I've noticed the only shows I watch often are in no particular order:
Stand up comedy
Banzai
Southpark (only new ones. I can't stand southpark reruns and avoid them like the plague. Maybe it's because they too closely match current events - They had a new episode where Saddam Hussein got captured like 4 days after he actually got captured. If they can do that, they can make a new episode for every week dammit!
Futurama
Family Guy
*Would prolly watch simpsons if I got it
Notice 3 are cartoons, and one Banzai, I will probably get bored of once the novelty wears off.
The stuff I watch rarely or intermittently probably adds up to the amount of time I spend watching the stuff I watch regularly but the list is longer and my devotion is less.
Movies
Samarai Jack
Mythbusters
Odd & assorted Discovery channel / History Channel / Animal Planet stuff. Black & white war footage or anything with Hitler in it is avoided, as is anything having to do with emergency rooms, UFOs, Crop Circles, Ghosts or Psychic Powers.
Operation shows ( where you get to see them do real operations ) these don't play much but they are very interesting.
Monster Garage/Junkyard Wars/Robot fights/etc
Misc. But: Reality show participants should be redissolved into primordial goo and given a chance to re-evolve into something more worthwhile. So I don't watch them needless to say unless there were a Real World/Road Rules VS. Overwhemling numbers of Lions Tigers, Bears and Canniballistic Savages with Machetes episode. That I would watch.
I read the Story of O and it's sequel at age 14. ( I was reading one of my parent's books they had to read in college "The Rhetoric of No" which had an article that mentioned it - I thought KEWL, a porno book I can probably get my hands on. I sat at the library and read it. I could have bought it at the Bookland but I was too poor to shell out. It didn't come with a Mature Rating sticker like CDs do nowadays.
Spam isn't any worse than that..
Re:Internet connection gets pulled.
on
Paid To Spam
·
· Score: 1
ISPs might pull the odd user that was sending spam, but if EVERYBODY sent spam they would have to cancel every customer's account. Customers used to recieving that $168/week will switch to their competitors and tell their friends about their new spam money making software.
I hate to say it, but opening a mailbox to the world, - saying that anyone can store bytes on your hard drive is asking for abuse. It may be that a combination of bulk email filters and whitelists are the only way for those that don't want a box full of spam to get any usefulness out of email.
Maybe there will be email certification services that you can subscribe to for a fee that have TOS that will forbid spam. ( basically the fee pays the cost of administators handling spam complaints and cancelling accounts ) Then you could whitelist any 'certified' mail, and not depend on any uncertified mail you send to actually pass people's very strict spam filters.
This would make anonymous email still possible, but not guaranteed to get past spam filters or get delivered to people who don't wish to recieve anonymous email.
Market forces will decide what people do about spam. If someone opens a registered email service if/when ISPs stop cancelling people's network accounts in response to the flood of willing paid spam-hosts, and people decide to use it then that's what'll happen.
ISPs shouldn't really be responsible for the 'usability of the internet at large' anyway. If some dingus decides to DOS a site let law enforcement take care of it. They at least are paid to help ensure the usability of the 'mean streets' and the internet too.
There's nothing preventing some people from opening a new People's Republic of the South Pole where Marijuana was legal. There could be vast greenhouses where food was grown to giant proportions during the 6 month growing season of 24 hour sunshine. Imagine the buds on a plant that grew for 6 months before flowering?
They could build the First City on an oil field and use that to run the lights to mine raw materials and to run the lights for the 6 months of darkness. ( I would recommend having their independence day on the June solstice so nobody has to wait for it to get dark to light off fireworks. ( those could be legal too since there's nothing but Ice to burn.
Something this small could never transmit it's location for lack of power. Where are the batteries? Even if it runs off blood glucose, then it's antenna would be tiny and impotent, not like Bender's
Probably causes cancer.
A little device floating around one's bloodstream is a recipe for a stroke
I think the moral is, that people who fart around all day determining which programming methodology to use are unlikely to be able to actually deliver a completed project. They are what is called 'poser retards using big words to look cool enough to continue recieving a large paycheck'. In life, the bigger the paycheck, the more of these buffoons are attracted like flies to it, and the more likely that the dollars will in fact go to feeding these parasitic maggots.
Re:UML for HUGE projects.
on
UML Fever
·
· Score: 4, Funny
I agree UML is fine for HUGE projects as long as HUGE is defined as 'just a little HUGER than the one we are working on'.
UML *can* work for small stuff too. For instance, when you are writing on a whiteboard explaining a process it may be helpful to use some UML-ish diagrams. However, the whiteboard, when explaining processes, is about useful as UML ever gets.
When a big company buys too deeply into the marketing spew emmitted by UML tool salesmen, the results are UML overuse which is counterproductive.
Case in point: One of the first programming jobs I had was programming a large C++ project in a group of developers for a large company that had recently bought into Rational Rose's whole shindig. The work ( before Rational Rose helped us change our process ) was divided up by screen where one developer would check out the files for that screen and implement the change. In the case of a new screen, one developer would design and implement it.
Post Rational Rose/UML, the Supposedly most proficient 'Senior Developers' did nothing but draw excruciatingly detailed but untested UML diagrams indicating process flow which the 'Newbie Developers' implemented.
The net result was that the least experienced developers did all the coding, and that they struggled to implement excruciatingly detailed UML specifications with blinders on, without the 10000 mile high view of what is going on that designing it yourself gives. The untested specifications, detailed down to the method level were almost impossible to understand in a meaningful way. ( like the basic 'what is the purpose of this screen?' way ) Because they were untested, they often had intrinsic logical flaws that were impossible for a person with no idea what the purpose of the screen they were implementing was to notice until they had completely implemented the class and debugged it enough to watch it run and prove to themselves that what they had written was indeed what was listed in the spec. Even then, bugs obvious to anyone who had that 10000 mile high view went undetected until QA.
This UML overuse probably cut our productivity to 1/3 of what it had been before, and lost them at least one talented programmer ( I quit. )
Any overly detailed specification is worse than useless. A three sentence description of what a screen is supposed to do, and the phone number of the business analyst to talk to are MUCH more valuable than a 30 page waste of paper, and will lead to a better quality product that is rolled out quicker and which the customer is actually happy with because they have seen 'drafts' of it and were able to make corrections before it was rolled out.
If you are tailgating someone going the speed limit, back off. If they are going more than 5-10 miles under the speed limit for more than 30-60 seconds in fair weather, flash lights or honk once, pass where legal when it looks safe.
Tailgating is unsafe. If the guy in front of you has to stop, you may not have time to react. Going slower when someone is tailgating you is wise since you may have to stop suddenly if say, a pedestrian crosses in front of you chasing their ball out into the street, and you wouldn't want to be going fast with the added danger of a tailgater behind you.
When people beep too soon at a stop sign it is a good habit to make a point of stopping and looking at the situation before going. This makes you less vulnerable to instinctively stepping on the gas when some impatient idiot who can't see what traffic is coming honks his horn annoyingly.
Slowing down for horn honkers and tailgaters is satisfying poetic justice, but not deliberate road rage. The very thing that irritates impatient drivers just happens to be the best way to be safe around them. Driving on the sidewalk and holding up traffic ( not just the guy you passed but everyone behind them ) for 15 minutes is definately road rage.
I am someone who tends to slow way down when I am being followed by a tailgater or someone that seems too trigger happy with the horn, so this kind of thing appeals to my desire for poetic justice.
However, I agree that this may also just be a tactic to collect more taxes in the form of fines. Now a cop posted at the light can collect the speeding fine and the running a red light fine if they time the light change just right...
There are some possibilities that these fires could be deliberately caused by a hoaxer:
1) a really big magnet to induce mucho current. ( hard to hide ) 2) A microwave beam. It would be hard to avoid frying the witnesse's eyes with reflected energy though. A carefully aimed beam that took into account ricochets might do the trick. 3) An non microwave beam. An infrared laser would make the fire look spontaneous.
Let us consider diabetes. Diabetes was first discovered hundereds ( thousands? ) of years ago by 'doctors' that saw the body in terms of it's humors ( fluids ). One of the bodily fluids is urine, which they tasted and found to be sweet in diabetics. I believe the word diabetes derives from 'sweet urine' or 'sugar urine' or some similar etymology. So we will define diabetes as secreting excessive sugar via the kidneys. Diabetes has many associated symptoms including blindness, lack of energy, bladder infections, eventual kidney failure, poor circulattion etc but we'll stick with sugar in the urine as the definition of diabetes.
At some point someone found, by testing a diabetics blood that high blood sugar was associated with diabetes.
It seems reasonable that high blood sugar causes diabetes ( sugar in the urine ), since the kidneys filter the blood, but that would need to be tested to be proven by say supercharging a healthy mouse's bloodstream with glucose solution and looking for it in the urine. Then you would know that high blood sugar causes diabetes.
But some diabetics take insulin. How do we know that lack of insulin causes diabetes? There have been people that lost their pancreases. Those people lose their ability to make insulin ( you can test for insulin ) and invariably develop type I diabetes. Giving them artificial insulin cures their high urine and blood sugar levels. Lack of insulin causes type I diabetes - case closed.
What about type II diabetes? This is not caused by lack of insulin since people with type II diabetes have normal or higher insulin levels. But they still have diabetes. So lack of insulin is not the root cause of all diabetes. Diabetes can have at least 2 different causes including, but not limited to lack of insulin. Can we rule out that diabetes might cause lack of insulin? Yes. People with type II diabetes who still produce insulin are the proof.
The brain works via electicity and chemicals so adding electricity and/or chemicals to the brain can be expected to have an effect on it's operation and on the thoughts it thinks. But so can the environment. The photons hitting one's retina unleash a cascade of electrical activity causing cells in the brain to communicate via neurotransmitters ( chemicals ). The same can be said for the other 4 senses. So the environment, or even one's own thoughts ( and it gets hairy when we talk about "one's own thoughts" because you can't really separate the software from the hardware it runs on ) effect, and are identical with the brain's electrical and chemical state.
Adding a drug to a brain is like trying to fix a computer infected with a virus by treating the '1 deficiency' of the bits on it's hard drive by flipping random 0-bits to 1's. Possibly the virus writes 0's to the drive and a preponderance of 0's on a hard drive can be associated with viral infection, but the 0's are not the cause of the infection. It's the virus itself. Maybe the usability of the computer is better in some ways after the 1-bit-flip treatment, but the data is now more corrupt than ever. Now, even removing the virus will not rid the hard drive of all the random 1's.
The brain seems to be pretty flexible with regards to corruption whether from a knock to the skull or from a drug like alcohol or tobacco, or even crack. Adding random molecules to the brain may confuse it into thinking it's been cured for a while but as soon as the brain adapts the patient will complain about the fact that they feel the same as before ( drug tolerance ) and then they will be issued another drug. Like an addict, the person never faces their problems - choosing, in good consience to take the drugs prescribed by their well respected doctor. How is a kid to learn that it is in their best interest to curb behaviors associated with hyperactivity if they never feel disposed to act out unless they are 'off their meds'. Seeing medication as a substitute for self control or meeting personal goals is a dangerous spiral.
Point 1: Firefox rules. I love it. It's my favorite non lynx browser.
Point 2: Who uses bookmarks for anything but temporary storage of a URL? If I find a site I actually care about I don't bookmark it, I stick it in a web page I can access from anywhere so I have it no matter where I'm sitting or what crashes on any given computer.
I wonder when they'll be able to make capacitors capable of storing quarter-shrinking power using this technique.. They'd be small because they aren't really capacitors but high amperage batteries...
We still have indentured servitude. You can sign contracts to work for someone for some future interval. If you try to wiggle out they can sue you. They can't beat you though, and there is no such thing as debtor's prison. Once you are broke, and they can lay claim to any future income beyond that required for barest survival, you can tell them to fsck off. What are they gonna do? Sue you for the lint in your pocket?
Why can't clinicians ( especially mental health types ) seem to understand this? You see commercials that say 'Depression has been associated with chemical imbalances in the brain.' which go on to offer some drug as the solution to the chemical imbalances problem that they hope the viewer will assume are causing their depression. This is deceptive advertising when in fact A) brain chemical imbalances cause depression B) depression causes brain chemical imbalances or C) Both are caused by one or more other phenomena. I would wager ( Occam's razor ) that most 'depressed' people have real problems whether they can bring themselves to articulate them or not that are caused by external forces or their own bad choices that they need to deal with without drugs. ( IANAPhycho-doc )
As for TV being associated with ADHD, there is the possibility that A) Excessive TV causes ADHD B) Children who are prone to ADHD like to watch more TV than other children or C) One or more other causes contribute to both excessive TV watching and ADHD. ( such as maybe parents that don't pay attention to their kids and sit them in front of the boob tube babysitter instead of socializing with them so they can learn how to interact. Maybe lack of human interaction is the ultimate 'cause'. )
Guessing A) B) or C) for 'diseases' is just that, nothing more than a guess unless the other choices are ruled out.
I was wondering if anyone knew if it were feasible to pole fused ( amorphous ) SiO2 so that it was piezoelectric when it hardened similar to how piezo ceramics are poled today. I would especially be interested in a fluorescently doped piezoelectric substance - maybe SiO2 doped w/Nd?
How frikken hard can it be to design a guided missile? I mean hobbyists already build and operate model jet airplanes. It would seem that you could just replace the jet engine with a rocket engine ( or not, just use the off the shelf jet engine ) add a camera with a TV frequency transmitter ( get from spy shop ) and sit in your van steering the thing manually to the target like a kamikaze. I think you could build a decent cruise missile with at least a 5 mile range for less than $1000 and a high school education.
Slashdot Mirror
And you can eat Olestra potato chips too....
Notice 3 are cartoons, and one Banzai, I will probably get bored of once the novelty wears off.
The stuff I watch rarely or intermittently probably adds up to the amount of time I spend watching the stuff I watch regularly but the list is longer and my devotion is less.
Spam isn't any worse than that..
I hate to say it, but opening a mailbox to the world, - saying that anyone can store bytes on your hard drive is asking for abuse. It may be that a combination of bulk email filters and whitelists are the only way for those that don't want a box full of spam to get any usefulness out of email.
Maybe there will be email certification services that you can subscribe to for a fee that have TOS that will forbid spam. ( basically the fee pays the cost of administators handling spam complaints and cancelling accounts ) Then you could whitelist any 'certified' mail, and not depend on any uncertified mail you send to actually pass people's very strict spam filters.
This would make anonymous email still possible, but not guaranteed to get past spam filters or get delivered to people who don't wish to recieve anonymous email.
Market forces will decide what people do about spam. If someone opens a registered email service if/when ISPs stop cancelling people's network accounts in response to the flood of willing paid spam-hosts, and people decide to use it then that's what'll happen.
ISPs shouldn't really be responsible for the 'usability of the internet at large' anyway. If some dingus decides to DOS a site let law enforcement take care of it. They at least are paid to help ensure the usability of the 'mean streets' and the internet too.
They could build the First City on an oil field and use that to run the lights to mine raw materials and to run the lights for the 6 months of darkness. ( I would recommend having their independence day on the June solstice so nobody has to wait for it to get dark to light off fireworks. ( those could be legal too since there's nothing but Ice to burn.
I think the moral is, that people who fart around all day determining which programming methodology to use are unlikely to be able to actually deliver a completed project. They are what is called 'poser retards using big words to look cool enough to continue recieving a large paycheck'. In life, the bigger the paycheck, the more of these buffoons are attracted like flies to it, and the more likely that the dollars will in fact go to feeding these parasitic maggots.
I agree UML is fine for HUGE projects as long as HUGE is defined as 'just a little HUGER than the one we are working on'.
When a big company buys too deeply into the marketing spew emmitted by UML tool salesmen, the results are UML overuse which is counterproductive.
Case in point: One of the first programming jobs I had was programming a large C++ project in a group of developers for a large company that had recently bought into Rational Rose's whole shindig. The work ( before Rational Rose helped us change our process ) was divided up by screen where one developer would check out the files for that screen and implement the change. In the case of a new screen, one developer would design and implement it.
Post Rational Rose/UML, the Supposedly most proficient 'Senior Developers' did nothing but draw excruciatingly detailed but untested UML diagrams indicating process flow which the 'Newbie Developers' implemented.
The net result was that the least experienced developers did all the coding, and that they struggled to implement excruciatingly detailed UML specifications with blinders on, without the 10000 mile high view of what is going on that designing it yourself gives. The untested specifications, detailed down to the method level were almost impossible to understand in a meaningful way. ( like the basic 'what is the purpose of this screen?' way ) Because they were untested, they often had intrinsic logical flaws that were impossible for a person with no idea what the purpose of the screen they were implementing was to notice until they had completely implemented the class and debugged it enough to watch it run and prove to themselves that what they had written was indeed what was listed in the spec. Even then, bugs obvious to anyone who had that 10000 mile high view went undetected until QA.
This UML overuse probably cut our productivity to 1/3 of what it had been before, and lost them at least one talented programmer ( I quit. )
Any overly detailed specification is worse than useless. A three sentence description of what a screen is supposed to do, and the phone number of the business analyst to talk to are MUCH more valuable than a 30 page waste of paper, and will lead to a better quality product that is rolled out quicker and which the customer is actually happy with because they have seen 'drafts' of it and were able to make corrections before it was rolled out.
If you are tailgating someone going the speed limit, back off. If they are going more than 5-10 miles under the speed limit for more than 30-60 seconds in fair weather, flash lights or honk once, pass where legal when it looks safe.
Tailgating is unsafe. If the guy in front of you has to stop, you may not have time to react. Going slower when someone is tailgating you is wise since you may have to stop suddenly if say, a pedestrian crosses in front of you chasing their ball out into the street, and you wouldn't want to be going fast with the added danger of a tailgater behind you.
When people beep too soon at a stop sign it is a good habit to make a point of stopping and looking at the situation before going. This makes you less vulnerable to instinctively stepping on the gas when some impatient idiot who can't see what traffic is coming honks his horn annoyingly.
Slowing down for horn honkers and tailgaters is satisfying poetic justice, but not deliberate road rage. The very thing that irritates impatient drivers just happens to be the best way to be safe around them. Driving on the sidewalk and holding up traffic ( not just the guy you passed but everyone behind them ) for 15 minutes is definately road rage.
Retards like you should be banned from the road.
However, I agree that this may also just be a tactic to collect more taxes in the form of fines. Now a cop posted at the light can collect the speeding fine and the running a red light fine if they time the light change just right...
There are some possibilities that these fires could be deliberately caused by a hoaxer:
1) a really big magnet to induce mucho current. ( hard to hide )
2) A microwave beam. It would be hard to avoid frying the witnesse's eyes with reflected energy though. A carefully aimed beam that took into account ricochets might do the trick.
3) An non microwave beam. An infrared laser would make the fire look spontaneous.
Fess up! Canada's insideous evil OOZES down over the border like Maple Syrup!
So we will define diabetes as secreting excessive sugar via the kidneys. Diabetes has many associated symptoms including blindness, lack of energy, bladder infections, eventual kidney failure, poor circulattion etc but we'll stick with sugar in the urine as the definition of diabetes.
At some point someone found, by testing a diabetics blood that high blood sugar was associated with diabetes.
It seems reasonable that high blood sugar causes diabetes ( sugar in the urine ), since the kidneys filter the blood, but that would need to be tested to be proven by say supercharging a healthy mouse's bloodstream with glucose solution and looking for it in the urine. Then you would know that high blood sugar causes diabetes.
But some diabetics take insulin. How do we know that lack of insulin causes diabetes? There have been people that lost their pancreases. Those people lose their ability to make insulin ( you can test for insulin ) and invariably develop type I diabetes. Giving them artificial insulin cures their high urine and blood sugar levels. Lack of insulin causes type I diabetes - case closed.
What about type II diabetes? This is not caused by lack of insulin since people with type II diabetes have normal or higher insulin levels. But they still have diabetes. So lack of insulin is not the root cause of all diabetes. Diabetes can have at least 2 different causes including, but not limited to lack of insulin. Can we rule out that diabetes might cause lack of insulin? Yes. People with type II diabetes who still produce insulin are the proof.
The brain works via electicity and chemicals so adding electricity and/or chemicals to the brain can be expected to have an effect on it's operation and on the thoughts it thinks. But so can the environment. The photons hitting one's retina unleash a cascade of electrical activity causing cells in the brain to communicate via neurotransmitters ( chemicals ). The same can be said for the other 4 senses. So the environment, or even one's own thoughts ( and it gets hairy when we talk about "one's own thoughts" because you can't really separate the software from the hardware it runs on ) effect, and are identical with the brain's electrical and chemical state.
Adding a drug to a brain is like trying to fix a computer infected with a virus by treating the '1 deficiency' of the bits on it's hard drive by flipping random 0-bits to 1's. Possibly the virus writes 0's to the drive and a preponderance of 0's on a hard drive can be associated with viral infection, but the 0's are not the cause of the infection. It's the virus itself. Maybe the usability of the computer is better in some ways after the 1-bit-flip treatment, but the data is now more corrupt than ever. Now, even removing the virus will not rid the hard drive of all the random 1's.
The brain seems to be pretty flexible with regards to corruption whether from a knock to the skull or from a drug like alcohol or tobacco, or even crack. Adding random molecules to the brain may confuse it into thinking it's been cured for a while but as soon as the brain adapts the patient will complain about the fact that they feel the same as before ( drug tolerance ) and then they will be issued another drug. Like an addict, the person never faces their problems - choosing, in good consience to take the drugs prescribed by their well respected doctor. How is a kid to learn that it is in their best interest to curb behaviors associated with hyperactivity if they never feel disposed to act out unless they are 'off their meds'. Seeing medication as a substitute for self control or meeting personal goals is a dangerous spiral.
Point 2: Who uses bookmarks for anything but temporary storage of a URL? If I find a site I actually care about I don't bookmark it, I stick it in a web page I can access from anywhere so I have it no matter where I'm sitting or what crashes on any given computer.
I wonder when they'll be able to make capacitors capable of storing quarter-shrinking power using this technique.. They'd be small because they aren't really capacitors but high amperage batteries...
We still have indentured servitude. You can sign contracts to work for someone for some future interval. If you try to wiggle out they can sue you. They can't beat you though, and there is no such thing as debtor's prison. Once you are broke, and they can lay claim to any future income beyond that required for barest survival, you can tell them to fsck off. What are they gonna do? Sue you for the lint in your pocket?
Then you can open multiple accounts and have a free offsite backup with no privacy concerns.
As for TV being associated with ADHD, there is the possibility that A) Excessive TV causes ADHD B) Children who are prone to ADHD like to watch more TV than other children or C) One or more other causes contribute to both excessive TV watching and ADHD. ( such as maybe parents that don't pay attention to their kids and sit them in front of the boob tube babysitter instead of socializing with them so they can learn how to interact. Maybe lack of human interaction is the ultimate 'cause'. )
Guessing A) B) or C) for 'diseases' is just that, nothing more than a guess unless the other choices are ruled out.
It's gross. And I'm not a booze hater. I just hate sake. Sushi/Sashimi etc is yummy tho.
I was wondering if anyone knew if it were feasible to pole fused ( amorphous ) SiO2 so that it was piezoelectric when it hardened similar to how piezo ceramics are poled today. I would especially be interested in a fluorescently doped piezoelectric substance - maybe SiO2 doped w/Nd?
Yup.
VB code?
How frikken hard can it be to design a guided missile? I mean hobbyists already build and operate model jet airplanes. It would seem that you could just replace the jet engine with a rocket engine ( or not, just use the off the shelf jet engine ) add a camera with a TV frequency transmitter ( get from spy shop ) and sit in your van steering the thing manually to the target like a kamikaze. I think you could build a decent cruise missile with at least a 5 mile range for less than $1000 and a high school education.
of chickens!