This raises an interesting issue. What if I created a Japanese website called "maikurosofuto.com"? Only a speaker of Japanese would recognize that it's a direct and obvious transliteration of "Microsoft" into Japanese, transliterated back in to Roman characters. Would a U.S., or more precisely, English-speaking, court uphold a lawsuit? What about a Japanese court?
I seem to recall Jobs saying in "Triumph of the Nerds" something to the effect that a _large_ group of very talented people is also _less_ capable of great things, and that you need some average people in the mix. He was referring specifically to Microsoft.
Ah, but it turns out that a year before you were born, your mother was carrying a child. It was a boy, and your parents decided to call him Geekboy, and hoped to send him to kindergarten so he could grow up to be a bright young man an a useful member of society. But the doctor told them that the child would be brain-damaged if born. So your parents decided to abort that child. They weren't planning on having any more children after Geekboy was born, but since he never made it, they decided to try again, and a year later you were born.
Just think of what a loss it is to the world that Geekboy(#1) was never born. He was never around to save lives and enrich the lives of those around him... oh, such a tragedy. If only Geekboy(#1) could have lived, then... then... Geekboy(#2) - YOU would have never been born.
>>> And the argument for overpopulation is equally ridiculous...
Well, seeing as my parents both came from families of 11+ kids with single incomes, I have to disregard this idea as ludicrous... >>>
Right. Hey, it never caused any problems in MY specific circumstances, so the idea that it could be detrimental in any of the many other circumstances (and has been shown to be in most cases) should be dismissed as ludicrous.
Yeah, I tried cocaine twice, and _I_ never went out and killed anybody as a result, so what's the problem with the stuff, right?
>>> Where would I be if my parents had followed a course of genetically engineering their children? I would NOT be around because I am predisposed to being overweight, under-athletic, and have less-than-perfect vision despite having an excellent mind and capacity for learning and thought. >>>
Yes, that embryo that became you would not exist. But in its place would be an individual without those physical imperfections but all the mental abilities, and guess what? That individual would be YOU!
I'm not advocating genetic engineering here. I just get tired of hearing that silly argument of if such-and-such never happened, I WOULDN'T BE HERE as if that would be a terrible tragedy.
Gee, if my father hadn't taken that trip to Boston in his twenties, he never would have met my mother, and I WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN BORN, thus I never would have had the social connections to get into Harvard, and I wouldn't be on this great promising political career with eventual presidential hopes, and... but wait, none of that happened! Instead, my father actually went to Asia, and met my mother, and I was born overseas, and thus I will never be the president, but I'm blessed with having two cultures, which never would have happened in the first scenario. So which is the greater tragedy/lost opportunity? There are an infinite number of potential scenarios, each centering on an individual who would be just as much YOU, some much better off, some much worse off.
Thinking like this is just silly and pointless. Arguing a point based on it is futile and proves nothing. And most of the time it's used to justify a series of completely random events and circumstances in the past as a preordained reason for one's existence, or something to be thankful for because you really wish things were better and need to rationalize it.
>>> Where would YOU be under such a system? Probably non-existant >>> Just try telling that to the poor genetically superior individual whose chance to exist was usurped by the imperfect person who was born instead!
The interface of a mechanical toggle switch which moves is quite different from a flat (mechanical or virtual) switch which is pressed, though.
The reason toggle switches are right or down to turn on is probably because in most languages are written left to right or top to bottom. (There are some languages which go right to left, but I'd be surprised if there are any that go bottom to top!) So we're culturally biased to associate these directions with "increase" or "progress" (as in numerical sequences.) Horizontal linear volume sliders always increase left to right, for example. And thus the right-for-on switch.
But the buttons on a dialog box don't move like toggle switches, so they don't have to accomodate the directional bias. Instead, they are righfully arranged in order of preference. Most of the time when you get an OK/Cancel dialog, you select OK. And it only makes sense that the most likely choice is presented first.
I really wish America would one day drop its absurd "middle-endian" date format: September 30, 1999
Most of the world is big-endian (YYYY/MM/DD), Europe is mostly little-endian (DD/MM/YYYY), but is there any other country in the world that is middle-endian?
Japan is almost(?) entirely big-endian: not just dates, but names and addresses too. I really dig that.
>> So why is it so wrong that celsius is based on the freezing and boiling point of water? Because temperature MATTERS to humans and the state changes of water have nothing at all to do with us. >>
But they are easily OBSERVABLE. If I have a kettle of water on the stove, I can tell you when it reaches 100 degrees Celsius. If I look outside the window from my warm house and see that the lake is frozen, I know that the temperature (near the surface of the water, at least) is 0 Celsius or less.
>>> The only reason base 10 (or A, if you prefer) makes sense is because we have 10 fingers. The reason we count in base ten stems from this fact from long ago. >>>
That's like saying the only reason we speak through our mouths instead of communicating by making farting noises with our armpits is because we have vocal chords. And so speaking is just an arbitrary method of audible human communication which isn't necessarily better than others.
>>> In response to the gist of these systems, the English system, while ugly in many ways, does have some sense in that it's people-units. Ie, feet, hands. For a while I was a mechanic, and we used foot-pounds as units of torque. It's pretty cool, nice and quick I can get an estime that if I want to torque a lug nut to 90 foot-pounds, I can apply 90 pounds of force 1 foot down the wrench. >>>
There's nothing about that wrench, or the units used, that's in any way human-oriented! Now if you could accurately apply some specifed number of foot-pounds of torque, for example, by POUNDing on the wrench at an "average" strength, at a distance equal to the measure of your FOOT, then it could be truly human-gauged. But otherwise, it's just as arbitrary as a kg-cm.
I found Lizard's rant page well worth my time. It raised some interesting points, and made me think. (Among other thoughts, that the author is a grade-A whiner...)
As to the conclusion that voluntary simplicity is parasitic, my response is "Great!" I prefer to think of it as low-level economic/social guerilla warfare. It's the poor (or wannabe-poor) are exploiting the (relatively) rich.
As a mild VS'er (no car, no credit card, mostly vegetarian), I pride myself on the belief that if half the people in the U.S. lived the way I do, the entire economy would collapse.
>>> On a separate note I do belive that we need the current break neck speed of technology just to keep feeding everyone, with the advance of medcine the population is growing larger and larger but the planet isn't getting any bigger. >>>
We need to have people running around with pagers/celphones on call 24/7 to keep people from starving? It seems to me that whatever (doubtful) social benefits are afforded by middle-class business and leisure-oriented high technology, virtually none of it goes to the poor underclass.
As for the general problems of overpopulation and resource scarcity, I think we've rightfully stopped looking for a technological solution long ago. Technology alone isn't going to solve them.
Homer: Are you saying you're never going to eat any animal again? What about bacon? Lisa: No. Homer: Ham? Lisa: No! Homer: Pork chops? Lisa: Dad, those all come from the same animal! Homer: Heh heh heh... ooh... yeah... right, Lisa. A wonderful... magical animal.
"Over the next years I'll off to Europe. Co-workers have been as far as Kuala Lumpur..."
I found that misty-eyed pronouncement amusing and quaint in its naivete, but hey, you've got the right attitude.
I quit my previous job on good terms after six years of quite satisfying work. When my boss asked me why I was leaving, I told him "so I can go mountain biking in Vietnam", and that was the honest truth, and that was exactly what I did during the following six months.
I don't know when I'll leave my current job, but it won't be too far down the road, and it won't be just for more money at some other company down the road.
I work as a software tester, and a few months ago we got a memo from one of the project bigwigs that our goal as testers should be to find "five bugs a day". Well, knowing that I was nowhere near able to maintain that quota, I instead offered the challenge to my co-workers that if anyone could find five bugs a day for five straight days, I would eat five bugs a day (for one day).
I wasn't too surprised when one of the guys actually did find five bugs a day for five straight days. Nor was I scared of holding up my end of the deal. I've eaten giant waterbugs and grasshoppers in Southeast Asia, and was looking forward to it.
Of course, finding insects to eat can be a challenge, but I managed to get a bunch of fat, juicy crickets at the local pet shop, in time for a party with all my co-workers in attendance. I had a few beers beforehand, but by the end of the evening I had downed five live-and-wriggling crickets. Kinda crunchy, gooey inside, and a bit sour. Mmmmmmmmmm.
"I find that today a single joint is enough to get me high . . . in one movie theater recently I found I could get high just by inhaling the cannabis smoke which permeated the theater," wrote Sagan...
I realize that this took place in 1971, but still, what kind of movie theater was this, and where??
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I'd rather watch The Matrix in 0:0
This raises an interesting issue. What if I created a Japanese website called "maikurosofuto.com"? Only a speaker of Japanese would recognize that it's a direct and obvious transliteration of "Microsoft" into Japanese, transliterated back in to Roman characters. Would a U.S., or more precisely, English-speaking, court uphold a lawsuit? What about a Japanese court?
Or Japanese, a la Pokemon, purikura, burapi, pokeberu, famicon, puresute...
Slashdot
-> surasshu-dotto
-> surado
I seem to recall Jobs saying in "Triumph of the Nerds" something to the effect that a _large_ group of very talented people is also _less_ capable of great things, and that you need some average people in the mix. He was referring specifically to Microsoft.
Ah, but it turns out that a year before you were born, your mother was carrying a child. It was a boy, and your parents decided to call him Geekboy, and hoped to send him to kindergarten so he could grow up to be a bright young man an a useful member of society. But the doctor told them that the child would be brain-damaged if born. So your parents decided to abort that child. They weren't planning on having any more children after Geekboy was born, but since he never made it, they decided to try again, and a year later you were born.
Just think of what a loss it is to the world that Geekboy(#1) was never born. He was never around to save lives and enrich the lives of those around him... oh, such a tragedy. If only Geekboy(#1) could have lived, then... then... Geekboy(#2) - YOU would have never been born.
>>>
And the argument for overpopulation is equally ridiculous...
Well, seeing as my parents both came from families of 11+ kids with single incomes, I have to disregard this idea as ludicrous...
>>>
Right. Hey, it never caused any problems in MY specific circumstances, so the idea that it could be detrimental in any of the many other circumstances (and has been shown to be in most cases) should be dismissed as ludicrous.
Yeah, I tried cocaine twice, and _I_ never went out and killed anybody as a result, so what's the problem with the stuff, right?
>>>
Where would I be if my parents had followed a course of genetically engineering their children? I would NOT be around because I am predisposed to being overweight, under-athletic, and have less-than-perfect vision despite having an excellent mind and capacity for learning and thought.
>>>
Yes, that embryo that became you would not exist. But in its place would be an individual without those physical imperfections but all the mental abilities, and guess what? That individual would be YOU!
I'm not advocating genetic engineering here. I just get tired of hearing that silly argument of if such-and-such never happened, I WOULDN'T BE HERE as if that would be a terrible tragedy.
Gee, if my father hadn't taken that trip to Boston in his twenties, he never would have met my mother, and I WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN BORN, thus I never would have had the social connections to get into Harvard, and I wouldn't be on this great promising political career with eventual presidential hopes, and... but wait, none of that happened! Instead, my father actually went to Asia, and met my mother, and I was born overseas, and thus I will never be the president, but I'm blessed with having two cultures, which never would have happened in the first scenario. So which is the greater tragedy/lost opportunity? There are an infinite number of potential scenarios, each centering on an individual who would be just as much YOU, some much better off, some much worse off.
Thinking like this is just silly and pointless. Arguing a point based on it is futile and proves nothing. And most of the time it's used to justify a series of completely random events and circumstances in the past as a preordained reason for one's existence, or something to be thankful for because you really wish things were better and need to rationalize it.
>>>
Where would YOU be under such a system? Probably non-existant
>>>
Just try telling that to the poor genetically superior individual whose chance to exist was usurped by the imperfect person who was born instead!
The interface of a mechanical toggle switch which moves is quite different from a flat (mechanical or virtual) switch which is pressed, though.
The reason toggle switches are right or down to turn on is probably because in most languages are written left to right or top to bottom. (There are some languages which go right to left, but I'd be surprised if there are any that go bottom to top!) So we're culturally biased to associate these directions with "increase" or "progress" (as in numerical sequences.) Horizontal linear volume sliders always increase left to right, for example. And thus the right-for-on switch.
But the buttons on a dialog box don't move like toggle switches, so they don't have to accomodate the directional bias. Instead, they are righfully arranged in order of preference. Most of the time when you get an OK/Cancel dialog, you select OK. And it only makes sense that the most likely choice is presented first.
... and did they?? Did they??
>>>
We should have started metric-US-2000 and made the big push the convert over.
>>>
We'll there's still time for binary-US-2048
I really wish America would one day drop its absurd "middle-endian" date format: September 30, 1999
Most of the world is big-endian (YYYY/MM/DD), Europe is mostly little-endian (DD/MM/YYYY), but is there any other country in the world that is middle-endian?
Japan is almost(?) entirely big-endian: not just dates, but names and addresses too. I really dig that.
>>
So why is it so wrong that celsius is based on the freezing and boiling point of water? Because temperature MATTERS to humans and the state changes of water have nothing at all to do with us.
>>
But they are easily OBSERVABLE. If I have a kettle of water on the stove, I can tell you when it reaches 100 degrees Celsius. If I look outside the window from my warm house and see that the lake is frozen, I know that the temperature (near the surface of the water, at least) is 0 Celsius or less.
So if the U.S. goes metric, will we have to go back and rewrite all those Beach Boys, Jan & Dean, and other surf rock hot rod song lyrics?
>>>
The only reason base 10 (or A, if you prefer) makes sense is because we have 10 fingers. The reason we count in base ten stems from this fact from long ago.
>>>
That's like saying the only reason we speak through our mouths instead of communicating by making farting noises with our armpits is because we have vocal chords. And so speaking is just an arbitrary method of audible human communication which isn't necessarily better than others.
>>>
In response to the gist of these systems, the English system, while ugly in many ways, does have some sense in that it's people-units. Ie, feet, hands. For a while I was a mechanic, and we used foot-pounds as units of torque. It's pretty cool, nice and quick I can get an estime that if I want to torque a lug nut to 90 foot-pounds, I can apply 90 pounds of force 1 foot down the wrench.
>>>
There's nothing about that wrench, or the units used, that's in any way human-oriented! Now if you could accurately apply some specifed number of foot-pounds of torque, for example, by POUNDing on the wrench at an "average" strength, at a distance equal to the measure of your FOOT, then it could be truly human-gauged. But otherwise, it's just as arbitrary as a kg-cm.
I found Lizard's rant page well worth my time. It raised some interesting points, and made me think. (Among other thoughts, that the author is a grade-A whiner...)
As to the conclusion that voluntary simplicity is parasitic, my response is "Great!" I prefer to think of it as low-level economic/social guerilla warfare. It's the poor (or wannabe-poor) are exploiting the (relatively) rich.
As a mild VS'er (no car, no credit card, mostly vegetarian), I pride myself on the belief that if half the people in the U.S. lived the way I do, the entire economy would collapse.
>>>
On a separate note I do belive that we need the current break neck speed of technology just to keep feeding everyone, with the advance of medcine the population is growing larger and larger but the planet isn't getting any bigger.
>>>
We need to have people running around with pagers/celphones on call 24/7 to keep people from starving? It seems to me that whatever (doubtful) social benefits are afforded by middle-class business and leisure-oriented high technology, virtually none of it goes to the poor underclass.
As for the general problems of overpopulation and resource scarcity, I think we've rightfully stopped looking for a technological solution long ago. Technology alone isn't going to solve them.
Homer: Are you saying you're never going to eat any animal again?
What about bacon?
Lisa: No.
Homer: Ham?
Lisa: No!
Homer: Pork chops?
Lisa: Dad, those all come from the same animal!
Homer: Heh heh heh... ooh... yeah... right, Lisa. A wonderful... magical
animal.
>>>
I've earned
...
Ugh.. i'll stop now.
>>>
Please do.
Ah, to be young, brash, and oh-so-naive again...
"Over the next years I'll off to Europe. Co-workers have been as far as Kuala Lumpur..."
I found that misty-eyed pronouncement amusing and quaint in its naivete, but hey, you've got the right attitude.
I quit my previous job on good terms after six years of quite satisfying work. When my boss asked me why I was leaving, I told him "so I can go mountain biking in Vietnam", and that was the honest truth, and that was exactly what I did during the following six months.
I don't know when I'll leave my current job, but it won't be too far down the road, and it won't be just for more money at some other company down the road.
Yeah, I thought he was dead. We obviously must be thinking of someone else... Peter Ustinov? John Gielgud? C'mon, one of those guys has to be dead!
I buy my books in person, at independent bookstores, with cash. They've got nothing on me.
Wow, I guess none of you kids have heard of NEIL YOUNG!!
I work as a software tester, and a few months ago we got a memo from one of the project bigwigs that our goal as testers should be to find "five bugs a day". Well, knowing that I was nowhere near able to maintain that quota, I instead offered the challenge to my co-workers that if anyone could find five bugs a day for five straight days, I would eat five bugs a day (for one day).
I wasn't too surprised when one of the guys actually did find five bugs a day for five straight days. Nor was I scared of holding up my end of the deal. I've eaten giant waterbugs and grasshoppers in Southeast Asia, and was looking forward to it.
Of course, finding insects to eat can be a challenge, but I managed to get a bunch of fat, juicy crickets at the local pet shop, in time for a party with all my co-workers in attendance. I had a few beers beforehand, but by the end of the evening I had downed five live-and-wriggling crickets. Kinda crunchy, gooey inside, and a bit sour. Mmmmmmmmmm.
"I find that today a single joint is enough to get me high . . . in one movie theater recently I found I could get high just by inhaling the cannabis smoke which permeated the theater," wrote Sagan...
I realize that this took place in 1971, but still, what kind of movie theater was this, and where??
It must be affiliated with George Costanza's "Human Fund"!