His entire point that a given temperature scale is only really useful for determining how the weather will feel to a human.
My references to cooking were to illustrate how commonly we need a temperature scale other than for weather. Sorry if this wasn't obvious to you.
Or do you think we should use one temperature scale for "how weather feels" and a different one for cooking, and a third for medical use, a fourth for chemistry.... a good old ad-hoc "system" of units that gave us such convenient conversions as 63,360 inches to the mile. Defended by traditionalists because they're "human".
Okay for knowing whether or not it will snow, but how often are you caring what temperature water is going to boil relative to the current temperature outside?
Do you cook food? Apparently not. When you do that, often you boil water, or use an oven to heat food to over 200C. If you roast meat, you may use a meat thermometer so you won't get food poisoning.
Maybe you just use a microwave and press the "nuke" button for everything.
"Editors at Wikipedia have removed a link to a blacklisted web site....
You might hope that Slashdot editors would CLICK ON THE FUCKING LINKS THEY POST and see the story is wrong at the time of being published. The current version of the page does indeed include the links, and it's been locked. Of course, the part of it being the subject of an edit war was true, and the linked Discussion page is a warzone.
I'm not arguing the merits, just wanted show what he was on about. TFA did not even mention the books based on his script that were the basis of his claim.
See, if Ellison had simply said that, we'd all nod our heads in agreement. Instead, he went off into an incomprehensible rant about fighting 'the man'. (At least, I think that's what it was about. Hard to tell through the foggy and indignant prose.)
Paramount licensed its sister-corporation Simon & Schuster, through its Pocket Books division, the right to publish a knock-off trilogy of paperbacks the Crucible series novels based on City, using Ellisons unique elements....
Slashdot links to a blog post by some jerk who dislikes Harlan intensely and makes fun of him (admittedly, Harlan is easy to dislike) with selective quotes and comments. Entertaining in its own way, but certainly not fair to Harlan.
Money, Power, Sex are all as alluring today as they were with cavemen
Cavemen were allured by money? These would be Geico cavemen, I assume.
Read Golding's "The Inheritors" for an attempt to get into the mind of real cavemen. And as for the future, try some of John Varley or Iain M Banks' stories as to how our motivations could, and I believe will, change.
It's only crappy sci-fi that makes the whole universe, past present and future, just the same as here and now, with just cosmetic changes in costume. But it's the kind of unchallenging entertainment that might fit in on SyFy.
Good characters are good characters, good plot is good plot. You can take a western put it in space and its the same story. Its intrinsic value ( to me anyways) doesn't really have anything to do with the surroundings.
In that case, what you had was not truly a Western or an SF story. A REAL Western could only take place in the West. A REAL SF story depends on advances in science.
Trouble is these kinds of story are hard to write, they require research and imagination. TV writers often just repackage their stories in exactly the way you describe. They might be slick and watchable, but are not really SF. (I'm thinking of 95% of Trek, for instance, since ToS which used real SF writers and not (just) journeyman hacks.)
I read historical novels and SF precisely because the background and society, and thus the characters and motivations of the protagonists, are different from the one I live in. People are NOT the same everywhere and at every time.
It's okay, man. I missed the opening season of Lost. It's on my list to watch in sequence on DVD one day.
I think this is the kind of show you need to watch while it's in progress. It's intriguing just trying to work out what's happening. There are innumerable blogs, wikis and such devoted to analysing it if that's your thing. Watching it after the finale, when being spoiled is unavoidable, will be a great anti-climax. Especially since I'm pretty sure the ending will be a lame incomprehensible copout, like the same guy's (JJ Abram) Alias, or the inane finale of the once-great X-Files.
But until the inevitable disappointment, one can still watch in hope, and the acting and cinematography make it a pleasant ride.
I'm currently watching Buffy on DVD, for the first time. I'm up to season 3. But whenever I read any reviews, I get annoyed by remarks that give away plot points years in advance. That's basically an episodic drama, new monster every week, but Lost is one big tapestry. Knowing the end when you go in will take the edge off.
How do you know it's location-based? I know someone who uses AOL. We're both in the US, but when I send her mail these days, AOL sends it straight to the bit bucket. There could be a lot of reasons AOL isn't accepting your mail. Maybe your ISP in Hong Kong is known as a spamhaven.
My ISP (Pacific.net.hk) is quite responsible and professional. AOL are just assholes. If one customer makes one complaint about spam, they apparently will blacklist the ISP for an indeterminate period. And there is NO WAY TO COMMUNICATE WITH THEM TO APPEAL. I've tried, all the feedback and info pages on this are dead links or get no reply. The ISP has tried and can't get them to explain either.
But I'm sure it is geographic, with a heavy negative weighting given to Hong Kong.
Other HK ISPs, notably Netvigator, were known to be spammer friendly, 10 years ago, but I don't use that one, and even they have cleaned up their act now.
I found out recently that all the email I was sending to my students who had yahoo addresses was going in their spam folders. Yahoo's default seems to be to blacklist mail coming from any domain they haven't heard of.
Different problem, mail to AOL doesn't even get to a spam folder, it just bounces. I have to advise my clients using AOL to get another account, like Yahoo actually. And I do have a Yahoo account, I check through its spam folder about once a week and rescue a few false positives. While it doesn't have an explicit white list, if you add the sender to your address book, it won't be classified as spam.
In China, $1 is like a week's worth of lunch money.
If you're a peasant, and there are hundreds of millions of them. However, they don't have MP3 players, computers, or Internet. This is for the middle class, who can afford $1/disc.
Either you had some filtering (eg, IP blocking) you were unaware of or very active moderators. Otherwise, you might as well walk naked though Central Park at midnight.
I find it hard to believe that given enough information to know that the site does not pertain to them, they sign up anyway.
Spammers will sign up to any and every forum they can. Some automated, some sweatshops i INia do this all day long. Any forum, on any subject, if you allow automatic registration, will be full of spam in a few weeks or months if not moderated.
No kidding. Basically, anyone who thinks geography-based filtering is a good idea should be shot. Imagine moving 2000 miles, then being told by some braindead webdesigner you can't talk to your friends anymore.
Happens to me a lot. I'm in Hong Kong. I find some US ISPs (like AOL) bounce my mail solely based on my location. And much media (even some on Youtube) is blocked geographically. Even some porn sites block me.... And other sites insist on giving me Chinese versions of their web pages, with no option to choose English. Highly irritating to go to Google.com and find myself redirected to Google.com.hk. (Yes, I have workarounds now, still annoying.)
A couple of years ago we started to get a lot of people signing up from China, India, Russia etc and then posting spam. So now, to register with the forum you have to answer a question that requires you have some local knowledge. That gets rid of most automatic signups. And secondly, the accounts are not activated automatically but have to be approved by an administrator. So we delete those with spammy URLs in their signatures ("Buy WOW gold" seems to be a common variety). In a small community, the number of real local people siging up is a few per week. Maybe a couple of spammers get past that in a month, and then their posts and accounts are quickly deleted.
All those applications were written for Windows 95......But you go with Apple, or Linux and what do you get? Every five years, maybe ten if you're lucky, you have to rebuild and redesign everything to make it work with the latest and greatest.
So, All those mission-critical Win95 apps will run on the latest version of Windows? I somehow doubt that. If not, what's the difference?
And with Linux, you could install the parts of the "latest and greatest" you wanted to, while keeping other parts for legacy apps, should that be necessary. But it probably wouldn't. And note that Red Hat supports some quite old versions of its software for exactly this reason.
Slashdot Mirror
Take another 10 seconds and try just .uk.
meat safety temperature cooking site:.uk: Results 1 - 10 of about 42,800....
But even if I limit it to .co.uk, there were still 3,620 hits. So I think you need some remedial Googlology.
My references to cooking were to illustrate how commonly we need a temperature scale other than for weather. Sorry if this wasn't obvious to you.
Or do you think we should use one temperature scale for "how weather feels" and a different one for cooking, and a third for medical use, a fourth for chemistry.... a good old ad-hoc "system" of units that gave us such convenient conversions as 63,360 inches to the mile. Defended by traditionalists because they're "human".
That was my point. The guy I was replying to couldn't imagine why he'd need to measure temperatures that high.
Do you need to read the posts you're replying to with your non sequiturs? Idiot.
Do you cook food? Apparently not. When you do that, often you boil water, or use an oven to heat food to over 200C. If you roast meat, you may use a meat thermometer so you won't get food poisoning.
Maybe you just use a microwave and press the "nuke" button for everything.
For fuck's sake, it DOES NOT MAKE MORE SENSE. It's just more familiar to YOU. Don't tell me it "makes sense", and don't claim to speak for "us".
That IS NOT what happened. It is just a TEXT link, clearly labelled and you proceed at your own risk if you want to see it.
You might hope that Slashdot editors would CLICK ON THE FUCKING LINKS THEY POST and see the story is wrong at the time of being published. The current version of the page does indeed include the links, and it's been locked. Of course, the part of it being the subject of an edit war was true, and the linked Discussion page is a warzone.
I'm not arguing the merits, just wanted show what he was on about. TFA did not even mention the books based on his script that were the basis of his claim.
Harlan DID say that. See his press release:
Slashdot links to a blog post by some jerk who dislikes Harlan intensely and makes fun of him (admittedly, Harlan is easy to dislike) with selective quotes and comments. Entertaining in its own way, but certainly not fair to Harlan.
Cavemen were allured by money? These would be Geico cavemen, I assume.
Read Golding's "The Inheritors" for an attempt to get into the mind of real cavemen. And as for the future, try some of John Varley or Iain M Banks' stories as to how our motivations could, and I believe will, change.
It's only crappy sci-fi that makes the whole universe, past present and future, just the same as here and now, with just cosmetic changes in costume. But it's the kind of unchallenging entertainment that might fit in on SyFy.
In that case, what you had was not truly a Western or an SF story. A REAL Western could only take place in the West. A REAL SF story depends on advances in science.
Trouble is these kinds of story are hard to write, they require research and imagination. TV writers often just repackage their stories in exactly the way you describe. They might be slick and watchable, but are not really SF. (I'm thinking of 95% of Trek, for instance, since ToS which used real SF writers and not (just) journeyman hacks.)
I read historical novels and SF precisely because the background and society, and thus the characters and motivations of the protagonists, are different from the one I live in. People are NOT the same everywhere and at every time.
And Breaking Bad. (Better Crime Through Chemistry. More geekery in that than most stuff on SciFi anyway.)
I think this is the kind of show you need to watch while it's in progress. It's intriguing just trying to work out what's happening. There are innumerable blogs, wikis and such devoted to analysing it if that's your thing. Watching it after the finale, when being spoiled is unavoidable, will be a great anti-climax. Especially since I'm pretty sure the ending will be a lame incomprehensible copout, like the same guy's (JJ Abram) Alias, or the inane finale of the once-great X-Files.
But until the inevitable disappointment, one can still watch in hope, and the acting and cinematography make it a pleasant ride.
I'm currently watching Buffy on DVD, for the first time. I'm up to season 3. But whenever I read any reviews, I get annoyed by remarks that give away plot points years in advance. That's basically an episodic drama, new monster every week, but Lost is one big tapestry. Knowing the end when you go in will take the edge off.
My ISP (Pacific.net.hk) is quite responsible and professional. AOL are just assholes. If one customer makes one complaint about spam, they apparently will blacklist the ISP for an indeterminate period. And there is NO WAY TO COMMUNICATE WITH THEM TO APPEAL. I've tried, all the feedback and info pages on this are dead links or get no reply. The ISP has tried and can't get them to explain either. But I'm sure it is geographic, with a heavy negative weighting given to Hong Kong.
Other HK ISPs, notably Netvigator, were known to be spammer friendly, 10 years ago, but I don't use that one, and even they have cleaned up their act now.
I found out recently that all the email I was sending to my students who had yahoo addresses was going in their spam folders. Yahoo's default seems to be to blacklist mail coming from any domain they haven't heard of.
Different problem, mail to AOL doesn't even get to a spam folder, it just bounces. I have to advise my clients using AOL to get another account, like Yahoo actually. And I do have a Yahoo account, I check through its spam folder about once a week and rescue a few false positives. While it doesn't have an explicit white list, if you add the sender to your address book, it won't be classified as spam.
In that case, you should have no problem in stating the site URL.
If you're a peasant, and there are hundreds of millions of them. However, they don't have MP3 players, computers, or Internet. This is for the middle class, who can afford $1/disc.
Use http://www.google.com/webhp, that doesn't redirect.
Either you had some filtering (eg, IP blocking) you were unaware of or very active moderators. Otherwise, you might as well walk naked though Central Park at midnight.
Spammers will sign up to any and every forum they can. Some automated, some sweatshops i INia do this all day long. Any forum, on any subject, if you allow automatic registration, will be full of spam in a few weeks or months if not moderated.
Happens to me a lot. I'm in Hong Kong. I find some US ISPs (like AOL) bounce my mail solely based on my location. And much media (even some on Youtube) is blocked geographically. Even some porn sites block me.... And other sites insist on giving me Chinese versions of their web pages, with no option to choose English. Highly irritating to go to Google.com and find myself redirected to Google.com.hk. (Yes, I have workarounds now, still annoying.)
A couple of years ago we started to get a lot of people signing up from China, India, Russia etc and then posting spam. So now, to register with the forum you have to answer a question that requires you have some local knowledge. That gets rid of most automatic signups. And secondly, the accounts are not activated automatically but have to be approved by an administrator. So we delete those with spammy URLs in their signatures ("Buy WOW gold" seems to be a common variety). In a small community, the number of real local people siging up is a few per week. Maybe a couple of spammers get past that in a month, and then their posts and accounts are quickly deleted.
So, All those mission-critical Win95 apps will run on the latest version of Windows? I somehow doubt that. If not, what's the difference?
And with Linux, you could install the parts of the "latest and greatest" you wanted to, while keeping other parts for legacy apps, should that be necessary. But it probably wouldn't. And note that Red Hat supports some quite old versions of its software for exactly this reason.
Do you want a PC/laptop? Do you wear shoes, clothing? Do you buy anything at a supermarket?
If you can answer "No" to all those, then you're okay to boycott Chinese goods.
In China you'd just buy a DVD, 5 GB of whatever you like (movies, music, porn, warez) for about US$1.