Well, consider me educated, though it still reads like a grammatical nonsense.
Are you actually defending the use of double negatives in English as well? That they are valid in one language does not make them correct in another.
I guess that, despite the internet, American and British English will continue to drift apart. It's not just a case of validity being based on making oneself understood, either, as I now have real trouble.
If you like Mint then you might want to check out Cinnamon, that clem is making.
I can't wait for it to be available for debian (may end up building it myself) but it looks like the start of a sane desktop based on GTK3 and GNOME 3, but without the steaming pile that is GNOME Shell.
You can shout fire in a crowded theater in the US anymore.
WTF does that even mean?
Seriously. I have no clue whether it's supposed to mean you actually can shout fire (in which case why is the 'anymore' there, it's out of place without a negative), or you can't (but it says 'can' and the following sentence implies that yes, you actually can).
I know we British are bad for the double-negative, but dropping them entirely is ludicrous. Did this start with the famous American mistake - "I could care less"?
I know, I know, that's enough of a figure of speech that we can guess at its meaning, but dropping the 't negative completely doesn't have the same get out clause. I genuinely cannot understand you.
if they wern't using piss-poor security when dealing with the customer data
Piss poor security? That implies they'd try to protect it.
The latest version of their online network "SEN", that replaces PSN, has an agreement which states that they can and will give your data to whatever third parties they wish, and if you disagree then you get no service. I cannot agree to this. I don't know what happens if you update to the new firmware that brings this change and then refuse the T&Cs, but I can't accept them.
Because I can guarantee you that it's not as bad as you think. The police state mentality here is a long, long, long way behind the US and there are far fewer speed cameras than you'd think.
here in Perth we just got our first one. Somebody shot it.
Here's the thing - here on/. you hear an awful lot about genuinely crappy proposals that various parts of the Australian government make. 99.99% of these never see the light of day.
I think it was fairly obvious. The technology can be used for more purposes than that, but you seemed to be afraid that someone could abuse it, and that you would be helping them do that.
Not so sure about that. You seemed to be conflating the idea of someone being frightened of accidentally and unintentionally helping criminals, with me saying I'm not going to deliberately give my resources over to the use of something I find morally repugnant. There is a stark difference here.
I also want to be clear - it's not the criminal status I care about. The law is an ass in more ways than I can count.
you know is used in the main
Is this true?
So far as I coule tell last time I looked at the various index/aggregator pages on the network, yes, though that wa a few years ago now.
How does it feel to know that you could, at some point in time, unknowingly support a criminal? You need to cease all activity at once so that that never happens.
How does it feel not knowing the difference between actively giving resources to a network that you know is used in the main for something you find morally repugnant, and whatever the fuck point you're trying to make?
I don't usually agree with your posts, but I do here.
I've been shouted at here on/. before for voicing similar opinions, to the extent that I've been told that not only do I not believe in free speech, but I should have no right to vote in a democratic country because of my opinions.
My opinions in that post were about freenet (for those not familiar, a darknet that uses some of your bandwidth and disk space to move content around, encrypted in such a way that even you can't tell what it is). Specifically that freenet was a technically cool idea, but having had a look at it and seen the prevalence of child porn on the system, I didn't feel I could run a freenet node in good conscience - I wasn't going to give my resources to support that sort of thing.
ust like you wouldn't want to see the pieces of pig snout and various orifices going into the grinder and coming out as your lunch, you wouldn't want to see the bickering, infighting, back-stabbing, and other types of anti-social behavior that are combined to make our laws.
I think that's the point - good quality sausages don't have all that crap going in. Allowing us to see the process tells us whether we want to buy them or not, because we can see what goes in.
The same goes for laws. If we see our politicians behaving like spoilt children, or obviously working against their own constituents, or just shoving cronyist crap into law, we should know, even at the early stages, so we can get rid of the laws and the assholes,
You read it to the end, right? Just thought I'd check..,
He's a bit less of an arse by the end of the books, but still handsome, heroic and pretty one dimensional, IMHO. Plus as mentioned above, the ending leaves a bit of a bad taste.
Actually, TBH the whole thing didn't really work for me, from the moment there were people coming back from the dead, and the whole Al Capone business was just silly.
Couldn't agree more on that count. Just as you were wondering how he's going to wrap all this up because, hell, there aren't all that many pages left in this massive set of tomes....
Lad, that's the definition of what space opera *is*.
Sort of. Alastair Reynolds is definitely space opera, but nobody violates light-speed constraints in his Revelation Space cycle. Being an ex-physicist I think he likes to play at the harder end of Sci-Fi in many of his books. Not all by a long shot, and I'm still not entirely sure what he was trying to portray in "Terminal World", but certainly some of it.
True! And he spends much of the rest of his time in the culture universe dwelling on the dirty tricks and dark side of the culture, the things it does in the name of multi-species advancement that, on the surface may look less than enlightened...
"Our systems of morality and ethics morph at a much slower rate than does scientific theory."
I don't know about "Our" systems of morality. Mine seems to adapt just fine.
As a society, you're right, it seems to take us decades to get used to something. This, IMHO, is because of scared, firghtened old people, and luddites. Not all older people are like that, but there are enough that it becomes a problem, especially when society has a tendency to put them in positions of power.
Society is slow to adapt, and hold back significant numbers individuals that would like to do it faster.
Reading through the thread I sorta missed that as well.
You're right, it can be remarkably inconsistent, to argue for the freedom to treat people however badly they want, to outsource, to avoid all wethics and decry all government control, and then blame the chinese government for allowing that behaviour.
Pity, because some of that is written by actual physics professors and talks about speculative (but possible) areas of real science, which is what you seem to be demanding in your fist sentance there.
For instance, I just finished "Blue Remember Earth" by Alastair Reynolds, a guy with a PhD in Physics and Astronomy, who has worked for ESA.
Some of the best Sci-Fi changes a single assumption about the world we live in and extrapolates what people do in that new circumstance (The Forever War, a lot of PKD's work). That's enjoyable. Other Sci-Fi changes everything, but is still about the people and how they live in this strange world (Dune, Culture Novels). That's also good. Asimov and Clark and others are all about the concept and the theory, people are just decoration, this is also good if rather dry for most tastes. Some Sci-Fi takes place in a world that is a satire of our own, to attempt to show us the folly of certain mindsets (Snow Crash, Market Forces).
All of these sub-genres have their merits, and all have their hack writers who should never have been published. But if you don't enjoy the space opera of Iain M Banks then then there's probably something wrong with you.
Vinyl for home listening as it has superior sound quality
No, it doesn't.
CD audio is perfectly able to capture audio just as well as vinyl. There is nothing inherently superior about vinyl. Vinyl also wears out over time.
There is no need for physical media. If you are getting a nice 'warm' sound from your vinyl, that is an artifact of the sound distortion being introduced by your amp, or other parts of your equipment, maybe even the mastering of the album. All of these things can be captured and played back digitally.
Your love of an old data storage format is just weird.
People frothing at the mouth on internet forums are generally just annoyed at being painted as evil or immoral by religious types, or by having their lack of belief characterised as a religion.
And it's not proselytising to discuss things on an internet discussion site, for fuck's sake.
Agnosticism avoids no trap as it is another axis on a two dimensional plane. Agnostic - no evidence, A-theist, no religion. The two go very nicely together.
Every Atheist I've ever met or talked to, IRL or in 20 years of reading religious arguments on the internet, has been an agnostic atheist.
Dawkins is an agnostic atheist.
The other kind is only ever brought up by religious folks who are attempting to cast anyone professing to be an atheist into that light, paint that position as a faith position and then say "see, it's just the same as being religious therefore I can't be wrong!", or else get the target to admit to being agnostic and say "so you see, you don't know, and therefore I can't be wrong!"
It's childish and tiresome, I first saw it on usenet sometime around 1993 and it still has the same gaping logic hole - define the word atheist as whatever you like, all that will happen is that we'll need another word for those that are currently described as agnostic atheists (pretty much all atheists). It is the most repetitive straw man argument I've ever come across.
Believe what you like, but this tired old shit gets on my nerves.
Firstly, many of those positions say "permanent", not "fixed term contract", and last no time at all.
And secondly, if I don't like your resume, I don't like your resume. As long as you have no reason to suspect I am discriminating on race, age, disability or gender then I can hire who the hell I like, sorry if that bothers you.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, consider me educated, though it still reads like a grammatical nonsense.
Are you actually defending the use of double negatives in English as well? That they are valid in one language does not make them correct in another.
I guess that, despite the internet, American and British English will continue to drift apart. It's not just a case of validity being based on making oneself understood, either, as I now have real trouble.
If you like Mint then you might want to check out Cinnamon, that clem is making.
I can't wait for it to be available for debian (may end up building it myself) but it looks like the start of a sane desktop based on GTK3 and GNOME 3, but without the steaming pile that is GNOME Shell.
WTF does that even mean?
Seriously. I have no clue whether it's supposed to mean you actually can shout fire (in which case why is the 'anymore' there, it's out of place without a negative), or you can't (but it says 'can' and the following sentence implies that yes, you actually can).
I know we British are bad for the double-negative, but dropping them entirely is ludicrous. Did this start with the famous American mistake - "I could care less"?
I know, I know, that's enough of a figure of speech that we can guess at its meaning, but dropping the 't negative completely doesn't have the same get out clause. I genuinely cannot understand you.
Piss poor security? That implies they'd try to protect it.
The latest version of their online network "SEN", that replaces PSN, has an agreement which states that they can and will give your data to whatever third parties they wish, and if you disagree then you get no service.
I cannot agree to this. I don't know what happens if you update to the new firmware that brings this change and then refuse the T&Cs, but I can't accept them.
Where do you live Mr AC?
Because I can guarantee you that it's not as bad as you think. The police state mentality here is a long, long, long way behind the US and there are far fewer speed cameras than you'd think.
here in Perth we just got our first one. Somebody shot it.
Here's the thing - here on /. you hear an awful lot about genuinely crappy proposals that various parts of the Australian government make. 99.99% of these never see the light of day.
Not so sure about that. You seemed to be conflating the idea of someone being frightened of accidentally and unintentionally helping criminals, with me saying I'm not going to deliberately give my resources over to the use of something I find morally repugnant. There is a stark difference here.
I also want to be clear - it's not the criminal status I care about. The law is an ass in more ways than I can count.
So far as I coule tell last time I looked at the various index/aggregator pages on the network, yes, though that wa a few years ago now.
How does it feel not knowing the difference between actively giving resources to a network that you know is used in the main for something you find morally repugnant, and whatever the fuck point you're trying to make?
I don't usually agree with your posts, but I do here.
I've been shouted at here on /. before for voicing similar opinions, to the extent that I've been told that not only do I not believe in free speech, but I should have no right to vote in a democratic country because of my opinions.
My opinions in that post were about freenet (for those not familiar, a darknet that uses some of your bandwidth and disk space to move content around, encrypted in such a way that even you can't tell what it is). Specifically that freenet was a technically cool idea, but having had a look at it and seen the prevalence of child porn on the system, I didn't feel I could run a freenet node in good conscience - I wasn't going to give my resources to support that sort of thing.
The geek-rage was immense.
I think that's the point - good quality sausages don't have all that crap going in. Allowing us to see the process tells us whether we want to buy them or not, because we can see what goes in.
The same goes for laws. If we see our politicians behaving like spoilt children, or obviously working against their own constituents, or just shoving cronyist crap into law, we should know, even at the early stages, so we can get rid of the laws and the assholes,
You read it to the end, right?
Just thought I'd check..,
He's a bit less of an arse by the end of the books, but still handsome, heroic and pretty one dimensional, IMHO. Plus as mentioned above, the ending leaves a bit of a bad taste.
Actually, TBH the whole thing didn't really work for me, from the moment there were people coming back from the dead, and the whole Al Capone business was just silly.
Couldn't agree more on that count. Just as you were wondering how he's going to wrap all this up because, hell, there aren't all that many pages left in this massive set of tomes....
BOOM! Suck my enormous Deus Ex, bitch!
Err... The Night's Dawn Trilogy by Peter F Hamilton?
It's a mix of soft Sci-Fi, weirdo spiritualism and "OMG Joshua the Hero is so great! And Handsome!"
Not that they're a bad read, they're well written and entertaining, but they didn't really hit the sweet spot for me.
Lad, that's the definition of what space opera *is*.
Sort of. Alastair Reynolds is definitely space opera, but nobody violates light-speed constraints in his Revelation Space cycle. Being an ex-physicist I think he likes to play at the harder end of Sci-Fi in many of his books. Not all by a long shot, and I'm still not entirely sure what he was trying to portray in "Terminal World", but certainly some of it.
Why the hell revive franchises when there's so much new stuff out there?
It would have been nice for there to have been more firefly, sure. But Stargate? That had a good run, it's over now, but that's OK, really it is.
Your site seems to be entirely devoted to "Save Terra Nova", which I've never even heard of...
True! And he spends much of the rest of his time in the culture universe dwelling on the dirty tricks and dark side of the culture, the things it does in the name of multi-species advancement that, on the surface may look less than enlightened...
I still want to live in the culture though.
I don't know about "Our" systems of morality. Mine seems to adapt just fine.
As a society, you're right, it seems to take us decades to get used to something. This, IMHO, is because of scared, firghtened old people, and luddites. Not all older people are like that, but there are enough that it becomes a problem, especially when society has a tendency to put them in positions of power.
Society is slow to adapt, and hold back significant numbers individuals that would like to do it faster.
Reading through the thread I sorta missed that as well.
You're right, it can be remarkably inconsistent, to argue for the freedom to treat people however badly they want, to outsource, to avoid all wethics and decry all government control, and then blame the chinese government for allowing that behaviour.
Pity, because some of that is written by actual physics professors and talks about speculative (but possible) areas of real science, which is what you seem to be demanding in your fist sentance there.
For instance, I just finished "Blue Remember Earth" by Alastair Reynolds, a guy with a PhD in Physics and Astronomy, who has worked for ESA.
Some of the best Sci-Fi changes a single assumption about the world we live in and extrapolates what people do in that new circumstance (The Forever War, a lot of PKD's work). That's enjoyable. Other Sci-Fi changes everything, but is still about the people and how they live in this strange world (Dune, Culture Novels). That's also good. Asimov and Clark and others are all about the concept and the theory, people are just decoration, this is also good if rather dry for most tastes. Some Sci-Fi takes place in a world that is a satire of our own, to attempt to show us the folly of certain mindsets (Snow Crash, Market Forces).
All of these sub-genres have their merits, and all have their hack writers who should never have been published. But if you don't enjoy the space opera of Iain M Banks then then there's probably something wrong with you.
Tower Defence was after that I think, and it was launched by the Desktop Tower Defence game, IIRC.
To join the industry, write something simple but awesome.
See SpaceChem as an example of this.
To me it reads like satire.
Poe's law I guess....
What, the sounds above 22kHz, the ones humans aren't capable of hearing?
Sure.
LOL.
No, it doesn't.
CD audio is perfectly able to capture audio just as well as vinyl. There is nothing inherently superior about vinyl. Vinyl also wears out over time.
There is no need for physical media. If you are getting a nice 'warm' sound from your vinyl, that is an artifact of the sound distortion being introduced by your amp, or other parts of your equipment, maybe even the mastering of the album. All of these things can be captured and played back digitally.
Your love of an old data storage format is just weird.
People frothing at the mouth on internet forums are generally just annoyed at being painted as evil or immoral by religious types, or by having their lack of belief characterised as a religion.
And it's not proselytising to discuss things on an internet discussion site, for fuck's sake.
Agnosticism avoids no trap as it is another axis on a two dimensional plane. Agnostic - no evidence, A-theist, no religion. The two go very nicely together.
Every Atheist I've ever met or talked to, IRL or in 20 years of reading religious arguments on the internet, has been an agnostic atheist.
Dawkins is an agnostic atheist.
The other kind is only ever brought up by religious folks who are attempting to cast anyone professing to be an atheist into that light, paint that position as a faith position and then say "see, it's just the same as being religious therefore I can't be wrong!", or else get the target to admit to being agnostic and say "so you see, you don't know, and therefore I can't be wrong!"
It's childish and tiresome, I first saw it on usenet sometime around 1993 and it still has the same gaping logic hole - define the word atheist as whatever you like, all that will happen is that we'll need another word for those that are currently described as agnostic atheists (pretty much all atheists). It is the most repetitive straw man argument I've ever come across.
Believe what you like, but this tired old shit gets on my nerves.
Firstly, many of those positions say "permanent", not "fixed term contract", and last no time at all.
And secondly, if I don't like your resume, I don't like your resume. As long as you have no reason to suspect I am discriminating on race, age, disability or gender then I can hire who the hell I like, sorry if that bothers you.