I once briefly contemplated learning the Charleston but I'm not sure if I can learn it without accidentally breaking someone's hip. Well, and if I'd ever meet someone who even knows it's a dance outside the dance school.
Then again, most people would assume that East Coast Swing is a rapper and Balboa involves machine guns.
And people wonder why homosexuality is becoming mainstream.
Actually, not being a Kinsey 0 is a huge benefit if you can deal with possibly coming out by getting yourself a same-sex partner. You can enter into a relationship with someone who actually behaves in a more or less rational way. Someone you can actually communicate with (I know that successful communication is possible between sexes but it's kinda rare). And if you wait another one or two decades you might even be able to have children that carry both partners' genes.
Note that from what I can tell men are just as illogical to women as women are to men. I don't discriminate based on gender or sex (although I have no idea how inter- or transsexuals think). We're all stupid in our own ways.
Unless you are in a major hub location for your field, you can probably count the remaining candidates on one hand (in binary).
Up to 31 candidates even in a non-hub location isn't particularly bad, actually. Definitely better than up to five with the usual unary counting system.
"Go to a disco." - "I have a hyperacusis. Lound noise causes me physical discomfort."
"Go to a pub." - "I hate drunkenness."
"Well, just talk to people." - "This entire conversation is about how to do that!"
The trick is finding someone who shares enough similarities. Even just "we get along extremely well" can be enough of a baseline; everything else is optional.
However, there are a few dissimilarities you need to be wary of. Location is one thing; long-distance relationships are not easy. Free time is even worse; my last (and admittedly first) relationship broke down because my GF was so busy with her social life (lots of ultra-important occasions that will never come around again) that I was tempted to get her a copy of Outlook so we could schedule meetings. In the end I told her that she'd have to call me when she has free time for me (which apparently was very rare) and two months later she broke up with me because I never came over anymore.
That relationship left me with two (actually more but the rest are too discouraging to mention) insights: First, I'm happy I'm not that social a person; having your social life be equivalent to a part-time job really messes up your schedule. Second, I'm not entering into a relationship with a person with that kind of social life again. I'm not going to spend twenty hours a week meeting people I don't know on the off chance of perhaps actually spending an afternoon with my partner (if I even get invited/can afford to come along, that is).
I like that when you typi in "why is" the first suggestion is "why is the rum gone". Apparently this is a very pressing issue in the English-speaking world.
As has been pointed out by others, he did have child porn. It was his job to do so as he was involved in child porn investigations. Then he resigned because he disagreed with how it was handled and the people responsible immediately revoked his rights and then dragged him to court before he could get rid of the stuff.
Essentially it's like a policeman resigning and then immediately getting arrested because he's a non-law officer running around in a police station with a loaded gun (inside the chief's office, no less!).
And pederasty. I would like to point out that it was the pederasts who came up with democracy. And philosophy. And the underpinnings of much of modern science. You know, things we as societies kinda suck at today.
...That allows for some very inconvenient conclusions.
Here's mine. Given that I have 35 tabs open (TabGroups Manager is a godsend!) and Firefox has been running for about two days since the last restart I think that's fairly okay; it comes out to about 34 megs per tab.
No, it's Linux Audio, a new audio stack for Linux. By applying the "many eyes find more bugs" paradigm to audio preocessing, Linux Audio works on the presumption that many mixers make great sound. Thus, Linux Audio is a kernel module that pipes all sound through PulseAudio, OSS, ALSA, PulseAudio again, ESD, aRts, itself and then through OpenAL to OSS using the ALSA API.
For some reason we have latency issues and some users remain unconvinced that our sound quality is nothing less than spectacular even after repeated demonstration. I wouldn't call it a sorry state, though. A pickle maybe. A very slight pickle, barely worth mentioning.
However the question stands whether trying to stop the symptoms helps. Is the change in morality a cause or a symptom of this downfall? We seem to have data on correlation but do we also have data on causation?
The one who fell for asus.co.uk being an Asus website? It isn't. Every single page but the offending one redirects to uk.asus.com (Asus' actual UK page) while the offending one displays a product presentation plus the FUD link. Also, there are inconsistencies regarding the domain registration. (Oh, look. I also got a +5, Informative in that thread for pointing this out.)
However, even high-end single level cells will wear out after a few million write cycles. Even though wear leveling mitigates that, there is a limit to what it can do. On a fairly full SSD there are much fewer locations to shift writes to, resulting in the wear being distributed over relatively few cells. A fairly full disk receiving constant writes will fail relatively soon.
The questions are how soon exactly it will fail, whether there are any reliable warning signs prior to data loss and whether SSDs or HDDs will generate higher replacament expenses over time.
Depends. For people who want reliability in the face of write-intensive applications SSDs aren't likely to overtake HDDs soon. No matter how long it will take for SSDs to displace HDDs in most markets, I expect HDDs to still be around in thirty years just like tape is still around today.
However, while the long-term behavior of HDDs is well-understood, we don't yet know how long an SSD can reasonably be expected to last. That kind of uncertainty is a bit off-putting if you expect to use your equipment for years.
It only becomes a problem of what my time is worth when a significant amount of my time is taken up by waiting for the hard drive. I only know a few people who have that problem and they're usually handling enormous amounts of data. Most people simply don't need to map out the state space of a Rubik's cube or statistically analyze twenty online poker games at a time.
However, that 32 GiB SSD costs more than 120 bucks. I can buy a netbook for that kind of money. The main issue with SSDs is not that HDDs have a better GB/$ but that SSDs still are abysmally expensive. There's a market segment that wouldn't dream of spending more than 100 bucks on fixed storage; SSDs are still too expensive for them (either they need more than 32 gigs of space or they wouldn't dare mess with their PC's hardware).
For me, SSDs are not quite there yet but probably will be within the next five years. But then again I think that LCD monitors have only become a sensible option somewhere around 2007, so I'm somewhat conservative when it comes to hardware.
Yes, but at "high" capacities like 256 gigabytes you have price differences in excess of 2000 percent between SSD and HDD (granted, a server HDD could get the difference as low as 1500 percent). The SSD wins out on power, noise and heat but I'd imagine that for the price of a 256 GiB SDD you can build a rather fast and reliable RAID of bigger HDDs. Unless acceptable RAID controllers cost in excess of 50 EUR per channel.
However, you could also have bought a 250 GB HDD and use the remaining 700 bucks to buy yourself something nice like a notebook or an upper-middle-class Intel CPU.
For the price I compared the OCZ Apex 250 (ca. 550 EUR ~ 765 USD) with the Western Digital WD2500 (ca. 25 EUR ~ 35 USD) and rounded the Dollar difference down to the nearest multiple of 100. The Euro-to-Dollar conversion was done after the substration; the conversion rate was obtained from the European Central Bank today at 11:30 AM.
No, they need to be paid in a different way. Selling copies of something that can be copied at zero cost is not a maintainable business because everyone can make those copies. You can't magically make that go away.
So the artists need to find a way to get paid in some other way. Most smaller bands don't make any appreciable money fom record sales anyway (if they even produce recordings of their shows) but work on a per-gig basis: You hire them, they play at your venue. So bigger bands have to do this as well, only they call it a tour. Or you produce stuff of intrinsic value and sell that - for example by bundling your CDs with something physical your fans are going to like. Or even auctioning off the gold master of your studio album if you're big enough. Or just by selling your music on vinyl.
The problem bands face is that the current distribution model has become obsolete. Extending copyright is not going to change that, especially as the labels now have the copyright for longer than the artist lives, so they'll keep profiting off his work when he won't be able to benefit from that profit (leaving aside that the artist only sees a small fraction of what the label makes).
Dsft Punk did this with Discovery - you got an access code to the (initially horribly DRM'd) Daft Club website where you could download remixes. Of course someone could de-DRM the remixes but share them but people with the code got new stuff earlier.
"Homeopathic" covers a lot, though, and some things sold under the homeopathic label are just a bad idea - colloidal silver, for example. While the stuff isn't dangerous per se, some people assume it to replace all antibiotics and be effective when taken as a preventive measure. And hell, one gram per day should be fine; more helps more and since it's not a chemical like normal antibiotics it can't poison me.
Oops, I developed an argyria and my skin has been irreversively tinted gray.
Many people have an odd notion that homeopathic products are a panacea without possible side effects.
Slashdot Mirror
I once briefly contemplated learning the Charleston but I'm not sure if I can learn it without accidentally breaking someone's hip. Well, and if I'd ever meet someone who even knows it's a dance outside the dance school.
Then again, most people would assume that East Coast Swing is a rapper and Balboa involves machine guns.
And people wonder why homosexuality is becoming mainstream.
Actually, not being a Kinsey 0 is a huge benefit if you can deal with possibly coming out by getting yourself a same-sex partner. You can enter into a relationship with someone who actually behaves in a more or less rational way. Someone you can actually communicate with (I know that successful communication is possible between sexes but it's kinda rare). And if you wait another one or two decades you might even be able to have children that carry both partners' genes.
Note that from what I can tell men are just as illogical to women as women are to men. I don't discriminate based on gender or sex (although I have no idea how inter- or transsexuals think). We're all stupid in our own ways.
Up to 31 candidates even in a non-hub location isn't particularly bad, actually. Definitely better than up to five with the usual unary counting system.
Yeah, you get some really great tips like that.
"Go to a disco." - "I have a hyperacusis. Lound noise causes me physical discomfort."
"Go to a pub." - "I hate drunkenness."
"Well, just talk to people." - "This entire conversation is about how to do that!"
The trick is finding someone who shares enough similarities. Even just "we get along extremely well" can be enough of a baseline; everything else is optional.
However, there are a few dissimilarities you need to be wary of. Location is one thing; long-distance relationships are not easy. Free time is even worse; my last (and admittedly first) relationship broke down because my GF was so busy with her social life (lots of ultra-important occasions that will never come around again) that I was tempted to get her a copy of Outlook so we could schedule meetings. In the end I told her that she'd have to call me when she has free time for me (which apparently was very rare) and two months later she broke up with me because I never came over anymore.
That relationship left me with two (actually more but the rest are too discouraging to mention) insights: First, I'm happy I'm not that social a person; having your social life be equivalent to a part-time job really messes up your schedule. Second, I'm not entering into a relationship with a person with that kind of social life again. I'm not going to spend twenty hours a week meeting people I don't know on the off chance of perhaps actually spending an afternoon with my partner (if I even get invited/can afford to come along, that is).
I like that when you typi in "why is" the first suggestion is "why is the rum gone". Apparently this is a very pressing issue in the English-speaking world.
As has been pointed out by others, he did have child porn. It was his job to do so as he was involved in child porn investigations. Then he resigned because he disagreed with how it was handled and the people responsible immediately revoked his rights and then dragged him to court before he could get rid of the stuff.
Essentially it's like a policeman resigning and then immediately getting arrested because he's a non-law officer running around in a police station with a loaded gun (inside the chief's office, no less!).
Don't mess with the CPAA. Just don't.
And pederasty. I would like to point out that it was the pederasts who came up with democracy. And philosophy. And the underpinnings of much of modern science. You know, things we as societies kinda suck at today.
...That allows for some very inconvenient conclusions.
Here's mine. Given that I have 35 tabs open (TabGroups Manager is a godsend!) and Firefox has been running for about two days since the last restart I think that's fairly okay; it comes out to about 34 megs per tab.
No, it's Linux Audio, a new audio stack for Linux. By applying the "many eyes find more bugs" paradigm to audio preocessing, Linux Audio works on the presumption that many mixers make great sound. Thus, Linux Audio is a kernel module that pipes all sound through PulseAudio, OSS, ALSA, PulseAudio again, ESD, aRts, itself and then through OpenAL to OSS using the ALSA API.
For some reason we have latency issues and some users remain unconvinced that our sound quality is nothing less than spectacular even after repeated demonstration. I wouldn't call it a sorry state, though. A pickle maybe. A very slight pickle, barely worth mentioning.
However the question stands whether trying to stop the symptoms helps. Is the change in morality a cause or a symptom of this downfall? We seem to have data on correlation but do we also have data on causation?
The one who fell for asus.co.uk being an Asus website? It isn't. Every single page but the offending one redirects to uk.asus.com (Asus' actual UK page) while the offending one displays a product presentation plus the FUD link. Also, there are inconsistencies regarding the domain registration. (Oh, look. I also got a +5, Informative in that thread for pointing this out.)
Just a small heads-up: Slashdot doesn't understand \LaTeX commands.\\
Yeah, it really should. {\tiny Moron.}
However, even high-end single level cells will wear out after a few million write cycles. Even though wear leveling mitigates that, there is a limit to what it can do. On a fairly full SSD there are much fewer locations to shift writes to, resulting in the wear being distributed over relatively few cells. A fairly full disk receiving constant writes will fail relatively soon.
The questions are how soon exactly it will fail, whether there are any reliable warning signs prior to data loss and whether SSDs or HDDs will generate higher replacament expenses over time.
Depends. For people who want reliability in the face of write-intensive applications SSDs aren't likely to overtake HDDs soon. No matter how long it will take for SSDs to displace HDDs in most markets, I expect HDDs to still be around in thirty years just like tape is still around today.
However, while the long-term behavior of HDDs is well-understood, we don't yet know how long an SSD can reasonably be expected to last. That kind of uncertainty is a bit off-putting if you expect to use your equipment for years.
It only becomes a problem of what my time is worth when a significant amount of my time is taken up by waiting for the hard drive. I only know a few people who have that problem and they're usually handling enormous amounts of data. Most people simply don't need to map out the state space of a Rubik's cube or statistically analyze twenty online poker games at a time.
However, that 32 GiB SSD costs more than 120 bucks. I can buy a netbook for that kind of money. The main issue with SSDs is not that HDDs have a better GB/$ but that SSDs still are abysmally expensive. There's a market segment that wouldn't dream of spending more than 100 bucks on fixed storage; SSDs are still too expensive for them (either they need more than 32 gigs of space or they wouldn't dare mess with their PC's hardware).
For me, SSDs are not quite there yet but probably will be within the next five years. But then again I think that LCD monitors have only become a sensible option somewhere around 2007, so I'm somewhat conservative when it comes to hardware.
Yes, but at "high" capacities like 256 gigabytes you have price differences in excess of 2000 percent between SSD and HDD (granted, a server HDD could get the difference as low as 1500 percent). The SSD wins out on power, noise and heat but I'd imagine that for the price of a 256 GiB SDD you can build a rather fast and reliable RAID of bigger HDDs. Unless acceptable RAID controllers cost in excess of 50 EUR per channel.
However, you could also have bought a 250 GB HDD and use the remaining 700 bucks to buy yourself something nice like a notebook or an upper-middle-class Intel CPU.
For the price I compared the OCZ Apex 250 (ca. 550 EUR ~ 765 USD) with the Western Digital WD2500 (ca. 25 EUR ~ 35 USD) and rounded the Dollar difference down to the nearest multiple of 100. The Euro-to-Dollar conversion was done after the substration; the conversion rate was obtained from the European Central Bank today at 11:30 AM.
Hey, that would require actually thinking about it. If they did that they might realize they're being charged twenty bucks for 20 ml of water.
No, they need to be paid in a different way. Selling copies of something that can be copied at zero cost is not a maintainable business because everyone can make those copies. You can't magically make that go away.
So the artists need to find a way to get paid in some other way. Most smaller bands don't make any appreciable money fom record sales anyway (if they even produce recordings of their shows) but work on a per-gig basis: You hire them, they play at your venue. So bigger bands have to do this as well, only they call it a tour. Or you produce stuff of intrinsic value and sell that - for example by bundling your CDs with something physical your fans are going to like. Or even auctioning off the gold master of your studio album if you're big enough. Or just by selling your music on vinyl.
The problem bands face is that the current distribution model has become obsolete. Extending copyright is not going to change that, especially as the labels now have the copyright for longer than the artist lives, so they'll keep profiting off his work when he won't be able to benefit from that profit (leaving aside that the artist only sees a small fraction of what the label makes).
Dsft Punk did this with Discovery - you got an access code to the (initially horribly DRM'd) Daft Club website where you could download remixes. Of course someone could de-DRM the remixes but share them but people with the code got new stuff earlier.
"Homeopathic" covers a lot, though, and some things sold under the homeopathic label are just a bad idea - colloidal silver, for example. While the stuff isn't dangerous per se, some people assume it to replace all antibiotics and be effective when taken as a preventive measure. And hell, one gram per day should be fine; more helps more and since it's not a chemical like normal antibiotics it can't poison me.
Oops, I developed an argyria and my skin has been irreversively tinted gray.
Many people have an odd notion that homeopathic products are a panacea without possible side effects.