I have no idea, but it seems like most people honestly believe they're getting a "bonus" hour from somewhere. You'd think that the first Monday morning after setting the clocks forward an hour would be a painful enough reminder, but apparently not.
why not make Daylight Savings Time a year-round proposal?
Because where I live, on December 21, the sun rises at 7:55 AM CDT. This means that it's almost daylight when I drive to work. Ain't no way I'm going to go along with changing that to 8:55 AM.
Remember, you're not lengthening the day - you're taking time from the morning and adding it to the evening.
If you contribute code to Project Foo, which is owned by somebody else, do you have legal standing to deny a third party the use of your code without Foo's maintainer doing the same?
The bats are going to be checking out your eaves, generation after generation, anyway until they find or make a place to live.
The main problem was with one small group that couldn't take no for an answer after they lost access to the one tiny hole they'd been using, so they fight each other for hours trying to find it again. I had a cluster of angry bats chittering and screaming at each other for hours, and it was directly above my front door so you couldn't exactly ignore them.
Since "evicting" that family, I haven't seen or heard a single bat anywhere near my house (but quite a few around my yard at night on their appointed rounds of eating the mosquitoes).
I have a completely rednecked Wiki site detailing the animals I've eliminated from my yard, and your only critique is that I used a metaphor instead of a simile in the explanatory text under the "animal vs. method" table?
I realize I could replace "is" with "refers to", but do you honestly think it detracts from the page?
Actually, I really like the little guys. We have a bazillion mosquitoes in my landlocked town each summer for some unknown reason, and the bats feast on them nightly. I even have neighbors that maintain bat houses.
However, I do not like a family of bats chewing through the siding of my house to crawl into my attic to die. After repairing the entryway they'd made, I just couldn't get them away from my eaves. I tried ice water blasts, moth balls, clumps of steel wool - in short, everything I could think of. The glue traps were the last resort, and that even at the insistence of my father-in-law and not my own volition.
Bats in the wild? Love 'em. Bats eating my house? They've gotta go.
Re:and thus, R.Stallman was right after all
on
No More BitKeeper Linux
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Suppose someone lends you a car [...]
...and tells you that you can use it as much as you want, as long as you don't use it to transport parts for other cars. You switch your entire corporate fleet to this car, which would ordinarily be prohibitively expensively but is a lot better than the offerings at Joe's Free Car Lot. You come to depend on those loaner cars.
Some guy at an unrelated company looks at the loaner car's ignition system to see if he could make it work on one of the models available at Joe's Free Car Lot. Your "friend" responds by yanking everyone's loaner cars.
What do you do next? Try to find someone else to loan you an expensive car? Buy a new fleet of your own? Or decide that helping Joe upgrade his fleet to everyone's mutual benefit is a worthy investment?
I wouldn't necessarily agree. Trying to train someone who doesn't want to learn.... well lets just say they're not going to learn anything.
I'm just about to the point of saying, "heck with them, then."
Same thing for viruses/trojans. Instead of arguing about if the latest outlook exploit should be called a worm/trojan/virus/etc. make alerts simple and clear.
The general population is expected to tell the differences between the common cold, influenza, and pneumonia. The news outlets certainly don't run stories about "an icky new virus going around" when they mean E.coli in a city's drinking water.
No, I think it's about time we went the other way and took off the training wheels. For decades we've been told "make it easy for the user!", "make it easy for the user!", "make it easy for the user!", but I think we've been going about it the exact wrong way. The general public isn't nearly as stupid as Slashdotters would like to pretend, so maybe it's about time we start treating them like responsible adults. There'll always be a few boneheads, sure, but that's true of any arena of human activity.
I think it's quite possible (and should be expected) that public releases strike a happy medium between "The OutlookInf64.L worm infects the MBR and modifies the autostart registry entries" and "A new thingy writes stuff on your harddisk."
Here in America, the right of the accused to receive a fair trial depends on the rights of media to publish this stuff immediately. It never occurred to me that someone would think that the government's ability to keep secret the court proceedings against its citizens is a Good Thing. Interesting.
I don't doubt that, but the poster made it sound like getting paid to write Free Software is a pipe dream. It's clearly not - a lot of us earn our livings doing exactly that.
I don't know anything about the grandparent's situation, but I can speak for mine. My wife and I moved to a small town (25,000) in Nebraska. We really like it here - the quality of life is wonderful - but one of the tradeoffs is that I'm nowhere near a university with big science college.
I'd love to audit some classes, and if I lived somewhere that I could, I certainly would. So, I'm in the position that if I'm going to learn something, it's pretty much up to me to take the initiative and start doing it. I'm pretty sure that other people are in the same boat.
I really appreciate the suggestions. They all sounded intresting and look like good jumping-off points for further study. Thanks for taking the time to reply, and extra thanks for the fact that no one commented about me keeping math textbooks for nighttime reading.
0. Buy a molecular assembler to build letters small enough to fit inside those tiny boxes on the form while still remaining legible.
Seriously, I'm a 30-something with excellent eyesight and steady hands. If I can barely fill one out with an engineering pen, how's grandma ever going to make it?
I came "this close" to completing a math minor. I recently read Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea and became interested in picking up where I left off. Upon the recommendation of the math department head at the school I graduated from, I bought a textbook on topology and have been reading that at night before I go to bed.
Any suggestions on what to tackle next? I really liked set theory, Boolean calculus, and so on (which means the topology book has been really enjoyable so far). My main goal is to be able to read the occasional article on higher math that filters through Slashdot, and the various interesting-looking physics books I find when I make it in to a city with a real bookstore (the best my town has to offer is a Hastings).
I know that the real answer is "whatever I'm interested in", but I haven't been exposed to enough math beyond multivariate calculus to know what I'm interested in. Was there any class you took or book you read that made you look at the world differently or left you hungry for more?
Re:Math Awareness Project for Slashdot
on
Math Awareness Month
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· Score: 3, Funny
It's been stated:
The IQ of the group is the lowest IQ of a member of the group divided by the number of people in the group.
This is Slashdot, not Fark. I don't recall a single "Here's the Windows source code! (nsfw)" troll, so why would you expect this to be different?
You always click off-site from Slashdot at your own peril. Chances are that any given target will probably be work-safe, but there's no guarantee and noone's ever attempted to create such a policy, AFAIK.
Slashdot Mirror
Before the pedants catch it: I meant "on December 21, the sun rises at 7:55 AM CST". D'oh!
I have no idea, but it seems like most people honestly believe they're getting a "bonus" hour from somewhere. You'd think that the first Monday morning after setting the clocks forward an hour would be a painful enough reminder, but apparently not.
Because where I live, on December 21, the sun rises at 7:55 AM CDT. This means that it's almost daylight when I drive to work. Ain't no way I'm going to go along with changing that to 8:55 AM.
Remember, you're not lengthening the day - you're taking time from the morning and adding it to the evening.
My brother, he fought long and hard over in Avirdnam. Darn 'virds shot his kneecaps off, they did. Wasn't the same when he came back.
If you contribute code to Project Foo, which is owned by somebody else, do you have legal standing to deny a third party the use of your code without Foo's maintainer doing the same?
The main problem was with one small group that couldn't take no for an answer after they lost access to the one tiny hole they'd been using, so they fight each other for hours trying to find it again. I had a cluster of angry bats chittering and screaming at each other for hours, and it was directly above my front door so you couldn't exactly ignore them.
Since "evicting" that family, I haven't seen or heard a single bat anywhere near my house (but quite a few around my yard at night on their appointed rounds of eating the mosquitoes).
None taken. :-)
I realize I could replace "is" with "refers to", but do you honestly think it detracts from the page?
However, I do not like a family of bats chewing through the siding of my house to crawl into my attic to die. After repairing the entryway they'd made, I just couldn't get them away from my eaves. I tried ice water blasts, moth balls, clumps of steel wool - in short, everything I could think of. The glue traps were the last resort, and that even at the insistence of my father-in-law and not my own volition.
Bats in the wild? Love 'em. Bats eating my house? They've gotta go.
Yes, but I'm that kind of person.
...and tells you that you can use it as much as you want, as long as you don't use it to transport parts for other cars. You switch your entire corporate fleet to this car, which would ordinarily be prohibitively expensively but is a lot better than the offerings at Joe's Free Car Lot. You come to depend on those loaner cars.
Some guy at an unrelated company looks at the loaner car's ignition system to see if he could make it work on one of the models available at Joe's Free Car Lot. Your "friend" responds by yanking everyone's loaner cars.
What do you do next? Try to find someone else to loan you an expensive car? Buy a new fleet of your own? Or decide that helping Joe upgrade his fleet to everyone's mutual benefit is a worthy investment?
I'm just about to the point of saying, "heck with them, then."
Same thing for viruses/trojans. Instead of arguing about if the latest outlook exploit should be called a worm/trojan/virus/etc. make alerts simple and clear.
The general population is expected to tell the differences between the common cold, influenza, and pneumonia. The news outlets certainly don't run stories about "an icky new virus going around" when they mean E.coli in a city's drinking water.
No, I think it's about time we went the other way and took off the training wheels. For decades we've been told "make it easy for the user!", "make it easy for the user!", "make it easy for the user!", but I think we've been going about it the exact wrong way. The general public isn't nearly as stupid as Slashdotters would like to pretend, so maybe it's about time we start treating them like responsible adults. There'll always be a few boneheads, sure, but that's true of any arena of human activity.
I think it's quite possible (and should be expected) that public releases strike a happy medium between "The OutlookInf64.L worm infects the MBR and modifies the autostart registry entries" and "A new thingy writes stuff on your harddisk."
The article's available at http://europe.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science/10/03/joke .funniest/. I don't know whether I saw it on Fark or Slashdot, but that one sentence made me laugh 'til I cried (thus proving itself, I guess).
Here in America, the right of the accused to receive a fair trial depends on the rights of media to publish this stuff immediately. It never occurred to me that someone would think that the government's ability to keep secret the court proceedings against its citizens is a Good Thing. Interesting.
I don't doubt that, but the poster made it sound like getting paid to write Free Software is a pipe dream. It's clearly not - a lot of us earn our livings doing exactly that.
My boss paid me quite a lot of money to write Free Software. So much for your hypothesis.
Before anyone gets too worked up, note that the first mentioned antogonist is "Holly R. Thanthow". I leave you to draw your own conclusions. :-)
I'd love to audit some classes, and if I lived somewhere that I could, I certainly would. So, I'm in the position that if I'm going to learn something, it's pretty much up to me to take the initiative and start doing it. I'm pretty sure that other people are in the same boat.
I really appreciate the suggestions. They all sounded intresting and look like good jumping-off points for further study. Thanks for taking the time to reply, and extra thanks for the fact that no one commented about me keeping math textbooks for nighttime reading.
That was a typo - I meant 80. Besides, you wouldn't expect a Slashdot equation to make sense or balance, would you?
0. Buy a molecular assembler to build letters small enough to fit inside those tiny boxes on the form while still remaining legible.
Seriously, I'm a 30-something with excellent eyesight and steady hands. If I can barely fill one out with an engineering pen, how's grandma ever going to make it?
Any suggestions on what to tackle next? I really liked set theory, Boolean calculus, and so on (which means the topology book has been really enjoyable so far). My main goal is to be able to read the occasional article on higher math that filters through Slashdot, and the various interesting-looking physics books I find when I make it in to a city with a real bookstore (the best my town has to offer is a Hastings).
I know that the real answer is "whatever I'm interested in", but I haven't been exposed to enough math beyond multivariate calculus to know what I'm interested in. Was there any class you took or book you read that made you look at the world differently or left you hungry for more?
And that's being charitable.
Truth is, it seems like some geeks actually like her, at least enough to Gimp her up for the Linux Chicks pictures.
You always click off-site from Slashdot at your own peril. Chances are that any given target will probably be work-safe, but there's no guarantee and noone's ever attempted to create such a policy, AFAIK.