The only thing worse than a person who calls me up and harasses me - is a person who ACCEPTS MONEY to call me up and harass me.
I know most of them don't like their jobs, but that doesn't change the fact that they are ABUSING PEOPLE FOR HIRE, which is despicable. At all times they have the opportunity to quit and find a job which doesn't involve abusing people, and which might even be more rewarding. But instead they have weighed the ethics of harassing people against the allure of money, and they have come down on the side of evil. I don't feel sorry for them at all. I'll make them pay.
The Alamogordo Daily News article has some of the worst writing I've ever seen. Get this guy an editor, quick! Not only is the science explained incorrectly, but paragraph after paragraph is filled with laughably awful sentence structure.
Here are just four paragraphs, with my commentary on them. The entire article is this bad.
Obviously, the world record was broken and the Test Track now owns the fastest thing ever attached to Earth. Jolliffe even suspects that once data is evaluated, the speed could exceed Mach 8.6.
It's usually unprofessional to use "obviously" in news articles. Somehow I think the speed isn't going to exceed zero anymore. What the writer means is that they'll FIND that the speed DID exceed Mach 8.6, not that the speed WILL exceed Mach 8.6. You probably should insert "the" before "data," buddy, because you're probably not referring to the data I evaluated this morning, which as far as I know didn't affect the missile's speed.
The spline system succeeded. Previously, double-sided tape held the plastic to the track. For this test, seven tankers pumped helium into the 11,000-foot tube. Because helium is 1/7th air's density, when the sled shot through the tube for the last two miles of the three-mile run, the sled's momentum increased by a "tremendous amount of speed," Kurtz said. As the sled entered through a diaphragm, the tube immediately disintegrated; but because of the speed the vacuum created helped the sled to continue unimpeded.
Jesus - the sled's momentum increased by an amount of speed? I bet its energy also increased in power and its current went up by fifteen volts. I think the guy means TANK, not "tanker." A tanker is a vehicle containing tanks. A tank is a vessel containing the actual helium. What's with the last clause, the one after the inappropriate semicolon? Because of the speed the vacuum created helped? What? There's too many verbs. It took me a long time to parse this sentence. My best guess is "Because of the speed, the vacuum WHICH WAS created helped the sled...."
The Hypersonic Upgrade began in 1997. The program converted the monorail sled (which held all previous speed records) to a double, narrow-gauge track with the rails 26 inches apart. (Supersonic speed transitions to hypersonic at Mach 5.) The monorail generated "high vibrations," Jolliffe said. The dual track reduces vibration by a factor of four (from 80 Gs to 18 Gs), helping in the push to faster speeds.
They converted a sled to a track? Somehow I doubt the monorail sled held ALL previous land speed records. For instance, the speed records that were set before it was invented. Those were probably held by something else. "Supersonic speed transitions to hypersonic at Mach 5" - what an opaque way of explaining it. I would say "The term 'hypersonic' refers to speeds of Mach 5 and above; speeds below Mach 5 but above Mach 2 are called 'supersonic.'" And why the hell is that sentence in that location, in between two sentences that discuss rail construction? It should have been immediately after the sentence in which "hypersonic" appeared. Was it really necessary to quote the words "high vibrations" directly?
According to Kurtz, the sled's first three stages were designed to traverse 1.4 miles in 4.65 seconds, and the final two stages 1.8 miles in 1.3 seconds. At a pre-specified point along the three-mile route, bolts on the missile front were explosively detached -- allowing the simulated warhead to lift about 20 degrees -- and a fraction of a moment later the back bolts were detonated. The track then dipped, and centrifugal force carried the missile upward into the target.
As George Carlin would say, "pre-specified" should mean it hasn't been specified yet. Even if it doesn't, the "pre-" is still redundant. "A fraction of a moment" is bad. Just use a "moment" or "split second" - you don't have to be accurate to within a fraction of your made-up time interval. It would appear from this paragraph that 1.4 plus 1.8 equals three. And, of course, centrifugal force has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with the motion of the missile. Centrifugal force isn't even real.
I lost a lot of weight last year by listening to Opie and Anthony while jogging. I would not have been able to keep at it without something that entertaining.
The defining characteristic of a corporation, in America, is that its investors cannot be held liable for more than the amount of their investment.
In other words, suing the VCs for the actions of the company they invested in is SPECIFICALLY PROHIBITED. What's next? Someone finds a syringe in a Coke bottle, and lawyers sue every little old lady who owns shares in a mutual fund that invests in Coca-Cola stock?
I can see the hamfisated DRM attempts now
on
Presenting The CDR-ROM
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· Score: 3, Insightful
No doubt companies would try to use the feature for copy protection and/or DRM. Simply write some machine identifier to the disc, and then presto, your software can demand that the user 1) keep the disc in the drive and 2) only run it on the machine that corresponds to the locked-in identifier.
Of course, for the competent user, this would be about as hard to defeat as the infamous "enhanced CD" scheme that you can defeat with a felt pen. But it would still be annoying and user-hostile. Although that seems to be a consciously decided marketing strategy for the Big Content conglomerates these days.
Restricting this scheme to AOL hillbillies probably won't hurt it's chances of success.
If you're smart enough not to use AOL, then not only are you probably smart enough to know how to burn music without paying for it, but you're probably also smart enough not to use cheesy proprietary music formats and software that are booby-trapped with DRM and spyware and god knows what else.
- many in my company believe that scripting languages are often more suitable for all applications except those where processing power or speed is absolutely critical. The added performance overhead is paltry compared to the development overhead involved in writing code to the more exacting specifications of compiled languages.
Atomic precision over FM? Shyeah! As if!
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Assorted CES Gizmos
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· Score: 1
Leaving aside the question of who needs atomic precision on their watch in the first place -
How do you expect to have nanosecond precision if:
- The data is broadcast on radio waves with a period of about ten nanoseconds (and that's just the carrier frequency) - AND the data is broadcast over an unknown distance (unless you only travel in a circle around the antenna) - AND the receiver's system clock cycles are also much longer than one nanosecond? (unless the watch runs at 1 GHz)
iAge tells you how that age is represented. If I saw a variable called 'age' I wouldn't have a clue what the type was. It could be string for all I know. Not everything is as obvious to everyone else as it is to you.
Yeah, that would be a big problem if you couldn't be bothered just to read the declaration:
unsigned short age;
Hmm, what could age be? A string? An array of doubles? How confusing! Better name it unsigned_short_integer_representing_someones_age to be sure. Not everything is as obviouus to everyone else as it is to me.
What's the difference between spam and denial-of-service attacks? A spammer does nothing but many unsolicited packets, just like a DoS perpetrator. If receiving spam is a "choice," as you say, then getting DoSed is also a "choice," isn't it?
Make up your mind: Either spam is illegal, or DoS attacks are legal. There is no basis for treating one differently from the other.
If you follow the theory that anything which brings humanity closer to cyborgdom is cool, then being a human teletubby is a step toward the future. Even if the cyborg to which you're a precursor is nothing more than a common everyday kiosk. You're not even VersaKiosk compatible. As you recall, the VersaKiosk was a wetware package originally developed by the Kamakazu Corporation and first released in 2047. This was in the infancy of nanobotic technology, before the advent of macrocyber. Instead, the user interface, which for a VersaKiosk consisted of standard A/V equipment and a touch screen (later versions provided for Personal Remote interaction), consisted of external electronics on a harness worn like clothing. The host and external harness communicated by muscular and tactile feedback. Needless to say, the bandwidth was lossy and a mere fraction of what we have now achieved with macrocyber. Today's state-of-the-art BrUIn 6K** infokiosks feature the complete melding of biological and electromechanical systems that only the most elite military research projects had just a few years ago. It just shows how far we've come. The A/V interface is literally grown into the host, who travels around the operational floor quickly and nimbly with the capable battery power of a neurally controlled 4-degree-of-freedom wheel drive (which is typically farmed out to mech specialists like Eisendracht or RLAX), while....
Oh no, I've been spouting anachronisms again. I'm in violation of any number of Directives. What year is it again?
So nearly every government in the world (except for the USA, naturally, with corrupt Bush) has signed up to the Kyoto treaty because most scientists think we have no effect on global warming? Aren't you a little divorced from reality?
Speak for yourself, hippie. Several countries have ratified Kyoto, but none of the countries who would actually face restrictions have signed it, with the exception of only two. So unless by "nearly every government in the world" you mean "Romania and the Czech Republic and that's about it," lay off the knee-jerk Bush-bashing and don't believe everything your fellow patchouli-sniffers tell you. Get your facts straight and try to break your immature leftist addiction to outrage for its own sake.
Yet another collection of sixty-five identical comments: "A security hole in a Microsoft product? I'm shocked!"
Gee, how original. You guys must be a bunch of comic geniuses to come up with something that witty and unpredictable.
You karma whores. You've come upon a foolproof way to get scores of "5, Funny". Just write "Yeah right, as if Microsoft doesn't suck" and you'll get modded up every time. This method is so foolproof, I bet I'll get modded down just for revealing your secret.
Advancement past level 60? That's awesome! I was afraid I'd never be able to level endlessly anymore. What could be more fun than walking up to a monster, pressing a key, leaving the room for two minutes, and then repeating the process 467,892 more times? Hooray!
The news report informing us that the Republican Party is bankrupt does not occur until the very end of the movie. As I interpret it, Martin isn't the culprit, Cosmo is. Cosmo wanted to use the box to remake the world into a Marxist utopia. The news report is meant to show that after Martin defeats him, he has resorted to the same cheesy pranks he was doing thirty years ago, screwing with Republican bank accounts.
That 70s Show stinks like a McDonald's dumpster
on
Katz v Taco: Futurama
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· Score: 1
Talk about the issues which the show is willing to broach, if you want. I don't care what it is able to get past the censors (after all, it's on Fox). I can't stand the show because it's blatantly unfunny. And I also consider laugh tracks insulting to my intelligence, especially when they are used after every single line.
Slashdot Mirror
The only thing worse than a person who calls me up and harasses me - is a person who ACCEPTS MONEY to call me up and harass me.
I know most of them don't like their jobs, but that doesn't change the fact that they are ABUSING PEOPLE FOR HIRE, which is despicable. At all times they have the opportunity to quit and find a job which doesn't involve abusing people, and which might even be more rewarding. But instead they have weighed the ethics of harassing people against the allure of money, and they have come down on the side of evil. I don't feel sorry for them at all. I'll make them pay.
Unless the hay happens to be buoyant. Guh.
"ROBOT HOUSE...!"
The Alamogordo Daily News article has some of the worst writing I've ever seen. Get this guy an editor, quick! Not only is the science explained incorrectly, but paragraph after paragraph is filled with laughably awful sentence structure.
Here are just four paragraphs, with my commentary on them. The entire article is this bad.
Obviously, the world record was broken and the Test Track now owns the fastest thing ever attached to Earth. Jolliffe even suspects that once data is evaluated, the speed could exceed Mach 8.6.
It's usually unprofessional to use "obviously" in news articles.
Somehow I think the speed isn't going to exceed zero anymore. What the writer means is that they'll FIND that the speed DID exceed Mach 8.6, not that the speed WILL exceed Mach 8.6.
You probably should insert "the" before "data," buddy, because you're probably not referring to the data I evaluated this morning, which as far as I know didn't affect the missile's speed.
The spline system succeeded. Previously, double-sided tape held the plastic to the track. For this test, seven tankers pumped helium into the 11,000-foot tube. Because helium is 1/7th air's density, when the sled shot through the tube for the last two miles of the three-mile run, the sled's momentum increased by a "tremendous amount of speed," Kurtz said. As the sled entered through a diaphragm, the tube immediately disintegrated; but because of the speed the vacuum created helped the sled to continue unimpeded.
Jesus - the sled's momentum increased by an amount of speed? I bet its energy also increased in power and its current went up by fifteen volts.
I think the guy means TANK, not "tanker." A tanker is a vehicle containing tanks. A tank is a vessel containing the actual helium.
What's with the last clause, the one after the inappropriate semicolon? Because of the speed the vacuum created helped? What? There's too many verbs. It took me a long time to parse this sentence. My best guess is "Because of the speed, the vacuum WHICH WAS created helped the sled...."
The Hypersonic Upgrade began in 1997. The program converted the monorail sled (which held all previous speed records) to a double, narrow-gauge track with the rails 26 inches apart. (Supersonic speed transitions to hypersonic at Mach 5.) The monorail generated "high vibrations," Jolliffe said. The dual track reduces vibration by a factor of four (from 80 Gs to 18 Gs), helping in the push to faster speeds.
They converted a sled to a track?
Somehow I doubt the monorail sled held ALL previous land speed records. For instance, the speed records that were set before it was invented. Those were probably held by something else.
"Supersonic speed transitions to hypersonic at Mach 5" - what an opaque way of explaining it. I would say "The term 'hypersonic' refers to speeds of Mach 5 and above; speeds below Mach 5 but above Mach 2 are called 'supersonic.'"
And why the hell is that sentence in that location, in between two sentences that discuss rail construction? It should have been immediately after the sentence in which "hypersonic" appeared.
Was it really necessary to quote the words "high vibrations" directly?
According to Kurtz, the sled's first three stages were designed to traverse 1.4 miles in 4.65 seconds, and the final two stages 1.8 miles in 1.3 seconds. At a pre-specified point along the three-mile route, bolts on the missile front were explosively detached -- allowing the simulated warhead to lift about 20 degrees -- and a fraction of a moment later the back bolts were detonated. The track then dipped, and centrifugal force carried the missile upward into the target.
As George Carlin would say, "pre-specified" should mean it hasn't been specified yet. Even if it doesn't, the "pre-" is still redundant.
"A fraction of a moment" is bad. Just use a "moment" or "split second" - you don't have to be accurate to within a fraction of your made-up time interval.
It would appear from this paragraph that 1.4 plus 1.8 equals three.
And, of course, centrifugal force has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with the motion of the missile. Centrifugal force isn't even real.
You have no idea.
I lost a lot of weight last year by listening to Opie and Anthony while jogging. I would not have been able to keep at it without something that entertaining.
So reduce the surface tension by adding detergent until the needle won't float.
Or churn the water as you're dumping the stuff in (if the act of dumping doesn't churn it enough already) so the needle doesn't stay on the surface.
Chumpnuts.
Futurama = more gooder
...don't they understand?
The defining characteristic of a corporation, in America, is that its investors cannot be held liable for more than the amount of their investment.
In other words, suing the VCs for the actions of the company they invested in is SPECIFICALLY PROHIBITED. What's next? Someone finds a syringe in a Coke bottle, and lawyers sue every little old lady who owns shares in a mutual fund that invests in Coca-Cola stock?
No doubt companies would try to use the feature for copy protection and/or DRM. Simply write some machine identifier to the disc, and then presto, your software can demand that the user 1) keep the disc in the drive and 2) only run it on the machine that corresponds to the locked-in identifier.
Of course, for the competent user, this would be about as hard to defeat as the infamous "enhanced CD" scheme that you can defeat with a felt pen. But it would still be annoying and user-hostile. Although that seems to be a consciously decided marketing strategy for the Big Content conglomerates these days.
Restricting this scheme to AOL hillbillies probably won't hurt it's chances of success.
If you're smart enough not to use AOL, then not only are you probably smart enough to know how to burn music without paying for it, but you're probably also smart enough not to use cheesy proprietary music formats and software that are booby-trapped with DRM and spyware and god knows what else.
- many in my company believe that scripting languages are often more suitable for all applications except those where processing power or speed is absolutely critical. The added performance overhead is paltry compared to the development overhead involved in writing code to the more exacting specifications of compiled languages.
Leaving aside the question of who needs atomic precision on their watch in the first place -
How do you expect to have nanosecond precision if:
- The data is broadcast on radio waves with a period of about ten nanoseconds (and that's just the carrier frequency)
- AND the data is broadcast over an unknown distance (unless you only travel in a circle around the antenna)
- AND the receiver's system clock cycles are also much longer than one nanosecond? (unless the watch runs at 1 GHz)
...is because pop-ups are more visible (read as: annoying) and they don't mess up the site's page layout.
So when I hear "Ask Jeeves is eschewing banners for paid listings" I cynically suspect they left out "and a heaping crapload of pop-ups."
It's all a moot point, though, because who in their right mind uses Ask Jeeves in the first place?
iAge tells you how that age is represented. If I saw a variable called 'age' I wouldn't have a clue what the type was. It could be string for all I know. Not everything is as obvious to everyone else as it is to you.
Yeah, that would be a big problem if you couldn't be bothered just to read the declaration:
unsigned short age;
Hmm, what could age be? A string? An array of doubles? How confusing! Better name it unsigned_short_integer_representing_someones_age to be sure. Not everything is as obviouus to everyone else as it is to me.
What's the difference between spam and denial-of-service attacks? A spammer does nothing but many unsolicited packets, just like a DoS perpetrator. If receiving spam is a "choice," as you say, then getting DoSed is also a "choice," isn't it?
Make up your mind: Either spam is illegal, or DoS attacks are legal. There is no basis for treating one differently from the other.
You know, the Nazis had pieces of flair that they made the Jews wear.
If you follow the theory that anything which brings humanity closer to cyborgdom is cool, then being a human teletubby is a step toward the future. Even if the cyborg to which you're a precursor is nothing more than a common everyday kiosk. You're not even VersaKiosk compatible. As you recall, the VersaKiosk was a wetware package originally developed by the Kamakazu Corporation and first released in 2047. This was in the infancy of nanobotic technology, before the advent of macrocyber. Instead, the user interface, which for a VersaKiosk consisted of standard A/V equipment and a touch screen (later versions provided for Personal Remote interaction), consisted of external electronics on a harness worn like clothing. The host and external harness communicated by muscular and tactile feedback. Needless to say, the bandwidth was lossy and a mere fraction of what we have now achieved with macrocyber. Today's state-of-the-art BrUIn 6K** infokiosks feature the complete melding of biological and electromechanical systems that only the most elite military research projects had just a few years ago. It just shows how far we've come. The A/V interface is literally grown into the host, who travels around the operational floor quickly and nimbly with the capable battery power of a neurally controlled 4-degree-of-freedom wheel drive (which is typically farmed out to mech specialists like Eisendracht or RLAX), while....
Oh no, I've been spouting anachronisms again. I'm in violation of any number of Directives. What year is it again?
So nearly every government in the world (except for the USA, naturally, with corrupt Bush) has signed up to the Kyoto treaty because most scientists think we have no effect on global warming? Aren't you a little divorced from reality?
Speak for yourself, hippie. Several countries have ratified Kyoto, but none of the countries who would actually face restrictions have signed it, with the exception of only two. So unless by "nearly every government in the world" you mean "Romania and the Czech Republic and that's about it," lay off the knee-jerk Bush-bashing and don't believe everything your fellow patchouli-sniffers tell you. Get your facts straight and try to break your immature leftist addiction to outrage for its own sake.
Agreed, I've noticed that the last star wars film always seems to be the "worst one ever" until a few years go by.
Maybe you notice that because it's TRUE.
Episode 6 WAS the worst of the three, and Episode 1 IS the worst of the four.
How many terrawatts are in 1.21 jigawatts?
Yet another collection of sixty-five identical comments: "A security hole in a Microsoft product? I'm shocked!"
Gee, how original. You guys must be a bunch of comic geniuses to come up with something that witty and unpredictable.
You karma whores. You've come upon a foolproof way to get scores of "5, Funny". Just write "Yeah right, as if Microsoft doesn't suck" and you'll get modded up every time. This method is so foolproof, I bet I'll get modded down just for revealing your secret.
I heard the only reason he made the third one was because Temple of Doom was so bad and he was ashamed.
Of course, I have come to doubt that story, as I no longer feel he is capable of feeling shame.
Advancement past level 60? That's awesome! I was afraid I'd never be able to level endlessly anymore. What could be more fun than walking up to a monster, pressing a key, leaving the room for two minutes, and then repeating the process 467,892 more times? Hooray!
The news report informing us that the Republican Party is bankrupt does not occur until the very end of the movie. As I interpret it, Martin isn't the culprit, Cosmo is. Cosmo wanted to use the box to remake the world into a Marxist utopia. The news report is meant to show that after Martin defeats him, he has resorted to the same cheesy pranks he was doing thirty years ago, screwing with Republican bank accounts.
Talk about the issues which the show is willing to broach, if you want. I don't care what it is able to get past the censors (after all, it's on Fox). I can't stand the show because it's blatantly unfunny.
And I also consider laugh tracks insulting to my intelligence, especially when they are used after every single line.