Assuming this is to "replace" my cards and/or cash, why would I want something where, if the batteries are dead, I can't buy anything?
A woman is usually carrying a purse, if it's a man he's typically carrying a wallet for other things anyway, so not much of a win there.
Why give hackers yet another way to steal my money?
Why give the feds/megacorps yet another way to track me and my spending?
WTF is wrong with cash? These days I'm a lot more likely to have my credit cards/bank account hacked than to be mugged for my bills, and money just doesn't weigh that much.
Risk management, cost benefit analysis means no way in hell would I sign up for this. I can't think of any possible improvements that would change this, short of a bona fide, anonymous, non-battery-powered credstick.
As the daughter of a long time, now retired public school teacher and who has friends who are currently public school teachers, I'll chime in with supporting teachers to sell their plans and keep the money.
I'll also corroborate all the people saying that teachers make these lesson plans outside of class, at home. They also do all their grading at home, including over holidays and school breaks. They start school 1 week or more before all the students. Most teachers I know pay for a significant portion of non-textbook classroom supplies OUT OF THEIR OWN POCKETS.
Teachers may have summers off - at least, ones who don't teach in year-round districts - but what they often do with that time is get a part time job so they can make up for the crappy pay they get.
Frankly, I find it appalling that we do not consider teaching a true profession, yet we make teachers go through a long certification process before we let them in the public schools to do often thankless work for crap pay and shoddy treatment. I am one of those people who adores teaching and is good at it, but I've seen what the public school system does to people, and the pay won't even come close to covering my living expenses. No thank you.
So let them sell the lesson plans. If it gives teachers more time with their families and a little more spending money, they deserve it, and so do their families.
Look, there are studies that have shown that people have different abilities to suspend disbelief. People who are better at it are more tolerant of gore and violence in films as well as games.
Your statement is clearly true for you, but it's not universal. But there are people who enjoy cartoonish violence.
I repeat what I said in a previous comment. Games are about having fun. If it's not fun, don't play it. If you want the violence to be realistic, and it's less fun without it, then assuming you're a normal person, you probably are just better at suspension of disbelief, and the violence for you is no problem.
I don't like it when it's immensely gory. I can tolerate a certain level of violence because I realize I am playing a game and ultimately all I'm doing is causing lines of code to run. But for me, there comes a point where the level of gore and violence are so realistic that that knowledge doesn't help any more - the images are too compelling and I have to work too hard to remind myself it's not real. That is when I stop having fun and I'm not going to play any more. And why should I?? It's just a frickin game!
"If you're properly focused on a game you don't really notice the extras."
Well I'll say this much - the amount and detail of gore in the Wolverine demo put me off too much to continue playing long enough to get to that level of focus. Things like the bullet time shots with the partial faces flying off and blood spurting everywhere were what did it.
Just face it, some of us simply do NOT like violence over a certain amount. I just do not enjoy the game. I find myself sitting there feeling physically bad. The whole point of video games is to have fun. If I'm not having fun, I don't care what the reason is, I won't keep playing it (and quite honestly couldn't give a crap what anyone thinks of me because of it).
I don't see why I should "get used" to a game, or properly focus, or learn better how to suspend disbelief or whatever. It's just a frickin game. If I want personal growth, I'll go to a therapist.
Ignoring that back then the weather, the makeup of the atmosphere, and the mammal population were different, and your glib implication that coal and oil were created by CO2,
what happens if currently temperate areas turn to desert instead of jungle?
What happens in the Sahara, and other equatorial regions, when they get hotter? They could easily grow larger and become even more inhabitable. You don't think people will just stay there, do you?
I don't think you've thought this through.
A couple of years ago I bought a Motion Computing tablet PC off of eBay, from a seller that was clearly well-established.
It didn't come with an install disc, so I e-mailed Motion Computing's customer service, asking if I could please purchase another one. I told them I got it on eBay, and gave them the serial number.
They replied within only a few days, and said, just send us your address - we'll send you one for free. And they did so.
As a result, I tell people about how accommodating they were every chance I get.
Yet another "OMG does X mean the end of Y? We can only hope predict chaos/destruction/carnage/dogs and cats living together/mass schadenfreude! **CLICK ITTT** READ IT RIGHT NOWWWUH !"
Twitter being hit by "a big phishing scam," yes it's news, but the headline is more than a little melodramatic, don't you think?
First I'll answer the question - most people don't have to care in order for a boycott to have an effect. If only one in ten people participate, that's a 10% loss in sales. Even if all you do is boycott DRM-protected media, any company would sit up and take notice of a 10% loss in sales, particularly in this economy. In short, it doesn't matter if everyone or even most people care - enough need to care that it causes noticeable loss.
At the time the iTunes store started, I felt like the DRM solution was the only way to lure / drag the recording labels, kicking and screaming, into the digital 21st century, and I felt like it was a lot better than the punitive approach of suing Napster and Limewire users. If you have been paying attention, the licensing terms for DRM tracks on the iTunes Music Store have been gradually relaxed. Now there are a number of ways to purchase non-DRM tracks legally and easily - not just iTMS, but Amazon.com, eMusic, Magnatune, and a number of other, smaller vendors. Furthermore, you have always been able to buy CDs yourself and rip them, and if you were a poor college student like I used to be, you could always buy used CDs and trade your old ones in that you never listened to, back before you could "rip" your music at all, let alone download it from some Russian MP3 site. It is my opinion that as distasteful as DRM technology may be, Apple's approach did open the door to the legitimate digital music download market - whether by provoking a response or goading the labels to provide *some* convenient, inexpensive method of legally aquiring music in virtual form. However, I think this should be an intermediate step only, and DRM needs to be abandoned as quickly as possible.
So I ask you, is a boycott of Apple entirely really necessary, or shouldn't we just stop buying DRMed tracks instead, and force the market down the path consumers wanted in the first place? That is the route I have been taking for the last 2 years. I don't buy DRM tracks any more unless I need it for reference (I'm also a musician), and I simply cannot find it anywhere else, either on CD or on one of my (legal) sources for digital music.
Re:My recollection differs from the book
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Trick or Treatment
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I have looked into these issues fairly recently and your recollection matches mine as well.
A large number of medicines today in common use are derived from plants. Aspirin is a big one. Aspirin has a variety of medicinal uses. Furthermore science is finding all sorts of health benefits from consuming certain plants, such as cranberry juice and cranberry extract as an antiseptic, or wine for heart health. To dismiss all of plant-based medicine as worthless (as some have, though obviously not this book) is not only ignorant but flat-out wrong, and is complete denial of thousands of years of successful medicinal practice before the formal science of pharmacology even existed. We know for sure that not all substances believed to have medicinal properties actually had them, but frequently there was one active ingredient in a preparation which acted as some kind of illness or injury prevention or treatment. Kohl, for example, was used successfully to help prevent eye infections in the ancient Near East.
To talk about herbal medicines made with tiger tooth or rhino horn or shark fin is a contradiction. These ingredients render the substance non-herbal by definition. To then claim that some herbal medicines are therefore contributing to animal extinction is straw-man argument.
My reading has been that acupuncture can assist with certain types of chronic pain and can lower blood pressure.
However, any time one studies pain or immune response, it appears that it's hard to isolate what works and what doesn't, because both seem to be very susceptible to the patients' biases and mental outlook.
This is not necessarily about being dumb. People like Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Al Franken, Michael Moore, Bill Maher, Dennis Miller - their popularity is simply about shock value. People love haters and ranters. People who are nice, calm, reasoned and accurate don't get nearly the attention that haters do because that's boring. To get attention you have to stand out and a great way to stand out is to lie and exaggerate, and get people good and mad. It's pure emotional manipulation and nothing more. Nobody seems to understand that people like Ann Coulter are utterly irrelevant to the political process. If everyone ignored them, they'd all go away.
Re:Those are america's problems
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American Nerd
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in other countries there arent such distinctions as 'nerds' etc, or such kind of school bullying culture.
Nerd bullying might be an American issue (and I certainly can't speak to the truth of that claim), but "school" bullying darn sure isn't - take England for example. I don't think the setting for the bullying is even relevant, nor is the target group - bullying is a classic social animal behavior used for establishing and maintaining a social hierarchy. It may be more or less prevalent in some areas, and the target group or type may be different, but it happens literally everywhere - not just in people but chickens, wolves, other primates, etc.
No revenge needed. Was:Re:Revenge of the Nerds...
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American Nerd
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I was a classic nerd throughout school. When I went back to rural North Carolina for my 20th high school reunion, I wasn't sure to expect, but what I found was that everyone had simply grown up. This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. Everyone was perfectly nice, we had good conversation, and it was just a big family cookout at the house of one of my classmates. Some of my classmates had started their own businesses, most were married with kids, and were generally doing well and happy. Sure, I make more money than most of them, I've likely seen a lot more of the world than they have, probably generally more educated, but mainly I realized that I no longer had much of anything in common with them - we didn't enjoy the same things, we didn't have the same hobbies, and not much shared experience. But everyone who'd been an asshole in school to me had long gotten over it, and so had I.
*shrug* I guess I'm supposed to feel all superior, but I honestly don't care enough to hang on to a bunch of BS that happened when we were all kids, and neither did they. We have important issues to deal with.
A black man has been elected President of the United States of America, and that alone is extremely important. You can debate all you want about the semantics, but that's how America and the world see it, and that's how I see it. The fact of the matter is, when the President of the United States of America stands up in front of the nation and the world, we will see a brown face for the first time ever, and that means a hell of a lot to me and millions of others.
The American people have finally decided to do something about their feeling that the country was going in the wrong direction - without bloodshed, without a coup, and by following the laws that were designed to make this happen in a civil and stable way.
I for one am sick and tired of people's excessive cynicism and pessimism. It's just as irrational as excessive optimism. People live down to expectations, and if you don't demand better, you won't get it. Just because we don't often see instant results, it doesn't mean our efforts are wasted.
Often it's just an excuse for not being an activist. Other times I think it's to avoid being disappointed when one's hopes aren't fulfilled, but really what you're doing is conditioning yourself against recognizing all possibilities. This conditions people against hope, and it is debilitating.
The bottom line is, this man is living proof that you don't have to let the odds stop you from doing anything great, especially not here in America. I'm going to fly my flag, and I won't let anyone tell me I shouldn't be proud today; I am going to feel the joy for a little while longer, then roll up my sleeves and get back to work trying to make the world a better place.
An electromagnetic field cannot exist inside a conductor. I use a hinged metal credit card box for a lot of my cards, since some of my purses/bags have magnetic closures, and this protects them (and my BART cards) from getting wiped. Just remember the RFID-equipped item needs to be completely enclosed.
There are RFID-reader-proof passport holders available for sale, but you could easily make one yourself in any number of ways. You could use industrial strength aluminum foil.
You can also use metal screen, which is more flexible than metal sheet and won't tear like foil, but just know that the screen openings have to be less than 10% of the wavelength of the RF you want to keep out.
It does not need to be thick (within reason/possibility - don't use a 1-atom thick layer, k?:) ) It just needs to be a conductor. The joints aren't really relevant as long as there aren't gaps when it's closed - see the 10% rule.
As a guideline for wavelength, the microwave (GHz) frequencies run to the centimeter range. If you have gaps at the millimeter level, you are fine - just look at the screens over a microwave oven door to see what I mean.
It's easy to make up motivations, since it's completely unprovable. The more believable it is the better, and people will make up motivations that fit their own biases, so you can believe whatever you want.
I prefer being more rational; do you have evidence for this? Has it happened in the past? Where and when? Do you have any evidence whatsoever that this is not just due to incompetence rather than conspiracy? How do you know that "no-one in government/civil service wants these documents to be 100% secure?" Do you know everyone in government and civil service, and have you asked them? If not, are you some kind of magical mind-reader? And how likely is it that literally nobody in government wants what's right for America? Nobody? There is no more sweeping generalization.
I don't think that bigotry is acceptable, period (I own up to being guilty of it too and I'm trying to stop that). Around here (in the Bay Area), the popular and acceptable targets of prejudice are smokers, fat people, Republicans/conservatives, and Southerners. People who fit these descriptions are called all the names I've heard the Southern racists I grew up around call black people, including "they stink," which interestingly appears to be a worldwide slur used against out groups. It's unfortunate, because liberals and/or atheists love to talk about how rational they are and how much they value science and rationality, yet, as a trained scientist and someone who has studied a number of philosophies, religions, and rational discourse formally, I see people repeating what is nothing more than gossip about issues and candidates, making purely speculative statements as if they were factual, misconstruing scientific research to support their personal beliefs, and utilizing all other forms of logical fallacy.
This to me is plenty of evidence that everybody's irrational, particularly when it comes to people they don't identify or agree with, and belies motives other than seeking the truth and solving real problems.
You're not as fair as you think. There are lots of things that are "in" the "Old Testament" but that doesn't mean they're approved. Prostitutes and money lenders are "in" the "New Testament," but they are clearly not approved of. In fact King David's conduct for having Bathsheba's husband killed so he could take her for himself, is pretty harshly condemned.
You're confusing origin stories that predated the establishment of Jewish law, with those laws. In the Torah, incest is explicitly forbidden, and human sacrifice is specifically replaced by animal sacrifice (starting with the binding of Isaac). The lesson of the binding of Isaac is that God does NOT actually want human sacrifice. There are portions in later books where some Israelites have taken up the practice (which is still being followed by their neighbors, by the way) and they are excoriated by the prophets of their time. So let's make this clear: human sacrifice and incest are FORBIDDEN by God in the Bible. Human actions occurring before the law of Moses was established are covered under the seven Noahide laws. (I leave finding out what they are as an exercise to the reader.)
The genocide portions are pretty horrific to (most) modern sensibilities today, and rightly so. Any decent person should have issues with those passages.
I keep reading the same wrong ideas over and over; I'm getting more than a little tired of people who seem to be relying on hearsay, poorly educated Sunday school teachers or Richard Dawkins talking points for their Bible knowledge, and then using this to form opinions about Christianity and/or Judaism. Even a small amount of study and reading in ancient Near East cultural history plus good Jewish AND Christian study Bibles would help. An uneducated opinion isn't an opinion at all.
Without dignifying the traditional Slashdot slap-happy, uncalled-for insistence on insulting every one of us with a religion at every minute opportunity, I agree with the point that, taken by themselves without any cultural context, the origin story of Scientology is no more bizarre than anything else.
However, it seems more bizarre to most people because it arose basically whole-cloth and with not a lot of cultural context. All of the so-called traditional religions developed over time and drew elements from the religious traditions around it (and rejected portions as being false or wrong). In that sense I think they were more evolutionary than revolutionary. This is the main area where Scientology differs. It also takes elements into its origin myths which are commonly believed to be false already. Most people of antiquity had no problems with the idea that there were other deities and that different tribes/nations/whatever worshipped their own. The aggressive cultures which adopted the world-dominating monotheism of Christianity and Islam changed all that in the Western world.
The definition of "cult" depends upon who you're asking. If you're asking scientists like archaeologists and anthropologists, then any offshoot of a religion that is considered heretical by the mainstream, a religion that is not widely adopted is considered a cult. Christianity in its early stages is frequently referred to as a Jewish "cult," with no insult implied. Judaism also had a "cult" of Astarte, a fertility deity believed by her worshippers to be God's wife, which didn't make it into modern times.
In the vernacular, we've attached a more pejorative meaning, and the best defintion I've read of a "cult" in this sense identifies several elements that tend to be present for this definition to hold: a charismatic leader, members must sever contact with family, members must hand over most or all of their money and/or possessions, members are discouraged from associating with non-members, and intolerance of dissent.
IAWTC, and, Benjamin Franklin's saying *actually* is: "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
I think a better way of putting it is: there is no way to prove that anything before right this very moment existed and was not actualy just conjured up wholesale and put in place a moment ago. It's been said for ages - the Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna said it too. This is the case because the only way to prove otherwise is to go outside your own mind and this is of course, absurd.
But really, to me this is mostly mental wanking. Of course we have to agree on some level of objective reality otherwise we wouldn't be having this discussion in the first place, because we'd just be talking to ourselves. Then again, some people insist that's exactly what's going on. I can't tell the difference, so I don't treat it as being something other than what it appears.
A second point I wanted to make: currently a computer simulation != biology, agreed, but with advances in quantum computing, it may be that we can create simulations which are, for all practical purposes, "real" universes with "real" physics and "real" beings and "real" biology - at least, to the things inside them, and they may have no way of knowing that they are "just" a computer program. They could invent all sorts of things to say about their "creator(s)" which aren't true at all. Does this make us Gods then? Does this not have some implications for this universe? I mean, maybe we're just some kid's homework assignment;)
I like the point about how it's true that organization can come from disorganization, but overall you must recognize that this organization in one area means increased disorganization in another. Earth evolved more complex organisms precisely because our sun is there, putting the energy into the Earth's system, and possibly also due to contamination by cosmic rays, comets and asteroids. So Earth is not a closed system. The sun is losing its energy converting all those hydrogen atoms. The sun gives life to us while it dies, to put it more romantically. So this does refute the creationist argument that you can't have increased organization without supernatural interference.
I hope I didn't repeat anything. Too many comments to read.
A friend of mine and I went to an ex-Atari developer's house in South San Jose to pick up a few old things he was selling. He just happened to have an old Tempest game . . . with a paper printout overlay. The serial number was 001. Yes, he let us play it. It was in near-perfect condition.
He also sold my friend another old (pinball?) game, unreleased, which previously had been thought to have only one model of. Wrong, there are definitely two. Wish I could remember what it was:P
Anyway, I hope he's able to recover the game. Even if it's a piece of crap, it's a piece of historical crap:) And you never know, it could be good (for kids) - sometimes games get canned for all the wrong reasons.
Some of you have this sense of entitlement to your "rights" that extends way beyond anything reasonable. We're not islands, we're part of a society and we affect other people. When your right to this or that tramples other people's, we have to figure out where the line is drawn.
Don't get me wrong; my general feeling is that when DHS, FBI or other law enforcement claim they have to violate my civil rights to protect me from terrorists, it's because they aren't trying hard enough, not because there's no way to protect me without also oppressing me.
But someone or something unusually radioactive can present a danger to others. Sorry but in my book that trumps anyone's "right," perceived or not, to keep their health information private, which I consider very minor compared to public safety. If you have contagious TB, then you damned well ought not to get on a commercial airliner, and if you do anyway, everyone else on the plane should be told they were exposed. And if you deliberately did it, then then if they get sick it's your fault, and they ought to know who you are so they can recover damages. Well I'm sorry but that's fair, and too damn bad if your "private health information" was handed out.
I suppose some of you are also against metal detectors in schools, banks and airports, too. The Bill of Rights says we're protected against *unreasonable* search, and in my emphatically assertive opinion, a Geiger counter installed on a major interstate is not unreasonable. Personally I'm somewhat relieved.
When I read it I thought, oh my god, is it really still like that? I started at NC State in EE back in 1985. At the time it was considered #3 of EE departments in the US. Every single one of those items was true then. At freshman orientation they said, "look to your left and your right. If you're still here after 4 years the people on either side of you will be gone," referring to the 67% losses from the department. My professors - what dicks. Textbooks - not only stultifying but ridiculously expensive. Huge, 75+ student classes that were nothing but weed-out classes (worked on me!) No tutoring available except your friends, if you had any (ha ha), but you kinda couldn't get your homework done without a study group. Creativity exercises? Are you kidding me? Shutup and finish that SPICE simulation. Grading in EE was so tough that a 2.5 GPA was considered decent, and you had not one but THREE chances to pass a core class with a C, replacing your crappy grade with the (hopefully) better one you got the next time.
Item # 6 could have been, "First and second year classes are all taught by barely intelligible foreign first year grad students."
If I'd written this article, it would have been subtitled, "or, Why I Changed To Physics." My boss at my co-op job made fun of me for it, telling me I was defecting to liberal arts, hahah! Physics was hard too, but at least I enjoyed it.
Of course, I ended up an engineer anyway (software engineer). Go figure.
> even though I think religious people are stupid for believing without evidence
Thank you, you have fulfilled the requirement for bashing religion on any and all threads.
You should educate yourself on how logic works. Mainly: you start with assumptions. Assumptions by definition cannot be proven and therefore there is no evidence for them. This means that as long as you are depending on logic to work out your belief system, by your own definition, you are stupid.
But you're not. And neither am I. Since we can't agree on our basic assumptions, we are at an impasse. How about we just agree to disagree rather than being pointlessly insulting?
Slashdot Mirror
Assuming this is to "replace" my cards and/or cash, why would I want something where, if the batteries are dead, I can't buy anything?
A woman is usually carrying a purse, if it's a man he's typically carrying a wallet for other things anyway, so not much of a win there.
Why give hackers yet another way to steal my money?
Why give the feds/megacorps yet another way to track me and my spending?
WTF is wrong with cash? These days I'm a lot more likely to have my credit cards/bank account hacked than to be mugged for my bills, and money just doesn't weigh that much.
Risk management, cost benefit analysis means no way in hell would I sign up for this. I can't think of any possible improvements that would change this, short of a bona fide, anonymous, non-battery-powered credstick.
As the daughter of a long time, now retired public school teacher and who has friends who are currently public school teachers, I'll chime in with supporting teachers to sell their plans and keep the money.
I'll also corroborate all the people saying that teachers make these lesson plans outside of class, at home. They also do all their grading at home, including over holidays and school breaks. They start school 1 week or more before all the students. Most teachers I know pay for a significant portion of non-textbook classroom supplies OUT OF THEIR OWN POCKETS.
Teachers may have summers off - at least, ones who don't teach in year-round districts - but what they often do with that time is get a part time job so they can make up for the crappy pay they get.
Frankly, I find it appalling that we do not consider teaching a true profession, yet we make teachers go through a long certification process before we let them in the public schools to do often thankless work for crap pay and shoddy treatment. I am one of those people who adores teaching and is good at it, but I've seen what the public school system does to people, and the pay won't even come close to covering my living expenses. No thank you.
So let them sell the lesson plans. If it gives teachers more time with their families and a little more spending money, they deserve it, and so do their families.
Look, there are studies that have shown that people have different abilities to suspend disbelief. People who are better at it are more tolerant of gore and violence in films as well as games.
Your statement is clearly true for you, but it's not universal. But there are people who enjoy cartoonish violence.
I repeat what I said in a previous comment. Games are about having fun. If it's not fun, don't play it. If you want the violence to be realistic, and it's less fun without it, then assuming you're a normal person, you probably are just better at suspension of disbelief, and the violence for you is no problem.
I don't like it when it's immensely gory. I can tolerate a certain level of violence because I realize I am playing a game and ultimately all I'm doing is causing lines of code to run. But for me, there comes a point where the level of gore and violence are so realistic that that knowledge doesn't help any more - the images are too compelling and I have to work too hard to remind myself it's not real. That is when I stop having fun and I'm not going to play any more. And why should I?? It's just a frickin game!
"If you're properly focused on a game you don't really notice the extras."
Well I'll say this much - the amount and detail of gore in the Wolverine demo put me off too much to continue playing long enough to get to that level of focus. Things like the bullet time shots with the partial faces flying off and blood spurting everywhere were what did it.
Just face it, some of us simply do NOT like violence over a certain amount. I just do not enjoy the game. I find myself sitting there feeling physically bad. The whole point of video games is to have fun. If I'm not having fun, I don't care what the reason is, I won't keep playing it (and quite honestly couldn't give a crap what anyone thinks of me because of it).
I don't see why I should "get used" to a game, or properly focus, or learn better how to suspend disbelief or whatever. It's just a frickin game. If I want personal growth, I'll go to a therapist.
Ignoring that back then the weather, the makeup of the atmosphere, and the mammal population were different, and your glib implication that coal and oil were created by CO2, what happens if currently temperate areas turn to desert instead of jungle? What happens in the Sahara, and other equatorial regions, when they get hotter? They could easily grow larger and become even more inhabitable. You don't think people will just stay there, do you? I don't think you've thought this through.
A couple of years ago I bought a Motion Computing tablet PC off of eBay, from a seller that was clearly well-established. It didn't come with an install disc, so I e-mailed Motion Computing's customer service, asking if I could please purchase another one. I told them I got it on eBay, and gave them the serial number. They replied within only a few days, and said, just send us your address - we'll send you one for free. And they did so. As a result, I tell people about how accommodating they were every chance I get.
Yet another "OMG does X mean the end of Y? We can only hope predict chaos/destruction/carnage/dogs and cats living together/mass schadenfreude! **CLICK ITTT** READ IT RIGHT NOWWWUH !" Twitter being hit by "a big phishing scam," yes it's news, but the headline is more than a little melodramatic, don't you think?
First I'll answer the question - most people don't have to care in order for a boycott to have an effect. If only one in ten people participate, that's a 10% loss in sales. Even if all you do is boycott DRM-protected media, any company would sit up and take notice of a 10% loss in sales, particularly in this economy. In short, it doesn't matter if everyone or even most people care - enough need to care that it causes noticeable loss.
At the time the iTunes store started, I felt like the DRM solution was the only way to lure / drag the recording labels, kicking and screaming, into the digital 21st century, and I felt like it was a lot better than the punitive approach of suing Napster and Limewire users. If you have been paying attention, the licensing terms for DRM tracks on the iTunes Music Store have been gradually relaxed. Now there are a number of ways to purchase non-DRM tracks legally and easily - not just iTMS, but Amazon.com, eMusic, Magnatune, and a number of other, smaller vendors. Furthermore, you have always been able to buy CDs yourself and rip them, and if you were a poor college student like I used to be, you could always buy used CDs and trade your old ones in that you never listened to, back before you could "rip" your music at all, let alone download it from some Russian MP3 site. It is my opinion that as distasteful as DRM technology may be, Apple's approach did open the door to the legitimate digital music download market - whether by provoking a response or goading the labels to provide *some* convenient, inexpensive method of legally aquiring music in virtual form. However, I think this should be an intermediate step only, and DRM needs to be abandoned as quickly as possible.
So I ask you, is a boycott of Apple entirely really necessary, or shouldn't we just stop buying DRMed tracks instead, and force the market down the path consumers wanted in the first place? That is the route I have been taking for the last 2 years. I don't buy DRM tracks any more unless I need it for reference (I'm also a musician), and I simply cannot find it anywhere else, either on CD or on one of my (legal) sources for digital music.
I have looked into these issues fairly recently and your recollection matches mine as well. A large number of medicines today in common use are derived from plants. Aspirin is a big one. Aspirin has a variety of medicinal uses. Furthermore science is finding all sorts of health benefits from consuming certain plants, such as cranberry juice and cranberry extract as an antiseptic, or wine for heart health. To dismiss all of plant-based medicine as worthless (as some have, though obviously not this book) is not only ignorant but flat-out wrong, and is complete denial of thousands of years of successful medicinal practice before the formal science of pharmacology even existed. We know for sure that not all substances believed to have medicinal properties actually had them, but frequently there was one active ingredient in a preparation which acted as some kind of illness or injury prevention or treatment. Kohl, for example, was used successfully to help prevent eye infections in the ancient Near East. To talk about herbal medicines made with tiger tooth or rhino horn or shark fin is a contradiction. These ingredients render the substance non-herbal by definition. To then claim that some herbal medicines are therefore contributing to animal extinction is straw-man argument. My reading has been that acupuncture can assist with certain types of chronic pain and can lower blood pressure. However, any time one studies pain or immune response, it appears that it's hard to isolate what works and what doesn't, because both seem to be very susceptible to the patients' biases and mental outlook.
This is not necessarily about being dumb. People like Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Al Franken, Michael Moore, Bill Maher, Dennis Miller - their popularity is simply about shock value. People love haters and ranters. People who are nice, calm, reasoned and accurate don't get nearly the attention that haters do because that's boring. To get attention you have to stand out and a great way to stand out is to lie and exaggerate, and get people good and mad. It's pure emotional manipulation and nothing more. Nobody seems to understand that people like Ann Coulter are utterly irrelevant to the political process. If everyone ignored them, they'd all go away.
in other countries there arent such distinctions as 'nerds' etc, or such kind of school bullying culture.
Nerd bullying might be an American issue (and I certainly can't speak to the truth of that claim), but "school" bullying darn sure isn't - take England for example. I don't think the setting for the bullying is even relevant, nor is the target group - bullying is a classic social animal behavior used for establishing and maintaining a social hierarchy. It may be more or less prevalent in some areas, and the target group or type may be different, but it happens literally everywhere - not just in people but chickens, wolves, other primates, etc.
I was a classic nerd throughout school. When I went back to rural North Carolina for my 20th high school reunion, I wasn't sure to expect, but what I found was that everyone had simply grown up. This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. Everyone was perfectly nice, we had good conversation, and it was just a big family cookout at the house of one of my classmates. Some of my classmates had started their own businesses, most were married with kids, and were generally doing well and happy. Sure, I make more money than most of them, I've likely seen a lot more of the world than they have, probably generally more educated, but mainly I realized that I no longer had much of anything in common with them - we didn't enjoy the same things, we didn't have the same hobbies, and not much shared experience. But everyone who'd been an asshole in school to me had long gotten over it, and so had I.
*shrug* I guess I'm supposed to feel all superior, but I honestly don't care enough to hang on to a bunch of BS that happened when we were all kids, and neither did they. We have important issues to deal with.
A black man has been elected President of the United States of America, and that alone is extremely important. You can debate all you want about the semantics, but that's how America and the world see it, and that's how I see it. The fact of the matter is, when the President of the United States of America stands up in front of the nation and the world, we will see a brown face for the first time ever, and that means a hell of a lot to me and millions of others.
The American people have finally decided to do something about their feeling that the country was going in the wrong direction - without bloodshed, without a coup, and by following the laws that were designed to make this happen in a civil and stable way.
I for one am sick and tired of people's excessive cynicism and pessimism. It's just as irrational as excessive optimism. People live down to expectations, and if you don't demand better, you won't get it. Just because we don't often see instant results, it doesn't mean our efforts are wasted.
Often it's just an excuse for not being an activist. Other times I think it's to avoid being disappointed when one's hopes aren't fulfilled, but really what you're doing is conditioning yourself against recognizing all possibilities. This conditions people against hope, and it is debilitating.
The bottom line is, this man is living proof that you don't have to let the odds stop you from doing anything great, especially not here in America. I'm going to fly my flag, and I won't let anyone tell me I shouldn't be proud today; I am going to feel the joy for a little while longer, then roll up my sleeves and get back to work trying to make the world a better place.
An electromagnetic field cannot exist inside a conductor. I use a hinged metal credit card box for a lot of my cards, since some of my purses/bags have magnetic closures, and this protects them (and my BART cards) from getting wiped. Just remember the RFID-equipped item needs to be completely enclosed.
There are RFID-reader-proof passport holders available for sale, but you could easily make one yourself in any number of ways. You could use industrial strength aluminum foil.
You can also use metal screen, which is more flexible than metal sheet and won't tear like foil, but just know that the screen openings have to be less than 10% of the wavelength of the RF you want to keep out.
It does not need to be thick (within reason/possibility - don't use a 1-atom thick layer, k? :) ) It just needs to be a conductor. The joints aren't really relevant as long as there aren't gaps when it's closed - see the 10% rule.
As a guideline for wavelength, the microwave (GHz) frequencies run to the centimeter range. If you have gaps at the millimeter level, you are fine - just look at the screens over a microwave oven door to see what I mean.
Here's the wikipedia page for the electromagnetic spectrum: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:EM_spectrum.svg
It's easy to make up motivations, since it's completely unprovable. The more believable it is the better, and people will make up motivations that fit their own biases, so you can believe whatever you want. I prefer being more rational; do you have evidence for this? Has it happened in the past? Where and when? Do you have any evidence whatsoever that this is not just due to incompetence rather than conspiracy? How do you know that "no-one in government/civil service wants these documents to be 100% secure?" Do you know everyone in government and civil service, and have you asked them? If not, are you some kind of magical mind-reader? And how likely is it that literally nobody in government wants what's right for America? Nobody? There is no more sweeping generalization.
This to me is plenty of evidence that everybody's irrational, particularly when it comes to people they don't identify or agree with, and belies motives other than seeking the truth and solving real problems.
You're not as fair as you think. There are lots of things that are "in" the "Old Testament" but that doesn't mean they're approved. Prostitutes and money lenders are "in" the "New Testament," but they are clearly not approved of. In fact King David's conduct for having Bathsheba's husband killed so he could take her for himself, is pretty harshly condemned.
You're confusing origin stories that predated the establishment of Jewish law, with those laws. In the Torah, incest is explicitly forbidden, and human sacrifice is specifically replaced by animal sacrifice (starting with the binding of Isaac). The lesson of the binding of Isaac is that God does NOT actually want human sacrifice. There are portions in later books where some Israelites have taken up the practice (which is still being followed by their neighbors, by the way) and they are excoriated by the prophets of their time. So let's make this clear: human sacrifice and incest are FORBIDDEN by God in the Bible. Human actions occurring before the law of Moses was established are covered under the seven Noahide laws. (I leave finding out what they are as an exercise to the reader.)
The genocide portions are pretty horrific to (most) modern sensibilities today, and rightly so. Any decent person should have issues with those passages.
I keep reading the same wrong ideas over and over; I'm getting more than a little tired of people who seem to be relying on hearsay, poorly educated Sunday school teachers or Richard Dawkins talking points for their Bible knowledge, and then using this to form opinions about Christianity and/or Judaism. Even a small amount of study and reading in ancient Near East cultural history plus good Jewish AND Christian study Bibles would help. An uneducated opinion isn't an opinion at all.
Without dignifying the traditional Slashdot slap-happy, uncalled-for insistence on insulting every one of us with a religion at every minute opportunity, I agree with the point that, taken by themselves without any cultural context, the origin story of Scientology is no more bizarre than anything else.
However, it seems more bizarre to most people because it arose basically whole-cloth and with not a lot of cultural context. All of the so-called traditional religions developed over time and drew elements from the religious traditions around it (and rejected portions as being false or wrong). In that sense I think they were more evolutionary than revolutionary. This is the main area where Scientology differs. It also takes elements into its origin myths which are commonly believed to be false already. Most people of antiquity had no problems with the idea that there were other deities and that different tribes/nations/whatever worshipped their own. The aggressive cultures which adopted the world-dominating monotheism of Christianity and Islam changed all that in the Western world.
The definition of "cult" depends upon who you're asking. If you're asking scientists like archaeologists and anthropologists, then any offshoot of a religion that is considered heretical by the mainstream, a religion that is not widely adopted is considered a cult. Christianity in its early stages is frequently referred to as a Jewish "cult," with no insult implied. Judaism also had a "cult" of Astarte, a fertility deity believed by her worshippers to be God's wife, which didn't make it into modern times.
In the vernacular, we've attached a more pejorative meaning, and the best defintion I've read of a "cult" in this sense identifies several elements that tend to be present for this definition to hold: a charismatic leader, members must sever contact with family, members must hand over most or all of their money and/or possessions, members are discouraged from associating with non-members, and intolerance of dissent.
IAWTC, and, Benjamin Franklin's saying *actually* is:
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Big difference.
I think a better way of putting it is: there is no way to prove that anything before right this very moment existed and was not actualy just conjured up wholesale and put in place a moment ago. It's been said for ages - the Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna said it too. This is the case because the only way to prove otherwise is to go outside your own mind and this is of course, absurd.
;)
But really, to me this is mostly mental wanking. Of course we have to agree on some level of objective reality otherwise we wouldn't be having this discussion in the first place, because we'd just be talking to ourselves. Then again, some people insist that's exactly what's going on. I can't tell the difference, so I don't treat it as being something other than what it appears.
A second point I wanted to make: currently a computer simulation != biology, agreed, but with advances in quantum computing, it may be that we can create simulations which are, for all practical purposes, "real" universes with "real" physics and "real" beings and "real" biology - at least, to the things inside them, and they may have no way of knowing that they are "just" a computer program. They could invent all sorts of things to say about their "creator(s)" which aren't true at all. Does this make us Gods then? Does this not have some implications for this universe? I mean, maybe we're just some kid's homework assignment
I like the point about how it's true that organization can come from disorganization, but overall you must recognize that this organization in one area means increased disorganization in another. Earth evolved more complex organisms precisely because our sun is there, putting the energy into the Earth's system, and possibly also due to contamination by cosmic rays, comets and asteroids. So Earth is not a closed system. The sun is losing its energy converting all those hydrogen atoms. The sun gives life to us while it dies, to put it more romantically. So this does refute the creationist argument that you can't have increased organization without supernatural interference.
I hope I didn't repeat anything. Too many comments to read.
sorry, I just remembered - it wasn't just a printout overlay but it was also hand-colored.
I love stories like this.
:P
:) And you never know, it could be good (for kids) - sometimes games get canned for all the wrong reasons.
A friend of mine and I went to an ex-Atari developer's house in South San Jose to pick up a few old things he was selling. He just happened to have an old Tempest game . . . with a paper printout overlay. The serial number was 001. Yes, he let us play it. It was in near-perfect condition.
He also sold my friend another old (pinball?) game, unreleased, which previously had been thought to have only one model of. Wrong, there are definitely two. Wish I could remember what it was
Anyway, I hope he's able to recover the game. Even if it's a piece of crap, it's a piece of historical crap
Thank you for your sane response.
Some of you have this sense of entitlement to your "rights" that extends way beyond anything reasonable. We're not islands, we're part of a society and we affect other people. When your right to this or that tramples other people's, we have to figure out where the line is drawn.
Don't get me wrong; my general feeling is that when DHS, FBI or other law enforcement claim they have to violate my civil rights to protect me from terrorists, it's because they aren't trying hard enough, not because there's no way to protect me without also oppressing me.
But someone or something unusually radioactive can present a danger to others. Sorry but in my book that trumps anyone's "right," perceived or not, to keep their health information private, which I consider very minor compared to public safety. If you have contagious TB, then you damned well ought not to get on a commercial airliner, and if you do anyway, everyone else on the plane should be told they were exposed. And if you deliberately did it, then then if they get sick it's your fault, and they ought to know who you are so they can recover damages. Well I'm sorry but that's fair, and too damn bad if your "private health information" was handed out.
I suppose some of you are also against metal detectors in schools, banks and airports, too. The Bill of Rights says we're protected against *unreasonable* search, and in my emphatically assertive opinion, a Geiger counter installed on a major interstate is not unreasonable. Personally I'm somewhat relieved.
Oh please! It's a joke, lighten up!
When I read it I thought, oh my god, is it really still like that? I started at NC State in EE back in 1985. At the time it was considered #3 of EE departments in the US. Every single one of those items was true then. At freshman orientation they said, "look to your left and your right. If you're still here after 4 years the people on either side of you will be gone," referring to the 67% losses from the department. My professors - what dicks. Textbooks - not only stultifying but ridiculously expensive. Huge, 75+ student classes that were nothing but weed-out classes (worked on me!) No tutoring available except your friends, if you had any (ha ha), but you kinda couldn't get your homework done without a study group. Creativity exercises? Are you kidding me? Shutup and finish that SPICE simulation. Grading in EE was so tough that a 2.5 GPA was considered decent, and you had not one but THREE chances to pass a core class with a C, replacing your crappy grade with the (hopefully) better one you got the next time.
Item # 6 could have been, "First and second year classes are all taught by barely intelligible foreign first year grad students."
If I'd written this article, it would have been subtitled, "or, Why I Changed To Physics." My boss at my co-op job made fun of me for it, telling me I was defecting to liberal arts, hahah! Physics was hard too, but at least I enjoyed it.
Of course, I ended up an engineer anyway (software engineer). Go figure.
> even though I think religious people are stupid for believing without evidence
Thank you, you have fulfilled the requirement for bashing religion on any and all threads.
You should educate yourself on how logic works. Mainly: you start with assumptions. Assumptions by definition cannot be proven and therefore there is no evidence for them. This means that as long as you are depending on logic to work out your belief system, by your own definition, you are stupid.
But you're not. And neither am I. Since we can't agree on our basic assumptions, we are at an impasse. How about we just agree to disagree rather than being pointlessly insulting?