You are not the only one who owns some stock. They have done quite well in the last six months. One of the better performers.
So what are you, as AOL's part-owners, doing to make it suck less? Bringing up any stockholder resolutions to, say, requiring educating new users? Or are you just planning to take the money and run, playing the "profit without responsibility" game that is our modern stock market?
It's their banner, nobody else can get the information about me, and as long as I don't give them personal information, they don't even really know who I am - I'm just a visitor number.
Really? Tell me then, what is the prime factorization of 16?
2 is prime. You may be thinking of the confusion surrounding 1, which is not prime even though it fits the "no factors other than 1 and itself" defintion because defining 1 to be prime screws up the concept of a unique prime factorization of any whole number.
So if I didn't agree with any of them, who could I vote for with a clear conscience?
Third party, or write-in. I pulled the Libertarian lever in 1992 and wrote in the Greens in 1996.
I think writing in "Bill The Cat" is a more effective statement than staying home. Think about it - you made the effort to go wait in line to say "I'd rather have a fictional dead cat in the White House than you." Doesn't that say more than silence?
Plus, you should still go and vote on local races, bond issues, and referendums. Might as well scribble something for President. And asking about how to write in a ballot causes much confusion amoungst the poll officials - hail Eris!
I do think that "none of the above" should be a valid ballot choice, though. Failing that, I've thought that it would be neat to run for some local office as the "none of the above" candidate -promising that I won't even show up for work and will return any and all salary to the treasury.
(We're going off-topic, so I'll say no more of this thread - e-mail me for further discussion if you want.)
Just because it's grown in a tank doesn't make it any less of an animal.
But a tissue sample does not an animal make. I think it's pretty clear that "an animal" refers to a complete organism, while "animal tissue" is a different thing.
You're still killing it. Just like you kill a tree when you buy a wood chair.
True. But what's interesting in this ethical question is not life (which is just a chemical process, albeit a very interesting one), but the termination of a consciousness (or, depending on your terms, an experiencer, a subjectivity, a subject-of-a-life, sentience, whatever) which may be present in a living brain - or (someday) in a computer, or in an extraterristrial critter based on a chemistry so different we wouldn't call it living.
Espousing the notion that it is proper for the government to seize half of a person's wealth upon their death exposes Woz as just another socialist.
If they're dead, it's not their wealth - the dead own nothing.
Anyway, estate taxes are only relevant to the wealthy - you can pass up to $675,000 tax-free. And in our system, the wealthy usually get that way through government backing (the state creates artificial entities such as corporations that concentrate wealth, and defines and enforces artificial property rights on land and (saints preserve us) ideas); so for the state to take back wealth it created for you in the first place is hardly a tragedy.
I just picked up a book by Cliff Stoll (Known for the cracker non-fiction whodonnit Cuckoos Egg) in which he argues that Computers DO NOT belong in schools...I'd recommend this book highly.
The book is Silicon Snake Oil, and I second the recommendation. I recently caught part of a radio interview with him on NPR's The Connection where he was discussing the same themes.
His point is basically that while computers are nice, "real life" can and should be even nicer, but that we are losing track of those real life pleasures. He may be a little too hard on the electronic beasties, but it's a refreshing and necessary antidote to e-hype.
For many (perhaps most) of us technophiles who become deeply involved with computers, there comes a time when we realize - as a friend of mine put it - that a real flower is infinitely more interesting than the best hi-res JPEG image of a flower. We have to find the balance where using computers and the net is enhancing, rather than replacing, our life experience.
As for computers in the classroom, they have their place there. But they should be though more of as replacing textbooks than replacing teachers.
It would be so nice to eat well-marbled dead cow for breakfast, lunch and dinner with no fear of heart attack or stroke.
Vegan and animal rights advocate that I am, I hope that given the tech level to create artery-scouring nanobots we'd put an end to slaughtering sentient creatures for pleasure and that you'd be eating tank-grown cloned meat instead.
Next time, run Dr. Watson while you're using the machine - it'll tell you why it crashed.
I don't think he had Dr. Watson. But that's hardly an answer - having a third party tell you why something sucks doesn't make it suck any less, does it?
You're a computer engineer, not a fool
Some might say I qualify as both. B-) But at that time I was acting as a user, not a hacker. I shouldn't need tools to tell me why standard COTS software crashes the whole machine - because standard COTS software ought not to crash the whole machine.
That's sort of like telling me to put a vacuum gauge on the engine of my new car to find out why its stalling. Point is, stalling indicates a defective vehicle, and my response would be to take it back to the dealer for repair or refund.
Hmmm... try doing Start Menu -> Run -> FTP.
Weird behavior was on the server side. But I've encountered annoying misfunctions in their ftp client, too.
the braindead binding of IE to view JPEG files
Err... it views them, doesn't it? What's the problem?
Sending a bloated program to do the work of a simple viewer program isn't a problem to you? (Think of it this way - I like editing with emacs, but I don't want it to take the place of simple, quick-starting more (or less) for file viewing!)
Then it asks if I want it to be the default web browser, when I'm not even browsing the web with it. Annoying.
MSPaint - on Windows 98, it even saves out as JPEG and GIF, as well as BMP format.
Except that it horribly degrades the image quality. (Yes, JPEG quality was set to max, thank you.)
Hmmm... I could have done it in about 1 minute...
Well, bully for you then. Clearly your hackitude is very strong. I'm sure that your phallus is also enormous and that you get all the girlies.
The huge software industry we enjoy today is due in no small part to the HATED microsoft.
No. The parts of the software industry that we don't enjoy are largely due to Microsoft.
Let me tell you a story:
I'm a second-generation programmer. My father has been working with computers since the late 1960s. I used to tag along with him when he went to work on weekends, carrying his boxes of punch cards. I have since gone on to earn an M.S. in Computer Science and am a well-payed software developer.
I've been using the Internet since 1989. I wrote my first HTML page back in 1993, have a reasonably involved personal website, and have helped a few friends set up sites of their own. Point being, I know my ass from/dev/null.
My father doesn't have the net experience I do, so while I was visting home on Christmas he asked me to help him set up a webpage with a scanned image of a basecall card he was auctioning on eBay. No problem, I figure, I can whip this out before dinner.
I didn't count on the joys of Windows 98 on our end and Windows NT on the ISP's end. The rebooting of his PC when it crashed for reasons unknown and unknowable, the weird FTP behavior, the braindead binding of IE to view JPEG files, the lack of a good standard tool for simple image manipulation...ah, such fun.
After an hours' effort, two men with with over four decades of combined programming experience and a decade of net experience could not publish a simple web page - a task I could have perfomed in five minutes on my Linux box and Unix-running ISP.
They're not so stupid they forgot how to fly, they're so smart they figured out how to fly underwater! Evolution, the greatest of hackers.
(Yes, I know the individual penguins didn't forget or figure out anything about flying any more than I figured out that an upright stance frees the forelimbs for carrying stuff.)
...The Gregorian Calendar was adopted in Britain (and in the British colonies) in 1752, with (Wednesday) September 2, 1752, being followed immediately by (Thursday) September 14, 1752.
I sit in an office all day that is lit by flourescent lights and I find it very draining.
Oh yeah, the regular industrial flourescents used in most offices suck rocks; the spectrum's all wrong and they flicker. (I'm under them now, but at least a little bit of natural light bounces into my cubicle.) But good lighting is very helpful - my downstairs computer nook has a halogen torch lamp, while my bedroom/computer room has good electronic-ballast CF bulbs in an overhead fixture.
Another thing that helps, which isn't mentioned in the article, is music. I don't know if you noticed or not, but music will often help you to concentrate.
Absolutely. But it should be familiar stuff - if it's any good, during the first listen or two of an album I'm paying attention to the music instead of my work. B-)
Get some good music playing (trancy techno preferred)...and get that room as dark as you can....I think that you will find that you got a lot more done in the dark environment. This has proven true consistently for me and I don't see why it wouldn't for you.
I have tried it and it never worked for me. Just wired differently, I guess. Dark rooms with trancy music put me more in mind of sex and drugs than coding. Not that that's a bad thing, mind you...but for coding I prefer a clean, well-lit place with upbeat rock and roll playing.
...yelling at any attempts to brighten the room anymore than my monitor already is...
Now that bit I've never understood. I've known quite a few hackers who liked the cave ambiance, but (so long as it's not glaring on my monitor) I want my hacking environment as bright as possible. Natural sunlight preferred during daylight hours, bright halogens or flicker-free compact fluorescents after dark. Dark rooms make me want to go to sleep.
Maybe a brighter room would help reduce the need for caffeine?
"Hackers often have a reading range that astonishes liberal arts people but tend not to talk about it as much." Garbage.
Why garbage? Many of my friends and aquaintances are "liberal arts people" and quite a few have been surprised when they beheld my library, which ranges from Asimov to Lao Tzu to Chandler (two Chandlers actually, Raymond and (unrelated to my knowledge) poet and spoken word artist Chris Chandler) to Hunter Thompson to Shakespeare to Plato to Feynman. I guess they expect me to have shelf after shelf of books on HTML and C++ and some SF novels, nothing more.
Current and recent reading includes Another Roadside Attraction, The Compass of Zen, Phillip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing, The Tick - Luny Bin, and Planet of the Apes - which despite the visions of bad monkey suits it conjures to those who've seen the movies it inspired is actually a satire of some merit.
An aside: I find some of the Slashdot response interesting. We're a bit schizophrenic. We are bananas about privacy issues and here is the state taking aciton against a company that makes a device that is used to illegally violate privacy and we, er, go bananas!
It's not schizophrenic at all. I am very much opposed to someone illegally beating another person's brains out with a baseball bat, but that doesn't justify the state taking action against the Louisville Slugger company.
Tools - be they microphones, cameras, guns, baseball bats, lockpicks, computers, frequency scanners, or EPROM burners - do not get up and go about violating the rights of others by themselves. It is the operator who determines the use of the tool and who bears responsibility.
I'm tired, DAMN tired, of people blaming the feds for doing their job... enforcing the law. If you don't agree with the laws, blame the people who MADE them, not those that enforce them.
At the risk of bringing Godwin's Law down upon my head...
"I was only following orders" didn't cut it at Nuremburg and doesn't cut it now when police and federal agents go about enforcing irrational, immoral, and unconstitutional laws. They choose their careers and their actions as much as any of us do, and bear fully moral responsibility.
I also see nothing wrong with allowing police to confiscate cars when needed to perform their duties, as long as the owner is compensated for the loss.
We're not talking about a cop borrowing a car to chase down a bad guy. We're talking about civil forfeiture, whereby the state can just take your stuff at gunpoint in the name of stopping drug use, prostitution, or some other "threat to our children", without even charging you with a crime. You can sue them to try to get it back if you like - good luck. The legal fiction is that the property itself is guilty of a crime, and as property has no rights due process does not apply.
Civil forfeiture is one of the most monsterous manifestations of the growing American police state.
...dowsing, which ironically anyone can do easily...
Here's a little experiment you can try at home. Get a sealed bottle of water. (You might be able to smell an open cup.) Make three opaque cylinders - closed at the top, open at the bottom, and larger than the bottle - out of construction paper or cardboard. Leave the room and have a friend put the bottle of water under one of the cylinders. Have him leave the room so he can't give you any subtle clues. (Many "psychic" insights are just the subconscious reading of subtle environmental or social cues.) Try your dowsing powers and see if you can figure out where the water is. Repeat 20 or 30 times to get some statistics.
Slashdot Mirror
2 is prime. You may be thinking of the confusion surrounding 1, which is not prime even though it fits the "no factors other than 1 and itself" defintion because defining 1 to be prime screws up the concept of a unique prime factorization of any whole number.
I think writing in "Bill The Cat" is a more effective statement than staying home. Think about it - you made the effort to go wait in line to say "I'd rather have a fictional dead cat in the White House than you." Doesn't that say more than silence?
Plus, you should still go and vote on local races, bond issues, and referendums. Might as well scribble something for President. And asking about how to write in a ballot causes much confusion amoungst the poll officials - hail Eris!
I do think that "none of the above" should be a valid ballot choice, though. Failing that, I've thought that it would be neat to run for some local office as the "none of the above" candidate -promising that I won't even show up for work and will return any and all salary to the treasury.
(We're going off-topic, so I'll say no more of this thread - e-mail me for further discussion if you want.)
But a tissue sample does not an animal make. I think it's pretty clear that "an animal" refers to a complete organism, while "animal tissue" is a different thing. True. But what's interesting in this ethical question is not life (which is just a chemical process, albeit a very interesting one), but the termination of a consciousness (or, depending on your terms, an experiencer, a subjectivity, a subject-of-a-life, sentience, whatever) which may be present in a living brain - or (someday) in a computer, or in an extraterristrial critter based on a chemistry so different we wouldn't call it living.Anyway, estate taxes are only relevant to the wealthy - you can pass up to $675,000 tax-free. And in our system, the wealthy usually get that way through government backing (the state creates artificial entities such as corporations that concentrate wealth, and defines and enforces artificial property rights on land and (saints preserve us) ideas); so for the state to take back wealth it created for you in the first place is hardly a tragedy.
His point is basically that while computers are nice, "real life" can and should be even nicer, but that we are losing track of those real life pleasures. He may be a little too hard on the electronic beasties, but it's a refreshing and necessary antidote to e-hype.
For many (perhaps most) of us technophiles who become deeply involved with computers, there comes a time when we realize - as a friend of mine put it - that a real flower is infinitely more interesting than the best hi-res JPEG image of a flower. We have to find the balance where using computers and the net is enhancing, rather than replacing, our life experience.
As for computers in the classroom, they have their place there. But they should be though more of as replacing textbooks than replacing teachers.
That's sort of like telling me to put a vacuum gauge on the engine of my new car to find out why its stalling. Point is, stalling indicates a defective vehicle, and my response would be to take it back to the dealer for repair or refund.
Weird behavior was on the server side. But I've encountered annoying misfunctions in their ftp client, too. Sending a bloated program to do the work of a simple viewer program isn't a problem to you? (Think of it this way - I like editing with emacs, but I don't want it to take the place of simple, quick-starting more (or less) for file viewing!)Then it asks if I want it to be the default web browser, when I'm not even browsing the web with it. Annoying.
Except that it horribly degrades the image quality. (Yes, JPEG quality was set to max, thank you.) Well, bully for you then. Clearly your hackitude is very strong. I'm sure that your phallus is also enormous and that you get all the girlies.Let me tell you a story:
I'm a second-generation programmer. My father has been working with computers since the late 1960s. I used to tag along with him when he went to work on weekends, carrying his boxes of punch cards. I have since gone on to earn an M.S. in Computer Science and am a well-payed software developer.
I've been using the Internet since 1989. I wrote my first HTML page back in 1993, have a reasonably involved personal website, and have helped a few friends set up sites of their own. Point being, I know my ass from /dev/null.
My father doesn't have the net experience I do, so while I was visting home on Christmas he asked me to help him set up a webpage with a scanned image of a basecall card he was auctioning on eBay. No problem, I figure, I can whip this out before dinner.
I didn't count on the joys of Windows 98 on our end and Windows NT on the ISP's end. The rebooting of his PC when it crashed for reasons unknown and unknowable, the weird FTP behavior, the braindead binding of IE to view JPEG files, the lack of a good standard tool for simple image manipulation...ah, such fun.
After an hours' effort, two men with with over four decades of combined programming experience and a decade of net experience could not publish a simple web page - a task I could have perfomed in five minutes on my Linux box and Unix-running ISP.
(Yes, I know the individual penguins didn't forget or figure out anything about flying any more than I figured out that an upright stance frees the forelimbs for carrying stuff.)
Different nations made the switch at different times. I think there are one or two that still haven't changed.
1752 is when the UK and the American Colonies made the switch, while 1582 is when Rome decreed it:
I also noticed something weird yesterday where a one-point positive moderation of one of my posts increased my karma by three points.
Must be Y2Karma problems.
Maybe a brighter room would help reduce the need for caffeine?
Current and recent reading includes Another Roadside Attraction, The Compass of Zen, Phillip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing, The Tick - Luny Bin, and Planet of the Apes - which despite the visions of bad monkey suits it conjures to those who've seen the movies it inspired is actually a satire of some merit.
My best schedule (I was doing this about 2 years ago while telecommuting) goes something like this:
- 10 am - wake. Breakfast while reading email. Think about today's hacking plans while showering.
- 11 am - start hacking.
- 3 pm - break. Play with dogs, hit heavy bag, do kata, talk a walk, whatever.
- 4 pm - hack
- 7 pm - dinner. Then Go Out And Play.
- Midnight - come home. Hack.
- 2 am - go to sleep.
This is what makes me healthy, happy, and productive, and I wish I could be getting paid to follow it now. Your mileage may vary.Tools - be they microphones, cameras, guns, baseball bats, lockpicks, computers, frequency scanners, or EPROM burners - do not get up and go about violating the rights of others by themselves. It is the operator who determines the use of the tool and who bears responsibility.
"I was only following orders" didn't cut it at Nuremburg and doesn't cut it now when police and federal agents go about enforcing irrational, immoral, and unconstitutional laws. They choose their careers and their actions as much as any of us do, and bear fully moral responsibility.
Civil forfeiture is one of the most monsterous manifestations of the growing American police state.
If you can find it consistently, contact the James Randi Educational Foundation and demonstrate your powers and they will give you a million dollars! Though you should probably read their page on dowsing first to learn why no one's been able to do this.