I have no formal education in this field so I may very well be talking out my ass, but I find it a bit of a stretch to equate monogamy with sexually transmitted diseases. STD being lethal is a much more modern thing [Yes syphilis does kill and it's been around for awhile] but I just don't see STD's being pervasive enough for this to occur. AIDS has only really become an issue for Homo Sapiens in the past 50 years or so, so clearly it was not a factor and with the exception of syphilis I can't think of another STD that is deadly [again, if you let things go they become worse but I don't see how this contributes to monogamy].
Your analysis, does not hold up in my mind, I'd love to read your response, maybe I'm missing something...
I remember getting my hands of an alpha copy of Warcraft II back in the AOL days. I had just found out about some chatroom called "warez" and was attempting to get every piece of free software imaginable forwarded to me; good ole AOL. Anyhow, the alpha version was pretty bare bones and it contained some resources that were changed but it peaked my interest. About four months later I was in an EB and I saw it for sale; I purchased the game and there went my social life for the next nine months.
But to be fair, this is really a two part love-affair. Had Kali not come along just around when Warcraft II [yes yes, I know it was designed for FPS's...kissmyasss] did then I probably would have beaten warcraft II and that would have been that but I began playing multiplayer games; this caused me spend most of my high school in front of a computer instead of chasing skirts...
Being a member of a help desk/network support staff, I can attest to the fact that if you let them end users will push you around. There are a few people on my staff who get bullied in to doing pointless shit for the same obnoxious people day in and day out. Never happens to me though; I find that being polite up to the point that they try to tell me how to do my job, at which point I end the conversation and inform them that the problem that they "think" they are having is not the problem that they are having and that if they'd like me to continue working on their problem to let me do so. For most people, this is very effective for some it isn't and they'll complain and my boss will side with me.
I think a lot of sys admins could save themeselves a lot of headaches by just setting proper boundaries. They key is to just be polite and NOT condescending; if you pull these two things off MOST people will give you the space-time-resources that you need to finish your task. People who are still pushy and rude to me after I've attempted inform them to stop, I won't help. Like anything, it's just about boundaries. I know I may sound like the help desk guy from hell...oh wait this is slashdot you all probably agree with me anyhow;)
Actually, I would argue that big corporations have spurned the religious right in to action on this issue. When dealing with issues of this nature, I find the best way to find the culprit is to look at who stands to gain the most (bear with me a moment on this one). In my mind, the central issue behind Gay Rights, particularly in regard to marriage, has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with money. If legislation is passed allowing for same-sex marriages it will force large corporations to cover the spouses of their gay employees with benefits.
Let's do some quick math; it is more or less commonly accepted that about 10% of the population is gay. So that means that big corporations don't have to spend money on benefits for say 4% of their employees [there's still 6% unaccounted for but I figured I'd just say they either weren't married or were not openly gay]. That doesn't sound that much money at the outset but considering that health care accounts for billions upon billions of dollars [and is the ultimate growth industry for at least the next thirty years, especially with the boomers getting older] and some corporations are even toying with the idea requiring employees to quit smoking/lose weight.
This is a really big issue to big corporations but if they were to come out and say "We just don't want to cover the spouses of gay people" they'd get lynched, so instead they spin the issue and make it a moral issue.
It's really too bad when governments formed with the idea that "church and state" should be seperated start legislating morality. The governments job is to create a system that allows for the maximum number of people to get the maximum benefit, it is not meant to be a mechanism of morality; leave that to our FUBARed mythologies.
Oops sorry, that was a rant and this was slightly offtopic...and as much as I like bashing the religious right, sometimes you gotta point to the puppet master, and maybe this is just a silly conspiracy theory maybe all those religious folks really did fail to miss the entire point of the Bible, but who knows;)
So you follow the mold of the big works projects of the 1930's-1940's. That way the folks with the hard hats get their jobs and can put food on their tables and maybe send their kids off to college one day and Bush will give his cronies "non-bidded" contracts so the folks at Halliburton can make even more money!
But at least we'd save the planet;)
Oh wait, the planet doesn't need saving! Human species might need it, but I think the planet is going to take care of itself...time to go back to drinking coffee and eating chips.
Re:This does not sound good...
on
Africa, The MMOG
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
My initial impulse is to agree with you, but sometimes someone really does have a better way of doing things. Robert Rodriguez [Sin City] said the same thing with his movies and he ended up being correct.
Dude, that's eight year old kids. Ever watched eight year old kids playing in the street? They just run all over the place with no regard to what's around them, the issue isn't childproofing the world; the issue is being an eight year old kid.
What MUD did you play and what was the medium age of the population? Over the years on a mud called Arctic I played multiple female characters and none of that shit really occured. Then again I always soloed and had a tendancy to kill other people so maybe that was the source of the...distance....interesting;)
Except that on a global scale an individual is irrelevant. The same goes for human beings as goes for antelope. The individual does not matter, the herd must survive.
Sorry, life isn't fair.
I say that knowing right now things sit well for me but in five years I could be the one hanging by the rope; it's terrible to know but it's the reality of life and it has been the reality of life for the past two million years. Some people get eaten by the saber-tooth tiger because they had the misfortune to wake up a little late, thank you...come again.
Nevermind the fact that regardless of ANYTHING that human beings do, this planet will continue to survive with *LIFE* on it. Yes, many mammals may become extinct and yes this is a bad thing for us. Yes, unless we make major technological advancements in the realm of nanotechnology the standard of living that we see today will never again be matched.
You're right we don't know the "knock-on effects" and I'm not proposing that we start killing off all the animals, merely that this planet is far more robust than we are and the worst that we could honestly hope to do at this juncture in our technological advancement is to kill off 99% of life on this planet which would not be enough to end life on this planet. Scientists believed it happened 3.8 billion years ago when the moon was formed and probablistically speaking it'll happen again.
Remember kids, 99% of the speices that have existed on this planet are...survey says...EXTINCT! It ain't right but those who survive write the history, get over it.
Bear in mind, there is no other reason to separate the male and female plants.
There is a reason to seperate the male and female plants. At a certain point the male plant will begin to pollinate the female plant causing energy that could be spent producing THC to be spent producing seeds thus lowering the concentration of THC in the plant.
It's high school, it's been occurring since we institutionalized eduation. The "geeks" do create homogeneous cliques but so do the Jocks, the Thespians, the Musicians, the Skaters, and the stoners. Geeks are not the least bit unique in this regard. Besides, who cares what a bunch of adolescent teenagers think? When I was 16 years old, I was convinced that I would program computer games for a living; I thought that that was for sure what I wanted to do.
Well, eight years later I'm persuing a career in acting...things and people change and teenagers not being interested in science is nothing new. Teenagers hardly realize that there is a world outside their own existence, my understanding is that there is evidence to suggest that this phenomona is chemically induced by puberty; just my two cents.
Moreover, I think us geeks like to make martyr's out of ourselves to explain being akward/uncomfortable in high school. The emo kids spend their time cutting themeselves and talking about how life sucks and there's no point to being alive, the stoners smoke pot all day, the cheerleaders turn everything in to a melodrama etc. High schoolers think and do lots of stupid shit all in the name of attempting to find an identity and it just seems to me that we, the collective members of slashdot, have a major inferiority complex. High school sucks for most people, it doesn't suck for some but hey I'm happy with how the cards played out for me.
I'd much rather people carry this sort of behavior out in a virtual environment as opposed to a real one. My guess would be is that there will be a very tiny segment of population who will be adversly affected by a game like this but my belief in the first amendment supercede my need to be comfortable. Personally, I think there could be some fascinating personas to adapt in an environment like this.
Another point, this environment is an adult environment. It is not meant for kids, it is not a playground. It's a place where darker sides of humanity can be explored. Afterall, every single person who is posting on this board has a murderer/rapist/amoral type individual in their genetic past; it's required to survive at times.
Free speech becomes more important the more uncomfortable the speech becomes.
Yeah I'm really going to have to agree with Firehed on this one, not to mention the fact that in the next ten years we'll probably have drastically different methods of storing dense pieces of information. I expect that within ten years terabyte drives will be common in personal computers and it may be even five years away. Space isn't a big deal;)
And seriously, how good do you think a surfer would really taste? By and large their very wiry and lean, not exactly good eating material. Maybe if some of us here on slashdot got out in the water the great whites would like it a bit more, kinda like a nice veal;)
Actually, about six-seven months ago some grandfather in I believe the Sudan killed a leopard by ripping its tongue out. It attacked him and I think his grandson and without thinking he just reached in and ripped it out.
A mastiff could rip your throat out. More over, we are comparatively week. If you compare our strength to the cat family, it's about a ten to one ratio. IE a 10 lbs cat = 100 lbs human.
We are very very very weak and fragile. But we got big brains and occasionally the NFL football players of the world are born... at 6'7'' 330 lbs I think we can be classified as fairly mamoth but still weak.
I think the parent was more attempting to say that although the US may not actively change because of a global economy, environmental laws in other parts of the world have affects on the companies that produce products sold in America; although those batteries arn't illegal in the US they are in the EU so it made economic sense to develop a battery that did not contain those materials and sold them in the US.
Re:Big Brother and the iTunes Company
on
iTunes is Malware?
·
· Score: 1
Hmmm the grocery stores collecting my information doesn't really bother me but that's because I've never bothered to actually fill out there sign up forms. Usually, if I don't have one of the cards and it happens to be a female clerk, I just give her my best smile and tell her that I forgot mine and she'll either use her card or I've had a few occasions where they just hand me a new card and tell me to fill the reply card out later. Needless to say I don't bother with such tomfoolery so those data centers just see what I purchase but have no demographic information about me...
I know many stoners and I've known many game addicts...the stoners are much more responsive. If you don't believe me then you've never seen someone utterly ingrossed in a video game. It's like talking to a brick wall, also I would be willing to bet that there is at least one person you work with who seems completely normal and straight edge who shows up to work stoned everyday and they are not noticably different.
It does impair you but people who do it habitually function remarkably well, I garentee you that.
If people want to spend their time and bandwidth arguing about the reputation of the person who submitted the story, so be it. I view this website as a portal that will lead me to various interesting places on the internet that can provide stimuli for my intellect. I enjoy posting on the discussion boards, but the truth of the matter is I only post while at work attempting to make the day go by faster. If I'm at home and I decide to peruse slashdot I will rarely spend any time on the message boards. I may not be the norm in this respect but because of how I use this website I could careless about the junk discussions.
People are going to get pissed and get in to internet arguments because it's something to do; if it's not this it'll be that so it is a pointless battle to fight. Besides, I just skip over trashy disucssions, or get pulled in and in to a shit throwing contest but hey it's all entertainment;)
In other words, don't change a damn thing. A good story is a good story is a good story. Some stories may not be good stories but that'll happen; not like there are monthly subscription fees to use slashdot [I realize some members do have a subscription but that's for a premium service...]. If people think it's bias or want to talk about conspiracy theories they can either do it here and live with it or go elsewhere but I personally think that your time is spent better doing what you already do well and not wasted on pissing contests [which is what this amounts to].
And I'd be quite careful with making assumptions with regard to what is encompassed by the word "factions". We don't even have to bring religions in to the picture to get "factions" that do this; educational organizations do it ALL the time [see the major University's in the US and their leftist socialist dogma], hell scientific institutions do it too [the stem cell research over in south korea]. So don't worry, it's not just religion! There's a lot more people out there doing it!
Slashdot Mirror
I have no formal education in this field so I may very well be talking out my ass, but I find it a bit of a stretch to equate monogamy with sexually transmitted diseases. STD being lethal is a much more modern thing [Yes syphilis does kill and it's been around for awhile] but I just don't see STD's being pervasive enough for this to occur. AIDS has only really become an issue for Homo Sapiens in the past 50 years or so, so clearly it was not a factor and with the exception of syphilis I can't think of another STD that is deadly [again, if you let things go they become worse but I don't see how this contributes to monogamy].
Your analysis, does not hold up in my mind, I'd love to read your response, maybe I'm missing something...
I remember getting my hands of an alpha copy of Warcraft II back in the AOL days. I had just found out about some chatroom called "warez" and was attempting to get every piece of free software imaginable forwarded to me; good ole AOL. Anyhow, the alpha version was pretty bare bones and it contained some resources that were changed but it peaked my interest. About four months later I was in an EB and I saw it for sale; I purchased the game and there went my social life for the next nine months.
But to be fair, this is really a two part love-affair. Had Kali not come along just around when Warcraft II [yes yes, I know it was designed for FPS's...kissmyasss] did then I probably would have beaten warcraft II and that would have been that but I began playing multiplayer games; this caused me spend most of my high school in front of a computer instead of chasing skirts...
Being a member of a help desk/network support staff, I can attest to the fact that if you let them end users will push you around. There are a few people on my staff who get bullied in to doing pointless shit for the same obnoxious people day in and day out. Never happens to me though; I find that being polite up to the point that they try to tell me how to do my job, at which point I end the conversation and inform them that the problem that they "think" they are having is not the problem that they are having and that if they'd like me to continue working on their problem to let me do so. For most people, this is very effective for some it isn't and they'll complain and my boss will side with me.
;)
I think a lot of sys admins could save themeselves a lot of headaches by just setting proper boundaries. They key is to just be polite and NOT condescending; if you pull these two things off MOST people will give you the space-time-resources that you need to finish your task. People who are still pushy and rude to me after I've attempted inform them to stop, I won't help. Like anything, it's just about boundaries. I know I may sound like the help desk guy from hell...oh wait this is slashdot you all probably agree with me anyhow
We should rename this place "The land of chicken little" because the sky is always falling here...
Actually, I would argue that big corporations have spurned the religious right in to action on this issue. When dealing with issues of this nature, I find the best way to find the culprit is to look at who stands to gain the most (bear with me a moment on this one). In my mind, the central issue behind Gay Rights, particularly in regard to marriage, has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with money. If legislation is passed allowing for same-sex marriages it will force large corporations to cover the spouses of their gay employees with benefits.
;)
Let's do some quick math; it is more or less commonly accepted that about 10% of the population is gay. So that means that big corporations don't have to spend money on benefits for say 4% of their employees [there's still 6% unaccounted for but I figured I'd just say they either weren't married or were not openly gay]. That doesn't sound that much money at the outset but considering that health care accounts for billions upon billions of dollars [and is the ultimate growth industry for at least the next thirty years, especially with the boomers getting older] and some corporations are even toying with the idea requiring employees to quit smoking/lose weight.
This is a really big issue to big corporations but if they were to come out and say "We just don't want to cover the spouses of gay people" they'd get lynched, so instead they spin the issue and make it a moral issue.
It's really too bad when governments formed with the idea that "church and state" should be seperated start legislating morality. The governments job is to create a system that allows for the maximum number of people to get the maximum benefit, it is not meant to be a mechanism of morality; leave that to our FUBARed mythologies.
Oops sorry, that was a rant and this was slightly offtopic...and as much as I like bashing the religious right, sometimes you gotta point to the puppet master, and maybe this is just a silly conspiracy theory maybe all those religious folks really did fail to miss the entire point of the Bible, but who knows
So you follow the mold of the big works projects of the 1930's-1940's. That way the folks with the hard hats get their jobs and can put food on their tables and maybe send their kids off to college one day and Bush will give his cronies "non-bidded" contracts so the folks at Halliburton can make even more money!
;)
But at least we'd save the planet
Oh wait, the planet doesn't need saving! Human species might need it, but I think the planet is going to take care of itself...time to go back to drinking coffee and eating chips.
My initial impulse is to agree with you, but sometimes someone really does have a better way of doing things. Robert Rodriguez [Sin City] said the same thing with his movies and he ended up being correct.
Dude, that's eight year old kids. Ever watched eight year old kids playing in the street? They just run all over the place with no regard to what's around them, the issue isn't childproofing the world; the issue is being an eight year old kid.
;)
Well, maybe that was just me
What MUD did you play and what was the medium age of the population? ;)
Over the years on a mud called Arctic I played multiple female characters and none of that shit really occured. Then again I always soloed and had a tendancy to kill other people so maybe that was the source of the...distance....interesting
Except that on a global scale an individual is irrelevant. The same goes for human beings as goes for antelope. The individual does not matter, the herd must survive.
Sorry, life isn't fair.
I say that knowing right now things sit well for me but in five years I could be the one hanging by the rope; it's terrible to know but it's the reality of life and it has been the reality of life for the past two million years. Some people get eaten by the saber-tooth tiger because they had the misfortune to wake up a little late, thank you...come again.
Nevermind the fact that regardless of ANYTHING that human beings do, this planet will continue to survive with *LIFE* on it. Yes, many mammals may become extinct and yes this is a bad thing for us. Yes, unless we make major technological advancements in the realm of nanotechnology the standard of living that we see today will never again be matched.
You're right we don't know the "knock-on effects" and I'm not proposing that we start killing off all the animals, merely that this planet is far more robust than we are and the worst that we could honestly hope to do at this juncture in our technological advancement is to kill off 99% of life on this planet which would not be enough to end life on this planet. Scientists believed it happened 3.8 billion years ago when the moon was formed and probablistically speaking it'll happen again.
Remember kids, 99% of the speices that have existed on this planet are...survey says...EXTINCT! It ain't right but those who survive write the history, get over it.
Gee, I bet it's a huge surprise that I happen to be a stoner...
;)
*smacks his head in to the wall a few more times*
Maybe I'll spend a few hours doing some reading comprehension at work tomorrow
Bear in mind, there is no other reason to separate the male and female plants.
There is a reason to seperate the male and female plants. At a certain point the male plant will begin to pollinate the female plant causing energy that could be spent producing THC to be spent producing seeds thus lowering the concentration of THC in the plant.
It's high school, it's been occurring since we institutionalized eduation. The "geeks" do create homogeneous cliques but so do the Jocks, the Thespians, the Musicians, the Skaters, and the stoners. Geeks are not the least bit unique in this regard. Besides, who cares what a bunch of adolescent teenagers think? When I was 16 years old, I was convinced that I would program computer games for a living; I thought that that was for sure what I wanted to do.
Well, eight years later I'm persuing a career in acting...things and people change and teenagers not being interested in science is nothing new. Teenagers hardly realize that there is a world outside their own existence, my understanding is that there is evidence to suggest that this phenomona is chemically induced by puberty; just my two cents.
Moreover, I think us geeks like to make martyr's out of ourselves to explain being akward/uncomfortable in high school. The emo kids spend their time cutting themeselves and talking about how life sucks and there's no point to being alive, the stoners smoke pot all day, the cheerleaders turn everything in to a melodrama etc. High schoolers think and do lots of stupid shit all in the name of attempting to find an identity and it just seems to me that we, the collective members of slashdot, have a major inferiority complex. High school sucks for most people, it doesn't suck for some but hey I'm happy with how the cards played out for me.
I'd much rather people carry this sort of behavior out in a virtual environment as opposed to a real one. My guess would be is that there will be a very tiny segment of population who will be adversly affected by a game like this but my belief in the first amendment supercede my need to be comfortable. Personally, I think there could be some fascinating personas to adapt in an environment like this.
Another point, this environment is an adult environment. It is not meant for kids, it is not a playground. It's a place where darker sides of humanity can be explored. Afterall, every single person who is posting on this board has a murderer/rapist/amoral type individual in their genetic past; it's required to survive at times.
Free speech becomes more important the more uncomfortable the speech becomes.
Yeah I'm really going to have to agree with Firehed on this one, not to mention the fact that in the next ten years we'll probably have drastically different methods of storing dense pieces of information. I expect that within ten years terabyte drives will be common in personal computers and it may be even five years away. Space isn't a big deal ;)
And seriously, how good do you think a surfer would really taste? By and large their very wiry and lean, not exactly good eating material. Maybe if some of us here on slashdot got out in the water the great whites would like it a bit more, kinda like a nice veal ;)
Actually, about six-seven months ago some grandfather in I believe the Sudan killed a leopard by ripping its tongue out. It attacked him and I think his grandson and without thinking he just reached in and ripped it out.
A mastiff could rip your throat out. More over, we are comparatively week. If you compare our strength to the cat family, it's about a ten to one ratio. IE a 10 lbs cat = 100 lbs human.
... at 6'7'' 330 lbs I think we can be classified as fairly mamoth but still weak.
We are very very very weak and fragile. But we got big brains and occasionally the NFL football players of the world are born
I think the parent was more attempting to say that although the US may not actively change because of a global economy, environmental laws in other parts of the world have affects on the companies that produce products sold in America; although those batteries arn't illegal in the US they are in the EU so it made economic sense to develop a battery that did not contain those materials and sold them in the US.
Hmmm the grocery stores collecting my information doesn't really bother me but that's because I've never bothered to actually fill out there sign up forms. Usually, if I don't have one of the cards and it happens to be a female clerk, I just give her my best smile and tell her that I forgot mine and she'll either use her card or I've had a few occasions where they just hand me a new card and tell me to fill the reply card out later. Needless to say I don't bother with such tomfoolery so those data centers just see what I purchase but have no demographic information about me...
I know many stoners and I've known many game addicts...the stoners are much more responsive. If you don't believe me then you've never seen someone utterly ingrossed in a video game. It's like talking to a brick wall, also I would be willing to bet that there is at least one person you work with who seems completely normal and straight edge who shows up to work stoned everyday and they are not noticably different.
It does impair you but people who do it habitually function remarkably well, I garentee you that.
If people want to spend their time and bandwidth arguing about the reputation of the person who submitted the story, so be it. I view this website as a portal that will lead me to various interesting places on the internet that can provide stimuli for my intellect. I enjoy posting on the discussion boards, but the truth of the matter is I only post while at work attempting to make the day go by faster. If I'm at home and I decide to peruse slashdot I will rarely spend any time on the message boards. I may not be the norm in this respect but because of how I use this website I could careless about the junk discussions.
;)
People are going to get pissed and get in to internet arguments because it's something to do; if it's not this it'll be that so it is a pointless battle to fight. Besides, I just skip over trashy disucssions, or get pulled in and in to a shit throwing contest but hey it's all entertainment
In other words, don't change a damn thing. A good story is a good story is a good story. Some stories may not be good stories but that'll happen; not like there are monthly subscription fees to use slashdot [I realize some members do have a subscription but that's for a premium service...]. If people think it's bias or want to talk about conspiracy theories they can either do it here and live with it or go elsewhere but I personally think that your time is spent better doing what you already do well and not wasted on pissing contests [which is what this amounts to].
Just my two cents...
I'm sure someone said it before Kiser Soze but "The greatest trick the devil ever played was convicing the world he didn't exist".
And I'd be quite careful with making assumptions with regard to what is encompassed by the word "factions". We don't even have to bring religions in to the picture to get "factions" that do this; educational organizations do it ALL the time [see the major University's in the US and their leftist socialist dogma], hell scientific institutions do it too [the stem cell research over in south korea]. So don't worry, it's not just religion! There's a lot more people out there doing it!
;)
But I guess that's kinda what you were saying