What if the guy at the gate of this fabulous place told you that you can come in, but before he lets you in he wants you to tell 10 other people about it?
Then I'd recognize it as a scam. Sounds like a multi-level marketing scheme for a time-share or something. In fact it sounds a lot like the methods used by the Landmark Forum cult.
Those of us that believe in Jesus Christ know that we have a wonderful place to go. The "gatekeeper" asked us to do one thing before he went back to this wonderful place. He asked us to let everyone know that they could come along.
Certainly those who founded the cult of Jeshua ben Josesph knew their stuff; steal from previous mythologies, throw in a little of the old eternal life jimjam, and bam! You've got a top five religion on your hands.
(BTW, I think Jeshua himself was largely innocent of this, it happened after his execution.)
Anyway: by now everyone's heard of it. So, you've let everyone know, y'all can shut up about it now.
There are truely some people with addictive personalities, but I don't see much difference (aside from consequences) of alcohol addiction and internet addiction
The notion of "addictive personalities" shows how distorted and degraded the notion of addiction has become.
Once upon a time, "addition" was a genuine syndrome of changes in the body at the celluar level created by the use of certain drugs, marked by a pattern of tolerance to drug dosage, widthdrawl symptoms on stopping use, continued use despite health problems, and repeated failed attempts to quit. Fine.
The the moralists noted that the use of some drugs they wanted to demonize didn't fit this pattern. So we were told that, e.g., cannabis, was "psychologically addictive" - meaning that it wasn't addictive but that people liked to use it and sometime got into bad relationships with it.
So why stop with drugs? Now any activity that people can get into a bad relationship with - gambling, sex, net usage, whatever - is "addicitve", and the guy who's going to die from the DTs if he stops drinking is supposed to be in the same category with the teen whose parents think he spends too much time IMing.
This has been twisted to mean that religious men and women in government can somehow not express their beliefs or base their decisions on them.
Oh, nonsense. No one has ever said that Amendment I forbids an office holder or official of the government from expressing their personal beliefs on their own time, or of voting on a bill a certain way because they ask themselves, "How would Buddha vote?"
A situation is created where a belief in a religion is regarded as somehow a bases to exclude practitioners (see current supreme court nominations) and victimizes those who dare to follow their religious beliefs.
Bullshit. How many atheists on the Court? Zero. Holding religious belief is clearly not being used an excuse to exclude SCOTUS nominees.
For instance it is just as wrong for the government to force acceptance of "gay marriage" as it is for the government to force censorship of television programming.
No one has ever suggested forcing "acceptance" of gay marriage, you are free to cluck your tongue and disapprove and your church is free to call such unions void in the eyes of the Flying Spaghetti Monster or whatever; that doesn't change the legal requirement for the government to extend equal protection under the law to homosexual unions.
Comment first. Code later. Then comment again.
on
How to Write Comments
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· Score: 1
// the idea here is to write a post about "Comment first. // Code later. Then comment again."
// first cover "Comment first." You should be writing your code from some sort of design/psudocode, right? Use that as a skeleton of comments.
// handle "Code later." Then put your code into that skeleton. Change the skeleton if needed. The process is recursive, BTW; apply it to the module as a whole, to each function, and to blocks therein. Also comment any section that when you go back and look at, you have to think about for a moment to decypher.// this means comment as you go
// finally, "Then comment again." Now make your function headers, formal comments, etcetera; all the things that fall under "Always code as if whoever maintains your code // shouldn't happen, is a violent psychopath who knows where you live."// but account for // this case anyway
// witty ending A fomer colleague of mine comapared documentation (under which comments should be considered) to foreplay; doing it right raises your desire to code and make the whole thing much more enjoyable. I suppose that makes the necessary after-documentation a little cuddle time. // FIXME - or changing the sheets the next morning? check this.
The words: "separation", "church", and "state" do not even appear in the first amendment.
The word "gun" does not appear in Amendment II, nor "police" in Amendment IV. So what?
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" means that Congress - i.e., the state - shall keep its nose out of - i.e., be separated from - matters of religion - i.e. the church.
Television is an awful medium for education. It's passive, and it's single speed (you can't go back and study a bit that you missed, or didn't quite understand, or skip through the simple bits easily).
Welcome to the age of the PVR, where you can indeed rewind TV or skip ahead. I often find myself skipping back when watching Mythbusters to see some detail of their setup. And it's no more passive than books.
This is such a good idea. Which means it will never happen.
It did happen. Dish Network used to offer a "Dish Pix" package - $15 a month for ten basic channels of your choice. It's not available to new subscribers but I've still got it.
Isn't this exactly what all of us OpenOffice/KOffice/Whatever-users have been hoping for in our wildest dreams?
Well, what I've been hoping for in my wildest dreams is more along the lines of the companionship of a certain redheaded woman, but hey, whatever floats your boat.
When you create objects in one module and give them to someone else, you create bugs.
No, the caller of your module creates a bug when they fail to free the object that you have clearly defined in the interface to be their responsibility. It's no different than any other violation of an interface condition. (If you don't clearly define your interfaces, then yes, you have of course created a bug.)
That's not a leak, it's sloppy programming.
Are you saying that leaks are not a form of sloppy programming? You've either failed to free things you knew needed to be freed (your sloppiness) or you've failed to know which things needed to be freed (which could be your sloppiness or someone elses').
Technically biodiesel is a blend of tradtional diesel and vegitable oil that burns cleaner than diesel by itself and if you have a free or cheap source of vegitable oil, used generally, it can be cheaper.
Er, no. Biodiesel is a fuel produced from vegetable oil, it is not vegetable oil. The article is about a cataylst to improve the process of vegetable oil to biodiesel.
The tremendous amount of energy required, not to mention the shortage of seawater in inland areas.
The level of lack of water is unlikely to reach propotions where people begin to die of dehydration, you might just stink more as you take fewer showers.
Plants need water. Food crops are plants. Water shortages mean no food. So no, people won't begin to die of dehydration, they'll starve to death before things get that dry.
If you live in a country with a repressive regime, escape. If the drought has been going on for more than five years, it's a climate change. Move.
Works good if you're Bruce Wayne, with near-superhuman martial arts skills to get past those border guards, and more money than God so as to be able to move whenever and whereever the mood takes you.
Down here IRL, however, there were people who couldn't afford a frickin' bus ticket out of New Orlease to avoid the flood, much less to pack up and move. And escape from repressive regimes is notably difficult, what with the secret police and the security walls and fences and all that.
Certainly the United States does not suffer the kind of devastating water shortages that are common in many third-world countries.
Not yet. However a large part of the nation, including prime argricultural production areas, gets it water from fossil aquifers such as the Ogallala that are going to run dry eventually.
You've misunderstood my comment. Wireless uses free air space, effectively open to anyone, and therefore has a greater potential to be hacked.
No, I didn't misunderstand you, I'm disagreeing with you.:-)
The clear cladding you mention is a very simple and primitive example of the type of security measure I was talking about. So how much of that clear-cladded cable is run through opaque walls, or just plain places that nobody looks? Cable can only be considered secure if run though tamper-resistant conduit that sounds an alarm if breached. (Example of such a product here.)
If you don't have that level of physical security from end to end - and very few do - from a security planning POV you must assue your wire is tappable, reducing wireless and wired to the same case: someone may be listening to your bits. Therefore you have to make your bits worthless to them, by encrypting higher up in the protocol stack.
Yet tankless water heaters are all the rage here, and I've installed dozens of them in the past year. They only make sense for compact homes in hot climates.
Tankless heaters make perfect sense for anyone who wants to never run out of hot water.
Also, the heat losts from a tank heater goes into warming up your basement or utility room; depending on the layout of your house, this may be useless, even in a cold climate. It's certainly useless to anyone living in areas of the country where it sometimes gets warm enough for cooling to be desired, i.e. most of the population of the U.S.
And of course they take up less space, and don't rust out and suddenly dump 30 gallons of water on your floor one day.
More and more Americans are getting the point and catching up with Japan and Europe in installing sensible, efficient tankless heaters. I can't speak of the specifics of this microwave design, but gas (natural or propane) tankless heaters make perfect sense for a growing number of people, and electric "flash" heaters have been a growing market for a while.
(I don't have natural gas service so when I decided on a tankless heater I first looked at having an electric one installed, but it would have meant an expensive electric service upgrade. So I went with propane instead.)
Wireless is still too insecure and will always be less secure than wired networks, regardless of the encryption protocols used.
Wired networks are not significantly more secure than wireless unless you're got physical security on the wire. And a one-time pad over wireless is just as unbreakable as a one-time pad over the wire...
Wired or wireless, security at the lower protocol levels is generally nonexistant. You have to encrypt your communication higher up in the stack - ssh, https, et cetera.
"Confiscatory government policy", my ass
on
The Demise of IP?
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· Score: 1
Copyrights and patents are issued by the government. It is in no way "confiscatory" for them to simply cease doing so.
Ideas aren't and never have been property. Copyright and patent holders are not property holders.
Listen, I can tell what you really are, so I'm prepared for it, but why would you refer to the flag that way?
So, what am I "really"?
I refer to the flag as a rag because it's accurate. All flags are rags, i.e. mere pieces of cloth, and pointing this out occasionlly helps counteract the bizarre idolatry that surrounds the starred and striped one. Don't confuse the map with the territory.
So you hate the US, fine, you're allowed to misrepresent reality. But what does insulting the symbol of the US do to help you?
Oh, bullshit. First, I don't hate the U.S., I love it. I also love Maryland, but that doesn't mean I think it is favored by God above New Jersey, or that its flag is a holy relic, or that its governor isn't an ass and its legislature largely corrupt. Still, it's home.
Second, I am not misrepresenting on insulting anything; it is people like you who misrepresent the rag and the nation.
Confusing a colorful rag with "the sacrifices of people who died protecting the ideals of freedom" is a big error; confusing the sacrifices of people who died because they were fooled into thinking that wars of imperialism had anything to do with protecting freedom, fooled into thinking that serving the government was serving the people of the nation, is a bigger error.
The budget for the National Endowment for the Arts for 2006 is $125.6 million.
Wow, about 42 cents per American for the year. Out of federal spending of $2.568 trillion, or $8,683 per American. Less than 0.005 percent of federal spending. Yep, no doubt, the NEA budget is tiny.
You want to see the process from prokaryote to vertebrate? Got a few billion years?
Your objection is like saying "I see infants and I see old people, but show me right now this minute an infant become an old person!"
We have observed change within species, and we have observed the development of new species within populations. That's about all we're going to be able to observe on human timescales.
These are individuals, who happen to share a country. They are linked by geography, nothing more.
Would that such were true. Unfortunately I'm stuck with the political and social structures that the majority of Americans want: from a president who's either delusion, criminal, or most likely both; to stores that start putting Christmas decorations out in the middle of Septemember; to TV channels full of "reality" programs; to schools that, should I ever have kids, will want them to start their school days in a religious ceremony of devotion to a starred and striped rag.
Now, maybe you're completely apolitical and asocial and can avoid these things.
(People asking me about my recent trip to Japan often inquire if I felt alienated or out of place; the fact is, Japanese society seemed or weirder or alien to me than mainstream American society.)
how about something on the efficacy of various alternative medical therapies?
They did just do an episode about motion sickness treatments, even including a placebo run. Ginger pills came out on top, better than OTC pharmeceuticals.
Of course, with a sample size of two people, this is not exactly publication-quality research. But a nice "scale model" of how a good study might be run.
If I observe you, a native tribesman, using some herb to cure toothaches, and I then extract and patent some new painkiller from the herb, how is that "stealing" knowledge from you?
You contradict yourself. If I, native tribesman, am using some herb as a painkiller, and you, chemist, examine the herb and find Compound X in it, and patent it, Compound X is not a new painkiller! I, native tribesman, was using Compound X before you came along.
If you take Compound X and add a hydroxyl group and a benzene ring to create Compound Y, you may have a new painkiller, but your work is derivative of the work that my native tribesman ancestors did in finding that the herb containing Compound X was good for toothaches, and their work in selectively cultivating and breeding that herb to make it more effective. Your work is a mere improvement on the work of my native tribesman ancestors, which (AFAIK) has a very different status under patent law than if you had invented Compound Y from first principles.
They're claiming that, because the potato came from Peru, Peru therefore should own a piece of everything that ever comes from the potato
The potato-as-we-know-it didn't just "come from" Peru; developing the modern variey was the long work of generations, and anything that comes from the potato is derivative of that work.
What exactly are "pirate stimulating late-night conversations?"
I suppose like, "Yarrr, matey, before we go sleep it off in our racks, pass me that bottle of rum and I'll tell ye o' the time we caught this fat merchant freighter off the coast, yarr..."
Slashdot Mirror
Then I'd recognize it as a scam. Sounds like a multi-level marketing scheme for a time-share or something. In fact it sounds a lot like the methods used by the Landmark Forum cult.
Certainly those who founded the cult of Jeshua ben Josesph knew their stuff; steal from previous mythologies, throw in a little of the old eternal life jimjam, and bam! You've got a top five religion on your hands.
(BTW, I think Jeshua himself was largely innocent of this, it happened after his execution.)
Anyway: by now everyone's heard of it. So, you've let everyone know, y'all can shut up about it now.
The notion of "addictive personalities" shows how distorted and degraded the notion of addiction has become.
Once upon a time, "addition" was a genuine syndrome of changes in the body at the celluar level created by the use of certain drugs, marked by a pattern of tolerance to drug dosage, widthdrawl symptoms on stopping use, continued use despite health problems, and repeated failed attempts to quit. Fine.
The the moralists noted that the use of some drugs they wanted to demonize didn't fit this pattern. So we were told that, e.g., cannabis, was "psychologically addictive" - meaning that it wasn't addictive but that people liked to use it and sometime got into bad relationships with it.
So why stop with drugs? Now any activity that people can get into a bad relationship with - gambling, sex, net usage, whatever - is "addicitve", and the guy who's going to die from the DTs if he stops drinking is supposed to be in the same category with the teen whose parents think he spends too much time IMing.
No.
By definition, a wiki is collaborative. That means it's a discussion, not a reference.
Oh, nonsense. No one has ever said that Amendment I forbids an office holder or official of the government from expressing their personal beliefs on their own time, or of voting on a bill a certain way because they ask themselves, "How would Buddha vote?"
Bullshit. How many atheists on the Court? Zero. Holding religious belief is clearly not being used an excuse to exclude SCOTUS nominees.
No one has ever suggested forcing "acceptance" of gay marriage, you are free to cluck your tongue and disapprove and your church is free to call such unions void in the eyes of the Flying Spaghetti Monster or whatever; that doesn't change the legal requirement for the government to extend equal protection under the law to homosexual unions.
// the idea here is to write a post about "Comment first.
// this means comment as you go
// but account for
// Code later. Then comment again."
// first cover "Comment first."
You should be writing your code from some sort of
design/psudocode, right? Use that as a skeleton of comments.
// handle "Code later."
Then put your code into that skeleton. Change the
skeleton if needed. The process is recursive, BTW;
apply it to the module as a whole, to each function,
and to blocks therein. Also comment any section that
when you go back and look at, you have to think about
for a moment to decypher.
// finally, "Then comment again."
Now make your function headers, formal comments, etcetera;
all the things that fall under
"Always code as if whoever maintains your code // shouldn't happen,
is a violent psychopath who knows where you live."
// this case anyway
// witty ending
A fomer colleague of mine comapared documentation (under
which comments should be considered) to foreplay; doing it
right raises your desire to code and make the whole thing
much more enjoyable. I suppose that makes the
necessary after-documentation a little cuddle time.
// FIXME - or changing the sheets the next morning? check this.
The word "gun" does not appear in Amendment II, nor "police" in Amendment IV. So what?
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" means that Congress - i.e., the state - shall keep its nose out of - i.e., be separated from - matters of religion - i.e. the church.
Welcome to the age of the PVR, where you can indeed rewind TV or skip ahead. I often find myself skipping back when watching Mythbusters to see some detail of their setup. And it's no more passive than books.
It did happen. Dish Network used to offer a "Dish Pix" package - $15 a month for ten basic channels of your choice. It's not available to new subscribers but I've still got it.
Well, what I've been hoping for in my wildest dreams is more along the lines of the companionship of a certain redheaded woman, but hey, whatever floats your boat.
No, the caller of your module creates a bug when they fail to free the object that you have clearly defined in the interface to be their responsibility. It's no different than any other violation of an interface condition. (If you don't clearly define your interfaces, then yes, you have of course created a bug.)
Are you saying that leaks are not a form of sloppy programming? You've either failed to free things you knew needed to be freed (your sloppiness) or you've failed to know which things needed to be freed (which could be your sloppiness or someone elses').
Er, no. Biodiesel is a fuel produced from vegetable oil, it is not vegetable oil. The article is about a cataylst to improve the process of vegetable oil to biodiesel.
Some people have done conversion work to run diesel engines on vegetable oil. That's way cool. But that's not biodiesel.
Blends of biodiesel and tradtional petroleum diesel fuel are popular. That doesn't mean biodiesel is a blend.
The tremendous amount of energy required, not to mention the shortage of seawater in inland areas.
Plants need water. Food crops are plants. Water shortages mean no food. So no, people won't begin to die of dehydration, they'll starve to death before things get that dry.
Works good if you're Bruce Wayne, with near-superhuman martial arts skills to get past those border guards, and more money than God so as to be able to move whenever and whereever the mood takes you.
Down here IRL, however, there were people who couldn't afford a frickin' bus ticket out of New Orlease to avoid the flood, much less to pack up and move. And escape from repressive regimes is notably difficult, what with the secret police and the security walls and fences and all that.
Not yet. However a large part of the nation, including prime argricultural production areas, gets it water from fossil aquifers such as the Ogallala that are going to run dry eventually.
No, I didn't misunderstand you, I'm disagreeing with you. :-)
The clear cladding you mention is a very simple and primitive example of the type of security measure I was talking about. So how much of that clear-cladded cable is run through opaque walls, or just plain places that nobody looks? Cable can only be considered secure if run though tamper-resistant conduit that sounds an alarm if breached. (Example of such a product here.)
If you don't have that level of physical security from end to end - and very few do - from a security planning POV you must assue your wire is tappable, reducing wireless and wired to the same case: someone may be listening to your bits. Therefore you have to make your bits worthless to them, by encrypting higher up in the protocol stack.
Tankless heaters make perfect sense for anyone who wants to never run out of hot water.
Also, the heat losts from a tank heater goes into warming up your basement or utility room; depending on the layout of your house, this may be useless, even in a cold climate. It's certainly useless to anyone living in areas of the country where it sometimes gets warm enough for cooling to be desired, i.e. most of the population of the U.S.
And of course they take up less space, and don't rust out and suddenly dump 30 gallons of water on your floor one day.
More and more Americans are getting the point and catching up with Japan and Europe in installing sensible, efficient tankless heaters. I can't speak of the specifics of this microwave design, but gas (natural or propane) tankless heaters make perfect sense for a growing number of people, and electric "flash" heaters have been a growing market for a while.
(I don't have natural gas service so when I decided on a tankless heater I first looked at having an electric one installed, but it would have meant an expensive electric service upgrade. So I went with propane instead.)
Wired networks are not significantly more secure than wireless unless you're got physical security on the wire. And a one-time pad over wireless is just as unbreakable as a one-time pad over the wire...
Wired or wireless, security at the lower protocol levels is generally nonexistant. You have to encrypt your communication higher up in the stack - ssh, https, et cetera.
Copyrights and patents are issued by the government. It is in no way "confiscatory" for them to simply cease doing so.
Ideas aren't and never have been property. Copyright and patent holders are not property holders.
So, what am I "really"?
I refer to the flag as a rag because it's accurate. All flags are rags, i.e. mere pieces of cloth, and pointing this out occasionlly helps counteract the bizarre idolatry that surrounds the starred and striped one. Don't confuse the map with the territory.
Oh, bullshit. First, I don't hate the U.S., I love it. I also love Maryland, but that doesn't mean I think it is favored by God above New Jersey, or that its flag is a holy relic, or that its governor isn't an ass and its legislature largely corrupt. Still, it's home.
Second, I am not misrepresenting on insulting anything; it is people like you who misrepresent the rag and the nation.
Confusing a colorful rag with "the sacrifices of people who died protecting the ideals of freedom" is a big error; confusing the sacrifices of people who died because they were fooled into thinking that wars of imperialism had anything to do with protecting freedom, fooled into thinking that serving the government was serving the people of the nation, is a bigger error.
Wow, about 42 cents per American for the year. Out of federal spending of $2.568 trillion, or $8,683 per American. Less than 0.005 percent of federal spending. Yep, no doubt, the NEA budget is tiny.
See that aquarium over there? It's full of 'em.
You want to see the process from prokaryote to vertebrate? Got a few billion years?
Your objection is like saying "I see infants and I see old people, but show me right now this minute an infant become an old person!"
We have observed change within species, and we have observed the development of new species within populations. That's about all we're going to be able to observe on human timescales.
Would that such were true. Unfortunately I'm stuck with the political and social structures that the majority of Americans want: from a president who's either delusion, criminal, or most likely both; to stores that start putting Christmas decorations out in the middle of Septemember; to TV channels full of "reality" programs; to schools that, should I ever have kids, will want them to start their school days in a religious ceremony of devotion to a starred and striped rag.
Now, maybe you're completely apolitical and asocial and can avoid these things.
(People asking me about my recent trip to Japan often inquire if I felt alienated or out of place; the fact is, Japanese society seemed or weirder or alien to me than mainstream American society.)
They did just do an episode about motion sickness treatments, even including a placebo run. Ginger pills came out on top, better than OTC pharmeceuticals.
Of course, with a sample size of two people, this is not exactly publication-quality research. But a nice "scale model" of how a good study might be run.
Kari fans (and what red-blooded guy isn't?) might want to check out her artwork here: www.karibyron.com.
You contradict yourself. If I, native tribesman, am using some herb as a painkiller, and you, chemist, examine the herb and find Compound X in it, and patent it, Compound X is not a new painkiller! I, native tribesman, was using Compound X before you came along.
If you take Compound X and add a hydroxyl group and a benzene ring to create Compound Y, you may have a new painkiller, but your work is derivative of the work that my native tribesman ancestors did in finding that the herb containing Compound X was good for toothaches, and their work in selectively cultivating and breeding that herb to make it more effective. Your work is a mere improvement on the work of my native tribesman ancestors, which (AFAIK) has a very different status under patent law than if you had invented Compound Y from first principles.
The potato-as-we-know-it didn't just "come from" Peru; developing the modern variey was the long work of generations, and anything that comes from the potato is derivative of that work.
I suppose like, "Yarrr, matey, before we go sleep it off in our racks, pass me that bottle of rum and I'll tell ye o' the time we caught this fat merchant freighter off the coast, yarr..."