Turn off periodic SMART status checking (on some drives this spins it up).
Sigh. You had me going with that one. That's the only thing I didn't think of when I tried diagnosing why I can't my Thinkpad to keep my Seagate drive spun down. Even with everything off (no syslog, cron, etc.), the little fucker still insists on spinning back up after a few seconds.
I mean, why would any good centre-right, middle-class courting, focus-group driven pack of fear-mongers pass up a perfectly good opportunity for a moral panic? Won't somebody PLEASE think of the CHILDREN!?
Agreed, but actions speak louder than words.
Instead of just thinking about the kids, what I do is help them with what they really need. Using my own youth as a point of reference, that typically means alcohol or cigarettes.
What works for me is, for example, reading a chapter of a textbook, followed by a few minutes on slashdot and whatnot, then going back to the book and so forth ad nauseum.
Good for you on being able to schedule your time and attention productively, but the above isn't what I would call multitasking.
It's been shown that the average attention span runs about 20 minutes. After that, you _will_ lose the ability to concentrate and your mind will naturally wander. This new period lasts about 5 minutes IIRC. Once that ends, you're refreshed enough go back to what you were doing with renewed concentration.
Mind you, you're free to invoke "willpower" to circumvent that natural ebb and flow, but your performance will suffer, and you'll accomplish half the work for twice the effort. With enough motivation or adrenaline, you'll manage just fine, but like missing few hours from a restful night's sleep to cram more workhours into your day, you'll discover diminishing returns.
So by all means, do browse Slashdot for a minutes. If your disciplined enough to avoid non-essential or otherwise unproductive activities generally, it'll help you work and get more done.
I suspect that that is on the docket as well, once the kinks are worked out; but it has a rather different risk/reward ratio.
But that's the part that I don't get. The article(s) as written make no mention of the value of growing teeth but instead talk about organ transplants.
As for the risk/reward ratio, isn't it the case, for example, that big pharma prefers to invest heavily in both R&D and advertising for drugs that are geared to ordinary problems for ordinary people rather than complex diseases? The way I understand it, a pill that cures baldness would be a money-making bonanza. A drug that helps with certain forms of cancer far less so.
For teeth, you want things to be worked out and well understood.
I do have friends with peridontal disease and I've had my share of root canals and caps so I'm reasonably familiar with some of the issues, but I appreciate your elaboration. Still, if the researchers can grow teeth, then don't all those problems go away?
The organ focus has merit, obviously. But more obvious is the immediate "Hey, we can grow teeth in mice!" There's a joke in there somewhere, but I hesitate to make one lest another over-eager moderator misinterprets it as "flaimbait".;-)
You don't need to be suffering from periodontal disease to know that missing or otherwise bad teeth are real enough issues for ordinary people. With the possible exception of friends from across the pond, of course.;-)
As a point of fact, the US allows more legal immigration than any other country in the world.
LOL. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, right?
Sorry, you're a victim of a myth. On a per capita basis, the US accepts roughly the same number of immigrants (and/or refugees) as many western European countries, but less than other countries. By contrast, Canada accept far more. Hell, I think Greece has higher immigration numbers.
And if you factor in the anti-immigrant rhetoric and attitudes prevalent across so much of the US (and the lack of such things as health care and basic social safety nets, I'd suggest that the US is hardly a welcoming place. That's been true historically and it's true today. In the past it was the Chinese, then the Irish, then the dirty Jews and Italians; today it's the Mexicans! The reason, for example, why the US has low immigration numbers and continues to spend less per capita on charitable foreign aid than most industrialised countries, is that the US simply doesn't like and has never liked foreigners, least of all when they try to immigrate. That is, until years pass and they blend into the landscape and we recognise them as citizens like everyone else.
Granted, it's a big and wealthy country. So total numbers or dollars spent are bigger. But then, so what?
As for the article, the immigration process does require a complete health check, so the issues related to the spread of infectious diseases are addressed. The problem, however, is that not everyone who comes here is eligible to become part of that process, and there is no free public health care for them or anyone else. Consider tuberculosis, for example. Mandatory screening when applying for a green card, but the rates of infection in the US go up by 20K cases per year.
I don't think this is about anything interesting from Twitter, but rather, is about a generation of users who probably don't understand the full implications and potential consequences of disclosing personally identifying information or of turning your day-to-day life into a public spectacle.
Explain the popularity of the Jerry Springer show, then.;)
I don't fall into the the "latest generation of users" and have always considered myself a generally private person (no Facebook for me), so here's a true story to think about while you ponder the above question.
A few years back, I was sued in small claims court by an individual that claimed I owed them money. A week or so passes and I get a phone call from the producers of the Judge Judy television program. I won't go into why they thought my situation was noteworthy or why I'd be an interesting guest, but I will say that I experienced a rush of emotions that ranged from "Who the fuck are you to be calling my private number?" to "Woohoo! I'm gonna be on TV!"
It took almost an hour of conversation for me to finally say "No thanks". And an another hour to pass before I could say "WTF was I even thinking to consider the offer?" To be completely honest, however, I'm still haunted by the feeling that I missed out on some fun, public spectacle aside.
Twitter and MySpace are a way for people with relatively benign and routine existences to validate themselves - I EXIST! I AM IMPORTANT... TO SOMEONE...
LOL. No doubt true (for a wide variety of reasons), but wouldn't buying a dog work just as well?
I have accepted that I am an uniportant tiny cog in some huge machine and no one cares to know the exact moment I take a shit (and where).
Oddly enough, something a dog would definitely be interested in.;-)
So-called intuition and common sense are usually nothing more than widely held but unquestioned assumptions... We ought to know well that intuitive interfaces are really familiar interfaces; the only really intuitive interface, as some wit once remarked, is the nipple.
I'd suggest that anyone who is a pediatrician or has otherwise observed a new mother trying to teach her baby how to breast feed would classify the "nipple as intuitive interface" line as not only an unquestioned assumption, but also one that's wrong.
Put simply, the nipple, to use your terminology, is a familiar interface. The familiarity happens very early, and there's a wealth of factors that motivate it, but still it's something that's learned.
Pain killers like the kind your brain gives you when you get laid would work better. Seriously, go have some meaningless sex - it WILL help.
Mod parent up. I've had my heart broken a few times, but there's usually one relationship that kills you the most, and it's that one that lingers throughout your life.
At the time, I tried working longer hours, regularly drinking heavily, lots of drugs, socialising with friends, going for long solitary walks... you name it. Distractions like working longer hours do help (provided you're past the "I'm out of my mind with grief and want to kill myself and take everyone with me" stage, but anonymous sex beats the other methods by a mile.
You'll earn bonus points if your anonymous sex partner is especially pretty; you tend to experience everything with heightened awareness in the first few weeks or months, so chances are high you'll remember your partner's face and body (and possibly her name). Being able to move very far away earns you the Daily Double, just so long as you don't risk losing everything by travelling back in the first few years to wallow in the nostalgia.
When all is done and you've moved on with your life, be sure to watch or listen to some Sam Kinison videos from time to time to keep things in "perspective".
The requirement to remember IPv6 addresses is just going to make for geeks that can do more math in their heads. I don't necessarily see that as a negative.
Being able to do math in your head is a positive. However, most computer users don't seem to have mastered binary[1], so you're concluding they'll be just as comfortable reading hexadecimal, and if not, they'll be motivated to learn about number systems and enthusiastically gear up for the challenge by repeating the rote work they they did in grade school when they learned their multiplication tables?
Try suggesting to a Windows that the netmask for a/24 is ffffff00 and see if you don't get blank stare. Or tell the webdesigner, "Skyblue? You mean 87ceeb, right?"
-------------- 1. Some Slashdot users insist binary is a fiction created by OS developers to make buying hard drives more complicated.
The point was, you don't go about memorizing them, you use DNS.
LOL. And network admins, those who are tasked with setting up and maintaining DNS, or those just doing occasional reverse lookups, do their heads just explode?
In the real world, people use IP numbers in a number of different ways, and for just as many reasons, have committed many to memory. You don't have to be a network admin, for example, to know what is behind 192.168.1.1, or that 4.2.2.1 is open for lookups.
This doesn't mean it's impossible to do the same or something similar with IPv6, of course, just that certain complaints about the complexity/awkwardness do have merit.
Once ISPs start regulating what they will and will not transport over their cables, they open themselves up to all kinds of lawsuits.
Don't know whether that's correct, but if the recent flap between usenet providers in the US and various Attorneys General is any indication, the inverse (where the threat of lawsuits to mandate self-imposed regulation), is certainly true.
What exactly is the "Cormac McCarthy style"? The article doesn't mention it all. I even skimmed through the paper and all it does it quote a paragraph from some work of Cormac McCarthy.
Admittedly, they should have included an excerpt of reference text. From a randomly selected website because I'm too lazy to walk to my bookshelf for something newer:
In large part, The Orchard Keeper is written with the same stylistic tics that that Harold Bloom would later celebrate in Blood Meridian as, to paraphrase, the most remarkable American prose accomplishment since Pynchon. Already, we see: the fresh refurbishment of nouns and adjectives as verbs; the repeated joining of two unlikely nouns to create an adjective without precedent in English; quotation-less dialogue; language that reaches toward the portent and cadence of epic (commonly referred to as "vatic"); the frequent use of proper names and highly precise, almost scientific language to describe nature; and the casual employment of archaic-sounding, uncommon words that perfectly fit the bumps and flows of their sentences.
I can't figure out what his style exactly is, and I certainly would not be able to fake it as the participants were supposed to.
Well, it sounds like you've never read him, so why would you expect to? That said, if I give you a page pulled from a book written by, say Raymond Chandler and Mark Twain, I'd wager you'd have little problem telling them apart, and similarly have little trouble "aping" their respective styles at a single sitting.
And the participants were supposed to not be literary geniuses.
You need to be a "genius" to distinguish things? The CSI television series, Tony Scott movies, Johnny Carson standup humour (as done by Jay Leno, Bill Maher, etc.), Matt Groening cartoon characters, xkcd.com comics, and Chuck Berry guitar riffs span a wide range of disciplines, but each is readily recognisable to the average person, and if not, a single exposure would suffice. Don't know whether a book like All the Pretty Horses is taught in high schools, but Faulkner certainly is, and for those students (even the C ones), his style is obvious.
press releases are never going to say "this sucks" or "this is completely unoriginal"
No, but news stories arise out of press releases, and the news writer will often use as source for information the... wait for it... press release. The story, in turn, inspires more news stories, most of which are just like it. By the time the cycle ends, everyone is repeating the same truthiness. And in a busy overstressed world, who has time to be a critical consumer of news and distinguish between press release content from real journalism (original reporting, editorial oversight, etc.)?
Kudos to Harry. I think his efforts thus far are interesting enough, but I'd like to see more as I think he's onto something. That is, if a blog that's a cross between the Daily Show and Mystery Science Theater can be considered "something".;-)
Aside from the general "Windows 7 hides things" comment, most of your complaints are related to Explorer.
Use a different file manager, and your problems are gone. To that end, I'd suggest Directory Opus.
I rely on command-line tools (courtesy of Cygwin) even for things like file management, but Directory Opus is one of those few programs that I wouldn't live without. Put differently, using or relying on Explorer is something I simply won't consider, anymore than I'd consider browing the intarwebs using AOL.
As for the "hiding" problem, there are workarounds for that. Running exe, cpl, msc file by names (or listed via a script) is one, as is using simple shortcuts (invoking rundll if needed). Remember that you're relying on a dumbed-down file manager to show (or in this case, not show) what administrative tools are available.
Two years ago, the Cleveland Clinic stopped hiring smokers. It was one part of a "wellness initiative" that has won the renowned hospital -- which President Obama recently visited -- some very nice publicity. The clinic has a farmers' market on its main campus and has offered smoking-cessation classes for the surrounding community.
Refusing to hire smokers may be more hard-nosed than the other parts of the program. But given the social marginalization of smoking, the policy is hardly shocking. All in all, the wellness initiative seems to be a feel-good story.
Which is why it is so striking to talk to Delos M. Cosgrove, the heart surgeon who is the clinic's chief executive, about the initiative. Cosgrove says that if it were up to him, if there weren't legal issues, he would not only stop hiring smokers. He would also stop hiring obese people. When he mentioned this to me during a recent phone conversation, I told him that I thought many people might consider it unfair. He was unapologetic.
Translation for reading comprehension impaired: Obama wants to kill fat people.;-)
I Cut every carb, coke, icecream, sugar, bread, rice, pasta, cookies, chips even water mellon. And begin to eat meat etc.
It's worth pointing out that doing so means your grocery bill will tend to go up. Not a bad thing, of course, but in a world where people demand things being cheap (i.e., subsidised, or the product of industrial farming techniques), it may be difficult for the average person to see the value in doing so. Chickens, for example, were once upon a time considered "special" and eaten at most once per week. Today, we expect them at the drive-thru window.
Moreover, in tough economic times, the average person will want to lower the amount of money they spend, not increase it for "non-essentials" like healthy food. Poor people doubly so. From least to most expensive, our buying choices could be crudely summarised as:
1. Dirt 2. Refined Sugar or Corn Syrup 3. Carbohydrates 4. Protein 5. Fruits and Vegetables 6. Fats (Olive Oil, Butter, etc.) 7. Nuts 8. Champaign, Caviar or Hookers
So replace protein with carbohydrates if you can. I have lots of wealthy friends who do just that and demand fresh fish (fresh grilled salmon seems the most popular choice) on a daily basis. Those same people are quick to offer up factoids such as "Walnuts are a perfect food" without worrying that they cost more per pound than expensive cuts of meat. By contrast, the poor people I know typically limit their choices to refined sugar and carbohydrates.
Granted, protein is available from different sources (beans, dairy, meat from various animals) at different costs, but most of will always prefer the meat variety to form the basis of our diet.
As for the conclusions of the article, I'd raise the question that if you've succeeded in getting a happy dose of fat into your system at one indulgent sitting, what need or motivation is there for cognitive thinking? It may be that your body is telling you to just enjoy the feeling and do nothing else. Put another way, eating a pint of ice cream is not unlike smoking a joint; it's supposed to be its own reward. If you expected to be doing something else (like drive, work, operate heavy machinery, or do math), then maybe you made the wrong choice.;-)
I already know cameras are on me in one form or another, and I act accordingly. THERE IS NO EXPECTATION OF PRIVACY IN PUBLIC - REPEAT AFTER ME.
It's different for cops.
If you're not in the habit of reading your local newspaper, try an experiment that involves taking a photograph of a police officer. For added fun, do it while he's in the process of making an arrest, or dealing with someone who is resisting arrest.
If your REPEAT AFTER ME speech isn't sufficent to piss off the cop and get you arrested on a lesser charge, the picture taking should inspire something serious.
Quite frankly, I don't believe there is any context-specific "accordingly" for the police. That applies to privacy concerns just as it does to the routine speeding or running red lights, shooting/tasering any subject who they consider uncooperative, or generally being an asshole.
This is pure manure. It is in the public interest to know what the police are doing.
Despite what I'd characterise as the reasonableness of the OP's position, I'm afraid I agree with your first statement.
As for the public interest argument, there's no doubt merit in it, but that's not to say that there shouldn't be limitations to what the public needs to know. I've had look at the woman's blog. Amusing to the casual reader, but it does appear to come close to the line of what should be considered acceptable, or legal. If it isn't, then I'd expect some justification for why it isn't, rather than a simple assertion by police sargeant.
My own opinion is that laws concerning police officers are over-broad, and are easily abused. I'd also wager that they're regularly abused. The indicident that led to the recent Obama Beer Summit is a good example where we can see how being disrespectful to a cop gets elevated to the crime of interfering with the duties of a police officer. Physical training, automatic weapons and kevlar vests protects against sticks and stones, but the officer is unable to deal with being called a bad name?
And judging from your gratuitous use of capital letters, I guess you're writing all your code on punch cards.
Quite the opposite. Capitalising acronyms, aside from being correct, makes things easier to read. Not doing so is somewhere between lazy and ignorant, and is indicative of a selfishness that you're writing to suit yourself rather than for the benefit of others, doubly so when the writer refuses to capitalise anything.
What the OP is guilty of, however, is not being able to distinguish `Perl' and `perl' (something shared by most of the Slashdot audience, and programmers who don't use Perl but insist on commenting about it) by using the allcaps form. More specifically, he believed `PERL' to be correct.
Hardly gratuituous. It's a simple error, and no different than the error made by other posters who think the language is called `perl` and not `Perl'.
Slashdot Mirror
Turn off periodic SMART status checking (on some drives this spins it up).
Sigh. You had me going with that one. That's the only thing I didn't think of when I tried diagnosing why I can't my Thinkpad to keep my Seagate drive spun down. Even with everything off (no syslog, cron, etc.), the little fucker still insists on spinning back up after a few seconds.
I mean, why would any good centre-right, middle-class courting, focus-group driven pack of fear-mongers pass up a perfectly good opportunity for a moral panic? Won't somebody PLEASE think of the CHILDREN!?
Agreed, but actions speak louder than words.
Instead of just thinking about the kids, what I do is help them with what they really need. Using my own youth as a point of reference, that typically means alcohol or cigarettes.
What works for me is, for example, reading a chapter of a textbook, followed by a few minutes on slashdot and whatnot, then going back to the book and so forth ad nauseum.
Good for you on being able to schedule your time and attention productively, but the above isn't what I would call multitasking.
It's been shown that the average attention span runs about 20 minutes. After that, you _will_ lose the ability to concentrate and your mind will naturally wander. This new period lasts about 5 minutes IIRC. Once that ends, you're refreshed enough go back to what you were doing with renewed concentration.
Mind you, you're free to invoke "willpower" to circumvent that natural ebb and flow, but your performance will suffer, and you'll accomplish half the work for twice the effort. With enough motivation or adrenaline, you'll manage just fine, but like missing few hours from a restful night's sleep to cram more workhours into your day, you'll discover diminishing returns.
So by all means, do browse Slashdot for a minutes. If your disciplined enough to avoid non-essential or otherwise unproductive activities generally, it'll help you work and get more done.
I suspect that that is on the docket as well, once the kinks are worked out; but it has a rather different risk/reward ratio.
But that's the part that I don't get. The article(s) as written make no mention of the value of growing teeth but instead talk about organ transplants.
As for the risk/reward ratio, isn't it the case, for example, that big pharma prefers to invest heavily in both R&D and advertising for drugs that are geared to ordinary problems for ordinary people rather than complex diseases? The way I understand it, a pill that cures baldness would be a money-making bonanza. A drug that helps with certain forms of cancer far less so.
For teeth, you want things to be worked out and well understood.
I do have friends with peridontal disease and I've had my share of root canals and caps so I'm reasonably familiar with some of the issues, but I appreciate your elaboration. Still, if the researchers can grow teeth, then don't all those problems go away?
The organ focus has merit, obviously. But more obvious is the immediate "Hey, we can grow teeth in mice!" There's a joke in there somewhere, but I hesitate to make one lest another over-eager moderator misinterprets it as "flaimbait". ;-)
How about restoring functions to ... teeth?
You don't need to be suffering from periodontal disease to know that missing or otherwise bad teeth are real enough issues for ordinary people. With the possible exception of friends from across the pond, of course. ;-)
As a point of fact, the US allows more legal immigration than any other country in the world.
LOL. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, right?
Sorry, you're a victim of a myth. On a per capita basis, the US accepts roughly the same number of immigrants (and/or refugees) as many western European countries, but less than other countries. By contrast, Canada accept far more. Hell, I think Greece has higher immigration numbers.
And if you factor in the anti-immigrant rhetoric and attitudes prevalent across so much of the US (and the lack of such things as health care and basic social safety nets, I'd suggest that the US is hardly a welcoming place. That's been true historically and it's true today. In the past it was the Chinese, then the Irish, then the dirty Jews and Italians; today it's the Mexicans! The reason, for example, why the US has low immigration numbers and continues to spend less per capita on charitable foreign aid than most industrialised countries, is that the US simply doesn't like and has never liked foreigners, least of all when they try to immigrate. That is, until years pass and they blend into the landscape and we recognise them as citizens like everyone else.
Granted, it's a big and wealthy country. So total numbers or dollars spent are bigger. But then, so what?
As for the article, the immigration process does require a complete health check, so the issues related to the spread of infectious diseases are addressed. The problem, however, is that not everyone who comes here is eligible to become part of that process, and there is no free public health care for them or anyone else. Consider tuberculosis, for example. Mandatory screening when applying for a green card, but the rates of infection in the US go up by 20K cases per year.
I don't think this is about anything interesting from Twitter, but rather, is about a generation of users who probably don't understand the full implications and potential consequences of disclosing personally identifying information or of turning your day-to-day life into a public spectacle.
Explain the popularity of the Jerry Springer show, then. ;)
I don't fall into the the "latest generation of users" and have always considered myself a generally private person (no Facebook for me), so here's a true story to think about while you ponder the above question.
A few years back, I was sued in small claims court by an individual that claimed I owed them money. A week or so passes and I get a phone call from the producers of the Judge Judy television program. I won't go into why they thought my situation was noteworthy or why I'd be an interesting guest, but I will say that I experienced a rush of emotions that ranged from "Who the fuck are you to be calling my private number?" to "Woohoo! I'm gonna be on TV!"
It took almost an hour of conversation for me to finally say "No thanks". And an another hour to pass before I could say "WTF was I even thinking to consider the offer?" To be completely honest, however, I'm still haunted by the feeling that I missed out on some fun, public spectacle aside.
Twitter and MySpace are a way for people with relatively benign and routine existences to validate themselves - I EXIST! I AM IMPORTANT... TO SOMEONE...
LOL. No doubt true (for a wide variety of reasons), but wouldn't buying a dog work just as well?
I have accepted that I am an uniportant tiny cog in some huge machine and no one cares to know the exact moment I take a shit (and where).
Oddly enough, something a dog would definitely be interested in. ;-)
So-called intuition and common sense are usually nothing more than widely held but unquestioned assumptions ... We ought to know well that intuitive interfaces are really familiar interfaces; the only really intuitive interface, as some wit once remarked, is the nipple.
I'd suggest that anyone who is a pediatrician or has otherwise observed a new mother trying to teach her baby how to breast feed would classify the "nipple as intuitive interface" line as not only an unquestioned assumption, but also one that's wrong.
Put simply, the nipple, to use your terminology, is a familiar interface. The familiarity happens very early, and there's a wealth of factors that motivate it, but still it's something that's learned.
Pain killers like the kind your brain gives you when you get laid would work better. Seriously, go have some meaningless sex - it WILL help.
Mod parent up. I've had my heart broken a few times, but there's usually one relationship that kills you the most, and it's that one that lingers throughout your life.
At the time, I tried working longer hours, regularly drinking heavily, lots of drugs, socialising with friends, going for long solitary walks ... you name it. Distractions like working longer hours do help (provided you're past the "I'm out of my mind with grief and want to kill myself and take everyone with me" stage, but anonymous sex beats the other methods by a mile.
You'll earn bonus points if your anonymous sex partner is especially pretty; you tend to experience everything with heightened awareness in the first few weeks or months, so chances are high you'll remember your partner's face and body (and possibly her name). Being able to move very far away earns you the Daily Double, just so long as you don't risk losing everything by travelling back in the first few years to wallow in the nostalgia.
When all is done and you've moved on with your life, be sure to watch or listen to some Sam Kinison videos from time to time to keep things in "perspective".
The requirement to remember IPv6 addresses is just going to make for geeks that can do more math in their heads. I don't necessarily see that as a negative.
Being able to do math in your head is a positive. However, most computer users don't seem to have mastered binary[1], so you're concluding they'll be just as comfortable reading hexadecimal, and if not, they'll be motivated to learn about number systems and enthusiastically gear up for the challenge by repeating the rote work they they did in grade school when they learned their multiplication tables?
Try suggesting to a Windows that the netmask for a /24 is ffffff00 and see if you don't get blank stare. Or tell the webdesigner, "Skyblue? You mean 87ceeb, right?"
--------------
1. Some Slashdot users insist binary is a fiction created by OS developers to make buying hard drives more complicated.
The point was, you don't go about memorizing them, you use DNS.
LOL. And network admins, those who are tasked with setting up and maintaining DNS, or those just doing occasional reverse lookups, do their heads just explode?
In the real world, people use IP numbers in a number of different ways, and for just as many reasons, have committed many to memory. You don't have to be a network admin, for example, to know what is behind 192.168.1.1, or that 4.2.2.1 is open for lookups.
This doesn't mean it's impossible to do the same or something similar with IPv6, of course, just that certain complaints about the complexity/awkwardness do have merit.
Once ISPs start regulating what they will and will not transport over their cables, they open themselves up to all kinds of lawsuits.
Don't know whether that's correct, but if the recent flap between usenet providers in the US and various Attorneys General is any indication, the inverse (where the threat of lawsuits to mandate self-imposed regulation), is certainly true.
What exactly is the "Cormac McCarthy style"? The article doesn't mention it all. I even skimmed through the paper and all it does it quote a paragraph from some work of Cormac McCarthy.
Admittedly, they should have included an excerpt of reference text. From a randomly selected website because I'm too lazy to walk to my bookshelf for something newer:
I can't figure out what his style exactly is, and I certainly would not be able to fake it as the participants were supposed to.
Well, it sounds like you've never read him, so why would you expect to? That said, if I give you a page pulled from a book written by, say Raymond Chandler and Mark Twain, I'd wager you'd have little problem telling them apart, and similarly have little trouble "aping" their respective styles at a single sitting.
And the participants were supposed to not be literary geniuses.
You need to be a "genius" to distinguish things? The CSI television series, Tony Scott movies, Johnny Carson standup humour (as done by Jay Leno, Bill Maher, etc.), Matt Groening cartoon characters, xkcd.com comics, and Chuck Berry guitar riffs span a wide range of disciplines, but each is readily recognisable to the average person, and if not, a single exposure would suffice. Don't know whether a book like All the Pretty Horses is taught in high schools, but Faulkner certainly is, and for those students (even the C ones), his style is obvious.
press releases are never going to say "this sucks" or "this is completely unoriginal"
No, but news stories arise out of press releases, and the news writer will often use as source for information the ... wait for it ... press release. The story, in turn, inspires more news stories, most of which are just like it. By the time the cycle ends, everyone is repeating the same truthiness. And in a busy overstressed world, who has time to be a critical consumer of news and distinguish between press release content from real journalism (original reporting, editorial oversight, etc.)?
Kudos to Harry. I think his efforts thus far are interesting enough, but I'd like to see more as I think he's onto something. That is, if a blog that's a cross between the Daily Show and Mystery Science Theater can be considered "something". ;-)
Aside from the general "Windows 7 hides things" comment, most of your complaints are related to Explorer.
Use a different file manager, and your problems are gone. To that end, I'd suggest Directory Opus.
I rely on command-line tools (courtesy of Cygwin) even for things like file management, but Directory Opus is one of those few programs that I wouldn't live without. Put differently, using or relying on Explorer is something I simply won't consider, anymore than I'd consider browing the intarwebs using AOL.
As for the "hiding" problem, there are workarounds for that. Running exe, cpl, msc file by names (or listed via a script) is one, as is using simple shortcuts (invoking rundll if needed). Remember that you're relying on a dumbed-down file manager to show (or in this case, not show) what administrative tools are available.
The folks in Accounting must love your expense and mileage reports.
The news actually are a cleverly disguised "Fat people are dumb".
They're also more expensive.
Quoth the article:
Translation for reading comprehension impaired: Obama wants to kill fat people. ;-)
I Cut every carb, coke, icecream, sugar, bread, rice, pasta, cookies, chips even water mellon. And begin to eat meat etc.
It's worth pointing out that doing so means your grocery bill will tend to go up. Not a bad thing, of course, but in a world where people demand things being cheap (i.e., subsidised, or the product of industrial farming techniques), it may be difficult for the average person to see the value in doing so. Chickens, for example, were once upon a time considered "special" and eaten at most once per week. Today, we expect them at the drive-thru window.
Moreover, in tough economic times, the average person will want to lower the amount of money they spend, not increase it for "non-essentials" like healthy food. Poor people doubly so. From least to most expensive, our buying choices could be crudely summarised as:
1. Dirt
2. Refined Sugar or Corn Syrup
3. Carbohydrates
4. Protein
5. Fruits and Vegetables
6. Fats (Olive Oil, Butter, etc.)
7. Nuts
8. Champaign, Caviar or Hookers
So replace protein with carbohydrates if you can. I have lots of wealthy friends who do just that and demand fresh fish (fresh grilled salmon seems the most popular choice) on a daily basis. Those same people are quick to offer up factoids such as "Walnuts are a perfect food" without worrying that they cost more per pound than expensive cuts of meat. By contrast, the poor people I know typically limit their choices to refined sugar and carbohydrates.
Granted, protein is available from different sources (beans, dairy, meat from various animals) at different costs, but most of will always prefer the meat variety to form the basis of our diet.
As for the conclusions of the article, I'd raise the question that if you've succeeded in getting a happy dose of fat into your system at one indulgent sitting, what need or motivation is there for cognitive thinking? It may be that your body is telling you to just enjoy the feeling and do nothing else. Put another way, eating a pint of ice cream is not unlike smoking a joint; it's supposed to be its own reward. If you expected to be doing something else (like drive, work, operate heavy machinery, or do math), then maybe you made the wrong choice. ;-)
I already know cameras are on me in one form or another, and I act accordingly. THERE IS NO EXPECTATION OF PRIVACY IN PUBLIC - REPEAT AFTER ME.
It's different for cops.
If you're not in the habit of reading your local newspaper, try an experiment that involves taking a photograph of a police officer. For added fun, do it while he's in the process of making an arrest, or dealing with someone who is resisting arrest.
If your REPEAT AFTER ME speech isn't sufficent to piss off the cop and get you arrested on a lesser charge, the picture taking should inspire something serious.
Quite frankly, I don't believe there is any context-specific "accordingly" for the police. That applies to privacy concerns just as it does to the routine speeding or running red lights, shooting/tasering any subject who they consider uncooperative, or generally being an asshole.
This is pure manure. It is in the public interest to know what the police are doing.
Despite what I'd characterise as the reasonableness of the OP's position, I'm afraid I agree with your first statement.
As for the public interest argument, there's no doubt merit in it, but that's not to say that there shouldn't be limitations to what the public needs to know. I've had look at the woman's blog. Amusing to the casual reader, but it does appear to come close to the line of what should be considered acceptable, or legal. If it isn't, then I'd expect some justification for why it isn't, rather than a simple assertion by police sargeant.
My own opinion is that laws concerning police officers are over-broad, and are easily abused. I'd also wager that they're regularly abused. The indicident that led to the recent Obama Beer Summit is a good example where we can see how being disrespectful to a cop gets elevated to the crime of interfering with the duties of a police officer. Physical training, automatic weapons and kevlar vests protects against sticks and stones, but the officer is unable to deal with being called a bad name?
All the crews and their families live at the station - imagine that as a way of life.
So it's like Survivor, but with David Hasselhoff and the cast from Baywatch?
And judging from your gratuitous use of capital letters, I guess you're writing all your code on punch cards.
Quite the opposite. Capitalising acronyms, aside from being correct, makes things easier to read. Not doing so is somewhere between lazy and ignorant, and is indicative of a selfishness that you're writing to suit yourself rather than for the benefit of others, doubly so when the writer refuses to capitalise anything.
What the OP is guilty of, however, is not being able to distinguish `Perl' and `perl' (something shared by most of the Slashdot audience, and programmers who don't use Perl but insist on commenting about it) by using the allcaps form. More specifically, he believed `PERL' to be correct.
Hardly gratuituous. It's a simple error, and no different than the error made by other posters who think the language is called `perl` and not `Perl'.
What? So no viruses?
If that's the case, then it would seem to that there's even less hope for the average Linux user to attract the notice of malware developers.
Geography to be specific. Croydon to be precise.
Alternatively:
Genealogy. The milkman to be precise.