Would you mind to explain me how glittering Headlines, dancing smilies, an eggshell-textured backdrop (of course alsmost indistinguishable from plain white), and the occasional Chain-Mail-ppt actually make communications MORE effective? Typography is critical to commercial communication. Maybe the negotiation between mail client and server should be modified so that if you have a text client you can request to only download the text MIME chunk of the email (which implies that email communication should include a plain text version.)
Effectivity is measured in information per size unit. No it's not. Maybe in extreme cases.
I didn't say faith, I said values. You can be an atheist and have values and empathy. I didn't say you believe that rape and murder are okay, I'm saying that if you are an atheist you have to acknowledge that if you don't want rape and murder to be okay in the world then values need to matter, because you can't make a non-relativistic moral argument. An acknowledgement for example that when Free Europe and its allies fought Nazi Germany, what in effect we were doing was saying "we value our way of life and find yours repellent, the two cannot coexist." They were saying the same thing, but we won. They are NOT equal viewpoints, they are inherently different. But viewed solely from a scientific viewpoint, all millions of deaths signifies in the grand scope of the universe is entropy.
The point is that the scientific method isn't sufficient to instruct you how to live. They operate within different problem domains. The "soul" is shorthand for an immutable essence of a human that gives it innate value (different conceptions give it additional attributes.) Science doesn't definitively know if there is an ACTUAL "soul" (thing that gives a human innate value) or not yet, but even if there isn't you will never get rid of the concept. Because it comes down to values, I make a decision that I think that all people have innate worth and I will work toward a society that upholds that value system even if it can never be proved that humans aren't just deterministically acting, densely packed clouds of molecules.
Values and morality and how you want to live your life, science can't get you there because the inescapable conclusion separated from personal values is that humans are specks of dust on a speck of dust in the universe, existing for a slice of time so small that nothing you do or say has even remotely the significance that a single dead hair cell on your body does to you as a person. How do you build a society or values on that that doesn't end in "do what you want, when you want, to the best of your ability to get away with it." MY answer to that question is, that science doesn't tell me who to love or what I should be doing right now, my values and the things that make me happy tell me that, and I am comfortable that that does not come from "science." So I ask you, what do you value and does that really derive from science?
I only live 15 minutes from my job by car, about 20-25 by bike. I'm in just that spot where I'd have to take two bus lines and about 6 dollars to go less than 4 miles by bus, which would take an hour and fifteen minutes. Sometimes I can walk it in the winter if I would have to, but generally it would not be fun. My solution is just to buy a front or all-wheel sedan next time I have to buy a car:-)
Actually, I used it as an excuse to telecommute on those days, which is always technically feasible for my job but which is frowned upon.
I'm not an SUV fan, but you're just wrong. This was a particularly bad winter. I have a rear-wheel drive car, and it was functionally worthless. Several days out of the year I was stuck in my driveway while others were perfectly able to get around.
When I was in school, you didn't get to use a calculator to solve higher-complexity problems until you could demonstrate an ability to apply basic concepts without one. Now the primary school I went to years ago lets fifth-graders use goddamn calculators to work through basic arithmetic. I don't disagree with what you are saying, except that you can't exclude a school's structured teaching plan from how much a child learns. If you just give a child a calculator, they will NOT gain a mastery of arithmetic. It is both an intuitive conclusion to reach, and you see it in practice as well as in theory: a reliance on technology for BASIC SKILLS makes you dumber.
It uses a Windows 2000 kernel, but it doesn't use any of the rest of the Windows 2000 operating system. They implemented an Xbox OS on top of the Win2k kernel that has almost no hardware abstraction because they know what the hardware is going to be and they need the performance. This OS re-implements many Windows APIs so from a programming standpoint they are functionally similar, but it doesn't use the same HAL architecture/code that the desktop and server Windows uses. It mostly doesn't use one at all.
I don't know about MIPS or PowerPC, but the Alpha port of Windows NT could run X86 binaries.
Incidentally, I've heard that the HAL started losing compatibility after Windows NT4, and was pretty much tied to little-endian even so. At least, this is what a prior, highly-rated Slashdot post that I can't find right now claimed.
I realize this is BT, but at least in the USA you can't hire someone as an agent on your behalf to alter content for you. There was a Mormon tape dubbing service in Utah that would take a legitimate copy of a tape you owned and remove the "dirty" parts. They got shut down because they didn't have any right to charge money to do that for the consumer with content that was not theirs (the agent's or the consumer's.) Ditto with online "MP3 ripping" services that would send you an MP3 copy of a CD you legitimately own, consumer "fair use" didn't authorize third party agents to provide this service. Does anyone know are there similar rulings in the UK regarding this?
Actually, this would kind of call into question the legality of any ISP adblocking or content modification.
Where the heck is mp3.com, the bright, shining, and defunct future of music distribution? I still have probably a thousand of free MP3s of cool bands I found through that site.
Here are some ideas based on my own experience of myself and my friends during high school/college:
You play and enjoy true "dungeon crawler" RPGs. Where you just run around and kill stuff and level up and that's it.
If a game kicks your ass, you try harder instead of quitting.
You start the game on "hard"
You play for more than 5 hours a day (this may be too little now because of WoW.)
You own every next-gen system, and not just because there's some exclusive you had to have.
You own one or more Japanese game soundtrack or drama CDs.
There is some classic game from the 80's or 90's that you never actually stopped playing.
You have purchased Japanese import games to beat the American release date (doesn't for European gamers who need to import games so they don't have to wait a year or more.)
You use a Gameshark to make your games HARDER rather than easier
You habitually play games that only let you save at savepoints that are sometimes hours apart (this is a good indicator that a game is for hardcore players rather than casual.)
You will put up with the worst control schemes ever foisted on the gaming market, without complaining.
You can, literally, talk about gaming until you get physically tired before you get bored.
More stuff, possibly involving games with the word "Dragon" in the title
If you read this and though "that's stupid" then you are not a hardcore gamer.
If you are a subscriber, you can probably find a prior post I wrote on why exactly political posts unrelated to "nerd-specific" topics are probably bad for discourse on slashdot.org. Summary: they eat mod points and attract trolls, which hurts every article.
It was implicit that the news in question was so important that it transcended the "news for nerds" slogan, and such stories were uncommon before politics.slashdot.org. YRO always regarded rights with a "nerd" slant.
I guess the fact that "News for Nerds" used to mean "nerd-specific news" until the last Presidential election has gone straight down the memory hole. And for crying out loud, "stuff that matters" was totally tongue-in-cheek.
I've said it before, I'll say it again, I can find news about the election f*cking everywhere, but there's only so many places I can find commentary on an experiment to see if gravity makes antimatter fall up. That's news for nerds. That Barack Obama won the democratic nomination is a front-pager for almost every newspaper/website on Earth.
Hey, I've been a Republican all my life, my politics are conservative. I'm voting for Obama because, despite differing viewpoints on MANY things, I think he is the right man for right now. I'm voting for him, but look at his record. He's really pretty left-wing.
While this is true, I disagree with the conclusion on two points: first, both sets of problems are important to people; and second, in the big picture humanity surviving is meaningless in a cold, uncaring universe;-)
Technology can solve all our problems if all our problems are strictly materialist in nature, but a large portion of human experience is from social interaction, which creates objects, processes and their concomitant problems which are every bit as "real" problems as Malaria or starvation. If I have two girls that I really love and I know that if I choose to progress a relationship with one that I'll end the relationship with the other, technology doesn't give me an answer on which one to choose. Before we even knew what germs were or that diseases might even be curable, people were concerned with the answers to such problems. I would argue they are more fundamental to the human experience.
The signatures do NOT have to match. The signature on the card only authorizes the card for use and is not for comparison. This is WRONG. If you go through with a transaction where the signatures don't match, your business could be held LIABLE for the purchase if it was a fraudulent transaction. You are supposed to hold the card and make a Code 10 call to VISA and ask for further instructions if the signature doesn't appear to match.
What the hell are you two talking about? Every free-trade Republican I know also wants (relatively) unrestricted immigration. It's the so-called "paleo-conservatives" that are against immigration, largely on cultural grounds.
Why should immigration, which is done by non-citizens, be the ONE SINGLE THING in the entire United States that is totally unregulated? We already lost the battle to keep government out of every aspect of our lives, I sure as hell am not going to legally exempt people living in this country that aren't even citizens.
You cannot "immigrate illegally". Obviously, you can. It's against the law unless you follow the process.
Why not go further and impose Soviet-like registration of citizens, penalizing them for moving from state to state or even from city to city "illegally"? It's the same way of thinking. No it's not, because that's movement inside the only administrative body that defines United States "citizenship." I don't see what the problem is, if you want to go to an amusement park, you buy a ticket. The rides aren't free.
the government has no right to restrict the liberty of any person barring criminal behavior. One of fundamental things the government has a right to do is restrict who enters and leaves the country, in particular non-citizens.
And the difference between prior immigration waves and this wave is the number of immigrants (much, much larger this time) and the amount of free land/resources available for the settling (basically none this time.) In other words, it is totally completely different.
I have installed Ubuntu on multiple macs, a B&W Powermac, a G4 Mac Mini, a couple of different models of G3 iMacs, and an Intel Powerbook pro. Almost none of them went smoothly, there was always a major problem just getting it installed.
I like Ubuntu, I use Ubuntu, but one of the reasons I got into Linux was because it didn't have mysterious problems that kept things from working all the time. Ubuntu has re-introduced this into my life and I don't like it:-( but, take the bad with the good I guess, it really is a superior Linux breed overall in terms of usability.
First, exclusive homosexuality is rare in nature. If not purely heterosexual, then the animal is usually bisexual (and then usually, only when the opposite sex is not available.)
Knowing that, here is one way that homosexuality can have an evolutionary advantage in social animals: pairings can increase your social bonds with members of the community, which makes you more popular. Being popular makes you more desirable as a sex partner. So, by limiting yourself to the opposite sex, you are depriving yourself of social bonds which can be used to boost your popularity among the opposite sex which CAN produce offspring. In other words, being bisexual can make you more popular, and popularity gets you more girls (if you are a male, that is the assumption here.)
It's not secret doctrine. It's basically a management handbook. If you put a Mcdonald's manager's handbook on Wikileaks they would probably get their lawyers to have it taken down too. AFAIK the LDS church doesn't have secret doctrine, although they do have secret ritual. Which is sort of the religious equivalent of physical intimacy in a relationship, and kept private for the same reason.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't say faith, I said values. You can be an atheist and have values and empathy. I didn't say you believe that rape and murder are okay, I'm saying that if you are an atheist you have to acknowledge that if you don't want rape and murder to be okay in the world then values need to matter, because you can't make a non-relativistic moral argument. An acknowledgement for example that when Free Europe and its allies fought Nazi Germany, what in effect we were doing was saying "we value our way of life and find yours repellent, the two cannot coexist." They were saying the same thing, but we won. They are NOT equal viewpoints, they are inherently different. But viewed solely from a scientific viewpoint, all millions of deaths signifies in the grand scope of the universe is entropy.
The point is that the scientific method isn't sufficient to instruct you how to live. They operate within different problem domains. The "soul" is shorthand for an immutable essence of a human that gives it innate value (different conceptions give it additional attributes.) Science doesn't definitively know if there is an ACTUAL "soul" (thing that gives a human innate value) or not yet, but even if there isn't you will never get rid of the concept. Because it comes down to values, I make a decision that I think that all people have innate worth and I will work toward a society that upholds that value system even if it can never be proved that humans aren't just deterministically acting, densely packed clouds of molecules.
Values and morality and how you want to live your life, science can't get you there because the inescapable conclusion separated from personal values is that humans are specks of dust on a speck of dust in the universe, existing for a slice of time so small that nothing you do or say has even remotely the significance that a single dead hair cell on your body does to you as a person. How do you build a society or values on that that doesn't end in "do what you want, when you want, to the best of your ability to get away with it." MY answer to that question is, that science doesn't tell me who to love or what I should be doing right now, my values and the things that make me happy tell me that, and I am comfortable that that does not come from "science." So I ask you, what do you value and does that really derive from science?
I only live 15 minutes from my job by car, about 20-25 by bike. I'm in just that spot where I'd have to take two bus lines and about 6 dollars to go less than 4 miles by bus, which would take an hour and fifteen minutes. Sometimes I can walk it in the winter if I would have to, but generally it would not be fun. My solution is just to buy a front or all-wheel sedan next time I have to buy a car :-)
Actually, I used it as an excuse to telecommute on those days, which is always technically feasible for my job but which is frowned upon.
I'm not an SUV fan, but you're just wrong. This was a particularly bad winter. I have a rear-wheel drive car, and it was functionally worthless. Several days out of the year I was stuck in my driveway while others were perfectly able to get around.
When I was in school, you didn't get to use a calculator to solve higher-complexity problems until you could demonstrate an ability to apply basic concepts without one. Now the primary school I went to years ago lets fifth-graders use goddamn calculators to work through basic arithmetic. I don't disagree with what you are saying, except that you can't exclude a school's structured teaching plan from how much a child learns. If you just give a child a calculator, they will NOT gain a mastery of arithmetic. It is both an intuitive conclusion to reach, and you see it in practice as well as in theory: a reliance on technology for BASIC SKILLS makes you dumber.
It uses a Windows 2000 kernel, but it doesn't use any of the rest of the Windows 2000 operating system. They implemented an Xbox OS on top of the Win2k kernel that has almost no hardware abstraction because they know what the hardware is going to be and they need the performance. This OS re-implements many Windows APIs so from a programming standpoint they are functionally similar, but it doesn't use the same HAL architecture/code that the desktop and server Windows uses. It mostly doesn't use one at all.
http://blogs.msdn.com/xboxteam/archive/2006/02/17/534421.aspx
He claimed he did. Btw, the Xbox/Xbox360 doesn't use the Windows kernel HAL.
I don't know about MIPS or PowerPC, but the Alpha port of Windows NT could run X86 binaries.
Incidentally, I've heard that the HAL started losing compatibility after Windows NT4, and was pretty much tied to little-endian even so. At least, this is what a prior, highly-rated Slashdot post that I can't find right now claimed.
I realize this is BT, but at least in the USA you can't hire someone as an agent on your behalf to alter content for you. There was a Mormon tape dubbing service in Utah that would take a legitimate copy of a tape you owned and remove the "dirty" parts. They got shut down because they didn't have any right to charge money to do that for the consumer with content that was not theirs (the agent's or the consumer's.) Ditto with online "MP3 ripping" services that would send you an MP3 copy of a CD you legitimately own, consumer "fair use" didn't authorize third party agents to provide this service. Does anyone know are there similar rulings in the UK regarding this?
Actually, this would kind of call into question the legality of any ISP adblocking or content modification.
Where the heck is mp3.com, the bright, shining, and defunct future of music distribution? I still have probably a thousand of free MP3s of cool bands I found through that site.
If you read this and though "that's stupid" then you are not a hardcore gamer.
If you are a subscriber, you can probably find a prior post I wrote on why exactly political posts unrelated to "nerd-specific" topics are probably bad for discourse on slashdot.org. Summary: they eat mod points and attract trolls, which hurts every article.
It was implicit that the news in question was so important that it transcended the "news for nerds" slogan, and such stories were uncommon before politics.slashdot.org. YRO always regarded rights with a "nerd" slant.
Congratulations on your low UID. A winner is you!
I guess the fact that "News for Nerds" used to mean "nerd-specific news" until the last Presidential election has gone straight down the memory hole. And for crying out loud, "stuff that matters" was totally tongue-in-cheek.
I've said it before, I'll say it again, I can find news about the election f*cking everywhere, but there's only so many places I can find commentary on an experiment to see if gravity makes antimatter fall up. That's news for nerds. That Barack Obama won the democratic nomination is a front-pager for almost every newspaper/website on Earth.
Hey, I've been a Republican all my life, my politics are conservative. I'm voting for Obama because, despite differing viewpoints on MANY things, I think he is the right man for right now. I'm voting for him, but look at his record. He's really pretty left-wing.
While this is true, I disagree with the conclusion on two points: first, both sets of problems are important to people; and second, in the big picture humanity surviving is meaningless in a cold, uncaring universe ;-)
Technology can solve all our problems if all our problems are strictly materialist in nature, but a large portion of human experience is from social interaction, which creates objects, processes and their concomitant problems which are every bit as "real" problems as Malaria or starvation. If I have two girls that I really love and I know that if I choose to progress a relationship with one that I'll end the relationship with the other, technology doesn't give me an answer on which one to choose. Before we even knew what germs were or that diseases might even be curable, people were concerned with the answers to such problems. I would argue they are more fundamental to the human experience.
What the hell are you two talking about? Every free-trade Republican I know also wants (relatively) unrestricted immigration. It's the so-called "paleo-conservatives" that are against immigration, largely on cultural grounds.
And the difference between prior immigration waves and this wave is the number of immigrants (much, much larger this time) and the amount of free land/resources available for the settling (basically none this time.) In other words, it is totally completely different.
I have installed Ubuntu on multiple macs, a B&W Powermac, a G4 Mac Mini, a couple of different models of G3 iMacs, and an Intel Powerbook pro. Almost none of them went smoothly, there was always a major problem just getting it installed.
:-( but, take the bad with the good I guess, it really is a superior Linux breed overall in terms of usability.
I like Ubuntu, I use Ubuntu, but one of the reasons I got into Linux was because it didn't have mysterious problems that kept things from working all the time. Ubuntu has re-introduced this into my life and I don't like it
First, exclusive homosexuality is rare in nature. If not purely heterosexual, then the animal is usually bisexual (and then usually, only when the opposite sex is not available.)
Knowing that, here is one way that homosexuality can have an evolutionary advantage in social animals: pairings can increase your social bonds with members of the community, which makes you more popular. Being popular makes you more desirable as a sex partner. So, by limiting yourself to the opposite sex, you are depriving yourself of social bonds which can be used to boost your popularity among the opposite sex which CAN produce offspring. In other words, being bisexual can make you more popular, and popularity gets you more girls (if you are a male, that is the assumption here.)
It's not secret doctrine. It's basically a management handbook. If you put a Mcdonald's manager's handbook on Wikileaks they would probably get their lawyers to have it taken down too. AFAIK the LDS church doesn't have secret doctrine, although they do have secret ritual. Which is sort of the religious equivalent of physical intimacy in a relationship, and kept private for the same reason.