Because you have it exactly backwards: the Church of Scientology didn't put this stuff out there. It was posted years ago by some of their critics, and CoS has been chasing it ever since, trying to stuff it back into the bottle.
If you're not either too young or not an American, think "Pentagon Papers", except that in this case the CoS is (obviously) a non-governmental (just mental) organization, so "national security" isn't an option. Instead they've claimed copyright on the materials in question, which were, they say, internal Church documents.
Oh, I'm not saying I don't resent what they're trying to do, or that I won't resist it. I'm just saying that media have been replaced before, and not always to the benefit of every user, although generally (you're right) to the benefit of the majority of us.
Of course, I might be jaded. I certainly have some LP's, I think I have an 8-track or two kicking around, probably next to the 5-1/4" floppies (which are next to the 8" floppies).
Way back when when the world was young and Lisa's roamed the Earth, Apple installed "Twiggy" drives -- 5-1/4", with two count 'em two heads and, of course, two slots in the disk to read through. Ebola was received with more enthusiasm, and Apple dropped the idea.
Whoops! Never mind. Just Googled them, and there're not as I remembered. Two slots, but on opposite sides, and rotational non-constant speed -- hey, these things were pretty cool...
Although I agree that Rowling is writing for kids and adults, don't let the franchise sway you. A good many books written for adults have become "childrens' classics" over the years.
After all, how many adults would be caught dead at a Gulliver's Travels movie? The book was certainly written for adults (indeed, at the time I'm not sure that anybody was writing for kids), but it has sort of devolved away from its author's intentions. Dickens thought he was writing searing social criticism (well, OK, he was paying the bills, too), but almost all his stuff is also currently marketed for kids. Same thing with Verne.
As a matter of fact, I'm beginning to suspect that that books that are too difficult for adults get marketed to kids.
Yeah, if Christianity could just take root in Latin America...
Besides, cell phones are often more widely used in third-world nations. They're only luxury goods if you already have a copper network in place. I'm quite sure that if we had it all do over again here in the States, we'd build cell towers rather than run thousands of miles of wire, just as many people are "building" WiFi LANs in their homes rather than running Cat5 through the walls.
Well, apparently Timothy agrees with you, although he opts to make it explicit.
One of the reasons I read The New Yorker is their insistence that the act of working together is "coöperation" (hope that renders right), rather than cooperation or co-operation.
What about a painting from the 16th century depicting a guy sticking an 18" cock up a woman's ass while she also gives head to another guy and fingers a chick? There's some terrific Chinese stuff from a thousand years ago, beautifully rendered and absolutely intended to arouse. And then there's Indian temple art...we haven't been in Kansas for a long time.
No! Next you'll tell me that the Germans didn't speak English all the time, even when talking amongst themselves.
Re:Y2K played down too much
on
Byte Wars
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· Score: 2
Although I agree with the thrust of your comment, I don't think we did see this in the air-traffic control system -- it was shut down deliberately and not ungracefully. Nobody was left hanging in the air looking for clearance.
We did see this sort of thing in the 1977 NYC blackout, with multiple lightning strikes causing cascade failures. In that instance the system protected itself and could later be brought back online, so in a sense it was designed behaviour, but it didn't seem to be a lot of fun for people in NYC.
Well, I figure that reading is systematic while spelling is arbitrary -- it's damned hard to figure out how to spell a word by examining its context. I wouldn't have mentioned it, of course, except that in a sig it gets repeated.
Does Slash retrofit the correction to your previous posts?
Yeah, I try to update my site every five or ten years, whether it needs it or not. I like to think of it as "minimalist".
Didn't really mean to be a dick, just thought you were being a little harsh. Hell, maybe he wrote "diagonally" and his editor swapped in "diameter". There is a picture, or at least there was when I looked at the story (yup, still there, almost literally big as life), and the screen is clearly rectangular. I probably would have written "four-inch screen" and left it at that, since diagonal measurements are pretty standard, and for a device described as being 3" x 5", that would be about right (looks like maybe a 1/4" border on the long sides and a 1/2" on the short, so maybe 2-1/2" x 4", so 2.5^2 + 16, take the square root, mumble, mumble, well, I get 4.7 inches -- close enough for jazz), and nobody's going to buy the damned thing based just on this description anyway. (In fact, odds are nobody's going to buy the damned thing period, or even have the chance to. He's probably going to review 6 more products we'll never see before the week is out.)
Actually, what he probably should have said was "itty-bitty screen, roughly the same size as those on a Palm".
Well, if open source is about anything, it's about choices -- go for it.
I wasn't really questioning the "totalitarian" part -- Rob & Co. don't really pretend otherwise (it's their world, we just live in it). It's more the "media", unless you meant "medium", so "this site" rather than "all channels of communication" (You know, like "The gray aliens, working with the Knights Templar, control the media".)
No, it's not optimal for data, you're right. Still, it all sort of depends the level you examine.
The biggest difference, as I understand it, is that the POTS stuff is connection-oriented, so that an entire channel is allocated even when not all of it is needed (your voice takes up 64kbs whether you're talking a mile a minute or pausing to think -- during the pause digitized silence is going down the wire), whereas data networks think more of packets and would tend to stuff other packets into the gaps.
"Digitized silence...we could name our band that, man!"
You misunderstand. The last mile of your phone service is analog, but that's about it. Long-haul voice was digitized years ago. At this point, I believe it's digital after the CO, so the "last mile" is more like the last 1000 yards in a metropolitan area, although it might be longer in Mayberry.
Now digital doesn't mean ATM, of course, but at any rate not analog.
Well, thank God you save your submissions. Maybe you can ask the refs for an instant replay call.
BTW, I noticed your plan:
Before I leave civilian life in August, I am going to launch my own competitive endeavour to counter/.'s totalitarian control of the media. Basically, it will consist of a/. like site where people can submit stories, and others can then comment on them. However, the placement and popularity of a topic will be up to the readership, as every viewer will get to either vote yeah or neigh to a particular piece or comment, allowing the readership to determine the popularity of a storey
Not to belabor the obvious, but have you looked at k5? Scoop might be a good basis for you.
"Totalitarian control of the media", though? Maybe you need to get out more. AOL/Time-Warner/God Inc. might have some "totalitarian control", but the people who read Slashdot are just a bunch of riff-raff goofing around to impress ourselves. It's like a cable-access channel, without the production values -- Wayne and Garth on a budget.
OK, the guy almost certainly meant "four inches diagonally". He screwed up. Somebody should have caught it, but the spell checker passed it so it got missed. It's not so much poor writing as it is poor editing, and it's not all that bad. Move on with your life.
He's going to be the only kid in his gradeschool with a patent, that's what. It's a novelty, a vanity patent, if you will, the sort of gift that a patent attorney is almost uniquely qualified to give his son. I think it's kind of sweet, to tell you the truth, and I daresay he'll never attempt to enforce it. Perhaps he'll donate license to the children of the world or somesuch.
Yeah, I'm starting to warm to it. Is there any reasonable way to lose the split infinitive? (because I'm that sort of bear -- I always wince and mutter, "boldly to go!" at the beginning of Star Trek)
Slashdot Mirror
isn't quite the same as
It's the same relationship as
and
I mean, for a law professor, "looking more like it's OK" is equivocal indeed.
If you're not either too young or not an American, think "Pentagon Papers", except that in this case the CoS is (obviously) a non-governmental (just mental) organization, so "national security" isn't an option. Instead they've claimed copyright on the materials in question, which were, they say, internal Church documents.
Of course, I might be jaded. I certainly have some LP's, I think I have an 8-track or two kicking around, probably next to the 5-1/4" floppies (which are next to the 8" floppies).
Way back when when the world was young and Lisa's roamed the Earth, Apple installed "Twiggy" drives -- 5-1/4", with two count 'em two heads and, of course, two slots in the disk to read through. Ebola was received with more enthusiasm, and Apple dropped the idea.
Whoops! Never mind. Just Googled them, and there're not as I remembered. Two slots, but on opposite sides, and rotational non-constant speed -- hey, these things were pretty cool...
After all, how many adults would be caught dead at a Gulliver's Travels movie? The book was certainly written for adults (indeed, at the time I'm not sure that anybody was writing for kids), but it has sort of devolved away from its author's intentions. Dickens thought he was writing searing social criticism (well, OK, he was paying the bills, too), but almost all his stuff is also currently marketed for kids. Same thing with Verne.
As a matter of fact, I'm beginning to suspect that that books that are too difficult for adults get marketed to kids.
So you've got Win XP on 5-1/4" disks?
Besides, cell phones are often more widely used in third-world nations. They're only luxury goods if you already have a copper network in place. I'm quite sure that if we had it all do over again here in the States, we'd build cell towers rather than run thousands of miles of wire, just as many people are "building" WiFi LANs in their homes rather than running Cat5 through the walls.
One of the reasons I read The New Yorker is their insistence that the act of working together is "coöperation" (hope that renders right), rather than cooperation or co-operation.
What about a painting from the 16th century depicting a guy sticking an 18" cock up a woman's ass while she also gives head to another guy and fingers a chick? There's some terrific Chinese stuff from a thousand years ago, beautifully rendered and absolutely intended to arouse. And then there's Indian temple art...we haven't been in Kansas for a long time.
No! Next you'll tell me that the Germans didn't speak English all the time, even when talking amongst themselves.
We did see this sort of thing in the 1977 NYC blackout, with multiple lightning strikes causing cascade failures. In that instance the system protected itself and could later be brought back online, so in a sense it was designed behaviour, but it didn't seem to be a lot of fun for people in NYC.
Would you guys please stop orking those poor cows?
Does Slash retrofit the correction to your previous posts?
Oh, yeah, and c'mere a sec (whisper: it's "anonymity", dude!)
Didn't really mean to be a dick, just thought you were being a little harsh. Hell, maybe he wrote "diagonally" and his editor swapped in "diameter". There is a picture, or at least there was when I looked at the story (yup, still there, almost literally big as life), and the screen is clearly rectangular. I probably would have written "four-inch screen" and left it at that, since diagonal measurements are pretty standard, and for a device described as being 3" x 5", that would be about right (looks like maybe a 1/4" border on the long sides and a 1/2" on the short, so maybe 2-1/2" x 4", so 2.5^2 + 16, take the square root, mumble, mumble, well, I get 4.7 inches -- close enough for jazz), and nobody's going to buy the damned thing based just on this description anyway. (In fact, odds are nobody's going to buy the damned thing period, or even have the chance to. He's probably going to review 6 more products we'll never see before the week is out.)
Actually, what he probably should have said was "itty-bitty screen, roughly the same size as those on a Palm".
I wasn't really questioning the "totalitarian" part -- Rob & Co. don't really pretend otherwise (it's their world, we just live in it). It's more the "media", unless you meant "medium", so "this site" rather than "all channels of communication" (You know, like "The gray aliens, working with the Knights Templar, control the media".)
Yeah, I got married and lost my...never mind.
The biggest difference, as I understand it, is that the POTS stuff is connection-oriented, so that an entire channel is allocated even when not all of it is needed (your voice takes up 64kbs whether you're talking a mile a minute or pausing to think -- during the pause digitized silence is going down the wire), whereas data networks think more of packets and would tend to stuff other packets into the gaps.
"Digitized silence...we could name our band that, man!"
Now digital doesn't mean ATM, of course, but at any rate not analog.
No, he'd rather download or play games than listen to his girlfriend. The difference is subtle but significant. :)
BTW, I noticed your plan:
Not to belabor the obvious, but have you looked at k5? Scoop might be a good basis for you.
"Totalitarian control of the media", though? Maybe you need to get out more. AOL/Time-Warner/God Inc. might have some "totalitarian control", but the people who read Slashdot are just a bunch of riff-raff goofing around to impress ourselves. It's like a cable-access channel, without the production values -- Wayne and Garth on a budget.
(BTW, "definition")
He's going to be the only kid in his gradeschool with a patent, that's what. It's a novelty, a vanity patent, if you will, the sort of gift that a patent attorney is almost uniquely qualified to give his son. I think it's kind of sweet, to tell you the truth, and I daresay he'll never attempt to enforce it. Perhaps he'll donate license to the children of the world or somesuch.
Yeah, I'm starting to warm to it. Is there any reasonable way to lose the split infinitive? (because I'm that sort of bear -- I always wince and mutter, "boldly to go!" at the beginning of Star Trek)
"Her poems aren't worth a penny" scans a little better (but that second line stumbles a bit).