Of course, that's about as impressive as getting 12 volts out of a.. lemon?
Actually, that would be pretty impressive. Normally (using equally household-common metals for the elctrodes) you would need a bunch of lemons in series to get anywgere near 12V. As would you with the trees. Except since they use the ground as one electrode, you can't put them in series. This is not just an uninteresting concept, it is way worse than replacing the trees with small glasses of salt water.
The scary thing here is not that there are ignorant crackpots out there, but the amazing chain of ignorance needed for this to appear on slashdot:
The original kook hmself of course, the journalist at masshightech.com, the submitter to slashdot, and finally the responsible/. editor. None of these can have even a passing knowledge of the very simplest basics of chemistry, because then they would have caught this and passed it on only as a joke if at all. This is simple oxidising/reduction reactions. It's where you start. It's chemistry 101 or even below. They teach it to any teen going for technical studies and then some (well, maybe they stopped, but they should teach it).
*sigh* I guess nerds just aren't what they used to be.
It's really a wonder that wristwatches ever made it into the mainstream at all. I guess they were simply too useful to ignore, and the culture was different at the time wrt. technology and progress. They never would have been a hit today; they geek stigma would be instant. They're starting to disappear too; I see more and more people without one, just using their phone in stead.
There'll be good money in it in a few years, when noone who graduated this century masters it, and all the non-masochists have moved on too, but stuff still needs to be maintained. The old COBOL story all over again.
Health insurance definitely is not a right, any more than having a house is a right.
Why not? Why definitely? There is no stone tablet from God deciding that education and freedom to assemble are right either. Please don't give me the constitution stuff. That is the basic law of one specific country (and a pretty good one), but not the complete and universal answer to all question of individual rights. Societies decide what are rights (for example through their constitutions or other laws). Some rights are more obvious candidates than others. Decent healthcare is perceived as dangerous in some places. In others it is an obvious right as a citizen and, an abvious good investment for the nation, and most people there can hardly believe how anyone could see it as a threat.
Yes, they make life better, but it's our own responsibility to make our lives better.
You could use that argument for most other right too. It's not black and white like that, and itæs not obvious which shade of grey things are.
Anything else is socialism, and socialism kills motivation, decreases the overall quality of life and kills the human spirit. See USSR, N. Korea, Cuba, China, Laos, Vietnam, etc. for some fine examples of that.
I hate to tell you this (or more precisely, I hate having to tell people this), but you're selecting your data. There are many, many countries with good healthcare that are better functioning democracies than the US, and have excellent quality of life for a much larger portion of the population (no, I'm not bashing the US, just pointing out it's not the only place to live in the free world). Now, I can respect the rational arguments against public healtcare (larger government, unnecessary cost to the individual, freedom of choice etc.), and although I believe those are outweighed by the benefits, I understand them. But that "slippery slope to communism" argument is just plain ignorant.
If you're going to tell me that my privacy rights aren't important when it comes to things that are important to me, why should I care if the government wants to violate privacy rights for the things you care about?
I'm not sure that's even a sentence, much less what it's supposed to mean, but just in case: My point was precisely that your privacy rights are important.
what we're trying to say is that those other rights are much more important for actually keeping your liberty and avoiding bad regimes. If you give them away while thinking "well, I've always got my gun", you're being suckered into a very false sense of security.
Anything that is in the Constitution is worth fighting for.
I really hope you have other and better reasons that you're not mentioning, than that it's there on a piece of paper. The US constitution is a fine thing, but it is the things it contains that makes it great, not it that makes them great.
don't particularly want to pay for some bum's health insurance, but that isn't really a high priority item to worry about. As far as I'm concerned, if the government performed national defense, police, schools, and nothing else, I would be happy.
Why are you willing to pay for his education but not his healthcare?
it works the best when it does the least.
Works best for whom? And can you back that up, or is it just conjecture? No, failures at the other extreme of the spectrum do not count as defense for your extreme.
I believe you have misread me. I did not call any of your liberties fascist. I said pracicing stronger gun-control than the US is not particular to fascist regimes.
I did call some other current trends fascist, but they apply to many countries in the west, and are not about allowing freedoms.
So if everybody jumps off a cliff, we should as well?
There are situations where that would eb a good retort. This is not one of them. As I believe was pretty clear from the posting, I was undermining the explicit premise that gun control is an intrinsically fascist practice. I did this by pointing out that this is simply not supported by the data. Whether it is a good idea or not does not shake that gun control is not a particularly fascist practice (unless you want to do a kansas-schoolboard stunt and arbitrarily redefine fascism to support your beliefs).
You may also be interested to note that those other countries that have, in your characterisation, jumped off a cliff, have in fact not collectively fallen down to their deaths, in a civil-liberties-metaphoric sense.
As for your constitution: how about fixing it to include some more important stuff, rather than using it as "scripture" to justify silly prioritization?
It is no coincidence in history that fascists create laws under the guise of preventing crime that instead targets everyone or a specific group of law abiding citizens.
Very true.
Gun laws are the most obvious because they have the most impact.
Way off base. The US is practically alone in the democratic world in having such lax gun control. Gun regulations (that apply equally to everyone) are about as typical of fascism as breathing oxygen is.
It's a tragedy that certain forces have managed to convince so many americans that rights really worth fighting for are things like the right to guns and the right to not have health insurance. People use their attention on these total red herrings while they're being robbed blind of the rights that really matter. Wake up! You're giving up your gold for worthless glass beads, for christ's sake.
Now, this british "war on privacy" on the other had (and the similar suff in the US, with the EU trailing close behind), that is scary stuff. That is what people should be rallying in their millions against. Same with undue industry power over legislation and enforcement. Those are true hallmarks of fascism, and that trend is moving with swiftness and momentum over the entire western world, and hardly anyone is speaking up.
So shut up about the worthless guns already, and get down to real business.
I like Eclipse, but the people I know who have used both it and IDEA seriously all say that Eclipse is clunky by compariason. And I don't find it very hard to believe. While Eclipse/Java has lots of nice stuff, a lot of it could be made way more accessible and streamlined (usability-wise).
Visual Studio with C# is also catching up fast, and will probably surpass them all soon, given the rate of improvement there recently, and the kind of people Microsoft has working on their development tools. In some areas it is already more elegant in its interactions. Be sure to compare any java IDE to VS/C# or J#, not VS/C++, which is a much more challenging language to support in the same way.
This discovery shakes some of our most long-standing and dearly held assumptions about the nature of the universe:
In contrast to conventional wisod, apparently now an infinite number of typewriter-wielding chimps will in fact produce the complete abridged works of Shakespeare.
CSS is great for a very few certain things (like flowing text), but totally sucks at a lot of other very common layout tasks.
It's a pity people at the time were so fired up about how tables were being misused, that they didn't consider a table-like layout paradigm. The success of misused tables should have been a dead give-away: If properly designed and optimised with predictable layout specifically in mind, an enhanced table-like layout model would be very powerful and, as opposed to CSS, easy for regular folks to understand, predict the behavior of, and just plain use to get the job done.
Slashdot Mirror
How about a new one? In Taiwan, they breed fluorescent green gigabits. Hmmmmm.... nope, doesn't look like it's got much in the way of legs.
So where are the winged pigs already?
Never mind the wings; what's taking so long with the five asses?
Of course, that's about as impressive as getting 12 volts out of a.. lemon?
Actually, that would be pretty impressive. Normally (using equally household-common metals for the elctrodes) you would need a bunch of lemons in series to get anywgere near 12V. As would you with the trees. Except since they use the ground as one
electrode, you can't put them in series. This is not just an uninteresting concept, it is way worse than replacing the trees with small glasses of salt water.
The scary thing here is not that there are ignorant crackpots out there, but the amazing chain of ignorance needed for this to appear on slashdot:
/. editor. None of these can have even a passing knowledge of the very simplest basics of chemistry, because then they would have caught this and passed it on only as a joke if at all. This is simple oxidising/reduction reactions. It's where you start. It's chemistry 101 or even below. They teach it to any teen going for technical studies and then some (well, maybe they stopped, but they should teach it).
The original kook hmself of course, the journalist at masshightech.com, the submitter to slashdot, and finally the responsible
*sigh* I guess nerds just aren't what they used to be.
Many analysts are hedging their bets that this year will bring a long overdue update to the Mac laptop family.
Can we now please hear how they are hedging those bets? Or does "hedge(v)" simply mean something different than you thought?
now let the "soviet russia" jokes begin.
I'll just do the obvious one:
In Soviet Russia, the government stands above the music industry
It's really a wonder that wristwatches ever made it into the mainstream at all. I guess they were simply too useful to ignore, and the culture was different at the time wrt. technology and progress. They never would have been a hit today; they geek stigma would be instant. They're starting to disappear too; I see more and more people without one, just using their phone in stead.
Or maybe just "C...ocks"?
Definitely. That way, all the losers who haven't moved on to modern languages by 2009 can be known as
[drum roll]
C++0x-suckers!
There'll be good money in it in a few years, when noone who graduated this century masters it, and all the non-masochists have moved on too, but stuff still needs to be maintained. The old COBOL story all over again.
Tell me about it! And those fancy editor thingamajiggs? A-phoooey! Real Programmers use cat(1) and do it right the first time!
I have my guns and I can tell you now that if I get an unwanted visitor in my house in the middle of the night, he's probably leaving in a body bag.
-which the visitor knows, and so it makes sense for him to try shoot first.
I do think its the duty of the citizens, and there are a few politicans who agree, to see that government does not become overbearing and facist.
And yet, exactly that is happening, and your guns aren't helping you, are they?
Health insurance definitely is not a right, any more than having a house is a right.
Why not? Why definitely? There is no stone tablet from God deciding that education and freedom to assemble are right either. Please don't give me the constitution stuff. That is the basic law of one specific country (and a pretty good one), but not the complete and universal answer to all question of individual rights. Societies decide what are rights (for example through their constitutions or other laws). Some rights are more obvious candidates than others. Decent healthcare is perceived as dangerous in some places. In others it is an obvious right as a citizen and, an abvious good investment for the nation, and most people there can hardly believe how anyone could see it as a threat.
Yes, they make life better, but it's our own responsibility to make our lives better.
You could use that argument for most other right too. It's not black and white like that, and itæs not obvious which shade of grey things are.
Anything else is socialism, and socialism kills motivation, decreases the overall quality of life and kills the human spirit. See USSR, N. Korea, Cuba, China, Laos, Vietnam, etc. for some fine examples of that.
I hate to tell you this (or more precisely, I hate having to tell people this), but you're selecting your data. There are many, many countries with good healthcare that are better functioning democracies than the US, and have excellent quality of life for a much larger portion of the population (no, I'm not bashing the US, just pointing out it's not the only place to live in the free world). Now, I can respect the rational arguments against public healtcare (larger government, unnecessary cost to the individual, freedom of choice etc.), and although I believe those are outweighed by the benefits, I understand them. But that "slippery slope to communism" argument is just plain ignorant.
If you're going to tell me that my privacy rights aren't important when it comes to things that are important to me, why should I care if the government wants to violate privacy rights for the things you care about?
I'm not sure that's even a sentence, much less what it's supposed to mean, but just in case: My point was precisely that your privacy rights are important.
what we're trying to say is that those other rights are much more important for actually keeping your liberty and avoiding bad regimes. If you give them away while thinking "well, I've always got my gun", you're being suckered into a very false sense of security.
Anything that is in the Constitution is worth fighting for.
I really hope you have other and better reasons that you're not mentioning, than that it's there on a piece of paper. The US constitution is a fine thing, but it is the things it contains that makes it great, not it that makes them great.
don't particularly want to pay for some bum's health insurance, but that isn't really a high priority item to worry about. As far as I'm concerned, if the government performed national defense, police, schools, and nothing else, I would be happy.
Why are you willing to pay for his education but not his healthcare?
it works the best when it does the least.
Works best for whom? And can you back that up, or is it just conjecture? No, failures at the other extreme of the spectrum do not count as defense for your extreme.
I believe you have misread me. I did not call any of your liberties fascist. I said pracicing stronger gun-control than the US is not particular to fascist regimes.
I did call some other current trends fascist, but they apply to many countries in the west, and are not about allowing freedoms.
So if everybody jumps off a cliff, we should as well?
There are situations where that would eb a good retort. This is not one of them. As I believe was pretty clear from the posting, I was undermining the explicit premise that gun control is an intrinsically fascist practice. I did this by pointing out that this is simply not supported by the data. Whether it is a good idea or not does not shake that gun control is not a particularly fascist practice (unless you want to do a kansas-schoolboard stunt and arbitrarily redefine fascism to support your beliefs).
You may also be interested to note that those other countries that have, in your characterisation, jumped off a cliff, have in fact not collectively fallen down to their deaths, in a civil-liberties-metaphoric sense.
As for your constitution: how about fixing it to include some more important stuff, rather than using it as "scripture" to justify silly prioritization?
It is no coincidence in history that fascists create laws under the guise of preventing crime that instead targets everyone or a specific group of law abiding citizens.
Very true.
Gun laws are the most obvious because they have the most impact.
Way off base. The US is practically alone in the democratic world in having such lax gun control. Gun regulations (that apply equally to everyone) are about as typical of fascism as breathing oxygen is.
It's a tragedy that certain forces have managed to convince so many americans that rights really worth fighting for are things like the right to guns and the right to not have health insurance. People use their attention on these total red herrings while they're being robbed blind of the rights that really matter. Wake up! You're giving up your gold for worthless glass beads, for christ's sake.
Now, this british "war on privacy" on the other had (and the similar suff in the US, with the EU trailing close behind), that is scary stuff. That is what people should be rallying in their millions against. Same with undue industry power over legislation and enforcement. Those are true hallmarks of fascism, and that trend is moving with swiftness and momentum over the entire western world, and hardly anyone is speaking up.
So shut up about the worthless guns already, and get down to real business.
Yes.
you can install your favourite OS and run your best games!
-provided you have very weird tastes in either OSes or games. Or both.
Eclipse/Java. This is the state of the art.
I like Eclipse, but the people I know who have used both it and IDEA seriously all say that Eclipse is clunky by compariason. And I don't find it very hard to believe. While Eclipse/Java has lots of nice stuff, a lot of it could be made way more accessible and streamlined (usability-wise).
Visual Studio with C# is also catching up fast, and will probably surpass them all soon, given the rate of improvement there recently, and the kind of people Microsoft has working on their development tools. In some areas it is already more elegant in its interactions.
Be sure to compare any java IDE to VS/C# or J#, not VS/C++, which is a much more challenging language to support in the same way.
This discovery shakes some of our most long-standing and dearly held assumptions about the nature of the universe:
In contrast to conventional wisod, apparently now an infinite number of typewriter-wielding chimps will in fact produce the complete abridged works of Shakespeare.
CSS is great.
CSS is great for a very few certain things (like flowing text), but totally sucks at a lot of other very common layout tasks.
It's a pity people at the time were so fired up about how tables were being misused, that they didn't consider a table-like layout paradigm.
The success of misused tables should have been a dead give-away: If properly designed and optimised with predictable layout specifically in mind, an enhanced table-like layout model would be very powerful and, as opposed to CSS, easy for regular folks to understand, predict the behavior of, and just plain use to get the job done.
Even your basic premise is flawed: that extra-terrestrial life is always oxygen-based.
He doesn't say that at all. An implication is not necessarily an equivalence, or proposed to be one.