I used to drive a small (10 ton) truck for a part time job and we had to maintain 4 seconds between us and the car in from of us. Even that wasn't that big of a distance, but it left plenty of time for switching the radio station or really slow reaction times.
exactly. So nothing is beyond the capability of God. So if God wants to communicate something to you, there is no need to do it through arcane texts and ambiguous 'signs' and such. God has the ability to communicate to everybody in the most clear and descriptive manner... After all if God is omnipotent and omniscient, and the creator, then there is no aspect of us that God isn't entirely familiar with.
Probably not. I think that the best form of worship is to be aware that this life is special. Petitioning the Lord with prayer is as silly and childish as is using the term "Lord" to describe God. Acting as if God (if a God exists, it is by definition perfect and omnipotent and omnipresent) is a big [jealous|petty|angry|(any other term used to describe imperfect human emotions)]) person in the sky who wants us to tell him how great he is seems a thousand times more blasphemous than just living and enjoying the life he (agruably) gave us.
Deciding that you somehow have the authority to speak or act on behalf of God (who, remember, can do anything he wants...with no exception) is so extremely presumptuous that it makes me nauseous. An omnipotent being does not expend any of its energy doing anything. If God doesn't want you to do something, you probably will not do it.
Ah, but what if Pepsi Electronics beats Pepsi Cola to the pepsi.com domain. That is what I was referring to. If this happens, Pepsi Cola takes domain from Pepsi Electronics.
The fact that more people associate Pepsi with a cola doesn't mean that PepsiCo gets exclusive rights to refer to itself as "Pepsi".
If Pepsi Electronics registers pepsi.com, PepsiCo should have no right to sieze it. They exist in different markets, so they can have the same name. Big corporations should not be able to take domains from smaller ones just because they are bigger. If they are late to the game, then TS. They have more to offer the small company in exchange for the domain, and they should buy it instead of siezing it.
I do agree that any alterations (pepsisucks.com, pepssi.com, etc) should be allowed, though...
But what if you are a small electronics manufacturer with the name Pepsi, or what if your family name is Pepsi (I know, families don't need.coms!)? This just ensures that the company with the most money available for litugation wins the name, even though both companies have a fair right to the domain name.
It seems to me that if you invented a time travel device, then faster than light travel would follow almost instantly. If you can't use the device to time-travel forward, you could at least take a trip to Centauri and back at 0.99c, learn faster-than-light travel from the much more advanced civilization that you find on Earth on your return, then time-travel back to your own time and teach them FTL travel.
Of course that creates a paradox, but hey, that's part of the fun of it all!
I think trackballs are great. Often at work I'd have to go back to a mouse, and it'd feel very klunky. Moving the curson in very fine increments seems so much easier with them as well. I suppose this makes quite a bit of sense... you are moving the cursor with your fingers instead of your whole arm.
First I point out that the moderation has been shit on this thread. Once again if the moderator disagrees he mods you down.
I've noticed that more and more lately.
As for you, what do you define as regular? Once a week at parties? Once a day? Once a month? I am talking about people who smoke pot like other people smoke cigarettes. I am talking about the people who have long ago stopped smoking it casually.
As for regular, I'd say daily. Not more than twice daily, though. Maaaybe three times daily, but that's getting pretty heavy. One of the guys I work with is always high. Constantly. If that's what you were referring to, then I agree with you. He's got a problem. I think he would have a problem even if he didn't smoke pot, though. His pot smoking habit is the symptom and not the ailment. He chain smokes cigarettes and drinks coffee like mad, too. He can't relax and have a beer, he must get plastered.
I can see how people who have addictive personalities would tend to choose pot over other things, though. It's pleasant and not too terribly destructive (compare to alcohol or hard drugs). I think the pot smokers you describe (the bad ones) would be losers with or without pot.
I can tell you that my coworkers do smoke pot but they never smoke it during the day. As for you being a physicist. I have never met a physicist how wasn't a drunk or a heavy drug user. I think it has something to do with trying to grasp concepts that would blow the mind of the average person.
That's funny! I see where you get that. It's a goofy crowd, it really is!
I shouldn't be responding to trolls, but I think I'll bite.
Unless you are also working some crappy job, you'd be amazed at the number of "productive" people that regularly smoke pot. Of course, this isn't something you'd know if your bias against it was really that strong. While I don't smoke pot, some of my co-workers do, and they are very productive (and in very good jobs). There are executives at my company that smoke pot (a few of the VPs that I'm certain of - all very educated and intelligent), and they do fantastic jobs.
Just because your experience with something is negative, that doesn't make it true for everybody else. I am a physicist, and I must say that some of my co-workers amaze me constantly with the stuff they produce when high.
Although nobody is likely to admit it when you approach them like the Spanish Inquisition, there's a chance that you work with people who regularly smoke pot and you don't even realize it.
I agree with you on this. While a good many people are probably interested in the stable branch point releases (me included), the unstable branch is generally not going to interest as many people. Those who are interested can check up on the kernel.org site for changes.
Now having said that, I think Slashdot should continue posting stories on whatever they see fit, and if a story doesn't interest me (which definitely happens), then I'll ignore it.
That's the big problem with those proposing censorship in any situation. The decision on what an individual gets to see and experience should rest solely with that individual. I don't want people making decisions for me, because they know 'what's best for me'.
I'd rather see more uninteresting (to me) stories on Slashdot than less interesting ones. Of couse, my interests vary from the interests of others, so I should expect to see stories that aren't interesting to me.
People should have the maturity to realize that everybody else in the world does not always agree with them, and shouldn't be punished for not agreeing with them. Take what you want and leave the rest. Judging by the number of comments that each article on the front page gets, every article interests somebody.
I must say that it is very irritating how non-compliant Outlook and Outlook Express have been (they may be better now). I gpg-sign my email messages, and the email is sent in multipart/MIME, with the signature having its own part. So far, everyone I know who uses Outlook/OE say that the message is blank with "some unreadable attachments". I find this horribly annoying.
I'm sorry to break it to you, but if the lens on your CD player is touching the disc, you need to have it serviced. I've been on the design team for a few optical media devices and that's not the way they're designed. There is air space between the lens and the plastic of the CD. CDs wouln't last very long if there wasn't.
(example, take a sheet of paper and rub it around the axis on the data side of a CD... then put it in a CD player and try to play it. You notice how the CD cleaning cloths always say to rub from the center to the outside, you really don't need long grooves right above the data.)
Also, as a seller, make sure that you have documented (pictures on the auction page) prrof of the serial number and all angles of the product. Well, this only applies if it's expensive.
I've been burned before when a buyer claimed that the item I had sent was broken and missing parts, and (of course!) I had no proof but my own word. The buyer was offering to return my broken item or pay me less than 5% of the auction price.
It turned out that this buyer was a reseller of the particular item that they had won, and so they most likely had broken ones laying around.
Pretty good scam, huh? I ended up contacting the BBB and various fraud agencies and they finally paid up, but it was a hassle, and I got negative feedback for it too.
While I'm already pretty nervous about installing precompiled binaries on my system, it seems like the success of LindowsOS would bring with it the attention of Windows virus writers.
If this distro became popular (even only in a business setting), Linux would be in the same boat as Windows as far as viruses go. Any binary packages you would download would be more likely to contain a virus, and who installs rpms and debs as a user?
Of course this risk is already there, but increased popularity would make it more risky.
Would that be useful in generating clones from us to used for transplants (spare parts) and such?
Does this accelerated aging stop when it has reached the age of the host? (How does it know how long it has been aging? IAONAB (I am obviously not a biologist!))
Exactly... There isn't really any need at all for big, fast, power-hungry processors that would spend most of their lives idling and millions of dollars being readied for 'the horrors of space'.
A poor analogy is that I'm not going to spend a bunch of time and money and gas replacing the engine in my car to a big muscle engine to drive in stop-and-go traffic every day.
You analogy is good except for one piece. KaZaA provides anonymity for its users.
This would be comparable to a stretch of highway where it's OK to drive without license plates or a drivers license. There is no way to "go after the perpetrators" in this system, and it was designed with that in mind.
They know that adding user tracking systems would make their service less desirable, but the obvious (and ultimately disturbing) argument is that a legitimate, legal user shouldn't care because they're doing nothing wrong.
If a road was being used to traffic drugs, it is not as bad to not enforce the law on that road as it is to design the road so that the law is unenforcable on that road.
What about NaCl? Sodium is a metal, thus table salt is a metal salt. What about any of the other salts that are used to melt snow in the winter? I'll wager most of them are metal salts.
I agree that anything that is used is likely to be harmful in some way, but this does indicate that this stuff is not non-toxic or non-flammable.
but do your IT folks know what they are doing? If I plopped a Linux server (or MacOS X server or IRIX server...) in front of a trained NT administrator, I wouldn't expect her to know how to keep it up.
What about dropping a NT server in fromt of a admin who only had UNIX experience? Would I expect amazing results? Of course not!
Assuming that IT folk can instantly master entire operating systems that they are unfamiliar with is just plain dumb. In no other field is that kind of assumption so commonplace.(I bet I'm wrong there!)
I don't judge the value of a product by how well it works in the hands of a complete novice. Saying linux isn't stable because an NT administrator can't keep it up is just like saying NT is unstable because a Mac operator can't keep it up.
Actually, by charging $15 for their product, it ceases to be a free-time/hobby contribution and starts to be a product.
If they are only making $15 per copy, they can't quit their day jobs, but now they need to cater to the people who want a $15 MS Word replacement. If people are actually shelling out money for a product, they can feel better about demanding support or immediate bug fixes or the like. Small business doesn't get the same benefits of large business (being able to say, "Screw off, we don't want to add those features. They are plenty of other customers, you're no loss.")
At least until AbiWord get to 1.0, anyways, they really shouldn't charge anything for it. Maybe they could sell support, but I feel that involving money is a bad idea here and will only make things more hairy.
People really should learn what to expect from things that cost them nothing. When I get something for nothing, I appreciate when it helps me at all, I don't bitch when it doesn't constantly impress me.
This is great. I've put a system in my car that does a few of these things. It's based on a regular x86 system, but uses straight DC-DC for power (eats less power). The BASIC STAMP I used (BS2-SX) is set up to power up the computer on ignition and it can start the car on a signal from the computer, as well. I'm in the process of setting my trunk button on my keyless entry to turn on the computer instead. I have a 5" LCD (no touchscreen yet!) and tiny keyboard (keypad next to the LCD, too). So far it has integratio with my GPS: moving map, output to my stereo, 802.11b (to work on it from my home, transfer music, etc), and the beginning of an interface to my car's CPU and testing system. I'm using a big deep-cycle battery to power it (charges from car) when the car isn't on, but I really just want to make it more low-power from the bottom up. My car is pretty light-weight anyway (RX-7), so I'd like to lose the battery eventually. This is mostly spare parts and home-built electronics, though, so I spent less than $200 on it as it is. My entire CD collection is in it in fairly high bitrate mp3/ogg files. Once the car CPU interface is complete, I can have all sorts of useless realtime stats to look at instead of the road! Now I just need retractable wings and I'm set. (Maybe oil-slick and caltrops, too!)
I don't agree. I, like the above poster, smoke occasionally (less than him, though), but am not addicted. I enjoy the buzz, and also like the taste (only in the winter, though... who knows!?). Sometimes (ie drinking), I'll smoke a lot, other times none. A pack will last me over a month (or more). The cigarettes usually go bad before I'm done with them. I enjoy the taste of coffee and the pick-up of the caffiene, but I do not crave it. I am not addicted to it.
A person does not necessarily get addicted to low doses of chemically addictive stuff. This isn't to say that after two weeks of two pots of coffee a day I'm going to feel fine the day after I quit... The chemical (physical) addiction will bother me for a while (read: less than a week) and I'm over it.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to drive a small (10 ton) truck for a part time job and we had to maintain 4 seconds between us and the car in from of us. Even that wasn't that big of a distance, but it left plenty of time for switching the radio station or really slow reaction times.
exactly. So nothing is beyond the capability of God. So if God wants to communicate something to you, there is no need to do it through arcane texts and ambiguous 'signs' and such. God has the ability to communicate to everybody in the most clear and descriptive manner... After all if God is omnipotent and omniscient, and the creator, then there is no aspect of us that God isn't entirely familiar with.
Probably not. I think that the best form of worship is to be aware that this life is special.
Petitioning the Lord with prayer is as silly and childish as is using the term "Lord" to describe God. Acting as if God (if a God exists, it is by definition perfect and omnipotent and omnipresent) is a big [jealous|petty|angry|(any other term used to describe imperfect human emotions)]) person in the sky who wants us to tell him how great he is seems a thousand times more blasphemous than just living and enjoying the life he (agruably) gave us.
Deciding that you somehow have the authority to speak or act on behalf of God (who, remember, can do anything he wants...with no exception) is so extremely presumptuous that it makes me nauseous. An omnipotent being does not expend any of its energy doing anything. If God doesn't want you to do something, you probably will not do it.
Ah, but what if Pepsi Electronics beats Pepsi Cola to the pepsi.com domain. That is what I was referring to. If this happens, Pepsi Cola takes domain from Pepsi Electronics.
The fact that more people associate Pepsi with a cola doesn't mean that PepsiCo gets exclusive rights to refer to itself as "Pepsi".
If Pepsi Electronics registers pepsi.com, PepsiCo should have no right to sieze it. They exist in different markets, so they can have the same name. Big corporations should not be able to take domains from smaller ones just because they are bigger. If they are late to the game, then TS. They have more to offer the small company in exchange for the domain, and they should buy it instead of siezing it.
I do agree that any alterations (pepsisucks.com, pepssi.com, etc) should be allowed, though...
But what if you are a small electronics manufacturer with the name Pepsi, or what if your family name is Pepsi (I know, families don't need .coms!)? This just ensures that the company with the most money available for litugation wins the name, even though both companies have a fair right to the domain name.
It seems to me that if you invented a time travel device, then faster than light travel would follow almost instantly. If you can't use the device to time-travel forward, you could at least take a trip to Centauri and back at 0.99c, learn faster-than-light travel from the much more advanced civilization that you find on Earth on your return, then time-travel back to your own time and teach them FTL travel.
Of course that creates a paradox, but hey, that's part of the fun of it all!
I think trackballs are great. Often at work I'd have to go back to a mouse, and it'd feel very klunky. Moving the curson in very fine increments seems so much easier with them as well. I suppose this makes quite a bit of sense... you are moving the cursor with your fingers instead of your whole arm.
First I point out that the moderation has been shit on this thread. Once again if the moderator disagrees he mods you down.
I've noticed that more and more lately.
As for you, what do you define as regular? Once a week at parties? Once a day? Once a month? I am talking about people who smoke pot like other people smoke cigarettes. I am talking about the people who have long ago stopped smoking it casually.
As for regular, I'd say daily. Not more than twice daily, though. Maaaybe three times daily, but that's getting pretty heavy. One of the guys I work with is always high. Constantly. If that's what you were referring to, then I agree with you. He's got a problem. I think he would have a problem even if he didn't smoke pot, though. His pot smoking habit is the symptom and not the ailment. He chain smokes cigarettes and drinks coffee like mad, too. He can't relax and have a beer, he must get plastered.
I can see how people who have addictive personalities would tend to choose pot over other things, though. It's pleasant and not too terribly destructive (compare to alcohol or hard drugs). I think the pot smokers you describe (the bad ones) would be losers with or without pot.
I can tell you that my coworkers do smoke pot but they never smoke it during the day. As for you being a physicist. I have never met a physicist how wasn't a drunk or a heavy drug user. I think it has something to do with trying to grasp concepts that would blow the mind of the average person.
That's funny! I see where you get that. It's a goofy crowd, it really is!
I shouldn't be responding to trolls, but I think I'll bite.
Unless you are also working some crappy job, you'd be amazed at the number of "productive" people that regularly smoke pot. Of course, this isn't something you'd know if your bias against it was really that strong. While I don't smoke pot, some of my co-workers do, and they are very productive (and in very good jobs). There are executives at my company that smoke pot (a few of the VPs that I'm certain of - all very educated and intelligent), and they do fantastic jobs.
Just because your experience with something is negative, that doesn't make it true for everybody else. I am a physicist, and I must say that some of my co-workers amaze me constantly with the stuff they produce when high.
Although nobody is likely to admit it when you approach them like the Spanish Inquisition, there's a chance that you work with people who regularly smoke pot and you don't even realize it.
I agree with you on this. While a good many people are probably interested in the stable branch point releases (me included), the unstable branch is generally not going to interest as many people. Those who are interested can check up on the kernel.org site for changes.
Now having said that, I think Slashdot should continue posting stories on whatever they see fit, and if a story doesn't interest me (which definitely happens), then I'll ignore it.
That's the big problem with those proposing censorship in any situation. The decision on what an individual gets to see and experience should rest solely with that individual. I don't want people making decisions for me, because they know 'what's best for me'.
I'd rather see more uninteresting (to me) stories on Slashdot than less interesting ones. Of couse, my interests vary from the interests of others, so I should expect to see stories that aren't interesting to me.
People should have the maturity to realize that everybody else in the world does not always agree with them, and shouldn't be punished for not agreeing with them. Take what you want and leave the rest. Judging by the number of comments that each article on the front page gets, every article interests somebody.
I must say that it is very irritating how non-compliant Outlook and Outlook Express have been (they may be better now). I gpg-sign my email messages, and the email is sent in multipart/MIME, with the signature having its own part. So far, everyone I know who uses Outlook/OE say that the message is blank with "some unreadable attachments". I find this horribly annoying.
I'm done bitching for the day, now. I promise.
Don't make me have to come over there and kick your ass to prove it :-)
I'm sorry, but I couln't resist! Isn't he supposed to come to you for that!
;)
I'm sorry to break it to you, but if the lens on your CD player is touching the disc, you need to have it serviced. I've been on the design team for a few optical media devices and that's not the way they're designed. There is air space between the lens and the plastic of the CD. CDs wouln't last very long if there wasn't.
(example, take a sheet of paper and rub it around the axis on the data side of a CD... then put it in a CD player and try to play it. You notice how the CD cleaning cloths always say to rub from the center to the outside, you really don't need long grooves right above the data.)
(now if we can just convince a judge in the US to accept an Australian court finding as precedent...)
But that would establish precedent for accepting Australian court findings as precedent, and that sounds very dangerous!
Also, as a seller, make sure that you have documented (pictures on the auction page) prrof of the serial number and all angles of the product. Well, this only applies if it's expensive.
I've been burned before when a buyer claimed that the item I had sent was broken and missing parts, and (of course!) I had no proof but my own word. The buyer was offering to return my broken item or pay me less than 5% of the auction price.
It turned out that this buyer was a reseller of the particular item that they had won, and so they most likely had broken ones laying around.
Pretty good scam, huh? I ended up contacting the BBB and various fraud agencies and they finally paid up, but it was a hassle, and I got negative feedback for it too.
While I'm already pretty nervous about installing precompiled binaries on my system, it seems like the success of LindowsOS would bring with it the attention of Windows virus writers.
If this distro became popular (even only in a business setting), Linux would be in the same boat as Windows as far as viruses go. Any binary packages you would download would be more likely to contain a virus, and who installs rpms and debs as a user?
Of course this risk is already there, but increased popularity would make it more risky.
Now IANAB (I am not a biologist) but...
Would that be useful in generating clones from us to used for transplants (spare parts) and such?
Does this accelerated aging stop when it has reached the age of the host? (How does it know how long it has been aging? IAONAB (I am obviously not a biologist!))
I know... I read too much sci-fi
Maybe I'm missing some point here, but why don't you save the difference and buy a mobo with a chipset that doesn't suck.
Maybe I'm just not using mine the same way you're using yours, but my VIA chipset hasn't given me any problems so far.
Exactly... There isn't really any need at all for big, fast, power-hungry processors that would spend most of their lives idling and millions of dollars being readied for 'the horrors of space'.
A poor analogy is that I'm not going to spend a bunch of time and money and gas replacing the engine in my car to a big muscle engine to drive in stop-and-go traffic every day.
Ugh, I should have stopped a while ago...
You analogy is good except for one piece. KaZaA provides anonymity for its users.
This would be comparable to a stretch of highway where it's OK to drive without license plates or a drivers license. There is no way to "go after the perpetrators" in this system, and it was designed with that in mind.
They know that adding user tracking systems would make their service less desirable, but the obvious (and ultimately disturbing) argument is that a legitimate, legal user shouldn't care because they're doing nothing wrong.
If a road was being used to traffic drugs, it is not as bad to not enforce the law on that road as it is to design the road so that the law is unenforcable on that road.
What about NaCl? Sodium is a metal, thus table salt is a metal salt. What about any of the other salts that are used to melt snow in the winter? I'll wager most of them are metal salts.
I agree that anything that is used is likely to be harmful in some way, but this does indicate that this stuff is not non-toxic or non-flammable.
This is a stupid reply, I know...
but do your IT folks know what they are doing? If I plopped a Linux server (or MacOS X server or IRIX server...) in front of a trained NT administrator, I wouldn't expect her to know how to keep it up.
What about dropping a NT server in fromt of a admin who only had UNIX experience? Would I expect amazing results? Of course not!
Assuming that IT folk can instantly master entire operating systems that they are unfamiliar with is just plain dumb. In no other field is that kind of assumption so commonplace.(I bet I'm wrong there!)
I don't judge the value of a product by how well it works in the hands of a complete novice. Saying linux isn't stable because an NT administrator can't keep it up is just like saying NT is unstable because a Mac operator can't keep it up.
Actually, by charging $15 for their product, it ceases to be a free-time/hobby contribution and starts to be a product.
If they are only making $15 per copy, they can't quit their day jobs, but now they need to cater to the people who want a $15 MS Word replacement. If people are actually shelling out money for a product, they can feel better about demanding support or immediate bug fixes or the like. Small business doesn't get the same benefits of large business (being able to say, "Screw off, we don't want to add those features. They are plenty of other customers, you're no loss.")
At least until AbiWord get to 1.0, anyways, they really shouldn't charge anything for it. Maybe they could sell support, but I feel that involving money is a bad idea here and will only make things more hairy.
People really should learn what to expect from things that cost them nothing. When I get something for nothing, I appreciate when it helps me at all, I don't bitch when it doesn't constantly impress me.
Just my 2c, anyway
This is great.
I've put a system in my car that does a few of these things. It's based on a regular x86 system, but uses straight DC-DC for power (eats less power). The BASIC STAMP I used (BS2-SX) is set up to power up the computer on ignition and it can start the car on a signal from the computer, as well. I'm in the process of setting my trunk button on my keyless entry to turn on the computer instead. I have a 5" LCD (no touchscreen yet!) and tiny keyboard (keypad next to the LCD, too).
So far it has integratio with my GPS: moving map, output to my stereo, 802.11b (to work on it from my home, transfer music, etc), and the beginning of an interface to my car's CPU and testing system.
I'm using a big deep-cycle battery to power it (charges from car) when the car isn't on, but I really just want to make it more low-power from the bottom up. My car is pretty light-weight anyway (RX-7), so I'd like to lose the battery eventually.
This is mostly spare parts and home-built electronics, though, so I spent less than $200 on it as it is. My entire CD collection is in it in fairly high bitrate mp3/ogg files.
Once the car CPU interface is complete, I can have all sorts of useless realtime stats to look at instead of the road!
Now I just need retractable wings and I'm set. (Maybe oil-slick and caltrops, too!)
I don't agree. I, like the above poster, smoke occasionally (less than him, though), but am not addicted. I enjoy the buzz, and also like the taste (only in the winter, though... who knows!?). Sometimes (ie drinking), I'll smoke a lot, other times none. A pack will last me over a month (or more). The cigarettes usually go bad before I'm done with them.
I enjoy the taste of coffee and the pick-up of the caffiene, but I do not crave it. I am not addicted to it.
A person does not necessarily get addicted to low doses of chemically addictive stuff. This isn't to say that after two weeks of two pots of coffee a day I'm going to feel fine the day after I quit... The chemical (physical) addiction will bother me for a while (read: less than a week) and I'm over it.