Everyone seems to have an agenda [on Slashdot] these days. Is there no such thing anymore as a news release not trying to sell something or push an agenda?
The entire first paragraph of the article is devoted to the notion that boys tend to spread their legs far out for exactly this reason - but notebook computers force a more artificial, closer-together position that's somewhat less conducive to gamete production.
I salute you on obtaining the same result independent of the linked article! Your simultaneous conclusion is on par with Newton and Leibniz! Gauss and Legendre! Napier and Burgi!
a link to the eponymous Parents Television Council. (Click several times! It's fun!)
I love their motto - "because our children are watching". Paternalism at its finest - television viewers must be treated as children!
(Luckily we can't air, for instance, photographs of caskets of US troops - but that's because voters, not children, are watching.)
I certainly hope these nice fellows will submit an FCC complaint if any television network tries to air "The Passion of the Christ". So much sadomasochism! So little time!
The campus paper ran a great version of that ad - page 10. It's a big list of usernames, networks, IP addresses, and dates with the caption "IS THIS YOU?" The thing is - none of the IP addresses in the ad start with "18.", the MIT Class A. So, no, it isn't us, but thanks for asking! (And thanks for paying for the color spread.)
On a loosely related note, The Tech also ran an awesome interview with Jack Valenti, MPAA President, earlier this year. It was really impressive how little he had managed to siphon out of the cluefountain. (Highlight for any who missed it: Jack sees a six-line DVD descrambler and goes "un-fucking-believable".)
I was amazed to discover this the other day:
on
Segway vs. Roomba
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
"Gaines and Harvey mounted tumble-bugs, and kept abreast of the Cadet Captain, some twenty-five yards behind the leaing wave. It had been a long time since the Chief Engineer had ridden one of these silly-looking little vehicles, and he felt awkward. A tumble-bug does not give a man dignity, since it is about the size and shape of a kitchen stool, gyro-stabilized on a single wheel. But it is perfectly adapted to patrolling the maze of machinery 'down inside', since it can go through an opening the width of a man's shoulders, is easily contrlled, and will stand patiently upright, waiting, should its rider dismount." -"The Roads Must Roll", from The Man Who Sold the Moon, circa 1950
Be careful with your blanket statement:
IBM sold things to willing customers with lots of money - like 1944 Germany.
Terrorists are willing customers with lots of money.
Whether or not impoverished residents of third-world countriesdeceived by clever marketing can count as either willing customers or ones with any money is a question of numbers.
It gets worse. According to the League of Women Voters Cleveland Education Fund, Blackwell has anticipated this kind of ruling.
Latest I've heard he'll allow the provisional ballots to be cast but it's likely that he'll instruct poll workers not to count them. He's going by a technicality here. Judging by the US Supreme Court's tendency in elections (cf.2000) and the Ohio Supreme Court's anti-activist leanings ("hey, state legislature, you're funding schools illegally, fix it please?... okay, or don't, that's fine") we're heavily borked.
Guess whether the rich or poor districts are likely to have these problems - go ahead, take a guess. Now see if you can figure out what the political affiliations of that likely-to-exhibit-uncounted-irregularities area is.
It's so bad in Cuyahoga County that they've started to hire an extra set of poll workers specifically to reinstruct people at the last minute on when and how to give out provisional ballots. The real training for poll workers occurred months ago; but this additional class of people (my dad has volunteered through his job with the County) is being trained at the last minute, to learn in an entire day things that they forgot to tell the workers they've already provided for. It's a bloody mess and nobody knows how to sort it out - there's no consistent policy.
Yeah, we call it "Crackgate" in Cleveland.
Laughingstock of the nation again - man, we have Kucinich (not such a bad guy!), the burning Cuyahoga River, and the Browns on our record and then came Crackgate. It's a bad time to live in Cleveland.
How many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? That's not funny!
I am a horrible person and am going to hell.
(On a racism side note: if you happen to be on the WVU campus, check out a copy of the student newspaper from today and the last few weeks. There's a great editorial to the effect of "if black people want us to stop calling them criminals, they should stop committing crime!". A bit ago there was a crime committed off campus; the only description was "mid-20's black man". The newspaper ran quotes from students saying "well, the description of [insert blatantly racist characterization, big lips, etc.] sounds just like all the black men I've seen!" and letters came in to the paper saying "yeah, they all -do- look like that!". It's a horrible, messy thing.)
We can't register online. We can -pre-register online; you have to go to the office physically and hand in a piece of paper to confirm registration (or to add or drop classes), and freshmen don't get to preregister. (Anecdote: the freshman credit limit is 54 credit hours - four x 12ch classes + 1 x 6ch seminar. After the last class drop opportunity, the registrar's office reported one junior was signed up for 160some credit hours.)
Other qualifications that made MIT not a very wired school: *We aren't provided Web pages - well, sort of. This is probably an error. We get a http://web.mit.edu/loginname/ directory, and the already extant directory/loginname/www/ is by default world-readable; but they don't set up Web pages for us. (You can also request a static IP address & hostname and run your own server. Yay for self-sufficiency!) In the strictest sense, though, I guess you could say they don't provide an easy interface for setting up our page (just ftp & kerberized telnet.)
*A computer isn't required of incoming students. It'd be hard to get by in practice, but in theory there are plenty of Athena clusters & there are several public machines along the Infinite Corridor; there are printers in the clusters and in each dorm, along with at least one workstation in each dorm. (There's also a free color laser printer in the student center! No fliers; one copy only.)
*A computer isn't provided as part of tuition - I doubt students would want to use the computer MIT provided anyway. Most of us have computers (several have many) when coming in; free, working systems and monitors appear on the Reuse mailing list as frequently as several times a day and at least two or three times a week. Finding a machine is no problem. (And tuition is absurd already.)
I was surprised to see it said we had USENET access - will have to figure out where that server is.
Another tangent: CWRU, in my hometown, held the honor of being the Most Wired Campus once; and they are pretty impressive - there's gigabit Ethernet running over fiber everywhere. The trouble is that the network guy lied on the application to make it look like they were using that capacity; in fact, he lied a lot. He got fired. CWRU isn't Most Wired any more:/
But it is a small price to pay for the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to become a minor character in a Robert Heinlein novel.
Congratulations, Neal! You can now have polygamous sex with every woman and man you can find, including but not limited to your redheaded, barely-pubescent, twin female clones! And your mother!
1) Discrete on/off codes (hereafter "X") exist. Lots of things have X! For example, some people take advantage of X. (+4 insightful) 2) X doesn't happen much. I know of one X. (+4 interesting) 3) Actually, X does happen. I only know of one thing without X. (+4 informative)
Gosh - insightful, interesting, and informative, all based on "what I know" and "what I've seen" and unsupported claim. Let me try this.
You're wrong! Actually, most TV's made in the last year don't have discrete on/off codes. You see, recent US government regulations prohibit the purchase of devices with "Easter Eggs" - undocumented features - which is why Windows XP was shipped without such Easter Eggs. This is a problem because TV manuals are printed to be as short and simple as possible, and they certainly don't include all the undocumented IR signals a remote might be able to use.
So to avoid having to make "consumer" and "military" models of their electronics, many manufacturers (Panasonic was in fact the first) have removed many features such as "discrete on/off" from their lower-end devices, which frequently generate military requisition for various reasons. (Break rooms and field offices tend to find the greatest use.)
I myself have bought five TV's in the past year (long story), and only one - a top-end 50" plasma HDTV - still supported discrete on/off. (And it was even mentioned in the manual!) You get what you pay for these days.
So, to answer the very original poster (#0)'s question, my other four newly purchased TV's would all be turned on by this device.
Racial stereotyping can be racist, that doesn't mean it automatically is. There is a racial stereotype of Geramans being efficient and hard working, is that racist?
Yes. Also, Germans are savage murderous Kraut who are ruled by their industrial complex. The positives and the negatives go hand in hand. "Oh, those black people, they're sure good at basketball, even if they're not so smart!" "Them Asians sure are studious. Haha, and they have small sex organs." "Those Jews are good at accounting! Because they're so materialistic!"
Asserting that "because you look (also, because your heritage is you're " is typically racist. (The issue is much deeper than that, however. I have devised a wonderful description, but these margins are too small, etc...)
As for a straight couple making a healthier family, I am sticking to a sociological perspective in my previous post
Can you cite some definitive, controlled, and large-sample sociological study which has adequately investigated this issue? I'm curious - even the dissenters in Goodridge v. Massachusetts Dept. of Public Health acknowledged they had no solid evidence heterosexual couples provided the "optimal" setting for child rearing.
Suppose your wife dies in a horrific accident and you don't remarry. Should you be allowed to keep raising your three-month-old child, or should it be taken as a ward of the state and given to a deserving, loving heterosexual couple? Little Timmy's parents are killed in a horrific plane crash. His only living relative, his grandmother, raises him. Should she give him up to adoption by a "normal" heterosexual couple? What if Tiny Tim's only relative, his grandmother, lives with her wife? What if a girl leaves her abusive husband and takes the child? Should she keep it? A transsexual marries his high school sweetheart. For medical reasons they can't conceive children themselves. Should they be allowed to adopt one, or to serve as foster parents?
They wouldn't get a double sided femenine/masculine upbringing
Pat is a self-confessed 'tomboy'; she was raised in a family of six boys, and she has mild Asperger's syndrome. She marries the very manly man Dan, and they enjoy the same activities; practically the only 'female' thing Pat does is sleep with her husband, and even then she's into kinky S&M stuff. Are Pat and Dan communicating an appropriate "feminine/masculine" image? Dan has had a change of heart and decides to be fashionable; now he's a "metrosexual". This isn't in the masculinity book! Should he lose his children?
a kid who is raised in a gay family will be disadvantaged socially. His two dads or whatever will not be able to participate in activities that require a mother. He/she may be ostracized by peers.
So - children of gay parents are in a bad place because nobody likes children of gay parents. Isn't that a little sweeping of a generalization to make about the entire world? (country?) How is a gay family in notoriously homosexual-friendly Provincetown, Massachusetts disadvantaged? Is this more pronounced than the severe lack of cultivation one gains by living on an Amish farm? By living a life confined exclusively to the inner city of Detroit? By being raised in Hawaii as a haole in an unfriendly community?
it would most likely encourage non-conformity by the child, which some would argue is a good thing but I disagree with that.
Should children develop as individuals? Frequently conservative Christians (some of them; not all!) assert that their orthodox Christianity is 'under assault' in our society. Suppose that this is the case. Then children raised with Bible-belt values in strongly "atheistic" areas may have trouble communicating their upbringing and, worse, may find that they and their parents are excluded from the religiophobic community on the basis of their being "them crazy religious freaks". (This happens, according to some said "crazy religious freaks"; they assert it's the reason revival meetings and the like are necessary.) Never mind how mean and intolerant these atheists are being; suppose that it happens. (Remember the Pledge of Allegiance lawsuit?) The child will want to conform with the expectations all around them, but a child -can't- abandon those most basic, axiomatic built-in parts of himself, such as "Jesus Christ is my personal savior and I must help save others." So two parents of the same strong religious faith should not be allowed to raise a child (it
Slashdot Mirror
Oops! Guess I should've hit the 'preview button'. My mistake. He's New Here.
You must be new here.
Naw, it happened like this.
(Perry Bible Fellowship)++
Type in g. Then type o. Then type a. Then type t. Aiyeee! I just wanted goat feeding instructions!
The entire first paragraph of the article is devoted to the notion that boys tend to spread their legs far out for exactly this reason - but notebook computers force a more artificial, closer-together position that's somewhat less conducive to gamete production.
I salute you on obtaining the same result independent of the linked article! Your simultaneous conclusion is on par with Newton and Leibniz! Gauss and Legendre! Napier and Burgi!
Hail the Slashdot warrior.
a link to the eponymous Parents Television Council. (Click several times! It's fun!)
I love their motto - "because our children are watching". Paternalism at its finest - television viewers must be treated as children!
(Luckily we can't air, for instance, photographs of caskets of US troops - but that's because voters, not children, are watching.)
I certainly hope these nice fellows will submit an FCC complaint if any television network tries to air "The Passion of the Christ". So much sadomasochism! So little time!
q: How do we know the CIA wasn't involved in the Kennedy assassination?
a: He's dead, isn't he?
The campus paper ran a great version of that ad - page 10. It's a big list of usernames, networks, IP addresses, and dates with the caption "IS THIS YOU?"
The thing is - none of the IP addresses in the ad start with "18.", the MIT Class A. So, no, it isn't us, but thanks for asking! (And thanks for paying for the color spread.)
On a loosely related note, The Tech also ran an awesome interview with Jack Valenti, MPAA President, earlier this year. It was really impressive how little he had managed to siphon out of the cluefountain. (Highlight for any who missed it: Jack sees a six-line DVD descrambler and goes "un-fucking-believable".)
"Gaines and Harvey mounted tumble-bugs, and kept abreast of the Cadet Captain, some twenty-five yards behind the leaing wave. It had been a long time since the Chief Engineer had ridden one of these silly-looking little vehicles, and he felt awkward. A tumble-bug does not give a man dignity, since it is about the size and shape of a kitchen stool, gyro-stabilized on a single wheel. But it is perfectly adapted to patrolling the maze of machinery 'down inside', since it can go through an opening the width of a man's shoulders, is easily contrlled, and will stand patiently upright, waiting, should its rider dismount."
-"The Roads Must Roll", from The Man Who Sold the Moon, circa 1950
Heinlein invented the Segway!
I laugh my ass off when I am playing Monkey Ball with friends because of some of the wonderfully random ways you can kill your monkey.
Usually before I kill my monkey I make sure there aren't other people around. Common courtesy, you know.
But whatever works for your friends, sounds great!
If you'll believe that, then I have a bridge to sell you...
Real cheap.
Be careful with your blanket statement: IBM sold things to willing customers with lots of money - like 1944 Germany. Terrorists are willing customers with lots of money. Whether or not impoverished residents of third-world countries deceived by clever marketing can count as either willing customers or ones with any money is a question of numbers.
It gets worse. According to the League of Women Voters Cleveland Education Fund, Blackwell has anticipated this kind of ruling.
... okay, or don't, that's fine") we're heavily borked.
Latest I've heard he'll allow the provisional ballots to be cast but it's likely that he'll instruct poll workers not to count them. He's going by a technicality here. Judging by the US Supreme Court's tendency in elections (cf.2000) and the Ohio Supreme Court's anti-activist leanings ("hey, state legislature, you're funding schools illegally, fix it please?
Guess whether the rich or poor districts are likely to have these problems - go ahead, take a guess. Now see if you can figure out what the political affiliations of that likely-to-exhibit-uncounted-irregularities area is.
It's so bad in Cuyahoga County that they've started to hire an extra set of poll workers specifically to reinstruct people at the last minute on when and how to give out provisional ballots. The real training for poll workers occurred months ago; but this additional class of people (my dad has volunteered through his job with the County) is being trained at the last minute, to learn in an entire day things that they forgot to tell the workers they've already provided for. It's a bloody mess and nobody knows how to sort it out - there's no consistent policy.
Yeah, we call it "Crackgate" in Cleveland. Laughingstock of the nation again - man, we have Kucinich (not such a bad guy!), the burning Cuyahoga River, and the Browns on our record and then came Crackgate. It's a bad time to live in Cleveland.
The nanny industry, for one, is run entirely under Poppins's iron fist.
According to my psych textbook, diagnosing other people with mental illnesses is a symptom of borderline personality disorder.
Hey, want to hear a joke?
Women's rights.
How many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
That's not funny!
I am a horrible person and am going to hell.
(On a racism side note: if you happen to be on the WVU campus, check out a copy of the student newspaper from today and the last few weeks. There's a great editorial to the effect of "if black people want us to stop calling them criminals, they should stop committing crime!". A bit ago there was a crime committed off campus; the only description was "mid-20's black man". The newspaper ran quotes from students saying "well, the description of [insert blatantly racist characterization, big lips, etc.] sounds just like all the black men I've seen!" and letters came in to the paper saying "yeah, they all -do- look like that!". It's a horrible, messy thing.)
We can't register online. We can -pre-register online; you have to go to the office physically and hand in a piece of paper to confirm registration (or to add or drop classes), and freshmen don't get to preregister. (Anecdote: the freshman credit limit is 54 credit hours - four x 12ch classes + 1 x 6ch seminar. After the last class drop opportunity, the registrar's office reported one junior was signed up for 160some credit hours.)
/loginname/www/ is by default world-readable; but they don't set up Web pages for us. (You can also request a static IP address & hostname and run your own server. Yay for self-sufficiency!) In the strictest sense, though, I guess you could say they don't provide an easy interface for setting up our page (just ftp & kerberized telnet.)
:/
Other qualifications that made MIT not a very wired school:
*We aren't provided Web pages - well, sort of. This is probably an error. We get a http://web.mit.edu/loginname/ directory, and the already extant directory
*A computer isn't required of incoming students. It'd be hard to get by in practice, but in theory there are plenty of Athena clusters & there are several public machines along the Infinite Corridor; there are printers in the clusters and in each dorm, along with at least one workstation in each dorm. (There's also a free color laser printer in the student center! No fliers; one copy only.)
*A computer isn't provided as part of tuition - I doubt students would want to use the computer MIT provided anyway. Most of us have computers (several have many) when coming in; free, working systems and monitors appear on the Reuse mailing list as frequently as several times a day and at least two or three times a week. Finding a machine is no problem. (And tuition is absurd already.)
I was surprised to see it said we had USENET access - will have to figure out where that server is.
Another tangent:
CWRU, in my hometown, held the honor of being the Most Wired Campus once; and they are pretty impressive - there's gigabit Ethernet running over fiber everywhere. The trouble is that the network guy lied on the application to make it look like they were using that capacity; in fact, he lied a lot. He got fired. CWRU isn't Most Wired any more
But it is a small price to pay for the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to become a minor character in a Robert Heinlein novel.
Congratulations, Neal! You can now have polygamous sex with every woman and man you can find, including but not limited to your redheaded, barely-pubescent, twin female clones! And your mother!
You must be so proud.
To summarize the last three rounds of posting
1) Discrete on/off codes (hereafter "X") exist. Lots of things have X! For example, some people take advantage of X. (+4 insightful)
2) X doesn't happen much. I know of one X. (+4 interesting)
3) Actually, X does happen. I only know of one thing without X. (+4 informative)
Gosh - insightful, interesting, and informative, all based on "what I know" and "what I've seen" and unsupported claim. Let me try this.
You're wrong! Actually, most TV's made in the last year don't have discrete on/off codes. You see, recent US government regulations prohibit the purchase of devices with "Easter Eggs" - undocumented features - which is why Windows XP was shipped without such Easter Eggs. This is a problem because TV manuals are printed to be as short and simple as possible, and they certainly don't include all the undocumented IR signals a remote might be able to use.
So to avoid having to make "consumer" and "military" models of their electronics, many manufacturers (Panasonic was in fact the first) have removed many features such as "discrete on/off" from their lower-end devices, which frequently generate military requisition for various reasons. (Break rooms and field offices tend to find the greatest use.)
I myself have bought five TV's in the past year (long story), and only one - a top-end 50" plasma HDTV - still supported discrete on/off. (And it was even mentioned in the manual!) You get what you pay for these days.
So, to answer the very original poster (#0)'s question, my other four newly purchased TV's would all be turned on by this device.
Racial stereotyping can be racist, that doesn't mean it automatically is. There is a racial stereotype of Geramans being efficient and hard working, is that racist?
Yes. Also, Germans are savage murderous Kraut who are ruled by their industrial complex. The positives and the negatives go hand in hand.
"Oh, those black people, they're sure good at basketball, even if they're not so smart!"
"Them Asians sure are studious. Haha, and they have small sex organs."
"Those Jews are good at accounting! Because they're so materialistic!"
Asserting that "because you look (also, because your heritage is you're " is typically racist. (The issue is much deeper than that, however. I have devised a wonderful description, but these margins are too small, etc...)
You mean Sony!
Can you cite some definitive, controlled, and large-sample sociological study which has adequately investigated this issue? I'm curious - even the dissenters in Goodridge v. Massachusetts Dept. of Public Health acknowledged they had no solid evidence heterosexual couples provided the "optimal" setting for child rearing.
Suppose your wife dies in a horrific accident and you don't remarry. Should you be allowed to keep raising your three-month-old child, or should it be taken as a ward of the state and given to a deserving, loving heterosexual couple?
Little Timmy's parents are killed in a horrific plane crash. His only living relative, his grandmother, raises him. Should she give him up to adoption by a "normal" heterosexual couple?
What if Tiny Tim's only relative, his grandmother, lives with her wife?
What if a girl leaves her abusive husband and takes the child? Should she keep it?
A transsexual marries his high school sweetheart. For medical reasons they can't conceive children themselves. Should they be allowed to adopt one, or to serve as foster parents?
Pat is a self-confessed 'tomboy'; she was raised in a family of six boys, and she has mild Asperger's syndrome. She marries the very manly man Dan, and they enjoy the same activities; practically the only 'female' thing Pat does is sleep with her husband, and even then she's into kinky S&M stuff. Are Pat and Dan communicating an appropriate "feminine/masculine" image?
Dan has had a change of heart and decides to be fashionable; now he's a "metrosexual". This isn't in the masculinity book! Should he lose his children?
So - children of gay parents are in a bad place because nobody likes children of gay parents. Isn't that a little sweeping of a generalization to make about the entire world? (country?) How is a gay family in notoriously homosexual-friendly Provincetown, Massachusetts disadvantaged? Is this more pronounced than the severe lack of cultivation one gains by living on an Amish farm? By living a life confined exclusively to the inner city of Detroit? By being raised in Hawaii as a haole in an unfriendly community?
Should children develop as individuals?
Frequently conservative Christians (some of them; not all!) assert that their orthodox Christianity is 'under assault' in our society. Suppose that this is the case. Then children raised with Bible-belt values in strongly "atheistic" areas may have trouble communicating their upbringing and, worse, may find that they and their parents are excluded from the religiophobic community on the basis of their being "them crazy religious freaks". (This happens, according to some said "crazy religious freaks"; they assert it's the reason revival meetings and the like are necessary.) Never mind how mean and intolerant these atheists are being; suppose that it happens. (Remember the Pledge of Allegiance lawsuit?) The child will want to conform with the expectations all around them, but a child -can't- abandon those most basic, axiomatic built-in parts of himself, such as "Jesus Christ is my personal savior and I must help save others." So two parents of the same strong religious faith should not be allowed to raise a child (it
Great!
CD prices are down!
CD sales are down!
(Clearly it's due to piracy. - whatever will we do?)
A straight couple makes a much healthier family unit and there are plenty of couples waiting in line to adopt a baby. Proof?