Jeez, when did Americans become whiny pussies? We used to be badasses, a shining symbol of freedom and courage. Now we're just money grubbing thugs who are willing to spend more money trying to install politicians in Middle Eastern countries than on mankind's progress. Sad.
WELL SPOKEN, SIR! Get this badass muthafucker on the next rocket to Mars with 10 fine women!
That's how the real world works and is why we can't have nice things.
Very True. But that is only if you are insisting on anonymity. If you are willing to lock down a real, permanent identity before allowing someone on your network, then punishing misbehavior becomes trivial. Sometimes is to beneficial to have a network where you know who everyone is.
You probably won't even get in the door at most places without the degree however...
I have absolutely no problem getting interviews or jobs. Nothing but a HS degree and I started programming at age 8. I spent a lot of time teaching myself all the topics that you would learn in CS classes, though, so unless you are really self motivated, this isn't the route for you.
...without government regulation or fear of monopolies.
This is the basic problem that I have with 'free market' proponents. Without the former, how do you prevent the latter? People have demonstrated time and again, that given the chance to acquire and abuse power, they will.
Teaching programming to a 6-year-old kid is a little bit too early
I taught myself to program at age 8. I would have loved to have a CS professor explain things to me. As it was I had to figure out PEEKs, POKEs, binary math and logic on my own and that took a lot of time and effort.
Putting a kid at 6-year-old through the programming routine might sound nice, but I am afraid of the unintended consequences - that the kid might be psychologically scarred for life
Don't get me wrong. I used to partake on the same Business/Education bashing when I was in school. We all did (well, except the few who didn't revel in sociopathic/narcissist tendencies.) Fortunately, I grew up to recognize it's just an infantile, narcissist, callous and ultimately useless look-at-me-mine-is-bigger kind of thing. I suggest you grow out of it, too.
Hear Hear, spoken like a true gentleman, sir! Lets not lower ourselves to pointless name calling and other such common behavior. Its boorish and undignified of an educated individual.
Especially since one should be basing philosophy majors, those filthy little beggars are the vermin of Academia! Why, I I hear they aren't even circumcised!
How does anyone justify going to a Penny Arcade convention?
What is there to be justified? They have done nothing wrong.
Why hasn't everyone joined the boycott?
See point 1; also, nobody cares. You are clearly an exceedingly stupid person, so I will break this down for you:
The humorous point of the comic strip in question is the perpetually unchanging state of NPCs in MMOs, and the strange quest systems that only incentives freeing of a selected number of slaves. Think now, if you were a really good person, wouldn't you give out a quest to free all of them? For the indifference of the player to really seem callous, (and thus HUMOROUS), the slave is revealing the awful conditions they must endure.
Does the player character ever say, 'OMFG, YOU ARE RAPED, YOU DESERVE IT!'? No. There isn't anything even vaguely hinting that rape is somehow OK or acceptable. In fact if there was, the joke wouldn't really work, would it?
If you were upset over this web comic, I would think you had low reading comprehension or some sort of over-developed sense of political correctness. The fact that years later, you are still losing your shit over this tells me that you are a true imbecile. Because you are taking umbrage and holding a grudge at a truly trivial event, when far worse things are occurring than a video game convention. (And a remarkably progressive one at that: PAX panels this year addressed GBLT gaming, among other things). Go boycott the Catholic church, the people who have systematically hid and protected serial pedophile rapists for decades. Or, how about working on recalling Todd 'Legitimate Rape' Akin from office? No, instead you are losing your shit over a comic that isn't even really about rape.
What kind of people go there?
Thankfully, not you. But don't let me dissuade you, I had a great time being surrounded by truly wonderful people this year. Your non-attendance is appreciated, it keeps the jerk factor good and low.
No, if we, as natural animals, cause the extinction of another species it is because it was unfit to survive and should be left extinct. Human beings are not outside nature and its methods of determining which species are worthy of survival.
Mother Nature isn't some fucking primitive fertility godless, its a bunch of organisms living together. There is no conscious mind directing a divine order for things. If you want to being back something extinct, go do it. Don't give me this bullshit that 'it wasn't fit to survive'. We change the environment whenever we feel like it.
Wow, you might want to watch how you are stating the facts about your grandfather. I'm getting a very different picture of him than I think you intended....
2000 years is probably conservative. I don't think you can include the suicide figures in long term estimates. Those prone to it will eliminate themselves early.
Except, how many of those suicides are people opting out of 'Incurable' ailments? I think you are correct that all the mental health suicides would drop off after 40 years or so, but even these might hold steady as mental health problems related to aging become more prevalent. Of course we are both speculating, but in the name of scientific inquiry, we can certainly run a test.
Brings up an interesting problem: If the scientists running the test don't live anywhere near the length of the study, will this effect the study? Ideally, no, but......
Why do foreigners think it's okay to insult Americans again and again? You're calling us "opossums". I had one British guy say if we don't reelect Obama it will prove we are a "backwards nation". And on and on. Lately everywhere I go I see Europeans slagging-off on Americans.
It makes me think the U.S. should quit NATO rather than be allied with people who hate us.
Ok, so you are saying that because someone criticized this country, we should abandon a 60+ year military alliance that helped preserve freedom for millions of people the world over by presenting a unified opposition to communism. You sir, are a true idiot. What kind of isolationist idiocy is that? Don't cooperate with others because they might have hurt your feelings?
Yeah, people criticize other people, get over it. We mock the other countries for what we feel are bad choices on their part, and they do the same to us. What, do you feel we are so fucking special that we should be above criticism?
Reading between the lines of your post, you seem more upset over the implication that 'Mittens' Romney is a imbecilic monkey who couldn't lead a platoon of marines to a whorehouse, and that electing him would thus reflect poorly on us. (Disclaimer: I am in no way a pro-democrat, I am just strongly opposed to electing a degenerate retard the the White house) So, there, I said it: If we elect Mitt Romney, it will show the world that we are a nation of backwards opossums. I am an American, so by your measure that makes it ok, right?
. No individual, armed or not, can physically force another armed individual to do anything he doesn't want to do. Disarming people simply leaves them at the mercy or those stronger than them. Whereas arming everyone just makes them all equally strong.
You are 100% correct in your statement. But here is where I have a problem with the whole 'right to bear arms' thing. I agree with the libertarian ideals about being allowed to do anything that doesn't harm others which is a basic pillar most of the same pro-gun arguments make.The problem I see is, my risk of being harmed by those with criminal or evil intent is far far smaller than the risk I have of being harmed by the honest, hard-working salt of the earth guy down the block who has the best of intentions and makes just one mistake, because there are thousands of the latter for every one of the former.
That's entirely the point: designing ways to compensate for the weakness of plastic.
This story is huge. We all know that home 3d printers are just a matter of time, but this is probably the 'magic app' that causes the tech to go mainstream. Think about it, we are going from tech geeks and designers wanting these, to gun fans, which there are a lot of. Also, the venn diagram of the two groups isn't close to overlapping, so the tech is going to spread, and fast.
Moreover, Corry Doctrow has written articles about the 'coming war on war on general purpose computing', describing how corporate entities want to control how you use your computers. This story could mark the beginning of the government wanting to try to control how you use them too. While contemporary printers cannot make plastic guns that fire thousands of rounds, mass adoption will lead to increases in quality, tolerances, and material strength of printed materials, while lowering costs. If you can print a one shot.22 pistol now, we are within a decade of being able to print a 10,000 round life Mac-10. If the ATF isn't flipping its shit over this, they should be. Ignoring the whole question of if it is constitutionally legal or not to bear arms, their current organizational goal is to regulate firearms, and that bus is pulling out of the station as we speak.
Obviously, you cannot control who gets their hands on files to print guns. They have been trying to stop digital child porn since the early days of the net, and that is a clearly winnable war. Unlike something like child porn, guns are not reviled by a good 99% of the population so good luck in regulating gun blueprints. Everybody will have access to them, for better or worse. I am not too concerned about criminals getting (more) guns, but I am worried about your average slob with poor judgement being empowered like this, since there are far more of them with plenty of good intentions. Get ready to see school shooting fatalities go up, as the kids in the trench coats upgrade from 9mm handguns to uzis.
If the corporation creates an environment where that manager is judge solely (or mostly) on the bottom line of his P&L, then they are engendering evil. Even a large corporation can put into place metrics and evaluation criteria which reward managers for making decisions that are profit neutral or profit negative in the short term, but that have other benefits, tangible and intangible, to the company outside of that manager's division.
But what you are suggesting is that the corporation's motivations (rules, threats, bonuses, metrics) exerts total control over an employee's behavior, which is not correct. The CEO and board can put all sorts of sticks and carrots in place, and people will still do stupid things. My observation is that you cannot really accurately judge a corporation's ethics based off of events that occur outside the boardroom, but only their reaction to those events. (Even then perhaps not, if they have a slimy enough PR department to spin things hard enough)
But lets be fair, this isn't about Google being evil. It is about some asshole middle manager that is running one department and only caring about the bottom line. Google the corporate entity doesn't really have any say in daily operations on this scale, it can only react to stuff like this happening. They can send out all the memos and make rules until they are blue in the face, but at some point an employee chooses how to act, and the company can then react.
The real test is how Google reacts at this point. If they were really a 'good' corporation (whatever that really means), they would probably step in and help this guy out, while canning the person who fired him.
It kind of bugs me that people can't seem to differentiate between actions that employees of a corporation take, and actions that the corporation takes. (e.g. Microsoft buys companies. Microsoft employees disregard open XML standards.) This story seems like a perfect example of that.
You know, just because science figures out something that could make our lives better doesn't mean that it will be misused. To automatically refute advances in medicine puts you squarely in the realm of the Luddite. Someone like you was saying that soap is an unhealthy and unholy invention a couple thousand years ago.
The only similarity I see is that both devices have black faces with a screen in the middle.
I'm not defending Apple here, but there was no pinch-to-zoom on Newton - in fact it required a stylus. As far as design elements, the Newton splayed outward to sharp corners - pretty much the opposite of rounded corners.
Apple stealing these design elements from someone else doesn't bother me. What bothers me is stupid shit like making claims that gesture based UI elements are 'Advances in the Arts and Sciences' worthy if patenting.
Of course, with Jobs attitudes towards IP, this news is hardly shocking. He seemed willing to change his views 180 degrees when he was on the other side of the fence.
Since there are only 2 significant figures, it's both 5.5 trillion degrees Kelvin and 5.5 trillion degrees Celsius, hence the joke.
Its not the heat, its the humidity.
I was going to just fire that off as a one line zinger, but since pressure ~ temperature, I wonder if there were any stray atoms that got fused together in the process...
Even with 3D printers, large factories will still be able to produce just about anything for a fraction of what you can do it for in your house.
3d printers will be to manafacturing as computers are to printing presses. Nobody (who isn't plain stupid) prints out NYT best sellers on their laserjets. And verboten 'plans' like printable disposable machineguns? Just like the Anarchist cookbook, some people will try to regulate and control it, but it will still be available.
You won't be saying that when you're bleeding out of all your orifices.
For someone to catch the disease, you are required to come into contact with other people. So unless you can catch it off a hot pockets wrapper, most of/. is safe for the time being.
I fail to see the relevance. This is not a political problem. The Lord will cure these people. If they cause an epidemic, killing millions, that's obviously just His will.
That is the poor Republican response. The rich Republican response is: Fuck em, they are the poor and probably brown people to boot.
Slashdot Mirror
Jeez, when did Americans become whiny pussies? We used to be badasses, a shining symbol of freedom and courage. Now we're just money grubbing thugs who are willing to spend more money trying to install politicians in Middle Eastern countries than on mankind's progress. Sad.
WELL SPOKEN, SIR! Get this badass muthafucker on the next rocket to Mars with 10 fine women!
That's how the real world works and is why we can't have nice things.
Very True. But that is only if you are insisting on anonymity. If you are willing to lock down a real, permanent identity before allowing someone on your network, then punishing misbehavior becomes trivial. Sometimes is to beneficial to have a network where you know who everyone is.
You probably won't even get in the door at most places without the degree however...
I have absolutely no problem getting interviews or jobs. Nothing but a HS degree and I started programming at age 8. I spent a lot of time teaching myself all the topics that you would learn in CS classes, though, so unless you are really self motivated, this isn't the route for you.
Let me highlight something you quoted...
...without government regulation or fear of monopolies.
This is the basic problem that I have with 'free market' proponents. Without the former, how do you prevent the latter? People have demonstrated time and again, that given the chance to acquire and abuse power, they will.
Teaching programming to a 6-year-old kid is a little bit too early
I taught myself to program at age 8. I would have loved to have a CS professor explain things to me. As it was I had to figure out PEEKs, POKEs, binary math and logic on my own and that took a lot of time and effort.
Putting a kid at 6-year-old through the programming routine might sound nice, but I am afraid of the unintended consequences - that the kid might be psychologically scarred for life
I should just stab you for saying that....
Don't get me wrong. I used to partake on the same Business/Education bashing when I was in school. We all did (well, except the few who didn't revel in sociopathic/narcissist tendencies.) Fortunately, I grew up to recognize it's just an infantile, narcissist, callous and ultimately useless look-at-me-mine-is-bigger kind of thing. I suggest you grow out of it, too.
Hear Hear, spoken like a true gentleman, sir! Lets not lower ourselves to pointless name calling and other such common behavior. Its boorish and undignified of an educated individual.
Especially since one should be basing philosophy majors, those filthy little beggars are the vermin of Academia! Why, I I hear they aren't even circumcised!
How does anyone justify going to a Penny Arcade convention?
What is there to be justified? They have done nothing wrong.
Why hasn't everyone joined the boycott?
See point 1; also, nobody cares. You are clearly an exceedingly stupid person, so I will break this down for you:
The humorous point of the comic strip in question is the perpetually unchanging state of NPCs in MMOs, and the strange quest systems that only incentives freeing of a selected number of slaves. Think now, if you were a really good person, wouldn't you give out a quest to free all of them? For the indifference of the player to really seem callous, (and thus HUMOROUS), the slave is revealing the awful conditions they must endure.
Does the player character ever say, 'OMFG, YOU ARE RAPED, YOU DESERVE IT!'? No. There isn't anything even vaguely hinting that rape is somehow OK or acceptable. In fact if there was, the joke wouldn't really work, would it?
If you were upset over this web comic, I would think you had low reading comprehension or some sort of over-developed sense of political correctness. The fact that years later, you are still losing your shit over this tells me that you are a true imbecile. Because you are taking umbrage and holding a grudge at a truly trivial event, when far worse things are occurring than a video game convention. (And a remarkably progressive one at that: PAX panels this year addressed GBLT gaming, among other things). Go boycott the Catholic church, the people who have systematically hid and protected serial pedophile rapists for decades. Or, how about working on recalling Todd 'Legitimate Rape' Akin from office? No, instead you are losing your shit over a comic that isn't even really about rape.
What kind of people go there?
Thankfully, not you. But don't let me dissuade you, I had a great time being surrounded by truly wonderful people this year. Your non-attendance is appreciated, it keeps the jerk factor good and low.
No, if we, as natural animals, cause the extinction of another species it is because it was unfit to survive and should be left extinct. Human beings are not outside nature and its methods of determining which species are worthy of survival.
Mother Nature isn't some fucking primitive fertility godless, its a bunch of organisms living together. There is no conscious mind directing a divine order for things. If you want to being back something extinct, go do it. Don't give me this bullshit that 'it wasn't fit to survive'. We change the environment whenever we feel like it.
smoked more pipes than popeye,
Wow, you might want to watch how you are stating the facts about your grandfather. I'm getting a very different picture of him than I think you intended....
Wow, I have to say this on /.
correlation != causality
2000 years is probably conservative. I don't think you can include the suicide figures in long term estimates. Those prone to it will eliminate themselves early.
Except, how many of those suicides are people opting out of 'Incurable' ailments? I think you are correct that all the mental health suicides would drop off after 40 years or so, but even these might hold steady as mental health problems related to aging become more prevalent. Of course we are both speculating, but in the name of scientific inquiry, we can certainly run a test.
Brings up an interesting problem: If the scientists running the test don't live anywhere near the length of the study, will this effect the study? Ideally, no, but......
Mommy, what did they do in Sodom that was sinful?
If the practiced Sodomy in Sodom, did they practice Gomorrahy in Gomorrah?
"it's illegal to inject yourself with Draino"
GODDAMMIT!
*puts down needle*
Why do foreigners think it's okay to insult Americans again and again? You're calling us "opossums". I had one British guy say if we don't reelect Obama it will prove we are a "backwards nation". And on and on. Lately everywhere I go I see Europeans slagging-off on Americans.
It makes me think the U.S. should quit NATO rather than be allied with people who hate us.
Ok, so you are saying that because someone criticized this country, we should abandon a 60+ year military alliance that helped preserve freedom for millions of people the world over by presenting a unified opposition to communism. You sir, are a true idiot. What kind of isolationist idiocy is that? Don't cooperate with others because they might have hurt your feelings?
Yeah, people criticize other people, get over it. We mock the other countries for what we feel are bad choices on their part, and they do the same to us. What, do you feel we are so fucking special that we should be above criticism?
Reading between the lines of your post, you seem more upset over the implication that 'Mittens' Romney is a imbecilic monkey who couldn't lead a platoon of marines to a whorehouse, and that electing him would thus reflect poorly on us. (Disclaimer: I am in no way a pro-democrat, I am just strongly opposed to electing a degenerate retard the the White house) So, there, I said it: If we elect Mitt Romney, it will show the world that we are a nation of backwards opossums. I am an American, so by your measure that makes it ok, right?
You're thinking of Louis Armstrong.
You are getting people confused...Louis Armstrong was the guy who landed on the moon.
. No individual, armed or not, can physically force another armed individual to do anything he doesn't want to do. Disarming people simply leaves them at the mercy or those stronger than them. Whereas arming everyone just makes them all equally strong.
You are 100% correct in your statement. But here is where I have a problem with the whole 'right to bear arms' thing. I agree with the libertarian ideals about being allowed to do anything that doesn't harm others which is a basic pillar most of the same pro-gun arguments make.The problem I see is, my risk of being harmed by those with criminal or evil intent is far far smaller than the risk I have of being harmed by the honest, hard-working salt of the earth guy down the block who has the best of intentions and makes just one mistake, because there are thousands of the latter for every one of the former.
That's entirely the point: designing ways to compensate for the weakness of plastic.
This story is huge. We all know that home 3d printers are just a matter of time, but this is probably the 'magic app' that causes the tech to go mainstream. Think about it, we are going from tech geeks and designers wanting these, to gun fans, which there are a lot of. Also, the venn diagram of the two groups isn't close to overlapping, so the tech is going to spread, and fast. Moreover, Corry Doctrow has written articles about the 'coming war on war on general purpose computing', describing how corporate entities want to control how you use your computers. This story could mark the beginning of the government wanting to try to control how you use them too. While contemporary printers cannot make plastic guns that fire thousands of rounds, mass adoption will lead to increases in quality, tolerances, and material strength of printed materials, while lowering costs. If you can print a one shot .22 pistol now, we are within a decade of being able to print a 10,000 round life Mac-10. If the ATF isn't flipping its shit over this, they should be. Ignoring the whole question of if it is constitutionally legal or not to bear arms, their current organizational goal is to regulate firearms, and that bus is pulling out of the station as we speak.
Obviously, you cannot control who gets their hands on files to print guns. They have been trying to stop digital child porn since the early days of the net, and that is a clearly winnable war. Unlike something like child porn, guns are not reviled by a good 99% of the population so good luck in regulating gun blueprints. Everybody will have access to them, for better or worse. I am not too concerned about criminals getting (more) guns, but I am worried about your average slob with poor judgement being empowered like this, since there are far more of them with plenty of good intentions. Get ready to see school shooting fatalities go up, as the kids in the trench coats upgrade from 9mm handguns to uzis.
I for better or worse, we are turning a corner.
If the corporation creates an environment where that manager is judge solely (or mostly) on the bottom line of his P&L, then they are engendering evil. Even a large corporation can put into place metrics and evaluation criteria which reward managers for making decisions that are profit neutral or profit negative in the short term, but that have other benefits, tangible and intangible, to the company outside of that manager's division.
But what you are suggesting is that the corporation's motivations (rules, threats, bonuses, metrics) exerts total control over an employee's behavior, which is not correct. The CEO and board can put all sorts of sticks and carrots in place, and people will still do stupid things. My observation is that you cannot really accurately judge a corporation's ethics based off of events that occur outside the boardroom, but only their reaction to those events. (Even then perhaps not, if they have a slimy enough PR department to spin things hard enough)
Do no evil....to the customers....
But lets be fair, this isn't about Google being evil. It is about some asshole middle manager that is running one department and only caring about the bottom line. Google the corporate entity doesn't really have any say in daily operations on this scale, it can only react to stuff like this happening. They can send out all the memos and make rules until they are blue in the face, but at some point an employee chooses how to act, and the company can then react.
The real test is how Google reacts at this point. If they were really a 'good' corporation (whatever that really means), they would probably step in and help this guy out, while canning the person who fired him.
It kind of bugs me that people can't seem to differentiate between actions that employees of a corporation take, and actions that the corporation takes. (e.g. Microsoft buys companies. Microsoft employees disregard open XML standards.) This story seems like a perfect example of that.
You know, just because science figures out something that could make our lives better doesn't mean that it will be misused. To automatically refute advances in medicine puts you squarely in the realm of the Luddite. Someone like you was saying that soap is an unhealthy and unholy invention a couple thousand years ago.
The only similarity I see is that both devices have black faces with a screen in the middle.
I'm not defending Apple here, but there was no pinch-to-zoom on Newton - in fact it required a stylus. As far as design elements, the Newton splayed outward to sharp corners - pretty much the opposite of rounded corners.
Apple stealing these design elements from someone else doesn't bother me. What bothers me is stupid shit like making claims that gesture based UI elements are 'Advances in the Arts and Sciences' worthy if patenting.
Of course, with Jobs attitudes towards IP, this news is hardly shocking. He seemed willing to change his views 180 degrees when he was on the other side of the fence.
Since there are only 2 significant figures, it's both 5.5 trillion degrees Kelvin and 5.5 trillion degrees Celsius, hence the joke.
Its not the heat, its the humidity.
I was going to just fire that off as a one line zinger, but since pressure ~ temperature, I wonder if there were any stray atoms that got fused together in the process...
Even with 3D printers, large factories will still be able to produce just about anything for a fraction of what you can do it for in your house.
3d printers will be to manafacturing as computers are to printing presses. Nobody (who isn't plain stupid) prints out NYT best sellers on their laserjets. And verboten 'plans' like printable disposable machineguns? Just like the Anarchist cookbook, some people will try to regulate and control it, but it will still be available.
You won't be saying that when you're bleeding out of all your orifices.
For someone to catch the disease, you are required to come into contact with other people. So unless you can catch it off a hot pockets wrapper, most of /. is safe for the time being.
I fail to see the relevance. This is not a political problem. The Lord will cure these people. If they cause an epidemic, killing millions, that's obviously just His will.
That is the poor Republican response. The rich Republican response is: Fuck em, they are the poor and probably brown people to boot.