This is an illegal commercial hunt and the courts have determined it as such. Pretending there is any actual science here is nothing more than a well destroyed lie at this point
Well, sure. But in my opinion, the real reason that the Japanese keep killing whales has little to do with either science or commerce. They do it for the same reason that the U.S. still uses inches and pounds, instead of the metric system. One, they've always done it that way, and two, every other country in the world is loudly and repeatedly calling them idiotic assholes for it, in the most obnoxious manner imaginable.
So, as human nature dictates, they double down on it. Because: USA! USA! US--I mean, Nip-pon! Nip-pon! Nip-pon!
So in the future... If there's hordes of stunningly gorgeous, 25-year-old women working in tech jobs, no one will be able to figure out, without some serious digging, if they were actually born female 25 years ago, or if they're actually 75-year-olds who used to be beer-bellied, balding men.
Does saying "you know, I think Jar-Jar was kind of a fun character" count as serious digging?
...armchair pundits whining about untestability are just whiners looking for attention. Remember the Higgs was untestable back in the 1960s when it was first theorized and not tested for almost 50 years.
Yeah, you're right. There's a slight possibility that I'll owe exactly one of those guys a big mea culpa in a half-century or so. Just in case, I guess I should probably set up a charitable trust so that my descendants can apologize to theirs. I've already composed the letter:
Congratulations, from our grampa to your great-grampa, on guessing the right number of dimensions. Enclosed is a small cash bonus as a token of apology. Tell his decayed, mostly skeletal corpse to keep up the good work!
NOTE: An additional bonus will be awarded if the number of dimensions turned out to be 69.
No. You can't bring that up without bringing up the superiority and sleek design of a proper Linux desktop. This is the year of the Linux desktop, and all Macs and PCs will be thrown to the dogs to chew on.
Veterinarians advise against using sleek desktop designs as dog toys. Their seamless interfaces slide too smoothly down the animal's windpipe, choking the animal with an excessively painless user experience. With extremely design-forward frontends, the animal itself might not even notice it until it's too late.
It can be hard to find them nowadays, but if you insist on giving your dog a GUI toy, try Windows 8, Vista, or even 3.0 if possible. Accept no Service Packs!
...essentially the holographic theory is that there are fewer "real" dimensions than is apparent (like a hologram is a flat sheet of paper that appears to be 3D. The point is that the universe is (d-1)D, but looks (d)D because of the way information is encoded.
Right, because string theory, completely untestable as it seems to be, is basically a make-work program for theoretical physicists. By the time Dr. 't Hooft rolled around, all the other string theorists had already staked out the claims that the universe has some number of dimensions greater than three. So he went the other way with it.
There's nothing a string theorist hates more than a falsifiable assertion, so if it turns out 't Hooft mucked up and accidentally formulated one, he's likely to be completely ostracized, the poor guy.
No, everyone would know that, but they're educated stupid. To quote from the current edition of timecube.com: "This a major lie has so much evil feed from it's wrong."
Can you imagine what would happen to the population if people no longer aged and only died from accidents, murder, or war?
Well, sure I can imagine. There would likely be a sharp uptick in murder and war. Either that, or a government-run system of birth control. Many cultures will probably prefer the murder and war.
I don't know about accidents. I'm thinking they'd probably go down, as the philosophy of "you only live once" yields to "you only live until something kills you, so stay well clear of motorcycles and places where they still have the plague".
"Who's that hiding in my kid's closet with handcuffs and a gunnysack? Molester Joe! You silly-billy! When I hired you to babysit my kids, you promised you weren't going to try to kidnap them! You even signed a contract to that effect!
"Well, it's my fault, really--I knew you wouldn't be able to resist. All right, but this is your second strike. Five more strikes and I'll have to report it. Now get outta here, you scamp!"
The solution is to make the possession of hammers illegal.
Yes. But we can't stop there. After all, many rocks can be used as hammers. We must start a task force (paid for by a punitive quarry tax) to collect all the rocks in America and put them under lock and key. And once there are no more hammers or rocks around, even a Master lock will suffice to secure these terroristic tools. Problem solved, democracy saved.
Oh, wait, no. When you think about it, dirt is basically just a bunch of small rocks. We'll need to collect all the dirt as well. We can pay for that vital initiative with a farm and hygiene tax.
Just as freedom isn't free, security isn't secure.
I could imagine an intelligent defense of the wholeness quiets infinite phenomena phrase... and the person able to find meaning in it would score lower than the cynic who finds fewer statements profound.
Right. Wholeness does quiet infinite phenomena, namely, the phenomena associated with incompleteness. An audience as technical as Slashdot users surely has plenty of experience with those phenomena. There's a lot of them.
Like the man says, colorless green dreams sleep furiously.
The comments were mostly unfunny, the profiles of the commenters were in the way, the whole thing was just downright silly and childish. What is it that so many seem to like about this junk?
"I have a great sense of humor! I just don't like things that are silly and childish! Like jokes! I defy you explain to me why jokes are funny!"
Exploding kittens, a card game raised more than $8,000,000 so unless they more than triple their current backers in 11 days they dont have a chance.
Exploding Kittens made eight million dollars? Wow. That game is like War without the strategic depth. People basically paid 8 million dollars for the words "Exploding" and "Kittens" and about sixteen doodles of cats.
If that's all it takes, I too have an idea for a card game Kickstarter. So, the formula seems to be that something bad ("exploding") has to happen to something that most people like ("kittens"). Hmm, okay... how about... um.... Steadily Declining... uh... Grandmas?
Wait, wait! I know it sounds depressing, but you haven't seen the pictures yet! They're really... well, actually, they're pretty bleak too. Hey, this is harder than it sounds.
Has there been a single video game that was Kickstarted that didn't get reviewed terribly, though?
Maybe not, but I think in some cases that might be more a problem with the backers than with the project, especially if we're specifically talking about the sequels to classic and beloved games of the 80's and 90's. Some of those seem to be pretty faithful to the spirit of the original game. If fans of the original still hate them, maybe it's because what they somehow thought they were paying for was not another video game but, rather, being young again. Which, of course, Kickstarter can't help with.
Yes, but they're far less likely to be effective terrorists. Half of them only test their bombs for the first time in the production environment, and they almost always fail. The other half insist on testing the bombs thoroughly and repeatedly at home, and thus do not survive their first successful test run.
I still don't really even understand what the cow thing is all about. Obviously a method of trolling, but what is the reference? Is the troll trying to say that we are all easily lead by the nose? That we eat grass? That we are docile cute animals?
I think what happened was, by the time Cow-Troll was trying to come up with a gimmick, cows were all that was left. The other trolls had already cornered the market on racism, sexism, jingoism, and greased-up Yoda dolls.
I can tell you're an engineer because apparently you've never heard of a paragraph.
Although you might be a manager, since you speak in PowerPoint.
What do you mean? My last post was a PowerPoint. Shit, did Slashdot mangle the formatting? Yeah, looks like it. That's too bad, because it's just not the same without the pictures. They were all really relevant, and not superfluous at all. There was one that was a picture of a Mercator projection. Another showed a cross-ethnic cross-gender couple, one standing behind the other's chair and pointing at something on a computer screen. There were various geometric forms in primary colors. The pictures also served to break the tension at regular intervals through judicious use of LOLcats.
(More seriously, I wanted every step in my chain of reasoning on its own line, but I couldn't figure out how to do that on Slashdot without it adding an extra line in between. I wasn't really happy with the results either, but I still liked it better than a single wall of text. Sorry for the lack of elegance.)
People from countries whose predominant religion is Islam tend to be Muslim.
Many of those countries are poor compared to Western nations.
People like wealth, and wish to escape poverty.
One popular method for escaping poverty is education.
However, only certain kinds of education correlate strongly with financial independence.
Islamic Studies majors, for instance, are a dime a dozen in Islamic countries.
In the long run, a career in engineering is likely to be far more lucrative.
But educational and economic opportunities in poor Islamic countries are limited.
By contrast, there is a relative abundance of jobs and respected educational institutions in the Western world.
But you can really only get into an math, science, or engineering program there, because the liberal arts programs are strongly biased towards the local culture.
But math and science don't pay all that well.
Therefore, people of college age in those countries look abroad to choose a college, and tend to choose engineering as their field of study.
When they arrive in the West to attend college, they are immigrants, don't speak the language, and don't share the culture.
They are also usually young.
Young adults really want to socialize, especially with those of the opposite sex.
The immigrant students can't socialize effectively with the local population, because of cultural differences, prejudices, and ordinary human nature.
Also, they can't hook up with the opposite sex effectively, because there's no support structure in their host country to do that in compliance with their cultural restrictions.
Young people who can't socialize tend to get depressed and angry.
These students tend to blame the culture of their host country for their depression and anger.
They become chronically homesick, and reject their host country in every way they can.
A terrorist recruiter is trained to spot these disaffected students.
The recruiter fulfills the student's need for socializing and the comforts of a familiar culture, by introducing them to other terrorist recruits.
Having found community at last, the student stops seeking it elsewhere, and cuts off any other contacts he may have had.
The community encourages and reinforces each other's anger, and directs it towards revenge.
I want to take down all of Taylor Swift's songs and videos from the web. Can I, by any chance, hire you to force the internet to take them all down until she proves that I *don't* own the copyright?
I have already dispatched a letter to Mr. Tyler Swift on your behalf. It reads: "Dear T-Swiff, it is a matter of public record that my client, Doctor Who, in fact wrote all your shit, especially that one about the poker face. Please send me one million dollars and stop singing forever. It has also come to my attention that at no time did you in fact poker any faces, so I will likely be suing you for false advertising as well.. Yours very truly, etc., etc., esq."
I anticipate a prompt response from the Internet Company in this matter. Thank you for your business. You will be billed in monthly installments for the next forty-eight months. Cancel at any time--it won't make any difference. No CODs. Offer void in Mexico.
Slashdot Mirror
In my experience, when a UI expert says you need to fix your interface, he is almost certainly right.
When a "UX" "guru" says you need to "update" your "experience", he is almost certainly wrong.
This is an illegal commercial hunt and the courts have determined it as such. Pretending there is any actual science here is nothing more than a well destroyed lie at this point
Well, sure. But in my opinion, the real reason that the Japanese keep killing whales has little to do with either science or commerce. They do it for the same reason that the U.S. still uses inches and pounds, instead of the metric system. One, they've always done it that way, and two, every other country in the world is loudly and repeatedly calling them idiotic assholes for it, in the most obnoxious manner imaginable.
So, as human nature dictates, they double down on it. Because: USA! USA! US--I mean, Nip-pon! Nip-pon! Nip-pon!
So in the future ... If there's hordes of stunningly gorgeous, 25-year-old women working in tech jobs, no one will be able to figure out, without some serious digging, if they were actually born female 25 years ago, or if they're actually 75-year-olds who used to be beer-bellied, balding men.
Does saying "you know, I think Jar-Jar was kind of a fun character" count as serious digging?
...armchair pundits whining about untestability are just whiners looking for attention. Remember the Higgs was untestable back in the 1960s when it was first theorized and not tested for almost 50 years.
Yeah, you're right. There's a slight possibility that I'll owe exactly one of those guys a big mea culpa in a half-century or so. Just in case, I guess I should probably set up a charitable trust so that my descendants can apologize to theirs. I've already composed the letter:
Congratulations, from our grampa to your great-grampa, on guessing the right number of dimensions. Enclosed is a small cash bonus as a token of apology. Tell his decayed, mostly skeletal corpse to keep up the good work!
NOTE: An additional bonus will be awarded if the number of dimensions turned out to be 69.
No. You can't bring that up without bringing up the superiority and sleek design of a proper Linux desktop. This is the year of the Linux desktop, and all Macs and PCs will be thrown to the dogs to chew on.
Veterinarians advise against using sleek desktop designs as dog toys. Their seamless interfaces slide too smoothly down the animal's windpipe, choking the animal with an excessively painless user experience. With extremely design-forward frontends, the animal itself might not even notice it until it's too late.
It can be hard to find them nowadays, but if you insist on giving your dog a GUI toy, try Windows 8, Vista, or even 3.0 if possible. Accept no Service Packs!
...essentially the holographic theory is that there are fewer "real" dimensions than is apparent (like a hologram is a flat sheet of paper that appears to be 3D. The point is that the universe is (d-1)D, but looks (d)D because of the way information is encoded.
Right, because string theory, completely untestable as it seems to be, is basically a make-work program for theoretical physicists. By the time Dr. 't Hooft rolled around, all the other string theorists had already staked out the claims that the universe has some number of dimensions greater than three. So he went the other way with it.
There's nothing a string theorist hates more than a falsifiable assertion, so if it turns out 't Hooft mucked up and accidentally formulated one, he's likely to be completely ostracized, the poor guy.
It's a time cube. Everyone knows that.
No, everyone would know that, but they're educated stupid. To quote from the current edition of timecube.com: "This a major lie has so much evil feed from it's wrong."
He's always struck me as borderline altruistic.
"2015/12/03 20:57:89.523 - Test rat 1591 consumed a pellet from dispenser A."
If I were going to stop aging, I'd like to stop aging at 35.
"You sure you wouldn't prefer to be, like, 20 again?"
"No, thanks, 35 for me. I like my bald spot, graying temples, hairy back, incipient presbyopia, and pot belly just fine."
"Uh... look, sir, I'll level with you. This treatment can only take you back to early adulthood. You don't get to pick a particular age or anything."
"Oh, in that case, never mind, I don't want it."
Can you imagine what would happen to the population if people no longer aged and only died from accidents, murder, or war?
Well, sure I can imagine. There would likely be a sharp uptick in murder and war. Either that, or a government-run system of birth control. Many cultures will probably prefer the murder and war.
I don't know about accidents. I'm thinking they'd probably go down, as the philosophy of "you only live once" yields to "you only live until something kills you, so stay well clear of motorcycles and places where they still have the plague".
If you really need a treatment, how about a nice backhand slap to the face?
Only if you take off your watch first!
"Who's that hiding in my kid's closet with handcuffs and a gunnysack? Molester Joe! You silly-billy! When I hired you to babysit my kids, you promised you weren't going to try to kidnap them! You even signed a contract to that effect!
"Well, it's my fault, really--I knew you wouldn't be able to resist. All right, but this is your second strike. Five more strikes and I'll have to report it. Now get outta here, you scamp!"
The solution is to make the possession of hammers illegal.
Yes. But we can't stop there. After all, many rocks can be used as hammers. We must start a task force (paid for by a punitive quarry tax) to collect all the rocks in America and put them under lock and key. And once there are no more hammers or rocks around, even a Master lock will suffice to secure these terroristic tools. Problem solved, democracy saved.
Oh, wait, no. When you think about it, dirt is basically just a bunch of small rocks. We'll need to collect all the dirt as well. We can pay for that vital initiative with a farm and hygiene tax.
Just as freedom isn't free, security isn't secure.
I could imagine an intelligent defense of the wholeness quiets infinite phenomena phrase... and the person able to find meaning in it would score lower than the cynic who finds fewer statements profound.
Right. Wholeness does quiet infinite phenomena, namely, the phenomena associated with incompleteness. An audience as technical as Slashdot users surely has plenty of experience with those phenomena. There's a lot of them.
Like the man says, colorless green dreams sleep furiously.
The comments were mostly unfunny, the profiles of the commenters were in the way, the whole thing was just downright silly and childish. What is it that so many seem to like about this junk?
"I have a great sense of humor! I just don't like things that are silly and childish! Like jokes! I defy you explain to me why jokes are funny!"
Exploding kittens, a card game raised more than $8,000,000 so unless they more than triple their current backers in 11 days they dont have a chance.
Exploding Kittens made eight million dollars? Wow. That game is like War without the strategic depth. People basically paid 8 million dollars for the words "Exploding" and "Kittens" and about sixteen doodles of cats.
If that's all it takes, I too have an idea for a card game Kickstarter. So, the formula seems to be that something bad ("exploding") has to happen to something that most people like ("kittens"). Hmm, okay... how about... um.... Steadily Declining... uh... Grandmas?
Wait, wait! I know it sounds depressing, but you haven't seen the pictures yet! They're really... well, actually, they're pretty bleak too. Hey, this is harder than it sounds.
Has there been a single video game that was Kickstarted that didn't get reviewed terribly, though?
Maybe not, but I think in some cases that might be more a problem with the backers than with the project, especially if we're specifically talking about the sequels to classic and beloved games of the 80's and 90's. Some of those seem to be pretty faithful to the spirit of the original game. If fans of the original still hate them, maybe it's because what they somehow thought they were paying for was not another video game but, rather, being young again. Which, of course, Kickstarter can't help with.
Are programmers more likely to be terrorists?
Yes, but they're far less likely to be effective terrorists. Half of them only test their bombs for the first time in the production environment, and they almost always fail. The other half insist on testing the bombs thoroughly and repeatedly at home, and thus do not survive their first successful test run.
I still don't really even understand what the cow thing is all about. Obviously a method of trolling, but what is the reference? Is the troll trying to say that we are all easily lead by the nose? That we eat grass? That we are docile cute animals?
I think what happened was, by the time Cow-Troll was trying to come up with a gimmick, cows were all that was left. The other trolls had already cornered the market on racism, sexism, jingoism, and greased-up Yoda dolls.
In my experience, when someone feels the need to insist that something is "surprisingly relevant", it's usually unsurprisingly irrelevant.
I can tell you're an engineer because apparently you've never heard of a paragraph.
Although you might be a manager, since you speak in PowerPoint.
What do you mean? My last post was a PowerPoint. Shit, did Slashdot mangle the formatting? Yeah, looks like it. That's too bad, because it's just not the same without the pictures. They were all really relevant, and not superfluous at all. There was one that was a picture of a Mercator projection. Another showed a cross-ethnic cross-gender couple, one standing behind the other's chair and pointing at something on a computer screen. There were various geometric forms in primary colors. The pictures also served to break the tension at regular intervals through judicious use of LOLcats.
(More seriously, I wanted every step in my chain of reasoning on its own line, but I couldn't figure out how to do that on Slashdot without it adding an extra line in between. I wasn't really happy with the results either, but I still liked it better than a single wall of text. Sorry for the lack of elegance.)
Beware oversimplification.
That's a fair point. But it's Slashdot, not the Lyceum. How rigorous do I have to be?
Correlation is not causation, but it is correlated with causation.
An alternate explanation:
People from countries whose predominant religion is Islam tend to be Muslim.
Many of those countries are poor compared to Western nations.
People like wealth, and wish to escape poverty.
One popular method for escaping poverty is education.
However, only certain kinds of education correlate strongly with financial independence.
Islamic Studies majors, for instance, are a dime a dozen in Islamic countries.
In the long run, a career in engineering is likely to be far more lucrative.
But educational and economic opportunities in poor Islamic countries are limited.
By contrast, there is a relative abundance of jobs and respected educational institutions in the Western world.
But you can really only get into an math, science, or engineering program there, because the liberal arts programs are strongly biased towards the local culture.
But math and science don't pay all that well.
Therefore, people of college age in those countries look abroad to choose a college, and tend to choose engineering as their field of study.
When they arrive in the West to attend college, they are immigrants, don't speak the language, and don't share the culture.
They are also usually young.
Young adults really want to socialize, especially with those of the opposite sex.
The immigrant students can't socialize effectively with the local population, because of cultural differences, prejudices, and ordinary human nature.
Also, they can't hook up with the opposite sex effectively, because there's no support structure in their host country to do that in compliance with their cultural restrictions.
Young people who can't socialize tend to get depressed and angry.
These students tend to blame the culture of their host country for their depression and anger.
They become chronically homesick, and reject their host country in every way they can.
A terrorist recruiter is trained to spot these disaffected students.
The recruiter fulfills the student's need for socializing and the comforts of a familiar culture, by introducing them to other terrorist recruits.
Having found community at last, the student stops seeking it elsewhere, and cuts off any other contacts he may have had.
The community encourages and reinforces each other's anger, and directs it towards revenge.
And that's why a lot of terrorists are engineers.
I want to take down all of Taylor Swift's songs and videos from the web. Can I, by any chance, hire you to force the internet to take them all down until she proves that I *don't* own the copyright?
I have already dispatched a letter to Mr. Tyler Swift on your behalf. It reads: "Dear T-Swiff, it is a matter of public record that my client, Doctor Who, in fact wrote all your shit, especially that one about the poker face. Please send me one million dollars and stop singing forever. It has also come to my attention that at no time did you in fact poker any faces, so I will likely be suing you for false advertising as well.. Yours very truly, etc., etc., esq."
I anticipate a prompt response from the Internet Company in this matter. Thank you for your business. You will be billed in monthly installments for the next forty-eight months. Cancel at any time--it won't make any difference. No CODs. Offer void in Mexico.