Yeah, the basic building blocks of so-called "heavy life" are Silicon, Lithium, Sulfur, Phosphorus, Arsenic, and Selenium. Everything is one row further down the table. So they use Si6Li12S6 as their primary fuel, breathe in S2, drink lithium sulfide, and exhale silicon sulfide, and need Strontium for healthy bones.
I'll leave calculating their theoretical room-temperature "comfort range" as an exercise for the aspiring sci-fi writer.
Actually, the old "I think you accidentally a word" joke is significantly older than 4chan. I personally first encountered it in the late eighties, which easily makes it older than the web.
> We will fire the Anti-Strange particle > emitter into the temporal distortion field > to correct the change in the timeline.
It's not working, Captain. The chroniton radiation emanating from the distortion field is creating too much quantum interference. I'm rerouting auxiliary power through the lateral sensor array, but it's not having any effect.
> > But for browsing the web, that big, uninterrupted iPad window is pretty nice. > The lack of Flash support kind of throw that option out already.
Meh.
I'm a lot less hostile to Flash these days than I used to be, due to the advent of FlashBlock, which allows the Flash plugin to be installed without making the web completely unusable from that computer.
But I still haven't figured out why anyone *cares* about it. My primary browser doesn't have the plugin installed, simply because I haven't bothered. I had it installed in Firefox 2.x, but when I upgraded to 3.0 I would have had to install it again or make a symlink, and I never bothered.
I do have a couple of other browsers sitting around that have Flash support (Konqueror, for instance), but I almost never use them for that. On the extremely rare occasion that I actually want to watch a YouTube video, I usually download it and watch it in Totem or somesuch. (There's an add-on for Firefox that lets you download even the ones that don't otherwise have a download link.) I experimented briefly with smart.fm, but I found that it didn't really meet my needs, and I ended up using a real SRS instead.
> They've cleaned up their ways since then, so I hear.
Yeah? I have two things to say about that:
1. I'll believe it when I see it.
2. There's no way on God's green earth I'm EVER going to install any software with the Real brand on it for long enough to see it. My aversion to Real software is so strong, if the dairy farmers' group came out with a game involving dairy products made with real milk and marked with the Real seal, I would not allow it to be installed on any computer or network that I have to work with, just because of the word Real.
On the contrary, I've been saying for close to twenty years that Real software should be illegal. I've not seen this RealDVD product, but if it's even remotely similar to other Real products, the world is MUCH better off without it. Real makes Bonzi look totally awesome by comparison.
Somebody on the academic study committee was smoking crack.
Orange County, California is one of the most infamous liberal hotbeds on the planet, second only to northern Europe, Hawaii, and parts of Massachusetts.
If you want to find out what conservative is, spend a year in Waterloo, Iowa, or rural Minnesota, or Kosciusko County, Indiana. I'm telling you, it's a whole different world. There are places out there where a Palin supporter can call himself a "moderate" and be taken seriously.
Please tell me I did not just read the phrase "purple and orange". Is someone over there completely colorblind? What will they come up with next, red and pink?
Yeah. Off the top of my head, I can think of three.
One of them is changing the extension on the filenames of a bunch of files that you can select with a wildcard (i.e., MOVE *.LOG *.TXT or the like). Doing this on *nix generally involves a Perl one-liner, a foreach loop, a regex substitution, and system('mv', $orig, $target); Windows (or DOS for that matter) wins this one.
The others are setting up a simple file share and setting up a simple print share. Sure, Samba configuration is easier when you start wanting to do anything complicated, but for the really simple stuff that is all most people ever need, it's easier on Windows.
> and some things are easier in *nix than Windows.
> Before Windows NT came on the scene, NetWare was > pretty much THE PC file-and-print server solution.
Yes, I remember. And it sucked horse pooh. Through a straw.
In fairness, I assume that Novell's software has improved over the last seventeen years. I mean, other software has improved rather considerably, so it seems logical that theirs would as well.
But, personally, if I never see a running copy of NetWare again, I'm not going to shed any tears over it.
> It's not testable, so it's not a theory. It's a hypothesis.
If you're going to be pedantic, at least get it right.
A theory is something that has already *been* tested, repeatedly. A hypothesis still has to be testable. An assertion that is neither is simply called "an idea".
> Okay, maybe this is where I inadvertently let on that I'm > not a physicist, but what is a "dragon here be" symbol?!
Actually, what you just let on is that you're not a computer geek. (You can turn in your card and Slashdot ID later.)
"Here be dragons", from the symbols on ancient maps, is what computer geeks say when they don't understand why a given section of source code is doing what it's doing. Just as ancient peoples found it dangerous to stray beyond the edge of their maps, any programmer worth his salt knows that it's dangerous to change code when you don't understand why it is the way it is, and for much the same reason: you're going beyond the edges of your knowledge, and you don't know what you'll find. Making changes to such code can end up breaking things you had no idea your change would impact at all.
> From my perspective, services are a moderate-margin business at best.
Depends on the services. Some services are pretty much a commodity: virtually anyone can provide them, and the result is about the same almost no matter who you get them from, so the competition drives the going rate down to within epsilon of what it actually costs to provide the service. Janitorial service is an excellent example of this. It's not that you can't find steady work there. You can. People are always going to need stuff cleaned. But you're not going to make a trainload of money at it, because if you charge too much you *will* be underbid.
However, not all services are commodity. Some services, require expertise, or infrastructure, or other things that not so many people have to offer, so it matters who you get them from. If you hire the lowest bidding advertising firm or lawyer, you may save some money up front, but it can also really cost you.
Computers and information technology are a sufficiently broad category of endeavor that, if you look, you can find examples of computer and IT services in both of the above categories, and some that are sort of in-between.
> Basically seems to allege that should this deal > go through, it would be unfair for current long > time shareholders of Novell as Elliott's takeover > would be underpaying and ripping them off
The market trading seems to agree with this, although it remains to be seen whether the share price will stay up. If the share price does stay up, obviously, the deal won't go through at the quoted figure. $5.75 per share doesn't look so generous when the current share trading price is over $6. If the share price stays up for about a day and a half and then sinks rapidly back toward its former level once the news goes stale, then that would be an argument for the opposite view.
Apparently you haven't been paying close attention to your spam lately.
Almost all of the advertised products are very obviously outright fraud (which is already illegal in most jurisdictions). Most of the rest are products that would be illegal no matter how they were advertised.
There are also a few adverts for porn mixed in, but upon closer inspection most of those appear to be attempts to get people to download obvious trojans and thus join their own computer to the botnet (you know, girls-who-love-cattle.mpeg.exe and that sort of rot), and most of the rest are actually advertising 1337ized-namebrand fertility drugs. As best I can figure, the porn industry doesn't have to send spam, because the search engines index them.
There's also a lot of spam that doesn't appear to be advertising anything at all, but I think mostly that gets sent to people on the "enemies" list: likely sysadmin addresses (abuse, webmaster, postmaster, hostmaster, and anything found in a domain registration), plus anyone who has sent back abuse reports, complaints, or unsubscribe requests.
> > how quaint: apparently in Spain, the accused have some right to privacy
> That's because in Spain you're not guilty > until proven guilty by a court of law.
Yeah, rules restricting what the news media can and cannot publish, with regard to ongoing criminal prosecution, obviously don't have anything to do with free speech or free press. It's all about presumed innocence. Clearly the right to a private trial is the most important right in a free society.
> but it's the conservative strongholds that have laws like that.
Yeah, it's the conser... WHAT? Wait.
We're talking about Orange County, California here, right? Have I fallen into some alternate reality where that's NOT one of the most liberal places on the whole entire planet, exceeded in radical extremity only by northern Europe, Hawaii, and parts of Massachusetts?
> Are there any Youtube alternatives that > don't take content down so easily?
Why not host it on your own web server?
Surely you don't think hosting video is technically hard? Dude, just throw it in/var/www/ and Bob is your uncle. Don't make it harder than it needs to be.
They could try to attack you via your DNS registrar and/or upstream connectivity provider, but in most cases that should be rather harder than just asking a server admin to take down a file.
Since Google is the publisher for YouTube content, the decision to publish or not to publish is theirs. You can disagree with their decision, and you are free to start up your own video-publishing site and attempt to compete with them (and I have no doubt _somebody_ will come forward to host the Lessig video), but you can't make Google publish stuff they don't want to publish, just like you can't make the local paper print your letter to the editor if they decide not to.
However, if somebody else is using legal action or the threat thereof to manipulate what Google will or won't publish, then that would be a different thing entirely. In that case (assuming the video's use of whatever it uses is fair use as the summary suggests), that would be third-party censorship.
The wording in the summary (notably, "arguably") also makes me wonder on what grounds the video's use of the song is considered fair use. I'd like to see the reasoning there.
> but I do not have such a right to say that I enjoy > the color blue purely as a matter of aesthetics?
On the contrary, that's protected political speech. (The difference between aesthetics and politics is essentially nil.)
But free speech does NOT give you a right to say anything you want at any time you want for any reason you want. It does not, for example, give you the right to claim that you are pregnant with Barak Obama's child, swear to this under oath in court, and sue him for child support, if in fact you've never even met him. (If the allegation were something you could _substantiate_, then that would be different.) Free speech also does not entitle you to take someone else's book without their permission, claim it's yours, and sell copies of it.
You can *talk about* the other guy's book. You can write *commentary* about the other guy's book. That's protected political speech.
But you can't just appropriate somebody else's work and distribute it as if it were your own work. Well, in China you can, but in Western society it's not kosher.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, the basic building blocks of so-called "heavy life" are Silicon, Lithium, Sulfur, Phosphorus, Arsenic, and Selenium. Everything is one row further down the table. So they use Si6Li12S6 as their primary fuel, breathe in S2, drink lithium sulfide, and exhale silicon sulfide, and need Strontium for healthy bones.
I'll leave calculating their theoretical room-temperature "comfort range" as an exercise for the aspiring sci-fi writer.
Actually, the old "I think you accidentally a word" joke is significantly older than 4chan. I personally first encountered it in the late eighties, which easily makes it older than the web.
> Is anti-matter matter?
No, but matter isn't anti-matter either.
> Could we build stuff out of it?
Sure, if by "stuff" you mean "the occasional short-lived antihydrogen nucleus".
> We will fire the Anti-Strange particle
> emitter into the temporal distortion field
> to correct the change in the timeline.
It's not working, Captain. The chroniton radiation emanating from the distortion field is creating too much quantum interference. I'm rerouting auxiliary power through the lateral sensor array, but it's not having any effect.
Black ones? Black roses, perhaps? That's what I would have sent IE6...
> > But for browsing the web, that big, uninterrupted iPad window is pretty nice.
> The lack of Flash support kind of throw that option out already.
Meh.
I'm a lot less hostile to Flash these days than I used to be, due to the advent of FlashBlock, which allows the Flash plugin to be installed without making the web completely unusable from that computer.
But I still haven't figured out why anyone *cares* about it. My primary browser doesn't have the plugin installed, simply because I haven't bothered. I had it installed in Firefox 2.x, but when I upgraded to 3.0 I would have had to install it again or make a symlink, and I never bothered.
I do have a couple of other browsers sitting around that have Flash support (Konqueror, for instance), but I almost never use them for that. On the extremely rare occasion that I actually want to watch a YouTube video, I usually download it and watch it in Totem or somesuch. (There's an add-on for Firefox that lets you download even the ones that don't otherwise have a download link.) I experimented briefly with smart.fm, but I found that it didn't really meet my needs, and I ended up using a real SRS instead.
> They've cleaned up their ways since then, so I hear.
Yeah? I have two things to say about that:
1. I'll believe it when I see it.
2. There's no way on God's green earth I'm EVER going to install any software with the Real brand on it for long enough to see it. My aversion to Real software is so strong, if the dairy farmers' group came out with a game involving dairy products made with real milk and marked with the Real seal, I would not allow it to be installed on any computer or network that I have to work with, just because of the word Real.
> The fact that it is even illegal is absurd.
On the contrary, I've been saying for close to twenty years that Real software should be illegal. I've not seen this RealDVD product, but if it's even remotely similar to other Real products, the world is MUCH better off without it. Real makes Bonzi look totally awesome by comparison.
Lawyers are much less popular than pigs.
Somebody on the academic study committee was smoking crack.
Orange County, California is one of the most infamous liberal hotbeds on the planet, second only to northern Europe, Hawaii, and parts of Massachusetts.
If you want to find out what conservative is, spend a year in Waterloo, Iowa, or rural Minnesota, or Kosciusko County, Indiana. I'm telling you, it's a whole different world. There are places out there where a Palin supporter can call himself a "moderate" and be taken seriously.
Please tell me I did not just read the phrase "purple and orange". Is someone over there completely colorblind? What will they come up with next, red and pink?
Gah.
> Some things are easier in Windows than *nix
Yeah. Off the top of my head, I can think of three.
One of them is changing the extension on the filenames of a bunch of files that you can select with a wildcard (i.e., MOVE *.LOG *.TXT or the like). Doing this on *nix generally involves a Perl one-liner, a foreach loop, a regex substitution, and system('mv', $orig, $target); Windows (or DOS for that matter) wins this one.
The others are setting up a simple file share and setting up a simple print share. Sure, Samba configuration is easier when you start wanting to do anything complicated, but for the really simple stuff that is all most people ever need, it's easier on Windows.
> and some things are easier in *nix than Windows.
Especially once you know what you're doing.
> Before Windows NT came on the scene, NetWare was
> pretty much THE PC file-and-print server solution.
Yes, I remember. And it sucked horse pooh. Through a straw.
In fairness, I assume that Novell's software has improved over the last seventeen years. I mean, other software has improved rather considerably, so it seems logical that theirs would as well.
But, personally, if I never see a running copy of NetWare again, I'm not going to shed any tears over it.
> It's not testable, so it's not a theory. It's a hypothesis.
If you're going to be pedantic, at least get it right.
A theory is something that has already *been* tested, repeatedly. A hypothesis still has to be testable. An assertion that is neither is simply called "an idea".
> Okay, maybe this is where I inadvertently let on that I'm
> not a physicist, but what is a "dragon here be" symbol?!
Actually, what you just let on is that you're not a computer geek. (You can turn in your card and Slashdot ID later.)
"Here be dragons", from the symbols on ancient maps, is what computer geeks say when they don't understand why a given section of source code is doing what it's doing. Just as ancient peoples found it dangerous to stray beyond the edge of their maps, any programmer worth his salt knows that it's dangerous to change code when you don't understand why it is the way it is, and for much the same reason: you're going beyond the edges of your knowledge, and you don't know what you'll find. Making changes to such code can end up breaking things you had no idea your change would impact at all.
Brownies? All I want is a decent cup of tea.
> From my perspective, services are a moderate-margin business at best.
Depends on the services. Some services are pretty much a commodity: virtually anyone can provide them, and the result is about the same almost no matter who you get them from, so the competition drives the going rate down to within epsilon of what it actually costs to provide the service. Janitorial service is an excellent example of this. It's not that you can't find steady work there. You can. People are always going to need stuff cleaned. But you're not going to make a trainload of money at it, because if you charge too much you *will* be underbid.
However, not all services are commodity. Some services, require expertise, or infrastructure, or other things that not so many people have to offer, so it matters who you get them from. If you hire the lowest bidding advertising firm or lawyer, you may save some money up front, but it can also really cost you.
Computers and information technology are a sufficiently broad category of endeavor that, if you look, you can find examples of computer and IT services in both of the above categories, and some that are sort of in-between.
> Basically seems to allege that should this deal
> go through, it would be unfair for current long
> time shareholders of Novell as Elliott's takeover
> would be underpaying and ripping them off
The market trading seems to agree with this, although it remains to be seen whether the share price will stay up. If the share price does stay up, obviously, the deal won't go through at the quoted figure. $5.75 per share doesn't look so generous when the current share trading price is over $6. If the share price stays up for about a day and a half and then sinks rapidly back toward its former level once the news goes stale, then that would be an argument for the opposite view.
Apparently you haven't been paying close attention to your spam lately.
Almost all of the advertised products are very obviously outright fraud (which is already illegal in most jurisdictions). Most of the rest are products that would be illegal no matter how they were advertised.
There are also a few adverts for porn mixed in, but upon closer inspection most of those appear to be attempts to get people to download obvious trojans and thus join their own computer to the botnet (you know, girls-who-love-cattle.mpeg.exe and that sort of rot), and most of the rest are actually advertising 1337ized-namebrand fertility drugs. As best I can figure, the porn industry doesn't have to send spam, because the search engines index them.
There's also a lot of spam that doesn't appear to be advertising anything at all, but I think mostly that gets sent to people on the "enemies" list: likely sysadmin addresses (abuse, webmaster, postmaster, hostmaster, and anything found in a domain registration), plus anyone who has sent back abuse reports, complaints, or unsubscribe requests.
> > how quaint: apparently in Spain, the accused have some right to privacy
> That's because in Spain you're not guilty
> until proven guilty by a court of law.
Yeah, rules restricting what the news media can and cannot publish, with regard to ongoing criminal prosecution, obviously don't have anything to do with free speech or free press. It's all about presumed innocence. Clearly the right to a private trial is the most important right in a free society.
> you should use an old disk. I mean very old, maybe going back
> to those 300-400MB disks we had on 486 computers or even older.
Much older. I'm pretty sure you have to go pre-IDE.
> but it's the conservative strongholds that have laws like that.
Yeah, it's the conser... WHAT? Wait.
We're talking about Orange County, California here, right? Have I fallen into some alternate reality where that's NOT one of the most liberal places on the whole entire planet, exceeded in radical extremity only by northern Europe, Hawaii, and parts of Massachusetts?
> Are there any Youtube alternatives that
/var/www/ and Bob is your uncle. Don't make it harder than it needs to be.
> don't take content down so easily?
Why not host it on your own web server?
Surely you don't think hosting video is technically hard? Dude, just throw it in
They could try to attack you via your DNS registrar and/or upstream connectivity provider, but in most cases that should be rather harder than just asking a server admin to take down a file.
Since Google is the publisher for YouTube content, the decision to publish or not to publish is theirs. You can disagree with their decision, and you are free to start up your own video-publishing site and attempt to compete with them (and I have no doubt _somebody_ will come forward to host the Lessig video), but you can't make Google publish stuff they don't want to publish, just like you can't make the local paper print your letter to the editor if they decide not to.
However, if somebody else is using legal action or the threat thereof to manipulate what Google will or won't publish, then that would be a different thing entirely. In that case (assuming the video's use of whatever it uses is fair use as the summary suggests), that would be third-party censorship.
The wording in the summary (notably, "arguably") also makes me wonder on what grounds the video's use of the song is considered fair use. I'd like to see the reasoning there.
> but I do not have such a right to say that I enjoy
> the color blue purely as a matter of aesthetics?
On the contrary, that's protected political speech. (The difference between aesthetics and politics is essentially nil.)
But free speech does NOT give you a right to say anything you want at any time you want for any reason you want. It does not, for example, give you the right to claim that you are pregnant with Barak Obama's child, swear to this under oath in court, and sue him for child support, if in fact you've never even met him. (If the allegation were something you could _substantiate_, then that would be different.) Free speech also does not entitle you to take someone else's book without their permission, claim it's yours, and sell copies of it.
You can *talk about* the other guy's book. You can write *commentary* about the other guy's book. That's protected political speech.
But you can't just appropriate somebody else's work and distribute it as if it were your own work. Well, in China you can, but in Western society it's not kosher.