I disagree. As you said, the minority is extremely vocal - still, the only reason they are persuasive enough to affect any sort of political change is because people are generally supportive of what they have to say.
Most people don't really understand science because they have never studied it, but they do understand the faith they were raised with to some degree, and if they have to make a choice between two things, neither of which makes a huge amount of sense to them anyway, they are going to choose whichever falls more closely in line with what they already understand. Do you have a lot of Christian friends? You should ask them. I guarantee you mine are generally more readily accepting of ID.
Your "vocal minority" also comprises almost any position in every Protestant church in the US, who actually speak every Sunday to a majority of Americans.
You have the stupid attitude of just about every Gentoo user who has ever posted here. In the last ten years, I have installed Linux machines starting with Slackware in 1996 and working my way through Redhat/Fedora, Debian, Mandrake, SuSE, and Ubuntu. Somewhere or other in there, I got the bright idea of installing and using a Gentoo machine for a year and a half. Unless things have changed a LOT, installing that thing required reading about fifty pages of installation instructions and typing well over 100 commands. Then I had the great fun of watching things compile for about seven days. I suppose they want to be the do-it-yourself system and that's just fucking great, really, if your entire life revolves around installing Linux and you don't have something BETTER TO DO.
Maybe when I'm done installing that piece of shit ever again, I'll get started on building my own house so I don't have to live in this cardboard box on the street, and building a radio so I have something to listen to instead of scraping my fingernails across this chalkboard. What's that you say? They BUILD HOUSES FOR YOU and you can BUY A RADIO IN A STORE?! Well, holy shit.
This is a great post, seriously. I had a very similar discussion with a close friend of mine, sitting out by a camp fire one night after drinking too many beers. I asked him why God would care whether or not people believed, and why he would reward their faith in some manner - isn't the fact that he created all of this its own reward for both himself and those he created?
He obviously disagreed, but, having been raised Catholic for twenty years, I have some insight into Christianity, and I guess I simply do not understand what the point of creation is. I know I shouldn't presume to understand God or whatever, but I always imagine someone sitting there, exercising their passion, day after day watching your project grow toward completion. The act of creating it is a joy in and of itself - does GOD need the fulfillment of having his project look up at him and KNOW that he is responsible? God needing validation? I don't see it.
I remember that school TV program you're talking about. Wasn't that really huge in Canada? I was just out of high school when they started doing that kind of stuff.
As I said, the way that the kids' internet speak these days work is for fast, informal conversations, NOT study aids. Trying to twist one form of communication - in this case, a study aid or reminder about something purely academic - into an entirely different form; i.e. a conversational slang between two teenagers, in my opinion, accomplishes absolutely nothing, and is a gigantic waste of time.
The point this guy is missing is that to the kids in question, it's not "cool" to talk like that, and they don't understand things better when they are delivered in this sort of shorthand - they only talk like that on the internet because it is faster. They can still read an entire sentence unless they are completely illiterate, and honestly, I have to give the kids a little more credit than that. If this guy really thinks that the kids will only "get" things if they're delivered in the hip vernacular (which strikes me as extremely similar to when a couple of dippy teachers tried to educate their students through RAP in the early nineties), then they are making a blanket statement that kids are too dumb to understand regular English. That's really nice.
They are "part of the vernacular" only for informal discussions, and only in text. Try saying IANAL to someone and see how they react to that.
Abbreviations, shorthand, whatever - it establishes faster communication in instant messengers, and that is just great. It can stay there. Trying to condense literary passages where the author had plenty of time to write them down into this ridiculous SPEED LANGUAGE is insane.
Are teachers going to start accepting papers with LOL written in them? Shouldn't the student be able to demonstrate the humor in a situation, given enough time, without resorting to a shortcut that only belongs in necessarily fast paced conversations? Given a large amount of time for a project, is it acceptable to write down parts and pieces of words because some kids might be too lazy to write them out?
Nice condescending attitude, dipshit. I'm sure you'd be just the guy to hire. I can picture you somewhere in the back of my mind, sitting in front of some server in a customer's office, halfway through your eighth cup of coffee, sweating and maybe twitching a little, your face scrunched up in anger and starting to turn red.
That telltale vein starts to pop out on your forehead as you sigh just loudly enough that everyone else in the office stops what they are doing to stare at you momentarily out of the corners of their eyes. Someone stops by to drop off some paperwork of some sort. "IDIOTS..." you mutter in a barely audible hiss after they are slightly out of earshot.
Also, you are fat.
Re:Sensationalist Journalism?
on
A Flu Pandemic?
·
· Score: 1
Intentionally arousing fear CREATES the cynicism of the poster you are responding to, and believe me, he is not alone. I don't think "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" presented a difficult to understand concept here.
Also, what action should the individual take to prepare for this? Your yearly flu vaccine shot is not going to protect you from H5N1, considering that the human-to-human version of it doesn't even exist yet and therefore can not be vaccinated against.
Are you in the US? In most states, you can be fired from a job for any reason (barring a couple of specifically prohibited reasons such as gender or racial discrimination). You could try to challenge your firing in court, but if you were in fact fired for getting arrested outside of work, you would almost certainly not succeed.
Expelling someone from a private school works pretty much the same way as far as I know, although it's slightly trickier since money has changed hands between the student and the school.
You RISC/CISC kids need a new fucking line - this one was already beat to death back when Apple switched from 68K to PPC about ten years ago. I know when you went to the first week of Intro to Computer Architecture they taught you that term, and you know what, that's really neat, but are you sure you should be making MULTIPLE THOUSAND DOLLAR purchasing decisions based on a 15-20 year old ONE WORD DESCRIPTION OF ENTIRE PROCESSOR ARCHITECTURES?
Don't you think maybe - JUST MAYBE - the subject has a little more depth to it than that? BTW, I hope you respond to this with the words "IBM PC" or "Megahertz Myth" because that would be FRESH and AWESOME just like YOU.
You can, but you have to use a specific video codec (H.264) and it has to be a particular resolution. Quicktime PRO already has a converter, from what I hear, and I'm sure other software with that feature is also out there or will be soon.
I was on vacation in Europe this summer, and the people we were staying with had MTV on the television, and I am serious - maybe 80-90% of the ads were from a couple of different companies hawking mind bogglingly irritating ringtones. It was completely unbelievable. And it was always the SAME ONES over and over. Yikes.
Considering how much I DIDN'T want to buy any of them, the only conclusion I could come to was that I must be getting old.
Oh, and by the way, if you're in the US, like me, this is going to be how our TV is pretty soon too, since we're trying to play catch-up with just about every other country in the world in cell phone technology right now. Just you wait.
You should try this new thing I read about on the Internet the other day - it's called SHUTTING THE FUCK UP. How many times are you going to make the same ridiculous generalization in the same story? Is it useful anymore? Is it contributing further to the discussion in any way? You sound like a god damn broken record and your point was completely fucking stupid in the first place.
You should put a.GUN in your god damn.MOUTH and pull the.TRIGGER
I seriously want to know what CDs you people are buying. Yeah, that's right - YOU PEOPLE. The several hundred people I have seen on Slashdot claiming that CDs only have one or two tracks they want at the most. Who in the hell do you listen to? I have AT LEAST 120 CDs where I love almost every track on the album. Maybe you should find some artists who produce more consistently listenable music.
Answering my own question - Adblock was still installed. Disabling it made WMP work fine again, but of course, Firefox still has the fun little flash popup issue - anybody thinking about fixing that one of these days?
Anyway, I guess you get both video playback AND popups or you get neither. AWESOME.
You can cook beef (even ground beef) until it is above a safe temperature and still have the middle be red. It tastes a whole hell of a lot better that way, too.
I'm sure when you typed that, you KNEW that someone would ask you about this - I actually thought your post was well written, but WHY in the world can't you type the word MEAT? That is the worst omission I have ever seen.
Why should he have to justify it to anyone? He spends his time on what he wants to spend his time on.
He wanted to try something out that interested him at the moment. Do you keep a time sheet at home to justify all of YOUR hobbies? How do you justify the time and effort it took you to post on Slashdot?
Why so defensive? The article simply reports the circumstances surrounding some guy's death. I guess they must have figured that an article stating "A man died today in South Korea" would be a little dry if it didn't provide a few details.
I must have accidentally skipped the part of the article you obviously read where they claim that online gaming is dangerous and evil.
Free hint: If you don't want people to call you and your former coworkers morons, you probably shouldn't spell people "ppl", you REALLY shouldn't say "lol" EVER, and above all, you absolutely never, ever should try to defend your pushy extended warranty sales to anyone with more than two functioning brain cells.
Thanks, Captain Explain-O! Your relentless courage has SAVED THE EARTH from CONFUSION over a joke some guy told on Slashdot! Even though the distinction between the prayer and the poem was clearly the entire point of that guy's joke, your quick explanation of the obvious may have saved THOUSANDS.
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree. As you said, the minority is extremely vocal - still, the only reason they are persuasive enough to affect any sort of political change is because people are generally supportive of what they have to say.
Most people don't really understand science because they have never studied it, but they do understand the faith they were raised with to some degree, and if they have to make a choice between two things, neither of which makes a huge amount of sense to them anyway, they are going to choose whichever falls more closely in line with what they already understand. Do you have a lot of Christian friends? You should ask them. I guarantee you mine are generally more readily accepting of ID.
Your "vocal minority" also comprises almost any position in every Protestant church in the US, who actually speak every Sunday to a majority of Americans.
You have the stupid attitude of just about every Gentoo user who has ever posted here. In the last ten years, I have installed Linux machines starting with Slackware in 1996 and working my way through Redhat/Fedora, Debian, Mandrake, SuSE, and Ubuntu. Somewhere or other in there, I got the bright idea of installing and using a Gentoo machine for a year and a half. Unless things have changed a LOT, installing that thing required reading about fifty pages of installation instructions and typing well over 100 commands. Then I had the great fun of watching things compile for about seven days. I suppose they want to be the do-it-yourself system and that's just fucking great, really, if your entire life revolves around installing Linux and you don't have something BETTER TO DO.
Maybe when I'm done installing that piece of shit ever again, I'll get started on building my own house so I don't have to live in this cardboard box on the street, and building a radio so I have something to listen to instead of scraping my fingernails across this chalkboard. What's that you say? They BUILD HOUSES FOR YOU and you can BUY A RADIO IN A STORE?! Well, holy shit.
This is a great post, seriously. I had a very similar discussion with a close friend of mine, sitting out by a camp fire one night after drinking too many beers. I asked him why God would care whether or not people believed, and why he would reward their faith in some manner - isn't the fact that he created all of this its own reward for both himself and those he created?
He obviously disagreed, but, having been raised Catholic for twenty years, I have some insight into Christianity, and I guess I simply do not understand what the point of creation is. I know I shouldn't presume to understand God or whatever, but I always imagine someone sitting there, exercising their passion, day after day watching your project grow toward completion. The act of creating it is a joy in and of itself - does GOD need the fulfillment of having his project look up at him and KNOW that he is responsible? God needing validation? I don't see it.
I remember that school TV program you're talking about. Wasn't that really huge in Canada? I was just out of high school when they started doing that kind of stuff.
As I said, the way that the kids' internet speak these days work is for fast, informal conversations, NOT study aids. Trying to twist one form of communication - in this case, a study aid or reminder about something purely academic - into an entirely different form; i.e. a conversational slang between two teenagers, in my opinion, accomplishes absolutely nothing, and is a gigantic waste of time.
The point this guy is missing is that to the kids in question, it's not "cool" to talk like that, and they don't understand things better when they are delivered in this sort of shorthand - they only talk like that on the internet because it is faster. They can still read an entire sentence unless they are completely illiterate, and honestly, I have to give the kids a little more credit than that. If this guy really thinks that the kids will only "get" things if they're delivered in the hip vernacular (which strikes me as extremely similar to when a couple of dippy teachers tried to educate their students through RAP in the early nineties), then they are making a blanket statement that kids are too dumb to understand regular English. That's really nice.
They are "part of the vernacular" only for informal discussions, and only in text. Try saying IANAL to someone and see how they react to that.
Abbreviations, shorthand, whatever - it establishes faster communication in instant messengers, and that is just great. It can stay there. Trying to condense literary passages where the author had plenty of time to write them down into this ridiculous SPEED LANGUAGE is insane.
Are teachers going to start accepting papers with LOL written in them? Shouldn't the student be able to demonstrate the humor in a situation, given enough time, without resorting to a shortcut that only belongs in necessarily fast paced conversations? Given a large amount of time for a project, is it acceptable to write down parts and pieces of words because some kids might be too lazy to write them out?
Nice condescending attitude, dipshit. I'm sure you'd be just the guy to hire. I can picture you somewhere in the back of my mind, sitting in front of some server in a customer's office, halfway through your eighth cup of coffee, sweating and maybe twitching a little, your face scrunched up in anger and starting to turn red.
That telltale vein starts to pop out on your forehead as you sigh just loudly enough that everyone else in the office stops what they are doing to stare at you momentarily out of the corners of their eyes. Someone stops by to drop off some paperwork of some sort. "IDIOTS..." you mutter in a barely audible hiss after they are slightly out of earshot.
Also, you are fat.
Intentionally arousing fear CREATES the cynicism of the poster you are responding to, and believe me, he is not alone. I don't think "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" presented a difficult to understand concept here.
Also, what action should the individual take to prepare for this? Your yearly flu vaccine shot is not going to protect you from H5N1, considering that the human-to-human version of it doesn't even exist yet and therefore can not be vaccinated against.
Drink lots of scotch when you catch the flu and depress your immune system. That's my plan.
Are you in the US? In most states, you can be fired from a job for any reason (barring a couple of specifically prohibited reasons such as gender or racial discrimination). You could try to challenge your firing in court, but if you were in fact fired for getting arrested outside of work, you would almost certainly not succeed.
Expelling someone from a private school works pretty much the same way as far as I know, although it's slightly trickier since money has changed hands between the student and the school.
You RISC/CISC kids need a new fucking line - this one was already beat to death back when Apple switched from 68K to PPC about ten years ago. I know when you went to the first week of Intro to Computer Architecture they taught you that term, and you know what, that's really neat, but are you sure you should be making MULTIPLE THOUSAND DOLLAR purchasing decisions based on a 15-20 year old ONE WORD DESCRIPTION OF ENTIRE PROCESSOR ARCHITECTURES?
Don't you think maybe - JUST MAYBE - the subject has a little more depth to it than that? BTW, I hope you respond to this with the words "IBM PC" or "Megahertz Myth" because that would be FRESH and AWESOME just like YOU.
You can, but you have to use a specific video codec (H.264) and it has to be a particular resolution. Quicktime PRO already has a converter, from what I hear, and I'm sure other software with that feature is also out there or will be soon.
I was on vacation in Europe this summer, and the people we were staying with had MTV on the television, and I am serious - maybe 80-90% of the ads were from a couple of different companies hawking mind bogglingly irritating ringtones. It was completely unbelievable. And it was always the SAME ONES over and over. Yikes.
Considering how much I DIDN'T want to buy any of them, the only conclusion I could come to was that I must be getting old.
Oh, and by the way, if you're in the US, like me, this is going to be how our TV is pretty soon too, since we're trying to play catch-up with just about every other country in the world in cell phone technology right now. Just you wait.
You should try this new thing I read about on the Internet the other day - it's called SHUTTING THE FUCK UP. How many times are you going to make the same ridiculous generalization in the same story? Is it useful anymore? Is it contributing further to the discussion in any way? You sound like a god damn broken record and your point was completely fucking stupid in the first place.
.GUN in your god damn .MOUTH and pull the .TRIGGER
You should put a
Not sure where you heard that - the charges against Skylarov were dropped in exchange for testimony that was used in a case against his company.
I seriously want to know what CDs you people are buying. Yeah, that's right - YOU PEOPLE. The several hundred people I have seen on Slashdot claiming that CDs only have one or two tracks they want at the most. Who in the hell do you listen to? I have AT LEAST 120 CDs where I love almost every track on the album. Maybe you should find some artists who produce more consistently listenable music.
Answering my own question - Adblock was still installed. Disabling it made WMP work fine again, but of course, Firefox still has the fun little flash popup issue - anybody thinking about fixing that one of these days?
Anyway, I guess you get both video playback AND popups or you get neither. AWESOME.
I've been using 1.06 for a while now, and upon upgrading, my windows media is now completely broken. Has anyone else had this problem?
You can cook beef (even ground beef) until it is above a safe temperature and still have the middle be red. It tastes a whole hell of a lot better that way, too.
I'm sure when you typed that, you KNEW that someone would ask you about this - I actually thought your post was well written, but WHY in the world can't you type the word MEAT? That is the worst omission I have ever seen.
MEAT MEAT MEAT MEAT MEAT.
Also, though, you can supposedly write the VMWare volume to a real hard drive and boot using regular hardware instead, getting actual native speed.
But I guess you need SSE3 to really take advantage right now. I have a Pentium IV 3.4 GHz and it doesn't even have SSE3.
Why should he have to justify it to anyone? He spends his time on what he wants to spend his time on.
He wanted to try something out that interested him at the moment. Do you keep a time sheet at home to justify all of YOUR hobbies? How do you justify the time and effort it took you to post on Slashdot?
Why so defensive? The article simply reports the circumstances surrounding some guy's death. I guess they must have figured that an article stating "A man died today in South Korea" would be a little dry if it didn't provide a few details.
I must have accidentally skipped the part of the article you obviously read where they claim that online gaming is dangerous and evil.
Free hint: If you don't want people to call you and your former coworkers morons, you probably shouldn't spell people "ppl", you REALLY shouldn't say "lol" EVER, and above all, you absolutely never, ever should try to defend your pushy extended warranty sales to anyone with more than two functioning brain cells.
Thanks, Captain Explain-O! Your relentless courage has SAVED THE EARTH from CONFUSION over a joke some guy told on Slashdot! Even though the distinction between the prayer and the poem was clearly the entire point of that guy's joke, your quick explanation of the obvious may have saved THOUSANDS.