I think there is an option for this that I probably opted out from when the new JS system was being tested. Basically, once I log in, Slashdot works exactly the way it has since the original CSS redesign, that is to say it works just like it has since before the redesign as well. To check this, I just completely turned off JavaScript and browed around for a bit. I didn't see any change in functionality except perhaps for tagging, which hasn't worked for me in Opera for a while now anyway.
Browsing without logging in, and thus with the new JS comment system, is indeed quite a pain. It's kind of neat, really, in the way you can adjust the moderation level by sliding the bar and do some other things, but ultimately seems pointless when the normal system works just fine and is much more reliable.
TL;DR: there should be an option somewhere to turn on the old JS-free system
Holy shit, the FAQ's been actually updated withing the last 10 years!
Although I had no idea it was possible to get 10 mod points now, I notice that I was getting them much more frequently than I used to, even though I barely ever moderate. There's nothing about that in the FAQ as far as I can see though.
When you sign up to do the military's bidding, you're just surrendering your sense of morality for that of a bunch of war criminals higher up the chain. How is that a good thing? They justify the war with whatever bullshit they need to sell it to the public, and send you off to do the killing and dying part.
That's a terrible fucking deal - not only you have to do something you don't necessarily believe in, you're also end up doing a disservice to your country and its interests when all is said and done.
The grocery, beer, and other cases aren't exactly relevant here. In this case, letting Oracle buy Sun they would create a bigger and more powerful direct competitor to the largest European software company, SAP. This is not the case with something like groceries, where non-EU presence is quite limited anyway.
I guess as an employee of SAP I should be happy with the decision, but I don't care too much and think this decision is a pretty stupid one. Yeah, I don't by the MySQL argument either. Worst case scenario is that MySQL is completely killed off, and everybody has to switch to another database, like Postgres. Actually, this makes it sound like the best case scenario!
PS. The harshest measures so far were against US companies. Does Intel and Microsoft mean anything to you?
Not to mention how buddy-buddy they were with each other when it came to taking a bite out of Poland. If Hitler wasn't so retardedly ambitious, the whole of Eurasia, Africa, and probably some other parts of the world would be Germany, Russia/USSR, and Japan now. Or maybe not, as the empires would probably fall apart on their own, but that's not the point.
-Prisoners are physically and mentally abused by staff -Prisoners are physically and mentally abused by other prisoners -Prisoners are forced to live in severely overcrowded conditions -Prisoners are serving ridiculous sentences which don't help achieve the intended goals -Prisoners get to interact and learn from more "hardcore" crims. Not necessarily barbaric as much as counterproductive.
Maybe your system isn't barbaric by medieval standards, but compared to modern day first-world nations, it is.
I don't disagree about the additional punishments though. Taking away voting rights is absolutely retarded (think the law that got you jailed is unjust? Well, fuck you!), but everything else isn't much better, GPS bracelets and address limitations included.
ABS was standard on my '86 Ford Scorpio, I think Opel/Vauxhall Omegas had it as an option from about the same time, and it was most definitely available on various Mercedes models from that period. Wikipedia also suggests that ABS was standard on E28 BMWs from '85. By volume you're probably still right, as this doesn't account for the majority of shitboxes people actually drive, but it's not like it was an unheard of technology at the time.
I think you'll find that very often speed limits are completely idiotic and don't have any connection to the real world, because whoever sets them for a given road can have several reasons not to maintain this relationship. This could be a municipality trying to cash in on speeding tickets, which has been shown to be pretty effective in many cases. Somebody could be playing the "think of the children" and safety cards by blindly lowering the speed limits everywhere - this sounds good to your average person, statistics be damned. Then there's the environmental angle, which is apparently how the retarded 55mph limits were set on US highways. This actually covers both cases, though there are other examples of course. And last but not least, the people responsible could be incompetent or just not care.
Following the limits can be stupid and dangerous if everybody else is breaking them as well for the above reasons. By driving below the average traffic speed, you're creating more of a hazard than if you just stay with the flow and keep the speed difference low. Also keep in mind that in all but a few exceptional cases, the speed limits don't reflect the actual conditions on the road. It's the middle of the night, there's a huge blizzard and you can't see shit, but the sign will still say 130km/h, just like it does when it's dry and sunny. Therefore, this leads me to conclude that statements such as "if you can't follow the speed limits and whatnot - you are a bad driver" are simply incorrect.
Same goes for the signs. There are at least real-world case studies that showed that removing all, or most, signs actually increased safety for all involved, here are the two I've been previously aware of: one in the Netherlands and one from Germany, which is actually a more recent follow up to the part that mentions that the Germans are also planning this change. In both cases, there has been no increase in accident rate, but actually a significant decrease.
I'm not going to argue completely against predictability on the roads, however blindly following whatever's written on those small metal disks isn't necessarily the best thing for the safety of those involved, as I have hopefully demonstrated clearly enough.
Of course I was aware of all these raids, but it wasn't clear what your opinion on them was. Maybe this is just highlighting the limits of my English, but "justified" actually seems somewhat ambiguous in this discussion. Obviously somebody (LeMay et al.) thought it's ok to target and kill hundreds of thousands civilians back then, otherwise the attacks wouldn't have been executed. Therefore, one could say that the attacks were justified - by somebody and to somebody - back then.
What I mean when I say something is not justified, is that it's not ok to indiscriminately target kill civilians, not now, not back then. I merely tried to figure out if what you wrote was an expression of you opinion or a statement of historical fact.
As for the LeMay quote, yeah I see the difference and it's not too clear what he meant there. McNamara, on the other hand, seems to all but admit that they were war criminals, I don't think there's another way to interpret "He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals". Maybe they aren't technically war criminals until judged guilty by a court, but this I think would be getting needlessly pedantic.
That "basically" was certainly a deliberate choice on my part, but it was a futile attempt to discourage somebody with a smug grin on their face from typing up exactly such a contrived hypothetical that you mention, as a response to the perceived challenge in my wording. This is definitely not meant as a loophole which would justify bombing wedding parties because they might happen to be terrorists or whatever is the latest popular fuckup.
I'm not sure at which point do I infer too much from a single word in the OP though, I think his post is pretty clearly in the "Can't make an omelet without murdering some civilians" territory, and I was replying to that rather any particular statement.
In this specific case, I think the best option would be to try to shoot the other terrorists (there were what, 3 or 4 of them?), then even if you end up losing foothold with the org, at least you're not personally shooting unarmed and innocent people. Participating would mean that there's no difference between you and the terrorists, as both sides are only killing people in an attempt to achieve some higher goal, which of course they believe is the only just one.
Let's not forget that the "terrorists" can actually be freedom fighters once you see through you government's bullshit, and you'd be sabotaging their attempt to free their nation from some oppressive regime that tortures and kills more innocents than they ever could. Then suddenly their mass murder is justified, and your actions (if you don't help them kill more people) are morally reprehensible!
What are you trying to say here? None of those attacks are morally justifiable in the least, and are simply war crimes by any objective definition. Shit, even two of the main people involved seem to think so. Of course this doesn't stop some people from trying to justify these actions, but they're wrong.
Nope, mass murder of civilians is basically not justifiable at all. That's for the terrorists as well as the "good guys" of course.
Having said that, this only applies to the real world and there's nothing wrong with the game having you mow down a few hundred innocent people, after all it's just a game and something we've all been doing for years. My personal bodycount for innocents is probably in the tens thousands by now, counting only those I've personally murdered and not just ordered their planet to be destroyed, their city nuked, etc.
That's a problem with Toyota shiboxes, not with modern cars in general. BMW are probably best at this from the mainstream manufacturers, though plenty of other, even more affordable, brands also provide excellent handling and feedback. As for tires, well I happen to think it's better to have more grip than less, so unless you're racing on a WRC snow stage, wider tires it is.
At least it used to be possible to hold or even adjust the steering wheel with one's knees when applying makeup/pouring a drink, but now... all is lost.
Yeah, UT (at least '99) was pretty awesome for this. Not only were the bots pretty good on their own, but the ways in which you could change them as well were also very useful. Each bot had a personality which you could adjust as you wanted, so you could change things like aggression, accuracy, or, IIRC, jumpiness as well as some other stuff, for each AI player. Sadly, I don't think the later UT games had this possibility:(
Really? How did I end up with an S3 account then? I guess Jeff must have slipped something in my coke when I wasn't looking.
My current backup there costs me about 10 cents per month. It includes almost everything I did in college, as well as my current programming and other projects, sans the final renders of stuff. I'm planning to go through my photo collection to pick up the good ones (burst mode is great, but results in many more mostly redundant photos to wade through) and when I upload those, I'm still expecting to pay less than 50 cents per month.
Now, if I were to buy an external hard drive for this purpose, let alone a tape drive, I'd be out of at least 80 bucks while using less than 10% of the capacity. While I could fill the rest of the drive with porn and warezed movies, this wouldn't change the calculations significantly as thous things don't have that much value to me, and can be easily replaced anyway. And even if I spread the costs over the five year life of the drive, it's still more expensive than S3. I also expect that Amazon will lower prices with time, while I'd be still out of the (more valuable) $80 I for the drive.
Oh, metered bandwidth is fine too, if fact it's better exactly for the reason you mention. Of course they shouldn't have a problem measuring usage, as my monthly invoice shows exactly how much I've actually used. I can see some people getting unpleasant surprises when they (or some rouge app) get carried away and download too much stuff, but overall it's a better solution.
Tiered pricing is really a pretty good solution for this. I'm sure many slashdotters would be posting here in outrage about how this is stifling innovation and how the man is keeping them down, but in reality it makes no sense to pay for unlimited data if you aren't using all the much. I'm glad I can get 100Mb from Vodafone for about $5/month, and I wouldn't get unlimited even if it was just a few bucks more.
This could change if I used the connection with my laptop, but as it is I'm usually either at the office or at home with wi-fi, and when I'm not I can still fit quite a lot of emails/browsing in the current plan.
Steam is an anti-competitive, anti-consumer piece of shit, and I'm surprised people on slashdot, of all places, are ready to white-knight it against any criticism. This guy might be still a whiny bitch, but then Steam still sucks for many reasons, including some of those he mentioned.
Slashdot Mirror
I think there is an option for this that I probably opted out from when the new JS system was being tested. Basically, once I log in, Slashdot works exactly the way it has since the original CSS redesign, that is to say it works just like it has since before the redesign as well. To check this, I just completely turned off JavaScript and browed around for a bit. I didn't see any change in functionality except perhaps for tagging, which hasn't worked for me in Opera for a while now anyway.
Browsing without logging in, and thus with the new JS comment system, is indeed quite a pain. It's kind of neat, really, in the way you can adjust the moderation level by sliding the bar and do some other things, but ultimately seems pointless when the normal system works just fine and is much more reliable.
TL;DR: there should be an option somewhere to turn on the old JS-free system
So, did they just forget about the other mandatory bullshit charge, resisting arrest?
Holy shit, the FAQ's been actually updated withing the last 10 years!
Although I had no idea it was possible to get 10 mod points now, I notice that I was getting them much more frequently than I used to, even though I barely ever moderate. There's nothing about that in the FAQ as far as I can see though.
When you sign up to do the military's bidding, you're just surrendering your sense of morality for that of a bunch of war criminals higher up the chain. How is that a good thing? They justify the war with whatever bullshit they need to sell it to the public, and send you off to do the killing and dying part.
That's a terrible fucking deal - not only you have to do something you don't necessarily believe in, you're also end up doing a disservice to your country and its interests when all is said and done.
He won a battle, but lost the war.
> Without disco, there would be no house music, which means no acid house, which means no trance.
Why are you saying that like it's a bad thing?!
> What kind of music is played on dance floors in your time period?
None.
The grocery, beer, and other cases aren't exactly relevant here. In this case, letting Oracle buy Sun they would create a bigger and more powerful direct competitor to the largest European software company, SAP. This is not the case with something like groceries, where non-EU presence is quite limited anyway.
I guess as an employee of SAP I should be happy with the decision, but I don't care too much and think this decision is a pretty stupid one. Yeah, I don't by the MySQL argument either. Worst case scenario is that MySQL is completely killed off, and everybody has to switch to another database, like Postgres. Actually, this makes it sound like the best case scenario!
PS. The harshest measures so far were against US companies. Does Intel and Microsoft mean anything to you?
Not to mention how buddy-buddy they were with each other when it came to taking a bite out of Poland. If Hitler wasn't so retardedly ambitious, the whole of Eurasia, Africa, and probably some other parts of the world would be Germany, Russia/USSR, and Japan now. Or maybe not, as the empires would probably fall apart on their own, but that's not the point.
That's also why I don't comment my code.
That's not a road train, THAT is a road train!
add this to your list:
-Prisoners are physically and mentally abused by staff
-Prisoners are physically and mentally abused by other prisoners
-Prisoners are forced to live in severely overcrowded conditions
-Prisoners are serving ridiculous sentences which don't help achieve the intended goals
-Prisoners get to interact and learn from more "hardcore" crims. Not necessarily barbaric as much as counterproductive.
Maybe your system isn't barbaric by medieval standards, but compared to modern day first-world nations, it is.
I don't disagree about the additional punishments though. Taking away voting rights is absolutely retarded (think the law that got you jailed is unjust? Well, fuck you!), but everything else isn't much better, GPS bracelets and address limitations included.
I assume you mean "on most cars" :)
ABS was standard on my '86 Ford Scorpio, I think Opel/Vauxhall Omegas had it as an option from about the same time, and it was most definitely available on various Mercedes models from that period. Wikipedia also suggests that ABS was standard on E28 BMWs from '85. By volume you're probably still right, as this doesn't account for the majority of shitboxes people actually drive, but it's not like it was an unheard of technology at the time.
I think you'll find that very often speed limits are completely idiotic and don't have any connection to the real world, because whoever sets them for a given road can have several reasons not to maintain this relationship. This could be a municipality trying to cash in on speeding tickets, which has been shown to be pretty effective in many cases. Somebody could be playing the "think of the children" and safety cards by blindly lowering the speed limits everywhere - this sounds good to your average person, statistics be damned. Then there's the environmental angle, which is apparently how the retarded 55mph limits were set on US highways. This actually covers both cases, though there are other examples of course. And last but not least, the people responsible could be incompetent or just not care.
Following the limits can be stupid and dangerous if everybody else is breaking them as well for the above reasons. By driving below the average traffic speed, you're creating more of a hazard than if you just stay with the flow and keep the speed difference low. Also keep in mind that in all but a few exceptional cases, the speed limits don't reflect the actual conditions on the road. It's the middle of the night, there's a huge blizzard and you can't see shit, but the sign will still say 130km/h, just like it does when it's dry and sunny. Therefore, this leads me to conclude that statements such as "if you can't follow the speed limits and whatnot - you are a bad driver" are simply incorrect.
Same goes for the signs. There are at least real-world case studies that showed that removing all, or most, signs actually increased safety for all involved, here are the two I've been previously aware of: one in the Netherlands and one from Germany, which is actually a more recent follow up to the part that mentions that the Germans are also planning this change. In both cases, there has been no increase in accident rate, but actually a significant decrease.
I'm not going to argue completely against predictability on the roads, however blindly following whatever's written on those small metal disks isn't necessarily the best thing for the safety of those involved, as I have hopefully demonstrated clearly enough.
Of course I was aware of all these raids, but it wasn't clear what your opinion on them was. Maybe this is just highlighting the limits of my English, but "justified" actually seems somewhat ambiguous in this discussion. Obviously somebody (LeMay et al.) thought it's ok to target and kill hundreds of thousands civilians back then, otherwise the attacks wouldn't have been executed. Therefore, one could say that the attacks were justified - by somebody and to somebody - back then.
What I mean when I say something is not justified, is that it's not ok to indiscriminately target kill civilians, not now, not back then. I merely tried to figure out if what you wrote was an expression of you opinion or a statement of historical fact.
As for the LeMay quote, yeah I see the difference and it's not too clear what he meant there. McNamara, on the other hand, seems to all but admit that they were war criminals, I don't think there's another way to interpret "He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals". Maybe they aren't technically war criminals until judged guilty by a court, but this I think would be getting needlessly pedantic.
That "basically" was certainly a deliberate choice on my part, but it was a futile attempt to discourage somebody with a smug grin on their face from typing up exactly such a contrived hypothetical that you mention, as a response to the perceived challenge in my wording. This is definitely not meant as a loophole which would justify bombing wedding parties because they might happen to be terrorists or whatever is the latest popular fuckup.
I'm not sure at which point do I infer too much from a single word in the OP though, I think his post is pretty clearly in the "Can't make an omelet without murdering some civilians" territory, and I was replying to that rather any particular statement.
In this specific case, I think the best option would be to try to shoot the other terrorists (there were what, 3 or 4 of them?), then even if you end up losing foothold with the org, at least you're not personally shooting unarmed and innocent people. Participating would mean that there's no difference between you and the terrorists, as both sides are only killing people in an attempt to achieve some higher goal, which of course they believe is the only just one.
Let's not forget that the "terrorists" can actually be freedom fighters once you see through you government's bullshit, and you'd be sabotaging their attempt to free their nation from some oppressive regime that tortures and kills more innocents than they ever could. Then suddenly their mass murder is justified, and your actions (if you don't help them kill more people) are morally reprehensible!
What are you trying to say here? None of those attacks are morally justifiable in the least, and are simply war crimes by any objective definition. Shit, even two of the main people involved seem to think so. Of course this doesn't stop some people from trying to justify these actions, but they're wrong.
Nope, mass murder of civilians is basically not justifiable at all. That's for the terrorists as well as the "good guys" of course.
Having said that, this only applies to the real world and there's nothing wrong with the game having you mow down a few hundred innocent people, after all it's just a game and something we've all been doing for years. My personal bodycount for innocents is probably in the tens thousands by now, counting only those I've personally murdered and not just ordered their planet to be destroyed, their city nuked, etc.
I just hope they send the French, that way nobody here will notice their long term absence.
That's a problem with Toyota shiboxes, not with modern cars in general. BMW are probably best at this from the mainstream manufacturers, though plenty of other, even more affordable, brands also provide excellent handling and feedback. As for tires, well I happen to think it's better to have more grip than less, so unless you're racing on a WRC snow stage, wider tires it is.
At least it used to be possible to hold or even adjust the steering wheel with one's knees when applying makeup/pouring a drink, but now... all is lost.
Yeah, UT (at least '99) was pretty awesome for this. Not only were the bots pretty good on their own, but the ways in which you could change them as well were also very useful. Each bot had a personality which you could adjust as you wanted, so you could change things like aggression, accuracy, or, IIRC, jumpiness as well as some other stuff, for each AI player. Sadly, I don't think the later UT games had this possibility :(
Really? How did I end up with an S3 account then? I guess Jeff must have slipped something in my coke when I wasn't looking.
My current backup there costs me about 10 cents per month. It includes almost everything I did in college, as well as my current programming and other projects, sans the final renders of stuff. I'm planning to go through my photo collection to pick up the good ones (burst mode is great, but results in many more mostly redundant photos to wade through) and when I upload those, I'm still expecting to pay less than 50 cents per month.
Now, if I were to buy an external hard drive for this purpose, let alone a tape drive, I'd be out of at least 80 bucks while using less than 10% of the capacity. While I could fill the rest of the drive with porn and warezed movies, this wouldn't change the calculations significantly as thous things don't have that much value to me, and can be easily replaced anyway. And even if I spread the costs over the five year life of the drive, it's still more expensive than S3. I also expect that Amazon will lower prices with time, while I'd be still out of the (more valuable) $80 I for the drive.
Oh, metered bandwidth is fine too, if fact it's better exactly for the reason you mention. Of course they shouldn't have a problem measuring usage, as my monthly invoice shows exactly how much I've actually used. I can see some people getting unpleasant surprises when they (or some rouge app) get carried away and download too much stuff, but overall it's a better solution.
Tiered pricing is really a pretty good solution for this. I'm sure many slashdotters would be posting here in outrage about how this is stifling innovation and how the man is keeping them down, but in reality it makes no sense to pay for unlimited data if you aren't using all the much. I'm glad I can get 100Mb from Vodafone for about $5/month, and I wouldn't get unlimited even if it was just a few bucks more.
This could change if I used the connection with my laptop, but as it is I'm usually either at the office or at home with wi-fi, and when I'm not I can still fit quite a lot of emails/browsing in the current plan.
Steam is an anti-competitive, anti-consumer piece of shit, and I'm surprised people on slashdot, of all places, are ready to white-knight it against any criticism. This guy might be still a whiny bitch, but then Steam still sucks for many reasons, including some of those he mentioned.