With DVR's becoming more and more popular, the time that a show airs is less and less important. Perhaps the execs realize this and are trying to work it to their advantage. Sometimes you need to take some risks to move forward.
So, they are killing their best shows out of a desire to have programming aimed at people who do not watch advertisements?
Yeah. I vote that Illinois also changes the definition of a mile and shortens it so that their residents can get more miles to the gallon! I also vote that they cut the definition of an hour down to 30mins to shorten my working day.
Consensus and standards be damned, they're just definitions!
A better analogy would be if they shortened a mile to 3 inches, while running, so they could say that an Illinoisan was the first to run 10 miles in 30 seconds.
After all, this is all about having some crappy touristy trivia item to stick in their pamphlets, right between the "See rock city" ad and the coupons for Shoney's.
Little aftertought, after reading the ars technica update I believe this is about money.
The Cook County Sheriff's Department is asking a federal judge to close the Erotic Services section of Craigslist, as well as reimburse the department $100,000 it has cost to pursue Craigslist-related prostitution investigations over the past year,
Umm...Shouldn't the police force be paying craigslist? Craigslist didn't create the prostitution. They stuck it all in one spot. The only way they could have helped the cops more is if they placed a big red arrow that says "hooker" over the prostitute's heads.
Maybe not the point of this experiment (well, if you can call it that -- this isn't exactly science anyway), but as with the previous graphics experiment, it might even produce some interesting tune somewhere down the line.
That would be awesome. If they have enough data to broadcast for decades, then it is likely that something would appear during that time.
I wouldn't want to have to argue with the people who say "year 12, month 2, day 7, 7:31:59am sounded kinda like Beethoven for thirty seconds, only god could make that happen", but it would still be interesting to see the patterns that must be there.
Perhaps this year, Linux will be ready for the desktop.
Linux has been ready for the desktop for years. It's just that certain users are not yet ready for Linux.
Of course! Linux is ready for the desktop, but the desktop is not yet ready for Linux! We'll have to find those carpenters and tell them to build better desks.
Sending an astronaut is many times as expensive, since we need more safety, need to keep the astronaut alive during the long trip over, and need to bring the astronaut back.
You haven't read the zombie posts, have you. We can send a dead astronaut over there, and then we only have to worry about safety on the trip back.
You'd think any lander we send up there looking for water would have the ability to analyze any liquid droplets growing, merging, and dripping on the lander's leg over the course of a Martian month.
Another example of why the "why send humans, robots can do everything just as well" idea is bogus. If that was an astronaut up there this would be resolved in a minute, not a month.
I think I saw this on "CSI: Mars". They pointed a blue light at it and determined that it was 10% blood, 70% semen, and 20% water.
Just have your underage kid click. They cant enter into a contract.
Of course if this happens too much, they will require you to produce a CC# and SSN for each EULA that gets sent back to the company. Or even force you get it at the store you bought the box from.
As for the last option, if they were required to provide you with the terms and conditions when you bought the product, I would consider that a small victory.
Of course, that may seem unreasonable, considering the complexity of the contract and that you are now requiring Walmart employees to handle hundreds of legal contracts...
But it's not my problem...The terms of the transaction should be negotiated (or dictated) before the sale is complete, not after.
If the terms are too numerous and complicated to discuss without legal council, then the companies need to agree on a simpler and more commonly used set of terms, rather than the current model which is "I can do whatever I want as long as it's in the fine print and nobody reads it".
The human body contains about 100g of DNA. You're saying about 2E15 grams, or 20 trillion human body's worth, of DNA is not only released into the atmosphere but then escapes the earths gravitational pull and enters interplanetary space. Sounds unlikely.
Lamarck is one of those guys who's name is generally synonymous with bad science (he's about as villified as Darwin is deified).
What? I've heard Larmarck's evolutionary ideas ridiculed but villified?
He wasn't that unscientific. He was just wrong.
Or are you thinking of Lysenko? Now that particular advocate of inherited-acquired-characteristics was indeed a villain, a lousy scientist and a political tool.
My understanding of this is that it is "Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs", and that the lower level needs come first, until they have been satisfactorily filled. Then, employees begin to really care about the higher needs.
As a web designer, I think it is interesting how that, by taking a few minutes to create an icon with a new shape, you can open your product to a wider audience.
Now there is the greater issue of whether businesses should be required to take special accessibility measures, such as building wheelchair ramps and having handicapped parking (which I think the two of us may disagree on), but I want to get across the point that GP could have just closed the web browser and walked away. At least by explaining why the site was not helpful to him, he is giving site developers a chance to learn to produce better sites.
And one last thing. He isn't telling people to boycott the site, or have it shut down. He's bitching about something he doesn't like about it. If he had said "gah, the color scheme is ugly" or "gah, the site is disorganized", then would it have been as much of an outrage to you, as it is when he brings up his disability?
I doubt kdawson has actually ever read a complete EULA either -- he simply needed something to bitch about..
Very few people have ever read a complete EULA. That is something to bitch about. That's the point. Most people agree to what is, arguably, a legally binding contract, full of unreasonable provisions, and have never even read the thing.
That affects the rest of us, because if the people who care about their rights are in the minority, then we all get trampled.
How is helping broadband going to stimulate the economy? The way to stimulate the economy is to get the banks lending [slashdot.org] again and get consumers spending again.
You forgot one aspect of the equation. you have to get lending institutions lending, consumers spending, and American products being consumed.
I'm not arguing the "buy American, it's your duty" position. I'm saying that we need to find a niche that we as a country, (if you happen to be American), can fill. American workers will never be cheaper than those in third world nations, and the American car industry has not earned confidence in our QA standards, but there is one place where we can compete.
Being one of the wealthiest countries on Earth, and having a large number of world-class research facilities, we should be doing everything we can to keep producing cutting-edge research. I love the fact that the world's best and brightest are coming to America to be doctors, programmers, and scientists, and that they are staying here to work. It gives us a competitive edge that most other countries don't have. But, if we allow ourselves to think that science is the enemy, that professors are incompetent, and that only factories provide anything of value, then this edge will dull quickly.
And yes, residential broadband would contribute to our success, as it would allow the future scientists, programmers, and engineers to learn, to experiment, and to work from their homes.
I am not prone to optimism, but I would like to think that this is a reasonable direction for our future.
You didn't read my post. The folks next door were white. My description of them as being niggers was, therefore, not racial.
I read you post and got that. But calling someone a "white nigger" is still an insult to black people, even if the person you meant to insult is actually white. The fact that you went from saying "stop acting like a nigger" to "stop acting like a nigga" does not change anything.
We have truly reached a new low in society if wherein it is suggested that one cannot discuss a word if such a discussion involves use of that word.
Correction: If it involves repeated use of the word.
If you, sir, see my discussion of the word "nigger," in pontification of how I learned how not to use the word "nigger," then you sir are as blind and stupid as the bigotry which you seem to attempt to renounce.
I can only assume that the purpose of gratuitous use of the word in a way that accomplished nothing, was intended to provoke people. And now you're playing the innocent victim because somebody called you out on it.
So blind, in fact, that you cannot see that I am trying to prevent further abuses of the term.
No, you aren't trying to prevent further abuse. you're trying to rewrite the dictionary so that people don't mind being called niggers. Unfortunately, that word is tied in with another time in America. Trying to divorce a racial epithet from its connotations is pointless. You can't put a happy face on an atrocity and expect the people affected by it to just smile and move on.
Were you in Salem in 1692, I expect that you'd have been one of the ones in the streets with a torch or a pitchfork.
No, I'd probably be running from those people. I assume that you'd be the guy running down the street yelling "n****r" at the top of his lungs.
And you could have said the exact same thing without using the N-word at all. I don't agree with your point about calling the people next door n****rs, and would feel that you were being a troll, if you decided to use another ethnicity into a synonym for "criminal".
I personally don't care if the GPs suggestion is put in place or not (and doubt if it ever will). The policy GP proposed was that the frequency of the word be limited to two more than what you would expect to hear in any reasonable conversation.
My objection was that the GP was modded "troll" for making a suggestion that people disagree with. That is censorship as well, but of a different kind. GP was suggesting that we censor words, and modders were censoring ideas. I would rather the idea be brought up and shot down, than modded down.
I think it is also very telling that my post was modded "troll" twice, because of the horribly offensive things I said (I have no complaints about those who modded it off-topic).
I have a computer science degree and, as a (computer) scientist, I declare global warming to be nothing more than preparation for the eminent arrival of the flying spaghetti monster.
Mod parent up. He is asking a legitimate question about how to prevent troll-posts from appearing. Even if you feel that such a policy (a limitation on how many times one can use the N-word in a single post), is censorship, his question isn't "trolling"
Slashdot Mirror
Stockholm syndrome?
<ducks>
With DVR's becoming more and more popular, the time that a show airs is less and less important. Perhaps the execs realize this and are trying to work it to their advantage. Sometimes you need to take some risks to move forward.
So, they are killing their best shows out of a desire to have programming aimed at people who do not watch advertisements?
Nothing retarded about that...
Didn't they "reboot" data, no pun intended, by killing him off and having him be replaced by his naive "twin" brother, in the last movie?
Yeah. I vote that Illinois also changes the definition of a mile and shortens it so that their residents can get more miles to the gallon! I also vote that they cut the definition of an hour down to 30mins to shorten my working day.
Consensus and standards be damned, they're just definitions!
A better analogy would be if they shortened a mile to 3 inches, while running, so they could say that an Illinoisan was the first to run 10 miles in 30 seconds.
After all, this is all about having some crappy touristy trivia item to stick in their pamphlets, right between the "See rock city" ad and the coupons for Shoney's.
Little aftertought, after reading the ars technica update I believe this is about money.
The Cook County Sheriff's Department is asking a federal judge to close the Erotic Services section of Craigslist, as well as reimburse the department $100,000 it has cost to pursue Craigslist-related prostitution investigations over the past year,
Umm...Shouldn't the police force be paying craigslist? Craigslist didn't create the prostitution. They stuck it all in one spot. The only way they could have helped the cops more is if they placed a big red arrow that says "hooker" over the prostitute's heads.
Maybe not the point of this experiment (well, if you can call it that -- this isn't exactly science anyway), but as with the previous graphics experiment, it might even produce some interesting tune somewhere down the line.
That would be awesome. If they have enough data to broadcast for decades, then it is likely that something would appear during that time.
I wouldn't want to have to argue with the people who say "year 12, month 2, day 7, 7:31:59am sounded kinda like Beethoven for thirty seconds, only god could make that happen", but it would still be interesting to see the patterns that must be there.
Seeing "Seeds: 1, Leaches: 1" while waiting for it to download.
I mean, how many people had even heard of "Death Magnetic"?
The worst part is that the title was "OMG! Kittenz." Everybody had to read it.
Linux has been ready for the desktop for years. It's just that certain users are not yet ready for Linux.
Of course! Linux is ready for the desktop, but the desktop is not yet ready for Linux! We'll have to find those carpenters and tell them to build better desks.
Sending an astronaut is many times as expensive, since we need more safety, need to keep the astronaut alive during the long trip over, and need to bring the astronaut back.
You haven't read the zombie posts, have you. We can send a dead astronaut over there, and then we only have to worry about safety on the trip back.
You'd think any lander we send up there looking for water would have the ability to analyze any liquid droplets growing, merging, and dripping on the lander's leg over the course of a Martian month.
Another example of why the "why send humans, robots can do everything just as well" idea is bogus. If that was an astronaut up there this would be resolved in a minute, not a month.
I think I saw this on "CSI: Mars". They pointed a blue light at it and determined that it was 10% blood, 70% semen, and 20% water.
Just have your underage kid click. They cant enter into a contract.
Of course if this happens too much, they will require you to produce a CC# and SSN for each EULA that gets sent back to the company. Or even force you get it at the store you bought the box from.
As for the last option, if they were required to provide you with the terms and conditions when you bought the product, I would consider that a small victory.
Of course, that may seem unreasonable, considering the complexity of the contract and that you are now requiring Walmart employees to handle hundreds of legal contracts...
But it's not my problem...The terms of the transaction should be negotiated (or dictated) before the sale is complete, not after.
If the terms are too numerous and complicated to discuss without legal council, then the companies need to agree on a simpler and more commonly used set of terms, rather than the current model which is "I can do whatever I want as long as it's in the fine print and nobody reads it".
The human body contains about 100g of DNA. You're saying about 2E15 grams, or 20 trillion human body's worth, of DNA is not only released into the atmosphere but then escapes the earths gravitational pull and enters interplanetary space.
Sounds unlikely.
How many people did Xenu kill? :)
Ok. How about the Allah Particle?
If it creates a black hole that takes out half the galaxy, then yeah, we can call it that.
What? I've heard Larmarck's evolutionary ideas ridiculed but villified?
He wasn't that unscientific. He was just wrong.
Or are you thinking of Lysenko? Now that particular advocate of inherited-acquired-characteristics was indeed a villain, a lousy scientist and a political tool.
So does he work for the discovery institute?
My understanding of this is that it is "Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs", and that the lower level needs come first, until they have been satisfactorily filled. Then, employees begin to really care about the higher needs.
As a web designer, I think it is interesting how that, by taking a few minutes to create an icon with a new shape, you can open your product to a wider audience.
Now there is the greater issue of whether businesses should be required to take special accessibility measures, such as building wheelchair ramps and having handicapped parking (which I think the two of us may disagree on), but I want to get across the point that GP could have just closed the web browser and walked away. At least by explaining why the site was not helpful to him, he is giving site developers a chance to learn to produce better sites.
And one last thing. He isn't telling people to boycott the site, or have it shut down. He's bitching about something he doesn't like about it. If he had said "gah, the color scheme is ugly" or "gah, the site is disorganized", then would it have been as much of an outrage to you, as it is when he brings up his disability?
You're probably the same douche who expects everyone in a foreign country to speak to him in English.
No, there's more than one of those, and they work in shifts.
I doubt kdawson has actually ever read a complete EULA either -- he simply needed something to bitch about..
Very few people have ever read a complete EULA. That is something to bitch about. That's the point. Most people agree to what is, arguably, a legally binding contract, full of unreasonable provisions, and have never even read the thing.
That affects the rest of us, because if the people who care about their rights are in the minority, then we all get trampled.
How is helping broadband going to stimulate the economy? The way to stimulate the economy is to get the banks lending [slashdot.org] again and get consumers spending again.
You forgot one aspect of the equation. you have to get lending institutions lending, consumers spending, and American products being consumed.
I'm not arguing the "buy American, it's your duty" position. I'm saying that we need to find a niche that we as a country, (if you happen to be American), can fill. American workers will never be cheaper than those in third world nations, and the American car industry has not earned confidence in our QA standards, but there is one place where we can compete.
Being one of the wealthiest countries on Earth, and having a large number of world-class research facilities, we should be doing everything we can to keep producing cutting-edge research. I love the fact that the world's best and brightest are coming to America to be doctors, programmers, and scientists, and that they are staying here to work. It gives us a competitive edge that most other countries don't have. But, if we allow ourselves to think that science is the enemy, that professors are incompetent, and that only factories provide anything of value, then this edge will dull quickly.
And yes, residential broadband would contribute to our success, as it would allow the future scientists, programmers, and engineers to learn, to experiment, and to work from their homes.
I am not prone to optimism, but I would like to think that this is a reasonable direction for our future.
*sigh*
You didn't read my post. The folks next door were white. My description of them as being niggers was, therefore, not racial.
I read you post and got that. But calling someone a "white nigger" is still an insult to black people, even if the person you meant to insult is actually white. The fact that you went from saying "stop acting like a nigger" to "stop acting like a nigga" does not change anything.
We have truly reached a new low in society if wherein it is suggested that one cannot discuss a word if such a discussion involves use of that word.
Correction: If it involves repeated use of the word.
If you, sir, see my discussion of the word "nigger," in pontification of how I learned how not to use the word "nigger," then you sir are as blind and stupid as the bigotry which you seem to attempt to renounce.
I can only assume that the purpose of gratuitous use of the word in a way that accomplished nothing, was intended to provoke people. And now you're playing the innocent victim because somebody called you out on it.
So blind, in fact, that you cannot see that I am trying to prevent further abuses of the term.
No, you aren't trying to prevent further abuse. you're trying to rewrite the dictionary so that people don't mind being called niggers. Unfortunately, that word is tied in with another time in America. Trying to divorce a racial epithet from its connotations is pointless. You can't put a happy face on an atrocity and expect the people affected by it to just smile and move on.
Were you in Salem in 1692, I expect that you'd have been one of the ones in the streets with a torch or a pitchfork.
No, I'd probably be running from those people. I assume that you'd be the guy running down the street yelling "n****r" at the top of his lungs.
In Soviet Russia, Slashdot slashdots Slashdot!
did I just wander into smurf village?
And you could have said the exact same thing without using the N-word at all. I don't agree with your point about calling the people next door n****rs, and would feel that you were being a troll, if you decided to use another ethnicity into a synonym for "criminal".
I personally don't care if the GPs suggestion is put in place or not (and doubt if it ever will). The policy GP proposed was that the frequency of the word be limited to two more than what you would expect to hear in any reasonable conversation.
My objection was that the GP was modded "troll" for making a suggestion that people disagree with. That is censorship as well, but of a different kind. GP was suggesting that we censor words, and modders were censoring ideas. I would rather the idea be brought up and shot down, than modded down.
I think it is also very telling that my post was modded "troll" twice, because of the horribly offensive things I said (I have no complaints about those who modded it off-topic).
I have a computer science degree and, as a (computer) scientist, I declare global warming to be nothing more than preparation for the eminent arrival of the flying spaghetti monster.
Mod parent up. He is asking a legitimate question about how to prevent troll-posts from appearing. Even if you feel that such a policy (a limitation on how many times one can use the N-word in a single post), is censorship, his question isn't "trolling"