Re:Please refer to my posting history, my good sir
on
Sid Meier Responds
·
· Score: 1
Just finished going over your posting history... I'm somewhat surprised you actually use it in your defense. If I had a posting history like that, I'd actually go to great lengths not to point it out to people.:p
I mean, like what's your problem with that Barry dude anyway? He criticizes you in one slashdot thread, and you immediately start singling him out and criticizing about every post he makes just to get even. Then when he points out you're trolling, suddenly he's the one attacking you "ad hominem" and you start going all "19th century phylosopher" on him about how he's not "engaging in a rational discourse", completely disregarding the fact that you were neither...
You do have some insightful posts in there too, I grant you that... Maybe instead of spending your energy on getting even and harassing those who dare criticize you, even if it's only once, you might employ that energy towards cramming out more informative and insightful posts. Stop taking things personal man, this is slashdot. Bask in the warm comforting knowledge that 90% of the people here are complete and utter morons, and just ignore them. That's what I do mostly anyway. *grin*
Part of the appeal of the IPods is that they do what they do *well*. Interface, and sound quality.
Exactly. Most people don't feel comfortable around complicated stuff like PDAs, but they knew how to operate their radios, stereo equipment, car radio, walkman, discman etc... They don't have to "start an application" to play their music, they turn their *audio equipment* on. They have a simple interface: play, pause, stop, next, previous, fast forward, rewind and volume. That's all they really need, so they want it in easy accessible locations: in the form of buttons on the case of the device.
I have both a PDA and a small flash-based mp3 player. I could technically use both to play my music, yet I never bothered installing mp3 software on the PDA. The mp3 player has a battery life of 17 hours of continuous play; the PDA doesn't come near that "always on" time. I can operate my mp3 player without looking at it, even if it's in my pants pocket. If I'd use the PDA for that, I'd need to whip it out every time I wanted to skip a song, turn the volume up or down etc... because I'd have to look at the screen to manipulate the virtual buttons. I'm not sure the music would keep playing if I switched to another app, like say my calendar, to check my meetings for the day. The music would definitely skip if I'd use some app that would do some burst of number crunching, assuming the PDA is multitasking in the first place.
A PDA is like a swiss army knife, or a Leatherman multitool. Yeah, it's a cool gadget for those who can afford spending cash on such frivolous things, and sometimes it comes in handy to carry around all those tools in a small package instead of having to drag along a small briefcase of single-purpose tools. But when I want to skin a bear, I'll use a hunting knife and not my swiss army knife. And when I want to fix my computer, I'll use a screwdriver set and not a leatherman multitool. There's a thing to be said for the simplicity of an ergonomic screwdriver with the head in the exact centerline, as opposed to a multitool where it's so far off center it becomes a pain to use for any job longer than 3 screws worth.
Basically, a PDA is just a crappy idea for mobile entertainment. It doesn't have the cool image projected by the iPod, and it's confusing to boot. That's why it doesn't appeal to the blinking 12's. The geeks and audiophiles for whom these disadvantages don't matter, since they're used to having somewhat more complicated toys, reject it because they rather have a device that does one thing and does it well as opposed to one that tries to do everything, but excells in nothing.
But you must remember that when you graduate and have a job, there will not be a teacher there holding your hand. You absolutely must be able to learn and work without the assistance of others all the time. It is perfectly possible to learn the coursework for an engineering degree using the resources of all TAs (no matter how shitty they are) and the instructor.
Let's apply that same logic to every learning process in life then, shall we? No decent guidance whatsoever; after all, when you're a grownup, you'll have to do without the assitance of others too. So no more teaching people to read in schools; surely they can figure it out by themselves with enough determination and skill, and with the help of others who can barely read or write, and maybe the Mexican nurse who knows how to read and write, but doesn't really speak English. If they can't figure it out with these resources, maybe they just weren't cut out for life in the civilised world...
I agree with you that university shouldn't hold your hand each step along the way, but as a university dropout myself (last year CS; only 6 courses and a master's thesis to go, most of which I flunked because I just didn't give a damn anymore and couldn't be arsed to show up for the actual exams) I recognise a lot of the complaints this man has. It just took me longer to let the reality sink in: universities aren't interested in teaching.
The professors who give lectures are not qualified to teach, don't give a damn about their teaching duties, and can't motivate their students. Oftentimes they can't even explain the basic concepts of what they're teaching because they simply don't understand the subject matter themselves. Doesn't necessarily mean they're stupid, oftentimes they're just assigned subjects outside of their area of expertise to lecture, an area they might not care for and hence will invest no effort nor time in. The course books are a total joke. Most of the time they're just collections of articles from various sources. If you're lucky they're even loosely related and somewhat organised according to topic. Others are full of typos, which makes them hard to study because you're wasting your time getting annoyed and imagining creative ways to kill the barbarian who rapes your mother tongue in such a vulgar fashion. And then there's the ones that in order to understand anything beyond page 20 assume intimate knowledge of stuff you never even heard about; mostly advanced math since CS and math are under the same faculty in our university, and the same course is also taught in the math department.
The exams are sometimes ridiculously easy, sometimes ridiculously hard. My Neural Networks exam consisted of translating some IEEE paper and explaining it to the professor. Same for Robotics: read a paper, come talk about it to the proffessor and answer a couple of his basic questions, repeat for four weeks, presto! Others like Speech Recognition are so ridiculously hard because the course material sucks, and afterwards they expect you to recognise spoken sounds on spectral graphs. One can argue that these skills are taught in the practice classes, but I'm of the opinion that in the case of a written or oral exam, everything I need to know to pass the test should be explained in the course documents. After all, I have a dayjob, and according to the university's own regulations I too have a right to do well on my exams.
And the real kicker is this: I didn't fail because it was too hard... I failed because I never really worked for it. Yeah, I had to take every year twice, but considering that during the four year curriculum, the subjects I actually read the entire course documents for can be counted on one hand, I think it's safe to assume that CS doesn't really hold much challenge for me nor anyone, really. Studying to me was more like "Exam tomorrow... Where's the damn book?" and then reading two thirds of it, tops, because I was bored out of my skull and every distraction was a good excuse
It's not as secure as you might think; the relative effectiveness of the bar-hack has been proven time and again. The technique consists of saturating the device with plain old alcohol, which on the organic apparatus you describe has the effect of making the output devices more permeable to the sensitive data, up to the point where a simple query will suffice to extract said data.
Nah, I remember it too... Even without the pics I thought there was something familiar about the article...
Anyway, since the dupe is 2 years old, doesn't that make it "not news anymore"? What the hell is 2 year old "news" doing on slashdot? Your argument stinks.
Not to mention the fact that you still got no clue who did the interview or what the interview was about.
Click here for the interview... THE Interview!!!
WHAT INTERVIEW?????
Yes, I know I can click the link to find out, but would it be so hard to actually describe the article in the short blurb? Imagine every submitter fucked up like this, then we'd have to RTFA on every single new slashdot headline. I'd never get around to getting actual work done...
Heh, I made it as far as the third paragraph, I think... He was still droning on about the soundtrack being sung in an annoying voice, and how whatever her name was matured into a diva, and how she would've been a better choice for the soundtrack etc... Really, I got the point the first time...
After that, I gave up. I was curious about the game, but not THAT curious...
I do the same between AZERTY and QWERTY; in Belgium, AZERTY is the default keyboard layout, but some friends swear by QWERTY for coding and sometimes I have to use their comps. And what's worse: lots of games even in this day and age have the keyboard layout hardcoded to QWERTY instead of just asking the OS what character corresponds to the pressed key, so this means I have to switch between the two fairly often. Although I'm not as fluent in QWERTY than in AZERTY I can type on a QWERTY board pretty well.
So I wouldn't bother too much; your QWERTY skills are pretty much hardcoded in your brain by now, and it's like riding a bycile... You may not ride it as well as ten years ago if you haven't ridden a bike during that time, but you'll still be able to get to where you wanna be.
I must admit though; the difference between AZERTY and QWERTY is of course a lot smaller than the difference between QWERTY and DVORAK, so YMMV. For me, the trick is to type in a made-up language: type a Z wherever I want to type a W, type a Q wherever I want to type an A, switch the M and the ","... This trick would probably not work to make the switch between QWERTY and DVORAK.
No, not really; the grandparent poster said he wouldn't buy stuff that wasn't supported by his OS, or in other words: wouldn't buy stuff he had no use for. The parent post tries to discredit him by offering an analogy that would make the grandparent poster look stupid because of how ridiculous it is. However, it's not an analogy; in his reply, he states he doesn't buy stuff a vendor doesn't sell. That's something completely different from not buying stuff because you have no use for it.
If a vendor sells a product which due to some of its features is useless to you, and you don't buy it because of that, one can argue they lost a sale. If a vendor doesn't sell a certain product, and you won't buy it because they don't sell it, they lost nothing. Hence the analogy is flawed, hence it's fair game to shoot down my parent poster.
So, no, I don't think I "missed the joke"; I think I saw the attack towards my grandparent's post just for what it was: unskillfully performed and utterly unprovoked.
And now translating this back to the issue at hand:
I asked nVidia to sell me a wireless access point. They wouldn't sell it to me.
When I ask a hardware vendor for a specific piece of hardware, I expect to have it sold to me. If a video card manufacturer refuses to sell me a wireless access point, I won't buy it off them. They just lost a sale! I know at least 20 people who won't be buying wireless access points from nVidia, not counting the hundreds of people online with whom I discussed this topic.
I'm not saying nVidia should forsake their demographics, target market or whatever other fancy words you wanna throw at it, but at least they should sell me a wireless access point if I decide I want an nVidia branded one.
God, it's true... Running something through a babelfish, then have the fish translate it back to your own language DOES produce funny results! Either that, or your analogy was dead-on wrong, but we all know that's impossible, don't we?
In Belgium it's longer even: you start with a temp contract which lasts for 3 months, after which you are let go or your contract is converted to a permanent contract. If you decide to go whilst under a temp contract, you're required to give one weeks notice, and under a permanent contract it's 6 weeks. On the other hand, the company is required to give you the same amount of notice when they decide to sack you, so it works both ways.
Maybe the law requires less than that, but I'd doubt it. Every contract I've seen so far uses the same notice periods. One would think if the law only requires 2 weeks, the company would be nuts to put itself in a position where they would have to keep you around for longer and pay you more when they decide to let you go. Especially since most of us are pretty replaceable to begin with, and replacements are readily available on the job market.
Not as long as they have no problem with their complete and utter lack of accountability of any type, and the vicious, one-sided partisan nature designed solely to incite vitriol in their groupthink audiences.
The vast majority of diaries never amount to anything. But some diaries become historical records that are truly valuable literary pieces. Anne Frank is the obvious example of this.
Don't confuse historical records with literary pieces. Though I admit I never read Anne Frank's diary, I somehow doubt it would be considered a literary masterpiece. It's a written account of historical events as interpreted by a young child who witnessed them, not a "valuable literary piece". Just like photographs of bodies in Iraq are just photographs of bodies in Iraq, not masterpieces of photography.
Hard-boiled wonderland and the end of the world (Sekai no owari to hard-boiled wonderland) by Haruki Murakami.
Before that, I finished the Hyperion and Endymion books by Dan Simmons, and was quite surprised people seem to consider these "classics of sci-fi literature"; I didn't find it as big a disappointment than Larry Niven's Ringworld though. Before that came Mad Sheep Chase by (again) Haruki Murakami, and before that Illium by (again) Dan Simmons, which I consider more worthy of the "classic of literature" title than his Hyperion saga. Seems last year has been quite Murakami & Simmons intensive for me...
Next on my list is Battle Royale; seen the movie, now I figure I want to read the book and get the *real* story. When I'm done with that, it's back to the sci-fi classics to see which of the ones I haven't read yet are actually good, and which ones I'd rather like to donate to George Lucas in the hopes that he will someday film another trash compactor scene for one of his movies...
Although his tone is condescending, was he not speaking about the quality of writing and discourse prevalent in blogs? Is this not clearly associated with one's facility with complex texts?
No, since his whole argument was against blog entries in English (I doubt he read any blogs criticizing him in other languages than English) it is clearly associated with one's proficiency in the English language. This in turn has much to do with the culture said person originates from. The fact that a Swede who happens to blog in English produces blog entries of questionable spelling or grammar gives us no insight in his abilities to read and understand complex texts. There is more than one language out there, and not everyone can be expected to have the same level of proficiency in any one such language than the people who natively speak it. After all, I wouldn't expect you to be a more eloquent French speaker than some great French author or poet.
Other than that, I have to agree with you that Mr. Gorman's thoughts on this whole matter are quite unintelligently worded; he probably wrote this in some fit of rage, which isn't the best time to start defending yourself in public against critique. What I found particularly ironic was how he argued that bloggers are unintelligent and inferior in the "grokking complex text" department because their skills in the English Language department are lacking, then goes on a couple of paragraphs later to state that the money invested in this new Google program would be better spent in buying new books for libraries, for example in library-starved California. Yes... It would be nice if more Californians had access to the superior option of local libraries. However, even though Google's new program may not be as elegant a solution as a humble library building stacked with books, it's a resource everyone from around the world (China and similarly censored countries not withstanding) can access.
I'm sorry, ma'am, but your (plain old paper) card says right here that you are Saddam Hussein. How you escaped and got the sex change and full facial reconstruction so fast is beyond us. Just come along peacefully, now. The potential for pickpockets exchanging your id with a fake one is amazing. If not written in pencil, at least imagine the identity theft possibilities.
Trust me, these cards are pretty safe. We been using similar ones for electronic cash and social security for years now, and I still haven't heard of the first case of abuse of those. I could of course look up how they work internaly to protect the data from overwriting by any joe schmoe with a multimeter, a couple of batteries and some PIC with associated firmware, but so could you, and I haven't seen you make any effort of informing yourself instead of posting uninformed nonsense, so I guess I'm excused from doing your work for you.
*sigh* Yes, you can refuse young children based on their electronic identity, even if they don't have an e-id. You refuse them on the *lack of* e-id. You make certain chatrooms adult only, and only people who can prove (trhough their e-id) that they are older than a certain age can enter.
If it were to be like you portray it, anyone could enter any and all chatrooms: just don't plug the e-id into the computer, and tadaa! Someone between 12 and 18 who would otherwise be refused access could now also enter, because "based on their e-id" (the way you seem to interpret that phrase) there now is nothing preventing them from doing so any more.
And to think that just when I was giving you credit for not posting anonymously, you decided to blow it all on a major flaw in reasoning like the one you just displayed. It's rather sad my respect means so little to you.;)
Just because immigration has worked in the past, doesn't guarentee it will work in the future. It depends on the quality of the immigrants you are getting *SNIP*
Don't know if this is an urban myth or not, but weren't the first people to colonise Australia a bunch of expelled criminals? Yet Australia has a far lower crime rate than say the US... Yup, it really depends on the "quality" of the immigrants you're getting...
If any Australian can either confirm or deny this factoid I been lugging around in my head for all these years, please do so. I'd really like to know if there's any truth in this, yet never saw that being covered in our history class, and for stuff like this I just don't trust a google search, but rather hear it straight from someone in the know.
We allow foreigners with five years of residency to vote.
Sorry to have to correct you, but you're wrong... I'm Spanish, I was born in Belgium, I'm 27 now. Do the math on how long I've been living here. Yet I'm not allowed to vote. I have to change my citizenship to Belgian for that.
Not that I care to vote though, never cared for politics. But on a moral level I have a problem with the whole "become Belgian if you want to vote" stuff. I have the same responsibilities than the rest of the people living in this country (getting and maintaining a job, paying taxes, abiding the law etc...) so I find it a bit odd that I don't get the same privileges. At least you have a say in what happens with your tax money; I don't.
Of course, I could just become Belgian, and get voting privileges. But then again, what's to stop someone who's far less integrated than I am (remember, I was born here; culturaly speaking I'm just as Belgian as you are, only my id says otherwise) from doing just that to play the system? And they're far more motivated than I am; I'm just too lazy to change my nationality, but someone who wants to play the system will have little objections to changing nationality just to do that. Be glad they're not organised yet...;)
And being a Spanish citizen living in Belgium (was born here, lived here whole my life but still got Spanish nationality), I'd like to add that it would be way cool if they also replaced our paper residency cards by something smaller and possibly more robust. Finding a wallet to fit my 12.5x9cm residency card in, which I need to carry with me all the time since it's the only id I have, is quite a bitch. Not to mention the fact that I got it in june 2004, it's valid 'till april 2009, and already looks like I been toting it around in 'nam or something.
Maybe in height, don't know how high a mini-itx board is, but 6.5x6.5 inches for a mac mini vs 6.7x6.7 for mini-itx, I wouldn't exactly call that "WAY too big"...
Of course, there's also the issue of the rounded corners on a mac mini mainboard vs straight corners on mini-itx, but overall both mainboard types are comparable in size.
Slashdot Mirror
Just finished going over your posting history... I'm somewhat surprised you actually use it in your defense. If I had a posting history like that, I'd actually go to great lengths not to point it out to people. :p
I mean, like what's your problem with that Barry dude anyway? He criticizes you in one slashdot thread, and you immediately start singling him out and criticizing about every post he makes just to get even. Then when he points out you're trolling, suddenly he's the one attacking you "ad hominem" and you start going all "19th century phylosopher" on him about how he's not "engaging in a rational discourse", completely disregarding the fact that you were neither...
You do have some insightful posts in there too, I grant you that... Maybe instead of spending your energy on getting even and harassing those who dare criticize you, even if it's only once, you might employ that energy towards cramming out more informative and insightful posts. Stop taking things personal man, this is slashdot. Bask in the warm comforting knowledge that 90% of the people here are complete and utter morons, and just ignore them. That's what I do mostly anyway. *grin*
Part of the appeal of the IPods is that they do what they do *well*. Interface, and sound quality.
Exactly. Most people don't feel comfortable around complicated stuff like PDAs, but they knew how to operate their radios, stereo equipment, car radio, walkman, discman etc... They don't have to "start an application" to play their music, they turn their *audio equipment* on. They have a simple interface: play, pause, stop, next, previous, fast forward, rewind and volume. That's all they really need, so they want it in easy accessible locations: in the form of buttons on the case of the device.
I have both a PDA and a small flash-based mp3 player. I could technically use both to play my music, yet I never bothered installing mp3 software on the PDA. The mp3 player has a battery life of 17 hours of continuous play; the PDA doesn't come near that "always on" time. I can operate my mp3 player without looking at it, even if it's in my pants pocket. If I'd use the PDA for that, I'd need to whip it out every time I wanted to skip a song, turn the volume up or down etc... because I'd have to look at the screen to manipulate the virtual buttons. I'm not sure the music would keep playing if I switched to another app, like say my calendar, to check my meetings for the day. The music would definitely skip if I'd use some app that would do some burst of number crunching, assuming the PDA is multitasking in the first place.
A PDA is like a swiss army knife, or a Leatherman multitool. Yeah, it's a cool gadget for those who can afford spending cash on such frivolous things, and sometimes it comes in handy to carry around all those tools in a small package instead of having to drag along a small briefcase of single-purpose tools. But when I want to skin a bear, I'll use a hunting knife and not my swiss army knife. And when I want to fix my computer, I'll use a screwdriver set and not a leatherman multitool. There's a thing to be said for the simplicity of an ergonomic screwdriver with the head in the exact centerline, as opposed to a multitool where it's so far off center it becomes a pain to use for any job longer than 3 screws worth.
Basically, a PDA is just a crappy idea for mobile entertainment. It doesn't have the cool image projected by the iPod, and it's confusing to boot. That's why it doesn't appeal to the blinking 12's. The geeks and audiophiles for whom these disadvantages don't matter, since they're used to having somewhat more complicated toys, reject it because they rather have a device that does one thing and does it well as opposed to one that tries to do everything, but excells in nothing.
Let's apply that same logic to every learning process in life then, shall we? No decent guidance whatsoever; after all, when you're a grownup, you'll have to do without the assitance of others too. So no more teaching people to read in schools; surely they can figure it out by themselves with enough determination and skill, and with the help of others who can barely read or write, and maybe the Mexican nurse who knows how to read and write, but doesn't really speak English. If they can't figure it out with these resources, maybe they just weren't cut out for life in the civilised world...
I agree with you that university shouldn't hold your hand each step along the way, but as a university dropout myself (last year CS; only 6 courses and a master's thesis to go, most of which I flunked because I just didn't give a damn anymore and couldn't be arsed to show up for the actual exams) I recognise a lot of the complaints this man has. It just took me longer to let the reality sink in: universities aren't interested in teaching.
The professors who give lectures are not qualified to teach, don't give a damn about their teaching duties, and can't motivate their students. Oftentimes they can't even explain the basic concepts of what they're teaching because they simply don't understand the subject matter themselves. Doesn't necessarily mean they're stupid, oftentimes they're just assigned subjects outside of their area of expertise to lecture, an area they might not care for and hence will invest no effort nor time in. The course books are a total joke. Most of the time they're just collections of articles from various sources. If you're lucky they're even loosely related and somewhat organised according to topic. Others are full of typos, which makes them hard to study because you're wasting your time getting annoyed and imagining creative ways to kill the barbarian who rapes your mother tongue in such a vulgar fashion. And then there's the ones that in order to understand anything beyond page 20 assume intimate knowledge of stuff you never even heard about; mostly advanced math since CS and math are under the same faculty in our university, and the same course is also taught in the math department.
The exams are sometimes ridiculously easy, sometimes ridiculously hard. My Neural Networks exam consisted of translating some IEEE paper and explaining it to the professor. Same for Robotics: read a paper, come talk about it to the proffessor and answer a couple of his basic questions, repeat for four weeks, presto! Others like Speech Recognition are so ridiculously hard because the course material sucks, and afterwards they expect you to recognise spoken sounds on spectral graphs. One can argue that these skills are taught in the practice classes, but I'm of the opinion that in the case of a written or oral exam, everything I need to know to pass the test should be explained in the course documents. After all, I have a dayjob, and according to the university's own regulations I too have a right to do well on my exams.
And the real kicker is this: I didn't fail because it was too hard... I failed because I never really worked for it. Yeah, I had to take every year twice, but considering that during the four year curriculum, the subjects I actually read the entire course documents for can be counted on one hand, I think it's safe to assume that CS doesn't really hold much challenge for me nor anyone, really. Studying to me was more like "Exam tomorrow... Where's the damn book?" and then reading two thirds of it, tops, because I was bored out of my skull and every distraction was a good excuse
It's not as secure as you might think; the relative effectiveness of the bar-hack has been proven time and again. The technique consists of saturating the device with plain old alcohol, which on the organic apparatus you describe has the effect of making the output devices more permeable to the sensitive data, up to the point where a simple query will suffice to extract said data.
Heh, yeah, thanks. Already noticed he linked to almost everything that's somehow related, except for the article itself. ;)
Nah, I remember it too... Even without the pics I thought there was something familiar about the article...
Anyway, since the dupe is 2 years old, doesn't that make it "not news anymore"? What the hell is 2 year old "news" doing on slashdot? Your argument stinks.
Not to mention the fact that you still got no clue who did the interview or what the interview was about.
Click here for the interview... THE Interview!!!
WHAT INTERVIEW?????
Yes, I know I can click the link to find out, but would it be so hard to actually describe the article in the short blurb? Imagine every submitter fucked up like this, then we'd have to RTFA on every single new slashdot headline. I'd never get around to getting actual work done...
Planet Bob
Heh, I made it as far as the third paragraph, I think... He was still droning on about the soundtrack being sung in an annoying voice, and how whatever her name was matured into a diva, and how she would've been a better choice for the soundtrack etc... Really, I got the point the first time... After that, I gave up. I was curious about the game, but not THAT curious...
I do the same between AZERTY and QWERTY; in Belgium, AZERTY is the default keyboard layout, but some friends swear by QWERTY for coding and sometimes I have to use their comps. And what's worse: lots of games even in this day and age have the keyboard layout hardcoded to QWERTY instead of just asking the OS what character corresponds to the pressed key, so this means I have to switch between the two fairly often. Although I'm not as fluent in QWERTY than in AZERTY I can type on a QWERTY board pretty well.
So I wouldn't bother too much; your QWERTY skills are pretty much hardcoded in your brain by now, and it's like riding a bycile... You may not ride it as well as ten years ago if you haven't ridden a bike during that time, but you'll still be able to get to where you wanna be.
I must admit though; the difference between AZERTY and QWERTY is of course a lot smaller than the difference between QWERTY and DVORAK, so YMMV. For me, the trick is to type in a made-up language: type a Z wherever I want to type a W, type a Q wherever I want to type an A, switch the M and the ","... This trick would probably not work to make the switch between QWERTY and DVORAK.
No, not really; the grandparent poster said he wouldn't buy stuff that wasn't supported by his OS, or in other words: wouldn't buy stuff he had no use for. The parent post tries to discredit him by offering an analogy that would make the grandparent poster look stupid because of how ridiculous it is. However, it's not an analogy; in his reply, he states he doesn't buy stuff a vendor doesn't sell. That's something completely different from not buying stuff because you have no use for it.
If a vendor sells a product which due to some of its features is useless to you, and you don't buy it because of that, one can argue they lost a sale. If a vendor doesn't sell a certain product, and you won't buy it because they don't sell it, they lost nothing. Hence the analogy is flawed, hence it's fair game to shoot down my parent poster.
So, no, I don't think I "missed the joke"; I think I saw the attack towards my grandparent's post just for what it was: unskillfully performed and utterly unprovoked.
And now translating this back to the issue at hand:
I asked nVidia to sell me a wireless access point. They wouldn't sell it to me.
When I ask a hardware vendor for a specific piece of hardware, I expect to have it sold to me. If a video card manufacturer refuses to sell me a wireless access point, I won't buy it off them. They just lost a sale! I know at least 20 people who won't be buying wireless access points from nVidia, not counting the hundreds of people online with whom I discussed this topic.
I'm not saying nVidia should forsake their demographics, target market or whatever other fancy words you wanna throw at it, but at least they should sell me a wireless access point if I decide I want an nVidia branded one.
God, it's true... Running something through a babelfish, then have the fish translate it back to your own language DOES produce funny results! Either that, or your analogy was dead-on wrong, but we all know that's impossible, don't we?
In Belgium it's longer even: you start with a temp contract which lasts for 3 months, after which you are let go or your contract is converted to a permanent contract. If you decide to go whilst under a temp contract, you're required to give one weeks notice, and under a permanent contract it's 6 weeks. On the other hand, the company is required to give you the same amount of notice when they decide to sack you, so it works both ways.
Maybe the law requires less than that, but I'd doubt it. Every contract I've seen so far uses the same notice periods. One would think if the law only requires 2 weeks, the company would be nuts to put itself in a position where they would have to keep you around for longer and pay you more when they decide to let you go. Especially since most of us are pretty replaceable to begin with, and replacements are readily available on the job market.
Take it from someone who knows better; you won't.
Here's the sticker story; here's the random number genarator story and this is the iPod shuffle link. Enjoy.
Not as long as they have no problem with their complete and utter lack of accountability of any type, and the vicious, one-sided partisan nature designed solely to incite vitriol in their groupthink audiences.
Sulphur trioxide?
The vast majority of diaries never amount to anything. But some diaries become historical records that are truly valuable literary pieces. Anne Frank is the obvious example of this.
Don't confuse historical records with literary pieces. Though I admit I never read Anne Frank's diary, I somehow doubt it would be considered a literary masterpiece. It's a written account of historical events as interpreted by a young child who witnessed them, not a "valuable literary piece". Just like photographs of bodies in Iraq are just photographs of bodies in Iraq, not masterpieces of photography.
Hard-boiled wonderland and the end of the world (Sekai no owari to hard-boiled wonderland) by Haruki Murakami.
Before that, I finished the Hyperion and Endymion books by Dan Simmons, and was quite surprised people seem to consider these "classics of sci-fi literature"; I didn't find it as big a disappointment than Larry Niven's Ringworld though. Before that came Mad Sheep Chase by (again) Haruki Murakami, and before that Illium by (again) Dan Simmons, which I consider more worthy of the "classic of literature" title than his Hyperion saga. Seems last year has been quite Murakami & Simmons intensive for me...
Next on my list is Battle Royale; seen the movie, now I figure I want to read the book and get the *real* story. When I'm done with that, it's back to the sci-fi classics to see which of the ones I haven't read yet are actually good, and which ones I'd rather like to donate to George Lucas in the hopes that he will someday film another trash compactor scene for one of his movies...
Although his tone is condescending, was he not speaking about the quality of writing and discourse prevalent in blogs? Is this not clearly associated with one's facility with complex texts?
No, since his whole argument was against blog entries in English (I doubt he read any blogs criticizing him in other languages than English) it is clearly associated with one's proficiency in the English language. This in turn has much to do with the culture said person originates from. The fact that a Swede who happens to blog in English produces blog entries of questionable spelling or grammar gives us no insight in his abilities to read and understand complex texts. There is more than one language out there, and not everyone can be expected to have the same level of proficiency in any one such language than the people who natively speak it. After all, I wouldn't expect you to be a more eloquent French speaker than some great French author or poet.
Other than that, I have to agree with you that Mr. Gorman's thoughts on this whole matter are quite unintelligently worded; he probably wrote this in some fit of rage, which isn't the best time to start defending yourself in public against critique. What I found particularly ironic was how he argued that bloggers are unintelligent and inferior in the "grokking complex text" department because their skills in the English Language department are lacking, then goes on a couple of paragraphs later to state that the money invested in this new Google program would be better spent in buying new books for libraries, for example in library-starved California. Yes... It would be nice if more Californians had access to the superior option of local libraries. However, even though Google's new program may not be as elegant a solution as a humble library building stacked with books, it's a resource everyone from around the world (China and similarly censored countries not withstanding) can access.
I'm sorry, ma'am, but your (plain old paper) card says right here that you are Saddam Hussein. How you escaped and got the sex change and full facial reconstruction so fast is beyond us. Just come along peacefully, now. The potential for pickpockets exchanging your id with a fake one is amazing. If not written in pencil, at least imagine the identity theft possibilities.
Trust me, these cards are pretty safe. We been using similar ones for electronic cash and social security for years now, and I still haven't heard of the first case of abuse of those. I could of course look up how they work internaly to protect the data from overwriting by any joe schmoe with a multimeter, a couple of batteries and some PIC with associated firmware, but so could you, and I haven't seen you make any effort of informing yourself instead of posting uninformed nonsense, so I guess I'm excused from doing your work for you.
*sigh* Yes, you can refuse young children based on their electronic identity, even if they don't have an e-id. You refuse them on the *lack of* e-id. You make certain chatrooms adult only, and only people who can prove (trhough their e-id) that they are older than a certain age can enter.
If it were to be like you portray it, anyone could enter any and all chatrooms: just don't plug the e-id into the computer, and tadaa! Someone between 12 and 18 who would otherwise be refused access could now also enter, because "based on their e-id" (the way you seem to interpret that phrase) there now is nothing preventing them from doing so any more.
And to think that just when I was giving you credit for not posting anonymously, you decided to blow it all on a major flaw in reasoning like the one you just displayed. It's rather sad my respect means so little to you. ;)
Just because immigration has worked in the past, doesn't guarentee it will work in the future. It depends on the quality of the immigrants you are getting *SNIP*
Don't know if this is an urban myth or not, but weren't the first people to colonise Australia a bunch of expelled criminals? Yet Australia has a far lower crime rate than say the US... Yup, it really depends on the "quality" of the immigrants you're getting...
If any Australian can either confirm or deny this factoid I been lugging around in my head for all these years, please do so. I'd really like to know if there's any truth in this, yet never saw that being covered in our history class, and for stuff like this I just don't trust a google search, but rather hear it straight from someone in the know.
We allow foreigners with five years of residency to vote.
Sorry to have to correct you, but you're wrong... I'm Spanish, I was born in Belgium, I'm 27 now. Do the math on how long I've been living here. Yet I'm not allowed to vote. I have to change my citizenship to Belgian for that.
Not that I care to vote though, never cared for politics. But on a moral level I have a problem with the whole "become Belgian if you want to vote" stuff. I have the same responsibilities than the rest of the people living in this country (getting and maintaining a job, paying taxes, abiding the law etc...) so I find it a bit odd that I don't get the same privileges. At least you have a say in what happens with your tax money; I don't.
Of course, I could just become Belgian, and get voting privileges. But then again, what's to stop someone who's far less integrated than I am (remember, I was born here; culturaly speaking I'm just as Belgian as you are, only my id says otherwise) from doing just that to play the system? And they're far more motivated than I am; I'm just too lazy to change my nationality, but someone who wants to play the system will have little objections to changing nationality just to do that. Be glad they're not organised yet... ;)
And being a Spanish citizen living in Belgium (was born here, lived here whole my life but still got Spanish nationality), I'd like to add that it would be way cool if they also replaced our paper residency cards by something smaller and possibly more robust. Finding a wallet to fit my 12.5x9cm residency card in, which I need to carry with me all the time since it's the only id I have, is quite a bitch. Not to mention the fact that I got it in june 2004, it's valid 'till april 2009, and already looks like I been toting it around in 'nam or something.
Maybe in height, don't know how high a mini-itx board is, but 6.5x6.5 inches for a mac mini vs 6.7x6.7 for mini-itx, I wouldn't exactly call that "WAY too big"... Of course, there's also the issue of the rounded corners on a mac mini mainboard vs straight corners on mini-itx, but overall both mainboard types are comparable in size.