I wonder if it'd ever be possible to register our data and preferences with some sort of trustworthy neutral party, and have advertising routed through them so that the business models that depend on it can still survive while we're not bored to pieces or abused by marketting companies.
No, it will never be possible. There will always be advertisers who are determined to exploit and wreck any system based on fair play.
A friend of mine and I were walking around San Francisco and I told him to count the amount of cameras he saw while walking around town.
You're right in that most major US cities are like that, but then most major US cities are run by Democrats. You don't get that shit in the red states.
2) In the case of regular citizens, I absolutely agree with you. But for Soldiers the RFID tattoo has a great advantage over the dog tag as it cannot be lost. If it is small, removable via inexpensive laser surgery, and placed on a couple different points around the body, it is useful for identifying bodies that have been badly mangled due to things like bombs, mines, and other explosives.
All military personnel have their DNA on file for that purpose.
IIRC, aiming for the joints was a common tactic in days of yore, when knights wore similar protection systems..... once you have the guy crippled and on the floor, a stab to an artery in the groin area would see him off.
Yes, but note that swords are a little more close up and personal than bullets. It's hard to pick out someone's joints when they're 50 meters away.
Unless this things has some sort of personal AC unit... but that would probably require portable energy beyound military logistical capabilies.
Or you could just ride in an air conditioned vehicle. Or integrate a personal cooling suit. My biggest question is how quickly you can get in the prone and roll since the best armor is a big chunk of dirt between you and the bullets.
IIW the Pentagon, I'd give it to weapons squad. An M240B is supposed to have a crew of 3, gunner + assistant + ammo bearer. (I'm presently an assistant gunner.)
Now, a 240 really needs at least two men on the gun because the gunner has to keep his eyes downrange while the AG takes care of ammo and barrel changes and such. But I wonder if it wouldn't be possible have a chain gun that draws off the suit's power. A chain gun is a far simpler mechanism because it doesn't rely on recoil or gas to operate, and you can set your rate of fire to keep the barrel from overheating. (The Bradley FV uses a chain gun.) And if you built the gun into the suit, you'd get tons of anime nerds signing up for the Army...
That's a troll. It combines trivia, imflammatory opinions, and a condescending tone with at least some creativity.
Nonsense. A troll is oriented entirely towards one result: disrupting the discussion. Most/. trolls just like to take the mickey out of self-important posters like you, but if on any political site you'll often see trolls that are trying to shut down or subvert the "other side."
Trolling is something that every student of rhetoric should understand. (Which is why I have so many trolls as friends...) Filibustering is trolling. Protesters that disrupt meetings are trolling. The guy preaching from a car with loudspeakers is trolling.
Without them, Slashdot would be nothing more than a bunch of people congratulating each other over their l33tn3s./. is pretty insular, to the extent that it's not it's because of differing viewpoints, not trolls. Most people browse at 3+ because most comments are pretty boring.
Actually, there is humor in Knuth. If you look up "Infinite recursion" in the index, you'll get a cross reference, to "Recursion, Infinite". Needless to say, that second entry is also a cross-reference.
Now I know who's behind those +5 Funny moderations.
From a page linked to by TFA: Regardless of the claims of battery makers, the technology to build an affordable battery that will last 100,000 miles, with minimal degradation of performance has yet to be demonstrated.
Li-ion batteries, after about a year, hold about half their charge. And this degradation can be accelerated if they're regularly stored in a hot place. And if battery manufacturers have fixed this, we sure as hell haven't seen these wonder batteries in laptops or mp3 players.
Maybe if you can afford a $100K Tesla you wouldn't mind buying a new battery pack every year, but I don't think this would go over well with consumers.
I had signed up with a debit card for XDrive. After I discovered that they had continued billing me after I had cancelled, I found that they simply ignored my emails and gave me a run-around on the phone.
But, surprise surprise, they finally answered my emails when I changed my card number and the money stopped flowing.
Now, my approach is to send an email demanding cancellation and cut off funds when I want a response. You might get threats, but if they send a collection agency to you, you can forward them the email as proof that you requested cancellation.
Due to Hawking radiation black holes *do* eventually lose mass and "evaporate." This happens quite quickly for small black holes and it's plausible that we could witness a nearby black hole evaporate.
"Those who would sacrifice essential liberties for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin
And, as always, people who quote Franklin can't read.
Not being watched at is not an "essential liberty." Odds are, if you put on clothes to go someplace you knew that cameras might be watching you, especially since every homo sapiens has two built into their head.
And the ability for people to walk the streets at night without fearing for their lives (an aspect of modern life I doubt Franklin could even comprehend) is not a "little temporary safety." For a lot of people it represents the ability to pursue happiness which really *is* an essential liberty.
What happened to the idea of kids playing to practice for the real world?
That's the purpose of play for the rest of the animal kingdom, with the various wild cat species being the best example
When most wild cats and dogs and whatnot play, the only toys they have are teeth and claws which are pretty innocuous compared to, say, a car. And their real world doesn't involve anything remotely as violent as war.
Yup, they even managed to throw in a reference to Gulf War Syndrome. I'm not going to debate the merits of GWS, but simply point out that depleted uranium (which is what is used in sabot rounds) is not highly radioactive. Its danger lies in the toxicity of dust particles that may be ingested, since it's a heavy metal.
I'd give it around a 7, about the same as Next Generation after it started getting good.
The story is engaging, the acting is very good by American standards, and the characters are well developed. Quite often the science aspect of it is outstanding.
Downsides: the plots are often too neatly resolved (e.g. turning someone into an alien and then back again with no ill effects) and it has the same problem Deep Space Nine did in that everything revolves around the stargate. And it never builds the dramatic intensity that the new BSG does.
I'm about as left on the political spectrum as any person you are likely to meet in the U.S. I'm part of what I like to think of as the Christian Left.
I'm about as secular as conservatives get.
In this post, you are making the common mistake of assuming that secularism is what drives the left. It's a factor, but I wouldn't call it a defining characteristic.
My experience is that what people have trouble with when it comes to religion, specifically Christianity, is the hypocrisy and hate of those that claim to be Christians and who have a significant following or media presence.
Bullshit. Liberals aren't secular, they're anti-Christian. Even a liberal church only exists to act as a forum for liberals to feel apologetic about Christian heritage.
You can't escape the fact that this is an intolerant statement.
All religions are intolerant because all religions have to assume that everyone else is damned unless they convert. If your church claims otherwise, it's deliberately misreading scripture (i.e. lying to you) or it's just there so you can pretend to be religious (you're lying to yourself). BTW, this is why I'm not religious.
However, you can't escape the fact that Pat Robertson has more free speech than either you, I, or the vast majority of people have.
So? Why should everyone have equal airtime? Not everyone has that much to say. I suppose you think that if you can shut up Robertson that he and all the people who agree with him will just disappear. This is what I hate about liberals: preaching tolerance while trying to silence dissent.
The point of moderation is to reduce noise, not ensure that your-good-post (tm) is modded up.
If that's the case, then why do highly rated comments give you more karma? And why the tags "Insightful" and "Informative"?
Most people who complain about slashdot's moderation do not understand slashdot's moderation system.
No, I understand it perfectly well. I understand that given a set of inputs (the comments and moderators) the system produces outputs that are routinely misleading or irrelevant to readers. To any logical way of thinking, it's broken, plain and simple.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if it'd ever be possible to register our data and preferences with some sort of trustworthy neutral party, and have advertising routed through them so that the business models that depend on it can still survive while we're not bored to pieces or abused by marketting companies.
No, it will never be possible. There will always be advertisers who are determined to exploit and wreck any system based on fair play.
Never used Linux's scheduler, but I tried to use NT's many times. At least as recently as Win 2K, it was horribly broken.
The bin of loaded .38s is a good idea, all the same.
A friend of mine and I were walking around San Francisco and I told him to count the amount of cameras he saw while walking around town.
You're right in that most major US cities are like that, but then most major US cities are run by Democrats. You don't get that shit in the red states.
2) In the case of regular citizens, I absolutely agree with you. But for Soldiers the RFID tattoo has a great advantage over the dog tag as it cannot be lost. If it is small, removable via inexpensive laser surgery, and placed on a couple different points around the body, it is useful for identifying bodies that have been badly mangled due to things like bombs, mines, and other explosives.
All military personnel have their DNA on file for that purpose.
Reset the permissions? I've been running multiple OS X systems since 10.0, and I've never had to "reset the permissions" even once.
Just guessing, but I think it refers to using Disk Utility to repair permissions.
IIRC, aiming for the joints was a common tactic in days of yore, when knights wore similar protection systems..... once you have the guy crippled and on the floor, a stab to an artery in the groin area would see him off.
Yes, but note that swords are a little more close up and personal than bullets. It's hard to pick out someone's joints when they're 50 meters away.
Unless this things has some sort of personal AC unit... but that would probably require portable energy beyound military logistical capabilies.
Or you could just ride in an air conditioned vehicle. Or integrate a personal cooling suit. My biggest question is how quickly you can get in the prone and roll since the best armor is a big chunk of dirt between you and the bullets.
IIW the Pentagon, I'd give it to weapons squad. An M240B is supposed to have a crew of 3, gunner + assistant + ammo bearer. (I'm presently an assistant gunner.)
Now, a 240 really needs at least two men on the gun because the gunner has to keep his eyes downrange while the AG takes care of ammo and barrel changes and such. But I wonder if it wouldn't be possible have a chain gun that draws off the suit's power. A chain gun is a far simpler mechanism because it doesn't rely on recoil or gas to operate, and you can set your rate of fire to keep the barrel from overheating. (The Bradley FV uses a chain gun.) And if you built the gun into the suit, you'd get tons of anime nerds signing up for the Army...
The Ayn Rand-influenced Librarian crowd.
Shit, you can troll them by just calling them a "crowd."
you: "So, you're an Objectivist?"
johngalt234285: "No, damn it, I'm an individual!"
That's a troll. It combines trivia, imflammatory opinions, and a condescending tone with at least some creativity.
/. trolls just like to take the mickey out of self-important posters like you, but if on any political site you'll often see trolls that are trying to shut down or subvert the "other side."
/. is pretty insular, to the extent that it's not it's because of differing viewpoints, not trolls. Most people browse at 3+ because most comments are pretty boring.
Nonsense. A troll is oriented entirely towards one result: disrupting the discussion. Most
Trolling is something that every student of rhetoric should understand. (Which is why I have so many trolls as friends...) Filibustering is trolling. Protesters that disrupt meetings are trolling. The guy preaching from a car with loudspeakers is trolling.
Without them, Slashdot would be nothing more than a bunch of people congratulating each other over their l33tn3s.
Actually, there is humor in Knuth. If you look up "Infinite recursion" in the index, you'll get a cross reference, to "Recursion, Infinite". Needless to say, that second entry is also a cross-reference.
Now I know who's behind those +5 Funny moderations.
From a page linked to by TFA: Regardless of the claims of battery makers, the technology to build an affordable battery that will last 100,000 miles, with minimal degradation of performance has yet to be demonstrated.
Li-ion batteries, after about a year, hold about half their charge. And this degradation can be accelerated if they're regularly stored in a hot place. And if battery manufacturers have fixed this, we sure as hell haven't seen these wonder batteries in laptops or mp3 players.
Maybe if you can afford a $100K Tesla you wouldn't mind buying a new battery pack every year, but I don't think this would go over well with consumers.
I had signed up with a debit card for XDrive. After I discovered that they had continued billing me after I had cancelled, I found that they simply ignored my emails and gave me a run-around on the phone.
But, surprise surprise, they finally answered my emails when I changed my card number and the money stopped flowing.
Now, my approach is to send an email demanding cancellation and cut off funds when I want a response. You might get threats, but if they send a collection agency to you, you can forward them the email as proof that you requested cancellation.
Due to Hawking radiation black holes *do* eventually lose mass and "evaporate." This happens quite quickly for small black holes and it's plausible that we could witness a nearby black hole evaporate.
You're my hero.
"Those who would sacrifice essential liberties for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin
And, as always, people who quote Franklin can't read.
Not being watched at is not an "essential liberty." Odds are, if you put on clothes to go someplace you knew that cameras might be watching you, especially since every homo sapiens has two built into their head.
And the ability for people to walk the streets at night without fearing for their lives (an aspect of modern life I doubt Franklin could even comprehend) is not a "little temporary safety." For a lot of people it represents the ability to pursue happiness which really *is* an essential liberty.
Its fun to imagine how the world would reshape itself. Would it be good, or a disaster.
Did you ever watch Babylon 5? (If you didn't: psychics were relatively common and telepathic screening was standard procedure in the corporate world.)
I disable them all because I hate any innovation of the web past 1991. Anyone who disagrees with me is wrong. This article is proof.
Screw the web, I'm posting over a gopher gateway.
Because, after all, it's not like you can seriously injure and kill with teeth and claws. It's not like that's their *intended purpose.*
Right, now compare an adolescent dog playing with teeth and claws with an adolescent human driving drunk.
Which is more dangerous?
More like a constant state of war where the enemy doesn't just try and shoot you, he eats you afterward.
Alright, what's the animal kingdom equivalent of the machine gun?
What happened to the idea of kids playing to practice for the real world?
That's the purpose of play for the rest of the animal kingdom, with the various wild cat species being the best example
When most wild cats and dogs and whatnot play, the only toys they have are teeth and claws which are pretty innocuous compared to, say, a car. And their real world doesn't involve anything remotely as violent as war.
Yup, they even managed to throw in a reference to Gulf War Syndrome. I'm not going to debate the merits of GWS, but simply point out that depleted uranium (which is what is used in sabot rounds) is not highly radioactive. Its danger lies in the toxicity of dust particles that may be ingested, since it's a heavy metal.
I'd give it around a 7, about the same as Next Generation after it started getting good.
The story is engaging, the acting is very good by American standards, and the characters are well developed. Quite often the science aspect of it is outstanding.
Downsides: the plots are often too neatly resolved (e.g. turning someone into an alien and then back again with no ill effects) and it has the same problem Deep Space Nine did in that everything revolves around the stargate. And it never builds the dramatic intensity that the new BSG does.
I'm about as left on the political spectrum as any person you are likely to meet in the U.S. I'm part of what I like to think of as the Christian Left.
I'm about as secular as conservatives get.
In this post, you are making the common mistake of assuming that secularism is what drives the left. It's a factor, but I wouldn't call it a defining characteristic.
My experience is that what people have trouble with when it comes to religion, specifically Christianity, is the hypocrisy and hate of those that claim to be Christians and who have a significant following or media presence.
Bullshit. Liberals aren't secular, they're anti-Christian. Even a liberal church only exists to act as a forum for liberals to feel apologetic about Christian heritage.
You can't escape the fact that this is an intolerant statement.
All religions are intolerant because all religions have to assume that everyone else is damned unless they convert. If your church claims otherwise, it's deliberately misreading scripture (i.e. lying to you) or it's just there so you can pretend to be religious (you're lying to yourself). BTW, this is why I'm not religious.
However, you can't escape the fact that Pat Robertson has more free speech than either you, I, or the vast majority of people have.
So? Why should everyone have equal airtime? Not everyone has that much to say. I suppose you think that if you can shut up Robertson that he and all the people who agree with him will just disappear. This is what I hate about liberals: preaching tolerance while trying to silence dissent.
The point of moderation is to reduce noise, not ensure that your-good-post (tm) is modded up.
If that's the case, then why do highly rated comments give you more karma? And why the tags "Insightful" and "Informative"?
Most people who complain about slashdot's moderation do not understand slashdot's moderation system.
No, I understand it perfectly well. I understand that given a set of inputs (the comments and moderators) the system produces outputs that are routinely misleading or irrelevant to readers. To any logical way of thinking, it's broken, plain and simple.