...stopped at the beach around 1:15AM HST (3:15 PST). About an hour after the peak, but there were still one or two a minute - that's of the bright ones, of course. I could see faint trails going by in some part of the sky about every 10 seconds or so. Drove home after a bit and was greeted stepping out of my car by one last, bright meteor with a green trail. Fantastic!
...I know, I know, Mandrake is a newbie distro, we had a sysadmin who was nuts for it though...but we've never had a hiccup from the database, and a good thing too...
I guess I *am* the weird co-worker at my company...while debugging, I generally talk to myself in a high-pitched, nasal voice that never fails to get *me* giggling, make odd screeching noises (one of the reasons I like to work at home is not just the lack of noise and bother from other people, but the ability to make noise without bothering them myself) and hold long, one-sided conversations with the compiler or my code. Once, our CTO walked by just as a nasty bit of programming had just started working. All he heard was my voice (I was hunched behind my workstation, hugging myself) saying, "Oh, yes! I LIKE ME!". Luckily, he was a bit of a "quirky engineer" himself (he liked to hang out in the server room and imitate the noises the computers made) so he overlooked the noises and the rocking, and we got along fine.
Absolutism smacks of religion, especially Christianity, which more than most religions, claims that all morals are absolute, and (surprise!) their morals are the absolutely correct ones.
Actually, even though many 'lay' Christians agree that morals are absolute, most theologians have a problems with this, specifically because religion is crippled by absolutism, and vice versa.
To claim that morals are absolute, and that we know them because 'God' told us (as most religions, not just Christianity, seem to do), is to imply one of two things:
1. There exist morals which are beyond 'God' (ie, which even 'God' acknowledges and is subject to), and therefore 'God' has not created these laws, but only passed them on. In this case, 'God' is not actually omnipotent, because there are rules it must live by, and it cannot change those rules.
2. 'God' has arbitrarily made up morals. Therefore, what is good is only good because 'God' says it is. In this case, there is no particular reason for praising 'God'. It could have picked any other arbitrary set of morals, and they would have been just as 'good' as the ones 'God' gave us - if 'God' had said 'thou shalt kill thy father and marry thy mother', we would have made Oedipus a saint. In this sense, to say 'God is good' is somewhat nonsensical, since good is only what makes 'God' happy, and if it changes its mind, so will 'good' change.This is actually relativism, because it depends on what 'God' thinks is good.
Religion and absolutism don't work - because once you've decided to believe in absolute morals, religion is irrelevant one way or the other. I believe most theologians settle on the first explanation preferentially, however, because it is somewhat less galling to say 'Morals exist which are beyond "God"' than it is to say '"God" is irrelevant'.
An absolute moral is one that society has determined is right or wrong, regardless of "local cultural norms".
No, that's a more. Obviously it's not an absolute, because different societies have different mores. You never took any first-year philosophy, did you? The/definition/ of an "absolute moral" is that it defines right or wrong regardless of society or anyone's beliefs. Anything else is relativistic.
On the other hand, (referring to elsewhere in the thread) I do believe it's possible to reconcile absolute morals with a lack of religion - in fact, religion itself cripples the concept of absolute morals (hint: they either exist on their own, (and were imparted to mankind by ) and therefore would exist without or they exist at the whim of and are therefore relativistic with regard to that deity. However, it's every bit as impossible to/know/ whether your conception of absolute morals is the right one as it is to/know/ whether the god you believe in, or any god, exists, so they are both a matter of faith, and all morals that humans declare or live by are therefore relativistic.
Cyclopatra
Re:You're right, unfortunately
on
KDE 2.2.1 Up
·
· Score: 2
While Potato is most certainly behind other distros, Sid is definitely not. Potato is absolutely wonderful for servers, but I'm not sure why you'd want to use it for your desktop. Sid is, if anything, far ahead of all other distros when it comes to binary packages. They're there faster, they're better, and they're easier to install:)
Besides, so long as you don't have a nightly dist-upgrade cron job, Sid is at the very least as stable as most other distros:)
If you can't/won't give blood, and want to give money, the red cross is taking donations by phone (1800HELPNOW, lines are busy though) and over the web at www.redcross.com. Yahoo! also has a link to an online donation form that is somewhat less likely to be attackdotted (I like the word, i'm stealing it). Select "Disaster Relief Fund" as your donation intent to make sure it goes to the relief efforts in this crisis.
I took Engineering Physics in university so I'm no stranger to advanced math. I know the fundamental
theories they're breaking things down to, but this is still some hard stuff to understand. For instance:
Axiom ax-2 4
Description: Axiom of Distribution. One of the 3 axioms of propositional calculus. It distributes
an antecedent over two consequents.
I agree totally. I had the same problem - I knew what they were talking about, because I've taken propositional calculus, but I still spent a couple of minutes trying to figure out their obfuscated writing style. They introduce the symbols used in the proofs, but not the language they use to explain them, and if this is intended for math "laymen", well, the average joe doesn't know what an antedecent or a consequent is, folks!
Cyclopatra "We can't all, and some of us don't." -- Eeyore
Poster: Ok, so you've told me that the allegations are unfounded, you've done so in writing (well, almost), this statement will be permanently archived, and you've done so in front of a whole Slashdot-full of witnesses, so I will trust you, but will hold you to your word. If you break your word, your statement will be used to rip you a new asshole.
Poster, cont: However, since we have no proof that you are in fact affiliated in any way with United Devices, and in fact that the/. user who goes by "Uncle Fluffy" is not in fact a 13-yo alligator in the Everglades whose owner is out on the bayou, we have no way of knowing whether ripping *you*, personally, a new asshole will have anything to do with the price of tea in China. Furthermore, the entire/. community collectively sticking out their tongues and saying "Neener, neener, neener" to you will do exactly shit to rectify the outrage felt by anyone who thought their cycles were going to a cancer cure, when in reality they were testing out MBNA's new online credit card application, in the event that UD does, in fact, default on their assurances that they will not use those cycles for anything but cancer, since their licensing argreement does not in any way bind them to it.
I'm not really so much taking sides here, as I enjoy pointing out holes in people's arguments.
Yea, so if a girl wont screw you on the first date she must be a prude. Language like this leads to "dominant male" attitudes towads women.
What if a guy won't screw me on the first date? (for the record, I'm female) Why do you leap down ESR's throat for having all the old "sexist stereotypes" and then assume he's talking about women who won't have casual sex? It seems to me that you are the one who needs to reexamine your attitudes - assuming that men are universally inclined to have casual sex with no scruples about it is *more* sexist than suggesting that a woman who isn't comfortable with it is a prude - especially when that isn't what was said.
Speaking as a woman, I'm highly offended by your protectionist attitude - an extremely pseudo-patriarchal one, at that - that assumes that all women are pressured into sex by evil, promiscuous men and that we don't, just maybe sometimes, have casual sex because we like it. Frankly, you can call me a chauvinist pig, but I wouldn't continue seeing a guy who wouldn't sleep with me. I might stay friends with him (if he were mature enough not to see this as some sort of "consolation prize") but someone who wants to spend time with me and not sleep with me is called a friend in my lexicon, not a boyfriend or a date.
Do you understand how incredibly impossible it is to know everything your kid is doing/seeing all the time?
Well, here's something that gets brought up a lot as an argument for censorship. The thing is, though - it's not essential that you know what your child is doing all the time. Seeing one dirty picture or one violent movie is not going to traumatize your precious poppet for life. Seeing a whole bunch of them might (although I'd argue about the dirty movie bit, unless it was *really* nasty porn - rape fantasy stuff or something (not that there's anything wrong with that, for consenting adults, etc, etc)) Even most people who believe things such as "violent media cause violent children" usually say it's due to a pattern of desensitization to violence. Desensitization (or the destruction of moral fiber, maybe, in the case of porn) takes place over time.
For that matter, if you're a decent parent, and your kids have seen something that upset them or that they think is inappropriate, they're gonna tell you. Young children aren't like teenagers - they still think mommy is the source of all good and the solution to all their problems. As for teenagers, well, at that point you've pretty much done your job, and if you've done it well, they can handle it. If they can't handle it, they're never going to be ready for the real world anyway, and they'll need just as much censorious "protection" as adults.
One more point - when I was little (at least, so little that I might not to be able to handle hardcore porn or movie violence - say until I was ten or twelve, I believe) I wasn't allowed to go over to someone's house until my mother had met their parents. That's how you keep tabs on what sort of environment your children are in, away from home.
Milky carbonated drinks have been around for years in Japan. Calpis Soda is yummy, for example.
They're nothing new in the US either, although they've sort of died out with the soda fountain. Now, of course, I can't remember for certain what they were called (egg creams, I think) but I used to love a drink that was made of chocolate syrup + milk + club soda that this 50's style diner served when I was a kid.
Then again, we can't *really* expect marketdroids to come up with anything new, can we?
3 x 10 = 30 - paid
30 - 5 = 25 - actually paid after refund of 5
25 + 3 = 28 - what they paid plus refund
28 + 2 = 30 - what was paid out plus the bellboys take
each person didn't really pay 9 dollars, rather 28/3 or 9.333...
I'm afraid that you're terribly mistaken because the pockets of the guests are missing 33 cents apiece if this
solution is correct. You have not accounted for the missing dollar.
Try this:
3x10 paid out
5 removed = 25 paid out
25/3 = 8.33 paid each.
8.33 + 1 returned = 9.33 accounted for each.
The 66 cents missing each is the 2$ that the bellboy has.
The guests didn't pay 9.33 each, they paid 8.33 each and got $1 each back. Those 33 "missing" cents apiece are in the hotel's cash register.
Good quality alcohol. (Absinthe (not that Absente crap), Cognac (at least VSOP, if not XO), Single Malts no younger than 16 years, Canadian hard cide or tap, and good micro-brews of various sorts.)
And for those of us who aren't alcohol snobs (with no offense intended to those who are)...blended drinks blended drinks blended drinks!
I would be more likely to patronize a bar that served frozen drinks (ie, pina coladas, margaritas, daquiris) just for that reason. What can I say? I'm a girl-drink drunk. Give me drinks with little umbrellas in 'em every time.
Sections that are quiet. (Sound-proofed if possible.) Half the time I go out I can barely hear myself think, let alone the person across from me.)
Seconded. One of my favorite bars has one room with dancing, loud thumping music, etc, and another that's fairly quiet, with some couches arranged around a tv or two, and another little setup with cards and board games. You can sit back there, play chess or cards and talk to people, then run out and shake your thang when you hear that song that you've just got to dance to. It's the best of both worlds.
Good live bands. (Groups like "Land of the Blind" that thrive on low crowd noise and lack of tobacco.)
Ack! I vote for NO live bands. They're uncontrollably loud, and they get offended if people don't pay attention to them. Also, the only bands I want to hear live, or for an hour at a time, are the ones I like well enough to buy concert tickets. Good canned music (ie, not too much you would hear on the radio, although a little is ok, say one song an hour) that can be turned down, that won't cuss you out if you ignore it, is my vote.
Networked deathmatch games.
Can I hear a "Hell, yeah?"
TVs that do not show sports. (Marx bros movies, Sci Fi, Ray Harryhousen movies, cartoons, Hong Kong action or fantasy films, or anything else I woul feel like showing.)
Sounds good to me. But not in the same room as the dance music, please? If I want to watch tv, I usually want to hear it too (unless its more of an ambiance thing, like Godzilla vs. Gamera or something)
Good looking females with an IQ.
I tell ya, we'll show up, if you give us good looking males who are capable of intelligent conversation...and, of course, Quake and Diablo and pina coladas...
That's so funny. Usenet. I don't think that, ten years ago, all of usenet together got even 1% of the hits/. gets each day
Ah, but some of us care about quality, not quantity. Usenet 10 years ago, or even 5, was like browsing/. with your threshhold set high. There may be more posts to/. now, but more trolling, flaming, and sheer mindlessness goes on here in a day than you saw in a month in the old days on Usenet. That old signal-to-noise ratio just keeps going down, though, and while you may want to applaud the now-eternal September of the 'net, don't vilify those of us who miss the days when you didn't have to hunt for intelligent conversation online.
You're not l33t because you just happened to use Usenet 10 years ago.
Nope, but you're not helping the general dumbing-down of society by insisting that the rest of us be happy about it, either.
MyPoints is the best ad-incentive program I've ever seen. The emails are text-only (unless you *ask* for html) and there have actually been quite a few offers I've taken up. Also, their shopping section has quite a few places I'd buy from anyway. I've currently got about $200 in gift certificates sitting in my account, waiting until i decide what to buy:P
Cyclopatra
"We can't all, and some of us don't." -- Eeyore
Re:This could be bad news for manned space travel.
on
Life On Mars: ALH84001
·
· Score: 2
Poster A: I do not support a manned mission to Mars in the light of this discovery - this is rational
because although the chances are so very small, we would be risking a lot - an entire ecosphere.
Poster B:And calling bacteria cultures an 'ecosphere' is a bit much. I can't speak for everyone else, but my conservationist leanings on this planet derive from a weird sense of kinship with other creatures on this planet, and awareness of their symbiotic relationships. I couldn't care less about bacteria on mars.
Wow, I'm flashing back on Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy.
I'm somewhere in between the two posters with my opinion, though. Life on Mars does make it sort of sad that we'll be bringing all our microbes over there soon, but not sad enough (IMNSHO) that we ought not to do it. Not only is moving some people over to Mars a really good Get Some Eggs Out of This Basket(tm) policy for humans as a species, but dammit, isn't it just about time that we stopped talking about it and just did it?
Besides, maybe the microbes over there are lonely!;)
If every Slashdot reader donated a dollar to this research, they'd be much farther than they are now.
Well, you can make a donation online here. And the project's webpage is here for more info and pictures of cute dolphins:P
I gave 'em 25$. Anybody else find that they donate a lot more as a result of reading/. ? Maybe it's a second/. effect...your website gets hammered, but your donations skyrocket...
On the other hand, antibiotics can also render the Pill useless for the time you're taking them, so this could still be a step up. Although I'm not sure I'd be running down to the clinic to get infected.
Cyclopatra "We can't all, and some of us don't." -- Eeyore
Besides the traditional desensitization, this seems to indicate that stabbing someone and watching someone get stabbed would both trigger some common neurons.
It all depends on how you look at it. To my mind, this could just as easily be an argument for *more* violence in media (if there's anyone who is a proponent of that) - watching someone get stabbed activates the same neurons as getting stabbed yourself, and increases your empathy towards victims of violence.
All in all, I think it probably balances out to a moot point in terms of violence on TV.
Cyclopatra "We can't all, and some of us don't." -- Eeyore
I don't know what the 'health' concerns of a human clone will be.
And we don't know what the health concerns of a human using the latest flu medication will be, either, but there comes a time when you have to stop testing it on mice and move to the human trials. "We don't know" is, to me, not a reason not to do something - how will we ever find out, if we don't try it?
If most of the Christian Churches of the world find the issue spiritually troubling, I think it would be fair to acknowledge that others might find the issue a little less trivial than you do.
I didn't say it was trivial (although I do think it is). But spirituality is one of those things that are so personal and individualized, that you know what? we don't make laws about it. At least, not in the US, where the original poster and I, at least, live (well, half the time I live there). So discussing whether cloning should be allowed "for spiritual reasons" is spurious.
And you find the government studying the science before clearing it repugnant?
No, I find the idea of sitting around, waiting for the gov't to say "OK" repugnant. I find the thought of the government getting into the bioethics business equally repugnant. It is not up to the government to make moral/ethical decisions for us. They're not good at it, and it's not what we put them there for.
And no, since you keep alluding to it, I am not in any way connected to cloning research (I'm pretty sure there isn't an "industry" yet).
Cyclopatra "We can't all, and some of us don't." -- Eeyore
But it's also ridiculous to believe that this isn't going to have a substantial impact on our worlds' culture.
I didn't say it wouldn't change things. I just don't see why that's a reason to be so Chicken Little about it.
Take everything you know about life and reconsider.(...) What is life, really?
Is this a question you claim to have the answer to? Do you think cloning is likely to change that answer?
If you answered 'yes' to both of the above questions, you don't have the answer yet. Come back when you have a theory that can't be shaken so easily.
Do clones have the same rights as any other human? Will this create a new sub-class of humans? Most likely.
Please tell me how you can tell the difference between someone who is a clone and someone who is not. Quickly, walking down the street or talking to them in a bar.
How can you discriminate against or deny rights to a class of people when you can't determine who its members are? How will this "create a new sub-class" of humans, unless they somehow engineer all clones to have, say, purple spots on the middle of their foreheads (which, before you go getting all pseudo-philosophical or hysterical about genetic engineering, we can't do yet)?
It becomes easy to abdicate responsibility for such attrocities as nuclear weapons, the hydrogen bomb, the holocaust (you think Hitler knew the best way to gas jews?), the list goes on. "It wasn't me!" the scientists cry
Notwithstanding Godwin's Law, you've just abjured responsiblity yourself, by foisting it all off on those evil, mean scientists who are obviously out to sell all our souls to Hell with their Godforsaken investigations. This kind of thing is nothing more than Frankenstein revisited. If you want to be a Luddite, fine. But why drag the rest of us down into this morass of fear? Some of us prefer to look on every new discovery as an opportunity, instead of a reason to be afraid.
Slashdot Mirror
...stopped at the beach around 1:15AM HST (3:15 PST). About an hour after the peak, but there were still one or two a minute - that's of the bright ones, of course. I could see faint trails going by in some part of the sky about every 10 seconds or so. Drove home after a bit and was greeted stepping out of my car by one last, bright meteor with a green trail. Fantastic!
Cyclopatra
Cyclopatra
Luckily, he was a bit of a "quirky engineer" himself (he liked to hang out in the server room and imitate the noises the computers made) so he overlooked the noises and the rocking, and we got along fine.
Cyclopatra
Actually, even though many 'lay' Christians agree that morals are absolute, most theologians have a problems with this, specifically because religion is crippled by absolutism, and vice versa.
To claim that morals are absolute, and that we know them because 'God' told us (as most religions, not just Christianity, seem to do), is to imply one of two things:
Religion and absolutism don't work - because once you've decided to believe in absolute morals, religion is irrelevant one way or the other. I believe most theologians settle on the first explanation preferentially, however, because it is somewhat less galling to say 'Morals exist which are beyond "God"' than it is to say '"God" is irrelevant'.
Cyclopatra
No, that's a more. Obviously it's not an absolute, because different societies have different mores. You never took any first-year philosophy, did you? The
On the other hand, (referring to elsewhere in the thread) I do believe it's possible to reconcile absolute morals with a lack of religion - in fact, religion itself cripples the concept of absolute morals (hint: they either exist on their own, (and were imparted to mankind by ) and therefore would exist without or they exist at the whim of and are therefore relativistic with regard to that deity. However, it's every bit as impossible to
Cyclopatra
While Potato is most certainly behind other distros, Sid is definitely not. Potato is absolutely wonderful for servers, but I'm not sure why you'd want to use it for your desktop. Sid is, if anything, far ahead of all other distros when it comes to binary packages. They're there faster, they're better, and they're easier to install:)
Besides, so long as you don't have a nightly dist-upgrade cron job, Sid is at the very least as stable as most other distros:)
Cyclopatra
Axiom ax-2 4
Description: Axiom of Distribution. One of the 3 axioms of propositional calculus. It distributes an antecedent over two consequents.
I agree totally. I had the same problem - I knew what they were talking about, because I've taken propositional calculus, but I still spent a couple of minutes trying to figure out their obfuscated writing style. They introduce the symbols used in the proofs, but not the language they use to explain them, and if this is intended for math "laymen", well, the average joe doesn't know what an antedecent or a consequent is, folks!
Cyclopatra
"We can't all, and some of us don't." -- Eeyore
s/UncleFluffy/Nugget...
Cyclopatra
"We can't all, and some of us don't." -- Eeyore
Poster, cont: However, since we have no proof that you are in fact affiliated in any way with United Devices, and in fact that the /. user who goes by "Uncle Fluffy" is not in fact a 13-yo alligator in the Everglades whose owner is out on the bayou, we have no way of knowing whether ripping *you*, personally, a new asshole will have anything to do with the price of tea in China. Furthermore, the entire /. community collectively sticking out their tongues and saying "Neener, neener, neener" to you will do exactly shit to rectify the outrage felt by anyone who thought their cycles were going to a cancer cure, when in reality they were testing out MBNA's new online credit card application, in the event that UD does, in fact, default on their assurances that they will not use those cycles for anything but cancer, since their licensing argreement does not in any way bind them to it.
I'm not really so much taking sides here, as I enjoy pointing out holes in people's arguments.
Cyclopatra
"We can't all, and some of us don't." -- Eeyore
What if a guy won't screw me on the first date? (for the record, I'm female) Why do you leap down ESR's throat for having all the old "sexist stereotypes" and then assume he's talking about women who won't have casual sex? It seems to me that you are the one who needs to reexamine your attitudes - assuming that men are universally inclined to have casual sex with no scruples about it is *more* sexist than suggesting that a woman who isn't comfortable with it is a prude - especially when that isn't what was said.
Speaking as a woman, I'm highly offended by your protectionist attitude - an extremely pseudo-patriarchal one, at that - that assumes that all women are pressured into sex by evil, promiscuous men and that we don't, just maybe sometimes, have casual sex because we like it. Frankly, you can call me a chauvinist pig, but I wouldn't continue seeing a guy who wouldn't sleep with me. I might stay friends with him (if he were mature enough not to see this as some sort of "consolation prize") but someone who wants to spend time with me and not sleep with me is called a friend in my lexicon, not a boyfriend or a date.
Cyclopatra
"We can't all, and some of us don't." -- Eeyore
Well, here's something that gets brought up a lot as an argument for censorship. The thing is, though - it's not essential that you know what your child is doing all the time. Seeing one dirty picture or one violent movie is not going to traumatize your precious poppet for life. Seeing a whole bunch of them might (although I'd argue about the dirty movie bit, unless it was *really* nasty porn - rape fantasy stuff or something (not that there's anything wrong with that, for consenting adults, etc, etc)) Even most people who believe things such as "violent media cause violent children" usually say it's due to a pattern of desensitization to violence. Desensitization (or the destruction of moral fiber, maybe, in the case of porn) takes place over time.
For that matter, if you're a decent parent, and your kids have seen something that upset them or that they think is inappropriate, they're gonna tell you. Young children aren't like teenagers - they still think mommy is the source of all good and the solution to all their problems. As for teenagers, well, at that point you've pretty much done your job, and if you've done it well, they can handle it. If they can't handle it, they're never going to be ready for the real world anyway, and they'll need just as much censorious "protection" as adults.
One more point - when I was little (at least, so little that I might not to be able to handle hardcore porn or movie violence - say until I was ten or twelve, I believe) I wasn't allowed to go over to someone's house until my mother had met their parents. That's how you keep tabs on what sort of environment your children are in, away from home.
Cyclopatra
"We can't all, and some of us don't." -- Eeyore
They're nothing new in the US either, although they've sort of died out with the soda fountain. Now, of course, I can't remember for certain what they were called (egg creams, I think) but I used to love a drink that was made of chocolate syrup + milk + club soda that this 50's style diner served when I was a kid.
Then again, we can't *really* expect marketdroids to come up with anything new, can we?
Cyclopatra
"We can't all, and some of us don't." -- Eeyore
Anyone feel like paying their one-time fees and setting up a mirror?
Cyclopatra
"We can't all, and some of us don't." -- Eeyore
30 - 5 = 25 - actually paid after refund of 5
25 + 3 = 28 - what they paid plus refund
28 + 2 = 30 - what was paid out plus the bellboys take
each person didn't really pay 9 dollars, rather 28/3 or 9.333...
I'm afraid that you're terribly mistaken because the pockets of the guests are missing 33 cents apiece if this solution is correct. You have not accounted for the missing dollar.
Try this:
3x10 paid out
5 removed = 25 paid out
25/3 = 8.33 paid each.
8.33 + 1 returned = 9.33 accounted for each. The 66 cents missing each is the 2$ that the bellboy has.
The guests didn't pay 9.33 each, they paid 8.33 each and got $1 each back. Those 33 "missing" cents apiece are in the hotel's cash register.
Cyclopatra
"We can't all, and some of us don't." -- Eeyore
Good quality alcohol. (Absinthe (not that Absente crap), Cognac (at least VSOP, if not XO), Single Malts no younger than 16 years, Canadian hard cide or tap, and good micro-brews of various sorts.)
And for those of us who aren't alcohol snobs (with no offense intended to those who are)...blended drinks blended drinks blended drinks!
I would be more likely to patronize a bar that served frozen drinks (ie, pina coladas, margaritas, daquiris) just for that reason. What can I say? I'm a girl-drink drunk. Give me drinks with little umbrellas in 'em every time.
Sections that are quiet. (Sound-proofed if possible.) Half the time I go out I can barely hear myself think, let alone the person across from me.)
Seconded. One of my favorite bars has one room with dancing, loud thumping music, etc, and another that's fairly quiet, with some couches arranged around a tv or two, and another little setup with cards and board games. You can sit back there, play chess or cards and talk to people, then run out and shake your thang when you hear that song that you've just got to dance to. It's the best of both worlds.
Good live bands. (Groups like "Land of the Blind" that thrive on low crowd noise and lack of tobacco.)
Ack! I vote for NO live bands. They're uncontrollably loud, and they get offended if people don't pay attention to them. Also, the only bands I want to hear live, or for an hour at a time, are the ones I like well enough to buy concert tickets. Good canned music (ie, not too much you would hear on the radio, although a little is ok, say one song an hour) that can be turned down, that won't cuss you out if you ignore it, is my vote.
Networked deathmatch games.
Can I hear a "Hell, yeah?"
TVs that do not show sports. (Marx bros movies, Sci Fi, Ray Harryhousen movies, cartoons, Hong Kong action or fantasy films, or anything else I woul feel like showing.)
Sounds good to me. But not in the same room as the dance music, please? If I want to watch tv, I usually want to hear it too (unless its more of an ambiance thing, like Godzilla vs. Gamera or something)
Good looking females with an IQ.
I tell ya, we'll show up, if you give us good looking males who are capable of intelligent conversation...and, of course, Quake and Diablo and pina coladas...
Cyclopatra
"We can't all, and some of us don't." -- Eeyore
Ah, but some of us care about quality, not quantity. Usenet 10 years ago, or even 5, was like browsing /. with your threshhold set high. There may be more posts to /. now, but more trolling, flaming, and sheer mindlessness goes on here in a day than you saw in a month in the old days on Usenet. That old signal-to-noise ratio just keeps going down, though, and while you may want to applaud the now-eternal September of the 'net, don't vilify those of us who miss the days when you didn't have to hunt for intelligent conversation online.
You're not l33t because you just happened to use Usenet 10 years ago.
Nope, but you're not helping the general dumbing-down of society by insisting that the rest of us be happy about it, either.
Cyclopatra
"We can't all, and some of us don't." -- Eeyore
Cyclopatra
"We can't all, and some of us don't." -- Eeyore
Poster B: And calling bacteria cultures an 'ecosphere' is a bit much. I can't speak for everyone else, but my conservationist leanings on this planet derive from a weird sense of kinship with other creatures on this planet, and awareness of their symbiotic relationships. I couldn't care less about bacteria on mars.
Wow, I'm flashing back on Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy.
I'm somewhere in between the two posters with my opinion, though. Life on Mars does make it sort of sad that we'll be bringing all our microbes over there soon, but not sad enough (IMNSHO) that we ought not to do it. Not only is moving some people over to Mars a really good Get Some Eggs Out of This Basket(tm) policy for humans as a species, but dammit, isn't it just about time that we stopped talking about it and just did it?
Besides, maybe the microbes over there are lonely! ;)
Cyclopatra
"We can't all, and some of us don't." -- Eeyore
Well, you can make a donation online here. And the project's webpage is here for more info and pictures of cute dolphins :P
I gave 'em 25$. Anybody else find that they donate a lot more as a result of reading /. ? Maybe it's a second /. effect...your website gets hammered, but your donations skyrocket...
Cyclopatra
"We can't all, and some of us don't." -- Eeyore
Easy. They don't have money in the 27th century - they're all working together to create a better society.
Cyclopatra
"We can't all, and some of us don't." -- Eeyore
Cyclopatra
"We can't all, and some of us don't." -- Eeyore
It all depends on how you look at it. To my mind, this could just as easily be an argument for *more* violence in media (if there's anyone who is a proponent of that) - watching someone get stabbed activates the same neurons as getting stabbed yourself, and increases your empathy towards victims of violence.
All in all, I think it probably balances out to a moot point in terms of violence on TV.
Cyclopatra
"We can't all, and some of us don't." -- Eeyore
And we don't know what the health concerns of a human using the latest flu medication will be, either, but there comes a time when you have to stop testing it on mice and move to the human trials. "We don't know" is, to me, not a reason not to do something - how will we ever find out, if we don't try it?
If most of the Christian Churches of the world find the issue spiritually troubling, I think it would be fair to acknowledge that others might find the issue a little less trivial than you do.
I didn't say it was trivial (although I do think it is). But spirituality is one of those things that are so personal and individualized, that you know what? we don't make laws about it. At least, not in the US, where the original poster and I, at least, live (well, half the time I live there). So discussing whether cloning should be allowed "for spiritual reasons" is spurious.
And you find the government studying the science before clearing it repugnant?
No, I find the idea of sitting around, waiting for the gov't to say "OK" repugnant. I find the thought of the government getting into the bioethics business equally repugnant. It is not up to the government to make moral/ethical decisions for us. They're not good at it, and it's not what we put them there for.
And no, since you keep alluding to it, I am not in any way connected to cloning research (I'm pretty sure there isn't an "industry" yet).
Cyclopatra
"We can't all, and some of us don't." -- Eeyore
I didn't say it wouldn't change things. I just don't see why that's a reason to be so Chicken Little about it.
Take everything you know about life and reconsider.(...) What is life, really?
Is this a question you claim to have the answer to? Do you think cloning is likely to change that answer?
If you answered 'yes' to both of the above questions, you don't have the answer yet. Come back when you have a theory that can't be shaken so easily.
Do clones have the same rights as any other human? Will this create a new sub-class of humans? Most likely.
Please tell me how you can tell the difference between someone who is a clone and someone who is not. Quickly, walking down the street or talking to them in a bar.
How can you discriminate against or deny rights to a class of people when you can't determine who its members are? How will this "create a new sub-class" of humans, unless they somehow engineer all clones to have, say, purple spots on the middle of their foreheads (which, before you go getting all pseudo-philosophical or hysterical about genetic engineering, we can't do yet)?
It becomes easy to abdicate responsibility for such attrocities as nuclear weapons, the hydrogen bomb, the holocaust (you think Hitler knew the best way to gas jews?), the list goes on. "It wasn't me!" the scientists cry
Notwithstanding Godwin's Law, you've just abjured responsiblity yourself, by foisting it all off on those evil, mean scientists who are obviously out to sell all our souls to Hell with their Godforsaken investigations. This kind of thing is nothing more than Frankenstein revisited. If you want to be a Luddite, fine. But why drag the rest of us down into this morass of fear? Some of us prefer to look on every new discovery as an opportunity, instead of a reason to be afraid.
Cyclopatra
"We can't all, and some of us don't." -- Eeyore