I wish everyone would quit their bitching about how unhealthy McDonalds is. I don't mean to be a defender of bad food, in fact, I'm a vegetarian and eat at McDonalds once or twice a year, but it's not like McDonalds ever pretended that their food was healthy. If the American public is too retarded to tell that eating a jucy burger, deep FAT fried french fries, and a calorie-sugar-caffene laden soda isn't good for them, the maybe they deserve to have their arteries clogged.
Sure, it's a bit sad that they market their product so strongly to children - but adults have no reason to complain. If you don't want horribly unhealthy food, don't eat there - or at least get one of their moderately healthy parfaits or salads or the new veggie burger.
The only thing that really pisses me off about McDonalds is that when they finally started making a Veggie Burger, they made it taste like shit. There's lots of veggie burgers out there that taste great, but McDonalds had to make one that could never compete in taste with their real meat patties.
This is Andrew Q Ranter, signing off.
I can testify to the pets thing. I grew up with cats and a dog, never had any problems. Then I spent a year in Belize away from any pets, and when I came back to my parent's house and our three cats for Christmas, I nearly died of sneezing before I figured out what was going wrong.
I was grading papers for a college writing class the other day when I came across a paper that a student had written about measuring the speed of light using the microwaving chacolate method. At first I thought he was just making shit up, but then I looked it up on the interweb, and lo and behold, he hadn't made it up.
Granted, he had copied his paper almost word for word from the interweb and I failed him for that, which just goes to show that it's dangerous to write papers that interest the graders.
While I'm against fundamentally altering the human biological structure to create some sort of super soldier, it's not that difficult to go without food for a few days. While I've never fasted for longer than three consecutive days, there's plenty of people who do.
Do any of you remember spirulina? In I think the mid 80s it was marketed as a food replacement, said to contain all the nutrients the body needed to survive in just a few tablets a day. I only heard about from the ultralight backpacking perspective, but for a while there were some backpackers who would go out into the woods for a week at a time with nothing more to eat than about eight spirulina pills per day. They claimed to have all sorts of energy on these expidition. This worked well untill the same backpackers just tried going out and fasting during their backpacking trips, and what do you know, they reported again having all sorts of energy.
The moral is that humans are capable of functioning at fairly normal levels for a few days without food already.
I've been thinking about this quite a bit lately, and though I'm sure lots of people have thought it before me, I haven't bothered to read their ideas, so I'll pretend like I'm the first.
In most every outdoor activity people can be divided into two groups, those who try to become one with nature and those who try to dominate nature. While this is mostly a mindset and often only reflected in fruty athlete interviews where someone talks about "becoming one with the mountain", that mindset effects actions.
For example, I downhill ski quite a bit, usually something like 20-30 days a season, and I can look at most good skiers and make a fairly good guess at which type of skier they are, if they're trying to feel the pulse of the mountain or make the mountain their bitch.
Personally, when I ski, I'm safe in the knowledge that at the end of the day I can go back to my house and waterbed, and so I try and dominate the mountain. However, when I'm backpacking I know that I'm more at the mercy of the elements and so I get into a more bonding with mother nature mindset.
Also, I find that I have a stronger desire to protect nature when I'm in a bonding with the wild mindset, and in overused wilderness areas it's fairly important to be careful about your impact on nature.
In essence, I've found that both mindsets work differently for different people in different situations and it bothers me when people champion one and decry the other. Or maybe I'm just too much of a weenie to have a strong opinion.
No, the problem with such a long time between releases is that the $12 million they paid for the rights to the character of Duke Nukem is going to waste. Even if the game were released tomorrow, people who weren't playing video games 5 years ago on computers, (a fairly significant portion of the population), will be saying, "Duke Who?"
I was in Malawi and Zambia a couple weeks ago, and it was funny to be driving in a beat up 1970's japanise minibus down a dirt road past mud huts, and have the african next to me answer his cellphone.
Without making a joke about our new targeted advertising overlords; I really don't have a problem with targeted advertising. Sure, I don't enjoy my every movement being tracked on the interweb; but if I'm going to be subjected to advertising I'd rather it be for things I care about.
No, the story wasn't pointing to an amaizing scientific breakthrough, it was pointing to the fact that a college freshman did something spectacular for a college freshman. This kid made a ditrium fusion whaddyacallit his freshman year in college, whereas I was proud of myself for secessuflly discovering where most of my classes were held my freshman year in college.
Actually, I was a volunteer at a hospital in Belize this past year for six months. I assisted a surgeon in around 30-40 surgeries over the course of my time there. About half of our surgeries would be interrurpted by one of the doctor's phones ringing. The circulating nurse would reach inside the doctor's operating gown, take the cellphone from his belt, answer and then tell the doctor who was calling. If the call was important enough and the surgery wasn't at a time-critical moment, the surgeon would have the nurse hold the phone up to his ear, so he didn't become un-sterile by touching it with his hands, and then have a phone conversation while the rest of us, and the sedated patient, waited. The first time it happened it was all very surreal.
Of course I don't mean to imply that this has any correlation to the national do not call registry, or that surgeons typically answer their phones during surgery in more developed countries. I hope.
Actually: I was at Dali Universe in London last weekend, and realized how much of Dali's work contains adult themes; and by adult themes I don't mean balancing checkbooks. I would say that a good third of the works I saw at the exhibition had overt sexual themes. I'll be interested to see what Dali without the sex looks like in a Disney cartoon. Of course this goes well with Disney's tradition of subtley showing phalluses to children.
I feel your pain. I was there, (London) last weekend and I when we stopped to fill up our rental car I calculated that it would cost me about $50 to fill up my little Subaru there as opposed to around $15-20 here in the states. Not that I'll stop complaining about American gas prices anytime soon.
Yeah, that's great, because you're better than all of us, and we should wait around so we can answer our phones whenever you're damn well ready to return our calls, and consider ourselves lucky to have the priviledge of talking to you.
If you'll look through some of your comics, both Breathed's and Watterson's (Calvin and Hobbs) comics have occasionally created comics centered around the shrinking size of the American comic strip. If I'm remembering aright Breathed's were usually a bit more pointed, while Wattersons were more typically self depreciating.
I think Breathed getting half a page is wonderful. While I love the bloom county and outland strips, Breathed's childrens books are beautiful. With more space, I would expect that Breathed will not only make us laugh, but be often profound in that offhanded way that only comics can.
"While this book was a nice read for me, it would have been terrible for most. It was written very poorly."
Apparently the same author wrote the review then? I didn't know it was possible to mangle sentences enough to add that many unnecessary commas. The reviewer has a gift, I hope he stops trying to share it with the world.
Because my tastes are different from many other people's, I usually don't pay too much attention to what I hear about a movie. It's mostly what I see in a trailer that decides for me weather or not I see a movie. Maybe if the movies didn't suck the trailers wouldn't have to either.
I agree that this is a form of blackmail. We all have dirty little secrets we would like hidden from the general public, and that's why we're disgusted by personal blackmail. But companies have no such protection. We expect full disclosure; if there's anything that can be used as blackmail against a company we invest in, we want to know about it. There's a big difference in the sleazyness factor of corporate and personal blackmail.
That said, I don't like the way they tried to profit from their discovery, but I don't think it's as nasty as when similar things happen in the personal arena.
Copy the CD from one of your friends, or the library, then send the artist a check in the mail. If they're a big group who doesn't need the money they'll probably ignore your check, if they're financially struggling, you may help them out; and either way you can feel like you've done a good thing (TM).
From time to time I think about something like that. I remember hearing a few years that it would possible to bradcast quite a bit of information per second over television signals. I even remember hearing a that PBS stations had some sort of digital signal piggybacking their TV signals for a while, but I could be making that part up.
While this would of course have to a be a 'push' technology, it seems like there could be alot of stuff usefully pushed through these channels. Say one channel sends a newsfeed, another sends linux distros, pirate stations that send warez and porn.... Since these wouldn't hog any sort of bandwith (except of course for their part of the wireless spectrum) and, piggybacking on existing television transmitters be available through most of the country, they could be a good thing, taking some of the load off of heavily used software servers and providing a sort of free one way connectivity to much of the nation. There would have to be some sort of scheduling mechanism, i.e. tune in to channel 23 at 4:00 to get the latest Debian ISO. I havn't yet figured out who would pay for this, maybe a combination of PBS type channels and advertising funded channels, but it's just a thought I've been having. Perchance someone can tell me why it would never work.
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I wish everyone would quit their bitching about how unhealthy McDonalds is. I don't mean to be a defender of bad food, in fact, I'm a vegetarian and eat at McDonalds once or twice a year, but it's not like McDonalds ever pretended that their food was healthy. If the American public is too retarded to tell that eating a jucy burger, deep FAT fried french fries, and a calorie-sugar-caffene laden soda isn't good for them, the maybe they deserve to have their arteries clogged.
Sure, it's a bit sad that they market their product so strongly to children - but adults have no reason to complain. If you don't want horribly unhealthy food, don't eat there - or at least get one of their moderately healthy parfaits or salads or the new veggie burger.
The only thing that really pisses me off about McDonalds is that when they finally started making a Veggie Burger, they made it taste like shit. There's lots of veggie burgers out there that taste great, but McDonalds had to make one that could never compete in taste with their real meat patties.
This is Andrew Q Ranter, signing off.
If you hate the command line, like I do, you can download a GUI wrapper for the Windows version of HYMN at http://stilleye.com/hymn.net/
I can testify to the pets thing. I grew up with cats and a dog, never had any problems. Then I spent a year in Belize away from any pets, and when I came back to my parent's house and our three cats for Christmas, I nearly died of sneezing before I figured out what was going wrong.
I love Slashdot.
Damn Government, trying to censor information that wants to be free.
Damn doctors, thinking up new ways to share information.
I was grading papers for a college writing class the other day when I came across a paper that a student had written about measuring the speed of light using the microwaving chacolate method. At first I thought he was just making shit up, but then I looked it up on the interweb, and lo and behold, he hadn't made it up.
Granted, he had copied his paper almost word for word from the interweb and I failed him for that, which just goes to show that it's dangerous to write papers that interest the graders.
While I'm against fundamentally altering the human biological structure to create some sort of super soldier, it's not that difficult to go without food for a few days. While I've never fasted for longer than three consecutive days, there's plenty of people who do.
Do any of you remember spirulina? In I think the mid 80s it was marketed as a food replacement, said to contain all the nutrients the body needed to survive in just a few tablets a day. I only heard about from the ultralight backpacking perspective, but for a while there were some backpackers who would go out into the woods for a week at a time with nothing more to eat than about eight spirulina pills per day. They claimed to have all sorts of energy on these expidition. This worked well untill the same backpackers just tried going out and fasting during their backpacking trips, and what do you know, they reported again having all sorts of energy.
The moral is that humans are capable of functioning at fairly normal levels for a few days without food already.
I've been thinking about this quite a bit lately, and though I'm sure lots of people have thought it before me, I haven't bothered to read their ideas, so I'll pretend like I'm the first.
In most every outdoor activity people can be divided into two groups, those who try to become one with nature and those who try to dominate nature. While this is mostly a mindset and often only reflected in fruty athlete interviews where someone talks about "becoming one with the mountain", that mindset effects actions.
For example, I downhill ski quite a bit, usually something like 20-30 days a season, and I can look at most good skiers and make a fairly good guess at which type of skier they are, if they're trying to feel the pulse of the mountain or make the mountain their bitch.
Personally, when I ski, I'm safe in the knowledge that at the end of the day I can go back to my house and waterbed, and so I try and dominate the mountain. However, when I'm backpacking I know that I'm more at the mercy of the elements and so I get into a more bonding with mother nature mindset.
Also, I find that I have a stronger desire to protect nature when I'm in a bonding with the wild mindset, and in overused wilderness areas it's fairly important to be careful about your impact on nature.
In essence, I've found that both mindsets work differently for different people in different situations and it bothers me when people champion one and decry the other. Or maybe I'm just too much of a weenie to have a strong opinion.
No, the problem with such a long time between releases is that the $12 million they paid for the rights to the character of Duke Nukem is going to waste. Even if the game were released tomorrow, people who weren't playing video games 5 years ago on computers, (a fairly significant portion of the population), will be saying, "Duke Who?"
I was in Malawi and Zambia a couple weeks ago, and it was funny to be driving in a beat up 1970's japanise minibus down a dirt road past mud huts, and have the african next to me answer his cellphone.
Without making a joke about our new targeted advertising overlords; I really don't have a problem with targeted advertising. Sure, I don't enjoy my every movement being tracked on the interweb; but if I'm going to be subjected to advertising I'd rather it be for things I care about.
No, the story wasn't pointing to an amaizing scientific breakthrough, it was pointing to the fact that a college freshman did something spectacular for a college freshman. This kid made a ditrium fusion whaddyacallit his freshman year in college, whereas I was proud of myself for secessuflly discovering where most of my classes were held my freshman year in college.
Actually, I was a volunteer at a hospital in Belize this past year for six months. I assisted a surgeon in around 30-40 surgeries over the course of my time there. About half of our surgeries would be interrurpted by one of the doctor's phones ringing. The circulating nurse would reach inside the doctor's operating gown, take the cellphone from his belt, answer and then tell the doctor who was calling. If the call was important enough and the surgery wasn't at a time-critical moment, the surgeon would have the nurse hold the phone up to his ear, so he didn't become un-sterile by touching it with his hands, and then have a phone conversation while the rest of us, and the sedated patient, waited. The first time it happened it was all very surreal.
Of course I don't mean to imply that this has any correlation to the national do not call registry, or that surgeons typically answer their phones during surgery in more developed countries. I hope.
Actually: I was at Dali Universe in London last weekend, and realized how much of Dali's work contains adult themes; and by adult themes I don't mean balancing checkbooks. I would say that a good third of the works I saw at the exhibition had overt sexual themes. I'll be interested to see what Dali without the sex looks like in a Disney cartoon.
Of course this goes well with Disney's tradition of subtley showing phalluses to children.
I feel your pain. I was there, (London) last weekend and I when we stopped to fill up our rental car I calculated that it would cost me about $50 to fill up my little Subaru there as opposed to around $15-20 here in the states. Not that I'll stop complaining about American gas prices anytime soon.
Yeah, that's great, because you're better than all of us, and we should wait around so we can answer our phones whenever you're damn well ready to return our calls, and consider ourselves lucky to have the priviledge of talking to you.
Berke Breathed is at best a competent artist, though I'll give him points for having his own style.
I disagree, look at his childrens books. A wish for wings that work, the last bassalope, etc... They're beautifully done.
If you'll look through some of your comics, both Breathed's and Watterson's (Calvin and Hobbs) comics have occasionally created comics centered around the shrinking size of the American comic strip. If I'm remembering aright Breathed's were usually a bit more pointed, while Wattersons were more typically self depreciating.
I think Breathed getting half a page is wonderful. While I love the bloom county and outland strips, Breathed's childrens books are beautiful. With more space, I would expect that Breathed will not only make us laugh, but be often profound in that offhanded way that only comics can.
And I suppose the aforementioned barcode will be tattoed on my forehead for convenience sake?
"While this book was a nice read for me, it would have been terrible for most. It was written very poorly."
Apparently the same author wrote the review then? I didn't know it was possible to mangle sentences enough to add that many unnecessary commas. The reviewer has a gift, I hope he stops trying to share it with the world.
Because my tastes are different from many other people's, I usually don't pay too much attention to what I hear about a movie. It's mostly what I see in a trailer that decides for me weather or not I see a movie. Maybe if the movies didn't suck the trailers wouldn't have to either.
I agree that this is a form of blackmail. We all have dirty little secrets we would like hidden from the general public, and that's why we're disgusted by personal blackmail. But companies have no such protection. We expect full disclosure; if there's anything that can be used as blackmail against a company we invest in, we want to know about it. There's a big difference in the sleazyness factor of corporate and personal blackmail.
That said, I don't like the way they tried to profit from their discovery, but I don't think it's as nasty as when similar things happen in the personal arena.
Copy the CD from one of your friends, or the library, then send the artist a check in the mail. If they're a big group who doesn't need the money they'll probably ignore your check, if they're financially struggling, you may help them out; and either way you can feel like you've done a good thing (TM).
From time to time I think about something like that. I remember hearing a few years that it would possible to bradcast quite a bit of information per second over television signals. I even remember hearing a that PBS stations had some sort of digital signal piggybacking their TV signals for a while, but I could be making that part up.
While this would of course have to a be a 'push' technology, it seems like there could be alot of stuff usefully pushed through these channels. Say one channel sends a newsfeed, another sends linux distros, pirate stations that send warez and porn.... Since these wouldn't hog any sort of bandwith (except of course for their part of the wireless spectrum) and, piggybacking on existing television transmitters be available through most of the country, they could be a good thing, taking some of the load off of heavily used software servers and providing a sort of free one way connectivity to much of the nation. There would have to be some sort of scheduling mechanism, i.e. tune in to channel 23 at 4:00 to get the latest Debian ISO. I havn't yet figured out who would pay for this, maybe a combination of PBS type channels and advertising funded channels, but it's just a thought I've been having. Perchance someone can tell me why it would never work.
It's a lie, there are none.
To all the ladies on Trepia who are about to be inundated with indecent propositions from me and my fellow slashdot geeks; I apologize in advance.