What is this? "Please stop pointing out the problems with the theory"?
The problem with ID proponents waving around claims about evolution not having genetic proof of the evolution of the eye is that ID doesn't provide any alternative provable explanation, nor does it disprove evolution in any way. To claim that there must be some unknowable hand involved in anything that we haven't understood fully yet is akin to saying thunder is the sound of angels bowling. Most people don't have the first clue about how a particle accelerator works, but that doesn't mean that all particle accelerators were created by god.
The first thing to go is your assumption that Atheism is somehow not religion. Atheism is the belief that there is no god of any sort. This is a religious belief, stated in religious terms. If you don't understand the very words you're using, you can't expect to get good results from them.
It is interesting that you feel you have such a good grasp of the meaning of the word 'religion', since it is something that has eluded every other student of the field. 'Religion' is a Western word invented as an umbrella term to group together Christianity with Eastern faiths such as Islam and Hinduism, despite the fact that they really are nothing like each other. In fact, Bhuddism does not even require a belief in supreme beings of any kind, yet few would deny it is a religion.
Most definitions of religion encompass institutions, actions, rituals, and dress rather than simply belief, and I don't know what it is like where you live but I've certainly never seen atheists attending sacred buildings to celebrate their lack of belief in the existence of god, or to put aside a traditional day of the week contemplate their atheism, or modify their diet (or fast) in accordance with their belief, or dress in a particular way because of their atheism.
To describe atheism as a religion or a religious belief actually betrays a complete misundertanding of what 'religion' means to those who have faith, and the influence it has on their lives.
thereby proving once and for all that most Brits' answers to questions by pollsters really mean "fuck off and leave me alone, you nosy bastard".
You may be on to something there. I think it was Douglas Adams who once noted that, if polls were to be believed, over 80% of British men ran their own successful company and earned over GBP100k a year.
At some level, every Athiest seems to be aware of the inability of any natural process to produce anything like sufficient useful variation for a species to survive the ravages of selection long enough to evolve, and compensates by embedding the guidance in the wee beastie itself -- or in benevolent, supervisorial Mother Nature, or some similar mumbo jumbo.
What the hell are you talking about? I'm an atheist and yet I certainly don't think that evolution is in any way influenced by conscious decision on the part of any particular species, or the existence of 'Mother Nature'. I put it to you that phrases like "the organism developed this" are used because it's a convenient phrasing, and you'd have to be pedantic or armed with an agenda to spend any time trying to infer ridiculous superstition on the part of the author just because of a slightly ambiguous use of the language.
Whilst I agree that scientific should be ideally be considered without influence from faith (and I'm including atheism there as a faith in the non-existence of god), you do yourself no favours by making ignorant sweeping assumptions about what 'every atheist' thinks, when evidently you haven't the faintest idea.
If you're messing around the the date and compilers on live production servers, you've got bigger problems.
Hah, that's nothing. I've worked at a place where the budget was too stingy to spring for a test environment, so changes and upgrades to a business critical system were 'tested' by pushing them out to the live server and letting approx 150 tech-illiterate remote users loose on it, and rolling back if it barfed. I'm not a religious man by nature, but I offered more than a few prayers during my time there. More by sheer luck (or divine intervention:-) than anything else, this actually worked for 3 years with only minor glitches.
You would not believe some of the shortcuts taken by SMEs when it comes to IT. And no, I don't work there any more - flying by the seat of your pants causes uncomfortable chafing after a while:-)
Disclaimer: I love Santa. Santa has always been very good to me, but that is not the reason I love him. I love him just becuase. I never want to see anything happen to him, so I dearly hope the Norad tracking is for entertainment purposes, and will not become part of the increasingly paranoid politics. Kids be good just becuase it is the right thing to do, and the benifits will follow!
You poor fool. Santa spends the year in his secret hideout, monitoring people without their permission and judging them 'good' or 'bad' according to an arbitrary set of rules concealed from public scrutiny, and based on this judgement illegally breaks into your house when you're asleep. Sounds like a member of some dodgy black-ops group to me.
the baliff's certainly aren't legally allowed to flag down cars and stop them: so do they do it in conjunction with the police?
The police generally know they're there and permit it, but I don't know what their exact legal standing on flagging people down is. The thing to remember with bailiffs is that they have less power than people think. If you leave a window open or a door unlocked they are able to use it to gain entry, but if there is no non-destructive method of entry and you simply don't answer the door, they can't do a thing (well, other than clamp your car, obviously). In this case, I suspect that if you just drove on they'd have to let you go - it's only if you stop and talk to them that the fun begins.
Note - this was a 6-month contract and I picked up a couple of things, but by no means am I absolutely certain of my ground here. I wouldn't use the above as a plan for avoiding paying your council tax or anything like that.
In the UK police regularly set themselves up at the roadside with a camera linked to the databases, and regularly catch large quantities of bad guys for relatively little cost and effort (the obvious motoring offences, such as driving without insurance, but also villains wanted for plenty of other things, the cops just didn't know where they were).
It's worse than you think - bailiffs collecting unpaid parking fines do this too. They get a big list of all registration numbers on the warrant database, then set up by the side of the road scanning every car that drives past, and if your number is on their list, you get nabbed. I know this, because I once contracted at a magistrate's court and had to test the camera.
No, it was not because of HCI work. No more than MII work (musical instrument interaction). Musicians have flexible equipment that is designed by musicians not MIIs. They have some of the most ergonomic devices, and I have never studied those in any ergonomics class. Musicians have to be able to play their equipment quickly and easily. A few milliseconds of stutter screws up the whole thing. Failure is not an option.
You've wandered away from the point. The use of the XCV keys for cut/copy/paste is an example of HCI. It's a way that a human interacts with the computer, and has become the standard because it's a fast and convenient way to access the functionality, with some cursory mnemonics (C for copy, X looks a bit like scissors) thrown in too. It might not have been invented by someone in a nice suit with a design doctorate, but it's still HCI, and it's a complete fallacy to claim that the XCV layout somehow irritates HCI experts because of some perceived logic vs aesthetics issue. In the same way, all those punchy little easy-to-type unix commands like cp, rm, mv, cd etc are examples of HCI. Here's a little experiment - create aliases for those commands along the lines of copy-file, copy-files-recursively, remove-file, remove-files-recursively etc etc and see how long it takes to drive you mad. That's why HCI is important.
You compared HCI to interior design and then dismissed it as "something that looks nice, but its fluff beyond that", and that is the point I disagree with (it's also incredibly blinkered to dismiss the entire field of interior design as 'fluff', but I won't go into that).
If HCI were so important, why do some programs place so many "drop down" items that they fill the screen, go forward and backward across the edges of the screen? I'm thinking of a common interface item that is used by millions of people every day that is labeled "Start". The same place you go to turn the computer off. Stop, and logout.
Way to dismiss the entire field just because Microsoft have made a few howlers. Hey, Matrix Revolutions had some shitty effects, let's make blanket claims that all movies look like crap.
Then a familiar silly sound, probably designed by another HCI guy, that goes something like duh de de duh, annoys everyone else in the otherwise quiet area.
You know as well as I do that a shutdown jingle has absolutely nothing to do with HCI. You seem to be labouring under the impression that HCI is solely concerned with making things look nice, at the expense of usability. In fact it's the opposite - it's about making computers easy to use, and aesthetics only enters the picture where it directly improves the usability of the system. It may be the case that most software is a pain to use, but that's because of *bad* HCI, not because of HCI itself.
Wow, you really have no idea what HCI is, do you? I'm a straight up coder, and even I know that HCI isn't analogous to 'interior design'. HCI is supposed to cover all the ways that you interact with your computer - keyboard shortcuts (and yes, that includes the idea of having the cut/copy/paste keys right next to each other - that happens *because* of HCI work, not in spite of it), muscle memory, principle of least surprise, hotspots (e.g. it's easier to move your cursor to one of the four corners of the screen than it is to any other location) and so on. About the only 'interior design' that shows up is stuff like not having green text on a red background, or anything else that makes your eyes bleed.
Seriously, I would never work for you. In fact mentality like yours is definitely a sure fire disaster recipe. Here is what I deduce from your comment:
You have no respect for your employees' goals.
You are unable to understand an opposing point of view.
You have the diplomacy of a trapdoor spider.
You draw conclusions from insufficient evidence.
You are not the leader you obviously think you are.
With qualities like that I am amazed, you still have a job.
Oh that's it, I can't mock this guy any more as it involves descending to the same level of adolescent spelling and grammar.
I've been in a similar situation to the submitter. I worked for just over 4 years for a company that had nothing to do with software, but thought it ought to have some computers around the place and then decided to dabble in Windows CE development. I got suckered in as I was 22 years old at the time and saw it as an opportunity to get early experience as a senior developer. There was no drive from upper management, absolutely no risks taken, and the pervading attitude of the whole company was that IT and software were a necessary burden rather than an asset. The size of the team increased by exactly one between the time I started and the time I left, and that hiring decision was made begrudgingly. The fact is, some companies absolutely will not expand their technology side (and they are often right not to, as it isn't always necessary), and any ambitious IT worker will be better off elsewhere. Working at that sort of company is ideal for people who want a bit of security to see out their career, or are looking for a sinecure, but career poison to anyone who wants to progress.
And with that, you earn my respect. There's way too much pressure on people to be in a relationship, and way too few people who will stand up and say "actually, I'm not that bothered". Myself, I'm 3 months into a relationship and starting to lose interest. It'll probably be over by Xmas, and some of my friends have difficulty understanding that I'm quite happy with that as an outcome. Fact is, I like being single at least as much as I like being coupled, and at less than 2 years short of 30 years old the thought of settling down and having children is a thought that evokes nothing but apathy in me. I think the word is "meh". Stay with it, man - if you don't have a burning desire to change everything in order to have a relationship, then you probably wouldn't be happy if you did.
If you aren't meeting women you're interested in, then you're probably looking in the wrong places. Shockingly, there's actually been some good suggestions in this thread - spend time at the local library, enroll on a couple of humanities courses (you might even learn something too - I've been studying history and architecture this year, lots of fine women at the weekly classes), take salsa lessons, there's all sorts of stuff out there that's fun to do.
I can't help but think that if you have to go through uncomfortable shopping sessions with friends or their girlfriends in order to meet women, you're trying to meet the wrong kind of woman. Any woman who likes me for my sharp suit can piss right off, frankly.
I smoked for 10 years, and gave up 2 years ago. It was my choice to smoke, and my choice to give up (I gave up when I stopped getting pleasure from it, not when the tedious health nazi whinging got through to me - it never did). There's nothing more dull than an anti-smoking fanatic.
As an ex-smoker, I have absolutely no problem with people lighting up in my presence, and resent the mummy-state crap that's banning smoking in pubs. As an ex-smoker, I encourage people to smoke as much as they want. As an ex-smoker, if I want to spend an evening in a smoke-free environment, the last thing I would do is bitch about it until smokers are shamed into stopping.
It astonishes me, the amount of people that will go on and on about personal freedom and then insist that their peers can't light up one of god's honest cigarettes. If you are worried about your health, don't go to smokey bars - whatever the hell happened to personal responsibility?
I have a tabby that will attack anything moving including rubber balls rolling down stairs, objects thrown 4 feet high in the air, people's asses, legs going up stairs, etc.. Sure is an outside cat, although no presents yet, and sorta gets along with the black-spotted rabbit.
Yes, we had a tabby when I was a kid. We called it "Max", derived from the prominent "M" branded on its forehead by the fur pattern. "Mental" would have been more appropriate. My abiding memory of this alleged 'pet' (sadly put down about 7 years ago at the grand age of 15) was his unhinged reaction to my Kermit hand puppet. Max was an aggressive little bastard at the best of times, but one glance at Kermit sent him into an apoplectic whirlwind of teeth and claws, and woe betide anyone stupid enough to be playing with the frog within pouncing range. I can only speculate what went through his mad little feline mind when faced with a large felt bug-eyed frog. Good times. Dunno if that supports your argument about unnaturally-coloured cats, or simply means that tabbies are deranged.
I once had a rat killing cat. She wasn't big, in fact she was the smallest cat we'd ever had. It was just that she was just a warhead of bloodlust mounted on a lean, stealthy, rocket of a body. We picked her up as a stray, and there was something not right about her. She grew up into the self-appointed deputy Angel of Death. Granted this describes most cats -- in any feline dreams they may have. But this cat made it her business to murder anything that crossed her path and was less than twice her size.
I once read that, in terms of sheer range of prey, the domestic cat is the most prolific predator on the planet. Birds, reptiles, fish, mammals, insects - put any living thing in front of a cat, and as long as the cat thinks it can win, it will attempt to make the kill.
All except my mum's last cat, that is, which spent 97% of its life asleep on any comfy material it could find, and ran in terror from butterflies.
Unfortunately, I think it will take a site having sustained hits around 100 conns/sec to prove to certain people that you can scale RoR, and I know of none that exist today.
It'll take a lot more than that - 100 conns/sec is not considered scaleable by anyone who has worked with seriously high volume traffic. For instance, the company I work for has a website that, at peak times, handles about 10,000 transactions per second, with each transaction requiring at least 2 database hits, and usually more than that. Current growth suggests this will reach 50,000 per second by 2010. The core is java. I absolutely love Ruby as a language, but I highly doubt it would scale up to these levels.
Re:Wrong argument - need a better solution
on
RIAA Sues a Child
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· Score: 1
This argument always goes the same way. Someone who is infringing copyright says it's not theft because the copyright holder still has the original material so they are doing no harm because they have deprived no-one of anything.
This is a strawman argument. Most of the posts in this thread have said no such thing; they're simply saying copyright infringement isn't theft. Nobody is claiming that copyright infringement isn't a crime, or does no harm - it is and it does, but it still isn't theft.
You've hit the nail on the head - once you turn off all the XP Fisher-Price interface stuff, it's basically Win2K. So why pay a few hundred for the upgrade if Win2K is good enough for what you want?
On top of that, XP isn't as stable, for me at least. In my last job I used to do PocketPC dev and spent a lot of time fooling with ActiveSync. I never saw Win2K crash even once; XP went down in flames roughly once a week, and on days where it didn't crash, it did weird things like deny there were any USB ports (there were 6), and would continue to stick to this belief until rebooted.
Slashdot Mirror
What is this? "Please stop pointing out the problems with the theory"?
The problem with ID proponents waving around claims about evolution not having genetic proof of the evolution of the eye is that ID doesn't provide any alternative provable explanation, nor does it disprove evolution in any way. To claim that there must be some unknowable hand involved in anything that we haven't understood fully yet is akin to saying thunder is the sound of angels bowling. Most people don't have the first clue about how a particle accelerator works, but that doesn't mean that all particle accelerators were created by god.
The first thing to go is your assumption that Atheism is somehow not religion. Atheism is the belief that there is no god of any sort. This is a religious belief, stated in religious terms. If you don't understand the very words you're using, you can't expect to get good results from them.
It is interesting that you feel you have such a good grasp of the meaning of the word 'religion', since it is something that has eluded every other student of the field. 'Religion' is a Western word invented as an umbrella term to group together Christianity with Eastern faiths such as Islam and Hinduism, despite the fact that they really are nothing like each other. In fact, Bhuddism does not even require a belief in supreme beings of any kind, yet few would deny it is a religion.
Most definitions of religion encompass institutions, actions, rituals, and dress rather than simply belief, and I don't know what it is like where you live but I've certainly never seen atheists attending sacred buildings to celebrate their lack of belief in the existence of god, or to put aside a traditional day of the week contemplate their atheism, or modify their diet (or fast) in accordance with their belief, or dress in a particular way because of their atheism.
To describe atheism as a religion or a religious belief actually betrays a complete misundertanding of what 'religion' means to those who have faith, and the influence it has on their lives.
thereby proving once and for all that most Brits' answers to questions by pollsters really mean "fuck off and leave me alone, you nosy bastard".
You may be on to something there. I think it was Douglas Adams who once noted that, if polls were to be believed, over 80% of British men ran their own successful company and earned over GBP100k a year.
At some level, every Athiest seems to be aware of the inability of any natural process to produce anything like sufficient useful variation for a species to survive the ravages of selection long enough to evolve, and compensates by embedding the guidance in the wee beastie itself -- or in benevolent, supervisorial Mother Nature, or some similar mumbo jumbo.
What the hell are you talking about? I'm an atheist and yet I certainly don't think that evolution is in any way influenced by conscious decision on the part of any particular species, or the existence of 'Mother Nature'. I put it to you that phrases like "the organism developed this" are used because it's a convenient phrasing, and you'd have to be pedantic or armed with an agenda to spend any time trying to infer ridiculous superstition on the part of the author just because of a slightly ambiguous use of the language.
Whilst I agree that scientific should be ideally be considered without influence from faith (and I'm including atheism there as a faith in the non-existence of god), you do yourself no favours by making ignorant sweeping assumptions about what 'every atheist' thinks, when evidently you haven't the faintest idea.
If you're messing around the the date and compilers on live production servers, you've got bigger problems.
:-) than anything else, this actually worked for 3 years with only minor glitches.
:-)
Hah, that's nothing. I've worked at a place where the budget was too stingy to spring for a test environment, so changes and upgrades to a business critical system were 'tested' by pushing them out to the live server and letting approx 150 tech-illiterate remote users loose on it, and rolling back if it barfed. I'm not a religious man by nature, but I offered more than a few prayers during my time there. More by sheer luck (or divine intervention
You would not believe some of the shortcuts taken by SMEs when it comes to IT. And no, I don't work there any more - flying by the seat of your pants causes uncomfortable chafing after a while
Perhaps you should read the article properly before ranting. It's an XP flaw, and you can still get caught if you're using Firefox.
Disclaimer: I love Santa. Santa has always been very good to me, but that is not the reason I love him. I love him just becuase. I never want to see anything happen to him, so I dearly hope the Norad tracking is for entertainment purposes, and will not become part of the increasingly paranoid politics. Kids be good just becuase it is the right thing to do, and the benifits will follow!
You poor fool. Santa spends the year in his secret hideout, monitoring people without their permission and judging them 'good' or 'bad' according to an arbitrary set of rules concealed from public scrutiny, and based on this judgement illegally breaks into your house when you're asleep. Sounds like a member of some dodgy black-ops group to me.
the baliff's certainly aren't legally allowed to flag down cars and stop them: so do they do it in conjunction with the police?
The police generally know they're there and permit it, but I don't know what their exact legal standing on flagging people down is. The thing to remember with bailiffs is that they have less power than people think. If you leave a window open or a door unlocked they are able to use it to gain entry, but if there is no non-destructive method of entry and you simply don't answer the door, they can't do a thing (well, other than clamp your car, obviously). In this case, I suspect that if you just drove on they'd have to let you go - it's only if you stop and talk to them that the fun begins.
Note - this was a 6-month contract and I picked up a couple of things, but by no means am I absolutely certain of my ground here. I wouldn't use the above as a plan for avoiding paying your council tax or anything like that.
In the UK police regularly set themselves up at the roadside with a camera linked to the databases, and regularly catch large quantities of bad guys for relatively little cost and effort (the obvious motoring offences, such as driving without insurance, but also villains wanted for plenty of other things, the cops just didn't know where they were).
It's worse than you think - bailiffs collecting unpaid parking fines do this too. They get a big list of all registration numbers on the warrant database, then set up by the side of the road scanning every car that drives past, and if your number is on their list, you get nabbed. I know this, because I once contracted at a magistrate's court and had to test the camera.
No, it was not because of HCI work. No more than MII work (musical instrument interaction). Musicians have flexible equipment that is designed by musicians not MIIs. They have some of the most ergonomic devices, and I have never studied those in any ergonomics class. Musicians have to be able to play their equipment quickly and easily. A few milliseconds of stutter screws up the whole thing. Failure is not an option.
You've wandered away from the point. The use of the XCV keys for cut/copy/paste is an example of HCI. It's a way that a human interacts with the computer, and has become the standard because it's a fast and convenient way to access the functionality, with some cursory mnemonics (C for copy, X looks a bit like scissors) thrown in too. It might not have been invented by someone in a nice suit with a design doctorate, but it's still HCI, and it's a complete fallacy to claim that the XCV layout somehow irritates HCI experts because of some perceived logic vs aesthetics issue. In the same way, all those punchy little easy-to-type unix commands like cp, rm, mv, cd etc are examples of HCI. Here's a little experiment - create aliases for those commands along the lines of copy-file, copy-files-recursively, remove-file, remove-files-recursively etc etc and see how long it takes to drive you mad. That's why HCI is important.
You compared HCI to interior design and then dismissed it as "something that looks nice, but its fluff beyond that", and that is the point I disagree with (it's also incredibly blinkered to dismiss the entire field of interior design as 'fluff', but I won't go into that).
If HCI were so important, why do some programs place so many "drop down" items that they fill the screen, go forward and backward across the edges of the screen? I'm thinking of a common interface item that is used by millions of people every day that is labeled "Start". The same place you go to turn the computer off. Stop, and logout.
Way to dismiss the entire field just because Microsoft have made a few howlers. Hey, Matrix Revolutions had some shitty effects, let's make blanket claims that all movies look like crap.
Then a familiar silly sound, probably designed by another HCI guy, that goes something like duh de de duh, annoys everyone else in the otherwise quiet area.
You know as well as I do that a shutdown jingle has absolutely nothing to do with HCI. You seem to be labouring under the impression that HCI is solely concerned with making things look nice, at the expense of usability. In fact it's the opposite - it's about making computers easy to use, and aesthetics only enters the picture where it directly improves the usability of the system. It may be the case that most software is a pain to use, but that's because of *bad* HCI, not because of HCI itself.
Wow, you really have no idea what HCI is, do you? I'm a straight up coder, and even I know that HCI isn't analogous to 'interior design'. HCI is supposed to cover all the ways that you interact with your computer - keyboard shortcuts (and yes, that includes the idea of having the cut/copy/paste keys right next to each other - that happens *because* of HCI work, not in spite of it), muscle memory, principle of least surprise, hotspots (e.g. it's easier to move your cursor to one of the four corners of the screen than it is to any other location) and so on. About the only 'interior design' that shows up is stuff like not having green text on a red background, or anything else that makes your eyes bleed.
With qualities like that I am amazed, you still have a job.
Oh that's it, I can't mock this guy any more as it involves descending to the same level of adolescent spelling and grammar.
I've been in a similar situation to the submitter. I worked for just over 4 years for a company that had nothing to do with software, but thought it ought to have some computers around the place and then decided to dabble in Windows CE development. I got suckered in as I was 22 years old at the time and saw it as an opportunity to get early experience as a senior developer. There was no drive from upper management, absolutely no risks taken, and the pervading attitude of the whole company was that IT and software were a necessary burden rather than an asset. The size of the team increased by exactly one between the time I started and the time I left, and that hiring decision was made begrudgingly. The fact is, some companies absolutely will not expand their technology side (and they are often right not to, as it isn't always necessary), and any ambitious IT worker will be better off elsewhere. Working at that sort of company is ideal for people who want a bit of security to see out their career, or are looking for a sinecure, but career poison to anyone who wants to progress.
Management had to hire a private detective to track the guy down, and they finally found him up in the mountains in Colorado, doing whatever.
Private detective?! FFS. If it had been me, that alone would have accounted for a couple of extra zeroes on the end of my salary demands.
And with that, you earn my respect. There's way too much pressure on people to be in a relationship, and way too few people who will stand up and say "actually, I'm not that bothered". Myself, I'm 3 months into a relationship and starting to lose interest. It'll probably be over by Xmas, and some of my friends have difficulty understanding that I'm quite happy with that as an outcome. Fact is, I like being single at least as much as I like being coupled, and at less than 2 years short of 30 years old the thought of settling down and having children is a thought that evokes nothing but apathy in me. I think the word is "meh". Stay with it, man - if you don't have a burning desire to change everything in order to have a relationship, then you probably wouldn't be happy if you did.
If you aren't meeting women you're interested in, then you're probably looking in the wrong places. Shockingly, there's actually been some good suggestions in this thread - spend time at the local library, enroll on a couple of humanities courses (you might even learn something too - I've been studying history and architecture this year, lots of fine women at the weekly classes), take salsa lessons, there's all sorts of stuff out there that's fun to do.
I can't help but think that if you have to go through uncomfortable shopping sessions with friends or their girlfriends in order to meet women, you're trying to meet the wrong kind of woman. Any woman who likes me for my sharp suit can piss right off, frankly.
"Is a threesome with Natalie Portman and Princess Leia considered multi-tasking?"
I don't see how, you're still only using one hand.
Funniest. Comment. Ever. Oh for modpoints today.
Right on.
I smoked for 10 years, and gave up 2 years ago. It was my choice to smoke, and my choice to give up (I gave up when I stopped getting pleasure from it, not when the tedious health nazi whinging got through to me - it never did). There's nothing more dull than an anti-smoking fanatic.
As an ex-smoker, I have absolutely no problem with people lighting up in my presence, and resent the mummy-state crap that's banning smoking in pubs. As an ex-smoker, I encourage people to smoke as much as they want. As an ex-smoker, if I want to spend an evening in a smoke-free environment, the last thing I would do is bitch about it until smokers are shamed into stopping.
It astonishes me, the amount of people that will go on and on about personal freedom and then insist that their peers can't light up one of god's honest cigarettes. If you are worried about your health, don't go to smokey bars - whatever the hell happened to personal responsibility?
I have a tabby that will attack anything moving including rubber balls rolling down stairs, objects thrown 4 feet high in the air, people's asses, legs going up stairs, etc.. Sure is an outside cat, although no presents yet, and sorta gets along with the black-spotted rabbit.
Yes, we had a tabby when I was a kid. We called it "Max", derived from the prominent "M" branded on its forehead by the fur pattern. "Mental" would have been more appropriate. My abiding memory of this alleged 'pet' (sadly put down about 7 years ago at the grand age of 15) was his unhinged reaction to my Kermit hand puppet. Max was an aggressive little bastard at the best of times, but one glance at Kermit sent him into an apoplectic whirlwind of teeth and claws, and woe betide anyone stupid enough to be playing with the frog within pouncing range. I can only speculate what went through his mad little feline mind when faced with a large felt bug-eyed frog. Good times. Dunno if that supports your argument about unnaturally-coloured cats, or simply means that tabbies are deranged.
I once had a rat killing cat. She wasn't big, in fact she was the smallest cat we'd ever had. It was just that she was just a warhead of bloodlust mounted on a lean, stealthy, rocket of a body. We picked her up as a stray, and there was something not right about her. She grew up into the self-appointed deputy Angel of Death. Granted this describes most cats -- in any feline dreams they may have. But this cat made it her business to murder anything that crossed her path and was less than twice her size.
I once read that, in terms of sheer range of prey, the domestic cat is the most prolific predator on the planet. Birds, reptiles, fish, mammals, insects - put any living thing in front of a cat, and as long as the cat thinks it can win, it will attempt to make the kill.
All except my mum's last cat, that is, which spent 97% of its life asleep on any comfy material it could find, and ran in terror from butterflies.
Unfortunately, I think it will take a site having sustained hits around 100 conns/sec to prove to certain people that you can scale RoR, and I know of none that exist today.
It'll take a lot more than that - 100 conns/sec is not considered scaleable by anyone who has worked with seriously high volume traffic. For instance, the company I work for has a website that, at peak times, handles about 10,000 transactions per second, with each transaction requiring at least 2 database hits, and usually more than that. Current growth suggests this will reach 50,000 per second by 2010. The core is java. I absolutely love Ruby as a language, but I highly doubt it would scale up to these levels.
This argument always goes the same way. Someone who is infringing copyright says it's not theft because the copyright holder still has the original material so they are doing no harm because they have deprived no-one of anything.
This is a strawman argument. Most of the posts in this thread have said no such thing; they're simply saying copyright infringement isn't theft. Nobody is claiming that copyright infringement isn't a crime, or does no harm - it is and it does, but it still isn't theft.
And don't forget the bananas. We'll need those when the radiation turns us all into monkeys.
I know people have short memories these days, and things that happened 10 years ago seem like a different century
Uh, seem? 10 years ago it WAS a different century. Millennium, even.
You've hit the nail on the head - once you turn off all the XP Fisher-Price interface stuff, it's basically Win2K. So why pay a few hundred for the upgrade if Win2K is good enough for what you want?
On top of that, XP isn't as stable, for me at least. In my last job I used to do PocketPC dev and spent a lot of time fooling with ActiveSync. I never saw Win2K crash even once; XP went down in flames roughly once a week, and on days where it didn't crash, it did weird things like deny there were any USB ports (there were 6), and would continue to stick to this belief until rebooted.