Re:Borrowed very, very heavily
on
D&D Is 30
·
· Score: 5, Funny
> D&D takes a *lot* from Tolkien. This shouldn't be all that shocking -- Tolkien's stated goal with LOTR and middle earth was to create a sort of modern mythology, and he did so sucessfully.
And sometimes, D&D gives back:
~wavylines~
"A balrog!" Gandalf rasped. "I might have known!"
Pippin hauled out his well-worn copy of the Monstrous Manual, while
Merry peeked over his shoulder. "I don't see 'Balrog' listed in the
index anywhere."
"Of course not, foolish Took," the high-level mage chided him. "The
copyright to the 'Balrog' name is owned by the Tolkien estate. Gygax
had to call it 'Balor' or a 'Type VI demon' when he put the MM together."
Merry quickly thumbed to the Demon section, only to recall that in 2nd
Edition, "Demons" and "Devils" had been renamed Baatezu and Tanar'ri,
although he never could remember which was which. He cursed the
Fundamentalist Christian parents' groups who had threatened to boycott
TSR for creating a "demonic" game, and which had forced that particularly
stupid name-change upon them. Finally, though, he located "Balor" in the
Tanar'ri section, grateful that they weren't among the discontinued demon
listings like Orcus and Demogorgon.
"They're only 13 hit dice," Merry dutifully reported, "But they can cast
dispel magic every round at 20th level, so watch yourself, Gandalf!"
"That also do 4d8 damage if they make a to-hit roll with their whip
and drag you close to their bodies," Gimli noted. "I'm outta here!"
He turned and ran at his full movement rate of 9 (12 if he wasn't
wearing armor).
"Leave him to me," the mage intoned. "They're worth 46,000 experience
points apiece, and if I kill him by myself, I get *all* of those points!"
He strode toward the Balr-- er, Balor, and blocked the 10-foot-wide
corridor leading out of the room. "YOU SHALL NOT PASS!!!!"
> Should you live only if you are useful... to whom? Useful to you? or useful to others? > >If you answer the second... does it mean that people who are no longer useful to other, should not live?
Yes, it does.
If I have a million bucks in the bank, even if all I do is read Slashdot, I'm still very useful to others. My Mercedes dealer, the local gourmet shops, my groundskeepers, etc.
If I get down to $10000 in the bank, I'm still useful to others. My landlord. My corner grocer. The cashier at Wal-Mart. The bus driver.
If I have $0 in the bank, I may be useful to others. Someone willing to pay me money in exchange for my ability to write code... or to clean toilets.
(I might not want to clean toilets in exchange for room and board, in which case I'd only be of use to someone who wants me to write code. My ability to clean toilets is of no use if I'm unwilling to use it for reasons of personal pride.)
If I have $0 in the bank and no skills that I'm willing to use in order to earn my keep, I might still be of use to someone who gets personal fulfillment out of keeping broken-down unemployable old coots like me out of the suicide booths, because some people (perhaps even you:) simply don't like the idea of suicide booths for the useless.
(And I might not be able to find a benefactor -- hard to believe in an age of omnipresent Google, but I might choose not to seek such help -- and if offered, I might refuse it, because in addition to being too proud to clean toilets for a living, I might also be too proud to accept charity. My usefulness to a charitable organization, in that case, would also be zero.)
So - if I had $0 in the bank, and no skills that I was willing to use to earn my keep, and was unable (or unwilling) to find a charitable d00d who would feed me in order to assuage his guilty conscience, then, and only then, would I be truly "useless" and therefore fit only for euthanasia.
That's a lot of "ifs". Declaring that the "useless" ought to self-euthanize doesn't take away from the fact that there are very few people who are "useless to everyone".
> Presumably, pussy parity has been acheived not only in quantity, but in quality as well. For every undesirable pussy out there, there's an undesirable pecker out there.
So... you're saying Peter packed her pickle pipe with prickly pussy?
> It's amazing what a change of two letters will do to a GNAA post.
> >Hmm...GNRIAA?
Naw, that'd be more like GNMPAA, wouldn't it?:)
Still, someone owes me a new monitor. This one's got coffee all over it. Best slashalchemy (turning troll into gold) I've seen in a long time. Fucking brilliant!
> Personally I see some room for a crossover film: one where the kid Anikin from Episode I is
involved in a transporter malfunction and has a black goatee, Jar Jar*BLAM*
> (For those who don't get the joke, go here and listen to Shatner's "Mr. Tambourine Man".
It's like Tubgirl for your ears.
Re:Ants in the Apollo 11 Crew Quarantine Module
on
Our Man In Black
·
· Score: 1
> Who knows, maybe life on Earth is the contamination from another planet.
Which is another argument for being very careful about forward contamination. "There Exists Life On Mars" is a Very Big Hypothesis.
As much as I'd like to see human exploration of mars, if I go to Mars, and I find bacteria there, I'm going to have a hard time proving they're Marsbugs, not Humanbugs.
If I radiation-bake a robot, and send it to Mars, and it finds bacteria that aren't rad-hardened, the case for life on Mars is much stronger.
If you've established life on Mars (tough), you have another question: Did life originate independently on Mars and Earth, or were lifeforms transferred by means of meteorites blasted off the surface of one planet and landing on the other?
If the Marsbugs aren't based on DNA, or use a wildly-different set of amino acids, odds are good that life originated independently. If the Marsbugs are based on the same chemical processes as those on Earth, the fact that Mars has a shallower gravity well than Earth would suggest that it's more likely that life originated on Mars and was transported to Earth.
If you want to prove that hypothesis, forward contamination is even more important to prevent, because that's a Really Fucking Gargantuan Hypothesis, and the simpler hypothesis may well be "yeah, life exists on mars -- because we put it there. Some bugs hitched a ride from Earth on a probe we didn't sterilize, and it survived when the Martian Air Defense Force shot it down in the early 21st century."
> you spend $200/month on food? assuming that your roommate spends a like amount, how on earth do you eat?
Pasta: $0.50 per meal (3-3 meals out of a 1-pound bag)
B33F: $0.50 per meal (3-4 big helpings of sauce out of a $3.00 glob of ground beef)
Garlic, herbs, veggies, bread: $0.10 per meal - considering how little you need in a pile of good sauce and garlic bread)
Wine: $0.50 per meal (again, a $2.00 bottle of red plonk to add zest to tomato sauce, or white plonk to add zest to bolognese)
For $2.00 per meal, you can eat pretty fucking well.
Don't have time to cook? Bullshit! If you add up the time it takes to get to the restaurant and wait for someone to prepare it for you, you're probably saving time, considering that you can make 4-5 jars (if you're clever about when/how/what/if you add the meat/wine, each with a different flavor) of sauce in one session, and freeze it for later.
These kinds of savings scale all the way up the ladder. Consider a steak dinner. $20.00 a pound for filet mignon. So you get a couple of 8-oz filets and pair it with $0.50 worth of veggies, potatoes, and onions ($0.33 per pound!) for onion soup and sauteed onions. That's a $100.00 meal for $15.00, and it took you about an hour to prepare it.
Want dessert? You know those wonderful chocolate balls that you pay $1.50 each for at Godiva's? Buy some $5.00/pound high-quality dark chocolate. Melt it down in a pot with some $2.00/250mL cream. Add a splash of cognac. 20 minutes later, pour into a big pan and chill it overnight. Tomorrow afternoon, chop it into cubes, and roll the cubes into balls. (Optional: If you have an SO, have fun licking each others' fingers:) Congratuations! You've (optionally: gotten laid, and) made $100+ worth of chocolate truffles for less than $10.00, and it's taken you about half an hour.
I eat about $1000/month worth of food every month. I pay about $150. Life is good.
> > Farked. > > Okay, this is a serious pet peeve. Fark is not a word, never was, never will be, STOP USING IT unless you want to be placed in the same category as lusers who make the Vulcan "V" sign. > >Farscape was a TV show, not "reality", and the only reason the word was "invented" was because Scifi didn't want the rating level increase that would come with characters actually properly swearing. If you're gonna swear, swear properly.
Unlikely: Geek submits Slashdot article about own website hosted on DSL and expects web server to remain unfarked long enough for someone to get a mirror.
Photoshop: Theme - an HDD assault cannon, a web server, a guy who doesn't know what Fark means. Difficulty - no Baby Head on Darl McBride's body.
> if someone assures me that is has a @$^@$%&$ ending!
Of course it has an ending. You set up this recursive loop, see, and you have it going around and around. And you have this other thread running in the background. And it spawns two child processes. And then you do a malloc(), and you say "Holy Fark! Only three pages free!". So you exit(0) and kill -9 everything.
Halting problem, my ass. All Stephenson novels halt. You even get advanced warning when you realize that you can feel your right forefinger and your right thumb through the last couple of pages! What more could you ask for?
(Disclaimer: I love Stephenson's novels. I despise the abrupt endings, though. I hope for the sake of Mrs. Stephenson that he doesn't fuck like he writes. If he does fuck like he writes, would she please enclue him? It might improve his writing!)
> I'm starting an entry level programming job at a local Uni for a little above minimum wage.
Considering that professors can often get grad students to work for free, it looks like someone in that university is pulling strings and doing one of their friends a favor by hiring you (a HS student) for pay. Take full advantage of the opportunity.
As for the original poster talking about entry level programming jobs: "Whatever the market will bear is fair".
Jobs are like relationships. It's always easier to get a new job offer when you've already got an existing job -- even a crappy one.
If you're working at Foocorp, a hiring manager at Barcorp knows you must be worth something (or Foocorp wouldn't have hired you) - and he also knows that you must be interested in Barcorp (because you've already got a job at Foocorp, so you're interviewing for reasons that go beyond "I'm unemployed and need food").
Same thing applies in relationships -- ChickFoo obviously digs your stuff, and that makes your stuff more interesting to ChickBar. (No, I'm not gonna let myself write that as "BarChick":)
> > I really like their pantyhosecrawler [pantyhosecrawler.com] companion site. > > > > Very cool research tool. > >
Pantyhose research? One moderation point left and there's no option for +/-1 WTF!?
For every kink, fetish, and perversion, there exists at least one adherent with a website. Proof is left as an exercise for the Internet.
> 150M consumers * $270 saved per DVD player purchased from China = $40.5B saved over 5 years. > > Well now you're just being ridiculous. Do you honestly believe that out of a total population near 290M Americans, that half of them will buy a new DVD player every year? Please, put the crack pipe down.
I didn't claim $40.5B per year times five years. I claimed $40.5B over five years. That is to say, 50% of consumers will buy a DVD player once during the 5-year period.
> Because I feel that workers in developing nations have as much right to be treated fairly and with respect doesn't mean that I insist on no foreign trade.
True, but I maintain that even if they're being paid $2.00/d, that's a pretty good deal if being a peasant farmer earns you $1.00/d, and the cost of living in the country is $30/month and the cost of living in the city is $45/month.
(All numbers pulled out of my own ass for sake of argument. My point is that if working in the cities sucked, Chinese people wouldn't be migrating from the countryside to the cities. The fact that this migration is happening indicates, to me, that Chinese "sweatshop" laborers are being treated "fairly and with respect". Maybe not by your standards, but certainly by their standards!)
If your notion of "fair treatment and respect" means that it costs $290 to build a DVD player in China and $10 to ship it here, the effect will be "no trade".
> You might want to ask a few peasant farmers who have had their livelihood destroyed due to urbanization. Most were quite happy to continue thousands of years of tradition growing and selling their own food. But you somehow know what they really want, and you'll make them take it no matter what the cost. Nice.
I don't know what they want. I can only know what I want -- the cheapest consumer electronic device that'll play a DVD every weekend.
I haven't a clue what "most" peasant farmers want, but I observe an influx of population from the farms into the cities, I observe the absence of uniformed men herding peasant farmers onto boxcars bound for Beijing, and I can only conclude that some peasant farmers are willingly choosing to make the switch.
If we go further, we'll likely end up in a chicken-and-egg cycle. (My DVD-lust drives a society to industrialization. Industrialization expands cities. Expanding cities reduce land available for peasant farming, so yes, some farmers may "have" to take a job in the city - because in China, they couldn't sell the farm to a rich factory builder, they probably had the farm seized by the Chinese government. But that's a bug in the Chinese government, not free trade; if anything, a free economy results in more industrialization, not less, because in a free economy, peasant farmers have an even greater motivation to sell their land to someone who can produce more economic output with it.)
> A recently published I-D (here) claims 200 seconds is sufficient time for a broadband sub to
successfully attack a TCP session, provided their ISP doesn't use egress filtering (and way too few do so).
Maybe it's about fucking time ISPs started using egress filtering. At the very least, there'd be an order of magnitude less crap (smurfage, etc) if ISPs dropped spoofed source IP packets before they got to the backbone.
OK, so the ability of any skript kiddie to spoof and insert a BGP update is a pretty fucking huge mess. But "pretty fucking huge" it may be the only kind of mess that motivates the clueless fucktards pretending to be "ISPs" these days.
> So you're willing to accept that certain groups within one country could be screwed while other groups benefit, but when you consider each country as a whole group, both groups benefit?
Yes, I'm willing to accept that it really sucks to be one of the 10,000 people who built VCRs in America, but that the for the other 299,990,000 of us, if half of us buy a DVD player from China at $30.00 (instead of $300.00 from a US manufacturer), we think it's pretty neat.
10000 jobs * $30K salary = $300M/year lost "wages". Over 5 years, $1.5B
150M consumers * $270 saved per DVD player purchased from China = $40.5B saved over 5 years.
Your Scenario: We keep 10000 jobs in the Good Ol' U.S. of A, and everybody pays $300 for a DVD player. 10000 employees keep a low-wage job for the next five years. Keeps $1.5B wages in the country.
My Scenario: Dump 'em onto the street. Hope that they've all found jobs in five years, but even if they haven't, we've freed up $40.5B of consumer dollars to buy more toys, or invest in new companies. Even if we have to pay unemployment and welfare benefits to the 10000 people we threw out, it's still a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of capital we free up by hiring people to build our DVD players cheaper than we can.
As for benefiting both groups, under my scenario, we also have 10000 Chinese who are pleased as punch to make DVD players, because the cost of living in China is low, and making DVDs in the city beats the living fuck out of peasant farming.
> Noone hunts IT workers in the US anymore. Just like no one hunts metalworkers who can't use
CAD. Value is totally subjective. Unless the IT worker is plated in gold, there seems to be little
left to do but move! Damn Bill and his legions of cheap labour.
Very well, then, we have our fix. Grab some old jewelry, some kingly water, a couple of electrodes, and plate yourself in gold!
Note: Although plating yourself in gold sounds like a really good idea to add value, there may be an offsetting factor that works against this theory, particularly in the form of higher health premiums that will apply your surviving co-workers. Minor detail.
>..as I'll hazard a guess and say that the vast majority of internet users do nothing but check email, look at web sites and chat on IMs. Heck, if that's all I did, I'd be happy with dialup too. But I also like to download large... uh... stuff... like videos? Oh! And music!
If you're after the legal content - like the 30-second grainy.wmvs of talking heads on cnn.com - you might as well skip broadband (anyone can read faster than a loser with a TeleprompTer) as a waste of bits.
So what's left? That's right. Pirated movies, music, and pr0n videos! It drives the broadband industry!
I feel a DRM rant coming on...
Imagine if we'd protected RIAA and MPAA the way they've been begging... Imagine we'd saved RIAA and MPAA a few hundred million dollars in profits by locking away all content behind DRM.
And then imagine how many tens of billions of dollars in venture capital - and hundreds of billions of dollars in market cap - to say nothing of the billions in revenues, billions of dollars in tax on earnings arising from those revenues, and the billions of dollars in payroll and income taxes paid on the tens of thousands of jobs and salaries created by mass piracy of content.
Now... convince your Congressman to imagine it. Just because Eisner, Valenti, and whoever the fuck runs RIAA this week can offer your Congressman a line of coke to snort from between the plastic tits of a some pop star or movie starlet - and Bill Gates, Lou Gerstner, Linus Torvalds and Michael Dell can't - doesn't mean that the $10B/year entertainment industry is worth protecting at the expense of destroying the $100B+/year technology industry.
> Geeks would be beaten up by bullies in larger, stronger, and better looking exoskeletons that all the girl exoskeletons want... I hate those bully exoskeletons!
Nope,
Exoskeletally-enhanced bullies beating up geeks would be h4x0r3d by geeks. They'd either learn to hack back (in which case, they'd become more like us), or would die hilarious deaths as their own exoskeletons were turned against them.
Last words of that guy who bugged you in third grade: "g0dd4mn g33k m3ch5x0r1ng f4gz0rzzzaaaaaaaauuuuunnngh!"
> But the quickest solution to ridding.doc documents is not to switch software tools, operating systems, and retrain users. Why not just rename.doc to.renamethisbacktodotdoc before sending it out, thus saving humanity from the hell that is anything microsoft hasn't touched yet?
Geek: "I can't read.doc files. Please use a non-proprietary format."
Luser: "What's a.doc file? I dragged an icon labeled '2004 annual report' and you tell me you can't read it?"
> # Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated.
I always read that as:
# Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated +5
Dumbest warnings I ever saw were on a laptop's power supply:
FOR USERS IN CALIFORNIA:
WARNING: The power cord on this product contains lead, a chemical known to the State of California to cause cancer, and birth defects or other reproductive harm. Wash hands after handling.
Of course, there's no word on whether the lead in the power cord is transmuted to gold when I cross the border into Nevada, or whether or not residents of other states need to wash their hands after plugging things in or not.
(The background is that a bunch of twits fell for the junk science on PVC softened with lead phthalates. Consider that if studies on intravenous bags with the stuff are questionable, it's Not Bloody Likely that failing to wash your hands after you plug in your laptop is going to kill you. But since when did science matter to the granola-crunchin' hypesters of the People's Republic of California? It's to protect the chilllllldren and the enviiiiiiirunmennnnnt!
> There's this wonderful security device known as an "air gap". Put one of those between the
modem and the phone cord, and another between the power cord and the plug, and I guarentee you
that the computer won't get any spyware.
...fucking laptops with built-in 802.11 and unpatched XP preinstalled from the fucking OEM...
> . They remember the Beatles, and the Who, and The Doors, and Led Zepplin, and Pink Floyd; but they forget Donna Summers, Bobby Day, The Surfaris, or Carl Douglas.
I had almost forgotten the day those tweedlin' robins that used to inhabit MacArthur Park were wiped out by kung-fu-fighting. And now you... you bring... all... of this... back. May God have mercy on your ears, you heartless bastard.
> And that's a mix set in that'll truly fuck with your head. Imagine, if you will: "Zzzzzzzzzzzip(giggle!)"-Motley Crue, Slayer, Public Enemy, KMFDM, Birmingham 6, the playlist loops back to Track 01, and *kaboom*, the listener's head explodes.
Damn, I'm better than I thought.
Motley Crue "She Goes Down" - a fun/sexy harmless hair band sthat starts with a Zzzzzip/giggle
Slayer "Angel of Death" - Hair metal to regular metal, introduce the guitar riff, and nobody bats an eye
Public Enemy "She Watch Channel Zero" - Same riff, some listeners might jump in surprise at hearing it in rap, and we have the social message that television rots your brain
KMFDM's original, and then Birmingham 6's cover, of "Godlike" - Same riff, another genre shift, leading us to something more technoey, conveying a more serious social message that theocracies are scary
Birmingham 6, "Birmingham 6" - Heavy techno-industrial, lyrics muttering about media coverups and terrorism, and an evil-sounding cackle that might implode the user's head if they remember where this mix started...
CD loops back - and if the listener wasn't paying attention to where the B6 sample was coming from, the punchline hits him over the head like a 2000-pound concrete bomb. w00t!
The best part of the 'net (fuck RIAA) is that even if you've never heard of any of these songs, you can probably assemble this mix for yourself by searching the P2P networks for the individual tracks.
Slashdot Mirror
And sometimes, D&D gives back:
~wavylines~
>
>If you answer the second... does it mean that people who are no longer useful to other, should not live?
Yes, it does.
If I have a million bucks in the bank, even if all I do is read Slashdot, I'm still very useful to others. My Mercedes dealer, the local gourmet shops, my groundskeepers, etc.
If I get down to $10000 in the bank, I'm still useful to others. My landlord. My corner grocer. The cashier at Wal-Mart. The bus driver.
If I have $0 in the bank, I may be useful to others. Someone willing to pay me money in exchange for my ability to write code... or to clean toilets.
(I might not want to clean toilets in exchange for room and board, in which case I'd only be of use to someone who wants me to write code. My ability to clean toilets is of no use if I'm unwilling to use it for reasons of personal pride.)
If I have $0 in the bank and no skills that I'm willing to use in order to earn my keep, I might still be of use to someone who gets personal fulfillment out of keeping broken-down unemployable old coots like me out of the suicide booths, because some people (perhaps even you :) simply don't like the idea of suicide booths for the useless.
(And I might not be able to find a benefactor -- hard to believe in an age of omnipresent Google, but I might choose not to seek such help -- and if offered, I might refuse it, because in addition to being too proud to clean toilets for a living, I might also be too proud to accept charity. My usefulness to a charitable organization, in that case, would also be zero.)
So - if I had $0 in the bank, and no skills that I was willing to use to earn my keep, and was unable (or unwilling) to find a charitable d00d who would feed me in order to assuage his guilty conscience, then, and only then, would I be truly "useless" and therefore fit only for euthanasia.
That's a lot of "ifs". Declaring that the "useless" ought to self-euthanize doesn't take away from the fact that there are very few people who are "useless to everyone".
So... you're saying Peter packed her pickle pipe with prickly pussy?
>
>Hmm...GNRIAA?
Naw, that'd be more like GNMPAA, wouldn't it? :)
Still, someone owes me a new monitor. This one's got coffee all over it. Best slashalchemy (turning troll into gold) I've seen in a long time. Fucking brilliant!
STOP. RIGHT. THERE.
And learn to be more careful what you ask for.
(Not my Photoshop)
It's like Tubgirl for your ears.
Which is another argument for being very careful about forward contamination. "There Exists Life On Mars" is a Very Big Hypothesis.
As much as I'd like to see human exploration of mars, if I go to Mars, and I find bacteria there, I'm going to have a hard time proving they're Marsbugs, not Humanbugs.
If I radiation-bake a robot, and send it to Mars, and it finds bacteria that aren't rad-hardened, the case for life on Mars is much stronger.
If you've established life on Mars (tough), you have another question: Did life originate independently on Mars and Earth, or were lifeforms transferred by means of meteorites blasted off the surface of one planet and landing on the other?
If the Marsbugs aren't based on DNA, or use a wildly-different set of amino acids, odds are good that life originated independently. If the Marsbugs are based on the same chemical processes as those on Earth, the fact that Mars has a shallower gravity well than Earth would suggest that it's more likely that life originated on Mars and was transported to Earth.
If you want to prove that hypothesis, forward contamination is even more important to prevent, because that's a Really Fucking Gargantuan Hypothesis, and the simpler hypothesis may well be "yeah, life exists on mars -- because we put it there. Some bugs hitched a ride from Earth on a probe we didn't sterilize, and it survived when the Martian Air Defense Force shot it down in the early 21st century."
Pasta: $0.50 per meal (3-3 meals out of a 1-pound bag)
B33F: $0.50 per meal (3-4 big helpings of sauce out of a $3.00 glob of ground beef)
Garlic, herbs, veggies, bread: $0.10 per meal - considering how little you need in a pile of good sauce and garlic bread) Wine: $0.50 per meal (again, a $2.00 bottle of red plonk to add zest to tomato sauce, or white plonk to add zest to bolognese)
For $2.00 per meal, you can eat pretty fucking well.
Don't have time to cook? Bullshit! If you add up the time it takes to get to the restaurant and wait for someone to prepare it for you, you're probably saving time, considering that you can make 4-5 jars (if you're clever about when/how/what/if you add the meat/wine, each with a different flavor) of sauce in one session, and freeze it for later.
These kinds of savings scale all the way up the ladder. Consider a steak dinner. $20.00 a pound for filet mignon. So you get a couple of 8-oz filets and pair it with $0.50 worth of veggies, potatoes, and onions ($0.33 per pound!) for onion soup and sauteed onions. That's a $100.00 meal for $15.00, and it took you about an hour to prepare it.
Want dessert? You know those wonderful chocolate balls that you pay $1.50 each for at Godiva's? Buy some $5.00/pound high-quality dark chocolate. Melt it down in a pot with some $2.00/250mL cream. Add a splash of cognac. 20 minutes later, pour into a big pan and chill it overnight. Tomorrow afternoon, chop it into cubes, and roll the cubes into balls. (Optional: If you have an SO, have fun licking each others' fingers :) Congratuations! You've (optionally: gotten laid, and) made $100+ worth of chocolate truffles for less than $10.00, and it's taken you about half an hour.
I eat about $1000/month worth of food every month. I pay about $150. Life is good.
>
> Okay, this is a serious pet peeve. Fark is not a word, never was, never will be, STOP USING IT unless you want to be placed in the same category as lusers who make the Vulcan "V" sign.
>
>Farscape was a TV show, not "reality", and the only reason the word was "invented" was because Scifi didn't want the rating level increase that would come with characters actually properly swearing. If you're gonna swear, swear properly.
Obvious: It's not news, IT'S FARKDOT!
Amusing: Drew sues Farscape producers. Claims trademark infringement. Hilarity ensues.
Unlikely: Geek submits Slashdot article about own website hosted on DSL and expects web server to remain unfarked long enough for someone to get a mirror.
Photoshop: Theme - an HDD assault cannon, a web server, a guy who doesn't know what Fark means. Difficulty - no Baby Head on Darl McBride's body.
Of course it has an ending. You set up this recursive loop, see, and you have it going around and around. And you have this other thread running in the background. And it spawns two child processes. And then you do a malloc(), and you say "Holy Fark! Only three pages free!". So you exit(0) and kill -9 everything.
Halting problem, my ass. All Stephenson novels halt. You even get advanced warning when you realize that you can feel your right forefinger and your right thumb through the last couple of pages! What more could you ask for?
(Disclaimer: I love Stephenson's novels. I despise the abrupt endings, though. I hope for the sake of Mrs. Stephenson that he doesn't fuck like he writes. If he does fuck like he writes, would she please enclue him? It might improve his writing!)
Considering that professors can often get grad students to work for free, it looks like someone in that university is pulling strings and doing one of their friends a favor by hiring you (a HS student) for pay. Take full advantage of the opportunity.
As for the original poster talking about entry level programming jobs: "Whatever the market will bear is fair".
Jobs are like relationships. It's always easier to get a new job offer when you've already got an existing job -- even a crappy one.
If you're working at Foocorp, a hiring manager at Barcorp knows you must be worth something (or Foocorp wouldn't have hired you) - and he also knows that you must be interested in Barcorp (because you've already got a job at Foocorp, so you're interviewing for reasons that go beyond "I'm unemployed and need food").
Same thing applies in relationships -- ChickFoo obviously digs your stuff, and that makes your stuff more interesting to ChickBar. (No, I'm not gonna let myself write that as "BarChick" :)
> >
> > Very cool research tool.
>
> Pantyhose research? One moderation point left and there's no option for +/-1 WTF!?
For every kink, fetish, and perversion, there exists at least one adherent with a website. Proof is left as an exercise for the Internet.
And thus, web crawlers were born.
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> Well now you're just being ridiculous. Do you honestly believe that out of a total population near 290M Americans, that half of them will buy a new DVD player every year? Please, put the crack pipe down.
I didn't claim $40.5B per year times five years. I claimed $40.5B over five years. That is to say, 50% of consumers will buy a DVD player once during the 5-year period.
> Because I feel that workers in developing nations have as much right to be treated fairly and with respect doesn't mean that I insist on no foreign trade.
True, but I maintain that even if they're being paid $2.00/d, that's a pretty good deal if being a peasant farmer earns you $1.00/d, and the cost of living in the country is $30/month and the cost of living in the city is $45/month.
(All numbers pulled out of my own ass for sake of argument. My point is that if working in the cities sucked, Chinese people wouldn't be migrating from the countryside to the cities. The fact that this migration is happening indicates, to me, that Chinese "sweatshop" laborers are being treated "fairly and with respect". Maybe not by your standards, but certainly by their standards!)
If your notion of "fair treatment and respect" means that it costs $290 to build a DVD player in China and $10 to ship it here, the effect will be "no trade".
> You might want to ask a few peasant farmers who have had their livelihood destroyed due to urbanization. Most were quite happy to continue thousands of years of tradition growing and selling their own food. But you somehow know what they really want, and you'll make them take it no matter what the cost. Nice.
I don't know what they want. I can only know what I want -- the cheapest consumer electronic device that'll play a DVD every weekend.
I haven't a clue what "most" peasant farmers want, but I observe an influx of population from the farms into the cities, I observe the absence of uniformed men herding peasant farmers onto boxcars bound for Beijing, and I can only conclude that some peasant farmers are willingly choosing to make the switch.
If we go further, we'll likely end up in a chicken-and-egg cycle. (My DVD-lust drives a society to industrialization. Industrialization expands cities. Expanding cities reduce land available for peasant farming, so yes, some farmers may "have" to take a job in the city - because in China, they couldn't sell the farm to a rich factory builder, they probably had the farm seized by the Chinese government. But that's a bug in the Chinese government, not free trade; if anything, a free economy results in more industrialization, not less, because in a free economy, peasant farmers have an even greater motivation to sell their land to someone who can produce more economic output with it.)
Maybe it's about fucking time ISPs started using egress filtering. At the very least, there'd be an order of magnitude less crap (smurfage, etc) if ISPs dropped spoofed source IP packets before they got to the backbone.
OK, so the ability of any skript kiddie to spoof and insert a BGP update is a pretty fucking huge mess. But "pretty fucking huge" it may be the only kind of mess that motivates the clueless fucktards pretending to be "ISPs" these days.
*blink*
What country is this? I'm on the next flight there!
Yes, I'm willing to accept that it really sucks to be one of the 10,000 people who built VCRs in America, but that the for the other 299,990,000 of us, if half of us buy a DVD player from China at $30.00 (instead of $300.00 from a US manufacturer), we think it's pretty neat.
10000 jobs * $30K salary = $300M/year lost "wages". Over 5 years, $1.5B
150M consumers * $270 saved per DVD player purchased from China = $40.5B saved over 5 years.
Your Scenario: We keep 10000 jobs in the Good Ol' U.S. of A, and everybody pays $300 for a DVD player. 10000 employees keep a low-wage job for the next five years. Keeps $1.5B wages in the country.
My Scenario: Dump 'em onto the street. Hope that they've all found jobs in five years, but even if they haven't, we've freed up $40.5B of consumer dollars to buy more toys, or invest in new companies. Even if we have to pay unemployment and welfare benefits to the 10000 people we threw out, it's still a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of capital we free up by hiring people to build our DVD players cheaper than we can.
As for benefiting both groups, under my scenario, we also have 10000 Chinese who are pleased as punch to make DVD players, because the cost of living in China is low, and making DVDs in the city beats the living fuck out of peasant farming.
I'm all for it. If the government is willing to stop taxing me, I'll be more than happy to give up my voting privileges in return :)
Very well, then, we have our fix. Grab some old jewelry, some kingly water, a couple of electrodes, and plate yourself in gold!
Note: Although plating yourself in gold sounds like a really good idea to add value, there may be an offsetting factor that works against this theory, particularly in the form of higher health premiums that will apply your surviving co-workers. Minor detail.
If you're after the legal content - like the 30-second grainy .wmvs of talking heads on cnn.com - you might as well skip broadband (anyone can read faster than a loser with a TeleprompTer) as a waste of bits.
So what's left? That's right. Pirated movies, music, and pr0n videos! It drives the broadband industry!
I feel a DRM rant coming on...
Imagine if we'd protected RIAA and MPAA the way they've been begging... Imagine we'd saved RIAA and MPAA a few hundred million dollars in profits by locking away all content behind DRM.
And then imagine how many tens of billions of dollars in venture capital - and hundreds of billions of dollars in market cap - to say nothing of the billions in revenues, billions of dollars in tax on earnings arising from those revenues, and the billions of dollars in payroll and income taxes paid on the tens of thousands of jobs and salaries created by mass piracy of content.
Now... convince your Congressman to imagine it. Just because Eisner, Valenti, and whoever the fuck runs RIAA this week can offer your Congressman a line of coke to snort from between the plastic tits of a some pop star or movie starlet - and Bill Gates, Lou Gerstner, Linus Torvalds and Michael Dell can't - doesn't mean that the $10B/year entertainment industry is worth protecting at the expense of destroying the $100B+/year technology industry.
Nope,
Exoskeletally-enhanced bullies beating up geeks would be h4x0r3d by geeks. They'd either learn to hack back (in which case, they'd become more like us), or would die hilarious deaths as their own exoskeletons were turned against them.
Last words of that guy who bugged you in third grade: "g0dd4mn g33k m3ch5x0r1ng f4gz0rzzzaaaaaaaauuuuunnngh!"
Geek: "I can't read .doc files. Please use a non-proprietary format."
Luser: "What's a .doc file? I dragged an icon labeled '2004 annual report' and you tell me you can't read it?"
I always read that as:
# Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated +5
Dumbest warnings I ever saw were on a laptop's power supply:
And no, I'm not making this up.Of course, there's no word on whether the lead in the power cord is transmuted to gold when I cross the border into Nevada, or whether or not residents of other states need to wash their hands after plugging things in or not.
(The background is that a bunch of twits fell for the junk science on PVC softened with lead phthalates. Consider that if studies on intravenous bags with the stuff are questionable, it's Not Bloody Likely that failing to wash your hands after you plug in your laptop is going to kill you. But since when did science matter to the granola-crunchin' hypesters of the People's Republic of California? It's to protect the chilllllldren and the enviiiiiiirunmennnnnt!
I had almost forgotten the day those tweedlin' robins that used to inhabit MacArthur Park were wiped out by kung-fu-fighting. And now you... you bring... all... of this... back. May God have mercy on your ears, you heartless bastard.
Damn, I'm better than I thought.
The best part of the 'net (fuck RIAA) is that even if you've never heard of any of these songs, you can probably assemble this mix for yourself by searching the P2P networks for the individual tracks.