He committed a crime, there were witnesses, AND he confessed. You don't get any more guilty than that.
Not true. You're a hell of a lot more guilty if a victim harmed by your crime steps forward and presses charges. Meanwhile, back at the office, he did as much to protect the safety of his fellow countryman and soldiers as any venerated war hero known to the public.
Technically, just about every person in Russia sent to the gulags first signed a confession for crimes against the state, if only committed inside their heads.
If that's the standard of guilt, guilt can go fuck itself.
I'm sympathetic to PHK, but I could never have written this piece myself without commenting on a single disadvantage of the Chinese wheelbarrow.
You seem to be stuck with one of three problems: * using a small wheel that won't easily roll over path obstructions * having the wheel intrude into the barrow, obstructing tending or shifting the load * having a large wheel under the barrow with a high center of gravity (what could possibly go wrong?)
The large carts at my nearby Costco are set up so that they won't pivot at the front (only at the middle). This is fine if you can find space to make a 90 degree turn on the spot. It's not at all good for creeping around a tight bend. Moreover, you've got both the front and back end swinging at the same time—which is the number of places you can visually attend plus one—so your chances of taking down some rickety display item are fairly decent if try to wing it.
Furthermore, nothing prevents two people from grabbing different handles on the European wheelbarrow. Also, PHK is wrong about the weight distribution. With a heavy load, it's customary to pile as much as possible up against the lip that protrudes over the front wheel in many front-wheel designs. I'd guess an European wheelbarrow front-loaded with wet clay has about a 4:1 lever arm in vertical displacement of the handle compared to vertical displacement of the load.
Wouldn't a Chinese wheelbarrow be something like a small unicycle with saddlebags and a trailer hitch? If you need to clear some brush (where only your wheel fits the path), you've got no way to jack the suspension under the load, either.
And wouldn't it be much harder for short and tall people to share the Chinese design unless equipped with some sort of adjustable handle. Somehow I'm just positive that the Chinese design from 1000 [BC|AD] comes replete with ergonomic dongles for the comfort of whatever schlep needs it next.
But then, with a billion identical people growing rice on ten million identically manicured terraces, I'm sure the Chinese design is a total win.
No kidding. I had to look through dozens of "flashlight" apps to find one that didn't want my calendar, SMS, internet access, and GPS.
The Android permission system blows goats. It's not just the "all or nothing" approach to app acceptance. It runs deeper. It's also the app store itself, where I can't restrict (or prioritize) search results based on permissions demanded.
Using aSpotCat, under android.permission-group.PERSONAL_INFO I've got AdService, Chrome, Firefox, Gmail, Google Play, Pebble, and RunKeeper. I've had to bail on the installation of close to fifty apps to keep this list this short.
Basically the Android security model deters me from actually installing software, to the point where I no longer regard it as a platform.
This xmas between an Android tablet and an eReader, I'm likely to get an eReader (Kobo here in Canada), which is not a platform either, and doesn't play one on TV.
I was reading reviews that commented that a Kobo Aura is about the price of a servicable, entry level tablet from Walmart. Several of the reviewers commented "you might as well get the full Android platform for the price". What platform? Android is mainly a platform for sharing far more about myself than I wish to divulge with strangers I don't even know. Whatever information is gleaned will never be under my control ever again: it will almost certainly be amalgamated from one low-life to another ad nausium.
I'd be quite happy if not a single vendor knew my location ever, who wasn't providing me with a map for my own purposes (such as RunKeeper). If they need to know, I'll tell them. Yet 90% of Android applications demand to hoover this up and the Google play store provides no mechanism to put these applications on a personal shit list, so that better-behaved applications float to the top of the candidate list.
Android: Death by a thousand peeping toms. Where's well-behaved Waldo? Crushed by the throng. Eventually Diogenes tires of visiting the Turkish baazar and begins to subsist on juniper berries.
Try again. Frame your narrative in terms of viable choices.
Indicate whether you think that previous health care reform efforts failed because the previous reform-oriented administrations A) didn't try hard enough; B) had the wrong approach and were justifiable opposed; C) accepted failure entirely against their best judgment lacking sufficient political power to ram the bill through (whether good/bad for America); or D) accepted failure when entrenched ideological opposition effectively made America ungovernable (a condition which shows no sign of abating any time soon).
Given the nature of the ideological quagmire, one might reasonably argue that the best is the enemy of the good.
I'm personally of the opinion that the status quo of the American health care system (about twice the cost of any other developed nation) had become permanently incompatible with fiscal austerity, and that America had reached the point where the wrong fix is still better than no fix. If the Republicans know what the right fix looks like, they had their chance and didn't even swing at the ball.
Without the expensive Republican war and expensive Republican banking sector bail-out (with hardly any reform of the banking sector), America could have afforded the status quo health care system for a long while yet.
they are already cheaper than incandescents if you aren't as short-sighted as the typical wall-street broker
Try this one. I live in a mild Canadian climate (snow happens, but not often) in an older residence with electric heat. In winter we keep the house at 18 degrees C, almost always warmer than the sea air, which means the electric heat runs intermittently throughout most of the dark season. For this half of the year—which represents 75% of our lighting needs—our little incandescent space heaters are 100% efficient: we need the heat anyway, and it's electric either way.
I've had CFLs in every fixture where they make sense for years and years. The one LED bulb I purchased I couldn't install so it sits in a drawer. It's not rated for installation into a recessed socket because of heat problems. If I hadn't read the packaging closely, my LED bulb would have burned out or degraded in no time at all.
If we had gas heat there wouldn't be an incandescent remaining in any socket used more than twice a week.
But we don't, so your efficiency calculation is just plain myopic concerning our circumstance. But good on you for mocking stockbrokers with your one-size-fits-all efficiency arithmetic.
The fixation on "best" accepted theory is more about hubris than insight.
The Kolmogorov/Chaitin view is that you should believe every statement about the universe that you can't formally disprove—all at the same time— using an exponentially weighted average based on the minimum description length of each viable description (baroque theories with billions of epicycles are down-weighted by k^-1e9, where k is the mean entropy of your typical epicycle). I don't really know the math, so take that with a grain of salt, but it's at least the general idea.
The standard model is extremely cogent and concise. It will exponentially outweigh practically everything else.
The only reason this isn't used is that we pretty much never know the minimum description length for anything (there's a result where something akin to minimum description is length is formally proven to be the hardest computation definable), and we can't take the exponentially-weighted integral of all as-yet undisproven theories by any convenient method.
Any undisproven theory that comes along with the potential to be formulated as cogently (or nearly so) as the standard model should be regarded as valid until proven otherwise (either false, or irredeemably baroque).
There's no sane reason to impose incumbency politics on theory. Theory is not a vote.
Saying "Publish or perish must go" is great, we all like the sound of that. But then what do you replace it with?
Duh, it's not so hard. The scientists could actually bother to replicate more than a tiny sliver of all results published, and citations of papers not replicated could be treated at damning with faint praise.
One thing peer review can not catch is chance aberration in the experimental data (structural aberration is a different matter).
Without actually replicating the significant results, it all degenerates into he said/she said and the act of citation becomes a political act, not a scientific act.
There is practically no funding made available to replicate past results, other than the biggest and most important. No prestige accrues from taking this work on, either.
What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. And a sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd value in everything, and doesn't know the market place of any single thing.
I think this needs updating.
What is a tiresome dweeb? A poster who knows the logic of everything and the proportion of nothing.
The summary's deliberately phrased to be inflammatory, and imply that she was persecuted for whistle-blowing.
A Google search for "Slashdot" still comes up Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters, but a single story summary this shitty sure puts paid to that aspiration.
For stories like this one, if my account wasn't a pseudonym I'd have to wear a bag over my face just to post here.
Even in a country that supposedly has a separation of church and state there are a lot of laws whose origins were based upon religion.
Yes, I get it. Everything that passes through religion is forever in debt. Not that religion itself didn't borrow its founding myths from oral culture dating back to the beginnings of human language.
There are two fundamental problems here. One is permanence and the other is moral authority. For permanence, nothing beats the invention of a chisel that mars stone. Scratch one. But for moral authority, why Hammurabi? Because his code is good, or because he kicks ass when anyone complains? The first is inevitably contested, the second reeks of non-moral authority.
Third option: I'm just the delegate on earth of the big guy in the sky.
Me special from special. How shocked the first person to successfully pull that off must have been.
"Sheesh, they actually went for it! Must be the mouldy grain again this year. But, hey, if it works, it's a great gig. Now, let's get on with appropriating all of human culture into a unified creation myth. I mean, it all comes from Him, or the whole point of this Glorious conceit is completely ruined."
Witness: the bulk of lottery winners are eventually poorer than when they started. This is PROOF that simply throwing money at poor people is truly a stupid idea - it doesn't help.
My standards of proof are exponentially higher than that. People don't buy lottery tickets with a rational expectation of gaining net wealth. If their ten dollar investment (times some large multiplier they prefer to neglect) gets them a year in Vegas debauching their brains out, some part of their lizard brain sighs and smokes a cigarette.
Once you start with the premise that different people want different things, proof is fleeting commodity.
I will grant you that very few social institution based on "throwing money at" outperform, regardless of whether the target is paupers or billionaires.
'Other companies came up with the guts for a machine and then the engineers would find a way to stuff them into a box,' says Zufi. 'Steve Jobs started with the box and said, "You need to find a way to get the guts in."'
No, these other companies weren't coming up with "the" guts, not back in the eighties and nineties.
Back then the "ap" was called an "expansion card" by serious users. If you had 10 megabits and you wanted 100 megabits, you could do that. If you wanted to stagger upgrading your system board and your video card, you could do that, too, with a bit of planning. Not "the" guts. Any guts.
We also had the notion of consumables which could be replaced, like CMOS batteries which didn't last forever, unlike the batteries Apple now uses after their break-through innovation in pentalobular lithium alkaloids.
Jobs was designing for a highly integrated potting-compound future long before the economics of this made any sense in the mass consumer marketplace. Design takes over once functionality plateaus, i.e. once Moore's projection passes into menopause. Just because you can stuff the circuitry into a designer's wet dream doesn't mean you should.
The truth of the Apple story is that the company was fortunate to survive their reality distortion field until Job's vision of the ubiquitous appliance was right for the times.
If we want to move forward and see Apple healthy and prospering again, we have to let go of a few things here. We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose. We have to embrace a notion that for Apple to win, Apple has to do a really good job. And if others are going to help us that's great, because we need all the help we can get, and if we screw up and we don't do a good job, it's not somebody else's fault, it's our fault. So I think that is a very important perspective. If we want Microsoft Office on the Mac, we better treat the company that puts it out with a little bit of gratitude; we like their software.
Who promulgated that caustic narrative in the first place?
Otherwise it's going to be continually asking you to verify your identity which would be very disruptive of your work.
I've always wanted an authentication system that identifies me by precisely the way I say "oh, fuck off" when something this stupid breaks my train of thought.
Normally I type from the home position, but sometimes I cross arms (certain combinations of mouse and keyboard operations are easier that way) and sometimes I type with one hand (mainly when I'm eating at my desk) and sometimes I type with fewer fingers because I'm grasping something extraneously with one pinky finger or the other (such as test clips not yet hooked to my scope, but the last voltage measured needs to be recorded with the least possible delay or I'm repeating my last bench setup for ten minutes).
Another great signature is how quickly I invoke AdBlock Plus to remove animated GIFs from my field of vision. Absolutely can't stand anything hooking my peripheral vision when I'm trying to comprehend text. Or how I mute the volume on advertising with about 80% coverage in any video stream I visit. Basically the rule is this: would I invite the advertising characters into my home? If not, no volume, ever, if I'm within reach of the controls. If I won't let you in the front door, you're not sneaking in through my media system, either.
It doesn't need to be black and white, either. If I have to reauthenticate my keyring a little sooner after five minutes of typing cross armed for an unusual editing task, I'm OK with that.
First time I got one of these calls I said "I don't have Microsoft" and hung up immediately. They called back shortly. This time I said "I don't have Microsoft don't ever call me again." Both calls began with "This is Microsoft Support calling..."
Didn't hear from them again for several months.
When that day arrived I had been having a horrible time with something (forget what) and I was pretty wound up when my phone rang "Hello this is Microsoft..." I hit the ceiling in 50 ms. Veins popped out of my neck.
I DON'T HAVE FUCKING MICROSOFT! GET OUT OF MY FUCKING LIFE! DON'T EVER FUCKING CALL ME AGAIN!
This (verbatim) at a rail gun rage acceleration that by the second syllable would give anger boy a good run for his money at 1m20 in Nicolas Cage Losing His Shit. I laced every word of that with contempt, vitriol, spittle and neck lunging malice. Then I dropped the call. I don't actually call people names if I can avoid it, but I'm not shy about dropping the F-bomb in any other capacity when the situation merits.
30 seconds later the phone rings. What the hell. I answer. "Hello are you the Joe 'fucking' Smith?" Same Indian accent, but this time even more sing-song, and a bit tart.
Really? You called back to jaw at me adding a profanity to my name? Do you think you're going to prey on my guilt or push my buttons? Fat chance. I repeated myself at a similar volume, now merely caustic in tone and then I hung up again. No further calls for several weeks now.
I could tell that even a person hardened to the shit-bag lifestyle was not amused to get ambushed by by Spinal Tap amplitude Cage rage before he could even complete his opening phrase. Couldn't have have quite hit that note cold turkey if I hadn't had the happy misfortune to have already been a slithering Champagne cork away from losing it. And to have been home alone. I'm not normally an angry guy.
It didn't even feel that good. It merely felt adequate and long overdue. That's what got under his skin. It's what he deserves from every person he calls and deep down he knows it.
I'm wasn't aware that universities had an existing policy in effect protecting non-tuititive students from forced enrolment of their metadata in minor research programs.
maybe try to not be such a douche-bag about "having exponentially many needless conversations" with your co-workers
Seconded. Every math or computer geek I've ever known who employed snotty language like that ended up sleeping in a bed they made themselves.
All too often "needless" conversations involves a passive aggressive asshole on one side doing everything humanly possible to prove to the world at large just how futile this interaction/interruption really is.
In most complex projects, there are any number of needful conversations just dying for an opportunity to take place between team members who are attentive to the needs of the project as a whole, and able to identify the appropriate venue and opportunity.
You must be arguing from a theistic position. It's sure not supported by the genetic code as expressed by wolves, seagulls, sharks, or dragons.
Because the human greed gullet sometimes takes years to complete the swallowing motion, we're the dancing bees of declaring "dibs".
A highly popular dance move is the puerile head fake of vapid collectivism.
It's certainly true that all life on earth shares the destiny of our damp blue marble, which should give pause to the greedy algorithm running amok.
Another highly popular head fake is the display of flagrant excess. Gives the chattering classes a focal point having nothing to do with reforming the "heads I win, tails you loose" gravy train known as Wall Street.
An old joke nearly served. The NSA is not a place where God coddles his minions.
It seems there was this priest who just loved to play golf, but he had been very busy for many months and had not been able to get away to go golfing. Well, one Sunday morning he woke up and felt he just HAD to go golfing. The weather was just beautiful.
He called up the Bishop and claimed he had a really bad case of laryngitis and couldn't preach, so the Bishop told him to rest for several days. He then got out his clubs and headed off for the golf course.
He set up at the first hole, making sure no one was there to see him playing hooky, and blasted the ball with his wood. It was a beautiful shot! It went straight and true. It bounced, and bounced (right up onto the green) and rolled its way closer... and closer... a hole-in-one! The priest jumped up and down in his excitement, praising the Lord and shouting hallelujahs!
He struts off to the green, collects his ball, and tees off at the second hole, repeating his performance on the first hole, much to his astounded delight. All this time St. Peter and God have been watching him from the gates of heaven. St. Peter has finally seen enough to pique his curiosity. "Lord," he says, "this priest seems to be a real trouble maker. He ignored his congregation and even lied to go golfing. Now you reward him with a hole-in-one! Why?"
"Well, think about it for half a second, you sanctimonious prat. Who can he tell?"
Those fuckers at www.connectify.me redirected my connection attempt to http://www.connectify.me/no-javascript/ so that even after I authorized Javascript for their site I was unable to navigate to my intended destination (whatever shit they pulled did not even leave a history item for the originally requested URL).
This sucks because I middle-click many URLs into tabs I might not visit until ten minutes later. It I had a bunch of these tabs open I wouldn't even have been able to recollect where I had originally been. In this case, I knew to come back here.
Those fuckers at www.connectify.me need to procure themselves an Internet clue stick PDQ.
Since Blockbuster's entire business model depended upon exorbitant late fees, and they were only too happy to reduce rental times for new releases from 2 down to 1-day for the same reason once their competitors were disappearing, I'll be near the front of the line to spit on their grave. Nothing of value has been lost.
Wear your shoulder pads and bring your A game. I'll be right there beside you, fighting dirty to for the honour to produce the first sputum of blood and saliva from between rapidly swelling lips I can't even pucker.
Then I'll get in line to do it again.
They devastated all the small shops offering a decent back catalogue like an infestation of mountain pine beetle. We've got one left where I live, but it's not exactly small, boasting 20,000 titles in stock. No sign it's going away any time soon, but still, I worry.
Slashdot Mirror
Not true. You're a hell of a lot more guilty if a victim harmed by your crime steps forward and presses charges. Meanwhile, back at the office, he did as much to protect the safety of his fellow countryman and soldiers as any venerated war hero known to the public.
Technically, just about every person in Russia sent to the gulags first signed a confession for crimes against the state, if only committed inside their heads.
If that's the standard of guilt, guilt can go fuck itself.
I'm sympathetic to PHK, but I could never have written this piece myself without commenting on a single disadvantage of the Chinese wheelbarrow.
You seem to be stuck with one of three problems:
* using a small wheel that won't easily roll over path obstructions
* having the wheel intrude into the barrow, obstructing tending or shifting the load
* having a large wheel under the barrow with a high center of gravity (what could possibly go wrong?)
The large carts at my nearby Costco are set up so that they won't pivot at the front (only at the middle). This is fine if you can find space to make a 90 degree turn on the spot. It's not at all good for creeping around a tight bend. Moreover, you've got both the front and back end swinging at the same time—which is the number of places you can visually attend plus one—so your chances of taking down some rickety display item are fairly decent if try to wing it.
Furthermore, nothing prevents two people from grabbing different handles on the European wheelbarrow. Also, PHK is wrong about the weight distribution. With a heavy load, it's customary to pile as much as possible up against the lip that protrudes over the front wheel in many front-wheel designs. I'd guess an European wheelbarrow front-loaded with wet clay has about a 4:1 lever arm in vertical displacement of the handle compared to vertical displacement of the load.
Wouldn't a Chinese wheelbarrow be something like a small unicycle with saddlebags and a trailer hitch? If you need to clear some brush (where only your wheel fits the path), you've got no way to jack the suspension under the load, either.
And wouldn't it be much harder for short and tall people to share the Chinese design unless equipped with some sort of adjustable handle. Somehow I'm just positive that the Chinese design from 1000 [BC|AD] comes replete with ergonomic dongles for the comfort of whatever schlep needs it next.
But then, with a billion identical people growing rice on ten million identically manicured terraces, I'm sure the Chinese design is a total win.
The Android permission system blows goats. It's not just the "all or nothing" approach to app acceptance. It runs deeper. It's also the app store itself, where I can't restrict (or prioritize) search results based on permissions demanded.
Using aSpotCat, under android.permission-group.PERSONAL_INFO I've got AdService, Chrome, Firefox, Gmail, Google Play, Pebble, and RunKeeper. I've had to bail on the installation of close to fifty apps to keep this list this short.
Basically the Android security model deters me from actually installing software, to the point where I no longer regard it as a platform.
This xmas between an Android tablet and an eReader, I'm likely to get an eReader (Kobo here in Canada), which is not a platform either, and doesn't play one on TV.
I was reading reviews that commented that a Kobo Aura is about the price of a servicable, entry level tablet from Walmart. Several of the reviewers commented "you might as well get the full Android platform for the price". What platform? Android is mainly a platform for sharing far more about myself than I wish to divulge with strangers I don't even know. Whatever information is gleaned will never be under my control ever again: it will almost certainly be amalgamated from one low-life to another ad nausium.
I'd be quite happy if not a single vendor knew my location ever, who wasn't providing me with a map for my own purposes (such as RunKeeper). If they need to know, I'll tell them. Yet 90% of Android applications demand to hoover this up and the Google play store provides no mechanism to put these applications on a personal shit list, so that better-behaved applications float to the top of the candidate list.
Android: Death by a thousand peeping toms. Where's well-behaved Waldo? Crushed by the throng. Eventually Diogenes tires of visiting the Turkish baazar and begins to subsist on juniper berries.
Try again. Frame your narrative in terms of viable choices.
Indicate whether you think that previous health care reform efforts failed because the previous reform-oriented administrations A) didn't try hard enough; B) had the wrong approach and were justifiable opposed; C) accepted failure entirely against their best judgment lacking sufficient political power to ram the bill through (whether good/bad for America); or D) accepted failure when entrenched ideological opposition effectively made America ungovernable (a condition which shows no sign of abating any time soon).
Given the nature of the ideological quagmire, one might reasonably argue that the best is the enemy of the good.
I'm personally of the opinion that the status quo of the American health care system (about twice the cost of any other developed nation) had become permanently incompatible with fiscal austerity, and that America had reached the point where the wrong fix is still better than no fix. If the Republicans know what the right fix looks like, they had their chance and didn't even swing at the ball.
Without the expensive Republican war and expensive Republican banking sector bail-out (with hardly any reform of the banking sector), America could have afforded the status quo health care system for a long while yet.
Reality bites.
"What kind of gibberish is that?" It's unemployable gibberish. To start with:
It still sucks. No amount of rephrasing will fix it. It's trying to create an infantile shock reaction while tiptoeing around the essential factoid:
We don't want to think, we just want to gasp at straws.
Slashdot: Nose peas for gasping Aspers, snuff that smatters
Try this one. I live in a mild Canadian climate (snow happens, but not often) in an older residence with electric heat. In winter we keep the house at 18 degrees C, almost always warmer than the sea air, which means the electric heat runs intermittently throughout most of the dark season. For this half of the year—which represents 75% of our lighting needs—our little incandescent space heaters are 100% efficient: we need the heat anyway, and it's electric either way.
I've had CFLs in every fixture where they make sense for years and years. The one LED bulb I purchased I couldn't install so it sits in a drawer. It's not rated for installation into a recessed socket because of heat problems. If I hadn't read the packaging closely, my LED bulb would have burned out or degraded in no time at all.
If we had gas heat there wouldn't be an incandescent remaining in any socket used more than twice a week.
But we don't, so your efficiency calculation is just plain myopic concerning our circumstance. But good on you for mocking stockbrokers with your one-size-fits-all efficiency arithmetic.
Getting "gobs" of RD-RAM involved fat modules.
Aside from muck-raking HP, The Register also did a lot to raise public awareness of problems with Intel in the P4 era.
Caminogate failure finally explained
RD-RAM was supposed to support three slots, but they couldn't make it work. It was one fiasco after another.
Mercifully, we got AMD64 out of the deal and a healthy competitor until Intel's Israeli team kicked out the CoreDuo.
Intel subsequently played the UEFI card, but it's a dim echo of their original agenda.
The fixation on "best" accepted theory is more about hubris than insight.
The Kolmogorov/Chaitin view is that you should believe every statement about the universe that you can't formally disprove—all at the same time— using an exponentially weighted average based on the minimum description length of each viable description (baroque theories with billions of epicycles are down-weighted by k^-1e9, where k is the mean entropy of your typical epicycle). I don't really know the math, so take that with a grain of salt, but it's at least the general idea.
The standard model is extremely cogent and concise. It will exponentially outweigh practically everything else.
The only reason this isn't used is that we pretty much never know the minimum description length for anything (there's a result where something akin to minimum description is length is formally proven to be the hardest computation definable), and we can't take the exponentially-weighted integral of all as-yet undisproven theories by any convenient method.
Any undisproven theory that comes along with the potential to be formulated as cogently (or nearly so) as the standard model should be regarded as valid until proven otherwise (either false, or irredeemably baroque).
There's no sane reason to impose incumbency politics on theory. Theory is not a vote.
Duh, it's not so hard. The scientists could actually bother to replicate more than a tiny sliver of all results published, and citations of papers not replicated could be treated at damning with faint praise.
One thing peer review can not catch is chance aberration in the experimental data (structural aberration is a different matter).
Without actually replicating the significant results, it all degenerates into he said/she said and the act of citation becomes a political act, not a scientific act.
There is practically no funding made available to replicate past results, other than the biggest and most important. No prestige accrues from taking this work on, either.
I think this needs updating.
That was the point of my first response.
Tonya Harding is on the line, with a prior claim to that idea. I think you should pay up, or else.
You can also kill people to prevent them from voting. Surprised it doesn't happen more often as it's so easy to do.
A Google search for "Slashdot" still comes up Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters, but a single story summary this shitty sure puts paid to that aspiration.
For stories like this one, if my account wasn't a pseudonym I'd have to wear a bag over my face just to post here.
Yes, I get it. Everything that passes through religion is forever in debt. Not that religion itself didn't borrow its founding myths from oral culture dating back to the beginnings of human language.
Code of Hammurabi
There are two fundamental problems here. One is permanence and the other is moral authority. For permanence, nothing beats the invention of a chisel that mars stone. Scratch one. But for moral authority, why Hammurabi? Because his code is good, or because he kicks ass when anyone complains? The first is inevitably contested, the second reeks of non-moral authority.
Third option: I'm just the delegate on earth of the big guy in the sky.
Me special from special. How shocked the first person to successfully pull that off must have been.
"Sheesh, they actually went for it! Must be the mouldy grain again this year. But, hey, if it works, it's a great gig. Now, let's get on with appropriating all of human culture into a unified creation myth. I mean, it all comes from Him, or the whole point of this Glorious conceit is completely ruined."
My standards of proof are exponentially higher than that. People don't buy lottery tickets with a rational expectation of gaining net wealth. If their ten dollar investment (times some large multiplier they prefer to neglect) gets them a year in Vegas debauching their brains out, some part of their lizard brain sighs and smokes a cigarette.
Once you start with the premise that different people want different things, proof is fleeting commodity.
I will grant you that very few social institution based on "throwing money at" outperform, regardless of whether the target is paupers or billionaires.
No, these other companies weren't coming up with "the" guts, not back in the eighties and nineties.
Back then the "ap" was called an "expansion card" by serious users. If you had 10 megabits and you wanted 100 megabits, you could do that. If you wanted to stagger upgrading your system board and your video card, you could do that, too, with a bit of planning. Not "the" guts. Any guts.
We also had the notion of consumables which could be replaced, like CMOS batteries which didn't last forever, unlike the batteries Apple now uses after their break-through innovation in pentalobular lithium alkaloids.
Jobs was designing for a highly integrated potting-compound future long before the economics of this made any sense in the mass consumer marketplace. Design takes over once functionality plateaus, i.e. once Moore's projection passes into menopause. Just because you can stuff the circuitry into a designer's wet dream doesn't mean you should.
The six worst Apple products of all time
Apple Puck Mouse
The truth of the Apple story is that the company was fortunate to survive their reality distortion field until Job's vision of the ubiquitous appliance was right for the times.
Who promulgated that caustic narrative in the first place?
I've always wanted an authentication system that identifies me by precisely the way I say "oh, fuck off" when something this stupid breaks my train of thought.
Normally I type from the home position, but sometimes I cross arms (certain combinations of mouse and keyboard operations are easier that way) and sometimes I type with one hand (mainly when I'm eating at my desk) and sometimes I type with fewer fingers because I'm grasping something extraneously with one pinky finger or the other (such as test clips not yet hooked to my scope, but the last voltage measured needs to be recorded with the least possible delay or I'm repeating my last bench setup for ten minutes).
Another great signature is how quickly I invoke AdBlock Plus to remove animated GIFs from my field of vision. Absolutely can't stand anything hooking my peripheral vision when I'm trying to comprehend text. Or how I mute the volume on advertising with about 80% coverage in any video stream I visit. Basically the rule is this: would I invite the advertising characters into my home? If not, no volume, ever, if I'm within reach of the controls. If I won't let you in the front door, you're not sneaking in through my media system, either.
It doesn't need to be black and white, either. If I have to reauthenticate my keyring a little sooner after five minutes of typing cross armed for an unusual editing task, I'm OK with that.
First time I got one of these calls I said "I don't have Microsoft" and hung up immediately. They called back shortly. This time I said "I don't have Microsoft don't ever call me again." Both calls began with "This is Microsoft Support calling ..."
Didn't hear from them again for several months.
When that day arrived I had been having a horrible time with something (forget what) and I was pretty wound up when my phone rang "Hello this is Microsoft ..." I hit the ceiling in 50 ms. Veins popped out of my neck.
I DON'T HAVE FUCKING MICROSOFT! GET OUT OF MY FUCKING LIFE! DON'T EVER FUCKING CALL ME AGAIN!
This (verbatim) at a rail gun rage acceleration that by the second syllable would give anger boy a good run for his money at 1m20 in Nicolas Cage Losing His Shit. I laced every word of that with contempt, vitriol, spittle and neck lunging malice. Then I dropped the call. I don't actually call people names if I can avoid it, but I'm not shy about dropping the F-bomb in any other capacity when the situation merits.
30 seconds later the phone rings. What the hell. I answer. "Hello are you the Joe 'fucking' Smith?" Same Indian accent, but this time even more sing-song, and a bit tart.
Really? You called back to jaw at me adding a profanity to my name? Do you think you're going to prey on my guilt or push my buttons? Fat chance. I repeated myself at a similar volume, now merely caustic in tone and then I hung up again. No further calls for several weeks now.
I could tell that even a person hardened to the shit-bag lifestyle was not amused to get ambushed by by Spinal Tap amplitude Cage rage before he could even complete his opening phrase. Couldn't have have quite hit that note cold turkey if I hadn't had the happy misfortune to have already been a slithering Champagne cork away from losing it. And to have been home alone. I'm not normally an angry guy.
It didn't even feel that good. It merely felt adequate and long overdue. That's what got under his skin. It's what he deserves from every person he calls and deep down he knows it.
Horrible story text.
I'm wasn't aware that universities had an existing policy in effect protecting non-tuititive students from forced enrolment of their metadata in minor research programs.
Doesn't he have somewhere else to troll?
These physicists are going to have to wash a lot of dishes to get that puppy in their xmas stocking.
Seconded. Every math or computer geek I've ever known who employed snotty language like that ended up sleeping in a bed they made themselves.
All too often "needless" conversations involves a passive aggressive asshole on one side doing everything humanly possible to prove to the world at large just how futile this interaction/interruption really is.
In most complex projects, there are any number of needful conversations just dying for an opportunity to take place between team members who are attentive to the needs of the project as a whole, and able to identify the appropriate venue and opportunity.
You must be arguing from a theistic position. It's sure not supported by the genetic code as expressed by wolves, seagulls, sharks, or dragons.
Because the human greed gullet sometimes takes years to complete the swallowing motion, we're the dancing bees of declaring "dibs".
A highly popular dance move is the puerile head fake of vapid collectivism.
It's certainly true that all life on earth shares the destiny of our damp blue marble, which should give pause to the greedy algorithm running amok.
Another highly popular head fake is the display of flagrant excess. Gives the chattering classes a focal point having nothing to do with reforming the "heads I win, tails you loose" gravy train known as Wall Street.
An old joke nearly served. The NSA is not a place where God coddles his minions.
Those fuckers at www.connectify.me redirected my connection attempt to
http://www.connectify.me/no-javascript/ so that even after I authorized Javascript for their site I was unable to navigate to my intended destination (whatever shit they pulled did not even leave a history item for the originally requested URL).
This sucks because I middle-click many URLs into tabs I might not visit until ten minutes later. It I had a bunch of these tabs open I wouldn't even have been able to recollect where I had originally been. In this case, I knew to come back here.
Those fuckers at www.connectify.me need to procure themselves an Internet clue stick PDQ.
Wear your shoulder pads and bring your A game. I'll be right there beside you, fighting dirty to for the honour to produce the first sputum of blood and saliva from between rapidly swelling lips I can't even pucker.
Then I'll get in line to do it again.
They devastated all the small shops offering a decent back catalogue like an infestation of mountain pine beetle. We've got one left where I live, but it's not exactly small, boasting 20,000 titles in stock. No sign it's going away any time soon, but still, I worry.
Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel—until he breaks cover shrieking "Pedophile, over there, getting away!"