I love the thought of lawyers penetrating into space, exploding in a cloud of court orders and subpoenas as they're jettisoned out of the back of the shuttle.
Ahh, the pleasures of jettisoning lawyers into hard vacuum.
You know what else is fun?
Sending politicians out the airlock, and watching them bloat like hot air balloons until they explode in a cloud of lies and broken promises.
Very true -- Africa is currently the living hell of continents. Meanwhile, the disease is threatening to do the same around the world, e.g.:
South America: "Latin America has yet to experience a full-blown AIDS epidemic, but the disease is spreading from high-risk individuals to the general population..."
Asia: "Asia is at risk of facing the world's worst AIDS epidemic if urgent preventative measures are not taken..."
People don't use X. Not directly, anyway, any more than they use the frame or suspension of their car. It's an underpinning that is itself used by a close-to-the-user app (or set of apps), such as Metacity, Enlightenment, FVWM, Gnome, KDE, etc.
Good points. Thanks for the clarification.
As for why my post got modded Insightful -- when it really isn't, in retrospect -- I can only blame the moderators.
No, because X is a transparent technology or at least it should be. The average user should only need to interact with the X server to change his graphical resolution and depth....
9 out of ten, those people that bitch and complain about X simply do not understand it.
If substantial numbers of people don't understand X, doesn't that indicate the need to make X more user-friendly?
It shouldn't matter if those nine out of ten are plain vanilla non-technical people, either -- if we want to get X more used, it's got to be easy for anyone to use.
That work about Socrates is nothing but the newspaper reports from thousands of years ago in a different language.
The problem -- did you read the link I posted, where Stone discusses his work? -- is that the very scanty reports about Socrates have been (according to Stone) drastically misinterpreted over the centuries. Stone, greatest of newsmen, did history a great service by going back to the source material. Hell, that's what every good reporter does: goes to the source material.
Get your nose out the book, boy. The humans you want to learn about are walking by all around you. Notice how all the "great american novels" were written on the back of years of newspaper reporting on the scene -- Steinbeck and the Grapes of Wrath (covered Okies for the San Fransisco paper), Mark Twain, etc.
For a guy who doesn't know anything about me, you sure make a lot of presumptions about what I do with my nose... and whether or not I've read Steinbeck and Twain, which as it happens I have.
Read, and write, the newspaper reports of today in this language, and you will get the same insight, with the added benefit that you, as a reporter, will matter to the world...
Perhaps. But that does nothing to invalidate the worth of reading the ancients, however bent you are on the matter. Did you have some sort of tramautic boarding school experience, or what?
... instead of being a worthless grad school parasite destined to waste out his life annoying kids as a depressed high school teacher who doesn't understand why the world doesn't appreciate intellectuals.
Actually, I dropped out of college, because... well, never mind why: make up your own misinformed reason why, I don't care.
"What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, "Look! This is something new"? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time."
-- Ecclesiastes 1:9
Right on. I couldn't have put it better myself.
On a similar note: Plato taught that knowledge is universal and eternal, and that the illusion of learning is in fact the loss of amnesia.
All our basic problems are there in [classical Athens] miniature. -- I.F. Stone
Exactly. The soul of man has not changed since the classical world.
Good, evil, right and wrong, kindness and cruelty, peace and war -- details may change, interpretations may change, certainly the technologies change... but in terms of our humanity, we are fundamentally the same as our ancestors.
There is a terrible temptation -- especially in America, my home country, whose founders saw themselves as the spiritual successors to the democratic principles of classical Athens -- to view one's own country as "better" than the rest of the world. Indeed, there is a terrible temptation to view oneself as "better" than the rest of mankind. But a reading of history says otherwise. We are neither better nor worse than our ancestors: we are surprisingly like them.
I'm learning to read classical Greek so that I may read Euripides.
An admirable exercise.
Journalist I.F. Stone, rather late in life, taught himself ancient Greek, in order to read the actual source documents relating to the trial and execution of Socrates.
No translation would suffice: Stone felt that only by reading the original text for himself could he arrive at the insight he desired.
Vidal is one of America's sharpest social critics, although he only operates as a critic. He ran for office once but I suspect he would be a failure as a career politician despite his family ties.
Vidal has also been in movies, without being an actor -- he played Director Josef in the movie Gattaca.
He's a bit stiff -- hell, he's an old man with no visible acting experience -- but there was a certain charming gleam in his eye, like he was having such a good time that you just couldn't help believing in him.
Old gangs running the "protection" racket could actually offer protection for a price, by ensuring the
exclusivity of their turf, and freedom from other gangs for those in it. That's how the tax/police model
works, theoretically offering the taxed a chance to choose the Boss by voting. But these Eastern
European "gangs" can't guarantee exclusive control of their turf (the Internet). By the same token, neither
can the police. Where will the equilibrium coalesce? Or have we swept over the edge of chaos, into the
abyss?
2. A false or spurious electronic signal caused by a brief, unwanted surge of electric power.
THAT was the original definition. Unfortunately the term has been hijacked by computer programmers to mean something slightly different, and that usage is now the most common one. It's too bad, because the word "glitch" used to have a very specific and useful meaning. It should NOT be a general term for a fuckup.
We don't make closed source or "secret" laws in this country, ie, laws that effect the public in general, and that the public is not permitted to know or examine, but yet will be held accountable to. We don't have anonymous or secret agencies enforcing laws and arresting people, ie, a secret police force.
True -- we don't have Star Chambers.
But we do have "Black Budgets" -- many billions of dollars for covert military/spook purposes, approved by small Congressional committees, the details of which are hidden from Congress at large and from the public. In other words, closed-source spending.
Far more convicts were sent to North America than Australia. Of course, we'll forget about that for now, but it does go some way to explain Bush & co.;-)
It was only after the American Revolutionary war that we started shipping them to the land down under.
Good point.
What about in terms of convicts vs. other groups e.g. refugees? Large numbers of early American immigrants arrived not in chains, but in flight from their oppressors? I assume that this was less the case with Australia, given the distance from Europe. Anyone have the numbers?
Slashdot Mirror
Are you thinking what I'm thinking ...?
... protein-based processors ... edible computers!
Self-replicating transistors
-kgj
I love the thought of lawyers penetrating into space, exploding in a cloud of court orders and subpoenas as they're jettisoned out of the back of the shuttle.
Ahh, the pleasures of jettisoning lawyers into hard vacuum.
You know what else is fun?
Sending politicians out the airlock, and watching them bloat like hot air balloons until they explode in a cloud of lies and broken promises.
-kgj
But AIDS is devastating Africa these days.
..."
..."
Very true -- Africa is currently the living hell of continents. Meanwhile, the disease is threatening to do the same around the world, e.g.:
South America: "Latin America has yet to experience a full-blown AIDS epidemic, but the disease is spreading from high-risk individuals to the general population
Asia: "Asia is at risk of facing the world's worst AIDS epidemic if urgent preventative measures are not taken
-kgj
Personally, I would much rather die of a drug overdose while having sex with supermodels than have to die of any of these viruses.
Supermodels, plural? I wish I half your imagination -- I figured sex with one supermodel was good enough to die for!
Kidding aside, thanks for the interesting comments about your uncle's work.
-kgj
People don't use X. Not directly, anyway, any more than they use the frame or suspension of their car. It's an underpinning that is itself used by a close-to-the-user app (or set of apps), such as Metacity, Enlightenment, FVWM, Gnome, KDE, etc.
Good points. Thanks for the clarification.
As for why my post got modded Insightful -- when it really isn't, in retrospect -- I can only blame the moderators.
-kgj
All very good points. Thanks for the extended explanation.
-kgj
No, because X is a transparent technology or at least it should be. The average user should only need to interact with the X server to change his graphical resolution and depth....
All good points. Thanks for the clarification.
-kgj
9 out of ten, those people that bitch and complain about X simply do not understand it.
If substantial numbers of people don't understand X, doesn't that indicate the need to make X more user-friendly?
It shouldn't matter if those nine out of ten are plain vanilla non-technical people, either -- if we want to get X more used, it's got to be easy for anyone to use.
-kgj
Okay, so biometrics is in stores ... but can I use in-store biometrics to launch a nuclear strike?
-kgj
And the only way to know-it is to remember it :)
Exactly. Plato called this anamnesia -- that is, "loss of amnesia".
That work about Socrates is nothing but the newspaper reports from thousands of years ago in a different language.
... and whether or not I've read Steinbeck and Twain, which as it happens I have.
...
... instead of being a worthless grad school parasite destined to waste out his life annoying kids as a depressed high school teacher who doesn't understand why the world doesn't appreciate intellectuals.
... well, never mind why: make up your own misinformed reason why, I don't care.
The problem -- did you read the link I posted, where Stone discusses his work? -- is that the very scanty reports about Socrates have been (according to Stone) drastically misinterpreted over the centuries. Stone, greatest of newsmen, did history a great service by going back to the source material. Hell, that's what every good reporter does: goes to the source material.
Get your nose out the book, boy. The humans you want to learn about are walking by all around you. Notice how all the "great american novels" were written on the back of years of newspaper reporting on the scene -- Steinbeck and the Grapes of Wrath (covered Okies for the San Fransisco paper), Mark Twain, etc.
For a guy who doesn't know anything about me, you sure make a lot of presumptions about what I do with my nose
Read, and write, the newspaper reports of today in this language, and you will get the same insight, with the added benefit that you, as a reporter, will matter to the world
Perhaps. But that does nothing to invalidate the worth of reading the ancients, however bent you are on the matter. Did you have some sort of tramautic boarding school experience, or what?
Actually, I dropped out of college, because
-kgj
"What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, "Look! This is something new"? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time."
-- Ecclesiastes 1:9
Right on. I couldn't have put it better myself.
On a similar note: Plato taught that knowledge is universal and eternal, and that the illusion of learning is in fact the loss of amnesia.
-kgj
All our basic problems are there in [classical Athens] miniature. -- I.F. Stone
... but in terms of our humanity, we are fundamentally the same as our ancestors.
Exactly. The soul of man has not changed since the classical world.
Good, evil, right and wrong, kindness and cruelty, peace and war -- details may change, interpretations may change, certainly the technologies change
There is a terrible temptation -- especially in America, my home country, whose founders saw themselves as the spiritual successors to the democratic principles of classical Athens -- to view one's own country as "better" than the rest of the world. Indeed, there is a terrible temptation to view oneself as "better" than the rest of mankind. But a reading of history says otherwise. We are neither better nor worse than our ancestors: we are surprisingly like them.
-kgj
I'm learning to read classical Greek so that I may read Euripides.
An admirable exercise.
Journalist I.F. Stone, rather late in life, taught himself ancient Greek, in order to read the actual source documents relating to the trial and execution of Socrates.
No translation would suffice: Stone felt that only by reading the original text for himself could he arrive at the insight he desired.
-kgj
It would be creepy if the Internet had a sort of fractal self-similarity to our physiology.
....
Agreed.
Good material for an X-Files episode
-kgj
Vidal is one of America's sharpest social critics, although he only operates as a critic. He ran for office once but I suspect he would be a failure as a career politician despite his family ties.
Vidal has also been in movies, without being an actor -- he played Director Josef in the movie Gattaca.
He's a bit stiff -- hell, he's an old man with no visible acting experience -- but there was a certain charming gleam in his eye, like he was having such a good time that you just couldn't help believing in him.
-kgj
Peter puffing faggot.
Vidal prefers the term "homosexualist".
-kgj
As a Slashdotter, you have posted.
;-)
As a curious person, why dont you go read the friendly article
Quite right. Thanks for the friendly reminder. In fact, the article is pleasantly internationalist.
-kgj
Old gangs running the "protection" racket could actually offer protection for a price, by ensuring the exclusivity of their turf, and freedom from other gangs for those in it. That's how the tax/police model works, theoretically offering the taxed a chance to choose the Boss by voting. But these Eastern European "gangs" can't guarantee exclusive control of their turf (the Internet). By the same token, neither can the police. Where will the equilibrium coalesce? Or have we swept over the edge of chaos, into the abyss?
Quite true, and well said.
-kgj
2. A false or spurious electronic signal caused by a brief, unwanted surge of electric power.
THAT was the original definition. Unfortunately the term has been hijacked by computer programmers to mean something slightly different, and that usage is now the most common one. It's too bad, because the word "glitch" used to have a very specific and useful meaning. It should NOT be a general term for a fuckup.
Right you are. Now I'm twice as disgruntled -- !
-kgj
... the same facilities are useful for thumbnailing, screen magnifiers, and arbitrary transforms of applications on their way to the screen ...
For example, parsing the content and editing it on the way to the screen. How long before it's used for pop-up advertising?
-kgj
(It's called ironic understatement.)
Yup.
"The glitch that can be named is not the true glitch."
-kgj
We don't make closed source or "secret" laws in this country, ie, laws that effect the public in general, and that the public is not permitted to know or examine, but yet will be held accountable to. We don't have anonymous or secret agencies enforcing laws and arresting people, ie, a secret police force.
True -- we don't have Star Chambers.
But we do have "Black Budgets" -- many billions of dollars for covert military/spook purposes, approved by small Congressional committees, the details of which are hidden from Congress at large and from the public. In other words, closed-source spending.
-kgj
E-Voting Glitch: 19,000 Voters, 144,000 Votes
I hate the word "glitch", I really do.
It's an evasion, a pathetic euphemism.
What it really means is "bad programming", "fucked up", "profoundly fucked up", etc.
-kgj
Far more convicts were sent to North America than Australia. Of course, we'll forget about that for now, but it does go some way to explain Bush & co. ;-)
It was only after the American Revolutionary war that we started shipping them to the land down under.
Good point.
What about in terms of convicts vs. other groups e.g. refugees? Large numbers of early American immigrants arrived not in chains, but in flight from their oppressors? I assume that this was less the case with Australia, given the distance from Europe. Anyone have the numbers?
-kgj