Communism was this vaguely threatening bogeyman who could lob nuclear missles at your country and burn down your churches if given the chance but never came to pass. Terrorism is at least tangible in the form of 9/11, embassy bombings, etc where the effects are very real.
How are a few isolated incidents like September 11th more real than the Soviet Union swallowing up Eastern Europe at the end of WWII?
Communism certainly became a bogeyman, just like terrorism has, but Russia *did* do some pretty nasty things during and after WWII.
actually creating hybrids (which will inevitably has a short and painful life) is really sick.
The article (and Slashdot summary) are pretty sensationalistic.
These aren't experiments where half human, half animals are created. They're things like engineering mice with human brain cells, or pigs with human organs.
Of course, that won't stop ridiculous hippie and religious activists from breaking out the torches and pitchforks because TEH SCIENTISTS ARE RAPING MOTHER NATURE AND BABY JESUS WITH THEIR UNNATURAL AND THEREFORE MORALLY REPREHENSIBLE EXPERIMENTS ad nauseum. There are even some quoted in the article.
Your conclusion is bogus because even if the premise was true, it is no commentary on society since violence and the threat thereof is often necessary to defend said society, so why should there be any stigma inherent in violence?
Sex is much more necessary to ensure the existence of society than violence is. Why should there be any stigma inherent in it?
Besides, most of the violence in film and games is hardly of the "necessary to preserve society" variety.
The Times-Dispatch article refers to the 13- and 14- atom clusters as "Al13" and "Al14." Wouldn't that be regular aluminum and an isotope of aluminum with one extra neutron, or does the lack of a dash really make the difference?
I notice that The Scientist's version of the article does not use this terminology.
Re:How Israeli Companies Are Succeeding...
on
Business Under Fire
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· Score: 1
There's a big difference between having a mutual defence pact and one country footing the bill for the entire military defence of another.
The US pours billions into the Israeli military every year. I think it's pretty inexcusable that we're spending that kind of money propping up a foreign country - especially one that's in such a volatile position because its founders wanted to fulfill a religious prophecy that involved having control of Jerusalem.
Public transportation is more convenient and cheaper.
Yes, it's certainly more convenient to take groceries, home electronics, etc. etc. home on the bus.
It's certainly more convenient to try and get home from a club on the bus only to realize that they stopped running at 11:30PM because your city is too poor to run them any later.
It's certainly more convenient to wait half an hour (or more) in the rain, because the last one came by five minutes early.
Public transportation is shit. I've had to deal with it for the last ten years in two cities. It's filthy, it's slow, I can't take anything substantial on it, and it doesn't go where I need to. I bought a car eight months ago, and it's been great. I can get places in ten minutes that used to take me an hour or more each way on the bus. I can go buy things at stores instead of mail-ordering them. On Monday I get a parking pass for my building at work, and then I can finally ditch the last vestiges of my reliance on public transportation and not have to worry about being half an hour late if I get out the door a minute later than I planned.
Time-sharing a car seems like an ideal plan for someone who wants that level of convenience but not the pricetag that comes along with actually owning one.
shame the gooks beat you good in vietnam though (though you probably won the unofficial underage girl rape contest) fuckin' rambo wankers
Haha, mod parent up, that was awesome.
Anyhow, with the Germans doing things like this to France, it's not at all surprising they surrendered. They would have been obliterated otherwise. Is that somehow more noble than being occupied?
The 5200 controllers had analogue sticks. They were a huge hassle and the early models broke all the time.
Re:More money than brains I guess
on
Re-Pet a Reality
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· Score: 1
Get a kitten.....Help support technology that will help clone cattle to feed starving villagers
Get a Kitten.....Help support technology that will help feed children that are currently starving to deth.
Even if you somehow believe that feeding starving villagers beef instead of grains, beans, and vegetables is the optimum solution, why do you think cloning is the answer?
It's not like it's hard to raise cattle the normal way, and it doesn't cost $50k+/pop for a cloning job either.
As opposed to what? A graphical IP address? A string IP address? A musical IP address?
There seems to be some sort of mentality inside Microsoft right now that if you can't refer to a host by a DNS name, it's not to be trusted.
A real-world example: I wrote a script last year to find the DHCP server of the machine it was running from and run an executable from there.
Finding the DHCP server is relatively easy by looking in WMI, although thanks to a particular lame decision at MS WMI remembers every NIC your machine has ever had installed, so I had to do some validation of the value(s) that were returned to make sure they were still around. We have some decrepit old workstations from another building, and the ghosts of network interfaces past kept telling my script that they were receiving DHCP information from a decomissioned server.
So anyway, I tried having the script run the code from e.g. \\156.124.22.2\path\code.exe. Under Windows XP and 2003 at least (and I believe 2000 as well, but it's been awhile), whoever was logged on at the machine would receive one of those "save to disk/run" dialogues, which was a big problem given that this was supposed to happen silently.
I added in more scripting to do a reverse lookup on the IP address, and given \\servername.company.net\path\code.exe it ran with no user interaction.
Does it make sense? Not really, but I'm sure someone at MS thinks their OS is more "secure" because of it.
I disagree... some homeopathic treatments are effective... only they're damned few and far between...
If you believe in science and rationality, then the only logical conclusion is to discount all homeopathy as a placebo effect.
Homeopathic "treatments" are diluted so much that what you buy at the store doesn't actually have any of the "active ingredient" left in it. This is because homeopaths believe that the less of something you use, the more powerful it is.
Further, even the "active ingredients" are bogus, because the way they're arrived upon is by finding a substance that causes the same negative effects as the condition it's supposed to treat.
As an example: Boiron's "flu remedy," (I can't remember the brand name offhand, I see it all the time at grocery stores though) is basically water mixed with duck liver paste. But wait, there's more. The entire world's supply of this stuff for a year is made from one duck. There's probably a greater percentage of Socrates in your drinking water than there is duck liver in that homeopathic product.
On the other hand, just about every boy in America was raised with an over-abundance of gay jokes and innuendo, which for most of us has carried on into adulthood.
I was raised with an over-abundance of racist jokes. Does that mean it's acceptable for me to use that kind of "humour" now? All in good fun, of course.
There is a very thinly-veiled contempt for gays and lesbians in America right now, whether it be in the form of Southern Baptists' paranoid schizophrenic fantasies of a gay conspiracy or phrases like "that's so gay," that just serve to emphasize the perception of homosexuals as second-class citizens, like they have a disability (ie using "gay" as equivalent to "that's so retarded/lame").
I mean, unless I'm missing something and gamers have evened the playing field by throwing in an "only a slant-eyed gook could miss that shot" here, and a "what was that, you wife-beating white trash piece of shit" there.
It's certainly possible to have genuinely funny, non-derogatory gay-related humour (e.g. Kids in the Hall), but slurs are not a part of it.
ZD has a large number of total jerks doing editorial and writing work for their magazines and websites (particularly Official US Playstation Magazine and Gamespot).
The only reason I continued to subscribe to OPM was the cover disc, and after I was personally insulted by their editorial staff I decided even that wasn't worth it. Similarly, I cancelled my Gamespot subscription after their editor in chief slagged a friend of mine in their forums in a totally unprofessional manner.
Take away their demo discs (like Microsoft was smart enough to do by handing their official magazine to another publisher), and you're left with magazines that no one really wants to buy. GMR, in particular, had the absolute worst layout and writing I've seen in a modern magazine, apart from Nintendo Power (which doesn't really count, given that it's a first-party propaganda magazine aimed at a very young age bracket).
Sure, the company needs to get some money to cover the costs of printing, distribution, and other things, plus the associations that sponsor the journal want some money to help hold conferences, but why, oh why, must they price journals so expensively that many colleges can't even afford them?
Printing a publication is expensive. Journals are advertisement-free, which is why they cost so much. I used to work for a student newspaper and it was ridiculous how much money we were paid for ads. Without that revenue, high subscription costs are the only way to go.
This is a recipe for eating only prepackaged foods produced by the Agribusiness industry. Maybe you should just skip all the trouble and take food pills.
No, the story's submitter just needs to make an additional investment in some barcode software and a printer, then create custom SKUs for anything that doesn't come pre-barcoded.
With proper design, perhaps only 15-20 minutes would be added to the process of storing groceries upon returning from the store. Imagine the convenience!
I cook it myself from recipies I've developed, instead of reading the instructions on a label.
I actually try to do this as well. It's fun, you get custom food, and it's a skill that tends to impress guests. Plus, if it's something fast like macaroni and (soy) cheese, it actually tastes better than the pre-packaged kind by far.
I was under the impression that, in many other countries, the meat is a complement to the meal. For instance, maybe a meal would consist of mostly rice and seaweed, with a portion of meat along side it.
A Korean friend of mine was telling me awhile ago that that's exactly how it used to be over there a few hundred years ago. Originally, Korean food was mostly vegan, but the Western influence got them adding side bits of meat. Now, they mix it in wholesale.
Friend++ for the rest of your posts attached to this article, by the way.
My memory is a little fuzzy, but back in the olden days when the original series was still being produced, I could have sworn that JMS had said he was working on a feature film based on the Telepath War called "Mind's Fire," or somesuch.
I'm a big fan of the original series. I still have my collection of every episode taped from cable (which I bought so I could get higher quality than broadcast) in SP mode, even though I've bought the DVDs as they've been released. I was in Vancouver, BC at the time, and when parts of it weren't immediately picked up for distribution there a small group of people would gather at a local sports bar who let us use their satellite feed to watch it.
That being said, everything that has come after the original series - A Call to Arms, Crusade, Legend of the Rangers - has IMO not been engaging at all. The problem for me has been that JMS keeps trying to introduce antagonists that use Shadow technology, or are like the shadows but more powerful, and it feels really stale. The Shadows are gone, let them rest in peace already.
I'll give this one a chance, but after Legend of the Rangers (couldn't he at least come up with a name that didn't betray his main influence *quite* so much?) my hopes are not high. Especially so given that this is going to feature not only a character from Crusade (bleh), but a technomage, who are my absolute least favourites out of the entire B5 universe.
I would have vastly preferred a Telepath War film.
Your right, no one in the US ever gets pissed off about things like the confederate flag or some other separatists nonsense.
Taiwan is not a separatist group in the sense that the Confederate States were. It is ruled by the democratic government that the Chinese Communists kicked out of power when they seized control.
Now, maybe if the Confederates had conquered Washington DC and Lincoln tried to form a government-in-exile in California...
However, some of the kids in 9th grade, might actually straighten up. Those who are 16, however, are very unlikely to straighten up by 18.
When I was 16, I was about ready to drop out of high school. I wasn't learning anything useful, most of my teachers had bad attitudes, and I couldn't take any classes that actually interested me (apart from a visual art class with an excellent teacher). I had a 1.0 GPA my last semester at high school (3 0.0 and 1 4.0 averaged).
Fortunately, my state has a program that allows HS students to do their last two years at a community college, so I was able to learn about things like astronomy and logic, and take government and sociology courses from teachers who were interested in the subjects and knew how to teach them well.
I never got a four-year degree, but on my way towards one I got into IT and now I work as a systems engineer at a Fortune 500 company. I start school again in about a month (after a six year hiatus) to earn a BS and possibly go further in another field.
There are a lot of 16-year-olds who are genuinely uninterested in learning, but many of the people I knew had been failed by the public education system the same way I would have been without that community college program.
Slashdot Mirror
Communism was this vaguely threatening bogeyman who could lob nuclear missles at your country and burn down your churches if given the chance but never came to pass. Terrorism is at least tangible in the form of 9/11, embassy bombings, etc where the effects are very real.
How are a few isolated incidents like September 11th more real than the Soviet Union swallowing up Eastern Europe at the end of WWII?
Communism certainly became a bogeyman, just like terrorism has, but Russia *did* do some pretty nasty things during and after WWII.
the Jews as Yahweh
In the Torah, God is identified as "YHVH," the Hebrew characters pronounced "yud-hey-vahv-hey."
"Yahweh" is a Christian mangling of it, I can't remember the full origin ATM. "Jehovah" is as well.
Sorry, it's a pet peeve I picked up from hanging around with Jews.
actually creating hybrids (which will inevitably has a short and painful life) is really sick.
The article (and Slashdot summary) are pretty sensationalistic.
These aren't experiments where half human, half animals are created. They're things like engineering mice with human brain cells, or pigs with human organs.
Of course, that won't stop ridiculous hippie and religious activists from breaking out the torches and pitchforks because TEH SCIENTISTS ARE RAPING MOTHER NATURE AND BABY JESUS WITH THEIR UNNATURAL AND THEREFORE MORALLY REPREHENSIBLE EXPERIMENTS ad nauseum. There are even some quoted in the article.
Your conclusion is bogus because even if the premise was true, it is no commentary on society since violence and the threat thereof is often necessary to defend said society, so why should there be any stigma inherent in violence?
Sex is much more necessary to ensure the existence of society than violence is. Why should there be any stigma inherent in it?
Besides, most of the violence in film and games is hardly of the "necessary to preserve society" variety.
Ah, I see. I am dumb. They mean the number as subscripted, like writing the formula for water as "H2O."
Wait, I think I have *my* terminology wrong too. Al-13 and Al-14 can't even exist, because Al has an atomic number of 13.
The Times-Dispatch article refers to the 13- and 14- atom clusters as "Al13" and "Al14." Wouldn't that be regular aluminum and an isotope of aluminum with one extra neutron, or does the lack of a dash really make the difference?
I notice that The Scientist's version of the article does not use this terminology.
There's a big difference between having a mutual defence pact and one country footing the bill for the entire military defence of another.
The US pours billions into the Israeli military every year. I think it's pretty inexcusable that we're spending that kind of money propping up a foreign country - especially one that's in such a volatile position because its founders wanted to fulfill a religious prophecy that involved having control of Jerusalem.
Public transportation is more convenient and cheaper.
Yes, it's certainly more convenient to take groceries, home electronics, etc. etc. home on the bus.
It's certainly more convenient to try and get home from a club on the bus only to realize that they stopped running at 11:30PM because your city is too poor to run them any later.
It's certainly more convenient to wait half an hour (or more) in the rain, because the last one came by five minutes early.
Public transportation is shit. I've had to deal with it for the last ten years in two cities. It's filthy, it's slow, I can't take anything substantial on it, and it doesn't go where I need to. I bought a car eight months ago, and it's been great. I can get places in ten minutes that used to take me an hour or more each way on the bus. I can go buy things at stores instead of mail-ordering them. On Monday I get a parking pass for my building at work, and then I can finally ditch the last vestiges of my reliance on public transportation and not have to worry about being half an hour late if I get out the door a minute later than I planned.
Time-sharing a car seems like an ideal plan for someone who wants that level of convenience but not the pricetag that comes along with actually owning one.
shame the gooks beat you good in vietnam though (though you probably won the unofficial underage girl rape contest)
fuckin' rambo wankers
Haha, mod parent up, that was awesome.
Anyhow, with the Germans doing things like this to France, it's not at all surprising they surrendered. They would have been obliterated otherwise. Is that somehow more noble than being occupied?
That isn't major, it is a rather small issue in the grand scope of things.
Except that it's completely destroying the economy in British Columbia.
You haven't lived until you've saved the world from thermonuclear destruction in Missile Command.
You can't save the world in the original Missile Command. That's why James Cameron had John Connor playing it in Terminator 2.
It's a lesson for humans that machines always win in the end, like most classic arcade games.
All the Ataris used digital sticks.
The 5200 controllers had analogue sticks. They were a huge hassle and the early models broke all the time.
Get a kitten.....Help support technology that will help clone cattle to feed starving villagers
Get a Kitten.....Help support technology that will help feed children that are currently starving to deth.
Even if you somehow believe that feeding starving villagers beef instead of grains, beans, and vegetables is the optimum solution, why do you think cloning is the answer?
It's not like it's hard to raise cattle the normal way, and it doesn't cost $50k+/pop for a cloning job either.
As opposed to what? A graphical IP address? A string IP address? A musical IP address?
There seems to be some sort of mentality inside Microsoft right now that if you can't refer to a host by a DNS name, it's not to be trusted.
A real-world example: I wrote a script last year to find the DHCP server of the machine it was running from and run an executable from there.
Finding the DHCP server is relatively easy by looking in WMI, although thanks to a particular lame decision at MS WMI remembers every NIC your machine has ever had installed, so I had to do some validation of the value(s) that were returned to make sure they were still around. We have some decrepit old workstations from another building, and the ghosts of network interfaces past kept telling my script that they were receiving DHCP information from a decomissioned server.
So anyway, I tried having the script run the code from e.g. \\156.124.22.2\path\code.exe. Under Windows XP and 2003 at least (and I believe 2000 as well, but it's been awhile), whoever was logged on at the machine would receive one of those "save to disk/run" dialogues, which was a big problem given that this was supposed to happen silently.
I added in more scripting to do a reverse lookup on the IP address, and given \\servername.company.net\path\code.exe it ran with no user interaction.
Does it make sense? Not really, but I'm sure someone at MS thinks their OS is more "secure" because of it.
I disagree ... some homeopathic treatments are effective ... only they're damned few and far between ...
If you believe in science and rationality, then the only logical conclusion is to discount all homeopathy as a placebo effect.
Homeopathic "treatments" are diluted so much that what you buy at the store doesn't actually have any of the "active ingredient" left in it. This is because homeopaths believe that the less of something you use, the more powerful it is.
Further, even the "active ingredients" are bogus, because the way they're arrived upon is by finding a substance that causes the same negative effects as the condition it's supposed to treat.
As an example: Boiron's "flu remedy," (I can't remember the brand name offhand, I see it all the time at grocery stores though) is basically water mixed with duck liver paste. But wait, there's more. The entire world's supply of this stuff for a year is made from one duck. There's probably a greater percentage of Socrates in your drinking water than there is duck liver in that homeopathic product.
On the other hand, just about every boy in America was raised with an over-abundance of gay jokes and innuendo, which for most of us has carried on into adulthood.
I was raised with an over-abundance of racist jokes. Does that mean it's acceptable for me to use that kind of "humour" now? All in good fun, of course.
There is a very thinly-veiled contempt for gays and lesbians in America right now, whether it be in the form of Southern Baptists' paranoid schizophrenic fantasies of a gay conspiracy or phrases like "that's so gay," that just serve to emphasize the perception of homosexuals as second-class citizens, like they have a disability (ie using "gay" as equivalent to "that's so retarded/lame").
I mean, unless I'm missing something and gamers have evened the playing field by throwing in an "only a slant-eyed gook could miss that shot" here, and a "what was that, you wife-beating white trash piece of shit" there.
It's certainly possible to have genuinely funny, non-derogatory gay-related humour (e.g. Kids in the Hall), but slurs are not a part of it.
ZD has a large number of total jerks doing editorial and writing work for their magazines and websites (particularly Official US Playstation Magazine and Gamespot).
The only reason I continued to subscribe to OPM was the cover disc, and after I was personally insulted by their editorial staff I decided even that wasn't worth it. Similarly, I cancelled my Gamespot subscription after their editor in chief slagged a friend of mine in their forums in a totally unprofessional manner.
Take away their demo discs (like Microsoft was smart enough to do by handing their official magazine to another publisher), and you're left with magazines that no one really wants to buy. GMR, in particular, had the absolute worst layout and writing I've seen in a modern magazine, apart from Nintendo Power (which doesn't really count, given that it's a first-party propaganda magazine aimed at a very young age bracket).
Sure, the company needs to get some money to cover the costs of printing, distribution, and other things, plus the associations that sponsor the journal want some money to help hold conferences, but why, oh why, must they price journals so expensively that many colleges can't even afford them?
Printing a publication is expensive. Journals are advertisement-free, which is why they cost so much. I used to work for a student newspaper and it was ridiculous how much money we were paid for ads. Without that revenue, high subscription costs are the only way to go.
This is a recipe for eating only prepackaged foods produced by the Agribusiness industry. Maybe you should just skip all the trouble and take food pills.
No, the story's submitter just needs to make an additional investment in some barcode software and a printer, then create custom SKUs for anything that doesn't come pre-barcoded.
With proper design, perhaps only 15-20 minutes would be added to the process of storing groceries upon returning from the store. Imagine the convenience!
I cook it myself from recipies I've developed, instead of reading the instructions on a label.
I actually try to do this as well. It's fun, you get custom food, and it's a skill that tends to impress guests. Plus, if it's something fast like macaroni and (soy) cheese, it actually tastes better than the pre-packaged kind by far.
I was under the impression that, in many other countries, the meat is a complement to the meal. For instance, maybe a meal would consist of mostly rice and seaweed, with a portion of meat along side it.
A Korean friend of mine was telling me awhile ago that that's exactly how it used to be over there a few hundred years ago. Originally, Korean food was mostly vegan, but the Western influence got them adding side bits of meat. Now, they mix it in wholesale.
Friend++ for the rest of your posts attached to this article, by the way.
My memory is a little fuzzy, but back in the olden days when the original series was still being produced, I could have sworn that JMS had said he was working on a feature film based on the Telepath War called "Mind's Fire," or somesuch.
I'm a big fan of the original series. I still have my collection of every episode taped from cable (which I bought so I could get higher quality than broadcast) in SP mode, even though I've bought the DVDs as they've been released. I was in Vancouver, BC at the time, and when parts of it weren't immediately picked up for distribution there a small group of people would gather at a local sports bar who let us use their satellite feed to watch it.
That being said, everything that has come after the original series - A Call to Arms, Crusade, Legend of the Rangers - has IMO not been engaging at all. The problem for me has been that JMS keeps trying to introduce antagonists that use Shadow technology, or are like the shadows but more powerful, and it feels really stale. The Shadows are gone, let them rest in peace already.
I'll give this one a chance, but after Legend of the Rangers (couldn't he at least come up with a name that didn't betray his main influence *quite* so much?) my hopes are not high. Especially so given that this is going to feature not only a character from Crusade (bleh), but a technomage, who are my absolute least favourites out of the entire B5 universe.
I would have vastly preferred a Telepath War film.
Your right, no one in the US ever gets pissed off about things like the confederate flag or some other separatists nonsense.
Taiwan is not a separatist group in the sense that the Confederate States were. It is ruled by the democratic government that the Chinese Communists kicked out of power when they seized control.
Now, maybe if the Confederates had conquered Washington DC and Lincoln tried to form a government-in-exile in California...
There really wasn't much knowledge of the human body excepting outwardly visible parts.
What about casualties on the battlefield?
However, some of the kids in 9th grade, might actually straighten up. Those who are 16, however, are very unlikely to straighten up by 18.
When I was 16, I was about ready to drop out of high school. I wasn't learning anything useful, most of my teachers had bad attitudes, and I couldn't take any classes that actually interested me (apart from a visual art class with an excellent teacher). I had a 1.0 GPA my last semester at high school (3 0.0 and 1 4.0 averaged).
Fortunately, my state has a program that allows HS students to do their last two years at a community college, so I was able to learn about things like astronomy and logic, and take government and sociology courses from teachers who were interested in the subjects and knew how to teach them well.
I never got a four-year degree, but on my way towards one I got into IT and now I work as a systems engineer at a Fortune 500 company. I start school again in about a month (after a six year hiatus) to earn a BS and possibly go further in another field.
There are a lot of 16-year-olds who are genuinely uninterested in learning, but many of the people I knew had been failed by the public education system the same way I would have been without that community college program.