The reason most people think older music was so much better is because they don't reminise over the old stuff that happend to be crap.
No, it's because there is no new stuff that isn't crap.
The BackStreet Boys actually deliver on that. I'm no great fan of them, but I know their music is catchy and a lot of 14 year-old girls genuinly liked the sound.
That's because they're 14 and don't know any better.
Nope, you're wrong. You may have seen ones that were similar, but this particular one is mine. I spent an evening writing it sometime within the past year.
It's not entirely original, since it has a similar format to a bunch that were around already. That's probably what you're thinking of. I remember seeing a "your post sucks because" form on USENET in 1994.
How long has the word "asshat" been in common usage anyway?
When I originally wrote that form months ago it took me several hours. Thinking of all the proposed solutions I've ever seen, and the obvious problems with them, was what took a long time. Typing is easy. But in every thread on spam I would see some joker come up with a nightmare "solution" that obviously wouldn't work. Every message will contain a hash. We keep a list of known valid senders in a central repository, so each email has to be authenticated by someone who knows your key, blah blah blah. I don't see any reason why this wouldn't work!
Anyway, I posted the form 2 or 3 times, then quit, figuring I made my point and it wore out its welcome. But I see the beast lives on! BWAhahaha! Although I wouldn't have filled out the same boxes that were filled out here.
Even if the CAN-SPAM act is a permissive piece of junk, I still like to see people going to jail for spam. It won't solve the problem, any more than putting pickpocketers in jail stops pickpocketing. But it's the least we should be doing. Jail is where these people belong.
Torin Nelson, who served as a military intelligence officer at Guantánamo Bay before moving to Abu Ghraib as a private contractor last year, blamed the abuses on a failure of command in US military intelligence and an over-reliance on private firms. He alleged that those companies were so anxious to meet the demand for their services that they sent "cooks and truck drivers" to work as interrogators. [stuff deleted] "A unit goes out on a raid and they have a target and the target is not available; they just grab anybody because that was their job," Mr Nelson said, referring to counter-insurgency operations in Iraq. "The troops are under a lot of stress and they don't know one guy from the next. They're not cultural experts. All they want is to count down the days and hopefully go home. They take it out on the nearest person they can't understand."
"I've read reports from capturing units where the capturing unit wrote, "the target was not at home. The neighbour came out to see what was going on and we grabbed him," he said.
According to Mr Nelson's account, the victims' very innocence made them more likely to be abused, because interrogators refused to believe they could have been picked up on such arbitrary grounds.
Bush banned research on stem cells harvested from abortions.
Although I seem to remember they were coming from the leftover embryos created at fertility clinics. One might argue these are technically "abortions" too, but fertility clinics don't draw the same sort of political fire. If more babies come out of a process then it's OK.
We don't need no stinking programming skills here! We can do this with a web browser, a text editor, and a can of beer for refreshment. Just use a META HTTP-EQUIV REFRESH tag and set it to refresh once every few milliseconds. Put the 419 dude in a frame or link to his images.
Of course, to do it WELL requires lots of OPM (Other People's Machines). So post that URL here when you've got it set up.
There was a Seinfeld joke about this. If you take the leftover soap chips and you successfully "mind meld" each one into a new bar of soap, people will eventually recognize you as you walk down the street.
"Hey, I heard about that guy! He never runs out of soap!"
A touchscreen system like that (with a modernized front end merely punching holes in your card for you) would be a fine enhancement to current systems. Unfortunately that's not how Diebold implements it. "Touchscreen voting" in this context refers to systems that replace everything in the back end and actually count the votes- votes are stored in Access MDB files on Windows machines, and votes are tallied electronically.
We should really call it "Microsoft Access voting" but nobody would know what that meant.
Myself and my family are from Napa, CA (one of the cities that had some serious problems with Diebold), and I can't explain how frustrating it is to not be sure if your vote was counted properly or not. For democracy to work, you must have faith in the security and validity of the elections.
Well said. This is a subtle but critical point and it goes straight over most people's heads. "Our county didn't have any problems!"
A common rule of legal ethics states that the appearance of a conflict of interest is a conflict of interest. It creates unaddressable concerns about impartiality and undermines faith in a process that depends on it. Voting is the same way. The appearance of voter disenfranchisement is voter disenfranchisement. It deprives us of our rights as citizens to know for certain that our votes are being counted, which is what disenfranchisement is. Perfectly reasonable voter concerns about touchscreen voting have not been alleviated, nor can they be alleviated. So you voted touchscreen? How do you really know? You really don't, and what's more, you really can't. Worst of all, in some counties, it turns out you really didn't.
Thomas Jefferson said the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. I bet wasn't even considering pretty flashing lights as a threat to the republic.
As stupid as it sounds, I am thankful for my mother thinkng D&D was a satanic cult and grounding me for weeks for playing it.
Remember the news stories about it? They would do these pieces on a weird kid here and there- like "Columbine weird"- who did nothing but play AD&D 25 hours a day and ended up killing himself. Then they interviewed the parents who always blamed the game, of course. I think one kid maybe left a suicide note describing how he was going to be a level 6 mage in the afterlife, or something completely bizarre.
My father (dope) saw that story on TV and pontificated. "Well it's obvious they should ban it, I don't see what the fuss is about." Well, maybe he was right, but not for that reason.
The 49G+ is a fantastic calculator. It craps all over the the 49G.
This may be true, but it's not saying much.
The only complaints about the 49G+ around are that some of the early keyboards were a bit naff. I have a 49G+ and a Ti Voyage 200 - heck even the guys over at TiCalc.org think that the 49G+ is fricking awesome.
I'll have to take their word for it. I suppose if you outsource all your engineering overseas, the people you gave the work to will eventually get better at it. But you lose customers during the transition, and you deserve to. I've been burned by HP enough that I'm not ever buying anything from them again.
The 49g+ wasn't released in 2000, you cock-smoking teabagger.
You're right, mine is the 49g not the 49g+. I shouldn't have typed the +. However I doubt the + makes much difference on this turkey of a calculator. Several hundred + signs might do it. They should have used two minus signs and called it "HP49g--" since everyone agrees the 48 series was much better.
If pointers to info are 'illegal' (*cough*2600*cough), then I would also like to state that you cannot buy weed at the park. If pointers to pointers are safe, then I would like to say that it's safe to dereference my friend Joey for the same pointer to the park.
Ah, but if you recall, 2600 was enjoined by the court from providing hypertext links to DeCSS, although they were still allowed to publish the URLs themselves because of First Amendment concerns. (You had to cut and paste them into the address field yourself- no HREFs.)
I, on the other hand, can't get rid of the hypertext link underneath my post that says "Parent".
I might expose myself to legal liability under the DMCA if I were to use my +2 karma bonus to publicly point out that a copy of the DeDRMS code may be found buried in the parent AC post (currently at 0, and NOT posted by myself) that I am replying to. The DMCA would expressly forbid such a reply informing others of the existence of such a post.
Therefore, I wish to state emphatically that the parent contains no C# whatsoever and should not be moderated up as Informative, cut, pasted, compiled, or disseminated.
Because in recent years HP decided to save a bundle of money by decreasing the product quality which is what the HP name was known for. They made up for it with that shiny metallic paint. Some focus group must have preferred it to the staid ABS plastic that was typical of HP stuff. Good thing, too, since it makes it easy to recognize pre-Carly from post-Carly HP products.
I have an HP-28S that I got in 1988 and used through college, and a HP49g+ that I was stupid enough to get in 2000. I know exactly what you're talking about. Once an HP model gets that metallic sheen on it, it's game over.
But this is all a side point. Even if Diebold did happen to be politically neutral, so what? Is the next voting machine manufacturer going to be as politically pure? We shouldn't even have to be worrying about Diebold's political affiliation. The mere fact that we are, and that we have to, is all the proof you need that this new process for counting votes is really, really fucked.
A common rule of legal ethics states that the appearance of a conflict of interest (like a judge going on a duck hunting trip with a defendant) is a conflict of interest. It creates unaddressable concerns about impartiality. If that's the case, I think it's not too much of a stretch to suggest that the appearance of voter disenfranchisement creates voter disenfranchisement. It deprives us of our rights as citizens to know for certain that our votes are being counted, which is what disenfranchisement is. Perfectly reasonable voter concerns about touchscreen voting have not been alleviated, nor can they be alleviated. So you voted touchscreen? How do you really know? You really don't, and what's more, you really can't. Worst of all, in some counties, you really didn't.
Are we so used to computerizing everything that we're not even thinking about whether it's a good idea anymore? It's not even like you should even need computers to count votes. What is the benefit? Computers are useful for saving human labor, for eliminating human intervention. That's why they replaced the armies of accountants and office clerks that used to be legion in decades and centuries past. What is being gained by computerizing voting? Is it so that we won't have to vote anymore? Is it so that we don't have to count the votes? Votes are counted by machines already, using technology that is transparent to auditing. You can see the ballots move through them. They could be made by Nazis or Scientologists and you could still trust those machines. We hire a couple goons to watch the stacks of ballots and we can be reasonably certain that nobody's vote is being lost or tampered with. Currently, voting involves as much human intervention as is absolutely required for everyone to retain trust in the process, and not much more.
HP used to make extremely well-made products. Then they shifted their focus, from serving customers to serving stockholders. Now they produce garbage. I was in Fry's today and overheard a lady returning a cheap HP printer she had foolishly spent money on. "Their customer support is horrible and they're all from India!" I almost burst out laughing. Sucker! NEVER buy anything from HP. They've been coasting on their name for years and they're slowly grinding to a halt. Soon "HP" will be synonymous with crap and they'll have to change their name to something like "Claria" the way Gator did.
If it weren't for the printer ink racket they're running, they'd have gone under long ago. What a sad end to what used to be a great American company.
Part of the outrage was that the spammers did not crosspost. Their script posted separately to each newsgroup.
Yes, I forgot that detail! People lost their newsfeeds because of it. And C&S poured gasoline on the fire because they were completely unapologetic to those whose resources they stole, and even went so far as publicly promising more spam. They thought they were geniuses for inventing such an effective marketing strategy. They really acted like they invented the Internet with that stupid post. It was funny how different newsgroups reacted. Nowadays everyone ignores this stuff and deletes it. And in most groups there were no responses to that post. But back then, in this case, people replied to it and started threads around it in groups like alt.peeves and alt.revenge. There were discussions going on all over the place about how lawyers suck, what the green card lottery was, whether the spam was a sign of things to come or just a one-time thing, etc. Most people understood that it wasn't the last time this would happen, but I don't think even the pessimists grasped the scale of just how bad it would get.
The stripper part was a lie. But it was fun lie to tell. The rest of it is true- she was a public defender, not appearing directly in court. She reviewed cases for prisoners that were in the appeals process. She's no longer practicing law after quickly realizing she hated it. She had a very short legal career.
Slashdot Mirror
If the New York Times were to print an article saying the sky was blue, it would be proof positive that the sky was some other color.
The reason most people think older music was so much better is because they don't reminise over the old stuff that happend to be crap.
No, it's because there is no new stuff that isn't crap.
The BackStreet Boys actually deliver on that. I'm no great fan of them, but I know their music is catchy and a lot of 14 year-old girls genuinly liked the sound.
That's because they're 14 and don't know any better.
From that one story you have hosts of other authors refering to "butterfly effects" and "quantum butterflys".
And of course, there is Chaos Butterfly.
Nope, you're wrong. You may have seen ones that were similar, but this particular one is mine. I spent an evening writing it sometime within the past year.
It's not entirely original, since it has a similar format to a bunch that were around already. That's probably what you're thinking of. I remember seeing a "your post sucks because" form on USENET in 1994.
How long has the word "asshat" been in common usage anyway?
When I originally wrote that form months ago it took me several hours. Thinking of all the proposed solutions I've ever seen, and the obvious problems with them, was what took a long time. Typing is easy. But in every thread on spam I would see some joker come up with a nightmare "solution" that obviously wouldn't work. Every message will contain a hash. We keep a list of known valid senders in a central repository, so each email has to be authenticated by someone who knows your key, blah blah blah. I don't see any reason why this wouldn't work!
Anyway, I posted the form 2 or 3 times, then quit, figuring I made my point and it wore out its welcome. But I see the beast lives on! BWAhahaha! Although I wouldn't have filled out the same boxes that were filled out here.
Even if the CAN-SPAM act is a permissive piece of junk, I still like to see people going to jail for spam. It won't solve the problem, any more than putting pickpocketers in jail stops pickpocketing. But it's the least we should be doing. Jail is where these people belong.
What does the "Face Detector" have to say about that thing on Mars?
EVERY basic military trainee is drilled on the UCMJ (Uniform Code Of Military Justice).
Are private contractors considered military trainees?
From the Gaurdian:
Torin Nelson, who served as a military intelligence officer at Guantánamo Bay before moving to Abu Ghraib as a private contractor last year, blamed the abuses on a failure of command in US military intelligence and an over-reliance on private firms. He alleged that those companies were so anxious to meet the demand for their services that they sent "cooks and truck drivers" to work as interrogators.
[stuff deleted]
"A unit goes out on a raid and they have a target and the target is not available; they just grab anybody because that was their job," Mr Nelson said, referring to counter-insurgency operations in Iraq. "The troops are under a lot of stress and they don't know one guy from the next. They're not cultural experts. All they want is to count down the days and hopefully go home. They take it out on the nearest person they can't understand."
"I've read reports from capturing units where the capturing unit wrote, "the target was not at home. The neighbour came out to see what was going on and we grabbed him," he said.
According to Mr Nelson's account, the victims' very innocence made them more likely to be abused, because interrogators refused to believe they could have been picked up on such arbitrary grounds.
Bush banned research on stem cells harvested from abortions.
Although I seem to remember they were coming from the leftover embryos created at fertility clinics. One might argue these are technically "abortions" too, but fertility clinics don't draw the same sort of political fire. If more babies come out of a process then it's OK.
We don't need no stinking programming skills here! We can do this with a web browser, a text editor, and a can of beer for refreshment. Just use a META HTTP-EQUIV REFRESH tag and set it to refresh once every few milliseconds. Put the 419 dude in a frame or link to his images.
Of course, to do it WELL requires lots of OPM (Other People's Machines). So post that URL here when you've got it set up.
There was a Seinfeld joke about this. If you take the leftover soap chips and you successfully "mind meld" each one into a new bar of soap, people will eventually recognize you as you walk down the street.
"Hey, I heard about that guy! He never runs out of soap!"
A touchscreen system like that (with a modernized front end merely punching holes in your card for you) would be a fine enhancement to current systems. Unfortunately that's not how Diebold implements it. "Touchscreen voting" in this context refers to systems that replace everything in the back end and actually count the votes- votes are stored in Access MDB files on Windows machines, and votes are tallied electronically.
We should really call it "Microsoft Access voting" but nobody would know what that meant.
Myself and my family are from Napa, CA (one of the cities that had some serious problems with Diebold), and I can't explain how frustrating it is to not be sure if your vote was counted properly or not. For democracy to work, you must have faith in the security and validity of the elections.
Well said. This is a subtle but critical point and it goes straight over most people's heads. "Our county didn't have any problems!"
A common rule of legal ethics states that the appearance of a conflict of interest is a conflict of interest. It creates unaddressable concerns about impartiality and undermines faith in a process that depends on it. Voting is the same way. The appearance of voter disenfranchisement is voter disenfranchisement. It deprives us of our rights as citizens to know for certain that our votes are being counted, which is what disenfranchisement is. Perfectly reasonable voter concerns about touchscreen voting have not been alleviated, nor can they be alleviated. So you voted touchscreen? How do you really know? You really don't, and what's more, you really can't. Worst of all, in some counties, it turns out you really didn't.
Thomas Jefferson said the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. I bet wasn't even considering pretty flashing lights as a threat to the republic.
As stupid as it sounds, I am thankful for my mother thinkng D&D was a satanic cult and grounding me for weeks for playing it.
Remember the news stories about it? They would do these pieces on a weird kid here and there- like "Columbine weird"- who did nothing but play AD&D 25 hours a day and ended up killing himself. Then they interviewed the parents who always blamed the game, of course. I think one kid maybe left a suicide note describing how he was going to be a level 6 mage in the afterlife, or something completely bizarre.
My father (dope) saw that story on TV and pontificated. "Well it's obvious they should ban it, I don't see what the fuss is about." Well, maybe he was right, but not for that reason.
The 49G+ is a fantastic calculator. It craps all over the the 49G.
This may be true, but it's not saying much.
The only complaints about the 49G+ around are that some of the early keyboards were a bit naff. I have a 49G+ and a Ti Voyage 200 - heck even the guys over at TiCalc.org think that the 49G+ is fricking awesome.
I'll have to take their word for it. I suppose if you outsource all your engineering overseas, the people you gave the work to will eventually get better at it. But you lose customers during the transition, and you deserve to. I've been burned by HP enough that I'm not ever buying anything from them again.
The 49g+ wasn't released in 2000, you cock-smoking teabagger.
You're right, mine is the 49g not the 49g+. I shouldn't have typed the +. However I doubt the + makes much difference on this turkey of a calculator. Several hundred + signs might do it. They should have used two minus signs and called it "HP49g--" since everyone agrees the 48 series was much better.
Which calculator are you using in high school?
Indeed, but you can still choose to reply to another post, and thus make the "Parent" link not to point to the offending data.
What would be the point of that? Then nobody would find it!
If pointers to info are 'illegal' (*cough*2600*cough), then I would also like to state that you cannot buy weed at the park. If pointers to pointers are safe, then I would like to say that it's safe to dereference my friend Joey for the same pointer to the park.
Ah, but if you recall, 2600 was enjoined by the court from providing hypertext links to DeCSS, although they were still allowed to publish the URLs themselves because of First Amendment concerns. (You had to cut and paste them into the address field yourself- no HREFs.)
I, on the other hand, can't get rid of the hypertext link underneath my post that says "Parent".
I might expose myself to legal liability under the DMCA if I were to use my +2 karma bonus to publicly point out that a copy of the DeDRMS code may be found buried in the parent AC post (currently at 0, and NOT posted by myself) that I am replying to. The DMCA would expressly forbid such a reply informing others of the existence of such a post.
Therefore, I wish to state emphatically that the parent contains no C# whatsoever and should not be moderated up as Informative, cut, pasted, compiled, or disseminated.
That thing is painful to look at
You're using the wrong browser then. HP's "Enlarge image" link only works on Internet Explorer.
Why couldnt they have made it like the 48sx?
Because in recent years HP decided to save a bundle of money by decreasing the product quality which is what the HP name was known for. They made up for it with that shiny metallic paint. Some focus group must have preferred it to the staid ABS plastic that was typical of HP stuff. Good thing, too, since it makes it easy to recognize pre-Carly from post-Carly HP products.
I have an HP-28S that I got in 1988 and used through college, and a HP49g+ that I was stupid enough to get in 2000. I know exactly what you're talking about. Once an HP model gets that metallic sheen on it, it's game over.
But this is all a side point. Even if Diebold did happen to be politically neutral, so what? Is the next voting machine manufacturer going to be as politically pure? We shouldn't even have to be worrying about Diebold's political affiliation. The mere fact that we are, and that we have to, is all the proof you need that this new process for counting votes is really, really fucked.
A common rule of legal ethics states that the appearance of a conflict of interest (like a judge going on a duck hunting trip with a defendant) is a conflict of interest. It creates unaddressable concerns about impartiality. If that's the case, I think it's not too much of a stretch to suggest that the appearance of voter disenfranchisement creates voter disenfranchisement. It deprives us of our rights as citizens to know for certain that our votes are being counted, which is what disenfranchisement is. Perfectly reasonable voter concerns about touchscreen voting have not been alleviated, nor can they be alleviated. So you voted touchscreen? How do you really know? You really don't, and what's more, you really can't. Worst of all, in some counties, you really didn't.
Are we so used to computerizing everything that we're not even thinking about whether it's a good idea anymore? It's not even like you should even need computers to count votes. What is the benefit? Computers are useful for saving human labor, for eliminating human intervention. That's why they replaced the armies of accountants and office clerks that used to be legion in decades and centuries past. What is being gained by computerizing voting? Is it so that we won't have to vote anymore? Is it so that we don't have to count the votes? Votes are counted by machines already, using technology that is transparent to auditing. You can see the ballots move through them. They could be made by Nazis or Scientologists and you could still trust those machines. We hire a couple goons to watch the stacks of ballots and we can be reasonably certain that nobody's vote is being lost or tampered with. Currently, voting involves as much human intervention as is absolutely required for everyone to retain trust in the process, and not much more.
HP used to make extremely well-made products. Then they shifted their focus, from serving customers to serving stockholders. Now they produce garbage. I was in Fry's today and overheard a lady returning a cheap HP printer she had foolishly spent money on. "Their customer support is horrible and they're all from India!" I almost burst out laughing. Sucker! NEVER buy anything from HP. They've been coasting on their name for years and they're slowly grinding to a halt. Soon "HP" will be synonymous with crap and they'll have to change their name to something like "Claria" the way Gator did.
If it weren't for the printer ink racket they're running, they'd have gone under long ago. What a sad end to what used to be a great American company.
Part of the outrage was that the spammers did not crosspost. Their script posted separately to each newsgroup.
Yes, I forgot that detail! People lost their newsfeeds because of it. And C&S poured gasoline on the fire because they were completely unapologetic to those whose resources they stole, and even went so far as publicly promising more spam. They thought they were geniuses for inventing such an effective marketing strategy. They really acted like they invented the Internet with that stupid post.
It was funny how different newsgroups reacted. Nowadays everyone ignores this stuff and deletes it. And in most groups there were no responses to that post. But back then, in this case, people replied to it and started threads around it in groups like alt.peeves and alt.revenge. There were discussions going on all over the place about how lawyers suck, what the green card lottery was, whether the spam was a sign of things to come or just a one-time thing, etc. Most people understood that it wasn't the last time this would happen, but I don't think even the pessimists grasped the scale of just how bad it would get.
The stripper part was a lie. But it was fun lie to tell. The rest of it is true- she was a public defender, not appearing directly in court. She reviewed cases for prisoners that were in the appeals process. She's no longer practicing law after quickly realizing she hated it. She had a very short legal career.
OK, the stripper part was a lie. But the rest of it is God's honest truth!