"a soon-coming scientific development tends to wipe out races when they are real young."
Sir, your logic is flawed. You assume, first of all, that there has been or is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe - and I don't care how many statistics you can juggle, I side with Clemens and say that statistics aren't proof. The idea that we haven't been visited because everyone else blew themselves up is, to be honest, absurd. How many inventions on Earth have been made by a relatively small group of people? What technologies would we still have if all these people had bought it? I'm sure we'd have the wheel, spears, and mud bricks, but how about gunpowder? Antibiotics? Atomic Weapons? The internal combustion engine?
The "tech tree" of an alien species could be entirely different from ours. They may feel spears are perfectly adequate for killing each other with, and see no need to develop further. They might have religious prohibitions against high technology. They might be sentient but...erm...not all that bright.
They might not even exist.
But sir, *we* are not going to kill ourselves off, despite what other species may or may not have done. Nobody really wants us all to be dragged into that good night.
a teen should get laid, or even learn how use a condom. I've said it before, I'll say it again: until we are willing to admit that getting it on is a better use of a person's time than wandering the woods or streets with a firearm, we"re going to stay an expletived-up country.
Of course, maybe I'm just bitter because I've had such little success in this area of my life, and the good Commander just destroyed my "but I'm a geek" excuse. Damnit, Taco...Mazel Tov again, by the way:-).
These characters could be integrated into a fully 3-d environment, and used as monsters in a game. The player would navigate this environment from a "first-person" perspective, and try to shoot the monsters. Who's with me on this?
Man, that is really cool. Romantic, but in a cool way. Those must have been the scariest 15 and a half minutes of your life. Wow. I wish you the best of luck, and many happy years together. Mazel Tov!
Little lines of text from advertisers. Sweet, huh?
Um, Supernovas are much more unpleasant than that
on
Supernova Discovered
·
· Score: 2
If alpha centauri, or any star within dozens of lightyears (right over the fence in astronomical terms) went supernova, we would find ourselves suffering from a condition doctors refer to in technical jargon as being "dead. very, very dead." The earth certainly wouldn't be vaporized, but the huge amounts of radiation put out by a supernova are not exactly healthy.
Fortuneatly, stars tend to get all funky and red-giant-y before doing the thermonuclear BreakDance to end all Breakdances, so we'd probably have enough warning to build shelters. Or just cower and have an epidemic of mass insanity - either way is cool, I guess. If we don't know about it until the boom, though - well, have you ever seen "On The Beach"? The original, not the remake.
Pokemon factor was a problem, though
on
HIstory of RTS Games
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
This is one case where I feel the game community's creativity really hurt the game - a lot of the people I play with will only play if you have such-and-blah third-party level packs, and many of these (I think) unbalance the game. That said, at a LAN party where you can prepare patches and unit packs in advance, it's an awesome game. A lot of people downplay the AI (and rightly so, it really isn't all that good) but sometimes it does put up a mean fight - I've spent days locked in epic battle with the AI, with the entire map filled with units, missiles flying everywhere - TA has a truly epic scale. And, you can get it for about five bucks from EB - with or without COre Contingency expansion pack, depending on the alignment of the stars. Best five bucks I ever spent.
I haven't tried it, but I suspect there are some fairly hairy stability issues here. An escalator, at the slinky scale, does not move all that smoothly. There are vibrations, stop-and-go jerks - I'm sure you could make it work for a few minutes, but any more than that is unlikely. Please not, I am not a physicist, slinky expert, or even a particularly good student or smart human being.
My high school has so many old 486s lying around, the school tech regularly begs me to take one (or two or six) home in order to clear some space. Why not install linux on one, slap some sappy love-related program on it to run at startup, and pre-configure the system. In addition, you could use the stuff at robotstore.com to control a servo motor through the serial port. Use the motor to operate some sort of candy dispenser, and you can have a comp that dispenses a candy every time it boots up! Sound good?
Just had a thought - would it be possible to make a heart-shaped CD/R that would actually be balanced enough for use? If not, could you build an adaptor like for some odd-shaped CDs, and use that in the drive?
As a high school senior, I find I am completely and utterly lacking in anything resembling "nerve", "spine", or "courage". So while a statement to the amazingly attractive, intelligent, insightful girl who sits in front of me in Calculus (hope she doesn't read/.) that she is quite possible the most remarkable person I have ever met would be nice, it's out of the question. So instead I'm sending her an anonymous flower and card through the school "Valey-gram" program, and a box of the Oatmeal Square cereal thingies. Ah well, backbones are for other people, I always say.
Enough with this maudlin Valentine's Day related self-pity - a high-caliber site like slashdot doesn't need the mumblings of a sappy highschooler. I say the best possible gift would be a Furby modded to say "Happy Valentine's Day" in as many different languages as possible.
"Still more evidence Earth is round" or "Still more evidence light has a finite speed"?
Haven't you ever heard of "Limeys"?
on
The Coldest March
·
· Score: 2
That's what they used to call British sailors. They'd bring limes on their sailing ships to provide vitamins and stave off scurvy. And they'd been doing it for centuries by the time of Scott's expedition. They may not have known the limes had vitamins as such, but they damn well knew they had *something* people needed to stay healthy.
...to have joined the Mile High Club much earlier in life, and simply be - ahem - maintaining my membership status while in my eighties. 62 years is too damn long to wait, sorry. Seriously though, if Ben Franklin was bonking french court chicks while a diplomat in France during the Revolutionary War, why can't this guy be enjoying one of the perks of power? Good ole' Ben was, I think, in his seventies at the time.
One last thought: if I were the Chinese premier, I would be flattered the CIA thought I'd still be an active member of the mile-high club.
Sir, you are very very good - far better than I at political debate. Thank you for pointing out the holes in my argument. I should point out that I am not really an anti-closed source zealot - were I forced to define my position, "moderately pro-open-source" would do. Well fought!
Just don't. Trust me on this, the average user just does not care about his computer. He does not care about improving performance, or being able to tweak his programs, or helping other programmers. He just wants "the machine" to work. If you focus on open source, you will get hammered in any and all public forums. Just for the heck of it, here's a quick sample speech by a hypothetical opponent of yours that could be made after you gave an "open-source" schpeel:
"Ladies and gentlemen, like many of you, I have heard Mr. Jaquith's speech on the benefits of switching the town to what he calls 'open-source' software. And like many of you, I am confused. Our city need money for roads, and schools. Our children need more parks and playgrounds, and children's programs to keep our youth off the streets. As we go into this new century, our city faces questions of crime, of poverty - Mr. Jaquith talks about Linucks and Debean or whatever it's called - I, for one, cannot make heads or tails of it.
And that's his perogative, of course - the right to campaign freely is what makes this country what it is, the unshakeable roots of our culture. But not to put too fine a point on it, do the people of Charlottville really care about my worthy opponent's issues? As long as our taxes and payrolls for city workers are processed in a timely manner, as long as other computerized fuctions are carried out properly - why should we change them? Even Mr. Jaquith cannot tell us how they will save any meaningful amount of time - in fact, I tell you it will cost us time, as our town employees are forced to learn the new system. So why does Mr. Jaquith want this?
I can tell you that. He believes that it is wrong, my friends, to pay for software. He believes a product that costs thousands of man-hours to produce must be given away for free, and that those who would not do this are evil. Go to a web site called slashdot.org, or freshmeat.net, or read any "linux advocacy" magazine, and the "open source" position becomes clear.
I know that this is a tight race, and that I may not be elected. That's fine, that's the democratic process, and I can accept that. But my fellow citizens, I ask one thing of you. When the time comes for you to vote, vote based on the issues that actually matter to your lives. Schools, taxes, health care - if you do not agree with me on these things, then please do not vote for me. But please don't vote for Waldo Jaquith for the sake of a complex new system that we don't need. Thank you."
It's a little rough, I admit, but with a little polishing it might be good against you, sir. Find "real" issues, like those mentioned in the speech above, and campaign on those - open source is something you can work for once you're actually in power. I hope this helped.
See, that's why I've adopted the solution I have: Bitch about the MPAA constantly, then buy the DVDs, turn off my brain, and complain on slashdot about how crappy the DVDs are, how eveil copy protection is, and how much I hate the MPAA. It's the best of both worlds! (And not in the bad assimilation way.)
No, Tasha Yar's Death is the turning point
on
Star Trek TNG DVDs
·
· Score: 2
As soon as she died, I just knew the show would get better! Ugh, butch tomboy who hits on androids - spare me. (Note: I don't care what you say, no one who isn't really drunk would think Yar was sexy in the "Everyone is Wasted" episode.)
Also, LaForge's promotion greatly improved the quality of the show.
Alternate sundays? Ah crud!
on
Star Trek TNG DVDs
·
· Score: 1, Redundant
I thought we hated them every sunday! Anything I can do to fix my mistake?
I thought avacado! Am I alone in this, or is "pear" the consensus?
Seriously though, why does TNN do the banner-squishing thing? Why can't they just display their logo in the lower right corner, like everybody else?
More to the point, why do I get the disturbing feeling they're tarketing their trek airings at the - erm - less educated market? I watch star trek: tng, and I see ads for Baywatch, monster trucks, and conspiracy "news" shows. Is the Star Trek demographic changing, or is TNN just on crack? Or are both true?
Phillips will probably just create their own copy protection standard, incorporate that into CD-DA, and force other companies to pay for the privilege of using this new standard if they want to call themselves CD-DA compatible. No way Phillips is doing this out of the goodness of their collective hearts.
Slashdot Mirror
"a soon-coming scientific development tends to wipe out races when they are real young."
Sir, your logic is flawed. You assume, first of all, that there has been or is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe - and I don't care how many statistics you can juggle, I side with Clemens and say that statistics aren't proof. The idea that we haven't been visited because everyone else blew themselves up is, to be honest, absurd. How many inventions on Earth have been made by a relatively small group of people? What technologies would we still have if all these people had bought it? I'm sure we'd have the wheel, spears, and mud bricks, but how about gunpowder? Antibiotics? Atomic Weapons? The internal combustion engine?
The "tech tree" of an alien species could be entirely different from ours. They may feel spears are perfectly adequate for killing each other with, and see no need to develop further. They might have religious prohibitions against high technology. They might be sentient but...erm...not all that bright.
They might not even exist.
But sir, *we* are not going to kill ourselves off, despite what other species may or may not have done. Nobody really wants us all to be dragged into that good night.
when you consider people have only been seriously trying to get into space for the past fifty years.
a teen should get laid, or even learn how use a condom. I've said it before, I'll say it again: until we are willing to admit that getting it on is a better use of a person's time than wandering the woods or streets with a firearm, we"re going to stay an expletived-up country.
:-).
Of course, maybe I'm just bitter because I've had such little success in this area of my life, and the good Commander just destroyed my "but I'm a geek" excuse. Damnit, Taco...Mazel Tov again, by the way
These characters could be integrated into a fully 3-d environment, and used as monsters in a game. The player would navigate this environment from a "first-person" perspective, and try to shoot the monsters. Who's with me on this?
Man, that is really cool. Romantic, but in a cool way. Those must have been the scariest 15 and a half minutes of your life. Wow. I wish you the best of luck, and many happy years together. Mazel Tov!
Little lines of text from advertisers. Sweet, huh?
If alpha centauri, or any star within dozens of lightyears (right over the fence in astronomical terms) went supernova, we would find ourselves suffering from a condition doctors refer to in technical jargon as being "dead. very, very dead." The earth certainly wouldn't be vaporized, but the huge amounts of radiation put out by a supernova are not exactly healthy.
Fortuneatly, stars tend to get all funky and red-giant-y before doing the thermonuclear BreakDance to end all Breakdances, so we'd probably have enough warning to build shelters. Or just cower and have an epidemic of mass insanity - either way is cool, I guess. If we don't know about it until the boom, though - well, have you ever seen "On The Beach"? The original, not the remake.
This is one case where I feel the game community's creativity really hurt the game - a lot of the people I play with will only play if you have such-and-blah third-party level packs, and many of these (I think) unbalance the game. That said, at a LAN party where you can prepare patches and unit packs in advance, it's an awesome game. A lot of people downplay the AI (and rightly so, it really isn't all that good) but sometimes it does put up a mean fight - I've spent days locked in epic battle with the AI, with the entire map filled with units, missiles flying everywhere - TA has a truly epic scale. And, you can get it for about five bucks from EB - with or without COre Contingency expansion pack, depending on the alignment of the stars. Best five bucks I ever spent.
I haven't tried it, but I suspect there are some fairly hairy stability issues here. An escalator, at the slinky scale, does not move all that smoothly. There are vibrations, stop-and-go jerks - I'm sure you could make it work for a few minutes, but any more than that is unlikely. Please not, I am not a physicist, slinky expert, or even a particularly good student or smart human being.
My high school has so many old 486s lying around, the school tech regularly begs me to take one (or two or six) home in order to clear some space. Why not install linux on one, slap some sappy love-related program on it to run at startup, and pre-configure the system. In addition, you could use the stuff at robotstore.com to control a servo motor through the serial port. Use the motor to operate some sort of candy dispenser, and you can have a comp that dispenses a candy every time it boots up! Sound good?
Just had a thought - would it be possible to make a heart-shaped CD/R that would actually be balanced enough for use? If not, could you build an adaptor like for some odd-shaped CDs, and use that in the drive?
As a high school senior, I find I am completely and utterly lacking in anything resembling "nerve", "spine", or "courage". So while a statement to the amazingly attractive, intelligent, insightful girl who sits in front of me in Calculus (hope she doesn't read /.) that she is quite possible the most remarkable person I have ever met would be nice, it's out of the question. So instead I'm sending her an anonymous flower and card through the school "Valey-gram" program, and a box of the Oatmeal Square cereal thingies. Ah well, backbones are for other people, I always say.
Enough with this maudlin Valentine's Day related self-pity - a high-caliber site like slashdot doesn't need the mumblings of a sappy highschooler. I say the best possible gift would be a Furby modded to say "Happy Valentine's Day" in as many different languages as possible.
"Still more evidence Earth is round" or "Still more evidence light has a finite speed"?
That's what they used to call British sailors. They'd bring limes on their sailing ships to provide vitamins and stave off scurvy. And they'd been doing it for centuries by the time of Scott's expedition. They may not have known the limes had vitamins as such, but they damn well knew they had *something* people needed to stay healthy.
...since the eighties? I seem to recall that he has not, but I could be mistaken.
...to have joined the Mile High Club much earlier in life, and simply be - ahem - maintaining my membership status while in my eighties. 62 years is too damn long to wait, sorry. Seriously though, if Ben Franklin was bonking french court chicks while a diplomat in France during the Revolutionary War, why can't this guy be enjoying one of the perks of power? Good ole' Ben was, I think, in his seventies at the time.
One last thought: if I were the Chinese premier, I would be flattered the CIA thought I'd still be an active member of the mile-high club.
Sir, you are very very good - far better than I at political debate. Thank you for pointing out the holes in my argument. I should point out that I am not really an anti-closed source zealot - were I forced to define my position, "moderately pro-open-source" would do. Well fought!
Just don't. Trust me on this, the average user just does not care about his computer. He does not care about improving performance, or being able to tweak his programs, or helping other programmers. He just wants "the machine" to work. If you focus on open source, you will get hammered in any and all public forums. Just for the heck of it, here's a quick sample speech by a hypothetical opponent of yours that could be made after you gave an "open-source" schpeel:
"Ladies and gentlemen, like many of you, I have heard Mr. Jaquith's speech on the benefits of switching the town to what he calls 'open-source' software. And like many of you, I am confused. Our city need money for roads, and schools. Our children need more parks and playgrounds, and children's programs to keep our youth off the streets. As we go into this new century, our city faces questions of crime, of poverty - Mr. Jaquith talks about Linucks and Debean or whatever it's called - I, for one, cannot make heads or tails of it.
And that's his perogative, of course - the right to campaign freely is what makes this country what it is, the unshakeable roots of our culture. But not to put too fine a point on it, do the people of Charlottville really care about my worthy opponent's issues? As long as our taxes and payrolls for city workers are processed in a timely manner, as long as other computerized fuctions are carried out properly - why should we change them? Even Mr. Jaquith cannot tell us how they will save any meaningful amount of time - in fact, I tell you it will cost us time, as our town employees are forced to learn the new system. So why does Mr. Jaquith want this?
I can tell you that. He believes that it is wrong, my friends, to pay for software. He believes a product that costs thousands of man-hours to produce must be given away for free, and that those who would not do this are evil. Go to a web site called slashdot.org, or freshmeat.net, or read any "linux advocacy" magazine, and the "open source" position becomes clear.
I know that this is a tight race, and that I may not be elected. That's fine, that's the democratic process, and I can accept that. But my fellow citizens, I ask one thing of you. When the time comes for you to vote, vote based on the issues that actually matter to your lives. Schools, taxes, health care - if you do not agree with me on these things, then please do not vote for me. But please don't vote for Waldo Jaquith for the sake of a complex new system that we don't need. Thank you."
It's a little rough, I admit, but with a little polishing it might be good against you, sir. Find "real" issues, like those mentioned in the speech above, and campaign on those - open source is something you can work for once you're actually in power. I hope this helped.
If sex were liscensed under a BSD liscence, would you simply have to distribute "how-to" manuals, or would you still have to allow spectators?
What's low-end soft-core porn without a cheesy soundtrack?
"Damn you moral code!"
See, that's why I've adopted the solution I have: Bitch about the MPAA constantly, then buy the DVDs, turn off my brain, and complain on slashdot about how crappy the DVDs are, how eveil copy protection is, and how much I hate the MPAA. It's the best of both worlds! (And not in the bad assimilation way.)
As soon as she died, I just knew the show would get better! Ugh, butch tomboy who hits on androids - spare me. (Note: I don't care what you say, no one who isn't really drunk would think Yar was sexy in the "Everyone is Wasted" episode.)
Also, LaForge's promotion greatly improved the quality of the show.
I thought we hated them every sunday! Anything I can do to fix my mistake?
I thought avacado! Am I alone in this, or is "pear" the consensus?
Seriously though, why does TNN do the banner-squishing thing? Why can't they just display their logo in the lower right corner, like everybody else?
More to the point, why do I get the disturbing feeling they're tarketing their trek airings at the - erm - less educated market? I watch star trek: tng, and I see ads for Baywatch, monster trucks, and conspiracy "news" shows. Is the Star Trek demographic changing, or is TNN just on crack? Or are both true?
Phillips will probably just create their own copy protection standard, incorporate that into CD-DA, and force other companies to pay for the privilege of using this new standard if they want to call themselves CD-DA compatible. No way Phillips is doing this out of the goodness of their collective hearts.