But... but... then how am I supposed to get my precious H2O if all "chemicals" are removed from our water supply?! In fact, what would even come out without H2O... air? I don't think we'd live very long with "chemicals" coming out of our faucets or at least money to buy bottled chemicals in the store! Never mind those other chemicals naturally available in trace amounts in most water that give us nutrients, like calcium and magnesium... if we don't get those from water, then we'll have to get them from something else instead!
But really, watch out with the word "chemicals"... it doesn't mean what most people think it does when they try to use the word on its own with a negative connotation. *You* are made up of chemicals. Everything around you is, including the air you drink and the coffee, tea or Coke sitting on your table. This chemical scare is about as stupid as the virus and bacteria scare. How about instead leading up to it with the word "synthetic" or "man-made"? And to be fair, even that would be far from accurate, because nature itself cooks up some pretty nasty chemicals... they just tend to be found in very small quantities and in confined and expected locations.
I don't know when the word "chemicals" started being used in a negative connotation like the word "drugs," but it's annoying and it needs to stop. Just as not all drugs are bad, and in fact most are not bad when used properly, not all chemicals are bad... when used properly. You need them to live, and so do the plants and animals you have sitting mutilated and seasoned on plates on your dinner table. Fair enough--all drugs are a specific class of chemicals on their own--but you get the point. Like I said, practically everything either is, or is made of, at least one chemical.
I do agree that we need to rely less on little-tested unnatural crap completely made in labs, but at the same time I will not spin that to make it seem as if "all" chemicals are somehow bad and to be untrusted by misusing the word. I trust natural chemicals, for the most part, over shit that's synthetic and only produced in labs.
No. Slashdotters will always moronically repeat the same idiotic "memes" everyone else repeats, over and over, because they have no true thoughts of their own.
I would go one further and admit to installing LibreOffice *alongside* a full MS Office installation at work. The ribbon interface in recent Office version just drives me completely nuts, and the versions of Office that do not have it yet are getting so outdated that they have serious problems opening files from the newer versions (even with the converters installed).
Ahhh... planned obsolescence. Don't you love it?
Whereas LibreOffice generally doesn't. The formatting may be slightly off, but at least I can get to the content.
If the content is the only thing that is important, why not use PDFs? Or just go all the way and use plain old text files? Meh... I don't get businesses' fascination with fancy word processor documents... maybe I'm just weird, but I tend to prefer the simplicity of a text file with a nice, readable monospace font... Fixedsys Excelsior or some other Fixedsys lookalike tends to be among my favorites.
I haven't used MS Office since school (a decade at least), and I've never even pirated it. There was a time I didn't know about OpenOffice.org, but I didn't need an office suite that bad. Once I heard about it and tried it out, although I still generally had little use for an office suite, I tended to keep it installed and up to date just in case. Then, by 2006 when I switched fully to Linux, whatever distro I had at the time probably had either AbiWord and Gnumeric or, more commonly, OpenOffice.org. With the exception of the whole Oracle/LibreOffice forking and renaming thing, it's been like that ever since.
It's successfully opened up the few Word documents I've tossed at it and I've made an occasional word processor document and spreadsheet with it with no trouble, so I would hardly consider it crap. Suits my needs well without requiring me to blow hundreds of dollars on the license and to stay on the upgrade treadmill. Considering I type most of my documents in draft form in a text editor and then cut and paste the near-final version into a word processor and only do a few adjustments before saving and/or sending it to the printer, I just can't justify spending so much on a word processor and spreadsheet... not to mention they really gouge you if you want database functionality!
Sounds like the only thing is eight cores instead of two or four... but give it time, typical general-purpose computers will catch up on that soon enough. This reminds me of... Xbox.
Like I said, if the government would just quit wasting our tax dollars, the cost would really not be much of a problem. Just look at all the money going into funding a massively failed drug war and an overpopulated prison system, and the money that goes into funding recycling worthless things like plastic and paper. Not to mention our outsourcing of... well, almost everything, out to places like China. And does the government care? Nah... doesn't seem like it. They're only just now starting to open up to the whole cannabis thing... who knows, maybe one day U.S. farmers will once again be allowed to grow "Hemp for Victory" on American soil instead of importing fibers of the crop from China.
The question then becomes: Why the hell are mission-critical systems connected to business networks that are themselves connected to the Internet? Surely the government could quit blowing our taxes on dumb, pointless shit for just long enough to get any hardware and technicians required to completely segregate these critical systems from any "business" network that may be connected to the Internet or vulnerable to malware hopping from some employee's USB flash stick? The idea that such critical systems could be exposed to such malware is disturbing... what business does anyone have plugging some random USB drive into a mission-critical system? Why are these systems not protected better in the first place?
Am I missing something? What's stopping these wretched GMO crops from pollinating and contaminating non-GMO crops, producing usable seed that can be planted for the next year, but by the time next fall rolls around... a large percentage of your new seed stock is now infertile, completely useless? Give it a few years of continuing cross-contamination and you're fucked.
Fairly obvious? I think braindead obvious is a better description for port 2222. I never did get why people use it... are they so incapable of remembering short number sequences that they have to add two more digits of the same number to the standard port number? Just like those idiots who use the combination 1-2-3-4-5 on their luggage. 2222 seems so common as a suggestion for an alternate "high-number" SSH port, it might as well be considered semi-official and just as dangerous as the "real deal" port 22. Never mind that even if 22 wasn't just two more twos tacked on 22, four number 2s is already an easy guess.
There are 65535 ports... is that really the best people can come up with? Seriously, be creative. Have you lived in a house with a long, somewhat complex/random address of 5-6 digits? Use that or something similar! Want another "random" port for some other service? Divide or multiply that address by two, and there you go--a second good port number that you can recall easily knowing your main port number and doing a bit of math. Using something as weak as 2222 is just pure laziness.
Is that really a bad thing? You should be thankful that they're dumb as fuck... stay silent, don't criticize, and maybe they'll stay dumb. Let your criticism get into the wrong hands and someone just might read it and take it as "suggestions" to improve their "product"... and then you might end up with real problems, and end up back here bitching that their bots are getting better at evading your security mechanisms...
I think the AC's meme got more widespread, because sometime last year I actually got RickRoll'd at a local store... they were playing the song on the damn radio for all their customers to hear.
Maybe console gamers want hardware that is not several years behind current PC quality?
Maybe true console gamers don't give a fuck about PC games? Just a wild guess, considering they are console gamers after all. I, for one, have always been a console gamer and for the most part have never given a rat's ass about the PC side of things.
And I always thought "service pack" was just Microsoft slang for "patch roll-up." Apparently I was wrong. In this case, I don't see why Microsoft continues to develop two separate lines of what is basically the exact same OS, patch by patch. Sure, help the businesses that want time to test... fine, but it's still stupid to maintain two bases for so long, when they are essentially the same damn thing. It's more likely that third party programs are going to fuck up on you, and in my experience that does seem to be where the problems often lie.
Such things as "nonsense, lies, or exaggeration"... not fecal matter from a bull's rectum. In fact, assuming I were to actually ever talk about the animal excrement, I would probably type it as two words with a space.
Nice way to take what I said and turn it way the fuck around to make it seem as if I was actually talking about something else entirely--you win the Unofficial Slashdot Trolling Asshole award. Anyone want to guess what an asshole is? Hint: It's not the part an animal's ass (a bull, donkey, human or whatever) that shit comes out of. Have fun.
Something tells me it would be far better on your wrist and your pinky if you just moved your entire hand the little extra distance and used one of your other fingers instead of stretching with that pinky. As a general rule, anything above or to the right of the main typing area (including insert, delete, home, end, pg up/dn, function keys, etc.) is pressed with the pointer or middle finger.
The pinky is the least accurate, the weakest, and the most fragile finger... so it makes sense to cut back on its use unless needed, to prevent injury. It's already bad enough that it has to stretch for backspace, return, right shift, etc., using it outside of the main board seems like it would be overkill.
What? The arrow keys, as in those ones between the main keyboard section and the numeric keypad? Maybe I'm just weird, but I never heard of that... I use my pointer and middle finger for those. I am lost as to why anyone would use their pinky for that, or whether there is any logic at all in doing it that way. Not to mention, it would feel awkward as all hell.
3. Try hard liquor, instead of beer and mixed drinks.
Drinking liquor instead of beer is a sure-fire way to make any potential hangover much worse in my experience... but, as you pointed out, it all has to do with the pace of your drinking for the most part.
0. Drink some alcohol the next morning (approx. half a beer). That'll end the hangover faster than anything else, coincidentally.
As long as you don't have such a bad hangover that even the thought of drinking more alcohol doesn't gag you. Which, again, typically only happens to me with liquor, not beer... but still, you bring up a good point, drinking a bit more when you get up can work amazingly well. The theory is, your body is going through a mild withdrawal after a long night of drinking, so a little alcohol can fix you right up.
Some of the other things you mentioned seemed more like good ways to prevent getting sick and puking (not drinking on an empty stomach) while drunk than ways to prevent a hangover the day after, and a couple of the others didn't make any sense whatsoever (I don't see how dental hygiene has anything to do with a hangover).
That layout has some killer same hand, same finger, row jumping. The location of P and M in relation to the U will undoubtedly lead to a hell of a bad time, just barely better than QWERTY. Imagine typing "jump" or "hump" or "pumpkin" or many similar words with similar sequences. Hell, even one of the simplest, two-letter words ("up") involves this same hand/finger row jumping! The guy who created the layout made a topic at the Colemak forums where I mentioned these problems, and he never replied. Sad too, because IMO the Workman layout sucks, but in general the Norman layout seems to be slightly better laid out while keeping Workman's one and only redeeming value (reduction of lateral movement), but it's clearly still very flawed...
But really, probably any decently-designed keyboard layout spreads the workload relatively evenly across the fingers. Dvorak does use the pinky and ring fingers quite a bit though, as a result of its design to favor the right hand. I have switched from QWERTY to Dvorak back in early December, and am currently learning Colemak as a second layout... I haven't used Colemak enough to come to a personal opinion on its finger usage, but from what I read it's pretty well evenly split between the fingers.
Maybe you could go to the CarpalX site and download the program, try setting it up to minimize the use of those fingers and run it yourself to see what it generates. The pre-made fully-optimized CarpalX layouts would probably be of little use, because they were not designed to avoid those fingers at all costs... they were made with the idea of having eight fully-functional fingers, while only slightly reducing the load on those fingers due to their natural weakness.
So maybe the flaw in my thinking is that I'm assuming that I'm talking to people who drink heavily on occasion (like weekends), instead of raging alcoholics? Sounds like a plausible misunderstanding and one that would change whether simple re-hydration would work well or not.
I realize it may not work for everyone since none of our bodies are exactly the same. But you're saying that even if it does work for me (and undoubtedly others), then it's still bullshit? Do you even know what the word bullshit means? Fact does not equal bullshit. And the fact is, in my own personal experience, water does provide the ability to minimize or eliminate the effects of a hangover after getting drunk.
Would you also call it "bullshit" if I said that you could die of water intoxication? Hey, after all, it's not an easy accomplishment to achieve, and very few people manage to do it. It must be bullshit!
In either case, the solution is obvious... drink plenty of water. I agree that there are probably other contributing factors, but I think dehydration is the big one. By the time I've re-hydrated myself, any remaining effects never last much longer. I am primarily limited to beer, though--both craft beer of all styles and typical macro lagers. I think you're probably right in that it would probably be more difficult to get rid of a hangover involving very large amounts of, for example, whiskey... lots of higher alcohols, not to mention a shitload more alcohol to begin with (assuming you do shots). Some of my worst and longest-lasting hangovers were whiskey-related.
Slashdot Mirror
-Removing chemicals from our water supply
But... but... then how am I supposed to get my precious H2O if all "chemicals" are removed from our water supply?! In fact, what would even come out without H2O... air? I don't think we'd live very long with "chemicals" coming out of our faucets or at least money to buy bottled chemicals in the store! Never mind those other chemicals naturally available in trace amounts in most water that give us nutrients, like calcium and magnesium... if we don't get those from water, then we'll have to get them from something else instead!
But really, watch out with the word "chemicals"... it doesn't mean what most people think it does when they try to use the word on its own with a negative connotation. *You* are made up of chemicals. Everything around you is, including the air you drink and the coffee, tea or Coke sitting on your table. This chemical scare is about as stupid as the virus and bacteria scare. How about instead leading up to it with the word "synthetic" or "man-made"? And to be fair, even that would be far from accurate, because nature itself cooks up some pretty nasty chemicals... they just tend to be found in very small quantities and in confined and expected locations.
I don't know when the word "chemicals" started being used in a negative connotation like the word "drugs," but it's annoying and it needs to stop. Just as not all drugs are bad, and in fact most are not bad when used properly, not all chemicals are bad... when used properly. You need them to live, and so do the plants and animals you have sitting mutilated and seasoned on plates on your dinner table. Fair enough--all drugs are a specific class of chemicals on their own--but you get the point. Like I said, practically everything either is, or is made of, at least one chemical.
I do agree that we need to rely less on little-tested unnatural crap completely made in labs, but at the same time I will not spin that to make it seem as if "all" chemicals are somehow bad and to be untrusted by misusing the word. I trust natural chemicals, for the most part, over shit that's synthetic and only produced in labs.
No. Slashdotters will always moronically repeat the same idiotic "memes" everyone else repeats, over and over, because they have no true thoughts of their own.
This. :)
I would go one further and admit to installing LibreOffice *alongside* a full MS Office installation at work. The ribbon interface in recent Office version just drives me completely nuts, and the versions of Office that do not have it yet are getting so outdated that they have serious problems opening files from the newer versions (even with the converters installed).
Ahhh... planned obsolescence. Don't you love it?
Whereas LibreOffice generally doesn't. The formatting may be slightly off, but at least I can get to the content.
If the content is the only thing that is important, why not use PDFs? Or just go all the way and use plain old text files? Meh... I don't get businesses' fascination with fancy word processor documents... maybe I'm just weird, but I tend to prefer the simplicity of a text file with a nice, readable monospace font... Fixedsys Excelsior or some other Fixedsys lookalike tends to be among my favorites.
I haven't used MS Office since school (a decade at least), and I've never even pirated it. There was a time I didn't know about OpenOffice.org, but I didn't need an office suite that bad. Once I heard about it and tried it out, although I still generally had little use for an office suite, I tended to keep it installed and up to date just in case. Then, by 2006 when I switched fully to Linux, whatever distro I had at the time probably had either AbiWord and Gnumeric or, more commonly, OpenOffice.org. With the exception of the whole Oracle/LibreOffice forking and renaming thing, it's been like that ever since.
It's successfully opened up the few Word documents I've tossed at it and I've made an occasional word processor document and spreadsheet with it with no trouble, so I would hardly consider it crap. Suits my needs well without requiring me to blow hundreds of dollars on the license and to stay on the upgrade treadmill. Considering I type most of my documents in draft form in a text editor and then cut and paste the near-final version into a word processor and only do a few adjustments before saving and/or sending it to the printer, I just can't justify spending so much on a word processor and spreadsheet... not to mention they really gouge you if you want database functionality!
Sounds like the only thing is eight cores instead of two or four... but give it time, typical general-purpose computers will catch up on that soon enough. This reminds me of... Xbox.
I see. Your time is better spent bitching about said Internet petition on Slashdot.
I already have an account but I didn't know about this petition, so for me it was just a quick log in to access the "sign petition" button...
Like I said, if the government would just quit wasting our tax dollars, the cost would really not be much of a problem. Just look at all the money going into funding a massively failed drug war and an overpopulated prison system, and the money that goes into funding recycling worthless things like plastic and paper. Not to mention our outsourcing of... well, almost everything, out to places like China. And does the government care? Nah... doesn't seem like it. They're only just now starting to open up to the whole cannabis thing... who knows, maybe one day U.S. farmers will once again be allowed to grow "Hemp for Victory" on American soil instead of importing fibers of the crop from China.
The question then becomes: Why the hell are mission-critical systems connected to business networks that are themselves connected to the Internet? Surely the government could quit blowing our taxes on dumb, pointless shit for just long enough to get any hardware and technicians required to completely segregate these critical systems from any "business" network that may be connected to the Internet or vulnerable to malware hopping from some employee's USB flash stick? The idea that such critical systems could be exposed to such malware is disturbing... what business does anyone have plugging some random USB drive into a mission-critical system? Why are these systems not protected better in the first place?
Am I missing something? What's stopping these wretched GMO crops from pollinating and contaminating non-GMO crops, producing usable seed that can be planted for the next year, but by the time next fall rolls around... a large percentage of your new seed stock is now infertile, completely useless? Give it a few years of continuing cross-contamination and you're fucked.
Smoke on the water... a massive brick in the sky...
Fairly obvious? I think braindead obvious is a better description for port 2222. I never did get why people use it... are they so incapable of remembering short number sequences that they have to add two more digits of the same number to the standard port number? Just like those idiots who use the combination 1-2-3-4-5 on their luggage. 2222 seems so common as a suggestion for an alternate "high-number" SSH port, it might as well be considered semi-official and just as dangerous as the "real deal" port 22. Never mind that even if 22 wasn't just two more twos tacked on 22, four number 2s is already an easy guess.
There are 65535 ports... is that really the best people can come up with? Seriously, be creative. Have you lived in a house with a long, somewhat complex/random address of 5-6 digits? Use that or something similar! Want another "random" port for some other service? Divide or multiply that address by two, and there you go--a second good port number that you can recall easily knowing your main port number and doing a bit of math. Using something as weak as 2222 is just pure laziness.
And the bots are REALLY stupid
Is that really a bad thing? You should be thankful that they're dumb as fuck... stay silent, don't criticize, and maybe they'll stay dumb. Let your criticism get into the wrong hands and someone just might read it and take it as "suggestions" to improve their "product"... and then you might end up with real problems, and end up back here bitching that their bots are getting better at evading your security mechanisms...
I think the AC's meme got more widespread, because sometime last year I actually got RickRoll'd at a local store... they were playing the song on the damn radio for all their customers to hear.
Maybe console gamers want hardware that is not several years behind current PC quality?
Maybe true console gamers don't give a fuck about PC games? Just a wild guess, considering they are console gamers after all. I, for one, have always been a console gamer and for the most part have never given a rat's ass about the PC side of things.
And I always thought "service pack" was just Microsoft slang for "patch roll-up." Apparently I was wrong. In this case, I don't see why Microsoft continues to develop two separate lines of what is basically the exact same OS, patch by patch. Sure, help the businesses that want time to test... fine, but it's still stupid to maintain two bases for so long, when they are essentially the same damn thing. It's more likely that third party programs are going to fuck up on you, and in my experience that does seem to be where the problems often lie.
So all this time you thought it was just excrement, and it turns out to be a rather clever double entendre.
And now we all know what bullshit means.
Nice one, genius, but the following is pretty much the definition of bullshit that I use:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/bullshit?s=t
Such things as "nonsense, lies, or exaggeration"... not fecal matter from a bull's rectum. In fact, assuming I were to actually ever talk about the animal excrement, I would probably type it as two words with a space.
Nice way to take what I said and turn it way the fuck around to make it seem as if I was actually talking about something else entirely--you win the Unofficial Slashdot Trolling Asshole award. Anyone want to guess what an asshole is? Hint: It's not the part an animal's ass (a bull, donkey, human or whatever) that shit comes out of. Have fun.
Something tells me it would be far better on your wrist and your pinky if you just moved your entire hand the little extra distance and used one of your other fingers instead of stretching with that pinky. As a general rule, anything above or to the right of the main typing area (including insert, delete, home, end, pg up/dn, function keys, etc.) is pressed with the pointer or middle finger.
The pinky is the least accurate, the weakest, and the most fragile finger... so it makes sense to cut back on its use unless needed, to prevent injury. It's already bad enough that it has to stretch for backspace, return, right shift, etc., using it outside of the main board seems like it would be overkill.
What? The arrow keys, as in those ones between the main keyboard section and the numeric keypad? Maybe I'm just weird, but I never heard of that... I use my pointer and middle finger for those. I am lost as to why anyone would use their pinky for that, or whether there is any logic at all in doing it that way. Not to mention, it would feel awkward as all hell.
3. Try hard liquor, instead of beer and mixed drinks.
Drinking liquor instead of beer is a sure-fire way to make any potential hangover much worse in my experience... but, as you pointed out, it all has to do with the pace of your drinking for the most part.
0. Drink some alcohol the next morning (approx. half a beer). That'll end the hangover faster than anything else, coincidentally.
As long as you don't have such a bad hangover that even the thought of drinking more alcohol doesn't gag you. Which, again, typically only happens to me with liquor, not beer... but still, you bring up a good point, drinking a bit more when you get up can work amazingly well. The theory is, your body is going through a mild withdrawal after a long night of drinking, so a little alcohol can fix you right up.
Some of the other things you mentioned seemed more like good ways to prevent getting sick and puking (not drinking on an empty stomach) while drunk than ways to prevent a hangover the day after, and a couple of the others didn't make any sense whatsoever (I don't see how dental hygiene has anything to do with a hangover).
That layout has some killer same hand, same finger, row jumping. The location of P and M in relation to the U will undoubtedly lead to a hell of a bad time, just barely better than QWERTY. Imagine typing "jump" or "hump" or "pumpkin" or many similar words with similar sequences. Hell, even one of the simplest, two-letter words ("up") involves this same hand/finger row jumping! The guy who created the layout made a topic at the Colemak forums where I mentioned these problems, and he never replied. Sad too, because IMO the Workman layout sucks, but in general the Norman layout seems to be slightly better laid out while keeping Workman's one and only redeeming value (reduction of lateral movement), but it's clearly still very flawed...
No joke. Look at the below picture--the pinky is so under-utilized in QWERTY it looks looks like it has been cut off in the diagram!
http://infohost.nmt.edu/~shipman/ergo/fig4.jpg
But really, probably any decently-designed keyboard layout spreads the workload relatively evenly across the fingers. Dvorak does use the pinky and ring fingers quite a bit though, as a result of its design to favor the right hand. I have switched from QWERTY to Dvorak back in early December, and am currently learning Colemak as a second layout... I haven't used Colemak enough to come to a personal opinion on its finger usage, but from what I read it's pretty well evenly split between the fingers.
Maybe you could go to the CarpalX site and download the program, try setting it up to minimize the use of those fingers and run it yourself to see what it generates. The pre-made fully-optimized CarpalX layouts would probably be of little use, because they were not designed to avoid those fingers at all costs... they were made with the idea of having eight fully-functional fingers, while only slightly reducing the load on those fingers due to their natural weakness.
Check out this tool to get a nice overview of the hand, finger, row, etc. usage and other stats that might be useful:
http://patorjk.com/keyboard-layout-analyzer/
So maybe the flaw in my thinking is that I'm assuming that I'm talking to people who drink heavily on occasion (like weekends), instead of raging alcoholics? Sounds like a plausible misunderstanding and one that would change whether simple re-hydration would work well or not.
I realize it may not work for everyone since none of our bodies are exactly the same. But you're saying that even if it does work for me (and undoubtedly others), then it's still bullshit? Do you even know what the word bullshit means? Fact does not equal bullshit. And the fact is, in my own personal experience, water does provide the ability to minimize or eliminate the effects of a hangover after getting drunk.
Would you also call it "bullshit" if I said that you could die of water intoxication? Hey, after all, it's not an easy accomplishment to achieve, and very few people manage to do it. It must be bullshit!
In either case, the solution is obvious... drink plenty of water. I agree that there are probably other contributing factors, but I think dehydration is the big one. By the time I've re-hydrated myself, any remaining effects never last much longer. I am primarily limited to beer, though--both craft beer of all styles and typical macro lagers. I think you're probably right in that it would probably be more difficult to get rid of a hangover involving very large amounts of, for example, whiskey... lots of higher alcohols, not to mention a shitload more alcohol to begin with (assuming you do shots). Some of my worst and longest-lasting hangovers were whiskey-related.