Don't be an idiot. Any parent who has had a kid with medical issues knows that before very long, you become far more aware of the daily ups and downs, ins and outs of the child's condition than any medical professional anywhere. And pretty soon, you get to know the little corner of science that affects your child very well.
Hey, dummy, how do scientific hypotheses get formed? Scientists turn casual observations - "hmm, these dietary changes seem to improve symptoms of autism" - or logical conjectures - "hey, mercury is really fucking poisonous in general - shouldn't we look for negative effects from giving so much of an untested mercury-containing substance to babies?" - into formal studies blah blah blah. This takes time - but the observations of parents will be a critical link in this chain. Those parents report chelating to have a positive effect very consistently.
Something else I'll tell you about parents and their children's medical problems: if you knew anything about dealing with a sick child - clearly you don't - you'd know that very easy in talking to parents to distinguish between overzealous, overoptimistic people who fool themselves and/or blame doctors at every opportunity and latch on to every quack cure in sight and those parents who are thoughtful, powerful agents in their child's care.
The suppression of information reported in the Salon article is fucking scary - large scale epidemiological databases showing dead obvious connections, then said data is removed from public view permanently by officials with deep industry connections defending their own policies. Whether the thimoseral connection shakes out or not, that public health policy was made this way is incredibly fucking stupid. But you don't care as long as you can take the lazy pose of a skeptic.
Science wouldn't progress quite so quickly without the parents observations being given credibility. Did you know that until the 1970s, most infant surgery - from circumcision on up - was done without anaesthesia? Why? Because scoffing skeptics like you (only with MDs) insisted
their nervous systems were to immature to feel pain. In retrospect, we can see pretty clearly how stupidly obviously wrong that was. Striking a skeptical pose doesn't make you scientific, it just makes you arrogant enough to believe your version of things is "obvious" and others are "fooling themselves".
Mapserver is a CGI-based program for making maps. It has an interface (mapscrpt) in Perl, Python, PHP.
PostGIS spatiall-enables Postgres. Great software.
we bought that some people had weird powers, but explaining it with something that sounds like "mitochondria" kinda ruins it.
on the other hand, i saw the original movie recently and it really didn't suck as much as i thought. it's kinda tart and cynical in a way that pays homage to 1930s movies the same way both star wars and indiana jones rip from 1930s serials. and still my mother-in-law (!!!) got it right that solo is way cooler than goofy old luke.
You need a history lesson. At the time of the lawsuits, Linux did not exist, period. Linus himself has said that were it not for the lawsuits, there would probably be no Linux, because he would have been able to use a BSD instead - there was more than commercial BSD at the time.
I'm sure all sorts of people are rude to you - it's because you are a pompous, pretentious idiot. Stop lecturing on subjects you don't know.
wow, y'all are too busy writing things like "verily, i say" and "surely you do not foolishly infer" and "peer review is not the only guarantee of veracity" to make, after 375 comments, a single joke on macromedia's cold fusion (yes, i know that's already a joke). i'm going to quote something i saw on some lefty blog, but... WILL YOU ALL PLEASE STOP TALKING LIKE CARTOON VILLAINS!!!!
Yet. They can decide to sue any time they see a threat to their business. But they are still more likely to start sticking mysterious binary fields inside the XML, only they'll call it "innovation". This will fool a few smart people they're up against into believing Microsoft is brimming over with idiots. This will cause them to pause long enough to get steamrolled by what is actually a smart way to break someone else's application and make the Microsoft product look superior.
If history is any guide, that is. Or maybe they've decided they simply have no competition and this is an efficient way to fix longstanding compatibility issues between their own damn product; maybe they decided it's a lot harder to embed a virus in an XML document than it is to cause a buffer overflow in an undocumented binary format. But it's hard to think of any precedent for that in their past behavior, which leaves me wondering why they are *really* doing this.
I'd like to hear what Cringley thinks. He's often wrong, but he regularly makes interesting speculations.
Read again, dummy. It's useless towards creating secure web apps. And I can't tell you the number of times some Dreamweaver/PHP monkey has given me a mouth open, cud-chewing stare when I remind them you have to validate on the server side regardless.
Apparently they didn't test *your* ability to apply basic logic. The set of the people who went to his school is a tiny subset of people who go to work at Microsoft. Try drawing out the Venn diagram and work out the syllogism; you can invalidate his inference but not his logic or his observation.
I'll re-paraphrase what he said for you: the people at his school most interested in working at Microsoft were greed-driven grade grubbers, and that doesn't bode well for Microsoft's future ability to attract the most talented programmers.
Actually I think that Microsoft uses every and any combination of dirty tricks and skillful programming necessary to destroy any perceived competition, and gets very smart people to do it. However, the quality of the end result is generally compromised anywhere and everywhere there is an absence of competition or pressure from huge customers. When the user's experience gets in the way of murdering the competition, too bad for the user: there's always the chance to convince them it's the competition's fault. I think you'll find these ideas more closely represent common beliefs about Microsoft around here (and elsewhere) than your self-focused whining.
But if you want me to reconsider the idiots thing, feel free to reply.
Right on. There's nothing quite like a view from the sky to reveal how much impact we have. Never mind the studies that prove big cities create their own weather systems - just fly coast to coast across the US and see how little is, practically speaking "terraformed". Sure, there are some spots in the west where you see only isolated human activity, but those places are mostly barren desert to begin with. And you NEVER see NO enviromentally significant human activity.
Basically, to completely disbelieve in global warming, you'd have to never have taken a long over-land flight (or be stupid drunk every time you did so).
Sadly, no one seems to have gotten your joke. That's OK, they'll figure it out someday, maybe after they watch their first stock options sink underwater, never to be seen again.
The area "most at risk" is: *.
Top 5 words a./ poster cannot spell:
loose
definately
???
Profit!
Oops! Maybe one should study some mathematics and logic and figure out the rest as a post-graduate degree.
... the only place you're even less likely to get laid than sitting at your computer posting on slashdot.
I love the "if anyone could copy it, no one would do it" argument. It has such vitality, such long life, and such total avoidance of reality. It's as bad as "homosexuality is unnatural": to believe that, you'd have to never have seen a dog - or a pig, or many species of birds, or many kinds of primates. Anyone ever seen that silver painted robot guy street performer? You know, with the top hat? Of course you have, because there are hundreds of them. Somehow, without copyrights, without trademarks these guys are making money.
Obviously, this argument is limited, but it's only meant to point out the absurdity of the "forever and a day copyright" capitalist-hating aristocratic-asslicking anti-democratic money-fucking pigs like Valenti, Bono, et al.
Bottom line: intellectual property is not property; it's a government-sponsored monopoly. It has LIMITED support in the U.S Constitution. It has much stronger support in Europe, where they still have the royalty from whose authority both patents and copyrights descended - the "capitalism needs IP" argument is simply an after-the-fact fairy tale. Any American who believes in Very Strong IP is a traitor to Our Values, plain and simple.
Sometimes I love Apple, sometimes I hate them. Sometimes they do great software, sometimes they screw their users as bad as any commercial software company.
This time, they done good. First: it looks like the iSight now can route audio through the system like any other mic; before, it was an expensive webcam with a crippled microphone. This should, for example, mean that Garageband can use it for recording audio input, which is convenient (and currently impossible). Second, the Audio Unit Lab is going to be interesting. It allows users to create Audio Units - which in Garageband means software instruments and which generally might give the Mac a built-in, midi-accessible sampler. It's hard to believe on the one hand - I doubt it would have features to encroach on, say Ableton Live - but on the other hand, with some pre-loaded audio, a cheapo Casio keyboard with midi ports, an isight, and Garageband, you'd practically be a moble radio station - podcasting anyone?
And the Audio Unit Lab is on http://www.apple.com/pro/musicaudio/tiger.html and NOT on the 200 list!
There is nothing capitalistic in the extremes to which IP enforcement has gone. In fact, quite the opposite. Excessive IP enforcement is anti-capitalist and in fact destroys the very possibility of competition. That is because "Intellectual Property" is not, in fact, about property at all: it concerns government-created monopolies (and I hate to break it to you Alex Keatons out there, but just because it may involve large amounts of money doesn't make it capitalist).
When anti-capitalist corporations (e.g. Disney) change the rules of the game to favor the established players, you can't say "this sucks, but I'll make money making it suck less", because the rules have been rigged to make you into a criminal for making things less sucky.
German bread is extremely underrated.
As to beer: there are many outstanding beers. If you found many non-outstanding beers, it's because a) you weren't drinking the good stuff, you cheap fucker; or b) unlike us poor Americans, you aren't so surrounded with pisswater that any decent beer tastes like the Nectar Of Venus.
Whatever. For as many buildings as you're talking about, there are probably a hundred others stocked with Ye Olde Electronicke Door Lockes et al that are run by whatever non-doofus "I don't need a manual to program a fucking VCR clock" types are handy. And those folks don't know - or particularly care - about the work involved in lowbrow facilities management.
Or else it's the facilities management types who can't type their way out of a paper bag dependent on whatever third rate retards took professional courses on how to program a Ye Olde Shitty Electronicke Door Locke.
Whatever. There are lots of decent people in between. I'm rudely exaggerating in order to highlight the notion that actual halfway smart people have the opportunity to cause all kinds of mischief in the gaps between geeks who have no time or don't care and facilities folks who are increasingly outclassed by systems designed by geeks for geeks.
I bet the net result, over the next 20 years, is systems that are less reliable and less secure. That will change only when digital devices are designed to be as reliable and simple as the 50 yr old analog equivalents (like when my gas stove works when the power is out, or when websites work on some javascript-less cell phone).
Prosecutors will use every tool available to them, fair or unfair. And that's why an apparent lack of abuses doesn't mean that the so-called Patriot act isn't hurting America. To study this properly, you'd have to find every case where the Patriot act's provisions are being used to fight crime that has nothing to do with terrorism; there are plenty of abuses of this sort because prosecutors will use whatever they can to go after the people they think are guilty.
This is why the Patriot act should be eliminated completely: since its passage, it has been used to tip the balance against defendants who are undisputedly not terrorists. It has not resulted in a single terrorist conviction. Therefore, it's illegitimate use exceeds its legitmate uses and it's bad law.
Americans aren't any safer from terrorists because of the Patriot act, and they are considerably less safe from overzealous prosecutors.
It would still be a good idea if companies were forced to publish the source code in the patent. They have a good motive against their own obfuscation - obfuscated code is hard to maintain. And in addition to adding the source code, patent examiners should be required to read it and grant the patent only if the code appears to do what the patent says it does. This is no different from examining engineering diagrams in a "real" patent.
Let's face it, as is, software patents don't even fit the standard of a patent - they don't provide skilled professionals in the field a blueprint of how to reproduce such an "invention" without re-inventing it all over. In other words, the disclosure ("how they did it") is totally worthless.
Software patents, therefore, have no value for society at all, and the government has no business granting monopolies and stifling competition when the public doesn't get a damn thing out of the deal. Which is funny, because so many supposedly pro-business types seem to love crap like software patents and claim to hate stuff like government interference; when you encounter this type of person, remind yourself that they don't give a rat's ass about capitalism or a good business climate or limited government. All they care about is an opportunity to grab, seize, and hold cash. They would be just as happy in a corrupt state like Russia, Nigeria, or Venezuela, as long as they were on the gravy train.
Promote capitalism and revoke all software patents and if you are in an emerging state like China, do not enforce IP laws until this perversion of free trade is annihilated - don't play by the rules while the game is rigged!
For now - turn an old crappy computer into a FreeBSD-based router. Later - buy your router/firewall meant for the Asian market, where IPv6 will have more support. Eventually, you will be able to buy the equivalent from the corpse of a company like Linksys, which at that point will be a backwater division of an Asian company, or else buy something from a "major American corporation" that will spy on you, incur monthly charges, and be riddled with viruses (though you'll still be able to gin something up with an old computer and FreeBSD or a Linux distribution fine-tuned for the task, with ease of upgrade an open question).
You gotta be kidding. First of all, if it gets "bounced" back to some non-existent e-mail address, spammers don't get no word 'bout nothin'. Second even if it gets bounced back to spammers, they don't care. Many (most) of them are getting email lists from some spam-address distributor, so they don't see themselves as custodians of the list; they just blast away like drunks with diarrhea.
How do I know this? I've owned my domain since 1996, and I've been administrating the email since 1998. I get spam nearly every single day for beth@ahab.com (no point in cloaking it, really), and it has NEVER been a valid address. It often bounces back to the postmaster (me) after not bouncing back to their forged yahoo address and after NOT getting the word out to a single baby-eating spammer (you do know they eat babies, right?), and I see it when I bother scanning my postmaster folder for anything interesting.
Sure, it's worth my hassle if it bounces back to them, but it's probably not worth it to the poor sucker whose yahoo address they forged.
Get a clue: SPAMMERS DON'T CARE. You're kinda hoping that the guy who lets his dog shit on the sidewalk in front of your house is going to be annoyed by the smell.
Right. Most people, even many scientists, make an appalling mess of understanding evolution.
If, for example, it turned out that homosexuals were more prevalent in affluent societies, cities, large families, and areas where population density is higher (all the only-child gay residents of Nebraska say holler - I thought so), one might hypothesize that a genetic predisposition to homosexuality (even - or especially - if only in high-density populations) have an evolutionary advantage of reducing inter-male conflict (by removing some males from competition for available females) and increasing social survival (by having more surplus productivity due to having no children of their own to care for, or by having unattached males available to fight wars). The result might well be a more affluent society with less internal violence and better evolutionary prospects for the offspring.
There are lots of sound reasons that having some homosexual individuals in a population might have an evolutionary advantage for the population.
Pretty bad inferences, all around. I have an excellent memory, and it's not really that hard to remember that d00d who rented "Edward PenisHands" when a female returns it the next morning by dropping it on the counter and running out quickly. Our drop box was closed during store hours (as a measure to enforce late payments).
Aside from that, memory is very contextual. I can't remember the name of someone I met 2 minutes ago, but I can remember the anecdote someone told me 10 years ago (and the face that went with it). Going back to file the videos every 5 minutes, you tend to know which blank spots on the shelf go with which movies just to make putting them back that much quicker. Then you see the face of the person returning it and remember who rented it yesterday.
And most people just aren't that ashamed about renting porn, to tell you the truth. I had plenty of chances to ask the returning party if the movie was any good when a group of friends were there at rental, since it wasn't so personal or invasive or creepy then (and that happened a lot, too). That kind of information (what porn flicks are good) comes in handy when someone calls in a porn flick for delivery and doesn't know what to order. Especially as I wasn't much of a consumer myself. It's also good customer relations because they feel comfortable renting porn from you when you are non-judgemental about it.
Or do you just doubt that anyone intelligent ever worked in a video store? Quentin Tarantino or Kevin Smith might beg to differ. I'd bet I'd measure a couple of standard deviations (and a few non-standard ones;-) above you by any metric. I worked in a video store because I moved cities, I had no money, and I needed a job. Are you just one of those lucky rich and/or sheltered people who think no one intelligent ever has a real job?
I'm kidding, of course. I'm from a border state where 17-yr olds are known to daytrip for access to strip clubs and alcohol. It's just that Canadians seem so harmless they make a nice easy target. And if I were really going below the belt, I'd pick on Quebecois.
As a civilized nation, you are of course porn consumers (only backwards places have no porn).
Slashdot Mirror
Um, you mean like Sendmail, qmail, Exim, postfix, etc? They aren't specific to Linux. Sendmail precedes Linux by many years in fact.
You might also be interested to know that lots of Apache (httpd) development is done on FreeBSD.
Hey, dummy, how do scientific hypotheses get formed? Scientists turn casual observations - "hmm, these dietary changes seem to improve symptoms of autism" - or logical conjectures - "hey, mercury is really fucking poisonous in general - shouldn't we look for negative effects from giving so much of an untested mercury-containing substance to babies?" - into formal studies blah blah blah. This takes time - but the observations of parents will be a critical link in this chain. Those parents report chelating to have a positive effect very consistently.
Something else I'll tell you about parents and their children's medical problems: if you knew anything about dealing with a sick child - clearly you don't - you'd know that very easy in talking to parents to distinguish between overzealous, overoptimistic people who fool themselves and/or blame doctors at every opportunity and latch on to every quack cure in sight and those parents who are thoughtful, powerful agents in their child's care.
The suppression of information reported in the Salon article is fucking scary - large scale epidemiological databases showing dead obvious connections, then said data is removed from public view permanently by officials with deep industry connections defending their own policies. Whether the thimoseral connection shakes out or not, that public health policy was made this way is incredibly fucking stupid. But you don't care as long as you can take the lazy pose of a skeptic.
Science wouldn't progress quite so quickly without the parents observations being given credibility. Did you know that until the 1970s, most infant surgery - from circumcision on up - was done without anaesthesia? Why? Because scoffing skeptics like you (only with MDs) insisted their nervous systems were to immature to feel pain. In retrospect, we can see pretty clearly how stupidly obviously wrong that was. Striking a skeptical pose doesn't make you scientific, it just makes you arrogant enough to believe your version of things is "obvious" and others are "fooling themselves".
Mapserver is a CGI-based program for making maps. It has an interface (mapscrpt) in Perl, Python, PHP. PostGIS spatiall-enables Postgres. Great software.
on the other hand, i saw the original movie recently and it really didn't suck as much as i thought. it's kinda tart and cynical in a way that pays homage to 1930s movies the same way both star wars and indiana jones rip from 1930s serials. and still my mother-in-law (!!!) got it right that solo is way cooler than goofy old luke.
I'm sure all sorts of people are rude to you - it's because you are a pompous, pretentious idiot. Stop lecturing on subjects you don't know.
wow, y'all are too busy writing things like "verily, i say" and "surely you do not foolishly infer" and "peer review is not the only guarantee of veracity" to make, after 375 comments, a single joke on macromedia's cold fusion (yes, i know that's already a joke). i'm going to quote something i saw on some lefty blog, but... WILL YOU ALL PLEASE STOP TALKING LIKE CARTOON VILLAINS!!!!
If history is any guide, that is. Or maybe they've decided they simply have no competition and this is an efficient way to fix longstanding compatibility issues between their own damn product; maybe they decided it's a lot harder to embed a virus in an XML document than it is to cause a buffer overflow in an undocumented binary format. But it's hard to think of any precedent for that in their past behavior, which leaves me wondering why they are *really* doing this.
I'd like to hear what Cringley thinks. He's often wrong, but he regularly makes interesting speculations.
Read again, dummy. It's useless towards creating secure web apps. And I can't tell you the number of times some Dreamweaver/PHP monkey has given me a mouth open, cud-chewing stare when I remind them you have to validate on the server side regardless.
I'll re-paraphrase what he said for you: the people at his school most interested in working at Microsoft were greed-driven grade grubbers, and that doesn't bode well for Microsoft's future ability to attract the most talented programmers.
Actually I think that Microsoft uses every and any combination of dirty tricks and skillful programming necessary to destroy any perceived competition, and gets very smart people to do it. However, the quality of the end result is generally compromised anywhere and everywhere there is an absence of competition or pressure from huge customers. When the user's experience gets in the way of murdering the competition, too bad for the user: there's always the chance to convince them it's the competition's fault. I think you'll find these ideas more closely represent common beliefs about Microsoft around here (and elsewhere) than your self-focused whining.
But if you want me to reconsider the idiots thing, feel free to reply.
Basically, to completely disbelieve in global warming, you'd have to never have taken a long over-land flight (or be stupid drunk every time you did so).
The area "most at risk" is: *.
Top 5 words a ./ poster cannot spell:
Oops! Maybe one should study some mathematics and logic and figure out the rest as a post-graduate degree.
Thank you, I be here all the week.
Obviously, this argument is limited, but it's only meant to point out the absurdity of the "forever and a day copyright" capitalist-hating aristocratic-asslicking anti-democratic money-fucking pigs like Valenti, Bono, et al.
Bottom line: intellectual property is not property; it's a government-sponsored monopoly. It has LIMITED support in the U.S Constitution. It has much stronger support in Europe, where they still have the royalty from whose authority both patents and copyrights descended - the "capitalism needs IP" argument is simply an after-the-fact fairy tale. Any American who believes in Very Strong IP is a traitor to Our Values, plain and simple.
Sometimes I love Apple, sometimes I hate them. Sometimes they do great software, sometimes they screw their users as bad as any commercial software company.
This time, they done good. First: it looks like the iSight now can route audio through the system like any other mic; before, it was an expensive webcam with a crippled microphone. This should, for example, mean that Garageband can use it for recording audio input, which is convenient (and currently impossible). Second, the Audio Unit Lab is going to be interesting. It allows users to create Audio Units - which in Garageband means software instruments and which generally might give the Mac a built-in, midi-accessible sampler. It's hard to believe on the one hand - I doubt it would have features to encroach on, say Ableton Live - but on the other hand, with some pre-loaded audio, a cheapo Casio keyboard with midi ports, an isight, and Garageband, you'd practically be a moble radio station - podcasting anyone?
And the Audio Unit Lab is on http://www.apple.com/pro/musicaudio/tiger.html and NOT on the 200 list!
There is nothing capitalistic in the extremes to which IP enforcement has gone. In fact, quite the opposite. Excessive IP enforcement is anti-capitalist and in fact destroys the very possibility of competition. That is because "Intellectual Property" is not, in fact, about property at all: it concerns government-created monopolies (and I hate to break it to you Alex Keatons out there, but just because it may involve large amounts of money doesn't make it capitalist).
When anti-capitalist corporations (e.g. Disney) change the rules of the game to favor the established players, you can't say "this sucks, but I'll make money making it suck less", because the rules have been rigged to make you into a criminal for making things less sucky.
Just ask, say, 321 studios.
German bread is extremely underrated. As to beer: there are many outstanding beers. If you found many non-outstanding beers, it's because a) you weren't drinking the good stuff, you cheap fucker; or b) unlike us poor Americans, you aren't so surrounded with pisswater that any decent beer tastes like the Nectar Of Venus.
Or else it's the facilities management types who can't type their way out of a paper bag dependent on whatever third rate retards took professional courses on how to program a Ye Olde Shitty Electronicke Door Locke.
Whatever. There are lots of decent people in between. I'm rudely exaggerating in order to highlight the notion that actual halfway smart people have the opportunity to cause all kinds of mischief in the gaps between geeks who have no time or don't care and facilities folks who are increasingly outclassed by systems designed by geeks for geeks.
I bet the net result, over the next 20 years, is systems that are less reliable and less secure. That will change only when digital devices are designed to be as reliable and simple as the 50 yr old analog equivalents (like when my gas stove works when the power is out, or when websites work on some javascript-less cell phone).
This is why the Patriot act should be eliminated completely: since its passage, it has been used to tip the balance against defendants who are undisputedly not terrorists. It has not resulted in a single terrorist conviction. Therefore, it's illegitimate use exceeds its legitmate uses and it's bad law.
Americans aren't any safer from terrorists because of the Patriot act, and they are considerably less safe from overzealous prosecutors.
Let's face it, as is, software patents don't even fit the standard of a patent - they don't provide skilled professionals in the field a blueprint of how to reproduce such an "invention" without re-inventing it all over. In other words, the disclosure ("how they did it") is totally worthless.
Software patents, therefore, have no value for society at all, and the government has no business granting monopolies and stifling competition when the public doesn't get a damn thing out of the deal. Which is funny, because so many supposedly pro-business types seem to love crap like software patents and claim to hate stuff like government interference; when you encounter this type of person, remind yourself that they don't give a rat's ass about capitalism or a good business climate or limited government. All they care about is an opportunity to grab, seize, and hold cash. They would be just as happy in a corrupt state like Russia, Nigeria, or Venezuela, as long as they were on the gravy train.
Promote capitalism and revoke all software patents and if you are in an emerging state like China, do not enforce IP laws until this perversion of free trade is annihilated - don't play by the rules while the game is rigged!
For now - turn an old crappy computer into a FreeBSD-based router. Later - buy your router/firewall meant for the Asian market, where IPv6 will have more support. Eventually, you will be able to buy the equivalent from the corpse of a company like Linksys, which at that point will be a backwater division of an Asian company, or else buy something from a "major American corporation" that will spy on you, incur monthly charges, and be riddled with viruses (though you'll still be able to gin something up with an old computer and FreeBSD or a Linux distribution fine-tuned for the task, with ease of upgrade an open question).
You gotta be kidding. First of all, if it gets "bounced" back to some non-existent e-mail address, spammers don't get no word 'bout nothin'. Second even if it gets bounced back to spammers, they don't care. Many (most) of them are getting email lists from some spam-address distributor, so they don't see themselves as custodians of the list; they just blast away like drunks with diarrhea.
How do I know this? I've owned my domain since 1996, and I've been administrating the email since 1998. I get spam nearly every single day for beth@ahab.com (no point in cloaking it, really), and it has NEVER been a valid address. It often bounces back to the postmaster (me) after not bouncing back to their forged yahoo address and after NOT getting the word out to a single baby-eating spammer (you do know they eat babies, right?), and I see it when I bother scanning my postmaster folder for anything interesting.
Sure, it's worth my hassle if it bounces back to them, but it's probably not worth it to the poor sucker whose yahoo address they forged.
Get a clue: SPAMMERS DON'T CARE. You're kinda hoping that the guy who lets his dog shit on the sidewalk in front of your house is going to be annoyed by the smell.
Right. Most people, even many scientists, make an appalling mess of understanding evolution.
If, for example, it turned out that homosexuals were more prevalent in affluent societies, cities, large families, and areas where population density is higher (all the only-child gay residents of Nebraska say holler - I thought so), one might hypothesize that a genetic predisposition to homosexuality (even - or especially - if only in high-density populations) have an evolutionary advantage of reducing inter-male conflict (by removing some males from competition for available females) and increasing social survival (by having more surplus productivity due to having no children of their own to care for, or by having unattached males available to fight wars). The result might well be a more affluent society with less internal violence and better evolutionary prospects for the offspring.
There are lots of sound reasons that having some homosexual individuals in a population might have an evolutionary advantage for the population.
Pretty bad inferences, all around. I have an excellent memory, and it's not really that hard to remember that d00d who rented "Edward PenisHands" when a female returns it the next morning by dropping it on the counter and running out quickly. Our drop box was closed during store hours (as a measure to enforce late payments).
;-) above you by any metric. I worked in a video store because I moved cities, I had no money, and I needed a job. Are you just one of those lucky rich and/or sheltered people who think no one intelligent ever has a real job?
Aside from that, memory is very contextual. I can't remember the name of someone I met 2 minutes ago, but I can remember the anecdote someone told me 10 years ago (and the face that went with it). Going back to file the videos every 5 minutes, you tend to know which blank spots on the shelf go with which movies just to make putting them back that much quicker. Then you see the face of the person returning it and remember who rented it yesterday.
And most people just aren't that ashamed about renting porn, to tell you the truth. I had plenty of chances to ask the returning party if the movie was any good when a group of friends were there at rental, since it wasn't so personal or invasive or creepy then (and that happened a lot, too). That kind of information (what porn flicks are good) comes in handy when someone calls in a porn flick for delivery and doesn't know what to order. Especially as I wasn't much of a consumer myself. It's also good customer relations because they feel comfortable renting porn from you when you are non-judgemental about it.
Or do you just doubt that anyone intelligent ever worked in a video store? Quentin Tarantino or Kevin Smith might beg to differ. I'd bet I'd measure a couple of standard deviations (and a few non-standard ones
I'm kidding, of course. I'm from a border state where 17-yr olds are known to daytrip for access to strip clubs and alcohol. It's just that Canadians seem so harmless they make a nice easy target. And if I were really going below the belt, I'd pick on Quebecois. As a civilized nation, you are of course porn consumers (only backwards places have no porn).