In other words, it was always this lame. The signal to noise ratio may have dipped slightly, the interface has gotten shittier, and many of us have gotten older and more crotchety, but it was never as cerebral as people like to remember it. Even now, the level of discourse here is quite a bit above most sites that allow comments. The only thing that's really sunk significantly is the quality of the trolls.
It was clearly CIA agents trying to come up with a pretense for an invasion of Iran by equipping Iranian-looking people with WMDs (rocks HURT!) and having them attack a True Patriot (tm).
A few laps through the news cycle, and these guys will be reported as a band of agents financed by Osama bin Laden under orders from the Ayatollah to fire nuclear-tipped RPGs at a guy who was on his way to a fundraiser for orphaned babies of US troops killed in Iraq. A quick trip to the UN with a vial of uranium, and we're off to the races.
Really, this is such elementary stuff I'm amazed I have to explain it to you people.
Rosa Parks intentionally broke the law because she was tired and didn't want to walk to the back of the bus.
I don't mean to play down the significance of what she did, I'm just saying that court was the farthest thing from her mind at the time.
"People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in." -- Rosa Parks
Please at least try to learn something about what you're talking about before you say something foolish.
I suppose that's true, and maybe she was figuring she wanted to be the poster child for this fight and would just file for bankruptcy if it didn't work out the way she wanted it to. Not a road I would have chosen, but to each their own I guess.
Seems like a pretty huge gamble to not only saddle your client with a huge unpayable debt but also set precedence for future cases just on the hope that it would stir public opinion enough to overcome the powerful RIAA lobby and get favorable legislative action on the issue, meanwhile hoping you can somehow get the ruling reversed on appeal (maybe due to ineffective counsel?)
If my lawyer tried a tactic like that, they would be fired well before the trial.
Specialists in every field complain that educators get their field wrong or don't stir the passions of kids for their field as much as they ought to. What they fail to understand is that they're coming at the whole problem from the perspective of someone who is obviously gifted at and highly passionate about the field. They don't seem to get that most people don't pick up their field as easily as they do, and don't care enough to put in the effort it would take to get even half as good at it as the specialist.
Instructors of just about every field at any level of compulsory education (K-12) have to battle against entrenched biases against their fields, and against education in general, that have been fostered for years before the student ever gets in their classroom. Further, their task is to teach the curriculum provided. If they inspire their kids to love the field, that's great, but if they spend so much time inspiring the kids that they don't have enough time to teach the kids what they need to pass the state-required tests, they're still going to lose their jobs.
Teaching math, science, or anything else is HARD. Teaching it to people who don't care and don't want to be there is even harder. Teaching kids to love the field when the only metric used to judge your performance is pass rates on a standardized test is harder still. It's all well and good for professional mathematicians to bitch and moan about the state of education, but until they're ready to step in with some realistic and implementable ideas that don't presuppose that all kids have some inherent interest in these things that just needs to be tapped into, it's not helpful in the least.
I really don't get it...how will Microsoft even know you downgraded to XP if you just boot the machine up for the first time using a WinXP install CD, and then later reinstall Windows 7 with the OS disk (you do insist on OS install disks being shipped with your new PCs, right?) at a later date? They would only be activating the Windows 7 installation one time, and MS would likely never know or care.
Aren't we talking about embryos here? In a fertility clinic setting, there could be several embryos per mother, even without the hair and eye color selection, because they produce lots of them in case the first several they try don't implant properly. Once these embryos are produced, are they bound by your moral code to allow them to become full-fledged human beings? In that case, everyone who goes to a fertility clinic will end up having a whole litter of babies!
Using words like "killing" to describe the discarding of unimplanted embryos is unnecessarily alarmist and does nothing to advance the debate.
By that logic, why bother maintaining roads at all? They are talking about primary roads here, which are generally roads which connect one populated area to another populated area, and are thus vital to the commerce of the entire area. Even if you never take that road, if you live anywhere in the general area, or anywhere that trades with that area, you benefit from that road.
In a relatively small state like Michigan with nasty freeze-thaw cycles that probably cause massive damage to roads anyway, this probably is not a bad idea. The distances are such that the lower speed limit required isn't going to mean it takes days to get across the state (like it would in, say, Montana). Plus, the freeze-thaw cycle means they'd be dealing with massive potholes every season regardless, and potholes are cheaper and easier to fix on gravel.
I certainly wouldn't want to try this tactic anywhere out west though, where vast distances make driving on gravel roads much more of a chore.
In time, almost 100% of keyboard users will have trouble typing
In time, all 100% of users will die. Should we start buying coffins?
Yes. I've left orders to my family that, in order to save money, I should be left to the wolves when I die. I have helpfully mapped out the locations of various wolf packs in the area to help them carry out my instructions.
Who cares. Disney is to culture what thyroid cancer is to metabolism. I wouldn't waste a 2400bps connection on their drivel.
If that's how you feel about Disney, then you absolutely should care, because if your ISP is a subscriber that means you are paying for content that you can't stand and will probably never watch. If you decide not to use any ISP that subscribes, you are being subjected to a reduction in choice in your ISP selection because of this. If a sufficiently popular site decides to go this route (and ESPN is popular whether you watch it or not), then you may be left with no choice in your area other than pay for this stuff or go without Internet access.
This should matter to everybody.
Probably because the people who complain live in areas where Verizon is perceived to provide a more reliable signal than Sprint. Might it have something to do with the scores of network technicians portrayed in Verizon's television ads?
That's why I won't use Verizon...if all their techs are busy following that one guy around, how are they ever going to find time to fix the network?
Don't worry, after a heart to heart talk on the walkie talkie with that cop who used to be on Family Matters, you'll be able to get up and save the day. Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker.
I'd gladly pay $10/month for on-demand commercial-free access (under Linux) to any episode of every show currently offered in Hulu's library.
I'd gladly pay $500 for a Ferrari. I don't think they could offer what you're asking for at that price without drastically reducing their catalog. Licensing fees would make it impossible.
At my kids' elementary school, each bus has a picture of a different animal taped to the window. The kids know what animal their bus has on it (for the first couple of weeks, the kids have the animal pinned to their shirt as well). If the bus breaks down, you just put the animal picture in the replacement bus. Much easier, and kids seem to have an easier time remembering they're on the "bee bus" rather than on bus #3542.
I'm not trying to say I believe that these companies are obligated to give back. In fact, what I'm trying to say is that these companies were persuaded to implement OSS because the OSI convinced them it was a way to get good quality software on the cheap. It was sold to them that way, and they're using it that way. We have no right to complain when companies use OSS the way they were told they could use it, and the way the license says they can use it.
Slashdot Mirror
He already tried sitting in the basement eating Cheetos and playing WoW all day...no luck so far.
Three Words: Jon Fucking Katz.
In other words, it was always this lame. The signal to noise ratio may have dipped slightly, the interface has gotten shittier, and many of us have gotten older and more crotchety, but it was never as cerebral as people like to remember it. Even now, the level of discourse here is quite a bit above most sites that allow comments. The only thing that's really sunk significantly is the quality of the trolls.
I commend you for at least customizing your troll to the story. So few bother these days.
It was clearly CIA agents trying to come up with a pretense for an invasion of Iran by equipping Iranian-looking people with WMDs (rocks HURT!) and having them attack a True Patriot (tm).
A few laps through the news cycle, and these guys will be reported as a band of agents financed by Osama bin Laden under orders from the Ayatollah to fire nuclear-tipped RPGs at a guy who was on his way to a fundraiser for orphaned babies of US troops killed in Iraq. A quick trip to the UN with a vial of uranium, and we're off to the races.
Really, this is such elementary stuff I'm amazed I have to explain it to you people.
Rosa Parks intentionally broke the law because she was tired and didn't want to walk to the back of the bus. I don't mean to play down the significance of what she did, I'm just saying that court was the farthest thing from her mind at the time.
"People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in." -- Rosa Parks
Please at least try to learn something about what you're talking about before you say something foolish.
I suppose that's true, and maybe she was figuring she wanted to be the poster child for this fight and would just file for bankruptcy if it didn't work out the way she wanted it to. Not a road I would have chosen, but to each their own I guess.
Seems like a pretty huge gamble to not only saddle your client with a huge unpayable debt but also set precedence for future cases just on the hope that it would stir public opinion enough to overcome the powerful RIAA lobby and get favorable legislative action on the issue, meanwhile hoping you can somehow get the ruling reversed on appeal (maybe due to ineffective counsel?) If my lawyer tried a tactic like that, they would be fired well before the trial.
Specialists in every field complain that educators get their field wrong or don't stir the passions of kids for their field as much as they ought to. What they fail to understand is that they're coming at the whole problem from the perspective of someone who is obviously gifted at and highly passionate about the field. They don't seem to get that most people don't pick up their field as easily as they do, and don't care enough to put in the effort it would take to get even half as good at it as the specialist.
Instructors of just about every field at any level of compulsory education (K-12) have to battle against entrenched biases against their fields, and against education in general, that have been fostered for years before the student ever gets in their classroom. Further, their task is to teach the curriculum provided. If they inspire their kids to love the field, that's great, but if they spend so much time inspiring the kids that they don't have enough time to teach the kids what they need to pass the state-required tests, they're still going to lose their jobs.
Teaching math, science, or anything else is HARD. Teaching it to people who don't care and don't want to be there is even harder. Teaching kids to love the field when the only metric used to judge your performance is pass rates on a standardized test is harder still. It's all well and good for professional mathematicians to bitch and moan about the state of education, but until they're ready to step in with some realistic and implementable ideas that don't presuppose that all kids have some inherent interest in these things that just needs to be tapped into, it's not helpful in the least.
My hypothetical situation was assuming you have valid licenses for XP before you install it. Sorry if I didn't make that clear.
I really don't get it...how will Microsoft even know you downgraded to XP if you just boot the machine up for the first time using a WinXP install CD, and then later reinstall Windows 7 with the OS disk (you do insist on OS install disks being shipped with your new PCs, right?) at a later date? They would only be activating the Windows 7 installation one time, and MS would likely never know or care.
Aren't we talking about embryos here? In a fertility clinic setting, there could be several embryos per mother, even without the hair and eye color selection, because they produce lots of them in case the first several they try don't implant properly. Once these embryos are produced, are they bound by your moral code to allow them to become full-fledged human beings? In that case, everyone who goes to a fertility clinic will end up having a whole litter of babies!
Using words like "killing" to describe the discarding of unimplanted embryos is unnecessarily alarmist and does nothing to advance the debate.
By that logic, why bother maintaining roads at all? They are talking about primary roads here, which are generally roads which connect one populated area to another populated area, and are thus vital to the commerce of the entire area. Even if you never take that road, if you live anywhere in the general area, or anywhere that trades with that area, you benefit from that road.
In a relatively small state like Michigan with nasty freeze-thaw cycles that probably cause massive damage to roads anyway, this probably is not a bad idea. The distances are such that the lower speed limit required isn't going to mean it takes days to get across the state (like it would in, say, Montana). Plus, the freeze-thaw cycle means they'd be dealing with massive potholes every season regardless, and potholes are cheaper and easier to fix on gravel.
I certainly wouldn't want to try this tactic anywhere out west though, where vast distances make driving on gravel roads much more of a chore.
In time, all 100% of users will die. Should we start buying coffins?
Yes. I've left orders to my family that, in order to save money, I should be left to the wolves when I die. I have helpfully mapped out the locations of various wolf packs in the area to help them carry out my instructions.
Who cares. Disney is to culture what thyroid cancer is to metabolism. I wouldn't waste a 2400bps connection on their drivel.
If that's how you feel about Disney, then you absolutely should care, because if your ISP is a subscriber that means you are paying for content that you can't stand and will probably never watch. If you decide not to use any ISP that subscribes, you are being subjected to a reduction in choice in your ISP selection because of this. If a sufficiently popular site decides to go this route (and ESPN is popular whether you watch it or not), then you may be left with no choice in your area other than pay for this stuff or go without Internet access. This should matter to everybody.
Probably because the people who complain live in areas where Verizon is perceived to provide a more reliable signal than Sprint. Might it have something to do with the scores of network technicians portrayed in Verizon's television ads?
That's why I won't use Verizon...if all their techs are busy following that one guy around, how are they ever going to find time to fix the network?
Don't worry, after a heart to heart talk on the walkie talkie with that cop who used to be on Family Matters, you'll be able to get up and save the day. Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker.
I came up with lots of ideas like this in college...I also smoked a lot of weed in college.
I don't know about anyone else, but I'd have a hard time passing up the chance to be the first person on Mars, even if it was just a one way trip.
I'd gladly pay $10/month for on-demand commercial-free access (under Linux) to any episode of every show currently offered in Hulu's library.
I'd gladly pay $500 for a Ferrari. I don't think they could offer what you're asking for at that price without drastically reducing their catalog. Licensing fees would make it impossible.
And they wonder why people are so lonely, sexually frustrated, and obese these days...
Sorry, I got distracted and ate the Jell-O.
What was your point again?
At my kids' elementary school, each bus has a picture of a different animal taped to the window. The kids know what animal their bus has on it (for the first couple of weeks, the kids have the animal pinned to their shirt as well). If the bus breaks down, you just put the animal picture in the replacement bus. Much easier, and kids seem to have an easier time remembering they're on the "bee bus" rather than on bus #3542.
The Linux/Open Source requirement is to get the Slashdot editors to post the story.
I'm not trying to say I believe that these companies are obligated to give back. In fact, what I'm trying to say is that these companies were persuaded to implement OSS because the OSI convinced them it was a way to get good quality software on the cheap. It was sold to them that way, and they're using it that way. We have no right to complain when companies use OSS the way they were told they could use it, and the way the license says they can use it.