But I don't think there's any reason to treat internet sales any differently than in-store.
There is a reason, in that applying sales tax rules is very hard. Sales taxes vary from place to place even within a state. A brick-and-mortar store has an advantage in figuring it out.
That still doesn't seem sufficient reason to put those brick-and-mortar stores at a disadvantage to internet retailers, and there are many potential ways to deal with it.
At 60fps, things look very different than at 24fps. It looks great in short clips, very "real", but it rapidly takes on a hyperrealistic feeling. I assume it's just from me being accustomed to 24fps; it's what a movie "should" feel like.
I suspect that they're going to have to develop a new cinematography around 48fps, much as they have to for 3D. They're still working on the latter, but Cameron got awfully close in Avatar; a few shots I really didn't like, but it generally enhanced rather than detracted.
Finding the right lighting/lenses/aperture etc. for 48fps will probably take a bit of work, but Jackson seems to have a strong visual feel and will be able to figure it out. It should be easier than the shift required for 3D cinematography.
It's good any time either country actually does something about its human rights record. When it's simply pointing out other abuses to distract attention from its own failures, it's a waste of time.
In this case, I think it's clearly the latter. The US record is far from perfect, but the Chinese record is abominable. There will always be a conflict between national security and free speech; there will always be an opportunity to point out when the US has veered too far towards the former. But it's a hell of a lot closer than China, whose record on free speech matters is abysmal, and the only reason they would point out the US's relatively few (if deplorable) excesses is to distract from their own.
If they want to criticize the US, it's not on free speech grounds, but on crime: the US has a higher number of prisoners than China (with four times the population). They throw their activists in jail, but we seem to be beating our poor until morale improves.
I think it's a bit more like "not complaining about the ads in newspapers". I don't go out of my way to read the ads. I even click on them on the rare occasions I glance at them and they strike me as interesting.
Unlike newspaper ads, web ads can demand your attention rather than request it, by moving. That's why I said "polite ads". I use NoScript to block the impolite ones, and have animated images turned off.
Everybody else can do what they like; this seems fair to me. I'm not going to engage in slippery-slope reasoning about what would happen if everybody did the same thing. I'm merely grateful that thus far, it all works out to my advantage in that the web sites are there. If I'm losing out on even MORE advantage that I could get by blocking them, then I don't much feel it.
We choose not to block polite ads, that don't slow the system down or distract. I don't want sympathy; I want technology that makes polite advertising feasible so that web sites I like can support themselves without having to charge me.
The title of the Slashdot article is "The Awesome Button", with no indication of what's so awesome about it.
The title of TFA is somewhat better: "The AWESOME Button: A Made-to-Measure USB Input Device". I have bigger complaints there that it's mostly in the video.
It writes the word "awesome".
on
The Awesome Button
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Attention writers and summary writers: they key information (like "What does it do?") goes FIRST. Not buried in the middle of a paragraph. DEFINITELY not to be omitted entirely from the summary.
So, this is the sentence from TFA that should have begun the article and the summary:
It’s a plug-and-play USB device that will type a random synonym for the word “awesome” when the button is pressed.
Then the rest of us can say, "Gosh, that sounds pretty damn lame" and move on with our lives far more efficiently.
Only if the Republican party gains more power in the next election.
Which they are likely to. Despite the trend of the last three elections, most elections favor incumbents. (As did the last three, actually; it's only because things are fairly close to balanced that a 10% change looks like a tidal wave.) So it's unlikely that they will lose the House.
And it's likely that they will gain the Senate. The Democrats are defending twice as many seats. Some have already been effectively conceded, enough to put it back to 50-50. With only 10 Republican seats up, it will be easier to play defense, and the Democrats must win all two dozen other races.
Still, the odds are good that Obama will continue to hold the Presidency, so they've got that going for them. Plus, even if they win the Senate, the odds of it being by a filibuster-free margin are essentially nonexistent, and the Democrats can play "party of no" just as well as they can. (Actually, not as well, but well enough, especially with the veto.)
The Osborne didn't have a built in anything. It had just enough BIOS to load a few K of operating system. That OS was written directly in Z80 assembly language. I don't remember if the assembler came with the OS or not; I don't think it did. I know that even C was an add-on I had to buy it, and I think the assembler came with it.
It did come with CBASIC and MBASIC. It's a bit hard to describe those as "built in" except that they came in the same box. They weren't really practical languages for serious work, though. (CBASIC was supposed to be, but it never worked very well.) We're talking REAL basic, with GOTOs and all, and GOSUB if you wanted to get all structured-programming. (Oh, and that M stands for Microsoft. Thank you, Bill Gates.)
It was "open" in more or less the same way a bag of resistors, capacitors, and transistors is open: you can roll anything at all you want. Just don't expect a lot of help.
I don't know why it's easier and more accurate for me to count from $0 to $13.63 than from $26.37 to $40. It may be because it works left to right: I put a ten in my hand, and the left digit is taken care of. I count out three ones, and that's taken care of. I know how quarters add up very easily: 25, 50... a dime is 60... three more pennies, done.
It's a failure of my brain, not of math, but at least in my experience it was easier and therefore more accurate. Yes, I'm depending on the computer to do math, but it's not going to make an arithmetic mistake. If it gives the wrong output it's because I gave the wrong input, and yes, I'd be well aware if I put in $100 when I meant $10.
It would be particularly painful if the customer handed me $40.12 so that their change would be an even $13.75. Having to keep $40.12 in my mind as the target through the operation would be a pain in the ass. I'd have to start at the beginning: "$26.37... plus a quarter is 52, no, 62... 87, another quarter makes $26.12, no wait, $27.12... hell, mister, just give me it all back. I'm giving you some pennies now and some more pennies at the end and you can hand 'em back to me when we're all done."
Maybe if I practiced it, I'd be just as good at it either way. But I doubt it's going to be any better. Yes, it would serve me well if the computer went down, and I'd get a lot of practice at my arithmetic skills. Yay.
the CPU package needs rather more pins/lands than it otherwise would
More lands? Because it has insufficient mana?
Not a hardware guy, so I had to look that up. What's the advantage of a land array over a pin array? (I did try to google it, and the one page I found talked about how pins bend, but is a bent motherboard pin better than a bent chip pin?)
I for one would not have been able to use a Tesla as a daily driver once in the last 15 years: between driving to work and travel during the day, 250 miles is not enough range.
I'm sure that Tesla is very sorry to have lost your business. However, as you point out, you are just one person. The average daily commute is closer to 15 miles each way, and a 250 mile range would mean that people could plug in just once a week.
Mind you, this is the sports car version, and it's not really intended as a daily commuting vehicle. Since it's not a race-track vehicle either (due to limited range) I'm not sure what it's for, besides a demonstration piece and penis-extender. It seems to serve both of those jobs quite adequately, though it seems to be Top Gear's job to advise others who are not naturally gifted in the apparatus department on how to win the dick-swinging contest when up against a Tesla owner.
Still, as a way of funding Tesla's future research into a cars for those who are comfortable with the size of their genitalia, it seems to be doing rather well.
That may just be you, since Google does some preference matching.
I used Bing (which I've never used before). The first hit was Wikipedia. The second was ChurchOfSatan.com. The third was religioustolerance.org's Satanism page.
The first page goes on like that, a mix of objective "about satanism" pages and various satanist churches. Not that it justifies the Vatican's argument: I'd get a similar mix if I searched for quilting or rugby or Catholicism, for that matter.
It's the reason I don't mind the April Fools Day jokes. News in the tech industry is actually pretty slow. Minor advances get blown up into big news. It's hard even to tell from this article exactly how much is novel and how much of it is just "Hey, we're students and we put together existing technologies in the hopes that after we graduate we're going to build something genuinely world-changing."
Of interest to the nerds, I suppose, especially those not actually in the field who are interested in something close to the state of the art. So it may be "stuff that matters", but it's not exactly "news" for nerds. This story could come out next week or next month or next year and probably be just as timely.
This is a tech news site. If you have to hear about the Debian 4.3.2.4.0001 release tomorrow instead of today, I'm pretty sure you'll live. Slashdot isn't about breaking news, or anything you need to act on right this minute. Tech changes fast, but not that fast.
This site is fundamentally about entertainment. Your job does not depend on it. It's what you do to take a break from the code. Today, you do it a little differently than yesterday. Don't worry, all the breaking news will be back tomorrow, and you'll find that you didn't really miss anything.
Barely ran? It ran great. The thing was incredibly reliable. WordStar was a great word processor, including the ability to edit documents bigger than RAM. What you saw was what you got, at least as long as you printed it that old workhorse Epson MX-80. Plus, it came with the computer, along with SuperCalc, a perfectly passable spreadsheet. I was able to manage local-scale databases (address lists, that sort of thing). It was "luggable" rather than "portable", but I did take it places and it was a hell of a lot easier than hauling around separate keyboard, tower, and monitor. The floppy drives could hold a basic business or school document.
Its graphics were practically nonexistent, though somebody did one hell of a job cobbling out Space Invaders and Pac Man games with nothing more than the ANSI graphics. The hilariously tiny monitor was a challenge, and I had an external monitor when I used it at home, but it was five and a quarter inches and we LIKED it.
It was early days, and the 3 pound computer I'm running right now could probably simulate 1,000 Osborne Is without breaking a sweat. But it was a hell of a computer at the time. I wouldn't be here without it.
Everybody knows that the AFJs are coming, so actually fooling people isn't very effective. Besides, when you've got a hundred thousand people coming to the web site, somebody's going to shout April Fool pretty fast.
So they tell jokes. You know they're jokes. Some of them are pretty funny. The best ones usually have a point. Huffington is joking about the New York Times paywall. ThinkGeek is joking about how annoying 3D movies can be.
I consider that a far higher standard than the "Hey, I just got a call, your mom is dead... APRIL FOOL" style practical joke. I don't think gullibility is terribly funny, especially not when the way to invoke gullibility is by being so tasteless nobody would imagine you would joke about it.
So lighten up. If you get a smile out of it, then it's a win. If not, remember that it's only 24 hours out of the year, and a lot of other people enjoy it.
The body of the kafir is itself najis, just because of the state of non-belief, so the kafir is not further defiled by touching najis.
But the kafir can be dealt with, especially the People of the Book (Jews and Christians). It's distasteful, and you may have to purify yourself afterwards. You don't have to destroy it, any more than you have to destroy urine or blood. You just avoid touching it, and purify yourself when you do.
Muslims in a state of najis are expected to know better, and can be shunned or admonished, so that he may go and be purified without further corrupting others.
Slashdot Mirror
But I don't think there's any reason to treat internet sales any differently than in-store.
There is a reason, in that applying sales tax rules is very hard. Sales taxes vary from place to place even within a state. A brick-and-mortar store has an advantage in figuring it out.
That still doesn't seem sufficient reason to put those brick-and-mortar stores at a disadvantage to internet retailers, and there are many potential ways to deal with it.
At 60fps, things look very different than at 24fps. It looks great in short clips, very "real", but it rapidly takes on a hyperrealistic feeling. I assume it's just from me being accustomed to 24fps; it's what a movie "should" feel like.
I suspect that they're going to have to develop a new cinematography around 48fps, much as they have to for 3D. They're still working on the latter, but Cameron got awfully close in Avatar; a few shots I really didn't like, but it generally enhanced rather than detracted.
Finding the right lighting/lenses/aperture etc. for 48fps will probably take a bit of work, but Jackson seems to have a strong visual feel and will be able to figure it out. It should be easier than the shift required for 3D cinematography.
It's good any time either country actually does something about its human rights record. When it's simply pointing out other abuses to distract attention from its own failures, it's a waste of time.
In this case, I think it's clearly the latter. The US record is far from perfect, but the Chinese record is abominable. There will always be a conflict between national security and free speech; there will always be an opportunity to point out when the US has veered too far towards the former. But it's a hell of a lot closer than China, whose record on free speech matters is abysmal, and the only reason they would point out the US's relatively few (if deplorable) excesses is to distract from their own.
If they want to criticize the US, it's not on free speech grounds, but on crime: the US has a higher number of prisoners than China (with four times the population). They throw their activists in jail, but we seem to be beating our poor until morale improves.
If I buy, say, a dozen dildos
Sounds like you throw one hell of a party.
> $50+ for a game? Obscene.
Obscene? For a game with thousands of developer and artist hours in it? For a game you're going to get a few dozen hours of play out of?
I think it's a bit more like "not complaining about the ads in newspapers". I don't go out of my way to read the ads. I even click on them on the rare occasions I glance at them and they strike me as interesting.
Unlike newspaper ads, web ads can demand your attention rather than request it, by moving. That's why I said "polite ads". I use NoScript to block the impolite ones, and have animated images turned off.
Everybody else can do what they like; this seems fair to me. I'm not going to engage in slippery-slope reasoning about what would happen if everybody did the same thing. I'm merely grateful that thus far, it all works out to my advantage in that the web sites are there. If I'm losing out on even MORE advantage that I could get by blocking them, then I don't much feel it.
We choose not to block polite ads, that don't slow the system down or distract. I don't want sympathy; I want technology that makes polite advertising feasible so that web sites I like can support themselves without having to charge me.
The article, for the most part, did in fact present itself as a tutorial. Especially in the context of MAKE magazine.
It's the Slashdot article which requires a device to generate synonyms for "bad".
The title of the Slashdot article is "The Awesome Button", with no indication of what's so awesome about it.
The title of TFA is somewhat better: "The AWESOME Button: A Made-to-Measure USB Input Device". I have bigger complaints there that it's mostly in the video.
Attention writers and summary writers: they key information (like "What does it do?") goes FIRST. Not buried in the middle of a paragraph. DEFINITELY not to be omitted entirely from the summary.
So, this is the sentence from TFA that should have begun the article and the summary:
It’s a plug-and-play USB device that will type a random synonym for the word “awesome” when the button is pressed.
Then the rest of us can say, "Gosh, that sounds pretty damn lame" and move on with our lives far more efficiently.
If he doesn't wear an eye patch and carry a cutlass, then he's No True Pirate.
Only if the Republican party gains more power in the next election.
Which they are likely to. Despite the trend of the last three elections, most elections favor incumbents. (As did the last three, actually; it's only because things are fairly close to balanced that a 10% change looks like a tidal wave.) So it's unlikely that they will lose the House.
And it's likely that they will gain the Senate. The Democrats are defending twice as many seats. Some have already been effectively conceded, enough to put it back to 50-50. With only 10 Republican seats up, it will be easier to play defense, and the Democrats must win all two dozen other races.
Still, the odds are good that Obama will continue to hold the Presidency, so they've got that going for them. Plus, even if they win the Senate, the odds of it being by a filibuster-free margin are essentially nonexistent, and the Democrats can play "party of no" just as well as they can. (Actually, not as well, but well enough, especially with the veto.)
Thanks!
The Osborne didn't have a built in anything. It had just enough BIOS to load a few K of operating system. That OS was written directly in Z80 assembly language. I don't remember if the assembler came with the OS or not; I don't think it did. I know that even C was an add-on I had to buy it, and I think the assembler came with it.
It did come with CBASIC and MBASIC. It's a bit hard to describe those as "built in" except that they came in the same box. They weren't really practical languages for serious work, though. (CBASIC was supposed to be, but it never worked very well.) We're talking REAL basic, with GOTOs and all, and GOSUB if you wanted to get all structured-programming. (Oh, and that M stands for Microsoft. Thank you, Bill Gates.)
It was "open" in more or less the same way a bag of resistors, capacitors, and transistors is open: you can roll anything at all you want. Just don't expect a lot of help.
I used to do retail. I tried your way.
I don't know why it's easier and more accurate for me to count from $0 to $13.63 than from $26.37 to $40. It may be because it works left to right: I put a ten in my hand, and the left digit is taken care of. I count out three ones, and that's taken care of. I know how quarters add up very easily: 25, 50... a dime is 60... three more pennies, done.
It's a failure of my brain, not of math, but at least in my experience it was easier and therefore more accurate. Yes, I'm depending on the computer to do math, but it's not going to make an arithmetic mistake. If it gives the wrong output it's because I gave the wrong input, and yes, I'd be well aware if I put in $100 when I meant $10.
It would be particularly painful if the customer handed me $40.12 so that their change would be an even $13.75. Having to keep $40.12 in my mind as the target through the operation would be a pain in the ass. I'd have to start at the beginning: "$26.37... plus a quarter is 52, no, 62... 87, another quarter makes $26.12, no wait, $27.12... hell, mister, just give me it all back. I'm giving you some pennies now and some more pennies at the end and you can hand 'em back to me when we're all done."
Maybe if I practiced it, I'd be just as good at it either way. But I doubt it's going to be any better. Yes, it would serve me well if the computer went down, and I'd get a lot of practice at my arithmetic skills. Yay.
the CPU package needs rather more pins/lands than it otherwise would
More lands? Because it has insufficient mana?
Not a hardware guy, so I had to look that up. What's the advantage of a land array over a pin array? (I did try to google it, and the one page I found talked about how pins bend, but is a bent motherboard pin better than a bent chip pin?)
I for one would not have been able to use a Tesla as a daily driver once in the last 15 years: between driving to work and travel during the day, 250 miles is not enough range.
I'm sure that Tesla is very sorry to have lost your business. However, as you point out, you are just one person. The average daily commute is closer to 15 miles each way, and a 250 mile range would mean that people could plug in just once a week.
Mind you, this is the sports car version, and it's not really intended as a daily commuting vehicle. Since it's not a race-track vehicle either (due to limited range) I'm not sure what it's for, besides a demonstration piece and penis-extender. It seems to serve both of those jobs quite adequately, though it seems to be Top Gear's job to advise others who are not naturally gifted in the apparatus department on how to win the dick-swinging contest when up against a Tesla owner.
Still, as a way of funding Tesla's future research into a cars for those who are comfortable with the size of their genitalia, it seems to be doing rather well.
Sorry I didn't get it. I fail.
That may just be you, since Google does some preference matching.
I used Bing (which I've never used before). The first hit was Wikipedia. The second was ChurchOfSatan.com. The third was religioustolerance.org's Satanism page.
The first page goes on like that, a mix of objective "about satanism" pages and various satanist churches. Not that it justifies the Vatican's argument: I'd get a similar mix if I searched for quilting or rugby or Catholicism, for that matter.
It's the reason I don't mind the April Fools Day jokes. News in the tech industry is actually pretty slow. Minor advances get blown up into big news. It's hard even to tell from this article exactly how much is novel and how much of it is just "Hey, we're students and we put together existing technologies in the hopes that after we graduate we're going to build something genuinely world-changing."
Of interest to the nerds, I suppose, especially those not actually in the field who are interested in something close to the state of the art. So it may be "stuff that matters", but it's not exactly "news" for nerds. This story could come out next week or next month or next year and probably be just as timely.
This is a tech news site. If you have to hear about the Debian 4.3.2.4.0001 release tomorrow instead of today, I'm pretty sure you'll live. Slashdot isn't about breaking news, or anything you need to act on right this minute. Tech changes fast, but not that fast.
This site is fundamentally about entertainment. Your job does not depend on it. It's what you do to take a break from the code. Today, you do it a little differently than yesterday. Don't worry, all the breaking news will be back tomorrow, and you'll find that you didn't really miss anything.
Barely ran? It ran great. The thing was incredibly reliable. WordStar was a great word processor, including the ability to edit documents bigger than RAM. What you saw was what you got, at least as long as you printed it that old workhorse Epson MX-80. Plus, it came with the computer, along with SuperCalc, a perfectly passable spreadsheet. I was able to manage local-scale databases (address lists, that sort of thing). It was "luggable" rather than "portable", but I did take it places and it was a hell of a lot easier than hauling around separate keyboard, tower, and monitor. The floppy drives could hold a basic business or school document.
Its graphics were practically nonexistent, though somebody did one hell of a job cobbling out Space Invaders and Pac Man games with nothing more than the ANSI graphics. The hilariously tiny monitor was a challenge, and I had an external monitor when I used it at home, but it was five and a quarter inches and we LIKED it.
It was early days, and the 3 pound computer I'm running right now could probably simulate 1,000 Osborne Is without breaking a sweat. But it was a hell of a computer at the time. I wouldn't be here without it.
Everybody knows that the AFJs are coming, so actually fooling people isn't very effective. Besides, when you've got a hundred thousand people coming to the web site, somebody's going to shout April Fool pretty fast.
So they tell jokes. You know they're jokes. Some of them are pretty funny. The best ones usually have a point. Huffington is joking about the New York Times paywall. ThinkGeek is joking about how annoying 3D movies can be.
I consider that a far higher standard than the "Hey, I just got a call, your mom is dead... APRIL FOOL" style practical joke. I don't think gullibility is terribly funny, especially not when the way to invoke gullibility is by being so tasteless nobody would imagine you would joke about it.
So lighten up. If you get a smile out of it, then it's a win. If not, remember that it's only 24 hours out of the year, and a lot of other people enjoy it.
The body of the kafir is itself najis, just because of the state of non-belief, so the kafir is not further defiled by touching najis.
But the kafir can be dealt with, especially the People of the Book (Jews and Christians). It's distasteful, and you may have to purify yourself afterwards. You don't have to destroy it, any more than you have to destroy urine or blood. You just avoid touching it, and purify yourself when you do.
Muslims in a state of najis are expected to know better, and can be shunned or admonished, so that he may go and be purified without further corrupting others.
There's nothing quite up to "tauntaun sleeping bag" brilliance, but ThinkGeek's AFJs are generally worth looking at:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/interests/looflirpa/
And the video they did for the light saber popsicles is worth it for the "ice cream truck Vader" theme:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/interests/looflirpa/e8b8/