Freedom of religion implies freedom to not practice any religion at all. I have a deep-seated faith that there is no God, and I show my faith by not going to church and not reading the Bible. Why is my faith less worthy of protection than yours? Why do you force me to acknowledge the existence of a God (in the Pledge of Allegiance for example) that I have absolute faith does not exist?
Or, if you don't like that argument, what if my religion is one of the many polytheistic or animist religions? Why am I forced to acknowledge one God when I believe in many, none of whom should be called "God?"
Freedom of religion in this country is a joke. We allow only Judeo-Christian religions here, and even among those we barely tolerate some of them (Islam). If you're not part of a mainstream monotheistic religion, you're routinely discriminated against by the Judeo-Christian establishment. Meanwhile, the Christians who control everything whine about being persecuted all the time.
What a ridiculously short-sighted point of view. THEIR resources will run out eventually, and then we'll start using OUR resources, which will run out as well. Then what? Mad Max time?
The only way to solve energy problems in the long term without eventually running out of resources is to use resources that are (for all practical purposes) infinite or infinitely renewable, like solar power or wind. With anything else, you're just kicking the can down the road.
With things like minerals it's harder of course, because the reason we use these rare earth minerals is they have certain properties that make them desirable for the purpose we use them for. However, we can still put effort into developing renewable (or at least more abundant) alternatives where possible, and aggressively recycling materials whenever we can.
Maybe he's looking for a job that follows OSHA requirements better. I can't imagine being that old and having your chair at the top of a flight of stairs is pleasant...not to mention the open pit in his office.
All of samzenpus's articles are Idle material, he just occasionally posts them in other sections so he can get views from the 80% of Slashdot readers who have blocked idle.
If he was hired to provide these sorts of stories, then great, let him do it...His bosses just need to prohibit him from posting in sections outside of Idle.
Face it, nobody writes pen and paper letters to anybody anymore, except maybe their great grandparents who can't use a computer and don't care to learn because they'll be dead soon anyway. Online connections are, in many cases, just as important as RL connections. I've gotten job offers from connections made online, in some cases people that I never actually met IRL. Hell, I met my wife online.
To say that online-only connections are meaningless is outdated and shortsighted. Yes, if you have 5,000 friends on Facebook, chances are 4,950 of those will never be of any use to you, but that doesn't mean online social connections are inherently inferior. Further, having meaningful social connections online does not preclude having meaningful social connections and interactions in the real world.
Some day it will be discovered that autism is actually caused not by thimerosal itself, but by the way thimerosal interacts with certain proteins present only in children whose parents are predisposed to excessive paranoia. This discovery will cause parents' heads to explode.
Actually, a lot of us who were early Internet users loath the allowing of anyone to join, we much preferred the college/alumni only version without so many idiots.
In my day, the acceptable way to end a sentence was with a period. I was referring to the fact that not so long ago, emoticons were considered annoying and unnecessary. Now, we have alternatives that are so annoying that emoticons seem downright sensible by comparison.
Oh come on, be nice...after all, how many other places are there on the Internet where nerds can sit around debating the finer points of Star Trek all day long? Talk about an under-served market!
Oh I agree, and I didn't mean to suggest the 3 year old would find it different and thus use caution. I meant that she probably would know that it wasn't the right tool for the Nintendo game. She would still see it as a fun new thing and want to play with it though.
Sure, but the kid shot herself in the chest. The idea that she was picking it up so she could play a game on the Wii seems a stretch at best, even if it looked similar to the controller. Hell, even a three year old would be able to tell something wasn't right just by the difference in weight between a plastic game controller and a real gun.
The fact that she apparently pointed the gun at her own chest and pulled the trigger suggests she just found a new toy and was screwing around with it...unless she was in the habit of pointing the gun at her own chest while playing the game, in which case I can't imagine her scores would have been very good.
Also, yes the father probably feels horrible, but he still should be brought up on charges, and barred from ever owning a firearm again. Anyone who would leave a loaded handgun within easy reach of a toddler has proven beyond a doubt that they aren't responsible enough to own a gun.
That's the part that bugs me. Most of Slashdot's articles are marginally interesting at best, and contain information available from a number of sources with better mobile-enabled websites, but the comments are usually really good. Without the ability to non-painfully read (and in a perfect world, respond to) the comments, reading Slashdot on the iPhone just isn't worth it.
I just find it odd that Slashdot has apparently made no effort to make their site compatible with a phone that represents something like 25% of the smartphone market.
I prefer not to have a keyboard on my smartphone because typing on a tiny keyboard, whether physical or not, is an enormous pain in the ass and I try to avoid it whenever possible. Since a tiny physical keyboard is only marginally less painful to use than the on-screen one, I'd prefer not to waste space with one.
It's been called the "holiday season" well before phony religious-right talking heads looking to score points with their base started babbling on about a "war on christmas". The holiday season (in general) means the time between Thanksgiving and New Years Day, inclusive, and is called "the holidays" because it encompasses multiple holidays, not because society is trying to kill the baby Jesus.
Basically, you do what you can to make your own job more efficient. With any luck, if you advertise that well enough to your superiors, you'll move up in the ranks and be able to apply efficiencies to more and larger processes. Eventually, if you stick to it long enough and get the right breaks, you'll be able to transform the whole company into a much more efficient operation.
Of course, all of this will take 30 years, by which time all of the stuff you did in your early years will be hopelessly antiquated, and all of the lower-level employees will be constantly complaining about how inefficient everything is. Then, some other enterprising individual deep in the lower levels will start doing whatever he can to make his own job more efficient. With any luck, if he advertises that well enough to his superiors, he'll move up in the ranks, and so on.
Change in large organizations is hard and it takes a long time. Right now a lot of larger organizations are using processes that would have seemed mind-blowingly efficient in the 1980s, or even 1990s, but seem hopelessly out of date today. Companies (and governments) do update process, and do get more efficient, but it takes a long time and a whole lot of effort.
Next time you want first post, just check the "post anonymously" button and say "frosty piss", or cut and paste a GNAA troll, or say something about CmdrTaco's gay sex orgies (with goatse link!) or something of that nature...you'll get less abuse that way.
There's no real problem with small-scale scalping. The problem with these large-scale operations is they artificially create scarcity by buying up every available ticket. A ticket that you could normally go up to the window and buy at face value is unavailable to you unless you pay inflated prices because the scalper has bought every ticket. They're inserting themselves as a middleman in a market that needs no middleman, and making things cost more for everyone else.
Slashdot Mirror
Freedom of religion implies freedom to not practice any religion at all. I have a deep-seated faith that there is no God, and I show my faith by not going to church and not reading the Bible. Why is my faith less worthy of protection than yours? Why do you force me to acknowledge the existence of a God (in the Pledge of Allegiance for example) that I have absolute faith does not exist?
Or, if you don't like that argument, what if my religion is one of the many polytheistic or animist religions? Why am I forced to acknowledge one God when I believe in many, none of whom should be called "God?"
Freedom of religion in this country is a joke. We allow only Judeo-Christian religions here, and even among those we barely tolerate some of them (Islam). If you're not part of a mainstream monotheistic religion, you're routinely discriminated against by the Judeo-Christian establishment. Meanwhile, the Christians who control everything whine about being persecuted all the time.
What a ridiculously short-sighted point of view. THEIR resources will run out eventually, and then we'll start using OUR resources, which will run out as well. Then what? Mad Max time?
The only way to solve energy problems in the long term without eventually running out of resources is to use resources that are (for all practical purposes) infinite or infinitely renewable, like solar power or wind. With anything else, you're just kicking the can down the road.
With things like minerals it's harder of course, because the reason we use these rare earth minerals is they have certain properties that make them desirable for the purpose we use them for. However, we can still put effort into developing renewable (or at least more abundant) alternatives where possible, and aggressively recycling materials whenever we can.
Maybe he's looking for a job that follows OSHA requirements better. I can't imagine being that old and having your chair at the top of a flight of stairs is pleasant...not to mention the open pit in his office.
All of samzenpus's articles are Idle material, he just occasionally posts them in other sections so he can get views from the 80% of Slashdot readers who have blocked idle.
If he was hired to provide these sorts of stories, then great, let him do it...His bosses just need to prohibit him from posting in sections outside of Idle.
You forgot to tell him to get off your lawn.
Face it, nobody writes pen and paper letters to anybody anymore, except maybe their great grandparents who can't use a computer and don't care to learn because they'll be dead soon anyway. Online connections are, in many cases, just as important as RL connections. I've gotten job offers from connections made online, in some cases people that I never actually met IRL. Hell, I met my wife online.
To say that online-only connections are meaningless is outdated and shortsighted. Yes, if you have 5,000 friends on Facebook, chances are 4,950 of those will never be of any use to you, but that doesn't mean online social connections are inherently inferior. Further, having meaningful social connections online does not preclude having meaningful social connections and interactions in the real world.
Some day it will be discovered that autism is actually caused not by thimerosal itself, but by the way thimerosal interacts with certain proteins present only in children whose parents are predisposed to excessive paranoia. This discovery will cause parents' heads to explode.
Actually, a lot of us who were early Internet users loath the allowing of anyone to join, we much preferred the college/alumni only version without so many idiots.
In my day, the acceptable way to end a sentence was with a period. I was referring to the fact that not so long ago, emoticons were considered annoying and unnecessary. Now, we have alternatives that are so annoying that emoticons seem downright sensible by comparison.
It's sad that the Internet has devolved to the point where an emoticon is considered the less annoying alternative for ending a sentence.
Oh come on, be nice...after all, how many other places are there on the Internet where nerds can sit around debating the finer points of Star Trek all day long? Talk about an under-served market!
Oh I agree, and I didn't mean to suggest the 3 year old would find it different and thus use caution. I meant that she probably would know that it wasn't the right tool for the Nintendo game. She would still see it as a fun new thing and want to play with it though.
Sure, but the kid shot herself in the chest. The idea that she was picking it up so she could play a game on the Wii seems a stretch at best, even if it looked similar to the controller. Hell, even a three year old would be able to tell something wasn't right just by the difference in weight between a plastic game controller and a real gun.
The fact that she apparently pointed the gun at her own chest and pulled the trigger suggests she just found a new toy and was screwing around with it...unless she was in the habit of pointing the gun at her own chest while playing the game, in which case I can't imagine her scores would have been very good.
Also, yes the father probably feels horrible, but he still should be brought up on charges, and barred from ever owning a firearm again. Anyone who would leave a loaded handgun within easy reach of a toddler has proven beyond a doubt that they aren't responsible enough to own a gun.
That's the part that bugs me. Most of Slashdot's articles are marginally interesting at best, and contain information available from a number of sources with better mobile-enabled websites, but the comments are usually really good. Without the ability to non-painfully read (and in a perfect world, respond to) the comments, reading Slashdot on the iPhone just isn't worth it.
I just find it odd that Slashdot has apparently made no effort to make their site compatible with a phone that represents something like 25% of the smartphone market.
Luckily Slashdot is pretty much entirely broken on the iPhone (still!), so this issue hasn't come up.
I prefer not to have a keyboard on my smartphone because typing on a tiny keyboard, whether physical or not, is an enormous pain in the ass and I try to avoid it whenever possible. Since a tiny physical keyboard is only marginally less painful to use than the on-screen one, I'd prefer not to waste space with one.
I hope not, I'd hate to think I covered all the vents in my computer case with these fan decals for nothing.
It's been called the "holiday season" well before phony religious-right talking heads looking to score points with their base started babbling on about a "war on christmas". The holiday season (in general) means the time between Thanksgiving and New Years Day, inclusive, and is called "the holidays" because it encompasses multiple holidays, not because society is trying to kill the baby Jesus.
On the bright side, these paper millions did result in one of the most unintentionally hilarious essays ever written. So, it wasn't a total loss.
Basically, you do what you can to make your own job more efficient. With any luck, if you advertise that well enough to your superiors, you'll move up in the ranks and be able to apply efficiencies to more and larger processes. Eventually, if you stick to it long enough and get the right breaks, you'll be able to transform the whole company into a much more efficient operation.
Of course, all of this will take 30 years, by which time all of the stuff you did in your early years will be hopelessly antiquated, and all of the lower-level employees will be constantly complaining about how inefficient everything is. Then, some other enterprising individual deep in the lower levels will start doing whatever he can to make his own job more efficient. With any luck, if he advertises that well enough to his superiors, he'll move up in the ranks, and so on.
Change in large organizations is hard and it takes a long time. Right now a lot of larger organizations are using processes that would have seemed mind-blowingly efficient in the 1980s, or even 1990s, but seem hopelessly out of date today. Companies (and governments) do update process, and do get more efficient, but it takes a long time and a whole lot of effort.
Note to self: Stay out of grub's basement.
I am never, ever getting into the data recovery business.
"How do you kill that which has no life...?"
Are you implying that Slashdotters are immortal?
Next time you want first post, just check the "post anonymously" button and say "frosty piss", or cut and paste a GNAA troll, or say something about CmdrTaco's gay sex orgies (with goatse link!) or something of that nature...you'll get less abuse that way.
There's no real problem with small-scale scalping. The problem with these large-scale operations is they artificially create scarcity by buying up every available ticket. A ticket that you could normally go up to the window and buy at face value is unavailable to you unless you pay inflated prices because the scalper has bought every ticket. They're inserting themselves as a middleman in a market that needs no middleman, and making things cost more for everyone else.