There was an employee who worked for AT&T in the twin cities' suburb of Bloomington (reports verified by many of his ex-coworkers) who used to jerk off during staff meetings under the table, while pointedly staring at female co-workers. He was apparently a big fat skinhead with horrible personal habits, and was also responsible for the following memo being sent out to the entire building: "Please do not smear fecal matter on restroom walls."
There is ONE world. Count 'em! One! All this crap about 3rd world, etc is just bullshit made up by elitists to separate all of us people from each other. "Oh! look at THEM! They're not us, they're from another world than ours. They're aliens and we should fear them, hate them, pen them in, and it's all right to enslave them if we can. Hell, we can work 'em like dogs for tuppence a month and pass the savings on to ourselve at Walmart!"
The other issue with this is the newer designation of Developing, Developed, Under-developed. These too, are arbitrary based on an assumption of false superiority. "Ooh, you're not covered in concrete there! You're obviously not as good as us!" We should relabel it Overdeveloped, About Right, and Developing.
I go from Minneapolis to Des Moines and back once or twice a year, and there's grown up this huge wind farm on plains south of the MN/IA border, about a mile west of I35. It's just majestic to look at, especially in late afternoon with the sun shining down from behind it. Crybabies worrying about their view should consider how their view would change with a billion tons of smog in the air.
Any reasonably techy person reading Tolkien will realize mithril is nothing but aluminum. It occurs in nature EXTREMELY rarely, but has shown up in the Alps, which are the Misty Mountains. He describes it as being similar in color to silver and can be alloyed with other metals to make amazingly light sturdy armor. Nowhere (to my knowledge) does Tolkien say mithril was ever used in swords. The great weapons of the dwarves and the Eldar were always steel whenever materials were mentioned.
I went out and actually PAID for that piece of shit "St Anger" and now I can't take the fucker back because it's been opened. Those fuckers'll get sympathy from me when I can return a POS cd and the false-advertising DVD that came with it. (The packagine says a dvd of a CONCERT of the entire album. It turned out to be a REHEARSAL, no audience, just the band and some cameras in a room, and the main singer guy doesn't sing one song in key.) Fuck them. They should download a copy of their own song that goes "Don't want your greed, don't wanit it-ah!" Sorry for the offtopic rant, but contrast Best Brains and Metallica and you'll see the difference in both their business style and their ethics.
>1. Cost Carbon fiber is expensive compaired to concret block and wood trusses. Earthen houses are incredibly cheaper than concrete block and wood. And way less energy goes into creating them. And less deforestation etc etc. More labor, but can be owner built for literally dirt cheap, and expanded over time. >Not to mention noone knows how well they will stand up to UV for the long term. Houses should last for at least 100 years. NO, houses should last as long as someone wants to live in them. There are cob houses in Devon that have been standing since the 1400's. Periodic replastering the lime on the outside will do it. >2. Looks. Good greif think of what a sub divsion of those things would look like! It would be like
war of the worlds. Well, that'd be cool actually, but one can do fascinating sculpture in cob, and each can be unique, unlike the fucking hideous clone-boxes that currently are marring america's landscape now.
"I can live without free beer copies of the latest boy band, but I can't live without Free Software."
Why not? Ever tried it? You'd be amazed at the things you can get along without. Besides, it's all part of the same thing. When the corporations have too much power, they'll stamp out freedom of any kind, whether it's downloading their crap music or being forced to use their crap software because nothing else is available.
So you went to England and expected things to be just like they are in FLORIDA? "lots of ice, fill the damned thing up with ice if you have to" --how could they? In hot semitropical american florida, there are these things called Ice Machines that produce tons of ice each day. In England, the machine that produces the ice is called a fridge, and they take a cube out of the tray. Or two.
Plus they have ideas of the Correct way to do things. They know how to serve their idea of whatever drink it is you ordered, and it doesn't include the filthy american habit of dumping a bunch of useless ice in there. For example, I drink scotch neat (that is, without ice, soda, water or whatever) and have the damndest time getting unpolluted whisky in cheap bars where every yahoo wants ice. But in the expensive bars it's fine but of course, expensive.
Look where I'm pointing! Don't you see 'em? Look! Just because you can't see them doesn't mean they're not there. What do you mean you can't see these 'atoms,' Mr Newton? Newton wouldn't have denied the existence of atoms as the basic building blocks of matter just because no one could conclusively prove they existed at the time.
One individual starts hobbling along on its back feet because the extra height gives her a better view of the surrounding area (better to spot predators and foodl). She is therefore more likely to survive, and her offspring copy this behaviour. BTW, the added height also makes the individual _taller_ (this is so obvious I shouldn't have to point it out, but you faithless Bible thumpers are notoriously dim), and as she is taller, she is higher in the local dominance hierarchy, which also increases chances to successfully reproduce. Other monkeys will notice this increased success and copy the behavior. Years spent hobbling around upright will change the tilt in the hip bones. Now, natural selection says those individuals with genes that already tilt the hips the right way will be "selected for" (that is they'll be more likely to reproduce offspring who grow to an age where they can reproduce themselves). My own personal hypothesis is that what individuals do can make changes in the body. Monkies who get used to walking upright will not find it uncomfortable, and their offspring will naturally be that way too within a short time. What evidence there is in the fossil record indicates changes happen in spurts in a line's development. Maybe the gods are tinkering, who knows? Who CARES, it happens. Burn your stupid bible.
lambasting M$, even accusing them of "theft" is perfectly right. Just like the Credence Clearwater Revival contract ripoff, whoever presented a contract with dishonest provisions on it is still a thief. Scamming is scamming. Should I trick elderly people into signing their life's savings over to me? That's a scam too, same thing. Tricking other people is still tricking them regardless of the law.
Regular/. readers will recognize this rant as a variation on one posted before about a whining CD store owner. Someone post a crosslink to the original! It's funny and I'm not skillful enough to do it. I especially like the part where the wuss goes home and gets reamed by his school-age daughters about their old clothes and how he cries. Heh
"Don't put all your eggs in one basket." I was lucky and thought of that before buying, and when I had to send in my pda to get it fixed I wasn't without a phone. "Don't count your chickens before they're hatched." That's pretty much what caused the dotcom bubble to burst.
McCarthy was only right in that there were indeed spies. But he was busy attacking Hollywood and ruining lives there while the hallowed halls of the Justice Dept was rife with spies. And to the parent poster, your logic is flawed (circular logic). They were the chief enemy of the united states BECAUSE they were "attempting to spread those ideals to others in government and the general population". BTW, spreading core political beliefs to other people is what the 1st amendment is all about. Are you some kind of idiot? What is the matter with Americans? If a guy stands on an orange crate and says "Let's throw down the capitalist oppressor!" you'll lynch him, but if he says "Let's all smear shit on our heads!" or "Let's all bow down and worship Jesus!" that's all fine and dandy. Which do you think the people of america would go for? Commies saying "You can't get rich" when our entire culture is geared around greed? There was never any reason for the persecution of communism; it never had a chance anyway, and ignoring it would have been better karma. Same thing goes for whatever dickheads ever criticise: various kinds of music, recreational drugs, abortion, etc etc.
that's right, all of the above posters make excellent points. A specific bird species to note is the african bee-eater. Wolf packs, too exhibit similar strategy; only the alpha male and female produce cubs, the other wolves help rear them.
Here's the Darwinian thing the original poster missed out on (by only looking at the surface and not thinking too deeply about the issue): Diversity and sample size. Any species with as large and complex a population as ours is going to mathematically have a certain percentage of different mating/sexual/child-rearing behaviours crop up. (As well as tons of other life strategies.) It is inevitable in a population of several billion complex individuals. Some will be gay as per the sliding scale, some will be Michael Jackson, etc.
I was running a used book sale in college when an indian student asked me if we had any "Debs. gah-zed debs?" We went around a minute before I realized he was saying 'cassette tapes.' The biggest difficulty in my mind of listening to the Hindustani accent is the tendency to voice all consonants instead of making them merely aspirant.
>Raising an animal to slaughter it for food and fuel is a lot different than torturing animals for fun.
You obviously know NOTHING about modern industrialized farming practices. Do a little research before your knee-jerk response pops out of your ignorant brain. Raising cattle the way it was done prior to the early 80s was a lot different. Nowadays cattle and other food animals are not treated with any humanity (nor are people for that matter). The term humanity has become a joke, in fact.
Nanos can go into your brain and remove the lipofuscin that's built up on the ends of the dendrites, and maybe even build some new connections, making you effectively smarter!
I got a 100% cotton shower curtain at Target; when it gets stinky I just throw it in the washing machine, snaps back wash after wash.
Oh, and "EEEWWWWW! The Sky is falling! The bacteria are swarming all over me!" Wah wah wah. Roll around in it a bit, you wussies! Jeez people are wimps nowadays.
I joined the SCA when I was 16 (nowadays you have to be 18 for the fighting) but I got pretty good within a few years, not even practicing every day. Hiro practices a LOT. and technically he's only a master in the metaverse; in the real world he only fought with either unarmed people or people w/guns or knives. Oh and Raven's harpoon. He also had a full time job writing code for one of the first institutions the created the Metaverse, including the creating the Black Sun. He didn't 'invent half the virtual world', he wrote some of the fundamental code that makes it work; so it stands to reason he'd know the tricks, especially in the Black Sun.
Reading comprehension is pretty low in this thread. And didn't we have this EXACT SAME DISCUSSION a few days ago when the most recent book came out? All you dildos who bitch about/. dupes better not be double posting your gripes about Neal Stephenson.
Finally someone who has some sense and wasn't raised by the TV. Dildo-parent says there's no Action? How about cutting Frosty the Pig away from a dead army butcher? How about skydiving onto a roof covered with spearpoints? Etc etc.. And people bitching about spelling errors? I've read every book NS has written, most of them more than once, and I've never seen anything spelled incorrectly, and I'm a stickler. And the typical/dotter spells "than" with an E in the middle.
Why are so many people here so thick? All these endings are proper endings to where the book/characters are going. The end of the Diamond Age is the point where the three main characters resolve their initial dilemmas: Nell solves the puzzles of the Primer (becomes an adult etc), Miranda meets her 'daughter' Nell, and Hackworth/the Artifex creates the new nanotech "Seed Technology", (though there's a slight delay due to Nell rescuing Miranda).
The ending of Cryptonomicon was even a pat ending: Randy's company gets the gold, and Randy and Amy live happily ever after (though there's certainly room for more adventures).
>It was destined to become a hit among twenty-something geeks who live in Silicon Valley and have no life outside of their job.
Considering how many people bought this book, your argument about who it appeals to holds as little water as your arguements about the writing. Sorry you didn't enjoy it; Clearly it was NOT written for 20-something geeks or he wouldn't have put in the exposition you found so painful. I don't know shit about Linux and found the whole book to be a fascinating techno-thriller on one hand and a great adventure story on the other. Can't wait to read the Baroque.
Slashdot Mirror
There was an employee who worked for AT&T in the twin cities' suburb of Bloomington (reports verified by many of his ex-coworkers) who used to jerk off during staff meetings under the table, while pointedly staring at female co-workers. He was apparently a big fat skinhead with horrible personal habits, and was also responsible for the following memo being sent out to the entire building:
"Please do not smear fecal matter on restroom walls."
There is ONE world. Count 'em! One! All this crap about 3rd world, etc is just bullshit made up by elitists to separate all of us people from each other. "Oh! look at THEM! They're not us, they're from another world than ours. They're aliens and we should fear them, hate them, pen them in, and it's all right to enslave them if we can. Hell, we can work 'em like dogs for tuppence a month and pass the savings on to ourselve at Walmart!"
The other issue with this is the newer designation of Developing, Developed, Under-developed. These too, are arbitrary based on an assumption of false superiority. "Ooh, you're not covered in concrete there! You're obviously not as good as us!" We should relabel it Overdeveloped, About Right, and Developing.
I go from Minneapolis to Des Moines and back once or twice a year, and there's grown up this huge wind farm on plains south of the MN/IA border, about a mile west of I35. It's just majestic to look at, especially in late afternoon with the sun shining down from behind it. Crybabies worrying about their view should consider how their view would change with a billion tons of smog in the air.
Any reasonably techy person reading Tolkien will realize mithril is nothing but aluminum. It occurs in nature EXTREMELY rarely, but has shown up in the Alps, which are the Misty Mountains. He describes it as being similar in color to silver and can be alloyed with other metals to make amazingly light sturdy armor. Nowhere (to my knowledge) does Tolkien say mithril was ever used in swords. The great weapons of the dwarves and the Eldar were always steel whenever materials were mentioned.
I went out and actually PAID for that piece of shit "St Anger" and now I can't take the fucker back because it's been opened. Those fuckers'll get sympathy from me when I can return a POS cd and the false-advertising DVD that came with it. (The packagine says a dvd of a CONCERT of the entire album. It turned out to be a REHEARSAL, no audience, just the band and some cameras in a room, and the main singer guy doesn't sing one song in key.) Fuck them. They should download a copy of their own song that goes "Don't want your greed, don't wanit it-ah!"
Sorry for the offtopic rant, but contrast Best Brains and Metallica and you'll see the difference in both their business style and their ethics.
>1. Cost Carbon fiber is expensive compaired to concret block and wood trusses.
Earthen houses are incredibly cheaper than concrete block and wood. And way less energy goes into creating them. And less deforestation etc etc. More labor, but can be owner built for literally dirt cheap, and expanded over time.
>Not to mention noone knows how well they will stand up to UV for the long term. Houses should last for at least 100 years.
NO, houses should last as long as someone wants to live in them. There are cob houses in Devon that have been standing since the 1400's. Periodic replastering the lime on the outside will do it.
>2. Looks. Good greif think of what a sub divsion of those things would look like! It would be like
war of the worlds.
Well, that'd be cool actually, but one can do fascinating sculpture in cob, and each can be unique, unlike the fucking hideous clone-boxes that currently are marring america's landscape now.
"I can live without free beer copies of the latest boy band, but I can't live without Free Software."
Why not? Ever tried it? You'd be amazed at the things you can get along without. Besides, it's all part of the same thing. When the corporations have too much power, they'll stamp out freedom of any kind, whether it's downloading their crap music or being forced to use their crap software because nothing else is available.
So you went to England and expected things to be just like they are in FLORIDA? "lots of ice, fill the damned thing up with ice if you have to" --how could they? In hot semitropical american florida, there are these things called Ice Machines that produce tons of ice each day. In England, the machine that produces the ice is called a fridge, and they take a cube out of the tray. Or two.
Plus they have ideas of the Correct way to do things. They know how to serve their idea of whatever drink it is you ordered, and it doesn't include the filthy american habit of dumping a bunch of useless ice in there. For example, I drink scotch neat (that is, without ice, soda, water or whatever) and have the damndest time getting unpolluted whisky in cheap bars where every yahoo wants ice. But in the expensive bars it's fine but of course, expensive.
Look where I'm pointing! Don't you see 'em? Look! Just because you can't see them doesn't mean they're not there.
What do you mean you can't see these 'atoms,' Mr Newton? Newton wouldn't have denied the existence of atoms as the basic building blocks of matter just because no one could conclusively prove they existed at the time.
One individual starts hobbling along on its back feet because the extra height gives her a better view of the surrounding area (better to spot predators and foodl). She is therefore more likely to survive, and her offspring copy this behaviour. BTW, the added height also makes the individual _taller_ (this is so obvious I shouldn't have to point it out, but you faithless Bible thumpers are notoriously dim), and as she is taller, she is higher in the local dominance hierarchy, which also increases chances to successfully reproduce. Other monkeys will notice this increased success and copy the behavior. Years spent hobbling around upright will change the tilt in the hip bones. Now, natural selection says those individuals with genes that already tilt the hips the right way will be "selected for" (that is they'll be more likely to reproduce offspring who grow to an age where they can reproduce themselves). My own personal hypothesis is that what individuals do can make changes in the body. Monkies who get used to walking upright will not find it uncomfortable, and their offspring will naturally be that way too within a short time. What evidence there is in the fossil record indicates changes happen in spurts in a line's development. Maybe the gods are tinkering, who knows? Who CARES, it happens. Burn your stupid bible.
lambasting M$, even accusing them of "theft" is perfectly right. Just like the Credence Clearwater Revival contract ripoff, whoever presented a contract with dishonest provisions on it is still a thief. Scamming is scamming. Should I trick elderly people into signing their life's savings over to me? That's a scam too, same thing. Tricking other people is still tricking them regardless of the law.
Regular /. readers will recognize this rant as a variation on one posted before about a whining CD store owner. Someone post a crosslink to the original! It's funny and I'm not skillful enough to do it. I especially like the part where the wuss goes home and gets reamed by his school-age daughters about their old clothes and how he cries. Heh
"Don't put all your eggs in one basket." I was lucky and thought of that before buying, and when I had to send in my pda to get it fixed I wasn't without a phone. "Don't count your chickens before they're hatched." That's pretty much what caused the dotcom bubble to burst.
McCarthy was only right in that there were indeed spies. But he was busy attacking Hollywood and ruining lives there while the hallowed halls of the Justice Dept was rife with spies. And to the parent poster, your logic is flawed (circular logic). They were the chief enemy of the united states BECAUSE they were "attempting to spread those ideals to others in government and the general population". BTW, spreading core political beliefs to other people is what the 1st amendment is all about. Are you some kind of idiot? What is the matter with Americans? If a guy stands on an orange crate and says "Let's throw down the capitalist oppressor!" you'll lynch him, but if he says "Let's all smear shit on our heads!" or "Let's all bow down and worship Jesus!" that's all fine and dandy. Which do you think the people of america would go for? Commies saying "You can't get rich" when our entire culture is geared around greed? There was never any reason for the persecution of communism; it never had a chance anyway, and ignoring it would have been better karma. Same thing goes for whatever dickheads ever criticise: various kinds of music, recreational drugs, abortion, etc etc.
that's right, all of the above posters make excellent points. A specific bird species to note is the african bee-eater. Wolf packs, too exhibit similar strategy; only the alpha male and female produce cubs, the other wolves help rear them.
Here's the Darwinian thing the original poster missed out on (by only looking at the surface and not thinking too deeply about the issue): Diversity and sample size. Any species with as large and complex a population as ours is going to mathematically have a certain percentage of different mating/sexual/child-rearing behaviours crop up. (As well as tons of other life strategies.) It is inevitable in a population of several billion complex individuals. Some will be gay as per the sliding scale, some will be Michael Jackson, etc.
I was running a used book sale in college when an indian student asked me if we had any "Debs. gah-zed debs?" We went around a minute before I realized he was saying 'cassette tapes.' The biggest difficulty in my mind of listening to the Hindustani accent is the tendency to voice all consonants instead of making them merely aspirant.
>Raising an animal to slaughter it for food and fuel is a lot different than torturing animals for fun.
You obviously know NOTHING about modern industrialized farming practices. Do a little research before your knee-jerk response pops out of your ignorant brain. Raising cattle the way it was done prior to the early 80s was a lot different. Nowadays cattle and other food animals are not treated with any humanity (nor are people for that matter). The term humanity has become a joke, in fact.
The ability to kill immortal idiots who have the strength of 10 gorillas and laser eyes.
Nanos can go into your brain and remove the lipofuscin that's built up on the ends of the dendrites, and maybe even build some new connections, making you effectively smarter!
I got a 100% cotton shower curtain at Target; when it gets stinky I just throw it in the washing machine, snaps back wash after wash.
Oh, and "EEEWWWWW! The Sky is falling! The bacteria are swarming all over me!" Wah wah wah. Roll around in it a bit, you wussies! Jeez people are wimps nowadays.
I joined the SCA when I was 16 (nowadays you have to be 18 for the fighting) but I got pretty good within a few years, not even practicing every day. Hiro practices a LOT. and technically he's only a master in the metaverse; in the real world he only fought with either unarmed people or people w/guns or knives. Oh and Raven's harpoon.
/. dupes better not be double posting your gripes about Neal Stephenson.
He also had a full time job writing code for one of the first institutions the created the Metaverse, including the creating the Black Sun. He didn't 'invent half the virtual world', he wrote some of the fundamental code that makes it work; so it stands to reason he'd know the tricks, especially in the Black Sun.
Reading comprehension is pretty low in this thread. And didn't we have this EXACT SAME DISCUSSION a few days ago when the most recent book came out? All you dildos who bitch about
Shenanigans!? I better get my broom!
Finally someone who has some sense and wasn't raised by the TV. Dildo-parent says there's no Action? How about cutting Frosty the Pig away from a dead army butcher? How about skydiving onto a roof covered with spearpoints? Etc etc.. And people bitching about spelling errors? I've read every book NS has written, most of them more than once, and I've never seen anything spelled incorrectly, and I'm a stickler. And the typical /dotter spells "than" with an E in the middle.
Why are so many people here so thick? All these endings are proper endings to where the book/characters are going. The end of the Diamond Age is the point where the three main characters resolve their initial dilemmas: Nell solves the puzzles of the Primer (becomes an adult etc), Miranda meets her 'daughter' Nell, and Hackworth/the Artifex creates the new nanotech "Seed Technology", (though there's a slight delay due to Nell rescuing Miranda).
The ending of Cryptonomicon was even a pat ending: Randy's company gets the gold, and Randy and Amy live happily ever after (though there's certainly room for more adventures).
>It was destined to become a hit among twenty-something geeks who live in Silicon Valley and have no life outside of their job.
Considering how many people bought this book, your argument about who it appeals to holds as little water as your arguements about the writing. Sorry you didn't enjoy it; Clearly it was NOT written for 20-something geeks or he wouldn't have put in the exposition you found so painful. I don't know shit about Linux and found the whole book to be a fascinating techno-thriller on one hand and a great adventure story on the other. Can't wait to read the Baroque.