Yes, it has to be derived from an energy source. But the point is, it can be derived from *any* energy source. Just add water, or any sort of organic matter.
If she likes playing Halo twelve hours a day, and I think that's absurd and excessive, I'll probably go do someone else.
It's one thing if your SO can't stand the fact that you have a hobby. But it's perfectly reasonable for her to expect that you'll put a lot of time and energy into the relationship.
Seriously, you don't need to let every phone call drag you away from the console and into a heartfealt conversation about her feelings. But if you're not willing to sacrifice your frag count to exchange a few complete sentences, then you're really whacked. Worse, you're going to lose her.
If the program knows how to reference the memory again if needed, then it's not technically a memory leak. So I guess what he's complaining about is "inefficient caching of tiles." Which is no small thing, I guess.
Simple, succinct, but it glosses over the downside. When I wake up in the morning, I want to shave, brush my teeth, and comb my hair, but integrating all those functions into one utensil wouldn't make for a better morning hygiene experience. A simple BitTorrent client might make sense in Firefox, but personally I want more control than a simple client would give me, especially in Firefox's environment (where the programmers will presumably want to make the experience similar to any other download).
At a minimum, I would want control over maximum download and upload speed, to decide when to stop seeding the file, and to be able to decide whether or not to download individual files within a directory. I just can't see a sane way to do that in Firefox's current download manager, and I can't see why I should want it to try.
I'm not aware of any other browsers that have such a thing integrated, so saying there isn't a reason to use Firefox until you get that particular feature seems a little silly. What are you using?
"Stable" and "unstable" aren't an either-or proposition. They're a continuum. So if something falls fairly close to the middle of the continuum, of course that thing will take it from both sides. You're trying to cling to a false dichotomy. Call it "stable enough for non-critical production work", and be at peace.
Some of the reviews are really out of line. For example, one says that if he doesn't stop bugging gamers, his fantasies of murderous teenagers might finally come true. Another reviewer claims that Jack Thompson anally raped him, and would do the same to anyone else who gave him a negative review. I don't think it's possible to take the second one seriously, and it may not be libelous for that reason. But the first one could very easily be a matter for law enforcement.
However, it seems that Jack Thompson wants all the one-star reviews deleted. Either he doesn't understand the law that he practices, or he's hoping Amazon's demon lawyer horde is even more confused than he is.
Now I'm reading Jack Thompson's post to Amazon, where he responds to his critics. Some of his accusations--such as his claim that this "vandalism" is being orchestrated by the gaming industry--would be libelous, if he'd only named names. And I feel very sorry for any Christian with a brain when he says, "I am a Christian. I proclaim the power, the sovereignty, the grace, and the incredible brilliance of the Creator of the Universe." My anti-religious biases notwithstanding, anyone with half a brain shouldn't have to be stuck in the same category as this guy.
I am curious to read this book. Anyone have a torrent of the PDF?
I suppose it wouldn't make any difference to your education if a beautiful woman in the front row turned around every few minutes and flashed her boobs at you either. After all, a distraction is a distraction is a distraction, right? If you're there to listen and learn, then you'll do well and won't get distracted, and if you're not motivated to do well, then you will.
I think the Internet is waaaay worse than standard distractions. It's vastly worse, because pretty much anything is out there, and each user can tailor their experience to exactly that which they find most interesting (and therefore most distracting). In fact, in order to come up with something equally distracting, I had to resort to naked women. But then, the Internet will give you those as well.
The Internet is a huge productivity sink, far worse than note-passing or doing crossword puzzles. This is because:
1) It's the most amazingest, wickedest, coolest thing ever.
2) It's only an Alt+Tab away from what you *ought* to be doing.
I think we can dismiss this article with a "Student who wasn't paying attention swears up and down that he really was paying attention. Film at 11."
As a teenager, I would frequently run up $60-$80 AOL bills. It's not fun having the "This costs $3/hour" meme banging on your cerebellum (though apparently not "not fun" enough for me).
I think a better plan would be to have separate models for occasional users. For example, $5 buys you the first ten hours in a month. If you exceed that, you have to pay the full $15-ish, but that's where it caps out. Or maybe a system that charged you $0.75/hour, but maxed out at $15 per billing cycle. Casual users would be attracted to the game, while more frequent users would carry on as they always have.
The problem from the game publisher's perspective is that a person can keep an account idle for months, without racking up any fees. Not only does that reduce their income directly, but it also breaks the, "Well, I'm paying for it so I might as well use it" thought mode. If anything, a user who hasn't been playing for a while will be less inclined to log in because he knows he'll be charged for it. So maybe a nominal $3 fee will keep people playing.
Another idea: A really popular game (like World of Warcraft) might strike a deal with a major cable service (Comcast for the sake of argument, but only because everyone has heard of them). A user could save money on their subscription by choosing to have it bundled into their Comcast bill. I think this would work because entertainment dollars are finite for a lot of people. If I'm paying $40/month for cable service and $15/month for the subscription, I might choose to forgo one and rely on the other for my entertainment needs. Sure, World of Comcrast will lose money on customers who would have bought both services, but it would also bring in new customers, whether from satellite TV customers with WOW accounts, from Comcast customers currently playing Star Wars Galaxies, or from people who have one service and are curious about the other.
Last thought: Why don't some of these games offer bundles? You know, pay one fee, and get access to three or four games. Maybe it would only attract the heavy users, but if they didn't want heavy users, why do they do the flat-fee pricing in the first place?
Well, yeah. But if you spread that out over a three month election, that's only a glass a day. Isn't that the amount we're supposed to be drinking?
I'm aware of how campaigns were conducted in the day. I may be naive, but I was awake for senior history class. I don't think anybody back then saw that sort of electioneering as condusive to democracy. But they had to draft a constitution that would actually pass, and having a long section on how campaigns would be regulated would have been seen as too much of a power grab. Or they might not have been thinking about it.
"Only the richest and most powerful of us can get an FEC exemption?" I'm not clear what you mean by that. The article reports that the FEC just gave an exemption to basically everyone with a blog.
Nor do I think that the Founding Fathers would have adhered so certainly to your absolutist interpretation of the First Amendment, when faced with examples like:
"Greetings, citizen. I notice that you're going in to vote now. I'll give you $35 to vote for Phil Phillerson, the Democratic candidate."
But the fact is, the Founding Fathers didn't live in a world of mass media, spin doctors, sophisticated demographic analysis, or billion dollar elections. The current system utterly fails to give people the candidates who will actually serve their interests. This is in part because the expense of mounting a campaign (especially against an incumbent) are prohibitive. But it's also because the necessity of raising vast quantities of money makes politicians much more aware of the needs of those who write the checks than those who cast the votes.
If the Founding Fathers wouldn't restrict speech at all, then to hell with them. As great a document as the Constitution was, this is a major bug. A real showstopper.
Your claim that these laws are a power grab by those at the top seems absurd to me, so I'd like some clarification. Laws that keep millionaires from donating millions, but don't keep thousandaires from donating thousands strike me as very egalitarian.
The reality where the computer, upon hearing the first snippit of a never-before-encountered language, begins providing a perfect translation? Though it never bothered to activate when Worf was swearing in Klingon. After all, it was a family show.
In retrospect, the Universal Translator was one of the more absurd things about the Star Trek universe.
To say the Mozilla people "have been refusing to investigate this bug for 2 1/2 years now" is a gross mischaracterization. It was right for them to mark this bug as invalid because it's not a bug. What it is is a collection of symptoms running the gamut from crashes to extreme memory usage to cpu hogging.
The folks at mozilla are fixing these sorts of bugs all the time. But since the report is too vague to let the Mozilla coders know when the bug that caused the crash is actually fixed, it could never be marked fixed.
In short, it's "not being investigated" because it's vague, unreproducable, and simply duplicates a large number of more specific bugs.
Funny thing. I've been on the latest release of Ubuntu, and nothing behaves the way I expect. When applications try to take focus, all Ubuntu Gnome does is start the taskbar button flashing for that application.
Sometimes I prefer this, but I've gotten in trouble with my girlfriend for not answering her instant messages, because I didn't notice that they got sent.
The problem is, when people make large contributions to a campaign, to the point where the candidate basically owes his or her position of power to a few special interests, that very much infringes upon my rights.
In order to live in a society where the freedom of speech means anything, we have to protect the integrity of the political process. When our politicians owe more to their financers than they do to the Constitution, the voting public, or society as a whole, the ensuing corruption becomes impossible to root out through strictly political means, because the system that allows us to effect change is broken.
There is an even simpler, more powerful idea than freedom of speech, from which that principle derives: Every citizen is equal under the law. If a person has the means to buy politicians, he makes himself greater than others in the eyes of the law, to the detriment of all freedoms.
Ergo, we need campaign finance laws. The details, I leave to the drunken debates between second year law students.
Details for those who don't know what he's talking about.
If I remember, the crux of the Democrats' legal case was that the use of Sinclair's media holdings to broadcast blatant propaganda constituted a donation to the Bush campaign, the value of which put Sinclair waaaaaaaay over the legal limits.
I think the psychology studies have proven exactly the opposite: To the vast majority of people, if they don't understand it, it can't possibly be difficult.
If you think about it, this explains a lot in life.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it has to be derived from an energy source. But the point is, it can be derived from *any* energy source. Just add water, or any sort of organic matter.
Where are you getting "it has to come from oil?"
If she likes playing Halo twelve hours a day, and I think that's absurd and excessive, I'll probably go do someone else.
It's one thing if your SO can't stand the fact that you have a hobby. But it's perfectly reasonable for her to expect that you'll put a lot of time and energy into the relationship.
Glad to see your priorities are in order.
Seriously, you don't need to let every phone call drag you away from the console and into a heartfealt conversation about her feelings. But if you're not willing to sacrifice your frag count to exchange a few complete sentences, then you're really whacked. Worse, you're going to lose her.
Which is fine. More unattached girls for me.
In this case, though, the number of customers is on the order of a hundred million people.
:)
Care to do the math again?
It's an important point, though. Sometimes programmer time isn't used terribly efficiently.
If the program knows how to reference the memory again if needed, then it's not technically a memory leak. So I guess what he's complaining about is "inefficient caching of tiles." Which is no small thing, I guess.
Simple, succinct, but it glosses over the downside. When I wake up in the morning, I want to shave, brush my teeth, and comb my hair, but integrating all those functions into one utensil wouldn't make for a better morning hygiene experience. A simple BitTorrent client might make sense in Firefox, but personally I want more control than a simple client would give me, especially in Firefox's environment (where the programmers will presumably want to make the experience similar to any other download).
At a minimum, I would want control over maximum download and upload speed, to decide when to stop seeding the file, and to be able to decide whether or not to download individual files within a directory. I just can't see a sane way to do that in Firefox's current download manager, and I can't see why I should want it to try.
I'm not aware of any other browsers that have such a thing integrated, so saying there isn't a reason to use Firefox until you get that particular feature seems a little silly. What are you using?
"Stable" and "unstable" aren't an either-or proposition. They're a continuum. So if something falls fairly close to the middle of the continuum, of course that thing will take it from both sides. You're trying to cling to a false dichotomy. Call it "stable enough for non-critical production work", and be at peace.
I strongly prefer that the browser just does what it knows best. I'd rather it just pop up the dialog asking me if I want to open it with Azureus.
What advantages do you think an integrated BT client would have?
Some of the reviews are really out of line. For example, one says that if he doesn't stop bugging gamers, his fantasies of murderous teenagers might finally come true. Another reviewer claims that Jack Thompson anally raped him, and would do the same to anyone else who gave him a negative review. I don't think it's possible to take the second one seriously, and it may not be libelous for that reason. But the first one could very easily be a matter for law enforcement.
However, it seems that Jack Thompson wants all the one-star reviews deleted. Either he doesn't understand the law that he practices, or he's hoping Amazon's demon lawyer horde is even more confused than he is.
Now I'm reading Jack Thompson's post to Amazon, where he responds to his critics. Some of his accusations--such as his claim that this "vandalism" is being orchestrated by the gaming industry--would be libelous, if he'd only named names. And I feel very sorry for any Christian with a brain when he says, "I am a Christian. I proclaim the power, the sovereignty, the grace, and the incredible brilliance of the Creator of the Universe." My anti-religious biases notwithstanding, anyone with half a brain shouldn't have to be stuck in the same category as this guy.
I am curious to read this book. Anyone have a torrent of the PDF?
I suppose it wouldn't make any difference to your education if a beautiful woman in the front row turned around every few minutes and flashed her boobs at you either. After all, a distraction is a distraction is a distraction, right? If you're there to listen and learn, then you'll do well and won't get distracted, and if you're not motivated to do well, then you will.
I think the Internet is waaaay worse than standard distractions. It's vastly worse, because pretty much anything is out there, and each user can tailor their experience to exactly that which they find most interesting (and therefore most distracting). In fact, in order to come up with something equally distracting, I had to resort to naked women. But then, the Internet will give you those as well.
The Internet is a huge productivity sink, far worse than note-passing or doing crossword puzzles. This is because:
1) It's the most amazingest, wickedest, coolest thing ever.
2) It's only an Alt+Tab away from what you *ought* to be doing.
I think we can dismiss this article with a "Student who wasn't paying attention swears up and down that he really was paying attention. Film at 11."
I've always been curious: How do you pronounce "pwning?"
As a teenager, I would frequently run up $60-$80 AOL bills. It's not fun having the "This costs $3/hour" meme banging on your cerebellum (though apparently not "not fun" enough for me).
I think a better plan would be to have separate models for occasional users. For example, $5 buys you the first ten hours in a month. If you exceed that, you have to pay the full $15-ish, but that's where it caps out. Or maybe a system that charged you $0.75/hour, but maxed out at $15 per billing cycle. Casual users would be attracted to the game, while more frequent users would carry on as they always have.
The problem from the game publisher's perspective is that a person can keep an account idle for months, without racking up any fees. Not only does that reduce their income directly, but it also breaks the, "Well, I'm paying for it so I might as well use it" thought mode. If anything, a user who hasn't been playing for a while will be less inclined to log in because he knows he'll be charged for it. So maybe a nominal $3 fee will keep people playing.
Another idea: A really popular game (like World of Warcraft) might strike a deal with a major cable service (Comcast for the sake of argument, but only because everyone has heard of them). A user could save money on their subscription by choosing to have it bundled into their Comcast bill. I think this would work because entertainment dollars are finite for a lot of people. If I'm paying $40/month for cable service and $15/month for the subscription, I might choose to forgo one and rely on the other for my entertainment needs. Sure, World of Comcrast will lose money on customers who would have bought both services, but it would also bring in new customers, whether from satellite TV customers with WOW accounts, from Comcast customers currently playing Star Wars Galaxies, or from people who have one service and are curious about the other.
Last thought: Why don't some of these games offer bundles? You know, pay one fee, and get access to three or four games. Maybe it would only attract the heavy users, but if they didn't want heavy users, why do they do the flat-fee pricing in the first place?
Excellent points, but I need to take issue with your formula. It should be more akin to:
_ in_college ))
$14 / (( monthly_salary * 0.9 ) - ( food + rent + utilities + transportation + clothes + health_insurance + keep_gf_happy_money + pay_off_the_credit_card_debt_from_that_one_bender
In short, the question isn't "Is this worth it as a percentage of my salary?", but "Is this worth it as a percentage of my disposable income."
I make under $1000 per month, but taking your formula literally, there is very little I would ever deny myself.
Oh, the * 0.9? It's crazy not to be stashing away at least ten percent of your income.
Technically, yeast are animals.
On the downside, they can probably have their metabolism slowed much more drastically than humans ever could (short of being comatose).
I don't expect this to lead to any immediate breakthroughs.
Well, yeah. But if you spread that out over a three month election, that's only a glass a day. Isn't that the amount we're supposed to be drinking?
I'm aware of how campaigns were conducted in the day. I may be naive, but I was awake for senior history class. I don't think anybody back then saw that sort of electioneering as condusive to democracy. But they had to draft a constitution that would actually pass, and having a long section on how campaigns would be regulated would have been seen as too much of a power grab. Or they might not have been thinking about it.
"Only the richest and most powerful of us can get an FEC exemption?" I'm not clear what you mean by that. The article reports that the FEC just gave an exemption to basically everyone with a blog.
Nor do I think that the Founding Fathers would have adhered so certainly to your absolutist interpretation of the First Amendment, when faced with examples like:
"Greetings, citizen. I notice that you're going in to vote now. I'll give you $35 to vote for Phil Phillerson, the Democratic candidate."
But the fact is, the Founding Fathers didn't live in a world of mass media, spin doctors, sophisticated demographic analysis, or billion dollar elections. The current system utterly fails to give people the candidates who will actually serve their interests. This is in part because the expense of mounting a campaign (especially against an incumbent) are prohibitive. But it's also because the necessity of raising vast quantities of money makes politicians much more aware of the needs of those who write the checks than those who cast the votes.
If the Founding Fathers wouldn't restrict speech at all, then to hell with them. As great a document as the Constitution was, this is a major bug. A real showstopper.
Your claim that these laws are a power grab by those at the top seems absurd to me, so I'd like some clarification. Laws that keep millionaires from donating millions, but don't keep thousandaires from donating thousands strike me as very egalitarian.
Money doesn't vote?
Go look up the statistics, and see if there's a correlation between candidates outspending opponents and candidates winning elections.
Then come back and tell me that money doesn't vote.
Annoyed girlfriend? Or $20? Annoyed girlfriend? Or $20?
Hang on, I'm thinking.
The reality where the computer, upon hearing the first snippit of a never-before-encountered language, begins providing a perfect translation? Though it never bothered to activate when Worf was swearing in Klingon. After all, it was a family show.
In retrospect, the Universal Translator was one of the more absurd things about the Star Trek universe.
To say the Mozilla people "have been refusing to investigate this bug for 2 1/2 years now" is a gross mischaracterization. It was right for them to mark this bug as invalid because it's not a bug. What it is is a collection of symptoms running the gamut from crashes to extreme memory usage to cpu hogging.
The folks at mozilla are fixing these sorts of bugs all the time. But since the report is too vague to let the Mozilla coders know when the bug that caused the crash is actually fixed, it could never be marked fixed.
In short, it's "not being investigated" because it's vague, unreproducable, and simply duplicates a large number of more specific bugs.
Funny thing. I've been on the latest release of Ubuntu, and nothing behaves the way I expect. When applications try to take focus, all Ubuntu Gnome does is start the taskbar button flashing for that application.
Sometimes I prefer this, but I've gotten in trouble with my girlfriend for not answering her instant messages, because I didn't notice that they got sent.
The problem is, when people make large contributions to a campaign, to the point where the candidate basically owes his or her position of power to a few special interests, that very much infringes upon my rights.
In order to live in a society where the freedom of speech means anything, we have to protect the integrity of the political process. When our politicians owe more to their financers than they do to the Constitution, the voting public, or society as a whole, the ensuing corruption becomes impossible to root out through strictly political means, because the system that allows us to effect change is broken.
There is an even simpler, more powerful idea than freedom of speech, from which that principle derives: Every citizen is equal under the law. If a person has the means to buy politicians, he makes himself greater than others in the eyes of the law, to the detriment of all freedoms.
Ergo, we need campaign finance laws. The details, I leave to the drunken debates between second year law students.
Details for those who don't know what he's talking about.
If I remember, the crux of the Democrats' legal case was that the use of Sinclair's media holdings to broadcast blatant propaganda constituted a donation to the Bush campaign, the value of which put Sinclair waaaaaaaay over the legal limits.
I don't think the Founding Fathers ever intended the "one dollar, one vote" system that occurs when you don't have regulation of campaign finance.
Do you?
I think the psychology studies have proven exactly the opposite: To the vast majority of people, if they don't understand it, it can't possibly be difficult.
If you think about it, this explains a lot in life.