You're absolutely right. The thing is though, Vista is a good operating system that is plagued by a stigma that is largely persisted by technology sites that, by default and in some sort of nerd conformance insist that all Microsoft products are garbage, an opinion formed with disregard to objectivity.
No, Vista got slapped with the reputation for being a worthless piece of shite by, hmm, let's see, being a worthless piece of shite. In other news, porcupines object to being described as "prickly."
Listen here, you pud-pulling jagoffs. We went and called it 7. Not R2, not Vista 1.5, not any motherfucking jungle cat name. No. It's 7! This means it's a completely different operating system, you fucking cunts. What's that, you say? The kernel on Vista is 6.0 and 7 is only 6.1? Security? Get over here. I want you to put on your dick-stomping boots and make this smart-ass' pride look like a waffle. Get the fuck out. Now as for the rest of you pole-smoking faggots, get with the story. 7 is what's it. It's the only game in town. Anything else is just stone age barbarism, may as well be using an abacus. Now I don't care if we have to throw in an extra blade and two aloe strips but this is going to be the biggest Windows launch ever or so help me, you better hope you have all your fucking chairs hidden.
I mean, the real question is whether or not there's even any climate change going on in the first place! But if we concede the point that it might be happening, is it man-made? Because if it's natural instead of man-made, that changes everything, right? A 10 degree change in average temp may see the polar caps melt and seas rise by 200 feet but if this was going to happen anyway it's no longer a problem, right? But I still say the jury's out on this one. Just like with the addictiveness of nicotine. There's been no conclusive scientific evidence from scientists paid by the tobacco industry to show that there's any addictiveness with nicotine. Oh, and that prison torture in Iraq? Did you not listen to the press conference? Bad apples in the lowest ranks of the military, nothing more.
I really wish people would pay more attention to the official story. A lot of time and money has been put into getting it down pat and it's incredibly disrespectful to then go and listen to other sources.
Seems like the quickest way to stir up some controversy here is to hack the computers of the people running these agencies and see if they're into salacious yet legal pr0n or, even better, nasty illegal stuff. Not that I'm advocating this sort of thing, of course, but there was news of this sort of thing being done to Justice Scalia. He saw no problem with privacy violations and a law professor had his class comb the interwebs for PI on Scalia. They put together a very revealing dossier with all his info. Word was that Scalia was not amused. Heh. Payback's a bitch.
You remind me of a popular adage... any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Perhaps any sufficiently advanced technology is also indistinguishable from God.
It really depends on how big your idea of God is.:) From the perspective of the earliest religions, every rock and tree and critter had a spirit and sometimes those things were also called gods. There was a god of a forest, a god of a river, comfortably small gods. By the time of the Greeks and the Romans gods had come to also embody philosophical concepts. But even for people like that, modern man would appear godlike. The president of the United States would certainly appear to be a god-king, at least by the standards of the ancient Egyptians. He can speak a word and command that he and his court be whisked around the world in his tamed metal bird. He can order the obliteration of a city just as easily. (ok, I hope not as easily but, in principle, the president has the button.) The president speaks and his entire nation can hear his voice as one, across the continent. Our scientists can create miracles of technology, we can fight back disease and age and even the poorest among us can live in homes that would be the envy of pretty much anyone in the world of antiquity. There's no doubt in my mind that the ancients would say we live as gods if not actually appear as gods as well.
The monotheistic god is given a lot more credit, though. He's not just the creator of man but all existence. As science pushed back the idea of what existence was, not just the borders of the world but the borders of space and time, religious folk were quick to say "Yeah, He did that, too. God is great." By that kind of definition, even Dr. Manhattan would look like a piker.
The talk of the idea of cloning Neanderthal got me thinking, though -- we probably do have tech sufficient enough to pass for gods by that perspective. We ourselves like to throw God at the gaps, saying what we don't understand must be God. Then we figure out some more and push God into smaller gaps. If we were able to bring back a Neanderthal and he grew up in the lab interacting with scientists and a surrogate mother who would, of course, still be a human being, we'd probably appear more god-like than as simple father and mother figures. We have mysterious magic machines whose workings would be beyond him, move in mysterious ways.
The capability of doing this sort of stuff isn't thousands of years out and speculative fiction, it's not even decades away. We're pretty much at the point where we can seriously talk about resurrecting extinct species. This seems to be going a wee bit beyond mucking about with fire brought by Prometheus, this looks more like getting a hold of one of Zeus's thunderbolts and blowing apart mountains. I'd say that splitting the atom was the very first baby step into godtech. Our biotech is going the same way here. Baby steps, sure, but pointing the way to developments that will be utterly godlike, especially to those on the outside looking in.
I found your post very well-thought, and an interesting read, but one note struck me as odd:
and humans are not that far removed from the trees. We are selfish, grasping, petty animals
What the hell do the trees look like where you live? They sound like they'd scare the *shit* out of me.
I assume you're funning with me here but if not... Chimps are our closest animal cousins and they're not all that nice. Sure, they'll make a few cute and kooky commercials but then they'll chew a lady's face off or cannibalize other chimp infants or do all sorts of horrible things. That's what I meant by saying we're not all that far removed from the trees, i.e. having come down from the trees, i.e. speciated from the common ancestor between modern man and modern chimp.
Ray Kurzweil, isn't he the Jon Katz of the transhumanist movement? I just remember there's supposed to be a couple of really good writers and philosophers and then one incredible douchebag that makes all of the rest look bad, someone who's approach to the topic is reminiscent of the very worst of Thomas Friedman (not to imply there's a best of Friedman.)
Is this the guy I'm thinking of or is there someone else?
I always thought of it more as a techno-rapture and that's the way I've seen it referred to in other places.
Even the most committed atheist can understand the attraction of religion and the idea of a rapture and a heaven, life everlasting. These are all very human yearnings. The difference between the idea of the religious and the techo-rapture is that the means of making it happen lie within our grasp. Certainly we could create the new heaven and new Earth and the reign of a thousand years right here and now. We have the technology, we have the knowledge, what we lack is the wisdom.
The poster who compares it with 1950's futurist utopianism is exactly right. We could have had the future depicted in 2001, we could have an end to world hunger, an end to disease, and if not an end to death then a comfortably long delay in its arrival. The problem is that we're still very human at heart and humans are not that far removed from the trees. We are selfish, grasping, petty animals and those few acts of sublime virtue from the best of us simply serve to make the rest of us look all the worse.
We've yet to develop a political system adequate to the task of promoting the greatest good for the greatest number without allowing unhealthy power and influence to be amassed by our least deserving fellows. Unfortunately, the very people who are most willing to acquire power are seldom the ones who should have it. The complaint I hear from my friends deeply involved with the Democrats is that there are plenty of good people they'd like to run as candidates but so many of them want nothing to do with politics. They're happy to put in the long hours behind the scenes but the thought of being in the spotlight and having all the attention on them is about as attractive a thought as a root canal. Someone actually willing to take that kind of attention is more than likely going to be someone like a John Edwards, a nice smile and slick approach but ultimately a self-serving jerk so blinded by his own awesomeness that he'd pull stupid shit like having an affair and then throwing his hat in the ring for the presidency.
I'm curious as to what the potential implication of a Singularity is for technology but I don't know if that would change the human situation all that much. There's been some good speculative fiction written along these lines in the Orion's Arm universe. It's trying to be a very hard SF look at future space opera. The few aliens are all completely inhuman, the humanoid aliens are actually all modified people from earth, terragen life as they call it. There's various scales that sophonts fall onto from sub-human to AI gods and all sorts of tech levels from stone-age to planck-age. It's certainly worth a look.
Too expensive, too restrictive. But I'm still a booster. The more these things sell, the cheaper the tech will get and eventually we'll have cheap, open architecture tablet PC's like this. Previous tablets were ridiculous, basically laptops with spinning drives and fans that you certainly weren't going to carry like a clipboard. The format represented by the Kindle is great. I just want to see it stripped of all the cruft that makes it suck. The more popular it gets, the more likely that will be. The mp3 player I'm quite happy with likely wouldn't have come about if not for the ridiculous success of the ipods, expensive restrictive devices I never wanted but which paved the way for better things.
It's kind of completely obvious in retrospect but I remember being so proud coming up with an idea like this way back when I was first getting into computers and reading way too much cyberpunk. The scenario I imagined was someone hacking into a corporate network and planting a virus that gets wormed into all the backups. The ransom note goes something like this:
1. Hi. I compromised your systems. 2. You have no idea when I compromised them and I won't tell you. Rest assured it's been for more than months. 3. I planted a virus. 4. It's in all your backups now. 5. It's set to start deleting everything next week. 6. You could conceivably take everything offline and pay security geeks big bucks to scrub it down. My guess is it'd take you weeks and cost $x megabucks. 7. For $.1x megabucks, I'll give you the disarm code.
I thought it was a kewl idea but the part that I could never figure out was how to make contact with the company without giving everything away. The only thing I could come up with is the old standby from TV and movies, the "numbered swiss bank account." Presumably your identity would be kept private, you would know when the deposit was made, end of story. But it always seemed like there would be some hole in the process that would leave a big red arrow pointing back to the hacker.
Of the historic hackers we've read about, the ones who have gotten caught, it's always some fuckup that gets them nailed, usually not being able to keep their yaps shut. This does make me wonder if we don't hear about the successful hacks because a) the good ones can keep their yaps shut and b) nobody wants to advertise getting pwn'd hard by some punk.
The other factor is a hack like this is so big and flashy, it's just bound to get law enforcement to throw more bucks at the case than it would normally warrant, just because it's so brazen, blatant, and just begging the feds to overreact.
So I have an honest question. How did Manga/Anime become such a nerd thing? I have been a nerd for quite a few years now and none of my nerd friends (RL friends that is) are into Manga. However, whenever I browse online nerdy things (/. in this example) Manga seems a prevalent thing. Can people tell me how you got into it and why you like it?
It's the nexus of nerdom. Many things are considered geeky -- Star Trek, Star Wars, scifi, gadgets, rpg's, comics, japanese media. While all may be geeky, you may not have geeked out on each and every one of them. Me, I never had the money to become a comic geek. There really weren't any other traditional geeks at my school and thus nobody playing RPG's. So I tended to be a hardcore book geek and later branched out into computers. I have an appreciation for good anime and manga but the most of it seems to follow Sturgeon's rule. And the anime nuts I have met tended to dork out on the subject so much that even I thought it was embarrassing.
To rephrase your statement, that'd be like saying "Hey, I'm a major sports guy but I never liked hockey. None of my friends were into hockey, we liked football. So why are people saying hockey is something sports guys are into?" Hockey's a sport. Maybe not your sport but nevertheless...
I'm not the biggest geek in the world but I consider myself to still be very geeky and I find this to be the most pointless waste of time and effort I've heard about since Twitter. Virtual lawsuits? Only if I can DM the lawyers.
I don't think us geeks are going to be complaining about the music kids listen to these days or getting off the lawn, we'll just bitch about how the impractical and useless the latest techno-geek fad is. "Twitter? What, blogs with RSS updates aren't good enough for you, son? Back in my day--"
"Back in your day your CPU only had one core and you liked it, right? Your polygons didn't even have textures, you had to customize your config.sys and autoexec.bat just to play--"
For the love of Christ, Republicans! You know that line about anti-zombie research? Don't fucking touch it! You saw what happened when you cut funding for volcano and pandemic flu research!
There's a few things, IMO, that CSS simply can't do for layouts that tables solve easily, or if it can be done in CSS, it becomes a lot more complicated and "hackey" than using simple tables.
I avoid tables, but that doesn't mean they aren't the best way to accomplish some layouts, and the only way to achieve certain goals. I think the worst problem is when you get nested table within nested table.
I've actually had people tell me that for certain dynamic content I should use javascript to adjust CSS just to avoid using a table, as if that makes things better.
Most of the problems I've encountered with CSS has to do with centering content.
A simple one or two cell table isn't going to ruin any page readers.
Dunno who the muppet was who modded you troll but he's obviously a wanker.
The cross-browser stuff kills me. Back when I did do web stuff full-time, CSS was around but it remained more theoretical than practical because no two browsers. It was like what Gandhi said when asked about western civilization: "I think it would be a good idea."
I've found a lot of people who are stuck on table layouts are stuck because they can only think of HTML pages in terms of how tables work. You have to break free from that mindset and CSS design makes much more sense.
After designing sites for 10 years, 3 of those in the dark ages of tables, I wouldn't touch tables with 100 foot pole. But if using tables makes it easier for you, more power to you. It's just really sad to see people bash CSS because it's too hard for them to implement.
I've not been doing direct web design for a while and I just use tables whenever something comes up simply because I know it works. I've tried looking into other techniques but it usually boils down to "I have enough time to do it a way I know works but not enough time to research a better way."
I know awesome stuff can be dones, Garden of CSS proves it, but I'm surprised I don't see those techniques applied on other sites anywhere. Where do the designers who created those templates go for work?
So does this mean that the next president after Obama should start practicing holding hands and kissing cheeks or whatever men do in Bolivia? I'd actually have to compliment Obama on his reserve, only "bowing" to the sheik instead of playing kissy-face like Bush did.
Your choices are rockets, parachutes, wings and landing gear, or a variety of weird and exotic options (like deploying helicopter blades; see the Roton concepts). There are a variety of reasons to prefer rockets to parachutes (and vice versa). The rockets are likely somewhat heavier than the parachutes and their deployment system, but I suspect the weight difference is small enough that the decision would likely be made on the basis of operational advantages (like being able to do a landing on solid ground instead of the ocean easily).
This is where you have to weigh the cost of the additional weight of rockets vs. parachute with the cost of having a carrier battle group standing by to pluck the astronauts out of the water. The Russian technique of just pointing the capsule at a wide expanse of steppe and sending out helicopters to retrieve the crew makes a lot of sense, far cheaper.
You don't start sex-ed by teaching them about the Stork bringing children. You tell them that when a mammy and daddy love each other very much, and want to have a baby, they hug in a very special way...
I'd love to see that excuse before the judge. "Your honor, I was just hugging her in a very special way. You're not about to legislate from the bench over how we might express our feelings, right?"
Slashdot Mirror
They're only 6 inches
CENTIMETERS!!!!
They are 6 CENTIMETERS! We Australians were one of the first to convert to metric and that's a metric ruler in the article.
You call that a ruler? *whips out yardstick* THIS is a ruler!
hell, even doritos make their own chips
Yeah, but their performance makes even Cyrix look good.
It really does drive home how stupid it is to call copyright infringers "pirates" when we have real pirates on the high seas.
You're absolutely right. The thing is though, Vista is a good operating system that is plagued by a stigma that is largely persisted by technology sites that, by default and in some sort of nerd conformance insist that all Microsoft products are garbage, an opinion formed with disregard to objectivity.
No, Vista got slapped with the reputation for being a worthless piece of shite by, hmm, let's see, being a worthless piece of shite. In other news, porcupines object to being described as "prickly."
Channeling Balmer here, forgive me.
Listen here, you pud-pulling jagoffs. We went and called it 7. Not R2, not Vista 1.5, not any motherfucking jungle cat name. No. It's 7! This means it's a completely different operating system, you fucking cunts. What's that, you say? The kernel on Vista is 6.0 and 7 is only 6.1? Security? Get over here. I want you to put on your dick-stomping boots and make this smart-ass' pride look like a waffle. Get the fuck out. Now as for the rest of you pole-smoking faggots, get with the story. 7 is what's it. It's the only game in town. Anything else is just stone age barbarism, may as well be using an abacus. Now I don't care if we have to throw in an extra blade and two aloe strips but this is going to be the biggest Windows launch ever or so help me, you better hope you have all your fucking chairs hidden.
I mean, the real question is whether or not there's even any climate change going on in the first place! But if we concede the point that it might be happening, is it man-made? Because if it's natural instead of man-made, that changes everything, right? A 10 degree change in average temp may see the polar caps melt and seas rise by 200 feet but if this was going to happen anyway it's no longer a problem, right? But I still say the jury's out on this one. Just like with the addictiveness of nicotine. There's been no conclusive scientific evidence from scientists paid by the tobacco industry to show that there's any addictiveness with nicotine. Oh, and that prison torture in Iraq? Did you not listen to the press conference? Bad apples in the lowest ranks of the military, nothing more.
I really wish people would pay more attention to the official story. A lot of time and money has been put into getting it down pat and it's incredibly disrespectful to then go and listen to other sources.
Someone needs to genetically engineer a big desert worm.
We know what happens when we drown a baby worm in water, I wonder what we'd get if we drowned it in tequila. Let's find out!
Seems like the quickest way to stir up some controversy here is to hack the computers of the people running these agencies and see if they're into salacious yet legal pr0n or, even better, nasty illegal stuff. Not that I'm advocating this sort of thing, of course, but there was news of this sort of thing being done to Justice Scalia. He saw no problem with privacy violations and a law professor had his class comb the interwebs for PI on Scalia. They put together a very revealing dossier with all his info. Word was that Scalia was not amused. Heh. Payback's a bitch.
You remind me of a popular adage... any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Perhaps any sufficiently advanced technology is also indistinguishable from God.
It really depends on how big your idea of God is. :) From the perspective of the earliest religions, every rock and tree and critter had a spirit and sometimes those things were also called gods. There was a god of a forest, a god of a river, comfortably small gods. By the time of the Greeks and the Romans gods had come to also embody philosophical concepts. But even for people like that, modern man would appear godlike. The president of the United States would certainly appear to be a god-king, at least by the standards of the ancient Egyptians. He can speak a word and command that he and his court be whisked around the world in his tamed metal bird. He can order the obliteration of a city just as easily. (ok, I hope not as easily but, in principle, the president has the button.) The president speaks and his entire nation can hear his voice as one, across the continent. Our scientists can create miracles of technology, we can fight back disease and age and even the poorest among us can live in homes that would be the envy of pretty much anyone in the world of antiquity. There's no doubt in my mind that the ancients would say we live as gods if not actually appear as gods as well.
The monotheistic god is given a lot more credit, though. He's not just the creator of man but all existence. As science pushed back the idea of what existence was, not just the borders of the world but the borders of space and time, religious folk were quick to say "Yeah, He did that, too. God is great." By that kind of definition, even Dr. Manhattan would look like a piker.
The talk of the idea of cloning Neanderthal got me thinking, though -- we probably do have tech sufficient enough to pass for gods by that perspective. We ourselves like to throw God at the gaps, saying what we don't understand must be God. Then we figure out some more and push God into smaller gaps. If we were able to bring back a Neanderthal and he grew up in the lab interacting with scientists and a surrogate mother who would, of course, still be a human being, we'd probably appear more god-like than as simple father and mother figures. We have mysterious magic machines whose workings would be beyond him, move in mysterious ways.
The capability of doing this sort of stuff isn't thousands of years out and speculative fiction, it's not even decades away. We're pretty much at the point where we can seriously talk about resurrecting extinct species. This seems to be going a wee bit beyond mucking about with fire brought by Prometheus, this looks more like getting a hold of one of Zeus's thunderbolts and blowing apart mountains. I'd say that splitting the atom was the very first baby step into godtech. Our biotech is going the same way here. Baby steps, sure, but pointing the way to developments that will be utterly godlike, especially to those on the outside looking in.
I found your post very well-thought, and an interesting read, but one note struck me as odd:
and humans are not that far removed from the trees. We are selfish, grasping, petty animals
What the hell do the trees look like where you live? They sound like they'd scare the *shit* out of me.
I assume you're funning with me here but if not... Chimps are our closest animal cousins and they're not all that nice. Sure, they'll make a few cute and kooky commercials but then they'll chew a lady's face off or cannibalize other chimp infants or do all sorts of horrible things. That's what I meant by saying we're not all that far removed from the trees, i.e. having come down from the trees, i.e. speciated from the common ancestor between modern man and modern chimp.
And here I thought living in the basement would keep me safe from our robot overlords. Looks like I'm going to have to reevaluate my strategery here.
Ray Kurzweil, isn't he the Jon Katz of the transhumanist movement? I just remember there's supposed to be a couple of really good writers and philosophers and then one incredible douchebag that makes all of the rest look bad, someone who's approach to the topic is reminiscent of the very worst of Thomas Friedman (not to imply there's a best of Friedman.)
Is this the guy I'm thinking of or is there someone else?
"The nerd rapture"
I always thought of it more as a techno-rapture and that's the way I've seen it referred to in other places.
Even the most committed atheist can understand the attraction of religion and the idea of a rapture and a heaven, life everlasting. These are all very human yearnings. The difference between the idea of the religious and the techo-rapture is that the means of making it happen lie within our grasp. Certainly we could create the new heaven and new Earth and the reign of a thousand years right here and now. We have the technology, we have the knowledge, what we lack is the wisdom.
The poster who compares it with 1950's futurist utopianism is exactly right. We could have had the future depicted in 2001, we could have an end to world hunger, an end to disease, and if not an end to death then a comfortably long delay in its arrival. The problem is that we're still very human at heart and humans are not that far removed from the trees. We are selfish, grasping, petty animals and those few acts of sublime virtue from the best of us simply serve to make the rest of us look all the worse.
We've yet to develop a political system adequate to the task of promoting the greatest good for the greatest number without allowing unhealthy power and influence to be amassed by our least deserving fellows. Unfortunately, the very people who are most willing to acquire power are seldom the ones who should have it. The complaint I hear from my friends deeply involved with the Democrats is that there are plenty of good people they'd like to run as candidates but so many of them want nothing to do with politics. They're happy to put in the long hours behind the scenes but the thought of being in the spotlight and having all the attention on them is about as attractive a thought as a root canal. Someone actually willing to take that kind of attention is more than likely going to be someone like a John Edwards, a nice smile and slick approach but ultimately a self-serving jerk so blinded by his own awesomeness that he'd pull stupid shit like having an affair and then throwing his hat in the ring for the presidency.
I'm curious as to what the potential implication of a Singularity is for technology but I don't know if that would change the human situation all that much. There's been some good speculative fiction written along these lines in the Orion's Arm universe. It's trying to be a very hard SF look at future space opera. The few aliens are all completely inhuman, the humanoid aliens are actually all modified people from earth, terragen life as they call it. There's various scales that sophonts fall onto from sub-human to AI gods and all sorts of tech levels from stone-age to planck-age. It's certainly worth a look.
Too expensive, too restrictive. But I'm still a booster. The more these things sell, the cheaper the tech will get and eventually we'll have cheap, open architecture tablet PC's like this. Previous tablets were ridiculous, basically laptops with spinning drives and fans that you certainly weren't going to carry like a clipboard. The format represented by the Kindle is great. I just want to see it stripped of all the cruft that makes it suck. The more popular it gets, the more likely that will be. The mp3 player I'm quite happy with likely wouldn't have come about if not for the ridiculous success of the ipods, expensive restrictive devices I never wanted but which paved the way for better things.
It's kind of completely obvious in retrospect but I remember being so proud coming up with an idea like this way back when I was first getting into computers and reading way too much cyberpunk. The scenario I imagined was someone hacking into a corporate network and planting a virus that gets wormed into all the backups. The ransom note goes something like this:
1. Hi. I compromised your systems.
2. You have no idea when I compromised them and I won't tell you. Rest assured it's been for more than months.
3. I planted a virus.
4. It's in all your backups now.
5. It's set to start deleting everything next week.
6. You could conceivably take everything offline and pay security geeks big bucks to scrub it down. My guess is it'd take you weeks and cost $x megabucks.
7. For $.1x megabucks, I'll give you the disarm code.
I thought it was a kewl idea but the part that I could never figure out was how to make contact with the company without giving everything away. The only thing I could come up with is the old standby from TV and movies, the "numbered swiss bank account." Presumably your identity would be kept private, you would know when the deposit was made, end of story. But it always seemed like there would be some hole in the process that would leave a big red arrow pointing back to the hacker.
Of the historic hackers we've read about, the ones who have gotten caught, it's always some fuckup that gets them nailed, usually not being able to keep their yaps shut. This does make me wonder if we don't hear about the successful hacks because a) the good ones can keep their yaps shut and b) nobody wants to advertise getting pwn'd hard by some punk.
The other factor is a hack like this is so big and flashy, it's just bound to get law enforcement to throw more bucks at the case than it would normally warrant, just because it's so brazen, blatant, and just begging the feds to overreact.
So I have an honest question. How did Manga/Anime become such a nerd thing? I have been a nerd for quite a few years now and none of my nerd friends (RL friends that is) are into Manga. However, whenever I browse online nerdy things (/. in this example) Manga seems a prevalent thing. Can people tell me how you got into it and why you like it?
It's the nexus of nerdom. Many things are considered geeky -- Star Trek, Star Wars, scifi, gadgets, rpg's, comics, japanese media. While all may be geeky, you may not have geeked out on each and every one of them. Me, I never had the money to become a comic geek. There really weren't any other traditional geeks at my school and thus nobody playing RPG's. So I tended to be a hardcore book geek and later branched out into computers. I have an appreciation for good anime and manga but the most of it seems to follow Sturgeon's rule. And the anime nuts I have met tended to dork out on the subject so much that even I thought it was embarrassing.
To rephrase your statement, that'd be like saying "Hey, I'm a major sports guy but I never liked hockey. None of my friends were into hockey, we liked football. So why are people saying hockey is something sports guys are into?" Hockey's a sport. Maybe not your sport but nevertheless...
I heard Tom Bombadil isn't even in this one!
I'm not the biggest geek in the world but I consider myself to still be very geeky and I find this to be the most pointless waste of time and effort I've heard about since Twitter. Virtual lawsuits? Only if I can DM the lawyers.
I don't think us geeks are going to be complaining about the music kids listen to these days or getting off the lawn, we'll just bitch about how the impractical and useless the latest techno-geek fad is. "Twitter? What, blogs with RSS updates aren't good enough for you, son? Back in my day--"
"Back in your day your CPU only had one core and you liked it, right? Your polygons didn't even have textures, you had to customize your config.sys and autoexec.bat just to play--"
"Aw, shut up. And get off my lawn."
At least these won't get out in the open that easily because someone copied them to an USB drive and lost it somewhere.
No, that's what firewall holes are for.
For the love of Christ, Republicans! You know that line about anti-zombie research? Don't fucking touch it! You saw what happened when you cut funding for volcano and pandemic flu research!
There's a few things, IMO, that CSS simply can't do for layouts that tables solve easily, or if it can be done in CSS, it becomes a lot more complicated and "hackey" than using simple tables.
I avoid tables, but that doesn't mean they aren't the best way to accomplish some layouts, and the only way to achieve certain goals. I think the worst problem is when you get nested table within nested table.
I've actually had people tell me that for certain dynamic content I should use javascript to adjust CSS just to avoid using a table, as if that makes things better.
Most of the problems I've encountered with CSS has to do with centering content.
A simple one or two cell table isn't going to ruin any page readers.
Dunno who the muppet was who modded you troll but he's obviously a wanker.
The cross-browser stuff kills me. Back when I did do web stuff full-time, CSS was around but it remained more theoretical than practical because no two browsers. It was like what Gandhi said when asked about western civilization: "I think it would be a good idea."
I've found a lot of people who are stuck on table layouts are stuck because they can only think of HTML pages in terms of how tables work. You have to break free from that mindset and CSS design makes much more sense.
After designing sites for 10 years, 3 of those in the dark ages of tables, I wouldn't touch tables with 100 foot pole. But if using tables makes it easier for you, more power to you. It's just really sad to see people bash CSS because it's too hard for them to implement.
I've not been doing direct web design for a while and I just use tables whenever something comes up simply because I know it works. I've tried looking into other techniques but it usually boils down to "I have enough time to do it a way I know works but not enough time to research a better way."
I know awesome stuff can be dones, Garden of CSS proves it, but I'm surprised I don't see those techniques applied on other sites anywhere. Where do the designers who created those templates go for work?
So does this mean that the next president after Obama should start practicing holding hands and kissing cheeks or whatever men do in Bolivia? I'd actually have to compliment Obama on his reserve, only "bowing" to the sheik instead of playing kissy-face like Bush did.
Your choices are rockets, parachutes, wings and landing gear, or a variety of weird and exotic options (like deploying helicopter blades; see the Roton concepts). There are a variety of reasons to prefer rockets to parachutes (and vice versa). The rockets are likely somewhat heavier than the parachutes and their deployment system, but I suspect the weight difference is small enough that the decision would likely be made on the basis of operational advantages (like being able to do a landing on solid ground instead of the ocean easily).
This is where you have to weigh the cost of the additional weight of rockets vs. parachute with the cost of having a carrier battle group standing by to pluck the astronauts out of the water. The Russian technique of just pointing the capsule at a wide expanse of steppe and sending out helicopters to retrieve the crew makes a lot of sense, far cheaper.
You don't start sex-ed by teaching them about the Stork bringing children. You tell them that when a mammy and daddy love each other very much, and want to have a baby, they hug in a very special way...
I'd love to see that excuse before the judge. "Your honor, I was just hugging her in a very special way. You're not about to legislate from the bench over how we might express our feelings, right?"