Ask me again in 20 years. I'm going to retire from my first 25-year career in 2008. After that, I plan to spend a lot of my time programming for fun and (meager) profit. If I never accomplish anything more than contributing to open source software, I'll still have a good time. If I actually make a career of it, so much the better.
I'm the one who should apologize for implying your original post was a troll. It never occured to me that you were serious. For God's sake, it was a a farcical rant that ended with "Comprende?" How was I supposed to know?
troll 1. v.,n. [From the Usenet group alt.folklore.urban] To utter a
posting on Usenet designed to attract predictable responses or
flames; or, the post itself. Derives from the phrase "trolling for
newbies" which in turn comes from mainstream "trolling", a style of
fishing in which one trails bait through a likely spot hoping for a
bite. The well-constructed troll is a post that induces lots of newbies
and flamers to make themselves look even more clueless than they already
do, while subtly conveying to the more savvy and experienced that it is
in fact a deliberate troll. If you don't fall for the joke, you get to
be in on it. See also YHBT.
2. n. An individual who chronically trolls
in sense 1; regularly posts specious arguments, flames or personal
attacks to a newsgroup, discussion list, or in email for no other
purpose than to annoy someone or disrupt a discussion. Trolls are
recognizable by the fact that they have no real interest in learning
about the topic at hand - they simply want to utter flame bait. Like the
ugly creatures they are named after, they exhibit no redeeming
characteristics, and as such, they are recognized as a lower form of
life on the net, as in, "Oh, ignore him, he's just a troll." Compare
kook.
3. n. [Berkeley] Computer lab monitor. A popular campus job for
CS students. Duties include helping newbies and ensuring that lab
policies are followed. Probably so-called because it involves lurking in
dark cavelike corners.
Some people claim that the troll (sense 1) is properly a narrower
category than flame bait, that a troll is categorized by containing
some assertion that is wrong but not overtly controversial. See also
Troll-O-Meter.
The use of `troll' in either sense is a live metaphor that readily
produces elaborations and combining forms. For example, one not
infrequently sees the warning "Do not feed the troll" as part of a
followup to troll postings.
The AC is correct (if a bit rude). Any idea that has 40 state laws supporting it has at some point enjoyed not only widespread grassroots support, but a period of political currency. This meter-reversing stuff goes back to the '80s in the US.
Yes, I'm sure that's the correct way to describe the phenomenon. Sorry for my half-assedness. Blame it on the high school counselor who talked my mother out of putting me in eighth grade physics class when we transferred to Georgia.
Since my wife and I home school (did I mention we're in Georgia?), I guess I need to address this deficiency pretty soon;)
Funny you should ask. Mythbusters did research into the deer-rifle equivalent of this problem and came up with several documented cases of people who had (accidentally) been shot from over a mile away. The bullets were still dangerous at that range because they had not been fired at an angle steep enough to cause them to expend all their energy fighting gravity (around 45 degrees?) If the bullets were fired straight(ish) up, their terminal velocity when they fell back wasn't nearly high enough to kill a person; if they arced up and arced back down like a throw to home from the outfield, they were still moving real fast and could do real damage when they landed.
The most surprising thing to me was the terminal velocity of a lead bullet--around 80mph. I would have expected higher from such a dense metal.
Isn't it encouraging to know that, while your solution works in theory, it's not good enough in practice because you can't trust people not to do that.
Doesn't seem that hard, really, but people are pretty stupid.
Mmmm, I think the question that makes this interesting is a little deeper than "Do blind people want to have an active life?" Probably what caught people's interest was the idea that a blind person might enjoy the idea of shooting an animal so much that they would pretend to hunt in order to feel the thrill of the kill.
I think it's pretty obvious that if one cannot find one's way into the woods (or out again), cannot locate one's prey without assistance, and cannot aim a weapon at the prey once it's been located, then one is NOT "hunting". One is "executing". The fact that someone might find this idea appealing is interesting. It's a little insight into human nature.
This is pretty funny. Not only am I also 46 years old, but at one time I owned TWO '93 escort wagons (both white--I distinguished them by their interiors). You don't have triplets, do you?
Not that there's any point in responding to an AC, but this is not the form of the verb "to cost" that was used in TFA. You can tell that because our friends at Merriam Webster have provided definitions for each entry in their dictionary. This form of "to cost" would make no sense in TFA. This is a kind of "cost" that people do, not objects for sale.
Well that answers the burning question "Why do I still have IE 6 even though I have auto-update running on my WinXP boxes?" I was starting to feel left out.
I wonder if this was just Slash-hysteria all along, or if MS changed their minds about how to handle the updates. I guess if I'd bothered to read the articles when this story first came out I might know.
I'll just jump right in here and admit that I suspect my daughter of having purposely gotten pregnant, while telling her partner (now husband, the poor sap) that she was using the pill. Because I divorced her mother years ago, I had less influence on her as she grew up than I would have liked, but there's no guarantee I could have made any difference.
Bearing children is instinctive in women. Like all instincts, it can drive people to do unscrupulous things. Young men, protect yourselves.
Dude. All of them. That's why Consumer Reports has never accepted advertising or samples of product. It's not like they enjoy buying everything at full retail. It's just the only way to get products to review after you've written a few thumbs-down articles.
Occasionally someone writes a post that justifies some of the time I piss away on Slashdot. This dead-on, dead-simple explanation of why censorship is bad is an example. So now I'll impose on you. I googled "neo-Nazi germany" and found this. If you get a second, could you look at it and drop a comment on how accurately it portrays the problem from your perspective?
BTW, I have no idea what the Afghanistan photos you mention are, nor does Google. What's that about?
True. And all the more intriguing in light of the fact (as someone pointed out in another post) that this is astroturf, apparently planted by some outfit called Lytis Interactive. They're sneaky, aren't they?
It's fun to bash Microsoft. I do it myself. They're way behind the power curve on proactive security measures and slow to fix vulnerabilities. However, maintaining my WinXP machines consists of checking the radio button labelled "Automatic (Recommended)" in the Automatic Updates dialog. It's not difficult, it's not expensive and it's not time-consuming. I run Ad-aware every once in a while just for grins, but so far it only finds trivial stuff, and I don't think I would be any worse off without it.
Of course, without the $40 router/firewall that keeps the machine from getting pwned every 10 minutes, the rest would be pointless, but honestly, I would need a router no matter what OS I was running.
Look at it this way. The military was probably not going to have you doing any work that benefited the Japanese (nor, I'm afraid, any Americans), so maybe you're better off in the long run. I know if I were able to translate Arabic I would be very hesitant about doing it for the DoD. It's pretty hard to study a language in great depth without developing a sympathy for the people that speak it.
Too bad Canada is weather hell. I still think about moving my family there sometimes. Or Costa Rica. Or New Zealand.
There are lots of businesses with this sort of built-in conflict of interest, and ways have been found around them. A mundane example is the pool maintenance business, where the better the store is at diagnosing and curing your pool's ails, the less money they make from sale of chemicals. Folks who really understand pools can stay profitable (and honest, too) by charging a fixed fee to keep pools clean and balanced. Because they're experts, they can do this with a lot less of the chemicals than most people would need, so they can charge a very good price and still make money. Everybody benefits.
Slashdot Mirror
Ask me again in 20 years. I'm going to retire from my first 25-year career in 2008. After that, I plan to spend a lot of my time programming for fun and (meager) profit. If I never accomplish anything more than contributing to open source software, I'll still have a good time. If I actually make a career of it, so much the better.
I'm the one who should apologize for implying your original post was a troll. It never occured to me that you were serious. For God's sake, it was a a farcical rant that ended with "Comprende?" How was I supposed to know?
troll 1. v.,n. [From the Usenet group alt.folklore.urban] To utter a posting on Usenet designed to attract predictable responses or flames; or, the post itself. Derives from the phrase "trolling for newbies" which in turn comes from mainstream "trolling", a style of fishing in which one trails bait through a likely spot hoping for a bite. The well-constructed troll is a post that induces lots of newbies and flamers to make themselves look even more clueless than they already do, while subtly conveying to the more savvy and experienced that it is in fact a deliberate troll. If you don't fall for the joke, you get to be in on it. See also YHBT.
2. n. An individual who chronically trolls in sense 1; regularly posts specious arguments, flames or personal attacks to a newsgroup, discussion list, or in email for no other purpose than to annoy someone or disrupt a discussion. Trolls are recognizable by the fact that they have no real interest in learning about the topic at hand - they simply want to utter flame bait. Like the ugly creatures they are named after, they exhibit no redeeming characteristics, and as such, they are recognized as a lower form of life on the net, as in, "Oh, ignore him, he's just a troll." Compare kook.
3. n. [Berkeley] Computer lab monitor. A popular campus job for CS students. Duties include helping newbies and ensuring that lab policies are followed. Probably so-called because it involves lurking in dark cavelike corners.
Some people claim that the troll (sense 1) is properly a narrower category than flame bait, that a troll is categorized by containing some assertion that is wrong but not overtly controversial. See also Troll-O-Meter.
The use of `troll' in either sense is a live metaphor that readily produces elaborations and combining forms. For example, one not infrequently sees the warning "Do not feed the troll" as part of a followup to troll postings.
The AC is correct (if a bit rude). Any idea that has 40 state laws supporting it has at some point enjoyed not only widespread grassroots support, but a period of political currency. This meter-reversing stuff goes back to the '80s in the US.
Anybody who hadn't slept through the "war on poverty" and the "war on drugs".
Since my wife and I home school (did I mention we're in Georgia?), I guess I need to address this deficiency pretty soon ;)
The most surprising thing to me was the terminal velocity of a lead bullet--around 80mph. I would have expected higher from such a dense metal.
Doesn't seem that hard, really, but people are pretty stupid.
I think it's pretty obvious that if one cannot find one's way into the woods (or out again), cannot locate one's prey without assistance, and cannot aim a weapon at the prey once it's been located, then one is NOT "hunting". One is "executing". The fact that someone might find this idea appealing is interesting. It's a little insight into human nature.
Sort of like reading your post.
This is pretty funny. Not only am I also 46 years old, but at one time I owned TWO '93 escort wagons (both white--I distinguished them by their interiors). You don't have triplets, do you?
Not that there's any point in responding to an AC, but this is not the form of the verb "to cost" that was used in TFA. You can tell that because our friends at Merriam Webster have provided definitions for each entry in their dictionary. This form of "to cost" would make no sense in TFA. This is a kind of "cost" that people do, not objects for sale.
I wonder if this was just Slash-hysteria all along, or if MS changed their minds about how to handle the updates. I guess if I'd bothered to read the articles when this story first came out I might know.
Bearing children is instinctive in women. Like all instincts, it can drive people to do unscrupulous things. Young men, protect yourselves.
Dude. All of them. That's why Consumer Reports has never accepted advertising or samples of product. It's not like they enjoy buying everything at full retail. It's just the only way to get products to review after you've written a few thumbs-down articles.
Nevermind the question about the skull photos. I still haven't seen them, but newswire descriptions, along with your characterization, tell me enough.
BTW, I have no idea what the Afghanistan photos you mention are, nor does Google. What's that about?
Somebody mod this up.
True. And all the more intriguing in light of the fact (as someone pointed out in another post) that this is astroturf, apparently planted by some outfit called Lytis Interactive. They're sneaky, aren't they?
Bingo! Of course, we're both going to Hell for using our fireplaces. I don't think it's eco-friendly.
Of course, without the $40 router/firewall that keeps the machine from getting pwned every 10 minutes, the rest would be pointless, but honestly, I would need a router no matter what OS I was running.
Too bad Canada is weather hell. I still think about moving my family there sometimes. Or Costa Rica. Or New Zealand.
Good luck. Sorry about the homophobe thing.
I'm sorry, what did you say? I started daydreaming after you said "really heavy rack."
So, you're saying that low-level bureaucrats don't make US$40 million per year?
There are lots of businesses with this sort of built-in conflict of interest, and ways have been found around them. A mundane example is the pool maintenance business, where the better the store is at diagnosing and curing your pool's ails, the less money they make from sale of chemicals. Folks who really understand pools can stay profitable (and honest, too) by charging a fixed fee to keep pools clean and balanced. Because they're experts, they can do this with a lot less of the chemicals than most people would need, so they can charge a very good price and still make money. Everybody benefits.
Lighten up, Mark. I meant other Americans, not me.