when compared to what happened to LPs in the 80's. Most of my record collection is vinyl. I know it is mostly a function of my age, but I picked up a couple of LPs every week back in the 80's and although I do own CD's, I'll never own as many. There is nothinig like the ritual of getting up every 20 minutes or so, flipping out the ole Discwasher (which you can still buy it and the refill fluids at high end music shops), and setting the needle in the groove. CD's just seem to get lost under my receiver, the liiner notes have text too small to read and when you do, it's not very interesting like the old stuff, the people who do the cover art aren't artists. The whole package has been cheapened but the price quadrupled. I just can't love the little plastic discs and cherish them like my favorite LP's. If CD's had good artwork and liner notes worth reading, many don't even have the lyrics, just credits for everyone and their accountant, then they'd have something I'd take pride in owning. As it it, you buy a couple of good songs and a lot of crap. I hate looking through my music and having to search for the good stuff. Nowadays,it's as much work to play straight from CD as playing 45's (singles), you have to choose each song individually, because playing an entire CD is so painful, amost as bad as listening to the radio. When I listen to music, I don't want to hear one or two good songs embedded in a bunch of crap.
What's the point in finding killer asteroids if we don't invest in the systems required to shoot them down? Sure, we have smoke detectors, but our communities also have fire trucks. Systems cabaple of killing killer asteroids would be capable of killing just about anything else we don't like overhead. Remember Star Wars? then again, maybe Pres. Raygun was just ahead of his time.
The Snopes page contradicts itself. Al Gore "took the initiative in creating the internet". But, Snopes says that to invent is to be the first to act on an idea. While, according to Snopes, create isn't necessarily the first to act on an idea, I would think including the word initiative means that he was the first to act on an idea. That is what it means to "take the initiative", it means to start the action towards an idea. While Gore may have been a major contributor to getting the idea some momentum, I doubt he was the first to publicly champion the idea. So, yes he was claiming a little too much in claiming that he "took the initiative" I would be more inclined that he took the initiative to get it and enabling legislation discussed in the Senate. But, he left out that bit about "in the Senate" and made it sound like he had the initiative in getting the idea discussed and enabled in the world. I guess he forgot that the Senate isn't the whole world, and in discussions of technology, it is usually way behind the world most of us live in.
The nytimes article is archived so i only read the little bit that was free. It appears that the artticle is about the projects of government scientist. What about university research? Much of it is funded by government grants, the rest is funded by industry. Naturally, the industry funded research is in technologies that have a quicker anticipated payoff, but blue sky research probably benefits some from being conducted in the same institutions. So how will university researchers be affected by government science cutbacks?
Radio, OTOH, will play stuff you never knew existed until you heard it there.
In theory, yes, but in fact it doesn't. Word of math, or simply selecting at random is best. Or college radio, that still works if you want something a little out of the mainstream.
The copys wouldn't seem so rediculous if they hadn't announced such a ridiculous cost for investigating these "bombs" . Surely, they have a bomb squad already costing money just for existing and being ready to deal with such a situation. If this is the case, the actual cost incurred would be extra gas money and wear and tear on the robot or whatever they have. It is possible that other cities were able to deal and therefore didn't become laughingstocks like Boston.
To clarify my position, although Boston over reacted, some sort of reaction was justified and it shouldn't have cost much more than a normal days work for a competent police department.
Wish I had Mod points, left. Sure, I wouldn't recognize the characters of Aqua Teen, but I would have been nervous even if it was Bart Simpson flipping a bird. You don't have to be very smart to make a bomb that looks like some kind of toy. And you would be very naive to ignore a bomb or a gun that looks like a toy. I do think that if the Cartoon Network want to run this sort of promotion, they should have stuck a phone number on the box. They could even make it part of the promotion.
That joke is much older than the Simpsons, it was in the Parent Trap, you know the old movie starring Haley Mills. Only they were hitting sticks to repell bears, which might actually work, if there were bears in the area. Actually, they managed to ironically turn the joke around on the jokers since they eventually did manage to accidentally attract bears with honey when they thought there were no bears. An extra level of complexity there, ah, the good old days of kids movies.
Criminal astronauts at that, which we don't have a large enough sample for meaningful discussion. Since the whole thread had meandered into general female bashing with virtually no mention of astronauts, my comment is meaningful.
You may pick any crime story out there, including this one. The gender of the criminal is a significant part of the headline. This is not the case when the perpetrator is male. It's either a "Student shoots up the school" or "Girl shoots up school", "Postal Worker goes Berzerk" or "Female Postal Worker Goes Berzerk". In this case, it isn't simply "Astronaut attempts Murder", but "Female Astronaut attempts Murder". When a woman commits a violent crime, it is almost a "Man bites Dog" story.
This real world fact, that the gender of the perpetrator makes the story more interesting to you, invalidates most of the comments here that imply that females are too unstable for submarines, spaceships, etc. Crimes of passion are normally committed by men. For a women to commit such a crime makes it seemly more shocking because it is so rare, so out of character.
You tell me, when someone describes a crime and you generate a profile of the killer, do you tend to see a woman? I doubt it. When our police departement releases a profile, it's always the same, a young, loner, male who can't maintain significant relationships with any woman other than his Mom.
If someone has not had a drink by the age of 24, they will probably never ever have a drink. You would have a society where an awful lot of people are drinking illegally. When laws exist that are so unpopular that virtually everyone breaks them, respect for that law and laws in general is greatly diminished. Ever try explaining to your kids why it's dnagerous to drive at or below the posted speed limit? Even though the "50 drive 55" BS is over, we still are living with a generation (mine) that pays no attention to posted speed limits.
To my point: we must distinguish between drinking, getting a buzz, getting totally wasted, and drunk driving. These are 4 different things. All drinking affects judgement, therefore even driving with just a little alcohol in the system is a bad idea. That's the nice thing abut having a teen, he's the automatic designated driver now that even one drink puts you over the line in most states. I see noting wrong at all with drinking, even to get a buzz. Getting totally wasted seems pointless, but I have no problem with it if the person remains in a safe place until it passes. But, I have big problems with drunks driving or even walking in public places. I've seen stats somewhere that a large percentage of pedestrians that get hit by cars are drunk.
The trick is disconnecting these two rites of passages. The worst situation is when people are learning to drink and learning to drive at the same time. But, having a legal drinking age, even a low one like 14 will create an occassion where many kids will expect to drink on their birthday. That's how kids create such bizarre games as 21 shots on your birthday. It would just move it down to a lower age.
Can you imagine how much more difficult it would be to investigate acts of terrorism where the terrorists have fake ID's instead of real ones. Since most of the folks hijaacking planes on 9/11 had valid passports and drivers licenses, it was relativiley easy to investigte after the fact and if a better job was done of putting the pieces together before 9/11, it may have been preventable. Several of those people were acting strange, not attendng classes, taking flying lessons, etc. Making it harder to keep tabs on them would simply make it harder to prevent acts of terrorims, but it does give authorities an excuse when they do fail to stop things before they happen.
Closer to home, I'd rather be hit by an insured driver with a valid drivers license than smeone who can't. Georgia was making great progressive at getting people to be partly legal until the feds came along and decreeed that illegal aliens shouldn't be able to get drivers licesnses. Recent changes were making it very difficult to get a license without insurance. Ten yeears ago, a third of georgia cars were uninsured, now it iless than 10% An awful lot of illegal aliens are or wnt to be law abiding as much as possible. They will comply with most laws, as long as it helps them to get away with the one law they see as a bad law. As easy as it is to get fake ID, much easier than the roundtrip to Mexico and back, linking immigration status to the drivers license is driving too many to the wrong side.
Besides, intentiionally confusing illegal immigration with terrorism is about as useful as confusing terrorist based in Afganistan with a despot in Iraq.
The drinking age thing comes up just about every time the Georgia legislature meets. The traditional argument is that people old enough to fight our wars should be able to have a drink, so sometimes, it is tied to being in the military. But, that isn't even the best reason.
Kids still drink, possibly as much as when I was in college. I got totally plastered a few times when I was a freshman, but I always managed to find my way home. I didn't particularly enjoy it. By the time I was an upper classman, we were drinking maturally in the various restarants all around Georgia Tech, and branching out to the variious night clubs and such where you had to be of age to get in. I talk to kids now, and they still drink, they get stinking drunk, but it's in their rooms, not in public, and it's binge drinking, not responsible. As you might expect when you have a case of beer and a few bottles of other stuff calling you from your own fridge. It is responsible drinking that the laws discourage. I think it is much easier for drinking to get out of cntrol when it is done in the dorm room or frat house. Getting the stuff isn't hard since so many people don't like the law and many of those adults don't mind breaking a bad law.
My son just got his driving license. I intentionally bought a house walking distance from school and shopping. He walks to school, it's right next door, but the walk to the stores half a mile awhile turned out to be too scary, not traffic lights, a five lane wide road that is always under construction (for years, Jones Bridge, if you've heard of it, it's famous around here). So, now I'm glad he's driving. Now he has that protective shell around him and everyone can see him in his rather large 4x4 pickup. It's terrible for the enviroment, but at least he's not fat.
Hey, I went to mod you up, but my points disappeared....
You bring up something that doesn't get mentioned enough needs to always be optional. And someone must keep track of how many votes were cast electronically. If more than a small percentage insist on doint it the old fashioned way, that demonstrates low confidence in the electronic systems.
Some tin foil would solve that problem. You mean to be funny, but it's true. It would take a very naive engineer (or cheapskape company) to forget to properly shield a computer. Since the emissions can be meaningful to someone with the proper test set, more shielding than normal is required if the vote is to remain secret.
He's an idiot in matters of governance and diplomacy, but an absolute genius at politicking. Watch him light up and become articulate and engaged when he's discussing electoral politics. But, he was hired to govern and diplome, not discuss politics. Why does the hiring process focus on the wrong skills?
Do we really have 2 separate parties? They may bicker over various issues, but when the same two parties agree on the basic mechanics to the extent that it is impossible for a new party to be taken seriously, we have a huge problem if they both agree that we know longer need our civil liberties.
Not quite right. If the owner says "sure", well, then you do what your boss says. there is no law against him complying with the request, but there is no law compelling him to comply either. He could have said "no", then the police would have had to go back and get a warrant. If I was a subscriber who got stung by something they found, I would have considerred going after you and your boss legally. If the police were dumb enough to say where they got the information. Unfortunately, most pepole who were into BBSs subscribed to several.
If they can persuade someone who has access to the email server to share it with them without a warrant, then it is as legal as if they persuaded your spouse to allow them to look at stuff in your house without a warrant. This has been done, and challenged as an invasion of privacy, but I'm not sure what the outcome was.
Slashdot Mirror
when compared to what happened to LPs in the 80's. Most of my record collection is vinyl. I know it is mostly a function of my age, but I picked up a couple of LPs every week back in the 80's and although I do own CD's, I'll never own as many. There is nothinig like the ritual of getting up every 20 minutes or so, flipping out the ole Discwasher (which you can still buy it and the refill fluids at high end music shops), and setting the needle in the groove. CD's just seem to get lost under my receiver, the liiner notes have text too small to read and when you do, it's not very interesting like the old stuff, the people who do the cover art aren't artists. The whole package has been cheapened but the price quadrupled. I just can't love the little plastic discs and cherish them like my favorite LP's. If CD's had good artwork and liner notes worth reading, many don't even have the lyrics, just credits for everyone and their accountant, then they'd have something I'd take pride in owning. As it it, you buy a couple of good songs and a lot of crap. I hate looking through my music and having to search for the good stuff. Nowadays,it's as much work to play straight from CD as playing 45's (singles), you have to choose each song individually, because playing an entire CD is so painful, amost as bad as listening to the radio. When I listen to music, I don't want to hear one or two good songs embedded in a bunch of crap.
What's the point in finding killer asteroids if we don't invest in the systems required to shoot them down? Sure, we have smoke detectors, but our communities also have fire trucks. Systems cabaple of killing killer asteroids would be capable of killing just about anything else we don't like overhead. Remember Star Wars? then again, maybe Pres. Raygun was just ahead of his time.
The Snopes page contradicts itself. Al Gore "took the initiative in creating the internet". But, Snopes says that to invent is to be the first to act on an idea. While, according to Snopes, create isn't necessarily the first to act on an idea, I would think including the word initiative means that he was the first to act on an idea. That is what it means to "take the initiative", it means to start the action towards an idea. While Gore may have been a major contributor to getting the idea some momentum, I doubt he was the first to publicly champion the idea. So, yes he was claiming a little too much in claiming that he "took the initiative" I would be more inclined that he took the initiative to get it and enabling legislation discussed in the Senate. But, he left out that bit about "in the Senate" and made it sound like he had the initiative in getting the idea discussed and enabled in the world. I guess he forgot that the Senate isn't the whole world, and in discussions of technology, it is usually way behind the world most of us live in.
The nytimes article is archived so i only read the little bit that was free. It appears that the artticle is about the projects of government scientist. What about university research? Much of it is funded by government grants, the rest is funded by industry. Naturally, the industry funded research is in technologies that have a quicker anticipated payoff, but blue sky research probably benefits some from being conducted in the same institutions. So how will university researchers be affected by government science cutbacks?
Radio, OTOH, will play stuff you never knew existed until you heard it there.
In theory, yes, but in fact it doesn't. Word of math, or simply selecting at random is best. Or college radio, that still works if you want something a little out of the mainstream.
The copys wouldn't seem so rediculous if they hadn't announced such a ridiculous cost for investigating these "bombs" . Surely, they have a bomb squad already costing money just for existing and being ready to deal with such a situation. If this is the case, the actual cost incurred would be extra gas money and wear and tear on the robot or whatever they have. It is possible that other cities were able to deal and therefore didn't become laughingstocks like Boston.
To clarify my position, although Boston over reacted, some sort of reaction was justified and it shouldn't have cost much more than a normal days work for a competent police department.
Wish I had Mod points, left. Sure, I wouldn't recognize the characters of Aqua Teen, but I would have been nervous even if it was Bart Simpson flipping a bird. You don't have to be very smart to make a bomb that looks like some kind of toy. And you would be very naive to ignore a bomb or a gun that looks like a toy. I do think that if the Cartoon Network want to run this sort of promotion, they should have stuck a phone number on the box. They could even make it part of the promotion.
That joke is much older than the Simpsons, it was in the Parent Trap, you know the old movie starring Haley Mills. Only they were hitting sticks to repell bears, which might actually work, if there were bears in the area. Actually, they managed to ironically turn the joke around on the jokers since they eventually did manage to accidentally attract bears with honey when they thought there were no bears. An extra level of complexity there, ah, the good old days of kids movies.
Criminal astronauts at that, which we don't have a large enough sample for meaningful discussion. Since the whole thread had meandered into general female bashing with virtually no mention of astronauts, my comment is meaningful.
You may pick any crime story out there, including this one. The gender of the criminal is a significant part of the headline. This is not the case when the perpetrator is male. It's either a "Student shoots up the school" or "Girl shoots up school", "Postal Worker goes Berzerk" or "Female Postal Worker Goes Berzerk". In this case, it isn't simply "Astronaut attempts Murder", but "Female Astronaut attempts Murder". When a woman commits a violent crime, it is almost a "Man bites Dog" story.
This real world fact, that the gender of the perpetrator makes the story more interesting to you, invalidates most of the comments here that imply that females are too unstable for submarines, spaceships, etc. Crimes of passion are normally committed by men. For a women to commit such a crime makes it seemly more shocking because it is so rare, so out of character.
You tell me, when someone describes a crime and you generate a profile of the killer, do you tend to see a woman? I doubt it. When our police departement releases a profile, it's always the same, a young, loner, male who can't maintain significant relationships with any woman other than his Mom.
Judging by the number of criminals in prisons, there are quite a few people, mostly men, who aren't even suitable for Earth missions.
That's the question that scientists exist to answer.
The Great Engineer didn't give us his documentation, so great minds are attempting to reverse engineer his design. That is Science.
If someone has not had a drink by the age of 24, they will probably never ever have a drink. You would have a society where an awful lot of people are drinking illegally. When laws exist that are so unpopular that virtually everyone breaks them, respect for that law and laws in general is greatly diminished. Ever try explaining to your kids why it's dnagerous to drive at or below the posted speed limit? Even though the "50 drive 55" BS is over, we still are living with a generation (mine) that pays no attention to posted speed limits.
To my point: we must distinguish between drinking, getting a buzz, getting totally wasted, and drunk driving. These are 4 different things. All drinking affects judgement, therefore even driving with just a little alcohol in the system is a bad idea. That's the nice thing abut having a teen, he's the automatic designated driver now that even one drink puts you over the line in most states. I see noting wrong at all with drinking, even to get a buzz. Getting totally wasted seems pointless, but I have no problem with it if the person remains in a safe place until it passes. But, I have big problems with drunks driving or even walking in public places. I've seen stats somewhere that a large percentage of pedestrians that get hit by cars are drunk.
The trick is disconnecting these two rites of passages. The worst situation is when people are learning to drink and learning to drive at the same time. But, having a legal drinking age, even a low one like 14 will create an occassion where many kids will expect to drink on their birthday. That's how kids create such bizarre games as 21 shots on your birthday. It would just move it down to a lower age.
Can you imagine how much more difficult it would be to investigate acts of terrorism where the terrorists have fake ID's instead of real ones. Since most of the folks hijaacking planes on 9/11 had valid passports and drivers licenses, it was relativiley easy to investigte after the fact and if a better job was done of putting the pieces together before 9/11, it may have been preventable. Several of those people were acting strange, not attendng classes, taking flying lessons, etc. Making it harder to keep tabs on them would simply make it harder to prevent acts of terrorims, but it does give authorities an excuse when they do fail to stop things before they happen.
Closer to home, I'd rather be hit by an insured driver with a valid drivers license than smeone who can't. Georgia was making great progressive at getting people to be partly legal until the feds came along and decreeed that illegal aliens shouldn't be able to get drivers licesnses. Recent changes were making it very difficult to get a license without insurance. Ten yeears ago, a third of georgia cars were uninsured, now it iless than 10% An awful lot of illegal aliens are or wnt to be law abiding as much as possible. They will comply with most laws, as long as it helps them to get away with the one law they see as a bad law. As easy as it is to get fake ID, much easier than the roundtrip to Mexico and back, linking immigration status to the drivers license is driving too many to the wrong side.
Besides, intentiionally confusing illegal immigration with terrorism is about as useful as confusing terrorist based in Afganistan with a despot in Iraq.
The drinking age thing comes up just about every time the Georgia legislature meets. The traditional argument is that people old enough to fight our wars should be able to have a drink, so sometimes, it is tied to being in the military. But, that isn't even the best reason.
Kids still drink, possibly as much as when I was in college. I got totally plastered a few times when I was a freshman, but I always managed to find my way home. I didn't particularly enjoy it. By the time I was an upper classman, we were drinking maturally in the various restarants all around Georgia Tech, and branching out to the variious night clubs and such where you had to be of age to get in. I talk to kids now, and they still drink, they get stinking drunk, but it's in their rooms, not in public, and it's binge drinking, not responsible. As you might expect when you have a case of beer and a few bottles of other stuff calling you from your own fridge. It is responsible drinking that the laws discourage. I think it is much easier for drinking to get out of cntrol when it is done in the dorm room or frat house. Getting the stuff isn't hard since so many people don't like the law and many of those adults don't mind breaking a bad law.
My son just got his driving license. I intentionally bought a house walking distance from school and shopping. He walks to school, it's right next door, but the walk to the stores half a mile awhile turned out to be too scary, not traffic lights, a five lane wide road that is always under construction (for years, Jones Bridge, if you've heard of it, it's famous around here). So, now I'm glad he's driving. Now he has that protective shell around him and everyone can see him in his rather large 4x4 pickup. It's terrible for the enviroment, but at least he's not fat.
Hey, I went to mod you up, but my points disappeared....
You bring up something that doesn't get mentioned enough needs to always be optional. And someone must keep track of how many votes were cast electronically. If more than a small percentage insist on doint it the old fashioned way, that demonstrates low confidence in the electronic systems.
Interesting, I suppose if you want to drop Netflix, you need to empty your queue and return all your disks before you cancel.
Avoid flying under low bridges or underpasses
Do we really have 2 separate parties? They may bicker over various issues, but when the same two parties agree on the basic mechanics to the extent that it is impossible for a new party to be taken seriously, we have a huge problem if they both agree that we know longer need our civil liberties.
Not quite right. If the owner says "sure", well, then you do what your boss says. there is no law against him complying with the request, but there is no law compelling him to comply either. He could have said "no", then the police would have had to go back and get a warrant. If I was a subscriber who got stung by something they found, I would have considerred going after you and your boss legally. If the police were dumb enough to say where they got the information. Unfortunately, most pepole who were into BBSs subscribed to several.
If they can persuade someone who has access to the email server to share it with them without a warrant, then it is as legal as if they persuaded your spouse to allow them to look at stuff in your house without a warrant. This has been done, and challenged as an invasion of privacy, but I'm not sure what the outcome was.
Many /.ers are victims of an STD? How did that happen?