ratio.
These scientists didn't figure tax into the cost of their fuel, because it would do no good to advertise 30-40 cents a gallon instead of 20. By using pre-tax math for their fuel, and after-tax math for the final ratio (160/20), they cleverly obscured the 20% drop in efficiency their machine would create.
In other words, it's either 80/20 (pre-tax cost) or 160/40 (after-tax cost). Not one from column A, one from column B. Assholes.
A general heating of the atmosphere may support a great deal more plant life than we have now. Seems like a fairly dangerous experiment, however.
Yes. Once again, I find myself trying to clear up the misconception that global warming = warmer weather. It does not. If anything, expect more blizzards.
Global warming destabilizes the climate. It produces as much colder weather as warm.
I ran into some tourists from Hawaii last summer in the local 7-11. It was 50 degrees out, they were like, wtf, why is it so cold? I said, "Welcome to Boston, the global warming capital of the US."
The weather up here is absurd. Blizzards in May, t-shirt weather in January. Sometimes they alternate by week, sometimes every other day. It's absolute chaos.
Sure, a warmer earth would be great. However, all we understand at this point is that warming it up makes it spin out of control.
If global warming continues, sell your northern property and move south. Global warming will hit the warmer climates last. These Hawaiians, for example, had certainly never experienced it at home, otherwise they wouldn't have been wondering why a summer day could be so cold.
But there is one element that is driving a wedge between the McCulture conference room and the quality of anime: DVD.
Yes, that's true. I was out of the anime loop for a while, and I was shocked when I went to the mall and found entire walls full of obscure titles on DVD. It is pretty amazing. I thought your comments about dubbed DVD's competing with their subtitled brethren were astute.
This is the reality: distinct styling has no advantage in a global marketplace
If that were true, anime would never have gotten to this point.
What point has anime acceptance reached? Cowboy Bebop on Cartoon network, that's great. Otherwise, it's still an individual collector's hobby. Meanwhile, the cultural aspects of anime are rapidly penetrating the American mainstream, but in such a roundabout way that few people are aware that it's happening.
When Matrix 2 comes out, I wonder how many people will notice that the movie boils down to a live-action Rhea Gallforce. Powerpuff Girls is a blatant tribute to Project A-Ko, but notice they stuck with whitebread American styling. Buffy bears similarities to A-Ko as well. Disney has lifted whole scripts from anime; I think The Lion King and Atlantis were the cited examples.
Personally, I rank Buffy, Powerpuff, and The Matrix as highly as any anime I've seen. They incorporate the source material well. But for every Buffy there is a Dark Angel, for every Powerpuff there is a Digimon. And for every Dark Angel and Digimon, there are legions of fans who think that they're witnessing something fresh and original, and this becomes the new standard for what gets put on the air.
People like anime when they see it, I think that's what you meant. DVD gives us the access. But without a mechanism for exhibiting the material, I suspect that there will always be a divide between collectors and mass-market consumers, and a corresponding impact on acceptance and public discourse.
Many agree that the animated Spidey flying around looks like crap in the TV spots. Luckily, in context, it works. I found that what the C.G. webslinger lacks in verisimilitude is made up for in choreography -- the sequences of Spidey swinging through Manhattan and thrilling and fun.
Ha ha. I haven't seen the TV ads but as soon as I saw this up on Slashdot's front page, I thought, "You know, I'll bet the CG of Spidey's parabolic flights is real cheesy." Yup, according to this.
Lifelike motion modeling is still in a sad state of infancy. They spent, what, a hundred million dollars on this movie and they couldn't model an elastic cord? Maybe they should stick with props and models if the CG isn't up to the task.
As for "thrilling and fun," I presume you're referring to the fast cuts and extreme close-ups they use to avoid costly cinematography. It might be impressive on the big screen, but in reality you're paying eight bucks for TV-style film editing.
OTOH, "dangerous" languages like C and C++ demand programmers with the skill and mindset to work with the language's strengths, and not fall prey to their weaknesses.
I totally agree with this.
Recently, I went back to school for my CS degree. In the time I was away, my school had switched from C and C++ to Java. Originally I was excited because Java is popular and modern. But once I got into the coursework, I became appalled.
It was like the lifeblood had been drained out of the curriculum. CS as I had come to understand it - pointers, arrays, code management, optimization - had been reduced to nothing more than reading docs and pasting method calls.
Of course, Java requires adhering to the concepts of abstraction, inheritance, and modularization, so the professors touted Java as "a great language for teaching CS." Well, no, that's backwards. When you require inheritance, it becomes a feature of the Java application in the minds of the students.
Likewise, my school also touts Lisp as a great language for teaching the concept of abstraction. But by the end of the course, half the kids still don't get it. They're lost in a sea of parentheses, not grokking the fact that they have been writing abstracted code all along. Without a contrasting example, they are unable to identify abstraction for what it is.
Schools have gone to great lengths to limit the scope of their curricula in order to "facilitate" the teaching of "fundamental" concepts. But teaching CS in Java or Lisp is like starting a pianist on a Casio or starting a deejay on CD's. It's like starting a sysadmin on NT. By creating a high-level teaching environment, you create a seminar course in the basics. And by creating a context-free "single path" towards comprehension, you disregard the fact that everyone learns in different ways.
Mastering a CS course in Java means knowing your way around java.sun.com/doc. The students who fail or drop out - like me - are the ones who couldn't grok that this is all they were ever expected to do.
Slashdot Mirror
So basically, if you're going to be using e anywhere close to regularly, go down to the local pharmacy/GNC and pick up some 5-HTP and some multi-vitamins (or however you feel like loading up on anti-oxidants). I can't offer any scientific evidence that this works, but within my circle of friends (about 30-45...all of whom follow this advice), not one person has complained about depression as a side effect of e.
That's cool. I haven't tried 5-HTP yet myself, but I have been mega-dosing Vitamin C lately and the effects are almost miraculous (not with e, just in general). Anti-oxidants should not be underestimated. Anyone doing drugs should mass up on vitamins big-time.
As an individual who suffers from both chronic depression and insomnia,
if you suffer from depression, try changing your circumstances. my experience has been that people are pretty good at natural adaptation, if they are depressed, it's usually because the environment has thrown them off.
this could be physical, social, financial...whatever.
you say you are "chronically" depressed, but i don't necessarily buy that. doctors et. al. have a pretty strong interest in getting you to believe that, because then they can pump you full of drugs. it's pretty rare that somebody is "fucked up" right out of the womb.
try listening to yourself. it usually works, as far as society allows anyway. try taking the premise that there is nothing wrong with you, and only believe otherwise if the evidence mounts.
modern society is pretty fucked up, you could be more normal than you think and not even know it. you are insomniac...maybe because you are terrified of failing exams? try taking things less seriously. mom and pop and doc don't know best, they are from a different era, they hurt themselves more to achieve less than we do.
after that, it fucked me up - i can't really describe what would happen, but i'd get this wierd feeling that my immune system was just sort of tenuously holding on.
try st. john's wort. you can get it cheap as a tea. i've found that every 12-oz glass drank reduced my need for sleep by about an hour.
might take 2-3 weeks to start working (if you read up on st. john's wort, this is a pretty standard estimate).
haven't used it in a while because i haven't needed it, and it does have stimulant-like side effects, although fewer side effects than any other drug i've tried. great hangover killer.
st. john's wort is good for the brain. too bad it has been advertised as a cure for depression. you can use it anyway.
Ever notice how hard it is to keep a costant speed while taking 10-second naps while driving?
instead of taking naps, try going into a continuous low-grade sleep. relax your focus, your vision, and your head. flutter your eyes. stay conscious, but dumb yourself down, reduce to the essentials.
i think we are doing basically the same thing but you are letting yourself nod off. i can do this for a few minutes at a time. i stay awake, with reduced reflexes, and when i go fully-conscious again i usually feel refreshed as if i had slept.
sometimes tiredness has more to do with the eyes than anything else.
Lately I've switched to buying loose lea. I find that it is usually cheaper (less processing) and better quality (it has to be whole leaves so it won't pass through the strainer).
Try using your coffee machine as well. Throw some loose tea in the basket, then make a pot, or two or three, all at once. Then put the tea in the fridge.
I've never understood why coffee requires a machine but tea takes some sort of bag, or diffuser, or whatever. The coffee machine works great for both.
one shot nyquil (The icky green liquid stuff, not Gelcaps), $2
I know this is essentially a joke, but I have to throw this in for all the drug newbs out there.
Nyquil (DXM) is a dissociative, as is Robitussin (DXM), ketamine, pcp, nitrous, and OTC sleep aids like Unisom. Dissociatives cause brain damage. Do all the drugs you want, but stay away from dissociatives.
Sure, many drugs can permanently alter brain chemistry, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand why dissociatives are different. Whereas stimulants and hallucinogens provide an "enhanced" experience, dissociatives do the opposite, breaking down neural connections to provide an anesthetic, disconnected experience. Ketamine also tends to make people unhappy, which is a pretty weird way to get high.
I've done my fair share of DXM, so this is certainly not a moral rant.
Other things to keep in mind:
Alcohol is pretty efficient at destroying neurons as well
Stimulants are bad for the heart (incl. caffeine/nicotine)
Acid affects certain people poorly
Mushrooms are challenging
Exstacy can make you depressed
Coke is a hard, hard drug
Shooting heroin is how you kill yourself
The only drug I know of that is safe from a physiological point of view is pot. And natural drugs (pot, mushrooms, smoked opium/heroin) seem most certainly safer in general (not a 100% rule) than synthetics.
Synthetic OTC's, such as Unisom (dissociative), Adderol (speed), and Vicodin (opiate) scare hell out of me in terms of physiological health. Synthetics produce a hangover that is quite distinctly alien, and just because you haven't noticed it doesn't mean it's not there. Vicodin's hangover, for example, is pretty subtle. Unisom's is not.
How does the Supreme Court's decision that the government can't outlaw virtual kiddie porn support your argument?
Because John Ashcroft went on tv and said, "We're not backing down."
Keep in mind that mankind has bad night vision.
Apparently, nature decided since we can't do much else in the dark, so we should sleep and occasionally get our sookie sookie on.
Yeah well, keep in mind that cats have great night vision and they sleep at all hours.
Yeah, you know what, you're right. I had always assumed it was some kind of NOCACHE'ing on Slashdot's part, but no, it's IE. How obnoxious.
I don't know why I didn't use opera on a regular basis before. It's time.
If I show pictures of breasts, am I .prn automagically?
.prn automagically.
Maybe if you sell pornography then you are
Convenience stores don't have difficulty filtering magazines to the back of the counter. Video stores don't have difficulty filtering tapes to a second room. Hell, Google filters porn as well.
I don't think this is hard. Rather, semantic categorization is the first step towards organizing anything. Maybe it's time the web got organized.
Forget the per-seat cost of an oracle license and read between the lines here. Exactly why did California officials decide to go with Oracle in the first place?
The only justification in the article is "claims of savings." In other words, Logicon handed California a balance sheet that said, "You can save $150m (or whatever) by using Oracle, therefore $95m is a deal." And California said, "Oh gee, the math works, sign us up!"
Nobody ever asked real-world questions like, what exactly do we need Oracle for? Who is going to install it? How difficult/costly will the changeover be? What alternatives are there?
Sounds to me like California believed the old hype that software is magic and that savings are automatic. This is what happens when you base too many of your decisions on "studies" and not enough on cold, hard logic.
How do you enumerate "savings" from installing a piece of software anyway? Is the existing system too slow? Are developers expensive? Is there too much red tape? It's such sketchy math.
If the existing system works, then it's probably not all that expensive. New systems should be based on a need for a faster, cleaner implementation, not on illusory "savings."
I tried to reply to say "At least slashdot doesn't have any bugs in it", but the reply button wasn't working...
Yeah, don't try hitting the back button when you're previewing comments, either. Never works.
For a high-volume site, Slashdot really seems to disfavor client-side caching.
So relax, dude; this isn't bottom feeding. I'm just trying to get this dinosaur turned around in the right direction.
Wow, dude, you're proposing to save the OSS movement all by yourself. I am an ambitious person, this is the kind of nonsense I used to say. Now I am 26, and I realize that I do not have the influence or resources to alter the landscape of software development all by myself.
Yet here you are, proposing to do exactly that. Where did this even come from? Your original post was a meek little request for info about Flash. Now all of a sudden you are our Lord Savior? What's your angle?
You paint a rosy picture of putting union resources behind OSS to miraculous effect. I would say you are naive non-CS type, but your second post is articulate enough to make it clear that you know about previous multi-million dollar cash injections from startups like RedHat and (the now defunct) V/A Linux. What makes you think your union of janitors and nurses is going to help any more than V/A Linux did?
Your organization, the SEIU, does not have a clean track record for "helping" or "working with" other organizations. In fact, the examples of CSEA and Intercity indicate that the SEIU will go to any lengths to infiltrate and co-opt existing organizations.
Your second post - a rallying cry for clarity in the struggling OSS world - amounts to little more than re-stating the obvious. This is a common tactic. By stating the obvious, you instantly win the hearts and minds of people who already agree. In reality, you have offered no new information, you have dreamed nothing we all haven't dreamed ourselves.
Beware, psychologist. You have met your match.
This is somewhat off topic, but my question is what does your site www.seiu.org [seiu.org] actually stand behind? Is there a page that clearly states your objectives? I see "current events", "get involved", "working family issues", but nothing that really states what your guys want and where you guys are going.
Thank God, one person noticed the obvious. The SEIU is a cult. Read my post further down for a full explanation.
Fellow slashdotters, please check out this guy's website before giving him any more help. Read it thorougly, do not simply gloss over. Notice the saturation of blue-collar propaganda, and the lack of any relevant details as to how the SEIU works. The SEIU is a cult.
...on Sept. 11, the original primary day, many of the local's staff were forced to volunteer to campaign for mayoral candidate Mark Green. Staffers were allegedly forced to sign vouchers stating they were taking a vacation day so they can go campaign...
The SEIU is, ostensibly, a union, and they do in fact unionize people. Like all unions, they have their share of corruption, money laundering, and influence peddling. However, what sets the SEIU apart from other unions is a singular pattern of coercive, manipulative, and undemocratic behavior towards their members, hostility towards other unions, and strict top-down financial and administrative control.
For documentation, please visit the Organized Labor Accountability Project Please compare the SEIU with the other unions listed at this link. I doubt you will find this pattern of cult-like behavior in any other union.
Local 32B-32J: Our union president... conducts general membership meetings in total violation of the LMRDA, our Local's constitution and basic parliamentary procedure. Mr. Fishman... refuses to open the floor for new business, refuses to take unrehearsed questions and refuses to open the floor to independent motions.
Local 32B-32J:
Local 79: [Employees] become union members only after working a probationary period of 100 events in a 12-month period. If a worker cannot work 100 events in twelve months, [he] must start over again... "The workers end up perpetually on probation."
Local 1212: In an effort to lure members away from the United Industry Workers Local 424, SEIU Local 1212... claimed to be the largest transportation union in N.Y. state... However, examination of the union's financial reports... destroy the claims. The report shows the union has only 5 officers and employees...[and] has only 94 members. And it is unclear whether any members are in the transportation industry.
CSEA: CSEA has refused to participate in SEIU's unity plan... which required locals to abandon their names and logos, and use the purple and gold SEIU banner. The unity plan also called for fees that would cost CSEA $18 million... Kenny summarized CSEA's complaints: "SEIU has disenfranchised CSEA."
Intercity Janitorial Services: SEIU began attempts to organize Intercity in late 1994. Intercity's president refused to sign... saying it was up to the workers to decide whether to unionize. SEIU's assistant director of organizing repeatedly warned Intercity... to sign the agreement or SEIU would attempt to drive the company out of business...
OSS users are usually the sorts who prefer the experiences inside their heads to external experiences. Reading roller coaster specs is just as good for a lot of them as actually riding the roller coaster.
Not so for normal folks.
Heh. Excellent stab at dorks. You're right, Flash is good, people who bash it are knee-jerking. But since you pitted dorks up against graphic designers, I'm going to have to step out of character and actually defend the dorks.
Yes, normal people want to see a professional presentation. The trick is that in the case of the web, dorks usually have a better understanding of what a professional presentation actually is.
Graphic designers are woefully under-equipped for the web. They think it's a piece of paper, and no amount of 7pt font can make this true. They see what's up on their 21-inch monitor and they think this is what the world sees. Graphic designers, sadly, have only one set of eyes.
Not so for normal folks.
Socialism is the centralization of capital, so it can be dolled out by those who know better. This doesn't tend to work too well.
No, it certainly doesn't. My point in comparing CEO's to warlords is that corporations are little more than modern-day armies. They have a strict hierarchy of command and control. The guy at the top controls the resources and can give direct orders to his troops. That sounds an awful lot like socialism to me.
You can say that a CEO will lose his job if he does it poorly, but that's a shallow analysis. The reality is that CEO's can get away with a lot of bad behavior before they cause a strike or a boycott. That's because job conditions and other ethical/moral issues are not part of the market. The market is defined by the bottom line.
Microsoft, for example, is an army without peer. They live outside the market; no amount of "voting with your dollars" is going to change their behavior. That's where the part about rape comes in - if Microsoft wants to cripple your OS, there's nothing you can do to stop it. You live at the mercy of the ruling warlords, Gates in this example.
This is not a radical theory. It is firmly understood in capitalist theory as "monopoly" and "collusion," which are illegal. The problem is that capitalism actively encourages monopoly. It's a positive feedback loop - larger companies keep getting larger until the DoJ arbitrarily steps in. A better system would have a natural, negative feedback loop instead encouraging perpetual growth.
The closest thing to a negative feedback loop is an economic downturn, when companies usually shed excess holdings. But nobody wants an economic downturn, so that's not great either.
Capitalism is king, I support it. But large-scale corporatism focuses too much power in the hands of individuals. Capitalism on this scale becomes very similar to socialism. Any large accumulation of wealth is the same, no matter what system it rose out of.
My suggestion for fixing the system? Bring ethical issues like sweatshops and environmenttal damage into the market by setting a price on them. If that's too complex, then simply force corporations to disclose their behavior.
Currently, the public grants corporations the right to exist, but in return, all they have to do is issue occasional stock reports. Even these tend to be pretty insightful. Imagine if, in addition to that, Nike had to issue reports detailing how much they pay their Indonesian workers. Maybe then consumers would really be able to vote with their dollars.
Of course she understood it, she was stoned.
I've gotten pretty used to explaining Akira to people, but in this case I stopped about 15 minutes in because I realized I was being condescending. She got it, no question.
I was stoned too, the movie made more sense than ever before. I hope you're not being sarcastic and implying that people can't grok stuff when they're stoned. The best way to describe pot is that it limits your attention to one thing. If it happens to be the TV, you can pierce Akira like a knife.
It's hit or miss. I watched Barbarella stoned and I don't remember a damn thing. In this case, we both hit. It was nice to have an Akira newb there to independently verify this. If it was myself alone, I might have simply chalked it up to the 17th viewing being better than the 16th.
Oh well, AC, you probably won't even read this.
You mean, like an oil refinery, or a one mile section of any industrial area in any city in the world? OK, I'm imagining it.
Heh. I spent a while looking for the size of nuclear power facilities (building size, not land area), and since I didn't find it, I went with the above examples of the pyramids, pentagon, etc.
But since you mentioned industrial city space, I found that NYC (all five boroughs) is 321 square miles. Total office space is 179 square miles. That's conveniently similar to my 161 square mile estimate for the scrubber.
Build another NYC to clean the air? Okay, seems feasible, if obtuse. But office space is basically inert. In order to make a valid comparison, you have to build a second NYC and then fill it entirely with air conditioners.
Hey, I don't know if these analogies are useful for predicting whether this is actually buildable. I'm mainly trying to point out that "1 sq. yard per person" is a cheesy marketing ploy, the old trick of dividing by a very large number. It implies that we can put these things in our backyards.
Their $0.20/gal statistic lies as well. I dissected that one in a separate post.
60,000 acres is the size of a moderate wheat ranch in Montana. It's a tiny fraction of the size of the US, and it doesn't have to be centralized.
Well here's my math. I assumed 0.5b people in the developed world, which is probably lowball. At 1sq yard per person, that's 161 square miles of facility.
Do we have 161 square miles of open space? Enough limestone? Of course we do, so forget it.
Massive size
Instead, concentrate on imagining a one square mile machine. This is not a farm, you don't throw seeds in the ground and walk away. This is a massive facility that needs to be built, serviced, and resupplied.
An aircraft carrier, by example, is 0.007 sq. mi. The largest Pyramid is 0.02 sq. mi, and the Pentagon building is 0.04 sq. mi. The Three Gorges Dam in China is 1.2 miles wide, probably not as tall, and there is only one of them. We need 161 of these machines.
If you think "a one square mile machine" is a poor point of reference, think of it another way: If we need 1 sq. yd. per person, how many square yards of facility can be built and operated by a single worker? One, ten, a hundred? No matter what the ratio, it's still a massive, Pyramid-building fraction of the workforce.
Rate of emissions
Assuming we built these facilities, project success relies upon the assumption that we've already halted the rate of emissions. This is a distant fantasy. Carbon emissions are accelerating, this is what Kyoto is trying to fix.
Now, think about what it would take to reverse global warming. Double the number of facilities and you can go backwards at the same rate you were going forwards. In other words, pre-industrial levels 50-100 years from now, and a corresponding surcharge on every gallon of gas we ever burned.
Feasibility of scrubbing
Active technologies, as opposed to passive ones, are not applied to whole environments as a rule. If they were, where would you send the waste products? Where does the fuel come from? You need to delineate two environments in order to clean one of them.
In this case, the proposed delineation is air/ground. I think this is dubious at best.
Active scrubbing seems about as smart as using an open refrigerator to cool one's apartment. Better to halt emissions and let the earth fix itself.
To extract 1 ton of CO2, we will use about 1/4 ton of gasoline (.255ton)
That's some cool math, but I arrived at the same conclusion simply from using gas prices.
I typed "gasoline price breakdown" into Google and the first hit - www.energy.ca.gov - says that crude oil is $0.50 and refining is $0.30. Eighty cents a gallon, the rest is tax. The quoted price of this technology is $0.20. Boom! 1:1/4 ratio.
These scientists didn't figure tax into the cost of their fuel, because it would do no good to advertise 30-40 cents a gallon instead of 20. By using pre-tax math for their fuel, and after-tax math for the final ratio (160/20), they cleverly obscured the 20% drop in efficiency their machine would create.
In other words, it's either 80/20 (pre-tax cost) or 160/40 (after-tax cost). Not one from column A, one from column B. Assholes.
A general heating of the atmosphere may support a great deal more plant life than we have now. Seems like a fairly dangerous experiment, however.
Yes. Once again, I find myself trying to clear up the misconception that global warming = warmer weather. It does not. If anything, expect more blizzards.
Global warming destabilizes the climate. It produces as much colder weather as warm.
I ran into some tourists from Hawaii last summer in the local 7-11. It was 50 degrees out, they were like, wtf, why is it so cold? I said, "Welcome to Boston, the global warming capital of the US."
The weather up here is absurd. Blizzards in May, t-shirt weather in January. Sometimes they alternate by week, sometimes every other day. It's absolute chaos.
Sure, a warmer earth would be great. However, all we understand at this point is that warming it up makes it spin out of control.
If global warming continues, sell your northern property and move south. Global warming will hit the warmer climates last. These Hawaiians, for example, had certainly never experienced it at home, otherwise they wouldn't have been wondering why a summer day could be so cold.
Yes, that's true. I was out of the anime loop for a while, and I was shocked when I went to the mall and found entire walls full of obscure titles on DVD. It is pretty amazing. I thought your comments about dubbed DVD's competing with their subtitled brethren were astute.
This is the reality: distinct styling has no advantage in a global marketplace
What point has anime acceptance reached? Cowboy Bebop on Cartoon network, that's great. Otherwise, it's still an individual collector's hobby. Meanwhile, the cultural aspects of anime are rapidly penetrating the American mainstream, but in such a roundabout way that few people are aware that it's happening.
When Matrix 2 comes out, I wonder how many people will notice that the movie boils down to a live-action Rhea Gallforce. Powerpuff Girls is a blatant tribute to Project A-Ko, but notice they stuck with whitebread American styling. Buffy bears similarities to A-Ko as well. Disney has lifted whole scripts from anime; I think The Lion King and Atlantis were the cited examples.
Personally, I rank Buffy, Powerpuff, and The Matrix as highly as any anime I've seen. They incorporate the source material well. But for every Buffy there is a Dark Angel, for every Powerpuff there is a Digimon. And for every Dark Angel and Digimon, there are legions of fans who think that they're witnessing something fresh and original, and this becomes the new standard for what gets put on the air.
People like anime when they see it, I think that's what you meant. DVD gives us the access. But without a mechanism for exhibiting the material, I suspect that there will always be a divide between collectors and mass-market consumers, and a corresponding impact on acceptance and public discourse.
Many agree that the animated Spidey flying around looks like crap in the TV spots. Luckily, in context, it works. I found that what the C.G. webslinger lacks in verisimilitude is made up for in choreography -- the sequences of Spidey swinging through Manhattan and thrilling and fun.
Ha ha. I haven't seen the TV ads but as soon as I saw this up on Slashdot's front page, I thought, "You know, I'll bet the CG of Spidey's parabolic flights is real cheesy." Yup, according to this.
Lifelike motion modeling is still in a sad state of infancy. They spent, what, a hundred million dollars on this movie and they couldn't model an elastic cord? Maybe they should stick with props and models if the CG isn't up to the task.
As for "thrilling and fun," I presume you're referring to the fast cuts and extreme close-ups they use to avoid costly cinematography. It might be impressive on the big screen, but in reality you're paying eight bucks for TV-style film editing.
OTOH, "dangerous" languages like C and C++ demand programmers with the skill and mindset to work with the language's strengths, and not fall prey to their weaknesses.
I totally agree with this.
Recently, I went back to school for my CS degree. In the time I was away, my school had switched from C and C++ to Java. Originally I was excited because Java is popular and modern. But once I got into the coursework, I became appalled.
It was like the lifeblood had been drained out of the curriculum. CS as I had come to understand it - pointers, arrays, code management, optimization - had been reduced to nothing more than reading docs and pasting method calls.
Of course, Java requires adhering to the concepts of abstraction, inheritance, and modularization, so the professors touted Java as "a great language for teaching CS." Well, no, that's backwards. When you require inheritance, it becomes a feature of the Java application in the minds of the students.
Likewise, my school also touts Lisp as a great language for teaching the concept of abstraction. But by the end of the course, half the kids still don't get it. They're lost in a sea of parentheses, not grokking the fact that they have been writing abstracted code all along. Without a contrasting example, they are unable to identify abstraction for what it is.
Schools have gone to great lengths to limit the scope of their curricula in order to "facilitate" the teaching of "fundamental" concepts. But teaching CS in Java or Lisp is like starting a pianist on a Casio or starting a deejay on CD's. It's like starting a sysadmin on NT. By creating a high-level teaching environment, you create a seminar course in the basics. And by creating a context-free "single path" towards comprehension, you disregard the fact that everyone learns in different ways.
Mastering a CS course in Java means knowing your way around java.sun.com/doc. The students who fail or drop out - like me - are the ones who couldn't grok that this is all they were ever expected to do.