It has nothing to do with Google, or what you can find via google.
No no, it has everything to do with Google and what you can find with Google. See, if a fictious journalist reported personal details about little old you or me, or our little old families, than yes, that would be silly. But if you or I was, I don't know, let's just say the CEO of a company (let's call it Moogle) that allowed anyone to find personal information about us and our little old families, and the journalist used Moogle's tools to find all the infomation that he/she published, well than; suddenly publishing that information becomes a little less silly and a little bit more, I don't know, satiric, maybe ironic, or maybe even under the umbrella of *Journalism For the Public Good* and little old you or I should either change our company so that it's more difficult for journalists (and criminals and bored computer nerds) to find personal information about little old you's and me's, or just accept that the public good that Moogle provides outweighs the price of making publically available some private information, including our own.
Whatever little old your or I would choose to do in that situation, I think using our corprate muscle to censure the perant company of the journalist who published the said article is just silly.
At no point did deep throat cross a legal line in reporting what he did to the Washington Post... In the case of the CIA leak... who ever their source was COMMITTED a crime by leaking the name to the reporter. By committing a crime, he should be reported and punished to the full extent of the law.
No. There's no difference. You can't promise a source "Anonymity conditional on the information you give me being useful and non-criminal" and expect them to spill the beans. What you can do is choose how you use the information. In this case, the reporters from Time and the New York Times very ethically chose not to release the information they recieved anonymously. Bob Novak (Who by the way I loathe) had no such ethical compunctions about screwing over a CIA operative.
On a related note, Time ruined its reputation with sources when it released the documents that pointed to Rove. Do you think that anyone wanting anonymity will now give this sort of information to a time reporter? No. My political inclination leads me to want Rove to get screwed over one this, but more important than that is the ability of journalists to promise their sources anonymity when necessary, and deliver on that promise.
Well, I certenly won't participate in the illigal activity of downloading this torrent, but if you head over to the pirate bay, there's a torrent claiming to be the x86 version of tiger right here.
Actually, if it can be proved that you knew that the crowbar you were selling would likely be used for robbery, than, yes, you could be sued, or at least criminally charged. It's the same sort of crazy shit that lets the government imprision people who sell advanced hydroponic systems often used to grow marajuana. Read about it in Reefer Madness. It's a great read by Eric Schlosser, the same gentelmen who wrote Fast Food Nation.
Yes, but have you ever flown El-Al? It's miserable. Completely miserable. The screening process is painful - the last time I flew through Israel on the way to Africa, (and the last time I ever will) getting through security in Israel took about two hours, with the security questions and the bag searching and the unending waiting in line.
I would imagine that in a country like Israel, this level of security might make sense. But the idea that American airlines should be more like El-Al in their security proceedures is rediculous. I'd do everything I could to keep from flying if I knew an experience like El-Al's security screening was waiting for me at the airport.
Now OT: Re:reason for, reason not for
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When I occasionally write articles for my college's newspaper that require interviews, I always have a bit of a crises. Because I have nothing like a photographic memory, I have to record the interviews somehow. I don't know short hand well enough to take good notes on paper during an interview - so I generally end up recording them on tape and than transcribing them onto a computer afterwords. However, I'm legally obligated to tell anyone I'm interviewing that I'm recording the conversation, and with sensitive subject-matter, realizing that their words are being recorded on tape can make them more reluctant to spill the beans.
Just last week I had to do a few extensive phone interviews, and I decided that instead of trying to figure out how to record the conversation and risk freaking out the interviewee, I'd try and transcribe the conversation on my keyboard as we talked. I wrote down my questions first, and than just filled in the outline as the interview went on. I discovered that with a fairly average typing speed (I'm usually about 60-80 wpm) I could just about keep up with the speed of the interview. I was able to transcribe the whole thing as it happened.
Of course this still only works over the phone, because when you're interviewing in person it's nice to make eye contact and whatnot - but still, compitent typing skills are a good thing (tm).
[Get it, it's funny because I put a (tm) after good thing.]
Besides, everyone that matters knows the only thing you really need to bring to a premiere is a towel.
I was just taking an english lit class from someone who worked at a bookshop where Douglas Adams came for a signing. While she was helping with the signing, a very ditzy very attractive fan came through line and said, without a hint of sarcasm in her voics, "Mr. Adams, I brought a towel with me for you to sign, has anyone else ever done that?"
Mr. Adams looked her in the eye, and with a completely straight face, said, "No, you're the first one" than signed the towel.
Actually, I was looking at the Creative line of hard-drive based mp3 players just the other week - comparing them to the ipods. I liked quite a bit of things about them, their design, their pricing, their features, but then I realized that they're not compatable with Mac's. It seems like a silly thing to not include on an iPod competitor, and is the reason that I won't be buying one.
Just yesterday I was studying for a test on the early romantic period in Britain (1780's to early 1800's). I had a list of 20 or so mostly historical terms to define, and at the outset, both Britannica Online (access paid for by my college) and Wikipedia tabs open. After looking up four or five terms in both encyclopedias, I found that Wikipedia was easier to use, had more pertinent information displayed in more prominent locations of the articles, and was plenty accurate. I've always been a bit skeptical of Wikipedia, but yesterday after 4 or 5 hours of use, I was convinced.
Generally, unions only exist where they need to. For example; The other day I was getting gas at Costco, and the employee came over to help me fill my car. I thanked him, and he said, "Not at all; guess how much I'm getting paid to do this." Turns out he was making $19 an hour to pump gas, and that's a typical Costco employee wage. I'm related to one of the vice-presidents of Costco and asked him about this. He told me that apparently there have been only two costco warehouses with unionized workers and recently, one of them disbanded because the workers realized that they were paying union dues for no reasons. Costco treats its employees very well. The upshot of this is that Wall Street doesn't like Costco very much, because they spend too much money on their employees; but they nevertheless continue to be a very sucessful company.
The moral is that while there are certainly bloated unions who only stifle industry; they're the exception. If businesses take good care of their workers, the workers won't feel the need to unionize. From the sound of things, parts of the game industry are in desperate need of unionization.
I'm looking for a way to make the most of my Epson Perfection 2400 with transparency adapter
Ha. I laugh. This is akin to saying, "I want to play this great new Half-Life 2, and need to know what I need to do to my 233mhz Pentium with 64 megs of ram and a tnt2 to get good frame rates." It's just not going to happen.
Flatbed scanners with transparency adaptors are useless for anything serious. They might work spectacularly for your 640 x 480 powerpoint slide show, but for anything involving printing pictures you need a dedicated high resolution slide scanner. If you have quite a few slides you need scanned, pay someone with the correct equipment to do it. Wal-Mart's a good place for low resolution slide scans, and places like gemega will give more resolution than you'll ever need for a higher price.
Finally, a chance to show my prowess as an english major on slashdot.
Most real, serious, critically acclaimed, whatever you want to call them, Haiku aren't in the strict five seven five form; they're just two to five line poems with somewhere between about four and ten syllables in each line.
Good idea, but wrong. I was listening to NPR the other day, and heard an interview on the topic of polling. The most orginizations poll people is to type in the area code and one of the 3 digit prefixes of a geographical area they're polling, and than have a random number generator generate the last 4 digits dialed. So, any cellphones in a given area code would be just as likely to be called as landlines.
Actually I remember reading about something similar in a Mountain Bike Action magazine about 4 or 5 years. It was the story of one of the magazine's editors who had been riding behind a pudgy out of shape professor type on some singletrack trails. Even though he seemed pudgy and out of shape, the editor was having trouble keeping up with him. Eventually he caught up, and noticed something funny about the professor's bike, and at the top of one of the hills, asked him about it.
It turns out that the professor's bike was outitted with a device that gathered energy when the breaks were applied and used it to compress air, and than when going up hills, that air could be released through a pneumatic pump to assist the rider.
The professor (who was indeed a professor), explained that the invention was the product of one of his student's graduate project, and asked the editor not to mention the device because the student was planning on marketing it commercially. The editor waited a few years, and when he saw no evidence of a product appearing, wrote the article.
As an avid mountain and road biker, this seems like a brilliant idea to me. I think of it often near the tops of particularly brutal hills. But somehow, I have yet to see one in my local bike shop.
Because then, (if the promises that Ruckus makes are anything like true), your tuition money wouldn't have to go to adding more t3 lines, or being sued by the RIAA, or buying CD's.
Mostly, everything you said is a load of crap. I'm sure your old peugeot works well for whatever you're using it, but to say that newer, and more expensive bikes won't make a difference to the average rider is a lode of crap. The most obvious difference is in the shifting components of each bike - the difference between Shimano's Sonora (entry level affordable) and Dura-Ace (high end very expensive) components is remarkable. Anyone could hop on a bike and ride around the block, shifting gears, and instantly notice a difference. That said, I went with the Sonoras, because that was what I could afford - but to say that I wouldn't enjoy or benifit from having a better shet of shifters is rediculous.
Now to the issue of Disc-Brakes vs. v-brakes on mountain bikes. Disc brakes stop better than v-brakes, period. Especially in wet conditions. On steep downhills in the rain, v-brakes become almost useless, whereas Disc-brakes will still work perfectly. For many riders, especially more techincal, (read "better"), freeride and downhill riders, the added expense, complexity and weight of disc brakes is far outweighed by the ability to stop their bikes more rapidly and more consistantly.
And to the bike shop owner who convinced you not to buy something from his shop - he's clearly a figment of your imagination.
Does it bother anyone else that this rocket is named Satan? I mean, Satan? What's next, the Beelzebub moonbase? Or, possibly, the Evil Overlord of the Universe mission to Mars? Trust me, this will be worse than Microsoft.
The LORD said to Satan, "Where have you come from?" Satan answered the LORD , "From roaming through the earth and going back and forth in it."
That's crap. It's true, you can get a good shot with a crappy camera - but in any sort of difficult or unusual conditions having manual control over at least your f-stop and sutter speed is essential.
Professionals take several hundred pictures in several settings just to get half a dozen really great shots worth publishing in a magazine.
Not True. I've worked with a few professional photographers, loaded film for them, held lights, etc... and the few who did just snap off hundreds of frames to get that one good picture didn't really know how to use their cameras. The ones who really knew what they were doing took time to compose a picture, and than only took a few shots.
Fashion photography is an exception, but for the most part - good photographers don't take hundreds of shots just to get one good one.
I don't mean to join the "cute fulffy animal brigade" but the reason I don't eat meat is because I don't like killing animals. It's clear to most everybody that dog's feel some sort of affection, and pain, and lonleyness, and a whole wide gamut of emotions - so why do we choose not to extend those emotions to cows and pigs and sheep?
It is easier to imagine that pultry, and even fish, don't have the same capacity to feel as mammals - I spent last year in Belize and ate fish while I was there without feeling too much guilt. But I saw that as more of a personal weakness than a moral decision.
Last night I was driving up in the mountains I saw a fawn (baby deer) laying on the road. When I saw it in my headlights, it just hunkered down to further try and not be seen. I had to sit there for about three minutes before it finally decided that I had seen it and it got up and walked away. It was very clearly scared. It was, quite possibly, the most adoreable thing I have ever seen. I couldn't imagine eating it anymore than I could imagine eating a human baby.
Of course later that night while I was laying in my sleeping bag in the woods I heard a cougar call rediculously close to where I was and I packed up my bag and drove home. I'm sure there's some deeper meaning there that I'm missing.
Yes. You would be absolutely correct if McDonlalds only served meat. But they happen to serve a few other things, like French Fries, or the Parfaits and Salads I MENTIONED IN MY POST. But you were being humerous, and I shouldn't take it personally, but sometimes I get ANGRY WHEN PEOPLE ACCUSE ME OF KILLING ANIMALS SO I CAN EAT THEM. My apologies.
You're right, but it wouldn't be especially good poetry. You can call just about anything you want poetry - for an example of this one of my literary analysis teachers cut up a few sentences of The Grapes of Wrath and layed them out like a poem - and they looked just like a poem.
But poetry, good poetry, will get recognized, and rewareded, and most of the other crap, except for somehow inexplicably Maya Angelou, will fall by the wayside.
Slashdot Mirror
It has nothing to do with Google, or what you can find via google.
No no, it has everything to do with Google and what you can find with Google. See, if a fictious journalist reported personal details about little old you or me, or our little old families, than yes, that would be silly.
But if you or I was, I don't know, let's just say the CEO of a company (let's call it Moogle) that allowed anyone to find personal information about us and our little old families, and the journalist used Moogle's tools to find all the infomation that he/she published, well than; suddenly publishing that information becomes a little less silly and a little bit more, I don't know, satiric, maybe ironic, or maybe even under the umbrella of *Journalism For the Public Good* and little old you or I should either change our company so that it's more difficult for journalists (and criminals and bored computer nerds) to find personal information about little old you's and me's, or just accept that the public good that Moogle provides outweighs the price of making publically available some private information, including our own.
Whatever little old your or I would choose to do in that situation, I think using our corprate muscle to censure the perant company of the journalist who published the said article is just silly.
At no point did deep throat cross a legal line in reporting what he did to the Washington Post ... In the case of the CIA leak ... who ever their source was COMMITTED a crime by leaking the name to the reporter. By committing a crime, he should be reported and punished to the full extent of the law.
No. There's no difference. You can't promise a source "Anonymity conditional on the information you give me being useful and non-criminal" and expect them to spill the beans. What you can do is choose how you use the information. In this case, the reporters from Time and the New York Times very ethically chose not to release the information they recieved anonymously. Bob Novak (Who by the way I loathe) had no such ethical compunctions about screwing over a CIA operative.
On a related note, Time ruined its reputation with sources when it released the documents that pointed to Rove. Do you think that anyone wanting anonymity will now give this sort of information to a time reporter? No. My political inclination leads me to want Rove to get screwed over one this, but more important than that is the ability of journalists to promise their sources anonymity when necessary, and deliver on that promise.
Well, I certenly won't participate in the illigal activity of downloading this torrent, but if you head over to the pirate bay, there's a torrent claiming to be the x86 version of tiger right here.
Actually, if it can be proved that you knew that the crowbar you were selling would likely be used for robbery, than, yes, you could be sued, or at least criminally charged. It's the same sort of crazy shit that lets the government imprision people who sell advanced hydroponic systems often used to grow marajuana. Read about it in Reefer Madness. It's a great read by Eric Schlosser, the same gentelmen who wrote Fast Food Nation.
Yes, but have you ever flown El-Al? It's miserable. Completely miserable. The screening process is painful - the last time I flew through Israel on the way to Africa, (and the last time I ever will) getting through security in Israel took about two hours, with the security questions and the bag searching and the unending waiting in line.
I would imagine that in a country like Israel, this level of security might make sense. But the idea that American airlines should be more like El-Al in their security proceedures is rediculous. I'd do everything I could to keep from flying if I knew an experience like El-Al's security screening was waiting for me at the airport.
When I occasionally write articles for my college's newspaper that require interviews, I always have a bit of a crises. Because I have nothing like a photographic memory, I have to record the interviews somehow. I don't know short hand well enough to take good notes on paper during an interview - so I generally end up recording them on tape and than transcribing them onto a computer afterwords. However, I'm legally obligated to tell anyone I'm interviewing that I'm recording the conversation, and with sensitive subject-matter, realizing that their words are being recorded on tape can make them more reluctant to spill the beans.
Just last week I had to do a few extensive phone interviews, and I decided that instead of trying to figure out how to record the conversation and risk freaking out the interviewee, I'd try and transcribe the conversation on my keyboard as we talked. I wrote down my questions first, and than just filled in the outline as the interview went on. I discovered that with a fairly average typing speed (I'm usually about 60-80 wpm) I could just about keep up with the speed of the interview. I was able to transcribe the whole thing as it happened.
Of course this still only works over the phone, because when you're interviewing in person it's nice to make eye contact and whatnot - but still, compitent typing skills are a good thing (tm).
[Get it, it's funny because I put a (tm) after good thing.]
Besides, everyone that matters knows the only thing you really need to bring to a premiere is a towel.
I was just taking an english lit class from someone who worked at a bookshop where Douglas Adams came for a signing. While she was helping with the signing, a very ditzy very attractive fan came through line and said, without a hint of sarcasm in her voics, "Mr. Adams, I brought a towel with me for you to sign, has anyone else ever done that?"
Mr. Adams looked her in the eye, and with a completely straight face, said, "No, you're the first one" than signed the towel.
Actually, I was looking at the Creative line of hard-drive based mp3 players just the other week - comparing them to the ipods. I liked quite a bit of things about them, their design, their pricing, their features, but then I realized that they're not compatable with Mac's. It seems like a silly thing to not include on an iPod competitor, and is the reason that I won't be buying one.
Just yesterday I was studying for a test on the early romantic period in Britain (1780's to early 1800's). I had a list of 20 or so mostly historical terms to define, and at the outset, both Britannica Online (access paid for by my college) and Wikipedia tabs open.
After looking up four or five terms in both encyclopedias, I found that Wikipedia was easier to use, had more pertinent information displayed in more prominent locations of the articles, and was plenty accurate.
I've always been a bit skeptical of Wikipedia, but yesterday after 4 or 5 hours of use, I was convinced.
Generally, unions only exist where they need to. For example; The other day I was getting gas at Costco, and the employee came over to help me fill my car. I thanked him, and he said, "Not at all; guess how much I'm getting paid to do this." Turns out he was making $19 an hour to pump gas, and that's a typical Costco employee wage.
I'm related to one of the vice-presidents of Costco and asked him about this. He told me that apparently there have been only two costco warehouses with unionized workers and recently, one of them disbanded because the workers realized that they were paying union dues for no reasons. Costco treats its employees very well. The upshot of this is that Wall Street doesn't like Costco very much, because they spend too much money on their employees; but they nevertheless continue to be a very sucessful company.
The moral is that while there are certainly bloated unions who only stifle industry; they're the exception. If businesses take good care of their workers, the workers won't feel the need to unionize. From the sound of things, parts of the game industry are in desperate need of unionization.
I'm looking for a way to make the most of my Epson Perfection 2400 with transparency adapter
Ha. I laugh. This is akin to saying, "I want to play this great new Half-Life 2, and need to know what I need to do to my 233mhz Pentium with 64 megs of ram and a tnt2 to get good frame rates." It's just not going to happen.
Flatbed scanners with transparency adaptors are useless for anything serious. They might work spectacularly for your 640 x 480 powerpoint slide show, but for anything involving printing pictures you need a dedicated high resolution slide scanner. If you have quite a few slides you need scanned, pay someone with the correct equipment to do it. Wal-Mart's a good place for low resolution slide scans, and places like gemega will give more resolution than you'll ever need for a higher price.
Finally, a chance to show my prowess as an english major on slashdot.
Most real, serious, critically acclaimed, whatever you want to call them, Haiku aren't in the strict five seven five form; they're just two to five line poems with somewhere between about four and ten syllables in each line.
AFAIK, they only poll over land lines.
Good idea, but wrong. I was listening to NPR the other day, and heard an interview on the topic of polling. The most orginizations poll people is to type in the area code and one of the 3 digit prefixes of a geographical area they're polling, and than have a random number generator generate the last 4 digits dialed. So, any cellphones in a given area code would be just as likely to be called as landlines.
Sorry to reply to myself, but; something like you're looking for can be bought at http://www.wildernessenergy.com/unibikekit.html
Actually I remember reading about something similar in a Mountain Bike Action magazine about 4 or 5 years. It was the story of one of the magazine's editors who had been riding behind a pudgy out of shape professor type on some singletrack trails. Even though he seemed pudgy and out of shape, the editor was having trouble keeping up with him. Eventually he caught up, and noticed something funny about the professor's bike, and at the top of one of the hills, asked him about it.
It turns out that the professor's bike was outitted with a device that gathered energy when the breaks were applied and used it to compress air, and than when going up hills, that air could be released through a pneumatic pump to assist the rider.
The professor (who was indeed a professor), explained that the invention was the product of one of his student's graduate project, and asked the editor not to mention the device because the student was planning on marketing it commercially. The editor waited a few years, and when he saw no evidence of a product appearing, wrote the article.
As an avid mountain and road biker, this seems like a brilliant idea to me. I think of it often near the tops of particularly brutal hills. But somehow, I have yet to see one in my local bike shop.
Because then, (if the promises that Ruckus makes are anything like true), your tuition money wouldn't have to go to adding more t3 lines, or being sued by the RIAA, or buying CD's.
Mostly, everything you said is a load of crap. I'm sure your old peugeot works well for whatever you're using it, but to say that newer, and more expensive bikes won't make a difference to the average rider is a lode of crap. The most obvious difference is in the shifting components of each bike - the difference between Shimano's Sonora (entry level affordable) and Dura-Ace (high end very expensive) components is remarkable. Anyone could hop on a bike and ride around the block, shifting gears, and instantly notice a difference.
That said, I went with the Sonoras, because that was what I could afford - but to say that I wouldn't enjoy or benifit from having a better shet of shifters is rediculous.
Now to the issue of Disc-Brakes vs. v-brakes on mountain bikes. Disc brakes stop better than v-brakes, period. Especially in wet conditions. On steep downhills in the rain, v-brakes become almost useless, whereas Disc-brakes will still work perfectly. For many riders, especially more techincal, (read "better"), freeride and downhill riders, the added expense, complexity and weight of disc brakes is far outweighed by the ability to stop their bikes more rapidly and more consistantly.
And to the bike shop owner who convinced you not to buy something from his shop - he's clearly a figment of your imagination.
Does it bother anyone else that this rocket is named Satan? I mean, Satan? What's next, the Beelzebub moonbase? Or, possibly, the Evil Overlord of the Universe mission to Mars?
Trust me, this will be worse than Microsoft.
The LORD said to Satan, "Where have you come from?"
Satan answered the LORD , "From roaming through the earth and going back and forth in it."
I think the moral of this article is that while most slashdot readers are nerds, they're not photography nerds.
That's crap. It's true, you can get a good shot with a crappy camera - but in any sort of difficult or unusual conditions having manual control over at least your f-stop and sutter speed is essential.
Professionals take several hundred pictures in several settings just to get half a dozen really great shots worth publishing in a magazine.
Not True. I've worked with a few professional photographers, loaded film for them, held lights, etc... and the few who did just snap off hundreds of frames to get that one good picture didn't really know how to use their cameras. The ones who really knew what they were doing took time to compose a picture, and than only took a few shots.
Fashion photography is an exception, but for the most part - good photographers don't take hundreds of shots just to get one good one.
I don't mean to join the "cute fulffy animal brigade" but the reason I don't eat meat is because I don't like killing animals. It's clear to most everybody that dog's feel some sort of affection, and pain, and lonleyness, and a whole wide gamut of emotions - so why do we choose not to extend those emotions to cows and pigs and sheep?
It is easier to imagine that pultry, and even fish, don't have the same capacity to feel as mammals - I spent last year in Belize and ate fish while I was there without feeling too much guilt. But I saw that as more of a personal weakness than a moral decision.
Last night I was driving up in the mountains I saw a fawn (baby deer) laying on the road. When I saw it in my headlights, it just hunkered down to further try and not be seen. I had to sit there for about three minutes before it finally decided that I had seen it and it got up and walked away. It was very clearly scared. It was, quite possibly, the most adoreable thing I have ever seen. I couldn't imagine eating it anymore than I could imagine eating a human baby.
Of course later that night while I was laying in my sleeping bag in the woods I heard a cougar call rediculously close to where I was and I packed up my bag and drove home. I'm sure there's some deeper meaning there that I'm missing.
Yes. You would be absolutely correct if McDonlalds only served meat. But they happen to serve a few other things, like French Fries, or the Parfaits and Salads I MENTIONED IN MY POST. But you were being humerous, and I shouldn't take it personally, but sometimes I get ANGRY WHEN PEOPLE ACCUSE ME OF KILLING ANIMALS SO I CAN EAT THEM. My apologies.
You're right, but it wouldn't be especially good poetry. You can call just about anything you want poetry - for an example of this one of my literary analysis teachers cut up a few sentences of The Grapes of Wrath and layed them out like a poem - and they looked just like a poem.
But poetry, good poetry, will get recognized, and rewareded, and most of the other crap, except for somehow inexplicably Maya Angelou, will fall by the wayside.
I would just like you to know that I find this to be the most brilliant comment I have ever seen on Slashdot. Thank You.