The extra fee on the card matches the extra time some old biddy takes to write a check for a $1.39 can of tuna for the cat.
And don't get me started on these people with bizarre traveller's check from Goddamned-Nowhere, Uganda with the Roswell alien lettering on it that needs to be verified by three managers, four computers and an Act of Congress before I can pay cash for my freaking bag of cheddar flavored Wavy Lays.
...Yahoo Billpay. It's the greatest thing since sliced bread. The small monthly fee is not paid for by savings in postage stamps, but as others have mentioned, the savings in my time more than compensates.
Although if they raise the cost of stamps anymore, maintaining my own network of Pony Express riders (horses and all) would be cheaper.
I'm planting FOUR new trees in my yard early next year. There. Y'all feel better now?
They will be: an Orange tree, Japanese Maple, Flowering Plum and a tree to be named at a later date (Magnolia, probably).
The Magnolia (probably) will be available for a tree sitter around 2005. It will be fully wired for gigabit Ethernet. I'll begin accepting applications next summer.
I figure it will be a conversation piece and help me score with pagan babes. Akter I hose them down, of course.
Maladies such as asthma, lead poisoning, pesticide exposure, etc. which are caused by environmental damage are harming people. These are facts based on science.
And the banning of DDT, which was based on junk science, is causing hundreds of millions of malaria deaths around the world. But those are just icky third world types,so you don't care about them. Nice job.
OK. You want a medal or decoder ring or something?
I also support this project and the tree sitters.
You have every right to.
What disgusts me are the right wing anti-hippy posts on this thread.
That's it, boy! Revel in your ideological stupor! Proudly shout your blinkered, monochromatic worldview to the world! There's only leftwing and rightwing! Yeah! There's nothing in between or outside! Woo hoo! You go girl!
I'm not some tree-hugging hippy, but would love to take that Stihl chainsaw to some of your suburban, cubicle-dwelling libertarian heads.
So we don't have the right NOT to agree with the tree sitters, eh?
Ah, yes, the quite, tempered, reasoned voice of the religious fanatic.:-) Shouldn't you be thumping a copy of "Earth In Balance" somewhere?
it's the destruction of plant and animal habitats. It is a matter of scientific record that old-growth forests support life which younger forests generally cannot. As you might expect this is controversial; scientific (and pseudoscientific) studies have been done to support and call into question all aspects of the matter.
Exactly. And extremists ignore the good science on the opposing side.
But to say it is just ideology is to oversimplify in an attempt to dodge the issue.
On the contrary, it rather cuts to the heart and core of the matter where the extremsist are involved. It IS a religion to some, and no better than any other. It even has it's own breed of terrorist extremists (Earth First). It follows the classical model so depressingly.
Yes, yes, whatever your religion tells you. I guess the advantage of envrioreligion is that your "preists" don;t rape little boys. That's always a plus for any theological system.
If you believe that a tree farm is an acceptable replacement for an integrated forest ecosystem maybe it's you who should crack open a science book. (BTW, that would be biology.)
I never said it was a replacement. Your theologically addled brain only lets you argue against strawmen, so I'll let the fallacy slide.
if anything, the high tech world needs a serious dose of environmental awareness, power consumption and chip production being the two main things that I'm sure we could come up with very creative solutions to.
Um, we already are, and quite nicely without the help of yahoos like you. The wireless market is the main driver there. Battery technology still sucks white hot chunks, so we need to work with less and less current. The FPGAs I use are down to 1.5V. The I/O voltages are commonly down to 2.5V or less. They'll be powered by quantum foam in a decade or so the way things are going.;-)
It is not contradictory to use technology to protect the environment.
That would be true if that was what they were actually doing, but they aren't, so the point is moot.
By and large, what these people are against is the thoughtless, greedy, UNSUSTAINABLE raping of earth's resources.
Ooooo! The "unsustainable raping" line!
You know they plant more trees, right?
Corporations have demonstrated themselves to be incapable of thought beyond the bottom line.
Which is a good thing- it makes them plant more trees to harvest later. Redwoods, as another posther whined about, don't HAVE to be thousands of years old to harvest. And the fresh gowing forest converts more CO2 to O2 than the older forest that got cut down.
People like this are you and I.
Well, like *YOU*, perhaps. I prefer to actually activate my brain in the morning.
There's a saying:
WHOOP! WHOOP! WHOOP! Ah, that sound of the klaxon can only mean one thing! CLICHE ALERT!
"If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention."
Or a misanthrope who stopped giving a damn. Guilty as charged.;-) Or someone who looked at the actual science of the situation. I'm guilty of that heresy as well.
Nice generic quote, though. The exact same saying could be used about the infestion of the airwaves by reality TV shows as well.
Instead of labeling these public servants, read a bit about the issues and I'll bet you find yourself in the same mindset.
And after you read the ideological screeds of these SELF servants based on religious nature worship, read a science book as an antidote.
/.ers are too smart to dismiss environmental issues and activism as "hippie stuff".
No, but they are smart enough to dismiss tree sittesr as silly little pikers crying out for attention.
...scientists are human, and it's a serious problem in a society that still imagines scientists to be seekers of Truth & Justice.
The problem is also compounded by a public that does not understand the vast gulf between a uncovering a simple correlation and finding a true cause and effect relationship between two things.
Look at how many people still think that high power lines cause cancer after the guy who did the original study admitted to lying about some of the numbers. How many millions of dollars in property value were lost by the average Joe Homeowner near power lines because that jackass "researcher" had to put his ideology before reality? He found random statistical clustering and got people to believe in a fake cause and effect.
In fact, not only are scientists susceptible to ideology, in my experience working in a scientific field, they can be MORE prone to ideological degeneration than most people. You listen to them talk about their field of expertise and can be impressed, then they comment on politics and you want to run screaming into the night plotting how best to take up arms against the mad scientist.
These environmentals know that trees grow, right? And that they plant more trees, right? And that a young, fresh forest converts more CO2 than an old forest, right?
Maybe, instead of watching logging, they should read a science book or three, but then again all religions, be they god based or nature based, are resistant to science. Extreme environmentalism is just another religion.
It's all just ideology, and it degenerates the human mind to less than that of a crude robot. I've met these extreme enviro types. They have passed beyond reason and rationality and truth into a fantasy world. They should be in padded rooms getting help rather than in the tops of trees.
about Apple's method of pomoting the iPod is its measure of how many "songs" it will hold. Songs by whose definition? Are we talking 3-minute pop ballads ripped at 128 Kbps? Or long metal anthems pulled at 192 or highter bit rates? What about VBR?
Then again, there is no one size fits all, so they also tell you how big the hard drive is so you can figure it out for yourself.
You're a geek. Do the math. Even better: write a Perl script to analyze your MP3 collection and make the estimate for you.
You are erronously classified as `gay'. You have a few laughs. Some months later your application to the US marine corps is mysteriously turned down.
So this is a positive benefit?;-) (Just kidding, Corps fans!)
You are in the middle of a divorce procedure. Suddenly the opposing counsel produces your `personal profile' in court.
Solution: avoid marriage!:-D (Just kidding, uh, marriage fans.)
A new craze falls over America:
Critical thinking? Finally seeing ideology as a mental illness? The lynching death of boy bands?
concerned parents demand that Tivo etc hand over the names and adresses of all people whose profile indicates `pedofile interests'.
Concerned parents are then made fun of because they can't spell pedophile. They then spend the rest of their lives sorting through crate after crate of powerwalking FAQ files and manuals on pedometer maintenance.
You wander what it takes to be classified as such.
Molesting a child generally works.
You are a 50 year old single man. What movies are still save to tape?
You order a book about the islam. Then the Statue of Liberty gets to be blown up. Next you are dragged out of your home, flown to a military base near Cuba and put in solitary confinement, all because a subtle combination of factors made your profile look like that of a crazed, militant moslem, and the FBI took notice.
In the country that won't even secure its own borders?
You don't think we went to the moon, do you?
To the programmers of this profiling software it's just a nice gig.
Bleah. Is the SW community still using "gig" for job?
To the company employing it, it's just a way to make more money. To everyone else this profile seems a little peek into your head. If the profile is wrong about you, then you should NOT pass it of as a harmless bit of fun.
Sure you should, because in the real world, your paranoid delutions are a bunch of piffly foo-foo, to use a scientific term. I think Freud coined that one.
Well, for a start... I predict that The Sims will fuse with Counter-Strike into a new game where heavily-armed psychopaths massacre hapless suburban clones....
I'd settle for some way to get the car from Spy Hunter and the Tesla Claw weapon from Ratchet & Clank into Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.
I like the system; over time it's brought authors to my attention that I might not otherwise have noticed.
I hate to agree, but I do. I was initially of the "Oh. man, that stupid profiling nonsense" mindset. However, I, too, have discovered new authors as well as new areas of scientific and technological interest thanks to Amazon's suggestions. Haven't had any major howlers, though.
I learned if I add a book for someone else to one of my orders, I should always go in and manually remove it. I ordered a political book for my dad once, and started getting recommendations for all sorts of ideological fluff from Michael Moore to whatsherface... the blond conservative woman I want to bang... Ann Coulter, I think. Ooo, boy! The world according to various clogged political filtration systems! I'll just pass by the latest book on superstring theory or AI for one of those!
Slashdot Mirror
Just buy a vowel to add to the end of their real male name. This only applies after 8pm.
And don't get me started on these people with bizarre traveller's check from Goddamned-Nowhere, Uganda with the Roswell alien lettering on it that needs to be verified by three managers, four computers and an Act of Congress before I can pay cash for my freaking bag of cheddar flavored Wavy Lays.
Although if they raise the cost of stamps anymore, maintaining my own network of Pony Express riders (horses and all) would be cheaper.
;-)
And when Apple fails to deliver on the wild speculation, the peanut gallery will cry out, "But they promised us!"
And some MadPlayers. I'd love to see what folks raised on tribal rhythms could do with those.
No, I dismiss the tree sitters. Your efforts here are wasted. Sorry.
And much of the "overwhelming science" is junk.
I'm also a complete, burned out misanthrope, and don't give a flying f**k. :-)
They will be: an Orange tree, Japanese Maple, Flowering Plum and a tree to be named at a later date (Magnolia, probably).
The Magnolia (probably) will be available for a tree sitter around 2005. It will be fully wired for gigabit Ethernet. I'll begin accepting applications next summer.
I figure it will be a conversation piece and help me score with pagan babes. Akter I hose them down, of course.
And the banning of DDT, which was based on junk science, is causing hundreds of millions of malaria deaths around the world. But those are just icky third world types ,so you don't care about them. Nice job.
OK. You want a medal or decoder ring or something?
I also support this project and the tree sitters.
You have every right to.
What disgusts me are the right wing anti-hippy posts on this thread.
That's it, boy! Revel in your ideological stupor! Proudly shout your blinkered, monochromatic worldview to the world! There's only leftwing and rightwing! Yeah! There's nothing in between or outside! Woo hoo! You go girl!
I'm not some tree-hugging hippy, but would love to take that Stihl chainsaw to some of your suburban, cubicle-dwelling libertarian heads.
So we don't have the right NOT to agree with the tree sitters, eh?
Ah, yes, the quite, tempered, reasoned voice of the religious fanatic. :-) Shouldn't you be thumping a copy of "Earth In Balance" somewhere?
Sounds like a wonderful place for an entertainment multiplex with a good view. :-) Are there any current bids for the land? I'm interested.
I didn;t say it was. Just making the comment.
it's the destruction of plant and animal habitats. It is a matter of scientific record that old-growth forests support life which younger forests generally cannot. As you might expect this is controversial; scientific (and pseudoscientific) studies have been done to support and call into question all aspects of the matter.
Exactly. And extremists ignore the good science on the opposing side.
But to say it is just ideology is to oversimplify in an attempt to dodge the issue.
On the contrary, it rather cuts to the heart and core of the matter where the extremsist are involved. It IS a religion to some, and no better than any other. It even has it's own breed of terrorist extremists (Earth First). It follows the classical model so depressingly.
Yes, yes, whatever your religion tells you. I guess the advantage of envrioreligion is that your "preists" don;t rape little boys. That's always a plus for any theological system.
If you believe that a tree farm is an acceptable replacement for an integrated forest ecosystem maybe it's you who should crack open a science book. (BTW, that would be biology.)
I never said it was a replacement. Your theologically addled brain only lets you argue against strawmen, so I'll let the fallacy slide.
Ah, the chant of the faithful.
Or was that the cry of the loon?
if anything, the high tech world needs a serious dose of environmental awareness, power consumption and chip production being the two main things that I'm sure we could come up with very creative solutions to.
Um, we already are, and quite nicely without the help of yahoos like you. The wireless market is the main driver there. Battery technology still sucks white hot chunks, so we need to work with less and less current. The FPGAs I use are down to 1.5V. The I/O voltages are commonly down to 2.5V or less. They'll be powered by quantum foam in a decade or so the way things are going. ;-)
That would be true if that was what they were actually doing, but they aren't, so the point is moot.
By and large, what these people are against is the thoughtless, greedy, UNSUSTAINABLE raping of earth's resources.
Ooooo! The "unsustainable raping" line!
You know they plant more trees, right?
Corporations have demonstrated themselves to be incapable of thought beyond the bottom line.
Which is a good thing- it makes them plant more trees to harvest later. Redwoods, as another posther whined about, don't HAVE to be thousands of years old to harvest. And the fresh gowing forest converts more CO2 to O2 than the older forest that got cut down.
People like this are you and I.
Well, like *YOU*, perhaps. I prefer to actually activate my brain in the morning.
There's a saying:
WHOOP! WHOOP! WHOOP! Ah, that sound of the klaxon can only mean one thing! CLICHE ALERT!
"If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention."
Or a misanthrope who stopped giving a damn. Guilty as charged. ;-) Or someone who looked at the actual science of the situation. I'm guilty of that heresy as well.
Nice generic quote, though. The exact same saying could be used about the infestion of the airwaves by reality TV shows as well.
Instead of labeling these public servants, read a bit about the issues and I'll bet you find yourself in the same mindset.
And after you read the ideological screeds of these SELF servants based on religious nature worship, read a science book as an antidote.
No, but they are smart enough to dismiss tree sittesr as silly little pikers crying out for attention.
You must be from the east coast, where they don't have any real trees...
Huh. And YOU accuse others of not having a clue, eh?
I built a deck last year out of clear, old-growth redwood. I just thought you'd like to know that.
The problem is also compounded by a public that does not understand the vast gulf between a uncovering a simple correlation and finding a true cause and effect relationship between two things.
Look at how many people still think that high power lines cause cancer after the guy who did the original study admitted to lying about some of the numbers. How many millions of dollars in property value were lost by the average Joe Homeowner near power lines because that jackass "researcher" had to put his ideology before reality? He found random statistical clustering and got people to believe in a fake cause and effect.
In fact, not only are scientists susceptible to ideology, in my experience working in a scientific field, they can be MORE prone to ideological degeneration than most people. You listen to them talk about their field of expertise and can be impressed, then they comment on politics and you want to run screaming into the night plotting how best to take up arms against the mad scientist.
Maybe, instead of watching logging, they should read a science book or three, but then again all religions, be they god based or nature based, are resistant to science. Extreme environmentalism is just another religion.
It's all just ideology, and it degenerates the human mind to less than that of a crude robot. I've met these extreme enviro types. They have passed beyond reason and rationality and truth into a fantasy world. They should be in padded rooms getting help rather than in the tops of trees.
Then again, there is no one size fits all, so they also tell you how big the hard drive is so you can figure it out for yourself.
You're a geek. Do the math. Even better: write a Perl script to analyze your MP3 collection and make the estimate for you.
stupid marketing tactics...
stupid consumer comments...
"Ozone Depeletion and global warming are two different issues."
It's CO2 emissions that are allegedly a major factor in global warming. Unless your fridge is gasoline powered, this is not an issue.
And CFCs have already been banned. I though /. was on the bleeding edge?
ObSheesh: Sheesh!
Richard Roeper? Is that you?
So this is a positive benefit? ;-) (Just kidding, Corps fans!)
You are in the middle of a divorce procedure. Suddenly the opposing counsel produces your `personal profile' in court.
Solution: avoid marriage! :-D (Just kidding, uh, marriage fans.)
A new craze falls over America:
Critical thinking? Finally seeing ideology as a mental illness? The lynching death of boy bands?
concerned parents demand that Tivo etc hand over the names and adresses of all people whose profile indicates `pedofile interests'.
Concerned parents are then made fun of because they can't spell pedophile. They then spend the rest of their lives sorting through crate after crate of powerwalking FAQ files and manuals on pedometer maintenance.
You wander what it takes to be classified as such.
Molesting a child generally works.
You are a 50 year old single man. What movies are still save to tape?
Solution: Avoid child porn! (Just kidding child porn fa- hey, wait minute...)
You order a book about the islam. Then the Statue of Liberty gets to be blown up. Next you are dragged out of your home, flown to a military base near Cuba and put in solitary confinement, all because a subtle combination of factors made your profile look like that of a crazed, militant moslem, and the FBI took notice.
In the country that won't even secure its own borders?
You don't think we went to the moon, do you?
To the programmers of this profiling software it's just a nice gig.
Bleah. Is the SW community still using "gig" for job?
To the company employing it, it's just a way to make more money. To everyone else this profile seems a little peek into your head. If the profile is wrong about you, then you should NOT pass it of as a harmless bit of fun.
Sure you should, because in the real world, your paranoid delutions are a bunch of piffly foo-foo, to use a scientific term. I think Freud coined that one.
I'd settle for some way to get the car from Spy Hunter and the Tesla Claw weapon from Ratchet & Clank into Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.
Ramblingly incoherent? :-D
I hate to agree, but I do. I was initially of the "Oh. man, that stupid profiling nonsense" mindset. However, I, too, have discovered new authors as well as new areas of scientific and technological interest thanks to Amazon's suggestions. Haven't had any major howlers, though.
I learned if I add a book for someone else to one of my orders, I should always go in and manually remove it. I ordered a political book for my dad once, and started getting recommendations for all sorts of ideological fluff from Michael Moore to whatsherface... the blond conservative woman I want to bang... Ann Coulter, I think. Ooo, boy! The world according to various clogged political filtration systems! I'll just pass by the latest book on superstring theory or AI for one of those!