Did you say James Bond? Or maybe George Smiley? You'd be wrong. They were both officers in the intelligence service. Intelligence sources, "agents", are "poor fuckers like you and me".
This is an incredibly relevant comedy sketch from Armstrong and Miller...
Presenter:Science now and Britain's Einsteins are a-go-go over a new theory which is thought will revolutionise our understanding of Life, the Universe, and, pretty much, everything else. Heterotic supersymmetry is said to combine elements of String theory with a new take on...now hang on...[reading] "Quantum chromodynamics". Try saying that when you've had a few. And it's the brain-child of Professor Alan King. Er, Professor King, good morning. Physicist: Good morning. Presenter:Can you just..briefly...take us through this new theory of yours? In laymans terms. Physicist: No. Presenter:All I'm after is just a...a...a...broad stroke..explanation if you like. Physicist:Um...there isn't one. Presenter:O.k....well what if you were to..to..take us through the whole thing...starting with the real basics and just working our way up. Physicist:Oh! O.k...I can do that. It will take quite a long time. Presenter:How long? Physicist:11 years. Presenter: [finger to ear]Ok, I'm just being told we don't have quite that long. Professor, some of our viewers are quite smart...perhaps there's someone watching who's...capable of understanding your theory? Physicist:There isn't. Presenter:How can you be so sure? Physicist:Well, Graham's on holiday and Chung Yao's dead. Presenter:Professor King, thank you! Physicist:My pleasure.
I'm genuinely shocked at the number of stupid people in this discussion who a) can't understand timezones, b)think this would be a good idea, c) can't understand 24hr time and d) can't easily flip between GMT/UTC and their local timezone in their head. Did I miss the memo about "Get a complete fucking idiot to post using your uid day"?
I personally would love it. I hate arranging conference calls only to have one person miss, no matter how I phrase the invites. "That's 9 am Mountain time, which is 11 am for you, Steve." Means Steve will call me at 7:10 Mountain time and say, "Where is everyone?"
Solved in meatware. 1. "Steve, call me at 11 a.m., your time." Why burden him with what time it is for you if he's that dumb?
Solved in software. 1. Schedule meeting in Outlook, or your software of choice 2. Outlook e-mails invitees with the start time wherever they are.
But why not: Inertia. TV producers will bandy about some straw man like, "Shows are used to delaying by an hour for Central, two for Mountain, and the odd hour out for the West. The common announcement that "x will be shown at y:00, z:00 West Coast" will have to be changed to "x will be shown at y:00, y-1:00 Central, y-2:00 Western, and some other time West Coast." The additional seconds it takes to say that will result in less advertising which will destroy our economy." That cable, satellite, DVR, and streaming have already made that argument pointless will not be understood by said producers or the politicians who listen to them.
Really? I would have thought that it's not because they're "used to" anything. The inertial problem surely exists because "prime-time" is when most people are sitting down watching, right? If they didn't delay for the different timezones, there'd be people who were still at work, or in bed when the "best" shows and most expensive ad slots were shown. Cable, satellite, DVR and streaming does not make any argument pointless unless everyone has them.
Remember, we're smart and in the minority.
Give them credit. The voters would understand that the existing system would be replaced by something which was just as arbitrary, had the same problems, would be costly and time-consuming to implement and which was completely new and foreign to them. 1. The minority you belong to is smaller than you think. 2. I'm not so sure it's all that smart.
I come back from lunch when people in London are either in bed or out partying, either way, they're not in the office. The approximate position of the sun and therefore whether or not people will be in the office is a fairly important consideration when scheduling a meeting, no?
That depends on what you define as an issue. Some people may not have issues with something someone else does.
Yes, but the submitter was just as vague! He doesn't explain the issues with the current system. He alludes to meeting scheduling, but that's ridiculous. Anyone who's scheduling international meetings likely already has the software solution to make meeting scheduling trivial. For anyone who doesn't, the proposed solution to the "issues" he perceives introduces extremely similar ones all of its own! So a meeting's at 4 a.m., everywhere? Who will I be waking up/making stay late? Boston? London? Hong Kong? And what's stopping him and his friends/colleagues arranging their meeting for 4 a.m. UTC? Why does the whole world have to change to suit him?
A more appropriate car analogy would be: "I have trouble remembering to put fuel in my car and some other people do too, therefore I think every car should be built with a loud warning siren that sounds every 5 seconds when the fuel level drops below 15% full".
I agree! I too am a brilliant genius, but everyone poo-poos my suggestion to replace circular wheels on cars with dodecagonal wheels! I don't understand it, why are people so afraid to think outside the box?!
Sorry to be obtuse, "thinking outside the box" is great, but this is not "thinking outside the box". It's "not thinking...in the box". Some dweeb on Slashdot is the first person to suggest abolishing time-zones? Hardly.
"Could we deal with the end of Time Zones?" Yes. We could. A better question would be, "Why would we ever have to deal with the end of Time Zones?". He's trying to solve an already solved problem in a ridiculous way. As someone who organises meetings with people in several other timezones, I can honestly say that the "problems" would not magically disappear as he envisions. To wit:
Got a meeting with colleagues on the other side of the world? 4 a.m. means 4 a.m. for everyone.
No. Just no. This is just not how it works and it tells me that the submitter hasn't ever actually had this "problem." It's solved. I schedule a meeting in Outlook/Whatever and it handles time-differences transparently so that I don't have to e-mail everyone separately with their own personal start time. I just don't care. If you don't have the luxury of software that handles that for you (why not? And why do you have an international meeting?) his system still doesn't do away with the thinking involved before choosing a time to schedule a meeting. Under his proposed system, how do I know off-hand if people will, or won't, be asleep at 4 a.m.? Or will everyone be working from 9 a.m.-5 p.m. regardless of daylight hours? I still have to have some idea about daylight/office hours in order to schedule a meeting. How is this better?
tl;dr He's not thinking outside the box, this is not a new idea. He's not thinking, this is not a problem. He's not thinking, this is not a solution to the percieved problem.
Paraphrasing, "An impertinent question often leads to a pertinent answer."
Corollary: "Sometimes an impertinent question is so mind-bendingly fucking stupid that to waste time discussing the many ways in which it is stupid is an affront to all human endeavour."
Next time on "Ask Slashdot": "Why doesn't everyone just belong to the same religion? We could consolidate all the churches, temples, synagogues and mosques and use the space to build affordable housing!"
Presumably he realised that was a subdomain, so I'm not sure the "dumbass" is entirely appropriate...
Is "lton.xxx" reserved? e.g. parishi.lton.xxx
Or "ilton.xxx"? Or "ishilton.xxx"?
Fact check. Sorry if this makes me a "hater" or a "hand-waver" but there *was* a market, however small, for portable mp3 players before the iPod. The Diamond Rio and the Creative NOMAD are the most memorable fore-runners. Similarly, there was already an almost 10 year-old market for "smart" phones before the iPhone came along, satisfied by offerings from Nokia, Microsoft, Palm and Blackberry. Or didn't you know that? Maybe you need to turn in your geek card?;)
Jobs steered Apple in the right direction; he recognised areas where they could excel and perhaps because of that you can claim he's a visionary, but he didn't invent (or even "dream up" the concept of) portable mp3 players or smart-phones, just directed his employees to produce marketably "better" ones.
It's more like: that guy who goes to an interview in shorts, tie-dye t-shirt, long hair in a pony-tail, scraggly beard, socks and sandals because "Hey if they don't like me for who I am, I don't want to work there" and wonders why he can't get a job despite having a PhD in Computer Science. For better or worse, people judge you and make their opinions of you based on their first contact with you, within the first minute.
If you believe in God, great, but your first contact with someone shouldn't be: "Hey! I really really love God! Maybe we could go to a prayer-meeting sometime?". Even if the other person believes in God too, they'll probably think you're a tad weird. Similarly, if your first contact is: "hye thr saw ur profiel n u lk rly hot", it doesn't matter whether you are the most kind-hearted, baby-kissingest, puppy-lovingest charity worker ever to volunteer at a soup-kitchen, you'll come across as a shallow dummy who can't even be bothered to spell the most basic words correctly.
tl;dr No-one's saying you have to change who you are, they're just offering tips on how to present yourself.
You would have a valid point, except that every PC game I've ever bought (boxed/retail) that had a EULA, popped it up during installation and asked you to agree to the terms before allowing you to continue the installation process. So the "specific action to indicate agreement" to which you allude is clicking "I agree" and "Continue" in the installation dialog box.
I can't remember a single game that came with a Microsoft Windows style "BY OPENING THIS BOX YOU FORFEIT YOUR SOUL" EULA. Also, as previously noted, the text on the box will be "by using this software you agree to the terms of the EULA", not "by opening this box for the first time, you agree to the terms of the EULA".
Not that what they did isn't a sneaky, evil thing to do, but this EULA stuff is nonsense.
If I had to guess, it would be because he/she was "virtually shaking and [...] scared"? That doesn't warrant calling 911 but that's the reason he/she did it. Not hard to understand.
Well, it all depends doesn't it? A small shallow earthquake, near the "right" kind of soil/terrain can feel much much much larger than a large deep one, and have larger effects and cause more damage.
The [Richter scale] values are typical only and should be taken with extreme caution, since intensity and thus ground effects depend not only on the magnitude, but also on the distance to the epicenter, the depth of the earthquake's focus beneath the epicenter, and geological conditions (certain terrains can amplify seismic signals).
And, as you say, it's more likely to make the news if it's a rare event for the area...
I wouldn't worry, currently the majority of the people who could afford to have their children gene-spliced to produce THC are also those least likely to do so.
"cautioned", "education", and "auctioned" are all anagrams of each other.
Yah...thanks...I'm not a top scrabble player, but I got that.;) I questioned the significance of them being 9-letter words because I assumed that a top player would not be playing someone who had left an open 'on' / 'ion' in a vulnerable area of the board. I almost said as much in my original post. I thought perhaps I had missed some even more obscure gambit known only to "top players"!:)
Slashdot Mirror
Who is the most famous fictional agent at MI6?
Did you say James Bond? Or maybe George Smiley? You'd be wrong. They were both officers in the intelligence service. Intelligence sources, "agents", are "poor fuckers like you and me".
Presenter:Science now and Britain's Einsteins are a-go-go over a new theory which is thought will revolutionise our understanding of Life, the Universe, and, pretty much, everything else. Heterotic supersymmetry is said to combine elements of String theory with a new take on...now hang on...[reading] "Quantum chromodynamics". Try saying that when you've had a few. And it's the brain-child of Professor Alan King. Er, Professor King, good morning.
Physicist: Good morning.
Presenter:Can you just..briefly...take us through this new theory of yours? In laymans terms.
Physicist: No.
Presenter:All I'm after is just a...a...a...broad stroke..explanation if you like.
Physicist:Um...there isn't one.
Presenter:O.k....well what if you were to..to..take us through the whole thing...starting with the real basics and just working our way up.
Physicist:Oh! O.k...I can do that. It will take quite a long time.
Presenter:How long?
Physicist:11 years.
Presenter: [finger to ear]Ok, I'm just being told we don't have quite that long. Professor, some of our viewers are quite smart...perhaps there's someone watching who's...capable of understanding your theory?
Physicist:There isn't.
Presenter:How can you be so sure?
Physicist:Well, Graham's on holiday and Chung Yao's dead.
Presenter:Professor King, thank you!
Physicist:My pleasure.
I'm genuinely shocked at the number of stupid people in this discussion who a) can't understand timezones, b)think this would be a good idea, c) can't understand 24hr time and d) can't easily flip between GMT/UTC and their local timezone in their head. Did I miss the memo about "Get a complete fucking idiot to post using your uid day"?
I personally would love it. I hate arranging conference calls only to have one person miss, no matter how I phrase the invites. "That's 9 am Mountain time, which is 11 am for you, Steve." Means Steve will call me at 7:10 Mountain time and say, "Where is everyone?"
Solved in meatware. 1. "Steve, call me at 11 a.m., your time." Why burden him with what time it is for you if he's that dumb?
Solved in software. 1. Schedule meeting in Outlook, or your software of choice 2. Outlook e-mails invitees with the start time wherever they are.
But why not: Inertia. TV producers will bandy about some straw man like, "Shows are used to delaying by an hour for Central, two for Mountain, and the odd hour out for the West. The common announcement that "x will be shown at y:00, z:00 West Coast" will have to be changed to "x will be shown at y:00, y-1:00 Central, y-2:00 Western, and some other time West Coast." The additional seconds it takes to say that will result in less advertising which will destroy our economy." That cable, satellite, DVR, and streaming have already made that argument pointless will not be understood by said producers or the politicians who listen to them.
Really? I would have thought that it's not because they're "used to" anything. The inertial problem surely exists because "prime-time" is when most people are sitting down watching, right? If they didn't delay for the different timezones, there'd be people who were still at work, or in bed when the "best" shows and most expensive ad slots were shown. Cable, satellite, DVR and streaming does not make any argument pointless unless everyone has them.
Remember, we're smart and in the minority.
Give them credit. The voters would understand that the existing system would be replaced by something which was just as arbitrary, had the same problems, would be costly and time-consuming to implement and which was completely new and foreign to them. 1. The minority you belong to is smaller than you think. 2. I'm not so sure it's all that smart.
To me 18 means diddly squat. 6 pm means something.
Hahahahaha! What? Are you 5?
Spoken like a true basement-dweller!
I come back from lunch when people in London are either in bed or out partying, either way, they're not in the office. The approximate position of the sun and therefore whether or not people will be in the office is a fairly important consideration when scheduling a meeting, no?
That was the joke. Please calibrate your sarcasmometer.
That depends on what you define as an issue. Some people may not have issues with something someone else does.
Yes, but the submitter was just as vague! He doesn't explain the issues with the current system. He alludes to meeting scheduling, but that's ridiculous. Anyone who's scheduling international meetings likely already has the software solution to make meeting scheduling trivial. For anyone who doesn't, the proposed solution to the "issues" he perceives introduces extremely similar ones all of its own! So a meeting's at 4 a.m., everywhere? Who will I be waking up/making stay late? Boston? London? Hong Kong? And what's stopping him and his friends/colleagues arranging their meeting for 4 a.m. UTC? Why does the whole world have to change to suit him?
A more appropriate car analogy would be: "I have trouble remembering to put fuel in my car and some other people do too, therefore I think every car should be built with a loud warning siren that sounds every 5 seconds when the fuel level drops below 15% full".
Sorry to be obtuse, "thinking outside the box" is great, but this is not "thinking outside the box". It's "not thinking...in the box". Some dweeb on Slashdot is the first person to suggest abolishing time-zones? Hardly.
"Could we deal with the end of Time Zones?" Yes. We could. A better question would be, "Why would we ever have to deal with the end of Time Zones?". He's trying to solve an already solved problem in a ridiculous way. As someone who organises meetings with people in several other timezones, I can honestly say that the "problems" would not magically disappear as he envisions. To wit:
Got a meeting with colleagues on the other side of the world? 4 a.m. means 4 a.m. for everyone.
No. Just no. This is just not how it works and it tells me that the submitter hasn't ever actually had this "problem." It's solved. I schedule a meeting in Outlook/Whatever and it handles time-differences transparently so that I don't have to e-mail everyone separately with their own personal start time. I just don't care. If you don't have the luxury of software that handles that for you (why not? And why do you have an international meeting?) his system still doesn't do away with the thinking involved before choosing a time to schedule a meeting. Under his proposed system, how do I know off-hand if people will, or won't, be asleep at 4 a.m.? Or will everyone be working from 9 a.m.-5 p.m. regardless of daylight hours? I still have to have some idea about daylight/office hours in order to schedule a meeting. How is this better?
tl;dr He's not thinking outside the box, this is not a new idea. He's not thinking, this is not a problem. He's not thinking, this is not a solution to the percieved problem.
Paraphrasing, "An impertinent question often leads to a pertinent answer."
Corollary: "Sometimes an impertinent question is so mind-bendingly fucking stupid that to waste time discussing the many ways in which it is stupid is an affront to all human endeavour."
Next time on "Ask Slashdot": "Why doesn't everyone just belong to the same religion? We could consolidate all the churches, temples, synagogues and mosques and use the space to build affordable housing!"
Should probably be modded informative, not funny. One Night In Paris (possibly NSFW) is the name of the DVD.
Presumably he realised that was a subdomain, so I'm not sure the "dumbass" is entirely appropriate...
Is "lton.xxx" reserved? e.g. parishi.lton.xxx
Or "ilton.xxx"? Or "ishilton.xxx"?
Fact check. Sorry if this makes me a "hater" or a "hand-waver" but there *was* a market, however small, for portable mp3 players before the iPod. The Diamond Rio and the Creative NOMAD are the most memorable fore-runners. Similarly, there was already an almost 10 year-old market for "smart" phones before the iPhone came along, satisfied by offerings from Nokia, Microsoft, Palm and Blackberry. Or didn't you know that? Maybe you need to turn in your geek card? ;)
Jobs steered Apple in the right direction; he recognised areas where they could excel and perhaps because of that you can claim he's a visionary, but he didn't invent (or even "dream up" the concept of) portable mp3 players or smart-phones, just directed his employees to produce marketably "better" ones.
If xkcd has taught me anything, it's that webcomics don't have to be funny.
It's more like: that guy who goes to an interview in shorts, tie-dye t-shirt, long hair in a pony-tail, scraggly beard, socks and sandals because "Hey if they don't like me for who I am, I don't want to work there" and wonders why he can't get a job despite having a PhD in Computer Science. For better or worse, people judge you and make their opinions of you based on their first contact with you, within the first minute.
If you believe in God, great, but your first contact with someone shouldn't be: "Hey! I really really love God! Maybe we could go to a prayer-meeting sometime?". Even if the other person believes in God too, they'll probably think you're a tad weird. Similarly, if your first contact is: "hye thr saw ur profiel n u lk rly hot", it doesn't matter whether you are the most kind-hearted, baby-kissingest, puppy-lovingest charity worker ever to volunteer at a soup-kitchen, you'll come across as a shallow dummy who can't even be bothered to spell the most basic words correctly.
tl;dr No-one's saying you have to change who you are, they're just offering tips on how to present yourself.
You would have a valid point, except that every PC game I've ever bought (boxed/retail) that had a EULA, popped it up during installation and asked you to agree to the terms before allowing you to continue the installation process. So the "specific action to indicate agreement" to which you allude is clicking "I agree" and "Continue" in the installation dialog box.
I can't remember a single game that came with a Microsoft Windows style "BY OPENING THIS BOX YOU FORFEIT YOUR SOUL" EULA. Also, as previously noted, the text on the box will be "by using this software you agree to the terms of the EULA", not "by opening this box for the first time, you agree to the terms of the EULA".
Not that what they did isn't a sneaky, evil thing to do, but this EULA stuff is nonsense.
They'll boycott gamestop if and only if the employees mug them at gunpoint when they come in.
You're giving them more credit than they deserve...
If I had to guess, it would be because he/she was "virtually shaking and [...] scared"? That doesn't warrant calling 911 but that's the reason he/she did it. Not hard to understand.
The [Richter scale] values are typical only and should be taken with extreme caution, since intensity and thus ground effects depend not only on the magnitude, but also on the distance to the epicenter, the depth of the earthquake's focus beneath the epicenter, and geological conditions (certain terrains can amplify seismic signals).
And, as you say, it's more likely to make the news if it's a rare event for the area...
It was up to ~1000 last time I checked at the end of last week. 1900 isn't outside the realms of possibility, but yes, it does seem a little high.
HAH! You FOOL! You can get all of those angles from FOX!
Palin/Bachman 2012
I wouldn't worry, currently the majority of the people who could afford to have their children gene-spliced to produce THC are also those least likely to do so.
While you might think the world evolves around you, it doesn't. In fact, most of us don't even care what you think.
It does evolve around him. It doesn't revolve around him.If you're going to spew bile, at least do it accurately ;)
"cautioned", "education", and "auctioned" are all anagrams of each other.
Yah...thanks...I'm not a top scrabble player, but I got that. ;) I questioned the significance of them being 9-letter words because I assumed that a top player would not be playing someone who had left an open 'on' / 'ion' in a vulnerable area of the board. I almost said as much in my original post. I thought perhaps I had missed some even more obscure gambit known only to "top players"! :)