I get that we have more CO2 in the air than at any point in history. Yay. Now what? I understand that cutting back on the use of fossil fuels will decrease the amount we are putting in the air. La dee da. How it got there is irrelevant. The real question, to end all questions, is how can we clean the existing CO2 out of the air to bring it back to reasonable levels? Keep in mind over cleaning could be catastrophic because, for the scientifically impared, green house gases hold in heat and if levels were brought to zero no heat would be maintained and earth would become a ball of ice. Don't clean enough and the icecaps melt, stop warm ocean currents, and we become a ball of ice. Guess it is time to buy stock in companies that make parkas...
The level added here was peer review. The students start to seek readership and in the process develop their own voice, something often lost when only the professor sees your work. Add to that, being forced to go out and use the net for a grade helps those who fear computers to overcome some of that. Many of the students go further and learn enough basic HTML to spice up thier blogs which is a nice fringe benefit. Please note: I am not referring to the MySpace layout HTML which is often an assult on the eyes. Their teacher required any styling to be comfortable to read and to fall within the basic guidelines of Web design. Otherwise they had to use approved templates.
Three "R"'s. That one always slays me. Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic. How many of those words begin with "R"? Spell check would have come in handy there...
Most of the PowerPoint presentations I have seen came from illiterate monkeys anyway. Either that or were made for them...freaking board of directors...MBA having A**holes...
I'm not bitter at all...
Computers should be the basics. I am sick and F***ing tired of having to manage networks full of people 10 years younger than me that can't use an F***ing word processor. Kids need tech immersion as soon as possible.
But first the educators need it. The only teachers I know who could tell a hard drive from a rock 2 out of 3 times are already in the computer science department. The rest of them have only a rudimentary knowlege of where the power button is and how to print a simple Word document. They think Office is Windows and saving requires a floppy.
I know I am generalizing but as is the case when I generalize, I don't care.
A hearty amen to that. Further I think the teachers need to be a bit more tech savvy and learn to actually implement the laptops as more than just fancy typewriters. Most teachers in our local district wouldn't know MySpace if it bit them in the ass. Further they need to know when to have students shut down the laptops. With some education, minus the MySpace/social networking fear-mongering the media puts out there, teachers could really leverage the technology to their advantage. I know one guy who's English professor has required all freshmen to maintain a blog for the semester making at least two entries a week. Grades have gone up in the class over 15% since implementing that. It is just a matter of the education system educating itself first.
Add to that, the site the hacked is one for scientific exploration and not tied to the military in any way, other than using Air Force and Navy pilots to fly the shuttle missions. While they are at it maybe the should do the same to the EPA and Department of Education web sites. It would make sense if the had hit an armed forces website like goarmy.com.
I have been an avid blogger for a while now. I write quality content designed to make people laugh, cry, think, and maybe leave a little bit more enlightened. Either that or laugh their asses off, whichever comes first. In any case, it absolutely slays me that while my readership tops out at 20-40/week, create a blog with horrible english and videos of morons lip syncing and you can get millions of hits a day. Oh well, it is not like we are a nation of deep thinkers anyway. I mean look how many "Red States" there are...
When you get right down to it, this whole debate ends at the same question that plagues the abortion debate. When does life begin? All of the funding at the Fedral level for embryonic stem cell research hinges on that one question. Theologians have said life begins at conception. Some scientists say it begins once the entity becomes a viable entity and not simply a mass of dividing tissue.
This begs the question, are embryos grown in a test tube that would otherwise be disposed of human life that must be protected? Is it wrong to dispose of excess embryos when implanting eggs fertilized in a lab into a mother? Should other mothers be called in to implant them with remaining embryos to prevent this waste of life? Or should scientists be funded to use what would otherwise be disposed of to possibly save human life? Should theology prevent technology from advancing our species and improving the quality of human life? Should I stop asking rhetorical questions?
The uneducated idiocy of bills like this boggles the mind. Any web site in which you register, have a profile, and are allowed to message other members is a social site. Slashdot is a social site, granted it has a higher educational value than MySpace, but so does smashing one's self in the head with a bat. Some high school students these days are maintaining Blogger accounts as their english class writing journals. Under the new rules Blogger would be among the taboo sites.
Add to that, the risk of pedophiles is minimal at best. More kids are molested at church than by predators found online. Should we ban all priests from public places? Then of course there are the kids who disappear from the mall so we need to shut those down. Then there was that one kid kidnapped at a gas station right in front of a video camera so we have to close those now. If parents would step up and take a real interest in their kids none of these things would be an issue. In fact, pedophiles are often a result of either parental abuse or abuse a parent could have prevented by taking proper precautions so parents doing their job would actually decrease the overall number of sickos.
Thank you for picking up on that angle. I thought about that after I posted and came to the same conclusion with the words "stop", "child", and "porn" being in the same sentence giving the illusion of stopping child porn. The fact is, legislation is already in place to stop child porn but without some serious funding the enforcement of that legislation is hit-and-miss at best. Legislate an increase in child porn law enforcement. Funding is something Congress knows. Meta tags should be left to those who could tell the difference between a hard drive and a rock at least 2 out of 3 times.
I don't know what slays me more, that the same dimwits who think the internet is made of tubes are legislating meta tags, or that these morons believe there are a bunch of deviants on the web trying to give porn to children. These idiots wouldn't know a meta tag if one bit them in the ass.
Porn didn't become a multi-billion dollar industry by marketing to people without the means to pay for it. This legislation "for the children" is nothing more than trying to stave off the ultra right wing fundamentalist wackos that aren't bright enough to realize their kids won't be protected by this at all. These are the same nutjobs who protest at movies they could totally prevent their kids from watching just by being good parents. If you don't want your kid watching porn buy a porn filter. Otherwise your kid will find porn. Christian fundamentalists have huge sexual hang-ups and make things like porn so taboo how could kids not be drawn to it? Tell a kid not to look at something fervently enough and eventually he will look just to see what the fuss is about.
I guess it is better they pass a bill that essentially does nothing instead of completely pandering to whack job hatemongers like Pat Robertson. Imagine if someone like him were in power. Anyone not in church on Sunday would be labeled a perverted homosexual Baby Jesus hater and put on the NSA watch list.
Growing up I was raised as a member of one of the religious groups that promotes companies like Cleanflix (Netflix minus the naughty bits). My parents had a very strict PG rule. Anything higher than that was not allowed in our home until the advent of services that clean the film for you. So on the one hand I think filmmakers are cutting off a valid revenue stream from the religious right.
That said, I believe if I were an artist and found people chopping up my work because they found it offensive I too would be upset. Maybe it is because I have outgrown my "Rush Limbaugh talks to God and the Bible is not a fairy tale" phase but I think no one has any business defacing another's art. I remember as a kid having my mom look through a history book of mine on the Renissance and use a black marker over Michaelangelo's anatomically correct statue of David. She also tried to prevent my reading of "The Outsiders" and "Lord of the Flies" because of naughty words and violent topics. The topper was when I found my copy of "Slaughterhouse 5" I was reading for Honors AP English with entire chapters ripped out. Censorship is WRONG. If you want to see a movie, do it. If you are offended by mere words or the act which has propigated our species since the dawn of time don't watch movies where that is part of the story. Disney is probably more your flavor anyway.
The reason the 1984 ad went over so well is the images in it were perceived to be a commentary on the still Communist USSR. At the time government invasions into our privacy were far less overt. Run the same ad today and people will assume it is a commentary against the current administration and a call to revolution. Come to think of it,
*rest of comment deleted to prevent ending up on the NSA's s#it list*...
Ahhh...the one true and proper use of usenet...aside from venting bitterness of course.
Of course it can all be prevented by never installing the Microsoft virus on your system. I use Fedora Core 5 and prior to that Slackware. I trained my non-geek wife and now she would never let me switch back to Winblows even if I wanted to. The few M$ programs you use, the safer you are.
Having finally seen the ad garnering all of this attention I conclude the only people who see this ad as racist are racists themselves. It would only come to mind to notice race if you evaluate a person based on skin color. The skin colors in this ad were meant to portray the color of the respective game consoles and has nothing to do with race. Looking at the picture from my point of view the domination implied is sexual, not racial. Sex sells and two attractive women in a dominant/submissive relationship sell BIG. Granted my view is tinted by my rather hedonistic views on sex. Think about it though, if you are a person who ignores skin color, can this possibly be seen as racist?
Sorry, I just skimmed it and then got called away. That is cool though. Finally I will be able to move towards a Microsoft free office. The firewall is already Linux. The server will be soon. Next the desktops. And then the world...
The thing is, the accessibility features are actually a feature set of Windows, not Office. To test I just pulled up OO and then used Narrator from the Accessibility menu to read me some text I typed in. You lose none of the accessibility features with ODF as long as you use an OS with those features. There are better features out there than wht is included with Windows but those are from third parties and have nothing to do with Office.
Which leads me to the question, is there an Open Source replacement for SharePoint? Replacing that would allow better functionality from ODF I would assume.
So when does the conversion utility for versions of Office people actually have come out? I have yet to find anyone who already owns a version of Office that is looking to upgrade. There are no features in the newest versions worth the pricetag. They claim OpenXML is THE reason to upgrade but with Open Document being availible without the insane pricetag there has been no real reason to upgrade. I still run 2003 on my work systems (only because the retards here already had it when I was hired and no one wants to try OpenOffice.org) and I would LOVE to convert all of our documents so when I finally make the switch on everyone to OO it will be that much easier. Once more governments move to Open Document standards getting OO adopted here will be a snap.
This gem isn't tech support precisely but still hillarious. Back in '99 I worked for a Navy contractor as the onsite support for one of the offices that handles all flight training data. At this time the Navy had mandated NT 4 Server and Workstation for all systems. We were brought in to migrate them from Novell 3.11 (not Y2K compliant) and Windows 3.11 on systems where the BIOS was also not Y2K compliant. We went to the big meeting where the Chief of Operations had layed out a nice project plan for us giving exacting timelines that had to be followed with the servers coming last in the migration. One glance at the plan and everyone on my team broke into uncontrolled laughter. The final date for Y2K compliance on this "unbreakable" schedule was...
I think while some of the variants of these stories are copies, many of us in the field have similar stories. In mine it was a much nicer man who actually stayed on the line after telling me the power was out. In his case the other shoe never dropped until I relayed to him that until the power came back on his computer would not work.
I also have one where a guy actually did the proverbial "my cupholder is broken" routine but that one is so cliche no one ever believes me. It was a 64 oz. mug and it just snapped it right off. And I had the seamstress who thought her mouse was a foot pedal (that one took me ten minutes to figure out what she meant by foot pedal, first thinking she meant the racing game foot pedals).
The problem with stories like ours is there are similar versions already out there that have achieved internet mythology status and we just sound like copycats.
A new company we recently purchased (a.k.a. new set of lusers to administrate) has AT&T with business class DSL and a set of 5 statics. This morning I called support because they are down for the third time this month. I said this only happens when it rains and Houston has gotten soaked. I am in Corpus Christi which is four hours away so I can't be onsite. When you go down only when you have the ground get soaked it is ALWAYS a ground fault in the telco copper. No other answer. I got a tech on the phone who insisted on conferencing with someone onsite (who incidentally wouldn't know a computer from a rock three times out of four). They reset the router to factory settings and then had to re-input all of the PPPoE data. This all complete the tech goes to test it and viola, he finds a ground fault between the local office and the demarc. Time spent finding out my initial diagnosis was right: 3 hours. ETA for repair, 24 hours. Overall time lost to internet down this month, 48 hours.
Early on in my career while I was still a grunt level tech we had a lady purchase a printer from our store with an onsite service warranty. It was a basic Lexmark color inkjet. A week later she called for warranty service saying it no longer functioned and there was a funny smell. She lived about 2 hours from our store so I loaded up for the trip and brought a replacement just in case it needed more than a simple adjustment. When I arrived I found her house filled with cats. I approached the printer and indeed there was a funny smell... I opened the printer and what do you know, it was filled with cat urine on both the bottom and inside the printer electronics including an especially rank part where it had mixed with the ink on the printheads making a horrid smell. The sad part is she was angry that I wouldn't replace it on warranty. I took photos for "evidence" to show the guys back at the office...
Slashdot Mirror
I get that we have more CO2 in the air than at any point in history. Yay. Now what? I understand that cutting back on the use of fossil fuels will decrease the amount we are putting in the air. La dee da. How it got there is irrelevant. The real question, to end all questions, is how can we clean the existing CO2 out of the air to bring it back to reasonable levels? Keep in mind over cleaning could be catastrophic because, for the scientifically impared, green house gases hold in heat and if levels were brought to zero no heat would be maintained and earth would become a ball of ice. Don't clean enough and the icecaps melt, stop warm ocean currents, and we become a ball of ice. Guess it is time to buy stock in companies that make parkas...
The level added here was peer review. The students start to seek readership and in the process develop their own voice, something often lost when only the professor sees your work. Add to that, being forced to go out and use the net for a grade helps those who fear computers to overcome some of that. Many of the students go further and learn enough basic HTML to spice up thier blogs which is a nice fringe benefit. Please note: I am not referring to the MySpace layout HTML which is often an assult on the eyes. Their teacher required any styling to be comfortable to read and to fall within the basic guidelines of Web design. Otherwise they had to use approved templates.
Three "R"'s. That one always slays me. Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic. How many of those words begin with "R"? Spell check would have come in handy there...
Most of the PowerPoint presentations I have seen came from illiterate monkeys anyway. Either that or were made for them...freaking board of directors...MBA having A**holes... I'm not bitter at all...
Computers should be the basics. I am sick and F***ing tired of having to manage networks full of people 10 years younger than me that can't use an F***ing word processor. Kids need tech immersion as soon as possible.
But first the educators need it. The only teachers I know who could tell a hard drive from a rock 2 out of 3 times are already in the computer science department. The rest of them have only a rudimentary knowlege of where the power button is and how to print a simple Word document. They think Office is Windows and saving requires a floppy.
I know I am generalizing but as is the case when I generalize, I don't care.
A hearty amen to that. Further I think the teachers need to be a bit more tech savvy and learn to actually implement the laptops as more than just fancy typewriters. Most teachers in our local district wouldn't know MySpace if it bit them in the ass. Further they need to know when to have students shut down the laptops. With some education, minus the MySpace/social networking fear-mongering the media puts out there, teachers could really leverage the technology to their advantage. I know one guy who's English professor has required all freshmen to maintain a blog for the semester making at least two entries a week. Grades have gone up in the class over 15% since implementing that. It is just a matter of the education system educating itself first.
Add to that, the site the hacked is one for scientific exploration and not tied to the military in any way, other than using Air Force and Navy pilots to fly the shuttle missions. While they are at it maybe the should do the same to the EPA and Department of Education web sites. It would make sense if the had hit an armed forces website like goarmy.com.
I have been an avid blogger for a while now. I write quality content designed to make people laugh, cry, think, and maybe leave a little bit more enlightened. Either that or laugh their asses off, whichever comes first. In any case, it absolutely slays me that while my readership tops out at 20-40/week, create a blog with horrible english and videos of morons lip syncing and you can get millions of hits a day. Oh well, it is not like we are a nation of deep thinkers anyway. I mean look how many "Red States" there are...
When you get right down to it, this whole debate ends at the same question that plagues the abortion debate. When does life begin? All of the funding at the Fedral level for embryonic stem cell research hinges on that one question. Theologians have said life begins at conception. Some scientists say it begins once the entity becomes a viable entity and not simply a mass of dividing tissue.
This begs the question, are embryos grown in a test tube that would otherwise be disposed of human life that must be protected? Is it wrong to dispose of excess embryos when implanting eggs fertilized in a lab into a mother? Should other mothers be called in to implant them with remaining embryos to prevent this waste of life? Or should scientists be funded to use what would otherwise be disposed of to possibly save human life? Should theology prevent technology from advancing our species and improving the quality of human life? Should I stop asking rhetorical questions?
The uneducated idiocy of bills like this boggles the mind. Any web site in which you register, have a profile, and are allowed to message other members is a social site. Slashdot is a social site, granted it has a higher educational value than MySpace, but so does smashing one's self in the head with a bat. Some high school students these days are maintaining Blogger accounts as their english class writing journals. Under the new rules Blogger would be among the taboo sites.
Add to that, the risk of pedophiles is minimal at best. More kids are molested at church than by predators found online. Should we ban all priests from public places? Then of course there are the kids who disappear from the mall so we need to shut those down. Then there was that one kid kidnapped at a gas station right in front of a video camera so we have to close those now. If parents would step up and take a real interest in their kids none of these things would be an issue. In fact, pedophiles are often a result of either parental abuse or abuse a parent could have prevented by taking proper precautions so parents doing their job would actually decrease the overall number of sickos.
Thank you for picking up on that angle. I thought about that after I posted and came to the same conclusion with the words "stop", "child", and "porn" being in the same sentence giving the illusion of stopping child porn. The fact is, legislation is already in place to stop child porn but without some serious funding the enforcement of that legislation is hit-and-miss at best. Legislate an increase in child porn law enforcement. Funding is something Congress knows. Meta tags should be left to those who could tell the difference between a hard drive and a rock at least 2 out of 3 times.
I don't know what slays me more, that the same dimwits who think the internet is made of tubes are legislating meta tags, or that these morons believe there are a bunch of deviants on the web trying to give porn to children. These idiots wouldn't know a meta tag if one bit them in the ass.
Porn didn't become a multi-billion dollar industry by marketing to people without the means to pay for it. This legislation "for the children" is nothing more than trying to stave off the ultra right wing fundamentalist wackos that aren't bright enough to realize their kids won't be protected by this at all. These are the same nutjobs who protest at movies they could totally prevent their kids from watching just by being good parents. If you don't want your kid watching porn buy a porn filter. Otherwise your kid will find porn. Christian fundamentalists have huge sexual hang-ups and make things like porn so taboo how could kids not be drawn to it? Tell a kid not to look at something fervently enough and eventually he will look just to see what the fuss is about.
I guess it is better they pass a bill that essentially does nothing instead of completely pandering to whack job hatemongers like Pat Robertson. Imagine if someone like him were in power. Anyone not in church on Sunday would be labeled a perverted homosexual Baby Jesus hater and put on the NSA watch list.
Growing up I was raised as a member of one of the religious groups that promotes companies like Cleanflix (Netflix minus the naughty bits). My parents had a very strict PG rule. Anything higher than that was not allowed in our home until the advent of services that clean the film for you. So on the one hand I think filmmakers are cutting off a valid revenue stream from the religious right.
That said, I believe if I were an artist and found people chopping up my work because they found it offensive I too would be upset. Maybe it is because I have outgrown my "Rush Limbaugh talks to God and the Bible is not a fairy tale" phase but I think no one has any business defacing another's art. I remember as a kid having my mom look through a history book of mine on the Renissance and use a black marker over Michaelangelo's anatomically correct statue of David. She also tried to prevent my reading of "The Outsiders" and "Lord of the Flies" because of naughty words and violent topics. The topper was when I found my copy of "Slaughterhouse 5" I was reading for Honors AP English with entire chapters ripped out. Censorship is WRONG. If you want to see a movie, do it. If you are offended by mere words or the act which has propigated our species since the dawn of time don't watch movies where that is part of the story. Disney is probably more your flavor anyway.
Thank you.
The reason the 1984 ad went over so well is the images in it were perceived to be a commentary on the still Communist USSR. At the time government invasions into our privacy were far less overt. Run the same ad today and people will assume it is a commentary against the current administration and a call to revolution. Come to think of it,
*rest of comment deleted to prevent ending up on the NSA's s#it list*...
Ahhh...the one true and proper use of usenet...aside from venting bitterness of course. Of course it can all be prevented by never installing the Microsoft virus on your system. I use Fedora Core 5 and prior to that Slackware. I trained my non-geek wife and now she would never let me switch back to Winblows even if I wanted to. The few M$ programs you use, the safer you are.
Having finally seen the ad garnering all of this attention I conclude the only people who see this ad as racist are racists themselves. It would only come to mind to notice race if you evaluate a person based on skin color. The skin colors in this ad were meant to portray the color of the respective game consoles and has nothing to do with race. Looking at the picture from my point of view the domination implied is sexual, not racial. Sex sells and two attractive women in a dominant/submissive relationship sell BIG. Granted my view is tinted by my rather hedonistic views on sex. Think about it though, if you are a person who ignores skin color, can this possibly be seen as racist?
Sorry, I just skimmed it and then got called away. That is cool though. Finally I will be able to move towards a Microsoft free office. The firewall is already Linux. The server will be soon. Next the desktops. And then the world...
The thing is, the accessibility features are actually a feature set of Windows, not Office. To test I just pulled up OO and then used Narrator from the Accessibility menu to read me some text I typed in. You lose none of the accessibility features with ODF as long as you use an OS with those features. There are better features out there than wht is included with Windows but those are from third parties and have nothing to do with Office.
Which leads me to the question, is there an Open Source replacement for SharePoint? Replacing that would allow better functionality from ODF I would assume.
So when does the conversion utility for versions of Office people actually have come out? I have yet to find anyone who already owns a version of Office that is looking to upgrade. There are no features in the newest versions worth the pricetag. They claim OpenXML is THE reason to upgrade but with Open Document being availible without the insane pricetag there has been no real reason to upgrade. I still run 2003 on my work systems (only because the retards here already had it when I was hired and no one wants to try OpenOffice.org) and I would LOVE to convert all of our documents so when I finally make the switch on everyone to OO it will be that much easier. Once more governments move to Open Document standards getting OO adopted here will be a snap.
This gem isn't tech support precisely but still hillarious. Back in '99 I worked for a Navy contractor as the onsite support for one of the offices that handles all flight training data. At this time the Navy had mandated NT 4 Server and Workstation for all systems. We were brought in to migrate them from Novell 3.11 (not Y2K compliant) and Windows 3.11 on systems where the BIOS was also not Y2K compliant. We went to the big meeting where the Chief of Operations had layed out a nice project plan for us giving exacting timelines that had to be followed with the servers coming last in the migration. One glance at the plan and everyone on my team broke into uncontrolled laughter. The final date for Y2K compliance on this "unbreakable" schedule was...
March 10, 2000.
I think while some of the variants of these stories are copies, many of us in the field have similar stories. In mine it was a much nicer man who actually stayed on the line after telling me the power was out. In his case the other shoe never dropped until I relayed to him that until the power came back on his computer would not work.
I also have one where a guy actually did the proverbial "my cupholder is broken" routine but that one is so cliche no one ever believes me. It was a 64 oz. mug and it just snapped it right off. And I had the seamstress who thought her mouse was a foot pedal (that one took me ten minutes to figure out what she meant by foot pedal, first thinking she meant the racing game foot pedals).
The problem with stories like ours is there are similar versions already out there that have achieved internet mythology status and we just sound like copycats.
Amen to that.
A new company we recently purchased (a.k.a. new set of lusers to administrate) has AT&T with business class DSL and a set of 5 statics. This morning I called support because they are down for the third time this month. I said this only happens when it rains and Houston has gotten soaked. I am in Corpus Christi which is four hours away so I can't be onsite. When you go down only when you have the ground get soaked it is ALWAYS a ground fault in the telco copper. No other answer. I got a tech on the phone who insisted on conferencing with someone onsite (who incidentally wouldn't know a computer from a rock three times out of four). They reset the router to factory settings and then had to re-input all of the PPPoE data. This all complete the tech goes to test it and viola, he finds a ground fault between the local office and the demarc. Time spent finding out my initial diagnosis was right: 3 hours. ETA for repair, 24 hours. Overall time lost to internet down this month, 48 hours.
Early on in my career while I was still a grunt level tech we had a lady purchase a printer from our store with an onsite service warranty. It was a basic Lexmark color inkjet. A week later she called for warranty service saying it no longer functioned and there was a funny smell. She lived about 2 hours from our store so I loaded up for the trip and brought a replacement just in case it needed more than a simple adjustment. When I arrived I found her house filled with cats. I approached the printer and indeed there was a funny smell... I opened the printer and what do you know, it was filled with cat urine on both the bottom and inside the printer electronics including an especially rank part where it had mixed with the ink on the printheads making a horrid smell. The sad part is she was angry that I wouldn't replace it on warranty. I took photos for "evidence" to show the guys back at the office...
Where is root when you need him...