Is it possible to read the entire story without subscribing to the Wall Street Journal? How am I supposed to RTFA if I don't have a subscription?
I hear in Africa the Wall Street Journal is giving the article away for free. It's apparently doing this to combat its biggest competitor in the region: African talking drums
Not necessarily. Most people will vote for a long-term Senator because they have a lot of seniority, and seniority in the Senate is everything. A very senior Senator will be able to have much greater influence and be much more successful at getting earmarks passed.
In short, as long as a Senator is able to bring home the bacon to his district, a little thing like a felony conviction won't necessarily do him in.
Yes, all GSM phones do this. However, since this article mentions the iPhone, it's automatically posted to the front page of Slashdot.
Aren't most iPhones still on the AT&T network, what with the whole exclusivity thing? AT&T uses GSM. My Palm Treo on AT&T does the same thing, as did my Razr before it.
It's not that easy...for one thing, you need the machine to be able to accurately count bribes from each candidate in real time, and weight the random vote switching code in favor of the biggest donor.
Also, you need to make sure that the vote switching happens most often when little old ladies who don't understand technology or clearly hard-core partisans that will bitch about everything (and that no one will believe) are voting. It really gets quite complicated.
Actually, Obama is the "left" candidate, and McCain is the "right" candidate.
I can understand how this might be confusing, but just remember it this way: your left hand is the one that when you hold it up, the index finger and thumb make an "L". Also, it wants to take all your money and give it to the poor. The right hand is the one that makes a backwards "L", and wants to take all your money and give it to the rich.
I grew up in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and have been through border patrol checkpoints literally hundreds of times. Since I'm white, they always just look in my car (looking for anyone that "looks" illegal, meaning brown people), and wave me on. However, I often see cars pulled over to the side being searched, presumably for drugs.
The ACLU claims that the Border Patrol regularly exceeds its authority in these checkpoints to look for things other than illegal immigrants or contraband from across the border, and they are absolutely right. It is interesting to note that occasionally one of these border patrol stations will have a sign up telling you what they've accomplished lately. It's never about how many illegal aliens they've captured, but rather how many pounds of narcotics they've confiscated. They claim the right to search your car because you are near the border, and any contraband they find is assumed to have been smuggled across the border, whether it actually was or not.
To people that have grown up around the Mexican border, it's no surprise that the border patrol can do pretty much whatever they want in these zones. They will pull you aside at these checkpoints for anything that looks suspicious, whether it's related to border security or not, especially if you are Hispanic.
These checkpoints have always been unsettling to me. While I understand that the Border Patrol needs to be able to operate at least to some degree within our borders in order to protect the border, it is ridiculous that I have to pass through checkpoints just to get from one city in America to another city in America, and that American citizens who happen to be of Hispanic descent are treated as criminals while traveling entirely within the United States just because of their skin color.
The checkpoint I've been through the most is just north of Las Cruces, New Mexico, and a good 60 miles away from the border. In order to go from Las Cruces (the second largest city in New Mexico) to points north (including Albuquerque, the largest city in New Mexico), you have to pass through this checkpoint. This means that thousands of people every day, most of whom are residents of the state of New Mexico and were not in Mexico at any point in the recent past, get to be harassed by the Border Patrol just because they want to travel within their own state.
The most important feature, and I cannot stress this enough, is that the oscilloscope be able to display wavy lines. I once got a discount oscilloscope from a back alley dealer, and all it could display was straight diagonal lines. It was an unmitigated disaster.
I thought it was just a metaphor. Like, leave your scientist card by the door on the way out.
No, there's a card for just about everything these days. For example, I'm a card-carrying sysadmin, but I'm also a card-carrying Slashdot geek. I am also a card-carrying American, a card-carrying driver of cars, and a card-carrying member of the Subway Sub Club.
Really, if you don't have a card for everything you do and everything you are, how can we really trust that you are what you say you are? Are you a card-carrying Anonymous Coward? Or a dirty fraud? We can't tell!
My wallet is overflowing with cards proving everything about every aspect of my life (I'm also a card-carrying wallet overstuffer!). Really, I don't know how you can get along in life without the appropriate cards.
The issue with DST is not that it's inconvenient, it's that it's insufficiently precise! We should be changing the time every day (at least!) to make sure our time is as accurate as possible to the length of the day. Every day, 12 noon should be when the Sun is directly overhead, no matter where you are.
Sure, this means changing time zones almost continuously while travelling, and at least daily while remaining stationary, but at least we won't have to deal with the confusion that comes from discovering that the Sun is directly overhead at 12:00:34 instead of 12 noon sharp! How can we call ourselves intelligent beings when our time system is so woefully inaccurate most of the time?
So, scrap daylight savings time and replace it with a system of several thousand time zones, each updated daily based on the predicted "high noon" for that particular day at that particular location. If the prediction ends up being off by a few microseconds on a particular day, just change the time to correct it right then and there! Sure, wristwatches will become orders of magnitude more complex, but it's the only way to have a truly sane and accurate system of time measurement. And after all, isn't that what we all really want here?
So I should avoid opening Christmas presents too close to the Hoover...check.
See, this is why I read Slashdot: useful tips like this one. My wife always runs the vacuum around the Christmas tree before we go to bed on Christmas Eve, and often she just leaves it there right by the tree. Luckily, my kids have developed gift opening techniques that somehow manage to rip the wrapping paper into several hundred small pieces without ever disengaging the tape, so they probably haven't been exposed to too much radiation thus far, but we'll have to be sure to put the vacuum back in the closet before going to bed from now on.
His whole premise is deeply flawed. People don't post stuff on these sites because they are so fat and happy that they just can't find anything better to do with their time. They do it because they want to be known for something, or they want to show off, or because they just want to contribute to a large project. None of these things are really affected by the economy.
Okay, some people might contribute less because they have to take 2 jobs or something, but that's a temporary phenomenon. For most people, their jobs will still occupy about 8 hours a day, and that still leaves several hours every day for farting around on the Internet, which often includes submitting content to these so-called "Open Source" content sites.
User-generated content was there at the beginning of the Web, and it isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Maybe CNN will toss the iReport thing, but not because of the economic downturn. Sure, they might decide that now is a good time to end it because they have a convenient excuse, but the real reason to end it is because it's a cesspool of mouth breathers posting pictures of their cats and saying the same kind of mindless garbage that gets posted to CNN's Political Ticker. The iReport site doesn't do much more than allow CNN to post stories that would be of no more than local interest otherwise (ooh, a car on fire! Alert the media!).
As for Wikipedia, it has deep and fundamental flaws that may or may not eventually lead to its downfall, but the economic condition isn't going to change that one way or the other.
Can we say we've reached the height of Google-worship when pictures of the exterior of a data center warrant a front page mention on Slashdot?
Now, if there were pictures of the interior (you know, where the interesting stuff is), I could see wanting to feature it, but the outside of the building? This is like saying you have a big scoop about the internal working of the NSA and then showing a picture of their front gate.
Why would they? No country will use a nuclear weapon unless it's their last option. To do so would virtually guarantee total annihilation at the hands of the US. They would almost certainly use the nukes just like everyone else does: as a deterrent and as a bargaining chip.
Clearly, it would put them in a much stronger negotiating position on the world stage. This is why we should be stopping them from getting nukes, not because we think they'd actually use them.
I always liked the LP-style MUDs. I hated playing the diku/circle style. One of the primary reasons for that may have been that the LP style was a lot more fun for me to develop on. I had great fun developing for various MUDs, but eventually they all sort of petered out and I stopped. It's no fun coding something if you know that no more than one or two people will ever see it.
The one I developed the most on was Styx, which was a local MUD run from New Mexico State University. It was fairly small, but the fact that many of the players were people I saw almost every day IRL made it more fun. Back then, we would have 20 or more people in the same lab in the computer center playing most of the night, to say nothing of the various players from elsewhere around the country and the world.
The one I spent the most time playing was LustyMUD (nothing sexual, that was just the character name of the person who ran it). I played that one for years, but never actually got to Wizard status because right before I got there they completely tore out the old quest system, put in a bunch of near-impossible quests, and reset everyone's completed quest count back down to 0. After that, I just didn't have the motivation to climb back up that hill.
Another MUD I played a great deal on was Genocide, which was a great PvP MUD. I sucked at it, but it was a lot of fun in its heyday. I credit it with my fast typing speed, as the only way to survive was to be able to buffer multiple commands in quick succession. It's still up, but now it's mostly just people idling all day and occasionally chatting. There are almost never any wars anymore.
I started playing MUDs in 1989, and didn't really stop logging on until maybe 2006. I still occasionally log in to one or two of the old MUDs, but almost never play anymore.
Honestly, all this fear running around and western democracies - and the Russians - are the ONLY ones who have managed them responsibly.
Maybe I'm just not up on my history, but when have any of the other nuclear powers detonated a nuclear weapon other than in uninhabited areas for testing purposes?
Was there a nuclear war between India and Pakistan that I missed? Did Israel wipe Syria off the map while I wasn't looking?
None of the countries that have nukes have blown up the world. The only one that has used them for their intended purpose (blowing lots of people up) is the US, and that was more than 60 years ago. To say that any other country that got nukes would obviously blow up the world is not backed by any kind of evidence.
Swap performance is going to suck no matter where you put it, except maybe solid state. If you're hitting swap so hard that the performance of said swap is a real issue of concern for you, you really ought to consider buying more RAM.
Tuition can continue to climb so quickly with nary a peep from anyone because so much of it is paid for through student loans, which are basically like free money to the students who get them. They only really pay attention to how much money it is when it comes time to repay it after they've already graduated.
Couple that with the idea that a more expensive school is widely seen as a "better" school, and there's really very little motivation to keep tuition down.
Slashdot Mirror
is the music quality really really bad?
Yes, but that's not really the site's fault, that's just how music sounds these days.
Is it possible to read the entire story without subscribing to the Wall Street Journal? How am I supposed to RTFA if I don't have a subscription?
I hear in Africa the Wall Street Journal is giving the article away for free. It's apparently doing this to combat its biggest competitor in the region: African talking drums
Not necessarily. Most people will vote for a long-term Senator because they have a lot of seniority, and seniority in the Senate is everything. A very senior Senator will be able to have much greater influence and be much more successful at getting earmarks passed.
In short, as long as a Senator is able to bring home the bacon to his district, a little thing like a felony conviction won't necessarily do him in.
232 years and counting, and that still hasn't happened. But sure, the next one will do the trick.
Don't worry, they were stunt lemmings.
Yes, all GSM phones do this. However, since this article mentions the iPhone, it's automatically posted to the front page of Slashdot.
Aren't most iPhones still on the AT&T network, what with the whole exclusivity thing? AT&T uses GSM. My Palm Treo on AT&T does the same thing, as did my Razr before it.
It's not that easy...for one thing, you need the machine to be able to accurately count bribes from each candidate in real time, and weight the random vote switching code in favor of the biggest donor.
Also, you need to make sure that the vote switching happens most often when little old ladies who don't understand technology or clearly hard-core partisans that will bitch about everything (and that no one will believe) are voting. It really gets quite complicated.
Actually, Obama is the "left" candidate, and McCain is the "right" candidate.
I can understand how this might be confusing, but just remember it this way: your left hand is the one that when you hold it up, the index finger and thumb make an "L". Also, it wants to take all your money and give it to the poor. The right hand is the one that makes a backwards "L", and wants to take all your money and give it to the rich.
Hope this clears things up for you.
With that many buzzwords, you must be on to something huge!
Here's a check for $200 million.
Regards,
Venture Capitalists
I would tell you to wait until we're not at war before you join up, but you'll probably be well past retirement age at that point.
I grew up in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and have been through border patrol checkpoints literally hundreds of times. Since I'm white, they always just look in my car (looking for anyone that "looks" illegal, meaning brown people), and wave me on. However, I often see cars pulled over to the side being searched, presumably for drugs.
The ACLU claims that the Border Patrol regularly exceeds its authority in these checkpoints to look for things other than illegal immigrants or contraband from across the border, and they are absolutely right. It is interesting to note that occasionally one of these border patrol stations will have a sign up telling you what they've accomplished lately. It's never about how many illegal aliens they've captured, but rather how many pounds of narcotics they've confiscated. They claim the right to search your car because you are near the border, and any contraband they find is assumed to have been smuggled across the border, whether it actually was or not.
To people that have grown up around the Mexican border, it's no surprise that the border patrol can do pretty much whatever they want in these zones. They will pull you aside at these checkpoints for anything that looks suspicious, whether it's related to border security or not, especially if you are Hispanic.
These checkpoints have always been unsettling to me. While I understand that the Border Patrol needs to be able to operate at least to some degree within our borders in order to protect the border, it is ridiculous that I have to pass through checkpoints just to get from one city in America to another city in America, and that American citizens who happen to be of Hispanic descent are treated as criminals while traveling entirely within the United States just because of their skin color.
The checkpoint I've been through the most is just north of Las Cruces, New Mexico, and a good 60 miles away from the border. In order to go from Las Cruces (the second largest city in New Mexico) to points north (including Albuquerque, the largest city in New Mexico), you have to pass through this checkpoint. This means that thousands of people every day, most of whom are residents of the state of New Mexico and were not in Mexico at any point in the recent past, get to be harassed by the Border Patrol just because they want to travel within their own state.
The most important feature, and I cannot stress this enough, is that the oscilloscope be able to display wavy lines. I once got a discount oscilloscope from a back alley dealer, and all it could display was straight diagonal lines. It was an unmitigated disaster.
four card-carrying scientists
I thought it was just a metaphor. Like, leave your scientist card by the door on the way out.
No, there's a card for just about everything these days. For example, I'm a card-carrying sysadmin, but I'm also a card-carrying Slashdot geek. I am also a card-carrying American, a card-carrying driver of cars, and a card-carrying member of the Subway Sub Club.
Really, if you don't have a card for everything you do and everything you are, how can we really trust that you are what you say you are? Are you a card-carrying Anonymous Coward? Or a dirty fraud? We can't tell!
My wallet is overflowing with cards proving everything about every aspect of my life (I'm also a card-carrying wallet overstuffer!). Really, I don't know how you can get along in life without the appropriate cards.
The issue with DST is not that it's inconvenient, it's that it's insufficiently precise! We should be changing the time every day (at least!) to make sure our time is as accurate as possible to the length of the day. Every day, 12 noon should be when the Sun is directly overhead, no matter where you are.
Sure, this means changing time zones almost continuously while travelling, and at least daily while remaining stationary, but at least we won't have to deal with the confusion that comes from discovering that the Sun is directly overhead at 12:00:34 instead of 12 noon sharp! How can we call ourselves intelligent beings when our time system is so woefully inaccurate most of the time?
So, scrap daylight savings time and replace it with a system of several thousand time zones, each updated daily based on the predicted "high noon" for that particular day at that particular location. If the prediction ends up being off by a few microseconds on a particular day, just change the time to correct it right then and there! Sure, wristwatches will become orders of magnitude more complex, but it's the only way to have a truly sane and accurate system of time measurement. And after all, isn't that what we all really want here?
So I should avoid opening Christmas presents too close to the Hoover...check.
See, this is why I read Slashdot: useful tips like this one. My wife always runs the vacuum around the Christmas tree before we go to bed on Christmas Eve, and often she just leaves it there right by the tree. Luckily, my kids have developed gift opening techniques that somehow manage to rip the wrapping paper into several hundred small pieces without ever disengaging the tape, so they probably haven't been exposed to too much radiation thus far, but we'll have to be sure to put the vacuum back in the closet before going to bed from now on.
His whole premise is deeply flawed. People don't post stuff on these sites because they are so fat and happy that they just can't find anything better to do with their time. They do it because they want to be known for something, or they want to show off, or because they just want to contribute to a large project. None of these things are really affected by the economy.
Okay, some people might contribute less because they have to take 2 jobs or something, but that's a temporary phenomenon. For most people, their jobs will still occupy about 8 hours a day, and that still leaves several hours every day for farting around on the Internet, which often includes submitting content to these so-called "Open Source" content sites.
User-generated content was there at the beginning of the Web, and it isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Maybe CNN will toss the iReport thing, but not because of the economic downturn. Sure, they might decide that now is a good time to end it because they have a convenient excuse, but the real reason to end it is because it's a cesspool of mouth breathers posting pictures of their cats and saying the same kind of mindless garbage that gets posted to CNN's Political Ticker. The iReport site doesn't do much more than allow CNN to post stories that would be of no more than local interest otherwise (ooh, a car on fire! Alert the media!).
As for Wikipedia, it has deep and fundamental flaws that may or may not eventually lead to its downfall, but the economic condition isn't going to change that one way or the other.
Can we say we've reached the height of Google-worship when pictures of the exterior of a data center warrant a front page mention on Slashdot?
Now, if there were pictures of the interior (you know, where the interesting stuff is), I could see wanting to feature it, but the outside of the building? This is like saying you have a big scoop about the internal working of the NSA and then showing a picture of their front gate.
I'd gladly be touched by a robot as long as it left less of a mess on the way out.
Pervert.
Why would they? No country will use a nuclear weapon unless it's their last option. To do so would virtually guarantee total annihilation at the hands of the US. They would almost certainly use the nukes just like everyone else does: as a deterrent and as a bargaining chip.
Clearly, it would put them in a much stronger negotiating position on the world stage. This is why we should be stopping them from getting nukes, not because we think they'd actually use them.
I always liked the LP-style MUDs. I hated playing the diku/circle style. One of the primary reasons for that may have been that the LP style was a lot more fun for me to develop on. I had great fun developing for various MUDs, but eventually they all sort of petered out and I stopped. It's no fun coding something if you know that no more than one or two people will ever see it.
The one I developed the most on was Styx, which was a local MUD run from New Mexico State University. It was fairly small, but the fact that many of the players were people I saw almost every day IRL made it more fun. Back then, we would have 20 or more people in the same lab in the computer center playing most of the night, to say nothing of the various players from elsewhere around the country and the world.
The one I spent the most time playing was LustyMUD (nothing sexual, that was just the character name of the person who ran it). I played that one for years, but never actually got to Wizard status because right before I got there they completely tore out the old quest system, put in a bunch of near-impossible quests, and reset everyone's completed quest count back down to 0. After that, I just didn't have the motivation to climb back up that hill.
Another MUD I played a great deal on was Genocide, which was a great PvP MUD. I sucked at it, but it was a lot of fun in its heyday. I credit it with my fast typing speed, as the only way to survive was to be able to buffer multiple commands in quick succession. It's still up, but now it's mostly just people idling all day and occasionally chatting. There are almost never any wars anymore.
I started playing MUDs in 1989, and didn't really stop logging on until maybe 2006. I still occasionally log in to one or two of the old MUDs, but almost never play anymore.
Honestly, all this fear running around and western democracies - and the Russians - are the ONLY ones who have managed them responsibly.
Maybe I'm just not up on my history, but when have any of the other nuclear powers detonated a nuclear weapon other than in uninhabited areas for testing purposes?
Was there a nuclear war between India and Pakistan that I missed? Did Israel wipe Syria off the map while I wasn't looking?
None of the countries that have nukes have blown up the world. The only one that has used them for their intended purpose (blowing lots of people up) is the US, and that was more than 60 years ago. To say that any other country that got nukes would obviously blow up the world is not backed by any kind of evidence.
They mean games that gamers can play. That pretty much eliminates sex as an option.
Swap performance is going to suck no matter where you put it, except maybe solid state. If you're hitting swap so hard that the performance of said swap is a real issue of concern for you, you really ought to consider buying more RAM.
Tuition can continue to climb so quickly with nary a peep from anyone because so much of it is paid for through student loans, which are basically like free money to the students who get them. They only really pay attention to how much money it is when it comes time to repay it after they've already graduated.
Couple that with the idea that a more expensive school is widely seen as a "better" school, and there's really very little motivation to keep tuition down.
Give him a break, he's still working on an old Pentium system.