I think you ought to be able to squeeze a couple more implied ethnicities into that name. Have you considered Yoshi Gomezovich McHaggis, or Vladimir Chung McCohen, or perhaps Mb'ossa Vladimir Von McHaggis III?
I'm pretty sure this would have all been postdiluvian, so I'm not sure how it's relevant there.
I do have a question, though, about their interpretation of the data. They assume that genetic similarities between two peoples (e.g., in the Orkney Islands and in Yakutia) implies that genetic information was transferred from one of those places to the other. I don't think that's necessarily valid. In the first place, both peoples could have got it from a common source (e.g., from a people who have since been effectively absorbed into a much larger population), and the common source may have since lost said genetic information due to degradation of the genome over time via chance or selection. Second, both peoples could have migrated to their present location from who knows where at any time in the past.
> My guess is that you are younger than 30, have never bought > medical tape or gauze pads, and were never in the Boy Scouts.
I'm 33, but what has that to do with anything? Did they leave off using the logo twenty years ago and still want to protect it?
I was never in the Boy Scouts. But then, most people aren't. I have known a lot of people who were in 4H at various times, but Boy Scouts not so much. Actually, I'm pretty sure I know more people who volunteer for the Red Cross than I do people who are in Boy Scouts. But in any event, why would you assume that all Boy Scouts troops necessarily use the same *brands* of first-aid products? Wouldn't each scout leader just buy whatever brand was cheapest and/or most convenient at the local drug store?
I've seen Ace bandages (or things that people *called* "ace bandages"; not sure if everyone is aware it's a brand name) plenty of times, but the gauze and (medical) adhesive tape I've seen generally was pharmacy-chain store-brand.
The main Johnson & Johnson products I'm aware of are baby-related things (baby oil, shampoo, wipes, lotions, powders,...) and medications, although of course I know they're a large company and presumably make other things as well.
Anyway, my point was that they seem to use a *different* logo and look-and-feel for each of their different product lines. The baby oil and baby shampoo have the same drawing of a baby on them, I think, but the diphenhydramine has a different logo, and the pseudoephedrine cold medications another, and the acetaminophen (and related products) another, and so on. They don't really have a strong brand identity centered around any one particular logo.
> Where do you live? I'm in the UK, and I've never seen the red cross on a Johnson and > Johnson product here... but I'm familiar with the "No More Tears" thing on their baby > shampoo. It may be different in the US, where this case relates to.
I live in Ohio. If Johnson & Johnson uses any logo featuring a Red Cross on or in association with any consumer product marketed in the US, I'm surely not aware of it. As I said, I associate that logo mainly with blood drives.
If the physical access is surreptitious then you can just slap a hardware keylogger on the thing (e.g., KeyGhost), pick it up the next day, and read back the encryption password. This takes longer than flashing the BIOS, typically a whole day. But it's dead easy, and probably faster than brute-forcing any non-trivial encryption password.
I don't know that physical access is by itself necessarily game over automatically, depending on what security measures are in place, but it sure tilts the scales heavily in the attacker's favor.
Yeah, but how many people were previously aware that the Red Cross logo is also a trademark of Johnson & Johnson? Personally, I had no idea they'd ever used that mark. The things I most associate with them are a certain color of yellow and the phrase "no more tears". A red cross inscribed in a white square, on the other hand, is something I associate mainly with blood drives.
Which might have something to do with the reason J&J lost. The Red Cross actually *uses* this logo extensively. J&J pretty much has a different logo or appearance for each and every product they sell. Which product do they use the red cross logo for? Whatever it is, I don't believe I've ever seen it, or even an advertisement for it.
Re:Slashdot linking to Youtube Videos
on
I Will Derive
·
· Score: 1
Only if they involve math, computers, physics. or Star Wars. HTH.HAND.
Elemental fluorine is highly reactive, yes, but that doesn't necessarily carry over to fluorine compounds, because the fluorine in the compound is already reacted, by virtue of the fact that it's in compound.
>... What, your phone doesn't do that in English? Is this > another backwards American thing? Mine does exactly what > you describe, and so did the one I had before it, and the > one before that, going back to time immemorial.
At my house, we still have a beige rotary phone...
> The Latin alphabet is no more "normal" than, say, the Korean alphabet.
The Latin alphabet is much more *common* than Hangul, and is used to write a much larger variety of languages.
Not that this invalidates your point; Hangul was just perhaps not the best example. The Cyrillic alphabet might be a better example. It's used for a fair variety of languages (not quite as widely as Latin, but nothing is), and it's flexible enough to write pretty much any language you can write with the Latin alphabet (which is not true of, say, hiragana; not sure about Hangul, as I've not studied it in detail). There are even languages that are commonly written in either the Latin or Cyrillic alphabet, depending on local preference. So they're functionally equivalent, just... different.
Besides that, someone who's familiar mainly with the Latin alphabet can easily see that Cyrillic letters do look sort of like letters (in general, even if some of them don't look like any _specific_ Latin letter). Once you get them used to the idea that letters can have different shapes from the Latin ones, you can gradually work them over to ones that look more and more different from Latin.
> They developed their own syllabaries by modifying the > characters, which are alphabet-like in that you can > write anything using those 46(?) characters.
You can write anything, as long as it sounds like Japanese.
It's not an alphabet. It's a syllabary. (Well, two syllabaries.)
A syllabary works okay for writing languages that have a strict CVCV pattern, but it's pretty much useless for writing any language that has blends or closed syllables. In that respect, it has pretty much the opposite limitations to an abjad writing system (like Hebrew), which can write blends and closed syllables but can't handle a sequence of vowels.
An alphabet is flexible enough to handle any combination of the phonemes it has letters for. That's one reason so many *different* languages can be written with (variations of) the Latin alphabet (or the Cyrillic for that matter). You may need a couple of diacritical marks or special characters to represent sounds we don't have in English, but the basic setup works for any spoken language.
The *other* advantage of an alphabet (having a limited number of symbols to learn) is shared by all phonetic writing systems, syllabaries included. But they fall short in the flexibility department. You can transliterate Japanese kana into Latin characters and back, almost losslessly. But if you transliterate English into kana and back, it gets mangled rather badly, because the kana can't handle adjascent consonants.
> And removed from reality? Dude, 2ch is very mainstream > in Japan. It practically makes its own reality.
Where I come from, being removed from (everyone else's) reality, and making your own reality, are generally considered to be pretty much the same thing.
I'm not entirely sure it would be possible to erase something off usenet just because a court orders you to do so. Maybe these days it would be easier, what with most ISPs outsourcing their usenet service to one of a smaller number of large dedicated usenet providers. But back in the nineties, it would have been like trying to put the feathers back in a feather pillow after you ripped it open at the top of a bell tower on a windy day. You can send out a cancel, but it would never catch up to the original message, and many servers ignore cancels anyway. You'd have to get the courts to order each individual nntp server admin to remove the message from that server. In dozens of national jurisdictions. Good luck with that.
BBS stands for Bulletin Board System, and traditionally refers to an "online" community service that you dial into, with a text-based interface, which is often full-screen (80x25 characters) and in color. (This was back in the days when personal computers ran DOS.) It may have a sort of CLI, kind of like telnet, but more often the interface was menu-based. Users of a BBS can leave messages for one another, read whatever content the system operator puts on there, exchange files (typically, unauthorized copies of commercial games), and so forth.
In the US, the small community BBS gradually gave way to larger, more modern services, such as Compuserve and AOL, which had more features, more content, and, importantly, more users. Then during the mid nineties access to the internet started becoming more widely available, which pretty much made the BBSes irrelevant. The large national ones like AOL adapted by transforming themselves into ISPs, and the small community BBSes just sort of died out.
However, I think this article may be using the term BBS in a slightly different way, possibly to refer to an internet-based forum.
As far as all that 2chan/4chan stuff, I'm pretty sure those are web-based fora for people who are obsessed with Japanese cartoons. The internet has a forum for every obsession. Frankly, in the broad scope of what people obsess over on the internet, that's not even really one of the weirder ones. Not that it's exactly normal either, mind you.
Our library catalog has a feature wherein if you are looking at search results, and you click for more information on a title, the expanded information on that title is loaded asynchronously and inserted into its entry in the search results page. You can see item availability, the full bibliography, a larger cover image, summary, reviews,... all without leaving the search results. When you then want to look at the remaining results, you don't have to hit back. It's nice, and it's a *huge* improvement over the previous system, which relied on pop-up windows to show some of that information.
Yeah, I know, there are lots of sites that have no sense and misuse every available technology in ways that gratuitously annoy the user and impede functionality. You know what? That's been the case ever since the IMG tag was introduced. But if you don't like a particular site, you can always just go to another site.
Actually I would consider the iPhone to be a handheld computer.
Nobody would spend that kind of money on a phone, but for a handheld computer they would.
Okay, so it's a handheld computer that also makes phone calls. But that's just one feature. You wouldn't buy it just for that any more than you would buy an automobile just for the radio. Because if all you want to do is make phone calls (or listen to the radio), there are *much* cheaper devices available that will do the job just as well.
Of course, your point about standing in line is still completely valid.
> ok. so where do the people who don't [care] about comic > books, star wars/trek and anime fit in to all of this?
IMO, those things are peripheral. Here's a quick one-question quiz that will help you determine where you stand:
QUESTION: Next year, the NFL and NASA get together to introduce a new sport. The rules are similar to football, but the sport is played on the inside surface of an enclosed cylinder in space, which is rotating on its axis so as to approximate earth gravity (on the surface of the field). The cylinder has a diameter of thirty-five yards. The endzones overlap (and it matters which direction you enter from). Starting from the center of the playing area (directly across the cylinder from the endzones), what is the optimal kickoff?
Don't read any further until you have an answer.
How to interpret your answer: If you rounded your answer to some number of decimal places, you're a nerd. If your first response had to do with how fast the cylinder would have to be spinning, you're a nerd. If you answered in terms of pi, you're a geek. If you say anything that has anything to do with the interior of a cylinder and the exterior of a sphere being topologically the same, you're a geek. If you ask who's playing, you're neither and do not belong here. If you started babbling about Ender, further analysis is required.
> I think the author of the "nerd credentials" statement should > have his nerd credentials revoked, if he ever had them at all.
Agreed.
> Star wars is Dorky, not nerdy.
Star Wars is neither. Frankly, it's mainstream.
> Nerds like math,
I love math. Especially abstract math, the more generalized the better. Group theory, number theory, that sort of thing. (Unfortunately, however, I've never really gotten into topology -- not for lack of interest, but simply for lack of running across a good introduction to the topic.)
In general, though I associate "nerd" with engineering, people who carry a scientific calculator around all the time, actually liked DiffEQ, think in terms of tolerances, and have specific opinions about how many decimal places things should be rounded to. (Whereas, a pure-math geek like me prefers not to introduce decimal approximations at all.)
> dorks like D&D. Completely different.
I've noticed that a *lot* (not all) of the people who are into D&D, at least around here, are actually rather pathetic, the sort of people who, although they aren't jocks, also never really liked school, don't read much, work entry-level jobs or just sit around,... You know, general all-around losers.
I've noticed the same thing about people who are really really into watching a lot of movies.
> Nerds get girlfriends due to their thirst for all knowledge > and experiences,
Dunno. Personally I never really understood humans well enough to want to spend a lot of my free time with one. But maybe that's my geek side coming through. (Besides being a math nerd, I'm also a GCS. I used DOS for years, Windows since 3.0, every Linux distro you can name since Debian 1.3.1, played around with BeOS at one point and had access to a VMS system for a while and at one point was even on the Encompass mailing list, ran FreeBSD on my PC for two years. I have a PAUSE account, and a large collection of custom elisp that I've written...)
> > You really play nethack in a dark basement, admit it. > Doesn't everyone?
No. I, for instance, don't. I think I tried nethack once, years ago, and I just didn't find it all that interesting.
I will, however, admit to having played through the Zork series in a dark basement, as well as the Enchanter series, and the incredibly frustrating HHGG game... but my favorite, I think, is Curses.
> So 54 data centers responded out of "over 100"? > That seems pretty good to me.
Indeed, I would consider a 54% response rate high for this kind of thing.
> How many of the rest just didn't know how much energy > they used, or couldn't be bothered to look it up?
Or have better things to do than fill out silly questionnaires for Yet Another Pointless Government Study Destined To Accomplish Precisely Jack Diddley Squat? I know what my response would have been: after reading about half of the first sentence and realizing what it was, if the back was blank, I'd have tossed it on the scrap-paper pile.
I mean, seriously, what exactly has the whole "Energy Star" program accomplished so far, other than that certain models of motherboards display a superfluous logo that nobody cares about at boot time? It's not like people make hardware buying decisions based on the presence or absence of said logo.
I suppose data centers, since they use so *much* power, probably care more about power usage than ordinary consumers do, but do you really think they're going to be taking Energy Star status into account? Wouldn't they be more likely to throw the dollar value of the projected three-year energy consumption of the hardware into their decision formula? And if they're going to do that, they're probably doing it already. They don't need Energy Star logos to help them figure it out.
You want people to buy stuff that uses less power? Put an excise tax on electricity. It wouldn't be any more unpopular than the one on gasoline.
Not very difficult *if* you have the replacement part, with a good BIOS on it. Which is probably only available bundled on another motherboard of exactly the same model and revision...
> I can't tell you the last time upgraded the bios on a motherboard
The last time I upgraded the BIOS on a motherboard, it was a Pentium II motherboard. The update failed, leaving the motherboard unusable.
Phreaking, phishing, pharming, phlashing,... What's next, philching? phrisking? It appears to me that all the shift from f to ph really means is "nefarious". Or perhaps that should be "nepharious"? I'm tagging all such stories as 'phxing'. *sigh* I guess it's not quite as bad as prefixing "i" and "e" and "My" to every other thrice-becursed word.
When they were describing the Worst Smell Ever (like vomit mixed with rotting flesh and burnt hair and everything nasty), I had a realization: I *know* that smell. It's that nasty powdered stuff the janitors always pour on vomit in elementary schools. Extremely foul. As a kid, I always thought vomit smelled like that. But as an adult I've been around sick people numerous times and you know what? Vomit doesn't actually smell that bad. I mean, it doesn't smell particularly *good*, but it's fresh-baked bread compared to that vomit-clean-up powder elementary schools use.
The most *painful* smell I've encountered is industrial-grade PVC cement (the blue kind, not the clear kind). It's not really disgusting, certainly not nauseating, but it will give you a headache faster than nobody's business. Always use in a well-ventilated area. (By "well-ventilated area", I really mean outdoors. By "outdoors" I really mean a mountain-top, preferably on an especially windy day.) A good whiff of that stuff is about like having your hypothalamus caught in a hydrolic vice. Potent.
Which gets me to thinking: what if you mixed the smells of PVC cement, ammonia, and the stuff elementary schools pour on vomit? What kind of area-denial weapon could you make with *that* stench?
Slashdot Mirror
> I'll be naming my first born Vladamir McHaggis.
I think you ought to be able to squeeze a couple more implied ethnicities into that name. Have you considered Yoshi Gomezovich McHaggis, or Vladimir Chung McCohen, or perhaps Mb'ossa Vladimir Von McHaggis III?
I'm pretty sure this would have all been postdiluvian, so I'm not sure how it's relevant there.
I do have a question, though, about their interpretation of the data. They assume that genetic similarities between two peoples (e.g., in the Orkney Islands and in Yakutia) implies that genetic information was transferred from one of those places to the other. I don't think that's necessarily valid. In the first place, both peoples could have got it from a common source (e.g., from a people who have since been effectively absorbed into a much larger population), and the common source may have since lost said genetic information due to degradation of the genome over time via chance or selection. Second, both peoples could have migrated to their present location from who knows where at any time in the past.
> My guess is that you are younger than 30, have never bought
...) and medications, although of course I know they're a large company and presumably make other things as well.
> medical tape or gauze pads, and were never in the Boy Scouts.
I'm 33, but what has that to do with anything? Did they leave off using the logo twenty years ago and still want to protect it?
I was never in the Boy Scouts. But then, most people aren't. I have known a lot of people who were in 4H at various times, but Boy Scouts not so much. Actually, I'm pretty sure I know more people who volunteer for the Red Cross than I do people who are in Boy Scouts. But in any event, why would you assume that all Boy Scouts troops necessarily use the same *brands* of first-aid products? Wouldn't each scout leader just buy whatever brand was cheapest and/or most convenient at the local drug store?
I've seen Ace bandages (or things that people *called* "ace bandages"; not sure if everyone is aware it's a brand name) plenty of times, but the gauze and (medical) adhesive tape I've seen generally was pharmacy-chain store-brand.
The main Johnson & Johnson products I'm aware of are baby-related things (baby oil, shampoo, wipes, lotions, powders,
Anyway, my point was that they seem to use a *different* logo and look-and-feel for each of their different product lines. The baby oil and baby shampoo have the same drawing of a baby on them, I think, but the diphenhydramine has a different logo, and the pseudoephedrine cold medications another, and the acetaminophen (and related products) another, and so on. They don't really have a strong brand identity centered around any one particular logo.
> Where do you live? I'm in the UK, and I've never seen the red cross on a Johnson and
> Johnson product here... but I'm familiar with the "No More Tears" thing on their baby
> shampoo. It may be different in the US, where this case relates to.
I live in Ohio. If Johnson & Johnson uses any logo featuring a Red Cross on or in association with any consumer product marketed in the US, I'm surely not aware of it. As I said, I associate that logo mainly with blood drives.
If the physical access is surreptitious then you can just slap a hardware keylogger on the thing (e.g., KeyGhost), pick it up the next day, and read back the encryption password. This takes longer than flashing the BIOS, typically a whole day. But it's dead easy, and probably faster than brute-forcing any non-trivial encryption password.
I don't know that physical access is by itself necessarily game over automatically, depending on what security measures are in place, but it sure tilts the scales heavily in the attacker's favor.
Yeah, but how many people were previously aware that the Red Cross logo is also a trademark of Johnson & Johnson? Personally, I had no idea they'd ever used that mark. The things I most associate with them are a certain color of yellow and the phrase "no more tears". A red cross inscribed in a white square, on the other hand, is something I associate mainly with blood drives.
Which might have something to do with the reason J&J lost. The Red Cross actually *uses* this logo extensively. J&J pretty much has a different logo or appearance for each and every product they sell. Which product do they use the red cross logo for? Whatever it is, I don't believe I've ever seen it, or even an advertisement for it.
Only if they involve math, computers, physics. or Star Wars. HTH.HAND.
Elemental fluorine is highly reactive, yes, but that doesn't necessarily carry over to fluorine compounds, because the fluorine in the compound is already reacted, by virtue of the fact that it's in compound.
What I want to know is, how well does it detect tetraazidotellurium?
> ... What, your phone doesn't do that in English? Is this
> another backwards American thing? Mine does exactly what
> you describe, and so did the one I had before it, and the
> one before that, going back to time immemorial.
At my house, we still have a beige rotary phone...
> The Latin alphabet is no more "normal" than, say, the Korean alphabet.
The Latin alphabet is much more *common* than Hangul, and is used to write a much larger variety of languages.
Not that this invalidates your point; Hangul was just perhaps not the best example. The Cyrillic alphabet might be a better example. It's used for a fair variety of languages (not quite as widely as Latin, but nothing is), and it's flexible enough to write pretty much any language you can write with the Latin alphabet (which is not true of, say, hiragana; not sure about Hangul, as I've not studied it in detail). There are even languages that are commonly written in either the Latin or Cyrillic alphabet, depending on local preference. So they're functionally equivalent, just... different.
Besides that, someone who's familiar mainly with the Latin alphabet can easily see that Cyrillic letters do look sort of like letters (in general, even if some of them don't look like any _specific_ Latin letter). Once you get them used to the idea that letters can have different shapes from the Latin ones, you can gradually work them over to ones that look more and more different from Latin.
> They developed their own syllabaries by modifying the
> characters, which are alphabet-like in that you can
> write anything using those 46(?) characters.
You can write anything, as long as it sounds like Japanese.
It's not an alphabet. It's a syllabary. (Well, two syllabaries.)
A syllabary works okay for writing languages that have a strict CVCV pattern, but it's pretty much useless for writing any language that has blends or closed syllables. In that respect, it has pretty much the opposite limitations to an abjad writing system (like Hebrew), which can write blends and closed syllables but can't handle a sequence of vowels.
An alphabet is flexible enough to handle any combination of the phonemes it has letters for. That's one reason so many *different* languages can be written with (variations of) the Latin alphabet (or the Cyrillic for that matter). You may need a couple of diacritical marks or special characters to represent sounds we don't have in English, but the basic setup works for any spoken language.
The *other* advantage of an alphabet (having a limited number of symbols to learn) is shared by all phonetic writing systems, syllabaries included. But they fall short in the flexibility department. You can transliterate Japanese kana into Latin characters and back, almost losslessly. But if you transliterate English into kana and back, it gets mangled rather badly, because the kana can't handle adjascent consonants.
> And removed from reality? Dude, 2ch is very mainstream
> in Japan. It practically makes its own reality.
Where I come from, being removed from (everyone else's) reality, and making your own reality, are generally considered to be pretty much the same thing.
I'm not entirely sure it would be possible to erase something off usenet just because a court orders you to do so. Maybe these days it would be easier, what with most ISPs outsourcing their usenet service to one of a smaller number of large dedicated usenet providers. But back in the nineties, it would have been like trying to put the feathers back in a feather pillow after you ripped it open at the top of a bell tower on a windy day. You can send out a cancel, but it would never catch up to the original message, and many servers ignore cancels anyway. You'd have to get the courts to order each individual nntp server admin to remove the message from that server. In dozens of national jurisdictions. Good luck with that.
BBS stands for Bulletin Board System, and traditionally refers to an "online" community service that you dial into, with a text-based interface, which is often full-screen (80x25 characters) and in color. (This was back in the days when personal computers ran DOS.) It may have a sort of CLI, kind of like telnet, but more often the interface was menu-based. Users of a BBS can leave messages for one another, read whatever content the system operator puts on there, exchange files (typically, unauthorized copies of commercial games), and so forth.
In the US, the small community BBS gradually gave way to larger, more modern services, such as Compuserve and AOL, which had more features, more content, and, importantly, more users. Then during the mid nineties access to the internet started becoming more widely available, which pretty much made the BBSes irrelevant. The large national ones like AOL adapted by transforming themselves into ISPs, and the small community BBSes just sort of died out.
However, I think this article may be using the term BBS in a slightly different way, possibly to refer to an internet-based forum.
As far as all that 2chan/4chan stuff, I'm pretty sure those are web-based fora for people who are obsessed with Japanese cartoons. The internet has a forum for every obsession. Frankly, in the broad scope of what people obsess over on the internet, that's not even really one of the weirder ones. Not that it's exactly normal either, mind you.
Our library catalog has a feature wherein if you are looking at search results, and you click for more information on a title, the expanded information on that title is loaded asynchronously and inserted into its entry in the search results page. You can see item availability, the full bibliography, a larger cover image, summary, reviews, ... all without leaving the search results. When you then want to look at the remaining results, you don't have to hit back. It's nice, and it's a *huge* improvement over the previous system, which relied on pop-up windows to show some of that information.
Yeah, I know, there are lots of sites that have no sense and misuse every available technology in ways that gratuitously annoy the user and impede functionality. You know what? That's been the case ever since the IMG tag was introduced. But if you don't like a particular site, you can always just go to another site.
> its a nice phone, but its a PHONE
Actually I would consider the iPhone to be a handheld computer.
Nobody would spend that kind of money on a phone, but for a handheld computer they would.
Okay, so it's a handheld computer that also makes phone calls. But that's just one feature. You wouldn't buy it just for that any more than you would buy an automobile just for the radio. Because if all you want to do is make phone calls (or listen to the radio), there are *much* cheaper devices available that will do the job just as well.
Of course, your point about standing in line is still completely valid.
> ok. so where do the people who don't [care] about comic
> books, star wars/trek and anime fit in to all of this?
IMO, those things are peripheral. Here's a quick one-question quiz that will help you determine where you stand:
QUESTION: Next year, the NFL and NASA get together to introduce a new sport. The rules are similar to football, but the sport is played on the inside surface of an enclosed cylinder in space, which is rotating on its axis so as to approximate earth gravity (on the surface of the field). The cylinder has a diameter of thirty-five yards. The endzones overlap (and it matters which direction you enter from). Starting from the center of the playing area (directly across the cylinder from the endzones), what is the optimal kickoff?
Don't read any further until you have an answer.
How to interpret your answer:
If you rounded your answer to some number of decimal places, you're a nerd. If your first response had to do with how fast the cylinder would have to be spinning, you're a nerd. If you answered in terms of pi, you're a geek. If you say anything that has anything to do with the interior of a cylinder and the exterior of a sphere being topologically the same, you're a geek. If you ask who's playing, you're neither and do not belong here. If you started babbling about Ender, further analysis is required.
HTH.HAND.
> I think the author of the "nerd credentials" statement should
... You know, general all-around losers.
> have his nerd credentials revoked, if he ever had them at all.
Agreed.
> Star wars is Dorky, not nerdy.
Star Wars is neither. Frankly, it's mainstream.
> Nerds like math,
I love math. Especially abstract math, the more generalized the better. Group theory, number theory, that sort of thing. (Unfortunately, however, I've never really gotten into topology -- not for lack of interest, but simply for lack of running across a good introduction to the topic.)
In general, though I associate "nerd" with engineering, people who carry a scientific calculator around all the time, actually liked DiffEQ, think in terms of tolerances, and have specific opinions about how many decimal places things should be rounded to. (Whereas, a pure-math geek like me prefers not to introduce decimal approximations at all.)
> dorks like D&D. Completely different.
I've noticed that a *lot* (not all) of the people who are into D&D, at least around here, are actually rather pathetic, the sort of people who, although they aren't jocks, also never really liked school, don't read much, work entry-level jobs or just sit around,
I've noticed the same thing about people who are really really into watching a lot of movies.
> Nerds get girlfriends due to their thirst for all knowledge
> and experiences,
Dunno. Personally I never really understood humans well enough to want to spend a lot of my free time with one. But maybe that's my geek side coming through. (Besides being a math nerd, I'm also a GCS. I used DOS for years, Windows since 3.0, every Linux distro you can name since Debian 1.3.1, played around with BeOS at one point and had access to a VMS system for a while and at one point was even on the Encompass mailing list, ran FreeBSD on my PC for two years. I have a PAUSE account, and a large collection of custom elisp that I've written...)
> > You really play nethack in a dark basement, admit it.
> Doesn't everyone?
No. I, for instance, don't. I think I tried nethack once, years ago, and I just didn't find it all that interesting.
I will, however, admit to having played through the Zork series in a dark basement, as well as the Enchanter series, and the incredibly frustrating HHGG game... but my favorite, I think, is Curses.
Slashdot? You had slashdot? Why, in my day we had to cut our own quills and stretch our own parchments!
> So 54 data centers responded out of "over 100"?
> That seems pretty good to me.
Indeed, I would consider a 54% response rate high for this kind of thing.
> How many of the rest just didn't know how much energy
> they used, or couldn't be bothered to look it up?
Or have better things to do than fill out silly questionnaires for Yet Another Pointless Government Study Destined To Accomplish Precisely Jack Diddley Squat? I know what my response would have been: after reading about half of the first sentence and realizing what it was, if the back was blank, I'd have tossed it on the scrap-paper pile.
I mean, seriously, what exactly has the whole "Energy Star" program accomplished so far, other than that certain models of motherboards display a superfluous logo that nobody cares about at boot time? It's not like people make hardware buying decisions based on the presence or absence of said logo.
I suppose data centers, since they use so *much* power, probably care more about power usage than ordinary consumers do, but do you really think they're going to be taking Energy Star status into account? Wouldn't they be more likely to throw the dollar value of the projected three-year energy consumption of the hardware into their decision formula? And if they're going to do that, they're probably doing it already. They don't need Energy Star logos to help them figure it out.
You want people to buy stuff that uses less power? Put an excise tax on electricity. It wouldn't be any more unpopular than the one on gasoline.
Not very difficult *if* you have the replacement part, with a good BIOS on it. Which is probably only available bundled on another motherboard of exactly the same model and revision...
> I can't tell you the last time upgraded the bios on a motherboard
... What's next, philching? phrisking? It appears to me that all the shift from f to ph really means is "nefarious". Or perhaps that should be "nepharious"? I'm tagging all such stories as 'phxing'. *sigh* I guess it's not quite as bad as prefixing "i" and "e" and "My" to every other thrice-becursed word.
The last time I upgraded the BIOS on a motherboard, it was a Pentium II motherboard. The update failed, leaving the motherboard unusable.
Phreaking, phishing, pharming, phlashing,
When they were describing the Worst Smell Ever (like vomit mixed with rotting flesh and burnt hair and everything nasty), I had a realization: I *know* that smell. It's that nasty powdered stuff the janitors always pour on vomit in elementary schools. Extremely foul. As a kid, I always thought vomit smelled like that. But as an adult I've been around sick people numerous times and you know what? Vomit doesn't actually smell that bad. I mean, it doesn't smell particularly *good*, but it's fresh-baked bread compared to that vomit-clean-up powder elementary schools use.
The most *painful* smell I've encountered is industrial-grade PVC cement (the blue kind, not the clear kind). It's not really disgusting, certainly not nauseating, but it will give you a headache faster than nobody's business. Always use in a well-ventilated area. (By "well-ventilated area", I really mean outdoors. By "outdoors" I really mean a mountain-top, preferably on an especially windy day.) A good whiff of that stuff is about like having your hypothalamus caught in a hydrolic vice. Potent.
Which gets me to thinking: what if you mixed the smells of PVC cement, ammonia, and the stuff elementary schools pour on vomit? What kind of area-denial weapon could you make with *that* stench?