Why can't you see that when you purchase one of these boxes, you're fighting for freedom? If you buy a cable box, you're voluntarily submitting yourself to oppression. It is really that simple.
Freedom? Oppression? We're talking about TV here. If not having full control of TV programming (which you don't create or pay for) is the worst thing that's happening to you, then you are leading a seriously charmed life.
If the parent is a troll, on the other hand, then very well done indeed.
A critically acclaimed video game turned movie will go a long way towards legitimacy.
Yeah, somehow it seems to me that you'd be better served actually doing something than worrying about your artistic legacy when you're a nobody.
That would be like me writing my memoir which would, at this point, consist of nuggets like "got up...went to work...came home...jerked off to midget porn." Maybe later when I've become an international man of mystery or whatnot, some of the later chapters might be more interesting. That's when I'll start worrying about my "legacy".
That might be because the USA is one of the largest Protestant-majority countries (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestantism_by_country). Catholics (and most of the groups which split from them prior to the Protestant Reformation) aren't fundamentalists. i.e. they don't take the Bible literally, seeing Genesis as symbolic rather than historical. This enables them to reconcile evolution (and other scientific principles) with their faith.
This also demonstrates that it is possible to be both religious and scientific.
In reality, that is a rather new development for the Catholic faith, who spent centuries killing anyone they could who spouted heresy related to non-strict interpretations of the Bible, or who attempted to print their own versions. If anything, they simply had the experience of more centuries of having science prove them wrong, and decided to get ahead of the curve.
Alternatively, license out your DRM tech so Sony can build a reader compatible with your service.
I imagine they would for the right price, but I have a feeling Sony isn't interested. I can't remember the last media format that was created where Sony didn't start a format war pissing contest. Probably the only times they don't is when they get enough of a market advantage that nobody else contested them (as in the audio CD, with them teaming with Philips).
Increasing the amount of spam received on anyone's servers is something that I think most admins will tell you is unacceptable. Even a child of 5 could tell you that 2 + 2 does not equal 0.
Pathetically superficial response and a red herring to boot.
I'm pretty sure most admins would beg you to do it if it works. If I can decrease future spam by 30% with a 1% increase in traffic due to fake spam today, that's a win.
Even a child of 2 can tell you that 30 is greater than 1.
Go back to my original response and read the first sentence again: Sending spam to eliminate spam is not eliminating spam.
If that's too overly simple for you, I don't know of any other way to get the point across.
That's a great sound bite for an audience with an IQ of about 80, but it doesn't hold up to analytical rigor. If you decrease the spam response rate, you make spamming less lucrative, and you have fewer spammers.
That's still pretty simple, even for sound-bite based logic such as you seem to prefer.
I know that the Slashdot editing has a very low reputation around here but I was pretty interested to see how much work was done on this article writeup. You can see mine at the Firehose entry. The Slashdot editor even went to the trouble of looking up prior Dvorak-related articles (and taking the trouble to notice the article I submitted was 13 years old -- whoops)
Wow, you're right. I'll fire off an email to Taco letting him know that kdawson's account has been hacked. That sort of compromise can't be tolerated, even if it's by a benevolent professional editor.
SOA = Service Oriented Architecture, and is one of the big crazes in the tech world right now.
Yup. Surprisingly, if you modularize your applications they'll work better, be more stable, and be more resusable. Don't know how we would have ever thought of that without an acronym.
You can send me my $50,000 speaking fee to my assistant.
Social Intelligence is a skill that can be taught and learned. That is how most people get it although somewhat unconsciously. Inherent personality does play a role which is why "Nerds" have to work harder at learning it.
So is quantum mechanics, but like with social skills some are just basically hopeless.
Because the majority of the world runs on Social IQ more than we like to admit.
When was that in question? I work with a number of very smart people who I wouldn't even think of putting in front of a customer. Of course, there are also smart people who can hold a real conversation, so I think this stereotype is overplayed.
You have to know your stuff, but if you can't express it you'll always be the guy they stick in a cube where he'll never interact with anyone. That guy also has his ideas stolen quite often, unfortunately.
Speaking absolute numbers, any software company in the world would be thrilled to sell ~10 million copies of their flagship product every month. So before you call Vista "unpopular" I'd like to ask: "Compared to what?"
Any company except Microsoft. As to your question: compared to XP, obviously, but more importantly to the rate at which the newest Windows replaces the old one. This one's not getting traction.
From a quick look online, it looks like Vista sold less total units than XP in the first 6 months, which is appalling since the total number of installed computers increased a great deal. Additionally, XP is still killing Vista for business sales as of 2008, two years after Vista was launched. And you can't trust MS's numbers, because the XP boxes they're selling now come with Vista licenses and XP pre-loaded, which they do so they can try to inflate their Vista numbers.
Going back to the story, Vista is so good that Microsoft has to run a "Project Mojave" campaign to convince people Vista doesn't suck. It's so good that Microsoft won't even mention it by name and are rushing it's replacement out the door as quickly as possible.
Gah. it's just the container. It is an easy problem to fix...either with a frosted cover,
A thin frosted cover won't successfully disperse a point source to a spherical ball.
or with a dome shape board with 5 LEDs
Which will completely look like shit when you have 5 oddly overlapping Gaussian beam patterns making your living room look like you have a disco ball.
Just because no one has made them for bikes, doesn't mean it isn't done.
You missed the point. LEDs *are* used for bikes (I have them), because the challenges inherently faced in trying to make a nice, uniform light source don't matter when you're just trying to see ahead of you. But that doesn't mean they'll work at home.
Seriously, do you honestly think that you, sitting in your living room for 5 minutes typing on slashdot, will out-think the entire LED lighting industry? Not likely. In most cases, if a problem claimed to be difficult seems easy to you, it's probably because you don't understand the problem. In this case, available LED-based light bulbs still don't tend to look enough like incandescent light bulbs to be well-accepted by consumers, and they're rather expensive.
That's not to say the problems are insurmountable, as I think within 10 years LED light bulbs will be fairly common, but they're still immature. Right now, they're mainly used where the color of the light isn't important, you don't need 360 degree coverage, and you need exceptional energy efficiency. For those reasons, they're becoming very popular in flashlights, like I mentioned.
A glass of cloudy water would do what you ask, quite easily.
Sure, as long as you don't mind destroying the energy efficiency that was the original reason for using LEDs in the first place.
It's definitely not trivial to take a directional light source and shape it so that the output is directionally uniform. I'm a cyclist, and I use LED lights for riding at night. They're just now getting to the point that they're reasonably priced, with decent power, and with a decent beam pattern in maybe a 10-15 degree swath for a single LED. And the ones that use multiple LEDs generally give weird looking beam patterns.
The technology is coming, but it's not fully there yet.
Until some new process is created which can demonstrate large volume production of biofuel at prices better than gasoline, we're stuck with gasoline.
That's pretty circular logic. You can't demonstrate large volume production until you've done research, done proof of concept, that sort of thing. If we want to be not stuck, we need to invest in other things.
Fact is, gasoline is cheap. Arguing about nebulous unknown "costs" in the future doesn't change it's price today. In fact, gasoline isn't just cheap, it's rock bottom dirt fucking cheap. The economics are simple, as long as gasoline is cheaper than any sort of biofuel, people will continue to use it.
Problem: Gasoline will not stay this cheap, and that's not a nebulous unknown. I'm old enough to have seen the back end of the gas crunch, then the investment in domestic resources in the 80s, which dried up in the 90s. This is cyclic, and it happens every decade at least, and it will continue to get worse. We need domestic production of a liquid fuel that can be used in place of gasoline, and we need the infrastructure in place to turn on whenever OPEC feels like jacking the price up. We'd be investing in a hedge.
Whether that's EtOH, I don't know. Coal liquefaction is a good alternative as well.
The focus of the slashdot story is the music. That's what I'm talking about.
Almost everything suggested for a sales tax increase is a non-necessity.
Nothing in life is absolutely necessary unless you're getting your 2000 calories a day from Raman noodles at $2.00 a day (max). Beyond that, living under a freeway ramp in Alabama is sufficient to sustain life and is free. Clothes aren't strictly necessary either. Start making that argument, and your tax plan is a flat tax on all those "luxuries" with a $1000 standard deduction for your Ramen. That's a regressive tax.
If a $0.99 music download trips your definition of "luxury", you're more than a little addled.
I also find it odd that so many americans find the very idea (of workers gathering together to form a stronger position for bargaining with employers) somehow offensive. It seems in the US that the party with more power (the employer) should be allowed to tread all over the weaker individuals in society (employees) because every last one of you is going to be that guy next.
I don't believe that's true. First, organized labor has far more power than employers (see below). Also, I think that America, by and large, dislikes the state of organized labor as a practical matter, not a theoretical one. There are a few good reasons why many Americans - myself included - dislike the unions that exist in this country. That doesn't mean we dislike the notion of unions. Those are two very distinct points that you lump together.
Here's why I dislike the major US unions I'm familiar with:
*Many unions were run by organized crime for decades. Some still seem to embrace that legacy.
*The balance of power is tipped very heavily toward organized labor and against employers due to the US's labor laws - companies are legally required to negotiate with striking unions, whereas union members can get jobs during a strike. That (and other) imbalances basically give unions a license to print money, bleeding companies dry until they go under or leave the US.
*American unions are the antithesis of a meritocracy - they make it absolutely impossible to fire incompetent employees, and negotiate for pay based on time served as opposed to skill. Both tend to rankle Americans (such as myself) who believe in working hard to make something of yourself.
*Lastly and probably most important, very often unions don't represent the wishes of their employees. Especially with big unions, they're very lucrative for the leadership which is very often out of touch with the rank and file. It's easy to rip off the workers (which is one reason the mob got involved with unions early on). Now, the unions are pushing for rules that eliminate secret ballots in union elections, the most fundamental tenet of any democratic process. There is no possible reason for that except to intimidate workers and prevent them from keeping the union accountable.
I'm not against unions in theory, I'm against the ones that exist in the US in practice.
Climbers die on the way down. It's more dangerous, you're more fatigued and your guard is down. You also tend to ignore clear signs of physical harm.
While I'm sure that's true, in this case they found that physical harm was a relatively minor risk compared to the cerebral edema that they found to be prevalent. In this case, the mechanism seems to be that on the way down, you've already been up, and hence your brain has been subjected to very low pressures for a long time.
Aaaaand now that we can make pretty much perfect diamonds as large as you want with a fairly inexpensive vapor deposition chamber, all this will soon be no more than a waste of money, time and energy.
Last I checked decent sized CVD diamonds were rather yellow. I'd say there's still some time before the likes of DeBeers get shut down, unfortunately.
One of our friends brought her boyfriend over the other day.. he'd heard of the Wii but never played it, so we fired up WiiSports for him. While playing "Tennis" I watched in amusement as he hit his hand into the wall, then my coffee table, then he tripped over the recliner, then he nearly hit his girlfriend in the head.
Good Christ, for her sake I hope he's better in bed. Unfortunately, though, I have a feeling that's some fearsome awful sex.
Actually, you will strike fear and awe into the hearts of all those redhat (linux equiv of gingers in southpark?) and ubuntu users. Telling people you use Slackware even makes gentoo users gasp in amazement. By using Slack, everyone around you will know that your kung-fu is the best kung-fu.
It's funny, and maybe because Slack is the only distro I've ever used by choice, but when forced to use RedSplat it makes my brain cry. Slack's so easy, you know exactly what config files control what, couldn't be easier. I'm not complaining that it strikes shock and awe into people when you mention you use Slack, but I'm not sure it's deserved.
My only gripe is that when attempting to compile yer own kernel, they don't ship with a kernel config with sane things enabled by default. Sometimes it's a bitch to figure out what kernel flags need to be set (for things like SATA drives, for instance) but that's more of a Linux gripe in general.
I'm not saying OSS would be a bad move for Apple or the iPhone, but to say that if they aren't careful they might end up completely dominating the market and rolling around in mountains of cash isn't going to get your point across to most people.
Slashdot Mirror
Why can't you see that when you purchase one of these boxes, you're fighting for freedom? If you buy a cable box, you're voluntarily submitting yourself to oppression. It is really that simple.
Freedom? Oppression? We're talking about TV here. If not having full control of TV programming (which you don't create or pay for) is the worst thing that's happening to you, then you are leading a seriously charmed life.
If the parent is a troll, on the other hand, then very well done indeed.
A critically acclaimed video game turned movie will go a long way towards legitimacy.
Yeah, somehow it seems to me that you'd be better served actually doing something than worrying about your artistic legacy when you're a nobody.
That would be like me writing my memoir which would, at this point, consist of nuggets like "got up...went to work...came home...jerked off to midget porn." Maybe later when I've become an international man of mystery or whatnot, some of the later chapters might be more interesting. That's when I'll start worrying about my "legacy".
That might be because the USA is one of the largest Protestant-majority countries (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestantism_by_country). Catholics (and most of the groups which split from them prior to the Protestant Reformation) aren't fundamentalists. i.e. they don't take the Bible literally, seeing Genesis as symbolic rather than historical. This enables them to reconcile evolution (and other scientific principles) with their faith. This also demonstrates that it is possible to be both religious and scientific.
In reality, that is a rather new development for the Catholic faith, who spent centuries killing anyone they could who spouted heresy related to non-strict interpretations of the Bible, or who attempted to print their own versions. If anything, they simply had the experience of more centuries of having science prove them wrong, and decided to get ahead of the curve.
Alternatively, license out your DRM tech so Sony can build a reader compatible with your service.
I imagine they would for the right price, but I have a feeling Sony isn't interested. I can't remember the last media format that was created where Sony didn't start a format war pissing contest. Probably the only times they don't is when they get enough of a market advantage that nobody else contested them (as in the audio CD, with them teaming with Philips).
Increasing the amount of spam received on anyone's servers is something that I think most admins will tell you is unacceptable. Even a child of 5 could tell you that 2 + 2 does not equal 0.
Pathetically superficial response and a red herring to boot.
I'm pretty sure most admins would beg you to do it if it works. If I can decrease future spam by 30% with a 1% increase in traffic due to fake spam today, that's a win.
Even a child of 2 can tell you that 30 is greater than 1.
The problem is a corporate ruling class with an extreme sense of entitlement.
And a bonus structure where the fox guards the henhouse. Great idea, guys.
Go back to my original response and read the first sentence again: Sending spam to eliminate spam is not eliminating spam. If that's too overly simple for you, I don't know of any other way to get the point across.
That's a great sound bite for an audience with an IQ of about 80, but it doesn't hold up to analytical rigor. If you decrease the spam response rate, you make spamming less lucrative, and you have fewer spammers.
That's still pretty simple, even for sound-bite based logic such as you seem to prefer.
I know that the Slashdot editing has a very low reputation around here but I was pretty interested to see how much work was done on this article writeup. You can see mine at the Firehose entry. The Slashdot editor even went to the trouble of looking up prior Dvorak-related articles (and taking the trouble to notice the article I submitted was 13 years old -- whoops)
Wow, you're right. I'll fire off an email to Taco letting him know that kdawson's account has been hacked. That sort of compromise can't be tolerated, even if it's by a benevolent professional editor.
SOA = Service Oriented Architecture, and is one of the big crazes in the tech world right now.
Yup. Surprisingly, if you modularize your applications they'll work better, be more stable, and be more resusable. Don't know how we would have ever thought of that without an acronym.
You can send me my $50,000 speaking fee to my assistant.
Social Intelligence is a skill that can be taught and learned. That is how most people get it although somewhat unconsciously. Inherent personality does play a role which is why "Nerds" have to work harder at learning it.
So is quantum mechanics, but like with social skills some are just basically hopeless.
Because the majority of the world runs on Social IQ more than we like to admit.
When was that in question? I work with a number of very smart people who I wouldn't even think of putting in front of a customer. Of course, there are also smart people who can hold a real conversation, so I think this stereotype is overplayed.
You have to know your stuff, but if you can't express it you'll always be the guy they stick in a cube where he'll never interact with anyone. That guy also has his ideas stolen quite often, unfortunately.
Speaking absolute numbers, any software company in the world would be thrilled to sell ~10 million copies of their flagship product every month. So before you call Vista "unpopular" I'd like to ask: "Compared to what?"
Any company except Microsoft. As to your question: compared to XP, obviously, but more importantly to the rate at which the newest Windows replaces the old one. This one's not getting traction.
From a quick look online, it looks like Vista sold less total units than XP in the first 6 months, which is appalling since the total number of installed computers increased a great deal. Additionally, XP is still killing Vista for business sales as of 2008, two years after Vista was launched. And you can't trust MS's numbers, because the XP boxes they're selling now come with Vista licenses and XP pre-loaded, which they do so they can try to inflate their Vista numbers.
Going back to the story, Vista is so good that Microsoft has to run a "Project Mojave" campaign to convince people Vista doesn't suck. It's so good that Microsoft won't even mention it by name and are rushing it's replacement out the door as quickly as possible.
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/Vista-struggling-to-match-XP-sales/0,130061733,339282002,00.htm
http://www.informationweek.com/news/windows/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=205210375
http://apcmag.com/xp_still_killing_vista_in_sales_volume_hp.htm
Gah. it's just the container. It is an easy problem to fix...either with a frosted cover,
A thin frosted cover won't successfully disperse a point source to a spherical ball.
or with a dome shape board with 5 LEDs
Which will completely look like shit when you have 5 oddly overlapping Gaussian beam patterns making your living room look like you have a disco ball.
Just because no one has made them for bikes, doesn't mean it isn't done.
You missed the point. LEDs *are* used for bikes (I have them), because the challenges inherently faced in trying to make a nice, uniform light source don't matter when you're just trying to see ahead of you. But that doesn't mean they'll work at home.
Seriously, do you honestly think that you, sitting in your living room for 5 minutes typing on slashdot, will out-think the entire LED lighting industry? Not likely. In most cases, if a problem claimed to be difficult seems easy to you, it's probably because you don't understand the problem. In this case, available LED-based light bulbs still don't tend to look enough like incandescent light bulbs to be well-accepted by consumers, and they're rather expensive.
That's not to say the problems are insurmountable, as I think within 10 years LED light bulbs will be fairly common, but they're still immature. Right now, they're mainly used where the color of the light isn't important, you don't need 360 degree coverage, and you need exceptional energy efficiency. For those reasons, they're becoming very popular in flashlights, like I mentioned.
A glass of cloudy water would do what you ask, quite easily.
Sure, as long as you don't mind destroying the energy efficiency that was the original reason for using LEDs in the first place.
It's definitely not trivial to take a directional light source and shape it so that the output is directionally uniform. I'm a cyclist, and I use LED lights for riding at night. They're just now getting to the point that they're reasonably priced, with decent power, and with a decent beam pattern in maybe a 10-15 degree swath for a single LED. And the ones that use multiple LEDs generally give weird looking beam patterns.
The technology is coming, but it's not fully there yet.
but that's not how it works in grown-up land.
...slashdot's not grown-up land.
Until some new process is created which can demonstrate large volume production of biofuel at prices better than gasoline, we're stuck with gasoline.
That's pretty circular logic. You can't demonstrate large volume production until you've done research, done proof of concept, that sort of thing. If we want to be not stuck, we need to invest in other things.
Fact is, gasoline is cheap. Arguing about nebulous unknown "costs" in the future doesn't change it's price today. In fact, gasoline isn't just cheap, it's rock bottom dirt fucking cheap. The economics are simple, as long as gasoline is cheaper than any sort of biofuel, people will continue to use it.
Problem: Gasoline will not stay this cheap, and that's not a nebulous unknown. I'm old enough to have seen the back end of the gas crunch, then the investment in domestic resources in the 80s, which dried up in the 90s. This is cyclic, and it happens every decade at least, and it will continue to get worse. We need domestic production of a liquid fuel that can be used in place of gasoline, and we need the infrastructure in place to turn on whenever OPEC feels like jacking the price up. We'd be investing in a hedge.
Whether that's EtOH, I don't know. Coal liquefaction is a good alternative as well.
Actually, we are talking yachts here. RTFA.
The focus of the slashdot story is the music. That's what I'm talking about.
Almost everything suggested for a sales tax increase is a non-necessity.
Nothing in life is absolutely necessary unless you're getting your 2000 calories a day from Raman noodles at $2.00 a day (max). Beyond that, living under a freeway ramp in Alabama is sufficient to sustain life and is free. Clothes aren't strictly necessary either. Start making that argument, and your tax plan is a flat tax on all those "luxuries" with a $1000 standard deduction for your Ramen. That's a regressive tax.
If a $0.99 music download trips your definition of "luxury", you're more than a little addled.
. I'd prefer the taxes on ipods, cigars, gasoline, and luxury cars to income tax increases.
Only problem: Sales taxes are inherently regressive. And it's not like we're talking yachts here, we're talking music.
I also find it odd that so many americans find the very idea (of workers gathering together to form a stronger position for bargaining with employers) somehow offensive. It seems in the US that the party with more power (the employer) should be allowed to tread all over the weaker individuals in society (employees) because every last one of you is going to be that guy next.
I don't believe that's true. First, organized labor has far more power than employers (see below). Also, I think that America, by and large, dislikes the state of organized labor as a practical matter, not a theoretical one. There are a few good reasons why many Americans - myself included - dislike the unions that exist in this country. That doesn't mean we dislike the notion of unions. Those are two very distinct points that you lump together.
Here's why I dislike the major US unions I'm familiar with:
*Many unions were run by organized crime for decades. Some still seem to embrace that legacy.
*The balance of power is tipped very heavily toward organized labor and against employers due to the US's labor laws - companies are legally required to negotiate with striking unions, whereas union members can get jobs during a strike. That (and other) imbalances basically give unions a license to print money, bleeding companies dry until they go under or leave the US.
*American unions are the antithesis of a meritocracy - they make it absolutely impossible to fire incompetent employees, and negotiate for pay based on time served as opposed to skill. Both tend to rankle Americans (such as myself) who believe in working hard to make something of yourself.
*Lastly and probably most important, very often unions don't represent the wishes of their employees. Especially with big unions, they're very lucrative for the leadership which is very often out of touch with the rank and file. It's easy to rip off the workers (which is one reason the mob got involved with unions early on). Now, the unions are pushing for rules that eliminate secret ballots in union elections, the most fundamental tenet of any democratic process. There is no possible reason for that except to intimidate workers and prevent them from keeping the union accountable.
I'm not against unions in theory, I'm against the ones that exist in the US in practice.
Climbers die on the way down. It's more dangerous, you're more fatigued and your guard is down. You also tend to ignore clear signs of physical harm.
While I'm sure that's true, in this case they found that physical harm was a relatively minor risk compared to the cerebral edema that they found to be prevalent. In this case, the mechanism seems to be that on the way down, you've already been up, and hence your brain has been subjected to very low pressures for a long time.
Aaaaand now that we can make pretty much perfect diamonds as large as you want with a fairly inexpensive vapor deposition chamber, all this will soon be no more than a waste of money, time and energy.
Last I checked decent sized CVD diamonds were rather yellow. I'd say there's still some time before the likes of DeBeers get shut down, unfortunately.
One of our friends brought her boyfriend over the other day.. he'd heard of the Wii but never played it, so we fired up WiiSports for him. While playing "Tennis" I watched in amusement as he hit his hand into the wall, then my coffee table, then he tripped over the recliner, then he nearly hit his girlfriend in the head.
Good Christ, for her sake I hope he's better in bed. Unfortunately, though, I have a feeling that's some fearsome awful sex.
Actually, you will strike fear and awe into the hearts of all those redhat (linux equiv of gingers in southpark?) and ubuntu users. Telling people you use Slackware even makes gentoo users gasp in amazement. By using Slack, everyone around you will know that your kung-fu is the best kung-fu.
It's funny, and maybe because Slack is the only distro I've ever used by choice, but when forced to use RedSplat it makes my brain cry. Slack's so easy, you know exactly what config files control what, couldn't be easier. I'm not complaining that it strikes shock and awe into people when you mention you use Slack, but I'm not sure it's deserved.
My only gripe is that when attempting to compile yer own kernel, they don't ship with a kernel config with sane things enabled by default. Sometimes it's a bitch to figure out what kernel flags need to be set (for things like SATA drives, for instance) but that's more of a Linux gripe in general.
I'm sure both of you still using Slackware will be very pleased! ;)
There's somebody else? ;)
I'm not saying OSS would be a bad move for Apple or the iPhone, but to say that if they aren't careful they might end up completely dominating the market and rolling around in mountains of cash isn't going to get your point across to most people.
Oh NOES!!! Teh moneeeez!!!!
*whoosh*