your suggestion that the domain name is modeled after a typical Facebook user name is proof of how much your brain has been warped). It's far easier to do that then to sign up for one of those sites, receive their constant spam and have to wade through page after blinking text, animated skull background page, scouring all of the "name9072", "name23897", "name893" accounts for the right person
Pot, meet kettle. My Facebook account name is... Kirk Strauser (note the coincidental similarity to my email address listed above?). The Facebook page itself is actually very clean with little on it that doesn't involve navigation or messaging. I'd go so far as to say that if you're OK with GMail's interface, then you should be OK with Facebook.
Seriously, we get that you don't like social networking. That's fine. To each his own. But you have the oddest strawman justifications for hating the most popular site that I've heard.
Last March, 54% of Facebook users were 26 or older (with 30% being 35 or older). I'm friends with my next door neighbor; she and her husband are retirees.
I've never had, nor will I ever have a Facebook or Myspace account. I'm not into teen events and gossip so I just don't see the point.
The US statistics tends to not include large parts of society: at that time segregated people, nowadays tens of million of "illegal aliens". If it were also including all people living in the country the figures would not be that impressive.
The official US population is about 300 million. For the per capita income to be diluted to Soviet levels, the "true" population would have to be about 2.4 billion. I'm pretty sure we'd notice we'd notice if the US population outnumbered China and India put together.
Are you a long distance runner? I'm guessing no, so just drink water.
There are plenty of outdoor activities that require so much liquid to stay adequately hydrated that you can drink yourself into an electrolyte imbalance. Ever chug water while mowing the lawn or chopping wood or skateboarding or riding your bike? You're secreting loads of salt while ingested pure water; keep it up for long and it can get ugly.
t's really not that hard to just jump cold turkey and drink water all the time. It's free and there's no sugar or chemicals.
Does your tap run dark matter or something? All the water I've ever drank contained at least one common compound.
His parents graduated the Moscow State University. They did not pay for their studies at all, not a penny.
Well, except for the fact that the Soviet citizens earned about one seventh to one eighth as much as their American counterparts. So, yeah, except for the ~85% tax for the rest of their lives, their education was totally free.
Ummm, that's actually what you want to use your newest drive for. Newer drives are almost always faster, especially compared to ones 4-6 years old (as the swap drives would be in your case). In the event that you're actually paging out, wouldn't you rather it be to a partition on a lower-latency drive with better throughput?
Sorry to burst your joke, but in 2000, CPUs had only just hit 1 GHz.
Moore called and agrees: 2 GHz was a year later. He also agrees that a 1-part-in-2000 rounding error makes the joke unfunny, and that girls at parties are surely awed by your devotion to technical accuracy.
The program in Kubuntu that lets you do things like select which wireless network to connect to, which network key to use, etc... doesn't really work from what I've seen. That program is part of the desktop environment.
But that's just one easily-replaceable program. I had the problem where knetworkmanager (or whatever it's called) wouldn't let me enter a WEP key. An apt-get install wicd to replace it with something more functional let me happily use my Kubuntu laptop at work.
Tiered Storage - "on the fly" support for that is something I would love to see:
Great idea! I'm using that today on FreeBSD with great success. Furthermore, the idea works well enough in practice with real machines that even a cheap USB flash drive gives a nice boost.
I find it hard to believe that the bug fixes and performance enhancements that x.org has implemented in the last 6 months (since 9.10) come even within an order of magnitude of the difference between the open-source and closed-source ATI drivers.
Then be surprised. I'm using the newest X.org on my FreeBSD desktop, the new FOSS ATI drivers, and the new Mesa with the Radeon HD 3600 that came with the Dell Vostro that my company bought. Compiz works perfectly and all the GL apps I've tried run without a hiccup.
Looks nice except for that huge grey bar on top: that's a waste of screen space. I'm now using Easy Peasy (Ubuntu Netbook Remix based) and that is doing something similar except putting the title bar of the window also in the top menu bar, saving those pixes for something useful.
That's what his screenshot is showing, too. The "Ubuntu Home Page | Ubuntu - Google Chrome" at the top is the title bar for the current app, Chrome. The gray bar is Chrome's own tab bar with only one open tab.
Whose mountain land would you be building that shack on? Scavenging and/or farming on? fishing/hunting on?
First, to address the straw men that people have set up: I am not advocating anything. I'm a comfortable suburb dweller who get no closer to real wilderness than dragging the family to sleep in a tent at a friend's farm from time to time. But the idea is that you always had the option of becoming self-sufficient - if you were willing to pay the price for accepting that responsibility. You or I might not ever want to do that, but it was a choice that at least some people wanted to make.
Second, that would be public land. There are vast tracts of it maintained by the federal government, and I wasn't able (with a quick Google search) to find any laws against going in and never coming back out.
The propaganda cons are all about things like the tremendous waits and how all the medical practitioners are going to quit because they won't get paid enough.
That's not propaganda. Right now, today, Medicaid reimburses many procedures for less than the raw materials required to perform them. For example, my wife is a podiatrist. Say that she removes an ingrown toenail and bills Medicaid for it. Also assume that her time has no value and is not figured into the calculations, and that you also neglect rent and utilities and other overhead. Going with just the cost of the bandages, syringe, anesthetics, knife blade, and other disposable, consumable materials that she uses to remove the toenail, she loses money. Even if she did the work in our back yard on a weekend so that all overhead expenses are removed, she loses money. Uncoincidentally, almost no doctors take new Medicaid patients without direct referrals from another doctor ("hey, could you look at this patient of mine?").
These aren't hypothetical issues. This is what the government medical landscape looks like right now, today.
so what is the "choice" here? there is no choice: you need health insurance
Before yesterday, you could choose to live "off the grid". You could grab some stuff, head out for the mountains, build a shack, and provide for yourself. While you were still technically supposed to file taxes, etc., no one really cared if you didn't apply for the tax credits and social programs you'd almost certainly be eligible for.
Today is different. As of now, you are officially a tax cheating criminal if you choose to wander off alone. You can bet the government will be interested that you're not filing returns that certify that you owe money for being uninsured.
The world is changed this morning, and I awake to applause. This is not the country I grew up to love and swore to protect.
That's ludicrous. C is the only other language I know of that injects so many functions and variables into the main namespace. If you run a Python script with 50 imports, then you have exactly 50 extra names to contend with, not 50 * the average number of definitions in each module.
It's sad that the list of languages includes only immature dynamic languages du jour like Python
I think you meant "du last two decades", as Python's first release was in 1991. What qualifies as "mature" in your opinion? Is it OK to start using ALGOL yet?
I took a few minutes to RTFA and the software equivalent of scholastic olympics today are pretty much the same as they were in 1984 when my team took second place at the state level.
Please do provide us with examples of democracy at work within the church.
As an aside, a lot of people don't seem to realize that many (most?) Protestant churches really are run as democracies, either direct or representative. I don't know as much about other Protestant organizations, but at least among the Southern Baptists, each church is autonomous. The preacher holds no special position "above" the other church members, and can be hired and fired by those members.
I witnessed a Southern Baptist church's "board of deacons" - who are elected from and by the church members - vote to fire their preacher. Afterward, they formed a hiring committee, solicited resumes from preachers who wanted to relocate to the area, and had a few come in to give sermons to the congregation on Sunday mornings. The deacons selected the one they thought was the best fit and the congregation voted to hire him.
When is the last time you saw an atheist fly a plane into a sky scraper?
I was in the Somalia theater when with Rwandan Hutus began slaughtering the Tutsis. They killed as much as 20% of the country's population in 100 days. Yeah, people kill in the name of religion, but more kill in the name of tribal affiliation or nationalism. When the leader of a large group sees that another large group controls something he wants, there's seemingly no end to the creative justifications he can invent to convince his followers to raise arms. Religion is just one of the traditional excuses, and eradicating it wouldn't remove the rest.
I'm going to answer the rest of your questions by pretending to be one of the people you disagree with. These are not my positions:
Or shoot a doctor dead, because some invisible man in the sky didn't like the LEGAL work the doctor was doing?
You just proved that atheists lack morals, because shooting a doctor to keep him from killing babies is clearly a moral decision and not a religious one. Furthermore, genocide has been LEGAL in certain societies on occasion, so the law is clearly not the ultimate arbiter of morality.
Have any ministers, reverends or priests (even the PEDO ones) been assaulted by bands of roving atheists?
Addressing specifically the last category. No, because atheists don't have the moral character to stand up for kids.
Are atheist groups campaigning en masse to deny rights to homosexuals and legislate bigotry?
No. They're campaigning en masse to deny rights to heterosexuality and legislate the end of marriage and the American nuclear family.
Slashdot Mirror
your suggestion that the domain name is modeled after a typical Facebook user name is proof of how much your brain has been warped). It's far easier to do that then to sign up for one of those sites, receive their constant spam and have to wade through page after blinking text, animated skull background page, scouring all of the "name9072", "name23897", "name893" accounts for the right person
Pot, meet kettle. My Facebook account name is... Kirk Strauser (note the coincidental similarity to my email address listed above?). The Facebook page itself is actually very clean with little on it that doesn't involve navigation or messaging. I'd go so far as to say that if you're OK with GMail's interface, then you should be OK with Facebook.
Seriously, we get that you don't like social networking. That's fine. To each his own. But you have the oddest strawman justifications for hating the most popular site that I've heard.
Try hanging out with adults then.
Last March, 54% of Facebook users were 26 or older (with 30% being 35 or older). I'm friends with my next door neighbor; she and her husband are retirees.
I've never had, nor will I ever have a Facebook or Myspace account. I'm not into teen events and gossip so I just don't see the point.
I bet you don't own a TV, either.
Not impossible if you can do matte painting.
You have a lot of faith in the average user.
The US statistics tends to not include large parts of society: at that time segregated people, nowadays tens of million of "illegal aliens". If it were also including all people living in the country the figures would not be that impressive.
The official US population is about 300 million. For the per capita income to be diluted to Soviet levels, the "true" population would have to be about 2.4 billion. I'm pretty sure we'd notice we'd notice if the US population outnumbered China and India put together.
I understand that, but in the grand scheme of things, I'd rather install a single program than replace my entire desktop with something else.
Are you a long distance runner? I'm guessing no, so just drink water.
There are plenty of outdoor activities that require so much liquid to stay adequately hydrated that you can drink yourself into an electrolyte imbalance. Ever chug water while mowing the lawn or chopping wood or skateboarding or riding your bike? You're secreting loads of salt while ingested pure water; keep it up for long and it can get ugly.
t's really not that hard to just jump cold turkey and drink water all the time. It's free and there's no sugar or chemicals.
Does your tap run dark matter or something? All the water I've ever drank contained at least one common compound.
Switch to brown sugar, it's much better for you.
And it goes great with patchouli! [rolls eyes]
His parents graduated the Moscow State University. They did not pay for their studies at all, not a penny.
Well, except for the fact that the Soviet citizens earned about one seventh to one eighth as much as their American counterparts. So, yeah, except for the ~85% tax for the rest of their lives, their education was totally free.
4) Use for swap space 2-3 Years
Ummm, that's actually what you want to use your newest drive for. Newer drives are almost always faster, especially compared to ones 4-6 years old (as the swap drives would be in your case). In the event that you're actually paging out, wouldn't you rather it be to a partition on a lower-latency drive with better throughput?
Sorry to burst your joke, but in 2000, CPUs had only just hit 1 GHz.
Moore called and agrees: 2 GHz was a year later. He also agrees that a 1-part-in-2000 rounding error makes the joke unfunny, and that girls at parties are surely awed by your devotion to technical accuracy.
The program in Kubuntu that lets you do things like select which wireless network to connect to, which network key to use, etc... doesn't really work from what I've seen. That program is part of the desktop environment.
But that's just one easily-replaceable program. I had the problem where knetworkmanager (or whatever it's called) wouldn't let me enter a WEP key. An apt-get install wicd to replace it with something more functional let me happily use my Kubuntu laptop at work.
Tiered Storage - "on the fly" support for that is something I would love to see:
Great idea! I'm using that today on FreeBSD with great success. Furthermore, the idea works well enough in practice with real machines that even a cheap USB flash drive gives a nice boost.
Merely claiming that this is another case of "entitlement mentality" is dishonest and *ssinine.
Dude, this is the Internet. You can say "ass" (especially when in a compound word that means "like a donkey"). I am ad*mant about this.
The [...] broken wireless card support was what finally drove me to back to Gnome.
LOLWHAT?
Umm, you do realize that WiFi is part of the kernel and has nothing to do with the desktop environment, right?
I find it hard to believe that the bug fixes and performance enhancements that x.org has implemented in the last 6 months (since 9.10) come even within an order of magnitude of the difference between the open-source and closed-source ATI drivers.
Then be surprised. I'm using the newest X.org on my FreeBSD desktop, the new FOSS ATI drivers, and the new Mesa with the Radeon HD 3600 that came with the Dell Vostro that my company bought. Compiz works perfectly and all the GL apps I've tried run without a hiccup.
Looks nice except for that huge grey bar on top: that's a waste of screen space. I'm now using Easy Peasy (Ubuntu Netbook Remix based) and that is doing something similar except putting the title bar of the window also in the top menu bar, saving those pixes for something useful.
That's what his screenshot is showing, too. The "Ubuntu Home Page | Ubuntu - Google Chrome" at the top is the title bar for the current app, Chrome. The gray bar is Chrome's own tab bar with only one open tab.
Whose mountain land would you be building that shack on? Scavenging and/or farming on? fishing/hunting on?
First, to address the straw men that people have set up: I am not advocating anything. I'm a comfortable suburb dweller who get no closer to real wilderness than dragging the family to sleep in a tent at a friend's farm from time to time. But the idea is that you always had the option of becoming self-sufficient - if you were willing to pay the price for accepting that responsibility. You or I might not ever want to do that, but it was a choice that at least some people wanted to make.
Second, that would be public land. There are vast tracts of it maintained by the federal government, and I wasn't able (with a quick Google search) to find any laws against going in and never coming back out.
The propaganda cons are all about things like the tremendous waits and how all the medical practitioners are going to quit because they won't get paid enough.
That's not propaganda. Right now, today, Medicaid reimburses many procedures for less than the raw materials required to perform them. For example, my wife is a podiatrist. Say that she removes an ingrown toenail and bills Medicaid for it. Also assume that her time has no value and is not figured into the calculations, and that you also neglect rent and utilities and other overhead. Going with just the cost of the bandages, syringe, anesthetics, knife blade, and other disposable, consumable materials that she uses to remove the toenail, she loses money. Even if she did the work in our back yard on a weekend so that all overhead expenses are removed, she loses money. Uncoincidentally, almost no doctors take new Medicaid patients without direct referrals from another doctor ("hey, could you look at this patient of mine?").
These aren't hypothetical issues. This is what the government medical landscape looks like right now, today.
so what is the "choice" here? there is no choice: you need health insurance
Before yesterday, you could choose to live "off the grid". You could grab some stuff, head out for the mountains, build a shack, and provide for yourself. While you were still technically supposed to file taxes, etc., no one really cared if you didn't apply for the tax credits and social programs you'd almost certainly be eligible for.
Today is different. As of now, you are officially a tax cheating criminal if you choose to wander off alone. You can bet the government will be interested that you're not filing returns that certify that you owe money for being uninsured.
The world is changed this morning, and I awake to applause. This is not the country I grew up to love and swore to protect.
of course there is going to be many functions.
That's ludicrous. C is the only other language I know of that injects so many functions and variables into the main namespace. If you run a Python script with 50 imports, then you have exactly 50 extra names to contend with, not 50 * the average number of definitions in each module.
you are exaggerating.
PHP has 5718 functions in the main namespace. Python has 79. Which is easier to learn and less likely to cause collisions?
It's sad that the list of languages includes only immature dynamic languages du jour like Python
I think you meant "du last two decades", as Python's first release was in 1991. What qualifies as "mature" in your opinion? Is it OK to start using ALGOL yet?
I took a few minutes to RTFA and the software equivalent of scholastic olympics today are pretty much the same as they were in 1984 when my team took second place at the state level.
You just had to slip that in there, didn't you.
By the way, winning felt even better. ;-)
Please do provide us with examples of democracy at work within the church.
As an aside, a lot of people don't seem to realize that many (most?) Protestant churches really are run as democracies, either direct or representative. I don't know as much about other Protestant organizations, but at least among the Southern Baptists, each church is autonomous. The preacher holds no special position "above" the other church members, and can be hired and fired by those members.
I witnessed a Southern Baptist church's "board of deacons" - who are elected from and by the church members - vote to fire their preacher. Afterward, they formed a hiring committee, solicited resumes from preachers who wanted to relocate to the area, and had a few come in to give sermons to the congregation on Sunday mornings. The deacons selected the one they thought was the best fit and the congregation voted to hire him.
When is the last time you saw an atheist fly a plane into a sky scraper?
I was in the Somalia theater when with Rwandan Hutus began slaughtering the Tutsis. They killed as much as 20% of the country's population in 100 days. Yeah, people kill in the name of religion, but more kill in the name of tribal affiliation or nationalism. When the leader of a large group sees that another large group controls something he wants, there's seemingly no end to the creative justifications he can invent to convince his followers to raise arms. Religion is just one of the traditional excuses, and eradicating it wouldn't remove the rest.
I'm going to answer the rest of your questions by pretending to be one of the people you disagree with. These are not my positions:
Or shoot a doctor dead, because some invisible man in the sky didn't like the LEGAL work the doctor was doing?
You just proved that atheists lack morals, because shooting a doctor to keep him from killing babies is clearly a moral decision and not a religious one. Furthermore, genocide has been LEGAL in certain societies on occasion, so the law is clearly not the ultimate arbiter of morality.
Have any ministers, reverends or priests (even the PEDO ones) been assaulted by bands of roving atheists?
Addressing specifically the last category. No, because atheists don't have the moral character to stand up for kids.
Are atheist groups campaigning en masse to deny rights to homosexuals and legislate bigotry?
No. They're campaigning en masse to deny rights to heterosexuality and legislate the end of marriage and the American nuclear family.