Mod parent up a lot. Back when I used to play WoW (and such a great feeling, being able to say that), and more precisely, back pre-Cataclysm when my main was a rogue, that was often the toughest part of boss fights, figuring out where the enormous boss's hitboxen were, so I could melee it appropriately. It wasn't always where you would expect it to be. Stabbing the air a couple feet in front of a dragon in order to hit it was always fun.
Now I'm free! Free from MMOs! (Every once in a while I feel a momentary desire to try Eve, but so not doing it. Freedom!)
The three laws of robotics were designed for thinking machines, that could intelligently -determine- what a human was, and whether an action it was thinking of taking would hurt any humans or allow them to come to harm through inaction.
I know they're called "smart" phones, but I don't think they're really quite that smart. Nor, really, would I want them to be.
Neat. I was going to post exactly that statement, as a statement of something I'd heard on slashdot before and that has so far seemed to be universally true of -slashdot- headlines; I had not, however, known that the statement had been given a proper name and expanded to all news (though it does seem mostly true in its expanded capacity.)
I'd like to say I've never been to reddit, but that's no longer true: I quite enjoyed Mr. Skullhead's AMA thread (Skullhead being one of the creators of KoL; I only went to reddit, and for that matter, only learned what "AMA" meant, because Skully announced it to the whole kingdom that he was doing one.)
Haven't been back since, though. Anyway, since when is requesting that sentences be grammatical English, a sign of pomposity? (Pedantry perhaps. Though, I think of myself as a staunch descriptivist!)
Quoth the top post: "These days, with the site's users are wary of people using expendable accounts to try to seed their own content." Would someone please explain to me how I'm supposed to parse that sentence? I'm not seeing any way of making it grammatical.
"Hard literature" and "profound book" are not by any means synonyms. I've read enough "hard literature" that had pretty much crap-all to really -say-, it just said it in a way so as to -appear- profound. The copy of Ender's Game I have actually even has a forward by Card stating that his goal in writing it was to deliberately avoid "all the literary games and gimmicks that make 'fine' writing so impenetrable to the general audience", so that "the reader wouldn't have to be trained in literature or even in science fiction to receive the tale in its simplest, purest form". Way more profound than a lot of "literature", in the sense of "actually having things to say" - it just says them by making you look for them in the story, rather than by making you search for them in the word salad because the author was trying to sound like he was high on something.
Garlic in sweets can be quite tasty, too. Don't even need to go to Thailand - the Gilroy Garlic Festival, while a bit overcrowded, does a great job showing that off. Garlic+vanilla ice cream: superb.
I think abortion is totally OK. Congratulations, now you've met someone who thinks abortion is ok! (For certain definitions of "met".)
(Rather, I think abortion is ok for at least a couple months, while you're talking about a bundle of connected cells, none of which could conceivably be described as creating a brain or a nervous system. I'm not an expert, but I've generally heard ~3 months given as a time after which the entity you're looking at is more than just some cells stuck together. I could be convinced to move that number higher or lower with facts, but not all the way to 0.)
The way I see it, if you want to call abortion after 3 weeks murder, you should be prepared to call every miscarriage an instance of involuntary manslaughter.
I parsed it: "Intel Needs Smartphones more than Intel needs Intel", which was completely nonsensical. Took me a couple tries to parse it the intended way.
No, Skype's been going downhill since well before MS acquired it. Skype 4 was a buggy piece of garbage; Microsoft didn't buy them until 2011. I mean, it's -continued- to go downhill under MS, but it's hardly completely their fault.
Is it sad that I was totally expecting to be bel-aired, and was a little disappointed when that isn't how your story ended?
Also, I don't think that's quite how it works... normal people aren't turned on by children, would be disgusted by the thought, and would continue to be disgusted by the thought no matter how many images you showed them while they were horny and thinking about non-disgusting things. (As opposed to pictures of -post-pubescent- girls who just happen to not be 18, which most guys would be turned on by, because 18 is a totally arbitrary number. Yes, most 17 year old girls aren't exactly totally mature, but they don't become magically more mature on the night of their 18th birthday, either. I have met a couple scarily-attractive 14 year olds, not because I'm attracted to girls who look 14, but because they could easily have gotten fake ids and passed for over 21. (Until they started talking, then the illusion was broken.))
Hasn't anyone ever watched Castle? " There are two kinds of folks who sit around thinking about how to kill people: psychopaths and mystery writers. I'm the kind that pays better."
They'd have a fun time trying to do their jobs, if any time they tried to google for information for their job*, they got feds at their door... (I hear that actually already happens occasionally, but it'd be pretty lame if it were happening -constantly-...)
I was 11 years old when I finished my degree Got my picture in the paper and my story on TV To be so young and so amazing took a genius they were sure I was the center of attention and my future was secure
Chorus: I'm the boy wonder They all know my name I'm the boy wonder but still I feel the same They talk about boy wonder and the promise that it brings But I'm the boy wonder and it doesn't mean a thing
So they asked me how I did it was I born a prodigy I tell them anyone can do it if they live a life like me Buried in the books while the others played outside I learned all about scholastics and a father's selfish pride
CHORUS
I was told it was an honor when I made the Guinness book So I opened up a copy I just thought I'd have a look My perusal was revealing I still see it in my sleep Haunted by the volume of the company I keep:
The largest ball of twine and the longest fingernails People struck by lightning The fastest moving snails Tallest totem pole and the longest loaf of bread Most objects juggled while turning pirouettes Largest jigsaw puzzle and the biggest piece of cheese My years of study had earned a place with these...
So I forfeited my childhood living in the public eye And a paragraph in Guinness was my consolation prize Now my choices lay before me with the future open wide So when I graduated college... I went back to Junior High
I'm the boy wonder but now I've changed my name Because I've always wondered what it's like to be the same No longer living under the attention that it brings Yeah I was the boy wonder and it didn't mean a thing
Rather than a Caesar shift (kind of ruins your point - I can easily remember a couple words and a date, but that doesn't make it any easier to remember the words-post-shift, nor can I do a Caesar shift trivially in my head), I prefer just using words that aren't actually in a dictionary, but are still words. For instance, I don't have the word "Frack" in any password, but that's a good word to use. Proper nouns seem like they'd be good too - "Spiderman", say. (Though I suppose characters in less mainstream works would probably be better, to reduce the chance that, even if they're not in a -dictionary- dictionary, they still might be in some password-cracking dictionaries.)
I was with you, up until the last couple sentences. Maybe early 2000s-era Microsoft would've done that. Current-day Microsoft is more likely to just stop at issuing take-down notices and/or suing, because their UIs are just so totally perfect and we all just need to get used to them instead of trying to live in the past. Until the next new version that's even more perfect.
Why is it a disaster exactly? Given that most of -us- don't really care about "looking good", why should we care if our far-too-infrequent female brethren (sistren?) do? I certainly don't. I mean, obvious things that any functioning adult should do every day like brushing their teeth and showering, sure, but I'm assuming you're talking about things more like wearing makeup and non-tshirts, in which case I just don't understand.
Course, I also don't understand why we should care if one field or another doesn't have perfect gender parity, unless it can be proven that it's the result of unfair hiring practices - in which case we should be fighting the issue at its root of unfair hiring practices, not adding yet more silly bureaucracy like the article describes. Yes, the software company I work for has an odd lack of female developers. Yes, this is sort of too bad. But it's not really our fault (and by "our" I mean both my company and my gender) if appropriate female developers aren't applying. When they do apply, they tend to get hired, but I don't really see any reason to spend money, government or otherwise, encouraging people of either gender to look for jobs in fields they otherwise wouldn't have been interested in... (college is slightly different - kids at that age often don't really -know- what they're interested in, and are far too motivated by peer pressure and what they "should" be doing.)
That is a lot of text to explain a very simple question with, it seems to me, a much simpler answer, called "cause, food -tastes good-". Water tastes like, well, water. Food tastes like almost anything. We don't eat given the ability even if we're not hungry "for no reason" - we eat given the ability even if we're not hungry because it's there, and eating it provides pleasurable stimuli to our brains. Same reason we do anything else fun but unhealthy.
No, it's more like what happens when you go around screaming "YOUR RELIGION IS INCORRECT" at the top of your lungs outside somebody's window. Or, even more aptly, what happens when you go spraypaint it onto the side of their house. If you just walk around telling people that Jesus was a con artist, or the devil or whatever, I, as a nonreligious person, would think you were basically harmless and kind of funny. If you went and spraypainted those facts onto the side of my apartment, on the other hand, I'd be almost as pissed as any random religious fanatic.
I have a better solution, that doesn't involve arbitrarily calling a whole medium stupid and worthless: it's called bittorrent.
Seriously, though, I don't get why people say television is *necessarily* worse than books or movies or radio or comics or etc. Yes, there's a lot of crappy tv, but there are a lot of crappy books, movies and comics, too. Nobody's forcing you to read or watch them. I -do- grant your linked article's point that -hypothetically-, the networks have more control over content, in a way that no such similar system exists for control over books, which is sort of too bad, and I do feel we'll move slowly towards a world in which network tv still exists, but has to compete more strongly with independent internet tv. In the meantime, though... that doesn't change the fact that I've seen some great, even some decently subversive, television programs out there.
Or, I suppose I should say, cause there are dozens of window managers and what-have-you to choose from... which are all garbage in different ways. Linux is a -fantastically- excellent server OS, because if you want a server OS, you may or may not be running it in headed mode (I do - I run a server application on mine that wants a GUI), but you're still probably not interacting with the GUI aspect of it on a regular basis. And Linux itself is great.
But as soon as you start talking about the (user mode, not actually part of Linux itself) GUI aspects of a proper, modern, WIMP-based OS, you've got loads of choices... but they all suck major balls. So no thanks.
Long answer: yes, because some laws are stupid, and I would personally be -happier- knowing that the grunts on the ground are capable of ignoring stupid rules: if their commanding officer says "torture these kids", I'd like that ignored, too.
Slashdot Mirror
Mod parent up a lot. Back when I used to play WoW (and such a great feeling, being able to say that), and more precisely, back pre-Cataclysm when my main was a rogue, that was often the toughest part of boss fights, figuring out where the enormous boss's hitboxen were, so I could melee it appropriately. It wasn't always where you would expect it to be. Stabbing the air a couple feet in front of a dragon in order to hit it was always fun.
Now I'm free! Free from MMOs! (Every once in a while I feel a momentary desire to try Eve, but so not doing it. Freedom!)
The three laws of robotics were designed for thinking machines, that could intelligently -determine- what a human was, and whether an action it was thinking of taking would hurt any humans or allow them to come to harm through inaction.
I know they're called "smart" phones, but I don't think they're really quite that smart. Nor, really, would I want them to be.
They've been making that drug for at least five thousand years. It's called "alcohol". (Works on guys, too!)
Neat. I was going to post exactly that statement, as a statement of something I'd heard on slashdot before and that has so far seemed to be universally true of -slashdot- headlines; I had not, however, known that the statement had been given a proper name and expanded to all news (though it does seem mostly true in its expanded capacity.)
I'd like to say I've never been to reddit, but that's no longer true: I quite enjoyed Mr. Skullhead's AMA thread (Skullhead being one of the creators of KoL; I only went to reddit, and for that matter, only learned what "AMA" meant, because Skully announced it to the whole kingdom that he was doing one.)
Haven't been back since, though. Anyway, since when is requesting that sentences be grammatical English, a sign of pomposity? (Pedantry perhaps. Though, I think of myself as a staunch descriptivist!)
Quoth the top post: "These days, with the site's users are wary of people using expendable accounts to try to seed their own content."
Would someone please explain to me how I'm supposed to parse that sentence? I'm not seeing any way of making it grammatical.
"Hard literature" and "profound book" are not by any means synonyms. I've read enough "hard literature" that had pretty much crap-all to really -say-, it just said it in a way so as to -appear- profound. The copy of Ender's Game I have actually even has a forward by Card stating that his goal in writing it was to deliberately avoid "all the literary games and gimmicks that make 'fine' writing so impenetrable to the general audience", so that "the reader wouldn't have to be trained in literature or even in science fiction to receive the tale in its simplest, purest form". Way more profound than a lot of "literature", in the sense of "actually having things to say" - it just says them by making you look for them in the story, rather than by making you search for them in the word salad because the author was trying to sound like he was high on something.
New, stomach-churning trend?! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mole_(sauce)#Poblano
Garlic in sweets can be quite tasty, too. Don't even need to go to Thailand - the Gilroy Garlic Festival, while a bit overcrowded, does a great job showing that off. Garlic+vanilla ice cream: superb.
I think abortion is totally OK. Congratulations, now you've met someone who thinks abortion is ok! (For certain definitions of "met".)
(Rather, I think abortion is ok for at least a couple months, while you're talking about a bundle of connected cells, none of which could conceivably be described as creating a brain or a nervous system. I'm not an expert, but I've generally heard ~3 months given as a time after which the entity you're looking at is more than just some cells stuck together. I could be convinced to move that number higher or lower with facts, but not all the way to 0.)
The way I see it, if you want to call abortion after 3 weeks murder, you should be prepared to call every miscarriage an instance of involuntary manslaughter.
I parsed it: "Intel Needs Smartphones more than Intel needs Intel", which was completely nonsensical. Took me a couple tries to parse it the intended way.
No, Skype's been going downhill since well before MS acquired it. Skype 4 was a buggy piece of garbage; Microsoft didn't buy them until 2011. I mean, it's -continued- to go downhill under MS, but it's hardly completely their fault.
Is it sad that I was totally expecting to be bel-aired, and was a little disappointed when that isn't how your story ended?
Also, I don't think that's quite how it works... normal people aren't turned on by children, would be disgusted by the thought, and would continue to be disgusted by the thought no matter how many images you showed them while they were horny and thinking about non-disgusting things. (As opposed to pictures of -post-pubescent- girls who just happen to not be 18, which most guys would be turned on by, because 18 is a totally arbitrary number. Yes, most 17 year old girls aren't exactly totally mature, but they don't become magically more mature on the night of their 18th birthday, either. I have met a couple scarily-attractive 14 year olds, not because I'm attracted to girls who look 14, but because they could easily have gotten fake ids and passed for over 21. (Until they started talking, then the illusion was broken.))
Hasn't anyone ever watched Castle? " There are two kinds of folks who sit around thinking about how to kill people: psychopaths and mystery writers. I'm the kind that pays better."
They'd have a fun time trying to do their jobs, if any time they tried to google for information for their job*, they got feds at their door... (I hear that actually already happens occasionally, but it'd be pretty lame if it were happening -constantly-...)
* http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ItsForABook
Carla Ulbrich's 'Boy Wonder':
I was 11 years old when I finished my degree
Got my picture in the paper and my story on TV
To be so young and so amazing took a genius they were sure
I was the center of attention and my future was secure
Chorus:
I'm the boy wonder They all know my name
I'm the boy wonder but still I feel the same
They talk about boy wonder and the promise that it brings
But I'm the boy wonder and it doesn't mean a thing
So they asked me how I did it was I born a prodigy
I tell them anyone can do it if they live a life like me
Buried in the books while the others played outside
I learned all about scholastics and a father's selfish pride
CHORUS
I was told it was an honor when I made the Guinness book
So I opened up a copy I just thought I'd have a look
My perusal was revealing I still see it in my sleep
Haunted by the volume of the company I keep:
The largest ball of twine and the longest fingernails ...
People struck by lightning The fastest moving snails
Tallest totem pole and the longest loaf of bread
Most objects juggled while turning pirouettes
Largest jigsaw puzzle and the biggest piece of cheese
My years of study had earned a place with these
So I forfeited my childhood living in the public eye
And a paragraph in Guinness was my consolation prize
Now my choices lay before me with the future open wide
So when I graduated college... I went back to Junior High
I'm the boy wonder but now I've changed my name
Because I've always wondered what it's like to be the same
No longer living under the attention that it brings
Yeah I was the boy wonder and it didn't mean a thing
According to one of my favorites songs, a true story of a kid from the town I grew up in a number of years ago, after graduating college, the kid decided to go back to junior high. http://www.broadjam.com/artists/songs.php?artistID=35045&mediaID=271694
Rather than a Caesar shift (kind of ruins your point - I can easily remember a couple words and a date, but that doesn't make it any easier to remember the words-post-shift, nor can I do a Caesar shift trivially in my head), I prefer just using words that aren't actually in a dictionary, but are still words. For instance, I don't have the word "Frack" in any password, but that's a good word to use. Proper nouns seem like they'd be good too - "Spiderman", say. (Though I suppose characters in less mainstream works would probably be better, to reduce the chance that, even if they're not in a -dictionary- dictionary, they still might be in some password-cracking dictionaries.)
I was with you, up until the last couple sentences. Maybe early 2000s-era Microsoft would've done that. Current-day Microsoft is more likely to just stop at issuing take-down notices and/or suing, because their UIs are just so totally perfect and we all just need to get used to them instead of trying to live in the past. Until the next new version that's even more perfect.
(s/perfect/annoying)
Funny, I like it almost as much as KDE, too. I hate KDE.
Why is it a disaster exactly? Given that most of -us- don't really care about "looking good", why should we care if our far-too-infrequent female brethren (sistren?) do? I certainly don't. I mean, obvious things that any functioning adult should do every day like brushing their teeth and showering, sure, but I'm assuming you're talking about things more like wearing makeup and non-tshirts, in which case I just don't understand.
Course, I also don't understand why we should care if one field or another doesn't have perfect gender parity, unless it can be proven that it's the result of unfair hiring practices - in which case we should be fighting the issue at its root of unfair hiring practices, not adding yet more silly bureaucracy like the article describes. Yes, the software company I work for has an odd lack of female developers. Yes, this is sort of too bad. But it's not really our fault (and by "our" I mean both my company and my gender) if appropriate female developers aren't applying. When they do apply, they tend to get hired, but I don't really see any reason to spend money, government or otherwise, encouraging people of either gender to look for jobs in fields they otherwise wouldn't have been interested in... (college is slightly different - kids at that age often don't really -know- what they're interested in, and are far too motivated by peer pressure and what they "should" be doing.)
There is, however, virtue in reexamining one's opinions on what one "KNOWS" "right" and "wrong" are.
That is a lot of text to explain a very simple question with, it seems to me, a much simpler answer, called "cause, food -tastes good-". Water tastes like, well, water. Food tastes like almost anything. We don't eat given the ability even if we're not hungry "for no reason" - we eat given the ability even if we're not hungry because it's there, and eating it provides pleasurable stimuli to our brains. Same reason we do anything else fun but unhealthy.
No, it's more like what happens when you go around screaming "YOUR RELIGION IS INCORRECT" at the top of your lungs outside somebody's window. Or, even more aptly, what happens when you go spraypaint it onto the side of their house. If you just walk around telling people that Jesus was a con artist, or the devil or whatever, I, as a nonreligious person, would think you were basically harmless and kind of funny. If you went and spraypainted those facts onto the side of my apartment, on the other hand, I'd be almost as pissed as any random religious fanatic.
I have a better solution, that doesn't involve arbitrarily calling a whole medium stupid and worthless: it's called bittorrent.
Seriously, though, I don't get why people say television is *necessarily* worse than books or movies or radio or comics or etc. Yes, there's a lot of crappy tv, but there are a lot of crappy books, movies and comics, too. Nobody's forcing you to read or watch them. I -do- grant your linked article's point that -hypothetically-, the networks have more control over content, in a way that no such similar system exists for control over books, which is sort of too bad, and I do feel we'll move slowly towards a world in which network tv still exists, but has to compete more strongly with independent internet tv. In the meantime, though... that doesn't change the fact that I've seen some great, even some decently subversive, television programs out there.
(Yes, I know, I'm a couple days late.)
Or, I suppose I should say, cause there are dozens of window managers and what-have-you to choose from... which are all garbage in different ways. Linux is a -fantastically- excellent server OS, because if you want a server OS, you may or may not be running it in headed mode (I do - I run a server application on mine that wants a GUI), but you're still probably not interacting with the GUI aspect of it on a regular basis. And Linux itself is great.
But as soon as you start talking about the (user mode, not actually part of Linux itself) GUI aspects of a proper, modern, WIMP-based OS, you've got loads of choices... but they all suck major balls. So no thanks.
Short answer: yes.
Long answer: yes, because some laws are stupid, and I would personally be -happier- knowing that the grunts on the ground are capable of ignoring stupid rules: if their commanding officer says "torture these kids", I'd like that ignored, too.