http://slate.msn.com/id/2102723/: unfairenheit 9/11 - a conservative's response to the movie. While I disagree with many of his points and his insulting style, he does raise factual issues.
Christopher Hitchens is NOT a conservative. He's an English socialist who has written extensively for magazines such as The Nation. However, he has been very critical of his colleagues' responses to the War On Terror. He feels that a liberal isn't just someone who wants an economically just society, but someone who wants to guarantee the essential freedoms that are curtailed in many Muslim countries (rights of women and homosexuals, freedom of religion, etc.).
1. Put broken computer in cardboard box
2. Ship it to your friend across town, being sure to take out a ludicrous amount of insurance
3. File UPS Damage claim
4. Profit!
When you fill up, the pump will tell you how many gallons you just pumped into your car. When I get back into my car, I reset the tripmeter (the "second" odometer which can be reset) after noting the number of miles I've driven since the last fuel stop. Then it's just a matter of spending the next minute or so trying to do the division as accurately as possible without getting into an accident.
As the reviewer pointed out, Socket 478 CPUs tend to stick to the heatsink and get yanked out during upgrades. Having built and repaired hundreds of machines in the past year, I have to tell you that I am still a bit scared to change my own machine's aging 865 chipset motherboard. For a business a few dead CPUs due to bent pins is no biggie, but for an individual who doesn't have another $300 it's more than an annoyance.
The advantage of the new setup is that the CPU is locked in place better, so as long as you are reasonably careful it won't come out and bend anything. Also, in 12 months when the chips are still a couple hundred bucks each, I'm sure ECS and others will have $60 value boards on the market. Sure they won't be the baddest mofos on the planet, but it's a nice safety blanket for geeks on a budget.
How's this for geeky: I don't own a TV, so in order to watch the Discovery Channel I bought a PCI tuner. Geekier still: the seven fans in my rig made it impossible to hear the audio, so I wound up gettting an external tuner/signal converter (which I can plug into USB 2.0 when I want to capture). This lets me watch tv when the computer is quiet, i.e. turned off (Okay, I guess I lose geek points for turning my machine off).
Sports are also live, and reasonable people tolerate a player dropping an F-Bomb during a sideline interview. But I would have been shocked-- SHOCKED-- had, during game five of the NBA Finals, announcer Al Michaels "sexed up" the ratings of a Detroit blowout by jumping up on the scorer's table, whipping out his sixty year old schlonger, and waving it Hokey Pokey style at the camera. By your logic, by choosing to watch a live basketball game, carrying that disturbing image to my grave is the chance I took, right?
(ABC could even use Maniacal Wood-Sprouting Al Michaels' wardrobe malfunction as a message from their sponsor, Levitra. "Do you believe in miracles!?! YES!!!")
We use this program at work for inventory control, and every item code is in all caps. Whenever I'm doing invoices I turn capslock on, then turn it off for all the other stuff I do, like e-mail, web authoring, etc. (I do sales / web design for an online computer retailer.) It's actually quite annoying, since my Capslock always seems to be on when I don't want it (like typing an e-mail that begins dEAR mR. jOHNSON, or having my password rejected). What's worse is that we have ergonomic computer desk trays, so the keyboard's capslock on/off indicator light is underneath the lip of the desk where I can't see it.
Announcer Guy: He's a superagent who plays by his own rules... Police Captain: You can't take on a 90 story building full of enemy spies by yourself! Vin Deisel: Sorry chief, I play by my own rules. [Turns, winks.] Announcer Guy: He's a wise-cracking Negro in the wrong place at the wrong time... [The Heroes run through a door way and stop cold. Slow motion pan of a roomful of guys with machine guns pointed at them.] Chris Rock: Daaaamn... I haven't seen this many weapons since the last time I was over at Jay Z's house. Announcer Guy: This summer, Vin Deisel and Chris Rock star in Elevator Action! Hot Chick: Going... down? [Things blow up, there is a Bad Ass slow motion kung-fu scene on top of an elevator, bad guys plummet to their deaths.] Vin Deisel: Now that's what I call getting the shaft. Chris Rock: Yeah, booooy!
[This film is not yet rated.]
Add some onions and I smell bratwurst! Yet another triumph for our rogue casemodder: no traffic = geting drunk; traffic = simmering pork. Win win situation.
It's ironic, since LucasArts made several adventure games (Monkey Island, Sam and Max, etc.) that had good but not great graphics. The games are replayable ten years on because of storyline and sharp dialogue, not because everything was rendered in lifelike 3D. (In fact Monkey Island 4 and Grim Fandango can be frustrating because the pixelated 3D graphics make it harder to see levers or items.)
Racing through the day like a hamster in a wheel, using incredible technology to document every mundane detail of where you've been, then sharing it with people who-- sick of their nine to five jobs and boring lives-- log on to watch yours. It's ridiculous techno-voyeurism reflecting the spiritual emptiness of the industrial age; it's postmodern art; it's
Walmart. A few years back the publisher bundled it with another game as a ten dollar RPG Value Pack. You can occasionally find it lumped in the same bin as Madden 2002 and Super Duper Extreme Solitaire (Grand Master Edition).
Offices? But, but, but they have glass windows and stuff! The sun, oh how that evil fiery orb burns our eyes so! Must slink back to the server room and guards our precious...
I'm an economic conservative and voted for W, but I have to agree with the above poster on the creeping corporatism of our economy. Marx claimed that capitalism would die because of its internal contradictions, where the business owners kept the workers as chattel building expensive goods solely for their (the capitalists) benefit and paying subsistance wages; eventually the resentment would boil up and the workers of the world would unite and yadda yadda Socialism.
Ironically the labor movements spawned from this Marxist thinking tweaked the capitalist system enough to allow for government intervention on minimum wages, workplace safety, etc. As a result the workers became part of the consumer class, ushering in the prosperity the western world knows today. I work hard to buy a big screen TV that Bill builds. Bill uses his big screen TV making wages to buy a car that George builds; George uses his paycheck on the computer I sell, etc.
However, the third world manufacturing facilities-- many of which are in dictatorships or quasi-Facist states which intentionally keep their citizens poor to make them focus on survival rather than revolution-- can ignore labor laws and make widgets far cheaper than America or Europe. The country's economy doesn't grow much since Jose Seis-pack's wages are barely above subsistance level, and while it's cool I can buy six bags of ramen for 99 cents it doesn't make it morally right. Maybe we should have a trade policy that dictates a minimum wage based on a country's GDP / U.S. GDP times the U.S. minimum wage or something like that.
Ironically, computer programs are the one area in life where free things are often better than expensive alternatives. Best server OS? BSD. Best Web server? Apache. It has something to do with Eric Raymond's theory of programming culture as a gift-based society where members grow in stature based on what they freely give to the community.
It has something to do with Native Americans and Potlatch dinners and stuff, but to be honest it was years ago when he explained it to me and I was half-drunk at the time and utterly distracted by how stereotypically Linux geek-y he was, with the hair and the beard and the flannel shirt and the GLAVIN! Um... oh yeah, Ethereal is free too.
Ghandi and MLK based their resistance on moral injustice. They thought that passively confronting their oppressor would make a people with a Judeo-Christian morality see the injustice of the situation and realize the error of their ways. In a democracy / republic, the people have the ultimate say, and the people told their governments to stop these terrible practices.
However, in much of the world we have Fascist governments who don't care one whit about their people's opinion, and only care about their own power. Sometimes this takes the guise of religion. For these regimes, guns (and lots of them) are the only path to freedom.
it's just a glorified chat loop for everyone to talk about Britney Spears on.
Who here likes Britney Spears? A recent interview indicates she wants to be taken seriously as an entertainer. Moreover, she thinks her vocals are more than throwaway part of a striptease girly show. She is not just the late 90's sex symbol; she is governed by a desire for self-betterment.
Let's think about her role as an artist. She is more than a piece of meat offered up by MTV. She is where it's at. Perhaps there are 1265 better singers out there, but she is an absolute Oak, standing tall against a public who think she she is a slut who should hit the road for all eternity.
It's a bit like IBM selling punch card machines to Nazi Germany for "accounting purposes." The "accounting" was keeping track of which Jew was in which death camp, but IBM didn't kinda sorta know that, exactly. Wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more.
What sucks is that you can't use Pay Pal for their adult items any longer. I have some, um, err... Educational DVDs I want to get rid of, but don't want to go through the hassle of waiting for checks to clear, etc.
A sketchy middle-aged guy came into the computer shop a week or so ago with complaints about his cable Internet being intolerably slow. His provider said it was a problem with his machine, and since he was under warranty I took a look at it.
The first thing I noticed was that half the icons on his desktop were Internet Explorer shortcuts named "100% Hot Young Sluts," "Barely Legal Semen Sippers," etc. Whatever-- my job is to fix his computer, not to be judmental about his affinity for Shaved High School Muffins.
Mmmm... muffins.
Ahem. Anyway, I downloaded Ad Aware and installed Norton Antivirus (he got an OEM version with his system board but never installed it). After removing numerous Trojans and spyware that was slowing his system by "phoning home," VOILA, his Internet connection was perfectly fine.
We had a chat about how spyware slows your machine and Internet conncection, how he should be careful what he downloads, update Ad Aware and Norton Antivirus regularly, etc.
Today, the same guy brings in his machine. He tells me that after a day or two the same symptoms returned. After he left I tossed the machine on my bench and started laughing out loud. He had apparently thought our discussion about adware and spyware had taken place on Opposite Day and did the reverse of everything I said, opening every attachment in sight, running every free sex dialer program he could find. Not ten days after I cleaned his machine, Ad Aware found 640 new objects, many happily hijacking his Net connection.
There were also several trojans, and something seems to have disabled Norton Autoprotect. We might be better off backing up his data, formatting the drive, and reinstalling Windows. Software problems are not covered by his warranty, and this might cost him fifty or eighty bucks.
On the bright side, he had cleared all the porn from his desktop-- a wise thing to do when you take the PC in for repairs.
I can dig it. Instead of tights and a cape, SuperFlu could wear all manner of gold chains, a full length fur coat, and a big floppy brimmed hat. Curtis Mayfield could provide the theme song...
I'm curious: in your experience, how many Indians have the stereotypical Indian accent? I went to college with a number of Indian exchange students and many of them had an English/British accent. Is one's accent determined by ancestry, economic class, or something else?
Funny stuff. As a tech line monkey, I've always liked Ernie Cline's Tech Support monologue. "The Internet is my bitch... I speak its language: I'm like f**king Tron."
Slashdot Mirror
Christopher Hitchens is NOT a conservative. He's an English socialist who has written extensively for magazines such as The Nation. However, he has been very critical of his colleagues' responses to the War On Terror. He feels that a liberal isn't just someone who wants an economically just society, but someone who wants to guarantee the essential freedoms that are curtailed in many Muslim countries (rights of women and homosexuals, freedom of religion, etc.).
1. Put broken computer in cardboard box
2. Ship it to your friend across town, being sure to take out a ludicrous amount of insurance
3. File UPS Damage claim
4. Profit!
Division!?! Math is hard. Let's go shopping!
The advantage of the new setup is that the CPU is locked in place better, so as long as you are reasonably careful it won't come out and bend anything. Also, in 12 months when the chips are still a couple hundred bucks each, I'm sure ECS and others will have $60 value boards on the market. Sure they won't be the baddest mofos on the planet, but it's a nice safety blanket for geeks on a budget.
"As you can see, the Ice Man is listening to Ace of Base, which was a very popular group in his era."
How's this for geeky: I don't own a TV, so in order to watch the Discovery Channel I bought a PCI tuner. Geekier still: the seven fans in my rig made it impossible to hear the audio, so I wound up gettting an external tuner/signal converter (which I can plug into USB 2.0 when I want to capture). This lets me watch tv when the computer is quiet, i.e. turned off (Okay, I guess I lose geek points for turning my machine off).
(ABC could even use Maniacal Wood-Sprouting Al Michaels' wardrobe malfunction as a message from their sponsor, Levitra. "Do you believe in miracles!?! YES!!!")
We use this program at work for inventory control, and every item code is in all caps. Whenever I'm doing invoices I turn capslock on, then turn it off for all the other stuff I do, like e-mail, web authoring, etc. (I do sales / web design for an online computer retailer.) It's actually quite annoying, since my Capslock always seems to be on when I don't want it (like typing an e-mail that begins dEAR mR. jOHNSON, or having my password rejected). What's worse is that we have ergonomic computer desk trays, so the keyboard's capslock on/off indicator light is underneath the lip of the desk where I can't see it.
Announcer Guy: He's a superagent who plays by his own rules...
Police Captain: You can't take on a 90 story building full of enemy spies by yourself!
Vin Deisel: Sorry chief, I play by my own rules.
[Turns, winks.]
Announcer Guy: He's a wise-cracking Negro in the wrong place at the wrong time...
[The Heroes run through a door way and stop cold. Slow motion pan of a roomful of guys with machine guns pointed at them.]
Chris Rock: Daaaamn... I haven't seen this many weapons since the last time I was over at Jay Z's house.
Announcer Guy: This summer, Vin Deisel and Chris Rock star in Elevator Action!
Hot Chick: Going... down?
[Things blow up, there is a Bad Ass slow motion kung-fu scene on top of an elevator, bad guys plummet to their deaths.]
Vin Deisel: Now that's what I call getting the shaft.
Chris Rock: Yeah, booooy!
[This film is not yet rated.]
Add some onions and I smell bratwurst! Yet another triumph for our rogue casemodder: no traffic = geting drunk; traffic = simmering pork. Win win situation.
Damn you, Command Line, damn you, Dominos, and damn you, Dr. Robert C. Atkins! </Stewie>
It's ironic, since LucasArts made several adventure games (Monkey Island, Sam and Max, etc.) that had good but not great graphics. The games are replayable ten years on because of storyline and sharp dialogue, not because everything was rendered in lifelike 3D. (In fact Monkey Island 4 and Grim Fandango can be frustrating because the pixelated 3D graphics make it harder to see levers or items.)
pomoblogging
Walmart. A few years back the publisher bundled it with another game as a ten dollar RPG Value Pack. You can occasionally find it lumped in the same bin as Madden 2002 and Super Duper Extreme Solitaire (Grand Master Edition).
Offices? But, but, but they have glass windows and stuff! The sun, oh how that evil fiery orb burns our eyes so! Must slink back to the server room and guards our precious...
Ironically the labor movements spawned from this Marxist thinking tweaked the capitalist system enough to allow for government intervention on minimum wages, workplace safety, etc. As a result the workers became part of the consumer class, ushering in the prosperity the western world knows today. I work hard to buy a big screen TV that Bill builds. Bill uses his big screen TV making wages to buy a car that George builds; George uses his paycheck on the computer I sell, etc.
However, the third world manufacturing facilities-- many of which are in dictatorships or quasi-Facist states which intentionally keep their citizens poor to make them focus on survival rather than revolution-- can ignore labor laws and make widgets far cheaper than America or Europe. The country's economy doesn't grow much since Jose Seis-pack's wages are barely above subsistance level, and while it's cool I can buy six bags of ramen for 99 cents it doesn't make it morally right. Maybe we should have a trade policy that dictates a minimum wage based on a country's GDP / U.S. GDP times the U.S. minimum wage or something like that.
It has something to do with Native Americans and Potlatch dinners and stuff, but to be honest it was years ago when he explained it to me and I was half-drunk at the time and utterly distracted by how stereotypically Linux geek-y he was, with the hair and the beard and the flannel shirt and the GLAVIN! Um... oh yeah, Ethereal is free too.
However, in much of the world we have Fascist governments who don't care one whit about their people's opinion, and only care about their own power. Sometimes this takes the guise of religion. For these regimes, guns (and lots of them) are the only path to freedom.
Who here likes Britney Spears? A recent interview indicates she wants to be taken seriously as an entertainer. Moreover, she thinks her vocals are more than throwaway part of a striptease girly show. She is not just the late 90's sex symbol; she is governed by a desire for self-betterment.
Let's think about her role as an artist. She is more than a piece of meat offered up by MTV. She is where it's at. Perhaps there are 1265 better singers out there, but she is an absolute Oak, standing tall against a public who think she she is a slut who should hit the road for all eternity.
Her new video debuts Thursday at 5 pm.
It's a bit like IBM selling punch card machines to Nazi Germany for "accounting purposes." The "accounting" was keeping track of which Jew was in which death camp, but IBM didn't kinda sorta know that, exactly. Wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more.
What sucks is that you can't use Pay Pal for their adult items any longer. I have some, um, err... Educational DVDs I want to get rid of, but don't want to go through the hassle of waiting for checks to clear, etc.
The first thing I noticed was that half the icons on his desktop were Internet Explorer shortcuts named "100% Hot Young Sluts," "Barely Legal Semen Sippers," etc. Whatever-- my job is to fix his computer, not to be judmental about his affinity for Shaved High School Muffins.
Mmmm... muffins.
Ahem. Anyway, I downloaded Ad Aware and installed Norton Antivirus (he got an OEM version with his system board but never installed it). After removing numerous Trojans and spyware that was slowing his system by "phoning home," VOILA, his Internet connection was perfectly fine.
We had a chat about how spyware slows your machine and Internet conncection, how he should be careful what he downloads, update Ad Aware and Norton Antivirus regularly, etc.
Today, the same guy brings in his machine. He tells me that after a day or two the same symptoms returned. After he left I tossed the machine on my bench and started laughing out loud. He had apparently thought our discussion about adware and spyware had taken place on Opposite Day and did the reverse of everything I said, opening every attachment in sight, running every free sex dialer program he could find. Not ten days after I cleaned his machine, Ad Aware found 640 new objects, many happily hijacking his Net connection. There were also several trojans, and something seems to have disabled Norton Autoprotect. We might be better off backing up his data, formatting the drive, and reinstalling Windows. Software problems are not covered by his warranty, and this might cost him fifty or eighty bucks.
On the bright side, he had cleared all the porn from his desktop-- a wise thing to do when you take the PC in for repairs.
I can dig it. Instead of tights and a cape, SuperFlu could wear all manner of gold chains, a full length fur coat, and a big floppy brimmed hat. Curtis Mayfield could provide the theme song...
I'm curious: in your experience, how many Indians have the stereotypical Indian accent? I went to college with a number of Indian exchange students and many of them had an English/British accent. Is one's accent determined by ancestry, economic class, or something else?
Funny stuff. As a tech line monkey, I've always liked Ernie Cline's Tech Support monologue. "The Internet is my bitch... I speak its language: I'm like f**king Tron."