He said: "I just got started taking Computer Science classes at my local university"... This doesn't sound at all like a grad student to me. If he's just starting CS at a local school, he's probably a tuition-paying undergrad, and therefore what he does on his own time should be his own business, and the school should have no particular stake in it.
That's old fashioned grammar. Nowadays, the apostrophe is used to warn the reader "here comes an 's'". Otherwise, they may be startled if they weren't expecting it, and we all know that stress is bad for you. Safety first.
A few years back in was in NJ on business, and pulled into a gas station to refill my car. The guy said his guy who pumped gas was on lunch break and wouldn't be back for 10 minutes, so I went and pumped my gas, having forgotten that that was highly illegal, and he yelled at me when I went to pay.
The guy was obviously just screwing with you. Otherwise, he'd have just pumped the gas himself (it's not like there's a special 'gas pumping certification' that the guy on lunch had that the guy you talked to didn't), and in 20 years of driving in Jersey I think I've had two places actually ask me not to pump my own gas when I didn't want to wait. They weren't concerned about safety though, they just wanted to make sure I didn't try to scam them out of some free gas.
I remember a few years ago a comedian talking about that. He was saying how if you used an ethnic, racial or religious slur somebody would always jump out of their seat and say "Hey, I'm a [insert group here], and you can't talk about us that way", but if he made a white-trash joke nobody was ever too eager to jump up and yell "Hey, I'm white-trash, and you can't talk about us that way".
Then your boss cringes, big-time. He remembers last week when you ordered a beer at the team lunch. He thinks, "crud, I'm an idiot and just assumed this polite, new employee was a Mormon. How I play this may determine what sort of lawsuit comes up against the company." Your boss may have just moved up the ladder from a job at a place where everyone was Mormon, and he just forgot that this time things could be different.
Um, why wouldn't he (the boss) just answer the question? "Oh, it's a Mormon thing, we go to blah blah blah whatever". I'm not aware of any labor laws that forbid any and all mention of religion, they forbid discriminatory behaviour and harassment based on religious preference. If Bob Christianson in accounting tells his cube-mate Moishe Goldbaum about the nice choir at Christmas Mass he is not violating either of these tenets (unless of course Moishe has asked him not to).
I think you're misunderstanding the use of "exclusive" in this context. It doesn't mean only a chosen few can have it, it means that it's only available from one source, in this case, that's iTunes.
As a 10th Grader in the US, and a linux observer, I do realize that, however, going by the kids I have seen in the local public schools (Thankfully I don't have to go there!), The majority are too stupid to do it subtly enough that the local admin wouldn't notice, and then their privileges are revoked.
While it's nice that you can go to an expensive private school, eventually you'll probably learn that as far as intelligence or stupidity goes, it doesn't mean as much as you think it does. Although a good private school can be an advantage, that's all it is, an advantage. I can still find true geniuses in public schools, and drooling morons with rich parents in good private schools. There's probably a kid or two in that school that would surprise you if you actually knew them.
Arrogance isn't a particularly admirable quality, its abundance on Slashdot notwhithstanding.
As I said, donate to relevant charities. Our country donates more to charity than anyone so I'm sure it could easily be funded.
If this were enough all on it's own, why do we have problems of homelessness and poverty among the elderly now, with both charity and government intervention? Are you seriously suggesting that the only reason that charities that help these people are underfunded is because people won't donate as long as Social Security is around?
As to rest of your post, I fail to see how a society taking care of it's older citizens is a flaw in any kind of moral code that wants to be seen as anything other than savage greed. These people are the ones who worked to build the society you're living in now. Leaving them to beg for charity and hope for the best is an idea that mocks the very concept of a "moral code". If you find yourself in a position when you're too old to work that you don't need any financial help to live, great, say no thank you and don't accept it or donate it to someone who needs it, but to begrudge everyone else even a bare minimum of what they need to live day-to-day shows a lack of compassion and level of greed that I find profoundly disturbing.
Out of curiosity, who exactly are we defending the Europeans from at this point? The Russians walked unfettered across the boarder into Georgia recently even though they're supposedly a "close ally" of ours, and the days of us preparing for a massive Soviet ground invasion of Europe are pretty long gone. Our biggest military bills now seem to be flushing good resources down the toilet in Iraq, and last time I checked we are under no imminent threat of attack by the Iraqi military now or in the past. Even if we are spending a ton of money on defending Europe from someone, why? They have their own militaries, whom we've asked for help (the "coalition of the willing" in the Middle East). If we have an inflated military budget, blame ourselves, not the people that we insist on "protecting".
That's all interesting, but it doesn't change the fact that Dave pointed out, which is NASA didn't invent velcro. Nobody questioned the fact that they use a lot of it.
Conversely, they may also be more prone to throwing the thing intentionally. I've been to Superbowl parties and seen everything from mini-hotdogs to half-full cans of beer thrown at the TV on a bad play.....
Wow, I was waaaaay off with the Digg comment before. You're more a YouTube comments kinda guy. There's hope for you though....sometimes people are just late-bloomers as far as maturity goes. With a little luck you won't always be like this, so keep that chin-up little-fella!
'Course, had you had the reading comprehension of a 12 year old, you wouldn't think a point-by-point reply was ambiguous. Do you use a ruler to help you focus on the line you're reading? Or do you still do it one word at a time with your finger?
C'mon Bri, high-school is over, time to put aside the childish attempts at insults. That was so weak and uncreative it's hard to believe you wasted the energy to type it. If you don't want to be misunderstood, post in a clear style. If you want to be incomprehensible, then just keep on doing what you're doing. I don't really care.
There were at least 20 people.
Oh, well, then you're a real long-termer! I stand corrected! Would you like to make any other unsubstantiated and unprovable claims? I'm in the mood to believe!
(See, I'm quoting now to point out the wording. This is necessary because my reply dismisses the bulk of what you said - because it's so dismissible. By keeping my reply short and punchy, and responding in a truthful yet exaggerated way, it becomes humorous.)
And you know what? If you just said "There were at least 20 people" without quoting, nobody would have the vaguest idea what you were yammering about. Since you quoted though, there was really no doubt. Apparently you can learn, good-boy! By the way, could you point out where you were being humorous? Normally I'd be able to tell, but since there's nothing actually clever, witty or even remotely funny in your post, it's kind of hard to find.
People CAN pick and choose whether or not to reply to me, and they can do so having just read my post, after seeing whether or not I use quotes.
And I did. And then since you were unable to convey what you meant the first time, you felt you had to return to clarify. 'Course, had you formatted the post in a way that was less ambiguous, you wouldn't have had to, but whatever.
Still on slashdot in a year? What are you insinuating?
That you'll probably go back to Digg, or 4chan.
I've been here longer than you know.
Oooooo, mysterious. If that's true, why do you need multiple accounts? Or are you one of those "I've been on here since there were only 6 users, but I only like to post as AC until recently" people? If you want people to think you're a longtime user, use an account with a UID that reflects it. Otherwise, don't be surprised if someone thinks you're new.
Which is why, if you want people to understand what you're saying, you quote.
in a deep thread, which only a few people are reading. Those people are the people I am directly replying to,
Slashdot is an open discussion board. If you want to pick and choose who you talk to, you're in the wrong place.
or people like you who are actively trolling on me.
I don't think that word means what you think it does. Then again, if you're still on Slashdot in a year I'll be pretty surprised, so I don't really care what you think. If you are still here by then, perhaps you'll learn how to express yourself coherently.
Quote, blockquote, itallics, bold...anything really, as long as you make it clear which lines are the original post and which are your comments. The point is that if you go point by point in a response (as opposed to responding to an entire post as we're doing now) without quoting the post you're responding to at all it makes it pretty difficult to follow. What sexconker is saying is that quoting is unnecessary:
I just assume people have read the post I've replied to. If you cant pick up on key nouns (Hellboy in this case) and remember them being present in the parent post, then you've got yourself a personal problem.
He's welcome to post however he likes, but whining when people don't track what he's talking about correctly seems a little stupid.
Wow, posts like that take me back. I remember when AOL users new to usenet used to say about the same thing...they always "corrected" longtime users about why they didn't need to follow established conventions too. Welcome to Slashdot Mr. UID-so-high-that-it-hurts-my-eyes.
By the way, me mentioning the blockquote thing was intended as friendly advice. This nasty response is payment for your deuschy reply.
You'll notice the line breaks and even paragraph breaks that tend to separate things.
Normally I'd agree, but you use them in such disjointed ways it's kind of hard to figure out what exactly you're trying to do. If you want to answer to specific points in another post it's helpful to blockquote those points as you respond to them as opposed to assuming the reader will scroll back and forth to figure out which of your comments match which of the previous poster's.
You'd save lots of lives. Directly and indirectly.
I doubt that on several different levels. You mention that a drug's illegality limits it's use due to a fear of being caught, which in many cases may be true. In the case of alcohol I think you'd find a different reaction due to the fact that anyone with access to a produce isle in a supermarket can make it. Marijuana can be a pain to grow (growing anything takes work), making your own cocaine would be beyond most users, and even crystal-meth is too much work for most (not to mention fairly dangerous). Alcohol however, is easy to make....hell, prisoners manage to make it in the toilets of their jail-cells, and perfectly safe (I've never heard of a home-brewer's beer keg exploding and taking out the neighborhood).
The next problem that I see is outlaw mentality. If drinking is illegal, that person is already committing one crime, so at that point fear of additional charges may be diminished (depending on the penalties for drinking in the first place). Ask any cop about the lengths that some people will go to to conceal that they have even trivial amounts of an illegal drug on them. Even if the penalty is barely more than a slap on the wrist, some people will get into a high-speed chase just to try to avoid being caught with it.
Next, there's exactly what happened the last time prohibition was tried: organized crime. These people were violent and dangerous criminals and left plenty of collateral damage in their wake.
Next, forget about getting many problem drinkers to think about any kind of rehab, treatment, counseling, or even to fess up to their habit at all. I'd wager a number of them would hide it even more than they do now out of the additional fear of legal action or additional social stigma. Employers frown on alcoholism now, if it were actually a criminal act it could become an issue that makes finding decent work very difficult if you're caught.
I'll agree that if you could just make alcohol disappear tomorrow, yes, lives would be saved and even improved, but that's simply not possible. The doctrine of unintended consequences would probably bite and bite hard if alcohol were banned again.
Coming around full-circle, you may save lives, but you'd lose other lives. All you'd be doing is shifting who dies and how.
The humans in the test are simply percepting something they see done to another as done to themselves.
It's not even that. They put goggles on the person that showed them the mannequin body from their own POV, and then poked them both with a stick at the same time. What the subject felt was actually happening to him/her, they just accepted that the mannequin-body they were looking at was actually their own because all the external inputs (vision and touch) matched what they were actually experiencing.
Another example of the same trick would be to blindfold someone. Give them a stick, and tell them to poke it forwards from time to time. Place a mattress in front of them. When they poke the mattress, poke them in the back at the same time with about the same amount of force. Their instinct will be to think they're somehow poking themselves even though logically it's impossible.
Slashdot Mirror
Where did you get that idea?
He said: "I just got started taking Computer Science classes at my local university"...
This doesn't sound at all like a grad student to me. If he's just starting CS at a local school, he's probably a tuition-paying undergrad, and therefore what he does on his own time should be his own business, and the school should have no particular stake in it.
That's old fashioned grammar. Nowadays, the apostrophe is used to warn the reader "here comes an 's'". Otherwise, they may be startled if they weren't expecting it, and we all know that stress is bad for you. Safety first.
The guy was obviously just screwing with you. Otherwise, he'd have just pumped the gas himself (it's not like there's a special 'gas pumping certification' that the guy on lunch had that the guy you talked to didn't), and in 20 years of driving in Jersey I think I've had two places actually ask me not to pump my own gas when I didn't want to wait. They weren't concerned about safety though, they just wanted to make sure I didn't try to scam them out of some free gas.
I remember a few years ago a comedian talking about that. He was saying how if you used an ethnic, racial or religious slur somebody would always jump out of their seat and say "Hey, I'm a [insert group here], and you can't talk about us that way", but if he made a white-trash joke nobody was ever too eager to jump up and yell "Hey, I'm white-trash, and you can't talk about us that way".
I notice that you posted AC...hmmmm.
Um, why wouldn't he (the boss) just answer the question? "Oh, it's a Mormon thing, we go to blah blah blah whatever". I'm not aware of any labor laws that forbid any and all mention of religion, they forbid discriminatory behaviour and harassment based on religious preference. If Bob Christianson in accounting tells his cube-mate Moishe Goldbaum about the nice choir at Christmas Mass he is not violating either of these tenets (unless of course Moishe has asked him not to).
I think you're misunderstanding the use of "exclusive" in this context. It doesn't mean only a chosen few can have it, it means that it's only available from one source, in this case, that's iTunes.
"You will be assimilated. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Resistance is futile."
Yeah, I know it's not what you were going for, first thing that sprang to my mind though.....
Well, if humanity actually is the problem, that's probably true....
While it's nice that you can go to an expensive private school, eventually you'll probably learn that as far as intelligence or stupidity goes, it doesn't mean as much as you think it does. Although a good private school can be an advantage, that's all it is, an advantage. I can still find true geniuses in public schools, and drooling morons with rich parents in good private schools. There's probably a kid or two in that school that would surprise you if you actually knew them.
Arrogance isn't a particularly admirable quality, its abundance on Slashdot notwhithstanding.
Heretic! You shall be burned at the stake!
Lemme see here....esc, okay, I'm in the right mode now....
Okay, now to find a stake....
/stake
Ah, got it! Now feel our wrath!
:set burnheretic!
Thou shalt put no editor ahead of the lord VI
If this were enough all on it's own, why do we have problems of homelessness and poverty among the elderly now, with both charity and government intervention? Are you seriously suggesting that the only reason that charities that help these people are underfunded is because people won't donate as long as Social Security is around?
As to rest of your post, I fail to see how a society taking care of it's older citizens is a flaw in any kind of moral code that wants to be seen as anything other than savage greed. These people are the ones who worked to build the society you're living in now. Leaving them to beg for charity and hope for the best is an idea that mocks the very concept of a "moral code". If you find yourself in a position when you're too old to work that you don't need any financial help to live, great, say no thank you and don't accept it or donate it to someone who needs it, but to begrudge everyone else even a bare minimum of what they need to live day-to-day shows a lack of compassion and level of greed that I find profoundly disturbing.
Out of curiosity, who exactly are we defending the Europeans from at this point? The Russians walked unfettered across the boarder into Georgia recently even though they're supposedly a "close ally" of ours, and the days of us preparing for a massive Soviet ground invasion of Europe are pretty long gone. Our biggest military bills now seem to be flushing good resources down the toilet in Iraq, and last time I checked we are under no imminent threat of attack by the Iraqi military now or in the past.
Even if we are spending a ton of money on defending Europe from someone, why? They have their own militaries, whom we've asked for help (the "coalition of the willing" in the Middle East). If we have an inflated military budget, blame ourselves, not the people that we insist on "protecting".
That's all interesting, but it doesn't change the fact that Dave pointed out, which is NASA didn't invent velcro. Nobody questioned the fact that they use a lot of it.
Conversely, they may also be more prone to throwing the thing intentionally. I've been to Superbowl parties and seen everything from mini-hotdogs to half-full cans of beer thrown at the TV on a bad play.....
Thanks for making my point for me Bri, you're a true gentleman
Wow, I was waaaaay off with the Digg comment before. You're more a YouTube comments kinda guy. There's hope for you though....sometimes people are just late-bloomers as far as maturity goes. With a little luck you won't always be like this, so keep that chin-up little-fella!
C'mon Bri, high-school is over, time to put aside the childish attempts at insults. That was so weak and uncreative it's hard to believe you wasted the energy to type it. If you don't want to be misunderstood, post in a clear style. If you want to be incomprehensible, then just keep on doing what you're doing. I don't really care.
Oh, well, then you're a real long-termer! I stand corrected! Would you like to make any other unsubstantiated and unprovable claims? I'm in the mood to believe!
And you know what? If you just said "There were at least 20 people" without quoting, nobody would have the vaguest idea what you were yammering about. Since you quoted though, there was really no doubt. Apparently you can learn, good-boy! By the way, could you point out where you were being humorous? Normally I'd be able to tell, but since there's nothing actually clever, witty or even remotely funny in your post, it's kind of hard to find.
And I did. And then since you were unable to convey what you meant the first time, you felt you had to return to clarify. 'Course, had you formatted the post in a way that was less ambiguous, you wouldn't have had to, but whatever.
That you'll probably go back to Digg, or 4chan.
Oooooo, mysterious. If that's true, why do you need multiple accounts? Or are you one of those "I've been on here since there were only 6 users, but I only like to post as AC until recently" people? If you want people to think you're a longtime user, use an account with a UID that reflects it. Otherwise, don't be surprised if someone thinks you're new.
Which is why, if you want people to understand what you're saying, you quote.
Slashdot is an open discussion board. If you want to pick and choose who you talk to, you're in the wrong place.
I don't think that word means what you think it does. Then again, if you're still on Slashdot in a year I'll be pretty surprised, so I don't really care what you think. If you are still here by then, perhaps you'll learn how to express yourself coherently.
And that makes perfect sense as well.
Quote, blockquote, itallics, bold...anything really, as long as you make it clear which lines are the original post and which are your comments. The point is that if you go point by point in a response (as opposed to responding to an entire post as we're doing now) without quoting the post you're responding to at all it makes it pretty difficult to follow. What sexconker is saying is that quoting is unnecessary:
He's welcome to post however he likes, but whining when people don't track what he's talking about correctly seems a little stupid.
Wow, posts like that take me back. I remember when AOL users new to usenet used to say about the same thing...they always "corrected" longtime users about why they didn't need to follow established conventions too. Welcome to Slashdot Mr. UID-so-high-that-it-hurts-my-eyes.
By the way, me mentioning the blockquote thing was intended as friendly advice. This nasty response is payment for your deuschy reply.
Normally I'd agree, but you use them in such disjointed ways it's kind of hard to figure out what exactly you're trying to do. If you want to answer to specific points in another post it's helpful to blockquote those points as you respond to them as opposed to assuming the reader will scroll back and forth to figure out which of your comments match which of the previous poster's.
I doubt that on several different levels. You mention that a drug's illegality limits it's use due to a fear of being caught, which in many cases may be true. In the case of alcohol I think you'd find a different reaction due to the fact that anyone with access to a produce isle in a supermarket can make it. Marijuana can be a pain to grow (growing anything takes work), making your own cocaine would be beyond most users, and even crystal-meth is too much work for most (not to mention fairly dangerous). Alcohol however, is easy to make....hell, prisoners manage to make it in the toilets of their jail-cells, and perfectly safe (I've never heard of a home-brewer's beer keg exploding and taking out the neighborhood).
The next problem that I see is outlaw mentality. If drinking is illegal, that person is already committing one crime, so at that point fear of additional charges may be diminished (depending on the penalties for drinking in the first place). Ask any cop about the lengths that some people will go to to conceal that they have even trivial amounts of an illegal drug on them. Even if the penalty is barely more than a slap on the wrist, some people will get into a high-speed chase just to try to avoid being caught with it.
Next, there's exactly what happened the last time prohibition was tried: organized crime. These people were violent and dangerous criminals and left plenty of collateral damage in their wake.
Next, forget about getting many problem drinkers to think about any kind of rehab, treatment, counseling, or even to fess up to their habit at all. I'd wager a number of them would hide it even more than they do now out of the additional fear of legal action or additional social stigma. Employers frown on alcoholism now, if it were actually a criminal act it could become an issue that makes finding decent work very difficult if you're caught.
I'll agree that if you could just make alcohol disappear tomorrow, yes, lives would be saved and even improved, but that's simply not possible. The doctrine of unintended consequences would probably bite and bite hard if alcohol were banned again.
Coming around full-circle, you may save lives, but you'd lose other lives. All you'd be doing is shifting who dies and how.
Well, the pizza delivery guy appreciated the big tip....
Oh, you meant negative effects.
It's not even that. They put goggles on the person that showed them the mannequin body from their own POV, and then poked them both with a stick at the same time. What the subject felt was actually happening to him/her, they just accepted that the mannequin-body they were looking at was actually their own because all the external inputs (vision and touch) matched what they were actually experiencing.
Another example of the same trick would be to blindfold someone. Give them a stick, and tell them to poke it forwards from time to time. Place a mattress in front of them. When they poke the mattress, poke them in the back at the same time with about the same amount of force. Their instinct will be to think they're somehow poking themselves even though logically it's impossible.