It's not just a courtesy thing. You can solve a lot with traffic shaping and other configuration, allowing your roommate to maintain relatively high bittorrent speeds and still have a decent web surfing experience. The one thing, mentioned above, is QoS. The other thing you might want to look into is the size of your router's NAT table and its TCP timeouts. If your roommate has 500 concurrent TCP connections out of a possible 512, that's going to slow you way down. If, on the other hand, you're looking at 500 out of a possible 4096, you should be in a lot better shape. You'll still *notice* when there are bittorrents running, but your internet should still be usable.
skews.com has this article rated as "liberal" -- it looks to me like it's just the result of a (somewhat alarming) study on education. This article here appears to have been labeled "conservative" just because it came from Fox News.
The truth is under no obligation to be "balanced". Rating media bias by tallying how many stories get linked from either side of the political spectrum pushes the media to aim for "balance" instead of the truth. If either side is more corrupt than the other, just report it truthfully. Don't tone the story down just because some jackbag declares that you're biased.
This quest for balance is the reason that news reporters interview people on both sides of the political spectrum, and when one side spouts things that are demonstrably false, the reporter doesn't call them on it. They don't want to look like they're tilted one way or the other. Tilt toward the goddamn truth.
This one is especially good if you have a roommate:
Pop the M and N keys off of their keyboard and switch them around. Then, download a keyboard remapper and remap the M and N keys so that they correspond with the new arrangement (ie, the M key gives you an M, and the N key gives you an N, but their positions are switched). Pop the M and N keys off of your keyboard and switch them as well, but don't remap them.
After repeatedly mistyping (nistypimg?) things, they'll take a good long look at their own keyboard and then have a look at yours, just to compare (and of course, you've anticipated this and switched your own keys around too). With any luck, they'll be convinced they're going crazy.
I've had perfectly good information deleted for dumb reasons (in one case, I cited references but I didn't do it *correctly* so the person wiped most of my article rather than fix the problem). In another case, there has been a debate raging on on the article about the Heroes TV series about including a link to the unofficial Heroes wiki, which has a lot of great info about the series. Some administrator commented that the Heroes wiki includes speculation, and therefore no link to it can be included. Never mind that the speculation is very clearly marked and that the link is to what is most likely the most definitive Heroes website on the web.
I gave up contributing to wikipedia a long time ago. The Deletionists can have their information. There's a big supply of it left, so they can happily go on deleting for years while the rest of the world moves on. I'm just not going to provide them with any more fodder.
*Why is it, when talking about gay porn, it is always about two men having sex but no one seems to have a problem with two women having sex? Why is the chant, "It's Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve" rather than, "It's Adam and Eve not Shannon and Eve"?
God thinks man-on-man sex is gross, but woman-on-woman sex is hot. This is why God punishes gay men with a much higher HIV rate than heterosexuals, and gay women have a lower HIV rate than heterosexuals. Duh.
I know Firefox is completely capable of supporting its own themes without having to go thru the GTK configuration program. What I'd like is maybe a link where I, as a Linux user, can download something that looks like the default theme that Firefox uses under Windows. Obviously I'm not the only person who would like to see this.
Atheism is not a religion, it's just the lack of belief in deities. It is the default position. There is no doctrine, ritual, or morality associated with a lack of belief.
I've seen people get pretty militant about their atheism, as much as I've seen people get militant about their Christianity. The problem is both parties tend to think, "they're all like that" without looking at the bigger picture. Rather than saying "Christians say this" or "atheists say that", people ought to be a bit more specific and say "a small, vocal minority of Christains say this" or "a small, vocal minority of atheists say that". You can turn anything into dogma if you work at it (even a lack of dogma). The trick is recognizing that individual people choose that path. It's not all atheists or all Christians, so don't get dragged into that just because a few idiots on the other side did. That's how stupid shit escalates.
The database should require warrants and be overseen by a provacy advocate group as well as some seriously paranoid geeks for security. But the data should be there if required to prove innocence or guilt. That's all well and good if we could ensure that it would be used in only this way, but the sad reality is that a system like this will almost certainly be abused. The minimal benefit a system like this may provide isn't worth the risk of abuse.
But the real source of this outrage, again, is the fact that they're metering bandwidth *at all*. If their bandwidth were unmetered (as any non-crappy ISP would be) then this wouldn't be an issue, because the download would be free from *anywhere*.
Well, metered access is definitely outrage-worthy, don't get me wrong. The problem is the metered access, though, and not the fact that they're not offering a specific product for download.
Company doesn't want to supply free bandwidth to a competitor, so they pull that competitor's download. Consumers can still download the competitor's product for free elsewhere on the internet. I just can't bring myself to be outraged about this.
The funny thing is that, on this subject, they *don't* know any more than we do. However, they're very good at saying "I don't know" with more words.:)
The interesting thing about the Drake Equation is that, while most of these values are arguably observable (we have the technological knowhow to create a telescope that can see earth-sized planets), the last two would require a statistical sampling of known intelligent civilizations, which isn't something that we can get any statistical significance on until *after* other intelligent life is discovered.
Because wow, I'd have quit playing video games long ago if I knew that they had a 1 in 2 chance of killing me.
I suppose the other (albeit less likely) possibility is that this respectable and unbiased researcher may have accidentally used hyperbole in an accidental attempt to drum up fear in support of his findings... And in all fairness, he technically says that smoking is a "slightly larger" danger, so maybe violent media only turns 45% of its viewers into murderers.
Government provided healthcare is, on average, less expensive and more effective than private health care. The jury is still out on efficiency, but you don't see Canadians waiting 5 hours to get treatment in an emergency room.
Americans pay more taxes per capita to insure 30% of our population than most countries with nationalized healthcare pay to insure 100% of their population. American healthcare has introduced layers of bureaucracy that are specifically designed to deny people care.
The profit motive is not a panacea. It's great in most circumstances, but sometimes it makes for a massive mess, especially when you get into a situation when a few huge companies control an entire market. This "vote with your dollars" thing only works if your choice is better than a douchebag or a turd sandwich.
Ditto here. A while ago, I took the time to write a nice article on bubble eye goldfish. This is the last iteration that contains most of my information:
Apparently my original article was gutted because it didn't include footnotes. Rather than taking the time to footnote the article (the information was all taken from references, and the references I used were cited at the bottom), someone saw fit just to gut the article, removing the majority of the useful information. Couldn't they have put a note at the top saying that the article needs to be footnoted?
I see this crap happening all the time, and not just on articles I've contributed to. But it's gotten to the point where I feel like if I go in and edit an article, the edit is just going to be reverted. Why bother?
Slashdot Mirror
It's not just a courtesy thing. You can solve a lot with traffic shaping and other configuration, allowing your roommate to maintain relatively high bittorrent speeds and still have a decent web surfing experience. The one thing, mentioned above, is QoS. The other thing you might want to look into is the size of your router's NAT table and its TCP timeouts. If your roommate has 500 concurrent TCP connections out of a possible 512, that's going to slow you way down. If, on the other hand, you're looking at 500 out of a possible 4096, you should be in a lot better shape. You'll still *notice* when there are bittorrents running, but your internet should still be usable.
here
here
You've never seen MySpace have you?
Most MySpace pages actually cause blindness.
Case in point:
skews.com has this article rated as "liberal" -- it looks to me like it's just the result of a (somewhat alarming) study on education. This article here appears to have been labeled "conservative" just because it came from Fox News.
The truth is under no obligation to be "balanced". Rating media bias by tallying how many stories get linked from either side of the political spectrum pushes the media to aim for "balance" instead of the truth. If either side is more corrupt than the other, just report it truthfully. Don't tone the story down just because some jackbag declares that you're biased.
This quest for balance is the reason that news reporters interview people on both sides of the political spectrum, and when one side spouts things that are demonstrably false, the reporter doesn't call them on it. They don't want to look like they're tilted one way or the other. Tilt toward the goddamn truth.
</rant>
This one is especially good if you have a roommate:
Pop the M and N keys off of their keyboard and switch them around. Then, download a keyboard remapper and remap the M and N keys so that they correspond with the new arrangement (ie, the M key gives you an M, and the N key gives you an N, but their positions are switched). Pop the M and N keys off of your keyboard and switch them as well, but don't remap them.
After repeatedly mistyping (nistypimg?) things, they'll take a good long look at their own keyboard and then have a look at yours, just to compare (and of course, you've anticipated this and switched your own keys around too). With any luck, they'll be convinced they're going crazy.
I've had perfectly good information deleted for dumb reasons (in one case, I cited references but I didn't do it *correctly* so the person wiped most of my article rather than fix the problem). In another case, there has been a debate raging on on the article about the Heroes TV series about including a link to the unofficial Heroes wiki, which has a lot of great info about the series. Some administrator commented that the Heroes wiki includes speculation, and therefore no link to it can be included. Never mind that the speculation is very clearly marked and that the link is to what is most likely the most definitive Heroes website on the web.
I gave up contributing to wikipedia a long time ago. The Deletionists can have their information. There's a big supply of it left, so they can happily go on deleting for years while the rest of the world moves on. I'm just not going to provide them with any more fodder.
Bart
*Why is it, when talking about gay porn, it is always about two men having sex but no one seems to have a problem with two women having sex? Why is the chant, "It's Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve" rather than, "It's Adam and Eve not Shannon and Eve"?
God thinks man-on-man sex is gross, but woman-on-woman sex is hot. This is why God punishes gay men with a much higher HIV rate than heterosexuals, and gay women have a lower HIV rate than heterosexuals. Duh.
I don't use gnome, I use KDE.
I know Firefox is completely capable of supporting its own themes without having to go thru the GTK configuration program. What I'd like is maybe a link where I, as a Linux user, can download something that looks like the default theme that Firefox uses under Windows. Obviously I'm not the only person who would like to see this.
I don't want to develop a theme... I just like the existing windows theme a lot more and would like to use it in Linux.
The default Linux theme is awful... is there any way I can get the windows theme for it under Linux?
I've seen people get pretty militant about their atheism, as much as I've seen people get militant about their Christianity. The problem is both parties tend to think, "they're all like that" without looking at the bigger picture. Rather than saying "Christians say this" or "atheists say that", people ought to be a bit more specific and say "a small, vocal minority of Christains say this" or "a small, vocal minority of atheists say that". You can turn anything into dogma if you work at it (even a lack of dogma). The trick is recognizing that individual people choose that path. It's not all atheists or all Christians, so don't get dragged into that just because a few idiots on the other side did. That's how stupid shit escalates.
I'm pretty anti-MS, but this can only be a good thing as far as I can tell.
But the real source of this outrage, again, is the fact that they're metering bandwidth *at all*. If their bandwidth were unmetered (as any non-crappy ISP would be) then this wouldn't be an issue, because the download would be free from *anywhere*.
Well, metered access is definitely outrage-worthy, don't get me wrong. The problem is the metered access, though, and not the fact that they're not offering a specific product for download.
Company doesn't want to supply free bandwidth to a competitor, so they pull that competitor's download. Consumers can still download the competitor's product for free elsewhere on the internet. I just can't bring myself to be outraged about this.
Whiny bastard, going off and doing something constructive. What's with people nowadays? Stop creating and consume, dammit!
The funny thing is that, on this subject, they *don't* know any more than we do. However, they're very good at saying "I don't know" with more words. :)
The interesting thing about the Drake Equation is that, while most of these values are arguably observable (we have the technological knowhow to create a telescope that can see earth-sized planets), the last two would require a statistical sampling of known intelligent civilizations, which isn't something that we can get any statistical significance on until *after* other intelligent life is discovered.
That would be really sad, if it were remotely true. :)
...is that violent video games kill 440,000 Americans every year?
Because wow, I'd have quit playing video games long ago if I knew that they had a 1 in 2 chance of killing me.
I suppose the other (albeit less likely) possibility is that this respectable and unbiased researcher may have accidentally used hyperbole in an accidental attempt to drum up fear in support of his findings... And in all fairness, he technically says that smoking is a "slightly larger" danger, so maybe violent media only turns 45% of its viewers into murderers.
...seeing as how nowadays you can outpace the US economy just by not tanking.
Government provided healthcare is, on average, less expensive and more effective than private health care. The jury is still out on efficiency, but you don't see Canadians waiting 5 hours to get treatment in an emergency room.
Americans pay more taxes per capita to insure 30% of our population than most countries with nationalized healthcare pay to insure 100% of their population. American healthcare has introduced layers of bureaucracy that are specifically designed to deny people care.
The profit motive is not a panacea. It's great in most circumstances, but sometimes it makes for a massive mess, especially when you get into a situation when a few huge companies control an entire market. This "vote with your dollars" thing only works if your choice is better than a douchebag or a turd sandwich.
Ditto here. A while ago, I took the time to write a nice article on bubble eye goldfish. This is the last iteration that contains most of my information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bubble_Eye&oldid=133225614
This is what's there now:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bubble_Eye
Apparently my original article was gutted because it didn't include footnotes. Rather than taking the time to footnote the article (the information was all taken from references, and the references I used were cited at the bottom), someone saw fit just to gut the article, removing the majority of the useful information. Couldn't they have put a note at the top saying that the article needs to be footnoted?
I see this crap happening all the time, and not just on articles I've contributed to. But it's gotten to the point where I feel like if I go in and edit an article, the edit is just going to be reverted. Why bother?