This quote just friggin rocks all over the place. Remember, this flamewar took place in 1992.
"Of course 5 years from now that will be different, but 5 years from now everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5." (Andy Tanenbaum)
The only people who like using the arrow keys are hunt-and-peck style typists. Touch typists know that any time their fingers leave the home row, they lose productivity.
Technically, the "next planet over" is Venus. It's generally closer to us than Mars and takes less time to get there. But we ain't ever setting foor on Venus, I'll wager.
Actually, you're the one not describing democracy. Democracy is one man, one vote, like old-style Athens. New England town meeting style government, where the whole town gets together to vote on matters is true democracy. What you're describing (and what the US currently has) is a representative republic. Republican government (as in the style of government, not the US political party) is where the people directly elect representatives to make all the decisions. It's basically democracy-by-proxy, except your particular proxy isn't always the one you would have liked to have had.
That started the ball rolling on political control and inflation, and Nixon finished it off with the Bretton Woods agreement.
Uh, no. You sound like a goldbug, but you don't even know that the Bretton Woods talks took place during FDR's presidency, and were an attempt to re-establish the gold standard after WWII?
You're thinking of Nixon "closing the gold window" and effectively taking the US *off* the gold standard. He was reneging on the promise of the Bretton Woods agreement, which was that the US would hold the gold, and other countries could redeem their currency (at a set exchange rate to US dollars) for gold from those reserves. Bretton Woods put the world on a proxy gold standard, where the US dollar was backed by gold, and other world currencies were backed by the dollar (and thus indirectly by gold).
It's always been my impression that this type of thing wouldn't fly, that you were just taxed in the state you live in.
I dunno. My sister used to live in New Hampshire (no state income tax) and work in Maine (has a state income tax) and she had to pay Maine state income tax in full.
You know, you probably don't want to let on that all your "friends" are 14 year old girls. The FBI usually doesn't look too kindly upon that.
It's cool if "he" is also a 14 year old girl. But in that case, what is "he" doing reading Slashdot? Everyone knows Slashdot is entirely peopled with ugly nerdy dudes.
Well, people insist on using "irregardless" as if it's an actual word. I figured I'd just go with the flow, and add another negation prefix. At least this way the three negatives make the word negative again.
It's supply and demand -- the same market factors that make A-Rod worth 400 times what you make
Yeah, but at least I have tangible evidence of what A-Rod is doing to earn his money. I see my CEO four times a year at the quarterly meetings (and now they're making those three-times-a-year meetings, even!) at which he blows smoke up my ass about how good/bad the company is doing and how disirregardless of company performance, good or bad or status quo, he can't afford to give me a raise. And inbetween those times, I have no idea what he's doing.
A-Rod, meanwhile, is hitting a little white ball and running around the bases, and the Yankees are in the playoffs.
Listen up, hippy. We happen to be living in a temperate age between the last ice age and a coming tropical age. The planet goes through cycles like this over geologic time. You do know there have been periods of time in the past where glaciers covered most everything up to the tropics, right? And times when the planet was mostly all tropics and little to no polar ice? And that all this happened many times LONG BEFORE humans showed up, or even mammals of any kind at all?
Those same scientists who are bleating about global warming now were crying about a coming mini-ice age in the 70s. Humans aren't very good at thinking about things on the time scale of geologic time. We see short-term perturbations in the norm and overreact. We're good at shit like that.
Are we speeding the process up? Maybe. Is what we can do to the environment greater than what natural cycles over geologic time do? Doubtful.
What, did you think NASA was just throwing this out and then were planning on waiting 50k years before getting any data from it?
Yeah, OF COURSE it's going to communicate with Earth during its mission. Jesus, what the hell would be the point, otherwise? It's not like we had to wait for Pioneer 10 and 11 or Voyager 1 and 2 to circumnavigate the universe and get back to us before we got any data, did we?
No retard, it's not going to take 50k years to GET to Pluto, just 50k years to possibly drift back this way. The important part of the mission is the part about getting to Pluto and relaying data back. The drift back to Earth is just something that might or might not happen someday.
Catch a card counter... and do what? Ask him to leave?
Yup. Exactly. They'll read you the trespass act and tell you you can't come back anymore or they'll arrest you for trespassing. They try their best to make it sound like what you did was illegal, but it isn't. However, it's perfectly within their rights to bar you from their establishment, and if you come back, they can and will arrest you for trespassing.
Last time I checked, IBM was incorporated in New York. So, the jobs in Europe were already outsourced jobs and were against the strange rules you made up about "benefit to the host country" (In this case, the USA.)
When does copyright begin, though? Currently, on written works, I know copyright begins as soon as you write it. What happens if you spend four years eleven months trying to sell a completed novel, but it keeps getting rejected. Then some publisher agrees to "take a chance" on your work, and it becomes a suprise best-seller--only you only get one month of royalties, and then it's public domain, tough noogies on you. That doesn't sound right.
We're never GOING to "sort out" the problems on this planet totally. No matter how many we "solve", new ones will crop up later. Following your advice is equivalent to constant procrastination.
Why should we bother sending our backup tapes offsite when we can barely keep our systems running as it is? Wouldn't it be better to spend more time and resources getting our current systems to run smoothly before we bothered coming up with an offsite data replication strategy? That sounds like a great argument until your building burns down, and you have no offsite backups.
It's not about where it's safest. Tell me, are your backup tapes safer locked in your secure climate controlled data center, or at your house under your bed? Now tell me where you'd want your backup tapes to be if your building burnt to the ground.
For me, I became an Ubuntu fanboy when I installed it on my laptop and everything "just worked". It detected my wireless card (something no other distro has been able to do successfully), activated it, and completed the install over my wireless connection. It installed slick as hell and the package repositories had everything I wanted/needed once I got the system up and running.
It doesn't make it "better" than all the other distros, but it sure helps me evangelize for the distro when I can just point to my laptop and say "I just popped in the CD, booted, told it to install, AND IT DID AND EVERYTHING WORKED!!" That one statement right there is enough for me.
Slashdot Mirror
This quote just friggin rocks all over the place. Remember, this flamewar took place in 1992.
"Of course 5 years from now that will be different, but 5 years from now
everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5." (Andy Tanenbaum)
-- Dave
The only people who like using the arrow keys are hunt-and-peck style typists. Touch typists know that any time their fingers leave the home row, they lose productivity.
-- Dave
Technically, the "next planet over" is Venus. It's generally closer to us than Mars and takes less time to get there. But we ain't ever setting foor on Venus, I'll wager.
-- Dave
Also, if you want to play adventure games online in your web browser there's Adventure Games Live
-- Dave
Actually, you're the one not describing democracy. Democracy is one man, one vote, like old-style Athens. New England town meeting style government, where the whole town gets together to vote on matters is true democracy. What you're describing (and what the US currently has) is a representative republic. Republican government (as in the style of government, not the US political party) is where the people directly elect representatives to make all the decisions. It's basically democracy-by-proxy, except your particular proxy isn't always the one you would have liked to have had.
-- Dave
That started the ball rolling on political control and inflation, and Nixon finished it off with the Bretton Woods agreement.
Uh, no. You sound like a goldbug, but you don't even know that the Bretton Woods talks took place during FDR's presidency, and were an attempt to re-establish the gold standard after WWII?
You're thinking of Nixon "closing the gold window" and effectively taking the US *off* the gold standard. He was reneging on the promise of the Bretton Woods agreement, which was that the US would hold the gold, and other countries could redeem their currency (at a set exchange rate to US dollars) for gold from those reserves. Bretton Woods put the world on a proxy gold standard, where the US dollar was backed by gold, and other world currencies were backed by the dollar (and thus indirectly by gold).
-- Dave
It's always been my impression that this type of thing wouldn't fly, that you were just taxed in the state you live in.
I dunno. My sister used to live in New Hampshire (no state income tax) and work in Maine (has a state income tax) and she had to pay Maine state income tax in full.
-- Dave
You know, you probably don't want to let on that all your "friends" are 14 year old girls. The FBI usually doesn't look too kindly upon that.
It's cool if "he" is also a 14 year old girl. But in that case, what is "he" doing reading Slashdot? Everyone knows Slashdot is entirely peopled with ugly nerdy dudes.
-- Dave
Well, people insist on using "irregardless" as if it's an actual word. I figured I'd just go with the flow, and add another negation prefix. At least this way the three negatives make the word negative again.
-- Dave
It's supply and demand -- the same market factors that make A-Rod worth 400 times what you make
Yeah, but at least I have tangible evidence of what A-Rod is doing to earn his money. I see my CEO four times a year at the quarterly meetings (and now they're making those three-times-a-year meetings, even!) at which he blows smoke up my ass about how good/bad the company is doing and how disirregardless of company performance, good or bad or status quo, he can't afford to give me a raise. And inbetween those times, I have no idea what he's doing.
A-Rod, meanwhile, is hitting a little white ball and running around the bases, and the Yankees are in the playoffs.
-- Dave
Spoken like someone truly bitter about not making the cut during the Fantasy Setting Search! ;-)
-- Dave
So you've been using your off hand lately, and somehow that makes you better than the rest of us?
-- Dave
Listen up, hippy. We happen to be living in a temperate age between the last ice age and a coming tropical age. The planet goes through cycles like this over geologic time. You do know there have been periods of time in the past where glaciers covered most everything up to the tropics, right? And times when the planet was mostly all tropics and little to no polar ice? And that all this happened many times LONG BEFORE humans showed up, or even mammals of any kind at all?
Those same scientists who are bleating about global warming now were crying about a coming mini-ice age in the 70s. Humans aren't very good at thinking about things on the time scale of geologic time. We see short-term perturbations in the norm and overreact. We're good at shit like that.
Are we speeding the process up? Maybe. Is what we can do to the environment greater than what natural cycles over geologic time do? Doubtful.
-- Dave
What, did you think NASA was just throwing this out and then were planning on waiting 50k years before getting any data from it?
Yeah, OF COURSE it's going to communicate with Earth during its mission. Jesus, what the hell would be the point, otherwise? It's not like we had to wait for Pioneer 10 and 11 or Voyager 1 and 2 to circumnavigate the universe and get back to us before we got any data, did we?
-- Dave
No retard, it's not going to take 50k years to GET to Pluto, just 50k years to possibly drift back this way. The important part of the mission is the part about getting to Pluto and relaying data back. The drift back to Earth is just something that might or might not happen someday.
-- Dave
So, what... You're claiming that people who live in the country are dumber than people who live in the city?
Yup. Exactly. They'll read you the trespass act and tell you you can't come back anymore or they'll arrest you for trespassing. They try their best to make it sound like what you did was illegal, but it isn't. However, it's perfectly within their rights to bar you from their establishment, and if you come back, they can and will arrest you for trespassing.
-- Dave
Last time I checked, IBM was incorporated in New York. So, the jobs in Europe were already outsourced jobs and were against the strange rules you made up about "benefit to the host country" (In this case, the USA.)
-- Dave
It's not manned. It's just cameras.
-- Dave
When does copyright begin, though? Currently, on written works, I know copyright begins as soon as you write it. What happens if you spend four years eleven months trying to sell a completed novel, but it keeps getting rejected. Then some publisher agrees to "take a chance" on your work, and it becomes a suprise best-seller--only you only get one month of royalties, and then it's public domain, tough noogies on you. That doesn't sound right.
-- Dave
We're never GOING to "sort out" the problems on this planet totally. No matter how many we "solve", new ones will crop up later. Following your advice is equivalent to constant procrastination.
Why should we bother sending our backup tapes offsite when we can barely keep our systems running as it is? Wouldn't it be better to spend more time and resources getting our current systems to run smoothly before we bothered coming up with an offsite data replication strategy? That sounds like a great argument until your building burns down, and you have no offsite backups.
-- Dave
Isn't this a Larry Niven quote? Or was Niven just quoting someone else?
-- Dave
It's not about where it's safest. Tell me, are your backup tapes safer locked in your secure climate controlled data center, or at your house under your bed? Now tell me where you'd want your backup tapes to be if your building burnt to the ground.
-- Dave
For me, I became an Ubuntu fanboy when I installed it on my laptop and everything "just worked". It detected my wireless card (something no other distro has been able to do successfully), activated it, and completed the install over my wireless connection. It installed slick as hell and the package repositories had everything I wanted/needed once I got the system up and running.
It doesn't make it "better" than all the other distros, but it sure helps me evangelize for the distro when I can just point to my laptop and say "I just popped in the CD, booted, told it to install, AND IT DID AND EVERYTHING WORKED!!" That one statement right there is enough for me.
-- Dave
Bill Clinton + GWB = 2 Presidents
-- Dave