The imaginary radiation, of course. Seriously, people who think CRTs emit any significant amout of potentially harmful radiation are the same people who think if you were to stand in front of a running microwave oven with the door open, you will be bombarded with ionizing radiation and get cancer. People hear radiation and all they know is "X-rays", or "nukular radiation". Crimony, don't they know that steam radiators give of radiation? It's mostly IR, but it's radiation.
To be fair, by most reports Stalin killed 10 million of his own people
And to be accurate, Stalin killed about 43 million between 1939 and 1953. Take a look at R.J. Rummel's web site for accurate analyses of historical acts of democide.
I always thought those were for emergency purposes only -- such as when those O2 masks drop down from the ceiling.
You are correct, sir. I did a little in-depth research and found that the cabin (on a 747 at least) is continuously fed outside air from at least two of three Environmental Control Units. The oxygen generators are for the emergency system only. My previous statement was based on hearsay. Never believe what people tell ya', right?
One interesting thing I found out is that the ECU's blow the pressurized outside air into the cockpit first and the exhaust is in the rear of the plane. So the closer to the front you are, the "fresher" your air is. Yet another way the 1st Class folks have it better.
Exactly where in Europe do you find socialist countries?? Just about all of them except the totalitarian and overly dogmatic Vatican are democracies these days. I don't know about most of the newly formed states when Yugoslavia collapsed, but my best guess is that these are emerging democracies as well.
Democracy doesn't preclude socialism. If the people vote for state-run industries, then the people have voted for socialism, yes?
But as for who owns bandwidth on the other side of the pond from your perspective: it's a mixture of academic institutions, private and state-owned telephone companies
This is what I meant. In europe, some countries have state-run telephone/datacom (socialism). We do not have that here in the US (not socialism). This is the only point I was making.
This is clever, but might have some undesirable side effects. Suppose a spammer attaches a long list of neutral words to his e-mail in order to 'dilute' the bad words. This way some innocent words might get assigned positive spam probability thus resulting in false positives later.
This is a possibility, but if the words are "neutral" then they'll likely show up on the "notSPAM" side too, which keeps them neutral. For an otherwise "good" word to become "bad" it'll either have to never show up as "good" (which means it might as well be bad), or show up in a LOT of spam, and I don't think you'll ever see that level of co-operation between spam spewers.
In the US, doesn't the government own and control access to the fiber lines?
No. You're thinking of a socialist country, like one would find in europe. Here in the US, the government doesn't own the infrastructure, rather it is owned by private corporations and regulated by the government. Then the corporations buy the regulators.
Er, I thought the plane engine compresses the air which is then circulated through the cabins
Actually, no. The truth is quite a bit more vile. They have what are called "oxygen generators", which are devices containing certain chemical compounds which (when activated) give off pure oxygen. The air in the cabin is basically just "re-oxygenated", filtered a bit, and recycled for the whole flight. So yes, you are breathing the same air as all those coughing, sneezing, choking, stinking people on the plane-- it's just been re-oxygenated.
Crimony, instead of linking to geartest.com's page on it only, why don't they link to Logitech's page too so that we can see what the stupid thing looks like when geartest.com gets slahdotted? Think, people!
If the companies believe they can make wiser decisions outside the court, why do they go inside the court?
Well, in order to get to the part of the process where they sit down and hammer out an agreement, they have to go through the legal system equivalent of a game of chicken. Intergraph says "I'm better than you" (you used our IP without paying)
Intel says back "No you're not" (no we didn't).
Intergraph retorts "Oh yeah? I'll prove it--I challenge you to a game of chicken" (We'll see you in court)
Intel: "Fine!" (Fine!)
Then, as the cars speed towards each other head on (as the court case progresses), Intel thinks that Intergraph isn't going to swerve out of the way first (has evidence to back up its claim), so they jerk the steering wheel to the side and chicken out (agree to some sort of non-judicial arbitration).
Driving head-on at one another is an important part of the legal system. It is the most costly of all the various means of proving whose wiener is bigger, but could very well end up with both parties wrecking their cars or dying. But since it's the only means of redress Intergraph can force Intel to participate in, it was invoked as its last resort. Basically, Intel wasn't going to give Intergraph a dime voluntarily unless their other option was limited to giving it to them involuntarily.
Personally, I think the CEO's of each company should be forced to play an actual game of chicken to decide the case. It might be a bit arbitrary, but the entertainment value would make up for that.
If I have photos proving you did something illegal, then the burden of proof is still on me as the accuser. Its just I already have proof.
Inaccurate comparison. It should read:
"If I have photos indicating that you have done something that could be illegal under certain circumstances, I have no proof of illegal activity."
Yeah, I've browsed at -1 before. That's where all the potty jokes, goatse.cx references, and f1r5t p05t! crap happens.If being a "real man" requires talking about poop, showing stretched asshole pics, and being the first dog to piss on the tree, count me out.
Which brings up the question: Why are domain names handled by ICANN, rather than the trademark/servicemark section of the Patent and Trademark office?
For the same reason the US Dept. of Commerce set up ICANN in the first place. They wanted the Internet to be a world-wide entity and decided it shouldn't be under the control of any one national government. Unfortunately, we now have an elitist corporation in charge instead of an elitist government agency, which isn't an improvement. Initially, the current board at ICANN was supposed to be a temporary board until a "popularly chosen" board could be assembled, but the "temporary" board decided that they wanted to stay and changed the rules so they became "temporary advisory board members", serving with the elected board. Then they pulled all sorts of sleazy rule changes that prevented the elected members from doing anything, and changed their "temporary" board status to "permanent". Now they've decided to get rid of the elected members altogether, because they cause too much trouble by objecting to all this crap. Sleazebags.
I have a good broom story much like that. I was installing a whole stack of routers in the server room of a very large travel agency. The room also contained the brains of their entire phone system. The whole thing (4 huge compaq servers, dozens of routers/switches, the phone KSU) was hard wired into a 3'x2'x4'high UPS unit to keep it all running no matter what happened to the power. Janitorial services folks always seem to think that the server room is the best place for the brooms, mops, dusters, etc. (perhaps because there are no chairs, they think no one ever goes in there?) and I had to move a half dozen brooms and dustmops to get to the back side of the equipment rack. So I leaned them against the wall by the door and was happily working away when a lowly "intern" type came in and knocked over one of the brooms. It fell, in that same well known broom-arc, bounced off the doorknob and landed right on the front panel of the UPS and flipped the little rocker switch that cut off all power to everything hooked up to the UPS. The room suddenly became deathly quiet, but the silence was soon broken by the yells of 200+ travel agents on three floors whose phones and network connections had suddenly gone dead. Normally, the UPS is supposed to have a plastic cover to prevent such things, but some dolt had removed it for reasons unknown. I flipped the switch back on and everything was back online within five minutes, but they were still quite upset.
just to build the dam in the first place they had to reroute the entire river around the area where they did the construction.
They rerouted the river through four tunnels blasted into the rock, two on either side of the construction site. However influential the dam may have become after completion, the re-routing through the tunnels caused no significant change in either the flow or quality of the river water. I'm not saying your other arguments are wrong, it's just that if your info about this aspect is so painfully inaccurate it throws the rest into question.
Like when people I know get hysterical and say "they're going to carpet bomb Iraq! Doesn't that enrage you?" I calmly reply that modern weapons make carpet bombing obsolete, and their hyperbole only discredits them in the eyes of those they wish to convince. So please: calm voice, accurate facts, pauses for listening. Makes your position sound less absurd that way.
Utzon was not too artsy fartsy to deal with engineering problems, he was beyond them. He is a great architect who demands great engineers to fulfill his vision.
Errr... another way of saying this is that he put too little thought into the engineering to realize that he was asking the impossible, but insisted the impossible be tried anyway. Be it out of hubris or ignorance, such demands are inexcusable. Design architects have to have SOME cognizance of structural engineering-- otherwise they design the impossible. He was selected in a competition where the applicants were asked to submit designs for an opera house to be built with a budget of ~$10 million. Engineering may have been "beneath" him, but cost accounting was a specific request of the customer.
I, for one, am glad that his Opera House was attacked not from the perspective of what was buildable, but what was beautiful
I agree, the building is amazing and much preferable over "standard" designs, but the fact remains that the designer didn't have his feet solidly on the ground (engineering-wise) when he came up with the design.
Who benefits most from the ability to get goods across your state from one side to the other? People in YOUR state, or people in states to either side of you who are trying to get the goods through your state? But who has to pay for the roads when there is no federal organization doing it? The state in the middle, with no incentive whatsoever to make travel across it's area fast, and every incentive to force people to slow down and patronise its businesses.
What the hell are you smoking? Does this "state in the middle" not require goods from other states? Is it not in that state's interest to make it easier for those goods to get there? A highway going through a state also is a highway coming into the state from both directions. As for your premise that hampering the flow of traffic somehow increases local revenue, you're totally on crack. If Oklahoma one day decided it was going to "de-pave" parts of I-80 in order to give travellers incentive to "slow down and patronise its businesses", how long would it take people to say "screw that, Texas has I-10 and it's paved"? Soon Texas has all the east-west traffic and Oklahoma businesses are leaving the state for Texas, where all the action is. This is elementary economics here.
You will note that in the days before federal funding, we had few freeways.
Hah! That's because the Feds first stuck their fingers in the highway system in 1916. Most roads weren't even paved back then. One cannot make a real before-after comparison because "before" was a time when cars were still little more than a novelty for most folks. Just because the National Highway System was built under Federal oversight doesn't mean that was the only way it could've worked.
"P"rogramming is obviosuly much more than just the means. The actual running "P"rogram of just about any design can have so many facets of care and life put into things - the ease with which the "P"rogram might be built. The configurability of the "P"rogram. The API which one might access the "P"rogram through other "P"rograms. The interface that leans the user to interact with the "P"rogram are all entireley different than the abstract thoughts that gave birth to the "P"rogram, and breathe soul, if you will, into what once was abstract and souless, and are all aspects of how successful we consider the program regardless of how strict it adheres to original design, or even intent.
I can't "P"ut my finger on it, but something about your "P"ersistent "P"enchant for "P"utting the letter "P" in quotes "P"ractically "P"uts my "P"oor eyeballs into a state of "P"ermanent "P"erplexment.
His example of the Sydney Opera House employing modular/modernist components despite its postmodern design fails to mention the real lesson Jorn Utzorn learned. Utzorn's initial design for the shell roofs didn't include "ribs supporting them." His original thought was that they'd be self-supporting, but he never had the proper engineering studies done. Subsequently, they had the first 20' of the shells built up before he realized that his napkin-based engineering tests weren't good enough. At that point there was a mad scramble to find off-the-shelf materials that could be added to hold up the roof. Basically "modernist components" saved this guy's ass because he was too engaged in the "art" of architectural design and didn't pay enough attention to the "science" needed to make things work. The projected $10 million cost ballooned up to $150 million because of Utzorn's failure to take into account the laws of physics, so in 1966 he (resigned/was fired from) the job. The guy who took his place as design architect found out what a further loser Utzorn was as an engineer when he looked at the plans and saw that elevation drawings of the glass walls that enclose the ends of the "shells" contained no design or engineering specs for their construction whatsoever: basically Utzorn had written "glass wall" with an arrow pointing to the empty space. Nice, eh?
I think the important lesson the Sydney Opera House debacle teaches us is that postmodernism is pretty, but if you're using it in creating something functional, make sure it'll at least function. That, and "don't send an artist to do an engineer's job".
Every time any sort of goods are transported to or from your state to other states your state is getting a benefit from the federal funding for highways.
Unless your state never trades any goods and is totally insular, you DO benefit from the highways in other states.
The objection I have to this argument is that it assumes that if the feds didn't pay for these highways, they wouldn't get built. Federal highway funding programs are, in my opinion, extortion schemes. If the feds were really just interested in highways, they'd let the states keep most of their money and simply distribute subsidies to underfunded states. Saying that the money the Feds are "graciously allowing" the states to have back goes to a good purpose doesn't justify the Feds taking it in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
What high radiation?
The imaginary radiation, of course. Seriously, people who think CRTs emit any significant amout of potentially harmful radiation are the same people who think if you were to stand in front of a running microwave oven with the door open, you will be bombarded with ionizing radiation and get cancer. People hear radiation and all they know is "X-rays", or "nukular radiation". Crimony, don't they know that steam radiators give of radiation? It's mostly IR, but it's radiation.
since I've started I've gone from 250 to 180 (and now can run 5 miles in 45 minutes).
Hah! I can drive 5 miles in ten minutes, and I didn't have to lose any weight to do it, either!
To be fair, by most reports Stalin killed 10 million of his own people
And to be accurate, Stalin killed about 43 million between 1939 and 1953. Take a look at R.J. Rummel's web site for accurate analyses of historical acts of democide.
I always thought those were for emergency purposes only -- such as when those O2 masks drop down from the ceiling.
You are correct, sir. I did a little in-depth research and found that the cabin (on a 747 at least) is continuously fed outside air from at least two of three Environmental Control Units. The oxygen generators are for the emergency system only. My previous statement was based on hearsay. Never believe what people tell ya', right?
One interesting thing I found out is that the ECU's blow the pressurized outside air into the cockpit first and the exhaust is in the rear of the plane. So the closer to the front you are, the "fresher" your air is. Yet another way the 1st Class folks have it better.
Exactly where in Europe do you find socialist countries?? Just about all of them except the totalitarian and overly dogmatic Vatican are democracies these days. I don't know about most of the newly formed states when Yugoslavia collapsed, but my best guess is that these are emerging democracies as well.
Democracy doesn't preclude socialism. If the people vote for state-run industries, then the people have voted for socialism, yes?
But as for who owns bandwidth on the other side of the pond from your perspective: it's a mixture of academic institutions, private and state-owned telephone companies
This is what I meant. In europe, some countries have state-run telephone/datacom (socialism). We do not have that here in the US (not socialism). This is the only point I was making.
This is clever, but might have some undesirable side effects. Suppose a spammer attaches a long list of neutral words to his e-mail in order to 'dilute' the bad words. This way some innocent words might get assigned positive spam probability thus resulting in false positives later.
This is a possibility, but if the words are "neutral" then they'll likely show up on the "notSPAM" side too, which keeps them neutral. For an otherwise "good" word to become "bad" it'll either have to never show up as "good" (which means it might as well be bad), or show up in a LOT of spam, and I don't think you'll ever see that level of co-operation between spam spewers.
In the US, doesn't the government own and control access to the fiber lines?
No. You're thinking of a socialist country, like one would find in europe. Here in the US, the government doesn't own the infrastructure, rather it is owned by private corporations and regulated by the government. Then the corporations buy the regulators.
Er, I thought the plane engine compresses the air which is then circulated through the cabins
Actually, no. The truth is quite a bit more vile. They have what are called "oxygen generators", which are devices containing certain chemical compounds which (when activated) give off pure oxygen. The air in the cabin is basically just "re-oxygenated", filtered a bit, and recycled for the whole flight. So yes, you are breathing the same air as all those coughing, sneezing, choking, stinking people on the plane-- it's just been re-oxygenated.
Crimony, instead of linking to geartest.com's page on it only, why don't they link to Logitech's page too so that we can see what the stupid thing looks like when geartest.com gets slahdotted? Think, people!
If the companies believe they can make wiser decisions outside the court, why do they go inside the court?
Well, in order to get to the part of the process where they sit down and hammer out an agreement, they have to go through the legal system equivalent of a game of chicken.
Intergraph says "I'm better than you" (you used our IP without paying)
Intel says back "No you're not" (no we didn't).
Intergraph retorts "Oh yeah? I'll prove it--I challenge you to a game of chicken" (We'll see you in court)
Intel: "Fine!" (Fine!)
Then, as the cars speed towards each other head on (as the court case progresses), Intel thinks that Intergraph isn't going to swerve out of the way first (has evidence to back up its claim), so they jerk the steering wheel to the side and chicken out (agree to some sort of non-judicial arbitration).
Driving head-on at one another is an important part of the legal system. It is the most costly of all the various means of proving whose wiener is bigger, but could very well end up with both parties wrecking their cars or dying. But since it's the only means of redress Intergraph can force Intel to participate in, it was invoked as its last resort. Basically, Intel wasn't going to give Intergraph a dime voluntarily unless their other option was limited to giving it to them involuntarily.
Personally, I think the CEO's of each company should be forced to play an actual game of chicken to decide the case. It might be a bit arbitrary, but the entertainment value would make up for that.
If I have photos proving you did something illegal, then the burden of proof is still on me as the accuser. Its just I already have proof.
Inaccurate comparison. It should read:
"If I have photos indicating that you have done something that could be illegal under certain circumstances, I have no proof of illegal activity."
A LOT happens down here in the -1 realm.
Yeah, I've browsed at -1 before. That's where all the potty jokes, goatse.cx references, and f1r5t p05t! crap happens.If being a "real man" requires talking about poop, showing stretched asshole pics, and being the first dog to piss on the tree, count me out.
Granted, it is a very very stupid error, but getting that password list (even though it is online) I would say constitutes some level of hacking
and I would say that getting the password list is no sort of crime. Using the passwords, however, would be.
nobody should browse at -1 unless they're moderating. Very little happens below "1" worth reading.
twas a joke, man. He's making a humorous statement by paraphrasing the annoying guy in the Dell TV commercials who says "Dude, you're getting a Dell."
Hmmm, in the process of replying to this thread, I have determined that the discussion was irrelevant. Dang.
:)
Yeah, I hate when that happens. I do it all the time.
Which brings up the question: Why are domain names handled by ICANN, rather than the trademark/servicemark section of the Patent and Trademark office?
For the same reason the US Dept. of Commerce set up ICANN in the first place. They wanted the Internet to be a world-wide entity and decided it shouldn't be under the control of any one national government. Unfortunately, we now have an elitist corporation in charge instead of an elitist government agency, which isn't an improvement. Initially, the current board at ICANN was supposed to be a temporary board until a "popularly chosen" board could be assembled, but the "temporary" board decided that they wanted to stay and changed the rules so they became "temporary advisory board members", serving with the elected board. Then they pulled all sorts of sleazy rule changes that prevented the elected members from doing anything, and changed their "temporary" board status to "permanent". Now they've decided to get rid of the elected members altogether, because they cause too much trouble by objecting to all this crap. Sleazebags.
I have a good broom story much like that. I was installing a whole stack of routers in the server room of a very large travel agency. The room also contained the brains of their entire phone system. The whole thing (4 huge compaq servers, dozens of routers/switches, the phone KSU) was hard wired into a 3'x2'x4'high UPS unit to keep it all running no matter what happened to the power. Janitorial services folks always seem to think that the server room is the best place for the brooms, mops, dusters, etc. (perhaps because there are no chairs, they think no one ever goes in there?) and I had to move a half dozen brooms and dustmops to get to the back side of the equipment rack. So I leaned them against the wall by the door and was happily working away when a lowly "intern" type came in and knocked over one of the brooms. It fell, in that same well known broom-arc, bounced off the doorknob and landed right on the front panel of the UPS and flipped the little rocker switch that cut off all power to everything hooked up to the UPS. The room suddenly became deathly quiet, but the silence was soon broken by the yells of 200+ travel agents on three floors whose phones and network connections had suddenly gone dead. Normally, the UPS is supposed to have a plastic cover to prevent such things, but some dolt had removed it for reasons unknown. I flipped the switch back on and everything was back online within five minutes, but they were still quite upset.
just to build the dam in the first place they had to reroute the entire river around the area where they did the construction.
They rerouted the river through four tunnels blasted into the rock, two on either side of the construction site. However influential the dam may have become after completion, the re-routing through the tunnels caused no significant change in either the flow or quality of the river water. I'm not saying your other arguments are wrong, it's just that if your info about this aspect is so painfully inaccurate it throws the rest into question.
Like when people I know get hysterical and say "they're going to carpet bomb Iraq! Doesn't that enrage you?" I calmly reply that modern weapons make carpet bombing obsolete, and their hyperbole only discredits them in the eyes of those they wish to convince. So please: calm voice, accurate facts, pauses for listening. Makes your position sound less absurd that way.
Utzon was not too artsy fartsy to deal with engineering problems, he was beyond them. He is a great architect who demands great engineers to fulfill his vision.
Errr... another way of saying this is that he put too little thought into the engineering to realize that he was asking the impossible, but insisted the impossible be tried anyway. Be it out of hubris or ignorance, such demands are inexcusable. Design architects have to have SOME cognizance of structural engineering-- otherwise they design the impossible. He was selected in a competition where the applicants were asked to submit designs for an opera house to be built with a budget of ~$10 million. Engineering may have been "beneath" him, but cost accounting was a specific request of the customer.
I, for one, am glad that his Opera House was attacked not from the perspective of what was buildable, but what was beautiful
I agree, the building is amazing and much preferable over "standard" designs, but the fact remains that the designer didn't have his feet solidly on the ground (engineering-wise) when he came up with the design.
Who benefits most from the ability to get goods across your state from one side to the other? People in YOUR state, or people in states to either side of you who are trying to get the goods through your state? But who has to pay for the roads when there is no federal organization doing it? The state in the middle, with no incentive whatsoever to make travel across it's area fast, and every incentive to force people to slow down and patronise its businesses.
What the hell are you smoking? Does this "state in the middle" not require goods from other states? Is it not in that state's interest to make it easier for those goods to get there? A highway going through a state also is a highway coming into the state from both directions. As for your premise that hampering the flow of traffic somehow increases local revenue, you're totally on crack. If Oklahoma one day decided it was going to "de-pave" parts of I-80 in order to give travellers incentive to "slow down and patronise its businesses", how long would it take people to say "screw that, Texas has I-10 and it's paved"? Soon Texas has all the east-west traffic and Oklahoma businesses are leaving the state for Texas, where all the action is. This is elementary economics here.
You will note that in the days before federal funding, we had few freeways.
Hah! That's because the Feds first stuck their fingers in the highway system in 1916. Most roads weren't even paved back then. One cannot make a real before-after comparison because "before" was a time when cars were still little more than a novelty for most folks. Just because the National Highway System was built under Federal oversight doesn't mean that was the only way it could've worked.
here is an amusing postmodernist essay generator.
"P"rogramming is obviosuly much more than just the means. The actual running "P"rogram of just about any design can have so many facets of care and life put into things - the ease with which the "P"rogram might be built. The configurability of the "P"rogram. The API which one might access the "P"rogram through other "P"rograms. The interface that leans the user to interact with the "P"rogram are all entireley different than the abstract thoughts that gave birth to the "P"rogram, and breathe soul, if you will, into what once was abstract and souless, and are all aspects of how successful we consider the program regardless of how strict it adheres to original design, or even intent.
I can't "P"ut my finger on it, but something about your "P"ersistent "P"enchant for "P"utting the letter "P" in quotes "P"ractically "P"uts my "P"oor eyeballs into a state of "P"ermanent "P"erplexment.
His example of the Sydney Opera House employing modular/modernist components despite its postmodern design fails to mention the real lesson Jorn Utzorn learned. Utzorn's initial design for the shell roofs didn't include "ribs supporting them." His original thought was that they'd be self-supporting, but he never had the proper engineering studies done. Subsequently, they had the first 20' of the shells built up before he realized that his napkin-based engineering tests weren't good enough. At that point there was a mad scramble to find off-the-shelf materials that could be added to hold up the roof. Basically "modernist components" saved this guy's ass because he was too engaged in the "art" of architectural design and didn't pay enough attention to the "science" needed to make things work. The projected $10 million cost ballooned up to $150 million because of Utzorn's failure to take into account the laws of physics, so in 1966 he (resigned/was fired from) the job. The guy who took his place as design architect found out what a further loser Utzorn was as an engineer when he looked at the plans and saw that elevation drawings of the glass walls that enclose the ends of the "shells" contained no design or engineering specs for their construction whatsoever: basically Utzorn had written "glass wall" with an arrow pointing to the empty space. Nice, eh?
I think the important lesson the Sydney Opera House debacle teaches us is that postmodernism is pretty, but if you're using it in creating something functional, make sure it'll at least function. That, and "don't send an artist to do an engineer's job".
Every time any sort of goods are transported to or from your state to other states your state is getting a benefit from the federal funding for highways.
Unless your state never trades any goods and is totally insular, you DO benefit from the highways in other states.
The objection I have to this argument is that it assumes that if the feds didn't pay for these highways, they wouldn't get built. Federal highway funding programs are, in my opinion, extortion schemes. If the feds were really just interested in highways, they'd let the states keep most of their money and simply distribute subsidies to underfunded states. Saying that the money the Feds are "graciously allowing" the states to have back goes to a good purpose doesn't justify the Feds taking it in the first place.