inability to go more than a page or two without repeating a cultural reference already made twenty seven times (either in that work or earlier) or superimposing his political or computer biases - even when such references or superimpositions have nothing to do with the story at hand.
Sounds like Heinlein to me!
Umm.... No.
Seriously, did you ever read any of his books? TANSTAAFL and free love and cat's are good and let's have sex with our mothers by using a time machine, and then space some slavers. Next we'll talk like 30's gangsters because that's how people talk. After that we'll convince a bad guy to give up because we can prove him logically wrong. Wash, rinse, repeat for 500 pages * 20 books.
Yes, I have read Heinlein, and what you write above shows that either you haven't - or it's been so long you've forgotten them.
When power fails where I live (Arizona), people die from the heat.
They die not of the heat - but of not being acclimated to the heat. (I grew up in Florida - where the conditions are far worse because of the humidity, even though the temperature is lower. I know whereof I speak.)
And have you ever tried going a couple days with your bedroom temperature in the 90's? For myself at least, it disrupts my sleep so much that it affects my quality of life quite severely.
Again, that's not because of the heat - but because of your failure to acclimate yourself to the heat. I've spent *weeks* sleeping with my bedroom temp in the 90's.
In the places where it gets hot, AC is unavoidable.
Right. That's why nobody lived in Arizona (or Florida, or South Georgia, or Texas) before the invention of air conditioning.
Except I've been using the same Laserjet 4050 for 5 1/2 years - meaning my cost per year in hardware is under $75 so far - and parts are cheap if it breaks (crossing my fingers, but so far good luck) - and I expect to get at least another 3-4 (or more) years from it.
Congrats! You've got a very rare gem there - one that sits extremely far out on the right hand end of the bell curve.
And given that most cheap inkjets give out after 1 -2 years of use, (longest I ever got was 2 1/2 years, I had a $89 epson that didn't make it 10 months) you are going to be buying at least 3 - 4 in the same time period.
That's an assumption - not a fact. My (inkjet) printers tend to last 2+ years each. Ditto for several other people I know.
I have had both inkjets and lasers and the lasers are far more economical in the long run.
Again, that's an assumption - not a fact. Which is more economical depends on your print volume and the nature of your printing.
I don't give a rats ass about calculations for tax purposes
You'd have a point if I had made any mention of calculations for tax purposes. You tossed out some numbers - I merely actually performed the calculations you implied, and found that the actual answers were quite different than what you assumed. (Which I see now is typical for you - you are unable to discern the difference between assumption and fact.)
Injets are made to be disposable. They want you to just buy their newest model when the old one dies.
You live in a fools paradise if you think any consumer grade equipment is anything other than disposable.
I'm keeping track of the power spent so far, and interested to see if there is a noticeable drop. Noticeable to me = $5 - $10 average. I'm not expecting a bill to go down by half, I do live in North Carolina and it's summer time so the AC is on full blast most of the time.
If you interested in saving energy and lowering your bills - why don't you learn to live without the AC, or with is set to 90 degrees or so?
Indeed, I think one of the reasons Heinlein is popular among geeky types is because he emphasized the sexual attractiveness of mind, character, and accomplishment. The fastest way to a Heinlein heroine's heart was witty repartee or a devastatingly clever and insightful argument...you know, the/. ideal for comments, +5 Sexy, that kind of thing.
Personally, across my 4+ decades spent going around the Sun - I've found that women who aren't attracted to witty repartee or a devastatingly clever and insightful arguments aren't worthing spending any time around.
My general rule of thumb is - the more you spend initially on the printer, the less the consumables usually are. That $80 inkjet will use $100 worth of ink in a year, but my $400 laser printer uses about $40 of toner a year...
That's fine if cost of consumables is your metric for determining the value of a purchase. (I don't know why you'd choose such a useless metric, but - whatever.) But let's look at the TCO for the first year of use (a much more common and useful metric), using your figures above:
Inkjet: $180
Laser: $440
Running the TCO out across multiple years, including the amortized cost of the printer, shows the inkjet to be a clear winner with a TCO around half that of the laser.
You can either pay now, or pay later...
Using your figures above, choosing the laser means you pay now and you pay later.
Your group must have been gaming in a cave if White Wolf's Storyteller (1991) system with its lack of classes was so surprising. Skill based, classless systems had exists for over a decade at that point, including well known systems Chaosium's Basic Role-Playing System in Call of Cthulhu (1981), Hero Game's Hero System in Champions (1981), and Iron Crowne's Rolemaster (~1980). By the time Storyteller showed up, classless gameplay continued in games like Steve Jackson's GURPS (1986) and Mayfair's Mayfair Exponential Game System in DC Heroes (1985).
Furthermore, it's not a clear case of "classless with skills is better than classes." D&D remains the most popular RPG in the United States; these aren't millions of players who are simply ignorant of classless systems. Classless systems have existed for almost 25 years and are widely available. For many younger player, classless games have existed since they were born. Yet they play D&D.
Indeed. and over on the MMO side of the house classless systems were 'present at the beginning' - I.E Ultima Online. Interestingly enough - the large majority of players choses to straightjacket themselves into classes (templates) despite the freedom the game allows. (Mostly, I suspect, because over time it's been discovered which templates are most powerful/effective - and most MMO players are after power and effectiveness instead of unique characters.)
But unlike most ghost written crap, this is being finished by a very good author (and alumnus from my college:-p). I think Robinson's up to it, should be a good read (though it might contain some very bad puns)
The words 'very good author' and 'Robinson' don't belong in the same sentence except where one is being indicated as not equivalent to the other.
Robinson once had great promise - but he's never lived up to it. Instead, he's merely been writing and rewriting the same story with the same wooden and forgettable characters. (Which is a real shame - because during the original Callahan's series, he had an excellent touch for creating memorable characters.) His later works are made even more tedious by his inability to go more than a page or two without repeating a cultural reference already made twenty seven times (either in that work or earlier) or superimposing his political or computer biases - even when such references or superimpositions have nothing to do with the story at hand.
In terms of oil not burned, or greenhouse gases not exhausted into the atmosphere, one bulb is equivalent to taking 1.3 million cars off the roads.
Setting aside the debate over that statement - if it is even remotely true, then these bulbs are not just simply a 'good idea'. They are a moral imperative.
Remember where those $100 bills that Hezbollah is handing out come from. Hint: they do not originate in Iran.
They are a moral imperative only if you are deluded enough to believe that reducing electrical consumption means significantly fewer dollars flowing to the Middle East from the US. Hint: Imported oil makes up a vanishingly small percentage of the already tiny percentage of electricity that comes from oil. Don't be misled by the analogy you quote.
Goes to show... how important intelligent communication is. While a topic like 'TV Culture, Myth and Star Trek', in my opinion, does not provide a revolutionary breakthrough in the study of humanities, the fact that she intelligently and effectively enumerates and supports her argument is enough to merit the award she received.
Not really. How to enumerate and support your argument is a skill you should learn in high school, at worst about your sophmore year in college. A PhD candidate is expected to go far beyond that.
ZachPruckowski: "Wikipedia works rather well at the core..." owlnation: "No... maybe... how do you know for sure? There's simply never any guarantee of that."
Where's the guarantee that information in, say, Britannica is accurate?
I'm not just being a smart-ass; it's a serious question. What, exactly, *is* a trusted source? What makes a fact, a fact? How much do we take on faith whenever we accept knowledge without firsthand experience?
Yes, it's a smart-ass question - typical of someone who just wants to handwave and dissimulate. They think asking makes them look smart and insightful - when in actuality it makes them look like what they are, intellectual poseurs.
Wikipedia has a core policy of Verifiability.
That would be useful - if they actually followed and applied it.
Anything which does not cite sources should be automatically highly suspect. Anything which does cite sources can be checked. You thus have the ability to make your own determination as to value, or lack thereof.
Again - another pretty theory that fails in practice. If you edit an article and cite a $200 reference book (one held only in a few specialized libraries or by private researchers) - it promptly gets [edited|reverted] back to a version that cites web pages. Even if the pages in question are demonstrably wrong - but the clod who (acts like he) owns the page only knows whats on the web. He doesn't give a rip about authoritative books, and everyone else supports him - because he can 'prove' he is correct. (Despite the fact that Wikipedia's own policies state that using such web pages is incorrect.)
Wikipedia forces one to realize just how much we rely on the word of others for all our information. The error is not in putting trust in Wikipedia, but in putting blind faith in everything else.
No, the error lies in putting trust in Wikipedia. Period. All the handwaving in the world won't eliminate its deep and persistent flaws.
intrepid two-year college level training in how to become a successful Project Entrepreneur
Entrepreneurship is something that, almost by definition, can't be taught, because it involves identifying how to use resources no one had before thought to identify. If you can systematize the method, it's not longer entrepreneurship, but a rote process.
Hardly.
Cooking, for example, is deeply systemized - but it's hardly rote. Considerably experience and knowledge is required to routinely produce great dishes. (I can hand you a recipe - and even with that experience and knowledge you might not be able to duplicate it. My sister, who is a trained chef, cannot (yet) duplicate several of my dishes.)
Chess is deeply systemized - but it takes considerable skill to know how and when to apply a specific tactic, or a counter to a specific tactic (after learning how to recognize it).
Military tactics and doctrine are deeply systemized - but it's decidely nontrivial to apply those in real situations. When the SSBN I served on went on patrol, we carried a shelf of books nearly five feet long detailing the tactics, doctrine, and philosophy of conducting a deterrent patrol as well as general submarine operations - but it takes years to master the material and know when to follow 'the book' and when to 'punt' (go your own way).
Now, I'll agree with you that you cannot teach how to identify opportunities - but you can codify how to search for, evaluate, and exploit them.
Re:Steal This Film fails to persuade...
on
Steal This Film
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· Score: 1
TPB, at least through this documentary, really tries to portray itself as an advocate for change in intellectual property laws, but fails (in my opinion) to offer any real compelling reason why that should be,
The Pirate Bay (TPB) differs not one whit from from what seemingly is the majority position of those who want IP reform - an adolescent belief that nobody has any right to dicate to them how they should behave.
People ought to be able to get music and have fair use with it. Before the age of Digital Rights Management (DRM), it was quite easy to be able to buy a CD, duplicate it, make mixes of different songs, copy it to a cassette tape, etc. within the bounds of personal use. The new locks that come with downloadable content are unacceptable because they remove the ability of the user to play it whenever, wherever, and on whatever they want.
The sticking point - is that the creators of the content have rights too... And there seems, currently, to be no way of protecting those rights short of a full lockdown.
This only adds fuel and justification to the piracy movement.
The 'piracy movement' long predates DRM, and will persist long after an equitable solution is found. Why? Because the 'piracy movement' isn't, in the end, based on political beliefs - but on immaturity and lack of respect for others rights. (The 'piracy movement' likes to put a pretty and philosophical face on it - but this movie from TPB starkly reveals the true face.)
Why not pick out some important articles, or high quality articles from the other languages, taking into account relevency to africans, just trnaslate them over as seed material.
Translate them over into what? Africa isn't a monolithic culture, nor is is there an 'African' language to translate into. Africa (the continent) has hundreds (thousands?) of each.
Kid admits to losing his toy in the toilet, bomb squad comes in and they interrogate him in that fashion? Fuck that for a game of soldiers...
Right. After they find a suspicious object, someone comes up and tells them 'these are not the droids you are looking for'... It's not possible that somebody with evil intent would attempt to divert attention away from himself or his activities is it?
I suspect that they could have pressured Turkey into giving him up for extradition if they really wanted to be pricks about it, but Turkey would've told them to piss off and every news outlet would murder the public image of the agency in full public view.
You suspect incorrectly - hunting pedophiles and handing them over for justice is something virtually every nation in the world pays at least lip service to. (Even nations that (behind the scenes) encourage sexual tourism make a great show of hunting child prostitutes and their johns.) They *might* have just made a pretense of searching rather than a real search - but the last thing they would do is refuse outright.
And the police can use agents in the form of paid informants who are involved in drugs to find drug-dealers or somesuch,
Certainly. I never said they couldn't use agents - but that they cannot use agents to circumvent the restrictions the law places on police.
So you're correct about the uranium devices being somewhat less problematic than the plutonium devices; they tend to be bigger and have a lower power for their size and weight,
Sure, if you limit yourself to 1950's designs and processes, they are somewhat less problematic today. In addition, Iran doesn't need a highly optimized weapon like the US/USSR did - even if its barely deliverable, it's enough.
and I don't think they [uranium fueled bombs] can be as easily used as the initiator of a hydrogen (fusion) bomb.
Iran doesn't need a hydrogen weapon. For their (short range) goals, something on the order of 40 kilotons is more than sufficient.
Be *very* careful when trying to discern the possible paths that Iran might choose - because the political and strategic situations that drove the US and the USSR during the cold war are *very* different than those facing Iran.
The cheapest way to do this would probably be to embed a mesh into the sheet rock. The manufacturer of the sheet rock could do this in their factory; you'd just select the "faraday sheet rock" model when remodelling. No extra labor costs, which, after all, is the biggest part of construction.
Utterly, completely, and laughably incorrect.
In order to form a Faraday cage - all the edges of the all the mesh in all of the sheetrock have to be connected together (very expensive in terms of labor) without any gap larger than about 1/8-1/4 of the wavelengths of interest (quite short in this instance, thus requiring skilled (expensive) labor). Then it has to grounded. Wiring in the building has to enter and exit via special filters to prevent them from acting as antennas, as does plumbing and air ducting. (More expensive components, more labor to install, more labor to test the installation.) The you need special doors and doorways, and special windows and frames... Building a Faraday cage is niether as simple nor as cheap as Mythbusters or tinfoil hat websites would have you believe.
The feds can't approve of someone breaking the law, obviously, or acknowledge that someone without warrants or CARNIVORE can do the job better than the ol' FBI. But they can turn a blind eye to it, if only for the crime of pedophilia and nothing else.
No, they cannot. Under US law what the FBI did is illegal. Not possibly illegal, not skirting the boundaries, not working in a grey area - but black letter law illegal. The police cannot use agents to accomplish what they themselves are not allowed to do. Period.
As I read the brief article it defiantly made me consider both sides of the story; however, in the end I side with my heart. Fuck the kid touchers, let em' rot.
Ah yes - anything for children, rights and due process be dammed.
And I should note in passing, that possession of pictures != abuse of a child by possessor. Except, that legally it is - which is thoughtcrime, which is a Bad Thing. By extending the same legal principle - all those pictures of murder victims in true crime books? Possession of one should make one also responsible for the murder. But it doesn't.
This guy could be doing some real garbage cracking, screwing with legit business and good people, but, he didn't. He went after the scum. I agree 100% with 1069. Go for it!
He didn't 'go after the scum', he happened across the scum in the course of committing a crime. I don't think for an instance it's either the first or the only crime he's comitted.
Slashdot Mirror
I grew up in Florida and Texas.
Umm.... No.
Yes, I have read Heinlein, and what you write above shows that either you haven't - or it's been so long you've forgotten them.
Nope.
They die not of the heat - but of not being acclimated to the heat. (I grew up in Florida - where the conditions are far worse because of the humidity, even though the temperature is lower. I know whereof I speak.)
Again, that's not because of the heat - but because of your failure to acclimate yourself to the heat. I've spent *weeks* sleeping with my bedroom temp in the 90's.
Right. That's why nobody lived in Arizona (or Florida, or South Georgia, or Texas) before the invention of air conditioning.
Congrats! You've got a very rare gem there - one that sits extremely far out on the right hand end of the bell curve.
That's an assumption - not a fact. My (inkjet) printers tend to last 2+ years each. Ditto for several other people I know.
Again, that's an assumption - not a fact. Which is more economical depends on your print volume and the nature of your printing.
You'd have a point if I had made any mention of calculations for tax purposes. You tossed out some numbers - I merely actually performed the calculations you implied, and found that the actual answers were quite different than what you assumed. (Which I see now is typical for you - you are unable to discern the difference between assumption and fact.)
You live in a fools paradise if you think any consumer grade equipment is anything other than disposable.
If you interested in saving energy and lowering your bills - why don't you learn to live without the AC, or with is set to 90 degrees or so?
Personally, across my 4+ decades spent going around the Sun - I've found that women who aren't attracted to witty repartee or a devastatingly clever and insightful arguments aren't worthing spending any time around.
That's fine if cost of consumables is your metric for determining the value of a purchase. (I don't know why you'd choose such a useless metric, but - whatever.) But let's look at the TCO for the first year of use (a much more common and useful metric), using your figures above:
Running the TCO out across multiple years, including the amortized cost of the printer, shows the inkjet to be a clear winner with a TCO around half that of the laser.
Using your figures above, choosing the laser means you pay now and you pay later.
Indeed. and over on the MMO side of the house classless systems were 'present at the beginning' - I.E Ultima Online. Interestingly enough - the large majority of players choses to straightjacket themselves into classes (templates) despite the freedom the game allows. (Mostly, I suspect, because over time it's been discovered which templates are most powerful/effective - and most MMO players are after power and effectiveness instead of unique characters.)
The words 'very good author' and 'Robinson' don't belong in the same sentence except where one is being indicated as not equivalent to the other.
Robinson once had great promise - but he's never lived up to it. Instead, he's merely been writing and rewriting the same story with the same wooden and forgettable characters. (Which is a real shame - because during the original Callahan's series, he had an excellent touch for creating memorable characters.) His later works are made even more tedious by his inability to go more than a page or two without repeating a cultural reference already made twenty seven times (either in that work or earlier) or superimposing his political or computer biases - even when such references or superimpositions have nothing to do with the story at hand.
They are a moral imperative only if you are deluded enough to believe that reducing electrical consumption means significantly fewer dollars flowing to the Middle East from the US. Hint: Imported oil makes up a vanishingly small percentage of the already tiny percentage of electricity that comes from oil. Don't be misled by the analogy you quote.
Not really. How to enumerate and support your argument is a skill you should learn in high school, at worst about your sophmore year in college. A PhD candidate is expected to go far beyond that.
Another post that dares to question the Great and Mighty Wikipedia moderated down into non-existence. Sad.
Yes, it's a smart-ass question - typical of someone who just wants to handwave and dissimulate. They think asking makes them look smart and insightful - when in actuality it makes them look like what they are, intellectual poseurs.
That would be useful - if they actually followed and applied it.
Again - another pretty theory that fails in practice. If you edit an article and cite a $200 reference book (one held only in a few specialized libraries or by private researchers) - it promptly gets [edited|reverted] back to a version that cites web pages. Even if the pages in question are demonstrably wrong - but the clod who (acts like he) owns the page only knows whats on the web. He doesn't give a rip about authoritative books, and everyone else supports him - because he can 'prove' he is correct. (Despite the fact that Wikipedia's own policies state that using such web pages is incorrect.)
No, the error lies in putting trust in Wikipedia. Period. All the handwaving in the world won't eliminate its deep and persistent flaws.
Hardly.
- Cooking, for example, is deeply systemized - but it's hardly rote. Considerably experience and knowledge is required to routinely produce great dishes. (I can hand you a recipe - and even with that experience and knowledge you might not be able to duplicate it. My sister, who is a trained chef, cannot (yet) duplicate several of my dishes.)
- Chess is deeply systemized - but it takes considerable skill to know how and when to apply a specific tactic, or a counter to a specific tactic (after learning how to recognize it).
- Military tactics and doctrine are deeply systemized - but it's decidely nontrivial to apply those in real situations. When the SSBN I served on went on patrol, we carried a shelf of books nearly five feet long detailing the tactics, doctrine, and philosophy of conducting a deterrent patrol as well as general submarine operations - but it takes years to master the material and know when to follow 'the book' and when to 'punt' (go your own way).
Now, I'll agree with you that you cannot teach how to identify opportunities - but you can codify how to search for, evaluate, and exploit them.The Pirate Bay (TPB) differs not one whit from from what seemingly is the majority position of those who want IP reform - an adolescent belief that nobody has any right to dicate to them how they should behave.
The sticking point - is that the creators of the content have rights too... And there seems, currently, to be no way of protecting those rights short of a full lockdown.
The 'piracy movement' long predates DRM, and will persist long after an equitable solution is found. Why? Because the 'piracy movement' isn't, in the end, based on political beliefs - but on immaturity and lack of respect for others rights. (The 'piracy movement' likes to put a pretty and philosophical face on it - but this movie from TPB starkly reveals the true face.)
If nothing you said implied that - I wouldn't have answered how I did, would I have?
If it wasn't ratified by the Senate - it's not a treaty.
Here's a clue for you since you seem to be in dire need of one: 'minimize' != 'zero'
Translate them over into what? Africa isn't a monolithic culture, nor is is there an 'African' language to translate into. Africa (the continent) has hundreds (thousands?) of each.
Right. After they find a suspicious object, someone comes up and tells them 'these are not the droids you are looking for'... It's not possible that somebody with evil intent would attempt to divert attention away from himself or his activities is it?
You suspect incorrectly - hunting pedophiles and handing them over for justice is something virtually every nation in the world pays at least lip service to. (Even nations that (behind the scenes) encourage sexual tourism make a great show of hunting child prostitutes and their johns.) They *might* have just made a pretense of searching rather than a real search - but the last thing they would do is refuse outright.
Certainly. I never said they couldn't use agents - but that they cannot use agents to circumvent the restrictions the law places on police.
Sure, if you limit yourself to 1950's designs and processes, they are somewhat less problematic today. In addition, Iran doesn't need a highly optimized weapon like the US/USSR did - even if its barely deliverable, it's enough.
Iran doesn't need a hydrogen weapon. For their (short range) goals, something on the order of 40 kilotons is more than sufficient.
Be *very* careful when trying to discern the possible paths that Iran might choose - because the political and strategic situations that drove the US and the USSR during the cold war are *very* different than those facing Iran.
Utterly, completely, and laughably incorrect.
In order to form a Faraday cage - all the edges of the all the mesh in all of the sheetrock have to be connected together (very expensive in terms of labor) without any gap larger than about 1/8-1/4 of the wavelengths of interest (quite short in this instance, thus requiring skilled (expensive) labor). Then it has to grounded. Wiring in the building has to enter and exit via special filters to prevent them from acting as antennas, as does plumbing and air ducting. (More expensive components, more labor to install, more labor to test the installation.) The you need special doors and doorways, and special windows and frames... Building a Faraday cage is niether as simple nor as cheap as Mythbusters or tinfoil hat websites would have you believe.
No, they cannot. Under US law what the FBI did is illegal. Not possibly illegal, not skirting the boundaries, not working in a grey area - but black letter law illegal. The police cannot use agents to accomplish what they themselves are not allowed to do. Period.
Ah yes - anything for children, rights and due process be dammed.
And I should note in passing, that possession of pictures != abuse of a child by possessor. Except, that legally it is - which is thoughtcrime, which is a Bad Thing. By extending the same legal principle - all those pictures of murder victims in true crime books? Possession of one should make one also responsible for the murder. But it doesn't.
He didn't 'go after the scum', he happened across the scum in the course of committing a crime. I don't think for an instance it's either the first or the only crime he's comitted.