Sony put a root kit on my computer.
EA sold me a crappy game with crappy DRM that screwed with my computer.
So I can retaliate?
How many senators do you own? If the answer is zero, the answer to your question is no. Make that a maybe if you don't currently own any senators but have sufficient funds to buy a few, outspending Sony in the process.
Closing the port they're using to access your computer(s) is way easier. Attacking them is actually aggressive.
Closing the port they're using is not necessarily a reasonable demand. Unless I'm an idiot, if I have an open port, I have that port open for a reason, and it needs to be open in order for my system to provide whatever services it provides. This is a bit like telling someone they have no right to defend themselves in public because it would be less aggressive for them to simply stay at home and not expose themselves to the attack to begin with. True, but not reasonable.
PNG is good if you dont mind blocky distortion around your line art too!
Huh? PNG supports 24 and 32-bit colour- more than enough for anti-aliasing- and 8-bit transparency so you're either assuming that the limitations of GIF are those of PNG, or you're using an old browser that doesn't handle transparent PNGs correctly and messes up the background.
No, he's "assuming" (or rather, correctly noting) that anti-aliasing and other distortions around line are unavoidable in any raster format. Only vector graphics can render to any display at any resolution without highlighting these blocky distortions. PNG is better than GIF, but it still suffers from this problem. Being yet another raster graphics format, is does share the limitations of such.
All dictionaries do. They're anthropological documents, really. They document observations of an aspect of human behavior: the words they use and what they mean when they use them. It boggles my mind that anyone gets confused about that, thinking they do anything more...
You have slain your strawman with skill. But if you want to look like you're actually a reasonable person instead of a paranoid partisan prone to hyperbole, you should actually wait for someone to make an absurd argument before you refute it.
The good news: It is 100 light years away from Earth so there's no way for it to reach us in time.
The not so good news: 100 light years is nothing cosmic-distance-wise. If our detection capabilities can let us spot a Super-Jupiter sized object 100 light years away, are there smaller object that are closer, but still pose a threat?
Given a 100 light year sphere, "trillions" would be an understatement of the number of smaller than Super-Jupiter size objects within it, but large enough to be a threat if they were on the right trajectory.
We should improve our detection abilities mainly to spot asteroids headed our way in time to prevent a catastrophe.
That's certainly true, but utterly unrelated to this finding. There ain't jack-shit we could do about a "rogue planet" headed for Earth, other than throw a few awesome end-of-the-world parties.
Nice theory, but when you get to the "we now know" part, it makes me question if you understand what "know" means. Much of what you said might be true, but we most certainly don't "know" any of it. Anything that follows from the premise "if we had done (something other than what we did)" is necessarily speculation. The only question is how good the speculation is...
The fact of the matter is, Britain did not get into the war to "try to help the French (and Poland)". They did it to try to save themselves. Whether it was necessary or not is unknown, but nation-states aren't known for committing to expensive (in both lives and money) tasks for altruistic reasons. Britain did what it did because it thought that was what was best for Britain, full stop. If anyone else was helped, that's nice, but not the reason why it was done.
What has he done other than give some pretty speeches and pass what was the Republican health care plan until he decided to support it so they suddenly decided their own plan must be "socialism"...
I got to my polling place in Brooklyn Center, MN a bit before 1pm, had virtually no wait -- the "line" had two people ahead of me, took less than a minute for spaces to open up for all three of us.
Um, no. Drone strikes are "just like" Anonymous hacks in the same sense that the Nazi invasion of Poland was just like knocking on your neighbors door to ask to borrow a cup of sugar. You can find things in common between the two, but it would be exceedingly idiotic to equate them as "just like" one another due to the similarities you find.
No no. In the context of a Slashdot discussion, "religion" means a belief in any ideology other than the dominant one here, which is naturally considered logical and obvious.;)
We're basically talking about google becoming a credit card company, with all the historical cartel & usury evil attached.
Um, no, we're not. That's almost as stupid as saying printing paper money with golden color ink is "basically talking" about returning to the gold standard. Just because you carry something in your wallet doesn't make it a credit card, even if you can swipe it in all the same places.
Um, The Black Hole had far less in common with Star Wars than with a lot of older sci-fi movies (particularly 50s stuff). It was certainly an attempt to try to cash in on the renewed popularity of sci-fi in the theater with big flash special effects, but calling it "a blatant rip-off of Star Wars" is utterly absurd...
Depends on which part. In terms of land area, most of Canada is north of Minnesota. In terms of population, most of Canada is south of Minnesota (the most populated part of Canada being the part that dips down with the Great Lakes, placing Toronto further south than Minnesota's "Twin Cities").
One of the more notable aspects of human behavior and thinking is that when you know something but not everything, you tend to see people who don't think the same things you do as not as smart as you, because they've reached difference conclusions, not realizing that often it's because they know something things you don't, and it's your missing knowledge, not theirs, that's leading to the different view. An especially ominous warning sign you should look out for, particularly in your own speaking or even thinking, is the word "obvious" and phrases like "common sense". If something seems obvious, or like it's common sense, but others are disagreeing, there's usually pretty high odds you are yourself missing some fairly big pieces of the puzzle. If you can't explain why someone thinks differently than you when the answer seems obvious, it's a sure sign you are yourself suffering from significant ignorance. (Controversial questions have no obvious answers; if they did, they wouldn't be controversial. If the answer seems obvious to you, it's a sure sign you don't understand the problem fully, and the answer seems obvious because your picture is incomplete.) That doesn't mean your conclusion is wrong, but it certainly means you don't know as much as you could (or you wouldn't be in the boat of being unable to explain why the other person thinks differently, without recourse to claiming a lack of common sense).
More specifically to your point, most people don't "move away from an area of smarter people because they start feeling a little dumb." Usually it's the opposite -- they move away because they think "those people are idiots". The more ignorant you are, the more likely you are to conclude everyone around you is a moron. The truly uneducated think they're dumb, the well educated know they're profoundly ignorant, it's just the ever so slightly educated who think they're really so much smarter than everyone else...
I was an interdisciplinary philosophy and computer science double-major. Trust me, you find plenty of "socially feral" philosophy nerds, too, whose attitude towards the "average person" would do the most arrogant computer geek proud.
Its not always what it seems. Some people have extra sensitve arrogance alarms. I think in a large portion of the cases, people with a degree TECHNICAL skill feel less of a need to participate in politics.
Or as many of them would put it, "I'm above politics..."
This gives the illusion of arrogance when it actually is not.
Actually, no, politics is just the art of taking other people's feeling into account while relating to them. Acting like this is something you have license to ignore is the height of arrogance, but you can justify this by maintaining the illusion that it's their problem, not yours, that they get offended by your behavior.
It's not that people are dumb, it's that computers are still very new
You know, I heard that excuse a lot twenty years ago. Since then, computers have entered into every facet of modern life. People leaving university today were born after the world wide went online, and even after home Internet access became cheap. I've spoken to people who are now retired who have been programming for their entire career. Unless someone has been living in a cave for the last few decades, they have no excuse for not being at least passingly familiar with this stuff. I have a lot of time for people who find that they are in a situation that their prior experience doesn't give them the tools to deal with, I have none for people who are wilfully ignorant and refuse to take advantage of opportunities to rectify this.
Cars have been around much longer. I can't fix problems with my car. Could I learn? Certainly. Arguably, then, I'm willfully ignorant. But the fact of the matter is, no matter how much I might like to come as close to omniscience as humanly possible, I do have priorities, limited time, and some things just aren't that important to me. If you come off sounding like I'm somehow morally deficient for failing to educate myself on how to disassemble and reassemble my car, I'll rightly call you an asshole. I suspect some people have this exact attitude towards you when they see how you think about them and their knowledge of computers...
Slashdot Mirror
That's nothing new. It's no different than land mines...
Oh, wait...
Sony put a root kit on my computer. EA sold me a crappy game with crappy DRM that screwed with my computer.
So I can retaliate?
How many senators do you own? If the answer is zero, the answer to your question is no. Make that a maybe if you don't currently own any senators but have sufficient funds to buy a few, outspending Sony in the process.
Closing the port they're using to access your computer(s) is way easier. Attacking them is actually aggressive.
Closing the port they're using is not necessarily a reasonable demand. Unless I'm an idiot, if I have an open port, I have that port open for a reason, and it needs to be open in order for my system to provide whatever services it provides. This is a bit like telling someone they have no right to defend themselves in public because it would be less aggressive for them to simply stay at home and not expose themselves to the attack to begin with. True, but not reasonable.
PNG is good if you dont mind blocky distortion around your line art too!
Huh? PNG supports 24 and 32-bit colour- more than enough for anti-aliasing- and 8-bit transparency so you're either assuming that the limitations of GIF are those of PNG, or you're using an old browser that doesn't handle transparent PNGs correctly and messes up the background.
No, he's "assuming" (or rather, correctly noting) that anti-aliasing and other distortions around line are unavoidable in any raster format. Only vector graphics can render to any display at any resolution without highlighting these blocky distortions. PNG is better than GIF, but it still suffers from this problem. Being yet another raster graphics format, is does share the limitations of such.
The OED describes, not prescribes.
All dictionaries do. They're anthropological documents, really. They document observations of an aspect of human behavior: the words they use and what they mean when they use them. It boggles my mind that anyone gets confused about that, thinking they do anything more...
You have slain your strawman with skill. But if you want to look like you're actually a reasonable person instead of a paranoid partisan prone to hyperbole, you should actually wait for someone to make an absurd argument before you refute it.
Oh wow, it gets worse. Oracle won this with a $88.5 million bid; what the hell took the Air Force so long to pull the plug with that kind of overrun?
What's an order of magnitude between friends. :p
The good news: It is 100 light years away from Earth so there's no way for it to reach us in time.
The not so good news: 100 light years is nothing cosmic-distance-wise. If our detection capabilities can let us spot a Super-Jupiter sized object 100 light years away, are there smaller object that are closer, but still pose a threat?
Given a 100 light year sphere, "trillions" would be an understatement of the number of smaller than Super-Jupiter size objects within it, but large enough to be a threat if they were on the right trajectory.
We should improve our detection abilities mainly to spot asteroids headed our way in time to prevent a catastrophe.
That's certainly true, but utterly unrelated to this finding. There ain't jack-shit we could do about a "rogue planet" headed for Earth, other than throw a few awesome end-of-the-world parties.
The bad news is that, by January, the next end of the world nonsense will begin.
Optimist... ;)
...and it should be noted, by the IAU definition, this "rogue planet" is not a planet at all. It's a "sub-brown dwarf".
I'm sure Samsung would be happy to continue manufacturing for Apple, as it is still income.
Indeed. Apple charges premium prices for its products. Samsung wants a cut. Nothing wrong with that.
We tend to be Romulans during war, and Ferengi the rest of the time...
Nice theory, but when you get to the "we now know" part, it makes me question if you understand what "know" means. Much of what you said might be true, but we most certainly don't "know" any of it. Anything that follows from the premise "if we had done (something other than what we did)" is necessarily speculation. The only question is how good the speculation is...
The fact of the matter is, Britain did not get into the war to "try to help the French (and Poland)". They did it to try to save themselves. Whether it was necessary or not is unknown, but nation-states aren't known for committing to expensive (in both lives and money) tasks for altruistic reasons. Britain did what it did because it thought that was what was best for Britain, full stop. If anyone else was helped, that's nice, but not the reason why it was done.
What has he done other than give some pretty speeches and pass what was the Republican health care plan until he decided to support it so they suddenly decided their own plan must be "socialism"...
I got to my polling place in Brooklyn Center, MN a bit before 1pm, had virtually no wait -- the "line" had two people ahead of me, took less than a minute for spaces to open up for all three of us.
Um, no. Drone strikes are "just like" Anonymous hacks in the same sense that the Nazi invasion of Poland was just like knocking on your neighbors door to ask to borrow a cup of sugar. You can find things in common between the two, but it would be exceedingly idiotic to equate them as "just like" one another due to the similarities you find.
No no. In the context of a Slashdot discussion, "religion" means a belief in any ideology other than the dominant one here, which is naturally considered logical and obvious. ;)
You don't have employees? Or you just don't pay them for doing all the aforementioned tasks?
We're basically talking about google becoming a credit card company, with all the historical cartel & usury evil attached.
Um, no, we're not. That's almost as stupid as saying printing paper money with golden color ink is "basically talking" about returning to the gold standard. Just because you carry something in your wallet doesn't make it a credit card, even if you can swipe it in all the same places.
Um, The Black Hole had far less in common with Star Wars than with a lot of older sci-fi movies (particularly 50s stuff). It was certainly an attempt to try to cash in on the renewed popularity of sci-fi in the theater with big flash special effects, but calling it "a blatant rip-off of Star Wars" is utterly absurd...
Canada? Is that north or south of Minnesota
Depends on which part. In terms of land area, most of Canada is north of Minnesota. In terms of population, most of Canada is south of Minnesota (the most populated part of Canada being the part that dips down with the Great Lakes, placing Toronto further south than Minnesota's "Twin Cities").
One of the more notable aspects of human behavior and thinking is that when you know something but not everything, you tend to see people who don't think the same things you do as not as smart as you, because they've reached difference conclusions, not realizing that often it's because they know something things you don't, and it's your missing knowledge, not theirs, that's leading to the different view. An especially ominous warning sign you should look out for, particularly in your own speaking or even thinking, is the word "obvious" and phrases like "common sense". If something seems obvious, or like it's common sense, but others are disagreeing, there's usually pretty high odds you are yourself missing some fairly big pieces of the puzzle. If you can't explain why someone thinks differently than you when the answer seems obvious, it's a sure sign you are yourself suffering from significant ignorance. (Controversial questions have no obvious answers; if they did, they wouldn't be controversial. If the answer seems obvious to you, it's a sure sign you don't understand the problem fully, and the answer seems obvious because your picture is incomplete.) That doesn't mean your conclusion is wrong, but it certainly means you don't know as much as you could (or you wouldn't be in the boat of being unable to explain why the other person thinks differently, without recourse to claiming a lack of common sense).
More specifically to your point, most people don't "move away from an area of smarter people because they start feeling a little dumb." Usually it's the opposite -- they move away because they think "those people are idiots". The more ignorant you are, the more likely you are to conclude everyone around you is a moron. The truly uneducated think they're dumb, the well educated know they're profoundly ignorant, it's just the ever so slightly educated who think they're really so much smarter than everyone else...
I was an interdisciplinary philosophy and computer science double-major. Trust me, you find plenty of "socially feral" philosophy nerds, too, whose attitude towards the "average person" would do the most arrogant computer geek proud.
Its not always what it seems. Some people have extra sensitve arrogance alarms. I think in a large portion of the cases, people with a degree TECHNICAL skill feel less of a need to participate in politics.
Or as many of them would put it, "I'm above politics..."
This gives the illusion of arrogance when it actually is not.
Actually, no, politics is just the art of taking other people's feeling into account while relating to them. Acting like this is something you have license to ignore is the height of arrogance, but you can justify this by maintaining the illusion that it's their problem, not yours, that they get offended by your behavior.
It's not that people are dumb, it's that computers are still very new
You know, I heard that excuse a lot twenty years ago. Since then, computers have entered into every facet of modern life. People leaving university today were born after the world wide went online, and even after home Internet access became cheap. I've spoken to people who are now retired who have been programming for their entire career. Unless someone has been living in a cave for the last few decades, they have no excuse for not being at least passingly familiar with this stuff. I have a lot of time for people who find that they are in a situation that their prior experience doesn't give them the tools to deal with, I have none for people who are wilfully ignorant and refuse to take advantage of opportunities to rectify this.
Cars have been around much longer. I can't fix problems with my car. Could I learn? Certainly. Arguably, then, I'm willfully ignorant. But the fact of the matter is, no matter how much I might like to come as close to omniscience as humanly possible, I do have priorities, limited time, and some things just aren't that important to me. If you come off sounding like I'm somehow morally deficient for failing to educate myself on how to disassemble and reassemble my car, I'll rightly call you an asshole. I suspect some people have this exact attitude towards you when they see how you think about them and their knowledge of computers...