"The men at Gitmo are prisoners of war and they're being treated better than any POWs is the history of the world. "
Ah, relativism. Does this mean that we treat these "illegal combattants" (can't use "POW" if the DoD isn't) that good, or that other countries treat their prisoners that poorly?
"Even with a Republican majority and a Republican President they were not able to pass an amendment pertaining to gay marriage."
Yet. If a small but noisy minority is able to browbeat the federal and state governments into ratifying a constitutional ban on alcoholic beverages, this can still happen.
"Now, it may very well be great for submarines, but I don't think it will be useful for scuba."
Ehhh... other navies differ, but for the time being "submarine" in the USN means "nuclear," which means they never had a problem getting enough electricity to get O2 from water the Old Fashioned Way (TM): cracking it.
From how I figure, this may be useful for industrial/military ops where you expect to spend time in a decompression chamber afterwards, or maybe situations where you intend to spend a few hours in relatively shallow depths (frogmen?), but unless this gear ends up being cheaper than buying and properly maintaining air tanks, I don't see it replacing tanks in recreational, "no decompression" dives.
Heck, even most industrial diving uses surface-supplied air. Even if you do equip them with these devices, there'll still be a tether to the surface for communcation (radio frequencies only go so far through water) and transporation (getting back up to the surface). So it seems this leaves military SpecOps.
"The EU is not a country, it is a conglomeration of countries. What is their actual power to enforce these laws? Especially seeing as how banning Microsoft on a continent-wide level would be an infringement of each country's right to self-determination."
The US is not a country, it is a conglomeration of states. What is their actual power to enforce these laws? Especially seeing as how banning Microsoft on a continent-wide level would be an infringement of each state's right to self-determination.
It's called "federalism," and the strength of the federation is determined by the member states. The Union has just as much power to enforce these rulings as has been surrendered by the member states by the ratification of the constitution in question. And while the constitution being considered by Europe may not be as binding as the US Constitution (especially not its moderen bastardized interpretation of it), it certainly seems more binding than our old Articles of Confederation, meaning the central government has both powers and the means to enforce them.
"Why should anyone even discuss anything with you if you're going to start labelling anything you don't like as "anti-American"?"
... what are you, a bot? Grepping Slashdot for the phrase "anti-American?"
Look at the subject!
Quoth the original poster:
we Americans are showing our puritanical roots
I didn't call the poster "anti-American" because he was saying something I didn't like, I called him that because that is practically what he called himself! He used generic "the US is anti-sex and pro-violence" arguments when violence wasn't even mentioned, apparently for no other purpose than to denegrate the US instead of staying on topic.
Nobody complained to the FCC about booth babes, John Ashcroft didn't step out of retirement to throw up a curtain in front of booth babes, and I have yet to hear any anti-booth babe legislation (to save the children! (TM)) mentioned in Congress. Maybe if I said "anti-US" instead of "anti-American" your code wouldn't have found me.
"Can anyone else think of a better idea to get lonely gamers (the kind that would go to E3 to begin with) to check out their booth?"
Depends on the gamer/geek in question. From where I sit, it seems that flashy booth babes will only attract the creepy geeks and actually repel those less-caustic geeks that would be too intimidated to be within two meters of one.
Of course, I thought E3 was all about the games, anyway. Unless it's a T&A game, it seems all the booth babes would do is distract from the product they're supposed to be selling, no matter what kind of geek we're talking about.
"Violence is ok, but anything to do with sex or sexuality is very shameful and bad!"
Look, I like tits and ass as much as the next guy, but there's a time and a place for everything, and I get sick of T&A being over-used to hit that lowest common denominator in advertising.
"So the companies use good looking women to attract attention to their products,"
Whatever happened to using the products themselves? Or are they simply not good enough to stand on their own two feet? Another issue I have with the concept of booth babes is the way publishers rely on them and their digital counterparts in the games to move product instead of, say, making a good game.
Your argument about how the US is pro-violence and anti-sex is ultmately a straw man argument here, anyway. I didn't see anything in TFA about blowing stuff up, and at least I personally think the concept of over-relying on cleavage to sell a game is just lame in and of its own right. How about countering my argument instead of the usual collection of anti-American soundbites?
"no oil and gas from Canada for Homeland Security..."
Now now, every good little Slashdotter knows that the US gets every last drop of its oil from Arab countries, hence the whole "no blood for oil" protest line (and, ultimately, probably one of the inspirations for this bill to begin with). If the name "Alberta" makes you think of oil then we'll have to adjust your blinders until hearing the name of any Canadian province makes your eyes glaze over.
"Yes, that's right, and those people are poisoning themselves, particularly in China. The pollution in the industrial cities is so bad that if it goes unchecked, it will, paradoxically, threaten their economic survival."
What China needs is an armed revolution by the working classes, overthrowing their government and setting up a true worker's paradi... oh, er, nevermind.
Your abuse of punctuation makes my head hurt. The part of my brain that parses English couldn't understand what you were doing with those quotation marks there, passed it off to another department, and I ended up reading "I double-prime, P double-prime."
You yourself should have seen how God-awful it looked while you were typing it. Didn't it ever occur to you that maybe, perahps you should spell your butchered acronym out for clarity? Heck, around here, even without trying to take a product of double derivatives, for all I know you could have been talking about internet "protocol."
"The great irony is that AOL, rather than go head to head with MS, continued to use internet explorer browser even after they bought Netscape. The world said "Huh?"
Do you think AOL will continue to be part of the default Windows install if they go all-Firefox? They'd have little to gain and almost everything to lose if they drop MS like that.
If anything, incorporating the whole MSIE engine in Netscape 8.0 may be a sign that Netscape itself (if not Firefox-branded) will be a part of the default AOL install soon, with the hopes of Netscape's calls to the IE engine would be enough to placate Microsoft.
On a somewhat related note, Netscape's ISP service seems to include their own browser (as well as plug-ins for IE), any indication if AOL is having any success there? And, if so, how many of their users are actually using the Netscape browser instead of just sticking with IE?
"When driving your car, can you confidently say you know within a margin of error of 10 cm *exactly* where your car is, 1/3rd of a foot"
If landing on an aircraft carrier were as easy as driving a car, we'd all be doing it.
"If any operation of such a large vehicle operated by a person required better than 10cm of precision to avoid damage, there would be serious problems.."
Why do you think it takes so much time and money to train them to do it?
As I've pointed out before, in their scramble to copy the SNES controller, they actually used the same exact pattern.
Put the letters in alphabetical order, then put the shapes in increasing order of the number of lines (curves) in the shape. Circle, 1 is A, cross, 2 is B, triangle, 3 is X, and square, 4 is Y.
Every time I'm in a game where a "mash the buttons in the right order" scene comes up (limit breaks in FF games, for example), I remember that map and it gets me through.
At least Sega did their own thing, going for us left-to-right readers as opposed to all those crazy right-to-left folks they have in Japan.
"This industry has always been kind of weird, with its emphasis on novelty instead of durability."
Durability doesn't need as much maintenance. It doesn't pay to get it right the first time.
I don't think this is unique to computers, though. Consider cars, where originally they were simple and durable enough to be maintained well-enough by your average dirt-poor farm boy, now you need an AS just to figure out how to plug in the chip for the fuel injection.
"Where do these people come from and why are they interviewing with me for 6 figures instead of the local McDonalds for $6/hr?"
Because those six-figure jobs are all you're looking for. All you find are people that more belong in five-figure jobs because everybody wants a six-figure magic genie to wave their wand and make all their computer problems go away five minutes after signing the tax forms. Those "one-week boot camps" do so well because they're about the only way someone new to the trade can get anything vaguely resembling experience these days.
Heck, I'm tempted to blame people like you for turning me off programming to begin with. From day 1 of GW-BASIC 101 students are constantly drilled not on programming but "proper problem solving skills" and "the programming process." As a math minor I can appreciate the importance in knowing how to tackle a problem, but the near-fanatical devotion to THE PROCESS I've found in the computer classes I was unfortunate enough to take sacrifices even learning the art of programming itself. What does Instruction X do? What doesn't it do? Why does the syntax have to be the way it does? Those aren't nearly as important as knowing how to draw a proper flow chart for Phase Two.
And why are they like this? Because six figures don't allow any room for experimentation. And there are no such thing as five-figure programming jobs.
"If you have the right mindset, you'll teach yourself your environment, automate your own job, and it will seem easy."
But unless you're learning on the job while teaching yourself that environment, you're up a creek. Teaching yourself on your own time doesn't get your foot in the door when all the postings say "five years experience minimum."
Classic chicken-and-egg.
As badly flamed as I'm going to be for saying this, it'd be nice if some of these silly networking certifications were actually seen as a substitute for on-the-job training, but ultimately you just see "CCxx/MCxx preferred" tacked on to the half-decade of previous work experience expected.
And the ads I'm seeing are always the higher-ups, always looking for a director/administrator for some xE5-client network, never "Medium-sized company looking for lower-level tech to kick print servers."
<TANGENT>
For example, I've got a CCNP cert that's due to expire this coming January. It's from Cisco so one would think it'd at least be worth something, at least more than, say, MCSE 2000. But "CCNP Seeking to Touch Actual Cisco Hardware for First Time" just doesn't get much attention in HR. Yet it's either work for a company using their products or try buying some of my own, and the only way I could afford even one of their small, three-digit remote access routers is to sell off rights to my first-born. So the only "real" networking experience I have is with my collection of SOHO boxen, and I can probably rattle off a list of a dozen features I wish they had in the time it takes you to read this post. Spanning Tree? Heck, my switches aren't even managed! And what's the point of "routers" that can't even change their default interface? Why support RIPv2 if you're just going to continue shoveling packets into a dark interface while there's a perfectly good 56k not one hop away? The built-in DHCP servers won't even let me designate a secondary gateway to return to my clients! But at least it's not "home networking" products... don't get me started on Linksys...
Experiences in the past two weeks with setting up my first wireless LAN have shown me how obsolete that Cisco cert already is ("Can a WAP function as a bridge?" is a question I shouldn't have had to ask myself) and I find myself doubting it's worth the effort to renew it anyway. Even if I could actually afford to (repeatedly) take the CCIE lab exam, I doubt even that could get me over the "no experience" hump.
"People will purchase the new one in spite of the original working just as well."
Spoken like someone who's never actually played both a GB and a GBP. The GBP had a much better LCD display, with far sharper contrast and all but eliminating the blurring you'd see on the original units. Nintendo didn't hype this fact because it'd make their old hardware look too bad, but the GBP is much easier on the eyes.
Slashdot Mirror
"The men at Gitmo are prisoners of war and they're being treated better than any POWs is the history of the world. "
Ah, relativism. Does this mean that we treat these "illegal combattants" (can't use "POW" if the DoD isn't) that good, or that other countries treat their prisoners that poorly?
"Even with a Republican majority and a Republican President they were not able to pass an amendment pertaining to gay marriage."
Yet. If a small but noisy minority is able to browbeat the federal and state governments into ratifying a constitutional ban on alcoholic beverages, this can still happen.
Never underestimate the power of astroturfing.
"Now, it may very well be great for submarines, but I don't think it will be useful for scuba."
Ehhh... other navies differ, but for the time being "submarine" in the USN means "nuclear," which means they never had a problem getting enough electricity to get O2 from water the Old Fashioned Way (TM): cracking it.
From how I figure, this may be useful for industrial/military ops where you expect to spend time in a decompression chamber afterwards, or maybe situations where you intend to spend a few hours in relatively shallow depths (frogmen?), but unless this gear ends up being cheaper than buying and properly maintaining air tanks, I don't see it replacing tanks in recreational, "no decompression" dives.
Heck, even most industrial diving uses surface-supplied air. Even if you do equip them with these devices, there'll still be a tether to the surface for communcation (radio frequencies only go so far through water) and transporation (getting back up to the surface). So it seems this leaves military SpecOps.
Yes, I know it's a loose fit, but...
"The EU is not a country, it is a conglomeration of countries. What is their actual power to enforce these laws? Especially seeing as how banning Microsoft on a continent-wide level would be an infringement of each country's right to self-determination."
The US is not a country, it is a conglomeration of states. What is their actual power to enforce these laws? Especially seeing as how banning Microsoft on a continent-wide level would be an infringement of each state's right to self-determination.
It's called "federalism," and the strength of the federation is determined by the member states. The Union has just as much power to enforce these rulings as has been surrendered by the member states by the ratification of the constitution in question. And while the constitution being considered by Europe may not be as binding as the US Constitution (especially not its moderen bastardized interpretation of it), it certainly seems more binding than our old Articles of Confederation, meaning the central government has both powers and the means to enforce them.
... what are you, a bot? Grepping Slashdot for the phrase "anti-American?"
I didn't call the poster "anti-American" because he was saying something I didn't like, I called him that because that is practically what he called himself! He used generic "the US is anti-sex and pro-violence" arguments when violence wasn't even mentioned, apparently for no other purpose than to denegrate the US instead of staying on topic.Look at the subject!
Quoth the original poster:
Nobody complained to the FCC about booth babes, John Ashcroft didn't step out of retirement to throw up a curtain in front of booth babes, and I have yet to hear any anti-booth babe legislation (to save the children! (TM)) mentioned in Congress. Maybe if I said "anti-US" instead of "anti-American" your code wouldn't have found me.
So does that mean we can have the vi vs. emacs debate settled once and for all by a mud-wrestling match?
"Can anyone else think of a better idea to get lonely gamers (the kind that would go to E3 to begin with) to check out their booth?"
Depends on the gamer/geek in question. From where I sit, it seems that flashy booth babes will only attract the creepy geeks and actually repel those less-caustic geeks that would be too intimidated to be within two meters of one.
Of course, I thought E3 was all about the games, anyway. Unless it's a T&A game, it seems all the booth babes would do is distract from the product they're supposed to be selling, no matter what kind of geek we're talking about.
"Violence is ok, but anything to do with sex or sexuality is very shameful and bad!"
Look, I like tits and ass as much as the next guy, but there's a time and a place for everything, and I get sick of T&A being over-used to hit that lowest common denominator in advertising.
"So the companies use good looking women to attract attention to their products,"
Whatever happened to using the products themselves? Or are they simply not good enough to stand on their own two feet? Another issue I have with the concept of booth babes is the way publishers rely on them and their digital counterparts in the games to move product instead of, say, making a good game.
Your argument about how the US is pro-violence and anti-sex is ultmately a straw man argument here, anyway. I didn't see anything in TFA about blowing stuff up, and at least I personally think the concept of over-relying on cleavage to sell a game is just lame in and of its own right. How about countering my argument instead of the usual collection of anti-American soundbites?
"no oil and gas from Canada for Homeland Security..."
Now now, every good little Slashdotter knows that the US gets every last drop of its oil from Arab countries, hence the whole "no blood for oil" protest line (and, ultimately, probably one of the inspirations for this bill to begin with). If the name "Alberta" makes you think of oil then we'll have to adjust your blinders until hearing the name of any Canadian province makes your eyes glaze over.
"Yes, that's right, and those people are poisoning themselves, particularly in China. The pollution in the industrial cities is so bad that if it goes unchecked, it will, paradoxically, threaten their economic survival."
What China needs is an armed revolution by the working classes, overthrowing their government and setting up a true worker's paradi... oh, er, nevermind.
Your abuse of punctuation makes my head hurt. The part of my brain that parses English couldn't understand what you were doing with those quotation marks there, passed it off to another department, and I ended up reading "I double-prime, P double-prime."
You yourself should have seen how God-awful it looked while you were typing it. Didn't it ever occur to you that maybe, perahps you should spell your butchered acronym out for clarity? Heck, around here, even without trying to take a product of double derivatives, for all I know you could have been talking about internet "protocol."
"The great irony is that AOL, rather than go head to head with MS, continued to use internet explorer browser even after they bought Netscape. The world said "Huh?"
Do you think AOL will continue to be part of the default Windows install if they go all-Firefox? They'd have little to gain and almost everything to lose if they drop MS like that.
If anything, incorporating the whole MSIE engine in Netscape 8.0 may be a sign that Netscape itself (if not Firefox-branded) will be a part of the default AOL install soon, with the hopes of Netscape's calls to the IE engine would be enough to placate Microsoft.
On a somewhat related note, Netscape's ISP service seems to include their own browser (as well as plug-ins for IE), any indication if AOL is having any success there? And, if so, how many of their users are actually using the Netscape browser instead of just sticking with IE?
"When driving your car, can you confidently say you know within a margin of error of 10 cm *exactly* where your car is, 1/3rd of a foot"
If landing on an aircraft carrier were as easy as driving a car, we'd all be doing it.
"If any operation of such a large vehicle operated by a person required better than 10cm of precision to avoid damage, there would be serious problems.."
Why do you think it takes so much time and money to train them to do it?
"Hollywood seems to believe that everyone is out to rob them."
When it's what you do all day it's difficult not to expect it from others.
Gauntlet for the NES?
Game needs more players, badly!
"and didn't move but stayed in the same place on the screen. Horrible.."
Lay off the Ms. for a while and try the original for a change. That's how fruit behaved in the original game.
Ehhh... it looks better with Reggie. As cool as Mario is, he doesn't strike me as the ass-kicking, name-taking type.
:)
Personally, I wanna see the 3-letter code on the bottom of the thing to turn out to be "REG."
"At least with AB/XY, there's a pattern to it."
As I've pointed out before, in their scramble to copy the SNES controller, they actually used the same exact pattern.
Put the letters in alphabetical order, then put the shapes in increasing order of the number of lines (curves) in the shape. Circle, 1 is A, cross, 2 is B, triangle, 3 is X, and square, 4 is Y.
Every time I'm in a game where a "mash the buttons in the right order" scene comes up (limit breaks in FF games, for example), I remember that map and it gets me through.
At least Sega did their own thing, going for us left-to-right readers as opposed to all those crazy right-to-left folks they have in Japan.
Yeah, us Windows users don't know what to do with fewer than three buttons.
But still, the bongos don't have any obvious control mechanisms at first glance beyond a Big Red Button... hrm....
No no, it will be the Phantom 720, so they can one-up Microsoft in the art of going nowhere fast.
"based upon a release candidate of the Hurd kernel"
Yes, even in this fanciful dream world, Hurd still hasn't been released.
Well, at least it ain't OS/2 5.0...
"This industry has always been kind of weird, with its emphasis on novelty instead of durability."
Durability doesn't need as much maintenance. It doesn't pay to get it right the first time.
I don't think this is unique to computers, though. Consider cars, where originally they were simple and durable enough to be maintained well-enough by your average dirt-poor farm boy, now you need an AS just to figure out how to plug in the chip for the fuel injection.
"Where do these people come from and why are they interviewing with me for 6 figures instead of the local McDonalds for $6/hr?"
Because those six-figure jobs are all you're looking for. All you find are people that more belong in five-figure jobs because everybody wants a six-figure magic genie to wave their wand and make all their computer problems go away five minutes after signing the tax forms. Those "one-week boot camps" do so well because they're about the only way someone new to the trade can get anything vaguely resembling experience these days.
Heck, I'm tempted to blame people like you for turning me off programming to begin with. From day 1 of GW-BASIC 101 students are constantly drilled not on programming but "proper problem solving skills" and "the programming process." As a math minor I can appreciate the importance in knowing how to tackle a problem, but the near-fanatical devotion to THE PROCESS I've found in the computer classes I was unfortunate enough to take sacrifices even learning the art of programming itself. What does Instruction X do? What doesn't it do? Why does the syntax have to be the way it does? Those aren't nearly as important as knowing how to draw a proper flow chart for Phase Two.
And why are they like this? Because six figures don't allow any room for experimentation. And there are no such thing as five-figure programming jobs.
"If you have the right mindset, you'll teach yourself your environment, automate your own job, and it will seem easy."
But unless you're learning on the job while teaching yourself that environment, you're up a creek. Teaching yourself on your own time doesn't get your foot in the door when all the postings say "five years experience minimum."
Classic chicken-and-egg.
As badly flamed as I'm going to be for saying this, it'd be nice if some of these silly networking certifications were actually seen as a substitute for on-the-job training, but ultimately you just see "CCxx/MCxx preferred" tacked on to the half-decade of previous work experience expected.
And the ads I'm seeing are always the higher-ups, always looking for a director/administrator for some xE5-client network, never "Medium-sized company looking for lower-level tech to kick print servers."
<TANGENT>
For example, I've got a CCNP cert that's due to expire this coming January. It's from Cisco so one would think it'd at least be worth something, at least more than, say, MCSE 2000. But "CCNP Seeking to Touch Actual Cisco Hardware for First Time" just doesn't get much attention in HR. Yet it's either work for a company using their products or try buying some of my own, and the only way I could afford even one of their small, three-digit remote access routers is to sell off rights to my first-born. So the only "real" networking experience I have is with my collection of SOHO boxen, and I can probably rattle off a list of a dozen features I wish they had in the time it takes you to read this post. Spanning Tree? Heck, my switches aren't even managed! And what's the point of "routers" that can't even change their default interface? Why support RIPv2 if you're just going to continue shoveling packets into a dark interface while there's a perfectly good 56k not one hop away? The built-in DHCP servers won't even let me designate a secondary gateway to return to my clients! But at least it's not "home networking" products... don't get me started on Linksys...
Experiences in the past two weeks with setting up my first wireless LAN have shown me how obsolete that Cisco cert already is ("Can a WAP function as a bridge?" is a question I shouldn't have had to ask myself) and I find myself doubting it's worth the effort to renew it anyway. Even if I could actually afford to (repeatedly) take the CCIE lab exam, I doubt even that could get me over the "no experience" hump.
</TANGENT>
"People will purchase the new one in spite of the original working just as well."
Spoken like someone who's never actually played both a GB and a GBP. The GBP had a much better LCD display, with far sharper contrast and all but eliminating the blurring you'd see on the original units. Nintendo didn't hype this fact because it'd make their old hardware look too bad, but the GBP is much easier on the eyes.