You miss the point. A good designer and a bad coder creates better output then a poor designer and a good coder.
Are you really suggesting that a clean, efficient design that crashes constantly because it is rife with coding errors is better than a kludgy mess of extensions and exceptions that somehow works anyway? I think you're nuts. Or are you suggesting that a good, clean, open design makes a bad coder irrelevant because you can always fire him and start over with a good coder? That's even MORE nuts.
NO. 2 very fundamental problems with nuclear : 1/not 100% safe (99.999 is NOT GOOD ENOUGH!) 2/offloading our waste onto future generations.
1) Are you serious? Coal kills more people through pollution than nuclear ever has or will. If 99.999% safe isn't good enough, then you better go get those fucking coal plants offline NOW, idiot.
2) nuclear "waste" is nothing of the sort. It's 95% unused fuel that a bunch of science-ignorant "no nukes" folks won't let anyone reprocess because they're too fucking stupid to realize that the mix of plutonium isotopes you get from reprocessing isn't usable in a warhead, which requires nearly pure Pu-239.
That's not inherent to nuclear, but to the one-off nature of all the early nuclear plants. Standardized designs, pre-approved by the appropriate regulatory agencies, can be cheap and reliable. Look at France. Their reactors are so cheap and reliable they're a net exporter of electricity, and they make quite a bit of cash from it. The trouble with all the reactors built in the 60's we have now is that each one was scratch built at a time when no one really knew the best way to build one. They're all basically experimental.
Yes, if only we'd had a computer to tell us that creating money out of thin air has negative economic consequences.
Ridiculous! Everyone knows that when you trade [stocks|houses|tulip bulbs] back and forth until their "value" is 5 to 10 times what you started with, that's all real money.
Seriously, why is it that people can't see the fact that there's 50 people and only 10 chairs, and when the music stops, 40 of them are gonna be standing? Do they think they'll be one of the lucky 10? Or are they just dumb? And more importantly, why do they get bailed out, when sensible folks like me who waited until now to buy property, and saved money for a sizable down payment, we get squat? Isn't it obvious that making stupid decision sought to be painful?
I work for a school district as a locksmith (which falls somewhere between 1 and 3), and our dress code is ridiculously lax. It's basically little more than 1) above, "work boots, long pants, no offensive writing/images on your shirt". I think we could do with a tighter code. The way some of my fellow employees dress, I swear that the reason they make us wear ID badges is so the schools don't think a homeless crackhead wandered on to campus.
Homebrewers laugh at Guinness, as like with most commercial beers, it tastes like water after you taste a well-bodied homebrew.
Friend of mine makes a homebrew that's 18% (or more!) and practically slices like bread. The sick bastard puts it in 24oz bottles! And to think that that pisswater Budweiser is the best selling beer in the US! People really have no sense of taste.
This is what happens when your science reporter flunked high school science.
The unfortunate truth about a disturbingly large fraction of journalists is that they're the ones that couldn't hack math, science, or any other logical discipline, but thought they'd like writing. Unfortunately, they found they weren't very good at writing anything creatively because they didn't like to read literature. Eventually they gravitated towards journalism because the basics of journalism are simple and logical, more like basic bookkeeping, only without numbers. Interestingly, the journalism majors of this stripe I met in college seemed to be the most likely to say "I'm becoming a journalist because I want to change the world". I suspect this is because real journalists realize that by reporting factuality, the world may change itself, while writing things intentionally crafted to sway opinion is actually propaganda, not journalism.
What does this mean? Give us a temperature. At least that would be concrete.
According to wikipedia, intergalactic space is 2.71 Kelvin. I would assume that they mean "100th the temperature of intergalactic space", not "100 times colder than intergalactic space", as the latter is nonsensical...
This reminds me of when I was a child watching the Buck Rogers TV show for the first time. The intro is rolling and the narrator is explaining how "due to a freak accident, Captain William 'Buck' Rogers was frozen by temperatures beyond imagination". At that point my father, an engineer, scoffs audibly and angrily launches into a tirade about the completely imaginable nature of Absolute Zero, and how idiots write for TV and probably get paid twice what he does. This was the beginning of my lifelong dedication to criticizing inexcusable violations of the laws of physics by TV writers--- much to my wife's displeasure.
Honestly, I don't understand why writers feel the need to reach for bizarre equivalencies when talking about extremes. Do any of us have any idea how tall the Statue of Liberty actually is? If something is long enough to go around the earth some number of times, how impressed can we be if anything farther than Grandma's house is simply "a long way"? When you say that the concrete in the Interstate Highway system is enough to make a sidewalk from the earth to the moon six times, how thick a sidewalk are we talking, and where can we lobby to have this six-lane promenade to Luna built?
And why can't people comprehend that folks write this stuff to sell books and make money? And why can't folks comprehend that Slashdot posts it in order to get page views and make money?
Ah, the good old Cringely-Dvorak Principle: "Nothing draws a crowd like a man in a position of authority doing something really, really stupid"
He's made the mistake of projecting his own motivations and beliefs onto others and then extrapolating from that.
"I see a disturbing trend on the horizon. People's wives will be leaving them in droves because they walked in on them playing naked twister with the neighbor's wife. This will lead to a massive economic downturn as people are fired because they work for their father in law. Being unable to afford both alimony and their $3,500/mo World of Warcraft bill, people will be forced to moonlight at a 7-11 while studying to become a court reporter. Because it's hard to stay awake to study after working all night, people will start smoking crack to stay awake, but instead of helping them studying, this will just make them want to smoke more crack. Before long, they'll be living in a van down by the river, wondering where they went wrong. Finally, people will have had enough of their empty lives and will drive up to the National Forest to wander off in the woods to hang themselves in private. Tow truck companies will be busy for months towing all their cars out of the forest.
And most people will be using that 'free time' to look for a job.
You can't "look for a job" 16 hours a day. In my experience, unless you're literally pounding the pavement filling out apps at 7-11's, you can't reasonably spend more than 8 hours a day looking for work. Finding work is a matter of sending out resume's, setting up interviews, and shaking down your friends and relatives for leads. After a couple days, you've probably already done the majority of the grunt work and are waiting for responses. What are you going to do for the whole day, send your resume out to the same people again? I don't think so. Job searching is often a waiting game.
If police informants can pass and beat a polygraph in a situation where they would be killed on the spot*, then how can the same test when used against people charged with a crime is still admissible as evidence?
I used to live about a block from there. It's probably little more than a mail drop. Tiny little suite with a 40 year old desk and a plastic potted plant and a pile of junk mail on the floor, I'd lay money on it. There are a lot of places like that in that seedy section of Mar Vista/Los Angeles. Crappy old 50's office suite buildings with baseball card wholesalers, direct mail scammers, and the like.
All decisions on whether or not to open a piece of luggage should occur at the moment the luggage leaves the hand of the customer and enters the custody of the airline.
I liked the way they do luggage at Pensacola. The big fancy TSA full color x-ray machines are right there in the middle of the lobby, roped off. You check in, then take your luggage to the TSA goons, which scan it and tag it while you watch. I suspect the scanners are only out in the open because the airport is so small they don't have room for them elsewhere, but I think it ought to be like that EVERYWHERE.
Nonsense. Why would anyone's favorite animal be a cow?
Exactly. He chose the topic to fit a joke he already had in his head. That's kinda like cheating.
and where do you get off calling Katz a cheat? Where is your proof?
"He [Katz] challenged Munroe to a cartoon-off â" each cartoonist to produce drawings about the Internet as envisioned by the elderly, String Theory, 1999, and one's favorite animal eating one's favorite food."
This indicates that Katz issued the challenge and named the categories. Do you have evidence otherwise?
"Cheating" is perhaps an exaggeration. I just don't think he chose such a bizarre topic as that completely at random.
except that originality (creativity) has a different meaning in copyright law to the everyday notion of originality....
I personally don't like the use of copyright to police unfair competition, but that's just how copyright works (in Australia at least).
So in Australia you're allowed to copyright a list of facts, based solely on the fact that the jackass that typed them in (skill) spent time (labor) doing it?
Out of all of my dreams, I can only remember a color memory from ONE...
My recurring anxiety dream is color-based. It's the military version of the "got to school and forgot my homework" dream, but I dream I'm standing in formation in my Army unit and suddenly I realize that everyone else is wearing the Desert Combat Uniform, while I am wearing the classic Woodland Camouflage BDU. In that dream, there's definitely a serious green vs. tan thing going on.
Katz cheated on 1999 and Munroe cheated on animal eating.
Are you kidding? Katz cheated on both of them. He clearly chose the "animal eating" topic to fit fit a cartoon he already had in his head. Really, the topic only lends itself to one marginally funny joke, and it's the one Katz had in mind.
The only lame one of Munroe's was the strange skateboard thing. Somewhat off topic, though it gets points for originality.
I think it's excusable, as the topic was obviously a ringer. Katz "cheated" when he chose that because he clearly already had the cartoon in his head. When you look at the rest of the topics, it's pretty obvious. That's the only one with any shred of humor in it.
It depends. If the hijackers managed to get on board with something a little more deadly than a box-cutter knife, it's hard to say what would happen. Trained soldiers can go up against real firepower and maybe win out, but a mass of average citizens wouldn't know how. It's not enough to just throw your life away: if you're up against an enemy that seriously outguns you, you really have to know what you're doing. It can still be done, but it's not so simple as overcoming a guy with a knife.
No, you've seen too many movies. Guns aren't magic. You can't gun down a human wave coming to tear you to pieces. Even a rifle won't go through more than 2-3 people, and you're going to have a hard time bringing rifles to bear in the close quarters of an airplane. No, there's nothing short of nerve gas that would put you in a position to gain control of the aircraft, and don't think that the pilots are going to just sit there while you batter the door in. They're gonna be wearing oxygen masks and shutting off the cabin pressurization and jinking randomly to knock you off your feet.
No, taking over a plane is pretty much history. People realize they literally have nothing to lose, and that makes them largely uncontrollable. Look what they did to Richard Reid.
... telling people to continue to go to work and not stop spending their money because we need to keep the economy strong. Of course, when an anthrax tainted letter was found in a congressional mail sorting facility, congress closed its doors.
Sadly, I think one of the best things you could do for the economy would be to get congress to run away more often...
I wouldn't doubt that the whole system isn't there to catch actual terrorists, but to simply condition the populace into accepting this kind of routine as a the standard quo.
I know people desperately want to see this as a subtle plot by hidden puppetmasters, but really, as with all conspiracy theories, Hanlon's Razor needs to be considered:
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
The desire to seek explanations involving some controlling individual or group is as old as humanity itself. The vast pantheon of gods invented to explain the frighteningly random whims of nature bear witness to this. Unfortunately, that's simply not the way it is. Nature is implacable. Tornadoes and tidal waves are inevitable, as is stupid security theater. Security theater is itself a kind of appeal to "the gods" to keep us safe. The truth is, people are just plain fucking stupid, particularly large groups of people put in charge of something that can't really be prevented. Yes, they do think this is to "stop terrorists". It's not logical, it's just blind reaction. In its own way, this is actually worse than the machinations of a secret cabal, because there's no central controlling authority to expose and thwart. It's just a giant morass of human nature. Half the population has an IQ of under 100, and many of them work for the TSA. All we can do is keep explaining their error and hope they learn.
is either gonna be a spectacular failure or spectacular success
now after watching cloverfield and lost i think the chances of this being a success are diminishing
Go watch MI:3 and a few episodes of Fringe, and I think you'll agree the chances of success are vanishingly small. JJ Abrams is a classic example of Hollywood nepotism. His father Gerald was a big producer in the 70's. JJ Abrams certainly didn't get where he is by anything even remotely resembling talent. This is the guy who wrote Regarding Henry, Armageddon, and Gone Fishin' (!!!) for god's sake. Looking through his entire work history on IMDB, I'd say the only thing that keeps him out of the same class as Uwe Boll is Felicity, which was a perfectly serviceable college soap opera.
Slashdot Mirror
You miss the point. A good designer and a bad coder creates better output then a poor designer and a good coder.
Are you really suggesting that a clean, efficient design that crashes constantly because it is rife with coding errors is better than a kludgy mess of extensions and exceptions that somehow works anyway? I think you're nuts. Or are you suggesting that a good, clean, open design makes a bad coder irrelevant because you can always fire him and start over with a good coder? That's even MORE nuts.
NO. 2 very fundamental problems with nuclear : 1/not 100% safe (99.999 is NOT GOOD ENOUGH!) 2/offloading our waste onto future generations.
1) Are you serious? Coal kills more people through pollution than nuclear ever has or will. If 99.999% safe isn't good enough, then you better go get those fucking coal plants offline NOW, idiot.
2) nuclear "waste" is nothing of the sort. It's 95% unused fuel that a bunch of science-ignorant "no nukes" folks won't let anyone reprocess because they're too fucking stupid to realize that the mix of plutonium isotopes you get from reprocessing isn't usable in a warhead, which requires nearly pure Pu-239.
They don't make a profit in their lifetime?
That's not inherent to nuclear, but to the one-off nature of all the early nuclear plants. Standardized designs, pre-approved by the appropriate regulatory agencies, can be cheap and reliable. Look at France. Their reactors are so cheap and reliable they're a net exporter of electricity, and they make quite a bit of cash from it. The trouble with all the reactors built in the 60's we have now is that each one was scratch built at a time when no one really knew the best way to build one. They're all basically experimental.
Yes, if only we'd had a computer to tell us that creating money out of thin air has negative economic consequences.
Ridiculous! Everyone knows that when you trade [stocks|houses|tulip bulbs] back and forth until their "value" is 5 to 10 times what you started with, that's all real money.
Seriously, why is it that people can't see the fact that there's 50 people and only 10 chairs, and when the music stops, 40 of them are gonna be standing? Do they think they'll be one of the lucky 10? Or are they just dumb? And more importantly, why do they get bailed out, when sensible folks like me who waited until now to buy property, and saved money for a sizable down payment, we get squat? Isn't it obvious that making stupid decision sought to be painful?
Yep, let's hear it for the chimps/editors at slashdot, once again proving that it's a good thing no one's PAYING them to do the job this badly...
1) Low level manual labor - whatever's comfortable. 3) Technical - Comfortable, nice looking clothes, probably collared shirt and khakis.
I work for a school district as a locksmith (which falls somewhere between 1 and 3), and our dress code is ridiculously lax. It's basically little more than 1) above, "work boots, long pants, no offensive writing/images on your shirt". I think we could do with a tighter code. The way some of my fellow employees dress, I swear that the reason they make us wear ID badges is so the schools don't think a homeless crackhead wandered on to campus.
Homebrewers laugh at Guinness, as like with most commercial beers, it tastes like water after you taste a well-bodied homebrew.
Friend of mine makes a homebrew that's 18% (or more!) and practically slices like bread. The sick bastard puts it in 24oz bottles! And to think that that pisswater Budweiser is the best selling beer in the US! People really have no sense of taste.
This is what happens when your science reporter flunked high school science.
The unfortunate truth about a disturbingly large fraction of journalists is that they're the ones that couldn't hack math, science, or any other logical discipline, but thought they'd like writing. Unfortunately, they found they weren't very good at writing anything creatively because they didn't like to read literature. Eventually they gravitated towards journalism because the basics of journalism are simple and logical, more like basic bookkeeping, only without numbers. Interestingly, the journalism majors of this stripe I met in college seemed to be the most likely to say "I'm becoming a journalist because I want to change the world". I suspect this is because real journalists realize that by reporting factuality, the world may change itself, while writing things intentionally crafted to sway opinion is actually propaganda, not journalism.
100 times colder than intergalactic space
What does this mean? Give us a temperature. At least that would be concrete.
According to wikipedia, intergalactic space is 2.71 Kelvin. I would assume that they mean "100th the temperature of intergalactic space", not "100 times colder than intergalactic space", as the latter is nonsensical...
This reminds me of when I was a child watching the Buck Rogers TV show for the first time. The intro is rolling and the narrator is explaining how "due to a freak accident, Captain William 'Buck' Rogers was frozen by temperatures beyond imagination". At that point my father, an engineer, scoffs audibly and angrily launches into a tirade about the completely imaginable nature of Absolute Zero, and how idiots write for TV and probably get paid twice what he does. This was the beginning of my lifelong dedication to criticizing inexcusable violations of the laws of physics by TV writers--- much to my wife's displeasure.
Honestly, I don't understand why writers feel the need to reach for bizarre equivalencies when talking about extremes. Do any of us have any idea how tall the Statue of Liberty actually is? If something is long enough to go around the earth some number of times, how impressed can we be if anything farther than Grandma's house is simply "a long way"? When you say that the concrete in the Interstate Highway system is enough to make a sidewalk from the earth to the moon six times, how thick a sidewalk are we talking, and where can we lobby to have this six-lane promenade to Luna built?
And why can't people comprehend that folks write this stuff to sell books and make money? And why can't folks comprehend that Slashdot posts it in order to get page views and make money?
Ah, the good old Cringely-Dvorak Principle: "Nothing draws a crowd like a man in a position of authority doing something really, really stupid"
He's made the mistake of projecting his own motivations and beliefs onto others and then extrapolating from that.
"I see a disturbing trend on the horizon. People's wives will be leaving them in droves because they walked in on them playing naked twister with the neighbor's wife. This will lead to a massive economic downturn as people are fired because they work for their father in law. Being unable to afford both alimony and their $3,500/mo World of Warcraft bill, people will be forced to moonlight at a 7-11 while studying to become a court reporter. Because it's hard to stay awake to study after working all night, people will start smoking crack to stay awake, but instead of helping them studying, this will just make them want to smoke more crack. Before long, they'll be living in a van down by the river, wondering where they went wrong. Finally, people will have had enough of their empty lives and will drive up to the National Forest to wander off in the woods to hang themselves in private. Tow truck companies will be busy for months towing all their cars out of the forest.
"That's how it looks from where I sit, anyway."
And most people will be using that 'free time' to look for a job.
You can't "look for a job" 16 hours a day. In my experience, unless you're literally pounding the pavement filling out apps at 7-11's, you can't reasonably spend more than 8 hours a day looking for work. Finding work is a matter of sending out resume's, setting up interviews, and shaking down your friends and relatives for leads. After a couple days, you've probably already done the majority of the grunt work and are waiting for responses. What are you going to do for the whole day, send your resume out to the same people again? I don't think so. Job searching is often a waiting game.
If police informants can pass and beat a polygraph in a situation where they would be killed on the spot*, then how can the same test when used against people charged with a crime is still admissible as evidence?
It's not admissible as evidence.
I used to live about a block from there. It's probably little more than a mail drop. Tiny little suite with a 40 year old desk and a plastic potted plant and a pile of junk mail on the floor, I'd lay money on it. There are a lot of places like that in that seedy section of Mar Vista/Los Angeles. Crappy old 50's office suite buildings with baseball card wholesalers, direct mail scammers, and the like.
All decisions on whether or not to open a piece of luggage should occur at the moment the luggage leaves the hand of the customer and enters the custody of the airline.
I liked the way they do luggage at Pensacola. The big fancy TSA full color x-ray machines are right there in the middle of the lobby, roped off. You check in, then take your luggage to the TSA goons, which scan it and tag it while you watch. I suspect the scanners are only out in the open because the airport is so small they don't have room for them elsewhere, but I think it ought to be like that EVERYWHERE.
Nonsense. Why would anyone's favorite animal be a cow?
Exactly. He chose the topic to fit a joke he already had in his head. That's kinda like cheating.
and where do you get off calling Katz a cheat? Where is your proof?
"He [Katz] challenged Munroe to a cartoon-off â" each cartoonist to produce drawings about the Internet as envisioned by the elderly, String Theory, 1999, and one's favorite animal eating one's favorite food."
This indicates that Katz issued the challenge and named the categories. Do you have evidence otherwise?
"Cheating" is perhaps an exaggeration. I just don't think he chose such a bizarre topic as that completely at random.
except that originality (creativity) has a different meaning in copyright law to the everyday notion of originality.... I personally don't like the use of copyright to police unfair competition, but that's just how copyright works (in Australia at least).
So in Australia you're allowed to copyright a list of facts, based solely on the fact that the jackass that typed them in (skill) spent time (labor) doing it?
Out of all of my dreams, I can only remember a color memory from ONE...
My recurring anxiety dream is color-based. It's the military version of the "got to school and forgot my homework" dream, but I dream I'm standing in formation in my Army unit and suddenly I realize that everyone else is wearing the Desert Combat Uniform, while I am wearing the classic Woodland Camouflage BDU . In that dream, there's definitely a serious green vs. tan thing going on.
Katz cheated on 1999 and Munroe cheated on animal eating.
Are you kidding? Katz cheated on both of them. He clearly chose the "animal eating" topic to fit fit a cartoon he already had in his head. Really, the topic only lends itself to one marginally funny joke, and it's the one Katz had in mind.
The only lame one of Munroe's was the strange skateboard thing. Somewhat off topic, though it gets points for originality.
I think it's excusable, as the topic was obviously a ringer. Katz "cheated" when he chose that because he clearly already had the cartoon in his head. When you look at the rest of the topics, it's pretty obvious. That's the only one with any shred of humor in it.
Bury a turd somewhere. Never tell anyone. The memory will always be yours alone.
That sounds too much like a variant of the infamous "library restroom" copy-paste troll...
It depends. If the hijackers managed to get on board with something a little more deadly than a box-cutter knife, it's hard to say what would happen. Trained soldiers can go up against real firepower and maybe win out, but a mass of average citizens wouldn't know how. It's not enough to just throw your life away: if you're up against an enemy that seriously outguns you, you really have to know what you're doing. It can still be done, but it's not so simple as overcoming a guy with a knife.
No, you've seen too many movies. Guns aren't magic. You can't gun down a human wave coming to tear you to pieces. Even a rifle won't go through more than 2-3 people, and you're going to have a hard time bringing rifles to bear in the close quarters of an airplane. No, there's nothing short of nerve gas that would put you in a position to gain control of the aircraft, and don't think that the pilots are going to just sit there while you batter the door in. They're gonna be wearing oxygen masks and shutting off the cabin pressurization and jinking randomly to knock you off your feet.
No, taking over a plane is pretty much history. People realize they literally have nothing to lose, and that makes them largely uncontrollable. Look what they did to Richard Reid.
... telling people to continue to go to work and not stop spending their money because we need to keep the economy strong. Of course, when an anthrax tainted letter was found in a congressional mail sorting facility, congress closed its doors.
Sadly, I think one of the best things you could do for the economy would be to get congress to run away more often...
I wouldn't doubt that the whole system isn't there to catch actual terrorists, but to simply condition the populace into accepting this kind of routine as a the standard quo.
I know people desperately want to see this as a subtle plot by hidden puppetmasters, but really, as with all conspiracy theories, Hanlon's Razor needs to be considered:
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
The desire to seek explanations involving some controlling individual or group is as old as humanity itself. The vast pantheon of gods invented to explain the frighteningly random whims of nature bear witness to this. Unfortunately, that's simply not the way it is. Nature is implacable. Tornadoes and tidal waves are inevitable, as is stupid security theater. Security theater is itself a kind of appeal to "the gods" to keep us safe. The truth is, people are just plain fucking stupid, particularly large groups of people put in charge of something that can't really be prevented. Yes, they do think this is to "stop terrorists". It's not logical, it's just blind reaction. In its own way, this is actually worse than the machinations of a secret cabal, because there's no central controlling authority to expose and thwart. It's just a giant morass of human nature. Half the population has an IQ of under 100, and many of them work for the TSA. All we can do is keep explaining their error and hope they learn.
is either gonna be a spectacular failure or spectacular success
now after watching cloverfield and lost i think the chances of this being a success are diminishing
Go watch MI:3 and a few episodes of Fringe, and I think you'll agree the chances of success are vanishingly small. JJ Abrams is a classic example of Hollywood nepotism. His father Gerald was a big producer in the 70's. JJ Abrams certainly didn't get where he is by anything even remotely resembling talent. This is the guy who wrote Regarding Henry, Armageddon, and Gone Fishin' (!!!) for god's sake. Looking through his entire work history on IMDB, I'd say the only thing that keeps him out of the same class as Uwe Boll is Felicity, which was a perfectly serviceable college soap opera.