Uh, I turned 36 this year, and this marks my 24th year of typing (and I must point out, at 90+ words per minute). The only concession I've made to keyboard layout occurred after I started using computer keyboards (I learned on a manual with the keys painted over).
This concession was to use what is now the "Microsoft Natural" keyboard form factor. This was because I had developed large cysts on my wrists. Within a week of my starting to use the Natural keyboard, these cysts went away. This isn't due to the layout, but the shape of the keyboard, which allows me to keep my hands slightly turned in as they naturally do at rest.
With some rough calculation, I can guess that I've typed over 65 million characters at minimum in my life, and my hands are non-arthritic and fully flexible. Of course it also helps that I play the bass guitar.
Keyboard layouts don't impress me. Never have.
I often equate this to people who may for some reason wish to re-arrange the order of notes on a musical instrument. Proficient users of the instrument can adjust rapidly. People who have no skill or speed or fluency will never have those things no matter how they re-arrange the keys or the notes.
In fact, I type so fast that I have to step away from my keyboard before I submit one-line comments on Slashdot due to the "idiot filter" that some idiot put in (and which I don't appreciate).
In short, I don't need a better keyboard. Even keyboards that move the backslash from above [ENTER] to beside [SHIFT] drive me insane. It's not that I don't want to commit to a new keyboard layout, it's that I don't need to bother. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with the one that is in use now, and no amount of self-serving BS from would-be layout designers can convince me otherwise.
maybe you might want to write to your congressmen about how you think it would be wise to reduce social entitlement payouts to retiring old farts in the forms of medicare and social security, and put the money to better use in the U.S. Patent Office
Well, you seem to be arguing from a position of pretty detailed knowledge. Care to back up any of your claims?
If you can, can you also let me know in any way shape or form why you specifically picked out medicare and social security to reduce? I'm just curious. I know people tend to zero in on social programs of which they do not approve when criticizing government spending, but in this case, there isn't anything like a logical correlation between one and the other. Your statement, translated, ends up reading that retirees and sick people are thoughtlessly robbing our patent system. Considering the notable lack of factual information in the rest of your post, it's interesting to note that you decided to throw total fucking illogic in to top it off.
I think the fundamental concern of a Democratic Administration (which barring major stupidity will take office in January of 2009) will be to evacuate and wipe that warty obscenity off the face of our planet.
And the second concern will be to void the Patriot Act, every single clause of it.
Because that is what almost every grassroots member of the opposition party has said. Dems who don't figure that out by 2006 will be replaced with ones who have.
This is why financial liberty is far more important than civil liberty. Cut off authorian access to your pocketbook and they'll be unable to affect your civil rights.
Where do people go to get the drugs you take to make this shit up? Seriously!
Authoritarian access to your pocketbook is the least of your problems if you can't vote. Financial liberty only works for the ultra-wealthy. This isn't hard to figure out. Civil liberty works for everyone, because you can't collect additional votes in a bank somewhere. No matter how much money you have, you still get just one vote. And I have no idea where you get the idea that voting imposes a "nanny state" on you. Many of the checks and balances of a modern Democracy are designed to thwart the tyrrany of the majority, and permit both individual civil rights and the needs of the prevailing majority to be figured into the scheme of things.
Financial parity is probably more important than financial liberty. Keeping the wealthy from becoming so wealthy that they are above laws and social norms is, I think, more important. It's also been a part of America's system since the beginning, most notably in things like the Estate Tax, which was specifically designed to keep an aristrocracy of worthless blueblood heirs from arising. It probably needs to be increased, and the top tax rate definitely needs to be jacked up. Our nation's wealthy have no reason to do anything but hoard their cash right now, which is, IMHO, most of the reason why worker wages are stuck in the 1970's.
Actually, I was told that the 3-foot model was there as well, for awhile. My wife and I had this huge argument that we finally settled by going to see the thing -- during the early 1980's I had seen the 13-foot (or whatever) model hanging in some corner. During some later period, she had seen the 3-foot version, and when we went in 1991 it was not on display, and one of the security people said it was a small model that was being prepared for re-display. But now they've got the big mamma jamma back up. I've seen it myself just two years ago.
Gee, if we weren't up to our necks in Chinese-held debt, and our currency wasn't being held hostage by them, we would have something to say about this.
I've done textual analysis of Tolkein's revisions; partly because I have several copies. None of them, aside from the "riddles in the dark" episode, were anything on the order of what Lucas has done. If Lucas had just gone through the films and cleaned up dirty special effects, that would be OK. But what he's doing is jacking around with things in some misguided attempt to correct the moral leanings of his characters (taking out blaster shots, re-timing them, etcetera) or actually trying to "improve" existing pieces of the story that originally worked just fine. Tolkein did far more esoteric things, like correcting errors in spelling and internal continuity -- not surprising for a book for which not one or two but several new languages have been invented.
Kind of, if you're an obsessive-compulsive control freak who has to continually tinker with shit and drive everyone else batty. I am increasingly glad that I retain not one but two copies of the original Star Wars (it will always be Star Fucking Wars to me, and never "A New Lame-Ass Hope," and one copy each of the other two on Laser Disc. I am awaiting an opportune moment to purchase a couple of extra players (which now cost less than the discs used to) in order to have the originals on hand for years to come.
It was really hilarious to listen to his pathological lying on the commentary for Empire. He started immediately with the "studio let me put the Episode V in the title." I mean one absolute crock of shit after the next. As if nobody could tell that Mark Hamil's wampa sequence was inserted specifically to hide scars from his car accident.
The scene wasn't even in the original version, and Jabba was portrayed as a human.
Actually, he was going to stick in an animated character but ran out of money/reason to do it. The human actor was only ever intended to be a standin. I remember seeing the footage years ago. What's kind of depressing about this is simply that the shine has come off. The originals worked because they were consistent. He keeps going back and jacking with that consistency, and it's jarring.
I don't know about you, but I don't want to look up at the moon and see piles of man-made crap instead of its current beautiful state
We would have to develop the Moon's real estate to a density much higher than the Earth's to get to that point. The story about the Great Wall of China being visible from Moon (250,000 mi) let alone orbit (~300 mi), is absolute bull. Conversely, we would have to put wall-to-wall power stations on the Moon, hundreds of times our required production capacity, before anyone would actually see it. And really, what the hell are you preserving? Your breathable air down here, in the thin layer of Earth which is the only habitable place in the Universe we know of? Or the cold, sterile surface of the moon? I submit your priorities are ass-backwards. Let 'em strip mine it and put down solar panels afterwards. NOBODY CAN LIVE THERE ANYWAY.
I can't stand N'Sync or any of the boy bands, but don't think for a minute that what they do isn't work
I do it too. I just do it better because I have put the effort into the quality of my performance, rather than how I look. I don't think they're lazy. I think they suck.
So they hire some people to market and promote them...
These boy bands are put together by a record producer. They do not come together of their own accord. You audition to the company/producer/whoever, not to the other members of the band. That is the other thing that is despicable about these groups. They're phony.
The popularity of the Antares Autotune ought to be enough proof that musicianship is not a prerequisite for a hit recording career anymore. That's why so many of these bands just can't hack it live. The record companies learned from Milli Vanilli that you have to hire people who are good-looking and sing their own songs. Since easily manipulated good-looking models rarely coincide with skilled vocalists, technology comes to save the day. I'm all for technology when it saves time or allows a more perfect capture of the performance. But this device is pathetic and an embarassment. In case you don't know what it does, listen to the big Cher hit of a couple of years ago (I think there's only been one) with the funky vocal effect. My guess is that this is the auto-tune used to exaggeration.
The Milli Vanilli debacle was only embarassing to the recording industry because they got caught. The proliferation of dancing boy bands and jiggling girl bands is just the continuation of a cookie-cutter process that's become the RIAA's wet dream. Now that technology can assure that you don't actually have to hire musicians to perform music, they've gone overboard. And they're about to be bowled over by the backlash. Every musical movement engenders a backlash. I remember the "disco sucks" revolt. Hundreds of teenagers at my school smashing records in the playground. Literally thousands of records were smashed, angrily. It was years before disco artists resurfaced. The backlash against Britney and 'N'Sync is going to make that look tame. Those people won't be able to go out in public until they're fifty . . .
Re:A crutch for the weak-minded?
on
God's Debris
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· Score: 2
The intellectual prowess, popularity, fame, fortune, or other major accomplishments of these people does not guarantee them to be right all of the time. A similar list of early Mesopotamian intellectuals would probably reveal a significant number of extremely smart people who nonetheless believed the world was flat and at the center of the universe because they were neither capable of nor comfortable with questioning that particular premise.
Einstein's famous rejection of the entire concept of quantum mechanics was simply stated as "God does not play dice." And he was proven wrong. It's very revealing that he found it necessary to invoke God in order to attack a theory which he found asthetically displeasing.
Of course you don't know any of this any better than she does. And she managed to get through her whole article without calling anyone a stupid cunt. Imagine that.
Well, well, well I see that you do not read more of his works. This man was/is pretty accurate!
If you weren't an AC I would probably have a better chance at this, but since you will never see my reply I suppose I post in vain. Show me, specifically, where a statement Nostradamus made can be interpreted only as a premonition of future events, and contains specific details that were impossible for him to know. And believe me, I have been inundated with Nostra-fantasy for over twenty years. I have enough familiarity with the technique to easily dismiss it as brain-rot.
And, buddy, I don't pray to anyone. We will get through this by specific acts of assisting one another, not by appealing to invisible people. Waiting for a divine intervention is waiting for a bus that's not coming. No one can get humanity out of its self-imposed messes but humanity.
What the hell are you talking about? Real is the physical, actual world. Language is the abstract symbolism we use to describe it. Nostrodamus chose to immerse himself in abstract symbolism and millions of ninnies around the world have chosen to believe that somehow he knew something we didn't based on their hazy interpretations of his equally hazy symbols. If he had ever said specifically that on the eleventh of september in the two thousand and first year since the birth of christ we would experience an act of terror, I would give a smidgeon of credibility to his words. But he deliberately kept his prophecies vague so they could be applied broadly.
Get the difference? Broad > specific. Broad statements: there will be much trouble in your future. Specific statements: there will be much trouble on Tuesday. Broad symbolic statements: there will be four horsemen of the apocalypse in your future (four airplanes would be taken to represent four "horsemen of apocalypse"). Specific statement: there will be four airliners of the apocalypse in your future. Nostrildamus made broad enough statements that they could catch many future incidents. We repeat historical tragedies enough that he can be invoked in many times, on many dates. He's like the phony psychic readers who spout off dozens of common names as they fish for the name of someone you actually know. They play you like a musical instrument, watching for a reaction that means their vague statements have somehow provoked a specific reaction in you. Then they trick you into revealing a personal piece of information, and like a logical prestidigitator, make it appear that they have pulled a name out of your head, like a magician appears to pull a quarter out of your ear.
If you have some platonic idea of real vs. ideal don't waste your breath on me. Plato was a dolt. His school of philosophy was the major obstruction to scientific progress for millenia. Supernatural paranoia and religious belief are a delusion from which the human race is gradually awakening. I occasionally pause to toss a little cold water on those who are still slumbering, but I rarely get them to open their eyes.
Re:All of Islam must be punished for this!
on
Handling the Loads
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· Score: 2
That can't be anything but a deliberate troll. Or a complete mindless idiot who doesn't know what he's talking about. Then again, there's so little difference between the two that I just couldn't tell.
Slashdot Mirror
This concession was to use what is now the "Microsoft Natural" keyboard form factor. This was because I had developed large cysts on my wrists. Within a week of my starting to use the Natural keyboard, these cysts went away. This isn't due to the layout, but the shape of the keyboard, which allows me to keep my hands slightly turned in as they naturally do at rest.
With some rough calculation, I can guess that I've typed over 65 million characters at minimum in my life, and my hands are non-arthritic and fully flexible. Of course it also helps that I play the bass guitar.
Keyboard layouts don't impress me. Never have.
I often equate this to people who may for some reason wish to re-arrange the order of notes on a musical instrument. Proficient users of the instrument can adjust rapidly. People who have no skill or speed or fluency will never have those things no matter how they re-arrange the keys or the notes.
In fact, I type so fast that I have to step away from my keyboard before I submit one-line comments on Slashdot due to the "idiot filter" that some idiot put in (and which I don't appreciate).
In short, I don't need a better keyboard. Even keyboards that move the backslash from above [ENTER] to beside [SHIFT] drive me insane. It's not that I don't want to commit to a new keyboard layout, it's that I don't need to bother. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with the one that is in use now, and no amount of self-serving BS from would-be layout designers can convince me otherwise.
And he's watched too many epic science fiction films with bad science and dopey fiction. Nothing to see here. Move along.
The person who answers your question will be up for a Nobel in Physics.
The Teen Titans will have to kick their asses, then. They've got a whole building shaped like a T.
Well, you seem to be arguing from a position of pretty detailed knowledge. Care to back up any of your claims?
If you can, can you also let me know in any way shape or form why you specifically picked out medicare and social security to reduce? I'm just curious. I know people tend to zero in on social programs of which they do not approve when criticizing government spending, but in this case, there isn't anything like a logical correlation between one and the other. Your statement, translated, ends up reading that retirees and sick people are thoughtlessly robbing our patent system. Considering the notable lack of factual information in the rest of your post, it's interesting to note that you decided to throw total fucking illogic in to top it off.
Coulda fooled me.
So E=MC2 is probably small potatoes to you, isn't it?
And the second concern will be to void the Patriot Act, every single clause of it.
Because that is what almost every grassroots member of the opposition party has said. Dems who don't figure that out by 2006 will be replaced with ones who have.
Where do people go to get the drugs you take to make this shit up? Seriously!
Authoritarian access to your pocketbook is the least of your problems if you can't vote. Financial liberty only works for the ultra-wealthy. This isn't hard to figure out. Civil liberty works for everyone, because you can't collect additional votes in a bank somewhere. No matter how much money you have, you still get just one vote. And I have no idea where you get the idea that voting imposes a "nanny state" on you. Many of the checks and balances of a modern Democracy are designed to thwart the tyrrany of the majority, and permit both individual civil rights and the needs of the prevailing majority to be figured into the scheme of things.
Financial parity is probably more important than financial liberty. Keeping the wealthy from becoming so wealthy that they are above laws and social norms is, I think, more important. It's also been a part of America's system since the beginning, most notably in things like the Estate Tax, which was specifically designed to keep an aristrocracy of worthless blueblood heirs from arising. It probably needs to be increased, and the top tax rate definitely needs to be jacked up. Our nation's wealthy have no reason to do anything but hoard their cash right now, which is, IMHO, most of the reason why worker wages are stuck in the 1970's.
Actually, I was told that the 3-foot model was there as well, for awhile. My wife and I had this huge argument that we finally settled by going to see the thing -- during the early 1980's I had seen the 13-foot (or whatever) model hanging in some corner. During some later period, she had seen the 3-foot version, and when we went in 1991 it was not on display, and one of the security people said it was a small model that was being prepared for re-display. But now they've got the big mamma jamma back up. I've seen it myself just two years ago.
Gee, if we weren't up to our necks in Chinese-held debt, and our currency wasn't being held hostage by them, we would have something to say about this.
I've done textual analysis of Tolkein's revisions; partly because I have several copies. None of them, aside from the "riddles in the dark" episode, were anything on the order of what Lucas has done. If Lucas had just gone through the films and cleaned up dirty special effects, that would be OK. But what he's doing is jacking around with things in some misguided attempt to correct the moral leanings of his characters (taking out blaster shots, re-timing them, etcetera) or actually trying to "improve" existing pieces of the story that originally worked just fine. Tolkein did far more esoteric things, like correcting errors in spelling and internal continuity -- not surprising for a book for which not one or two but several new languages have been invented.
Kind of, if you're an obsessive-compulsive control freak who has to continually tinker with shit and drive everyone else batty. I am increasingly glad that I retain not one but two copies of the original Star Wars (it will always be Star Fucking Wars to me, and never "A New Lame-Ass Hope," and one copy each of the other two on Laser Disc. I am awaiting an opportune moment to purchase a couple of extra players (which now cost less than the discs used to) in order to have the originals on hand for years to come.
It was really hilarious to listen to his pathological lying on the commentary for Empire. He started immediately with the "studio let me put the Episode V in the title." I mean one absolute crock of shit after the next. As if nobody could tell that Mark Hamil's wampa sequence was inserted specifically to hide scars from his car accident.
Actually, he was going to stick in an animated character but ran out of money/reason to do it. The human actor was only ever intended to be a standin. I remember seeing the footage years ago. What's kind of depressing about this is simply that the shine has come off. The originals worked because they were consistent. He keeps going back and jacking with that consistency, and it's jarring.
We would have to develop the Moon's real estate to a density much higher than the Earth's to get to that point. The story about the Great Wall of China being visible from Moon (250,000 mi) let alone orbit (~300 mi), is absolute bull. Conversely, we would have to put wall-to-wall power stations on the Moon, hundreds of times our required production capacity, before anyone would actually see it. And really, what the hell are you preserving? Your breathable air down here, in the thin layer of Earth which is the only habitable place in the Universe we know of? Or the cold, sterile surface of the moon? I submit your priorities are ass-backwards. Let 'em strip mine it and put down solar panels afterwards. NOBODY CAN LIVE THERE ANYWAY.
d) crow about how smart they are and squander their energy on trivialities.
You have apparently forgotten about
e) Meglomaniacs who feel they have to force the entire energy of human ambition into their personal agenda
Not everyone's concerns are your concerns, and not everyone can be concerned about the same thing at once. It is you who have no sense of perspective.
I do it too. I just do it better because I have put the effort into the quality of my performance, rather than how I look. I don't think they're lazy. I think they suck.
So they hire some people to market and promote them...
These boy bands are put together by a record producer. They do not come together of their own accord. You audition to the company/producer/whoever, not to the other members of the band. That is the other thing that is despicable about these groups. They're phony.
The Milli Vanilli debacle was only embarassing to the recording industry because they got caught. The proliferation of dancing boy bands and jiggling girl bands is just the continuation of a cookie-cutter process that's become the RIAA's wet dream. Now that technology can assure that you don't actually have to hire musicians to perform music, they've gone overboard. And they're about to be bowled over by the backlash. Every musical movement engenders a backlash. I remember the "disco sucks" revolt. Hundreds of teenagers at my school smashing records in the playground. Literally thousands of records were smashed, angrily. It was years before disco artists resurfaced. The backlash against Britney and 'N'Sync is going to make that look tame. Those people won't be able to go out in public until they're fifty . . .
Einstein's famous rejection of the entire concept of quantum mechanics was simply stated as "God does not play dice." And he was proven wrong. It's very revealing that he found it necessary to invoke God in order to attack a theory which he found asthetically displeasing.
Of course you don't know any of this any better than she does. And she managed to get through her whole article without calling anyone a stupid cunt. Imagine that.
If you weren't an AC I would probably have a better chance at this, but since you will never see my reply I suppose I post in vain. Show me, specifically, where a statement Nostradamus made can be interpreted only as a premonition of future events, and contains specific details that were impossible for him to know. And believe me, I have been inundated with Nostra-fantasy for over twenty years. I have enough familiarity with the technique to easily dismiss it as brain-rot.
And, buddy, I don't pray to anyone. We will get through this by specific acts of assisting one another, not by appealing to invisible people. Waiting for a divine intervention is waiting for a bus that's not coming. No one can get humanity out of its self-imposed messes but humanity.
Get the difference? Broad > specific. Broad statements: there will be much trouble in your future. Specific statements: there will be much trouble on Tuesday. Broad symbolic statements: there will be four horsemen of the apocalypse in your future (four airplanes would be taken to represent four "horsemen of apocalypse"). Specific statement: there will be four airliners of the apocalypse in your future. Nostrildamus made broad enough statements that they could catch many future incidents. We repeat historical tragedies enough that he can be invoked in many times, on many dates. He's like the phony psychic readers who spout off dozens of common names as they fish for the name of someone you actually know. They play you like a musical instrument, watching for a reaction that means their vague statements have somehow provoked a specific reaction in you. Then they trick you into revealing a personal piece of information, and like a logical prestidigitator, make it appear that they have pulled a name out of your head, like a magician appears to pull a quarter out of your ear.
If you have some platonic idea of real vs. ideal don't waste your breath on me. Plato was a dolt. His school of philosophy was the major obstruction to scientific progress for millenia. Supernatural paranoia and religious belief are a delusion from which the human race is gradually awakening. I occasionally pause to toss a little cold water on those who are still slumbering, but I rarely get them to open their eyes.
That can't be anything but a deliberate troll. Or a complete mindless idiot who doesn't know what he's talking about. Then again, there's so little difference between the two that I just couldn't tell.