What if your idiot brother-in-law blows up the house while you are in it? If idiots could only harm themselves, that would be fine. If they can harm us by buying uncertified gasoline-powered indoor grills, that's bad.
I have assumed for the purpose of the argument that you are not an idiot. If you are an idiot, did you know that indoor grills cook food even faster if you fill them with gasoline?
-aiabx
Just to correct a bit of misinformation here, Spartacus was not a mythological character, he was a real person who led a slave revolt in pre-imperial Rome. Kirk was the star of the Hollywood-ized story of his life.
-aiabx
A few months ago, I was sitting around the office (a major corporation's software lab) and tried to decide if we were better off as programmers or plumbers. What we decided was that while we worked long hours at an occasionally tedious job, we had the advantages of frequent intellectual challenges, comfortable and clean working conditions, coworkers capable of a fairly high standard of conversation, and a certain level of respect in society (useful or not, you decide). Plumbers on the other hand, work ankle-deep in shit, work at 3 AM if that's when someone's pipes have burst, and get to converse with random cranky people whose toilets have overflowed. And whether it is fair or not, plumbers don't get a lot of admiration and respect from people.
-aiabx
A comparison to the Apollo system would also be appropriate, where we had 2 major accidents (1 fatal) in 11 or so manned flights. If you feel like quibbling, we can leave out Apollo 1 because it failed before launch, but still...
-aiabx
Re:Why are we always nitpicking?
on
Shuttle Politics
·
· Score: 1
It's a perfectly cromulent word.
-aiabx
Re:Why are we always nitpicking?
on
Shuttle Politics
·
· Score: 1
1,2 and 3) Everything discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope?
-aiabx
Everyone whined when the transit of Mercury was posted after the fact. This time, the editors are ahead of the curve. This is what the people wanted!
-aiabx
I once heard about a guy who built his house in the Alaskan wilderness by mailing himself cinder blocks. They were far cheaper to mail than to ship to wherever it was he was building.
NASA could learn from this and mail components to the ISS, instead of shipping them up in their own spacecraft.
-aiabx
Until people adjust their work and school schedules to conform to sunrise and sunset times, you are still going to get people who wake up at 7 and go to bed at 11. If we can timeshift an hour of daylight from before dawn to before bedtime, we will save in North America 36,000,000 kWh of electricity per day. (based on as assumption that 300,000,000 people each leave 2 60W bulbs burning when they are awake at night). You can quibble about the numbers if you want, but the point of a massive energy saving is there, and anyone who isn't in the oil business will agree that's a good thing.
-aiabx
I'd mod you up if I could because it's an excellent choice, but I will trump your cast trivia by pointing out the Gordon Urquhart is played by Denis Lawson, aka Wedge in the first 3 Star Wars movies.
-aiabx
I'm not sure one-liners is the litmus test for good movies, but if it is, well funnily enough my choice is full of them too. My vote is for Repo Man, and 20 years later, I still have a hard time preventing myself from dorking out and saying things like "Let's get sushi and not pay", "Plate of shrimp", "Ordinary fucking people - I hate 'em" and "The more you drive, the less intelligent you are" - even when the other people around have never seen the movie and don't have a clue what I'm gibbering about.
-aiabx
That's why I generally only play online with friends.
That's the soliution that works best. If you play with people you trust, you not only escape all the misery and suspicion of dealing with cheaters (potential or actual), you get the pleasure of popping your buddy in the head with the railgun, and not some random dork in his mom's basement.
-aiabx
A notion to consider is selecting a punishment to fit the crime. We laugh at the notion of people being hung for the crime of stealing a loaf of bread in the 17th century, but is that any different from setting a claymore mine to kill someone for the crime of stealing your old 13" black and white TV? Do I have the right to kill people who have pirated software from the company I hold stock in? Do you get to gun down lost japanese tourists asking for directions because they haven't understood your command to get off your property? Lethal boobytraps are a form of vigilante justice, and they violate the rights of people who may not be guilty of a crime deserving death, or may not be guilty of any crime at all.
-aiabx
In the jargon file, esr says Reading Habits: Omnivorous, but usually includes lots of science and science fiction. The typical hacker household might subscribe to "Analog", "Scientific American", "Whole-Earth Review", and "Smithsonian" (most hackers ignore "Wired" and other self-consciously `cyberpunk' magazines, considering them wannabee fodder). Hackers often have a reading range that astonishes liberal arts people but tend not to talk about it as much. Many hackers spend as much of their spare time reading as the average American burns up watching TV, and often keep shelves and shelves of well-thumbed books in their homes.
And if esr says we have a reading range that astonishes liberal arts people, then you'd better live up to it if you want to be part of the Hacker Club.
-aiabx
The US didn't intervene in Europe in WWII. Britain, France and the Commonwealth nations intervened. The US and USSR didn't do anything* until the Germans had declared war on them.
*I know about the actions of the US Navy in the Atlantic before December 1941, but they were actions on a small enough scale that they wouldn't have prevented the completion of a Nazi Moon program. I could also quibble that the Atlantic convoy routes weren't "in" Europe.
Thank you for trolling. I will have a nice day.
-aiabx
Slashdot Mirror
Right! Like Atari's ET video game. That was a *BIG* seller.
You can't fool all of the people all of the time.
-aiabx
What if your idiot brother-in-law blows up the house while you are in it? If idiots could only harm themselves, that would be fine. If they can harm us by buying uncertified gasoline-powered indoor grills, that's bad.
I have assumed for the purpose of the argument that you are not an idiot. If you are an idiot, did you know that indoor grills cook food even faster if you fill them with gasoline?
-aiabx
Just to correct a bit of misinformation here, Spartacus was not a mythological character, he was a real person who led a slave revolt in pre-imperial Rome. Kirk was the star of the Hollywood-ized story of his life.
-aiabx
You forgot the details:
3a) Take passengers for $50k rides.
3b) Licence technology
3c) Sell space planes for $5m.
-aiabx
He may have thought you were just some Tom-Clancy-style army groupie, and was trying to tell you to piss off without being openly rude.
-aiabx
A few months ago, I was sitting around the office (a major corporation's software lab) and tried to decide if we were better off as programmers or plumbers. What we decided was that while we worked long hours at an occasionally tedious job, we had the advantages of frequent intellectual challenges, comfortable and clean working conditions, coworkers capable of a fairly high standard of conversation, and a certain level of respect in society (useful or not, you decide). Plumbers on the other hand, work ankle-deep in shit, work at 3 AM if that's when someone's pipes have burst, and get to converse with random cranky people whose toilets have overflowed. And whether it is fair or not, plumbers don't get a lot of admiration and respect from people.
-aiabx
A comparison to the Apollo system would also be appropriate, where we had 2 major accidents (1 fatal) in 11 or so manned flights. If you feel like quibbling, we can leave out Apollo 1 because it failed before launch, but still...
-aiabx
It's a perfectly cromulent word.
-aiabx
1,2 and 3) Everything discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope?
-aiabx
Everyone whined when the transit of Mercury was posted after the fact. This time, the editors are ahead of the curve. This is what the people wanted!
-aiabx
I once heard about a guy who built his house in the Alaskan wilderness by mailing himself cinder blocks. They were far cheaper to mail than to ship to wherever it was he was building.
NASA could learn from this and mail components to the ISS, instead of shipping them up in their own spacecraft.
-aiabx
Or, to expand slightly on the question, how about Sneakers?
-aiabx
Until people adjust their work and school schedules to conform to sunrise and sunset times, you are still going to get people who wake up at 7 and go to bed at 11. If we can timeshift an hour of daylight from before dawn to before bedtime, we will save in North America 36,000,000 kWh of electricity per day.
(based on as assumption that 300,000,000 people each leave 2 60W bulbs burning when they are awake at night). You can quibble about the numbers if you want, but the point of a massive energy saving is there, and anyone who isn't in the oil business will agree that's a good thing.
-aiabx
Here are 5 of my favourite underrated films:
Repo Man
Local Hero
Whisky Galore
The Lady Eve
Bullets over Broadway
Of course, underrated is a hard criteria to follow.
-aiabx
I'd mod you up if I could because it's an excellent choice, but I will trump your cast trivia by pointing out the Gordon Urquhart is played by Denis Lawson, aka Wedge in the first 3 Star Wars movies.
-aiabx
I'm not sure one-liners is the litmus test for good movies, but if it is, well funnily enough my choice is full of them too. My vote is for Repo Man, and 20 years later, I still have a hard time preventing myself from dorking out and saying things like "Let's get sushi and not pay", "Plate of shrimp", "Ordinary fucking people - I hate 'em" and "The more you drive, the less intelligent you are" - even when the other people around have never seen the movie and don't have a clue what I'm gibbering about.
-aiabx
That's why I generally only play online with friends.
That's the soliution that works best. If you play with people you trust, you not only escape all the misery and suspicion of dealing with cheaters (potential or actual), you get the pleasure of popping your buddy in the head with the railgun, and not some random dork in his mom's basement.
-aiabx
A notion to consider is selecting a punishment to fit the crime. We laugh at the notion of people being hung for the crime of stealing a loaf of bread in the 17th century, but is that any different from setting a claymore mine to kill someone for the crime of stealing your old 13" black and white TV? Do I have the right to kill people who have pirated software from the company I hold stock in? Do you get to gun down lost japanese tourists asking for directions because they haven't understood your command to get off your property?
Lethal boobytraps are a form of vigilante justice, and they violate the rights of people who may not be guilty of a crime deserving death, or may not be guilty of any crime at all.
-aiabx
In the jargon file, esr says Reading Habits: Omnivorous, but usually includes lots of science and science fiction. The typical hacker household might subscribe to "Analog", "Scientific American", "Whole-Earth Review", and "Smithsonian" (most hackers ignore "Wired" and other self-consciously `cyberpunk' magazines, considering them wannabee fodder). Hackers often have a reading range that astonishes liberal arts people but tend not to talk about it as much. Many hackers spend as much of their spare time reading as the average American burns up watching TV, and often keep shelves and shelves of well-thumbed books in their homes. And if esr says we have a reading range that astonishes liberal arts people, then you'd better live up to it if you want to be part of the Hacker Club. -aiabx
I'm one! I read the book and enjoyed it, more so than my wife, but I suspect the nerd/comic-book resonance was a positive factor for me.
-aiabx
Life is short. I don't want to waste an afternoon telling you not to read David Brin's The Postman.
-aiabx
The US didn't intervene in Europe in WWII. Britain, France and the Commonwealth nations intervened. The US and USSR didn't do anything* until the Germans had declared war on them.
*I know about the actions of the US Navy in the Atlantic before December 1941, but they were actions on a small enough scale that they wouldn't have prevented the completion of a Nazi Moon program. I could also quibble that the Atlantic convoy routes weren't "in" Europe.
Thank you for trolling. I will have a nice day.
-aiabx
Also, wood and graphite pencils are a serious fire danger in a pure oxygen environment.
-aiabx
On the subject of Man-Kzin Wars - how much was your work, and how much was just a desire to keep your name on the potential franchise?
-aiabx
but since it's digital, that means it really only goes to 3.
-aiabx